Tinderbox

TWO

For as long as Adam can remember, there has been a divide in the family about the house his father’s father, Max, commenced building the year he turned fifty-one. The divide, Adam has come to understand, is, in fact, about Frank Lloyd Wright, whose Wisconsin Taliesin home was its inspiration—to the ire of Adam’s grandmother, Ida, prime minister of the hate-the-house or, more precisely, hate-Frank-Lloyd-Wright faction of the family, his father, Larry, her secretary of state. Once Adam reached an age when he could verbalize an opinion, he became his grandfather’s most vociferous ally in support of the house, an attitude he only later understood he had absorbed from his mother’s quiet admiration for the sentiments of his grandfather which the house embodied. In Adam’s case, though, his allegiances are seen as of questionable motive. As his father is fond of saying, Adam would have become a cannibal had Larry been a vegetarian.

Max, who died five years ago, had made by the standards of the family a substantial amount of money as an entertainment lawyer with a client list that Ida, dead herself now for nearly two years, never missed an opportunity to report had included at various times Zero Mostel, Dean Martin, and Doris Day. His own father had been a diamond merchant in Frankfurt who came to America in the 1880s and opened a jewelry store in South Orange, New Jersey, on whose bread-and-butter trade of gold wedding bands, silver charm bracelets, and sensible watches he raised three sons who went on to become a rabbi, a teacher, and, in Max’s case, a lawyer.

As a young man, Max had been dapper and dilettantish, in love with cloisonné pens and platinum cuff links, limited-edition pocket knives, engraved leather folios. By the time Larry was old enough to play in his father’s dressing room, there were shelves of Italian-made shoes, drawers of silk pajamas, and a cedar closet housing baskets of cashmere socks, piles of merino wool sweaters, a collection of fox-lined hats.

Then everything changed. The change took place almost overnight. It was the spring of 1952, and Max had taken his family—Ida, unhappy that they were not going to Palm Beach; Larry, an awkward and moody thirteen; and Henry, then nine—to Phoenix, where he had business to conduct for a client. The client invited all of them to his home, a house, it turned out, that had been designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. It was unlike anything any of them had ever seen: low to the ground, with cement panels and periwinkle-blue beams and ceiling-to-floor glass windows—an abode that Ida politely complimented to the owner’s face but later declared to be the ugliest house ever built.

Standing inside, looking out at the green lawn and the palm trees and the desert sky, Max, a man who until that moment had been an unadvertised atheist, felt for the first time that he had seen God—seen that the duty of mankind is to honor nature and to live in harmony with the earth and all her creatures. Simultaneously shattered and filled with joy, he’d experienced in his bones the paradox of the infinitesimal scale of each human being, the earth itself but a speck of dust in the universe, existing in concert with the infinite potential of each individual.

On his arrival home, Max vowed to live the rest of his years clothed in what he already owned. To Ida’s horror, he donated his silk pajamas and platinum cuff links and Hermès cravats to the used-clothing store run by the local B’nai B’rith ladies (from which she secretly reclaimed the cuff links for her sons), keeping for himself seven changes of clothing for each season, which he wore until they were threadbare. A month later, on a Thursday morning, he left his Riverdale home, as he did every weekday, in his yellow Cadillac. Instead of turning south toward his office in the Flatiron building, he drove north along the Taconic Parkway into the Catskills, where he remained alone for three nights, purchasing before his return an eighteen-acre lot in the township of Willow, with the intention, he informed Ida, of having Frank Lloyd Wright design them a home.

Max commenced a correspondence with the eighty-four-year-old Wright, their exchange of letters, which he showed Adam, mired in Max’s elegiac descriptions of the mountain vistas and Wright’s compulsive iterations of his contractual policies. After one visit to the bug-infested land over a particularly rainy June week during which the family stayed at a dingy hotel with lumpy mattresses and attended a cacophonic atonal concert at a nearby avant-garde music colony, Ida dug in her heels, refusing to discuss the construction of anything in what she called that godforsaken corner of the world. By the time Max was able to convince her that a nearby country home would be nice for the boys, Wright had died and his sons were both already in college. Never having wavered from the vision he’d had on the Arizona trip, Max hired an architect who had spent a brief time at Wright’s Arizona studio, Taliesin West. The architect designed a hodgepodge Prairie and Usonian house with signature Wrightian features, such as casement windows that opened wide enough for a small person to be able to crawl in and out, and a cruciform design centered on a flagstone fireplace.

Unfortunately, what was primarily needed was a proper siting of the house on the property, which was adjacent to a pond that, in the summers, attracted wild geese whose abundant fecal deposits drew all species of flying insects, including mosquitoes, wasps, and bees that nested in the low eaves formed by the flat roof. Without a basement, the flagstone floor remained damp spring, summer, and fall, with pods of black mold forming in the corners. Winters, the subfloor would constrict and thin slivers of ice would push through the blackened grout.

When Larry and Myra married, in 1967, Ida had already ceased her visits to the house. Although Max maintained a stubborn allegiance to the property, which he’d named Max’s Tali in homage to Wright’s Taliesin (a name which he pretended not to know was twisted by his sons into Max’s Folly), he was beginning to appear worn down by the seamless way the never-quite-completed construction had merged into ceaseless repairs of termite-ridden beams and rusting casement hinges.

On Myra’s first night at the house, the August before she married Larry, she donned the obligatory bug spray and joined Max on the terrace, while Larry stayed inside watching a baseball game. It was too overcast to see the moon or the stars, the air somehow both muggy and chilly, the only sound that of the mosquitoes sizzling as they flew into the citronella candles. In his soon-to-be daughter-in-law, Max found an open ear for his thoughts about Frank Lloyd Wright as a descendant of Emerson and Thoreau and a recipient of the most elevated strains of Americanism—an Americanism not about property and a New World Industrial Revolution but about the nation as the embodiment of an ideal in which spirit and equality reigned supreme over tradition and greed. It was the first time Myra had ever considered the possibility that being an American was something to cultivate and honor. For her own perpetually exhausted father, America had been a place to get ahead, the home of a grim, godless modernity, an idea about which he’d had neither the energy nor the inclination to attach any moral valence.

Until their divorce, Larry and Myra took their children every Memorial Day and Labor Day to the Willow house—trips, Adam would later learn, that were largely bolstered by his mother’s admiration of his grandfather’s vision, a sentiment which earned her a permanent place in Max’s circle of deepest affection.

At the beginning of July, Larry calls Caro to tell her that he and Betty, his third wife, will be spending the first two weeks of August at Max’s Folly, the name they have all taken to calling the house now that Max is gone. Since Ida’s death, Larry and his brother, Henry, have rented the house to two sculptors. The lease will run out at the end of the month, and Larry and Henry intend to put the house up for sale after Labor Day. During Larry’s trip, he will arrange for some painting and minor repairs to be done. Would Caro like to come for a visit with Adam, Rachida, and Omar? Not wanting to sound morbid, Caro thinks, her father refrains from saying final visit, though this is obviously the case.

“Actually, if you don’t mind having the workers around, you could stay until Labor Day. I’m having the pool liner replaced next week, and the Ping-Pong table is still set up in the dining room.”

“Did you ask Adam?”

Her father clears his throat. The tension between her brother and father has only increased with the addition of Rachida to the family. What kind of hypocritical bullshit is that? Adam sputtered when her father responded to the news of his plan to marry Rachida by asking if their children would be American or Moroccan. All my life you lecture me on the importance of marrying a Jewish woman. Not that you’ve seemed to think, since Mom, that it applied to you. What you really meant was have your babies with a white Jewish woman. Only the Ashkenazi need apply.

Adam’s comments, Caro knows, had cut her father to the quick. Her father thinks of himself as a reasonable man, an enlightened person, a man with his feet firmly planted in science but with a healthy respect for his heritage and the history of his people. In his mind, his feelings are utterly distinct from racial prejudice, even if he cannot articulate exactly how when Adam accuses him of precisely this.

“Well, I was hoping you could do that. You know Adam. If I ask, he’ll say no. Think it over, okay? I’ve got to run.”

Caro remains holding the phone, filled with the sort of uncomfortable feelings that make her want to put something in her mouth, which, in fact, she does: the rest of a box of cereal followed by the remaining third of a jar of peanut butter. By the time she reaches the jar bottom, she is too sedated and filled with disgust at her lack of self-control to think about her brother.

Adam’s response when Caro calls the following evening to convey their father’s offer comes as a surprise. “Sure. That would be great. Omar’s camp will be over early August. We can go for a week while Dad’s there and then stay for another week after that. I’ll bring Eva so she can watch Omar and I can get some work done. Rachida can come up on the weekends.”

“What do you mean we? I wasn’t thinking of staying after Dad leaves.”

When Adam speaks again, it is in the voice Caro has known since childhood: the boy who, having understood that he was too old to get into bed with their mother after a bad dream, would creep downstairs to climb in with her, the trellising details of the dream described while she tried to make herself comfortable in half of a twin bed. “Come on, Caro, your school’s closed in August. You know I can’t go without you.”

With Larry’s move to Arizona, Caro and Adam’s Memorial Day and Labor Day visits to Max’s Tali came to a halt. Instead, each August their father would travel east and they would take a two-week vacation with him, the destinations limited by Adam’s plane phobia to locales reachable by car or train, with a few days first at the Willow house. By then, with the help of abundant chemical sealants and an expert who’d succeeded in removing the geese from the property by placing poison in the pond, Max had managed to hold his own against nature’s attack on the property, and Ida, won over by the presence of her grandchildren, begrudgingly agreed to summer visits. Max built a swimming pool with a black rubber liner safe from cracks in the winter at the cost of making the water ominously opaque and installed a Ping-Pong table in the dining room, where they held nightly round-robin doubles tournaments, the pairings—plump Ida and clumsy Adam, tanned Larry and bespectacled Max—amusingly reported by Caro in her nightly calls home to her mother.

Adam can no longer recall when they ceased the August visits to Willow. It must have been, he thinks, when his father finally threw in the towel on those summer trips, all of which involved endless car drives during which Adam would try to mitigate the boredom by reading in the backseat, resulting in a car sickness whose progression could be measured in the accelerating yellow cast to his skin. Having arrived at their destination, a mountain or lake or beach cottage somewhere, Adam would stay inside with his nose in a book, a choice that yielded the satisfaction of substantially pissing off his father.

It was on one of those occasions that he discovered the story of Wright’s original Taliesin home. He’d run out of reading material before they left Willow and borrowed a book about Wright from his grandfather’s bookcase for the trip, which that year was to a cottage on Prince Edward Island that bordered the St. Lawrence Sound. His father and Caro had just come in from an afternoon at an empty, duned beach, an excursion which his father had first attempted to cajole him to join, then threatened punishment if he did not, before reaching a final peevish “Suit yourself, your loss, not ours.”

Larry was on the back patio shaking the sand out of the towels and tote bags when Adam, whose late pubescence had left him beached in a place neither child nor man, swung open the screen door.

“Did you know that the original Taliesin burned to the ground?”

“No, I never heard that.” Larry sat down on the picnic bench and began working on a recalcitrant sandal strap.

“Mamah Borthwick Cheney, Wright’s mistress”—Adam could not hide the pleasure in being able to use this last word—“and two of her children and three other people were ax-murdered.”

“Really.”

Adam was dancing from foot to foot, approaching a state when he would get so excited his voice would crack, his father yelling, “Jesus Christ, calm the fuck down,” and Adam shouting, “Look at you, look at you, fuck fuck fuck…” before he stormed out—which here would entail climbing down the red clay cliffs to the water’s edge, where, knobby-kneed and weak-ankled, he might slip on the rocks and, Adam’s imagination jumping ahead, flail in the crashing waves.

“Ax-murdered,” Adam repeated in a mock spooky voice.

Larry sat up, a sandal in each hand. “What are you talking about?”

“The servant from Barbados doused the dining room with gasoline, sealed off all the doors but one, lit a match, and then stood at the remaining door axing everyone as they came out.”

Adam sank down on his haunches and swung an imaginary ax through the damp hot air. His father stared at him with a look of disgust, as though he were holding back from saying something along the lines of Don’t you think you’re a little old for this sort of stuff? At your age, I was sneaking Playboy magazines under my bed.

“So, how did Frank Lloyd Wright survive this carnage?” Larry asked.

“He wasn’t there.” Although Adam had not intended for there to be an analogy drawn to his absent father, recognizing the potential, he lingered on the last syllable and then, without a backward glance, picked up his book and returned inside.

Since then, Adam has read different versions of the first Taliesin fire. (The house was rebuilt and then caught fire again.) In some accounts, the culprit was, as he’d originally read, a man from Barbados. In others, he was a recently fired servant enraged by his dismissal; a manservant abusively treated by Wright’s lover, Mamah Cheney; a cook driven mad by the immorality of Wright and Cheney, both of whom had left their spouses and children to travel together to Europe, living openly together without so much as a hint of shame. Hussy, Mamah would hear the cook mumbling as he diced apples for cobbler and onions for pork stuffing. In some versions, all egresses from the Wright dining room were sealed. In others, certain members of Wright’s studio escaped through the casement windows. In all of them, it was the fire in the luncheon room that sent the victims into the arms of the man with the ax.

They leave at two o’clock on a Saturday afternoon, Eva and Omar in the backseat with the cooler Myra has filled with cold drinks and snacks, Adam in the passenger seat, Caro behind the wheel. Rachida is on call for the weekend, her goodbyes whispered to Adam and Omar while they were still half-asleep. Myra stands on the street watching the last-minute loading of bags and buckling of seat belts.

For the past week, Caro has tried to convince her mother to come up the following Saturday with Rachida, by which time her father and Betty will have left.

“Thank you, darling. It’s sweet of you to invite me, but I wouldn’t feel comfortable.”

“I’d tell Dad. I’m sure he’d have no problem with your staying with us.”

“It’s not him. It’s me. You know that I don’t enjoy nostalgia trips. I’ve never even gone back to see my parents’ house in Baltimore.”

By the time they reach the thruway, Omar and Eva have both fallen asleep. Adam opens his window and closes his eyes.

It’s five when they arrive at the Willow house. Larry comes out to the driveway in time to see his daughter drive up with three inert bodies. “I’m glad everyone’s so excited to be here.”

Adam opens the car door, stumbles toward the bushes, leans over the blue hydrangeas, and throws up.

“Jesus,” Larry calls out. “Are you all right?”

Adam picks up his glasses, which have fallen onto the gravel. He wipes his mouth on the back of his arm, points at the house, and heads inside.

Caro shakes Eva and Omar awake. When she turns around, Betty is there, barefoot in micro white shorts that hug her broad bottom and show off her long, tanned legs. Betty pinches her nose. “What is that foul smell?”

Caro kisses Betty on the cheek. “Adam puked in the bushes.”

Omar climbs out of the car and hugs his grandfather. Eva stands with the coolor pressed against her middle, looking around.

“Betty, Dad—this is Eva. Eva—this is my father, Larry, and Betty. Wow, it is nasty smelling…”

“I’ll get the hose.” Betty blows kisses at everyone, then heads to the side of the house. Larry takes the cooler from Eva.

“It is so beautiful here,” Eva says. “I never see anything like this except in The Sound of Music. At the beginning, where Maria sings.”

“It’s the Catskills, not the Alps,” Larry says. “But it is pretty.”

Betty drags the hose over to the bushes and begins spraying them. The kitchen door bangs and Adam reappears, clammy and pale. “I should do that,” he says.

“I got it, lovey. Remember, I grew up on a ranch in New Zealand. This is nothing next to what the dogs would drag home. Chewed-up rabbits and worse.”

“Go,” Caro directs, “rest by the pool. I’ll unload the car.”

“Turn off the stove,” Betty hollers. “Swedish meatballs should be done.”

Caro and Larry carry the bags inside, the bedroom arrangements having been worked out over the phone: Adam in the guest room with the queen bed, so there will be space for Rachida when she comes, Eva and Omar in the bunk beds in what Grandma Ida had called the children’s room, Caro on the couch in the den until her father and Betty leave, when she will move into what had been her grandparents’ room.

Caro pulls on her black tank suit, covering up her excesses with an oversized T-shirt. Most of the time, she feels at peace that she is never going to be anyone to look at, her brief foray with having a sexy figure the year she lived abroad having borne nothing worthwhile. Given one wish, it would not be to have that body again but, rather, to eat normally: three meals a day and a snack here and there. Around her father, though, she is always thrown back into the feeling she has had since her solid child’s body morphed into something with bulges in the right, but also in too many of the wrong, places—that she has disappointed him by not being a beauty.

She climbs the flagstone steps to the pool, where Eva and Omar are already in the water, squealing as they take turns throwing a basketball into a floating hoop left by the tenants. Eva has on a tomato-red bathing suit with an attached skirt and a stiff built-in brassiere, absurdly large on her, a hand-me-down, perhaps, from Ursula or Alicia.

Her father and Betty are seated under an umbrella with drinks in their hands. Adam is sprawled on a chaise at the edge of the pool with his eyes closed.

“Miss Caro, Miss Caro!” Eva waves.

“You found your suits.”

“Dr. M. tell me to pack them on top of the suitcases so Omar can swim right away. Omar show me the way Mr. Adam used to go to the pool. Through the window!”

Caro had forgotten this, that Adam would leave the screen propped against the bedroom wall so he could come and go through the window.

Betty pours Caro a drink that looks like a melted lollipop. “Have a meatball,” she says, pointing at the platter. “Nice, isn’t it? I like seeing the mountains. And it’s so cool compared to Arizona. You can’t even be outside in August there.”

Betty flings her legs up so that her bunioned but well-manicured feet rest on Larry’s thighs. Caro feels her jaw tighten as she recalls her last visit to Tucson, when an evening had similarly commenced with a pitcher of something too sweet and had then proceeded to Betty pressing her pelvis against her father and calling him her baby cucumber.

“I have to admit, for the first time, this visit, I understand why my father loved it here.”

Adam opens his eyes.

“Where did you say Eva’s from?” Betty asks Adam. “She seems like a sweet girl.”

“Iquitos. That’s a city on the Amazon in northern Peru.”

“I didn’t know the Amazon went through Peru. Geography.” Betty laughs. “Well, school in general, was never my thing.”

“Eva,” Adam says to Betty, “is what you would call one of us. Her great-great-grandfather was a Jew from Morocco.”

“She knew Rachida?”

Adam raises the back of the chaise so he is sitting up. He sniffs his drink. “Eva’s great-great-grandfather was a rubber trader from Rabat who lived in the Amazon at the turn of the century. The rest of her heritage is Bora Indian.”

“So she’s an Indian Jew?” her father asks. “I never heard of that.”

“Grow up, Dad. There are Chinese Jews. There are Pakistani Jews. Judaism is a religion, not a blood type.”

Caro stands. “I’m going for a swim.” She shoots her father a look. He nods and rises to his feet. Caro takes Adam’s drink from his hand while her father yanks Adam’s glasses from his nose.

“You grow up,” Caro says as she and her father tip Adam into the pool.

It is the first evening Myra has been alone in the house in nearly two months. She sits in the garden with her notebook in hand, pleased but also a bit disoriented by the solitude.

At the front of the notebook, she keeps her master list, her evolving teleology of love, which she has titled “A History of One Woman’s Passions.” At first, as for all mammals, she has written, there is the breast or, in her case, the substitute bottle, since she was born at a time when breastfeeding was viewed as slightly barbaric. Only for her, the bottle had been simply that—a disembodied receptacle with no sensual body attuned to hers. Anything more would have terrified her mother. Where her appetite should have been, Myra was left with a hole, so that to this day food brings her no pleasure; she eats to squelch hunger and acquire fuel, having to remind herself in the same way she has to pay attention to put gas in her car. But, of course, Dreis, her former analyst, said, you were starved for love. No cookie would do.

Looking out from her crib, she saw the shadows of the venetian blinds on the walls, the shift as the sun rose in the sky and the room lightened. Then later, the love of I can do it: walk, talk, ride, draw, and then read, which led to books, her first passion, the world opening from the pages. Books remained preeminent through her discovery of her own late-blooming body, not dwarfed until she found men: a boy in high school who read poetry and kissed her on a damp summer lawn, a boy in college who played the cello and had long lean legs and thick dirty blond hair. She slept naked with him, let him make her come with his fingers. It had been he, not she, who was too scared to have intercourse. With Larry, there had been her first and only deep romantic love, but it paled, or perhaps simply faded, with the onslaught of the love of her children, when she knew that she could survive the loss of him but not of them.

There had been the twisted attachment, a sort of love, really, Dreis proclaimed, that she developed for pain: the miscarriages, over and over; her parents’ deaths, which left her not with a feeling of loss but with a sense of utter aloneness as she recognized that she had never been able to love either of them because neither had loved her. They had taken care of her the way a turtle does her young: providing until the season when the offspring can manage on its own. Foods with adequate nutrients, given without pleasure, so they were stripped of taste, shelter scrubbed so it felt more like an institution than a home, protection that forbade joy but left her limbs intact. Her parents died so quickly, there was no opportunity for her to take care of them (even that, it seemed, they had deprived her of), to transform what they’d not given her into something she would do for them.

With Dreis, she felt for the first time what it was like to be seen and understood by another; with her patients, she learned that the experience was equally profound when she was the one with the mirror to show them who they were, the vision of what they could be. After the divorce, there was love of nature, which she found in her garden and terra-cotta pots, in her daily walks in the park—the world transformed from the ammonia scent of her mother’s house into a thing of beauty. And then, with her fiftieth birthday, there was the piano, the awe she felt when the patterns in the Bach Inventions began to reveal themselves to her, when she could glimpse the logic of a Chopin mazurka.

Briefly, she’d thought she might discover a love of God, but a month of Saturdays in a synagogue left her embarrassed, sadly aware that it was too late for her not to experience the rituals as false or, worse, silly. When she discovered that, for her, God is grace, the pieces fell into place. That she could do. She would aspire to live with grace, even more, to embody grace, her home infused with as much beauty and generosity as she could muster. It was with this idea, this latest stage of her teleology, that she had opened her home to Adam and Rachida and Omar, with the hope that Adam would finish a screenplay he could sell for some respectable money and Rachida would do her fellowship and Omar would march his little self through first grade. Opened her home, she’d not recognized at the time but had to now, to Eva as well. Eva with her dreams of next year in Jerusalem.

At dusk, Myra waters the flowering beds and blooming herbs, then locks the terrace door, leaving her garden clogs on the deck. Barefoot, she climbs the stairs to the music room, where she sits down to play without the sound of footsteps overhead. She begins with the major scales, advancing by fifths, first hands separate, triple octaves, then hands in tandem, and then one ascending while the other descends, a pattern, her teacher showed her, which creates a series of chords while keeping the fingering between the hands the same. She proceeds to arpeggios, saving the sevenths for last: the progression from the joyful third, celebration of life, to the melancholic seventh, mournful reminder of its fading.

When she first learned the cycle of fifths, it had taken her breath away, the mathematical perfection, the way the magic happens no matter the scale. As a child, she’d loved mathematics, not for the pyrotechnics of computation, but for the mystical nature of an invention that insists on utter independence from its creator, an invisible system more discovered than constructed, so that studying trigonometry or doing geometric proofs felt like unveiling the laws of the universe—as if those were not also a fiction of man. Larry had also loved mathematics. But what he loved was the use to which numbers could be put—the prediction of velocities and markets and weather patterns—a kind of exploitation, Myra had felt, of mathematics for man’s purposes rather than a reverence for its poetry.

Larry found these thoughts of hers very sweet, very feminine. Her mind literally turned him on. He’d listen to her talk and wrap his arms around her or fondle her breasts and press his groin against hers. It took her years to realize how degrading she found this, how his actions implied that her ideas were soft next to the harder qualities of his, and how his amusement at her mind was for him a metaphor of sexual conquest, of being able to pin her against a wall or hold her beneath him in bed.

When she’d discovered Larry’s affair and told him to leave, her father-in-law, Max, sixty-six and in his last year of work, seemed more heartbroken than his son, who, at first, seemed half-relieved. Not knowing what else to do, Max invited her to lunch. Seated across the table from her at La Caravelle, he asked her to consider the implications of her decision for the children. Silently, Myra, who in the prior five years had miscarried six times and buried both her parents, wept into her leek soup.

Max offered her his handkerchief, which she blotched with her tears and then accidentally dropped in her soup.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s unfair of me to ask you that. Larry is just so goddamned weak. Smart but weak. He couldn’t bear your grief over your miscarriages. The girl, the secretary, receptionist, whatever the hell she is, he was trying to keep you from getting pregnant again.”

Her head bent, Myra nodded. What Max said was so true, she immediately recognized it as something she already knew. And although it did not make her feel she could trust Larry again or remain married to him, it had changed everything, because she could no longer hate him. To the contrary, with the truth of her father-in-law’s comment in mind, she had come to feel toward Larry a mild, neutered affection, a feeling not unlike what she might have for a former schoolteacher or neighbor, an affection that allowed her to go forward unencumbered by powerful emotions.

Before Larry’s infidelity, she’d visualized the four of them—Larry, Caro, Adam, and herself—as a four-sided form: a square, a rectangle, a parallelogram, a quadrilateral, a tetrahedron. Afterward, they became a pentagon: the fifth position occupied first by the receptionist and then by each of Larry’s subsequent two wives. When she invited Adam, Rachida, and Omar to stay with her this year, she imagined again a four-sided form. Now, though, there is Eva. Again, a fifth.

The week that Caro, Adam, Omar, and Eva spend with Larry and Betty proceeds with surprising ease. Larry has purchased a month’s membership to the local country club. Each morning, he leaves with Eva and Omar to spend the day teaching them the rudiments of golf and tennis, buying them lunch at the clubhouse, goofing around with them on the shuffleboard court. Around noon, Adam disappears into his room with the door closed, at work on his rewrite of The Searchers, and Betty heads out to go shopping for what she calls antiques—napkin rings, a ceramic spoon rest, a wooden duck—leaving the pool area deliciously free for Caro to read and swim.

Every day, over breakfast, Larry and Adam debate the merits of various Westerns in preparation for the choice of the evening’s viewing. Caro had forgotten that Adam’s love of these movies came from her father, who now sees them as a ratification of his decision to move to Arizona. For Adam, it is as though his expertise about Westerns compensates for his being unable to do any of the things the men in these stories routinely do: ride a horse, shoot a gun, woo a woman, punch a man. With Eva’s reaction to The Searchers, Caro at first worries about her watching the other movies Adam and her father choose, but whatever bothered Eva in The Searchers does not seem to do so with The Magnificent Seven, The Naked Spur, Stagecoach, Shane.

On Wednesday afternoon, the phone rings while Caro is at the pool. When Adam fails to pick up, Caro races down the steps.

“Hey,” Rachida says.

“Is everything okay?”

“Yeah. Only I have to cancel coming up. I’m on call.”

Caro can hear the tension in Rachida’s voice. “I’ll find Adam.”

“Just tell him, okay? I’ll talk to him when Omar calls before bed. I’ve got to get to rounds.”

“Sure.” Caro looks at her watch. It is two o’clock. From what she remembers with her father, rounds are usually first thing in the morning and then at the end of the day.

Annoyed that Adam didn’t answer the phone, she knocks on his door. She knocks again and then, in the way of family members, turns the knob.

The door is locked. “One minute,” Adam calls out. She waits, wondering what the hell she is waiting for.

When Adam opens the door, he looks disheveled. The blinds are shut and the bed is unmade. There’s a musky smell in the room. Her stomach turns.

“Did I wake you?”

“Just a little snooze.”

“That was Rachida. She can’t come this weekend. She’s on call.”

Adam knits his brows. “How can she be on call? She was on call last weekend.”

Caro examines her brother. Everything needs to be trimmed: hair, beard, fingernails. She hates feeling caught between him and Rachida. “That’s what she said. She said she’d talk to you about it tonight.”

It is past midnight when Myra hears Rachida come in. Unable to fall back asleep, she sits in her office with a blanket over her knees, looking out at a milky moon hovering over a treetop. She tries to read, her concentration pierced by memories of the Willow house, where her children now are, and the early years of her marriage, before the call, before everything halted, when she’d spent so much time there herself.

The call. For years, it had felt as though it had taken up permanent residence in her consciousness, that she was locked in its confines, in the supra-intensity of those moments. Now, though, it has been years since she has thought about it at all.

Still, it’s all there: Caro in the kitchen doing her third-grade homework; Adam in the tub, blowing bubbles through a wand, just old enough to be left alone in the water, with firm instructions not to stand up while Myra went to answer the phone in her bedroom.

“Is he home?”

It was a woman’s voice, loud and demanding, so that Myra, with her mind still on Adam in the tub, jumped to the easiest conclusion: a patient who had somehow gotten hold of their number, even though Larry kept it unlisted so that patients would have to go through his service to reach him on evenings and weekends.

“Where is he?”

In fact, Myra could not say. She had stopped trying to keep track of Larry’s schedule. Sometimes he arrived home in time to kiss the children good night, sometimes not. There were women she knew from the playground who considered taming the hour of their husband’s return home as the index of their control in the marriage, but on her end, aside from wishing the children would get to see more of their father, it didn’t much matter. Her evening routine with Adam and Caro, in fact, went more smoothly when Larry came home after they were asleep. On those nights, she would sit with him while he ate a reheated plate of whatever she’d prepared earlier for the children, her mind already on the reading or other work she needed to do for her next day’s classes.

The woman on the other end of the line began to cry.

“Is there something I can help you with?” Myra asked.

“You can tell that prick if he doesn’t leave you, he’s going to be sorry. Real sorry.”

“Excuse me,” Myra said. Her voice was small and hollow. “I have to get my son out of the bath.”

Myra hung up. Her heart was pounding so wildly she had to sit down on the edge of the bed. The phone rang again. She let it ring and ring. When she finally picked up, the woman screamed, “Eight months. Eight goddamned months.” She made a sound that was either a sob or a laugh. “That bastard’s been screwing me for eight goddamned months, telling me goddamned lies.”

Myra hung up again. She leaned down to unplug the phone. Already, the phone was ringing again. The jack was behind the bed, and she had to go onto her hands and knees to reach it. When she stood back up, she held on to the headboard to keep from blacking out.

In the bathroom, Adam had moved on to playing with his pirate boat. At seven, he was on the verge of becoming too old for playing in the tub. Too old for bubbles and pirate boats. Too young to go through a divorce, but in the time she’d walked from her bedroom back into the bathroom, she’d seen into the months and years ahead to what would happen.

She got Adam out of the tub, dried him, and sent him to get into his pajamas. Then she knelt next to the toilet, a wave of nausea yielding the dinner she’d had with the children. The eight months made perfect sense. It coincided precisely with the last time she and Larry had had sex, with the polite chill that had fallen between them. With the way that her marriage had come to occupy fewer and fewer of her thoughts, slipping lower on her list of priorities, behind the children, behind her classes, behind her work with Dreis on the backlog of grief she felt about the six miscarriages which had left her afraid to try again but still longing for another child—a longing Dreis had gently begun to show her had its origins in never having felt longed for herself, her parents’ deaths having made finite what had never taken place.

She rinsed out her mouth at the sink. She knew women who had gone insane with jealous rage after discovering their husbands’ affairs. When her neighbor downstairs had learned in the ninth month of her pregnancy that her vain husband had slept with another woman on an out-of-town business trip, she put as many of his prized Ferragamo shoes as she could fit into the oven and roasted them until they turned into something resembling beef jerky. Another woman from the playground tore her husband’s photographs of his mother, who’d died when he was eleven, into confetti and then, weeping, flushed the pieces with her wedding ring down the toilet. Afterward, she begged him to come back.

Myra washed her face. The woman had sounded thirtyish. Myra imagined her having peroxided blond hair and big breasts. She imagined Larry atop her, thrusting and grunting. She imagined the woman sucking Larry while he sat upright in his desk chair, swallowing his cum, the way she could never bring herself to do. She imagined Larry mounting the woman from behind and holding on to her squishy breasts.

The images had brought with them a sharp pain that started in her throat and moved into her gut. The pain was not about Larry touching someone else. It was not because she wanted to be the woman. The images brought pain because, with this breach, she knew she would never again be able to sleep in the same bed with Larry or let him touch her in any way. They brought pain because this was the father of her children, the man with whom she had conceived eight times (with this thought, which came after the good-night kiss she gave Adam and the chapter of Little Women she read to Caro, the sobs came hard and fast), because now there would be no more children and Adam and Caro would have to be told all the stupid unbelievable things children of divorce are told about how their parents no longer love each other but will still always love them.

For their last evening in the Willow house, Larry suggests that they grill salmon steaks. Betty buys corn on the cob and tomatoes from the farmers’ market and Caro and Omar bake brownies for dessert. Adam, Larry notices, actually changes his shirt.

Eva and Omar ring the terrace with citronella candles, paltry defense against the mosquitoes, so they can eat outside. The divide in the family about the merits of the house had been mirrored in the divide between who did and did not get bitten by mosquitoes. Larry and his mother, Ida, had been eaten alive; Max (always lobbying to dine on the terrace), Myra, and Adam had never been touched.

Larry sprays his arms and legs with insecticide and, out of homage to his father, takes his glass of wine outside. He turns on the grill. The last time he can recall eating on the terrace was with Myra. It must have been her suggestion, to please his father, who, she argued, had paid his doghouse dues for the house.

His father had loved Myra from the moment Larry introduced them. A woman with a soul, his father announced. Myra was twenty-three, an assistant at a publishing house. Larry was thirty, in the last year of his cardiology residency. He had slept with thirteen girls, the first few, girls from his set, well versed on the pros and cons of Bergdorf’s versus Bendel’s, with good tennis serves and strong opinions on the diamond settings they expected. He had broken off two engagements, one because he’d developed an aversion to the way the girl smelled, the second because he’d decided after six months of her endless complaining—how her dresses came back from the cleaners, the temperature of a consommé, the hours he watched baseball on television—that he would rather kill himself than spend the rest of his life listening to her.

It had been a fluke that he even met Myra, at a book party, an event he never would have attended had another resident, a cousin of the author, not brought him along on the way to a bar they frequented. It was the first time he’d been at a book party and he’d not known quite what to do. Myra was behind the table where they were selling copies of the book. She had small breasts, dark hair pulled back in a ponytail, and a thin prominent nose that made it impossible to call her pretty but that he would later realize made her quite beautiful. She was dressed in a long Indian skirt and embroidered shoes. He bought a copy of the book so as to be able to talk with her.

She was like no girl he’d ever dated. She read Rilke in French and Marcuse and Virginia Woolf and grew dozens of plants in her tiny apartment on the fourth floor of a brownstone on Seventy-fourth Street. She spent her meager salary on tickets for nosebleed seats to hear Glenn Gould play the Goldberg Variations at Carnegie Hall. His mother, disapproving of Myra’s clothes, unhinged by her stillness, the strangeness of a girl who didn’t make chirpy entertaining conversation, pursed her lips before issuing a damning She seems very nice.

Larry had understood his father’s comment that Myra had a soul to mean that he himself lacked depth. It hurt him because he had chosen cardiology precisely because of the metaphors, which he believed, about the heart. It hurt him because he knew it was true. He was loud. He drank a lot. He loved to play tennis, ski, watch sports on television. He’d been fucking regularly since he was fifteen. He and Myra, he believed, were yin and yang. With her, he believed, he would gain access to a river of meaning that ran beneath the surface of things, a river he’d been aware of on rare occasions, sometimes after sitting with his mother in synagogue for most of the Yom Kippur day, once when his father had taken his brother, Henry, and him on a mule trip into the Grand Canyon and they’d slept outside so they could watch the shooting stars.

And indeed, at first he and Myra had felt like two pieces of a puzzle that fit together. He’d taught her to ski, lifted her high in the air, skis and all, when she’d made it down the bunny slope the first time, her cheeks red, her eyes glistening with pride. He’d taken her on her first airplane ride, to a hotel in Puerto Rico where he’d ordered rum drinks for them both from the swim-up bar in the pool and chartered a sailing boat for the afternoon. And although she had been shy and inexperienced in bed, she’d let him teach her about her body and then his.

Caro pokes her head out the door. “Are you ready for the fish?”

“Sure.”

Larry watches his daughter carry the platter, an oven mitt and a long spatula squeezed under an arm. Adam had inherited Myra’s graceful form, hidden now under his middle-aged tire and schlumpy gait. In Caro, it is his mother’s body reincarnate—the heavy breasts, the short legs—and his own narrow, deeply set brown eyes. He watches his daughter the way he might watch a patient or even a stranger, with an odd distance between them that he would not say distresses him but leaves him feeling disconnected from himself, his love for her absolutely there but out of sight, like the shed on the distant edge of his land.

She smiles at him as she sets the platter next to the grill. A wave of gratitude passes over him that she has always been sweet to him, that, unlike Adam, she has not held the divorce against him. Not that she isn’t tough. She had driven a hard bargain when she wanted to buy her apartment, but he had admired her shrewdness and not resented her for it. Like her mother, who has always been meticulously fair with him about money, something he knows from his divorced friends is virtually unheard of, his daughter holds firm to a standard of reasonableness and equity.

Larry puts the salmon on the grill and hands the platter to Caro to take back inside. He sits on the stone wall of the terrace waiting for the steaks to cook on the first side. When the children were little, he’d been besotted with them. He’d prided himself on being a hands-on father: changing diapers, giving baths, taking the children on Saturdays to the park so Myra could have some time for herself. Saturday nights, there had been a standing babysitter, and he and Myra would go out to dinner, laughing that they seemed mostly to talk about the kids, on occasion leaving before dessert, unable to stay away any longer from their sleeping babes, and then, after paying the babysitter, having sex, sometimes on the living-room floor, while Myra chastised him about Caro and Adam being able to hear them if they awoke, but mostly in their bed, where Larry would marvel that he lusted even more for his wife since they’d had children together.

Then came the miscarriages, each at ten to eleven weeks. Myra had braved the first and second with a stiff upper lip. Her gynecologist reassured her that one out of four conceptions miscarry. Larry can no longer remember the exact order of things after that: the progesterone suppositories, which left her so sluggish she could barely stay awake; her parents dying within ten months of one another; her decision to use the money she’d inherited to go to graduate school. Another miscarriage, this time with so much bleeding he had to rush her to the emergency room. The night he called her a selfish bitch, Jesus fucking Christ, he yelled, we have two beautiful children who you’re fucking neglecting now, either sleeping all the time or off at your useless classes. He still remembers the devastated look on her face as she took her pillow so she could sleep on the couch, and then, in the middle of the night, hearing her throwing up in the bathroom and realizing she was pregnant again.

After the sixth miscarriage, he found himself devising excuses to stay later at the office. He would look up at the clock and it would be nearly eight. With the children already in bed, there seemed no reason not to go out to eat by himself. No reason not to schedule the racquet ball games he’d always squeezed into his lunch hour for after work.

The less time he spent with his kids, the less satisfying the time with them became. He no longer knew which was Adam’s latest favorite bedtime story. He missed Caro’s transition from bathtub to shower, was not aware that she had made it to the twelves on the multiplication table. On the rare evenings when he was home before the children went to bed, Adam would insist that his mother read to him and Caro would forget to give him a good-night kiss. Myra stopped leaving food covered with foil for him in the fridge. Then came the night when he told his receptionist, Sheri, who, he had to admit, he’d hired in part because of her enormous boobs, and his nurse, who hated his receptionist for those appendages, to go home, he would lock up. His nurse called out a goodbye as she left. Was he truly surprised when Sheri appeared at his office door with her blouse unbuttoned and her size D brassiere on display?

Larry flips the salmon steaks, basting them with the marinade Betty made. Through the kitchen window, he can see Betty putting pats of butter on the corn, Caro tossing the salad.

Strangely, thinking back, he’d not been angry at Sheri for calling Myra. He moved his clothing into her apartment in Yorkville, never arguing with Myra about the children’s visitation schedule, which he let her set, all the while certain that after Myra finished her Ph.D. and the renovation on the brownstone she’d bought with her inheritance, they would have a serious talk in which they would agree to stop this silly charade about getting divorced and he would stop fucking Sheri and move into the house with the children and her.

When, eight months after he’d moved out, he phoned Myra to suggest a dinner, the venue, he imagined, for the serious talk, she seemed already to know what he intended to tell her.

“We’re collaborating so well about the children,” she said. “Let’s not ruin it by saying a lot of painful things that we won’t be able to forget.”

“What do you mean?” A bitter taste was filling his mouth.

“Larry, don’t ask me.” For a moment, he thought perhaps she was crying. “The answer is no. It’s as no as no can ever be. I cannot go backward. I’ll have my Ph.D. in a month. The children and I are moving into the brownstone in June.”

“We have our entire lives before us. The kids are only eight and ten. Think of them. How much happier they’d be if we got back together.”

“You should have thought about that before you slept with Sheri.”

“Sheri is nothing. Something that never would have happened had we not been falling apart.”

“And why were we falling apart? Have you thought about that?”

The truth was he had not.

“Your father told me it was because you couldn’t tolerate the pain I was in.”

“When did he say that?”

“He took me out to lunch, right after we separated.”

Then he did something stupid, something he can understand only as desperation, desperation at the vision of his life stretching before him, the life of a divorced father, the distance that would develop with his children, the shallowness of Sheri and the others who would follow. Or perhaps it was hurt that his father, who had hardly talked with him since he’d moved in with Sheri, had talked, instead, with Myra. “We could keep trying,” he said. “We could get pregnant again.”

He heard Myra suck in her breath. Then the line went dead.

In the morning, he called a realtor, who by week’s end had found him a two-bedroom apartment in a building with a garage and health club. He gave Sheri three weeks’ severance pay and a pair of gold earrings. He went to Bloomingdale’s and in an afternoon bought a leather sectional couch, a glass coffee table, a dining-room set, a king-sized bed for the master bedroom, twin beds for the room where the kids would stay on their alternate weekend visits, and a wall unit for the expensive television and stereo equipment he purchased the next day. He leased a Porsche for the garage and bought a silk bathrobe that he hung in his closet for the want-to-be models and actresses happy to sleep with a thirty-nine-year-old cardiologist with plenty of money for nice restaurants and weekends in the Hamptons. And still, all the while, he imagined that sometime, not now, but not too long from now, when the time was right, he’d have his dinner with Myra and his life would return to … the word he thought, over and over, was normal.

After two years had passed, he had to acknowledge that this time was not going to come. He fell into a depression that left him with a pit in his stomach and unable to sleep, which he dug himself out of by the move to Tucson to join a practice that even in his sickened state of mind he had the instinct to know would make him rich.

With his move, he had seen the children for two weeks each August, during the time between Christmas and New Year’s, when he’d stay in a suite at the Stanhope (even Adam unable to resist the pleasures of room service and television in bed and a visit to F.A.O. Schwarz), and then during their March break, when Myra would bring them by train to Tucson to stay with him in the house he’d bought on the west side of town, a Spanish-style casita with a ten-stall barn and a four-car garage and a gunite pool with an attached hot tub. Myra would do a house exchange with a retired French professor from the University of Tucson, an arrangement about which Larry had been deeply grateful, since Adam, even at thirteen, would not have been able to manage ten days without seeing his mother.

Each year, he picked up what he still thought of as his family at the train station, the children grumpy, dragging the backpacks out of which they’d lived for two days, Myra astonishingly crisp in her tailored pants and white blouse. Because of his car sickness, Adam would sit in the front seat, Caro and Myra in the back, while they drove to the French professor’s house, a bungalow near the university, close enough to shopping that Myra didn’t have to rent a car. He’d carry Myra’s suitcase to the front door while she hugged the children goodbye, reminding Adam to take his allergy medicine, the pill at bedtime, the nose spray in the morning, promising Caro that she’d call them every night.

Larry tests the salmon steaks with a fork. “I need a serving platter,” he calls out.

He can no longer remember how many of those March trips there had been, or on which of them he’d made a fool of himself with Myra, only that he’d already introduced Caro and Adam to Linda, whose lingerie model’s body, on exhibit in her tight T-shirts and horsewoman’s jeans and boots, embarrassed them—her spending problem, centered on shoes and handbags, still unknown to him.

The children had been old enough to be left alone at the house for a few hours, which he did one evening while he went to check on a patient at the hospital. His patient, who’d had quadruple bypass surgery at six in the morning, was staring at the ceiling while his wife busied herself rearranging the objects on the bedside stand, preoccupied in the anxious way of people visiting someone truly ill with an attempt to be useful. Larry asked her to step outside, not because he intended to examine his patient—that would be left to the surgical resident—but rather because he knew that a break from the sickroom, which she would do only on doctor’s orders, would rejuvenate her for the long night ahead.

When he took his patient’s hand, the man looked at him with the terror of someone whose chest has been sawed open, who in some inchoate way knew how close he had traveled to death.

“I feel like shit.”

“I bet you do.”

“I’m afraid I’m not going to pull through.”

“If you weren’t here, you wouldn’t. But you are here, and you will.”

For the remainder of the ten minutes Larry spent with his patient, the man said nothing. He closed his eyes, not asleep, but too deeply fatigued for any more visual input. Early in his career, Larry had learned how powerful a few words of reassurance could be to his patients. It had surprised him to find this capacity in himself, a patience he had never achieved with his children or Myra or anyone else. When he’d expressed as much to Myra, she’d said, “But it’s common that a person will have his best self emerge in a context that’s less personal. It’s easier.”

“It’s not quite real?”

“It’s real. You’re no less real as a doctor. You’re just more conflicted about being your strongest best self outside of that role.”

Leaving the hospital, he stopped to buy a bottle of wine. He’d told Linda he would try to drop by her condo on the way home. He lingered for a few moments, talking with the store owner about the year’s new Beaujolais, all the while thinking about Myra, about the conversation so many years ago about his best self, about the children in the casita watching television. Would Myra be at the bungalow at this hour? She’d never liked red wine; it reminded her of the Manischewitz her father had poured at Passover, the one night each year he would have wine in the house.

He bought a bottle of an already chilled Sancerre.

Parking outside the French professor’s bungalow, he felt absurdly nervous. There was a light on in the living room, but when he rang the bell, no one came to the door. He stood awkwardly on the step outside, shifting from foot to foot, before trying the bell again.

“Larry?”

He started, the awareness that the voice was Myra’s coming as he turned, his ankle twisting beneath him. He leaned against the door. “Fuck.”

“Is everything okay?”

“I twisted my ankle.”

“With the children?”

“They’re fine.” He sat down on the step, gripping his ankle.

“Let me get you some ice.”

“You spooked me, coming out of the bushes like that.”

“I was on the patio out back. You spooked me, coming over without calling.”

“Can I come in? I’ll just ice my ankle and then let you be.”

He followed his ex-wife inside. She was wearing a loose cotton dress with a sweater on top. Her long thin legs and feet were bare. From the back, she looked like a girl of twenty. The bungalow was filled with books and a perfumy smell from some flowers she had set on the dining table in the tiled front room. She brought him a dampened towel knotted with ice inside. He sat down at the table and rested his foot on the opposite chair. She had been here less than a week, but still the house felt the way he remembered their home together to have been.

Myra handed him a glass of lemon water.

“I brought you a bottle of wine. It’s in the front seat of the car. Only I’m too much of a klutz to be able to go get it.”

“You haven’t told me why you’re here.”

“Be kind to an injured guy and go get the bottle of wine and then I’ll tell you.”

When Myra returned, it was with the bottle of wine, two glasses, and a corkscrew. She gave him the corkscrew and he opened the bottle, pouring each of them a glass. She sat in the chair next to him and took a small sip. He took a large one.

“I just wanted to talk with you. I never get to talk with you.”

“Is Linda with the kids?”

“You know about Linda?”

“They told me about her. They said she’s very nice.” Larry knew that his children had said no such thing. “Caro said she’s very glamorous and a skilled horsewoman. You must like that.”

“They’re by themselves, watching TV. It’s fine. The house has an alarm, but it’s so safe out there, I usually don’t even lock the doors.”

“You left them with the doors unlocked?”

“Of course not. I locked up tight. And no one could get past the dogs.”

“Maybe we should call them.”

“I called before I left the hospital. They were watching M*A*S*H.”

Larry took the ice off his ankle. Like most doctors, he hated being a patient. Luckily, he had his mother’s stolid constitution, so years would go by without his suffering more than a winter sniffle or summer cold. He could recall only one occasion during the years they’d been married that he’d been sick enough to stay in bed. Instead of enjoying Myra’s ministrations, the bed trays she’d brought him, the cool washcloths she placed on his feverish forehead, he’d snapped at her.

“So what did you want to talk about?”

He bit his tongue so as not to blurt out That I still love you. “There’s nothing specific. I just miss you.”

“I miss you sometimes too.”

He took Myra’s hand, so cool and light after his patient’s clammy paw. “It was a mistake, what I did.”

She put down her glass of wine. “I haven’t eaten yet tonight. This will go to my head and I’ll do something I regret.”

He leaned toward his ex-wife. He took her other hand so that both of her hands were cupped between his. “Do something you’ll regret.”

He edged his chair next to hers, cringing at the screeching sound of the legs on the tile. She let him kiss her. She tasted the same. She smelled the same. He kissed her several times. His breath deepened. The bedroom was behind them. If he stood, would he be able to lead her there?

Her hands were on his chest. She pushed him back and stood up.

She moved to the armchair, curling her legs under her. He hobbled, one shoe on, the other off, to the couch. She looked at him with what at first glance, in the dim light, seemed like amusement, but, on second glance, did not.

“You sure know how to make a guy feel ridiculous.”

“Don’t talk to me about making someone feel ridiculous.” She covered her eyes with her fingertips, pressing along the sockets. Had his ankle not been throbbing, he would have gotten up from the couch and pried her fingers away. Instead, he waited for her to lower her hands.

“Some women might feel flattered to have the man who cheated on them then try to cheat with them on someone else. But I just feel debased. I’m sorry to sound cruel, but in my professional opinion, you don’t know what you want. This is pathetic, your being here, my letting you touch me.”

He had not waited for her to kick him out again. He’d gathered up his shoe and left.

Adam comes through the kitchen door with an empty platter. He scampers, barefoot, like a mole emerging from a burrow. Larry feels the familiar irritation at his son rising in him, curbs the impulse to tell him to put on his goddamned shoes.

He lifts the first of the salmon steaks from the grill onto the platter.

“Boo!” Startled, Larry turns toward the voice. Omar is climbing out the casement window. “Boo, Grandpa! Boo!”

“Jesus,” Larry says. Eva climbs out behind Omar. She giggles as she straightens herself up. “I nearly dropped the fish.”

“I scared you?” Omar asks. He smiles shyly.

“Nearly scared the pants off of me.” It is good to see the kid acting like a kid. “Your father used to do the same thing—crawl out of the window to come to dinner. Spook us.”

Adam laughs. “I used to pretend I was one of Mamah Cheney’s kids jumping out of the dining-room window after the servant set the house on fire.”

Eva stares at Adam.

Larry examines his thirty-two-year-old son, the face that seems still only half-formed. The almost twenty-five years since Myra kicked him out have passed in a heartbeat.

“Sometimes I’d get Caro to climb out the window,” Adam continues, “and then I’d chase her, pretending I was the ax murderer.” Adam raises his hand as though there were an ax in it and bolts toward Omar, who screams with terrified delight as he runs from his father. Adam chases Omar around the edge of the terrace.

“He-elp!” Omar yells. “Help!”

Larry lifts the last of the fish steaks onto the platter. In his mind’s eye, he can still see Myra lowering her hands from her face while he nursed his injured ankle. Even in the dim light of the bungalow, there had been no question about it. Her eyes were dry.

“Save me from this dangerous man!” Omar cries, now on his second lap around the terrace.

“Got ya, got ya,” Adam yells, swinging his arms. Omar veers toward Larry. He darts between Larry and the picnic table, his father close behind.

Adam stumbles. “Shit!” he cries, crashing into Larry.

The platter falls to the ground, breaking into two jagged halves as the fish tumbles onto the flagstones.

Larry looks at the broken platter. There are shards of porcelain on the steaks. “Idiot. Look what you’ve done.”

Adam leans over to pick up the fish. “I stubbed my toe,” he mumbles. He holds a piece of fish in each hand, looking helplessly for somewhere to put them.

Betty arrives with a new platter. Caro follows with a broom, her eyes moving from person to person. “Here,” Betty says, taking the fish from Adam and then picking up the other pieces from the ground. “Nothing a quick rinsey under the water and two more minutes on the grill won’t cure. Just don’t cut your feet.”

Omar buries his face in Eva’s side. She puts an arm around him.

Larry touches Adam’s shoulder. He feels like a bully. A monster. “Sorry, son. I didn’t mean that. Are you okay?”

“It was stupid of me to be running like that.”

The worst part is that Larry knows that Adam thinks he is right. That he is an idiot. “Is your toe okay?”

“Yeah, it’s fine.”

Adam sits on the picnic bench. He clutches his foot. Omar sits next to him. He leans over to examine the toe. Caro sweeps the plate shards into the dustbin.

Larry turns the grill back on. He takes a gulp of his wine. “Okay, another adventure at Max’s Folly.” His voice sounds artificial, the cheerfulness disingenuous even to his own ears.

Betty musses Omar’s hair as she passes behind him with the fish, but he does not respond. He is watching Eva, who has raised her palms so they form a cup under her chin. She spits into them. Three times in quick succession.

“Why’d you do that, Eva?” Omar asks. “Spit in your hands?”

“Because of the story of the wicked man who burn down the house and use his ax on the people.”

“That’s just a story, right, Daddy?” Omar turns to look at his father. “It’s not real.”

“Oh, it happened all right.”

Caro glares at Adam. “It was a long time ago, Omar. A freak event.”

Eva spits in her hands again. “Four.” She spits again. “Five.”

“Why do you keep doing that?” Omar asks.

“My grandmother teach me. It is how you keep away the evil.”

Omar counts the bodies. “There are five of us out here. You spit five times because there are five of us.”

“One time for each finger,” Eva says.

“But you have ten fingers. Don’t you have to spit ten times?”

“Five. There are five fingers on a hamsa. You spit five times.”

“What’s a hamsa?” Omar asks.

Eva wipes her palms on the sides of her pants. She lifts the chain that hangs around her neck so the hand-shaped silver amulet that had been inside her shirt rests momentarily between her thumb and forefinger. She raises it to her lips, then tucks it back beneath her shirt.

Of them all, only Adam believes in the significance of coincidence. As a child, he would study lists of notable dates. With great solemnity, he would announce the connections: Did his parents know that Charlie Chaplin died on the birthday of Houdini? That the Great Fire in San Francisco occurred on the same day as an eruption of Mount St. Helens? His father would attempt to debunk the significance with his layman’s statistical proofs: in a room of twenty-three people, there is a greater chance of two or more persons having the same birthday than not. But none of it had mattered to Adam. Once he believed something, not even God, had he believed in a deity, would have been able to sway him.

Back in the city, Adam is struck with the first coincidence to get under his skin in a very long time. The quiver of uncanniness he felt so often as a child envelops him one afternoon as he is reading about the rubber boom in Iquitos. In 1909 in Iquitos, the rubber trade was approaching its precipitous end, the 70,000 rubber seeds Sir Henry Wickham smuggled out of Brazil having taken hold in neatly organized rubber plantations halfway across the world. In 1909, Frank Lloyd Wright and Mamah Cheney left their respective families in Chicago to sail to Europe together, the prequel to the disaster to befall them.

Adam gets up from his desk. He stretches his arms overhead. He can hear the front door opening, Omar and Eva laughing together. Why does Omar rarely laugh when he is with Rachida or him?

Surely, Adam thinks, one of the rubber traders must have traveled from Manaus to New York, booking passage to Europe on the same boat on which Frank and Mamah fled together, all of them with children and spouses left behind.

For the first few weeks after Adam, Omar, and Eva return from Willow, Myra maintains her routine: her morning sessions followed by a brisk walk around the Central Park reservoir, a shower, then a simple lunch, which she eats, when the weather is nice, on the deck off the kitchen. She’d initially protested when Eva began making her lunch, but Eva is so eager to do it, Myra lets her.

In general, the girl seems happier. She chatters about Omar, who loves her, Adam says, because she plays with him like another kid. Coming up the stairs after seeing her last patient, Myra will hear the laughter that accompanies Eva and Omar’s ongoing card tournament, the centerpiece of which is a game called Spit that involves whooping yells.

At the beginning of September, Eva tells Myra about a mother she met in the park who has offered to introduce Eva to the rabbi at the nearby West End Avenue synagogue. Eva asks Myra if she can shift her hours so she can attend the services Friday evenings and the adult Hebrew classes Tuesday and Thursday mornings.

Eva’s first visit to the synagogue is on the Friday before Rosh Hashanah. “I never was in a synagogue before,” she tells Myra when she returns. “I think it will be something very strange, maybe like a crypt, but it looks like the cathedral we have at home. There is a man who sings. He has the most beautiful voice.”

“The cantor.”

“The cantor,” Eva repeats. She begins to hum, a mournful melody that Myra dimly recalls from the synagogue where her uncle had been the rabbi. Her mother had never liked going to services, had seemed relieved when Myra announced at eleven that she no longer wanted to attend. During the few weeks, now nearly a decade ago, Myra tried attending services again, she visited the same West End Avenue synagogue where Eva now goes: a grand, crumbling edifice with peeling pink paint and stained-glass windows clouded with decades of dirt. The rabbi had been interested in radical theology and a messianism that had made Myra think of men in black coats davenning at the Wailing Wall.

“In Iquitos,” Eva continues, “there is an old Jewish man. People come to his house Friday nights and on Yom Kippur. Until my mother die, she take me every Yom Kippur to the man’s house. We drink tea and eat sweet mango cakes. The cakes are to remind us of God’s sweetness, the old man say.”

Myra’s parents had always fasted on Yom Kippur. When she turned thirteen, they expected that she would fast too. Afraid to tell them how light-headed the fasting made her, she had stashed licorice under her mattress to help her get through the long day.

Eva smiles in a way that suggests she is remembering the sweet mango cakes. “Every year, on Yom Kippur day, my mother take me from the old man’s house to the Catholic church so we can say confession and receive communion.” She studies Myra’s face. “The Jewish people, they don’t do that here, do they?”

After a few weeks of Friday pickups, Caro and Omar fall into their own routine. Immediately after school, they walk to an ice-cream store on Columbus Avenue where Omar orders a scoop of strawberry in a cone and Caro orders whatever nonfat concoction is being offered from the machine. Ice cream in hand, they head south to the Museum of Natural History, where they visit first the dinosaurs on the fourth floor and then the African mammals off the rotunda. Afterward, they catch the bus up Central Park West, getting off at Ninety-fifth Street as Caro had during all of her high school years.

The salad Eva has made will be on the counter, the table set, the chickens her mother has cleaned and seasoned earlier in the day already in the oven. Omar plays cards with Eva until she leaves for evening services. A little before six, Myra climbs the stairs from her office. She and Caro have a glass of wine before calling the others for dinner.

After some toing and froing, Myra and Rachida have agreed that meals are not to be delayed for her since she rarely arrives before eight, and even that hour is unpredictable. On the first Friday in October, however, Caro notices two extra settings on the table.

“Who’s coming?” Caro asks her mother when she arrives upstairs.

“Rachida. She invited another resident from the hospital. A woman named Layla who’s also from Morocco.”

A few minutes later, there are footsteps on the brownstone stairs. The front door opens and Rachida, in blue hospital scrubs, enters with Layla, a slip of a woman in a short skirt and sling-back pumps.

Layla’s hands flutter as she reaches out to touch first Myra’s and then Caro’s arm. Adam comes down the stairs, unaware or having forgotten, Caro surmises from his unkempt appearance, that a guest will be at the table. Layla greets him with her arms pressed tightly to her sides.

Caro follows Adam to the kitchen while the others settle into the parlor. He opens a bottle of red wine and she pours a glass of juice for Omar, who has come downstairs, too. “Tuck your shirt in,” she whispers as she leaves to bring the juice to Omar. “You look like something the cat dragged in.”

Layla is draped in one of the Barcelona chairs, talking about the four years she spent at medical school in Iowa. Omar has taken Caro’s seat on the couch, his head resting on his grandmother’s shoulder.

When Adam extends a glass of wine toward Layla, she holds up a hand like a stop sign. “No thank you.”

“A teetotaler?”

Rachida shoots Adam a sharp look as she gets up and heads to the kitchen.

“I don’t drink because I’m a Muslim,” Layla says softly.

“Excuse us, dear,” Myra says. “We’re all so parochial here.”

“What’s that mean?” Omar asks.

“You know,” Caro says, “how some children love playing with action figures and you don’t? Imagine if they couldn’t understand that you don’t.”

“That would be mean.”

“Well, I don’t think it’s meant to be mean, but it can feel like that.”

Rachida returns with a glass of sparkling water that she gives to Layla.

“So, the two of you work together?” Caro asks Layla.

Layla glances at Rachida, who answers for her. “Layla is a second-year primary-care fellow. My track, the respecialization track, overlaps with the second-years.”

Over dinner, Layla tells them that she was raised in a small village near the edge of the Sahara, not far from the Algerian border. “My father was the eldest son of the man who was the chief of the region. His grandfather was a sultan. When I was a child, my grandfather kept camels that he’d rent at the tent camps used by tourists headed out to see the Erg Chebbi dunes. He gave that business to my two uncles, and now they have the cell phone franchise for the area—which is very big because there are so few landlines.”

“That’s where Bertolucci filmed The Sheltering Sk y, isn’t it?” Adam asks.

“That was in Ouarzazate,” Layla says. “In the Draa Valley. Where we live is totally desert.”

“Layla was telling us about her family,” Myra says, looking pointedly at Adam. “What is the village like where you live?”

“We live in an ancient town called Rissani. It was the home of the first of the Alaouites, Hassan the Alaouite. There is an old palace there that belonged to the royal family. Now, though, the area is very poor. Most people live off the meager incomes they receive from the government with a little extra money when they can get it harvesting dates in some nearby oases. My family has had electricity since 1990, but many families only got it in the last few years. Now everyone spends the hot afternoons squeezed into the houses of the people in the village who have televisions.”

“Watching,” Rachida adds, “dubbed sitcoms from the States. Layla intends to go back to southern Algeria and open a clinic. The electricity is too spotty to be counted on for refrigeration, so it makes antibiotic and vaccination use hard to manage. She’s writing a grant proposal for the World Health Organization to fund solar generators for medical refrigerators.”

“Blindness is the main problem,” Layla says. “One out of eight children suffers from eye infections that place them at risk of losing their vision.”

“You put us to shame,” Adam says, pouring himself a second glass of wine. “Our father’s a cardiologist, but he won’t even take private health insurance anymore.”

“How does your family feel about your being here?” Caro asks.

“When you call his office,” Adam continues, “they ask for credit card information before they even ask what the problem is.”

Rachida stands to clear the plates.

“Let me help you,” Layla says.

After dinner, Adam heads upstairs to give Omar his bath while Eva does the dishes. Layla thanks Myra for having her, apologizing for leaving so early. “I haven’t had more than ten hours’ sleep all week,” she says.

“Of course, you must be exhausted.”

“I’ll walk you to the cross-town bus,” Rachida says.

“I can walk her there,” Caro says. “I’m headed that way.” Having assumed Rachida would prefer to have time with Omar before he goes to bed than to walk Layla to the bus, she is surprised by Rachida’s expression, which suggests otherwise.

“Come back anytime,” Myra says. “We’d love to have you.”

Outside, the autumn air is damp and chill. Layla’s heels make a clicking beat on the sidewalk. They turn south on Columbus Avenue, Caro folding her arms across her chest, Layla’s gaze fixed on the sidewalk in front of her.

When they reach Eighty-sixth Street, Caro points across the street where the bus will stop, then extends a hand to say good night. Layla grasps Caro’s arm.

“I didn’t want to say it in front of the child,” she says.

“Say what?”

Layla examines Caro’s face. “You asked how my family feels about my being here.”

Caro nods.

“My father and my brothers stoned me after they heard I’d been accepted to medical school in New York.” Layla pushes up her jacket sleeve to reveal a long scar on her arm. “They broke my arm and my nose and three ribs, then dumped me as far out into the desert as their truck could go.”

Caro gasps.

“They left me on the sand to be eaten by the vultures. My boyfriend heard about it. It took him until the next morning to find me, because I’d been half-covered by sand. He wrapped me in gunny sacks to hold my bones together and took me to a hotel where some French tourists had me flown to a hospital.”

The bus pulls into the stop and Layla dashes across the street. When she reaches the curb, she turns to wave. Caro exhales, her breath held since she saw Layla’s long scar.

Myra began her analysis with Dr. Klara Dreis after her parents’ deaths, when she felt backlogged with grief from the miscarriages and achingly alone. At the time, she had not understood how unusual the analysis was. There was no chipping away at resistances, no gradual construction of unconscious thoughts. Rather, once she lay on Dreis’s couch, everything poured out: the chill in her bones that had lasted her entire childhood; the fear of making a mess—of her puke, shit, toys, clothes impinging upon her mother’s vigorously sanitized rooms, for that’s what they had felt like, not a home, certainly not Myra’s home.

Then, behind that torrent to Dreis, came the words They didn’t love me, words sputtered with humiliating tears that backed into her nose and chafed her cheeks, followed then by something worse—the apprehension that the words were true.

For months, her only comfort was Dreis’s reassurance that it would eventually become a relief to have it said, that her parents had not loved her, and then to look at this idea from a distance, as something of curiosity, how it had happened that two people had borne a child whom they then had not loved.

“When?” Myra demanded, her tears still abundant. “When will this relief come?”

“When you stop believing as you did as a child that it was because of you, who you are.”

Not at five, not at eleven, at twenty, at thirty, had she been able to conceive of this possibility: that the sorry state of affairs had nothing to do with her, a reality which had its own quality of pain—the utter impersonality of it, the utter obliviousness to her, so that it would have made no difference if she were a saint or a psychopath. That these people whose offspring she was simply had nothing in them that allowed love: not for themselves, not for each other, not for her. The actual ease of their circumstances had never touched their belief that they were on the precipice of disaster, that living was a brutal grind that required unflagging vigilance.

“Had you been more difficult, had you enacted your sorrow,” Dreis said, “they would have hated you for the interference. That might have been easier for you, since at least you would have had their attention.”

For Dreis, the insight was just the skin of the beast. Myra still needed to face the ugly fact that she was like them—her own insistence on order and cleanliness, her stubborn, cruel belief that the state of pristineness was possible, be it in her thoughts, where she expected of herself to have only clean and generous responses, or her home, where she never allowed the paint to remain chipped, or with her body, where her torso by eight weeks after both of her children’s births had been free of bulges.

“If your insistence on perfection was simply your identification with your mother,” Dreis declared, “you would have given it up by now. No, it is more insidious. It is the expression of your grandiose defenses against the rage and despair you felt, as though you can conquer the natural order of disintegration and decay. You believe that you alone can keep a flower in bloom, that in your home, on your body, the petals will not wilt and the leaves not turn brown.”

With this, Myra wept. What issued from her body was something more than tears, something closer to her own soul. She saw her insistence on having a third child as part of her demand for perfection: a tyrannical expression not only of her mother still alive and scrubbing inside her, but the invulnerability she had cultivated. With this, she was able to say out loud, “Well, I didn’t love my mother and father either”—and then to weep at the great loss of this, not to have loved her own parents.

After Myra returned to New York from Tucson, the trip during which Larry had managed to delude himself for a scant few minutes that she might go to bed with him, he received a letter from her, her precise handwriting filling a single sheet of pale gray stationery.

Dear Larry,

I hope your ankle is okay.

I think you should know that I was tempted to sleep with you. Unlike you, I have been with no one else since you left. (I know you like to say that I kicked you out, but surely you can see that it was you who left me…) I am grateful that whatever small quantity of wisdom I have gained over the years was able to take the reins, because it would be a terrible mistake for us to become entangled again above and beyond what we will always have, which is to be the parents together of our children.

Once you severed the covenant between us (I am sorry to sound so Catholic here), it altered forever the path of my life. I had assumed that we would go hand in hand to old age, that our growth would come through learning about ourselves, through learning to love each other more deeply. I was very sad to give that up. I would have liked to take that path with you. Now, though, we will each take different routes. On my end, I do not believe that romantic love will be a central part of my life from this point on. Not that I don’t think that I will have another lover—I imagine I will once the children are older, perhaps after they’ve left the house. Rather, I feel that I now have the children and my patients, and I suppose myself to nourish first. When I fell in love with you, I gave you all my heart. I will never be able to do that again, not because you broke my heart, but rather because I have moved on to a place where I can no longer give away that much of myself.

So, my dear Larry, you will remain always my ex-husband (my only ex-husband, I am quite certain) and the father of my children. If you take up with the women you take up with because you truly desire love, I hope that you will find it and be at peace, and that we will continue to work kindly together to parent our children. I think we’ve been doing a pretty decent job at putting aside our quarrels with each other in the service of their well-being. Sometimes, I even think that we’re doing a better job as divorced parents than we might have had we remained together.

Yours in friendship,

Myra

For three nights after receiving Myra’s letter, Larry made excuses to Linda for not seeing her, spending his evenings drinking brandy and watching television with his dogs on the couch beside him. On the fourth night, Linda came over unannounced with two filets mignons and a chocolate sour-cream bundt cake. She was three inches taller than he, six in her spike-heel sandals. He could discern the outline of her nipples beneath her white T-shirt. Pushing the dogs aside, he fucked her on the living-room couch and then, unable to control himself, cried in front of her.

In the morning, with Linda still asleep in his bed, he wrote Myra:

Dear Myra,

Now it’s my turn to be honest with you. I wanted to touch you two weeks ago not because I lusted after you but because I still love you. That must sound like a strange thing to say after what I did to you. There is no defense to my argument other than to say, which, of course, you must know, being in your line of work, that a person is the final arbiter of the truth or falseness of his own feelings and this is how I feel. I believe that we could have a strong marriage. I have half my life left. I would like to sit with you when our children graduate from high school and college, to visit our baby grandchildren together. I would like to be grandparents together, doing all the corny things that grandparents do with their grandchildren.

Maybe you’re being a little selfish to hold on to your grievances with me?

Yours always,

Larry

A week later, he received another letter from Myra:

Dear Larry,

Thank you for your letter. I am very warmed that you still love me. In a certain way, I love you too. I do need, however, to point out that your fantasies about us are only an extension of our being parents together, which we can, to some extent, continue to do. You can sit with me when the kids graduate from high school and then from college. We can both attend our grandbabies’ birthday parties.

You must, however, recognize that these images do not constitute a marriage, or at least not the marriage I would want (and will probably now never have). Very few people actually have a marriage that I think is worth having. My parents shared little more than a roof together. Your parents are locked in constant battle, which protects them from the harsher reality that your father long ago outgrew your mother. My cousins, Ursula and Alicia, carry on with their husbands as in tawdry romantic comedies. Only my friend from graduate school, Charlotte, who you never met, has a marriage that looks good to me. She and her husband are truly friends. They discuss everything. They go to one another first when they are in pain. They nourish one another’s most delicate hopes, the wishes most of us don’t dare to even say to another person. They treat each other with a most gentle kindness, aware that they hold each other’s inner life in their hands. And they manage to do all of this without sentimentality or banality, their lives together leavened always with humor. Perhaps we might have learned to treat one another similarly, but during the years we lived together, we never achieved anything even approaching this.

I think it best that we not correspond further.

Again, yours in friendship,

Myra

Before she has the key in the door, Caro knows that she is going to eat. There is no hunger, her stomach still filled with her mother’s food. Rather, after hearing Layla’s story, seeing the long scar on her arm, there is a craving for the oblivion of salt, sugar, chewing, all the while knowing, even before she has touched the refrigerator door, that what will enter her mouth will not be a comfort but rather a gorging—a debasement of what her mother would call the human spirit, that tiny flame it remains every person’s mission to keep alive.

She starts with a leftover deli container of tuna and continues through a bag of pretzels and the remains of a box of cocoa she eats dry with a spoon. Hopelessness descends over her, accompanied by revulsion, not only at her behavior, but at the immorality of creating misery, of wasting her own life with this cycle of destruction. She subtracts dates in her head: fifteen years since her return from Morocco when she stumbled upon food as a drug—the disgust about her gluttony preferable to the disgust she felt that fall about herself.

Paris, Agios Nikolaos, Casablanca.

Slut.

Returning to Harvard, she ate so much food, she feared damaging her intestines. She prayed to be able to make herself vomit, but could not force her stomach to eject its contents. That semester, she’d read the Richmond Lattimore translation of The Odyssey of Homer, been pierced by the image of Penelope weaving a shroud by day for her father-in-law, Laertes, and then unraveling it by night. And so it seemed with herself when, by the end of the year, twenty pounds heavier, she settled on the seesaw of binging by night and starving by day.

Caro stares at her bloated face in the bathroom mirror. For Penelope, the unraveling at night served a noble purpose: the stalling of the suitors who would have had her abandon her husband, Odysseus.

Would there be suitors if she stopped?

She stretches out on her bed. She has her mother, whereas her mother had no one. How, then, is it that her mother can do so many things that she cannot? Her mother knows how to make herself lovely, something she does in the same way, for the same reasons, she arranges a vase of flowers—that it is ennobling to create beauty. With effort, Caro can make herself look passable, someone people won’t notice one way or the other. Her mother knows how to take care of a child. Caro, child expert, lecturer at national conventions on the emotional and pedagogic needs of the three-year-old, has never tucked a child into bed, given a bath, taken a temperature.

Her mother knows how to make a meal: roast a chicken, whisk a salad dressing, roll out a pie crust. Her mother knows how to create a home, a garden, an office. Her mother knows how to heal a person.

Her mother has never slept with four men in a five-month span, one of whom tried to kill himself afterward, and then not been touched by anyone in the fifteen years since.

Adam watches his wife clip her toenails. Still in the hospital scrubs she wore through the dinner with Layla, she is seated in the middle of what, despite the four months they have occupied this room, he still thinks of as his mother’s bedroom. Omar is asleep a floor below them. His mother has finished her piano practice. He can hear Eva climbing the stairs, the sound of her door shutting.

Rachida carries her weight in her back and arms. With her head bent over her small foot, she looks even more top-heavy than usual.

“Damn. I think I’m getting an ingrown.”

Adam ignores his wife’s comment. Rachida is a workhorse—she returned to work when Omar was three weeks old—but she maintains a habitual litany about minor ailments, a litany that seems like a nervous tic, an unconscious imitation of her mother’s more insistent complaints. He’s met Rachida’s mother only once, on the trip she made with Rachida’s father to New York for his and Rachida’s wedding, but even then, she complained morning to night: her aching feet, her upset stomach, the terrible injustice that Rachida—hating shopping, soap operas, and anything to do with homemaking—has refused to act like a daughter and then, to add insult to injury, moved across an ocean.

“What do you think Eva does in her room at night?” Adam asks.

“She’s studying Hebrew. She’s taking a class at some synagogue.”

“She told you?”

Rachida looks up from her feet. “What do you mean?”

“She hardly talks to me. Does she talk to you?”

“When I’m around. Your mother told me about the classes. I can’t think of anything more stupid than learning Hebrew, a language spoken in one country with six million people. Why doesn’t she learn Chinese?”

“Because they don’t speak Chinese in Israel. And that’s where she wants to eventually move.”

Rachida makes a snorting sound. “So she can live in a settlement on the West Bank with an Uzi rifle under her bed? You should see the pictures of the places my mother’s brothers and cousins live. The Israelis talk a good game about being the homeland for all Jews, but what they really mean is for all Ashkenazi Jews.”

Adam regrets having come upstairs after putting Omar to bed. He’d had a vague idea of talking with Rachida about his remake of The Searchers—how he has changed Ethan to Moishe, a peripatetic rubber trader whose brother settled in Iquitos and fathered two daughters with an Indian woman, Ethan’s issues about miscegenation recast as Moishe’s rejection of his brother’s daughters as Jews, but now, with Rachida’s scowl, he already knows her response. She’d find the logical hole in the idea, the reason that Ethan cannot become Moishe, that Texas cannot be Iquitos.

Rachida stands. “I’m going to take a shower.”

Through the half-open bathroom door, Adam watches his wife pull off the blue scrubs. It has been nearly a year since he and Rachida have had sex. What would happen if he put his hand on the white cotton underwear she is still wearing as she turns on the shower? Most likely, he thinks, she would laugh.

The first time he saw Rachida naked, he’d been surprised to discover a scattering of black hairs around her nipples and a faint dark fuzz that ran from her belly button down to her pubic line. He softly touched the fuzz. He’d never touched a woman in an intimate way, never imagined there would be an opportunity.

“My mother used to come after me with depilatory creams. She once threatened to have me restrained in an electrolysis chair if I didn’t do something about the hair on my stomach.”

“I like it,” Adam said, and in a way he had. It alleviated his worries about his own scrawny arms, his lack of sexual experience, which he quickly learned didn’t bother Rachida at all. To the contrary, she preferred his inexperience, since it made it easier for her to direct his fingers and tongue to precisely the places she wanted. For the first year, she had wanted sex every night, and she had come every time. As the months passed, he’d grown bolder—a liberation in knowing there was no other man he was competing with for her—and she had let him lead on occasion, moving her body the way he wanted.

At the end of their first year together, he’d started looking at magazines. The first few times, he had told himself that it was simply an overflow of his sexual feelings—that after Rachida would leave for the hospital, he was sometimes still aroused. He filled a brown envelope with photographs cut from the magazines: some of them Playboy girls whose photos he had never looked at in adolescence, pink nipples and firm buttocks pointed sky-high; then, as he ventured into edgier magazines, vaginas spread open, men with elephantine penises, handcuffs, anuses. Men kissing men. Men sucking men.

Terrified of tainting the screen, of blighting that refuge, he never looked at videos, at images on the computer. When Rachida had stopped wanting sex during her pregnancy with Omar, he’d been relieved, his orgasms, by then, more intense with the brown envelope than with her.

Rachida closes the bathroom door. Adam can hear the shower curtain being drawn shut. He goes downstairs to the piano room his mother has let him use as his study. “Do you remember?” she asked the afternoon they arrived when she showed him the table she had moved under the window for his desk and the closet she had cleared for his things. “I’d planned for this to be your room, down the hall from Caro. You insisted, though, on taking the room upstairs, across from mine. I tried to convince you that this room was nicer, larger, but you would have none of it.”

The first thing he checked after his mother left was that the door had a lock. There were rice shades that covered the windows. Now he bolts the door, closes the shades, opens the closet, and retrieves the brown envelope from the back of the farthest file box.

“I love Eva,” Omar says. It is a Saturday night and Rachida is home, sitting what Omar calls criss-cross-applesauce on the bath mat while he plays in the tub with his rubber sea animals and plastic submarine. For a moment, what looks to Rachida like a wave of worry passes over Omar’s face. Is he afraid that he should not have told her that he loves Eva? That she will be mad? But he’d been so open about his love for Zahra, his Moroccan babysitter in Detroit. And Rachida had so clearly endorsed it, taking him each year to buy something special for Zahra’s birthday, holding him in her lap when he cried after they had to say goodbye because they were moving here. Hadn’t she told him that love is a bottomless lake? That loving one person does not take away from loving another?

Eva, though, is different. She is nothing like Zahra. She runs up and down the stairs with Omar. At night, after Rachida or Adam has tucked Omar in and gone up to their room, Eva, Omar has confided in Rachida, sometimes sneaks downstairs and climbs into bed with him because she is scared. Rachida had not been pleased to hear this, but the truth is, Omar seems happier than she has ever seen him. With Eva, to come back to that word Omar’s preschool teacher used, Omar seems actually childish.

“It’s very dangerous where Eva comes from,” Omar says. “Her father once killed a poisonous spider in their kitchen. Her sister got leeches on her legs when they were playing by the river.”

Rachida soaps Omar’s back. When, as a baby, he was slow to pull himself up and late to walk, she assumed he had inherited Adam’s lack of coordination and strength. It had taken her a while to realize that Omar is simply still—without the compulsive climbing-touching-spinning-top frenzy of so many young boys.

“Eva said she’s going to take me to see the jungle. When she comes back from Israel to visit Iquitos, she’ll stop and get me and bring me with her. The poor people come there on rafts they make into their houses. They bring banana leaves to make into roofs and their bathrooms are floating outhouses! And she’s going to take me to the jungle lodge where she used to work. They have dolphins in the river and red howler monkeys like the one she gave me.”

“That’s nice.” She is drifting into half-listening, something she finds herself doing too often in response to Omar’s strings of enthusiasms—dinosaurs, jellyfish, asteroids, the moon, enthusiasms that center on science, her passion too, but are too melded with fantastical narrations to hold her attention.

She’s had to delegate long hours of Omar’s care to Adam and various babysitters, but this has never dented her feeling that Omar’s well-being is entirely her responsibility. She alone has organized each step in his life: the cessation of the bottle and then the pacifier, the beginning of foods, toilet training, the adjustment to school. With a look, she can tell if he is well or sick, tired or rested. It has come as a disappointment, though, to discover her lack of patience, not only for Omar’s enthusiasms, but for play itself. The discomfort she has felt when observing Omar belly-flopped beside Adam or Zahra or, these past few months, Eva, the two of them moving around Komodo dragons or killer whales or triceratops, Omar’s hand resting on his companion’s wrist or arm or shoulder. The fear that she resides outside the circle of his deepest feelings, the administrator of his life rather than a character in it.

Mid-October, Myra decides it is time to start Omar’s piano lessons. With her own children, she had been too insecure to do many simple things for them. Looking back, she feels remorse that she’d taken them to a salon to have their hair cut, assumed that bakery cakes would be superior to those she could make herself, hired a tutor for Adam when he panicked at learning long division rather than working with him herself. With rare exceptions, the other parents around her had been equally intimidated, as though parenting was some new, complicated development that required expert handling. Now, with Omar, the foolishness of this assumption is apparent to her, accompanied by a sadness that she missed the pleasures of teaching her own children to read, to swim, to do, for God’s sake, long division.

Afraid that Rachida might object to homespun piano lessons, Myra cautiously asks her permission.

Rachida pauses. Is she concerned that Myra’s inexpert instruction might scar Omar’s musical development, a realm that perhaps seems mysterious to her given that she cannot carry a tune, can hardly recall a melody? Having experienced the Moroccan music, the Gnaouan and Chaabi music that filled the squares Ramadan nights and the cafés on warm evenings, as primitive and bellicose, Rachida had as a child refused to learn either the indigenous instruments—ouds, kanuns, tan-tans, karkabats—or the European ones.

She grins. It is so rare to see Rachida’s face relaxed, it actually looks strange, her mouth larger than Myra had realized, with bottom teeth that are quite cockeyed.

“You’re a good woman, Myra. I’m lucky to have you.”

Myra’s eyebrows shoot up in surprise.

“I should have said that to you years ago. You’re always thinking about what you can do for us.”

“Thank you, dear. I’m lucky to have you too. Without you, Caro and I would still be shepherding Adam. But it’s not an effort—lending a hand where I can. You’re my loved ones. There’s nothing more satisfying than helping your loved ones.”

“You say that as though it’s a given. But my mother is nothing like that.”

When Myra met Rachida’s family, on their trip here for Rachida and Adam’s wedding, she’d been struck by the stealthiness of Rachida’s mother’s complaints, slipped in rather than directly lobbed—That dish was a bit salty, wasn’t it? The odor, it kept me up all night, maybe it was coming from the hotel room rug?—her audience too uncertain if a complaint has actually been delivered to serve back a rebuttal.

“I’m not intending anything too ambitious for Omar. Some scales, some easy pieces from the Thompson series.”

Myra gives Omar the choice between Wednesday afternoons or Sunday mornings for their lessons. With the concrete logic of childhood, Omar chooses Wednesday, which for him feels earlier in the week and will therefore mean more frequently.

Leaving to pick up Omar at school on the afternoon of their first lesson, Myra asks Eva if she could have a snack prepared for Omar when he gets back.

Eva is ironing a pair of Adam’s jeans. She irons expertly, never getting trapped on sleeves or collars, singing along with the songs from a pop radio station. Myra has made a list for her of what to iron. Otherwise, Eva would iron everything: underwear, sheets, dish towels, Myra’s nightgowns.

Eva holds the iron in front of her and smiles. “Snack. I never hear that word until I come to this country. Miss Caro, when she meet me at the airport, she ask me if I want a snack.”

“What’s the word in Spanish?”

“We have porción or bocadillo, but they are not really the same. Maybe we do not have this word?”

Eva places the iron on the leg of Adam’s jeans. The meaning of her word lapse seems obvious: no one had offered her an after-school welcome.

When Eva looks up, it is with an expression that Myra has learned means she wants to ask something but feels hesitant.

“Yes?”

“It would bother you if I listen when you give Omar the piano lesson?”

“No, of course not,” Myra says, though by the time she has walked the seven minutes to Omar’s school and then waited in the crowd of mothers and nannies for the children to be dismissed, she realizes, too late, it seems now, that she does not like the idea at all.

The lesson is uneventful. Omar, as expected, is an attentive student. He quickly learns the names of the piano keys, the C scale, and “Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater.” By the end of the half hour, while Myra has not forgotten Eva’s presence on the chair behind them, she is no longer monitoring Eva’s response, so that it comes as an unwelcome surprise when Myra gets up from the bench and sees Eva’s face, her eyes half-closed, her chin tipped heavenward in what looks like rapture.

A week later, Myra tells Eva that she is going to start having her lunch in her office. When she lived alone in the brownstone, she often made phone calls or looked over her patient notes while she ate her lunch at the farm table. Now, with others again in the house, her concern for her patients’ confidentiality no longer permits this. Moreover, between Eva’s puppy-dog looks and Adam’s habit of plunking himself across from her to launch a lengthy anecdote about the Amazonian rubber trade, she misses the quiet hour she’d had to read and think and jot an occasional note for her own work in progress.

“I bring it down to you,” Eva says.

“Thank you, but I can get it.”

“I can do it,” Eva insists.

And so it has come about that after her noon walk around the reservoir, Myra calls out a hello to Eva and heads down the front stairs to shower in the tiny maid’s bath. With her hair still wet, she returns to her office where she finds her lunch tray on her ottoman. Like clockwork, at 2:20, ten minutes before Myra’s first afternoon patient, Eva knocks on the rear office door, the door that leads to the back stairs to the kitchen. Myra looks up from the phone or whatever work she is doing and smiles as Eva retrieves the tray.

On the Friday that ends the first week of this new routine, Myra is reading in the armchair where she sits while she sees her patients when Eva knocks.

Eva pauses, looking around. “This is where your patients sit?” She points to the armchair across from Myra.

“Yes.”

Eva touches the tissue box on the table next to the patient chair.

“They cry?”

“Sometimes.”

“I can try the chair?”

“If you’d like.”

Eva lowers herself into the chair. She yawns like a sleepy cat. How many times has Myra watched her patients respond to her office in this feline way, as though the upholstery itself stimulates an evolutionary regression?

“This is nice,” Eva says. “I like it here.”

Myra picks up the napkin on her tray. She folds it into a triangle. Aware from years of listening to patients talk about tempestuous relationships with nannies and housekeepers, relationships often more fraught than marriages, she has been careful not to ask Eva too much about herself, refraining from pursuing the clues.

“What do people talk about?”

“I can’t say specifically. Everything my patients tell me is confidential. But, in general, people talk about what is bothering them.”

“But what bothers them?”

“Events from their past. Their relationships. Aspects of themselves.”

“When something bothers me, I ask God to take it away.”

“Well then, you’re lucky. Not everyone has your faith in God.”

A fierce look Myra has not seen before settles across Eva’s face. “I just said that. God never helps me. God hates me, I think.”

“What do you mean?”

Immediately Myra regrets her question, the reflexive curiosity that she has come to understand is experienced as love—a recognition of something not yet spoken. If she believed in the kind of God Eva is talking about, she would ask to have the clock skip back five seconds and the four-word invitation disappear.

“If God love me, he does not let my father do what he do to me.” Eva looks Myra straight in the eye.

Myra feels her breath catch in her throat.

The buzzer rings. Myra glances at the clock on the table next to Eva.

Eva stands. She is a good girl. “I am sorry. I take your lunch now.” She picks up the tray with the remains of a turkey sandwich and carries it to the door. When she gets there, she turns halfway to look at Myra. “Do not worry, I won’t bother you anymore.”

By the time Myra comes upstairs from seeing patients, Eva has left for synagogue. Saturday, Myra is out all day at a friend’s daughter’s wedding, and on Sunday, Eva’s day off, Eva leaves early in the morning and doesn’t return until late.

On Monday, when Myra comes in from her midday walk, she calls out hello, but Eva doesn’t respond. A tray is on the ottoman when she returns to her office after her shower. When Eva has not come to retrieve it by 2:25, Myra carries it up the back stairs herself.

Eva is folding laundry on the farm table. The room feels strangely quiet, and it takes Myra a moment to realize it is because Eva is not singing.

“Hello, Eva.”

Eva keeps her eyes locked on the clothes in front of her.

“Is something the matter?”

Eva shakes her head.

“You usually come for my tray.”

Eva shrugs her shoulders.

Myra stands watching the girl, trying to intuit what is going on inside her head, the atmosphere charged like the positive-ion-laden air before a deluge. Myra says the only thing she can feel any certainty about. “You seem not to want to talk with me.”

With those words, Eva looks up. “We can do that? Not talk? You leave me a note about what you want me to do.”

The truth is that Eva has verbalized precisely what Myra—at this moment, suddenly terribly tired, wishing more than anything that she were alone, without Eva in her kitchen, without her patient about to arrive—would love were it not so absurd, so ominous. She would curl up on the couch and fall into an immediate sleep.

“It’s impossible not to ever talk.”

“You write on a piece of paper what I supposed to do. I read it.”

Myra inhales deeply, reeling her thoughts back from the world of desire to the reality of her kitchen, of this mid-afternoon hour. “Perhaps you were upset that I didn’t have the time on Friday to hear what you were starting to tell me?”

“I never talk to anyone. I never tell anyone. When I was little, I stop talking for three years.”

“What do you mean?”

It takes Myra a moment to recognize that she has repeated her question from Friday.

Eva shakes out one of Omar’s T-shirts. She presses it flat with her hands.

“For three years, I say nothing to no one. My mother take me to a doctor, then to a priest, then to this lady in the Belén market who makes medicines from herbs, but I never talk.”

“You must have a lot to say bottled up inside.”

“Bottled up?”

“Things from the past that it would make you feel better to share with someone.”

Eva looks at her strangely, as Myra realizes how incomprehensible her words must be. When new patients come to see her, they already know this. It is the premise for their coming—either their own or that of the person who has encouraged or, in some unfortunate cases, coerced them to come.

“No. I do not think it make me feel better. How does it make me feel better? Now I think about loving God. I study Hebrew. I work to go to Israel.”

The next day, Eva knocks at precisely 2:20. Without looking at Myra, she sits down in the patient chair.

“I will tell you everything now.”

Myra gets up from her seat and closes the door.

Eva pushes back her hair from over her ear, revealing an albumen-colored scar where her hair meets her neck. “This is where I try to shoot myself. I use my father’s gun.”

Myra stares at the scar. She can feel her heart pounding. Out of her mouth comes the brief humming interjection “Mmmm” she sometimes thinks is the most important thing she does with her patients. “How old were you?”

“I was ten years old. The bullet didn’t go in. It just scrape the side of my head. I never try again. My mother die a few months later and I don’t want to go to Hell. I want to go to Heaven to see her.”

The buzzer rings. Eva stands. “Your patient is here.”

That night, at the piano, Myra cannot focus on the notes in front of her. She repeatedly misses the beat for the turns on a Beethoven rondo, cannot keep in mind the flats when she reaches the minor section. Her thoughts are on Eva. Is the girl too unstable to take care of Omar? Could she possibly be a danger?

Who, though, behind the veil of social appropriateness, does not have a hidden story? A teenage run-in with the law, a depression, a bankruptcy. It is naïve to think that there is anyone who does not have ghosts in the attic. If a Good Housekeeping seal of mental health were required to take care of a child, would Adam or Rachida or, for that matter, Larry or herself, have made the grade?

Myra switches off the piano light and tidies her music books. She sits in the wing chair that now faces the table where Adam works. Papers are scattered every which way, books piled in precarious towers. The closet door is flung open, revealing lopsided stacks of file boxes. She wishes she could simply tell Adam and Rachida what Eva has told her and leave her questions with them. Had Eva shown Myra her scar and told its story seated at the farm table, Myra would have felt able, but what is said behind the closed door of her office, unless there is a clear danger at hand, belongs to the speaker and is not hers to share. Besides, she knows what Adam and Rachida would say about Eva. That she is wonderful with Omar—playful and loving and responsible.

When asked how to decide if a child needs treatment, Anna Freud had responded, If his problems are interfering with his life. If a child is proceeding with the tasks before him—his schoolwork, his friendships, his growing independence—leave him be. Wouldn’t the same apply to an adult? If Eva is doing her job well, should she be penalized for having had troubles as a child?

Too much talk, Myra imagines Dreis saying. Why so much explaining?

For the next two weeks, Eva comes to Myra’s office every day at precisely 2:20. Sometimes she sits down, sometimes she does not. When she sits, she waits for Myra to give an indication that she is ready to listen—a tilt of her head, a lift of an eyebrow. Sometimes she stops before Myra’s buzzer rings. If not, the moment the buzzer rings, she stands and heads upstairs to the kitchen with Myra’s tray.

The story unfolds piecemeal, like a photo collage where the images don’t quite match up, fractured so the mind needs to connect the lines to make up a whole. A courtyard behind the house where Eva’s family lived before her mother died. In the courtyard, there was a chicken coop. Eva’s father forbade anyone other than himself to kill the chickens.

“He drink from this brown bottle and then twist off their heads and throw the heads on the cement for the cats to eat.” Eva shudders. “It was disgusting. In the morning, I see bloody chicken heads outside the door.”

The next day: “When I do not eat the chickens, he come into my sister and my room and wave his hands covered with the blood over me. He smear the blood all over my blanket.”

Then on the Friday: “He smear it in my hair.”

It is 2:25. Eva has a faraway look in her eyes. “I scream so loud, my mother come running in with a butcher’s knife. She chase my father outside into the courtyard. He trip and chip his tooth. When he get up, he spit a piece of his tooth onto the cement.”

Myra prays for her patient to be late.

“My father take the rifle he keep in the chicken coop. My sister hide under the bed, but I watch from the door. He point the rifle at me, then at my mother. He shoot my mother in the thigh.”

Eva holds her fingers a centimeter apart. “He miss the bone by this much. When my mother get home from the hospital, he tell her, If you ever raise a knife at me again, putano, I will kill you. I will twist your neck like one of those chickens.”

The buzzer rings. Eva’s eyes follow Myra’s hand as she pushes the button to unlock the outside door. Eva stands. She takes Myra’s tray. “When I scream the next time, my sister run and my mother know not to come.”

After Eva leaves, Myra remains frozen in her chair. She feels the walls of her own house closing on her.

All weekend, her mind goes in circles. On the one hand, she feels bound by the confidentiality between therapist and patient. On the other hand, there are the strictures against dual relationships: not treating an employee, a friend, a relative. But Eva never stays in her office more than eight, nine minutes. How could these snippets of time be considered a treatment?

When Adam asks Eva if he can interview her as part of the research for his screenplay, she looks at him strangely.

“Would you mind?”

“No, I no mind.”

After dinner, they sit side by side at the farm table while Adam attempts to construct Eva’s family tree, beginning with Eva’s great-great-grandfather, whose name and date of death Eva knows from the gravestone her grandmother showed her: Isaac Selgado, b. Rabat 1861, d. Iquitos 1895.

“Rabat, that’s in Morocco,” Adam says.

“Where is Morocco?”

“Northern Africa—where Rachida is from.”

“I never know that. My mother never tell me that.”

Slowly, Adam gathers what Eva knows. Isaac Selgado had a son, who seems to have been born around 1890 and was the father of Eva’s maternal grandmother, Ana. It was Ana who showed Eva the Jewish cemetery, who took Eva and her mother to the Friday-night gatherings where Eva heard Hebrew read, watched candles being lit. Eva’s mother, the great-granddaughter of Selgado, was born in 1945. She attended the convent school and slept beneath a crucifix. “We are Jews,” she whispered to Eva, “but you must never tell anyone, not even your father.”

Adam fills in the chart as best he can. Upstairs, his mother is playing the piano. Eva draws a finger along the lines. She glances overhead.

After his mother finishes her piano practice, Adam takes the chart up to the music room and settles into the wing chair to study it further. He can hear Rachida, who has managed to make it home in time to give Omar his bath, say a last good-night.

Eva knocks on the doorjamb. She steps toward him, thrusting out her closed hand.

“Here. I bring this to show you.” She unfurls her fingers. In her palm is the piece of silver, the size and shape of a baby’s hand, she showed Omar that night on the terrace after Adam had crashed into his father. There is a hole at the wrist where a chain could be threaded through. “My mother tell me this was my great-great-grandfather’s. The writing on back, she say, is Hebrew.”

Adam takes the amulet. He holds it under the reading lamp. Each of the five digits is engraved with a filigree design. On the back of the hand are Hebrew letters.

“I can’t read Hebrew, but Rachida does. Can I keep it to show her?”

Eva nods. She bites her lip as the amulet disappears into Adam’s pocket.

When Adam comes into the bedroom, Rachida, still in her hospital scrubs, is lying propped on pillows atop the bed.

“I’m so beat, I barely made it through one story with Omar. My eyes were closing as I read. I must have seen thirty patients today, half of them with no medical history on file and a presenting problem of I don’t feel right, Doctor.”

Adam sits on the edge of the bed. He lifts Rachida’s foot, still in the heavy sock she wears with her hospital clogs, onto his lap. On the rare occasions when the hostility is not too thick between them, Rachida permits her feet to be massaged. He makes circles with his thumbs around her ankle.

She moans. “Whatever you’re doing, keep doing it.”

Adam removes his wife’s socks and deeply massages one foot.

“Eva gave me something she says belonged to her great-great-grandfather who came from Rabat. When she showed it to Omar, she said it’s called a hamsa.” Adam reaches into his pocket and takes out the silver hand. He gives it to Rachida and then goes back to work on her foot.

Rachida examines it. “My father makes these. The Muslim women have their version that they call the Hand of Fatima. Both Jewish women and Muslim women wear them to ward off evil.”

“Can you read the Hebrew on the back?”

Rachida turns over the hamsa. In Essaouira, women wear hamsas inscribed to Lilith, the demon who menaces the pregnant and newborn, so as to protect them from her nefarious deeds.

She reaches for her glasses on the bedside stand. “I think it says, I have set the Lord always before me.”

Rachida studies the amulet while Adam moves on to her other foot. In the afternoon, he’d taken the subway to the Village to visit an Adults Only bookstore. The store had been empty except for a Gypsy woman at the counter eating a smelly sandwich and staring at a portable television. She looked at him with no more interest than if he’d come to search for shampoo. Perhaps because of her indifference (on past visits, there had been a skinny man with bad skin who watched his every move), he went for the first time to the Men and Men section.

Back at the house, he locked the music room door and looked at the magazine he’d bought. Most of the pictures were of men sucking other men’s monstrous penises, images that held no interest for him. One picture, though, had mesmerized him: a tall, very erect, muscular man lifting another slighter, younger man high in the air, his mouth twisted into a lewd gesture that exposed his red tongue. Viewed in profile, the slighter figure, his penis hidden against the larger man’s abdomen, might have been a woman. Not until Adam brought himself to a climactic gasp imagining himself held aloft, his genitals pressed against the hard belly of the tall figure, did he recognize the image as the one from The Searchers where Ethan lifts his niece Debbie high over his head.

During the months after his father had left, the apartment thick with the sadness Adam felt inside, he would lie in bed at night imagining that at any moment, soon, very soon, his father would bound through the door. He’d lift Adam high, out of his bed, and tell him he was back, it was all over, he was home. Instead, there had been Sheri with her cartoonish boobs and her cats who would jump on him as he and Caro slept on her pull-out couch. Then, later, after his father had moved to Arizona and transformed himself into a cowboy cardiologist, there was his father’s relentless disappointment in him. Jesus Christ, he’d yell, kids around here start riding while they’re still in diapers, taking care of the animals not much later than that. Get on the goddamn horse.

Adam presses his thumbs into his wife’s arch. She lets out a guttural sound. He presses harder. In the dim light, with her broad torso and short hair, she could be mistaken for a man. He moves his fingers up to her calves.

Rachida lays the amulet next to her. Hidden beneath her scrubs, Layla wears a hamsa too. Rachida discovered this the first night she and Layla were on overnight call together. They exchanged back massages, something the residents often did for one another. Because it had been only the two of them that night in the residents’ dorm, Layla had taken off her top. Hanging between her child-sized breasts, hardly filling her teacup-sized bra, was the hamsa. Rachida could feel each of Layla’s ribs descending down to her waist, her back no wider than a twelve-year-old child’s. When it was Rachida’s turn to be massaged, Layla had teased that now Rachida had to take off her top too. She laughed at the size of the straps on Rachida’s granny-style bra.

Now Rachida imagines unsnapping Layla’s teacup bra, touching the tawny nipples. Pushing her tongue into Layla’s cardamom mouth.

In the photo, it is unclear if the figure held aloft is aroused. Adam wants that to be the case. He wants the larger man’s mouth against his ear, murmuring to him, pressing against him, Ethan, who wanted his brother’s wife, Debbie’s mother, now taking the grown girl instead. Adam moves up Rachida’s body, massaging her thighs. She turns off the light and he pushes her onto her side and curls around her, his hands kneading her ample breasts until she directs them to the places where she imagines Layla’s sweet fingers.

“It start before my mother die,” Eva tells Myra. She runs her hand down the upholstered arm of the patient chair.

“What started?”

“My father, he pull me out of the bed after he kill the chickens. He drag me by the hair with his hands all bloody into the chicken coop. He pull down his pants and push my mouth over him. He push himself into me until his stuff squirt all over me.”

Eva is softly crying. She takes a tissue from the box next to the chair and tears it into pieces. “I scream when he come into my room, but my sister put the pillow over her head and my mother is scared that he shoot her again.”

The tissue falls in shreds onto the floor. Myra feels a sharp pain in the pit of her stomach. She knew this was coming.

“He is a dirty, dirty man. He keep magazines with dirty pictures under a floorboard in the bathroom. My sister tell me that if we spit on them, it destroys the evil. We spit so many times, the pages stick together.”

When the buzzer rings, Eva immediately gets to her feet. Seeing the pieces of tissue on the floor, she bends over to pick them up.

Myra waits to call Dreis until her last patient has left. Two years after Myra had reached what both she and Dreis had considered the end of her analysis, she sheepishly went back to discuss her distress at a new permutation of Adam’s phobias that had arisen at the time of his college applications. It had taken only a few sessions for Myra to see what was being set off in her by Adam. A few years later, Dreis, having finally decided to retire, called Myra to tell her.

“What if,” Myra timidly asked, “there is something I need to talk with you about?”

“You’ll telephone me. I’m not disappearing. I just won’t be keeping regular hours or teaching any longer.”

Since then, Myra has seen Dreis only once, perhaps three years ago, after she’d developed an inexplicable anxiety about one of her patients. She’d gone to Dreis’s Park Avenue apartment. A housekeeper greeted Myra at the door, led her into the library, where her former analyst was seated with a blanket over her legs. It was a shock to see how old Dreis had become. But her mind remained as sharp as ever, and in one conversation, Myra felt back on track—not just with her patient, but with herself too.

“Would you like to come tomorrow? I know you wouldn’t call me until it felt pressing.”

“Would noon be okay?”

“Of course, dear.”

After her last morning patient, Myra goes directly upstairs. Eva is at the sink washing lettuce. With the water running, she doesn’t hear Myra open the stairway door.

She is singing to herself, and for a moment, Myra pauses to listen: “When the dog bites / When the bee stings…”

She has a beautiful voice. Sweet and pure.

“When I’m feeling sad…”

Myra clears her throat. Eva twists around. She looks shyly at Myra. “You are not going to the park today?”

“No. I have a doctor’s appointment. I’ll be back before my next patient.”

“I make you a tuna sandwich for when you get back?”

“Don’t bother. I’ll have something while I’m out.”

Eva turns back to the lettuce. Her shoulders pulse slightly. “I think you eat outside because you do not want me to talk to you today.”

“She was right,” Myra tells Dreis when she has reached the end of her description of Eva. “I don’t want her to tell me any more, not today, not any day.”

Dreis sips her tea and nibbles on one of the shortbread cookies the housekeeper has brought into the library.

“Of course you don’t. We can’t have our maids or our sisters or our neighbors as patients. It is too exhausting for us. There is no time off. If we can’t attend to our own fantasies for some hours of the day, we burn out. Besides, it is dangerous.”

“How so?”

“The transference is out of control. The girl wants you to really be her mother. There is no play in the work, no as if.”

“I haven’t thought of it as a treatment. I’ve thought of it as a lonely, troubled girl unburdening herself to an older person.”

“Myra, you know better. She sits in your patient chair. She tells you the things that people only tell their therapists.”

“She sits eight, nine minutes at a time.”

“My dear. All a patient needs sometimes is three minutes. Think of everything that is done in the last minutes of a session. For some patients, the entire treatment occurs in those few minutes. But here, you don’t have a patient. You have a girl who sees you all day long. She wants to be at your feet, to suckle your breast without end. She wants you to be the mother she lost too young.”

Myra sighs. She sinks back into Dreis’s armchair.

“There is something you didn’t tell me,” Dreis adds.

“What is that?”

“How her mother died.”

“She hasn’t told me.”

“And you haven’t asked?”

Myra stares out the window. She can hear the Park Avenue traffic below. In her mind’s eye, she can see Eva’s father with blood dripping from his hands and his fly unzipped.

“So what do I do now?” Myra asks as she turns back to Dreis. “Now that I’ve allowed things to go this far.”

“You explain to her what we’ve talked about and then give her the phone number of a clinic. You take her the first time if need be.”

In the afternoon, when Adam comes downstairs, Eva is putting on her jacket, getting ready to pick up Omar at school. From the way she keeps glancing up at him as she does the buttons, he feels as if there is something he has forgotten to do or say or …

“Mr. Adam, did you show Mrs. Rachida what I give you?”

That’s it. To give the amulet back to Eva. He was so thrown off balance by having sex with Rachida, he forgot to take the amulet back from Rachida. But where the hell is it? He remembers Rachida examining it, but what happened to it after that?

“I did. She said she’s seen lots of them before. I’ll get it for you while you’re out.”

Eva bends down to tie her shoes. She leaves without saying goodbye.

Adam climbs the two flights of stairs to his and Rachida’s room. Rachida must have put the amulet on the bedside stand when she took off her glasses, he decides. He searches the drawers. He searches under the bed. He searches on top of the dresser.

He stretches out on the bed, reconstructing that night. Did he take the amulet with him after Rachida fell asleep and he crept into the music room to look again at the magazine? He had wanted to see the picture of the man lifted high, the one that reminded him of Debbie in The Searchers. Had the amulet dropped inside the file box?

Adam goes downstairs to look in the music room. He locks the door, pulls down the shade, and drags the file box from the closet, sweeping his hand between the folders. He removes the envelope from the box and empties the pictures onto the floor. A weird feeling overtakes him, as though the men in the pictures are hiding the amulet from him.

He calls Rachida’s cell.

“Do you know where Eva’s amulet is?”

“The hamsa?”

“The thing you said was a hand.”

“I can’t talk now. I’m with a patient and we’re crazy backed up.”

From the other side of the door, Adam can hear Omar knocking. “Daddy, I’m home. Can I come in? I want to practice the piano.”

The photos are strewn across the floor. “One minute. I’m just finishing up something. Go have a snack and I’ll come get you when I’m done.”

“I already had a snack. Eva gave it to me.”

“Well, go watch TV or something. I just need a few minutes.”

“The TV is in here.”

“Omar, I said I need a few minutes.”

Adam can hear his son sighing and then heading to his room. He gathers up the pictures and puts them back in the brown envelope. He puts the envelope back in the file box and the file box back inside the closet, then opens the shades and the door.

“What should I tell her?” he asks Rachida after she too has looked everywhere for the amulet and cannot find it.

“You’ll have to tell her the truth.”

“She’ll be devastated.”

“I could ask my father to make her another hamsa, but I don’t think it would be the same.”

“Maybe she’d take it better if we had one to give her when we tell her hers is lost.”

“Maybe.” Rachida flops onto the bed. “There is an outbreak of croup. A lot of the children also have asthma, so we have to give them nebulizers. The nurses were so behind showing parents how to hook up the tubing that I had to do the blood tests and shots myself.”

“Do you remember the inscription?”

“The inscription?”

“On the amulet, do you recall the inscription?”

Rachida presses her fingers over her eyelids. For a moment, Adam thinks he remembers the hamsa lying on the bedcovers next to Rachida’s face. Had it been left there? Wouldn’t Eva have found it in the morning when she made the bed?

“I have set the Lord always before me.”

Eva sits motionless in the patient chair, her feet planted on the floor so her knees stick straight up.

“You look like you have something on your mind.”

Eva stares suspiciously at Myra. “How do you know?”

“The expression on your face suggests you’re thinking about something.”

“I think about the silver hand my mother give me. She give it to me after my father shoot her in the leg. I never know if she give it to me because it stop working for her or because she think I need it more than she need it.”

Dreis’s question comes back to Myra. “You didn’t say how your mother died.”

“She die in a fire.”

“A fire?”

“A fire in our house. My father set the house on fire.”

Eva touches the chain that hangs around her neck. “My sister and I were in the courtyard. The house was one floor, so the fire catch the roof fast. The flames shoot up into the air.”

“Your father set the house on fire on purpose?”

“He want to kill all of us. My mother, my sister, and me. But he kill only my mother. She burn to death.”

Eva crinkles her nose. It is the same crinkle of disgust Myra has seen Eva make when she talks about the smell of cooking meat. She touches the spot under her shirt where something hangs from the chain.

“The only good thing is, he burn the dirty pictures. I never see them again after that.”

Myra calls the clinic at St. Luke’s Hospital. She speaks with the intake social worker, who promises a Spanish-speaking psychiatry resident, a man named Dr. Gonzalez, will see Eva.

Myra finds Eva in the kitchen. She’s at the sink scrubbing potatoes.

“There’s something I want to talk with you about.”

Eva keeps her eyes on the stream of water.

“We need to find someone who will have more time for you than I do. Someone you can talk to about some of the things you’ve been telling me.”

Eva nods as though she has known this would happen.

“I’ve made an appointment for you for Thursday at noon with a doctor, a man named Dr. Gonzalez, at a clinic nearby. They will only charge what they think you can afford. If it’s still too much, I’ll help you with it.”

“You want a girl to cook meat for Omar. You think a growing boy needs meat and it bother you to have to do it yourself.”

“This has nothing to do with your work. You are doing a fine job.”

“I can cook meat. I will do it from now on.”

A feeling of despair descends over Myra: it is too late with Eva, they are already in too deep. Don’t be ridiculous, she chastises herself. You just have to handle this with clinical tact. “This has nothing to do with your cooking. This has to do with what you’ve been telling me about yourself, with your needing more time to talk and someone who can listen to you without interruption.”

“You can listen to me. I will come down earlier.”

“It’s not good for your therapist to be the person you work for.”

“After my mother die, my aunt take me to a doctor. He come out to the waiting room and listen to my heart. He pinch my cheek, then give my aunt some pills to give me.”

“This doctor will talk with you before he decides what would help. The appointment is for noon. I’ll go with you the first time.”

Eva turns up the water; it splashes against the sides of the sink. Myra imagines Eva as a young girl, putting the pills under her tongue and then, when her aunt turns her head, spitting them into her palm.

On Thursday, Myra comes upstairs after her last morning patient. Eva is not in the kitchen. On the third floor, Adam has the door to the music room closed. The beds are made in Omar’s room, in Adam and Rachida’s room on the fourth floor, and in Eva’s room, but Eva is nowhere to be seen. At five minutes to twelve, Myra cancels the appointment.

“I forget,” Eva says when Myra sees her before dinner.

“Are you sure you forgot?”

“Yes. I am more careful next time.”

But the next week, the same thing happens. Again, when Myra comes upstairs to get Eva, she is gone. She searches the house, calling Eva’s name before canceling the appointment. This time, instead of waiting fruitlessly for Eva to reappear, she changes her clothes for her reservoir walk.

When Myra returns to her office, a lunch tray is on her desk. Eva is in the patient chair.

Myra sits behind her desk. Eva looks at her shyly, then giggles. “I am sorry. I forget again.”

“Clearly, you did not forget.”

“I cannot talk to a strange man.”

“Would you feel better if the psychiatrist were a woman?”

Eva shrugs her shoulders. Myra wonders where Eva hid today. In the synagogue on West End Avenue? In the back of a closet, sucking her thumb, listening as Myra called her name?

“Her mother burned to death?”

They are in Dreis’s living room, where the housekeeper has made a fire. Outside, the air is the murky white that harkens a freeze. The room is exceedingly warm, but Dreis keeps her legs covered with a blanket. It occurs to Myra that it has been a long time since she has seen her former analyst standing. Even in full health, Dreis was tiny, hardly five feet. Myra wonders how tall she stands now or if she can, in fact, stand at all.

Myra nods.

“People die of smoke inhalation, of injuries from falling beams. Does she mean her mother was pulverized?”

Myra feels suddenly very foolish. Inept. Eva has said that her father set the fire and that she watched the house burn to the ground. Did she manage to get herself out or did her father change his mind and rescue her and her sister?

“I know that the picture doesn’t quite fit together.”

Now Dreis nods.

“She needs to tell her story. I know she shouldn’t be telling it to me, but I don’t think she’s going to tell it to anyone else. If I refuse to let her talk to me, she’ll never tell anyone.”

In her mind’s eye, Myra can see the newspaper photograph from the summer when Adam and Rachida and Omar traveled out West: a moose, antlers aloft, standing in the middle of the Salmon River, banks aflame.

Were it up to Adam, Eva would never be allowed into the music room, but his mother has gently insisted that Eva, whom he has instructed not to touch the papers on his desk or the boxes in the closet, be permitted once a week to vacuum the rug and dust the piano. Usually, Eva vacuums on Thursday afternoons while he is picking up Omar, Rachida’s plans for doing pickup never having materialized, but this Thursday, the first Thursday in December, when he arrives home with Omar, he can hear the vacuum still running.

Adam forces himself to climb the stairs. Two weeks have passed, during which he’s avoided telling Eva that he can’t find her amulet.

Eva is bent over the vacuum, carefully guiding it between the piano legs.

“Eva, could I talk with you?”

Eva stares at him.

“Could you turn off the vacuum?”

The vacuum stops. Adam points at the wing chair. He drags the desk chair over for himself.

“I have bad news.” He swallows, rests his clammy palms on his thighs. “I seem to have misplaced your amulet. I feel terrible about it. I’ve searched everywhere.”

Eva sits motionless, her lips slightly parted.

“I’m sure it will turn up because I never took it out of the house. I showed it to Rachida. Then, when I went to get it to give it back to you, I couldn’t find it. Rachida and I tore apart our room. We looked under the mattress. We even rolled up the rug.”

Eva does not reply. She appears to be watching Adam’s lips, as though they are strange doggish fish.

“Rachida’s father—he’s a jeweler—is making you another one. I know it’s not the same, and I’m not saying we won’t find yours. But in the meantime, at least you’ll have something.”

Adam’s armpits are pouring sweat. He would not have felt worse if he were telling a kid he’d run over her dog.

“Can I go back to vacuuming?”

“My mother always say never tell anyone anything,” Eva tells Myra the following day.

“Many children are told that.”

“If I tell you things, you will think I am lying.”

It is she, Myra, who feels like the liar. She told Dreis she would insist that Eva go to a clinic, that their talks cease. And she has tried. She made a third clinic appointment, which Eva also missed, but it was followed by a week during which Eva retrieved Myra’s tray without sitting in the patient chair, so that Myra had thought, Well, she understands even if she won’t go see another therapist. The following Monday, though, Eva was back in the patient chair. Before Myra could say, You can’t sit here with me in the office, Eva resumed. Rags. Her father had stuffed rags soaked with kerosene in the corners. It was night, her mother asleep in the back bedroom. At the last minute, with the house already filling with fumes, he dragged Eva and her sister outside. He put them in the chicken coop and told them not to move. Then he crept into the kitchen and threw a lit match.

“All I have left from my mother is the amulet she give me.” Eva touches something hanging under her shirt.

“Now you will quit me,” she continues.

“Quit you?”

“Make me leave.”

“Why would I make you leave?”

“The people who want it.”

“Who want what?”

“When my sister tell her teacher that our mother die, my father hit her in the mouth with a rock.”

Myra’s buzzer rings.

After Eva leaves, Myra stands to stretch her back. She bends forward, her head and arms dangling down. A wave of dizziness, then nausea, comes over her, and for a moment she wonders if the sandwich Eva made for her was spoiled.

She walks toward the waiting room, not thinking, as she usually does, about the patient she will greet, the mood she might encounter, the link to what happened in his last session, her mind still on Eva so that the sight of her patient’s face comes as a jolt, like a boat bumping against a dock, an undertow of fear in its wake.