IN WARM MID-SEPTEMBER SHE met Ivan’s parents, who lived in a modest suburban tract house in White Plains. Ivan had not grown up there but in lower Manhattan; he didn’t care for the new house, he told her on the way up. Not that he wasn’t glad his parents could finally afford it, but it had no history for him. No Depression had taken place there, no street fights, no rationing lines during the war. And he did seem a stranger as he shut the screen door behind him, sent his trained eye over the living room furnished in bland colors and predictable lines, and edged slowly into the low-ceilinged space. His parents were built the way he was, large and straight. His father was totally bald and benign, with a gruff voice and an overeager manner, as if he wished personally to ensure the welfare of anyone under his roof. Ivan looked more like his mother, who was dark, with strong features, and whose thick glasses hid pensive eyes. After the embraces and exclamations, to which she gave herself with zeal, Ivan’s mother hovered nervously like a shy gray gull, then fled to the kitchen. Caroline followed to help serve the dinner. Ivan’s mother turned from the stove to clasp her hands warmly. “We’re glad to have you in our family.” Her voice held an unmistakable note of relief.

“Thank you,” said Caroline. Perhaps she was supposed to say she was glad to be in their family, but she was not ready yet to go that far.

“Ivan tells us you have no family of your own,” she went on, spooning yellow rice into a bowl.

“A couple of aunts and uncles, that’s all. I hardly know my cousins—they’re all in Chicago.”

“Well, I hope you’ll consider us your family, Caroline. I really mean that.”

“Thank you.”

“Ivan has always had good taste. He had excellent taste in everything he picked out—clothes, pictures, everything. I remember, even as a boy he would rather do without than take something shoddy.” His mother smiled. “I see his taste hasn’t failed him.”

“That’s very kind of you. Thank you.”

“Well, I don’t want to embarrass you, dear. Now why don’t you take this rice into the dining room and then come back and I’ll let you carry in the vegetables.”

She set the rice bowl on the table, which had a centerpiece of white chrysanthemums in their honor, and wondered how it would feel had she been raised in this family. Would she need to re-create herself in isolation, like Ivan?

“The only one missing from this gathering is Vic,” said Ivan’s father as he carved the roast. He carved with skill, and the roast was perfectly done, pink in the center and brown at the edges. “You’ll meet Vic when he comes in for Christmas. Or maybe he’ll come for Thanksgiving. We don’t know yet.”

“Oh, yes, I’ve heard a lot about him.” This was not exactly true. She had heard of his existence, that he was five years younger than Ivan, and that he was going to law school in California.

“He wanted to come in for this occasion,” Ivan’s mother said, “but the term just started and they make them work so hard.” She frowned with pity. “He felt terrible that he couldn’t make it. He’s going to call later on. It’s three hours earlier there, you know. I told him to wait until about nine o’clock, our time. He says he spends all his spare time studying.” She sighed. “I guess you can’t get anywhere in this world without hard work.”

“Yes, he’s quite an individual,” Ivan’s father said. He gave his wife the first slice of roast beef and reached for Caroline’s plate. “Here you go, Caroline. No danger of starvation tonight. Yes, both of our sons are real individuals. Summa cum laude at City College, both of them. And now one going to a fine law school, the other a Fulbright scholar.” He reached over and patted Ivan on the back. “We’re very proud.”

“Come on, Dad. Cut it out.”

“Why, what’s wrong with a man being proud of his family?” He smiled broadly at Caroline. “I’ve been running a hardware business all my life, but I wanted to see them do something better. Just wait, both of you, till you have a family of your own. Then you’ll know what I’m talking about.”

“Now tell us all about your impressions of Italy,” Ivan’s mother said, raising her fork delicately. “How did you happen to meet each other?”

When the phone rang at five after nine, Ivan leaped up and dashed to the kitchen to get it. “Hey, Victor, how’s it going? Hey, yeah!” he shouted, startling Caroline with his heartiness but not his parents, who beamed in rapt pleasure. “Yes, I’m back all right...Yes, I finally did it...Thanks...Oh, great...Terrific.” He laughed insinuatingly. The three of them sat listening to Ivan’s voice, alien and cheery, booming through the kitchen door. Caroline wanted to start a conversation but couldn’t think of a subject. Any subject would be an interruption.

“I’ll have to show you my slides. Say, I hear you’re really doing great out there. How do you like it?...I didn’t think you had it in you...No no, only kidding. Listen, do you want to speak to the folks?”

They took turns talking to Vic. Both his mother and his father told him that Ivan’s wife was a very lovely girl. “Come in for Thanksgiving and see for yourself,” his father said. “Your turn now, Caroline.” He waved the receiver at her. “Come on, don’t be shy. It’s all in the family now.”

“Hello?” she said tentatively.

“Well hello there!” It was a low voice remarkably like Ivan’s, but lacking his subtlety. The others surrounded her, watching. “I’m sure you feel kind of awkward,” the voice went on, “but I just want to tell you I’m glad to have you in the family, and I’m looking forward to meeting you. Rumor has it that you’re really terrific.”

“Well, thank you very much. I’ve heard good things about you too.”

“I hope my big brother’s treating you all right so far?”

“So far, yes.” She laughed. “Well, I think...I think Ivan wants to talk to you again. It’s been good talking to you.”

“So...” Ivan’s father said as they returned to the living room, with brandy. “Where are you kids thinking of settling down? Or haven’t you thought about it yet?”

“I hope I never settle down,” said Ivan. “That isn’t one of my goals in life.”

“You know what your father means, Ivan,” said his mother. “You’ve got to live somewhere. And you must have given some thought to finding a job? It’s only natural that we should want to know.”

“I thought I might become a forest ranger.”

He was sober and impenetrable, as at the first moment they met. Caroline felt sorry for his parents. “We thought we’d look for an apartment in Boston. I come from around there,” she explained. “I’m going back to graduate school to finish my degree, and I might have a job as a teaching assistant at the same time. Ivan...isn’t quite sure yet what he’ll do. But there are a lot of opportunities in his field up there. I’m sure it won’t be difficult.”

Ivan sat back with his arms folded, studying her.

“Thank you, Caroline,” his mother said pointedly. “That sounds reasonable. We were just interested. After all.”

“Congratulations. You’ve become a wife,” said Ivan.

Soon it was time to go.

“But don’t you kids want to stay overnight? I made up the bed in the guest room. Or if that isn’t big enough for you, this couch right here opens into a double bed.”

“Mom, I told you we were staying in the city.”

“Yes, but I thought if you stayed late you might want to...”

“We can still catch the last train back.”

“You’re sure, now? Don’t worry, we’ll let you sleep as late as you want in the morning.”

“Thanks, but it’s all arranged. Caroline never stayed in a hotel in New York. We thought it would be...kind of a treat.”

“Oh, of course. I see. Well, remember, you can stay here anytime till you get settled. A hotel can run into money.”

“Thanks anyway, Mom.” He kissed his mother good-bye.

Ivan’s father drove them to the station. They were just in time. In the train Caroline took off her shoes, leaned her head back and sighed.

“I guess they can be pretty hard to take,” he said.

“Not at all. I liked them. They were awfully nice to me. I’m just not used to it. Ivan, do you think we’ll ever get back to Rome?”

“Oh, sometime, I guess. Maybe in our wheelchairs.”

She laughed. “I can just see that. I’ll wheel you around St. Peter’s.”

“But who will wheel you?”

“I will be self-propelled.”

He stroked her hair. “You look tired. Well, we won’t be seeing them very often.”

“What a way to talk about your own parents. My parents wouldn’t have been so friendly to a total stranger. You don’t appreciate them. What have you got against them?”

“Nothing, really. Only that they make me feel about twelve years old.” He put his hand on her leg.

“Well, if that’s how you behave...”

“Don’t. I have a mother already.” He leaned into the aisle and peered through the car, which was empty except for two solitary men up front. He moved his hand up under her skirt.

“Ivan! Here?”

“Shh.”

They did what Caroline told Ivan’s parents they would do. Their apartment was in an old section of Boston known for its appeal to young couples of modest incomes and enthusiasms for the finer things. The building stood on a broad street shrouded by maples and lined with brownstones whose complex filigrees were blurring with age. To Caroline nothing was more sturdily comforting than their wide street and its forthright, settling houses, but Ivan, expert in such matters, liked to remind her that it was built on landfill. Where they walked each day was not as solid as it felt; it had once been shifting river banks.

Back in the doctoral program she switched from statistics to geometric topology. In topology you pushed shapes around so that spaces within and without transformed into new spaces: a protean vocation. You could smooth out bumps and knot up curves and play with dimensions like a god, teasing and testing how far a configuration might be deformed yet still keep its fundamental nature and properties intact. Three mornings a week she taught introductory calculus to freshmen. Ivan got a job doing research in architectural history for the Institute for Studies in the Humanities, a nonprofit organization of vague ameliorative purpose and connections to the nearby universities. Besides that, he was working on a book about the relation of Rome’s architecture to its history. When they unpacked, Caroline found he had piles of notes on his meanderings and readings, even several chapters already outlined.

“I thought you loafed the whole time.”

“I never said that.” At home, among his overflowing cartons, his books by visionaries like Lewis Mumford and Buckminster Fuller, Ivan seemed distinctly exotic. He wore dungarees and blue work shirts around the house like the young husbands in apartments above and below, but his hair was long and his expression lacked their frank, or blank, simplicity. So she did marry someone exotic after all. She smiled to herself. When her mother had worried over her lack of interest in the upstanding boys in town, she used to threaten to marry an African, or an Arab.

“When did you do all this?” She pointed to the ragged notebooks. “Before you met me, I suppose.”

“Most of it. We didn’t meet till June, remember? But I did some after too. Nights.”

“Certainly not toward the end?”

“No, I guess not.”

“I must have interfered with your project.”

“It doesn’t matter. You were an interesting project too.”

It pleased her to find he was a serious worker, like a surprise icing on a cake, but it hardly mattered. For she had accepted him, serious or idle; was not marriage the unconditional acceptance?

As Ivan had wished, they shared the pots and pans and the food in them, and he no longer had to carry his hairbrush around late at night. They shopped and cooked together, and every few weeks spent a Saturday afternoon cleaning up the apartment’s accumulated mess while Caroline’s records spun for hours on the phonograph. Afterwards, so as not to dirty their pristine kitchen, they would bring in pizza or Chinese food, then make love in slow, passive exhaustion on clean sheets and allow a new mess to begin accumulating.

They made friends with neighbors, and with people from the math department and from Ivan’s Institute, along with their husbands and wives. Male and female created he them, and male and female the serious young hordes set forth in tandem, as if every movie or party or picnic were as charged with perilous mission as Noah’s journey in the Ark. The era of togetherness blazed in its fading years with the luminosity of decadence. Caroline and Ivan were preeminent among couples striving to create a dyad of unshakable firmness, with a near-perfect meshing of parts. They did not even need to try too hard. As discordant as their courtship had been, so harmonious was their marriage. They had taken the vows.

“You two are disgusting,” one woman said. “You even talk to each other at parties.” They chalked it up to envy.

She loved the cold winters. She wanted Ivan to skate with her on the pond in the Public Garden, after work, in the bluish dusk of January, but he found excuses. Not long ago she had been ready to face two months alone in Italy; now she found she could not skate alone less than half a mile from home.

“Come on, please. It would be so nice. You can leave your book for a while.”

“I just don’t feel like it today.”

“Don’t you remember, when you were a kid, how great it felt—you get all warm, and the stars come out? We used to have a pond in town. We went after school and stayed till suppertime. We skated so long that walking felt funny after.”

“There aren’t a lot of ponds around Fourteenth Street.”

They were getting dressed for work. Ivan was scrutinizing his ties. He hated to wear a tie but owned dozens: he liked them as abstract designs.

She came over and reached her arms around his neck. “Can I ask you a personal question?”

He grunted.

“Do you know how to skate?”

He pulled her close to him. She could feel his head shaking from side to side.

“Did you ever skate?”

He nodded.

“Aha, you fell, right?”

“It’s a ridiculous means of locomotion.”

“Listen, and look at me. Meet me tonight, around six, when there’s hardly anyone left, and I will teach you how to skate.”

Shivering in the dark, she sat down on a bench to wait. The only others on the pond were two small girls of about eight, with an older girl in charge. Good; little girls would not shame him. He was habitually late, she was discovering. It was a mode of protest, like a nervous tic. When he finally arrived he put on the skates in silence and leaned on her like a cripple. She led him from the snow-covered ground to the ice feeling like a dedicated nurse in the physical therapy room of a hospital. With her arm around his waist his body sagged into its own gravity. They stood still for a moment in the crisp darkness with the trees looming, strange bulbous shapes. In the anonymous dark it could be any winter: he could be eighty, not thirty, and she seventy-five. He was a heavy, ancient shell of a man, but her burden, and she would be loyal to the end, holding him until he made the trip into darkness on his own. It was not a vision of horror, only of bleakness, and doubly vivid because so entwined were their imaginations that she suspected Ivan was seeing the same thing. A folie à deux, the most pernicious kind.

He nudged her. “Well, let’s get moving,” he said gruffly.

“Okay! First just try to walk. Pick your feet up.”

After a number of turns on her arm he was ready to try it alone. And after a few tentative turns by himself he began to glide and to skim a bit. His body lost its hunched tension as he glided to and fro like some young night bird practicing easy swoops. He crashed into Caroline in order to stop—he didn’t know yet how to stop himself. Every time she saw him veering proudly in her direction she steeled her muscles to bear the weight thudding into her. Ivan found this crashing and her patient stiffness tremendously funny, and clowning in an antic way, crashed far more often than necessary. He was delighted with himself, and planning on figure eights for next time. Hallelujah, he could skate, she thought as she watched him disappear round the bend of the center island. He would be a good skater, and he would skate alone. He was out of sight, skating somewhere off and on his own, and she felt a profound, guilty relief.

They made the desired advances. Caroline finished her Ph.D. and became an instructor, which meant more courses to teach and more money. More respect, too, than she had anticipated, being one of the few women in a man’s field, and even a small reputation for her research, she noticed when she attended conferences. Still fewer women ventured into the esoteric theory of knots. The older professors, especially, looked at her askance, but in the end had to offer a grudging approval. She undertook a new project in elementary transcendental functions, and also supervised graduate students, whom Ivan liked to refer to as her boys. When she came home drained and fell into a chair after four hours of conferences, he would bring her a Scotch and say, “What’s the matter? The boys give you a rough time?” Besides working at the Institute, Ivan published two chapters of his book in architectural magazines and was asked to serve on the Mayor’s Advisory Council for historic preservation. He wrote occasional articles for The Nation. He might have taught at one of the universities had he wished to, but he thought that would be taking on too much.

At each of these advances, after the celebrating, Caroline was left with a hollow, vertiginous feeling, as though someone had punched her lightly in the stomach. Happenings were spinning and spinning in a widening orbit of which she was the center. It dizzied her to watch them spin, yet she seemed to possess the stasis of a still center. She could not trace how she had gotten to that point. How she had become that point. Somewhere along the way she had relinquished something—motion, life. The more that happened, the more inert she felt.

Ivan’s mother asked a funny question when she telephoned every week. She asked, “Are you making each other happy?” Had she not known Ivan’s decorous mother, Caroline might have found it intrusively intimate. But Ivan’s mother was not referring to sex. Depending on her mood, Caroline smiled or frowned, but always said politely, “Yes, of course.” Ivan never answered it directly. If he was in good spirits he teased and said, “Tell me what happy is and I’ll tell you if we’re making each other it.” But if he was feeling sullen, as he often was these days, from overwork, he said, exasperated, “Mom, really!”

“What does she literally mean by that?” Caroline asked him one night after they hung up.

“God only knows,” he said, pouring a drink.

“Are married people required to make each other happy? Besides everything else?”

“I wouldn’t know,” said Ivan. “It sounds like too great a burden to me.”

Many evenings they spent together in the extra room they had fixed up as a study, with the desks against facing walls so that they worked with their backs to each other. She liked to imagine that although their heads were bent in opposite directions on separate endeavors, a current of warmth and connection pulsed between them. One night she raised her head and felt nothing, the absence of the current. A current needed to be fueled: the fuel was depleted, sucked away, she didn’t know how. She turned. Ivan’s head was bent over and he was writing. He did not feel her stare. She walked around the room.

“Do you want to stop and have some coffee?” she asked.

After a long while he answered, “No,” without looking up.

That was all right; she understood what it was to be absorbed. Later he would seek her out, in bed. There he was absorbed in her. The air in the room became suddenly thick and stifling. She opened the window wide. Ivan’s papers fluttered and rattled.

“Could you lower that a little, please?” he said without looking up.

She shut the window and fled to the bedroom. Waiting in bed, she read back issues of The Nation, mostly articles Ivan had written, because she enjoyed his style, which was epigrammatic yet fluid and complex. He analyzed the social causes of the deterioration of urban spaces with an unyielding lucidity not always displayed when he spoke. The lucidity reminded her of the novels of Jane Austen, favorites of her youth, and she recalled unhappily how, in them, all action comes to an abrupt end with marriage. Satisfying as Jane Austen was, Caroline used to sit up wondering, at the last page, what happened then, and then, and after that? What would happen to her, now, that could move her? Anything? Irritated, she began smoking, though Ivan hated the smell hanging over the bed. Hers were foolish, childish complaints. The trouble was only in her expectations. Her naïveté. The trouble was only that before, she had looked forward to a future of large and unimaginable changes, twists and turns, and now the future was mundanely imaginable and linear: professional advancement, a larger apartment, vacations. A reasonably good time. She took off her plain wedding ring and revolved it between her fingers. Was it only a trick of language that in topology the circle is called a trivial knot? When Ivan came to bed she greeted him with a savage passion, but it was partly sham. She was restless. She wanted it, not him.

Their connection was fading, losing its vibrancy, as a print hanging on the wall too long loses the vigor of its colors, and indeed the prints he had brought back from Italy, of splendid old buildings and terraced countryside, were losing their color, hanging for several years in the unrelenting sunlight of the east windows. Caroline understood now what their friend had meant about their being disgusting: at parties they circulated. They talked to other people, they flirted. Dancing with some man, she drifted off into a dark corner in a tight erotic embrace. It was interesting, he had an interesting body. Different from Ivan’s. Of course Ivan, with his contacts, would take in everything. She and the man unlocked; fifteen minutes later she saw Ivan kissing his wife. That was all right too. They were even. It would never be mentioned, except maybe months from now, as a joke.

They went to the movies a lot, but she liked films about love and family bonds, films of desire and strife, betrayal and sacrifice, while he liked films about politics—struggle and power, strategy and intrigue. They sat through each other’s films patiently, but Ivan usually found Caroline’s favorites to be oversimplifications, with earnest good people aligned against devious bad people. In his favorites she found good and evil washed together in a spreading amoral gray, and she argued that such a high degree of ambiguity destroyed all distinctions. Life was like that, he replied; things were not as distinct as they had been taught in school. She could forgive a good deal of grossness so long as there was not emotional dishonesty, but he required aesthetic purity and was harsh about lapses in taste. He said that if something was shoddily executed it had unquestionably been shoddily conceived and insufficiently felt. This rigor in him, especially when directed at a well-meaning movie, gave her a sinking, hopeless feeling. Yet she knew that it was so in her own work: everything true and useful proceeded from a clear statement of the premises.

They agreed that power corrupts, but Caroline believed it corrupted so absolutely that there was no hope of improvement through sanctioned channels. The problem, as she sketched it out for Ivan one afternoon in the park, began with the social contract, when more than three or four people gathered together and made rules. Then they felt important and set about policing the observance of their rules, and from this feeling of importance flowed all social ills. It was very simple. It could happen even to good people, with good rules. So, she was an anarchist, she told Ivan, but added laughingly that he must not tell anyone at the university or she would lose her job. Of course she would not throw a bomb into an occupied building, but in her heart she was an anarchist. Ivan thought this sequence of logic was ineffectual. Perhaps he thought it was funny too, but he did not laugh at her opinions—he was unfailingly respectful and courteous. What good is a closet anarchist, he asked courteously, pulling petals from a daisy. If she really believed as she said, she should take the shuttle down to New York and bomb the stock exchange. She said he was not being fair. Anarchism was far more than throwing bombs and he knew it; he knew she was referring to freedom from superimposed social restrictions, freedom to become. That was all very well, said Ivan, everyone wanted freedom. Ah yes, personal freedom. Especially those members of the more privileged classes wanted it, who had never known the lack of money. And he gave her a curiously detached look. However, if she had any practical commitment she should do as he suggested, bomb the stock exchange; even though his father had finally acquired some small holdings, he would testify on her behalf. But she should do it at night, when no one would get hurt. For his part, he preferred to make small, incremental but tangible improvements through the existing system. You could never dismantle the entire corporate structure, so you might as well do what you could in your own small way. In either case you were not going to get very far. Therefore he loved enduring beauty, and chose to spend weekend afternoons looking at paintings in galleries and museums. Well then, she wanted to know, if he felt that way about incremental change and enduring beauty, why did he subscribe to the National Guardian, whose self-righteous, unbeautiful hysteria made her laugh? Because they had something to say, he replied, tearing another daisy, and it was important to hear all sides, particularly those the popular press ignored. She had no answer for that, but she muttered that she didn’t relish being referred to as a member of the privileged classes merely because her father had been a high school teacher, and moreover, she had no intention of apologizing for being born too late to appreciate the Depression.

But months later, walking on the wet sand of the beach on Cape Cod, where they rented a summer place for three weeks, each one confessed, in a rare moment of closeness, that they believed the other more intelligent. They were mutually surprised, after all the thrust and counterthrust of debate, and demurred with embarrassed modesty, then clasped hands and continued on, with the mild surf lapping at their feet. The only disparity, thought Caroline, was that her compliment to him was tinged with candid admiration, and his to her with shadowy resentment.

“Well, you’re prettier, anyway,” Ivan said. “At least we can agree on that.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” she teased. “I’m not so sure.”

She looked at him, tanned and rested, still younger than his thirty-three years, and he did appear beautiful. She embraced him and urged him to a nook of the beach behind some rocks, for though they still made love all the time and with a new restless energy, it was seldom that they could make love with a fullness of heart, as they used to.

In her spare time Caroline read novels and poetry, while Ivan read books about social issues or the history of art. If he read a novel it was something she had never heard of, like Elective Affinities, or The Last Puritan, or The Man Without Qualities, novels which, she found on leafing through them, treated reality in a large and unsparing way that made her uneasy. The titles themselves, alluding to life’s absences, intimidated her. Because Ivan himself, who picked those books, seemed absent. Present to the touch but absent to the more discerning senses. His desire for her had become a conundrum. Why had he wanted her to be always with him, if he was absent himself?

While she felt herself and Ivan fading away from each other, receding like figures in a thick fog, she read book after book by Henry James. They were the perfect mental nourishment: pungent but safely digestible. Everyone renounced what they wanted most, and never had to face the worse pain of getting what they wanted most. Sometimes she worried that Ivan, with his books about issues and his brilliant but neglected novels, was getting an ever firmer grip on reality, while she, with her daily forays into the equivalences of non-trivial knots as well as into Henry James and his more fey contemporaries, was losing hers. But perhaps they did not both need such a firm grip on reality. Perhaps Ivan could do that for her. The principle of any organization was a suitable division of labor. Lately, in fact, with both of them so busily engrossed in work foreign to the other, it had seemed wasteful to cook together and clean up together, so they had devised a system of alternate nights. It was lonesome in the kitchen, but more efficient.

There was a woman at his office, he told her one night at dinner, who did the same kind of research as he did. They were working on a project together, a plan to take museum holdings out on loan in city vehicles so that people in poor neighborhoods who didn’t go to museums could see beautiful things. Of course, the security problems were overwhelming—the project might never get off the ground. This woman had an unusual name, Chantal. She also had an unusual life. Her father had been in the diplomatic corps, so she spent her childhood in foreign parts, and went to the Sorbonne. She was about forty, Ivan would guess, and had no children. She was married to a painter named Joe who lived in New York. One week out of every month Joe came up to Boston to stay with Chantal in her rehabilitated brownstone.

“And that’s how they’re married?” said Caroline.

“Yes.”

“That’s kind of odd. I mean, do they want to be together or not?”

“I suppose they want to be together for one week a month. He’s involved in something down there, a cooperative gallery or something, and anyhow, he likes it. She prefers it here.”

“How convenient. I suppose she has...other men, for the three weeks that Joe is not around?”

Ivan gave her his sideways critical look and shrugged. “I don’t know anything about that part of her life. She’s very nice, though. Very interesting. I thought maybe we might have her over for dinner one night.”

“Hm,” said Caroline, taking more spaghetti. Ivan had cooked tonight, superbly. Spaghetti al pesto, green and grainy. His best efforts were in foreign, exotic dishes. He could cook the night Chantal came over too. Caroline did not plan to like her. It seemed unjust that Chantal should have the advantages of both the married and the single states. She knew already what this Chantal would look like: she would wear long dark flowered skins and long earrings and have dark eyes and long dark hair. Everything about her would be long and dark and rather droopy, but she would have broad shoulders and broad hips. She would look like an elegant peasant.

Chantal did not come over for dinner, since Ivan did not suggest inviting her again. Her name came up when he talked about the Artmobile, and once in a while he mentioned having lunch with her, either with a group of people or alone. He became even busier at work and had to stay late nights at the office once or twice a week. Not for the Artmobile, he said; it was something else—the architectural competition for the new city hall. On one of those late nights Caroline lay in bed reading The Golden Bowl. The name of the character who came between the young couple in the novel was Charlotte, and when she saw this name on the page she thought of Chantal. She raised her eyes from the book. The tableau before her—dresser with comb, brush and bottles of perfume, strands of beads hanging from nails in the wall, bookshelves, print of Degas dancers bending over stiffly to tie their shoes—was suddenly unfamiliar. She was a stranger in her own bedroom. Right at this moment Ivan might be screwing Chantal. Maybe Chantal was moaning with pleasure. Or screaming—maybe she was the type who screamed. Or no, maybe she was having a hard time getting there. Oh yes, she liked that notion very much, Chantal straining fruitlessly for an orgasm, under Ivan. Maybe she never came at all. But then Ivan wouldn’t be sprawled on top of her—Ivan required a response. Some men’s self-esteem resided in having an erection, but Ivan’s, conveniently, resided in eliciting a response. It might be his first time with Chantal, though. He would soon catch on and never go back, unless he thought she was worth saving from such perdition. No, Ivan hadn’t the soul of a missionary. Maybe he was having trouble himself. Maybe Chantal was coaxing it along. Probably not; that was not his sort of trouble. Still and all, a new person, the secrecy, the guilt. Even so stalwart a man as Ivan...

She realized in shame that all her fantasies were of crude mechanical failure. But in all probability it was nothing like that. Ivan was magnetic and irresistible, Chantal was a dark, passionate gypsy. She put aside her book, and closing her eyes to the alien room, acknowledged hollowly that despite the vivid pictures in her mind, she was feeling nothing.

That was horrible, to feel nothing. Neither revulsion nor jealousy nor desire, only irritation, as if some stranger had borrowed an essential household article and would surely return it in a deteriorated condition. Was this what her promising life had become, sitting up alone in bed while her husband was off fucking a woman of eccentric habits, and feeling nothing except a niggardly irritation? She tried to imagine what would make Ivan go to this woman: loneliness, boredom, restlessness. They were what she felt too, except her mind would not fix on any of them—they formed a turgid medium she had moved into so insensibly and drifted in for so long. What she could readily imagine, and with a small stirring of tenderness, was how he would approach Chantal: his diffidence, the pained longing and dread he had had when first approaching her. What drew him? Her name, first of all. A romantic name, Chantal, he would love to say it. She could share his pleasure in the beauty of the sound. He would use the special tone of voice to say, “Chantal,” the tone he used when he was moved by love and desire, and which she heard less and less of late. And then, his touch on Chantal. Her skin, her hair. She was feeling for Ivan, who was so close to her, after all, feeling for Ivan’s pleasure in the touch. Let him have that wonder with Chantal, if he no longer had it with her. Everyone should have that. She thought of the ways he made love, of gestures and caresses of his that had grown into being on her body, shaped and tailored to envelop her like a second skin, and returned in kind, so that in the dark they still found a sustaining presence, despite the absence so visible in the light of day. But what if these ways did not fit so well on Chantal? Chantal was a different body; maybe she needed a different sort of lover. Past all sense, she wished that Ivan should please Chantal, for the sake of his pride, so that the lover that he was would be truly recognized. For the sake of her own pride as well, for the lover that he was, was hers. And at last she was with them, neuter and unaroused, but partaking of his giving and of her receiving, that it should go well.

Ivan came in. She pretended to be asleep. He undressed quietly, came into bed and put his arms around her.

“Are you asleep?” he whispered.

She didn’t answer.

“Caroline,” he persisted. “Are you awake?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Be awake, Caroline.”

“Why?”

“Why do you think?”

She had already extended herself, in fantasy, beyond her powers. This was asking too much.

“Aren’t you tired?” she said.

“Not too tired. Come on. Come to me.”

She did not want to touch him because of the possibility of Chantal, but she wanted him to touch her. Exhausted and empty, she wanted to do nothing, only to receive love. Ivan understood, and she in turn gave him the response he sought. And because for the life of her she could not tell whether he sought her after a solitary evening working, or after Chantal, who disappointed or aroused him beyond measure, she wept.

“What’s the matter, baby? Wasn’t it good for you?”

“Yes, yes. It’s...Ivan, I have this awful feeling...something is very wrong between us, and I can’t bear it.”

He was quiet. She expected that he would brush it off or else had fallen asleep.

“I know. I know. But I am just so exhausted I can’t talk about anything now. Can we talk about it another time?”

On the way home from work a few weeks later she stopped in a bookstore to buy a birthday present for Lila, the five-year-old daughter of friends who lived downstairs. Lila was a precocious, wispy child who was already learning to read. Lately she would ring their doorbell weekends and, clutching a book to her chest, step shyly over the threshold. Ivan held her on his knee and read whatever she had brought with her, and then in a deep dramatic voice told her stories of fairies and ogres and elves. Lila took them to be real, and he did not disillusion her.

Caroline had never been in the children’s section before. Quickly seduced, she read book after book straight through, and left an hour later feeling exalted, as though she had traveled to far-off places. There was an entire subculture, complete with a literature that embodied the consciousness of its race—children—as thoroughly as any literature did for its people. Springing with life, it was an alternative more appealing than the corrupted mainstream. To inhabit it, though, you needed either to be a child or to have a child.

“Look what I bought for Lila,” she said that evening. Ivan was lying on the couch reading, one hand under his head and one hand holding the book upright on his chest, the way her father used to do after dinner.

“Let me see,” he said. “Ah. When We Were Very Young. I don’t think she has that.”

“I think you’ll like it. Do you know, when I browsed through all those children’s books in the store I had an epiphany.”

“Really? You mean like James Joyce?”

“I think I would like to have a baby.”

“A baby.”

“Yes. It’s easy to do. You just do what we do all the time, except without—”

“Will you please stop talking like an idiot?” Ivan sat up and put The Tale of Genji aside. “You want to have a baby. I’m a little surprised. The other day you said, and I quote, conjugal life was overrated,”

“I know. But I changed my mind. This would be something productive.”

“People who have babies to...to prop up marriages—that is the worst thing in the world.”

“Yes, yes, I know. But it’s not for that. We’re not in such bad shape, really. I mean, look, we can still make love. People on the verge of...of, you know...don’t make love like we do.”

“How do you know? That’s a very naïve assumption. Anyway, sex means nothing. You can have sex with anybody.”

She looked at him sharply but her voice was calm. “Oh. I don’t know anything about that. I didn’t think it meant nothing.”

“Well, not nothing. But the point is...” He scrutinized her with doubt. “You’re sure you want to have a baby?”

“Why, you like Lila, don’t you? You like children.”

“Lila visits. Our own would live here. But that’s not an answer.”

“No, I’m not sure. I only thought it might be interesting. I’m waiting to hear your opinion.”

“Caroline!”

“What?”

“Why are you talking like this?”

“Like what?”

“You know what I mean. You don’t sound like yourself.”

“Because I don’t know how to talk to you any more,” she cried. “I don’t know where you are and what you’re becoming. You don’t tell me anything. The only time we make any contact is in bed. What the hell is this all about?”

Ivan bent over with his head in his hands. When he sat up again his face was washed over with gray. “That’s not true.”

“Almost true.”

He took her hand in both of his. His hands were warm and large, and her hand disappeared between them. He placed her hand on his thigh.

“Oh, that’s a lot easier than talking, Ivan, sure. But it doesn’t change anything.”

He let her hand go. “You don’t even want me for that any more. What do you want me for, then? To help you make a baby?”

There were tears in his eyes. Caroline’s heart flipped over. Her inner organs shriveled up, and for a moment she feared her shriveled heart would stop beating altogether. But she wouldn’t touch him. She said, “You think that’s your best feature? You’re mistaken.”

“I think you’ve had it with me. I knew this would happen.” Ivan leaned back and stretched both arms across the back of the couch: he was spread out like an offering. If she wasn’t careful she would be climbing on him to ease her frustration, but it would not be eased, just stifled.

“No. I can stick anything out. I’ve waited out death twice. It’s you. You don’t love me any more,” she said. “You only love yourself. Your projects. Your work. Your pleasures.”

“I do love you,” he said bitterly. The words sounded squeezed out of him, as in an interrogation. Caroline’s eyes widened in pain. “All right, I didn’t mean it like that, wait a minute,” he said. He closed his eyes and rested his hands on his thighs, extending the long taut fingers. He breathed in and exhaled like an exhausted runner. “I do love you,” he repeated quietly. “But you’re sticking it out.”

“You can be very perverse. I’ll stick it out because I love you. Because it matters to me. But still, something is very wrong.”

“Nothing out of the ordinary. This is what real life is like. It gets to be...inert.”

“I’ll never accept that,” she said. “If that’s so, then I don’t want to be ordinary.”

“What, then?”

“It would not be inert if we were available to each other.”

“Available to each other! I hate that kind of jargon.”

“All right. Be a purist. But you are somewhere else, Ivan.”

“Tell me where I am then, Caroline.”

“I wish I knew. Maybe...maybe with Chantal.”

He stood up and walked to the window. “Don’t be ridiculous. I thought you were going to say something profound. Metaphysical. An epiphany!”

“Not that I care,” she said. “Not that I care. It’s just that if you are, she certainly takes it out of you.”

He whirled around. “Shut up about that! Do you know what you’re doing to me when you say that? How can you say such things?” He flung himself into a chair and flung himself up again. He paced. “You’re venomous, you know? You’re crude. You’re like an ax. You’re killing me.”

She was amazed at how hard she had suddenly become. Her body received this as if she were a stone. “Ivan,” she answered coolly, “I can’t even get near enough to kill you.”

“And you want a baby. To bring a baby into this.”

“Yes. I know this is very ugly, right now. But it’s not the whole thing. It’s a...brutto periodo.”

“A what?”

“Don’t you remember? A brutto periodo. It has to pass.”

“Oh, her.” Ivan sat down on the couch again. “That seems like another century. Look, Caroline, this is obviously not getting us anywhere. I don’t need scenes like this. We’d be better off living separately.”

“We would not. Look at everyone scrambling around and switching partners, like a square dance. Do you honestly want that? You’re not going to find anyone who would understand you better than I do. And I’d probably never find anyone who would put up with me.”

“But don’t you see, this kind of understanding is...is lethal. I can do without it,” said Ivan. His voice softened, though. It gave up the hard, sealed edge. “If you understand so much, understand that I can’t be something I’m not.”

“That’s not what I’m asking. I’m asking you to be what you are. Were.”

“Then tell me exactly what you want from me that you don’t have.”

She shook her head. “I don’t know what else to call it.”

“Caroline, let’s stop this. I want some peace.”

“I don’t like peace. I mean, that sort of peace. It’s easy to be at peace when two people don’t want anything from each other, but just occupy the same space. That’s not peace, that’s a vacuum.”

Ivan closed his eyes.

After a long silence she said, “Barbara and Rick got their divorce papers yesterday. I met her on campus. She looked terrible. And Christine is having an affair with an actor in her company and is miserable about it. Cory and Joan are separating. I got a letter from her today.”

“Cory and Joan?”

“Yes. She didn’t say exactly how it came about. But for one thing he’s drinking an awful lot and she can’t live with that. It scares the baby too.”

“Cory drinking?” Ivan gave her a puzzled frown. “Cory was like a child.”

“Yes. But people grow up, you know. I don’t want to be like that. I don’t want to see you like that.”

“That’s awful. Cory.” He got up and paced the room again. “I don’t get it. They all seemed happy enough to me.”

“Oh, happy.” She waved an arm in dismissal.

“What’s wrong with happy?”

Caroline laughed briefly. “Don’t you remember, you were the one who said happiness is not the point.”

“Did I? What did I say the point was?”

“You didn’t say. I’m not surprised at all those breakups. I could tell. There were things...”

“Well, I don’t delve the way you do,” said Ivan, sitting down beside her again.

Caroline shifted sideways to face him. She touched his arm lightly. “Ivan. Let’s not be like that. Let’s be different. We’ll last.”

“I’m sure they all felt that way.”

“You wanted me to marry you,” she said softly, “so that I would always be here. So I did. I am here, and I will always be here. Now I want something, Ivan. I want to have a baby.”

At last he turned around and looked her straight in the face. She saw that some barrier, at last, had yielded. He was fully present, as if they were joined in an embrace.

“Ah, you did change your mind,” he said. “Did you get a feeling, right here, or here?” He knew by now exactly where everything was in a woman.

Her eyes filled. “No. To tell the truth. But simply because this...is not enough.”

“You mean,” he said, not moving his eyes from her face, “I’m not enough.”

“No, not you,” she protested. She felt, remotely, tears dripping off her lashes. “This is not enough.”

“All right.”

“But do you want it?”

“I said all right.”

“That’s not the same as wanting it.”

“It’ll have to do. You’ve gotten what you wanted, Caroline, haven’t you? Take the claws out of me.”

“I’m sorry. I am. But I’m not trying to win a victory. I’m saying it because, you know, you’ll have to be a father. Will you do that?”

“Oh Jesus! Yes, I’ll be a father. It’s my kid too. What do you take me for?”