THE CHANGE

Gina had all the symptoms: sleep disturbances, hot flashes, irritability, weight gain, loss of libido, aching joints, and heart palpitations. The one she complained of most was hot flashes, which she dealt with by throwing off her clothes and cursing. As far as Evan was concerned, her irritability was the worst symptom; she was increasingly difficult to get along with. Churlish, he told her. Her lack of interest in sex was possibly more frustrating, though he admitted to himself that he found her less desirable because she was so uncivil, so he didn’t suffer unduly from wanting her and being rejected. When they did make love, it was a wrestling match, which Evan enjoyed well enough. They had never been much for tender embraces.

Her work was changing, too; it was getting darker. As he stood looking at an engraving of trees, of a dark forest, he wondered how it could all seem so clear when it was almost entirely black. She was working all the time, well into the nights, because she couldn’t sleep. Often enough he found her in the mornings curled up under a lap rug on the cot in her cluttered, inky little studio with the windows open and the chill early morning light pouring in.

She wasn’t taking care of herself properly, not eating enough, not washing enough; she hardly took any exercise at all. Sometimes she lay around the living room all day, napping or reading magazines, getting up now and then to rummage around in her studio, then back to the couch, where she left ink stains on the upholstery. There were dust balls under the beds and in the corners of the rooms, dishes always stacked in the sink.

“It’s driving me crazy,” Evan complained. “Can’t we get someone in to clean this place, since you can’t keep up with it?”

She gave him a cold, reproachful glare over her magazine. “I can keep up with it,” she said. “I just don’t keep up with it.”

“Well, then, hire someone who will.”

“You hire someone,” she replied. “Since it bothers you so much.”

Evan turned away. He did all the cooking as it was. How could he possibly take on the cleaning as well? And he had no idea how to hire someone. He went to the kitchen and threw open the refrigerator. “And what are we going to eat for dinner?” he shouted to her. “This refrigerator is practically empty.”

“We’ll go out,” she shouted back.

They went out. She was in a good mood for a change. They laughed, drank too much wine, walked back through the city streets with their arms locked around each other, made love on the living room floor. Evan went to bed, but she wouldn’t go with him. She went to her studio, and twice when he woke in the night, he saw that the light was still on.

The next day she was a harridan again, peevish and distracted. His own work was going poorly; he had taken on too much and had two deadlines he didn’t think he could make. When he complained to her, she shrugged. “Then don’t make them,” she said. “Tell the editor you can’t do it.”

“Right,” he said. “And then she never calls on me again. I need the work.”

“You always say that,” she snapped. “And you always have more work than you can do. So obviously you don’t need it.”

Evan followed her out of the room into her studio. “I don’t always have more than I can do. Sometimes I don’t have any. It’s feast or famine in this business, as you well know.”

Gina yawned, put her hands on her hips, and stretched, making an agonized face at him. “Jesus, my back hurts,” she said.

“It’s freezing in here,” he said, moving toward the open window. “Why don’t you close this?”

But before he could reach it she blocked his path. “Don’t close the window,” she said angrily.

“Ugh,” Evan said. “What is that?” For on the windowsill were the remains of some animal. Evan pushed past his wife to get a closer look. It was the back half of a mouse, tail, feet, gory innards.

“Where did this come from?” he said.

“The cat must have left it.” She turned away, bending over a partially engraved plate.

“We don’t have a cat.”

All at once she was angry, as if he’d done something annoying. “The neighbor’s cat,” she sputtered. “Would you just leave it? I’ll take care of it.”

“It’s disgusting,” he said. He looked around the room at the half-empty coffee cups, the dishes with crumbs and bits of old sandwiches or dried cottage cheese stuck to them, the confusion of ink and paper, copper plates, presses, the disorder of the bottles of acids and resins, the writing desk overflowing with unanswered mail, bills, and photographs. “This whole room is disgusting,” he concluded. “How can you find anything in here?”

To which she replied, “Who asked you to come in here? Will you get out of here?” And she pushed him out the door.

They were invited to a dinner party. Gina was in her studio until it was almost time to leave. Then she came out, washed her hands, combed her hair, threw on a skirt, and said she was ready. Evan had showered, shaved, dressed carefully, even polished his shoes. He looked at her skeptically. “That’s it?” he said. “You’re ready?”

“Why not?” she said.

No jewelry, he thought. No makeup, no perfume. There had been a time when it took her at least an hour to dress for a party.

The party went well, it was easy conversation, good wine, old friends, until a couple Gina and Evan had not seen for some time arrived. Evan spotted the woman, Vicky, first, smiled and waved as he caught her eye. Something was different about her, he thought, but he couldn’t be sure. She looked great, very bright, very intense. Her blouse had flecks of gold in it; she was sparkling. Gina, standing next to him, laughing at something their host was saying, turned and saw the woman too. “Oh my God,” she said softly. Vicky moved slowly toward them, smiling.

Seeing Gina’s drop-jawed amazement, the host said confidentially, “She’s been done.” Evan sent him an inquiring look, to which he responded by tapping his lower jaw with the backs of his fingers.

Vicky had stopped to speak to someone else. Evan watched her, though he tried not to stare. In a distant, agreeable way he had always admired her. The last time he had seen her, several months ago, he had observed that her delicate beauty was fading. Now she looked good, he thought. She’d changed her hair too, probably to disguise the more surprising change in her face. They’d done a good job on her. Perhaps her mouth was a little stretched at the corners, and of course the flesh around her chin looked tight. She broke away from her conversation and continued toward Gina and Evan.

“Vicky, how are you?” Evan said, catching her outstretched hand in his own, as if he were retrieving her, he thought, or pulling her out of a fish tank. “It’s good to see you.”

He was aware of Gina at his side, of her steady, even breathing, but he didn’t see her face until it was too late. “Have you lost your mind?” she said sharply to Vicky. “Why would you do something like that? You look awful.”

Vicky missed a beat to astonishment and another to dismay, but that was all. “I may have lost my mind,” she said, “but you seem to have lost your manners.”

Evan turned on his wife. He was so angry he wanted to slap her. “For God’s sake, Gina,” he said. “Are you drunk?”

Gina blinked her eyes rapidly, ignoring him. She was concentrated on Vicky, who was easing herself away. “So you count on people not to say anything. Do you tell yourself they don’t notice?”

“Excuse me,” Vicky said, disappearing into the crowd.

“It’s ridiculous,” Gina continued. “She looked perfectly fine before. Now she looks like something from television, like a talk show host.”

“I think we’d better go,” Evan said, trying to take her arm, but she shook him off.

“Will you calm down,” she said.

So they stayed and the rest of the evening passed uneventfully, but Evan was miserable and felt humiliated. At dinner they were seated as far from Vicky and her husband as possible, probably at her request, Evan thought. Vicky was the center of attention; Evan could hear her tinkling laugh but couldn’t bring himself to look her way. Gina leaned out past him now and then to shoot a disapproving look toward the offending jawline, but she said nothing more about it, and once she got into a conversation with her neighbor, which Evan joined, she seemed to forget the unpleasant incident. They talked about publishing—the neighbor was also a journalist—and then about travel. Gina told a funny story about a hotel they had stayed in on a Greek island, and Evan, though he had heard this story before, though he had actually been there when the porter threw Gina’s suitcase out the window, found himself laughing as heartily as their friend. He applied himself to his wine and resolved to forgive his wife.

Evan noticed the book a few times before he actually picked it up to look at it. He’d seen it on the table in the living room, half buried in a pile of magazines, and on the kitchen table, and once on the nightstand next to their bed. A woman’s book about women, he thought, about all the trials of their biology and psychology, the special wonderfulness of it all and the failure of men to comprehend any of it, though it was going on right under their noses. Women lapped this stuff up like cream, even intelligent women like Gina, which was what really made it annoying. Here was the book again, jammed between the cushions of the couch with a pencil stuck in it to mark the page. He pulled it out and opened it to the page with the pencil. The chapter was titled “No Longer a Woman,” and it told all about the biological changes attendant on menopause: the shrinking of the uterus, the drying out of vaginal tissue, the atrophy of the ovaries, the steady depletion of estrogen.

Pretty dry reading, Evan thought with a sardonic chuckle. He put the book back where he had found it and wandered off to his desk, where his article was not taking shape. No longer a woman, he thought. But if not a woman, then what? It was ridiculous. When was a woman ever not a woman? All the symptoms Gina complained of only proved she was a woman, and a susceptible one at that, which was part of being a woman too. An old woman was still a woman, still behaved as she always had, only more so. Evan thought of his grandmother. Not an old woman but an old lady. She wore violet perfume—he could still remember it—and was fond of a certain candy, a puffy, spongy, fruit-flavored ball that came in tins; he hadn’t seen any in years. She was small, bent, arthritic, but industrious to the end. She did a little gardening on the last day of her life. She had survived her husband by twenty years. Perfectly nice, perfectly sexless. Serene, agreeable. Everyone loved her.

Though he remembered that once, when he was praising this wonderful woman to his mother, she had commented drily, “Yes, she’s very nice now. But she wasn’t always.”

Their son, Edward, called. Gina answered the phone. Evan stood by waiting for his turn; he was fond of his son and looked forward to these weekly calls. Gina was smiling. She laughed at some witticism and said, “Watch out for that.” Then for several minutes she fell silent. Her eyes wandered around the room, never settling, and she shifted her weight from foot to foot restlessly. At last she said, distantly, “That’s really great, dear. Here’s your father. I’ll talk to you next week,” and held out the phone to Evan.

While he stood talking to Edward, Gina sat down at the table and pulled off her sweater. Then, as Edward went on about his psychology class, she stripped off her shirt and bra. She stretched her arms out across the table and rested her head upon them. Evan turned away from her and tried to concentrate on his son’s description of his daily life. When he hung up the phone she was sitting up, blotting her forehead with her sweater.

“You were a little abrupt with him,” Evan said. “He asked if you were okay.”

“Of course I’m okay,” she said.

Evan took a seat next to her and watched as she pulled her shirt back over her head. “Did he tell you about his psychology professor?”

“Yes,” she said. “He talks too much.”

Evan ran his hand through his thinning hair, trying to stroke down his impatience. “You’re not the only one who’s getting older, you know.”

She pushed back her chair, dismissing him. She was on her way to her studio. “It’s not the same,” she said in parting. “It’s different.”

It was always different, he thought. They wanted to be treated the same, but only with the understanding that they deserved special treatment because they were different. It was true that they had been treated as if they were different for a long time, but they had been treated as different in the wrong way, they were not different in that way. What was different was the deal they got, the way they were treated, which was never fair. He loosened his collar; his face felt hot. But oh no, it wasn’t anything that wasn’t his fault. It wasn’t hormones surging uncontrollably like guerrilla fighters, it was just his lousy blood pressure, which was elevated by his annoyance with his wife’s suffering, and if he was uncomfortable, if he felt a little snappish, well, it was all his fault, because her bad temper was a symptom, and his was just plain old garden-variety bad temper, typical in the male. He got up and staggered into his study, where his article accosted him, demanding what he could not, because of Gina, seem to give it: his undivided attention. He turned away and went into the kitchen to make coffee.

Gina had gone out to have lunch with a friend. Evan was alone in the apartment with his article. He sat at his desk reading over his notes, listening to the taped interview he had done with a teenage girl who, he recalled, had been dressed in something that resembled two pieces of bicycle tubing. It depressed him to listen to her agitated, rage-filled monologue. She had a vocabulary of twenty-five words or so, insufficient to express any but the most basic threats and complaints. She was the current girlfriend of a gang member named Smak; Evan’s article was about these girls, the attendants of brutal young men, about their precarious, angry, voluptuous, and mindless daily lives. On the tape she was trying to explain to Evan that she did not get up at the same time every day, which was why school was not a possibility for her.

He switched off the tape machine and stared at his bright computer screen for several minutes, but nothing came to him so he switched that off too. Then he got up and wandered through the apartment to Gina’s studio.

The lunch was a kind of celebration; she’d finished all the work scheduled for a show next month. There were two new engravings on the drying rack; the rest were stacked away in two big portfolios, ready to go. As Evan stood looking at one on the rack, a line from one of her catalogs ran through his head: “She is a woman who has never stopped loving the forest.” They had a joke about it, a follow-up line: “And she is a woman who has never stopped living in Brooklyn.”

For twenty years her subject had been the same, but this didn’t mean her work had not changed. In Evan’s opinion the change had been gradual and persistent. She was more patient, saw more clearly, though the prints were progressively darker. That was the odd, wonderful thing about the newer prints; though they seemed to be covered with ink, they were full of an odd kind of light, an almost subterranean glow. In this one, for instance, he could see through a tangle of vegetation to the ground beneath, and on that dark ground he could make out the tracks of some small animal, a mouse or a chipmunk. In both prints on the rack, the viewpoint was high, as if the viewer were above it all, in a tree perhaps, looking down. Evan studied the second one. He seemed to be falling into it; it was truly an exhilarating angle. There, as he looked deeper and deeper through the accumulation of lines, he made out something extraordinary. He crouched down, close to the paper. It was the small hind foot of a rabbit, no bigger than his fingernail, but perfectly clear. In the next second, he knew, it would be gone.

He went to the portfolio, opened it, lifted the first print. Again the odd feeling of vertigo seized him as he looked down upon the teeming world of branches and vines. He could almost hear the dull buzz of insect life, breathe the oxygen-laden air. “These are terrific,” he said aloud. No wonder she had been so absorbed, so distracted, so uninterested in the daily course of her life. He felt a little stab of jealousy. His own work did not claim him; he had to drag himself to it. But that feeling passed quickly. He sat down on her cot, flushing with excitement, imagining how the room would look filled with his wife’s strange vision. He heard her key in the door, her footsteps in the hall, then she was standing in the doorway looking in at him.

“What are you doing in here?” she said, just an edge of territorial challenge in her tone.

“I was looking at the new work,” he said.

She leaned against the doorframe, pushed her hair off her forehead. She’d had a few drinks at lunch, celebrating. “Well, what do you think?” she said.

“I think it’s just amazing,” he said. “It’s so good I had to sit down here and mull it over.”

She sagged a little more in the doorway, smiling now but anxious. “Do you really think so? I’ve been almost afraid for you to see it.”

“Oh, my dear,” he said.

Tears filled her eyes. She brushed them away with the back of one hand. “I’m so happy,” she said. She came into the room and sat beside him, still wiping away tears. “These stupid tears,” she said impatiently.

Evan put his arm around her, muttered into her shoulder, “I’m so proud of you.” There they sat for some time, contented, holding on to each other as if they were actually in the forest of her dreams.

There was always a letdown after she’d finished a block of work, Evan told himself in the difficult days that followed. She was petulant and weepy, angry with the gallery owner, who had been her friend and supporter for years, complaining about every detail of the installation. She hardly slept at night, though what she did in her studio Evan couldn’t figure out. She wasn’t working, and she hadn’t, as she usually did between showings, cleaned the place up. But night after night he woke just long enough to watch her get up, pull on her robe, and go out, then he saw the light from her studio. During the day she lay about the apartment, napping or reading, getting nothing done and snapping at him if he so much as suggested a trip to the grocery. He tried to ignore her, spent his days struggling with his article, which resisted his efforts so stubbornly he sometimes sat at his desk for hours, literally pulling at what he called the remains of his hair. Finally he began to have trouble sleeping too. He lay on his back in the darkness, unable to move or to rest, while panic gripped his heart. When he did sleep, he had strange, unsettling dreams in which he was lost, pursued by something terrifying, powerful, something silent and brooding, something with wings.

One night, waking in terror from such a dream, he found himself, as he often did, alone in the bed. Once his heart slowed down and strength returned to his legs, he resolved to get up. His throat was parched; he felt dehydrated, as if he had been wandering in a desert. Pursued by what? he thought as he sat up and fumbled around for his slippers. Some desert creature? A creature with claws and wings and the face of a woman who would pose some unanswerable riddle before tearing him to bits? The idea amused him as he stumbled to the kitchen and switched on the lights, which made him recoil so violently he switched them back off. He poured himself a glass of water and stood, still sleep-shocked, gazing out the kitchen window at the back of the building across the alley. Above it he could see the milky luminescence of the half-moon. He finished his water, feeling quiet now, and friendly. The light from Gina’s studio made a pool across the kitchen floor. He put his glass in the sink and followed this light to her room. The double doors had glass insets, but the glass was mottled so as not to be transparent. They were closed, but not tightly—in fact, one stood free of the latch and could be opened noiselessly with a push. He didn’t want to startle her, but if she was asleep he didn’t want to wake her, either. “Gina?” he said softly once, then again. Carefully he pushed the door open a few inches. He could see the cot from where he was; she wasn’t in it. He opened the door a little further, then all the way. The window stood open, the room was bright and cold; Gina was not in it.

It took him a moment to apprehend this information. He looked around anxiously, as if he could make her materialize by his determination to find her there. He went to the living room; perhaps she was sleeping on the couch. He looked in the bathroom and then the bedroom, though of course he knew she was not there. He glanced at the clock, 3:00 a.m. He went back to the studio.

What did it mean? How often in the past months when he had believed her to be here in this room had she been…wherever she was? His heart ached in his chest; he laid his hand upon it. She had a lover, there could be no doubt of it. That was why she was so tired all the time, why she slept all day, and why she was so cold and bitter.

Evan switched off the light and went to sit on the couch in the living room in the dark. He would wait for her; they would have it out. His rival was probably much younger than he was. When women Gina’s age could, they often did. He thought of Colette and George Eliot. He would be a young man impressed by her because she was an artist and he was, surely, a nothing, a boy in need of a mother. It went like that; there were countless such stories. The minutes ticked by. He waited in a fog of anxiety and weariness. He wasn’t up to the scene to come. Perhaps he should get back in bed and pretend he didn’t know. Maybe then the affair would run its course, she would tire of the young man, or he of her, and things would get back to normal.

He was awakened by a clatter coming from Gina’s studio. It sounded like someone was smashing china. He leaped to his feet, crossed the narrow hall, and threw open the doors. The early-morning light was soft and pale, bathing the scene before him in a wash of pink and gray. Gina was on her hands and knees on the floor just inside the window. Next to her was a broken plate. A few crusts had flown from it and landed near her foot. One was lodged in the cuff of her pants.

“What on earth are you doing?” he cried.

She sat up, rubbing her ankle, picking out the bit of bread. “What does it look like I’m doing?” she said crossly. “I’m trying to get up off the floor.”

“But where have you been? You weren’t here.”

She lifted her head toward the window. “I was on the fire escape.”

She couldn’t have come in the door, Evan reasoned. She would have had to walk through the living room, and he would have seen her. “What were you doing out there?” he complained. “Didn’t you hear me call you?”

“No,” she said. “I guess I fell asleep.” She got to her feet, brushing herself off. Evan pushed past her and stuck his head out the window. “How could you sleep out here?” he called back to her. In the summer she kept plants on the landing, herbs and geraniums, and on hot nights she sometimes took a cushion and sat among the pots. But now there was nothing but the cold metal, the cold air, and the cold stars fading overhead in a pale sky. The stairs led down to a narrow alleyway, which opened into a school parking lot that was fenced and locked at night. She couldn’t have gone down there. His eye was caught by something on the landing below. It was a long brown feather with a black bar across it. He turned from the window to his wife, who was sitting on the cot, her head in her hands.

“You don’t expect me to believe that,” he said.

She raised her head and gave him a brief, weary inspection, as if she were looking at an annoying insect. “I don’t care what you believe,” she said.

“Gina, what’s happening to you?” he exclaimed. “You disappear in the middle of the night, you tell me an absurd lie nobody would believe, and then you give me your too-tired-to-care routine.”

“I’m not tired,” she said. “I just don’t care.”

“We can’t go on like this,” he said, in despair.

“I know it,” she said.

But they did go on. What else, Evan thought, could they do? He accepted her story, partly because he couldn’t come up with an alternative scenario—she had been coming in through the window, and the fire escape, as she pointed out, led nowhere—and partly because it didn’t seem to matter. He didn’t think she was having an affair, because she didn’t act like someone who was in love; she was neither defensive nor elated, and she seemed completely uninterested in her own body. What he had often thought of as a brooding sensuality now became just brooding. He continued his struggle with his article, Gina battled it out with her gallery, and finally they were both finished and both were moderately successful. They had a little time to rest, to cast about for new projects. Usually when this happened they gave themselves over to the pleasure of having no deadlines, sleeping late, eating at odd hours, gorging on videos, food, and sex. But this time it was different. Gina was still sleeping very little at night, and she seemed so uninterested in sex that Evan made a resolution that he would not initiate it. In the past, he thought gloomily, he had never paid much attention to who started it. Now he was self-consciously aware that it was always him. She rejected him without speaking, with a shrug, or by walking away. And if she did accept his overtures, she hurried him along, as if she didn’t really have the time and her mind was somewhere else. He grew sick of trying and sick of waiting. Winter was dragging on; the weather was rotten, cold and rainy.

Evan was drinking too much, and for the first time in his life he began to put on weight. One Sunday when the sun was shining for a change and there was a hint of warmth in the air, he ran into a neighbor at the farmers’ market. During their conversation Evan jokingly mentioned the latter problem; the drinking was a secret he was keeping even from himself.

“It happens to the best of us,” his neighbor said. “Especially at our age. I’ve joined a gym; it’s not far from here. It’s made a big difference in how I feel.”

Evan had to admit that his neighbor looked fit and energetic. “Give me a call,” the neighbor concluded. “I go two or three times a week. I’ll take you over and show you around. Bring Gina, if she’s interested.”

But of course she wasn’t interested. “It’s ridiculous,” she said, throwing one magazine on the floor and taking up another. “I’m not going to spend my time running on a treadmill like a laboratory rat.”

So Evan went alone. He met his friend at the reception desk and received a pass, then a tour of the facility. He was impressed with the size of the place, the up-to-date equipment, swimming pool, racquetball courts—he hadn’t played in years, but he remembered enjoying the game. There was even a juice and salad bar. It was in this bar, as he was leaving, that he found Vicky and her husband, who waved him over to their table with soft cries of enthusiasm and surprise. As he walked to join them, Evan experienced a mild pang of discomfort; he hadn’t seen either of them since Gina had behaved so rudely at the party. But Vicky seemed not to remember, or not to care. Her hand pressed his warmly in greeting and she patted the chair next to her, inviting him to sit.

“So you’re thinking of joining up?” her husband, Victor, inquired.

Evan smiled at him and nodded, looking around the pleasant, busy room. He was thinking, as he always did when he saw them together, Vicky and Victor, such silly names. “It’s much bigger than I thought it would be,” he said.

Vicky drained her carrot juice. “We’ve been coming for a year now. It’s a lifesaver.”

“You look great,” Evan said. She really did. She was wearing a sleeveless scoop-neck leotard and leggings, so he could see exactly how good she looked. There was just a hint of cleavage visible at the neckline, enough to show that her breasts were still firm, not sallow-looking or wrinkled. Her arms looked firm and strong too, though the thick cords and darkened skin on the backs of her hands gave some hint of her age. She had a scarf tied around her waist—not the best idea, Evan thought, because it called attention to the small but distinctly round belly just below. He couldn’t see her hips. She pushed her hair back from her face, giving Evan a quick, complex look made up in parts of gratitude, flirtation, and suspicion. “Thanks,” she said. “I feel great.”

Victor patted her shoulder proprietarily. “She’s fantastic,” he said. Vicky laughed, childishly pleased to be the object of her husband’s praise. Evan looked down at himself with fake dismay. “I’ll need a lot of work,” he said. “It may be too late for me.”

“Never too late,” Victor assured him. “You’re as young as you feel.”

Evan wished they could talk about something else, but there was no way to change the subject. This was a gym, after all. The subject was bodies. Victor told Evan about his routine. He liked the stair-step machine; Vicky preferred the treadmill. The aerobics classes were excellent. Vicky even did yoga. The free-weights room was sometimes a little crowded; the young jocks did not always leave the racks in perfect order, that was the only drawback. At last there was a lull long enough for Evan to make an excuse. He had to get back to work, he said. As always, he had a deadline.

“Time for us to hit the showers,” Victor said, getting up. He popped Vicky playfully across the shoulders with his towel. “Great to see you,” he said, grasping Evan’s hand. “Give Gina our best.”

Evan noted the brief flash of distress that crossed Vicky’s face at the mention of his wife. She remembers perfectly well, he thought. She’s just being nice about it. Then he was angry at Gina all over again. What right had she to criticize this nice woman because she cared enough about her appearance to have her face lifted? What was wrong with staying fit and wanting to look good for each other, as Vicky and Victor obviously did?

Evan left the gym with a printed sheet of membership privileges and prices gripped tightly in his hand. Filled with resolution and optimism, he stopped in the chilly parking lot to look it over. This was a good thing to do, he told himself. He wanted to be like Vicky and Victor. Gina would ridicule him, but he didn’t care. He wanted to feel good about himself, he wanted to change his life. Carefully he folded his informational paper and put it deep in his coat pocket.

That night Gina was particularly restless and distracted. Evan made pasta and a salad for dinner, but she hardly touched it. She complained that her neck and shoulders were stiff, shrugging repeatedly, trying to loosen up the muscles. Evan told her about the gym, expecting a tirade, or simply a dismissive remark, but to his surprise she listened attentively. In fact, as he explained why he thought it would be a good investment for him, how he feared that his sedentary ways resulted in fatigue and depression, she seemed to focus on him with a distant but sincere interest. “It can’t be good for you to be closed up in here with me all the time,” she said.

“It’s not that,” he protested.

She said nothing. Evan chewed a piece of lettuce. He could feel her eyes on his face. At last he looked up at her, expecting to find contempt, or anger, or indifference, but she was studying him with a look of complete sympathy, devoid of pity or self-interest, as if, he thought, she were looking right into his soul and finding it blameless, but also infinitely sad. He felt a hot flush rising to his cheeks, and he looked away, at his fork resting among the salad greens, at his half-full glass of wine.

“I think it’s a good idea,” she said.

They sat together on the couch watching a video. It was a complicated story of intrigue on a Greek island. Evan had chosen it because the cover showed a man standing in front of a white building set against a sky so blue and so clearly warm he wished he was in the picture. The scenery in the film was terrific; the television screen seemed to pour warmth and color into their drab living room. When it was over Evan talked a little about how much he wanted to travel, to go to Greece again, and also to Italy and Spain, warm, sunny countries where the people were relaxed and friendly and the food was fresh, healthful, and prepared with care and enthusiasm. Now that their son was grown they could think about going off-season, when there were no tourists. Gina listened, inserting qualifiers here and there—the food in Spain was notoriously filthy, the Italians were far from relaxed—but she seemed more amused than irritated by his aimless fantasies. “You’re full of desires today,” she said.

“It’s true,” he admitted. “I am.” He rubbed his hand along her thigh, nuzzled his face against her shoulder. She neither responded nor pushed him away. He brought his hand up to her breast, took her earlobe gently between his teeth. “Please don’t,” she said softly.

He dropped back on the couch, letting out a sigh of frustration.

“I’m sorry,” she said, getting up.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said.

She went into her studio and began gathering up dishes, wadding up pieces of paper. She left the doors open and Evan could see her from where he sat. She went into the kitchen carrying plates, came back with a garbage bag. Evan looked at the clock; it was after midnight. A great time for a little light cleaning, he thought. “A little night cleaning,” he called to her.

“I can’t stand it anymore,” she said, amiably.

“Me neither,” Evan said, but softly, to himself. She didn’t hear it. After a few minutes he realized he was falling asleep. He got up, pulling off his clothes as he went to bed.

The dream ended, as he had known it must, with his missing the plane. Evan woke feeling breathless. He had been running, but they kept the planes across a busy six-lane highway from the check-in. There was a fence too, he recalled, chain-link, tall, over six feet. He rolled onto his side and looked at the clock. It was 5:00 a.m. Gina had still not come to bed. He sat up, rubbing his head, disoriented and strangely apprehensive. After a few moments he got up and made his way to the kitchen. While he stood at the sink drinking water, it dawned on him that the lights in Gina’s studio were off. She must have decided to sleep in there. Usually when he found her asleep, the lights were on, the book she had been reading had slipped to the floor or lay, still open, beneath her hand. He stepped out into the hall.

The day was just beginning to dawn, and there was enough gray light for him to see his way. It was, he thought, the most beautiful time of day. The air was still, the building all around him wrapped in a nearly palpable silence, yet alive with the impending and inevitable intensification of light. It was warm in the hall; the apartment was overheated and there was no way to adjust it. A blast of cool air greeted him as he reached Gina’s studio. There he stood absorbing one shock after the other.

She had left both the doors and windows wide open. The room was in perfect order, down to the pencils. Some of the habitual clutter had even been stored away in boxes, which were stacked against one wall. The cot was made up neatly: Gina was not in it. Nor was she anywhere else in the room. He said her name once, turned and looked out into the living room, but of course she wasn’t there either. He crossed the orderly studio—it seemed alien yet familiar to him, like a room in a dream—to look out on the fire escape, which he found, as he expected, unoccupied. Why was this happening? he thought. Why couldn’t everything just go on as it always had? He gazed up at the pale sky, down at the iron clutter of the fire escape, across the narrow, ugly yard at the opposite building. He felt an ineffable sadness curling up into his consciousness like a twining plume of smoke. The building was mostly dark; no one was up yet. One narrow window had a light on, probably a bathroom light left on all night.

He had the uncanny feeling that he was being watched. An abrupt snapping sound drew his eyes to the ledge at the top, just one story above his own.

That was when he saw the owl.

His sadness was dissipated by this wondrous sight. He leaned out the window, craning his neck to see more clearly. “Wow,” he said. “An owl in Brooklyn.”

A big owl too, or so it seemed to him. He reflected that he had never actually seen an owl before, at least not at such close range. The bird was perfectly still, but its head was inclined forward, its golden eyes focused on Evan. Then, to his astonishment, with a sudden convulsion of motion that was as soundless as it was alarming, the owl opened its wings and flew directly at him. The distance between them, some thirty yards, disappeared in a second. Evan reeled away from the window, aware only of fierce talons extended in his direction. In the next moment he stood clutching the edge of Gina’s drawing table, and the owl was perched comfortably on the window ledge, not ten feet away.

His momentary terror faded, replaced by fascination and wonder. The bird was evidently not going to attack him. There was a raised metal bar along the sill, part of the fire escape, and the owl had wrapped its feet around this. He could see the talons sticking out beneath the thick brown fluff of the legs, black and long and sharp as a cat’s claws. The bill too looked sharp and dangerous, like a hard black finger pointing down between the large golden eyes. These eyes were fixed on Evan’s face with unblinking, unnerving directness. They seemed to be looking right through him, possibly at something behind him. He shifted uneasily from one foot to the other. “I’d ask you to stay,” he said, “but we’re fresh out of mice.”

The bird opened its beak, as if to speak, then spun its head around to face the courtyard, where some tiny motion or sound, invisible or inaudible to Evan, attracted its attention. The whole maneuver was so sudden he had only an impression of having seen it, but it seemed to him the bird’s head went all the way around. The eyes drilled through him again. What a disturbing thing it was to be scrutinized in this way by a creature who had, he knew, no sympathy with him. Again the owl opened its beak, but this time a sound issued forth, a high-pitched, startling scream, such as a frightened woman might make. It was so loud and sudden it made Evan step back. Then, as suddenly, the bird was silent again. “Please,” Evan said. “You’ll wake the neighbors.” The owl, unconcerned, fell to picking at its chest feathers. Evan stepped closer, quietly, stealthily, as if the bird didn’t know with each second exactly where he was. He was so close he could have reached out to touch the beautiful mottled wings, though he knew he would not dare. The owl raised its strange, otherworldly face, made a calm sidestep on the bar, dipped its head, then refocused on his face.

“Why have you come here?” Evan asked.

But the owl only stared at him, and he felt foolish for speaking. With the intrusion of this portentous creature, all the tedium and anxiety of his life had fallen away. A thrill, as of discovery, passed through him, but he did not move. It was best to be still in such a presence, which surely would not stay long or ever come again.