II

WHEN I emerged from bed late one Sunday afternoon, my mother said, “That little Markapolous girl called you.” Maybe to my mother every female under twenty was still a little girl, but even so, that seemed a strange way to describe Cassandra. I called back, and Cassy said, “No, it wasn’t me. Must have been little sister. Hang on a minute.”

In an instant Zoë was effervescing at me: “Hi, John, are you doing anything today? Do you feel like taking some pictures? I’ve been waiting for it to cool off, but it’s never going to cool off . . .” and on and on: her Courrèges copy dress, and some other outfits she’d put together, and some editorial shots she’d show me in Seventeen, and I was thinking, oh, right, for her book. “I don’t even own a camera, Zoë.” That was a lie; I still had my old Argus from high school.

“That’s OK,” she said, “Dad’s got one. A really nice one. He said you could use it if you were careful. I bought film too.”

As I walked toward Cassy’s house, I was met by the bright whir of the lawnmower and the grotesque figure of Doctor Markapolous, his white hairy legs sticking out of plaid Bermudas, his pot gut hanging out: this funny cheerful man waving at me. “Hi there, John, how goes the Confederacy?”

“Oh, just great,” I lied. “Twenty more pages.”

“Fine, fine. And how are you doing?”

“Is that a professional question?”

He laughed. “God, you’re a flip kid. No, just inquiring after your soul.”

“My soul’s wallowing in free-floating angst.”

“It’s called youth,” he said as he began to manhandle the lawnmower through the thick grass. “Things that bother you in your twenties don’t seem much of a problem in your fifties. And I know my saying it won’t do you any good at all.”

How the hell did he get so cheery? Maybe I should have gone into medicine.

I walked around to the back of the house and found Cassandra lying on a beach towel in Lolita sunglasses and a white bikini, a stack of books next to her. I couldn’t understand how she did it; no matter how much beer she drank, she stayed as lean as ever. “Jesus, Cass,” I said, “you look sexier than seventeen harem girls.”

“Yeah? Well, what I am is braised like a short rib.”

I sat down next to her on the towel. In the direct afternoon sun I began to sweat in torrents. “So where’s little sister?”

“Preparing her outfits. Her costumes. Her goddamn wardrobe. Whatever models call it. Jesus.”

Cassandra had rubbed every inch of her exposed body with baby oil, and plenty of her body was exposed. The white of her bikini flared out to an eye-blistering solarized nothingness against the gleaming surface of her skin; as brown as I’d got in Florida, she was browner. I could see nothing of her eyes; the surface of her sunglasses reflected back nothing but sky. She was, I thought, positively iconic. “Do we have to sit in the sun?” I asked her.

We moved to the front porch glider and drank iced tea with fresh mint. I closed my eyes to try to clear away the blaze of afterimages. “I was trying to remember,” I said, “what color your bikini was . . . that time when I dropped by here and found you in the backyard.”

“You mean when you first met me?”

“Yeah.”

“It was blue. Turquoise blue. Dad had a fit when he saw it. I wasn’t allowed to wear it to the pool, and it wasn’t even that brief.”

“It was pretty brief for those days.”

She’d taken her sunglasses off, but I still couldn’t read her face. “I’ll never forget the first time I tried to talk to you,” I said. “It was right here. On this glider. You were sitting exactly like that . . . with your feet up on the railing.”

“What’s this, nostalgia time?”

No, I thought, just trying to connect with you. “Something like that,” I said, “Déjà vu maybe. I remember admiring your ankle bones . . .”

“Oh, God,” with a laugh.

“Boy, was that hard. Everything that came out of my mouth just sounded unbelievably stupid.”

“Hard? You think it was hard for you?”

We swung gently. It had never occurred to me that it might have been hard for her too. “I didn’t care what you said,” she told me. “You could have said anything. I knew perfectly well you’d come to see me.”

“Yeah? How’d you know that?”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, you had it written all over you. And then you made me wait damn near two months before you came back again, you son of a bitch.” Her voice had been flat as a breadboard, but she was smiling slightly. I felt a silvery shiver down the back of my neck. “Oh, come on, Cassy,” I said, “you seemed so cool.”

“Yeah, I was cool all right . . . I was just out of the eighth grade, and you’d already graduated from high school.”

Amazing. In the five years we’d known each other, we’d never talked about any of this. “Did you think you were too young?”

“Oh, hell, no. That never crossed my mind. I had a highly inflated opinion of myself . . . except for my figure. I didn’t think I had much of a figure. But I certainly thought I was mature enough for you . . . Oh, I knew I’d get in trouble with Mom, and I did. And it took me a long time to believe you were serious, and . . . Well, I couldn’t pretend to be . . . I even knew it at the time . . . I remember thinking he better like me for who I am, because who I am is who I am.”

“That’s wonderful,” I said. “That’s exactly how you came across.”

“Oh, yeah? What a pain in the ass I was. I can’t believe myself sometimes. I remember thinking that I was so much more complicated and interesting than all those . . .”

With a bang of the screen door, Zoë was out on the porch with us. Her hair was up on rollers. “Cassy, why didn’t you tell me John was here?” and then to me: “Do you want to see Dad’s camera? It has a whole bunch of lenses with it . . .” She was raining words down on us like handfuls of bright beads. “Wish we had a studio . . . the backyard over by the hedge . . . in the living room maybe . . . a real romantic prom look . . .”

“Zo,” Cassandra said, her voice uninflected and deliberate, “can you leave us alone for a minute?”

Little sister stopped in mid-flight. “But John’s said he’d . . .”

“I know what John said. John will come and play with you in a minute, all right?”

Zoë’s emotion was compressed into a single blue-eyed flash. She wasn’t miffed or annoyed or even badly deflated; she was genuinely hurt. Then she turned and was gone, letting the screen door slam behind her. I felt a pang of sympathy for her. “The light’s not right,” I called after her. “The sun’s still too high.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake.” Cassandra collapsed back onto the glider, let her head fall back so she was staring upward at the ceiling. “How the hell did you get so goddamned fat?”

“Jesus! Why does everybody keep asking me that? I drank a lot of beer. I ate a lot of crap. I sat on my ass and wrote half a fucking book.”

She didn’t say anything. “There’s no place to walk in Los Angeles,” I said, feeling monumentally sorry for myself. Oh, this is intolerable, intolerable. And then another wave of fury struck me like a mugger having a second go. “How the hell did you get so bitter? ” I yelled at her.

“Give me a cigarette.”

I offered her the pack. She hesitated, then pushed it away. I followed the direction of her eyes. Her father still had two or three passes to make over the lawn; he’d paused to mop his forehead with his handkerchief. “I can’t take another goddamned lecture,” she said. “I don’t care what’s happening to my cilia. I don’t care what’s happening to my bronchia.”

We watched her father finish up the lawn and push the mower into the garage. He walked into the house, and I handed her the cigarettes. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” she said. “I wish the hell I did . . . Sometimes I think Bennington was a mistake.”

“Yeah?”

“I probably should have gone to Antioch or Oberlin.”

“What’s wrong with Bennington?”

“Shit, it’s not that bad. It’s a good school. It’s certainly liberal . . . It’s just . . . The whole goddamn place is full of girls.”

I laughed. She gave me a bleak smile. “Yeah, I suppose it is funny . . . Oh, fuck, John, I’m one of these weird girls who never had girl friends. When I was a kid, I was always one of the boys . . . and then you came along . . . and then there were always more boys coming along.”

She shrugged. “Girls can be so fucking petty . . . Oh, some of them are nice enough. They’re not all preppy New England snots . . . although a lot of them are. And you know what I am? I’m ‘the Greek girl from West Virginia.’ That’s great, isn’t it? I don’t even remember my grandfather . . . but when it turns out that I’m not an expert on stuffed grape leaves and the Parthenon, they don’t know what to make of me. And West Virginia? They don’t even know where it is, for Christ’s sake. I didn’t know I had a West Virginia accent, but I guess I do. Jesus.”

Now she was inviting me to laugh with her, and I did. “Oh, it’s not that bad,” she said, “or . . . you know, unbearable or anything like that. Like Camus says, in the long run you get used to anything. But whatever I do, it’s never quite right. It’s not a big blatant thing. It’s really subtle. I can’t quite put my finger on it. But I just don’t . . .”

“If you’re different,” I said, “they pick you to pieces, but if you try to be like them, that doesn’t work either because they know you don’t mean it.”

I could see I’d surprised her. “Christ, you’ve got a good memory,” she said after a moment. “You’re the only person I know who can quote me back to myself.”

“Well, it is kind of similar, isn’t it?”

“Of course it is. But I don’t want my life to be Canden High School over and over again forever . . . just an endless series of places where I’ve got to figure out how to fit in. Shit, maybe it gets easier. Maybe I should let Zoë cut bangs in my hair so I’d look like Françoise Hardy. I don’t know. Maybe William’s right. Maybe it’s just growing up.”

“But not like he’s doing it. Can’t you see how hard he’s working at it?”

“Oh, yeah. But maybe that’s what it comes down to in the end. Like Sartre says, you choose yourself. But what he doesn’t say is that you’ve got to choose from what’s possible.”

“Do you really think you’re going to end up in some New England suburb pushing a baby carriage?”

“I just said that to piss you guys off. But yeah, that’s probably what will happen to me.”

That wonderful turn of phrase from The Port Huron Statement popped into my head. I hadn’t thought of it for years. “So the message you’re getting,” I said to her, “is that there’s no viable alternative to the present?”

“That’s good. That’s it exactly.”

“But there’s got to be a way out, Cassy.”

“Yeah? Where is it?”

• • •

MY WAY out was my Civil War novel. It was my secret ace in the hole, my only consolation. I’d called it The Rest Is Silence (I’d thought that a perfect title for a story told entirely from a Confederate point of view, one that ended in crushing defeat and the bleak hopeless days of Reconstruction), and all I had to do was finish my first draft, read the manuscript over again and tighten it up, send it around until I found an enthusiastic editor (my Maxwell Perkins, an infinitely patient guy with impeccable taste who would help me impose some order on the damned thing), and then it would be published, shoot to the top of The New York Times best seller list, and I’d be off to the races. Not being a complete idiot, I knew that it probably wasn’t going to be quite as easy as all that, but I did believe in my own talent. I kept telling myself that if I worked on it every day, eventually I’d get somewhere— maybe not exactly where I thought I was going but certainly farther along than I was at the moment.

I had slipped into the novel sideways, merely amusing myself in the Void, certainly not setting out to do anything as arduous as writing a book. I’d always wondered about my great-grandfather, the first John Henry Dupre. Had he really been from New Orleans? Had he really ridden with Morgan? Who the hell was Morgan? If Morgan had not been a phantom fabricated by my father, if he’d actually existed and fought in the Civil War, then his career must be on public record. One weekend soon after I’d arrived in L.A., a weekend in which I was bored beyond belief and nearly dying of loneliness, I went to the public library and looked him up, discovered within ten minutes that Morgan had not only been a real person but had been famous—or notorious, depending on which side of the war one’s sympathies lay.

His name was John Hunt Morgan. His mother’s family, the Hunts, were Southern aristocrats; his grandfather, John Wesley Hunt, was the first millionaire west of the Alleghenies. Morgan was born in Alabama in 1825 but raised in Lexington, Kentucky. (Ahha, I thought, that’s where my grandfather died, so there’s got to be a connection.) Morgan had a university education and, by all accounts, was the walking personification of the Southern gentleman: hot-blooded, headstrong, independent, and honorable. He grew up in the Kentucky of the grand manner, of blue-blooded gentry living side by side with wild frontiersmen, of fox hunts and grand balls, of duels fought at dawn over a lady’s honor. He served in the Mexican war, saw action at Buena Vista, returned to Kentucky, founded the Lexington Rifles in 1857. He advocated the secession of his state, joined the Confederate forces as soon as the war began, commanded the 2nd Kentucky Cavalry—“Morgan’s own.” He became a colonel in 1862 and, later in the same year, was promoted to brigadier general.

A dashing, smiling officer with a debonair mustache, six feet tall, immaculately dressed even in the most harrowing of circumstances, John Hunt Morgan drew legend to himself like lightning to a rod. From the mythologizing of the heroes of the first American Revolution (Confederates called theirs the second), from Arthurian legends and the example of the English cavaliers, from Tennyson and Scott and the popular romances of the day, the South had developed an ideal of what a soldier should be—a Christian warrior, a gallant knight—and what is most amazing is not that such an antique model of behavior should have been pitted against the practicality of the Yankee war machine, but that so many of the Confederate generals, headed by the saintly Robert E. Lee, managed to live up to it.

Southerners idealized John Hunt Morgan, called him “The Thunderbolt of the Confederacy,” compared him to Robin Hood. In the North, he was a ghostly, terrifying figure called “Morgan the raider.” His cavalry could outride any Yankee on horseback, and Morgan had the nasty habit of turning up hundreds of miles from where anyone thought it was possible he could be, often well to the rear of Federal lines. A military court of inquiry once asked a Union major, apparently in all seriousness, if he had any evidence that Morgan had ever been seen in two places at the same time.

In July of 1863, Morgan, exceeding his orders, made his most famous raid—through Kentucky, Indiana, and across Ohio nearly to the Pennsylvania border—one of the longest rides by regular cavalry behind enemy lines in the history of modern warfare. For twenty-five days Morgan tied up nearly all the Federal forces in the Midwest; it’s estimated that 110,000 men were looking for him before it was over. Trading spent horses for fresh as he went, Morgan used up 15,000 mounts, took his men over a mountain that locals claimed could only be climbed by goats, destroyed ten million dollars’ worth of Federal property. He was captured at the point farthest north ever reached by an armed Confederate force, was sent, not to a military prison, but to the Ohio state penitentiary at Columbus. He pulled off a storybook jailbreak—some historians believe the stories current at the time that he tunneled his way out, others claim that Confederate agents bribed prison officials—but, despite a massive manhunt, he managed to escape back to the South.

Morgan, who was always the master of the grand gesture, once gave a captured train as a token to the local Yankee ladies. His critics suggested that it might have been more to the point if he’d burned it. His raids were the very stuff of high romance, but he disobeyed orders, did what he damned well pleased. Confederate generals grumbled that he’d be more useful as the regular cavalry extension of Bragg’s army than as an unpredictable independent raider galloping through the North.

Accounts of his last days make sorry reading. It’s as though Morgan had begun the war thinking of himself as Parsifal but ended it realizing he was Don Quixote. The cream of Southern chivalry was dead by then; many of the men who filled Morgan’s last command were little more than bandits. He couldn’t control them. Looting had become epidemic. Morgan was about to be relieved of his command. His friends say that a profound gloom settled over him, that he knew he’d never live to see the end of the war. The Yankees, he said, would never make the mistake of capturing him alive a second time. His death was mysterious. Some say he was betrayed by a woman, others that he was done in by his own stupidity. The Michigan cavalry who took him appeared to know exactly what they were doing, rode directly to the house where he was sleeping. He was shot down in a grape arbor. The entire South mourned.

So that was Morgan. Honorable, daring, independent. Rash, insubordinate, stupid. The perfect metaphor for the South: a gentleman and a jackass. And wasn’t it a fabulous story—a perfect story for a ten-pound novel and then, later, for a spectacular treatment on the big screen? You’re damned right it was, and I really wanted to tell that story.

• • •

FOR SEVERAL nights after I got off work (I’d landed the job in the camera store by then), I paced up and down Sunset Boulevard mulling it all over, trying to figure out the best way to go about it. I decided that I needed an observer, someone off to the side, involved in the action but not at the center of it—someone to play Nick Carraway to Morgan’s Jay Gatsby—and I soon had that character. He was a quiet watchful fellow with a shadowy background. He was said to have fled New Orleans after killing a man in a knife fight, or maybe it was a gun fight, no one knew for sure. I called him Henri Leblanc. He wasn’t a big man (was about my height, as a matter of fact); he spoke with a slight French accent, was always impeccably dressed, and made his living as a gambler.

As the story opens, Leblanc has just escaped, in a flurry of gunplay, from a riverboat where he was accused of cheating at cards. He hides out in the mountain fastness of Western Virginia, down in Hatfield and McCoy territory (where I had never been and about which I knew nothing). There he is befriended by a wild mountain clan of pig farmers and moonshiners. The patriarch of the clan has a beautiful young red-haired granddaughter who falls in love with Leblanc. Her name is Evergrace; in several touching scenes, she sings Elizabethan ballads and accompanies herself on the dulcimer. Although he’s moved by the beauty of the place and the rude dignity of the folk (and, of course, is charmed by Evergrace), Leblanc knows that he can’t settle down in the mountains. One night there’s a drunken fight. Up until then, Leblanc has gone out of his way to avoid trouble, but his patience has worn thin; he whips out his hidden Bowie knife and throws it into the heart of an obnoxious lout. Then, at dawn, he gallops off to Kentucky to join the Confederate Army.

Hearing that the great Morgan needs men in his cavalry, Leblanc rides to Lexington (where I had never been and about which I knew nothing) where he meets the dashing ne’er-do-well blue-blood, Fraser MacGillivray, who is serving under Morgan. Leblanc and MacGillivray become instant friends, and MacGillivray introduces Leblanc to the best families in Lexington, including the Tubervilles where, at a grand ball, Leblanc meets their youngest daughter, Eleanor, and falls in love with her at first sight . . . And that’s as far as I’d gone with it. The war hadn’t started yet, Morgan was still offstage, and I’d already covered four hundred pages. I was, I thought from time to time, probably doing something wrong. Maybe there was too much detail. Maybe I should have opened the story in Kentucky, not Western Virginia (although that didn’t feel right somehow). But one thing was certain: it wasn’t going to get finished if I didn’t work on it.

In one of the dozen or so how-to-be-a-writer books I’d consulted in L.A., I’d found a bit of advice that had made perfect sense to me: never revise until you have a completed first draft. So day after day I’d forced myself to plow ahead without ever looking back any farther than yesterday’s work; that’s the way I’d piled up those four hundred pages. A year and a half of my life had gone into those pages, and I still hadn’t read them straight through from beginning to end.

• • •

AFTER DINNER we retired to little sister’s territory. It was slightly cooler down there, almost pleasant, with shafts of sunlight through the high slit windows lighting up the brilliant colors of Zoë’s fabrics, with a rotating fan gently riffling through the pages of her fashion magazines. Sonny and Cher, on the radio, were proclaiming their eternal love for each other while, on the old tattered couch, Cassandra was taking the rollers out of Zoë’s hair and throwing them into a shoebox. “My God,” she said to me, “do you remember when I used to set my hair every damn day? Boy, am I glad I don’t have to do that anymore.”

“You never had to,” Zoë said primly. “You have naturally curly hair.”

I was studying the good doctor’s camera; of course it would be a Nikon. I replaced the standard 50 mm. lens with the 80 mm. portrait lens, looked through it. What I’d always told prospective buyers was absolutely true: Nikons did have the loveliest focusing system in the world. I zeroed in on the cornea of Zoë’s right eye; the lens put me practically in her lap. “Miss Fairfax wants me to try a lot of different looks,” Zoë was saying. “She says you’ve got to be versatile . . .”

“Who’s Miss Fairfax?” I said.

“The old bag who keeps taking Dad’s money,” Cassandra said.

“She’s not an old bag,” Zoë said, annoyed. “She’s the head of the agency.”

“Oh, we’ve got a modeling agency in Raysburg, do we?” I said. “And Miss Fairfax? Christ, nobody in Raysburg, West Virginia, is named Miss Fairfax.”

“Her name was probably Myrtle Gotz,” Cassy said.

“Will you guys stop making fun of me?” Zoë said. “You can hurt my feelings, you know.”

Zoë must have been planning her photo shoot for days. She had everything worked out in a notebook—at least a dozen different looks. She’d sketched each one with cartoon drawings that I thought were genuinely clever; in a precise, unbelievably tiny handwriting she’d listed every article of clothing she would need all the way down to her underwear. Paper-clipped to her notes were pages torn from magazines so we could see exactly what she wanted. “For Christ’s sake, Zo,” her sister said, “we’re never going to get through all these.”

“Oh, sure we will. They’re all with the same hairstyle . . . except for the last one . . . well, sort of the same.”

“God, this is worse than playing dress-up when you were six.”

“How would you know? You never played with me.”

“Touché,” I said.

“I’m not kidding,” Zoë said to me. “When we were little, Cassy thought she was a boy.”

“No,” Cassandra said, laughing, “I always knew I was a girl. That was the trouble.”

Big sister and I went outside to scout a location while Zoë ran up to her bedroom to create her first look. I stood Cassandra in a deep blue afternoon shadow and took light readings from her face. The low sun was blasting through holes in the hedge; I could use it as a back light, but I’d have to be careful. “If I didn’t know you,” Cassy said, “I could almost believe you knew what you were doing,” then, as she saw her sister trotting out from the house, “Gloves, Zoë?”

In spite of the heat, Zoë was wearing not only shortie gloves but a nubby wool jumper with white ribbed stockings, on her feet deft little ghillies that looked fresh from the box. She was carrying a purse that matched the shoes. “It’s a back-to-school look,” she said. “You see a lot of this in Seventeen.” I looked at her though the lens. As I’d guessed it would be, the light was exquisite; against the deeply absorptive green of the hedge, her skin seemed to glow with an inner radiance. I focused on her impossibly blue eyes. “You look fresh as a dewdrop,” I said.

“God, Dupre,” Cassandra said, “you’re such a poet . . . Hey, did you get a load of the bow? Turn around, Zo.”

Zoë spun on her heels to show us the back of her head; her hair was caught back in a blue bow that must have been a foot across. “Back to school?” Cassandra said. “I’d just love to see you turn up at Canden High looking like that.”

“This isn’t for real, dopey. I’m a girl in a magazine.”

“Oh, is that who you are? I was afraid for a minute you were you.”

“I wanted to do one really prissy look . . . you know, all scrubbed and polished . . . everything matching . . . one hundred percent the lady.”

“One hundred percent the lady? One hundred percent the candy-ass is more like it.”

Zoë made a small strangled yelp that I realized was a giggle. She covered her mouth but couldn’t stop. “Don’t do that, dopey,” her sister said. “You’ll get lipstick on your pretty white gloves.”

“Stop it, stop it, stop it!” Zoë was laughing so hard she was bent forward, holding her sides.

“Oh, dear God,” Cassandra said to me, “where did that pathetic thing come from? Somebody please drown it in the bathtub.”

“Come on, Cassy,” Zoë gasped out between spasms of laughter, “that’s not fair.” She didn’t look much like a model, but the giddy girl I was watching through the lens might be, I thought, cute enough to be preserved on film, so I started to shoot.

“OK,” Cassandra said, “I’ll be good . . . Take a couple deep breaths. You can do it, sweetheart. You look terrific, no lie . . . OK, now sell us those damn clothes.”

Zoë turned her back on us. When she faced us again, I could see how hard she was concentrating. “OK,” she said and began posing, imitating the girls in Seventeen. She’d obviously learned a thing or two from her Mickey Mouse modeling courses, and soon I could see what she was trying to do, even anticipate her. At first she looked stiff, but gradually something magical began to happen; she was no longer riding on her innate beauty but reaching for something deeper. “Hey, she’s pretty good,” her sister said.

“You’re damned right I am,” Zoë said, and her eyes fired a stinging bolt of blue electricity straight down the lens. I caught it. I was getting better too.

• • •

WITH CASSANDRA egging us on, I shot Zoë in polka dots and stripes, in paisley and lace, in voile and cotton, in rayon and wool; I shot her looking schoolgirlish, looking demure, looking Romantic, looking Young London, with and without bows in her hair, in a kerchief and a little cap that Zoë called a “helmet” (but Cassandra called a “baby bonnet”), in knee socks and loafers, in nylons and pumps, in her Courrèges copy dress and go-go boots. Now Cassandra and I were sitting in the dining room, waiting for little sister to come back and present us with what she’d sworn would be her final image.

Looking through a camera lens had made me keenly aware of light. The low golden blaze of the late afternoon sun was transforming even the most commonplace objects—the oak table, the silver candelabra, the marble top of the antique sideboard, the crystal in its display case, the threadbare Oriental rug on the floor—into objects of rare beauty. The light was perfect. “What’s taking her?” I said.

“Oh, this one’s a major production.”

The sharp nose-twisting smell of nail polish remover sprang into the room: Cassandra was changing her white polish. “Zo’s got the right idea,” she said. “If you’re a girl, you sell your looks. Nobody really gives a shit about anything else.”

I hadn’t realized before how exhausting it was to take pictures. I could feel a thick weariness settling onto me. “One of the girls at school,” Cassandra said, “Sandy . . . Her older sister graduated from Bennington with an honors degree in history, and guess what she’s doing now? She’s a Playboy Bunny.”

I laughed.

“Yeah, it is funny,” Cassandra said, “but do you know what she makes? Two hundred and fifty fucking bucks a week. She said it’s not too bad. Like being a cocktail waitress in a Halloween costume. And the customers aren’t allowed to ask you out. They’re not allowed to touch you,” and she paused to give the proper ballast to her punchline, “not even your tail.”

“Oh, great.”

“The horrible thing is I keep thinking about it. I could do it for a year, save my money, and go to Europe.”

“Oh, come on. You’re not serious, are you?”

“Sure I’m serious. Where else could I make that kind of money?”

I couldn’t imagine anyone more ill-suited to being a Playboy Bunny than Cassandra. I found the very thought of it repellent. It was almost as bad as if I’d announced that I was going to join the Marines. “Jesus, Cass,” I said, “that’s ridiculous.”

“It’s not that ridiculous. What the hell am I going to do with an English degree from Bennington? Be somebody’s secretary? Get married? The only thing I can think of I might want to do . . . the only thing that’s possible . . . is go to New York and try to get on as a junior editor in a publishing house or something like that . . . along with a million other smart-ass girls with degrees who have exactly the same idea.”

Cassandra hadn’t yet changed into her evening uniform, was still wearing her white bikini, but with a boy’s shirt over it. She sat sideways in a massive wing-back chair, her bare legs draped over one of its arms. The golden light pouring through the open window burnished her deeply tanned skin. She looked impossibly alive—far too alive to be talking about what was or wasn’t possible. The last of her nails painted, she screwed the brush back into the polish bottle (careful, careful, don’t smudge a nail), waved her hands in the air. Smiled at me.

We heard Zoë’s distressed voice wailing from upstairs: “Cassy! Please come help me.”

“Oh, no,” Cassandra said. “Cassy, puhleeze. God, that’s funny.”

“Hurry her up,” I said.

Cassandra left me alone. I thought of getting a beer, but that particular light, I knew, would be as brief as a suspended teardrop and I didn’t want to miss any of it. I could hear the high-pitched timbre of Zoë’s voice, her sister’s lower soothing tone. The good doctor and his wife were talking too, a distant murmur. Outside, the lawn sprinkler was swishing and a single bird was hitting the same note repeatedly, a sharp sound like a nail on metal—chip, chip—that seemed a punctuation to the only thing I could make out from the intoning voice of the TV: Vietnam, Vietnam, Vietnam. I felt as though something truly significant was about to happen, and then I realized that I would never be there again, exactly as I was, exactly at that moment—smelling the newly cut grass and Cassandra’s nail polish remover and her father’s aromatic tobacco and something else. What? Cassandra didn’t wear perfume; she’d never worn perfume. Could it be the flowers outside?

She crossed the room quietly and sat down again in the antique chair. “Well, is she coming?” I said.

“Almost. She hasn’t quite achieved perfection yet. She’s wearing my prom dress. Jesus, all the effort . . .”

“Cass,” I said, “you aren’t really thinking about being a Playboy Bunny, are you?”

The question stopped her for a moment. “Oh, come on, Dupre, I know you. You’d love to see me in a Bunny costume.”

“Fuck, Cass, you wouldn’t last a night. You’d piss off all the customers.”

“No, I wouldn’t. For two hundred and fifty bucks a week, I’d be the dumbest bunny you ever saw.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake. You’d hate it.”

“Yeah, but so what? In the long run, you get used to anything, right? Unlike you and William, I operate in the realm of the possible.”

“But what if the possible’s intolerable?”

She didn’t answer, but she’d just admitted me to the inside of her head, and it was every bit as bleak in there as it was in mine. I’d always depended upon her for . . . I wasn’t sure what: a fierceness, a clarity, the untamed spirit of the back-alley tomboy she used to be. In the old days, she would never have talked about operating in the realm of the possible. If this was growing up, I didn’t want her to grow up. “Cassandra,” I said, “remember when you drove down to Morgantown with Cohen? And you and I watched the dawn from the top of North High Street?”

“Of course I do. Did you think I’d forget?”

“I don’t know. That was a long time ago.”

There was no mask now, and not a even a hint of a smile. She was looking directly into my eyes. She could have been sixteen again. “I didn’t forget,” she said. I’d just got what I’d wanted ever since I’d come home, and I felt the impact of it shiver through my body all the way down to my toenails. “OK, Cass,” I said, “we’re linked. We were linked then, and we’re still linked . . . Here’s the deal. If one of us gets out, then the other one’s got to do it too.”

Now she did smile. “You mean it, don’t you?”

We heard Zoë’s heels on the stairs. “Yeah, I do,” I said. “Shake on it?”

“God,” she said, “you’re such a fucking Romantic,” but offered me her hand. I took it and held it.

“I’m really sorry,” Zoë said. “I didn’t know it would take so long.” She crossed the few feet of the Oriental and turned to face us. I could read her uncertainty from the way she moved—shyly, almost diffidently. “It doesn’t work, does it?” she said.

The prom gown was a timeless blue taffeta with a full skirt that was shorter on Zoë than it would have been on Cassy, but not quite short enough—as though it couldn’t make up its mind whether it wanted to be the length called “ballerina” or the one called “princess.” Zoë was wearing little white flats, crochet stockings and gloves; she’d brushed her hair up in the back and rolled it, leaving the long bangs in the front, and those touches were certainly now, exactly what you’d see in Seventeen, but she’d done her makeup like an adult model in Vogue—probably only trying out what they’d taught her in modeling school—and it was far too much. Her exposed neck and shoulders looked clean, young, and fragile, but the face she’d created was—and no other simile would do—as artificial as a doll’s. “Don’t worry,” I said, “It’ll make a great photograph,” not sure that it would. “Sit where Cassandra’s sitting.”

Zoë smiled at me gratefully, and the sisters traded places. Zoë gathered her skirt under her and settled into the wing-back chair. I looked through the lens. “The sidelight on your stockings is terrific,” I said.

Cassandra began to fuss with her sister’s hair, hiding some wisps at the back of her neck. “Oh, my God, the prom,” she said to me. “I can’t believe I ever went to it. It feels like somebody else’s life.”

I took a light reading. We’d missed the golden moment; all that was left was the long last slow blue fade. I’d have to shoot wide open. I’d have no depth of field at all. “I’m sorry, you guys,” Zoë said.

“Oh, shut up, little sister,” Cassandra said softly, “you’re so pretty.”

• • •

I DIDN’T know how Cassandra and I had ended up on the back porch in the dark; it was where we used to go to be alone when we’d first met, but that was a billion years ago when the earth was still cooling. We’d watched the last of the smoky twilight drift away into full-blown night; there was no reason why we should be, but we were speaking in hushed voices. “You know,” she was saying, “it’s almost a curse to be born with her looks. And she’s . . . Well, she’s not dumb. She’s anything but dumb. She just seems awfully young sometimes. She’s a lot younger than I was at her age.”

“Yeah,” I said, and put verbal quotations marks of irony around the phrase: “but you were ‘wise beyond your years.’”

“Oh, yeah. Sure I was. But she seems . . . I don’t know . . . pre-conscious.”

Pre-conscious? Where had she learned that one? First-year psych? “I wouldn’t be too sure of that,” I said. “Did you look at the notes she made? She seems fully conscious to me.”

“Come on, she doesn’t have a clue what she’s playing around with.” Then with a wicked teasing inflection: “Does she get to you?”

“Fuck off, Cass,” but I was thinking: You get to me.

“Oh, I know,” she said, “it isn’t just you. She’d get to anything male. Christ, I’m glad I was never like that. And you know what’s funny? It’s all sublimated. As soon as she discovers the joys of boys in cars, this modeling crap will go straight down the tube.”

Inexplicably annoyed, I said, “I don’t think so. It doesn’t have anything to do with sex . . . Well, that’s not true. It’s got everything to do with sex, but it’s got so much to do with sex that it flips around and reverses itself . . . so it isn’t about sex at all. Does that make any sense?”

There was just enough light so that I could see her expression; she was smiling. “No.”

I wasn’t sure what I’d meant, but I knew I was onto something. Then, apropos of nothing—or maybe apropos of everything—she said, “William made a pass at me.”

I gave her my most noncommittal interrogative monosyllable: “Ah?” William Revington, I thought, you son of a bitch.

“Yeah, he did. Earlier in the summer. Before you came back. I couldn’t believe it. He’s engaged to that little moron from Charleston, so what does that make me? A free piece of tail?”

“I wouldn’t take it too seriously. I think he regards it as his manly duty to make a pass at anything female.”

“But me? Jesus, he’s known me since I was ten. You’d think the incest taboo would kick in or some damn thing . . . Oh, it wasn’t a big dramatic number. It was one of those things you could take as a joke. But I knew he meant it. Part of me was flattered and another part of me wanted to knee him in the balls. Remember all the shit he gave you when you started taking me out?”

“Oh, yeah. You know what he said? ‘Isn’t that cherry a little bit green for you, John?’”

“Christ,” with a laugh, “the vermin. You know, I’d like to go to bed with him once just to see if he could do it.”

After a while the silence began to pile up around us like some idiot’s mile-high construction of fragile dishware. She hadn’t really meant anything by that, I told myself. It had just been another of her smart-ass remarks—so what I should do was find a good Raymond Chandler wisecrack that would move things along, something wry and astringently funny, but all I had in my head was an appropriate verse from the Bible: “For he that hath, to him shall be given, and he that that hath not, from him shall be taken,” but then, perfectly timed to save us, Zoë stepped out from the kitchen. “Do you guys want to be alone?”

“No,” Cassandra and I said simultaneously. “It’s OK,” Cassy said. “Come on out, Zo,” I said.

Zoë sank onto the top of the steps leading down into the garden. “Oh, that was so much fun.” She’d changed into shorts and a halter top, but she hadn’t taken off her elaborate makeup. In the faint light that was left, her face looked entirely unnatural and eerily beautiful; transformed by the Purkinje Shift, her lips burned as darkly as the roses at the edge of the lawn.

I lit two cigarettes, passed one to Cassandra, listened to the desiccated churr of the locusts. The back porch was depressing; why the fuck were we out there? I’d had too much to drink, and there were too goddamn many memories out on that back porch. I said to Zoë: “Your sister’s been telling me how she’s going to be a Playboy Bunny when she grows up.”

“Oh?” puzzled. Then: “I can never tell when you guys are kidding.”

“That’s OK,” Cassandra said. “We can’t either.”

• • •

DAYS PASSED, a thousand combat infantry landed at Camranh Bay, Dean Rusk told the North Vietnamese that they’d better watch out or we’d bomb their asses off, the Marines creamed the Vietcong near Da Nang, Johnson was thinking about calling up the reserves, the heat wave did not break, it did not rain, and I did not work on my novel. I usually avoided weighing myself, but one morning in July, driven by morbid curiosity, I stepped onto the bathroom scales and discovered that, just as I had suspected, I had been growing inexorably larger. For the first time in my life I was over two hundred pounds. My God, I thought, I have become gigantic. Later, flipping through my Civil War books, I discovered that on that very weekend in 1863, everybody in Raysburg had been expecting John Hunt Morgan to drop in. I took it for an omen.

Morgan had been in the midst of his great raid—on the run by that time, desperately trying to find some place to cross the Ohio, escape his pursuers, and vanish into the mountains of West Virginia. He’d already made one attempt—at Blennerhassett’s Island down below Parkersburg—where some three hundred of his men did manage to get across before a Federal gunboat appeared. Had Morgan attempted to cross up the river here at Raysburg, he would have been met by Brigadier General James S. Wheat with a sizeable chunk of the West Virginia Militia, but the Thunderbolt of the Confederacy knew better and was already miles north in rural Ohio, riding hard. The folks here didn’t know that, however; terror swept the town: “Morgan’s coming! Morgan’s coming!” Church bells were rung, horses hidden in the woods. Every male with a gun had it cleaned and ready. And people sat up all night waiting for those apocalyptic horsemen who never arrived.

I called Revington to tell him all about it. “Christ, man,” he said, “you’ve hit two hundred pounds on the very same day when Raysburg was not invaded? I can’t believe it! This calls for a celebration. You know what we need, Dupre? Mint julep.”

I called Cassandra. “You’re so full of shit,” she said. “Come on over, I’m boring myself to death.”

I didn’t know how to make mint julep, so I settled for a fifth of J. T. S. Brown, drove out to Cassy’s house. She was reading Camus on the front porch glider. “What the hell you got there, Dupre?”

“Some of that old J. T. S. Brown. Want a snort?”

“That’s a very evocative name . . .”

“Yeah, it’s Fast Eddy’s drink in The Hustler.”

She laughed. “Oh, Jesus. You guys are incredible. So what are you playing today, Jackie Gleason?”

“I’m gigantic.”

“Yeah, you sure are. You keep on going, you’re going to look just like the sheriff of Ohio County. No . . . no, I don’t want any of that damned stuff. I’ve still got some pride, you know. At least I can wait till the sun sets.”

Within minutes Revington drove up, parked, and strolled toward us carrying a gallon milk jar. “Excuse me, son,” he said to me, “do you know the road to Morgantown?”

“No,” I said happily, taking up an imaginary guitar, “but if you hum a few bars, maybe I can play it for you.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Cassandra said, “you guys really are pathetic.”

He set the jar down at my feet. “It should be a demijohn, but I couldn’t find one.”

“All right, I’ll be the straight man,” Cassandra said. “Excuse me, William, what’s that?”

“Aren’t we celebrating John’s gigantism and Morgan’s raid? It’s mint julep.” He picked up the jar with both hands, raised it, and saluted me with it. Ice cubes tinkled. “To your health, sir,” he said, “and to a steady increase in your weight. May you achieve the stature you so richly deserve. And to the South, sir. Long may she simmer.”

“Amen,” I said. “You know, it really is the perfect metaphor . . . Morgan’s raid. Raysburg on this very day,” and I allowed myself to expand to the mellifluous oratorical tones of a Senator Phogbound, “as is the inevitable destiny of this hallowed city . . . as it will be its destiny forever . . . was once again bypassed . . . by anything important.” I took up the jar and drank. “Yow, that’s got a bite to it.”

“Do you clowns want glasses?” Cassandra said.

“No, no, straight from the jar,” I said and passed it to Revington.

“It’s like Kierkegaard’s rotation method,” she said. “It may not be much, but it’s all we’ve got. Every night we can change drinks.”

“The hot water at ten,” Revington muttered in a deeply funereal voice, “and if it rains, the closed car at four . . .”

“But of course it’s never going to rain,” I said. He offered me the jar; I took it and had another good gulp. I could, I thought, develop a taste for this damned stuff. “Stetson!” I yelled, “how the hell you been, man? I haven’t seen you since the war.”

“I’m doing just fine,” he said. “I read much of the night and go south in the winter.”

“You guys are just so unbelievably full of shit,” Cassandra said. “Oh Jesus, another month and my sentence is up.”

The light was changing, the shadows cooling toward blue. The violet hour, I thought, still drifting along with Eliot, and it was enough, for the moment, to be sitting there getting plastered with my friends, talking nonsense, the taste of mint and bourbon in my mouth, with no plans and no need of plans. “Hey,” Revington announced. “I got a call from Alicia.” Ah-Lee-Sha. “She’s back in the States. She’s in New York.”

“How nice,” Cassandra said, “and how is the darling little girl? Did she have herself a peachy-keen time in Paris?”

Revington’s face shifted. His grin fell away, his jaw tightened and his eyes looked away, focused somewhere between the houses across the street; it signaled a change of persona as clearly as if he’d laid down one mask and picked up another. “I probably shouldn’t be,” he said quietly, “but I’m worried about her.”

“Oh, what did she do,” Cassandra asked, “get a run in her stocking?”

He sent an angry glance at Cassy, opened his mouth to say something—didn’t say it. His face closed; he looked into my eyes, invoking our bond against her. “What’s the matter?” I asked him.

“It’s complicated. She really misses me . . . I miss her too, of course, but . . . Well, she wants me to fly up to New York and surprise everybody. She thinks if I just appear, it’ll be OK. But I know her mother. It would really piss her off . . . I mean, tactically we could get away with it, but strategically it’s not the greatest idea in the world . . .”

“Oh, yeah,” Cassandra said. “You can’t piss off Mom. You’re not just marrying sweet little Lissy, you’re marrying her whole goddamn family.”

Revington looked at Cassandra a moment, his eyes narrowed as though assessing her. Then he turned to me: “Listen to that salty bitch, will you? What are we going to do with her?”

“Who says there’s anything you can do with me?”

“So Alicia wants you to come up anyway?” I said, trying to move the conversation along. “How long’s she going to be in New York?”

“Oh, just a week. We can wait a week, for God’s sake. I tried to explain it to her, but . . . Well, your brain can be telling you one thing, but when your heart tells you . . .”

“Oh, come on, William,” Cassandra said evenly, “do your duty like a man. Fly on up there and put the horny little girl out of her misery.”

I saw that Revington had not simply adopted another pose; he was genuinely angry. Oh, great, I thought, so much for the violet hour. I was trying to think of something soothing to say when, from inside the house, Mrs. Markapolous called: “Cassandra.”

“Oh God, now what? . . . Yes, Mom?” and then she was gone, letting the screen door slam behind her.

“That goddamned arrogant little bitch,” Revington said, smashing a match into fire. “How does she get off with being such a fucking little bitch? What she needs is a good, thorough, methodical, therapeutic screwing. Jesus Christ, I swear I’m going to nail that high-assed little bitch.”

“No, you won’t,” I said.

“You want to bet?”

“Sure.”

“A bottle of Scotch.”

“Sure.”

“You’re on, Dupre. I’ll fuck her before the summer’s over.” I extended my hand, and he slapped it, grinning. Now why the hell did I do that?

Bang! back through the screen door, Cassandra: “My mother is too polite to tell you gentlemen, but she is afraid that we are not presenting the proper image to the neighborhood. It just will not do for us to be sitting on the front porch drinking whiskey out of a milk jar. She wonders if perhaps you gentlemen would not feel more comfortable on the back porch.”

• • •

THE NIGHT is closing around us like the screwing-down of the aperture on the good doctor’s Nikon; mosquitoes have begun to needle my forearms. I am sitting with my shoulders against the back porch railing; my shirt is glued to me; I can feel sweat trickling down my sides. And I’m watching Cassandra loll about in the crook of Revington’s arm. Oh, this is intolerable, intolerable. The son of a bitch had started to make his move, and Cassandra had not been at all one of Diana’s elusive does, had rather come to him like a bridled mare. He’s talking on, his voice pitched with resonant sincerity, invoking himself in power—politics. He’d worked for Johnson in sixty-four; he’d met some of the top Democrats in the Northern Panhandle. And now he knows all those damned old-time crooked Democrats in Alicia’s family down in Charleston. He’s presenting us with snapshots of meetings behind closed doors, in back rooms, those famous back rooms where decisions are made in camera, far from the sweating populace. He’s telling us how Kennedy bought West Virginia. “It’s not just about spending money,” he’s saying. “It’s an art . . . like being a great actor. They talk about the Kennedy charisma as though it didn’t take any work. But no one realizes how much planning goes into it. Care. Skill. Timing.” The image before the lenses; get it right for the lenses. Presenting himself now to Cassandra: look at me, I am potent. Potens, potentia. I’M A LONG TALL TEXAN. Oh, Jesus, this is intolerable.

I wander into the house. Zoë’s in the living room with her boyfriend—a tall quiet kid—and with another couple. Zoë must have decided that her Courrèges copy wasn’t just for her book after all; she’s wearing it, and she looks spectacular. The good doctor is having himself a drop of Scotch; he’s discoursing to the boys on Vietnam. I stumble up to the bathroom. I’m dragging my bottle of bourbon along with me, absent-mindedly. Most of it has gone into the julep jar by now, but a couple good shots left. I drain the bottle and step on the scales. Dressed, I weigh two hundred and seven pounds. I lie down in the dry bathtub, tilt back the bottle, and lick up the last drop of bourbon. I am boiled, I am plastered, I am drunk as seven skunks. What am I doing here? ASK NOT, ETC. Intolerable. Perhaps I’ll take a nap in the bathtub. Someone’s banging on the door. “Hey, John, you’ve been in there forever. What are you doing?” Zoë.

“Damned if I know.” I climb out of the bathtub; I find movement surprisingly difficult. “Sorry,” Zoë says when I open the door, “but other people have to get in here too, you know.”

“I’m gigantic,” I say idiotically. Her hair is curled, her eyelashes are curled, and she’s painted her lips and fingernails pink. It’s just as hot as it’s been every other damn night since I’ve come back to Raysburg, but she’s wearing stockings—and her go-go boots of course. I’ve photographed her in that dress, so I’ve certainly had a good look at it, but I still can’t believe how short the skirt is. I put my arms around her, murmur, “Ah, Zoë, are you one of Lyndon’s little majorettes?”

“Oh, good grief,” she says, laughing at me. “Come on, John, cut it out. Stop it, you’re drunk.”

“No shit.”

“Hey, let go.” Giggling, she slaps my wrist so hard it stings. “Cut it out. I mean it.”

“Ah, Zoë, my love . . .”

“You’re really being silly.” She’s pushing me. “Out, out, out. I’ll have an affair with you when I’m twenty. Now just get out of here, OK? That’s it, just keep moving forward. Out, out, out.”

I’m floating down the stairs, carrying my empty bottle of J. T. S. Brown with me. The whole house seems to be rocking gently, as though we’ve drifted away down the river. Passing the living room, I wave languidly to the good doctor, ooze through the kitchen and out onto the back porch. “The problem that Johnson faced in Congress . . .” Revington is saying. Oh, Jesus. I sink down onto the floor next to the julep jar. The ice has melted long ago, now just tepid mint-flavored whiskey. I’ve got my muzzle sunk into it, gulping away. Revington’s shirt is open; Cassandra is playing with the hair on his chest. In the dark, her white fingernails stand out starkly against his skin. I RIDE FROM TEXAS ON A BIG WHITE HORSE.

“Mah fellow Ah-mericans,” I yell, imitating Johnson’s shit-kicker accent. “I know I told you’ll I was a peace candidate. That, howevah, was just to get my sorry ass elected. Now I’m gonna bomb the fuck out of those little bastards . . . Jesus Christ, Revington, I voted for that hypocritical peckerwood. Now I wish the hell I’d voted for Goldwater.”

There is a silence in which I can imagine Revington regrouping. I am, I know perfectly well, not precisely welcome at that moment on that back porch. “Yes, that’s just the sort of man for you, Dupre,” Revington says, “a loser like Barry Goldwater. The biggest piece of political flotsam in recent American history.”

“An honest man,” I say, “stupid and wrong, but honest. The last of a vanishing breed. From now on, only the most wretchedly empty of men will go into politics.”

Revington doesn’t answer. It’s too dark for me to see his face. And all that mint julep is running through me like water through a sluice gate. Christ, I can’t climb those stairs again. I jack myself to my feet, lean against the side of the house, and begin to piss off the porch. The sound of the urine splashing onto the lawn is somehow very appealing. “What the fuck are you doing, Dupre?” Revington is yelling at me.

“What the fuck’s it look like I’m doing?”

He stands up, drags Cassandra by the hand toward the door. She pulls free of him. They stand there a moment—two silhouettes against the light from the kitchen. Then he shrugs and goes in. She hesitates, then follows. “Do you think you’re going to get rid of me that easily?” I’m mumbling. I follow. Revington has closed the door. As I reach for the knob, I hear it lock.

I begin to chuckle, take off at a run, around the house, up the steps. Revington has beaten me to the front door. It’s locking just as I jerk open the screen. I’m suddenly furious. “You goddamn prick, I’ll kick your teeth down your throat,” I yell at him. Through the small window I see him blow me a kiss and turn away.

I wander to the back porch and the whiskey jar. My blood is pounding in my temples; a red haze is beginning to float in front of my eyes. Some detached part of me is saying, “It’s not just an expression. You really do see red.” And then the detached voice is gone, and I’m smashing the back door, ramming my shoulder into it. “You can’t keep me out,” I’m yelling. “I’m gigantic.”

The wood is cracking. I’m immensely satisfied with the sound of it. CRACK. SMASH . Revington is just inside. I can see him. He’s leaning against the door. He’s afraid of me. Good. I hit it again. CRACK. Inside the house are running footsteps, voices, yelling. The front door bangs. Footsteps running around the house. I look down; at the bottom of the stairs is Zoë, giggling at me. “John. What the hell are you doing? You’re breaking our door.”

With a whoop, I leap off the porch directly at her. I land on all fours in the grass, and she’s running away, laughing. “Zoë, my love,” I yell. “Light of my life! Fire of my loins!” And I’ve leapt up and am running too, chasing her.

She’s screaming with laughter. I’m howling and barking like a dog. At a dead sprint we’ve run around to the front of the house and I’m chasing her up the street. Her little white go-go boots are flickering in the dark just ahead of me.

PAIN. The world has tilted on me. I’m flat on my face on the pavement. I roll over onto my back. “Owww, owww, owww!” My God, that’s my voice. I’m baying like a whipped beagle. I’ve run into a fireplug.

Cassandra is looking down at me. “Stop it,” she gasps out between spasms of laughter, “you’re fucking pathetic.”

“Owww, owww, owww!”

“Stop it, John, you’ll have the neighbors out.”

And here’s Zoë, panting and giggling, staring down at me. “John? Are you all right?”

“Owww, owww, owww!” I pull up my pants leg, feel my shinbone. It’s still in one piece, thank God, but my hand comes away bloody. “Owww, owww, owww!”

“For God’s sake, please stop it.” Cassandra’s caught up to us. She’s laughing so hard she sinks to her knees on the pavement.

Zoë looks genuinely concerned. “Come on, Cass, let’s get him up,” she says. They lever me to my feet. There’s a sister under each of my arms. “Come on, help us, John. Don’t just hang there. You weigh a ton.”

“I’m gigantic.”

“No shit. Come on, walk.”

I begin to shamble toward the house. And here, hesitantly, comes Revington to meet us. “You miserable prick,” I yell at him. “Save your Confederate money, Revington, the South’s going to rise again! Ho Chi Minh forever! Juan Bosch Presidente! Hang Lyndon Johnson from a sour apple tree!”

I was too drunk to drive home; Revington had to take me. As I was getting out of his car, I said, “I’m sorry, William.”

“You asshole,” he said.

• • •

I DREAMED that I had caught up with Zoë. I grabbed her by one of her white go-go boots and spilled her down onto the grass in front of me; she flowed down in slow motion, like honey out of a jar. I lifted her little skirt, found the smooth semi-ovals of her bum, and then, in my dream, I did what I’d never done before, not even in my imagination—entered her as easily as sliding my hand into a warm, moistly oiled glove. I woke up. My hangover was appalling. I lay, naked, flat on my back on my steam-bath bed. My mother was standing in the doorway, looking at the far wall. I was topped with an erection as obvious as the Washington Monument. “You should cover yourself, John,” she said. I rolled onto my side and pulled a sheet over myself.

“It’s nearly one in the afternoon,” she said.

“Yeah, Mom, I’m getting up soon. I’ve been contemplating it.”

“That little Markapolous girl called you. She’s called you twice.”

“Which one? Cassandra?”

“No, the other one. The little one.” I could hear the disapproval in her voice. “What did you do to your leg?”

“I ran into a fireplug.”

“A fireplug?”

“Yeah. I was running down the street and I ran into a fireplug.”

Her face pursed; she seemed to be on the point of saying something. But she didn’t say it; she lingered a moment and then began to back out of my room, closing the door behind her. “Hey, Mom,” I said, “I’m thinking of going back down to WVU.”

She stopped. “WVU?”

“Yeah, you know, Mother, it’s the state university they have down there in Morgantown.”

“Oh, John,” she said, annoyed, “don’t be like that.”

“If I stay here I’m going to get drafted.” ASK NOT, ETC. I hadn’t intended to yell at her, but I was yelling.

“Oh,” she said. I began to suspect that she was going to leave, simply, without saying a word. Her face seemed pinched, drawn forward to a point; the point hung there, unsure which way to go. Finally she said, “You’re going back to school?”

“Yeah, I guess so . . . anyhow I’m thinking about it.”

“Oh, good Lord . . . Well, I suppose I can always go back to Household Finance.”

I gulped down a Bromo, sat with my father in front of the blank TV screen, drinking coffee and smoking. “John?” he said. It was one of his words I could always understand, although it came out something like “Zhuh.”

“Yeah, Dad?”

“Drin smush?”

What the hell was drin smush? “What’s that, Dad?” I leaned closer to him.

The side of his face that worked was attempting a grin. “Dju drin t-t-t-tuhsss smush?”

“You’re goddamn right I drank too much.” I touched my forehead to illustrate.

He made the harsh coughing sound that I’d decided a while back was a laugh. He lit another cigarette and so did I. “John?”

“Yeah, Dad?”

“Wunna t-t-t-talia . . .”

I leaned closer. A burst of spitty unintelligible syllables came out of him. “Sorry, Dad, I’m not getting it.”

The good side of his face was twitching. He seemed upset. “Shih,” he said, which I translated into “shit.” Then he made another run at it. All I got was something that sounded like “mahoe gawnduh fise.” Could that be “my whole goddamn face”? But what if it wasn’t? Oh, this is intolerable, intolerable. “Do you want more coffee?” I said.

“No. Juswanna t-t-t-talia,” and then try to tell me he did, but I couldn’t make out a word of it.

“Wait a minute. I’ll get Mom.”

He made a pushing gesture with his good hand. Sometimes he could be clear as a bell: “Piss on it.”

I walked into the kitchen and regarded the phone as though it were a sleeping copperhead. What in God’s name could I possibly say to Zoë? Some kind of apology was obviously in order. But what if she didn’t answer? What could I possibly say to her mother?

Zoë answered on the third ring. “Oh, John, how are you? Are you OK?”

“I’m fine. A little hung over.”

“I bet you are. How’s your leg?”

“It hurts, but it’s OK . . . Zo?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m sorry I pawed you in the bathroom and chased you up the street. I mean I’m deeply, profoundly, and genuinely sorry.”

“That’s OK,” she said, giggling. “I just thought it was funny . . . until you ran into the fire plug. Boy, were you drunk. I’ve never in my life seen anybody that drunk. You were a riot.”

That was me all right, a full-scale riot. From where I was standing, I could see the wrecked figure in front of the silent TV set. After two strokes the asshole was still smoking, and I was sure that if somebody poured it for him, he’d still be drinking too. The horrible thing was that I’d always rather liked him drunk. With most of a bottle of rye in him, he’d been a talkative fool, a joker, an affectionate slob who’d pat me like a dog, a man who would (as I’d seen with my own eyes) dance around a party with a lampshade on his head. Now I seemed to be following firmly in his footsteps, and last night had been the pinnacle of my success—my finest performance to date as a fat drunken buffoon.

I heard Zoë sigh. “Are you ever going to get my pictures?”

I’d been meaning to do it for days—another thing I’d fucked up. “Sorry, Zo. They’re still at Middleton’s. I’ll get them first thing in the morning, I promise . . . Hey, is your sister there?”

“No, she’s not here right now. You broke our door, you know.”

“I did?”

“Yeah. Not just the hinges. You cracked the wood right down the center. I’m not sure I should say this, but . . .”

“What? Go ahead and say it.”

“Dad’s going to have to get the whole thing replaced. He says he should send you a bill, but he doesn’t really mean it. He says he’s always considered you a member of the family. But Mom’s really mad. She’s madder than hell. She’s madder about you relieving yourself off the back porch than she is about the door . . . and she’s plenty mad about the door.”

“Great,” I said.

“John?”

“Yeah?”

“Do you want me to tell you what to do?”

“Sure. Tell me.”

“It’d help a lot if you told her you were sorry. You know what I mean. And do it today. And get her some flowers. She’d really like that. Roses. She likes yellow roses.”

• • •

I HAD to take a cab to Meadowland to get my mother’s car, and then I had to drive to Ohio to find the yellow roses. “Why, John, are these for me? How nice.”

“Mrs. Markapolous . . . I’m sorry about last night.”

“Yes, John, I imagine you are.”

“Look, I’m really sorry about your door. Maybe I could buy you a new one?”

“Oh no, John, you don’t have to do that. I’m sure nothing like that will ever happen again.”

“No, of course it won’t . . . there’s not even the faintest possibility . . .”

“John.” I jumped a foot. The good doctor. I was still so deeply lost in the trackless waste of my hangover that I hadn’t heard him coming. “I want to talk to you.”

I followed him into his study. He shut the door, sat at his desk, lit his pipe. I sat in the chair in front of the desk. I wondered if he was regarding me as a patient. “I prepared a little speech,” I said.

“I’m sure you did.”

“Do you want to hear it?”

“Of course. I’ve always been a sucker for prepared speeches.”

“Look, Dr. Markapolous, I’m sorry I got hopelessly plastered and pissed off your back porch and broke your back door and chased your daughter up the street. I’ll never do anything like that again.”

“How’s your leg?”

“It hurts like hell.”

“Pull up your pants.”

He cleaned off the dried blood and put a bandage over my shinbone. I thought it was nice of him. He sat down again behind his desk. “John, I know you’re under a lot of stress.”

“What do you want to do, refer me to a psychiatrist?”

“Hell, no, I don’t want to refer you to a psychiatrist. Most of the ones I know don’t have the brains of a sardine. When somebody has a problem, there’s usually a simple solution. You’re worried about getting drafted aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“What are you going to do about it?”

“I was thinking of going back to WVU.”

“Great. That’s the most sensible thing I’ve heard out of you all summer. Any problem going back? How are your grades?”

“My grades are just terrific.”

“Well, get right on it, John. Get your student deferment back. You’re running out of time. If you don’t get moving, you’ll end up in the army by default.”

“I know.”

“It’s a damn stupid ridiculous war and you don’t want any part of it.”

“You bet.”

“I approve one hundred percent. Go back to school. Stay out of this war. They have enough cannon fodder. Work to change things.” He stood up. “Have I been talking through my hat?”

“No,” I said, “of course not. You never talk through your hat . . . Look, do you want me to pay for a new door?”

“Christ, no, I do not want you to pay for a new door.” He put his hand on my shoulder. “You’re welcome in this house any time, John,” he said, “just do your heavy drinking somewhere else, OK?”

I didn’t know what to do next. I hadn’t seen Cassandra anywhere. I could go back home, but almost anything in the world was better than going back home. I settled onto the front porch glider, my head pounding. I lay back and closed my eyes. Why did it have to be so goddamned hot? I heard the screen door open and close; I felt the motion as Zoë sat down next to me. “Mom really liked the roses. She said it was very thoughtful of you. She asked me to ask you if you want to stay for dinner.”

“That’s nice. Tell her I’d be delighted. Where’s your sister?”

Zoë didn’t answer. I sat up, opened my eyes, and found her looking at me. I didn’t have a clue what was going on, but I knew that something was. She held my gaze a moment, then looked away. “She’s at the country club,” she said.

“The country club?” It didn’t make any sense.

“Yeah, William took her to the country club. She even put a dress on. I haven’t seen her in a dress all summer.”

• • •

IF MRS. Markapolous had stopped to consider the implications of it, she probably wouldn’t have asked me to stay; if I’d had a brain in my head, I wouldn’t have accepted. It was classic summer night’s food—ham and potato salad. We filled our plates at the kitchen counter, carried them to the table, sat down, and regarded each other. Then we must all have been thinking much the same thing: My God, this is awkward. Cassandra was gone, leaving behind her a black hole the size of a galaxy, and I was left with Zoë—and, as both of her parents knew perfectly well, I was the very same fellow who, only the night before, had, like a demented fool in a bad farce, been barking like a dog while merrily chasing Zoë up the street. “John tells me he’s going back to WVU in the fall,” the doctor announced in an insistently cheerful voice.

“What a good idea,” his wife beamed at me. “You were so close to getting your degree, it’d be a shame not to finish.”

“Yeah,” I said, “a year and a half. I could even do it in a year if I went to summer school.”

“Cool,” Zoë said.

Now I’d just said to them what I’d said to my mother—sending her, God help me, back to Household Finance—but was it possible that I could really do it? And instantly my mind conjured up an image of myself hermetically sealed into some ratty little basement apartment in Morgantown, sitting up all night trying to bang out a paper on Wordsworth. But no, it wouldn’t be Wordsworth. I’d already done the Romantics. Maybe it’d be Webster or Kyd. Now wouldn’t that be fun? Revington had told me that Morgantown’s tiny chapter of SDS had died when Marge Levine had left, and times had changed. In the age of the Beatles, there probably wasn’t any room left for an authentic ethnic folk singer—even if I could have revived that venerable role. So how about the serious young novelist? Would that impress freshman girls? But no, more than likely what they would get was the fat drunken buffoon. Oh, this is intolerable, intolerable.

We slogged our way through dinner, and then the good doctor said, “Well, John, how about a game of chess?” So that’s what I’m doing here, I thought. I haven’t been left with Zoë after all. I’m a member of the family. “Sure,” I said.

The doctor and I had always been fairly evenly matched— although, on a good night, I could usually take him—but I hadn’t played chess for years. I drew white and confronted him with my Russian closed front, which, as it was meant to, baffled him into an excess of caution and led us into a maze of complexity and tedium. I was having trouble concentrating. I never played chess without remembering the night when Natalie had showed me, for three games in a row, what a real chess player looked like, and, thinking of her, I felt a wave of that old dangerously bittersweet longing I’d been trying like hell to avoid; back in my university days, it would have caused me to write a poem.

Oddly for such a grown-up tomboy, Natalie had worn a lot of perfume—a bright splashy girlish scent—and I suspected that if I were ever to smell it again, I would weep like Pagliaccio. On my list of the most disastrous mistakes of my life, letting Natalie go was very near the top. It wasn’t as though she’d been the love of my life. If anyone fit that bill, it was Cassandra, but, at that very moment, Cassandra, the love of my life, wearing a dress for the first time that summer, was dining at the country club, probably sitting on the terrace watching all the lovely rich children cavort in the pool, accompanied by my oldest friend, the lean and sexy William Goddamn Revington, whose avowed and entirely malevolent intention was to screw her ass off. Oh, this is intolerable, intolerable . . . But anyhow, back to Natalie. Most people did not end up marrying the loves of their lives, and Natalie and I had been happy with each other, and maybe even could have married each other, but then again, maybe I was just wallowing in my old familiar hog trough of nostalgia—the most perfect girl was always the one who got away—and right now any girl would look good, and the doctor was making his next move, exactly the one I’d been expecting. I advanced my queen’s bishop to say, “Watch it buddy, not so fast.” But at the top of the list, the height of my stupidity, the most ghastly mistake I’d ever made had been dropping out of WVU. If I hadn’t done that, I’d have a BA and I’d be off to grad school in the fall to study some damn thing at some damn school or other, and my draft board could kiss my ass.

Had I really let Carol Rabinowitz fuck up my life? After that hideous last encounter with her, I should have walked around Morgantown for a few hours, gone back to my apartment and got a good night’s sleep, gone back to classes, and then started attending the meat-market mixers at the Lair until I found myself a pretty wholesome freshman girl who would have been duly impressed by older and worldly-wise me. But that isn’t what I’d done. Well, the light in the tropics had been exquisite, and something in me must have needed to soak the sun into myself until I was hot to the bone, and it wasn’t as though I’d never thought of any of this before. Over the years I’d chewed it all to a sour indigestible pulp. “Check,” Doctor Markapolous said.

Shit, I thought, how did that happen? I stared at the board and saw that my convoluted Russian game was unraveling from every corner. I had to protect my king, and the minute I did, there would go that exposed pawn—zip—and then what? I didn’t have the energy to work it out. I resigned. “Are you sure?” the good doctor said. “There’s many a slip . . .”

“Yeah, I’m done. You’ve got me good.”

“Care for another?”

“No, thanks,” I said. “I can’t think straight tonight.”

I bade the good doctor a good night and stepped out onto the front porch. I was far from sleepy, and the Yacht Club was closed on Sundays, and there was nowhere else I was going. (Hey, I thought, that’s just like the Dylan song.) I had most of a six-pack left at home, so it could be cold beer and my fashion mags, or even watching TV with my wrecked father. But I couldn’t move.

Zoë stepped outside, closed the screen door quietly, and sat down next to me. “Hi,” she said as though she’d just met me on a street corner.

“Hi,” I said. Out of nowhere, a bit of Rilke appeared in my mind: Ach, die Gärten bist du . . . ach, ich sah sie mit solcher Hoffnung.

We swung together for a while. She’d settled into a posture— back perfectly straight and knees together—that was almost prim. Maybe that’s how you sat next to an unpredictable lunatic: carefully. “What are you thinking?” she asked me.

I wasn’t thinking of anything, damn it; I was sinking further into melancholy. The lines had been from one of Rilke’s short, unbearably sad poems I’d memorized when I’d been at WVU, and, if I wanted to abandon myself to a one-way trip to the bottom of the pit, all I would have to do was recite it to myself word for word. It was strange to have Rilke sneaking up on me again. I hadn’t thought about him in years, but I used to hear his German sounding even in my dreams. If I’d been talking to Cassandra, I would have explained all of this to her in far too much detail—God, what a boring pretentious asshole I could be at times—but, because it was Zoë, I said simply, “I was thinking about German poetry.”

She gave me an inscrutable sideways look. “I don’t think that’s what you were thinking about.”

“Oh, yeah? What do you think I was thinking about?”

She didn’t answer for a moment. Then she said, “She doesn’t really like him. She was just bored.”

I was too stung and startled to do anything but snap back at her: “She may not like him all that much, but she thinks he’s sexy.”

“I don’t think he’s sexy. I think he’s a jerk.”

I looked at her. She was looking out at the empty street. Her profile was as exquisite as a cameo. Maybe she could be a model. And I didn’t want to be discussing big sister with little sister—I couldn’t imagine anything more impolitic—and I certainly couldn’t talk seriously about any of the twists and turns of my untrustworthy mind, but I couldn’t just stand up and leave either. “Well, Zo,” I said in the hearty voice of an adult addressing a sixyear-old, “was that your boyfriend who was here last night?”

“Who? Jeff? . . . Oh, he’s taken me out a few times, but he isn’t really my boyfriend . . . not yet anyway.”

“Do you want him to be?”

“I don’t know . . . I think so. Maybe. I like him, but he’s . . . I don’t know. Shy. He’s going to be a senior.”

“And what are you going to be? A sophomore?”

“No, a junior.” She sounded annoyed.

“Two more years, huh?”

“Yeah. What a drag.”

She sighed. We swung on the glider. Then, with no preamble, she hit me with a deluge of words: “Miss Fairfax says if I was in New York, I could be working right now . . . Oh, she understands how important it is to finish high school. She always says I should finish high school. But I talked to Dad . . . I tried to talk to him, and . . . He always said we could talk about anything, and then when I tried to talk about it . . . I said maybe I could go to New York and find a nice family to board with and finish high school there, and then I could see if I could really . . . but I guess he didn’t really mean it. I guess there must be some things you can’t talk about . . . I mean, all I wanted to do was talk about it . . . He just got mad at me. He’s never got that mad at me before. He yelled at me. He called me ‘a little hare-brained idiot.’ Well, I’m not as smart as Cassandra, but I’m not a little hare-brained idiot.”

“No, you’re not. Of course you’re not.”

“He wants me to go out to Brooke. Or down to WVU. Would I like it at WVU?”

“No, you’d hate it. The girls down there think the height of fashion is the sweater set.”

She giggled. “That’s what I thought. Not everybody has to go to college, do they?”

“No.”

This was not the Zoë I knew—or thought I knew. She had fallen silent. We sat there swinging, and I was getting more and more uncomfortable. “I think I better go home soon,” I said. “I don’t want to be here when Cassandra gets back.”

“Oh,” she said—a single round sad monosyllable—and, for only a second or two, let one of her hands rest lightly on the top of one of mine.

“Good night, Zoë,” I said.