The Philosophy Study Group

“BODY OF LAND.”

Esther chose continent. “Asia, in particular. It sprawls and the boundaries aren’t clear.”

“Peninsula,” I said.

“Prairie. No, I guess that’s not ... Forest?” said Gabrielle. “Anything landlocked. Nina?”

“Island.”

“Island?” That bothered Gaby. “Well, let it go. Pick a gem.”

“Emerald,” said Nina.

“Why emerald?”

“Because it’s cool on the outside and hot on the inside.”

Laughter.

“Ruby,” said Esther. “Hot on the outside and hot on the inside.”

On the outside, December snow is falling on the playground, etching swings and seesaws in the dark, making the sandbox into a snow-box, and softening the lines of tall slivers of buildings. Inside we are folded in warmth, our toes digging into the shag rug. No longer girls playing games in a college dormitory, but women edging towards thirty in a world spinning towards 1967, and still playing games. We are in Nina’s apartment in a Greenwich Village high-rise near New York University, where she is an assistant professor of chemistry. Nina’s apartment is sensuous; it suggests the harem. The dominant color is purple. (But in our game she said she was black. Gabrielle: “Rust.” Esther: “Green.”) Purple and gold. Gold in the lush, mosaic-like Gustav Klimt prints on the walls, of lovers, flora, and rainbows. Gold threads in the purple curtains. Gold, or really mustardy, pillows on the purple couch and on the floor. In the bathroom, purple towels, and in the kitchen, purple ceramic dishes, purple mugs, with the rest austerely white, smooth and glistening like her mind. Like a laboratory, I sometimes think, but are laboratories in fact so pristine? Near the refrigerator hangs a bulletin board with notices of meetings, phone numbers, events she plans to attend, the edges of every little rectangle of paper parallel to the edges of the bulletin board. A five-by-eight card, printed in Nina’s narrow, swift block letters, contains a quotation from The Golden Sayings of Epictetus, which she says she sometimes reads to put her to sleep: “Everything has two handles, one by which it may be borne, the other by which it may not. If your brother sin against you, lay not hold of it by the handle of his injustice, for by that it may not be borne; but rather by this, that he is your brother, the comrade of your youth; and thus you will lay hold on it so that it may be borne.” The long wall in the living room, where we gather, is lined with bookshelves. The center, most accessible, shelves hold her thick science books. Below, books of philosophy, politics, sociology. Above, novels (Nina is an insomniac; Epictetus doesn’t always work) and poetry: Frost, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams—she enjoys the sanctification of the ordinary. And on the top shelf, barely reachable, the books she used in college.

By day Nina appears still ladylike, and fashionable; on her tall, understated body, clothes seem modeled; her oval face, with dark hair tethered by pins or combs, is assertive yet reserved about what it asserts; she has a model’s look of unlimited possibilities held in check. At home she transforms. She releases the hair, longer and thicker than it seems when drawn back, and strides through the apartment in harem clothes—filmy, rustling shirts, rope belts with bells and tassels, gold slippers. Once in a while she pulls on a pair of jeans and a mannish shirt to dash to the corner in the middle of the night for cigarettes or orange juice, when sleep eludes her, or to drive to Rockaway in her white Triumph convertible, to walk along the boardwalk and look at the ocean, which she did not see till she was over twenty. To an outsider Nina and her apartment with its velvet-covered pillows and Tiffany lamps would appear exotic. To me they are an image chosen deliberately out of a range of possible self-images, not an organic growth but like an adopted child no less genuine, no less lovable, and in time, fitting and necessary.

The Philosophy Study Group was Nina’s idea, conceived when she returned to New York after five years of acquiring advanced degrees at Princeton. Her engagement to the fellow student was over; he left to work in Colorado, where she did not wish to follow him. She said she missed us. When she visited we were strained and distracted by husbands and babies. The best times we ever had together, she reminded us, were those late nights in her room the year we studied philosophy and took it seriously—before we abandoned the search for truth as sophomoric. Everything had turned around in the few short years since our college days. Hadn’t we noticed? Or had we been too busy perpetuating the life cycle? The country was heaving with war, drugs, sex, revolt, throwing up a lava that muddied the mind. Everything they had taught us was in question. What did we intend to do about it? Our plans? “Physical survival,” I replied. I had two babies but difficulty believing I was a mother. For Nina survival was not enough. She wanted to uncover the nerves that connected daily life to the metaphysical. She had a theory that the flower-bearing middle-class rebels taking over the public parks were descendants of the Greek Sophists, those slippery relativists, betes noires of Plato, who spent dozens of glittering pages mocking their claim that man is the measure of all things. She was drawn to that easeful vision too, but suspicious. She went to all the antiwar protests, mingling, signing, getting high, and accepting the handouts of every special interest group, but she couldn’t stand their ragged clothes and their hair. A scientist, as well as a sexual rebel herself, she was withholding judgment till all the evidence was in. Meanwhile she wanted to give them the dignity of a history they themselves scorned.

The unexamined life was not worth living. We must come to her apartment, where there were no husbands and babies. I agreed for nostalgia’s sake; my prolonged postpartum anomie, boring as a pornographic home movie, had just peaked and seemed to be relinquishing its hold; Nina’s exigence would help. She suggested books of philosophy we should read (William James, another Sophist, American-style), but as it turned out, the Philosophy Study Group did not always, or often, discuss philosophy. No. The name was a bit of a joke. Our lives did not encourage abstract thought. Phil was almost two, Althea almost four. What will and stamina I had, I saved for practicing, recovering the lost ground with scales and arpeggios, Beethoven and Bach in slow motion. Like a child who avoids the homework but brings in something cute for show and tell, I came to Nina’s purple apartment with tales of Thales, or talies of Thales, as Esther put it, to make it rhyme. I had found them while browsing in the library, with Althea at Story Hour and Phil slung on my back.

“Okay, I’m sure you all remember how Thales measured the height of the pyramid. Well, he also figured out how to measure the distance of ships at sea. He built a tower right at the shore and projected a line drawn from the top of the tower to a far-off ship. He measured the angle formed by the line and the tower, and then, keeping that same angle, rotated the line around the axis of the tower so that it extended in the other direction, inland. The point where the line hits the ground, to the tower, is the distance. How do you like that?”

Applause. Refilling of glasses. Encore!

“One night, as his servant was leading him across the fields so he could observe the stars, Thales stumbled into a ditch. The woman asked him how he could ever hope to know the heavens if he didn’t know what was right under his feet.”

“I was like that.”

“You were very good on your feet, Gaby, as I recall.”

“You know what I mean.”

“We were all like that.” Esther laced her fingers in curious designs, like a cat’s cradle. She had stopped smoking.

“When asked why he had no children of his own, Thales said it was because he loved children.”

Nina said, “I love children too. But I would like to have them anyway.”

“I don’t, in general,” said Esther. “But I would like to too.”

“When his mother pestered him to get married, Thales said the right time had not yet come. Years later, when she brought it up again, he said the right time had passed.”

“There must be a right time to divorce too,” said Esther. “If I don’t do it soon, the right time will pass and then it won’t matter any more. I’ll accept this as my fate. We’ll get like those horrible middle-aged couples you see on buses, who stare straight ahead and look catatonic—you don’t even realize they’re together until they get off at the same stop. He nudges her or she pokes him. You know the ones I mean. You sit there trying to figure out what peculiar nasty things they must do to each other when they’re alone.”

“My parents were like those couples on the bus,” said Nina, “except they would never nudge or poke each other. I’ll tell you what they do alone. They never quarrel out loud. But they have long spells of silence. A week. Three weeks. Even a month. The house is filled with that silence—and ours was a very small house, two floors with just the two bedrooms upstairs, so it really was filled—the way a house can be filled with a cooking smell. Cabbage, liver, something oppressive.” Nina reached over to get a small black lacquered box from a cabinet. She opened it and rolled herself a joint, which the rest of us declined, Esther with a shudder. Since Ralph had tried everything on the street, Esther loathed drugs; she knew the down side of each high as well as any emergency room orderly. Nina no longer smoked her one cigarette a week. She indulged every appetite, but with a careful, measured indulgence, as she must have measured out her chemicals in the lab, as Thales must have measured. Right now she was intrigued by the biochemical factors in neurological diseases that produce spells of wildness, like epilepsy or Tourette’s syndrome.

“The silence in that house was so dense I used to imagine reaching out and grabbing a fistful. It would be like taffy and stick to everything it touched, and if you tried to pull it off it would keep on stretching.” It had taken her till now to outgrow the habit of silence. To us, Nina’s past was like a burnt book; this was a charred page snatched from the fire, and we listened as raptly as the three-year-olds at Story Hour.

“Only on Sundays, for church, did they put on a show of togetherness. He would wear his best suit, navy pin stripe, and she would wear a fancy print dress, always print. There was one with green birds, I remember, that I especially hated; the birds had their beaks open and I could practically hear them squawking. She would walk into the church on his arm, with me trailing behind in a starched dress. I knew the minister was fooled, but I used to wonder whether God was fooled also. That was his house, they told us, where he dwelt, and I thought if he dwelt only there he would never know. But if he came into our house too ... It bothered me that God might be fooled. They slept in twin beds. I assumed all couples slept in twin beds, till I saw my friend Kate’s parents’ bedroom. I was shocked. My imagination was shocked, I mean.” She paused for a moment and stared blankly. Seeing the beds, I thought, and the vast space between them.

“I used to hear low whispers sometimes, from across the hall. I was born very late to them, you know. They were close to forty. I think after that my mother didn’t want to sleep with him any more. Maybe she never had wanted to—they never joked about how they met or how they came to marry, that sort of thing. I don’t know to this day. I have these fantasies—that she objected to ... some of his, uh, requests. She had a rather legalistic mind, in fact she’d been a legal secretary for a while. I know how her mind worked. She would have wondered exactly how far conjugal rights extended.” I had to smile. Nina, whose appeal for me lay in contradiction, spoke of sex like a vestal virgin. “I’ll never know the truth. I imagine her as very dry, though. A very dry woman. Never even sweated. I mean, perspired. She would perspire, if at all.”

She was finishing her joint, looking high and dreamy, starting to chuckle. She played with a fringe on her shirt, and her eyes were very large and ironic. “She had no bodily fluids, you see, just dust, or something powdery inside, seeping through her where the rest of us have liquid. You know how they say some babies just slip out, and you imagine all that slithery stuff they’re sliding through? It’s a nice thought, isn’t it, sliding out into the world, something like those twisty slides they have in motel swimming pools, that the kids pour water on to keep them wet. But I imagine myself being born by friction. Inching my way down those tight dry walls. Abrasive. Like peeling a tight dress up over your head. Actually I did peel her off. I was a breech baby.” She laughed. “They used to tell me I was lucky to come from such a good home, where I had everything I needed. And I did, more or less. It all depends on what you think you need. If that’s all you see around you, how do you know things could be otherwise?”

“How did you ever bear it?” Esther asked.

“Well, you see I didn’t. I’m here.”

“I guess I mean how do you bear it. Now.”

Nina’s face took on the shielded, daytime look. She gave a chilly smile. “Just an old Stoic, I guess. ‘Everything has two handles, one by which it may be borne, the other—’”

“I know, I know,” groaned Esther. “I’ve been in your kitchen. But some things don’t seem to have any handles at all. The best thing to do is let them drop.”

Esther did leave Ralph, less than two months later. In the skirmish she lost the baby she had been carrying unawares, when she remarked that she didn’t love children in general but still she wanted to have them. Worn out, she went home to Chicago (“Are you happy?” asked her mother, senile or wicked or both. “Because if you’re happy, then I’m happy too”), and on her return, got religion. She read the Old Testament, and in envelopes from the shelter for disturbed children where she was working, sent me double-edged missives from Ecclesiastes. Pushing the stroller home from the supermarket with Althea toddling alongside, the groceries tucked under Phil’s feet and behind his back, I would arrive and find in the mailbox: “All go unto one place; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again. ... Wherefore I perceive that there is nothing better than that a man should rejoice in his own works; for that is his portion: for who shall bring him to see what shall be after him?” Tears still came to me too easily—a vestige of my sickness—but I smiled as well. By works Esther did not mean grocery shopping. She had hated my giving up when Althea was born. I stuffed the envelope in my jeans pocket and for the hundredth time tried to figure out the best way to get children, stroller, and groceries up to the fourth floor without leaving any two items alone either upstairs or down, like the ferryman who has to carry a fox, a rooster, and a bag of corn across a river, the kind of riddle I had always found exasperating. Nina’s sort of riddle, Nina’s delight, and had I brought it up in the Philosophy Study Group she might have solved it for me. But it never occurred to me there, happily sipping wine.

Upstairs, while Phil napped and Althea colored pictures of fairytale characters, I forced myself to work on Mozart trios, dreaming of the time, not too far off, when I might call Rosalie and say I was ready to come back. If they would have me. The next week there would arrive in Esther’s chubby handwriting: “Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest.” It made me study my hands, and with some pleasure—they were once again looking like hands that possessed a skill. The grave reminded me of the Golden Age Club. Mrs. Kirchner and the Brahms waltzes for four hands. Was she still waiting? No, surely they had found someone else. Most likely I was too late for any of it, and besides, whatever I earned would go straight to a babysitter. Why bother? Much easier to rot. But the next week’s envelope scolded: “He that observeth the wind shall not sow; and he that regardeth the clouds shall not reap.” So I pulled together my strength and late at night, while the children slept, I studied scores and drummed my fingers on the kitchen table.

Esther’s religion did not get past the Philosophy Study Group unscrutinized. Nina wanted to hear the evidence for her sudden belief.

“There is no evidence for any belief,” she replied. “Or else there’s evidence for all—it comes to the same thing. We believe what appeals to us, what we can use, whatever satisfies our fears of the unknown. Afterwards we worry about the evidence.” With religion and leaving Ralph, she had acquired a stillness of the body that made her seem demure, nearly cherubic, even though her once-rosy face was wan with anguish overcome. She spoke quietly, without the old urgency, and stroked the book resting on her lap. “William James says so. You ought to know—you’ve read everything. He says a set of beliefs is an emotional response to the world, not an intellectual one. That, let me see, truth exists insofar as we feel it to exist, insofar as it works for us.”

“Works, did you say?” asked Gabrielle.

“Works, yes. Don’t you remember all that from school? If you act according to a certain belief and your actions yield the desired results, the belief is valid.”

“It’s so amoral, though. So very American.” Gabrielle, knitting a powder-blue afghan to lure Cynthia from crib to bed, yanked more wool from the skein and aimed the needle like a spear. “I can think of a lot of beliefs that worked just fine. How about Hitler’s idea of the master race? That was useful to a lot of people; it satisfied their fears; and it worked, Esther. Very efficiently.”

“Only for a short time. They lost the war.”

“Lost the war? That’s a moot point. But anyway, how many people were gassed before the belief stopped working?” Gabrielle dug the knife blade into the cheese. She was angry, an anger that could hook itself to anything. She had put on weight, her beautiful hair had no shine, Don was doctoring for absurdly long hours yet rarely missed a night in bed—sometimes they couldn’t get to talk for days, she told me, but he was not too worn out for that. Oh no. He needed his fix so he could go on. She was helping to heal the sick, indirectly. The voracious love left her vacant, her energy tamped down. She was looking for part-time work, but though she could quote pages of Chaucer, the only thing the publishers wanted her to do was type.

“Look,” Esther said softly, “I’m not going to persecute anybody. I’m just trying to live. I need the belief, the idea.” She gave in, took one of Nina’s cigarettes, and struck a match. “The idea is like a prophecy. James says the strength of your belief, the will to have the world be a certain way, can actually make things happen.” She had forgotten the match. I watched the flame creep closer to her fingers. “Take Schopenhauer. Say you accept that. Okay, so you think the world is basically—” Her hand jumped, she shook out the match and dropped it, and sucked her fingers. “Basically evil, all it has in store is misery, life is some kind of grotesque mistake.”

“Lydia!” For a moment Gabrielle’s face was girlish again with the old light. “Remember when you carried around that horrible quote from Schopenhauer in your purse?”

I closed my eyes. That was when we shared the apartment and knew the contents of each other’s purses. “Oh yes. Nothing gives lasting satisfaction. The desire is long, the demands are infinite, the satisfaction is short and scanty. It sounds like an adolescent boy jerking off, doesn’t it?”

“You have just proven my point.” Esther grinned. “You don’t feel like believing that any more. Thank God. I remember you after Althea was born, and when you got pregnant again. Ugh, what a mess. But anyway, supposing you did, so completely that you finally committed suicide. Or you might just sit in a room staring at the walls like my mother, which is the coward’s form of suicide. You’ve made Schopenhauer come true, you see? On the other hand, say you accept the idea of a moral universe with a more or less benevolent God, and you live in a decent and optimistic way. Which is what you all do anyway. Chances are you’ll find the world will bear out the truth of that belief. The wish is father to the fact.”

“Whose chances?” asked Gaby. “Blacks in South Africa? Jews in Germany? Or maybe Vietnamese?”

“We’ll end this war in time,” said Esther. “You’ll see. There’ll be a moral victory, coming from the streets.”

“A moral victory, sure, over how many bodies piled on the TV screen?” Gaby tossed aside her knitting and went to the bedroom to phone her babysitter.

“So.” Nina stretched out languidly, the tiny mirrors on her shirt glinting. “Tell us what he’s like, this God of yours. Is he like the devil who visited Ivan Karamazov? Suit and tie? Or noble and sexy like the one on the Sistine ceiling? I’m assuming you haven’t seen any burning bushes.”

“No. At least not yet,” Esther said sweetly, refusing the bait. She flicked her eyes over Nina. “He’s not elegant or well-dressed. Or she. I don’t know about sexy. More kind of ... erratic. Like me.” She smiled, testing James’s theory on us. Would her world respond in kind to kindness, with charity for charity? She opened her book to a turned-down page and read: “‘In this real world of sweat and dirt, it seems to me that when a view of things is “noble,” that ought to count as a presumption against its truth, and as a philosophic disqualification. The prince of darkness may be a gentleman, as we are told he is, but whatever the God of earth and heaven is, he can surely be no gentleman. His menial services are needed in the dust of our human trials, even more than his dignity is needed in the empyrean.’”

A cleaning woman! What I needed so badly but couldn’t afford.

But I said nothing. For the force of her good will did indeed claim, engender, and elicit good will in turn, and we hectored her no more. Only when Esther went to the bathroom, Nina whispered, “Lo, we have witnessed the creation of God, ex nihilo.” “Ex need, you mean.”

The next fall, 1967, Esther went off to pick fruit on a kibbutz in Israel. She was barely gone when the cease-fire was violated once more. The news reports carried tales of weapon caches, sporadic shootings, disrupted settlements.

“What kind of lunatic would go to Israel at a time like this? We don’t even know what part of the country she’s in,” Gabrielle brooded in the Philosophy Study Group. “We ought to look it up on a map—she could have been killed. How would we ever find out?”

“I looked. It doesn’t seem to be near the fighting. But it’s hard to tell. It’s such a small country.”

On Nina’s lap was Peter Abelard’s Ethics, her latest enthusiasm, a book about sin. Escape reading, I teased her. I had no time for obscure tracts. I was studying at Juilliard again, and working for Mrs. Rodriguez at the Golden Age Club, where my replacement was taking time off to have a baby. The aged faces, alas, were new; Mrs. Kirchner had not been able, after all, to wait for me to play the Brahms waltzes for four hands, and I suffered remorse.

“Well, I managed to read it,” Gaby said, “waiting my turn at job interviews. Abelard says the Lord only tests the strong, Is Esther the strong?”

“He was referring to temptation,” Nina corrected. “Tests with temptation, not outside danger. One of us is sure to get a letter any day.”

Gabrielle frowned. “I must not be the strong. He never tests me.” She was pale, in a nondescript dress. She had brought along four pairs of Roger’s corduroy pants, and while Nina explained sin, for my benefit, Gaby hemmed, sipped wine, and hemmed.

“There are two components needed for real sinning: will and consent. If you have the will but don’t consent to do the act, you haven’t sinned; that’s simply the human condition—we all have the will. And if you consent to the act without having the will, like committing murder in self-defense, that’s not sin either. Also—this part is rather nice—if you have neither the will nor the consent, there’s no particular virtue accruing. Because with no temptation there’s no moral strength.”

“You know, I still get a funny feeling about Henrietta Frye. That time she broke her wrist hiking and I got to play for The Yeomen of the Guard. Remember? I wished it on her.”

“But you wouldn’t have broken it for her, would you, sneaking into her room at night with a hammer?”

“Certainly not. ... I might have gotten caught.”

Nina laughed. “I think you’re safe from hellfire, Lydia.”

“She’s moving to California in November, so I’ll get my place back in the trio. It was perfect timing. And this time I didn’t wish it, I swear. I had something else lined up, with a group of woodwinds.”

They congratulated me. Gabrielle etched a cross in the air with her needle. “Go, child, and sin no more. But surely that’s not the worst secret wish on your conscience?”

“Not the worst, no.” Gaby waited, needle poised over the pants. “I sometimes used to wish I didn’t have any children. So I could play more, and go on tour—it’s so important. If you can’t travel, you’re nowhere.” I waited in vain for the bolt of lightning from the ungentle-manly cleaning woman. No one showed any horror. Gabrielle began to sew again, Nina popped an olive into her mouth. “I don’t wish it any more. Consciously, anyway.”

Nina said, “That doesn’t count. It’s not a real wish, just a passing fancy. Sorry, Lyd.”

“I have wished much worse, because I really meant it. I have wished that at one of his many conferences Don would meet some beautiful woman doctor and become infatuated, so that I could be relieved of that endless devotion. Temporarily. It’s like a straitjacket, you know. But then, beautiful women doctors are relatively rare.” She didn’t stop sewing and didn’t look at us. “When someone loves you so unconditionally they don’t see you any more. It’s like you’ve ceased to exist—as a person changing in time, I mean. Who I am now is invisible. I only needed to exist at the very beginning, to start it.”

“Esther’s little bureaucrat of a God is so terribly inefficient. That is exactly what I would like,” said Nina. “To be loved unconditionally.”

“Yes, I can see that. Well, it’s a stupid thing to complain about, really. People are being killed in those jungles ... Gabrielle rubbed an eye beneath her glasses and bit off a piece of thread, then turned to me and said curtly, “You don’t suffer from the same problem, I gather?”

What could I say? No, he didn’t love me too much? I couldn’t tell it to anybody; I guarded it as Evelyn had guarded her secret life, confiding only in the sunflower. Since I had recovered and was working, Victor and I again sat up late at night in bed whispering in the dark, hypnagogic murmurs on the fine line of consciousness; we felt born from the same soil, our cells interchangeable, and our love had the heady tinge of incest. Even to say I love you was a semantic error, too great a separation.

“Well, not quite.”

“‘To sin is to hold the Creator in contempt,’” Nina announced. “‘That is, to do by no means on his account what we believe we ought to do for him, or not to forsake on his account what we believe we ought to forsake.’”

“Oh, honestly!” Gaby said. “He’s such a bore, so vain and petty, always fretting over whether he’s getting the proper respect. You’d think someone omnipotent would be above all that.”

“No, that’s how you stay omnipotent. But in any case he’s really talking about self-respect. It’s internalized.”

Ah. Now I knew why she had chosen sin and Abelard, like herself libertine and ascetic. A new lover, no doubt, maybe even less suitable than the Cuban TV repairman, the Canadian soccer player, the tap dancer attempting to stamp out his homosexuality. There were times I suspected she chose them only to shock her parents, but if so it was a Pyrrhic victory: she wouldn’t have dreamed of telling them.

It was a student, she said. Not one of hers, thank God. Not even graduate. Undergraduate, and for Nina that distinction—that he was twenty-one rather than twenty-four—made it more lusciously sinful. Bright but not brilliant, she confessed ruefully, as though brilliance too might have been a mitigating factor. From Jamaica. “Jah-mai-cah,” with a musical lilt she had picked up to perfection. He visited late at night and left before dawn. She had a penchant for such arrangements. In the halls they were discreet. Oh yes, I could well imagine. She was incorrigible, and incorrigibly guilty. Guilty of what exactly? I always asked. If you like them, where’s the great harm? Self-betrayal, she said. Bad faith.

“Abelard understands perfectly. He’s cleverer than God. God’s attitudes are awfully naive, if you think about it. Honor thy father and mother. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife. They’re impossible to obey—they command emotions. At best, all we can do is behave ourselves. Covet thy neighbor’s wife if you must, but don’t sleep with her, would make more sense. Behave honorably to your father and mother, and take care of your resentments in private. Those are fine distinctions and his language blurs them. While Abelard says, ‘There are people who are wholly ashamed to be drawn into consent to lust or into a bad will and are forced out of the weakness of the flesh to want what they by no means want to want.’”

“That’s bad faith.” Again Gaby didn’t look up from her sewing. “You want what you want to want.”

“Oh no. There’s a crucial difference. I want to be a decent, straightforward Bosc pear like Lydia, but I find myself making the choices of a plum. That is, I wish I could want to be a pear, but I must want—Wait a minute. This is getting ... What did I say?”

“Philosophy!” Gabrielle smiled for the first time all evening. “Ce n ’est guere la philosophie, girls.”

“Jejune! Jejune!” Nina and I chorused. In a flash, it conjured up Esther. Continent (Asia), geyser, ruby, peach, poppy, pumpkin. All the identities she had chosen in all our games. Gaby laid down her needle and clicked her tongue, and we brooded, growing cold with apprehension.

Finally she folded the corduroy pants. We stood up and put on our shoes and began clearing away glasses. Will without consent, I thought. Henrietta Frye. Will with consent (the winner). George? Ah no, that was too superficial to be really sinful. No will but consent. Two babies. Those neat boxes nudged something in a corner of my mind. Yes! Win, Place, and Show. “Nina! It’s time for another one of our sinful outings. Before it gets too chilly. How is this Saturday?”

“Saturday is fine. Gaby?”

She shook her head. “I’ve told you before, I’m no gambler. I’d rather ride them.”

Wickedness made me merry, leaving husband and two children and work for a day at the races. I had fifteen dollars tucked in the back pocket of my jeans, play money. It was clear and hot, more like June than early October, and Nina came around noon to fetch me in the white Triumph, top down. “I had a letter from Esther,” was her greeting. “She’s fine. The kibbutz isn’t anywhere near where the fighting was. She’s still picking fruit.” We sped off with eased minds.

Nina had been introduced to the track by her Cuban TV repairman. The Spanish names of the jockeys slid familiarly off her tongue. When she dismissed the repairman she recruited me, wooing me with intricate analyses of odds, lineage, and track records. But I bet on the names and the bodies. When the horses trotted around the paddock beforehand to display flesh, stance, and gait, a wonderful tang of sexual exhibition spiced the air. I giggled like a teen-ager. Who cared about odds or past performances? I wanted to run my hands over those glossy bodies.

The place was constructed in levels, like an allegory, from the bright green turf up through sections of varicolored bleachers ascending heavenward. Across the turf, huge boards flashed the odds, green numbers that changed endlessly (by whim? necessity?), a Heraclitan vision of the abstract concept of change. Inside, behind glass windows, bespectacled men registered bets with comic sobriety, and out of their toy-like machines came tickets to chance, little cardboard tokens of risk. Everywhere were round-shouldered, unshaven, preoccupied men dressed in loose gabardine pants and light shirts with wide fluttery sleeves, and they gnawed their fingernails, scratched their bellies, and counted their money. Bills flashed—what a tempting display of hard cash!—but few pockets would be picked. The money was only the material sign of far more important business at hand. These men were committed to risk: romantics, existentialists, they would not stoop to cheating the game of its outcome. Nine times a day, for three minutes, their drabness got charged with life, as they were propelled through the stations of emotion like souls awaiting their fates on the Day of Judgment, voices ragged from imploring. And in the instant before the end, life’s longest moment, there was still time for a last-minute change, for irretrievable loss, or redemption. Then the great god Chance gave his verdict, to cheers and groans. The happy saved all streamed in one direction, tickets in hand, to claim their reward with the careless, cruel, glowing avidity of winners, while the others, downcast, glumly crushed their tickets underfoot, in no hurry at all. I had expected something fairly disreputable, and instead it was a Bosch painting, a human comedy.

“There’s no rhyme or reason to this,” I said the first day she brought me. “It’s pure chance.”

“They’ve found scientifically that nothing is really pure chance. Nature is slightly skewed, on a bias. Circles are not perfectly round. Lines are not perfectly straight.”

“But how do you figure out where the bias is?” “Here? Well, you can’t, really. Not with the data at hand.” “So then it amounts to the same thing. Random.” “Theoretically,” she persisted, “if you had all the relevant facts you could work out a winning system. Like the Greek Atomists: if you understood where every atom was going and why, you could foresee everything. But then there wouldn’t be horse races. On the other hand there’s Heisenberg’s Principle of Uncertainty. I guess that would have to enter into it.” She paused. “This is all lost on you, isn’t it?”

I nodded cheerfully. But now I was an old hand. I bet on a ginger-colored horse named Fantaisie-Impromptu, whose parents were Chopin and Music of the Spheres; the jockey’s outfit was a flamingo color, with black triangles on the sleeves and black hoops on the trousers. The odds had risen to fifteen to one. Nina studied the racing form.

“I don’t know, Lydia. What they say about Fantaisie-Impromptu is not inspiring. ‘Needs proof.’ ‘Has been idle.’ ‘Recently dull.’” She bet on an unimpressive brown horse called Nobly Built, won fourteen dollars, and brought me back a frankfurter for consolation. I bet on Princess Althea (how could I resist?), while with pencil in hand Nina pondered for fifteen minutes, bet on Captain Marvel, collected seventeen dollars and forty-eight cents, and returned carrying two strawberry ice-cream cones.

“I’m hot,” she said. “Sometimes you just know that you’re hot. It comes in spurts. Then again you can get cold and stay cold for a long time. You might lose a lot trying, because no one likes to admit they’ve gone cold. It’s like saying the gods have withdrawn their favor.” I listened respectfully. She licked her cone as she worked out her bets on the next three races, then leaned back, stretching her legs to the empty seat in front and turning her face up to the summery sun. She sighed contentedly, as after an arduous task.

“If you’re hot, why do you have to do all that work?”

“It’s like insurance. You can’t afford to get overconfident when you’re hot. The gods don’t like that.”

“You mean you’ve got to be cool in order to stay hot?”

“Sort of.”

“Speaking of hot, how are things with your Jamaican student?”

“It’s running the usual course. Oh, sorry.” She laughed. “I didn’t mean the awful pun.” She raised her large sunglasses to her forehead and looked at me wistfully. “Do you know what the usual course is?”

“Nope.”

“First there’s the sexual excitement part, which is like a colored cloud, a very loud color—cerise or fuchsia—surrounding the two of you so that you’re not aware of anything else. Very, very nice. Lethe. But that starts to fade, because it’s only a cloud, after all. It dissipates slowly, and you begin looking for other qualities—there’s some space to fill once the cloud is a little smaller, a little less opaque. You start to talk to the person more seriously, and inevitably you find the limitations, little fenced-off areas you can’t talk in, subjects you can’t pursue because the person simply has no interest there. Or is afraid to enter, for some reason. I assume he’s finding the same in me, too—I don’t mean to sound superior. After a while you find so many fenced-off, impossible areas that there’s only a very small space left for you to talk in. Too small. You talk around and around in this space like a prisoner pacing the courtyard of the jail—you know, so many steps this way, so many steps that way, till you reach the familiar stone wall. But at the same time you’ve gotten to like the person; you feel comfortable, affectionate, he’s a decent sort. You don’t quite want to get rid of him; that would be unkind. You feel a kind of ... attachment, but not truly a friendship. What you’ve attached is your body. It’s odd. The person knows your body without knowing you. Of course in that first rush, in the cloud, you thought that the body was a ... a stand-in for the whole self, and that in revealing your body and its ways, you were revealing who you are. But that’s an illusion. The body is only the body. So then slowly, from being someone who brought the essential into your life, moments, really, of ... oh, what can I call it? I guess glory is not too strong a word although I must say it’s embarrassing. ... Anyway, the person becomes a bit of a bore, sort of like an old relative you found intriguing as a child but not any more, somebody you’re still fond of and feel you ought to visit every so often, yet you’re not eager to. It feels like time taken away from your real pursuits. You’re ill at ease. If you stop there, though, it’s all right. You can still have good memories. But you don’t stop there, usually. You go on till the person becomes truly a bore, and even while you’re making love you’re faintly bored, bored and excited at the same time, if you can imagine that, Lydia, bored by your own excitement, which is so predictable and so inevitable. And naturally he begins to notice and to ask. You can lie or you can tell the truth—it doesn’t matter, because either way it deteriorates, until at the moments you’re feeling most excited you feel most disgusted with yourself. And even that can generate its own kind of excitement, a rather perverse excitement. But that kind is thin, and brief, and really not very pleasant, and in the end you’re worn out. It hardly seems worth the effort. You start to break dates, and then there is one time that’s the last time. It doesn’t have to be spoken, you both feel it. You have used the person up, and he has used you up. And you feel when he goes out the door that he’s taking away a big chunk of you and leaving nothing in return, and the sad part is that he probably feels the same way.”

She lowered her sunglasses. We both leaned forward to watch the horseflesh being paraded along the track.

“It doesn’t sound like love, in my experience.”

“It’s not love. It’s more like a shadow of love. Seen from the cave.”

“God, you make it sound awful.”

“No. It’s interesting, or why would I do it? Lots of people do. Of course it has its price. It’s a bit eroding.”

“I never understood why you didn’t marry that one in Princeton. You seemed happy with him.”

“Yes, well, he was set on Colorado. I suppose I could have lived in Colorado if I tried. I think, really, that the right time had not yet come.”

We laughed. “And if I ask you in ten years, you’ll say the right time has passed?”

“Probably.”

Post time was announced. She took off the glasses and got out her binoculars. As they rounded the bend we rose with the crowd. All around us men cheered and shouted. I was jumping up and down to spur my horse, Mood Indigo, who had started out ahead but soon slipped behind. Nina alone was still, more like a spectator at a ballet than at a horse race, chastely in white, blue scarf rippling on the breeze, lips slightly parted, nothing betraying excitement except a quivering muscle near her jaw. Mood Indigo ended in third place, but I had bet to win. Nina’s two horses, Social Butterfly and Prince Hal, trailed also. We sat down. She tore up her tickets, extended her hand with the exaggerated gesture of a lady offering it to be kissed, and let the pieces drift to the ground. “That was twenty bucks, dammit. This is no more scientific than a horse race. Ah, well. Do you remember what Gaby was saying about being in a straitjacket from being loved too much?”

“Yes.”

“To me nothing could be too much. It’s never enough to let me rest content. I’m not talking about sex, you know that.”

“I know.”

“With the ones who really loved me, two maybe, I always found fault. I start measuring, to see how much. Never with the others. It’s a ridiculous kind of ... Ah!” She waved her hand in resignation. “They fall short, of course—they have to.”

“Short of what? What’s the standard?”

“What indeed? In Sunday school, when I was a kid, we’d have lessons on stories from the Bible. Lots of miracles. My favorites were the parts where Jesus healed the sick or made the lepers’ sores disappear. I once told that to the minister, and he smiled and said maybe I would like to be a nurse. That could be my way of following Jesus. I had no interest in being a nurse. He didn’t understand at all. I liked the idea of its being a miracle.”

“Ah, a faith healer.”

“Exactly.” She laughed. “I would have liked that—transform with a touch. Anyway, at the end of the lesson, after we sang a couple of hymns, we would all file out, and the teacher, who was skinny and his hair was so oiled your fingers felt greasy just looking at it, would say good-bye to each of us in turn. He patted each of us on the head and said, ‘Remember, Jesus loves you. Jesus loves you, Nancy Dalton.’ Oh, at first it made me feel wonderful, bathed in that vast love. But after a while it wasn’t any good. It was too vast and abstract—I couldn’t get my hands on it. It didn’t help in little daily things, to remember that love. There was a painting of Jesus on the wall, just the face. He was supposed to be smiling down on us. But if you took a good look at the smile, it wasn’t connected to us at all. It was very self-absorbed, as if he was amused by a private joke and we were excluded. It irritated me, and so did the teacher, because he said the same thing to every child. There were about twenty of us. I knew that in every town in the world some oily teacher must be saying that to some kid, and I thought, how can he love so many? He couldn’t even remember all the names. That wasn’t love, or it was love so diluted there was no kick left. You know I always drink everything straight. I didn’t want to be loved as part of a category. I wanted him to love me in particular. It’s terribly self-centered, I know. I want to be the world, for somebody. I know I’m not a world. But I want someone to find the world in me and never want to leave.”

“You would get bored even faster. Look at Gabrielle.”

“Possibly. Still, it’s the truth. Not a truth I’m especially proud of. It’s certainly not what I want to want.”

“Nancy?”

“I changed it when I came East to college. Nancy is so ... oh, simpering. I wanted to leave home that kid who curtsied and behaved herself in Sunday school and never let a boy put his hand under her blouse. Who wasn’t even used to being touched.” She gave me a wry smile. “That was a good idea you had that summer, to hand me George. He did a lot for me.”

“Hah! I can imagine.”

“More than that. He was the finishing touch. His mind was so unfettered.”

“Yes, that’s the trouble.”

“No, unfettered is fine. The trouble is something not there.”

“Passion,” I said. Nina laughed and I blushed, a decade after the fact. “Well, that kind he has. I mean passion about life. Passion makes the fetters.”

“He suffered a lot as a kid,” she said.

“So did you. That’s no excuse.”

“You’re hard on him, Lydia. For you the past is always present, isn’t it? And yet he did you no harm.” She was silent for a while. “I think the only time my mother touched me was to do my braids. She brushed them out morning and night and did them right up again, as if it was perilous to leave the hair unbraided. She brushed so hard, it was like a punishment. Yes, I’m sure it was a punishment.” She laughed again and tossed a stray lock off her forehead. “She made those braids so tight my scalp ached. That’s why I finally cut it off, my freshman year. It was a great moment, when I realized it was my hair and I could do what I liked with it. It was gradually dawning on me that the rest of me was mine too. Now I brush it with such affection, Lydia, you would laugh if you saw. I had a man once, who brushed my hair. He did it so well. He used to ... Ah, this is all very silly. I don’t know why I’m telling you all this.”

“No, go on. You always stop at the best parts.”

“Yes. Well, I suppose Nancy hasn’t changed all that much. Still pure in word if not in deed. Nina was the name of someone in a novel, the kind I couldn’t bring into the house. I had to read it in the lending library, in snatches. She was a femme fatale. She had flaming red hair and breasts that were forever quivering.”

I smiled. “In all these years you never even told me your name. Or that you were a femme fatale.”

“Hardly. I’m just a repressed academic.” I must have looked doubtful. “What I mean is that I’ve repressed the cravings for the ordinary. I did it backwards. The ninth race is coming up, Lyd. We can do a triple.”

We both bet on Slalom and Stately Minute for Win and Place, and I picked Dapper Dan for Show, a ruinous choice, Nina pointed out, since in the opinion of the handicappers, Dapper Dan was “hardly the one.” But the three jockeys wore purple, gold, and green—how glorious they could look together at the finish line. At the last minute Dapper Dan did zoom up from behind, but only to fourth place. Luckily for me, Nina was not a gloater. Suddenly, strange green patterns flashed on the boards, and the crowd held its breath. Chance was a foxy god: the horse in third place—Nina’s Old Curmudgeon—was disqualified for some breach of equine etiquette, and Dapper Dan was moved up. Forty-six dollars! I could buy Victor the print he wanted from his friend Tom’s show down in a Village loft.

“You’re the one who’s hot now. I’ve transferred my heat. What on earth made you pick Dapper Dan?”

“That’s my father’s name. And he’s dapper, too. Pin-striped suits, folded handkerchief in the jacket pocket. When I was a kid it made an impression. Also, when he and Evelyn and I watched prizefights on television Friday nights, he taught us always to root for the underdog. Nina, what are those people doing?”

All around us, the sallow, unshaven men in baggy pants were bent over, swishing their hands through the racing tickets that papered the floor.

“Looking for a winning ticket thrown away by mistake.”

“Hey! Come on, we might pick up a few bucks.”

“Oh Lydia, stop it. Get up! Really!”

“Aha! That’s Nancy speaking. Okay, okay, I’ll be a lady. Even at the track.”

We got back into the Triumph I so loved to ride in; when she speeded I tasted adventure on the wind, and an impossible freedom.

Out on the highway she glanced over and read my mind. “Maybe I’ll run away someday. Would you care to come? We’ll take the car, and find two men who like to eat and drink and swim, and we’ll drive around stopping off in motels with pools, like in Lolita. We can follow the sun and the horses, and shoplift caviar from supermarkets, and chill our champagne in rivers. Just you and me and two fly-by-night men, if such exist.”

“It’s a deal. Just give me a couple of days’ notice.” I didn’t want to spoil her mood or her fantasy; I found her delectable and tingling as lime ices, as well as gallant in her solitude. Why tell her I had never been further from running away? I was hot and running back into my life. Back to Victor, to my work, and to the children, whose infancy I had known only through a mist. What I wanted now was the adventure of being happy in the ordinary way. But I felt shy about telling her. Compared to what she had to tell, it sounded banal.

It was not the moment, either, to tell her I was pregnant. No accident. I was stronger now, and I yearned for another chance, to prove I could do things right, like everyone else. A question of pride. Victor had been easily persuaded. He loved children, and as the embryonic Alan was later to do, loved landmark and ritualistic events in his life. He was beginning to sell paintings, teaching at Parsons, and tending bar rarely. I was earning some money by teaching too. We had moved uptown to a solid apartment building with an elevator that could hold groceries, stroller, and a whole troop of children. Things were so much easier; possibly I missed the eerie thrill of living on the edge.

Through the fall and winter, as my belly grew, I sat at the piano and practiced. Rosalie kept watch like a warden and I was a model prisoner. I never missed a lesson or a rehearsal, and I did two concerts at Saint John the Divine, the unfinished cathedral, wrapped in her voluminous gypsy dresses. I kept on till the last moment, which came at the end of March. My mother, her broken arm in a sling, was summoned to stay with Althea and Phil. She turned on the TV to hear the President, while Victor hunted for the car keys. Victor’s ambivalence over so middle-class a concession as a used car took the form of misplacing the keys.

“Lydie, did you hear that?” my mother gasped.

“What?” I was in the hall, tossing the old Trollope novels into the overnight case.

“He said he’s not going to run again.”

In a moment we were all in front of the television. “Shush,” Victor told Phil, and picked him up.

It was true. He would not seek another term because of the public outcry against his waging of the war. Althea, on my mother’s lap, wanted to switch to Sesame Street. “Shh, darling, there’s no Sesame Street at night.”

“They should be in bed, Mom.”

“You should be in the hospital. Why are you both standing here?”

“Shh, wait a minute,” said Victor.

Johnson’s face had become human again. Those deep grooves were where our marching feet had tracked. He had felt it. We stood for five more minutes, mesmerized. I had another contraction and grabbed hold of a chair. “Victor, the keys!”

“I never would have thought it.” He put Phil down and went to continue the search.

The phone rang. It was Gabrielle. “Did you hear him?”

“Yes! Isn’t it incredible?”

“Maybe Esther was right about the moral victory. ... What did she say, the wish was father to the fact?”

“Yes, her William James phase.”

“Lydia,” Victor called from the kitchen. “This is no time for one of those girlish chats.”

“I have to go. I’m having the baby.”

“I want to see the baby!” Phil whined.

“Oh! Good luck!” said Gabrielle. “Or should I say break a leg?”

“I’d much rather, believe me.” I hung up.

Victor dashed in, jangling the keys. “Who put them on top of the refrigerator?”

“Not me,” said Althea. “I can’t even reach.”

He pulled on his coat. “Did he say anything about ending it?”

“No. Would you two go already? The war will wait, I assure you.”

“Okay, come, Lydie. Come along. Are you timing them? Keep track.” He nudged me out the door. “Good-bye, Althea. Good-bye, Flip. Good-bye, Francie, I’ll call you. Move, sweetheart. You don’t have all day.”

And lo it came to pass, as Ecclesiastes might have put it, that Alan slid out like a child going down a wet slide, and I actually laughed, lying on the table, when the doctor held him up high like a coveted football in her large and gifted hands, shook her gray curls, and said, “If there’s another you might not make it to the hospital.” After the infected stitches I had found her, a painstaking lady, a woman who would take pains.

The first day home I wheeled the white wicker bassinet (unberibboned) over to the piano and played Brahms and Rachmaninoff so he would get used to sleeping through the loudest, most urgent of sounds. Rosalie told me that trick and it worked. I did it for my survival, but I did it too for those little missives of Esther’s. I wanted to be worthy of that chubby, loving handwriting.

It was a Pyrrhic victory for the moral force. The wish was not father to the fact, or not yet. The gestation was endless; four days after Johnson’s speech Martin Luther King was killed in Memphis, and the other, anonymous, bodies kept piling up on the TV screen.

By 1971 Esther had been back from Israel for a year. The kibbutz was “fantastic,” but, well, she had had it with communal living. Now she “had” social work school, and was having psychotherapy, with a woman who was a Gestalt therapist, an anarchist, and a feminist. Her father’s daughter, Esther felt cozy in the company of people whose views could be encompassed by “ist” words. Ralph had been a Marxist as well as an addict.

We all “had” something new. At the monthly magazine where three years ago, to her chagrin, she had begun as a typist, Gabrielle was an associate editor. They had recognized her brains and her durability. We were acquiring our lives, like the consumers Esther’s father scorned. Choosy shoppers, though, we paid dearly for our goods and we treated them well. Collectively we acquired children, skills, work, lovers, trips, experience—and we thought that these things constituted ourselves, and that without them we would no longer be who we were. As if they were barnacles lodged to the bottoms of ships. Or as if they were swallowed and assimilated. Or better still, implanted.

Nina had been promoted to associate professor, and she had a new lover. Freed from that unhappy pattern at last, she told me: he was much more appropriate. A lawyer. Civil rights. A Jewish lawyer, no less, a dozen years older than she, and married. “Appropriate? I can’t see what’s so appropriate.” “Lydia, you’re being parochial. You know what I mean. He’s someone I can talk to, for one thing.” “You wanted to be the world for somebody. How much of the world do you suppose you can be for him if he already has a wife?” “His wife is not my business. That’s his problem. I’ve got to think about me.” “I am thinking about you, Nina.” But she was in the fuchsia cloud, from which neither common sense nor the stringencies of Abelard could extricate her. Did she receive him at midnight in the harem outfits, Epictetus at her bedside and bangles on her wrists? I knew several Jewish lawyers in their mid-forties, politically liberal and sexy. Such men would love the harem outfits and the brainy, lapsed Sunday school student in them. But would not find the world there, nor bring it.

It was 1971, the war was still going on, and the promise of the sixties was turning like aging milk. Disheartened, Nina said we must go back to the beginning, where the crucial questions were first and best articulated. Plato, Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus. But how could we? The Philosophy Study Group was meeting more sporadically than ever. Gabrielle and I zipped from home to work like frantic mechanical toys, Nina herself was deep in a study of the biochemical roots of schizophrenia, and Esther refused to come: it might interfere with her therapy. “Considering the depth of our inquiries,” Gaby commented, “I think her alarm is excessive.” But Esther was firm. Her therapist was teaching her, among other things, to say no.

“Therapists are the sophists of the age,” Gabrielle said testily as we fell onto the purple pillows.

Nina handed us gin and tonics in tall glasses. “Four ice cubes, Lydia.” She knew I loved ice.

Outside, a heat wave was stifling the city. From the huge windows, in the seeping dusk, we could see young mothers in shorts and halters, their backs shiny with sweat, slowly pushing strollers one last time around the playground to calm the fretful babies. Someone had opened a fire hydrant, and little kids splashed in their underwear. Passers-by walked through the spray with peaked smiles. It was a New York August. Inside, Nina had the air-conditioner on full force. We pinned up our hair and sat with our loose summer dresses pulled high on our thighs.

“Therapists”—Gaby spoke the word with contempt—“are the real sophists of the age. They travel around and give lectures—those marathons—just like Protagoras. They also take money for their teachings. In Greece the real philosophers didn’t condescend to take money.”

“But they don’t claim to be philosophers.” I was thinking of George, who was really quite humble.

“Don’t they? They teach skills for getting by, as Protagoras did. Only back then they called what they taught wisdom and virtue; we don’t even bother. Just a certain efficiency. Self-help. How-to. Truth is whatever works for you. The only difference I can see is that in Greece they manipulated words and emotions to succeed in politics, and here the action is all in the private arena. You know, ‘relationships.’ Being with people is a technique.”

I remembered her great tirade in the dorm, when she raged through the room in her blue leotard, splendid in her indignation against philosophic bad faith. She no longer raged. It was too hot, for one thing, and she had grown subdued, earthbound. More out of sorts, it seemed, than truly indignant. Maybe she was getting her period. I scolded myself for such retrogressive thinking.

She was smoking again too, French cigarettes. She tossed a still-burning match into an ashtray a foot away, as Esther used to do. It landed on the purple rug. Nina, once so quick to restore safety, sat unmoved while Gaby absently retrieved it and rubbed at the dark spot on the rug. “Look,” she went on, “Esther will always be Esther. She’ll always fumble around, and not because she doesn’t understand her own motives. I give her more credit than that. She understands fine. What she doesn’t understand is the world, what’s happening around her and to her. Protagoras says you can give the same food to a healthy man—well, let’s say woman—to a healthy woman or a sick woman. The healthy woman will say it’s good, the sick woman, bitter. Does that mean the sick woman is mistaken? Oh no, perceptions never lie. Only it’s better to be healthy, of course. So the job is to change the sick woman into a healthy woman, so that she can find the food good. How? By words. Now isn’t that exactly what a therapist does? But—the food is what happens to you in your life. And the point is, the food is good or rotten in itself. Everyone’s forgotten that. Let the world fall to ruins, we’ll just refine our coping techniques.”

“Good grief, you’ve become an absolutist,” said Nina.

“Why should you care if she goes to a therapist? If it helps?”

“No, you haven’t mastered the proper vocabulary, Lydia. You’re supposed to ask, why does it make me feel threatened.”

I felt a chill in the Philosophy Study Group, beyond air-conditioning and ice cubes. I got up and walked around the room. Gabrielle stubbed out the cigarette and crossed her legs Indian fashion. Then, as if to show she could still do it, she arranged her legs and bare feet in the lotus position. She looked at us with a peculiar, needless defiance, her eyes blue and green, flamed by discontent.

“Not just an absolutist. A Stoic.” Nina laughed as she rose and took our glasses. “I can see it in the way you sit.” She went into the small kitchen, and through the connecting window, as she fixed the drinks, peered out at us. “Bear and forbear,” she said with a jaunty tilt of her head. “Those Golden Sayings of Epictetus. Death, disaster, loss, all wonderful opportunities to prove your mettle. Bear whatever comes, and forbear from evil. Bear the pain and forbear from the pleasure. Charming, isn’t it?” Ice cubes crackled out of a tray, and in a moment she was back.

I took the frosty glass. “It’s not all so priggish. Marcus Aurelius has that lovely part about the emeralds. Although he too—Gaby, don’t, what is it?” I reached over, but she shook her head.

She was crying with her face in her hands. She waved us away, and in a moment was composed again. Not menstrual pangs. A man in her office. It was driving her mad. She had never felt this way before—with eyes averted. She hadn’t known it could be so bad. It. Her face darkened. She thought about him all the time. All the time. She banged a fist on her knee, still captive in the lotus position.

“Well, what are you doing about it?” Nina asked. “You’ve got the will. What about the consent?”

“I’m doing nothing. What can I do? Wait it out. It’s no good, but it’ll pass. The hard part is ... I have to see him every day. It’s funny—I lie awake at night and think that with a few well-aimed words I could have him transferred. He’s in the Art Department. He could do the same thing for another magazine in the group. It would be a relief. But of course I would never do that. It’s wrong. I’d rather leave myself.”

“After all the effort you’ve put in! You said in a couple of years you could be the arts editor.”

“No, I’m not planning to leave. That wouldn’t be right either.”

“Your vocabulary,” Nina remarked, “is somewhat limited. Right. Wrong. Good. Bad.”

She smiled. “Unthreatening, I guess. Look, I know I could push words around to make it all right. I mean, all right to have the affair, or all right not to. With words you can do anything. But they don’t change the truth of what’s happening.”

“Yes,” said Nina. “It’s like that story about the student who wouldn’t pay Protagoras his fee.”

“What story?”

“Oh, you don’t want to hear a story at a moment like this. Go ahead, indulge yourself. Tell us all about him.”

“No, no. Tell it. It’ll distract me.”

“Okay. Protagoras taught the student how to be successful at argument, and they agreed that the student would pay his fee only if he won the first case he pleaded in court. Well, he kept delaying his first case, till Protagoras threatened to sue him; he pointed out that the student didn’t stand a chance: if Protagoras won, the student would have to pay by the judgment of the court, and if the student won he would have to pay according to the terms of their agreement. But the student—he must have been a pretty clever student—pointed out that Protagoras didn’t have a chance: if he, the student, won, he was freed of all debt by the court’s decree, and if Protagoras won, he was free and clear according to the terms of the agreement. There’s your typical sophist argument. You choose what you like and find words to justify it.”

I was never good at riddles. I sat puzzling, while Gabrielle made an effort to smile. The next minute she was in tears again.

“Oh, it’s really too hot to cry, Gaby,” Nina said. “It’s too hot even to talk. Let’s go to the beach, just for a look. The car’s right outside.”

I was up and ready. Gabrielle looked at her watch. “I don’t know. ... Don ... the kids ...”

“Is it right? Is it wrong?” Nina mocked. “Shall we bear the heat, forbear from going to the beach? Or maybe we should forbear from denying ourselves the beach. Let’s sit and analyze it.”

“Okay, okay.” She wiped her eyes and turned to me. “What was the part about the emeralds?”

“I’ll tell you another time. Come on, up! It’ll do you good.”

Nina put on real clothes, and we trooped downstairs to the aging but still plucky white Triumph. We sped over the bridge, with the Watchtower, home of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, glaring at us severely, warning of imminent apocalypse, then through the broad, stolid avenues of Brooklyn, past old people in sturdy white laced shoes, taking the night air on plastic chairs set on narrow stretches of grass. Very soon the smell of ocean seasoned the air. On the boardwalk were other seekers after a breeze and a glimpse of infinity. We took off our shoes and went down to the sand, cool on the soles of our feet. The beach itself was nearly empty. Wire trash baskets loomed like animals in the night; here and there a bulbous lump shifted on the sand, couples rolling in blankets. We didn’t dance or frolic as we used to, but walked sedately to the water’s edge and stepped in almost up to our knees. The surf knocked against our legs. Far off, a yellow light from a ship at sea (how far, Thales?) cast a ray on the water like a mistaken sun, out of season. The water was warmish, having been heated all day, all week, all month; it was comforting to think that even the sea, under a planetary sway, was subject, like us, to small fluctuations of temperature. A few gulls swooped overhead, plummeted, skimmed the surface and shot upwards into a black sky full of stars promising more heat when the dark lifted. We walked along the water’s edge about a quarter of a mile, stopped as one and turned back, not speaking. We were cooled. The heat and the day and the facts of our lives drained from us, and we were creatures unspecified, abstracted from ourselves, poised at the rim of the sea.

We sat down on the sand, not close together but together. I saw a shooting star. It went by so fast I had no time to tell the others. No, I wanted it all for myself, because it brought back to me the night Vivian was conceived, thirteen months ago, when there was also a shooting star.

“Did you see it?” Victor had said. It was a weekend camping, our first weekend away alone in years. “Yes, I saw it. Ah, come here, Mr. Watson, I need you.” Our words came so slowly and lazily, everything else so fast. “First put the damn thing in, Lyd. Come on, baby,” he drawled, and I drawled back, “I can’t reach it, and I can’t get up. It’s too chilly out there. Look at all those cold stars. So cold. Yes, oh that.” “Lydie, I don’t want ... Let’s just—” “One time out of so many. It can’t happen. Oh Victor. Love.” “Baby, move over, yes. Oh Jesus. It’s always ... I could die in you. It would be all right.” “Stay still for just a minute. Can you? Oh that’s good.” “Listen, I’d better not. It’s too risky.” “Oh Victor, don’t, don’t. It doesn’t feel nice. Stay, please. Don’t go ’way.”

Vivian was what we had. We thought of an abortion and we remembered that moment on the damp earth, when I had pleaded and he had been unable to leave me, and we couldn’t bring ourselves to deny the fire that was her source. It was as if we knew it would be Vivian, child of air and water, conceived lakeside, child of the elements, magical, careless, with glistening shy black lake eyes; as if we knew in advance her delights and would not miss having her for the world. The world well lost. We would manage somehow. Four of them! There was something seductive, wonderfully outrageous about it. A game, like playing poor. People thought us stupid, but were too discreet to say. Had they heard how it happened, they would have thought us stupider still.

Gabrielle waited but the feeling did not pass. It wore her down like a disease; she got thin from it, and her blue eye and green eye both faded to gray. Yet she would do nothing but abide with it, speaking of it rarely, bearing it like a disease, not progressive and not terminal. In Don’s spiffy green Volkswagen bus we drove out to the country for picnics on warm Sunday afternoons, children bouncing around in the back, clamoring, How much longer? Sometimes she invited us for dinner and cooked fancy French food. There seemed little change between them. As ever, she was the gracious wife, receptive to his affection, but quieter. A weary kind of stillness settled on her movements. She glided around the table carrying dishes with almost no sound, deft, light, and self-absorbed, while he continued to dote, never letting on if he knew anything.

Holding me in bed, Victor whispered, “What is the matter? Is she not well?” “She’s well.” “What is it, then? Something between them?” “No, I think they’re all right.” “Someone else,” he said. It was terribly difficult not to respond; this murmuring was the core of our life. He nudged me. “Lyd? You up?” “I’m up.” “You can’t tell me?” I shook my head against him in the dark. He could feel it. “But Don. She still loves him. Doesn’t she?” “Oh yes,” I said. “Otherwise ...” “What if that should happen to us?” “She’s good,” I said. “I wouldn’t be such a good girl.” “No,” he said, “I don’t imagine you would.” “I don’t see it happening. I don’t have the time. Move your elbow, Victor. My arm’s asleep.” He did, and began to caress me. “Come here again,” he whispered, and moved to pull me on him. “I’m tired. Can’t we just lie here and talk?” He stopped and simply held me. “I could not love anyone else,” he said. “Of course you could.” “Maybe. That Jasper, Lyd. Jasper looks at you ... Greg never looked at you that way.” I moved off a bit. “Jesus, what is this, ‘The Kreutzer Sonata’? First of all, Jasper is homosexual, Victor. If he looks at me it has to do with what we’re playing. There’s an intimate current in a chamber group. You have to keep checking out the others. You can sense what’s going on in them. Musically. It may be analogous to sex but it is not sex. Besides, Jasper is better than Greg. Maybe that’s why he looks more.” “Then why is Greg the one who got the job in the Philharmonic? And incidentally, Jasper is bisexual, not homosexual. Didn’t you ever notice?” “You know, Victor, with all your perception, sometimes you seem very ignorant.” “I suppose when I want to make love I get ignorant.” I moved back to him. “In that case you should insist.” “Ah, I don’t like to insist. All right. I insist. No, I’ll urge. Like this.” I laughed. “Not bad. You’re funny, Victor.” “That’s why you married me, right? For laughs.” “It’s after two, though. They’ll be up in a few hours.” “Quick, then. We’ll make it very quick this time. No fooling around. You can even count. You tell me how many, uh, thrusts you require, and I’ll deliver, like George’s seltzer man. You can be asleep in five minutes if you concentrate. Ready, Lydia? One.” “Stop horsing around. I couldn’t count past two.” “Two,” he said. “Shh.” He stopped and stroked my face. “Don’t ever fall in love with anyone else. Please.” “I won’t, I won’t ...Oh!” I clasped him tighter, and when we parted I burrowed into his shoulder, almost asleep. “I’m glad you urged. Good night.” Hypnagogic pictures began, with music to match. I was almost gone. “Twelve,” he said in my ear. “Victor, how could you? How could I love someone who could do that?” “I’m just kidding. I made it up.” “Hah! I wonder.”

Gabrielle saved her good grace for Don and their kids; with her friends she was moody. Unexpectedly, Esther turned up one evening, strengthened and impervious to whatever damage latitudinarianism could do. She said that the Gestalt wizard had transformed her, or rather, enabled her to transform herself.

“She doesn’t operate on a Freudian model. She thinks the process is more like a Socratic dialogue.” Esther’s face was ruddy and radiant again, and her voice clear, not raspy—she had stopped smoking for the third time. Her hems were not hanging, she wore a bra, her hair had been recently washed. “It all has to do with figure and ground, the boundary where the organism meets the environment. That’s a dynamic relation. You’d be surprised—your boundaries are more fluid than you think. You operate in a field, and you keep changing according to how things in the field move in and out of you.”

Nina brought us a bowl of grapes and Gaby, as she clutched a handful, said, “That’s all very well. But a women’s group might do more for people our age.”

Esther gave a newly ironic smile. “Couldn’t you call us a women’s group?”

“No. If we were we’d do something practical. Instead of sitting here we could be learning to use a speculum, for example. Why shouldn’t a woman know what’s inside her?”

“I’d rather know what’s inside my head,” Esther said, quite without irony this time, twining her fingers, feeling for the absent cigarette.

“We don’t accomplish anything. We have a friendly feeling, that is all. Warmth does not get you unstuck.”

“Gaby,” I said, “you want a women’s group, go find a women’s group. I like what you contemptuously call a friendly feeling. And a speculum—are you kidding? After four pregnancies I’m not looking for any gratuitous probing. Thanks anyway.”

“That’s pure ignorance speaking! You of all people should want to know—”

“Ignorance! I know it so well I could be a midwife! Oh, sleep with the man already, will you? Enough of this saintly shit. It’s pure self-indulgence. Give your consent. Do you think a women’s group would tell you any different?”

“What man?” Esther glanced warily around the room as if he might materialize, an intruder come through a window. Then she looked at each of us. “Oh, I see. I’ve really been out of touch.” Silence. “Silence makes me anxious. ... I recently learned that.”

“I’m sorry, Esther, go on,” said Gaby. “You were telling us about the Gestalt person.”

“Oh, never mind. Frankly, I don’t see any point in a false purity. ... He’s on your mind so you might as well ... Clearly Esther was not of the school of Abelard. Still siding with God: lust in the eye is as good as done.

“Yes? And then what? Have a secret life? Or give up everything? I don’t want to. I’m too entrenched. I can see it all. Notes in the office; surreptitious phone calls; I’d arrange to meet him when Don was away, or else I’d make up excuses, say I was here or there, with one of you, maybe—I’d have to drag my friends in. You’d lie for me, you’d feel contempt, he’d be humiliated. I’ve been through it a million times in my head. I don’t want that kind of life.”

What a talented projector. She could map the movements of Leucippus’ atoms to their inevitable destiny; life could be over, in abstraction, before it was even lived.

“But when you were with him,” Nina said. “That’s the part you’re leaving out. That part might give you ... oh ...”

Glory was the word she had used, with embarrassment, at the race track.

“No one seems to remember that I once made a promise. But let’s drop the subject. It’s my private life.”

“You didn’t promise to suffer,” said Esther. “Your first obligation is to take care of yourself. If Don doesn’t satisfy all your needs—”

“Oh, please!” Gabrielle cried. “Don’t give me that cant about needs! This is not a matter of need but of greed. He satisfies what you call my ‘needs.’ He gets it up, all too well. That is what you mean, isn’t it? Oh, if only it were that simple! Who knows what needs are? Needs conform to the available satisfactions.”

I often recalled that little epigram of Gaby’s, aimed at the narcissism of the age and as out of step as a Jesuit at a disco party. Three years later, in 1975, after a visit to India in the entourage of a swami, Esther married Clyde Powers of the SAVE community, child of rampant sophistry, nephew of Richard Nixon’s Doublespeak, and fifteenth cousin of Freud, though surely the master would have turned from him in disgust, as Shakespeare from Caliban. Clyde was available and Esther was in need.

Nina and I told Gaby about the wedding, soon after her return from France. Again it was late summer, again hot, again we saw the open fire hydrant through Nina’s wide second-story window, and the perennial young mothers pushing fretful babies one last time around the playground. And for us, again the comfort of family without its blood resentments. Nina was the one who actually told, in her most arch manner. “In touch with himself, he boasted. But if all you touch is a void ...” I sat and drank. With my skirt pulled up for the cool air, I examined my legs for red and blue streaks of aging. I was thirty-seven, a good but not great pianist, locally known but unable to travel as frequently as I should. When the trio or my woodwind pals had a gig of more than a couple of days, they got someone to fill in, while I ground my teeth at night and muttered, like a prayer to rout frustration, Althea, Phil, Alan, Vivian, the world well lost. It worked, most of the time. But I had too much to do and was showing inevitable signs of wear—intimate little occurrences all over my body that I wished Victor could not see. Having studied me so long, drawn me and painted me as well as loved me, he could not help but see, though he was far too chivalrous to mention them out loud. A foolish worry, I was aware, but it sufficed in black moments—and Esther’s wedding had gotten me down.

“What’s the matter, Lyd?” Gaby said with the old gentleness. Her passion, and the bile it oozed, had finally passed, as she had trusted it would. “You haven’t spoken a word since we got here, except to ask for ice.”

“It seems such a waste. Our going to school together, our talking. And she goes and does that with her life. Even India—at least it was India. There is really nothing to discuss. Nothing ever changes. I have no more taste for argument for its own sake.”

“We never did engage in argument for its own sake. It was for our sake. Except maybe in school.”

“Yes, what a falling off was there. From the cosmic to the personal. Gossip.”

“Esther will pass through this like everything else,” Gaby said. “She’ll be the same, but the way she’ll be the same will change, and who knows, the next way may be better.”

I wasn’t sure I believed her, but her serenity was a pleasure to watch. She possessed the grace that comes with ripeness, with having become what one was meant to become and has accepted as fitting. In college she had been an arty American girl, member of a genus. With age she looked more European, or perhaps it was the month in France that had given her eyes their allusiveness and tinge of history, her wide mouth its ambiguous curve. She did not look young for her years as Nina and I did: her various renunciations, and the unlovely virtue with which she had sustained them, had toughened her skin and left narrow ravines of strain around the eyes. But she had followed her anachronistic lights, and the stubbornness of that journey showed in the earned repose of her face and the lines of her body. She no longer kept the taut readiness of a dancer. She looked smooth, almost sleek, and satisfied. At the magazine, where she was arts editor now, she had a reputation for being tough and shrewd. She played no favorites, was afraid of no one, and never grumbled about compromises with commercialism—that was part of the job and she knew it. The mobilities of her face were carefully monitored, and hinted at vast inner rooms of privacy, a secret life. The secret life was not erotic but verbal. She wrote mysteries under a pseudonym. They were cool and caustic and elegantly plotted; the characters who toed the line were rewarded in the end, Nina and I noted, while those who followed aberrant paths were punished. In real life she was tolerant and forbearing. Having denied herself, she could allow others their divergences. Smugness, maybe, but she never flaunted it. Her auburn hair was cut razor straight, reaching not quite to her shoulders, and had streaks of gray that made it more beautiful. Her two children not only were bilingual but had excellent manners in both tongues, more than I could say for mine. With Don she was the same, gracious and receptive at a slight distance, which was perhaps where he wanted her. He touched her a lot in public, on the arm, the shoulder, neutral places emblematic of the others. I don’t imagine she liked that but she gave no sign. I imagine she liked it all well enough in private. I think that after her love affair, her non-love affair, she was drawn to Don again, as sometimes happens, with a passion of her own, not merely a reactive one. I think she took the longings she had felt for the man, in their most elemental form, the hollowness and quickenings in the cavities of the body, and brought them to Don to have them allayed, and she knew exactly what she was doing and forgave herself. The forgiveness was what saved her, and gave her mouth and eyes that humane ambiguity. I think.

“It’s true, our interest has never been disinterested,” I said. “Maybe that’s why it didn’t do anything for Esther. We discussed everything for how we could use it. We foraged. We picked the prettiest flowers and out of them we made our soups.”

“Lydia has grown so facetious in her advancing age,” Nina said. “I don’t think you’re a kindly Bosc pear any more, Lyd. You’ll have to be something a little odd, like a fig, or endive.”

“Endive is good. A fig is too exotic. For that matter, Esther’s not much of a peach any more, either. More of a ... watermelon. She can still be a ruby, though. What about you, Gaby?”

“Topaz,” she replied instantaneously, and with perfect accuracy.

Nina said, “Emerald,” and we all laughed. Hot on the inside and cool on the outside.

“Emerald ... emerald. You were going to tell us something about emerald once, Lyd.”

I shook my head. “I don’t remember.”

“Well, what are you?”

“Something blue. I can’t think of what it’s called.”

“Sapphire?”

“No, sapphire is too gaudy.”

Nina got up and fetched her huge Webster’s dictionary. She opened to the array of gems, a shiny thick page amid the dry definitions. We huddled around it. Each color was discrete and luminous.

“How wonderful. I’ve never seen this page. This is the one.” I pointed. “Lapis lazuli.”

“You would pick a rare one. Well, enough of childish things. I’ve got to go. I promised to pick up Cynthia by ten-thirty. She’s making posters to protest cooking classes. It appears the girls are going to strike.”

“But school’s out.”

“They’re getting their strategy set—it’s only a few weeks off. I think she eavesdrops when the women’s group meets at my place.”

“Oh, I meant to ask, did you ever learn to use a speculum?”

“Yes. We had someone come in to teach us.”

“And?”

“Interesting.” She smiled gnomically, a bit like Evelyn. I could see I had forfeited the right to details. “Want to share a cab, Lydia, or are you staying?”

“No, I’ll get one later. The air is too good to leave.” I remembered the many nights when a cab would have been out of the question, and with that sense of time and change came a premonition that the Philosophy Study Group was over. Friends forever, very likely, but no more half-purposeful fooling with ideas. We would never be true believers. Things had fallen off too far—fruits, gems. Not ideas, but the intangibles of identity.

At the door Gaby said, “Wait.” Perhaps she had the same intimation of closure. “It was from Epictetus. We were talking about bear and forbear. When I was ... you know.”

“Oh yes! That was years ago. It was Marcus Aurelius, but I can’t remember what any more.”

Nina went and knelt before a low shelf, stretched her arm directly to the book she wanted. What an efficient retrieval system! Perhaps her whole life was coded that way—given the topic and the year, could she lay her hands on anything? “Here. Find it.”

I found it. It made me suddenly very happy—one of those moments when the shards of life fit together like a prehistoric bowl, and the mind is flooded with contentment. “‘Whatever anyone does or says, I must be good, just as if the gold, or the emerald, or the purple, were always saying this, Whatever anyone does or says, I must be emerald and keep my color.’”

Gaby laughed, a laugh of concealment, not candor. “I’ve kept my color, all right.” Then she kissed us good night and was gone. We sat back on the pillows again. After a while I said, “So, Nina? How is it going with you?”

She leaned over, took the lacquered black box from the cabinet, and rolled a joint. She undid her hair and let it tumble down her back, smooth and thick. I thought of the man who used to brush it. She smiled slowly—it was almost seductive—and shook her head. “I don’t want to talk about love. I’m sick of love. He’s very much there, that’s all. And his wife is there too, and her diabetic comas. Let’s not talk about anything.” She passed me the joint. “What would you like to hear?”

“Wanda Landowska. Do you have any Scarlatti?”

She reached a hand out and found it immediately. We sat and smoked. The pungent smell was good accompaniment for the relentless, supple sound of the harpsichord. I could listen better than look. I studied Nina, wishing for Victor’s eyes. After all the years of the Philosophy Study Group I still wasn’t sure I understood how she saw the world. A scientist first, that I knew—her mind open to experiment, but her allegiance given only to evidence and proof. She had changed the least since college, except to become more talkative. The enormous change, the metamorphosis of Nancy into Nina, had taken place in school, right before my eyes, but I had been too inexperienced to know what I was seeing. I envisioned it now as a huge reconstruction project, where sometimes the shell of the old becomes the skeleton of the new; the dirty work is surrounded and hidden by makeshift wooden boards with tiny windows cut out to satisfy curious passers-by, but often the windows are too remote for the eyes of youngsters. Then it is unveiled, a suave modern building with a glassy facade, beautiful in its way but a trifle forbidding. She was wearing a loose and shiny black shirt with a gold chain given her by Sam, the civil rights lawyer. A noose. To his credit, though civil rights were no longer a glamorous or fashionable issue for whites, Sam persisted. For glamor, he had her. She sat with her knees drawn up. Listening? Or maybe working out some formula in her head. She narrowed her eyes, played with a bracelet, drew in the smoke so deeply I could see the muscles around her collarbone twitch. She had been home on three occasions in the sixteen years since college, and returned the first time looking frayed, and picked up a stranger in a bar. The only time, she told me. “I thought he might kill me and I didn’t even care. He was all right, though. I was lucky.” She didn’t go to see them again, but telephoned regularly, honoring her father and mother long-distance, sending money for a cataract operation, a new roof. The other two occasions were the funerals.

The music stopped and we looked at each other and smiled. “It’s peaceful here,” I said. “I could sit here all night, listening.”

She shrugged. “Stay if you like. I don’t sleep much anyway.”

“No.” There was a silence.

“It’s always been Victor, hasn’t it?” Her voice was low; it made the very air heavy.

“Yes.”

Then she smiled again, and I was grateful for this fine agility of hers. “Do you know, I still sometimes ask myself those Pythagorean questions at the end of the day. Can you believe it? A way of life and a salvation, Professor Boles said. In what have I failed? What good have I done? What have I not done that I ought to have done? A lot!” She laughed, head tossed back, eyes half closed. “The answers are interesting, but I don’t really care. I mean I can’t feel guilty about much any more.”

“I can just see you kneeling at your bedside, the way you used to say your prayers with your mother standing by.”

“Yes.”

I was high. My thoughts were swirling lazily, like the smoke. I saw our lives fulfilled and, in a way, over. We had arrived at who we were, emerald, lapis lazuli, and the rest would be simply acting out the roles of ourselves, creating scenes in which our natures and talents could unfurl, the way a playwright writes a part for a specific actress. There would be no more great changes, I thought. I saw myself continuing to play, with new groups forming and dissolving, and perhaps in a few years going on tour. I saw myself continuing to love Victor and to raise our four children, subject to their delights as well as their selfishness. It was a vision pleasantly boring. Perhaps my greatest problem would be boredom. Not surface boredom or dullness—not with four children—but the kind of profound and temperate boredom you can feel in the midst of activity, a placidity that comes with the relief of growing up and believing that nothing wonderful or terrible will ever happen to you again. Or rather, that things will happen, but you will be so ripe with experience as to be unable to feel wonder or terror, knowing that anything is possible and everything finally subsides.

That was what I thought, high and ignorant, in Nina’s purple apartment.

“I’d better go,” I said, “before I start staggering.”

“Yes, go.” There was a touch of approaching middle age in the slow way she stood up: she used to spring from the floor like a beanstalk. She rested her hand on my shoulder. “Who knows what exotic adventures might befall you, Lydia.”

“Thanks for everything.”

“Shall we go to the races soon? About two weeks? I’m hot, I can feel it.”

“Two weeks is fine.”

We kissed, hugged, and parted. She felt light and soft, for an instant sinking in my embrace. That must be the feeling men loved. I must ask, some night in bed.