“Sorry. Your ears seem very sensitive.”

“Maybe because I’ve been exerting them. Listening.”

“To what?”

“Oh, everything. Conversations I overhear as I walk. What friends say over the phone. They call to see how I am, but they don’t quite believe I’m sick. And if I tell them I’m seeing a witch, I hear this strange veil come over their voices. But they humor me. I even write down things you say that interest me. No wonder my ears are sensitive.”

“That may be.” I’d never known her to deny any possibility, no matter how farfetched, but she looked dubious. She was scientific, in her way.

“The ear and the fetus,” I mused. “Maybe that’s why lovers like to lick ears. They could be licking points that correspond to sex organs.”

“Funny, I never thought of that.” She began pressing her hands down hard along the length of my legs. “I’d like to check it out, but unfortunately no one’s licking my ears at the moment.”

“What ever happened to the rabbi you mentioned a few weeks ago? Is that progressing?”

She sighed. “Slowly. It’s up and down. He called once or twice, we met for a walk, we had coffee. There’s definitely a strong attraction, I know that much. If this weren’t such a puritanical age we probably would have made love by now. Ten, twelve years ago, well . . . But I’m glad we haven’t, because I’m not about to get all involved while he’s living with someone, and I as much as told him so. I also ran into him on the street several times—he lives in the neighborhood. But I think the fates had something to do with that.”

“Which fates?”

“Well, a couple of weeks ago, before I knew for sure about his girlfriend, I cast a spell with my mother.”

“Your mother? Didn’t you say she was in California?”

“She is.” She grinned as she pressed down on my ankles. “We did it over the phone.”

“Oh, is she a witch, too?”

“No, a computer programmer. But she’s very supportive. We lit candies simultaneously and offered up dried flowers at little altars we improvised. Some real witches have elaborate altars to goddesses in their apartments, but I don’t go that far. We told each other how the candles were flickering, and they seemed to be making similar patterns. Three thousand miles apart. I think something powerful must have been passing through the air. Then we both whispered some wishes, and over the next few days I met him twice on the street. By accident, so to speak.”

“I hope your phone isn’t tapped.”

“No kidding, there are covens that do witchcraft over the phone, goddess and spirituality stuff. Conference calls. You know how hard it can be to get a bunch of people together in the city. But I’m too busy working and keeping up with the scientific literature. . . . Well, since that first spell seemed to work, I tried again with a friend, not on the phone. We lit the candles and we also offered up some pieces of very expensive chocolate. Godiva. I figured, if I were a goddess, I’d have high-class tastes. What would induce me to grant someone’s wishes? The thing I came up with was Godiva chocolates.”

“And did that work?”

“I think so. It was right before we had a date to meet in Central Park. We had a lovely time, I thought. We talked, we held hands, we sat on the grass and kissed a little. But that was over a week ago. Since then things have cooled. I ran into him on the street last Friday and he was very casual, as if nothing had ever passed between us. So I’m beginning to think he’s just a playboy, the land who acts very seductive and then when they’re sure they’ve got you interested, that’s the end of it. Do you know the type I mean? They can be pathological, especially when they don’t even realize what they’re doing.”

“Yes, I do.”

“He got what he wanted, which was to get me hooked. On the other hand, he might have changed because I asked him to please clarify for me what is going on with his girlfriend. If we’re going to be just friends, then why doesn’t he invite me over to meet her, I said. And if we’re going to be more than friends, why is he still living with her and deceiving her? I think I might have frightened him off.”

“I bet you did. You’re too much for him. It stands to reason—a witch, and he’s a mere rabbi. He must be scared to death and I don’t blame him.”

She reached over for a small, ornately carved brass box covered by wire mesh. “Your abdomen feels cold. It’s partly the change in weather, but I think I need to send some warmth there.” She placed a gauze pad on my stomach. With a small knife, she scraped some muddy stuff from inside the box and deposited it on the pad to form a little mound.

“What’s that?”

“It’s just moxa in a different form.” She flicked her handy cigarette lighter and applied the flame to the mound resting on my stomach. It sent up plumes of smoke like the warning signs of a volcano. “Tell me if it gets too hot.”

“What kind of spell is this? What horrible symptom will I get now?”

“Nothing from this. The symptoms you’re referring to are a result of the herbs and the acupuncture doing what they’re supposed to. I told you I’d be releasing heat and toxins to free up your energy. They have to come out in some way. What have you had this week?”

I gave her all my complaints.

“I’m not sure what to do, Laura.” It was the first time she’d shown a trace of exasperation. “You can’t tolerate the skin rashes or the stomach cramps or the fever. If you find it all unacceptable, then my hands are tied.”

“Your hands are tied?”

“Yes. Why, what’s so odd about that?”

“Nothing. It’s just.. . you know how sometimes you hear expressions literally, as if for the first time? That happens to me lately. Knowing you, I can’t imagine your hands are tied. You’ll find something. How about a vaginal infection? Yeast or whatever. That’s not so bad, and I’m not using it at the moment.”

“I can try, but I can’t promise. It’s your body that chooses how it responds to the treatment.”

“This potion on my stomach is heating up,” I said sullenly.

She quickly removed the gauze pad, grasping it deftly in her long fingers. “You are getting better, though, Laura. Don’t you feel it? Over and above the transient symptoms?”

“It could be. But the doctor said I might get better in a few months anyway. Who knows? I’m just tired of feeling this way. My patience is wearing down.”

When I was dressed, we kissed good-bye and hugged. She was large, and her body felt hard and supple as a palm tree. “Hold on,” she said.

Through summer’s ebb I keep walking along the river, Lungohudson, mostly in the late afternoons. Play areas with benches appear at five-minute intervals as if designed for my walking habits—and why not, if it’s my estate?—though my favorite is the sandbox where the huge tree stump sits serene amid the children’s rumpus, its bulging whorls of bark like the muscles of a tangled wrestling team. From exposure, the stump’s round-table surface has been bleached to a gray-beige color, with rivulets of yellow and brown and rose streaking through it as through marble. Even with its cracks and fissures, it looks as smooth as if a sculptor’s hands had stroked it patiently over and over until it became like the down of a peach. I imagine it would feel peachy to the touch, and porous, like downy human contours. I don’t touch it, though. I feel a bit of the awe we’ve been taught to feel in museums, and in fact the stump looks eerily man-made, iconic: nature copying primitive art. I’ve never seen anyone else touch it either—it’s so sublimely indifferent.

I like sitting where mothers and children congregate. I study the toddlers wobbling down the slide and rummaging in the sandbox, some of them bellicose, hurling sand as a weapon, others already accustomed to insult. The dreamers sit apart letting sand sift through their plump fingers, while the budding movers and shakers mark off their territory and busily organize equipment—pails, shovels, sieves. On the benches are mothers in varying degrees of attentiveness and an occasional father, but most of the watchers are black or Latina women whose children must be across the city with still other baby-sitters or grandmothers.

The plastic pails these days are notched at the bottom, for instant crenellations. What’s happened to craftsmanship? Jilly and I made our own crenellations, those long-ago summers on the beach, while Ev and Tony dived into the waves. We’d cut them out with sharp shells or with a tarnished butter knife from the house, suiting their size to the grandeur of the castle.

Over on the grass, a few small boys, barely old enough for school, are learning to swing their plastic bats. Each mother or baby-sitter stands six feet away and aims the ball slowly and directly at the bat. The boys swing out wildly the moment the ball leaves her hands. Their bodies are firm, rubbery, and energetic as the Tai Chi teacher urges us to be. Be like a child, he says, or rather the interpreter says. An infant. An infant is infused with energy and moves spontaneously, without tension or stiffness. See how firmly he grabs things in his fist. See how he falls so loosely, he doesn’t get bruised.

About one time out of five, the ball glances off the bat. One time in ten a boy will actually hit the ball, at which the mother sends up great cheers. The boys’ persistence in the face of such a high failure rate is admirable. It seems a marvel that they ever learn to hit the ball, yet they do, for only a block down the Drive, not much bigger boys, with no mothers standing by, are pitching, hitting, running, the whole ball game. At some mysterious point, the nerves connecting brain and hand draw up a contract, and bat smacks ball. Is all the practice necessary or would it happen in any case, like menstruation or erections or death?

A few seven-year-olds are learning to ride bikes with the training wheels removed by eager parents who trot along behind, one hand steadying the back of the seat. At some arbitrary moment the parents let go. Immediately, the children feel the withdrawal of the hand anchoring them to the earth, rooting them, and they hastily concentrate all their efforts on keeping the wheels balanced. Their blood turns to fear; they can’t relinquish their concentration and let the wheels roll, and yet it’s the surfeit of concentration that undoes them. No longer spontaneous, like infants, they’re sabotaged by effort, the mind turned in on itself. The bicycle starts rocking from side to side while the parents shout encouragement in English, Spanish, and Chinese: Just let go, relax and pedal. But the weight of concentration collapses in on the children; their panicky feet abandon the pedals and grope for firm ground. There they stand, shaky and forlorn, as the bicycle clatters to the pavement between their spread legs.

Yet how persistent they are, how bravely willing to climb back on, because for one immeasurably small instant between the removal of the steadying hand and the blood turning to fear, they felt the exhilaration of balance in motion, the blissful absence of effort, the joy of doing without doing. For this immeasurably small instant, they keep trying until one time, caught in the forward impulse, they fail to notice the removal of the steadying hand. They’re carried along, skimming through air for fifteen or twenty feet before the shock—I’m riding the bike, this is the whole idea!—jolts them into concentration once more—Can something so wonderful feel so natural? No, I must earn it!—and once more the bike rocks, this time with a loose, merry abandon. Again it clatters to the pavement, but this time the children stand above it triumphant, like heroes.

One afternoon I felt a spurt of energy, possibly the energy freed up by the low-grade fever et al., which were appearing as promised. This witch delivers. Enough of my own performance. I’d go across town and look at some real art.

A stab of guilt reminded me I was passing Tim’s building. Tim’s familiar window on the first floor, where he told me to knock if I passed by and wanted company. I’d ended it, finally, after our visit with Hal and Celia. Dismissed him, as he put it, slapping my extra set of keys down on his coffee table.

“Sure, I’m not serving any purpose anymore,” he said. “Don’t you think I know that? You’re not the only one who notices what’s going on. You’re not feeling sexy and you’re busy with your notebooks, so what do you need me for?”

“I’m very sorry,” I said, and picked up the keys. “I certainly wouldn’t put it that way. I don’t want to hurt you but I just can’t. . . . It’s not a good time for me to be with anyone. This illness is messing up my head.

I need to sort things out.”

I said other embarrassingly lame things, but he was right to feel dismissed and we both knew it. Still, he wouldn’t be lonely for long. A couple of Saturday afternoons in the Museum of Modern Art should do it. Naturally I didn’t say anything so crude. Businesslike people like Tim are more sensitive than the arty types I’m used to: emotional violence and crudity are our raw materials, our daily bread.

Broadway was thick with strollers, shoppers, panhandlers, and neighborhood crazies cursing their unseen enemies. Tables of secondhand books and racks of clothing stood brazenly on the sidewalks, hot dog vendors dipped their tongs in the simmering vats, as a passing ambulance casually wailed and the Mister Softee truck piped its tune to scurrying children. So dense that I could feel the texture of the air. Practice swimming in air, the Tai Chi teacher said. This air felt more like soup. Thick, rich urban soup. Swimming in soup.

As I boarded the bus that swooped through Central Park, I clutched my bag closer. Joyce’s dismay as she rummaged through her purse was still vivid. I carried my composition notebook everywhere now, to jot down sentences as I unreeled the tapes: Joyce’s eating habits in restaurants, the subtle beliefs of the Tsumati, the witch’s supportive mother lighting candles in California. I couldn’t afford to lose it—I might not be as lucky as once before. There’d still be the typed sections on my desk, but I’d have to reconstruct the newer bits from memory, arduously piecing things together. A rough framework was already taking shape. If memory failed me I’d be forced to fill it in with invention, the way you make substitutions in a recipe when you’ve run out of the real thing. But I was low on invention, too.

Aside from typing faster and holding the notebook tight, I could only trust that the thing would shape itself with what was at hand, making opportunity its design, even making sense of loss, incorporating lost with found. And that the vibrations my ear picked up on the air would pipe a melody to charm me back to myself.

The museum had the look, feel, and smell of a major airport. Getting to the paintings required a great deal of waiting in line. In front of each painting were half a dozen people moving along in the slow, submissive fashion of passengers assembling to board the plane.

“I can’t understand why would he want to paint the same haystacks so many times.” The voice rose from a group leaving the Impressionist room, all similarly dressed for a cultural outing. They thronged the already crowded space.

“Carolyn, Carolyn,” came another voice a few feet off, near a Gauguin. “What say we take this one home?”

I inched on to a Vuillard painting wider than it was high.

“Can she cook and serve, though?” asked a woman edging up beside me.

The painting was in tones of red, burgundy, and maroon, merging into one another. Hues of blood.

“She cooks but she doesn’t serve,” a voice behind me replied. “But she’s very good, very thorough.”

Only gradually could I discern the figures of several women, Vuillard’s mother and sisters, according to the card on the wall. They seemed part of the richly patterned background rather than discrete entities.

“I have to have someone who can serve. The cooking alone is no use to me. Jane can cook all right but she can’t serve. She’s never been trained and she doesn’t have the finesse.”

Vuillard’s mother and sisters sewed at home for a living, the fact-packed card explained, and he painted them over and over, working at their machines. Sometimes he put himself in the paintings, too, a melancholy, bemused presence, but not in this one.

“Well, you can’t expect them to do everything. That’s how it is. If they can clean they can’t cook, and if they can cook they can’t serve.”

Vuillard’s mother and sisters emerged more clearly the longer I looked. It was up to the viewer to find them and dislodge them from their setting, as if they were reluctant to show themselves.

“That’s the hardest thing to get right, the serving. Since Dorothy went back to Barbados I haven’t had a single one. .. . By the way, this is gorgeous, isn’t it? Just gorgeous. I wish I could find drapes that color.”

I tired quickly and took a cab home to the waiting embrace of the bed. Near midnight I woke, tingling and restive. Another spurt of energy—the magic herbs, no doubt, coursing through the channels.

I sat at my desk and wrote down what I’d heard in the museum. Just to clear it from my ears—it was too obvious to be of any use. Next I typed up some pages from the notebook: the water level in Hal and Celia’s pool, the story of the color-blind immigrant and his capes of many colors which appealed to Sarah Bernhardt, as well as Harvey’s being spoonfed applesauce at an indeterminate but definitely inappropriate age. Simple enough work, but my fingers had a different agenda. Typos, misspellings, and homonyms appeared. Familiar phrases ever so slightly off. Shades of Hortense! Had my fingers forgotten the layout of the keyboard? Protesting this project made of scraps? They preferred the small seaside town.

I paced through the apartment as if taking inventory, putting errant things in place. Restoring order may be the tangible expression of panic, but it’s also the remedy. I stared out at the night and checked on the river, always reliable. The squirrel hadn’t appeared for a while but the nest was there—I’d grown careless about cleaning it up. It had come to seem a natural growth on the ledge, like the ivy of which it was made. My heart pulsed, craving action. Again I tried to type my notes, but hands and brain refused to cooperate, as if they’d never been properly introduced, as if I were one of the small boys wildly swinging a plastic bat.

On the desk was a letter from my editor, no longer Gretchen, alas. A couple of years after introducing me to Ev at that book party, she’d joined a group of radical activists bound for Central America and stayed. Somewhere in Guatemala, she was teaching children to read. The letter slipped through my fingers to the floor. I picked it up and gripped it firmly with both hands. He’d had no luck reaching me by phone, he wrote, and politely chided my not using the answering machine. What about lunch someday soon? Oh, and he was enclosing the galleys of a hot new novel of disaffected, coke-snorting youth, hoping I’d supply some words of praise to help sell it. How was my work progressing, by the way?

It would be politic, to say the least, to reply. Keep the show going. Grace once mentioned a performance artist who sent his friends postcards announcing what time he got up each morning, and occasional telegrams saying, “I am still alive.” After a while these were collected and hung in a gallery, making a statement of sorts. A document.

Dear Colin, Am I correct in interpreting your six-month silence as a faint brushoff, a sign that my stock is sinking, or am I being oversensitive? I knew a man once who used to say I was very touchy, but never mind. Yes, probably you were on vacation, or in a meeting. . . .

No, no, no, that would never do. What’s gotten into you, Laura? Delete.

Dear Colin, Yes, I’m starting a novel. I do appreciate your interest, but in all honesty, I suspect it’s not going to be any more “commercial” than the last. Probably less so. At least with the way it’s shaping up I can’t see . . .

Out of control. Is this what Hortense meant when she said she couldn’t sew properly? Delete, and fast.

Dear Colin, Yes indeed, there’s a new book in the works. And what a blockbuster it will be! Victorian neurasthenia, origins ambiguous. Or call it immune-system breakdown, sign of the times. Action-packed thrills on every page: fevers, vertigo, muscle aches. Long walks along bodies of water. Oh, yes, and a love triangle. Well, not exactly a triangle but something or other. And much, much more. Maybe not quite blockbuster material, come to think of it. Maybe a trifle self-involved, as my late husband used to say, if that isn’t an oxymoron . . .

The poor computer was perplexed. Are you sure you wish to delete? it kept asking. You are deleting more than can be retrieved. Well, yes, I’ve made that mistake before. I took pity on it and got a grip on my wayward fingers.

Dear Colin, I’m sorry I missed your calls. Yes, I’d love to have lunch but I’m very tied up with work at the moment. How about in a month or two, when I’ve gotten things organized. I’ll give you a call then, and look forward to seeing you. Warmly, Laura. PS. The galleys look intriguing—I’ll have a look as soon as I can.

There. An impeccable performance. So lifelike, you could hardly call it a metaphor. Simply the cry we all utter behind each small, ritual interchange. “I am still alive.”

Save. Print. Bed.

I haven’t made it to the Tai Chi class since I returned from the Cape, but I’ll get there this morning no matter what. I wake early to allow time for the somnambulistic rites. Raising shades, opening windows, checking the squirrel’s empty bed and greeting the river, this cool, crisp morning streaked by silver light with lime-green patches like splashes of Pernod.

Going down the hill to the park I meet Grace, looking morose. “Hi. How’s your dental performance shaping up? I hope I didn’t miss it while I was away.”

“Don’t worry,” she mutters. “It’s off.”

“Really? That’s too bad. What happened?”

“The dentist made a pass at me.”

“Oh, for Chrissakes. I thought you knew him. He was interested in the project, wasn’t he?”

“Yeah, well, I see what he was interested in. I don’t know him that well—I’ve seen him maybe three or four times. And he did it in such a canny way too. Yuck.”

“During the root canal work?”

“No, it wasn’t a regular visit. I stopped in to pick up some insurance form. Just as I was leaving, at the door, he bent over fast and kissed me on the lips and cupped my breast with his hand. The hand that wasn’t holding the doorknob. I swear, it was so quick I couldn’t do a thing. In an instant he had the door open and there I was facing a waiting room full of people.”

“Couldn’t you make a scene?”

“Who would believe me? He’d say I was a hysterical woman. Anyway, it’s hard to make a scene when you’re flabbergasted. Before I could even grasp it, it was over. A guy in his sixties, married. Grandchildren, I bet.”

“Did he have his mouth open or closed?”

“I don’t remember. Partly open, I guess.”

“Did he press his body against you?”

“No, I don’t think so. What is this anyway, Laura? The Spanish Inquisition?”

“Sorry. It’s too bad about your idea.”

“I’ll have another idea. There’s no shortage of ideas. More important at the moment is my teeth.”

“Why don’t you make some kind of complaint? Tell the insurance company. Or the dentists’ association.”

“Are you kidding? They’d laugh. No, no complaints whatsoever. It’s not like I’m scarred for life or anything. And you know how those bureaucracies work—I’d be embroiled forever. I should have told him, Doc, I’m a dyke. That might have scared him off. Or I wonder if I could have used Tai Chi. What do you think the teacher would say? Yield and be soft? Imagine where that would get me!”

“I somehow don’t think that’s the sort of situation the old masters had in mind.”

“No,” says Grace. “He says they were fearless in the face of ferocity. But the dentist wasn’t what I’d call ferocious.”

“No. Oh, that reminds me. I went to the Fauves show at the Met the other day and thought of you. What you said about museums not being the right place to show art. I thought I’d wandered into a suburban shopping mall.” I tell her about the woman in search of a maid who could serve as well as cook.

“Well, those women have a right to look at paintings, too. That would be okay, to hang work in shopping malls. The paintings could be part of daily life, next to the Taco Bell place or the merry-go-round. Or between the ATM machine and the ice-cream bar. In the Middle Ages the art was in the cathedrals, which were gathering places, and you’d see it whenever you passed through. Of course that was a holy atmosphere, but nowadays shopping malls are holy, so it comes to the same thing. Or else hang them in the subway. That would be ideal. Other countries have art in the subways.”

“It would certainly look better than ads for acne, warts, and anal fissures.” We’ve reached the park now and can see the others standing around in clusters, waiting.

Grace shakes her head sadly. “They should think of those ads as our public art, then see if the Moral Majority would make a stink. Or if the NEA would fund them, not that those guys need funding. Listen, twenty-odd years ago there were these hordes of hippie couples coming to the museums in their tie-dyed uniforms with babies on their backs and toddlers trailing with sticky lollipops. They’d put the kid in front of a Picasso and say, So, Jason, what do you think of that? And the father would whip out a notebook to preserve Jason’s opinion for posterity. Meanwhile people are standing there trying to get a peek at the painting. So, is that any different from busloads of suburbanites getting culture?”

“Maybe not. I was in school back then. That all seemed very exotic and free.”

“Yeah, well, I dropped out,” says Grace. “I happened to be one of those counterculture types with the sticky kid holding my hand. But even then I knew that parading through those huge overheated rooms with one great picture after another lined up on the white walls was not the way. People get the idea that art has to do with self-improvement, you know, take your regular doses, like vitamins. And now, between the cards on the wall and the tapes you plug in your ears that tell you what to think, how can you see or feel anything? Those tapes should be bombed out of existence.”

I’ve never heard Grace so irritable. “How many kids do you have?”

“Just the one.”

“Where is he? Or she?”

“He. Don’t ask. He’s a schoolteacher in Memphis. He married a born-again Christian and he became one, too. It’s his personal backlash, my punishment for giving him a disorderly childhood. What did I know? I thought he’d be a free spirit. He thinks I’m a disgrace, my work, the fact that I live with a woman, everything about me. You know, I think he’d prefer it if I were really militant, heavily into gay rights and stuff. Then I’d have a kind of religion. He could relate to that. This way, he thinks I’m just perverse. I’ve told him it’s not that I didn’t like men per se. I had my share. Only after a while I just couldn’t take all the shit that goes along with it.”

“I don’t suppose he appreciated that.”

“No.”

“But I know what you mean. I’ve thought the same thing. Believe me, I’ve often considered...”

“It’s not something you consider, Laura. You just find yourself doing it.”

“I guess I never met anyone who’s my type.”

“Why, what’s your type? Oh, don’t get alarmed, I’m happy with Irene. I’m just curious.”

“My type? Big shoulders, hairy chest, scratchy cheeks . . .”

“Uh-huh.” She nods as we take our places in the assembling group. “I can see your problem. But I’ll keep my eyes open. You never know.”

“Good morning,” the teacher says. “Continue.”

“He could change,” I whisper halfheartedly.

“He’d have to,” Grace whispers back, “because I can’t.”

Then it’s business as usual. Relax, sink, keep the breath thin, long, quiet and slow. Spine straight—it’s the Pillar of Heaven. Joints loose. Feel the weight of the air, feel the arms encircling the ball of energy. Like Mount Lu and the River Che, nothing much.

“In the olden days,” he says, as he has said often before, “the masters used to teach at the shore of a lake. The students would raise their arms and with the invisible strings at their fingertips pull up the energy of the water. When the water level began rising, ha ha, they knew they were doing Tai Chi. Here we have the river. See what you can do.” He glances in my direction and the interpreter’s gaze follows along. “A parable, Laura.”

“Ha ha,” I reply. Could the interpreter do all this by himself, maybe? Surely he knows the images and parables after so much translation. Unless the teacher’s presence and voice are needed for the efficacy of the words. Is there an original that the teacher translates from?

We do the arm-raising movement five, ten, fifteen times—why keep track? We’ve done it many times before. We know the repetitions are a test of endurance, and by now we’ve mastered the unspoken secret of endurance, which is not to long for the test to be over. The teacher himself has no sense of time, or I should say feels no pressure about time, though the lessons begin unfailingly at the appointed moment and end exactly an hour later. How he manages this is unclear. Perhaps he goes by the progress of the sun, scaling the sky from the east or heading down to rest overnight in the river.

“All right, enough. Now we’ll do a little exercise. Rooting the feet.”

We’ve done this little exercise before. We stand with one foot forward and the other slightly behind and pointed outward, like fourth position in ballet. We place all our weight on the front leg for two or three minutes, then switch to the back leg. Very simple, back and forth for an eternity. The faint of heart, or of leg (in Chinese medicine their strength is interdependent, linked by the circulation), drop out quickly. I endure out of pride and habit, though this may well cost today’s quota of energy.

“If you do this for a few minutes each day, growing your root deep into the earth, nothing will throw you off balance.”

He calls me over to do push hands with Marvin, who seems preoccupied. Maybe video rentals are in a slump. He teeters off balance again and again. The teacher lectures him about adhering. To me he says, “I see you’re listening to him.”

“I don’t know why it’s happening. I’m not even trying.”

“Not trying is good. But something is different,” he insists. “You’ve started to listen. To listen.” He says those last two words in English and ears perk up all around: What’s going on here—the teacher spoke in English!

He fixes me with a penetrating look. Of course. “You’re right, actually. I have been listening.”

He’s satisfied. I’ve given the correct answer.

Afterward, the students sit or lie on the grass, limp, the two stockbrokers resting their heads on their attaché cases. The teacher comes over to ask, through the interpreter, how I enjoyed my vacation. I’m glad to see that at least he acknowledges my words directly, without having them translated.

“Have you seen the woman I suggested? Carol?”

I always forget she’s only human and has an ordinary name.

“Oh, yes, thanks again. You did get my note? That was very kind of you.”

“Is she helping?”

“I think so. At least I feel better for a couple of days after I see her. She’s a bit of a witch, isn’t she?” Carol the Witch.

“A wise woman.”

“That’s what I meant. A good witch. Can she make the waters rise?”

“Yes, I think she can. It’s nice to have you back, Laura.”

“Thank you.” I look the interpreter squarely in the eye. “Nice to see you again, too.” An experiment.

He nods blandly as they turn to leave. Has he nothing to say for himself?