1

The vision was like this: he was sitting in the temple and the light was coming through the bad stained glass and he was trying to find a comfortable position on the stupid pews. He’d suggested something better and softer and more ergonomic but they’d said it was a temple, not a movie theater. He couldn’t manage it without making noise, although, of course, you could never be sure if the noise that was audible to you was audible to anyone around you; maybe they couldn’t hear his shifting and the rustle of the fabric of his pants and the keys rearranging themselves slightly in his pocket and so forth over the sound of the praying and singing and all the other asses reorienting themselves and keys rattling and children whispering and giggling and older people muttering and coughing and Sarah’s mother crying and her father clearing his throat—acoustics, after all, were really less science than art; Abbie had dealt with plenty of acoustic consultants and materials specialists in his professional life, and it was pretty goddamn clear that they hadn’t the slightest idea what they were talking about. In any event each person’s sensitivity to sound, especially in a lively acoustic environment, was deeply personal and idiosyncratic, although Abbie, who liked to imagine that he defied convention in many ways, was in this regard deeply conventional. He was trying to be quiet so as to avoid distracting his wife from the task of dealing with her mother while simultaneously contemplating in a purely hypothetical but deeply personally pleasing way the prospect of a really excellent fire gutting the building that middlebrow bourgeois taste had utterly ruined while also thinking—still vaguely, but with an increasing sense of necessity—of somewhere to suggest for dinner, because after the service concluded and they’d all shuffled around shaking hands and murmuring, “Good Shabbos,” he knew he’d find himself on the front steps of the temple with his wife and his in-laws, and his father-in-law would suggest maybe they should all get something to eat. His mother-in-law would neither agree nor disagree even though it would be obvious that she was hungry—she’d say something like, “Oh, whatever you want,” or “I just don’t want to wait in a long line”—and Sarah would look at him helplessly, and for some reason it would be suddenly his problem. It really was a problem because there was nothing decent in the immediate vicinity, and none of them would want to walk very far or bother with a cab. The congregation was singing Adon Olam to a preposterous, lilting melody. The chazan had said that it was Calypso, but it didn’t sound Calypso to him; suggestively Caribbean, maybe. Then again, what did he know? The closest he knew to Calypso was that Vonnegut book. You know the one. “B’et ishan,” they sang. He closed his eyes.

He found himself standing in a field. All around him there were stalks of corn. They were low yet, just at his waist. It must have been early summer. The field fell down a shallow hill to a highway where a few cars passed. Beyond the highway was a tangle of woods, what grows along a highway where land was at one time cleared but over which first weeds and then spindly, haunted trees grew back. Beyond these woods stood another low hill, and on that hill the weedy and unpleasant roadside gave over to a sturdier deciduous forest. Farther away, several miles probably, although it looked closer, a wide blue ridge swelled up a thousand feet. Just to his right, the ridge extruded a lower promontory, a thick knot of land covered in pines. To his left, winding up the face of the ridge, tucked into a sort of notch in its face, was a road; it must have been that same highway he was looking across, which wound around the lower hill and carved its way up the base of the ridge. It was a sunny day, but there were high, white cumuli, and wherever they drifted, they cast shadows on the face of the ridge, ink-dark blots as big as whole towns. It must have been late in the day, as the sun was beginning to go down behind him, which meant that he was facing east toward the westernmost escarpment of the Appalachians, near to Pittsburgh where his sister lived. He squinted. There was a small clearing on top of the mountain, just beyond the knot of land. He felt as if he was being lifted up; he felt as if he was rising toward it, although his feet were still planted in the dirt and the scratchy stalks were still around his hands, which were at his sides, and something in his heart was saying here here here here here here. He felt that he must look away and so he turned his head, wrenched it; it felt as if he’d torn a lung loose; it felt as if something rattled out of his chest. He looked to his right and there, standing in the field, was a deer. It was shockingly close to him. He had never been so close to a wild animal. It didn’t look like a dog or a house cat, soft and uniform and sewn like a stuffed toy. Its coat was mangy and matted, not the smoothly speckled brown of a deer glimpsed from the car as you sped down a country road, but a mottled, wild collision of every brown. There were ticks in its hide; his vision was such that he saw them clenched and ravenous against the gray-black skin under the animal’s coat. The wind was blowing toward him, and Abbie could smell it, the buck, a wild stink of leaves and digestion. Its small tail flicked a few times. It exhaled, horse-like and sudden and hot. Its shoulders must have been as high as his own shoulders. Its antlers were immense, prehistoric, before the old world shrank to a merely human scale, with eight points on each. They’d just begun to shed their velvet, which was bloody and loose upon them. He could smell the blood, also. The buck’s eyes were black and utterly inhuman and they reflected his face. He saw in his reflection, in the eyes of this animal that had no need or will to speak, another self that was his own self before language and beyond language; then, apprehending something without the need for language, he opened his eyes.

“V’a’ira,” sang the congregation.

“Is everything all right?” asked his wife.

•  •  •

This is how it happened.

Abbot Mayer first spoke with God at a Mostly Musical Shabbat at Temple Beth-El on the Upper West Side. Abbie had been, until then, generally irreligious. He thought of himself rather as a deeply spiritual man in the broadest human tradition. He had flirted in his younger years with Buddhism and then a vague Vedanta that mostly involved an abortive dedication to the rigorous practice of Hatha yoga, a period he now looked back on with some embarrassment, not because there was anything wrong with Buddhism or yoga per se, but because there was something slightly suspect about a hippie kid from a prosperous family of New York Jews engaging in that kind of stoned Orientalism. He’d subsequently settled on a kind of ethnic, ethical Judaism that was not taxing for him and acceptable for his wife, who did believe. Her whole family believed, actually, which Abbie accepted even as he found it odd. He’d been raised in a Conservative home, observing many of the forms, even intermittently keeping kosher, depending on his mother’s moods and his father’s appetites. He remembered their rare trips to synagogue, usually only on High Holy Days, as hazy chains of uninterrupted and unintelligible Hebrew. Sarah’s family was Reform, but they went regularly to Friday-night services, sent their children to a Jewish summer camp near Pittsburgh, had traveled as a family to Israel, and believed thoroughly and entirely in Adonai—believed, in fact, with a melodic, tent-revival joyfulness that struck Abbie as oddly evangelical and un-Jewish. But, as he didn’t believe in God, he kept these thoughts to himself, and he treated his wife’s religious interests with supportive disinterest that, unrecognized by him, bordered on disdain. It had never yet occurred to him that this attitude suggested to Sarah that her faith was some kind of charming feminine hobby. He assumed she was glad he left her to it and didn’t offer his opinions, which was, he’d be the first to admit, a habit of his and not, perhaps, his most pleasant.

There were, however, occasions on which it was necessary to accompany her to services. Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, of course, and then, once a year, in the spring, on the Friday night that coincided with her younger brother’s Yahrtzeit. Elliot had died at twenty-two, hit by a car in a rain-slicked intersection on 7th Avenue in Park Slope around eleven at night. It had been one of those frustrating accidents in which no real blame can be assigned—perhaps the driver had approached the red light a little too fast; perhaps Elliot had stepped out a few seconds too soon. The driver wasn’t drunk. Elliot wasn’t drunk or, at least, not very. The preceding week had been dry, the downpour sudden and intense. He’d been at dinner with friends, and when the rain passed, they’d headed for the subway, and then.

They say, whoever they are, that the death of a child is never easy, but it was especially not so for the Liebermans, who were in that genus of family that stays, somehow, almost miraculously untouched by tragedy, each member of each generation, whether family by blood or by marriage, passing peacefully and surrounded by loved ones after nine robust decades on this earth. That, at least, was their self-reinforcing myth. One of Sarah’s aunts had in fact died in her sixties of breast cancer, and Sarah’s great-grandfather had committed suicide after the crash in ’29, a fact that she hadn’t learned until she was nearly thirty. Her own mother, drunk and a little maudlin at a cousin’s wedding, had revealed it in a lurching conversation overlain with the DJ’s exhortations to “the ladies.” Like any myth, its historicity was beside the point, and the family believed in it as surely as they believed in God, whether or not Genesis, say, was literally true. Liebermans did not just die.

Like a lot of nonbelievers, Abbie, however much he flattered himself as a materialist and creature of a phenomenal world, secretly held a set of complex and interrelated superstitions, chief among them an abiding belief in a universal principle of synchronicity, a kind of cosmic irony in the inevitable alignment of certain things. If he had, at the time, believed in a god, it would have been less a cruel god or a harsh god or a judgmental god so much as a mordant one. (Later in his life, Abbie would tell people that he came to believe God’s evident nonexistence was positive proof that He was, in fact, the God of the Jews, His own nonexistence being the sort of joke that only a Jew would find funny.) One of these synchronicities, also a source of some dismay among the Liebermans, was the fact that Elliot’s Yahrtzeit seemed to arrive inexorably on the same weekend as Beth-El’s monthly Mostly Musical Shabbat service, a campfire affair transported into the sanctuary and overstocked with young children and guitars. It was also—these were, after all, well-to-do Reform Jews, well populated with academics and public-radio liberals—peppily distressing in its ethnomusicological ambitions; a typical service might involve the chazan’s recent discovery of a traditional Ethiopian version of Ador V’dor, say, and the temple’s core membership of enthusiasts would break out the qachels. Abbie found it both tacky and endearing—certainly the service flitted by more quickly with singing and dancing children, and these people really did seem to enjoy being Jewish, something he could never once recall from his own upbringing, whose religion had mushed in his mind into a lot of dour, unintelligible Ashkenazi mumbling punctuated by the percussive bronchial hacking of his own parents’ aging congregation. Nevertheless, all the happy-happy singing lent the whole service a kind of antic, circus atmosphere, and by the time the Mourners Kaddish rolled around at the end, Susan Lieberman would be beside herself with nervous agitation, and Sarah would be just as anxious and upset, ironically, from trying to keep her mother calm.

It was ironic (or not; who could really tell as far as God is concerned?) that Abbie had actually designed the temple or, in any case, had been the head architect for the renovation of its current location; it had been in the commission of this project that he’d first met Sarah, who’d been the token younger woman on the temple board at the time. A crypto-biblical catastrophe involving burst pipes and flooding had ruined the old sanctuary and lobbies and the big dining facility in the basement. The building itself had previously been an Episcopalian church, before, as Elliott had—according to Sarah—put it, they had disappeared up the asshole of their own indecision, and then it was converted haphazardly into a synagogue in the late sixties. By the time of the flood, its combination of obliquely Christian architecture and truly regrettable later-addition fixtures and finishes (“Walden Pond meets the Brady Bunch,” Elliott had also called it) had begun to strike some of the congregation as retrograde and embarrassing and Not Very Jewish. Abbie would have told them that the architectural history of Jewish houses of worship was fascinating in its lack of actual historical sources and tradition; the vague hitching of Near Eastern decorative flourishes with stained glass and auditorium seating that seemed, to Beth-El’s leadership, as the real and authentic thing was pure invention. But in this case, Abbie was just a junior associate in his firm, and the job offered a nice piece of solo work; every architect’s portfolio required a few holy places, he reasoned, and the soggy volume of the ruined temple was an opportunity to put some of his own ideas about salvage and environmentally sound building into practice. Abbie was ahead of the vanguard in thinking about these things; it was what would make him eventually, albeit retrospectively, famous.

“An architect does not design buildings; an architect solves problems.” Thomas Arah, who’d become his adviser at Yale, told him so—told a roomful of people, actually, during a convocation in—it must have been 1974 or 1975. It struck him at the time as the sort of self-satisfied banality that was better laughed at than ignored. Arah was nearly seventy and had already lost much of his close vision to macular degeneration. He’d become instead typically drunk—never very, but almost always just a bit—and philo-sophical. He referred to Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe as Frank and Mies. He was writing some immense book, which he never finished, on the relationships between national character, architectural vernacular, and political economy. During Abbie’s junior year, he’d accompanied the old man as some kind of assistant on a trip out West, a tour that was to include several early Spanish missions in California, Pueblo Indian cliff dwellings in Colorado, and a stop in Arizona to visit Taliesan West. He’d done very little assisting and came to believe that he was along just so that Arah would have a body present to prove to waiters and stewardesses that the old man wasn’t talking to himself. As the plane had descended into Phoenix—which was not yet the vast sprawl of suburbs and golf courses that it would become but which it was already quite visibly on its way to becoming—Arah told Abbie to look out the window, where the greenish edge of human habitation met the desert. “These people,” he told Abbie, “are going to destroy our civilization. Los Angeles is going to break off into the ocean. Florida is going to sink. New York is going to flood. And these poor ignorant idiots, they are going to suck every last drop of water out of the Colorado River, and then they’re all going to die.” Then he pressed the call button and harangued the stewardess into bringing him another vodka.

Arah’s beliefs—that architects were servants and functionaries of the social organism; that architecture was about the practical, if hopefully aesthetically pleasing, solutions to a series of definable and identifiable practical problems; that one must resist the urge to look at the evolution of forms as a teleology of progress and understand it instead as an adaptive response to circumstances; that Frank and Mies, et al. were geniuses, yes, but were also reasons to be suspicious of the very category of genius (after all, Lloyd Wright couldn’t so much as design a proper gutter and downspout)—eventually converted Abbie, even as he became known among distinctly smaller circles as something very much resembling a genius himself. But he’d resisted them at the time; like plenty of prosperous Jewish kids, Abbie had had no trouble syncretizing the vaguely communal stoner ethic with a derivative version of Objectivism—speaking of vanguards: when you believe all of your friends to be geniuses and revolutionaries, it isn’t even a difficult marriage. Reflecting on this period of his life in an interview years later, he said that every young architect imagines himself as Howard Roark at some point in his development, usually before he has to write his first door schedule. “Howard Roark would consider a door schedule unheroic,” Abbie had said, “but you can’t hang a thirty-inch door in a thirty-six-inch doorway.”

No architect ever entirely eradicates that early self-image as some kind of Promethean superman, and none of them ever escapes the occasional desire to just dynamite the hell out of some work of theirs that’s been bowdlerized in the process of meeting someone else’s budget and taste. That was how Abbie felt about the Temple Beth-El. On the occasions when he was stuck there, if anyone had asked him about the building, which they did from time to time, then he’d have replied with the embarrassed pride that successful writers reserve for their early poetry. Secretly, though, he nursed a pleasing fantasy of sneaking into the place one night and burning it to the ground. His original designs had simplified the already self-effacing, if prosperous, simplicity of the Episcopalians into something of almost Shaker austerity, the only real ornamentation to have been railings and trim and windowpanes that made subtle reference to the Star of David. The congregation had insisted on stained glass; then on carpeting the aisles; then, at last, on replacing his elegant, Japanese wall panels with horrible accordion dividers—this last was a concession to cost, Abbie knew, but still.

So, it was during Mostly Musical Shabbat, during a Calypso version of Adon Olam, on the occasion of the observed anniversary of the death of a brother-in-law whom he’d never met, while staring at a stained glass depiction of Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt that recalled nothing so much as a Saturday-morning, Hanna-Barbera cartoon, that God spoke to Abbie Mayer for the very first time. Of course, God doesn’t speak; it’s as silly to imag-ine the Lord uttering actual words as it is to imagine that, because we are made in God’s image, He therefore resembles in some actual, physical way, a human being. As we are, body and soul, afterimages of the totality and universality of the divine, frozen, sub-photographic images of a vastness of being that is and moves, so too is our language less even than an echo of the primordial verb of existence. God, Abbie learned, doesn’t speak to men at all but rather puts into their minds and hearts the knowledge of and belief in that which He would—if He did, if He even could, speak—have said.

•  •  •

After the service, they stood on the front steps of the temple in the quick spring twilight until Abbie, feeling oddly ravenous, though not as generally discombobulated as he would have expected if you’d told him earlier in the day that he’d receive a vision from God, asked if anyone was hungry and suggested an Italian place on the next block that he knew they all liked. It was an Italian restaurant as they used to be, unconcerned with faddish authenticity, the sort of place where you could still get lasagna and garlic bread and where the waiters all sounded like a swim in the waves off the shore in Jersey was the closest they’d ever got to Italy. The sun was still higher than the buildings but sinking swiftly, and something about the quality of its light suggested reflection off the water, although you certainly couldn’t see the river from there. Abbie disapproved of the neighborhood’s sometimes slavishly historic architecture, but he approved of its lowness. He’d never designed a skyscraper. Twelve stories was the maximum decent height for human habitation. It was a question of scale. New York’s immensity appealed to him, but not its height. He took Sarah’s hand, and she let it hang limply in his for a minute before sliding it out of his grip and shaking it as if she’d touched something wet and unpleasant before shoving it into the pocket of her coat. Abbie gave her an inquiring look, but she stared at the ground. But she was always upset after this service, so he turned back to his in-laws and said, “So, what do you think?”

As was her habit, Susan Lieberman said, “Oh, I don’t know. I don’t know if I’m really in the mood to sit in a restaurant,” and her husband said, “Well, come on, Sue. We should eat something.” Susan shrugged helplessly and said as long as there wasn’t a wait. There was never a wait. Herman talked about real estate. He’d been retired for almost five years by then but still spoke about it as if he were always in the middle of the next big deal.

“The gays,” he told Abbie. “That’s how I know.”

“The gays?” Abbie repeated. He’d been trying to get Sarah to look at him to no avail; she was embroiled in a quiet sidebar with her mother. That wasn’t necessarily unusual, but he could tell that she was upset with him, and, as was his habit, he found himself echoing his father-in-law’s phrases as a proxy for actually conversing, which fortunately suited Herman just fine. He let his mind file through the inventory of recent sins that Sarah may or may not have discovered—there is, after all, no one so paranoid as a man who makes a habit of lying, if only by omission, to his wife; those normal moments of distance or distraction in a marriage, which a policy of general honesty would render as innocuous as they are inevitable, become, each of them, immensely significant, indicative of some tear in the veil of secrets.

“The gays,” Herman was saying, “That’s right. I always say, it’s a good thing I’m not a prejudiced man. Well, you know, my grandfather was in the theater, not an actor of course, but in the business, so we always knew all kinds in my family and said, live and let live. And for a man in real estate, the gays are the bellwether. If they’re moving in, you can be sure that prices are going up, up, and up. That’s how I knew to buy downtown, and as you know, it worked out well for me.”

“Yes,” Abbie said. “That’s a good policy.”

“You ought to buy downtown, Abbie. A man of your interests? One of these lofts. Can you believe it?” He chewed his scampi. “Lofts,” he repeated.

“Sarah likes it here,” Abbie replied. He found that invoking Sarah’s tastes was a prophylactic against his father-in-law’s advice. He sent a pleading look in her direction, but she was still embroiled with her mother.

“And tell me, Abbie, what are you working on these days?”

“Oh,” Abbie wrenched himself away from the side of Sarah’s head. “Oh, lighting mostly.”

“Lighting? Do you do that as well? Don’t your electricians or what have you do that sort of thing? After you design the, the building and so forth.”

“Well, an architect doesn’t so much design buildings as he solves problems,” Abbie said. “Anyway, very interesting new technologies in lighting. Fluorescents, actually.”

“Fluorescents! No thank you. Like prisons and cafeterias.”

“Well—” Abbie started to say.

“Not for me,” said Herman, and that was clearly the end of it.

Herman and Susan walked home after dinner, and Abbie and Sarah shared a silent cab to their apartment several blocks farther north. “A nice doorman building on West End Avenue.” He could still hear the voice of their broker, who’d hustled them through a series of catastrophes that she must have staged as a sales tactic before ushering them past a uniformed Russian man with huge shoulders and a mismatched, delicate face to the brass elevators and into their new home. “Well,” she’d said, whatever her name was. Abbie remembered her voice, but not her name. No, Myrna, that was her name. She was in her sixties and sounded distantly like the Bronx, although she’d polished the rough edges into something more generically New-York career-woman. She wore all black and had large, but tasteful, jewelry. “Well,” she said again, and she stood there nodding. They couldn’t say no. It was too big and much too traditional. It had wainscoting and radiators. None of their furniture would match. He said as much to Sarah after they’d already said yes. “You’ll rise to the challenge, I’m sure,” she told him.

Sarah disappeared into their bedroom as soon as they were inside, and Abbie poured himself a scotch and went out onto the balcony to smoke a cigarette. The balcony, that detail he liked. He’d quit smoking years ago, but kept a pack in the freezer and still indulged from time to time in the evening, or when he’d had quite a lot to drink. He took a drag of the cigarette and traced a dollar sign in the dark air and laughed at himself. “That’s a little architect’s joke,” he said. If you looked between the buildings, you could catch sight of the dark expanse of the Park: that carefully constructed fantasy of how the island had been before there was a city there.

He reflected on his experience—well, that was the wrong word, but it would have to do until he could come up with a better euphemism—in the temple. Rationally, of course, it would have been a confabulation, a daydream, albeit a startlingly visceral one. It comported, after all, very closely with a train of thought he’d lately been toying with without permitting himself seriously to commit to considering it: leaving New York. His sister, Veronica, had suggested it; he’d called her to ask her advice about Cathy, the woman he’d been seeing, but when Veronica had asked him if he was calling to talk to her about “that woman,” he’d become angry—not so much because she called her “that woman” but more because she’d intuited his purpose before he could reveal it, and it made him feel like the lesser intellect. That pained him acutely, because if his sister was, by the crudest economic measures, more successful than him, he comforted himself with the fact that he was smarter.

As children, they’d been very close; she’d protected her dreamy, artistic sibling by carrying the weight of their parents’ absurd expectations on the strength of her intelligence and limitless talents—a musician, a dancer, an artist, an athlete—and then, later, he’d returned the favor a thousandfold when their father had discovered Veronica’s first real girlfriend and reacted very badly. Saul Mayer lacked Herman Lieberman’s essential libertinism. Herman had had mistresses over the years, which Susan had always tolerated, later confessing to her college-age daughter that, after Elliot was born, their marriage had cooled, passion settling into a deeper, if less physical, sort of friendship. “But it sounds terrible!” Sarah said. “He was exploiting you!”

“On the contrary, honey. I’ve had my fun too!”

Saul Mayer did not cheat on his wife, nor had they settled into an amicable intellectual companionship. He’d persisted in a state of faithful matrimonial anxiety until his wife, only sixty-two at the time, had passed away. To discover that his daughter was a lesbian was too much for him. But even as a stoned college kid, Abbie had viewed the world with an inconsistent but utterly unbending moralism, and the study of architecture had given him a Masonic presumptuousness about his own mental superiority over most other people, his father certainly included. This would later harden into a less redeemable condescension, but only later—and he’d been a rock against which their father’s anger and opprobrium crashed but which it couldn’t erode. “It seems to me,” Veronica could still hear him saying, languid and probably high, “that the question of whom a person loves is very much secondary to the simple fact that a person loves.” Her father had screamed back that it wasn’t natural. Abbie had shrugged: “A townhouse in a city of ten million people is natural? Coal-fired electricity is natural? Glass windows are natural? Cars and subways are natural? What’s natural? Besides love, what is there but artifice?” This argument hadn’t worked on their father, who passed the rest of his life very rarely speaking to his daughter, and if he did, whenever possible, only through the intermediary of his son, but it had worked on Veronica, cementing permanently her sororal loyalty. In the two decades since, Abbie had frequently tested that permanence, but she did what she could, when he let her.

He’d called, as always, at the most inopportune time, and she’d just hoped he wasn’t calling—again—to talk about his stupid affair. She’d always found men to be fatuously moralistic about their own immorality, forever haranguing their friends and wives and children into self-serving arrangements that they then picked at with the childish, masochistic pleasure of little boys picking at their scabs. Her brother and Sarah had never had a traditional marriage—at least not a wholly monogamous one. (Even thinking it, Veronica could hear Abbie correcting her, reminding her not to equate monogamy, a latecomer when you consider the breadth of history, with tradition. “An aberration!” she imagined him bellowing with the particular glee he reserved for when he won an argument that he was having only with himself. “Something new under the sun!”)

They’d married in the early eighties. Reagan was the silly president. New York had retained a louche permissiveness that the rest of the country, in rediscovering some celluloid, high-desert vision of itself, was supposedly leaving behind. Even in Manhattan, though, you could sense a change in the tolerated transgressions. Everyone wore suits all of a sudden, even the women, who looked terrible in them—the men only looked ridiculous—and did coke and aspired to steal money from retirees. Men had fewer love affairs, but there were more hookers. Veronica was sure that all these ethnographic impressions were completely wrong; if she’d ever mentioned them to her brother he’d have marshaled a statistical counterargument—delivered in that voice of utmost patience that signaled his utter disdain—to tell her very certainly that she was most assuredly wrong about all this. “The plural of anecdote,” he’d say with a smile. Abbie loved clichés the way some men love Beatles albums; they recalled the exaggeratedly pleasant memories that are so frequently scattered around recollections of an unpleasant youth. You couldn’t argue with him; what would be the point?

The trouble with their marriage wasn’t that Abbie fucked other women, but that he fell in love with them. He could never accept this, and he privately accused Sarah of a more general female jealousy. “Female jealousy,” Veronica would repeat, and he’d sigh and say, “You know what I mean.” The problem was that he didn’t even realize that he fell in love with them; like all egotists, he failed to recognize his own reflection, thinking himself somehow larger than the strangely diminished man in the glass. And Veronica knew, to be fair, that he never loved any of them as much as he loved his wife, or at least, he never loved her any less than he loved any of them. Sarah, for her part, rarely slept with other men—when she did it, she did it instrumentally, usually because Abbie’s attention had wandered, and after all, as Abbie would have said, “We’ve all got needs.” He always tried to hide these other women, despite the fact that they’d agreed to their inevitable presence early on. In his mind, this had to do with her “jealousy issues,” whereas it was really the guilt that sprung from his unacknowledged infatuation with them. Veronica always knew when he was seeing someone because he became at once furtive and solicitous. He never knew when Sarah slept with other men. Likely he imagined she didn’t.

“Hello, Abbie.” When she’d reached across her desk to answer the phone, she’d knocked a sheaf of relief maps onto the floor, and when she heard her brother’s voice and greeted him a second time, she leaned on the desk and looked at them forlornly, feeling that stooping to pick them up would represent a kind of defeat. “Fuck,” she muttered. It was nearly four, and Phil Harrow, her business partner in the venture whose plans now lay scattered on the carpet, would arrive any moment for the last meeting of the day. She had nothing but bad news for him.

“Fuck you, too,” Abbie said. His voice sounded suspiciously jocular. Anytime he was anything other than lugubrious and condescending, she knew he was going to ask a favor. She hoped it would only be money. He’d hinted about it recently, though he never had the balls to come out and ask directly. Probably he was so twisted around about having a sister who made so much more than him that he’d never get over the embarrassment of asking.

“Not fuck you,” she said. “I dropped something.”

“Ahhh,” said Abbie.

No, fuck you, thought Veronica. If he was going to be intolerable—when was he not, though?—then she was going to hang up. But he hadn’t really said anything, and she was acting like her mother. Or she told herself that she was acting like her mother, which always calmed her whenever she felt herself drifting into sentiment or annoyance, whether or not this was anything like her mother at all.

“How are you?” she asked him.

“In debt.”

“Ah.” She hadn’t expected him to come out with it so easily.

“It’s not your problem, of course.”

“No,” she said, but how could she not have been thinking: then why did you bring it up to me?

“It’s a curious thing,” Abbie told her. “I’m sought, but not compensated.”

“I’m sure you’re compensated.”

“Undercompensated.”

“Mm,” she said. Her brother was famous in the minor way that people can become famous within their own professions without ever being known to anyone outside, and he lived grandly, flying from conference to museum to university to give talks about saving the world from impending catastrophe through new paradigms of design. In arguments, he’d even accused her—“you and your housing divisions,” he’d spat—of conspiring to drown the world. She knew that his firm was more concept than practice, and although the colleges paid for his flights and hotels and surely compensated him well for his worn-out and frankly hectoring prophesies, she couldn’t remember the last time he’d actually built something. She suspected that his and Sarah’s tastes in wines and restaurants and the frequent redecoration and renovation of their overlarge apartment were a little more than he could reasonably afford. Having reached a point in her own financial life where there was effectively nothing that she couldn’t reasonably afford, Veronica took a slightly pornographic pleasure in speculating on the budgets of the more cruelly leveraged middle class, especially those to whom she was related.

“Also,” he said, “I have a problem with a woman.”

“Does Sarah know?”

“About the money? Or the woman?”

“Either, I suppose.”

“No. The latter, certainly not.”

“You should try monogamy, Abbie. It’s easier to keep your story straight.”

“Lesbians,” he said.

“Well,” Veronica replied. “Be that as it may.”

“What am I going to do, though?”

“About the woman or the money?”

“Both.”

Veronica sighed audibly. “Forget the former, concentrate on the latter.”

“I might need a loan.”

“A loan, Abbie. That entails repayment. With interest, as a general rule.”

“Usurer.”

“That’s Christian, Abbie. I think. And I have no such compunctions. The last time you asked me for money, we didn’t speak for a year.”

“Why was that?”

“Let’s not get into it.”

“I didn’t pay you back.”

“No. It was for the apartment. You told me you needed a larger one for a family.”

“Yes, that didn’t work out. Not yet.”

Veronica’s assistant tapped lightly on the office door and poked in her head. “Mr. Harrow is here. Should I send him back?”

“You’d better tell him to wait,” she said.

“Wait for what?” said Abbie.

“Not you,” Veronica told him. “I was talking to my secretary.” Her secretary frowned as she closed the door. “Damn,” Veronica muttered. Jill hated being called a secretary, and who could blame her? She had some sort of absurd degree in studio art from some preposterously expensive private college that no one had ever heard of, and Veronica had hired her as an assistant in a rare moment of solidarity—with what, or whom, she wasn’t sure. She reminded herself to try to remember to offer the girl some kind of praise for professional acumen when just enough time had passed that it would not seem like a premeditated apology, knowing that she’d forget. Veronica was a feminist, obviously, but she occasionally—all right, more than occasionally—longed for a thick-ankled and omnicompetent older woman with a bad perm and worse attitude to keep her working life in order. Alas, they were like real craftsmen in the construction trades: dead, retired, ever harder to find, frightfully expensive when you did.

She realized she’d let the call lapse into silence. “I have an appointment,” she said vaguely.

“You’re trying to get off the phone with me.”

“Yes,” she said. One lesson she had learned was that it was pointless to be less than direct about these things.

“Well, a loan, then.”

“What’s it for, Abbie? Specifically?”

“The firm. We’re having cash flow issues.”

“I’ll think about it. And I’d want to look at the books first.”

“Yes, I imagined.”

She’d wandered around the desk while they talked, and now she leaned against the other side of her desk. She pinched the bridge of her nose and closed her eyes. Her office overlooked the silver dome of the Civic Arena. She looked out the windows. There was a hockey game that evening, and the lots were already filling up. She looked at the floor, the curled plans flapping in the breeze from the vent.

“Abbie?” she said. “What do you know about hydrology?”

•  •  •

He thought back on the rest of that conversation and watched the smoke from his indulgent cigarette drift away from the light of the French doors. A vision. Well, he wouldn’t be the first, and did it matter, really, the quantity or quality of his particular faith? He finished smoking and went back inside, where he poured himself another drink. Then Sarah appeared. She hadn’t changed, and she was holding a paper in her hand. “What’s this, Abbie?” she asked. Her face was set in a look of frozen determination that Abbie found especially ridiculous, and he smiled without meaning to.

“I don’t know. What is it?”

She slapped it on the counter in front of him. He glanced. “It’s an American Express bill,” he said.

“And?”

“And what? I’ve told you, I’m taking care of it.”

“Taking care of what, Abbie?”

It occurred to him that he wasn’t sure what she was talking about, but he pressed on. “I’ve spoken to my sister. She’s not averse to the idea of a loan. Although, she mentioned, possibly, a project that I might, oh, come out and work on.”

“What the fuck are you talking about? I’m talking about this.” Her thin finger landed on a line item on the page, and he let himself look and realized his error. He’d always been careless with money. It was a mistake to charge it.

But he’d never known how to back down gracefully from a lost position, so he said, “What’s that?”

“That,” Sarah said, “is a doctor’s bill for a doctor’s office I don’t go to, and you don’t go to, and when I called, I found out that it’s an Ob/Gyn.”

“Ah.”

“Abbie,” Sarah said, “Goddamnit, how could you?”

“How could I what, Sarah? These things will happen. It meant nothing. It means nothing. Goddamnit, and I’m having it taken care of, too.”

What is it about some men, Sarah wondered, that makes them imagine morality as a matter of accountancy, a balancing of columns, the good against the bad? “You’re having it taken care of? What are you, the mafia? You make it sound like you’re putting out a hit!”

“You’re being ridiculous.”

That was when she broke the vase. She didn’t want to, but it had to be done. You were damned either way, a victim or a punisher, too weak or too angry, too emotional or too indifferent; well, better to do something than nothing; better to be disdained than pitied. Later, she knew, Abbie would comfort himself by recalling this demonstration of her irrationality. And, in fact, he put on his calmest face and asked if she’d been drinking.

She told him no.

Then she didn’t speak to him for almost a week, and although she should have hated him, it also reminded her, in an odd way, of why she loved him, because he let her not speak to him, let her glide through the house in a noisy silence—the silent treatment exacerbated by her loud stacking of dishes, phone calls with her parents, television turned deliberately too high. He let her be angry, which, hard as she tried to remain so, exhausted her; it deprived her combustible fury of oxygen, and toward the end of the week, she sat across the dining room table from him and said, “So, what are we going to do?”

“I talked with Veronica, again,” he said. “What would you think . . . I know I did a wrong thing. And then there’s the money. What would you think about a fresh start?”

“A fresh start?” she said.

“Well, now you sound sarcastic.”

Get a fresh start, she thought, as if they were just closing the books at the end of the month and carrying forward the gains or losses to the next period. What a fantasy, that life ever began anew, that it consisted of a series of neat movements, like a classical sonata. Sarah could’ve killed him for suggesting it, except that Abbie’s notoriety had never really translated into regular returns; she knew that. They increasingly faced, frankly, the punishing inevitability of an unmanageable proportion of debt, and here they were in an endless apartment with no real hope of ever filling it.

“What would it entail?” she asked him.

“Well,” he said. “How do you feel about Pennsylvania?”