2007

“. . . and I figure you’ll want to invite me to dinner now that I’m married and all,” he signed off in his needling way.

“I’m sorry, what did he say?” I asked Myrna, who was helping me unload the groceries. Of course she would have no idea who he was, and would even find having to speak of my incoming calls a distasteful infringement.

“Oh yes,” Myrna said with reluctance. “This caller. You’ll have to back it up further. That’s only the end of his most recent message. This caller first rang in the morning, while Lion was taking his ten o’clock nap. I had to lower the volume because I thought he’d wake Lion with speaking so loud.”

“First rang?”

“You’ll see there’s four messages new. I believe they’re the same caller, four different times. I’m not certain. I kept the volume turned down.” Myrna often found evidence of my defects of character in locations quite separate from me, and her comments now regretted my vulgarity, in having such strange, loudmouthed callers as Dutra, and broadcasting the fact with an audible message machine. But she never was rude: saying she’d turned down the volume to help Lion sleep was a kindness of hers to my pride. Obviously I should have my machine’s volume down all the time, but I just didn’t know any better. For this failure, as for so many others, she supplied her own cure. One of Myrna’s ironclad idiosyncrasies was that she wouldn’t put Lion’s soiled clothes in the hamper, because the hamper was kept in the master bedroom. When Myrna arrived in the morning, if the door to our bedroom was not already shut, she would shut it herself, pointedly. Then, as the hours elapsed, and little Onesies and elastic-waist short-shorts and overall sets grew besmirched in their varied quotidian ways, she would drape items over the bedroom doorknob, one on top of the other. I’d seen her get to the height of six items of clothing. The instant I came home they collapsed to the floor for nobody but me to pick up—but God save Myrna from crossing that threshold and putting the clothes in the hamper herself! It wasn’t decent for her to set foot in our bedroom. She knew if we didn’t.

“If this guy that called really is married, there must be alien abductors involved,” I said now, because it was one of my ironclad idiosyncrasies to be nervously provoked by Myrna toward just the sort of jokey oversharing for which she had the least use. Of course, Myrna did not take this bait. She only blinked, as if to say, Does this pertain to the physical, mental, or emotional health and well-being of the little boy sleeping now in the next room?

No. In that case, is this something I ought to discuss with my pastor?

No again. Satisfied by the results of her silent inquiry, Myrna pretended she hadn’t heard me. “There’s leftover pasta with carrots and peas in the icebox,” she said in conclusion. “He made one poop this morning. At the playground he played very nicely with Noah.” She shouldered her purse.

“Thank you, Myrna,” I said humbly. I never felt more like my own impostor than when speaking with her, but she was the best sitter, by many orders of magnitude, we had ever employed, and Matthew—who of course had less than nothing to do with our sitters, having laid eyes on each one of them no more than twice, first to hire, then, until Myrna, to fire—insisted on her. I’d indulged in my youthful experimentation, had my fun—the aspiring-jazz-singer sitter, for example, who diapered Lion backward, and was never less than forty minutes late—and now it was time for an “actual, competent sitter,” to quote Matthew’s passionate speech. A sitter who knew what her job was and did it, in order—so I felt went the unspoken subtext—that I might recall what my job was, and do it as well.

I never looked in on Lion while Myrna was still in the house. For all my alleged lapses in guarding my own privacy, I couldn’t bear her to realize how eager I was to see him. I would potter around in the kitchen. Unload bags. Coolly glance at my mail. Never once would I ask how he’d been, as if I hardly realized he was there. Then as soon as she left I’d go into his room and kneel next to his miniature bed, where he lay in the throes of his delicious, sweat-dampened, enviable postlunch nap. Today he lay on his side, his legs scissored apart as if he’d been trying to outrun his slumber. His plump cheek squashed against the pillow had pushed his lips apart, deepening the arrowed indentation of the upper. His loose curls lay in a spray around his head. Carefully, fearing I’d wake him, I lowered nose and mouth into the cleft where his neck met his jaw, into that hot crease of cleanly odorous flesh, and there, eyes closed, inhaled and inhaled with hunger—if I could devour it, I thought, and so keep it forever, that hot, honeyed, clean scent of unfallen flesh—

From downstairs, the base of the building, I heard the muffled boom of the massive Victorian oak double doors: Myrna hitting the street. She was off to her other job, a pair of children she picked up from school and stayed with until someone got home. Beyond that I knew nothing of them, due to Myrna’s discretion, which didn’t mean I did not sometimes find myself thinking Poor children, no more shocked than amused by my smugness, as if, like a vice, it gave equal parts pleasure and shame. Poor children, to not have their mommy with them in the late afternoon, the best part of the day, when the languorous city belonged to the carefree alone. No one striding tight-lipped to the subway. Outside it was finally spring. When Lion woke up, we would go to the park and count tulips.

That an undeserved fluke, a strange coincidence of passable effort with outsize enthusiasm, was the reason I no longer needed a job, didn’t hamper my feeling of moral supremacy over mothers with actual jobs, that I could spend so much more time with my child than they could with theirs. Nor did the feeling of moral supremacy hamper my awareness of being a fake, a do-nothing, unfairly lounging in leisure unearned. The two feelings were two sides of one weave, though it’s hard to say which was the “good” side and which the reverse. More than a decade before, after losing my first job in New York as the assistant of an agent of extremely lowbrow fiction who had fired me for being “an incorrigible snob,” I had written what I’d hoped was an extremely lowbrow book as a sort of revenge. “Call me a snob? I’ll show you!” I had thought, though in truth I had not meant to show it to anyone. But my young-girl-in-the-city rehash, like a Frankenstein monster, had thrown off her bonds and gone lumbering into the world, and to this day had not ceased her surprisingly lucrative rampage. She’d got herself translated into sixteen foreign languages, and adapted for premium cable; she’d even gotten me, early on, to produce her a sequel. But that was all she would get, I had vowed. Since the second turn of the millennium, as I thought of it, in September of 2001, I had set her aside and expected that everyone else would as well, but strangely, they had not. In general, multiple overloud messages on my machine would have been from my agent, a crass, brassy, hyperactive, come-to-think-of-it-not-so-un-Dutra-like man-boy hustler, who possessed the additional interesting feature of being a colleague of Matthew’s, though I’d met Matthew second, through him. My agent was the agency’s cash cow; Matthew was their nonfiction cap-feather, their pride, all the more prized for his anomalousness, his wholly un-agent-like professorial solemnity, his Pulitzer Prize–winning projects about genocide and the coming oil crisis. It was a matter of enormous satisfaction to the agency’s heads that Matthew seemed there by mistake, and that he’d married me, four years after we’d met at an agency party, was fondly considered by his colleagues the stuff of great screwball.

As quickly as I’d swooned into Lion’s soft neck, I stood again and slipped out of his room. He had not even stirred.

Dutra had indeed involved himself with my machine. He really had called four separate times, and talked a total of almost twenty minutes, touching on the subject of his marriage exactly once, gotcha!-style, in the course of the sign-off I’d already heard. “I figure you’ll want to invite me to dinner now that I’m married and all.”

“Prick,” I remarked without heat as I picked up the phone. It was a peculiarity of my relationship with Dutra that I neither possessed, nor even knew if existed, home phone or mobile phone numbers for him. For years he had virtually lived at the hospital, in and out of surgery, periodically placing calls to me, at random hours, from what I imagined to be an atmosphere of unremitting somber urgency affronted, if not outright maddened, by his breezy wisecracking. There he must sit, the bludgeon-heavy handset of a bright-red phone prominently labeled FOR EMERGENCY ONLY pinched between jaw and shoulder, his long legs propped up on some erstwhile sanitized surface, spinning a pen on one thumb and yakking to his tolerant friend about the fantastical idiocies of his most recent cabbie while scrubs-clad and blood-spattered nurses rushed past him with lifesaving tools in their hands. Or so I imagined the scene, which was why I never called him unless he called me. “Dr. Dutra, please—Regina Gottlieb returning his call,” I ventured to the woman who answered. “I’ll put you through,” she murmured pliantly—it was a very famous and well-endowed hospital at which Dutra had landed, and always surprised me anew with its telephone manner of a fancy hotel.

“Hel-lo. Looks like I got your attention.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“Such a fast callback. That must be a record.”

“I always call you back.”

“Eventually. Anyway, don’t you think congratulations are in order? Aren’t you so happy for me?”

“Are you seriously married?”

“I would never get unseriously married. Yes, I’m seriously married.”

“Wow! Okay. Congratulations. And who did you marry?”

“I married Nikki.” Here he paused, as if expecting recognition, but I knew he was smirking—I could practically feel his smirk through the phone.

“Have I ever met Nikki?”

“I don’t know, have you? Her last name is Chevalier. Nicole Chevalier. She’s thirty-nine years old,” he declared, as if this were a primary characteristic, although the fact that he was thirty-nine himself was a matter of total indifference to him. “Family’s originally from Montreal. Very big-deal people. They own a couple hundred of the Thousand Islands.” Now I could feel he was grinning, his face-splitting, earlobe-to-earlobe, clown/wolf-with-the-upper-hand grin. “Don’t you know her, Ginny? She knows you. She’s a fan of your book.”

“Jesus, Dutra. You’re calling me out of the blue with the news that you’re married to some woman you’ve never introduced me to, and now you’re faulting me I don’t know her?”

Oh, the delight! Oh, the satisfaction! Dutra verily burbled with glee—who needs a bride when one has an old friend to make fun of? “Of course you’ve never met her!” he crowed. “I’ve only known her for thirty-five days!”

Nicole Chevalier’s elderly father had been operated upon by Dutra, it went without saying brilliantly and successfully, some two and a half years before. After the father’s recovery, she’d gone home to San Diego, and dropped cleanly from Dutra’s awareness, but as it turned out, he had not dropped from hers. Some six months ago she had written to him and included a photo. They’d shifted to e-mail, and then to the phone. Another man might have suggested a weekend in Vegas or Cancún to test the waters—but Dutra didn’t have the leisure of other men or the patience for half-measures. He introduced a bit of drag to the momentum, made her twist in the wind a few months, then invited her to spend his vacation with him in New York. The day she arrived, he proposed. The next day, he took her shopping for apartments. The next week they were at City Hall. The rest of the month they had spent honeymooning in Tunis.

By the end of the conversation he’d extracted what it seemed he wanted even more than my shock: a dinner invitation. “How about next Thursday?” I’d suggested, feigning eagerness proportionate to his.

“Thursday,” he repeated. “Gee. Are you sure? Don’t you already have hot Thursday plans?”

“Thursday’s the new Friday.”

“‘Hey, guess what? I got married!’” Dutra dialogically reminisced. “‘No shit? How fantastic! Let’s have a big celebration—on Thursday.’”

“Dutra’s coming to dinner this Saturday,” I told Matthew that night, by which I meant, in our marital shorthand, Start thinking about what you’ll cook.

“Could you have told me sooner?”

“I just found out myself.”

“Involuntary hospitality?”

“Sort of. But, you’ll like this: he’s bringing his wife.”

“He married Alicia?”

“No no no. Come on, he and Alicia split two years ago. He’s married a woman he barely knew—I’m sorry. I’m guilty again of a misleading adverb. ‘Barely’ is not only needless but actually wrong. He’s married a woman he didn’t know—”

“Is this about to become a long story?” Matthew interrupted me, his pen poised in midair above the usual split ream of paper, the first draft of part twelve of The Rising Fundamentalist Tide or some such embryonic best-seller. “Because I need to finish reading this tonight.”

“Why don’t you just let me know when it’s the time for easygoing marital chit-chat? Maybe we can put a little light above your head that turns green for, like, five minutes right before you pass out.”

Matthew had already relowered his head to the page. “I’m sure it’s an interesting story. I’ll look forward to hearing it.” He had a great talent for squeezing his mind’s telescope to the width of a straw. Was a time, I reflected, and not so long ago, when I was that split ream of manuscript pages, spread beneath that most smoldering beam of attention—but this complaint seemed both childish and vain, and I took perhaps vain pride in not making it.

•   •   •

After I’d published my book, a certain kind of person from my past—the girl I’d passed notes with in seventh grade typing, the other waiter from the “health food” café where I’d worked for a summer in college—would tend to reappear for a while in my life, establishing contact with a phone call or letter, maintaining it briefly, then fading away. It was this category to which Matthew assumed Dutra belonged. The basis for the misprision was twofold, in addition to the fact that I didn’t correct it. First, Dutra’s reappearance coincided with most of the others, although I never thought it was my book that prompted him to call, nor did he use it as a pretext. Perhaps he’d reasoned that my having acquired a public profile, however minor and silly it was, meant his chances with me were improved. I might grant him the same graciousness I would grant to a stranger. Second, from Matthew’s perspective Dutra was just as miscellaneous as the others—he formed no part of the contemporary pattern. He was a random odd fragment. The arbitrary groupings of childhood and young adult life, when our social contacts aren’t yet fully aligned with our preferences, would account for him best—maybe Dutra and I, long ago, shared a second-grade classroom, or scooped side by side in the same ice cream shop.

What Matthew couldn’t understand was why Dutra stayed on, and what I couldn’t understand was why I didn’t just tell Matthew who Dutra was. I had my reasons, or perhaps my excuses. Matthew had never been one to pore over the past, to fetishize my baby pictures, to play the voyeur to my lurid depictions of previous carnal milestones. Love for him was not a ritual of disclosing, confessing, or unearthing, but a resolute march to the future, well planned and equipped and unhindered by doubt. Our first weeks of love, when we managed to get out of bed, we hadn’t spent telling our stories, or showing our scrapbooks and photos, or playing our most favorite records, or reciting our most favorite poems. We had bought me a helmet and flashing reflector, so when I cycled with him he felt sure of my safety, and we’d marked up the real estate section in search of a place we could live in a good school zone, so that when we had children, whenever that was, we would not have to move. I had never had a lover so unafraid of a future with me—and not just unafraid, but determined on it. The past didn’t matter to Matthew because in the past, we had not been together—and this was a belief, like some religious beliefs, I suspected might benefit me if I shared it. And so I pretended I did, and readmitted Dutra to my life as a random odd fragment. It was an attitude to which Dutra, by instinct, gave his unspoken cooperation. Dutra and I never spoke of our earlier chapter of friendship, and this felt not artificial but natural, as if there were no past to speak of at all.

On the day he ambushed me with news of his marriage I hadn’t seen Dutra in more than three months, but three months for us was a short interval, and Dutra tended to stay just the same a lot more than he tended to change. He still lived in the same five-hundred-square-foot bachelor pad off the Bowery he’d found when he first had returned to New York, although now he could have afforded the same apartment at its current market price, which was saying a lot, plus a few more just like it, exactly how many I couldn’t determine given the corresponding absence of clear income cues and the continuing presence of not just the little apartment, but the rest of the time-honored Dutra attire. Dutra still had his hair cut by the Astor Place barbers, still wore the same bomber jacket he’d bought with his savings on Eighth Street at the age of sixteen. He still wore Vasque hiking boots in the winter with wool socks from Campmor (very likely the very same socks!—for he frequently bragged that, like all of the personal items he chose with such care, they were unparalleled for their comfort, endurance, and cheapness) and that same pair of Vasque hiking boots in the summer, but with white cotton socks now from Sears. He still “dressed up” for a glamorous evening in khaki trousers topped off with a black roll-neck sweater—the roll-neck his allusion to style—though five years ago, squinting at him through the crepuscular light of his favorite downtown restaurant, I’d been shocked by my sudden suspicion the sweater was newly cashmere, as if, even as our bodies had been replacing themselves cell by new, yet age-appropriate, cell, the sweater, too, had by fibers unknit and reraveled itself. Perhaps as a final, secret act of vanity it had traded its tag from J.Crew to Armani, or now even had no tag at all. Going to the ladies’ room I’d tried for a look down the back of his neck, but the roll had been doing its job, rising up to just touch with its lip the shorn hair at his nape.

That night, the single time Matthew and Dutra and I ever dined together, had been to mark the occasion of Matthew’s and my engagement. Dutra, on hearing our news, had awkwardly and needlessly and, it must be said, persistently in the face of Matthew’s steady noninterest, insisted on taking us out. “What about Casper?” Dutra asked when I returned to the table, toiling, because we were with Matthew, to bring us to shared conversational ground, despite the ground being almost too small for us all to stand on. Dutra had barely known Casper when we were in school, and now did not know him at all. But Matthew, at least, had met me at the same time as I had rediscovered Casper in New York, and the two of them were better friends now than were Casper and I.

“He’s been writing for this magazine called Ultra,” said Matthew. “I think the third issue is just coming out. Apparently the business plan is, you can’t buy it on the newsstand, and you can’t subscribe to it, but if your net income is over six hundred thousand a year they send it to you for free without asking you whether you want it.” Matthew and I had been dining out on the premise of Ultra ever since Casper, perpetually overtalented and un- or underemployed, had through friends of ours been hired to do Ultra’s art coverage, which took the form of a quick-shopping guide to works of art available for acquisition to millionaire collectors with unformed or catholic taste. Everyone with whom we talked about Ultra deplored it or laughed at it or distilled from it some sort of vile cultural essence, but so far no one had said, as Dutra did that night, dredging his mackerel sashimi through soy sauce:

“So that’s what that is. I wish I’d known Casper was in it. I threw it away.”

“Seriously,” I said to Matthew later that evening, as we were riding back home in a cab, “how much do you think Dutra earns?”

“Now we know more than six hundred thousand.”

“I thought Ultra went to people who made more than five hundred thousand.”

“That’s just half a mil. And, the less predictable number’s a marketing trend. Thirty-eight ways to lose weight this winter. The season’s fifty-two hottest looks. Six hundred thousand or more.”

“Six hundred’s just a hundred more than five hundred,” I complained pointlessly.

“You’ve got to draw the line somewhere,” said Matthew.

The next time we’d seen Dutra had been at our wedding, where of course we’d hardly seen him at all. The next time after that had been four months or so after Lion was born, though Dutra had conceived of the visit, and very likely had experienced it, as a visit to a newborn—to that distressingly remote and enigmatic extraterrestrial that had long since passed out of existence, what to me felt like two or three epochs ago. Since then had been the miraculous Smiling and Seeing Us baby, the terrifying, suicidal-thoughts-provoking Not Sleeping for Thirty Hours baby, the baby whose head must be held in one’s palm lest it fall off his neck—such a boggling contrast to the baby who, at four months, could be plopped in a front-facing backpack without injury, and who then would dangle and bounce, smiling and babbling at charmed passersby. This was a baby who was practically ready for college—such was the depth and breadth of my experience as a mother by the time Dutra came to see us that I accepted his haphazardly wrapped offerings with a sense of anachronism—Lion had grown far too old for this gifts-of-the-Magi routine. Dutra wouldn’t have noticed. As with that dinner he’d bought me and Matthew when we were engaged, the presentation of gifts to a newborn was the sort of gesture Dutra executed with equal parts anxiety and impatience, to get it done with and show he knew how, though I increasingly suspected he didn’t. With Lion stuffed in the Snugli front pack I’d met Dutra on the Promenade in Brooklyn Heights, where we’d sat on a bench while I opened his gifts—a piece of stiff, multicolor-striped cloth with a white paint stain marring one end, and three crude wooden puzzles, of an elephant, hippo, and giraffe, made up of slightly splinter-edged, slightly warped pieces that had to be forced for assembly and forced even harder to break them apart. Dutra had in his spare time been flying abroad to donate surgery in various unswept corners of the third world where his patients would likely have died without him, but the more I tried to elicit the details of his actual work, the less enlightening he was, though he could talk endlessly, with his old near-insufferable swagger, about unhinged, untrained alcoholic helicopter pilots in the bush with whom he flew and even sometimes crash-landed, or about the squalid little saloons serving home-distilled rotgut from jagged cups made from the bottoms of Poland Spring bottles, or about the astronomically stupid white people with whom he, Dutra, had to contend. He discoursed for some time on the gifts. The piece of cloth was the exact ritual piece of cloth that the tribe with whom he’d grown so familiar would have presented to its next newborn child if Dutra had not come to alter the piece of cloth’s fate; the puzzles were by local artists working with tools they had also handcrafted; with his usual bombastic pedantry Dutra established the gifts’ peerless uniqueness yet aptness, and with his usual careless impatience he then shoved them back in their bag, which he proceeded to carry, as I had a diaper bag and handbag already. I made a mental note to double-seal the cloth’s unknown allergens and the puzzles’ likely lead-based paint in Ziplocs and store them in the basement until Dutra’s next visit. We walked, over the Brooklyn Bridge into Manhattan, something we’d last done September 12 of a few years before, when all of downtown had been coated in ash and Dutra, utterly expressionless, had with his right arm held high in the air snapped one photograph after another with a series of disposable cameras he had stuffed in his pockets, snap snap every couple of steps, never looking where the camera was pointed, and never looking through the little viewfinder, as if to do so would be to lower himself to the level of the thousands of people who were also there gawking like us, if through tears, and with far less restraint. We hadn’t talked about it since and didn’t talk about it now. We fell easily into tandem, his unhurried gait matching my fast one. I had always walked swiftly with him because his legs were so long, and because he would not tend to notice me falling behind. One stranger after another graced me with a smile, often a positively luminous beam; I’d grown so accustomed to this since acquiring a baby I would hardly have noticed had Dutra not said, as another wave of approbation broke on us, “People think it’s my kid. They assume you and I are together.”

It was pointless to rebut this. He would have taken rebuttal as evidence of discomfort, which he as usual would have enjoyed. And besides, he was right. No one ever saw a man, woman, and child and thought, Oh, he must be her exasperating friend, permanent as a sibling. Instead I said, “Would you ever want children?”

I might have asked, “Is the sun in the sky?” Dutra pshawed noisily that I’d had any doubt. Of course he was going to have children. “Look at the things that I’ve done in my life,” he instructed. “Sex, I’ve done every kind of fucking I ever dreamed of and a lot that I never imagined. Drugs, I was a heroin addict. Money, I was poor. Now I make so much money I can’t even keep track of it. I cut people and get paid to do it—I cut a fucking maharani last month. I’ve traveled everywhere I ever wanted to go and I never want to travel again. The whole world’s exactly the same. That’s my biggest disappointment in life, that the whole world’s the same. I’ve got to have kids. If I didn’t have kids I would fucking implode out of boredom. It’s the only way left I can challenge myself.”

Flop-limbed in his harness, strapped snug to my chest, Lion absorbed this harangue in a state of entrancement, and when it concluded let out an empathic shriek, flinging all four limbs wide, as if Dutra’s excess emphasis took the form of electrical charge. “That’s not exactly what they’re for,” I said. “They’re not some toy for relieving your boredom. They’re for themselves.”

“They’re for the species, if you want to split hairs. Anyway, you can’t tell me you have no selfish motives for having a kid.”

“Well, sure, I wanted a kid—”

“The way you want all the trophies in just the right order. Book, boyfriend, fame, apartment, husband, baby—”

“Jesus, Dutra, I’m hardly famous.”

“You’re famous for what you do among the people who do it, the same as I am. You’re the same as me in a lot of ways, Ginny, you just hate to admit it.”

“You’ve got the big bucks, and I’ve got the baby, but otherwise, game tied,” I humored him, weary of it.

Back then Dutra was still with Alicia, the girlfriend he’d been dating, and then living with, almost the whole time he’d been back in New York. Alicia was vastly younger than Dutra—when they’d first met, with Dutra already a resident and Alicia some kind of uncategorizable laboratory scullery maid, their age difference of roughly a decade had struck me as downright immoral. Through murky connections Alicia, who’d never finished high school, had been given a job maintaining experimental equipment—she literally washed tubes, and mopped floors—in one of the city’s most prestigious medical research institutes. She had a security clearance, and was regarded by some of the bench scientists as a valued apprentice, despite the fact that she had never been to college and was by my guess about nineteen years old. Given that everything I knew about Alicia had been told me, with typically self-regarding bombast, by Dutra, every worst instinct of mine had been excited long before she and I met, but when we finally did, I’d been impressed. Striking, though hardly pretty. Her body that of a thin, bookish boy, her eyes those of a very old woman placed into the face of a very young girl. Unmarred flesh and a weather-worn soul; I couldn’t decide if she was a frigid virgin or a retired child prostitute, and the information that she had lived for a time with her unmarried anthropologist mother on a seagoing yacht between the microscopic South Pacific islands did nothing to tend my conclusions one way or the other, although it helped explain the recognition I’d felt upon watching her sit next to Dutra at dinner. Through his noise and her silence, his tics and her stillness, I’d perceived their sameness: their unfitness for social relations, combined with their fierce competence. She was a hermit, and knew it; Dutra was also, but didn’t. Henceforth I had blessed their alliance and been barely required to see her again.

That day we walked to the midpoint of the bridge and stood awhile suspended between the two boroughs before walking back to the waterfront park on the Brooklyn side, where we lay on the grass with Lion stretched on his stomach between us. I noticed that, unlike other childless men I knew, Dutra felt no obligation to incessantly pull faces at or nonsensically speak to or otherwise signal his fearless enthusiasm for the baby. In fact he seemed more relaxed around Lion than he frequently did around other adults. Perhaps because he was a doctor, and Lion a nonspeaking, hale little body whose physical needs Dutra understood better than me. “Alicia wants to get married,” he said. Without forethought I expressed my delight, as if conventional sentiments, conventionally phrased, ever made it past Dutra.

“What makes you think it’s so great?”

“Oh, God, Dutra, I’m just trying to congratulate you. I’m not looking for a long drawn-out dissection of the benefits of marriage.”

“Uh-oh! A little defensive.”

“A little not-stoned. Can you ever just converse like normal people? Marriage is great, Alicia is great, Alicia wants to get married, that’s great.”

“That’s not how I remember you talking before you were married. Remember? Before you and Matthew got married you were superambivalent. ‘I don’t believe in marriage.’ ‘It’s the path of least resistance.’ That time we went out in my ’hood, you told me you were terrified he was going to ask you to marry him, because you’d have to say ‘yes,’ and then you’d have to get married, and then you’d be married, and you felt locked into it, like it wasn’t your choice. Don’t you remember? We were sitting at that crappy little place down on Orchard, with the fluorescent-lit bar—”

Of course I remembered. “Of course I remember,” I snapped. “I was drunk and freaked out. Change is scary. Don’t read me the transcript.”

“Now you’re married and marriage is great.”

“Because as it turns out, it is great.”

“Really? Are you sure it isn’t because, once you’re locked in, you have a greater vested interest in thinking it’s great?”

It was just like Dutra to undermine all my hard-won maturity and wise acceptance of the inherent costs of marriage with a single remark. “Marriage as Stockholm syndrome?” I snapped irritably. “God, Dutra, you’re right! Only you had the insight to realize!” But Dutra had already traded mockery for doe-eyed solicitude, as if at the flip of a switch.

“Aw, Ginny,” he said, “I’m just kidding. I know that you’re happy.” My little malformed happiness, kindly noticed by him, might sprout leaves and grow tall after all.

It was Alicia’s happiness he was worried about. Alicia was demanding they marry, but for all the wrong reasons. What Alicia really needed, what she desperately wanted, was a stay of execution for her mother. Her mother was dying, very rapidly and unpleasantly, of cancer, and Alicia could not come to terms. And so she berated Dutra or abandoned him, disappearing for days at a time to her mother’s small farm in Bucks County. She always seemed to be slamming a taxicab’s door in his face, her parting words choked and generic: “I’m sorry—” “I can’t—.” Dutra refused to propose until Alicia acknowledged the root of their problems.

“Which is what, that she’s upset that her mother is dying? Jesus, Dutra, do you even want to marry Alicia?”

“Of course I want to fucking marry her.”

“Then propose and don’t be such a know-it-all. She’s scared out of her mind, she wants love and security, she doesn’t need you to act like her analyst. Are you being supportive?”

“Of course I’m supportive!”

“Not like a genius surgeon, like a boyfriend. Sometimes you need to can it with the relentless emotional honesty, Dutra. You should be hugging her and saying her mother won’t die.”

“I should lie to her? No fucking way. Her mom’s untreatable too-far-gone dying and in a couple of months she’ll be dead.” He’d been right about this, as he had probably been right about the causes of Alicia’s behavior—but not, if he’d meant to keep her, about how he should act. The next time I’d seen him, the following spring, Alicia’s mother was dead and Alicia was married, to somebody else. Just after our day at the park, Dutra and Alicia had agreed to a separation Dutra somehow imagined would return Alicia to him as she’d been, as they’d been, at the start. Alicia began seeing someone with sufficient free time, unlike Dutra, to be willing to frequently visit her mother; arriving one midwinter late afternoon they’d found her mother propped up on her pillows in bed, a hole blown through the back of her skull by the handgun still hooked to her thumb. A funeral and a wedding had followed, in barely that order. “That person walked in that house with her that day—not me,” Dutra said, without rancor but with a terseness that forbade any further discussion. And so his girlfriend of close to a decade, the only girlfriend he’d had in the whole time I’d known him, was never mentioned between us again. Since then he’d been single, or so I assumed, though busily enthralled as I was by my life as a mother, I’d rarely seen him. Just an annual glimpse through the crush of our holiday party, at which he invariably made a few fans and a few enemies, and perhaps even flirted. But so far as I’d ever observed, at the ends of those evenings he went home alone.

•   •   •

In the course of married life, the perilous transition I most often endured was the preliminary moment of hosting a dinner. The blundering scrum at the door; the salutation of Matthew, immured and in fact downright stony amid pots and pans in the kitchen; the dispatching of jackets and bags; the exclaiming in grateful protest over stuffed toys for Lion and bottles of wine; and all the while the secret, panicky struggle to surmount the great hurdle and serve a first round. At that point, the page turned. Knowing this I kept my head down like a sheepdog until I’d propelled everyone to their places. Once Dutra and Nikki were on the living room sofa with sloshing wineglasses and Lion was tearing the wrap from his gifts, I could analyze her at my leisure. I’d thought I had no expectations, yet I found myself very surprised. Perhaps “Chevalier” had brought me in mind of “chignon” or some other species of smooth elegance. But, “Regina!” she had squealed at the door, in the voice of a helium addict or a cartoon chipmunk. Even Lion, with his lifetime of experience with my mother’s ear-rupturing voice, was momentarily stunned. The impression of a living doll, or a humanized version of some beloved cartoon, was so strong that he quickly recovered himself, and with the unerring instincts of the toddler seized her firmly by the hand and made to lead her to his room for an introduction to the rest of his toys. Her nonchignoned hair was a mess, not in spite but because of the effort she’d made, the front locks pinned unevenly back from her face by a jeweled barrette that might have sooner been worn, and perhaps even made, by a grade-school child. Her eyes were large and startled, like a doe’s, and made up to look even larger by thick fronds of mascara which either failed to conceal, or created, a downturned effect, so that her whole expression, even while she was smiling, was droopily wistful. Her frame was very small, and lost beneath a witchy ensemble of black lace and black silken tassels and a black crocheted shawl of connected rosettes. In short, she spoke like a child, and dressed like a granny. I would have given her, if pressed further, a family of cats with whom she shared a secret language; a canopy bed; and at least forty-five years of life. “She’s thirty-nine years old,” I recalled Dutra stating, though he hadn’t been asked, the sameness of their ages made even more doubtful by the fact that beside his new bride he looked many years younger than that.

“Does having a baby take up lots of room?” Nikki was asking me wonderingly, as Lion, having perfunctorily inspected the embarrassment of high-priced new toys he’d released from their wrappings, industriously distributed gift box cardboard and paper so that ankle-deep garbage now covered the floor. “Because Danny’s place is so tiny, but every time we come back there from seeing apartments we just love it more. It’s so him. It’s where we’ve always known each other.”

“It’s not babies that take up the space, it’s their stuff,” I offered, as if not just the union of Dutra and Nikki, but their future offspring, were the oft-sounded themes of our long years of friendly discourse. “All they really need is someplace to sleep.”

“But you’d want all those things,” Nikki said dreamily.

“Ginny hasn’t even seen my apartment in, what, almost four years?”

“You haven’t invited us.”

“Oh, bullshit. You know you’re always welcome to drop by my place. Anyway, Ginny doesn’t know all the stuff I’ve done there.”

“Danny has such gorgeous taste,” Nikki cried.

“Does he now?” I teased, but this went disregarded.

“She hasn’t seen my place in ages,” he repeated, as if to explain my extreme ignorance. “I did it all down to the inch in Italian modern. Down to the inch. Where I couldn’t find the perfect thing I got it custom. Down to the inch. That apartment’s only five hundred square feet. When I finished it looked like a loft. Only thing was, I designed it for me.”

The surprise of hearing Dutra, for the first time, talk about spending his money was hardly noticeable amid all the other surprises. “We couldn’t have a family there,” Nikki said with regret of the customized loftlike apartment.

“We couldn’t even have a meal. No functional kitchen. When I did the pavlova I had to work on the floor.”

“When you did the what?” I said.

“Okay, this was insane.” Dutra was laughing. “I had to buy an electric mixer—”

“He hasn’t told you about the pavlova?” Nikki’s hands flew together at her breast. “It was the most romantic thing.”

“Nikki’s favorite dessert is pavlova—”

“And my favorite ballerina is Pavlova!”

“You know pavlova’s meringue with whipped cream. So I’d had our rings made, and I got the idea I’d conceal them inside a pavlova.”

How much better it was to stop pretending their story was something expected, and instead give full expression to my incredulity. By so doing I gratified Nikki, who discerned in me no skepticism, only apt astonishment at her good luck. Dutra had, in fact, had their rings made—before he’d even met her, or secured her consent to their marriage, let alone measured her finger. The rings—hewn with their interlocked initials, thick and heavy as signets—were undeniably unique and beautiful. They’d been the devils themselves to suspend in meringue, and Dutra had almost gone mad from the effort, presuming he’d started out sane. The morning that Nikki arrived, on the red-eye from San Diego, neither of them had slept in more than two days, from in his case pavlova and in both cases nerves. Dutra had driven her straight from the airport to Montauk, a takeout picnic brunch from Russ and Daughters, and the pavlova on the rental car’s backseat. On the winter-lonely beach he’d watched his guest break meringue with the edge of her spoon until, unable to wait any longer, he’d smashed up the pavlova with his hands and found for her the gob of crusted egg whites, and gold.

Lion was an easy child to put to bed, yet once I’d had him say good night and excused us, and brushed his teeth and tucked him under his covers, I lingered on the floor beside his elf’s bed, in the undersea glow of his LED nightlights. Having weathered the night’s cooking crisis, I heard Matthew emerge from the kitchen. I could see without actually seeing the hospitable face he would now have put on. He would refill their glasses and gather to him all the loose conversational strands. The compact of marriage: an intricate code of reliance. One always on if the other is off. One up if the other is down. They would never know how little he’d wanted them here, nor how much I now wished they would leave. I heard their voices, burbling on without impediment, caught in the current of warm fellow-feeling and booze. It was possible I could stay in Lion’s room for almost half an hour and not be suspected of anything strange. Only Matthew would wonder, and at the same time assume that a rare freak of Lion’s had kept me. A twitch of the threadlike antennae. I was pregnant; a fact so recently established I refused to give it credence. “It’s possible,” I had told Matthew a few days before, “that in about seven weeks, I’ll be about twelve weeks’ pregnant. But it’s equally possible that I will not.” “Equally possible? Exactly the same odds apply?” “Also possible,” I’d amended. And that had been that; tell Matthew that a fact was not a fact until further established, and he no more brooded on it than on something he’d never been told.

But Lion; Lion scented a change. The night before, at bedtime, as I was rising from kissing his cheek, he’d seized my hand with such unprecedented strength I had gasped in surprise. “I want to keep you forever,” he’d whispered, still squeezing my hand like a vise, and my rush of adoration had been streaked with fear, as if he’d slammed a cage door in my face. “I’ll always be your mommy,” I’d whispered, already trying to draw my hand free. “No!” he’d said, his other small hand shooting out from his covers to buttress the first. I’d been half an hour extracting myself, my gratification alternating with rising impatience. Since emerging from changeable infancy Lion had been notably self-contained, sitting alone and absorbed with a toy or a book, toddling far away at the playground without so much as a glance at me over his shoulder, and I’d sometimes wondered how much of my enthusiasm for parenthood rested on this foundation. Now, though, with Dutra and Nikki effusing at my dining table, I longed for him to cling and detain me. He settled himself on his pillow, his face turned to the ceiling, hooked one arm around his bear, and closed his eyes. Tonight it was I who kept hold of his hand, and it lay in mine limply relaxed, as soft and slight as the fallen magnolia petals that for the past week had littered the streets. From the living room the voices rose and fell. How long had I been hiding here—five minutes? As many as ten?

“Mommy?” Lion murmured, eyes still smoothly closed.

“Yes, sweetheart?”

“Why you still here?”

“Just making sure you’re okay.”

“I’m okay.”

“Okay, sweetness. Should I go?”

“Okay,” he exhaled, dropping off.

Now I was unambiguously truant. A perfect solitude enfolded me, defined by Lion’s slow, even breaths. Coup de foudre. That was what it was called. Mad love like a bolt from the blue. As different from compatible, practical, let’s-live-together-for-four-years-to-make-sure love as an abruptly erupting volcano from a sixty-watt lightbulb. I was jealous of them, I realized, as I was jealous, always, of odd pairs. The fat girl, her upper thighs squashing and squeaking together with each awkward step, and the slender boy tenderly holding her hand. Or the deformed boy, with a withered right arm, and the beautiful blonde twined around his good side. Something foreign to logic cleaved such pairs together: pure ardor. A sheer force of love. Matthew and I were a pair of quite similar envelopes. Close in age, close enough in background, genetically lucky with our looks and our minds. Inclined, for all our supposed hairsbreadth “differences,” toward all the same places, people, and things. One might wonder, if feeling unsteady, how deep a deficit of ardor such a list of matched traits could conceal.

It was a dangerous thought and it propelled me from Lion’s bedside, back into the convivial glare.

Dutra and Nikki had followed Matthew to the kitchen, where, timers having gone off, the potential for crisis was resurrected. “Can you please set the table?” Matthew muttered at me through his teeth. So I had been gone slightly, or a great deal, too long.

“I had another nightmare getting Lion to bed,” I lied, as I sometimes found I could, when the only other witness, not yet having turned three, wasn’t likely to give me away.

“Should I go in to him?”

“No, he’s asleep finally.”

“You’ve almost missed the whole story of how I almost left Nikki a widow after two weeks of marriage.” Dutra barged between us, dumping wine in my glass. “So what happened was, we’re in Sousse, on the coast, in this place that’s supposed to be famous for seafood, and I order lobster, I fucking love lobster. But Nikki goes, ‘Ehhh,’” Dutra made a moue, “‘I’m just not in the mood for seafood,’ and she orders, like, pizza! I’m really pressuring her to get lobster. Come on, we should both have the lobster. No no, I’m just not in the mood. I’m frustrated, fuck it, I’ll just get the lobster myself.”

“He always wants us to do things together,” Nikki glowingly clarified.

“So our food comes. Her pizza is—”

“So funny! Like a cake with tomato sauce on it—”

“It’s disgusting, completely disgusting, and my lobster is gorgeous. It’s this fucking magnificent lobster. And I’m so into it, I’m getting ready, I’m putting my bib on, I’ve laid out my tools, I get my claw meat out first—”

“Danny always saves the tail for last.”

“You know? The meat’s less delicate and delicious than the stuff in the claws and the legs, but it’s a steak. It’s a fat, chewy, ocean-grub steak and I want to devour the whole thing at once and then relax and doze off like a pig, so I do the fine surgery first. Claws and legs.”

“Legs!” Matthew said, for now we were all taking chairs at the table, the roast laid before us, the trough left behind yet again as the four of us rose yet again on a wave. “I should have figured a surgeon could deal with the legs.”

“You don’t eat the legs?”

“I can never get anything out of there.”

“Are you serious? Aren’t you from Boston? Matthew, man, we have to go out for lobster some night. I’ll school you. Let the girls go out for a girls’ night and eat pasta or something, we’ll go out for a man’s night and eat us some lobster. You will never again leave a lobster a shred of its flesh.”

“Where’s the part of this story where you almost die?” I cut in.

“It’s right here! We’ve reached it! So I’m happily eating my lobster and,” Dutra threw himself out of his chair and collapsed on the floor. Ech! ech! ech! came the sounds of his flailing and gasping, obscured from my view by the table.

“It was unbelievable,” Nikki took up, her eyes huge. “I was next to him, trying to help him, and all the waiters were just walking by with their noses in the air, saying things like, ‘I guess someone’s had too much sun!’ Finally another tourist couple from France helped me carry him to our hotel. And he was all gray and convulsing and gasping and I couldn’t get out of my mind what he’d said—”

“I forgot to tell what I had said,” Dutra said, climbing back in his chair. “I knew I was going down. A split second before I went down, I knew I was going. I felt it. Remember, I’ve been a heroin addict. I’ve OD’d. I knew my systems were all shutting down, bam-bam-bam. I wasn’t sure if they’d ever come back up again. And right before I fell out of my chair, I looked at Nikki and said—”

“‘I’m so sorry,’” she wailed along with him. “‘I’m so sorry I married you!’”

Over the neglected roast we gaped at each other, astonished.

“He felt so bad that he’d made me his wife, for just seventeen days, and now he was going to die and abandon me,” Nikki explained. “But I wouldn’t have been abandoned, because I would have died, too.”

After a dumbstruck moment I managed to say to Dutra, “Will you ever eat lobster again?”

“Fuck, are you kidding? I ate lobster the very next day.”

“He’s amazing,” Nikki said, beaming.

“She’s amazing,” Dutra corrected. “You know how we found out what happened? She had a BlackBerry with her, you know what that is? She starts going tap tap, the next thing you know she has it all figured out: toxic lobster syndrome. Certain lobsters, their flesh carries this toxin, you never know if you’ll get one or not. People who’ve eaten it all of their lives, they get one of these, boom, they’re dead.”

“So you’ll still eat it?” I exclaimed in exasperation.

“Sure, won’t you? It could happen to any of us.”

“If that’s true, I don’t think that I will!”

“That,” Dutra said, “is the difference between us, Virginia.”

A great deal, perhaps the whole final hour, of the dinner conversation was given over to plans that we four would embark on as soon as we could—trips to Vietnam and rented houses in Nice, at the very least brunch at their place on the first Sunday that Matthew and Lion and I were at leisure, all proposed by Dutra and Nikki with fervid insistence, as we sat over wrecked roast and glasses of bourbon. At last they were gone, and Matthew and I spent what seemed an eternity loading the dishwasher before I broke the silence. “Do you think she meant she would have killed herself?”

“What?” Matthew said with terse noncuriosity. “When?”

“When she said that if Dutra had died, then she would have died, too.”

“I took it more as a romantic sentiment than a suicide threat.”

“I didn’t say threat. I’m just asking, do you think she meant she would have killed herself?”

“I think I just said no.”

Our silence reinstated itself, perhaps the silence of equal exhaustion, a form of union. Or perhaps it was the silence of inward-turned brooding, of taking our measure as a couple against that of our giddy and tireless guests, and finding it short. That task, however much shared, still must count as division. There was a danger in the room that I knew I would have to evade but I wasn’t sure how.

“What did you think of her?” I asked at last, and I must have done the trick with my tone, because I felt Matthew actually pause and consider.

“I just don’t know,” he said at last. “I couldn’t get a read on her at all. The only thing I wound up feeling sure of was that she’s had more than one thirty-ninth birthday.”

“Really?” I cried with delight.

“Oh, yeah. I might have said she’s in her mid-forties, but something made me think she’s even older than she looks. How girlishly she dresses. And acts.”

“So what is up with her? Is she after his money?”

“I have no idea. I more wonder what Dutra’s after. How long did you say he’d known her? Forty days?”

“As of today he’s known her forty days. And all forty are since he proposed! But maybe no one’s ‘after’ anything,” I allowed. “Maybe it’s love.” It was easy to be generous now, Matthew’s comment having made the possibility seem so remote. Yet in the following days my shame grew at how eager I’d been to discredit them. Who more than Dutra deserved adoration, after so much time spent on his own? Coup de foudre; perhaps it was real. One went from believing, when twenty, that it was the one kind of love that was real, to believing, once closer to forty, that it was not only fragile but false—the inferior, infantile, doomed love of twenty-year-olds. Somewhere between, the norms of one culture of love were discarded, and those of the other assumed. When did it happen, at midnight of one’s thirty-first birthday? On the variable day that, while browsing a grocery-store aisle with a man, the repeating refrain of the rest of one’s life for the first time resounds in one’s ear?

Despite all the plans they’d proposed, all the nations they’d felt we should visit and all the brunches they’d promised to serve, in the days, then weeks, after the dinner we heard nothing from Dutra and Nikki, not even a phone call of thanks. It was all of a piece, I concluded, with their passion for each other, which swept up everything within reach, but temporarily and blindly; the accretions fell away again unmissed. After a while of musing and brooding, they fell away from me, too. I did continue to tell the tale of Dutra’s toxic lobster syndrome, most often at the playground, to casual acquaintances, when the fitting occasion arose.

•   •   •

After Lion was born, I had gone temporarily crazy. The terror he’d unleashed in me—that he would cease to breathe and stiffen in the night and be blue and ice-cold in the morning; that cars would leap the curb and crush his tiny body as I passed with the stroller; that fever would incinerate him, or the volatile chemicals in the fresh coat of paint on his nursery walls give him brain damage, or that I myself would poison him through some bad thing I ate and passed into my milk—seemed inadequately accounted for by such a simpering phrase as “maternal instinct.” “Mother love.” “Mama bear, fiercely guarding her cubs.” The knowing condescension of my female friends, who had gone before me and now had ancient one- and two-year-olds, and even—this hardly counted anymore—children who went to grade school, left me disgusted and alienated. None of them remotely understood the threats ranged against Lion, or me. For the first time in my life I sincerely contemplated suicide. I wanted to know what foolproof method to use if I lost him. I was aware that losing children had once been routine, and that even now it still happened, and people went on. Such people to me were heroic, and very abstract. Their resilience would never be mine. It was outside my limits.

And yet, at the same time as being engulfed by this postpartum paranoia, I’d been crazily happy. Doom dogged my steps, death displayed all its faces—I had become a compendium of freak deaths, I could find the fatal instrument in the most padded playroom—and life, like the sun’s blazing hair in a solar eclipse, only dazzled the more. Each extreme was the back of the other. They couldn’t be pried apart, watered down. I’d wondered if anything ever had felt the same way, and of course thought of Martha. But the resemblance was superficial. It only arose from the phrases and words that so poorly described the emotions. The emotions themselves, from one case to the other, had nothing in common. Why then all these overlapped words? Love. Adoration. Ardor. All, previously used, now felt a bit grimy to me, not to mention deficient, in the way of maternal instinct. There was no language of love that pertained to my child. Perhaps this was why I couldn’t bear to lose sight of him—because there weren’t symbols to translate him to me, to capture his essence and keep it preserved.

“I’m not sure if I can stand to have another one,” I’d said to Matthew, “and I’m not sure if I can stand not to.” Matthew, in his infinite wisdom, had said, “Let’s discuss it on Lion’s second birthday, and until then not discuss it at all.” It was essentially what we had done. The very night of Lion’s second-birthday party, the bright-colored paper plates heaped in the trash, I’d entered our bedroom with drama, while Matthew was reading, and lowered the lights.

“Is this the discussion?” he murmured, as I tugged off his boxers and, burrowing, even peeled off his socks. “I object . . .” Matthew’s muffled voice said, “to this demeaning treatment . . .” But the rest of the subject was examined without use of words.

I’d always known Matthew wanted more children; it was me we had wondered about. Me and my stated historical lack of ambition to ever have children; my remote and beneficent attitude toward them; my nice-place-to-visit-but-don’t-ever-need-to-live-there. Once Lion was born I could not fathom how such ideas had ever been mine. What had made me imagine that children were optional for me? Again I thought of Martha, and her very imperfect example of motherhood. And, though I might have expected to judge her more harshly, I found myself forgiving her instead, for those countless superiorities of hers, by which I’d felt crushed, which she turned out to have never possessed. She had not been infallible. The realization was melancholy instead of triumphant, and I remembered my confusion, a few years before, when I’d found myself having lunch in Manhattan at the same restaurant where amid untold glamour she’d treated me to my first oysters. The intervening decade alone could not have accounted for how small and out of style and even shabby it had somehow become.

One hot May morning I awoke three months’ pregnant, by the clock I’d set seven weeks back. Matthew’s head lay dented in his kingly pile of pillows like a bust made of lead, his breathing magically silent, testimony to the power of the strange nasal tape he applied without fail every night. “Wake up, Tiger,” I said, climbing on him. “Awful news. Lion’s getting a teammate.”

“Another one?” Matthew cried sleepily. “God, no. We’ll die in the poorhouse.”

Dutra was the crimp in my elation: I realized seven weeks was the same span of time since we’d had him and Nikki to dinner. Had they spent it in bed? As always I called him at his hospital, despite the change in his domestic conditions, despite the fact that he now had an actual wife who might be sitting at that moment on his Italian Modern chaise, blissfully fielding his incoming calls. As always the mellifluous switchboard attendant put me straight through to his office, and as always he answered—“When do you do your lifesaving surgery, anyway?” I demanded as greeting, because the rare times I remembered it was a pleasure to inflict on him the sort of verbal ambush he routinely doled out.

“All the fucking time, Ginny, except I do still allow myself lunch, and you might have noticed that your biannual phone calls to me are always at the lunch hour, because you can’t bring yourself to call me unless you’re also making a sandwich, so you don’t have to feel like you’re wasting your time.”

The son of a bitch: I was making a sandwich. I stopped mid-scrape of the knife over bread out of fear he would hear it. “For Pete’s sake, Dutra, it’s you who owes me a phone call. I haven’t spoken to you since we had you and Nikki to dinner. Ever heard of ‘thank you’?”

“You didn’t get Nikki’s note?”

“Nikki’s what?”

“Forget it. It’s probably still in her purse. Or she put it in the mail without a stamp. Or she never remembered to write it at all. Sorry. I should’ve just called but she was all into writing a note. I should have known that she wouldn’t.”

“How are you guys?” I asked after a moment.

“Divorcing. And you?”

It seemed so certain Dutra must have been aware of my skepticism about his marriage that my first reaction was tainted by guilt. For a moment I could not even lay hold of empathy, so self-regardingly worried was I to sound sufficiently shocked. Yet I was shocked—no less for not being surprised that the marriage had failed. I just hadn’t imagined the failure would have the same speed as the marriage itself. “Oh, shoot, Dutra,” I exclaimed. I realized I’d been able to put Dutra out of my mind not despite, but because of his marriage—because his marriage had let me believe, as one always longs to believe of that worrisome parent or sibling or friend, that against all the odds, a lifetime of increasingly lonely cantankerousness had by some miracle been avoided. “I’m so sorry. What happened?”

“Have lunch with me. I don’t want to talk on the phone.”

“Of course,” I said, now falling all over myself to accommodate him. “Do you want me to meet you near work?”

“I’ll come to you. I can’t eat around here.”

Such was his brusque urgency that I agreed to meet him the very next day, at the nicest restaurant in my neighborhood I could think of—“Whatever,” he’d said when I asked him his preferences, “something decent. With wine.” At ten-thirty that morning my phone rang. It was Dutra, barely audible amid an atmospheric howl as if he stood on the deck of a ship. “I’m coming now,” he said.

“What?” I said.

“Now,” he was repeating, almost barking, perhaps only to cleave through the interference, “. . . need to see you now,” and half an hour later we’d converged at the restaurant, an hour earlier than we had planned. It had only just opened for business. The white light of midmorning drenched the farmhouse-quaint room, with its varnished plank floorboards and bare wooden tables and nude brick and undraped windows which amplified and ricocheted the slightest noise, but despite this Dutra’s voice didn’t scale itself down—when had it ever? “You choose, I could give a shit,” he said with echoing clarity of the tables, all equally unoccupied, which the flustered waitress indicated to us with a sweep of her arm while retreating, her apron not yet tied, to the shelter of a cappuccino station. “Bring us a wine list,” Dutra called peremptorily after her as I led him to a table beside the front window.

“How about ‘please,’” I suggested, as if he were Lion.

“Too hot,” Dutra said of the table. “I can’t sit in the sun. It’s a furnace outside.”

“How about this one, then.”

“That’ll be in full sun in a couple of hours.”

“And we’re planning to be here how long?”

“Don’t be so eager to leave.”

“I’m not, Dutra, but since you don’t care at all where we sit can you please choose a table?”

“So controlling, Ginny,” he admonished as he dropped into a chair at the least sheltered, least intimate, most central and visible table, like planting his flag, in the act grandiosely extending his arm at the opposite chair as if I were the one who was picky—but I saw he took no pleasure in the gibe and might not even realize he’d said it. “I’ve been fired,” he announced as I sat. “And blacklisted. I’ll never operate again. At least not in New York.”

It was possible my mouth was hanging literally open. Since we’d met on the sidewalk outside I’d been trying to ask him, hitting just the right note of alacrity, what had happened with Nikki, for I’d assumed that his crisis with her was the reason he wanted to see me. But the collapse of his marriage was miles downstream, far beneath our attention—not to mention my still-unannounced pregnancy, which I now couldn’t manage announcing. “I had a hunch they would do it today,” he went on. “Friday. Traditional day of the axe.” He was deeply agitated. It was only by a Herculean effort of the will that he sat in his chair instead of hurling it and its identical brethren and anything else not tied down through the window. He kept twisting one way, then the other, jutting his long legs to alternate sides, and then twisting to check on the waitress, who’d ducked out of sight. “Excuse me!” he said.

“I’m sorry, you what?” I repeated. “How can you have been fired? Can they even do that?”

“Of course they can. Hello,” he greeted our waitress with a psychotic sudden onslaught of charm as she ventured toward us.

“Oh, the wine list!” she exclaimed.

“Y’know,” he stilled her with his voice, “you can forget about the wine list if you’ve got some Beaujolais you can bring us. You do? Oh, that’s awesome. I don’t want it warm,” he warned her as she hastened to fetch it.

“What happened?”

“They wanted to get me. Real bad. And they finally got me.”

“Who?”

“All the fucking nobodies. That’s what they are. Fucking nobody, no-talent pricks hanging on to their power.”

Friend of his childhood as I essentially was, utterly ignorant of the nature of his actual work, let alone the politicized hierarchies within which it took place, I was either the worst person or the best person in the world to whom he could unburden himself, given how much tutelage I required to follow the story. But in any case I was perhaps the only person. And it didn’t make him impatient to have to explain every detail to me, but calmed him, to the extent he could ever be calm.

For years I’d assumed that Dutra, because so highly paid and sought after, must be highly valued as well, by anyone who could matter. This had been, it turned out, only partly true, but his troubles hadn’t arisen from the fact that not everyone valued him equally. They arose from the fact that certain people valued him so highly, above everyone else, and that this favoritism coincided with a standing controversy. Dutra’s field, like any field of science, was constantly riven by theoretical and practical disagreements, but all these disagreements, and their perpetrators, could roughly be sorted into one of two camps: the camp that left the paradigm of Western medical practice intact, defending it from all outside threats; and the camp that posed the threats—that sought, in other words, nothing less than a paradigm shift. The direction of shift, within camp, was not always harmonious, but by and large it tended east, toward China. I felt only momentary surprise to learn that Dutra not only threw in his lot with the paradigm shifters but was their prize specimen and their chief troublemaker. The surprise I felt because Dutra was, on his surface, so little a crusading world changer. He was a nonjoiner, a prankster and cynic who only recycled for money, who mocked vegans for their pious narcissism, who had never, to my knowledge, cast a ballot in any election because no candidate had ever failed to earn his contempt. But, as I say, all this surprise was momentary, because once he offered this alternate glimpse of himself, I realized what had always been obvious: Dutra was the only true idealist I’d ever known. He was intolerant to the utmost degree of waste, incompetence, disorganization, incompletely implemented knowledge, and wrongheaded priorities—he was intolerant, in other words, of human life, and all human-built systems, including the system of care at his hospital.

The head of Dutra’s hospital—Dutra’s boss, a category of person I’d not thought existed—was a hidebound Western-style traditionalist who disliked Dutra, finding him a loudmouthed irreverent prick, and was disliked by Dutra in turn, but the animus between the two men only made up a baseline and could have repeated forever. It was a third factor—external and wealthy—that provided the tune. The hospital’s board of directors, as picturesque a collection of white-skinned and white-haired rich people as convened to do good anywhere in Manhattan, were for the most part ignorant or indifferent to such controversies of practice as Dutra had begun kicking up—for example, Dutra’s declaration that a large percentage of the surgeries performed at the hospital, his included, were profit-driven and unnecessary; or Dutra’s insistence that the hospital spearhead American use of supposedly uniquely efficacious Chinese traditional herbs. Either the board members knew nothing of all this, or didn’t take sides, but one of them, a well-known philanthropist, got on Dutra’s bandwagon and made it her own. She and Dutra twice traveled to China, and grew thick as thieves. At last she announced her intention of endowing the hospital with countless millions of dollars to establish a research institute. Its aim would be the reconciliation of the medical theories and practices of the East and the West, and its director would be Dutra.

“So you might say, Sounds pretty opportunistic, but believe it or not, and it doesn’t matter either way, I didn’t want her to pull the trigger on the institute. My contract with the hospital was supposed to be up at the end of this year and I knew I was leaving. No way I’d stay, even if I wanted to. I’ve been saying no to jobs all over the country the whole time I’ve been chained at that place because, idiot that I am, I didn’t want to leave New York. But with the idea for the institute coming together I decided I had to get out. Find a real place, a real way to do this. Not a bullshit way to do this. So whatever Feshbach”—his boss—“wants to say, that I had this board member under my thumb, her going ahead with her gift is the proof that I didn’t. Doing that, she signed my death warrant. Feshbach had to get rid of me fast, before my contract came up for renewal and I nailed this directorship. He had to bust ass to hang on to the money and get rid of me.”

“But how could he? He needs you! Without you that woman won’t donate.”

“Of course she will. She did. Rich people are like that, they get excited and want to throw money around. She didn’t need me to do that. The institute’ll bear her name whether I’m there or not.”

“But you’re the whole reason for it! Isn’t she loyal to you?”

“Shit no. She’s putting distance between us right now. By five o’clock she won’t ever have met me.”

“But why—”

“Because of how they did it, Ginny. Not to mention I’ve lost all my power. But it’s the way that I’ve lost all my power.” His voice faltered abruptly, broke off mid-harangue, and he recrossed his long legs with violence and peered out the window. “They did me so good. The one way that, the more I fight back the more done in I am.”

They’d gotten him on sexual harassment. The accusation and perhaps even the crime seemed equally unthinkable and inevitable, and for a damning moment my voice failed me from my fear it was true. He’d mastered himself again, whatever rivulets of moisture had ventured to travel his tear ducts had been scorched away, and he was watching me closely. “Never happen,” he coldly assured me. “I don’t shit where I eat.”

“That metaphor’s disgusting and doesn’t make sense,” I snapped, hiding my shame with annoyance.

“Then no metaphor: I don’t fuck where I work. I don’t fuck, I don’t flirt, and I sure as shit never harass.”

“I know that you wouldn’t.”

“Yeah, sure. But you can imagine me doing it, can’t you? Come on. I know you can. You’ve known me a long time, you know me probably better than anyone else. You and Alicia. And you can imagine it.”

“No, I can imagine other people imagining it.”

“Short step. And don’t think I’m wounded. I’m an asshole. I shoot my mouth off. I make people uncomfortable. Do I say rude, raunchy shit in the OR to put myself at ease and keep my brain from imploding? Fuck yes, I do. The stress I’m under, most people would die or they’d start killing others. I save people and in the process I sometimes crack jokes, fucking send me to jail. Bathroom humor, sex humor, whatever fucking humor I can find in there, they should be grateful—men, women, doctors, interns, patients, janitors, I hassle everybody, I fuck with everybody, I don’t exploit my position of power. I don’t create a hostile work environment for women. All my life I’ve been a loudmouth, all my career I’ve been a loudmouth, from the day I walked into that hospital I’ve been a loudmouth and people might not like it but they have to accept it because I’m great at what I do so tough shit.”

But little by little, until fatally, Dutra’s enemies at the hospital had come to outnumber his admirers, in a process having little to do with his jokes. It had never helped him that his most passionate admirers were his patients and their family members, who, because he did so well by them, dispersed. While his enemies—the surgical colleagues whose judgments he actively questioned or whose glory he passively, inevitably stole; the workaday inferiors whose lapses in hygiene protocol, and mishandlings of crucial equipment, and countless other health-endangering manifestations of incompetence or laziness he tirelessly reprimanded—stayed on, nursing grudges into vendettas. It had been remarkably easy, Dutra had discovered this morning, for Feshbach to find employees who were willing to swear, in signed but confidential statements, that Dutra had sexually menaced them, with lewd demands and plausible threats. Dutra’s signature style—his big mouth—was not the crime so much as circumstantial evidence.

“You have to fight this,” I begged him, for somewhere in the course of his telling I had seen him see himself: outmaneuvered, but above that, unloved. His face had gone gray with fatigue. A barely perceptible scrim—like the chic window shades that our waitress was now lowering, which did not shade the windows at all but did turn outside forms vague and dull—had come over his eyes.

“No point. They never charged that I fucked anyone. They know I could dispute that. This, I can’t dispute without looking more guilty. A Chinese finger trap.”

“You can dispute it,” I said. “They’re ruining your reputation. Smearing you.”

“Yeah. I’ll try. I made a call to a lawyer.” But the effort of telling me this seemed the most he would make. Drained of his story, his bile, he was growing inert, though perhaps inertia was not overtaking him, but being willed from within. After we both had been silent a moment he reached for his wineglass and I saw his hand trembling.

“Wouldn’t trust me with a scalpel,” he said.

From the restaurant we went to a bar farther down the same block, my answer to his question, “Where can we keep drinking?” He’d never noticed he was drinking alone. I called Matthew clandestinely from the women’s bathroom. “I need a huge favor. I’d never ask if it wasn’t important, but I need you to come home and take over from Myrna. She leaves at two-thirty so you’ll have to come now.”

“What’s going on? Where are you?”

All duplicity failed me. “At a bar. With Dutra.”

“Jesus, Regina. You’re asking me to cut short my workday so you can sit in a bar? With Dutra? You’re not drinking, are you?”

“Of course not! What would make you say that? I’m sitting with him because he’s been fired. I can’t leave him alone. I’m afraid what he’ll do.”

“So take him with you to our house. For fuck’s sake, Regina. I have meetings today.”

“You have meetings every day, and every day, at two-thirty, I drop whatever I’m doing, and I go home to Lion—”

“Oh, is that what this is about? Is that what we’re talking about?”

“Don’t ask me to bring a blind drunk potential suicide who’s been fired and is getting-divorced-by-the-way home to play with our child! Can’t you please just get here? Have I ever once asked you to do this?”

After a pause Matthew said, through a locked jaw, “I’ll be there.”

“I’ll get home as soon as I can. Maybe you can get back to the office by four—” I began to appease, but he’d already hung up on me.

At the bar Dutra said with impatience, “Tell the guy what you want. We’ve been waiting for you.”

“I’m just drinking seltzer,” I reminded him pointedly, as if this placed a limit on not just libations but time. Still, one hour passed, and then two, and we entered a third, discussing I no longer even knew what. I finally said, “Dutra, what happened with Nikki? Was there any connection?”

“With this?” He stared blearily. “No. Of course not.”

“Then what happened?”

“She just wasn’t the person I thought she was.”

“Like she assumed a false identity? She was a criminal? She had a sordid past?”

“No. No. Just—she was disorganized. She wasted money. She made stupid decisions.”

“But what do you mean? What sorts of stupid decisions?”

“Like that trip to Tunisia. She did most of the planning. The bookings and stuff. She was a travel agent for a while, before I met her. It was her idea we honeymoon there. I figured she must be savvy, know all the secret places. The good deals. The stuff it’s worth traveling for. But the place she booked us, it was cheesy. So, okay, maybe Tunisia hasn’t got something better. Then the next month I look at my credit card bill, this mediocre place she booked cost like four thousand dollars a week. She just—she hadn’t even tried to find something good. She just took the first thing she found. And she’s like that with everything.”

“The pizza like cake.”

“The everything. This is a woman who worked as a travel agent, real estate agent, jewelry maker, hair cutter, art-gallery sales whatever, publicist whatever, event planner whatever, lived in Tucson, Fort Lauderdale, Miami, Key West, Houston, L.A., San Diego, I don’t even know where the fuck else, just randomly doing whatever. No choices. No thought.”

“Just randomly choosing, say, you.”

He shrugged. “Who the fuck knows.”

“Dutra, Nikki pursued you from the far side of the continent. Two years after she met you. That wasn’t random. She was crazy about you.”

With head flung back he drained his pint glass. “I’m not divorcing her because she doesn’t love me.”

“So it’s you, divorcing her?”

“She knows it’s not working.” He had summoned the bartender. “Double shot of Maker’s Mark, rocks, and another pint of whatever this was. And whatever she’s having.”

“I’m having seltzer,” I reminded him, and of his order, “Wow. The more things change.”

“It’s been a long time since I’ve had the freedom to drink to the full extent of my abilities.”

“Maximize your potential.”

“Finish what I’ve started.”

“Why not do that with Nikki?”

“Because,” he said, demolishing his bourbon, “she can’t do that with anything.”

“That’s just a waste of ice, the way you’re drinking.”

“The next one I’ll get neat.”

“Have your feelings about her so totally changed?”

“Why are we talking about this? Even if I’d wanted to stay married this morning, this afternoon it would still have to end.”

“Because this is the nineteenth century? Because you have to support your poor helpless wife in the style to which she’s grown accustomed?”

“Nicely said.”

“Why can’t she support you?”

“That’s an awesome idea. Can you guess how much debt she brought into the marriage? No? I couldn’t either. It was really nice. I got to be surprised.”

I called home clandestinely again from the bathroom, interrupting Matthew giving Lion his dinner. It was a pleasure Matthew rarely if ever enjoyed on his own—on the weekends we did it together. I could hear from the dilation of his voice, its rare musical lift, that he’d boxed up his anger at me. He would not let it spoil the windfall of a long afternoon with his son. “So,” he said, between a stream of asides on the subject of carrots to Lion, “job loss and divorce?”

“And more. They got him on a bogus charge of sexual harassment. I’ll explain it all later. I think he’s coming to dinner.”

Matthew loudly deflated. “That’s not ideal. We’ve got steaks. Two of them.”

“Can you cut them some way to serve three?”

“Jesus, Regina. They’re T-bones.” A dark pause. “I’ll try. I’ll make extra potatoes.”

“It’s just I get the feeling he’s afraid to be alone.”

“I think at this point you could forgivably hand him off to someone else for the rest of the night.”

“There is no one else. I’m actually the only friend he has.”

Through the phone I could almost hear Matthew’s mind register this—a fact he would have never conceived on his own, but that was of course indisputably true. It explained a great deal.

“Bring him on then,” Matthew said with exaggerated weariness, the degree of exaggeration a peace offering to me. And so I felt the relief of his forgiveness, and envisioned, once we’d hung up the phone, the parallel tracks of dismay and determination scored onto his brow as he embarked on our dinner. Matthew’s annoyance at having two steaks and three people was a very separate thing from his habitual coolness toward Dutra. It would have arisen regardless of whom I’d brought home. Perhaps a legendary hostess of a previous age had transmigrated into Matthew, bringing with her a horror of impromptu or “make-do” arrangements, and an ardent desire to furnish each guest with precisely his keenest desires. Now that Dutra was coming, Matthew was annoyed that he didn’t have a standing rib roast, or a contrasting first course, or exceptional wine, or an unopened bottle of rare Armagnac he could set before Dutra once dinner was cleared, for Dutra alone to deflower the seal. Matthew’s lavish fastidiousness frequently came in conflict with my exactly opposed tendencies, my miserly attempts to make a meal for five stretch to eight, my noninterest in matching place settings, my “first courses” of olives served out of the plastic tub bearing the price tag, but little by little, in the years we’d been cohabitating, I’d found some of my impatience with him converted to admiration, and some of my admiration even to feeble emulation, so that, steering Dutra back onto the street, I stopped into the deli to buy bread and olives and cheese, and imagined preslicing the bread and the cheese, and presenting the olives in one bowl, with a second nearby for the pits.

I realized how eager I was to get home. The abrupt desolation of Dutra’s existence felt threatening, as if it might spread. Where was my own generosity, my own tenderness toward him? I was less caregiver than captive, wondering, as I stole sidelong glances at him pacing stone-faced beside me, just how long it would last—and I remembered, as I hadn’t in years, the girl who’d fainted off her feet at our party, and how cheerfully Dutra had hefted her into his arms.

At the corners I told him, “Let’s cross,” or “Let’s turn,” as if leading a blind man. Otherwise we had stopped talking. Dutra less followed me than was impelled by my movement, like a bit of detritus aligned with my slipstream and drifting along. Perhaps he less feared aloneness than had somehow forgotten about it. Coming into our apartment he received a glass of wine, a plate of food, a snifter of brandy, Matthew’s undivided attention, and even, to my silent gratitude, Matthew’s sympathy, as if it had all been arranged weeks before; and to my surprise Dutra did talk, relating to Matthew everything he had already told me, but with an altered, more remote and knowing style. It was possible for him to discuss with Matthew the disintegration of his professional life much as he might have discussed the malfeasance of the Bush administration or the financial collapse of the recording industry. But his persistence at our table, and the swiftly dwindling brandy, told the truth. I began to think I’d have to bed him down on the couch. Near one in the morning Matthew excused himself, rounding the table to shake hands with Dutra, which connection turned into a clumsy embrace and a clap on the shoulder. Then it was Dutra and I and a near-empty bottle beside Dutra’s glass and Dutra still didn’t move. “I’ve got to go to bed, too,” I asserted at last, and like a paraplegic Dutra planted his palms on the table and hauled himself onto his feet.

“You have a cigarette?” he asked.

“You know I don’t smoke anymore.”

“Bodega near here?”

“On the way to the train.”

In fourteen hours he’d consumed with no assistance at all four bottles of wine, ten pints of beer, and a liter each of bourbon and brandy, yet he perfectly bisected the doorframe and hallway. Feet neither wandered nor hands braced the wall. He only threatened to plunge through the floor with the force of a meteorite, as if he were made of cast iron. I’d find him smoldering in the subbasement, sunk to the neck in the poured-concrete floor. Outside he dropped onto the steps leading up to our entrance while I stood, debating. Sitting as well might suggest he was welcome to sit there all night, but standing was too dictatorial. I might have already told him I needed to sleep, but I wasn’t some bartender tossing him out. I sat. The warm night was silken, its tenderness almost unwelcome; sharing the secret of such nights as this seemed a part of my youth I would never regain, this night and my discomfort in it the proof. All the numerous kindnesses Dutra had done me, those many occasions on which he’d maddened me with his arrogant competence, now presented themselves to my mind. I couldn’t think of one kindness I’d done in return. Perhaps my acquiescence in his dogged belief that our friendship was deathless, at least not to be killed by betrayal or any other such finite cataclysm of feeling, had been my kindness to him. My declining to swear or hang up when he’d called that night almost a decade ago, what had seemed like so many years later, and what now was nearly twice that many years in the past. “Hey, Gin,” he’d begun without the slightest preamble. “Didja know there’s five Regina Gottliebs in the book, and you’re the fifth one I called?” Having missed him so much I’d thought, All right, I’ll play. I’ll play along and pretend it’s all right, and in this way obtain reckoning. But who had been playing—deluded—and who simply stating the facts? Hadn’t Dutra, in calling, asserted the fact of our friendship, and in that way pried me loose of a chimera? For I never had stopped loving Martha, but Martha herself had been leached of reality for me, and Dutra far more than the passage of time deserved credit for that. The passage of time, left alone, burnished her and concealed her flaws. Dutra jettisoned her and forbade recollection. If I’d asked him, that first night in years that we spoke on the phone, “Have you also found Martha?” his reply would have been “Martha who?” But of course I did not even mention her name. I accepted the premise he offered. He embodied those years of my life, and if he didn’t know her, she didn’t exist.

I realized I’d gotten my reckoning from him already.

At this hour my unbeautiful block, with its broad deserted sidewalks, and its facing chain link parking lot now plunged into darkness like a secretive garden, and its restive ailanthus trees brooming their leaves through the pools of street light, had the feel of the deep countryside, as if that feeling came up all the time through the pavement, but could only be felt during near-perfect moments of hush. A delivery boy in cooks’ whites and a white paper hat on his head glided by on a bike, as if towed by his handlebar freight of a great padded cube of stacked pizzas. From many blocks distant we heard drunken singing. Beside me Dutra metamorphosed. Dutra’s steady ascent as the years slipped away had concealed the years somehow, his arrow and time’s keeping pace. Now abruptly his fell and I gazed on a middle-aged man. Perhaps this was the relativity Dutra had labored so hard, and with such total lack of success, to elucidate to me, while sprawled on that scratchy orange couch we had shared. Two airplanes fly next to each other and onboard them no one gets old . . . I could not have it right. I longed to have something to ask him so that he could lord over me with his vast erudition. Instead I asked, “Are you taking the subway?” and with this he unfolded and rose to his feet, and I stood up also, now too close beside him to look into his face.

“I’ll walk.” When I protested he added, “What, you think Big Bad Brooklyn’ll eat me? Don’t forget I was born here. I’ll survive.”

“You were born in Queens.”

“So much the worse.”

“I just meant it’ll take you so long.”

“It’ll take me an hour or so. I’ve got plenty of time.” Without warning he crushed me against him. “I love you,” he stated, as if bracing for a rebuttal. Before I could gasp out an echo he added, “I love you, I love my mommy, I love Alicia.” He released me. His “mommy”: mocking her, mocking himself, mocking all of us? Even with sarcasm he could not get the better of what he had said. He stood staring just past my ear, his eyes damp.

“Don’t you love any men?”

“I love Lion.”

“You hardly know Lion.”

“He’s your kid. I love him.” Now he’d mastered himself. “You locked out?”

It was the moment to tell him, the first time in this long day and night that I’d felt I could seize his attention and turn it to me and the child I was going to have. Yet I couldn’t. It would have felt like kicking him. Instead I said, “I’ve got keys in my pocket.”

“Okay. Tell Matthew thanks for the food.” He turned to go.

“I love you too,” I said then, to his back.

“I know, Ginny. So long.” And he sprang down the steps as if newly awake and strode off.

Not a week later Myrna greeted me, on my return home, with a look of rebuke and a phone number scrawled on a sheet of notepaper. “That gentleman called here again. This time he used up all the tape so to make him stop calling I picked the phone up.” She looked much as I imagined she would after plunging her arm shoulder-deep in our hamper. “He asked me to give you a message. I had a great difficult time hearing him. It sounded to me like he called from inside a tornado.”

In fact he had called from a rented convertible traveling west at high speed through the state of Wyoming. “That’s when he calls to say goodbye: from Wyoming,” I told Matthew later, aggrieved. Dutra had sold all his assets, or left them in somebody’s care to be sold, and gotten onto I-80 with no clear destination in mind. At least, none he’d shared with Myrna. Just his mobile phone number. When I called I got a boilerplate message that the Sprint customer I was trying to reach must have strayed out of range.