12

THEY DRIVE HOME, through the hills of Ashfield and Conway, and down across the flatter landscape of Hatfield, Lucius delighting in the light snowfall. It is the first snow he has ever seen, and he keeps his bare hand stuck out the side window so that he can catch the flakes, lick them from his palm. The road is slick and black, the wet flakes dissolving the instant they hit pavement. Aaron watches a lone car, a dozen yards ahead, skid sideways, fishtail, recover. He downshifts from third to second, keeps the van in second gear, listens to Lucius talk about what people back home would think, could they see him now.

“Instead of flowers,” he says, “I gonna bring some gal a snowball when I come courtin’ next time, don’t you think? She can keep it in her icebox.”

Aaron smiles, but his smile falters. He is never comfortable when Lucius talks this way—back-home talk—and he feels that Lucius uses talk like this to put distance between them.

“Can you close the window? We’ll both catch a chill. The sweat’s not dry on me yet.”

Lucius rolls the window up, puts his hands between his thighs to warm them, laughs easily, then pats Aaron on the shoulder in a way that lets Aaron know that Lucius senses what Aaron feels. Lucius talks naturally—his voice guttural, his inflection almost without southern accent—asking questions about snow: what makes it stick? what makes it melt? how deep can it get in how much time? what’s the worst snow Aaron has ever seen? what happens if the snow comes down mixed with rain….

The world is dim, all whites and grays except, in the patch of light illuminated by their headlights, the snow falling at a slant, a lemony-yellow. The fields stretch away to either side, cabbages and cornstalks visible here and there where they have not yet been plowed under. Thanksgiving is still ten days off. Aaron cannot remember snow having come this early, and he says so to Lucius. Lucius says that the cabbages, like soft babies’ bottoms, look as if they’ve been sprinkled with talcum. To their left, where the Connecticut River flows less than a hundred yards away, they see nothing but white—and the whiteness does not please Aaron. He cannot see the river, or the line of trees that borders it. He senses a wall of black behind the whiteness, pressing against it: a thin, hard veneer. Aaron loves the land when he can see across it, when there are wide horizons, endless vistas. His favorite time of year—between autumn and first snow, when the leaves fall from the trees little by little, slowly revealing the landscape beyond; when he can see the hills and green fields that have been hidden for half a year, even as the green itself begins to fade to browns and lavenders and yellows and golds—this is gone now. He feels as if he is driving under an enormous dome of snow, the dome moving along with him, the side walls remaining equidistant from his van. There are pinpoints of color here and there—a splash of orange on a billboard, a yellow porch light, a green highway sign, black shutters on an old farmhouse, silver mailboxes on dark posts. Is life like that—an endless haze of gray and white, without beginning or end, with here and there a flash of color, a spot of something that suggests the possibility of beauty? Can one enter these points of color—of light—and pass through to the other side, to some other world?

Aaron chides himself for such musings, yet finds that he is less irritable, less tense, for letting thoughts come this way. Until recently—he has been talking with Susan about this—he had never thought of himself as a man with imagination. He could draw well, of course. He could design houses and, his great pleasure, make beautiful architectural renderings of them—design sections or construction drawings, architectural elevations—but in doing so he felt for the most part that he was only setting down what was already there, or would be there, in the physical world. He was collaborating with clients, working to order, rendering the actual: what could, in fact, in the physical world, be constructed out of wood and metal and glass and cement. But to have thoughts beyond things physical—to consider the presence of things not visible in the world—this was something he couldn’t remember having done often. In the portraits he drew when he was a boy? In his drawings of apartment buildings and storefronts? Perhaps. For much as he wanted to render things as accurately as he could, he was aware that he was also trying to get at something else, that he was trying, somehow, to draw through the details to something more real, to some quality of the person or of the place that could not be expressed by things merely physical.

His mind drifts, whiteness swirling softly inside his brain like plaster dust caught in an updraft. A cluster of houses set back from the road, to the west—a dairy farm, a four-walled fortresslike layout of buildings, with a red and silver silo jutting upwards like a bullet—makes him think of the dark, close barn, the warm bodies of cows, the sweet, musky smell of silage. He imagines a cardinal passing in front of the car, from west to east—a streak of crimson that bleeds across the white landscape, coming from nowhere, disappearing forever. He looks sideways at Lucius, and he recalls the easy way his father would sit in the bedroom with him while he drew, and of how, when he would look up from his paper, he would never know how many minutes or hours had passed. Were those happy times? Was he ever, in the four small rooms of that apartment, happy—at ease in this world?

Lucius asks him what they will do for work—for money—when they are finished with the house they are building. They are down to minor items now—cabinets and countertops in the kitchen and bathroom, paneling in the study, moldings—and Aaron says he has a few small jobs—bookcases, kitchen renovations, taking out walls, putting in walls, finishing a family room—that should keep them busy through the end of January. Other things may come along. He has a contract for a new house in North Amherst, and they can start on that in mid-April, when the frost will be out of the ground.

“Maybe something sooner. When I called Susan at noon she said that somebody’s coming by tonight to talk about renovating a big old farmhouse, in Hadley. Says he admires my work.” Aaron feels the sweat evaporate, warming the air trapped between skin and clothing. A vapor barrier. “You’d like that, Lucius—restoring an old house. When you cut into the walls and floors, get past the lathing, tear away a chimney and see the innards—building the house backwards in your mind is the way I think about it, from the inside out—that does make the blood flow.”

“Well. We want to keep the blood flowing, don’t we? Like the man says, gonna be one long ball-breaking winter—snow balls and blue balls—and me without a woman.”

“You can sleep a lot. Have good dreams.”

“Oh yeah. You bet I’ll dream, Aaron. Dream lots. Dreams are what keep us alive, right? I had a dream. Sure. I had a dream that someday the sons of black sharecroppers would lie down with the daughters of white millionaires. Oh yes, Lord. I had a dream….”

Lucius laughs. Aaron looks out through mists of white, imagines a fawn and its mother staring back at him, bending over to pick at grass, at tufts that rise through the snow like green hair.

“There’s a bone in the middle of a deer’s heart. Did you know that?”

“Coon got one in his dingus, makes a good toothpick. You know that?”

“The truth, Lucius,” Aaron says, laughing easily, “is that the winters are long and dark and cold here. You should think about that part of your life too.”

“Don’t do much some evenings but think on it. Trouble is, my boss works me so hard, all I want to do at the end of day is to lay down my weary bones and sleep.”

Aaron makes suggestions he’s made before, ever since he brought Lucius back with him at the end of August: that Lucius consider enrolling in courses at the university; that Lucius go to S.N.C.C. meetings or C.O.R.E. meetings; that Lucius do something so that his entire life does not filter through Aaron’s life, so that he can begin to meet and know other people and families, so that he can meet women.

“Blow it out your ass with that line,” Lucius snaps. “You white guys been in the Movement get me, plugging all the white and black ass you can all summer long, then reaching out your hand to help us poor niggers, except we gotta do our plowin’ in black soil only. Damn! You don’t know shit sometimes, Levin, you’re so fucking pure.”

“Pure?”

“Yeah. Pure. You probably the only guy down there, all them babes creamin’ over you, who didn’t get anything.”

“I’m a free man, too,” Aaron says. “And a happily married one.”

“I know that. Everybody round here knows about your famous happy marriage. Only you got to be human too. Otherwise you put strains on things natural, don’t you see? I mean, when I was married, what I said was, ‘Oh, yeah, I’m married, only I ain’t a fanatic about it.’”

They ride in silence, south along Route 5, Aaron concentrating on the driving, on the dots of color in the landscape: crimson, pea-green, gray, orange. The houses are closer to the road now, closer to one another. Aaron thinks of replying, of saying that he’s human enough, that being married to one woman—one interesting woman—for eight years is no easy thing, but his mind veers to something else.

“Do you want to go back?” Aaron asks.

“Sometimes.”

“You miss Carrie?”

“Not much.”

“The child?”

“Some.”

“Well.” Lucius is Rose Morgan’s cousin and Aaron knows Lucius can trust Rose to keep an eye on Carrie and the boy. “You’re a free man too now. If—”

“Oh shit on that, Aaron. A free man. Come on!”

“If you want to go back home, I’ll take care of it. The money, I mean.”

“Is that a promise or a threat?”

“Neither.”

“You still gettin’ them calls about me?”

“What calls?”

“You know what calls. Susan told me—nasty calls about all I been doing to your wife and daughter, what you been doing to me, what I been doing to your boys—”

“I didn’t know Susan had told you.”

Lucius shrugs. “I didn’t know she kept anything from you. Thought you two shared everything—no secrets—the famous happy marriage you got.”

“There’s lots about me that Susan doesn’t know, or have to know.”

“Well, I’m glad to hear that,” Lucius says. “Relieved too, you want the truth. Only there’s something else I been wanting to tell you.”

“Yes?”

“I was never married. Not legal anyway. Rose must have told you.”

“No. But I figured.”

“You did?”

“Do you think a man as pure as Aaron Levin would have taken someone North who was abandoning wife and child?”

“I been sending money back home for the boy—to Rose—only the main thing is that I wouldn’t put a bet on him being mine.”

“So? What difference would that make?”

“The difference is some men ain’t so bighearted like you. They get a son, they want that son to be son of their blood, see? The difference is all men don’t feel about kids not their own the way you do about Susan’s.” Lucius pauses. “Anyway, jealousy’s never been one of my depths. I look at that boy and I think of all the men been in Carrie’s body.”

“Why did you marry her then—stay with her?”

“Never married her, didn’t you hear me? Don’t you listen, man?”

“I listen.”

Aaron turns off Route 5, heading west. He is pleased to be able to get a rise out of Lucius. He loves the easy way they have of bantering, teasing, and of how their conversations will suddenly, unexpectedly, become serious. When they work, eight and ten hours a day, they rarely talk, except about the business at hand. Aaron waits, knowing that if he does, Lucius will speak. Aaron feels warm and drowsy, safe within the van, the van safe within its dome of snow. The snow is less wet now, the flakes larger, falling more densely. If the snow sticks, the children will be able to go sledding in the morning. Aaron imagines Lucius on the toboggan with his children, all six feet three inches and 220 pounds of him bundled in wool and down, his coal-black face swathed in bright Scandinavian colors. He thinks of Tony and Regina, in the subway, heading for Coney Island, Regina bundling close to Tony for warmth, and he realizes that Tony will never be able to see Aaron’s drawings—how good he’s become—and that he will never be able to tell his friend Lucius about his friend Tony.

Lucius sighs. “All right. Story time, then?”

“Sure,” Aaron says. “I’d like that.”

Lucius shrugs, as if to shake off the last of his anger. “Why I stayed with her, crazy as she was? Took the easy way out maybe. My old man used to say, why go hunt up some new woman and get her broke in right when you already got one in your bed? After all the shit I lived through in prison, it was good to be with somebody wasn’t wanting something from me every minute of my life. It was good not to be scared. She was good to me, Aaron. Real good. Kind. You seen that.”

“Yes.”

“What you didn’t see was why everybody was so surprised, why they thought she was crazy. What everybody knew about her—why they couldn’t figure me and her together—was how, from the time she started dropping her drawers for whatever came along, she used to have this thing, see, where if a guy came too soon or wasn’t doing it the way she liked, she’d pull out this little penknife, stick it in the guy’s ribs, make him stay there till she got what she was after.”

“Freedom now.”

“You got it.” Lucius laughs. “Only problem was, it ain’t easy for a guy to keep it up when he got a knife in his ribs. By and by, when they found out she was doing the same thing to them all, the guys got wise to her, they just started in beating up on her and I guess I wound up feeling sorry for her, dumb me. See? I ain’t so much unlike you as I make out when it comes to wanting to help the colored people. Oh yeah. So when I come on three guys knocking the shit out of her back of the high school one night, her screaming like a cat with its ear ripped off, I let loose, picked up two of them at once, banged their heads together, then took the other guy and heaved him at the wall, broke bones.

“Well. Our size count for something once in a while, Aaron. And Carrie, by the time I got her fixed up she started being so sweet and good to me—thanking me, loving me up, telling me how she gonna change, how if anybody pulled something on me she gonna kick their ass—I just found myself staying on with her. Seemed easy. The real crazy thing was how I got to like her more than anyone I knew, how we could talk with each other, say all we wanted to without being scared. First time I ever had that with somebody—what I guess I got with you, brother—so when the kid started showing, and her telling me every day I better move my ass out or people gonna think it was mine, I just said ‘Fuck what people think,’ and stayed on.”

“But you don’t want to go back to her? You don’t ever think about going back?”

“No.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’ m sure.”

“Not to your own family either?”

“My old man, I see him again, I might kill him, make the buckle on his belt mighty sharp first.” Lucius smiles slowly. “Know that belt well. Too well. Only I figure I gonna do something like that, I save it for somebody worth killing.”

The porch light is on, and in the amber haze Aaron stamps his feet on the black rubber mat, pushes the door open, enters. They are assaulted at once, Carl on Aaron’s back, Larry all over Lucius, both boys shouting that there is a surprise waiting in the living room—someone—and Aaron has to guess who it is. Susan touches Aaron’s ear with her knuckles, lovingly, kisses him, remarks on the crazy weather, on how bitter cold it is. Didn’t Aaron wear a hat? Was their space heater working? Aaron jokes with Lucius about Jewish wives being Jewish mothers to their husbands, and Lucius smiles, accepts a kiss from Susan, blows into his hands, the palms bright pink like the insides of conch shells.

Aaron is pleased to be home. His nostrils quiver, take in the fragrances of things baking: potatoes, he guesses, and a pork roast. Buttermilk biscuits. His eyes take in color: forest-green carpeting, blue and purple Venetian glass in the bay window, ivory-white drapes, a brass menorah and silver spice box on a cherry wood table, a rose-colored smoked-glass fixture suspended from the ceiling, brightly colored hand-woven pillows on the window seat. Susan is happiest, Aaron knows—despite all her worldly talents—when she is in their upstairs bedroom alone, looking out at the backyard, working at her sewing machine, making things for the children or the house. He listens to her tell him about her day, about how peaceful it was until the children arrived home, about how they were excited by the sudden snowfall, and as she talks, leaning against the doorjamb, her head tilted, her cheek on the back of her hand, he is struck again, as if for the first time, by how extraordinarily beautiful she is.

Whenever he is away from her for more than a few hours—whenever he leaves home and returns, if only on an errand—it always seems a small miracle to him that this woman, who is more beautiful than most movie stars—a talented actress who, before she had children, probably could have been a famous movie star—is there waiting for him, that she is happy to see him, that she loves him, that she is his wife. How can it be? Sometimes when he tells her how lucky he feels—to have her, to have the family they have—she becomes annoyed, tells him that she is only a woman who happened to be born with the features she was born with. Were she not so physically beautiful, she will ask, would he love her as much?

Still, when he is with her, he often feels somewhat adrift, as if he is a small boy who needs to ask her permission for things. Why? She talks with Lucius now, laughs with him about snow, then bends down and explains to Larry that Lucius has never seen snow before. As good a wife and mother as she is, Aaron often feels that there is a curious distance between them—air—that they remain, in part, strangers, that they are never as easy with one another as she is with the children, and it occurs to him that this is so not only because they have chosen, he more than she, to hold back their full histories from one another—who they were and what they did before they met and fell in love and married—but because when he is with her, her beauty allows him to forget what he often feels when they are apart: that there is something missing. It is as if, he will imagine, she is not solid all the way through—as if several layers down there are air chambers instead of organs, tubes instead of bones—and he has to ask himself if he is only, when he feels this way, to use one of Susan’s favorite words, projecting. The truth, he knows, is that he cannot imagine, no matter how good his new life seems, ever being able not to feel that he is the one who is hollow, that some part of him is missing.

Susan moves to the alcove, between the foyer and the kitchen, inviting him there, he knows, and he goes to her, tells her that he and Lucius will have drinks—bourbon on ice, with a splash of water—and as she turns to him, smiling, he seizes her wrist, presses her against the closet door, lifts her honey-colored hair with the side of his hand, nuzzles at her neck. She hums, embraces him, takes his chin with her hand, kisses him hard. She pulls back, shows him her forearm, where the goose flesh has risen. She tells him that she misses him, and he laughs, tells her he is there. Her eyes are a strange winter shade of blue—almost transparent, like thin ice at dusk. She has never seemed more lovely, and when he thinks this he realizes that in another part of his mind he has been imagining that it is Tony and not Lucius who has come home with him, who is watching him and smiling. Poor Tony.

The children jump on them, try to pry them apart, tell him to hurry and come with them, to see who is waiting in the living room. Can he guess?

“You go—I’ll be right there with the drinks,” Susan says. Her eyes show puzzlement. Is she warning him of some danger? Have there been more calls?

He enters the living room and Paul Steiner smiles, rises from the couch, hand extended. Aaron hesitates, startled momentarily by how handsome and healthy Paul looks—as if time has gone in reverse—then moves forward, shakes Paul’s hand.

“Good to see you, Aaron. Good to be here.”

“How are you, Paul?”

“Better. Much better.”

Aaron nods. He does not, he realizes, want Lucius to sense his tightness. “I see that. I’m pleased for you.”

Jennifer and Benjamin, waiting politely, come forward now, kiss Aaron, but he knows that they can sense his unease in Paul’s presence. Benjamin sulks. Aaron turns, introduces Lucius to Paul, says that Lucius works with him. Paul tells Lucius that the children have been singing his praises.

“Will you show uncle Paul your scars?” Larry asks Lucius.

“Not now,” Paul says, touching Larry’s head, with affection. “Not now.”

“I told him about the scars you have on your back from being whipped in jail. But I bet in a fair fight you would of busted those guys good, right? You’re as strong as Daddy—”

“Lucius comes from Mississippi and he was in jail because he stood up for his rights,” Carl begins, as if reciting a speech for school assembly. “When he entered prison he weighed two hundred and fifteen pounds and when he was finally freed he only weighed one hundred and twenty pounds.”

“Hey now,” Lucius says. “No need. No need.”

“Paul is Benjamin and Jennifer’s father,” Aaron explains. “Susan’s first husband. We haven’t seen one another for a long time.”

“I’ve been away.” He glances at his children, as if for encouragement, and then continues, speaking deliberately. “I wasn’t well, you see. I had some problems and tried to take care of them.” He smiles. “They tell me I did—that I took care of them.”

“Daddy was in a private psychiatric clinic,” Jennifer says to Lucius. “Many people believe that it’s a sign of weakness to ask for help, but it’s really a sign of strength is what I believe. It took a lot of courage for my father to say ‘I-have-a-problem-that-I-cannot-solve-alone-and-I-need-help-with-it.’”

Well, Aaron thinks: she is her mother’s daughter.

“Jesus!” Benjamin says, turning away. “Why’d you have to tell Lucius? You suck, Jennifer, did you know that? You really do. You’re a real priss-ass.”

“And you are a narrow-minded immature twit.”

“But why did Lucius have to know? Jesus—”

Paul takes Benjamin by the shoulders, bends down so that they are at eye level. “There’s nothing to be ashamed of,” he says. “Mental problems are problems too—the brain and the heart are organs just as the kidneys and the lungs are—and if you have problems with your mind and your feelings, you go to the doctors and the places that fix them up.”

“Just leave me alone,” Benjamin says, pulling away from Paul, striding across the room. “Just leave me alone already.”

Carl and Larry stare at Benjamin, and in their eyes, Aaron can tell, is the hope that things will escalate—that Benjamin will lose his temper, that he and Jennifer will go at each other, that people will start arguing and screaming, that they will get the chance to gang up on their older brother. Paul is, clearly, upset by Benjamin’s surliness, by being its cause. What Paul lacks in character, Susan has always said, he makes up for in charm. Now that he is less charming—a bit humbled—will he gain in character?

Paul wears a brown tweed jacket, a button-down shirt, a soft, gray silk tie patterned with wine-red wagon wheels. He looks, Aaron thinks, exactly like the headmaster of one of the local private secondary schools—the Williston School, Deerfield Academy, Mount Hermon, North-field. All he lacks is the pipe in hand, the Irish setter at his knee, the crest on his jacket pocket. In photographs taken during their years together, he and Susan look like the ideal Wasp couple—blond and blue-eyed, patrician, cool—and he knows that this was part of the attraction for Susan: that a man who looked like the head of a Christian fraternity had been born of a mother whose flesh floated up through a chimney in Auschwitz, whose ashes served as compost for hard winter fields. Aaron thinks of the cabbages in the snow, of a man on a tractor, bundled behind a plastic wind screen against the gusting wind. He sees the tractor’s blades grind up the cold earth.

“I hope you don’t mind, my just stopping by,” Paul says. “I thought it might be easier that way. Susan told you I’d be here, didn’t she—that I have a project I hope you’ll be interested in?”

“Yes.”

“I wanted to talk to you about other things also, and I will: I wanted to say thank you for all you’ve done for my children these past years, while I was away.”

“Save it,” Aaron says, and he feels heat rise around his collar. He does not look toward Lucius or the children. He feels angry, uncomfortable, used. He imagines Paul rising from a sewer, pushing the grating aside, hoisting himself up. He sees Paul following him through the city. Why? Is he only feeling what Lucius felt looking at Carrie’s child—an adolescent jealousy towards a man who had once known his wife? Perhaps. He looks at Paul and remembers what Paul looked like the last time they saw him, when they took Benjamin and Jennifer to Stockbridge, an hour west, to the Austin Riggs Psychiatric Center. Paul’s eyes were half-closed, his face puffy, his neck rigid. Now Paul’s face is lean, well tanned, as if he has been skiing. Aaron wonders if Jennifer is recalling that last visit, if that is why she is pleased, and he wonders too if that is why Benjamin, for the same reason, is so surly. How can his father be two such different men?

Susan enters, tells the children to leave, serves drinks. Her eyes meet Aaron’s but he cannot read them. Is she worried that he will be angry afterwards because she didn’t tell him Paul was there? Paul says something to Aaron about how good the children look, how Jennifer looks more and more like Susan. Susan’s color rises. Aaron sees her as Nina in The Sea Gull, at the Williamstown Playhouse, the summer they met. He recalls something Paul said to him after his divorce from Susan was final and before Aaron and Susan were married: that by marrying a woman who looked like Susan yet was Jewish, they had it both ways—they remained within the fold while at the same time fulfilling all their fantasies about blond, blue-eyed goddesses. Aaron didn’t bother to deny it, to tell Paul that as a boy he had trained himself most of the time not to imagine the future, the life unlived. But Aaron is disturbed by Susan’s presence, by her silence, by the high color in her cheeks. Does she like the idea that her two husbands, present and past, are there with her at the same time? Does this turn her on, as if they are, somehow, sharing her? Or is he imagining this—his version of preemptive rejection—in order to deny his feelings of jealousy, in order to blame the feelings on Susan?

Paul talks about the house he has found, the restorations he wants. Aaron does not doubt Paul’s desire to insinuate himself into his and Susan’s life, and he figures he can handle that at least as well now as he did before. What bothers him is his need to imagine that Susan likes the idea, that she would want to insinuate her past into Aaron’s present, that she would want to hurt him. Why does he think this? Paul is telling Lucius that in the house, once owned by the Congregational Church, they have found secret chambers that they believe were used in the nineteenth century to hide runaway slaves on their way north to Canada. Paul says that this fact was crucial in his decision to buy the house. He says that underground railroads interest him and that, in time, Aaron will discover why. Aaron waits, shows no curiosity. He looks at the straight line of Susan’s nose, the almond shapes of her wide-set eyes. She is broadly built, robust. He imagines her on a field in Russia, a black babushka on her head, a scythe in one hand, a bundle of wheat in the other. She smiles at him without coyness, and they move off together across the field until they come to a shaded copse, by a stream. Lucius sets his drink down, half-finished, says that he is going. Aaron senses Lucius’s rage, is pleased that it is there. Lucius touches Aaron’s shoulder, leaves the room without saying goodbye to Paul or Susan.

“Sure,” Paul says. “First love is the one love worth having, I guess—the one we dream about, the one that stays with us forever—but the best marriage is often a second marriage. I hope it will be for me. From the look of things, it surely is for Susan.”

Paul looks at Aaron for confirmation, but Aaron shows nothing. They are alone in the kitchen. The children are upstairs doing their homework. Susan is driving Lucius home. What, Aaron wonders, is Paul’s game this time?

“You’ll like Debbie,” Paul says, the second time he has done so. “I want you and Susan to meet her soon. I guess I’m even hoping that the four of us might become friends. Could you live with that?”

“I thought you were here for business. Haven’t I heard Susan say that you always believed that business and friendship never mixed?”

“You’re a hard man, Aaron Levin.”

“In business or friendship?”

Paul laughs. “In both, I suspect.”

“Maybe. What’s on your mind? I have things to do.”

Paul opens a cabinet above the sink as if he has done so the day before—as if to remind Aaron of how close, in a daily way, Paul and Susan once were. Paul sets glasses on the shelf. “Look,” he says. “I guess my need to make you see how I’ve changed is a bit larger than your need to see the changes, but I am serious about the house. I’d love to have you come out and take a look at it, tell me what you think and take on the job. You’re not holding back because of Susan, are you?”

“No.”

Aaron knows that he has answered too quickly. “Think about it, though, all right?” Paul says, smiling. “If things work out, you see, the house I’m buying will be one that Benjamin and Jennifer can spend time in, where we can get to know one another again. Susan and I talked it over, before you came home. She told me she thought it would be good for the children to spend some time with me. I think she and I can be friends now in a way that—”

“I said I’ll think about it.”

“Do you have to consult with Lucius?”

“Why should I have to do that?”

“You two are in business together, aren’t you?”

“Lucius and I aren’t in business together. Lucius works for me.”

“Ah,” Paul says. “And if you take on this job, you’ll be working for me. Is that the problem—the reason you hesitate?”

“No. There are things I need to think about.”

“Such as?”

“The differences between a man like you and a man like Lucius.”

“Well,” Paul says, smiling. “He wasn’t married to Susan, I’ll grant that. Still—”

“Be careful,” Aaron says. “Your illness doesn’t give you license here.”

Paul laughs, says he sees that Aaron is still a very literal man. A literalist of the imagination perhaps? Aaron considers asking Paul why he is telling him all this but decides that he has already said too much. He imagines himself outside, in early spring, playing basketball with Lucius and Tony. In three-man ball, could anybody beat the three of them? He recalls walking along Flatbush Avenue with Tony, meeting Avie and Little Benny, Tony telling Benny that he was Jackie Robinson’s brother. Yeah. I just look pale today ‘cause of how much you guys scare me.

He wonders: after he left, did Tony ever visit Gail and Emilie? What would Gail have felt, opening the door and seeing Tony there? What would Tony have felt, embracing her, picking up the baby? Paul is talking about his upcoming marriage to Debbie, about his years with Susan, about how young Susan was when they married, about how neither of them had really tried the world very much. After their early happiness, he says, the banked fires of passion and independence exploded, and neither of them ever knew why. They still believed, all through their last miserable years together, that they loved one another, when all they really wanted was to destroy the other. They nearly succeeded, Paul says.

Does the fact that Aaron now has what Paul once had and still desires—Susan—satisfy Aaron in some way he would rather not acknowledge? Is this why he has enjoyed the bit of competitive edge to their conversation—his willingness to parry Paul’s small barbs?

When Paul talks the way he is talking now—holds forth, really—he seems very professorial. Aaron imagines him parading in front of nineteen-year-old girls at Smith College, their eyes full of desire and adulation. Aaron reminds himself that that was, after all, the way Susan met Paul. Paul had been a young instructor in Smith College’s Theater Department—Susan’s teacher, her director when she had the lead in a production of Our Town.

Aaron is relieved to hear the sound of Susan’s Ford approaching the house, the wheels squealing against snow and gravel. He will go out later, shovel the steps, plow the driveway. In the morning he will be back in Ashfield with Lucius, finishing up the trim, cutting moldings to length. They will talk about Paul.

Susan enters the kitchen, her forehead slick with melted snow. She shivers, talks about the snow turning to ice.

“Did Susan tell you how Debbie and I met—the circumstances?”

“We haven’t been alone since you got here—how could she tell me?”

“We met at my father’s funeral, actually. Debbie was the daughter of a distant cousin, the part of the family that got out of Germany before the war. My father—”

“I’m not really interested,” Aaron says. “In fact, I think our conversation is over.”

“The house is a beauty.” Paul talks as if he has not heard Aaron. “A nice old colonial, Federal style, built in 1835, with an attached barn in an ell. You can go straight from the barn to the kitchen, which is terrific for bringing in wood, or getting to the car in winter. From what little I can tell, the timbers are solid. Post-and-beam construction, chestnut for the most part, oak in the parts added on to the house in the late nineteenth century. Nobody’s lived in the house for two winters—the family was feuding over inheritance—but the roof is in reasonably good shape and—”

“I said I’ll think about it. Don’t push.”

“Me push?” Paul grins. “I wouldn’t think of it.”

“Good.”

“But how about tomorrow sometime? I can come by late afternoon.”

“I said not to push. I work tomorrow.”

“The weekend then?”

“Lucius and I promised the Lesters they could be in their house by December fifteenth, so we may work over the weekend.”

“Lucius,” Paul says. “Lucius. An interesting man.” He smiles at Susan. “You get the slave home all right?”

Susan’s mouth goes rigid, her eyes widen. She looks toward Aaron, terrified.

“Get out,” Aaron says. “Get out fast.”

Paul does not move. His eyes show no fear.

“Just testing, old man. Just wanted to make sure the ancient fires of justice are still burning within you, that the passion for the underdog and the dispossessed has not—”

“I said to get out. Now you move.”

Paul turns to Susan, “Have you told him how much I admire what he did last summer, that I read his articles?”

Susan’s fingers, on the back of Aaron’s neck, are like ice. He pulls away, numb with rage. Susan tells him to take it easy, that it’s Paul’s old way of trying to get a rise out of others, that he doesn’t mean anything by it, that he just can’t help being the way he is.

“Call it habit,” Paul says. He leaves the kitchen. “Or envy. That would be more precise. N-V—the biggest two-letter word in the English language. Envy can be a habit also, and a bad one. The worst. Imagine being me and seeing you here, Aaron. Can you? Can you imagine that? Imagine being me and seeing the way my children adore you and hang on you. Can you imagine that?” He smiles. “Imagine being me and what I might do next.”

“Oh, cut it, Paul,” Susan says. “Stop acting out. Just turn the battery to your tongue off before you get into trouble.”

“Well,” Paul says. “I am trying, believe it or not. Will you believe me? I’ll tell you what—I’ll begin to let you in on some secrets, all right? We all have secrets, and not the kind you give to doctors when you’re lying on a couch. We have other secrets, Aaron, men like you and me. How not? What you did this past summer—it’s the kind of thing I’d like to do, the kind of risk I’d like to take. And in my own way, I’m going to. Can you imagine that? Can you imagine me bringing somebody out of…”

Susan gives Paul his coat. Aaron cannot move. He thinks of the low rolling hills that surrounded them on all sides when they were driving down from Conway—the Holyoke Range to the south, the Pelham hills to the east, the Leverett hills to the north, the Berkshires to the west—all of them invisible behind the dome of snow. He thinks of Emilie, asleep in her crib, Carl and Larry looking in at her. He looks at the hanging plants, the copper pots and Delft tiles on the walls, the children’s drawings taped to the refrigerator. He hears the front door open and close.

“It’s true,” Susan says, moving toward him. She leans against him easily, and in the way she touches his cheek he senses an apology. But for what? “When the children were telling Paul about Lucius before you two came home—when they were bragging about how Lucius weighed so little when he got out of jail, Paul talked to them about his father—their grandfather, after all—and of how he weighed less than ninety pounds when the American soldiers liberated his camp, about how he came to America and made his fortune. He told them how his father was still making deals by phone from his deathbed, and—”

“Any calls today?”

“One.”

“What did he say this time?”

“I don’t know. Jennifer answered.”

Aaron blinks. He is thinking of another call, one he made eight years ago—the only time he tried to go back, the only time he risked touching the other life. He wanted to know if Gail and Emilie were all right, but he didn’t want them to know he was asking. There was only one person he could trust, and he recalls, as he dialed from a phone booth in Albany, and then began dropping quarters and dimes in, how, for a second, he began to hope that maybe Tony would be so happy to hear from him that the two of them would start talking about where they could meet, about how they would roam around the country together, how they would get enough money to buy a trailer they could live in….

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have lost my temper.”

“It’s all right. Paul still knows how to work you, to prey on your jealousy. Don’t worry about it.”

“I’m not worried. I’m angry.”

“And confused.”

“No, not really. Mostly I’m angry that he saw he could get to me.”

Is Tony there?

His heart lurches. He puts his arm around Susan, kisses her hair.

Tony who?

Tony Cremona. I know he may not live there anymore, but I wanted to get in touch with him. If—

Susan’s hand moves inside his shirt, along the small of his back. He never wished for his first life to end, he tells himself. But he wonders: had he known he would have a second life like the one he has, would he have been willing to see the first life die? And if, in some way that makes him sadder than he ever dreamt he could be, he does believe that living with Susan and their four children is like a dream come true—his deepest wish fulfilled—does that mean, even in part, that he somehow willed his new life into being?

Tony’s dead, fella.

Dead?

Where you been? He died over in Korea two years ago. Hey—who is this anyway?

“Don’t be.” Susan sighs, caresses the back of his neck, moves away and starts to put leftover food into containers, to clear the sideboard. She does not seem to notice the sadness that he believes is melting from his eyes. She does not seem to notice that anything is going on inside him besides the feelings he chooses to show her. Poor, sweet Tony. Go fly a kike, okay? Sure. Aaron blinks, feels that his eyelids are passing over dry, cold marble. Killers. “Paul,” Susan says. “Paul just likes to stage things, don’t you know that yet? He likes to set things up so that he can see how people will, under his control, react. He likes to move people around, to play god to a small, enclosed world. Same old guy. He never fools anybody for long.”

“He fooled you.”

“That’s what I said.”