Van Gogh's Room at Arles

Her Sense of Timing

“All I can say,” Schiff told Claire, “is you’ve got a hell of a sense of timing, a hell of a sense of timing. You’ve got a sense of timing on you like last year’s calendar.”

“Timing, Jack? Timing? Timing has nothing to do with it. Time maybe, that it’s run out. This has been coming for years.”

“You might have told a fella.”

“Oh, please,” Claire said.

“Oh yes, you might have prepared a chap.”

“I just did.”

“Given fair warning I mean. Not waited till the last minute.”

“Two weeks’ notice?”

“Ain’t that the law?”

“For the help.”

“You were the help, Claire.”

“Not anymore.”

“I can’t afford to be single.”

“Tough,” she said.

“Tough,” Schiff said. “Tough, yeah, that should do me.”

“All you ever think you have to do is throw yourself on the mercy of the court.”

“Well, ain’t mercy of the court the law too?”

“For juveniles and first offenders. You’re close to sixty.”

“So are you.”

“I don’t talk about ‘fair.’”

“Very refined, very grown-up. Come on, Claire, put down the suitcases.”

“No. The others are all packed. I’ll send UPS for them when I’m settled.”

“I won’t let the bastards in. The door to this house is barred to the sons of bitches.”

“Oh, Jack,” Claire said, “the things you say. Stand up to delivery people? You? Painters and repairmen? But you’re such a coward. The man who comes to read the meter terrifies you. Tradesmen do, the kid who brings the pizza.”

“Why are they blue collar? This is America, Claire.”

“Is that my cab?” She looked down out their bedroom window and waved.

“This is really going to happen?”

“It’s happened,” she said, leaned over the bed to kiss her husband on the check, and just upped and walked out the door on their thirty-six-year marriage.

“Wait, hey wait,” Schiff called after her, taking up his walker and moving toward the window. By the time he got around the bed Claire was already handing the driver two big valises. Schiff, bracing his hands on the sill, stood before the window in his shorty pajamas. “Excuse me,” he called to the man. “Sir? Excuse me?” The fellow shaded his eyes and looked up. “Where are you taking her?”

The driver, a young man in his twenties, looked at Claire, who shook her head. “Sorry,” he said, “destinations between a fare and her cabbie are privileged information.”

Schiff held up his walker. “But I’m a cripple, I’m handicapped,” he said. “I’m close to sixty.”

“Sorry,” the man said, shut the trunk in which he’d put Claire’s suitcases, and got into his cab.

“That,” Schiff called after the taxi, “was no fare, that was my wife.”

And thought, Her sense of timing, her wonderful, world- class, championship sense of timing. Leaving me like that. Just like that. Just get up and go. Just got up and gone. Don’t tell me she forgot tomorrow’s the party.

Schiff’s annual party for his graduate students, though by no means a tradition — Schiff, who was a professor of Political Geography, had started it up only two or three years ago when, during a fit like some cocktail made of equal parts of sentimentality and pique, he realized that though it was barely a few years until retirement he had had only a stunningly scant handful of students who ever wrote him once they were done with their studies, let alone any who might regard him as a friend — had become, at least in Schiff’s diminishing circles, one of the hottest tickets in town. Admittedly, it was not like Creer’s annual anti- Thanksgiving Day bash, or one of Beverly Yaeger’s famous feminist dos in honor of the defeat anywhere of a piece of anti-abortion legislation, but unlike the old manitou he could not claim Indian blood or, unlike Ms. Yaeger, even the menstrual stuff. Unlike any of his fabulous colleagues he was axless, out of it, their long loop of rage, degrees below the kindling point of their engagement. Outside all the beltways of attention and the committed heart. In point of fact so uncommitted that one of the next things he would do, once he struggled back to bed, would be to call his guests and explain that his wife had left him suddenly, the party was off.

They’d understand. He did none of the work for it himself, never had — my handicap, my handicap and footicap, he liked to say — and would simply set forth for them the now impossible logistics, freely giving Claire the credit for the splendid spread they put out— not one but three roasts, rare through dark medium, turkey, sliced cheeses like slivery glints of precious metals, pâtés riddled with gemmy olives and crumbs of spice, breads and pastries, cakes and ale. Put out and gave away, in doggy bags and Care packages, Schiff — who addressed them in class as “Mister,” as “Miss”—avuncularizing at them and propped up in the doorway forcing the uneaten food on his departing, liquored-up guests like some hearty, generous Fezziwig. Schiff’s all-worked-and-played-out Bob Cratchits, his pretty young Xmas Carols. It was a strain. It was more. Not just another side but a complete counterfeit of his character and, while he generally enjoyed the masquerade, he couldn’t help but wonder what his students made of his impersonation. Many sent thank-you notes, of course — a form Schiff regarded as condescending — but few ever actually mentioned the parties to him because the only other times they saw each other were in class, where it was business as usual, where the smoking lamp was never lit, and it was Mister and Miss all over again.

What he feared for was his dignity, protecting that like some old-timey maiden her virginity. The annual party, to Schiff’s way of thinking, was pure ceremony, obligatory as hair let down for Mardi Gras, candy and trinkets tossed from the float, insignificant gelt on the anything-goes occasions. But only, they would surely see, voluntarily obligatory, obligatory for as long as his mood was up for it. This was what the great advantage of his age came down to. Added to the other great advantage of his disenabling condition, Schiff practically had it made. A cheerful, outgoing older man might have genuinely enjoyed it. Bargains struck with the Indians for Manhattan, a kind of openhanded heartiness done strictly on spec. Even — he’s thinking about his rough bluff brusqueness with them — the flirting — the men as well as the women— Schiff’s sandpapery humours. (Well, it was in the nature of the profession to flirt, all profs engaged in some almost military hearts-and-minds thing.) Schiff would have enjoyed it. He had enjoyed it. In the days before he’d been struck down, when even at twenty- five, when even at forty and for a few years afterward, all this curmudgeon business had been merely a dodge, style posturing as temperament and all, he suspected (almost remembered) the customary mishmash of mush skin-deep beneath it. Because, again, the only thing that stood between him and his complete capitulation — he could not revert to what he had not really come from in the first place — to type, was that brittle dignity he had practically lain down his life for. Pretty ironic, he’d say, even in as ironic a world as this one, to have had stripped from him (and by mere pathology) the physical bulwark of his great protective formality and fastidiousness. (Completely toilet trained, according to family legend, at nine months.)

And now he has a choice to make: whether to wiggle- waggle on the walker (with no one in the house to help him should he fall) the thirty or so steps to the bathroom, or to scoot crabwise up along the side of his bed toward the nightstand, where he keeps his urinal, Credé his bladder by pressing up on it with his good hand, priming piss like water from a pump till it flowed, not in anything like a stream but in nickel-and-dime dribs and petty drabs from his stunted, retracted penis (now more like a stuck elevator button than a shaft). They tell him he must use his legs or lose them, but it’s his nickel, his dime — his, he means, energy, and he sidesaddles the bed, bouncing his fists and ass on the mattress in some awkward, primitive locomotion somewhere between riding a horse and potato-racing. Vaguely he feels like a fellow in a folk song, a sort of John Henry, or as if he is somehow driving actual stitches into the bedding and thinks, and not for the first time, that he ought to be an event in the Olympics.

His head within striking distance of the head of the bed, Jack Schiff laid into gravity and fell back on the pillow, then, with his palms under his left thigh, he pulled his almost useless leg up after him. The right one still had some strength and he kicked it aboard, leaned over to open the door to the nightstand, and took out the green plastic basin and thin urinal, angled, tipped at its neck (always reminding Schiff somehow of a sort of shellfish, indeed actually smelling like one, of the shore, its filthy musks and salts and iodines, its mixed and complex seas gone off like sour soup). It’s into this, once he’s snapped back its plastic lid, Schiff must thread his penis, hold it in place, pushing up on the bottom of his abdomen, jabbing and jabbing with his thumb until he feels the burn. (Taking pleasure not just in the release of his water but in the muted, rain-on-the-roof sound it makes once it begins to come.) Only recently has he noticed the bruise on the skin of his lower stomach where he’s been punching himself silly. He examines it now, reading the yellowish black and blue like a fortune-teller. What, thought Schiff, a piece of work is man, and blotted at his pee with a Kleenex. Then he measured his output in cubic centimeters on the bas relief plastic numerals outside the urinal. His secret wish was to piss a liter, but the most he’s ever done was six hundred cubic centimeters. This time it’s under two hundred. Not even average, but he’s relieved because the fact is Schiff can’t stand even 75 cc of discomfort, not even fifty. For a man as generally incapacitated and uncomfortable as Schiff is he’s a sort of snob, but pissing is something he can do something about. Schiff is very conscientious about pissing.

And only now does his new situation have his full attention.

For the truth is Schiff has always been very organized. Even before he was a cripple he was organized. (Schiff believes in a sort of cripple’s code — that one must never do anything twice. It’s a conservation-of-energy thing, an anti- entropy thing, scientific, almost Newtonian, and now, in an age of raised environmental consciousness, recycling, of substitution and cut corners, the golden age, he supposes, of the stitch in time, of taken pains and being careful in the streets, he finds — for a cripple — he’s not only, given his gait, in step with his times but practically a metaphor for them. It’s a conservation-of-energy thing and a nine- months-of-toilet-training thing.)

Of course — he’s thinking of his new situation, he’s thinking of the carefully trained guns of his full attention, he’s thinking of the inescapable fallout of the world, he’s thinking of synergy, of the unavoidable garbage created not only out of every problem but out of each new solution — the pisser — he knew this going in, he couldn’t help himself, by nature he was a list maker — will have to be emptied, especially this particular pisser with its almost caramel-colored urine. (Schiff prefers a clearish urine, something in a dry white wine, and what, he wonders, is the liquid equivalent of anal retentive?) This had been — even with the handle of the urinal attached to the walker’s wide aluminum crossrail his wild limp would not have permitted him to take five steps without setting up the dancing waters, a rough churn of spilled piss — Claire’s job, and though he doesn’t really blame Claire for leaving him — had their roles been reversed, take away his nine-month toilet training and his incremental, almost exponential squeamishness, he’d have bugged out on her long ago — he understands that, should this thing stick, in the future he will have to think twice, three times, more, before using the urinal. (Or maybe, thinks the list maker, he can arrange for a case of urinals, keep them in the night- stand, turn it into a kind of wine cellar. Nah, he’s kidding. Well he is and he isn’t. It’s something to think about, another thing he’ll have to run past the cripple’s code, the garbage potential latent in all solutions.)

But he set all that aside for the moment and took up the phone to see if he could get some idea where he stood.

The dispatcher at the cab company — Schiff had made a mental note of the number on Claire’s taxi — said he’d like to help but the computer was down. (Schiff, who didn’t believe him, wondered what the fallout would come to from such solutions.) He checked with the airlines, but since he couldn’t give them Claire’s destination, let alone times or flight numbers, they couldn’t help him. (Couldn’t or wouldn’t. He insisted that even without the specifics they ought to be able to punch up her name on their computers. Claire Schiff, he said to one agent, how many Claire Schiffs could there be riding on their airplanes? She was his wife, for God’s sake, and he didn’t know of another Claire Schiff in all of America. Suppose this had been a real emergency. A real emergency? “Sure. If the plane went down, God forbid. If there’d been a hijacking.” “If the plane went down, if there’s been a hijacking?” the agent said slyly. “God forbid,” said Schiff. “She’s your wife,” another agent said, “and you don’t even have a destination for her?” “Well, my girl.” “Oh, now she’s your ‘girl.’” “My daughter,” he said, “we think she’s run off.” “Your daughter, is she?” the agent said. “Listen, you,” Schiff, getting defensive, said aggressively, “I happen to be a Frequent Flyer on this airline. I have your platinum card, more than a hundred thousand uncashed miles and enough bonus points to practically charter my own goddamn plane. Either look up Claire Schiff for me or let me speak to your supervisor.” The son of a bitch hung up on him. They’d whipped him. “I have to find her,” he told the very last agent he spoke to, “I’m disabled and we’re giving a party.”) He probably spent thirty or forty dollars on long-distance fishing expeditions. Their friends, proclaiming no knowledge of her plans, went on fishing expeditions of their own. “No,” he’d say, putting them off, “no trouble. As for myself, my condition’s pretty much unchanged, but I think Claire may be getting a little spooked. Well,” he said, still fairly truthfully, “we’re both getting on. Hell,” he said, “I’m close to sixty. So’s Claire, for that matter. Maybe she thinks she won’t be able to lift me much longer.” But finally as cavalier with the truth as he’d been with the airline son of a bitch who’d hung up on him. “She’s been depressed,” he said. “I’ve got her meeting with a psychiatrist three, sometimes four times a week. We’re starting to think about institutions. We’re starting to think, now they’ve got a lot of the kinks worked out, about electroshock therapy. Life’s a bitch, ain’t it? Yeah, well, if you should happen to hear anything, anything at all, you have my number, give me a ring. Dr. Greif and I want to get this thing settled as soon as we can. Tell Marge hi for me.”

No longer bothering to pick up the litter he left after these flights of fancy, no longer even thinking about it. Just working his new situation. And was still working his new situation when the idea came to him to call Harry Aid in Portland. Once he thought of it he didn’t screw around.

“Harry, it’s Jack. Is Claire with you?”

“With me? Why would she be with me?”

He recognized the tone in Harry’s voice. It could have been the tone in his own voice when he was handing out his God forbids to the airline agents and transforming his wife’s identity into his girlfriend’s and then declining that one into some daughter’s.

“Why? Well, for starters, I think she may still have a thing for you, you big lug.”

“That was years ago, Jack. Christ, man, I’m sixty years old. We ain’t high school kids any longer.”

“Is she with you, Harry?”

“Jack, I swear on my life she isn’t.”

“Yeah, all right, it’s a four-hour plane ride to Portland. Is she on her way?”

“Honor bright, Jack, I’m telling you that as of this minute I have absolutely no idea where she is.”

So, Schiff thought, she’s run off to play out her life with her old sweetheart.

“Okay, Harry. Hang tough. Stonewall me. Just you remember. I’m a helpless old cripple with a degenerative neurological disease who has to be strapped into the chair when he goes down the stairs on his Stair-Glide.”

“Oh, Jack,” Harry said.

“Oh, Harry,” said Jack, and hung up.

It wasn’t that satisfactory but at least now he knew where he stood. (Well, he thought, stood.) What he’d told his wife had been true. He couldn’t afford to be single. Not at the rate his exacerbations had been coming. Only a little over a year ago he’d still been able to manage on a cane, he’d still been able to drive. He’d owned a walker — a gift from the Society — but hadn’t even taken it out of its box. Now they had to tote him around in a wheelchair he hadn’t enough strength in his left arm to propel by himself. Now he had to go up and down stairs in contraptions on tracks— Schiff’s little choo-choo. Now he couldn’t stand in the shower, there were grab bars on the sides of his handicap toilet, a bath bench in his tub, he had to sit to pee, and couldn’t always pull the beltless, elastic-waistband pants he wore all the way up his hips and over his ass. (Now, for the same reason, he didn’t even wear underwear.) There were ramps at both the front and rear of the house. And every other month now there was some elaborate new piece of home health equipment in the house. Indeed, where once it had been a sort of soft entertainment for him to go into the malls and department stores, now it had become a treat to drop into one of the health supply shops and scope the prosthetics. On his wish list was the sort of motorized wheelchair you’d see paraplegics tear around in, a van with a hydraulic lift in which to put it, and one of those big easy chairs that raised you to a standing position. Also, although in his case it was still a little premature to think about just yet, he had his eye on this swell new electronic hospital bed. He found himself following ads for used hospital beds in the Society’s newsletter. (“Don’t kid yourself,” he told colleagues, “it takes dough to be crippled and still have a lifestyle.”)

You could be crippled or you could be single. Schiff, though he made a pretty good living at the university— Check, he reminded himself, the savings and money-market accounts, see if she cleaned you out before she split— didn’t know anyone who could afford to be both. Oh, maybe if you went into a home maybe, but unless you had only three or four years to live that was prohibitive, too. (Wasn’t everything up front? Didn’t you have to sign your life savings over to those guys? He should have known this stuff, but give him a break, until this morning he hadn’t even known his wife would be running out on him.) And, though he’d never actually been in one, he didn’t think he’d like the way it would smell in the corridors.

So he was checking his options. Still working his new situation, he meant, still, he meant, thinking about the blows he would be taking in his comfort, he found his mind drifting back to that wish list. He found himself idly thinking about the skeepskin whoosies crips draped over the furniture and across their wheelchairs and sheets to help prevent lesions and bedsores. It was astonishing what one of those babies could go for in a wicked world. (It varied actually. They came in different grades, like wool rugs, fur coats, or diamonds. Lambskin was the most expensive, then ewes, then adult males, but it wasn’t that simple. There were categories within even these categories, and certain kinds of sheep — castrated fully-grown males were an example — could sometimes be more expensive than even the finest virgin lambskin. Once you really got into it, it was a waste, a waste and a shame, thought Schiff, to be crippled- up in such an interesting place as the world.) Oh well, he thought, if he really needed them he could afford all the sheepskins he wanted. Sheepskin deprival wasn’t his problem. His wish list wasn’t. He had been drifting, he had been thinking idly. With Claire gone his problem was the real and present danger he was in, his problem was singleness and emergency.

He picked up his cordless phone and called Information. (Another thing he didn’t understand about his wife. Since his disease had been first diagnosed, even, that is, when he was relatively asymptomatic, he’d asked the telephone company, and with a supporting letter from his neurologist received, for its free Unlimited Information Privilege. For years now he hadn’t cracked a phone book. Claire had telephone numbers written down in a small, worn black spiral notebook she kept in a drawer in the kitchen. When she wanted the number of a plumber, say, or the man who serviced their air conditioners, she’d go all the way downstairs for it rather than call Information. Recently, it was the cause of some of their biggest fights. “Ask Information,” Schiff offered expansively, almost like a host pressing food or drink on a guest. “The number’s in my book,” she’d say. “Why not ask Information? It’s free.” “I’ve got the number downstairs. Information has better things to do.” “It’s their job, for Christ’s sake. What do you think the hell else they have to do?” “That’s all right, I don’t mind.” “I mind,” Schiff would say, and he’d be shouting now. “Why?” he’d yell after her. “This is some passive-aggressive thing, isn’t it? Sure,” he’d shout, “this is some lousy passive-aggressive thing on your part. Just your way of showing me who the cripple is in this outfit!” Sometimes, out of spite and with Claire as witness, checking what was playing at all the movie houses, when the feature was scheduled to begin, he’d rack up a dozen or so calls to Information at a time. Or patiently explain to her, “You know, Claire, the Information operators don’t actually look anything up. It isn’t as if they were ruining their eyes over the tiny print in the telephone directory. It’s all computers nowadays. They just punch in an approximate spelling and the number comes up on the screen.” “It’s wasteful,” Claire might say. “It’s free.” “It’s a drain on the electricity, it’s wasteful.” “You clip goddamn coupons for shampoos and breakfast cereals and shit we wouldn’t even eat unless you got fifteen or twenty cents off the price of the goddamn box! That’s wasteful! Do you know what they charge for a call to Information? Forty-five cents, that’s what! Forty-five cents! They’re ripping you off I’ll tell you the truth, Claire, I feel sorry for people who aren’t handicapped today, I really do. I probably save us a dollar eighty cents a day. You know what that comes to over the course of a year? Practically six hundred fifty dollars a year! Go buy yourself a designer dress, Claire, go get yourself a nice warm coat.” “Big man!” “Big fucking passive aggressive!”)

“S.O.S. Corporation,” a woman said when the number rang through. “How may we help you?”

“I’ve seen your ads on TV and I’d like to speak to one of your sales representatives,” Schiff said.

“Bill isn’t busy just now. I’ll put you through to Bill.”

“I’m disabled,” Schiff told Bill. “My wife of thirty-six years skipped out on me today to be with an old boyfriend in the Pacific Northwest and left me high and dry and all alone in the house, pretty much a prisoner in it, in fact. Claire left me the car, and I have my handicap plates — my ‘vanity plates,’ I call them, with their stick-figure, big- wheeler wheelchairs like a kid’s toy — but I haven’t driven in over a year and don’t even know whether I still can.”

The salesman started to explain his company’s services but Schiff interrupted him. “Yes,” he said, “I’ve seen your ads on TV,” and continued, teaching Bill his life and current situation. Then the good political geographer went on to explain what he called “choke points” in his home, fault lines along which he could be expected most likely to fall, how close these were to the various telephones in the house. When he was done, the fellow, if he’d been paying attention at all, could have passed, and might even have aced, any pop quiz on the material that Schiff cared to give him.

“Yes sir,” Bill said, “that’s pretty clear. I think we’ll be able to serve you just fine.”

“I think so,” Schiff said, “I’ve seen your ads on TV, I’ve heard them on the radio.”

“Pretty effective spots,” Bill said.

“Long-time listener, first-time caller,” said Schiff.

“Hey,” said the salesman, “you can rest easy. We could get the equipment over to you and set you up today.”

“Well, I do have some questions.”

“Oh,” Bill said, disappointed, realizing things had gone too smoothly, sensing the catch, “sure. What’s that?”

Schiff wanted to know if he could wear the thing in the shower, whether there was any chance he would be electrocuted. The shower was one of the major choke points; if he was going to be electrocuted the deal was off.

“No chance at all,” Bill, who’d actually often been asked this same question, said brightly. “The emergency call button works on the same principle as the waterproof watch. Besides, everything in it, the case, the working parts, are all made of high-grade, bonded, heavy-duty plastic. The only metal part is the copper wire that carries the signal, and that’s locked in bonded, heavy-duty, high-grade plastic insulation.”

Schiff said that that was good, that people his age had been known to recover from broken hips, but that he couldn’t think of anyone who’d ever come back from an electrocution. Bill chuckled and, feeling his oats, wanted to know if Professor Schiff had any other questions. Well, yes, as a matter of fact, he had. If he wasn’t near a regular phone would it work on a cordless? The salesman was ready for him. He slammed this one right out of the park. “Yes, absolutely. So long as it’s in the On mode. Then of course, since the battery tends to drain down in that position, it’s your responsibility to see to it that you keep your phone charged.”

“I could do that, I’m not completely helpless, you know,” said Schiff, who, from the salesman’s quick answer to what Schiff thought a cleanly unique question, suddenly had a sad sense of himself as a thoroughly categorized man.

“Of course not,” Bill said. “Anything else?”

There was the question of price. Bill preferred to wait until he had a chance to meet Schiff in person before going into this stuff — there were various options— if a doctor accompanied the paramedic on a call, whether Schiff would be using some of the other services the company offered, various options — but the professor was adamant. He reminded Bill of all he had yet to do if he was going to call off that party for his graduate students. He wouldn’t budge on this one. The salesman would either have to tell him what it cost right then and there or lose the sale. Bill gave him the basic monthly rates, installation fees, what it would cost Schiff if they had to put in additional phones. He broke down the costs to him of the various options and offered a price on specific package deals. It was like buying a good used car.

It was expensive. Schiff said as much.

“Is it?” Bill said. “Do you have a burglar-alarm system in your house there, Professor?”

“No.”

“Sure,” Bill said, “and if that’s what you have to pay to see to it your hi-fi ain’t stolen or they don’t clear out your spoons, isn’t your very life worth a few dollars more to you than just making sure they don’t get your tablecloth?”

“I said I don’t have a burglar-alarm system,” Schiff said.

“Whether you do or you don’t,” the salesman said. “It’s the same principle.”

On condition that all of it could be put in that day he ended up picking one of the S.O.S. Corporation’s most all- inclusive plans. He got a bit of a break on the package.

“You won’t be sorry,” Bill told him sincerely. “They dealt you a rotten hand. In my business I see it all the time, and I agree, it’s a little expensive, but you’ll see, it’s worth it. Even if you never have to use us, and I hope you don’t, it’s worth it. The sense of security alone. It’s worth it all right. Oh, while I still have you on the phone, is there something else you want to ask, can you think of anything you’d like to know?”

Schiff figured the man was talking about credit arrangements, but he didn’t care about credit arrangements. It was expensive, more expensive than Schiff would ever have thought, but not that expensive. If the bitch hadn’t cleaned out his accounts — something he’d have to check — he could afford it. But there was something else. Schiff brought it up reluctantly.

“Would I have to shout?” he asked. “On the TV, that lady who falls down shouts.”

“Well, you take a nasty spill like that you could just as well be screaming as actually shouting.”

“I think she’s shouting,” Schiff said. “She’s pretty far from the phone, all the way across the room. It sounds to me like she’s shouting.”

“Well,” Bill said gently, “shouting, screaming. That’s just an example of truth in advertising.” And Schiff knew what Bill was going to tell him next. He braced himself for it. And then the salesman said just exactly what Schiff thought he was going to say. “Maybe,” he said, “her phones aren’t sensitive enough, maybe they’re not wired for their fullest range. That’s one of the reasons I want to be on the site, why I don’t like to quote a customer a price over the telephone.”

He has me, thought the political geographer, they dealt me a rotten hand — he’s in the business, he knows — and he has me.

If it wasn’t one thing it was another. Or no, Schiff, remembering his theory of consequences, fallout, the proliferation of litter, corrected. First it was one thing, then it was another. Once you put the ball into play there was nothing for it but to chase it. He had to find out about his funds, whether there were enough left to take care of it if S.O.S. insisted on payment for their service up front. (Claire paid the bills, he hadn’t written a check in years. Except for a couple of loose dollars — it was awkward for him to get to his billfold, finger credit cards from a wallet or handle money — for a coffee and sweet roll when he went to school, he didn’t even carry cash anymore. Even in restaurants Claire paid the check, figured the tip, signed the credit-card slip. His disease had turned him into some sort of helpless, old-timey widow, some nice, pre-lib, immigrant lady.) He knew the names of the three banks with which they dealt, but wasn’t entirely certain which one they used for checking, which handled their trust fund, which was the one they kept their money-market account. (There was even a small teacher’s credit-union account they’d had to open when the interest rates were so high on certificates of deposit a few years back and they took a loan out on an automobile Claire didn’t think they should pay for outright.)

Information gave him the bank’s number, but the bank— they might have been suspicious of his vagueness when he couldn’t tell them what kind of account he was asking about — wouldn’t tell him a thing without an account number.

“Jesus,” he said, “I’m disabled, I’d have to go downstairs for that. My wife usually takes care of the money. Normally I wouldn’t even be bothering you with something like this, but she walked out on me today. Just left me flat.”

“I don’t like it,” the bank said, “when people take the name of the Lord in vain.”

He knew where to find the stuff, in the top drawer of a high, narrow cabinet in the front hall — for reasons neither could remember they called it “the tchtchk”—the closest thing they had in the house to an antique, and except for the fact that two of its elaborate brass handles were missing it might have been valuable. The only thing was, getting there would not be half the fun. Even with the Stair-Glide Claire had to help him. Always she had to swivel and lock the seat, folded upright like a seat in a movie theater, into position for him at the top of the stairs. On days he was weak she had to lift Schiff’s feet onto the little ledge — less long than his shoes — and pull down its movable arms held high in the air like a victim’s in a stickup. Even on days he was strong she had to fold and carry his aluminum walker down the stairs for him. The logistics seemed overwhelming. He’d really have to think about this one.

He was in bed. He was lying down. Lying down, sitting, he was any man’s equal. He didn’t know his own strength. Literally. He had no sense of weakness, his disease. He could be in remission. Unless he tried to turn on his side, or raise himself into a sitting position, he felt fit as a fiddle. At rest, even his fingers seemed normal. He could have counted out money or arranged playing cards. Really, the logistics seemed overwhelming. He was as reluctant to move as a man in a mine field. Inertia had become almost a part of his disease, almost a part of his character. His character, Schiff thought, had become almost a part of his disease. A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do, he thought, and heaved himself upright. So far, so good. Not bad, he thought, and pushed himself up off the bed and, preparing to move, leaned into his walker. Not bad, he thought again, pleased with the relative crispness of his steps, but soon his energy began to flag. By the time he’d taken the thirteen or so steps to the Stair-Glide (the twenty-six or so steps, actually, since his movement on the walker could be broken down — to keep his mind occupied, he really did break it down — this way: push, step, pull; push, step, pull, each forward step with his right leg accompanied by dragging the left one up alongside it, almost alongside it. He felt like someone with a gaping hole in his hull). Push, step, rest, pull, he was going now; then push, rest, step, rest, pull. Rest! He lived in slow motion, like someone bathed in strobe light or time-lapse photography. He could have been the subject of time- motion studies.

In repose, folded out of the way against the wall, the Stair-Glide looked like a torso on a target on a rifle range. Gasping, Schiff fumbled with the lever that swiveled it into position and, almost losing his balance as he took a hand off the walker, had practically to swipe at its shallow little theater seat to get it down. With difficulty he managed to lower the chair’s arms and wrap them about himself — there was a sort of elbow on each arm that loosely encircled his body and was supposed to keep him from falling too far forward — and lower the tiny footrest. (They design this shit for kids, Schiff thought. They think of us as a bunch of Tiny Tims.) He didn’t know what to do, whether to pull his feet up on the footrest and then try to collapse the walker, or to collapse the walker and then worry about getting his feet up. (They’re right, he thought. We are kids. We need nursemaids. Or wives. Boy, he thought angrily, her sense of timing. Her world-class, son-of-a-bitch sense of timing. Briefly, it occurred to him that he might be better off homeless, find himself a nutso, broken-down bag lady with whom he could bond and who would take care of him, or, if it was still too soon for him to make a commitment, get involved, or even too early for him to start dating again, some streetsmart, knowledgeable old wino with a feel for the soup kitchens, the ground-floor, handicap-friendly shelters. He had money. Surely she’d left something for him, though even if she hadn’t there was the house. He could sell it, split the proceeds with her, and have enough left over to pay the wino or bag lady for their trouble. What could it cost him— ten bucks a day, fifteen? Hell, if he didn’t save almost that much on the calls he made to Information, he saved almost almost that much. I was already crippled, Schiff thought, now I’m crazy, too.) It was a dilemma, a whaddayacallit, Hobson’s choice. This ain’t going to happen, he told himself. If I bring my feet up and fold the walker, my feet will slide off the footrest and I’ll never get them back on it again. If I fold the walker and hold it I won’t have the use of my hands to lift up my feet. Then, out of the blue, it came to him. He raised his feet onto the footrest and moved the chair into its glide mode. He leaned over and picked up the still uncollapsed walker. He didn’t even try to fold it. With his arms on the armrests and the heel of his hand pressed against the button that made the Stair-Glide go, he raised the lightweight aluminum walker around his body and up about level with the top of his head and, to all intents and purposes, proceeded to wear it downstairs!

By the time he’d made it the eight steps to the landing— his hand kept slipping off the button and stopping the chair — a second walker — one he could keep permanently set up at the bottom of the stairs — had gone on his wish list. When the Stair-Glide slowly started its turn into the second flight — he’d timed it once, it took exactly one minute to do the trip — the telephone began to ring. He knew it would stop ringing before he could get to it. I’m in farce, he thought. I take to farce the way ducks take to water. But, even in farce, Schiff was a hopeful man — a man, that is, obsessed with solutions, even though he tried always to live by the cripple’s code with all its concomitant notions about the exponentiality of litter and his grand ideas about every solved problem creating a new one. Now, for example, he had still more items for his wish list. He could leave cordless phones all over the house, in every out-of-the-way place he was likely to be when a phone started to ring, by the shelf where the toilet paper was kept, along the tops of tables, between the cushions of the sofa, in the gap between his pants pocket and the side of a chair, beside potted plants on windowsills— in each inconvenient closet, pantry, alcove, and cuddy, adjunct to all the complicated, nesty network of random space.

The minute was up. He was at the bottom of the stairs. He disrobed himself of the walker and set it down, aware at once (by the relief he felt, that suffused him like a kind of pleasure) of how rough it could be, how heavy it became if one wasn’t up to the burdens of aluminum. The burdens of aluminum. And, still seated in the Stair-Glide, already accustomed to his relief, no longer surprised by the return of his off-again, on-again energies, restored — so long as he remained seated — to health, which after the ordeal of the stairs he intended to savor a while longer, not even tempted by the telephone which he suddenly realized had never stopped ringing. It’s Claire, he thought. Only Claire knew he was alone in the house, how long it took him to get to a phone. Then he thought, No, that’s not true, plenty of people know, Claire’s driver, even the dispatcher at the taxicab company, the agents at the airlines, the woman at the bank, friends to whom he’d spilled the beans, Harry in Portland, Bill at S.O.S. Even, when it came right down, Information. God, he hoped it wasn’t Information. Then he realized he was wrong about that one too. He hoped it was Information. They could be checking up on him to see if he was still crippled. He wanted Information on his side and decided not to pick up. The phone stopped ringing. Though, actually, Schiff thought once it had stopped, it could have been anyone. Thieves checking to see if the house was empty so they could come out and strip it, take what they wanted. If it was thieves, Schiff thought, it was probably a good thing he hadn’t yet had time to do anything about his wish list— that second walker, the dozen or so extra cordless telephones he’d thought he might buy. And suddenly scratched the cordless telephones and had another, less expensive, even better item for the wish list— an answering machine. They didn’t have an answering machine — Schiff felt clumsy speaking to them and didn’t like to impose on others what he hated to do himself— but he had to admit, in his new circumstances, under his novel, new dispensation, an answering machine could be just the ticket. It might just fill the bill. The problem with an answering machine as Schiff saw it was the message one left on it to tell callers you couldn’t come to the phone. If the device caught important calls you didn’t want to miss, it was also an open invitation to the very vandals and thieves he was concerned to scare off. “I can’t come to the phone just now, but if you’ll just…” was too ambiguous. It wouldn’t keep the tiger from your gates. A good thief would see right through the jesuiticals of a message like that and interpret it any way he wanted. Schiff wouldn’t take it off the wish list but he’d first have to compose an airtight message for the machine before he ever actually purchased one. An idle mind is too the devil’s workshop, Schiff thought, and rose from the chair, plowed — he often thought of his walker as a plow, of his floors and carpets as fields in which he cut stiff furrows— his way to the tchtchk and, quite to his astonishment, found almost at once statements from the banks with their account numbers on them. These he put into his mouth, but he couldn’t go up just yet, couldn’t yet face the struggle with the walker on the Stair-Glide; he had to rest, build strength, and decided to go into the living room for a while and sit down.

Where he collected his strength and doodled messages in his head for the answering machine.

Hi, he thought, this is Jack Schiff. Sorry to have missed your call, but I’ve stepped out for five minutes to run out to the store for some milk for my coffee. Just leave your et cetera, et cetera, and I’ll get right back to you.

That wasn’t bad, Schiff thought, but what would people who knew him make of it, of his “stepped out” and “run out” locutions? Of the swiftness and fluency of movement — so unlike him — he implied in that “get right back to you” trope? Unless they read it as the code that it was, they would think they’d reached some other Jack Schiff. Also, what if the thieves waited five minutes and called back? Or ten? Or fifteen? Or a whole hour and then heard the same damn message? After they robbed him they’d probably trash the place, maybe even torch it.

Hi, et cetera, et cetera, he revised, but — WOULD YOU CUT THAT OUT, PLEASE? DOWN, DAMN IT DOWN! Sorry, my pit bull’s acting up again. Look, just leave your name at the sound of the — oh, my God, BEEEEP!

Well, Schiff thought, pleased with the new composition and his invention of the pit bull. But there was a problem of verisimilitude. Wouldn’t there have to be growls, the sound of snarls and vicious barking? Probably he could manage a fairly convincing growl, or even a snarl, particularly over a telephone with its gift of enhanced, electronic sibilance, but he was an academic not an actor, he’d never be able to handle the rough barking. (A pit bull went on the wish list. Then, thinking of the effort it would be to care for, came right back off again.)

Et cetera, et cetera, he began over, I’m too depressed to come to the phone right now. Thieves cleaned me out. I called the cops. They tell me it looks like the work of professionals. Like that’s supposed to be a comfort? Leave your name, if I ever cheer up I’ll try to get back to you.

There were people at his front door. From where he sat on the sofa he could see the S.O.S. van through the French windows. Well, thought Schiff, thank God for small favors.

It was good he was downstairs. If he’d gone up — he had the wrong temperament for someone with his disease; really, he thought, he wasn’t laidback enough; not trying to get to the phone earlier before it stopped ringing was the exception not the rule — he could have had an accident in an effort to rush down to them before his visitors gave up and left. Even now, knowing what he knew about himself, and no more than twenty feet from the door, he scampered to it. The bank statements were still in his mouth.

“No no,” Bill, who was in the business, who knew a rotten hand when he saw one, who’d told him as much, said, waving off the hand Schiff extended, “let’s wait, why don’t we, until you sit down before we try to shake hands?”

In the living room Bill introduced him to the technician he’d brought with him, a woman. For a fellow with a quiet libido, it was astonishing to Schiff how much at ease women could put him, even women like this one, got up in gray coveralls like a repairman’s, moving man’s, or delivery man’s jumpsuit, a person’s who worked basements. It was generally true what Claire had said. Workmen tended to frighten him. At something like the ambassadorial level Claire handled the workmen, though Schiff began to wonder if he hadn’t been missing something. After some initial small talk—“Have any trouble finding the place?” ““Yes, it is a nice neighborhood, St. Louis’s best-kept secret”—which he quite enjoyed but wouldn’t have guessed he had in him, Bill presented him with some brochures about the equipment and service. Schiff accepted and started to read them before Bill interrupted. “Those are just to give you an idea of the colors that are available.”

“Oh, I don’t care about the color,” Schiff said.

“Well, good for you,” said Bill.

“The olive would have to be special-ordered anyway,” Jenny Simmons said. “So would the teal.”

“We don’t have the teal?” Bill said.

“I don’t think Indianapolis even makes it anymore. When was the last time you saw a teal?”

“Come to think of it,” Bill admitted.

“I really don’t care about the color,” Schiff said.

“Most clients don’t,” Bill said.

“Hey,” Schiff said, “I’m far gone, but I’m not that far gone. I still get a kick out of life. It’s not all monochromatic. All I meant was, it ticks me off when a company tries to make a profit off the paint it splashes over its products. I can remember when the Princess telephone first came out and Ma Bell charged you extra for any piece of equipment that wasn’t black.”

“That’s what I thought you meant,” Bill said, “Wasn’t it Henry Ford who said you could get the Model T in any color you wanted so long as it was black? Some clients are a little fussy is all. It actually matters to them whether the unit they wear around their neck and that could save their life is green or gray. Though don’t get me wrong. The S.O.S. Corporation isn’t Ma Bell. We don’t charge extra for the color.”

“There’s no scientific reason for it I can think of,” Jenny Simmons said, “but it’s been my experience that we have less trouble with a plain white unit than with any other color.”

“Plain white it is for me,” Schiff said.

“There you go,” Bill said. “It’s just we’re required by law to show you what’s available.”

Schiff looked to Jenny, who seemed to be frowning. By law? Was he serious? Required by law? Schiff smiled at her. Jenny looked down. Then Schiff wondered if she knew about his situation. Sure, he thought, she had to. They’d come together in the van. They were partners. Like cops. The salesman would almost certainly have passed on all that Schiff had himself volunteered— that he’d been married thirty-six years and that this was the day the Lord had made for his wife to just up and leave him, fled to her boyfriend in Oregon, spilling his life like a suicide. Also, she’d seen him with bank statements in his mouth. Now Schiff looked down. And only a few minutes earlier he’d been thinking of giving them tea, hard stuff even. (Schiff remembered when he was a kid, his parents offering “a shot” to men who came to do for them, carry their furniture up and down flights of stairs. Maybe that’s why he was still afraid of them— their power and rough, blue-collar ways.) He felt a little betrayed. Even at that, though, he took a sort of comfort in their company, and if it wasn’t for the fact that he had still to call the banks and check with them about his accounts he would have been content to spend the rest of the afternoon being sold to. There was something soothing about it, like watching a fishing show on TV that taught you to tie your own flies or showed you how to paint a picture. It was a little, he imagined, like a woman getting a free makeover in a department store. (Schiff, abandoned, on his own, was coming a little to terms with the domestic.)

“I took the liberty of making some notes during our earlier phone conversation.” Bill said. “Whenever you’re ready we can check out your floor plan. Jenny’s the expert. I’d like her to walk us through it. Nothing’s written in stone yet. There could still be some changes you might want to make.”

“Of course, of course, but I don’t think you really need me. While you’re pacing it off I could be making some calls.”

“Sure thing,” Bill said, “we’ll take care of it. Go make your calls.”

“Well, that’s just it,” Schiff said. “I have this cordless phone? I may even have mentioned it to you.”

“I remember you did.”

“It’s up on the bed in my room. I live by the cripple’s code. That you must never do anything twice. Unfortunately, I do just about everything twice. Well,” he said, “I’m crippled. I almost have to.”

“You mustn’t say that. You’re hardly a cripple,” the salesman said. “You know how to cope. I hope I cope half as well as you do if I’m ever handicapped.”

“Well,” said Schiff, “in any event. I wasn’t able to bring it with me when I came down. If someone could just get it for me?”

“No problem,” Bill said. “Your room is—?”

“First door on the left, top of the stairs.”

Which left him alone in the living room with Jenny. She seemed shy for someone who worked with Bill. Stuck for something to say, she grinned at him goofily. It occurred to him she was embarrassed by everything she already knew about him. Bold cop, shy cop. Schiff poked around, looking for something he could say to put her at ease.

“I had you for a professor,” Jenny told him.

Schiff felt himself flush, a stain of red discovery cross his features.

“I don’t blame her,” he blurted. “Not for a minute. She should have done it years ago. I would’ve. In her place I would’ve. No one owes anyone that kind of loyalty.”

Before either of them could recover Bill was back with Schiff’s phone. “There you go,” he said.

“Thank you,” Schiff said, “thanks.”

“No problem. It was just where you said. You give very good directions.”

Schiff waited impatiently while Bill explained what was going to happen, that he and Jenny were going to go over the house looking for the best spots to install their relays. He had his notes, he said, he just wanted to make sure they hadn’t overlooked anything. “For example,” Bill said, “I notice the house has a third floor.”

“I’m never up there.”

“Well, I know,” Bill said, “but can’t you conceive of a circumstance which might bring you up there?”

“There’s no Stair-Glide. I couldn’t get to the third floor if I wanted to.”

“What about the basement, what if something went wrong in the basement? If the furnace went out, or, God forbid, your storm drains clogged and you had severe water damage?”

“Same thing,” Schiff said, “no Stair-Glide.”

“Well, sure,” said Bill. “I’m not prying. That’s just the sort of thing the corporation has to find out about if it’s to render its services properly. Also, I’ll tell you something, we have to cover our behind. If something happened to a client in an area of the house we overlooked or failed to warn him he was vulnerable we could be looking at a pretty good lawsuit.”

“I consider myself warned,” Schiff said, getting a little cranky now, the charm of being sold to having worn off, and oppressed by all he had yet to do.

Bill chuckled. “Well, I know,” he said, “and I hope you don’t mind putting your signature to that when we close the deal.”

“I have to sign a consent form? Like you’re my surgeon? Like you’re operating on me?”

“It’s for both our protections,” Bill said in exactly the same tone of voice Schiff often used in class when he had to explain something. He turned to his partner. “What do you say, Jenny? We start down here?”

Shit, Schiff thought, fingering his bank statements, getting anxious now, feeling suddenly rushed, hurried, his oppression compounding into a sort of spiritual indigestion he could almost feel.

Now see, he told himself, that’s exactly what I meant about farce. He was furious he had to call the bank while S.O.S. was there, more outraged than by his condition itself, than by Claire’s leaving. It wasn’t fair. It was none of the corporation’s business that his wife might have plundered their accounts. It was that straw that breaks that camel’s back. He waited for them to clear out of the living room, which they went over, deliberate as sappers. Maybe she’d been his student when he still taught undergraduates. But that was just what he meant, too. It wasn’t just her odd garment that threw him off the scent. He simply didn’t know these people. His students, he meant. It wasn’t even only that they failed to keep in touch. They weren’t in touch to begin with. Many of his colleagues’ former students were like family. They had pictures of the people their students had married, of their kids. Also, it a little depressed Schiff to see one of his old students got up in coveralls, doing, he didn’t care how much electronics she probably knew, a sort of manual labor. It was a long way from political geography, from the high ground of pure theory, the strictly hands-off of scholarship and the sheer delicious luxury of an arcane discipline. Schiff knew professors of painting whose students had pictures hanging in museums, business profs with kids who were CEOs. It diminished already diminished old Schiff that he couldn’t think of a single one of his students who’d gone on in the field. He taught graduate students pursuing advanced degrees in history, in poli sci, and many of them had distinguished careers, but Schiff kept up, he knew the people in his field, hotshots in Washington think tanks many of them, high-ups in the CIA, consultants to or officials in the Census Bureau, advisers to Rand- McNally, the publishers of other important atlases, and couldn’t think of anyone who’d been in one of his classes who was a practicing political geographer. They were probably waiters, he thought, drivers in the taxicab trade very likely, or, like Miss Simmons here, got up like people you see when your airplane has landed, signaling jets to the gate.

They left the living room and moved through the rest of the first floor, going into the dining room, Schiff’s kitchen, his half bath, the small storage area at the rear of his house where the backdoor opened out onto the porch, the small in-ground pool.

Schiff waited until he heard their steps on the stairs. Then, cupping his hand over the speaker, he lowered his voice and asked Information for the bank’s phone number. Even as was doing so he saw it, plain as the nose, right there on the statement. It would have been too much trouble to tell the operator that never mind, forget it, he’d found it (never mind, forget it, more farce), so he waited for the little mechanical recitation to come on and dutifully checked it against the phone number on the statement.

Now that he could give them their account number (sotto voce, as sotto as he could make it and still be heard, so sotto, in fact, that he sounded suspicious even to himself), the bank was nice as pie. Too nice, you asked him. He could have been anyone. He was upset with them that they’d just hand out information like that. He even thought he recognized the voice, that it belonged to the religious zealot he’d spoken to earlier. Now here it was again, giving out inside info on him like there was no tomorrow. Taking his substance in vain. Which, even in his pique, he was pleased to learn Claire had made no inroads on. He called their other banks, the one where they did their checking, the one used for the trust-fund account.

Which couldn’t have been more cooperative, sir, pleased to provide him with that information, sir, yes sir, connected with an employee who might, Schiff felt, had he only asked for them, have called out the intimate weights and measures of anyone who’d ever done business with the bank, not only to the last penny but right down to the last overdraft, the last bounced check. Not only was money fungible, apparently an account number, any account number was too, or maybe just any five random digits, like figures on a Bingo card. He felt like a government agency. He felt like a car dealer, Jack Schiff Oldsmobile, say, calling for the lowdown on a would-be customer.

He probably wouldn’t have felt this way (or felt anything more than a little surprised) if just at that moment, the very moment when the bank’s teller, or clerk, or paid professional informer, was singing out Schiff’s bottom lines, bright, clear, and brassy as a belter on Broadway stopping the show, someone somewhere in the house hadn’t picked up an extension.

The cooperative teller asked if Schiff had gotten that and, before he could answer, broke down the sums for him again.

“Oh,” said Miss Simmons, “is that you, Professor? I didn’t know you were still making your calls.”

“I got a wrong number,” he said, and disengaged.

The three of them were downstairs.

“Yep,” Bill was saying, rubbing his hands, “you got it right the first time. Turns out we didn’t really have to check. We could almost go with the plan we specified on the telephone. Jenny found one or two places the signal may have to be reinforced, but you could do a voice level, she’ll meter you and, who knows, you might just be able to get away without us having to change a thing in the original specs. Even if we do have to make an adjustment it wouldn’t run you more than an additional two or three hundred dollars.”

“I have to go upstairs?”

“No, no,” Bill said, “she marked off the distances. You can do the reading right down here, can’t you, Jenny?”

“Sure,” said his former student. She took something that looked rather like a light meter from one of the deep pockets in her coveralls and held it up. “Go ahead,” she said, “pretend you’ve fallen. Just speak into the air.”

“What should I say?”

“Anything. I’m just getting a level.”

“Calling all cars,” Schiff said in a normal voice. “S.O.S. S.O.S. Save our Schiff.”

“What do you think, Jen?” Bill said.

His former student looked at her old professor whose worth she knew — as a teacher, as a husband — she looked at his weakened limbs, may even, when she was upstairs, have seen his urinal — as a man.

“It’s all right,” she said.

“Is it?” said Bill, surprised. “How about that?” he said. “You got it right the first time, but then that’s your business, isn’t it, Professor? Floor plans, knowing the territory.”

In spite of himself, Schiff basked in what, in spite of himself, Schiff knew wasn’t really a compliment. But he did, he did know the territory.

“Yep,” Bill said, “Jenny tells me you used to be some kind of geography professor.”

“I still am,” Schiff said, “I still teach.”

“Do you?” Bill said. “Well, good for you.”

He knew the territory, all right. He should have thrown the S.O.S. s.o.b. out of the house. He told himself it was only because Claire had left him and he needed the service that he didn’t. But it was because of what Claire had said, too. His fear of tradesmen, of almost anyone who didn’t teach at a university. At least a little it was. So he knew the territory.

“Well,” said Bill, “all we have to do now is a little paperwork, fill out a few forms.”

He was asked questions about his medical history, stuff out of left field. Not just about his neurology but about childhood diseases, allergies, even whether he’d ever had poison ivy. He listed his medications. It was for show, not for blow, but again, and still in spite of himself, he took a certain pleasure in this medical inventory. It was the first time in years anyone had taken such an interest in him, even a faked one. Bill was more thorough than any of his physicians, and Miss Simmons seemed to hang on his answers as much as the salesman.

“That should about do it,” Bill said.

“Oh,” said Schiff, a little let down.

“Well, except for a few housekeeping details the corporation has to have for its files. Nothing GMAC or any financial institution wouldn’t need to know if you were applying for a loan on a car.”

Schiff couldn’t have said why he was so steamed. He’d expected it. Wasn’t this the reason he’d been trying to get through to his banks? Wasn’t it why he’d attempted to be so circumspect?

“Will you be paying by check?”

“Yes,” Schiff said, thrown off, expecting some such, but not exactly this, question. “The corporation takes checks, doesn’t it?”

“These systems are fairly big-ticket items. It takes cashier’s checks.”

“Well, that poses a problem, doesn’t it?” Schiff said. “Me being crippled and all? My wife having lit out for the territory and leaving me up shit creek without a paddle with a car in the driveway to get to the bank but not quite enough strength in my legs to press down on the accelerator let alone the brake pedal?”

“Don’t get so excited,” Bill said. “We’re flexible. We’ll work with you. Hey,” he said, “we’re nothing if not flexible. If you can demonstrate you have enough money in your account to cover the check, we’ll work with you.”

“Ask Miss Simmons if I have enough money in my account to cover it,” Schiff said.

“No offense, old man,” the salesman said. “Hey,” he said, “take it easy. No offense. Often, a spouse quits on a partner who’s been dealt a bad hand she Hoovers out their joint accounts before she goes.”

“This happens?” Schiff, oddly moved, said suddenly, in spite of himself, interested, narrowly studying the man, a sort of political geographer in his own right, a kind of bellwether, some sibyl of the vicissitudes.

“Well, a lot of resentment builds up,” Bill explained. “I mean, put yourself in her place. At least some of the trouble between you had to have been physical, right?”

Schiff stared at him.

“Sure,” Bill said, “and it’s my guess that until you were struck down you two probably had it pretty good in bed together. Go ahead, write the check. It’s the amount we agreed on. You’re good for it.”

“Am I?”

“Well, sure you are,” Bill said. “She ever have to lift you up off the floor?”

“Yes,” Schiff said stiffly.

“She ever have to carry you?”

“Once in a while,” he said.

Bill clucked his tongue. “You enjoy that? You come to enjoy that?”

“Well,” Schiff said evasively.

“Well, sure you did,” Bill said.

“I didn’t want her to hurt herself.”

“Of course not,” Bill said.

“She’s pretty strong, but let’s face it, she’s no spring chicken.”

“Let’s face it,” Bill said.

“I don’t have my checkbook.”

“Want me to go get it? Want Jen to?”

“I think it may be in one of the drawers in the tchtchk.”

“Say what?”

“The cabinet in the hall. We call it the tchtchk.”

“That’s a new one on me. You ever hear that, Jen? The choo-choo? Heck, I can’t even pronounce it. How do you say that again?”

“Tchtchk. It doesn’t mean anything.”

“Just a pet name, eh? From your salad days.”

“I guess.”

“Well, sure,” Bill said. “It’s just something you ought to bear in mind.” Schiff didn’t follow. “Well, that you had salad days,” Bill said.

“Oh, right,” Schiff said, who didn’t need the lecture but wanted to placate the man just long enough to write the check and be rid of him.

“That’s why the good Lord usually lets us hold on to our memories,” Bill said. “So we can remember the times before our wives had to carry us around piggyback.”

“She never carried me around piggyback,” Schiff said.

“No? How’d she manage you?”

“She held me around my waist.”

“Off the ground?”

“Thanks,” Schiff told Jenny, “thank you.” She’s brought his checkbook. She could have brought him the one from the money-market account, even the tiny credit-union one. It was the account with money from the trust. “May I use your pen?” he asked coolly. It was hard to get a good grip on the pen with his weakened hand, difficult for him to write the check, almost impossible to form the numerals, some of which he had to trace two or three times and which were an illegible muddle when he finished. He didn’t even bother to sign it but pulled the ruined check from the book and started another. Miss Simmons looked elsewhere. Bill watched Schiff closely, bearing down on him with a knowing stare. “My small motor movements are shot,” Schiff explained. “I didn’t forget how to make out a check.”

“Of course not,” Bill said. “It’s like riding a bicycle.”

“I forgot how to ride a bicycle,” Schiff said.

“We have to keep our chin up,” Bill said. “Hey,” he said,

“I’ve got to get back to the office. Jenny still has to do the installations so I’ll leave her here with you.”

“Sure,” Schiff said.

“Watch yourself now.”

“I will.”

“Don’t fall.”

“I won’t.”

“I don’t know if Jenny could handle you,” Bill said. Schiff didn’t answer. “The service, though, the service is another story. Sometimes the service sends out women.”

Schiff had enough. “What is this?” he demanded. “What are you getting at? Just what are you hinting? Do you talk this way to all your customers?”

“Why are you so excited? Do you think it’s good for you to get so excited? I know your blood-pressure medications. I know what you have to put into your bloodstream to keep a lid on the stress. Do you think I’m against you? I’m not against you. Quite the contrary. I represent the service. Does the service stand to gain if its clients become upset with it? I know how highly you think of our advertising campaign but believe me, brother, what it finally boils down to is word-of-mouth. And, if you want to know, I wasn’t ‘hinting’ or ‘getting’ at anything. All I was referencing was man’s dependence on woman for her ability to nurture.”

“All right,” Schiff told him wearily.

“Sure,” Bill said, “that’s all there is to it. She helps him out with his motor movements. Large and small both.”

“Okay.”

“Ain’t a mother’s son of us don’t want to float around in the pool in his mama’s arms. Ain’t a joey alive don’t enjoy going for a ride in the mommy roo’s pouch. Security is the name of the game.”

Okeydokey already, Schiff thought.

“So I wasn’t suggesting anything kinky. Honi soit qui mal y pense,” the salesman said, took up the check in Schiff’s smashed handwriting, and left him in the house with Miss Simmons.

Who to this point, she told him, had only been seeing what had to be done, that now she could start to plant.

“To plant?”

“Your garden,” she said. “Lay out your seeds and bulbs for you. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s a serviceman’s term in the industry.”

The professor nodded, surprised by the term “industry,” though once he thought about it, maybe not so surprised. Increasingly, he’d been noticing those ads on TV. It was some crisis of the infirm and elderly thing, high tech’s interim arrangement with the nursing-home interests, with Medicare, the aging demographics, the death-with-dignity folks. He explained this to Miss Simmons as she laid out her tools, set out the equipment she brought into Schiff’s home from the van.

“Oh, now,” Miss Simmons said.

“By which, thought Schiff, she meant to assuage him, ease him, allay his fears, cut him, he meant, from the herd of the infirm, aging and elderly, anyone struggling for a few last breaths of dignity. Because it was true what the salesman had said. Women were nurturers, even women like this one. Beneath her repair or maintenance man’s gray union suit, this person who worked in the basement down with the pipes, boilers, and boards of circuit breakers, was probably just another bleeding-heart nurturer and enabler.

And my God, Schiff thought, I wasn’t even fishing. Though maybe, he thought, all he ever did now was fish, his condition, his very appearance these days a fishing expedition, searching out reassurance like a guy on a treasure hunt. (Appalled by his letters of credit, his devastating carte blanche entree like some terminal kid’s on a trip to Disney World. Appalled, too, by what he must have done to Claire, who’d abandoned him, forcing her against her nature by the cumulative, oppressive weight of his need.) Shit, he thought, I am what I am, and asked a question that had been at least somewhere on his mind since she’d told him he’d been her professor.

“I’ve been trying to think,” Schiff said, “was I still on a cane when you were my student?”

“A cane?” she said. “I don’t think so. I don’t remember any cane. No,” she said, “you walked like everyone else.”

“That had to be at least a dozen years ago.”

“I graduated it’ll be fifteen years this June.”

“You knew me when,” Schiff said.

“Oh, now,” Miss Simmons said.

“I knew you when,” he said.

Miss Simmons looked down at her wrenches and scissors and rolls of duct tape, at all the instruments he did not have names for. She appeared to blush, though women were clever, he thought. Blushing and downcast eyes could be a sort of nurturing, too. Outright flirting could. How could men trust a sex that lived so much by its inborns and instincts, that stood so firm by the agenda of its drives and temperament (anything for the cause), its goals and nature? Christ, he thought, they might just as well have been critters, low and furious on the biological scale as spawning salmon. (Giving another passing, glancing, bruising thought to what he must have done — his disease must have done — to his own wife’s damaged intrinsics and basics.) And, quite suddenly suspecting she may have thought he was coming on, momentarily panicked.

“Oh, no,” he said, finding his place again in the lecture she probably hadn’t even recognized was one, “I’m all for it. I believe it’s exactly the thing, quite the right way to go. I mean after the initial outlay it’s rather economical. And Bill is right, a sense of security is the name of the game.”

“Well,” she said, gathering up some pieces of equipment and rising, “this is going to take at least a couple of hours. I’m afraid I have to tie up your phones; you won’t be able to use them till I’m done. If there are any calls you have to make you ought to try to make them now. Otherwise…”

“What if someone was trying to reach me?”

“Well, they’d get a busy signal.”

“At least two hours, you said. No one talks on a phone two hours. They’d think something was wrong, that I’d had an accident. Well,” he said, “they could call the operator, I suppose, ask her to check to see if the line really was engaged.”

“That’s right,” Miss Simmons said.

“I think of all the contingencies,” Schiff somewhat apologetically said.

“I see you do.”

“Occupational hazard,” he said. “Plus it has something to do with my being a gimp.”

“Oh, now.”

“No, really,” he said, “I could give you a whole song and dance about the cripple’s code. But I’d bore you silly.”

“Oh, now.”

Schiff, who still had some character left, was becoming as tired of the game as Miss Simmons.

“Really,” he said, “two hours?”

“If I get started right now.”

“I take your point,” he said, and gallantly moved his arm as if signaling her to pass, to play through.

She excused herself and disappeared from his living room.

Well, thought Schiff, reminded of sudden furious electrical storms when he was a boy on vacation with his parents in the summer bungalow they had in the country, of great howling winds and plummeting temperatures and of wide shadows that spread from horizon to horizon and came down over the bright, burning afternoon like dark paint, this is cozy. He meant it. His legs and his telephones useless, he felt stranded, shut off, closed down, all the abrupt, unexpected holiday of emergency, of every chore suspended. (He could have lived, he recalled thinking, like this forever, and remembered his disappointment when the storm passed and the world resumed.)

Miss Simmons had returned. She was screwing some tiny piece of equipment into the handset of the extension in the living room.

“I didn’t mean to abandon you,” she said.

“No, not at all,” he said. “I think I may have dozed off.” It was a lie, but he did feel refreshed. He watched the efficient movement of Miss Simmons’s fingers, her accomplished cybernetics. It would be like this in a home, he thought. All the activity of the nurses, their aides, the physical and occupational therapists, the people who brought you your trays, the nimbleness with which they stripped the little lids from your jellies and butters and creamers, undid the impossible knots of Saran Wrap from around your salads and sandwiches. He wondered if he could talk the university into letting him teach his classes from his room in a home. He wondered if the laws protecting the disabled covered cases like that, if his entitlements extended to people to mark his papers for him, deliver his lectures, lead his discussions. Because otherwise, Schiff thought, the deal was off. If he had to lend anything to the process except his presence (his consciousness, he meant, his sheer witness) the spell would be broken. Because that’s what it was, all that activity — Miss Simmons’s, the nurses’ and aides’, the food servers’ and PTs’ and OTs’, as much as the sudden, explosive summer storm — had been — a spell, an enchantment, and as quickly broken. And the lines had been down then, too. (Perhaps that’s what had put him in mind.)

“Oh,” she said, “I forgot about your cordless. I’ll have to put an adapter in that, too.”

He handed it over.

“These,” said Miss Simmons, “are a son of a bitch.”

“Oh, now,” Schiff said.

She grinned. Schiff didn’t remember her but thought she must have been a good student.

“Is everything hooked up yet?” he asked when she gave back his phone.

“Almost. Maybe another half hour.”

Because of course there were calls he had to make. (As a cripple, he lived like a bookie.) The listmaker had not forgotten his situation, the necessary stations of his crip’s paced cross. Had not forgotten the party for his students that had still to be called off. Had not forgotten the probable roasts and hams, turkeys and pâtés, and could easily imagine the possible meaty haunches — goats’, stags’, and rams’—ticking their timed shelf life in Claire’s party-stocked refrigerator even now; the spoiling berries, oxidizing melon balls, and splinters of crystallized ice creams forming even as he thought of them, as they went on his lists; the sweet, separating, stratified milks and creamy desserts turning, going off, the freezer-burned breads tanning cancerous in the kitchen. Because (now it occurred) it wasn’t the banks he’d needed to call, it was all the little food boutiques, awning’d purveyors of powerhouse cheeses, of tinned smoked delicacies, oysters and fruits de mer (squid and tiny, fetal octopi, lavender as varicose veins), as if fed-up Claire, working their only recently annual party like a serial killer, had taken it into her angry old head that even getting even wasn’t enough, that only vengeance and wrath would serve.

“Jesus!” oathed Schiff, sniffing violently, taking rapid, shallow gusts of air into his hyperventilate nostrils, slapping his head, clipping it with the heel of his hand like a self- inflicted personal foul. “Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!”

“What,” Miss Simmons asked, “what is it? What’s wrong?”

And, believe it or not, it was suddenly revealed to Schiff that it was no mere accident that Jenny Simmons had been a former student of his, that she’d been — yes, he knew how he sounded, he knew just how he sounded — like Creer, like Beverly Yeager, bowed beneath the weight of their mad, customized agendas — sent like the closing couplet in some fabulous poetic justice to save them. Jenny d’Arc. If all that “Oh, now” had been genuine nurturing and not just conventional courtesy, let her nurture him now or forever hold her peace.

“I was thinking,” he said. “I haven’t had anything in my stomach all day. I’m so hungry I could eat a horse.”

“Really?” she said. “You haven’t eaten all day?”

“It puts me off my feed,” Schiff said, “when my wife walks out on me.”

“You’ve got to eat.”

“I know,” Schiff said.

“Shall I make you a sandwich?”

“Jeez,” Schiff said, “that’d be putting you to a lot of trouble, wouldn’t it? I’m going to have to get connected up with one of those Meals-on-Wheels deals or something.”

“Well, but I could make you a sandwich.”

“I am hungry,” admitted Schiff.

“I’ll just make you a sandwich. What would you like?”

“Gosh, anything. I think Claire may have left some stuff in the refrigerator.”

“Coming right up,” she said.

“And if anything suits your fancy …” Schiff said, breaking off.

She was back within minutes. There, on a plate on a tray, was a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, the bread perfectly toasted, its crusts almost surgically removed. There was a tall glass of innocent-seeming milk.

“Peanut butter and jelly?” Schiff said.

“Don’t you like peanut butter and jelly? I thought everyone did. You haven’t eaten all day and it’s easy to digest.”

“No no,” Schiff said, “this is fine. It’s just I had this craving for some of that gourmet shit my wife left in the freezer for this party we’re giving. Were giving. She stocked up, I thought she left stuff in the refrigerator. I was going to cancel out anyway, I just didn’t want it all to go to waste.”

“There’s nothing in the refrigerator.”

“In the freezer part.”

“I looked in the freezer part. There’s nothing in the refrigerator.”

“That’s impossible,” Schiff said. “The party’s tomorrow night. We give it every year for my students.”

“Well, maybe,” Miss Simmons said, “she planned to leave you. If she was planning to leave you, why would she take the trouble of going to specialty shops and charcuteries to stock up on exotic foods she knew were never going to be eaten in the first place? That stuff isn’t cheap. Why would she waste the money?”

Planning to leave him, planning to leave him? Schiff couldn’t quite take it all in, but if she was planning to leave him — he’d announced the party to his class three weeks ago, Claire knew that — that somehow put everything into an altogether different light. A poorer light, a darker light. Could this have been up her sleeve for three weeks now? Had she been setting him up for three weeks? More? At the inside three weeks? Had she been setting him up all term? Longer? From the beginning of the school year? Boy oh boy, thought Schiff, who understood he was no prize, who for years now, even when he’d been on the cane, even when he’d still wielded it with some authority, when it had been simple ancillary to his balance, pure latency, say, like peroxide, analgesics, tapes, and bandages in a first-aid kit, had begun to notice something long in the tooth about himself in mirrors and photographs— particularly photographs — something faintly sour and beginning to go off in his posture and features like all those imaginary delicacies in his refrigerator, must she have had it in for me! So planning, planning to leave him? Planning, that is, to set him up, planning to wait until the day before their annual party before she stepped out on him. (Who knew how important these parties had become to him!) What did it mean, wondered the old geographer. Would she have already notified his students, the party called on account of divorce, or at least an upcoming separation down the road she knew of and let his students in on but that the old geographer himself hadn’t heard about yet? What did it mean? What did it mean, eh?

On the principle that it takes a thief, et cetera, et cetera, these were the questions he put to that other old nurturer, his former student, Miss Simmons.

“What do you mean do I think she called them up to tell them her plans?” she said. “What do you mean do I think she didn’t call anyone up and that she left that for you? What do you mean when they show up at the door she hopes you’ll be so humiliated you won’t know what to do?” “Yes,” he said. “That’s just what I mean.”

“Well, I don’t know. How would I know?”

“How did you know about the empty refrigerator? All right,” he said, “that’s a bad example. But you knew about her planning to leave me.”

“I never said she planned to leave you. I suggested it was a possibility.”

“You knew she left me. Bill must have told you in the van. You can’t deny that.”

“I don’t deny it,” she said. “People gossip about people. It’s human nature.”

“You knew to the penny what we have in the trust-fund account. When you were up in my room, when you were up in my room, you probably saw my urinal. You’re practically my confidante. You took pity on me and gave old Bill the high sign that enough was enough, that he needn’t pad the equipment, you told him my credit was good. If all that doesn’t make you my confidante, I don’t know what does.”

“What’s more likely,” she said, “is that it makes me old Bill’s confidante.”

“Oh,”said Schiff, “oh.”

“Hey,” Miss Simmons said, “hey now.”

“That’s all right.”

“You bet,” she said. “Because if that’s what you’re driving at, you can just forget it, you can just put it out of your mind.”

“What,” asked the helpless cripple with the useless legs, “what?”

“You know what,” she said. “I’m not standing in as your hostess. It’s been at least fifteen years since you were my professor, at least fifteen years.”

“That’s right,” he said, astonished, amazed. “At least fifteen years. That’s right. So don’t tell me you’re not my confidante. Now that Claire’s gone that makes you one of maybe only half a dozen people in this town who knew me when.”

“I’m here on a job,” she said, all business.

“Of course.”

“Another few minutes I’m through. I’m almost through now. Here,” she said, “I need you to put this on for me.”

She handed him a sort of necklace with, for pendant, a button and light on a little plastic box like a switch on a heating pad or electric blanket. He recognized it from the S.O.S. commercial on TV. “Just put the chain over your head,” she said. “It should fit. If it doesn’t there’s a way of adjusting it.” Now the moment of truth had arrived Schiff felt some qualms about actually wearing such jewelry. It was another giant step toward his invalidism, like having the Stair-Glide put in or going into a wheelchair. Miss Simmons, misreading his reluctance for mechanical uncertainty as to how the equipment operated, took it back from him and fastened the collar about his neck like a kind of electronic bib. “There,” she said, “is that comfortable?”

“Is it ever,” Schiff said miserably.

“Why don’t we test it to see if it’s working?”

And see, he thought, he was right, his identity already subsumed in plural baby talk.

“Test it out,” she said again. “Press the button. That dials the service for you. Wait six or seven seconds, then just speak into the air. If everything’s been connected properly, they should be able to pick you up at the service.” Schiff pressed the button and spoke into the air. Miss Simmons took the little console out of his hand and hit the button a second time. The light went off. “You didn’t give it time to dial. You have to wait a few seconds before you start talking. By depressing the button a second time I aborted your call.”

“Whoa,” Schiff said. “This thing’s a lot tougher than it seems.”

“You’re not used to it yet, that’s all. You’ll get used to it.”

“Shall I try again?”

“Sure. Just give it a chance to dial the phone before you speak.”

He pressed the button. He waited half a dozen seconds. He glanced up at Miss Simmons. She nodded. “Help,” Schiff said quietly into the air. “Help me, I’ve fallen and I can’t get up.” It was the message he’d heard the old woman deliver on television. The only difference was Schiff’s bloomers weren’t up around his ears.

“What,” someone shouted back at him down at S.O.S, “what’s that? Speak up, I can’t hear you.”

“Is that you, Charley?” Miss Simmons called out. “Charley, it’s Jenny Simmons. I’m at 727-4312, 225 Westgate, in the Parkview area— Jack Schiff’s residence. Dr.

Schiff’s new on the service and I’m walking him through the procedures.”

(Well, Schiff thought, walking.)

“Hi, Jenny. Hi, Dr. Schiff.”

“Hi, Charley,” Schiff said.

“You’re coming in fine now, sir. You don’t have to shout, though. Just speak up, that’ll do it.”

“I’m sorry,” Schiff shouted.

“That’s all right, you’ll get used to it.”

Everyone kept telling him he’d get used to it. A good sign and a bad sign both. He didn’t need all that accident in his life, but it was comforting to think S.O.S. would pick him up each time he fell down. This is what it comes to, he thought. If you just hung on and managed to live long enough you turn into a bowling pin.

Now he knew he was expected to do a fair share of falling he was reluctant to be left alone. It was Schiff’s suggestion they go through the rest of the house, check out each of the base stations Miss Simmons had rigged. She had to push him in his wheelchair, help lift his feet onto the little platform of his Stair-Glide, help raise his pants up (he wore only pants with elastic waistbands these days, shirts whose buttons, except for the top button and the one beneath that, had been already buttoned so that all he had to do was slip it on over his head, his shoes were fastened with Velcro tabs, and he dressed not so much for comfort — when was the last time he’d been comfortable? — as for sitting down on toilet seats and getting up from them again, so he wore no underwear, and tended, the elastic waistband reconfiguring itself about his body each time he moved, casually to moon the world each time he stood) for him again as he got out of it and leaned into his walker. It took another forty minutes for them to do the rounds of the second floor and he was satisfied that all systems were go. Each area was a little different from the others and required, as if he were reciting from the stages of separate theaters, a slightly different projection of his voice. By the time they were finished, however, Charley was complimenting him on his levels. He sounded, Charley said, like someone who’d been doing pratfalls for years.

There was nothing left for her to do. He could stall her no longer, he’d have to let her go.

“Oh,” she said, “I forgot to get your key from you.”

“My key?”

“For the house. The service will need it if it has to get

in.”

“Gee,” Schiff said, “my key, I don’t know.”

“We take an impression, we duplicate it on our premises and get it back to you.”

“No,” Schiff said, “I mean I don’t know. Where it even is. I can’t remember the last time I used it.”

“Maybe it’s in the tchtchk,” Jenny Simmons said.

“Gosh,” he said, “you pronounced that perfectly.”

She seemed to blush. Which would make it once for him and twice for her. Were the two of them falling in love?

“I’ll look and see,” she said, and left him in his bedroom, sitting on his bed.

“That’s just where it was,” she called up in a couple of minutes. “I’ve already checked to see if it’s the right one. This is it, all right. It unlocked your front door straight off.”

“That’s terrific,” he called. “It was clever of you to think of the tchtchk.”

“People have patterns,” she called back up the stairs. “It’s human nature.”

“You’re right,” he said from where he sat on his bed, projecting perfectly now from all the practice he’d had on their dry run through the base stations, “it is human nature.”

“Goodbye,” she called. “I’ll have this duplicated ASAP. I’ll see to it someone gets it back to you. Oh, and Profesor”

“Yes?”

“You mustn’t worry about any of this. It’s like health, or fire, or automobile insurance. It’s for your peace of mind. You hope you never have to use it. You just know it’s there for you if you ever do.” It was exactly what Bill would have said. He heard the front door close behind her.

So much, Schiff thought, for love.

Well, thought dignified old Schiff, that was a close one. Because for a few minutes there he’d begun to rethink his decision to call off the party. He was going to invite Miss Simmons. If she’d come upstairs to say goodbye properly he would have. It wasn’t crazy. He could have asked without embarrassing either of them. It was perfectly natural. She’d been his student, too, once. Of course, she seemed put off when he mentioned the party, but that was because she thought he was trying to get her to stand in for Claire. She’d seen there was nothing in the fridge, that the cupboard was bare. She may have thought he wanted her to do his shopping for him. She was a busy woman, he knew that. A dozen or so phone calls, he could have taken care of it himself. What did Miss Simmons know of his arrangements with Information?

Well, he thought, there’s no fool like an old fool. Hold it right there, old fool, he told himself. Because where, really, was the foolishness in all this? Hadn’t she recognized him? It had been fifteen years. At least fifteen years. She could have been a sophomore when she’d taken his class. Even, with permission of the instructor, a freshman. So at least fifteen years, probably sixteen, but possibly seventeen or eighteen. If she wanted to get her distribution requirement in political science out of the way.

But say fifteen years. She knew him when, he’d said. She’d known him when. He didn’t kid himself. He knew well enough what he looked like these days, his frail, shot, worn-out, emeritus looks and cripple’s diminished, broken bearing. Yet she’d recognized him through all the schmutz of disability, through all the scaffolding of his wheelchairs, Stair-Glides and walkers, the heavy disguise of his ruined body. So where was the old foolishness? Where exactly? He was a geographer, show him on a map. And if it had been fifteen years since she’d graduated, that made her, what, thirty-seven? (At least thirty-seven.) Which would have made him about forty-four — she knew him when — when she knew him. Or, depending on those distribution requirements, that permission of the instructor, conceivably only forty-one. Looked at in this light, not so much sub specie aeternitatis as in the enchanted, almost charming relativity of love and other such matters, that made them practically contemporaries. So where, where was the foolishness? Where was there even such a big-deal age difference? Because didn’t young women often develop crushes — he used the lightest, most flattering term for such things — on their professors? Didn’t they fall in outright love with them? Develop grand passions for them that ended up not just in some motel room but frequently in actual officially sanctioned, ceremonially blessed marriage beds? He could name at least half a dozen such arrangements right here on this campus. Sure. Happens all the time. (And, frequently, with happier, longer-lasting outcomes than his and Claire’s.) Or maybe she didn’t care for him in that way (or it could be she knew all too well what was happening and had simply been too shy to come up), but how did no-fool-like-an-old-fool apply? He could have as easily said — this was love he was talking about, that grand enchantment, that charming relativity that smashed time’s tenses — that he’d been thinking like a high school kid, and what did he see in her, a woman at least thirty-seven?

All right, that was stretching things. But he at least wanted it on the record that he was taking back all his disclaimers. He was ruling nothing in, he was ruling nothing out. And if this was some May and December thing, okay, all right, but at least it was some late May, early December thing!

And besides, Schiff thought, he was alone in the house, he was in enough trouble as it was. He had to think about something that would keep his spirits up.

And not only alone in the house, left alone in the house. Left like some kid babysitting himself for the first time. Face it, he was spooked. Not by ghosts and not by darkness. But by all the hobgoblins of contingency, what Charley called pratfall, a comic term that didn’t fool him for a minute, that he knew all along masked a broken hip. Or worse. Help, Schiff rehearsed over and over in his head, help me, I’ve fallen and I can’t get up.

When he woke he figured from the fullness of his bladder he must have slept for at least two hours. He reached into the nightstand where he’d stashed the basin and pisser and peed into it without even having to Credé himself. Added to what was already there, there’s now about seven hundred cc in the urinal. Jesus, he thinks, and prays that next time it will be his ordinary dribs and drabs again. Ultimately, of course, he would have to risk walking into the bathroom, but he doesn’t think he feels up to it tonight. He’s still spooked, wants to get this first night left alone in the house behind him before he tries anything brave. And Damn, he thinks, feeling hunger pangs, and maybe even a little thirst there at the back of his throat, that son of a bitch. Meaning Claire. Who’d abandoned him to his bare necessities, his basic needs and what to do with his wastes and grimes. That no-good whoreheart! Damn her and all who sail in her!

He takes up the remote control for his television set and turns the power on, not because he wants to watch television but because he needs to see the yellow date and time stretched across the top of the screen like a banner headline. Ten thirty-nine. Figures, he figures. (He’s not particularly superstitious, but he doesn’t like it when numerals add up to thirteen.)

Well, he wonders, knocked back on his own devices, what to do, what to do?

Idly at first, his head and heart not only not really in it but not even aware that that’s what they’re doing, he begins to make up another of his messages for the answering machine he does not yet even own. Please leave a message at the beep, he composes, then, inspired, takes out the “please.” Leave a message at the beep. Yes! he thinks. That’s it! No frills. No chinks in the sheer insurmountability in so imposing a cliff face. What could be simpler, yet pack more powerhouse ambiguity? Thieves, even those professionals cops so loved to brag on and seemed to respect (if not flat- out admire, as if they were so many Sherlock Holmeses confronting so many Professors Moriarity), thugs worthy of them, thugs with mettle, thugs with brains, would be put off. Or would they? Is this guy for real, they might wonder. Who does he think he’s fooling with this bluff? Surely, if they were truly worthy of the professionalism the cops claimed to respect them for, they’d recognize the Mayday appeal in such a communiqué. Oh, oh, the looseness of cripples, mourned buffeted, crippled Schiff, who, on second thought had seen that real professionals, genuine gangsters, or even only revved kids hopped-up on drugs, could read the vulnerable, terrified wimp factors right through such ploys. It was practically an open invitation practically. Why not just come out and say just come out and get it?

Good Christ, Schiff thought, taking another reading off the television screen, it was already eleven twenty-nine (again thirteen). Almost an hour had passed since the last time he’d checked. Was it too late to call his students to tell them the party had been scrubbed? Well, they were graduate students, accustomed, he would have thought, to burning the not-yet-but-almost midnight oil, hitting the books or, sunk in the creases of their own complicated lives, their various affairs and dramatized politicals, even their own ardent lonelinesses (drinking or partying or doing their thing in their stricken privacies), so he was pretty certain he wouldn’t be waking them, ripping their sleep like the torn fabrics over the furniture in their secondhand rooms. Rather, it was still a question of his dignity-meister’s guarded dignity. Full professors didn’t telephone graduate students. Not at this hour. Not at high noon. He couldn’t conceive of a message that would not wait. That’s what campus mail was for, stairways, restrooms, and corridors where you could bump into each other, office hours, those three or four minutes before class started up, the choreographed minute or so afterward when one hefted garments and maneuvered briefcases or bookbags into the fast-closing stream of things at the door. (“A word with you, Bumas, please, when you have a chance.”) It was bad enough when the student called the professor up. Oh, Schiff didn’t mind the kid’s preliminary feint and shuffle, his nerves and courtesy like a bout of flu, was even a little grateful for the tribute of all those deferential, stammered reluctancies. (“I hope I’m not calling you at a bad time, Professor, that I’m not interrupting your and Mrs. Schiff’s dinner or anything. I hate bothering you at home like this, sir.”) But bad enough anyway. Because you had to be on your toes when the phone rang. You had to see to it that the TV was inaudible, had to fumble for the Mute button on the remote control, or turn down the volume on the radio, make certain the silence the kid heard at his end of the line was the pure, unadulterated noise of interruption, the sound of difficult, significant books being read, the quiet of a busted, damaged concentration.

Of course Schiff’s being crippled excused him from a lot of that crap. He didn’t get to campus often enough to use campus mail, he no longer kept regular office hours, people tended to steer clear of him in the corridors, he never went near a stairway, and no longer did choreography in the fast- closing stream of things at the door, don’t ask him. So he could have called. Technically. It was the message that would have compromised his dignity. Announcing at damn near midnight that their — well, his, his now that Claire had blown him off — party would have to be canceled. And not only damn near midnight, but, by the time he’d reached all of them, damn near one o’clock, too, later, the very A.M. of the very P.M. of the party in question. Still, he could have called. Technically. Even, technically, his message notwithstanding. Though then the embarrassment would be on the other foot. He’d be the one breaking the peace, breaking into the peace, calling at a bad time and interrupting God-knew- what, bothering their lovemaking perhaps, disturbing their youth. His own stammered hesitations and uneasiness barely audible over the unturned-down volume of hi-fi and boom box. (“Professor Schiff here. Schiff. SCHIFF!”)

What time was it now? Twelve one-niner. (Again thirteen? This was beyond high odds. This was into fate.)

Still protective of his dignity, he thought, fuck it, picked up the phone and asked Information for the telephone number of Molly Kohm.

Miss Kohm (though this was unclear, she could well have been married; older than his other students, in, he judged, her early forties, and got up always in the costumes, the cloaks, boots, skirts, and dresses of ladies, he imagined, on symphony, museum, and various other arts boards; and something too dramatic, even a little hysterical, about her dark makeup, its etched or engraved character, almost as if it were not makeup at all but a sort of tattoo, a kind of stenciled quality to her enduring tan, something about Miss — or Mrs. — Kohm that suggested, well, weekends spent elsewhere, her passport in her purse as surely as her car keys, coins for tolls; something — he admitted this though she was not his type — vaguely exciting about her, her intelligence grounded — if that was the word — in intimacy and some mysticism of the far, as though — he had no other way of putting this— Schiff was the geographer but she was the traveler) picked up on the very first ring. And, when he identified himself (hemming and hawing, beating about the bush, shuffling with the best of them), pretending — he assumed pretending — she’d been expecting his call.

“Oh,” she said, “you poor man, I was going to call you.”

“You were?”

“Well, when I heard what your not-so-better-half had done to you … And on the eve of your party! Outrageous! People ought to know that some of the most significant damage one can do to others is to force them to change their plans at the last minute. Too too rude, I think. To treat other persons’ lives as though they were subject to alterations like something off-the-rack. Barbaric!”

“Then why didn’t you?”

“Why didn’t I—?”

“Call me,” he asked her.

“I thought Dickerson would take care of it. Dickerson was supposed to take care of it. That’s what we arranged at any rate.”

“We? You and Dickerson? Arranged?

“We, the members of the Political Geographers Party Committee.”

“There is such a thing?”

“Well, now there is. The people in your seminar threw it together as soon as we heard.”

“Heard? Heard what?”

“Why, what Mrs. Professor S. did to Mr. Professor S., of course.”

“What’s none of your business is none of my business, I suppose, but I’d like to know—” Schiff said formally, and with as much dignity as the thought would allow, “this just happened — who put the word out? How did you know? Is it some jungle telegraph thing?” Then, risking the inside joke, “Or are you folks connected to Information, too?” Chilled to the bone when Miss or Mrs. Kohm gave her immense and raucous board member’s society laugh.

“We take care of our own, dear,” is what she said.

“The Political Geographers Party Committee,” Schiff said. “Is that like a fan club or something?”

“Would you like a fan club?”

“I’d like,” said Schiff, sorry as soon as he permitted the words to escape, “for my life to go into remission.”

“Well,” she said, “there’s nothing the seminar can do about that one, of course, but it can and will rally round its annual party.”

“The party,” Schiff said, “the party is off.”

“Of course the party’s not off. As far as the party’s concerned, well, damn the torpedoes, full-speed ahead.”

“It’s off,” Schiff said.

“Why? Give me one good reason.”

“I’ve nothing to serve.”

“Eats,” she said, “the subcommittee on eats is taking care of that.”

“There’s a subcommittee on eats?”

“There’s a subcommittee on booze, there’s a subcommittee on party decorations.”

“Who organized all this? Did you?”

“Oh, that isn’t important,” Ms. Kohm — it was how he neutrally addressed her in class, too — dismissed. “You won’t have to lift a finger.”

“I can’t lift a finger.”

“You won’t have to.”

“Look,” Schiff said, “it’s late. There are other people in the seminar I still have to get in touch with.”

“But I told you, there’s nothing for you to do. Dickerson will take care of it.”

“Dickerson,” Schiff said. “Dickerson didn’t even call me.”

“Possibly he was nervous about catching you at a bad time, or that he was interrupting your dinner, or that he hates bothering you at home. In any event,” Ms. Kohm said, “there’s no reason for you to call the scholars. Everything really has been taken care of. The PGPC is on top of it.”

“The Political Geographers Party Committee,” Schiff said, exactly like a moderator of a news show identifying a reference for the audience.

“Exactly,” Ms. Kohm said, exactly like a panelist.

“Listen,” Schiff said, “what you and the others in the seminar have done is very kind. Really,” he said, “very kind. And I appreciate it, I do, but to tell the truth, I don’t believe I could even handle a party just now. Be a guest at one, I mean, never mind its host. I don’t much enjoy playing hearts and flowers, Ms. Kohm, but it’s been a pretty rough day, I’ve a lot on my mind, and the last thing in the world I’m up to right now is a celebration.”

“Jack, let me give you some advice: the worst thing someone like you can do at a time like this is to feel sorry for himself.”

Jack? Jack?

“Negative energy, particularly for someone in your condition, has devastating effects.”

In his condition? In his condition?

“Let me tell you something, Ms. Kohm,” Schiff said, “unless they’re referring to alternative fuels or to how they’re feeling, I’m always a little suspicious of, and embarrassed for, people who use terms like energy.”

“Jack,” she said, “I know you’re upset, that you’re just sick with worry about Claire, and, incidentally, I shouldn’t think she’s in Portland.”

Claire? Claire?

Where did this woman get off? (Or would she stop at nothing?) Was she drunk? She might be drunk. She looked like a drinker, had, he meant, a drinker’s dramatic, slightly hysterical expression, and her makeup, fixed in place like cosmetic surgery, might have been a drinker’s makeup, something planted on her face for emergency, like a name sewn into her clothing.

Still, he didn’t know which bothered him more, the dignity he’d leaked through his mean outburst about her use of language, or the dignity he lost through her (and he could only assume everyone’s) general knowledge of his business, how it was between him and Claire, how it was between him and his condition.

“I know,” she was saying, and Schiff, who’d tuned out for a couple of moments, once for his indignation and once again for the regret he felt for permitting himself to give in to it, knew he’d missed something, perhaps even something important (maybe she’d gone on to say what the thinking was in political geography regarding Claire’s whereabouts), “things are pretty much up in the air just now, but, you’ll see, they’ll come down, they’ll settle. It isn’t the end of the world. Oh, I grant you, when these things happen, one always thinks it’s the end of one’s world, and, occasionally, even frequently, one’s often right about that. After all, there’s no arguing with a judgment call, but I wouldn’t count myself out just yet. The consensus now is that three things may still happen, Your wife could come back. Two, time heals all wounds. And, three, you could make an adjustment, discover not only that you don’t really need her but that, if you make the adjustment, become more independent, you might even be better off without her.”

The consensus? The consensus?

“You’re right that she could come back,” he told her, “but it’s a long shot. Even about three — though it’s iffy, improbable, the odds are against it — that I might adjust. But that, two, time heals all wounds, is out of the question.”

“Time doesn’t heal all wounds?”

“Only if there’s time,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “I don’t underst—”

“Well,” Schiff said, stinging her, hoping to anyhow, hoping she’d take it back and pass it on to the consensus, “aren’t you forgetting my condition?”

“Oh,” she said.

“Yes,” he said, “you bet.” Then, while he had her on the ropes, following through. “But my real objection to a party this year is that I couldn’t possibly clean up afterward. My ‘condition’ militates against it.” Forgetting about the PGPC and realizing his mistake at once. And — perhaps something to do with his hand eye coordination, his cripple’s slowed reaction times, just the merest piece of a beat off but a miss as good as a mile and except in horseshoes close didn’t count for diddly — Ms. Kohm, losing no time, all over him.

“Did you forget what I told you? That you won’t have to lift a finger? That we wouldn’t permit it even if you could? Listen,” she said, “this isn’t even a committee thing. I mean no one’s been assigned to wash, no one’s been assigned to dry. No one’s been named to empty the ashtrays or run the vacuum over the rug in the living room. This is an area where everyone pitches in. Should someone see anything out of place, he or she straightens it up. This party will be a strictly straighten-up-as-you-go party. Will that be all right? Is that good enough for you?”

“Well,” Schiff said.

“Will it?” she asked. “Is it?” she teased.

“Well,” said Schiff. “Do I have your word? That no one leaves the house until it’s neat and clean as when they came in?”

“Neater and cleaner,” Ms. Kohm said.

“All right,” Schiff said. “Look, I’m sorry I’m such a tightass, but really,” he said, “unless everything’s just the way you found it … I’m going to let you in on something. I try to live by the cripple’s code.”

“Yes?”

“One must never do anything twice.”

“Oh, what a good rule! That’s a good rule even for persons who aren’t physically challenged.”

“Actually it is,” Schiff said.

“No, I mean it,” Ms. Kohm said.

“Okay, all right. We’ll try having the party.”

“Do you know what time it is?”

“No. Is it late?”

“Twelve thirty-seven.”

“Thirteen,” Schiff said.

“What?”

“Nothing,” Schiff said.

“Well,” said Ms. Kohm, “it’s been a long day. Tomorrow’s the party. Tonight, actually. Better turn in.”

“I will,” said Schiff.

“Me, too,” said Ms. Kohm. “Well,” she said, “see you tomorrow night.”

“Tonight, actually,” he said, and both laughed and hung up, and Schiff, too tired to try to make it into the bathroom, took up the pisser and peed within a cc of his life.

He slept like a baby. He didn’t dream. He didn’t once wake up. And, in the morning, it was like being roused from a trance, awakened, like someone from the audience, on stage, in the middle of a hypnotist’s act, come to life after a surgery in a room one can’t remember. Even, in those first several blank-slate seconds, experiencing what was not joy, not hope, not peace or patience, curiosity or wonder or even pleasure, so much as a sort of passivity, even obedience, something almost theological, some deep trust, almost— and here’s Schiff’s brain kicking in, and here’s Schiff — he supposes, like faith, like a perfect numb composure, Schiff detached and poised as an angel, like one of those rare dreams — and here’s Schiff with the slow, ever-so-gradual beginnings of self-consciousness — where he dreams himself moving, walking, running, pleased with the smooth point- to-point of his compliant synapses. And here’s Schiff. Tumbled from grace like a man overboard. Alert, alive, aware of the facts, passed sudden and roughly from one condition to the next like a clumsily transferred baton. Here’s Schiff. All at once the phone is ringing, his bladder is bursting, virtually screaming, “Do something, do something, will you, before I wet your pants all over you, your blankets, sheets, and pillowcases, your carpets and furniture and upholstery, before I take matters into my own hands and leave what used to be your dick jumping around every which way, loose and as out of control as a live wire spraying indiscriminate voltage like a hose in the street,” and his bones and body are stiff, filling up with pain in every cavity like air stretching a balloon, and — here’s Schiff, here’s Schiff now— he pulls himself up in bed to sit on its side and he reaches for his pisser but the son of a bitch is filled to the top — the job he did on it before retiring last night — and somehow he has to get into the toilet without — there’s no time to put them on — his shoes with their footdrop braces standing up in them like long shoehorns, and which permit him to put his feet out in front of him without kicking a foot into the carpet, smashing his practically hammertoes, tripping and stumbling the length of his body headfirst into the floor. So, here’s Schiff landed back in Farce, his homeland practically, and he pictures himself falling arse over tip down the stairs shoved tight against the aircraft and diving, face down, nose to the tarmac, which he kisses as if he’s finally come home after a long exile.

He’s up on his walker now, skedaddling to the John before he bursts, Schiff’s version anyway, his modified skedaddle, distracting himself, thinking, Push, Step, Pull (on “Push” pushing his walker out in front of him; on “Step” stepping out with his right foot; on “Pull” pulling his left foot up almost even with it), though even as he thinks Push, Step, Pull, he’s wondering if it wouldn’t be better to change his mantra to Push, Step, Drag, because times change and a chap owes it to himself to keep up with his disease. (And because the effort is so great. He should, he thinks again, have been an event in the Olympics.) What, it occurs, are these tears in these eyes? Because suddenly he can’t remember the last time he walked without having to resort to these diversionary tactics and gambits, when he didn’t have to think of his walker as a plow, or his floors as fields, when he didn’t have to break down his progress — progress, hah! — into tiny, divisible bits like so much sovereign acreage or, just to keep himself from going nuts — walking was so difficult now, required such concentration; this was how he concentrated on it — providing a running — running, hah! — commentary on it, like some kid muttering the play-by-play in his head as he throws a rubber ball against a stoop. The pressure on his bladder is driven by its own terrible, gathering momentum. Schiff, still pushing the walker, concentrating, but switching over to alternative modes even as he begins to feel a little, a little, not much, leakage— I think I can, I think I can! Or “Schiff not out of the woods, yet, ladies and gentlemen, though even if he pees now, at least it won’t be on the Berber. Because once that stuff gets on wool, it’s yech, and watch out, it’s time for the Home! Over to you in the crapper, Jim.” “Thanks, Dave Wilson, but you’ve just about told the whole story. Schiff, as you say, had begun to feel a little moisture, but, fortunately, this was just about the time he was swinging his walker around, dropping his drawers, and already lowering himself onto the toilet seat. Maybe I can get him to give us a comment. Jack, Jack, it’s Jim Johnson, You do much damage?” “No, Jim, I don’t think so. There’s a phrase in Ward Howe’s ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic’ that best sums it up, I think. Something about the ‘evening dews and damps.’ I don’t think anything actually got on the tile though there may be some small humidity in my pants, however. In any event, I’m chucking them into the laundry basket on my way out.”

Which made him think about laundry. Which, Jesus, gave him a jolt. Because, really, with Claire gone, how was he ever going to handle that one? He didn’t know if they even still did laundry service, couldn’t recall the last time he’d seen a laundry truck. Claire, Schiff thought, you’re the rat and I’m the sinking ship! And where, he wondered, had his mild hope for the day gone? Those few seconds or so of respite he felt when he’d first waked up? That perfect, numb composure?

On his walker again, returning to his room, so caught up in his analysis of where he was, letting his fans know — he’s beaming his coordinates back to the PGPC — the long row he’s yet to hoe—“Technically I’m still in the bathroom, though the wheels of the walker, and even its two hind legs, are over the threshold and out in the hall, heading south, my right foot on Steppp, my left, huff puff huff puff, on Draaaag. And I’m in the hall too, now, in the hall and making my adjustments, shifting my trajectory, handling the walker, raising it up off the carpet and swinging it east, bringing my body into alignment with the walker. All right. All right. Just about ready to move on. From here it’s a fairly clean shot east to the bedroom, where I’ll have to hang a north, then jockey from there northeast to the bed. You know something, folks? I’m not saying it’s a blessing or promising rose gardens, merely mentioning in huff-puff passing that this disease could have done worse than chosen to be trapped in the body of a political geographer”—that he realizes the phone is still ringing only after he’s back in bed, that probably it hasn’t stopped since it first began eleven or twelve minutes ago. It has to be Claire, he thinks, it has to be Claire. Anyone else would have hung up after eight or nine rings, ten rings tops. When he realizes this he wonders if he should pick up at all. It’s Saturday. She knows he has to be home, that except for Tuesdays and Thursdays when he teaches his classes, unless she’s there to take him somewhere, he has to be home. Sure, he decides, let Claire ring the phone’s ass off, let her ring and ring until she pictures him dead. Then she’ll be sorry, then she will. I’m a grown fucking man, for Christ’s sake. And he picks up the phone.

“Claire?”

“Harry Ald, buddy. Boy, you really are crippled up. I’ve been on the line fifteen minutes waiting for you to answer. I direct-dialed, for God’s sake, but the long-distance broad broke in anyway, wanted to know if I ‘wished’ to place my call later. I told her no, let it ring, I had this stiff-in-the- joints pal took his own sweet damn time coming to the telephone. Breaks in again in five minutes, tells me, ‘Sir, please place your call later, you’re tying up the lines.’ I say, ‘How can I be tying up the lines, I’m not even connected.’ Miss Priss offers it’s some satellite thing, very technical. I go ‘Oh yeah?’ She’s gonna disconnect me, she says, if I don’t hang up, and I shoot back that that’d be a violation of the First Amendment, but I see where she’s coming from and tell her, all right then, charge me for the goddamn call, you can count from the time I first began dialing. You know what she does, Schiff? You know what she tells me? She says to hang up and call person-to-person collect. I ask how that would change anything, I’d still be tying up the line, wouldn’t I? ‘Oh no,’ she says, ‘collect, person-to-person calls go through on a different circuit, that’s why we have to charge the customer extra for them.’ ‘And all the time,’ I tell her, ‘I thought that had to do with greed and operator assistance, so-called,’ which is when she starts giving me this you-can-talk-to-my-supervisor crapola. Well, do I have to tell you, there’s nothing in the world worse, or more boring and futile, than talking to some telephone-company operator broad’s supervisor. Fortunately, as it turns out, however, I didn’t have to because that’s just when you finally decide to pick up. So how are you? D’ja hear anything from Claire?”

He could be making this all up, Schiff thought. Claire could have put him up to it. He could be Claire’s beard, or decoy, or special agent, or whatever. She could be sitting beside him (even lying beside him) right now, for goodness’ sake, or listening in on an extension. It wasn’t proof she still loved him or anything, but after as long as they’d been married she was vested. Well, they both were.

“Nothing,” Schiff said, “not a word. Did you?”

“Me? God no, Jack. Anyway, you know what would happen if Claire ever did show up here?”

“What?” He felt like a straight man.

“We go back you and me, but we ain’t seen each other in years. We probably wouldn’t even recognize each other in the street.”

“What are you saying to me, Harry?”

“I’m a different person, Jack. Just like you’re a different person.”

“I’m not a different person,” Schiff said. “I’m the same person I always was.”

“Jack, you used to do the hundred in split seconds, you used to go out for the long ones.”

“Those are physical things,” Schiff said.

“Physical things? Physical things?” Harry Ald said. “What the hell else is there? It took you fifteen minutes to answer the telephone. This doesn’t do something to a man’s soul? But all right, okay, you’re still the same old Jack Schiff. The spitting image. But me, I’ve changed. I’m a roughneck. I’ve got tabs in bars. Sixty years old and I’m a regular in bars. Sixty years old and I’ve got, you know, girlfriends. I’m living right now with a squaw.”

“A squaw? Really?”

“Well, a half-breed, really, but this is the Pacific Northwest. It ain’t that big a deal with the braves, but the women take it very seriously. You know what they say about Catholic converts, how they’re more Catholic than the pope? Well, that’s what your half-breed squaw is like.”

“More Catholic than the pope?”

“Ha ha,” Ald said, “that’s a good one on me all right.”

“What?” Schiff asked. “What would happen?”

“If Claire showed up here? Oh, nothing. She’d get gut shot is all. Flowers of the Field would see to it personally.”

“Flowers of the Field? This is your squaw’s name?”

“It’s a beautiful name.”

“It is a beautiful name,” Schiff said.

“You don’t believe me? You want me to put her on? Wait, I’ll put her on, she’ll tell you herself. Hey, Flowers of the Field, put down the Maize Flakes a minute, come over here and tell my old friend what you’d do if all of a sudden his wife showed up and wanted to move in with me.”

“I’d gut shoot the bitch,” a woman said.

“Jesus,” Schiff said.

“How do you like that?” Harry Ald, who’d taken the phone back, said. “And don’t think for a minute this is some young bimbo we’re talking about here, Jack. She’s got almost a decade on me.”

“She sounds like a pistol,” Schiff admitted.

“She’s a bow-and-arrow.”

He told Harry Ald about his graduate students coming over that night. He explained about the PGPC. Harry thought it was wonderful, that it would do him a world of good. “Just don’t let them mug you,” he warned.

“Mug me? They’re my students. Why would they mug me?”

“Sometimes,” Harry Ald said, “graduate students see a helpless old professor in his house, they can’t help themselves, they mug him, then they throw him down the stairs.”

Schiff couldn’t have explained it, but he thought he was feeling better. Sometimes a good laugh, of course, but he felt stronger, too. He got off the bed and, moving about his bedroom, tested himself on the walker. He actually was a little stronger, back to Push, Step, Pull, from Push, Step, Drag, down to the occasional huff puff from the occasional huff puff huff puff. This wasn’t, he understood, mere fancy. He’d been to too many neurologists by this time, and knew that it was in such tiny incrementals and small diminishments that the state of his disease was tracked, his particular pathology relatively long-haul, even his death a matter more of yards than of inches. (He thought now might be a good time to fit the handle of the urinal over the walker’s crossbar, take it into the toilet, and flush its contents down the commode, but then he realized he’d have to rinse out the pisser in the bathroom sink, that, or sit with it on his shower bench and let water into it from the faucet in the tub, running over his feet, spilling on his legs.) But already his strength draining, settling, separating, retreating into its nooks, crannies, holes and corners— all the ragged features and interiority of its customary itty-bitties. The phone ringing again and Schiff fading fast.

Sam Creer was on the line, the law school’s Native American activist, its expert on Treaty Law, practically its inventor, in fact; world famous, in fact, who had turned down an offer from Harvard because, as he said, he’d be damned if he’d teach school in a place that had been hacked out of pure aboriginal real estate. Sam wanted to know if Jack happened to have heard from Claire yet. No, Schiff told him, and said that as long as he had Sam on the line, he wondered, had Creer ever run across a dame called Flowers of the Field?

“Flowers of the Field,” Creer mused, “Flowers of the Field. Is she Penobscot?”

“There’s no telling,” Schiff said.

Others called wanting to know about Claire. Even folks with whom Schiff couldn’t recall having ever brought up the subject.

“You know,” he was saying to a colleague with whom he hardly ever had contact, “for a guy as protective of his dignity as I am, people seem to know a whole shitload about my affairs. Every Tom and Dick. Maybe I’m not half as dignified as I think I am.”

“No,” said the colleague, a man whose face Schiff couldn’t conjure and even whose voice was unfamiliar, “I don’t think that’s it. Why, your wheelchair alone earns you a certain amount of dignity, say thirty to thirty-eight percent. Then, anyone who ever saw you struggle on your walker into a men’s room or maneuver it into a stall would grant you at least another couple dozen dignity points. That’s, what, sixty-two? Dignity-wise, all you’d need for a gentleman’s C would be another ten or so points.”

“Just see to it my fly is shut when I come out of the stall, as it were.”

“As it were,” said the colleague.

He was in bed, absently fingering the S.O.S. collar about his throat and resting up for his assault on the shower, when the phone rang again.

“Hello?” Schiff said.

“Professor Schiff?”

Speak of the devil, it was S.O.S. itself. In the voice of Miss Simmons.

“Miss Simmons?”

“What happened? Are you all right? If it’s anywhere near you, see if you can pull the blanket off the bed and cover yourself with it. Try to stay warm. Try to keep calm. Now tell me what happened. I’m not so concerned with the extraneous details as I am with your precise location. Where are you right now? Does anything hurt? What hurts? Do you know where your wounds are? Do you know if you’re bleeding? If you’re not in a position to tell, can you say if there’s a sticky sensation that might be blood? Do you feel as if you’re going to faint? Does my voice sound muffled, does it sound like it’s coming from far away? On a scale of one to ten, mild to severe, what would you estimate the extent of your injuries to be? Do you have any chest pain, or pain radiating down your left arm? An ambulance has been dispatched to your house and should be arriving within seven minutes.”

“Well, gee,” said Schiff, “I think I may have the wrong number.”

“The wrong number? You haven’t fallen? You’re not exhibiting the classic symptoms of heart-attack discomfort?”

“As a matter of fact,” Schiff said, “for me, I’m feeling pretty darned relatively good.”

“You turned in a false alarm. There’s a two-hundred dollar fine for turning in a false alarm,” Miss Simmons said.

“A false alarm? Hey, no,” Schiff said.

“You were playing with your button, weren’t you?”

“Not consciously I wasn’t,” Schiff said.

“Unconsciously is just as bad. S.O.S. has three teams on call. One’s out on a job and the second’s on its way to 225 Westgate. If the third’s called away and we get a call and are left unprotected, do you know who’s responsible if there’s a disaster that results in a subsequent lawsuit?”

“Me, I bet you,” Schiff said.

“That’s right,” said Miss Simmons.

“How can this be?”

“You’re a consenting adult, you signed papers.”

“Ah, papers,” said Schiff.

“That’s right.”

“They aren’t here yet, call them back.”

“It’s too late, I’m not allowed. You’ll just have to absorb the two-hundred-dollar fine and pray there are no emergency complications.”

“Help me,” Schiff said. “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up.”

Then Schiff moved to the edge of the bed and, leaning over it as far as he could, as if he were stretching for something just beyond his reach, he put out his balled fists, sought reliable purchase on the rug, and maneuvered his stronger right hip, thigh, and leg scant inches out over the mattress, and dragged his left leg up with the right one, hovering there for a moment in a sort of crippled yoga levitation. Then, gently as he could, he lowered himself carefully down off the bed and onto the floor. Stretched out on the carpet, he turned on his back, pulled the blanket off the bed and covered himself. For good measure he reached up and managed to find a pillow, which he placed behind his head.

He was breathless, but he’d just saved himself two hundred dollars, more if you threw in lawsuits and emergencies.

“Professor Schiff?” Miss Simmons was saying. “Professor Schiff?”

He was on the floor in his bedroom, he explained, nothing hurt him, he didn’t think he was bleeding, he didn’t feel faint. She was coming in clear as a bell, and his heart, knock wood, felt sound as a dollar. He was no doctor, he told her, not that kind anyway, and couldn’t estimate the extent of his injuries.

But they’d know soon enough, he said, he thought he heard the ambulance now.

And he did, a crazed, mechanical Geschrei, somewhere between the regulation alarms of police and fire and the amok pitch of a child’s video game raised to its wildest power.

“I know what you’re doing,” Miss Simmons said. “Don’t think I don’t know what you’re doing.”

When the S.O.S. men let themselves in with their key they found Schiff on the floor.

“I see you’ve got a pillow,” one of them said.

“Presence of mind,” Schiff said offhandedly.

Then the other examined him before both lifted him back onto the bed.

“Thanks a lot,” Schiff said.

“Hey,” the guy said who’d noted his pillow, “no problem.”

“I guess I was trying to do too much.”

“Yeah, how’s that?”

Schiff lowered his voice. “Well,” he said, embarrassed, “I was just getting out of bed to try to empty that when I fell.” He pointed to the nightstand.

“I’ll take care of that for you,” said the paramedic who’d examined him.

“Would you?” Schiff said.

“No problem.”

When the man brought it back, empty and odorless, Schiff wondered if he should tip them, then thought of the fines they’d have demanded of him, of all the ways he’d opened himself up to the possibility of bankruptcy by signing their papers. Not one cent for tribute, he decided; then, as they were leaving, called after them. “If you see Bill,” he said, “tell him hi for me.”

“I know what you’re doing,” Miss Simmons said, startling him. He’d forgotten they were still linked up.

“Do you know what I forgot?” Schiff said, realizing he had to pee again and taking advantage of the empty urinal.

“What?”

“To ask for my key back.”

“Gee,” she said, “I had it duplicated. I forgot to get it back to you.”

“That puts us about even then.”

“Oh?”

“Sure,” he said, “my playing with the button, your forgetting my key.”

“I guess maybe it does,” she said.

“Except for one thing,” Schiff said.

“What’s that?”

“My key,” he said, “I need it, I have to have it back today.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, “I’m filling in on the switchboard today. I can hardly send out another ambulance. I suppose I could bring it by after I’m off, but that’s not until six. Can you wait that long?”

“Hey,” Schiff said, “no problem.”

Checkmate! thought wily old Schiff. Gin! Name of the game! the crippled-up old political-geographer gentleman thought, planting his flags for Spain, for France. Well, he thought, for Farce, at least, Schiff’s own true motherland with its slapstick lakes and Punch and Judy rivers, its burlesque deserts and vaudeville plains, with its minstrel peninsulas and cabaret hills, its music-hall mountains and its dumb-show shores, all its charade forests, all its low-comedy lowlands.

His body not only ravaged — well, he was sixty, or near enough, closing in on retirement, closing in on death, personal wear-and-tear coming with his jokey territory — but savaged now, too, effectively gut shot, brought low, lower than good taste permitted, a dispensated man, on Information’s arm, on some general sufferance — there were federal laws now protecting him like some endangered species — his ass not only covered but sanctioned, like some loony or fool whose culture would not permit itself to raise a hand against him. These were the perks of Farce, the privileges of citizenship, like coins sprinkled to street mimes.

Not, thought Schiff, unearned or had cheap. For even before he’d so openly lived in Farce, even, he meant, when, like some dual-citizen’d child who could declare his allegiance in ripened time, Schiff had had his tendencies; marked by a weird boldness, some not fully thought-out bravery, blind, or anyway indifferent, to consequence, a very inversion of the cautious, look-before-you-leap models of whom he boasted, and whom, at least theoretically, on paperly, boosted, all those coded, once-burned-twice-shy gimps and wary worrywarts whose nine months of toilet training had, in spite of everything, been wasted on them, a crack in their anality and something let-loose and litterbug struck into their souls like a brand. You might as well hand him a pistol and put a single bullet into its chamber like the buck you slip into a gift wallet.

Luring Miss Simmons — Jenny — to the party without even moving the finger Ms. Kohm herself had promised him he’d never have to lift. Here’s, he mentally toasted himself, to dangerous Jackie Schiff, the Have-It-Both-Ways Kid.

Hi! You’ve reached 727-4312, the home of Professor Jack Schiff. I’m sorry, caller, but I’m not in just now. Please wait for the beep and leave a message. This block is protected by armed vigilantes. I’m not saying it is, and I’m not saying it isn’t, but the house just might be booby-trapped. Why take chances?

Because a certain part of him couldn’t afford to admit thoughts toward the down side of things. And even as he thought this — maybe it was the word “afford” that triggered the idea—this occurred: that he’d been a damn fool to call those banks yesterday, that he’d wasted his time. (Oh, his time, thought the damn fool.) That having been married to him all those years, Claire was incapable of great train robberies, of major or minor larcenies, that walking out on him was one thing but stiffing him another. She was, finally, incapable of caper. She hadn’t disturbed the money in their accounts because that’s how she continued to think of them— as “their” accounts, the fiduciary aspect of their relationship intact. Because, because — and this made him furious — they would both be working off the same accounts! Drawing down off the same funds like a couple of old-timey teenagers in the malt shop sipping their soda from the same glass through two separate straws. And why he was furious was that she’d turned over the accounting to him, that he was the one left behind to balance their checking. (All right, granted, her canceled checks would give him, if not her address, then at least some general idea of what she was up to and where she was up to it at.) So this was what his cripple’s code came down to— that he stay out of it; not just that he must avoid doing things twice, but that he must never do them even once if he could help it. Being disabled had made him lazy, his incentive shot, a sort of welfare drag. It was his fate, he saw, to depend — how he’d plaintively pointed out the pisser to the paramedic — on everyone’s mercies. That it had become his job, duty, his life, like some old zayde worrying Torah in shul, to lie in his bed and worry his character. (Flash! he thought. I’m disabled and can’t come to the phone right now, I can’t come to the phone, I can’t come!)

Enough! Enough and enough!

He moved off the bed, as demanding of himself as a physical therapist. Thinking: Tonight’s the party. People are coming, students, maybe two or three spouses, Jenny Simmons is dropping off the key to the house. Thinking for the first time since God knew when: Not thinking, Push, Step, Pull, or I think I can, I think I can, or doing any of his other play-by-plays and routines. Merely hauling his ass like any other severely disabled human being; merely minding his business, his heart too full of its sorrows to pay much attention to anything but his business, to his problems and their solution. Hey, he thinks, this is serious; perhaps he should call it off, put his foot down, get back to Ms. Kohm, tell her he’s made up his mind about it once and for all, this party’s canceled, ask could she get word to the others, tell them he’s sorry, hand them some blah blah about maybe later when he was feeling better, maybe once he knew where he stood, maybe, as it were, next year— Or no, forget that, just tell them it’s off. Besides, he sees through his window how dark it is out, how rotten it looks, how it’s probably going to Sturm und Drang buckets, how he wouldn’t want it on his conscience, couldn’t stand it in fact, if a student of his, any young person, liquor- or weather-impaired, should be hurt in an accident in the rain, sideswiped dead in the slick, slippery streets on the way to or fro any party of his. How he’d never forgive himself, who’d been there and back, if he were even merely the glancing, proximate cause of — never mind actually killing him or her — putting a person in his educational charge into a cast or brace for so much as a week or even a day, an hour, even a minute. He was sorry, he’d tell her, it was just the way he was. I am what I am. He is what he is. And if that was the bedrock bottom line of why Mrs. Professor S. left Mr. Professor S., well then, so be it, the leopard couldn’t change its spots or the doggie its growl. One was stuck with oneself. The world had too few competent political geographers as it was, he’d be darned if he helped contribute to the further diminution of talent in his field.

Somehow he showered.

Somehow, dispensing with the services of both wife and valet, he dressed.

Somehow, the cook run off to join the circus, the navy, see the world, take Europe by storm, he managed breakfast. Two handfuls of dry cereal, some grape jelly spooned into his mouth from a jar, a few sips of half-and-half from an open carton. Even preparing future meals for himself by holding a carton of eggs carefully in his lap and propelling himself across the smooth linoleum toward the gas stove by alternately hunkering his upper torso, then suddenly pressing himself hard against the back of the wheelchair so that he seemed to move by a kind of peristaltic action, rather like a gigantic inch worm. It was slow work, and exhausting, but when he reached the stove he laid down his dozen eggs gently as possible into a large, high pot a little less than half filled with water left there to soak a sort of rusty crust of Claire’s days-old tomato sauce from the pot’s insides. He set the flame very low.

And somehow, awfully tired now and the butler nowhere in sight, he managed to get back to the second floor and, fully dressed, settle into his unmade bed. From which he would have put through his call to Ms. Kohm on the spot had not he first turned on the television and, quickly reviewing the thirty-or-so network and cable channels available in his city, taken up his remote-control wand and recorded the finals of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit competition on ESPN.

Schiff had long ago discovered the mildly erotic possibilities of the Pause button on his VCR, the flagrantly concupiscent ones inherent in slo-mo and super slo-mo. Certain music videos played back in the super slo-mo mode made Schiff, for all his physical deficits, ardent as something in rut, and caused him to participate in a sort of endless, extended foreplay, the images on the screen grainy as the thrown, close-up pouts and moues of received pornography, his own responses as real in their way as the perspiratory, steamy efforts of the actual. He did not so much play with as handle himself, fondle himself, his eyes on the television screen, on the practically time-lapse movements of the girls, muscles barely visible to the naked eye pronounced, vivid and fluid as avatars in dreams in the delicate, strobographic revelations before him, so that what he saw was a sort of palpable anatomical demonstration, some nudity beneath nudity, going on under the flesh, oily, somehow slow and forbidden as an exhibition of mandatory poses of female field slaves on an auction block.

But could not quite bring himself off, this all-but sixty- year-old man, only sensation available to him, love’s mood music, his hand finally falling away from himself, satisfaction locked up tight inside him like a kind of sexual arthritis.

And might have called Ms. Kohm then and there had not something warned him not to be too precipitate (he knew what it was, that weird boldness and devil-may-care indifference to consequence of the cautious), not to cut off (whatever the hell he meant by that) his chances (maybe only to preserve for as long as he could the last faint, surviving buzz of sexual vibration lengthening in frequency in him like a neurologist’s tuning fork held against the skin). Hanging on, he meant. Hoping, that is, to be saved by the bell. Which, believe it or not, he literally was. His doorbell rang just as he was about to give in and call Ms. Kohm. Once he managed to get into the Stair-Glide, ride downstairs and open the door, it turned out that the PGPC’s subcommittee on decorations was standing on his doorstep in all its rigged and prompted patience under the light rain, which just that moment had begun to fall.

“Come in, come in, you’ll catch your deaths,” Schiff welcomed, breezy as a man half his age and many times more healthy.

For presumedly bluff volunteers — Schiff thought of “neighbors” in films come to raise a barn or bring in a harvest — there was something rather hangdog and shamed in their bearing.

Schiff, a stiff and somewhat formal grown-up better than twice their age who called them “Miss,” who called them “Mister,” supposed them in on their professor’s domestic secrets, supposed himself (one of those — he supposed they supposed — hotshot, crisis celebs, a consultant in times of national stress to movers and shakers with means at their disposal — their bombs and high-tech devices — quite literally to move and shake the very political geography that had hitherto been merest contingency, simple textbook, blackboard example, his finger — their professor’s — on the planet’s pulses, its variously scant or bumper crops, its stores of mineral, vegetable, animal, and marine wealth — currents where the advantageous fish hung — an advisor — he supposed they supposed — to presidents, kings, and others of the ilk, who could determine a vital interest simply by naming it, pronouncing it, pointing to it chalktalk fashion on a map, virtually talking the hotspots into being) fallen in their youthful, fickle estimation, emotional, skittish as a stock exchange. So no wonder they seemed so nervous around him. His wife had left him, he stood as exposed as a flasher. His wife had left him, and now they perceived Professor S. as one who evidently — and oh so feebly — pulled his pants up over his uncovered ass one damaged leg at a time; a man, in the absence of crisis, not only like any other — his wife had walked, had taxicabbed out on him — but maybe even more so. He was revealed to them here on his — the political geographer’s and erstwhile hotshot, crisis celeb’s — very turf as one more defective, pathetic, poor misbegotten schlepp.

Ms. Kohm must have turned them. Ms. Kohm must have been running them. Ms. Kohm, who, if he was the political geographer, must surely have been (with all the coordinates, inside info and morning line she put out on him) the political geographer’s geographer. Who’d told Schiff they took care of their own, but really meant she did, and had organized committees and subcommittees like this one on a moment’s notice. Apparently she had named him a sudden, inexplicable vital interest. Why? Had she set her cap for him? What was this all about anyway? How had he — the defective, misbegotten schlepp — managed to become a target of opportunity, anyone’s eligible man?

Leaning on his walker and reciting at them like a moron, “Come in, come in, you’ll catch your deaths. Let’s have your coats.” Which, had they given them to him, would surely have knocked him down.

“Will it be all right,” Mary Moffett said, “if we put these up now? They’re for the party tonight.”

She held a shopping bag out for his inspection. In it, like wires, lights, tinsel, and Christmas-tree ornaments that could be used, put away, and used again the next year, were a variety of comic maps in assorted joke projections. (Their rendition of The New Yorker’s rendition of the United States.) Some, certain classic campaigns (the siege of Troy, the Norman Conquest, Custer’s last stand at the Battle of the Little Bighorn), were offbeat versions of history, even of epochs (Schiff’s St. Louis suburb at the time of the Ice Age), and many were as topical, or once were, as the monologues of talk-show hosts. All were cartoonish, satirical. There was, Schiff recognized (and had, the sad man, even before he’d become so sad), a kind of desperation in these efforts, almost as if his students were pretending to be like the campus’s engineers and architects, who turned out prototypes of ingenious machines and interesting buildings that seemed to have sprung up overnight on celebratory weekends and occasions. There, tossed at his feet on the hall carpet like a sample of fabric, was this pleated string of construction- paper, accordion-fold maps, silly, insignificant as party favors.

He had to sit down or die, so scarcely had time to do more than acknowledge the presence of the course party’s inherited, cumulative two- or three-year archive.

“Yes, yes,” Schiff said, “very nice, very nice.”

Fred Lipsey carried a sort of easel under one arm, a paper bundle of what could have been placards under the other. Joe Disch held a small stepladder, a Scotch-tape dispenser.

“That won’t stick to the walls, will it?” Schiff said. “It won’t pull the paint off with it?”

“No sir,” Disch said.

“Because that’s all I need, if the paint started chipping and peeling away from the walls.”

“It’s one of those low-grade adhesives.”

“I mean because that’s all I need,” Schiff said, inexplicably close to tears, “this place turned into a total shithouse.”

“No,” Joe Disch said, “that won’t happen. I use it to hang posters and prints in my apartment all the time. It comes away as easily as if you were turning the pages in a newspaper.”

“Posters and prints,” Schiff said. “You graduate students don’t know how good you have it, do you? These are the best years of your life, you know that? You have any idea how happy you are? What you get away with at your age? I mean, for God’s sake, just on the level of posters and prints. You can decorate a whole apartment with bullfight posters, airline ads for Bora Bora, Big Ben, the Great Wall. Low- slung canvas chairs, do they still have those? They were very popular when I was a graduate student. We thought them quite beautiful. Red light bulbs screwed into the lamps. The place looked like a fucking darkroom. The stub of an incense candle stuck into a Chianti bottle, wax on the colored glass and collected in the fishnet that wrapped it like a package. Then, you threw in a few boards over building blocks for your bookcase and you were all set. Remember hi-fis, LPs?

“Well,” Schiff said, “listen to me, will you, running on at the mouth about the old days. I go back. Hell, I remember when Oldsmobile introduced Hydra-Matic transmission. We thought that was a miracle. Who’d have believed there’d ever be a system a cripple could install in his house, or anyone on their own, really, that if they fell all they had to do was press a button and practically in minutes have an entire hospital at their disposal? Well,” he said, “I’m just going to sit down over here and let you do what you have to. Do the departments still have softball leagues? We were out every Saturday. I played first base.”

And some of this, he couldn’t have told you the exact percentage because he wasn’t that sure himself, but probably, conservatively, oh, eighty or ninety percent, was for their benefit. Put on. Made up. They wanted fear and trembling, he’d give them fear and trembling. Hey, it was their party. (“Remember hi-fis?” the old first basemen had asked them.) He was his own comic projection, something fun- house-mirror to his reality, the same distorted representation on the flat surface of his curved personality as Greenland’s. That was Schiff, all right. A joke like Greenland, sprawled across the top of the world like a continent.

And now sat down over here, just as he said. To let them get on with it. Never letting them out of his sight. Never letting himself out of theirs.

At about three he sent out for pizzas. Two large with the works for his tiny crew. Plus Cokes in cans. Though he hated, he said, to buy them at the prices they charged for a Coke these days. He remembered when Coca-Cola was a nickel.

“A nickel?” said little Miss Moffett. “Really? A nickel?”

“Damn right,” Professor Schiff said. “Twentieth part of a dollar. That’s what the candy butchers at burlesque shows used to call nickels in the old days.”

“I never knew Coca-Cola was a nickel.”

“Pepsi-Cola was a nickel and you got twelve ounces! Automobiles were four hundred dollars. The Sunday paper cost two cents. You furnished a five-room house in a stable neighborhood for a hundred dollars.”

“A hundred dollars? Really?”

“Tenth part of a thousand.”

“Professor Schiff’s jerking you around, Mary,” Fred Lipsey said.

“A grand piano set you back ten bucks.”

“My goodness,” Mary Moffett said.

“Scalpers wanted fifty cents a pop for the hottest ticket in town. Kidnappers asked seventy-five simoleons if you ever wanted to see your kid alive again. Oh, yeah,” Schiff said, “it was simpler times. A meal in a good restaurant was free, and a Picasso…” He didn’t finish the sentence. What were these children doing in his house? He was sixty years old, why was he still throwing parties? Why had Claire left him? Did she think she could change her life? At her age? What would she change it to? Admitted, living with him couldn’t have been any picnic. It was hard work. Granted. The hours were awful and the sex was lousy. They’d left life long ago. Ten years easy. Now they floated above it like folks in an out-of-body experience, or like people drugged. They had no children and couldn’t even fall back on the surrogate joy of watching their kids succeed— seeing them through school, finding partners, a career, having children of their own. Or on even the motions of going through a life— taking up a hobby, going on vacations, celebrating holidays, even their own birthdays and anniversaries. He wasn’t for a minute pessimistic on the world’s account, only on his and Claire’s. He didn’t resent other people’s happiness — he was that cut off — only his and Claire’s misery. Nor did he question why they’d been singled out. They hadn’t. It was all luck of the draw. Everything. Luck of the draw. Nature never screwed anyone. That’s why disciplines like his were invented. To explain the borders, to draw up new ones. To make, in the best light of the best-case scenario, amends, restitution, seeking, in that same good light, what there could be, and when, and where, of order. It was like anything else. A political geographer who determined his own political geography had a fool for a traveler. Which was why he was more disappointed than angered by Claire. Had she learned nothing from her years with him? She would change her life? Yes? How? Tell him that, how? Oh, she could become a bag lady. Just as he could throw his lot in with the homeless. (Hadn’t he had this thought today? Yesterday? It seemed to him he had, though he couldn’t put his finger on it, or in what context, which circumstances. Though if it had occurred to him earlier, it just went to show that it was on his mind, that he was that far from taking violent charge of his life. Though he wouldn’t have given you two cents for his consistency: Help me. I’ve fallen and I can’t get up. This block is protected by armed vigilantes!)

Meanwhile the PGPC subcommittee on decorations was directing a sort of traffic in his dining room, Mary Moffett the traffic cop on duty, signaling Lipsey and Joe Disch where to hang the maps, and reciting a sort of background litany, which in other circumstances might almost have been comforting: “A little to the left. A little more. No, good. Now up on the right. Right there, hold it right there. No, you went too far over. All right, good, that’s got it, though maybe the whole thing ought to be a little lower so everyone can read it better. What do you think, Dr. Schiff?”

Dr. Schiff thought it astonishing he hadn’t thrown them out.

“Oh,” he said, “you know, mi casa, su casa. I defer to your judgment.”

“No,” she said, “really.”

“My dear,” said Schiff, suddenly finding himself trying out a new role on them (who had played so many; who had kept his studied, professional distance and who, even on the occasion of his annual party when the barriers came down for a few hours, but only, he’d always been careful to assure himself, in the interest of preserving them, rather like those old-time, once-a-year, red-letter bashes of the aristocratic when the servants and rabble, and all the good people from the village, had the run of the grounds and great house, and stayed up late into the night, taking such liberties and doing such damage — damage encouraged and even willingly eaten by the squire, just part of the expense of doing business as a landowner, of having vast holdings — that they would hate themselves in the morning, ashamed, accepting, even embracing, their fate for another year), “have I forgotten to mention I’ve worked up the will to go homeless? That it’s true what they say— you can’t live with them, you can’t live without them. No no,” said Schiff, holding his hand up as if to forestall an objection (and not knowing, really, where he was going, only that surely, really, this was too much: that she should have left him at this juncture, good God, what a sense of timing, because he knew she knew, he even remembered their having discussed it just this week, Claire herself suggesting that maybe they should open the party up to some of their colleagues, and Schiff considering it until Claire said no, on second thought it probably wasn’t such a good idea, that it would dilute the point of the evening if they did that, and throwing in, too, that it could hardly be expected to put the students at their ease if they had to sit around at attention all evening with a bunch of old farts, and Schiff agreeing, saying, right, that was a good point, no old farts, and here he was, one of the oldest, throwing his tantrum, making his scene, going Christ- knew-where with their attention tucked under his arm like a football— only that he had to keep on talking, like a drunk who knew he had to make himself presentable for important company, perhaps, and who was determined to walk off the toxins). “Well, isn’t it always darkest before the dawn or somesuch? Political folk wisdom has it right, the word on the street. Contrast plays its role in life. Well, the element of surprise, for instance. Being what it is in both warfare and negotiation. Have you noticed how often they play down our expectations, then go off to the summit and come away with a treaty you wouldn’t have guessed was in the cards for another twenty years?

“Listen,” Schiff said, “I really appreciate your coming over. It’s cost you your afternoon, putting out the party favors, throwing your lot in with the old prof like this. I only hope Ms. Kohm, God bless her, didn’t do too much damage to your arms when she twisted them. No? Good. Because she means well, she really does. She means well by me, she means well by you. Heck darn it, it isn’t too much, or telling tales out of school, to say she means well by the entire hemisphere and all the ships at sea. She’s one of those women who abhors a vacuum. I mean, well, I spoke to her last night. I wanted to call this party on account of, hey, you name it— I’m crippled, the place is a mess, there’s nothing in the house to serve, my wife couldn’t be here because she’s running around on me. But Ms. Kohm wouldn’t have any of it. She told me to hang tough, to wait till she showed up with the torch and touched the holy fire to the holy fire. I’m sorry the nuts and dip aren’t out, the crackers and candy, but Ms. Kohm will be by soon with fruit, with melon in season. Smoke if you got ’em,” Schiff said, eying his living room.

The tops of the pizza boxes had been torn from their bottoms, and everywhere, teetering on the arm of the sofa, on the coffee table, left on a seat cushion, on a stereo speaker, in the makeshift dishes, the smeared, greasy, bronzed mix- and-match of the cardboard china, lay pieces of cold, uneaten pizza like long slices of abstract painting, their fats congealing, fissures opening in their cooling yellow cheeses, burst bubbles of painterly cholesterol, chips of pepperoni raised on them like rusty scabs. Bits of green bell peppers, tiny facets of oily onion, bright hunks of tomato like semiprecious stones caught Schiff’s eye, glinted up at him from the carpet. Crumpled paper napkins, like the soiled sheets of wet beds, soaked up spilled Coke. There was an aluminum rubble of crushed cans.

“The geopolitical reasons for Daylight Saving Time,” Schiff said suddenly. “Mr. Disch?”

Mr. Disch, holding a beer, extended an arm, raised it toward Schiff in a sort of dippy, upward salute, body English for “Have one, Professor?”

His professor scowled narrowly, tersely shook his head, body English for “No thanks, where’d that come from, the sun ain’t over the yardarm, take care you don’t spill it!” (For he was, this clumsy, even, by disease-defaulted, sloppy-appearing man, almost compulsively neat, spic ’n’ span in his arrangements, who’d have his own narrow area ordered as the universe. Which was maybe why he went into political geography in the first place, as though the planet, its seas and landmasses, its rivers and mountain ranges, its hemispheres and continents, its nations and borders and cities and towns, its houses, its rooms, was ultimately rather like a class of furniture, like closets, like dressers, like wardrobes, like cupboards and desks and chiffoniers, like cabinets and files and chests of drawers, language a furniture, too, finally, only a way of gathering and organizing all the far-flung stuff of Earth.) Schiff looked toward Mary Moffett and Fred Lipsey, hunkered down over Mary Moffett’s shopping bag (meant to hold more, evidently, than the committee’s joke maps and decorations), pulling cans of beer from it like dogs scrabbling at dirt. “If I’m not mistaken,” Schiff said loftily, “there’s a question on the floor.”

“We’re on break,” said Miss Moffett.

Schiff, oddly unconcerned, thought, She’s drunk, and wondered when that had happened, suspecting he’d dozed off, suspecting they’d heard him snore, greedily scoop great gobs of air into his nose, pass gas, probably giggling about their old political geography teacher (who’d turned out to have a behind, habits), not only crippled, but reduced, too, and was impatient for the party to begin, knew it had, and already yearned for the time when they’d all clear out and he could go back to bed. And realized (having taken this all in, his brief snooze, their surreptitious drinking and, glancing once more at the remains of lunch, at the beer cans scattered about the landfill starting up — which was a sort of furniture, too, wasn’t it? perhaps some final furniture, some ultimate piece — in what was his hall, his dining and living rooms) the farce question about Daylight Saving’s geopolitical reasons had been merely his failed, reflexive, face-saving opening salvo, like dropping the checkered flag, say, not only after the gentlemen had already started their engines but had already completed their first several laps. It was out of his hands. Officially or not, the annual class party had begun!

Changing his mind, accepting Joe Disch’s beer, and abruptly all over them with a riff of gag questions. “Why have ocean currents been the casus belli of most civil wars?” “Explain how prevailing winds determine national borders.” “Discuss the concept of the island. How is it a macrocosm of the tribe but a microcosm of the family?” “How do the animals indigenous to a nation determine the character of that nation’s underlying political structure?” “What’s the difference between a ‘region’ in a first-world country like Italy and a third-world country like Paraguay?” “How is it that the so-called ‘hot-bloodeď peoples have had fewer revolutions than their more northerly neighbors?” “Speculate on the reasons for the inverse ratio between the beauty of a nation’s flag and its contributions to the fields of art, music, and poetry.” “If individuality, rather than community, accounts for most of the world’s great inventions and economic progress, why is it that countries with the greatest populations tend to be the most backward in their cultural and economic development?”

“Mr. Lipsey? Miss Moffett? Mr. Disch?

“Ms. Kohm? Mr. Hughes? Miss Simmons? Mr. Wilkins? Mr. Tysver? Miss Carter? Miss Freistadt? You, Dickerson? You, Bautz?”

Because these others (without, he noticed, their two or three spouses in tow— was this, he wondered, out of deference to him, or were all marriages foundered on the rocks?) had begun to drift in while Schiff was still in the nervous throes of his rap. Because he missed Claire and hoped and, despite himself, almost believed she would relent, reverse herself and, using her incredible sense of timing for good, still show up to save him, and because on one, the most furious, level of his forced, inspired hospitality, he was playing (for all that he knew better) for time, for some impossible dispensation, as though, could he but keep coming up with his loopy diversionaries, he might never have to answer to the still (for him) more alarming demands of serious social obligation. Soon, he quite feared, he might be telling them everything, conducting his guests on the grand tour around the posted neighborhoods and dark, off-limits districts of his heart.

“Tell me would you if you will all the ways the counterclockwise movements of water going down a drain in the southern hemisphere may account for the greater number of languages and dialects spoken below the equator.”

They stared at him.

“Anyone?

“No? No one? Well, I should do some checking if I were you, you degree candidates, for that’s a question that’s almost certain to turn up on your prelims. Really, people, if you haven’t got the basics down, I don’t know how you hope to be political geographers. Do you think others in the political sciences are as unfamiliar with their areas of concentration as you seem to be— the political biologists, the political chemists, the political comp. lit. majors?

“Well,” Schiff said, apparently relenting, “let the wild rumpus begin. Miss Simmons,” he told the somewhat surprised-looking woman who had separated herself from the graduate students and was approaching the wheelchair to which he had transferred and in which he was now sitting, “how nice to see you! How good of you to come!”

“I brought you your key back.”

“Listen,” he said, lowering his voice, “can you stay? We give this party for my students. I may have told you. I’m caught short here. Claire’s left me. I’m caught short here, I could really use the buffer. You’d be doing me a favor. Really. Please don’t go, please stay. It’d be swell if you would. You don’t know how much more comfortable I’d feel.”

“I came with your key. I haven’t even been home yet. I’m not dressed for a party.”

“Well, of course she’ll stay. How do you do, dear? I’m Molly Kohm. I’m very pleased to meet you. How interesting our professor is, what astonishing resources he has! Practically a paraplegic and confined to a wheelchair (even a somewhat older paraplegic), yet here he is dispensing keys to his home as if there were no tomorrow and neither one of you had ever even heard of an actuarial table. My goodness, how fast one may get about in a wheelchair! I hadn’t realized! Oh, and you mustn’t even think of returning that key. Don’t take it back, Professor. It was a misunderstanding. These things happen, they’re worked out every day. And night.”

“This is Jenny Simmons,” Schiff said. “Miss Simmons was a student of mine.”

“A student. Really, a student. Oh, now I am jealous, I quite actually am! Professor, you rascal, if only I’d known. I might have made a play for you myself. I might have,” she told Miss Simmons. “And I wouldn’t be threatening him with the return of his keys,” she added huskily. She bent down in front of Schiff’s chair and, resting her hand across the inside of his thigh, almost absent-mindedly, began stroking it. “Oh good,” she said, “there’s evidently still some feeling down there.” Schiff caught slight gusts of conditioned, alcoholic essence coming from her, pleasant, agreeable (despite her obvious drunkenness) as the gentle drafts and enticing steams one smells outside a steakhouse. Also, he saw up past her crouching, silk-stocking’d knees and along her own flexed thighs high into the dark of her skirt where they joined like perspective in a painting.

Ms. Kohm suddenly seemed as oddly capable as a witch, an impression enhanced by her pitch, shiny hair, the bright, thin streaks of white silver that crackled through it like some personal storm of the head. A dramatic purple-and- black-checked cape hung about her shoulders and over a dark tank top. She wore no brassiere, and Schiff saw the hard points of her nipples rising from what he momentarily conceived of as rings of soft, purple, lava-like slabs, imagining their faintly brackish taste in his mouth like the flavor of struck matches.

Giving him a soft, dismissive pat on the knee, she rose effortless as a yogi from the deep squatting position she had held before him like some patronizing tribute. (As if he’d been a child, say, to whose level she’d lowered herself— or the cripple he was. And Schiff, as though Ms. Kohm, come to him almost like some Dickensian specter, had an abrupt image of himself through women’s eyes. Why, he was like somebody behind and over whose head life was conducted, arrangements made, a kid traveling alone, say, or someone handicapped — well, hell, he thought, I am someone handicapped — whose needs were negotiated indirectly, guided past metal detectors in airports for a hand- check as if he were absent, a party in the third person, as though his earlier impression of having left life were true as far as it went, only reversed, life floating about a foot or so above him. Schiff some doll-like object present less in spirit than in sheer, brutal deadweight, his feet there to be stockinged and shod, his arms to be helped into the sleeves of his jackets, whatever was left over, say his spirit, to be lulled and comforted, regarded, even loved, admired as a piece of art might be admired, something not responsible for itself, diligently plied into being, as anything worked on hard enough or worried over long enough had to be turned into an object worthy of the effort, like silverware polished down to its highlights. This was how women saw him. For it was only women — he had left life — who dealt with him these days. It was how Miss Simmons, who had gone out of her way to bring him his key, saw him, how Ms. Kohm, who single-handed had refused to let his party go into the record books with an asterisk this year, did. Finally, it was how Claire must have seen him up until the time she discovered that enough was enough and refused to take one more minute of him, and left him, on the day of her incredible sense of timing, on the eve of his party, to deal with the women who would deal with him. Well, you know what? Saving Claire’s absence, he didn’t much mind, was willing as ever to throw himself on their — on women’s — mercies like a log on a fire.)

She turned around and made a signal to her helpers. (The rest of the students, he meant.) Without a word, Miss Carter appeared with a big galvanized pail. The pail was new, shiny, the sort of pail one associates with mops and wringers, with dark, greasy water. (Oh, shit, he thought, suddenly remembering the eggs, surely exploded by now, he’d dropped into the rusty water that morning.) It was filled to the brim with salad. With great leaves of lettuce, violently torn from what must have been eight or nine heads. There were long shards of cucumber and zucchini. There were whole rings of sweet onion like small quoits. There were jagged slices of tomato and, here and there, dollops of red, tomatoey pulp like a sort of jam. Sprinkled throughout were raisins like the droppings of rodents. Mr. Tysver carried an open butter tub of oil-and-vinegar dressing, already mixed, and Miss Freistadt and Mr. Wilkins each swung three or four large cartons of pasta like Chinese takeout from their thin metal handles like a sort of Jack and Jill. Bautz brought bread and Dickerson paper plates, white plastic cutlery, a box of salt, tins of colored seasonings, napkins. Each appeared before Ms. Kohm with his or her offering.

“Does this go in the kitchen, Molly?” asked Miss Carter of the galvanized pail.

“Put it down here. We’ll be eating soon, why make two trips?” She was pointing at the carpet.

“Hey, wait a minute,” objected Schiff from his wheelchair.

But she had already set down her burden on the living- room carpet.

“Hey,” said Schiff. “Hey.”

No one listened to him. Many seemed drunk. Schiff turned to Ms. Kohm. “Hey,” he said, “hey.”

An awful picnic of the awful graduate student food began to blossom on the carpet beneath him. Pieces of lettuce and cucumber and zucchini spilled over the pail or fell from heaps stacked too high on the paper plates and lay on Schiff’s beige carpet as if they grew there in actual nature. Bright bits of tomato, red onion, and pasta spotted the carpet like flowers. They’ve turned the place into a damn garden, Schiff thought bitterly. You could dig for worms in here. Miss Simmons, bless her heart, seemed as appalled as Schiff, and made no move to leave. Between trips to the salad bar on his floor for refreshment, Disch, Lipsey, and Moffett spelled each other as bartenders, offered mixed drinks from the remarkable bag where they had set up shop. Schiff, who didn’t think he saw that many takers, couldn’t account for the astonishing level of intoxication in the room. This crowd was high! Either they were already three sheets to the wind when they came in, or something about being in his house had unsettled them, roused them he meant, sprung them he meant, from the general graduate- student monasticism and hole-and-corner roughhouse of their days. Something about being in their mid-to-late twenties and still under the vows of delayed gratification, their lives unbegun. It was the old story of the total shit- house Schiff had complained of earlier, of posters and prints, of canvas chairs and incense, cement-block bookcases and all the make-do improvisation of their lives. Sprung from that. Grown-up for a day! Not Ms. Kohm. He excepted Ms. Kohm. Ms. Kohm was their ringleader, their unmoved mover, something thwarted in Ms. Kohm, something about Ms. Kohm profoundly unchecked and envious, infiltrated and into deep cover.

Only then did he understand what he had noted earlier— that there were no spouses here, not even his own. So sprung from spouses, too, from mewling babes, even from baby-sitters they couldn’t afford to pay and so had— another improvisation — to trade off with, time-sharing each other’s kids as if they lived in a commune. It was how Claire, high on a whiff of the other guy’s air, must have felt. Only God forbid that Claire was in some other old gent’s place finger-painting with pasta on the rugs.

Whether they knew it or not, whether they meant to or not, they were looking for trouble. In some weird, incomprehensible way, understood neither by him nor themselves, they had entered into some odd conspiracy with him. Drawn, it could be (though pushed by Ms. Kohm) by his handicap, by his own low troubles.

Somebody came by and offered him a plate of food, of the handled salad drenched in dressing, of the cold, pasted, stuck-together pasta. Which he refused like someone gently shaking off a sign. As much out of his own stuck-together dignity as from any failure of hunger. Though he was hungry. Could have done right now with some of the terrific foods he and Claire used to put out— the turkey and roasts, the pâtés and swell cheeses. (As much, perhaps, out of some need to wow them into respect as to satisfy the inner man.)

He accepted a poor plate of church supper from Miss Simmons, the plastic cutlery wrapped in what he now saw were cocktail napkins.

“Join me?” he said.

“Well,” Miss Simmons said hesitantly.

“No really,” he said, “make up a plate of rabbit food for yourself and rough it with me, why don’t you?”

“Well,” she said again.

“Afraid of ruining your appetite?”

It was difficult for him to eat in the wheelchair. He had lost considerable muscle mass in his hips, whatever it was that kept one upright, and he bobbed, weaved, swayed, lunged and lost his balance whenever he tried to fork food from the thin, fragile, wet paper plates and bring it to his mouth. He was spilling salad all over himself, on his lap, down the front of his shirt. There were salad-dressing stains on both shirt cuffs, high up his sleeves. “Can’t tempt you, eh?” he said, and this struck him as very funny, starting what might have been an out-of-control, almost hysterical laugh, but quickly turned into a helpless series of snorts. “No,” he managed, “can’t seem (snort) to (snort) tempt (snort, snort) you!” Long, extended snort. Snorting through. Snorting while his heart was breaking.

“No,” he said when he was in control again, correcting himself, “not rabbit food. But look at the pail. Doesn’t it remind you of something?”

“Of what?”

“No, you’ll get it,” he said, still the teacher. “What does it remind you of? Where have you seen pails like it before? All that chopped-up green shit?”

“Where?”

“At the zoo! In cages at the zoo! In the gorilla house. Where the elephant roams, and the skies are not cloudy all day.”

“Oh yeah,” she said, “right.”

“Look at this place,” he said.

“Oh, it’ll be all right. No permanent damage has been done.”

“Look at this place. Look what I’ve allowed to happen. My wife would kill me.” He was quite sad. It was as if Claire were dead and his house were being reclaimed by nature.

To keep himself from falling forward again, or from slipping to the side, he hooked his left arm under the arm of the wheelchair and steadied himself, sitting in a sort of stolid, struggled balance. In this way, planted as somebody in a tug-of-war, he managed to feed himself some of the pasta and salad. But it was rigid work, he knew how stiff he looked.

It was as if she could read his mind.

“Would you like me to help you with that?” Miss Simmons volunteered.

Still hungry but pretending not to have heard her, Schiff set the plastic fork down on the paper plate. He took a cocktail napkin and tapped at the corners of his lips in mock satiety. Had he the ability to belch at will he might have fired off the better part of a twenty-one-gun salute in Miss Simmons’s direction. He patted his stomach in a round, broad dumbshow of yum-yum satisfaction. Miming full holiday dinners, a kind of exhaustion, a vow not to eat again for a week, to forgo feasts forever. With his faked belly applause and silent, phony tongue-in-tooth, chewy exaggeration, it was almost as if he were congratulating himself. He was conscious that his forearm was still hooked under the arm of his wheelchair, that he might even have appeared defiant the way he held on to his balance for dear life, protecting himself from all comers like a kid playing king-of- the-hill. He might almost have seemed to have been challenging someone to break his hold, to see if they could tip him over. It seemed an odd thought for an old fellow with an S.O.S. amulet under his shirt, around his neck. “I know you wouldn’t think it to look at me,” he told Miss Simmons, “but I actually used to be fairly athletic I won’t even say when I was a kid but back before I was stricken, while I was still a professor even, almost up until the time it might have begun to appear maybe a little unseemly for somebody my age to be scrambling around doing the run, jump, hit, and throw with fellows ten years younger than himself, almost as if he was trying to recapture his lost youth or something. That wasn’t the way of it,” he said. “I wasn’t even particularly competitive. Except in table tennis. I was good at table tennis. Oh, I wasn’t one of those guys who stand twenty feet back from the table, I’m not saying that, but I had a relatively exceptional slam. That’s why I preferred sandpaper over rubber paddles. To my way of thinking, a rubber paddle was for putting spin and English on the ball, to deceive your opponent to death, to turn Ping-Pong into a game of chess. For me it was always a physical, aggressive sport. With sandpaper you could hear all the bang-bang and take-that that the game was designed for. Whenever my opponents took up a rubber paddle I pretty much knew what I was in for— defense and stinking strategy. Some joker who’d just pretty much just stand there and let me wear myself out. I loved playing with the punchers and always pretty much resented the little judo and ju-jitsu guys who nickeled-and-dimed me and in the end usually beat my brains out. You think that’s odd in a fellow trained in the art of political geography? It probably is, but probably it was my way of letting off steam, of that final, futile satisfaction one must feel after he’s dropped the big one.

“It was pretty much the same when I played softball,” Schiff said. “I was a fairly lousy first baseman, but not a bad hitter. Good hit, no field. Story of my life. And you’ll have to take my word for this— Hell, I have to take my word for it, because seeing how I am now it’s pretty difficult to believe, but I was actually something of a diver back in high school. My specialty was a double somersault off the high board, though I have to admit I always lost a few points for my angle of entry when I hit the water. If you were anywhere near the pool you probably still feel the splash, and …”

Hearing himself, his flagrant boasting, Schiff quite suddenly paused, broke off. “Well,” he said a few seconds later, “you get the idea. I knew him, Horatio. I’m sorry,” he said, “I don’t know why I take on like this. Possibly to keep you from noticing the salad dressing on my pants.”

“Oh, those stains come right out. They’re nothing to worry about,” Miss Simmons said.

“No, I’m not worried,” Schiff said.

“I’m like that, too,” Miss Simmons said, “I think everyone is. It’s a nuisance when you get all dressed up, then spill something on yourself.”

“Good hit, no field.”

“That’s right,” Jenny Simmons said.

Schiff was thanking his lucky stars he’d had enough sense not to loosen his grip on the arm of his chair, fall forward and kiss her — presence of mind, he thought, regarding the terrible disorder throughout his house, the joke decorations that had come undone and fallen, draped now in waves of construction paper over his sideboard, his dining-room table, over the Oriental rug in his entrance hall like a comic treasure map, casting an eye on the abandoned picnic table that was his living-room floor, the uneaten plates of food, the crushed cocktail napkins working their capillary action on the liquory dregs and stubbed, cold cigarettes at the bottoms of the plastic glasses of booze, abandoned, displaced sofa cushions, on the carpet, against the living-room walls; presence of mind when all about you are losing theirs— when he became conscious of the buzz and grind of his Stair-Glide. Unmistakably — from where he sat he could not see this, merely heard their joyous squeals as they went up his stairs — people were riding his chair, Ms. Kohm directing them like someone working a ride in an amusement park, the Ferris wheel, say, the carousel.

“All right, Bautz, you’ve had your turn. Get off and let Miss Carter have a ride.”

“Aw, come on, Molly, one more time. Please?”

“No, it’s Carter’s turn. Then Tysver, Miss Freistadt next, then Wilkins, Dickerson, Lipsey, Miss Moffett, and Disch.”

“I don’t see why she gets to have all the say-so.”

“What are you complaining about? You’re next. I don’t get to go until last.”

“Disch, you’re such a baby!”

“I’m not a baby. I was here putting up the decorations hours before anyone else even showed up.”

“Oh, yeah, hours,” Dickerson said.

“Well, I was.”

“Big fucking federal deal,” Dickerson said.

“Yeah,” Tysver said.

“If you want,” Miss Freistadt said, “you can ride up with me. You can sit on my lap.”

“Really?”

“Would I tease a baby?”

“Hey!” Schiff called. “Hey!” He turned to Miss Simmons. “Are they really using my Stair-Glide, you think?”

“Gee, I don’t know. Shall I go see?”

“Go see,” Schiff said.

In seconds she was back. A trip that would have taken him five minutes at least, he couldn’t help thinking. If he was even up to it.

“They are,” she said.

“Hey,” called Schiff. “Hey now.”

There was hysterical squealing, shouting, a terrible clamor of drunken, almost falsetto rivalry. Schiff would recall crying out at them to cut the foofaraw, using this word which he’d not only never used before but which he couldn’t remember having ever even heard. Remembering, moreover, that he called it out not once but three times. Like some magic cockcrow in legend. Angered now, crying, “Cut out that foofaraw! Knock off the foofaraw! Enough with this foofaraw!” Thrice denying them foofaraw, forbidding them foofaraw within his house, as if to say, not in this household you don’t, or, take that outside where it belongs, or proclaiming that the neighborhood wasn’t zoned for foofaraw. But overruled. At the very least ignored. Almost, so unmindful of him were they, cut.

Close to tears now he was, the rage of his helplessness. As if they didn’t understand him or, worse yet, as if they did, some nice question of choice here, equating the hick, obsolete word with the hick, obsolete professor. Their continued laughter and cackle not merely an unmindfulness of his sovereignty here, but of his simple (simple, hah!), physical (physical, hah!) presence, an absolute refutation of his existence, an argument against his claims and rights as a landlord. The inmates were in control of the asylum. The students were calling the shots, making the assignments, handing out the grades. Now he was scared, beside himself.

“He is, he is on her lap!”

“How is that, Disch? You like that?”

“May I ride with Dickerson, Ms. Kohm?”

“Little Miss Moffett.”

“Sat on Dickerson’s tuffet.”

Their voices were like noises made in free-fall, a glimpse of the abyss from the apogee at the lip of a thrill ride. Then, suddenly, abruptly, their brassy shrillness ceased— all their odd, excited, asexual soprano. Displaced by a screech. Something mechanical. A sick, scraping sound. Something unoiled and harsh. To Schiff’s ears, perfectly pitched for the noises of stuck, soiled machinery, stalled, soured works.

“Take me in there,” he commanded Miss Simmons. “Bring me, take me. Hurry, I have to see! My wheelchair. Damn,” he said, “the brakes are locked. Wait, I’ll unlock them. Shit,” he said, “my feet aren’t on the footrests. Wait, no, those swing into place. No, the whole whoosis swings over. Right. Yeah. Listen, can you lift up my legs? There. Thanks. There. Hey, thank you. Thanks. Push me into the hall.

“Hey,” he called in the hall, “what’s going on?” But he could see what was going on. His Stair-Glide was stuck, on the blink. Engaging the buttons on its arms, Dickerson could not get it to move. All ten of his students were arranged on the stairway. Frozen in his stare, they seemed like deer startled by headlights on the highway, like folks caught confused in a burning building, not knowing which way to turn in the fire, whether to try to make it to the top of the stairs where it wasn’t yet burning, or to plunge through the fire toward the door. Indeed, some seemed headed in one direction, others in another. Ms. Kohm had somehow been stripped of her powers. Schiff, to judge from the way they looked at him, at least temporarily restored to his. Yet he wasn’t sure he wasn’t mistaken about this. Many of them could have been hiding their real attitudes toward him under what might have been smirks behind the hands they held in front of their mouths. Smirks, or fear, or outright laughter.

Clearly they were still under the influence, had not yet come down. Schiff couldn’t understand the cause of their intoxication. He was certain they hadn’t imbibed that much liquor. Unless, again, strangely, he was somehow the cause, his freedom about himself somehow contributing to their vandalism of him.

“What happens now,” he demanded, “what happens now? Am I supposed to sleep on the couch, or what? Look what you’ve done. You’ve busted my Stair-Glide. How do I get upstairs? How do I get upstairs now?”

“That’s nothing to worry about,” Miss Carter explained. “There are ten of us here, eleven counting that one.” She pointed to Miss Simmons. “If worse comes to worse, we could always carry you.”

“That’s right,” a cry went up, “let’s carry him.”

“You get his feet, Lipsey,” instructed Molly Kohm. “Tysver and Wilkins can hold him under the arms.”

“No,” said Miss Freistadt, “that won’t work. This stairway’s too narrow, the chair and the track are in the way. I’m smaller, I’ll get one side. You look strong,” she said to Miss Simmons, “can you take him under the other?”

“I guess,” said Miss Simmons.

“No sweat then, Disch said. “Let’s get him up out of his wheelchair.”

Now they started down the stairs toward him.

“Wait!” Schift shouted. “Not so fast! What about all that food on my floor? No one leaves until it’s all cleaned up. I don’t have a wife now. I’m crippled. How do you expect me to get that crap up? I warned Ms. Kohm about this. I couldn’t clean up after the party, I said. I did, didn’t I? My condition, I said. I asked her what about afterwards, and she specifically said I wouldn’t have to lift a finger, that she wouldn’t even let me, that you’d empty the ashtrays, that you’d vacuum the rugs. It wasn’t even a committee thing, she said, you’d all straighten up, everyone would pitch in, do their fair share. You promised, Ms. Kohm.

“Well, what about it, Ms. Kohm? Those ashtrays are full. Most places these days, they don’t even let you smoke. It wasn’t all that long ago the only place they might not permit you to light up was the main branch of the public library. You could puff away everywhere— health-food stores, City Hall, any part of the cabin after the No Smoking sign was turned off. Even in your doctor’s waiting room, for Christ’s sake! Not now, not today. Most places are off-limits. Entire cities, complete countries. I gave you the whole house, and what do I see? Ashtrays spilling over!

“And as far as the carpet’s concerned, incidentally, it would be swell if you vacuumed, but let’s get real here. I’d be satisfied if you picked most of the salad up off the floor, the onions and cucumbers, the zucchini, the loose lettuce and tomatoes. If you got up some of the raisins. There’s a broom in the closet off of the kitchen should God or good conscience lead you to see the light.”

But they weren’t listening, they seemed to be bickering, arguing amongst themselves on the stairway. Their voices were raised, some were actually shouting. Indeed, it seemed to Schiff to be the end of the PGPC as we know it. He was more than a little alarmed for his stairway, his rail and balusters. Ten people were on the eight steps.

“It’s not an entrance to a museum,” he explained to Miss Simmons. “It’s only a fairly modest home in a nice, middle- class neighborhood. It’s not the summer palace, that ain’t the grand staircase.”

“They’ll calm down,” Miss Simmons said.

“Is that banister swaying, you think?”

But they had calmed down, their argument, if that’s what it was, now declined to a simple discussion. Schiff, his own rage building, could even make out what some of them were saying. Moffett, Dickerson, Carter, and Tysver knew of other parties that might still be going on. Wilkins and Bautz wanted to go dancing. It was six of one, half a dozen of the other to Disch and Freistadt, to Kohm and Lipsey. Whatever the rest of them decided, they said.

“Oh no,” Schiff exploded, “oh no you don’t!”

They looked down, startled.

“Nobody move! Stay right where you are!” he ordered.

They stared at him, taking in his outburst, it seemed to Schiff, with something of a mild, patronizing amusement. Oh, he thought, I tickle you, do I? Well, he thought, I may be down, but I ain’t out. Who’s the political geographer here, anyway? he thought. And, gathering himself where he sat in the wheelchair, sized up the situation on his jammed, peninsulary stairway.

Four wanted to go to parties. But from what he could make out, they were different parties. At least two, possibly three. Counting his own, the party they were already at, there might conceivably be four. Bautz and Wilkins wanted to go dancing. Taking the most conservative view of it (four people choosing between two different parties, two individuals who preferred to go dancing) meant there were six people holding positions on three options. Disch, Freistadt, Kohm, and Lipsey were undecided, which meant that all that was needed to capture the swing vote was just two of these.

Schiff thought carefully.

Not fifteen minutes before, Ms. Kohm had been in clear, unchallenged charge. She’d assigned them turns on his Stair-Glide, had granted permission to various students to ride Schiff’s chair while various other students sat on their laps. If she’d lost command, it was to the situation she’d surrendered it, the breakdown of Schiff’s Stair-Glide. To the general panic and disarray that followed in the wake of that event, the terrifying, momentary, anarchic tableau they made on his stairway. No one had moved to take her place. Indeed, all that had happened was that various new alternatives had been proposed. It was entirely possible the group still didn’t know it was leaderless.

Schiff, the crippled but wily political geographer, knew what he had to do.

He addressed Ms. Kohm as if it were status quo ante.

“I’m sorry, Molly,” Schiff said calmly, choosing his words carefully, “but this is where I put my foot down. I have to pull rank on you, I’m afraid. First off, I don’t trust that stairway. Second, you’ve broken my Stair-Glide.” (Molly, he chose. My Stair-Glide. Two I’ms, three Is, he chose.)

“Come down from it now, please. One at a time. Calmly, calmly. No need to panic. That’s right, that’s right. As a matter of fact, you might even try to pick it up a little. All right,” he said when most were down off the stairway and bunched about his wheelchair in the hall. “Well, Molly,” he chose, “if you get your people to do the salad and pasta, I’d no longer have any reason to hold all your grades hostage to fortune,” he chose.

Molly Kohm shrugged as if the game were up. Low man on the stairway, she came down a step and into Schiff’s hall. “Come on you guys,” she said to the other students as Schiff turned his head and beamed up at Miss Simmons. The rest dutifully followed. They went with her into the living room. Without bothering about anyone else’s, she found the paper plate she’d been eating off, leaned down, scooped it up, and walked with it past Schiff toward his kitchen. Apparently she hadn’t noticed the cherry tomatoes that rolled off the plate when she stooped to scoop it up.

Meanwhile her classmates, only a litle more ambitious than their leader, stumbled through Schiff’s living room, grabbing up handfuls of lettuce and clumps of pasta, picking over Schiff’s rug like drunken field hands.

“Fuck this,” Disch said, took his jacket, still wet from the rain, up off the dining-room table where he’d left it when he’d come in, shrugged into it, and walked out the door.

“Yeah,” said Lipsey, “fuck this all right,” and followed Disch out.

“Invited to a party,” mumbled Miss Freistadt, “don’t have to take this shit,” and she left too.

He’d lost three of the undecideds.

“Hey, what about me,” asked worried Schiff, trying to stanch the flow, “how am I supposed to get up those stairs?”

“Hold it!” Ms. Kohm boomed. “Hold it, he’s right!” Schiff looked gratefully up at her. “Somebody get that pail!”

“The pail, the pail! It was as if her priorities lagged three or so beats behind Schiff’s own. Or no. Had leapfrogged his priorities altogether. Hopscotched them. Or no. Were on an entirely different plane. Or no. Were not priorities any longer at all. Not priorities, not even choices. Neither picks nor preferences. Completely off any even platonic idea of a ballot and, now in the hands of his lone remaining undecided, catapulted into the range of fitful caprice. So she’d called for her bucket. Next it might be for her fiddlers three.

“I’ll get it for you, Ms. Kohm,” said Miss Carter.

“Push me, push me,” he snapped in Miss Simmons’s direction. Lazily, she wheeled his chair in and out of the first-floor rooms. “No no,” he said, “after Miss Carter. She’s gone into the kitchen.”

She had. She was standing beside Ms. Kohm, to whom she had handed her pail, at the sink. Where she was emptying the remains of the salad. Pouring salad into the sink from the pail. Mindful of her fingers, pushing salad carefully into the sink, down into the rubberized maw of the garbage Disposall. Force-feeding the garbage Disposall. Taking leftover pasta and salad from the paper plates handed on to her in a sort of crazy bucket brigade by a chain of migrant student workers and adding these scraps into the now unwilling, refractory machine, grinding and grinding down, growling and choking, coughing up lettuce, spitting zucchini over mounds of red, regurgitant pasta.

“Please stop, it’s breaking,” requested Schiff. “Please?” he offered. “No, really,” he said, “it’s all right. You don’t have to bother, I’ll get it. She won’t stop,” Schiff complained to Miss Simmons.

“Those other guys were right,” said Miss Simmons. “Fuck this,” she said, and she walked out on him, too.

“All right,” spoke Schiff from his now pusherless chair, hoping to catch someone’s attention, “see what you’ve done? Miss Simmons is gone. The strong-looking one walked out. See what you’ve done? Who’ll get me upstairs? How will I manage? What’s going to happen to me?” he appealed to them. And where, he wondered, did his own intoxication come from? Why, from woe, he thought. Woe was its source, and he was as helpless to stanch it as he’d been to keep Lipsey and the others from leaving. Helplessly he continued to ask his rhetorical questions. “Why do bad things happen to good people? Or vice versa?” he asked. “If one knew going in that this was how a pretty fair country Ping-Pong player was going to end up, would one even have bothered? What are the odds, would you say, of my ever getting your respect back after putting you through an evening like this? All right,” he said, addressing Ms. Kohm, “I’ve got one for you. If Claire’s not in Seattle, where is she you think?”

But Ms. Kohm was still at her blind ablutions, bent over the kitchen sink, her arms plunged into the extaordinary pile of salad, lifting strands of it toward her face and examining them as if there were something inherent in the salad itself that prevented the Disposall from handling it. “Nope,” she pronounced, “she won’t go down. Say,” she said, turning to Schiff, “what are we thinking of here anyway? This stuff is still fresh, You could live off it for a week. Let’s get it into the fridge.” No one but Schiff seemed to be listening to her, though, so she set an example. She took up an armful of the stuff and started with it toward the refrigerator. “Someone get that door for me, will you,” she said, “my arms are full.”

“No, really,” Schiff said, “you don’t have to bother. Not on my account. Tomorrow I’m making these arrangements with Meals-on-Wheels.”

But by this time she’d managed to work the door open. Unceremoniously, she dumped her green burden onto a shelf in Schiff’s refrigerator. “There,” said Ms. Kohm, “it’s on one of the lower shelves. See, I’ve made it handicap accessible for you.”

“Right,” said Schiff. “You’re in compliance. Now I won’t have to take you to court.”

And idly wondered not only why he hadn’t thrown them out of his house, but why he hadn’t called the cops, why even now, abandoned in the dead center of his kitchen as the others began to drift back into his living and dining rooms, into his hall, back up onto his stairway, which they’d taken over, had gravitated toward like some playground for the able-bodied, in the wheelchair he hadn’t strength enough to guide, or move by himself, so that he had begun to think of it as of a riderless horse on some sad state occasion, and of himself as a witness to his own lugubrious funeral, why even now, terrified as he was, as frightened (not of them, not of his students, who wouldn’t harm him, who wouldn’t throw him down the stairs, but had only meant to ride out the storm of his mad display, and who were still high, it could be, on sheer proximity, not, as he’d first thought, on something reprieved in him, in his life, on something, well, matriculate in the stepping-stone progression of his—their— curricula-loaded being, close, pledged as they were, to vocation, calling, some academic plane of the almost religious, some devoted, tenure-sustained existence of the pleasantly civilized, of books and ideas, redeemed from their monasticism and lifted into a realm of sheer pure reward and perk and blessing, the goodish furniture, the respectable house, the solid neighborhood, but to its opposite; knocked for more of a loop by the debit side of his ledger: his physical deficits, all the more visible in the privacy of that respectable house in the solid neighborhood on the goodish furniture, most of which he couldn’t even use, than ever they were in mere public; by his not-only-absent, but positively run-off, whereabouts-unknown wife, fleeing him, could be, for all she was worth) of the long-term exigencies as he was of the short, tipsy on woe, fuddled on fear, why even now he couldn’t bring himself to urge them to leave, signaling the end of the evening with all the politically correct semaphores available to an internationally wised-up guy like himself, all the recognized, honored peremptories, a stretch, a yawn, an extension of arms, of reversed, interlocked fingers. Though he knew why, of course, understood that it was because he did not want to be left alone, was willing to accept on behalf of his house all the risks that letting them stay in it for even a little while exposed it to. Those risks, he understood, which were only the cost of doing business. (Which was why, he supposed, cumulatively, belatedly, he felt so abandoned now that Lipsey, Freistadt, Simmons, and Disch had ditched him.) It was his funeral. Where was everybody?

“Hey? Hey? Hey?” he called, taking the roll. “Hey!” he yelled, calling the class to attention as they dribbled back in.

(All, all of them pie-eyed on woe’s potent, astronomical proof, sozzled on the neat punch of grief.)

“Listen,” Schiff said, “maybe you’re right. Maybe it ain’t such a hot idea to take me upstairs. What with the Stair- Glide out and all. I mean, suppose there’s a fire? You people smoked up a storm. I mean, look at those ashtrays. God only knows what could still be burning, smoldering in there, what might even yet only be waiting on oxygen, drafts, sparks, the rain to subside, whatever it takes for conditions to ripen, ignition, combustion, the balloon to go up. Maybe if you just stretched me out down here on the couch. On the other hand, if there were a fire, why, down here’s where it’d probably start, wouldn’t it? Oh, I don’t know, when you get to be my age, when you have to live the way I have to live, why, it’s sixteen of one, thirty-seven of the other, isn’t it?

“Well, just listen to me. Is this what I sound like? Do I always come on with all this self-pity? Talk about party poopers. And the irony is, it’s my own party I’m pooping. I’m worn out and old. What do you expect? Hey, there I go again. Listen, I’m sorry. Maybe I’m overtired, maybe that’s why I’m so cranky. Give me the benefit of the doubt, will you?

“I know,” he said. “While we still have the numbers. Let’s go back to plan A. Take me upstairs? Put me to bed?”

So a few of them gradually came forward. Little Miss Moffett. Tysver. Mr. Dickerson. Mr. Bautz. Only Kohm and Wilkins hung back.

But he didn’t like the way they were handling him. They started to pull him from his wheelchair but, inexpert as friends enlisted to help move another friend into a new apartment, had no clear idea of what they were doing. They jostled his old ass. Miss Moffett, who held him under his left arm, was way too small. She was only getting in Mr. Tysver’s way. No one was supporting him at the middle and, since they were too close to each other to begin with, part of his body tended to bump along the ground rather like a rolled-up carpet, say, new, tied-up and still in its paper, that was being carried from one point to another.

He was almost too alarmed to complain, but managed, despite a sort of vertiginous fright, to get out a warning. “No,” he said, “this ain’t going to happen.”

“He’s right,” said Ms. Kohm, who had apparently been studying the situation. “Get him back into his wheelchair.”

Which might not, he was thinking, be such a hot suggestion because it would involve a sort of customized fitting, a proper folding and, at the same time, working him into an upright position, rather, he supposed, like maneuvering one of those heavy dummies they use to test-crash automobiles, into the driver’s seat. He shut his eyes. Perhaps they were better at erasing mistakes than at making them. In any event, he was back in the chair in no time at all.

“Now wheel him into the hallway,” Ms. Kohm said. “What’s the point of trying to carry him there? This is the kitchen. The stairs are in the hall. What could you have been thinking of?”

Was this a political geographer, Schiff thought, or was this a political geographer? Remind me, he thought, to give her an A in this course.

In the hall, Ms. Kohm took over.

She dismissed big Tysver, little Miss Moffett. “Too many cooks spoil the brew,” she said. “All right,” she said, “Kohm in for Moffett, Dickerson in for Tysver. Wilkins in for Bautz at the feet. Can you get out of that wheelchair by yourself?” she asked him.

“Sure,” Schiff said. “If it’s locked, if the footrests are out of the way, if I push myself up on its arms.”

“Go on,” she said, “do it. Dickerson and I will be at your side ready to grab you. Wilkins will take your feet.”

He had his misgivings, of course, but then recalled Ms. Kohm’s flexed thighs when he’d looked up her dress as she’d crouched before him that evening and, rising, gave himself over to the group like some kid with Outward Bound on a confidence course. And was correct in his instincts. Effortlessly, it seemed, they started to carry him up the stairs. Tysver followed with his walker. “I used to be quite athletic myself,” he told them mindlessly. They didn’t bother to answer. They had work to do, proceeding to do it with all the silent efficiency of kidnappers, bank robbers.

Then, to himself, chastised himself for what must surely have seemed to them such a silly, pointless remark. And, flinching, cursed his life, his rotten fate, as they took him the rest of the way up the stairs.

Perhaps, he thought, this was the fate of a gasbag, a punishment for being an academic, for daring to undertake any analysis of the world, for not taking it, that is, for granted, but always to be looking for reasons behind the great gift horse that was life; though he didn’t truly believe this, believed deep down that pain was reason enough, its own excuse for being, that anything complicated as the machinery of existence had already built into it the flaws of its own annihilation. There was something redundant about the routine responses to pain, something tchotchkying up disaster, rather like calling in all those FAA inspectors to start their investigations after some big jet had gone down, hundreds dead, dozens unaccounted for. Why, it was simple, really, when all you needed to understand in the first place was that it was an airplane.

It occurred to him that this might be a message worthy to leave on the answering machine he had put on his wish list. Though, really, he thought, he didn’t have much of a wish list left. Just, he supposed, that his plane hadn’t gone down.

They were in his bedroom.

They laid him down on his bed.

“Phew,” said Miss Moffett, “what’s that smell?” Schiff had forgotten about the nightstand, the carafe of his pee. He shut his smarting eyes. “Wherever can it be coming from?” she said. “Oh,” she said.

Crazily, he was glad Miss Simmons wasn’t here to witness this final humiliation. Even as he acknowledged the terrible casualties he’d sustained this evening, his tremendous loss, practically Oriental in its proportions, of face, he leaned on this frail, single plus — that there was someone who’d been there that evening who’d probably never know the full extent of his tumbled circumstances. Disch, Lipsey, and Freistadt he wrote off. They would be filled in soon enough by the others. (He could just imagine their version, the portrait they would serve up of him. “He lives like a farm animal. Really. Like a farm animal. Like something you could wring cheeses from, or whose fats are industrially rendered, or that you raise for its by-products, its stinking, organic mulch, the ripe, rife salvage of its bones and grease, its hair and hooves, the crap that goes in the cold cuts. All right, he’s a cripple. But not a very self-respecting one. Anyway, there are cripples and there are cripples, You should see where he lives. Or, no, where he keeps himself. Neither lair nor burrow, nor stall nor den, neither quite nest nor coop nor sty, though something of all of these. But off the beaten path, secret, out of the way, like those places beasts slink off to to die. Brr, it was creepy.”) But Miss Simmons, a stranger to them, was outside the orbit of their gossip. It was amazing, Schiff thought, the fig leaves one could, in extremis, pull about oneself for warmth and modesty. Like drawing a curtain between two beds in a hospital room and emptying one’s bowels into the bedpan, grunts, farts and all, separated not only from the party in the next bed, but from all his visitors as well. We live, he thought, by the frail myth of boundary.

And was sustained, however flimsily, by just this sense of things as Ms. Kohm and the others, good neighbors now rather than guests, went about straightening his room, offering to change his sheets, to crack a window a few inches to let in a bit of air. Even little Miss Moffett, who without a word, now that she knew the source of the at-once sharp yet faintly sour ammoniac odor in the room, could see its dark, caramel-yellow reasons beneath its loosed lid, took up the urinal and emptied it in the toilet, rinsed it under the tap, brought it back to the room and returned it (smelling fresh now, even lightly, pleasantly scented, as though she’d washed it out, scrubbed it with cleanser) to the nightstand by his bed. No more put off by his sick man’s foul ways than she might have been by her own child’s sullied diapers. But of course, Schiff thought, they lived in the age of Candy Stripers, nurse’s aides, sponge bathers, administers of enemas, handlers of bedpans, masseuses of the comatose, volunteers at just about anyone’s bedside, heroines of vicious diseases, broken in by AIDS patients, for whom the body and its poisons were just more brittle frontier. Fallen flesh meant nothing to them, nothing. (Just try to pinch one though, or steal a kiss. Cops would be brought in. Calling all cars, calling all cars.)

So they hovered, flitted about him, the alcoholic levels in their blood probably no lower now than they’d been at the height of their games on his stairway, or spreading out their picnic on his living-room floor. Whistling, giggling while they worked. Playing a sort of house with him now, a kind of family, even Bautz and Tysver, even Wilkins and Dickerson, the special care they took of him maybe even a game of deathbed, making sure as they fluffed up his pillows and smoothed down his sheets to keep their voices low, addressing each other in exaggerated whispers, cautious high sign. Two or three of them actually tiptoeing, so that, despite himself, he found he could not keep his eyes open, was succumbing to the lullaby of their oddly soothing movements.

He must actually have dozed, for when he opened his eyes again everyone but Ms. Kohm was gone from his room. Only the lamp beside his bed was on.

Molly Kohm was sitting sidesaddle on his bed at about the level of his chest, her hip just pressing comfortably against his arm.

“Shh,” she said, “hush,” though he had uttered no sound. “I just wanted to thank you for the lovely evening.”

“You’re welcome. No problem,” Schiff said hoarsely.

“Shh,” she said. “No, really,” she said, “thanks very much.”

“Hey,” Schiff said, wondering if he dare lift a finger, “I didn’t lift a finger. It was all the PGPC’s doing.”

“The PGPC is dissolved now,” she said. “They say that once the Macy’s Day or Rose Bowl parade is over, the people who put it together are back at it again the very next morning, preparing for next year. Don’t you believe it.”

“I don’t,” Schiff said. “I never did.”

“Well,” she said, “are you going to be all right?”

“Oh, sure,”he said.

“Your wife never called?”

“No,” he said.

“I don’t know where she is. She could be in Seattle. She could be anywhere.”

He was gathering courage, putting together a sort of schoolkiďs nerve he hadn’t used in years. All that stuff yesterday about Miss Simmons had been wishful thinking, pure pipe dream, idle fantasy. At no time had she perched on the edge of his bed, been this close to him, her haunch brushing his arm, mere inches from his hand, his cupped palm. Yes, Schiff thought, I’m going to touch her. I’m going to reach over and hold her.

And was just shifting his weight when he heard a great, joined barrage of laughter from downstairs. His students. He thought they’d left. Had even taken this into account before he’d decided to make his move. And not only that, but what’s more, had even believed that their departure — he could picture them, their fingers at their lips, shushing each other, up on point, on tiptoe again, in exaggerate, conspired, sneak-thief pantomine — may even have been a sort of deliberate ante-upping, building the story, the Disch, Lipsey, Freistadt version, leaving Ms. Kohm alone with him on his bed as though making off with the metaphorical silver. So, already enlisted in the farce, caught up in it, he was doubly disappointed, once for his ruined moves, once more for the shortfall of legend.

He heard their wild laughter again, helpless as a fit of coughing.

“What’s that?” he asked her. “What are they up to?”

“They’re young,” Ms. Kohm said, rising, “they’re having fun. Weren’t you ever young?”

“Sure,” Schiff said. “I was young. I think I was young.”

“Well there you are.”

“They sound drunk. They sound out of control.”

“What are you worried about?”

“Jesus,” he said, “they already broke the damn Stair- Glide. There’s every kind of pasta, oil-and-vinegar, spilled wine, and lettuce stain you can think of on my carpets and furniture. The Disposall’s stopped up like a toilet, and you tell me the PGPC is shut down for the duration. What do you mean what am I worried about?”

“All right,” said Ms. Kohm.

“All right? All right? My Stair-Glide is busted! Look around you, this bedroom, the other rooms on this floor— these are my borders, lady, this is my political geography!”

“Take it easy,” she said. “Do you want to have a stroke? That’s just the way people bring them on. You don’t want to have a stroke, do you?”

“No,” Schiff said, “I don’t want to have a stroke.”

“Because I didn’t realize you were so upset. No. Say no more about it. I can take a hit. All of us can. We’ll just clear out.”

“You can take a hit?”

“What?”

“You said you can take a hit.”

“No I didn’t. Did I? I meant a hint. I can take a hint. Did I really say hit? Well, no matter. Ta,” she said. “Ta ta.” She blew her professor a kiss from the doorway.

He heard her going downstairs, heard her roust the rest of the students. So they still had a leader, a spaced-out one, but a leader.

He heard them leave, in a few moments heard their two or three cars start up, heard them drive off.

What he hadn’t heard, he suddenly realized, was the door close behind them. And sure enough, in just about the time it takes weather to travel from a door left open on the first floor, up the stairs, and into a fellow’s bedroom, he felt a draft.

But it would be all right. He knew what he could do, and reached inside his shirt and felt for his pendant, his magical S.O.S. jewelry, found its special, emergency button, and pressed it.

While he was waiting, it occurred to him that once they got here he could offer them fifty dollars or so and ask if, so long as they were already there, would they mind straightening up for him downstairs?

In the distance he heard a siren. It mightn’t be for him, of course. It was a weekend night, there were plenty of emergencies to go around.

And then it came to him, the message he’d have put on that answering machine. “You have reached 727-4312,” he would have said. “I can’t come to the phone right now. I’ve fallen.”