Our time together in New York had granted me the sense of partnership I’d so badly wanted. I was no longer just Martha’s lover, but her equal and most trusted adviser. Strangely, yet perhaps not so strangely, this was owing to Nicholas, who’d so obligingly surrendered his shade, that we might theorize, anatomize, regret, and deplore him for hours of the day, days on end. Nicholas had gone everywhere with us, our ghostly third wheel, not an intrusion but the basis of a bond. His prominent role in our conversation was the proof of our intimacy. I believed then—perhaps I still believe—that such complete confidence is exclusive, or at least, it should be. In sharing his secrets with me, she’d replaced him with me—or should have. But then we returned and acquired a different third wheel, with very different, even opposite, effects.

Martha and Dutra had developed a mania for bar pool. I couldn’t play pool at all, and found myself, in their company, less and less able to learn, so that from the beginning their fondness for pool left me sitting alone with my drink. But soon they’d debuted as a team. It was inevitable that this should have happened—on any given evening Martha and Dutra could play against each other only so long before another player, or several, signed up on the dusty blackboard with the nub of gray chalk for the privilege of playing the winner. Then the only way both could stay on the table was to suggest a contest between teams. But it wasn’t inevitable, or to me unobjectionable, that they should do quite so well—that they should win quite so often, and, worse, start to practice their game in the daytime with grave self-importance.

Their preferred venue was the half-derelict poolroom of the town bowling alley, a windowless concrete-block tomb that was open for business from ten in the morning. This made it ideal for Martha—no sooner had baby and nanny embarked for the playground than Martha and I hurried off to meet Dutra, so that they could play pool for an hour free of all competition, and equally free of what threats to intense concentration are posed by a bowling ball knocking down pins. Not even the most purposeless in our town bowled or shot pool at ten in the morning, though like me a few of them drank. I tried to drink only for show, from a glass of Budweiser I hoped to make last the whole length of the visit, and pretending to read while my lover and housemate crept around the worn felt taking aim with their cues like game hunters surprising an elephant. I could find this amusing just up to a point. One day when the stroke of noon found them still playing, I demanded of Martha, “Can I have the keys?” interrupting their lazy trash talk. I’d driven us home late at night many times in the Saab, though of course she had always been there in the passenger seat. “I’m hungry,” I added brusquely. I was daring her to refuse me, in a similar way, I now felt, she’d been daring me to complain I was bored.

“You are, babe? There’s food here,” she said, bent from the waist in a perfectly right-angled, upside-down L as she lined up her shot. Dutra, one long leg triangled in front of the other, one elbow stuck out as he planted his cue just in front of his crotch, watched her with a motionless concentration he very rarely achieved. It was his way to be twitchy, impatient—but pool brought out a physical kinship between them. With their long-limbed and meticulous predation they seemed, perhaps, less like armed hunters than elegant herons beak-skewering fish.

“Those hot dogs have been riding the wheel since June. I’ll go to Jade Dragon. I’ll bring you back something.”

“Moo shu pork and egg rolls,” Dutra said without looking at me. “Aw, fuck you, Hallett,” as Martha sank two in a row.

“Lend her the Volvo if you’re asking for food.”

“Am I actually standing here begging for keys?”

“You’re not begging,” Martha said, straightening.

“Gottlieb can’t handle the clutch in the Volvo. It’s too specialized.”

“Fuck you, Dutra.”

“Fuck me? I’m on your side!”

“There’s not sides,” Martha said with annoyance, excavating her keys from her pocket and tossing them to me.

“Do you want anything?”

“Just a Pepsi.”

“They sell Pepsi here.”

“They sell food here too, but you’re leaving.”

“I’m not going to Jade Dragon for hot dogs.”

“It’s soooo sad when the honeymoon ends,” Dutra said with a sigh.

“Shut the fuck up and take your shot, Dutra,” said Martha, as if I had already left.

Outside I slammed myself into the Saab and squealed out of the lot and bounced over the freight railway tracks and took the wide turn onto State Road 15, among the strip malls of which lay Jade Dragon, putting Jade Dragon half a mile in my wake before I realized I’d passed it. Jade Dragon was another of Dutra’s esoteric bequeathals, a linoleum temple to peppers and grease situated as far from the flagged walks and greenswards of campus as a person could go without crossing the town line in the general direction of Canada. Of course Martha had not known of it before meeting Dutra, despite the fact that the town’s most inexpensive supermarket, Mighty Buy, was also located here at the back of a vast lake of asphalt. Now I had to turn into the Mighty Buy lot, to reverse direction and go back to Jade Dragon. That parking lot was always a confusion of mud-spattered four-door pickup trucks and professorial Volvos and other commingled town/gown/John Deere vehicles among whom there was no right-of-way consensus. I was a long time getting back to Jade Dragon and by the time I arrived I was no longer angry. I just wanted Martha. Had it not been for Dutra’s moo shu and egg rolls I would have blown off Jade Dragon and gone straight back to her with the claim I had eaten the food in the car. It was strange to be there in her car, so surrounded by her, yet alone. There was Joachim’s Swedish car seat, a sliding pile of Xeroxes—she’d started research on a book—dumped in its cradle of cushions. Here was her stainless-steel travel mug, with its fitted rubber lid and its mountaineer’s clip, suitable for attachment to backpacks. A vestige of wholesome Berkeley. Here, on the black leather seat, lay a pale orphaned hair. Human movements in the parking lot woke me again—other car doors being opened and closed. Again I remembered my errand. I wanted to go back to her; and I wanted to protract this strange moment alone in her sanctum; and I had to go order the moo shu and rolls to achieve a reunion at all. With a sense of sacrifice I got out of the car and found Nicholas there, his face alive with combating emotions, as if he’d both meant to surprise me, and been shocked by me at the same time.

“No good ever comes of spying,” he said. The sun beat down onto our heads and back up from the asphalt, despite which squirms of cold raked the goose pimples out of my skin. “I thought I’d find the owner of this car if I followed behind. I saw you in the lot at Mighty Buy. Not you—the car. You know the windows are tinted.” I might have affirmed that I knew this, or conceded never noticing before, or made a sound of surprise or acknowledgment, or perhaps only chattered my teeth in the motionless heat and stared at him, because I understood now that despite all I’d said to Martha, the demands I had made for acknowledgment, I was a coward. I had tried to pretend Nicholas didn’t really exist, and now I felt all the defenseless secret history of his I had come to possess like ill-gotten loot bulging my pockets. If only I could have returned it, just emptied my thief’s sack and run.

“I wonder why you have Martha’s car,” he went on steadily. “I wonder where she is.”

“I was just—picking up lunch for her.”

“It’s thoughtful of you, Regina. Martha’s kept so busy. Our nanny informed me she’s hardly at home anymore.”

“And you—you took a trip?” I attempted, as if we were making small talk.

“I did. My canoe trip. It was generous of Martha to let me go this year, despite the baby. I did have a wonderful time. But the trip’s lasted longer than I had expected. Strangely it’s still going on. Don’t you need to go order your food?”

“No,” I murmured, or perhaps I only shook my head mutely at him.

“Martha won’t be expecting you back?” This consideration of his verged on unkind and he realized; he didn’t persist. “In that case I’d like to waylay you a few minutes more. I’d like to talk. Somewhere out of the sun. It’s lucky I happen to live just a short way away. Did you know that? Did you know that I have a new home?” My face must have told him I didn’t. All this time he’d kept me pinned beneath his merciless, pale-eyed gaze, yet in my wordless reaction to his disclosure he saw me anew. He actually tilted his face very slightly to alter his angle of gaze, as if he might, in that way, see beneath the mute mask that I wore. He should have seemed masked to me also, because so transformed, but the transformation further revealed him. The canoe trip had painted a rose-tinted brown on his usual scholarly pallor. His face seemed both harder and younger, the same shape as his anger, which was not at all veiled by his mock-courtesy. Recognizable as he was he also seemed a very different person from the one I’d known before, and despite the suffocation of the moment I recalled Martha saying of him, “There’s no inside, inside,” and wondered if she could have said this if she’d ever seen him angry at her—truly and maximally angry, as he now was at me.

He released me for the moment from his gaze, like letting a lid slam back down. “Follow me,” he said, turning away. Though I could have sped off in another direction, could have ignored his high-handed directive, or even laughed at it, such defiance of him at that moment was unthinkable to me. It was more unthinkable than clutching the slippery thighs of his wife through the arduous thunder of dual orgasm; it was more unthinkable than gazing on the perforated toes of his socks and the flaccid waistbands of his boxers. It was somehow most unthinkable of all. Could he have believed I respected him more, since I’d fallen in love with his wife? Could he have believed that in fact I loved him, with a comrade’s compassionate, sorrowing love? Perhaps he, of all people, could have, though I wouldn’t have dared make my case. Dumbly I got back in her car, to follow.

Halfway up the hill he turned on one of the transverse streets and into a small parking lot behind a building I wouldn’t have noticed. Left in the lot side by side, perhaps the two cars would discuss everything that their owners could not. A few paces behind Nicholas I passed down corridors without noticing them, but through the door he unlocked I stopped short. Blinding masses of light filled a vast, almost unfurnished space. “Do you like it,” his voice startled me, but it wasn’t a question. The cheap lock had imprisoned his keys, which he wrenched loose and impatiently hurled on a counter in the galley-style kitchen just inside the door. Past the kitchen the ceiling height doubled, and then after a time the room ended, on a distant horizon, in gigantic windows. “An old munitions factory. It’s unfurnishable. Apparently unheatable also. My friend Walter Debrango—history department, revolutionary France—moved here when he got his divorce. He calls it the Home for Scorned Husbands. Walter says that because it’s so hard to get comfortable here, there are always available units. I’m pouring a drink if you want one. I only have gin. I’m not well set up to play host.” The kitchen appeared to be empty, except for lonely glasses in the cupboard, and ice cubes in the freezer, and a two-thirds-empty bottle of gin. The emptied box that had held the glasses, a set of eight from Woolworth’s, sat with torn-open flaps on the floor. “In the living room you’ll find an armchair. Please take it. I’ll sit on the floor.”

“I’ll sit on the floor!” I implored.

“I insist that you sit in the chair. It’s my prerogative as host.” If he’d intended to allude to my transgressions, in the past, as his guest, he couldn’t have chosen a better means of enforcing my compliance. I sat down in the chair, among other dwarfed objects. There was a spindly floor lamp and a spindly potted ficus that had shed a few leaves, a small stereo system set directly on the floor, and several short piles, new growth, making tentative claim to the vast territory—a little pile of scholarly hardcover books, a little pile of compact discs, a pile (shortest of all) of trade paperback novels, and a slim pile of folded, seemingly never-opened copies of the Times Literary Supplement, perhaps five weeks’ worth. Each pile was perfectly squared. Altogether the armchair and stereo and printed matter and ficus made no impression whatsoever on the sense of stark emptiness. I drank from the glass he’d thrust at me and my mouth filled with protesting saliva but I managed to swallow. Nicholas seated himself on the floor with his back to the opposite wall. It put him far from me, which was worse than if he had been near: I’d have to speak up, to respond to his questions. Then he did not even start with a question, but an accurate statement.

“You didn’t know I’d moved out of my house,” he observed.

“No—but why would I have known?” I’d been wrong—silence so filled that cavernous room I could whisper to him and be heard.

“I would have thought Martha would tell you. Lucia said you accompanied her, the week that she spent in New York. The week that she spent in New York to be out of my way, so that I could move out, as she’d asked me to do.”

“She said you were coming to see the baby,” I said after a moment.

“Of course. Joachim was my primary interest. Hers was that I should get out, and be gone by the time she was back. I’m surprised that she didn’t tell you,” he repeated.

“Why?” Now my voice rang out harshly. “Why should she have told me?”

“Wasn’t it for your sake that she asked me to leave?”

So he knew. Yet I’d learned something, too. She hadn’t told me she’d asked him to leave, precisely because it was not for my sake. She had told me this plainly herself, but I wouldn’t believe her. “I don’t think so.”

“What makes you say that?”

“She would have told me. And she didn’t.”

“Maybe she wasn’t yet ready.”

“I don’t think so. It doesn’t have to do with me,” I said wretchedly, quoting her, but he thought I was trying to dodge his suspicions.

“It doesn’t have to do with you?” he exclaimed. “You should know that I have a reliable source. It’s you who’ve shown me how reliable she is. I’ve done Lucia a great disservice. Until I found you at the wheel of Martha’s Saab I assumed she was mistaken, or lying. Lucia has always played a game with us I didn’t enjoy. She’s always tried to tattle on Martha, to me. Martha doesn’t nurse often enough, she doesn’t sing Joachim songs, she doesn’t dress him in warm-enough clothes. It’s annoyed me. If Lucia hadn’t otherwise done her job so impeccably I might have tried to dismiss her a long time ago. But this felt like the limit, this gleeful new slander. Regardless that it wasn’t even true—in fact, to me it was much worse for being clearly untrue. Martha sneaking out of her own house at night like a teenage delinquent? Martha returning at dawn with a young female lover, and moans and groans heard through the walls? You can see how even someone without my vested interest would find such a story far-fetched. Yet it seems I’ve done wrong by Lucia. Or have I? Is Lucia a liar? Perhaps the victim of her own imagination?” He had spoken a long time, and beautifully; he’d suffused his tan even more deeply with blood so his flush climbed up into his hairline, and descended his collar; he’d drained his glass, and averted his gaze from my face so that now I could dare to return it.

“Lucia’s not lying,” I said, and my flush rivaled his. Between the two of us we might have outperformed a furnace in that very large, very cold room. All my physical points of connection set up an unbearable hum as if a cyclone had punctured the room and was trying to suck me apart—my knuckles were white on the soft leather arms of the chair and I was grinding my molars. The sun-bleached crest of Nicholas’s hair seemed to stand slightly farther away from his scalp.

“Regina, are you in love with Martha?” he asked quietly.

“Yes,” I said, and I was so sorry, and so relieved, to tell him that to my shame and relief I erupted in tears, and once started, could only gain strength, so that, clapping my hands on my face, I sobbed with gusto and drenched my shirtfront in my effort to spare his armchair being stained.

He let me cry for what felt like a very long time. When I had reclaimed some small part of composure he also looked more composed, as if my outpouring had washed away grime and restored his calm, handsome outlines. He disappeared from the room for a moment, and returning refilled our two glasses, and set a toilet-paper roll on the arm of the chair. I pulled off a streamer and mopped at my face while he resettled himself with his drink on the floor. “Having ascertained the facts, I suppose I ought to throw you out,” he said thoughtfully.

“I’m so sorry, Nicholas,” I said into my wad of stained tissue. By this I truly meant, without arrogance, I was sorry she no longer loved him.

“I’m sorry also. I’m not sure how to say this without seeming to belittle your feelings, which I don’t mean to do. My and Martha’s history—comprises many chapters and in fact many people. I’m very sorry you’re now one of them. I wish you weren’t.”

“I understand,” I said, to make clear to him the past held nothing to surprise or frighten me.

At that moment, I think we each genuinely believed ourselves to be the protagonist, and the other a naïve and pardonable walk-on whose role might even have a tragic end. Still, it was good to trade compassion in that large and chilly room, regardless if one of us, or perhaps both of us, would turn out to be mistaken.

“Thank you for defending Lucia’s veracity,” he said after a while. “I’m glad to know I hadn’t trusted my child with someone prone to malicious falsehoods. But she had to go. It isn’t what she said—the truth or falsehood of it. It’s the way that she said it. The pleasure she took in disparaging Martha. But none of that means I enjoyed firing her.”

This was the “disservice” of which he had spoken. I must have looked as amazed as I felt. Lucia gone? She seemed as permanent a part of their lives as the baby himself, and for an unreasoning moment I imagined the baby was gone, banished alongside his loyal factotum, the two of them perched on a box of his arty wood toys and her garish bedspreads by the side of the road. But no, they had been separated.

“I couldn’t let her spend another hour with my son. A child shouldn’t grow up in the care of a person who is constantly calling his mother vile names.”

“Such as what?”

“Careful, Regina,” he warned, “my concern is for him. It’s his dignity and self-love I am talking about. There was something of that bile he understood. I’m not defending Martha’s honor, or yours.” Standing abruptly, he tossed his spent ice cubes into the ficus. “I must get back to Joachim.”

“Where is—Joachim?” It was the first time I’d spoken his name. Until now I had called him “the baby.”

“At the moment, with Laurence and Sahba. Laurence did me the favor of picking him up, using Bebi’s car seat, because I didn’t have our one for Joachim. I had to take Lucia to the Greyhound bus station. Then I was going to Mighty Buy to get something for Joachim’s dinner when I happened to notice the car I’d been looking for all over town. Martha told Lucia she would be in her office, but that wasn’t the case. You never did tell me where Martha is.” He came to take my empty glass and stood a moment regarding the top of my head as I stared at my lap, the two glassfuls of barely iced gin eating holes in the pit of my stomach. Nicholas’s regard correspondingly drilled on my scalp. I couldn’t return it. It wasn’t because I had wronged him, but because the idea that I’d wronged him now seemed so inadequate, self-regarding even.

Back outside I stood out of his way as he struggled to remove the Swedish child restraint from its complex installation in the rear of the Saab, but Martha’s papers impeded him, and I finally ventured to open the other rear door and go to work fitting them into an empty seltzer box. For some moments we hunched together in wordless labor like spouses whose entire involvement has worn down to the sharing of such dowdy tasks. Martha had complained to me that Nicholas was never proactive in household affairs. She claimed he contributed nothing, took the initiative in nothing, and yet seemed unsurprised that they should have, for example, a large house which she had shopped for and purchased—Nicholas passively contributing his share of their funds—and furnished and, with increasing distaste and resentment, maintained. She charged him with being unsurprised that they should have a spectacular garden which she had laid out and planted, not with distaste and resentment this time—imprisoned inland since they’d moved to this town, now her garden served much the same purpose her sailboat once had—yet still with the desire, which could not be so strange, that he take notice of the scope of her efforts every once in a while. She would say it was the same with their admittedly infrequent entertainments; with the contents of their refrigerator and liquor cabinet and wine cellar; with their subscriptions and their museum memberships and the expensive, unique, tasteful gifts they bestowed upon friends when occasions arose, and the same with their glasses and flatware and linens and with their house cleaner, lawn boy, and nanny—he didn’t know whence any of it arose nor what was required to keep and pay for it. He was like a child, she said, accustomed to having his whole world outfitted for him.

Yet today he had fired Lucia. Either Martha underestimated him, or he had made an extraordinary departure. One might think the latter, if judging by his rapport with the child restraint. Finally, in exasperation, he yielded to my offer to give it a try. I knelt on the floor of the car and peered into the crack where the backrest and seat came together, meanwhile following straps where they descended and crisscrossed each other. I remembered the suction-cup bowl, and Lucia’s reflexive insolence, that Martha had not been aware that it stuck to the tray. Certainly Lucia had been a maestro when it came to the child restraint. If you can do it I can, you old bitch, I encouraged myself. My hand squeezed a cold metal bar and all the plastic and padding and straps came away in one piece.

Nicholas seemed almost blind to the cumbersome thing as he took it from me. He pushed it in the back of his Jetta and slammed the door shut. Laurence would have to install it, but of course Laurence would, the right way. Equally senseless as my vision of Joachim and Lucia hitchhiking, the idea flashed through me that Joachim would be staying a long time with Laurence and Sahba, as if he’d been orphaned. I pictured Lucia at the Greyhound bus station, throttling the pay phone receiver and stuffing the slot with coins raked from the depths of her purse while cataracts of mascara asphalted her face and she poured out her tale of woe to her outraged and voluble clan banging skulls to get close to the earpiece in a crowded little house in São Paulo. Perhaps I should have raced to the station myself, just in time to grab Lucia as her wide, stubby feet in their puffy white sneakers clumped disconsolately up the rubberized stairs of her city-bound bus. Perhaps I was starting to realize she’d been my ally—she’d enabled my lover to lavish attention on me. Nicholas climbed in his Jetta and started the engine, then glanced at me out his window. “Regina,” he said, and I stepped close to hear him. “Martha will be very angry Lucia is gone. Just because you and I spoke about it, it isn’t your job to defend what I’ve done.”

“I understand,” I said, just as I’d said it before. But I already knew I’d defend him.

Something crossed his face, a pure motion like wind over water—I couldn’t have guessed what emotion it was. “I’ll miss you,” he said. “Your friendship.”

“Is it gone?” I wondered, but with luck he hadn’t heard my foolish question as, gesturing me to step back, he drove off.

•   •   •

Lucia’s disappearance struck the house as might a natural disaster, an earthquake or flood. Electric power still emerged from the outlets and potable water from all of the taps, but you would hardly have known it for the chaos entailed by an oatmeal breakfast. Martha’s inherent capability, which allowed her to build outdoor ovens of rocks, or patch sails, or cultivate asparagus with such unprecedented ease for an amateur that a professor of the Agricultural College had produced a monograph on her methods, seemed not to drop off in certain arenas so much as simply to vanish in a massive perforation, a scissor-hole in her brain around “bathing a child” and “spoon-feeding a child” and “soothing to sleep an overtired, distressed child” where some continuity, some carryover from other realms of exceptional competence, might have been expected. One potentially soluble problem she could not seem to solve was that she did not know where anything was that pertained to her child. She could not find the child-size towels, the specially short-handled bright plastic spoons, the wipe cloths or replacement crib sheets or, worst of all, favorite toys for which Joachim wailed in a repetitive, surely translatable argot to which Martha did not have the key. To her credit the uncomfortable parallel, between Nicholas’s uselessness as deplored by Martha, and Martha’s own that had now been revealed, was not lost on her. Here was the difference she saw: Nicholas did not prize Martha for all Martha did, while Martha had prized Lucia, as they say, above rubies. “I knew what she was worth!” Martha said, almost weeping. “I don’t care if she called me a dyke or if she thought I was going to hell. She did a great job. She did everything and she asked me for nothing and now just to spite me she’s gone.”

“Who wanted to spite you? Not her.”

“Of course not. Nicholas! Don’t believe that bullshit about safeguarding Joachim’s dignity. Joachim adored her. Look at him. How must this feel, having her disappear? A lot worse than hearing his mama called Satan’s handmaid. As if he can grasp what that means. He can grasp that she’s gone.”

Just as Nicholas had predicted and tried to forestall, I did find myself taking his side. “You might think that she did a great job, but Nicholas thinks that respect for you is part of her job. And frankly, he’s right. The way she talked about you—how could you tolerate that?”

“Easily! Who cares if she didn’t respect me? She respected my child. She loved him. Nicholas had no right to send her away. And don’t you understand why he did this? To get back at me. Shorten my leash. Leave us less time together. Who replaces Lucia? I do. You of all people ought to complain!”

But in fact both of them replaced her. Nicholas relieved Martha on alternate days, and when he did, when Martha had a full day to herself, during which she might do anything that she chose—during which she might research her book, or perfect her pool game, or perhaps even sprawl in the bath while her devoted young lover test-drove on her body the ingenious sex toys that, in happier days, had been jointly selected and ordered by mail—her mood, and our relations, grew worse. Lucia’s departure posed such a crisis, so thoroughly gripped Martha’s mind and reduced to inconsequence other concerns, that days passed before she acknowledged, much less discussed, those connected developments that, to my mind, were of equal interest: that Nicholas had moved out of the house, and that Nicholas knew I’d become Martha’s lover. “It has to be an au pair,” Martha ranted as she hurled items into the dishwasher. “Someone who’ll live in and knows how to drive. That’s Lucia’s one failing: she would not learn to drive. Though it wouldn’t have mattered if Nicholas hadn’t rented a place on the far side of campus. Fricking Walter Debrango and his Home for Scorned Husbands. They don’t just share a building, they share the same jokes.”

“You didn’t tell me you’d asked Nicholas to move out,” I said, not for the first time.

“Can you please hand me those plates from our lunch?” she demanded. “Of course I told you he’d moved out.”

“You didn’t tell me that you’d asked him to move out. Nor did you tell me he had.”

“Of course I did. You know, don’t you?”

“I know it from him!”

“What difference does it make?”

“You didn’t tell me: why? You didn’t want me to know? You said he was going to come spend a week with the baby, not that you’d given him that week to move out.”

“And this is some crime against you? That having possibly a few fucking things on my mind, I failed to keep you apprised of my husband’s movements?”

“That’s not the point. The point is you came to a major decision about your marriage and you didn’t tell me.”

“Because it’s my marriage, not yours,” she said, slamming the dishwasher shut.

“So you admit it?”

“What am I, on trial?”

“You wouldn’t be on trial if you weren’t so evasive!”

“So you admit that you’ve put me on trial!” While we bickered Joachim, on the floor on his stomach with his head slightly raised, had been shoving the floor with the heels of his hands, so that, though he had his eyes fixed on a goal well ahead—Martha’s feet—he never moved forward but backward, and now had wedged himself under the legs of a chair.

“You didn’t tell me you were asking him to leave for the same reason you didn’t tell him we’re lovers,” I theorized furiously as Joachim unleashed a wail of frustration.

“I did tell you I was asking him to leave. Are you out of your mind?”

“You did not!”

“And there’s a tradition, perhaps you don’t know, of refraining from telling one’s husband all about the adultery one is committing,” she said as, bisecting the room, she snatched the baby out by his tiny armpits, which rescue only further outraged him, so his wails became screams.

“So much better to let the news come from the nanny.”

“Why don’t you call Nicholas and commiserate then. Poor wronged lover and husband!” But our screams were no match for the baby’s, and that argument, like all arguments, as well as all peaceable conversations, and all meals, and all sex, was cut short.

To a depth no lecture of Lucia’s could have ever achieved I’d begun to understand Joachim’s disproportionate power. His very inability to walk, talk, obtain food, obtain toys, change his own elevation, control his own waste, added up to such efficient tyranny no five minutes elapsed that was not interrupted. No activity wasn’t derailed. No coherence attempted to harden its edges that wasn’t immediately smashed. And somehow, Martha’s stubborn attempts to control her existence just deepened the chaos around us, so that I, who’d idolized her independence, and her unfettered intelligence, and her many achievements, now wished she’d concede her defeat and tie on a babushka and do some housecleaning. Martha was grimly determined to write her book, and the heaps of her research appeared everywhere, well-intentioned haystacks beside the high chair or in sight of the doorway bounce swing or wherever she thought she might steal a few moments for reading, so that in addition to misplacing Joachim’s things, she was always misplacing the page where she’d had to leave off, and would ransack the house in a rage, grabbing up and discarding. Nights when Joachim was tranquil in his crib, and we might have made love, or at the very least slept, Martha’s books would form jagged deposits all over the bed, and Martha herself would sit up with her face barricaded behind her bifocals, and the breast pocket of her old Oxford shirt bristling dangerously with black razor-tip pens. If I managed to doze underneath the hot glare of her lamp, I would often wake up with a sharp-cornered library binding impaling my gut. Yet I never went home, nor to some other room of her house where the light wasn’t on. I would still rather lie with my cheek pressed against her bare thigh and the Norton Anthology splayed by my head. For some nights, when she finally clicked off her lamp to reveal the dawn starting to texture the room, as if freed by our shared tiredness, like composites of darkness our bodies would merge. Without words or struggle a fluid of pleasure would seal us in its cocoon, and final outcries would be quakes without sound, as if taking place on the floor of the ocean. For the night’s short remainder, we slept blissfully, and whatever it was that we shared would seem inviolate.

If only she would tell me what it meant that Nicholas had moved out, that he knew we were lovers—if only she would tell me the one thing I wanted to know, which was what sort of future together we had. And yet the future arrived every day, until half of August was gone. Then questions of my own separate future, as a student and scholar, grew hard to ignore. Though I tried, for a while.

One morning when it was Nicholas’s day to spend with Joachim he called to say he was sick. An au pair had been hired, but had not yet arrived. Nicholas had aches, a high fever, was sweating and chilled, and had vomited twice in the night. I heard Martha repeating his symptoms back to him as if she were expecting something more. Their conversation was brief, and when Martha set down the receiver she was pale with anger. “I suppose that you think he was faking,” I said, nastily.

“Go ahead and side with him again.”

“Side with him! Do you really believe he’s not sick?”

“Of course he’s sick. He could barely make sense. But I have just ten days until I’m back in the classroom. Ten days left to research and write, and now this day is shot.” For some time, scarcely seeming to see me, she continued to scold me, as if I’d suggested she give up her career. Just a half hour later the phone rang again, and answering Martha turned not pale but red with unease.

“Oh, Laurence! How nice . . .

“Yes, he’s sick. Oh, he called you. Then why—

“Lunch?—No, I had no idea.

“A ‘play date’? Oh, I see.

“Can I phone you back later? Of course I’d love seeing you too . . .

“A ‘play date’!” Martha cried when she got off the phone. Today Laurence and Bebi, it turned out, had expected Nicholas and Joachim to come over for lunch and the activity Laurence called a “play date.” Having heard from Nicholas he was sick with the flu, Laurence had called Martha to urge her to accept the invitation in her estranged husband’s stead. Joachim’s absence, and hers, would be a great disappointment; Bebi had been awaiting his playmate’s arrival for days.

I hadn’t seen Laurence in months, since the night of the dinner, and Sahba and Beb in even longer than that. For a moment the dense interval, of my time with Martha, disappeared, and I was plunged into a prehistoric world, and felt I hardly knew who I was anymore. “Laurence loathes me,” Martha was saying. “This is some kind of divine punishment! Not only denied my workday, but now I have to have lunch with my ex-husband’s friend who loathes me, so the babies can have a play date.”

“He doesn’t loathe you,” I reproved her, although I was more lost in thought about whether or not Laurence might now loathe me, so that for a moment I didn’t realize what she meant when she said, with a gasp of insight,

“You should go—you and Laurence are friends.”

“I go?”

“I’ll leave you the car.”

“No!” I cried, understanding she meant it. “I haven’t seen Laurence in ages—I don’t think we’re friends anymore. Just call him and say they should have their date some other time.” But I knew it was hardly the play date that Martha most wanted.

“Please, babe,” she said, sliding onto my lap. “I have so much to do and so few days to do it. I won’t ever get these days back. I’ve never asked you for a favor,” and before I could halfway discern if this statement was true, she plunged her hot tongue in my mouth and I groaned when I’d meant to be silent, and slid my legs open and crushed her to me, and for the first time in weeks, in the daylight and conscious, we set ruthlessly after each other. But after some moments I pushed her away.

“You want me to take him to lunch and what else?”

Rosily disheveled, she leaned her head on one elbow and thought. “Could you look after him until six?”

It was eleven in the morning. “Martha,” I exclaimed. “That’s seven hours.”

“Until five? No, how about this: you tell me how long.”

“You’re asking me to babysit.”

“I trust you! You’re far more trustworthy than me,” she attempted to joke. But this wasn’t my objection, and she knew it. That she so frankly hoped to use me coursed through me like a charge, and I felt I understood, perhaps for the first time, the warlike accounting of love: the storing up of credits and debits like a forging of shackles.

I made her wait until she should have grown uncomfortable before I said, with some refrigeration in my voice, “I’ll watch him because I love you, and I’m happy to help you. Not because I haven’t got something better to do.” She’d gone too far, and yet, I was perversely glad she’d done so, which might mean I had gone too far, also.

“Of course. Thank you. I’m truly grateful, babe. I hope you realize how much.”

Our ardor of moments before had evaporated, and it only felt foolish to be lying, as we had somehow wound up, on her dining-room floor. We stood and Martha straightened her clothing and then, with tenderness but not heat, gathered me in her arms. “I know you’ve noticed,” she said in my ear, “that I’m a much more inventive lover when I’ve gotten work done.”

“Then by all means go do it. I’ll expect to enjoy the rewards.”

“You will,” she said, kissing me deeply again, but briefly, as if she feared that the longer she lingered the greater the risk I’d renege. After much energetic ransacking of rooms she located her most needed papers, and with a shout of “love you!” tossed back over one shoulder, she rushed from the house.

All this time Joachim had been taking his late-morning nap. Had he been awake the discussion could never have happened, let alone the outcome. He was more skilled at retaining her presence than I. His absence had enabled her departure, and now, as he continued to heedlessly sleep, it forced me to reflect on my own situation despite how unpleasant would be the conclusions. I was alone in Martha’s house and in charge of her child, yet I felt not like her trusted ally but a child myself. I would have liked to think it was because I hadn’t babysat since the age of thirteen, but I knew this wasn’t true, just as Martha’s belief that I could have refused her was somehow untrue. She wouldn’t think she’d overstepped. She had asked, I’d consented; then why did I feel like a child? Martha liked to pretend her adult obligations, her parenthood and her professorship and mortgage and the rest of the dread weighty things, added up to a prison forged only for her, but in fact it was armor. Thusly clad she could make every other claim yield, for what did I have better to do? Not a thing, as she knew even better than me. I had my summer reading list, off of which I had crossed not one title. I had my fall classes to choose: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Contestation? (M)Other Tongue(s)? How would I ever decide? And right then, though I loved studenthood, perhaps loved it too much, I was finished. I was finished with all forms of life that resembled a child’s. At my age, twenty-one, my own mother had been already married and pregnant and entrapping new clients in my father’s little office like the spider traps flies; twenty-one wasn’t inherently inconsequential. And though I could have decided, in my angry resolve, to kidnap the baby and hold him for ransom, I meant to pursue consequence along dignified paths. No longer would I be the student, to Martha’s professor. No longer denizen of a house full of empty beer bottles, to her mansion owner. And while she’d fled Laurence and in fact her own child, I would calmly attend to them both.

I went upstairs and crept down the hall to his nursery door. As usual it was ajar; after a moment’s hesitation I inched it just open enough to squeeze through. My heart was beating so loudly I thought it might wake him—I really had no idea what I was doing. In all my career babysitting I’d never cared for a child so young. I saw only the crib, its monkey-patterned bumper sufficiently high that the baby, asleep, was obscured. I knew this and yet still grew convinced he’d somehow disappeared. I was alone; no one could judge me; I dropped to all fours, and with the caution of a predator—or prey?—noiselessly crawled toward the crib, the heels of my hands and my knees sinking into the carpet. I didn’t have to get all the way there to come in range of the sound of his breathing. Once I heard it, so faint yet so steady, the quintessence of self-containment—here he’d been all this time—I was compelled to make sure it was him breathing there and not something else, like a raccoon. I raised my head just far enough to peer over the bumper. He’d bundled himself in a corner, limbs tucked under his body, face turned toward me. Because his eyes were closed I felt I had no idea what he looked like. I might never have seen him before. And then his breath snagged in his throat and he let out a strange, high-pitched whinny and shrugged himself more tightly into a ball and with wild haste, as if fleeing gunfire, hunched over I ran out the door, and closed it to a finger’s width behind me, afraid of the noise of the latch.

The nearest phone was in the bedroom, where my clothes and Martha’s seemed to have been raining down from great heights for a great length of time. With a pang I discovered I still knew Laurence’s number by heart. And then hearing his chipper “Hello-oh?” I almost hung up but would not let myself.

“Hi, Laurence.”

“Martha!” with a great gust of mustered delight. “Are you able to come?”

“It’s Regina,” I said, trailing into the uncertain silence that followed. “Martha asked me to call you. Something came up and she can’t come to lunch.”

“Regina!” poor Laurence managed. “My God, I’m sorry. You sounded just like—hello there, how are you?”

“I’m babysitting Joachim today, and I’d be happy to bring him to lunch. I heard Beb was excited to see him.”

“Well—wonderful! That’s terrific! We’ll be thrilled to see you.”

Martha was right—it was truly exhausting, adult artifice. Standing there beside the unmade, hard-used bed, Martha’s phone in my hand, Martha’s unlaundered panties and cut-offs and wife-beater T-shirts ankle-deep at my feet, and Laurence’s voice in my ear, I was two places at once, or perhaps more exact, two times: before Martha, and after. Laurence didn’t know who I’d become and was not sure he wanted to ask. “Come on, Laurence,” I said, my voice seeming to drop a full octave. “That’s not necessary.”

“Certainly it is!” But as always, Laurence was betrayed by his honesty. “Sahba might be uncomfortable,” he admitted, “but she’s not here. She’s gone down to New York for a girls’ weekend with an old school friend. That was why, when Nicholas fell ill, I thought I would ask Martha over. She and I could break the ice, and Bebi wouldn’t have to be disappointed. He loves other children, and there are simply no children out here where we live.”

“Now you’ll have to break the ice with me.”

“I hope there’s no ice to be broken,” he gaily protested, but Laurence was Laurence. He’d known me too well to pretend he might not, at this point, know me less. Still he kept his tone light when he said, “We can just keep it simple: it’s a play date, for your charge and mine.”

For me at least it was more, which I realized before we arrived. My nervousness at driving with the baby—somehow heightened instead of allayed by the Swedish restraint, with its Space Shuttle catastrophe straps, as if Joachim would be shot into orbit—at first made me drive very slowly. Then my growing eagerness to see Laurence again made me speed. I’d so badly missed Laurence. His friendship, it seemed to me now, had coincided with a sense of pure rightness, a time of being just who I was without needing to try. Herky-jerky, going too fast and then going too slow, Joachim and I struggled toward Laurence’s house. Waking Joachim from his nap so that we could set out I had found myself declaiming, in an improvised mixture of self-consciousness and lack of inhibition, while he sat staring at me from the crib, “Mommy has gone to her office. To work on her book. So I, Regina, am going to stay with you. What do you think? Is that okay with you? Mommy asked me to stay. So I’m going to pick you up now. Then we’ll have a new diaper. Then we’ll get in the car. Then we’ll drive to see Laurence and Beb. What do you think, Joachim? Does that all seem okay?” I tried not to bellow as if he were deaf, yet I couldn’t stop recalling that parrotlike volubility he had shown with Lucia, those musical babbles and shattering squawks. Now he was silent. Was it the silence of protest? Not necessarily, I felt. It might be the silence of deliberation. All the way down the hill, and through town, and out the other side along the two-lane state highway through farmland to Laurence’s house, when I was not accelerating or braking I was stealing quick glances at Joachim in the rearview. He would be gazing either into the deep distance or right into the mirror, at me. “Here’s the new road where we turn! There’s a barn falling down! There’s a birdie up there on the wire!” I thundered inanely, imagining his silence alternately as assent, or disagreement. But when we turned into Laurence’s driveway—“Here we are! Here is Laurence’s house! Which is also Beb’s house! Where they LIVE!”—all at once a fluty noise of acknowledgment rose from his throat, and he kicked up his feet. Laurence was already crossing the lawn with a long-legged, sooty-eyed boy in his arms—the baby Beb, metamorphosed. Perhaps to lessen my shock at the passage of time Laurence was dressed as always, which meant overdressed for the weather, in his uniform khakis and button-down shirt underneath a light blazer, and braided belt, and Top-Siders.

“He seems to recognize your house,” I said, sparing Laurence the question of whether to kiss me in greeting or not by submerging my entire upper half in the car, in order to free Joachim from his seat. But when I got out again, holding the baby, Laurence bestowed his chaste brotherly kiss.

“You’re looking wonderful. Come on in. I’ve got lunch all laid out, baby things and some less mushy items for us.”

I’d never seen Laurence’s house in its full summer glory. The back deck was ringed around with flowerboxes and urns of eggplant and peppers and staked cherry tomatoes. A picnic table with an umbrella in its center was set for four, with high chairs before two of the places, one that clamped to the edge of the table and one of the usual kind. “This is Beb’s travel high chair,” Laurence said, taking Joachim from me, “and so also his guest chair when he entertains. Will you fit in it, darling?” he asked Joachim. “Yes, you’ll fit very nicely. Let me get them installed and I’ll get us some vinho verde. Just small glasses. I won’t let you overindulge.” The table recapitulated the abundance and variety of the deck, spread as it was with little bowls of olives and cashews and exotic-looking crackers, as well as halved grapes and halved clementine sections and halved cherry tomatoes and pale pink rubber erasers which I belatedly realized were pieces of hot dog and which gave me the key to the feast, the items intended for babies, and intended for us, although all were presented with care. Even tantalizing were the colored purees, in pale green and pale gold and pure white and a deep indigo. “Not that we’re barred from partaking of mushy,” Laurence assured me, returning and setting a wineglass in front of my place. “The mushy is all rather good. That’s a fresh pea puree. That’s fresh corn with a bit of yogurt, that’s just yogurt, that’s wild blueberries Beb and I picked today, again mixed with yogurt—”

“You made these?”

“I love the summer. And now that Beb’s almost two we can try him on all sorts of things. Last night he had asparagus spears and wild mushrooms. I don’t read anymore, I just play with the blender.”

Outside our oasis of shade, blinding platinum sunshine ignited the lake. All we heard was a motorboat dragging its zipper of froth. Laurence and I ate, fed, wiped, shifted items within or beyond the babies’ reach depending on what could be gauged of their changing intentions. At one point Beb upset his squat plastic cup, and Laurence said, “Shall we clean it up, darling? You take one napkin and I’ll take another,” and it seemed then, as it had seemed the whole meal, that there was nothing so special involved in the care of young children. In fact, it was the simplest thing in the world. It was as simple as cooking five kinds of puree, and cultivating produce and flowers, and keeping a home clean and ordered, and ironing button-up shirts. Moderation in drinking seemed equally simple, because Laurence accompanied me. We had both only sipped at our thimbles of vinho verde. Everything had slowed down. No one was crying and nothing was lost.

When they had eaten their fill Laurence spread a blanket in the sun and anchored its corners with baskets of toys, setting Joachim in the middle, while ambulatory Beb roved back and forth, presenting various of the toys to his guest and demonstrating their functions. They seemed not to need us, and it was now that Laurence finally broached a subject not having to do with the children, the weather, the garden, the food, or the lake. “Do you know what you’re taking this term?”

“Only a leave of absence,” I said, “but I might not even make it a leave. I might just withdraw.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. Do you feel like telling me why?”

“Don’t be sorry. I just don’t want to do it anymore. Papers, and classes—I’ve been in school since I was four. I want to be in the world.” It sounded childish even as I said it.

“What would you do instead?”

“Maybe get a job. It’s a novel idea, isn’t it?”

“But this is training for a job. A very good job at which I think you would be brilliant.”

“You will be brilliant. Me? I just can’t see it anymore. Two years of course work, then exams, then a dissertation, then the job market? I want to do something now.”

“Fair enough. But what?”

“That’s what I don’t know,” I admitted.

We directed our gaze at the children, though they still were contentedly playing and still didn’t need us. In a sudden movement of resolve Laurence topped off our glasses. “I want to apologize to you for something. I told you on the phone that Sahba would have been uncomfortable to see you. I was an ass to say that. Sahba cares for you a great deal.”

“But she’s never cared for Martha,” I said. “It seems more likely you were being honest the first time you spoke. It’s all right, Laurence. I’m a big girl. I know you might not like me either.”

“I like you very much, and Sahba does also. Her liking you so much is what makes her uncomfortable. Uncomfortable because unwilling to speak her mind to you, unwilling to speak her mind to you because she doesn’t want to hurt you. That pains her.”

“She can speak her mind to me. Why couldn’t she?”

“Oh, no, Daddy,” Beb despaired, for Joachim had begun flinging toys, and one had gone over the edge of the deck.

“Look at that pitching arm. It’s all right, darling. It’s on the grass there. I’ll go down in a moment and fetch it back up. Regina, I don’t want you to feel patronized, and I’m afraid that you will, but there’s no other clear way of saying it. Sahba and I both, and Nicholas—yes—we all feel concerned about Martha’s relationship with you. That your expectations and hers may not match.”

“What expectations? Of a miserable faculty marriage and a big gloomy house? Those are the last things I want,” I exclaimed caustically, just as if I were fending off Martha. For Martha accused me of wanting from her what I couldn’t define and she couldn’t provide—an accusation that enraged me in proportion to how accurate it was.

Laurence said, “Please don’t be angry. If you are you’ll prove Sahba right and me wrong, which will cause no surprise. Sahba insisted we couldn’t be so blunt with you. She was afraid we would injure your feelings, and make you turn a deaf ear to our worries.”

“I’m not a child, Laurence.”

“It’s because you’re not a child that I felt I could speak to you frankly. You’re not a child, but your life situation is very much different from hers.”

“Because I haven’t got a Ph.D., or a job, or a baby? Why do I feel as though I’m always being penalized for not having these things?”

“I’m talking about whether two people can honor each other the way that they should. It’s not about matching possessions or matching credentials. I can’t claim to have any idea what Martha requires in her life. I only know it will be complicated because we’re all complicated. I am. You are. These little boys, even. Complex beyond imagining, the things that we need. And now she has you, Regina, and what do you have?”

“Everything,” I said with bravado. Whether or not it was true, I knew the declaration made me sound like a fool.

After a moment Laurence said, gently, “I’m the greatest fan of love there is.”

I smiled on the droplets of moisture still lining my glass, while adding a few of my own. Love’s ecstasy felt like sorrow. “I’m glad you don’t hate me,” I said.

“Don’t be absurd.”

“I’m sure Nicholas hates me.”

“I’m even less qualified to speak for him than for Sahba, but still, I don’t think so. I don’t think he blames his suffering on you. I don’t think he would try to relieve it in hatred of you.”

“But he’s suffering,” I said, as if I hadn’t seen this clearly myself. Like any craven guilty party, I longed for absolution. For the first and only time that afternoon I caught sight of the nonsaintly Laurence, who could judge when required, and scorn when deserved. Now he let slip his impatience with me.

“Of course he’s suffering,” Laurence said curtly.

On the drive back, Joachim fell asleep. Little by little his face had grown jowly and skeptical, cheeks and lids drooping down while the translucent eyebrows struggled upward in failed counteraction. The thread snipped while my eyes were turned back to the road. The next time I looked the dark fringe of his lashes, like wee Spanish fans, had been spread. One cheek was flat on the edge of his Swedish restraint, squashing the small rosebud mouth slightly open, so that a thread of clear drool, like an icicle, hung from one corner. Asleep and inert, his face flickered with alien life, as if first Martha’s ghost, then Nicholas’s, chased each other across it. Hardly seeing where I went I passed by Hobo Deli and took the homeward turn onto my street, pulling into my driveway for the first time in weeks. I killed the Saab’s engine and turned all the way around in the seat. Joachim stayed asleep. Once again, as that morning, I was surprised by his breath, how regular and audible it was, even immersed in the rattlesnake chorus of summer insects. After a moment a door slammed behind me. Turning back toward the windshield I saw Dutra come out on the porch. I got out of the car with a finger bisecting my lips.

“He’s sleeping,” I said as Dutra bobbed and squinted, looking past me. When he finally saw Joachim he raised his own eyebrows slightly, that were so dark and emphatic, unlike the baby’s faint ones, little brushstrokes with water that would vanish as soon as they dried. When did people grow eyebrows? Or maybe some, like Dutra, had them in the womb.

“Now you’re the nanny?” he said.

“Just today.” His mockery annoyed me. “Put your head in the car and you’ll hear that he’s breathing.”

“Where’s Hallett?” His adoption of this bunkhouse familiarity was also annoying.

“Working on her book. It was Nicholas’s day, but he’s sick.”

“And she couldn’t quit work for one day to take care of her kid?”

“Jesus, Dutra. I’m not dangerously incompetent.”

“No one said you were. I just think it’s ballsy, using the girlfriend for free babysitting. Have a little pride, Ginny.”

“Fuck yourself, Dutra.”

“No other options. Are you coming in? It’s been starting to feel like I’m living alone.”

We didn’t go inside but sat out on the porch, where I could still see the baby, slumberous in his seat, through the Saab’s open window. The reflections of overhead trees weirdly framed him, oak leaves pulsing and glittering out of the glossy black depths of the Saab as if off the face of an undisturbed pond. I realized it had been a whole year since I’d first seen this house, walking here from the bus stop with a scrap of paper in my hand and being greeted by avid Dutra, with his long Roman nose and his tireless, percolating attention. It could have happened a decade ago. This summer, my time in this house had been simplified to intervals of sleep and then simplified further, to the occasional retrieval of some item. I lived with Martha entirely now. I wore her clothes and ate her food and read her books and even brushed with her toothbrush and washed with her soap, I left my drained coffee cups in her car and my shed hairs and sweat in her sheets. If I already knew that this couldn’t go on, I equally knew that I couldn’t move back in with Dutra. The house behind me felt as separate from me as it had on the day I’d first mounted the steps. And Dutra felt separate too, in an opposite way. I felt a reaching toward him like an ache. What I’d missed most was precisely this mode, this purposeless sitting together with beers while his mind paced and rummaged and ceaselessly tossed scraps of putative knowledge at me. The human mammal, for example, was not meant to metabolize wheat, hence beer made us sleepy; and yet this was the nature of civilization, these determined pursuits of the unnatural. Beer had been discovered when the stored wheat got wet and fermented, but what made man start storing wheat? What had made him start farming, stop hunting, forget who he was—

“I’ve decided to rent my own place,” I cut in.

For a moment Dutra, halted midlecture, tipped his beer bottle and gazed down the street. “Have you found something?”

“Not yet.”

“I’ve got the Journal inside. Take a look at the ads and if there’s anything good I can drive you to see it. The way to do it is line up a bunch and I can drive you to see all of them at one time. That’s the biggest pain about apartment hunting, all the time you spend seeing them.” The more officiously he offered his help, the more I knew I’d hurt him. We were both staring forward but in my peripheral vision I could see his bottle being raised to his lips with a quicker tempo, as if he’d remembered he had to be somewhere and wanted to drain it.

“It’s not anything personal, Dutra. I just want my own space.”

“Sure you do. We all do. If it wasn’t for money I’d live here alone. But I’ve loved living here with you, Ginny. Even when you’ve been crazy.”

Perhaps only Dutra could use the word “love” as if setting out two separate, even opposite meanings, for the listener to choose from, at no risk to Dutra himself. I’ve “loved” living with you as a cheerleader loves, with indiscriminate, bouncy fatuity that in fact isn’t love, because it privileges nothing, which means living with you has meant nothing to me. Or: I’ve loved living with you—words I’ve not said to anyone else. I knew the second meaning was his true one, from his calling me crazy.

“Wanting the shower curtain pulled shut isn’t crazy, you asshole,” I said, looking at him so that he had to look back. “Otherwise it gets moldy.”

“Wanting the toothpaste tube cap on the toothpaste isn’t crazy, either. Otherwise gobs of toothpaste get stuck on the sink.”

“Much worse than the toilet seat always left up.”

“Much worse.”

“I’ve loved living with you, too. I’ll miss you.”

“It’s been like you already left,” he said after a moment. “Sure you need your own place? You’re pretty much living with her.”

“I want my own place. Besides, the au pair’s moving in.”

“The oh what?”

“The au pair. A live-in babysitter. It’s like an exchange student, except she takes care of your kid.”

“So she’s going to be young?”

“About my age. A year out of college.”

Now he was feeling better. A wolf grin split his face. “Oh, baby,” he said. “Now’s when you’re going to move out? And let the au pair grab your spot in the bed?”

If I hadn’t been feeling so tenderly toward him I might have broken my beer bottle over his head. “If all Martha wanted was a woman my age she wouldn’t need an au pair. Women my age are pretty thick on the ground around here.”

“But this one will be living in her house. Taking care of her kid,” jerking his head toward Joachim, still oblivious in the backseat. “Might start to remind her of a very special person.”

“Fuck you, Dutra.” I shoved my chair back and stood up. “It’s late. I should go.”

“Aw, c’mon. I’m just teasing.”

“I know you’re teasing and I don’t give a shit, but I do have to go.”

He followed me back to the Saab, and stood a moment peering in the backseat. Joachim had shifted his head, exposing one flushed, dented, drool-varnished cheek. I found a clean cloth in his diaper bag and dabbed the cheek dry before getting into the car. “You seem good at this,” Dutra said through the window.

“I used to babysit when I was thirteen. It’s all come back to me.”

“I really was just teasing about the oh-whatsit chick, but—don’t turn your back, Gin. If you know what I mean.”

“I don’t. I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“I just mean, when your lover leaves someone, for you—or is cheating on someone, with you—those kinds of betrayals are maybe a habit. I’m just speaking on principles.”

“She didn’t leave Nicholas for me. Their marriage was over a long time before it was over.”

“Still. Hallett seems like a leaver. Just take care, okay, Ginny?”

I started the engine, perhaps more emphatically than was required, and as an afterthought glanced into the backseat. Still asleep. Joachim’s capacity to sleep, at age ten months, through every kind of disturbance, would lead me to believe, incorrectly, that imperviousness was a component of his personality, and not just a transient feature typical of this developmental stage. “I know you like to believe that I need your protection,” I told Dutra, “but I’m actually fine. Really. You can relax,” and within I shored up this proud self-diagnosis by smugly reflecting that here was a man who required a six-pack, a packed bong, and both the TV and stereo on before his mind calmed enough to allow him to study. At least until I’d turned the corner he lingered in the driveway watching after the car. I turned slightly too sharply, as if shaking him off.

•   •   •

It had taken them a long time to choose the au pair, weeks of manila file folders passing back and forth between their departmental mailboxes bearing densely written Post-its by which each, with scrupulous courtesy, expressed grave doubts about the first choice of the other. The autobiographical essays, CVs, testimonials, and head shots of contending au pairs papered Martha’s table, crackled in her bedsheets, slid underfoot when one climbed into the car. Wherever I looked, female faces looked back. They had an unpleasant effect on me. I too now needed a job. I too seemed to possess as my principal qualifications only youth and a uselessly broad liberal-arts education. Unwillingness to work as an au pair might set me apart, but then again it might not. The au pair applicants seemed to fall into three major types: the cheerleader/camp-counselor type, the premature-matron type, and a last miscellaneous type whose only trait in common seemed to be an unstated, but to me perfectly palpable, unwillingness to work as an au pair. It was written all over their faces, and loudly crammed between the lines of their overlong, self-regarding essays on their interests and goals. Perhaps inevitably it was one of this third type that Nicholas and Martha finally chose. She was a German named Anya, and I hypothesized that her pompous essay about studying Goethe had let them feel they were not hiring a substitute parent, but accepting a protégée.

When I’d told Martha I’d decided to drop out of school, her reaction had been so enthusiastic I’d started to wonder, in my mounting annoyance, if I’d hoped she would talk me out of it. “Baby, I’m so proud of you!” she enthused, sitting up from the postcoital snarl of bedsheets within which for some reason I’d thought to attempt serious conversation. “Graduate study of literature is the catchall for smart, rudderless people who can’t think what to do with themselves—that’s how I ended up here. I wish I’d had your guts. Honestly, babe, you’re so lucky to be at the front of your life and not stuck halfway into the mire. I always want to say it to my most brilliant students: Get out! Go do something real! But I’m their professor: ironically the most qualified to tell them to get out of this field, and the least able to do so. I’m supposed to make clones of myself—” On and on she went like this, extolling my boldness and vision, until I could no longer quash my suspicions.

“You’re awfully relieved I dropped out. Were you afraid that I couldn’t have hacked it?”

“Couldn’t have taught the great works to a room of stoned children? Are you joking? I think you could have—I think you can—do almost anything else.”

This mollified me, for the moment. “The problem is, I can’t figure out what the anything will be.”

“You don’t have to. You’re twenty-one! Do you know what I’d give to be that age again?”

“Do you know what I’d give if you’d stop saying that?”

“I know what you should do: travel. It’s what I should have done.” With lusty vicariousness she began to plot out my itinerary. “London, Paris, and Rome,” she began, “just to get those three out of the way. Then you keep heading east. Istanbul—”

“Now you sound like my mother. ‘Europe’s Crown Jewels.’ ‘Gateway to the Ottoman Empire.’ I haven’t got money to travel.”

“Money? You need a backpack and train pass. In fact, I think you’ve got to buy the train pass while you’re still twenty-one. When’s your birthday?”

“November twenty-eighth.”

“That gives you three months!”

“But you’re teaching this term.”

I might have finally irked her as much as she had irked me. “Regina,” she warned. “Look around at my life here. I can’t travel with you.”

“And I don’t even want to! I’m not interested in travel, I’m interested in you. And you seem interested in waving me off from some dock.”

“I’m interested in what’s best for you,” she shot back, swinging out of bed. “I thought you wanted to be free.”

“Not of you.”

“Why does everything turn melodramatic?” she cried. But she returned to the bed and threw her unshowered body on mine.

The au pair finally arrived the first day of fall term, on the regional flight from New York that was always an unannounced interval late. Nicholas was teaching all morning, and after waiting several hours Martha had to rush down to campus to teach her own class, leaving me for a last time in charge of the baby. Just a few minutes later a taxi pulled into the drive. The au pair, Anya, looked just as she had in her picture, but larger. I imagined her ancestress swinging a scythe with her hair in a kerchief. Anya, however, was generations separated from outdoor occupations. Although August was ending she was as pale as if she’d spent the whole summer inside. She wore a long black tube skirt and an oversize black cardigan with large buttons and librarians’ pockets, which costume should have been modest but somehow was haughty, as if by it she meant to imply that anyone who dressed better than she must be trying too hard. The quantity of her things was surprising. She stood by in calm idleness as the driver, the sort of sunburned, grizzled, eye-creased, twitchily feral white man I always assumed, seeing his doppelgängers lining the bar at the Pink Elephant, must be a Vietnam vet, with begrudged effort emptied the trunk. Things piled up on the grass: two large, soft, fat suitcases, a shoulder bag, a tote bag, sundry plastic shopping bags, and four small boxes which might have been packed full of lead from the way the man staggered with effort. “Which door?” she asked me, meaning I ought to direct him.

“I’ll help you carry your stuff. He’s a cab driver.” She raised her eyebrows very slightly at this, then let her gaze fall on the baby, who’d been watching the process with interest.

“So you are Joachim,” she said matter-of-factly, as if checking him off a list. She didn’t offer to take him, so that I had to struggle, hitching him up with one arm, to get Martha’s envelope open and pay the cab driver. I overtipped him for her presumption that he was her servant, somewhat hoping that as a result he would servantlike carry her heaped things indoors out of gratitude to me. He got back in his cab and drove off.

“Let’s go in,” I told her. “We can put Joachim in his playpen and then carry your things in together.” But she was already making her way to the house, taking off her cardigan as she went.

“This is a nice house,” she said over her shoulder. “Larger than it looked in the pictures.”

“You saw pictures?”

“Of course. Of the kitchen and yard and my room. I could not have chosen to come if I didn’t know what I would find.”

“I thought it’s more like they chose you.”

“We chose each other. Otherwise there can be bad surprises. Sometimes there are, anyway.” She’d led me through the solarium and now her gaze flicked appraisingly around the vast kitchen. “I would love to drink some coffee, if possible.”

Everything in the kitchen interested her—the marble mortar and pestle, the heavy glass blender, the cast-iron Japanese teapot, the elaborate French press coffeemaker like a piece of equipment from chemistry lab, the dishwasher with its drenched racks of freshly bathed mugs, the double-door refrigerator stuffed with fresh berries, heavy cream, bundled members of the onion family dangling gobbets of dirt from the bountiful garden. This was going to be her coffee cup, that her vase for fresh flowers. I could have thought she was casing the room like a professional thief had she not been just the opposite of furtive. She was plump with self-regard and entitlement, and she asked me for a butter knife, a small plate, a teaspoon, and some sort of fruit jam as if I were working for her.

“What sorts of bad surprises?” I asked in spite of myself. She’d continued to pay no attention to Joachim whatsoever and I’d finally installed him in his high chair with a pile of board books and a bowl of cut grapes which he was throwing alternately to the floor, first a book, then a grape, then a book.

“Don’t,” she interrupted as I stooped to retrieve his projectiles. “You’re only teaching him to throw it again. I can tell you about my bad surprises if you’re interested, but then you must do the same thing for me. Tell me what I need to know about them. What time do they get here?”

I realized she assumed I was a fellow babysitter: who else would I be? “Noon,” I said. “He’ll go down for a nap before then.”

“Are you a student at the school here?”

“Until recently.”

“I miss my student life. With little kids there’s never any peace. You saw all my books in the boxes outside. When I was in school, almost each day I read a new book. Now, since I’m doing this work, it’s a book in a month, reading little by little, so my thinking is all broken up. When I get to the end I’ve forgotten the start. It makes everything pointless.”

With this preamble she related the list of her bad surprises, which was much the same thing as her résumé. She’d had two prior jobs in the States, the first in Los Angeles, the second in New York. The Los Angeles family had been a television writer (the father), a talent agent (the mother), and three children ages three, eight, and ten. The father drank and had affairs. The mother shopped and disappeared to desert spas. Worst of all were the children, so insecure that they required almost constant attention and misbehaved almost all of the time. The parents provided no values and no discipline, and it being Anya’s job to uphold such a structure, not create it herself, she quit after a year and moved on to New York, where she encountered a contrasting problem. In New York she worked for a hedge-fund manager (the father) and a textile designer (the mother) with two children, seven and five. These children were so venerated by both of the parents their every utterance and whim was celebrated. If the boy mentioned rockets he was taken to NASA and given a professional-size telescope. If the girl mentioned flute or piano she received flute and flute lessons, a piano and piano lessons, trying everything, sticking with nothing. The children had French instructors and cooking instructors and soccer and ballet and juggling instructors and only God knew what other kinds of instructors. If they wanted to mold clay then fresh clay must be found. If they wanted to repaint their rooms, paint must be acquired and assistance provided and plastic sheets over all of their things. “These parents worshipped their children, but it’s just the same thing. There’s no structure at all. It was very bizarre.” This time Anya was fired, for not being “the right fit,” her employers had said. Nevertheless they’d written her a glowing referral, practically an encomium. “Guilt,” she concluded, confirming her assumption of our sisterhood by this final disclosure, for not even the agency knew she’d been fired.

“And what about them?” she now asked. “I’ve been interested to meet them. Professor Brodeur, I ordered his book. Of course I had no time to read it, but it looked very good.”

“They’re great. Of course you know they’re separated. But they’ve been great about it. It’s for everyone’s good.”

“So their relationship is amiable?”

She was probably thinking of “amicable” but her choice was far better: more sun-splashed and bouncy, without the trace of discord that “amicable,” in its exclusion of discord, retains. “Very much so.”

“It is a shame, though. When a child is so young. I wonder what’s made them do a divorce?”

She was determined to root out a scandal, but if the scandal itself blocked her way, she would never succeed. “They just grew apart,” I said tersely. “It’s time for his nap.” Perhaps now she might notice the sticky-bibbed, slump-lidded child in his seat. “If you bring him upstairs I can show you his bedroom and stuff.”

“I hate her,” I greeted Martha in the driveway a few minutes later.

“Good thing her job isn’t to take care of you! Joachim go to sleep?”

“After I fed him and washed him and changed him while the brand-new au pair helped herself to your bookshelves.”

“If the job opens again shall I tell you?”

“Fuck you, Hallett,” I said to her back, for she was already striding inside. But as always the very rare times I was rough and profane, because really furious with her, she turned magically soft and coquettish.

Returning she gave me her deep, searching kiss, as a promise or bribe, if these aren’t the same thing. Either way I accepted.

•   •   •

My new apartment was the second floor of a blue wood-frame house with a steeply pitched roof that sat just against, was in fact almost part of, the base of the hill. Climbing University Ave. one could actually pass, at foot level, the house’s rear-facing second-floor windows. This was how I had found it, spotting the small FOR RENT sign almost obscured behind the veil of roadside goldenrod and fleabane. The sign was repeated again in the front, where the little house sat blue against the green of the hill at its back, behind a wall of hydrangea whose blooms were blue against the green of their leaves. I didn’t yet know the name for hydrangea; this would be a late bequeathal of Martha’s, along with the name of the tree whose boughs scraped on the second-floor window: redbud. But even without this botanical knowledge I felt proprietary. I knew I’d live in that house before stepping inside.

There were two free apartments, the top rear, with its view of the steep wall of weeds, and the top front, with its view of the redbud. I took the front although its monthly rent was eighty dollars more than the back. So far I had one very part-time and poorly paid job, doing research for a leprechaun-like retired professor of English named Angus McCann who had a rosy chapped face and abundant white hair. He was completing a treatise on longing. “Bring me all sorts of quotes about longing,” he’d exhorted me, with such energy he was practically pogoing out of his chair. “All those folks who are craving and hankerin’ after and suffer from yens.” Whether he would pay me by the quote or the hour had not been made clear. “And I’ll be getting some writing assignments,” I supplementarily lied to the taciturn landlord, who stood impassively in a mud-stiffened Carhartt barn jacket and mud-spattered boots, holding the signed lease and awaiting my check. When I handed it over he quartered them together as he might have a grocery list and shoved them into a pocket.

The landlord’s name was Tim and he lived not in the house but somewhere outside town. This was all that I would ever learn about him. But he was clearly no absentee landlord; he kept the house freshly painted, the hydrangea beds weeded, the redbud boughs pruned, the porch floorboards nailed down, and the gutters devoid of dead leaves. He was tall, with a wedge-shaped upper body and big, callused hands, and the sort of rough-hewn, brooding face that does well in the movies—perhaps a movie about a solitary rancher with an unknown tragic past who elicits gasps, onscreen and in the audience alike, when some twist of narration requires him to shave, trim his hair, and put on a tuxedo. Something about Tim kept ringing a bell for me, as he almost wordlessly led me on a perfunctory tour of the building, showing me, as if he already ascribed to me the Martha-like sophisticated expertise I expected this home to bestow, not only the fixtures within the apartment but the hot water heater and circuit breakers in the basement. The basement also held untold years’ worth of items abandoned, presumably by previous, prodigal tenants, all stacked in an orderly way by someone, presumably Tim, who could not abide waste and hoped to see it all returned to use. He noticed me looking and nodded. “Up for grabs. Anything you can use, feel free.” I realized then who it was Tim reminded me of. He was the double of every other terse and wounded and good-looking and rarely washed man of a particular mold, after whom I had hankered, for whom I had suffered a yen, whom I’d craved, starting with Han Solo when I was ten. Was a time, and not long before, when this mumbled exchange in the basement, witnessed only by the noiselessly revolving electric and gas meters, might have gone in a different direction, and ended with my mouth and the upper insides of my thighs stained raw red from protracted abrasion. Now I only looked on Tim with remote curiosity, as if at a photo of some dead ancestor. I understood that we shared a connection but no part of me felt it.

“There’s a whole box of stuff to go with that,” he spoke up, when after choosing a rattling futon frame and gray lumpy futon, and a rust-pimpled chrome-legged table and chairs, and a threadbare armchair with scratched carved wooden things at the ends of the armrests like knuckles, I paused with frivolous greed at an empty fish tank, slightly clouded with limey deposit but otherwise clean. I’d always hankered after a fish tank the way some have a yen for, or crave, a fireplace. It seemed to me that with fishes to gaze on, I’d be safe and serene. Tim went on, “It’s all stuff that’s been used but I boiled it in bleach. The filters and air pump and heat element, even some of the gravel. It would save you a fortune.”

“I’ll take a look,” I agreed with pretended reluctance. “Are you sure you don’t need it?”

“You can see it’s just sitting here taking up space.”

Without the bed, everything I was bringing from Dutra’s could be moved in one trip in the Volvo. “There’s a futon already,” I told him as we packed up the car. “I’ll leave my bed here for Ross.” Ross, who had fallen in love with a waitress from Thailand he’d met at a Japanese restaurant, had given up his room in a group house to move in with her, which arrangement had ended when her husband returned from a tour in the army. “I scored so much nice stuff in this house. Everything I need, I got out of the basement. Even a fish tank.”

“No shit? How many gallons?”

“I have no idea.”

“Well, how big is it, Ginny?”

“I don’t know. Big.” I framed air with my hands. “Like this. Taller than wide.”

“Pretty, but less practical.” I should have known Dutra would claim expertise about fish tanks. “What kind of tank are you going to set up?” he demanded. “Freshwater or salt?”

“What’s the difference?”

“What’s the difference! Freshwater: our lakes, ponds, and rivers. Saltwater: the ocean. Jesus, Ginny.”

“I didn’t mean, what’s the difference between fresh- and saltwater! I meant what’s the difference in terms of a tank.”

“I’m having second thoughts about letting you live on your own. I’m not sure you’re ready.”

“Shut the fuck up, Dutra.”

“Has anyone shown you the pilot light yet? It’s supposed to stay on.”

“Shut up, Dutra.”

“Don’t stick your finger in sockets. Do you know about sockets? Where you plug in the lamp?”

“Shut up, Dutra.”

“And saltwater’s not good for drinking. Make ouchie in tummy.”

“Just fucking shut up.”

Our landlocked northern hamlet turned out to be served by two tropical fish stores, as far apart from each other, one southward, one north, as if a noncompete pact had dictated the sites. Back and forth Dutra drove me, first to one, then the other, always in search of some new crucial thing, as we puzzled out nitrogen levels and argued about the decor, Dutra so bent on a hinged treasure chest that it might have been his fish tank we were outfitting. Dutra now highlighting passages from my Saltwater Tank Manual, a joint pinched in his lips; myself now mislaying the water-test tablets amid the tofu and rice for our dinner, and ransacking my three little rooms in despair—for a couple of days we could almost believe we still lived with each other. I knew that Dutra was apprehensive about Ross moving in, as Ross had no money, and was unlikely to ever pay rent. But more than that, Ross presumed a certain Dutra to be the sole Dutra, just as easily as he’d presumed, when he’d learned I was leaving, that Dutra would be eager for him to move in. Almost no one who orbited Dutra—neither Ross nor Lucinda nor Alyssa, nor any other of the town’s becalmed flotsam, Birkenstocked and fogged in by pot smoke, with whom Dutra sedated himself—would have ever suspected that Dutra was dead serious. He was even more serious than the standard correction for standard underestimation of him would suggest. He’d done absurdly well in his classes, and had been singled out for the most prestigious of the second-year fellowships; he was now broadly viewed in the world of his school as the person to beat. But he kept that world carefully far from the world of his friends. Among his friends, Dutra’s smart-ass posturing was a typical symptom of having no prospects. It allowed him to hide in plain sight his true secrets—his brilliance, and his equally outsize ambition, and the certainty, almost like doom, that he’d be a success. But I knew, and he knew that I did, and that meant something to him.

I kept putting off Martha’s first viewing of my apartment, until without having meant to I’d provoked her real curiosity and equal frustration. Then I kept tweaking her to buy time, because the apartment kept falling so far short of what I’d envisioned. “Is it on the hill or off?” she might wonder. “A little of both.” “In a house or a building?” “A house is a building.” “No more sophistic bullshit. Housemates or alone?” “Wouldn’t you like to know.” “Now I’ll have to assume it’s a commune devoted to orgies.” “Aren’t you petulant!” “In fact, I’m annoyed, Regina, that you won’t show it to me—” “All I said is I wanted to clean it. You’re the one having sinister thoughts.” The apartment was far from the Shangri-la that inflamed expectation had made it. My first poststudent, adult apartment, it was, to the very last detail, a student apartment. It was uncomfortable and homely and bare. It was furnished with cast-offs and a half-dead houseplant and a shimmering cube of saltwater enclosing one fish half the size of my thumb. I was almost flat broke; I had paid a month’s rent and discovered no pithy expressions of longing. There were only my own, like an ocean tide forcing its way up my channels and rills, swelling me into regions of rash exaltation; and then washing out all at once. Subsidence and collapse. Longing. “It’s just an apartment,” I told Martha crossly when I called her, my line newly set up, on my cheap plastic phone from Woolworth’s. It would only, I knew, collect fingertip grime and require yearly cleanings with Windex. It disclosed only absences: absence of money and absence of taste.

“I’m coming over,” she said. “I’ll have Dutra with me. He can give me directions.”

When they arrived, an hour later, they were almost as long coming in: with an antique brass floor lamp with a clear blue glass marble on top that screwed down the lampshade; an old crazy quilt I’d admired countless times where I’d seen it tossed over her downstairs armchair; three framed paintings in radiant, lush sunset colors, all bosomy with afterglow clouds and ripe fruit trees and avalanches of velvet and languid or serenely dead sylphs; and two loud boxes of mismatched kitchenware, more kinds of pots, pans, and skillets than I’d realized were made; and towels and pillows and sheets in a motley of patterns, all pleasantly wash-paled and exceedingly soft; and penultimately a glazed pot full of green glossy leaves and very small, very white star-shaped flowers exuding a honey-rich scent like a swoon; and finally, Martha and Dutra each hefting an end, a massive rug rolled in a tube and secured with duct tape. My painstaking, awkward furniture arrangement, the futon-couch at an angle on one side, my armchair and half-dead houseplant marooned opposite in unsuccessful colloquy, was quickly erased. The rug—a box-cutter emerging from Martha’s back pocket—was sliced out of its bindings and unfurled into the room. It was an Oriental rug, in a palette related to that in the pictures, but more darkly saturated: bloodred and apricot orange. I stood to one side with the jasmine, for that’s what the plant was, in my hands, rooted there by my pleasure and shame which were trying to strangle each other. In the end pleasure might have prevailed, but her toga was stained, and her eyes blurred a little with tears.

“Is it all right I helped warm your house?” Martha whispered to me nuzzlingly, when Dutra, inaugurating my bathroom, briefly left us alone.

Was it? Now the apartment looked just as I’d hoped that it would, when I’d hoped to impress her. In fact, apart from the fish tank, it now looked like it ought to be Martha’s apartment.

“Of course it is,” I murmured. “Thank you.”

“It’s a sweet place,” she said. “I love it.”

“I hoped that you would.” I fell speechless, an inexplicable lump in my throat. I’d copied my door key for her, imagining it would make a significant gift. Childishly I’d envisioned the act of bestowal: like sliding a ring on her finger I’d lay the key onto her palm. And as fairy-tale keys tend to do, it would open far more than a mere wooden door. But it now seemed superfluous. Everything beguiling in these rooms she had brought in herself. The key stayed in my pocket.

Dutra returned and a hammer and nails and a bottle of Glenlivet (“The Glenlivet,” mugged Dutra, impressed) emerged from one of the two kitchen boxes. While Dutra poured, Martha hung the three Maxfield Parrish reproductions (for that’s what they were), shifted my furniture to her satisfaction, and removed the jasmine from my hands to the front windowsill where she thought it might get enough light. Along with all these things of hers into my rooms had come a smell, encyclopedic and subtle, like a threadbare tapestry on some epic subject: her former lovers and gardens and meals and travels and sails and wounds and orgasms and perhaps even failures, a dusty and vegetal, floral and heat-baked and cool-moist and unnameable smell. The smell of her past, her past self, here where my self was seeking its future.

“I can’t hang out,” Dutra declared in a voice that would not brook dispute, throwing his scotch back and raising a hand in goodbye.

I didn’t object, but Martha said, “Oh, come on. I haven’t met the fish yet.”

“The fish is right there. Ginny can make introductions.”

“Martha, Country Joe. Country Joe, Martha.”

“‘Country Joe’?” Martha said.

“Dutra named him.”

“Jesus, Dutra. I forget what a hippie you are.”

Provoked, Dutra forgot he was leaving. “Here’s a case where you don’t understand the big picture. Country Joe is the pioneer fish. To establish the right chemical balance in a saltwater tank you have to start with one tough little fish. He eats, he pisses, he shits, the levels seesaw like crazy until the nitrogen cycle gets going and the tank’s safe for fish. Get it? Country Joe isn’t really a fish! He survives where most others would die, and by his very existence creates an environment healthy for fish. So after this preliminary stage, it’ll be Country Joe and the Fish.”

“You really are a fucking hippie,” said Martha.

We sat, Martha and I on the futon-frame couch, Dutra at an angle to us in the armchair, all of us framed by the rug’s boundary as if riding a raft. We passed the bottle of scotch back and forth. We watched Country Joe flutter up, and drift down, and flutter upward again in his luminous cube. There was no other light in the room. How had she done it? She had bound the room deftly together, as if tucking the ceiling and walls into the carpet which served as their bed. Now all was snug. It was graceful and spare but not bare. I was growing drunk, and her scent, which had flooded my rooms, and uprooted my frail little seedlings of self, now drugged and aroused me. I wondered if style such as Martha possessed was inherent, or learned. Learned, I decided; give me ten years and I’d have it as well. God, give me ten years, but right now! What was the future with Martha that crowded my dreams? What bright shapes bodied out of the clouds? Much of the time my desire was so humble it didn’t reach past the next day: if only she’d lavish me with her assurance. She was a generous, ravenous, unrestrained lover, yet this she withheld. If only she’d tell me she never intended to leave. Other times, covertly ambitious, I ventured to install her in the very same domestic fantasia I’d nursed since girlhood, which in fact required little renovation to replace gruff Han Solo or gloomy Lord Byron with lithe, sly-mouthed Martha—still we lived in some sun-drenched abode and reared flawless offspring and made love every day years on end. Very often, and sometimes unkindly, Martha posed me the challenge of describing to her any future at all we could share, as if I were the water-bound fish, and she the versatile frog, in one of Joachim’s sad picture books. She implied there was simply no world for us. Yet I saw it clearly—too clearly to dare share with her.

The tank steadily burbled and hummed. Dutra and Martha were talking about the Great Barrier Reef, their low voices sheltered in vastness. “I feel like we’re outside,” I said suddenly. “Camping.”

“I would love to go camping,” said Dutra.

“Then we should,” Martha said.

“In the woods,” I agreed. “In the woods, with that smell . . .”

Martha got up to go to the bathroom, but the sense of entrancement remained. When she returned she slipped behind me on the couch, scissoring her long legs around me and holding me close, as if we were sharing a horse. I sank into her, closing my eyes, and felt her hands, with their rough finger pads, steal under my shirt. She gardened without gloves, too impatient for them, and her long narrow fingers had become stained with dirt in the needle’s-width creases, like esoteric tattoos, and her fingertips were shaggy and dry and undid me far more than when they had been creamy and smooth. I heard her quick breath, and my own, and then my mind seemed to yaw between hunger and the dim recollection of Dutra, still in the armchair. Struggling upstream against pleasure I looked and saw him, his own eyes remote as he watched us. Martha craned over me, catching my mouth on her own, and when I arched back to kiss her more deeply her hands closed on my nipples and assailed them with torments, tender shapings and whispery teasings and sudden hard pinches and twists, and I let out a groan, no longer caring who heard or saw what, and her mouth broke away.

“Did you used to touch her like this?” I heard her wonder to Dutra, her voice thick and bemused. “It’s amazing. She’s so sensitive. You have every inch of her nerves in the palm of one hand.”

“You’re a psychopath,” Dutra remarked. It might have been in that way that he had of giving two opposed meanings from which one might choose—but the words, though I heard them along with the rubbery squeak of the scotch bottle’s cork thumbed back into the bottle, and along with his loud angry tread on the stairs, couldn’t pierce the dense fug of my lust. I would not allow them. If I did, it was only to think, with superior pity, Poor Dutra. I did not even know if he’d closed my front door, as I clawed off her clothes and devoured her body, sprawling over her hand-me-down rug, as if I could force not just tongue breasts and hands but each knuckle and toe joint, each shoulder and kneecap, the whole ribcage and skull, somehow into myself. Sucking here, shoving there. When all else failed swallowing whole. Then I really could keep her.

•   •   •

Because school had resumed without me—because there wasn’t even Dutra running late to his class, spanking his alarm clock on the far side of the wall; because my Professor of Longing operated on a rarefied emeritus calendar which placed our next meeting somewhere between Christmas and Easter; because, for more money, I’d begun writing movie reviews for the local free weekly, at a fee of thirty dollars per review out of which I must pay for the ticket, so that to make any money at all I spent hours on end by myself in the dark watching all the worst films of 1993—it was weeks before I realized what it meant, that school had resumed without me. It meant that Martha had resumed her conspicuous life on the campus, without me. Already, on the pretext of Anya’s Teutonic severity, Martha had managed to shift our affair entirely from her house to mine, so that I no longer stepped through her doorway, let alone slept in her bed. Now I equally didn’t walk with her the length of the Quad, my arm brashly snaking her waist, regardless of how many times I’d imagined just such a perambulation. She and I, sitting shoulder to shoulder at some visitor’s lecture, weren’t stared at or whispered about. My name wasn’t comprised in a fresh, titillating graffito. Admiration, notoriety, envy—I didn’t need any of this, but I wanted acknowledgment. I was so proud that she loved me—did nobody know? Her separation from Nicholas, her love affair with me must have been the first-ever installments of the tale of the Hallett-Brodeurs that hadn’t been broadcast all over the campus. Yet when I said as much to her she gaped back, amazed and offended. “I suppose that you want me to publish the banns,” she exclaimed.

“I didn’t say that. I just asked why it seems to suit you, that I’m never on campus, now that I’m working and not taking classes.”

“It doesn’t suit me. I miss you all day. Can’t you tell, when it’s night?” It was night now, and she lay on my bed, in between her old sheets, and, to make her point further, slid one thigh between mine and reached under me, seizing my ass. But, though gripping her greedily back, I pursued my subject.

“If you miss me all day, let’s have lunch. At the Movable Feast.” Movable Feast was the student café in the English department’s basement, where professors and students held meetings while dining on sandwiches named, to cite just one example, Absalami, Absalami! Movable Feast was the English department’s piazza, its most heavily used public space.

“I don’t have lunch on days that I teach. I don’t ever have time. And if I did, I would sooner eat dirt than at Movable Feast.”

“Then take me as your date to the dinner for Slavoj Žižek.”

“Have you been reading my mail?”

“You left the card on my table, Martha. Tell me why you won’t take me.”

“I’m not not taking you—I’m not going myself. That man subsists entirely on Diet Coke. Why would I go to a dinner for him?”

“Then take me someplace you are going.”

“I don’t go anywhere! Regina, when I go out at night, I see you.”

“And you only ever see me at night. Here. In my apartment. Ever since I moved here, you treat me like your mistress.”

“I’d much prefer being treated like a mistress to being treated like a wife. Lots more fun.”

“We’re talking about my preferences, not yours.”

“Oh!—would you prefer this,” she renewed her assault, deftly reversing herself so her redolent cunt squashed my face, “. . . or would you prefer this?”

Small as our town was, even when I did make the hike up to campus my move had put me on completely different paths from before, and this was how I ran into Casper, my friend of the first weeks of school. Even before I’d dropped out Casper had drifted into a world of postmodern cereal boxes and abstruse applications of Freud to broadcast television, and I’d hardly seen him. Now we were thrilled to discover we’d moved to apartments just a couple of blocks from each other. “What are you taking?” Casper asked as we mounted the crumbling shale steps of the steep creekside trail. “I haven’t run into you anywhere.”

“I took the term off, but I probably won’t reenroll. I’ve been working. Long, tedious hours at very poor pay. It might be a career.”

“Really!” Casper cried, his admiration more pleasing than Martha’s. “God, I wish I’d thought of that. I have two papers overdue from the spring and one from last fall. Every day in the morning I think, Today’s the day that I’ll start work on them. And by lunchtime I think, Why do today what can wait till tomorrow?”

“Where are you going now?”

“Happy hour at Hot Jalapeños. Haven’t you been? It’s the best happy hour on the hill. Two-for-one margaritas and three-for-one shots, and if you’re able to eat a whole one of this really hot pepper without having water for five minutes after, they take half off your whole evening’s bill.”

“Wow. That sounds really tawdry.”

“It is, absolutely, downscale. A frat-boy-type place. Shalom Kreutzberg”—an art historian and shopping-mall theorist—“turned me on to it last semester. It’s the so-bad-that-it’s-good place to go.”

“Irony can be a health hazard. Who do you owe papers?”

“Oh, God. And not even a margarita yet safely in hand. Kreutzberg, of course. Luc Botelli, that Hum Center visiting scholar.”

“‘Aesthetic/Prosthetic’?”

“The same. But he’s gone back to Venice, so it’s hard to get motivated. And Hartmann for Baudrillard and Ballard last fall.”

“You must have something around you can hand in for that.”

“That’s the problem. Why bother at all? If I’ve already said everything, all by myself, then how trite must it be?”

My true self felt so far from this conversation that, paradoxically, I homed in ever closer, fascinated, my true self trailing my physical self just offshore of, perhaps, my left shoulder. Casper was Casper but I was a perfect impostor; every cell that composed me had remade itself; I was not the same person he’d known. Aesthetic/Prosthetic and Ballard; I’d never care a fig about these things again. Only love mattered to me: the singularity of it, the damnable difficulty of it, the certain solution I knew must lie just out of reach. We emerged at the top of the trail, streaming sweat from the effort just the same as before I’d met Martha, but my sweat was invisibly different; its scent must have changed. All the chemical soup of my body had changed. I thought of Country Joe, creating his environment, excreting the waste that would then feed the wee organisms that would then feed the algae to feed Country Joe—if that was even what happened; Dutra had so patiently labored to teach me the nitrogen cycle on which all the life in my tank would rely but my brain was too scrambled by love to absorb anything—and then I thought of Martha, her elusive life force, swimming in, swimming through, firing chemical changes and cycles. And at the same time I was laughing with Casper, and now weaving a little as I shifted from shoulder to shoulder the lead weight of a bagful of library books I’d been skimming for pithy expressions of longing and was now on my way to return. A car crossed the sidewalk in front of us, exiting out of a faculty lot, and without breaking conversation or stride we diverted around its back end and as if God had cut the sky’s string I was smote on the top of my skull and sent flying, like the ball by the star slugger’s bat, with a shattering CRACK! and pain yanked the blinds on my eyes and I hit the asphalt.

“Jesus! Oh my God! Regina!” I could hear Casper shouting. My vision slid around like grains of sand. Whatever image it last held had been smashed to the smallest component. The dead weight of my head, lightning-struck, dangled down from my neck. Its pain arrowed out in a ceaselessly flowering starburst as if strewing wide all the shards of my skull that were actually crunching around in my scalp. This is how a broken neck feels, I thought wonderingly, except that somehow I had heaved up my torso, I was no longer sprawled on my face. Casper had me beneath the armpits and pulled me onto the sidewalk, well clear of the subtle driveway. Bit by bit I blinked together a smeared panorama, my library books strewn in an arc.

“My books,” I mumbled. My tongue was still there. I dragged it over my teeth. They were still there as well. I had a pink and white skid mark the length of my forearm, where I must have thrown the arm up to shelter my head as I fell, but somehow nothing was broken. The throb in my skull now retracted and grew more intense, as if defining its outlines, but even my skull was somehow in one piece. “Ow,” I added. “Ow ow ow! What hit me?”

“That parking-lot barricade thing,” Casper said, indicating. “It was raised up for that car and we walked under it, and it came down right on top of your head.”

“Ow!” I cried again, belatedly frightened.

“No shit.” Casper’s teeth were chattering in the heat; he was almost more frightened than me. “It sounded like, some sort of—”

“Like a two-by-four hitting a huge ball of bone.” Pushing away Casper’s effort to help I struggled onto my feet. Anger and embarrassment had quickly outstripped fear. I had the idea that the sooner we moved from the site of the mishap, the less likely that it could inflict any permanent damage. In my impatience I reeled on my feet and Casper caught at my arm.

“Are you sure that you’re okay to walk?”

“Of course I’m okay to walk! But I have a headache.”

“Of course you fucking have a headache! And your arm is scraped up.”

“It’s okay. Stings a little.”

“I feel absolutely horrible, Regina,” Casper burst out, stricken. “I should have noticed that thing!”

“It’s not your job to notice the things I walk under. Don’t feel guilty. You’ll make my headache hurt more.”

“If my guilt gives you headaches, you’re in for a very uncomfortable future.”

After Casper had picked up my books and insisted on carrying them we resumed on our way, both of us darting glances side to side as we proceeded up the sidewalk like soldiers afraid of an ambush. My head’s throbbing deepened another half-octave, seemed to tuck in its elbows and knees and settle in for a permanent stay. “I can really use that margarita now,” I remarked when at last we had reached the library and surrendered my books to the heap of Returns.

“You still feel up for it?”

“More than before. Lead the way.”

“Here’s to Numbing the Pain,” Casper said.

Hot Jalapeños was on the Collegetown Strip, just outside University Gate, so that Casper and I were now headed back downhill again for the first time since we’d started to walk. Adding that to the loss of my library books, I felt buoyant. Tonight Martha was coming with me to the movies; the theater showing the film that I had to review wasn’t close to the campus, but it was an art house, which made it a campus appendage. There was a strong chance we’d see someone she knew. My eagerness for this to occur was counterweight to her unstated, but to me clear and vexing, reluctance for it to occur, and I was eager to refute that reluctance, to lay hold of the proof that it didn’t exist. When we ran into her eminent colleague while buying our popcorn, her arm would hook my waist and her voice state my name as she made the unhesitant introduction—it was this pleasingly natural scene, vividly enacted in the playhouse of my mind, that so buoyed me as Casper and I strode toward margaritas. But the scene also blotted out others. What if the person we saw was some friend of my own—like that erstwhile friend of my own who was also her husband? Theorists of passion often term it “all-consuming” but I found it excluding instead; there were vast realms of life it refused to consume, but boxed up out of sight. I charged Martha with happily keeping me separate from campus, with its many ogling eyes and wagging tongues, but there were times I suspected myself just as glad, and that my bravado in quitting my program was disguised cowardice. I brazenly wanted the shock and the envy, but I shrank from the possible condemnation. Perhaps just like her I was selfish in love, and not brave. And so I hectored her to meet me at Movable Feast, to accompany me to the movies, while all the while I kept Nicholas, and friends and partisans of Nicholas, and the very concept of Nicholas, boxed out of sight—his last intrusion, on that day I had seen his apartment, not complicating but assisting the effort. For I had seen him consigned to a separate if parallel realm. It consisted of those bright and cold rooms with the scant furniture and the ficus; perhaps the parking lot at Mighty Buy; and perhaps a few more strange locations neither Martha nor I could have found even if we had tried.

Ducking into the Wawa I bought a bottle of aspirin and then Casper and I, bouncing with restored merriment, entered Hot Jalapeños. The gaudy teal and yellow dining room was eerily empty but a racket of music and voices reached us from somewhere in the back. “Will you be joining us for Happy Hour on the patio?” inquired a ponytailed hostess, in a hot-pepper-monogrammed golf shirt and khaki short-shorts. “All the tables are taken, but there’s standing room at the Cocktail Palapa.”

The patio was as raucous and crowded as the inside dining room had been silent and empty, but I still spotted him right away. So did Casper. “Introduce me,” Casper implored as I froze in my tracks, for of course Casper knew I had served as the Chaucer TA, and had no idea my role, in relation to Chaucer’s professor, had changed.

“No, Casper—”

“I’ll be so well behaved!”

“It’s not that, you don’t understand—” Yet for all the density of obstacles, of drunken young men in backward baseball caps and drunken young women in ponytails and short-shorts all packed shoulder-to-shoulder between oversize white plastic tables impaled with umbrellas exclaiming ¡Sauza!, the unwanted encounter came rolling toward me as if it were Nicholas parting the crowd, and not, somehow, myself, leading Casper, in helpless acquiescence to Nicholas’s own helpless wave. Sitting on the far side of the patio framed by two other men, on a bench with its back to the trellised rear wall, he was as trapped by my startling appearance as I was by his. It was the secrecy of our relation that trapped us, in preventing our rushing away from each other. But it peculiarly freed us as well, by enforcing fatuity. “I see you’ve made wise preparations,” he yelled when we reached him, with necessary loudness and superfluous cheer, and indicating my bottle of aspirin. “Regina brilliantly taught Chaucer with me last semester,” he announced to his companions, who were Harrison Franklin, the often condemned Southern Gentleman writer, and a scowling and dead-white-complected young man with copious and in some strange way lewd, as if both simian and pubic, long and tangled black hair pouring out of his face and his scalp. “Working with me has taught her the true value of aspirin, as you can observe. Andrew Malarkey of Trinity College Dublin, and our esteemed visitor this semester; and Harrison Franklin, professor and author, whom I think you may already know; meet my dear friend Regina Gottlieb, and her friend, I’m afraid—”

“Casper Rosen,” managed Casper, now all head-bobs and gulped syllables. “Second year, English department—”

“Of course I recognize you. You’re one of the young prodigies who understands Shalom Kreutzberg.”

“I’d hardly say I understand!” Casper cried with delight.

“Caspar happens to be my favorite name,” Nicholas revealed, as if his own discomfort fed the flame of his charm. His hair was drenched at the scalp, and his cheeks burned with color. Like an octopus his companions had reached out from the table, Franklin this way, Malarkey that, and somehow captured two chairs, into which Casper and I were assimilated. “Even Regina might not have known that,” Nicholas went on, grazing me with his voice as if he’d touched my knee under the table. It was a furtive signal—we knew what they didn’t, and could keep it that way. “But she can no doubt guess why.”

“The painter,” I offered, accepting my cue.

“I was hoping to name my son Caspar,” Nicholas abruptly added, as if, just when he’d pledged discretion, impulse had him veer the other way. Now he’d made mention of Martha inevitable. With a flash I understood—as if, soused in the bosom of Hot Jalapeños, such understanding was some sort of insight—that serious drinking was happening here. All three men were already drunk, not in the way of the undergraduate students tumbling like puppies from table to table, whose drunkenness was more than half mob behavior, a raucous effusion that burned as much alcohol, in the heat, as they were likely consuming. By contrast the drunkenness of Nicholas and Malarkey and Franklin was packed in the marrow, disproportionately dense for its volume. It might blow up without any warning and God knew what would happen.

But then Casper, unknowingly snuffing the fuse, said, “I’m afraid mine’s the Friendly Ghost spelling.”

A waitress had appeared. “Four margaritas,” we urged her. “Two—plus the two that are free.”

“All at once?”

“All at once,” I affirmed. I had learned from Laurence.

“Quite right,” said Malarkey. “Casper the Ghost is American, and you’re an American. I don’t understand this poncey trend of foreign names for American children. Bloody American children named ‘Kwame’ and ‘Dante’ and ‘Krishna’ instead of just normal American names.”

“What’s a normal American name, Andy?” asked Nicholas kindly.

“Well, ‘Andy’ does very nicely, doesn’t it? Just as nicely for you as for us.”

“Very neutral and Christian.”

“Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John do quite nicely as well. But no, we must have Joachim.”

Back in danger again; yet attention had drifted. “Open that aspirin, Regina,” Franklin badgered me. “Your bottle says two hundred tablets. That’s forty for each of us here.”

“Are we doing a suicide pact, or averting hangover?”

“Suicide is a form of hangover aversion.”

“Andy, you bring out the camp counselor in me when you say things like that. I’m going to take you canoeing this weekend. That will clear out the cobwebs. It keeps me alive.”

“Regina doesn’t hold your faith in boats, Nick. She’s aspirining up.”

I wondered if these three men had confessed to each other their reasons for anguish, or if, far more likely, they hewed to an unspoken code to say little, ask nothing, and drink all they could. Franklin’s sadness was proud, almost savage, as if he dared you to take it away. Malarkey’s sadness was distracted and sullen; of the three he seemed least to enjoy his companions, as if somewhere, his solitary teenager’s room was still waiting for him, with its Sex Pistols posters and refrigerator-size stereo speakers and a scuffed patch of wall where he propped up his feet, and he longed to get back to that refuge as soon as he could. Nicholas’s sadness was apologetic. He seemed to hope it would bother no one, even me. I realized the secret we shared was far more intimate than the knowledge of who was, or wasn’t, whose lover. The unspoken code was mine also. I must stop noticing Nicholas’s sadness; his steady gaze told me to leave him his pride.

“Actually I’m recovering from an assault,” I declared to the party, swallowing two of the aspirin with the rest of the first of my two margaritas. “I was hit on the head with a two-by-four not long ago. I’m getting a goose egg,” I added, massaging it where I’d just noticed it starting to grow at the crown of my head.

Now they all grew absorbed and excited.

“My God!”

“Were you mugged?”

“She’s not kidding. I can feel the bump.”

Casper and I alternated and overlapped, telling the story. “Relating this event has taken almost one hundred twenty times the length the event itself took,” I observed through their oaths of amazement and horror.

Casper was repeating, “My masculinity is the real victim here. Did I avert the catastrophe? No. I may never recover.”

“Regina,” Nicholas was saying to me with solemn persistence, as I received my third and fourth margaritas. “Regina, darling, look at me.”

He’d broken his own rule. It was the same compulsion he’d already shown—mentioning Joachim as a pathway to Martha. Hesitating, I looked at him. A bell jar might have dropped over us. He reached for my innermost gaze and took that, and in doing so, surrendered his own. It seemed a fragile, darting thing, momentarily stilled in my care. His eyes were that color that people call “hazel,” that is actually green, gold, and brown, each thin petal distinct in its hue, as if laid on by a brush. The skin of his face had developed a slack, tender look. If I’d pressed a finger against it, I imagined a dimple would linger a moment, recalling the touch. He had aged. And yet his beauty, being male, seemed more potent on account of the wear. We wanted women to be smooth like children, and men just the opposite way. Was this true? The fraudulence of such ideals abruptly amazed me. I adored Martha’s subtly rough imperfection. And feeling her body as I always did, against mine and within it, I realized I was seeing him now as she did, and a boundlessly receding horizon dropped out of the back of that intimate gaze, like an empty keyhole at the centermost part of the pupil. Pursue me this far and you lose me, it warned, though the dazzle continues—the featureless fields of gold all around. But the landmarks are gone.

“Your pupils don’t seem abnormally dilated,” he concluded, leaning back, “but it depends on the size that they normally are. Are they usually large?”

“I have no idea,” I said, blinking at him.

“Do one more thing for me. Stand up, like this—” he stood awkwardly, where he was on the bench with his knees partly under the table—“and spread your arms wide like this.” I obeyed, and we faced each other over the table like matching scarecrows.

“What’s this now?” Andy demanded. “May I play along?”

It conveys the atmosphere of Happy Hour, which had continued, around and behind us, to grow more and more crowded and loud, that Nicholas and I in our cruciform pose attracted no general attention at all. Only our own tablemates were attentive to what we were doing. “Now bring the tips of both index fingers very quickly to the tip of your nose, just like this.” I complied. “Again.” Like repeating a strange calisthenics we outstretched our arms, pointed our fingers, swung them fast on the fulcrum of elbows to land on our noses; a few times, going fast, I was off by an inch. “Not bad,” Nicholas said. By now Andy had joined us and the three of us shifted around to not bump our wingspans.

“Warming up?” asked our waitress.

“Just cranking the hollow leg open,” said Andy. “Another round, please. Let’s try strawberry now, everyone. Are the strawberry ones really lovely? All frothy and pink?”

“All right,” Nicholas concluded at last. “If I were Coach Clive, that infallible sage of my youth, I’d pronounce you All Right to go back on the ice. No concussion, Regina. You may lace up your skates.”

“Is that really a test for concussion?”

“Coach Clive said it was, and Coach Clive was a leader of men. I always felt safe, trusting him.”

“If it’s a test for sobriety I’ve flunked,” Franklin said. “Just watching you has made me nauseous.”

“I agree,” Casper said. “I’m exhausted.”

“Five frozen strawberry margaritas!” our waitress sang out as she banged down the frost-furry mugs.

Afterward I couldn’t be sure if it was at the time, or only in retrospect, that my awareness of my transit to the women’s bathroom disappeared. I found myself alone there in a stall and had the sense I had been there too long. The women’s bathroom at Hot Jalapeños was on the far side from the patio entrance of the main dining room, very near the street entrance where Casper and I had come in; these geographical facts were disclosed to me as if for the first time once I’d put my clothes in order and gotten through the bathroom door, as if pulling myself, with both arms, vertically through a hatch in the ceiling. A festive roar told me which way to go to get back to my table, but I struggled as if sunk to the waist in that invisible gelatinous impediment of dreams. Like a sailboat fighting the wind I tacked with painful slowness leaning to my port side, then switched to my starboard, avoiding a table; the dining room seemed entirely empty, abandoned even by the ponytailed hostess, though in the distance I heard a door swinging, and young voices calling out things like, “Six frozen, one rocks, no salt, eighty-six the jalapeño cheese poppers!” Then all at once I’d dropped through the trap door and was out in the sun, the gelatinous impediment was gone, with new determination and power my legs pumped beneath me as my table, land ho! eked up over the distant horizon. I could see Nicholas, seeing me, the frothy crest of his dirty blond hair standing up on his scalp in alarm. “Whoa!” someone shouted, as I plunged full length over a table that had rotated into my path. Heavy glassware crashed down and a wave of wet drenched my shirt front. I neither expected nor sensed any laughter, only paralyzed awe and alarm, as if a resurrected prehistoric monster had brought down its huge foot on the crowd, smashing tables and chairs into kindling as the nimble young drunks all dove out of the way. I saw fear on their faces, and empathy, the beast, talons out, apparently just at my back; saving arms and hands seized hold of me and with pooled strength tossed me like a doll to my table. I landed in a tangle of my limbs and Andy’s and Franklin’s and Casper’s and Nicholas’s and with the force of the impact threw up, arcing fountains of pink, and at the same time was suddenly lofted in Nicholas’s arms—I felt myself rushing up as my spatters of vomit were still audibly raining down.

“Check, please!” Nicholas cried as he bore me away.

Then we were in his car, speeding like a torrent downhill. “Stop,” I gasped and with a shriek of brakes he pulled over and I pushed the door open and vomited onto the curb. It seemed to happen again and again as if the drive, Zeno’s-paradox-like, by fractions was being stretched out to infinity. In a parking lot somewhere Nicholas said to me roughly, “Wake up!” and dropped a shopping bag from Hobo Deli full of lumpy cold stuff on my lap. “Drink that Gatorade in there, Regina. Now. Drink. All of it. No, don’t doze off Regina KEEP DRINKING.” Then we were driving again. “Stop,” I gasped and with a shriek of brakes he pulled over and I pushed the door open and vomited onto the curb. . . .

“Is this it?” he was saying. “This one?” Hands—large, tense, rough finger pads, square-cut nails, a row of calluses dangling skin-shreds marking off like sentries the frontier of the palm—took hold of my face and pried open my lids.

“Stand up now. Walk with me.” Like a marionette’s my feet paddled the sidewalk as I looked down on them from a distance. “Is it this one, Regina?

“Is it this one?

“Are your keys in your pocket? Are your keys in your bag?

“Is it this door, Regina?

“Drink the Gatorade. All of it. That’s the way. . . .”

Then a column of pale, bluish light had unfurled like a banner, but from the top down, and the bottom up, at the same time. Perhaps it was better described as a mouth yawning open. Jaws of faint light stretched apart from each other. The aperture they made was a doorway, submerged. Drowning light filtered in from above. A skin layer peeled itself free but then lingered there, twisting and shifting its shape. Now it ebbed and withheld its movements. The pale light died away. Exhausted, I sank away also, and as if to reward me for setting it free the luminosity disclosed itself again, but by the slightest indication possible, a faint pulse in the darkness. It grew steadily closer without growing brighter, homed in on my helplessness now, and to mark its progress drove a needle of pain through my skull.

There were two things, which perhaps I took years to unbraid and discern. The dying light in my bedroom window, where my gauze curtain rippled a bit in the breeze; and the telephone, ringing. The ringing noise wasn’t the light, which was bleeding away. And the ringing noise wasn’t arriving from somewhere far off, but was in the next room.

I staggered toward the sound, dragging blankets behind me, and upsetting a glass of red juice of some kind. My hand reached for the phone and a fear-cataract paralyzed me in place with my hand still outstretched, my heart beating my ribs like a club, for Nicholas, in my penumbral room, only lit by the tank’s chill fluorescence, had spectrally risen, as if from the floor—where in fact he had been, on his knees, to one side of my armchair.

“Answer it,” he whispered. “I thought I’d unplugged it but I had the wrong cord.” He could have said to me, “Step out the window.” Was I dreaming? Of course! Staring at him, hypnotized, I picked up the phone. “Hello?” I asked thickly, through parched, rubber lips. Nicholas remained in his spot just beside and behind the armchair, an awkward space no one would use but a ghost. I realized I was wearing only panties and one of the old cotton T-shirts I slept in, though not the one I’d been sleeping in lately. I passed a hand through my hair and got stuck; my hair was stiff at the ends with dried vomit. My gut heaved and I would have thrown up again had there been anything left to expel.

“When did you get home?” I heard Martha ask, her voice biting each word.

“I don’t know.” I stared at Nicholas, staring at me. He must hear her voice also, the room was so hushed. “Are you still coming over?” I whispered.

“Gee, sure! I guess waiting twenty-five hours for a date doesn’t count as being stood up. There’s no reason I should be angry.”

“What do you mean? What time is it?”

“Ten past nine.”

“Weren’t you coming at eight?”

“I was coming at eight yesterday, Regina. If you’re trying to be funny, or cagey and sexy, please stop.”

I had never felt less funny, cagey, or sexy. I implored, “I don’t know what the fuck’s going on!”

“Jesus, are you play-acting?” I heard Martha wonder. “Is this some kind of game? I’ve got to check in with Anya and then I’m coming over. Do try to be home.” On her end she slammed down the handset and I winced at the snip into silence as if I’d been slapped.

“What are you doing here?” I asked Nicholas in a whisper. The effort to whisper was almost too much. A powerful wave of disorientation, physical as an ocean swell tipping the deck, rose through me from the floorboards straight up through my painfully pulsating head and I thought I would faint. I flailed with one hand and seized hold of the back of the armchair.

He appeared to be equally broken. With a visible effort he came around from the side of the armchair and pressed me down into it by my shoulders. Then he let himself drop on the couch. “I brought you home from the bar,” he rasped, interrupting himself with an unwholesome cough. “I kept myself up the whole night. Then some time this morning I couldn’t hang on anymore. I had very much too much to drink yesterday. And I’ve had very poor sleep the past month. I passed out, like you. Inexcusable. I woke up just now when the phone began ringing again. I was here on the couch,” he appended.

He’d spoken at too great a length for my quivering brain. The phone fell with a startling noise to the floor; I’d still had it clutched in my hand. Very far behind him I managed, “You stayed here all night? Why?”

“To check on you. I woke you up every hour to make sure that you didn’t go into a coma.”

“Is that a joke?”

“No. I should have taken you to hospital immediately.”

“I’m glad you didn’t.”

“I should have. Clearly, you’ve had a concussion. But then, my judgment was not operating as well as it should have. I got foolishly scared out of going. I’m ashamed. Thank God you woke up and came out of your bedroom. Thank God.”

“You’re frightening me,” I objected, feeling so baffled I was nearly in tears.

“I mean to. Your life is what matters. Please make me a promise you’ll go to a doctor first thing in the morning.”

I grew more fully conscious of being half nude. He must have undressed me, changed my vomit-drenched clothes for these sleep things and perhaps even sponged off my skin. Whether the logic of those actions dictated an image, or whether I actually now recollected, I felt his tense arm at my shoulders, and caught a glimpse of the length of myself wet and naked and seemingly dead in the tub. I dragged the welter of blankets I’d brought from the bedroom more thoroughly over my lap. Country Joe, still alive, raised and lowered his orange and white flag. When was the last time I’d fed him? I’d fallen overboard from time and it was steaming away, its vast blind bulk indifferent to me, yet there was so much transpiring onboard I could not comprehend. My message machine was on the point of exploding, its light pulsing a frantic red blur like a hummingbird’s heart. It came to me that this was what the light did when the tape had run out, and that the tape running out would explain why the phone had been endlessly ringing. I pressed the rewind button on the machine and its little toy wheels hurried backward through time to the start of the story. Nicholas stood suddenly. “I should go. Promise me that you’ll go to the doctor.”

It took me a beat to realize that the volume was all the way down. “. . . just about eight. Are you splashing around in the shower? Oh, here you come, a gazelle trailing droplets across the wood floor. Pull the blinds, please. Okay, you are not picking up. Listen, I got held up but I’m on my way now and I’ll be there in less than ten minutes. I’m sorry we’re missing the movie, but I’m bringing some pasta I made and a bottle of wine so don’t worry your head about dinner.”

“Gottlieb, eight twenty-five. I’m using the Hobo’s pay phone. Why aren’t you home?”

“Regina, I’m over at Dutra’s. He hasn’t seen you all day. It’s nine, we said eight. Please call Dutra the instant you hear this.”

“Regina, I’ve just been back by your apartment. Your downstairs neighbor guy says he heard you come in more than three hours ago and never heard you go out, so I’d like you to pick up the phone, please, and kindly stop fucking with me.”

“PICK. UP. THE. PHONE.”

“I’ve come home now and had the pasta and wine by myself. I hope you realize your only good excuse has you bleeding and dead in a ditch and if that’s the case I’m going to feel like an asshole for being so angry, so either I’m an asshole, or I’m legitimately angry, and either way it is fucking unpleasant.”

“Regina, it is seven o’clock in the morning. Wake the fuck up and answer your phone.”

“Nine-forty A.M. I’m going to class now where I will be the queen bitch to my innocent students. No news reports of you bleeding and dead in a ditch.”

“All right, Gottlieb. It’s noon. You’ve woken up now, wherever you are, and found your panties and shoes and tiptoed past your sleeping new friend—”

Nicholas brought down his finger on STOP. “Why not enjoy the rest of these in private.”

“She was here,” I realized with horror.

“Yes, she was. Quite a number of times. And I, in my drunk foolishness, didn’t answer the door to her knock, and ask her, as someone who was hopefully sober, to drive you to the hospital. Regina.” He’d taken the crown of my head in his hands. “I’m going, before Martha arrives here again. Look at me and say you will go to the doctor.”

But I didn’t care about doctors or health. I didn’t care about my brain, perhaps suffocating in the dented and tight-fitting vault of my skull. Perhaps it was the swelling of my brain that prevented my caring about it—I only cared about her, and what she might think of me, and how quickly and permanently such dark groundless thoughts might dampen love. That was enough to swell with fear my foolish heart, and send it running around my ribcage like the proverbial chicken relieved of its head. “Where did you park?” I demanded. “Are you parked out in front? Did she notice your car?”

He withdrew his hand now and perhaps also reeled in something else that was less tangible. “In fact I’m parked three blocks from here,” he said after a moment, “because you had trouble explaining to me where you live. Worry about your head, Regina. If for no one else do it for me. I feel responsible. I was too deep in my cups.” And then before I could go to my window, to make sure Martha wasn’t at that very moment arriving outside, he’d shut my door behind him and was descending the stairs. I heard the downstairs door as I reached my front window, in time to see him passing the trunk of the redbud and crossing the street.

His sudden absence was as strange as his presence had been. Dropping my toga of blankets, I made my way gingerly to my tiny efficiency kitchen, holding on to the walls. In the fridge were two liter bottles of red Gatorade, one half empty, and a jumble of moderately decent and fresh edibles: an orange, a banana, a yogurt, and a loaf of white bread. All of this had come from Hobo Deli and Nicholas; apart from Smucker’s jam and Tabasco my fridge had been bare. My hands were trembling: hunger, I hoped, though I felt I had no appetite. I made myself peel and eat the banana, and then looked in the bathroom. My clothes had been rinsed out, though not entirely cured of pink stains, and hung over the rod. A towel lay like a rug on the floor, and was damp. On the closed toilet lid, on the far side of the sink from the tub, lay a very small book, blue clothbound, almost looking, from a few feet away, like a pack of Gauloises cigarettes. I picked it up and saw, faintly stamped on the front, Shakespeare’s Sonnets. He must have had it in his back pocket when he started to bathe me, and then removed it to the relative dryness of the closed toilet lid. He must have also had pink vomit stains on his own shirt, though in the twilight in which I’d just seen him, I hadn’t discerned them.

I lost time again as I sat on the closed toilet lid with the book in my hands. Its cloth binding was very fine, but very dry, and in some way alive, strangely warm. Perhaps silk. It felt disproportionately heavy in my hands, as if every wrong I had done to its owner was closed in its covers. I could almost think that I’d ruined this also, dropped it into the toilet already. But for the moment the book was still dry. The necessity of keeping it so didn’t soften my sense of deceit as I hid the book on a high shelf, at the same time as I heard Martha’s car pulling up.

•   •   •

If Martha’s fury was titanic when she thought I was standing her up, even more titanic was the countervailing flood of her remorse. It agonized her that she had banged, shouted, worst of all darkly concluded while all the while I lay helplessly—alone—in my apartment in the grip of a head injury. “I should have broken down that door!” she declared. I knew that some of her distress was concern for herself and not me. It was the lesser part, but potent—she intensely disliked that she’d lost her composure, that she’d betrayed an insecure and anxious need, and what was worse with Dutra, and my downstairs neighbor, for onlookers. And so perhaps I was able to feel I was sheltering her with my lies and omissions, and not just accepting emotional tribute I didn’t deserve. The little blue book of sonnets lay gathering dust in the darkness. The key I’d made for her—with which, when I failed to answer her knock, she might have let herself in to discover her estranged husband vomit-spattered and drunk on my couch—was lost in a jumble of junk in my desk drawer. In my story, it was Casper who’d gotten me home. “Why did he leave?” she demanded. “He should have stayed with you.” “He didn’t know, Martha. He didn’t know I was hurt. I didn’t know I was hurt.” I basked in her fussing attention while a part of me grieved. I didn’t think that I’d ever grow used to this fact that pure-feeling emotion comprised every possible taint, dishonesty and excess self-love being only a start. Of course I did grow used to it, but not soon enough.

Nevertheless I devoured her repentance. After weeks of having used every pretext to confine our affair to my apartment, she swept me back into her house. I was made to sleep late every morning, awaking to jars of fresh flowers she placed by the bed. To prevent dehydration she harassed me all day to drink mineral water, pouring me glasses herself out of blue-tinted bottles. She cooked me cream-drowned wild mushrooms and sweet pea risottos and vibrant red ratatouille, all the life-giving foods of late summer. Murmuring jokes and admonishing lust, she insisted we must be restrained making love, “so as not to burst any blood vessels,” though always, in the end, the first pebble bounced down the hill and the avalanche followed, and we found ourselves heaving for breath in a nest of stained bedsheets and uprooted hairs.

One morning the clock ticked past ten and we, strangely unhurried, remained standing entwined in the kitchen. A noise of thick soles and pram wheels over gravel forewarned us, and yet Martha did not rush me out of the room. Anya entered, with Joachim in his stroller, to encounter the person she assumed her professional predecessor.

“Anya, this is my Girlfriend, Regina,” said Martha, her arm looping my waist and her hand nuzzled in my front pocket, lest her meaning be misunderstood.

“We’ve met,” Anya said, rousing herself from an onset of amazement visible as a rash, despite the fact her stolid features had not even twitched. I could hear her future recitation of this résumé item—then there were the two college professors with the one little boy. Beautiful house, with an excellent kitchen, and they were both so good-looking—but they divorced. You know why? The wife was a lesbian. Total rug-muncher. And the girl she was doing it with was the old babysitter!

It wasn’t quite the introduction to an eminent colleague I’d already scripted and staged in my rosy-hued mind—but Martha made clear it was merely a start. By increments, adding less and less water to cocktails, and more and more vigor to sex, we brought my convalescence to an end. One night, as we sat in her bed with a bottle of Glenlivet (“The Glenlivet”) in the pillows and an old Hitchcock movie on pause, she remarked, “The department is giving a big bash for Ernie O’Rourke. It might be a can’t-miss. Should we go?” Ernie O’Rourke was the crown jewel of the English department, an octogenarian poet who, having already racked up every national honor, in the last year had received the Nobel Prize for Literature. Any party for him would be lavish with high-quality free food and booze, but I knew, as she meant me to know, that the caliber of the event wasn’t why she had now brought it up.

“Should we go?” I asked, peering at her.

“There’s not anyone else in the room.”

“I don’t need to be introduced as your ‘research assistant,’” I said. “I’ve already got all the research work that I can stand.”

“I’d introduce you as my Girlfriend,” she said. “To those guests so poorly brought-up that ‘Regina Gottlieb’ won’t suffice.”

We’d slid sideways into the sheets and lay facing each other, the movie forgotten. “Are you sure?” I asked seriously. “Everyone in the world will be there.”

She reached for my hair, as she liked to do sometimes, and toyed with the coarse, bristly ends. “Yes,” she said. “Why am I hiding you? Nicholas knows.”

I didn’t say, with a satisfied pounce, “So you were hiding me.” Some moments are free of all taint. I kissed her, and she drew me against her, though first we removed the scotch bottle and TV remote from the bed—to give love a clear field, or clean slate.

•   •   •

“I have to say, for someone who’s supposedly fully recovered from head trauma, your short-term memory’s really alarming,” complained Dutra as we drove to the mall to ostensibly shop for a piscine companion for Joe. My real agenda was makeup and shoes for the party for Ernie O’Rourke, for I was so elated and agitated, and impatient for and frightened by, the prospect of what felt increasingly like my debut, or my public deflowering, or both, that my mind skittered and spazzed when it functioned at all, and Dutra, whose characteristic agitation rather took the form of tenacity, was finding me close to intolerable. “For niTRATES you want no more than twenty parts per million,” he persisted, “for niTRITES you want zero. Null. Zilch. Nitrites kill. Now say again, what were your readings—”

“Have you ever been inside the Scroll and Compass?” I interrupted. The Scroll and Compass was the fancy private club that due to its unapologetic exclusivity was somehow both outside university bounds and most deeply embedded within them, the secret wheelhouse. It was there that the party would be.

“Once, when I was an undergrad. We broke into the tunnels that connect the quad buildings, where all the plumbing and heating and cooling stuff is, and from there we got into the Scroll. Only as far as the basement before somebody tripped an alarm.”

“What was it like?”

“It was like a basement,” Dutra said impatiently. “With big heaps of white aprons, I guess for the lackeys who serve at the dinners. Ginny. Focus. You had pH above eight-point-oh, right? But below eight-point-five. Ammonia should be zero, nitrites should be zero.”

“I can’t tell nitrites and nitrates apart.”

“This is just what I’m saying about short-term memory loss.”

“But I never could tell them apart. Who can tell them apart?”

“Nitrite has the i, like in kill. Nitrate has the a, that’s ‘okay’—”

“Is this the way that you ace all your classes?”

“Mnemonics are one piece of it.”

“Nemonicks? What on earth are nemonicks?”

“You see? You were a literature grad student, Ginny. You used to know what ‘mnemonic’ meant! I told Hallett I thought you should see a neurologist but she’s such a fucking WASP about doctors.”

“You called Martha? Why? How are WASPs about doctors?”

“They don’t need them because they’re immortal. I would have called Hallett because I hadn’t seen you in days but then she called me first.”

“About what?”

“About you, Dopey. Jesus! Your brain’s like Swiss cheese. She called to tell me about your concussion because you hadn’t bothered.”

“I’d had a concussion, Dutra. I wasn’t in my right mind.”

“And she called me to ask my advice, but of course didn’t take it.”

“What was your advice?”

“Did I not say two seconds ago that I told her you should see a neurologist? You have zero retention! Who am I? Where are we going and why?”

“Kidnapping!” I called out the car window, my voice snatched by the wind as we sped down the road. “Help! A strange man is taking me I-don’t-know-where!” At last I saw Dutra suppressing a smile.

Since the boozy night of my apartment’s “housewarming,” Dutra’s manner when I spoke about Martha had been palpably different: constrained, and at moments of lapsed self-control even irritable, as if, though he wasn’t aware that he showed it, he’d had his fill of her. From the start of my romance with Martha I’d suspected that Dutra, despite being, according to self-diagnosis, unusually highly evolved, was unable to take us as seriously as he would have had Martha been male. We were pleasingly racy, and pleasingly decorative; being third wheel to us meant a ringside seat to a diversion, not exclusion from something profound that did not involve him. He teased us as he might have a pair of kid sisters—and not until that night in my apartment had he started to doubt that he still had the prominent role.

Now, as I pretended to share his absorption with browsing fish tanks—“I can’t picture the fish that goes with Country Joe, but I know we’ll know it when we see it,” he said frowningly—I was aware of how lonely Dutra must be. He hadn’t had a lover since me. He hadn’t had an actual, publicly at-his-side girlfriend since the unnamed, foresworn girlfriend of his drug-dealing days. I knew Dutra got laid—among other ephemeral ties he had slept with Lucinda—but as for nourishing intimacy with a person who knew what he truly was like; a person who knew he was stupid with hubris and unstintingly, joyfully kind; a person who knew that if given his bong, Donahue, London Calling, an everything bagel with scallion cream cheese, and a coffee-iced coffee, sitting on his sofa he could master any subject and retain it indefinitely—in other words, as for being known, which is the best part of love—by whom was he known, even chastely, apart from myself?

Meanwhile the shape of my future with Martha had finally begun to emerge, like the earth’s familiar face from those maps of the old blobby continents bumping around. It was a miracle yet inevitable, the only outcome I’d been willing to foresee. If attending the party for Ernie O’Rourke as a couple was going to shock, it would shock all the more for how clear it would be that we weren’t just a transient fling. They’ve been together in secret for months all the gossips would murmur, with grudging respect. I knew Dutra must feel the tectonic plates shifting him off to one side, the more keenly the more Martha and I kept him part of our life. Urging someone to make himself feel at home only serves to remind him the house isn’t his; nor the saltwater tank, for that matter, though I practically let him think so, from the kindly remorse I was feeling toward him, that Martha and I in the end would be forced to—indeed were already beginning to—leave him behind.

“The blue chromis,” Dutra announced, directing me to a wafer-thin, silvery-pale little fish with no blotches or stripes or dorsal banners or quill-like extrusions at all.

“Why?” I objected. I’d been pondering a choice between the bristling lionfish and the Picasso triggerfish, as gorgeous and weird as an African mask. “The blue chromis is totally plain.”

“And you’re a total amateur who needs an amateur fish. The triggerfish is high-needs and high-risk and it costs twenty bucks. It’ll die, guarantee you. Blue chromis is the friend that Joe needs.”

“I’m not an amateur. And it isn’t Joe’s tank or even your tank, believe it or not.” But of course I would let Dutra win.

Abstracted from the dazzling bazaar of the tropical fish store, the simple blue chromis did ignite with its own luminosity, so that the penny-candy brightness of Joe’s orange and white stripes was offset by a cool lunar glow. But the glitter that far more entranced me, once Dutra had taken a set of tank readings and reluctantly left me alone, was that of the dangly new earrings I’d bought; with careful hands I juxtaposed them to a fragrant new lip gloss, and a new pair of high-heeled Mary Jane shoes. The clothes I would wear to the party had begun to consume me with equal parts pleasure and anguish. I longed to remake myself into an image I could scarcely intuit, let alone put in words; my mind groped toward sinuous forms and aloof, careless gestures. I suppose I wanted Martha’s effortless perfection by the opposite means. If she could sweep her face distractedly with rouge while yelling over her shoulder to Anya to take Joachim out of the bath—then I could pore over department-store displays of rouge brushes, of the broom-flared and the fat as a pom-pom, the cheap bristly and the shockingly pricey like the cut tail-stump of some silk-pelted beast, for the one that would touch me with feverish magic and make me like her. If she could retrieve a silk shift off the back of a chair it had limply embellished for months, and in pulling this sweat-fragrant, never-once-dry-cleaned tube over her head emerge creamy and cool as the young Princess Grace—then I could spend secret days muscling through packed racks of clothes at Filene’s of the Glacial Lakes Mall, and straining my neck as I stared at my ass in all sorts of encasements, from all possible angles, and then plying my cheap Woolworth’s iron on an ironing board made by shrouding my desk with a towel. If Martha could, the afternoon of the party itself, call to tell me she and Dutra were going to get in a few games of pool at The Pines before she swung by her place to get dressed and then picked me up around six—I could spend the whole day, almost since waking up, in unsystematic, fastidious preparation. I styled my hair before showering, showered, and ruined, and redid my hair. I made up my face before donning my dress, put the dress on, dredged the neck on foundation and rouge and had to take off, spot-wash, and re-iron the dress and re-make-up my face. I brushed my teeth and in jittery dizziness ate a banana and brushed them again. I poured myself a double scotch for courage, and brushed my teeth again, and then poured scotch again and then brushed a third time. I threw over my whole painstaking ensemble for a completely different outfit and different hairstyle and wondered if it was too late to buy different shoes, but it was now five P.M.; in agitation and despair I drew the blinds and lay flat on my back on the sofa and tried to freshen myself with a nap, without moving a muscle, all my weight on two thumbprint-size spots on the back of my skull and the top of my rump, so as not to wrinkle my dress or disorder my hair.

I hadn’t slept well the previous night. Until now I had never had problems with sleeping, but since my concussion, and especially nights I was staying at Martha’s, I’d often found myself awake at two or three in the morning, sleep snatched from me so abruptly that no drowsiness softened the onslaught of fretful alertness. I would wonder, made anxious by Dutra, if this was some tardy response of my body, defending me, after the danger, from succumbing to coma. I suspect that what really awoke me was surfeit—of the elation of having won Martha, and the terror of it; of satiation, my mouth webbed with sap and my tongue paralyzed with fatigue; and for some reason grief, as if I already knew I could never possess her enough. All in surfeit, beyond what I’d ever contain or endure, as I lay close to her in the dark. Her thin flank in slumber, hitched up, sometimes pinioned my hips. Her breast hung as if tucked in the fold of her arm, and subsiding from there to the curve of the other. Sometimes she looked older when she slept. Then the horror of her mortality, as if it were an unjust curse on her and me alone, would demolish my pride and restraint, and with a convulsion as unwilled as willed I would jostle her roughly so that she woke up. Sometimes, as if we’d arranged it that way, we would lavishly fuck. Sometimes, with a groan, she would tell me to get up and read, or to finish the joint on her dresser. One time we fought—“You are so fucking selfish!” she snarled. But the risk of that wound was offset by the prospect of love. By one side of her mouth rising up in the way that she had of attributing great wicked slyness to me, as she roughly unzipped me and spilled out my fear so that sleep could return.

Other nights, I never woke her at all but slipped silently out of her bed. Then her home would seem alien to me, its own elaborate nitrogen cycle. Those six doors on the second-floor hall: her own; the former master bedroom that now served as her study; the former study of Nicholas’s that was now a guest bedroom; the former “library” which was dedicated now to the transient, to boxes being packed or unpacked; and past the stairwell at the opposite end, the corner rooms belonging to Anya and to Joachim. And an entire “stand up” attic above, and then the slovenly grandeur below, the vast kitchen and breakfast nook, the only rooms on that floor that seemed wanted and used; and then the formal dining room and living room and den and the entry foyer with their dust-pale refugee camps of side chairs and armchairs and side tables and end tables and sideboards and “consoles” and other words that would sometimes scud past that I had never yet linked to an object. At that time of my life I had no understanding at all of such houses as these, of the process by which they come mushrooming all on their own from the compost of cohabitation. I had no experience of adult sediment, no experience of that chemistry of domesticity by which x, which is love or its likeness, becomes y, which is not quite the same, becomes z, which is more different yet, to the point that sustains, or that smothers and kills. The twelve years she had over me, thirty-three to my wise twenty-one, meant no more to me than the one year Joachim had just recently notched on his belt. Had those twelve years separated us later in life—my thirty-seven from her forty-nine; my forty from her fifty-two—this blindness, which was really the thoughtless belief in our sameness, might have been apt. But it was treacherous now, so much so that despite my complete ignorance of how little I knew, I intuited somehow my weakness. I knew her house was strange water to me, when I bobbed there alone.

The phone startled me awake where I’d lain so conscientiously motionless that even as my heart broke out into a gallop my arms and legs blundered, benumbed. For a moment, catching sight of my glittering skirt and my hard glossy shoes throwing back the aquarium light, I did not know who I was, let alone where and why. The red numerals on my alarm clock spelled 6:23. “Are you looking outside?” said her voice. Clutching the phone I lurched to the window, somehow expecting to see her though there wasn’t a telephone booth on my block. The window framed noiseless snowfall, like a rain of ashes. The redbud’s bare limbs sprouted fluff as I watched.

“Where are you?” My voice strangely vibrated my ears. My apartment was so plunged in silence I might have been underwater along with my fish, except for the dense little windstorm of noise coming out of the phone. A faraway clamor of music and voices through which I could barely hear her though she seemed to be shouting.

“. . . walked outside and my car had been buried in snow.”

“Where are you? It doesn’t look so bad—”

“It doesn’t look so bad! It must have just started falling in town. Here we’re getting socked in.”

“Here? Where are you? It’s six twenty-five.”

“I told you, we came out to The Pines to shoot pool. Now the roads are fucked up—”

“Martha, it’s six twenty-five!”

“Would you please stop obsessing on time? That’s why I’m calling. I’m running a little bit late.”

“A little? You’re still in Trumansburg!”

“That’s my point, Regina, and the roads are fucked up, so I’m running—”

“But it’s almost six-thirty.”

“We don’t have to be there at six-thirty. That’s just when the cocktail hour starts, little food things on trays, I doubt people’ll start sitting down before eight—”

“We’re not getting there until eight?” I exclaimed. I stopped wearing a watch and I’ve never been late, I remembered her bragging. At least, not because I’ve lost track of the time . . . My whole body came back to me now, I was thrumming with monster adrenaline as if on the legs of a giant I could cover the distance between us, crush houses and cars, the fresh powdery snow jumping up in alarm. I would rip the roof off of The Pines and seize her in my fist.

“. . . getting there as soon as we can. This fucking snow is not just happening to you, everyone’ll be late . . .”

But it was just happening to me. Her phone call at six forty-five, to sketch the merry mayhem of trying to dig out her car. Her phone call at seven-fifteen, less a call than a broadcast, as if, after dropping her quarter and dialing, she’d dropped the receiver and wandered away, though the mufflement of sound must have been her own palm closing over the mouthpiece like closing a door in my face. Then the connection reopened and I heard Dutra’s voice strike a note in the background, his words tumbled and lost, leaving only the coy, needling tone.

“. . . wait for the plow . . .” I seized on the shred of her voice as if catching a glimpse of her face through a crowd. Then the curtain of noise closed again.

“Martha!” I shouted. “Martha!”

Outside my window an orphan flake made its way down like a feather, tossed this way and that by the wind. The snowfall had ended. Perhaps a fluffy inch lay on my sill, mostly air; press a palm flat on it, as I did, and it melted away. Below me a passing car painted black stripes on the street. Certain snowfall reminds you that snow is just fancier rain. A plow out in this would be raising its blade up and heading back to the garage. The air was wetter than cold where it streamed in my part-open window and painted my guts, tarred them thickly in dread. But The Pines lay on Trumansburg Road on the opposite side of the lake; I stood mumbling this to myself like a simpleton chanting a memorized prayer. Sometimes a tornado will drill down one side of a street while the opposite side goes untouched. Surely the same thing must happen quite often with blizzards. Surely Martha would not lie to me—and not even lie plausibly, but with brazen conspicuousness, declaring herself in the grip of a blizzard that hadn’t occurred. The front of my slippery dress had gone damp from the air. And my feet, crushed like fleshy dead stumps in the punishing cones of my high-heeled shoes, and the rims of my eyes gummed around with black clots of mascara, and my gnarled hands, cross-hatched with blood at the knuckles where the damp frigid draft, like an acid bath, ate them away. Stand as still as you can and the beast never finds you. Don’t run. It’ll just catch your scent. Stand as still as you can and your body’s death slips out of hiding: you can hear its faint faraway noise like a river that runs underground. In possession of that, how can any harm ever befall you? Martha loved me. She had chosen tonight to announce to the world that she did. Martha did not make elaborate plans—plans best suited, perhaps, to please somebody else—and just chuck them. She did not invite people to dine in her home, and decide, at the hour, not to cook. She did not tell her lover to put on a beautiful dress, and decide not to show. The next instant would bring her if only the unending now could be butchered and done with. Years before, all of four years before, when I’d been seventeen, I’d taken acid with a man I had known just a little and liked just a little bit more. The horizon had constricted and constricted around us, all past time, every possible future, had withered away, reality outside his window was swallowed by void, his doors opened onto a nothing, if there had been a supermarket, a neighboring house, a police station near where he lived I would not have known “supermarket” or “neighbor” or “police officer,” I would not have known “hot dog” or “handcuff.” The man had tied me, wrists and ankles, to his bed using shirts from his closet, the ones with long sleeves, and had fucked me in a mad thrashing panic, as if he’d lost something he hoped to spade out of my guts, and then like a madman he’d lurched half-dressed out his front door and had ceased to exist. I worked first my friction-burned right hand and wrist from its noose, then my left, then left ankle and right. Once I’d accomplished this task time attacked me like furies. I was helplessly trapped on the far side of hours with a mind scorched and bare, agonized by its own emptiness. Being conscious was torture. A clock hung on the wall framing me with its motionless hands. Push them forward and live. Kill the minutes and live. I found a box, turned it on and made pictures. Found another, turned it on and made noise. I found a slippery heap, cleaved it open and words leaped at me and were lost, little motes in the great molten lake; my consciousness burned viciously, the more stuff I threw on it, the hotter it grew. I was watching Donahue and reading Marx and listening to Tchaikovsky and doing the crossword and memorizing the phone book and counting the yarns in the carpet all at the same time, and none of it snuffed out my stark naked dreadful awareness, I still didn’t know who I was and time still didn’t pass, it was still seven-twenty, seven-fifty, eight-ten, eight-sixteen, and at some point I stood up and took myself into the bathroom and scoured my face and reapplied all my makeup with a white-knuckled half-steady hand and then going back to my post by the window smashed the handset of the phone against the cradle with such force that both were destroyed, and the mute metal discs and the uprooted wires and the phone’s other guts scattered over the floor. Then there was nothing but Martha, the dusty indigo thumbprints that sometimes appeared on the frail skin under her eyes, the slight shine of the bump on her nose, the hairsbreadth chink of light between her upper front teeth, the tart taste of her cunt, and the river was dry in its bed and no boat slipped its mooring and no one departed and Martha was coming to get me because she was mine.

At a quarter past nine in the morning an engine roared up to the curb underneath the redbud and the Volvo’s door slammed like a detonation. Then I heard Dutra’s heavy boots pounding the boards of the porch and his heavy fist pounding my door.

“Ginny!” he bellowed. The bright cube of saltwater lurched in its box. Country Joe and the chromis stood perfectly still in the storm as if hanging from strings. The door strained in its frame. I remembered shopping with Dutra at the tropical fish store as if it were some rare, squandered moment of heedless existence from childhood, my hand in my father’s while climbing a stairs, my mother seated on the edge of my bed radiating her tenderness on me like heat, all my stuff like that suctioned away, all the worse to have ever occurred. Better to have been pitched in the woods like a football at birth. The lock wasn’t much, not a bolt, just the cheap little wedge kind that springs in and out. At some point in that night I had drunk my whole bottle of scotch and I couldn’t sit upright; I couldn’t even raise an arm; creased at the waist by hot pain I inched to the door and raised my arm as if ripping out stitches and did up the door chain and fell heavily back on the floor. I heaved over my knees but again, as with all but the first time, no vomit came out. Now Dutra had heard me. He paused in his pounding and shouting and we both heaved for breath raggedly on our opposite sides of the thin wooden door. And then the whole weight of what seemed like far more than just Dutra flew onto the door as if having been dropped there from miles above. The door stove in, splitting from the doorframe, but the chain caught and held. Dutra’s bulging, chapped eye, branched with blood, stared at me through the crack.

That downstairs neighbor of mine, who must have by now had his fill of my door being banged on and screamed at, was a heavyset, unhappy poet named Donald. I heard him open his door and say something. Dutra’s eye disappeared.

“Get the fuck out of here!” Dutra barked. After a pause, the door slammed.

“You get out,” I whispered to the bloodshot eye, when it reappeared.

“Please just listen to me.”

“YOU get out.”

“Ginny, I beg of you, listen to me.”

“Did she say it was you all along that she wanted? She noticed you all the way back on that day with the coffee-iced coffee.”

“Ginny, please listen—”

“You want me to listen to you!”

“It’s like, imagine I was drinking all night. Getting more and more high and fucked up.” His voice squeezed out of him like a paste, stiff and thick with emotion. “And it’s like, imagine that I came home, I’m blind drunk coming home, I don’t know who I am, I don’t know what I am, but you’re there, Ginny, you’re still living with me, just imagine, and now I come home, and you’re upstairs, asleep in your bed,” he was weeping, “asleep in your bed, just imagine, and I come home so drunk, I don’t know who I am, I don’t know what I’m doing, and I’m hungry, like an animal, hungry, no thoughts, and I grab your fish out of their tank and I fry them and eat them.” He paused, heaving for breath. “And I don’t mean to! I don’t want to do it! They’re not fish to eat! They don’t even taste good but I DO it, I EAT them, and now they’re gone and I can’t bring them back, I can’t fucking undo it!” The bloodshot eye glistered and streamed, alien and repulsive. Of course it was far worse for him than it might be for me. Worse for him, with his strict codes of honor in which he took such inadvisable pride. Now in betraying me he’d betrayed them, and he’d never have quite the same vigorous faith in himself. Time stood still. I stood up, I could not fathom how, soul-sick and exhausted and drunk as I was in my slick tawdry dress, and went so near the broken door Dutra’s hot breath dirtied me through the gap, and then, as he had, rammed my shoulder so hard that I slammed the door back in its splintery frame, and perhaps broke his nose, though if so, he did not make a sound. And all my furies burst out of my chest like the fireball out of a bomb, with their thousands of fists and their thousands of tongues, so that even I didn’t know all the things that I said, all the ways that I shamed him and smote him, except that the violent migration had vacuumed me clean so I realized in fact I’d said nothing, and might never say something again.

Not even when she came, hours later, though I opened the door. I had sat in my living room, propped on my sofa, tightly wound in a blanket, unable to sleep or wake up. The wretched deathless consciousness: this was why people murdered themselves. Morning might have changed to day and day begun to fade though I can only assume. Yet at the noise of her engine arriving outside I stood up, in a trance, and I undid the chain on the door and sat back down again. In my own shock I must have been shocking, as if it were all physical, entry wounds and soft clots of brain matter strewn into the folds of my limp party dress. Smeared makeup and snarled, de-coiffed hair and unused fancy shoes—I saw her, seeing me, give up on whatever she’d thought she would say. I say I saw her, but she was metamorphosed, the violence she’d done to me making its ricochet back. She was diminished and hardened, as if her restless appetites were a prison that had overnight whittled her down. Her skin gray, her hair heavy and dark with its oils, two fine lines I had never seen scoring her face linking nostrils, mouth corners, and jaw. Dressed in her sour-smelling pool-playing jeans and unraveling sweater and cracked bomber jacket as if she’d been out not all night but for months, on the streets, with the snot-crusted runaway teens on the methadone line. And seeing her so besmirched and exposed I felt choked with fresh love and hatred for her, that she’d so thoroughly ruined herself in my heart, by design and beyond all repair.

“I’m sorry, babe,” she said, her voice pitched too high, her eyes redly damp, her jaw clenched. “I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t walk into that party with you.

“Every hour all night I kept thinking, It isn’t too late. But I already knew when I left to play pool that I’d never get there.

“I couldn’t let you believe we’d keep going, when we’d already lasted too long.

“I don’t suppose you’d come out for a drink. Talk a little about it.”

Into the silence came a rattling noise I realized was my teeth chattering. My window was still standing open. I did not feel the cold.

“No. I didn’t think so,” she finally answered for me.

Perhaps she thought my silence was strength, and not a helpless condition, as if she had pulled out my tongue.

“I kept trying to tell you I couldn’t give you what you wanted. I don’t think you ever understood—could have understood—how different my life is from yours. You’re twenty-one, Regina,” as if it were a self-indulgence, a foible. “I’m almost thirty-four.”

But in the absence of ready assent with her thoughtful self-justifications, in the presence of ongoing silence, she swiftly lost patience. “At least with Dutra, we already realize we need different things. That didn’t take long. In fact, at risk of betraying to you that you weren’t my first choice, I can tell you he won’t have a drink with me, either.” A ticlike tremor, of regret or self-pity, for a moment distorted her face. “You should have seen him bolt awake and come running to you to confess. Then he came back and said, ‘Get the fuck out.’ Just like you. Though you’re saying so in not so many words.

“Go ahead. Tell me what a cunt I am.

“Go ahead! Oh, poor fucking you! So fucking wounded you can’t even speak!”

Yes, I was. Though as she wept and raged at me—for I’d cornered her into it, hadn’t I, and I loved her too needily, didn’t I, and would always want more from her, wouldn’t I—my desire to speak, if it had even still been there, pilot light for the flame of my voice, softly snuffed itself out. The thread of smoke melted away. No, I would not speak again. Such a promise of peace.

At last, solitary and wronged, she turned her back on me. “I get it,” she shot over her shoulder as she went out the door. “No one drinks with the bitch. The bitch drinks by herself.”