What Was Mine

WINDY DAY AT THE RESERVOIR

1

Fran figured out that the key worked when it was inserted upside down — all the Brunettis had mentioned in the note was that the key had to be turned counterclockwise to open the door.

Chap groped along the wall for the light switch, found it, and said, “There!” triumphantly. On wooden pegs hung above the switch were the family’s ski-lift passes: Lou Brunetti, smiling the same way he smiled in his passport picture; Pia, poker-faced, self-consciously touching the ends of her hair; Anthony, cherubic and bemused, no doubt thinking: What is the family into now? Another world that his father intended to master, with books about organic gardening and expensive skis to allow people to streak through the snow.

This would have been a bit much to notice simply from looking at the picture of Anthony, but Chap had seen some of the letters Anthony wrote Fran, who had once been his first-grade teacher. She was a hero to the Brunetti family because she had put them in touch with the doctor who prescribed Ritalin for Anthony. By the time he had taken the drug for a month he had made friends. Dishes no longer toppled from the table. He began to finger-paint with great concentration. That winter, Fran had invited the Brunettis to dinner. The Brunettis had reciprocated by having them over for sweet wine, homemade biscotti, and a slide show of Capri, where they had often vacationed before they emigrated to the States at Lou’s insistence. Fran had given them Mastering the Art of French Cooking. They had given Fran and Chap a print of the Trevi Fountain, taken from an old book, with so many birds circling the gushing water it seemed a cartoon caption should be underneath. In late summer, they had gone to the visiting carnival together. Fran had recommended her dermatologist when Anthony’s doctor was mystified by a rash behind his knees. Pia had sewn Fran’s niece’s wedding dress. When the Brunettis moved away to Vermont, Fran and Chap put on a brave front and helped pack their dishes. There was much amusement when they gave the Brunettis a bottle of champagne to open in their new home, and the Brunettis gave them a farewell present, too: a kind of Amaretto liqueur impossible to buy in the States. The women were teary, and the men shook hands, squeezing with extra pressure. Then they were gone, and after a year or so they wrote more often than they called. There was a May rendezvous in Boston, at a restaurant in the North End, when Anthony sat briefly on Fran’s leg even though he otherwise took pride in being a big boy, and talked excitedly to Chap about computers. At the end of the evening, though, in their own car, Fran and Chap agreed that the Brunettis seemed much more restrained — not with them so much as with one another. Fran wondered whether Pia resented the move. Chap thought a sort of rigidity had set in with Lou: would he ever before have had such strong opinions on regional politics? He had actually banged the table, reminding Fran of the way Anthony behaved when she first met him. Lou had spoken to the waitress in Italian, tapping the bread and sending it back because the crust was not crisp. Pia, much to Fran and Chap’s astonishment, ordered a martini instead of mineral water before dinner. In the ladies’ room, Pia confided to Fran that Lou had been urging her to see a fertility doctor because she had had trouble conceiving. She was having trouble, she told Fran, because she was taking birth control pills. Her husband was almost forty-six; she could not imagine why he would want to have more children. Alone at the table with Lou, when Anthony was invited into the kitchen to meet the chef, Chap had learned nothing more than that the natives of Vermont blamed the governor for the mosquito problem. Before they parted, it was agreed that for their vacation, Fran and Chap would house-sit for the Brunettis, who would be gone in July, visiting a cousin in Atlanta, then continuing to New York City, where at the end of a weekend they would board a cruise to nowhere. “What if the ship doesn’t ever leave port but the people on it all disappear instead?” Anthony had said. His father had chuckled, as Pia frowned with real concern.

Several days later, the key to the Brunettis’ house arrived in an envelope in the mail, Scotch-taped to the back of a postcard of cows in a field. “Maybe they know they preside over Heaven on Earth!” Lou had written underneath the information printed at the top: that there were 450,000 cows in Vermont. Pia’s note was warm, thanking them several times for picking up the dinner check. Warmer than she had been in person, Fran said sadly, handing the note to Chap. In the note, Pia told them how to open the door, what to do if the sump pump did not come on during a hard rain, and the peculiarities of one burner on the gas stove. There was a P.S., telling them that mosquitoes bit more when the body was warm. After a dip in the stream behind the house, Pia said, they could sit on the banks for twenty minutes or half an hour without being bitten.

When they began to walk around the house, sensing the shape of lamps and fumbling for buttons or switches to turn them on, they noticed, immediately, that the Brunettis had become collectors: of wooden decoys, hand-tinted photographs, glass insulators, silver candlesticks. It was a big house, but so low-ceilinged it felt constricting, in spite of the four-over-four windows that came almost to the floor. For a while, disoriented, they noticed small things; the house had been added on to so many times, the configuration of rooms was impossible to predict. The long span of shelves in the living room sagged from age, not from the weight of books. Lou’s architecture books, many of them oversized, were lined up on the bottom shelves, but the rest of the shelves held only a few paperbacks. As they toured the living room, they found pepper shakers from the fifties: Scottie dogs and pirouetting ballerinas whose craniums poured salt and pepper; seven box cameras in a row; at least a dozen unpaired ladies’ shoes, fancy high heels from the forties; hair combs displayed standing upright in shallow bowls filled with sand; Roseville vases; replicas of the Eiffel Tower. The Italian landscapes both of them had always admired were there, clustered now in the hallway that led to the kitchen instead of interspersed throughout the house. Mastering the Art of French Cooking was in the kitchen, but Fran could see no other cookbooks; it looked as if the book had been put in the bookstand and placed in the center of the counter so Fran wouldn’t miss seeing it. More decoys were clustered at the far end of the counter. On the refrigerator, another picture of the intense Anthony stared them in the eye. There was a postcard of the evangelist Matthew (Fran took it off the freezer door and turned it over; it was from a museum in Germany), and several photographs, slightly overlapping, of what was probably the Brunettis’ garden: phlox, gladiolas, columbine, twiggy lilacs.

Chap turned on the faucet, filled a coffee mug with water, and glugged it down. He turned the mug upside down and put it in the dish drainer. It was what he did at home — just upended a glass or mug as if he hadn’t drunk from it. Fran bit her tongue and turned back toward the refrigerator. There was a picture of an elderly lady she did not recognize. Everything was held in place with magnets shaped like clouds. Droplets of rain fell from the cloud holding the postcard of Matthew to the refrigerator. Four differently shaped clouds not in use were lined up vertically next to the door handle. Fran moved them until they were separated by wider spaces, pushing one higher and another lower, the way clouds would really look in the sky.

“It’s certainly not their house in Cambridge, is it?” Chap said.

Outside, moths fluttered against the glass, seeking the light. She saw on the counter a spray can of Yard Guard and another can of Deep Woods Off. A mosquito buzzed her ear. Reflexively, she flinched and ducked. Chap ran toward her, clapping his hands. He was as quick as a snake’s tongue. A bug hardly ever escaped him. At home, if a cricket or a lightning bug got in, she would have to holler out quickly so he wouldn’t kill it. She always got a glass and the notepad they kept by the kitchen phone so she could capture nice insects and release them outdoors. He chided her. “You let in more than you free,” he said. Still, something made her patiently stalk them, and she felt victorious when she pulled her hand back inside after shaking out the glass and finding it empty. That had happened the night before they left for Vermont. “What does your crystal ball say?” Chap had asked, passing by in his pajamas as she was closing the door with her foot and gazing into the bottom of an empty glass. And she had thrown it at him. Not hard — she had more or less tossed it, but it had caught him by surprise; he hadn’t ducked, and it had hit him in the shoulder. He winced, more perplexed than angry. Several expressions crossed his face before he pulled his chin in tight to his throat as if to say: What’s this?

“It looks like one of those antique shops that’s set up to look like somebody’s house when actually everything’s for sale,” she said.

“The decoys must be his,” Chap said.

“Jesus,” she said. “We don’t collect anything. I wonder when they started doing this?”

He leaned against the counter, the moths behind his head like large, durable snowflakes. She thought of Anthony’s letter — the one he had sent about Christmastime, telling her about the new lights the college in town had installed so people could cross-country ski at night. Everything the Brunettis wrote made the town sound idyllic. Cows — whether or not they were presiding over heaven — were not dear to Fran’s heart, but what she had heard about the horses made her curious to see them, and from the photographs on the refrigerator, she could tell she was going to love the garden. She and Chap had enough sunny land behind their house to garden. She wondered why they never had. She began to fantasize that there would be endless herbs. As a child, she had stood in her grandmother’s dill patch, tickling her nose with a stalk of the delightful, feathery stuff, hoping a wind would blow other big stalks her way to touch her legs. She looked again at the picture of the elderly lady on the refrigerator. The woman was eating something from a plate on her lap. It looked like white-frosted cake. Strawberry shortcake? Or a mound of vanilla ice cream? She suddenly wondered if there would be a farmers’ market in town; if there might be special dinners at the firehouse, or even some celebratory day. In the town her grandmother had lived in, they had had an annual celebration to commemorate the day the library opened. She had gotten her first kiss in a rowboat on the lake in that town on the seventeenth anniversary of the opening of the library. Her grandmother’s next-door neighbor had taught her how to spot the constellations.

“You collect cookbooks,” Chap said suddenly. “Isn’t that what you always look for in airport bookshops?”

They were on the Brunettis’ screened porch. It seemed quite large, but she could not put her finger on the light switch. As her eyes focused a little better in the dark, she went toward a cord dangling from a ceiling light. She pulled it and a breeze started up; it was a fan, not a light. Then Chap found the light switch and two sconces flickered bright on the far side of the porch, at each corner. In a few seconds Chap had also pulled the chain on a table lamp, so the porch was almost as bright as the kitchen.

“The place goes on and on,” Chap said.

She looked at him. “A little jealous of the Brunettis’ house?” she asked, raising her eyebrows. He shook his head no, walking toward her.

“Well, maybe in the daylight,” he said, hugging her.

Feeling his body against hers, and feeling his fingertips pressing into her, she said: “Honey, I don’t buy cookbooks for the recipes, you know. I buy them if they have funny old-time illustrations.”

In college, she had intended to become an illustrator. One of the things that had drawn her to Pia Brunetti had been Pia’s love of drawing. Of course she had been very fond of Anthony and might have become the Brunettis’ friend in any case, but one day she had run into Pia at a bookstore when Pia had been staring at a book of Ingres drawings. She did not usually — in fact, ever — run into people in the art section of bookshops. And when Pia began to speak about the drawing she was looking at, running her finger through the air as if lightly shaving a layer from something that could not be seen, she had been moved, and had asked her to join her for coffee after they finished browsing. That was when she found out that Pia was a seamstress, and that she was adept at altering patterns so her creations would be entirely unique. Fran’s own career as an illustrator had gotten derailed in college as she began to study biology in order to do biological drawings. Biology itself became so much more interesting. First biology, then medicine. Then the thought of so many years in medical school (she had already met, and was almost engaged to, Chap) gave her cold feet. Somehow — she herself was not quite sure how — she had decided to teach art to children, though when she went to graduate school she had not specialized in that, after all. She had written her thesis on the use of music in early childhood development, and taken exams, the summer she married, for her teacher’s certification. She had Anthony in class her second year of teaching. By then, the tests she and Chap had undergone had revealed that it was almost certain he and she could not conceive. A more intense feeling for children — children as a category — came over her. She indulged herself and became quite attached to certain children, even fantasizing that they might be hers, though the fantasizing did not extend beyond scenarios she would imagine as she was falling asleep at night. She had a strange reaction to those late-night imaginings. Or at least she thought it must be a strange reaction: both to wish that they extended into her dreams and to luxuriate in the letdown when her eyes opened in the morning. That was where she really might have had a crystal ball: she could tell quickly — so quickly that she thought of it as intuition — if, and in what way, a child was in distress. Anthony was easy to diagnose. Telling the parents in a way that would not offend or frighten them was the only problem. She had been so good at her job that several private schools had tried to hire her away from Bailey, but she had liked her colleagues, appreciated the fact that few administrative meetings were convened unless there was a real need to bring everyone together. But in the fall of her third year of teaching she had begun to have headaches, and in the morning her eyelids were swollen. Chap finally persuaded her to go to the doctor. She had blood tests, and was diagnosed as having mono. A young person’s kissing disease, and her usual outlet of affection, except for kissing Chap, had been hugging the children at school. In fact, although she and Chap made love two or three times a week, they rarely kissed — or only afterward: little kisses she planted on his shoulder; a fond kiss smack in the center of her forehead, before he rolled out of bed. It was his idea, after she spent almost two weeks at home and seemed to enjoy it in spite of her low energy, that she take time off from teaching and indulge her love of drawing. People were too programmed in this society, he said: his salary was quite adequate to support them both. Something persuaded her that he was right. Perhaps she wanted to be flattered and cajoled by the headmaster of Bailey. In the back of her mind she also thought about putting out feelers to other schools — seeing what response she would get if she instigated something, rather than receiving surprise offers. Instead, she walked around the empty house in the day, wearing Chap’s bathrobe, which she appropriated, thinking: This is what solitude is. This is what it’s like to be childless. She enjoyed the misery this provoked, the way she enjoyed, in part, the disturbing dreams. Word got out in the community that she and Chap had inherited money — that she had quit because they now had a great amount of money and because she wanted to follow other pursuits. It was never a surprise to her that adults fantasized as quickly as children, because the converse was true: speculative children inevitably grounded themselves, after a spell, in reality. It was just too frightening to fly by the seat of their pants for too long. They would begin to paint within the borders. Read from beginning to end.

The white wicker furniture on the porch had an opalescent patina. Pink pillows — pink had always been Pia’s favorite color: slightly orangeish pinks, or electric pinks — were banked against the back of the settee. Larger pink pillows were propped against the backs of the four white chairs.

She pulled away from Chap and reached up to try to grab a mosquito that had been buzzing behind her head. He bent to scratch his leg. He and Fran were lingering on the porch because it was a sort of annex to the house. Almost at a glance, they had found that the house no longer had anything to do with their conception of how the Brunettis lived. It was still a mystery to both of them that Lou had resigned from private practice and become co-chair of the architecture department at a small-town college. The house itself, with its unevenly spaced floorboards, sinking shelves, and peeling ceiling, needed a lot of work, but Fran supposed that it was the same situation you always found with doctors: they would not treat members of their own family.

Back in the kitchen, she found that one of the cloud magnets had fallen to the floor after she rearranged them. She pressed it back and followed Chap out of the kitchen, frowning. She felt like a burglar, but one who had all the time in the world to really consider what was of interest.

Chap poked his head into Lou’s study. Fran turned on the light in the bathroom. A framed print of Monet water lilies hung on the wall beside the claw-footed tub. A vase of lavender flowers, dropping petals, sat on a shelf above the sink.

“Look at this,” Chap said.

She walked across the squeaking floorboards and went into Lou’s study. Chap was looking at a child’s drawing of cubes and pyramids seen from different angles. “The Future,” it was titled, and underneath, printed a little lopsidedly, “Anthony Brunetti.” She saw, in her own hand — that slightly calligraphic way of writing — the date: May 1, 1985.

2

Chap stood in the garden. He had tried it the day before, without spraying himself with bug repellent, and had added eight or ten bites on his quickly spotting body. Today he had sprayed himself from head to toe, intent on gathering enough basil for pesto, some arugula and Boston lettuce for salad. He had not been able to find plastic bags in the kitchen, so he had brought his emptied-out duffel bag in which he had transported his summer reading. If a color could have a smell, basil would be the essence of green. He killed a mosquito on his wrist, then turned like a paranoiac: a bee’s buzz had sounded like a tornado of mosquitoes. He did not, of course, try to kill the bee. He bent over and carefully twisted a small head of lettuce from the ground, banging the roots against the duffel bag before dropping it inside. He had been at the Brunettis’ house before, though Fran had no idea of that.

The buzzing behind his head this time was a mosquito. He turned and clapped his hands, then flicked the black body from his palm. He looked where it fell and saw that radishes had begun to sprout. He had grown them as a child: radishes and tomatoes, in a big cedar tub on his mother’s porch. He suddenly remembered his heartache — heartache! — when, on one of his infrequent visits, his father had pulled up radish after radish, to see if they had formed yet. Only swollen white worms dangled below the leaves. After his father pulled four or five, Chap reached out and put his hand on his father’s wrist. His father stopped. His father had been perplexed, as if he had been guaranteed a prize simply for reaching out and pulling, and he had gotten nothing. Chap had been named for his mother’s brother, Chaplin J. Anderson — the J. for Jerome. His uncle had been his father figure, coming every weekend until he moved to the West Coast when Chap was fifteen or sixteen. Sixteen, it must have been, because Chaplin had been teaching him to drive. He died mountain-climbing, when Chap was in his second year of college. After that, his mother was never the same. She turned to a cousin — crazy Cousin Marshall — who suddenly became, in spite of his belief in the spirit world and his railing against Ezra Pound as if the man still lived, a pillar of sanity. And now, since his mother’s death, he was saddled with Marshall, because he had been kind to his mother. He arranged to have Marshall’s road plowed in winter; sent him thermal underwear. But since Marshall’s dogs, Romulus and Remus, died, he had been increasingly sad and bitter. Would he have another dog? No. Would he take a little trip on the weekend — get away from the house with the dog bed and the sad memories? Not even if Chap sent a check for a million dollars. Didn’t his belief in the afterlife offer him some consolation? Silence on the telephone. Marshall was now eighty-one years old. He would not move out of his house but would not have it insulated because he thought all insulation was poison. Chap would barely have known Marshall if his mother had not sought him out. Now he was often vaguely worried about Marshall’s health, his depression, his naïveté, which could well get him into trouble those times he ventured into the big city of Hanover, N.H.

With his bag full of greens, Chap quickened his step as he walked toward the house. He saw that a wasp nest had begun to form next to the drainpipe. Inside, he heard the coffee machine perking. He had always had keen hearing. Passing the open window, he looked through the screen and saw Fran searching through a kitchen drawer. Even at home, she always misplaced the corkscrew, scissors, and apple slicer. Fran had a circular implement that could be placed over an apple and pushed down to core it and separate the apple into sections. She believed in eating an apple a day. Whatever else she believed in these days was a mystery. In saving the rain forest — that was what she believed. In banning pesticides. She also believed in cotton sheets and linen pants, even though they wrinkled.

He opened the door, knowing he was doing her an injustice. She was a very intelligent woman, gifted in more ways than she liked to admit. And, in fact, she was usually the one who took Marshall’s calls. She also wrote polite notes when he sent books depicting the archangels.

“Maybe in the daylight,” she muttered, still riffling through the drawer. He smiled; it had become a standing joke between them that everything in the house, and by extension everything, period, would come clear in the light of day.

On their third day in the house daylight had revealed one of Anthony’s jokes: a piece of rubber shaped and painted to look like a melted chocolate-covered ice-cream bar. Chap had peeked at blueprints rolled up on Lou’s drafting table. Fran had put fresh flowers throughout the house. She was reading War and Peace and listening to the Brunettis’ collection of classical CDs, though earlier in the morning she had been leafing through a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comic and listening to an old Lou Reed record. The elderly woman whose picture was on the refrigerator turned out to be a neighbor who cleaned house for the Brunettis once a week. She took an instant liking to Fran, once she saw the flowers set out in vases. She said the photograph on the refrigerator had been taken by Anthony during the strawberry festival the year before. He had wanted to catch her with a beard of whipped cream, but she had licked it away too fast. Chap had seen her — Mrs. Brikel — the other time he visited, and this time he had held his breath, hoping she would not remember their meeting. From the way her eyes flickered, he had thought she was going to say something, then decided against it.

Fran said, as if she had tuned in to his thoughts: “Mrs. Brikel called and said she wants to give us half an apple pie. Wasn’t that nice of her? We’ll have to think of something to do for her before we leave.”

The Brunettis’ pictures and postcards on the refrigerator had been joined by two postcards forwarded from Fran and Chap’s: a detail of a stained-glass window at the Matisse chapel, sent by a friend of Fran’s who was traveling through France, and a picture of her niece’s new baby, propped up in her mother’s arm, eyes closed.

“Would you mind going over to Mrs. Brikel’s?” Fran said. “I said the least we could do would be to walk over and get our share of pie.”

He put the bag on the counter. “Drop all this in the sink and splatter it with water,” he said. “I’ll be back in a flash.” He had gone out the door and closed it before he thought to open it again and ask whether Mrs. Brikel lived to the left or the right.

“Right,” Fran said, pointing.

He closed the door again. Two or three mosquitoes trailed him, hovering near the center of his body as he cut across the grass. He tried to swat them away, quickening his step. A jogger went by on the road, a big black Lab keeping time with him as he ran. A car honked when it passed, for no reason. He looked after the dog, who reminded him of Romulus, and wondered briefly whether it might be nice to have a dog.

“Could you smell it baking?” Mrs. Brikel asked, opening the door. She was smiling a bright smile. Her eyes were not particularly bright, though, and the smile began to fade when he did not answer instantly.

“There’s no breeze,” he said. “Isn’t there always supposed to be a breeze in Vermont? If we had some wind, those mosquitoes couldn’t land the way they do.” He flicked one off his elbow. He entered the house quickly, smiling to make up for his lack of cheerfulness a few seconds before.

“I thought I’d bake a pie, and I would have made blueberry, but I came down this morning and saw my son had eaten every one for breakfast,” she said. “I usually don’t make apple pies except for fall, but your wife said apples were a favorite of hers.”

In the gloom of Mrs. Brikel’s back room, he saw another person: a tall boy, watching television. The shades were dropped. His feet were propped up on a footstool. Guns exploded. Then he changed the channel. Someone was singing, “What happened to the fire in your voice?” Someone laughed uproariously on a quiz show. The sound of a buzzer obliterated more gunfire.

“What’s your favorite pie?” Mrs. Brikel said. She had turned. He followed her into the kitchen. There was a wooden crucifix on the wood panel separating the windows over the sink. There were two rag rugs on the floor. A little fan circulated air. “All the screens are out being repaired,” Mrs. Brikel said. “I sure wouldn’t open the windows with these mosquitoes.”

In the kitchen, the aroma was strong. Chap could actually feel his mouth water as Mrs. Brikel cut into the pie.

“I’d give it all to you, but that it upsets him,” Mrs. Brikel said, nodding over her shoulder. Chap turned and looked. There was no one in the doorway. She was referring to the person watching television.

“I was all set to make two, but I ran out of flour,” Mrs. Brikel said. “That’s always the way: you remember to buy the little things, but you’re always running out of the big things like milk and flour.”

There were stickers of dancing dinosaurs on the window ledge. He looked at the refrigerator. Long strips of stickers hung there, taped at the top: stickers of birthday cakes and little animals holding umbrellas, pinwheels of color, multicolored star stickers.

“He knows you’re taking half the pie,” Mrs. Brikel said, tilting the dish. Half the pie slid free, landing perfectly on a plate. “That’s what he knows,” she said, talking to herself. She opened a drawer, pulled off a length of Saran Wrap, and spread it over the pie, tucking it under the plate.

“This is very kind of you, Mrs. Brikel,” he said. Without her saying anything directly, he assumed that the person in the living room was her son and that there was something wrong with him. The TV changed from muffled rifle shots to girls singing.

“I love to bake in the winter,” Mrs. Brikel said, “but come summer I don’t often think of it, except that we have to have our homemade bread. Yes we do,” she said, her voice floating off a little. He looked at the half pie. He knew he should thank her again and leave, but instead he leaned against the kitchen counter. “Mrs. Brikel,” he said, “do you remember me?”

“Do I what?” she said.

“We met, briefly. It was during the winter. Lou and I were backing out of the driveway and you and your son — or I guess it was your son, walking in front of you — were coming up the driveway …”

“In the car with Mr. Brunetti?” Mrs. Brikel said. “You were up here at the end of that big winter storm, then.”

“I was pretty surprised to find myself here,” he said. “Lou called me when Pia went in for surgery.”

“Oh, yes,” Mrs. Brikel said, bowing her head. “That was an awful day.”

“Not as bad for us as for Pia,” he said. He looked at the plate covered in Saran Wrap. He wanted to say something else, but wasn’t sure what.

“But now she seems to be coming along well,” Mrs. Brikel said.

“My wife doesn’t know I was here,” he said. “I was quite surprised, to tell you the truth, that Lou asked me to come. I told my wife I was visiting my cousin in New Hampshire.”

“Well, you were good to do it,” Mrs. Brikel said. She ran her hand along the counter edge. She thumbed away an imaginary spot of dirt.

“My wife doesn’t know about the trip because Lou asked me not to tell her,” he said. “It’s a funny thing, but I guess there are some things women don’t want other women to know.”

Mrs. Brikel looked slightly perplexed, then dropped her eyes. If he was going to continue, he would have to think of what to say. The TV was changing from station to station in the other room.

“Lou thought Pia wasn’t only upset to be losing a breast, but worried that with her breast gone, she’d …” He let his voice drift, then started again. “She was worried, Lou thought, that she’d lose stature in my wife’s eyes. That’s not true, of course. My wife is a very kind woman. Pia apparently worshiped Fran, and she must have thought the operation would …” He faltered. “Would distance them,” he said.

He had never tried to articulate this before. He had tried, many times, to remember exactly what Lou had said, but even a second after he heard it, it had seemed confusing and puzzling. This was the best paraphrase he could manage: that Pia had taken some crazy notion into her head, in her anxiety. To this day, Pia did not know that he knew she had had a mastectomy. Lou had not wanted him to visit Pia, but to go to the bar with him at night and have a few drinks and shoot pool. On the way back to Fran, he had detoured to Marshall’s house in New Hampshire, taken him on errands, left him with a new jack for his car and with new washers on the faucets. He told Fran that he had spent four days there, when really he had spent only one. He had been at the Brunettis’ the other three days. Anthony had been sent to stay with a family friend. At night, Lou had ducked his head through Anthony’s bedroom door, though, before turning off the downstairs lights. Chap did not know whether Lou had any other close friends. Until Lou called, he had assumed that of course he did — but maybe they were just acquaintances. Couples in the community.

“It’s a strange reaction,” he said, pushing away from the counter. He had kept Mrs. Brikel too long, imposed on her by making her listen to a story that wasn’t even really a story. He looked at her. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“Well, I don’t know,” Mrs. Brikel said. “I don’t have any firsthand knowledge of these matters. I think Pia’s doing much better though, now that the treatments she’s had have been successful.”

He followed Mrs. Brikel to the door. He had not intended to ask any more questions, and was surprised to hear himself asking one more.

“Do they seem happy here?” he said.

She dropped her eyes again. “Anthony loves it,” she said. “So much to do in the winter, and all. I don’t know Mr. Brunetti very well because we go to bed early around here, and he’s a late one coming home. But Pia, you mean? Pia I wouldn’t say likes it very much. Of course, she’s had a very bad year.”

“I’m sorry if I’ve upset you,” he said. “I think I’ve been upset about the past year myself, and Lou isn’t the most talkative man.”

“He isn’t,” Mrs. Brikel said.

“Where’s my pie?” a voice called from the dark front room. The TV went silent. There was a long pause, and then it started up again. Mrs. Brikel looked in her son’s direction. “Pie’s on the counter,” she said quietly to Chap, as if he had been the one who asked the question.

“Thank you for your kindness, Mrs. Brikel,” he said, holding out his hand. She shook it and smiled slightly. “Keeps me with something to do while the Wild West is won every day,” she said. “I’d relive all the wars and hear nothing but gunfire if I didn’t play the kitchen radio and make some pies and bread.”

“I sneak cigarettes,” he said. “Fran doesn’t know it, but after lunch, at work, I light up. One cigarette a day.”

This brought a bigger, more genuine smile from Mrs. Brikel.

“Okay, then,” she said, as he started down the walkway.

He would tell Fran, if she asked, that he had done some minor repair to help Mrs. Brikel. The coffee would still be hot; he would have some coffee with the apple pie.

3

What if they never came back? Fran thought. She wrote the question in her notebook. It was a notebook covered with lavender cloth Chap had given her for Valentine’s Day; since then, she had been keeping some notes, making a few sketches of things she had seen or done during the day. Like a teenager, she had sketched her face with and without bangs, to see if she should let the wisps continue to grow or have them trimmed. She decided, after looking at what she had drawn, to let the hair grow; soon she would have it all one length — the stark but simple way she liked to see herself.

She thought for a moment about people who had disappeared: Judge Crater; Amelia Earhart; Mrs. Ramsey. Though it was cheating to count Mrs. Ramsey among the missing: she had died — it was just that the reader found out about her death abruptly, and so reacted with great shock.

Fran drew parentheses in her notebook. She stared at the little curving lines for a while, then made quick motions with her pen, zigzagging a connection between the curves until they looked like the vertebrae she had sketched years before in her college anatomy class. She had fallen in love with the teaching assistant in that class. The summer she was twenty they had gone to Key West together, and he had given diving instructions while she waited tables at Pier House. They lived in a room in a guest house owned by one of his former girlfriends. The only other person living there that summer was a man named Ed Jakes, who wrote poetry they thought brilliant at the time, and who introduced them to good wine. She had kept in touch with him. He had become an interior decorator. Recently, she had shown Chap Ed’s name in Architectural Digest. It meant nothing to him, of course; no one ever really shared another person’s sentimental youthful attachments. He had collected canes with carved heads, she suddenly remembered: dog faces, tropical birds in profile. One night, in the courtyard of the guest house, Ed Jakes had held one of his canes higher and higher as she leapt over. When the cane rose to a certain height, her boyfriend had walked away, disgusted. Much later, meaning to hurt her, he had said that he and the woman who owned the guest house had gone to bed during the period they stayed there. It never occurred to her to question the truth of that until another boyfriend asked why she was so sure her previous lover hadn’t just been trying to make her jealous. She had learned a lot from that boyfriend, including skepticism. If she had stayed with him, and gone to his classes in method acting, she might have become quite a different person.

Since moving into the Brunettis’ house, she had begun to think about their lives. It was only natural. All houses had their owners’ personalities. In wandering through the rooms, though, she had not sensed much of Pia’s presence. She had even decided that the collections of things on the shelves must belong to Lou — or even that Anthony might have gotten into the act by collecting miniature versions of the Empire State Building. Anthony’s room was a shrine to athletes and rock stars. Instead of finding dust, Fran had found footballs — footballs had rolled into three corners. There were weird robots that fascinated Chap (they could be altered to become rockets), and he had chuckled over the violent comic books and the collection of movies: Schwarzenegger; Ghostbusters; Robocop. There had been so little evidence of Pia, though, that Fran had had to open the bedroom closet and run her hand along Pia’s dresses to conjure up a sense of her. She was puzzled that she could find no bottles of perfume, that the medicine cabinet shelves were almost empty, that the kitchen looked so well scrubbed, as if no one ever cooked there. Take-out menus were tucked in the phone book like bookmarks.

Chap was outside cutting the grass, seated atop Lou’s riding mower. He had on a baseball cap and the shorts he had bought in four different colors at the factory outlet they had stopped at on their way up. It was true of many men: their desire to get a bargain won out over their indifference to clothes. Fran thought about the garment bag she had brought — dresses she would probably never wear. All the restaurants allowed you to dress casually. She had removed her fingernail polish and not repainted her nails. Her hair was clipped back on top, to keep her bangs out of her eyes. She looked at Chap, heading down a line of uncut grass, fanning mosquitoes away from his face. He had covered his body with insect repellent before he went out, though his shirt was unbuttoned and he was pouring sweat, so most of it had probably washed away.

She thought about all the things she liked about Chap: his endearing smile when she came upon him and found him staring into space; his insistence that he had total recall, beginning at the age of five, which of course she could not dispute; his myopic concentration as his big fingertips moved over the tiny buttons of the calculator; the way he always pointed out a full moon; his insistence, every time, that at last he had found an honest car mechanic. When women talked about their husbands, there seemed to be no nice, comfortable gray areas of love: women either detested their mates or bragged or implied that they were great lovers, that they spent their nights joyfully enacting sexual fantasies as they jumped and toppled and fucked, like figures perpetually animated in a flip-book thumbed through time and again.

As Chap turned the mower and steered down another span of grass, she decided that when he headed back she would call out to him. She opened the refrigerator door and took out the half-empty bottle of red wine they had recorked the night before. She took a sip, then poured some into a wineglass. She would hold the wineglass out to Chap and smile a sly smile. She knew that he liked being propositioned in the afternoon; he acted slightly abashed, but secretly he liked it. Aside from surprises, he preferred morning sex, and she liked sex late at night — later than they usually managed, because he fell asleep by midnight.

As she put the glass on the counter, another thought came to her. She would go upstairs and put on one of Pia’s stylish dresses, maybe even Pia’s high heels if she could find fancier ones than she had brought herself. Clip on Pia’s earrings. Make a more thorough search for the perfume.

Going up the stairs, she felt as excited as a child about to play a sophisticated trick. There were small silhouettes — a series of ten or twelve — rising up the wall as the stairs rose. She wondered if they might be family members, or whether they were just something else that had been collected.

In the bedroom, she pulled the shade, on the off chance Chap might glance up and see her undressing. She opened the closet door and flipped through: such pretty colors; such fine material. Pia sewed her own clothes, using Vogue patterns. Friends in Rome sent her fabric. Everything Pia wore was unique and in the best of taste. From the look of the closet — dress after dress — it seemed she still did not wear pants.

The perfume — several bottles — sat in a wicker container. Fran found them when she lifted the lid. She unscrewed the tops and sniffed each one. She put a drop of Graffiti on the inside of each wrist, tapped another drop on her throat. She touched her fingertip to the bottle again and placed her moist finger behind her knee. Then she screwed the top on tightly and began to take off her clothes. She dropped them on the bed, then decided that she and Chap would be using the bed, so she picked them up and draped them over a chair. It was probably Pia’s needlework on the seat: a bunch of flowers, circled by lovebirds — very beautiful.

She took a dress the color of moss out of the closet. It was silk, flecked with silver. It had broad, high shoulder pads. Fran wiggled the dress over her head and felt at once powerful and feminine when the shoulder pads settled on her shoulders. She smoothed the fabric in front, adjusting the waist so the front pleat would be exactly centered. The appeal of the dress was all in the cut and the fabric — a much more provocative dress than some low-cut evening wear. The perfect shoes to go with it, simple patent-leather shoes with very high heels, were only a bit too small for Fran’s foot. She twisted her arm and slowly zipped the back zipper. Facing the mirror, she let her hair down and ran her fingers through it, deciding to let it stay a bit messy, only patting it into place. She clipped her bangs back neatly and looked at herself in the mirror. This was the place where Pia often stood studying herself. She smoothed her hands down the sides of the dress, amazed at how perfectly it fit.

Chap came into the house and called for Fran. The timing was too perfect to believe. She would slowly unzip the zipper, let him watch as the dress became a silk puddle on the floor. She would step out of it carefully. Once free, she could run to the bed and he would run after her.

She called to him to come into the hallway and close his eyes.

“I can’t,” he said. “A goddamn bee bit me.”

“Oh no,” she said. She checked her impulse to run down the stairs. “Put baking soda on it,” she called. “Baking soda and water.”

She heard him mutter something. The floorboards creaked. In a second, he hollered something she couldn’t understand. She went halfway down the stairs. “Chap?” she said.

“You don’t know where she’d have baking soda, do you?” he said, slamming drawers.

“There’s some in the refrigerator!” she said suddenly. She had seen an open box in the refrigerator. “Top shelf,” she hollered.

“The mosquitoes aren’t bad enough, I’ve got to get a bee bite,” he muttered.

“Have you got it?” she said.

He must have, because she heard the water running.

“Do you think taking aspirin would do any good?” he said. “Come in here so I can talk to you, would you?”

She stepped out of the shoes and ran into the kitchen. He was leaning against the counter, frowning, the box of baking soda on the drainboard, the bee bite — he had made a paste and then for some reason clapped his hand over the area — on his bicep. His face was white.

“Sit down,” she said, going toward him to lead him to the nearest chair. “It’s okay,” she said reflexively, deciding to be optimistic. Chap always rallied when someone was optimistic. “It’ll be fine,” she said, taking his elbow. “Go into the living room and sit down.”

“I don’t believe this,” he said. “I was finished. I’d shut the mower off. It came right at me and bit me, for no reason.”

They stepped across a fallen postcard and two cloud magnets he had knocked down as he bent to get the baking soda.

“What are you all dressed up for?” he said, frowning as he sank into a chair.

“Take your hand away,” she said. “Let me see.”

“I don’t think baking soda does anything,” he said. He closed his eyes and shook his head. “I haven’t had a bee bite since I was about ten years old. How long is this thing going to sting?”

“I don’t know,” she said. She wiped his sweaty forehead. She dropped her wet hand onto the arm of the chair. She was crouching, looking up at him, wondering if he was just pale from shock.

“What are you doing in that dress?” he said.

“I was going to surprise you,” she said. “I got all dressed up to seduce you.”

He snorted. He closed his eyes again. In a few seconds he opened his eyes and said, “Is that your dress?”

“It’s Pia’s.”

“Pia’s?” he said. “What was the idea? That I’d dress up like Lou and we’d play house?”

She smiled. “I just thought I’d dress up and seduce you.”

“Well, when this fucking pain stops — if it ever stops — why don’t I put on one of Lou’s suits and we can talk about postmodern architecture and politics at the college?”

“And what do I talk about?” she said.

“Whatever Pia would talk about,” he said. A little color was coming back to his face. There was a white smear over the bee bite. So far, it hadn’t swollen.

She sat on the floor, her hand resting on his knee. “Does it feel at all better?” she said.

“I can’t tell,” he said. He briefly touched her hand, then clapped his over the bite again.

“I don’t know what she’d talk about,” Fran said. “She’d say that Anthony wants a new robot. Or she’d tell him about some paper Anthony got a good grade on.”

“Couples aren’t supposed to always talk about their children,” he said.

“But then I don’t know what she’d talk about,” Fran said, puzzled.

“Hey,” he said, “we don’t really have to do this. It’s just a game.”

“I don’t think she wears these dresses,” Fran said softly, running her hand across the skirt to smooth it. “The minute I opened her closet and saw that long row of dresses hanging there so neatly, I had the feeling that she never wore them anymore.”

“What do you think she wears?”

“I don’t know, but it wouldn’t make sense, would it? Most everywhere you go, you can just go as you are. She always looked so beautiful in the city. Remember that until I found out she sewed, I couldn’t understand how she could have so many designer clothes?”

“I always thought you were a little jealous of Pia,” he said. “Which is particularly stupid, because you’re such different types.”

“She’s what American girls want to be,” Fran said. “Very cosmopolitan. Sophisticated. Simple, but beautiful.”

“You’re beautiful,” he said.

“You know what I mean.”

“Take off Pia’s dress and we’ll go to bed and be sophisticated,” he said. “Just let me take a quick shower.”

“Is your arm better?” she said, letting him help her up.

“There!” he said. “That’s good: that’s just what Pia would say in this situation, right?”

She smiled. “I would imagine,” she said.

“Then maybe what Lou needs is to be in pain more often. That way his wife will have something to talk to him about.”

In the same way it came upon Fran that Pia no longer wore elegant dresses, it dawned on Chap that Lou and Pia no longer communicated.

“I don’t want anything to ever happen to you,” Chap said, following Fran up the stairs. He stood in the doorway and watched as she shimmied out of the dress.

“I don’t either,” she said, “but that’s not too likely, is it?”

“No,” he said.

“The question is just what’s going to hit me between the eyes.” She stepped out of the dress as carefully as she intended. She was wearing only panties and Pia’s black high heels. She gave him a coquettish look.

He knew that she only meant to turn aside what he said, but for a split second, he wanted to say something important, so she would wipe the smile off her face. He wanted to say: “Let me tell you what happened to Pia,” though he did not, because Lou had sworn him to secrecy.

They made love before he showered. He closed his eyes tightly and did not open them again until after he climaxed, though the scent of Pia’s perfume almost tempted him to look quickly to make sure it was Fran.

Afterward, he looked at Pia’s green dress on the floor. He ran his finger lightly down Fran’s spine. The smell of sweat intermingled with the perfume. The shade flapped in the breeze, then was sucked against the window screen. How was it that he knew only now — not months before, when he sat beside Lou at the bar or cooked breakfast for him or clapped his arm around his shoulder as he headed off to the hospital — how was it that only now he knew the Brunettis’ marriage had caved in?

“I was always jealous of her,” Fran said, her voice muffled in the pillow. “You were right when you said that.”

4

“Mrs. Brikel,” Chap said as he rolled down the window on the passenger’s side of the car. He had just gotten into the car when he looked out and saw her leaving the laundromat, carrying a white laundry bag.

“Hello there,” she said, raising one elbow instead of waving. The bag was as round as a barrel. Sunglasses were on top of her head. She was squinting in the sun.

“You have a car, I suppose,” he said.

“That’s a long story,” she said, “but my cousin’s boy is coming to get me.”

“I’d be glad to give you a ride,” he said.

“Well, I wonder about that,” she said. She moved her elbow again. Her arm moved away from her body like a bird’s wing stretching. She looked at her watch: a large digital watch. He noticed also that she was wearing pink running shoes with white tennis socks. The shoes were tied with bright red laces. She shifted from foot to foot as she thought about taking the ride.

“Would you be so kind?” she said. “I can go over there by the hardware store to call and save Jay a trip.”

“Go ahead,” he said, turning the button to start the air-conditioning. He put the fan on 3. “Leave those here,” he said, as Mrs. Brikel turned away with her laundry bag.

“I guess I will,” Mrs. Brikel said. He pushed open the door and she put the bag on the front seat; as she walked away, he tossed it into the back seat and stood it upright. Looking after her, he wondered if she was as old as he had thought. Perhaps today she looked younger because of her silly shoes, and her slightly disheveled clothes. All the fashions now were supposed to sag and droop. He was glad that except for sleeping in oversized T-shirts, Fran ignored the new look. Fran had always been quite an individual. It was at her insistence that they married, years ago, in a grove of willows. When something stopped being fun, Fran usually found a way to stop doing it. They no longer flew to his brother’s house for Christmas, since his brother remarried and his wife had four noisy cats. Fran had been trying to decide what career she would embark on next for quite a while, but he gave her credit: if she was restless, she hid it well, and she did not think her quandaries should be his.

Mrs. Brikel was hurrying back toward the car. She greeted a boy on a skateboard, then ran the last few steps. This time when he pushed open the door it was cool inside. She sank into the seat and said, “Aah. This has got to be my lucky day. I would have had to wait another half hour even if Jay was coming. It’s the best luck, running into you.”

He decided she was younger than he had thought.

“Today you remember me, right?” he said.

She laughed as if he had made a very good joke. “I guess by now I do,” she said.

“Car in for repairs?” he said.

“No, it’s a long story. I loaned it to a friend who had to go on a trip. Tomorrow night I’ll get it back, but my son was upset he was missing so many clothes, so I headed in to the laundromat.”

“I’m glad I ran into you.”

“It works out,” she said.

At the rotary, he waited for a sports car to pass in front of him, then quickly accelerated into the circling traffic. Three quarters of the way around, he turned onto the highway leading to the Brunettis’.

“Small town, I don’t guess you’ve had too much trouble learning your way around,” she said.

“I’ve got a lousy sense of direction, but no — this place hasn’t stumped me,” he said. He touched his neck. “There certainly are a lot of mosquitoes. We’d have gone out for more walks, but it’s impossible.”

There was a pause in the conversation.

“The damp did it,” she said. “I’ve lived here most all my life and I’ve never seen anything like this. Some kinds of bug spray they’re all out of, you know.” She shifted in the seat. “All that rain’s kept my son cooped up for a long time, and that’s not good,” she said. “You might have noticed he was in a very quiet mood when you were at the house the other day.”

“I didn’t expect him to make conversation while the TV was on,” he said.

“Oh, he does,” Mrs. Brikel said. “He gives more of a running commentary than some of those news announcers. When my son starts to think about something, nobody on earth can shut him up. He sees that television as a member of the family — talks back to it, thinks he’s in there as part of the picture some of the time. Worst time of day is when he should go to bed, because you know some stations stay on all night now. There never comes a natural time to go to bed.”

“I didn’t realize that,” he said.

“When the rain did stop, there was an accident out on the road one night. Someone put out flares just past our walkway, and it scared him. Two days later he still wouldn’t go out of the house.”

He thought about the tests he and Fran had gone through, trying to solve their infertility problem. What if she had gotten pregnant and they had been saddled, all their lives, with someone like Mrs. Brikel’s son? You put such thoughts out of your mind unless you were confronted with the possibility. Something about the way Mrs. Brikel talked about her son made him feel the boy’s presence in the car. His eyes darted to the rearview mirror. The big white laundry bag had tipped over.

Mrs. Brikel knocked her feet together. “He picks out my shoes,” she said. “I let him pick out things like that. He found these laces at the Ben Franklin. He’s got them in all his shoes, too. Something appeals to him, he never wants to have it change.”

He didn’t know what to say. He thought that someone more adept would turn the conversation — find a way to move on to something else.

“I know you’ve been friends of the Brunettis’ for some time,” she said. “Pia told me she wished she’d planted twice the flower garden when she knew your wife was coming, because your wife was such a lover of flowers.”

He looked at her, slightly puzzled. Perhaps Fran did care about flowers: though she never put flowers in their house, she had picked flowers from Pia’s garden as soon as they arrived. Did she have a favorite flower? He would have to ask her.

“Pia’s coming along real well,” Mrs. Brikel said. “With her trouble lifting her arm, I’m surprised she got in as much of a garden as she did. Wouldn’t you think she’d plant perennials? But she loves the annuals. If I went to that much trouble, I’d like them to spring up again every year.”

“You don’t have a garden?” he said.

“Something of one,” she said, “but my cousin’s boy, Jay, puts in so many things that all summer we eat the overflow.”

“It seems pretty idyllic to a city boy.”

“Have you been in a city all your life?” she said.

He thought about it. “Pretty much,” he said. “Yes. I guess I have.”

“When my son was younger I was in cities quite a lot, taking him to doctors. Waiting in doctors’ offices. My heart went out to Pia when she had to go so many times for all those examinations and treatments.” She looked at Chap. “How does Mr. Brunetti say she is?”

The question surprised him. He had no current information. Except for one call after his visit, when Lou said the doctors had found a drug to lessen the nausea, he hadn’t heard anything. The prognosis — or was it just the hope? — was that after she completed the treatments, she would be all right.

“I don’t know anything you wouldn’t know,” he said.

She nodded and looked down. He hoped she didn’t think he had cut her off. If he had known anything, he would gladly have told her.

“I was very surprised when he called and wanted me to come to Vermont,” he said. “It’s also a little awkward. Not being able to tell my wife.”

“I would imagine,” Mrs. Brikel said.

There was a long, awkward silence that made him wish he had put on the radio as they pulled out of the parking lot.

“Of course there’s not a soul on earth who doesn’t have secrets,” she said. “And it’s funny how one minute something seems the most important thing imaginable to keep hushed up, and a year later it’s something you could tell anyone.”

She was looking out the window. Land was being plowed for another new shopping center. The barbershop near where the land was being plowed would probably disappear — that funny little building with the stripes spiraling down the pole out front.

“May I ask why you mentioned it to me?” Mrs. Brikel said.

“What?” he said. He had been lost in thought about urban sprawl. The way roads leading into towns already looked exactly the same.

“I was wondering why you mentioned to me that you’d been here when Pia was sick.”

“I don’t know why,” he said, then contradicted himself. “I thought you might suddenly remember me and say something in front of my wife.”

Mrs. Brikel nodded. “You know, I only saw you for a few seconds that day in the snow.”

He nodded.

“You were both pretty bundled up. Hats and scarves and all of that.”

“I know,” he said. “It seems crazy to me now, but I thought you were going to remember me. I thought it was better to say something than take the chance.”

“Wouldn’t you have just said I was mistaken?”

“Well, yes, I could have,” he said. “But if I wasn’t thinking quickly … I don’t know.”

“Not that I mind your confidence,” Mrs. Brikel said.

“I don’t know what made me say that,” he said, this time really considering it. “Maybe to acknowledge that I’d really been here. My wife thought I was with my cousin.”

“You said that,” Mrs. Brikel said.

“Did I startle you when I brought it up? I think I was a little startled myself, to be saying it. Or that I said it because something startled me. That’s it: I said it because something startled me.”

Mrs. Brikel smiled. “That something wouldn’t have been my son, would it?”

“No,” he said. It was an instant, immediate response. But then he began to wonder what had startled him.

“The reason I was curious is because Mr. Brunetti has also confided some things in me. Things I never would have known if he hadn’t brought them up. Things that happened in another town, say. Nowhere I’d ever been.” She rubbed her finger on the edge of the dashboard. “If I could say something without you thinking I meant it as personal?”

He nodded. In the rearview mirror, he saw that a car was riding his bumper. He accelerated slightly, but the car stayed with him.

“I’ve done some substitute teaching at the elementary school,” she said. “I couldn’t teach subjects, but if the gym teacher or the home economics teacher was out, sometimes they’d give me a call.”

He nodded.

“And the gym teacher there was a lady named Mrs. Pepin. She had flu so many times that one fall I was called in every couple of weeks, and I got to like it and the children got to like me. Anyway, the point of my story is that when there was a Parents’ Night, Mrs. Pepin told me, she was always asked to bake and serve cookies. She thought some of the other teachers would do it next, but every time the night to have the parents came around the principal would call her in and ask her to please bake and serve cookies. After three years, she asked him why he always asked her, and this man, who was even by Mrs. Pepin’s account a quite nice, educated man, said, ‘Because French women have a heritage of serving, and they do it so gracefully.’ ”

“Good God,” Chap said.

“Over the years, I’ve tried to think about this,” Mrs. Brikel said. “I don’t mean Mrs. Pepin in specific, but the prejudices people have that they never examine. I don’t mean to be superior in this matter. I can remember picking on a scrawny girl when I was a child just because she was thin and funny-looking. There are two things that continue to mystify me in this life. Prejudice, and why some people are drawn to other people. Drawn in so they want to tell them things. It comes as a great surprise to me that I seem to be one of those people that other people need to say things to. When our local minister was contemplating a divorce, he told me about it and swore me to secrecy. He said that if he had the courage of his convictions, he’d be gone from town soon enough, and that then he wouldn’t care what I said. But for one year, the minister was still in town. It was almost another six months after that before he divorced his wife and moved to Michigan, I think it was. And shortly thereafter Mr. Brunetti moved to town. When he was returning a snow shovel he hinted at some things about his life elsewhere. Eventually he said quite a few things, although I don’t consider that we have the sort of relationship that I can even ask how things really are with Mrs. Brunetti.” Mrs. Brikel was rubbing her knees with both hands. She saw that he was looking at her hands and stopped. “But I don’t mean I don’t have some ideas,” she said. “As I’ve thought about it, I think that people see that I’ve been dealt some problem cards in life, and that here I am, dealing with the situation. To me, that’s just the way you have to live — the best way you can. But tell me if I’m wrong here. Do you think that because of my son being something of a trial, people think I’ve learned something from the experience of raising him, and that I could say something that might help them in times of stress?”

“That makes sense,” he said. Once he spoke, he realized he had spoken too quickly. She was going to distrust such an automatic answer. She was going to stop talking to him just when he was trying to formulate something important to say to her. Just when his curiosity was piqued about Lou Brunetti’s life.

“Of course,” she said, “I can imagine that I’m making it too complicated. It might just be that people see you have one kind of problem, which makes people feel less guilty about presenting you with another one.” She dropped her hands to her lap.

“Let’s have a cup of coffee,” he said.

She took her sunglasses off the top of her head. She looked out the window, as if he hadn’t spoken, then gently pushed the arms of the glasses above her ears.

“Let’s go on to the next town,” she said quietly. “If I’m going to be gone awhile longer from my son, let’s go somewhere that’s new to me. Someplace where I’ll feel like I’m really away from him.”

“Who do you talk to?” he said. The car that had been riding his tail passed, cutting sharply in front of him to avoid an oncoming truck.

“Sometimes I talk to my son’s father,” she said, “but he has a wife and family. I can’t quite pick up the phone and talk to him.”

“He remarried?” Chap said. He was nervous. Why had he asked a question when he had already been told the facts?

“He’s always had a wife and family,” Mrs. Brikel said. “There was never a time I was married to the father of my son.”

5

“You keep looking away,” Ben said.

“I was looking at that table over there. Tired tourists not knowing what to eat.”

Ordinarily, she did not eat fried food, but Fran loved the fried fish platter at this restaurant. Each time she and Ben returned, she ordered it. “And obviously it feels strange to be seeing you again,” she said. She took a sip of iced tea. Before they went on vacation, she had established the lie: that she was being interviewed by a design firm that might want her to handle the graphics for a big new Boston hotel. In fact, she had already gotten a commission to do the artwork for the hotel’s brochure. She did not think she would land the large part of the account, though.

“Have you been drawing in Vermont?” he said.

“I’ve just been batting around the house,” she said. “It must seem like a real vacation, though, because my city driving reflexes didn’t come back to me. And the air is killing my eyes.”

He nodded. His cup of black coffee sat on the table untouched, steaming. His right hand was on the table, a few inches from the saucer, absolutely immobile.

He picked up the cup and took a sip.

“Chap and I are getting along very well,” she said.

“I can’t see why somebody wouldn’t get along well with Chap,” he said. “Such an upbeat fellow.”

He infuriated her. They had been together only ten minutes, and already he was violating the rule of not criticizing the other person’s mate. The four of them had crossed paths half a dozen times over the years. Boston — and the art world — was only a small game in a small town, when you came to think of it.

“I did do a still life,” she said, deciding not to let him spark her anger. “I’d hoped the house would have interesting spaces and that things …” She frowned in concentration. “That things would call out to be sketched. But the house is strange. A lot of it is empty space, like the kitchen, and when you do find things you might draw, they look too predictable. Like duck decoys. Or the collections of things they have.”

“What do they collect?” he said.

“More stuff than you could imagine. I was in his study and closed the door behind me, and there were shelves behind the door holding blue Fiestaware. Imagine finding that behind a door?”

“So you went into his study to snoop, huh?” Ben said. A year before, Ben had been a sort of mentor to her. She had taken one of his classes at night. As a former teacher, she liked the way he was always one step ahead of any student, however advanced the student might be. Now she tended to think that he just didn’t listen.

“I went in because I heard a noise somewhere in the house, coming from that direction.”

“But if there’s a prowler, you’re never supposed to close doors behind you,” he said. “You haven’t watched enough late-night movies.” He took another sip of coffee. “What else do they collect?” he said.

“Why are you so interested?”

“Because I’m a visual sort of person,” he said. “I like to be able to imagine where you are.”

She smiled in spite of herself. When he said he was “visual,” he was alluding to a pronouncement someone had made about him at a cocktail party. They had found the drunk’s interpretation of Ben’s raison d’être particularly funny. They had gone late to the cocktail party, and arrived sober, because they had been making love.

“I used to collect powder horns,” he said. “I still collected them when I was in college. They were what my grandfather collected, but after a while I couldn’t see the point in buying powder horns and putting them in boxes.” He finished his coffee and looked for the waitress. In profile, Ben was the most handsome man Fran had ever known. Though she had met him as a grown woman, she still had something of a schoolgirl’s crush on him. The waitress was coming toward them with a pot of coffee. “The way some of them are embossed reminds me of certain drawings of yours,” he said. As the waitress poured, he said: “I should dig some of the good ones out and send them to you.”

“We’re never meeting again?” she said.

“Excuse me,” the waitress said. She put the coffeepot on a busboy’s cart. “Would you like to order?”

Ben opened his menu. “Do you know what you want?” he said to Fran. Please get some excitement into your voice about the fisherman’s platter, he thought. Please get some excitement into your voice about something.

Her eyes lit up a bit when she ordered the fisherman’s platter. Coleslaw, not french fries. Yes: another iced tea.

He ordered broiled mackerel. He asked for a Samuel Adams. That satisfied both desires: not to drink, because he might get morose, but to have a beer, because a beer was not a potent mixed drink that would go to his head.

When the waitress walked away, he, too, looked at the tourists. They were pale and slightly overweight. Their teenage son did nothing to disguise his annoyance at being on the trip. One of the things Ben hoped most earnestly was that his three-year-old son would never become sulky and estranged from him. They could change the ground rules entirely when the boy hit puberty, if it came to that. Whatever it took, Ben was willing to do it.

“Well,” Ben said, “our rental on the Vineyard fell through. They returned the check last week, when there was no chance in hell of our finding anything else, with a scrawled note that didn’t even have our names on it. They said they’d decided to rent the house year-round, and the tenant was already occupying it. We’ve rented that house for the last six years, and that’s the sort of kiss-off we get. Great, huh?”

She gnawed her lip. She felt sure that he was saying something indirectly about the two of them. Obviously, that was why he was so angry.

“We had a signed rental agreement,” he said. “If my lawyer wasn’t already working on two other things, I’d dump this one on his desk.”

“You always talk about Rob as if you hardly know him. ‘My lawyer.’ He was your college roommate.”

He shrugged. “When we’re playing handball I think of him as my college roommate, and when I’m pissed, I think of him as my lawyer.”

The busboy brought bread and butter. For a second, the white napkin folded over the basket reminded him of his son’s diapers. He had been awake at five A.M., changing his diapers.

“You can find a place somewhere on the Cape to rent,” she said. “People always cancel at the last minute.”

“Maybe we could have your friends’ house,” he said. “Didn’t you tell me they were leaving for a month, but you could only be there two weeks because that was all the vacation time Chap had?”

She looked at him. There was some small chance that he was completely serious.

“It’s just a house in the middle of nowhere,” she said.

“Aren’t you skeptical of my wife for liking flashy things? It might be a way to start deconditioning her.”

“I think you and your wife should try to work out your problems on more neutral territory,” she said. “I always have thought you should work out your problems.”

He surprised her by laughing. He fluttered his eyelids and said, quite archly: “I always have thought you should work out your problems.”

The busboy, passing with bread he was carrying to another table, looked down as he heard Ben speaking in falsetto.

Ben saw the boy slow down and could hardly muffle his laughter. Fran, too, began laughing.

“You’re lucky he walked by when he did,” Fran said. “You’ll probably be shocked to hear that I was about to strongly object to your impersonation of me.”

“ ’Atta girl,” he said. “Got to defend yourself in this world.”

“You know,” she said, “you talk about people in the capacity in which they exist: my wife; my lawyer. You always say ‘my son’ and ‘my tenants,’ and the people who live downstairs from you have been there for what? Ten years?”

“I don’t get your point,” he said. “I hear your voice icing over, but I’m not quite sure what you’re getting at.”

“You don’t use people’s names,” she said.

The family they had watched earlier got up. The teenage son was the last to leave the table, and he pushed all the chairs back in place, which broke her heart. She could remember being places she had not wanted to be, and acting inappropriately. Tripping over herself in an attempt not to stumble. What equanimity she had now had not even begun until she was in her twenties. What did she still do that communicated things she was oblivious of signaling? Until Ben mentioned the way her voice became detached and cold — icing over, as he called it — she had had no idea of her immediate impulse to withdraw when there was contention. She knew she sometimes lifted her hand to her head and fluffed her hair, but she had not known about the voice change until he pointed it out.

“Ben,” she said suddenly, “I don’t feel there and I don’t feel here. I do think it’s a good idea that we be friends, but coming back to the city to meet you, when I was off in the woods on vacation, just makes me feel …”

“It makes you feel bad,” he said. “You’ve always been very consistent about saying that. That basically, seeing me under any circumstances makes you feel bad. Why don’t you tell me a lie for a change and see if there’s some truth in the lie.”

“I don’t want to lie to you,” she said. “I feel peculiar about seeing you. I’m afraid I didn’t cancel this lunch because of cowardice. I wanted to fall back on you, in case the vacation turned out to be a disaster.”

“Is that true?”

She nodded yes.

“We’re friends,” he said. “What’s wrong with wanting something from me?”

He was astonished when tears began to roll down her cheeks. So surprised that he pushed his chair back, wanting to embrace her. He would have, if she had not held up her hand. What a strange gesture! As if those delicate fingers could stop anything more tangible than a breeze. He thought of the school crossing guard at his son’s preschool. The black gloves so large they must have been padded. Yet why would a crossing guard have boxer’s mitts? Or was that the way the man’s hands had looked, after all? He blinked, remembering his son, early that morning, walking in front of him, the sun striking his ash-blond hair, and the gloved hand at the crossing guard’s side, the other hand raised to stop traffic. He thought: The crossing guard was Tony Hightower, taking his turn as a volunteer. Not a crossing guard, Tony Hightower.

“You look terrible,” she said, drying her cheeks. “I’m sorry. Let’s talk about something else. Do you know anything funny?”

He sighed, letting the image go. “I’m sure that’s what half the people in the restaurant are doing,” he said. “Half of them are recounting disasters, and the other half are telling jokes.”

The waitress appeared at Fran’s side.

“What do you think?” he said to the waitress, who was lowering a plate. “I just said to my friend that I thought half the people here were yukking it up and the other half were in great distress.”

“Whichever way it starts out, they always walk out in the opposite mood,” she said. She was standing there with her hands at her sides, like a child reciting. She reached up and touched her earring. “At least, that’s usually true,” she said. “If they’re drunk, it’s another thing. But if they’re just in a good mood, they’ll be sedate when they leave, and if they came in quiet, they’ll be talking up a storm when they go out.”

Ben was looking at Fran, who was looking at the waitress. It wasn’t collusion, Fran knew — there was no way he could have put the waitress up to saying what she’d said. But what had she said, really, that puzzled her so deeply? Just that people changed?

“I don’t often stop to think about it,” the waitress said, springing into action again and giving Ben his lunch. “Is there anything else I can get for you?”

“You probably see it all in a second, don’t you?” Fran said. “You can probably look in their eyes and see what kind of a tip they’re going to leave.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” the waitress said.

“What their relationship is to one another,” Fran said.

“Yes,” the waitress said, looking directly into Fran’s eyes. “I’m usually right about that.”

6

Disturbing, Chap thought. Disturbing to get such a self-pitying letter from Marshall, saying that summer would be the ideal time to die. That predictable periphrasis: “Passing on to the Heavenly Kingdom.”

Disturbing that the Brunettis’ house seemed to intensify Fran’s feeling of isolation. Though she had finally perched on one of the wooden kitchen stools to draw a still life of fruit in a wicker basket, her heart hadn’t been in it. Things had to speak to Fran — declare their necessity, so she would not feel she was just some zookeeper, capturing them — or drawing became just a chore. Of the several drawings she had done during their stay, the first seemed to him the most complex and … well, disturbing. The loose weave of the basket was picked up, or rather made to seem similar to, the grillwork of the Galaxy fan they had brought with them. Once the eye detected the strange similarity between the fan front’s splayed metallic regularity and the basket’s handwoven symmetry, though, you began to notice what the grillwork hid (amber blades) and what the basket contained (shiny, overripe fruit). That was what artists did. Like poets, they ferreted out strange connections. Though he was not really sure what conclusion could be drawn from what he observed in Fran’s drawing. That two dissimilar things were similar? If that was all there was to it, why wouldn’t she jumble together any number of similar shapes?

He looked, again, at Anthony Brunetti’s drawing he had seen his first night in the house. Naturally Lou would like the fact that his son could think three-dimensionally. That the boy was not put off by the material world, but saw in it shapes that could be exposed, transparent cubes wittily tipped and rectangles into which he could stare.

He remembered seeing 2001 stoned, and how utterly convincing and involving it had seemed. He wondered if there was a video store nearby, and whether he might be able to rent that movie to watch again, although he realized at the same time that in doing so, he would just be opening the floodgates for disappointment.

That word again.

He finished his letter to Marshall a bit more abruptly than he intended. He was afraid that if he went on, and allowed larger issues to intrude, he would never be able to keep Marshall focused on the facts. When a person was in distress, it was not the time for anyone else to question the order of the cosmos. He had written a firm, fond letter to Marshall, enclosing a check and telling him to have the house insulated before winter, or he would be forced to go there and hire somebody to do the job himself.

Of course he realized that Marshall had not wanted the mention of winter’s cold to suggest only the temperature of the house. He knew perfectly well what Marshall meant, but except for insisting on his own affection for Marshall, he could not imagine what incentive to go on he might offer.

He was sitting on a kitchen stool. He had pushed it across the floor so it was six feet away from the area where Fran had been drawing. She had her spot, he had his. In her spot, a few tiny gnats spiraled up from the ripe bananas. In his, there was a stain made by the bottom of the coffee mug. He gave it a moment’s thought: it was interesting that while the Brunettis liked variety among the things they collected, the kitchen plates and cups were all uniform: mugs in different colors, but exactly the same shape. Simple white plates in graduated sizes.

He was not sure which of Pia’s breasts had been removed. But of course that did not matter at all. The fact of having one breast missing was horrible, but undoubtedly something a man could never really understand, just as a woman couldn’t really know what it felt like to be kicked in the balls.

The sun was shining on the garden. Butterflies fluttered. For a split second, he allowed a Daliesque scene to shimmer outside the kitchen window, where a naked-torsoed Pia stood behind the garden, like the Virgin presiding over paradise. Just as quickly the image was gone, and he thought, for the second time that day, about LSD. About seeing 2001 stoned, about the chances he had taken, the time he had wasted during that period of his life when he often viewed the world through a drug haze.

He ground fresh coffee. As the water boiled, he thought that skills — things you could do in the world — were likely to help you, but that objects — because they could never be complex enough, and rarely beautiful enough — would almost always disappoint you. Fran was not a skier, so it was difficult to explain to her how the same ski slope could be so involving, day after day. The slope itself was fascinating: varying, even as you rode the lift to descend again. But the further fascination was in your own skill, because you could never tell when chance would intervene, when you would have to compensate for something that was happening. Only an egocentric fool would try to predict his response vis-à-vis chance and as a variable in danger. You just snapped to, even when it already seemed too late, and you found yourself operating automatically.

He turned off the water, deciding that caffeine was the last thing he needed. He even took a deep breath and left the kitchen, suspecting, as Fran did, that the room made him a little crazy. Bad vibes, he would have said in the sixties. Or no vibes at all, which was just as bad.

He, too, discovered the Fiestaware in Lou’s study. The window above Lou’s drafting table had been left open, and the wind that had begun to blow as the sky clouded over sucked the door closed. When Chap opened the door, he looked for a doorstop and found, instead, the shelf of blue dishes. Marshall’s wife had had some of those plates, though he hadn’t seen them in years. By now, they were probably all broken.

Lou’s room did have good vibrations. The posters from European museums were in good taste; the architectural drawings drew you in. He sat on Lou’s high chair and looked out the window. He could imagine being an architect. Which also made him think about Fran, and the decision she was trying to come to about what job to move on to next. When you were an adult, you could not easily try on other professions: no dressing up in a white hat as a nurse; no clomping around in firemen’s boots. It was no longer a matter of how you dressed that transported you, but the possibilities, say, awakened by music, though explaining its direct application would have made you sound like a fool.

He pushed the POWER button on Lou’s stereo, then the PLAY button for the tape inside. Whatever it was was unfamiliar. He listened for quite a while, though, liking it — liking being in the room sitting on Lou’s drafting chair, his feet dangling because they could not touch the floor — preoccupied by the motion of a wasp examining the outside window frame. It had such a delicate, frightening body, and it was so intent upon what it was doing. Though there was every chance that the wasp was only programmed. That what it was doing had nothing to do with selectivity and everything to do with survival. The wasp flew up, then landed and crawled to the top corner of the outside window frame. It was just a little too far away for him to see it clearly without his glasses. In a minute or two, during which he lowered the window a bit because the breeze was coming much stronger and there was going to be a storm, the music changed. As he was transported, the music changed once again. The tape must have been a compilation of things Lou liked. He pushed EJECT and took out the tape. He had been wrong: it was a tape by a group called Metropolis. They were so good they could play in a variety of musical styles and be utterly convincing. Fran’s favorite book by Calvino was on the floor. A book by Richard Rorty was on Lou’s drafting table, the charge receipt tucked inside. Another wasp joined the wasp crawling outside the window. The first drops of rain began to fall. He got up, closed the window all the way, and went back to the kitchen, where he stood looking out the screen door. The driveway was deeply rutted. The holes had been filled with muddy water when he and Fran arrived, from so much rain. Mosquitoes hovered outside the screen, wanting to get in. He realized his folly: he was anthropomorphizing again. They were instinctually drawn to the surface of the screen. Who knew what made them hover?

He rubbed his hand over his forehead. The conversation a couple of days before, with Mrs. Brikel, came back to him in snatches, though he remembered more what she looked like, the view from the window of the tiny restaurant, the missing letters on the shop across the street: JOH DEER. AS he and Mrs. Brikel talked about things left incomplete, the fragment of the sign above her head, across the street, had riveted his attention. Mrs. Brikel’s love affair gone wrong. His insistence, in the face of no opposition from Mrs. Brikel, that he and his wife confided easily in each other.

Hadn’t she led him to a chair when the bee bit him?

But what did that have to do with sharing confidences?

He tried to conjure up Fran’s presence in the house, but it was slow in coming and vague when it seemed to be there.

“Frannie, Frannie, Frannie,” he said aloud, though he had not used her nickname in years.

7

He snapped a branch off a bush, threw it to the ground, and walked past the blue clapboard house where the painters had been scraping wood for what seemed like half the summer. The shutters had been removed and were stacked in the carport, the Audi backed out in the driveway. One of the men was getting a drink of water from the hose and made a motion as if to spray him as he walked by.

He waved. It was the house of the woman who sometimes sat with him in the evening, Mrs. Torius. Her name was much longer than that. She was a Greek woman with a name too long to spell and too hard to pronounce, so he called her Mrs. Torius. He had laughed about it when he found out that Spaniards called bulls toro. Most of what he knew he had found out from television, although his mother still insisted on reading school books to him as if he were small. He was five feet ten inches, and twenty-six years old. For twenty years his mother had been thinking over whether he could have another gerbil, because he had killed the first one. He didn’t care anymore, but it was something to keep after her about.

“Get on home, Loretta,” he squealed. There were many things the Beatles ordered people to do that he liked to hear. “Don’t leave me standing here” was another, though he could never get the cadence of that one right, so he just shouted it.

“How ’ya doin’ today, Royce?” the mailman said.

“You’ve got the mail,” Royce said.

The mailman walked on. In the cartoons, dogs bit mailmen.

Royce, after promising he wouldn’t go out, had left a note for his mother (he had whirled the yellow crayon around and around in a circle, so she would know he was taking a walk around the neighborhood; it had cut the paper, and he was going to be in trouble for getting crayon marks on the kitchen counter, which was not where he was supposed to color). In his note, he also told her, in purple Magic Marker, that he was going to bring home a fish. He liked fish very much, but his mother would only buy fish sticks because it disgusted her to see the way he chewed and chewed so carefully to make sure there were no bones, which would kill him if he swallowed them.

“Get on home, Loretta,” he said again, to a cat crossing his path. The cat could have run away from a Dr. Seuss book. Come to think of it, he could be the man in The Cat in the Hat because he had put on a top hat for his stroll. A walk was a stroll if you went slower than you normally walk. He slowed down even more, putting the heel of one red-laced high-topper against the toe of his other shoe, and alternating feet so he moved forward one footstep at a time.

John, his second-favorite Beatle, was dead.

Royce stopped to practice the Heimlich maneuver on an imaginary victim of choking. Then he metamorphosed into Batman and the bad guy fell to the ground, knocked unconscious. He put his arms above his head, knowing full well that he wouldn’t disappear like Batman, and he didn’t. He had seen Batman three times. The first time he saw it he sat through it a second time. He made such a stink that his mother couldn’t get him to leave and gave up. The other time he had to promise all day that he would only sit through Batman one time, if she allowed him to go. She did not go inside with him, having also made him promise that he would sit alone and not say anything to anybody. His mother was crazy if she thought he always had something to say. He didn’t.

His favorite pies were cherry, apple, blueberry, peach. In the order: apple, cherry, peach … and he could not at the moment remember the other kind of pie he liked.

He poked his finger in the air to make a decimal point. Ralph Sampson got to it, though, and once his hand touched it, it became a basketball. Score one victory. Jump off the ground and fly it up there, Ralph. Easy come, easy go.

That was what his mother said when he got his footprints on something, like the bed sheets or the dining-room table, which he was forbidden to stand on. The Cat in the Hat propped up one side of the recliner chair he sat in to watch TV. The house was old and the living-room floor sloped, but he liked sitting on the most sloping part. And the book made the tilt better. He teased his mother by leaning way over the side of the chair and waving his arms, saying “Whoooooooooo” sometimes, pretending he was falling off the side of a ship. He could always make her ask why he didn’t sit elsewhere.

His plan for catching the fish was to puff up his chest and dive into the Mediterranean Sea and get one from one of the frogmen who hunted fish at night with spears. He had just seen a show about night fishing off the coast of Italy. The men put on black suits and floated in shallow water, looking for what they wanted. He intended to see what he wanted by going to the water’s edge and peering in. It was very bad to go out when he had promised to stay home, but even worse to go near water. Therefore, he would carefully peer in. At the curb, he tested: he leaned slightly forward, like an elegant, myopic British gentleman about to meet someone of importance. The night before, on television, he had seen a movie in which an Englishman with a monocle eventually reached for some princess’s hand. People in that movie had been wearing top hats. His mother had had her father’s top hat in a box on the top shelf of the closet for years. He had brought it down with his magnet-vision. He just looked at a thing and it came to him. This only happened when his mother was not at home, though.

One of the boys in his crafts class, where he made belts and pouches and might be allowed to make a pair of moccasins, wore a diaper. A few days before, the boy had unbuttoned his long pants and let them drop around his ankles while the teacher’s attention was elsewhere. Mothers always liked buttons better than zippers, because they were harder to undo.

He thought that he had been on the corner long enough. He put one toe in the water. It was dry. He looked both ways. No fish yet. He decided to swim across the stream, but in case anyone came along he wouldn’t want to appear to be swimming, because they might tell his mother. What he would do would be look left and right and then hurry across the stream with only his invisible arms swimming.

He did so, and got to the other side.

For almost an hour, Royce walked in the direction of the reservoir. He had gone there years ago with his mother — more than once, actually — but his sense of direction was bad, so it was difficult to say what kept him on course. Walking along in his chinos, with a tie-dye shirt he had picked out himself and a top hat, he might have fooled anyone whizzing by in a car who didn’t notice the expression on his face, because this part of Vermont was still full of hippies. Where the hill dipped, instinct carried him once more down the road, where it forked to the right, and once on it, he was headed directly toward his destination. His mother and father had often walked with him there on summer nights, up until the time he began to scream because he wanted to go in the water. Though he had no memory of it, his screaming when he was two years old had brought his mother to tears, daily. She had taken tranquilizers and considered institutionalizing him. His father stopped coming, because his mother would no longer speak to him. Sometimes, for as much as a week, he and his mother would stay inside the house. In the house, she could run away from him and lock herself behind a door. Some things he did were only the things any baby would do, yet she reacted strongly to them. When he reached for her glasses, she stopped wearing them and functioned in a fog. When he was old enough to pull out her shoelaces, she did not replace them. She had a lock on one small closet that contained clothes she would wear when she took him into Boston to see doctors. Except for those clothes, she would often stay, all day, in her nightgown. Even after his teeth came through, she rubbed his gums with whiskey, hoping he might fall asleep earlier. She would smash delicate things that fascinated him before he had a chance. They drank from paper cups and ate more food than was reasonable with their fingers.

He took off one shoe and sock and left them by a tree, because the little piggy that cried “Wee-wee-wee” all the way home was also telling him it wanted to walk barefoot on the grass. When he took off the shoe, he made a mental note of where to find it again. He had left it at tree number fifty. There were exactly four thousand four hundred and ninety-six trees on this road to the reservoir.

Pale white clouds began to turn luminous, becoming the same yellowish color — something like burnt yellow — as the water in town, where the water was shallow as it fanned out to go over the waterfall. The clouds were quickly overlapping. It was as if blotting paper was soaking up all color. From second to second, more brightness faded as a stronger wind blew up. This was the sort of wind that preceded an alien landing. It could be used to advantage, Royce also knew, by criminals, who would step through broken store windows and steal whatever was to be had. In the distance, he heard sirens.

By now, he could see cars parked off the side of the road and, in the distance, the big green hill that led to the water. He looked down and saw that he had cut his toe. He crossed his arms across his chest and marched bravely on. He only stopped when he felt the wind start to lift his hat. He pulled it lower on his forehead, then ran his fingers along his temples to feel the fringe of mashed-down hair.

Several sirens were wailing at the same time. He looked over his shoulder. Two men were hurrying toward their truck: no fire in the distance, no car through which a toppled tree had crashed. He looked at the front of his shirt and thought that the mottled orange and yellow looked like fire. That made him feel powerful again, and he pulled his foot out of his other sneaker and kicked it high, like a football. It landed in the grass partway up the hill. By now the clouds were dark gray against a pale gray sky, and blowing so they twisted one in front of the other. He was a little out of breath from trying to breathe in such wind. He had to duck his head to breathe easily. When he got to his shoe, he sat down for a minute, enjoying the way the raindrops fell, flicking themselves over his body. He touched his hand to the top of his hat. The rain made the same sound falling on his hat that it did when it fell on the roof. He looked at the trees fringing the flat land on which bright green grass grew, now made dusty green by blowing dirt and a lack of light. The grass was newly mowed; something in the air made him sneeze. He sneezed several times in succession, blessing himself after each explosion, yelling God’s name louder each time. His feet were cold, and he thought about going back for the abandoned shoe, but the wind was blowing across the water in the reservoir so enticingly that he was transfixed. It reminded him of what it looked like when his mother peeled Saran Wrap back from a tray of chocolate-frosted brownies.

When the next gust of wind blew the top hat from his head and sent it skipping down the darkening grass, he followed behind, hobbling a bit because of his cut toe. He put his hands over his ears. The sound the wind made, rushing through the trees — a sound like paper being crumpled — muted. The sirens’ wail continued. What do fish hear? he thought.

A couple ran past, a sweater or jacket that was too small held over their heads as they laughed, running from the picnic area. They were the last people to see Royce, and later the girl said she believed that she had seen his hat blow in the water, though she had no reason to concentrate on that or anything else in her desperate rush toward shelter.

Maybe the fish said glug-glug. Maybe they talked the way fish did in fairy tales, and said something like: Come into the kingdom of the deep. Or maybe the hat itself started to talk, and that was what made Royce edge into the water, looking back as if taunting someone behind him as he advanced.

The reservoir was posted: no swimming, no boating, no water sports of any kind. No no no no no. Just a beautiful body of water that could magnetize people. Picnic tables to eat at while they enjoyed the view. Little paths that worked their way into the woods like shallow veins running down an arm. A place where lovers could stroll.

The hat was found floating, like a hat in one of the comics Royce loved so much. The shoes were found first, then the hat.

8

All her life Mrs. Brikel had been struck by the way people and things turned up when they were most needed and least expected. Today, just when she was feeling discouraged because her cold had lingered so long, a flower arrangement had been delivered from the local florist — a thank-you from a professor whose paper she had typed the night before on a moment’s notice, staying up until midnight so he could present it today at a conference in Chicago. There were daisies, roses, and three iris in the flower arrangement — a lovely sight to see in midwinter.

Since the publication of Pia Brunetti’s book almost a year before, Mrs. Brikel’s typing services had been much in demand. The acknowledgment in Pia’s book thanked Mrs. Brikel for her dedication and support: when Pia was unable to type for so long after her mastectomy, the entire task of typing the manuscript had fallen to Mrs. Brikel. But who would have done otherwise? It was not as though Pia had not paid her. As well as being an occasion for kindness, it had allowed her to develop her typing skills. She now had a word processor and more work than she had ever imagined. Suddenly she was doing very nicely in terms of income. The previous summer she had planted annuals instead of perennials. The house, if not exactly toasty warm, was quite comfortable since insulation had been blown into the attic and aluminum siding had been installed. If Royce were still alive, it would be much too hot for him in the house. He had sat around in his shirt-sleeves even in winter because he was never cold. The house would seem like a sauna bath to Royce.

Recently a health club had opened in town, and she had been hired to type the information that would be included in the brochure. The young woman who managed the health club, Marsha, had invited her, the week before, to use the facilities. She had ridden the stationary bicycle. At first she had laughed and said she was too old for such a thing, but Marsha’s husband, who was older than she, had proven her wrong by jumping onto one of the bikes and pedaling a mile, grinning, as she protested that she herself was rather uncoordinated. Bicycling was good for the circulation, and although she would feel silly going out on the street on a bicycle, she saw no point in not using one at the health club. Afterward, she would change into her bathing suit and sink into the hot tub’s warm bubbling water, which soothed her shoulder muscles. She had thought about using the sauna, but something about the uncomfortable-looking wood benches and the sharp smell of pine had made her hesitate: perhaps sometime when Marsha had time to join her, she would spend five or ten minutes in the sauna.

It came as no surprise to Mrs. Brikel that the town was changing. Those children she had seen all her life were bound to grow up and have children of their own. Now, instead of rushing off to the city to make their mark, many people wanted to settle into life in a small town. They missed out on something, but they gained something, as well: a sense of the continuity of days; a feeling of belonging.

Chap had written her recently that he was giving serious thought to moving to Vermont. He had always seemed the sort of person who might prosper under the right circumstances. Since his divorce — his wife had run off with another man, at the end of the summer they spent house-sitting for the Brunettis — he had gone through quite a metamorphosis. Now Anthony Brunetti had gone to live with him outside Boston. Lou, after the book’s publication and his separation from Pia, had moved to California. And Pia — of course, Pia was now back in Italy and the toast of the town, as well as being a widely respected feminist author in the United States.

As she was looking for her car keys (she had promised Marsha she would drop off a letter to new members Marsha had given her earlier in the week), a word came to Mrs. Brikel’s mind: paradoxically. Typing Pia’s manuscript — or perhaps more exactly, reading the reviews — had provided Mrs. Brikel with quite an education. The reviewer for the Boston Globe had said that Pia’s book was about the Americanization of an Italian family. The reviewer wrote that paradoxically, only when she learned she had cancer and faced the prospect of death did Pia truly come to have a sense of her own individuality and strength. Mrs. Brikel had read the book twice — reading was quite a different thing from typing a manuscript — and on the second reading, with the help of the newspaper reviews, she began to see more clearly why people thought about the book the way they did. On first reading, she had thought that Pia was writing only about the difficulty of having made a specific transition. It seemed to her that a family would naturally have some trouble adapting to life in a new country. A family, like a small town, was a particular thing: you had to give up something in order to gain something. You had to give up some … what? Some individuality, for the common good. The only part of the book that still seemed puzzling was the part she had typed last, but that came first: the introduction.

In the introduction, Pia had made public a very surprising secret. Typing it, Mrs. Brikel had been uncomfortable. Imagine allowing the world to know that before going on vacation, she had taken the two special brassieres she had had made after her surgery and hidden them in the attic, in a suitcase inside another suitcase, so there was no chance her friends who were house-sitting would discover them and therefore discover her secret. That was not the most shocking part, however. The shocking part was Pia’s admission that she took it for granted her friends would snoop through her house. She spoke of them as if they were burglars looking for silver, or teenagers hunting for the liquor cabinet. Perhaps such things went on more than she knew. She had read letters in Ann Landers from people who claimed to have stumbled upon drug paraphernalia in the apartment of a friend, had overheard girls at school complaining that their mothers read their diaries. Looking through a keyhole had never held any fascination for Mrs. Brikel. Sticking her nose in other people’s business (as her own mother had called prying) had never seemed a way to maintain a friendship. Even when you did not ask, you usually heard more than you wanted to, in Mrs. Brikel’s experience.

She put on her hat and coat and picked up the keys from the little dish on the table in the hallway. It was not really a dish, but a saucer — a piece of Fiestaware in a dark shade of blue that Mr. Brunetti had given her as a little souvenir. She had gone to the Brunettis’ house to return a turkey baster Pia had once loaned her, as Mr. Brunetti had been packing to leave, and he had told her to please just keep the turkey baster. Then he had straightened up — he had been packing things in his study, and his face looked very bad, though perhaps it was just red because he had been bent over for so long — he had straightened up and said he supposed a turkey baster was not really the nicest thing he could think to offer her. Then he had asked what she might really like, and she had understood from the way he looked at her that if she said she would like the living-room sofa, it could have been hers. If she had said that she would like every picture on the wall, or even the china press, and all the china, that would have been hers also. So she had pointed at the closest thing: the piece of unpacked Fiestaware. She was sure that if she did not choose something small, he would insist she take something large and expensive. She tended to like things that were more delicate than Fiestaware, and in fact blue was not her favorite color, but she had been a little unnerved by his expression. So there it was, then — the blue saucer that served quite nicely as a place to keep her keys. As soon as she got a package of Kleenex from the kitchen drawer she would be ready to leave.

But instead of going into the kitchen, she sat down in the living room, luxuriating, for a moment, in the added warmth of her coat in what was finally, after all these years, a perfectly well insulated house. The sun was moving westward. In a couple of hours it would set and sink below the mountains.

She tapped her toes together, and looked at her shoes. They were a new sort of shoe Marsha had told her about that exercised the foot when you walked and resembled a ballet slipper: black cloth, with a small grosgrain bow on top. She liked them so much, and they were so comfortable, that sometimes she forgot where she lived — forgot that outside there was dirty snow, and deep mud where the snow had melted — and she would occasionally start out the door as if she could simply breeze off without a care in the world in her delicate new shoes.

In the spring she would wear them outdoors. She might even ride a bicycle to and from town then, if she built up more strength riding the stationary bike during the winter. What did it matter if you were a little eccentric, if you did not act exactly like everyone else? People were quick to forgive. They forgave you because they were eager to keep things polite and eager to get on with their own lives. On the day of Royce’s funeral, everyone had offered their condolences and admired her for what she had done. They spoke about the lightning that had struck the tree, the sudden storm that had blown up — they said everything they could think to say about what a gray, wild, windy day it had been, while saying nothing about the fact that if the sun had been shining, the flowers blooming, and all of nature glistening in the sunlight, Royce would still have wandered away, taken some crazy idea into his head, and drowned. The only difference might have been that if there had been no storm, someone might have been at the reservoir to hear his cries.

But who knew whether he had made a sound? The only sound might have been the slight stirring of water displaced by a body.

It was very hard to be alone in the world. Not alone as in no-one-in-the-house alone, but by yourself, even when you meant to be. Certain people would be drawn to you and would buzz around as if a quiet person, a woman in late middle age, no longer attractive, could provide them with nectar. Years before, her lover — Royce’s father — had hovered around that way. He was one of those people who would get as close as she allowed. It seemed not quite real now, all those rendezvous, and those late-night whispered phone conversations with him. Surprising and a bit sad, too, that Mr. Brunetti had wanted to confess first his peccadillos, then his absolute shame — his feeling that he could never forgive himself for ruining Pia’s life. Perhaps when sex was not involved it was easier for people to forgive. It had been years before she first had sex with Royce’s father — that had not been the nature of the attraction. And now she was old. Safe, in a way. Though there had been that odd moment the summer Royce died when she and Chap had coffee and the tension between them had been, undeniably, sexual. There was some urge as intimate as sex, though it had nothing to do with sex itself, which had made him confess that she had seen him when he first visited the Brunettis. She would never have remembered. That snowy day, and she had been in such a hurry. But he had wanted her to know that he had been there, a real person, someone she needed to factor into the landscape.

Sitting in the newly upholstered chair, enjoying the colors of the flowers in the fading light, she let her eyes sweep slowly across the floor. After Royce’s death, it had taken three men only one afternoon to make it perfectly level. The high polyurethane gloss made the floorboards glisten like water. It looked like a large, calm lake that she could imagine gliding swiftly over. Just looking at it, she could feel the buoyance of her heart.