This was at a time when my marriage was still happy.

We were living in a large city in the northeast. It was winter. February. The coldest month. I was, of course, still trying to write, and my wife was working as a translator for a small publishing company that specialized in Czech scientific papers. We had been married for ten years and were still enjoying that strange, exhilarating illusion that we had survived the worst of life’s hardships.

The apartment we rented was in the old factory section on the south end of the city, the living space only a great, empty room with tall windows front and back, and almost no electric light. The natural light was all. A famous avant-garde theater director had lived in the room before and put on his jagged, nihilistic plays there, so that all the walls were painted black, and along one were still riser seats for his small disaffected audiences. Our bed — my wife’s and mine — was in one dark corner where we’d arranged some of the tall, black-canvas scenery drops for our privacy. Though, of course, there was no one for us to need privacy from.

Each night when my wife came back from her work, we would go out into the cold, shining streets and find a restaurant to have our meal in. Later we would stop for an hour in a bar and have coffee or a brandy, and talk intensely about the translations my wife was working on, though never (blessedly) about the work I was by then already failing at.

Our wish, needless to say, was to stay out of the apartment as long as we could. For not only was there almost no light inside, but each night at seven the building’s owner would turn off the heat, so that by ten — on our floor, the highest — it was too cold to be anywhere but in bed piled over with blankets, barely able to move. My wife, at that time, was working long hours and was always fatigued, and although sometimes we would come home a little drunk and make love in the dark bed under blankets, mostly she would fall straight into bed exhausted and be snoring before I could climb in beside her.

And so it happened that on many nights that winter, in the cold, large, nearly empty room, I would be awake, often wide awake from the strong coffee we’d drunk. And often I would walk the floor from window to window, looking out into the night, down to the vacant street or up into the ghostly sky that burned with the shimmery luminance of the city’s buildings, buildings I couldn’t even see. Often I had a blanket or sometimes two around my shoulders, and I wore the coarse heavy socks I’d kept from when I was a boy.

It was on such a cold night that — through the windows at the back of the flat, windows giving first onto an alley below, then farther across a space where a wire factory had been demolished, providing a view of buildings on the street parallel to ours — I saw, inside a long, yellow-lit apartment, the figure of a woman slowly undressing, from all appearances oblivious to the world outside the window glass.

Because of the distance, I could not see her well or at all clearly, could only see that she was small in stature and seemingly thin, with close-cropped dark hair — a petite woman in every sense. The yellow light in the room where she was seemed to blaze and made her skin bronze and shiny, and her movements, seen through the windows, appeared stylized and slightly unreal, like the movements of a silhouette or in an old motion picture.

I, though, alone in the frigid dark, wrapped in blankets that covered my head like a shawl, with my wife sleeping, oblivious, a few paces away — I was rapt by this sight. At first I moved close to the window glass, close enough to feel the cold on my cheeks. But then, sensing I might be noticed even at that distance, I slipped back into the room. Eventually I went to the corner and clicked off the small lamp my wife kept beside our bed, so that I was totally hidden in the dark. And after another few minutes I went to a drawer and found the pair of silver opera glasses which the theater director had left, and took them near the window and watched the woman across the space of darkness from my own space of darkness.

I don’t know all that I thought. Undoubtedly I was aroused. Undoubtedly I was thrilled by the secrecy of watching out of the dark. Undoubtedly I loved the very illicitness of it, of my wife sleeping nearby and knowing nothing of what I was doing. It is also possible I even liked the cold as it surrounded me, as complete as the night itself, may even have felt that the sight of the woman — whom I took to be young and lacking caution or discretion — held me somehow, insulated me and made the world stop and be perfectly expressible as two poles connected by my line of vision. I am sure now that all of this had to do with my impending failures.

Nothing more happened. Though in the nights to come I stayed awake to watch the woman, letting my wife go off to sleep in her fatigue. Each night, and for a week following, the woman would appear at her window and slowly disrobe in her room (a room I never tried to imagine, although on the wall behind her was what looked like a drawing of a springing deer). Once her clothes were shed away, exposing her bony shoulders and small breasts and thin legs and rib cage and modest, rounded stomach, the woman would for a while cast about the room in the bronze light, window to window, enacting what seemed to me a kind of languid, ritual dance or a pattern of possibly theatrical movements, rising and bowing and extending her arms, arching her neck, while making her hands perform graceful lilting gestures I didn’t understand and did not try to, taken as I was by her nakedness and by the sight on occasion of the dark swatch of hair between her legs. It was all arousal and secrecy and illicitness and really nothing else.

This I did for a week, as I said, and then I stopped. Simply one night, draped again in blankets, I went to the window with my opera glasses, saw the lights on across the vacant space. For a while I saw no one. And then for no particular reason I turned and got into bed with my wife, warm and smelling of brandy and sweat and sleep under her blankets, and went to sleep myself, never thinking to look through the window again.

Though one afternoon a week after I had stopped watching through the window, I left my desk in a moment of frustration and pointless despair, and stalked out into the winter daylight and up along the row of fashionable businesses where the old buildings were being restyled as dress shops and successful artists’ galleries. I walked right to the river, clogged then with great squares of gray ice. I walked on to the university section, nearly to where my wife was at that hour working. And then, as the light was failing, I started back toward my street, my face hard with cold, my shoulders stiff, my gloveless hands frozen and red. As I turned a corner to take a quicker route back to my block, I found that I was unexpectedly passing before the building into which I had for days been spying. Something about it made me know it, though I’d never been aware of walking past there before, or even seen it in daylight. And just at that moment, letting herself into the building’s tall front door, was the woman I had watched for those several nights and taken pleasure and undoubtedly secret consolation from. I knew her face, naturally — small and round and, as I saw, impassive. And to my surprise though not to my chagrin, she was old. Possibly she was seventy or even older. A Chinese, dressed in thin black trousers and a thin black coat, inside which she must’ve been as cold as I was. Indeed, she must’ve been freezing. She was carrying plastic bags of groceries slung on her arms and clutched in her hands. When I stopped and looked at her she turned and gazed down the steps at me with an expression I can only think now was indifference mingled with just the smallest recognition of threat. She was old, after all. I might suddenly have felt the urge to harm her, and easily could’ve. But of course that was not my thought. She turned back to the door and seemed to hurry her key into the lock. She looked my way once more, as I heard the bolt shoot profoundly back. I said nothing, did not even look at her again. I didn’t want her to think my mind contained what it did and also what it did not. And I walked on then, feeling oddly but in no way surprisingly betrayed, simply passed on down the street toward my room and my own doors, my life entering, as it was at that moment, its first, long cycle of necessity.

Where he stopped for the red light on busy Sheridan Road, Wales watched a woman fall down in the snow. A sudden loss of footing on the slick, walked-over hummock the plows had left at the crosswalk. Must be old, Wales thought, though it was dark and he couldn’t see her face, only her fall— backwards. She wore a long gray man’s coat and boots and a knitted cap pulled down. Or else, of course, she was drinking, he supposed, watching her through his salted windshield as he waited. She could be younger, too. Younger and drinking.

Wales was driving to The Drake to spend the night with a woman named Jena, a married woman whose husband had done colossally well in real estate. Jena had taken a suite in The Drake for a week — to paint. She was forty. She had her husband’s permission. They — she and Wales — had done this five nights in a row now. He wanted it to go on.

Wales had worked abroad for fourteen years, writing for various outlets — in Barcelona, Stockholm, Berlin. Always in English. He’d lately realized he’d been away too long, had lost touch with things American. But a friend from years ago, a reporter he’d known in London, had called and said, come back, come home, come to Chicago, teach a seminar on exactly what it’s like to be James Wales. Just two days a week, for a couple of months, then back to Berlin. “The Literature of the Actual,” his friend who’d become a professor had said, and laughed. It was funny. Like Hegel was funny. None of the students took it too seriously.

The woman who’d fallen — old, young, drunk, sober, he wasn’t sure — had gotten to her feet now, and for some reason had put one hand on top of her head, as if the wind was blowing. Traffic rushed in front of her up Sheridan Road, accumulating speed behind headlights. Tall sixties apartment blocks — a long file of them, all with nice views — separated the street from the lake. It was early March. Wintry.

The stoplight stayed red for Wales’s lane, though the oncoming cars began turning in front of him in quick procession onto Ardmore Avenue. But the woman who’d fallen and had her hand on her head took this moment to step out into the thoroughfare. And for some lucky reason the driver in the nearest lane, the lane by the curb, slowed and came to a stop for her. Though the woman never saw this, never sensed she had, by taking two, perhaps three unwise steps, put herself in danger. Who knows what’s buzzing in that head, Wales thought, watching. A moment ago she was lying in the snow. A moment before that everything had been fine.

The cars opposite continued turning hurriedly onto Ardmore Avenue. And it was the cars in this lane — the middle turning lane — whose drivers did not see the woman as she stepped uncertainly, farther into the street. Though it seemed she did see them, because she extended the same hand that had been touching her head and held it palm outward, as if she expected the turning cars to stop as she stepped into their lane. And it was one of these cars, a dark van, resembling a small spaceship (and, Wales thought, moving too fast, much faster than reasonable under the conditions), one of these speeding cars that hit the woman flush-on, bore directly into her side like a boat ramming her, never thinking of brakes, and in so doing knocked her not up into the air or under the wheels or onto its non-existent hood, but sloughed her to the side and onto the road — changed her in an instant from an old, young, possibly drunk, possibly sober woman in a gray man’s coat, into a collection of assorted remnants on a frozen pavement.

Dead, Wales thought — not five feet from where he and his lane now began to pass smartly by, the light having gone green and horns having commenced behind. In his side mirror he saw the woman’s motionless body in the road (he was already a half block beyond the scene). The street was congested both ways, more car horns were blaring. He saw that the van, its taillights brilliant red, had stopped, a figure was rushing back into the road, arms waving crazily. People were hurrying from the bus stop, from the apartment buildings. Traffic was coming to a halt on that side.

He’d thought to stop, but stopping wouldn’t have helped, Wales thought, looking again into the mirror from a half block farther on. A collection of shadowy people stood out on the pavement, peering down. He couldn’t see the woman. Though no one was kneeling to assist her — which was a sure sign. His heart began rocketing. Cold sweat rose on his neck in the warm car. He was suddenly jittery. It’s always bad to die when you don’t want to. That had been the motto of a man named Peter Swayzee he’d known in Spain — a photographer, a silly man who was dead now, shot to pieces covering a skirmish in East Africa, someplace where the journalists expected to be protected. He himself had never done that— covered a war or a skirmish or a border flare-up or a firefight. He had no wish for that. It was reckless. He preferred the parts that weren’t war. Culture. And he was now in Chicago.

A year after my father departed, moved to St. Louis, and left my mother and me behind in New Orleans to look after ourselves in whatever manner we could, he called on the telephone one afternoon and asked to speak to me. This was before Christmas, 1961. I was home from military school in Florida. My mother had begun her new singing career, which meant taking voice lessons at a local academy, and also letting a tall black man who was her accompanist move into our house and into her bedroom, while passing himself off to the neighborhood as the yard man. William Dubinion was his name, and together he and my mother drank far too much and filled up the ashtrays and played jazz recordings too loud and made unwelcome noise until late, which had not been how things were done when my father was there. However, it was done because he was not there, and because he had gone off to St. Louis with another man, an ophthalmologist named Francis Carter, never to come back. I think it seemed to my mother that in view of these facts it didn’t matter what she did or how she lived, and that doing the worst was finally not much different from doing the best.

They’re all dead now. My father. My mother. Dr. Carter. The black accompanist, Dubinion. Though occasionally I’ll still see a man on St. Charles Avenue, in the business district, a man entering one of the new office buildings they’ve built — a tall, handsome, long-strided, flaxen-haired, youthful, slightly ironic-looking man in a seersucker suit, bow tie and white shoes, who will remind me of my father, or how he looked, at least, when these events occurred. He must’ve looked that way, in fact, all of his years, into his sixties. New Orleans produces men like my father, or once did: clubmen, racquets players, deft, balmy-day sailors, soft-handed Episcopalians with progressive attitudes, good educations, effortless manners, but with secrets. These men, when you meet them on the sidewalk or at some uptown dinner, seem like the very best damn old guys you could ever know. You want to call them up the very next day and set some plans going. It seems you always knew about them, that they were present in the city but you just hadn’t seen a lot of them — a glimpse here and there. They seem exotic, and your heart expands with the thought of a long friendship’s commencement and your mundane life taking a new and better turn. So you do call, and you do see them. You go spec fishing off Pointe a la Hache. You stage a dinner and meet their pretty wives. You take a long lunch together at Antoine’s or Commander’s and decide to do this every week from now on to never. Yet someplace along late in the lunch you hit a flat spot. A silent moment occurs, and your eyes meet in a way that could signal a deep human understanding you’d never ever have to speak about. But what you see is, suddenly — and it is sudden and fleeting — you see this man is far, far away from you, so far in fact as not even to realize it. A smile could be playing on his face. He may just have said something charming or incisive or flatteringly personal to you. But then the far, far away awareness dawns, and you know you’re nothing to him and will probably never even see him again, never take the trouble. Or, if you do chance to see him, you’ll cross streets midblock, cast around for exits in crowded dining rooms, sit longer than you need to in the front seat of your car to let such a man go around a corner or disappear into the very building I mentioned. You avoid him. And it is not that there is anything so wrong with him, nothing unsavory or misaligned. Nothing sexual. You just know he’s not for you. And that is an end to it. It’s simple really. Though of course it’s more complicated when the man in question is your father.

When I saw Mack Bolger he was standing beside the bottom of the marble steps that bring travelers and passersby to and from the balcony of the main concourse in Grand Central. It was before Christmas last year, when the weather stayed so warm and watery the spirit seemed to go out of the season.

I was cutting through the terminal, as I often do on my way home from the publishing offices on Forty-first Street. I was, in fact, on my way to meet a new friend at Billy’s. It was four o’clock on Friday, and the great station was athrong with citizens on their way somewhere, laden with baggage and precious packages, shouting goodbyes and greetings, flagging their arms, embracing, gripping each other with pleasure. Others, though, simply stood, as Mack Bolger was when I saw him, staring rather vacantly at the crowds, as if whomever he was there to meet for some reason hadn’t come. Mack is a tall, handsome, well-put-together man who seems to see everything from a height. He was wearing a long, well-fitted gabardine overcoat of some deep-olive twill — an expensive coat, I thought, an Italian coat. His brown shoes were polished to a high gloss; his trouser cuffs hit them just right. And because he was without a hat, he seemed even taller than what he was — perhaps six-three. His hands were in his coat pockets, his smooth chin slightly elevated the way a middle-aged man would, and as if he thought he was extremely visible there. His hair was thinning a little in front, but it was carefully cut, and he was tanned, which caused his square face and prominent brow to appear heavy, almost artificially so, as though in a peculiar way the man I saw was not Mack Bolger but a good-looking effigy situated precisely there to attract my attention.

For a while, a year and a half before, I had been involved with Mack Bolger’s wife, Beth Bolger. Oddly enough — only because all events that occur outside New York seem odd and fancifully unreal to New Yorkers — our affair had taken place in the city of St. Louis, that largely overlookable red-brick abstraction that is neither West nor Middlewest, neither South nor North; the city lost in the middle, as I think of it. I’ve always found it interesting that it was both the boyhood home of T. S. Eliot, and only eighty-five years before that, the starting point of westward expansion. It’s a place, I suppose, the world can’t get away from fast enough.

What went on between Beth Bolger and me is hardly worth the words that would be required to explain it away. At any distance but the close range I saw it from, it was an ordinary adultery — spirited, thrilling and then, after a brief while, when we had crossed the continent several times and caused as many people as possible unhappiness, embarrassment and heartache, it became disappointing and ignoble and finally almost disastrous to those same people. Because it is the truth and serves to complicate Mack Bolger’s unlikeable dilemma and to cast him in a more sympathetic light, I will say that at some point he was forced to confront me (and Beth as well) in a hotel room in St. Louis — a nice, graceful old barn called the Mayfair — with the result that I got banged around in a minor way and sent off into the empty downtown streets on a warm, humid autumn Sunday afternoon, without the slightest idea of what to do, ending up waiting for hours at the St. Louis airport for a midnight flight back to New York. Apart from my dignity, I left behind and never saw again a brown silk Hermès scarf with tassels that my mother had given me for Christmas in 1971, a gift she felt was the nicest thing she’d ever seen and perfect for a man just commencing life as a book editor. I’m glad she didn’t have to know about my losing it, and how it happened.

I also did not see Beth Bolger again, except for one sorrowful and bitter drink we had together in the theater district last spring, a nervous, uncomfortable meeting we somehow felt obligated to have, and following which I walked away down Forty-seventh Street, feeling that all of life was a sorry mess, while Beth went along to see The Iceman Cometh, which was playing then. We have not seen each other since that leave-taking, and, as I said, to tell more would not be quite worth the words.

But when I saw Mack Bolger standing in the crowded, festive holiday-bedecked concourse of Grand Central, looking rather vacant-headed but clearly himself, so far from the middle of the country, I was taken by a sudden and strange impulse — which was to walk straight across through the eddying sea of travelers and speak to him, just as one might speak to anyone you casually knew and had unexpectedly yet not unhappily encountered. And not to impart anything, or set in motion any particular action (to clarify history, for instance, or make amends), but simply to create an event where before there was none. And not an unpleasant event, or a provocative one. Just a dimensionless, unreverberant moment, a contact, unimportant in every other respect. Life has few enough of these moments — the rest of it being so consumed by the predictable and the obligated.

I knew a few things about Mack Bolger, about his life since we’d last confronted each other semi-violently in the Mayfair. Beth had been happy to tell me during our woeful drink at the Espalier Bar in April. Our — Beth’s and my — love affair was, of course, only one feature in the long devaluation and decline in her and Mack’s marriage. This I’d always understood. There were two children, and Mack had been frantic to hold matters together for their sakes and futures; Beth was a portrait photographer who worked at home, but craved engagement with the wide world outside of University City — craved it in the worst way, and was therefore basically unsatisfied with everything in her life. After my sudden departure, she moved out of their house, rented an apartment near the Gateway Arch and, for a time, took a much younger lover. Mack, for his part in their upheaval, eventually quit his job as an executive for a large agri-biz company, considered studying for the ministry, considered going on a missionary journey to Senegal or French Guiana, briefly took a young lover himself. One child had been arrested for shoplifting; the other had gotten admitted to Brown. There were months of all-night confrontations, some combative, some loving and revelatory, some derisive from both sides. Until everything that could be said or expressed or threatened was said, expressed and threatened, after which a standstill was achieved whereby they both stayed in their suburban house, kept separate schedules, saw new and different friends, had occasional dinners together, went to the opera, occasionally even slept together, but saw little hope (in Beth’s case, certainly) of things turning out better than they were at the time of our joyless drink and the O’Neill play. I’d assumed at that time that Beth was meeting someone else that evening, had someone in New York she was interested in, and I felt completely fine about it.

“It’s really odd, isn’t it?” Beth said, stirring her long, almost pure-white finger around the surface of her Kir Royale, staring not at me but at the glass rim where the pink liquid nearly exceeded its vitreous limits. “We were so close for a little while.” Her eyes rose to me, and she smiled almost girlishly. “You and me, I mean. Now, I feel like I’m telling all this to an old friend. Or to my brother.”

Beth is a tall, sallow-faced, big-boned, ash blond woman who smokes cigarettes and whose hair often hangs down in her eyes like a forties Hollywood glamour girl. This can be attractive, although it often causes her to seem to be spying on her own conversations.

“Well,” I said, “it’s all right to feel that way.” I smiled back across the little round blacktopped café table. It was all right. I had gone on. When I looked back on what we’d done, none of it except for what we’d done in bed made me feel good about life, or that the experience had been worth it. But I couldn’t undo it. I don’t believe the past can be repaired, only exceeded. “Sometimes, friendship’s all we’re after in these sorts of things,” I said. Though this, I admit, I did not really believe.

“Mack’s like a dog, you know,” Beth said, flicking her hair away from her eyes. He was on her mind. “I kick him, and he tries to bring me things. It’s pathetic. He’s very interested in Tantric sex now, whatever that is. Do you know what that even is?”

“I really don’t like hearing this,” I said stupidly, though it was true. “It sounds cruel.”

“You’re just afraid I’ll say the same thing about you, Johnny.” She smiled and touched her damp fingertip to her lips, which were wonderful lips.

“Afraid,” I said. “Afraid’s really not the word, is it?”

“Well, then, whatever the word is.” Beth looked quickly away and motioned the waiter for the check. She didn’t know how to be disagreed with. It always frightened her.

But that was all. I’ve already said our meeting wasn’t a satisfying one.

Early this past spring someone left a puppy inside the back gate of our house, and then never came back to get it. This happened at a time when I was traveling up and back to St. Louis each week, and my wife was intensely involved in the AIDS marathon, which occurs, ironically enough, around tax time in New Orleans and is usually the occasion for a lot of uncomfortable, conflicted spirits, which inevitably get resolved, of course, by good will and dedication.

To begin in this way is only to say that our house is often empty much of the day, which allowed whoever left the puppy to do so. We live on a corner in the fashionable historical district. Our house is large and old and conspicuous— typical of the French Quarter — and the garden gate is a distance from the back door, blocked from it by thick ligustrums. So to set a puppy down over the iron grating and slip away unnoticed wouldn’t be hard, and I imagine was not.

“It was those kids,” my wife said, folding her arms. She was standing with me inside the French doors, staring out at the puppy, who was seated on the brick pavements looking at us with what seemed like insolent curiosity. It was small and had slick, short coarse hair and was mostly white, with a few triangular black side patches. Its tail stuck alertly up when it was standing, making it look as though it might’ve had pointer blood back in its past. For no particular reason, I gauged it to be three months old, though its legs were long and its white feet larger than you would expect. “It’s those ones in the neighborhood wearing all the black,” Sallie said. “Whatever you call them. All penetrated everywhere and ridiculous, living in doorways. They always have a dog on a rope.” She tapped one of the square panes with her fingernail to attract the puppy’s attention. It had begun diligently scratching its ear, but stopped and fixed its dark little eyes on the door. It had dragged a red plastic dust broom from under the outside back stairs, and this was lying in the middle of the garden. “We have to get rid of it,” Sallie said. “The poor thing. Those shitty kids just got tired of it. So they abandon it with us.”

“I’ll try to place it,” I said. I had been home from St. Louis all of five minutes and had barely set my suitcase inside the front hall.

“Place it?” Sallie’s arms were folded. “Place it where? How?”

“I’ll put up some signs around,” I said, and touched her shoulder. “Somebody in the neighborhood might’ve lost it. Or else someone found it and left it here so it wouldn’t get run over. Somebody’ll come looking.”

The puppy barked then. Something (who knows what) had frightened it. Suddenly it was on its feet barking loudly and menacingly at the door we were standing behind, as though it had sensed we were intending something and resented that. Then just as abruptly it stopped, and without taking its dark little eyes off of us, squatted puppy-style and pissed on the bricks.

“That’s its other trick,” Sallie said. The puppy finished and delicately sniffed at its urine, then gave it a sampling lick. “What it doesn’t pee on it jumps on and scratches and barks at. When I found it this morning, it barked at me, then it jumped on me and peed on my ankle and scratched my leg. I was only trying to pet it and be nice.” She shook her head.

“It was probably afraid,” I said, admiring the puppy’s staunch little bearing, its sharply pointed ears and simple, uncomplicated pointer’s coloration. Solid white, solid black. It was a boy dog.

“Don’t get attached to it, Bobby,” Sallie said. “We have to take it to the pound.”

My wife is from Wetumpka, Alabama. Her family were ambitious, melancholy Lutheran Swedes who somehow made it to the South because her great-grandfather had accidentally invented a lint shield for the ginning process which ended up saving people millions. In one generation the Holmbergs from Lund went from being dejected, stigmatized immigrants to being moneyed gentry with snooty Republican attitudes and a strong sense of entitlement. In Wetumpka there was a dog pound, and stray dogs were always feared for carrying mange and exotic fevers. I’ve been there; I know this. A dogcatcher prowled around with a ventilated, louver-sided truck and big catch-net. When an unaffiliated dog came sniffing around anybody’s hydrangeas, a call was made and off it went forever.

“There aren’t dog pounds anymore,” I said.

“I meant the shelter,” Sallie said privately. “The SPCA— where they’re nice to them.”

“I’d like to try the other way first. I’ll make a sign.”

“But aren’t you leaving again tomorrow?”

“Just for two days,” I said. “I’ll be back.”

Sallie tapped her toe, a sign that something had made her unsettled. “Let’s not let this drag out.” The puppy began trotting off toward the back of the garden and disappeared behind one of the big brick planters of pittosporums. “The longer we keep it, the harder it’ll be to give it up. And that is what’ll happen. We’ll have to get rid of it eventually.”

“We’ll see.”

“When the time comes, I’ll let you take it to the pound,” she said.

I smiled apologetically. “That’s fine. If the time comes, then I will.”

We ended it there.

Faith is not driving them, her mother, Esther is.

In the car, it’s the five of them. The family, on their way to Snow Mountain Highlands, to ski. Sandusky, Ohio, to northern Michigan. It’s Christmas, or nearly. No one wants to spend Christmas alone.

The five include Faith, who’s the motion-picture lawyer, arrived from California; her mother, Esther, who’s sixty-four and has, over the years, become much too fat. There’s Roger, Faith’s sister Daisy’s estranged husband, a guidance counselor at Sandusky JFK; and Roger’s two girls: Jane and Marjorie, ages eight and six. Daisy — the girls’ mom — is a presence, but not along. She’s in rehab in a large midwestern city that is not Chicago or Detroit.

Outside, beyond the long, treeless expanse of whitely frozen winterscape, Lake Michigan itself becomes suddenly visible, pale blue with a thin veneer of fog just above its metallic surface. The girls are chatting in the back seat. Roger is beside them reading Skier magazine.

Florida would’ve been a much nicer holiday alternative, Faith thinks. EPCOT for the girls. The Space Center. Satellite Beach. Fresh pompano. The ocean. She’s paying for everything and doesn’t even like to ski. But it’s been a hard year for everyone, and somebody has to take charge. If they’d gone to Florida, she’d have ended up broke.

Her basic character strength, Faith thinks, watching what seems to be a nuclear power plant coming up on the left, is the same feature that makes her a first-rate lawyer: an undeterrable willingness to see things as capable of being made better, and an addiction to thoroughness. If someone at the studio, a V.P. in marketing, for example, wishes to exit from a totally binding yet surprisingly uncomfortable obligation — say, a legal contract — then Faith’s your girl. Faith the doer. Faith the blond beauty with smarts. Your very own optimist. A client’s dream with great tits. Her own tits. Just give her a day on your problem.

Her sister Daisy is the perfect case in point. Daisy has been able to admit her serious methamphetamine problem, but only after her biker boyfriend, Vince, had been made a guest of the state of Ohio. And here Faith has had a role to play, beginning with phone calls to attorneys, a restraining order, then later the police and handcuffs for Vince. Daisy, strung out and thoroughly bruised, finally proved to be a credible witness, once convinced she would not be killed.

Going through Daisy’s apartment with their mother, in search of clothes Daisy could wear with dignity into rehab, Faith found dildos; six in all — one even under the kitchen sink. These she put in a plastic Grand Union bag and left in the neighbor’s street garbage just so her mother wouldn’t know. Her mother is up-to-date, but not necessarily interested in dildos. For Daisy’s going-in outfit, they eventually settled on a nice, dark jersey shift and some new white Adidas.

The downside of the character issue, the non-lawyer side, Faith understands, is the fact that she’s almost thirty-seven and nothing’s very solid in her life. She is very patient (with assholes), very good to help behind the scenes (with assholes). Her glass is always half full. Stand and ameliorate could be her motto. Anticipate change. The skills of the law, again, only partly in sync with the requirements of life.

A tall silver smokestack with blinking white lights on top and several gray megaphone-shaped cooling pots around it now passes on the left. Dense, chalky smoke drifts out of each pot. Lake Michigan, beyond, looks like a blue-white desert. It has snowed for three days, but has stopped now.

“What’s that big thing?” Jane or possibly Marjorie says, peering out the back-seat window. It is too warm in the cranberry-colored Suburban Faith rented at the Cleveland airport especially for the trip. The girls are both chewing watermelon-smelling gum. Everyone could get carsick.

“That’s a rocket ship ready to blast off to outer space. Would you girls like to hitch a ride on it?” Roger, the brother-in-law, says to his daughters. Roger is the friendly-funny neighbor in a family sitcom, although not that funny. He is small and blandly handsome and wears a brush cut and black horn-rimmed glasses. And he is loathsome — though in subtle ways, like some TV actors Faith has known. He is also thirty-seven and prefers pastel cardigans and Hush Puppies. Daisy has been very, very unfaithful to him.

“It is not a rocket ship,” says Jane, the older child, putting her forehead to the foggy window, then pulling back to consider the smudge mark she’s left.

“It’s a pickle,” Marjorie says.

“And shut up,” Jane says. “That’s a nasty expression.”

“No it’s not,” Marjorie says.

“Is that a word your mother taught you?” Roger asks and smirks. He is in the back seat with them. “I bet it is. That’s her legacy. Pickle.” On the cover of Skier is a photograph of Hermann Maier, wearing an electric red outfit, slaloming down Mount Everest. The headline says, GOING TO EXTREMES.

“It better not be,” Faith’s mother says from behind the wheel. She has her seat pushed way back to accommodate her stomach.

“Okay. Two more guesses,” Roger says.

“It’s an atom plant where they make electricity,” Faith says, and smiles back at the nieces, who are staring out at the smokestacks, losing interest. “We use it to heat our houses.”

“But we don’t like them,” Esther says. Esther’s been green since before it was chic.

“Why?” Jane says.

“Because they threaten our precious environment, that’s why,” Esther answers.

“What’s ‘our precious environment’?” Jane says insincerely.

“The air we breathe, the ground we stand on, the water we drink.” Once Esther taught eighth-grade science, but not in years.

“Don’t you girls learn anything in school?” Roger is flipping pages in his Skier. For some mysterious reason, Faith has noticed, Roger is quite tanned.

“Their father could always instruct them,” Esther says. “He’s in education.”

“Guidance,” Roger says. “But touché.”

“What’s touché?” Jane says, wrinkling her nose.

“It’s a term used in fencing,” Faith says. She likes both girls immensely, and would happily punish Roger for speaking to them with sarcasm.

“What’s fencing,” Marjorie asks.

“It’s a town in Michigan where they make fences,” Roger says. “Fencing, Michigan. It’s near Lansing.”

“No it’s not,” Faith says.

“Well then, you tell them,” Roger says. “You know everything. You’re the lawyer.”

“It’s a game you play with swords,” Faith says. “Only no one gets killed. It’s fun.” In every respect, she despises Roger and wishes he’d stayed in Sandusky. But she couldn’t ask the little girls without him. Letting her pay for everything is Roger’s way of saying thanks.

“So. There you are, little girls. You heard it here first,” Roger says in a nice-nasty voice, continuing to read. “All your lives now you’ll remember where you heard fencing explained first and by whom. When you’re at Harvard …”

“You didn’t know,” Jane says.

“That’s wrong. I did know. I absolutely knew,” Roger says. “I was just having some fun. Christmas is a fun time, don’t you know?”

On the drive over to the Nicholsons’ for dinner — their first in some time — Marjorie Reeves told her husband, Steven Reeves, that she had had an affair with George Nicholson (their host) a year ago, but that it was all over with now and she hoped he — Steven — would not be mad about it and could go on with life.

At this point they were driving along Quaker Bridge Road where it leaves the Perkins Great Woods Road and begins to border the Shenipsit Reservoir, dark and shadowy and calmly mirrored in the late spring twilight. On the right was dense young timber, beech and alder saplings in pale leaf, the ground damp and cakey. Peepers were calling out from the watery lows. Their turn onto Apple Orchard Lane was still a mile on.

Steven, on hearing this news, began gradually and very carefully to steer their car — a tan Mercedes wagon with hooded yellow headlights — off of Quaker Bridge Road and onto the damp grassy shoulder so he could organize this information properly before going on.

They were extremely young. Steven Reeves was twentyeight. Marjorie Reeves a year younger. They weren’t rich, but they’d been lucky. Steven’s job at Packard-Wells was to stay on top of a small segment of a larger segment of a rather small prefabrication intersection that serviced the automobile industry, and where any sudden alteration, or even the rumor of an alteration in certain polymer-bonding formulas could tip crucial down-the-line demand patterns, and in that way affect the betting lines and comfort zones of a good many meaningful client positions. His job meant poring over dense and esoteric petrochemical-industry journals, attending technical seminars, flying to vendor conventions, then writing up detailed status reports and all the while keeping an eye on the market for the benefit of his higher-ups. He’d been a scholarship boy at Bates, studied chemistry, was the only son of a hard-put but upright lobstering family in Pemaquid, Maine, and had done well. His bosses at Packard-Wells liked him, saw themselves in him, and also in him saw character qualities they’d never quite owned — blond and slender callowness tending to gullibility, but backed by caution, ingenuity and a thoroughgoing, compact toughness. He was sharp. It was his seventh year with the company — his first job. He and Marjorie had been married two years. They had no children. The car had been his bonus two Christmases ago.

When the station wagon eased to a stop, Steven sat for a minute with the motor running, the salmon-colored dash lights illuminating his face. The radio had been playing softly — the last of the news, then an interlude for French horns. Responding to no particular signal, he pressed off the radio and in the same movement switched off the ignition, which left the headlights shining on the empty, countrified road. The windows were down to attract the fresh spring air, and when the engine noise ceased the evening’s ambient sounds were waiting. The peepers. A sound of thrush wings fluttering in the brush only a few yards away. The noise of something falling from a small distance and hitting an invisible water surface. Beyond the stand of saplings was the west, and through the darkened trunks, the sky was still pale yellow with the day’s light, though here on Quaker Bridge Road it was nearly dark.

When Marjorie said what she had just said, she’d been looking straight ahead to where the headlights made a bright path in the dark. Perhaps she’d looked at Steven once, but having said what she’d said, she kept her hands in her lap and continued looking ahead. She was a pretty, blond, convictionless girl with small demure features — small nose, small ears, small chin, though with a surprisingly full-lipped smile which she practiced on everyone. She was fond of getting a little tipsy at parties and lowering her voice and sitting on a flowered ottoman or a burl table top with a glass of something and showing too much of her legs or inappropriate amounts of her small breasts. She had grown up in Indiana, studied art at Purdue. Steven had met her in New York at a party while she was working for a firm that did child-focused advertising for a large toymaker. He’d liked her bobbed hair, her fragile, wispy features, translucent skin and the slightly husky voice that made her seem more sophisticated than she was, but somehow convinced her she was, too. In their community, east of Hartford, the women who knew Marjorie Reeves thought of her as a bimbo who would not stay married to sweet Steven Reeves for very long. His second wife would be the right wife for him. Marjorie was just a starter.

Marjorie, however, did not think of herself that way, only that she liked men and felt happy and confident around them and assumed Steven thought this was fine and that in the long run it would help his career to have a pretty, spirited wife no one could pigeonhole. To set herself apart and to take an interest in the community she’d gone to work as a volunteer at a grieving-children’s center in Hartford, which meant all black. And it was in Hartford that she’d had the chance to encounter George Nicholson and fuck him at a Red Roof Inn until they’d both gotten tired of it. It would never happen again, was her view, since in a year it hadn’t happened again.

For the two or possibly five minutes now that they had sat on the side of Quaker Bridge Road in the still airish evening, with the noises of spring floating in and out of the open window, Marjorie had said nothing and Steven had also said nothing, though he realized that he was saying nothing because he was at a loss for words. A loss for words, he realized, meant that nothing that comes to mind seems very interesting to say as a next thing to what has just been said. He knew he was a callow man — a boy in some ways, still— but he was not stupid. At Bates, he had taken Dr. Sudofsky’s class on Ulysses, and come away with a sense of irony and humor and the assurance that true knowledge was a spiritual process, a quest, not a storage of dry facts — a thing like freedom, which you only fully experienced in practice. He’d also played hockey, and knew that knowledge and aggressiveness were a subtle and surprising and uncommon combination. He had sought to practice both at Packard-Wells.

But for a brief and terrifying instant in the cool padded semi-darkness, just when he began experiencing his loss for words, he entered or at least nearly slipped into a softened fuguelike state in which he began to fear that he perhaps could not say another word; that something (work fatigue, shock, disappointment over what Marjorie had admitted) was at that moment causing him to detach from reality and to slide away from the present, and in fact to begin to lose his mind and go crazy to the extent that he was in jeopardy of beginning to gibber like a chimp, or just to slowly slump sideways against the upholstered door and not speak for a long, long time— months — and then only with the aid of drugs be able merely to speak in simple utterances that would seem cryptic, so that eventually he would have to be looked after by his mother’s family in Damariscotta. A terrible thought.

And so to avoid that — to save his life and sanity — he abruptly just said a word, any word that he could say into the perfumed twilight inhabiting the car, where his wife was obviously anticipating his reply to her unhappy confession.

And for some reason the word — phrase, really — that he uttered was “ground clutter.” Something he’d heard on the TV weather report as they were dressing for dinner.

“Hm?” Marjorie said. “What was it?” She turned her pretty, small-featured face toward him so that her pearl earrings caught light from some unknown source. She was wearing a tiny green cocktail dress and green satin shoes that showed off her incredibly thin ankles and slender, bare brown calves. She had two tiny matching green bows in her hair. She smelled sweet. “I know this wasn’t what you wanted to hear, Steven,” she said, “but I felt I should tell you before we got to George’s. The Nicholsons’, I mean. It’s all over. It’ll never happen again. I promise you. No one will ever mention it. I just lost my bearings last year with the move. I’m sorry.” She had made a little steeple of her fingertips, as if she’d been concentrating very hard as she spoke these words. But now she put her hands again calmly in her minty green lap. She had bought her dress especially for this night at the Nicholsons’. She’d thought George would like it and Steven, too. She turned her face away and exhaled a small but detectable sigh in the car. It was then that the headlights went off automatically.

George Nicholson was a big squash-playing, thick-chested, hairy-armed Yale lawyer who sailed his own Hinckley 61 out of Essex and had started backing off from his high-priced Hartford plaintiffs’ practice at fifty to devote more time to competitive racket sports and senior skiing. George was a college roommate of one of Steven’s firm’s senior partners and had “adopted” the Reeveses when they moved into the community following their wedding. Marjorie had volunteered Saturdays with George’s wife, Patsy, at the Episcopal Thrift Shop during their first six months in Connecticut. To Steven, George Nicholson had recounted a memorable, seasoning summer spent hauling deep-water lobster traps with some tough old sea dogs out of Matinicus, Maine. Later, he’d been a Marine, and sported a faded anchor, ball and chain tattooed on his forearm. Later yet he’d fucked Steven’s wife.

Having said something, even something that made no sense, Steven felt a sense of glum and deflated relief as he sat in the silent car beside Marjorie, who was still facing forward. Two thoughts had begun to compete in his reviving awareness. One was clearly occasioned by his conception of George Nicholson. He thought of George Nicholson as a gasbag, but also a forceful man who’d made his pile by letting very little stand in his way. When he thought about George he always remembered the story about Matinicus, which then put into his mind a mental picture of his own father and himself hauling traps somewhere out toward Monhegan. The reek of the bait, the toss of the ocean in late spring, the consoling monotony of the solid, tree-lined shore barely visible through the mists. Thinking through that circuitry always made him vaguely admire George Nicholson and, oddly, made him think he liked George even now, in spite of everything.

The other competing thought was that part of Marjorie’s character had always been to confess upsetting things that turned out, he believed, not to be true: being a hooker for a summer up in Saugatuck; topless dancing while she was an undergraduate; heroin experimentation; taking part in armed robberies with her high-school boyfriend in Goshen, Indiana, where she was from. When she told these far-fetched stories she would grow distracted and shake her head, as though they were true. And now, while he didn’t particularly think any of these stories was a bit truer, he did realize that he didn’t really know his wife at all; and that in fact the entire conception of knowing another person — of trust, of closeness, of marriage itself — while not exactly a lie since it existed someplace if only as an idea (in his parents’ life, at least marginally) was still completely out-of-date, defunct, was something typifying another era, now unfortunately gone. Meeting a girl, falling in love, marrying her, moving to Connecticut, buying a fucking house, starting a life with her and thinking you really knew anything about her — the last part was a complete fiction, which made all the rest a joke. Marjorie might as well have been a hooker or held up 7-Elevens and shot people, for all he really knew about her. And what was more, if he’d said any of this to her, sitting next to him thinking he would never know what, she either would not have understood a word of it or simply would’ve said, “Well, okay, that’s fine.” When people talked about the bottom line, Steven Reeves thought, they weren’t talking about money, they were talking about what this meant, this kind of fatal ignorance. Money — losing it, gaining it, spending it, hoarding it — all that was only an emblem, though a good one, of what was happening here right now.

At this moment a pair of car lights rounded a curve somewhere out ahead of where the two of them sat in their station wagon. The lights found both their white faces staring forward in silence. The lights also found a raccoon just crossing the road from the reservoir shore, headed for the woods that were beside them. The car was going faster than might’ve been evident. The raccoon paused to peer up into the approaching beams, then continued on into the safe, opposite lane. But only then did it look up and notice Steven and Marjorie’s car stopped on the verge of the road, silent in the murky evening. And because of that notice it must’ve decided that where it had been was much better than where it was going, and so turned to scamper back across Quaker Bridge Road toward the cool waters of the reservoir, which was what caused the car — actually it was a beat-up Ford pickup — to rumble over it, pitching and spinning it off to the side and then motionlessness near the opposite shoulder. “Yaaaa-haaaa-yipeeee!” a man’s shrill voice shouted from inside the dark cab of the pickup, followed by another man’s laughter.

And then it became very silent again. The raccoon lay on the road twenty yards in front of the Reeveses’ car. It didn’t struggle. It was merely there.

“Gross,” Marjorie said.

Steven said nothing, though he felt less at a loss for words now. His eyes, indeed, felt relieved to fix on the still corpse of the raccoon.

“Do we do something?” Marjorie said. She had leaned forward a few inches as if to study the raccoon through the windshield. Light was dying away behind the slender young beech trees to the west of them.

“No,” Steven said. These were his first words — except for the words he took no responsibility for — since Marjorie had said what she’d importantly said and their car was still moving toward dinner.

It was then that he hit her. He hit her before he knew he’d hit her, but not before he knew he wanted to. He hit her with the back of his open hand without even looking at her, hit her straight in the front of her face, straight in the nose. And hard. In a way, it was more a gesture than a blow, though it was, he understood, a blow. He felt the soft tip of her nose, and then the knuckly cartilage against the hard bones of the backs of his fingers. He had never hit a woman before, and he had never even thought of hitting Marjorie, always imagining he couldn’t hit her when he’d read newspaper accounts of such things happening in the sad lives of others. He’d hit other people, been hit by other people, plenty of times— tough Maine boys on the ice rinks. Girls were out, though. His father always made that clear. His mother, too.

“Oh, my goodness” was all that Marjorie said when she received the blow. She put her hand over her nose immediately, but then sat silently in the car while neither of them said anything. His heart was not beating hard. The back of his hand hurt a little. This was all new ground. Steven had a small rosy birthmark just where his left sideburn ended and his shaved face began. It resembled the shape of the state of West Virginia. He thought he could feel this birthmark now. His skin tingled there.

And the truth was he felt even more relieved, and didn’t feel at all sorry for Marjorie, sitting there stoically, making a little tent of her hand to cover her nose and staring ahead as if nothing had happened. He thought she would cry, certainly. She was a girl who cried — when she was unhappy, when he said something insensitive, when she was approaching her period. Crying was natural. Clearly, though, it was a new experience for her to be hit. And so it called upon something new, and if not new then some strength, resilience, self-mastery normally reserved for other experiences.

“I can’t go to the Nicholsons’ now,” Marjorie said almost patiently. She removed her hand and viewed her palm as if her palm had her nose in it. Of course it was blood she was thinking about. He heard her breathe in through what sounded like a congested nose, then the breath was completed out through her mouth. She was not crying yet. And for that moment he felt not even sure he had smacked her— if it hadn’t just been a thought he’d entertained, a gesture somehow uncommissioned.

What he wanted to do, however, was skip to the most important things now, not get mired down in wrong, extraneous details. Because he didn’t give a shit about George Nicholson or the particulars of what they’d done in some shitty motel. Marjorie would never leave him for George Nicholson or anyone like George Nicholson, and George Nicholson and men like him — high rollers with Hinckleys— didn’t throw it all away for unimportant little women like Marjorie. He thought of her nose, red, swollen, smeared with sticky blood dripping onto her green dress. He didn’t suppose it could be broken. Noses held up. And, of course, there was a phone in the car. He could simply make a call to the party. He pictured the Nicholsons’ great rambling white-shingled house brightly lit beyond the curving drive, the original elms exorbitantly preserved, the footlights, the lowlit clay court where they’d all played, the heated pool, the Henry Moore out on the darkened lawn where you just stumbled onto it. He imagined saying to someone — not George Nicholson — that Marjorie was ill, had thrown up on the side of the road.

The right details, though. The right details to ascertain from her were: Are you sorry? (he’d forgotten Marjorie had already said she was sorry) and What does this mean for the future? These were the details that mattered.

Surprisingly, the raccoon that had been cartwheeled by the pickup and then lain motionless, a blob in the near-darkness, had come back to life and was now trying to drag itself and its useless hinder parts off of Quaker Bridge Road and onto the grassy verge and into the underbrush that bordered the reservoir.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Marjorie said, and put her hand over her damaged nose again. She could see the raccoon’s struggle and turned her head away.

“Aren’t you even sorry?” Steven said.

“Yes,” Marjorie said, her nose still covered as if she wasn’t thinking about the fact that she was covering it. Probably, he thought, the pain had gone away some. It hadn’t been so bad. “I mean no,” she said.

He wanted to hit her again then — this time in the ear— but he didn’t. He wasn’t sure why not. No one would ever know. “Well, which is it?” he said, and felt for the first time completely furious. The thing that made him furious — all his life, the very maddest — was to be put into a situation in which everything he did was wrong, when right was no longer an option. Now felt like one of those situations. “Which is it?” he said again angrily. “Really.” He should just take her to the Nicholsons’, he thought, swollen nose, bloody lips, all stoppered up, and let her deal with it. Or let her sit out in the car, or else start walking the 11.6 miles home. Maybe George could come out and drive her in his Rover. These were only thoughts, of course. “Which is it?” he said for the third time. He was stuck on these words, on this bit of barren curiosity.

“I was sorry when I told you,” Marjorie said, very composed. She lowered her hand from her nose to her lap. One of the little green bows that had been in her hair was now resting on her bare shoulder. “Though not very sorry,” she said. “Only sorry because I had to tell you. And now that I’ve told you and you’ve hit me in my face and probably broken my nose, I’m not sorry about anything — except that. Though I’m sorry about being married to you, which I’ll remedy as soon as I can.” She was still not crying. “So now, will you as a gesture of whatever good there is in you, get out and go over and do something to help that poor injured creature that those motherfucking rednecks maimed with their motherfucking pickup truck and then because they’re pieces of shit and low forms of degraded humanity, laughed about? Can you do that, Steven? Is that in your range?” She sniffed back hard through her nose, then expelled a short, deep and defeated moan. Her voice seemed more nasal, more midwestern even, now that her nose was congested.

“I’m sorry I hit you,” Steven Reeves said, and opened the car door onto the silent road.

“I know,” Marjorie said in an emotionless voice. “And you’ll be sorrier.”

When he had walked down the empty macadam road in his tan suit to where the raccoon had been struck then bounced over onto the road’s edge, there was nothing now there. Only a small circle of dark blood he could just make out on the nubbly road surface and that might’ve been an oil smudge. No raccoon. The raccoon with its last reserves of savage, unthinking will had found the strength to pull itself off into the bushes to die. Steven peered down into the dark, stalky confinement of scrubs and bramble that separated the road from the reservoir. It was very still there. He thought he heard a rustling in the low brush where a creature might be, getting itself settled into the soft grass and damp earth to go to sleep forever. Someplace out on the lake he heard a young girl’s voice, very distinctly laughing. Then a car door closed farther away. Then another sort of door, a screen door, slapped shut. And then a man’s voice saying “Oh no, oh-ho-ho-ho-ho, no.” A small white light came on farther back in the trees beyond the reservoir, where he hadn’t imagined there was a house. He wondered about how long it would be before his angry feelings stopped mattering to him. He considered briefly why Marjorie would admit this to him now. It seemed so odd.

Then he heard his own car start. The muffled-metal diesel racket of the Mercedes. The headlights came smartly on and disclosed him. Music was instantly loud inside. He turned just in time to see Marjorie’s pretty face illuminated, as his own had been, by the salmon dashboard light. He saw the tips of her fingers atop the arc of the steering wheel, heard the surge of the engine. In the woods he noticed a strange glow coming through the trees, something yellow, something out of the low wet earth, a mist, a vapor, something that might be magical. The air smelled sweet now. The peepers stopped peeping. And then that was all.

Madeleine Granville stood at the high window of the Hotel Queen Elizabeth II, trying to decide which tiny car far below on Wellington Street was her yellow Saab. Henry Rothman was tying his tie in front of the mirror. Henry was catching a plane in two hours. Madeleine was staying behind in Montreal, where she lived.

Henry and Madeleine had been having a much more than ordinary friendship for two years — the kind of friendship no one but the two of them was expected to know about (if others knew, they’d decided, it didn’t matter because no one really knew). They were business associates. She was a chartered accountant, he was an American lobbyist for the firm she worked for, the West-Consolidated Group, specializing in enhanced agricultural food additives and doing big business abroad. Henry was forty-nine, Madeleine was thirty-three. As business associates, they’d traveled together a great deal, often to Europe, staying together in many beds in many hotel rooms until late on many mornings, eating scores of very good restaurant meals, setting out upon innumerable days in bright noon sunshine, later saying their goodbyes in other hotel rooms or in airports, in car-parks, hotel lobbies, taxi stands, bus stops. While apart, which had been most of the time, they had missed each other, talked on the phone often, never written. But when they’d come each time again into the other’s presence, they’d felt surprise, exhilaration, fulfillment, grateful happy relief. Henry Rothman lived in D.C., where he maintained a comfortable, divorced lawyer’s life. Madeleine had settled in a tree-lined suburb with her child and her architect husband. Everyone who worked with them, of course, knew everything and talked about it constantly behind their backs. Yet the general feeling was that it wouldn’t last very long; and beyond that it was best to stay out of other people’s business. Conflicted gossip about people doing what you yourself would like to be doing was very Canadian, Madeleine said.

But now, they’d decided, was the time for it to be over. They loved each other — they both acknowledged that. Though they possibly were not in love (these were Madeleine’s distinctions). Yet, they had been in something, she understood, possibly something even better than love, something with its own intense and timeless web, densely tumultuous interiors and transporting heights. What it exactly was was hazy. But it had not been nothing.

As always, other people were involved — no one in Rothman’s life, it was true, but two in Madeleine’s. And to these two, life had been promised a steady continuance. So either what was not just an affair ended now — they’d both agreed— or it went much much further, out onto a terrain that bore no boundaries or markers, a terrain full of terrific hazards. And neither of them wanted that.

It could as easily have stopped six months ago, in London — Henry had thought, on the plane flying in the day before yesterday. Seated together at a sidewalk café on Sloane Square one spring morning, with taxis pouring past, he and Madeleine had suddenly found they had nothing much to say at the precise moment when they’d always had something to say — an enjoyable prefiguring of their luncheon plans, rehearsing their assessments of a troublesome client, discussing reviews of a movie they might attend, or an encoded mention of lovemaking the night before — all of the engaging, short-range complications of arrangements such as theirs. Love, Henry remembered thinking then, was a lengthy series of insignificant questions whose answers you couldn’t live without. And it was these questions they’d run out of interesting answers for. But to have ended it then, so far from home and familiar surroundings, would’ve been inconsiderate. Ending it then would’ve meant something about themselves neither of them would’ve believed: that it hadn’t mattered very much; that they were people who did things that didn’t matter very much; and that they either importantly did or didn’t know that about themselves. None of these seemed true.

Therefore, they’d kept on. Though over the intervening months their telephone conversations grew fewer and briefer. Henry went alone to Paris twice. He began a relationship with a woman in Washington, then ended it without Madeleine seeming to notice. Her thirty-third birthday passed unacknowledged. And then, just as he was planning a trip to San Francisco, Henry suggested a stopover in Montreal. A visit. It was clear enough to both of them.

The evening of his arrival, they’d eaten dinner near the Biodome, in a new Basque place Madeleine had read about. She dressed up in a boxy, unflattering black wool dress and black tights. They drank too much Nonino, talked little, walked to the St. Lawrence, held hands in the chill October night, while quietly observing the fact that without a patched-together future to involve and distract them, life became quite repetitious in very little time. But still, they had gone back to his room at the QE II, stayed in bed until one a.m., made love with genuine passion, talked an hour in the dark, and then Madeleine had driven home to her husband and son.

Later, lying alone in bed in the warm, clocking darkness, Henry thought that sharing the future with someone would certainly mean that repetitions had to be managed more skillfully. Or else it meant that sharing the future with someone wasn’t a very good idea, and he should perhaps begin to realize it.

. .

On the first day of their Maine vacation, they drove up to Harrisburg after work, then flew to Philadelphia, then flew to Portland, where they rented a Ford Explorer at the airport, ate dinner at a Friendly’s, then drove up 95 as far as Freeport — it was long after dark — where they found a B&B directly across from L. L. Bean, which surprisingly was open all night.

Before getting into the rickety canopy bed and passing out from exhaustion, Nancy Marshall stood at the dark window naked and looked across the shadowy street at the big, lighted Bean’s building, shining like a new opera house. At one a.m., customers were streaming in and out toting packages, pulling garden implements, pushing trail bikes and disappearing into the dark in high spirits. Two large Conant tourist buses from Canada sat idling at the curb, their uniformed drivers sharing a quiet smoke on the sidewalk while their Japanese passengers were inside buying up things. The street was busy here, though farther down the block the other expensive franchise outlets were shut.

Tom Marshall turned off the light in the tiny bathroom and came and stood just behind her, wearing blue pajama bottoms. He touched her shoulders, stood closer to her until she could feel him aroused.

“I know why the store’s open ’til one o’clock,” Nancy said, “but I don’t know why all the people come.” Something about his conspicuous warm presence made her feel a chill. She covered her breasts, which were near the window glass. She imagined he was smiling.

“I guess they love it,” Tom said. She could feel him properly — very stiff now. “This is what Maine means. A visit to Bean’s after midnight. It’s the global culture. They’re probably on their way to Atlantic City.”

“Okay,” Nancy said. Because she was cold, she let herself be pulled to him. This was all right. She was exhausted. His cock fit between her legs — just there. She liked it. It felt familiar. “I asked the wrong question.” There was no reflection in the glass of her or him behind her, inching into her. She stood perfectly still.

“What would the right question be?” Tom pushed flush against her, bending his knees just a fraction to find her. He was smiling.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe the question is, what do they know that we don’t? What are we doing over here on this side of the street? Clearly the action’s over there.”

She heard him exhale, then he moved away. She had been about to open her legs, lean forward a little. “Not that.” She looked around for him. “I don’t mean that.” She put her hand between her legs just to touch, her fingers covering herself. She looked back at the street. The two bus drivers she believed could not see through the shadowy trees were both looking right at her. She didn’t move. “I didn’t mean that,” she said to Tom faintly.

“Tomorrow we’ll see some things we’ll like,” he said cheerfully. He was already in bed. That fast.

“Good.” She didn’t care if two creeps saw her naked; it was exactly the same as her seeing them clothed. She was forty-five. Not so slender, but tall, willowy. Let them look. “That’s good,” she said again. “I’m glad we came.”

“I’m sorry?” Tom said sleepily. He was almost gone, the cop’s blessed gift to be asleep the moment his head touched the pillow.

“Nothing,” she said, at the window, being watched. “I didn’t say anything.”

He was silent, breathing. The two drivers began shaking their heads, looking down now. One flipped a cigarette into the street. They both looked up again, then stepped out of sight behind their idling buses.

Two weeks before the Phoenix sales conference, Frances Bilandic and Howard Cameron drove from home — in Willamantic and Pawcatuck — met at the Olive Garden in Mystic and talked things over one more time, touching fingertips nervously across the Formica tabletop. Then each went to the rest room and made a private, lying cell phone call to account for their whereabouts during the next few hours. Then they drove across the access road to the Howard Johnson’s under the Interstate, registered in as a Mr. and Mrs. Garfield, and in five minutes had chained the door, turned up the air conditioning, pulled the curtains across the sunny window and abandoned themselves to the furious passions they’d been suppressing for the month since meeting at the awards banquet, where they were named Connecticut Residential Agents of the Year.

What had occurred between them at the awards banquet was something of a mystery to them both. Seated beside each other at the head table, they’d barely spoken before being presented with their agent-of-the-year citations. But after the first course, Howard had told a funny joke about Alzheimer’s disease to the person seated on his other side, and Frances had laughed. When Howard realized she thought he was funny, their eyes had met in a way Frances felt was shocking, but also undeniable, since, in her view, they’d each experienced (and fully acknowledged) a large, instinctual carnal attraction — the kind, she thought, animals probably felt all the time, and that made their lives much more bearable.

Within fifteen minutes, she and Howard Cameron had begun exchanging snickering asides about the other winners’ table manners, their indecipherable wardrobe choices and probable sales etiquette, and all the while avoiding the dull, realtor shop-talk about house closings, disastrous building inspection reports, and unbelievable arguments customers routinely waged inside their cars.

By dessert, they were venturing into more sensitive areas — Frances’s junior college roommate Meredith, who’d died of brain cancer in June at thirty-four (Frances’s age); Howard’s father’s tachycardia and his unfulfilled wish to play Turnberry before he died. Napkins across their empty plates, they moved on to life’s brevity and the need to squeeze every second for all its worth. And by the time decaf arrived, they’d eased over onto the subject of sex, and how misunderstood a subject it was in the culture, and how it was all the Puritans’ fault that it even was a subject, since it should be completely natural and unstigmatized. They each spoke lovingly about their spouses, but not that much.

Seated at the long head table full of fellow award-winners and bosses, and directly in front of a Ramada Inn banquet room full of noisy, laughing people they didn’t know but who were occasionally casting narrow-eyed, flaming arrows of spite through the two of them, sex infiltrated their soft-spoken conversation like a dense, rich but explosive secret they, but only they, had decided to share. And once that happened, everything, everyone in the room, everything Frances and Howard planned to do later in the evening— drive home to their spouses, Ed in Willamantic, Mary in Pawcatuck, down dark and narrow, late-night Connecticut highways; the chance visits they might have with zany colleagues at the bar; voice mail they might check for after-hours client calls — any and all thoughts about this night being normal ended.

Most Americans don’t even begin to reach their sexual maturity until they’re not interested in it anymore, Frances observed. The Scandinavians, indeed, had the best attitude, with sex being no big deal — just a normal human response (like sleeping) that should be respected, not obsessed over.

Americans were too hung up on false conceptions of beauty and youth, Howard agreed, sagely folding his long arms. He was six-foot five, with big pie-plate hands and had played basketball at Western Connecticut. His father had been his high-school coach. Howard had dull gray, closely spaced eyes and still wore his hair in an old-fashioned buzzed-off crew cut that made him look older than twenty-nine. Orgasm was way overrated, he suggested, in contrast to true intimacy, which was way underrated.

Nothing in a marriage could ever be absolutely perfect, they agreed. Marriage shouldn’t be a prison cell. The best marriages were always the ones where both partners felt free to pursue their personal needs, though neither of them advocated the open marriage concept.

The word marriage, Frances said, actually derived from an Old Norse word, meaning the time after the onset of a fatal illness when the disease has you in its grip but you can still walk around pretty well. This was her father’s joke, though she didn’t mean it to sound like a sourpuss complaint. Just a yuck, like Howard’s Alzheimer’s story. She found she could joke with Howard Cameron, who was witty in the blunt-to-gross way nerdy ex-jocks who weren’t complete idiots could be funny. She was impressed she knew him well enough to relax, after only two hours. With Ed she hadn’t gotten that far in six years.

“I’m the fifth of five. All boys,” Howard said, watching the Mexican waiters collecting banquet dishes off the tables. Their own table had emptied, and the crowd was filing out through the back doors, leaving the two of them conspicuously alone behind the white-skirted dais table. People were saying goodbyes and telling lame jokes about spending the night in the car on the Interstate. The lights were turned up bright to move people out, and the room smelled of sour food. He was aware they were obviously lingering. Yet he felt intimacy with Frances Bilandic. “I’m sure my parents had a solid sex life until my dad had to go on the blood thinners,” Howard went on solemnly. “But then, well, I guess things changed.”

“Technology took over, right?” Frances said and smirked. She was spunky and had snapping blue eyes, an attractively mannish little blond haircut and a barely noticeable overbite that displayed the bottoms of her incisors. She was the only daughter of a Polish widower from Bridgeport, had performed the balance beam in high school, and was as hard as a little brickbat. She’d probably seen plenty. Though he knew he was getting serious too fast, and that could spook her. Only she had to know what was what. It was a game. “He went on the pill? Or the pump, right?” Frances made a little up-down pumping motion with her thumb, up-down, up-down, and a little “eee-eee-eee-eee” squeaky sound. “That works out better for older people, I guess.”

“He’s not the type,” Howard said. He thought then about his father standing sadly out in their broad, freshly mown back yard that sloped all the way to the shining Quinebaug River, in Pomfret. It was the late-spring day his father had come back from the hospital after having his veins surgically ballooned. Geese were flying over in a V. His father had been wearing faded madras shorts and stood barefoot in the cool grass, staring off. His legs were thin and pale. It was heartbreaking.

But heartbreaking or not, Howard thought, it just showed that life had to be seized and squeezed before somebody came after you with a vein balloon. Marriage, kids — these were certainly ways you could squeeze it. His parents’ way. (Though maybe they weren’t so happy about that now.) But there were also alternatives, avenues that society or their employer the Weiboldt Company — red-and-white FOR SALE and SORRY YOU MISSED IT signs littering the seaboard from Cape May to Cape Ann — wouldn’t necessarily condone; and avenues you definitely wouldn’t start down every day of your life. Except of course those very avenues got chosen every day. Every second probably somebody somewhere was squeezing life on that alternative avenue. Probably in this very Ramada, while their banquet was ending, somebody was squeezing it. Why fight it?

“I hope I haven’t made light of a serious subject,” Frances said somberly referring to his parents. She was wearing a white pants suit with a green polka-dot blouse that did nothing, she knew, to show off her curves. But what she had wanted tonight, her special night of recognition, was to look drop-dead gorgeous, yet also to look like business. She, after all, had sold more real estate than anybody in her part of western Connecticut, and done it by working her tail off. And not by listing water-view contemporaries and Federalist mansions in Watch Hill, but by flogging attached row-houses in Guatemalan neighborhoods, four-room Capes, and buck-and-a-half condos downwind of the Willamantic landfill — units they buried you with in anybody else’s market. And she knew business didn’t take nights off, so you had to look the part. She thought of herself as a smart, tough cookie, a Polack go-getter, an early riser, a quick study who didn’t blink.

But that didn’t mean you couldn’t wander into some fun with a guy like this big Howard. A long, tall, galunky-jocky guy with some mischief in his eye, who could use some release from his own pressure cooker. Having an intense, private conversation with Howard Cameron was the reward for doing her job so fucking well.

“I’ll bet if we adjourned to a bar where there aren’t so many familiar faces, we wouldn’t have to be so solemn,” Frances said, touching her napkin to the corners of her mouth. She liked the sound of her voice saying this.

Howard was already nodding. “Right. I’m sure you’re right.” He picked up the cheap fake-wood-framed certificate he’d gotten for selling huge amounts of real estate and making everybody but himself rich. “I intend to hang this over the can at home,” he said. The certificate had a stick-on gold seal below his name, and the words In Hoc Signo Vinces embossed around the rim in Gothic-looking letters. He had no idea what this meant.

“I intend to lose mine someplace,” Frances said. He felt her hard-as-a-board little gymnast’s thigh (conceivably innocently) brush by his knee as she slid away from the long head table. “You find us a bar, okay? I’ll find you.” She placed her small hand onto his large one and squeezed. “I’m off to the whatever.” She started for the rear doors, leaving him alone at the table.

A Negro woman’s big round face had for a while been staring at them through the round porthole window in the kitchen door. The crew in there were wanting to go home. But when Howard caught the woman’s eye, she winked a big lewd wink which he didn’t appreciate.

This was how these things happened, he understood, fingering his chintzy agent-of-the-year plaque. He would see Frances Bilandic after tonight. No way it wouldn’t happen. He had no pre-vision about the circumstances or what the degree of risk would be — if they’d go straight to bed or just have lunch. But in the fervid yet strangely familiar way he knew sex could make a point-of-no-return out of the most unsuspecting and innocent human interaction, nothing now seemed to make any difference but the two of them having a drink and almost certainly giving serious thought to fucking each other senseless in the not too distant future. And she knew it. She was definitely up for whatever this would lead to — the little brush against his leg was no mistake. Women were all different now, he thought, working women especially. A blow job meant what a handshake used to. When he’d driven down the teeming, vacationer-swarmed corridor of I-95 tonight, he’d had no idea there was even a Frances Bilandic on the planet, or that she’d be waiting for him, and that in the time it took to get designated agent of the year, they’d be wandering off in search of a dark little bar for some dirty work. The world was full of wondrous surprises. And he was absolutely ready for this one, ready to find out all the mysteries and wonders it was ready to bring.

He looked back at the porthole window where the black woman’s face had appeared and winked at him. He wanted to give her some kind of answering look, a look that meant he knew what she knew. But the window was empty. The light behind it had been turned off.

I wish to express, for the thousandth time, my gratitude to Gary L. Fisketjon, and also to Bill Buford, Meghan O’Rourke, Christopher MacLehose, Margaret Stead, Ian Jack and L. Rust Hills, for their generous efforts to make these stories better. I wish to thank, as well, Angela and Rea Hederman for their encouragement and long friendship. For being my acute reader and friend, I wish to thank Sarah MacLachlan. Finally, and again, my great gratitude goes to Amanda Urban.

RF

Richard Ford was born in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1944. He has published six novels and three collections of stories, including The Sportswriter, Independence Day, Wildlife, A Multitude of Sins and, most recently, The Lay of the Land. Independence Day was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.