The interior design of the cabin on the lake has not been updated since the early 1970s or maybe earlier. The carpet is orange shag, and the furniture in the living room is yellow vinyl. Taxidermied creatures inhabit many corners, stare out from every wall, and augment countertops. Ryan and Gabriella are in a bedroom, one of three. Their friend Keener, whose parents own this place, is in another, and Gabriella’s sister Maggie is in the third with her boyfriend Dave. They are all either freshmen or sophomores at the University of Alabama. Ryan and Gabriella are naked in bed, but they are not having sex because neither of them thought to bring condoms on this trip.

Two weeks earlier, Ryan and Gabriella met when this same group of students drove to Birmingham in Keener’s car to see a rock concert. Ryan and Gabriella ended up making out in the back seat of the car on the drive home. They’ve run into one another on campus a few times since then and taken walks together. Since they both have roommates and live in dorms where visitors of the opposite sex are strictly monitored, this is the first opportunity they’ve had to spend the night together.

As Ryan stares at the ceiling, he is composing a melody in his head. He hasn’t yet thought about the lyrics, but he thinks it will be about shame. Shame and frustration. Gabriella has rolled over with her back to Ryan and is sleeping soundly. In the other rooms of the cabin, Dave and Maggie are having sex. Keener is alone in his own room with a bottle of blended scotch, sketching out some Dungeons & Dragons characters that he hopes to use later in the week. The lake outside is silent and cool.

Later in the week, Ryan and Gabriella will actually have sex for the first time, in Ryan’s dorm room, while his roommate is in class. Ryan will be nervous and ejaculate almost instantly upon penetration. They will try again an hour later, and it will be much better for both of them. Over the next two years, they will both learn a lot more about one another’s bodies and how to give one another pleasure, and then they will sink into a routine that will satisfy their basic urges but will lack the transcendence of the early experimentation. Occasionally, they will try something new, such as incorporating vibrators and other toys, but this will most often bring back the awkwardness of their early relationship without the same level of excitement. They will make no discoveries that improve their overall routine. At the end of their junior year at the university they will break up.

The painting above the bed shows a woodsy landscape and uses thick layers of dark green and brown tempura to capture the texture of the tree-lined mountainside. It was originally created by Keener’s mother many years ago when she audited some art classes at a local community college. Ryan thinks it would look good if it had some neon space monkeys painted among the trees, and perhaps some robots shooting lasers out of their eyes. He has made a mental note to mention this to Keener in the morning.

Earlier tonight, Ryan told Gabriella that the one time he’d had sex before, it was in high school with a girl from the country whom he had pursued explicitly because he thought he had a good chance of losing his virginity with her. He said that he met her at a fast food restaurant where she worked and thought she was pretty. They went on only a few dates and had nothing at all in common. All of this was true except the part where he had sex with her. He’d made that up because he didn’t want to admit to still being a virgin. Gabriella said she had only had sex once before also, the previous year, with a short-term boyfriend whom she said “liked me enough for the two of us.” Her story was true.

Later, Ryan will write the song that is currently germinating in his head and teach it to his band. Dave is the drummer in the band, and Keener is the bass player. The song will eventually be called “The Ballad of Desire and Shame,” but its first name will be “Faust” because Ryan is an English major, and the lyrics will be about making a deal with the devil that ends badly. Though he normally writes catchy power pop anthems, this song will come out as a slow country waltz, where the chorus changes to double time and takes on a glorious gospel feel. Not having much of a feel for country, Ryan’s band will play the song with heavy power chords, distortion, and delay effects, and it will not sound very good at all.

The cabin has an “atmosphere refreshment system” that pumps an artificial scent—a combination of pine and cinnamon—into the air at regular intervals. Keener’s parents are heavy smokers, and the system does little to mask the stale cigarette stench that over the years has infiltrated every fiber of every piece of furniture in the place. At this point however, it has overtaken the smell of sweat and semen in the bedroom.

Earlier, Gabriella said they couldn’t have intercourse without a condom, but there were other things they could do. After fumbling around for only a few minutes, Ryan sprayed ejaculate across Gabriella’s pert, tan breasts. Ryan confessed that he had lied about his previous experience and then covered his head with a pillow. Gabriella warned him not to lie to her anymore, but also reassured him that he’d get the hang of it. They’d just have to practice more. Anyway, she told him, she was impressed with the force and volume of what came out of him. He must have been really excited she said.

Ryan’s toenails are entirely out of control and are beginning to resemble twisted roots. They remind him of the cypress knees in the shallows of the lake outside. Outside, an owl prepares to swoop down on a deer mouse. A white tailed doe nibbles on some acorns, its fawn drowsing nearby. The pink brilliance of Venus is clearly visible just above the horizon. Ryan thinks that maybe he’ll try to grow out his beard this year.

Later, Ryan will wake up with a stuffed bobcat from the living room staring him in the face, and he will resist the urge to scream. Over breakfast, Dave will admit to sneaking into their room in the middle of the night to pose it there. Dave will think this is much funnier than everyone else does.

“Emblem” Richard Hoffman
Barrow Street Press, 2011, $16.95

Emblem is Richard Hoffman’s third book. His second, Gold Star Road, won the 2006 Barrow Street Poetry Prize.

Emblem departs from Alciati’s 1531 Emblemata, a Latin metrical collection of moral, proverb-like sayings, in which ethical teaching is couched in elegant and forceful diction. That text is accompanied by woodcuts. After Alciati, writing such a collection became a pastime for humanists steeped in classical culture; which is to say, with Emblemata, Alciati spawned thousands of imitations, creating a Renaissance genre.

Hoffman’s Emblem is not an emblem book, though the second section of the book draws closest to wit and forceful diction. Beautifully designed and composed, Emblem is an outstanding book of poetry. A response to yankee puritanism, humanist cynicism, and Zen. It is book of lovely georgics about finding one’s way in the world; perhaps of finding one’s way to one’s creative source and to finding one’s balance with the world.

Yes, the world may be a ship of fools, but it is a magical place. In one poem an ancestral monster comes bounding to assist its progeny. In others, a husband watches a plumber “snaking” a drain, Columbus (another specious world voyager?) discovers––not Indians––but the working class; aphrodisia is deconstructed in a villanelle. There are celebrations of laughter and the nutritions and joys of a life of wakefulness and watchfulness; futility, nothingness, cowardice, and apathy are used as foils, and at the same time are exposed.

In one poem, fire metaphorically rises to make a cloud and eventually extinguishes its own ancestral fire. In different poems, Hoffman’s imagination engages fire, earth, water, air, and aether.The physical world is ethereally reflected in poetics. In another lyric, the voice in the poem theistically considers a New England snow storm:

You have made me to seek refuge
and charged me to care for my brothers.

How cruel. That could only be You out there
howling, cracking the trees, burying everything.
What could I possibly want from You
that would not undo the whole world as it is?

(“Winter Psalm”)

In one––if security is what we want, the voice adjures us “to walk among thieves: Pocketless.” In another, “On Impulsiveness,” the lean, solitary living bobcat keeps springing after pray leaving the dogs to devour his kill (work ethic overkill?). The dogs, being social creatures, have to accommodate to live and hunt in a pack; but by sacrificing their privacy, they are well fed.

What would a philosophical examination be without considering erotic Love? In one poem Hoffman deconstructs courting, down to a boy bringing flowers and a fish:

Shall we read the meaning
that he rules both land and sea?
For flowers, one must wait for their season,
and to catch a fish means patient waiting too,

a day declines to evening and you doubt your luck
and wonder at the river’s mysteries, hoping
down below the worm still wriggles on your hook.

(“Emblem 107” On Love)

There are passages of arresting ars poetica:

protect me from haste,
from willingness,
from forgetfulness,
and the wish to please….

Easy now, easy….

Here in my head the world
abrades and sparks. Still, this kind of understanding is like
those photographs of lightning over the sea or the plains,
exquisite but no longer thrilling because no longer auguring

thunder seconds later to disclose how far away the rain is,
how much time we have to take shelter, to gather what we’ve
brought, to confer with one another whether we will make it.

(“Anamnesis”)

“Here in my head the world.” The English word world comes from the Old English weorold, weorld, worold (-uld, -eld), a compound of wer “man” and eld “age.” (The fullness of the world is perhaps likened to the mature, perceiving individual.) The corresponding word in Latin mundus, literally means “clean, elegant”, itself a loan translation of Greek cosmos “orderly arrangement.”

Emblem is Hoffman’s wise, artful meditation from aboard the ship of fools; his balanced poetic meditation on the “orderly arrangement” of our world.

Fogged Clarity contributor Jim Rioux discusses music and meaning with songwriter Guy Capecelatro III.

Guy Capecelatro III records four tracks for this exclusive session.

*Accompaniment provided by Jim Rioux.

1. Caves
2. Something Like a Door
3. New Bed
4. Biology Teacher

Rocky Votolato’s resonant voice and rich songwriting make his latest release, “Television Of Saints,” worth well more than one listen.

~ Launch Pop-out Player ~

The great American poet joins Ben to discuss his life and craft.

Benjamin Evans

Executive Editor, Fogged Clarity

• Bruce SmithBruce Smith is the author of six collections of poems, most recently, Devotions (University of Chicago, 2011), which was nominated for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His fourth book, The Other Lover (University of Chicago, 2000) was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. His poems have appeared in Poetry, The New Yorker, The Best American Poetry Anthology, The Nation, The New Republic, The Paris Review, The Partisan Review, The American Poetry Review, and many other journals. Essays and reviews of his have appeared in Harvard Review, Boston Review and Newsday. He has been a recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship as well as twice receiving grants from the National Endowment of the Arts and the Massachusetts Foundation for the Arts. Four Poems From His Series, Thinly Sealed
• Robert WrigleyRobert Wrigley has published eight collections of poetry, the most recent of which is Beautiful Country (Penguin, 2010). His poems have appeared in many journals, including Poetry, The Atlantic, Barrow Street, and The New Yorker, and were included in the 2003 and 2006 editions of Best American Poetry. Wrigley’s honors and awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Idaho State Commission on the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation, as well as a Poets’ Prize, Kingsley Tufts Award, J. Howard and Barbara M.J. Wood Prize, the Frederick Bock Prize from Poetry magazine, the Wagner Award from the Poetry Society of America, the Theodore Roethke Award from Poetry Northwest, and six Pushcart Prizes. From 1987 until 1988 he served as the state of Idaho’s writer-in-residence.Calendar
• Anna Karenina
• The Scholar
• Bruce SniderBruce Snider is the author of two poetry collections, Paradise, Indiana, winner of the 2011 Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Prize, and The Year We Studied Women, winner of the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry. His poems and non-fiction have appeared in the American Poetry Review, Southern Review, Ploughshares, Gettysburg Review and Ninth Letter, among other journals. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow, he has been writer-in-residence at the James Merrill House in Stonington, CT as well as at the Amy Clampitt House in Lenox, MA. He currently lives in San Francisco and teaches at Stanford University.My Grandmother Shoplifting at the Pick ‘n Save
• The Afterlife of Roadkill
• Someone Knocks On A Door In The State Where I Was Born
• Adrianne KalfopoulouAdrianne Kalfopoulou is the author of two poetry collections, most recently, Passion Maps (2009, Red Hen Press). Her essays and poems have appeared in Web del Sol, Hotel Amerika, WLT, and the Beloit Poetry Journal, among other publications. She is on the faculty of Hellenic American University, and teaches in the creative writing program at NYU.The History of Too Much

• Adam MartinakisAdam Martinakis lives and works in Athens, Greece. His work has been featured in numerous art portals, books and magazines including Book of Creation, 3d artist magazine, 3ds max bible 2012, evermotion.org, cultureinside.com, artlimited.net, digart.pl, thisiscolossal.com, mymodernmet.com, bulkka.com, embrosyst.com, fuctart.gr and others.Digital 3D Art
• Laurent CrasteLaurent Craste is a Montreal-based artist and sculptor represented by Galerie Sas.Sévices (Abuse)
• Andrew HolmquistAndrew Holmquist is a Chicago-based artist and alumni of The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.Paintings

• Adam ArcuragiAdam Arcuragi is a folk singer and guitarist from Atlanta. Since 2006, he has released four albums, including his most recent: Like a Fire That Consumes All Before It… He has recorded studio sessions for both NPR and Daytrotter.Like a Fire That Consumes All Before It…

• Scott HightowerScott Hightower is the author of three books. This fall, Self-Evident, his fourth collection stateside, is forthcoming from Barrow Street Press. Early next year, Oases/Hontanares, a bi-lingual book, is forthcoming from Devenir, Madrid. Hightower teaches as adjunct faculty at NYU and Drew University. A native of central Texas, he lives in Manhattan and sojourns in Spain.reviews B.K. Fischer’s Mutiny Gallery

Adam Arcuragi’s, “Like a Fire That Consumes All Before It…” fuses grit and lyrical eloquence to create an accomplished collection of deeply resonant songs.

Sorry, streaming albums are only available during the month they are featured.

“Mutiny Gallery” B.K. Fischer
(Winner of the 2011 T.S. Eliot Prize)
Truman State University Press, 2011, $18.00

B.K. Fischer’s Mutiny Gallery, a novel in verse, is an act of earnest imagination. In a period when much poetry is thin- I biography, it is refreshing to come to a first book that is provocatively metaphoric and hearty… and with a personae, one surmises, set apart from the author. The premise of the book is rather simple: a mother and her son are escaping — fleeing “domestic peril.” –– and, in so doing, are engaged in a U.S. cross-country road trip. Tanks of gas are burned; bridges are burned –– and unintentionally preserved; nightmare museums are the temporary stops. What emerges in the deeper kinetic landscape of the novel is not so simple:

Dreams she is naked with a lover but can’t
find a place to be alone––a hotel room laden
with noisy sleepers, a sliding door opening

at an intersection, a wall dissolving into
a department store where she crouches
among the racks, grabbing something…

She lights a cigarette, her first since
she snuffed out her sworn last
by the wheel of his stroller outside

a bodega in November 2001…

Surely a seedy love scene is coming up,
a cheap fling, except she is traveling
with a chaperone too young to leave.

She fingers a key ring, only free
to take a peep, a body broken down
into boxes: ridge of a foot, glans.

(“Exotic World Burlesque Museum”)

There are passages of disintegration; and passages of assemblage. Intimacy seems to collapse down to sleepy arms wrapped around a sleepy neck. New zones of risk have to be navigated. Even without the father’s violence, there were intrinsic problems in the original landscape:

…Take your chances with the big city, take
this ticket out of Gambrills, where all there is, is a divided

highway with a median-strip Taco Bell and a sand quarry….

She wanted to talk about kitsch and the str(i/u)ctures of faith,…

but her advisor leveled his gaze at her chest throughout the defense.

Too bad about those other girls, such promise but they turned out
to be bourgeois opt-out suburbanite incubators come home

to roost and lost their edge. That won’t happen to you, will it?

(“Museum of Bad Art”)

There are also intriguing passages of description; often in what, in any other situation, might pass as nonchalant aside. There is nothing nonchalant in Mutiny Gallery:

Claire is the only one in the museum. Max has run off to the
bottom of a hill to poke around in some rocks. A rotating fan
pushes a cabin smell across and past her, across and past.
Folding chairs stacked against one wall suggest that perhaps
the room is still used for a congregation or at least a group.

(“Church of One Tree”)

There are poignant poems about being dogged by poverty, living near the edge, ever on the go. The aromas are odd mixtures of where the two travelers are, where they have been. Time moves forward and backward. Snippets of memories, moments of panic, innutritious snacks, and serendipitous flashes of graffiti fill the voids where more meaningful textures and continuities are missing. There are simply wisps of race, faith, class, and cultural identity. Lost and Found become unclear designations. A peacock, popcorn bucket, mosaics made from torn bits embroider the day’s tapestry:

At natural Bridge, he…
trotted down sixty steps before the ticket-taker
sent him back up, short by $7 to see the arch.

He thinks about
the Alamo and what would have happened had it
never been avenged. No state of Texas, the USA
a thinner-bellied creature with Louisiana and Florida
at its two front paws.

(“Killing Time Museum”)

Besides the emotional spaces that are opened and collapsed, the poems are carefully lined and well made. Metaphors are thoughtfully introduced, listed, returned to for development. Fischer is masterful with pacing, ruthless, and skilled.

She is tired.
Paid it all: tuition, dues, tolls.
Where the hell’s
the deus ex machina?

(“American Precision Museum”)

Mutiny Gallery, is so worth the read, and leaves us looking
forward to more from B.K. Fischer.

Benjamin Evans
Executive Editor, Fogged Clarity

• Stephanie ElliottStephanie Elliott graduated from the City College of New York where she won numerous awards for her writing. Her work has appeared in Confrontation and The Healing Muse. Swaddled

• Jonathan WellsJonathan Wells‘ first collection of poems, Train Dance, was published in October 2011 by Four Way Books. His poems have been published in The New Yorker, Alaska Quarterly Review and The Paris Review Daily, among other journals. Sledding Out
• Home Is Not One Heart
• Scott HightowerScott Hightower is the author of three books. This fall, Self-Evident, his fourth collection stateside, is forthcoming from Barrow Street Press. Early next year, Oases, a bi-lingual book, is forthcoming from Devenir, Madrid. Hightower teaches as adjunct faculty at NYU and Drew University. A native of central Texas, he lives in Manhattan and sojourns in Spain. “Follies”
• The Zeppelin Field at Nurnberg
• Amy LemmonAmy Lemmon is the author of two poetry collections: Fine Motor (Sow’s Ear Poetry Review Press, 2008) and Saint Nobody (Red Hen Press, 2009) and co-author, with Denise Duhamel of ABBA: The Poems (Coconut Books, 2010) and Enjoy Hot or Iced: Poems in Conversation and a Conversation (Slapering Hol Press, 2011). Her poems and essays have appeared in Rolling Stone, New Letters, Prairie Schooner, Verse, Court Green, The Journal, Barrow Street, and many other magazines and anthologies. She is currently associate professor of English at the Fashion Institute of Technology.1965
• Jean KaneJean Kane teaches English at Vassar College. Her fiction and poetry have been published in American Short Fiction, Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, and Indiana Review. La graffeta d’amor
• Much Later
• John M. AndersonJohn M. Anderson teaches at Boston College. Featured in both Poetry Daily and Verse Daily, he has new poems in Poetry Northwest, Spillway, Tuesday: An Art Project, and Crazyhorse – plus a canyonland chapbook, Dictionary Quilt (Pudding House, 2007). His manuscript Alamos: A Chain Reaction is a ghost story in verse about J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb. Peter Oppenheimer Hearing the Who…
• Some Version of Late Peter Oppenheimer…

• Guy LarameeGuy Laramee is an interdisciplinary artist whose work has been seen and heard in Canada, United States, Belgium, France, Germany, Switzerland, Japan and Latin America which includes some 15 solos and more than 20 collective shows. The Great Wall
• C.J. PyleCJ Pyle is a Chicago-based artist represented by the Carl Hammer Gallery. Illustration
• Greg DunnGreg Dunn is currently working on his PhD in neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania. He spends his free time creating works of art inspired by his doctorate work and classic Asian art. Neuroscience

• Justin Robinson and the Mary AnnettesJustin Robinson is a Grammy Award-winning violinist who played with the Carolina Chocolate Drops before beginning his latest project, Justin Robinson and the Mary Annettes. Thus far, the band has released the full-length album Bones for Tinder, along with the E.P. Precious Blood.Bones for Tinder
• The Fogged Clarity Session

• Andrew HudginsAndrew Hudgins is the author of eight books of poems, including Saints and Strangers, Ecstatic in the Poison, and most recently American Rendering: New and Selected Poems. He has been a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, won the Harper Lee Award, and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. the renown poet discusses his work

• Scott HightowerScott Hightower is the author of three books. This fall, Self-Evident, his fourth collection stateside, is forthcoming from Barrow Street Press. Early next year, Oases/Hontanares, a bi-lingual book, is forthcoming from Devenir, Madrid. Hightower teaches as adjunct faculty at NYU and Drew University. A native of central Texas, he lives in Manhattan and sojourns in Spain.reviews Neil Shephard’s collection, (T)ravel, Un(T)ravel

Benjamin Evans
Executive Editor, Fogged Clarity

• Colin FlemingColin Fleming is a contributing writer for The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The Boston Globe and The New York Times Book Review. His fiction has appeared in Boulevard, Texas Review, Slice Magazine and The Iowa Review, among other publications. Mushroom Wine

• Daniel SchwarzDaniel R. Schwarz is Frederic J. Whiton Professor of English Literature and the Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow at Cornell University. He is the author of numerous books and has published poems in journals throughout the world. Closure: 1986
• klipschutzklipschutz is a poet living in San Francisco. His poems have appeared in venues ranging from Poetry (of Chicago) to FUCK! (Tucson), along with many anthologies. His books include Twilight of the Male Ego and The Erection of Scaffolding for the Re-Painting of Heaven by the Lowest Bidder (o.p.). In 2006, through Luddite Kingdom Press, he issued the collectible All Roads. . .But This One. Upon Reading About Frank Lloyd Wright in a Rented Basement Room
• The Alpha Beta Male
• Dennis MahaginDennis Mahagin is a poet from the Pacific Northwest. His work has appeared in magazines such as 42opus, Exquisite Corpse, Night Train, Juked, Stirring, 3 A.M. and The Nervous Breakdown, among other journals. His chapbook, entitled Fare, is forthcoming in 2012 from Redneck Press.Fence Fragment
• Luke HollisLuke Hollis has studied at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln and currently is a student at the University of Oregon Master of Fine Arts program. He has received the Miriam Starlin Award and Irby F. Wood Prize for his poetry. The Co-op in Fairmont, NE
• Ron AntonucciRon Antonucci is a librarian and book critic whose reviews and articles have appeared in dozens of magazines and newspapers. He has had poems published in Whiskey Island Magazine, The Vincent Brothers Review, Pudding, Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine and I Have My Own Song for It: Modern Poems of Ohio (University of Akron Press, 2002). He was fiction editor at Artful Dodge and currently serves as a contributing editor for The Journal. Supplicant
• A Picasso Blue

• Akos MajorAkos Major is a Hungarian photographer currently living and working in Vienna, Austria. Minus & White
• Maurizio AnzeriMaurizio Anzeri is an Italian artist living and working in London. Embroidery on Photographic Prints
• Michael ZimmererMichael Zimmerer is a fine art and commercial photographer who graduated from Savannah College of Art and Design in 2009. He currently resides in Orlando, FL. White Horizon

• Win Peter WintersWin Peter Winters is a chamber folk band from Upstate New York and led by Chris Bell.Self-titled
• The Fogged Clarity Session

• Bruce SniderBruce Snider is the author of two poetry collections, Paradise, Indiana, winner of the 2011 Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Prize, and The Year We Studied Women, winner of the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry. His poems and non-fiction have appeared in the American Poetry Review, Southern Review, Ploughshares, Gettysburg Review and Ninth Letter, among other journals. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow, he has been writer-in-residence at the James Merrill House in Stonington, CT as well as at the Amy Clampitt House in Lenox, MA. He currently lives in San Francisco and teaches at Stanford University. discusses his prize-winning collection “Paradise, Indiana”

• Scott HightowerScott Hightower is the author of three books. This fall, Self-Evident, his fourth collection stateside, is forthcoming from Barrow Street Press. Early next year, Oases/Hontanares, a bi-lingual book, is forthcoming from Devenir, Madrid. Hightower teaches as adjunct faculty at NYU and Drew University. A native of central Texas, he lives in Manhattan and sojourns in Spain.reviews the poetry of Steve Fellner

Sorry, streaming albums are only available during the month they are featured.

Hints of Southern Gothic tradition and beautiful instrumentation make this debut album well worth a listen.

“Mama!” her baby cries as she begins readying them both for the bus ride. “Shhh, Wendy, princess,” she soothes the baby with coos and talk. “It’s cold out. We must dress warm. So the snake won’t bite!” With a yellow blanket, the mother swaddles the little form into an almost unrecognizable rigid mass, then covers herself with her own coat, picks up her baby and throws a top blanket over them both, bonding them as one. “I love you!” the baby says with a clearer voice than you’d expect from one so small. So special. The mother smiles at her child and says, “I love you, too, my Wendy. Little Cinderella.”

***

Right away they notice as she steps up. People in the front seats of the city bus sight the woman with the dangling cloth obscuring the bundle she so watchfully carries. Whatever it is, it doesn’t look heavy. They observe her intently looking for a seat in the front among them. If you see something say something go the signs and announcements all around the public transportation system. The citizens on the bus are seeing something, but aren’t sure if that something needs saying.

And the woman with the bundle sees something right away, too. The eyes cast upon her. She suspects they want to know, as usual, what’s wrapped in the blanket clutched to her chest. A seat second from the first is made available to her, a center seat that causes the woman to have to wriggle her bottom between an obese lady with big bags and an elderly man packed in a puffy down coat. The bus begins to move. The woman holds her load securely so as not to drop it as she splays her legs for support. People still look as she adjusts the blanket at the top, gently folding back the edges. A peek of the side of a baby’s head. The passengers appear to collectively relax. A mother with her baby. Making sure to nestle its blanket around the infant’s head, folks witness a mother protecting her child’s ears and neck from any draft. Conversation in the crowded space livens up, talk about the frigid record-breaking February weather, and pieces of one-sided cell phone chatter erupt as the bus drives on to the next stop.

Still curious, some people keep watching, for after all it is a baby, and the sight of a baby has a habit of breaking deadpan dazes, seems to revive worn out New Yorkers, bringing smiles, or at least some small interest that awakens them from their otherwise ticking-time lives. Sometimes the mother sees other looks, though. Looks of remembrance perhaps. Sometimes mystified expressions. Maybe even jealousy. As if they long for a baby of their own.

At each bus stop bodies get off and new bodies board with brand new glances at the woman, as if they’ve never seen a mother and child before. The looks do make her feel a bit embarrassed, but in a way, also special. Without the baby she more than likely would go unnoticed, could be just anyone on a bus. But with the baby in her arms they know who she is: A good mother. Though after a certain length of constant ogling, she feels uncomfortable. They stare, seem to scrutinize her every move. The gawking, the gawking always makes her self-conscious, and even, well yes, a little angry. Is she doing something wrong? Have they figured it out? It’s not the first time anyone has done this, what are they all glaring at? She knows who she is, what she’s doing. They always do this, this glaring and eyeballing and then someone will whisper, “It looks like…like a doll,” or a comment like that. And then someone else will whisper back a thing like, “Doesn’t it? I think maybe, too. A little baby doll.”

She gets that a lot. She always gets that about her baby. And she knows why.

***

Little babies. Lined up behind glass, each nearly identical. Each little baby swaddled the same, in the same but separate, plastic cradle. On the maternity ward she’d learned how to swaddle them good and secure, to make them feel as if they were still in the womb.

“Nurse,” she heard, and saw the other faces that peered and longed to touch what they’d made, as they called for her through the glass partition. “Where’s my baby? Which one is mine? Can you hold my baby up so I can see him?” Only she could touch the babies. For now, they were hers. Brand new, unformed, who would have known which was which? Who would have known who they belonged to? She did, though. Nurse Florence.

At this point in their unlived lives, she knew them better than anyone. Their individual sounds became recognizable to her within hours of being born. Nurse Florence knew their needs. And she’d tend to her babies’ needs.

And then they were gone.

Little babies. She saw them everywhere. Saw them behind her eyes in her sleep at night.

***

For most of those years living with her mother she’d always thought that if she were to die, if her mother got sick or had a heart attack and died, or even had a stroke that left her so bad that she couldn’t speak or think and just lay there like a rotting potato, Florence would never be able to make a decision on her own. She knew in her heart that if Mama were to go she couldn’t possibly go on without her.

Someone had said to her once, “It’s not natural. Not natural to live with your mother at that age, when you’ve been a grownup for so many years.” This someone she thought had maybe taken those words right out of one of those self-help psychology books, or maybe heard a doctor on TV say, “It’s not natural for an adult to live with their parents.” This someone, she also thought, had never known alone.

But still, it wasn’t smooth satin this living together business. She often felt like her mother had no respect for her. None at all. Like her mother owned her, as if Florence were just a piece of property, her own thing she could use as she pleased. And as if that owner, like owners are entitled to do with their own stuff, could handle the merchandise at their own whim.

“Slut,” her mother would call out the second floor window, while Florence tended to the small garden of gladiolas, tomatoes, and herbs in front of their tiny townhouse. “You going out again to that bar to find a man? You’ll never get a man,” her mother would say, and Florence would hope as she bent over the basil and thyme, that none of the neighbors heard, “Who would want you? Why you going there?” But when Florence stood at the gate trimming the hedge, she could see plainly that people passing by looked up at her mother with her head craning on her neck out the window, yelling, “You’re too old,” and she knew they’d never heard their own Mama saying a thing like, “Too old for a man. Too old for having a baby. Nothing but a slut.”

After a long time, Florence’s thoughts changed. She thought now she’d made a mistake. She’d rather have a man upstairs to kiss than her mother, that snake. But for the relief of the burden of cursing love every day, for that reason alone, Florence begged death on, not caring what would become of her without her mother. And now since it happened, since Mama had passed, from that day on Florence could, and does, make every decision on her own. And they are hers, and hers alone.

***

Everywhere. Little babies. She sees them inside and outside and hidden behind eyes. On crowded streets eyes darting taking in new sights, faces in parks and crying on buses, and peering from car windows that stop and start again at green lights, and she thinks they want out, those unhappy eyes from behind glass, saying to her, take me home with you. And so if she doesn’t take them, take care of her babies, their needs, they’ll be gone— “Maam, why are you running? Oh my God! Is that your baby? Stop! Stop running. Stop that woman! Oh God! She’s got a baby. Stop her now, she’s almost out of the building.” She keeps running, and her mind races…. It’s not like it’s never been done before, it’s not like nobody else has never done this. I have a voice, I can speak. They think I’m out of my mind, but I know what’s happening, and why I’m doing it. I remember the lived pieces….Layers of living, layer upon layer cascade and crash into each other—“Mama!”—moments that have been lived are in moments now forming— Cinderella dressed in yella— all that collected living—kissed a fella— of moments, sights sounds smells tastes tactile touch thoughts ferment—made a mistake—and then fertilize moments of the future…little babies. Wendy— People knock to walls and doors and down side hallways in the hospital, security guards rush to apprehend the woman, and then as they pin the woman to a wall, her head knocks up against a glass case with shelves displaying get-well cards, hospital-logoed coffee mugs, stuffed bears and bunnies, all available in the gift shop in the lobby, “Oh, for Christ’s sakes,” someone else says, “it’s just a goddamn doll.”— 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8— She missed, OUT.

***

Little babies. Everywhere she saw little babies. Behind plastic windows in boxes all lined up, identical, which one would she choose? There were infant ones. Toddler ones. Which one?

Maybe she would just take the one right here in front of her.

“No, no,” her mother said, “Take it out from under your sweater.” And the girl did, pulling the doll out from under her yellow, two-sizes-too-big, hand-me-down sweater, putting the doll back on the shelf. “You mustn’t steal. It’s not right, Florence. I’ll buy you one. Which one do you want?” But they all looked the same. The ones on this shelf at least. “Here, take this one,” her mother said, reaching to the shelf above where there was one single box. She pulled it down and put it in Florence’s hands. “You’ll have this one.”

The writing on the box declared that Wetting Wendy, not only could wet, but she could speak. A special little doll inside. Florence turned the box over and saw a hole there in the cardboard back and poking out was a plastic ring that begged her to pull. When she drew the plastic ring toward her a long string came out, and then took its time slipping back as Wetting Wendy said, “Mama!” She could speak! Wendy could talk! and she spoke directly to Florence right here and now.

The little girl pulled the string again. “Hold me,” Wendy said, and so Florence put her arms around the box with the little baby inside. She longed to take Wendy out, save her from her isolation and hold her for real. She pulled the string until Wendy told the girl, “I love you!” and Florence whispered close to the cardboard side, “I love you, too, Wendy.” Again she pulled the string and Wendy insisted, “I’m your baby girl! Take me home with you!” And then Florence knew this was her baby. This baby had always been waiting just for Florence to come along so she could take good care of Wendy forever. “This one, Mama. I want this baby. I want Wendy.”

***

The big girls in the schoolyard had the jump rope going round at a good, fast, rhythmic pace, so that each girl could take their turn hopping in to show off their jump-roping skills. Florence just watched the big girls, always with her mouth hanging open, just watched. And listened. Heard every word the same as she’d mouth them, the words she used to lull herself to sleep at night. Just watched them hop and skip and sing:

Cinderella, dressed in yella
Went upstairs to kiss a fella
Made a mistake
And kissed a snake
How many doctors
Did it take?
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8—you missed, OUT!

This exclusive studio session is nothing short of lush, and is perhaps one of the most skillfully orchestrated we’ve featured.

It was not that Tanyon Shotter was absolutely certain that he would not see his wife Keara again, but that did seem to be the unspoken agreement between them as she gave him a cold peck on the cheek in the early Holy Saturday sunshine of her parents’ Wellesley driveway.

He knew, of course, that he’d see her again in some capacity. Probably in a legal one, which worried him. But he was fairly certain that they would never come together in the manner of a husband and wife reuniting after a long day, with any of a number of pet names lining themselves up at the front of Tanyon’s mind, waiting to see what positive effect they might have on his wife. The creation and dissemination of these stockpiled names had become a sort of hobby for Tanyon. As he pulled Keara’s bags from the trunk of his still-idling Ford Mustang—a mid-life crisis car purchased a half dozen or so years before a mid-life crisis normally sets in—he reflected on some of his attempts to come up with a core group of honorifics that were supposed to become part of their daily back-and-forth. These names, he felt, need not have been all that serious, and they might even work better the more embarrassing they were. Playful names, he thought, were ideal—names that any one person only ever said to any other in private, beyond the hearing of a third party. Like a secret word that let you into a club made up of two members.

“Let’s see…there were the early stalwarts—Love, Sweets, Sugar. Very awkward, that Sugar one.” He looked up from his work to see Keara’s parents frozen in their familiar, judgmental American Gothic-style pose behind their dining room window, as though they had taken their places in the standing-room-only section at some kind of athletic contest.

“Ugh. Bad time. Bad time all around. Maybe I should wave to them?”

He started to raise his right hand, and then let it fall.

“That might make them enjoy themselves more,” he thought.

***

“I had tried to spice it up. It was a concerted effort. Legitimately. At the therapist’s suggestion. ‘Be as dirty as you can, be a cave man. Be cave lovers.’ Right. What a disaster that was. I guess that is why we are here now. But these things are rarely the result of a single moment. Even if everything does seem to crystallize in that moment.”

He had come home from the office early, having made some vague excuse to cancel his only post-noon consultation. Mrs. Faraguana was a hypochondriac anyway, she’d simply return the following weekday afternoon, like she normally did.

He picked up two dozen snapdragons at his regular Beacon Hill florist’s, a shop he visited often enough in his amends-making efforts that all the clerks knew his name, and would greet him as soon as he walked through the door wearing his normal look of apprehension as to what arrangement might work best.

“It’s getting to the point that I’m like Norm on Cheers,” he thought one night, after exchanging greetings with a newly hired clerk, who nonetheless knew him at first sight. He liked the idea of snapdragons, not only because Keara had once stated, back in college, that they were among her favorites—and because he’d get points for remembering that—but also because he appreciated the floral irony, and was confident that his wife would not pick up on it.

“I deserve a little joke. She does snap at me a lot. True, she doesn’t exactly breathe fire, but there are times when I wonder if she might.”

After the florist’s, it was on to a Charles Street market where he secured several cuts of filet mignon, three twice baked potatoes, and an assortment of asparagus glazes so that he could make his trademark roasted spears. He spent an unduly amount of time in the wine section trying to find a Cabernet that was both zesty and mellow, and then returned to his Rowes Wharf apartment. Years before it had been selected as one of Boston’s fifty best homes by Architectural Digest, a citation that he thought would please his wife, but only made her cry instead.

Still, he felt that his Cabernet selection would go over well. Keara had commented on a couple reviews in Wine Spectator a few weeks ago, post-coitus—“my once-a-month trip to the farmer’s market,” as Tanyon thought of it. He poured two glasses of wine and set one on his nightstand, and one on hers. He felt his courage growing. “Perhaps tonight—if all goes as planned—I’ll kick it up a notch. Maybe that therapist is on to something after all.”

He vacuumed the apartment, did the laundry, cleaned all the sinks, and even de-limed the shower head, which gave him a satisfaction akin to completing an extra credit assignment. And then he readied the bedroom DVD player with one of their favorite discs, and made a path, of sorts, with the snapdragons, placing one after another, from the front door to the bedroom. He felt a little silly doing this, and it reminded him of that episode of The Brady Bunch where the boys leave a trail of popcorn so that they don’t get lost in a Hawaiian forest, only to end up meeting Vincent Price in a cave.

“Ha. I wonder what that therapist of ours would make of that imagery. Maybe she’d just say sometimes a man in a cave is just a man in a cave. I don’t think I’ll tell her all the same though.”

As a final preparation he rounded up the dozen or so rusticated brown-copper votive holders that they kept in an antique midshipman’s chest, and equipped each with a squat candle, placing them at paced-off intervals alongside his snapdragon path. With the family room aglow, and his work complete, he went to the window and savored the dusk as the day’s last rays of sun spangled the harbor.

Keara arrived and set out on her husband’s path. She found Tanyon in the bedroom in his lightest, most sheer dressing gown. He moved to kiss her, but she had already bent down to remove her shoes, and his lips deflected off of her shoulder. He pressed play on the DVD player, and the pleasing voice of Rod Serling filled the room. They had watched a Twilight Zone marathon at the end of their first date in college, back when it was the three of them more often than it was just the two of them. But it was only the two of them now, plus Rod Serling, and Burgess Meredith, who had emerged from the vault beneath the bank where he worked, to find that he was the only man left on earth.

“I think this “Time Enough at Last” episode is my favorite,” Tanyon said as Keara swirled some of the Cabernet around her mouth.

“You would.”

“How’s that?”

“Well, the Burgess Meredith character is bookish, like you. And his wife—who dies, of course—is cold. As you like to imagine that I am.”

“That’s not true. Not at all. It’s just not true.” He paused and considered his options. Was this the right time to premiere his latest honorific? Could there be a better time? A worse time? Was the best and worst time one and the same? If so, should he just go for it?

He stood up from the bed and cupped his hands inside the lapels of his lightly-cinched dressing gown. He took a deep intake of breath, and separated himself from his robe, with a little shimmy of his left foot. He stood there naked before her—like a cave man—but this was not his great surprise.

“Why, that’s not true at all,” he resumed. “That’s just not true. Angel Tits.”

After making up the couch in the living room, he stood once more by the window. He pressed his head against it and felt a draft coming through, but it didn’t really bother him now that he had his heavier robe on. He could see the airport across the harbor. A plane landed. A plane took off. Three hundred yards away. Four hundred. Five at the most. He measured in football fields. He tried to count the blackened husks docked in the Charlestown marina. Some boats looked bigger than other boats, but they probably weren’t much bigger.

***

He wasn’t sure what to do next as he pulled out of the driveway of his in-laws, fighting the urge to flip them off.

“Well, I’m a free man now. With the whole weekend in front of me. What does a Boston bachelor do with two full days at his disposal?”

He could already feel his forced enthusiasm starting to wane. The last place he wanted to be was at home. He was shocked though at his own impetuousness as he found himself on I-95 South, bound for Manhattan to hit up some of his favorite Greenwich Village record shops. It would kill the day, and provide a nice surge of nostalgia harkening back to those times when he would pester his father to put off their yard work so that they could leave Ridgefield, Connecticut behind for the amped-up pace and pulse of New York.

Some of his fondest memories involved listening to old vinyl records by Illinois Jacquet, Don Byas, and Ben Webster—the great, stomping tenor men—in closet-sized record shops on MacDougal Street, as his father flipped through the racks of bebop and stride pianists, turning to his son and holding up his latest, greatest find whenever he came upon an Art Tatum or Earl Hines LP that he didn’t already own.

Tanyon liked that his father was a piano aficionado, and he was more of a tenor buff. It was as though they’d be able to harmonize with each other in some imaginary band—were either of them able to play their favorite instrument—rather than compete for the same spot. Sometimes he thought of the happier days of his marriage as Coltrane in his mid-fifties Prestige years, where everything was soulful and rhythmic; now, it was like mid-sixties Coltrane, when everything went atonal.

Many of the shops that he used to visit with his father were still in business, which both relaxed and excited him. “This is a pretty fine day after all,” he thought, pleased that the present had not completely dislodged the past. He bought enough records and CDs to fill the cloth bag in the trunk which he usually used when he went off on one of his wine buying excursions to his favorite shop on the Cape, and resumed his journey.

***

It was typical of him to think that the disassembling of his marriage had more to do with him than with his wife. There had been a period of heavy drinking—“guilt fallout,” as he put it, while Keara was away for a couple weeks in Milan. These temporary separations usually served to rejuvenate them, but in this instance, the reason for Keara’s trip was more in line of a meditative mission—specifically, some time apart to give some final thoughts to starting a family, an issue they had gone back and forth on, given Keara’s unhappy girlhood and an uncle who may or may not have—well, they weren’t exactly sure what he may or may not have done. Spotty details would sometimes be dragged to the surface—thanks to the same therapist who had hit upon the less-than-brilliant “be a cave man” strategy—but neither Tanyon nor Keara knew what to think, or what they should do.
“What if it’s a girl and I’m overly possessive? And too protective, and I don’t let her live her own life? And beyond messing up a child’s life, I’ll make you resent me too, Tanyon. And sometimes I already feel like it’s so hard to connect, to be part of something that’s more than just myself. I can’t even get the myself part right.”

He’d try to be agreeable. “I feel the same way. Like it’s impossible, sometimes, for me to be a part of something else either.”

This technique was among his least successful, and he never understood why lines of this nature would cause his wife to immediately race from his presence, like the sight of him was about to cause her to combust.

He wondered what each of them would have done if they had not ended up with the other. Keara was intelligent and attractive enough that he would have expected that she would have eventually met someone, the issues from her past notwithstanding. As for himself—there was Sindy back in Connecticut, but there was also the matter of what he believed that he and Keara had done to her. But back in college, he bounced back and forth between the two women, unsure who he ought to commit to. Not that he ever thought of himself as a philanderer. It was, simply, he believed, how young people lived at the time.

“No harm, no foul. So long as you’re honest with everyone.”

And he had been.

***

While Keara was in Italy, Tanyon took several trips of his own to Falmouth and his favorite wine shop, intent on stocking up the wine cellar he had had custom-built in the basement. On his way back on the day before Keara came home, he stopped at a forest preserve near Sandwich. It hadn’t been his intention to do so, but when he saw the ivy and the creepers that encrusted the edges of a sign heralding one of the Cape’s most idyllic spots, the bucolic temptation proved too great to resist.

As the car rolled to a stop atop a bed of nettles and auburn-tinged moss that served as the unofficial parking lot, Tanyon looked at his watch and saw that the sun would soon be setting. He decided to take one of his bottles of newly purchased ‘89 Bordeaux and trudge out to the coast and see the day off in style.

The shoreline proved to be further away than he had expected, but he could hear the sound of waves meeting rocks somewhere off in the distance as he padded along in the forest. He liked that there was sand amidst the carpet of pine needles, like he was at the very spot where two ecosystems came together. But he could no more find the shore than he could refrain from tucking into the wine as he walked, and eventually he had to retreat back to the car before he ran out of light or fell over.

He didn’t like admitting that he was drunk any more than he liked thinking about his upcoming discussion with his wife about the children they were going to or not going to have. The only thing of which he was sure was that it would feel cathartic to turn his car around in this darkened forest of a parking lot and gun it back towards the main road.

Which is exactly what he did—hitting a deer in the process, and knocking himself unconscious when the head of the animal penetrated the windshield. A state cop told him the next morning that he was lucky it wasn’t a buck.

“This time of year, with those antlers of theirs, they can impale you in a car like this. What were you doing up here anyway?”

He had made sure to get rid of the empty wine bottle by throwing it in the hollow beneath an overturned tree.

“I was thinking about a girl,” he answered.

“Ha. Aren’t we all, buddy…”

***

He figured that if anyone should be blamed, it was probably Duke Ellington, who had a way of making him feel braver than he knew he really was. His official reason to head further south and stop off in Fairfield County was to visit his father, and share his new bounty of jazz albums. The old man would get a kick out of some fresh sounds. But he knew he wouldn’t be going by the house, because he understood that an unannounced visit would tip off his father that something was wrong. And when his father knew that something was wrong, Tanyon only ever felt guilty, because he knew how much his father would worry.

He originally supposed, as he drove through Harlem, that he would simply return to the apartment at Rowes Wharf, worn out from his long day and tired enough that he’d be able to fall asleep without hours’ worth of effort. He called himself an idiot—out loud, even—when his thoughts turned to hoping that Keara might have changed her mind, and was now at the apartment, waiting for him, worried. But it was Duke Ellington—and, more specifically, Paul Gonsalves—that settled it.

There was always something about Ellington’s performance from the 1956 Newport Festival that pumped him up. He had found a remastered CD set in one of the Greenwich Village shops, which was now cranking on the stereo. Usually he hated taking the Merritt Parkway, because he couldn’t stand the rhythmic clicks that would emanate from beneath the car when the tires passed over each segment of the road—it was like driving over a bunch of LEGOs that had been stuck together.

But now, he noticed that the clicks seemed timed to fall between the beats of Sam Woodyard’s drums on “Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue,” like an extra accent. As tenor man Paul Gonsalves began to blow his eighth chorus of his famous twenty-seven bar solo, Tanyon knew that he was going not to Ridgefield but to nearby Wilton to see Sindy, and offer something in the way of an apology for cutting her out of a business plan—however unintentionally—that had set Tanyon and Keara up for life—a life they were no longer to share together.

He never questioned how much he owed Sindy, and the good times with Keara were always undercut by a concern that someone else had helped put them in their particular situation. To be fair, he wasn’t exactly sure that the truffle idea was not mostly his own. He knew it was not Keara’s, although it was her father—and a few investment group friends—who put up a lot of the money to get them started.

Tanyon’s own father had a degree in agricultural engineering, a passion which—like jazz—he passed along to his son. He was also one of those knockabout inventors—the kind that legitimate inventors sometimes branded as a “quack”—who spent endless hours tinkering with formulas in hopes of coming up with some radical new food source or beverage that would yield amazing benefits for the human race, and give him something to shoot the bull about with his friends at one of his clubs.

At Tufts, Tanyon continued on in his father’s tradition, and thought, after joining an amateur inventor workshop, that maybe he could surprise the old man with a patent of his own—some wrinkle on a new way to make wine, maybe. He spent a lot of long afternoons in Bray Laboratory, where he eventually met Sindy, a gifted biomedical student who had actually been a neighbor of sorts in their pre-college days, although neither of them knew it at the time. She had more know-how than he did, and understood what he meant when he discussed his rather crude ideas about making wine out of something besides grapes. Like out of mushrooms, something that would offer health benefits beyond those normally associated with wine. He remembered reading that fungi can be a deterrent to breast cancer, which had claimed his mother halfway through high school, and turned his father into a perpetual tinkerer, wisher, dreamer—anything that might take his thoughts away from his pain.

“I’m sure I can help you come up with something,” she had said. “Although I wouldn’t exactly be sweating if I were Ernest or Julio Gallo.”

***

They worked on the idea over the next several years, while Tanyon wondered if he was meant to be with Keara or Sindy. He was prone to thinking in fatalistic terms, as though some things were simply going to happen, whether he wished them to or not. Sindy was the less guarded of the pair. She had a nonchalance to her that Tanyon envied, like she could just pick up and leave anything behind, if it no longer suited her or no longer brought her pleasure, or meaning. Keara was more rigid, but she committed more deeply, even when it hurt her, and Tanyon thought that he was probably the kind of person whom other people had an easy time leaving, so maybe Keara was best for him. But then he’d pick up in the lab again with Sindy, and he’d find some counter-argument to move him back in the other direction, a thought process he later blamed on the caprices of youth.

A few overly bored TAs became involved in hammering out a formula that might work, and finally hit on one that went off to a testing lab. It looked like a small success had been achieved, and the project, seemingly, came to an end. But months later, reports came back from the lab that they might really have something here. And then 60 Minutes just happened to run a piece on the salutary effects of black truffles—glorified mushrooms, of a sort—and Tanyon was able to find some investors in a small black truffle farm, led by Keara’s father, and the formula was pressed into service.

Six years later, Tanyon and Keara had a cash windfall on their hands, having introduced a new fad in wine circles that was the source of a number of feature pieces in the leading magazines, garnering further investments from different sectors of the health, wine, and biomedical industries. Sindy, meanwhile, was working as a real estate agent in her hometown of Wilton.

Whenever Tanyon would ask Keara about cutting Sindy in, his wife would say that she had already tried, but to no avail. And then she would often begin to cry, which confused Tanyon greatly, so he would let the matter drop and try to find something less upsetting to talk about. Perhaps he could make it right by Sindy at some point in the future, when he and Keara were in a better position as husband and wife. Or afterwards.

***

He drove through the center of Wilton on the lookout for the agency where he had read online that Sindy worked. “I wonder if it’s very depressing,” he thought, “showing houses to strangers that your friends used to live in.”

He was also hard at work on his opening line. Naturally, he didn’t want to come across as a stalker; nor did he want to use anything as trite as saying that he had been home to visit his father, and now, after all of these years, he had decided it was prime time for a visit with his old chum—to say nothing of the money she must have known she had a right to, and his wife’s confusing claims that she had tried to make things right.

He parked a little ways down the road so that he could sit in the car for a few minutes and gather himself. The agency was about thirty yards up the street. But just as he had finalized his opening line and was starting to get out of the car, there was a knock on the passenger side window. It was Sindy, who opened the door and sat down as though he had explicitly come to pick her up.

“I think we should probably talk.”

“What on earth…I mean…”

“I was at the diner down the street picking up lunch for the office. Keara had phoned and said you might be stopping by. You look good by the way.”

“Um…okay. That’s just odd. The thing about my wife. Not the looks thing. Same to you, I mean.”

“Let me just drop this off inside and tell them that I’m going to be out for a little while.”

“Okay.”

He thought about backing out and making a break for Boston—or maybe his father’s—but he figured that he probably deserved whatever he had coming to him.

***

She had him drive to Weir Farm, a spot he knew from childhood field trips. It was a home for several generations of artists, as well as a working farm. The entire notion of a farm—given the whole truffle business—made him even more ill at ease.

“You’re fidgeting something awful, Tan. I’m the one who ought to be anxious.”

“Um…alright. If you say so. I feel like I’ve gone down the rabbit hole, in a manner of speaking. I don’t know what you know. More than I would have ever guessed, apparently. So maybe this is redundant. My wife left me today—formally, that is. And I don’t know what the hell I’m doing driving all over the Northeast Corridor. And now I’m walking around with a bunch of goats and geese by my side with a former girlfriend of sorts, and my wife’s erstwhile best friend, whom I basically screwed in more ways than one and I’m just so sorry…And you appear disturbingly clued in. I tried to talk about you with Keara, but…”

“But I wouldn’t take anything. Financially.”

“Yes. But if you ever change your mind…God. I sound like an idiot. Even with the divorce. I’m sure we can work out something. But I’m glad that at least one friendship was saved. It’s just like Keara not to have told me though. We don’t really talk anymore. I don’t expect that we ever will again, in any real sense. There will be lawyers, of course. They’ll talk.”

“Your wife loves you very much, Tan…”

Her voice began to trail off as his eyes scanned over a nearby pond, where several painted turtles clustered on a thick branch that jutted out of the water. He looked back at her, unsure whether she had stopped talking or whether her words had been scattered by the breeze that had him reaching deeper into his pockets.

“I’m not sure what you’d call it. I started thinking that not having kids was a way to leave herself an exit, if you will. From us. From whatever we were.”

“Or maybe it was a way to keep your relationship with her different from your relationship with me.”

“Ha. That’s just odd. Because not having a kid—“

“A daughter.”

“Fine, a daughter. Or a son. Either one. You can’t have a combo.”

He didn’t know why he had said something so boorish and immediately lowered his voice.

“Sorry. Bad joke.”
“No. That’s not what I mean. Please don’t hate Keara for this.”

She grabbed his forearm and he could feel her nails through his coat. She was shaking and trying not to cry, with some degree of success. This made Tanyon panic all the more. Her pain was obvious, but she had some dominion over it, so it must have been a pain she had lived with for a long time, something she had worked at mastering.

“I didn’t tell you. I came here. Keara knew. But I didn’t want to complicate things. I was in my own head and I couldn’t get out. And you two were starting out. And I felt…betrayed. Not because of the money or anything like that. But because I knew you had made up your mind. And then Keara got in touch a few months back, and just started crying into the phone about how you were growing apart, and about having kids, and about…”

“About what?”

“About the daughter you already had.”

“I have a daughter?”

“You…had a daughter.”

He turned to vomit into the pond, and succeeded in merely retching instead—having not eaten all day—dispatching the turtles back into the water.

***

“What do you want?”

“I want to talk to my wife.”

“Tanyon…it’s the middle of the night. Sleep it off. I’ll ask her to call you tomorrow.”

He was not surprised that his mother-in-law sounded as alert as she did, never mind that it was quarter-of-three in the morning. She was always alert, like some sentinel looking over her daughter so that he could not cause her harm.

“Look…if she doesn’t want to talk now…just tell her I’m on the road. Back from Connecticut. Promise me you’ll tell her that. Tonight.”

“I don’t think she needs to know that you’re on your way home from visiting your father.”

He could tell that he only had a sentence or two left in him.

“I was not visiting my father. Please. Tell her.”

He hung up and tried to concentrate on the road. He didn’t know when he would be home. Probably after daybreak. It didn’t matter.

He wondered if he was being overdramatic by crying for someone he never knew, or if the very concept of a stillborn child mitigated against full-blown tragedy. It wasn’t like he had some three-year-old daughter die on him, one whom he—or someone—had gotten to know. And then he worried if he was in some kind of violation of morality by trying not to cry. His head felt heavy, and he considered that maybe nodding off wouldn’t be so bad after all. He went long stretches without seeing another car.

The Ellington CD was still in the player. When Tanyon turned it on, Paul Gonsalves resumed his solo. Tanyon knew it by heart. Gonsalves was halfway through. Thirteen and a half bars to go. Tanyon kept the volume down low, simmering the music. When Gonsalves wrapped up bar number twenty-seven, he cued up the beginning of the track once more. Again and again and again—he didn’t think he’d be able to get home any other way.

It was near five when he stumbled into his apartment. Darkness. He put his cell phone down on the living room table and saw a small piece of paper, which he gently collected and turned around in his fingers, as though he were filtering out any potential bad contents. He went towards the window, where there was a vague stream of light. A draft was coming through again, but it felt good against his forehead as he looked down at the missive that was probably some long-forgotten grocery list or one of the occasional notes he wrote to himself.

It was in Keara’s hand: Come to bed. Angel dick.

He could see the airport across the harbor. A plane landed. A plane took off. Three hundred yards away. Four hundred. Five at the most. He measured in football fields. He tried to count the blackened husks docked in the Charlestown marina. Some boats looked bigger than other boats, but they probably weren’t much bigger.