The New Yorker Stories

“Don’t think about an apple!” Matt hollered. Vernon turned his head, but he was left smiling at a closed door.

In the small, bright areas under the streetlights, there seemed for a second to be some logic to all the swirling snow. If time itself could only freeze, the snowflakes could become the lacy filigree of a valentine. Carol frowned. Why had Matt conjured up the image of an apple? Now she saw an apple where there was no apple, suspended in midair, transforming the scene in front of her into a silly surrealist painting.

It was going to snow all night. They had heard that on the radio, driving to the Brinkleys’. The Don’t-Think-About-Whatever game had started as a joke, something long in the telling and startling to Vernon, to judge by his expression as Matt went on and on. When Carol crossed the room near midnight to tell Vernon that they should leave, Matt had quickly whispered the rest of his joke or story—whatever he was saying—into Vernon’s ear, all in a rush. They looked like two children, the one whispering madly and the other with his head bent, but something about the inclination of Vernon’s head let you know that if you bent low enough to see, there would be a big, wide grin on his face. Vernon and Carol’s daughter, Sharon, and Matt and Gaye’s daughter, Becky, had sat side by side, or kneecap to kneecap, and whispered that way when they were children—a privacy so rushed that it obliterated anything else. Carol, remembering that scene now, could not think of what passed between Sharon and Becky without thinking of sexual intimacy. Becky, it turned out, had given the Brinkleys a lot of trouble. She had run away from home when she was thirteen, and, in a family-counseling session years later, her parents found out that she had had an abortion at fifteen. More recently, she had flunked out of college. Now she was working in a bank in Boston and taking a night-school course in poetry. Poetry or pottery? The apple that reappeared as the windshield wipers slushed snow off the glass metamorphosed for Carol into a red bowl, then again became an apple, which grew rounder as the car came to a stop at the intersection.

She had been weary all day. Anxiety always made her tired. She knew the party would be small (the Brinkleys’ friend Mr. Graham had just had his book accepted for publication, and of course much of the evening would be spent talking about that); she had feared that it was going to be a strain for all of them. The Brinkleys had just returned from the Midwest, where they had gone for Gaye’s father’s funeral. It didn’t seem a time to carry through with plans for a party. Carol imagined that not canceling it had been Matt’s idea, not Gaye’s. She turned toward Vernon now and asked how the Brinkleys had seemed to him. Fine, he said at once. Before he spoke, she knew how he would answer. If people did not argue in front of their friends, they were not having problems; if they did not stumble into walls, they were not drunk. Vernon tried hard to think positively, but he was never impervious to real pain. His reflex was to turn aside something serious with a joke, but he was just as quick to wipe the smile off his face and suddenly put his arm around a person’s shoulder. Unlike Matt, he was a warm person, but when people unexpectedly showed him affection it embarrassed him. The same counselor the Brinkleys had seen had told Carol—Vernon refused to see the man, and she found that she did not want to continue without him—that it was possible that Vernon felt uncomfortable with expressions of kindness because he blamed himself for Sharon’s death: he couldn’t save her, and when people were kind to him now he felt it was undeserved. But Vernon was the last person who should be punished. She remembered him in the hospital, pretending to misunderstand Sharon when she asked for her barrette, on her bedside table, and picking it up and clipping the little yellow duck into the hair above his own ear. He kept trying to tickle a smile out of her—touching some stuffed animal’s button nose to the tip of her nose and then tapping it on her earlobe. At the moment when Sharon died, Vernon had been sitting on her bed (Carol was backed up against the door, for some reason), surrounded by a battlefield of pastel animals.

They passed safely through the last intersection before their house. The car didn’t skid until they turned onto their street. Carol’s heart thumped hard, once, in the second when she felt the car becoming light, but they came out of the skid easily. He had been driving carefully, and she said nothing, wanting to appear casual about the moment. She asked if Matt had mentioned Becky. No, Vernon said, and he hadn’t wanted to bring up a sore subject.

Gaye and Matt had been married for twenty-five years; Carol and Vernon had been married twenty-two. Sometimes Vernon said, quite sincerely, that Matt and Gaye were their alter egos who absorbed and enacted crises, saving the two of them from having to experience such chaos. It frightened Carol to think that some part of him believed that. Who could really believe that there was some way to find protection in this world—or someone who could offer it? What happened happened at random, and one horrible thing hardly precluded the possibility of others happening next. There had been that fancy internist who hospitalized Vernon later in the same spring when Sharon died, and who looked up at him while drawing blood and observed almost offhandedly that it would be an unbearable irony if Vernon also had leukemia. When the test results came back, they showed that Vernon had mononucleosis. There was the time when the Christmas tree caught fire, and she rushed toward the flames, clapping her hands like cymbals, and Vernon pulled her away just in time, before the whole tree became a torch, and she with it. When Hobo, their dog, had to be put to sleep during their vacation in Maine, that awful woman veterinarian, with her cold green eyes, issued the casual death sentence with one manicured hand on the quivering dog’s fur and called him “Bobo,” as though their dog were like some circus clown.

“Are you crying?” Vernon said. They were inside their house now, in the hallway, and he had just turned toward her, holding out a pink padded coat hanger.

“No,” she said. “The wind out there is fierce.” She slipped her jacket onto the hanger he held out and went into the downstairs bathroom, where she buried her face in a towel. Eventually, she looked at herself in the mirror. She had pressed the towel hard against her eyes, and for a few seconds she had to blink herself into focus. She was reminded of the kind of camera they had had when Sharon was young. There were two images when you looked through the finder, and you had to make the adjustment yourself so that one superimposed itself upon the other and the figure suddenly leaped into clarity. She patted the towel to her eyes again and held her breath. If she couldn’t stop crying, Vernon would make love to her. When she was very sad, he sensed that his instinctive optimism wouldn’t work; he became tongue-tied, and when he couldn’t talk he would reach for her. Through the years, he had knocked over wineglasses shooting his hand across the table to grab hers. She had found herself suddenly hugged from behind in the bathroom; he would even follow her in there if he suspected that she was going to cry—walk in to grab her without even having bothered to knock.

She opened the door now and turned toward the hall staircase, and then realized—felt it before she saw it, really—that the light was on in the living room.

Vernon lay stretched out on the sofa with his legs crossed; one foot was planted on the floor and his top foot dangled in the air. Even when he was exhausted, he was always careful not to let his shoes touch the sofa. He was very tall, and couldn’t stretch out on the sofa without resting his head on the arm. For some reason, he had not hung up her jacket. It was spread like a tent over his head and shoulders, rising and falling with his breathing. She stood still long enough to be sure that he was really asleep, and then came into the room. The sofa was too narrow to curl up on with him. She didn’t want to wake him. Neither did she want to go to bed alone. She went back to the hall closet and took out his overcoat—the long, elegant camel’s-hair coat he had not worn tonight because he thought it might snow. She slipped off her shoes and went quietly over to where he lay and stretched out on the floor beside the sofa, pulling the big blanket of the coat up high, until the collar touched her lips. Then she drew her legs up into the warmth.

Such odd things happened. Very few days were like the ones before. Here they were, in their own house with four bedrooms, ready to sleep in this peculiar double-decker fashion, in the largest, coldest room of all. What would anyone think?

She knew the answer to that question, of course. A person who didn’t know them would mistake this for a drunken collapse, but anyone who was a friend would understand exactly. In time, both of them had learned to stop passing judgment on how they coped with the inevitable sadness that set in, always unexpectedly but so real that it was met with the instant acceptance one gave to a snowfall. In the white night world outside, their daughter might be drifting past like an angel, and she would see this tableau, for the second that she hovered, as a necessary small adjustment.

Summer People

The first weekend at their summer house in Vermont, Jo, Tom, and Byron went out for pizza. Afterward, Tom decided that he wanted to go dancing at a roadside bar. Byron had come with his father and Jo grudgingly, enthusiastic about the pizza but fearing that it would be a longer night than he wanted. “They have Pac-Man here,” Tom said to his son, as he swung the car into the bar parking strip, and for a couple of seconds it was obvious that Byron was debating whether or not to go in with them. “Nah,” he said. “I don’t want to hang out with a bunch of drunks while you two dance.”

Byron had his sleeping bag with him in the car. The sleeping bag and a pile of comic books were his constant companions. He was using the rolled-up bag as a headrest. Now he turned and punched it flatter, making it more a pillow, and then stretched out to emphasize that he wouldn’t go in with them.

“Maybe we should just go home,” Jo said, as Tom pulled open the door to the bar.

“What for?”

“Byron—”

“Oh, Byron’s overindulged,” Tom said, putting his hand on her shoulder and pushing her forward with his fingertips.

Byron was Tom’s son from his first marriage. It was the second summer that he was spending with them on vacation in Vermont. He’d been allowed to decide, and he had chosen to come with them. In the school year he lived with his mother in Philadelphia. This year he was suddenly square and sturdy, like the Japanese robots he collected—compact, complicated robots, capable of doing useful but frequently unnecessary tasks, like a Swiss Army knife. It was difficult for Tom to realize that his son was ten years old now. The child he conjured up when he closed his eyes at night was always an infant, the tangled hair still as smooth as peach fuzz, with the scars and bruises of summer erased, so that Byron was again a sleek, seal-like baby.

The band’s instruments were piled on the stage. Here and there, amps rose out of tangled wire like trees growing from the forest’s tangled floor. A pretty young woman with a blond pompadour was on the dance floor, shaking her puff of hair and smiling at her partner, with her Sony earphones clamped on, so that she heard her own music while the band took a break and the jukebox played. The man stood there shuffling, making almost no attempt to dance. Tom recognized them as the couple who had outbid him on a chain saw he wanted at an auction he had gone to earlier in the day.

On the jukebox, Dolly Parton was doing the speaking part of “I Will Always Love You.” Green bottles of Rolling Rock, scattered across the bar top, had the odd configuration of misplaced bowling pins. Dolly Parton’s sadness was coupled with great sincerity. The interlude over, she began to sing again, with greater feeling. “I’m not kidding you,” a man wearing an orange football jersey said, squeezing the biceps of the burly man who sat next to him. “I says to him, ‘I don’t understand your question. What is tuna fish like? It’s tuna fish.’ ” The burly man’s face contorted with laughter.

There was a neon sign behind the bar, with shining bubbles moving through a bottle of Miller. When Tom was with his first wife, back when Byron was about three years old, he had taken the lights off the Christmas tree one year while needles rained down on the bedsheet snowbank they had mounded around the tree stand. He had never seen a tree dry out so fast. He remembered snapping off branches, then going to get a garbage bag to put them in. He snapped off branch after branch, stuffing them inside, feeling clever that he had figured out a way to get the dried-out tree down four flights of stairs without needles dropping everywhere. Byron came out of the back room while this was going on, saw the limbs disappearing into the black bag, and began to cry. His wife never let him forget all the wrong things he had said and done to Byron. He was still not entirely sure what Byron had been upset about that day, but he had made it worse by getting angry and saying that the tree was only a tree, not a member of the family.

The bartender passed by, clutching beer bottles by their necks as if they were birds he had shot. Tom tried to get his eye, but he was gone, involved in some story being told at the far end of the bar. “Let’s dance,” Tom said, and Jo moved into his arms. They walked to the dance floor and slow-danced to an old Dylan song. The harmonica cut through the air like a party blower, shrilly unrolling.

When they left and went back to the car, Byron pretended to be asleep. If he had really been sleeping, he would have stirred when they opened and closed the car doors. He was lying on his back, eyes squeezed shut a little too tightly, enclosed in the padded blue chrysalis of the sleeping bag.

The next morning, Tom worked in the garden, moving from row to row as he planted tomato seedlings and marigolds. He had a two-month vacation because he was changing jobs, and he was determined to stay ahead of things in the garden this year. It was a very carefully planned bed, more like a well-woven rug than like a vegetable patch. Jo was on the porch, reading Moll Flanders and watching him.

He was flattered but also slightly worried that she wanted to make love every night. The month before, on her thirty-fourth birthday, they had drunk a bottle of Dom Pérignon and she had asked him if he was still sure he didn’t want to have a child with her. He told her that he didn’t, and reminded her that they had agreed on that before they got married. He had thought, from the look on her face, that she was about to argue with him—she was a teacher and she loved debate—but she dropped the subject, saying, “You might change your mind someday.” Since then she had begun to tease him. “Change your mind?” she would whisper, curling up next to him on the sofa and unbuttoning his shirt. She even wanted to make love in the living room. He was afraid Byron would wake up and come downstairs for some reason, so he would turn off the television and go upstairs with her. “What is this?” he asked once lightly, hoping it wouldn’t provoke her into a discussion of whether he had changed his mind about having a child.

“I always feel this way about you,” she said. “Do you think I like it the rest of the time, when teaching takes all my energy?”

On another evening, she whispered something else that surprised him—something he didn’t want to pursue. She said that it made her feel old to realize that having friends she could stay up all night talking to was a thing of the past. “Do you remember that from college?” she said. “All those people who took themselves so seriously that everything they felt was a fact.”

He was glad that she had fallen asleep without really wanting an answer. Byron puzzled him less these days and Jo puzzled him more. He looked up at the sky now: bright blue, with clouds trailing out thinly, so that the ends looked as if kite strings were attached. He was rinsing his hands with the garden hose at the side of the house when a car came up the driveway and coasted to a stop. He turned off the water and shook his hands, walking forward to investigate.

A man in his forties was getting out of the car—clean-cut, pudgy. He reached back into the car for a briefcase, then straightened up. “I’m Ed Rickman!” he called. “How are you today?”

Tom nodded. A salesman, and he was trapped. He wiped his hands on his jeans.

“To get right to the point, there are only two roads in this whole part of the world I really love, and this is one of them,” Rickman said. “You’re one of the new people—hell, everybody who didn’t crash up against Plymouth Rock is new in New England, right? I tried to buy this acreage years ago, and the farmer who owned it wouldn’t sell. Made an offer way back then, when money meant something, and the man wouldn’t sell. You own all these acres now?”

“Two,” Tom said.

“Hell,” Ed Rickman said. “You’d be crazy not to be happy here, right?” He looked over Tom’s shoulder. “Have a garden?” Rickman said.

“Out back,” Tom said.

“You’d be crazy not to have a garden,” Rickman said.

Rickman walked past Tom and across the lawn. Tom wanted the visitor to be the one to back off, but Rickman took his time, squinting and slowly staring about the place. Tom was reminded of the way so many people perused box lots at the auction—the cartons they wouldn’t let you root around in because the good things thrown on top covered a boxful of junk.

“I never knew this place was up for grabs,” Rickman said. “I was given to understand the house and land were an eight-acre parcel, and not for sale.”

“I guess two of them were,” Tom said.

Rickman ran his tongue over his teeth a few times. One of his front teeth was discolored—almost black.

“Get this from the farmer himself ?” he said.

“Real-estate agent, three years ago. Advertised in the paper.”

Rickman looked surprised. He looked down at his Top-Siders. He sighed deeply and looked at the house. “I guess my timing was bad,” he said. “That or a question of style. These New Englanders are kind of like dogs. Slow to move. Sniff around before they decide what they think.” He held his briefcase in front of his body. He slapped it a couple of times. It reminded Tom of a beer drinker patting his belly.

“Everything changes,” Rickman said. “Not so hard to imagine that one day this’ll all be skyscrapers. Condominiums or what have you.” He looked at the sky. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m not a developer. I don’t even have a card to leave with you in case you ever change your mind. In my experience, the only people who change their minds are women. There was a time when you could state that view without having somebody jump all over you, too.”

Rickman held out his hand. Tom shook it.

“Just a lovely place you got here,” Rickman said. “Thank you for your time.”

“Sure,” Tom said.

Rickman walked away, swinging the briefcase. His trousers were too big; they wrinkled across the seat like an opening accordion. When he got to the car, he looked back and smiled. Then he threw the briefcase onto the passenger seat—not a toss but a throw—got in, slammed the door, and drove away.

Tom walked around to the back of the house. On the porch, Jo was still reading. There was a pile of paperbacks on the small wicker stool beside her chair. It made him a little angry to think that she had been happily reading while he had wasted so much time with Ed Rickman.

“Some crazy guy pulled up and wanted to buy the house,” he said.

“Tell him we’d sell for a million?” she said.

“I wouldn’t,” he said.

Jo looked up. He turned and went into the kitchen. Byron had left the top off a jar, and a fly had died in the peanut butter. Tom opened the refrigerator and looked over the possibilities.

Later that same week, Tom discovered that Rickman had been talking to Byron. The boy said he had been walking down the road just then, returning from fishing, when a car rolled up alongside him and a man pointed to the house and asked him if he lived there.

Byron was in a bad mood. He hadn’t caught anything. He propped his rod beside the porch door and started into the house, but Tom stopped him. “Then what?” Tom said.

“He had this black tooth,” Byron said, tapping his own front tooth. “He said he had a house around here, and a kid my age who needed somebody to hang out with. He asked if he could bring this dumb kid over, and I said no, because I wouldn’t be around after today.”

Byron sounded so self-assured that Tom did a double take, wondering where Byron was going.

“I don’t want to meet some creepy kid,” Byron said. “If the guy comes and asks you, say no—O.K.?”

“Then what did he say?”

“Talked about some part of the river where it was good fishing. Where the river curved, or something. It’s no big deal. I’ve met a lot of guys like him.”

“What do you mean?” Tom said.

“Guys that talk just to talk,” Byron said. “Why are you making a big deal out of it?”

“Byron, the guy’s nuts,” Tom said. “I don’t want you to talk to him anymore. If you see him around here again, run and get me.”

“Right,” Byron said. “Should I scream, too?”

Tom shivered. The image of Byron screaming frightened him, and for a few seconds he let himself believe that he should call the police. But if he called, what would he say—that someone had asked if his house was for sale and later asked Byron if he’d play with his son?

Tom pulled out a cigarette and lit it. He’d drive across town to see the farmer who’d owned the land, he decided, and find out what he knew about Rickman. He didn’t remember exactly how to get to the farmer’s house, and he couldn’t remember his name. The real-estate agent had pointed out the place, at the top of a hill, the summer he showed Tom the property, so he could call him and find out. But first he was going to make sure that Jo got home safely from the grocery store.

The phone rang, and Byron turned to pick it up.

“Hello?” Byron said. Byron frowned. He avoided Tom’s eyes. Then, just when Tom felt sure that it was Rickman, Byron said, “Nothing much.” A long pause. “Yeah, sure,” he said. “I’m thinking about ornithology.”

It was Byron’s mother.

The real-estate agent remembered him. Tom told him about Rickman. “De de de de, De de de de,” the agent sang—the notes of the theme music from The Twilight Zone. The agent laughed. He told him the farmer whose land he had bought was named Albright. He didn’t have the man’s telephone number, but was sure it was in the directory. It was.

Tom got in the car and drove to the farm. A young woman working in a flower garden stood up and held her trowel up like a torch when his car pulled into the drive. Then she looked surprised that he was a stranger. He introduced himself. She said her name. It turned out she was Mr. Albright’s niece, who had come with her family to watch the place while her aunt and uncle were in New Zealand. She didn’t know anything about the sale of the land; no, nobody else had come around asking. Tom described Rickman anyway. No, she said, she hadn’t seen anyone who looked like that. Over on a side lawn, two Irish setters were barking madly at them. A man—he must have been the woman’s husband—was holding them by their collars. The dogs were going wild, and the young woman obviously wanted to end the conversation. Tom didn’t think about leaving her his telephone number until it was too late, when he was driving away.

That night, he went to another auction, and when he came back to the car one of the back tires was flat. He opened the trunk to get the spare, glad that he had gone to the auction alone, glad that the field was lit up and people were walking around. A little girl about his son’s age came by with her parents. She held a one-armed doll over her head and skipped forward. “I don’t feel cheated. Why should you feel cheated? I bought the whole box for two dollars and I got two metal sieves out of it,” the woman said to the man. He had on a baseball cap and a black tank top and cutoffs, and sandals with soles that curved at the heel and toe like a canoe. He stalked ahead of the woman, box under one arm, and grabbed his dancing daughter by the elbow. “Watch my dolly!” she screamed, as he pulled her along. “That doll’s not worth five cents,” the man said. Tom averted his eyes. He was sweating more than he should, going through the easy maneuvers of changing a tire. There was even a breeze.

They floated the tire in a pan of water at the gas station the next morning, looking for the puncture. Nothing was embedded in the tire; whatever had made the hole wasn’t there. As one big bubble after another rose to the surface, Tom felt a clutch in his throat, as if he himself might be drowning.

He could think of no good reason to tell the officer at the police barracks why Ed Rickman would have singled him out. Maybe Rickman had wanted to build a house on that particular site. The policeman made a fist and rested his mouth against it, his lips in the gully between thumb and finger. Until Tom said that, the policeman had seemed concerned—even a little interested. Then his expression changed. Tom hurried to say that of course he didn’t believe that explanation, because something funny was going on. The cop shook his head. Did that mean no, of course not, or no, he did believe it?

Tom described Rickman, mentioning the discolored tooth. The cop wrote this information down on a small white pad. He drew crosshatches on a corner. The cop did not seem quite as certain as Tom that no one could have a grudge against him or anyone in his family. He asked where they lived in New York, where they worked.

When Tom walked out into the sunlight, he felt a little faint. Of course he had understood, even before the cop said it, that there was nothing the police could do at this point. “Frankly,” the cop had said, “it’s not likely that we’re going to be able to keep a good eye out, in that you’re on a dead-end road. Not a route,” the cop said. “Not a major thoroughfare.” It seemed to be some joke the cop was having with himself.

Driving home, Tom realized that he could give anyone who asked a detailed description of the cop. He had studied every mark on the cop’s face—the little scar (chicken pox?) over one eyebrow, the aquiline nose that narrowed at the tip almost to the shape of a tack. He did not intend to alarm Jo or Byron by telling them where he had been.

Byron had gone fishing again. Jo wanted to make love while Byron was out. Tom knew he couldn’t.

A week passed. Almost two weeks. He and Jo and Byron sat in lawn chairs watching the lightning bugs blink. Byron said he had his eye on one in particular, and he went “Beep-beep, beep-beep” as it blinked. They ate raw peas Jo had gathered in a bowl. He and Jo had a glass of wine. The neighbors’ M.G. passed by. This summer, the neighbors sometimes tapped the horn as they passed. A bird swooped low across the lawn—perhaps a female cardinal. It was a surprise seeing a bird in the twilight like that. It dove into the grass, more like a seagull than a cardinal. It rose up, fluttering, with something in its beak. Jo put her glass on the little table, smiled, and clapped softly.

The bird Byron found dead in the morning was a grackle, not a cardinal. It was lying about ten feet from the picture window, but until Tom examined the bird’s body carefully, he did not decide that probably it had just smacked into the glass by accident.

At Rusty’s, at the end of summer, Tom ran into the cop again. They were both carrying white paper bags with straws sticking out of them. Grease was starting to seep through the bags. Rickman had never reappeared, and Tom felt some embarrassment about having gone to see the cop. He tried not to focus on the tip of the cop’s nose.

“Running into a nut like that, I guess it makes getting back to the city look good,” the cop said.

He’s thinking summer people, Tom decided.

“You have a nice year, now,” the cop said. “Tell your wife I sure do envy her her retirement.”

“Her retirement?” Tom said.

The cop looked at the blacktop. “I admit, the way you described that guy I thought he might be sent by somebody who had a grudge against you or your wife,” he said. “Then at the fire-department picnic I got to talking to your neighbor—that Mrs. Hewett—and I asked her if she’d seen anybody strange poking around before you got there. Hadn’t. We got to talking. She said you were in the advertising business, and there was no way of knowing what gripes some lunatic might have with that, if he happened to know. Maybe you walked on somebody’s territory, so to speak, and he wanted to get even. And your wife being a schoolteacher, you can’t realize how upset some parents get when Johnny doesn’t bring home the A’s. You never can tell. Mrs. Hewett said she’d been a schoolteacher for a few months herself, before she got married, and she never regretted the day she quit. Said your wife was real happy about her own decision, too.” The cop nodded in agreement with this.

Tom tried to hide his surprise. Somehow, the fact that he didn’t know that Jo had ever exchanged a word with a neighbor, Karen Hewett, privately made the rest of the story believable. They hardly knew the woman. But why would Jo quit? His credibility with the cop must have been good after all. He could tell from the way the cop studied his face that he realized he had been telling Tom something he didn’t know.

When the cop left, Tom sat on the hot front hood of his car, took the hamburgers out of the bag, and ate them. He pulled the straw out of the big container of Coke and took off the plastic top. He drank from the cup, and when the Coke was gone he continued to sit there, sucking ice. Back during the winter, Jo had several times brought up the idea of having a baby, but she hadn’t mentioned it for weeks now. He wondered if she had decided to get pregnant in spite of his objections. But even if she had, why would she quit her job before she was sure there was a reason for it?

A teenage girl with short hair and triangle-shaped earrings walked by, averting her eyes as if she knew he’d stare after her. He didn’t; only the earrings that caught the light like mirrors interested him. In a convertible facing him, across the lot, a boy and girl were eating their sandwiches in the front seat while a golden retriever in the back moved his head between theirs, looking from left to right and right to left with the regularity of a dummy talking to a ventriloquist. A man holding his toddler’s hand walked by and smiled. Another car pulled in, with Hall and Oates going on the radio. The driver turned off the ignition, cutting off the music, and got out. A woman got out the other side. As they walked past, the woman said to the man, “I don’t see why we’ve got to eat exactly at nine, twelve, and six.” “Hey, it’s twelve-fifteen,” the man said. Tom dropped his cup into the paper bag, along with his hamburger wrappers and the napkins he hadn’t used. He carried the soggy bag over to the trash can. A few bees lifted slightly higher as he stuffed his trash in. Walking back to the car, he realized that he had absolutely no idea what to do. At some point he would have to ask Jo what was going on.

When he pulled up, Byron was sitting on the front step, cleaning fish over a newspaper. Four trout, one of them very large. Byron had had a good day.

Tom walked through the house but couldn’t find Jo. He held his breath when he opened the closet door; it was unlikely that she would be in there, naked, two days in a row. She liked to play tricks on him.

He came back downstairs, and saw, through the kitchen window, that Jo was sitting outside. A woman was with her. He walked out. Paper plates and beer bottles were on the grass beside their chairs.

“Hi, honey,” she said.

“Hi,” the woman said. It was Karen Hewett.

“Hi,” he said to both of them. He had never seen Karen Hewett up close. She was tanner than he realized. The biggest difference, though, was her hair. When he had seen her, it had always been long and windblown, but today she had it pulled back in a clip.

“Get all your errands done?” Jo said.

It couldn’t have been a more ordinary conversation. It couldn’t have been a more ordinary summer day.

The night before they closed up the house, Tom and Jo lay stretched out on the bed. Jo was finishing Tom Jones. Tom was enjoying the cool breeze coming through the window, thinking that when he was in New York he forgot the Vermont house; at least, he forgot it except for the times he looked up from the street he was on and saw the sky, and its emptiness made him remember stars. It was the sky he loved in the country—the sky more than the house. If he hadn’t thought it would seem dramatic, he would have gotten out of bed now and stood at the window for a long time. Earlier in the evening, Jo had asked why he was so moody. He had told her that he didn’t feel like leaving. “Then let’s stay,” she said. It was his opening to say something about her job in the fall. He had hoped she would say something, but he hesitated, and she had only put her arms around him and rubbed her cheek against his chest. All summer, she had seduced him—sometimes with passion, sometimes so subtly he didn’t realize what was happening until she put her hand up under his T-shirt or kissed him on the lips.

Now it was the end of August. Jo’s sister in Connecticut was graduating from nursing school in Hartford, and Jo had asked Tom to stop there so they could do something with her sister to celebrate. Her sister lived in a one-bedroom apartment, but it would be easy to find a motel. The following day, they would take Byron home to Philadelphia and then backtrack to New York.

In the car the next morning, Tom felt Byron’s gaze on his back and wondered if he had overheard their lovemaking the night before. It was very hot by noontime. There was so much haze on the mountains that their peaks were invisible. The mountains gradually sloped until suddenly, before Tom realized it, they were driving on flat highway. Late that afternoon they found a motel. He and Byron swam in the pool, and Jo, although she was just about to see her, talked to her sister for half an hour on the phone.

By the time Jo’s sister turned up at the motel, Tom had shaved and showered. Byron was watching television. He wanted to stay in the room and watch the movie instead of having dinner with them. He said he wasn’t hungry. Tom insisted that he come and eat dinner. “I can get something out of the machine,” Byron said.

“You’re not going to eat potato chips for dinner,” Tom said. “Get off the bed—come on.”

Byron gave Tom a look that was quite similar to the look an outlaw in the movie was giving the sheriff who had just kicked his gun out of reach.

“You didn’t stay glued to the set in Vermont all summer and miss those glorious days, did you?” Jo’s sister said.

“I fished,” Byron said.

“He caught four trout one day,” Tom said, spreading his arms and looking from the palm of one hand to the palm of the other.

They all had dinner together in the motel restaurant, and later, while they drank their coffee, Byron dropped quarters into the machine in the corridor, playing game after game of Space Invaders.

Jo and her sister went into the bar next to the restaurant for a nightcap. Tom let them go alone, figuring that they probably wanted some private time together. Byron followed him up to the room and turned on the television. An hour later, Jo and her sister were still in the bar. Tom sat on the balcony. Long before his usual bedtime, Byron turned off the television.

“Good night,” Tom called into the room, hoping Byron would call him in.

“Night,” Byron said.

Tom sat in silence for a minute. He was out of cigarettes and felt like a beer. He went into the room. Byron was lying in his sleeping bag, unzipped, on top of one of the beds.

“I’m going to drive down to that 7-Eleven,” Tom said. “Want me to bring you anything?”

“No, thanks,” Byron said.

“Want to come along?”

“No,” Byron said.

He picked up the keys to the car and the room key and went out. He wasn’t sure whether Byron was still sulking because he had made him go to dinner or whether he didn’t want to go back to his mother’s. Perhaps he was just tired.

Tom bought two Heinekens and a pack of Kools. The cashier was obviously stoned; he had bloodshot eyes and he stuffed a wad of napkins into the bag before he pushed it across the counter to Tom.

Back at the motel, he opened the door quietly. Byron didn’t move. Tom put out one of the two lights Byron had left on and slid open the glass door to the balcony.

Two people kissed on the pathway outside, passing the pool on the way to their room. People were talking in the room below—muted, but it sounded like an argument. The lights were suddenly turned off at the pool. Tom pushed his heels against the railing and tipped his chair back. He could hear the cars on the highway. He felt sad about something, and realized that he felt quite alone. He finished a beer and lit a cigarette. Byron hadn’t been very communicative. Of course, he couldn’t expect a ten-year-old boy to throw his arms around him the way he had when he was a baby. And Jo—in spite of her ardor, his memory of her, all summer, was of her sitting with her nose in some eighteenth-century novel. He thought about all the things they had done in July and August, trying to convince himself that they had done a lot and had fun. Dancing a couple of times, auctions, the day on the borrowed raft, four—no, five—movies, fishing with Byron, badminton, the fireworks and the sparerib dinner outside the Town Hall on the Fourth.

Maybe what his ex-wife always said was true: he didn’t connect with people. Jo never said such a thing, though. And Byron chose to spend the summer with them.

He drank the other beer and felt its effect. It had been a long drive. Byron probably didn’t want to go back to Philadelphia. He himself wasn’t too eager to begin his new job. He suddenly remembered his secretary when he confided in her that he’d gotten the big offer—her surprise, the way she hid her thumbs-up behind the palm of her other hand, in a mock gesture of secrecy. “Where are you going to go from there?” she had said. He’d miss her. She was funny and pretty and enthusiastic—no slouch herself. He’d miss laughing with her, miss being flattered because she thought that he was such a competent character.

He missed Jo. It wasn’t because she was off at the bar. If she came back this instant, something would still be missing. He couldn’t imagine caring for anyone more than he cared for her, but he wasn’t sure that he was still in love with her. He was fiddling, there in the dark. He had reached into the paper bag and begun to wrinkle up little bits of napkin, rolling the paper between thumb and finger so that it formed tiny balls. When he had a palmful, he got up and tossed them over the railing. When he sat down again, he closed his eyes and began what would be months of remembering Vermont: the garden, the neon green of new peas, the lumpy lawn, the pine trees and the smell of them at night—and then suddenly Rickman was there, rumpled and strange, but his presence was only slightly startling. He was just a man who’d dropped in on a summer day. “You’d be crazy not to be happy here,” Rickman was saying. All that was quite believable now—the way, when seen in the odd context of a home movie, even the craziest relative can suddenly look amiable.

He wondered if Jo was pregnant. Could that be what she and her sister were talking about all this time in the bar? For a second, he wanted them all to be transformed into characters in one of those novels she had read all summer. That way, the uncertainty would end. Henry Fielding would simply step in and predict the future. The author could tell him what it would be like, what would happen, if he had to try, another time, to love somebody.

The woman who had been arguing with the man was quiet. Crickets chirped, and a television hummed faintly. Below him, near the pool, a man who worked at the motel had rolled a table onto its side. He whistled while he made an adjustment to the white metal pole that would hold an umbrella the next day.

Janus

The bowl was perfect. Perhaps it was not what you’d select if you faced a shelf of bowls, and not the sort of thing that would inevitably attract a lot of attention at a crafts fair, yet it had real presence. It was as predictably admired as a mutt who has no reason to suspect he might be funny. Just such a dog, in fact, was often brought out (and in) along with the bowl.

Andrea was a real-estate agent, and when she thought that some prospective buyers might be dog lovers, she would drop off her dog at the same time she placed the bowl in the house that was up for sale. She would put a dish of water in the kitchen for Mondo, take his squeaking plastic frog out of her purse and drop it on the floor. He would pounce delightedly, just as he did every day at home, batting around his favorite toy. The bowl usually sat on a coffee table, though recently she had displayed it on top of a pine blanket chest and on a lacquered table. It was once placed on a cherry table beneath a Bonnard still life, where it held its own.

Everyone who has purchased a house or who has wanted to sell a house must be familiar with some of the tricks used to convince a buyer that the house is quite special: a fire in the fireplace in early evening; jonquils in a pitcher on the kitchen counter, where no one ordinarily has space to put flowers; perhaps the slight aroma of spring, made by a single drop of scent vaporizing from a lamp bulb.

The wonderful thing about the bowl, Andrea thought, was that it was both subtle and noticeable—a paradox of a bowl. Its glaze was the color of cream and seemed to glow no matter what light it was placed in. There were a few bits of color in it—tiny geometric flashes—and some of these were tinged with flecks of silver. They were as mysterious as cells seen under a microscope; it was difficult not to study them, because they shimmered, flashing for a split second, and then resumed their shape. Something about the colors and their random placement suggested motion. People who liked country furniture always commented on the bowl, but then it turned out that people who felt comfortable with Biedermeier loved it just as much. But the bowl was not at all ostentatious, or even so noticeable that anyone would suspect that it had been put in place deliberately. They might notice the height of the ceiling on first entering a room, and only when their eye moved down from that, or away from the refraction of sunlight on a pale wall, would they see the bowl. Then they would go immediately to it and comment. Yet they always faltered when they tried to say something. Perhaps it was because they were in the house for a serious reason, not to notice some object.

Once Andrea got a call from a woman who had not put in an offer on a house she had shown her. That bowl, she said—would it be possible to find out where the owners had bought that beautiful bowl? Andrea pretended that she did not know what the woman was referring to. A bowl, somewhere in the house? Oh, on a table under the window. Yes, she would ask, of course. She let a couple of days pass, then called back to say that the bowl had been a present and the people did not know where it had been purchased.

When the bowl was not being taken from house to house, it sat on Andrea’s coffee table at home. She didn’t keep it carefully wrapped (although she transported it that way, in a box); she kept it on the table, because she liked to see it. It was large enough so that it didn’t seem fragile or particularly vulnerable if anyone sideswiped the table or Mondo blundered into it at play. She had asked her husband to please not drop his house key in it. It was meant to be empty.

When her husband first noticed the bowl, he had peered into it and smiled briefly. He always urged her to buy things she liked. In recent years, both of them had acquired many things to make up for all the lean years when they were graduate students, but now that they had been comfortable for quite a while, the pleasure of new possessions dwindled. Her husband had pronounced the bowl “pretty,” and he had turned away without picking it up to examine it. He had no more interest in the bowl than she had in his new Leica.

She was sure that the bowl brought her luck. Bids were often put in on houses where she had displayed the bowl. Sometimes the owners, who were always asked to be away or to step outside when the house was being shown, didn’t even know that the bowl had been in their house. Once—she could not imagine how—she left it behind, and then she was so afraid that something might have happened to it that she rushed back to the house and sighed with relief when the woman owner opened the door. The bowl, Andrea explained—she had purchased a bowl and set it on the chest for safekeeping while she toured the house with the prospective buyers, and she . . . She felt like rushing past the frowning woman and seizing her bowl. The owner stepped aside, and it was only when Andrea ran to the chest that the lady glanced at her a little strangely. In the few seconds before Andrea picked up the bowl, she realized that the owner must have just seen that it had been perfectly placed, that the sunlight struck the bluer part of it. Her pitcher had been moved to the far side of the chest, and the bowl predominated. All the way home, Andrea wondered how she could have left the bowl behind. It was like leaving a friend at an outing—just walking off. Sometimes there were stories in the paper about families forgetting a child somewhere and driving to the next city. Andrea had only gone a mile down the road before she remembered.

In time, she dreamed of the bowl. Twice, in a waking dream—early in the morning, between sleep and a last nap before rising—she had a clear vision of it. It came into sharp focus and startled her for a moment—the same bowl she looked at every day.

She had a very profitable year selling real estate. Word spread, and she had more clients than she felt comfortable with. She had the foolish thought that if only the bowl were an animate object she could thank it. There were times when she wanted to talk to her husband about the bowl. He was a stockbroker, and sometimes told people that he was fortunate to be married to a woman who had such a fine aesthetic sense and yet could also function in the real world. They were a lot alike, really—they had agreed on that. They were both quiet people—reflective, slow to make value judgments, but almost intractable once they had come to a conclusion. They both liked details, but while ironies attracted her, he was more impatient and dismissive when matters became many-sided or unclear. They both knew this, and it was the kind of thing they could talk about when they were alone in the car together, coming home from a party or after a weekend with friends. But she never talked to him about the bowl. When they were at dinner, exchanging their news of the day, or while they lay in bed at night listening to the stereo and murmuring sleepy disconnections, she was often tempted to come right out and say that she thought that the bowl in the living room, the cream-colored bowl, was responsible for her success. But she didn’t say it. She couldn’t begin to explain it. Sometimes in the morning, she would look at him and feel guilty that she had such a constant secret.

Could it be that she had some deeper connection with the bowl—a relationship of some kind? She corrected her thinking: how could she imagine such a thing, when she was a human being and it was a bowl? It was ridiculous. Just think of how people lived together and loved each other . . . But was that always so clear, always a relationship? She was confused by these thoughts, but they remained in her mind. There was something within her now, something real, that she never talked about.

The bowl was a mystery, even to her. It was frustrating, because her involvement with the bowl contained a steady sense of unrequited good fortune; it would have been easier to respond if some sort of demand were made in return. But that only happened in fairy tales. The bowl was just a bowl. She did not believe that for one second. What she believed was that it was something she loved.

In the past, she had sometimes talked to her husband about a new property she was about to buy or sell—confiding some clever strategy she had devised to persuade owners who seemed ready to sell. Now she stopped doing that, for all her strategies involved the bowl. She became more deliberate with the bowl, and more possessive. She put it in houses only when no one was there, and removed it when she left the house. Instead of just moving a pitcher or a dish, she would remove all the other objects from a table. She had to force herself to handle them carefully, because she didn’t really care about them. She just wanted them out of sight.

She wondered how the situation would end. As with a lover, there was no exact scenario of how matters would come to a close. Anxiety became the operative force. It would be irrelevant if the lover rushed into someone else’s arms, or wrote her a note and departed to another city. The horror was the possibility of the disappearance. That was what mattered.

She would get up at night and look at the bowl. It never occurred to her that she might break it. She washed and dried it without anxiety, and she moved it often, from coffee table to mahogany corner table or wherever, without fearing an accident. It was clear that she would not be the one who would do anything to the bowl. The bowl was only handled by her, set safely on one surface or another; it was not very likely that anyone would break it. A bowl was a poor conductor of electricity: it would not be hit by lightning. Yet the idea of damage persisted. She did not think beyond that—to what her life would be without the bowl. She only continued to fear that some accident would happen. Why not, in a world where people set plants where they did not belong, so that visitors touring a house would be fooled into thinking that dark corners got sunlight—a world full of tricks?

She had first seen the bowl several years earlier, at a crafts fair she had visited half in secret, with her lover. He had urged her to buy the bowl. She didn’t need any more things, she told him. But she had been drawn to the bowl, and they had lingered near it. Then she went on to the next booth, and he came up behind her, tapping the rim against her shoulder as she ran her fingers over a wood carving. “You’re still insisting that I buy that?” she said. “No,” he said. “I bought it for you.” He had bought her other things before this—things she liked more, at first—the child’s ebony-and-turquoise ring that fitted her little finger; the wooden box, long and thin, beautifully dovetailed, that she used to hold paper clips; the soft gray sweater with a pouch pocket. It was his idea that when he could not be there to hold her hand she could hold her own—clasp her hands inside the lone pocket that stretched across the front. But in time she became more attached to the bowl than to any of his other presents. She tried to talk herself out of it. She owned other things that were more striking or valuable. It wasn’t an object whose beauty jumped out at you; a lot of people must have passed it by before the two of them saw it that day.

Her lover had said that she was always too slow to know what she really loved. Why continue with her life the way it was? Why be two-faced, he asked her. He had made the first move toward her. When she would not decide in his favor, would not change her life and come to him, he asked her what made her think she could have it both ways. And then he made the last move and left. It was a decision meant to break her will, to shatter her intransigent ideas about honoring previous commitments.

Time passed. Alone in the living room at night, she often looked at the bowl sitting on the table, still and safe, unilluminated. In its way, it was perfect: the world cut in half, deep and smoothly empty. Near the rim, even in dim light, the eye moved toward one small flash of blue, a vanishing point on the horizon.

Skeletons

Usually she was the artist. Today she was the model. She had on sweatpants—both she and Garrett wore medium, although his sweatpants fit her better than they did him, because she did not have his long legs—and a Chinese jacket, plum-colored, patterned with blue octagons, edged in silver thread, that seemed to float among the lavender flowers that were as big as the palm of a hand raised for the high-five. A frog, Nancy thought; that was what the piece was called—the near-knot she fingered, the little fastener she never closed.

It was late Saturday afternoon, and, as usual, Nancy Niles was spending the day with Garrett. She had met him in a drawing class she took at night. During the week, he worked in an artists’ supply store, but he had the weekends off. Until recently, when the weather turned cold, they had often taken long walks on Saturday or Sunday, and sometimes Kyle Brown—an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania, who was the other tenant in the rooming house Garrett lived in, in a run-down neighborhood twenty minutes from the campus—had walked with them. It was Kyle who had told Garrett about the empty room in the house. His first week in Philadelphia, Garrett had been in line to pay his check at a coffee shop when the cashier asked Kyle for a penny, which he didn’t have. Then she looked behind Kyle to Garrett and said, “Well, would you have a penny?” Leaving, Kyle and Garrett struck up the conversation that had led to Garrett’s moving into the house. And now the cashier’s question had become a running joke. Just that morning, Garrett was outside the bathroom, and when Kyle came out, wrapped in his towel, he asked, “Well, got a penny now?”

It was easy to amuse Kyle, and he had a lovely smile, Nancy thought. He once told her that he was the first member of his family to leave Utah to go to college. It had strained relations with his parents, but they couldn’t argue with Kyle’s insistence that the English department at Penn was excellent. The landlady’s married daughter had gone to Penn, and Kyle felt sure that had been the deciding factor in his getting the room. That and the fact that when the landlady told him where the nearest Episcopal church was, he told her that he was a Mormon. “At least you have some religion,” she said. When she interviewed Garrett and described the neighborhood and told him where the Episcopal church was, Kyle had already tipped him; Garrett flipped open a notebook and wrote down the address.

Now, as Garrett and Nancy sat talking as he sketched (Garrett cared so much about drawing that Nancy was sure that he was happy that the weather had turned, so he had an excuse to stay indoors), Kyle was frying chicken downstairs. A few minutes earlier, he had looked in on them and stayed to talk. He complained that he was tired of being known as “the Mormon” to the landlady. Not condescendingly, that he could see—she just said it the way a person might use the Latin name for a plant instead of its common one. He showed them a telephone message from his father she had written down, with “MORMON” printed at the top.

Kyle Brown lived on hydroponic tomatoes, Shake ’n Bake chicken, and Pepperidge Farm rolls. On Saturdays, Garrett and Nancy ate with him. They contributed apple cider—smoky, with a smell you could taste; the last pressing of the season—and sometimes turnovers from the corner bakery. Above the sputtering chicken Nancy could hear Kyle singing now, in his strong baritone: “The truth is, I nev-er left you . . .”

“Sit still,” Garrett said, looking up from his sketchbook. “Don’t you know your role in life?”

Nancy cupped her hands below her breasts, turned her head to the side, and pursed her lips.

“Don’t do that,” he said, throwing the crayon stub. “Don’t put yourself down, even as a joke.”

“Oh, don’t analyze everything so seriously,” she said, hopping off the window seat and picking up the conté crayon. She threw it back to him. He caught it one-handed. He was the second person she had ever slept with. The other one, much to her embarrassment now, had been a deliberate experiment.

“Tell your shrink that your actions don’t mean anything,” he said.

“You hate it that I go to a shrink,” she said, watching him bend over the sketchbook again. “Half the world sees a shrink. What are you worried about—that somebody might know something about me you don’t know?”

He raised his eyebrows, as he often did when he was concentrating on something in a drawing. “I know a few things he doesn’t know,” he said.

“It’s not a competition,” she said.

“Everything is a competition. At some very serious, very deep level, every single thing—”

“You already made that joke,” she said, sighing.

He stopped drawing and looked over at her in a different way. “I know,” he said. “I shouldn’t have taken it back. I really do believe that’s what exists. One person jockeying for position, another person dodging.”

“I can’t tell when you’re kidding. Now you’re kidding, right?”

“No. I’m serious. I just took it back this morning because I could tell I was scaring you.”

“Oh. Now are you going to tell me that you’re in competition with me?”

“Why do you think I’m kidding?” he said. “It would kill me if you got a better grade in any course than I got. And you’re so good. When you draw, you make strokes that look as if they were put on the paper with a feather. I’d take your technique away from you if I could. It’s just that I know I can’t, so I bite my tongue. Really. I envy you so much my heart races. I could never share a studio with you. I wouldn’t be able to be in the same room with somebody who can be so patient and so exact at the same time. Compared to you, I might as well be wearing a catcher’s mitt when I draw.”

Nancy pulled her knees up to her chest and rested her cheek against one of them. She started to laugh.

“Really,” he said.

“O.K.—really,” she said, going poker-faced. “I know, darling Garrett. You really do mean it.”

“I do,” he said.

She stood up. “Then we don’t have to share a studio,” she said. “But you can’t take it back that you said you wanted to marry me.” She rubbed her hands through her hair and let one hand linger to massage her neck. Her body was cold from sitting on the window seat. Clasping her legs, she had realized that the thigh muscles ached.

“Maybe all that envy and anxiety has to be burnt away with constant passion,” she said. “I mean—I really, really mean that.” She smiled. “Really,” she said. “Maybe you just want to give in to it—like scratching a mosquito bite until it’s so sore you cry.”

They were within seconds of touching each other, but just at the moment when she was about to step toward him they heard the old oak stairs creaking beneath Kyle’s feet.

“This will come as no surprise to you,” Kyle said, standing in the doorway, “but I’m checking to make sure that you know you’re invited to dinner. I provide the chicken, sliced tomatoes, and bread—right? You bring dessert and something to drink.”

Even in her disappointment, Nancy could smile at him. Of course he knew that he had stumbled into something. Probably he wanted to turn and run back down the stairs. It wasn’t easy to be the younger extra person in a threesome. When she raised her head, Garrett caught her eye, and in that moment they both knew how embarrassed Kyle must be. His need for them was never masked as well as he thought. The two of them, clearly lovers, were forgoing candlelight and deliberately bumped knees and the intimacy of holding glasses to each other’s lips in order to have dinner with him. Kyle had once told Nancy, on one of their late-fall walks, that one of his worst fears had always been that someone might be able to read his mind. It was clear to her that he had fantasies about them. At the time, Nancy had tried to pass it off lightly; she told him that when she was drawing she always sensed the model’s bones and muscles, and what she did was stroke a soft surface over them until a body took form.

Kyle wanted to stay close to them—meant to stay close—but time passed, and after they all had moved several times he lost track of them. He knew nothing of Nancy Niles’s life, had no idea that in October, 1985, she was out trick-or-treating with Garrett and their two-year-old child, Fraser, who was dressed up as a goblin for his first real Halloween. A plastic orange pumpkin, lit by batteries, bobbed in front of her as she walked a few steps ahead of them. She was dressed in a skeleton costume, but she might have been an angel, beaming salvation into the depths of the mines. Where she lived—their part of Providence, Rhode Island—was as grim and dark as an underground labyrinth.

It was ironic that men thought she could lead the way for them, because Nancy had realized all along that she had little sense of direction. She felt isolated, angry at herself for not pursuing her career as an artist, for no longer being in love. It would have surprised her to know that in a moment of crisis, late that night, in Warrenton, Virginia, when leaves, like shadows on an X ray, suddenly flew up and obscured his vision and his car went into a skid, Kyle Brown would see her again, in a vision. Nancy Niles! he thought, in that instant of fear and shock. There she was, for a split second—her face, ghostly pale under the gas-station lights, metamorphosed into brightness. In a flash, she was again the embodiment of beauty to him. As his car spun in a widening circle and then came to rest with its back wheels on an embankment, Nancy Niles the skeleton was walking slowly down the sidewalk. Leaves flew past her like footsteps, quickly descending the stairs.

Where You’ll Find Me

Friends keep calling my broken arm a broken wing. It’s the left arm, now folded against my chest and kept in place with a blue scarf sling that is knotted behind my neck, and it weighs too much ever to have been winglike. The accident happened when I ran for a bus. I tried to stop it from pulling away by shaking my shopping bags like maracas in the air, and that’s when I slipped on the ice and went down.

So I took the train from New York City to Saratoga yesterday, instead of driving. I had the perfect excuse not to go to Saratoga to visit my brother at all, but once I had geared up for it I decided to go through with the trip and avoid guilt. It isn’t Howard I mind but his wife’s two children—a girl of eleven and a boy of three. Becky either pays no attention to her brother Todd or else she tortures him. Last winter she used to taunt him by stalking around the house on his heels, clomping close behind him wherever he went, which made him run and scream at the same time. Kate did not intervene until both children became hysterical and we could no longer shout over their voices. “I think I like it that they’re physical,” she said. “Maybe if they enact some of their hostility like this, they won’t grow up with the habit of getting what they want by playing mind games with other people.” It seems to me that they will not ever grow up but will burn out like meteors.

Howard has finally found what he wants: the opposite of domestic tranquility. For six years, he lived in Oregon with a pale, passive woman. On the rebound, he married an even paler pre-med student named Francine. That marriage lasted less than a year, and then, on a blind date in Los Angeles, he met Kate, whose husband was away on a business trip to Denmark just then. In no time, Kate and her daughter and infant son moved in with him, to the studio apartment in Laguna Beach he was sharing with a screenwriter. The two men had been working on a script about Medgar Evers, but when Kate and the children moved in they switched to writing a screenplay about what happens when a man meets a married woman with two children on a blind date and the three of them move in with him and his friend. Then Howard’s collaborator got engaged and moved out, and the screenplay was abandoned. Howard accepted a last-minute invitation to teach writing at an upstate college in New York, and within a week they were all ensconced in a drafty Victorian house in Saratoga. Kate’s husband had begun divorce proceedings before she moved in with Howard, but eventually he agreed not to sue for custody of Becky and Todd in exchange for child-support payments that were less than half of what his lawyer thought he would have to pay. Now he sends the children enormous stuffed animals that they have little or no interest in, with notes that say, “Put this in Mom’s zoo.” A stuffed toy every month or so—giraffes, a life-size German shepherd, an overstuffed standing bear—and, every time, the same note.

The bear stands in one corner of the kitchen, and people have gotten in the habit of pinning notes to it—reminders to buy milk or get the oil changed in the car. Wraparound sunglasses have been added. Scarves and jackets are sometimes draped on its arms. Sometimes the stuffed German shepherd is brought over and propped up with its paws placed on the bear’s haunch, imploring it.

Right now, I’m in the kitchen with the bear. I’ve just turned up the thermostat—the first one up in the morning is supposed to do that—and am dunking a tea bag in a mug of hot water. For some reason, it’s impossible for me to make tea with loose tea and the tea ball unless I have help. The only tea bag I could find was Emperor’s Choice.

I sit in one of the kitchen chairs to drink the tea. The chair seems to stick to me, even though I have on thermal long johns and a long flannel nightgown. The chairs are plastic, very nineteen-fifties, patterned with shapes that look sometimes geometric, sometimes almost human. Little things like malformed hands reach out toward triangles and squares. I asked. Howard and Kate got the kitchen set at an auction, for thirty dollars. They thought it was funny. The house itself is not funny. It has four fireplaces, wide-board floors, and high, dusty ceilings. They bought it with his share of an inheritance that came to us when our grandfather died. Kate’s contribution to restoring the house has been transforming the baseboards into faux marbre. How effective this is has to do with how stoned she is when she starts. Sometimes the baseboards look like clotted versions of the kitchen-chair pattern, instead of marble. Kate considers what she calls “parenting” to be a full-time job. When they first moved to Saratoga, she used to give piano lessons. Now she ignores the children and paints the baseboards.

And who am I to stand in judgment? I am a thirty-eight-year-old woman, out of a job, on tenuous enough footing with her sometime lover that she can imagine crashing emotionally as easily as she did on the ice. It may be true, as my lover, Frank, says, that having money is not good for the soul. Money that is given to you, that is. He is a lawyer who also has money, but it is money he earned and parlayed into more money by investing in real estate. An herb farm is part of this real estate. Boxes of herbs keep turning up at Frank’s office—herbs in foil, herbs in plastic bags, dried herbs wrapped in cones of newspaper. He crumbles them over omelets, roasts, vegetables. He is opposed to salt. He insists herbs are more healthful.

And who am I to claim to love a man when I am skeptical even about his use of herbs? I am embarrassed to be unemployed. I am insecure enough to stay with someone because of the look that sometimes comes into his eyes when he makes love to me. I am a person who secretly shakes on salt in the kitchen, then comes out with her plate, smiling, as basil is crumbled over the tomatoes.

Sometimes, in our bed, his fingers smell of rosemary or tarragon. Strong smells. Sour smells. Whatever Shakespeare says, or whatever is written in Culpeper’s Complete Herbal, I cannot imagine that herbs have anything to do with love. But many brides-to-be come to the herb farm and buy branches of herbs to stick in their bouquets. They anoint their wrists with herbal extracts, to smell mysterious. They believe that herbs bring them luck. These days, they want tubs of rosemary in their houses, not ficus trees. “I got in right on the cusp of the new world,” Frank says. He isn’t kidding.

For the Christmas party tonight, there are cherry tomatoes halved and stuffed with peaks of cheese, mushrooms stuffed with puréed tomatoes, tomatoes stuffed with chopped mushrooms, and mushrooms stuffed with cheese. Kate is laughing in the kitchen. “No one’s going to notice,” she mutters. “No one’s going to say anything.”

“Why don’t we put out some nuts?” Howard says.

“Nuts are so conventional. This is funny,” Kate says, squirting more soft cheese out of a pastry tube.

“Last year we had mistletoe and mulled cider.”

“Last year we lost our sense of humor. What happened that we got all hyped up? We even ran out on Christmas Eve to cut a tree—”

“The kids,” Howard says.

“That’s right,” she says. “The kids were crying. They were feeling competitive with the other kids, or something.”

“Becky was crying. Todd was too young to cry about that,” Howard says.

“Why are we talking about tears?” Kate says. “We can talk about tears when it’s not the season to be jolly. Everybody’s going to come in tonight and love the wreaths on the picture hooks and think this food is so festive.”

“We invited a new Indian guy from the Philosophy Department,” Howard says. “American Indian—not an Indian from India.”

“If we want, we can watch the tapes of Jewel in the Crown,” Kate says.

“I’m feeling really depressed,” Howard says, backing up to the counter and sliding down until he rests on his elbows. His tennis shoes are wet. He never takes off his wet shoes, and he never gets colds.

“Try one of those mushrooms,” Kate says. “They’ll be better when they’re cooked, though.”

“What’s wrong with me?” Howard says. It’s almost the first time he’s looked at me since I arrived. I’ve been trying not to register my boredom and my frustration with Kate’s prattle.

“Maybe we should get a tree,” I say.

“I don’t think it’s Christmas that’s making me feel this way,” Howard says.

“Well, snap out of it,” Kate says. “You can open one of your presents early, if you want to.”

“No, no,” Howard says, “it isn’t Christmas.” He hands a plate to Kate, who has begun to stack the dishwasher. “I’ve been worrying that you’re in a lot of pain and you just aren’t saying so,” he says to me.

“It’s just uncomfortable,” I say.

“I know, but do you keep going over what happened, in your mind? When you fell, or in the emergency room, or anything?”

“I had a dream last night about the ballerinas at Victoria Pool,” I say. “It was like Victoria Pool was a stage set instead of a real place, and tall, thin ballerinas kept parading in and twirling and pirouetting. I was envying their being able to touch their fingertips together over their heads.”

Howard opens the top level of the dishwasher and Kate begins to hand him the rinsed glasses.

“You just told a little story,” Howard says. “You didn’t really answer the question.”

“I don’t keep going over it in my mind,” I say.

“So you’re repressing it,” he says.

“Mom,” Becky says, walking into the kitchen, “is it O.K. if Deirdre comes to the party tonight if her dad doesn’t drive here to pick her up this weekend?”

“I thought her father was in the hospital,” Kate says.

“Yeah, he was. But he got out. He called and said that it was going to snow up north, though, so he wasn’t sure if he could come.”

“Of course she can come,” Kate says.

“And you know what?” Becky says.

“Say hello to people when you come into a room,” Kate says. “At least make eye contact or smile or something.”

“I’m not Miss America on the runway, Mom. I’m just walking into the kitchen.”

“You have to acknowledge people’s existence,” Kate says. “Haven’t we talked about this?”

“Oh, hel-lo,” Becky says, curtsying by pulling out the sides of an imaginary skirt. She has on purple sweatpants. She turns toward me and pulls the fabric away from her hipbones. “Oh, hello, as if we’ve never met,” she says.

“Your aunt here doesn’t want to be in the middle of this,” Howard says. “She’s got enough trouble.”

“Get back on track,” Kate says to Becky. “What did you want to say to me?”

“You know what you do, Mom?” Becky says. “You make an issue of something and then it’s like when I speak it’s a big thing. Everybody’s listening to me.”

Kate closes the door to the dishwasher.

“Did you want to speak to me privately?” she says.

“Nooo,” Becky says, sitting in the chair across from me and sighing. “I was just going to say—and now it’s a big deal—I was going to say that Deirdre just found out that that guy she was writing all year is in prison. He was in prison all the time, but she didn’t know what the P.O. box meant.”

“What’s she going to do?” Howard says.

“She’s going to write and ask him all about prison,” Becky says.

“That’s good,” Howard says. “That cheers me up to hear that. The guy probably agonized about whether to tell her or not. He probably thought she’d hot-potato him.”

“Lots of decent people go to prison,” Becky says.

“That’s ridiculous,” Kate says. “You can’t generalize about convicts any more than you can generalize about the rest of humanity.”

“So?” Becky says. “If somebody in the rest of humanity had something to hide, he’d hide it, too, wouldn’t he?”

“Let’s go get a tree,” Howard says. “We’ll get a tree.”

“Somebody got hit on the highway carrying a tree home,” Becky says. “Really.”

“You really do have your ear to the ground in this town,” Kate says. “You kids could be the town crier. I know everything before the paper comes.”

“It happened yesterday,” Becky says.

“Christ,” Howard says. “We’re talking about crying, we’re talking about death.” He is leaning against the counter again.

“We are not,” Kate says, walking in front of him to open the refrigerator door. She puts a plate of stuffed tomatoes inside. “In your typical fashion, you’ve singled out two observations out of a lot that have been made, and—”

“I woke up thinking about Dennis Bidou last night,” Howard says to me. “Remember Dennis Bidou, who used to taunt you? Dad put me up to having it out with him, and he backed down after that. But I was always afraid he’d come after me. I went around for years pretending not to cringe when he came near me. And then, you know, one time I was out on a date and we ran out of gas, and as I was walking to get a can of gas a car pulled up alongside me and Dennis Bidou leaned out the window. He was surprised that it was me and I was surprised that it was him. He asked me what happened and I said I ran out of gas. He said, ‘Tough shit, I guess,’ but a girl was driving and she gave him a hard time. She stopped the car and insisted that I get in the back and they’d take me to the gas station. He didn’t say one word to me the whole way there. I remembered the way he looked in the car when I found out he was killed in Nam—the back of his head on that ramrod-straight body, and a black collar or some dark-colored collar pulled up to his hairline.” Howard makes a horizontal motion with four fingers, thumb folded under, in the air beside his ear.

“Now you’re trying to depress everybody,” Kate says.

“I’m willing to cheer up. I’m going to cheer up before tonight. I’m going up to that Lions Club lot on Main Street and get a tree. Anybody coming with me?”

“I’m going over to Deirdre’s,” Becky says.

“I’ll come with you, if you think my advice is needed,” I say.

“For fun,” Howard says, bouncing on his toes. “For fun—not advice.”

He gets my red winter coat out of the closet, and I back into it, putting in my good arm. Then he takes a diaper pin off the lapel and pins the other side of the coat to the top of my shoulder, easing the pin through my sweater. Then he puts Kate’s poncho over my head. This is the system, because I am always cold. Actually, Kate devised the system. I stand there while Howard puts on his leather jacket. I feel like a bird with a cloth draped over its cage for the night. This makes me feel sorry for myself, and then I do think of my arm as a broken wing, and suddenly everything seems so sad that I feel my eyes well up with tears. I sniff a couple of times. And Howard faced down Dennis Bidou, for my sake! My brother! But he really did it because my father told him to. Whatever my father told him to do he did. He drew the line only at smothering my father in the hospital when he asked him to. That is the only time I know of that he ignored my father’s wishes.

“Get one that’s tall enough,” Kate says. “And don’t get one of those trees that look like a cactus. Get one with long needles that swoops.”

“Swoops?” Howard says, turning in the hallway.

“Something with some fluidity,” she says, bending her knees and making a sweeping motion with her arm. “You know—something beautiful.”

Before the guests arrive, a neighbor woman has brought Todd back from his play group and he is ready for bed, and the tree has been decorated with a few dozen Christmas balls and some stars cut out of typing paper, with paper-clip hangers stuck through one point. The smaller animals in the stuffed-toy menagerie—certainly not the bear—are under the tree, approximating the animals at the manger. The manger is a roasting pan, with a green dinosaur inside.

“How many of these people who’re coming do I know?” I say.

“You know . . . you know . . .” Howard is gnawing his lip. He takes another sip of wine, looks puzzled. “Well, you know Koenig,” he says. “Koenig got married. You’ll like his wife. They’re coming separately, because he’s coming straight from work. You know the Miners. You know—you’ll really like Lightfoot, the new guy in the Philosophy Department. Don’t rush to tell him that you’re tied up with somebody. He’s a nice guy, and he deserves a chance.”

“I don’t think I’m tied up with anybody,” I say.

“Have a drink—you’ll feel better,” Howard says. “Honest to God. I was getting depressed this afternoon. When the light starts to sink so early, I never can figure out what I’m responding to. I gray over, like the afternoon, you know?”

“O.K., I’ll have a drink,” I say.

“The very fat man who’s coming is in A.A.,” Howard says, taking a glass off the bookshelf and pouring some wine into it. “These were just washed yesterday,” he says. He hands me the glass of wine. “The fat guy’s name is Dwight Kule. The Jansons, who are also coming, introduced us to him. He’s a bachelor. Used to live in the Apple. Mystery man. Nobody knows. He’s got a computer terminal in his house that’s hooked up to some mysterious office in New York. Tells funny jokes. They come at him all day over the computer.”

“Who are the Jansons?”

“You met her. The woman whose lover broke into the house and did caricatures of her and her husband all over the walls after she broke off with him. One amazing artist, from what I heard. You know about that, right?”

“No,” I say, smiling. “What does she look like?”

“You met her at the races with us. Tall. Red hair.”

“Oh, that woman. Why didn’t you say so?”

“I told you about the lover, right?”

“I didn’t know she had a lover.”

“Well, fortunately she had told her husband, and they’d decided to patch it up, so when they came home and saw the walls—I mean, I get the idea that it was rather graphic. Not like stumbling upon hieroglyphics in a cave or something. Husband told it as a story on himself: going down to the paint store and buying the darkest can of blue paint they had to do the painting-over, because he wanted it done with—none of this three-coats stuff.” Howard has another sip of wine. “You haven’t met her husband,” he says. “He’s an anesthesiologist.”

“What did her lover do?”

“He ran the music store. He left town.”

“Where did he go?”

“Montpelier.”

“How do you find all this stuff out?”

“Ask. Get told,” Howard says. “Then he was cleaning his gun in Montpelier the other day, and it went off and he shot himself in the foot. Didn’t do any real damage, though.”

“It’s hard to think of anything like that as poetic justice,” I say. “So are the Jansons happy again?”

“I don’t know. We don’t see much of them,” Howard says. “We’re not really involved in any social whirl, you know. You only visit during the holidays, and that’s when we give the annual party.”

“Oh, hel-lo,” Becky says, sweeping into the living room from the front door, bringing the cold and her girlfriend Deirdre in with her. Deirdre is giggling, head averted. “My friends! My wonderful friends!” Becky says, trotting past, hand waving madly. She stops in the doorway, and Deirdre collides with her. Deirdre puts her hand up to her mouth to muffle a yelp, then bolts past Becky into the kitchen.

“I can remember being that age,” I say.

“I don’t think I was ever that stupid,” Howard says.

“A different thing happens with girls. Boys don’t talk to each other all the time in quite the same intense way, do they? I mean, I can remember when it seemed that I never talked but that I was always confiding something.”

“Confide something in me,” Howard says, coming back from flipping the Bach on the stereo.

“Girls just talk that way to other girls,” I say, realizing he’s serious.

“Gidon Kremer,” Howard says, clamping his hand over his heart. “God—tell me that isn’t beautiful.”

“How did you find out so much about classical music?” I say. “By asking and getting told?”

“In New York,” he says. “Before I moved here. Before L.A., even. I just started buying records and asking around. Half the city is an unofficial guide to classical music. You can find out a lot in New York.” He pours more wine into his glass. “Come on,” he says. “Confide something in me.”

In the kitchen, one of the girls turns on the radio, and rock and roll, played low, crosses paths with Bach’s violin. The music goes lower still. Deirdre and Becky are laughing.

I take a drink, sigh, and nod at Howard. “When I was in San Francisco last June to see my friend Susan, I got in a night before I said I would, and she wasn’t in town,” I say. “I was going to surprise her, and she was the one who surprised me. It was no big deal. I was tired from the flight and by the time I got there I was happy to have the excuse to check into a hotel, because if she’d been there we’d have talked all night. Acting like Becky with Deirdre, right?”

Howard rolls his eyes and nods.

“So I went to a hotel and checked in and took a bath, and suddenly I got my second wind and I thought what the hell, why not go to the restaurant right next to the hotel—or in the hotel, I guess it was—and have a great dinner, since it was supposed to be such a great place.”

“What restaurant?”

“L’Étoile.”

“Yeah,” he says. “What happened?”

“I’m telling you what happened. You have to be patient. Girls always know to be patient with other girls.”

He nods yes again.

“They were very nice to me. It was about three-quarters full. They put me at a table, and the minute I sat down I looked up and there was a man on a banquette across the room from me. He was looking at me, and I was looking at him, and it was almost impossible not to keep eye contact. It just hit both of us, obviously. And almost on the other side of the curve of the banquette was a woman, who wasn’t terribly attractive. She had on a wedding ring. He didn’t. They were eating in silence. I had to force myself to look somewhere else, but when I did look up he’d look up, or he’d already be looking up. At some point he left the table. I saw that in my peripheral vision, when I had my head turned to hear a conversation on my right and I was chewing my food. Then after a while he paid the check and the two of them left. She walked ahead of him, and he didn’t seem to be with her. I mean, he walked quite far behind her. But naturally he didn’t turn his head. And after they left I thought, That’s amazing. It was really like kinetic energy. Just wham. So I had coffee, and then I paid my check, and when I was leaving I was walking up the steep steps to the street and the waiter came up behind me and said, ‘Excuse me. I don’t know what I should do, but I didn’t want to embarrass you in the restaurant. The gentleman left this for you on his way out.’ And he handed me an envelope. I was pretty taken aback, but I just said, ‘Thank you,’ and continued up the steps, and when I got outside I looked around. He wasn’t there, naturally. So I opened the envelope, and his business card was inside. He was one of the partners in a law firm. And underneath his name he had written, ‘Who are you? Please call.’ ”

Howard is smiling.

“So I put it in my purse and I walked for a few blocks, and I thought, Well, what for, really? Some man in San Francisco? For what? A one-night stand? I went back to the hotel, and when I walked in the man behind the desk stood up and said, ‘Excuse me. Were you just eating dinner?,’ and I said, ‘A few minutes ago,’ and he said, ‘Someone left this for you.’ It was a hotel envelope. In the elevator on the way to my room, I opened it, and it was the same business card, with ‘Please call’ written on it.”

“I hope you called,” Howard says.

“I decided to sleep on it. And in the morning I decided not to. But I kept the card. And then at the end of August I was walking in the East Village, and a couple obviously from out of town were walking in front of me, and a punk kid got up off the stoop where he was sitting and said to them, ‘Hey—I want my picture taken with you.’ I went into a store, and when I came out the couple and the punk kid were all laughing together, holding these Polaroid snaps that another punk had taken. It was a joke, not a scam. The man gave the kid a dollar for one of the pictures, and they walked off, and the punk sat back down on the stoop. So I walked back to where he was sitting, and I said, ‘Could you do me a real favor? Could I have my picture taken with you, too?’ ”

“What?” Howard says. The violin is soaring. He gets up and turns the music down a notch. He looks over his shoulder. “Yeah?” he says.

“The kid wanted to know why I wanted it, and I told him because it would upset my boyfriend. So he said yeah—his face lit up when I said that—but that he really would appreciate two bucks for more film. So I gave it to him, and then he put his arm around me and really mugged for the camera. He was like a human boa constrictor around my neck, and he did a Mick Jagger pout. I couldn’t believe how well the picture came out. And that night, on the white part on the bottom I wrote, ‘I’m somebody whose name you still don’t know. Are you going to find me?’ and I put it in an envelope and mailed it to him in San Francisco. I don’t know why I did it. I mean, it doesn’t seem like something I’d ever do, you know?”

“But how will he find you?” Howard says.

“I’ve still got his card,” I say, shrugging my good shoulder toward my purse on the floor.

“You don’t know what you’re going to do?” Howard says.

“I haven’t thought about it in months.”

“How is that possible?”

“How is it possible that somebody can go into a restaurant and be hit by lightning and the other person is, too? It’s like a bad movie or something.”

“Of course it can happen,” Howard says. “Seriously, what are you going to do?”

“Let some time pass. Maybe send him something he can follow up on if he still wants to.”

“That’s an amazing story,” Howard says.

“Sometimes—well, I hadn’t thought about it in a while, but at the end of summer, after I mailed the picture, I’d be walking along or doing whatever I was doing and this feeling would come over me that he was thinking about me.”

Howard looks at me strangely. “He probably was,” he says. “He doesn’t know how to get in touch with you.”

“You used to be a screenwriter. What should he do?”

“Couldn’t he figure out from the background that it was the Village?”

“I’m not sure.”

“If he could, he could put an ad in the Voice.”

“I think it was just a car in the background.”

“Then you’ve got to give him something else,” Howard says.

“For what? You want your sister to have a one-night stand?”

“You make him sound awfully attractive,” Howard says.

“Yeah, but what if he’s a rat? It could be argued that he was just cocky, and that he was pretty sure that I’d respond. Don’t you think?”

“I think you should get in touch with him. Do it in some amusing way if you want, but I wouldn’t let him slip away.”

“I never had him. And from the looks of it he has a wife.”

“You don’t know that.”

“No,” I say. “I guess I don’t know.”

“Do it,” Howard says. “I think you need this,” and when he speaks he whispers—just what a girl would do. He nods his head yes. “Do it,” he whispers again. Then he turns his head abruptly, to see what I am staring at. It is Kate, wrapped in a towel after her bath, trailing the long cord of the extension phone with her.

“It’s Frank,” she whispers, her hand over the mouthpiece. “He says he’s going to come to the party after all.”

I look at her dumbly, surprised. I’d almost forgotten that Frank knew I was here. He’s only been here once with me, and it was clear that he didn’t like Howard and Kate. Why would he suddenly decide to come to the party?

She shrugs, hand still over the mouthpiece. “Come here,” she whispers.

I get up and start toward the phone. “If it’s not an awful imposition,” she says, “maybe he could bring Deirdre’s father with him. He lives just around the corner from you in the city.”

“Deirdre’s father?” I say.

“Here,” she whispers. “He’ll hang up.”

“Hi, Frank,” I say, talking into the phone. My voice sounds high, false.

“I miss you,” Frank says. “I’ve got to get out of the city. I invited myself. I assume since it’s an annual invitation it’s all right, right?”

“Oh, of course,” I say. “Can you just hold on for one second?”

“Sure,” he says.

I cover the mouthpiece again. Kate is still standing next to me.

“I was talking to Deirdre’s mother in the bathroom,” Kate whispers. “She says that her ex-husband’s not really able to drive yet, and that Deirdre has been crying all day. If he could just give him a lift, they could take the train back, but—”

“Frank? This is sort of crazy, and I don’t quite understand the logistics, but I’m going to put Kate on. We need for you to do us a favor.”

“Anything,” he says. “As long as it’s not about Mrs. Joan Wilde-Younge’s revision of a revision of a revision of a spiteful will.”

I hand the phone to Kate. “Frank?” she says. “You’re about to make a new friend. Be very nice to him, because he just had his gallbladder out, and he’s got about as much strength as seaweed. He lives on Seventy-ninth Street.”

I am in the car with Howard, huddled in my coat and the poncho. We are on what seems like an ironic mission. We are going to the 7-Eleven to get ice. The moon is shining brightly, and patches of snow shine like stepping stones in the field on my side of the car. Howard puts on his directional signal suddenly and turns, and I look over my shoulder to make sure we’re not going to be hit from behind.

“Sorry,” he says. “My mind was wandering. Not that it’s the best-marked road to begin with.”

Miles Davis is on the tape deck—the very quiet kind of Miles Davis.

“We’ve got a second for a detour,” he says.

“Why are we detouring?”

“Just for a second,” Howard says.

“It’s freezing,” I say, dropping my chin to speak the words so my throat will warm up for a second. I raise my head. My clavicle is colder.

“What you said about kinetic energy made me think about doing this,” Howard says. “You can confide in me and I can confide in you, right?”

“What are you talking about?”

“This,” he says, turning onto property marked “NO TRESPASSING.” The road is quite rutted where he turns onto it, but as it begins to weave up the hill it smooths out a little. He is driving with both hands gripping the wheel hard, sitting forward in the seat as if the extra inch, plus the brights, will help him see more clearly. The road levels off, and to our right is a pond. It is not frozen, but ice clings to the sides, like scum in an aquarium. Howard clicks out the tape, and we sit there in the cold and silence. He turns off the ignition.

“There was a dog here last week,” he says.

I look at him.

“Lots of dogs in the country, right?” he says.

“What are we doing here?” I say, drawing up my knees.

“I fell in love with somebody,” he says.

I had been looking at the water, but when he spoke I turned and looked at him again.

“I didn’t think she’d be here,” he says quietly. “I didn’t even really think that the dog would be here. I just felt drawn to the place, I guess—that’s all. I wanted to see if I could get some of that feeling back if I came here. You’d get it back if you called that man, or wrote him. It was real. I could tell when you were talking to me that it was real.”

“Howard, did you say that you fell in love with somebody? When?”

“A few weeks ago. The semester’s over. She’s graduating. She’s gone in January. A graduate student—like that? A twenty-two-year-old kid. One of my pal Lightfoot’s philosophy students.” Howard lets go of the wheel. When he turned the ignition off, he had continued to grip the wheel. Now his hands are on his thighs. We both seem to be examining his hands. At least, I am looking at his hands so I do not stare into his face, and he has dropped his eyes.

“It was all pretty crazy,” he says. “There was so much passion, so fast. Maybe I’m kidding myself, but I don’t think I let on to her how much I cared. She saw that I cared, but she . . . she didn’t know my heart kept stopping, you know? We drove out here one day and had a picnic in the car—it would have been your nightmare picnic, it was so cold—and a dog came wandering up to the car. Big dog. Right over there.”

I look out my window, almost expecting that the dog may still be there.

“There were three freezing picnics. This dog turned up at the last one. She liked the dog—it looked like a mutt, with maybe a lot of golden retriever mixed in. I thought it was inviting trouble for us to open the car door, because it didn’t look like a particularly friendly dog. But she was right and I was wrong. Her name is Robin, by the way. The minute she opened the door, the dog wagged its tail. We took a walk with it.” He juts his chin forward. “Up that path there,” he says. “We threw rocks for it. A sure crowd-pleaser with your average lost-in-the-woods American dog, right? I started kidding around, calling the dog Spot. When we were back at the car, Robin patted its head and closed the car door, and it backed off, looking very sad. Like we were really ruining its day, to leave. As I was pulling out, she rolled down the window and said, ‘Goodbye, Rover,’ and I swear its face came alive. I think his name really was Rover.”

“What did you do?” I say.

“You mean about the dog, or about the two of us?”

I shake my head. I don’t know which I mean.

“I backed out, and the dog let us go. It just stood there. I got to look at it in the rearview mirror until the road dipped and it was out of sight. Robin didn’t look back.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Get ice,” he says, starting the ignition. “But that isn’t what you meant, either, is it?”

He backs up, and as we swing around toward our own tire tracks I turn my head again, but there is no dog there, watching us in the moonlight.

Back at the house, as Howard goes in front of me up the flagstone pathway, I walk slower than I usually do in the cold, trying to give myself time to puzzle out what he makes me think of just then. It comes to me at the moment when my attention is diverted by a patch of ice I’m terrified of slipping on. He reminds me of that courthouse figure—I don’t know what it’s called—the statue of a blindfolded woman holding the scales of justice. Bag of ice in the left hand, bag of ice in the right—but there’s no blindfold. The door is suddenly opened, and what Howard and I see before us is Koenig, his customary bandanna tied around his head, smiling welcome, and behind him, in the glare of the already begun party, the woman with red hair holding Todd, who clutches his green dinosaur in one hand and rubs his sleepy, crying face with the other. Todd makes a lunge—not really toward his father but toward wider spaces—and I’m conscious, all at once, of the cigarette smoke swirling and of the heat of the house, there in the entranceway, that turn the bitter-cold outdoor air silver as it comes flooding in. Messiah—Kate’s choice of perfect music for the occasion—isn’t playing; someone has put on Judy Garland, and we walk in just as she is singing, “That’s where you’ll find me.” The words hang in the air like smoke.

“Hello, hello, hello, hello,” Becky calls, dangling one kneesocked leg over the balcony as Deirdre covers her face and hides behind her. “To both of you, just because you’re here, from me to you: a million—a trillion—hellos.”

Home to Marie

My wife, Marie, has decided to give a party—a catered party—and invite old friends and also some new people and the neighbors on the left, the ones we speak to. Just before the caterer arrives there’s a telephone call from Molly Vandergrift, to say that her daughter’s temperature is a hundred and two, and that she and her husband won’t be able to come, after all. I can see my wife’s disappointment as she consoles Molly. And then, a few seconds after the call, Molly’s husband’s car peels out of the drive. My thought, when I hear a car streaking off, is always that a person is leaving home. My wife’s explanation is more practical: he’s going to get medicine.

My wife herself has left home two times in the three years we’ve been reconciled. Once she left in a rage, and another time she extended her visit to a friend’s house in Wyoming from one week to six, and although she did not really say that she wasn’t coming back, I couldn’t get her to make a plane reservation, couldn’t get her to say she missed me, let alone that she loved me. I’ve done wrong things. I’ve bought myself expensive new cars and passed off my old ones on her; I’ve lost money gambling; I’ve come home late for dinner a hundred times. But I never left my wife. She was the one who moved out the time we were going to get divorced. And after we reconciled she was the one who tore off in the car as a finale to a disagreement.

These things bubble up from time to time; some little thing will remind me of all the times she’s left, or threatened to leave. Or she’ll want something we can’t afford and she’ll look at me with what I call her stunned-rabbit eyes. For the most part, we try hard to be cheerful, though. She’s been looking for work, I come straight home at the end of the day, and we’ve worked out the problem with the remote control for the TV: I give it to her for an hour, she gives it to me for an hour. We don’t tend to watch more than two hours of TV a night.

Tonight there won’t be any TV at all, because of the cocktail party. Right now, the caterer’s car is double-parked in front of our house, and the caterer—a woman—is carrying things in, helped by a teenage boy who is probably her son. He’s as glum as she is cheerful. My wife and she give each other an embrace, all smiles. She darts in and out, carrying trays.

My wife says, “I wonder if I should go out and help,” and then answers by saying, “No—I hired her to do it.” Then she’s smiling to herself. “It’s a shame the Vandergrifts can’t come,” she says. “We’ll save something for them.”

I ask if I should put some music on the stereo, but my wife says no, it’ll be drowned out by the conversation. Either that or we’d have to crank it up so loud that it would bother the neighbors.

I stand in the front room and look at the caterer and the boy. He comes through the door holding one of the trays at arm’s length, carefully, like a child with a sparkler that he’s half afraid of. As I watch, Mrs. May, the neighbor we don’t speak to (she called the police one night when we went to bed and mistakenly left the light burning on the front porch), comes by with her toy poodles, Annaclair and Esther. She pretends not to notice that a caterer is carrying party food into our house. She can look right through you and make you feel like a ghost. Even the dogs have cultivated this look.

My wife asks me which person I’m most looking forward to seeing. She knows that I like Steve Newhall more than anybody else, because he’s such a cutup, but just to surprise her I say, “Oh—it’ll be nice to see the Ryans. Hear about their trip to Greece.”

She snorts. “The day you care about travel,” she says.

She’s as responsible for fights as I am. She gets that edge to her voice. I try to keep a civil tongue in tone as well as in speech. She never minds giving one of those cynical little snorts and saying something cutting, though. This time, I decide to ignore it—just ignore it.

At first I can’t figure out how come my wife and the caterer are so huggy-kissy, but as they talk I remember that my wife met the caterer at a shower in Alexandria a few months ago. The two of them are shaking their heads over some woman—not anyone I’ve met, so she must be a friend of my wife’s from back when she had her job—and saying that they’ve never heard of a doctor who let labor go on for over sixty hours. I find out, as the foil is pulled back from the deviled eggs, that the woman is fine now, and that she had her tubes tied before she left the table.

The boy goes back to the car without saying goodbye. I stand in the hallway and look out the door. He gets in the car and slams the door shut. Behind him, the sun is setting. It’s another one of those pink-to-orange sunsets that used to take my breath away. I move back from the door quickly, though, because I know the caterer is on her way out. Truth is, if I don’t have to exchange amenities with her, all the better. I’m not good at thinking of things to say to people I don’t know.

The caterer ducks her head into the room where I’m standing. She says, “You have a good party tonight. I think you’re really going to like the fiery-hot bean dip.” She smiles and—to my surprise—shrugs. The shrug seems to have no context.

My wife comes out of the kitchen, carrying a tray of sliced meat. I offer to carry platters with her, but she says she’s fussy and she’d rather do it herself. That way, she’ll know where she’s placed everything. I wonder whether she couldn’t just look at the table and see where she’s put things, but when my wife is preparing for something it is not the time to ask questions. She’ll snap and get in a bad mood. So I go out to the front porch and watch the sky darken.

The caterer honks as she pulls away, and for some reason—probably because he’s sitting so straight—the boy reminds me of what happened when part of the highway into Washington was reserved for cars carrying at least three passengers: people around here started buying inflatable dolls and sitting them in the car. They put hats and coats on them.

“Mary Virushi and her husband are having a trial separation, but she’s coming to the party with him anyway,” my wife says from the doorway.

“Why’d you have to tell me that?” I say, turning away from the sunset and coming back into the house. “It’ll just make me feel uncomfortable around them.”

“Oh, you’ll survive,” she says. She often uses this expression. She hands me a stack of paper plates and asks me to divide it in thirds and place the stacks along the front of the table. She asks me to get the napkins out of the cabinet and put piles of them down the middle of the table, between the vases of daisies.

“Nobody’s supposed to know about the Virushis,” she says, carrying out a tray of vegetables. Fanned out around the bowl in the middle, their colors—orange and red and white—remind me of the sky and the way it looked a few minutes ago.

“Also,” she says, “please don’t make it a point to rush to refill Oren’s glass every time it’s empty. He’s making an effort to cut back.”

“You do it,” I say. “If you know everything, you do everything.”

“You always get nervous when we entertain,” she says. She brushes past me. When she comes back, she says, “The caterer really did a beautiful job. All I have to do is wash the platters and put them out on the porch tomorrow, and she’ll take them away. Isn’t that wonderful?” She kisses my shoulder. “Have to get dressed,” she says. “Are you going to wear what you’ve got on?”

I have on white jeans and a blue knit shirt. I nod yes. Surprisingly, she doesn’t argue. As she walks up the stairs, she says, “I can’t imagine needing air-conditioning, but do what you think best.”

I go back to the porch and stand there a minute. The sky is darker. I can see a firefly or two. One of the little boys in the neighborhood passes by on his bike, all shiny blue, with training wheels on the back. There are streamers on the handlebars. The cat that kills birds walks by. I’ve been known to fill a water pistol and squirt the cat when nobody’s looking. I’ve also turned the hose on it. It walks on the edge of our lawn. I know just what it’s thinking.

I go in and take a look at the table. Upstairs, water is running in the shower. I wonder if Marie will wear one of her sundresses. She has a handsome back, and she looks lovely in the dresses. In spite of what she says, I do travel—and I often like it. Five years ago, we went to Bermuda. I bought the sundresses for her there. She never changes size.

On the table, there’s enough food to feed an army. Half a watermelon has been hollowed out and filled with melon balls and strawberries. I have a strawberry. There are what look like cheese balls, rolled in nuts, and several bowls of dip, with vegetables around some and crackers in a bowl next to the others. I spear a piece of pineapple wrapped in prosciutto. I drop the toothpick in my pocket and push the pieces closer together, so the one I took won’t be missed. Before the caterer came, my wife put out the liquor on the deep window ledge. There are candles with matches, ready to light. She might be wrong about the music—at least, it might be nice to have some music playing just as the first few people show up—but why argue? I agree that since there’s a nice breeze we don’t need air-conditioning.

In a little while, Marie comes down. She does not have on a sundress. She is wearing a blue linen dress I’ve never been fond of, and she is carrying a suitcase. She is not smiling. She looks, suddenly, quite drawn. Her hair is damp, and pulled back in a clip. I blink, not quite believing it.

“There isn’t any party,” she says. “I’d like you to see what it’s like, to have food prepared—even though you didn’t prepare it—and then just to wait. To wait and wait. Maybe this way you’ll see what that’s like.”

As fast as I think You’re kidding! I also know the answer. She isn’t kidding. But the marriage counselor—no marriage counselor would agree that what she’s doing is all right.

“You couldn’t possibly be so childish,” I say.

But she’s out the door, going down the walk. Moths fly into the house. One flies across my mouth, tickling my skin. “What are you going to say about this to Dr. Ford?” I say.

She turns. “Why don’t you ask Dr. Ford over for cocktails?” she says. “Or do you think the sight of real life might be too much for him?”

“Are you quitting?” I say. But I’ve lost heart. I’m out of steam, nearly out of breath. I say it so quietly I’m not sure that she heard. “Are you ignoring me?” I holler. When she doesn’t answer, I know she is. She gets in the car, starts it, and drives away.

For a minute I’m so stunned that I sink down in one of the porch chairs and just stare. The street is unusually quiet. The cicadas have started to send up their sound. As I sit there, trying to calm myself, the boy on the bike pedals slowly up the hill. The neighbor’s poodles start barking. I hear her shushing them. Then the barking subsides.

What was Marie thinking of ? I can’t remember the last time I was late for dinner. It was years ago. Years.

Katrina Duvall comes by. “Mitch?” she says, raising her hand over her brow and looking at the porch.

“Yes?” I say.

“Have you gotten your paper the last couple of Sundays?”

“Yes,” I call back.

“We stopped it when we went to Ocean City, and we can’t get it started again,” she says. “I knew I should have just asked you to take it in, but you know Jack.” Jack is her son, who is slightly retarded. She either does everything to please Jack or says that she does. The implication is that he is a tyrant. I know very little about him except that he slurs his words and once, during a snowstorm, he helped me dig out my driveway.

“All right, then,” she says, and walks away.

In the distance, I hear rock and roll. There is loud laughter in the Vandergrifts’ house. Who is having such a good time, if the child is sick? I squint hard at the house, but where the windows are lit it’s too bright to see in. A squeal, and more laughing. I get up and walk across the lawn. I knock on the door. Molly, breathless, answers.

“Hi,” I say. “I know this is a silly question, but did my wife invite you for drinks tonight?”

“No,” she says. She smooths her bangs off her forehead. Behind her, her daughter zooms by on a skateboard. “Take it easy!” Molly hollers. To me, she says, “They’re coming to refinish the floors tomorrow. She’s in heaven, being able to do that in the house.”

“You didn’t speak to Marie on the phone tonight?” I say.

“I haven’t even seen her in a week. Is everything all right?” she says.

“It must have been somebody else she invited over,” I say.

The little girl whizzes by again on the skateboard, doing wheelies.

“Jesus,” Molly says, putting her hand over her mouth. “Michael went to Dulles to pick up his brother. You don’t think Marie asked Michael and he forgot to tell me, do you?”

“No, no,” I say. “I’m sure I’m mistaken.”

Molly smiles her usual radiant smile, but I can tell I’ve made her nervous.

Back in my house, I turn the light down a notch and stand at the front window, looking up at the sky. No stars tonight. Maybe in the country, but not here. I look at the candles and figure what the hell. I strike a match to light them. They’re in ornate, heavy silver candlesticks—a hand-me-down from my aunt, who lives in Baltimore. As the candles burn, I look at the window and see the flames, and myself, reflected. The breeze makes the wax bead and drip, though, so I watch the candles burn only a few seconds more, then blow them out. They smoke, but I don’t lick my fingers and pinch the wicks. After looking again at the empty street, I sit in a chair and look at the table.

I’ll show her, I think. I’ll be gone when she gets back.

Then I think about having a few drinks and some food.

But time passes, and I don’t leave and I don’t get a drink. I haven’t touched the table when I hear a car coast to a stop. The blinking lights get my attention. An ambulance, I think—I don’t know how, but somehow she hurt herself, and for some reason the ambulance is here, and . . .

I spring up.

The caterer is standing at the door. She is frowning. Her shoulders are a little hunched. She has on a denim skirt, a tube top, and running shoes. Behind me, the house is entirely quiet. I see her peer around me, toward the light in the front room. Her puzzlement is obvious.

“It was all a joke,” I say. “My wife’s joke.”

She frowns.

“There isn’t any party,” I say. “My wife went away.”

“You’re kidding,” the caterer says.

Now I am looking past her, at her car, with the lights blinking. The boy is not in the front seat. “What are you doing here?” I ask.

“Oh,” she says, dropping her eyes. “I actually—I thought that you might need help, that I’d pitch in for a while.”

I frown.

“I know that sounds funny,” she says, “but I’m new in this business and I’m trying to make a good impression.” She is still not looking at me. “I used to work in the bursar’s office at the community college,” she says, “and I hated that. So I figured that if I could get enough work as a caterer . . .”

“Well, come in,” I say, standing aside.

For some time, bugs have been flying into the house.

“Oh, no,” she says. “I’m sorry there’s trouble. I just thought . . .”

“Come have a drink,” I say. “Really. Come in and have a drink.”

She looks at her car. “Just a minute,” she says. She goes down the walkway. She turns off the lights and locks the car. She comes back up the walk.

“My husband said I shouldn’t butt in,” she says. “He says that I try too hard to please and when you let people know you’re eager you’ll never get what you want.”

“His philosophy aside,” I say, “please come in and have a drink.”

“I thought your wife seemed edgy,” the caterer says. “I thought she was nervous about having such a big party. That she might be grateful for some help.”

She hesitates, then steps in.

“Well,” I say, throwing up my hands.

She laughs nervously. Then I laugh.

“Wine?” I say, pointing to the windowsill.

“That would be fine. Thank you,” she says.

She sits, and I pour her a glass of wine and carry it to her.

“Oh, I could have gotten that. What am I—”

“Sit still,” I say. “I’ve got to be the host for somebody, right?”

I pour myself a bourbon and take a few ice cubes out of the ice bucket with my fingers and drop them in the glass.

“Do you want to talk about it?” the caterer says.

“I don’t know what to say,” I say. I move the ice around in my glass with one finger.

“I came here from Colorado,” she says. “This place seems odd to me. Uptight, or something.” She clears her throat. “Maybe it’s not,” she says. “I mean, obviously you never know—”

“What’s really going on with other people,” I say, finishing the sentence for her. “Case in point,” I say, raising my glass.

“Will she come back?” the caterer asks.

“I don’t know,” I say. “We’ve quarreled before, certainly.” I take a sip of bourbon. “Of course, this wasn’t a quarrel. It was sort of a prank on her part, I guess you’d say.”

“It is sort of funny,” the caterer says. “She told you all those people were invited and—”

I nod, cutting her off.

“Funny if it’s not you, I mean,” she says.

I take another sip of my drink. I look at the caterer. She is a thin young woman. It doesn’t seem she could have any particular interest in food herself. She is actually quite pretty, in a plain way.

We sit in silence for a while. I can hear squeals from next door, and am sure she hears them too. From where I sit, I can see out the window. The lightning bugs make brief pinpoints of light. From where she sits, the caterer can only see me. She looks at me, at her drink, and back at me.

“I don’t mean that this should matter very much to you,” she says, “but I think it’s good for me to see that things aren’t necessarily what they seem. I mean, maybe this town is an okay place to be. I mean, as complicated as any other town. Maybe I just have it unfairly stereotyped.” She takes another drink. “I didn’t really want to leave Colorado,” she says. “I was a ski instructor there. The man I live with—he’s not really my husband—he and I were going to start a restaurant here, but it fell through. He’s got a lot of friends in this area, and his son, so here we are. His son lives here with his mother—my friend’s ex. I hardly know anybody.”

I get the bottle and pour her another glass of wine. I take a last sip of my drink, rattle the ice cubes, and fill my own glass with wine. I put the bottle on the floor.

“I’m sorry I stumbled in on this. My being here must embarrass you,” she says.

“Not true,” I say, half meaning it. “I’m glad to see somebody.”

She turns and looks over her shoulder. “Do you think your wife is going to come back?” she says.

“Can’t say,” I say.

She nods. “It’s funny to be in a situation where you know something about somebody and they don’t know anything about you, isn’t it?”

“What do you mean? You just told me about Colorado, and the restaurant you were going to open.”

“Yeah,” she says, “but that’s nothing personal. You know what I mean.”

“Then go ahead and tell me something personal.”

She blushes. “Oh, I didn’t mean that.”

“Why not?” I say. “This is a strange enough night already, isn’t it? What if you tell me something personal?”

She gnaws at her cuticle. She might be younger than I thought. She has long, shiny hair. I try to picture her in a nylon jacket, on a ski slope. That makes the night seem hotter suddenly. It makes me realize that in a few months, though, we will be wearing down-filled jackets. Last November there was a big snow.

“The guy I live with is an illustrator,” she says. “You’ve probably seen some of his stuff. He doesn’t need money, he just wants to have it all. To draw. To have a restaurant. He’s grabby. He usually figures it out to have what he wants, though.” She takes a drink. “I feel funny saying this,” she says. “I don’t know why I started to tell you about us.” Then she stops talking, smiling apologetically.

Instead of coaxing her, I get up and put some things on two plates, put one plate on a table by my chair, and hand the other plate to her. I pour her another glass of wine.

“He has a studio next to the ceramics factory,” she says. “That big building with the black shutters. In the afternoon he calls me, and I take over a picnic basket and we eat lunch and make love.”

I break a cracker in half with my thumb and first finger and eat it.

“That’s not it, though,” she says. “The thing is, it’s always something like Wonder bread. It’s real kinky. I trim off the crust and make bologna sandwiches with a lot of mayonnaise. Or I’ll make Cheez Whiz sandwiches with Ritz crackers, or peanut-butter-and-marshmallow sandwiches. And we drink Kool-Aid or root beer or something like that. One time I cooked hot dogs and sliced them to go on crackers and squirted cheese around the circles. We had that and Dr Pepper. The thing is, the lunch has to be really disgusting.”

“I got that,” I say. “I guess I got it.”

“Oh,” she says, dropping her eyes. “I mean, I guess it’s obvious. Of course you figured it out.”

I wait to see if she’s going to ask me to reveal something. But instead she gets up and pours the last of the wine into her glass and stands with her back to me, looking out the window.

I know that ceramics factory. It’s not in a good part of town. There’s a bar just down the street from it, and one night when I was coming out of the bar a kid jumped me. I remember how fast he came at me on his bike, and the screech of tires, as if the bike were a big car. Then he was all over me, half punching and half squeezing, as if my wallet would pop out of hiding like a clown’s head spinning out of a jack-in-the-box. “It’s in my back pocket,” I said, and when I said that he jammed his hand into the pocket and then slugged me in the side, hard. “Stay down!” he said in sort of a whisper, and I lay there, curled on my side, putting my hand over my face so that if he thought about it later he wouldn’t come back and make more trouble because I’d gotten a good look at him. My nose was bleeding. I only had about twenty bucks in my wallet, and I’d left my credit cards at home. Finally I got up and tried to walk. There was a light on in the ceramics factory, but I could tell from the stillness that nobody was there—it was just a light that had been left on. I put my hand on the building and tried to stand up straighter. There was a point when a terrible pain shot through me—such a sharp pain that I went down again. I took a few breaths, and it passed. Through the big glass window I saw ceramic shepherds and animals—figures that would be placed in crèches. They were unpainted—they hadn’t been fired yet—and because they were all white and just about the same size, the donkeys and the Wise Men looked a lot alike. It was a week or so before Christmas, and I thought, Why aren’t they finished? They’re playing it too close; if they don’t get at it and start painting, it’s going to be too late. “Marie, Marie,” I whispered, knowing I was in trouble. Then I walked as well as I could, got to my car, and went home to my wife.

Horatio’s Trick

A few days before Christmas, the UPS truck stopped in front of Charlotte’s house. Charlotte’s ex-husband, Edward, had sent a package to her and a larger package to their son, Nicholas, who was nineteen. She opened hers immediately. It was the same present she had been sent the year before: a pound of chocolate-covered macadamia nuts, wrapped in silver striped paper, with a card that read “Merry Christmas from Edward Anderson and family.” This time, Edward’s wife had written the card; it wasn’t his handwriting. Charlotte dumped the contents out onto the kitchen floor and played a game of marbles, pinging one nut into another and watching them roll in different directions. She’d had a few bourbons, not too many, while Nicholas was off at the gas station getting an oil change. Before she began the game of chocolate marbles, she pulled the kitchen door closed; otherwise, Horatio, the dog, would come running in at full tilt, as he always did when he heard any sound in the kitchen. Horatio was a newcomer to the house—a holiday visitor. He belonged to Nicholas’s girlfriend, Andrea, who had flown to Florida for a Christmas visit with her parents, and since Nicholas was going to drive here for his Christmas, he had brought Horatio along, too.

Nicholas was a junior at Notre Dame. He had his father’s wavy hair—Edward hated that kind of hair, which he called kinky—but not his blue eyes. Charlotte had always been sad about that. Nicholas had her eyes: ordinary brown eyes that she loved to look at, although she could not say why she found them so interesting. She had to remember not to look at him too long. Only that morning he had said at breakfast, “Charlotte, it’s a little unnerving to roll out of bed and be stared at.” He often called her Charlotte now. She had moved to Charlottesville six years ago, and although it was a very sociable town and she had met quite a few people (she had finally reached the point with most of them where they had stopped making jokes about a Charlotte coming to live in Charlottesville), she did not know anyone with a son Nicholas’s age. Oddly enough, she knew two women about her age who were having babies. One of them seemed slightly abashed; the other was ecstatic. It was a scandal (people parodied themselves in Charlottesville by calling scandals—which they did not believe in—“scandales”) that the ecstatic forty-one-year-old mother-to-be, a recent graduate of the University of Virginia Law School, was not married. Other gossip had it that she was forty-three.

Charlotte worked as a legal secretary for an old and prestigious law firm in town. She had left New York after she and Edward separated a dozen years ago, and had moved to Washington, where she enrolled in American University to resume her B.A. studies in preparation for entering law school. Nicholas went to Lafayette School, and was taken care of on the weekends by her parents, who lived in the Cleveland Park area, while Charlotte sequestered herself and studied almost around the clock. But there were problems: Nicholas had a hard time making friends in his new school; also, the bitterness between Charlotte and Edward seemed to escalate when there was actual distance between them, so Charlotte was constantly distracted by Edward’s accusatory phone calls and his total lack of faith in her ability to get a degree. It had all been too much, and finally she decided to abandon her plans of becoming a lawyer and became a legal secretary instead. Edward began to make visits, taking the Metroliner from New York to Washington; one day he turned up with a dark-haired, dark-eyed young woman who wore a bit too much jewelry. Soon after that they were married. The “and family” part of the gift card referred to her daughter from a previous marriage. Charlotte had never met the child.

Charlotte looked out the back window. Horatio was in the yard, sniffing the wind. Nicholas had stopped on the way south and bought a stake and a chain to keep Horatio under control during the visit. Actually, the dog seemed happy enough, and wasn’t very interested in the birds or the occasional cat that turned up in Charlotte’s yard. Right now, Nicholas was upstairs, talking to Andrea on the phone. Someone throwing a life ring to a drowning child could not have been more energetic and more dedicated than Nicholas was to the girl.

Charlotte poured another bourbon, into which she plopped three ice cubes, and sat on the stool facing the counter, where she kept the telephone and pads of paper and bills to be paid and whatever odd button needed to be sewn back on. There were also two batteries there that were either dead or unused (she couldn’t remember anymore) and paper clips (although she could not remember the last time she used a paper clip at home), a few corks, a little bottle of Visine, some loose aspirins, and a broken bracelet. There was a little implement called a lemon zester that she had bought from a door-to-door salesman. She suddenly picked it up and pretended to be conducting, because Nicholas had just put on Handel upstairs. He always played music to drown out his phone conversations.

“For the Lord God omni-potent . . .” She had forgotten to get back to the Tazewells about Father Curnan’s birthday party. She had promised that she would find out whether Nicholas would come, and then call back. She had meant to ask Nicholas at breakfast but had forgotten. Now she suddenly saw that Horatio might be her salvation. Whenever he came indoors he ran through the house in an excited fashion, and if that happened to get Nicholas off the phone, who would blame her? She went outdoors and, shivering, quickly unhitched the dog and led him in. His fur was soft and cold. He was glad to see her, as usual. The minute they were inside, he bounded up the stairs. She stood at the bottom, listening to Horatio’s panting outside Nicholas’s door, and then, sure enough, the door banged open. Nicholas was at the top of the stairs, staring down. He did look as if he had been rescuing a drowning child: disheveled, with not an extra second to spare. “What’s he doing inside?” he asked.

“It’s cold out,” she said. “Nicky, the Tazewells are having a dinner for Father Curnan’s birthday tonight. Will you go with me?”

The sopranos soared in unison. She must have looked alarmed—surely he noticed that she had suddenly put both hands on the banister railing—and perhaps that was why he quickly nodded yes and turned away.

Back in the kitchen, with her boots off, Charlotte stroked the dog with one stockinged foot, and in response he shot up and went into his little routine, his famous trick. Almost complacently, he sat and extended his right paw. Then he rubbed his snout down that leg, put the paw back on the floor, and lifted and rubbed the left paw in the same fashion. He sneezed, turned twice in a circle to his left, and then came over to be patted. The trick meant nothing, of course, but it never failed as a crowd-pleaser. Sometimes Charlotte had even come into a room and found him doing it all by himself. “Okay, you’re wonderful,” she whispered to Horatio now, scratching his ears.

She heard Nicholas’s footsteps on the stairs and called, “Where are you going?” It dismayed her that he kept to himself so much. He stayed upstairs most of the day studying, or he talked on the telephone. He already had on his coat and scarf. Instead of hanging them in the hall closet, he kept them up in his room. He kept everything there, as if he were forever on the point of packing up for some quick journey.

“Back to the garage,” he said. “Don’t get upset. It’s no big thing. I asked them yesterday if they had time to line the rear brakes, and they said they could fit me in this afternoon.”

“Why would that upset me?” she said.

“Because you’d think the car was unsafe. You’ve always got your images of disaster.”

“What are you talking about?” she said. She was addressing Christmas cards, trying to convince herself that there might be some truth to Better late than never.

“When I had the broken thumb, you carried on as if I was a quadriplegic.”

He was talking about the year before—a bicycling injury, when he’d skidded on some icy pavement. She shouldn’t have flown out to Indiana, but she missed him and she hated the idea of his being hurt. College was the first time he had ever lived away from her. She hadn’t made a scene—she had just gone there and called from a motel. (It was in the back of her mind, she had to admit now, that the trip might also be a chance for her to meet Andrea, the off-campus student who had begun to turn up in Nicholas’s letters.) Nicholas was horrified that she’d come all that distance. He was fine, of course—he had a cast on his left hand was all—and he had said almost angrily that he couldn’t tell her anything without eliciting a huge overreaction.

“You didn’t forget the dinner, did you?” she said now.

He turned and looked at her. “We already talked about that,” he said. “Seven o’clock—is that right?”

“Right,” she said. She began to address another envelope, trying to pass it off.

“It will take approximately one hour at the garage,” he said.

Then he left—the way his father so often had left—without saying good-bye.

She wrote a few more cards, then called the florist’s to see whether they had been able to locate bird-of-paradise flowers in New York. She wanted to send them to Martine, her oldest friend, who had just returned from a vacation in Key West to the cold winds of the Upper East Side. Charlotte was happy to hear that someone had them, and that a dozen had gone out. “I thought we’d have good luck,” the woman at the florist’s said. “If we couldn’t locate some paradise in New York, I don’t know where paradise could be tracked down.” She had a young voice—and after Charlotte hung up it occurred to her that she might have been the VanZells’ daughter, who had just been hired by a florist in town after having been suspended from college because of some trouble with drugs. Charlotte clasped her hands and touched them to her lips, in one of her silent prayers to the Virgin: No drugs for Nicholas, ever. Protect my Nicholas from harm.

The Tazewells’ sunken dining room was done in Chinese red, and against the far wall there was an enormous glass china press edged in brass, illuminated from within in a way that flooded the cut glass with light. The shelves were also glass, and their edges sparkled and gleamed with a prism-bright clarity. Charlotte was not surprised to see that Martin Smith, who ran the Jefferson Dreams catering service, was there himself to oversee things. People in Charlottesville followed through—even fun wasn’t left totally to chance—and Charlotte liked that. Edith Stanton, the host’s cousin, almost Charlotte’s first friend when she had moved here to Charlottesville (she could remember their first lunch together, and Edith’s considering gaze above the seafood salad: was this nice-looking new single woman who was working down at Burwell, McKee going to fit in?), was talking with Father Curnan. Charlotte looked hard at his face—the round, open face of an adolescent, except that there were deep lines around his eyes—and saw on it the look she called Bemused Monsignor. He could nod and smile and murmur his “not to be believed” as Edith went on in her breathless way (surely she was telling him again about her session in a bodybuilding shop for women out in Santa Barbara last summer), but his interest was feigned. Edith was not a Catholic, and she could not know the sort of complicated, surprising man Philip Curnan really was. He had told Charlotte once that after working his way through Cornell (his father had an auto-repair garage in upstate New York somewhere), he had ridden across the country on a Harley-Davidson, while searching his soul about his desire to enter the priesthood. Charlotte smiled now, remembering the confidence. Just last week he had told her that there were still times when he longed to get back on a motorcycle; his helmet was still on the top shelf in his bedroom closet.

A server passed by, and Charlotte finally got a drink. Surveying the room, she was pleased to see that Nicholas was talking to the McKays’ daughter, Angela, home from Choate for Christmas. Charlotte thought of the day, a month before, when Angela’s mother, Janet, had consulted with the head of Burwell, McKee about filing for legal separation from Chaz, her husband. Chaz, a lawyer himself, stood with his arm around his wife’s waist, talking to a couple Charlotte didn’t know. Perhaps Chaz still did not know that she had made inquiries about getting a divorce. M.L., the hostess, passed in her peach-colored gown, and Charlotte touched her shoulder and whispered, “It’s wonderful. Thank you for having us.” M.L. gave her a hug and said, “I must be somewhere else if I didn’t even say hello.” As she moved away, Charlotte smelled her perfume—at night, M.L. always wore Joy—and heard the rustle of silk.

Martin VanZell came up to Charlotte and began talking to her about his arthritic knee. He tapped a bottle in his breast pocket. “All doctors dote on Advil,” he said. “Ask any of them. Their eyes light up. You’d think it was Lourdes in a bottle. Pull off the top, take out the cotton, and worship. I’m not kidding you.” He noticed that he seemed to have caught Father Curnan’s attention. “Meaning no disrespect,” he said.

“Who was being slighted?” Father Curnan said. “The pharmaceutical company?” His eyes met Charlotte’s for a second, and he winked before he looked away. He speared a shrimp and ate it, waving away the napkin a server extended in her other hand.

Frankie Melkins suddenly swooped in front of Charlotte, kissing the air above her cheek. Frankie had been in a bad car accident last New Year’s, and had returned to the Church after Father Curnan’s hospital visits. That had been much talked about, as well as the fact that the case was settled out of court, which led people to believe that Frankie had got a lot of money. As Frankie and Martin began to compare painkiller stories, Charlotte drifted away and went to the side door, where someone had been knocking for quite some time. Oren and Billy! Oren could be such a devil. He gave drums to his nephews for Christmas and once threw rice during a party that wasn’t at all like a wedding. The minute she opened the door, he gave her a bear hug.

“What on earth!” M.L. said, staring out the door after the two men had come in. “Why, I’ll bet Frankie has left the cabdriver out there waiting.” She began to wave her arms wildly, whistling to him. She turned to Charlotte. “Can you believe it?” she said. She looked beyond Charlotte to Frankie. “Frankie!” she called. “Were you going to leave your cabdriver out in the driveway all night? There’s plenty of food. Tell him to come in and have something to eat.”

Father Curnan stood talking to the host, Dan Tazewell. They were looking at the mantel, discussing a small drawing of a nude that was framed and propped there. She overheard Father Curnan lamenting the fact that the artist had recently left the art department at the university and gone back to New York to live. Charlotte accepted another drink from a server, then looked back at Father Curnan. He was scrutinizing the drawing. On her way to the bathroom, Charlotte heard Nicholas telling Angela McKay details about hand surgery, spreading his thumb and first finger wide. Angela looked at the space between his fingers as though staring at some fascinating thing squirming beneath a microscope. His hand? Had Nicholas had hand surgery?

One of the servers was coming out of the bathroom as Charlotte got to the door. She was glad it was empty, because she had had two drinks before she left the house and another at the party. She put her glass on the back of the sink before she used the toilet. What if she left the drink there? Would anybody notice and think things?

The bathroom was tiny, and the little casement window had been flipped open. Still, Charlotte could smell cigarette smoke. She reached up and pulled the window closed, hooked it, and rubbed her hand down her new black shirt. “Wheet,” she said, imitating the sound the silk made. “Someone’s in there,” she heard a voice say. She took a sip of her drink, then unhooked the window and pushed it out again. The sky was black—no stars visible across the small part of the sky she could see. There was a huge wind out there, like an animal loose in the trees. She turned and began to wash her hands. The spigot reminded her of a fountain she had seen years ago in Rome, when she was first married. It had bothered her that so many things there were exaggerated but not full-form: massive marble heads—lions and gargoyles, rippling manes, mythic beasts spewing water—but whole bodies were usually to be found only on the angels and cherubs. She dried her hands. That couldn’t be true—that couldn’t have been what all the fountains looked like. What am I doing thinking about fountains in Rome, she thought.

When she opened the door, she saw Martin VanZell in the dim hallway, his white face a ghostly contrast to his dark pin-striped suit. “Great party, huh?” he said. She had stopped outside the door, dead center. It took her a minute to realize that she was staring, and blocking his way. “It is every year,” she heard herself saying, and then he passed by and she turned toward the noise of the party. A man whose wife ran one of the nurseries on Route 29 came over as she walked down the two steps into the room. “Charlotte, you just missed my wife here, losing track again. She was telling Father Curnan—hey, he’s gone off again—she thought Chernobyl was this year. It was last year. It happened in the spring.”

“Well, I believe you,” his wife said, with a false smile. “Why were you bringing it up, Arthur?”

Nicholas came up to Charlotte just as the host rang a bell and everyone fell silent.

“It’s not Santa. It’s the annual ringing out of one year for Father Curnan and a ringing in of the new,” the host said cheerfully. He rang the bell again. “Because today he’s our birthday boy again, and if he’s going to keep getting older we’re going to keep noticing it.”

Father Curnan raised his glass, blushing. “Thank you all—” he began, but the host clanged the bell again, drowning him out. “Oh, no, you don’t. You don’t make us take time out from the party to hear a speech,” the host said. “Time for that on Sunday, Philip, when you’ve got your captive audience. But happy birthday, Father Phil, and on with the ball!” People laughed and cheered.

Charlotte saw that someone’s glass had made a white ring on the tabletop between two mats that had been put there. Janet’s husband came up and started to talk about the cost of malpractice insurance, and then Charlotte felt Nicholas’s hand on her elbow. “It’s late,” he said. “We should go.” She started to introduce him to Janet’s husband, but Nicholas steered them away and into a bedroom where two temporary clothes racks stood bulging with coats and furs. More coats made a great mound on the bed. Then suddenly she and Nicholas were standing with M.L. at the courtyard door, saying goodbye as they struggled into their coats and scarves. It was not until the door closed that Charlotte realized that she had not said a single word to Father Curnan. She turned and looked back at the house.

“Come on,” Nicholas said. “He didn’t even notice.”

“Did you speak to him?” Charlotte said.

“No,” Nicholas said. “I have nothing to say to him.” He was walking toward their car, at the foot of the drive. She looked up.

“I only asked,” she said.

He was too far ahead of her to hear. He held open the car door, and she got inside. He crossed in front of the car, and she realized that for some reason he was upset.

“All right,” he said, getting in and slamming his door. “You’re wronged. You’re always wronged. Would you like it if I left the engine running and we both went back in and said good night to Father Curnan? Because that would be entirely proper. I could bow and you could curtsy.”

Charlotte wouldn’t have thought that at that moment there was an emotion she could feel stronger than frustration. Wouldn’t have thought it until she realized that what was smothering her was sadness. “No,” she said quietly. “You’re entirely right. He didn’t even notice that we left.”

The telephone rang twice, interrupting their Christmas Eve ceremony of tea and presents. Nicholas had been nice to her all day—even taking her out to lunch and trying to make her laugh by telling her stories about a professor of his who delivered all his lectures in the interrogative—because he knew he had jumped on her the night before, leaving the party. Each time the phone rang, Charlotte hoped it wasn’t Andrea, because then he would drift away and be gone for ages. The first call was from Martine in New York, overjoyed by the flowers; the next was from M.L., to wish them a good Christmas and to say that she was sorry she had not really got to talk to them amid the confusion of the party.

Nicholas gave her a cashmere scarf and light-blue leather gloves. She gave him subscriptions to Granta and Manhattan, inc., a heavy sweater with a hood, and a hundred-dollar check to get whatever else he wanted. His father gave him a paperweight that had belonged to his grandfather, and a wristwatch that would apparently function even when launched from a rocket pad. When Nicholas went into the kitchen to boil up more water, she slid over on the couch and glanced at the gift card. It said, “Love, Dad,” in Edward’s nearly illegible script. Nicholas returned and opened his last present, which was from Melissa, his stepsister. It was a cheap ballpoint pen with a picture of a woman inside. When you turned the pen upside down her clothes disappeared.

“How old is Melissa?” Charlotte asked.

“Twelve or thirteen,” he said.

“Does she look like her mother?”

“Not much,” Nicholas said. “But she’s really her sister’s kid, and I never saw her sister.”

“Her sister’s child?” Charlotte took a sip of her tea, which was laced with bourbon. She held it in her mouth a second before swallowing.

“Melissa’s mother killed herself when Melissa was just a baby. I guess her father didn’t want her. Anyway, he gave her up.”

“Her sister killed herself ?” Charlotte said. She could feel her eyes widening. Suddenly she remembered the night before, the open window in the bathroom, the black sky, wind smacking her in the face.

“Awful, huh?” Nicholas said, lifting the tea bag out of the mug and lowering it to the saucer. “Hey, did I shock you? How come you didn’t know that? I thought you were the one with a sense for disaster.”

“What do you mean? I don’t expect disaster. I don’t know anything at all about Melissa. Naturally—”

“I know you don’t know anything about her,” he said, cutting her off. “Look—don’t get mad at me, but I’m going to say this, because I think you aren’t aware of what you do. You don’t ask anything, because you’re afraid of what every answer might be. It makes people reluctant to talk to you. Nobody wants to tell you things.”

She took another sip of tea, which had gone tepid. Specks of loose tea leaves had floated to the top. “People talk to me,” she said.

“I know they do,” he said. “I’m not criticizing you. I’m just telling you that if you give off those vibes people are going to back off.”

“Who backs off ?” she said.

“Charlotte, I don’t know everything about your life. I’m just telling you that you’ve never asked one thing about Dad’s family in—what is it? Eleven years. You don’t even mention my stepmother by name, ever. Her name is Joan. You don’t want to know things, that’s all.”

He kicked a ball of wrapping paper away from his foot. “Let’s drop it,” he said. “What I’m saying is that you’re always worried. You always think something’s going to happen.”

She started to speak, but took another drink instead. Maybe all mothers seemed oppressive when their children were teenagers. Didn’t everyone say that parents could hardly do anything right during those years? That was what Father Curnan said—that although we may always try to do our best, we can’t always expect to succeed. She wished Father Curnan were here right now. The whole evening would be different.

“Don’t start sulking,” Nicholas said. “You’ve been pissed off at me since last night, because I wouldn’t go over and glad-hand Father Curnan. I hardly know him. I went to the party with you because you wanted me to. I don’t practice anymore. I’m not a Catholic anymore. I don’t believe what Father Curnan believes. Just because twenty years ago he had some doubt in his life and sorted it out, you think he’s a hero. I don’t think he’s a hero. I don’t care what he decided. That’s fine for him, but it doesn’t have anything to do with me.”

“I never mention your loss of faith,” she said. “Never. We don’t discuss it.”

“You don’t have to say anything. What’s awful is that you let me know that I’ve scared you. It’s like I deliberately did something to you.”

“What would you have me do?” she said. “How good an actress do you think I can be? I do worry. You don’t give me credit for trying.”

“You don’t give me credit,” he said. “I don’t get credit for putting up with Dad’s crap because I came to Virginia to be with you instead of going to his house. If I go to a stupid party for some priest who condescends to me by letter and says he’ll pray for my soul, I don’t get credit from you for going because you wanted me there. It never occurs to you. Instead I get told that I didn’t shake his hand on the way out. If I had told you that the car was driving funny before I got it fixed, you would have bitten your nails some more and refused to ride in it. I wish you’d stop being scared. I wish you’d just stop.”

She put the mug on the table and looked at him. He’s a grown man, she thought. Taller than his father. Nicholas shook his head and walked out of the room. She heard him stomp upstairs. In a few minutes, the music began. He was playing rock, not Christmas music, and her heart seemed to pick up the relentless beat of the bass. Nicholas had scored his point. She was just sitting there, scared to death.

The sound jolted through her dream: once, twice, again. And then it awakened her. When she opened her eyes, it took her a minute to realize that she was in the living room in a chair, not in bed, and that she had been dreaming. The loud music had become part of her dream. She was squinting. Light flooded part of the living room—a painful brightness as constant as the noise. Out of the area of light she saw the shapes of crumpled gift wrappings by the tree. She passed one hand over her forehead, attempting to soothe the pain. The dog looked up from across the room. He yawned and walked over to the footstool beside her, wagging his tail.

The noise continued. It was from outside. A high-pitched squeal resonated in her chest. It had been snowing earlier. It must have gone on snowing. Someone’s car was stuck out there.

The dog padded with her to the front window. Beyond the huge oak tree in the front yard, there was a car at an odd angle, with its headlights aimed toward the house. A front and back wheel were up on the hill. Whoever was driving had missed the turn and skidded onto her property. There was a man bending over by the side of the car. Somebody else, in the driver’s seat, gunned the engine and wheels spun again. “Wait for me to move! Wait till I’m out of the way, for Christ’s sake,” the man outside the car hollered. The wheels screamed again, drowning out the rest of what he said.

Charlotte got her coat from the hall closet and snapped on the outside light. She nudged the dog back inside, and went carefully down the front walkway. Snow seeped into one shoe.

“What’s going on?” she called, clasping her hands across her chest.

“Nothin’, ” the man said, as if all this were the most normal thing in the world. “I’m trying to give us something to roll back on, so’s we can get some traction.”

She looked down and saw a large piece of flagstone from her wall jammed under one back wheel. Again the man raced the engine.

“He’s gonna get it,” the man said.

“Do you want me to call a tow truck?” she said, shivering.

There were no lights in any nearby windows. She could not believe that she was alone in this, that half the neighborhood was not awake.

“We got it! We got it!” the man said, crouching as the driver raced the engine again. The tire screamed on the flagstone, but the car did not move. Suddenly she smelled something sweet—liquor on the man’s breath. The man sprang up and banged on the car window. “Ease up, ease up, God damn it,” he said. “Don’t you know how to drive?”

The driver rolled down the window and began to curse. The other man hit his hand on the roof of the car. Again, the driver gassed it and tires spun and screamed.

For the first time, she felt frightened. The man began to tug at the door on the driver’s side, and Charlotte turned away and walked quickly toward the house. This has got to stop, she thought. It has got to stop. She opened the door. Horatio was looking at her. It was as though he had been waiting and now he simply wanted an answer.

Above the screeching of tires, she heard her voice, speaking into the telephone, giving the police the information and her address. Then she stepped farther back into the dark kitchen, over on the left side, where she could not be seen through the front windows or through the glass panels that stretched to each side of the front door. She could hear both men yelling. Where was Nicholas? How could he still be asleep? She hoped that the dog wouldn’t bark and wake him, now that he’d managed to sleep through so much. She took a glass out of the cabinet and started toward the shelf where she kept the bourbon, but then stopped, realizing that she might be seen. She pulled open the refrigerator door and found an opened bottle of wine. She pulled the cork out and filled the glass half full and took a long drink.

Someone knocked on the door. Could it be the police—so soon? How could they have come so quickly and silently? She wasn’t sure until, long after the knocking stopped, she peered down the hallway and saw, through the narrow rectangle of glass, a police car with its revolving red and blue lights.

At almost the same instant, she touched something on her lapel and looked down, surprised. It was Santa: a small pin, in the shape of Santa’s head, complete with a little red hat, pudgy cheeks, and a ripply white plastic beard. A tiny cord with a bell at the bottom dangled from it. Nicholas must have gone back to the store where they had seen it on his first day home. She had pointed it out on a tray of Christmas pins and ornaments. She told him she’d had the exact same pin—the Santa’s head, with a bell—back when she was a girl. He must have gone back to the store later to buy it.

She tiptoed upstairs in the dark, and the dog followed. Nicholas was snoring in his bedroom. She went down the hall to her room, at the front of the house, and, without turning on the light, sat on her bed to look out the nearest window at the scene below. The man she had spoken to was emptying his pockets onto the hood of the police car. She saw the beam of the policeman’s flashlight sweep up and down his body, watched while he unbuttoned his coat and pulled it open wide in response to something the policeman said. The other man was being led to the police car. She could hear his words—“my car, it’s my car, I tell you”—but she couldn’t make out whole sentences, couldn’t figure out what the driver was objecting to so strongly. When both men were in the car, one of the policemen turned and began to walk toward the house. She got up quickly and went downstairs, one hand sliding along the slick banister; the dog came padding down behind her.

She opened the door just before the policeman knocked. Cold flooded the hallway. She saw steam coming out of the car’s exhaust pipe. There was steam from her own breath, and the policeman’s.

“Could I come in, ma’am?” he asked, and she stood back and then shut the door behind him, closing out the cold. The dog was on the landing.

“He’s real good, or else he’s not a guard dog to begin with,” the policeman said. His cheeks were red. He was younger than she had thought at first.

“They were going to keep that racket up all night,” she said.

“You did the right thing,” he said. His head bent, he began to fill out a form on his clipboard. “I put down about fifty dollars of damage to your wall,” he said.

She said nothing.

“It didn’t do too much damage,” the policeman said. “You can call in the morning and get a copy of this report if you need it.”

“Thank you,” she said.

He touched his cap. “Less fun than digging out Santa and his reindeer,” he said, looking back at the car, tilted onto the lawn. “Have a good Christmas, ma’am,” he said.

He turned and left, and she closed the door. With the click, she remembered everything. Earlier in the evening she had gone upstairs to tell Nicholas that she was sorry they had ended up in a quarrel on Christmas Eve. She had said she wanted him to come back downstairs. She had said it through the closed door, pleading with him, with her mouth close to the blank white panel of wood. When the door opened at last, and she saw Nicholas standing there in his pajamas, she had braced herself by touching her fingers to the door frame, shocked to realize that he was real, and that he was there. He was looking into her eyes—a person she had helped to create—and yet, when he wasn’t present, seeing him in her mind would have been as strange as visualizing a Christmas ornament out of season.

Nicholas’s hair was rumpled, and he looked at her with a tired, exasperated frown. “Charlotte,” he said, “why didn’t you come up hours ago? I went down and let the dog in. You’ve been out like a light half the night. Nobody’s supposed to say that you drink. Nobody’s supposed to see you. If you don’t ask any questions, we’re supposed to stop noticing you. Nobody’s supposed to put you on the spot, are they? You only talk to Father Curnan, and he prays for you.”

Downstairs in the dark hallway now, she shuddered, remembering how she had felt when he said that. She had gone back downstairs and huddled in the chair—all right, she had had too much to drink—but it was she who had woken up and been alert to squealing tires and people screaming, and Nicholas who had slept. Also, she thought, relief suddenly sweeping through her, he couldn’t have been as angry as he seemed. He must have put the pin on her coat after the party—after their words in the car—or even when he had come downstairs to let Horatio in and had seen her asleep or passed out in the chair. He must have pinned it onto her lapel when the coat still hung in the closet, so she would find it there the next day. She had found it early, inadvertently, when she went out to investigate the car and the noise.

She looked at the dog. He was watching her, as usual.

“Are you real good, or not a guard dog to begin with?” she whispered. Then she pulled the cord. Santa’s face lit up. She pulled the cord again, several times, smiling as the dog watched. Over her shoulder, she looked at the kitchen clock. It was three-fifty Christmas morning.

“Come on,” she whispered, pulling the cord another time. “I’ve done my trick. Now you do yours.”

Second Question

There we were, in the transfusion room at the end of the corridor at Bishopgate Hospital: Friday morning, the patients being dripped with blood or intravenous medicine so they could go home for the weekend. It was February, and the snow outside had turned the gritty gray of dirty plaster. Ned and I stood at the window, flanking a card table filled with desserts: doughnuts, cakes, pies, brownies, cookies. Some plastic forks and knives were piled in stacks, others dropped pick-up-sticks style between the paper plates. Ned surveyed the table and took a doughnut. In his chair, Richard was sleeping, chin dropped, breathing through his mouth. Half an hour into the transfusion, he always fell asleep. He was one of the few who did. A tall, redheaded man, probably in his mid-fifties, was hearing from a nurse about the hair loss he could expect. “Just remember, honey, Tina Turner wears a wig,” she said.

Outside, bigger snowflakes fell, like wadded-up tissues heading for the trash. Which was what I had turned away from when I went to the window: the sight of a nurse holding a tissue for a young woman to blow her nose into. The woman was vomiting, with her nose running at the same time, but she refused to relinquish the aluminum bowl clamped under her thumbs. “Into the tissue, honey,” the nurse was still saying, not at all distracted by her posturing colleague’s excellent imitation of Tina Turner. I’d stopped listening, too, but I’d stuck on the phrase “Gonna break every rule.”

Richard was dying of AIDS. Ned, his ex-lover and longtime business associate, found that instead of reading scripts, typing letters, and making phone calls, his new job description was to place organically grown vegetables in yin/yang positions inside a special steamer, below which we boiled Poland Spring water. A few months earlier, in that period before Richard’s AZT had to be discontinued so that he could enter an experimental outpatient-treatment program at Bishopgate, Ned had always slept late. He couldn’t call the West Coast before two in the afternoon, anyway—or maybe an hour earlier, if he had the unlisted number of an actor or of a director’s car phone. All of the people Richard and Ned did business with worked longer hours than nine-to-fivers, and it was a standing joke among us that I was never busy—I had no real job, and when I did work I was paid much more than was reasonable. Ned joked with me a lot, an edge in his voice, because he was a little jealous of the sudden presence of a third person in Richard’s apartment. Richard and I had met in New York when we were seated in adjacent chairs at a cheapo haircutter’s on Eighth Avenue. He thought I was an actress in an Off Broadway play he’d seen the night before. I was not, but I’d seen the play. As we talked, we discovered that we often ate at the same restaurants in Chelsea. His face was familiar to me, as well. Then began years of our being neighbors—a concept more important to New Yorkers than to people living in a small town. The day we met, Richard took me home with him so I could shower.

That year, my landlord on West Twenty-seventh Street remained unconcerned that hot water rarely made it up to my top-floor apartment. After I met Richard it became a habit with me to put on my sweatsuit and jog to his apartment, three blocks east and one block over. Richard’s own landlord, who lived in the other second-floor apartment, could never do enough for him, because Richard had introduced him to some movie stars and invited him to so many screenings. He would sizzle with fury over the abuse I had to endure, working himself up to what Richard (who made café filtre for the three of us) swore was a caffeine-induced sexual high, after which he’d race around doing building maintenance. Now, in the too-bright transfusion room, it was hard for me to believe that only a few months ago I’d been sitting in Richard’s dining alcove, with the cluster of phones that rested on top of Variety landslides and formed the centerpiece of the long tavern table, sipping freshly ground Jamaica Blue Mountain as my white-gloved hands curved around the pleasant heat of a neon-colored coffee mug. The gloves allowed the lotion to sink in as long as possible. I make my living as a hand model. Every night, I rub on a mixture of Dal Raccolto olive oil with a dash of Kiehl’s moisturizer and the liquid from two vitamin E capsules. It was Richard who gave me the nickname “Rac,” for “Raccoon.” My white, pulled-on paws protect me from scratches, broken nails, chapped skin. Forget the M.B.A.: as everyone knows, real money is made in strange ways in New York.

I turned away from the snowstorm. On a TV angled from a wall bracket above us, an orange-faced Phil Donahue glowed. He shifted from belligerence to incredulity as a man who repossessed cars explained his life philosophy. Hattie, the nicest nurse on the floor, stood beside me briefly, considering the array of pastry on our table as if it were a half-played chess game. Finally, she picked up one of the plastic knives, cut a brownie in half, and walked away without raising her eyes to look at the snow.

Taking the shuttle to Boston every weekend had finally convinced me that I was never going to develop any fondness for Beantown. To be fair about it, I didn’t have much chance to see Boston as a place where anyone might be happy. Ned and I walked the path between the apartment (rented by the month) and the hospital. Once or twice I took a cab to the natural-food store, and one night, as irresponsible as the babysitters of every mother’s nightmare, we had gone to a bar and then to the movies, while Richard slept a drug-induced sleep, with the starfish night-light Hattie had brought him from her honeymoon in Bermuda shining on the bedside table. In the bar, Ned had asked me what I’d do if time could stop: Richard wouldn’t get any better and he wouldn’t get any worse, and the days we’d gone through—with the crises, the circumlocutions, the gallows humor, the perplexity, the sudden, all-too-clear medical knowledge—would simply persist. Winter, also, would persist: intermittent snow, strong winds, the harsh late-afternoon sun we couldn’t stand without the filter of a curtain. I was never a speculative person, but Ned thrived on speculation. In fact, he had studied poetry at Stanford, years ago, where he had written a series of “What If” poems. Richard, visiting California, answering questions onstage after one of the movies he’d produced had been screened, had suddenly found himself challenged by a student whose questions were complex and rhetorical. In the following fifteen years, they had been lovers, enemies, and finally best friends, associated in work. They had gone from Stanford to New York, New York to London, then from Hampstead Heath back to West Twenty-eighth Street, with side trips to gamble in Aruba and to ski in Aspen at Christmas.

“You’re breaking the rules,” I said. “No what-ifs.”

“What if we went outside and flowers were blooming, and there were a car—a convertible—and we drove to Plum Island,” he went on. “Moon on the water. Big Dipper in the sky. Think about it. Visualize it and your negative energy will be replaced by helpful, healing energy.”

“Is there such a place as Plum Island or did you make it up?”

“It’s famous. Banana Beach is there. Bands play at night in the Prune Pavilion.”

“There is a Plum Island,” the man next to me said. “It’s up by Newburyport. It’s full of poison ivy in the summer, so you’ve got to be careful. I once got poison ivy in my lungs from some asshole who was burning the stuff with his leaves. Two weeks in the hospital, and me with a thousand-dollar deductible.”

Ned and I looked at the man.

“Buy you a round,” he said. “I just saved a bundle. The hotel I’m staying at gives you a rate equal to the temperature when you check in. It’s a come-on. I’ve got a queen-size bed, an honor bar, and one of those showers you can adjust so it feels like needles shooting into you, all for sixteen dollars. I could live there cheaper than heating my house.”

“Where you from?” Ned asked.

“Hope Valley, Rhode Island,” the man said, his arm shooting in front of me to shake Ned’s hand. “Harvey Milgrim,” he said, nodding at my face. “Captain, United States Army Reserve.”

“Harvey,” Ned said, “I don’t think you have any use for guys like me. I’m homosexual.”

The man looked at me. I was surprised, too; it wasn’t like Ned to talk about this with strangers. Circumstance had thrown me together with Ned; fate precipitated our unlikely bonding. Neither of us could think of life without Richard. Richard opened up to very few people, but when he did he made it a point to be indispensable.

“He’s kidding,” I said. It seemed the easiest thing to say.

“Dangerous joke,” Harvey Milgrim said.

“He’s depressed because I’m leaving him,” I said.

“Well, now, I wouldn’t rush into a thing like that,” Harvey said. “I’m Bud on draft. What are you two?”

The bartender walked over the minute the conversation shifted to alcohol.

“Stoli straight up,” Ned said.

“Vodka tonic,” I said.

“Switch me to Jim Beam,” Harvey said. He rolled his hand with the quick motion of someone shaking dice. “Couple of rocks on the side.”

“Harvey,” Ned said, “my world’s coming apart. My ex-lover is also my boss, and his white-blood-cell count is sinking too low for him to stay alive. The program he’s in at Bishopgate is his last chance. He’s a Friday-afternoon vampire. They pump blood into him so he has enough energy to take part in an experimental study and keep his outpatient status, but do you know how helpful that is? Imagine he’s driving the Indy. He’s in the lead. He screeches in for gas, and what does the pit crew do but blow him a kiss? The other cars are still out there, whipping past. He starts to yell, because they’re supposed to fill the car with gas, but the guys are nuts or something. They just blow air kisses.”

Harvey looked at Ned’s hand, the fingers fanned open, deep Vs of space between them. Then Ned slowly curled them in, kissing his fingernails as they came to rest on his bottom lip.

The bartender put the drinks down, one-two-three. He scooped a few ice cubes into a glass and put the glass beside Harvey’s shot glass of bourbon. Harvey frowned, looking from glass to glass without saying anything. Then he threw down the shot of bourbon and picked up the other glass, lifted one ice cube out, and slowly sucked it. He did not look at us or speak to us again.

The night after Ned and I snuck off to the bar, Richard started to hyperventilate. In a minute his pajamas were soaked, his teeth chattering. It was morning, 4 a.m. He was holding on to the door frame, his feet in close, his body curved away, like someone windsurfing. Ned woke up groggily from his sleeping bag on the floor at the foot of Richard’s bed. I was on the foldout sofa in the living room, again awakened by the slightest sound. Before I’d fallen asleep, I’d gone into the kitchen to get a drink of water, and a mouse had run under the refrigerator. It startled me, but then tears sprang to my eyes because if Richard knew there were mice—mice polluting the environment he was trying to purify with air ionizers, and humidifiers that misted the room with mineral water—he’d make us move. The idea of gathering up the piles of holistic-health books, the pamphlets on meditation, the countless jars of vitamins and chelated minerals and organically grown grains, the eye of God that hung over the stove, the passages he’d made Ned transcribe from Bernie Siegel and tape to the refrigerator—we’d already moved twice, neither time for any good reason. Something couldn’t just scurry in and make us pack it all up again, could it? And where was there left to go anymore? He was too sick to be in a hotel, and I knew there was no other apartment anywhere near the hospital. We would have to persuade him that the mouse existed only in his head. We’d tell him he was hallucinating; we’d talk him out of it, in the same way we patiently tried to soothe him by explaining that the terror he was experiencing was only a nightmare. He was not in a plane that had crashed in the jungle; he was tangled in sheets, not weighed down with concrete.

When I got to the bedroom, Ned was trying to pry Richard’s fingers off the door frame. He was having no luck, and looked at me with an expression that had become familiar: fear, with an undercurrent of intense fatigue.

Richard’s robe dangled from his bony shoulders. He was so wet that I thought at first he might have blundered into the shower. He looked in my direction but didn’t register my presence. Then he sagged against Ned, who began to walk him slowly in the direction of the bed.

“It’s cold,” Richard said. “Why isn’t there any heat?”

“We keep the thermostat at eighty,” Ned said wearily. “You just need to get under the covers.”

“Is that Hattie over there?”

“It’s me,” I said. “Ned is trying to get you into the bed.”

“Rac,” Richard said vaguely. He said to Ned, “Is that my bed?”

“That’s your bed,” Ned said. “You’ll be warm if you get into bed, Richard.”

I came up beside Richard and patted his back, and walked around and sat on the edge of the bed, trying to coax him forward. Ned was right: it was dizzyingly hot in the apartment. I got up and turned back the covers, smoothing the contour sheet. Ned kept Richard’s hand, but turned to face him as he took one step backward, closer to the bed. The two of us pantomimed our pleasure at the bed’s desirability. Richard began to walk toward it, licking his lips.

“I’ll get you some water,” I said.

“Water,” Richard said. “I thought we were on a ship. I thought the bathroom was an inside cabin with no window. I can’t be where there’s no way to see the sky.”

Ned was punching depth back into Richard’s pillows. Then he made a fist and punched the center of the bed. “All aboard the S.S. Fucking A,” he said.

It got a fake laugh out of me as I turned into the kitchen, but Richard only began to whisper urgently about the claustrophobia he’d experienced in the bathroom. Finally he did get back in his bed and immediately fell asleep. Half an hour later, still well before dawn, Ned repeated Richard’s whisperings to me as if they were his own. Though Ned and I were very different people, our ability to imagine Richard’s suffering united us. We were sitting in wooden chairs we’d pulled away from the dining-room table to put by the window so Ned could smoke. His cigarette smoke curled out the window.

“Ever been to Mardi Gras?” he said.

“New Orleans,” I said, “but never Mardi Gras.”

“They use strings of beads for barter,” he said. “People stand up on the balconies in the French Quarter—women as well as men, sometimes—and they holler down for people in the crowd to flash ’em: you give them a thrill, they toss down their beads. The more you show, the more you win. Then you can walk around with all your necklaces and everybody will know you’re real foxy. Real cool. You do a bump-and-grind, you can get the good ole boys—the men, that is—and the transvestites all whistling together and throwing down the long necklaces. The real long ones are the ones everybody wants. They’re like having a five-carat-diamond ring.” He opened the window another few inches so he could stub out his cigarette. One-fingered, he flicked it to the ground. Then he lowered the window, not quite pushing it shut. This wasn’t one of Ned’s wild stories; I was sure what he’d just told me was true. Sometimes I thought Ned told me certain stories to titillate me, or perhaps to put me down in some way: to remind me that I was straight and he was gay.

“You know what I did one time?” I said suddenly, deciding to see if I could shock him for once. “When I was having that affair with Harry? One night we were in his apartment—his wife was off in Israel—and he was cooking dinner, and I was going through her jewelry box. There was a pearl necklace in there. I couldn’t figure out how to open the clasp, but finally I realized I could just drop it over my head carefully. When Harry hollered for me, I had all my clothes off and was lying on the rug, in the dark, with my arms at my side. Finally he came after me. He put on the light and saw me, and then he started laughing and sort of dove onto me, and the pearl necklace broke. He raised up and said, ‘What have I done?’ and I said, ‘Harry, it’s your wife’s necklace.’ He didn’t even know she had it. She must not have worn it. So he started cursing, crawling around to pick up the pearls, and I thought, No, if he has it restrung at least I’m going to make sure it won’t be the same length.”

Ned and I turned our heads to see Richard, his robe neatly knotted in front, kneesocks pulled on, his hair slicked back.

“What are you two talking about?” he said.

“Hey, Richard,” Ned said, not managing to disguise his surprise.

“I don’t smell cigarette smoke, do I?” Richard said.

“It’s coming from below,” I said, closing the window.

“We weren’t talking about you,” Ned said. His voice was both kind and wary.

“I didn’t say you were,” Richard said. He looked at me. “May I be included?”

“I was telling him about Harry,” I said. “The story about the pearls.” More and more, it seemed, we were relying on stories.

“I never liked him,” Richard said. He waved a hand toward Ned. “Open that a crack, will you? It’s too hot in here.”

“You already know the story,” I said to Richard, anxious to include him. “You tell Ned the punch line.”

Richard looked at Ned. “She ate them,” he said. “When he wasn’t looking she ate as many as she could.”

“I didn’t want them to fit anymore if she tried to put them over her head,” I said. “I wanted her to know something had happened.”

Richard shook his head, but fondly: a little gesture he gave to indicate that I was interchangeable with some gifted, troublesome child he never had.

“One time, when I was on vacation with Sander, I picked up a trick in Puerto Rico,” Ned said. “We were going at it at this big estate where the guy’s employer lived, and suddenly the guy, the employer, hears something and starts up the stairs. So I ran into the closet—”

“He played football in college,” Richard said.

I smiled, but I had already heard this story. Ned had told it at a party one night long ago, when he was drunk. It was one of the stories he liked best, because he appeared a little wild in it and a little cagey, and because somebody got his comeuppance. His stories were not all that different from those stories boys had often confided in me back in my college days—stories about dates and sexual conquests, told with ellipses to spare my delicate feelings.

“So I grabbed whatever was hanging behind me—just grabbed down a wad of clothes—and as the guy comes into the room, I throw open the door and spring,” Ned was saying. “Buck naked, I start out running, and here’s my bad luck: I slam right into him and knock him out. Like it’s a cartoon or something. I know he’s out cold, but I’m too terrified to think straight, so I keep on running. Turns out what I’ve grabbed is a white pleated shirt and a thing like a—what do you call those jackets the Japanese wear? Comes halfway down my thighs, thank God.”

“These are the things he thanks God for,” Richard said to me.

Ned got up, growing more animated. “It’s all like a cartoon. There’s a dog in the yard that sets out after me, but the thing is on a chain. He reaches the end of the chain and just rises up in the air, baring his teeth, but he can’t go anywhere. So I stand right there, inches in front of the dog, and put on the shirt and tie the jacket around me, and then I stroll over to the gate and slip the latch, and about a quarter of a mile later I’m outside some hotel. I go in and go to the men’s room to clean up, and that’s the first time I realize I’ve got a broken nose.”

Although I had heard the story before, this was the first mention of Ned’s broken nose. For a few seconds he seemed to lose steam, as if he himself were tired of the story, but then he started up again, revitalized.

“And here’s the rest of my good luck: I come out and the guy on the desk is a fag. I tell him I’ve run into a problem and will he please call my boyfriend at the hotel where we’re staying, because I don’t even have a coin to use the pay phone. So he looks up the number of the hotel, and he dials it and hands me the phone. They connect me with Sander, who is sound asleep, but he snaps to right away, screaming, ‘Another night on the town with a prettyboy? Suddenly the bars close and Ned realizes his wallet’s back at the hotel? And do you think I’m going to come get you, just because you and some pickup don’t have money to pay the bill’?”

Eyes wide, Ned turned first to me, then to Richard, playing to a full house. “While he was ranting, I had time to think. I said, ‘Wait a minute, Sander. You mean they didn’t get anything? You mean I left my wallet at the hotel?’ ” Ned sank into his chair. “Can you believe it? I’d actually left my fuckin’ wallet in our room, so all I had to do was pretend to Sander that I’d gotten mugged—sons of bitches made me strip and ran off with my pants. Then I told him that the guy at the hotel gave me the kimono to put on.” He clicked his fingers. “That’s what they’re called: ‘kimonos.’ ”

“He didn’t ask why a kimono?” Richard said wearily. He ran his hand over the stubble of his beard. His feet were tucked beside him on the sofa.

“Sure. And I tell him it’s because there’s a Japanese restaurant in the hotel, and if you want to wear kimonos and sit on the floor Japanese style, they let you. And the bellboy thought they’d never miss a kimono.”

“He believed you?” Richard said.

“Sander? He grew up in L.A. and spent the rest of his life in New York. He knew you had to believe everything. He drives me back to the hotel saying how great it is that the scum that jumped me didn’t get any money. The sun’s coming up, and we’re riding along in the rental car, and he’s holding my hand.” Ned locked his thumbs together. “Sander and I are like that again.”

In the silence, the room seemed to shrink around us. Sander died in 1985.

“I’m starting to feel cold,” Richard said. “It comes up my body like somebody’s rubbing ice up my spine.”

I got up and sat beside him, half hugging him, half massaging his back.

“There’s that damn baby again,” Richard said. “If that’s their first baby, I’ll bet they never have another one.”

Ned and I exchanged looks. The only sound, except for an intermittent hiss of steam from the radiator, was the humming of the refrigerator.

“What happened to your paws, Rac?” Richard said to me.

I looked at my hands, thumbs pressing into the muscles below his shoulders. For the first time in as long as I could remember, I’d forgotten to put on the lotion and the gloves before going to sleep. I was also reflexively doing something I’d trained myself not to do years ago. My insurance contract said I couldn’t use my hands that way: no cutting with a knife, no washing dishes, no making the bed, no polishing the furniture. But I kept pressing my thumbs in Richard’s back, rubbing them back and forth. Even after Ned dropped the heavy blanket over Richard’s trembling shoulders, I kept pressing some resistance to his hopeless dilemma deep into the bony ladder of Richard’s spine.

“It’s crazy to hate a baby for crying,” Richard said, “but I really hate that baby.”

Ned spread a blanket over Richard’s lap, then tucked it around his legs. He sat on the floor and bent one arm around Richard’s blanketed shins. “Richard,” he said quietly, “there’s no baby. We’ve gone through the building floor by floor, to humor you. That noise you get in your ears when your blood pressure starts to drop must sound to you like a baby crying.”

“Okay,” Richard said, shivering harder. “There’s no baby. Thank you for telling me. You promised you’d always tell me the truth.”

Ned looked up. “Truth? From the guy who just told the Puerto Rico story?”

“Or maybe you’re hearing something in the pipes, Richard,” I said. “Sometimes the radiators make noise.”

Richard nodded hard, in agreement. But he didn’t quite hear me. That was what Ned and I had found out about people who were dying: their minds always raced past whatever was being said, and still the pain went faster, leapfrogging ahead.

Two days later, Richard was admitted to the hospital with a high fever, and went into a coma from which he never awoke. His brother flew to Boston that night, to be with him. His godson, Jerry, came, too, getting there in time to go with us in the cab. The experimental treatment hadn’t worked. Of course, we still had no way of knowing—we’ll never know—whether Richard had been given the polysyllabic medicine we’d come to call “the real stuff,” or whether he’d been part of the control group. We didn’t know whether the priest from Hartford was getting the real stuff, either, though it was rumored among us that his flushed face was a good sign. And what about the young veterinarian who always had something optimistic to say when we ran into each other in the transfusion room? Like Clark Kent, with his secret “S” beneath his shirt, the vet wore a T-shirt with a photograph reproduced on the front, a snapshot of him hugging his Border collie on the day the dog took a blue ribbon. He told me he wore it every Friday for good luck, as he sat in oncology getting the I.V. drip that sometimes gave him the strength to go to a restaurant with a friend that night.

Ned and I, exhausted from another all-nighter, took the presence of Richard’s brother and godson as an excuse to leave the hospital and go get a cup of coffee. I felt light-headed, though, and asked Ned to wait for me in the lobby while I went to the bathroom. I thought some cold water on my face might revive me.

There were two teenage girls in the bathroom. As they talked, it turned out they were sisters and had just visited their mother, who was in the oncology ward down the hall. Their boyfriends were coming to pick them up, and there was a sense of excitement in the air as one sister teased her hair into a sort of plume, and the other took off her torn stockings and threw them away, then rolled her knee-length skirt up to make it a micromini. “Come on, Mare,” her sister, standing at the mirror, said, though she was taking her time fixing her own hair. Mare reached into her cosmetic bag and took out a little box. She opened it and began to quickly streak a brush over the rectangle of color inside. Then, to my amazement, she began to swirl the brush over both knees, to make them blush. As I washed and dried my face, a fog of hair spray filtered down. The girl at the mirror fanned the air, put the hair spray back in her purse, then picked up a tube of lipstick, opened it, and parted her lips. As Mare straightened up after one last swipe at her knees, she knocked her sister’s arm, so that the lipstick shot slightly above her top lip.

“Jesus! You feeb!” the girl said shrilly. “Look what you made me do.”

“Meet you at the car,” her sister said, grabbing the lipstick and tossing it into her makeup bag. She dropped the bag in her purse and almost skipped out, calling back, “Soap and water’s good for that!”

“What a bitch,” I said, more to myself than to the girl who remained.

“Our mother’s dying, and she doesn’t care,” the girl said. Tears began to well up in her eyes.

“Let me help you get it off,” I said, feeling more light-headed than I had when I’d come in. I felt as if I were sleepwalking.

The girl faced me, mascara smudged in half-moons beneath her eyes, her nose bright red, one side of her lip more pointed than the other. From the look in her eyes, I was just a person who happened to be in the room. The way I had happened to be in the room in New York the day Richard came out of the bathroom, one shirtsleeve rolled up, frowning, saying, “What do you think this rash is on my arm?”

“I’m all right,” the girl said, wiping her eyes. “It’s not your problem.”

“I’d say she does care,” I said. “People get very anxious in hospitals. I came in to throw some water on my face because I was feeling a little faint.”

“Do you feel better now?” she said.

“Yes,” I said.

“We’re not the ones who are dying,” she said.

It was a disembodied voice that came from some faraway, perplexing place, and it disturbed me so deeply that I needed to hold her for a moment—which I did, tapping my forehead lightly against hers and slipping my fingers through hers to give her a squeeze before I walked out the door.

Ned had gone outside and was leaning against a lamppost. He pointed the glowing tip of his cigarette to the right, asking silently if I wanted to go to the coffee shop down the block. I nodded, and we fell into step.

“I don’t think this is a walk we’re going to be taking too many more times,” he said. “The doctor stopped to talk, on his way out. He’s run out of anything optimistic to say. He also took a cigarette out of my fingers and crushed it under his heel, told me I shouldn’t smoke. I’m not crazy about doctors, but there’s still something about that one that I like. Hard to imagine I’d ever warm up to a guy with tassels on his shoes.”

It was freezing cold. At the coffee shop, hot air from the electric heater over the door smacked us in the face as we headed for our familiar seats at the counter. Just the fact that it wasn’t the hospital made it somehow pleasant, though it was only a block and a half away. Some of the doctors and nurses went there, and of course people like us—patients’ friends and relatives. Ned nodded when the waitress asked if we both wanted coffee.

“Winter in Boston,” Ned said. “Never knew there was anything worse than winter where I grew up, but I think this is worse.”

“Where did you grow up?”

“Kearney, Nebraska. Right down Route Eighty, about halfway between Lincoln and the Wyoming border.”

“What was it like, growing up in Nebraska?”

“I screwed boys,” he said.

It was either the first thing that popped into his head, or he was trying to make me laugh.

“You know what the first thing fags always ask each other is, don’t you?” he said.

I shook my head no, braced for a joke.

“It’s gotten so the second thing is ‘Have you been tested?’ But the first thing is still always ‘When did you know?’ ”

“Okay,” I said. “Second question.”

“No,” he said, looking straight at me. “It can’t happen to me.”

“Be serious,” I said. “That’s not a serious answer.”

He cupped his hand over mine. “How the hell do you think I got out of Kearney, Nebraska?” he said. “Yeah, I had a football scholarship, but I had to hitchhike to California—never been to another state but Wyoming—hitched with whatever I had in a laundry bag. And if a truck driver put a hand on my knee, you don’t think I knew that was a small price to pay for a ride? Because luck was with me. I always knew that. Just the way luck shaped those pretty hands of yours. Luck’s always been with me, and luck’s with you. It’s as good as anything else we have to hang on to.”

He lifted his hand from mine, and yes, there it was: the perfect hand, with smooth skin, tapered fingers, and nails curved and shining under the gloss of a French manicure. There was a small, dark smudge across one knuckle. I licked the middle finger of the other hand to see if I could gently rub it away, that smudge of mascara that must have passed from the hand of the girl in the bathroom to my hand when our fingers interwove as we awkwardly embraced. The girl I had been watching, all the time Ned and I sat talking. She was there in the coffee shop with us—I’d seen them come in, the two sisters and their boyfriends—her hair neatly combed, her eyes sparkling, her makeup perfectly stroked on. Though her sister tried to get their attention, both boys hung on her every word.

Zalla

Recently, I had reason to think about Thomas Kurbell—Little Thomas, as the family always called him. Little Thomas fooled the older members of the family for a while because he was so polite as a child—almost obsequious—and because his father, Thomas Sr., had been a genuinely nice man. Ours was an urban family, based in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., and Little Thomas’s father’s death reinforced every bit of paranoia everyone had about life in the country. No matter that he actually died of complications of pneumonia, which he had contracted in the hospital as he was lying in traction, recovering from a broken leg, shattered ankle, and patched-together pelvis, suffered after falling from a hay wagon. Legend had it that he’d died instantly from the fall, and this was always invoked as a cautionary warning to any youngster in the family who took an interest in skiing or sailing or even hiking. For the sake of storytelling, Thomas Sr.’s death often dovetailed into the long-ago death of his cousin Pete, who had been struck by lightning when he got out to investigate a backup on the Brooklyn Bridge: wham! With Thomas still sliding out of the hay wagon, there was a sudden bolt of electricity, and Pete, moved to New York City, was struck dead, lit up for such a quick second it seemed somebody was just taking a picture with a flash. I suppose it’s true in many families that some things get to be lumped together for effect, and others to obscure some issue. I was thirty years old before I got the chronology of the two deaths correct. It’s just the way people in our family tell stories: it wasn’t done to mislead Little Thomas.