“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!

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.

Inside her bedroom, Patsy depressed the hairspray’s nozzle until her finger ached and then touched the lighter’s flame to the flammable cloud. She stared into the airborne flames, transfixed.

Patsy’s latest lover pulled her down onto the bed and sounded his nasty chuckle. “You’re not the only one can set a fire.”

Patsy wondered how much longer she would keep him around. He’d only lasted this long, three weeks and counting, because she hadn’t yet found his replacement. She hated an empty house and setting fires just wasn’t the same when no one was watching. Even with company over, though, she always felt Anna’s absence in the house.

It was Anna’s weekend with her dad and his second wife, Lily. Patsy sometimes fantasized about setting fire to her ex-husband and his skinny, smug, replacement missus, saw them burning out like two straw dolls.

Her lover’s stubble tore at her chin and cheeks, like sandpaper on paint, and she pictured her outsides flaking away, chip by chip. She closed her eyes and conjured the fire of moments earlier, beating overhead like a golden eagle.

…

Patsy had never mastered pancakes. Her batter always turned out too thin or thick and she either burned the pancakes or they remained raw in the middle. Today, her Saturday with Anna, she tried her hardest.

Anna pushed her plate away. “They’re black.”

“They’re fine,” Patsy said.

“They’re yuck.”

Twelve-going-on-twenty, Anna’s chest, waist and hips were starting to fill out along with her attitude.

Patsy and Anna argued inside the gloom of the kitchen. The house faced the wrong way and the sun never entered the back rooms until afternoon.

Anna threatened to go live with her dad and Lily.

“Because of pancakes?” Patsy said.

“Because you don’t try. You don’t care.”

“Fine, go live with Tom and Lily, see how long they’d put up with you,” Patsy said.

Anna’s chin trembled and her cheeks burned red.

Patsy felt immediately sorry and suggested they go out for breakfast, to the IHOP.

Anna shook her head hard, as if she had spiders in her hair.

Patsy suggested they make S’mores. Anna had loved to make S’mores when she was younger, when they’d go camping, when they were still a family.

Anna lit up like a sparkler. “For breakfast? Seriously?”

They readied the marshmallows, graham crackers and chocolate and Patsy reached for the gas lighter. The familiar feel of the lighter in her hand calmed and heartened her, much like an alcoholic’s first daily grip of the bottle.

They ate to full and laughed at each other’s chocolate teeth and marshmallow lips. Anna wore a black camisole and her hair caught-up in a bun, showing off her shoulders and long neck and shiny oval face. She looked like a dancer, like a beautiful girl on stage in the lead role. Patsy felt an ache in some part of herself she couldn’t name.

“How’d I get so lucky,” she said, “to get you?”

In the afternoon, three of Anna’s friends came over. Patsy liked to have the girls hang out at hers, enjoyed the full, happy feeling in the house. The girls disappeared up to Anna’s bedroom and soon the sounds of music and laughter and screeches touched every wall. Patsy locked herself inside her bedroom and sat on the edge of her plump duvet. She lit match after match and watched the sticks burn out. The smell of sulfur always catapulted her back to childhood and her father’s ritual with his matches, loose-leaf tobacco and pipe.

Patsy’s parents had raised her with a fear of fire. As a boy, her father had lost his two next-door-neighbors, seven-year-old twins, in a house fire. The boys were his best friends. He could smell their cooked corpses for months after the inferno and sometimes said he could still hear their screams.

Her father had never allowed candles in the house, or a deep fat fryer or Christmas lights. He also kept matches and lighters out of children’s reach and unplugged every electrical appliance in the house every night.

Patsy stared into the ball of fire atop the matchstick. Fire brought out a tenderness in her that not much else did anymore, aside from Anna. Fire made her feel like she was deep-kissing an angel.

…

Tom and Lily insisted on a meeting to discuss ‘Anna’s welfare.’ Patsy refused to meet with them, but they threatened her with Child Protective Services. As soon as Patsy heard the splutter of Tom’s car in her driveway, she raced upstairs to her bedroom and her aerosols and watched fire dance in the air. Anna called and called.

Tom and Lily remained standing inside the living room. Tom looked like he’d bulked up at the gym and his stance and new build made him appear more like a police officer than a technical writer. Lily, a yoga instructor, remained as skinny and attractive as ever, her chestnut hair pouring down her tiny back. Patsy inwardly talked down her panic and sniffed at the sulfur on her fingers. She wanted to be in her kitchen, not the living room. She’d feel better in her kitchen. She offered lemonade.

They sipped the lemonade with mechanical movements and suffered small talk. Patsy pressed her thumb to the scar on the inside of her left wrist. Years back, she’d burned herself on the face of an iron. Tom had pulled her over to the faucet and held her arm under cold, running water, and had fussed and worried. After that, she’d burned herself repeatedly. In the end, though, even hurting herself couldn’t make Tom care.

Tom started the ambush. “We need to talk about Anna.

“What about Anna?” Patsy said.

“We’re concerned about her well-being,” he said.

Patsy laughed into her glass. “Her what?”

In the back garden, Anna played hoops and repeatedly thumped the basketball against the backboard.

Tom returned his glass to the table, lining it up perfectly again with its ring of condensation on the pinewood. “Thing is, Patsy, Lily and I think it best Anna come live with us.”

Patsy’s glass slipped out of her hand and dropped to the floor. She looked up from the smashed glass and seep of lemonade over the tiles and glared at Tom through tears. “That will never happen. Never.”

“Please, Patsy,” Lily said, “we know this is hard, but we have to think about what’s best for Anna.”

Patsy imagined taking the red lighter to Lily’s hair, to her lips, to her hands and feet.

“You need to accept you’re not the best role model,” Tom continued.

Patsy ordered him and Lily out of her house.

“We’ve already filed paperwork,” Tom said.

Patsy shouted and chased Tom and Lily down the hall and out her front door.

Lily turned around at the front gate. “You’re crazy. You need help.”

“You better believe it,” Patsy said and slammed her front door.

She returned to the kitchen and pulled every tea towel from the drawer and heaped them onto the counter. Anna remained outside, the basketball still thudding. Patsy held the gas lighter to the mound of tea towels. The reflected flames shimmered in the window.

Anna shouted from the back garden. “Fire! Mom! Fire!”

Patsy remained motionless inside the kitchen, her face warmed by the flames.

Anna burst through the back door. “Mom?”

Patsy brushed the fabric bonfire into the sink, turned on the faucet and doused the flames.

“What happened?” Anna asked, her tone suspicious.

Patsy faced her daughter, that longstanding feeling of fuel in her veins gone. Calm, resolute, she made them both a promise. “It’s okay, sweetheart, Mommy’s got everything under control.”

photo: Sigrid Estrada

In an intimate interview, the award-winning author discusses his process, growth, and the relationship between creation and mortality.

Six months in Los Angeles, and I’m still alone in my place. But not too depressed. No longer mourning the loss. Ready for the present, perhaps, if not my future. Let well enough alone. If it’s well. If it’s enough. I sit at a good though monotonous job at Technetronics, Inc., assembling micro-components for the guidance system of what must be the latest model cruise missile.

We’ve all been cleared to work here, some forty men and women on this line. At 08:00, we file from the locker room into our places, wearing gauze surgical masks and caps, covered up by sterile white jumpsuits, our feet shod in canvas booties. The badges over our hearts show our names and our polaroid portraits, both profile and full mug. This room in the plant is sterile: sealed, air-conditioned, bathed in soft, gray-white fluorescence, and permeated by Muzak— cocktail-hour dance tunes, slowed-down old jazz standards— a flattened-out, tinkly noise played at the one low volume that wears away the day and fills the night and sleep with its tinny, discreet jangle. Nauseating. We sit at the long bench, working with tiny bits of gold wire and hundreds of minuscule chips under stereomicroscopes. This little brain we’re assembling will guide a stubby-winged missile a thousand miles— skimming over hill and dale, streaking along just above the surface of the earth, darting through valleys and touching treetops, up, down, up, winding in and out at a tall man’s eyelevel until it sees its target, plunges abruptly down to detonate a small, strategic mini-holocaust, and obliterates a city somewhere.

During lunchtime, we get to chatting, more or less. My coworkers are more or less like me: young to middle-aged, all from somewhere else, too. We talk movies, tv, the sports page— sex, religion, and politics are no-no’s. At 17:30 there is the slamming of car doors and the roaring of exhausts as we file out and head for the Freeway. And then the long evening— each in his or her own unit, alone for all you know. Turning the key confirms the solitude. But the pay’s very good, the job more or less assured— it’s a fresh subcontract and Technetronics, Inc., is in on the ground floor of this new development in weaponry. So not to complain, I adjure myself. Maybe someday soon I’ll return to the stud¬ies abandoned in despair after the breakdown. I know that this time I have got ahold of things. Damned if I ever let go again.

About 16:00 this afternoon the fellow to my left, Peter Fuerst, says to me, “Kingsley, how about coming to our party tonight. Most of our bench will be there.”

Well…, I say.

And Sally Johns, the girl to my right, with a pair of hips if ever I saw hips, even in her full, loose, white jumpsuit, says, “Come on, Kingsley, give it a try. You bring your wine, and I’ll bring mine.”

Her luminous blue eye winks at me above her white mask. I’m persuaded.

It’s Friday. April again. It’s even rained this week, Los Angeles is clear, washed, glistening— there’s snow on the peak of Mt. Baldy to the East, and the many different kinds of green foliage that fill this city are fresh and tender. Life may be possible, who knows? I do need something more for myself.

A shabby stucco cottage in Venice, gabled and low, with a Midwest sort of front porch and some splintery rattan furniture on it. A half-dozen cats prowl about or sprawl, lazily cleaning themselves. It’s on Rose Avenue, a few doors from the Pioneer Bakery. The street’s lined with decrepit houses just like it, all with fenced, hopeful patches of front lawn. Bougainvillea vines, rose and hibiscus bushes mask their peeling age, and the cool evening air is tainted with the night blooming jasmine— a sharp scent that mixes pleasantly with the delicate yeasty odors of bread baking in the nearby plant. A few blocks to the West, beyond the flat, broad beach, the Pacific lies calm and gray, not a boat or ship anywhere in sight. It’s nearly 22:00 when I open the front door, and the party’s underway. I straighten my tie and step in. The usual scene. Outside, the quiet of late evening; inside, hi-fi cramming the small rooms with thunder and screeching. I set my jug of mountain red on a side table with the rest of the booze offerings. People are dancing, or talking mouth to ear. I have the feeling I have come to the wrong party, not a soul in the place do I recognize.

Or else I’m not as well as I have believed myself to be. By 23:00 I’m slouched on a beanbag in a corner, an observer, sipping at my 7th glass of wine. Plenty of action, yes; but it baffles me. I’m sure I must know these folks from Technetronics, Inc., by name or face or form? Yet somehow they are all strangers now. One tells me he’s a movie director, up for an Oscar. Another is a State Senator down for the tax hearings next week. Another’s on the Gover¬nor’s Special Commission for Environmental Protection, Toxic Wastes Committee. That gal’s a well-known sculptor in epoxy resins, getting into advanced laser holography. Another, a little Chinese, is a minimal conceptualist— she shows me the razor marks on her wrists, a famous artwork she created the other year in the elevator of the County Museum. The tall black girl is a ceramist— lingams and yonis and omphaloids three meters high. I have spoken to a familiar-looking man from my own bench who tells me he’s a psychotherapist specializing in addicted call girls. There is a pair of Sufi dancers in orange pantaloons and gauze blouses, their heads in blue turbans, and a pale, married couple of Sikhs in white, wearing tall white headdresses and drinking only Perrier. I have poured my wine out to a woman who’s the bestselling author of Gothic romances in paperback, she’s just passed the ten-million mark. Peter Fuerst himself has red hair now, not mousy brown. Sally’s cropped black head is hidden in a long, silky, synthetic blonde mane, its tresses compressed by a band of sparkling rhinestones, hanging below her backside — I know those hips — and the rest of her full body hardly covered— shiny platinum patches on the large nipples of her heavy and free-swinging breasts…and she’s not Sally now either…she’s Salome Head, Coptic belly-dancer from Alexandria, Egypt. Mark, who assembles to the left of Peter Fuerst all day long, is introduced to me as a stockbroker— he’s offering me a new issue of preferred stock in a valve-factory— a steal now at seven dollars, shares bound to triple and split within the year…it’s all the new chemical pipeline-building, he says, and diversification too: chips, and more chips. And it is Mark, I think, behind the curly chestnut G.B.S. beard. Though it’s not Mark’s nose propping the heavy frames of his thick, clear glasses.

I have tried talking to these people over the buffet, in the kitchen, even while faking a hootch with Sally, who has pressed her quivering, naked abdomen and buttocks up against me more than once. Yet none of them seems to know me, and we have to get acquainted all over again. Hi there, it’s Kingsley! I’ve said, only to be met with blank looks: “Kingsley who?” It’s finally too much for me, and I have to sit down in my corner to nibble at hardtack and drink my wine in peace.

Towards 24:00, things start to get wild. Not rough, just a little wild. I can guess what is going down soon. Group swinging. Whatever. Sally — Salome Head — crouches in the center of the room, gyrating to the sounds of Ali Baba and his Middle East Assassins— a long album, with six endless, authentic ethnic tracks. The place has been darkened, the lighting undulating blue and purple around the walls and ceiling.

And I don’t feel at all well. I am holding a brimming glass of wine, staring at it as it runs over my cupped hands. I look up, and Sally’s standing over me, her long thick blonde hair brushing the top of my head. Her forehead’s sweat-beaded, the mascara’s sliding down her heavy cheeks, the lids of her big black eyes painted a cobalt blue and powdered with flecks of gold dust. I realize that she must be wearing black contacts. And when she unpins her muslin veil, all embroidered with hearts and roses, and smiles at me, a gold tooth glints in the front of her mouth. Maybe it’s not even Sally? No one here tonight has the same name, or same anything I remember from Technetronics, Inc.

“Come on now, John,” she whispers throatily. “Dance with me, okay, man?”

John? Kingsley here, I say.

She stares at me and replies brusquely, “Kingsley? Never heard of him.” And then she leans over above me, her pendulous breasts powdered white, sweat-streaked, rank, musk reeking from her deep armpits, her heavy, gold-glittered thighs trembling from her exer-tions on the dance floor. She thrusts her hands under my arms as though to lift me from my collapsed, beanbag seat. But I am too heavy, too firmly planted. The heat radiating from her hits me in the face, dizzying me. She grins, full of zany lust. There is a bright zircon-crusted star winking from her bellybutton. “Come on now, John, won’t you join the dance?”

Tell me one thing, I say.

“And what should that be, my darling lover?” she croons, panting.

Just tell me— what gives? That’s Peter over there, isn’t it; and that’s Mark; and this is our bunch from Technetronics, Inc., isn’t it? Silence. Well, isn’t it? I insist.

She lets go of me. Stands back erect, her plump belly, its hollow, starry gash of navel thrust at me, her bangled wrists planted firmly on those hips, their painted talons gripping her thighs in anger. She gazes down at my forehead, not at me. And she speaks in a new voice: acid, mocking. “Look, Kingsley, you better leave L.A.”

“But why?” I ask surprised, and anxious too.

“Because you just ain’t gonna make it here, man.”

Oh?

“No, man, you ain’t. Because you lack a persona, see?”

But Sally…!

My protest is cut short. She digs a sharp nail into my heart, and says, “Man, you got nothing but your own self!”

That’s all I want! I hear myself shout back at her.

Her other hand slices across my Adam’s apple, and she snorts, “That just ain’t enough, man. Never was. Never will be.”

There’s a sudden silence in the room. They haven’t changed the cassette. I can hear the loud, low hum of the amplifier putting out its silent, roaring sound, like the white noise of nothingness. Salome hooks both hands into my belt and heaves me from my seat; she leads me through this congeries of pure strangers, not one of them resembling the disciplined, skilled workers I know during the week at Technetronics, Inc. From their invented vocations and surprising faces, they watch me being yanked along. They stare at me with pity, and contempt. As she thrusts me backwards out the front door into midnight on Rose Avenue, I see their turned heads. They have watched my expulsion and said nothing. She closes the door, slowly hooking up her yashmak again with one hand, leaving visible now only those black-stenciled brows arched over her great, black, blank eyes. The Sufi has already put the Assassins back in the machine and turned them loose. The drums erupt with a wallop, and the door is shut in my face. The Princes of the Earth go on partying without me.

I walk to the car. There’s a damp breeze flowing in from the Pacific a few blocks off. It’s salty and it’s sour. I am chilled in my light suit. I have nothing but myself now. And I am wondering what I can do with it.

The ad in the back of the paper claimed she was twenty-three. As she climbed the stairs and smiled, chin lifted toward the landing, Jack saw the lines in her face, the gray strands at the crown of her head where roots showed beneath the bleach job. He tried to tell himself it didn’t matter but the best he could do was recognize that one got what he paid for, one hundred-twenty-five dollars. She wasn’t fat. She had a shapeless paunch to her, a full body flaccidity highlighted by tight, lacy clothes. He wanted desperately for this to be satisfying. Her hips were too narrow for her lumpy haunches.

She took his money, asked what he wanted and where the bathroom was. He told her.

“Undress, sweetie,” she said.

She gave him perfunctory head, which he knew was par for the course. They all made it clear they didn’t like this part, though they all did it. When he was stiff enough she handed him the condom. They began in the missionary position but his erection flagged as he looked at her. He couldn’t, when he closed his eyes, erase Kate’s face. And the call girl’s was impossibly haggard. He pulled out and asked her to get on all fours.

“That’s my favorite,” she said.

He wasn’t hard anymore.

“Suck it again?” he said.

“I want to fuck.”

“Just to get me hard.”

She did it. Her mouth was cold. He imagined he felt the filth and acid breath seeping from her porous, wet tissues into his prick.

He got behind her and squeezed himself to maintain his tenuous stiffness. It was a miracle he got it in again. He pumped gingerly, hoping there’d be enough friction to get him worked up so he could screw her in earnest and get this over with. He stared down at her greasy anus. Its tang and musk were overpowering. Perhaps she hadn’t taken a proper shower in days. He knew he couldn’t do it. He became angry, lost his diffident erection that much more quickly.

Apologizing, he pulled out and tried to make small talk while the woman waited for her car service.

“Got any blow?”

She stared at him. “I’ll wait downstairs, I guess.”

At twenty past eight he watched her climb into a Lincoln town car and ride away. He’d still be on time for work. He felt like utter shit, scraped out inside and disgusted with himself. He’d wanted to do something to Kate without her knowing, something he could gather within and use later to cut her. He hated her a little more for the embarrassing way his attempt had played out.

* * *

A week earlier Jack had switched on Kate’s computer and shut off the internet connection. Browsing through her history he found troubling email exchanges. One contained a breathy confession to a friend: She was no longer in love with Jack and had feelings for someone else. Another email detailed plans to meet a man named Sean at a dark bar with high-backed booths.

“Because I’m tall and this is a secret,” she wrote.

He sat before the screen, his stomach turning and tightening. His head felt huge, membranous and diffuse. It was difficult for him to be still, but he hadn’t will to move from the chair. When she came home he confronted her and she screamed at him, berated him for invading her privacy. They fought until they were both exhausted. Jack’s rage subsided in increments, giving way to tearful bewilderment.

“What did I do to you?” he asked.

“Nothing.”

“Why don’t you love me?”

“I do.”

He stared at her. There were more questions, but he knew well enough he wouldn’t like the answers. And anyway, to speak would mean to lose hold of the weeping and moaning he’d at last subdued. His eyes burnt. His head ached. He wanted Kate, loved and admired her. He’d believed she would stay with him, only him, but that—he now understood—was foolish, a case of believing what he wanted to, rather than what made sense. She was twenty-one to his thirty. It occurred to him he should leave or tell her to sleep somewhere else. He imagined explaining it all to any of his few friends, and a pang of nausea twisted his gut. She sat across from him in the small living room, her big legs crossed at the knee. A stubborn white stain they’d dripped together onto the sofa, just a few months before, peeked from beneath her haunch. She was still angry but had stopped yelling. Something like sympathy tempered her speech. The sound of her soft and reasoned words enraged Jack. He imagined raping her. For two seconds: One hand would claw deep into the flesh of her waist, the other would grip the back of her neck, four fingers gently deflating her windpipe. His bloated prong rasping in and out. Perhaps there’d be spots of blood on his shaft, to gloat over. He blinked it away, not sickened by the violence of it but by the knowledge that he wasn’t capable of doing more violence to her than that entailed in begging.

They lay down in the same bed. Jack curled tight against Kate, not sleeping. He wanted her even then, her big frame and comforting height, her long legs, broad shoulders and equine buttocks. He gazed at the wall over her shoulder, traced a crack in the paint. He sniffled.

She touched his shoulder and asked, “What did you expect?”

If the question made sense—and it did—it meant he was a fool. It meant he’d never had the right to expect anything but this.

“Why?” he said. He spoke softly, hoping for a reassuring lie. But as he repeated himself his voice rose and cracked. She held him. He knew that in allowing her to touch him he forfeited some of his few remaining scraps of dignity. He couldn’t help himself.

* * *

He sat at his desk writing sloppy code and feeling aware of his groin. He hadn’t showered. He wondered whether his coworkers smelled the latex and lubricant on him. His office mate Steve used cocaine often, daily. Jack asked if they might go out together after work and Steve said sure. He knew of a good band playing in Manhattan. They’d stop at his place in Astoria, call his dealer and head into town.

They stopped at Molly Malone’s for a beer and a rail in the bathroom. They stayed there because they no longer cared about anything else. Jack snorted a fat one off the top of the toilet paper dispenser. The mucous and powder paste dribbled down the back of his throat and he savored the bitter chemical flavor presaging the rush. They took turns handing off the bag and bracing the door. Then they were on their barstools, babbling, laughing and talking seriously about how great each thought the other fellow was. Jack wanted to have sex with someone, almost anyone. He looked around at the shabby women there and tried to make inviting eye contact. A plain brunette around forty looked back. She stared through him with severe purpose. Jack and Steve drank more beer and snorted most of the cocaine. Steve went to the bathroom alone and returned with a handmade paper envelope for Jack.

“I gotta crash,” he said. “That’s the rest of yours.”

They stumbled out and said goodnight. Jack stood on the sidewalk believing he wanted to screw, not merely to lie next to a naked woman and feel the warmth of her skin as a stand-in for affection. He thought about money, knew he really hadn’t any to spend. He couldn’t make it matter. There was a video store with peep booths three blocks away. He walked to it.

Inside were white wire racks of videos categorized into four aisles, plus the rear wall of gay porn and the narrow dead end corridor lined with red formica stalls. He might change a twenty for singles, feed them into a booth, masturbate, and go home. That was a possible choice. But a rack of adult classified papers sat by the door, plain black and white print, dozens of photos of nude women with eyes blacked out, local telephone numbers, rates by the hour and half-hour. Standing under a streetlamp he scrutinized them.

He called five numbers before finding an in-call service that didn’t require an advance appointment, in Midtown. On the N train platform he slipped a hand into his trouser pocket and tried to rub some feeling into his penis. It was numb and soft but the train came and he got on. For forty minutes he held his adult want ads, thought about the last flakes of cocaine in his pocket, wished the old man across the aisle would leave so he could stuff his nose into the unfolded envelope and suck it up before he got to the hooker’s doorstep. He missed four calls from Kate while the train lumbered beneath the streets, out of her range.

He emerged from the subway wanting the last line badly, but foot traffic was surprisingly dense at three in the morning and police saturated Manhattan heavily. They kept driving past him. He became paranoid. It seemed a particular cruiser circled the same ascending blocks he did, watching him. He tried to remember the call numbers: one seven one two? Was that the same number as the last cruiser he’d seen? The intensity of his craving beat the logic of his fear. In an alley behind a dumpster he squatted, smelling piss and garbage. His fingers shook but he got the envelope out, opened it, poked with the cut straw and broke the clusters into powder. It wasn’t much but he would feel it.
He knew what he was doing. This wasn’t revenge or one-upmanship. This would have no effect on Kate, other than providing her with occasion to tell him again how little she thought of him now.

He found the address easily and called.

Their toneless female voice message said, “Leave message after beep. We call back in minute. Please no private numbers.”

“Uh, yeah,” he began. He left his name.

He’d never been to an in-call service but the procedure made sense to him. Four minutes passed and he answered his phone to a heavily Slavic male voice. He repeated his name and the door buzzed. His phone rang again: “Home.” He pressed the ignore button before shutting off the ringer.

The apartment was cramped, furnished with a loveseat and one upholstered chair in the square living room, a bed and nightstand in each open-doored bedroom, a bare unlit galley kitchen. There were two girls, one on each seat, a plump bottle blonde who, Jack thought, might be slightly pregnant, and a bony brunette with royal blue eyes. They wore matching snug velour tracksuits.

“You can choose,” the blonde said. “Me or her.”

She had the same accent as the man who’d called to check Jack’s number and buzz him in. The man was absent. Jack wondered whether he’d gone to another apartment in the same building, maybe next door, so he could rush in and violently come to the girls’ aid if necessary. He wondered how many apartments could be used this way without calling the business to the attention of law-abiding neighbors. The whole high rise might be a brothel made of two-bedroom, two girl cells.

He pointed to the brunette, “Her.”

The blonde shrugged and sat down. The brunette stood and looked at him from shoes to hair without expression. She led him to a bedroom, took off the tracksuit and, still wearing her plain white panties, asked him to help her make the bed. Raw, ragged scars underlined each of her small breasts. Before her surgery she must have had nothing but nipples riding a minute swell of flesh. A shame Jack thought, to ruin that in favor of this. She stripped the sheets and fetched another set, which he helped her tuck in.

“Oh, forgot to take money,” she said.

He’d had it ready in his back pants pocket, separated from carfare and identification. Most of it was earmarked for rent, which would now be late. She took it from his outstretched fingers, moved to the door, opened it. The blonde—who had stood waiting while Jack and the brunette performed preliminary chatter—took the money, walked away and, Jack heard, slammed the front door of the apartment behind her. Where would she go with the cash, to an apartment reserved for accounts receivable and bookkeeping?

The brunette faced him. “So what you like to do?”

The first time he had a prostitute he’d invited her into his home and stood in the middle of his living room waiting for anything to happen, until, after a long silence during which she looked at him severely, the girl told him, “First, I gotta have my money. Then you need to tell me exactly what you want, or we can’t do anything.”

Now he felt only a little less awkward describing what he wanted. He steeled himself and blinked slowly. This girl had said her name was Raina. He silently rehearsed a request.

“You give me head and then we fuck,” he said too softly.

She made him repeat and smiled, genuinely it seemed.

“You are good looking guy.”

“Thank you. You’re very beautiful.”

“No,” she said. “Take off your clothes.”

He’d paid for an hour but when he finished they’d used less than thirty minutes. She told him how much time he had left and looked at him in a way that did not appear to say she wanted him gone. He was disgusted at himself again, but wanted something more.

“Lay down on your stomach,” he said.

She did. He was jangling, exhausted, and the desire to use a human being had been false. It was an idea he’d tried to clutch, an effective distraction, but a brief one. He’d wanted to feel something. He was too preoccupied with the specifics—why wasn’t he good enough, how had he reduced himself so severely in Kate’s estimation, who was this “Sean?”—to perceive or admit to himself that what he wanted to feel was good, at whatever cost and for however brief a duration.

And then he thought this girl beautiful and genial, and these fine qualities failed to make one whit of difference. He recognized that much. He desired. He wanted painfully and maybe his want had no bottom. He wanted someone to want him back, to need him. He wanted more of Kate than could ever be on offer. There wasn’t that much to spare in any woman, unless she was like Raina and then it wouldn’t matter because anyone could have her for two hundred fifty dollars an hour.

“Now push your bottom up in the air.”

She turned her head, regarded him skeptically but did as he asked. He crawled behind her, between her legs. He gripped his penis and bent his face to her narrow, splayed haunches. This erection surprised him more than the last; its fervency did. He wanted to discover how far into her he could push his tongue. He pumped himself with his fist, licked and drooled over her wriggling bottom. He kissed it delicately. She squirmed and looked back at him, again smiling her possibly genuine smile.

“I like this,” she said.

He groaned, “I like it too.”

Raina smelled, not like a woman in the morning, but still musty and peppery with professional residue and sweat. As he ejaculated over his fingers and onto the scratchy sheet, his reasons fluttered about his mind, his love, his resentment, his counterfeit surprise at discovering the infidelity he’d suspected for months.

“You have time for fast shower,” Raina told him.

She held her flat palms beneath the anchor scars and said she mustn’t get them wet or she would have joined him. His penis was oversensitive from latex and friction and he tried to be delicately thorough with the soap and hot water. Would Kate smell how clean he was? Would she care? She’d called him so many times. Why? He stood under the near scalding water in a stranger’s shower thinking about the other men who must have used it. He ran the soap halfway across his chest. There was very little left of his hour in Raina’s apartment, seven or eight minutes. Runnels of water ran over his pubic hair and testicles and shaft, stinging the raw patches.

Outside the prostitutes’ apartment building Jack checked his phone and found he’d missed five additional calls. He dialed home.

Four young women make their way through groups of people on spread-out towels and blankets. This is the third day of unusually warm weather for June in Maine, and the beach is crowded. They find a spot close to the water, near the line where the sand is wet, and shake out their beach towels. One woman sits cross-legged on her towel in a flowered sundress. Blond hair wisps out from under a floppy straw hat. The others watch, and sit down around her, as if following her lead. After a few moments they remove tee shirts and pull off dresses. They pull out tubes of sunscreen and wipe the white cream on their arms and legs. The blonde woman watches them, and finally pulls off her dress. She takes off her hat, and puts sunscreen on her thighs and on her belly, which pushes over the top of her bikini bottoms more than she would like it to. She sighs, and lies on her back, closing her eyes behind her sunglasses.

Andrea hears the low murmur of her friends’ voices, punctuated by the regular hiss of waves landing on shore. “Oh no, I don’t think so . . .” hssh . . . “That’s what she said. I didn’t ask . . .” hssh . . . There is a moment of silence then, and Andrea feels their attention on her, pushing against her like the sun. She knows they are all thinking of it again, their thoughts drawn back to what they are trying not to talk obsessively about. Jessica, who is least able to hold her tongue when she has a thought, says, “I still think it was a gang thing.”

Andrea raises her voice with effort to be heard over the hssh of the waves and the protesting murmur of the others. “It was not a gang thing. It was more like a fight. Only very short.” She opens her eyes to the brightness of the sun, and closes them again.

“It was just a punch, Jessica. The guy just punched him after Derek said what he said.” The voice belongs to Nicole.

“Oh, right,” Jessica says. “Sorry.” After a pause, Jessica says, “I think I’ll go for something at the snack bar. Would anyone like anything? Andrea, can I get you something?”

“No . . .” she says, then realizes that Jessica wants to be of help. “Well, I’d like a soda, I guess. A Diet Sprite, if they have it.” She lifts a hand and waves toward her bag. “There’s money in there.”

“No, never mind that, I’ll get it.”

Andrea hears her stand and brush sand off her thin legs. She imagines her pulling on a shirt over her two-piece suit before walking away. Then it is silent but for the waves. She feels her friends’ concern thick around her. Though Andrea asked for friends to accompany her to the beach today, this sunny warm Sunday the day before Derek’s funeral, she suddenly finds them intolerable, and wishes she’d come alone, or wishes she’d stayed home. But that would probably have been intolerable, too. At moments she is nearly able to forget about it, or to feel okay, but then something rises in her, as regular as the waves, as strong and as uncontrollable, and she is not able to bear it. Yet she continues to lie here, eyes closed behind her sunglasses, and there is nothing she can do but bear it.

It was just two nights ago. Not Saturday night, last night, but the night before. Saturday early morning, actually, around 1:30 a.m. She had broken up with Derek three months earlier but they had gone out together, for old times’ sake, and because they were still friends. Their friendship, at that point, was an uneasy one. Derek could still not accept that they would no longer be together. His persistence made Andrea exasperated; couldn’t he see that they weren’t right for one another? They’d gone out for two years, and during all that time he’d never seemed to notice her impatience with him, how far she felt from him at times. He’d been oblivious to it, assuming that she was as much in love with him as she used to be, as much in love with him as he was with her.

He’d insisted on paying for her drinks at the bar, even though she protested. “No, no, I’m working now and you’re still a college student,” he said, waving his credit card at the waitress. His engineering degree and GPA had landed him a good job. Andrea had decided to be practical and major in nursing, but she resented her courses, and longed for a freedom she had when she was younger, before she knew Derek, when she’d thought she would major in art. Derek, with his button-down shirts and credit card, was the living picture of stability, practicality. After a few drinks his face turned heavy, his eyes half-lidded and soulful as he’d looked at her. He’d gained a few pounds in the past year, and his stomach pushed against his cotton shirt as he leaned toward her. “Andrea,” he said, and something in his voice made her want to turn away. He became earnest and too sincere when he drank; any irony he was able to summon when sober deserted him entirely.

She took another sip of her gin and tonic, and leaned toward him, a mocking look on her face. Would he even notice? “Derek.”

He stared at her. “I’m serious.”

“I know you’re serious, Derek. I wish you weren’t.”

He leaned back then suddenly and turned toward the room. She’d hurt him. She didn’t want to hear him talk about his feelings for her, and ask again about her feelings for him. “I’m sorry,” she said, raising her voice to be heard above the music. He leaned an arm across the top of the booth behind him, and raised his drink to his mouth with the other.

Jessica has returned with a soda in a can for Andrea. Andrea sits up and pops it open, feels the cool carbonation and artificial sweetness on her tongue. Just like that, she remembers being here on this same beach with Derek, the summer they’d started going out. How could she have forgotten that? Derek was working on a painting crew that summer, and had a t-shirt shaped tan. She’d thought he was sweet, the goofy humor and earnestness then part of his charm, before it came to annoy her. He was lying next to her on the blanket, looking at her from under the brim of a Red Sox hat. He’d touched her cheek, and drawn a line down it with his forefinger. They were new lovers then, and thinking of this, Andrea has to remember what she does not want to remember: how she was the first girl Derek had made love with. Though she had boyfriends before she met Derek, he was a virgin until he met her.

She sets the soda can down next to her so suddenly that droplets spray up from the open mouth. Her friends look at her. She turns to Nicole, to Jessica, to Alli. “I told you we were fighting, right?” They nod, miserably.

“What were you arguing about?” Alli asks, uncertainly. None of them know how to act with her; she doesn’t know how to act with herself anymore.

“Oh, nothing. You know. You know how he gets sometimes.” She hears the present tense come from her mouth but they just nod, and don’t correct her. She stands. “I think I’ll get in.”

Jessica stands up also, awkward. “I’ll go with you.”

But Andrea shakes her head. “I think I’d rather go by myself.” She touches the other girl’s arm. “Don’t take it wrong, Jessie, I love you,” and Jessica smiles.

Andrea gasps when the water hits her, and raises her arms, but makes herself walk farther in. The water is a cold shock; now she knows why only one or two other people bob in the water farther out.

They were both drunk when they left the bar. Her apartment was just a few blocks away, but Derek insisted on walking her, though she said she was fine to walk alone. “C’mon, I do it all the time,” she said. “This is Portland.”

“I care about you, even if you don’t care about yourself.”

She’d stopped at that, hands on hips. The street was empty around them, a night mist making the streetlamp glow hazy above their heads. “What is that supposed to mean?”

Derek had been walking with his hands in his pockets, a toothpick from the bar in his mouth. He took it out before he answered. “You don’t take good care of yourself. You don’t seem to think you’re worth taking care of. You smoke . . .” he gestured to her lit cigarette, “and you do reckless things.”

Andrea didn’t want to hear more about what reckless things he thought she did. He was always protective of her, not recognizing the fact that she was a grown woman who could take care of herself. She turned and headed for the park, a shortcut to her apartment. He talked with his parents every day and she’d been on her own since she was sixteen, but she was stronger for it. Over her shoulder she shouted, “You just need someone to take care of. You don’t feel like a man unless you’re protecting a weak female.”

“No, Andy, I didn’t mean that.” He was walking after her now, trying to catch up. “Let’s go the street way, come on.”

She shook him off and kept walking, dropping her cigarette butt on the sidewalk. The light from a streetlight flickered through leaves onto a small group of young men sitting on a bench just inside the park. They made catcalls at her as she went past, cigarette smoke rising above their heads as they laughed. They shouted something at Derek, walking just behind her; one said something about what he’d show her, since her boyfriend couldn’t. She felt rather than saw Derek pause behind her, heard him say something sharp to them as he walked past without stopping. They were words he wouldn’t normally say, in a place he wouldn’t normally be, but for her. Then the shout, the footsteps, the noise of a fist hitting Derek’s face—just once—and the sound he made as he fell, the back of his head hitting a low concrete border. Then it was just the two of them, Andrea and Derek alone in the park. He lay on the ground with his eyes closed and she crouched next to him, the only sound her sobbing as she fumbled for her cell phone.

The water is cold, but she doesn’t want to get out. Her feet are nearly numb. Maybe this is her being reckless with herself, not caring about herself again. She turns to see her friends sitting on shore, looking out at her. She waves, and they wave, and she turns back toward the ocean. She will not die today, out here; they will not let her die. The small dot of a ship is nearly invisible on the horizon, where the blue sky meets the darker blue water. She lets her thoughts take her again to that street, to the light shaking through leaves as they approach the park. This time she imagines herself stopping in the middle of the street, turning toward Derek instead of running away from him. There is no traffic on this cobblestoned street. She sees herself taking his hand, and lifting it to her lips. It is a thick hand, graceless yet capable, and she feels its warmth beneath her lips. “What are you doing?” Derek asks. “What’s that for?” A smile would, that easily, have taken the anger from his face.

She shrugs and smiles. “You were always good to me,” Andrea imagines saying. It is so true that she can almost believe she did say it to him. “Even when I was being a bitch. You were always sweet to me.”

He laughs then, and moves to take her in his arms. She knows what he would want to happen next between them, and knows that she would not let it happen. Even if she could tell him that she knew she had often been irrationally angry at him; even if she could tell him he had done nothing wrong; even if she could say that she couldn’t trust his love because she’d never had anything like that; she still could not go home with him. That time between them was done.

She sees herself taking his arms from her shoulders and putting them down at his side. She looks at his sweet, gone face once more, at his brown eyes edged in thick black lashes before looking toward the park, toward the dark shadows beyond the trees, where she knows they must go.

Jessie stands before me, a circus mirror image of the woman I married ten years earlier. Slight and shriveled, the sight of her furthers my longing for the plump blonde that used to laugh with me, that same woman who would not hesitate to shear off her top and slacks before crawling into bed with me on a Saturday afternoon, would let me stroke her skin until we could take it no longer and gave in to all of our desires — sex, dessert, marathon viewings of Friends reruns watched while curled around each other in half-sleep. Now Jessie uses her afternoons to run the trails in the park behind our house or lift weights at the local gym, coming home sweaty and spent, her cheeks rosy. She looks the same as if we’d been making love.

“Are you coming?” she asks. “We’re going to be late.”

I am wearing the only suit that fits me now, a navy model bought from a big and tall shop a year before for this same office function. The buttons strain against my stomach, the top one coming undone as I scratch out a mustard spot from last year’s party. When it is sufficiently eliminated, I move to refasten the button.

“Leave it,” she says, “it makes you look less fat.”

It all started with a skirt that wouldn’t zip, Jessie refusing to don something else to attend a New Year’s Eve party. Instead we rushed to the grocery in our sweatshirts, socks and sandals, picked up a cheap bottle of champagne. We spent an hour in the store, pestering the fish man for the plumpest shrimp, sorting through to the ripest, greenest broccoli, taking our time deciding what to have. The clerk gave us a dirty look as we checked out. We were the last ones in the place.

Mid-way through the evening, between episodes of Top Chef, Jessie stopped watching and looked at me calmly, seriously; looked at me the way people do before they tell you something terrible.

“It’s time,” she’d said, “to do something about this weight.”

I remember shrugging my shoulders, not wanting to upset her but not wanting to urge her on. She’d smiled at me and rubbed her stomach, then leaned her head on my shoulder. I turned the channel so we could watch the ball drop, our conversation punctuated by crostini with herbed goat cheese, peppercorn boiled shrimp dipped in Cajun remoulade, bites of perfectly steamed broccoli drizzled with Mornay sauce. A Dick Clark wannabe counted down the final ten seconds and Jessie turned, her eyes wide, smiling at me as we leaned in, our lips finding each other as they’d been doing for seven years.

“You look fine,” I said when our eyes had opened again. “I like you the way you are.”

“I don’t,” she returned without hesitation. “I want to try, at least. I feel like I’ve given up on myself.” She paused, looked down at the soft purple robe that she wore, the fuzzy slippers. “I don’t want to look like this anymore.”

“Okay,” I said, then took her hand.

“And it’s healthier, you know? They’re saying now that obese women have more complications during childbirth. I don’t want that to be me someday,” she said, looking at me earnestly.

“Of course not, Jess.” I tried to soothe her. We’d been talking about kids, but this was the first real planning we’d discussed. “But you’re healthy now. I’m sure it’ll be fine.”

“Still,” she added, “diet starts tomorrow.” And she reached for another shrimp.

One Christmas, two pant sizes after Jessie and I had wed, my father told me that getting fat was the married way of life.

“You’re happy, you get married, you get fat,” he’d said, laughing. “At least women get pregnant and fat. We’ve got nothing to show for all the weight. Good thing is, it’s all part of the process.” I think I’d laughed at the time, didn’t really think much of it. I could look at Jessie’s and my expanding waistlines, our enlarged pant sizes, and think about the nights that we’d stay up until sunrise, walking the darkened streets of our little town before retiring home to cheesecake in bed, large glasses of whole milk, our soft flesh pressing together as we made love with full stomachs, the warmth of Jessie next to me while the early-shift cars rolled by outside. On our honeymoon, we’d tried to taste everything that Italy had to offer—sharply aged parmesan cheese and fully matured Burgundy and salty cured prosciutto; made-fresh pasta with every kind of sauce, seafood and lamb, each meal topped with fresh cannoli. It seemed we would always be lovingly full.

For the next year and a half, Jessie dieted. At nights and on the weekends, times when we shared our meals, I joined her, forcing down cabbage soup and numerous salads, beef stroganoff made with lean meat and fat free sour cream, a blackened vegetable stir-fry, more rice than I’d care to admit, and, during the low-carb phase, more meat than was reasonable. Many of them worked for a few weeks – two months at most – Jessie’s face glowing as she stepped out of the bathroom in the morning. She recorded her weight on a calendar fastened to the refrigerator, each month marked by a different pin-up picture. She purchased smiley face stickers to mark the days where she’d lost. Whenever there were five blank spaces in a row, I knew our cuisine would be changing again.

Everything revolved around weight, not just Jessie’s weight on the bathroom scale but the weight of every piece of food we put into our mouths. We bought measuring cups marked with cups and milliliters and ounces. We bought food scales whose boxes featured pictures of the scale filled with apples. Nothing was cooked or dressed or plated without having its weight taken and recorded. Everything was documented, regimented, prescribed; spontaneity was deemed dangerous. I longed for one high-risk meal.

Together we learned how to weigh food without scales or cups: three ounces of cooked meat is the size of a deck of playing cards, a quarter cup of nuts is the size of a golf ball, a tablespoon of oil, mayonnaise, salad dressing, butter is equal to the size of a poker chip. When we went out to eat, everything was on the side, dry, low fat, fat free, healthy choice, low calorie. Jessie packed her purse with a cheat bag: a deck of playing cards, poker chips, a golf ball. If she’d been mugged, someone might’ve guessed she was a rabid poker player with a stress-reducing hobby or a greens keeper with a gambling problem. She would order the smallest sirloin – no oil, no butter – then pull out her deck of cards and cut off the excess. Her steamed vegetables always came dry, her salads with the dressing on the side, a golf ball’s worth of oil and vinegar destined to grace the lettuce.

After about a year of dieting, losing then regaining, Jessie had lost a total of twenty pounds. She excitedly tossed out her old work suits, shrieking with delight as she slipped them on one by one and wiggled, seeing if she could slip the skirts and pants down over her hips. If they slid down significantly, she would strip them off and toss them to me, gleefully skipping back to the closet and rubbing the outsides of her thighs. I remembered those dimpled places, the firm deposits of flesh that I would caress with the tip of my fingers while we watched television in the mornings, before Jessie was fully awake. They were noticeably smaller, not nearly as shaky as I remembered them, and I could feel her disappearing into this new, smaller self.

As we make our way to the party, I find myself studying my wife through the corner of my eye. She is tall for a woman, with dirty blonde hair that she regularly highlights at the beauty salon, and a pinkish complexion – one that is easily flushed. Where she used to be shaped like a sturdy hourglass, she now resembles a long box with a bit of bulge in the center because of all the excess skin she still has from the 100 lbs. of her that is gone. From the side, before, she was a series of curves: out for the breasts and then in again and slanting back out for the pouch of her lower stomach, the backwards leap of her butt, then the slope of her thighs that would flatten out so that her calves could take the last hurrah. She was beautiful.

Sometimes I see her, the Jessie I once held and loved and knew, in the sagging around this new Jessie’s middle. It haunts me in its own silent way, like when an ex-lover comes to a party that you also attend. It reminds me of the duality of our lives now: separate cabinets for our foods, two sets of pots and pans in the sink after each home cooked meal, two schedules, and I wonder if it’ll ever go back to being just one again, if our house will shed the weight of an extra life.

We would take day-trips on weekends to some of the local sights: Thomas Edison’s winter home, the Salvador Dali museum, the Ringling property, sometimes even venturing the four hours to Orlando to parade around all day in one of the various amusement parks, our fat selves t-shirt clad and sandal-wearing, our hearts bubbling founts of mirth. Often, though, we would settle for the ten minute drive to the beach followed immediately by the arduous rub-in of sunscreen, the time it took to set up our lounge chairs and towels, homemade roast beef sandwiches with thyme-infused aioli, shaved slices of sharp cheddar cheese, fresh arugula. After lunch, we would strip off our clothes and head into the water. Jessie would be gloriously pale and fresh in a swimsuit – black, of course — and she would splash and play and I would hold myself against her, feeling her solidity in the ocean surrounding us. When we came home, we would strip ourselves bare in the laundry room and, full of sand-grit and sea-stickiness, we would make love in our soft bed, our skins fresh with sunburn. I remember her laughing and naked, a pink box on her chest where her swimsuit did not cover her.

Jessie sits behind the wheel of her new Jetta, a car that she had always liked but had not felt she fit into. Tonight she has her hair pulled up into a curly ponytail, something that she has spent hours perfecting with a curling iron, and is dressed in a close-fitting black skirt that cuts off below her knee. The bright red top she wears to hide those folds of skin has a ribbon below the bust that ties in the back. Two years ago, she would have asked me to tie it for her, kissing me gently after I’d done so. Tonight, I did not see her until moments before she told me to stop fussing with my jacket and get in the car.

We ride mostly in silence, the radio tuned to some channel that appears during the holidays to repeat the same twelve Christmas songs over and over. Jessie hums along as we cruise through Bonita Beach, looking for the turnoff to her boss’s large home, and I wonder what she is thinking about, whether she is really so absorbed in her own thoughts or if she simply has nothing to say to me, a man that she knew so well once. I find myself gazing nostalgically at the lump in her top that sits at her waist, wondering how many card decks of herb buttered ribeye would fill that space, how many golf balls of salty, creamy pistachios or poker chips of chunky, tangy bleu cheese could bring her back to me.

Jessie came in from the salon with a smile spread across her face.

“You love it,” I said to her, “I can tell.”

“It’s not the hair,” she’d said, sliding onto the couch beside me, “it’s gastric bypass.”

I remember feeling a drop inside my torso, like the tissue holding my heart and my stomach had simultaneously given way.

“See, they take your stomach and staple it closed so that only the top portion is—”

“I know what it is,” I said. “Don’t you think it’s a little drastic?”

“Jim, this weight is never going to come off if I don’t do this.”

“And what’s the problem with that?” I asked, my voice wavering.

“Losing weight will be good for my heart,” she said, “and my cholesterol. It’ll prevent diabetes. All that stuff.”

I could see hope in her face, present mostly in the gloss of her eyes, the pink rising up in her throat and cheeks.

“I didn’t know that you had problems with any of that.”

“Well, I don’t right now. But I could! The doctor is always saying I need to lose weight.”

“Isn’t this the same doctor that told you to lose weight when you went in for a sinus infection?”

She sighed at me and I could tell she had already made up her mind.

“Becky at the beauty salon says that her cousin got gastric bypass and lost like 200 pounds. Imagine what that would be like for me.” She stood up and twirled as though showing off a new dress. “Can you see it?”

“First off,” I started, “you don’t have 200 pounds to lose.”

She rolled her eyes.

“Secondly, I think that having surgery when nothing is wrong with you is silly and over-the-top.”

Jessie crossed her arms, her newly tinted blonde hair slipping over her shoulders.

“And thirdly, I like the way you are now. I don’t want you to change—you’re beautiful now, Jess.”

But her face had changed. Instead of giddiness or the sarcastic rolling of the eyes while a hint of smile still played on her face, Jessie looked disappointed and angry.

“What about the obese pregnancy thing? I’m more likely to get gestational diabetes because of my weight!”

“I didn’t know we were planning to get pregnant yet. I thought you wanted to wait a little while?” I was being honest. We’d agreed to wait until Jessie got a hold on her career, until we’d saved enough money to give our kid what we felt it would deserve.

“I don’t think you get what this feels like,” she said to me, blonde eyebrows pressed into a straight line above her green eyes. “Do you know what it’s like to be me every day?”

“I must know a little,” I said, waving my hands down my own robust figure, “it’s not like I’m Brad Pitt.”

“No,” she said, shaking her head, “it’s not the same for men as it is for women.” She loosened her hands from her crossed arms and gestured with them, a sign that I was in for quite an argument. “You all dress in pants and shirts and that’s it. There aren’t a lot of different styles or shapes to wear, it’s just shirts, sweatshirts, jackets, trousers, and jeans.” Her mouth hung open slightly as she paused, waiting for her point to sink in. “I have to go shopping for a different dress for every party or for work or to hang around the house in or whatever, and it has to be in style, in the shape that whatever person decided looks good this season. Do you understand how hard that is for me? Do you think I like having to sort through every plus-sized section to find something that doesn’t look like a tent?”

Her face was flushed and her breath was ragged, sure signs that she would cry. I moved to stand up but she put her hand out, keeping me in my place on the sofa.

“I want to look normal,” she said, tears sliding down her rosy cheeks, “I want to feel like a regular person.”

I pulled her down to me, sat her soft body on my lap and held her while she cried, my hand sliding down her back.

“Shh, shh,” I cooed, “it’ll be alright. If that’s what makes you happy, then we’ll look into it. But you don’t have to do this.” I sucked in a breath, held it in my lungs for a moment. “You don’t have to do this for me.”

Jessie could not eat real food for almost three months after the surgery. For the first few weeks, at very regulated times, I would feed her liquids — chicken and beef broth, juice, water, melted popsicles when she craved something sweet. Even then, she couldn’t keep certain things down, her new walnut-sized stomach rejecting items that were too sugary or salty for its momentary tastes. After a few weeks she graduated to mushy foods and I shopped in the baby food aisle, a task I thought Jessie and I would perform together, hungry child in tow. She would gobble down pureed carrots and creamed peas, didn’t much care for squash, and she never ate more than a jar full. It seemed sad, to need so little to sustain her. I remembered Jessie piling her plate with mashed potatoes and gravy, thick slices of turkey and spoonfuls of stuffing and cranberry sauce at Thanksgiving, the way she seemed so robust, so full of life. Lying on the sofa or in bed, her once plump body slowly withered underneath her blanket, slipping further away with each teaspoon of mashed peaches or applesauce.

She lost weight rapidly at first, her cheeks and arms loosening, it seemed, by the day. When she could get up and move again, she slowly built up her exercise routine – first walking around the house slowly, then more quickly, then buying a new pair of tennis shoes and walking around the neighborhood. She eventually built up to a jog, then a run. She would log long hours as though training for a marathon. When she came in, her face dripping with sweat, it would startle me to see this flaccid woman walking around as though she belonged there, her legs lean underneath her running shorts.

After a while, her weight loss plateaued and I got used to seeing her in her new form — the leaner version of herself, this dimmed image of the woman that used to glow with life. Jessie did not necessarily look sickly, but I could not help but think of her that way when comparing her with the old Jessie, that beach goddess in the large black swimsuit, her blonde hair shimmering in the afternoon sunlight. But she was still my wife, this other woman dressed in my wife’s ill-fitting skin.

I found myself examining her attitude and manner, the way that she would say things. I could find offense in her many side comments, but did not want to start a fuss. Instead, I ignored them, hoped that she would neglect her running for a day and come to sit with me. I tried running with her, but she easily passed me by, trotting backwards to tell me she would meet me back at the house when I was through. I’d gone out on my own, starting with a brisk walk and moving up to a slow jog in an attempt to be able to go out with her. Each time I tried, I would have to stop and gasp for breath, and after a while I stopped trying so much, thought that maybe she would tire of all of this newness and look for me back in the things that she seemed to have left behind.

We stand on the front porch under the soft white lamp swarmed with moths and the mosquitoes that have withstood the South Florida winter. Jessie faces forward, her hands fussing with the bottom of her blouse. I reach to put my hand on her waist but she pushes it away, looking at me sternly for a moment, then softening.

“Please don’t,” she says, her voice sweet, “it makes me self-conscious.”

I nod to her and face forward, too, waiting for her boss to open the door.

Inside the party is as usual — Jessie’s coworkers stand about holding drinks and gossiping with one another, men and women separated mostly into their own groups. Jessie looks at the men’s group and smiles at me, waves me over with her hand. I muster a smile back and make my way to the men, greeted by handshakes and pats on the shoulder.

“Jim,” they say to me, their faces ruddy with scotch, “Good to see you!”

“Jessie looks great,” her boss, Frank, leans in to me, his breath a mix of liquor and something sharp. “She’s really taking it off, huh?”

“She always looked great,” I say, “but thank you.”

“Must be a big change,” he says, ignoring my response, and nudges one of the other men in the group, causing him to break out in an awkward laugh. I excuse myself and make my way over to the hor d’oeuvres table.

I skewer a few cheese cubes and place a finger sandwich on my plate, followed by two slices of rolled salami that I dot with Dijon mustard. After snagging a can of seltzer water from an open cooler, I seat myself at the counter, notice that I am the only person staying in the kitchen. A few people come in for a moment, pick up a drink or a small plate, then vanish back into their groups.

Last year, Jessie was here with me, the flesh of her face slightly melting, sipping on a glass of iced water with lemon, the seltzer too much for her post-op stomach at the time. I think of the smile that she gave me, the pathetic look from her ice water to the food on my plate. I sat a piece of salami in her hand.

“Just chew it,” I told her, “don’t swallow.”

She’d smiled at me and kissed my cheek and I’d flushed with pleasure at her touch.

We spent this Thanksgiving with Jessie’s parents in Orlando. Jessie’s mom had gone all out despite Jessie’s previous warnings that she wouldn’t be able to eat much of anything and that rich food upset her stomach. I don’t think Regina was being contrary — the spread was typical of their Thanksgiving meals — but Jessie was unnerved by it. She reluctantly dabbed teaspoon-sized portions of everything onto her plate: a dollop of mashed potatoes, the tip of a yam, a few green beans glistening with butter and studded with chips of crispy bacon, half a slice of turkey, a fluffy ping-pong ball of stuffing. At the table, her father laughed, asked her why she was eating like a bird. When she sighed, frustrated at his questions, he turned serious and put his hand over hers on the table.

“I didn’t mean to upset you, honey,” he said. “I’m just kidding with you.”

Regina nodded and glanced at me, my plate stacked with items like a map of food nations set in a gravy ocean. She gave me a look that said she sympathized with me, our relationships to Jessie all strained by food. We were all big people at that table, save for Jessie. She used to be one of us.

“At least Jim can still pack it in,” her father said, smiling. “There’s a man with a good appetite.” He chuckled and patted his round stomach. “A man after my own heart. Or stomach, at least.”

We all laughed at this.

“It’s a good sign to see a man eat,” Jessie’s father said. “I don’t know how we’re gonna get no grandbabies out of you though, honey, if you don’t get back to being a little robust.”

Jessie smiled dimly at this and we all kept eating, but the world on my plate seemed less appetizing. I found myself choking down the last bites of turkey and yam and mashed potato.

After dinner, Jessie’s dad and I sat in the living room, watching the last dregs of football drain out of the television while Regina and Jessie washed up in the kitchen. I was gluttonously full, but it didn’t feel the same. Instead of warm and loved, I felt disgusted with myself. I thought about Jessie’s meager plate, her gaunt face half-smiling at her father’s remark. I made my way into the bathroom.

I splashed my face with cold water and fought the nauseated feeling in my stomach. When I shut off the faucet I could hear Jessie and Regina talking in the kitchen, their words punctuated by the clanking of dishes, the sound of rinsing.

“But he’s right,” Regina said, “you look so thin! Are you even able to have children with this surgery?”

I could hear Jessie sigh.

“Yes, Ma. I can still have kids. Jim would have never agreed to this if we couldn’t.”

“Well thank Jesus for that,” Regina said. “So are you thinking about it any time soon,” she asked. “Your father is just dying for grandkids to spoil. We’re the only one at the VFW with no photos of fat grandbabies.”

There was a pause then and I could almost see Jessie’s face. We hadn’t talked about kids since Jessie asked the doctor—at my urging—whether or not she should have the surgery if we were planning on getting pregnant. After that it just hadn’t seemed relevant.

“I just want to focus on one thing at a time,” I heard Jessie say. “I feel like I’m finally getting the life I wanted and I want to enjoy it for a while before thinking about a baby.”

Dishes clanked in the sink. The dishwasher door closed and the knob ratcheted its way to the proper setting. Before the machine hummed to life I heard Jessie’s voice.

“Besides,” she said, “I just lost all this weight. I can’t imagine turning around and getting fat again.”

From the other room I can hear the co-worker’s wives oohing and aahing over Jessie.

“You look so good,” one says, “you’re so much smaller! How much have you lost?”

“About 100 pounds,” Jessie returns, a polite but giddy tone to her voice. “I feel like a new person.”

“So what now,” another asks. “Do you have much more weight to lose?”

“Not really. I’m going to the gym and running so that I can tone up, but the biggest problem is all this extra skin.”

I close my eyes and try to block it out. I’m tired of this change, tired of hearing about the old, unacceptable body and what was wrong with it, how she wants to fix it.

“So I guess the next thing is to get it removed,” she says, and I hear the women nodding and murmuring their approval.

“Won’t that leave a scar?” someone remarks.

“Won’t it hurt?” says another.

“It’s the last thing,” Jessie says matter-of-factly. I can imagine the look on her face—her eyebrows lifted, eyes bright, mouth set in a smug smirk. “After that, I’ll be a totally different person.”

“Then you’ll be just like the rest of us,” another woman says, her words sloppy, “the only dead weight you’ll have is your husband!”

The women laugh, the tinkle of their high voices like flames dancing inside my gut. I stand up from the table and make my way outside, my legs moving quicker than my mind understands. I think I hear Jessie behind me, but am not sure if that is her voice saying my name or if it’s someone else’s voice, someone else’s name.

Outside the cars roll past on some nearby highway and cicadas rattle in the palm trees. The Florida night air is cool and balmy and, in the distance, I note the sound of an infant crying or a cat mewling its laments. I button and unbutton my jacket, take it off, toss it on top of the Jetta. I walk down the suburban street, past the large houses with soft lighting glimmering through tall French doors. I can see families sitting around the TV, parents and kids illuminated by the blue glow. I pass a house where a child is playing with a toy truck in front of the door and he presses his face against the glass, watching me walk by. I must look like a man on a stroll, enjoying the night air, a man taking account of his life, a man looking to remove some worries, or drop a few pounds. Inside, this new weight is unbearable.

PART 4 OF 4

Read Part 1 Here
Read Part 2 Here
Read Part 3 Here

“Everything all right, Sarah?” Roberta yelled out from her desk as she passed in the hallway. It was the next morning. Sarah thought she might be able to slip by again, not have to speak to her until lunch time, but Roberta must have been waiting. She stopped, leaned against the doorway to Roberta’s classroom and blew out a deep breath.

“You usually say goodnight,” Roberta said.

“Students and their romances.”

“Yep, so much drama.” Roberta hadn’t looked up from her stack of papers yet. “Talking to this girl a couple days ago. She was so upset because this kid she slept with went around telling everyone about it. I mean details about what they did, intimate stuff. Even the teachers know.” She leaned back in her chair. “I’ll never get over how brutally they treat each other in high school.”

“Not any more brutal than out there,” Sarah said.

“Yeah, but stuff in here spreads like a virus.” Roberta looked at her. “The walls are thin, the windows large, and everyone’s got their eyes peeled for trouble.”

She didn’t mean to, but Sarah looked away, down the empty hallway.

“Come on in,” Roberta said. Sarah walked in and sat at a desk in front of Roberta’s.

“There was this kid when I was student teaching,” Roberta said. “Matthew Nielsen.” She leaned back in her chair and looked up at the ceiling. “He was gorgeous. I mean just fantastic. And he never smiled, so he had this dangerous, brooding thing going on, which I’ve always fallen for.” She grinned. “You know I was just barely twenty-three and he was a senior, seventeen, I think. I used to have dreams about him. You know, teaching in your underwear, but with a twist. He’d be the one who undressed me while I was writing things on the chalkboard, or while we were discussing a diagram of a fallopian tube in the text book, things like that, and all the students would be watching and taking copious notes.” She laughed. “Everytime he walked into that classroom my mind would go blank, so I’d write out scripts for myself so I could get through that period each day. He wasn’t a great student. Not horrible either, but I started finding problems in his work that I needed to discuss with him after class or after school. Legitimate problems, mind you, but problems others had and ones that weren’t all that unusual. He’d barely talk, but something about him just sent me through the roof. I started having little daydreams. Innocent ones, where we had dinner out. He’d be wearing a suit, the lighting would be dim, and, of course, in these little dreams he knew how to dance the salsa even. I’m a big girl and was big then too and guys weren’t exactly crashing down my front door.” She leaned forward and put her elbows on the desk. “Imagine that, big Roberta Vasquez dancing the salsa with blonde haired, blue-eyed Matthew Nielsen.” She waited a minute. “Then one day he came into class wearing braces. He smiled to show them to one of his friends. It was the first time I’d ever seen his teeth. He looked so young, even younger than his real age, and the obvious finally hit me: he was just a kid. Somehow I’d stopped seeing him as one. I’d started thinking things, like, ‘There’s only four years between us’ and stuff like that, but he was just a kid afterall.”

“You never told me that.”

“Well, you don’t go around admitting to other teachers you’ve had fantasies about your students now, do you?” She spoke through a laugh. “Not exactly a great resumé builder.”

Sarah laughed and tried not to look nervous.

“Remember who you are, Sarah.”

* * *

Three weeks later she found herself on the threshold of a decision, one she couldn’t delay much longer. After leaving Royal Coffee she knew there was only one place to go, her house. She understood enough to know that an eighteen year old boy didn’t stick around indefinitely without something in return. Depending on how you looked at it, this either made young men callous and vulgar or self-conscious and needy. With Dominic, she had decided, it was the latter. It would be a personal insult not to sleep with him, a pain that suggested his worthlessness.

“Take me for a ride,” she said.

“Where?”

“Anywhere,” she said. “I just want the feeling.”

They had parked behind the store in employee parking. Normally she wouldn’t let him drive her around in his car; it was too conspicuous, its shiny chrome and tinted windows just begged for attention, but today she wanted something else, she wanted the immediate pleasure of his world. Her car was a Volvo station wagon, steel reinforced for safety, room in the back for bikes, snowboards, a boy or all three at once. It was an adult car, a liberal minded teacher’s car, a mother’s, full with the weight of social responsibility. Dominic’s, though, was full of too much shine and polish to be anything but a toy. A boys’ pleasure vehicle, so layered with watery lacquer paint and sub-woofers and bouncing radio lights that there was no room for anything but the desire to experience, and she wanted to be immersed in that world, that little window in time so perfectly tuned to sensory overload.

He opened the door for her and held it until she swung her legs inside. Her skirt was pulled up a bit, and she watched him watch her skin and he noticed her watching him and they were together in that knowledge, encased in the secret of it. She leaned down in the seat, her back sliding against the slickness of vinyl upholstery. Dominic started the engine and it shook the whole inside of the car, not violently, but like a lullaby. She watched his face, so serious, his jaw tight, his sunglasses hiding his eyes, the tinted windows concealing him from everything outside of it, and she had the sense of being wrapped in his insecurities—the smell of his cologne, the shininess of the paint, the slick, oily feel of the seats, and the very deliberate way he shifted gears, like he was in the cockpit of a passenger jet or guiding a space shuttle into orbit.

He drove down Estudillo and onto the freeway, and took the turn-off to Highway 17. The houses and strip-malls and tangled on and off-ramps were replaced by groves of redwood trees and green rolling hills pinned against the permanence of blue sky. The wind rushed around the car and he downshifted into third as he rounded a corner, his fingers spreading out around the silver ball as he slid it into the slot, his feet depressing the gas pedal that rocketed the car up the edge of the ridge, the engine rumbling with the strain but still gaining speed. He shifted back into fourth and the car settled, the ground just inches below them blurring away, the heat of rubber sticking to the pavement like life depended on it, and it did, she realized. He took another corner and the weight of the car shifted too much and she could see the canyon below them falling away in landslides of dirt. But the car stuck to the road and that’s when she realized the adept moves of his hands on the steering wheel were meant to impress her – the way he pumped his foot to rev the engine, the way his hand fluidly shifted in rhythm with the mechanics of the car, like his body moved in synchronicity with fast moving life. All of this was supposed to put her in awe of him, was supposed to turn her on. And it sort of did, but not in the way he believed it would. It turned her on because of the absolute need of it, the amazing fragility of his need to have such power over someone.

When they reached the top of the ridge, they drove along the spine of coastal mountains. To their left was the bay and little toy airplanes floated below them to a landing at the airport. To their right, just over her shoulder, was the endless blue of the Pacific and except for this strip of backbone they drove there was nothing else but sky. Something turned over in her as Dominic powered the car through the sky, a rising freedom that was dangerous and young and unscarred. She felt it as sure as she rocked within the car, as sure as he sat next to her, and she reached her hand over and placed it on his leg. He didn’t smile, but she could see the pleasure in his face, and when he pushed in the clutch to shift once again, she felt all the working muscles beneath the fabric of his pants. This was the freedom of a boy in a car, the freedom of not understanding that life was more boring and more important and full of more consequences than you could possibly imagine in just eighteen years.

Then the road fell toward the west and the ocean that was once beneath them, flat like something to walk across, became bigger and bigger and filled up her vision with its rolling and white-capped strikes at land. When they reached the beach, Dominic parked the car and leaned his head against the seat and looked at her. There was silence for a moment until the roar of the ocean replaced the roar of the engine. Dominic leaned forward to kiss her, but Sarah refused.

“Let’s walk,” she said.

The summer fog sat in the distance, fingers of clouds stretching towards land. A fierce wind blew in ahead of it and spit salt water into the sky so that a light mist landed in their hair and wet their coats. Beyond the jetty, in the gunmetal shadow of the coming fog, were row upon row of waves building and crashing and then receding back into the expanse. A few surfers threw themselves down the face of waves, their black bodies falling into the whitewash and disappearing. Sarah sat down in the sand and Dominic sat next to her. The surface was warm, but on the tips of her fingers, just beneath the surface, she felt the cold sand dig underneath her nails.

“Is this the place?” she asked.

He nodded. Something had changed in him. Maybe it was the refused kiss, but he was pouty, distant.

“When you come here now, what do you think?” she asked.

He used a stick to dig into the sand. He shook his head. “I don’t know, you know.” He looked out towards the crashing waves. “She’s too far away. My old man, well, he’s gotta be dead to me, you know.” He smiled, an ironic smile that was like a slash of pain across his face. “Not giving a shit’s like being dead to someone, don’t you think?”

“I don’t really know. Giving a shit—as you put it—doesn’t seem to matter much.”

A large wave crashed, one of a set, and she watched the frothy ocean creep closer towards their feet.

“That’s wrong,” he said. He pulled the sunglasses from his face. “That’s hella wrong, Sarah.” He looked at her and she could tell he was scared, scared that this friendship she’d offered him was fake.

“You’re beautiful,” she said.

“Beautiful? Shit, that’s like telling me I’m cute.”

“Well, deal with it,” she said.

The sun was swallowed up by clouds; grey would be the final color of the day.

“You know you’re not in love with Maria,” she said. “If you were you’d follow her, no matter what I or anyone else said.”

“Maybe I still will.”

“You won’t,” she said. “What you call love is not love.”

“What is it then?” he said.

“Something else.”

The wind whipped salt and sand into the air. She turned her face away from it.

“Well, if it’s not love,” he said, “I don’t think I want it, because nothing felt like her, you know. Nothing.”

“Your first?” she said.

“My only.” He said it and then he was embarrassed.

She thought he might be lying. “You’ll know it’s love when you take it for granted, when you expect that it’ll always be there, when it becomes a part of you, when it settles into something other than sex and other than beauty. And when you lose it, when it’s taken away, you’ll have to follow it just to find yourself again.” She waited. “You’re not in love with her because you’re here with me.”

“I’m not in love with you,” he said.

“That’s good.” When she said it he stared down at the sand like he was counting every grain, like he was afraid to lose it against the tide.

She leaned forward, not far, but enough. He turned his head and she put her hands to his cheeks and kissed him and he let her.

* * *

They had cleaned the bullet hole. He had been shot in the chest, and the hole was so small, so perfectly round, that it seemed utterly harmless. There was more damage when he broke his leg falling from his skateboard, she thought, but this damage was near the heart, this damage cut through the lungs. When the man asked her if this was her son, she looked at him and felt such a brutal anger that she had to hold onto the inside of the pockets of her jeans to keep from hitting him. She looked at him for a moment, the way his hair was perfectly parted, the paperwork in his hand he needed to file, the way his pencil sat between his fingers ready to write his official notes.

She looked back at David’s body. She could see the lines of unused veins beneath the surface of his skin. He was naked from the waist up, below the waist he was covered with a white sheet. The sheet clung against his legs and his groin and at the end of the sheet his blue feet stuck out, bare except for a plastic tag tied to his toe. She wanted to pull the sheet from his body. She hadn’t seen him naked since he was a child, and this suddenly seemed to her such a shame. She looked at his face; there were still traces of pink around the edges of his nostrils, color clinging to the lids of his eyes. She touched his hair, felt the curl of his eyelashes, and ran her fingers along the edge of his thin nose. She touched his chest and laid her hand on the softness of his stomach. The skin was cold and smooth like waxed paper.

She nodded slightly.

“That’s a yes?” the man asked.

“Yes,” she said, and she hated him for making her say it. He was a skinny man, the color of a worm.

He pulled the sheet back up over David’s face. She almost crumbled; she could feel things collapsing inside her, but she imagined him sleeping and this helped her keep her feet. The skinny man pushed on the edge of the table and it slid into the mouth of the body-sized tomb. When David’s head was all the way inside, he closed the door and slid a small piece of paper with David’s name and a number written in blue pen into a small plastic sheath on the outside of the door. It looked like the call numbers to an author in a library card catalogue.

“It’s a shame,” he said. “I’m sorry.” But his voice was too formal, business like.

The room was horribly cold and she began to shake uncontrollably; the muscles of her jaw hurt, but she wanted to stay.

“Do you have kids?” she said, her voice accusing. He stared at her. “Do you?”

“No,” he admitted, and he seemed embarrassed by it. She knew he wanted her to leave; he had turned his body towards the door and even began to lift his hand to guide her out. She didn’t turn but stood and faced him directly. She wished he would push her so that she could push him back, knock him down, kick him in the stomach. She wanted to say something, to tell him how hard it was to raise a child, and how he knew nothing about any of it. She wanted words strong enough to make him bleed, but then she heard her own question and realized, now, that her answer would also be “no”.

* * *

Dominic took the freeway back from the beach, and what had been an hour drive before took only twenty minutes this time. She made him park his car around the corner, on a cul-de-sac that few people ever drove down. The walk was long to the front door and she felt the loneliness in the time of day, the lull before men arriving home from work, the anxious peace of a neighborhood empty of teenagers still out cruising, hanging out with friends at malls. Dominic tried to lay his hand on the small of her back.

“Don’t do that,” she said.

He immediately removed his hand and replaced it in his pocket.

“Wait until we’re inside.”

All the windows were shut and the drapes pulled and with the deep shadows concealing the brightness of the sun, the house was full of flat, dull light. The effect was like that of coming into a long closed museum; the air was stale like sediment settled in the follicles of a carpet that needed to be shaken.

Her experience with men, including her own husband, was that when they got this close to a woman’s bed, there was little hesitation. Once he got within sniffing distance of bedsheets, he took control, owned the room and you in it. It wasn’t until after the man left that you had yourself and your possessions back. She expected that call to action; she expected Dominic’s hand on the back of her neck immediately; she expected grasping fingers, powerful lips, a walk backwards like one long fall towards her bed.

But what she got was something else entirely. He stood near the kitchen counter, his hands thrust into his pockets. This was new ground they were treading, and even Dominic seemed afraid of it. She breathed more easily and her eyes briefly welled with water, the same thing that happened at school when a student said just the right thing or clearly understood a difficult concept through much exhausting thought.

“Can we open a window?” he asked.

“No, we can’t.” She walked over to him, smiled, and pulled his coat from his shoulders. He stood and let her, one arm tugging free and then the other. “Come in and sit down.”

She retrieved a cold bottle of vodka from the freezer and two glasses. She had learned to drink the vodka straight with a twist of lemon, but in the afternoon heat and the eyes of a boy that now made her self-conscious she added a measure of cranberry juice to sweeten it. She joined him at the couch, where he had separated the slants of velor blinds to look out onto the dull, quiet street. When she sat down, he turned abruptly as if he had been caught peeping through the window of another woman’s house. The blinds stuck, and a thin, bright ray of light flooded her vision with floating particles of dust.

“What time is it?” he asked.

“Four-thirty.”

He nodded and seemed to be making some sort of calculation in his head.

“What time do you need to be home?”

“Six.”

“You’ll make it,” she said.

She took a sip of the drink. “I want you to tell me what it feels like with Maria, what makes it worth all the risk.”

“Don’t wanna talk about Maria,” he said.

“Then show me.”

He reached and took a sip of his drink while he gave her his most striking, well-practiced sexy look. This is what he’ll look like in a bar someday, she thought. Some day when he’s lonely and lost. He set the drink down, his hand shaking just a little to jingle the ice more than he would have liked.

“Show me, Dominic.”

His face reddened and he shifted his weight nervously on the couch, the sunlight catching the side of his unwrinkled face. Sarah ran her hands down the dusty blinds until her fingers caught on the one shade out of alignment. With a little more pressure from her hand it snapped into place and cut out the light. He moved towards her and she leaned back on the couch.

The sun had fallen lower in the sky and the house was shades of grey shapes: the grey of square walls, the darker grey of furniture, the carpet like a rainy day ocean. And then the slate colored ceiling hovering above her, strangely foreboding and closing in. His fingers worked at her blouse buttons as he tried to kiss her, his lips freezing a moment on the hot nape of her neck as he concentrated on the second button his fingers couldn’t unhook. His right knee pinched the skin of her thigh and she moved with the pain in a way to make him feel she was moving with desire for him. He reacted to the lifting of her hips by remembering that his mouth was supposed to be kissing her neck and he began to kiss so hard, so pressing as if he were trying to bore his lips through her that she nearly laughed out loud. She had to help him with her bra, which made him embarrassed and frustrated, a feeling she watched him forget when he was revealed the full view of her breasts. Then it all became too much for him and he awkwardly tried to do four things at once: remove the remains of her shirt and unhooked bra with one hand, kiss her left breast, and use the other hand to unbutton her jeans, while simultaneously wedging his foot down in the inseam of the pants to pull them down.

This time she laughed, but an admiring, maternal laugh which stopped him in mid-motion but did not upset him. “Slow down,” she said. “I’m not running away.”

She helped him remove the rest of her clothes and she was aware of the blue color of her skin in the light; she felt a rush of self-consciousness but then she realized he wasn’t noticing such things now and forgot the feeling. Once her clothes were removed, he hesitated, a shade of fear running through his eyes before she began to strip off his shirt. She looked away, over his shoulder to the sunlit lines of the closed shades. When she helped him slip off his baggy pants, she looked at his eyes.

“It’s okay. You’re doing fine.” She was surprised but glad he needed so much reassuring.

When he was undressed she lay back down on the couch and looked up at the ceiling, until he fell on top of her and his face filled up her vision. He tried to get inside of her, but he missed and she reached down to help him. His face changed immediately. She watched it go through stages, of fear then astonishment—a look that made her want to hold him and keep him with her forever—and then a loosening of every feeling but desire, a simple, unambiguous need. There was no sense of ownership, no thoughts of work or other women rolling around in his head, just the desire to feel. There was an innocence in it that she would never be able to explain to anyone.

It didn’t take long and when he had finished he looked at her, his eyes watery, the skin on his neck flushed and patchy. He smiled and rested his head on her chest. She pulled him close, her hands rushing over the tight muscles of his back, holding him against her. Some day soon he’d graduate, go to Oaxaca, maybe, go out into the world and stumble through it. He would figure out that this wasn’t what he wanted, and that would be okay. She’d let him go, possibly even keep in touch, if he’d allow it. But for now, she’d hold onto him as long as the world allowed it, as long as secrets could be kept, and as long as the life of a mother mattered to a boy.

She touched the back of his head, kissed him on the lips and his closed eyes.

“We must get you home,” she said.

* * *

She watched his back from the window as he walked down the front steps of the house. She thought for a moment about saying something to him as he walked away, but what that would be she didn’t know. She didn’t, though, and let him go in silence, watching him until he turned the corner of the street to find his car.

She made herself another drink and then went into the garage and found empty boxes and a roll of foam packing paper. It was her intention to take down the pictures, as Patrick had done, to wrap them carefully in the foam, and secure the ends with tape. She would then stack them one on top of another in the boxes. With each layer, she would lay towels atop the frames, before laying down the next row. When she was done, she would fold together the opening of the boxes and tape each one shut. Then she would place each box in the attic, hide them behind the old shirts and rusting weight set, to gather dust. She could remember the smell of his hair, the sourness of his dirty clothes on her hands after washing, the feel of his skin, the tiny sound of his voice as a boy, and the strange, low presence of it as he became a man—but he was a stranger, some being that traveled through her and on to know things she should have known before him. His face smiling on a bridge, his face straining to pull a fish to shore, his hands opening a gift he hated, his lips drinking a Coke on the beach, his bare chest emerging from surf, and each one she would wrap like something old but not quite forgotten.

But there was one that kept her from packing them away. It was a black and white of David as a baby. She remembered taking the picture. He was strapped inside the baby-seat, his pudgy fingers grasping at the padded bar that held him in place. It was Easter and Patrick was saying goodbye to his parents, standing just outside the open door to the car and saying things about love and visiting soon. It had been unusually cold that April and the wind swept into the car and it mixed with the heat coming through air vents. David hated the seat and he twisted his tiny body and grasped at the bar that would not let him go. He began to cry, an angry, frustrated yell, as Patrick pulled the car out of the driveway. When they reached the freeway, David was in full wail, his mouth opened so wide you could see his tonsils, drool running down his chin. Patrick said she should hold him in her lap, but she had said it was too dangerous.

She found the Polaroid camera in her bag; David had been fascinated by it and everytime she pulled it out he stared at the boxy thing in her hand and reached for the floppy picture that came out of its mouth. But this time he was too upset and his face was red and his voice filled the car and he threw his fists into the air. She held the camera up to her face and reached out to him to get his attention. When she did, he saw the camera and stopped crying. Just then she snapped the picture and when the flash lit up the small center of the car, he laughed, a small giggle like something gurgling up inside of him. It was this picture she looked at now, those eyes like freshly blown glass, his face full of curiosity and wet with a forgotten anger.

When the picture came out of the camera, he reached his wet hands out to grab it and she let him because it kept him quiet. She watched him for a moment as he held the picture in front of his face and then dangled it from two fat fingers over the bar of the car seat. She turned around to look out the window of the car driving 70 miles per hour towards home, past fields of orange groves still filled with grey puddles, past newly built houses sitting beneath freeway overpasses. The car was warm and next to her was Patrick, his hands on the wheel, guiding them through lane changes and the twisted mess of highway interchanges, and for that hour everything she loved was within touching distance, just a few inches of empty space away.

While Sarah Witherspoon was still alive she was a mockingbird with a tin ear. Her attempts to recreate beauty never did justice to what she mimicked. When not insulting her outright, people called her Spoony. She was a plain brunette with thin hair and a thick brow that kept her from being pretty. The most remarkable aspect of her was how hard she tried and failed to be remarkable.

Spoony wore different colored sneakers to church. Her clothing made her look like a bag lady who had been miraculously made back into a girl. Her clashes of fabric were disturbing rather than an expression of taste. Striped skirts and argyle shirts with a plaid flannel. I avoided her until I fell for her sister Julia.

The Witherspoons lived around the bend of a lakeside road near downtown Roosevelt City. Both of our homes were considered historical sites. Our home’s myth of origin involved a doctor whose daughter was murdered in her sleep. That ghost never left her bedroom. Whenever a window would shut by itself in there my mother would say, “See? See?” Then we would laugh and I would wonder how seriously she took it.

Our house seemed to be a strange mélange of nineteenth century styles. It had a tower and stained glass but also a wide-open interior. I was told it was the fourth oldest remaining private residence in the county. It dates from the decade before the Civil War. The murder supposedly happened as a result of an unfaithful fiancée. A doctor’s daughter had wandered in wartime and she been killed for doing so.

Spoony supposedly lived where there was an early death as well. Her home was from the early twentieth century, but held more repute because it was done by a rouge pupil of Frank Lloyd Wright. Julia, Spoony’s younger sister, called it Frank Lloyd Light. The home attracted more attention than ours even though it was forty or so years younger. As a result, their supposed ghost was more renowned. Ethel died by her own hand as a teenager when her shell-shocked fiancé abandoned her shortly after World War I. Our families were both crusted with bloodstains that could never be washed from the spirit.

The homes were situated at the very northern extent of Roosevelt, where it ends with sand cliffs overlooking Agawatta Lake. As such, we both had docks at the bottom of long sets of wooden stairs. These docks had to be high for the chop that hit the lake. Across it was only a ribbon of green, North Roosevelt, richer than us. We looked rich, though.

One afternoon Julia got to me. It was a spring day in the nineteen-nineties. Julia had left her bedroom to read under real light, and had done so in a bikini. Her hair was the blond of Roosevelt sand, pale yellow, almost white. When I came down to see what wondrous thing had appeared on the dock down the way, she waved and then went back inside. Her smile was a life preserver that took me out to sea.

The next day it was hot enough to be August. I came down at the same time as the day before and was happy to find Julia there again. I shot looks at her skin without seeming to look at all. Spoony, overdressed and sweating out a glow, kept Julia there. Like shiny paper, the light crinkled on the choppy surface of the lake. Though only late May, there were already the white triangles of sloops ghosting over the water. The sun got so bright that it seemed to shine through skin, as if we were thin and held up to a powerful bulb.

I was beside my mother. She looked as young as me at times. I already had a beard at the end of my third year in high school. Though cracked by thin wrinkles, from a distance mom could pass for a girl. Her thin fingers played with the celery in her Bloody Mary, breaking it into chunks.

She and I talked about the children’s book she was always about to start, one based on personal myths I was told growing up. As an only child, I had shared these imaginary friends my mother had made. Sometimes, in the minutes before sleep, I would actually hear Pappy the Mongoose complain about the Cobra Sisters. The family stories made more sense to me than what little I had been taught of the Bible.

Julia and Spoony were the only other children who knew mom’s stories. Mom babysat for us all. Since babysitting, I had seen little of Julia. She was the sort of teenage girl who treated her bedroom like a cocoon. Then she emerged and flew, and I was searching for a net.

Spoony treated her sister as if she wanted to kill her in a jar and pin her to the family wall. Julia was elegant in every way that Spoony was plain – from features to wardrobe, it felt like Julia got right what Spoony meant to. If there was a song Spoony wanted to sing it was Julia’s. I suppose it was inevitable that sibling jealousy would arise. Still I thought she wouldn’t mind my pursuit of Julia; stupidly, but I thought it still.

Julia seemed to be pursuing me in kind. In June she swam over and dried off next to me. I loved it when she would emerge from the water and drip out a shine in the weak Michigan sunlight. Then it was my task to spread thick sunblock on her smooth back. We didn’t touch much other than that. Still, the give and take of her skin moved all of me.

Spoony followed her, swimming more skillfully but still seeming less graceful. When she climbed out of the lake, Spoony bragged that she had been up four days straight. Seeing a translucent girl every night did that to her. Spoony claimed impossible powers. She had a special connection to the spiritual world. Julia shook her head, and then lay a hand on her sister’s bouncing leg, stilling it.

Spoony was always touching me, and I was always jerking away. Finally I told her that my dad hit me a lot as a child, and that I didn’t like to be touched because of that. Later, though, when Spoony was looking at an empty spot somewhere above the boat-clogged lake, Julia put her hand on mine and I liked that touch.

Julia and I ran into each other twice at the same coffee shop, and the second time she asked me out. She was wearing a sundress and the wind off Lake Michigan was brutal, so that it clung to her on one side. It was checkered with small red squares that fell away before her pale skin at just the right curve of her chest. She caught me looking at her breasts and smiled quickly before darting away.

The meetings in the cafe parking lot allowed a private invitation to go to a movie. The sisters were privileged in that they had their own phone line. It was for both of them, though. I couldn’t call Julia without risking chatter with Spoony. That didn’t matter now that a date was set.

Julia had a car and I didn’t, so she showed up at my place. She had on pearl earrings. I complimented them. Julia said they were her great-grandmother’s and for special occasions. Her face paused in repose, every thin bone seeming to form a sentence she was about to punctuate. Then Julia pulled out a flask, right there, driving, she had a flask, and she took a pull in such a way that it meant freedom to me, as if I had achieved what growing up was supposed to be but never quite became. I held her hand in the film and got hard and smiled like a maniac for days after.

Before we got back to her house, she invited me in. Spoony was standing in the driveway when we got there, smoking a cigarette. Some light was still in the sky but so little that it blackened her so that I could see no color in her at all. There was a breeze coming off Agawatta Lake even at night, and it shuffled her long skirt and kept the cigarette smoke from lingering around her. Spoony’s puffs were awkward and thick with coughs. It was clear that she had been waiting for us. She was the only reason I didn’t kiss Julia goodnight.

Two days later, Spoony waded down the autumn shore just to show me something. Beneath her arms were slashes and cigarette burns. Spoony brandished them proudly, as if they were intricate tattoos. We said not a word about Julia, but there was no escaping one sister for the love of the other.

I stayed apart from Julia even as my ardor intensified. A few weeks passed where I didn’t call either sister. Spoony kept coming over with new wounds. Now the ghost girl was telling her to do terrible things. That’s all I was told, that the things were terrible. Spoony had always tried so hard to draw attention to herself that I tried to pay little attention. On callous days I scoffed to myself and wondered when she would end up in a mental hospital.

A few weeks after my date school started again. Two strange boys started showing up around the Witherspoon home, both of whom would set next to Julia on the dock. Senior year was getting underway by then, and I told myself to forget about my neighbors. Spoony didn’t leave me alone, but it seemed that Julia had forgotten me.

Then came the September day Julia called me. She had never called me before, and I expected to hear bad news about Spoony. There seemed to be no other reason left for us to speak. I was told we had to talk in person. We sneaked out very late and met by the water. Julia said nothing about Spoony. She just picked cattails until I took her hand and we kissed. Together we collapsed beautifully into the thin beach, the long grasses of the marshy shore brushing against my calves. I had long hair at the time, straight and blond, just like Julia’s, and we mixed our hair together as our mouths searched each others.

In October, Julia found Spoony under bloody sheets, cut all to hell. There was no one big slash, just dozens of slits in various degrees of healing, she said. I didn’t mention that I had known as much, nor did I tell Julia what Spoony had done the night before.

The cuts came the day after I got into bed and found Spoony there, fully clothed and sweating. She smelled like roses in a locker room. I told her to leave. She did. No threats. No tears. Only a strange, mechanical walk out of the house. I wonder what my parents thought, seeing Spoony leave my bedroom that late.

A few days before Halloween Spoony smothered Julia with a pillow. Then she hung herself in the dining room. The funeral for both was on All Saint’s Day. I remember wondering how there could be any saints after a world that could be so awful to two girls. I barely faulted Spoony for the murder at first. I felt I should have known and stopped it. If anyone had known enough to do so, it had been me.

School was a terror afterward. The two boys who had been doting on Julia told everyone that I had slept with both. Someone threw a hard-boiled egg at me during lunch. A guidance counselor curled her lips as if I stunk. I transferred from Roosevelt City to Roosevelt Shores and left high school alone.

Harmonies began to find me in the night. I saw nothing while awake. Awake I only hear voices. A quartet of girls sing Motown wordlessly. These voices only came at home, sometimes in the tower, sometimes in the attic. Sometimes in my dreams I still see Spoony teaching new songs to the older ghosts, though they are all the same age. In those dreams the voices take on new words, “Baby, baby, where did our love go?”

PART 3 OF 4

Read Part 1 Here
Read Part 2 Here

She made the mistake of turning on the television–something to relieve the silence of the house–and there he was on the evening news, a headline, one of three bodies. On a radio talk show a psychologist discussed the state of our children and included David in an epidemic of childhood immorality that included the burning of a church, the beating of a woman in Golden Gate Park, and the use of drugs. Our youth were reckless, soulless, and adrift, he said. Every day another paper arrived on the front porch like a taunting and even after Patrick had canceled the subscription they kept coming. And here, at the grocery store, was David again, staring back at her from the front page of the Enquirer.

She was at Safeway, standing in a long line of shoppers who waited in the narrow row that led to the cash register. What finally got Sarah out of the house was an empty fifth of vodka and the last four aspirin of a large bottle that was full just a week before. She stood there in line behind women with baskets full of fish sticks and Otter Pops, boxes of Coke cans and lunch-size bags of chips spilling out across the black conveyor. With a bottle of Stolichnaya clutched in her hand, she felt the walls of her chest collapsing in on her lungs. She tried to turn away from his picture, but wherever she looked he was staring back at her, either for real, in the bleeding color of those photographs, or in her mind when she closed her eyes to calm herself. She couldn’t go home without this bottle and she couldn’t stand there with her dead son watching her. So she stood there in paralysis, with nowhere to go except inward and face the horrible fact that she had to go on living. She had to stand there and wait her turn, she had to smile to the smiling cashier—who was just a child, just a high school kid with a night job—and she had to pull the money from her pocket and wait for the change and she had to go home, and, inevitably, she had to go back to school and face her students, kids who didn’t know yet what their lives were worth.

She knew the picture; it was his ninth grade yearbook photo, the last year he smiled for such shots. She faced him and remembered the day the picture was taken, the way she had forced him to comb his hair, even though he wanted to spray it up into little spikes as if his head was a dangerous weapon. She had bought him the blue shirt just days before because it brought out the color of his eyes and she liked to see that blue looking out at her. She drove him to school for the picture that day and he made her park on the other side of the parking lot. Even though she understood why, when he got out and walked across that expanse of pavement, between the parked cars and the planted trees, she felt alone and separate in a way she knew she would for good.

They must have gotten the picture from someone at school. Roberta had called her and told her someone had asked for information about Sarah. She had told him to go to hell, but they were hovering around the school, talking to students. She guessed they must have been to Washington too. One night a man from The Sun had called the house, got Patrick, thank God, and offered him $10,000 to sell their story. Patrick pulled the phone out of the wall, but then calmed, grabbed his tools from the garage, rewired the phone, refastened it, and called their lawyer.

Above David’s picture was a headline: “Boy Professes Love for Councilman’s Wife.” Then in smaller letters, “The shocking story of love and murder.” She wanted to read what was inside, even though she knew, or thought she knew, it would be lies, but the prospect of there being any truth in the story at all was like an open conviction in a public trial and she needed to know, she needed answers, any answers.

But she couldn’t do it, she couldn’t lift her hand and she turned away to see a woman in the next aisle open the paper. As she read, a little girl, maybe seven, ran up to her with a bag of candy in her hand.

“Can I get this?” The girl leaned against her mom’s hip, but kept her eyes on the candy. “Can I?”

The woman glanced at the girl’s hand and said, “Sure, honey” and the little girl smiled and began to rip the plastic off the bag. Her mother didn’t seem to notice and she continued reading. The girl had now opened the package and pulled out a small red candy and placed it in her mouth. While she ate that one, she reached in the bag, pulled out another, and put that piece of candy between her lips. She reached for a third. She’s going to choke, Sarah thought, but the mother was still reading the paper, her brows pushed together, her eyes glancing back and forth, and when she was done, she closed it and shook her head, the kind of head shake that indicates disgust, the kind that implicates and believes that the horrible things that happen in the world happen in some separate reality, some place far away from yourself.

“Beautiful daughter,” Sarah said.

The woman looked up, her face broken into a smile and said, “Thank you” before she recognized Sarah’s face.

“Don’t think you can keep her safe,” Sarah said. She twinged at her own words, but didn’t try to soften the effect.

The woman’s smile left and she looked at Sarah for a moment like she was some suburban prophet spreading a dark truth. She turned away, found her daughter’s arm and pulled her close.

When the line moved up, Sarah lifted every Enquirer off the rack and held them close to her chest. When she laid them out on the conveyor and the poor girl rang each one up, the woman standing behind her stared off in the distance out at something that was not Sarah.

* * *

His journals were silent for a few weeks, but she didn’t bother him about it because he hadn’t betrayed anything to the students. They kept writing in their journals, folding over their most personal entries. Sarah even stopped marking zeroes in the grade book next to Dominic’s name where the grade for the journals should have been.

There was something new between them, she could feel it. In class he still said nothing, didn’t do any of the in-class writing, but he was quietly less defiant. She thought she noticed him looking at her, just brief glances, when he came into class. Occasionally when she lectured, his face would be lifted from his binder, his hand would stop drawing, and he would listen. One morning she called in sick to work. She had had a dream about David and when she woke the prospect of a day surrounded by kids felt like a rock pressing against her chest. In her desk drawer the next morning was a note from him. Man, Ms. Evans, that substitute was hella boring! She should have been angry, but she couldn’t find it in herself.

Then something happened and he started filling pages upon pages of his journal with writing, none of them folded over. When she first saw the pages, something caught in her chest, and rather than read them after school at her office desk, she took his home, made a drink, and settled into the couch.

He wrote about what it was like to be stoned, the way he had thought about killing his step-father once, the way school was for geeks and people who kissed teachers asses, how he hoped to be a BMW mechanic one day because you could make “hella money” and he wrote about his father.

My mom says my father ain’t worth thinking ‘bout, but I can’t help it and I think ‘bout him all the time. He lives in L.A. and he used to be in some gang, some small East L.A. gang, but he did time and now I don’t know what he does. Got a letter from him like three years ago. My mom didn’t know ‘bout it and I just left one night and took a Greyhound to L.A. I didn’t even know where I’d find him, but I sent a letter to him, back to the address on the letter he sent, told him I was coming, and I kept imaginin’ him standing there at the bus station, waiting for me to get off, but when I got there he was no place to be seen. Just some guy sleeping on the benches, and I remember he was all wet in the middle like he’d pissed his pants or something and the whole station smelled like piss and I got sick in the bathroom and I got back on the next bus home. When I got home my mom looked like she hadn’t slept in like forever and she slapped me when I got back, but then I knew she loved me. But it isn’t enough, you know. It’s like there’s this one person out there that doesn’t give a shit, and I can’t stop thinking ‘bout him and don’t know if I will ever. How do you forget about someone? How did you get over what happened to your son?

“You have no right to ask me such a question,” she wrote back. But then she set aside his journal, made a drink, and let her mind settle. “If you want me to speak to you about David,” she wrote, “I want you to tell me about Maria.”

* * *

Sarah had pulled pictures out of albums and taped them to the refrigerator, she hung pictures from the mirror in their bathroom, spread them across the kitchen table. She spent hours staring at their glossy images, as if they might speak to her some explanation. For months she stood in front of the refrigerator with a drink in hand and gazed into her son’s face or sat in the middle of the living room with baby pictures spread across the floor or placed certain pictures from family vacations in progressive order as if they might become animated. There was a picture with his hand wrapped in a gauzy bandage, and what it told her was that it was her fault he had touched the stove-top burner. There was another of his leg in a cast–she never should have let him have a skateboard. There were a million mistakes she had made, but the worst was that when she looked at these pictures, even now, nearly a year after his death, she only saw shades of the boy in him, even when he had become a man, and that mistake, that underestimation of him as a separate person was the final thing that caused her to lose him.

And there were the clippings from newspaper articles, Op Ed pieces, the pictures of his body being wheeled out into the light, the picture of her in Detective O’Reilly’s car, her face like something transluscent and nocturnal. There were the quoted phrases from his journals, a supposed text message sent from his cell phone: “U-R-Myn”, it said, and she didn’t know if he had sent it or the woman. There were pictures of her, the woman, young, beautiful, much younger than Howard. There were the words and phrases she underlined: ‘Illicit”, “affair”, “guilty”, “absent parents”, “found naked”, “unstable”, “troubled”,“love”, “lover”, “loving”, “loveless”, “too young.”

Patrick came and went to work, he took trips to the home office in Phoenix and had called one night to tell her he needed to stay a couple days longer; they were working over the weekend, he had said. She knew what that meant. When he came home, he would take the pictures off the bathroom mirror and hide them in drawers and she would have to find them and replace them when he was gone. It was like a game they played, an argument with mementos as pawns. One night when she had been asleep, he pulled down all the clippings in the house, even lifted the ones off the floor and placed them in a shoebox that took her all of the next day to find. When he got home that night she waited for him and screamed and he screamed back and then they sat there in that thickening silence once again.

His mind must have still been unsettled about it, because Patrick came home with a couple bottles of wine and a bag full of groceries. It was a week and a day from the anniversary of David’s death. The night was warm, the first in months, and he opened up the house to let it in, put on some Coltrane, uncorked the first bottle of wine and went to work in the kitchen. She wasn’t hungry, but she went into their bedroom anyway and found a dress she knew he liked. She washed her face and pulled back the hair she had let fall into her eyes. There was more grey, the wrinkles around her eyes were deeper, but she was able, through much makeup, to create a semblance of her other self. When she was done, she found Patrick at the table, bathed in candlelight, and she almost remembered that she loved him and she wanted to, wanted that feeling in a way she hadn’t in a long time. He stood and took her hand–an amazing thing a hand–and walked her to the table. It was as if they were on their first date and it seemed ridiculous to her, but she allowed him to pull out her chair. He poured the wine and held it up for a toast, although to what they were toasting she didn’t know because he didn’t say anything. They didn’t even touch glasses, just lifted them towards each other. There was something sinful about this, as if Patrick were trying to tease pleasure out of the world again, and she felt slightly sick to her stomach as she cut into the fish. She drank the wine, but it was dry and acidic.

Patrick moved the food around on his plate but ate little. He set down his fork and knife and looked at her. “I need you back,” he said.

She set the wine glass down and held it there for a moment to make sure it wouldn’t tip over. She didn’t know what that meant, to ‘have her back’, but she found out when he stood, walked around the table, laid his hand on the back of her neck and kissed her. She tried to kiss him back and before she knew it she was standing up from the table, the uneaten meal left there alone, and being led back to the bedroom.

He laid her on the bed and she immediately wanted to sleep, wanted to curl herself up into a ball and become small and distant and lost, but he was kissing her shoulder, the weight of him pushing down. He turned her over and unhooked the dress, and she let herself be undressed. She watched him as if from a great distance as he pulled the tie from his neck, unbuttoned his shirt, and lifted his legs out of his pants.

He lay on top of her and she could feel his stomach against hers. She kept her arms at her side, but he lifted them and wrapped them around the thickness of his shoulders, placed her fingers on his back, and she felt the softness of his skin give under the pressure of her fingertips. She felt him pushing his way inside, but she wasn’t ready and it hurt but she let him anyway. He leaned in closer to her face, filling up her vision with his cheeks and nose and flashes of his lips and then David was there, there in that face that moved in and out of her vision, there in the contours of bone and flesh and she tried to drive him away, tried to force him out of her mind, but even as she closed her eyes he was there. She pushed Patrick away, shoved her knees into his hips, and kicked her legs until he was off her. She pulled her legs to her chest, facing him, and thought of all the things she should say but said none of them.

“I can’t do this,” Patrick said. He sat on the edge of the bed, his white back facing her. “They offered me the position in Phoenix.”

She let that settle into the carpet a moment, the fact of it ringing in her ears.

“Do you love her?”

He lifted his head a little; she could see the movement of shallow breath in his ribs.

“I can’t be here like this,” he said, and he stood up naked in their bedroom, his body thin and sad. She remembered the muscles of who he was, the tight stretch of ligaments, the thickness of his chest, but age had finally caught him by the neck. He was only a man afterall, she thought, and she wasn’t mad. “Maybe some day in the future, but not now, not like this,” he said. In the dark he pulled on his pants, slipped on a shirt and started to walk out.

“Don’t,” she said.

He stopped near the open door.

“Come here,” she said. “Come here and you can pack tomorrow.”

He walked back towards the bed, laid his body next to hers, the warmth of it seeping through his clothes and into her skin, and he stayed like that until the coldest part of the night passed into morning.

* * *

Her father’s got the old school Oaxaca thing going on. He hates me and everytime I drive by the house he comes out waving his fist or screaming to me in Spanish. But he’s gotta go to work, you know, so when he’s gone Maria’ll meet me outside and we’ll drive somewhere. Sometimes my house or down to the water, but not too often there because that place eats at me, or up into the hills, just somewhere we can be alone. She tells me her father threatens to send her back to Mexico, and sometimes she cries over it, but what can we do? She was a virgin when she met me and if her father knew she wasn’t now, he’d probably kill me or something. I think his family still pulls the old white sheet on the wedding night, shit. Can you believe that? It’s kind of weird talking about this with you, but you know she didn’t really want to at first and I didn’t force her to, but we talked about it, and I said it would be safe and we used stuff, you know. I think it hurt her when we did it the first time. Her face was funny looking, and she cried a little, and I thought about stopping, but I couldn’t. I kind of feel bad about that, you know, because I think it would’ve been nice for her if I did, especially when I knew it hurt her, but once you’re going it’s like your body takes over and you’re on overdrive or something and you just can’t stop. But it wasn’t just sex. Really it wasn’t–it’s more than that, but I can’t explain it. It doesn’t matter what my mother says about it, or what her Dad says. He tells her I just want to use her, just want to ruin her, you know, because that’s the only way he can think about it—me ruining her. But he’s wrong, because it’s not just about getting inside of her, about ‘getting off’ like they say, it’s about how she makes me feel afterwards, you know? She’s so damn beautiful, like an angel, really, ‘my mexican angel’, and every time I can’t believe she’d do that with me, I can’t believe she’d let me, and, you know, in a way I kind of do feel like I’m ruining her. Is that weird? Will I marry her? Shit, Ms. Evans, I don’t now, but I’ll tell you one thing, I love her.

* * *

They had made a deal, an exchange of confidences, but she was onto her third drink and still the blank page of his journal stared back at her. She had only written “Dominic–” at the top, and the rest of the page was such an expanse of emptiness, that she had no clue how to fill it up. How did she get over losing David?

She hadn’t, but in some way she must have because she was sitting here, writing to this boy, going to school everyday, and even hoping that Patrick might come back sometime, that he might return and they could start over again. Sometime she had made a decision to get off her bed, to not let herself rot away, but she hadn’t made that decision through any degree of letting David go. Or had she? She remembered him in a fixed state, the only state she could: an eighteen year old man who shaved but still had the skin of a child. But more than two years had passed now. She was getting older and greyer, and the dye she rinsed through her hair no longer hid the fact. She sank into certain unassailable beliefs that only the old and worn-out keep. The only sure thing in life is that you search for love and lose it. We all are–no matter how strong, tough, young or brutal–horribly vulnerable. Love. Love is a killer. Love is overprotective and not protective enough. Love is the keeping of memories. No matter what, life is lived when it no longer seems livable, and there’s a permanence to that, a painful, dig down in the earth and hold on kind of permanence. And this last fact, no matter what she did to reconcile herself to it, always made her feel she was betraying David. A mother shouldn’t move on, she thought.

She wrote: You’ll never forget your father. He’ll always be there as a memory, good or bad, hovering over everything you do and everything you are or become. You can’t wait for him, because he’s not coming back. You might as well accept that now, and learn to live with it, learn to be stronger and better than it. My son was beautiful and I’ll never forget him and I don’t want to, but he’s gone and I cannot let the memory of him live my life. The worst thing about it is that I feel like I did it somehow, like I was the one who killed him. Does that make sense? –Ms. Evans (Sarah)

She thought about crossing out her first name, but decided to leave it.

She set down the journal, walked to the kitchen and made herself another drink. It was late, 2:00 AM according to the clock in the kitchen, and she had to be at school for her first class at 8:00. She had learned to get through class hung-over, drunk even, and when she took another sip of her fourth drink, the icy-burn in her chest was like the numbing of the whole world. She was working up a question, something she needed to know from Dominic, because she suspected this love he spoke of wasn’t love at all, but that he, also, wouldn’t recognize it as anything but this four-letter word that was batted around in songs and movies and by fourteen year old girls with stars in their eyes. She walked down the hallway that led to David’s bedroom, stood in the doorway, and tried to imagine his presence there, tried to hear his voice, or the sound of his breathing from beneath the sheets. She remembered him in the middle of the night, when she awakened to his head beating against his pillow, the sound like a fist punching a mattress. He was asleep, his eyes shut tight like they were threaded together, but he kept drawing back his head and slamming it against the pillow. She laid her hand on the back of his head, the hair so soft between her fingers, and pushed down gently to keep it resting on the pillow. When the muscles in his neck calmed, she sat there next to the bed, her fingers working in his hair, trying to calm whatever was wild inside. But he was calm in his waking, or seemed so, and that’s what disturbed her most: the possibility that David, underneath the surface of his placid temperament, had actually been smashing up against himself. What he was as an adult, however briefly he may have been one, was fading from her memory—if she even really knew the adult David at all.

When she sat back down on the couch, she lay Dominic’s journal on her lap. She wrote: You say Maria’s father would kill you if he found out you’d slept with her–and you know he’s going to find out, right?– that he might send her away to Mexico, that everything could change for the worse for both of you, so why do you take that risk? Do you understand what you’re risking?

* * *

But he never wrote to her again. The next time she saw him was after school. Dominic hadn’t been in class and she had swallowed down panic all day, reminding herself that Dominic wasn’t David, that he was a man who had to find his way in the world. She was planning a lesson for Hamlet when he burst through her door. Before she even had a chance to look up and see who it was, he had thrown over a chair and was heading to toss another into the air when she reached him and touched his forearms.

“Dominic, calm down.” She turned him around to face her, and even though he struggled a bit he wanted to be turned around. She held onto his wrists with her encircled fingers and then slid them around his palms to cradle his hands. “What’s wrong,” she said. “Talk to me.”

His eyes were dilated with anger, big black openings into something ugly at his center, and she had the feeling that if she were someone else, he would kill her—and he could.

“Maria’s gone,” he said.

She pictured bullet holes, blood on a tile-floor, the white of skin turning blue, and for a moment she wanted him to shut up. “What do you mean, gone?”

“Her father sent her back to Oaxaca, to live with her uncle.”

“Sit down,” she said.

“Don’t wanna fucking sit down,” and he pulled his hands away from her.

She looked through the blinds of the classroom windows, out across a grassy quad towards a square of light that still shone from the prinicpal’s office.

“Okay, just don’t throw any more desks.” He said nothing. “Okay?” she said. “The furniture’s bad enough around here already.”

“Allright, Sarah.”

“You can’t call me Sarah here.” She closed the door to the classroom and then the blinds to the windows. She walked over to her desk, took a seat on top of it, and looked up towards him. “Take a breath and tell me what’s going on.”

“That bastard was waiting for me. Supposed to be at work, but he was waiting for me there on the porch. That’s how badly he wanted to fuck me over. He stayed home from work to tell me and they need the money, you know.” He walked across the room and leaned himself into the corner near the windows. He didn’t look at her, but spoke while staring at the empty desks, their faces scratched with crude messages. “When I saw him I knew things were bad, you know, so I got out and walked up the steps to where he was sitting. I tried to look in the house to see if Maria was looking out the windows, but then he said, ‘she’s not here, pendejo.’ He really did called me a pendejo and I wanted to hit him right then and there, but he’s her father, you know, and you don’t go hitting fathers. Then he said, and he smiled his rotting teeth when he said it, ‘Her plane left, oh,’ and he actually looked at his wrist watch, even though he knew the time, ‘about an hour and ten minutes ago.’ Then…” Dominic was silent, but lifted his head as if searching for something in his memory.

“You didn’t hurt him?”

“No, but I would have, easily. I said some things, some bad things, and I walked up the steps towards him and I would have beat the shit out of him, but he was ready.” He wiped at his eyes. “He had a baseball bat where I couldn’t see it and when I got up to the top step, he stood up and held that thing like he was Barry Bonds or somethin’. I could tell he wanted me to try and hit him, he was hoping for it. It was this big aluminum bat with a dent in the side.” He kicked the wooden cabinets with the heel of his shoe and looked at her. “I don’t know what I’m gonna do.”

“You’re going to calm down first,” she said. “Then you’re coming with me.”

* * *

They left the classroom together, but split up once they were in the hallway. She told him to meet her around the corner from the parking lot, off campus property. If you were a female teacher you could be seen leaving campus with a girl, but not with a boy. She gathered up her bags, locked up her room, and had to walk by Roberta’s classroom to get to the parking lot. Roberta’s door was open when she passed and she sat at her desk, her nose buried in a stack of papers. Sarah slipped by without being noticed.

Dominic was waiting in the streetlight shadow of an oak tree, backed up against the trunk and smoking. It was the red point of the cigarette that gave him away and when she opened the car door she said, “Put that out before you get in here.”

He threw it on the ground and stomped it out with the ball of his shoe, a little too angrily, she thought, and got in the car.

She had no intentions at first, no direction, but she pointed her car south along Estudillo road, towards her house. It was silent for a while and out of the corner of her eye, she watched the passing streetlight turn from brightness to shadow and back again across Dominic’s lap. His face was turned away, looking out the window onto the blue streets and the dozens of intersections that led away into the night.

“I need a drink,” she said.

“No kidding.”

“When you’re twenty-one, kiddo,” she said.

He laughed. “Shit,” he said. “Fight for your country, but can’t have a beer.”

“Oh, where’ve you heard that one?” She turned to look at him. “You’re not dressed to go out.”

“Don’t start dissin’ the threads.”

“You’re coming over to my house,” she said. She thought he might refuse, say he had other things to do, people to meet, any old line to get away.

“No argument here,” he said.

She made him a drink. The house was dark and she watched him stand in the kitchen a moment, his hands in his pockets, looking around at the tiles, the kitchen sink all sparkly and silver underneath the light, the table strewn with pictures.

“Nice place,” he said. “A real nice crib.”

“Why don’t you try some English for a change.” She threw some ice in the glass, poured the drink, and handed it to him. He sniffed it. “Not poisoned,” she said.

“You never know these days,” he said. “Gin’s usually my juice.”

“Well, it’s vodka or sparkling water, kid.”

He smiled and took a sip. “Any juice is better than none,” he said. “You always bring students over for a drink?”

“This seemed to be a special occasion.” She finished pouring her own. “You’re not scared of an old lady English teacher are you?”

“Only if you’re giving me a grade.”

“Touché.”

He walked into the living room and turned on a light. She watched him. He was like a cat checking his surroundings, looking behind chairs, glancing at the books stacked beneath the coffee table, walking along the walls and surveying the pictures. He stopped at a picture of David, leaned in, and stared for a moment. She couldn’t see it, but she knew which one it was. David standing next to his new car, the door open, him leaning on it like a lover and smiling.

“How old was he?” He didn’t look at her, but kept on staring.

She let silence creep in for a moment, imagined hearing David’s voice down the hall, and finished her drink.

“Sorry, you don’t have to answer that,” he said.

“There, sixteen,” she said. “Eighteen when…”

He glanced at her and she could tell he was adding things up, equating his life to the dead. He stood up and walked over to the kitchen table, near to where she stood, and looked at the pictures, the headlines, everywhere David’s eyes looking back.

“How long now?” He looked at her.

“Two years,” she said. “Well, going on three.”

She walked away and started making herself another drink. Out of the corner of her eye she could see him watching her.

“It’s a little weird, you know,” he said. “All of this.”

“Look,” she said. “You understand nothing about this, okay?” She stopped. “Don’t tell me how to miss him, and I won’t tell you how to miss her.”

“Right,” he said, and held up his hand in surrender. He sat down at the kitchen table, but she refused to join him and made him come into the living room and sit on the couch. He sat on the far end of it and she on the other.

“I’m going down there,” he said.

“Oaxaca?”

“Yeah. I got to.”

“No you’re not,” she said.

“I got to, you know.” He looked at her and his eyes starting filling and she was surprised once again at how full up this kid could be.

“Look,” she said. “Even if you find her, what’re you going to do? Stay down there and raise chickens with her in the jungle?” She leaned forward and put her hand on his knee. “If you bring her back here, her father’s waiting. She’s fourteen, Dominic, are you going to make her choose between you and her father?”

“She loves me,” he said.

“Maybe she does.” She waited a second and thought about not saying it. “But she’ll fall in love again, with someone else.” He stood up and looked down at her as if he might slap her. “And so will you.”

In his face she could see things collapsing inside of him, little doors closing and others he didn’t yet understand opening. He walked across the room and stood shaking his legs, his arms folded across his chest.

She stood and walked towards him, slowly like she would approach a wounded animal. She could see his eyes shining in the lamplight, and she knew he was trying to hold it back. From the other side of the room he was a huge man, football player size, but as she walked towards him he became smaller, his shoulders collapsing, his chest shrinking inward, and when she reached him his hands became small grasping things that held onto her, that pulled at the folds of her blouse. She wrapped herself around him and felt him growing smaller by heaves and sobs. And as she held him, there was something else, a hardness pressing against her stomach. She tried to ignore it, but it was there. She didn’t push him away, and while he cried she marveled at the confusion of his body, his ability to feel every possible thing at once.

Continue to Part 4

PART 2 OF 4

Read Part 1 Here

She and Dominic had only been meeting for three weeks, but it had really started months before that with a journal entry she wasn’t supposed to read.

What the fuck happens to people? I mean, they get old and turn into fascist dictator nazis who’ve forgot what it’s like to breathe, to feel, to even believe that we can think for ourselves. That bastard thinks he’s got the low-down on me ‘cause he married my mom, and he hangs around the place like some homeland security spy. They don’t understand what it’s like. Like he tries to be my homey or something and he thinks he can talk to me about girls and shit and what does he know, I mean, what the hell do they know about it anyway? Taking my keys, fuck them!! Just because my girly and I like to get it on? Just because he came home early from work. Should’ve gone to the hill. But damn, you know, it’s like living in a cell, stuck behind bars of ‘love you’s’ and ‘want the bests’ and ‘go to college’ and ‘be somebodies’ and my mom crying and he, that fucker, talking ‘bout rubbers right in front of her—my fucking mom, right there and her eyes all full of water and tears falling down her cheeks. Like that’s shit she just don’t need to know about. And whatta they know about love? Just sit in front of the TV, their eyes going all watery and empty, never touch each other, him telling her to go to hell. What’s thatta bout? Man, and they telling me that what Maria and me got goin’ on ain’t love. They know what her skin feels like? The way she looks at me with her blue eyes, like I could fall into them and swim? There’s always a girl around, you know. They’re easy because they like the car or they like the jersey and the gold chain and you act all jack and you tell ‘em their pretty and that their eyes are filled with stars or some other shit and they fall all over you, but whatever, you know, it’s like leave me alone. With Maria it’s all different. She’s so fly, the way her hair curls around her shoulders, her blue eyes. I mean, man, a Mexican girl with blue eyes. And everyone wants her, you know? Cholos always hanging ‘round, but she rides with me. She tells me I’m fine and she holds onto me and when we’re together, you know, and she kisses me on the neck or on the lips everything’s sweet, everything’s good. And when she’s with me, just me, you know, and I hear her breathing and she says she thinks she’s in love and those bars go away, and I feel calm, crazy calm like this’s all that matters and I feel so strong like the world can’t touch me. They say they love me, but they don’t even know me, and it don’t matter ‘cause it’s not the same you know, your mom’s gotta love you, but not Maria, man, not her, she’s gotta choice and she chooses me.

The page had been folded over the entry, covering it. She had told her students to fold over the page of any journal entries they thought were too personal for her to see. She wouldn’t read those entries, she assured them. She would simply glance at these to see that the page had been filled with writing—to make sure they were actually making the effort. She had all her students keep a journal and she told them they could write about anything, use any language they wanted, and grammar didn’t count. The point was to get them to write about things important to them, rather than simply learn how to write in stifling diction and false phrases to get a grade on essay papers. What most students wrote was boring, pedestrian, and fairly vacant, but others wrote about things that were truly amazing and shocking, as if the journal was a confessional.

She never intended to read the folded over entries. It was a genuine offer of trust to her students, but the eye wanders and when it did those first few times, she discovered things that were impossible to ignore. A few months before, a boy had been brutally beaten after a football game. He had been left in the parking lot, next to the opened door of his car, and it wasn’t until much later in the evening that a policeman found him in a puddle of his own blood and rushed him to the hospital. In one of his folded over entries, Bryson Williams wrote this line: “Seth hit him with the bat, and I know he’s a fag and all, but once was enough, but Seth just kept pounding him.” She knew Seth Green, and to look at him you’d think he was the nicest kid, well-mannered, well-spoken, polite. Nothing about Seth’s appearance betrayed a bat wielding attacker, and Bryson, he was on his way to UCLA, a good student, one of her favorites. Seth was in Marty Thompson’s class and when she showed him the entry, they contacted the principal. The next day the police arrived at school. They called Bryson into the principal’s office during her class, and when he left she avoided looking at him. Just a year before that, Keesha Johnson wrote about how her uncle came into her bedroom one Thanksgiving night when everyone else was in front of the television watching football. Sarah talked to the school counselor, social services got involved, and eventually Keesha left school. It was almost as if these kids wanted her to read these entries, as if the fold indicated an opportunity for intimate confidences to be exchanged.

She didn’t see this as a betrayal of trust. Unless an issue of life and death was at hand, their secrets were safe with her, but what she discovered, what she had absolute proof of now, was that their world was a dark, murky, dangerous place that they hid from their parents, from their friends, and from most of their teachers. Each kid was walking around in a space unto themselves, just waiting for someone to reach them or stop them or protect them but you had to break that barrier, you had to offer them the chance because in their world chances didn’t exist, in their world everything was ending tomorrow, if tomorrow even came.

Dominic was a terrible student. His unfolded entries were silly, adolescent at best. One was an ode to marijuana titled “The Last Toking” where he had Jesus and the twelve apostles smoking a bowl, except for Judas who refused and became a policeman and arrested them all. When Jesus was nailed to the cross, he yelled out, “Oh, my homies, they know not what they do.” Next to it was a picture of a bearded man sitting on a cloud and smoking a huge joint with a caption: “Heaven.” Another entry consisted of transcribed verses of ‘poetry’ from Tupac Shakur and a penned-in tombstone with R.I.P written in the center, but when she asked her students to write about the nature of love, she got another folded over entry.

After my Dad left I’d drive out to the water, alone, and the sky and the water were almost the same color and it’d be so big and I’d want to jump into it, and everything would be perfect for a few minutes ‘cause there’s nothin’ but blue as far as you can see, but then there was a ship and that ship got bigger and bigger and pretty soon your watchin’ that ship instead of the sky and water and that ship is ugly but you watch it anyway and you know it’ll never stop, that it’ll just keep on goin’ away, out into that empty space that’s too far for you to go out into, and too dangerous, and that ship’ll get smaller and smaller until it’s just a dot on the horizon and then nothin’ at all and you wonder where it’s goin’ and you know you’ll never see any of those places, those people, and then it’s gone. After that, the ocean and the sky isn’t the same anymore, it’s just empty, ugly, space.

Below this entry, she took a risk.

“It’s difficult to lose someone you love, Dominic. If you ever need someone to talk with, please let me know. –Ms. Evans”

* * *

“Did you know your son was having an affair with councilman Howard’s wife?” the man asked as he shoved a microphone in her face. It was just hours after she’d watched Dominic’s body, with three others, all of them anonymous in their county shrouds, be wheeled out of the house. She couldn’t make out the reporter’s face, or any others. She was in the middle of a surge of cameras and microphones, a tangling of arms, a throng of talking heads, but she had retreated so far within herself, into the hard shell of shock, that she barely noticed the way her body was pressed against, jostled to the side, pulled backwards by reaching hands. Detective O’Reilly’s hand was tight around her right arm and he shoved his way through the crowd, pulling her in his wake, and she tried to concentrate only on this. She tripped over a man’s foot and O’Reilly pushed him out of the way, knocking him into another man with a camera.

Detective O’Reilly had just asked her the same question in the police station.

“Did you know your son was seeing Mrs. Howard?” He asked it softly, as if his voice might hurt her more than all of this.

“Of course not,” she said. She wanted to hit him, but the world felt two-dimensional, like it was a movie projected on a 360 degree screen, and the words came from far, far away.

“I’m sorry,” he said. She watched him tap his fingers against the desk. “We think your son was seeing Mrs. Howard. The councilman found them–” He looked at her a moment. “It looks like the councilman found them together.”

An image of David’s back going out the front door that morning flashed in her mind. He had his headphones on and when she said, ‘Love you,’ he couldn’t have heard it.

“Did it hurt?” she asked.

“Excuse me?” Detective O’Reilly said.

“Did it hurt him?”

“The bullet was near the heart,” he said. He looked around the room as if he were looking for help. “It didn’t take–” He stopped and looked at her. “I don’t know,” he said.

Now O’Reilly was taking her home even though she didn’t want to go there, and as he settled her into the passenger seat of his unmarked police car, camera lenses pointed through the glass. Someone switched on a spotlight and the inside of the car became brilliantly light, her white hand on the armrest of the door, her feet hiding in the shadows of the dashboard. Out of the corner of her eye she could see the lenses focus, the huge mechanical corneas turning in the center, growing smaller with the light, and settling on her face like the hollow barrel of a loaded gun.

* * *

It took Patrick a day and a half to get home from Singapore. She didn’t blame him; it wasn’t his fault.

The first night, the very night of David’s murder, Roberta had come over but she didn’t really know what to do and ended up cooking dinner, but Sarah wouldn’t eat. Roberta tried to hug her, but Sarah refused. Outside the street was deserted; the police had set up a road block to keep out the press, but in the distance, if Sarah listened closely, she could hear the hum of voices, the movements of a crowd like something gnawing on roots buried in the ground. “You shouldn’t leave for a few days,” Roberta had said. “They’re everywhere.”

Those first few dozen hours after Roberta left Sarah didn’t turn on any lights, didn’t use any appliance, didn’t even change her clothes, but simply sat in the dark and listened to the silence. The house had never been this quiet, and the stillness of it was like having your body held under deep, cold water. There were phone calls, but she had turned the volume down on the answering machine. She knew she should call her mother, but she simply couldn’t tell her that David was gone and she wasn’t yet convinced of the truth of it, even if she had seen his body and identified it with his name. A neighbor, someone that very day, had mowed his lawn and she had to sit and listen to the pop and whine of the mower. With the blinds closed, the streetlight was kept out, and at night she sat on the sofa and stared into the darkness and sometime in the early morning she wondered if she had even ceased to exist, but then light began to seep through the cracks in the shutters and soon shapes appeared in the faint, blue light and she watched her legs and the curve of her hip become part of another day. Sometime in the morning she heard a thump at the front door, and it took her a while to realize it was the newspaper, sitting there and waiting with the patience of written words.

When Patrick finally arrived, even he wouldn’t break the silence. He walked through the door, still dressed in a suit, his hand grasping the handle of his briefcase, and looked at her curled up on the sofa. His eyes were deep and red and filled with hours and hours of knowledge. He dropped the briefcase in front of the door, walked across the room, and laid down beside her, his head in her chest, his arms wrapped around her like another set of ribs and sobbed like he was drowning from holding it back, and if she hadn’t have been so filled with her own water, her own ocean of pain, she might have found room for his pain too.

* * *

The next journal Dominic turned in was 10 numbered blank pages. She wrote ‘incomplete’ at the bottom and returned it but said nothing else. Two weeks later when he did the same thing again, numbering the next ten pages 11—20, she waited until the end of class, and asked him to see her. He stood by her desk, his one three-ring binder at his side, and waved to a friend who was out in the hall. His demeanor towards his friend was one of a ‘homeboy’, like a man who stood on a corner sipping 40oz. beers and constantly pulled up his falling pants. When everyone in the class had left, she told the friend that Dominic would be a few minutes, closed the door and asked him to sit down.

“I’m all right,” he said, and he remained standing there in front of her desk, his jaw set, his face pointed towards the ceiling so that she was presented with his chin.

“Are you really?” she said.

He held his arms out for a moment and let them slam back against his body. “Man, Ms. Evans, why you all worried about me and shit?” He looked towards the closed door. “It’s none of your business.”

“Dominic, you put on this show,” she said, “as if you’re all tough and heartless, but I think there’s more to you than that.”

“Oh, Jesus,” he said. “Don’t pull that nice teacher shit. You don’t know nothing, Ms. Evans.”

“Anything,” she said. “I don’t know anything.”

He sat on the edge of a desk, his lips curled, showing teeth. “You know, you lie,” he said after a moment.

“I’m sorry about that,” she said. “It was wrong.”

He set down his binder and looked away for a minute at the closed door. He seemed to relax a bit, something changing in his face so that he looked more like a boy than a man who might be hiding a gun. “What if all the kids knew you read those things? That’s pretty screwed-up, you know?”

“Strung up from the school flagpole, maybe?” He didn’t laugh. “I’d appreciate it if they didn’t,” she said. “It wouldn’t be too good for them to know. Besides, I don’t make a practice of it. Sometimes things just catch my eye and I worry.”

Dominic was silent and then nodded his head. He grabbed his binder and stood up. “Your kid’s the one got shot, right?” he said.

He could have walked over to the desk and punched her in the face and the shock would have been less. She looked up, her eyes trying to kill him, but when she saw his face, she could tell he wasn’t trying to hurt her. He was trying to understand something.

“Yes,” she said. It was silent for a minute and a parade of thoughts marched out in front of them, but she said nothing more and neither did he.

“All right,” he said. “It’s cool, Ms. Evans.” And he walked out the door.

* * *

“What do you know about this kid?” Sarah asked Roberta.

They were sitting outside near the front steps of the school, working their lunch supervision. She motioned her head towards Dominic, or rather, his car; Dominic couldn’t be seen behind the tinted windows of his Chevelle. He had driven the purring machine up to the front steps, set the stick shift in neutral and let the engine idle, a mean, low idle that seemed set so low on purpose. She had watched him before. He always picked up underclassmen—freshman and sophomore girls that made themselves look older with copious use of make-up, who leaned over the doors and stuck their faces inside the darkness of the car, their bodies moving like clumsy gymnasts, pirouetting themselves into the passenger seat. Recently, though, he had been picking up the same girl. And sure enough, there she was: young, a freshman probably, her belly exposed by a mid-riff shirt, her jeans so tight at the hips she had to tip-toe down the steps. As she reached the car, the passenger door came swinging open.

“Open Sesame,” she said.

Roberta laughed and looked at the car. The girl hopped in and for a moment, through the open door, Sarah could see Dominic behind the wheel, hidden in the shadows of the car, hand on the stick shift, other hand hanging limp over the steering wheel.

“Dominic Salazar?” Roberta said and pulled the plastic wrapping from her tuna sandwich; the wrapping was smeared with mayonnaise. “What do I think of Mr. Salazar?”

“I can’t believe you eat that stuff,” Sarah said.

The girl got in the car and flipped her dyed blonde hair once for all the world to see before closing the door.

“I can’t believe they fall for that,” Roberta said. “It’s like they’re prostitutes or something. All Christina Aguilera’d out, piercing their noses, blue contact lenses, and for what? A ride in some jerk’s car, a trip to the ‘hill’?”

The engine roared under the hood a couple times, as if he might skid out across the pavement, and Sarah was ready to report it, ready to have a heart to heart with him, but then the wheels surged forward, rolled quietly away and out onto the street like it was carrying the Grand Marshall in a parade.

“A jerk?”

“Professional opinion or two friends?” She didn’t let Sarah answer. “He’s a young man with a lot of affective issues, a boy with low self-esteem who has a difficult time with social adjustment, and…”

Sarah just lowered her chin and looked at Roberta who smiled and took a bite of the sandwich.

“Jerk,” she said, her mouth full of tuna. “A jerk and a half and a quarter more.” She wiped her fingers on a napkin. “You know, he shows up here, revs up that engine of his and these little girls, you know straight out of middle-school, who don’t even know what’s up, who are still trying to decide if it’s okay to wear ‘Winnie the Pooh’ panties, these little girls’ hearts go all flitter-flutter, and he takes them for a drive, tells them they look ‘fly’, like they’re J-Lo or something, and finds a quiet little spot in the shade somewhere in the hills or maybe he even takes them home and says, “You know, baby, you’re my one and only,” and what girl doesn’t want to hear that, especially from an upperclassman, and the next thing she knows his hand is down her shirt, what there is of it anyway, or his fingers are slipping into her pants, if that’s possible these days.”

“That it?” Sarah said. “Or do you have more to say.”

“Oh, I’ve got more. Just catching my breath.”

“How do you know this?”

“Why are you so curious about this kid, Sarah?” Roberta started on the other half of the sandwich.

“He’s in my class.” She pulled a strand of hair behind her ear. “He’s writing some interesting stuff in his journal. Doesn’t sound like things are too good at home.”

Roberta looked at her a moment. “Ahh, I see what’s going on here,” she said. She nodded her head sadly.

“You do, you think?” Sarah said.

Roberta put her hand on Sarah’s knee. “Yeah, I think I do, and it’s not the same thing. Not even close. David didn’t know what he’d gotten himself into. He was the victim.” She looked at Sarah a moment and then rolled her napkin into a ball. “Look Sarah,” she said. “I talk to the girls. You know they tell me things. Don’t bother with this kid; he’s not the one to save. I’m telling you, it’s not worth it.”

* * *

Patrick met with the police, made arrangements at the cemetery, but avoided the morgue. She watched him read the papers, four of them in all that had piled-up like little caskets on the front porch. He had a pad of paper sitting next to him on the coffee table and as he read the story, he jotted down times and phrases and other information. She watched his face, the way his eyes squinted when he read something painful, the flexing of his jaw muscles, and that distinct troubled look of someone who cannot figure out a problem. She looked at his thinning hair, the wrinkles beneath his eyes, and the lips that moved ever so slightly as he read, and in everything, even the curl of his eyelashes, she saw an older David. She knew then, even though it would take many more months, that she couldn’t look into his face everyday, that the crowning achievement of their marriage was David, and without him they had little together to hold onto. He finished one paper and moved onto the next, not even bothering to close the pages of the first. The pages crackled in his hands as he turned them. He wrote more on his pad and underlined something.

“10:30,” he said. “The school called to tell you he wasn’t there?”

She walked to the kitchen, opened a cabinet above the refrigerator and pulled out a bottle of vodka. Her hands were shaking and little splashes of it fell onto the counter when she poured. When she returned, she saw him look at the glass in her hand but he managed not to say anything.

“I got the message between classes, around 9:15.” Patrick had fried some eggs and the stink of it filled the house. It was just four days after the shooting. She had watched Patrick eat a plate full, and she had been so disgusted she wanted to throw it on the floor. Now he sat in front of his empty plate dressed in one of his starched shirts, a necktie clawing at his throat, even though he wasn’t going into work. “Patrick, it wasn’t the first time,” she said, and realized that was a mistake as soon as she said it, but she wanted him to know.

“He’d been missing class?” The look on his face was so full of hurt, so full of confusion that she almost laughed at him. How can a man be so unaware? But the pain of it touched her somewhere and she stopped. He laid the paper down on the table.

“But his grades were fine,” she said. “He always showed back up.” His face said, why didn’t you tell me. It was the face of betrayal.

“Jesus, Patrick, he’s eighteen.”

“Should have told me.”

“When you’re in Singapore? When you’re at the office in Phoenix with…?”

There was a moment of recognition between them, a filing away of things to be dealt with later.

He crossed something out four times on the yellow pad of paper. “Did you know about this woman?” he said.

“No, I didn’t know about that.” The irony of it hit her somewhere and it deepened the pain. She should have known about that, she thought.

“You didn’t need to work, Sarah.” He rubbed the heel of his palm against his forehead. “I make enough money. You could’ve stayed at home.”

“Don’t,” she said. “Don’t do that.”

He stopped and looked at her, then looked away. “In Singapore,” he said, “it’s so clean, so God damned clean. You should see it, not a spot anywhere. When you walk around, it’s like your walking in some dream.” His hands began to shake and he set down the pencil. “When I got your call, I was having dinner with the Japanese at the hotel. They brought the phone to the table, if you can believe that. My translator didn’t understand the word ‘accident,’ and they all were confused.” He held the back of his palm up to his eyes and turned away so she wouldn’t see. His shoulders started to shake. “They just kept asking questions, and the word kept coming to my head but I just couldn’t say it. But they wouldn’t stop asking and finally by the look on my face, the translator understood. I stood up from the table to leave and as I started walking out I heard the translator say it for me, but I still didn’t believe it.”

“I was there,” she said. “I identified David’s body.” She let the silence build around that until she was sure he understood. “The hole looked like nothing, like something to put a band-aid over.”

He stared at her a second, his eyes blinking as if little explosions were going off in his head. “God, I’m sorry,” he said.

* * *

It was the Tuesday after the funeral that Patrick went back to work. When she saw him come out of the bathroom dressed in his suit and tie, slathered with cologne, his hair combed as if having combed hair actually mattered, she wanted to hurt him.

“Your son has died, how can you go to the office?” she said.

“Our son.” He reached for his watch on the dresser next to the bed. “You can take the blame out of your voice,” he said. “It won’t help.” This was Patrick as always: calm, rational, unemotional. When David was born, she remembered now, he didn’t cry like she expected him to. He was even scared to hold the baby.

He walked out of the bedroom and towards the family room. She jumped out of bed and followed.

“You got him that car,” she said. “If he hadn’t have–”

He stopped in the middle of the hallway and turned to face her. His face had a thousand things to say and she waited, formulated responses. He raised a finger to her and for a moment she thought he might hit her, and she hoped he would, but then he turned around and walked to the closet where he kept his briefcase.

She reached him, grabbed his hands, and forced him to sit down at the kitchen table. She bent down on her knees next to him and held his arms down at his sides.

“I need you not to go,” she said. “I need it not to be normal.”

He looked at her, his eyes moving back and forth inside his head as if he were searching for something else hidden behind her words. Then he nodded and let himself fall back into the seat. She let go of his hands, placed her own on his knees, and looked up at his face but he had turned it away. She sat next to him at the table, the light of morning coming in through the windows and settling across the kitchen floor. There was nothing to say or do. He touched his tie, pulled on his jacket, and then laid his hands on the table. She looked at him, but he wouldn’t look at her. She wanted to say “sorry” and the word came into her head and rolled around her tongue and she thought that if she sat there long enough in the silence he’d be able to hear it knocking there behind her closed lips but she swallowed it down. And then that silence really crept into the house and Patrick must have heard it too, because he leaned over, laid his hand on hers, just long enough for her to feel the warmth of blood below the surface of his skin, reached down, picked up his briefcase, stood, and walked out the front door.

Continue to Part 3

Rick and I sat in the living room, breath falling from our mouths. The television was on but no cable to watch. We needed money. We needed cigarettes, food, heat and all the other things, but mostly money. There was a Uni-Mart up the street. Rick toyed with a hand rolled cigarette until the thing fell apart in his hands.

“I’ve been giving this some thought,” he said. “We could really blow that place over.”

“What place?”

“The convenience store.”

I lit a cigarette. A thick cloud billowed under the single bulb dangling from the ceiling. I wasn’t listening.

“At this hour it’d be easy,” Rick said. “In and out.”

He’d seen too many cowboy movies but it was too cold to tell him to lock it up. He went on about going up the street real quick and getting some money.

“You mean robbing the place?”

He looked excited for the first time in a long while. We could do this, he said. We needed to do this, he said. This was the end of the line, he said, and we needed to make a move. Everyone is making moves. Everyone is out there making moves and we’re stuck in here. “Make moves with what,” I asked.

He bounced out of the orange tweed armchair and down the hallway. Two steps later he was back out straight-armed, pointing a black automatic pistol at my face. “Yeah?” he asked. “What now?”

I jerked my eye from the barrel.

“Relax,” he said. He aimed at the wall and pulled the trigger. The trigger clacked a sound of pressurized gas firing and a small round cracked in the drywall.

“A pellet gun?” I motioned. “A clerk will know the difference.”

“You didn’t.”

It was true. It was a solid looking piece and could have fooled anyone. Rick paced the living room, thumbing a cigarette in one hand and twirling the gun in the other.

“They don’t even make these anymore. Look too real,” he said. “We could probably pull like four hundred bucks from that place. Think of that. You want to be warm? You want to live here next month?” He paused, waiting for me to say something. “Well, there you have it,” he said. “The whole thing in ten seconds. All you do is watch the door.”

I’d been in the place enough times, night after night. The only person in the place would be the night shift clerk, a small and precise Chinese man.

“We just walk to the register, flash this thing and run. We’ll be back before the cops even leave the station.”

The ceiling bulb flickered, dancing light off the walls. No heat, no cable, no food. Just that single hanging ceiling light. Maybe this was the ticket.

“What are we supposed to wear? He’ll recognize us.”

Rick had another idea. He ran back and ran back out with a red bandana. He told me to tie it over my face. It was the only bandana so his disguise was going to be the hood of his sweat shirt. He’d draw the strings tight over his face so nothing could be seen. He demonstrated, a hole closing in over him.

I tied the bandana on over my nose, and Rick pulled the drawstrings tight. We stood in the window. “He’s going to laugh at us,” I said.

“Yeah, he’ll be laughing ‘til I shoot his face in.”

“You sure about this?” I asked.

“Ten seconds,” he said. “In and out.”

The air was dark and the street was empty. We walked until we reached the Uni-Mart and stood on the side of the building smoking my last two cigarettes. I put the bandana on and Rick drew his hood strings.

“Our voices,” I said. “He’s going to know our voices.”

“He doesn’t know us.”

“Well if there was some kind of police line up. He’ll identify us by our voices.”

There was a phone booth a few yards away. I walked in and tore some pages from the phone book. I told Rick to stuff them in his mouth and I did the same. Rick checked the gun. He stuffed the barrel in his pants with the handle hanging out and tucked his coat over it.

I glanced inside. The store was empty. I thought about paying bills. Personally delivering the rent to that landlord with the hanging gut and skinny arms, telling him the ceiling light was on the fritz again and the carpet was just about shot.

“This is it,” I mumbled through the phone listings.

“You just watch the door.” He mumbled back. “And don’t this fuck up.”

We pushed the door in. Rick paced towards the counter with a long, deliberate stride. Just short of the register he bailed back into the sodas and sports drinks, all the way down the aisle. The clerk stared confusedly, trying to eye the both of us. I walked past him nodding. “Cold night,” I mumbled, pointing to the bandana. I found Rick back there.

“What the fuck?” I whispered. “I thought this was in and out.”

“I froze.”

“What now?”

Rick grabbed a cola and brought it to the counter, hood still drawn. “Cold night,” he mumbled.

The clerk nodded with wide eyes. Rick paid for his drink in assorted change. We walked back outside. I spit out the listings.

“What was that? Don’t fuck it up?”

“I didn’t see you making any moves.”

“You had the goddamned gun.”

“Well you take the goddamned gun.”

And I did. It was weightier than I expected. I stuffed the thing in my pants. Rick eyed me up. “Are you sure this is worth it?” he asked. “I mean what if something goes wrong? What if he has a gun?”

“He doesn’t have a gun. He doesn’t have a pot to piss in. This was your idea so quit your crying and we’ll be home in a minute.” I stuffed my mouth with the pages and I walked back up the sidewalk entrance.

I pushed the door and it swung open, knocking into the stand of discount candy. Rick followed, throwing open the other door. I marched up to the clerk. “Forget something?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I mumbled through the print pages, feeling the gun’s handgrip hot in my palm. “Yeah, I forgot something.” Rick watched the door. The store was empty. The Chinaman would see what I’d forgotten. Just pull it from my waist and press it in his face.

He seemed aware of what was going to happen but there was no fear in his eyes. Instead, something fierce. Something stupid. This place, his temple. He’d die for it if he had to; reach a hand out for my throat and the other for a baseball bat to bash my face in with. I took a step back. “Any buy-one-get-one’s on sale?” I mumbled though the wad.

“Camel lights,” he said. I sighed and pulled the bandana off. He pulled them down and I paid for them with what was the last of my cash. Two packs for the price of one. Rick walked out.

Outside, I took out a cigarette and passed it to Rick. I stuffed the pack I paid for in my pocket and took one from the pack I got for free. I lit one up and Rick’s as well. I took a long drag and exhaled into the wind.

“You’re a bitch,” he said.

We made it back to the house. Rick took the couch and I plopped into the orange tweed armchair. The cushion was just about in shreds. I looked at myself in the window. I took a deep breath. I jumped out of the chair and whipped out the gun all in one smooth motion. I held it waist high, point blank at the tattered armchair.

“Shut The Fuck Up Motherfucker Before I Blow Your Brains All Over This Fucking Place!” I screamed.

“Please,” the armchair whimpered back. “I have a wife and kids. Just take it, take it all.”

“I thought I told you to keep your mouth shut,” I said and squeezed off fifteen rounds into the thing. Clack, clack, clack they went, burying themselves deeply and fatally. Rick sat on the couch, watching the door as I stood under the light. He got up to look at the carnage. And there we were. The world’s two richest men and it’d be nothing but the best. Nothing but the best that money could buy and all the free cigarettes to go with it. Nothing but the heat and the light of the world.

THIS NOVELLA WAS PUBLISHED IN SERIAL FOR FOUR CONSECUTIVE ISSUES.

PART 1 OF 4

She wasn’t about to apologize for this. Life had been full of apologies, and now, at forty-three, she wasn’t going to answer for it. It was simply coffee and conversation, or a beer in the backyard of her house where the wooden fences offered protection. Today it was cappuccino at a Royal Coffee, which had three stores in Santa Maria. They sat together at a small table in the newest one on the edge of town, near the sparkling car dealerships and on-ramps to the freeway. She chose it because it was two miles from her place and even farther from the high school where she taught English, and because Dominic liked to look over the brand new Fords, lit up with afternoon sun like monstrous pieces of joy.

To ease the silence between them, she read out loud the logo that rose in man-size letters above the car showroom: “Ford: The Driving Experience”. This caught Dominic’s attention and he raised his bowed head from the cup of coffee.

“Old 289’s didn’t have much power, but they looked just as fine as any other Mustang. The GT-350s, though, they were hella-tight,” he said. He took a sip and curled his lips at the taste. He reached across the counter, over her arms, saying an unnecessary, “Excuse me,” and grabbed the sugar. Pouring another heap into the coffee, he continued. “Look at these new ones,” motioning his head out the window, “they’re pretty, but the power is soft. Don’t even feel it accelerate. Look down you’re doing eighty. Just like that.” He snapped his fingers. “If you can’t feel it, what’s the point, right?” He smiled and took a sip of the coffee, his eyes trying to draw her in.

“There’s something to be said for a slow cruise,” she said.

He stopped, held the drink in front of him, pulled it back to his lips and took a larger swallow. When he finished, just a hint of frothed milk stuck to his goatee.

“Sarah, if it’s a slow cruise you want, take a boat,” he said. “These bastards are pretty, but I’d put my bills on an old 350. A muscle car should feel musculature.”

“Muscular,” she corrected.

“Muscular,” he whispered to himself, naturally falling back into the role of a student.

She waited for him to wipe the froth from his beard, but when he took another sip and set the mug back down without cleaning it himself, she picked-up her napkin, folded it over into a triangle, dipped the end in her water glass, and reached forward to dab it away. He didn’t seem shocked or embarrassed by it, although if it had been his mother she knew he would have turned away and done it himself. With her, though, he sat by dutifully, letting her fingers touch the hair above his lips. When she finished, he looked into her eyes as if he was staring into a mirror, affecting just the right sexual sneer. His brown eyes still revealed the purity of the child, but the depth of his iris hid dissembled motivations just like a man’s– which by law he was, she reminded herself.

She was an attractive woman, she knew that, despite the stresses of raising a child for eighteen years, after losing him, and even after her separation from Patrick. When her friends asked her how she did it — her friends whose hips grew wider than a doorway with age, whose full lips retreated to thin lines, whose whole demeanor suggested that they were resigned to their sexual depletion — she said that it was all the teenage hormones on campus, like a plague of youth, that kept her young. She knew she was still pretty, not because of what she saw in the mirror, but because of the reaction she got from the kids. The boys liked her. She saw the way they acted when she came into class in jeans, her pearl fitted blouse tucked-in to show off her hips. She felt their eyes, like a warm shadow on her body when she turned to write on the chalkboard. Sometimes she leaned over a desk, the blouse giving way to reveal just enough of her bra to be a turn-on, but not enough to be obvious. She didn’t mind using her body to keep their attention, for how many teenage boys are really interested in Jane Eyre?

It wasn’t as if they looked alike, Dominic and David, but she was conscious of a resemblance. David had had chestnut hair, his light blue eyes the color of veins near the surface of skin. His features were slight, his skin the tone people use to paint bedroom walls. If David was in a room you wouldn’t notice him unless you were standing near enough to see his lips; they were thick lips, drawn boldly in purple, like the petals of a tropical flower. This, she knew, was what had attracted the woman to her son. David was not a handsome boy, but where it counted for a woman, in that one critical place, that one soft, beautiful vulnerability, he was flint to an older woman’s stone. With Dominic it was his hands. The long, dark, delicate fingers, the pale crescent nails extending just beyond the tips. Those hands that held on as if touching was the only thing important in life. If you placed a picture of David and Dominic side-by-side, as she had done, their faces would draw in you no conclusion whatsoever– just two eighteen year old boys burning the ether of their innocence. But if you placed a picture of David’s lips next to one of Dominic’s hands, every woman would recognize something in them, something innately sensual that demanded the touch of a woman’s skin.

These meetings with Dominic had started three weeks ago, and now they were running out of things to say to each other. He sat sliding his index finger along the edge of his mug, a smooth action like ones actors use in movies. In the future this mannerism would become his own, but for now it was obviously plagiarized. She had nothing more to say. What did a forty-three year old woman have to talk about with a boy who was interested in the feel of muscle cars? She was intrigued by him, moved to tears by the softness of his skin, afraid of his shallowness, but had that instinctive teacher’s sense that something deeper lay beneath his short goatee, his slicked back hair, and Lakers jerseys.

“I’m empty,” she said, and glanced down at her cup.

“Let me fill you up,” he said. She had to keep herself from laughing. One day he’d realize how silly these exchanges were, but in their own way they were endearing.

He picked up her mug, awkwardly bumped his hip into the table as he stood, and walked towards the coffee bar for a refill. She watched his stiff shoulders, the way he scratched the back of his neck. He pretended to look at the CD case of the music that was being played and advertised at the counter— soft, watery music that reminded her of being tossed beneath a crashing wave. She knew it wasn’t his kind of music, but he turned the case over anyway and read the credits, nodded his head, and even danced a brief hula, his hips swiveling to the easy beat. He turned and smiled at her. He got the refilled cup, walked to the cream and sugar counter and called across the room. “Cream, milk?” he asked.

“No thanks,” she said.

“They’ve got amaretto. Some sweetening?”

“No, just black.”

He smiled and poured the amaretto into her cup anyway. It was impossible to protest to that smile.

They sat in silence for a few moments, she watching him, saying nothing at all, but using her eyes. He looked at her and then glanced around the room. When he did, he saw the woman two tables away who was pretending to read the paper. Sarah had noticed her from the moment they sat down, but apparently Dominic had just picked up on the eyes looking past the newsprint and reading them instead.

“Her eyes are like fuckin’ bullets.” He stirred his coffee, clanging the spoon against the mug.

“Don’t worry about her,” she said. “And stop cussing.”

“It’s rude, you know,” he said.

“She’s trying to decide if I’m your mother or not.”

Dominic looked at her, his eyes darting and nervous, his hands patting down his oil-slick hair. The woman didn’t bother Sarah particularly; she would be doing the same if she were in her position. What bothered her, though, was the woman’s desire for the illicit, her need to be excited by something that might disgust her. A young man and a not-so-young woman having coffee together, so what? But she knew it was a big deal, after all. A cup of coffee was not a cup of coffee. A gentlemanly boy had other ideas.

Sarah reached into her school bag, pulled out a pad of paper and a pen, placed her reading glasses on the bridge of her nose, and asked in a formal voice: “How much experience do you have then, in retail?”

Dominic looked up at her, his face confused, his lips slightly open as if he thought she was finally losing her mind.

“You need to be able to work a cash register to perform this job,” she said.

“A year at Staples,” he said.

The woman returned to her newspaper.

“Good, good,” she said, pretending to write something down. “What about—”

“I’m qualified,” he said. She looked up, recognizing something dangerous in his voice. His elbows were on the counter and he leaned forward.

“Hired,” she said.

* * *

It was two years ago, the morning of November 6th, when Sarah got a phone call from David’s school telling her that he hadn’t shown up for classes. This wasn’t the first time. There were two high schools in Santa Maria– David attended Washington and she taught at Taft. He was a senior and she had chalked it up to senioritis but this was turning into a habit. The district allowed fifteen unexcused absences and he was now at twelve. “Damn it, David,” she thought, and she was late to class after leaving two messages on his cell phone voice mail.

“Wherever you are you get your butt back to school when you get this message.” She called again, thinking she had sounded too angry. “I love you,” she said, talking into a machine. The emptiness of fiber-optics answered back. “I’m worried about you.”

In the two classes preceding lunch, she had passed back essays and reminded her students to use topic sentences at the beginning of each paragraph. A room full of kids stared back blankly at her, their eyes like unwashed glass. In her European Literature course she lectured about iambic pentameter. “It’s the rhythm of the heart,” she said, and had them put their hands on their chests and tap as she pointed to stress marks on the chalkboard. It worked for awhile until Dante Campbell began to rap, syncopating the rhythm with lyrics about “homies” and “gin and juice.” She stopped the lecture and instead started with puns. “Ay, the heads of maids or their maidenheads. Take it in what sense thou wilt.” Some of the girls looked shocked, their faces turning red.

“Damn, Ms. Evans,” Dante said. “Shakespeare’s some X-rated shit.”

“Dante, the intelligent man doesn’t need to curse” she said. But she knew she had them hooked. One small battle won.

Lunch was after fifth period. She usually called Patrick, her husband, but he was in Singapore at the time on a business trip, selling plastic fabric to be used in advertising billboards. Before going to the faculty lounge, she stopped by the principal’s office and used the secretary’s phone to call David once again. When Patrick bought David the car, against Sarah’s protests, she bought him a cell phone in case of any road side emergencies. At least that’s what she had said; it was really just out of a need to know she could always be in touch despite the new freedom of a car. She got his voice mail again: “I’m indisposed at the moment,” he said in his most mature, mocking voice. Then, as if he suddenly found himself in a music video. “Drop a line and I’ll get ya on the backside.”

“What’s the use of a phone if you never answer?” she said. “You sound like a cockney rapper. I’m putting you in the leg irons when you get home.”

In the lounge, she sat with Roberta Vasquez. She was a large woman originally from Nogales, Arizona. She was thirty-six, unmarried, without children, and spent late nights at school writing long comments to each of her students on their biology assignments. Roberta treated biology as a life lesson, a ‘this is how it is in the world, and this is why you shouldn’t do it’ curricula that was supposed to scare kids into responsible action. She showed them pictures of enlarged hearts, like sponges filled with years of alcohol. She played movies about venereal diseases, and taped pictures of organs with discolored warts on the walls of her classroom, until a parent group became upset. Teaching was a battleground for her; she understood that the world offered no protection for kids, and that they had to know what they were up against. She was no nonsense and Sarah appreciated her for it. There was a television hanging in the corner of the lounge; the news was on, but no one watched. Over the din of the teacher’s complaints — those stupid school board members, the superintendent’s over-spending, frayed text books from 1986 — she could just make out the voice of the anchorman.

“I think Carla’s pregnant,” Roberta said. “She cried all the way through class.”

“It’s the nineties,” Sarah said. “Don’t you teach them about condoms?” She took a bite of her salad.

“Bananas in the first semester,” Roberta said.

“Why pregnant?” There was a breaking newsflash on the television. Sarah’s stomach jumped. Most of the rest of the news seemed planned, scripted, but when something was breaking it felt to her like the world was a machine held together with loose screws.

“Some of these girls want a baby,” Roberta said. “They’ve got nothing else. A baby’ll love them, they think. The boys don’t.” She took a bite of her tuna sandwich and spoke while she chewed. “She called him a pequeno cabron.”

“Probably is,” Sarah said. “All that mayonnaise is unhealthy. Don’t you teach them about cholesterol?”

There was a reporter standing outside a house. The street looked vaguely familiar, but she couldn’t place it. Behind the reporter strings of yellow tape waved in the wind. Men in plain clothes but with guns strapped to their waists stood just outside the front door to the house. They were well dressed, their pants pleated, the shirts starched and tight, their hair closely cropped. The kind of men that look like they have everything under control.

“I know her father,” she said. “He’ll make her marry the boy.” Roberta kept rubbing her thumb over the knuckles of her left hand. “It’d be the biggest mistake in her life.”

“Or the second,” Sarah said.

The anchorman was speaking, but she couldn’t hear what he said. Then the camera panned to the left to find a frightened looking woman. She looked like a housewife, that flustered, unkempt, “I just cleaned the bathtub” look Sarah couldn’t stand. Someone turned the volume up on the television. The woman’s eyes bounced back and forth, she looked at the house and back beyond the camera. She wiped at her eyes with the tips of two fingers. She said she heard three shots. She thought they were backfires from a car, but a car never backfires three times in a row, she said. A graphic below her said: “Eyewitness”.

“Earwitness,” Sarah said out loud, but a knot started to develop in her stomach. The world felt so much more dangerous when you didn’t know where your child was.

“What?” Roberta said.

“The television,” she said.

Then, as the woman told her story, Sarah noticed the car behind her, parked on the street and wrapped in yellow tape. It was David’s silver Honda; the windows were tinted. On the left hand side of the bumper was a sticker that said, “Skateboarding Is Not A Crime”. She dropped her fork. Everything in the room tilted and she became dizzy.

“Sarah,” Roberta said. “What’s wrong? You look like you’re going to throw up.”

“I’ve got to go,” she said. “I won’t be here sixth period.”

“Sarah?”

But she was up from the table, walking towards the door before panic forced her feet into a stumbling run. As she turned the corner into the hallway, she heard someone say. “Jesus Christ. That’s Howard’s place.”

* * *

There were police cars everywhere, their lights silently flashing out a warning. She had been to the house before; a campaign party for Councilman Howard. She and Patrick had donated money and David had worked on his campaign, part of an internship that they hoped would get him into Berkeley on a Political Science scholarship. He hadn’t wanted to do it, but after a few weeks he settled into the job just fine, and even seemed to enjoy it. She had to park behind two television vans and when she got out she tripped over wires that ran like black snakes to the cameras. There were people standing three feet deep behind yellow taped borders and she had to fight her way through the crowd. “Jesus,” one man said. “How ‘bout excuse me.” She ignored him, her heart pounding in her throat, a spinning gathering at the edges of her vision. She talked herself into calm, “This is nothing, just some coincidence. David’s at home watching television.” But when she got to the head of the crowd, she saw two of the plain clothed officers ducking into the backseat of David’s car. One wore latex gloves and placed a stack of text books in a plastic trash bag held by the other. When they finished, they opened the trunk of the car. What got her, what made it come crashing in, was that they used a set of keys to open the trunk, the man’s gloved hands fingering the key chain as if it was his, as if he owned even the car.

In her panic, she forgot to lift up the yellow tape and instead pushed through it, tugging it forward and alerting the nearest policeman. “Ma’am,” he said. “You can’t go in there.” She tried to untangle herself, her hands grasping and stretching the tape, but before she could the policeman reached her. He grabbed her by the arm and when she looked up all she saw was the black of his uniform; he was so close that the darkness filled up her vision and she thought she was passing out. He pulled her up and took her by both shoulders.

“That’s my son’s car,” she said. She tried to rip her shoulders free, but he had strong hands.

“What’s your name?” he said.

“Bastards,” she said. “Leave him alone.” She yelled it towards the men who were sifting through the trunk, but they didn’t stop or even appear to hear. It was as if they were standing behind a glass wall or working within the box of a television screen.

“Please, ma’am, your name,” His voice was soft, almost caring, but his hands were pinching her skin and she couldn’t pull free. She felt like her body was about to come apart in fragments, but every spark in her muscles told her to get inside, to push through the open front door to the house, to find David and wrap her body around him, but she just wasn’t strong enough.

For a moment she couldn’t remember her name, only his.

“David,” she said. “Evans. David Evans.” Something about saying it steadied her, as if the name itself kept him alive. She looked at the policeman, looked into his eyes for an answer and got it. “God,” she said and twisted her whole body away from his hands, but he grabbed her again and wrapped her up in his arms, gave her an unwanted hug, and began carrying her away from the crowd. She couldn’t do anything, her feet dangled inches above the grass, and she slumped in his arms. When he placed her feet back on the ground, he held her and she buried her face into his chest. The metal of the badge dug into her scalp and she pushed against it to feel it dig in further. In the space between his chest and his arm she could see men running around, just becoming aware that they had a mother on the scene. Two policemen in uniform ran over to where she was being held, and a plain clothed cop rushed towards the open doorway to the house, frantically waving his left hand to someone inside. But before he could stop them a stretcher pushed through the darkness of the doorway, the white sheet catching all the sunlight of mid-day as it came into the pandemonium of people in awe.

Continue to Part 2

It wasn’t that she was sad, though she was. It was life’s awful brilliance – the eternity of every single thing, small and big. A flood brought misery with it, but the click of her heels when she walked was sublime. Families were executed in turbulent times, but the scent of home brought deliverance. She could, in a moment, be swept into melancholy, madness, or glee. At any moment, reality might be undone, and the true vision of her hysteria could overpower the night.

Julia cried when she was born, and she cried every day after. When a fly came into the room she cried, and she cried when the fly left. When there was no milk she cried; when there was more milk than she could drink she cried again. She cried at night and in the day, at dawn and at twilight. The doctors couldn’t say why.

Despite her parents’ concerns, Julia learned, grew and played like any little girl. Her mother thought the affliction might become worse with age, and that adulthood – with its setbacks – would bring a more terrible sickness. She stayed up nights and invented a time in which Julia’s heart was broken in some immature love affair, and Julia, unable to absorb the consequences, had to be hospitalized to prevent suicide.

She expressed her fears to Julia’s dad. Equally afraid, he only responded, “We will protect her.”

When she was five her mom and dad brought Julia a fish. Golden lived in a bowl with white pebbles on the bottom, and a green stone castle. Julia watched Golden float. Her eyes followed the easy roll of Golden’s fins. When Julia swam she kicked and struggled, but Golden was quiet in the water. Julia talked to her, and imagined Golden had the same problem with tears that she had. Only Golden’s tears were lost in the water, and became invisible.

“Don’t be sad,” Julia whispered.

When Golden stopped swimming they made a cake. Julia drew Golden’s portrait in the frosting. Julia cried, and her mom cried too, as she licked sugar from her thumb.

On her next birthday, Julia’s mom and dad took her to see a hot-air balloon. When the balloon lifted from the ground and into the sky above them, Julia hopped with excitement.

“There it goes,” her dad said.

Julia’s mom pulled a tissue from her purse and wiped Julia’s cheeks. Julia bit her lip and her weight shifted quickly from one foot to the other. The balloon drifted into the clouds and then a thousand more joined it. The pilots inside leaned out to her, each becoming ever smaller in the offing.

“Julia, come join us!” they shouted.

“I will!” Julia cried.

The pilots fired their burners and the balloons rose until they disappeared.

“You will what?” asked Julia’s dad.

Julia waved to the shrinking balloon.

They took a cross country train on family vacation. Julia’s mom pointed out the window to the mountains, cows, and crows. Julia touched the glass. There were more tears. They bought candy from a cart that passed through. Julia unwrapped a caramel and let it melt on her tongue until it dissolved completely.

Tragedy came in a rocky place where the trees were thick and green. The train left its tracks at a curve and slid down a long hill. It had been a quiet moment, just before nap time. Julia’s dad sat with his fingers intertwined and his eyes half-closed. Her mom read a magazine. Julia sat between them and kicked her legs up and down. Then the car tilted. Tree limbs shattered the windows. Leaves, dirt and stones violated the air. As the train twisted and turned over itself Julia’s tears floated in space around them. They splashed against a thin man’s suitcase and at the base of a grasping woman’s empty hand.

When the train stopped moving Julia lay between her parents and thought she was dead. Heaven seemed a strange place to her. Suitcases shifted and fell. Dust swirled in the sun.

For months afterward Julia lived in a hospital. During the day the nurses made her practice walking in the hall. She walked between parallel bars until her arms ached, or was strapped into a wheeled device that made her feel more machine than girl.

She was in bed one night when a meteor shower took place outside her window. The meteors were great fireballs that lit up the church steeple in the trees a mile away. Julia was so frightened she pulled the blanket over her head. She moaned and choked as quietly as she could. Her gown became damp with sweat, her legs trembled, and the muffled obliteration of everything she knew reached her from the unobserved distance.

When she woke in the morning the sky was clear. Instead of a field of ashes and fire the city stood the way it always had. Julia was terrified that she’d lost her mind; that she’d been misplaced in some endless delusion.

A nurse arrived holding a tray. She observed Julia’s bloodshot eyes and quivering lips.

“What’s wrong?” the nurse said.

“Are my parents alive?” asked Julia.

“What?”

The nurse gawked. Julia peered back. Her hair fell in stale black strands over her ears.

“You know they’re not,” said the nurse.

She placed the tray across Julia’s bed. It was runny eggs, juice, and toast.

Julia became convinced that she hadn’t invented the meteors, and was frustrated when the nurses wouldn’t believe her.

“It was real,” she screeched. She threw her pillow on the floor. “Real!”
A nurse put on the T.V. and pointed at the news.

“There’s nothing there!” she shouted. “Get your head out of the clouds!”

The nurse was a big woman with flabby arms. She lifted Julia like she was paper and put her on her feet.

“Now walk,” the nurse grunted.

Instead of walking, Julia went limp.

“Walk!” the nurse screamed. “Walk! Walk! Walk!”

Tears came. Julia couldn’t speak or move. She let her weight fall and the nurse dropped Julia on the tile. Then the nurse growled and stalked out of the room, her fat ankles struggling against her white sneakers. Her socks were pink with lace ruffles.

Julia lay very still for a long time.

When she could walk again Julia was taken to an orphanage in a large, wood house painted blue, with an iron filigree fence. Julia thought it looked haunted. She saw sorry spirits around every corner, and behind all the doors.

Julia was left in the front hall and the headmistress took her hand. The headmistress was a tall woman who walked with an angry limp. She had black eyes and spoke as if she’d been insulted at birth. As Julia was led upstairs a row of girls peered down on her from the second floor banister. They looked like dolls, or as if dolls had been made with them in mind.

Sometimes the girls went on field trips. At the aquarium Julia admired the starfish most. The other girls preferred the seahorses. A person in a scuba suit hung in the middle of a great tank and gave out pieces of pink flesh to the barracudas and sharks. The diver wore a mask but Julia could see his eyes were wide and excited. She watched; the other girls squealed, their faces to the glass, and the headmistress tapped her foot behind them.

At the petting zoo, on another day – at the first touch of a lamb’s tongue – Julia knelt on the ground – in the straw and dust – and she bawled, with her fingers curled into fists. The other girls stood far away and they whispered. The headmistress put her hand on Julia’s shoulder and shook her. It was no use.

“Is something wrong?” said an employee.

“Nothing at all,” the headmistress sighed. “Except this little girl who confuses crying with breathing. You’d think everything was a funeral.”

The employee, an old woman with thick glasses and breath like a candy cane, leaned over Julia.

“The lamb is just fine, dear,” she said. “The lamb is just fine.”

The clouds were pink and a warm, warm orange, in the shape of many things, and the sky beyond was cream.

When she was thirteen Julia took notice of an ancient woman who often passed by the orphanage. Her face resembled a ravaged skull, and her body was slight as a breeze. She wore long, drab gowns, even on the hottest days. Most notable was her head, which was bald and spotted with lonely islands of downy white hairs. The old woman’s gait was so proud, and her scalp so stunning, that Julia wept at the thought of her.

One morning Julia stood in the bathroom mirror and cut chunks of her hair away, until her own head was as bald as the old woman’s. She buried the hair she removed under a tree in the front yard of the orphanage.

“You’re never going to be adopted,” one of the girls said from the porch.

Julia wiped her tears and hissed. The girl ran inside. Julia showed her head to the woman as soon as she could. The woman opened her toothless gums and, for several minutes, laughed her approval.

The other girls in the orphanage wore brightly-colored dresses and had long, blonde hair. They had fine manners and sat up straight at the dinner table. In the evenings they tried on each other’s clothes and practiced kissing on their hands. They were adopted quickly, then new girls took their place, and the new girls were even prettier.

Julia did not want to be pretty. Her clothes were faded and mismatched. She gnawed her nails so they were uneven and raw, and refused to clean her ears. She licked her lips until they were chapped, then chewed them until they bled. Her eyebrows grew in a single line and she didn’t pluck them. At the dinner table she slouched.

Couples came to the orphanage and fawned over the girls, but when they came to Julia, crying, they didn’t know what to do. One would lean over her and ask what was wrong, and Julia would respond that nothing was wrong. The other would cross their arms and say, “You’ll never be adopted that way.”

Julia drew a collection of friendly houses. Inside each she sensed the remains of better days. The place felt like one she’d known, but she couldn’t complete it in her memory.

“What is that?” one of the girls sneered.

“Nothing,” she snapped.

Julia crumpled the page.

Julia didn’t think the life she drew was real, but then, sometimes the life she led didn’t seem real either. The colors were too vivid, and the people too strange. Events passed that seemed impossible, and sometimes she was the only one who saw them, and sometimes not.

She drew her mom and dad, and put the picture under her pillow next to a stamp with a yellow frog on it, and a plastic man with a top hat who seemed to have no purpose at all, and to belong nowhere.

The girls shared a room with two long rows of beds. The other girls decorated their beds with pink sheets and left fresh flowers on their bedside tables. Julia had no sheets at all, unless it was cold. Then she used one blanket, and it was brown.

During the night she was at the girls’ mercy. Julia kept her eyes closed tight, even when they surrounded the bed and tormented her. They pulled on her clothes, poked her stomach, jumped on her mattress, and smeared toothpaste on her face. They prodded and bit, spit in her ears, and when it was cold, they took her blanket.

She didn’t open her eyes, except once. A girl named Wendy leaned close and whispered, “You’re the saddest thing I ever saw.” Julia opened her eyes then. The girls were distorted and monstrous. It was so terrible that Julia closed her eyes again. The girls pealed. The game went on.

She took a walk one morning past the overflowed creek to the supermarket. She stood by the oranges and watched the boy at the cash register. He had dark skin and big eyes. His voice was soft as tissue. Her tears fell harder when she was near him, and she was embarrassed. She could see his back sway one way and then the other as he rang up old women’s cabbages and fish.

Julia sighed and took an orange, then she got in the boy’s line.

The boy twitched when he saw her. Julia eyed the candy. She put the orange in his hand.

“One orange,” he said.

Julia nodded and a tear came loose from her lashes.

“I think I’m going to the circus when it opens,” the boy said.

His nose was peeling. He and his friends swam in the creek on occasion, when no one else was around.

“Are you?”

Julia rolled her head, then shrugged and nodded.

“We could go together,” said the boy. The orange was still cradled in his palm. He handed it to her. “Take it.”

Julia held the orange in both hands.

The night of the circus, the girls wore their most colorful summer dresses and tied ribbon around their waists. The headmistress did the girls’ hair and put on their makeup. The bedroom was fogged with hairspray and powder.

No one attended to Julia, because she had no hair and she refused to wear makeup. She wore the only dress she owned – it was gray and black. Everyone else hated it, and the more they hated it, the more she wanted to wear it.

“Where did you get that thing?” the headmistress asked.

Julia couldn’t remember, so she made something up.

“My mom made it,” she said.

“That’s not true,” the headmistress said. “Your mother died long before you were big enough to wear it. Where did it really come from?”

Julia ignored her. She convinced herself that the dress had been sewn by her mother, and it became her most prized possession.

When the clock struck seven she sat in the front room and waited. The other girls’ dates came all at once. They were clean boys with blue eyes and stupid grins. The girls skipped down the stairs and were led out of the house on the arms of their immaculate escorts.

Julia waited patiently. It became late. The headmistress clucked her tongue and went to bed.

“It’s because of your hair!” she called from upstairs.

It was much later when the girls came home. Their faces glistened with sweat and first kisses. Wendy threw herself in the sofa across from Julia. She blew hair out of her face.

“We saw your boy tonight,” she smiled. “The one from the supermarket.”

Julia started. Wendy puckered her lips and extended her arms, then played her fingers on the cushions of the couch.

“He is a beautiful kisser, you know,” she smiled. “He invited me to go swimming with him.”

Julia’s mouth fell open in a great frown, her lips curled and her teeth bared. Wendy crossed her legs.

“I think I just might,” she whispered.

The girls tittered from the hall.

“Quiet down there!” came the headmistress’ voice, accompanied by the bang of her fist on the wall.

Julia leapt from her chair, but before she could put her hands on Wendy, the other girls were on top of her. They giggled and held her down. Julia sobbed and choked on their perfume and the cherry scent of their lip gloss, until she was too exhausted to move. The girls rushed upstairs, each one of them still sniffling with delight, until the door closed overhead.

Julia lay on the rug. The circus was long over. She went to the front porch and looked for the boy. A dog walked into the street, stopped to sniff a manhole cover, and continued on.

The rain came. Instead of going inside Julia walked to the bus stop. The bus arrived shortly after. The only other person on board was asleep in the back row.

“Something wrong?” the driver said.

Julia shook her head. She dropped her quarters in the slot then found a seat.

The driver shifted and the bus moved. The shudder of the bus was a comfort. The driver and the sleeping man in the back seat felt like friends to her. Julia closed her eyes. When she opened them a different man was asleep in the back row. Julia rubbed her eyes as the bus came to a stop on the edge of a vast lot. A tower at the lot’s center illuminated two great swaying hulks. Their backs glistened with water and massive chains were attached to their legs. Their trunks were listless and their mouths hung open. The elephants stood one behind the other. They lifted and dropped their ears. Julia could see tents and trailers. The shapes of people moved between them.

She left the bus and passed her way forward through the rain. She looked in the windows of the trailers. One held a band of singing gypsies. A burly man with a beard sat on top of a dresser with an accordion. A curvy woman with red lipstick was at a table with her legs crossed. There were two children at her feet. The woman sang.

Julia moved on. Another trailer held the fat lady. The next contained the bearded woman and the tattooed man. Finally Julia came to the trailer of a dark-haired woman at a tremendous desk. Julia knocked on the door. The rain seemed to fall harder. The woman appeared in a red and black tuxedo. She introduced herself as Donna, the owner of the circus, and invited Julia in. Julia stood in the warm trailer on a plush red rug. Water dripped into its fibers. Julia held her arms out and evaluated the ruins of the dress her mother had made.

“You’re sure a mess, aren’t you?” said the woman.

Julia’s features came undone and she fell on her knees and sobbed. Her hands covered her face and shook. Snot poured from her nostrils and into her mouth. After her surprise passed, the woman led Julia to a hammock by a window and helped her lay down. Outside the gypsy music played, the moon was clear between the rain clouds, and a moth clung to the window screen.

Days went by and Julia didn’t stop crying. Jugglers and clowns came and went. A pony was brought in on a leash. Dwarves did somersaults outside the window. Nothing worked. The tears didn’t end.

At a loss, Donna put Julia on the midway. A tiger had died a few weeks earlier. Donna gave Julia a red-sequined ballerina costume and put her on a stool in the tiger’s cage.

Visitors looked at her, moaned with sympathy, then moved on. Women who seemed very kind – some of whom reminded Julia of her mother – bent over their children’s heads in long dresses that hugged their rear ends, pointed, shook their heads, and led the children away. One evening Julia thought she saw the boy from the supermarket, near the back, peering over the shoulder of a man in overalls. She caught the boy’s eyes and he stared back, eyebrows raised. Then her vision blurred and she dropped her head. When she looked again he was gone.

A red and white sign was painted and placed above her. It said, “THE AMAZING CRYING GIRL!”

Julia no longer left her cage. She took her meals there, and did her private business in a corner, behind a black curtain. She sat on the stool all day and wept, and at night she slept sitting up. She wobbled but kept her balance, and salty tears slipped from her closed eyelids to the sawdust at her feet.

A member of the cleaning crew swept around her cage every morning. He was a dangerously lean man of seventy, who, due to cancer, whispered when he talked. One morning he put his face between the bars of Julia’s cage. Julia lifted her eyes to his.

“Why do you cry?” he asked, so softly Julia almost misunderstood him.

“Isn’t there every reason to cry?” she said.

The man didn’t respond. He looked on a moment longer into Julia’s cage. It was just long enough for Julia to catch the swimming moistness of the man’s eyes. She almost reached out to him. She wanted to ask if he missed the world they used to live in, where things were what they were supposed to be; if his escape was the same as hers; if he was who he said he was. She almost asked him if he knew where she was from, and if she could go back. Instead she stared, and after a moment the man shuffled away, his overalls faded and greasy with dirt, and Julia soon forgot him.

The circus traveled in a train painted with the faces of its most popular clowns. Trapeze artists in elegant dives flew across the churning body of the locomotive as it traveled over bridges and hills. Julia was transported in the same car with the dogs and ponies. Her life seemed now an unalterable night.

Her car shook. The train had been moving for days, and Julia was lost in thought and dream, with no recollection of time or place. The hot afternoons on the midway were one continuous stink of hotdogs and cotton candy; a blur of leering red faces and pitying looks. She floated in her body. The car bumped and screeched. The circus, she’d learned, was beautiful and ugly. Its delights were reserved for children. Its terrible mechanisms were in hiding below. Julia didn’t look for beauty where she was. It had been too long since anything touched her.

The train entered a soft curve, then all seemed still before a roar and a force lifted Julia and her cage free. She was tossed into a familiar space. She felt her tears splash across an ankle and back into her eyes as she was upended into the darkness. There was a horrible sound of metal twisting, bones breaking, screams, cries, then, a deep silence.

Julia lay on her side, afraid to move. She heard nothing. After a long time she stood, and found her cage had been battered open. She limped to a small spot of light in the dark, and pulled the door of the car free.

The country had been decimated. A layer of ash muted the miles all around. Trees hung low with soot, and the train was charred to black.

“Was it a bomb?” she said to no one.

There was no life. The air moved with floating powder, and soon Julia’s red-sequined tutu was as gray as the sky.

She stepped from the train and searched from car to ravaged car for survivors. There were only burned and mummified corpses that looked as if they’d been left embalmed some centuries before. Cars had been torn open, and human and animal bodies lay in the ash like distorted statues in a blanket of snow.

Just inside the muttering wind there was a sound of shuffling. It came from the car where her cage had been. Julia ran to the opened door and peered in. There a pink pony named Perfect was getting to her feet, and a mongrel dog named George was shaking his body at her side.

Julia put her arms out and helped the pony and the dog to the ground. Perfect searched the ash for food and George walked in a circle before resting on his haunches. A minor dust cloud rose around him.

Tears streamed down Julia’s face. She grinned and tears fell on her tongue.

“I guess we better find food,” she laughed. “This is the way. Come with me.”

Perfect and George followed her from the train and onto a path past a line of trees and a decaying row of friendly houses. Julia knew them. She’d learned to ride a bicycle in front of one; at the next she’d skinned her knee. Farther on was someplace better; someplace thrilling. A purple dragonfly buzzed across the path and disappeared into the keening ruins of the earth. George yipped. Julia skipped ahead.

1-12-2011, 8:42 pm—Deceased brought in from snow. After signing transfer form, delivering officer, Deputy Desmond Fogle [#347], makes crass remark about deceased’s ‘knockers’ before surrendering Oklahoma state license with the name ‘Heidi Gordon’ printed beside an approximate picture of the deceased. I examine picture, and for a fleeting moment believe it might be a practical joke. I scrutinize Deputy Fogle’s features; they are bent towards the clipboard in my hand. He yawns impatiently, waiting for me to sign off so that he can take a nap on the side of the highway somewhere. I scribble my name in appropriate blank and stand poised above her while he exits. Have not looked closely at the body until now, but the resemblance is stunning. Her skin is blue and her features mute. It is not possible for her to be the same person, but that fact does not interest me. I close my eyes, forget what I know—try to see how far I can stretch the suspension of disbelief.

*

“No more reading,” I remember saying.
“Lots more reading,” she responded. I lay on her chest in her room, beneath a canopy of shade created by her book. We both had an organic chemistry test in the morning, although, unlike me, she was determined to study. I readjusted my body, rested my fingers against the parts of her I knew were ticklish, hoping to distract her without her realizing. No use. I continued to lay with my ear pressed against her chest, listening for every fourth heartbeat. I kept time with my finger against her breast, lightly tapping until I came to the fourth beat, which I held in the air, hovering above her nipple until the rhythm resumed.

“Hey!” she said, suddenly realizing what I was doing.

“Weirdo.”

“I’m not a weirdo.” She closed the book and sat up, shifting so that now she was on top
of me. “What do you need, little boy? Are you looking for attention?”

I nodded.

“Do you feel neglected?”

I nodded again.

“Well, come here, little darling, and let mommy make it all better.”

I grabbed her by the waist and rolled her over so that her back pressed firmly against the carpet, kissed her and pressed with my tongue against her teeth.

“Little boy!” she said with mock astonishment. “What on earth will the neighbors think?”

“Knock it off,” I said, and kissed her again. This time she softened and relaxed into it, her body arching against the floor as I fumbled with her pants’ button. We messed around, and afterwards I laid on top of her again, head against her chest, listening to the quickened rhythm of her heart and counting once more the missed beats.

“What does it feel like when your heart skips a beat?” I asked.

“How should I know?”

“It’s your heart.”

My eyes focused on a freckle on the inside of her left breast, watching it blur and regain focus as I drifted in and out of thought.

“I’m surprised it doesn’t make you feel anxious.”

“What would I be anxious about?”

“Complications.”

I had not meant to say it—that was my anxiety, not hers—but now that it was out, I continued: “Your heart sets the rhythm for the rest of your body. If that rhythm isn’t stable, your body’s like a band with a fucked up drummer. Like free jazz or something.”

“I like free jazz,” she smiled. “And besides, my rhythm is stable, it’s just different. More interesting, you could say.”

I listened for the fourth beat and felt how, as it passed, my entire body seemed suspended, as though my own heart were waiting for hers to start beating again.

“And besides, isn’t it all just perspective anyway? What if it isn’t a lapse, but a pause—a four p.m. siesta before the factory doors open again and everything starts anew, refreshed?”

“However you want to look at it.”

“I think that you could use a siesta.” She smiled and crawled on top of me, positioned her ear against my sternum and held her hand over my stomach, began slapping it rapidly once she’d dialed into my heartbeat. I tried to inhale, to breathe deeply and force my heart rate to slow, but her fingers continued to slap my belly at the same blinding pace, until the skin there began to flush.

“See there?” I said, grabbing her hand and pulling her up onto my chest. “Totally dependable. Never misses a beat.”

She smirked.

1-12-2011, 11:16 pm—Wife calls to ask when I will be home. Late night, I tell her, which is a kind of code the other has learned not to question. I circle the table. ‘Heidi’ lays upon it, still dead. I stare at her from different angles. Karen died years ago, but my mind cannot stop postulating the improbable. I imagine one scenario after another; far-fetched sequences of events to justify how the girl I once knew might have ended up on the table in front of me. As if it mattered. A corpse is a corpse… but even as I think it, I know it is not true. Late night. Sleep has been scarce. Deputy Fogle [#347] has advised that I practice thinking about nothing. Is this the same as not thinking? Have tested this method on several occasions now, lying in bed next to well-meaning wife, thinking about not-thinking, about the color black; thinking about the globules of color radiating on the inside of my eyelids, and about many things in a fevered, stream-of-conscious fashion, trying to convince myself that I already am dreaming. The result is a waking nightmare. Method is faulty. Late night. Even the freckle on the inside of her breast is where it should be, although the breasts themselves have swollen over the years. My breath catches and I look away. It can be awkward, surrounded by naked bodies. One feels there is some haunted part of them still capable of objecting. I look at her again and decide that this one, at least, does not mind.

*

By the time I received my first graduate school acceptance, Karen had already been accepted to four different schools, including Johns Hopkins’s medical program: her first choice. I remember celebrating with her the night she found out. I also had applied to Johns Hopkins, but hadn’t heard anything as of yet. “I think acceptances are rolling,” she said. “I’m sure yours is on its way.”

All that followed were rejections, except for one, and that wasn’t even to a medical program, but to the one law school I applied to out in Colorado. Not sure what made me apply. A change of pace, maybe? Deep down I think I knew I wasn’t cut out for medicine, but Karen was, and I believed I was pretty cut out for her.

I did not tell Karen about my acceptance, but continued to hold out hope for the final school on my list: The Annapolis School of Medicine. Annapolis, after all, was only a stone’s throw away from Johns Hopkins. I could see her on the weekends. Possibly during the week, as long as I promised not to keep her up too late—a promise I fully intended not to keep. When the rejection finally came, I hardly looked at it before crumpling it up and tossing it in the wastebasket. I did not tell Karen, but continued to check the mail as usual, cursing whenever I was with her and found it empty.

“Don’t worry,” she would reassure me constantly. “Any day now.”

Meanwhile, she commenced preparations for her own impending departure. We were still five weeks away from graduation, but she had a trip scheduled to tour the campus, meet her professors, all of that stuff.

“Maybe I should come too,” I said, the two of us laying together on the eve of her departure. “Annapolis isn’t that far away. I should probably check it out just in case I do get in.”

“I can’t believe you haven’t gotten your offer yet. You should call them, say you’ve got other acceptances pending or something. This is ridiculous.”

“Yeah. Ridiculous. So what do you think?”

“About what?”

“About me coming with you.”

“Oh. Well, of course I’d love for you to come… Do you think you could get a flight this late? Obviously you could stay in the hotel with me, but how would you get back and forth to Annapolis? You’d need a rental car or something…”

“Forget about it,” I sighed, and rolled over onto my back. “I probably won’t get in anyway.”

“Don’t say that! Of course you’ll get in.”

“Right. Of course. But what if I don’t?”

“What do you mean?”

“Us. What will we do if I don’t get accepted to the program in Annapolis?”

Her eyes drifted toward the ceiling. I couldn’t tell whether it was a thing she’d not considered, or one she’d considered exhaustively. I knew the answer: we were too young. Too young to keep up the long distance, and too young for me to follow after her… unless, of course, I could find some personal reason that would not put any pressure on her, or me.

Karen did not answer the question. Instead, she chided me for being so negative. I apologized by going down on her, then drew up and pushed our two bodies together. She loved the way my face smelled after I went down on her. We fucked and came and, even after I was finished, my hand slipped beneath the covers and pressed between her thighs. There was a moment of questioning in her eyes, but only a moment. I don’t know how many times I made her come before she finally forced my hand away, but I know it was not enough.

Afterwards, I laid with my head on her chest, listening once again for the fourth beat: that pause, my sanctuary. Her body was relaxed, drifting in and out of half-sleep the way one does sometimes after sex. My eyes remained fixed on the two suitcases standing side by side in the corner, and I clung to her, drinking her in as gently as possible so that she would not notice. It was as if I could not get close enough. Until every fourth beat, that is, when everything felt suspended and I experienced the temporary relief of stasis. It always passed though, too soon. No matter how I clung to her, her beating heart always resumed.

1-13-2011, 12:53 am—The blue has faded from deceased’s skin, resuming a healthy corpse-like paleness. She’s still cold to the touch though. I was sitting next to her on the steel table, savoring the buzz from a nicotine patch, when my hand pressed against the bare skin of her shoulder. Unsure, still, whether gesture was intended or accidental. I was surprised at how the cold actually transmitted between us, like a current between two wires, mingling with the nicotine and chilling the base of my spine, causing my testicles to draw up into my body. The air feels cold in my lungs. The quality of light in the room has shifted, now tinged with something that makes it appear darker while, at the same time, more crisp. World feels diminished, compressed to the size of this room, this table, the distance between our cold, increasingly mutual bodies.

*

The problem with an arrhythmia is that it is difficult to distinguish from a long QT interval—i.e. the time it takes for electrical impulses in the heart to recharge between beats. Unlike an arrhythmia, a long QT interval may appear stable, without actually being so. There is always the threat of the charge not picking back up, or, just as bad, picking up a fraction of a second too late. I’m not sure exactly when it happened to Karen, although I’m told that she was sleeping. For a long time afterwards I would try to simulate the rhythm myself, drumming it on my chest at night and sustaining every fourth beat, like counting sheep, until eventually I would drift off and the rhythm would cease altogether.

I accepted the University of Colorado’s offer and attended law school there, which turned out to be a much better fit than medicine. Later on, I combined interests by studying forensic law, and after several years, put together a campaign for county coroner. It was a long shot: the incumbent I was running against had been coroner for the past five years, was a physician of some standing before that, and unfortunately, his years in office had passed as uneventfully as a ship in the night, which is all anybody wants from a coroner.

Except that’s not entirely true.

During our one public hearing—which took place on a winter night in February and was attended by a grand total of six people, including us candidates—I asked him about his relationship with the bodies in his care.

“Relationship?” he repeated, drawing out each of the vowels sardonically.

“Yes, relationship. Are you not often called upon to spend late, quiet hours in the morgue? And are you not frequently alone there, surrounded by any number of deceased bodies, some of them female, and some of them admittedly attractive?”

His face went red immediately, and he looked to the moderator for help. Neither one of them seemed to know quite what to say.

“You can’t be serious,” he finally sputtered. “What is wrong with you, to even consider asking me a question like that?”

I would not answer.

Instead, I continued, addressing the rest of the room, which, besides the moderator, consisted of two janitors and a junior reporter from the local news network. “It’s not that I don’t believe you,” I said. “It’s just that I’m unsettled by your unwillingness to even consider the question. Do you honestly expect us to believe that, in the five years you have served as coroner for this great county, with deceased persons circulating through your office on a regular basis, many of whom are both young and attractive—not to mention nude—that the thought, no matter how brief, of fucking them has not flittered across your mind?”

“Young man, you are insane.”

“Not once?”

The hearing ended with him storming out of the hall, still not having answered what, to me, and evidently to the other citizens of Arapahoe County, was a perfectly legitimate question. Weeks later, after I had been elected the new Arapahoe County Coroner, and the video of the hearing had gone viral, I met again with the junior reporter who had been there at the hearing, and who had since received a promotion. She joked with me, congratulated me on my election and the unusual tactics I’d used to secure it, but eventually she could not help steering the conversation back to that night, turning the question around on me. She worked hard to suppress her laughter as she asked: “Would you, Mr. Harper, ever consider amorous conduct with one of the deceased trusted to your care?”

Obviously, after what had happened, there was only one answer I could give. She smiled, and I returned her warmth with ease. “Consider?” I repeated, and rolled my eyes for a moment before answering: “Well sure, Nathalie. I suppose in certain unforeseen circumstances the thought would at least occur to me.” We both laughed and shook hands, and she congratulated me once more on my victory.

1-13-2011, 1:03 am—I rest the tips of my fingers against the deceased’s eyelids, feel the gently sloping astigmatism pressing against the other side. Her mouth, the skin of her neck, her shoulders: all are relaxed, lacking any tension. I bend my head to her breasts and locate the freckle on the left—like a hole in ice—turn my head so that my ear rests above her sternum. My fingers hover, poised above her breast and waiting; waiting for the rhythm to resume, waiting for the night to come swirling back into focus. We remain like that, poised but not moving, the silence spreading around our increasingly mutual bodies.

It was Kurt’s turn to host the neighborhood playgroup, and he felt uneasy as he located the Equal packets behind the sugar bowl. The women attending his little gala – his nascent fête – were all women who discussed him. He was a topic. He was the man who stayed home. At the playground mothers stepped away from him to husband-bash, then returned to ask, coyly, “So, what do you do?” As if the set of baby swings, missives filled with his progeny, were merely a cover for some stunning and mysterious profession. When he admitted he was a “stay-at-home,” the women went from thinking him exotic for being on the playground at eleven a.m. to cocking their heads with pity. It only slightly helped to think he was lumped in with the other schmucks who’d lost their jobs in the downturn.

Kurt put himself on mind-numbing autopilot: cleaning the kitchen and playroom, stashing piles of clutter in laundry baskets, washing dirt streaks off the bar of soap in the bathroom. When things were presentable, he cradled sleeping three-month old Paige – in her one ridiculous French outfit, deliberately washed but not ironed – in the crook of his arm while he and Ian started a wooden Pooh puzzle. Ian kept trying to jam pieces together that obviously didn’t fit. Ian knew the pieces didn’t fit, but he wanted them to fit very badly, and the angrier Ian got, the harder he tried to make his anger into something that would change the way things worked.

They put the puzzle away. A house cleaned for no reason was depressing to Kurt, that crisply toxic Pine-Sol oblivion. They sang Twinkle Twinkle in heavy metal; they misted the plants, somewhat inaccurately; they did superball tricks in the kitchen involving the refrigerator magnets and ceiling fan.

Then, right when he thought they wouldn’t, the women arrived. Babies yowled in bucket car seats and toddlers clung to legs and sucked their thumbs, and suddenly Kurt had nine women standing in his kitchen: low-slung-jeans, overstuffed diaper bags, and assorted states of recovering blond (you can’t dye your hair during pregnancy, Kurt had learned, and not from his wife), extracting themselves from jackets and baby slings. They furtively studied the interior of his boxy, almost-new colonial – just like theirs – studded with toddler art projects, books stacked on the floors (art within art, Abbey liked to say, fanning the piles), and a series of damp and moldy-looking terrariums in plastic cups he and Ian had been creating to fend off the doom of impending winter. There was little remarkable about the house, inside or out, and Kurt preferred it that way. He tried to forgive his neighbors their massive Childlife swingsets, lawn services, velvet window treatments and the general heaviness of people who have everything they want but nothing they really need. Abbey said anyone with half a load of self-respect or iota of creativity wouldn’t keep house the way they did: the original blazing white paint job, the cheap pine crap they had adored in their youth. The way Kurt saw it: this was a house full of love. In more honest flashes, he was grateful to Abbey for not insisting her house reflect the level of refinement and prestige she had at work. He wasn’t sure he’d do the same if the situation were reversed, but he’d squandered his own long stab at a career.

Jessica, Mia, Deb, Lorie, Shelly, Tova, Kate, Justine and Ruthie: full attendance. They gripped his forearms and called him Honey until Kurt felt like the gag gift that has unexpectedly reappeared in an inappropriate place. Edible underwear at your mother-in-law’s birthday party; a vegetarian at an NRA convention; a man in a woman’s playgroup. He lagged behind to start more coffee as the children dragged their mothers off to find the toys they knew to be lurking. Playgroups were invented as a social outlet for mothers; to the children, the sharing issues and sudden blasé treatment made them act like heads of rival states, and all eventually resorted to primitive self-preservation tactics like hitting and biting.

“Let me see,” Mia said, lingering in the kitchen with him, clapping her hands to take Paige.

Kurt reluctantly gave up the baby.

“How is Abbey?” Mia asked, brushing Paige’s cheek with her finger. “I wish she was around more.” She stuck her nose into Paige’s neck.

“Busy. Her client base is expanding a little fast.”

“What does she do, again?”

Kurt paused. What did his wife do? She drove forty-five minutes into the city dressed in fine three-season wool, bought her lunch at a Vietnamese noodle shop, was always clean, made more money than he had ever contemplated, sat through meetings with would-be clients who bragged about how many millions in seed money they’d squandered, and never arrived home before 7 PM. He shrugged. “She’s in finance.”

Mia turned. “My husband’s in finance, too.”

Kurt hooked his eyes on Mia’s, and they laughed. She had short brown hair, darker brown eyes, and wore enigmatic Chinese silk-screened shirts that showed off her breasts and the thin map of her collarbones. She nursed her children well past age two, but didn’t flaunt it. Mia made no effort to dress herself up; she wore clothes appropriate for paint, snowball injuries and vomit.

Paige woke and spit up, and Mia wiped it on her yoga pants.

“I want to ask your opinion,” she said, pertinently looking at the baby.

Abbey had chided him that morning for his nerves, joking that the women wanted him only to figure out what sports’ equipment to get their husbands for Christmas. He had squelched his response in order not to start an argument, one that would merely highlight his own insecurities. He had watched Abbey zip out of the driveway in the Infiniti – he drove the minivan, a car single-handedly designed to make you feel trapped in practicality, despite its splendid remote control sliding doors and heated seats – watching the way she smoothed her silk skirt beneath her so it wouldn’t get wrinkled, her coffee thermos in its slot, her mind neatly untangling itself from him and the children.

Mia herself was a Tuck MBA with seven years experience as a biotech CIO. Now she had three children under the age of four, chose unglamorous volunteer work (books on tape for the blind, town recycling initiatives) and showed off her elasticity at the gymnastics class their children shared. She was known for eschewing babysitters because at nine dollars an hour for a fourteen year old “they had better clean my house, too”.

“So,” Mia the Tuck MBA said. “Tova told me you used to be a cop.”

“She did?” Kurt felt socked in the stomach. They had lived in this town for three years, and his past life had never come up.

Mia cooed at the baby. “Let me get to the point. I’m being stalked. Any ideas on what I should do from here would be appreciated. Particularly from someone who has seen this kind of thing. I mean, you have, haven’t you?”

“You’re being stalked?” Kurt played his best shocked civilian self. Tova! He looked around for her, for anyone hiding, watching him.

Mia continued, waving her hands in the air. “Someone I didn’t like at work. Or let me put it another way: someone I didn’t like back. Remember I quit three years ago.”

“Define stalked.” Kurt tried to half-listen to her answer, fussing with the coffee machine.

“He follows me in the car. I have children in the car. He tailgates, he mouths things. If I leave my car doors unlocked, he leaves me notes. Once I found one wrapped around my toothbrush. So I guess he was in my house. He’s not dangerous, but he’s obviously got some sort of derangement issue. Some sort of obsession.”

“He’s not dangerous? What do the notes say?” A lascivious hunger rose in him, keen and familiar, that he wanted to punch in the face.

Mia shrugged, leaned back on her heels. “Mostly nothing. Like, I love that red sweater! I love the way you move in it. Suggestive and sophomoric and really dumb. It’s kind of flattering, to tell you the truth. I always look like shit. But ultimately, guys like this are the ones who end up pathetic and unmarried and unloved, because they never make it past bar games and rating women based on the size of their–“ She looked at Kurt. “They’re the kind of guys who make you feel hot. Right? The kind you wind up with for one night and regret it the rest of your life.”

Kurt swallowed. “Does Drew know?”

“He thinks it’s funny. Isn’t it cute how the twenty-six year old likes Mia! Look at how he grovels! Look what he can never have! He says it’s a little fantasy I’ve indulged myself in to relieve the monotony of being at home. It’s not my fantasy! No – it’s his! Wanting what someone else wants, right? And that’s not even the sad part. You want to know what the sad part is?”

Kurt could imagine the sad part, yes he could.

“I’ve led him on. I’ve done it by not being more aggressive in telling him to cut it out, and now I’m getting kind of scared. He’s not acting like the kid I knew. It’s like I knew him and it was cute, and then it got more like breaking and entering, and now I’m afraid he’ll be waiting for me sometime when I get home. He’s a big guy. Drew teases me because I’ve been setting the alarm! I feel trapped.”

Kurt wondered what was wrong with Mia’s husband. “Take out a restraining order. It’s a formal deterrent. Or you can press charges for harassment.”

“Oh, I don’t know.” Mia sighed dismissively.

“You asked for advice. He’ll back off if you do it, trust me. What’s his name?”

“Bo.” She giggled nervously.

“Sometimes a guy like Bo really doesn’t understand what he’s doing, he doesn’t see it as compulsion until he gets the order. Embarrassment is like guilt. No one else can make you feel it, but nevertheless when it bubbles up it can be an effective tool.”

She sighed. “Bo wouldn’t know what embarrassed is.”

“You’d be surprised. That kind of guy thrives on power, what’s he going to feel when it’s taken away? When his little game is found out?”

“What if it just pushes him over the edge? What if I wind up dead?”

Dead? His eyes flickered over Mia. How much did she know?

“It’s very rare, but it happens.”

He sighed. “Yes. Unfortunately.” Kurt held out his hands for Paige.

“Well. Thanks for the advice.”

When Kurt walked in to survey the progress of the playgroup, eight women sat on the floor talking in the midst of ankle deep plastic. It was typically chaotic, the women trying to conduct three simultaneous adult conversations while acting as judges in sharing traumas, until he saw his son, Ian, in the corner. He looked baleful and lacking pants. In fact, he looked as if he had just peed in the corner, miserably mistaking his big red bucket for his training potty with handles. He was surrounded by cooing women, one of whom pinched his tiny blue underwear in her fingers.

“Ian.” Kurt ran over and scooped up his son with his free hand. Ian put his head down on his father’s shoulder and as they walked upstairs he said, “I thought there was a potty, Daddy, I thought there was a potty but I forgot I couldn’t find it.”

Kurt spent a long time upstairs with his son, talking. The fact there were guests downstairs made their conversation strangely poignant, as if they had to whisper, or were spies.

“I love you, Ian,” he said, over and over.

“I do too, Daddy,” Ian said, spacey. “Let’s play laundry basket.”

“Not now, sweetheart. We have to go back downstairs. There are people here. This is supposed to be fun!” This evoked his own experience of being a child. He knew Ian could only hate him for it.

But Ian completely ignored him – a lifeskill of the toddler set – and shot out five fingers. “Just five rides,” he said. Kurt saw his wife in him, a flash of her rational, mathematical self. “Just: one two three four five.”

Kurt couldn’t help it. He spun Ian around the landing five times in a laundry basket, all of them squealing, until Mia stood at the bottom of the stairs calling up.

“Everything okay up there?” she said. “Or are you just avoiding us?”

Kurt evened his breath and appeared. They went back into the playroom and sat down. The kids were already getting whiny. The women packed up their bags, putting tiny feet into soft leather walkers and Velcro boots. Kurt hadn’t really spoken to any of them. His careful tray of mini bagels and juice boxes was decimated.

“Time to go already,” Justine sighed. She was a redhead who wore hats. “We always seem to be transitioning, don’t we, Boo-Boo?” She said this to her six-month-old son, Milo, as she stuffed his head into a knitted peapod.

Kurt helped locate coats and shoes and tried to quell the depressed, scattered feeling he always had when people left. What was it he’d been hoping for? His maleness was immutable, and the women instinctively held back, or insulted him by overdoing the isn’t-he-cute eyes when he changed Paige, or tousled Ian’s hair, or interjected a comment about shopping for cases of diapers at Costco. If he was enlightened, why weren’t they?

Mia moved slowly at the door, taking her time with her children’s zippers and hoods. When she stood up she leaned in and kissed Kurt on the lips, just slightly longer than a goodbye peck. Kurt froze. Had she just lingered? Was she the only woman who’d kissed him hello and goodbye?

She was.

“Thanks for the advice,” Mia said, taking her baby in her arms and her toddler by the hand. She was on her way to pick up her four year old from nursery school. “You’re sweet.”

Kurt followed Ian into the playroom and they silently cleaned up while Paige slept in the swing that clicked like a metronome. When they were finished, it was time to make lunch and mix a bottle and Kurt was exhausted. Ian played a game on the computer and when Kurt asked him to stop to eat a sandwich he said no, and then NO NO NO NO NO NO NO and threw a pen at Kurt while his back was turned. Then he told his first deliberate lie.

Ian, did you throw that pen at me? After an entire minute – Ian shock-still, fingers stuffed in his mouth, weighing the answers, eyes darting – he said, NoDaddyNoDaddyNoIdidn’t.

Kurt felt Mia’s kiss again, her dry lips. He did not enjoy this new perspective. Every turn in life brought a new perspective, it seemed, and once you had it, there was no giving it up. This was not always enjoyable. For instance, his wife: she would not be pleased about Mia kissing him on the lips, and he would tell her about it if it would not upset her. But it would upset her. And he wasn’t willing to do that. And the very act of not telling his wife – this is what made him a man! – it made his dick hard.

*

That night when Abbey arrived, weary and wrinkled, he and Ian and Paige sat on the edge of the bed and watched as she undressed, putting her shoes in their place on the rack and unrolling her hose without using her nails and working slowly through each silky tucked-in layer until she stood in her underwear, poised to redress with sweatpants and a turtleneck sweater and woolly socks. It was silent and cold in the room, and Abbey smiled at them, and Ian marveled at her biceps and long hair and Kurt marveled at the girlishness of her thighs and the lovely supple jelly of her small tummy and Paige became agitated by her smell. This was Kurt’s favorite moment of every day.

*

Every Thursday night in winter Kurt met his friend Dennis at the hockey rink for men’s pickup. They skated an hour in full pads – it was a checking league – until Kurt waved himself off the ice, exhausted. In the locker room, waiting for Dennis, a kid – twenty-five or so – put on his pads with his buddies for the next game. Kurt toweled his hair and tried to get used to the static rubber floor.

“Christ, she’s awesome,” the kid said. “I keep telling her to relax. She wants to, I can sense that. She’s got the kids though. I never thought I’d find a woman like that attractive. I always thought, yuh! Over thirty, fat, kids, suburban housewife thing. But this one– I can’t get her off my mind. I leave her notes, I send flowers, I follow her around just for that eye contact. You know what I mean? That acknowledgment. I nailed her once in the conference room when we were both working late, and I can’t forget it.”

His friends snickered and Kurt could detect the ones who had girlfriends they loved by the way they studied the floor. It was easy to brag about love if your idea of it was breaking and entering and leaving a note wrapped around a married woman’s toothbrush.

“Bo, check out at that dude,” said one of the guys, nodding at Kurt.

He wheeled around. “What’re you smiling at, prick?”

Kurt swallowed his face. He should have known better. He looked behind him for Dennis.

“Me? I enjoyed your little story. Man meets woman, man harasses woman, man lies about having sex with woman to his friends.”

“Why are all married guys such pricks? You know what I think? You don’t even enjoy fucking your wife anymore, and you’re bitter. You’re bitter because all you can do is hear about it. You just keep focusing on the love, man. It’s all about the love, isn’t it? Isn’t that what you tell yourself?”

“Ha ha ha,” Kurt said. “Ha ha ha ha ha ha.”

The kid was short but wide, and tense with bunched-up anger, eyes dim with a mistake waiting to happen. Kurt worked hard to seem like he didn’t care, his body leaden, and he avoided the kids’ eyes like he would with a dog.

“Ge’th’fuck outta my way, prick,” the kid said, purposefully walking past Kurt with his shoulder down. Kurt saw it coming and treated it like a check. Hockey in the goddamn locker room.

“Whoa,” said Dennis, when he came in a minute later. “I guess we need to get outta here.” He cut his shower short.

At the Meetinghouse they sat at a table and had a pitcher of beer and potato skins, the tips of their hair still wet, their faces pulsing red heat.

“My mom’s sick.” Dennis was very good at trading one difficult topic for another. “I’ve been doing all the housework. You know.”

“Like me.” Kurt tried to say it with humor, the joke of his little life.

“I guess. Shit, I wish there were kids, at least it’d be fun.”

“It’s not always fun.”

“Bullshit. You have more fun than anyone I know.”

“So get married.”

Dennis was grave. “If I could just have the kids.”

“You’re missing the point,” Kurt said.

“Now if I could have Abbey,” Dennis said. “That would make things worth it.”

“Your kids would be ugly,” Kurt said. “Forgetaboutit.”

“Not with Abbey.”

“Stop about Abbey!”

Dennis was a carpenter who lived in his mother’s basement apartment in the town center. He hung out in his bedroom listening to Pink Floyd wearing the same rugby shirts he had worn in high school.

“I want your life, Patchen.”

“My life. Shut up, Den.”

“I’d be real good with the kids. It would be deeply meaningful. I could learn how to cook.”

“Leaving eight bucks under your dinner plate for your Ma is the most I’ve ever seen you cook.”

“Leave my ma alone. She’s not feeling well.”

For twelve years Dennis had joked about Abbey. How he wanted Abbey. He said tentatively, your wife. He called her, Beautiful. Hey Beautiful. Kurt had a moment of clarity he knew he’d regret.

“You fucking love my wife,” he said. “You’re fucking in love with Abs.” He guessed it was something he’d always known.

Dennis barked out a laugh. He held his stomach and leaned over the picnic table as if to retch. Then he sat up straight and grinned like an ass. He hadn’t changed at all from high school. Maybe none of them had. “You’re so fucking fucked-up,” he said. “My best friend.”

“Well, am I right?”

Dennis gave him a queer look, damning and innocent, the look of a man who’d always wanted the wrong things.

Kurt thought about the first time he saw Abbey, in high school at a swim meet. She wore an oversized sweatshirt over a keyhole navy suit and a stack of colorful ankle bracelets. He had kissed her two invitational meets later. She was a butterflyer and he had dreamed about the ridge of muscle in her lean shoulders, how she smelled like chlorine and sleep.

“My mom has a tumor in her spine,” Dennis said after a long pause. “Fuck.”

“Fuck,” Kurt repeated, because it was the most respectful thing he could think of.

The day Dennis announced, “No college for me, Ma! I’m going to Carpentry School!” She had looked at him – was Kurt there? and said, You’ll make a wonderful carpenter. It’s what you’ve always wanted, isn’t it? She fed him his favorite dinner that night. They still ate together.

*

Paige slept between them with her arms flung over her head; Abbey nursed her at night. During the day Kurt fed Paige bottles of formula or breast milk Abbey pumped with a contraption that made Kurt’s teeth hurt. Tonight Kurt dipped into the middle of the bed to lift his infant daughter out and into her cradle. Abbey stirred, and he could tell she had been crying by the way her eyes were puffy and her nose navigated air.

“Hey,” he said. He crawled into bed and put his arms around her. “What’s up?”

“You stink,” Abbey said, and curled up tight against him. “I was just thinking.”

“About?”

“What time is it?” She leaned over to see the clock but Kurt held onto her. He could see her sweet ass. He put his hand down into her thin, stringy underwear.

She slapped his hand and said, “God, it’s one-thirty and I have to work tomorrow. How’s Dennis?”

“His mother’s going to die.”

“What?” Abbey tried to sit up but he held her down. He felt strong against her thinness. He smelled himself as he moved, pockets of soapy sweat tinged with smoke from the bar.

“She’s dying of cancer.” He put his hands back on his wife.

“I love that woman. Did you know she works at the soup kitchen near my office? She’s there every Thursday. She’s a chopper. She chops and chops and chops, and then someone else arrives to assemble and receive all the glory.”

“What were you crying for?”

“Ian,” Abbey said, resolutely. “I get the overwhelming sense that I’m missing everything. He grows from the moment I step out the door until when I get back. He looks different, he’s learned new words, he’s riding a tricycle. He’s made up whole games I know nothing about.”

“You could cut your hours.”

“I don’t want to talk about this! What would we do?”

“Should I answer that? I would get a job, and you would stay home.”

She shook her head. “It’s working. Right, Kurt, this arrangement is working? Because it’s easier to wallow in a little self-hatred than to fantasize about some life overhaul that’s never going to happen.”

“Define never.”

Abbey sighed.

Kurt thought of Ian naked in the playroom. The women had laughed, had called his penis cute things. He thought of Mrs. Stelf dying of cancer. He thought of Dennis taking care of her, and doing the housework and secretly loving Abbey. He put his hands back on his wife.

“You want to make love to me?” Abbey said.

Kurt gently flipped her onto her stomach and slid off her underwear. He had been the type of kid to cry at the sight of an old person, someone hobbling around in the middle of the street. Then, when he was older, they started falling in front of him, drawing blood. He usually rescued them and then became violent to get away. It had happened more than once. He lived his life like this.

“I’m going to be so damned tired tomorrow,” Abbey said, muffled by her pillow.

Kurt rubbed his palms down her spine on each side, along the muscles he loved. Abbey went limp. He was fierce with desire. He was usually so careful, so yielding. Now he worked her over, his hands rough and callused from hockey, working his imagination in ways he knew would shame him the millisecond it was over. But right now– right now it was what he wanted and needed, a want he could fill, and he closed his eyes, away from her, tunneling down the path of his own need.

*

In the morning Kurt pulled into Mia’s driveway. He wanted to talk to her, and he wanted to make his point in person. He left his children in the car and rang her bell.

She answered in sweatpants and a T-shirt, her hair sticking straight up.

“My God,” she said. “It’s the grim reaper.”

“I met that kid at the rink last night.”

Mia’s eyes shot open. “You what?”

“I saw that punk. Bo. The one stalking you? I came to tell you I think he’s dangerous. I think you should take out the restraining order. Now. Today. You have to do something. Have you?”

Mia yanked him inside by his sleeve. “How did you know it was him?”

“He mentioned you. Showboating for his buddies.”

“What did he say?” She slammed the door to the cold.

“Nothing that incriminating,” Kurt lied. “I just get the feeling I know what kind of kid he is. A loose wire. I think you’re wrong about knowing him, and I think you’re wrong about him hurting you.”

“Huh,” Mia said.

A child whizzed by in a cape. Someone screamed.

“We’re still doing Halloween,” Mia said. “My kids can’t let it go.”

“The kids all look cute until about second grade,” mused Kurt. “Then they start making themselves as unattractive as possible.” This year Ian and Paige had gone as ladybugs, Kurt as an aphid. “I just – you know. Thought I should say something. Had to say something, I guess.”

“I won’t ignore it,” Mia said, coming too close. “I was serious when I asked you about it. What I should do.”

“Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Well, that’s it. That’s all I wanted to tell you.” Kurt tipped back and forth on his feet, his mind thinking: KISS KISS KISS KISS KISSSSSSSSSS.

Mia studied him, and Kurt tried to contort his face with what he hoped looked like comprehension.

“Kurt?” Mia was too close; he smelled her fillings. He thought of what Bo had said about the conference room and shook it off like rain. He thought of Dennis wanting Abbey. He had stood on the threshold too long; Mia cocked her head in a question, and they were suspended there, a test of will and movement, of breath, of his future and his sad past.

“Maybe–”said Mia, taking a step back, slightly flustered.

“I should go,” said Kurt.

She seemed hurt, a little. Or was that disgust in her eyes?

Kurt told himself to stop creating the desire to protect something that wasn’t his in the first place.

He broke free and ran to the car, where the children were howling, cold and abandoned in their rocketship seats. He buried his face into each of their laps for forgiveness.

*

In Debbie’s basement – enviably finished – Ian played Tinker Toys with the “big kids”, all of whom were two. Kurt wanted to maim the person who invented Tinker Toys. They had been brought back for nostalgia in their chic cardboard tins, but every time Kurt tried to make the helicopter he decided they were only good for kindling. Nothing fit right, the holes were too small, and the wood naturally shrunk and swelled and splintered. The women spoke around him (was he the only one, goddammit, who ever played?), politely asking questions about Abbey (whether she was still nursing) and Paige (whether she was still nursing). He had to control Ian’s temper when finally they gave up on the helicopter (again) and someone said, “Is that just frustration or is he holding something else inside of him? Something bigger?”

It wasn’t until they were packing up to leave – the twenty minute ritual – that she said hello.

“Hi, Kurt.” Mia.

He stumbled on Ian’s toes, then put his hand over Ian’s mouth to stop the howl.

“Hi,” Kurt said. “How’s it going?”

Mia had dark circles under her eyes. “It’s going. I’m late. Nice to see you.” She struggled past him with her two kids. When her fleece jacket accidentally got caught up in the door handle she stumbled towards him and fell, and as he caught her his mouth barely brushed the waxy cup of her ear. She might have considered it an accident.

Sitting in his car, Kurt watched the rest of the women emerge. He studied them cruelly: dowdy dresser, fat hands, obsessed with cocktail parties. When had he turned into such a crank? He yearned for Mia’s smile, her small teeth, and when his mind moved over her, he felt the way he would have in high school, a terrible physical lurch. He was the last to turn on his car.

“Daddy,” Ian said, disgusted by his slowness, “Go.”

*

On Saturday, while Abbey finger-painted with Ian and Paige napped, Kurt went to visit Mrs. Stelf. Dennis’ truck was gone. He would be at the gym, pumping up for a Saturday night spent alone watching Comedy Central. Mrs. Stelf knew Kurt was coming; he had called ahead. She set out a box of Pepperidge Farm cookies on top of a thick plastic tablecloth, the kind with the furry bottom. She wore neatly pressed sweatpants with Keds, and became out of breath pouring tea.

“Air,” she said, waving her hands around her face. Mrs. Stelf was not a hugger, although Kurt had considered overwhelming her on the way in; until he realized, with no small amount of shame, that he didn’t want to touch her. Not because he was afraid of catching something, but because he was afraid she would disintegrate.

“Air,” Mrs. Stelf continued, “is not something you should take for granted.”

Kurt sat down at the table and dumped sugar into his tea. In the car on the way over he had rehearsed stupid euphemisms about dying, not one of which considered the apparent fact of not breathing anymore and how painful that would be.

“So I guess Dennis told you,” said Mrs. Stelf.

“I’m so sorry.”

Mrs. Stelf sat down next to him. “They want to know what I choose, Kurt. Fight the good fight or let nature take its course. Ultimately, I don’t think they can deny the therapy to anyone. If you’re willing to pay, to take that risk. Suddenly everyone wants to live.”

“Of course.”

“Dennis thinks it isn’t an option. He’s spoken with the doctors. He thinks he understands the treatment, and the odds mean everything to him, that shred of hope. Thirty-seventy! Twenty-eighty! For me, the numbers are meaningless. What’s in a statistic other than a bunch of cold history? I’ll die at the end either way. We’ll rip through my savings and Dennis will have to sell the house, my only thing to leave him.” She looked directly at Kurt, and he could imagine the conversation he would have with Dennis.

Dennis: Fuck yeah she’s getting the treatment! She’s not going to just roll over and die on me! Fuck no!

They drank peppermint tea. Kurt remembered all the time he spent in this house as a child. Mrs. Stelf worked; in the afternoons the house was gloriously empty. His own mother was perpetually home, busy becoming a ghost of herself, one of those mothers who was so present that she somehow failed to exist. Mrs. Stelf used to arrive and clunk down her keys and change into matching pastel sweats and make them crackers smeared with cream cheese and pepper jelly. She would pour a glass of wine and sing Frank Sinatra at the top of her lungs. Her apron said Kiss My Cookies.

“But really,” said Mrs. Stelf now, “I don’t worry about Dennis; he’ll be fine. I don’t worry about the actual dying part, the departing. It’s the unknowable juncture of pain and death. I mean, is it necessarily unbearable and then you die? It’s very unpleasant to think about.”

The back door slammed and Dennis strode in as if were still in the gym, doing that ridiculous puffed up male thing in between sets. Kurt was not happy to see him. He would ruin the truthful cadence of the conversation.

“I’ve already told her,” Dennis said, gulping water at the sink, “that I would happily ensconce her in mind-relieving drugs if things got rough. Wouldn’t I, Ma?” Dennis draped his arms around his mother’s shoulders, and she visibly winced.

“Come sit.” Kurt patted a chair. “Here.”

“We were discussing options.”

“There are no options,” Dennis said. “She does the therapy, it goes into remission. It’s a no-brainer.” He shoveled a stack of cookies out of their crinkling plastic nest and popped them into his mouth.

When this was met with silence, Dennis said, “The doctors have no reservations that she can handle it. She’s in good shape. She’s always been perfect.”

“You sound like you are discussing a farm animal,” Mrs. Stelf said, not entirely annoyed. “I want to hear what Kurt has to say. He’s always had a fine opinion for what’s right.”

Dennis rolled his eyes dramatically.

Kurt nibbled on a Milano. He was thinking about how Ian, when he was nervous, screwed up his eyes and face and fists, then laughed hysterically.

“It’s not a question I could possibly answer,” Kurt said. “How could I? It’s not my body. It’s not my life, it’s not my mother’s life. I think if it were, I’d have to agree with Dennis. How could you not go for it? What if you could live in remission and get another good eight or ten years? What if you could get five, or two? Isn’t that something? But then, our idea of cancer treatment is barbaric. I know it’s gotten better, but it’s still barbaric. Not to mention humiliating.”

“That’s the other thing,” said Mrs. Stelf. “I don’t want Dennis taking care of me if I linger around here past my prime. Past when I can make my own decisions. How will he ever be able to meet someone, if his old ma is stinking up the house?”

Dennis snorted.

“My number one priority is to see him get married before I go.”

Kurt said, “I agree with Dennis then. You need to live forever.”

Mrs. Stelf smiled. “He will find the right girl,” and the way she said girl, Kurt could see her own girlhood in her, the luck and the fresh love and the pining. His chest squeezed, and he thought about this other unmentionable sea of female love, and his own abiding love for Mrs. Stelf.

“The lawyers can help us, Ma,” Dennis said. “It’s all set up beforehand. You can do whatever you want, as long as you set it all up before. It’s just that not everything is foreseeable. Don’t you agree, K-man? Don’t you think there are things that are unforeseeable?” His voice broke.

Kurt left them sitting at the table. Dennis was terribly stubborn. His mother would die and he would continue to live in the basement of the house, maybe for years and years afterward, trying to conjure her up through casseroles and certain Lily of the Valley soaps. He would keep her clothes and the boxes of fake silk scarves and costume jewelry clunking around in beautiful wooden boxes Dennis made her in high school. Inside were dovetailed compartments and squares of coarse velvet he had meticulously sliced with an exacto knife.

Kurt knew he should hurry home. Ian would have lasted two minutes finger-painting and Paige would be squalling and they all had been up since five-thirty. He often wished Abbey would get flustered so he could rescue her with his skill. This would ensure that she still needed him. But parenting wasn’t skill, and the knowledge he banked – where Ian’s slippers might be hiding (behind his dresser), Paige’s sudden love for having her forehead stroked, Ian hating his favorite roasted carrots because yesterday he’d inhaled a stray piece of garlic – all seemed incredibly poignant now. There would always be things to know about his children, and different people would know them along the way. He was winning an unwinnable contest. His fear was that he would wake up one day and Abbey would be a brilliant financier and his children would have moved on, and him? His sporadic dream of becoming a science teacher – the hands-on, rocks and birds and skeletons of sixth grade science, before the gruesome stretching of amphibians on pins and the breaking up of everything into the tiny units of atoms, microns, DNA, cells – would have been forgotten. He would be wallowing in some gray area of empty-nest volunteer hell, and his knees would be too shot to play hockey. He would have the look of his own mother at four o’clock in the afternoon.

Instead of driving home, Kurt drove himself over to the police station. The woman behind the plexi looked at him frankly and then told him to hang on a sec, the way they did in towns where things rarely lurked or hunted or gave chase. The dispatch radio spewed pre-party DUI, kids on skateboards near the monument, a parking meter defaced; little things, really, compared to what men were capable of.

“May I help you?”

Kurt recalled the day he retired his badge. It was the worst day of his life, yet it freed him for less spurious lifetime pursuits. Was he here to make a confession? Compose a speech? It was the first time he’d dared step foot in a police station. It smelled familiar, like wet dog and paperwork and greasy lunch.

“My name is Kurt Patchen.”

He thought he saw a flicker of recognition.

“May I help you?”

“Maybe. I’m just wondering about certain protocols.”

“What kind of protocols?”

“You know. Restraining orders.” He coughed.

“For yourself?”

Kurt laughed.

“Mr. Patchen? Is that funny?”

“Uh, it’s not for me. It’s for, um, a colleague. A friend who–“

The woman pointed to the shelf behind him. “Take a brochure. It has numbers to call, hotlines, lawyers, everything you need to know about harrassment.” She eyed him. “Take two.”

“Right. Okay.” She looked at him like she was flipping through her memory bank, trying to find him filed under psychopath. But maybe Kurt was just paranoid. He hoped she wouldn’t reach his particular history of disgrace. He’d been let go for falsifying testimony, having made up some reports to help a woman’s case. He believed her to be in grave danger. He had not been romantically involved, as speculated in the papers, but even Abbey didn’t trust his motives. He became obsessed with the woman’s safety, ignoring certain signs that she wasn’t well. He only did it to ensure she didn’t wind up – what was the term Mia used? – dead.

“Hey, thanks.” He felt strangely vindicated pocketing the brochures.

*

At home there was a double stroller by the front door. When he walked into the house, Abbey and Mia were laughing in the living room. Mia nursed her ten month old son Christopher, who turned to look at him. Kurt told himself not to stare at Mia’s breast, now pulled into a cone. He heard Ian and Mia’s other two children playing downstairs, and he had to stop himself from wishing it had been a harder afternoon for Abbey.

“Well well well,” Abbey said. “If it isn’t the knight in shining armor himself.”

“Hi.”

“We were just talking,” Abbey said. “I’m catching up on everything you don’t tell me about playgroup.”

Kurt looked back and forth at the two women and they both eyed him with diminutive amusement.

“Don’t worry, it’s nothing serious,” Mia sat cross-legged while Christopher nursed.

“Okay.” Kurt searched Mia’s eyes too long, and his wife looked at him quizzically. He’d just realized the kid Bo wasn’t lying about Mia. Of course! What an idiot he was. She’d been with the creep all along, and he’d fallen for her ideas of victimization. She didn’t want to file a report because it wasn’t like that: she had been willing.

“I just stopped at the police station,” Kurt said.

Both women looked at him with eyes so bright they could have been tears.

“You look very earnest,” Mia said. “What a big earnest guy.”

Abbey snorted. She looked at him strangely, and he felt the clobber of nervous sweat. “Whatever were you doing there?” She bore her eyes into his solar plexus. His firing was mixed up in notions of propriety – he was painted as taking advantage of a woman who turned out to be so semi-deranged and unstable, why, anyone in their right mind could see it! – and his wife’s amazed disappointment in his judgment was his never-ending penance. He barely had to breathe to be reminded of it.

Kurt looked straight at Mia. “Oh, you know. Looking for protocols.” His eyes lingered – yes! – over Mia’s breasts, which she had left exposed, after all, nipples erect and hard beneath her flimsy nursing apparatus. He turned and banged through the swinging door into the kitchen. He stood at the sink and drank water straight from the tap like Dennis, slurping and noisy, half of it running down his chin.

He saw the clock and reflexively barked, “Have you fed Paige?”

The kids were supposed to save him. Ian was born two months after he was fired. They moved to a different town and Kurt stayed home with the baby when Abbey went back to work after six weeks of maternity leave. Kurt enjoyed the flexibility of his time, and felt back in control of his life.

After a beat Abbey yelled back, blithely, “I fed her but she wasn’t really hungry. I put her back down. She ought to sleep for a while, don’t you think?”

It wasn’t Tova who told Mia about his disgrace. It was his wife.

Paige never slept for more than twenty minutes in the late afternoon. When he flipped on the monitor he could already hear her armadillo grunts, sucking on her wet fist, struggling to lift her head. He crept upstairs and into her room to to feast on her sweaty, hot neck, on the way her eyes sparkled at the sight of him.

1. Twins, Age 34
Small One-Bedroom Apartment, East Village, Manhattan

The knocking lasts an hour and forty-seven minutes. As always, the neighbors stay quiet. I lie still, listening. It begins timidly at 1:32 a.m. and ceases at 2:49 a.m., according to my bedroom clock. I keep the clock six minutes fast, so truly the sobbing begins at precisely 2:43 a.m., and it savages my heart. I chew at a nail. I chew two or three more before tiptoeing to the door. I stand and listen to my sister cry. Somehow I can tell that she is sitting, leaning against the door, facing the opposite wall. At 3:00 a.m. by my watch (accurate), I let Lexi in. It is the first time I have seen her in four months. She wears a typically bizarre arrangement of clothing: a huge Russian officer’s jacket, pink floral pants and red spiked heels. Her eyes are red, her mouth red at the corners, her cheeks blotchy. At her worst, she is still beautiful.

“Take off your coat,” I say.

“No.”

“My house. Take it off.”

She removes her coat and throws it on my couch. I examine her arms. When I look up she is staring into my eyes. My heart seizes in a pandemonium of love and hope.

“You want money,” I say. It is not what I mean.

“Naturally you assume that,” she says.

I mean to say I am so happy you are alive: life without you would not be life. But I do not.

“Do you want a drink?” I ask.

“Sure. A juice if it’s OK.”

I pour myself a vodka and cranberry and pour the remaining juice into a glass for Lexi. We stand sipping our drinks, avoiding one another’s eyes as though shy. I will be exhausted at work tomorrow. The greasy F train will deposit me in mid-town, and I’ll adjust my collar in the windows of storefronts, rotate my stockings, and forget to change from my scuffed and comfortable shoes. I know: suited men will appear ghoulish; the coffee will taste poisoned; my manager’s condescension will rile me to unwarranted anger. I will despair at how low-status my office job is; how much older I look in the years since I began work here; how unlikely I am to advance. All day I’ll misfile documents and forget the names of clients. It’s too late to worry, though. I’m awake.

I look at the ice cubes melting in my drink. There are two of them, waning. An evil in me incites me to say loudly, too loudly for the room, “Lexi, when did you become so…”

Her head snaps up, “So what? So burdensome? Such a life sentence?”

“No. I mean, no.” I am shocked at how easily she has exposed my most malevolent thought. “So hostile, I guess. I mean, you used to be…”

“The second you turned into such a do-gooder. Such a sell-out.”

She abruptly walks to my stereo, both hands tight around her drink. Once again, I am taken aback by how graceful her hands are, slim, perfectly tapered, the nails not cheapened by lacquer or excessive length. I look down at my own hands, four nails wrecked this very night, the pearl-colored polish peeling off. My hands betray me: the rest of my look reflects my new life, my ordinary job. Lexi is skinny and punk rock. Her weird pink pants – more like pajama bottoms than couture – harmonize strangely with the red pointy-toed shoes. On her boyish chest an obscure band logo clashes pink on a blue shirt. Lines have developed around her mouth and eyes. Her short spiky haircut partially reveals the thumb-sized scar behind her left ear. Each time I see it I get a rusty taste on my tongue, as though my mouth were filling with blood.

She picks out a record at random and stares at the cover, then replaces it. Then she picks out another. It is a New York Dolls LP. The record corner shakes in her hand. There is a graphic of a fat pink baby on the cover. The font looks as though it has been squeezed from a toothpaste tube.

“Didn’t you give me this?” she asks.

“Yes. Sorry. You should take it.”

“I listened to it every day.”

“I remember.”

“I liked everything you liked.”

I don’t say anything.

“I was always singing Bad Girl.” Lexi bites her lip.

“Lexi,” I say helplessly.

“I don’t want money, Cassie,” she says, “I just wanted to stay here with you.”

“You can’t stay here anymore.”

Tears form in her eyes, but she does not let them drop. “I have nowhere to go,” she says softly.

“You made yourself this,” I say, “It must be what you want.”

“No, of course it’s not,” she says carefully, “no, but I’m so lonely, Cass. I’m a stray.”

“That’s exactly the problem, exactly.” Please do not leave me, I think.

“I guess I’ll leave,” says Lexi.

We stare at one another. From the bedroom the clock ticks in the silence. From the building, no sound at all. We stand with our melting drinks, perfectly still.

2. Twins, Age 29
Small Studio Apartment, Lower East Side, Manhattan

Of the scenes I remember most vividly, one is of holding Lexi’s head under cold water in her bathtub, lifting it and lowering it again. Like an inquisitor, torturing a martyr.

“Come on,” I say to myself, and to her, “come on”. I have just left work: I am still in my cheap suit. The sleeves are soaking wet, even pulled all the way up. I lift her head from the freezing water for the final time and her wild eyes open. She is drugged, but awake. Her make-up runs in ghastly circles beneath her eyes.

“Oh?” she says.

I remove my jacket first, then the shirt beneath. I cup cold water in my hands and run it over my hot face. I take a washcloth and wash Lexi’s face.

“Oh,” she says again, “shit.”

“Why now?” I ask. I sound whiny. It is I who supports her drug habit by giving her money whenever she wants it, and refusing the “help” of doctors, clinics and police. I lean back against the tub. I cannot bear my own face in the mirror.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers, not for the first time. “It’s just that I’m all alone. I feel all alone.”

Here’s my chance for indignation, which I can exploit or not, and I do. “Bullshit self-indulgence,” I say, “I’m here every time. You’re going to die.” I am too tired for anger suddenly. “I’m the one who’ll be alone.”

“You know what I mean, though. You… disapprove all of the sudden. You’re the one who…” Lexi stands up shakily. She’s trembling and goose-fleshed in her baby tee-shirt and tiny skirt with long underwear on underneath.

“We all need to stop some time,” I say, “we all need to fucking grow up.”

“I know.” She takes my hand. I look into her eyes. Drugged, her eyes are filled with the most unalloyed sympathy.

The emergency room is as always. They admit her, they give her the options, they let her back into my defective custody.

“You’re a lucky young lady,” the doctor says to Lexi in a tone that indicates how little patience he has for us. “You have a sister who cares a lot.” He knows nothing, with his petite figure, thinning hair, his going-to-seed good looks and his other places he needs to be. Be nice, I think: he is not unkind, I think. He has seen this before: he has even seen us before. My fingers tap irregularly against my thigh. Each tap indicts me, a vice-measuring metronome. Our father, the classicist, loved Seneca: “we have walls,” he made us translate, “not so that we might live safely, but so that we might sin secretly.” Lexi and I sin publicly. Is that better? It was our father, the hypocrite, who sinned secretly. Lexi sits shamed, already a little dope sick maybe. Fuck, what am I going to do?

“Does she want treatment?” says the doctor. “Full time is an option. Out-patient is also an option. Methadone: a step-down process.”

“Thank you sir,” I say.

“So, what does she want?”

I look at Lexi. She shakes her head. I say, “We’re OK. Thank you, sir.”

Another Seneca quote almost makes me laugh as we walk unsteadily down 2nd Avenue: it is our bad conscience that stations the doorkeepers, not our pride. I am her doorkeeper, of that I am sure. Of that I am fairly sure.

At 9th Street Lexi insists that we buy a bowl and wet cat food to feed the strays in an alley behind her apartment. Not regular cat food, either, she wants macrobiotic cat food from the open-all-night clinic, the kind with proper human-grade meat in it. The guy in the store will actually eat this brown, viscous substance to prove its suitability for consumption. I can’t watch it again, so I stay outside and scan for dealers, but see nothing amiss. Lexi emerges from the clinic with a bag full of products and five-and-change from the forty dollars I gave her. She looks happy if not healthy.

“You’re a crazy cat-lady,” I say, “twenty-nine and already a crazy cat lady.”

“Think of when I’m older.”

“You’ll be building, like, duplexes for them in the back yard.”

“What makes you think I haven’t already?”

Back home she sits on the bathroom floor and lets me strip off her tee-shirt and skirt, wrap her in a bathrobe. She doesn’t seem sick, just exhausted and shamed. I wipe her make-up remover off and carefully apply moisturizer to her face. I repeat the process on myself. In the mirror on the door, I am momentarily disoriented, unsure which of us is which. Lexi looks at my reflection and I look at hers. The subtle dissimilarities between our faces, so obvious when we are face to face, disappear in the mirror. Lexi is shivering. I pull a sweatshirt over her head and lead her to bed and get in with her.

“You’d be better off without me,” she sniffles, “you’d be fine.”

When she is asleep I say aloud, “I wouldn’t be fine.”

3. Twins, age 25
Small One-Bedroom Apartment, Fort Green, Brooklyn

Lexi and I us are playing blackjack in Fort Green with our respective boyfriends, Tim and a guy who calls himself – ridiculously, embarrassingly – Mr. Bix.

We are using pills instead of money: Valiums are worth one unit, Codeine capsules are worth two, Vicodens are five and the thirteen remaining Percocets, large, oblong and white, are worth ten. There is a single tablet of morphine, Lexi’s contribution, whose value we all deem at twenty units. I have my eye on it. The four of us are languid, opiated. In the background an endless Tarkovsky film is playing, sometimes in color, sometimes in black and white.

“It’s a masterpiece,” explains Tim, the graduate student. “Tarkovsky made this movie with any film stock the Soviets made available to him. The black and white isn’t even intentional.”

In our state, the slow, eloquent shots and incrementally-unfolding plotline border on the mystical. Were I not so high, I might follow what appear to be a slow series of cynical but valuable epiphanies. I redouble my efforts to watch the film, until Lexi pops a Vicoden from her own stash into Tim’s mouth.

“You can’t keep distributing the proceeds, Lexi,” I say, “you’re fucking up the integrity of the game.”

“Don’t take sportsmanship lessons from her, Lex” says Tim. He smiles and rests his chin on his arms. His cigarette ash drops onto the floor. He is a big man who possesses, I must admit to myself, a certain craggy handsomeness. His pompadour is thinning at the temples: he’ll only be able to pull it off for a couple more years at most. He is nice to Lexi. This relieves me, but also makes me jealous. I am afraid that I am losing her.

The four of us are sitting on the floor around my coffee table. Lexi and I used to share it. It was her idea to move in with Tim, and though she lives mere blocks from me, and we work at the same vintage clothing shop, the separation causes an anxiety I can’t explain: I bite my fingernails bloody and take too many drugs. To show her loyalty, she matches me drug for drug. She always does everything I do, only more: she is a true believer in the wrong demiurge. The two of us are six or seven months away from alleys, needles, evictions. We have never looked more alike: skinny as hell, wearing one another’s clothes, cutting one another’s hair, doing our laundry haphazardly together, not really caring who ends up with what. These are the unspoken parameters of our new arrangement: drugs, laundry, similitude.

My curtains are beginning to glow in the pre-dawn: the color of a marginally healed bruise. The thought of dawn, the inception of a long, Lexi-less day, horrifies me. Mr. Bix, with his stupid name, has passed out against the couch, cards still held against his chest. He is a dark, brooding man: when he is awake, his intellect sparkles dangerously, pitilessly. I don’t want him to wake after Lexi leaves.

“Tim,” I say, my voice a little desperate, “As a career student, how are you going to support my sister in the lifestyle to which she is accustomed?”

“Oh, she’ll support me. She makes more than I will with a film degree,” he laughs, throwing an arm around her shoulder. “Hey,” he says, “you should come to school and make no money with me. Your looks and smarts: you’d clean up.”

“Going to school is working for the man,” I say.

“Yeah,” says Lexi, “that’s selling out. That’s what we were supposed to do.”

“Ah: academic parents. Say no more,” says Tim.

Lexi smiles at me. “Inter execrationes parentum crevimus,” she says. She rarely uses the Latin our father forced on us. I am touched almost beyond words, and find myself unable to speak to her directly.

“It has a double meaning,” I say to Tim, controlling my tears. “Execretiones means both ‘prayers’ and ‘curses’. Our parent’s prayers curse us.”

We sit in silence for a few minutes, until they excuse themselves.

I stand at the window watching Lexi and Tim walk through the morning toward the train. He hasn’t even left the Tarkovsky, in which there seems to be some kind of redemption to lend me meaning, if only for the night. The sky, a dazed-looking ochre, makes everything ache. Lexi walking away feels like flesh severing from bone. I take another pill and fall asleep on the couch next to Mr. Bix.

4. Twins, age 19
Studio Apartment, Williamsburg, Brooklyn

When we are nineteen, Lexi is mine. Lexi, wearing a little go-go dress from the Salvation Army: myself dressed in a very mod pants-suit and big bangly earrings. We have escaped home: we are on our own in the city. I have taken a Percocet just to get me through the day at the art bookstore, where my duties are so slim as to make the workday nearly unbearable. Lexi is getting ready for her waitressing job. She is smoking a joint with short, rapid drags.

“Do you want some?” She asks, holding it in front of me.

“The gateway drug? No way.”

We both giggle. She has an amazing smile, stretched over front teeth that overlap slightly.

She is suddenly serious. “The soup kitchen after work,” she says.

“Ah yes,” I say, “our noblesse oblige.”

“You make it sound stupid.”

“It’s not. Sorry.”

On the L train we sit next to one another.

“Well I knew a bad girl, lived on my block,” sings Lexi.

“I gave her my keys, I said you don’t have to knock,” I finish. “Stop singing this. I’m serious.”

“Never! All dolled up, got a waitress’ skirt,”

“Why don’t you come over, don’t you make my heart hurt.” My fingers tap out the rhythm against my thigh. I have a sudden memory of our father, grading papers in some hazily happy past, Lexi and I side by side on the carpet beneath his chair. Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier” plays in the background. He approximates the left hand of the keyboard alternately on the tops of our heads. We both nestle close, savoring his touch.

First I walk Lexi to her job, which is east of Tompkins Square Park. It is a dirty hole-in-the-wall diner with cheap food and mismatched chairs, tables and couches. I sit drinking coffee, watching the chubby owner yell over the phone. He claims to be French, but he speaks in what sounds like Arabic. After screaming he sits and quietly plays backgammon with his blonde jailbait girlfriend from Long Island who, though she can’t be more than 17, already has the posture of someone who is used to ducking hurled objects. I trust them. I like the owner’s incongruous tenderness toward her. I know he is not the one who has damaged her.

Lexi negotiates the tables with ease. She is adept at deflecting passes, conversing with heaped dishes on one arm, procuring free cups of coffee for broke customers when the boss isn’t looking. She flicks cockroaches off of tables unnoticed, using a greasy menu. Her hair is cut in a flattering A-line around her face, a style that hides her scar. She is thin and statuesque, her fingers long with round, unpainted nails. Her cheekbones are high and somehow tragic. Her posture, unlike mine, is flawless. I think she looks like a lesser character in a Greek myth, about to be ruined by the capriciousness of an angered and unjust god.

“Lexi,” I say. The owner looks up from his game, grins. His girlfriend gives a haggard little smile. The three of them will smoke pot during the dead periods, in the kitchen of the restaurant. Lexi comes over to my table. “I’ll pick you up when I get off,” I say.

“O.K.,” she says, “but remember the hats.”

“Yes, the hats. I’ll pick them up. Tonight?”

“Tomorrow. Tonight is the soup kitchen.”

Every year around Christmas she buys 100 wool hats on Delancey Street and hands them out to homeless people around the Bowery. They are not always grateful, so I always come with her, though altruism is not as hard-wired into me as it is into her.

“Lexi,” I say, “you’re like the patron saint of… something. The Bowery, maybe.”

She briefly takes my hand and gives me a smile that is shy and venerable.

5. Twins, age 13
Suburban Home, East Northport, New York

I drag Lexi through our father’s garden, one hand flailing in front of me. We are running away from home. Lexi is sobbing. In the dark, I stop, sit down right on the path, and rock Lexi back and forth. After the garden, there is a quarter mile of trees descending sharply down a hillside. Then there is the road.

“We’re going to leave. We’re going to get the fuck out of here,” I say to her, “does it hurt?”

“No.”
The air smells sweet and white subtropical flowers bob in front of us. They look like severed mouths, shrieking. I think of our father’s garden as a place where people stagger in various phases of calamity. Each year it blooms with the violence of a rut. Like many of my father’s beautiful things, it has become a lie.

I examine Lexi’s head in the fading light. The skin above her left ear is broken, filled with blood and fragments of plaster. I am afraid there is a crack in her skull. I am afraid there will be brain damage. Moments before, our father was wielding a high-quality replica of Virgil’s bust – that poor, benign, plaster poet with his round, dead eyes – and the blow was destined for my head. I am the customary, mutinous target of our father’s rage, and I know how to duck: I know how to run. But this time Lexi, her blonde hair aglow about her face, stepped in front of me and took the crack to the skull. The sound was thick and wet. I grabbed Lexi and dragged her from the house. In this garden of heartbreaking beauty, all I hear is the echo of Virgil connecting with Lexi’s bone.

I must think clearly. Where should we go? Before our parents divorced, our father was a man with an easy laugh. But our mother’s departure exposed vast reservoirs of anger. He grew bitter, then violent. A week of flowering bruises left us in foster care for four months, and we hated it. The anxiety of separation plagued us. And the reunion: the cool blue hours of reconciliation, our father contrite, brimming with love, Bach and Latin. He meant neither word nor blow. He meant, in his heart, the same well-balanced perfection we all mean.

I scan the garden. Terminus defunctus, in both directions.

“You shouldn’t have done that, Cassie. Someday he’ll kill you.”

“Non habemus illos hostes sed facimus,” I say.

“Don’t quote him.”

“We can leave. They won’t find us.” But I know this isn’t true and it’s obvious in my voice.

She stops crying suddenly. She says firmly, “now we have to go back.”

I look down. There is a quarter mile of trees to go before the road. “O.K., we’ll go back.” But I sit still a moment, holding Lexi’s small body in the faltering light. This failure is irredeemable. This failure, I know even then, will poison our lives like a virus, like a drug spreading in the body.

6. Twins, Age 34
Small One-Bedroom Apartment, East Village, Manhattan

Lexi looks at me, holding the New York Dolls LP. “I don’t need money,” she says, “I don’t need anything. I just wanted to stay here.” She still does not let her tears spill, but the lines around her mouth deepen. She sits on the couch, clutching the record. She smiles tremulously: “I could sleep on the couch?”

It is 4:10 by my watch. I need to be up soon. Lexi stretches on the couch, leaning on her arm, continuing to smile hopefully.

Here is another chance for indignation. Instead I say, “Lexi, you look like an Odalisque. Not Manet’s; she’s too slutty. Maybe Ingres. The record is a peacock fan.”

“I look like a prostitute?”

“No! Just… you look very coy.” My face flushes, but I continue, “It’s that position you’re lying in. You look like an innocent. About to be corrupted.”

“About to be?” And a real smile brightens her face. I feel an inexplicable rush of relief. She says, “I guess dad’s erudite ways afforded us something. We’re art-fluent.”

I walk over to the couch and sit down. She makes room for me.

“I did everything wrong,” I say, tapping my fingers against my leg, “I trusted you when I shouldn’t and I didn’t trust you when I should. I’m sorry.”

“Cass, enough. Enough, Cass.” Her voice is hoarse.

I touch the scar above her ear. She recoils, then relaxes and lets me explore it.

Lexi says, “Do you think we should have run away? Do you think things would be better?”

“No.” I am silent a moment. Then I say, “Shit. Will you stay here tonight?”

I suddenly feel overwhelmed, and I rest my head against her stomach. She lifts her hand to my head and begins timidly to stroke my hair, catching it behind my ears. “Thanks,” she whispers.

“I want to lie down,” I say, “I feel so tired.”

“Lie down. I’ll take care of you for awhile.”

She gets up and gathers our glasses. I lie down on the couch, staring up at the ceiling. Presently I hear the teapot boiling. I pick up the record and hold it in front of my face. The edges are worn out and tattered. Lexi walks in with mugs of tea.

“I can’t believe how long you’ve had that,” she says.

“I know. Like twenty years.”

“You know, I was thinking. I was thinking maybe this year we should do the hats.”

“Let’s do.”

I turn my head and look at her. She sits beside me on the couch, takes the record and hands me my tea. The apartment is so quiet, the dawn for once a mystery I look forward to. I know I will fall asleep soon, but before I do, I want to make sure to commit this scene to memory; for a moment I want everything to be exactly as it is.

Delly thought she was a cat person, even though she didn’t own any cats. She collected dozens of feline figurines, but whenever she went to the local animal shelter to possibly adopt a real cat, she always heard her mother’s voice, echoing from that afternoon when she was six years old and had stopped to pat a stray.

“Don’t touch that thing!” her mother shrieked. “It has fleas! And filth! And probably AIDS! Don’t you know that AIDS was brought over to the United States by cats?”

Delly, at six, was only barely aware of the United States as something she mumbled during the Pledge of Allegiance in school, and she had no idea what AIDS could be, except it sounded terrible. She’d wiped her fingers on her shirt and cried all the way to the closest restroom, where her mother soaked Delly’s hand and arm all the way up to her elbow in water so hot, it left her skin pink.

Much later, Delly knew what AIDS was and she knew monkeys carried it to the United States, though she wasn’t sure how the monkeys got here or how they transmitted the disease. Even so, as much as she loved cats, she just couldn’t bring herself to touch them. At the shelter, when the cats pressed themselves against the bars of their cages and rolled their green and blue and yellow eyes, Delly still swore she saw vermin and filth flying in black and grey flecks from their fur. Her figurines, though, could be dusted, and she did so, twice a week.

Her mother, still alive, gave her a new figurine twice a year, on her birthday and at Christmas, though she tsked at her every time, as if it was possible to catch AIDS from ceramic cats. And when she called on Saturdays, she always wanted to know if Delly was going out that night and with whom. Most of the time, Delly wasn’t. Her mother always wondered why. When there was a date, she always wondered why there wasn’t a second. Delly told her mother, “Oh, you know, Mama. He was just like all the others. After only One Thing.”

Which wasn’t true at all. It was Delly after the One Thing. Sometimes she got it, but usually only once with each man.

Delly knew she wasn’t that attractive. Her father refused to pay for braces when she was a teenager and so her buck teeth still protruded beneath her upper lip and pressed into her lower lip, creating two permanent red and moist indentations. She could never do anything with her hair, and so she didn’t do anything at all and it fell lank and lifeless down to her hips. Her eyes were crossed just a bit and sometimes she saw double. And she was heavy, always shopping in Lane Bryant and Torrid for the latest and sexiest wear for a size 28 woman.

Despite the teeth, the hair, the eyes and the weight, she felt that if she wore just the right clothes, a man would want her to strip as fast as possible. And then he would stay to watch her get dressed again and undressed and dressed and undressed until suddenly, twenty-five years flew by and it was time to celebrate their silver anniversary. Twenty-five years of dressing and undressing and never sleeping alone.

But all of the men she dated were fast, lasting barely twenty-five minutes in her bed, let alone twenty-five years. They kissed her briefly on the teeth, gave her hair and breasts an obligatory stroke’n’grope, found their way between her legs and came. Then they left, before she even had a chance to offer them the frostbitten wine she kept constantly cooling in the refrigerator.

Most of the men came from the Internet. Delly was great at cybersex, possessing fast and talented fingers on the keyboard. So by the time she met the latest man, he was usually primed and ready to go. And come. And leave.

But most Saturday nights, she was alone. And even when she wasn’t, she still slept by herself in her full-sized bed.

One evening, as she sat on the front step of her apartment building with her cell phone and her mother’s voice in her ear, a large dog stepped out from behind the garbage dumpster across the street. He stood still for a moment, caught in the setting sun, and his gray and white fur seemed to catch fire. His muzzle lifted to the sky, one leg raised in a point in her direction, he seemed as grand and ceramic as her cats, but then he lowered his nose and began to sniff. As he smelled the curb, the fallen garbage, the fire hydrant, he kept looking up at her and his eyes flashed alternately black and red. He stared right at her as he lifted his leg and blasted a heady stream of iridescent urine on the only tree, a skinny thing with just a few brown leaves. Then he started crossing the street. Delly couldn’t see a collar.

“Hey, Mama?” Delly asked. “What do you think of dogs? Are they vermin too?”
“Oh, no,” her mother said. “Dogs are regal. Majestic. Honorable. Think of Rin Tin Tin, Lassie, or Benji. Dogs save people. They didn’t bring diseases to our country.”

The dog sat next to her. His tongue hung out of one side of his mouth, giving him a cheerful and rakish appearance. Delly felt his hot breath against her knee.

When her mother finally said goodbye, Delly reached out tentatively to stroke the dog’s head. “Hello, Mister,” she said. He closed his eyes against her touch, then stood and walked down the street. Delly watched him go. Before she went back upstairs for an evening of television and dusting her cats, she reached into her pocket, pulled out her favorite snack, a Slim Jim, unwrapped it, and left it at the bottom of the stairs. When she came back down at nine o’clock, just to peek out, it was gone.

****

She began to leave a Slim Jim at the base of the stairs every morning before work, and again in the evening, at around seven o’clock. They always disappeared and she assumed the dog was eating them. Sometimes she saw him. He stood a few feet away and wagged his tail, a long slow sweep that held grace and power. Once, she held out the Slim Jim to him directly, but he just lowered his head and rolled his eyes coyly up at her. Another time, when she came down at nine o’clock to peek out the front door, he was sitting at the base of the steps like he was watching for her. The Slim Jim stuck like a cigar out of his mouth. He lolled his tongue around it, then drew it in and chewed slowly. He watched her the whole time, then licked his muzzle and trotted away, his tail swaying.

On a Saturday when Delly actually had a date, she wasn’t home at seven and when she and Brent came back to her place at ten, the dog was sitting on the bottom step. Delly felt guilty, but she didn’t want to say anything in front of her date and she didn’t have a Slim Jim in her purse. So as she passed the dog, she ducked her head and smiled secretly at him. She took Brent quickly into her bed. She tried to concentrate, but she kept seeing the dog, waiting downstairs for his snack. She thought of the way he looked at her when he ate his Slim Jim, a look of guarded gratitude and something else she couldn’t quite put her finger on. A strength of some sort. A directness.

Brent, she noticed when he rose above her, kept his eyes closed. Although she invited him to stay afterward, even mentioning the chilled-for-months wine, he left, mumbling something about having an early morning church service and he’d call her. After the door closed, she lay there for a while. Usually, this was the time she used to masturbate, since the men were all so fast. She reached into her drawer for a vibrator, but then just rested it on her belly. She was distracted.

Pulling on her robe, she tucked a Slim Jim in her pocket and went downstairs. The dog was lying on the sidewalk in front of the building. When she came out, he rose quickly and wagged his tail.

At that time of night, no one else was around, and so Delly wrapped her robe more tightly and sat on the bottom step. Peeling away the cellophane, she put the meat stick down on the sidewalk. “Here you go, Mister,” she said. When he lowered his head to eat, she touched his back, just running her fingertips down his spine. His tail moved slowly, beating against her knees. When he was done, he sat down and looked at her.

“Don’t you have an owner?” Tentatively, she ran her hands over his neck. His ruff was smooth, there were no breaks where a recently lost collar could have nestled.

He moved suddenly, pushing his head between her legs and pressing his forehead against her stomach. His nose, pointed down, stopped just above her crotch, and Delly attempted to close her knees, thinking he could smell the sex she’d just had. But he didn’t seem to want to move. She stroked him a few more times and he heaved a huge sigh. When he did, she felt his ribs against her thighs.

“All right then,” she said. “You might as well come up. Tomorrow, I’ll get you something besides Slim Jims.”

She placed a bowl of water for him in the kitchen, which he drank rapidly, and when she dug through her refrigerator for leftovers, he ate those too. Then, despite the late hour, she gave him a bath, just in case. She used her own shampoo and when she was done, he smelled like a fresh field.

That night, he slept at the foot of her bed. From time to time, he rested his head on her ankle.

****

She kept calling him Mister because it seemed to fit, and she bought him a black leather collar with shiny silver studs shaped like dog bones. She got a leash too and at night after work, they walked around the block together. He was a very neat dog, never messing up her apartment. She left the television on for him during the day and when she came home, he was on her recliner, watching Oprah.

When Delly told her mother about Mister, she had to come over and meet him. “Oh,” she said, running her hands through his fur. “Oh, he’s beautiful, Delly. He looks like Rin Tin Tin and Lassie all rolled together.” She brought him gifts, rubber squeaky toys and bones and brightly colored bone-shaped biscuits. She brought him a bed too, a soft sheepskin one with a brown leopard print, but Mister preferred to sleep in Delly’s bed at night, the recliner during the day.

As the nights went by, he slowly moved up from the foot of the bed, until he stretched full-length next to her, his head on his own pillow. Delly sometimes woke up pressed against him, her arm thrown over his filled-out ribcage. Other times, she woke with her back to him, his muzzle buried in her hair.

As Delly grew used to their walks, they went farther and farther, venturing into parts of her own neighborhood that Delly only glanced at as she drove through. She bought herself some sneakers and several pairs of drawstring pants. Her old clothes grew looser as the walks grew longer.

One night as they passed a bar, a man stopped in front of them. “Nice dog,” he said.

When he reached out to pat Mister’s head, Mister growled deep in his throat. He was leaning against Delly’s legs and Delly felt the vibration.

The man told her that he watched them walk by several times that week and would she like to stop for a drink? It was a Saturday night and Delly said sure, she’d just run back to put the dog in her apartment. When she got there, she took off the drawstring pants and threw on some of her Torrid clothes. Fitting more loosely now, the scoop neckline gapped and displayed even more rolling flesh than usual. She nodded her approval, then turned the television on for Mister.

She stayed at the bar for about two hours. The man who invited her eventually moved on, but she struck up conversation with another and then came home with a third. When she brought him to bed, she looked over his bare shoulder when she heard a deep whine. Mister, hackles raised, stood next to bed. She tried to wave him away, but he stayed, his whine going up and down several scales. The man hesitated for a moment, looking nervously at the dog, but when Delly said it would be okay, he got down to business, finished quickly, kissed her, said no to the wine, and left.

Delly lay there, stared at the ceiling, and used her vibrator. She wasn’t sure when Mister crawled on the bed, but suddenly, he was there and humping her leg. She pushed him away and he panted while she finished. Then she curled against him and they went to sleep.

****

She picked up other men. From the Internet, from bars, once from a grocery store. Each left. Delly began to cry afterward while she used her vibrator. Her clothes continued to fall loose and so she had to keep buying more and she was able to leave Lane Bryant and Torrid behind to shop in stores that carried XL’s and size 18’s. She had her hair cut and she wore it in a loose wave against her cheek. There wasn’t anything she could do about her teeth or her eyes, but she began practicing lowering her upper lip, to make her teeth look less big, and she also began to tilt her head in a way that she felt made her eyes look straighter.

But still the men left.

Mister kept standing next to the bed, whining. He never sat nor lay down. As soon as the men left, he scrambled up next to her and he licked her tears away as she used the vibrator. He kept trying to hump her leg and eventually, she just gave in, pushing him away when she was done. It was too hard to hold him off while she brought herself to orgasm; he was a big dog. He always lay close to her afterwards and his warmth and steady breathing made her feel better.

Then one night, he sat up while she was using the vibrator. He leaned forward and took a sniff and Delly jumped and pushed his head away. But then he licked the vibrator and his tongue traveled down to her. And he did it again.

Delly felt a jolt and she was stunned. She reached down and touched his head and he began to lick steadily. She removed the vibrator and opened her legs further. She stopped thinking. When she came, his steady rhythm maddening, never increasing, never slowing, the same lollop-lollop she heard him use at the water bowl, her mind splintered and scattered momentarily throughout the room.

Rolling away, gasping, she pressed her belly and her still throbbing crotch to the sheet. She felt the bed shift, then Mister’s nose pressed against her rear. He sniffed, then snorted. Both of his front legs appeared on either side of her neck, and he buried his muzzle in her hair. She knew what was going on before she felt his flanks beating against her.

She lay there for a minute, feeling his breath, feeling his heat. She was still damp. He wasn’t going anywhere. And every night, when she came home, he bounded to the door to meet her, his eyes overjoyed, his tail waving so strongly, she no longer had her cat figurines at tail-height in her apartment. His happiness sometimes led to destruction.

Slowly, she raised her hips until she was on her knees. She kept her upper body pressed against the bed. When she felt him enter her, she shuddered. He began to groan and growl. She learned that when she tired, she had only to roll onto her back and he would lick her refreshed. When she presented her hips, he mounted her again.

Eventually, Delly climbed out of bed and staggered to the kitchen. Ignoring her crystal wine glasses, saved especially for this occasion, she dumped the water out of Mister’s plastic dish and filled it with the refrigerated wine. They drank from it together, she on all fours, Mister’s tail stroking her bare thigh.

When they went to sleep that night, Delly’s knee knocked her vibrator off the bed and she heard it roll under the bedside table. She left it there.

****

Eventually, Delly’s mother stopped asking her about her lack of Saturday night dates. She laughed when Delly replaced her mailbox sign with “Mister and Mrs. Delilah Markham.” When her mother died, Delly took her inheritance and bought a nice house with a large yard out in the country. When the moving men came for her furniture, she found the old vibrator, still on the floor where the bedside table used to be. She left it for the future occupants. She bought a king-size bed and six lit curio cabinets for her cat figurines. She threw out the dog bed that Mister never used. She bought a new size 10 wardrobe and had oral surgery to fix her teeth. And she turned down men right and left. Yet, she never ever slept alone again.

Tommy met her at a party through a mutual friend, Edgar, who had once almost burned down the fraternity house by spurting a mouthful of vodka at a raised match. Edgar was married now and had a job organizing an annual wine festival, and the parties he threw were lame, the type where everyone sat in the living room, legs crossed, chatting quietly through ambient music. But they were parties, so Tommy went. He stayed in the kitchen with the liquor and offered to mix drinks. When people accepted, he did the whole routine—twirled the glass, raised the bottle to make the pour long and precise, slammed and popped the shaker, garnished the rim. One man he didn’t know reached for his wallet. Tommy had to stop him. After the man left, Tommy opened a fresh beer and carried it to the porch, where he lit a cigarette and watched the Oregon drizzle turn the lawn muddy.

A woman joined him. She wore a black dress that ended just above powerful-looking calves and held a brimming wineglass away from her body, watching it as she moved. She paused to lower her lips to the glass, then looked at him and asked if she could bum a cigarette and smiled. Her name was Penelope. She was a social worker but volunteered at Edgar’s festival to get free wine, she said. Tommy mentioned that he had recently been promoted to manager at his restaurant. Then they talked about a movie they had both found disappointing. When he flicked his butt into the yard, she retrieved it and ran both butts under the tap and tossed them in the trash.

Tommy followed her to the living room. She kept refilling her wine glass and talked exhaustively about her ex-boyfriend. Twice she omitted the “ex” without seeming to notice. Eventually she pointed him out: “The sullen one by the stairs,” she said.

He didn’t look sullen to Tommy. He was a little man, early thirties maybe, dressed in black slacks and a black button-down, holding a martini glass that Tommy had filled several times. He stood with a redhead, smiling and nodding as she talked.

“Looks like he’s doing okay to me,” Tommy said.

He and Penelope went outside to smoke again. They ended up kissing and groping and afterward went to his apartment instead of returning to the party.

The dining room was full, the wait time about an hour, he guessed. The murmur of conversation didn’t quite cover the tinkling piano fed in by speakers. Servers bustled, legs scissoring, upper bodies motionless to make them look calm. Whenever they pushed open the kitchen door they released a burst of clattering plates and shouting. Then the door swung closed and muffled the noise.

In the kitchen Tommy found Rick holding the steel salad fridge like a pinball machine and thrusting his big belly at it. The black stubble grew too high on his cheeks, almost to his eyes. His face was shiny with sweat and grease. He wore a chef’s hat that looked like a white beret, and his apron was streaked brown with meat-juice.

“Keep it down back here,” Tommy yelled over the rumbling dishwasher and industrial ventilation and laughter.

“Get out of my kitchen,” Rick yelled back at Tommy. “Go sniff ass with the customers.” He took off his hat and shooed him with it, revealing a cleanly shorn scalp.

Tommy washed his hands to show he wasn’t obeying Rick before he went to the dining room, where wall sconces glowed against burnished mahogany and votive candles flickered gently on the tables. He approached a white-haired couple hunched over their split order. He clasped his hands and looked at the torn meat. “How are you folks enjoying the rib eye?” he said.

Tommy stood at his bathroom mirror, smiling. Then he dropped the smile and scrutinized the corners of his eyes and was pleased to find the skin smooth. He lifted his chin and among the shaving cream flecks saw a spot of blood on his voicebox. He pressed toilet paper there and with his other hand lifted his bangs to inspect his hairline. His forehead seemed to have sprouted little bulbs of bare skin. He wondered if this was new or something he’d never noticed before, then decided he just hadn’t noticed. He let his eyes drop to the tightly packed muscle of his upper arm, where blue veins traversed the skin. He was proud of his body because it compensated for a face that belonged to some underground creature, beady black eyes too close together, nose long and pointy, lips curled in. He scraped his bangs down and rinsed the shaving cream, then put on his shirt and tie and nametag.

Penelope sat at the kitchen table over the newspaper. Steam tendrils untangled above the mug she gripped. It was Saturday afternoon. They’d stayed in bed until two, as they had the last Saturday and Sunday.

“Time to go,” Tommy said.

Her eyes kept scanning the print. “I just made tea.”

Tommy took down a travel mug and set it on her newspaper. “I have to go to work.”

“Go then. I want to drink my tea and take a shower.”

He stood there a moment. Usually his relationships ended at this point, before they could become relationships. He dated infrequently enough to appreciate them a week or two, but he generally didn’t like the women he dated, probably because they didn’t like him. Penelope was different, though. Their conversations were effortless, and he found himself revealing experiences and feelings he had never admitted before—his secret distaste for casual sex, his fear that he would never marry. Also, she had a distanced quality he found irresistible. In public she always brushed his hand away when he touched her elbow or back, and after they had sex she sometimes went home, which he’d wanted from other women, but not from her. He was happy to wake to her groans and grins, her hand reaching between his legs. Plus, he would turn twenty-six soon, just before the new year, and the longest he had been with anyone was two months, the spring he had dropped out of college. It might be time to make a run at that record.

He put the travel mug back in the cupboard. “Make sure to lock the door when you leave,” he told her. “And you can make the bed if you want.”

When he got home at midnight the door was unlocked, the bed unmade. He decided he wouldn’t call, but then started to miss her and called anyway.

The next weekend she gave him a wallet photo, and he looked at it in the restaurant’s bathroom because there was nothing to read. She wore a black bikini top and grinned enormously between silver hoop earrings, the ocean glittering in the background. He thought she looked like a mother who hadn’t borne her children yet, though he wasn’t sure what gave him that impression. She was almost thirty, but fit, built like a gymnast, short and muscular from rock-climbing at the gym. She wore fashionable clothes that revealed her figure. She drank and smoked like he did. But there was something about her—maybe the Irish roundness of her face, or maybe her cautious makeup, or maybe her hair’s natural sandy color; maybe it was her gracious smile, or her occasional unsettling sternness; maybe it was just her sweetness, a natural disposition that made him picture floral aprons and oven mitts. Whatever it was, when he looked at the photo he thought of some stranger saying, “This is what I looked like before the twins,” and smiling nostalgically, maybe with regret. He wasn’t sure if he liked this quality or not. His attraction to her had a small current of disgust running along its edge.

Someone came into the bathroom. “Tommy?” Through the crack in the paneling Tommy saw a server’s long black apron.

“I’m busy,” he said.

“The POS system froze. Nobody can punch in orders.”

Tommy put away the photo and flushed. He washed his hands, then wiped down the sink and mirror with paper towels. All the servers were huddled by the POS terminal, waiting. They watched with jittery, desperate eyes as he looked things over. Finally he flipped the power switch off, then back on, and became a hero.

Penelope’s cell phone buzzed. They were cuddled up in his bed in the late afternoon, looking at each other dreamily, their stomachs sticky with sweat. She fished the phone from her purse, looked at it, smiled, then put it away and draped herself over him again. A few moments later she asked, “How many people have you slept with?”

He breathed through his nose, enjoying her sour musky odor. It was a smell he recognized from the locker room and usually hated. “Let’s not talk about that,” he said, then watched her eyes drift away and worried his response might make him sound promiscuous. “A number you’d like,” he said. “A nice medium number.” He looked at the translucent fuzz along her jaw, the freckles running the slopes of her nose. “How many guys—” he started to ask. “No, don’t tell me.” He traced the contours of her back. The heater clicked off. He closed his eyes and listened to the drumming rain. “Okay, how many?”

“You’re my twentieth.”

He kept his breathing normal, made his hand continue moving. A blackhead grazed his fingertips like a grain of sand, and he resisted the impulse to pick at it.

“That’s a good number, right?” Penelope said. “I know people whose number is a lot higher.”

“It’s a good number.” He scooted away so he could rest on his stomach.

She nuzzled him, stroked his calf with her instep. “What’s your number?”

“About twenty,” he lied. It was seven.

He was running on a treadmill at the gym later that week. A woman asked him, “Are you going to be much longer?” She had a low voice and severe Slavic features, a woman who would look good in bright red lipstick and a fur coat, he thought. She wore running shorts and a ratty tank top. He had noticed her kicking ass on the treadmill before, braid bouncing with her long strides. She intimidated and excited him.

“I think I’m signed up until noon,” Tommy said through labored breath. His pecs bounced beneath his T-shirt, which made him feel both sexy and silly, like David Hasselhoff.

“On this treadmill?” she asked.

He paused the machine. They went to check the sheet. She put a finger on the slot and said, “I guess I signed up for the wrong time.”

He looked at the name she was pointing to, then at her nubby fingernail. “Tell you what, Savannah. You let me take you for coffee, and I’ll let you have the treadmill.”

Her harsh features softened, and Tommy shed the feeling of inadequacy he’d been carrying all week.

It was late, but he couldn’t do the books until the last customer had cashed out. When the knock came, he paused the computer game and opened the office door. Rebecca stood there untying her apron, her face incredulous. She handed him a tab. “The guy at twenty-three won’t pay.”

The man was alone, the only customer left. He was slender, maybe forty, dressed in jeans and a grubby sweater, clean shaven, hair slicked into a ducktail. He put on an expression of warmth and challenge as Tommy approached.

“Hi, there.” Tommy offered his hand, and the man took it. “How was your dinner tonight?”

“Top-notch,” the man said.

“And how was the service?”

“No complaints in that department.”

“Was there some trouble with the check?”

The trouble was, he couldn’t pay. Didn’t have a dime on him. Didn’t have a credit card or check, didn’t even have a driver’s license to offer as collateral. “Payment is impossible,” he said, and gave a smirk.

Tommy understood it was a scam, but he didn’t know what to do except kick the man out. He considered having him work off the debt washing dishes, but it would take an entire shift, and you didn’t want someone like this in the kitchen. He looked toward the hostess stand and saw Rebecca slumped in a booth, tugging her ponytail loose, and he thought about this man accepting her service and kindness, making Rick keep the grill on, and here he was smirking, proud that he was a thief.

“Sir,” Tommy said, straightening his spine, “if you can’t arrange payment, I’ll have to call the police.” He felt emboldened by his responsibility, the way he could recognize a problem and tackle it. “Would you like to use our phone?”

The man put on a look of dignity. “No thank you.”

He had a busboy keep an eye on the man until blue and red lights pulsed outside, but the man sat there calmly, back straight, hands in his lap, as though nothing was out of the ordinary. A woman officer came in looking burdened by her gun belt. Tommy explained the situation. She led the man to the car, then came back to ask Tommy some questions.

Afterward he stood at the window watching the taillights recede.

“The fucker,” Rick said. “Probably pulled that scam all over town.”

But it had occurred to Tommy that maybe the guy really couldn’t pay. Maybe he was desperate. Maybe he hadn’t eaten in days and decided to eat. He mentioned these possibilities to Rick.

“That guy’s no bum,” Rick said.

Tommy stood there looking out the window. He knew he was being naïve but couldn’t help feeling guilty. The rain made diagonal zags under the streetlamp and textured the parking lot puddles.

“Okay, so let’s say you’re right,” Rick said. “Let’s say he needed to eat. Fine. He ate. Now he has to pay the price. You had a decision to make. If that disappoints him, sorry, he can deal with it. That’s what adults do, Tommy.”

Tommy didn’t know if he was talking about making decisions or dealing with disappointments. When he glanced over, Rick was rubbing his eyes with meaty, grease-stained fingers.

In a dream that night, he glanced in the bathroom mirror and saw that his hairline had receded halfway across his skull. The remaining hair was patchy like crabgrass and came loose when he touched it. He tried to remain calm. Oh well, he told himself. At least it hadn’t happened sooner.

He felt a rush of panic when he woke, then relief. He knew he’d been lying to himself about his hairline and resolved to look into treatments. Penelope was way across the bed. He crossed the cool space and entered her warm hollow beneath the covers and huddled against her backside. At his touch she murmured affectionately. Her body softened. He slipped a knee between her thighs, not to open them but to become entangled with her. He was lucky to have met her while he still had hair, he thought, and resolved to tear up Savannah’s phone number.

By morning he had forgotten this resolution, but he had forgotten Savannah, too.

The next day he decided to surprise Penelope at work. He was sitting on the couch in sweatpants and slippers, his hair going all directions. He hadn’t done anything all day but watch TV and drink Dr. Pepper. He put on sneakers and a baseball cap but didn’t shower or shave, and at the social services office the fat black woman behind the desk asked if Penelope was his caseworker. Tommy pointed his bouquet of roses at her and asked, “What does it look like?”

She told him that during business hours Penelope could meet only with cases. It was five minutes till five. Tommy scowled and called Penelope with his cell phone, watching the expanse of cubicles behind the front desk. Her head rose above a partition near the back. She smiled and took the phone from her ear and came over. She wore gray slacks, a black button-down shirt, her hair in a bun. She looked like she belonged on Wall Street.

“I tried,” the fat woman told Penelope.

“It’s okay. This one’s current.”

Tommy didn’t know what to make of that, but he didn’t like it. When he gave her the flowers, she sloped her eyebrows like when she saw cute puppies. They kissed, and Tommy saw the fat woman watching and felt a tingle of happiness and pride.

His family was sitting down to Thanksgiving dinner, the air thick with food smells, tall candlesticks burning above the china and crystal and steaming dishes. Tommy displayed the wine label for his mother and father, then moved around the table and displayed it for his younger brother Trevor, who had brought a stunning blonde girlfriend from Arizona, where he studied architecture.

“Are you twenty-one?” Tommy asked the girlfriend.

“I practically am.”

Trevor tugged his tie loose. “Just pour already.”

Tommy opened the bottle and poured a taste for the girlfriend. She frowned at the puddle of wine. “Can I have more?”

“You’re supposed to taste it,” Tommy said.

“Would you just pour the goddamn wine?” Trevor said.

“Easy,” their father said. “I’m sure it’s fine, Tommy. Go ahead and pour.”

Tommy moved around the table, sloshing wine casually into each glass, embarrassment and anger vibrating in his chest. Purple droplets leapt over the rims and stained the white tablecloth. No one said anything. He poured for himself last, then sat, and they began to serve themselves.

“You don’t have to open bottles at work anymore, I hope,” his mother said, scooping sweet potatoes.

“Never. But it’s one of those things you miss doing. Cutting lemons, too. I always liked cutting lemons.”

“And how’s the manager job?” his father asked.

“Oh it’s great.” Tommy swirled his wine and sniffed it, detected chocolate and oak, maybe a hint of asparagus. “Lots of problem-solving, lots of responsibility. But I enjoy that.”

“My boy,” his father said. He had white hair, a red round face, a fleshy neck that sagged over his tightened collar. His expression was different than when Tommy had been in high school, earning C’s and getting suspended for going to dances drunk or high. Tommy had been telling himself for years that he didn’t care what his parents thought, but he liked this new expression.

“I have a new girlfriend, too,” he said. “We’re getting pretty serious.”

Penelope showed up two hours late. “Let’s take your car,” she said.

She buckled her seatbelt while he backed down the driveway. She still wore her work clothes, which made her look professional and made Tommy feel like a bum in his jeans and T-shirt. They were going to eat sushi. Tommy didn’t like sushi, but he liked the idea of making a sacrifice for Penelope.

“Why’d you have your phone turned off?” he asked.

“It’s out of batteries.”

“What were you doing?”

She looked out the window. She ran her hands through her hair and sighed. “So did I tell you I’m getting sued?”

“Sued? By who?”

“This woman whose son we took into care, based on my decision. I had to explain to her that it’s dangerous to leave a six-year-old alone in the house for an extended period of time. How long, we don’t know, I said, because you won’t be straight with us. But long enough for him to get scared and call nine-one-one. So the woman says she’s going to talk to a lawyer. This is fucked up, she says. And I tell her, yeah, it is fucked up to leave a six-year-old all alone.”

He could tell by her voice that she was on the verge of tears, so he pulled into a gravel parking lot and turned off the engine. It was dark. He put his arms around her, kissed her temple, smelled lavender shampoo. “Sounds like you were doing your job.”

“We’re trying to help people.” Her breathing went choppy. Her chest twitched. “We don’t want to break up families,” she said, her voice an octave higher.

Tommy tried to comfort her, but it felt significant to have her in his arms, crying. Her vulnerability touched him.

“Is that why you were late?”

“Why am I crying?” she said suddenly. “What the hell is wrong with me?”

“Nothing,” he said happily. “Shh.”

He called Edgar early that Saturday and said he had tickets to the Ducks game, then bought tickets from a scalper outside the stadium. They were expensive because it was last game of the season. Edgar wore a yellow jersey over a yellow sweater and had a yellow rain poncho folded on his arm. He asked, “Why’d you tell me you had tickets?”

“So Penelope would let me go.” Penelope didn’t care if he went, but he wanted Edgar to understand the level of domesticity they had reached.

The stadium tunnels were made of thick concrete slabs, and there was an overwhelming smell of popcorn. Tommy took a flask from his sock, uncapped it, swigged, then offered it to Edgar. It was ten o’clock in the morning. Edgar frowned.

“I knew this would happen after you got married,” Tommy said. “Remember when we dumped beer on our heads during the barn dance photo?”

“Just let me get some coffee first.”

They bought coffee and carried it to their seats and dumped in the whiskey. Tommy had another flask in his left sock and another in his coat pocket. He didn’t understand football or care about the game. Edgar kept telling him about players and rankings. It was cold. The sky looked low and dark and deeply textured.

“You and Carol,” Tommy said after kickoff, “you fart around each other, right?”

Edgar kept his eyes on the game but grinned. “Sometimes I hold her head under the covers.”
“How do you go from not-farting to farting? How’s that happen?”

“You forget you’re not supposed to, then one day you just fart.”

“How long does that take?”

Edgar stood suddenly and cheered. So did the rest of the crowd. Tommy was trapped in a cave of yellow torsos. When it was over, Edgar sat down and said, “Carol farted first, actually. She let one rip while I was tickling her, and she got so embarrassed she almost cried. This was pretty early on. After that I felt like I had to start farting.”

Tommy kept drinking and at halftime called the restaurant to say he was sick. A prep cook answered the phone, and Tommy realized he didn’t know who to ask for, because he himself was the manager.

When he received the Rogaine package in the mail he felt foolish and skeptical but took it to the bathroom immediately and massaged the foam into his scalp like the instructions said.

Penelope came over a few hours later and pressed him against the wall before he could close the door. Outside the rain came down in sheets and made a roaring noise. She gyrated her hips and flicked her tongue into his mouth and lifted his T-shirt over his head.

“Will you still like me if I go bald?” Tommy asked.

She ran her hand over his stomach and chest. “I like this body.”

He decided not to feel belittled. He was glad she liked his body because it made all that time in the gym worthwhile. He thought about how all these years, without even knowing it, he’d been going to the gym for her.

At first he was startled to see Savannah come into the restaurant, she and her friend both wearing high-heels with pointed toes, wool overcoats, the shoulders matted with sleet. Then he decided there was no reason to feel uncomfortable. They stowed sodden Christmas shopping bags under the table and looked at their menus with serious faces. He waited until they had ordered, then brought over an expensive shiraz.

“On the house,” he said, cutting the foil with a borrowed wine key. “Robust blackberry profile, hint of vanilla. Goes great with everything but salmon.”

Savannah’s smile went cold with recognition. “You’re that guy from the treadmill.”

“Tom,” he said, offering his hand, which she didn’t take.

“When you ask a girl out, Tom—” she spit his name like a cherry pit—“you should take her out afterwards.”

“I meant to, but things started getting serious with my girlfriend.”

Savannah stood, gathered her bags, and walked out.

“She can get kind of intense,” the friend said. She had a chubby face she tried to modify with strategic makeup. She gave him a meek smile and stood. “She’d probably go out with you still.”

“That stuff about the girlfriend is true,” Tommy said. “I think I love her.”

“Can we still have the wine?”

He handed it over.

The rice-cooker bubbled and hissed while Tommy sautéed chicken in white wine, butter, lemon juice, garlic and capers—a recipe Rick had detailed for him. It smelled tangy and successful. He jostled the pan to make it sizzle. The gray windows were steamy.

“My parents want to take us to dinner next week for my birthday,” he said.

Penelope was cutting carrots. The knife made a tearing sound, then a thwack.

“I’ve never brought a girl home before,” he said. “They’re going to love you. They’ll shower you with affection.”

The cutting noise continued a moment, then stopped, and the knife clattered on the counter. He turned and saw Penelope contemplating him, her arms folded. “I don’t know if I’m ready for that,” she said.

“Why not?”

She shrugged and looked down. “It could put a lot of pressure on us.”

Tommy crossed the kitchen to hug her. “We can handle pressure.” He rested his chin on her forehead, ran his hands down her long back. “You’re important in my life, Penelope. I think I’m falling in love with you.”

Penelope kept her hands at her sides.

“I said I think I’m—”

She pulled away. Her neck and cheeks were splotchy like when his beard stubble irritated her skin. She gripped his biceps. “Don’t be ridiculous, Tommy. It’s been—what? Three months?”

“Three and a half. Doesn’t it seem longer?”

“You don’t fall in love in three months.” She looked down. Her eyelashes were suddenly wet. “That’s not love.”

“Hey.” He embraced her, kissed her forehead. “Don’t cry. I’m sorry. You don’t have to meet my parents.”

But he knew what he felt. He’d never been in love before, and now he was.

His fingers were frantic on the keyboard. He had already beaten a long-standing high score, and now the Tetris pieces came rocketing down. He reacted instinctively. He was serene, unthinking, Zen-like. Someone knocked on the door. He maneuvered several pieces more, then paused the game.

“There’s a guy here who wants to see you,” the hostess told him.

“Is it a vendor?”

“He just said he needed to see you.”

Tommy rubbed the digital haze from his eyes. He stood, waited for the head rush to subside, then made his way through the bar. The clamor was pleasant and refreshing—the jumble of voices, the tinkling piano, the sound of forks touching porcelain. He smelled a blend of special-occasion aftershaves and perfumes and the sweet scent of liquor. The man beside the hostess stand looked delicate in his slacks and dress shirt. He had slight shoulders and was several inches shorter than Tommy. “Mr. Upshaw?” he asked, looking Tommy in the eye.

Tommy shook his hand. “Call me Tom. What can I do for you?”

The man glanced at the crowd waiting for tables. “Can we talk in private?”

“About what? I’ve got a busy restaurant here, sir.”

“I’m Penelope’s boyfriend.”

Tommy felt his smile go stiff. He recognized him now—the tanned face that didn’t seem to need a razor except at the chin, flaxen hair disheveled meticulously above a confident square forehead.

They were still shaking hands. “Her ex-boyfriend?”

“Her boyfriend,” the man insisted.

“I think you’re confused.”

The man shook his head in a disappointed way that made Tommy believe him. He released Tommy’s hand. “Listen, Penelope’s been going through some difficulties lately, but we’re going to try to move past it now, if we can. I know she’s kept you in the dark about all this. But she can’t see you anymore.”

Tommy puffed out his chest. “Says who?”

“Well, Penelope.”

Tommy heard himself yelling. He didn’t know what he was saying, but the little man looked frightened, his eyes like nickels beneath the trendy hairdo, which pleased Tommy. He noticed customers turning, understood that the restaurant had gone silent except for the elegant piano music, but he couldn’t stop himself, not until Rick came charging from the kitchen and bear-hugged him. Tommy was grateful for the restraint because it suggested he was about to do something crazy. He pretended to struggle. He didn’t really want to fight; he just felt confused, and deceived. Rick lifted him off his feet and carried him to the office and put him in the desk chair. He whistled and made a gesture, and a moment later there was a beer on the desk. Tommy felt too nervous to drink, but Rick kept standing there, so he took up the beer and sipped it. It was cold and tasted good.

“We’ll bring more,” Rick said. He tapped the computer screen. “Look at some porn or something.” He left, closing the door gently.

Tommy drank the beer, stunned by the scene he had made and a little amused. He worked his mind over the new information carefully, like a prep cook thumbing a blade, and each time it snagged on the way the little man had shaken his head, as if in resignation. He was angry about so many things he didn’t know where to begin, except with the possibility that it wasn’t true, and he tried making that argument, though he saw all the evidence against it now. Then he tried to inflate his injury, imagining the ways he’d been used, but he couldn’t quite believe in them. He wanted to call Penelope but was afraid to. He gulped the beer and waited for Rick to bring another, which Rick did. Wordlessly, breathing heavily, he set down a fresh pint and removed the empty one. Tommy felt great tenderness for him.

When he resumed the Tetris game, the pieces fell like lightning. They stacked up before he could react.

The next morning he passed the fat black woman and marched down the aisle. He looked into several cubicles but couldn’t find Penelope’s, so he returned to the front desk for directions, which the fat woman happily provided.

Penelope was on the phone. She held a finger at him and continued the conversation for several minutes, cradling the phone against her shoulder and scribbling notes. Tommy sat and watched her. He smiled. He couldn’t help it. When she finally hung up, he said, “Guess who came into the restaurant last night.” She kept her hand on the phone and stared at it and didn’t say anything, and Tommy felt his heart tumbling from a great height. “Penelope?”

Her face twisted. She covered it with her hands. “I’m sorry.”

He watched her cry. He wanted to put a hand on her shoulder, but he just sat there and watched her battle the tears. He didn’t know if he was allowed to touch her.

“Can we still see each other?” he asked.

She looked at him from puffy red sockets.

“We don’t have to be exclusive.” He knew he was embarrassing himself; that he would regret saying these things, but he couldn’t stop. “I don’t want to lose you. I want you in my life, Penelope. I’m in love with you.”

“Stop saying that. It’s not true.”

It was true. But it wasn’t something he could argue.

Penelope stood when he did and embraced him, but her touch was mechanical, detached, and it saddened him that he couldn’t have one last moment of affection. She was crying again, so he held her, which was difficult. He let his eyes roam the grid of cubicles, the people working in them. Finally Penelope pulled away. She sniffled and kept her eyes down. “Tommy, I’m so sorry.”

“I go by Tom now,” was all he could say.

Edgar’s answering machine said they were at the coast for New Year’s weekend, but Tommy kept calling and leaving messages. When it got dark he poured a shot of Johnny Walker. He tried to watch TV but couldn’t care about anything happening on the screen. He searched his CD collection for lovesick songs and listened to a few, but they wouldn’t break him open, so he poured more Scotch and went through his old photos and found the one of Edgar and him dumping beer on their heads. It was the group photo from the fraternity barn dance. All the brothers wore cowboy outfits, lined up on hay bales, looking with surprise and laughter and admiration at the crazy ones kneeling in the foreground, showering themselves with Hamm’s.

He looked at the photo a long time. Then he drove to the old fraternity house. It was a big wooden mansion with brown-edged panels that gave the impression of a Swiss cottage. On a lower panel someone had written DOUCHEBAGS in ketchup and mustard. The letters sagged wetly, saturated by a moisture that seemed half mist, half rain. As Tommy walked from the car it tickled his face like fog but soaked his hair and jacket.

The kid who answered the door had bug eyes and a skinny neck and a few long blond whiskers on his chin. He wasn’t the type of kid they would’ve let in when Tommy was there. Still, Tommy recited the necessary proofs of membership and the kid invited him to the basement, where they were having a darts tournament. There was no party because almost everyone was gone for winter break. Tommy followed him down the staircase, which contained the familiar smells of dried beer and cold cement. Enormous party speakers in the basement played hip-hop at low volume. The carpet had been torn away to reveal slick concrete but the smells of accumulated sweat and vomit persisted, tinged by disinfectant. Half a dozen boys holding cheap beer turned to stare at him. They looked like children, smooth-cheeked, spindly, sullen. He tried to call back the old easy feeling, the state where nothing mattered except how much beer was left, but these boys depressed him, and all he could feel was the big building’s emptiness and dilapidation.

Someone tossed him a beer, and he decided to carry out his plan anyway—he dumped it over his head and yahooed. The boys only looked at him, then turned to look at each other. A couple laughed, but it wasn’t the same. He felt cold, silly. “When I was here,” he told them, but something finally collapsed in him, and he was relieved to feel tears in his eyes. They were warm and satisfying, like the sun.

The kid with bug eyes walked across the room and offered him a crusty towel.

“When I was here,” Tommy said to the kid, his voice tight, “none of you would’ve even gotten in.”

“Guess it’s different now,” the kid said.

When his wife asked him for a divorce M drove down the New York State Thruway from New Paltz into Manhattan and checked into the Pierre Hotel.

Catherine hadn’t been specific; it had been understood for some time that things were not working. M pouted, pleaded, tried to be charming, threw a fit, attempted to argue her out of it, and finally resorted to negotiating, but nothing worked. Catherine was firm. “Look, let’s just forget it,” she’d said.

M chose New York for its anonymity. He wanted to become invisible, his childhood wish. The argument with Catherine had discharged so many violent emotions that M had trouble remembering who he was. If he was no longer married than who was he?

He removed his wedding band and laid it on the dresser. Then he thought better of that and placed it in his billfold. He looked down at his bare hands and wrists. The ring had left an indentation on his finger. He placed the thumb and forefinger of his right hand in the ring groove and traced the circle of bruised flesh.

Exiting the hotel, M turned north and walked alongside Central Park in the shade of the large overhanging trees. It was midsummer and everything was in bloom.

At 70th Street he looked across the avenue at a tall black gate which guarded—what? He couldn’t remember. He hadn’t been to the city in years. Crossing the street, he joined a small group of people waiting to enter the building.

It was an art museum. The handsome building had been a private residence that now housed a remarkable collection of Old Masters. There was an intimacy to the collection that seemed to invite M directly in. To look, undisturbed.

He wandered through the library and the family room and paused to admire an elegant staircase leading to the family’s living quarters on the second floor of the residence which was roped off. Standing at the base of the staircase next to the bust of a woman mounted on a pedestal, M looked at the forbidden second floor. A painting was hung on the landing, and two candelabras framed magnificent gold inlaid ornamentation that resembled the cabinets of a cathedral pipe organ.

M walked down the long dim hallway and stopped to look at a small painting. It was a Vermeer. A young girl sits at a dark table. Sheet music lies on the table, and a man holds with his thumb another sheet of music, which the girl also holds with both hands. But she is not looking at the man, whom M supposes is her teacher. Her face is turned toward the viewer, as if she had been interrupted at her music by M himself. She wears a look of mild astonishment. Her fine head, sheathed in a white scarf, is turned away from her music. She looked directly at him.

Unnerved, M peered at the title of the painting: “Girl, Interrupted at Her Music.”

Two weeks after 9/11 M had traveled with Catherine to New York, where they bought a grand piano at Steinway Hall on West 57th Street. Catherine had been a music major in college, and taught private lessons for many years. Over time she had stopped giving recitals, and eventually she ceased to play. Her Baldwin spinet piano held dozens of family photos, of their children and their dogs and horses, but no music. Making a present of the Steinway, it was thought, would spur her to play again. And she did, for a time. But then the grand piano stood idle as well. No pictures were mounted on it.

Now as he returns the gaze of the girl in the painting, M thinks of his wife, whom he had left standing in the hallway of their house, she holding the mail, he reaching for his car keys. Her face was careworn, and puffy from crying. A strange, lonesome pity enters his heart to think of her. He had never known Catherine in her girlhood, had not in more than a dozen years asked her a question about how it was with her in those days when she was a child, raised by a widower, who managed to see to it that she continued her piano lessons after her mother died. By the time they had met, in college, Catherine was an orphan. He stares now, at the girl interrupted at her music, and he feels his soul run away, the solid world dissolve to tears. He tries to release his gaze but the girl goes on looking at him, startled.

Johannes Vermeer

He noticed how she watched him circle the plaza fountain. Her head tilted slightly skyward, as if she wanted him to think that she didn’t notice him at all. But he was aware of her glances. She took a drink when she looked. She peeked past the curve of her soda bottle.

He circled twice, hesitating when he was on her side of the fountain to bring the stub of a cigarette to his lips, his head raised over chattering students on their way to class. Smoke drifted from his mouth as he peered dumbly at the names stamped on distant buildings. He shook his head then circled the fountain again, patting the pockets of his jean jacket. A green messenger bag hung off his shoulder.

She watched breathlessly the third time he circled toward her, when he was holding it out in front of himself. She leaned forward on her bench to look, forgetting to be inconspicuous because he’d been swallowed into a crowd. He stepped clumsily in front of bicycles and edged between groups of women in conversation. Then he bent suddenly over to look at it and was obscured by bodies. It was a ring, he lifted it in the sunlight when he knew she was watching, a wedding band that held some foreign inscription, maybe, but looked familiar to anyone, in the thickness of the metal, in the way the silver glinted in the light.

He made his way to her then and grinned pathetically, searching the faces of others before picking her out—her, of course, because it couldn’t have happened any other way. She looked stunned when he smiled at her. She was braless under a sundress, hair hanging untied to her shoulders. The ring was between his fingers but he slid it into his jeans before speaking. Her eyes followed somewhat desperately as the band disappeared into his fob pocket.

“Excuse me,” he said. He pulled a digital camera from his messenger bag. “Do you mind if I take your picture?”

This is how it happened with Jessica Harding.

He told her to call him Aaron.

The sports bar waitress was named Kim Boettcher. She was a blonde and had a soft round stomach she liked to show off. She wore her jeans low on her hips. Aaron met her outside a grocery store, where her bank was. They were parked next to each other and she rapped on his window to complain after he took her photo. She was still wearing the apron she kept her tips in at work.

“You can’t do that,” Kim told him. She wanted to be a broadcast journalist and enlightened him on consent laws. Aaron was happy to listen.

She lived with a couple friends in a south Omaha duplex. It was a single-story house with four garage doors on the street side. Her room was in the back, with a washer and dryer in the closet. Aaron slept there for three days.

Kim lay face down while he massaged her with baby oil every morning, her eyes closed. When he put his weight on her body, Aaron could smell fryer grease in the sheets.

Lorna Chaplin flashed her cleavage over the orange formica counter when she rang up his total. Aaron was buying a microwavable Rueben and a Diet Pepsi. She worked at a filling station near the interstate in Ralston and had blond hair with dark freckles around her neck. She wore low rise stonewashed jeans without a belt. When Aaron looked at her midriff he noticed a thick pink scar across her navel. She said, “My eyes are up here.”

He came back the next night to ask her out to the burger and gyro place down the road.

She lived in a small white house not far from the filling station. It had been her parents’ house, the place she grew up in. All of the old furnishings were still there, worn sofas, porcelain knickknacks on the wall. There were small wooden cups that Lorna’s father made in his basement workshop when he was still alive. Her eyes pinched nearly closed when she smiled. It was a nice smile, one that made Aaron think that she’d been very pretty when she was in high school.

Aaron liked talking to Lorna about her life. He laughed at the way she spoke when nostalgic and teary, muttering “son of a bitch” through dry nicotine lips as something sad emerged from her memory.

She told him how most of her life was documented in the public record, in court cases and various judgments levied against her, in smarmy newspaper articles. There was a string of charges that ended with a conviction for transporting a minor across state lines—a fifteen-year-old boy listed in the record as N.S. And that’s what she called the boy too, when she told Aaron about it, even though N.S. would be close to thirty by then, a man off living somewhere, with a family probably. “I was pregnant by him when they picked us up,” Lorna admitted. “But I don’t have children of my own.”

Betsy Updike ran away across a parking lot when Aaron took her picture, holding her hands in front of her face. She was heavy and short and stomped when she ran. She wore horn-rimmed glasses. Aaron chased after to tell her he meant no harm. This was outside the Von Maur. It was a cold, breezy day.

“I love your hair,” he said. “That’s why I was shooting a photo of you.”

Betsy wore a green cardigan and had black hair that washed over her shoulders. She showed her teeth when she smiled.

When they got back to her house, Aaron brushed her hair and they watched movies she’d recorded on a cassette. He liked sitting behind her on the couch, his legs wrapped around hers, smelling the fruit of her shampoo. Betsy was a sweet girl. She was so eager to be loved that she nearly knocked Aaron over when they hugged.

He introduced himself to Carrie Rehbein at a karaoke bar by the freeway. She was from Ashland and had come to Omaha that day to go shopping with her sisters. She had green eyes and red hair, wore a tight yellow tee shirt under her coat and two small gold necklaces around her neck. Her engagement had been broken off the month before, just after Thanksgiving.

It was obvious that her sisters were the ones who really wanted Carrie to go home with Aaron. All of them drank tumblers of white wine.

The sisters sang raunchy lyrics they’d improvised until the DJ refused to let them go on again. They got Carrie too drunk to drive home and made Aaron promise he’d take care of her.

Carrie was nervous to be alone with him, once they were in his car. She turned and looked out the window, watching for her sisters as he drove her away.

The girl said, “My name’s Emily.”

She didn’t mind that Aaron hung his messenger bag on the stool next to her. In fact, she leaned over and talked to him while he did it, flashing the freckles of her chest. This was in a small town called Jackson.

Aaron fixed his eyes on different parts of her face while they drank. He was intense in this way. She tried turning away, but she couldn’t stop looking at him while he was looking at her, while he was smiling. It made Emily visibly nervous, half-smiling herself, her eyes swelling. His hand latched to her thigh and she let it stay there. He understood how these things worked.

“You know,” he said, “you’re kind of a pretty girl.”

“I doubt that,” she said, blushing.

“Would it be too much to take a photograph?”

“What do you mean? You and me take a picture together?”

“Of course,” Aaron said. He fingered the strap on his shoulder, ready to pull out his camera and snap a shot of her.

“You can’t take it here,” she objected. “Who in the world would want to be remembered like this?”

“Okay,” he said, slouching back into the stool. “But we’ll snap one later. Promise me that.”

“Sure,” she said, and then she laughed to herself. “We’ll drink a few Long Islands and then take some portraits for the Christmas card.”

She would apologize for saying this later, because all the other people in the bar laughed long and hard at how she’d put him down. She was sorry for it, even though he never quit smiling at her the whole time. He never let on if he was mad.

They were driving on the brick roads around town when she apologized. They circled the town square and the Jackson County Courthouse, its moss-covered spires. There was a slumping old lumber yard, stacks of boards and plywood housed in open, side-less buildings enclosed by chain-link fence. There were shops for farm goods, for implements, for rock candy and candles, for baby clothes. At the edge of town was a towering Co-Op silo, plaster white and ominous.

She suggested they stop.

“I live around here,” she said, and they went inside.

Aaron met Tamara Jones outside a liquor store in Omaha. It was just a come on. She walked out and Aaron took her picture. That’s how it started.

She kept a room in a boarding house and that’s where they went to drink. They had some beers and screwed. It wasn’t anything special.

Tamara sang along with the albums she played the whole time he was there. She only ever stood up to use the bathroom at the end of the hall, or to flip a record. She wailed disconsolate incantations, tilted at different keys, half-notes, trying to exorcise the slow undulations of her blues.

It really bothered Aaron the way she did it. Tamara Jones laid naked on her bed, swilling, singing, falling asleep.

Elisabeth Hindmarsh lived on the second floor of a partitioned Victorian in Lincoln. There was an inside stairway to get to her door. Aaron just walked in off the street but she didn’t care. It was after a party and he was going to help her finish the gin.

It was a tiny place, a living room, a kitchenette, a bathroom with black and white checker-board tile. Red paper lanterns hung on wires sheathed in cloth insulators. Elisabeth was thick-bodied, athletic, and her hair was dyed a bluish shade of black. She wore a dress over jeans to hide her porcine legs. Aaron was dressed like Charles Starkweather, a plain tee shirt tight over his weakling chest, blue jeans fitting loose on his skinny hips. He hoped his wispy blond mustache and brown felt hat made him look like the singer of a band.

Elisabeth was in the bathroom, peeing in that start and stop way people do when they don’t want to be heard, but Aaron talked to her from the adjacent room anyway, reciting the records in her collection that he approved of. She laughed at him when she returned.

“You know I wasn’t standing behind you anymore.”

Aaron was good at being laughed at, it didn’t bother him.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said.

It felt safe there, warm in a boozy way.

“Would you dance with me?” he asked, stepping into her space.

The LP was a live recording of Piaf. It was warped and scratchy, and Elisabeth blushed when it started playing. She was surprised that he’d picked her favorite.

His name was Crawford Norris. We’d spent more than an hour talking and drinking before he introduced himself. Crawford was tall and husky and looked to be on the long end of seventy. He finished the story he was telling me with a salesman’s smile, his lips parting to reveal a neat row of lime-white teeth.

I drained my Jack and Ginger, making sure to wince as I swallowed.

“Still hurts?”

“Yeah.”

My pain wasn’t all phony. I was reeling from my wife walking out on me. That was the real extraction. The other, about having a wisdom tooth pulled out, I’d made up that morning. It was an excuse to get off work and drink, and I’d decided to carry the lie around with me the rest of the day.

Crawford siphoned off the head of a new beer. Wisps of foam clung to the sides of his mouth. “Know where’s she staying?”

The alcohol had loosened my tongue. Crawford was the first person I’d told about my wife.

“With her sister.”

“Then call her,” he said. “Tell her your mouth is sore. She’ll come back.”

“She hates me.”

Crawford shrugged his shoulders. “Women aren’t like men: they can still love someone they hate.”

I didn’t want to talk anymore about my wife. So I brought up his.

***

“I can’t believe she did that to you? I would’ve called the cops.”

“I almost did.” Crawford sucked up more beer.

“What stopped you?”

“I guess I thought that if she was willing to do all that to get my attention, it was worth giving it to her.”

“And things worked out?”

He paused. “Better than I hoped.”

“Ready for another?”

It was the bartender asking. He lifted away my empty glass and mopped up underneath with a hand towel.

“Sure,” I said. “And a beer for my friend.”

Crawford held his right hand up. “No more for me. Got to get home for supper.”

“One more.”

“Another time.”

“Your wife must be a good cook.”

“She was,” he said, “before she passed.”

“I’m sorry.”

Crawford blew out his cheeks as he exhaled. “It might sound silly. But I still like to sit at my own table and eat dinner every night. If I don’t, I feel adrift. Know what I mean?”

“I think so.”

“Your next is on me.” Crawford rose from the stool and nudged his chin toward the bartender who was busy making my drink. “Tell Jeff I’ll square up tomorrow.”

I scanned the bar. Only a few customers remained, all men, each intently watching a horse race on the overhead television. Underneath the television was a jukebox, unplugged and dull with dust. The flooring consisted of chipped checkerboard tiling. The metal stools were covered in black vinyl littered with cigarette burns.

“You’re Jeff?” I asked the bartender when he returned.

“That’s right.”

“The old guy that just left said to put this one on his tab.”

Jeff’s bald head was too big for his thin neck. He kept the drink in his hand and said, “Better you pay for it yourself.”

“Why?”

“Because he’s not good for it.”

I pushed over a ten-dollar bill. “He seemed solid,” I said. “Told me a helluva thing about his late wife – said she once knocked him cold with a baseball bat after finding out he was messing with another woman. Then she removed his front teeth with a pair of pliers. ”

“Not true,” Jeff said. “My mother never did that.”

“Crawford’s your father?”

Jeff nodded.

“Maybe he never told you about it.”

Jeff took my money to the register. He stacked the change, five single dollars, next to the new drink. “If you don’t believe me, I’ll give you my mother’s number. Call and ask her yourself.”

“She’s not dead?”

“Look,” he said, “my father lies. I’m sorry.”

He moved down the bar and began working on the other customer’s refills. I finished my drink and walked out. It was dusk and coldish. I thought about what to do next. It occurred to me that I better go find some dinner. Then again, chewing food might hurt too much with the extraction I’d endured. It felt good to lie, even if only to myself. I turned and went back inside and ordered a drink. A new race on the TV had begun.

I bought a bottle of beer and sat next to a woman I found attractive at the bar. She was alone and reading a book. I finished the beer and introduced myself. She told me her name was Meg. She was reading The Sun Also Rises and I asked her what she thought of Hemingway. Meg took a sip of her own beer and said Hemingway was good but not as good as Fitzgerald. I joked whether she meant “Ella,” and bought us both beers and we talked some more about writers and books. When she got up to leave I asked for her number and she seemed sincere as she wrote it down on a napkin. Two days later I called her and got the answering machine for an airport limousine service.

A few weeks later I spied a great looking blonde in a halter-top at the bar. She was dancing in place near the jukebox with eyes closed and I imagined for a moment she resembled a French harlot from a Maupassant story I’d just read. I downed a tequila shooter and introduced myself. Her name was Claudine and we found some common ground talking about books. It turned out she really liked Jack London. She also liked tequila. After a few more shooters she said I would look good in a parka. I agreed and made a move to kiss her. We had sex that night and started dating.

Things were good in the beginning with Claudine, but by the end of our second month together I sensed her interest waning. Trying to stem the tide, I started to wear heavy snow boots, even though it was the summer. I also bought her a copy of The Sea Wolf. It didn’t help. She kept the book and broke up with me.

The next weeks saw me every night at the bar. I pined hard for Claudine, writing love poems in my head and doodling pictures of her face on napkins. I thought several times of putting on my snow boots and trying to win her back, but a mixture of pride and cowardice held me back and kept me rooted to alcohol.

One night, deep in a funk, I met Talia. She was taller than me and approached with two shots of Jim Beam in her hand. She gave me one and we talked. I learned she played basketball for a local college women’s team. She was also an English Major. When I asked who she liked to read she didn’t hesitate: “Somerset Maugham.” She spoke for a half-hour straight about his work. I found her passion erotic and suggested we go somewhere more private to talk about Maugham. Talia must have sensed my real purpose because she told me she had a rule never to have sex with a man until he first watched her play basketball. She said her next home game was three days away.

I marked my calendar and waited. But right before I was to leave for the game Claudine rang me. She told me she had been reading Jane Austen and was feeling romantic. She thought now I would look good in aristocratic clothes. I told her I had a tweed jacket with denim elbow patches in my closet. She asked me to put it on and come over. I did.

A few weeks later I was at a bar when Talia tapped me on the shoulder. “You never came to my game,” she said. She pulled a book out of a kna