‘Potted?’

‘You’ve had too much to drink.’

‘Nonsense. M. R. Chang sober as a judge.’

I smiled when I heard that old American phrase, and seeing that I was amused, Chang suddenly burst out laughing. It was the same staccato eruption I’d heard in his store on Saturday. Ha-ha-ha. Ha-ha-ha. Ha-ha-ha. It was a disconcerting sort of gaiety, I found, dry and soulless somehow, without the vibrant, lilting quality one usually hears when people laugh. To prove his point, Chang hopped off the bar stool and began striding back and forth across the room, demonstrating his ability to keep his balance and walk a straight line. In all fairness, I had to admit that he passed the test. His movements were steady and unforced, and he seemed to be in complete control of himself. Understanding that there was no stopping this man, that his determination to drive me home had become a passionate, single-minded cause, I reluctantly gave in and accepted his offer.

The car was parked around the corner on Perry Street, a spanking-new red Pontiac with whitewall tires and a retractable sun roof. I told Chang I thought it looked like a fresh Jersey tomato, but I didn’t ask how a self-proclaimed American flop had managed to acquire such a costly machine. With evident pride, he unlocked my door first and ushered me into the passenger’s seat. Then, patting the hood as he walked around the front of the car, he stepped up onto the curb and unlocked the other door. Once he’d settled in behind the wheel, he turned to me and grinned. ‘Solid merchandise,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘Very impressive.’

‘Make yourself comfortable, Mr. Sid. Reclining seats. Go all the way back.’ He leaned over and showed me where to push the button, and sure enough, the seat began propelling itself backward, coming to rest at a forty-five-degree angle. ‘Like that,’ Chang said. ‘Always better to ride in comfort.’

I couldn’t disagree with him, and in my slightly tipsy state I found it pleasant to be in something other than a vertical position. Chang started up the engine of the car, and I closed my eyes for a moment, trying to imagine what Grace would want for dinner that evening and what food I should buy when I got back to Brooklyn. That turned out to be a mistake. Instead of opening my eyes again to see where Chang was going, I promptly fell asleep – just like any other drunk on a midday binge.

I didn’t wake up until the car stopped and Chang turned off the engine. Assuming I was back in Cobble Hill, I was about to thank him for the lift and open the door when I realized I was somewhere else: a crowded commercial street in an unfamiliar neighborhood, no doubt far from where I lived. When I sat up to have a better look, I saw that most of the signs were in Chinese.

‘Where are we?’ I asked.

‘Flushing,’ Chang said. ‘Chinatown Number Two.’

‘Why did you bring me here?’

‘Driving in car, I have better idea. Nice little club on next block, good place to relax. You look tired out, Mr. Sid. I take you there, you feel better.’

‘What are you talking about? It’s quarter past three, and I have to get home.’

‘Just half an hour. Do you a world of good, I promise. Then I drive you home. Okay?’

‘I’d rather not. Just point me to the nearest subway, and I’ll go home myself.’

‘Please. This very important to me. Maybe a business opportunity, and I need advice from a smart man. You very smart, Mr. Sid. I can trust you.’

‘I have no idea what you’re talking about. First you want me to relax. Then you want me to give you advice. Which is it?’

‘Both things. All things together. You see place, you relax, and then you tell me what you think. Very simple.’

‘Half an hour?’

‘No skin off nose. Everything on me, free of charge. Then I drive you to Cobble Hill, Brooklyn. Deal?’

The afternoon was turning stranger by the minute, but I allowed myself to be talked into going with him. I can’t really explain why. Curiosity, maybe, but it also could have been just the opposite – a feeling of total indifference. Chang had begun to get on my nerves, and I couldn’t take his incessant pleading anymore, especially not while cooped up in that ridiculous car of his. If another half hour of my time would satisfy him, I figured it was worth it to play along. So I climbed out of the Pontiac and followed him down the densely thronged avenue, breathing in the pungent fumes and acrid smells of the fish stores and vegetable stands that lined the block. At the first corner, we turned left, walked for about a hundred feet, and then turned left again, entering a narrow alley with a small cinder-block structure at the end of it, a tiny one-story house with no windows and a flat roof. It was a classic setup for a mugging, but I didn’t feel the least bit threatened. Chang was in too jolly a mood, and with his usual intensity of purpose, he seemed hell-bent on reaching our destination.

When we came to the yellow cinder-block house, Chang pressed his finger against the doorbell. A few seconds later, the door opened a crack and a Chinese man in his sixties poked out his head. He nodded in recognition when he saw Chang, they exchanged a few sentences in Mandarin, and then he let us in. The so-called club of relaxation turned out to be a small sweatshop. Twenty Chinese women sat at tables with sewing machines, stitching together brightly colored dresses made of cheap, synthetic materials. Not one of them looked up at us when we entered, and Chang rushed past them as quickly as he could, acting as if they weren’t there. We kept on walking, threading our way around the tables until we came to a door at the back of the room. The old man opened it for us, and Chang and I stepped into a space that was so black, so dark in comparison to the fluorescent-lit workshop behind us, that at first I couldn’t see a thing.

Once my eyes had adjusted a little, I noticed some dim low-wattage lamps glowing in various places around the room. Each one had been fitted with a bulb of a different color – red, yellow, purple, blue – and for a moment I thought about the Portuguese notebooks in Chang’s bankrupt store. I wondered if the ones I’d seen on Saturday were still available and, if they were, whether he’d be willing to sell them to me. I made a mental note to ask him about it before we left.

By and by, he led me to a tall chair or stool, something made of leather or imitation leather that swiveled on its base and had a nice cushiony feel to it. I sat down, and he sat down next to me, and I realized that we were at some kind of bar – a lacquered, oval-shaped bar that occupied the center of the room. Things were becoming clearer to me now. I could make out several people sitting across from us, a couple of men in suits and ties, an Asian man in what looked like a Hawaiian shirt, and two or three women, none of whom seemed to be wearing any clothes. Ah, I said to myself, so that’s what this place is. A sex club. Oddly enough, it was only then that I noticed the music playing in the background – a soft, rumbling piece that wafted in from some invisible sound system. I strained to pick out the song, but I couldn’t identify it. Some Musak version of an old rock-and-roll number – maybe the Beatles, I thought, but maybe not.

‘Well, Mr. Sid,’ Chang said, ‘what do you think?’

Before I could answer him, a bartender appeared in front of us and asked for our orders. It might have been the old man who had opened the door earlier, but I wasn’t certain. It could have been his brother, or perhaps some other relative with a stake in the enterprise. Chang leaned over and whispered in my ear. ‘No alcohol,’ he said. ‘Fake beer, 7-Up, Coke. Too risky to sell booze in place like this. No liquor license.’ Now that I’d been informed of the possibilities, I opted for a Coke. Chang did the same.

‘Brand-new place,’ the ex-stationer continued. ‘Just open on Saturday. They still iron out the kinks, but I see large potential here. They ask if I want to invest as minority partner.’

‘It’s a brothel,’ I said. ‘Are you sure you want to get mixed up in an illegal business?’

‘Not brothel. Relaxation club with naked women. Help the workingman feel better.’

‘I’m not going to split hairs with you. If you’re so keen on it, go ahead. But I thought you were broke.’

‘Money never a problem. I borrow. If profit from investment stay ahead of interest on loan, everything okay.’

‘If.’

‘Very little if. They find gorgeous girls to work here. Miss Universe, Marilyn Monroe, Playmate of Month. Only the hottest, most sexy women. No man can resist. Look, I show you.’

‘No thanks. I’m a married man. I have everything I need at home.’

‘Every man say that. But the dick always win out over duty. I prove it to you now.’

Before I could stop him, Chang wheeled around in his chair and made a beckoning gesture with his hand. I looked over in that direction myself and saw five or six cocktail booths lining the wall, something I had managed to miss when I first entered the room. Naked women sat at three of them, apparently waiting for customers, but the others had been curtained off, presumably because the women who occupied those spots were busy at work. One of the women rose from her seat and came walking toward us. ‘This one the best,’ Chang said, ‘the most beautiful of all. They call her the African Princess.’

A tall black woman emerged from the darkness. She was wearing a pearl-and-rhinestone choker, knee-high white boots, and a white G-string. Her hair was done up in elaborate cornrow braids, ornamented with bangles at the ends that tinkled like wind chimes when she moved. Her walk was graceful, languorous, erect – a regal sort of bearing that no doubt explained why she was called the Princess. By the time she was within six feet of the bar, I understood that Chang had not been exaggerating. She was a stunningly beautiful woman – perhaps the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. And all of twenty, perhaps twenty-two years old. Her skin looked so smooth and inviting, I found it almost impossible to resist touching it.

‘Say hello to my friend,’ Chang instructed her. ‘I settle up with you later.’

She turned to me and smiled, exposing a set of astonishing white teeth. ‘Bonjour, chéri,’ she said. ‘Tu parles français?’

‘No, I’m sorry. I only speak English.’

‘My name is Martine,’ she said, with a heavy Creole accent.

‘I’m Sidney,’ I answered, and then, trying to make a stab at conversation, I asked her which country in Africa she came from.

She laughed. ‘Pas d’Afrique! Haiti.’ She pronounced the last word in three syllables, Ha-ee-tee. ‘A bad place,’ she said. ‘Duvalier is very méchant. It is nicer here.’

I nodded, having no idea what to say next. I wanted to get up and leave before I got myself into trouble, but I couldn’t move. The girl was too much, and I couldn’t stop looking at her.

‘Tu veux danser avec moi?’ she said. ‘You dance with me?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe. I’m not a very good dancer.’

‘Something else?’

‘I don’t know. Well, maybe one thing … if it isn’t too much to ask.’

‘One thing?’

‘I was wondering…. Would you mind terribly if I touched you?’

‘Touched me? Of course. That is easy. Touch me anywhere you like.’

I reached out my hand and ran it down the length of her bare arm. ‘You are very timide,’ she said. ‘Do you not see my breasts? Mes seins sont très jolis, n’est-ce pas?’

I was sober enough to realize that I was traveling down the road to perdition, but I didn’t let that stop me. I cupped her small round breasts in my two hands and held them there for some time – long enough to feel her nipples harden.

‘Ah, that is better,’ she said. ‘Now you let me touch you, okay?’

I didn’t say yes, but neither did I say no. I assumed she had something innocent in mind – a pat on the cheek, a finger traced across my lips, a playful squeeze of the hand. Nothing to compare with what she actually did, in any case, which was to press herself against me, slide her elegant hand down into my jeans, and take hold of the erection that had been growing in there for the past two minutes. When she felt how stiff I was, she smiled. ‘I think we are ready to dance,’ she said. ‘You come with me now, okay?’

To his credit, Chang didn’t laugh at this sad little spectacle of male weakness. He had proved his point, and rather than gloat over his triumph, he merely winked at me as I walked off with Martine to her booth.

The whole transaction seemed to last no longer than the time it takes to fill a bathtub. She closed the curtain around the booth and immediately unbuckled my pants. Then she dropped to her knees and put her right hand around my penis, and after a few gentle strokes, followed by some timely licks of the tongue, she put it in her mouth. Her head began to move, and as I listened to the tinkling of her braids and looked down at her extraordinary bare back, I felt a rush of warmth rising up through my legs and into my groin. I wanted to prolong the experience and savor it for a little while, but I couldn’t. Martine’s mouth was a deadly instrument, and like any aroused teenage boy, I came almost at once.

Regret set in within a matter of seconds. By the time I’d pulled up my jeans and fastened my belt, regret had turned into shame and remorse. The only thing I wanted was to get out of there as quickly as I could. I asked Martine how much I owed her, but she waved me off and said my friend had already taken care of it. She kissed me when I said good-bye, an amiable little peck on the cheek, and then I parted the curtain and went back to the bar to look for Chang. He wasn’t there. Perhaps he’d found a woman for himself and was already with her in another booth, testing the professional qualifications of one of his future employees. I didn’t bother to stick around to find out. I walked around the bar once, just to make sure I hadn’t missed him, and then I found the door that led to the dress factory and started out for home.



The next morning, Wednesday, I served Grace breakfast in bed again. There was no talk about dreams this time, and neither one of us mentioned the pregnancy or what she was planning to do about it. The issue was still up in the air, but after my disgraceful behavior in Queens the day before, I felt too embarrassed to broach the subject. In the span of thirty-six short hours, I had gone from being a self-righteous defender of moral certainties to an abject, guilt-ridden husband.

Nevertheless, I tried to keep up a good front, and even though she was unusually quiet that morning, I don’t think Grace suspected anything was wrong. I insisted on walking her to the subway, holding her hand for the entire four blocks to the Bergen Street station, and for most of the way we talked about ordinary matters: a jacket she was designing for a book on nineteenth-century French photography, the film treatment I had handed in the day before and the money I hoped would come from it, what we would have for dinner that night. On the last block, however, Grace abruptly changed the tone of the conversation. She gripped my hand tightly and said: ‘We trust each other, don’t we, Sid?’

‘Of course we do. We wouldn’t be able to live together if we didn’t. The whole idea of marriage is based on trust.’

‘People can go through rough times, can’t they? But that doesn’t mean things can’t work out in the end.’

‘This isn’t a rough time, Grace. We’ve been through that already, and we’re beginning to pull ourselves together again.’

‘I’m glad you said that.’

‘I’m glad you’re glad. But why?’

‘Because that’s what I think too. No matter what happens with the baby, everything between us is going to be fine. We’re going to make it.’

‘We’ve already made it. We’re cruising down Easy Street, kid, and that’s where we’re going to stay.’

Grace stopped walking, put her hand on the back of my neck, and pulled my face toward her for a kiss. ‘You’re the best, Sidney,’ she said, and then she kissed me once more for good measure. ‘No matter what happens, don’t ever forget that.’

I didn’t understand what she was talking about, but before I could ask her what she meant, she disentangled herself from my arms and started running toward the subway. I stood where I was on the sidewalk, watching her cover the last ten yards. Then she came to the top step, grabbed hold of the railing, and disappeared down the stairs.

Back at the apartment, I kept myself busy for the next hour, killing time until the Sklarr Agency opened at nine-thirty. I washed the breakfast dishes, made the bed, tidied up the living room, and then I went back into the kitchen and called Mary. The ostensible reason was to make sure Angela had remembered to give her my pages, but knowing that she had, I was actually calling to find out what Mary thought of them. ‘Good job,’ she said, sounding neither greatly excited nor terribly disappointed. The fact that I had written the outline so quickly, however, had enabled her to pull off a high-speed communications miracle, and that had her gushing with excitement. In those days before fax machines, e-mails, and express letters, she had sent the treatment to California by private courier, which meant that my work had already traveled across the country on last night’s red-eye. ‘I had to get a contract off to another client in LA,’ Mary said, ‘so I hired the courier service to come by the office at three o’clock. I read your treatment right after lunch, and half an hour later the guy shows up for the contract. “This one’s also going to LA,” I said, “so you might as well take it too.” So I handed him your manuscript, and off it went, just like that. It should be on Hunter’s desk in about three hours.’

‘Great,’ I said. ‘But what about the idea? Do you think it has a chance?’

‘I only read it once. I didn’t have time to study it, but it seemed fine to me, Sid. Very interesting, nicely worked out. But you never know with those Hollywood people. My guess is it’s too complicated for them.’

‘So I shouldn’t get my hopes up.’

‘I wouldn’t say that. Just don’t count on it, that’s all.’

‘I won’t. But the money would be nice, wouldn’t it?’

‘Well, I do have some good news for you on that front. I was just going to call you, in fact, but you beat me to it. A Portuguese publisher has made an offer on your last two novels.’

‘Portugal?’

Self-Portrait was published in Spain while you were in the hospital. You know that, I told you. The reviews were very good. Now the Portuguese are interested.’

‘That’s nice. I suppose they’re offering something like three hundred dollars.’

‘Four hundred for each book. But I can easily get them up to five.’

‘Go for it, Mary. After you deduct the agents’ fees and foreign taxes, I’ll wind up with about forty cents.’

‘True. But at least you’ll be published in Portugal. What’s wrong with that?’

‘Nothing. Pessoa is one of my favorite writers. They’ve kicked out Salazar and have a decent government now. The Lisbon earthquake inspired Voltaire to write Candide. And Portugal helped get thousands of Jews out of Europe during the war. It’s a terrific country. I’ve never been there, of course, but that’s where I live now, whether I like it or not. Portugal is perfect. The way things have been going these past few days, it had to be Portugal.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘It’s a long story. I’ll tell you about it some other time.’



I made it to Trause’s apartment on the dot of one. As I rang the bell, it occurred to me that I should have stopped off somewhere in the neighborhood and bought take-out lunches for the two of us, but I had forgotten about Madame Dumas, the woman from Martinique who managed the household. The meal was already prepared, and it was served to us in John’s den on the second floor, the same room where we had eaten our Chinese dinner on Saturday night. I should note that Madame Dumas was not on duty that day. It was her daughter, Régine, who opened the door and led me upstairs to Monsieur John. I remembered that Trause had called her ‘nice to look at,’ and now that I’d seen her myself, I was forced to admit that I, too, found her remarkably attractive – a tall, well-proportioned young woman with glowing ebony skin and keen, watchful eyes. No G-string, of course, no bare breasts or white leather boots, but this was the second twenty-year-old French-speaking black woman I had met in two days, and I found the repetition jarring, almost intolerable. Why couldn’t Régine Dumas have been a short, homely girl with a bad complexion and a hump on her back? She wasn’t the heart-stopping beauty that Martine of Haiti was, perhaps, but she was a fetching creature in her own right, and when she opened the door and smiled at me in her friendly, self-assured way, I felt it as a reproof, a mocking rejoinder from my own troubled conscience. I had been doing everything in my power not to think about what had happened the day before, to forget my sorry peccadillo and put it behind me, but there was no escape from what I had done. Martine had come to life again in the form of Régine Dumas. She was everywhere now, even in my friend’s Barrow Street apartment, half a world away from that shabby cinder-block building in Queens.

As opposed to his unkempt appearance on Saturday night, John looked presentable this time. His hair was combed, his whiskers were gone, and he was wearing a freshly laundered shirt and clean socks. But he was still immobilized on the sofa, his left leg propped up on a mountain of pillows and blankets, and he seemed to be in considerable pain – as bad as the other night, if not worse. The clean-shaven look had thrown me. When Régine brought the lunch upstairs on a tray (turkey sandwiches, salads, sparkling water), I did everything I could not to look at her. That meant focusing my attention on John, and when I studied his features more carefully, I saw that he was exhausted, with a sunken, hollowed-out look in his eyes and a disturbing pallor to his skin. He left the sofa twice while I was there, and both times he reached for his crutch before maneuvering himself into a standing position. From the look on his face when his left foot touched the ground, the slightest pressure on the vein must have been unbearable.

I asked him when he was supposed to get better, but John didn’t want to talk about it. I kept after him, however, and eventually he admitted that he hadn’t told us everything on Saturday night. He hadn’t wanted to alarm Grace, he said, but the truth was that there were two clots in his leg, not one. The first was in a superficial vein. It had nearly dissolved by now and posed no threat, even though it was causing most of what John referred to as his ‘discomfort.’ The second was lodged in a deep interior vein, and that was the one the doctor was worried about. Massive doses of blood thinner had been prescribed, and John was scheduled to have a scan at Saint Vincent’s on Friday. If the results were less than satisfactory, the doctor was planning to admit him to the hospital and keep him there until the clot disappeared. Deep-vein thrombosis could be fatal, John said. If the clot broke loose, it could travel through his bloodstream and wind up in a lung, causing a pulmonary embolism and almost certain death. ‘It’s like walking around with a little bomb in my leg,’ he said. ‘If I shake it around too much, it could blow me up.’ Then he added, ‘Not a word to Gracie. This is strictly between you and me. Got it? Not a single goddamn word.’

Not long after that, we started talking about his son. I can’t remember what led us into that pit of despair and self-recrimination, but Trause’s anguish was palpable, and whatever concerns he had about his leg were nothing compared to the hopelessness he felt about Jacob. ‘I’ve lost him,’ he said. ‘After the stunt he’s just pulled, I’ll never believe another word he says to me.’

Until the latest crisis, Jacob had been an undergraduate at SUNY Buffalo. John was acquainted with several members of the English Department there (one of them, Charles Rothstein, had published a long study of his novels), and after Jacob’s disastrous, near-failing record in high school, he had pulled some strings in order to get the boy accepted. The first semester had gone reasonably well, and Jacob had managed to pass all his courses, but by the end of the second term his grades had fallen off so badly that he was put on academic probation. He needed to maintain a B average to avoid suspension, but in the fall semester of his sophomore year he cut more classes than he attended, did little or no work, and was summarily booted out for the next term. He went back to his mother in East Hampton, where she was living with her third husband (in the same house where Jacob had grown up with his much-despised stepfather, an art dealer named Ralph Singleton), and found a part-time job at a local bakery. He also formed a rock band with three of his high school friends, but there were so many tensions and squabbles among them that the group broke up after six months. He told his father he had no use for college and didn’t want to go back, but John managed to talk him into it by offering certain financial incentives: a comfortable allowance, a new guitar if he kept his grades up in the first semester, a Volkswagen minibus if he finished the year with a B average. The kid went for it, and in late August he’d gone back to Buffalo to play at being a student again – with green hair, a row of safety pins dangling from his left ear, and a long black overcoat. The punk era was in full bloom then, and Jacob had joined the ever-expanding club of snarling, middle-class renegades. He was hip, he lived on the edge, and he didn’t take crap from anyone.

Jacob had enrolled for the semester, John said, but a week later, without having attended a single class, he returned to the registrar’s office and dropped out of school. The tuition was returned to him, and instead of sending the check to his father (who had provided him with the money in the first place), he cashed it in at the nearest bank, put the three thousand dollars in his pocket, and headed south to New York. At last word, he was living somewhere in the East Village. If the rumors circulating about him were correct, he was deep into heroin – and had been for the past four months.

‘Who told you this?’ I asked. ‘How do you know it’s true?’

‘Eleanor called me yesterday morning. She’d been trying to get hold of Jacob about something, and his roommate answered the phone. Ex-roommate, I should say. He told her Jacob had left school two weeks ago.’

‘And the heroin?’

‘He told her about that too. There’s no reason for him to lie about a thing like that. According to Eleanor, he sounded very concerned. It’s not that I’m surprised, Sid. I’ve always suspected he was taking drugs. I just didn’t know it was this bad.’

‘What are you going to do about it?’

‘I don’t know. You’re the one who used to work with kids. What would you do?’

‘You’re asking the wrong person. All my students were poor. Black teenagers from tumbledown neighborhoods and broken families. A lot of them took drugs, but their problems have nothing to do with Jacob’s.’

‘Eleanor thinks we should go out looking for him. But I can’t move. I’m stuck on this couch with my leg.’

‘I’ll do it if you like. It’s not as if I’m very busy these days.’

‘No, no, I don’t want you getting involved. It’s not your problem. Eleanor and her husband will do it. At least that’s what she said. With her, you never know if she means it or not.’

‘What’s her new husband like?’

‘I don’t know. I’ve never met him. The funny thing is, I can’t even remember his name. I’ve been lying here trying to think of it, but I keep drawing blanks. Don something, I think, but I’m not sure.’

‘And what’s the plan once they find Jacob?’

‘Get him into a drug rehab program.’

‘Those things aren’t cheap. Who’s going to pay for it?’

‘Me, of course. Eleanor’s rolling in money these days, but she’s so fucking tight, I wouldn’t even bother to ask her. The kid chisels three thousand bucks out of me, and now I have to cough up another bundle to get him clean. If you want to know the truth, I feel like wringing his neck. You’re lucky you don’t have any children, Sid. They’re nice when they’re small, but after that they break your heart and make you miserable. Five feet, that’s the maximum. They shouldn’t be allowed to grow any taller than that.’

After John’s last comment, I couldn’t hold back from telling him my news. ‘I might not be childless much longer,’ I said. ‘It’s not clear what we’re going to do about it yet, but for the moment Grace is pregnant. She had the test on Saturday.’

I didn’t know what I was expecting John to say, but even after his bitter pronouncements on the agonies of fatherhood, I figured he’d manage to come out with some kind of perfunctory congratulations. Or at least wish me luck and warn me to do a better job than he’d done. Something, in any case, some little word of acknowledgment. But John didn’t make a sound. For a moment he looked stricken, as if he’d just been told about the death of someone he loved, and then he turned his face away from me, abruptly swiveling his head on the pillow and looking straight into the back of the sofa.

‘Poor Grace,’ he muttered.

‘Why do you say that?’

John slowly turned back toward me, but he stopped midway, his head aligned with the sofa, and when he talked he kept his gaze fixed on the ceiling. ‘It’s just that she’s been through so much,’ he said. ‘She’s not as strong as you think she is. She needs a rest.’

‘She’ll do exactly what she wants to do. The decision is in her hands.’

‘I’ve known her much longer than you have. A baby is the last thing she needs right now.’

‘If she goes through with it, I was thinking of asking you to be the godfather. But I don’t suppose you’d be interested. Not from what you’re saying now.’

‘Just don’t lose her, Sidney. That’s all I’m asking you. If things fall apart, it would be a catastrophe for her.’

‘They’re not going to fall apart. And I’m not going to lose her. But even if I did, what business is it of yours?’

‘Grace is my business. She’s always been my business.’

‘You’re not her father. You might think you are sometimes, but you’re not. Grace can handle herself. If she decides to have the baby, I’m not going to stop her. The truth is, I’ll be glad. Having a child with her would be about the best thing that ever happened to me.’

That was the closest John and I had ever come to an out-and-out argument. It was an upsetting moment for me, and as my last words hung defiantly in the air, I wondered if the conversation wasn’t about to take an even nastier turn. Fortunately, we both backed off before the flare-up developed any further, realizing that we were about to goad each other into saying things we would later regret – and which could never be expunged from memory, no matter how many apologies we made after our tempers had calmed down.

Very wisely, John picked that moment to pay a visit to the bathroom. As I watched him go through the arduous manipulations of hauling himself off the sofa and then hobble across the room, all the hostility suddenly drained out of me. He was living under extreme duress. His leg was killing him, he was grappling with the awful news about his son, and how could I not forgive him for having spoken a few harsh words? In the context of Jacob’s betrayal and possible drug addiction, Grace was the adored good child, the one who had never let him down, and perhaps that was the reason why John had been so adamant in coming to her defense, butting into matters that finally didn’t concern him. He was angry at his son, yes, but that anger was also laden with a substantial dose of guilt. John knew he had more or less abdicated his responsibilities as a father. Divorced from Eleanor when Jacob was one and a half, he had allowed her to remove the child from New York when she settled in East Hampton with her second husband in 1966. After that, John had seen little of the boy: an occasional weekend together in the city, a few trips to New England and the Southwest during summer vacations. Hardly what one could call an actively involved parent, and then, after Tina’s death, he had disappeared from Jacob’s life for four years, seeing him only once or twice from age twelve to sixteen. Now, at twenty, his son had turned into a full-blown mess, and whether it was his fault or not, John blamed himself for the disaster.

He was gone from the room for ten or fifteen minutes. When he returned, I helped him onto the sofa again, and the first thing he said to me had nothing to do with what we’d been talking about earlier. The conflict seemed to be over – swept away during his trip down the hall and apparently forgotten.

‘How’s Flitcraft?’ he asked. ‘Making any progress?’

‘Yes and no,’ I said. ‘I wrote up a storm for a couple of days, but then I got stuck.’

‘And now you’re having second thoughts about the blue notebook.’

‘Maybe. I’m not sure I know what I think anymore.’

‘You were so revved up the other night, you sounded like a demented alchemist. The first man to turn lead into gold.’

‘Well, it was quite an experience. The first time I used the notebook, Grace tells me I wasn’t there anymore.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘That I disappeared. I know it sounds ridiculous, but she knocked on my door while I was writing, and when I didn’t answer she poked her head into the room. She swears she didn’t see me.’

‘You must have been somewhere else in the apartment. In the bathroom, maybe.’

‘I know. That’s what Grace says too. But I don’t remember going to the bathroom. I don’t remember anything but sitting at my desk and writing.’

‘You might not remember it, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. One tends to get a little absentminded when the words are flowing. Not true?’

‘True. Of course true. But then something similar happened on Monday. I was in my room writing, and I didn’t hear the phone ring. When I got up from my desk and went into the kitchen, there were two messages on the machine.’

‘So?’

‘I didn’t hear the ring. I always hear the phone when it rings.’

‘You were distracted, lost in what you were doing.’

‘Maybe. But I don’t think so. Something strange happened, and I don’t understand it.’

‘Call your doctor, Sid, and set up an appointment to have your head examined.’

‘I know. It’s all in my head. I’m not saying it isn’t, but ever since I bought that notebook, everything’s gone out of whack. I can’t tell if I’m the one who’s using the notebook or if the notebook’s been using me. Does that make any sense?’

‘A little. But not much.’

‘All right, let me put it another way. Have you ever heard of a writer named Sylvia Maxwell? An American novelist from the twenties.’

‘I’ve read some books by Sylvia Monroe. She published a bunch of novels in the twenties and thirties. But not Maxwell.’

‘Did she ever write a book called Oracle Night?’

‘No, not that I know of. But I think she wrote something with the word night in the title. Havana Night, maybe. Or London Night, I can’t remember. It shouldn’t be hard to find out. Just go to the library and look her up.’

Little by little, we veered away from the blue notebook and started discussing more practical matters. Money, for one thing, and how I was hoping to solve my financial problems by writing a film script for Bobby Hunter. I told John about the treatment, giving him a quick summary of the plot I’d cooked up for my version of The Time Machine, but he didn’t offer much of a response. Clever, I think he said, or some equally mild compliment, and I suddenly felt stupid, embarrassed, as though Trause looked on me as some tawdry hack trying to peddle my wares to the highest bidder. But I was wrong to interpret his muffled reaction as disapproval. He understood what a tight spot we were in, and it turned out that he was thinking, trying to come up with a plan to help me.

‘I know it’s idiotic,’ I said, ‘but if they go for the idea, we’ll be solvent again. If they don’t, we’re still in the red. I hate to count on such flimsy prospects, but it’s the only trick I have up my sleeve.’

‘Maybe not,’ John said. ‘If this Time Machine thing doesn’t work, maybe you could write another screenplay. You’re good at it. If you got Mary to push hard enough, I’m sure you’d find someone willing to fork over a nice chunk of cash.’

‘It doesn’t work that way. They come to you; you don’t go to them. Unless you have an original idea, of course. But I don’t.’

‘That’s what I’m talking about. Maybe I have an idea for you.’

‘A movie idea? I thought you were against writing for the movies.’

‘A couple of weeks ago, I found a box with some of my old stuff in it. Early stories, a half-finished novel, two or three plays. Ancient material, written when I was still in my teens and twenties. None of it was ever published. Thankfully, I should add, but in reading over the stories, I found one that wasn’t half terrible. I still wouldn’t want to publish it, but if I gave it to you, you might be able to rethink it as a film. Maybe my name will help. If you tell a film producer you’re adapting an unpublished story by John Trause, it might have some appeal. I don’t know. But even if they don’t give a shit about me, there’s a strong visual component to the story. I think the images would lend themselves to film in a pretty natural way.’

‘Of course your name would help. It would make a huge difference.’

‘Well, read the story and let me know what you think. It’s just a first draft – very rough – so don’t judge the prose too harshly. And remember, I was hardly more than a kid when I wrote it. Much younger than you are now.’

‘What’s it about?’

‘It’s an odd piece, not at all like my other work, so you might be a little surprised at first. I guess I’d call it a political parable. It’s set in an imaginary country in the eighteen thirties, but it’s really about the early nineteen fifties. McCarthy, HUAC, the Red Scare – all the sinister things that were going on then. The idea is that governments always need enemies, even when they’re not at war. If you don’t have a real enemy, you make one up and spread the word. It scares the population, and when the people are scared, they tend not to step out of line.’

‘What about the country? Is it a stand-in for America or something else?’

‘It’s part North America, part South America, but with a completely different history from either one. Way back, all the European powers had set up colonies in the New World. The colonies evolved into independent states, and then, little by little, after hundreds of years of wars and skirmishes, they gradually merge into an enormous confederation. The question is: What happens after the empire is established? What enemy do you invent to make people scared enough to hold the confederation together?’

‘And what’s the answer?’

‘You pretend you’re about to be invaded by barbarians. The confederation has already pushed these people off their lands, but now you spread the rumor that an army of anti-confederationist soldiers has crossed into the primitive territories and is stirring up a rebellion among the people there. It isn’t true. The soldiers are working for the government. They’re part of the conspiracy.’

‘Who tells the story?’

‘A man sent to investigate the rumors. He works for a branch of the government that isn’t in on the plot, and he winds up being arrested and tried for treason. To make matters more complicated, the officer in charge of the false army has run off with the narrator’s wife.’

‘Deceit and corruption at every turn.’

‘Exactly. A man ruined by his own innocence.’

‘Does it have a title?’

‘“The Empire of Bones.” It’s not very long. Forty-five or fifty pages – but there’s enough to squeeze a film out of it, I think. You decide. If you want to use it, I give you my blessing. If you don’t like it, then chuck it in the garbage, and we’ll forget all about it.’



I left Trause’s apartment feeling overwhelmed, tongue-tied with gratitude, and not even the small torment of having to say good-bye to Régine downstairs could diminish my happiness. The manuscript was in a side pocket of my sport coat, tucked away in a manila envelope, and I kept my hand on it as I walked to the subway, itching to open it up and start reading. John had always been behind me and my work, but I knew this gift had as much to do with Grace as it did with me. I was the half-destroyed cripple responsible for taking care of her, and if there was anything he could do to help us get back on our feet, he was willing to do it – even to the extent of donating an unpublished manuscript to the cause. There was only the slimmest chance that anything would come of his idea, but whether I could turn his story into a film or not, the important thing was his readiness to go beyond the normal bounds of friendship and involve himself in our affairs. Selflessly, without any thought of profiting from what he’d done.

It was already past five o’clock when I made it to the West Fourth Street station. Rush hour was in full swing, and as I descended the two flights of stairs to the downtown F platform, gripping the banister tightly so as not to stumble, I despaired of finding a seat on the train. There would be a crush of passengers traveling back to Brooklyn. That meant I would have to read John’s story standing up, and since that would be immensely difficult, I prepared myself to fight for a little extra space if I had to. When the doors of the train opened, I ignored subway etiquette and slipped in past the jostle of disembarking passengers, entering the car before anyone else on the platform, but it didn’t do me any good. A mob came pouring in behind me. I was pushed to the center of the car, and by the time the doors closed and the train left the station, I was crammed in among so many people that my arms were pinned to my sides, with no room to reach into my pocket and take out the envelope. It was all I could do not to crash into my fellow riders as we rocked and lurched our way through the tunnel. At one point, I managed to get my hand up far enough to hook my fingers onto one of the overhead bars, but that was the extent of the movement possible for me under the circumstances. Few passengers got off at the succeeding stops, and for every one who did, two others shouldered themselves in to take that person’s place. Hundreds were left standing on the platforms to wait for the next train, and from the beginning of the ride to the end, I didn’t have a single chance to look at the story. When we pulled into the Bergen Street station, I tried to get my hand back onto the envelope, but I was bumped from behind, squeezed from both left and right, and as I pivoted around the center pole to get ready to exit the car, the train suddenly stopped, the doors opened, and I was pushed out onto the platform before I could check to see if the envelope was still there. It wasn’t. The surge of the departing crowd carried me along with it for six or seven feet, and by the time I spun around to elbow my way back into the car, the doors had already closed and the subway was moving again. I pounded my fist against a passing window, but the conductor paid no attention to me. The F glided out of the station, and a few seconds later it was gone.

I had been guilty of similar lapses of concentration since coming home from the hospital, but none was worse or more wrenching than this one. Instead of keeping the envelope in my hand, I had foolishly shoved the thing into a pocket that was too small to hold it, and now John’s manuscript was lying on the floor of a subway car headed for Coney Island, no doubt trampled and smudged by half the shoes and sneakers in the borough of Brooklyn. It was an unforgivable mistake. John had entrusted me with the only copy of an unpublished story, and given the academic interest in his work, the manuscript alone was probably worth hundreds of dollars, perhaps thousands. What was I going to tell him when he asked me what I thought of it? He had said I should toss it in the garbage if I didn’t like it, but that was merely a hyperbolic way of denigrating his own work, a joke. Of course he would want the manuscript back – whether I liked it or not. I had no idea how to make amends. If someone had done to me what I’d just done to Trause, I think I would have been angry enough to want to strangle him.

Demoralizing as that loss was, it was only the beginning of what turned out to be a long and difficult night. When I returned home and walked up the three flights of stairs to the apartment, I discovered that the door was open – not simply ajar, but flung back on its hinges and standing flush against the wall. My first thought was that Grace had come home early, perhaps carrying an armful of bundles and grocery bags, and had forgotten to shut the door behind her. One look at the living room, however, and I understood that Grace had nothing to do with it. Someone had broken into the apartment, most likely by climbing up the fire escape and jimmying the kitchen window. Books were strewn about the floor, our small black-and-white TV was gone, and a photograph of Grace, which had always stood on the mantel, had been torn up into little pieces and scattered onto the sofa. It was a remarkably vicious gesture, I felt, almost a personal attack. When I went over to the bookcase to inspect the damage, I saw that only the most valuable books were missing: signed copies of novels by Trause and a number of other writer friends, along with half a dozen first editions that had been given to me as presents over the years. Hawthorne, Dickens, Henry James, Fitzgerald, Wallace Stevens, Emerson. Whoever had robbed us was no ordinary thief. He knew something about literature, and he had zeroed in on the few treasures we owned.

My study appeared to be untouched, but the bedroom had been systematically and thoroughly ransacked. Every drawer had been pulled out of the bureau, the mattress had been overturned, and the Bram van Velde lithograph that Grace had bought at the Galerie Maeght in Paris in the early seventies was missing from its place on the wall above our bed. When I sifted through the contents of the bureau drawers, I discovered that Grace’s jewelry box was also missing. She didn’t own much, but a pair of moonstone earrings she’d inherited from her grandmother had been in that box, along with a charm bracelet from her childhood and a silver necklace I’d given to her on her last birthday. Now some stranger had walked off with these things, and it felt as cruel and pointless to me as a rape, a savage plundering of our little world.

We had no theft or home insurance, and I was disinclined to call the police to report the break-in. Burglars were never caught, and I saw no reason to pursue what struck me as a hopeless case, but before I made that decision I had to find out if anyone else in the building had been robbed. There were three other apartments in the brownstone – one above us and two below – and I began by going downstairs to the ground floor and talking to Mrs. Caramello, who shared the superintendent duties with her husband, a retired barber who spent most of his time watching television and betting on football games. Their place hadn’t been touched, but Mrs. Caramello was sufficiently distressed by my news to call out to Mr. Caramello, who came shuffling to the door in his slippers and merely sighed when he was told what had happened. ‘Probably one of them goddamn junkies,’ he said. ‘Gotta get bars on your windows, Sid. Ain’t no other way to keep the trash from crawling in.’

The other two tenants had also been spared. It seemed that everyone had bars on their back windows but us, and therefore we’d been the logical target – trusting dumbbells who hadn’t bothered to take the proper precautions. They all felt sorry for us, but the implicit message was that we’d deserved what we’d got.

I went back into the apartment, even more horrified now that I could survey the mess in a calmer state of mind. One by one, details I had overlooked earlier suddenly jumped out at me, further aggravating the effect of the intrusion. A standing lamp to the left of the sofa had been tipped over and broken, a flower vase lay smashed on the rug, and even our pathetic, nineteen-dollar toaster had vanished from its spot on the kitchen counter. I called Grace at her office, wanting to prepare her for the shock, but no one answered, which seemed to imply that she had already left and was on her way home. Not knowing what else to do with myself, I began straightening up the apartment. It must have been about six-thirty at that point, and even though I was expecting Grace to walk through the door at any moment, I worked steadily for over an hour, sweeping up debris, returning the books to the shelves, righting the mattress and putting it back on the bed, sliding the drawers back into the bureau. At first, I was glad to be making so much progress while Grace was still gone. The more effectively I could put the place in order, the less disconcerting it would be for her when she walked into the apartment. But then I finished what I had set out to do, and she still hadn’t come home. It was seven-forty-five by then, long past the time when a subway breakdown could have accounted for her failure to reach Brooklyn. It was true that she sometimes worked late, but she always called to let me know when she would be leaving the office, and there was no message from her on the answering machine. I called her number at Holst & McDermott again, just to make sure, but again no one picked up. She wasn’t at work, and she hadn’t come home, and all of a sudden the break-in seemed to be of no importance, a minor irritation from the distant past. Grace was missing, and by the time eight o’clock rolled around, I had already worked myself into a feverish, all-out panic.

I made a number of calls – to friends, co-workers, even to her cousin Lily in Connecticut – but only the last person I talked to had any information to give me. Greg Fitzgerald was head of the art department at Holst & McDermott, and according to him, Grace had called the office just after nine that morning to tell him she couldn’t make it to work that day. She was very sorry, but something urgent had come up that required her immediate attention. She didn’t say what the something was, but when Greg asked her if she was all right, Grace had apparently hesitated before answering. ‘I think so,’ she’d finally said, and Greg, who had known her for years and was extremely fond of her (a gay man half in love with his prettiest female colleague), had found the response puzzling. ‘Not like her’ was the phrase he used, I think, but when he heard the mounting alarm in my voice, he tried to reassure me by adding that Grace had ended the conversation by telling him she would be back in the office tomorrow morning. ‘Don’t worry, Sidney,’ Greg continued. ‘When Grace says she’s going to do something, she does it. I’ve been working with her for five years, and she hasn’t let me down once.’

I sat up all night waiting for her, half out of my mind with dread and confusion. Before talking to Fitzgerald, I had convinced myself that Grace had been harmed in some violent way – mugged, molested, knocked down by a speeding truck or cab, a victim of one of the countless brutalities that can befall a woman alone on the streets of New York. That seemed unlikely now, but if she wasn’t dead or in physical danger, what had happened to her, and why hadn’t she called to tell me where she was? I kept going over the conversation we’d had that morning on our walk to the subway, trying to make sense of her curiously emotional statements about trust, remembering the kisses she’d given me and how, without warning, she’d broken free of my arms and started running along the sidewalk, not even bothering to turn around and wave good-bye before disappearing down the stairs. It was the behavior of someone who had come to an abrupt and impulsive decision, whose mind had been made up about something but who was still full of doubts and uncertainties, so shaky in her resolve that she hadn’t dared to pause for a single backward glance, fearing that one more look at me might destroy her determination to do whatever it was she was planning to do. I understood that much, I felt, but beyond that point I knew nothing. Grace had become a blank to me, and every thought I had about her that night quickly turned into a story, a gruesome little drama that played on my deepest anxieties about our future – which rapidly seemed to be turning into no future at all.

She came home a few minutes past seven, roughly two hours after I had resigned myself to the fact that I would never see her again. She was wearing different clothes from the ones she’d had on the previous morning, and she looked fresh and beautiful, with bright red lipstick, elegantly made-up eyes, and a hint of rouge on her cheeks. I was sitting on the sofa in the living room, and when I saw her walk in I was so taken aback that I couldn’t speak, was literally unable to get any words out of my mouth. Grace smiled at me – calmly, resplendently, in full possession of herself – and then walked over to where I was sitting and kissed me on the lips.

‘I know I’ve put you through hell,’ she said, ‘but it had to be this way. It won’t ever happen again, Sidney. I promise.’

She sat down next to me and kissed me again, but I couldn’t bring myself to put my arms around her. ‘You have to tell me where you were,’ I said, startled by the anger and bitterness in my voice. ‘No more silence, Grace. You have to talk.’

‘I can’t,’ she said.

‘Yes you can. You have to.’

‘Yesterday morning, you said you trusted me. Go on trusting me, Sid. That’s all I ask.’

‘When people say that, it means they’re hiding something. Always. It’s like a mathematical law, Grace. What is it? What are you holding back from me?’

‘Nothing. I just needed to be alone yesterday, that’s all. I needed time to think.’

‘Fine. Go ahead and think. But don’t torture me by not calling to tell me where you are.’

‘I wanted to, but then I couldn’t. I don’t know why. It was like I had to pretend I didn’t know you anymore. Just for a little while. It was a rotten thing to do, but it helped me, it really did.’

‘Where did you spend the night?’

‘It wasn’t like that, believe me. I was alone. I checked into a room at the Gramercy Park Hotel.’

‘What floor? What was the number of the room?’

‘Please, Sid, don’t do that. It’s not right.’

‘I could call them and find out, couldn’t I?’

‘Of course you could. But that would mean you didn’t believe me. And then we’d be in trouble. But we’re not in trouble. That’s the whole point. We’re good, and the fact that I’m here now proves it.’

‘I suppose you were thinking about the baby….’

‘Among other things, yes.’

‘Any new thoughts?’

‘I’m still on the fence. I’m still not sure which way to jump.’

‘I spent a few hours with John yesterday, and he thinks you should have an abortion. He was very insistent about it.’

Grace looked both surprised and upset. ‘John? But he doesn’t know I’m pregnant.’

‘I told him.’

‘Oh, Sidney. You shouldn’t have done that.’

‘Why not? He’s our friend, isn’t he? Why shouldn’t he know?’

She hesitated for several seconds before answering my question. ‘Because it’s our secret,’ she finally said, ‘and we haven’t decided what we’re going to do about it. I haven’t even told my parents. If John talks to my father, things could get awfully complicated.’

‘He won’t. He’s too worried about you to do that.’

‘Worried?’

‘Yes, worried. In the same way I’m worried. You haven’t been yourself, Grace. Anyone who loves you is bound to be worried.’

She was becoming slightly less evasive as the conversation continued, and I meant to go on prodding her until the full story came out, until I understood what had driven her to run off on her mysterious twenty-four-hour fugue. So much was at stake, I felt, and if she didn’t come clean and tell me the truth, how was I going to be able to trust her anymore? Trust was the one thing she demanded of me, and yet ever since she’d broken down in the cab on Saturday night, it had become impossible not to feel that something was wrong, that Grace was slowly crumbling under the pressure of a burden she refused to share with me. For a little while, the pregnancy had seemed to account for it, but I was no longer certain about that now. It was something else, something in addition to the baby, and before I started tormenting myself with thoughts about other men and clandestine affairs and sinister betrayals, I needed her to tell me what was going on. Unfortunately, the conversation was suddenly interrupted at that point, and I was no longer in a position to pursue my line of thought. It happened just after I told Grace how worried I was about her. I took hold of her hand, and as I pulled her toward me to kiss her on the cheek, she finally noticed that the standing lamp wasn’t where it was supposed to be, that the area to the left of the sofa was vacant. I had to tell her about the burglary, and just like that the entire mood shifted, and instead of talking to her about one thing, I had no choice but to talk to her about another.

At first, Grace seemed to take the news calmly. I showed her the gap in the bookshelf where the first editions had been, pointed to the end table on which the portable TV had stood, then led her into the kitchen and informed her that we would have to buy a new toaster. Grace opened the drawers below the counter (which I had neglected to do) and discovered that our best set of silverware, which had been given to us by her parents as a first-anniversary present, was also missing. That was when anger took hold of her. She kicked the bottom drawer with her right foot and started to curse. Grace seldom used four-letter words, but for a minute or two that morning she was beside herself, and she let go with a barrage of invective that surpassed anything I’d heard from her lips before. Then we went into the bedroom, and her anger spilled over into tears. Her lower lip started to tremble when I told her about the jewelry box, but when she saw that the lithograph was gone as well, she sat down on the bed and started to cry. I did my best to comfort her, promising to look for another van Velde as soon as possible, but I knew that nothing could ever replace the one she’d bought as a twenty-year-old on her first trip to Paris: a swooping configuration of variegated, glowing blues, punctuated by a roundish blank in the center and a broken streak of red. I had been living with it for several years by then, and I had never grown tired of looking at it. It was one of those works that kept giving you something, that never seemed to use itself up.12

It took her about fifteen or twenty minutes to pull herself together, and then she went into the bathroom to wash away the streaked mascara and reassemble her face. I waited for her in the bedroom, thinking we would be able to go on with our conversation there, but when she returned it was only to announce that she was running late and had to go to work. I tried to talk her out of it, but she wouldn’t relent. She’d promised Greg she would be there this morning, she said, and after he’d been nice enough to give her yesterday off, she didn’t want to take further advantage of his friendship. A promise was a promise, she said, to which I answered that we still had things to talk about. Maybe we did, she replied, but they could wait until she came home from work. As if to prove her good intentions, she sat down on the bed before leaving, threw her arms around me, and hugged me tightly for what felt like a long time. ‘Don’t worry about me,’ she said. ‘I’m really okay now. Yesterday did me a lot of good.’



I took my morning pills, returned to the bedroom, and slept until the middle of the afternoon. I didn’t have any plans for the day, and the sole business on my agenda was to pass the time as quietly as possible until Grace returned home. She had promised to go on talking to me that evening, and if a promise was a promise, then I meant to hold her to it and do what I could to pull the truth from her. I wasn’t terribly optimistic, but whether I failed or not, I wasn’t going to get anywhere unless I buckled down and made an effort.

The sky was bright and clear that afternoon, but the temperature had dropped down into the 40s, and for the first time since the day in question, I could feel a touch of winter in the air, a foretaste of things to come. Once again, my normal sleep pattern had been disrupted, and I was in worse shape than usual – unsteady in my movements, at a loss for breath, tottering precariously with each step I took. It was as though I had regressed to some earlier stage of my recovery and was back in the period of swirling colors and fractured, unstable perceptions. I felt exceedingly vulnerable, as though the very air were a threat, as though an unexpected gust of wind could blow right through me and leave my body scattered in pieces on the ground.

I bought a new toaster in an appliance store on Court Street, and that simple transaction used up nearly all my physical resources. By the time I’d chosen one we could afford and had dug the money out of my wallet and handed it to the woman behind the counter, I was trembling and felt close to tears. She asked if anything was wrong. I said no, but my answer must have been unconvincing, for the next thing I knew she was asking me if I wanted to sit down and drink a glass of water. She was a fat woman in her early sixties with the faint trace of a mustache on her upper lip, and the shop she presided over was a dim and dusty hole-in-the-wall, a run-down family business with nearly half the shelves denuded of stock. Generous as her offer was, I didn’t want to stay there another minute. I thanked her and moved on, staggering toward the exit and then leaning against the door to shove it open with my shoulder. I stood on the sidewalk for a few moments after that, gulping down deep drafts of the chilly air as I waited for the spell to pass. In retrospect, I realized it must have looked as if I’d been on the verge of blacking out.

I bought a slice of pizza and a large Coke at Vinny’s two doors down, and by the time I stood up and left I was feeling a little better. It was about three-thirty then, and Grace wouldn’t be home until six at the earliest. I didn’t have it in me to trudge around the neighborhood and shop for groceries, and I knew I wasn’t up to preparing dinner. Eating out was an indulgence for us then, but I figured we could order in some take-out food from the Siam Garden, a Thai restaurant that had just opened up near Atlantic Avenue. I knew that Grace would understand. Whatever difficulties we might have been having, she was concerned enough about my health not to hold that kind of thing against me.

Once I’d polished off the last of my pizza, I decided to walk over to the Clinton Street branch of the public library to see if they had any books by the novelist Trause had mentioned the day before, Sylvia Monroe. Two titles were listed in the card catalogue, Night in Madrid and Autumn Ceremony, but neither one had been checked out in over ten years. I skimmed them both, sitting at one of the long wooden tables in the reading room, and quickly discovered that Sylvia Monroe had nothing in common with Sylvia Maxwell. Monroe’s books were conventional mystery stories, written in the style of Agatha Christie, and as I read through the arch, wittily contrived prose of the two novels, I felt increasingly disappointed, angry with myself for having assumed there could be a similarity between the two Sylvia M. s. At the very least, I thought maybe I’d read a book by Sylvia Monroe as a boy and had since forgotten about it, only to dredge up an unconscious memory of her in the person of Sylvia Maxwell, the pretend author of the pretend Oracle Night. But it seemed I’d plucked Maxwell out of thin air and Oracle Night was an original story, with no connection to any novel other than itself. I probably should have felt relieved, but I didn’t.

When I returned to the apartment at five-thirty, there was a message from Grace on the answering machine. Bluntly and quietly, in a series of simple, forthright sentences, she dismantled the architecture of unhappiness that had been growing up around us for the past several days. She was calling from her office, she said, and had to talk in a low voice, ‘but if you can hear me, Sid,’ she began, ‘there are four things I want you to know. First, I haven’t stopped thinking about you since I left the house this morning. Second, I’ve decided to have the baby, and we’re never going to use the word abortion again. Third, don’t bother to make dinner. I’m leaving the office at five sharp, and from there I’m going down to Balducci’s to buy some nice ready-made stuff that we can heat up in the oven. If the subway doesn’t break down, I should be home by six-twenty, six-thirty. Fourth, make sure Mr. Johnson’s ready for action. I’m going to attack you the minute I walk in the door, my love, so be prepared. Miss Virginia’s achin’ to get naked with her man.’

Miss Virginia was one of my pet names for her, but I hadn’t used it since the first or second year of our marriage, and certainly not since my return from the hospital. Grace was evoking early good times with that phrase, and it moved me to know that she remembered it, since it had generally been reserved for moments of postcoital decompression: Grace rising from the bed after we had finished making love and strolling across the floor on the way to the bathroom, immodest, languid, happy in the nakedness of her body, and sometimes (it was coming back to me now), I would jokingly call her Miss Nude Virginia, which always made her laugh, and then, inevitably, she would stop to strike a comic cheesecake pose, which in turn would always get a laugh from me. In effect, Miss Virginia was shorthand for Miss Nude Virginia, and whenever I called her Miss Virginia in public, it was always a secret communication about our sex life, a reference to the bare skin under her clothes, an homage to her beautiful, much-adored body. Now, immediately after announcing that she wasn’t going to end the pregnancy, she had reanimated the mythic personage of Miss Virginia, and by juxtaposing the one statement against the other, she was telling me that she was mine again, mine as before and yet mine in a different way as well, subtly announcing (as only Grace could) that she was prepared to enter the next phase of our marriage, that a new era of our life together was about to begin.

I called off the showdown I had been planning for that evening and didn’t ask her a single question about her absence on Wednesday night. We did all the things she had warned me about on the answering machine, wrestling each other to the floor the moment she entered the apartment, then dragging our half-dressed bodies toward the bedroom, which we never quite managed to reach. Later on, after we had slipped into our bathrobes, we warmed the food in the oven and sat down to a late dinner. I showed her the new wide-slotted, bagel-compatible toaster I had bought that afternoon, and although that led to some sad talk about the robbery, it was cut short when my nose suddenly started to bleed, gushing out onto the apricot pastry that Grace had just put in front of me for dessert. She stood behind me at the sink as I tilted my head back and waited for the flow to stop, her arms wrapped around me, kissing my shoulder and my neck, all the while suggesting funny names for us to give the baby. If it was a girl, we decided, we would call her Goldie Orr. If it was a boy, we would name him after one of Kierkegaard’s books, Ira Orr. We were stupidly happy that night, and I couldn’t remember a time when Grace had been more giddy or effusive in her affections toward me. When the blood finally stopped flowing from my nose, she turned me around and washed my face with a damp cloth, looking steadily into my eyes as she dabbed my mouth and chin until all traces of the spill had vanished. ‘We’ll clean up the kitchen in the morning,’ she said. Then, without adding another word, she took me by the hand and led me toward the bedroom.



I slept late the next morning, and when I finally rolled out of bed at ten-thirty, Grace was long gone. I went into the kitchen to take my pills and start a pot of coffee, and then slowly cleaned up the mess we had walked away from the night before. Ten minutes after I had put the last dish in the cupboard, Mary Sklarr called with bad news. Bobby Hunter’s people had read my treatment, and they’d decided to pass on it.

‘I’m sorry,’ Mary said, ‘but I’m not going to pretend I’m shocked.’

‘It’s all right,’ I said, feeling less chagrined than I thought I would. ‘The idea was a piece of shit. I’m glad they don’t want it.’

‘They said your plot was too cerebral.’

‘I’m surprised they know what the word means.’

‘I’m happy you’re not upset. It wouldn’t be worth it.’

‘I wanted the money, that’s all. A case of pure greed. I wasn’t even very professional about it, was I? You’re not supposed to write anything without a contract. It’s the first rule of the business.’

‘Well, they were pretty amazed. The sheer speed of it. They’re not used to that kind of gung ho approach. They like to have lots of discussions with lawyers and agents first. It makes them feel as if they’re doing something important.’

‘I still don’t understand why they thought of me.’

‘Somebody there likes your work. Maybe Bobby Hunter, maybe the kid who works in the mailroom. Who knows? In any case, they’re going to send you a check. As an act of goodwill. You wrote the pages without a contract, but they want to reimburse you for your time.’

‘A check?’

‘Just a token.’

‘How much of a token?’

‘A thousand dollars.’

‘Well, at least that’s something. It’s the first money I’ve earned in a long time.’

‘You’re forgetting Portugal.’

‘Ah, Portugal. How could I forget Portugal?’

‘Any news on the novel you might or might not be writing?’

‘Not much. There could be one piece to salvage from it, but I’m not sure. A novel within the novel. I keep thinking about it, so maybe that’s a good sign.’

‘Give me fifty pages, and I’ll get you a contract, Sid.’

‘I’ve never been paid for a book I haven’t finished. What if I can’t write page fifty-one?’

‘These are desperate times, my friend. If you need money, I’ll try to get you money. That’s my job.’

‘Let me think about it.’

‘You think, and I’ll wait. When you’re ready to call, I’ll be here.’

After we hung up, I went into the bedroom to fetch my coat from the closet. Now that the Time Machine business was officially dead, I had to start thinking about a new plan, and I figured a walk in the cool air might do me some good. Just as I was about to leave the apartment, however, the phone rang again. I was tempted not to answer it, but then I changed my mind and picked up on the fourth ring, hoping it would be Grace. It turned out to be Trause, probably the last person on earth I wanted to talk to just then. I still hadn’t told him about losing the story, and as I prepared myself to blurt out the confession I’d been putting off for the past two days, I was so wrapped up in my own thoughts that I had trouble following him. Eleanor and her husband had found Jacob, he said. They’d already checked him into a drug clinic – a place called Smithers on the Upper East Side.

‘Did you hear me?’ John asked. ‘They’ve put him in a twenty-eight-day program. That probably won’t be enough, but at least it’s a start.’

‘Oh,’ I said, in a faint voice. ‘When did they find him?’

‘Wednesday night, not long after you left. They had to do a lot of finagling to get him in there. Fortunately, Don knows someone who knows someone, and they managed to cut through the red tape.’

‘Don?’

‘Eleanor’s husband.’

‘Of course. Eleanor’s husband.’

‘Are you all right, Sid? You sound completely out of it.’

‘No, no, I’m okay. Don. Eleanor’s new husband.’

‘The reason I called is to ask a favor. I hope you don’t mind.’

‘I don’t mind. Whatever it is. Just ask and I’ll do it.’

‘Tomorrow’s Saturday, and they have visiting hours at the clinic from noon to five. I was wondering if you’d go up there for me and check in on him. You don’t have to stay long. Eleanor and Don can’t make it. They’ve gone back to Long Island, and they’ve already done enough as it is. I just want to know if he’s all right. They don’t lock the doors there. It’s a voluntary program, and I want to make sure he hasn’t changed his mind. After all we’ve been through, it would be a pity if he decided to run away.’

‘Don’t you think you should go yourself? You’re his father, after all. I barely know the kid.’

‘He won’t talk to me anymore. And whenever he forgets he’s not supposed to talk to me, he feeds me nothing but lies. If I thought it would do any good, I’d hobble up there on my crutch and see him. But it won’t.’

‘And what makes you think he’ll talk to me?’

‘He likes you. Don’t ask me why, but he thinks you’re a cool person. That’s an exact quote. “Sid’s a cool person.” Maybe because you look so young, I don’t know. Maybe because you once talked to him about a rock band he’s interested in.’

‘The Bean Spasms, a punk group from Chicago. One night an old friend played a couple of their songs for me. Not very good. I think they’re gone by now.’

‘At least you knew who they were.’

‘That was the longest conversation I’ve ever had with Jacob. It lasted about four minutes.’

‘Well, four minutes isn’t bad. If you can get four minutes out of him tomorrow, that would be an accomplishment.’

‘Don’t you think it would be better if I took Grace along with me? She’s known him a lot longer than I have.’

‘Out of the question.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Jacob despises her. He can’t stand to be in the same room with her.’

‘No one despises Grace. You’d have to be unhinged to feel that way.’

‘Not according to my son.’

‘She’s never breathed a word to me about this.’

‘It goes all the way back to when they first met. Grace was thirteen, and Jacob was three. Eleanor and I had just gone through our divorce, and Bill Tebbetts invited me down to his country place in Virginia to spend a couple of weeks with his family. It was summer, and I took Jacob with me. He seemed to get along with the other Tebbetts kids, but every time Grace walked into the room, he’d punch her or throw things at her. One time, he picked up a toy truck and smashed her on the knee with it. The poor kid was bleeding all over the place. We rushed her to a doctor, and it took ten stitches to sew up the wound.’

‘I know that scar. Grace told me about it once, but she didn’t mention Jacob. She just said it was some little boy, and that was all.’

‘He seemed to hate her right from the start, from the first moment he laid eyes on her.’

‘He probably sensed that you liked her too much, so she became a rival. Three-year-olds are pretty irrational creatures. They don’t know many words, and when they’re angry, the only way they can talk is with their fists.’

‘Maybe. But he kept it up, even after he got older. The worst time was in Portugal, about two years after Tina died. I’d just bought my little house on the northern coast, and Eleanor sent him over to stay with me for a month. He was fourteen, and he knew as many words as I did. Grace happened to be there when he showed up. She was out of college then and about to start working for Holst & McDermott in September. In July, she came to Europe to look at paintings – Amsterdam first, then Paris, and then Madrid. After that, she took the train to Portugal. I hadn’t seen her in over two years, and we had a lot of catching up to do, but when Jacob got there he didn’t want her around. He muttered insults at her under his breath, pretended not to hear her when she asked him questions, and once or twice even managed to spill food on her. I kept warning him to stop. One more nasty move, I said, and I’d ship him back to his mother and stepfather in America. And then he crossed the line, and I put him on a plane and sent him home.’

‘What did he do?’

‘He spat in her face.’

‘Good God.’

‘The three of us were in the kitchen, chopping vegetables for dinner. Grace made some innocuous remark about something – I can’t even remember what it was – and Jacob took offense. He walked over to her waving a knife in his hand and called her a stupid bitch, and Grace finally lost her temper. That’s when he spat at her. Looking back on it now, I suppose it’s lucky he didn’t take the knife and stab her in the chest.’

‘And this is the person you want me to talk to tomorrow? What he deserves is a swift kick in the ass.’

‘If I went up there myself, I’m afraid that’s what would happen. It’ll be a lot better for everyone if you go there for me.’

‘Has anything happened since Portugal?’

‘I’ve kept them apart. They haven’t crossed paths in years, and as far as I’m concerned, the world will be a safer place if they never see each other again.’13



Grace didn’t have to go to work the next morning, and she was still asleep when I left the apartment. After talking to Trause on Friday, I had decided not to tell her about the promise I’d made to go to Smithers that afternoon. That would have forced me to mention Jacob, and I didn’t want to run the risk of stirring up bad memories for her. We had lived through a difficult stretch of days, and I was loath to talk about anything that could cause the slightest agitation – and perhaps destroy the fragile balance we’d managed to find again in the past forty-eight hours. I left a note on the kitchen table, telling her I was going into Manhattan to visit some bookstores and would be home by six at the latest. One more lie, added to all the other little lies we had told each other in the past week. But my intention wasn’t to deceive her. I simply wanted to protect her from more unpleasantness, to keep the space we shared as small and private as possible, without having to entangle ourselves in painful matters from the past.

The rehab facility was housed in a large mansion that had once belonged to the Broadway producer Billy Rose. I didn’t know how or when the place had been turned into Smithers, but it was a solid example of old New York architecture, a limestone palace from an age when wealth had flaunted itself with diamonds, top hats, and white gloves. How odd that it should have been inhabited now by the bottom dogs of society, an endlessly evolving population of drug addicts, alcoholics, and ex-criminals. It had become a way station for the lost, and when the door buzzed open and I went inside, I noted that a certain shabbiness had begun to set in. The bones of the building were still intact (the huge entrance hall with the black-and-white tile floor, the curving staircase with the mahogany banister), but the flesh looked sad and dirty, dilapidated after years of strain and overwork.

I asked for Jacob at the front desk, announcing myself as a family friend. The woman in charge seemed suspicious of me, and I had to empty my pockets to prove I wasn’t trying to smuggle in drugs or weapons. Even though I passed the test, I felt certain that she was going to turn me away, but before I could begin arguing my case, Jacob happened to appear in the front hall, walking with three or four other residents toward the dining room for lunch. He looked taller than the last time I had seen him, but with his black clothes and green hair and excessively thin body, there was something grotesque and clownish about him, as if he were a ghostly Punchinello on his way to perform a dance for the Duke of Death. I called out his name, and when he turned and saw me, he looked shocked – not happy or unhappy, simply shocked. ‘Sid,’ he muttered, ‘what are you doing here?’ He separated from the group and walked over to where I was standing, which prompted the woman behind the desk to ask a superfluous question: ‘You know this man?’ ‘Yeah,’ Jacob said. ‘I know him. He’s a friend of my father’s.’ That statement was enough to get me in. The woman pushed a clipboard at me, and once I’d printed my name on the sheet for visitors, I accompanied Jacob down a long hallway into the dining room.

‘No one told me you were coming,’ he said. ‘I suppose the old man put you up to it, huh?’

‘Not really. I happened to be in the neighborhood, and I thought I’d stop by and see how you were doing.’

Jacob grunted, not even bothering to comment on how thoroughly he disbelieved me. It was a transparent fib, but I’d said it in order to keep John out of the discussion, thinking I’d get more out of Jacob if I avoided talking about his family. We continued in silence for a few moments and then, unexpectedly, he put his hand on my shoulder. ‘I heard you were real sick,’ he said.

‘I was. I seem to be getting better now.’

‘They thought you were going to die, didn’t they?’

‘So I’m told. But I fooled them and walked out of there about four months ago.’

‘That means you’re immortal, Sid. You’re not going to croak until you’re a hundred and ten.’

The dining hall was a large sunny room with sliding glass doors that led out to a small garden, where some of the residents and their families had gone to smoke and drink coffee. The food was served cafeteria-style, and after Jacob and I loaded up our trays with meat loaf, mashed potatoes, and salad, we began looking for an empty table. There must have been fifty or sixty people in the room, and we had to circle around for a couple of minutes before we found one. The delay seemed to irritate him, as if it were a personal affront. When we finally sat down, I asked him how things were going, and he launched into a recitation of bitter grievances, nervously jiggling his left leg as he spoke.

‘This place is for shit,’ he said. ‘All we do is go to meetings and talk about ourselves. I mean, how boring is that? As if I want to listen to these fuckups pour out their dumb stories about how rotten their childhoods were and how they stumbled off the true path and fell into the grip of Satan.’

‘What happens when it’s your turn? Do you get up and speak?’

‘I have to. If I don’t say anything, they point their fingers at me and start calling me a coward. So I make up something that sounds like what everyone else says, and then I start to cry. It always gets them. I’m a pretty good actor, you know. I tell them what a crud I am, and then I break down and can’t go on anymore, and everyone’s happy.’

‘Why scam them? You’re just wasting your time here if you do that.’

‘Because I’m not an addict, that’s why. I’ve fooled around with junk a little bit, but it’s not a serious thing for me. I can take it or leave it.’

‘That’s what my college roommate used to say. And then one night he wound up dead from an overdose.’

‘Yeah, well, he was probably stupid. I know what I’m doing, and I ain’t gonna die from no overdose. I’m not hooked on the stuff. My mother thinks I am, but she doesn’t know shit.’

‘Then why did you agree to come here?’

‘Because she said she’d cut me off if I didn’t. I’ve already pissed off your pal, the almighty Sir John, and I don’t want Lady Eleanor getting any stupid ideas about stopping my allowance.’

‘You could always get a job.’

‘Yeah, I could, but I don’t want to. I’ve got other plans, and I need a little more time to work them out.’

‘So you’re just sitting here, waiting for the twenty-eight days to end.’

‘It wouldn’t be so bad if they didn’t keep us busy all the time. When we’re not wearing out our asses at those god damn meetings, they make us study these terrible books. You’ve never read such garbage in all your life.’

‘What books?’

‘The AA manual, the twelve-step program, all that horseshit.’

‘It might be horseshit, but it’s helped a lot of people.’

‘It’s for cretins, Sid. All that crap about trusting in a higher power. It’s like some baby-talk religion. Give yourself up to the higher power, and you’ll be saved. You’d have to be a moron to swallow that stuff. There is no higher power. Take a good look at the world, and tell me where he is. I don’t see him. There’s just you and me and everyone else. A bunch of poor fucks doing what we can to stay alive.’

We had been together for only a few minutes, and already I felt drained, depleted by the boy’s vapid, cynical talk. I wanted to get out of there as quickly as I could, but for form’s sake I decided to wait until the meal was over. Trause’s pale and emaciated son appeared to have little appetite for the Smithers cuisine. He picked at his mashed potatoes for a while, sampled one taste of the meat loaf, and then put down his fork. A moment later, he rose from his seat and asked me if I wanted dessert. I shook my head, and he marched off to the food line again. When he returned, he was carrying two cups of chocolate pudding, which he set before him and ate one after the other, showing considerably more interest in the sweets than he had in the main course. With no drugs around, sugar was the only substitute available, and he devoured the puddings with the relish of a small child, scooping every morsel out of each cup. Somewhere between the first and second helping, a man stopped by the table to say hello to him. He looked to be in his mid-thirties, with a rough pockmarked face and his hair pulled back in a short ponytail. Jacob introduced him as Freddy, and with the warmth and earnestness of a true rehab veteran, the older man extended his hand to me and said it was a pleasure to meet one of Jake’s friends.

‘Sid’s a famous novelist,’ Jacob announced, apropos of nothing. ‘He’s published about fifty books.’

‘Don’t listen to what he says,’ I told Freddy. ‘He tends to exaggerate.’

‘Yeah, I know,’ Freddy answered. ‘This one’s a real hell-raiser. Gotta keep a close eye on him. Right, kid?’

Jacob looked down at the table, and then Freddy patted him on the head and walked off. As Jacob dug into his second chocolate pudding, he informed me that Freddy was his group leader and not such a bad guy, all things considered.

‘He used to steal things,’ he said. ‘You know, a professional shoplifter. But he had a smart gimmick, so he never got caught. Instead of going into stores with a big overcoat on, the way most of them do it, he’d dress up as a priest. No one ever suspected him of anything. Father Freddy, the man of God. One time, though, he got himself into a weird jam. He was somewhere in midtown, about to go in and rob a drugstore, when there was this big traffic accident. A guy crossing the street was hit by one of the cars. Someone dragged him onto the sidewalk, right where Freddy was standing. There was blood all over the place, the guy was unconscious, and it looked like he was going to die. A crowd gathers around him, and suddenly a woman spots Freddy in his priest’s costume and asks him to say the last rites. Father Freddy is fucked. He doesn’t know the words to any of the prayers, but if he runs away, they’ll know he’s a fake and arrest him for impersonating a priest. So he bends down over the guy, puts his hands together to make it look like he’s praying, and mumbles some solemn bullshit he once heard in a movie. Then he stands up, makes the sign of the cross, and splits. Pretty funny, huh?’

‘It sounds like you’re getting quite an education at those meetings.’

‘That’s nothing. I mean, Freddy was just a junkie trying to support his habit. A lot of the other people around here have done some pretty crazy shit. See that black guy sitting at the corner table, the big one in the blue sweatshirt? Jerome. He spent twelve years in Attica for murder. And that blond girl at the next table with her mother? Sally. She grew up on Park Avenue and comes from one of the richest families in New York. Yesterday, she told us she’s been turning tricks on Tenth Avenue over by the Lincoln Tunnel, fucking guys in cars at twenty dollars a pop. And that Hispanic guy on the other side of the room, the one in the yellow shirt? Alfonso. He went to jail for raping his ten-year-old daughter. I’m telling you, Sid, compared to most of these characters, I’m just a nice middle-class boy.’

The puddings seemed to have energized him a bit, and when we carried our dirty trays into the kitchen, he moved with a certain spring in his step, unlike the shuffling somnambulist I’d spotted in the front hall before lunch. All in all, I’d guess I was with him for thirty or thirty-five minutes – long enough to feel I’d discharged my duty to John. As we walked out of the dining hall, Jacob asked me if I’d like to go upstairs and see his room. There was going to be a big group meeting at one-thirty, he said, and family members and guests were invited to attend. I was welcome to come along if I wanted to, and in the meantime we could hang out in his room on the fourth floor. There was something pathetic about the way he’d latched on to me, about how reluctant he seemed to let me go. We were barely even acquaintances, and yet he must have been lonely enough in that place to think of me as a friend, even though he knew I’d come as a secret agent on behalf of his father. I tried to feel some pity for him, but I couldn’t. He was the person who had spat in my wife’s face, and even though the incident had happened six years before, I couldn’t bring myself to forgive him for that. I looked at my watch and told him I was supposed to meet someone on Second Avenue in ten minutes. I saw a flash of disappointment in his eyes, and then, almost immediately, his face hardened into a mask of indifference. ‘No big deal, man,’ he said. ‘If you gotta go, you gotta go.’

‘I’ll try to come back next week,’ I said, knowing full well that I wouldn’t.

‘Whatever you like, Sid. It’s your call.’

He gave me a condescending pat on the shoulder, and before I could shake his hand good-bye, he turned on his heels and started walking toward the stairs. I stood in the hall for a few moments, waiting to see if he’d look back over his shoulder for a farewell nod, but he didn’t. He kept on mounting the staircase, and when he rounded the curve and disappeared from sight, I went over to the woman at the front desk and signed myself out.



It was a little past one o’clock. I rarely went to the Upper East Side, and since the weather had improved in the past hour, rapidly warming to the point where my jacket now felt like an encumbrance, I turned my daily walk into an excuse to prowl around the neighborhood. It was going to be hard to tell John how depressing the visit had been for me, and instead of calling him right away, I decided to put it off until I returned to Brooklyn. I couldn’t do it from the apartment (at least not if Grace was home), but there was an ancient telephone booth in the back corner of Landolfi’s, complete with a closable accordion door, and I figured I would have enough privacy to do it from there.

Twenty minutes after leaving Smithers, I was on Lexington Avenue in the low 90s, moving along among a small crowd of pedestrians and thinking about heading home. Someone knocked into me, accidentally grazing my left shoulder as he walked by, and as I turned to see who it was, something remarkable happened, something so outside the realm of probability that at first I took it for a hallucination. Directly across the avenue, at a perfect ninety-degree angle from where I was standing, I saw a small shop with a sign above the door that read PAPER PALACE. Was it possible that Chang had managed to relocate his business? It struck me as incredible, and yet given the speed with which this man conducted his affairs – closing up his store in one night, rushing around town in his red car, investing in dubious enterprises, borrowing money, spending money – why should I have doubted it? Chang seemed to live in a blur of accelerated motion, as if the clocks of the world ticked more slowly for him than they did for everyone else. A minute must have felt like an hour to him, and with so much extra time at his disposal, why couldn’t he have pulled off the move to Lexington Avenue in the days since I’d last seen him?

On the other hand, it also could have been a coincidence. Paper Palace was hardly an original name for a stationery store, and there easily could have been more than one of them in the city. I crossed the street to find out, more and more certain that this Manhattan version was owned by someone other than Chang. The display in the window proved to be different from the one that had caught my attention in Brooklyn the previous Saturday. There were no paper towers to suggest the New York skyline, but the replacement was even more imaginative than the old one, I felt, even more clever. A tiny doll-sized statue of a man sat at a small table with a miniature typewriter on it. His hands were on the keys, a sheet of paper had been rolled into the cylinder, and if you pressed your face against the window and looked very closely, you could read the words that had been typed on the page: It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us

I opened the door and went in, and as I crossed the threshold I heard the same tinkling of bells I’d heard in the other Paper Palace on the eighteenth. The Brooklyn shop had been small, but this one was even smaller, with the bulk of the merchandise stacked up on wooden shelves that extended all the way to the ceiling. Once again, there were no customers in the store. At first, I didn’t see anyone, but a soft, tuneless humming was wafting up from somewhere in the vicinity of the front counter, as if someone were squatting behind it – tying his shoe, perhaps, or picking up a fallen pen or pencil. I cleared my throat, and a couple of seconds later Chang rose from the floor and put his palms on the countertop, as if to steady his balance. He was wearing the brown sweater this time, and his hair was uncombed. He looked thinner than he had before, with deep creases around his mouth and slightly bloodshot eyes.

‘Congratulations,’ I said. ‘The Paper Palace is back on its feet.’

Chang stared at me with a blank expression, either unable or unwilling to recognize me. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I don’t think I know you.’

‘Of course you do. I’m Sidney Orr. We spent a whole afternoon together just the other day.’

‘Sidney Orr is no friend of mine. I used to think he’s good guy, but no more.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘You let me down, Mr. Sid. Put me in very embarrassing position. I no want to know you no more. Friendship over.’

‘I don’t understand. What did I do?’

‘You leave me behind at dress factory. Never even say good-bye. What kind of friend is that?’

‘I looked everywhere for you. I walked all around the bar, and when I couldn’t find you I figured you were in one of the booths and didn’t want to be disturbed. So I left. It was getting late, and I had to go home.’

‘Home to your darling wife. Just after you get blow job from the African Princess. How funny is that, Mr. Sid? If Martine walk in here now, you do it again. Right here on floor of my shop. You fuck her like a dog and love every minute of it.’

‘I was drunk. She was very beautiful, and I lost control of myself. But that doesn’t mean I’d do it again.’

‘You not drunk. You horny hypocrite, just like all selfish people.’

‘You said no one could resist her, and you were right. You should be proud of yourself, Chang. You saw into me and found my weakness.’

‘Because I knew you think bad thoughts about me, that’s why. I understand what’s in your mind.’

‘Oh? And what was I thinking that day?’

‘You think Chang in nasty business. Dirty whore-man with no heart. A man who dream only of money.’

‘That’s not true.’

‘Yes, Mr. Sid, it’s true. It’s very true. Now we stop talking. You give big hurt to my soul, and now we stop. Look around if you like. I welcome you as customer to my Paper Palace, but no more friend. Friendship dead. Friendship dead and buried now. All finished.’

I don’t think anyone had ever insulted me more thoroughly than Chang did that afternoon. I had caused him a great sadness, unintentionally wounding his dignity and sense of personal honor, and as he lashed out at me with those stiff, measured sentences of his, it was as if he felt I deserved to be drawn and quartered for my crimes. What made the attack even more uncomfortable was that most of his accusations were correct. I had left him at the dress factory without saying good-bye, I had allowed myself to fall into the arms of the African Princess, and I had questioned his moral integrity about wanting to invest in the club. There was little I could say to defend myself. Any denials would have been pointless, and even if my transgressions had been relatively small ones, I still felt guilty enough about my session with Martine behind the curtain not to want to bring it up again. I should have said good-bye to Chang and left the store immediately, but I didn’t. The Portuguese notebooks had become too powerful a fixation by then, and I couldn’t go without first checking to see if he had any in stock. I understood how unwise it was to linger in a place where I wasn’t wanted, but I couldn’t help myself. I simply had to know.

There was one left, sitting among a display of German and Canadian notebooks on a lower shelf at the back of the store. It was the red one, no doubt the same red one that had been in Brooklyn the previous Saturday, and the price was the same as it had been then, an even five dollars. When I carried it up to the counter and handed it to Chang, I apologized for having caused him any suffering or embarrassment. I told him he could still count on me as a friend and that I would continue to buy my stationery supplies from him, even if it meant traveling far out of my way to do so. For all the contrition I tried to express, Chang merely shook his head and patted the notebook with his right hand. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘This one not for sale.’

‘What do you mean? This is a store. Everything in it’s for sale.’ I removed a ten-dollar bill from my wallet and spread it out on the counter. ‘Here’s my money,’ I said. ‘The sticker says five dollars. Now please give me my change and the notebook.’

‘Impossible. This red one the last Portuguese book in shop. Reserved for other customer.’

‘If you’re holding it for someone else, you should put it behind the counter where no one can see it. If it’s out on the shelf, that means anyone can buy it.’

‘Not you, Mr. Sid.’

‘How much was the other customer going to pay for it?’

‘Five dollars, just as sticker say.’

‘Well, I’ll give you ten for it and we’ll call it a deal. How’s that?’

‘Not ten dollars. Ten thousand dollars.’

Ten thousand dollars? Have you lost your mind?’

‘This notebook not for you, Sidney Orr. You buy other notebook, and everybody happy. Okay?’

‘Look,’ I said, finally losing patience. ‘The notebook costs five dollars, and I’m willing to give you ten. But that’s all I’m going to pay.’

‘You give five thousand now and five thousand on Monday. That’s the deal. Otherwise, please buy other notebook.’

We had entered a domain of pure lunacy. Chang’s taunts and absurd demands had finally pushed me over the edge, and rather than go on haggling with him, I snatched the notebook out from under his palm and started for the door. ‘That’s it,’ I said. ‘Take the ten and go fuck yourself. I’m leaving.’

I hadn’t taken two steps when Chang jumped out from behind the counter to cut me off and block my way to the door. I tried to slip past him, using my shoulder to push him aside, but Chang held his ground, and a moment later he had his hands on the notebook and was yanking it away from me. I pulled it back and clutched it against my chest, straining to hold on to it, but the owner of the Paper Palace was a fierce little engine of wire and sinew and hard muscle, and he tore the thing from my grip in about ten seconds. I knew I would never be able to get it back from him, but I was so peeved, so wild with frustration, that I grabbed hold of his arm with my left hand and took a swing at him with my right. It was the first punch I’d thrown at anyone since grade school, and I missed. In return, Chang delivered a karate chop to my left shoulder. It crashed down on me like a knife, and the pain was so intense that I thought my arm was going to fall off. I dropped to my knees, and before I could stand up again, Chang started kicking me in the back. I yelled at him to stop, but he kept on sending the tip of his shoe into my rib cage and spine – one short brutal jab after another as I rolled toward the exit, desperately trying to get out of there. When my body was flush against the metal plate at the bottom of the door, Chang turned the handle; the latch clicked open, and I fell out onto the sidewalk.

‘You stay away from here!’ he shouted. ‘Next time you come back, I kill you! You hear me, Sidney Orr? I cut out your heart and feed it to the pigs!’



I never told Grace about Chang or the beating or anything else that happened on the Upper East Side that afternoon. Every muscle in my body was sore, but in spite of the power of Chang’s avenging foot, I had walked away from the pummeling with only the faintest bruises along the lower part of my back. The jacket and sweater I had been wearing must have protected me, and when I remembered how close I’d come to taking off the jacket as I roamed around the neighborhood, I felt lucky to have had it on when I entered the Paper Palace – although luck is perhaps an odd word to use in such a context. On warm nights, Grace and I always slept naked, but now that the weather was turning cool again, she had started going to bed in her white silk pajamas, and she didn’t question me when I joined her under the covers in my T-shirt. Even when we made love (on Sunday night), it was dark enough in the bedroom for the welts to escape her notice.

I called Trause from Landolfi’s when I went out for the Times on Sunday morning. I told him everything I could remember about my visit with Jacob, including the fact that the safety pins were gone from his son’s ear (no doubt as a protective measure), and summarized each one of the opinions he’d expressed from the moment I arrived until the moment I saw him vanish in the bend of the staircase. John wanted to know if I thought he’d stay for the whole month or skip out before the time was up, and I answered that I didn’t know. He’d made some ominous remark about having plans, I said, which suggested that there were things in his life that no one in his family knew about, secrets he wasn’t willing to share. John thought it might have had something to do with dealing drugs. I asked him why he suspected that, but other than making a glancing reference to the stolen tuition money, he wouldn’t say. The conversation hit a lull at that point, and in the short silence that followed, I finally mustered the courage to tell him about my misadventure on the subway earlier in the week and how I’d lost ‘The Empire of Bones.’ I couldn’t have chosen a more awkward moment to bring up the subject, and at first Trause didn’t understand what I was talking about. I went through the story again. When he realized that his manuscript had probably traveled all the way to Coney Island, he laughed. ‘Don’t torture yourself about it,’ he said. ‘I still have a couple of carbons. We didn’t have Xerox machines in those days, and everyone always typed at least two copies of everything. I’ll put one in an envelope and have Madame Dumas mail it to you this week.’

The next morning, Monday, I went back into the blue notebook for the last time. Forty of the ninety-six pages were already filled, but there were more than enough blanks to hold another few hours’ work. I started on a fresh page about halfway in, leaving the Flitcraft debacle behind me for good. Bowen would be trapped in the room forever, and I decided that the moment had finally come to abandon my efforts to rescue him. If I had learned anything from my ferocious encounter with Chang on Saturday, it was that the notebook was a place of trouble for me, and whatever I tried to write in it would end in failure. Every story would stop in the middle; every project would carry me along just so far, and then I’d look up and discover that I was lost. Still, I was furious enough with Chang to want to deny him the satisfaction of having the last word. I knew I was going to have to say good-bye to the Portuguese caderno, but unless I did it on my own terms, it would continue to haunt me as a moral defeat. If nothing else, I felt I had to prove to myself that I wasn’t a coward.

I waded in slowly, cautiously, driven more by a sense of defiance than any compelling need to write. Before long, however, I found myself thinking about Grace, and with the notebook still open on the desk, I went into the living room to dig out one of the photo albums we kept in the bottom drawer of an all-purpose oak bureau. Mercifully, it had been left untouched by the thief during the Wednesday afternoon break-in. It was a special album, given to us as a wedding present by Grace’s youngest sister, Flo, and it contained over a hundred pictures, a visual history of the first twenty-seven years of Grace’s life – Grace before I had met her. I hadn’t looked at this album since coming home from the hospital, and as I turned the pages in my workroom that morning, I was again reminded of the story Trause had told about his brother-in-law and the 3-D viewer, experiencing a similar kind of entrapment as the pictures pulled me into the past.

There was Grace as a newborn infant lying in her crib. There she was at two, standing naked in a field of tall grass, her arms lifted toward the sky, laughing. There she was at four and six and nine – sitting at a table drawing a picture of a house, grinning into the lens of a school photographer’s camera with several teeth missing, posting in the saddle as she trotted through the Virginia countryside on a chestnut-brown mare. Grace at twelve with a ponytail, awkward, funny-looking, uncomfortable in her skin, and then Grace at fifteen, suddenly pretty, defined, the earliest incarnation of the woman she would eventually become. There were group pictures as well: Tebbetts family portraits, Grace with various unidentified friends from high school and college, Grace sitting on Trause’s lap as a four-year-old with her parents on either side of them, Trause bending forward and kissing her on the cheek at her tenth or eleventh birthday party, Grace and Greg Fitzgerald making comic faces at a Holst & McDermott Christmas bash.

Grace in a prom dress at seventeen. Grace as a twenty-year-old college student in Paris with long hair and a black turtleneck sweater, sitting at an outdoor café and smoking a cigarette. Grace with Trause in Portugal at twenty-four, her hair cut short, looking like her adult self, exuding a sublime confidence, no longer uncertain of who she was. Grace in her element.

I must have looked at the pictures for more than an hour before I picked up the pen and started to write. The turmoil of the past days had happened for a reason, and with no facts to support one interpretation or another, I had nothing to guide me but my own instincts and suspicions. There had to be a story behind Grace’s dumbfounding shifts of mood, her tears and enigmatic utterances, her disappearance on Wednesday night, her struggle to make up her mind about the baby, and when I sat down to write that story, it began and ended with Trause. I could have been wrong, of course, but now that the crisis seemed to have passed, I felt strong enough to entertain the darkest, most unsettling possibilities. Imagine this, I said to myself. Imagine this, and then see what comes of it.

Two years after Tina’s death, the grown-up, irresistibly attractive Grace goes to visit Trause in Portugal. He’s fifty, a still vigorous and youthful fifty, and for many years now he’s taken an active interest in her development – sending her books to read, recommending paintings for her to study, even helping her to acquire a lithograph that will become her most treasured possession. She’s probably had a secret crush on him since girlhood, and Trause, who has known her all her life, has always been intensely fond of her. He is a lonely man now, still struggling to find his balance after his wife’s death, and she is smitten, a young woman at the height of her loveliness, and ever so warm and compassionate, ever so available. Who can blame him for falling in love with her? As far as I was concerned, any man in his right mind would have fallen for her.

They have an affair. When Trause’s fourteen-year-old son joins them in the house, he’s revolted by their carryings-on. He has never liked Grace, and now that she’s usurped his position and stolen his father from him, he sets out to sabotage their happiness. They go through a hellish time. Ultimately, Jacob makes such a nuisance of himself that he’s banished from the household and sent back to his mother.

Trause loves Grace, but Grace is twenty-six years younger than he is, the daughter of his best friend, and slowly but surely guilt wins out over desire. He is bedding down with a girl he used to sing lullabies to when she was a small child. If she were any other twenty-four-year-old woman, there wouldn’t be a problem. But how can he go to his oldest friend and tell him he loves his daughter? Bill Tebbetts would call him a pervert and kick him out of the house. It would cause a scandal, and if Trause held his ground and decided to marry her anyway, Grace would be the one to suffer. Her family would turn against her, and he would never be able to forgive himself for that. He tells her she belongs with someone her own age. If she sticks with him, he says, he’ll turn her into a widow before she’s fifty.

The romance ends, and Grace returns to New York, crushed, disbelieving, brokenhearted. A year and a half goes by, and then Trause returns to New York as well. He moves into the apartment on Barrow Street and the romance starts up again, but much as Trause loves her, the old doubts and conflicts remain. He keeps their affair a secret (to prevent the news from getting back to her father), and Grace plays along, unconcerned about the question of marriage now that she has her man again. When male co-workers at Holst & McDermott ask her out, she turns them down. Her private life is a mystery, and the tight-lipped Grace never tells anyone a thing.

At first, all goes well, but after two or three months a pattern begins to emerge, and Grace understands that she’s trapped in a machine. Trause wants her and he doesn’t want her. He knows he should give her up, but he can’t give her up. He vanishes and reappears, withdraws and comes back, and each time he calls for her, she goes flying into his arms. He loves her for a day or a week or a month, and then his doubts return and he withdraws again. The machine goes off and on, off and on … and Grace isn’t allowed near the control switch. There’s nothing she can do to change the pattern.

Nine months after this madness begins, I enter the picture. I fall in love with Grace, and in spite of her connection to Trause, she is not wholly indifferent to me. I pursue her relentlessly, knowing there’s someone else, knowing there’s an unnamed rival competing for her affections, but even after she introduces me to Trause (John Trause, celebrated writer and longtime friend of the family), it never occurs to me that he’s the other man in her life. For several months she goes back and forth between us, unable to make up her mind. When Trause waffles, I’m with Grace; when Trause wants her back, she’s unavailable to see me. I agonize through these disappointments, continuing to hope things will turn my way, but then she breaks up with me, and I assume I’ve lost her forever. Perhaps she regrets her decision the moment she walks back into the machine, or perhaps Trause loves her so much that he begins to push her away, knowing that I represent a more promising future for her than the hidden, dead-end life she shares with him. It’s even possible that he talks her into marrying me. That would account for her sudden, inexplicable change of heart. Not only does she want me back, but in the same breath she declares that she wants to be my wife, and the sooner we get married the better.

We live through a golden age of two years. I’m married to the woman I love, and Trause becomes my friend. He respects my work as a writer, he takes pleasure in my company, and when the three of us are together, I detect no signs of his former involvement with Grace. He’s turned himself into a doting, quasi-paternal figure, and to the degree that he looks on Grace as an imaginary daughter, he looks on me as an imaginary son. He’s partly responsible for our marriage, after all, and he’s not about to do anything that could put it in jeopardy.

Then catastrophe strikes. On January 12, 1982, I collapse in the 14th Street subway station and fall down a flight of stairs. There are broken bones. There are ruptured internal organs. There are two separate head injuries and neurological damage. I’m taken to Saint Vincent’s Hospital and kept there for four months. For the first several weeks, the doctors are pessimistic. One morning, Dr. Justin Berg takes Grace aside and tells her they’ve given up hope. They doubt I’ll live more than a few days, and she should prepare herself for the worst. If he were in her shoes, he says, he’d begin thinking about possible organ donations, funeral homes, and cemeteries. Grace is appalled by the bluntness and coldness of his manner, but the verdict seems final, and she has no choice but to resign herself to the prospect of my imminent death. She goes reeling out of the hospital, blasted apart by the doctor’s words, and heads straight for Barrow Street, which is just a few blocks away. Who else can she turn to at such a moment but Trause? John has a bottle of Scotch in his apartment, and she begins drinking the moment she sits down. She drinks too much, and within half an hour she’s crying uncontrollably. Trause reaches out to comfort her, wrapping his arms around her and stroking her head, and before she knows what she’s doing, her mouth is pressing against his. They haven’t touched each other in over two years, and the kiss brings it all back to them. Their bodies remember the past, and once they begin to relive what they used to be together, they can’t stop themselves. The past conquers the present, and for the time being the future no longer exists. Grace lets herself go, and Trause doesn’t have the strength not to go with her.

She loves me. There’s no question that she loves me, but I’m a dead man now, and Grace is falling to pieces, she’s half out of her mind with misery, and she needs Trause to hold her together. Impossible to blame her, impossible to blame either one of them, but as I continue to languish in Saint Vincent’s over the next few weeks, not yet dead, but not yet truly alive, Grace continues to visit Trause’s apartment, and little by little she falls in love with him again. She loves two men now, and even after I defy the medical experts and begin my miraculous turnaround, she goes on loving both of us. When I leave the hospital in May, I’m only dimly aware of who I am anymore. I don’t notice things, I stagger around in a half trance, and because a fifth pill is part of my daily regimen for the first three months, I’m in no shape to perform my duties as a husband. Grace is good to me. She’s a model of kindness and patience, she’s warm and affectionate, she’s encouraging, but I can’t give anything back to her. She continues her affair with Trause, hating herself for lying to me, hating herself for leading a double life, and the more my recovery advances, the worse her suffering becomes. In early August, two things happen that prevent our marriage from crumbling into ruin. They occur in quick succession, but neither event is related to the other. Grace finds the courage to break off with John, and I stop taking the fifth pill. My groin comes to life again, and for the first time since I left the hospital, Grace is no longer sleeping in two beds. The sky has cleared, and because I know nothing about the deceptions of the past months, I’m blissfully and ignorantly happy – an ex-cuckold who adores his wife and cherishes his friendship with the man who nearly stole her from him.

That should be the end of the story, but it isn’t. A month of harmony ensues. Grace settles down with me again, and just when our troubles seem to be over, another storm breaks out. The disaster occurs on the day in question, September 18, 1982, no more than an hour or two after I find the blue notebook in Chang’s store, perhaps at the very moment I sit down at my desk and write in the notebook for the first time. On the twenty-seventh, I open the notebook for the last time and record these speculations in an effort to understand the events of the past nine days. Whether they are sound or not, whether they can be verified or not, the story continues when Grace goes to the doctor and finds out she’s pregnant. Glorious news, perhaps, but not if you don’t know who the father is. She keeps going over the dates in her head, but she can’t be sure if the baby is mine or John’s. She puts off telling me about it as long as she can, but she’s in torment, feeling as if her sins have come back to haunt her, feeling as if she’s getting the punishment she deserves. That’s why she breaks down in the cab on the night of the eighteenth and attacks me when I reminisce about the Blue Team. There’s no fellowship of goodness, she says, because even the best people do bad things. That’s why she begins talking about trust and weathering hard times; that’s why she implores me to go on loving her. And when she finally tells me about the baby, that’s why she immediately talks about having an abortion. It has nothing to do with our lack of money – it’s about not knowing. The idea of not knowing nearly destroys her. She doesn’t want to start a family that way, but she can’t tell me the truth, and because I’m in the dark I lash out at her and try to talk her into keeping the child. If I do anything right, it’s when I back down the next morning and tell her the decision is hers. For the first time in days, she begins to feel a possibility of freedom. She runs off to be alone, scaring the life out of me when she stays out all night, but when she returns the next morning she seems calmer, more capable of thinking clearly, less afraid. It takes her just a few more hours to figure out what she wants to do, and then she leaves that extraordinary message for me on the answering machine. She decides she owes me a gesture of loyalty. She wills herself to believe the baby is mine and puts her doubts behind her. It’s a leap of pure faith, and I understand now what courage it’s taken her to arrive at that decision. She wants to stay married to me. The episode with Trause is finished, and as long as she continues to want to stay married to me, I will never breathe a word to her about the story I’ve just written in the blue notebook. I don’t know if it’s fact or fiction, but in the end I don’t care. As long as Grace wants me, the past is of no importance.



That was where I stopped. I put the cap on my pen, stood up from the desk, and carried the photo album back into the living room. It was still early – one, maybe one-thirty in the afternoon. I rustled up some lunch for myself in the kitchen, and when I’d finished eating my sandwich, I returned to my workroom with a small plastic garbage bag. One by one, I ripped the pages out of the blue notebook and tore them into little pieces. Flitcraft and Bowen, the rant about the dead baby in the Bronx, my soap opera version of Grace’s love life – everything went into the garbage bag. After a short pause, I decided to tear up the blank pages and then shoved them into the bag as well. I closed it with a tight double knot, and a few minutes later I carried the bundle downstairs when I went out for my walk. I turned south on Court Street, kept on going until I was several blocks past Chang’s empty, padlocked store, and then, for no other reason than that I was far from home, I dropped the bag into a trash can on the corner, burying it under a bunch of wilted roses and the funny pages from the Daily News.



Early in our friendship, Trause told me a story about a French writer he had known in Paris in the early fifties. I can’t remember his name, but John said he had published two novels and a collection of stories and was considered to be one of the shining lights of the young generation. He also wrote some poetry, and not long before John returned to America in 1958 (he lived in Paris for six years), this writer acquaintance published a book-length narrative poem that revolved around the drowning death of a young child. Two months after the book was released, the writer and his family went on a vacation to the Normandy coast, and on the last day of their trip his five-year-old daughter waded out into the choppy waters of the English Channel and drowned. The writer was a rational man, John said, a person known for his lucidity and sharpness of mind, but he blamed the poem for his daughter’s death. Lost in the throes of grief, he persuaded himself that the words he’d written about an imaginary drowning had caused a real drowning, that a fictional tragedy had provoked a real tragedy in the real world. As a consequence, this immensely gifted writer, this man who had been born to write books, vowed never to write again. Words could kill, he discovered. Words could alter reality, and therefore they were too dangerous to be entrusted to a man who loved them above all else. When John told me the story, the daughter had been dead for twenty-one years, and the writer still hadn’t broken his vow. In French literary circles, that silence had turned him into a legendary figure. He was held in the highest regard for the dignity of his suffering, pitied by all who knew him, looked upon with awe.

John and I talked about this story at some length, and I remember that I was quite firm in dismissing the writer’s decision as an error, a misbegotten reading of the world. There was no connection between imagination and reality, I said, no cause and effect between the words in a poem and the events in our lives. It might have appeared that way to the writer, but what happened to him was no more than a horrible coincidence, a manifestation of bad luck in its cruelest, most perverse form. That didn’t mean I blamed him for feeling as he did, but in spite of sympathizing with the man for his dreadful loss, I saw his silence as a refusal to accept the power of the random, purely accidental forces that mold our destinies, and I told Trause that I thought he was punishing himself for no reason.

It was a bland, commonsense argument, a defense of pragmatism and science over the darkness of primitive, magical thinking. To my surprise, John took the opposite view. I wasn’t sure if he was pulling my leg or simply trying to play devil’s advocate, but he said that the writer’s decision made perfect sense to him and that he admired his friend for having kept his promise. ‘Thoughts are real,’ he said. ‘Words are real. Everything human is real, and sometimes we know things before they happen, even if we aren’t aware of it. We live in the present, but the future is inside us at every moment. Maybe that’s what writing is all about, Sid. Not recording events from the past, but making things happen in the future.’

Roughly three years after Trause and I had that conversation, I tore up the blue notebook and threw it into a garbage can on the corner of Third Place and Court Street in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn. At the time, it felt like the correct thing to do, and as I walked back to my apartment that Monday afternoon in September, nine days after the day in question, I was more or less convinced that the failures and disappointments of the past week were finally over. But they weren’t over. The story was just beginning – the true story started only then, after I destroyed the blue notebook – and everything I’ve written so far is little more than a prelude to the horrors I’m about to relate now. Is there a connection between the before and the after? I don’t know. Did the unfortunate French writer kill his child with his poem – or did his words merely predict her death? I don’t know. What I do know is that I would no longer argue against his decision today. I respect the silence he imposed on himself, and I understand the revulsion he must have felt whenever he thought of writing again. More than twenty years after the fact, I now believe that Trause called it right. We sometimes know things before they happen, even if we don’t know that we know. I blundered through those nine days in September 1982 like someone trapped inside a cloud. I tried to write a story and came to an impasse. I tried to sell an idea for a film and was rejected. I lost my friend’s manuscript. I nearly lost my wife, and yet fervently as I loved her, I didn’t hesitate to drop my pants in a darkened sex club and thrust myself into the mouth of a stranger. I was a lost man, an ill man, a man struggling to regain his footing, but underneath all the missteps and follies I committed that week, I knew something I wasn’t aware of knowing. At certain moments during those days, I felt as if my body had become transparent, a porous membrane through which all the invisible forces of the world could pass – a nexus of airborne electrical charges transmitted by the thoughts and feelings of others. I suspect that condition was what led to the birth of Lemuel Flagg, the blind hero of Oracle Night, a man so sensitive to the vibrations around him that he knew what was going to happen before the events themselves took place. I didn’t know, but every thought that entered my head was pointing me in that direction. Stillborn babies, concentration camp atrocities, presidential assassinations, disappearing spouses, impossible journeys back and forth through time. The future was already inside me, and I was preparing myself for the disasters that were about to come.



I had seen Trause for lunch on Wednesday, but aside from our two telephone conversations later that week, I had no further contact with him before I got rid of the blue notebook on the twenty-seventh. We had talked about Jacob and the lost manuscript of his old story, but that was the extent of it, and I had no idea what he was doing with himself during those days – except lying on the sofa and taking care of his leg. It wasn’t until 1994, when James Gillespie published The Labyrinth of Dreams: A Life of John Trause, that I finally learned the details of what John had been up to from the twenty-second to the twenty-seventh. Gillespie’s massive six-hundred-page book is short on literary analysis and pays little attention to the historical context of John’s work, but it is exceedingly thorough when it comes to biographical facts, and given that he spent ten years working on the project and seemed to have talked to every living person who had ever known Trause (myself included), I have no reason to doubt the precision of his chronology.

After I left John’s apartment on Wednesday, he worked until dinnertime, proofreading and making minor changes on the typescript of his novel The Strange Destiny of Gerald Fuchs, which he had apparently finished several days before the onset of his phlebitis attack. This was the book I had suspected he was writing but had never been certain about: a manuscript of just under five hundred pages that Gillespie says Trause had started during his last months in Portugal, which meant it had taken him over four years to complete. So much for the rumor that John had stopped writing after Tina’s death. So much for the rumor that a once-great novelist had given up his vocation and was living off his early accomplishments – a has-been with nothing more to say.

That evening, Eleanor called with the news that Jacob had been found, and early the next morning, Thursday, Trause telephoned his lawyer, Francis W. Byrd. Lawyers seldom make house calls, but Byrd had been representing Trause for over ten years, and when a client of John’s stature informs his attorney that he’s laid up on the sofa with a bad leg and needs to see him on an urgent matter at two o’clock, the attorney will scrap his other plans and arrive at the appointed hour, equipped with all necessary papers and documents, which he will have pulled from his office files before heading downtown. When Byrd reached the Barrow Street apartment, John offered him a drink, and once the two men had finished their Scotch and sodas, they sat down to the task of rewriting Trause’s will. The old one had been drawn up more than seven years earlier, and it no longer represented John’s desires concerning the disposal of his estate. In the aftermath of Tina’s death, he had named Jacob as his sole heir and beneficiary, appointing his brother Gilbert to serve as executor until the boy reached the age of twenty-five. Now, by the simple act of tearing up all copies of that document, Trause disinherited his son in front of his lawyer’s eyes. Byrd then typed out a new will that bequeathed everything John owned to Gilbert. All cash, all stocks and bonds, all property, and all future royalties to be earned from Trause’s literary works would henceforth be inherited by his younger brother. They finished at five-thirty. John shook Byrd’s hand, thanking him for his help, and the lawyer left the apartment with three signed copies of the new will. Twenty minutes later, John went back to proofreading his novel. Madame Dumas served him dinner at eight, and at nine-thirty Eleanor called again, telling him that Jacob had been admitted to the program at Smithers and had been there since four o’clock that afternoon.

Friday was the day Trause was supposed to have his leg examined at Saint Vincent’s Hospital, but he neglected to look at his calendar and forgot to go. In all the turmoil surrounding the business with Jacob, the appointment had slipped his mind, and at the precise moment when he should have been meeting with his doctor (a vascular surgeon named Willard Dunmore), he was on the phone with me, talking about his son’s lifelong animosity toward Grace and asking me to go to Smithers for him on Saturday. According to Gillespie, the doctor called Trause’s apartment at eleven-thirty to ask him why he hadn’t shown up at the hospital. When Trause explained that there had been a family emergency, Dunmore delivered an angry lecture on the importance of the scan and told his patient that such a cavalier attitude toward his own health was irresponsible and could lead to dire consequences. Trause asked if it would be possible to go in that afternoon, but Dunmore said it was too late and they would have to put it off until Monday at four o’clock. He urged Trause to remember to take his medicine and to remain as still as possible over the weekend. When Madame Dumas arrived at one, she found John in his usual spot on the sofa, correcting the pages of his book.

On Saturday, while I was visiting Jacob at Smithers and tangling over the red notebook in Chang’s store, Trause continued to work on his novel. His phone records indicate that he also made three long-distance calls: one to Eleanor in East Hampton, a second to his brother Gilbert in Ann Arbor (who worked as a professor of musicology at the University of Michigan), and a third to his literary agent, Alice Lazarre, at her weekend house in the Berkshires. He reported to her that he was making good progress with the book, and if he didn’t run into any unforeseen problems in the days ahead, she could expect to have a finished manuscript by the end of the week.

On Sunday morning, I called from Landolfi’s and gave him the rundown on my brief visit with Jacob. Then I made my confession about having lost his story, and John laughed. If I’m not mistaken, it was a laugh of relief rather than of amusement. It’s difficult to know for sure, but I think Trause gave me that story for highly complex reasons – and the talk about providing me with the subject for a film was no more than an excuse, a peripheral motive at best. The story was about the cutthroat machinations of a political conspiracy, but it was also about a marital triangle (a wife running off with her husband’s best friend), and if there was any truth to the speculations I put down in the notebook on the twenty-seventh, then perhaps John gave me the story in order to comment on the state of my marriage – indirectly, in the finely nuanced codes and metaphors of fiction. It didn’t matter that the story had been written in 1952, the year Grace was born. ‘The Empire of Bones’ was a premonition of things to come. It had been put in a box and left to incubate for thirty years, and little by little it had evolved into a story about the woman we both loved – my wife, my brave and struggling wife.

I say he laughed with relief because I think he regretted what he had done. When we were having lunch on Wednesday, he reacted with great emotion to the news of Grace’s pregnancy, and immediately after that we found ourselves on the verge of an ugly quarrel. The moment passed, but I wonder now if Trause wasn’t a good deal angrier at me than he let on. He was my friend, but he also must have resented me for having won back Grace. Breaking off their affair had been her decision, and now that she was pregnant, there was no chance that he would ever be with her again. If this was true, giving me the story would have served as a veiled, cryptic form of revenge, a churlish sort of one-upmanship – as if to say, You don’t know anything, Sidney. You’ve never known anything, but I’ve been around a lot longer than you have. Perhaps. There is no way to prove any of this, but if I’ve misunderstood his actions, how then to interpret the fact that John never sent me the story? He promised to have Madame Dumas mail me a carbon of the manuscript, but he wound up sending me something else instead, and I took that thing not only as an act of supreme generosity but as an act of contrition as well. By losing the envelope on the subway, I had spared him the embarrassment of his momentary fit of pique. He was sorry for having let his passions run away from him, and now that my clumsiness had gotten him off the hook, he was determined to make it up to me with a spectacular, altogether unnecessary gesture of kindness and goodwill.

We had talked on Sunday somewhere between ten-thirty and eleven o’clock. Madame Dumas arrived at noon, and ten minutes later Trause handed her his ATM card and instructed her to go to the neighborhood Citibank near Sheridan Square and transfer forty thousand dollars from his savings account to his checking account. Gillespie tells us that he spent the rest of the day working on his novel, and that evening, after Madame Dumas had served him dinner, he dragged himself off the sofa and limped into his study, where he sat down at his worktable and made out a check to me for thirty-six thousand dollars – the exact sum of my unpaid medical bills. Then he wrote me the following short letter:

Dear Sid:
I know I promised you a carbon of the ms., but what’s the point? The whole idea was to earn you some money, so I’ve cut to the chase and written you the enclosed check. It’s a gift, free and clear. No terms, no strings, no need to pay me back. I know you’re broke, so please don’t get on your high horse and tear it up. Spend it, live on it, get yourself going again. I don’t want you to have to waste your time fretting about movies. Stick with books. That’s where your future is, and I’m expecting great things from you.
Thanks for taking the trouble to visit the brat yesterday. It’s much appreciated – nay, more than much, since I know how unpleasant it must have been for you.
Dinner this coming Saturday? Can’t say where yet, since it all depends on this damn leg. Strange fact: the clot was brought on by my own cheapness. Ten days before the pain started, I made a lightning trip to Paris – back and forth in thirty-six hours – to talk at the funeral of my old friend and translator, Philippe Joubert. I flew coach, slept both ways, and the doctor says that’s what did it. All cramped up in those midget seats. From now on, I only travel first class.
Kiss Gracie for me – and don’t give up on Flitcraft. All you need is a different notebook, and the words will start coming again.
J. T.

He sealed up the letter and the check in an envelope and then wrote out my name and address in block letters across the front, but there were no more stamps in the house, and when Madame Dumas left Barrow Street at ten o’clock to return to her apartment in the Bronx, Trause gave her a twenty-dollar bill and asked her to swing by the post office in the morning to stock up on a new supply of first-class stamps. The ever-efficient Madame Dumas took care of the errand, and when she showed up for work on Monday at 11 a. m., John was finally able to put a stamp on the letter. She served him a light lunch at one. After the meal, he pushed on with the proofreading of his novel, and when Madame Dumas left the apartment at two-thirty to shop for groceries, Trause handed her the letter and asked her to mail it for him while she was out. She promised to return by three-thirty, at which point she would help him down the stairs and into the town car he had ordered to take him to his appointment with Dr. Dunmore at the hospital. After Madame Dumas left, Gillespie tells us we can be sure of only one thing. Eleanor called at two-forty-five and informed Trause that Jacob had gone missing. He’d walked out of Smithers sometime in the middle of the night, and no one had heard from him since. Gillespie quotes Eleanor as saying that John became ‘extremely upset’ and went on talking to her for fifteen or twenty minutes. ‘He’s on his own now,’ John finally said. ‘There’s nothing we can do for him anymore.’

Those were Trause’s last words. We have no idea what happened to him after he hung up the phone, but when Madame Dumas returned at three-thirty, she found him lying on the floor at the foot of his bed. That would seem to suggest he’d gone into the bedroom to begin changing his clothes for the appointment with Dunmore, but that is only conjecture. All we know for certain is that he died somewhere between three o’clock and three-thirty on September 27, 1982 – less than two hours after I tossed the remains of the blue notebook into a garbage can on a street corner in South Brooklyn.

The initial cause of death was presumed to be a heart attack, but on further investigation by the medical examiner that verdict was changed to pulmonary embolism. The blood clot that had been sitting in John’s leg for the past two weeks had broken loose, traveled upward through his system, and found its target. The little bomb had finally gone off inside him, and my friend was dead at fifty-six. Too soon. Too soon by thirty years. Too soon to thank him for sending me the money and trying to save my life.

*


John’s death was reported in a late bulletin at the end of the local six o’clock news broadcasts. Under normal circumstances, Grace and I would have turned on the television as we were setting the table and preparing our dinner, but we didn’t have a television anymore, so we went through the evening without knowing that John was lying in the city morgue, without knowing that his brother Gilbert was already on a plane from Detroit to New York, without knowing that Jacob was on the loose. After dinner, we went into the living room and stretched out on the sofa together, talking about Grace’s upcoming appointment with Dr. Vitale, a female obstetrician recommended by Betty Stolowitz, whose first baby had been delivered in March. The visit was scheduled for Friday afternoon, and I told Grace I wanted to be there with her and would show up at the office on West Ninth Street at four o’clock. As we were going over these arrangements, Grace suddenly remembered that Betty had given her a book about pregnancy that morning – one of those big paperback compendiums filled with charts and illustrations – and she hopped off the sofa and went into the bedroom to retrieve it from her shoulder bag. While she was gone, someone knocked on the door. I assumed it was one of our neighbors, coming to borrow a flashlight or a book of matches. It couldn’t have been anyone else, since the front door of the building was always locked, and a person without a key had to push an outside buzzer and announce himself through the intercom before he could get in. I remember that I wasn’t wearing any shoes, and when I climbed off the sofa and went to open the door, I picked up a small splinter in the sole of my left foot. I also remember looking at my watch and seeing that it was eight-thirty. I didn’t bother to ask who it was. I simply opened the door, and once I did that, the world became a different world. I don’t know how else to put it. I unlocked the door, and the thing that had been building inside me over the past days was suddenly real: the future was standing in front of me.

It was Jacob. He had dyed his hair black, and he was bundled up in a long dark overcoat that hung down to his ankles. Hands thrust into his pockets, bouncing impatiently on the balls of his feet, he looked like some futuristic undertaker who’d come to carry away a dead body. The green-headed clown I’d talked to on Saturday had been disturbing enough, but this new creature scared me, and I didn’t want to let him in. ‘You’ve got to help me,’ he said. ‘I’m in real trouble, Sid, and there’s no one else to turn to.’ Before I could tell him to go away, he pushed himself into the apartment and shut the door behind him.

‘Go back to Smithers,’ I said. ‘There’s nothing I can do for you.’

‘I can’t go back. They found out I was there. If I go back to that place, I’m dead.’

‘Who’s they? Who are you talking about?’

‘These guys, Richie and Phil. They think I owe them money. If I don’t come up with five thousand dollars, they’re going to kill me.’

‘I don’t believe you, Jacob.’

‘They’re the reason I went to Smithers. It wasn’t because of my mother. It was to hide from them.’

‘I still don’t believe you. But even if I did, I wouldn’t be able to help. I don’t have five thousand dollars. I don’t even have five hundred dollars. Call your mother. If she turns you down, call your father. But leave Grace and me out of this.’

I heard the toilet flush down the hall, a signal that Grace would be coming back to the room at any moment. Distracted by the noise, Jacob turned his head toward that area of the apartment, and when he saw her walk into the living room with the pregnancy book in her hand, he broke into a big smile. ‘Hiya, Gracie,’ he said. ‘Long time no see.’

Grace stopped in her tracks. ‘What’s he doing here?’ she said, addressing her words to me. She looked stunned, and she spoke in a kind of suppressed rage, refusing to turn her eyes back in Jacob’s direction.

‘He wants to borrow money,’ I said.

‘Come on, Gracie,’ Jacob said, in a half petulant, half sarcastic tone of voice. ‘Won’t you even say hello to me? I mean, it doesn’t cost anything to be polite, does it?’

As I stood there watching the two of them, I couldn’t help thinking about the torn-up photograph that had been left on the sofa after the break-in. The frame had been stolen, but only someone with a deep, long-standing grudge against the person in the portrait would have gone to the trouble of ripping it to pieces. A professional burglar would have left it intact. But Jacob wasn’t a professional; he was a frantic, drug-addled kid who’d gone out of his way to hurt us – to hurt his father by going after two of his closest friends.

‘That’s enough,’ I said to him. ‘She doesn’t want to talk to you, and neither do I. You’re the person who robbed us last week. You crawled in through the kitchen window and smashed up the place, and then you walked off with every valuable thing you could find. Do you want me to pick up the phone and call the cops, or do you want to leave? Those are your two choices. Trust me, I’ll make that call with great pleasure. I’ll press charges against you, and you’ll wind up going to jail.’

I was expecting him to deny the accusation, to pretend to be insulted that I would dare to think such a thing about him, but the boy was much cleverer than that. He let out a beautifully calibrated sigh of remorse, and then he sat down in a chair, slowly shaking his head back and forth, acting as if he were shocked by his own behavior. It was the same kind of self-loathing performance he’d mentioned to me on Saturday when he’d bragged about his theatrical talents. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘But what I told you about Richie and Phil is true. They’re after me, and if I don’t give them their five thousand bucks, they’re going to put a bullet in my head. I came here the other day thinking I’d borrow your checkbook, but I couldn’t find it. So I took some other things instead. It was a dumb move. I’m really sorry. The stuff wasn’t even worth that much, and I shouldn’t have done it. If you want, I’ll give it all back to you tomorrow. I still have it in my apartment, and I’ll bring everything back first thing in the morning.’

‘Bullshit,’ Grace said. ‘You’ve already sold what you could, and then you threw out the rest. Don’t play that sorry-little-boy routine, Jacob. You’re too big for that now. You ripped us off last week, and now you’re back for more.’

‘Those guys are fixing to shorten my life,’ he said, ‘and they need their money by tomorrow. I know you two are strapped for cash, but Christ, Gracie, your dad’s a federal judge. He’s not going to flinch if you ask him for a loan. I mean, what’s five thousand dollars to an old southern gentleman?’

‘Forget it,’ I said. ‘There’s no way we’re going to drag Bill Tebbetts into this.’

‘Get him out of here, Sid,’ Grace said to me, her voice tight with anger. ‘I can’t stand it anymore.’

‘I thought we were family,’ Jacob replied, staring hard at Grace, almost forcing her to look at him. He had begun to pout, but in a curiously insincere way, as though he were trying to mock her and twist her dislike for him to his own advantage. ‘After all, you’re sort of my unofficial stepmom, aren’t you? At least you used to be. Doesn’t that count for something?’

By then, Grace was already moving across the room, on her way to the kitchen. ‘I’m calling the police,’ she said. ‘If you won’t do it, Sid, I will. I want this slimeball out of here.’ In order for her to reach the phone in the kitchen, however, she had to pass in front of the chair Jacob was sitting in, and before she managed to get there, he had already stood up to block her way. Until then, the confrontation had consisted entirely of words. The three of us had been talking, and no matter how distasteful that talk had been, I wasn’t prepared for those words to erupt into physical violence. I was standing near the sofa, a good eight or ten feet from the chair, and when Grace tried to slip past Jacob, he grabbed hold of her arm and said, ‘Not the police, stupid. Your father. The only person you’re going to call is the judge – to ask for the money.’ Grace tried to squirm out of his grip, bucking around like an incensed animal, but Jacob was five or six inches taller than she was, which gave him superior leverage and allowed him to bear down on her from above. I rushed toward him, slowed by my sore muscles and the splinter in my foot, but before I got there, Jacob had already locked his hands onto her shoulders and was slamming her into the wall. I jumped him from behind, trying to wrap my arms around his torso and pull him away from her, but the kid was strong, much stronger than I had expected, and without even bothering to turn around, he sent his elbow straight into my stomach. It blew the wind out of me and knocked me down, and before I could make another charge at him, he was punching Grace in the mouth and kicking her in the belly with his thick leather boots. She tried to fight back, but each time she stood up, he slugged her in the face, banged her against the wall, and threw her to the floor. Blood was pouring out of her nose when I was ready to attack again, but I knew that I was too weak to have any effect, too debilitated to stop him with my sad and frail fists. Grace was moaning and nearly unconscious by then, and I felt there was a real danger that he would beat her to death. Instead of going straight for him, I rushed into the kitchen and pulled out a large carving knife from the top drawer next to the sink. ‘Stop it!’ I yelled at him. ‘Stop it, Jacob, or else I’m going to kill you!’ I don’t think he heard me at first. He was completely lost in his fury, an insane destroyer who scarcely seemed to know what he was doing anymore, but as I advanced toward him with the knife, he must have caught a glimpse of me out of the corner of his eye. He turned his head to the left, and when he saw me there with the knife raised in my hand, he suddenly stopped hitting her. His eyes had a wild, unfocused look, and sweat was sliding off his nose and falling onto his narrow, trembling chin. I felt certain he was going to come after me next. I wouldn’t have hesitated to stick the knife into his body, but when he glanced down at the bleeding and immobilized Grace, he dropped his arms to his sides and said, ‘Thanks a lot, Sid. Now I’m a dead man.’ Then he turned around and left the apartment, vanishing into the streets of Brooklyn a few minutes before the police cars and the ambulance pulled up in front of the house.



Grace lost the baby. The blows from Jacob’s boot had torn up her insides, and once the hemorrhaging began, the tiny embryo was dislodged from the wall of her uterus and came washing out in a miserable stream of blood. Spontaneous abortion, as the term goes; a miscarriage; a life that was never born. They drove her across the Gowanus Canal to Methodist Hospital in Park Slope, and as I sat beside her in the back of the ambulance, wedged in among the oxygen tanks and two paramedics, I kept looking down at her poor battered face, unable to stop myself from trembling, seizing up in continual spasms that shuddered through my chest and down the entire length of my body. Her nose was broken, the left side of her face was covered with bruises, and her right eyelid was so swollen it looked as if she would never see out of that eye again. At the hospital, they wheeled her off for X rays on the ground floor and then took her upstairs to an operating room, where they worked on her for more than two hours. I don’t know how I did it, but as I waited for the surgeons to finish their job, I managed to pull myself together just long enough to call Grace’s parents in Charlottesville. That was when I found out John was dead. Sally Tebbetts answered the phone, and at the end of our exhausting, interminable conversation, she told me that Gilbert had called earlier that evening with the news. She and Bill were already in shock, she said, and now I was telling her that John’s son had tried to kill their daughter. Had the world gone crazy? she asked, and then her voice choked up and she started to cry. She handed the phone to her husband, and when Bill Tebbetts came on, he got right to the point and asked me the only question worth asking. Was Grace going to live? Yes, I said, she was going to live. I didn’t know that yet, but I wasn’t about to tell him that Grace was in critical condition and might not pull through. I wasn’t going to hex her chances by speaking the wrong words. If words could kill, then I had to keep a careful watch over my tongue and make sure never to express a single doubt or negative thought. I hadn’t come back from the dead in order to watch my wife die. Losing John was terrible enough, and I wasn’t going to lose anyone else. It simply wasn’t going to happen. Even if I had no say in the matter, I wasn’t going to allow it to happen.

For the next seventy-two hours, I sat by Grace’s bed and didn’t budge from my spot. I washed and shaved in the adjoining bathroom, ate meals as I watched the clear liquid in the IV line drip into her arm, and lived for those rare moments when she opened her good eye and said a few words to me. With so many painkillers circulating in her blood, she seemed to have no memory of what Jacob had done to her and only the dimmest awareness that she was in a hospital. Three or four times, she asked me where she was, but then she’d drift off again and immediately forget what I’d told her. She often whimpered in her sleep, groaning softly as she swatted at the bandages on her face, and once she woke up with tears in her eyes asking, ‘Why do I hurt so much? What’s wrong with me?’

People came and went during those days, but I have no more than the faintest memories of them, and I can’t recall a single conversation I had with anyone. The assault occurred on a Monday night, and by Tuesday morning Grace’s parents had already flown up from Virginia. Her cousin Lily drove down from Connecticut that same afternoon. Her younger sisters, Darcy and Flo, arrived the next morning. Betty Stolowitz and Greg Fitzgerald came. Mary Sklarr came. Mr. and Mrs. Caramello came. I must have talked to them and left the room every now and then, but I can’t remember anything but sitting with Grace. For most of Tuesday and Wednesday, she was in a semiconscious torpor – drowsing, sleeping, waking for just a few minutes at a stretch – but by Wednesday evening she seemed to be a little more coherent and was beginning to remain conscious for longer periods of time. She slept soundly that night, and when she woke up on Thursday morning, she finally recognized me. I took hold of her hand, and as our palms touched, she muttered my name, then repeated it to herself several more times, as though that one-syllable word were an incantation that could turn her from a ghost into a living being again.

‘I’m in a hospital, aren’t I?’ she said.

‘Methodist Hospital in Park Slope,’ I answered. ‘And I’m sitting next to you, holding your hand. It’s not a dream, Grace. We’re really here, and little by little you’re going to get better.’

‘I’m not going to die?’

‘No, you’re not going to die.’

‘He beat me up, didn’t he? He punched me and kicked me, and I remember thinking I was going to die. Where were you, Sid? Why didn’t you help me?’

‘I got my arms around him, but I couldn’t pull him off you. I had to threaten him with a knife. I was ready to kill him, Grace, but he ran off before anything happened. Then I called Nine-one-one, and the ambulance brought you here.’

‘When was that?’

‘Three nights ago.’

‘And what’s this stuff on my face?’

‘Bandages. And a splint for your nose.’

‘He broke my nose?’

‘Yes. And gave you a concussion. But your head is clearing now, isn’t it? You’re starting to come around.’

‘What about the baby? There’s this big pain in my gut, Sid, and I think I know what it means. It can’t be true, can it?’

‘I’m afraid it is. Everything else is going to get better, but not that.’



One day later, Trause’s ashes were scattered in a meadow in Central Park. There must have been thirty or forty of us in the group that morning, a gathering of friends, relatives, and fellow writers, with no official from any religion present and not one mention of the word God made by any of the people who spoke. Grace knew nothing about John’s death, and her parents and I had decided to keep it from her as long as we could. Bill went to the ceremony with me, but Sally stayed behind at the hospital to be with Grace – who had been told I was accompanying her father to the airport for his flight back to Virginia. Grace was gradually getting better, but she still wasn’t well enough to handle a blow of that magnitude. One tragedy at a time, I said to her parents, but no more. Like the single drops of liquid that fell from the plastic bag into the IV tube attached to Grace’s arm, the medicine would have to be parceled out in small doses. The lost child was more than enough for now. John could wait until she was strong enough to bear a second onslaught of grief.

No one mentioned Jacob at the service, but he was present in my thoughts as I listened to John’s brother and Bill and various other friends deliver their eulogies under the blazing light of that autumn morning. How rotten for a man to die before he had a chance to become old, I said to myself, how grim to contemplate the work he still had in front of him. But if John had to die now, I felt, then surely it was better that he had died on Monday, and not Tuesday or Wednesday. If he had lived another twenty-four hours, he would have found out what Jacob had done to Grace, and I was certain that knowledge would have destroyed him. As it was, he would never have to confront the fact that he had sired a monster, never have to walk around with the burden of the outrage his son had committed against the person he loved most in the world. Jacob had become the unmentionable, but I burned with hatred against him, and I was looking forward to the moment when the police finally caught up with him and I would be able to testify against him in court. To my infinite regret, I was never given that opportunity. Even as we stood in Central Park mourning his father, Jacob was already dead. None of us could have known it then, since another two months went by before his decomposing body was found – wrapped in a sheath of black plastic and buried in a Dumpster at an abandoned construction site near the Harlem River in the Bronx. He had been shot twice in the head. Richie and Phil had not been phantoms of his imagination, and when the forensic report was placed in evidence at their trial the following year, it showed that each bullet had been fired from a different gun.

That same day (October 1), the letter sent from Manhattan by Madame Dumas reached its destination in Brooklyn. I found it in my mailbox after I went home from Central Park (to change my clothes before setting out for the hospital again), and because there was no return address on the envelope, I didn’t learn who it was from until I’d carried it upstairs and opened it. Trause had written the letter by hand, and the script was so jagged, so frenzied in its execution, that I had trouble deciphering it. I had to go through the text several times before I managed to crack the mysteries of its illegible curls and scratches, but once I began to translate the marks into words, I could hear John’s voice talking to me – a living voice talking from the other side of death, from the other side of nowhere. Then I found the check inside the envelope, and I felt my eyes watering up with tears. I saw John’s ashes streaming out of the urn in the park that morning. I saw Grace lying in her bed in the hospital. I saw myself tearing up the pages of the blue notebook, and after a while – in the words of John’s brother-in-law Richard – I had my face in my hands and was sobbing my guts out. I don’t know how long I carried on like that, but even as the tears poured out of me, I was happy, happier to be alive than I had ever been before. It was a happiness beyond consolation, beyond misery, beyond all the ugliness and beauty of the world. Eventually, the tears subsided, and I went into the bedroom to put on a fresh set of clothes. Ten minutes later, I was out on the street again, walking toward the hospital to see Grace.

1. Twenty years have elapsed since that morning, and a fair amount of what we said to each other has been lost. I search my memory for the missing dialogue, but I can come up with no more than a few isolated fragments, bits and pieces shorn from their original context. One thing I’m certain of, however, is that I told him my name. It must have happened just after he found out I was a writer, since I can hear him asking me who I was – on the off chance he ran across something I had published. ‘Orr’ is what I said to him, giving my last name first, ‘Sidney Orr.’ Chang’s English wasn’t good enough for him to understand my response. He heard Orr as or, and when I shook my head and smiled, his face seemed to crumple up in embarrassed confusion. I was about to correct the error and spell out the word for him, but before I could say anything his eyes brightened again and he began making furious little rowing gestures with his hands, thinking that perhaps the word I’d said to him was oar. Again, I shook my head and smiled. Utterly defeated now, Chang emitted a loud sigh and said: ‘Terrible tongue, this English. Too tricky for my poor brain.’ The misunderstanding continued until I lifted the blue notebook from the counter and wrote out my name in block letters on the inside front cover. That seemed to produce the desired result. After so much effort, I didn’t bother to tell him that the first Orrs in America had been Orlovskys. My grandfather had shortened the name to make it sound more American – just as Chang had done by adding the decorative but meaningless initials, M. R., to his.

2. John was fifty-six. Not young, perhaps, but not old enough to think of himself as old, especially since he was aging well and still looked like a man in his mid-to late forties. I had known him for three years by then, and our friendship was a direct result of my marriage to Grace. Her father had been at Princeton with John in the years immediately following the Second World War, and although the two of them worked in different fields (Grace’s father was a District Federal Court judge in Charlottesville, Virginia), they had remained close ever since. I therefore met him as a family friend, not as the well-known novelist I had been reading since high school – and whom I still considered to be one of the best writers we had.
    He had published six works of fiction between 1952 and 1975, but nothing now for more than seven years. John had never been fast, however, and just because the break between books had been somewhat longer than usual, that didn’t mean he wasn’t working. I had spent several afternoons with him since my release from the hospital, and sprinkled in among our conversations regarding my health (about which he was deeply concerned, unflagging in his solicitude), his twenty-year-old son, Jacob (who had caused him much anguish of late), and the struggles of the floundering Mets (an abiding mutual obsession), he had dropped enough hints about his current activities to suggest that he was thoroughly wrapped up in something, devoting the better part of his time to a project that was well under way – and perhaps now coming to an end.

3. I happened to meet Grace in a publisher’s office as well, which might explain why I chose to give Bowen the job I did. It was January 1979, not long after I had finished my second novel. My first novel and an earlier book of stories had been brought out by a small publisher in San Francisco, but now I had moved on to a larger, more commercial house in New York, Holst & McDermott. About two weeks after I signed the contract, I went to the office to see my editor, and at some point during our conversation we started discussing ideas for the cover of the book. That was when Betty Stolowitz picked up the phone on her desk and said to me, ‘Why don’t we get Grace in here and see what she thinks?’ It turned out that Grace worked in the art department at Holst & McDermott and had been given the job of designing the dust jacket for Self-Portrait with Imaginary Brother – which was what my little book of whims, reveries, and nightmare sorrows was called.
    Betty and I went on talking for another three or four minutes, and then Grace Tebbetts walked into the room. She stayed for about a quarter of an hour, and by the time she walked out again and returned to her office, I was in love with her. It was that abrupt, that conclusive, that unexpected. I had read about such things in novels, but I had always assumed the authors were exaggerating the power of the first look – that endlessly talked-about moment when the man gazes into the eyes of his beloved for the first time. To a born pessimist like myself, it was an altogether shocking experience. I felt as if I had been thrust back into the world of the troubadours, reliving some passage from the opening chapter of La Vita Nova (… when first the glorious Lady of my thoughts was made manifest to my eyes), inhabiting the stale tropes of a thousand forgotten love sonnets. I burned. I longed. I pined. I was rendered mute. And all this happened to me in the dullest of precincts, under the harsh fluorescent glare of a late-twentieth-century American office – the last place on earth where one would think to stumble upon the passion of one’s life.
    There is no accounting for such an event, no objective reason to explain why we fall for one person and not another. Grace was a good-looking woman, but even in those first tumultuous seconds of our first encounter, as I shook her hand and watched her settle into a chair by Betty’s desk, I could see that she was not inordinately beautiful, not one of those movie star goddesses who overpower you with the dazzle of their perfection. No doubt she was becoming, striking, pleasant to behold (however one chooses to define those terms), but fierce as my attraction was, I also knew that it was more than just a physical attraction, that the dream I was starting to dream was more than just a momentary surge of animal desire. Grace struck me as intelligent, but as the meeting wore on and I listened to her talk about her ideas for the cover, I understood that she wasn’t a terribly articulate person (she hesitated frequently between thoughts, confined her vocabulary to small, functional words, seemed to have no gift for abstraction), and nothing she said that afternoon was particularly brilliant or memorable. Other than making a few friendly remarks about my book, she gave no sign to suggest that she was even remotely interested in me. And yet there I was in a state of maximum torment – burning and longing and pining, a man trapped in the snares of love.
    She was five feet eight inches tall and weighed a hundred and twenty-five pounds. Slender neck, long arms and long fingers, pale skin, and short dirty-blond hair. That hair, I later realized, bore some resemblance to the hair shown in the drawings of the hero of The Little Prince – choppy juts of spikes and curls – and perhaps the association enhanced the somewhat androgynous aura that Grace projected. The mannish clothes she was wearing that afternoon must have played their part in creating the image as well: black jeans, white T-shirt, and a pale blue linen jacket. About five minutes into her visit, she removed the jacket and draped it over the back of her chair, and when I saw her arms, those long, smooth, infinitely feminine arms of hers, I knew there would be no rest for me until I was able to touch them, until I had earned the right to put my hands on her body and run them over her bare skin.
    But I want to go deeper than Grace’s body, deeper than the incidental facts of her physical self. Bodies count, of course – they count more than we’re willing to admit – but we don’t fall in love with bodies, we fall in love with each other, and if much of what we are is confined to flesh and bone, there is much that is not as well. We all know that, but the minute we go beyond a catalogue of surface qualities and appearances, words begin to fail us, to crumble apart in mystical confusions and cloudy, insubstantial metaphors. Some call it the flame of being. Others call it the internal spark or the inner light of self hood. Still others refer to it as the fires of quiddity. The terms always draw on images of heat and illumination, and that force, that essence of life we sometimes refer to as soul, is always communicated to another person through the eyes. Surely the poets were correct to insist on this point. The mystery of desire begins by looking into the eyes of the beloved, for it is only there that one can catch a glimpse of who that person is.
    Grace’s eyes were blue. A dark blue flecked with traces of gray, perhaps some brown, perhaps some hints of hazelish contrast as well. They were complex eyes, eyes that changed color according to the intensity and timbre of the light that fell on them at a given moment, and the first time I saw her that day in Betty’s office, it occurred to me that I had never met a woman who exuded such composure, such tranquillity of bearing, as if Grace, who was not yet twenty-seven at the time, had already moved on to some higher state of being than the rest of us. I don’t mean to suggest that there was anything withheld about her, that she floated above her circumstances in some beatific haze of condescension or indifference. On the contrary, she was quite animated throughout the meeting, laughed readily, smiled, said all the appropriate things, and made all the appropriate gestures, but underneath a professional engagement in the ideas that Betty and I were proposing to her, I felt a startling absence of inner struggle, an equilibrium of mind that seemed to exempt her from the usual conflicts and aggressions of modern life: self-doubt, envy, sarcasm, the need to judge or belittle others, the scalding, unbearable ache of personal ambition. Grace was young, but she had an old and weathered soul, and as I sat with her that first day in the offices of Holst & McDermott, looking into her eyes and studying the contours of her lean, angular body, that was what I fell in love with: the sense of calm that enveloped her, the radiant silence burning within.

4. John was the only person in the world who still called her Gracie. Not even her parents did that anymore, and I myself, who had been involved with her for more than three years, had never once addressed her by that diminutive. But John had known her all her life – literally from the day she was born – and a number of special privileges had accrued to him over time, elevating him from the rank of family friend to unofficial blood relation. It was as if he had achieved the status of favorite uncle – or, if you will, godfather-without-portfolio.
    John loved Grace, and Grace loved him back, and because I was the man in Grace’s life, John had welcomed me into the inner circle of his affections. During the period of my collapse, he had sacrificed much of his time and energy to helping Grace through the crisis, and when I finally recovered from my brush with death, he started turning up at the hospital every afternoon to sit by my bed and keep me company – to keep me (as I later realized) in the land of the living. When Grace and I went to visit him for dinner that night (September 18, 1982), I doubt that anyone in New York was closer to John than we were. Nor was anyone closer to us than John. That would explain why he considered our Saturday nights so important and hadn’t wanted to break the date, in spite of the problem with his leg. He lived alone, and since he rarely circulated in public, seeing us had become his principal form of social entertainment, his only real chance to indulge in a few hours of uninterrupted conversation.

5. Tina was John’s second wife. His first marriage had lasted ten years (from 1954 to 1964) and had ended in divorce. He never talked about it in my presence, but Grace had told me that no one in her family had been particularly fond of Eleanor. The Tebbetts had seen her as a stuck-up Bryn Mawr girl from a long line of Massachusetts bluebloods, a ‘cold fish’ who had always looked down her nose at John’s working-class Paterson, New Jersey, family. No matter that Eleanor was a respected painter whose reputation was nearly as important as John’s. They weren’t surprised when the marriage ended, and not one of them was sorry to see her go. The only pity, Grace said, was that John had been forced to remain in contact with her. Not through any desire on his part, but because of the ongoing antics of their troubled, wildly unstable son, Jacob.
    Then he had met Tina Ostrow, a dancer-choreographer twelve years younger than he was, and when he married her in 1966, the Tebbetts clan applauded the decision. They felt confident that John had finally found the woman he deserved, and time proved them right. The small and vibrant Tina was an adorable person, Grace said, and she had loved John (in Grace’s words) ‘to the point of worship.’ The only problem with the marriage was that Tina didn’t live long enough to see her thirty-seventh birthday. Uterine cancer slowly took her from him over the course of eighteen months, and after John buried her, Grace said, he shut down for a long time, ‘just froze up and sort of stopped breathing.’ He moved to Paris for a year, then to Rome, then to a small village on the northern coast of Portugal. When he returned to New York in 1978 and settled into the apartment on Barrow Street, it had been three years since his last novel had been published, and the rumor was that Trause hadn’t written a word since Tina’s death. Four more years had passed since then, and still he hadn’t produced anything – at least not anything he was willing to show anyone. But he was working. I knew he was working. He’d told me as much himself, but I didn’t know what kind of work it was, for the simple reason that I hadn’t found the nerve to ask.

6. Much of her graphic work was inspired by looking at art, and before my collapse at the beginning of the year, we had often spent our Saturday afternoons wandering in and out of galleries and museums together. In some sense, art had made our marriage possible, and without the intervention of art, I doubt that I would have found the courage to pursue her. It was fortunate that we had met in the neutral surroundings of Holst & McDermott, a so-called work environment. If we had been thrown together in any other way – at a dinner party, for example, or on a bus or a plane – I wouldn’t have been able to contact her again without exposing my intentions, and I instinctively felt that Grace had to be approached with caution. If I tipped my hand too early, I was almost certain I would lose my chance with her forever.
    Luckily, I had an excuse to call. She had been assigned to work on the cover of my book, and under the pretext of having a new idea to discuss with her, I rang up her office two days after our initial meeting and asked if I could come in and see her. ‘Anytime you like,’ she said. Anytime proved to be difficult to arrange. I had a regular job then (teaching history at John Jay High School in Brooklyn), and I couldn’t make it to her office before four o’clock. As it happened, Grace’s agenda was clogged with late-afternoon appointments for the rest of the week. When she suggested that we meet the following Monday or Tuesday, I told her I was going out of town to give a reading (which happened to be true, but I probably would have said it even if it wasn’t), so Grace relented and offered to squeeze in some time for me after work on Friday. ‘I have to be somewhere at eight,’ she said, ‘but if we met for an hour or so at five-thirty, it shouldn’t be a problem.’
    I had stolen the title of my book from a 1938 pencil drawing by Willem de Kooning. Self-Portrait with Imaginary Brother is a small, delicately rendered piece that depicts two boys standing side by side, one a year or two older than the other, one in long pants, the other in knickers. Much as I admired the drawing, it was the title that interested me, and I had used it not because I wanted to refer to de Kooning but because of the words themselves, which I found highly evocative and which seemed to fit the novel I had written. In Betty Stolowitz’s office earlier that week, I had suggested putting de Kooning’s drawing on the cover. Now I was planning to tell Grace that I thought it was a bad idea – that the pencil strokes were too faint and wouldn’t be visible enough, that the effect would be too muted. But I didn’t really care. If I had argued against the drawing in Betty’s office, I would have been for it now. All I wanted was a chance to see Grace again – and art was my way in, the one subject that wouldn’t compromise my true purpose.
    Her willingness to see me after office hours gave me hope, but at the same time the news that she was going out at eight o’clock all but destroyed that hope. There was little question that she had an appointment with a man (attractive women are always with a man on Friday night), but it was impossible to know how deeply connected she was to him. It could have been a first date, and it could have been a quiet dinner with her fiancé or live-in boyfriend. I knew she wasn’t married (Betty had told me as much after Grace left her office following our first meeting), but the range of other intimacies was boundless. When I asked Betty if Grace was involved with anyone, she said she didn’t know. Grace kept her private life to herself, and no one in the company had the smallest inkling of what she did outside the office. Two or three editors had asked her out since she’d started working there, but she’d turned them all down.
    I quickly learned that Grace was not someone who shared confidences. In the ten months I knew her before we were married, she never once divulged a secret or hinted at any prior entanglements with other men. Nor did I ever ask her to tell me something she didn’t seem willing to talk about. That was the power of Grace’s silence. If you meant to love her in the way she demanded to be loved, then you had to accept the line she’d drawn between herself and words.
    (Once, in an early conversation I had with her about her childhood, she reminisced about a favorite doll her parents had given her when she was seven. She named her Pearl, carried her everywhere for the next four or five years, and considered her to be her best friend. The remarkable thing about Pearl was that she was able to talk and understood everything that was said to her. But Pearl never uttered a word in Grace’s presence. Not because she couldn’t speak, but because she chose not to.)
    There was someone in her life at the time I met her – I’m sure of that – but I never learned his name or how seriously she felt about him. Quite seriously, I would imagine, for the first six months proved to be a tempestuous time for me, and they ended badly, with Grace telling me she wanted to break it off and that I shouldn’t call her anymore. Through all the disappointments of those months, however, all the ephemeral victories and tiny surges of optimism, the rebuffs and capitulations, the nights when she was too busy to see me and the nights when she allowed me to share her bed, through all the ups and downs of that desperate, failed courtship, Grace was always an enchanted being for me, a luminous point of contact between desire and the world, the implacable love. I kept my word and didn’t call her, but six or seven weeks later she contacted me out of the blue and said she had changed her mind. She didn’t offer any explanation, but I gathered that the man who had been my rival was now out of the picture. Not only did she want to start seeing me again, she said, but she wanted us to get married. Marriage was the one word I had never spoken in her presence. It had been in my head from the first moment I saw her, but I had never dared to say it, for fear it would frighten her off. Now Grace was proposing to me. I had resigned myself to living out the rest of my life with a shattered heart, and now she was telling me I could live with her instead – in one piece, my whole life in one piece with her.

7. Kansas City was an arbitrary choice for Bowen’s destination – the first place that popped into my head. Possibly because it was so remote from New York, a town locked in the center of the heartland: Oz in all its glorious strangeness. Once I had Nick on his way to Kansas City, however, I remembered the Hyatt Regency catastrophe, which was a real event that had taken place fourteen months earlier (in July 1981). Close to two thousand people had been gathered in the lobby at the time – an immense open-air atrium of some seventeen thousand square feet. They were all looking up, watching a dance contest that was being held in one of the upstairs walkways (also referred to as ‘floating walkways’ or ‘skyways’), when the wide flange beams supporting the structure broke loose from their moorings and collapsed, crashing down into the lobby four stories below. Twenty-one years later, it is still considered one of the worst hotel disasters in American history.

8. The Lid Lifts by Patrick Gordon-Walker (London, 1945). More recently, the same story was retold by Douglas Botting in From the Ruins of the Reich: Germany 1945–1949 (New York: Crown Publishers, 1985), p. 43.
    Just for the record, I should also mention that I happen to own a copy of a 1937/38 Warsaw telephone book. It was given to me by a journalist friend who went to Poland to cover the Solidarity movement in 1981. He apparently found it in a flea market somewhere, and knowing that my paternal grandparents had both been born in Warsaw, he gave it to me as a present after he returned to New York. I called it my book of ghosts. At the bottom of page 220, I found a married couple whose address was given as Wejnerta 19 – Janina and Stefan Orlowscy. That was the Polish spelling of my family’s name, and although I wasn’t sure if these people were related to me or not, I felt there was a good chance that they were.

9. Four years earlier, I had adapted one of the stories from my first book, Tabula Rasa, for a young director named Vincent Frank. It was a small, low-budget film about a musician who recovers from a long illness and slowly puts his life together again (a prophetic story, as it turned out), and when the film was released in June 1980, it did fairly well. Tabula Rasa played in just a few art houses around the country, but it was perceived as a critical success, and – as Mary was fond of reminding me – it helped bring my name to the attention of a so-called wider public. Sales of my books began to improve somewhat, it’s true, and when I turned in my next novel nine months later, A Short Dictionary of Human Emotions, she negotiated a contract with Holst & McDermott worth twice the amount I’d been given for my previous book. That advance, along with the modest sum I’d earned from the screenplay, allowed me to quit my high school teaching job, which had been my bread-and-butter work for the past seven years. Until then, I had been one of those obscure and driven writers who wrote between five and seven in the morning, who wrote at night and on weekends, who never went anywhere on his summer vacation in order to sit at home in a sweltering Brooklyn apartment and make up for lost time. Now, a year and a half after my marriage to Grace, I found myself in the luxurious position of being an independent, self-employed scribbler. We were hardly what could be called well off, but if I continued to produce work at a steady pace, our combined incomes would keep us floating along with our heads above water. Following the release of Tabula Rasa, a few offers came in to write more films, but the projects hadn’t interested me, and I’d turned them down to push on with my novel. When Holst & McDermott brought out the book in February 1982, however, I wasn’t aware that it had been published. I had already been in the hospital for five weeks by then, and I wasn’t aware of anything – not even that the doctors thought I would be dead within a matter of days.
    Tabula Rasa had been a union production, and in order to be given credit for my screenplay I had been obliged to join the Writers Guild. Membership entailed sending in quarterly dues and turning over a small percentage of your earnings to them, but among the things they gave you in return was a decent health insurance policy. If not for that insurance, my illness would have landed me in debtor’s prison. Most of the costs were covered, but as with all medical plans, there were countless other issues to be reckoned with: deductibles, extra charges for experimental treatments, arcane percentages and sliding-scale calculations for various medicines and disposable implements, a staggering range of bills that had put me in the hole to the tune of thirty-six thousand dollars. That was the burden Grace and I had been saddled with, and the more my strength returned, the more I worried about how to get us out from under this debt. Grace’s father had offered to help, but the judge wasn’t a rich man, and with Grace’s two younger sisters still in college, we couldn’t bring ourselves to accept. Instead, we sent in a small amount every month, trying to chip away at the mountain slowly, but at the rate we were going, we would still be at it when we were senior citizens. Grace worked in publishing, which meant her salary was meager at best, and I had earned nothing now for close to a year. A few microscopic royalties and foreign advances, but that was the extent of it. That explains why I returned Mary’s call immediately after I listened to her message. I hadn’t given any thought to writing more screenplays, but if the price was right for this one, I had no intention of turning down the job.

10. I hadn’t made any serious progress, but I understood that I could improve Bowen’s condition somewhat without having to alter the central thrust of the narrative. The overhead light has burned out, but it no longer seemed necessary to keep Nick in total darkness. There could be other sources of illumination in Ed’s well-equipped fallout shelter. Matches and candles, for instance, a flashlight, a table lamp – something to prevent Nick from feeling he’s been buried alive. That would push any man over the edge of sanity, and the last thing I wanted was to turn Bowen’s predicament into a study of terror and madness. I had left Hammett behind, but that didn’t mean I intended to replace the Flitcraft story with a new version of ‘The Premature Burial.’ Give Nick light, then, and allow him a shred of hope. And even after the matches and candles have been used up, even after the batteries in the flashlight have lost their power, he can open the refrigerator door and cast some light into the room with the small bulb that burns inside the white enameled box.
    More significant, there was the question of Grace’s dream. Listening to her talk that morning, I had been too shaken by the resemblances to the story I was writing to grasp how many differences there were as well. Her room was a sanctuary to be shared by two people, a small erotic paradise. My room was a bleak cell, inhabited by one man, whose only ambition is to escape. But what if I managed to get Rosa Leightman in there with him? Nick has already fallen for her, and if they’re trapped in the room together for any length of time, perhaps she would begin to reciprocate his feelings. Rosa was the physical and spiritual double of Grace, and therefore she would have the same sexual appetites as Grace – the same recklessness, the same lack of inhibition. Nick and Rosa could spend their time together reading passages out loud from Oracle Night, baring their souls to each other, making love. As long as there was enough food to sustain them, why would they ever want to leave?
    That was the little fantasy I carried around with me through the streets of the Village. Even as I played it out in my mind, however, I knew it was deeply flawed. Grace had aroused me with her erotic dream, but in spite of the temptations it seemed to offer, it was just another dead end. If Rosa can get into the room, then Nick can get out, and once that opportunity is presented to him, he wouldn’t hesitate to leave. But the point is that he can’t leave. I had given him some light, but he was still locked inside that grim chamber, and without the proper tools to dig his way out, he was eventually going to die in there.

11. When Chang told this story to me twenty years ago, I was certain he was telling the truth. There was too much conviction in his voice for me to doubt his sincerity. Several months ago, however, while preparing for another project, I read a number of works on China during the period of the Cultural Revolution. In one of them, I came across an account of the same incident by Liu Yan, who was a student at the Beijing Number Eleven Middle School at the time of the book burning and witnessed the event. No teacher named Chang is mentioned. A female language teacher is referred to, Yu Changjiang, who broke down and wept at the sight of the burning books. ‘Her tears provoked the Red Guards to give her a few extra lashes, and the belts left ugly scars on her skin.’ (China’s Cultural Revolution, 1966–1969, edited by Michael Schoenhals; Armonk, New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1996.)
    I’m not saying this proves Chang was lying to me, but it does cast some suspicion over his story. Possibly, there were two teachers who wept, and Liu Yan didn’t notice the other one. But it should be pointed out that the book burning was a highly publicized event in Beijing at the time and, in Liu Yan’s words, ‘caused a major stir all over the city.’ Chang would have known about it, even if his father hadn’t been there. Perhaps he told this infamous story in order to impress me. I can’t say. On the other hand, his version was extremely vivid – more vivid than most secondhand accounts – which leads me to wonder if Chang wasn’t present at the book burning himself. And if he was, that must have meant he’d been there as a member of the Red Guard. Otherwise, he would have told me that he’d been a student at the school – which he never did. It is even possible (this is pure speculation) that he himself was the person who lashed the weeping teacher.

12. Grace had been a student at the Rhode Island School of Design, off on a junior-year-abroad program in Paris. Trause was the one who had written to her about van Velde, whom he had met once or twice in the fifties and who was known, he said, to be Samuel Beckett’s favorite artist. (He included Beckett’s dialogue with Georges Duthuit about van Velde in his letter. My case is that van Velde is … the first to admit that to be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail, that failure is his world.) Van Velde’s paintings were rare and expensive, but his graphic works from the sixties and early seventies were quite affordable at the time, and Grace had bought the piece in installments with her own money, skimping on food and other necessities in order to stay within the allowance sent each month by her father. The lithograph was an important part of her youth, an emblem of her growing passion for art as well as a sign of independence – a bridge between the last days of her girlhood and her first days as an adult – and it meant more to her than any other object she owned.

13. The conversation ended with my agreeing to visit Jacob – alone. I was willing to do John that small service, but I was appalled by what he’d said about the boy’s animosity toward Grace. Even if there was some cause for envy on his part (the neglected son cast off in favor of the beloved ‘goddaughter’), I felt no sympathy for him – only disgust and contempt. I would go to the clinic for his father’s sake, but I wasn’t looking forward to the time I would have to spend in his company.
    As far as I could remember, I had met him only twice before. Knowing nothing about his history with Grace, it had never occurred to me to question why she hadn’t been with us on those occasions. The first was a Friday-night outing to Shea Stadium to see a game between the Mets and the Cincinnati Reds. Trause had been given tickets by someone who owned a season box, and because he knew I was a fan, he’d invited me to go along with him. That was in May 1979, just a few months after I’d fallen in love with Grace, and John and I had met for the first time only a couple of weeks earlier. Jacob was about to turn seventeen then, and he and one of his classmates rounded out the foursome. From the moment we entered the stadium, it was clear that neither boy had any interest in baseball. They sat through the first three innings with bored and sullen expressions on their faces, and then they stood up and left, supposedly to buy some hot dogs and ‘wander around for a while,’ as Jacob put it. They didn’t return until the bottom of the seventh – giggling, glassy-eyed, and in far better spirits than before. It wasn’t difficult to guess what they’d been up to. I was still teaching then, and I’d seen enough kids high on pot to recognize the symptoms. John was wrapped up in the game and seemed not to notice, and I didn’t bother to mention it to him. I scarcely knew him at the time, and I figured that what happened between him and his son was none of my business. Beyond saying hello and good-bye to each other, I don’t think Jacob and I exchanged more than eight or ten words the whole night.
    The next time I saw him was about six months later. He was in the middle of his senior year and in danger of flunking all his courses, and John had called up with a last-minute invitation to spend an evening shooting pool. He and Jacob were barely on speaking terms then, and I think he wanted me to come along to serve as a buffer, a neutral third party to prevent war from breaking out between them in a public place. That was the night Jacob and I talked about the Bean Spasms and I acquired my reputation as a cool person. He struck me as an exceedingly bright and hostile kid, determined to screw up his life in every way he could. If I detected any shadow of hope, it was in his determination to beat his father at pool. I was a lousy player and quickly fell behind in every game, but John knew what he was doing, and somewhere along the line he must have taught his son how to play. It brought out the competitiveness in both of them, and the mere fact that Jacob was concentrating on something struck me as an encouraging sign. I didn’t know then that John had been an expert pool hustler in the army. If he’d wanted to, he could have run the table and wiped Jacob out, but he didn’t do that. He pretended to be trying, and in the end he let the boy win. Under the circumstances, it was probably the right thing to do. Not that it did them any good in the long run, but at least Jacob cracked a smile when they finished and walked over to his father and shook his hand. For all I knew, it could have been the last time that ever happened.