THE SECOND BABY WAS Greta, born when Isabel was nearly eight. There was nothing crooked about Greta’s eyes, but in every other respect she was as troublesome a baby as Isabel had been angelic. Caroline and Ivan took turns pacing the floor with her the first year of sleepless nights, and once during what Ivan called the changing of the guard he muttered, “You wanted this. Take her.” She took her. She was too numb with exhaustion even to be hurt, and besides, she knew he didn’t mean it, he was worn out. Still. They were too old for this. Soon she would be forty. Isabel, who had developed sympathetic insomnia but who read pacifically, curled in a chair with a finger in her mouth, looked up from her book and commented in the offhand manner of her father, “‘They’re changing guard at Buckingham Palace—Christopher Robin went down with Alice.’”

“Another great wit. Why don’t you just go to bed?” When Isabel ignored her, and Ivan, relieved of his duty, went to the refrigerator to swig ginger ale from the bottle, she cried out over the crying of the baby, “It’s two-thirty in the morning and everyone in this household is wide awake! What kind of a crazy place is this? I have to teach a class at nine o’clock. I can’t stand it any more!”

“I told you what to do,” said Ivan. “Drug her.”

She gave in and got a prescription for a sedative. “Now for your sleeping potion, sweetie-pie,” she would murmur to Greta each evening, shoving the spoon at her, scraping up any stray drops on her chin and guiding them firmly to her mouth. That took care of the nights, but the days grew worse as Greta grew more mobile. She whipped through the house like a lashing hurricane, not bad-natured, nor frustrated like Koh Ma, but propelled rather by the impersonal fury of the elements. She had physical strength beyond her years, and an appetite for adventure. I didn’t need this, Caroline thought. I had my baby already. This was her punishment for trying to deflect Ivan’s infatuation. She had interfered with the course of nature and the gods themselves were humbling her.

Indeed her strategy had worked, but in ways she never intended. Ivan doted on them both. He was tired, though, of night feedings and diapers, tired of playing with mashed food and plastic beads, tired of being enlightened and fair-minded. But he was picking the worst possible moment to slacken, for all about them sounded ancestral voices prophesying war. Women, arming unobtrusively for a decade, loosed their primal and most potent of weapons, words. The words sprang from the newspapers, lurked in the mailbox, invaded the bookstores and tumbled from the lips of Caroline’s students and friends. She absorbed them avidly. They were a delight to hear, saying things she had known quietly all her life. Once she heard them, she knew she knew them. And even though through circumstance she was raising a family in the conventional way, she still felt herself an anarchist at heart. This rising, at its verbal peak, had gloriously anarchic possibilities.

Reading and listening, she could feel a certain coziness. She had little to complain of, personally. She had always had her work; no one could have stopped her. In two universities she had been the first woman in the mathematics department without thinking much of it, politically, at any rate. She had seen it more as a private feat: sleight of hand, slipping through the eye of the needle. The militant women students in her classes even looked to her as some kind of exemplar, though she felt unworthy. And Ivan did not abuse her for her sex. Ivan, she was gradually discovering, adored, no, esteemed women and girls: the way they thought and spoke and moved and acted and felt. Divorced friends envied her. He was not afraid to wash dishes and he was not afraid to be tender. He was not afraid of hidden teeth in her private passageways. Like Leopold Bloom and unlike most men, he understood or felt what a woman is.

So Caroline went about her business, which was Greta and devastating. Hurricane Greta, a record-breaker. Her life had become incessant labor. Labor at school and labor at home. Somehow there was forever some wretched but consuming task to do, despite the baby-sitters. She had always disliked domestic work, but she dragged herself doggedly from one task to the other without question: they were assigned to her, apparently, by circumstance. When through the death and illness of elderly men, the chairmanship of the department dropped in her lap like a ripe fruit, she felt not honored as she would have years ago, but oppressed. She accepted, certainly; a woman in her position could not refuse. She gave up resting; she would rest in the grave. She lost weight and looked haggard, and cultivated the useful habit of not thinking ahead, or back, or beyond the task at hand, whether laundry or ever-higher-dimensional non-trivial knots.

The family thrived. Isabel was president of the fifth grade, and Greta’s powerful arm knocked objects off surfaces, shattered glass. Ivan worked longer hours, writing articles and hustling money for artists. His advice was widely sought; he consulted, he plotted strategies. He was in the prime of life and his energy was boundless. His long hair was in fashion now, and no one wore a tie any more. He marched and rallied, protesting the winding-down war with Greta on his shoulders and Isabel by his side. But she was the anarchist, Caroline thought with some bitterness, and she had no time to protest. Exhilarated by dissent, he came home ready for love. That she hardly minded. That was by far the easiest of her assigned tasks. The thriving literature of sexual discontent gave her guilt pangs, for she felt like those churlish men they complained of: she liked it quick and uncomplicated and with a minimum of talk, playful or soulful. Ivan amorous was like a chef with a gourmet feast in store, whose guests have an appetite only for hamburgers.

He cooked fancy dinners too, once in a while, but he burned the pots. One wintry evening Caroline was attacking the charred grains of rice sticking to the bottom of a pot. Like the anti-war demonstrators, like Ivan himself, they would not be moved. She scrubbed absently, dreaming of a toddlers’ play group for Greta, till it struck her that her hand had been oscillating across the bottom of the pot for at least five minutes. Odd, was it not? The motion of the hand, pointless and mechanical, detached from the world of purposeful action, took on an aura of the absurd. Its oscillation, fulfilling some obscure metaphysical arrangement, became sinister. All at once the seeming infinity of her futile motion, of all the tasks she assaulted each day only to see them spring up the next with unremitting life, magnified into the labors of Sisyphus, except Sisyphus, as she remembered Camus pointing out, at least relished his instant of success. And she became, in her own mind, no longer a woman but a symbol, gathering into herself the futile labors of thousands like her. Her head vibrated. Everything she had read and heard seethed and bubbled inside as in a cauldron, and then a crack in the cauldron released a torrent of spewing, accumulated brew, and she ran with dripping hands into the living room, where Ivan sat reading the newspaper and the children played with blocks on the floor.

“Why?” she screamed. “Why am I standing at the sink scrubbing a filthy pot while you’re reading the paper? Will you tell me that?”

“But I cooked it. I thought we took turns.” He lowered the paper with reluctance.

“What is the use of your cooking,” she screamed, “if you burn the pots? Do you know how hard it is to clean a burned pot? You don’t, because when I cook I don’t burn them. I have never left you a burned pot to clean.”

“Throw the pot away. Buy a new pot.”

She came closer. She wanted to hit him, he was so calm. The muscles in her right arm tensed to strike, but she was afraid to, in front of Isabel and Greta, who had put down their blocks to watch. “Don’t you dare tell me to buy a pot!” She stamped her foot. “I’m sick of your burned pots, and of the whole damned thing.”

Ivan got up wearily. “Why don’t you go lie down, then? I’ll finish the dishes.”

“I don’t want you to finish the dishes! I want you to explain to me how it came about that I am oppressed by your burned pots, how come I am standing at the sink and you are reading the paper. Is it because you’re paid more money for what you do? Is it because you’ve got a—Is that what gives you the right to burn pots?”

“Now look,” said Ivan very loudly. “Now look. I am not oppressing you. I said I’d do the dishes if you’re tired.”

“I am not tired!” she shrieked. “It’s not because I’m tired. Don’t you see, this is an oppressive situation.”

Ivan threw the newspaper to the floor and lunged forward. “I am not your oppressor!” he yelled.

Together, the children stood up. Isabel turned her head from one to the other, back and forth like a mechanical doll. She had two fingers in her mouth. Greta put her thumb in her mouth and started to wail. Both of them had a demented, mesmerized look.

“I am not your oppressor!” he yelled again, so loud that Caroline stepped back and gasped. She heard Isabel gasp too, above Greta’s wails. “Don’t call me that! I have never oppressed you or anyone else and I don’t intend to. I’ll do your fucking dishes but I will not be called an oppressor. You think life is oppressive? I’m just as oppressed as you are. People all over the world are a lot more oppressed than either of us. That’s real oppression—you want to try it? It’s a political thing. Not burned pots. Did I ever once stop you from doing what you want?” He moved brusquely to pick up Greta but she cowered away from him, howling.

“The political is personal! I mean, the personal is political.” She had read that in a magazine the other day. It had seemed profound but now it sounded stupid, with Greta crying and Isabel staring and sucking her finger.

“Don’t give me that cant!” Ivan thundered. The hanging asparagus plant in the path of his voice swayed perilously. “I’ll do the dishes for the rest of my life if you want, I don’t care, but don’t give me that nonsense! The personal is just that, personal!” He grabbed up the shrieking baby. For a second Caroline thought he would attack Greta, but he tried awkwardly to soothe her. The touch of her quieted him. “Look here, Caroline, I’ll do the dishes. We’ll eat out. We’ll eat pizza. Whatever. I know it’s hard. But this is our life. Our life is not happening in the pages of some pop magazine. Where are your brains? You’re no better than Jerome when you talk like that.” He stalked off to the kitchen, carrying Greta.

“Hard!” she yelled after him. “Hard! You don’t know what hard is!” She stretched out on the floor. The blood in her head pounded so fiercely she thought it would burst. Isabel knelt beside her. “Are you okay, Mommy?”

“You’re old enough to think now. Think, before you ever get married.”

From the kitchen, Greta’s sobs were subsiding. In a few moments she appeared, her face red and streaked, with a lollipop in her mouth. Caroline heard running water, the clink of metal against porcelain. Ivan was doing the dishes.

The local nursery school took children at three years old. The day after Greta’s birthday party—six toddlers, sugary cake, Scotch neat—Caroline enrolled her. She had a bit of spare time now, and intended to use it for rest. The hangover from the party was prolonged. But on the second day of nursery school she met her old friend the French professor in the university parking lot. She looked beautifully ascetic, he said; she could use some of his brioches. Two days later, still persuasive, he stopped her after class and suggested a drink at his apartment. Caroline was so light-headed knowing Greta would be in school all afternoon and for the next eighteen years that she would have consented to anything.

There was a divorced father who dropped off his child at nursery school the same time she did. He was giddy with relief too. They joked together on the way out like truants. Coffee. Drinks. It seemed inevitable. Ivan had said long ago to use her imagination. Her imagination told her to speed. In dreams reappearing from adolescence she drove convertibles at top speed down endless flights of stairs and woke an instant before the crash. She could do it all if she did it fast. She formed a committee of women in math and the physical sciences, graduate students and younger teachers. A small group. They did not know yet just what their mission would be—there were so many possibilities—but for the moment it was good simply to sit in a room and feel bitter together. She had always wanted to play the flute. Life was brief. She went to the music department for lessons. She raced with the velocity of a whirling dervish from the university to the nursery school, from Isabel’s dentist to her ballet classes to student conferences. She could almost be in two places at once. Her comings and goings were a study in complex variables. Mark was teaching that now, as a matter of fact, at Columbia, on her recommendation. He still sent her everything he published and asked for her comments. Touching and unnecessary deference, since, unhindered by any family, his researches had surpassed hers.

Barely eating, she ran on nervous energy and anger, an anger secretive and firmly implanted, like her IUD. Badges of merit, both. She was angry most of all at Ivan: he had no pity for her lot in life. His pity was for starving peasants in far parts of the world, political prisoners in distant cells—he was an avid follower of the news. Caroline too, but what she read in the newspapers abetted her. For the first time she was reading them from cover to cover, compulsively, like a man. Everything fitted in, everything was part of a malevolent ancient scheme. When the courts handed down decisions against abortions and pregnancy benefits, when Bella Abzug was defeated and state legislatures rejected the ERA, she stared at Ivan, reading great classics to his daughters on the floor, with a venomous cold gleam. A natural enemy. Thus did the political become personal.

Taking a shortcut one afternoon down an unfamiliar street, she stopped to admire a huge hairy sheep dog who sniffed at her with curiosity. The youngish owner spoke with animation about how intelligent his dog was: he remembered people he hadn’t seen in years. Maybe he had seen Caroline around before. Maybe she had a dog too? No? Well, anyway, maybe she would like to come up to his place, just across the street, for a glass of wine. It surprised her; she had assumed he was homosexual, because of the leather jacket, the tight jeans and boots, the earring and the dog—that was why she talked to him so freely on the street. She glanced at him, at the dog, and at her watch. “I have only thirty-five minutes.”

“Let’s go, then,” he said. He was a photographer: there was equipment everywhere—tripods, black boxes, cameras, rolls of film. Photographs hung all over the walls, mostly group portraits of solemn Mexican and South American Indians. They had a glass of wine. He copulated the way he took pictures, decently enough, with seeming concern for his object but overriding self-absorption. The dog was called Stieglitz. When she hit the street she was horrified at the risk she had taken and dashed home as if pursued. Never again. Still, in a few days she could look back on it detached, and remember the piquant aspects. The world was certainly an amazing place. There was a world beneath the ordinary one, perceptible only to the initiated, where strangers met, signaled, coupled and parted. Was Ivan initiated? They could compare notes. What a pity, indeed, that she could not tell this story to Ivan, for the dog Stieglitz sniffing around the bed, the severe faces of the Indians looking down on them, the tripods like slender dark spectators, possessed just the quality of outlandishness that would entertain him. It came to seem, after a while, that she had done it almost for the satisfaction of telling him, whether to entertain or torment was immaterial. Still, she did not dream of taking such vicious satisfaction. Had she any tears left she would have wept.

Ivan led his own busy life without her, courteous and remote. She felt overlooked. As she whirled from place to place she clung savagely to the notion that it was he who avoided her. She wanted him to give up everything to succor her. He could cajole her and make her stop her running, but he refused. He refused to interfere with the course of her life; he would let her destroy herself, if that was her choice. His obstinate silence was an outrage. Like a starving child clutching an empty bowl, she clutched her resentment to her heart. She dreamed of more obscure ways of tormenting him, but knew in advance that he would not be tormented, or would refuse to show it. She dreamed of poisoning his plants, but when she envisioned herself approaching them, powder in hand, she knew it was beneath her. She dreamed of withholding his mail. She had no wish to read it, only to keep it from him, to deprive him of the world and make him turn to her alone for sustenance. Once she did keep from him an urgent message from work, but when she relented two days later he said it didn’t matter, it had been taken care of. Nothing she could do would matter. She seethed. When he went up to bed she drove out alone to midnight movies, and came home to the silent house to sit downstairs in darkness and smoke. She gave him no news of herself, only, scrupulously, of the children, the household. She tested, with a thrill of fear, how far she could go before he would break and try to break her. Before he would leave. She could go vast distances, she found; he was not keeping her, nor was he moving. Long ago, in a different discontent, she had felt like the still point in the whirlpool, and now she was the whirlpool itself, whirling around him. How he liked her in her new guise he did not say. He did not oppress her, that was true. For what he did to her there was no word yet invented; it was something more than ignore, but not quite obliterate. It was patrician, a skillful, unique defense. There were ready labels for what she did to him, though, nothing unique about it, and this too, her own base and limited means, enraged her.

Now and then at night in the dark, briefly unshielded, he would reach out for her. They could do that in silence, old hands, expert at procuring pleasure. Waking in the morning, brittle and tossing, her opening thoughts on making breakfast, packing lunches, planning dinner, the countless ruthless and boring demands of the day, she resumed her anger. But Ivan would smile tentatively, his eyes holding a memory. Only when she stood up and felt the stuff running down her legs did she remember what he was smiling about. That memory was a luxury she couldn’t afford. She washed it away.

Just once, afterwards, lying together, he said, “Why must we be so cruel to each other? Can’t we stop this?” She had the satisfaction of refusing an answer. He caressed her again, with gestures of such grace that she tightened every muscle to resist.

“You can’t deny,” he said in the special voice, nearly forgotten, “that this makes you happy.”

“I’ve never denied it. That’s not the point.”

But in truth she felt so harassed that she had lost sight of the point altogether.

Looking at herself in the mirror, she wondered if she looked like the callous woman she had become. No, the changes were superficial: she was thinner, her hair was shaggier, her movements more nonchalant and her clothes more expensive—no time to hunt for bargains. She had an air of experience and authority. After Greta, little could frighten her. Ivan had taught her strategies for every situation in life, and she knew how to get along. In topology, there were infinite numbers of looping paths you could take around any given knot, and sometimes when she felt cut loose and freed, she imagined she could travel them all simultaneously. But she knew well that they could be grouped and reduced to a finite number of repeating patterns, all ending at the point where they began. She had become an exaggeration, she felt, a parody of a certain kind of driven woman. The French professor, whom she saw once in a while, said that in the last year or so she had become a very beautiful woman. An impressively beautiful woman. She liked hearing it. He said it in three languages. Ivan rarely said things like that. She laughed with the French professor and said, “Oh, you just like them aging and gaunt.” But she would never trust a flatterer.

At home there was no need to talk about separation or divorce or breaking up the family. They were separate enough. When their hours did not coincide, she and Ivan left each other notes, informative like the memos of business partners, often witty and stylized, on some days even affectionate. Coming in late one night and finding him asleep contentedly on his side of the bed, a note on her pillow—please get him up at seven—Caroline thought, He must have someone. He wouldn’t go for weeks at a stretch without it. And the sight of him, the classic lines so pure and harmless in sleep, gave her a terrible pang of nostalgia, and of love, unaccustomed. She missed him bitterly. Her anger, stiff and heavy, was the oppressor, a mercenary’s suit of armor. Did she have to be angry too at the burden of waking him? At the casualness of the request? She was sated with anger. She would wake him. She tossed from dawn on anyway, and he knew it. Naturally she looked no different in the mirror. Naturally, because it was only the center that had dissolved, the living part, that once had grown layers and striations of color from exposure, had been lashed by weather and sent out tendrils of connection, to him, and that she had permitted to be crushed to nothing, by politics. The center was empty and longing for him. Wherever she was, however she fled him, she was thinking of him, a bondage more constraining than love.

On a Saturday afternoon in early June she came home from her office pulsing with energy, and flung down her book bag. She had finished the most resistant section of a paper she was scheduled to deliver at a conference, then stopped to visit the French professor, who gave her coffee and the inevitable brioches. The aroma of honeysuckle rising from the hedges into the lush spring air had encircled her all the way home. Now she would see to the children. Isabel, who was almost thirteen, was recovering from chicken pox, and Greta would break out at any moment. On the living room floor, Ivan, wearing his glasses, sat cross-legged, reading aloud with the book on his ankles. Isabel and Greta lay stretched out before him, rapt like statues. They looked up at her and smiled but didn’t speak. There was a passionate hush in the air, of people holding their breath in unison with anticipation and wondrous dread.

“‘What were the use of my creation, if I were entirely contained here?’” said Ivan, his husky voice rolling with sonorous urgency. Greta’s thumb rested inert between her front teeth. “‘My great miseries in this world have been Heathcliff’s miseries, and I watched and felt each from the beginning: my great thought in living is himself. If all perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger: I should not seem a part of it.’” He paused and glanced at Caroline as though to welcome her, for she had stretched out on the floor with the children, to listen. “‘My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it, I’m well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff! He’s always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being. So don’t talk of our separation again: it is impracticable.’”

He stopped, releasing his audience. There was a moment of ardent silence. Ivan took out a handkerchief, blew his nose, and surreptitiously wiped his eyes with his fist. Isabel turned to Caroline.

“Mom, why are you crying? It’s only a story.”

“I can’t help it. Stories always make me cry. Look, Greta is crying too.” She put her arm around Greta and drew her close; her childish eyes, shining with sorrow, streamed. “Do you understand it?” she asked.

Greta shook her head no, and wept.

Ivan took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes again. He stretched out his legs and stretched his arms towards the ceiling. Their eight legs, elongated on the rug like chaotic vectors, were identically clad in blue jeans. They all wore cotton T-shirts. The four of them, she thought, were like members of a primitive clan, bound by the markings of hallowed tradition.

“You read so beautifully,” she said to Ivan. “You make it real.”

“Well, I have good material. And you came in at the right moment.”

She couldn’t look at him. “I wish you would read to me sometime.”

“You do? But you’re so busy. You’re always dashing somewhere.”

“I could make time to hear you read like that.” If only he would read to her like that she would not need to whirl any longer. That would content her. “My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath.” Yes, that would do. It transcended the political, and even the personal.

A year of kindergarten had a calming effect on Greta, so that Caroline no longer woke at sunrise with the apprehension of disaster—would they survive this day? The house was not the prison of perpetual dangers, as in Greta’s earliest years. As though she and the child were reflections of each other’s inner state, Caroline’s vision unblurred as Greta calmed: Ivan was not responsible for social atrocities. It was hard to say who was responsible; that was the problem. Everyone had an historical alibi. The political was so impersonal.

Gradually she slowed down; the pulses that used to beat on the surface of her skin like the vibrations of an itchy serpent—the amused French professor’s image—disappeared. In a delicate manoeuvre, she slipped out from under the skin of her anger to laze in the back yard sun. With the relentlessness of truth, the dispatches about women and men kept coming at her in all their dissonant clamor. She tried to cleave to their truth but scrape away the fury it came wrapped in like a layer of static. That was an even trickier manoeuvre, requiring some imagination.

With Ivan she lived in the uneasy balance of truce, like ancient, bickering neighbor nations of common descent, common language, and common perversity. There might never be a lasting peace, but the injuries seemed smaller in scale, and in any case they were even. He was the more magnanimous power; as her malice ebbed, it was he who found the means to approach with the olive branch. More magnanimous, or politically astute? She didn’t pursue the question.

There were times, especially when Greta relapsed into peril, that she cried out to herself, No, the cause is just! And she wanted to flee. But you could serve a just cause insanely, she remembered. Flight was no service. It was worse than being a closet anarchist. The cause was just, but were their lives not their own, and a cause more just? Or simply more precious? She was full of these contradictions and qualifications. Her life was so riddled with ambiguity that any path she chose was a betrayal of something. But she was hanging on, though it was hardly what she had expected.

Like Caroline, Greta was still intermittently alarming. She tugged at a picture book wedged tightly in the bookcase supported by tension poles, and the entire structure collapsed. Luckily she covered her head with both hands while scrambling out. At the university swimming pool while Caroline’s back was turned, she wandered onto the high diving board, pranced, and fell in. Luckily, Ivan had taught her to swim a bit, early on. And one night with Ivan and Caroline out at the movies and Isabel on the phone with a friend, she dragged a ladder to the center of her bedroom, unscrewed the burnt-out light bulb and screwed in a new one. She had forgotten to turn off the switch. Startled by the sudden light and heat, she fell off the ladder, breaking a finger. Isabel found a neighbor to drive them to the emergency room, where the family was known. Looking at the splint when she returned from the movies, Caroline grieved that this accident was her fault because she used to lecture her daughters about self-sufficiency: they must not get into the habit of waiting for Ivan to make simple repairs.

Greta’s most terrifying venture was the fault of a feverish imagination, and occurred the summer they spent packing. Caroline and Ivan were tired of their small university town. They wanted action, noise, flurry. Without saying so aloud, they each wanted to leave the scene of remembered ugly spells. Ivan had received a call from New York in the spring: he was offered a tantalizing place at the Metropolitan Museum. And the City University needed someone with a background in topology and knot theory. An available qualified woman was beyond their wildest hopes. She could embody affirmative action. Like Yeats’s Anne Gregory, she wished they could love her for herself alone and not her yellow hair. But not even Ivan could manage that. Yeats said only God could do it. So they sold the house in which they had built up equity, and in their bedroom, stripped prints from the walls. Standing on the ladder, Caroline heard strange sounds from the other side of the wall, Greta’s room. They were rhythmic, repetitious sounds, like an incantation. Greta was in there with her dearest friend, a tractable boy named Harold, who camped at their house weekends from dawn to dusk.

“I have a funny feeling,” she said to Ivan, climbing down. “I think I’d better go see what she’s up to.”

Ivan no longer laughed at her funny feelings. He had come to the conclusion that Greta was the true anarchist—nothing could restrain the public unfurling of her private identity. He laid down his screwdriver and came along. Caroline pushed open Greta’s door.

The children sat on the floor facing each other. Greta held a long bread knife in her right hand and chanted, “This vow will seal our kinship true, Blood of me and blood of you.” Blood oozed slowly from her left index finger. She was reaching for Harold’s right hand, which he sat on. “Come on, Harold, it doesn’t really hurt.”

Ivan grabbed the knife out of her fist. Caroline slumped against the door frame with her hand pressed against her heart. She felt very old. Too old.

“I wouldn’t hurt him,” Greta protested to Ivan. “It’s because we’re moving, and I want us to be blood brothers. He’s my best friend.”

Ivan squeezed her finger and wiped it with his handkerchief. “You could have chopped a finger off, do you know that! This is going to need iodine! And Harold! Don’t you know any better?”

Harold hung his head and sucked an edge of his polo shirt.

“What was that you were saying?” asked Caroline.

“This vow will seal our kinship true, Blood of me and blood of you.”

“And where did you hear that? On one of those crummy TV shows?”

“I made it up.”

“Don’t give me stories. Where did you hear it?”

Greta’s eyes filled with tears of injury. “I saw them do it on a TV show, but I made up the poem myself.”

“Don’t you ever open a kitchen drawer again!” Caroline shouted. “Don’t even go in the kitchen!”

Isabel ambled in. These days she affected a sullen, slinking walk which suited her narrow body very well. She was nearly as tall as her mother. In one languid hand she held Jane Eyre, a finger keeping her place. “What is all the commotion? Oh, hi there, Harold.”

“Your sister was performing an ancient ritual,” said Ivan, brandishing the knife. “She was making Harold a blood brother. Welcome him to the family.”

“Oh God,” said Isabel, averting her eyes. “That child is incorrigible. I shudder to think what will become of her.”

“Oh, cut it out,” said Caroline. “Incidentally, Isabel, I have an idea. Do you know what you might do this summer?”

“What might I do?”

“You might teach Greta to read. I think she’s ready. I’m sure you’d be an excellent teacher.”

“I wouldn’t mind,” said Isabel, glancing down at her sister as if from a great height, “but I doubt that her attention span would be sufficient.”

“Yes it would!” cried Greta.

“I want to read too,” said Harold.

“I’ll teach you also,” said Isabel, “but only if you stop sucking on shirts.”

In adolescence the once-gracious Isabel was proud and haughty. She found her parents deficient in many ways, notably in self-discipline, a charge which pained though they laughed with irony. “She should only know,” Ivan said. Caroline felt sorry for him—he had drunk up the adoration so thirstily. They joined forces to defend each other against Isabel’s lucid critiques: what could they possibly understand of passion and commitment, the conflicts between the actual and the ideal, the fire in the blood? Their speeches for the defense were mutually touching: they had forgotten, in all their strife, that they thought so well of each other. Greta was friendly still, but in the territory of adventure she had staked out as her own, they knew they had no place, unless that of the occupying militia. For solace they turned back, no longer young, but powerful, to each other.

By the time they had lived in New York for two years, almost everyone they knew had been divorced. It was like a marathon, thought Caroline, in which all dropped out but the most tenacious runners, panting and sore. Ivan had become an accomplished runner, in fact, and hoped to be ready for the Central Park Marathon in a year or two. When he went out in his white shorts and blue shoes these days, she did not work herself up with self-indulgent fantasies, or even think much about it. Nor did she ever run with him—she hated fads, and found him strangely guilty of a lapse in taste—but she did dance exercises on the hard wood floor instead, listening to music. She did not accompany him to the galleries either, in his quest for enduring beauty, and he did not go to the Mozart festivals, to which she bought subscriptions and took along friends or Isabel. She still disliked professional parties where she was expected to appear in the role of Ivan’s wife, but she went and performed because she knew he needed her there; he alluded proudly to her esoteric work and she smiled esoterically. Occasionally on the way home she ranted her resentments and he listened, driving calmly and very fast, secure in the knowledge that eventually, like a record, she would run down. For her part, she was glad to stop asking him to math department gatherings, where the jokes were exclusive and abstruse, and he was bored. All parties were haunted by the ghosts of missing persons. Everyone mingled with everyone else—there were few firmly packaged husbands and wives as there had been in Boston—and Chantal’s living arrangements would hardly be considered eccentric.

What they did together was gossip with old friends and attend assemblies of protest. They were congenital protesters, they finally acknowledged, and politics could be relied on indefinitely for the necessary evils. Caroline still would not throw a bomb into the stock exchange, even at night when no one was there, but she had come round secretly to hope that someone with fewer scruples would. And they went ice skating and to the movies, especially Italian movies, which they loved indiscriminately. She was able, at last, to appreciate movies about the ambivalences of power, and Ivan had developed a taste for the grand simplicities of passion. He read to her sometimes, feelingly, in bed, from old and great tales of love and betrayal and sacrifice. She listened entranced. But when they made love they had to keep their cries and laughs down, because Isabel, sizzling with energy, prowled the apartment till all hours.

This weekend Isabel was on a class trip to Washington, and Greta had gone straight from school to a friend’s house, where she would stay till Sunday. “Please be careful, sweetie,” Caroline urged in the morning, packing her off. “So they’ll want to invite you again.” After the Friday classes, to savor her solitude she lay on the floor rereading The Portrait of a Lady. It was not the same as when she had read it the first time, when she, too, stood on the brink of life, peering into its dangers and delights and temptations. Then she had brought to the book a corresponding eagerness. Now she brought a wry wisdom. And a touch of envy, also, as well as of relief, for James’s Isabel would be forever young and forever susceptible. She was luckier than that valiant Isabel, she reflected. The self-absorbed aesthete she had married was good, not evil. And at that notion, as if on cue, Ivan unlocked the front door and came striding down the hall whistling the tune from Rome, which he always whistled off key, just missing the parabolic curves of the melody. She put the book aside and lay flat on her back, viewing him upside down. He stood at her head waving a bottle of champagne in each hand.

“Are we alone at last?” he greeted her.

“We are alone. What’s that for?”

“To celebrate. I brought two. One for before and one for after. Don’t go away, I’ll put them on ice.”

When he returned she said, “Did I forget some great occasion?”

He bent over her. “Oh, you’re such a stuffy old professor, Caroline. We’re celebrating being alone. A hundred years of solitude. Would you ever have imagined...I mean, I’d sell my soul for a weekend.”

“Oh, Ivan.” She put her hands in his hair. Only a little thinner—a diminishing arithmetic progression. At this rate it would last. Maybe his father had been right about the brushing.

He was fumbling at her clothes, looking for bare skin, which, wide awake, he quickly found. “Or maybe...Oh,” he sighed, “Caroline, baby. You’re all warm.”

“Yes. I was waiting for you,” she whispered in his ear. “Just for this. Maybe what?”

“Maybe we should have them both after.”

“Oh yes...Oh yes...That’s a better idea. But, Ivan, love. Let’s go to bed. Because...the floor...is so hard.”

“You never did like hard floors, did you?”

“Ah, you think you know everything I like?”

“I think I do, mm-hm. Don’t I, now?”

“Well, sure, that’s very nice, but what if I developed...oh...new predilections?”

“I would soon discover them. You have no escape.”

She closed her eyes with a feeling of levitation, but then let go of him. “Really, let’s go to bed. Or it will be too late, and my back will hurt.”

“But how will we get there? I don’t want to move, Caroline. I’m so comfortable here.”

“That’s because you’re not lying on something hard. It’s only a little way, love. Come on, get up, I’ll help you. That’s it. Lean on me. No, I can’t carry you, though. You’re too big. And how can I walk when you do that? Save that for later. You’re too much.”

“Thank you, ma’am. That was a fine trip. A little bumpy. All right, here’s the bed, so no more of your delaying tactics. Let’s have the goods.”

“Well, if I have to go through with it, I’ll resign myself.”

“I’m afraid so. Now don’t be shy, sweetheart. I know you’re very shy about these things. This won’t take more than a little while, and it’s completely painless if you just relax.”

“For Chrissake, Ivan, I’m all relaxed already! How long are you going to keep this up?”

“Oh, you’d be surprised, baby. Now, why do you keep on laughing? I never saw a woman laugh so much at such a serious moment. How do you expect to get this done laughing like a loon? Sober up.”

After, Ivan got up and brought the champagne and glasses back to bed. He popped the cork, the cold wine steamed, and he caught it in time, expertly. They drank.

“This is good,” Caroline sighed. “It’s so hot in here. I’m burning up. And it’s only June.”

“Oh, hot flashes?”

“That’s not funny, because pretty soon it’ll be the real thing. I’m getting on.”

“You’re complaining. I’m half a century old, and do you realize that all my life I’ve been surrounded by women? That’s just what I was afraid of.”

“Well, you’ve borne your fate bravely. Like a man.”

“Thanks a lot. What I mean is, all my attachments...all my great loves have been women.”

Besides the three of them, she wondered, who else? “So be bisexual. It’s never too late. See if I care.”

He moved away and slammed his empty glass on the night table. “Why do you have to be that way? Why do you have to reduce things? I’m trying to tell you something serious.”

“I’m sorry. You’re awfully touchy, you know? I do take you seriously. This business of being flippant to avoid...I picked it up from you. You’re the original avoider.”

“Why don’t you pick up my better traits?”

“Well, maybe I have, also. All right, go on. I’m really listening. All your great loves have been women.” She poured them both more champagne. If he intended to confess anything, she wanted to be fortified.

“I mean, not things or ideas or causes,” he said morosely. “This is a certain sort of life, that’s all. Limited. Private. There are other ways to live.”

“I know. We got caught up. But you would never have been a lover of things or ideas anyway. You see through everything. That’s why I like you.”

He moved closer and laid a heavy arm across her. “You’re the only one who stayed with me. Everything else moved on.” He chuckled. “You’re a living example of perseverance. It must come from untangling all those knots.”

So it was victory by default? This time she considered her words carefully. “Isabel will be back to you in a few years.”

Ivan smiled. “And you’ve grown so discreet, too. All the Henry James. No, it will never be the same, with Isabel. And Greta—to Greta I don’t think we’re quite real. So there’s only you, Caroline.”

It was true: no one rushed to greet him at the door any more. Greta sat absorbed in her books, and Isabel was far beyond such antics.

He rested his head on her chest. “I can hear your heart.”

“What is it saying?”

“Well.” He paused. “Your heart, as we know, is topological.”

“Oh, is it?” she smiled.

“Yes. It’s saying, ‘A perfect circle is a trivial knot.’”

Her eyes flicked open. “Hey, that’s not bad. Not bad at all. You have possibilities.”

“Did you think I could have hung around this long without learning anything?”

She watched him as he lay sprawled across her. Outwardly he had not changed very much. He had never turned into the middle-aged monster she dreaded. That was partly luck. The circumstantiality of her life sent a shiver of mortality though her. Lying on her chest as if he belonged there was a person who had aroused her at a party over twenty years ago on a sunny afternoon when she was lonely and slightly drunk, and so—her life. Only one turn round, and hers was more than half passed. Had it been different weather or different wine, had he not taken her immediately into those dark recesses to show her a she-wolf...That she loved him in a way that was appalling, that things about him over which he had little control—ways of seeing and of speaking, ways of being—exerted a control over her, she accepted now as a fact of life, neither loathsome nor lovely. She could confront it with detachment, like other facts about herself. There might easily have been other facts in its place, equally intransigent, more or less dense with possibility. But there would not be. Or was it still too soon to say?

Ivan sat up and tipped the bottle over her glass; only a few drops came out. “There’s more inside,” he said. “Do you want to get really looped?”

“Sure. We’re on our own. I’ll get it this time. Let me open one.”

“Ha! Did you ever open a bottle of champagne? It’s an art. It can’t be done sloppily.”

“I’m not a slob! At the last two department parties I did it. It’s not beyond my powers.” With the French professor too, on several occasions that she recalled quite vividly, but she could not say that.

“I’m sure it’s not, but I’ll do it anyway.” He got out of bed and headed towards the kitchen.

She leaped up and followed. “Not this time, sweetheart. I want to open a bottle. Fair’s fair.” She chased him and overtook him in the living room, and they raced to the kitchen. Ivan got there first, flung the refrigerator open and seized the champagne. He laughed exultantly and waved it aloft. Caroline yanked his arm down and grabbed the neck of the bottle. Their four hands slipped and grappled on the dewy surface, tugging above their heads.

“Come on, baby, let go.”

“Never! Why don’t you?”

“If only I had a free hand,” gasped Ivan, “oh, what I would do to you.”

“I don’t need a hand. I could destroy you with a knee.”

“Your loss,” he jeered.

Then by a common impulse, at the same instant they both yielded. The bottle fell from its height to the hard tiles. Pieces of glass bounced like a starburst. Sweet-smelling foam streamed onto the kitchen floor, and blood flowed from Ivan’s ankle.

“Look what the hell you’ve done!” he shouted. “You’re so damn perverse!”

“And you’re so damn stubborn!” she shouted back. “Sit down and let me look at that. And watch your bare feet.”

“You watch your bare ass.” But he sat.

Ivan’s blood dripped into the rills and puddles of champagne that eddied out on the floor, making the two of them into an island. The blood slid in sinuous arcs that quickly dissolved and turned the liquid a pale, effervescent pink.

Caroline examined his ankle. “It’s not as bad as it looks. A little cut and a lot of blood. Have no fear, you’ll run again.”

“Look at this disgusting mess,” he muttered. “Senseless. Too bad there’s no ship.”

She dabbed at his ankle with a paper napkin and turned it toward the light. Something glinted. “Hold it, Ivan. Sit still. You have a bit of glass in there.”

“Oh, terrific. We don’t even need Greta around to have a calamity. And you used to worry when I disappeared in the park. It’s much more dangerous at home with you.”

She stroked his leg. “Stop it,” she said softly. “Will you stop being so angry? We both did it.”

“Oh, all right.” He took a deep breath. “But will you take the glass out of my leg? If it’s there. I can’t see it.”

“Your eyes,” she said, shaking her head. She bent over his ankle and picked out the sliver, not half an inch long. She held it for a moment in the palm of her hand, then lifted it and looked into his eyes. He looked back uncomprehending at first, then slowly he smiled and leaned back, waiting. It was the smile that had first undone her, that made him ingenuous, accessible. His eyes shone a brighter green.

She sliced a careful line on the tip of her index finger. Blood oozed. “This vow will seal our kinship true...”

“You are...not quite the usual article,” whispered Ivan. He put his hands on her bare shoulders. “I knew when I first saw you, in that setting, you would be...I don’t know what it is. Wild.”

She winked and rubbed her bleeding finger on Ivan’s cut ankle. “Blood of me and blood of you.”

He kissed her finger, and then her mouth. “But,” he said, “I still think I could have opened it better. I have more experience.”