CHAPTER NINE

RICHARD

Shortly before he was due to pick me up, Finney called to say he was having car trouble and could I swing by his place instead? “Sure, no problem,” I said, brightly if not intelligently, because as I hung up it occurred to me I didn’t have a clue just where his place was—the odds were seriously against his having bought the same cozy Colonial he and Roslyn shared in my world. Careful not to let Debra catch me doing it, I scanned the short list of Finneys in the phone book, stumbling across a familiar address: Finney, David. 148 Pennacook Road, Apltn. I blinked, thinking for a moment I’d misread it, but there it was: the same address, three miles outside of town, that I’d visited so many times in my youth; the same rambling, ramshackle house his parents had bought decades ago, intending to fix up but somehow never quite getting around to it. I knew Finney’s folks had passed away five years before, but could he really still be living there? In that drafty old barn of a house, ringed by a tumbledown stone fence?

But no; maybe in this world, Finney’s parents had fixed it up. Maybe Finney, for that matter, had renovated it himself. I put the thought aside. In the living room Debra was skimming a copy of the Christie’s auction catalog and I pecked her on the cheek. “That was Finney. His car’s on the fritz, he wants me to pick him up.”

She smiled knowingly. “Yes, and I understand the sun’s going to rise in the east tomorrow, too.”

I assumed by her comment that this situation wasn’t unique, but since she seemed more bemused than irritated, I kissed her again—this time more lingeringly—and smiled. “I’ll take the Volvo. Back by ten at the latest, okay?”

It was a clear, cold April night, a light dusting of snow on the streets, recent enough that only a few tire treads predated mine on my passage through downtown Appleton and up winding old Pennacook Road. Finney lived only a few minutes outside town, but as children the distances had seemed so much greater to us; even now, living here again, I couldn’t help but be surprised when someplace I’d remembered as being as remote as Mount Parnassus turned out to be practically next door.

But in some ways Finney’s home had always been as remote as Mount Parnassus. Finney’s father had been a chemist, underpaid and overworked, employed by Axton-Cross in Manchester, who years before had gotten a wild hair about buying a house in the country, growing his own vegetables, and becoming a gentleman farmer. Except he never did quite develop a knack for it. In back of the house had been animal pens, goats scuttling behind chicken-wire fences, a loud and anxious squawking erupting from the henhouse at anyone’s approach. There’d been a good ten acres or so of tomatoes, potatoes, lettuce, corn, and other crops, but if the yield made any difference in the Finneys’ standard of living, I never saw it.

Turning into the Finneys’—correction: Finney’s—gravel driveway, I half expected to hear the squawk of chickens or the bleating of goats. But as my headlights illuminated the yard, I saw that the animal pens were long since rusted shut, the chicken wire coiled in useless loops, the fields sheeted with winter frost. All that, I suppose, I’d expected; what shocked me was the house itself.

It was the same as the last time I’d laid eyes on it, perhaps fifteen years before. Someone might’ve slapped on a fresh coat of paint, flat and perfunctory, a few years back, but already that was fading and chipping; the roof, as near as I could tell in the scant light from my car, was badly in need of repairs, and I could even see a few shingles, torn from the eaves by a nasty wind, scattered across the front lawn. The lawn, of course, was blanketed by snow, but the rest of the yard had always been graced by hardy evergreens—white pine, spruce, cedar—now left unattended and untrimmed, their branches sagging like the wattles of elderly men; even the deciduous trees, like the crabapple tree I fondly recalled climbing, were so thick with bare branches I wondered if they would ever return to life, come this spring or any other. Up above, the attic windows—blown out by a hurricane when Finney and I were ten years old—were still, all these years later, boarded up with cheap plywood.

But most bizarrely of all, there in the driveway just ahead of me, shining prettily in the wash of my brights, was a flame-red Jaguar XJ6—sleek, sporty, and pricey, its lines only somewhat diminished by the dent in the passenger side or the dings in the rear bumper. I got out of the Volvo, feeling suddenly rather downscale as I circled the Jag for a moment before heading up the front porch. The boards groaned unhappily as I took the steps, but I made it to the doorbell without incident and rang—half-expecting Lurch from the Addams Family to answer it. You rang?

But on the second ring the door swung wide and Finney stood grinning in the doorframe. “Cochrane! I saw you lusting after my car, don’t think I didn’t. Hell, you’re lucky Mister Death’s not around anymore, he’d’ve gunned you down without even stopping. Get your ass in here.”

He stepped aside to let me enter, and it took all the control I could muster not to betray my astonishment and dismay at what I saw. I told myself that Rick must’ve been here dozens, hundreds of times before; but it was all bewilderingly new to me, and I struggled to keep it from showing.

“Hang on—let me get my coat and we’ll be on our way, okay?” Finney was up the stairs two at a time, and as I heard him clumping about on the second floor, I wandered about dazedly downstairs. Like the exterior, the interior of the Finney home was distressingly similar to what I remembered: the same overstuffed, copper-and-red-print sofa; the same ersatz-walnut-grain coffee table, particleboard beneath the cheap veneer; the same ornate brass standing lamps, actually quite nice though I couldn’t imagine they reflected Finney’s tastes, just his parents’. Above the mantel was tacked a blue-and-white varsity pennant, our school colors; on either side of it were a brass soccer trophy Finney had won in our junior year and a lucite plaque naming him MVP on the school football team, the Panthers, senior year.

I wandered into the dining room. In the china hutch, next to the old but elegant dinnerware, were another handful of athletic awards, some dating back to junior high, and a permaplaque of the front page of the Appleton (H.S.) Sentinel’s story on the time the Appleton Panthers whipped the Manchester Crusaders, 22 to 7. In the upper left-hand corner was a photo of Number 23, Dave Finney, whooping it up postgame with his fellow Panthers.

Almost twenty years later Finney galloped down the stairs as though warming up for a marathon, and suddenly I wanted badly to get out of this house, as fast and as far as I could manage.

“Ready to roll?” Finney said, slapping me on the back. I was out the door before him and in minutes the Volvo was back on Pennacook, heading toward the intersection with Route 3.

The light snow had virtually all melted and I could take the road a bit faster than I’d anticipated, Finney noting this with a wry smile. “Not bad pickup,” he allowed, “for a box on wheels.”

His teasing tone told me this sparring was probably of long standing between him and Rick, so I just gave him a lopsided smile and said, “Least mine’s working. What’s wrong with the Jag?”

Finney shrugged. “Transmission again. The body shop up in Manchester wants an arm and a leg, and that cheap bastard DeLuca won’t give me another advance, so the cat’s sidelined for a few weeks.”

DeLuca? Finney was still working at DeLuca & Sons, the textile plant? Not still as a night watchman, surely? “How are you, uh, getting to work, then?”

He shrugged. “Some say this is why God gave us feet.”

“What time do you have to leave to get there on time, anyway?” I asked, hoping my subterfuge was not too evident.

“Five-thirty,” he said, “five-forty, to get there by six p.m. If I’m a little late, there’s usually someone left from the day shift to cover for me.”

Day shift. Of course. He was still the night watchman; that was why we were getting together tonight, Fridays and Saturdays had always been his nights off. Fifteen years? Fifteen years and still—

I tried to assimilate all this at the same time I had to fake some semblance of a casual conversation. “Jesus,” I said, “are all these maintenance bills on the Jag really worth it, Fin?”

Something like genuine irritation flashed in his bright blue eyes. “Oh Christ, Cochrane, don’t get started on that again, okay? It was my goddamn inheritance and I could spend it any way I fucking well pleased. Give me a fucking break.”

Inheritance? Good God—that Jag must’ve cost fifty, sixty grand, easy. I couldn’t imagine Finney’s parents having amassed a life savings of much more than that. I didn’t know what to say, but I had to say something, so I just shrugged it off with a casual, “It’s your money”—but Finney’s response was no less disconcerting. “That’s right,” he said with a smirk, adding offhandedly, “Or at least it was.” He laughed and I managed a strictured smile, but inside I felt a gnawing fear take root, worrying away at the edges of my perfect world. By the time we reached the Manchester bar that Finney had suggested, I was less aware of its noisy, blue-collar ambience than I was of my mounting need for a drink—anything to numb this growing anxiety within me. But at the table, when I told the waitress I’d have a scotch on the rocks, Finney gave me the strangest look: “Hey. Cochrane,” he said, laughing a short, uneasy laugh. “Sure you wouldn’t rather make that a Bud? Somebody’s gotta drive home, y’know.”

I looked at him, looked again at the waitress, and found myself asking, “Do you, uh, have Heineken?”

“Whatever you want, hon,” she said.

Finney ordered a Jim Beam. “Bring the bottle, hon.”

Somebody’s gotta drive home.

I was staring blankly into space in the general direction of the waitress as she sashayed to the bar; Finney took my stare for something other than it was and said, “‘Whatever you want, hon.’” A pause, then: “What do you want, Rickie?”

I looked up. “What?”

“Nothing,” he said. “Debra pissed at you for going out with me tonight?”

Hoping to sound merely disingenuous I asked, “Why should she be?”

Finney laughed. “I don’t know. Maybe she thinks I’m a bad influence on you.” Our drinks arrived, I took a swallow of the beer but would much rather have had the scotch. No sooner had Finney downed half his drink than I looked up to find him gazing across the room at someone—his arm shot up, and that big familiar grin lit up his weather-beaten face. “Hey! Sherry! How’s it going?”

I followed his gaze: a woman at the bar, mid-twenties, with dark hair and prodigious breasts, suddenly smiled and waved back. “Finney! Hi!” By the time I turned back, Finney was already rising, drink in hand, nudging me with one elbow. “Cochrane, c’mon,” he said. “Lemme introduce you to someone.”

I didn’t have much choice but to follow him across the packed room to the bar. He and Sherry kissed hello with a bit more than casual affection. “Good to see you,” she gushed, adding, just a little too earnestly, “You know, you are the last person I expected to run into tonight. Hallie, do you know Dave Finney?”

The woman seated to her right was also in her twenties, red-haired, freckled, and had the look of someone who is about to be slightly embarrassed. Finney introduced me to Sherry, Sherry introduced me to Hallie, even as Finney was motioning the bartender to freshen the women’s daiquiris; then he sat down beside Sherry, who had casually reseated herself so there was an empty stool between her and Hallie.

The whole thing smacked of setup, but what could I do? I sat down next to Hallie. Sometime in the last two minutes Finney had inhaled the rest of his Beam, so he ordered another for himself and a second Heineken for me, though I’d barely touched my first.

Hallie and I began chatting, and I managed to carry on a pleasant enough conversation with her—nice lady, actually, a computer programmer with M-Tek—despite the fact that inside I was near panic. Good God, what had I gotten myself into here? Was this SOP for Rick and Finney, catting around in bars, Finney pimping for Rick? I hated the thought that Rick might have been cheating on Debra, hated it because if he had the potential to be an adulterer, then so did I. I felt dirty, dishonest, unfaithful, because like it or not the seed of any and everything Rick had ever done lived in me, as well.

I couldn’t let that make me crazy. I couldn’t dwell on Rick’s flaws, real or imagined, and then worry if and when they would flower, wickedly, in me. All I could do was take charge of now, of the moment, as I had taken charge of the life Rick had left to me. It was too early in the evening to invent a reason to go home, but I came up with the next best thing: glancing at my watch, I stood and announced, pointedly, “’Scuse me a minute—my son’s got a fever and I promised I’d check in on him. I might have to leave early if his temp hasn’t gone down. Be right back.” And I was making my way toward the men’s room before Finney could utter a word; I could practically feel the anger coming off him in waves. I glimpsed the disappointment in Hallie’s eyes, the irritation in Sherry’s, and I regretted the necessity of lying to them, but it was either that or an even more unpleasant scene at the end of the evening.

I lingered in the men’s room for a plausible interval, and when I returned to the bar the women had vanished into the ether. Finney sat slumped over what appeared to be his third drink of the evening, glaring at my approach.

“Jesus Christ,” he said, disgusted, as I slid onto the stool beside his. “You know what you just threw away, man? You have any idea?”

“I think so,” I said. “I may be stupid but I’m not blind.”

“Don’t look so goddamn satisfied.” he snapped. “What are you so goddamn satisfied about, anyway? You bitch and moan about your sex life, about how you and Deb haven’t gotten it on in, what, three, four months—”

So that was it. “That’s changing,” I said quickly. “Really.”

“Yeah, sure.” He was barely listening to me. “Just like that girl from Cambridge—Jesus, man, you had a clear shot at her, she thought you were terrific, but you, you just pissed it away—”

I was surprised but pleased: it was nice to know that whatever his faults, Rick didn’t have it in him—I didn’t have it in me—to cheat on Debra. But then, out of nowhere, a nasty voice inside taunted: No, of course not. You just do it with other men’s wives. Small difference.

The thought startled and appalled me. I told myself that we’d agreed to it, that he’d entrusted her to me as I had my life to him—

But Debra hadn’t agreed to it, had she? I might not have been cheating on her, but I was still deceiving her, wasn’t I?

Stop it, I told myself, stop torturing yourself. She was better off for the deception, all she’d had to look forward to with Rick was divorce, or battery, or widowhood. She was happy with me; I knew she was.

“Finney,” I said slowly, “it’s no bullshit. Really. Things are better between us. The breakdown, you know, it cleared away a lot of bad feelings; a lot of old hurts.” He looked at me skeptically. “I appreciate what you’re trying to do,” I said, “but it’s not necessary. Honest to God. Okay?”

I think it finally started to sink in to him, because after a moment he nodded, downed the rest of his drink, and stood. “Okay. It’s your life; I hope you know what you’re doing.” Part of me bristled at that—coming from him, of all people—but he gave me a good-natured whack on the back and started off toward the back room. “C’mon, let’s go rack ’em up.”

The poolroom was packed with about half a dozen big, muscular guys who might have worked at Empire Sheet Metal down on Hancock Street or Dulac’s Concrete over near Hooksett. We had to wait about ten minutes for one of the four tables. Grateful for the distraction, I picked a cue stick and began chalking it. “So what’ll it be?” I asked Finney. “One-pocket, nine-ball, rotation?”

Finney gave me a funny look at first, then broke into a short laugh. “I think we’ll get by fine with plain old eight-ball.”

“Whatever,” I said, racking up the balls. I took solids; Finney took stripes. He broke, and on the break, sank the six-ball in the side pocket. Throwing me a cocky grin, he tried for a two-cushion shot into the same pocket, but missed by well over an inch. “Shit,” he snapped, as I stepped up to the table and sized it up. The cue ball was teetering near the right corner pocket, and the ball I wanted to sink was maybe a quarter of an inch from the opposite pocket. In between were two of Finney’s balls, either of which I might inadvertently sink if I made the shot in a straight line. So I opted for a bank shot off the far cushion, the cue ball rolling down to the far end of the table, forming a long, graceful V as it neatly knocked my object ball into the corner pocket.

I was so engrossed in the game, so happy at this welcome respite from the emotional turbulence of the last hour, that I completely failed to notice at first the amazement, then the irritation that flickered across Finney’s face. I just went on, oblivious, with the game: first a three-cushion shot, sinking my object ball in the far corner pocket, then a combination shot, deftly skirting two of Finney’s balls in my path. On my fourth shot I missed, giving Finney his turn up, and I was surprised to see how clumsily, how unimaginatively he played; when we were young he’d always trounced me handily at this. Now he missed an absolute sucker shot, I took back the table, and I didn’t let go of it. One by one the solids disappeared into the pockets as though sucked into black holes, and it wasn’t until the next to the last shot—only one solid left before the eight-ball—that I looked up to see the barely concealed rage on Finney’s face, the cords in his neck tensed and ropy, his hand fiercely gripping the cue stick. I finally realized the mistake I’d made: just as I’d violated an unspoken agreement when I tried to order scotch, I was now violating another tenet of his and Rick’s relationship. This, too, had not changed between them over the years.

But it was too late to do much about it now. I sank my last solid, then the eight-ball, winning the game. I was terrified that my sudden sophistication at the game had made him suspicious, but it quickly became clear that he was too angry to entertain anything remotely like suspicion. Instead of congratulating me, Finney just brushed past and started racking them up again.

“Two out of three,” he said tightly. This time I broke, and now, I saw, I had a fine line to tread here. I couldn’t appear too suddenly clumsy without making it obvious I was throwing the game. I had to lose just enough shots, by close enough margins, to make it believable. I hated myself for it, loathing the necessity of going back to being the loser, the fraction in this pathetic equation. I tried to convince myself it didn’t have to go on like this indefinitely—that eventually I could work my way up to where he and I could play honestly and equally—but as I watched him miss easy shots and sink others more by luck than by skill, I realized bleakly that that day would never come. Thirteen years of honing my game had made me a better pool player than Finney would ever be; and ironically, it was Finney’s own fault. I’d never realized it before, always just looked on pool as a pleasant diversion or a way to hone my actor’s reflexes, but I knew now that that was all facade: I’d become a good pool player to make up for all the humiliations, all the whippings Finney had put me through in our youth.

I lost that game, and the next as well, by which time Finney—with the help of two more bourbons—was in fine fettle; fine enough that when a burly construction worker challenged him to a game, Finney accepted cheerfully. And the construction worker then proceeded to whip the living daylights out of Finney, even as I had in our first game.

Living in New York, you become hypersensitized to any potential violence around you; your peripheral vision expands, and that drunk just ahead of you or that wild-eyed proselytizer on the corner, all the borderline weirdnesses around you are processed automatically and examined in terms of possible physical threat. Maybe living in Appleton these past weeks had dulled my instincts; or maybe I was just so relieved not to be playing, not to have to take any more dives, that I didn’t see the danger signals until almost too late. As the construction worker sank ball after ball—using an impressive array of bank shots, three-cushion shots, and combination shots—Finney’s bright mood eclipsed. His face darkened, his eyes took on a hooded aspect, the cords in his neck stood out again. After every missed shot—and the more he drank, the worse his playing became—he took to hurling his cue to the floor with a shout: “Shit!” “Son of a fucking bitch!” “Cocksucking bastard!” I couldn’t tell if the epithets were directed at himself or at the other player; by the end of the game, neither could his opponent, who was casting surly looks in Finney’s direction.

Finney took the loss of the game even less well than he had with me; he demanded, rather belligerently, a rematch, and when the construction worker declined Finney came just short of questioning his manhood. Stonily the construction worker acceded, snapping up the balls, then racking them up; but as he went to chalk his cue stick, Finney began circling the table, and with the quarts of pure trouble he’d been drinking all night slurring his words, he suddenly yelled, “You bastard! This is a fucking whorehouse rack, you cocksucking pussy!”

A whorehouse rack is when the balls have been loosely packed, so loosely that when a player breaks, the cue ball absorbs all the shock, robbing the player of a full break. I’d watched the rack, and it was definitely not loose. But Finney needed some excuse for his inevitable loss.

Before I could even move, Finney’s opponent hurled his cue stick violently onto the table, its tip making a jagged tear in the green felt. “Jesus Christ!” he yelled, bearing down on Finney. “You are the pussy around here, man, you know that?”

“The fuck I am,” Finney snapped, facing him off. They were both roughly the same height, but the other guy had at least ten, twenty pounds on him, and Jimmy the Greek would not have given Finney very high odds. I hurried over and grabbed him firmly by the arm. “C’mon, Fin, take it easy,” I said, trying to pull him away. “The rack looked fine to me—”

“What the fuck would you know about it?” he snapped at me; then, turning back, pushed the construction worker in the chest with the flat of his hand. “I’ll show you how fast this ‘pussy’ can tear your fucking face off, asshole!”

“Go ahead,” and the other guy pushed back, hard enough to send Finney sprawling backward into the pool table. Finney lunged forward, but then I jumped in, leading with my shoulder, knocking Finney backward and to the left; he gave the table a glancing blow before sprawling onto the floor.

I stood between him and his opponent, looking down as Finney drunkenly tried to scramble to a squatting position. “Okay, that’s enough!” I yelled—shocking him, I think, with the steel in my tone. “You’ve got no beef with this guy, he wasn’t cheating, he beat you on the square and you damn well know it!”

Finney got to his feet, swaying as he tried to lunge forward again, but I was even more ready now and when he was just inches from me I pushed at him with both hands, hard—not hard enough to fell him, but hard enough to shake him with the knowledge that I could stop him cold if I wanted.

He swayed there a moment, taking this in, and then I said, “Okay. You’re going home now.”

I turned to the construction worker behind me. “Sorry,” I said. “He won’t be bothering you any more tonight.”

The guy just shook his head and sighed. “You his keeper, or what?” I scowled, not at him, not even at Finney, but at me. “Yeah,” I said quietly. “I guess I am.” Taking Finney by the arm, I guided him out of the bar. His steps were rocky, uncertain, and just before reaching my car he stooped suddenly and vomited into the gutter. After he’d finished, he squatted there, breathing in fits and gasps, for some moments. I gave him a minute, then said, half impatient, half bemused: “You all done? I mean, it may be just a box on wheels, but it’s got genuine leather upholstery.” He laughed raggedly—the first hint of the old, good-natured Finney I’d seen in hours. “Keep the window rolled down,” he suggested hoarsely, “and I’ll turn at appropriate moments.” I helped him into the Volvo and within minutes we were threading our way through Manchester’s back streets toward the nearest entrance to Route 3.

Halfway home, Finney leaned his head back on the headrest, tilted his face toward me, and smiled a strange, weary smile. “Came in a bit late this time, didn’t you, Cochrane?” he said, the words a bit thick, but the thought alarmingly clear.

If this was a joke, I was in no mood for it. “I saved your goddamn ass, Finney.”

He nodded. “Granted, granted. It’s just that you usually step in before I’m stupid enough to make the first move.”

Good Lord, what chutzpah. It wasn’t enough I pulled his stupid neck out of danger—he had a specific routine all laid out for me. I thought back to the similarly averted—and sometimes not so averted—brawls of our youth, then multiplied them by all the scrapes and arguments Rick had doubtless broken up since then. “Maybe,” I suggested, an edge to my voice, “I’m getting tired of having to do it. Maybe I wanted to give you a little more rope this time, to see how you might like it.”

“Ah,” he said, head tilting away from me again but still with that damnably irritating smile on his lips, “like the time you walked out on me in Concord, and that large black gentleman broke both my kneecaps? The time I couldn’t walk for a month?”

I said nothing for a long while, feeling chilled despite the heat blowing full blast from the air vents, till Finney finally looked over at me again, his expression now more bemused than taunting. “Quite a shove you gave me back there,” he said, part appreciative, part quizzical. “Where’d you get arms like that, Cochrane?”

From learning to juggle for a production of Barnum, I wanted to tell him; from going three days a week to the gym, because you need physical strength as much as intellectual skill as an actor. I gave him a mysterious look. “Maybe I’m a costumed adventurer,” I said. “Maybe I have a secret life.”

He laughed quite a bit at that, then fell silent the rest of the way back to Appleton.

I got him up the front steps to his house, supporting him as best I could, fishing around in his pocket for the house keys. Somehow I got him upstairs, by which time he seemed to have developed something of a bladder problem; I propelled him into the nearest bathroom, then after a decent interval, pried him off the toilet seat and guided him toward his bedroom, where he sprawled on his back in the bed. His eyes closed as I switched off the lights—I thought he’d passed out—but as I started to leave the room I heard his voice behind me, slurred but still comprehensible. “Cochrane?”

I turned.

“Thanks,” he said into the darkness. “I’m lucky…” He paused. “It’s lucky that jerkoffs like me have friends like you.”

I didn’t know how to answer, and after a moment the sound of his shallow, steady breathing told me that he had, indeed, passed out. I shut the door behind me, heading down the upstairs corridor to the staircase, but passing the door to what had once been Martin Finney’s den I stopped and lingered in the doorframe. In the light of a small desk lamp I could see the heavy walnut desk, the comfortable leather recliner Finney’s dad had always sat in, and the bookshelves that lined three sides of the room. Empty bookshelves. A few chemistry texts lay on their sides, untouched, no doubt, since Mr. Finney’s death, but other than that, no books. I switched off the desk lamp and hurried down the stairs, locking the front door behind me and leaving the keys under the doormat. I backed out too fast from the short driveway, spraying gravel across the dead lawn, feeling more than wind at my back as I hurried away, hurried home.

*   *   *

I got in around eleven-thirty to find Paige planted sullenly in front of the living room TV, not really watching whatever screeching cop show was playing, headphones on as she studied—with something like a scowl—a textbook in her lap. Mine was the first generation able to simultaneously watch TV and read, or listen to rock and study, but I noted Paige’s peers had taken the genetic mutation one step further. Paige was up a little later than she should have been, even for a Saturday, but oddly I was the one who felt he’d been out past curfew. I went into the kitchen, after the last four and a half hours desperately needing a nightcap, but one lingering flash of Finney, his head hanging out the side window as we raced along Route 3, was enough to switch my choice to a Polar raspberry-lime soda.

I joined Paige on the living room couch, surprised to find that the text she’d been so aggressively frowning over was, in fact, Romeo and Juliet. “Hey, great stuff,” I said. She read my lips, I guess, and removed her headphones. “Yeah,” she said sourly, “except you’ve gotta go to the glossary for every third word. I mean, how’re you supposed to remember that back then, ‘an’ meant if, and ‘list’ was another way to say please, and—” She flipped to a page with particular agitation. “Get this: ‘I’ll look to like, if looking liking move.’ Why did these people talk like this?”

“Just to annoy us,” I smiled. “See, that’s a great moment there: Juliet’s just been given this long harangue on why she should love Paris, not Romeo, and she’s asked, ‘Can you like of Paris’ love?’ And Juliet, contemptuously, says in effect, If the mere sight of him is enough to make me love him, fine, but otherwise, ‘No more deep will I endart mine eye/Than your consent gives strength to make it fly.’ Meaning he’s not going to get much more than the courtesy you obligate me to give him.”

Paige sort of gaped at me, her mouth open as I recited the lines. “You—you remember all that?”

“I did my share of Shakespeare,” I said, “in college.”

Looking utterly forlorn, Paige slapped shut the book. “Oh God,” she lamented. “I’m never going to be able to play this.”

I straightened a little, my interest piqued. “You mean you’re doing a scene from it in some class?”

Paige suddenly looked as though she’d spilled the H-Bomb secret to the Russians. “Well … actually,” she admitted, clearly uncomfortable, “we’re sort of doing the whole thing. In closing assembly, end of term.”

“And they’ve cast you?” I said in surprise. “Which part?”

She looked utterly morose. “Juliet, the little wimp.”

“But that’s terrific,” I said, and my delight seemed to genuinely startle her. “Honey, it’s a great part, you’re going to love it! When did this all happen?”

She looked downward, at the closed book in her hands. “Yesterday,” she admitted.

“Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”

She looked up at me, visibly distressed: not knowing how to answer this, not wanting to dredge up things best left forgotten. My tone quickly sobered. “Right,” I said. “Wrath of the Father-Thing, Part Two. Got it.” She smiled a little bit at that, and I laughed and put a hand to the back of her head, ruffling her shoulder-length blonde hair. “That was a different guy,” I said, knowing she couldn’t suspect how much truth there was to the joke. “A pod-person. I’m happy for you, honey, really I am.”

I wasn’t sure if she believed me or not, but in any event her mood didn’t improve. “Well, I’m glad you are,” she sighed, “’cause I’m halfway through this and already I want to jump off an overpass. I mean, God, I can’t even understand half these funny old words—how am I gonna play them?”

“Well, that’s your director’s job; he’ll help you with that.”

She looked at me with amazement. “Mr. Conover?” she gasped. Teenage girls, I was discovering, do gasps very well. “Weren’t you the one who told me what a stiff he was?”

“Frank Conover?” I said, remembering suddenly the only actor in my college stagecraft class—possibly the only one in the history of the stage—to read Macbeth’s “Tomorrow and tomorrow” with the same inflections, the same trenchant pauses, as William Shatner at his most excessive. “Tomorrow … and tomorrow,” I began to recite, falling into the Shatnerian rhythms, “creeps in its … petty pace … from day to day … to the last syllable of … recorded time…”

Paige was in hysterics, giggling uncontrollably the more I went on, and the more she laughed, the harder it became to keep a straight face; eventually I gave up, the two of us collapsing into helpless laughter. I wiped a tear from my eye. “You mean that Frank Conover?” God, I couldn’t believe it—not only had the lummox actually graduated from the theater program, he’d become a teacher. And the wafflecone was teaching my daughter!

“Okay,” I said, sobering up, “I’ll coach you. We won’t mention this to Mr. Conover, of course, but we’ll work on it together, you and me—okay?”

Her expression was equal parts astonishment and a small, secret pleasure. “Really?”

“Really. When you played Peter Pan—ten to one he showed you tapes of Mary Martin in the role, am I right?”

“Yeah,” she confirmed, “she was great.”

“Yes, she was. And William Shatner can be a pretty good actor, too, with the right director sitting on top of him, but the point is, Frank Conover doesn’t have the vaguest inkling of a personal acting theory—all he ever did in college was mimic other actors, and it sounds like as a teacher all he does is give you examples on which to model your performance. Good models, maybe, but that’s not all there is to learning to act.” I put my hand to her back, rubbed it reassuringly. “Don’t worry, kiddo, we’ll get you through this alive.”

“You mean my Juliet won’t come out sounding like Captain Kirk?” she said, grinning wickedly, and then we were both in hysterics again—“Romeo,” Paige intoned, “wherefore … art thou … Romeo?”—until the commotion brought Debra downstairs in her bathrobe, looking understandably puzzled: “You guys on drugs, or what?”

“Dad’s gonna coach me in my Juliet,” Paige said, excited now, all her doubts and disbelief gone. Debra looked stunned, but covered it with a joke. “I remember your Juliet,” she said dryly. “Sexy décolletage.”

“She scoffs,” I said, standing, “but we’ll show her. Meantime, kitten, you better read through the play; we’ll talk it over tomorrow over brunch, in general terms, then get down to the nuts and bolts later.” I kissed her on the forehead. “Night.”

“Night, Dad.”

Night, Dad. I liked that. More and more, I liked the sound of that.

Debra and I adjourned to our bedroom, where the CD player was playing a track from a George Winston album—Winter into Spring, I think it was—and I started undressing. “So how was your heavy date with Finney?” she asked.

“Fine,” I said. “Fine.”

Whether she believed me or not, she propped herself up in bed and returned to the book she’d been scanning: the latest auction catalog from Sotheby’s. As I crossed over to the bed, in fact, I noted a whole stack of similar art catalogs—three-inch-thick volumes from Sotheby’s, Butterfield & Butterfield, and Christie’s. I flipped the pages of one phone-book-size catalog. “A little light reading before bedtime?”

She seemed to weigh something in her mind, carefully. “I’ve been thinking,” she said finally. “Jeffrey’s ready for day care, but instead of putting him in full-time, I thought”—she eyed me cautiously—“I thought maybe instead of going back to the gallery, I might try my hand at art appraisal … work here, out of home, and only have to put Jeffrey in daycare a couple days a week—whenever I had to schedule appointments or view paintings. I’d like to be able to spend more time with him than I have with Paige, because of that crazy schedule we were on when we were first married, you know?

“Of course,” she added quickly, “even though the rate can go as high as a hundred an hour, all told I won’t be making nearly as much as I did at the gallery—at least at the start.” She hesitated. “Do you think we can manage it? Financially?”

“If it makes you happy,” I said, “we’ll find a way to work it out.” She looked both relieved and surprised; maybe Rick would’ve grated about having to shoulder more of the financial burden. “It is funny, though, thinking of you as an appraiser. I mean, God, remember how in college you never even wanted to know from pricing—appreciation—any of that ‘bourgeois artifice’?”

She winced a little at that. “Well, it wasn’t till I left the museum, and started working in small galleries, that I began to see things differently. I mean, here you are in the Rose Art Museum, and you see this piece of tripe by Warhol valued at five gazillion dollars and you can’t help but think, come on, this is all a crock. Or you see a Wyeth priced at six figures and you think, how can anyone put a price on anything as sublime as this? It’s absurd. It’s crass, it’s—God help me—bourgeois.”

She laughed, closing her catalog. “But then you go to work in a small gallery in Hanover, and one of the local artists comes in—some guy who lives on ten thousand a year, just scraping by, even with a little commercial work on the side—and you tell him the piece you sold for him six months ago has appreciated ten percent since then…” She smiled, looking at once embarrassed and pleased. “It’s not like he’s getting any more money for that particular piece, he’s already sold it, but—it does something for him, you know? You can see it in his smile, in the way he walks out of the gallery—it tells him that someone values what he does, that he’s not just working in a vacuum, that he’s making progress.

“And,” she conceded, “it makes me feel like I’ve had some part in it, too. That’s one of the things I envied about you, when we first met—you were studying something you loved, we both were, but you could practice it. You could get up on that stage and act, but all I could do was study. Analyze and admire. Give me a pen, I’m lucky to manage my own signature.”

She hesitated, then gave me a slightly disbelieving, slightly pleased look. “You’re really going to coach Paige on this Juliet thing?”

“You remember Frank Conover,” I said, slipping into bed beside her. “You don’t mind, do you?”

“Mind? No, of course not. If anything”—she put her Sotheby’s catalog aside, snuggling closer—“I find it kind of a turn-on.”

“Really?” I said hopefully. “Maybe you’d like me to recite one of Petkoff’s speeches from Arms and the Man?”

She gave me a playful kiss. “Just the arms and the man will do fine right now,” she said. We embraced, kissed, long and lingeringly … but after a moment I felt her stiffen, start to draw away, and I let go, wondering what I’d done wrong. “Deb?” I said uncertainly, looking suddenly into eyes clouded by doubt and apprehension. Had I made some ghastly mistake, fallen horribly out of character? “Did I … do something wrong?”

Debra frowned and shook her head. “No, that’s just it,” she said quietly. “You’ve been perfect. Too perfect.”

I felt the tightness across my chest again; I struggled to stave off the anxiety, to keep my expression mild and puzzled when inside I was terrified, panicked that somehow she knew, somehow she suspected—

“I’m just afraid…” She stopped, her voice quavering. “Rick, forgive me, but … I’m just so frightened that all of this—you and me, you and Paige—it’s all just a…” She looked down. “An act. A pretense. That underneath, nothing’s changed, and one day—”

She began crying softly. I reached out, put a hand gently to her chin, made her look up at me. Stage gesture, I assailed myself. Can’t you do better than that?

I looked her in the eyes and said, as plainly and truthfully as I could, “I swear to God, Deb … this is not an act,” and I leaned in and kissed her again, more hungrily this time, as though by joining my mouth with hers I might, by sheer force of will, bind myself to her—forge a covenant that could convince her of my love and sincerity, despite the great falsity, the unvoiced lie, that separated us. It was an impossible task, I knew, but for the moment, we both wanted to believe, and she returned the kiss just as hungrily, entered the covenant just as willingly. Our bodies pressed close, the flesh making real the faith—the faith that what we felt was real, and that nothing else mattered. It was a contract written on air and upheld only by love; I think both of us knew it, and both chose not to care.