4

Several weeks later, Eleanor is doing what she has done every Tuesday and Friday afternoon since they moved here, which is to take Irina to the Broken River Public Library and sit with her in downtown’s only coffee shop with their piles of cigarette-reeking, broken-spine hard-covers. It’s unusually hot for September, and the coffee shop—it is called Frog and Toad’s and is located in a kind of difficult-to-find mini-mall behind an abandoned bank—has the air-conditioning going full blast. As a result it’s quite crowded. Eleanor is self-conscious about occupying a table in a crowded coffee shop; she can sense other people waiting, studying her for evidence of impending departure. When potential customers walk in, see the crowd, frown, and march back out, Eleanor feels responsible. She wants to leave now in order to accommodate what she perceives as other people’s more pressing needs. But she has identified this quality in herself as a personality flaw, and she doesn’t wish to pass it on to her daughter. So she pretends she belongs here and deserves this table.

Irina’s drinking coffee too. She asked for a cup, just now, in line at the counter. Their conversation went like this: Irina ordered coffee, Eleanor laughed, Irina said, “What’s so funny?”

“You’re serious? You want to try coffee?”

“I don’t want to try it, Mother, I want to drink it.”

“So you’ve had it before?”

She recognized Irina’s scowl from her father’s face: that broad forehead so effective at advertising hurt. “I have it all the time.”

“Where?” Eleanor asked, though she knew.

“Father’s studio.”

“He has a coffeemaker out there?”

The barista, through a tiny, tight mouth, said, “Two coffees, then?”

“Yes, please!” Irina chirped. “Milk in mine, please. No sugar,” she added, proudly. Eleanor immediately recognized this pride not as a manifestation of her own emerging faith in herself but rather of Karl’s natural, effortless, self-satisfied bluster. She checked herself: now stop that.

The girl poked the cash register iPad with one hand while pointing at the condiment station with the other. Irina blushed, obviously embarrassed at having blown the protocol. You’ll learn, young one, Eleanor silently reassured, and a gray funk settled over the two of them.

Now they’re sitting together at a tiny table by the window, pretending to read their books. People in business casual drag themselves damply down the street, casting the occasional envious glance into the coffee shop. Whenever one meets Eleanor’s gaze, she offers up a small, embarrassed smile. She is thinking about the coffee in Karl’s studio. What else has he got out there? Packages come for him regularly; she has seen the cardboard boxes, neatly broken down and stuffed underneath the advertising circulars and egg cartons in the recycling bin. These expenses do not show up on her credit card statement, and so he must be paying for them himself, with his own money.

She doesn’t go out to the studio very often, and when she does—to bring Karl mail or ask him if he wants lunch—she rarely steps over the threshold. He invites her in now and then to look at what he’s working on, but it seems perfunctory, an effort to demonstrate that he has nothing to hide. In New York his rented studio was where he had his girls, and, though there are no girls now, she still feels as though it’s his private space, which she shouldn’t invade.

She does not know why she is affording him this courtesy.

For her own part, she is blocked. Early on in this project, before they moved, she had been sending chapters to her agent, and her agent claimed excitement. He wanted to sell early, get her an advance. But instead of moving forward with her outline, she has decided to go back and tweak things a little. Nudge them a bit. “I’m making some changes to those chapters,” she told the agent, and he said, “No need to do that. Just move forward. Move forward, and we’ll work on it together.” Craig Springhill is his name, a smooth-faced, honey-voiced white man with prematurely silver hair and a charmingly patronizing manner that she used to find reassuring. He came from the dying world of old-school New York publishing and treats her as though she’s the only lady novelist in his stable, a titillating unicorn. When she comes to town he buys her twenty-four-dollar cocktails at the Algonquin Hotel and laughs hysterically at everything she says.

They had a relationship. Well—a thing, anyway. It was a long time ago, before he represented her, when she worked as his assistant. She was twenty-three; he was nearly twice her age. He’s the one who first called her Nell, the name all intimates now use to address her. They were in her apartment, his fingers were fondling the top button of her blouse, and a query appeared in his eyes: “May I undress you?” was the question she expected, but the actual question, which he posed while undressing her without requesting permission, was, “May I call you Nell?” Yes. Yes, you may call me Nell.

He was married then and slept with most of his assistants. Divorce was inevitable, but what came next was a surprise, at least to Eleanor: he found someone, a woman three years his elder, and entered into an evidently stable relationship with her that brought the assistant fuckings to a close. Eleanor has met this woman, a foxy, silver-haired, rather intimidating television critic named Shannon something-or-other.

Eleanor was glad when Craig settled down, or she told herself as much at the time. In truth, however, she had chosen to see Craig’s serial infidelity as a manifestation of the general incorrigibility of men, something she needed to believe was real if she was to tolerate Karl’s sexual exploits. Craig’s rehabilitation, then, could be taken to mean that she was, in fact, married to a jerk. And there was no avoiding the other plausible lesson here: that, unlike Shannon the TV critic, Eleanor was not the kind of woman who inspired men to abandon their promiscuity.

In any event, she did not take his advice. She changed the chapters, rewrote every sentence. And when she sent them to Craig, he said, “Very compelling, keep at it,” and when she sent him yet another draft of the same pages, he said, “Brilliant, genius, love them.”

“Good.”

“Of course I adored the original version, before you changed it. And the second version. But these are also fantastic.”

“The other drafts are gone now, Craig,” she told him. “They’re deleted. The new versions are the real ones.”

“Yes, got it,” he said, and then, after an awkward pause (awkward, in particular, for Craig, who is so very skilled at filling empty spaces with words): “Nell, dear, you do realize that these are all roughly the same.”

“They are not remotely the same,” she replied, attempting to suppress the stirrings, in her breast, of panic.

“The words are different—”

“Yes.”

“—but what they say is not. They are variations on the same thing. It’s the same novel.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” Eleanor told him, weakly.

“I think,” Craig Springhill told her, with gentle condescension, “that it is time to move forward on this book. To write new pages.”

“These are new pages.”

“To write the pages that come after these pages, Eleanor. To write,” he said, with uncharacteristic irritation, “the rest of your novel. To begin to finish it. Don’t you agree?”

“There’s only one acceptable answer to that question, when a man asks it.”

“Eleanor,” he said, and at this point his voice had adopted the tone of exasperated finality that she had previously heard only while sitting in his office, waiting for him to get off the phone with someone else, “writing your damn book is a gender-agnostic good. Just do it, please.” And he hung up.

Eleanor’s books are about, and ostensibly for, women. Both the women she writes about and the women who read what she writes are young, smart, reasonably affluent, white, and firmly middle- to upper-middle-class. Her protagonists have been called “sassy” by leading entertainment magazines. The pastel-colored covers of Eleanor’s books are the kind that display shoe-clad disembodied white women’s legs or a fancy warm-weather hat or a signifier of free time such as a beach umbrella or shopping bag. (Eleanor was disdainful of these design clichés in the years before her name was embossed over them: reassuring expressions of conventional femininity, promising womanly universality through the promise of capitalism. She has since learned to do her sneering exclusively in private.)

The common parlance for the kind of book Eleanor writes is “chick lit.” If asked, Eleanor will say that she writes “literary chick lit,” an awkward and redundant term that nevertheless gets across the intended message: that she recognizes the essential frivolity of her work but insists upon approaching it with intelligence and a dedication to craft. She has learned, in the ten years her career has spanned, that certain other writers, ones with more intellectual cred than she possesses, read her, and regard her as a guilty pleasure. “Smart-lady trash” is what Craig calls her work. “As reliable a racket as this business has seen since the celebrity tell-all.” Each of her books has sold better than the one before, and she is on the cusp of achieving genuine entrenched semistardom. “This,” he told her, speaking of the new book, “will be your first number one bestseller.” He didn’t mean that the new book was better than the others—he meant that because it was functionally identical to them, it would not impede her career’s natural rise. The book, in Craig’s conception, should be cart, runners, and grease, all at once.

She has admitted to herself that he is right, at least in that it truly is time to move forward. But she is hopelessly blocked.

Irina lets out a noisy sigh and theatrically slams her book shut. She says, “I don’t think I’m good at reading.”

“That’s silly,” Eleanor replies, with a reflexive strenuousness that unpleasantly reminds her, every time, of her own mother. “You’re a great reader.”

“I start reading a paragraph and then something reminds me of something and by the time I get to the end I realize that I’ve been thinking of the thing in my head and not the thing I just read, and I have to start over!”

“Oh, that,” Eleanor says.

“I’ve read this paragraph five times! And I don’t know what it’s about!”

“Maybe it isn’t very good.”

Irina says, “What’s with all this reading, anyway? Like, how long have humans been doing it? Compared to all of history, I mean. A zillionth of a percent of time, I bet. It’s unnatural!”

“But on the way here you said it was your favorite thing to do.”

“That’s the point!” Irina cries. “It is my favorite thing, but it’s never good enough!”

She picks up her spoon and idly stirs her milky coffee while Eleanor tries to think of something to say. Irina, always precocious, never satisfied by the simple pleasures of childhood, has lately been witness to an abundance of adult troubles; and instead of shunning them, of regressing into prepubescence, she seems perversely eager to shoulder them herself. The bitterness of coffee is one thing, but Eleanor had hoped to shelter her from the bitterness of everything else, at least for a few more years.

Her instinct is to reassure, but the truth is that she agrees with Irina, she feels the same way about books: about everything, really. Your favorite things are never good enough. They’re idealized by nature; their favoriteness is derived from Platonic forms, perfect realizations that existed only once, usually the first time, if at all. No book, no meal, no sunny day ever equals the one in your head. She should tell her agent this. She should tell her husband this. She did tell her husband this when Rachel, the Last Straw, cast her lumpen shadow over their already-compromised union. Go to her, Eleanor told him, and find out. Find out just how happy she makes you. Instead, he agreed to an arrangement that Eleanor presented as months in the making rather than the drunken whim that it actually was: a year upstate, and then we’ll see.

When Eleanor met him, Karl was a graduate student in sculpture at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan and lived in a fairly spacious fourth-floor walkup in Bushwick, on the same block as a barber who used only clippers and an illegal Jamaican speakeasy and gambling den. He was thin then, with broad shoulders and narrow hips; his arms and chest were naturally well developed from his handling of the heavy materials—concrete, iron, glass—that his sculptures were made from. He was very handsome. His heterosexuality was so pronounced as to seem, in the heavily diverse, non-gender-normative environment of early-2000s art school, almost radical. He came off as arrogant. He was arrogant. He loved, or professed to love, the stridently masculine painters of the American midcentury: essentially, anything Clement Greenberg liked in 1963, Karl liked in 2005, and for this his fellow students hated him. He identified more powerfully with painters than with sculptors—“I’m painting in three dimensions,” he used to tell Eleanor—for which his fellow students and most of the sculpture faculty hated him.

But women loved him, even the ones who hated him. Within his grad school cohort (some of whom Eleanor eventually got to know), fucking and then hating and then grudgingly admitting you really still kind of liked Karl was practically a rite of passage. She met him at a party. He had arrived with one woman, an experimental portrait painter, and left with Eleanor.

Months later, when she realized she was pregnant, she mounted a campaign of emails and phone calls, none of which he answered. So she went to Manhattan, found Karl in his studio at school (where he was scraping German curves into a chunk of veiny sandblasted glass with a hand chisel while singing along to whatever noise was pumping out of his giant insectile headphones), and in front of two other sculptors working in separate corners of the room shouted, “Hey!”

He didn’t look up.

“Hey, man!”

Now he saw her. His face registered nothing. He raised a finger: Hold on a minute.

“How come you’re ignoring me!”

“Jussec, jussec …” Scrape, scrape, went the chisel. Tockatockatockatocka went the headphones. For fuck’s actual sake.

“Dude!” Eleanor shouted. “You knocked me up! What are you going to do about it!”

“Oh shiiiit!” came a voice from behind a precarious-looking sculptural pile of corrugated cardboard. From the other side of the room, a snicker sounded. Karl appeared to sense the shift in vibe. He removed his headphones.

“Hey,” he said placidly. “What?”

She told him. He didn’t appear surprised or alarmed. He swore he hadn’t been ignoring her—or, rather, he’d been ignoring everybody, working on this project. “Look,” she said. “Do you want to pay for the abortion? Do you want to come to the clinic with me? Or would you just like to be a garden-variety dick?” Something in Karl inspired this gleeful vulgarity, which was otherwise out of character for Eleanor. Later she would understand that bluster was necessary, when addressing this man, to conceal and undermine strong emotion. You didn’t want to cry in front of him. You didn’t want to be weak. You wanted to win.

He said, “Oh, no, don’t do that. Have it. Have the baby.”

Her only response was a snort.

“No, I mean it.” He jabbed with a dusty finger at the portable CD player attached to his belt, and the pulsing hiss emanating from the neck-slung headphones stopped. The room dropped into a kind of hush. Karl spoke quietly. “I’m sorry. Have the baby. We can’t kill it. Let’s move in together.”

“That’s insane. I have a life.” Though this wasn’t true. She had half a shitty novel draft and worked for her ex-boyfriend.

He shrugged.

“We don’t know each other,” she said. Save me, she didn’t say.

“Sure we do. Also, I have money. Family money. This is great, actually. We’ll be a couple. Didn’t you tell me you were a writer? That’s perfect.”

He took two steps and gathered her into his arms. The feeling was extraordinary: like being picked up by a warm gust and deposited on some sunny, grassy hilltop. “It’s perfect,” he said. “We will be amazing. The baby will be amazing. He’ll be an opera singer, or a tattoo artist or something. All three of us will be fucking famous.”

“Let’s get coffee and talk this over.”

“Yeah. No. Coffee’s no good for the baby. Remind me of your name again.”

Someone else in the room said, “Awwww, so sweet.”

“Eleanor.”

“Yeah. Right. Eleanor.”

“But you can call me Nell.”

“Okay, Nell. Let’s go get some herbal tea or something.”

They went out for tea, and Eleanor got coffee and felt bad about it.

She supposed she knew he was going to sleep with other women. Or, rather, she told herself he was without really believing it and found herself surprised to have been right. It was hurtful and cruel and she didn’t like it, but it also felt very grown-up to let him do it; it felt like a clever heterodoxy, an artsy relationship hack of which she elected to be proud. She was allowed to do it, too, of course—sleep around. Once she had had the baby, nursed it to toddler strength, regained her former slim figure, found a babysitter, and managed to attract a guy who was interested in extramarital sex with some kid’s mom, she would really go crazy with it.

Uh huh.

Anyway, they stuck it out, and they got better at what they did, and they lived the lives they thought they wanted. And then, somewhere in there, she got sick. That’s the way she thinks of it now—the illness as one event among many: or, in the terms of her trade, a subplot. Cancer as a minor character, who appears in chapter 8 and fades away, like an old boyfriend or nosy neighbor, into the fog of memory. Like her mother and her aunt before her, Eleanor survived it, she beat it, leaving her corporeal and emotional selves intact. She kept her breasts, her husband, and her life, and she did so without joining a support group, without registering for an internet forum, without wearing a pink ribbon. She quietly triumphed. There are still friends who don’t know she had it.

Of course, the illness scraped their bank accounts down to the metal and then some: her insurance policy, even after a deductible you could buy a used Mercedes with, left her footing 20 percent of every bill. After years of strongly worded letters and daily phone calls from collection agencies, the sales of the Brooklyn apartment and her unwritten fourth novel finally erased the rest of the medical debt, with enough left over for a down payment on the place upstate, while Karl’s family income (which had not proven as substantial as he made it sound) would pay the mortgage.

The irony that Karl’s infidelity helped to finally balance the books is not lost on her. But no matter. She is healthy now, and she is writing.

Well, in theory, she is healthy. In truth, she needs to make an appointment at Sloan Kettering. She hasn’t been in for a checkup in almost two years. The last one she scheduled, she didn’t keep: just walked up to the automatic doors, watched them part before her, then turned around and left. She figured one of these days the scans wouldn’t be clean anymore. And she did not want that day to come. So she faked it. Went through the motions. Took the train to Manhattan and walked aimlessly around the Upper East Side. Soon after they moved here, she did it again: four and a half hours in the car, five hours of solitary wandering, a night in Craig’s girlfriend’s apartment, and home. “All clean,” she told Karl, making sure Irina was in earshot.

And she is writing, too, only in theory. Actually, she hasn’t written a word since they moved. She has decided to see this fact as a mere technicality. The novel manuscript is open on her laptop screen every single day: that counts. That’s writing!

Her daughter, of course, really is writing, for hours at a time, with the kind of feverish intensity Eleanor can only enjoy in distant memory. (Or maybe that’s yet another idealized experience she has invented to torture herself with.) She is proud of Irina, and proud that her pride is not merely a euphemism for jealousy, at least not yet.

Irina is turned around in her seat, staring out the window. Her forehead is pressed against the glass, and her body is tense. Tall and narrow, jointed like a crane, she has a kind of accidental grace: she ought to be bumbling, with her big head, nascent hips, and prominent knees; instead she navigates her environment with spidery lightness, leaving behind little evidence of her passage. It’s not that Irina has mastered her body, not yet; it’s as though her body has mastered the world. Like her father, she is going to get away with almost everything she tries.

Only in her eyes and mouth does she resemble her mother, and that’s too bad, because Eleanor has made a life project of being hard to read. Irina’s features are placid but composed: something is unfolding itself in her head.

“Hey. Irina.”

She starts, spins around. “Can I get an ice cream?”

Through the window, Eleanor can see, a half block down Onteo Street, some kids lined up in front of a Dairy Queen. She says, “Well … we could leave here now and get some on the way home.”

“No, I want to stay! Just let me go and come back.”

Irina is avid. She is gripping the table with both hands and blinking a little too fast. The latter is familiar to Eleanor: she has seen herself do it on television, while dissembling about her work.

“Um, sure. Yes. Sure.”

“Thank you!” Irina shoots a quick final look out the window, as though to make certain the ice cream stand is still there. Most of her coffee is still in the cup; pale continents of milk fat drift on its surface.

Eleanor feels a moment of relief: the girl is still a child, after all. She hands over some cash, and Irina extracts herself from her chair and tugs down the hem of her tee shirt. She moves through the tables to the door and in moments is outside and is briskly walking, almost skipping, down the street.

It is in a similar spirit of optimism and youthful energy that Eleanor is now able to push aside the piles of library books and lift her small laptop up onto the table. Ahhh, the freedom to write. Except that, of course, the moment the screen flickers on, she minimizes her untouched word processor, with its bloated cargo of doubts and second-guesses, revealing a web browser open to her current obsession, the CyberSleuths forum, specifically the Geary murders subforum, which she has rescued from obscurity under the screen name smoking_jacket.

She doesn’t want to admit to Karl how excellent his choice of house was; she’d held its shortcomings, not entirely consciously, in reserve as something to resent him for later. But in fact she likes the place very much—its musty, woody odor that even the professional cleaning couldn’t suppress; its dark and twisty corners and cramped spaces; its dirty windows, busy with densely packed trees, that only the most oblique rays of sun occasionally touch.

And the murders—how they excite and obsess her. How much more interesting they are than the petty dalliances of her novel-theoretically-in-progress. She feigned indifference to Karl on the subject and didn’t mention them to Irina at all—fat lot of good that did—but of course they intoxicated her. She’d begun her internet research before they even left the city; Karl had told her about the killings only in order to explain the great deal they got, but she dug in like a starving dog. Since arriving here she has made secret forays into the library’s paper and microfiche archives. There, she found a parallel, digitally unsearchable narrative of the crime, as reported by a short-lived competitor to the then-already-terrible Broken River Daily Reporter (now chain owned and called, depressingly, Broken River Week) known as the Onondakai County Shout. Its editor and primary writer, a man named Zane Ellsburgh, was prone to wild speculation and overheated prose, excellent qualities in a writer if what you want is to blather recklessly on about his subject on an internet forum. The paper died with him, and his life’s work was now archived, to no great evident interest and in thrillingly perishable form, at the Broken River Public Library alone.

Eleanor is now giddy with power, if only in the small virtual world of CyberSleuths. She has single-handedly transformed the Geary murders subforum into a minor sensation with her previously unavailable newspaper clippings, police quotations, crime scene photos, and evidentiary culs-de-sac. She, or rather smoking_jacket, has taken to referencing Ellsburgh by his first name, as though she and he were close. Eleanor thinks of smoking_jacket as a brassy gal of around forty-five, maybe a career diner waitress with an unfinished college degree in semantics, or philosophy, or some other impractical and ultimately unsuitable area of study: she moved back to Broken River at age twenty to take care of her invalid mother, got a night shift at the Chomp Stop or Lyle’s Sandwich Parlor, and never left. When her mother died, s_j renovated the house and took an older lover: yes, the shambling and jowly (but smart and charming) Zane Ellsburgh, whose motor mouth and sweaty brow served as titillating correctives to the trials of life with Mother. It was tragic, his coronary (he was in his prime, the Daily Reporter eulogized out here in real life, in what seemed to Eleanor a tone of barely suppressed gleeful relief); smoking_jacket inherited little, save for the violent mystery that distracted Broken River, more than a decade ago, from the long, boring project of its own decline and death. She reads the archives, calls up a few retired cops. Posts her results online.

That is, Eleanor does so, in the voice of her character, whom she has inhabited with greater enthusiasm than perhaps anyone she has yet invented. Maybe it’s the refreshing lack of mediation that makes this project so much fun—no agent, no editor, no publisher, no bookstores. Or maybe she wishes that her life were a little more like smoking_jacket’s: solitary, obsessive, and straightforward.

Eleanor doesn’t have anything new today, so she answers a few questions other forum members have asked. From ladygumshoe2: Any idea what agency, state or local, administered Samantha Geary’s care and eventual adoption? No, she replies, as smoking_jacket; if you’ve read the thread, you already know that I think we ought to leave Samantha Geary alone. From DotOnTheTrail: Is there any new information about the identity of Mr. Chet, the drug kingpin the crimes have been linked to? Eleanor: If Mr. Chet is alive or active, he is probably using a new name, because I haven’t been able to turn up any information about him that originates after 2005.

And then, this, from UncleJ: Has anyone gone back to the house to see if they can uncover new clues? Is it true that there are new owners?

It gives her a chill, this post. There is nothing, of course, overtly threatening about it, but it represents the first time her own corporeal existence has been referenced, however obliquely, on the forum. She is suddenly aware of the smallness of the world, this town, this coffee shop.

Eleanor looks up from the laptop and out the window. Irina is in line now, behind a small, dark-skinned child and a big man with flowing blond hair. She is fidgeting, as she often does, hopping from one foot to the other as she reads, presumably, the menu.

Whoever wrote that post knows about her family, is implying that maybe they ought to be visited, interrogated, their home searched. In the politest possible way, of course. Time for smoking_jacket to nip this one in the bud. Eleanor writes, Dear UncleJ, haven’t met the new people yet, but I’ll stop by and say hello. If they’ve found anything, I’ll let you know. But don’t hold your breath. The place has been gutted and rebuilt more than once.

In other words, back off, dude.

Satisfied that the threat has been neutralized, Eleanor looks up to reassure herself, once again, of her daughter’s safety. But her view has been blocked, by a man wearing a zipped-up windbreaker. He is standing here in Frog and Toad’s, right in front of her, holding a coffee mug and a plate bearing what looks like a blueberry muffin. He’s a big man, not quite monstrously so, with a jumbled pale face punctuated by a crooked nose and enormous ears, one higher than the other; his hair is mussed and graying, both on his head and on the backs of his rough and meaty hands. The coffee and muffin clank down onto the table’s surface, and the hands push aside Irina’s pile of library books. He sinks onto Irina’s chair with a groan and the chair groans back. He looks like a fat vulture occupying a fence post.

“That’s my daughter’s chair,” Eleanor says.

For a moment the man continues to look out the window, and then, seconds later, turns slowly to face her. His eyes are gray and expressionless. They are like glass eyes. She endures a moment of terror as they lock onto hers; then she shakes it off.

“My daughter,” Eleanor says again. “That’s her seat.”

The man blinks, takes up the coffee mug, silently half-drains it of coffee. Then he puts it back down on the table and turns back to the window.

The gesture is peculiar enough to shake Eleanor’s social confidence. How do you react to being utterly ignored? She tamps down a sudden spike in anxiety and leans around the man to find Irina.

Her heart clenches: Irina’s gone.

No. Wait. There she is; she’s off to one side, sitting on a wooden barrier, made out of railroad ties, that separates a parking lot from the sidewalk. She’s licking a giant vanilla soft-serve cone beside a tall girl who seems to be in the latter stages of the same activity. The two are talking.

Whatever the big man is looking at, it isn’t her daughter. He seems to be staring directly across the street, at a row of empty storefronts. Occasionally somebody passes by on the sidewalk, but the man’s eyes don’t follow them, not even for a second. He is just staring. For a moment Eleanor wonders if the man is homeless or has escaped from something. His jacket is clean, as are his unfashionable tan pants, and from him issue the faintest scents of soap and aftershave—yet there’s something overly mannered and contoured about his grooming, as though he learned to do it from an old book or a social worker. He seems designed to deceive.

Meanwhile the tall girl has gotten up, and Irina has, too. Irina is turned three-quarters away from Eleanor and is gesturing excitedly with both hands; the ice cream cone, still largely uneaten, wobbles alarmingly. The tall girl is bending over slightly, scowling in apparent concentration. She speaks a few words, then is silent for a time as Irina talks and gesticulates. At one point she looks up at Frog and Toad’s. Eleanor feels as though their eyes have met. The girl looks back at Irina, speaks, and then lowers herself back onto the guardrail. Irina sits beside her, and the two are again engaged in conversation.

Eleanor’s not sure why this situation unnerves her. It’s typical behavior for her daughter: an introvert by nature, Irina is nevertheless prone to periodic bursts of intense social engagement, and it has been months since she has had the opportunity to be around people. So of course the girl wants friends.

But why this girl? She looks like a teenager, or older. The two are sitting close, and the tall girl is listening, nodding. It’s almost as though Irina chose her, targeted her for friendship from afar.

Now Eleanor is distracted by a movement in the foreground; the man in the windbreaker has turned from the window. He is gazing at his blueberry muffin with the same mooselike affect he previously employed to examine Eleanor herself. He picks up the muffin, hefts it, turns it over in his hands, like it’s some unfamiliar piece of technology. His meaty fingers pick at the pleated paper baking cup, seeking purchase; little grunts escape the man’s throat as he concentrates. Finally, his thumb and forefinger get a grip, and the paper is torn away like a cocktail dress. The muffin disappears into the man’s mouth in two casual bites.

The entire operation has made Eleanor extremely anxious. She gathers up the library books and computer and dumps them into her cloth tote from the Strand (18 MILES OF BOOKS! promises the logo, and it sounds to Eleanor like a death march); she slings the bag over her arm and collects the dishes she and Irina have dirtied. The table trembles a little as she does it, and the man’s coffee sloshes around in his mug; as though its motion reminds him of its existence, he seizes the mug and pours the liquid down his throat. He’s like a robot that’s been programmed to eat and drink, to appear more human. She says, “All yours,” but by now the man has turned again to the window and appears to have forgotten she was there.

It’s hotter outside than when she entered Frog and Toad’s. It has to be ninety. That’s just not right. It’s September! Upstate! She has exited on the far side of the building and has to loop around to Onteo Street, and by the time she’s halfway to the Dairy Queen, Irina is walking toward her down the sidewalk, daubing at her hands with an enormous wad of paper napkins. Behind her the guardrail is empty of sitters. “Oh my god, it’s so sticky,” Irina says. “Hi, did you get my books?”

“I have everything. Some weird guy stole your seat and I figured it was time to go. Who was that?”

“Who was who?” Perfectly innocent. Eleanor has turned around, and now they’re both walking toward the car, which is parked in one of the diagonal spaces in front of the empty strip mall.

“The girl you were talking to.”

“Oh! That’s Sam.”

“You seemed to know her.”

“No, we just started talking.”

“Why did you suddenly just start talking to a girl twice your age?”

“She’s not that old, she’s seventeen.” A pause. “Well, I think she’s around seventeen. She had a Brooklyn shirt on, and I was like, hey, I’m from there!”

Eleanor doesn’t remember seeing a Brooklyn shirt, but she didn’t see the girl for long, and she was far away.

“She’s never been there, actually,” says Irina. “She’s from Buffalo, supposedly. She’s in town visiting her brother and living with her uncle.”

“She’s visiting the brother, but she’s staying with the uncle? Not the brother?”

“Umm,” Irina says, “yeah, I don’t really get that, I guess the uncle’s got the extra room. Anyway, she seems cool. I gave her my email.”

They’ve reached the car, and Eleanor unlocks it with the button on her fob. She wishes she could have started the engine from two blocks away and turned on the AC so that it would be ice-cold by the time they got in. Then she chastises herself for such a miserably bourgeois desire. She says, “I don’t know how I feel about that. You shouldn’t just befriend an older kid on the street. If she’s seventeen, shouldn’t she be in school? I mean, she’s staying with her uncle and going to school?”

“I guess, Mother. I only talked to her for five minutes.”

“Well, I’m not going to let you just go into town and be friends with an older girl I’ve never met.”

“Okay, okay.” They are in the car now, and Irina is not looking at her. She doesn’t appear angry, just off in her own world.

They drive in silence down County Route 94. The library books lie in a heap at Irina’s feet, spilling out of the tote bag, and she is rhythmically pressing her thumb to her middle and ring fingers, then pulling them apart, over and over again. Feeling, no doubt, the stickiness of the melted ice cream that the napkins couldn’t clean off.

The gesture unexpectedly fills Eleanor with sadness. She suddenly believes that her marriage is going to fail. Indeed, it was never going to work, was it. They married for Irina, and she tolerated Karl’s philandering for Irina, too. But there’s more to it than that: the philandering was useful to her. It gave her a moral advantage, a reason to serve as the default parent, a license to make Irina into the ideal friend and roommate that her own prickly nature never allowed her to find outside her family.

She loves Karl, but her love never wrung her heart out or made her feel like she would die if it weren’t reciprocated. Of course, that kind of love doesn’t last—just read one of her dumb books—but maybe this kind doesn’t, either. She’s annoyed when Karl enters a room she is in, as often as not is repelled by his touch, cringes at the sound of his voice. Prevented from fucking for forty-eight hours, he paces like a caged animal until she relinquishes herself to him. He actually said to her last week, rolling off her, “How was that?” and she replied, truthfully, “Kind of rapey.” He didn’t seem to be offended—he nodded and reached for his phone, and soon tiny video game sounds filled the bedroom.

She is aware that all of the things about him that presently vex her—his intensity, amorousness, and imperturbability—are the very things that attracted her to him in the first place. But now he has hurt her too much. Right?

They get home and she feels as though she has wasted the journey: oughtn’t they have talked? Irina jumps out of the car and sprints for the front door while Eleanor heaves herself oldly out of the Volvo, grunting: her back is still killing her, weeks after the move. How did she end up hauling so many boxes when Karl was supposed to be the family muscle? In retrospect, he seemed mostly to have scratched his beard over how things should be arranged in the truck. Her anxiety has seized upon her muscle aches, found them to its liking, declared them permanent.

She hobbles around to the passenger side and gathers up the library books from the floor. She would like to spend the evening on the sofa, reading these while Karl’s hands massage her legs and feet. He is good at that, and when he does it she is willing to forgive him almost anything. Suddenly she does want to forgive—she wants to be put into a state where she can do so. She gazes up at their house. It’s beautiful, really, in a rough-hewn, workaday sort of way; she understands why Karl found it so appealing. He might have built it. Its low shoulders and slightly awkward angles resemble his art, which in turn resembles automobiles that have been crushed into uneven cubes.

She’s shouldering through the front door now—Irina has already disappeared up the stairs—and hoisting the bag of books onto the table, and she spies his two favorite sculptures through the archway to the living room, standing there on their steel tripods like a couple of obsolete machines that have been powered down for good. It’s getting late and she ought to start cooking dinner—though who wants to do anything hot in this weather—but she walks into the living room and stands before them, telling herself that they deserve to be appreciated, they deserve to be understood. It seems wrong that they receive less of her daily attention than the television set that now stands beside them, a concession, on Karl’s part, to conventional matrimonial togetherness.

They are called Flow (frozen) #4 and Flow (frozen) #11, but Karl refers to them as Huck and Jim. He has proudly claimed that they are the two ugliest things he has made. Each consists of a massive glass block, cracked, drilled, and broken in several places, with inch-thick steel beams tunneling and bending around and through them. Huck stands about five feet tall and two and a half feet wide; Jim reaches seven feet but is nowhere wider than eighteen inches. They remind her of trees that have grown through fences—or of a trick her father showed her once. Take a block of ice—in Dad’s case, the size and shape of a two-gallon bucket he had commandeered in order to illustrate this phenomenon—and place it on a grate over a tub. (He used a baking rack from the oven and their actual bathtub, doubly irritating her mother.) Gravity will pull the ice block through the grate; enthalpy will fuse it back together. In the case of the oven rack and the ice bucket, the healing was nearly seamless. Dad lifted the ice-gripped grate with his skinny arms and held it over his head, laughing. Then Mom made him run hot water over it into the sink so that she could have her oven back.

Her father probably intended this experiment to illustrate some philosophical principle, or maybe some commonplace of human behavior. Our tendency to return to our original state after a tragic event? The persistence of our preconceptions in the face of contradictory evidence? She can’t remember. Today, though, it tells her that there is a force that keeps intact things intact. An object wants to stay whole. One may expend great energy attempting to break it apart, but it may gather itself back together regardless. She doesn’t even know how Karl does it—how he gets the steel in there, how he cracks the glass and fuses it back together. Some rough magic, the same stuff he has used to keep her.

There’s enough space in the corner for Eleanor to walk behind the two sculptures. She hasn’t seen them from this angle since they moved—actually, it’s probably been years, because they stood in the same configuration in Brooklyn as they do here. Why on earth did they waste so much precious apartment space on them? Even here, they dominate the room. It’s strangely intimate, back here in the corner, behind the sculptures; she reaches out and touches them both, runs her hands up and down them. They’re cool to the touch, despite the heat, and the air around them is cool. There’s less light here, almost as though it’s a separate time zone or dimension. Above her the ceiling is filthily stained where it meets the wall, and is dotted with mold: the third contractor mistake they’ve found so far. She’s sick of calling them, demanding that they come back, giving them more money.

She wants to see her husband. She wants to make up for her traitorous thoughts in the car. Does he feel this way about her? Does he stand out there in his studio, cleaving glass and bending metal into shapes and regretting falling in love with somebody else? Imagining it seems to make it so. She calls up to Irina that she’s going out back, walks out the door and around the house, knocks on the studio door and enters.

He’s standing with his back against the west wall, his pants unbuttoned and his hand in his boxer shorts. His other hand has pushed up his tee shirt and is stroking his belly hair in a gentle circular motion. In front of him, on the work table, his laptop computer is open, and a woman’s tinny moans emanate from it. He looks up, startled, slaps the computer shut. “Um,” he says.

She can’t help laughing. She forgives him for everything, the idiot. She goes to him. “You’re not done yet, are you?”

He appears absolutely horrified. He jerks his hand out of his pants. “Um, no?”

Eleanor mashes herself up against him. He’s still hard: good. She pushes his jeans and shorts down and takes over for him. He has already created a sticky preemptive mess. She remembers, against her will, Irina’s ice cream cone and her sticky hands. She says, “Can I fuck you, or do you want it like this?”

“Fuck,” he manages, so she hikes up her dress and puts his hand on her, and when she’s ready, they do it. He is good at it, and when he is doing it, he puts everything he has into it, and into her pleasure. He makes her aches disappear. Her cries sound to her like sudden epiphanies, as she discovers forgotten pockets of love.

Afterward he’s dressed again and is holding her and stroking her hair. They are panting, leaning against the wall. He says, “Uh, sorry about the …”

“I get it,” she says. “I wasn’t home. You’re a horny guy.”

“I guess … yeah, I suppose.”

She wants to look at his face and he doesn’t seem to want to let her. Finally she disentangles herself. He is staring over her shoulder at the door, though when she turns to see who is there, it is closed. “Hey—are you all right?”

“I’m great. That was—thanks. Sorry.”

“I don’t care, Karl.”

“Yeah, no—that’s—I appreciate that.”

She pulls back a little farther from him, leans back against the workbench. “Did you not want that? Would you rather have done it alone?”

“No!” He’s looking at his feet. “I mean, that was great. I was just … I thought I locked the door. It could have been Irina walking in.”

“So remember to lock it.”

“I will.”

She stares at him until he looks at her. He seems to wince. Then he gathers himself and gazes into her eyes. “I love you,” he says.

“I love you, too.”

Twenty minutes later, while she is cooking dinner, it occurs to her that maybe she ought to have opened up the laptop to see what was on the screen.