THE MAN — ME, this pale being, no one else, it seems — wakes in fright, tangled up in the sheets.

The darkened room, the half-closed doors of the closet and the slender pine-slatted lamp on the bedside table: I don’t recognize them. On the opposite side of the room, the streetlight’s distant luminance coating the window shade has an eerie unwelcome glow. None of these previously familiar objects have any familiarity now. What’s worse, I cannot remember or recognize myself. I sit up in bed — actually, I lurch in mild sleepy terror toward the vertical. There’s a demon here, one of the unnamed ones, the demon of erasure and forgetting. I can’t manage my way through this feeling because my mind isn’t working, and because it, the flesh in which I’m housed, hasn’t yet become me.

Looking into the darkness, I have optical floaters: there, on the opposite wall, are gears turning separately and then moving closer to one another until their cogs start to mesh and rotate in unison.

Then I feel her hand on my back. She’s accustomed by now to my night amnesias, and with what has become an almost automatic response, she reaches up sleepily from her side of the bed and touches me between the shoulder blades. In this manner the world’s objects slip back into their fixed positions.

“Charlie,” she says. Although I have not recognized myself, apparently I recognize her: her hand, her voice, even the slight saltine-cracker scent of her body as it rises out of sleep. I turn toward her and hold her in my arms, trying to get my heart rate under control. She puts her hand to my chest. “You’ve been dreaming,” she says. “It’s only a bad dream.” Then she says, half-asleep again, “You have bad dreams,” she yawns, “because you don’t…” Before she can finish the sentence, she descends back into sleep.

I get up and walk to the study. I have been advised to take a set of steps as a remedy. I have “identity lapses,” as the doctor is pleased to call them. I have not found this clinical phrase in any book. I think he made it up. Whatever they are called, these lapses lead to physical side effects: my heart is still thumping, and I can hardly sit or lie still.

I write my name, Charles Baxter, my address, the county, and the state in which I live. I concoct a word that doesn’t exist in our language but still might have a meaning or should have one: glimmerless. I am glimmerless. I write down the word next to my name.

“HEY,” HE SAYS, “Charlie. What the hell are you doing here? What’s up?”

Sitting down next to him, I can see his glasses, which reflect the last crescent of the moon and a dim shooting star. In the half-dark he has a handsome mild face, thick curly hair and an easy disarming smile, like that of a bank loan officer who has not quite decided whether your credit history is worthy of you. His eyes are large and pensive, toadlike. I realize quickly that if he is sitting out here on this park bench, now, he must be a rather unlucky man, insomniac or haunted or heartsick.

“Hey, Bradley,” I say. “Not much. Walkin’ around. It’s a midsummer night, and I’ve got insomnia. I see you’re still awake, too.”

“Yeah,” he says, nodding unnecessarily, “that’s the truth.”

We both wait. Finally I ask him, “How come you’re up?”

“Me? Oh, I found myself working late on a window in my house. The sash weight broke loose from the pulley and I’ve been trying to get it out from inside the wall.”

“Difficult job.”

“Right. Anyway, I quit that, and I’ve been walking Bradley the dog, since I couldn’t fix the window. Do you remember this dog?”

“His name is… what?”

“Bradley. I just told you. Exact same as mine. It’s easier to call him ‘Junior.’ That way, there’s no confusion. He’s my company. But you’re not sleeping either, right?” he asks, staring off into the middle distance as if he were talking to himself, as if I were an intimation of him. “That makes the two of us.” He leans back. “Three of us, if you count the dog.”

“I woke up,” I tell him, “and I was seeing things.”

“What things?”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” I tell him.

“Okay.”

“Oh, you know. I was seeing spots.”

“Spots?”

“Yes. Like spots in front of your eyes. But these were more like cogs.”

“You mean like gears or something?”

“I guess so. Wheels with cogs turning, and then getting closer to each other, so that they all turned together, their gears meshing.” I rub my arm, mosquito bite.

In the shadows, one side of his face seems about to collapse, as if the effort to keep up appearances has finally failed and daylight optimism has abandoned him. He sighs and scratches Junior behind the ears. In response, the dog smiles broadly. “Gears. I never heard of that one. I guess you don’t sleep any better than I do. We’re two members of the insomnia army.” He stretches now and reaches up to grab some air. “A brotherhood. And sisterhood. Did you know that Marlene Dietrich was a great insomniac?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Do you know what she did to keep herself occupied at night?”

“No, I don’t.”

“She baked cakes,” he tells me. “I read this in the Sunday paper. She baked angel food cakes and then in the daytime she gave them away to her friends. Marlene Dietrich. She looked like she did, those eyes of hers, because she couldn’t sleep well. Now me,” he says, rearranging himself on the bench, “I just sit still here, very still, you know, like what’s-his-name, the compassionate Buddha, thinking about the world, the one you and I live in, and I come to conclusions. Conclusions and remedies. Lately I’ve been thinking of extreme remedies. For extreme problems we need extreme remedies. That’s the phrase.”

“ ‘Extreme remedies’? What d’you mean? And don’t go putting me in your brotherhood. I’m just on a neighborhood stroll.”

“ ‘A neighborhood stroll’! Man,” he says, pointing a revolver-finger at me, “you’ll be lucky if a patrol car doesn’t pick you up.”

“Oh, I’m respectable,” I tell him.

“Listen to yourself. ‘Respectable’! You’re dressed like a vagabond. A goon. It’s illegal to walk around at night in this town, didn’t you know that?” He stands up to give me an inquiring once-over. He apparently doesn’t like what he sees. “It makes you look like a danger to public safety. Vagrancy! They’ll haul your ass down to jail, man. They don’t allow it anymore unless you have a dog with you. The dog” — he nods at his own dog — “makes it legal. The dog makes it legitimate. I have a dog. You should have a dog. It’s best to have an upper-class dog like a collie or a golden retriever, a licensed dog. But any dog will do. Believe me, the happy people are all at home and asleep, snuggled together in their dreams.” He says this phrase with contempt. “All the lucky ones.” He sits down but still seems agitated. “The goddamn lucky ones… What’s your trouble?” He grins at me gnomishly. “Conscience bothering you? Got a writing block?”

“No. I told you. I woke up disoriented. It happens all the time. Thinking about a book, I guess. I have to walk it off. Anyway, I already have a dog.”

“I didn’t know that. Where is it?” He glances around, pretending to search.

“Sleeping. She doesn’t like to walk with me at night. She doesn’t like how disoriented I am.”

“Smart. So what you’re saying is, you don’t know where you are? Is that it?”

“Right. I know where I am now.”

“Maybe you’re too involved with fiction. Well, don’t mind me. But listen, since we’re here, tell me: how does this new book of yours begin? What’s the first line?”

I start to pick some chewing gum off my shoe. “Nope. I don’t do that. I don’t give things like that away.”

“Come on. I’m your neighbor, Charlie. I’ve known you, what is it —?”

“Twelve years,” I say.

“Twelve years. You think I’m going to steal your line? I would never do that. I don’t do that. I’m not a writer, thank God. I’m a businessman. And an artist. Go ahead. Just tell me. Tell me how your novel starts.”

I sit back for a moment. “ ‘The man,’ ” I recite, “ ‘me — no one else, it seems — wakes in fright.’ ”

He kicks the toe of his shoe in the dirt and tanbark, and Junior sniffs at it. Now Bradley tries out a sympathetic tone. “That’s the line?”

“That’s the line. It’s still in rough draft. Actually, it’s just in my head.”

He nods. “Kind of melodramatic, though, right? I thought it was a cardinal rule not to start a novel with someone waking up in bed. And what’s all this about fright? Do you really awaken in terror? That doesn’t seem like you at all. And by the way I believe the word is awakens.”

Irritated, I stare at him. “When did you become Mr. Usage? All right, I’ll revise it. Besides, I do wake in terror. Ask my wife.”

“No, I would never do that. What’s the book called?”

“I have no idea.”

“You should call it The Feast of Love. I’m the expert on that. I should write that book. Actually, I should be in that book. You should put me into your novel. I’m an expert on love. I’ve just broken up with my second wife, after all. I’m in an emotional tangle. Maybe I’d shoot myself before the final chapter. Your readers would wonder about the outcome. Yeah, the feast of love. It certainly isn’t what I expected when I was in high school and I was imagining what love was going to be, honeymoon jaunts, joy forever and that sort of thing.”

I glance at the dog, who is yawning in my face. I bore this dog. “Aren’t you going out with a doctor now? Some new woman?”

“That’s private.”

“Hey, you came up with the title, and then you decide I can’t have it because it’s a metaphor? And you want to be a character in this book, and you won’t give me the details of your love life?”

“Metaphor my ass. I don’t know. Call it The Feast of Love. I know: call it Unchain My Heart. Now there’s a good title. Call it anything you want to. But remember: metaphors mean something,” he says, sitting up. Junior also sits up. “You remember Kathryn, my ex? My first ex? When Kathryn called me a toad, which she did sometimes to punish me, I’m sure she chose that metaphor carefully. She took great care with her language. She was fastidious. She probably searched for that metaphor all day. She went shopping for metaphors, Kathryn did. X marked the spot where she found them. Then she displayed them, all these metaphors, to me. After a while it became her nickname for me, as in ‘Toad, my love, would you pass the potatoes?’ They were always about me, these metaphors, as it turned out. She got that one from The Wind in the Willows, her favorite book. You know: Mr. Toad?”

He says this in his low voice and surveys the gloom of the playground, and now, in the dark, he does sound a bit like a toad.

“It could have been worse,” he informs me. “A toad has dignity.” He looks around. Then he breaks into song.

EVERY RELATIONSHIP HAS at least one really good day. What I mean is, no matter how sour things go, there’s always that day. That day is always in your possession. That’s the day you remember. You get old and you think: well, at least I had that day. It happened once. You think all the variables might just line up again. But they don’t. Not always. I once talked to a woman who said, “Yeah, that’s the day we had an angel around.”

“DID HE TELL YOU about the dogs?”

“Well, yes. He did.”

“And he said that I was afraid of dogs and that he drove me to the Humane Society?”

“That was the gist of it.”

“Did he make fun of me?”

“Oh no, Kathryn, he didn’t. Certainly not. No — he didn’t do anything like that at all.”

“Well, you wouldn’t tell me if he had. Anything else? Did he tell you anything else about us?”

“He said you two were broke in those days. You worked in a library part-time. He said that you gave names to the dogs, the ones at the Humane Society. You named the dogs one by one, he said. The way he described it, what you did sounded like a blessing.”

“He told you that? I don’t remember naming anybody or anything. I believe that he may have imagined the entire episode. We did go to the Humane Society once. I do remember all those animals. The barking. But I think we just walked in and then walked out without anything like an event, any sort of story, happening there. We had both been at the Botanical Gardens and we heard the dogs making a ruckus nearby, and we went over to investigate. The rest is probably imaginary. I’m certain he made it up.”

“I suppose he might have,” I tell her.

“This is all so weird,” she says. “Your calling me out of the blue and asking me about some encounter that Bradley and I had years ago. Aren’t those matters personal? I think maybe they should be. I realize that nothing stays hidden anymore but I’d still like to keep a few domestic particulars private. Especially when it comes to my love life. Such as it is. I can’t imagine why anybody else would be interested in who I love or how I loved them.”

“Oh, everyone’s interested in that. Besides, I’d change your name. You could retain your privacy.”

“That’s not quite what I’m getting at,” she says. “My marriage with him failed. So it’s not a matter of pride exactly. I switched partners, but doing that is very difficult and taxing in ways you don’t anticipate. Especially when you do it the way I did. It changes your views of yourself and who you are. You said you’re a writer. Have you ever read Schnitzler’s La Ronde?”

“Yes, sure.”

“Then you remember what it’s about. Changing partners. You should reread it. I acted in it once when I was a sophomore.” She waits for a moment, as if imagining it. “I played a housemaid. There was a pantomime lovemaking scene on stage between me and ‘the young gentleman.’ That was fun.”

“Well, maybe you have a story of your own,” I suggest. “About what happened to you.”

“I have lots of stories,” she says. “But they’re not the sort you give away, you know… and I don’t tell them to just anybody. What did you say your name was again?”

I tell her.

“I honestly don’t remember ever meeting you. I’ve never heard of you. Did we ever meet? And this is for a book you’re writing, Charlie?”

“Sort of.”

“You aren’t going to post this whole deal on the Internet, are you?”

“No.”

“Thank God. Who are you anyway? Could you please explain that again, that who-you-are thing?”

I try to spell out to her who I am. It’s not easy, summarizing yourself on the telephone to a stranger. Before I’m finished, she breaks in. “All right. I think I get the idea,” she says. “Okay. That’s enough. You want a story? I’ll give you one. But then you have to promise me not to bother me anymore. Are you writing this down?”

“Yes.”

“Oh. The thing is, you’re appealing to my vanity. I suppose I always wanted to appear in someone’s book, and I guess this is my chance. I can be a literary entity. Up there with Mrs. Danvers and Huck Finn and imaginary people like that. But you’ll just have to understand that I’ll only do this once. Then you can’t call me again. I’m going to check on you before I talk to you again to make sure that you really are who you say you are. A woman in my position has to be careful. To start with, I don’t remember you from my Bradley days. You could be anybody.”

“Of course. That’s right. I could be anybody.”

“But if you check out, this is where I’ll meet you.” And she gives me the name of the coffee shop where Bradley is the manager, Jitters, and she also gives me a time.

When I get there, I am served by a woman whose name tag identifies her as Chloé. Kathryn orders a café latte, sizes me up, then begins to speak.

“I FOUND KATHRYN,” I say. “You know, she wasn’t at all hard to track down. She’s listed in the phone directory. She told me all about it. She told me about Jenny and how she left you and how she threw a chair at you. I’m sorry about that chair, I guess, but it’s still a good story.”

“Wonderful,” Bradley says. “That’s just great.” He scratches his hair. “But you should realize our marriage was a long time ago, all that stuff, her leaving me and all.” He hops up and down twice, an odd gesture. “You didn’t have to look her up, you know. You could have taken my word for it. Kind of a small-minded trick, if you ask me, finding people to bear witness to my past.” He grins at me. “Isn’t this an excellent fire?”

Bradley had called and arranged to meet me at a benefit for the Ann Arbor fire department. They’d be burning an abandoned house — two stories, an attic, and an attached garage, he said — out in the township. The firefighters would be showing the locals how they do what they do, and there’d be a suggested donation of four dollars to help the Firemen’s fund. Now we’re standing off to the side, in a ditchlike dogleg of the dirt road bordered by poplars and junipers, watching this old firetrap farmhouse burn, as the accelerants planted in the basement explode and speed the flames along. From this distance, the fire has a festive quality. Just ahead and to my left, one fire truck, a tanker of some sort, is spewing water entertainingly through a second-floor window, while the children in the crowd cheer and run around in circles. A Dalmatian sits on another truck, looking rather smug. On the right of us, the firefighters themselves, in their yellow coveralls, are watching with academic interest as the house burns.

“It’s a great fire,” I say to Bradley, feeling the heat on my face. “But as for looking up Kathryn, well, this whole thing was your idea,” I tell him. “Having everybody give me stories. Besides, the two of us, Kathryn and I, talked in your coffee shop, the one you own. It wasn’t secret or anything.”

“Kathryn. She’s still with Jenny?”

I nod. “She says men are really hard to love. Hard for her to love. We’re not very lovable, she says. Do I look lovable to you?”

“I’m not answering that. You’re going to have trouble with continuity, Charlie. By the way, you know what you should do? You should talk to my employees in Jitters. They’re just kids. There’s a cross section for you. Start with this girl Chloé. She pronounces it Chloé, not Clow-ee but Clow-ay — I don’t have any idea where she gets that from. Quite a girl. Excuse me. ‘Woman,’ I suppose I should have said. She’s got a boyfriend named Oscar. Chloé and Oscar. They’re sweet kids, but I don’t think they represent anything. You won’t get them to stand as symbols of today’s youth, too bad for you.”

I give him a look. He ignores me and keeps on talking. “They met at that fast-food place, Dr. Enchilada’s. She quit that job. She said she went home smelling of guacamole and that the karma was bad. The karma was bad! Really, you should talk to her. Incidentally, while we’re on the subject, you should stop talking to me. This is getting much too personal. But as long as you’re collecting stories, did I ever explain to you how I got the dog back?”

“No.”

“You’re going to think this is funny. I know you. It’ll make you chuckle. But it wasn’t funny at all. It’s a comic story, just not comic to me.”

OSCAR AND ME, we had such good sex together we thought there ought to be a way to make some money out of it, to live off of our crazy ruinous love forever. Only we hadn’t figured out how. Oscar’s real good-looking once you get his clothes off and his body into its characteristic behavior. As a boyfriend he’s kind of indescribable. Words violate him. And me, Chloé, I’m even more that way. There’s almost no point in me saying anything about myself because the words will all be inhuman and brutally inaccurate. So no matter what I say, there’s no profit in it.

Still: once upon a time he, Oscar, had been a stoner, sort of upwardly mobile from pot to hash and XTC and heroin, but it was just an excursion for him, Oscar being ambitious in other directions. He got fascinated by oblivion but discovered its secret, which is that it’s boring. But on some days you could look at him standing and eating a cheeseburger and see from his eyes that he had been ruined for a spell. He had been briefly tragic.

He told me once that in a drug dream he’d seen the famous African whispering monkey. The whispering monkey told him awful things about his possible future, bleeding scabby death in garbage alleyways, and that was what sent him into rehab.

After his substance-abuse experiences he became advanced, a reformed boy outlaw. Plus, we were, as I said, both real lively between the sheets. We were swoon machines.

SINCE YOU ASKED, I live next door to Bradley W. Smith. I see him walking his dog, also called Bradley. What is this, that a man should name his dog after himself? The man runs a local coffee franchise, a modest achievement, in all truth. Megalomania can strike anywhere, I suppose is the point.

After he lost his second wife to another man, I decided to explain to him about Kierkegaard.

ONCE I HAD BRADLEY THE DOG returned to his rightful owner (myself), I saved a bit of money for a down payment-actually, I was doing pretty well, financially — and moved out of my basement apartment into a white clapboard house next door to Harry and Esther Ginsberg, who became my friends and neighbors. Everything I owned fit into one small moving van. I brought the dog, and my easels, my paint tubes, my paintings, and every other worldly possession that I thought was fit to survive, and I found places for them where they seemed comfortable. I was the only entity in that house that didn’t have a place to be. Bradley had his back room and his dog bed, the paintings had the basement, the clothes had their closet, the clock had its wall, the audio system had its shelves. I roamed around the house trying to figure out my proper location. But I couldn’t get comfortable anywhere, including the bedroom, and finally I decided not to worry and just to go on being relaxed and uncomfortable and myself. After all, I was a single, recently divorced man. I was both a problem and a solution.

SMELLING OF ONION and garlic, what we did was, we’d lie in bed together, jabbering about the future, Oscar and me. This was in his room, because I was moving out of my roommates’ palace into my own efficiency and spending more time just now in Oscar’s bedroom, except for those days we house-sat at Bradley Smith’s. Oscar’s bedroom: like I already told you: trophies with bronzed guys running in place up on the shelf, his track shoes still on their nail, and snow drifting down outside. On his bookshelf: board games like Monopoly and Clue, relay batons from his track team, and busted video cartridges, dead Super Mario circuits and dead Ninja Warriors likewise. And right over there, up above us, located on the wall, was a crucified bronze Jesus I didn’t want to ask about, what he was doing there or anything. I was lying snug under the covers one day with my hand peacefully on Oscar’s dick, you know, holding it, it being only half-awake, similar to Oscar himself, ’cause we’d already done our lovemaking a couple times, and he, Oscar, was talkin’ about the future.

“I have this image,” he said.

“What image?”

“You know how people when they’re ultra-rich, they’ve got front hallways?”

I said yeah.

“There’s a name for it.”

“For what?”

He lowered himself down in bed and kissed me, a little tongue and lip thing, on my nipple. His tongue stud gave it, I don’t know, metallic content. Next to the bed we had acquired a bowl of popcorn that we microwaved a little while ago. When he kissed me, he tasted inside his mouth of buttered popcorn. Sometimes burned popcorn. It was like he was cooking snacks in there. My nipples stood up, it was almost painful.

“They’ve got a name for that, that room inside the front door. Where they put the big grandfather clocks and shit. You know. Also those things they put the umbrellas into.”

“Like, the foyer?”

“Fucking A.” He nodded. “The foyer.” He was so pleased with himself or with me, he woke up utterly and got a boomer Woodrow immediately. It lifted my hand up. His dick is like a human barometer that way. I started to go down on him but he said, “No, no, wait.” He put his fingers on my face and drew it up back to the pillow. His woody didn’t get discouraged. It stayed nestled in my girl-grip, and I could feel his heart beat through it. “See, here I am, comin’ home. Here’s Oscar. Oscar-of-the-future.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, you gotta imagine this. Okay? Here I am, Oscar, and I’m comin’ home.”

“All right. You’re comin’ home. I’m imagining it.”

“Right. From what am I coming home? From whatever shit it is that I do. From my work.”

“Okay.”

“It’s, like, the end of the day. Quitting time. Factory whistles are blowing. And I’m comin’ home. Right? And in my truck, I’ve run into a detour which takes me around that new drive-in bank and this pond where the ducks have already flown south and that mini-mall and the multiplex. I’m just drivin’, my hands on the wheel. And I’m like, I don’t care about this detour. I am not bummed. We’re thinking up the future, okay? Now? This is what we’re doin’?”

“Okay.” Outside, I heard the sound of an airplane or something taking off. The furnace in the house started up.

“I’m comin’ home.” He got distracted and kissed me on the mouth and our tongues swirled for a while. Tongue stud action again. He shook his head like he was waking up. “I’m not comin’ home, I am home, see, and I’m comin’ in the door. My truck’s in the driveway.”

“Where am I, Oscar?”

“Where are you? Oh, okay. Honey, you’re inside. You’re inside this big house, Chloé, you’re doing household shit. How the fuck should I know? You gotta decide that for yourself, right? ’Cause you’d be totally adult and feminist and everything about it. You want something done in the house, you give orders and it happens. You’re tough. You’re a take-no-prisoners woman. A real tough chick. We’re alike, that way. Tough, I mean.”

“I’m in the house? I live with you?”

“Yeah, you’re there.”

“Wow. Okay.” I moved over and slipped his cock inside me. He was ultra-hard like a broomstick, but softer, Oscar being human.

“Don’t distract me,” he said. “So I’m comin’ in the front door, and I’ve got, like, the bills, that’ve come in the mail?”

“Right.”

“And Chloé, these are fucking huge bills. You never saw bills like this! These are bills for mortgages and shit, bills for the fucking dentist, bills for — I don’t know — the eye guy, and the shrink, and bills for the phone and the electricity, these are the biggest colossal bills you ever saw, and they came in the mail, and I’ve got them. I got them in my hand.”

“What’s so great about this?” We were lying side by side, doin’ our thing with our hips sedately, but it’s weird because it’s so secondary, though I’m heating up? I was so wet down there but I was also trying to concentrate on what he was saying. “What’s so great about getting bills?”

“Hello? You’re not listening to me,” he said. “’Cause I’ve got these bills, they’re like, uh, you know, the national debt, but look at the look on my face.”

“Now?” His eyes were kind of not-focusing just then. He was staring toward the Monopoly game, on the other side of the room, and his glass Mason jar full of pennies, and the other Mason jar full of old shoelaces.

“No, not now. In the future. Look at me, Oscar-of-the-future. Uh. Do I look scared?”

“I can’t see you.”

“Yes, you can. Look harder. Close your eyes.”

I closed them.

“Okay, now imagine Oscar-of-the-future. That’s me. That’s me comin’ home to the house, not-bummed by the detour. Look at the look on my face while I’m holding these huge bills I gotta pay. Do I look scared?”

“No.”

“How do I look?”

I kept my eyes closed. “Like a man. Confident and like that. A hero, even. You’re smiling?”

“Fucking A. I’m smiling. You know why I’m smilin’?”

“’Cause you can pay all those bills, right?”

“Oh, yeah. ’Cause I’m a big man and nothin’ scares me and I can pay all the bills because we got plenty of money, and, uh, I’m fearless —”

He made a yelp, and he suddenly came, to his surprise. When he comes, his shoulders sometimes jerk back, and they did this time, too. It made me so happy to see him that I came with him, right on the dotted line, but quick. Efficient. It’s like we’re connected with wires that way. Something happens to him, it happens to me. We’re concerted. Is that a word? It should be. Now it is.

We took a minute out for a breather, though we kept ourselves together. No condoms, I don’t like them, I’m on the pill. It’s funny about Oscar, he can come and pretty soon he’s got his hard-on back, standing up and smiling at me. Weird. Maybe this was, like, the month of his sexual peak. I mean, in some ways he was still a boy. You could tell how he was still treating sex like it was a drug and vastly illegal. He had that addict glint in his eye. But it could be tiring also, like shoplifting. It goes from being hip to being a chore. You get to where you want to do something else. The righteousness goes out of it. That can happen.

“Now you,” he said.

“What about me?”

“The future, man. We were talkin’ about the future.” He put his finger on my earlobe, where it had been pierced, as per his suggestion, my earlobe where I wasn’t underpierced anymore, thanks to him.

“I can’t see anything.”

“Sure you can. Chicks can always see the future, it’s what they do. Guys don’t, so much, except those weathermen, you know — meteorologists. Forecasters. So whattya see?”

“I can’t see anything,” I repeated.

“Don’t be lame. Close your eyes.” I did. “Okay. Whattya see?”

I put my head on his chest. “Well, maybe in that foyer we were talkin’ about? With the, what do you call it? umbrella stand?” I was speaking real slow. Groping love-talk.

“Yeah?”

“There’s a table made out of wood? And there’s, like, this vase, and it’s red glass, and it’s got flowers and… wait a minute.”

“What?”

“Your heart sounds weird.”

“Oh, yeah, that.”

I had my ear to his chest, where usually with humans you hear chunka-thoom, chunka-thoom, chunka-thoom. But! Oscar had this other sound, chunka-jazz-thoom, chunka-jazz-thoom, chunka-jazz-thoom.

“I’ve got this heart thing,” Oscar said. “Valves and shit. Like a murmur.” He shrugged. His dick went down from where it was, but he was working up the confidence look and the greaser sneer on his face, like what’s-his-name, the movie star. Even in bed he was working hard on his attitude. “It’s nothin’,” he said.

“Fuck and alas, Oscar! It’s something. You should, like, have it looked at?”

“They did already. And they said, Forget it, he’ll live. So tell me about this vase, Chloé, that you mentioned.”

But now, I sort of didn’t want to do it, I didn’t want to imagine the future. The righteousness had gone out of that, too. But I thought maybe I should, a favor to Oscar. “There’s flowers, you know, people have flowers in vases.”

“What kind?”

He had his hands now in my hair, which was tricky, ’cause my hair’s so short. “I don’t know.” It was hard for me to imagine the fucking flowers in the damn vase while Oscar’s heart was murmuring and death was taking a close look at him. “Roses,” I said. I took a big breath, to imagine them. “Red roses, with petals? Like they have them.”

“Okay. We’ve done this. What’s upstairs?”

“Oscar, I’m sort of tired of this.” I shined a big fakey smile at him, then dropped the idea.

“Come on, Chloé, what’s upstairs?”

I shut my eyes. I was working at it. I was imagining. Imagining is hard work for me, at times.

“Well?” he asked.

“I’m still goin’ up the stairs.”

“Okay.” He waited. “You up there, yet?”

“Yeah. Just about. I got my hand on the banister.”

“So what’s up there?”

I had this problem then. Because what I was seeing was, all the kids Oscar and I would have. Like three kids in their kid clothes, OshKosh overalls with spit-up on the bibs, and they’re yelling and jumping up and down and breaking shit and having fun, like a kid party. And maybe a baby in a crib or something.

“Well?” he asked.

“Big bedrooms, Oscar. The thickest carpeting you ever saw.”

“Right. I can see it. It’s, like, gotta be white.”

“Yeah. It’s the second floor. White carpeting in the hallways. Thing is, Oscar, I’ve never been in a house with a second floor. So it’s hard for me to know.”

“I have,” he said. “They got bedrooms up there.”

“Okay.” He closed my eyes with his fingers. He did it real softly. “Okay. I guess I’m, like, supposed to imagine the rest of it,” I said.

“What’s in the bedrooms, Chloé?”

“We are.”

“And what else?”

I took a deep breath, from way down in, what do they call it? the diaphragm. By which I mean my heart. Because I have one, too. “Kids, Oscar. There’s kids everywhere. They’re our kids. We’ve got, like, three? I can’t count them all.”

His dick started standing up again. “I was hopin’ you’d say that.”

“Bullshit. You were? Really?”

“Yeah. On account of I am the person who is not scared, like I said. Fearless. So that would also include kids, right? I like kids, man. Gettin’ into trouble and shit. I was a kid. Absolutely.”

“Absolutely!” I said, so happy my toes were tingling, little battery-operated things zapping them. “So…”

“Yeah?”

I was thinking of his heart. “So I have this idea.”

“What’s that?”

“I brought it with me,” I said.

So what I did then was, I got out of bed, naked, and I walked over to my backpack, and I was about to get the thing I wanted to show him out of there, but I had to clean myself up, I was dripping, so I said, like the Princess of Wales: Excuse me, I’ll be right back.

I went out into the hall, I guess you’d call it. Oscar’s bedroom is on one side, and his father, the Bat, well, the Bat’s bedroom is on the other side, and that’s it, in this little ranch house. Oscar’s older brother, he’d moved out, and there’s no mother because she’s dead and everything. It was about four in the afternoon. I was going to the bathroom to clean the remnants of Oscar off of myself. And I did. But when I was returning to Oscar’s bedroom, I thought I saw something way down out there on the corner of my eye. It was Oscar’s dad, the Bat, in the kitchen, sitting at the table, peeling some kind of awful fruit, and I sort of thought he got a measuring look at me, without my clothes on. Maybe I was imagining it. That can happen.

“I think your dad’s home,” I said, standing there. My hand stayed on the doorknob.

“Fuck him,” Oscar said.

“No, I think he’s really home.” I waited. “He’s peeling food,” I said, to prove it.

“So what’re you going to show me?”

I took the videocam out of my backpack. “This,” I said. I hoisted it on my bare shoulder and aimed it down at him.

“Where’d you get that, Chloé?”

“I sort of stole it. The people who own it, they won’t miss it.” I meant my parents, who I knew pretty well.

“And what’s your plan?”

I put the camera down on the floor and got back into bed with him, my forearm on his chest. “Well, this girl told me how, you make a tape, you know, us in bed, you sort of invent a name for yourself and a story and then, I mean, we, well, what we do is, we just make a tape of ourselves doing it, like what we usually do, maybe some additions, fancy stuff, costumes that we take off for the camera, and there’s an address these sex industry magazines have where you send the tape, or, well, you send them a sampler first, then the tape, and they send you huge bucks. This girl I know, Janey, she’ll do it all for us. She wants to break into the video industry.”

Oscar didn’t look that happy about it. You could see he was kind of divided. ’Cause after all we had just been talking about a house, and, like, vases and stairs. And so much money that you weren’t afraid of anything in the world. It’s hard to make big bucks at Dr. Enchilada’s or Jitters. But he was the one who said our sex lives were so good we ought to be able to make some money out of it, but clueless as to how, leaving it to me. He was the one who said we were magnificent, or some word like that. I told him I knew he was smart and could think of a story we could act out. It would be harmless.

But. I also had a little disgusting feeling, even as I was saying what I was saying. I mean, Oscar’s got a nice body and, me, I’ve got a nice body, but I could see these old men looking at our tape and drooling. Excuse me, that’s not always the road to vases and flowers and kids upstairs. That’s radically poor karma, guys drooling. Also, as a rule, guys who drool don’t shave. Gargoyles! But I thought, hey, a few times, why not, hey, nothing ventured? And we don’t have to see the guys. We’ll be safely inside the television screen.

Anyway, this friend I had, this video person named Janey, would help us make it look cool. And tasteful. She was the one who gave me the idea in the first place. She said she knew what to do with it, to sell it. She had taken film and video classes at the community college. She knew lighting and how to focus.

This is where, out of the blue, Oscar said, “Chloé, it’s weird, but I love you.” He waited. “I never said that before.”

And I said, “Oscar, I love you, you are everything.”

“You think we can make some money out of this?”

“Maybe.” Then I said my nothing-ventured thing and how we were so minimum-wage and actually desperate right now.

“It’s way creepy,” he said. “But it’s okay. I guess. ’Cause of the money.”

“Right.”

“And it’s not like work, either.”

“No, it’s not like that.”

“Chloé, tell me somethin’ about when you were a girl.”

“Why?”

“I want to hear it. I just want to see you from then.” He looked right in my eyes. He wasn’t zoned. So I, like, got up and sort of straddled him.

“Okay,” I said. “When me and my sister, we rode in the car? long trips? We sat in the backseat. And time goes slower in the backseat than the front seat because the front seat gets everywhere first, in case you haven’t noticed. Just zombie slow. So what my sister Rhonda and me did was, we took Kleenex tissues, just plain Kleenex, from our mother, who had zillions of them in her purse, and we’d take them, and this was a contest. We invented this.” I had my hands on his shoulders, pinning the boy down. “I’d open my back window, just partway, and put the Kleenex, just, sort of, the edge of it, into that groove that the window makes, and then I’d, like, close the window? Rhonda did that with her Kleenex on her side. So there was mostly Kleenex tissues flapping outside, but held in place, and the car’s speeding along, with these white Kleenex ears on both sides of it. And Rhonda and me, we’d watch our respective Kleenexes, out there, as the landscapes flew by, cows and farmland and cities and landfills, and the one whose Kleenex lasted the longest, didn’t get torn up by the wind, she was the one who won the contest. I know it sounds dumb. But I — you know — I kinda enjoyed this. It kinda passed the time.” I waited. “Well, you wanted a story.”

That was when I heard footsteps outside our door. I was sure I heard them.

“Oscar,” I said. “Oscar, I think your dad’s outside. I think he’s listening.”

Oscar looked toward the door. “Dad?” he said. “You there?”

I heard a floorboard creak. The Bat was standing, just standing out there, giving off ghoul-auras. Jesus. My philosophy is, if somebody’s standing outside your bedroom door, not saying anything, they’re not going to be good for you. They are going to be the devil’s hatchlings.

“Dad?” Oscar sat up in bed. He lowered his feet to the floor and stood up. He reached down under the bed. He got a knife from the box he had under there. The blade was very shiny and pointed. I didn’t like Oscar being naked, though, under those circumstances. A man’s gotta have clothes on to be in a fight. Shorts, anyway, like in boxing. Just my opinion. Oscar could’ve probably taken him, though, he’s so buff.

“I tell you what,” the ghoul-voice said. “You get that girl out of your room and your bed, Oscar, and you do it now. Or else,” and here he coughed, just like a human-bat would, “I’ll have to do it myself. I’m not running a motel here.”

“You drunk dumb fuck,” Oscar said under his breath. “Would you like that?”

“Did you hear me?” the Bat asked, flapping his bat wings, out there outside the door, where I couldn’t see him.

“Yeah,” Oscar said, real quietly. But dangerously, too, like he wasn’t scared of mayhem. “He is one mean son-of-a-bitch,” Oscar said quietly, turning toward me. “But I can be, too, if I gotta be. You better get dressed, Chloé. Just don’t be scared. I’ll kill the son-of-a-bitch if I have to. You know why?”

I was putting on my underpants — black ones, that I had bought for him to see — and my jeans, and then my bra, and my tee-shirt that said RAGING HORMONES on the front, right across my tits, and then my jacket and the backpack. I was doing it fast. “Why?”

“’Cause I’m so into you, I’d protect you.” He leaned down and put his clothes on, but not fast like me. Slow and slick, the jeans slowly rising up his legs where you can see the muscles to his waist. Like he could take his time. That was Oscar all over. Then he put away the big knife and got another one out of his dresser drawer. This one was, like, all folded up. “I gotta move out of here. Outta this house.”

“Cool. Move in with me. We can make space.” My efficiency was tiny but I could always create room for Oscar, seeing as how he was saying he loved me.

“Are you doing what I said?” the Bat asked.

“Maybe we should climb out the window,” I suggested. I could tell my voice was, like, shaking? “Out onto the lawn.”

“Fuck that,” Oscar informed me. “Come on.” He took my hand and walked me to the door. “You ready?” he asked. I nodded. “Let’s have the introductions.”

Oscar put his hand on the doorknob and whipped the door open. There in front of us was the Bat, his dad, standing in the hallway, his grimy hands made into fists. His mouth was open, and you could see in there, most of the way down into his stomach. You wouldn’t want to send postcards with this guy on the picture side. I had expected somebody older. And bigger. The Bat was shorter than Oscar, more kind of pint-sized, very ratty and low-rent, with long Brylcreem greaseball hair swept back in hoodlum waves, and this brown mole just to the right of his nose. He looked like one of those smelly little cigaretted guys who ran the Tilt-a-Whirl at a seedy backwoods carnival, just waiting for someone to barf. That’d give him a tickle. They had shaved the warm-and-fuzzy off this guy a long time ago. From the odors in the air you could tell also that he was, heads-up, a full-time drunk. He’d gone way past the hobby stage. He had stare-at-the-jury eyes and funny pointed bat ears to pick up screams. Also: the deadest expression I had ever seen on a human being was equipped into this man’s face, like he was a failed rapist or something, and couldn’t get over it. The small wiry guys are the meanest. He’d kill you for a nickel. Under the hall light, he looked at me and panted. He would be the first customer for the video we were going to make, I just had a feeling.

“Hello Missy,” he said, lookin’ at me, proportionating me.

“The name’s Chloé,” I said. “Pleased to meetcha.” I was keeping up the civilities, because maybe someday this ghoul would be my father-in-law. Didn’t hold out my hand, though. Give me some credit. Anyway Oscar had my other hand.

But what Oscar did, was, being brave, he just had my fingers in his and took me, like we were the cool kids, down the hall and out the front door, Oscar saying nothing. I guess he didn’t want to start a fight exactly at that moment.

“Don’t you come into this house again unless I invite you,” the Bat said. “I don’t want that stuff going on here. There’ll be trouble I can’t be responsible for. Real bad trouble.” I heard his ineffectual voice fading, a mean-streak voice floating in the air, rising up to the atmosphere, and because nothing in the universe is ever lost, heading out to the galaxies, and I thought: Jeez, what a bad ambassador for Earth that guy is!

Short fathers can be so weird. There must be something about short-fathering that makes men so crazy. If you’re middle-sized or tall you’re usually okay as a father. Otherwise, it’s mysteriously unreal for everybody and inexplicable, in addition.

We got into Oscar’s junk car, this old AMC Matador, with doors that sang when you opened them. I loved that sound and feel I should mention it.

“That son-of-a-bitch,” Oscar said. “I’m gonna kill him.”

“You could try to never see him again,” I said.

Oscar put his head down on the steering wheel. This old car, I loved it, and I wanted to cheer Oscar up but couldn’t think of how.

“It’s ’cause of him,” Oscar said, “I was sort of a junkie for a while. How I got my start.”

“Wow,” I said. “I can see that.”

“I don’t want to talk about it though.” He started the ignition and the engine magically turned over. “Chloé,” he said, “we gotta make some money. We just gotta set ourselves up. I’m gonna kill him otherwise. Who’s this Janey person, this video woman?”

So I explained to him about it, one more time. When I finished explaining, he nodded. I figured that was the go-ahead.

Charlie, now you know. Now you know how we got ourselves into show business.

SOMETIMES I FEEL as if my life is a murder mystery, only I haven’t been murdered yet, and I don’t plan on being murdered at all, of course. But it’s puzzling — my life, I mean — the way a murder mystery is puzzling, with something missing or dead out there where everyone can see it — what happened to Bradley W. Smith — only I don’t know what it is, just this intimation of violence. I need a detective who could snoop around in my life and then tell me the solution to the mystery that I have yet to define, and the crime that created it.

For example: every morning, driving Turbo, my car, on the fifteen-minute commute to Jitters, I go around three curves. On two of these curves someone has planted little white wooden crosses to memorialize sudden vehicular deaths, and next to each cross, a display of artificial flowers. Artificial flowers! Petunias, these are, and violets, probably. Weeks pass, and they don’t fade. I wait for them to droop as in a natural cycle. But they are stubbornly unalive and therefore unwilting, so they must be plastic, with machine-made blues and yellows and whites. Imagine that: plastic-flower sorrow. It’s not ennobling. The quality of the grief has a discount aura, like a relic tossed haphazardly into a bin. I just mark it down and store it away every morning. I notice these things for my own protection.

It’s a short drive that I have to do, each dawn of the working week, and there are few signs of violence on it except for these crosses. I watch for minute changes in the landscape. I steer a straight line past the reddish-yellow-brick high school, ease my way around one of the fatal curves, and there’s the Tiny Tot Drop-in Day Care Center, its sign decorated with pseudofestive balloons and a teddy bear waving an American flag, followed by a few acres of scrubby farmland with two FOR LEASE signs planted near the highway.

The last cash crop on this acreage happened to be pumpkins. Just before Halloween two years ago, the pumpkins covered the lawn fronting the highway, and the farmer sat behind a card table, wearing his feedstore hat and collecting his money. From the farmhouse chimney, smoke rose day and night, from autumn till spring. Woodsmoke spread across the highway like a porous blue curtain and enveloped the passing cars in a domestic living room odor, also blue. The farmer, too, smelled of woodsmoke, and his skin looked like treated lumber. He dropped his meager earnings into a little steel box. He seldom smiled. Then we never saw him again. Another section of his land was bought up, and condominiums stand there now, a complex called The Polo Fields. No more fires, not now.

A drive-in bank is located near the second curve (you’d think the manager of the bank would try to remove the white cross and the plastic flowers from the edge of the bank’s manicured lawn, but no), and then you see a strip mall where the office of my dog’s veterinarian, Dr. Hasselbacher, is located. After the mall you would see, on this route, three separate apartment and condominium developments, one called Appleton Estates and the other One Pine Lane. At One Pine Lane, the eponymous white pine, a token tree five feet high, stands planted near the entrance. It’s amazing that the kids haven’t killed it by kicking it to death. What I mean is, day after day, freshly scrubbed schoolchildren wearing backpacks are lined up for the bus, jostling one another, early morning kids, dressed in bright-colored kid-clothes, yellows mostly, and nautical blues. The boys bravely kick the tree, ripping off the bark. The girls watch, some avidly.

I like seeing these kids, though I wish they’d leave the tree alone. I recall being a kid myself. I was a successful child. I count these multicolored schoolchildren each morning and try to remember how many are wearing backpacks and how many are carrying lunch boxes. Sometimes their parents come along and stand with them, smiling proudly and distractedly. This thought keeps me occupied and momentarily removes the image of those drive-by crosses and plastic flowers.

I drive with one hand on the wheel, holding my cup containing coffee mixed with vanilla and chocolate-chip ice cream in my other hand.

I pass by the health club. The manager is often outside, enjoying a cigarette.

“LISTEN, UH, what did you say your name was?” Diana asks.

“Charlie.”

“Listen, Charlie. I mean, I suppose this is all very interesting and everything, but it gives me the willies. First of all my story is not a story. Second of all, it’s not yours. It’s mine, isn’t it? I thought my life was mine and not yours. Third of all, I… I just lost my train of thought. Oh, I know: it’s all private. My life is not in the public domain. All right? Please don’t write about me.”

“Oh, I won’t. Not exactly. But I’ll invent a replica of you.”

“I wish you wouldn’t. I don’t really have time to argue. I’m a busy woman. I’m an osteopath, you know.”

“Oh, that’s fascinating,” I say without irony, because I mean it. “An osteopath? What do osteopaths do? Do you mind my asking? I’ve always been confused about osteopaths.”

“No, sorry, I don’t have time to explain. You can look it up.”

“Okay. Maybe I’ll make you into a lawyer.”

“A lawyer? How can you do that? Incidentally, what did you say this project of yours is called?”

“The Feast of Love.”

“Ah-huh. Just like Bradley’s painting. I got that, didn’t I?”

“Yes. Just like Bradley’s painting.”

“It’s the best thing he ever did,” she says.

“There you go,” I tell her. “See, you have opinions to contribute, too.”

“That wasn’t an opinion,” she says. “I didn’t say anything. And I’m not going to say anything, believe me.”

“Okay,” I tell her. “But you’ll wish you had talked to me.”

“What does that mean?” she asks. “Are you threatening me? I should give you a piece of advice. As a favor. Free. Here it is. Don’t threaten me.” Her voice somehow manages to rise and to stay calm simultaneously. “Don’t threaten people, especially lawyers. Don’t threaten your own characters. It’s for your own good. You’ll wind up in a mess of litigation and … subplots.” She pauses. Then she seems to laugh. At least I think it’s a laugh. “You’re probably an intelligent man. Let’s not beat this shit to death. You get the point.”

THE POINT WAS, I didn’t need a lover. I already had one of those, a married man who sometimes came over and who brought bunches of beautiful cut flowers, or soup he had made at home the night before.

He’d sneak the soup, carrot-leek being my favorite, out of his house in Tupperware containers, pretending he would serve it to himself for lunch. How he snuck the containers back was not my concern. He favored white shirts with French cuffs, lightly starched, though he sometimes wore a leather jacket and sunglasses to my place for his beauty’s sake. The last time he tried that I said, “You look like one of the Village People, sweetie,” kidding him, and he never wore those clothes again. As a back-door man he was devoted to me, and reliable. He wasn’t a lawyer, thank God. He worked for a pharmaceutical company, and his hours were flexible. I wasn’t in love with him so far as I could tell, but I liked him, sometimes to bursting, and I enjoyed talking to him, going to bed with him, and cooking meals with him, anything you could do inside four walls and away from public view.

He was athletic and fierce, funny when he wanted to be, and affectionate. As a lover, he was so companionable and enthusiastic, and he was clean as a knife. He had a thick head of hair, absolutely gorgeous features, and kiss-curls at the neck. I only saw him sweat hard when we were physically locked together, and his sweat had no odor, none, though his body did, a wonderful breadlike smell. We could have sex all day. He could make me come over and over again, but he didn’t bring me to a boil. How can I put this accurately? As follows: I didn’t have to sit up any further than normal for him and take more than the usual notice. Maybe I should have.

The only trouble with having an affair like ours is that the two of you can’t go outside much. It tests the friendship more than it tests the sex. The old story: you can’t be viewed in public, you’re always Anna and Vronsky on this diminished suburban scale. You can’t work in the garden, the two of you. You can’t rake the leaves. You can’t go to movies at the cineplex and you can’t find yourselves at concerts or gallery shows. You have no opportunity to sit around on Sunday morning, funky and grungy and full of opinions, while you read the paper. You just stay in little rooms, those times when you can arrange it, the illicit playground of furtive and therefore heightened eros. The constraints challenge your sexual resourcefulness. Sometimes you have sex inventively all afternoon, in bed or on the floor or in the shower, for want of anything better to do. You do the fireworks. You light them and watch them go off. Of course, he didn’t mind that, but, like me, he saw its limitations.

BECAUSE THE NEXT MORNING was a Saturday, and my Esther was sleeping at last, perhaps only for a few minutes, the tossing-and-turning kind of sleep, I rolled quietly off my side of the bed and took a shower. I took care not to drop the bar of soap. I shaved my face (my features are porcine, coarse, and bristly — I have a snout like a wild boar, and yet, I think, I am handsome), not looking into my own eyes, avoiding self-commentary on the bags underneath them. I cooked some oatmeal for myself and then fed the goldfish, Julius and Ethel.

I went into my study and pulled out the checkbook from the desk drawer. I am familiar with clutter, with the diffusion of philosophy into papers and bookmarks and the scatterings of thought. I wrote out a check to the order of my son Aaron Ginsberg (it was not for as much as he had asked). And then I realized: no no no, I cannot send the boy a check with my bank account number on it. He is wily, he and his strange dangerous friends. They will find a way of ordering the bank to send them all the money in my account. I do not know how they will do this, but they will know. These children of ours have befriended computers, and the terrible dangerous computers will help them help themselves.

So I therefore drove, this bright sunny morning, to the branch bank that kept its offices open on Saturday. By this time it was nine o’clock, by the official clocks. The sun shone its burning rays on the landscapes of my life, the real world that made Plato so unhappy. My bank teller’s name was Theresa. I seem to remember that she wore glasses. I was beyond having any certain opinions on her appearance, however, this girl, her beauty or lack of it. Perhaps she belonged to somebody, in the amorous way of things. Perhaps she gave off an odor of lilac. What was that to me? What, may I ask, was the odor of sachet of lilac from a bank teller to me that morning? We were in separate galaxies. We were lit by separate lights and we cast separate shadows. I was managing a catastrophe, and she was working as a clerk in a bank.

Theresa, I said when I reached her window, my throat dry, I need a cashier’s check made out to my son, Aaron Ginsberg. It must come from my savings. I handed the passbook and the withdrawal slip to her, and she checked my balance and quickly typed up the check on a machine. Thank you, I said. She must have smiled, such people do all the time, after all, but I must confess that it made no impression on me. I returned to my Ford car and drove home.

Back in my study I wrote a brief note to my son, asking for… asking for what? For his assurance that he would spend it wisely? We were beyond such tender father-son messages. (A maddening tune was going through my head, “Twentieth-Century Blues.”) I asked my son Aaron not to make good on his threat to end his life. On my desk was a picture of him, smiling into the white-cotton sunshine on a tennis court, on a singular day when he was healthy and happy.

I enclosed the check with this note. On the front of the envelope I attached a stamp — the American flag. Well, I don’t mean for these details to have an oppressive poignancy. I stamped the letter and wrote his name and address, a post office box number, on it. I walked to the corner and dropped it in the mailbox. In the dark it lay among the other fellow letters, whispering to one another their messages of love and longing and betrayal.

But almost as soon as I released the metallic lip of the box, I remembered that Aaron had instructed me to send the money by express mail, as a sign of his last-minute emergency condition, the bloodletting of his threatened mortality. What could I do? The letter had been thoughtlessly mailed. Briefly I considered calling the airlines to get a ticket immediately out to Los Angeles, to intervene personally. But by now I knew that to him I was worse in person and therefore more ineffective as a father than I was when reduced microscopically to a mere voice over the phone. In person, revulsion at the mere sight of my paternal features would settle over his face instantly, before I had committed the first father crime of the day.

Inside the house, Esther slept on restlessly, poor old girl.

I CAN BE SO UNMOTIVATED. For example. You know the dust that can, like, float in the air? Me, I was totally capable of sitting in a chair for hours, watching the dust-fuzz hanging in front of me. If there was sunlight in the room, just the particles of visible molecules or whatever, I was excellent and enthralled.

I’m not saying that I’m deep, I’m just saying I watch the dust, and I’m not stoned either, when I do it. Just observant. I’m concentrating on it, figuring out its mystery, its purpose for being here in the same universe with us.

When I tried to get Oscar to study the dust, he went: you’re so, like, Looney Tunes, Chloé. Jeez, dust. He was smiling when he said that, criticizing my dust interest. But you could tell that he didn’t get the profundity of dust at all. Poor guy. Well, some people can’t sing, either.

But what I’m saying is, I can get motivated when I have to. I can stop dust-meditating and get off my ass and get the job done. Which means that when I had to figure out the future, I took steps.

Oscar’s friends, these boy-men from his high school jock clique — Speedy and Ranger and Fats (who was not fat — where do guys get names like this?) — came by our apartment, grab-assing Oscar and demanding that he come out to play basketball, it being early summer, and the two of us, Oscar and me, not having to work at Jitters that day. Oscar! Hey, man, they said, first of all hollering up to our window, dude, you just gotta come shoot some hoop, dooooooode, Oscaaaaaaaar, we just gotta have another guy. Oscar hears the call of male needs, he barks his yes downward to them, so then he puts on his shorts and his Nikes and kisses me and gets his shoulders punched in the parking lot and his ass whapped and he is gone. Like poof, like a husband. Empty nest.

I had to figure out if Oscar and me had any prospects at all, as a couple, together. So there I was, me, Chloé, alone. But with the keys to Oscar’s ancient AMC Matador, and I sat there, and I’m like, I gotta find out the future from an expert. So I took some money and put it into my pockets and my shoes in case I got robbed, and I drove over to Ypsilanti, where the psychics are. You can’t do psychics off of TV. The TV psychics are mostly wrong, and way too expensive besides.

I had been reading my tarot cards on Oscar and wanted a second opinion. And I figured I’d need to take something of his, so I took a mungy sweat sock and his track team relay baton and one of his knives, which he had told me not to touch, but which I did touch, for his own good and mine too.

YOU KNOW WHAT I HATE? I hate it when someone turns to me and says, “What’re you thinking, Bradley? Tell me. What’re you thinking?” Well, no. If it’s a-penny-for-your-thought time, here’s your penny back. Because, first of all, it’s private, whatever my thoughts are — and don’t think I’ll tell you all my thoughts, either — but secondly, most of the time I don’t, in the way of things, have any thoughts. There aren’t any thoughts, per se, is what I’m saying. Day after day it’s a long hallway up there, just a yard sale, interrupted with random images of my paintings, or my dog, or the coffee store, or memories, or a woman, her face or her body or something she said, all of it in free fall through the synapses.

And I don’t care if I’m mixing my metaphors. This is my second marriage I’m talking about now. I can damn well mix my metaphors on that marriage if I want to. I’ve got my rights.

The reason I say all this is that I couldn’t stop asking Diana what she was thinking. We’d be somewhere, like a restaurant, before or during our engagement, and she’d drop into these states, staring off into space or down at the breadsticks in the glass container. Then she’d look at the butter plate or the hors d’oeuvres instead of at me. And I just knew she was carrying on a serious conversation with herself. You could all but see her lips moving.

So I’d say, “Hey, Diana. What’re you thinking?”

She’d smile, suddenly. She’d sort of pick at her engagement ring. “Nothing.” As if she had been recalled to Earth from some asteroid belt or other. “Nothing. Why do you ask, Bradley?”

When they — women — are serious about you, they’ll use your full name. Bradley. “You just looked deep in thought, that’s all.”

“I’m thinking about us,” she’d say, and reach for my hand. Another big smile, like a smile you’d do for a flashbulb, a smile like arriving in France after seven cramped hours on the plane, that’s what she’d give me. But those smiles of hers didn’t even have a half-life. They were on her face, optically illusional, and then they’d be gone so quickly you couldn’t be sure you’d seen them at all.

She’d go absent without leave at meals, she’d go absent in the car, and she’d go absent after our lovemaking. She looked like a woman gazing out from the railing of a cruise ship toward an island of some sort, and her bangs would fall over her eyebrows while her feet twitched in time to an interior melody. She was a great one for examining the ceiling. The molding fascinated her. Lying beside me, she could carry off her fleshly existence away from me, but, after a moment, she couldn’t. I mean, my God, I was so in love with her that I almost didn’t notice. I thought I was made of plutonium, I was that powerful. Radioactive Man. I would imagine Diana walking toward me, looking at me with recognition — I am your woman, you are my man, we are mated — and I’d think: How did I get this lucky? Not that I’m selling myself short.

Other men envied me, I was sure. I longed for her. I looked forward to her, not to her sweetness, because she didn’t have any of that, but to her acids and spices, the way she made me feel more alive. To hear Diana talking or to kiss her, to wake up beside her, you’d just know, I mean any man in his right mind would know, that she was a goddess, and not one of those New Age goddesses either, but one of the old ones, the genuine kind of goddess, the sort they don’t make anymore, with lightning coming out of her eyes. She filled my eyes with her beauty; her eyes put me on trial.

I mean, Diana was a handful, but after one of our largish moments she would lie in a still, solemn posture while her feet beat in time to her inaudible music and her fingers touched my ribs like a fretboard, and she would stare off ceilingward, as if… well, it was then that I’d ask her what she was thinking, and she’d turn to me and give me a flashbulb smile, and she’d say, “I’m thinking about you, honey.”

And I didn’t know whether that was good news or bad, given the fact that she was almost frowning, and her lower lip beginning to stick out, pouty, as if she were reading poetry or something like that that’s more trouble to figure out than it’s worth. I didn’t really want to know what she was thinking after such moments. I just kept that door shut. Bluebeard kept one of his castle doors shut too. Well, I said to myself: she’s a lawyer, and she’s contemplating her next case.

At our wedding, which was not at a church, because she and I didn’t believe in anything that large, but which occurred in the expansive back yard of a reception hall near the Saline River, she had said, “I do,” with considerable force. We were under a large white canopy and there would be dancing afterward. But she had seemed almost surprised when at the conclusion of the ceremony I leaned down to kiss her, the way you do when the ritual is finished. She was made light-headed by my kiss, the fact of it. You could tell from the way she looked at me. Her eyes grew wide and she seemed frightened for a split second as my lips attached themselves to hers. She said later that she had been studying the pattern of the woodwork in the bandstand and had been distracted. Distracted? At our wedding? For the kiss? I used to think that technically the wedding doesn’t happen unless you kiss each other.

After the kiss, though, she remembered to smile. She could be polite. And following the reception, we had a horse-drawn carriage take us to the motel. The carriage was antique-elegant, with inlaid wood though it had a wet bar inside, and a TV, and as we got into it, we were pelted with rice and flowers by her lawyer friends and my artist-and-coffee friends, and by our parents and relatives and hangers-on. Chloé and Oscar were there in thrift-shop formal attire, and they threw flowers at us, too. My sister Agatha was there, and Harold, and my nephews, my friends, and my father and mother, and some of Diana’s friends including an old boyfriend of hers named David, whom I didn’t exactly get to meet, not then.

The sun was out, not a cloud in the sky. The driver wore a top hat. This was unlike my first wedding to Kathryn, which took place in city hall, where people do not typically wear costumes. We clip-clopped away from the reception hall, and I kissed Diana again, and she didn’t seem so surprised this time. The horse smelled of straw and oats, I remember.

My best man had said, long before this, You may end up like the happiest man on Earth, old Buddy, or you may end up like someone on daytime television.

During the first night, after we had made love as man and wife, as wedded partners, instead of just lovers, Diana said, “Bradley, you’re such a nice guy,” as she drifted off to sleep. I thought: Well, I’ll take my compliments where I can get them, but “nice” is not what a man wants to hear under these particular circumstances. I mean, she had nothing to complain about. I had satisfied her. She looked satisfied. We had groaned together during our lovemaking. But “nice”? When you make love to a goddess, you want a fierce compliment. Or speechlessness. Speechlessness will do just fine.

THERE’S A STORY of Kierkegaard’s that I especially like. A philosopher builds an enormous palace, but to everyone’s surprise he himself does not live in the palace but establishes his residence in a dog kennel next to it. The philosopher is invariably offended when it is pointed out to him that he lives in this ludicrous manner. But how else could I have built the palace, the philosopher asks, if I had not also lived in the dog kennel?

It is like a Jewish joke. Kierkegaard made great efforts to live in the palace of thought he himself had built, but of course he could not manage it, given to polemical rages as he was, and to a peculiar kind of spiritual unhappiness driven by heart-spite. Besides, one eventually grows attached to one’s own doghouse and the daily bowl of scraps. Stubbornly we stay on in the dog kennel to prove that we were correct to have established ourselves in there in the first place.

The story about Kierkegaard I like is the one in which he falls drunkenly off a sofa at a party. Lying on the floor, he starts to refer to himself in the third person when the other guests try to help him up. “Oh, just leave it there,” he says, speaking of his body. “Let the maids sweep it up tomorrow morning.”

WITHIN A MONTH after our return to Ann Arbor, we were talking about a divorce. Diana lived with me for a while, a few desultory months, and then, once she had the renters removed from her house, she moved out of here and back in there. She took the stone child she bought in the Upper Peninsula and put it in her back yard. Snow fell on that child all winter long; drifts blew up against it, and gradually it disappeared into the snow. She also salvaged the pictures I had drawn of herself on the back of the dragon. Those she saved. That dragon erased the two of us.

That’s all I’m going to say about the subject for now. As Chloé says, some things don’t bear much looking into. If you want something to read, then read the white space on the rest of this page. That’s me, down there in the white.

I COULDN’T GET Mrs. Maggaroulian out of my head. I’d be sleeping, and there she’d be in my dreams, pulling up a chair for an intimate girl-to-girl chat. Her wig’d be edging down toward her forehead and her nail polish would sort of be flaking off. I mean, she looked like a human pawn shop, Mrs. Maggaroulian did, but she never was one for appearances anyway. The whole point of Mrs. M as a person was inner truth. The outer Mrs. Maggaroulian was a horse that somebody should have let out to pasture years ago; you could see she didn’t even have a game plan for contemporary life. She was post-makeover and just about post-human. You could have, like, set her on fire, and I don’t think she’d even have noticed or minded.

But in my head and my dreams, she made sense. She talked to me about Oscar and myself, us as a couple, and she told me to get my marriage license signed immediately, because time was running out on the two of us. She said we had to get married right away on account of our personal eternity was contracting rapidly into a space the size of a dime. We had just about no eternity left, Mrs. Maggaroulian told me. If we weren’t careful, we would be forcibly tossed out of a time window. She couldn’t elaborate. She went on about how you can’t name names in dreams. She had all these disclaimers, how she knew everything there was to know but only had an operator’s permit from the universe to tell me a tiny percentage of it before I woke up.

I told Oscar some of this. I trusted him.

She was a soul-antique, Mrs. Maggaroulian. You could see that she believed in marriage by the way she talked about it. A sacrament, she quoted from somewhere, rubbing her big hands together. Mrs. Maggaroulian talking about marriage was weird. It was kind of like a dog talking about being the mayor of Cleveland. But if the dog does it long enough, talking on and on about the difficulties and the responsibilities of being mayor and how he has to keep track of everything and not slip up, you start to believe him. Well, she could have called it — what Oscar and I had — anything she wanted to, because, as you know, we were getting married. Mrs. Maggaroulian was telling me what I already knew. I mean, I knew we were holy and would only become more so. She was just saying to get holier in a hurry, to put it on the fast track.

THE LITTLE MARRIAGE EXPERIMENT with Bradley hadn’t worked out, and so here I was, doing a recently divorced debutante show.

It was Saturday. I had drifted into this summer evening party, a back yard gathering with pinprick clouds of gnats disturbing the air, in that space where the other guests were drinking and talking. Farther back, near the garage, a wasp nest was hanging from a maple branch just above the phone lines. I didn’t see any wasps, but the guests were windmilling their hands in front of their faces to keep the gnats away. “Hi, Diana,” they would say, waving as if to say good-bye. The hostess, Lydia, smiled with relief when I came in. I am rarely a disappointing guest. I tend to spice up whatever social gathering I am invited to. I create small harmless scenes.

The weather seemed untroubled. I heard birds crying out, somewhere above us.

These two people, my friends, the hosts, had constructed this back deck a few years ago, parallel gray boards nailed to a frame. Lydia’s taste was for a certain easygoing informality that thrived on summer parties but not winter ones; this marriage, the one with Don, was her third, and all sorts of children and stepchildren and semi-orphans had been dressed up and were serving condiments and hors d’oeuvres. One of them, whose name was Edgar — you don’t expect a small child to be named Edgar — was playing the piano in the den. The windows were open, and the music-beginner’s Mozart — mixed with the sounds of conversation.

People lazed around. They came and went. Coolers full of beer lay open for inspection and slow bluesy jazz arose like candle smoke out of the stereo and was combined near the house with the sound of Edgar’s Mozart, the minuets he was playing. Their house, which was stuffed with scratched-up antiques, was set back far enough away from the street for privacy, and the hedges were littered with kids’ toys, tricycles, and broken plastic battery-operated games. Walking in, you’d see this wreckage, and it was comforting, familial. Then you’d get to the back and note a treehouse falling to pieces close to the nest of wasps. And down there, in the yard, under the wasp nest, the guests had assembled. The invited guests and the more or less invited guests, people like me, our laughter mixing with the sounds of the crickets and the outcasts, the cigarette smokers, huddling in the back corner, grumpily inhaling.

Lydia is a tall, straight-lined woman with curly black hair that sweeps in a tangle down both sides of her face and her neck. She’s not beautiful, exactly, but her eager, smiling intelligence greets you at the doorway, and before very long you’re divulging your small wickednesses to her, and she’s telling you hers, and she takes on the attractiveness of anyone for whom every sub-minor detail is interesting. Interesting events cling to her. She’s a perfect hostess for a party. She’ll just pry the outrageousness out of you for the sake of a story. She wants to hear about everyone, and it’s only later that you remember that you neglected to ask her about herself.

She writes and illustrates children’s books, all of them about a family of goats who are given distinctive individual features like reading glasses, distinctive smirks, uncombed forelocks, and scowls that Lydia has picked up from her two ex-husbands and her own children. I have often wondered what her children thought about finding their own features located in these goats, but I never found the right moment to ask.

The guests were all from Burns Park, a rumpled academic-professional neighborhood, mostly made up of professionally paid know-it-alls, people with opinions and the leisure to express them.

They — we — had a certain party varnish on. Depending on whether I’ve had enough to drink, I usually don’t like ironic friendliness as much as homely glitter. Because it’s the Midwest, no one really glitters because no one has to, it’s more a dull shine, like frequently used silverware. We were all presentable enough, but almost no one was making any kind of statement. Out here in Michigan, real style is too difficult to maintain; the styles are all convenient and secondhand. We’re all hand-me-down personalities. But that’s liberating: it frees you up for other matters of greater importance, the great themes, the sordid passions.

I hadn’t planned to come at all. I knew people were going to take a sort of friendly interest in me and my novelty marriage to Bradley and its quick aftermath. I was prepared to be snarly in a provocative and sexy way, provided I could manage my smiling and witty quarrelsomeness within acceptable limits. I didn’t want sympathy. Well, these people were too hip for sympathy anyway. To be honest, I had this image of myself: I was the tree that a drunk driver slides off the road into. The tree doesn’t move. It doesn’t do anything except stand there. It kills the person just by standing there. That would be me. I’ve got my attitude: lethal neutrality and immobility.

“Hi, Diana.” A voice out of the party air.

“Oh, hi.” My voice back to it. A glassy indifferent smile.

“You look so cute in that.”

“Thanks.” I turned to freshen my drink. I said something about the weather.

I had been back in my house, refurnishing it, preparing one of my cases, and thinking about David now and then, just before this party. Bradley, who was a mistake when conjoined with me, did not occupy my thoughts, but David did, and the other preoccupations I had were the probable duration of our affair and his probable attendance at this back yard social. The statue of the little boy reclined in my back yard.

If you’re recently divorced, and you’re a woman, you don’t know what to wear for a while. You put on the pale blue sundress but you don’t like the boniness of your shoulder blades — people will comment on your eating habits or your level of fitness because they’re terrifically eager to know your mood — so you take off the sundress and you put on the jeans, but that’s physically vain and indulgent unless they’re new and the exact right fit, and so you take them off for the simple skirt, but that’s too simple, that and the blouse: it turns you instantly into one of the clueless off-the-racks, hopelessly unstyled and unaccessorized. So what you do is, you put on one of David’s shirts that he left behind, one time, one summer afternoon in your bedroom, escaping in his undershirt from your presence, bloated and mind-numbed from sex, the undershirt with the bookstore logo on it. Then you put on your jeans. You don’t tuck in the shirt, David’s blue denim, you let it hang down. Then you do tuck it in. You wonder if the wife, the ill-named Katrinka, will recognize it. It has started to seem, in your meaner moments, to be an interesting prospect that she might recognize it. She could make a fuss and stage an outcry. That might even be quite wonderful, that prospect. It would enliven the party.

Before the itch started, I made a social effort. I conversed with one doctor and one accountant, one electrical engineer and two remedial educationists, one professor of economics and one landscape gardener, another person who as far as I could tell was gainfully unemployed, very proud about it, too, and one person who had in a former life-phase programmed computers and now, following a personal crisis, contentedly made furniture. I talked to an aging personnel manager who wanted to take up jazz piano. Some of these people were women and some were not.

Then I felt the itch on the sole of my right foot, a poison ivy rash or a mosquito bite. What I wanted to do was to remove my sandal and start clawing. Sometimes my whole body feels that way. When that happens, I can claw at myself anywhere, I turn into a woman-rash, head to foot.

I put down my plate of barbecued ribs and barbecued chicken right there on the green and fuzzy lawn, without somehow noticing that the clouds had formed and rain had begun to fall and then was insistently falling. Soon everyone except for myself had gone inside. There I was. Preoccupied, I took my sandal off to scratch my foot. Intent on my little task, I just dug at it. I love to do that, it’s one of my bad habits when I have an itch. I was sitting behind a tree guarded from public view, near that wasp nest. No one saw me, or so I thought, enthralled with myself as I was, dazed and thoughtless and fugued. That’s why I didn’t notice this lightly damp business from the sky, this airy show of droplets. I wasn’t paying attention. I was under that tree. The party had gone inside, the people and their food and Edgar’s minuets, and I hadn’t noticed, and it had been reciprocal. No one had collared me. I was uncollected.

At that point I was facing away from the house, with my back hunched over, and I had the sensation on my back of a man looking at me. That particular feeling’s like a humming on your skin.

And what I remember next was this guy, David, of course, his arms folded across his chest like a park ranger, bending over me and putting his jacket over my shoulders and saying, “Let’s cover you up. Let’s shelter you.”

“Hi, David.”

“It’s raining, Diana. Didn’t you notice?”

“Apparently not.”

“You don’t pay enough attention to the present conditions.” He looked up at the sky with gentle gloominess. “You never did. You don’t pay attention to the conditions at hand and then you get soaked and someone has to come and clean up the mess you’ve made of yourself. You’re so willful, but in you it isn’t courage, it’s obstinacy. Diana, Diana, Diana.” I noticed that he liked saying my name.

I said, “Ah. I see that I have been explained in full. Where’s your wife, by the way? Where’s Katrinka?”

“Kat? Well, she’s inside, of course, with the other guests.” He looked toward the house. “They sent me out to get you. They said it was raining. And it is, Diana. It is.”

“I hadn’t noticed.” I looked up at the sky and rain fell into my eyes.

“Exactly right. That’s just what I’m saying.” He gave me a sweet look, and my heart crashed in my chest, at least a little. “The weather reports had predicted rain.”

“Well, I was scratching my foot. I think I have poison ivy.”

“Let’s see.” He sat down and lifted my foot. “Ah.” He fingered it. The itchy spot was right under the arch. “Yes, there’s a dermatitis there, all right.” Then he bent over, shielded by the tree trunk, and kissed it, kissed me, right there on the rash. The nerve of him! My lover.

I don’t remember anything else about the party except for a conversation I had twenty minutes later with Katrinka, there in the corner by the upright piano. Having come inside, I had given the jacket back to David, and he had disappeared into the kitchen. Katrinka and I, old acquaintances, were talking about the politics of the local school-board election, and then we were discussing poison ivy (she, too, had it growing at the edge of their yard), and as we held our plates (I had a new plate with new food) and ate, the conversation swerved like a slightly out-of-control automobile toward the proven or unproved benefits of Vitamin E, and all this time, through an act of will so resolute and brave that it can scarcely be imagined, she kept her eyes on my face after having looked, locked on is maybe a better phrase, once, twice, and then a third time, at the denim shirt I was wearing. You could see, from a telltale movement of her eyebrows, that she was struggling to remember the shirt, trying to ascertain if she did remember it, whether she thought or could think that it might be the shirt she suspected it was, her husband’s blue denim shirt, hanging on me two sizes too large. I watched, not without a trace of pity, as a small gauze of sweat broke out on her forehead, tiny spindles of perspiration.

FOLLOWING THE DIANA marriage incident, Bradley the dog took over my affairs. He urged me onward to take walks with him, eat regularly, and make noises at strangers. This did not include Harry and Esther Ginsberg, who came by from time to time with baked foods of various sorts, and who informed me that the cause of my divorce was not actually myself, or my happenstantial faults, but the house I lived in. At first I thought they meant this metaphorically, but no: the reference was to the physical enclosure, the walls and windows and ceilings. They claimed there was a dybbuk living in it. I had never heard of such a thing, and they refused to explain, claiming that to speak of the thing itself was, like the uttering of the unutterable name of the divinity, bad luck. I checked it in the American Heritage Dictionary and couldn’t believe what I found there. He was a philosopher and she was a scientist, and they were both alleging that Diana and I had been done in by some sort of Jewish phantom.

Well, they’re my neighbors, and I suppose they mean well. I listened to them talk about their son Aaron, and they listened to me talk about Diana. Let them have their dybbuk. Or, excuse me, my dybbuk. After all, I had heard Chloé and Oscar yelping with love cries in my house long after they had been there, house-sitting. I had felt the breath of themselves, the memory of their bodies crisscrossing down the hallways. Who was I to scoff at a dybbuk?

IN THOSE DAYS, before I fell in love with Diana and married her (which was after Bradley had met her, married her, and she left him for me) — before all that, I used to hunt in the forests and marshes up north. Deer, in particular, but ducks also, and pheasants. Now that I’ve lost that passion, I remember my prey with an odd clarity. I see all the individual animals I killed and cleaned and prepared for meals, crossing my line of sight one by one like mechanical birds in a shooting gallery flipping up from one side and sinking down on the other. I see their eyes, small glintings there. Sympathy for these animals? Why should I feel sympathy? That’s for others. They were one form of life, I was another. I was never one of them.

It could be that I didn’t think at all. The cells of my body collectively strained to be outside with a weapon in my hand, in pursuit of them.

Every part of this pursuit made me edgy and alert. I didn’t say to myself: I like to hunt. Liking had nothing to do with it. It was much more simple: I was a hunter, and that simplified my identity. I didn’t really have to consider the matter at all. I hunted the way an apple tree produces apples, as if it was purely second nature. My father had taught me how. I felt his presence there in those woods and fields, the weight of his flesh and bones on my shoulders, the sound of his gruff voice in my ear.

I counted the days until hunting season opened just as other men counted the days on the calendar until baseball or football season began. My hunting clothes were stored in a basement closet, the bright orange for deer hunting, the camouflage for the ducks. I’d go to that particular corner, open the door, yank at the pull chain for the light, and just look at the clothes, hanging there, swaying sometimes in the draft I had brought in, or from the furnace vents, swaying like ghosts dangling on the clothes rack. I’d have a beer in my hand and I would drink the beer as I gazed at the contents of the basement corner, an expression of suspended animation on my face.

I had a succession of girlfriends who tolerated this behavior. Then I had Katrinka. I married her.

I gave it all up when I left her and moved in with Diana, when I left my boys, Carl and Jeremiah, and took up with her. Once Diana belonged to me, and once I had begun to experience what it was like to live with her, and to live without my sons except on weekends, to have lost or at least be separated from my children, I abandoned all my interest in hunting. I took all my guns and my hunting clothes to the dump. I had no intention of selling them or giving them away. I didn’t want them to fall into another man’s hands. I wanted their history to end with me. I loved her, I loved her with some kind of violence, and that was all that mattered.

I’D BEEN AT THE GROCERY BUYING, I don’t know, food, for example orange juice, and a candy bar and ice cream for Oscar, and I had come out to the parking lot to unload all this stuff into the Matador and take it home. That was when I saw, over there in the corner by the dumpster, my future father-in-law, the Bat, leaning against his truck, an open-sewer smile on his face. He was taking his own time, the Bat was. He had his wings folded up but he was calamitizing me with his evil.

I figured that word had finally gotten out to the Bat about Oscar and me getting married. Maybe Oscar had invited him to the reception as what you’d call a friendly gesture.

That must’ve just shoved the Bat’s psyche down to the barroom floor among the peanut shells and the sawdust. His short-fatherhood was obsolete now, he had no necessity for being alive. Nobody wanted him here on Earth. Anyway, explanations aside, his little greaseball head nodded at me directly over the space of the cars in the parking lot. Like, recognition. He hoped! Maybe he thought… shit, why am I saying this? I don’t care what he thought.

I pulled the car out onto Stadium but fuck and alas, there trailing behind me, still at a distance, was the Bat himself, busily hunched over his steering wheel smoking his Camels and drinking his no-brand beer while he kept me in his line of sight. Well, now at last I had a one hundred percent genuine stalker, and not a handsome one like some women get, with a killer smile and Continental manners, but a genuine blue-ribbon humanoid rodent. I turned by the Dairy Queen, hoping to shake him, but his intentions, being impure, were strong. He hung on to me from his distance. I could feel his puny rat’s eyes boring into the back of my neck.

I drove downtown and parked in the police station parking lot. I figured some proximity to the law would give him the willies. Plus you put human refuse next to courts of law and the human refuse will get anxious and crazy, and eventually they will go away. I thought I’d got rid of him. I waited and then I drove over to our apartment.

But when I got there, the Bat had already arrived and was parked across the street, like we had an appointment. I eased the Matador into the parking lot and hefted the grocery bags into my arms and made my way to the front door. I was not about to run away. The ice cream would melt, wasting my hard-earned money.

Oscar was at work. I should mention that now.

I was trying to open the door with my hand, holding all the groceries. From behind me I heard the Bat say, “You want some help?”

“No,” I said, trying to get into the building.

“Hey, maybe you and me could have ourselves some lunch?”

“Well,” I said, “Lunch? I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Or dinner? Not that I need ’em. You been standing against me,” the Bat said, getting closer. There was this odor in the air that preceded him. “You been back in my house.”

“No, I haven’t.” I wasn’t going to get inside of my building in time. I’d have to face him directly.

“You been in my house and you been takin’ my things over here for your own self.”

“No, I haven’t,” I said. I put the grocery bags down on the stoop. He wasn’t going to hurt me in broad daylight. Bats don’t do that. Not here. God, he stank. I could hardly breathe. Evil has got a smell. Don’t let them tell you otherwise.

“You been takin’ my things, girl. You could have got you your own things but you took mine and you kept them for yourself. You even took that souvenir glass dish I like. I want the things back, all the valuables that you got your little bitty hands on.”

“What glass dish? I don’t have your things,” I said. “Except Oscar, and he’s not yours.”

“I oughta punish you for your smart mouth,” he said. “Wouldja like that?” He smiled, making a joke. “Some do.”

“No.”

“I been thinkin’ ’bout how I might just manage it. The punishment.” He put his chin in his hand like a demonstration of thinking. “It’d hurt. And you, with them nice pretty features you got there, it’d sure be such a shame and a mess.” He waited in a posture of thoughtfulness. “I’m still pondering it, considering the right and the wrong.” He smiled again, and what an awful sight that was. Demons smile, as a rule, before they force themselves into you. “You showin’ your naked self to me in my house and then stealin’ my son the same breath, and takin’ my valuables, I oughta just cancel your rights right on the spot, missy.”

“What spot would that be?” Maybe I could get him on technicalities.

He looked confused for a microsecond. “Any spot.”

“Like this one?”

“You’re tryin’ to turn me around. All’s I’m sayin’ is, you return what you stole. Meanwhile I’m keepin’ my eyes on you, so’s you don’t take you any more of my belongings and then smile yourself up like the little weaselly piece of tail you are.”

He did this little swivel thing and walked back to his car before I could correct him on his dirty language. It’s sad when youth has to reprimand the elders. I could hear him chuckling to himself. I felt relieved that he wasn’t going to try anything violent on my front stoop. He couldn’t have done anything anyway because that week, being totally in love, I was immortal. Also I was relieved to see evil in such a pure form and to see how stupid it looked. The thing about Oscar’s dad was, he was a moron. God himself could’ve tried to tutor the Bat and He’d’ve gotten absolutely noplace. Still, he was Oscar’s dad, and I was sorry we’d never have cheery Thanksgivings around the turkey, family reunions, photo albums, and suchlike. We’d have this dumbfuck drunk meanness, instead. We’d have forty miles of bad road always stretching out in front of us.

It just amazed me that Oscar had come out the way he had, with a father like that. It just goes to show you how inexact a science genetics is.

I took the groceries upstairs and got the ice cream into the freezer before it melted.

Oscar’d been gone a lot, working at Jitters during the day and taking classes at the Arbogast School of Broadcasting at night. He wasn’t going to do coffee all his life. Oscar was not a loser. He had a future in broadcasting. He would be Radio Man. We both agreed on that. He would practice his glottal thrust in the bathroom where the echo was good. In the shower with me, while I was washing his back or his chest, he’d recite commercials that he had written himself in his broadcast voice. He wrote commercials for products that didn’t exist. He wrote a commercial for a pair of scissors with three blades instead of two. You could efficiently cut two things with it simultaneously. He wrote a commercial for a pocket furnace that you’d carry in your overcoat during the winter. Oscar had many many ideas, several of them amazing.

He made an audition tape for a radio show he wanted to do, a mix of Goth, techno, and progressive rock. I listened to it at home. You’d never guess that it wasn’t already on the air. His DJ name was Bone Barrel. He had a medium-low voice and could sound scary and crucial.

We had to do something, since the sex thing hadn’t been lucrative and had been a morale drain besides. We were starting to map out our future. He would be in radio, and I was going to do something utterly else, only I hadn’t decided what yet. Oscar said I should be in the movies as a screen star, and I did consider it. I figured I was so good at so many things, I could kind of pick and choose. I was beginning to think that maybe I could go into social work. I didn’t mind being in the service sector. Anyway, Bradley had asked me if I wanted to learn bookkeeping so I could keep the books at Jitters. So maybe I would do that. I had many options.

For the next couple of days we didn’t see the Bat. He went back to his cave, I guess. And then it was the day of our wedding.

THIS BAREFOOT YOUNGSTER, Chloé, wearing her bridal blue jeans, approached me to make a few inquiries at her wedding party, which happened to be next door at Bradley’s. Why, she asked, did love — by which she appeared to mean sexual love — attract so much, her phrase, weird badness to it? She said that as a philosopher I would know and that she needed to have the answer in a hurry. (I am not a philosopher; I teach philosophy of the antique and outmoded variety, and there is after all a difference between making philosophy and teaching it, a difference of stature and modesty.) Her question was not entirely clear. She stood there beautifully young in the hot sunlight. She referred to “scumbags,” but I grasped her intention. She was holding a beer and grinning quizzically. Her lips were so chapped it must have hurt her to smile.

When I asked about the scumbags, she referred to pornography in a general way and then pointed to a strange little man staring at us from a distance near the street. Who was he? She didn’t say. But he, the strange man, appeared to be the scumbag problem to which she referred.

Oh, I said — I had had some wine myself by that time, my syntax was not of the best — the force of eros, which is godlike and has been known to be such since ancient times and therefore does not have to include morality, being outside of it — think of the Bacchae, the unleashing of this force, the goatish caperings, well, any force as powerful as that is premoral. Eros, I told Chloe, is a devil as well as an angel; the faces are the same but the expressions are dissimilar. Every positive attracts a negative and must contend with it. I mentioned The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Freud and de Sade, the mingling of the angelic and the demonic, the control of these forces by means of ritual, of which her official marriage was one. I was prepared to speak of Spinoza and Plato, the Symposium and the Phaedrus, but she asked me to dance just as I was about to pontificate.

I taught her to waltz, this young woman in bare feet. Esther danced with the handsome groom, who was similarly unshod, if otherwise decorated with earrings and a necklace of animal teeth. The music was not waltz music, but I hummed it into existence. Her delicate bones under my hand unleashed in me an unexpected surge of protectiveness. She was someone’s daughter. Of her parents, nothing was visible at this party. I took this to mean that at the ceremony itself, her father had not given her away. She had given herself away, courageous girl.

IT DOESN’T SEEM FAIR that I’ve spent all this time telling you about Kathryn and Diana, who made me unhappy, but not about Margaret, who did the opposite and filled me with joy, a word I don’t trust and have never used in my life until this moment. When I met Margaret, I wasn’t inclined to tell anyone what was going on between us. People don’t go to psychiatrists and pay good money to talk at length about how happy they are. Talking can spoil it. As a rule you don’t settle down at the end of the day with a beer and tell your friend the particulars of how you lucked out and how well the day and the week and the year went, unless you’re the gloating type. You just don’t do that. It’s provocation. You find some other neutral ground. If you’re smart, you keep happiness to yourself.

THERE I WAS, CAGED. I sat in the front seat next to David, with Chloé bending over Oscar in the back, trying to breathe her life into him. All around us people, these fans, these monkeys, hollered. They whooped. They celebrated. On their faces were all the manifestations of glee. Being of a difficult and combative nature, I wanted to kill them early in their lives.

I sat in the car, containing myself but wild with sanctioned fury, and then I thought of whom I would sue.

Oscar and Chloé, these two kids, who had served me coffee day after day out at the mall — I had taken a liking to them. I enjoyed the spectacle of how they felt about each other. I thought it was rather inspiring, actually, those two orphans, with nothing, really, to their names. They weren’t middle class in any of the tiresome customary ways, and they didn’t have two nickels to rub together. You could tell from the fatigue lines under their eyes that they’d been around a few blocks. Sometimes, seeing them working together at Jitters, I thought: David should marry me. We could have that. Except, possessing money, we would have it easier, we would do it with a little more style and a little less emotion.

And now, in the backseat, Oscar looked, to all appearances, no longer living, no longer even dying. His dying had been successfully accomplished. Watching Chloé trying to keep him alive, putting her lips to his, I started to cry. I never do that.

I’m a lawyer. I reached for the car phone. I called the emergency number. I explained the situation. The dispatcher told me that no ambulance would be able to move faster in this traffic than we were able to do. No helicopter would be able to land where we were located, the congestion being what it was. Such a maneuver, I was informed, would be unsafe. It would be faster if we just continued to drive.

So we stayed in the car.

I’m a lawyer. I think about responsibility. And in my ire, I thought: I’ll sue the university, for staging the game; I’ll sue the city of Ann Arbor, for having clearly inadequate plans for controlling and siphoning off the traffic. Within Ann Arbor, I’ll sue the police department and individuals within that department, standing at intersections and misdirecting the cars, buses, trucks, and vans; and then I will organize a suit against the city manager, for permitting the congested and overfilled parking lots to block proper egress from the city; and the zoning board, for the proximity of the buildings. I’ll sue the architects, for the design of those buildings. I’ll institute proceedings against the automobile manufacturers, for the size and shape of these vehicles. I’ll sue the athletic department, no, I’ve already done that; I’ll sue the advertisers who have supported these games; and I’ll sue the Wolverine Fan Club; I’ll sue each and every one of the businesses lining this street, for being located there and for blocking our way. I’ll sue the driver of the car in front of us and I’ll sue his drunken girlfriend — I already have their license plate number committed to memory — and the two passengers in the back, waving at us while David gives them the finger and then leans on the horn, they’ll all be penniless by the time I’m finished with them and sorry that they were ever within living proximity to me. In my wrath I’ll sue the drivers and passengers in front of them. I’ll sue the manufacturer of the football that Oscar caught, that proximate cause, I’ll drag the officers of that company into court and pull their names through the mud, so that even their children will refuse ever to speak to them. I’ll sue the makers of the clothes Oscar wore, including his shoes (he may have slipped! he may have lost traction! he may have fallen because of the shoes!); I’ll find out what he ate while he watched the game, and I’ll sue the brewers of the dangerous beer he drank and the makers of the arteriosclerotic snack food he consumed; I’ll sue the tattoo artist who tattooed the skull and crossbones onto Oscar’s back (Chloé told me about it) with the word “Die” underneath it, goddamn it, I’ll sue them for prophecy; I’ll sue Oscar’s father, the Bat, for not taking care of him, for not preventing this eventuality, and for generally endangering Oscar and Chloé’s welfare; I’ll sue the doctors, I will take their fat-cat medical school asses to court and nail those asses to the wall, for whatever they give him, for whatever they do, in their wisdom and knowledge, oh, let them try anything, fuck them all, for I shall see to it that their efforts could be construed as unprofessional, mistaken, foolish, and wrong. I’ll sue the doctors and the drug manufacturers for not bringing him back to life; I’ll sue Jesus, who is acquainted with Chloé and who once met her at a party, for not being here, when we needed Him; and I’ll sue God, who passes out misfortune with equanimity.

Such were my thoughts as we motored, inch by inch, toward the university hospitals.

Oscar had been a young man, physically beautiful, and in wonderful condition except for his now-defunct heart. After they were done with the electrical defibrillation, the intubation, the epinephrine, the lidocaine and the procainamide, and the chest compressions, they harvested him. They sold him off for parts, down to the skin and bones. He helped save the lives of others, et cetera, et cetera.

BEFORE I MET OSCAR, I was fine. But then I met him, and I knew him, and I loved him, and he died, and after that, in an Oscarless world, I couldn’t go back to the way I was before I knew him, because I wasn’t the same person anymore. He mutated me.

First off, I had to do some serious crying. It got me nowhere, but I did it anyway. It felt like work, like building a fence or doing hard labor. I was okay during the day, most days, but I’d wake up crying and go to sleep crying, first in chairs, then in bed. I’d wake up and the pillow was still wet. In the morning I’d cry into my cereal, my tears dropping into the milk. I’d cry in the shower, and then I’d cry at work during my breaks. At home I watched TV and wept all the way through an infomercial for exercise equipment. So I guess I wasn’t okay during the day after all.

It didn’t help that Oscar showed up in my dreams constantly. Talking and jiving, his cap on backward, wearing his wedding ring, he’d go on and on about bands he liked and games he wanted to see, curious about my news just as if nothing special had happened. I kept telling him to get actual, that he’d died, and he’d say, No no, honey, you got it all wrong. Oh, man, look at my hand. And I’d look at his hand that he held out, and I’d grab it, reaching out in dreamtime, doubting him, and it was there all right, but the touch of it, the tight tough skin exactly Oscar’s, would startle me with terror and love, and I’d wake up by myself in my apartment in the dark like a flashlight you’ve just switched on, with the traffic moving on the street outside the window and the headlights lighting the ceiling, and this big broken hole in me that Oscar had left behind, by dying.

Sometimes I’d get mad at him for leaving me behind here in this life on Earth, but that didn’t work either. It was counterkarmic. Okay, I admit it: I only pretend to know about karma. I read in this magazine about it and I made up the rest. I don’t even know what language it comes from. So there I was. All day I was baffled, and all night I was sweating and shivering. Only I wasn’t sick, unless you count being pregnant and abandoned as sick.

It’s funny what being pregnant does for you socially, though. People such as your parents, who couldn’t be bothered calling you up or saying that you were an interesting person, who were alienated from you, suddenly do start calling and showing up as if you were interesting all of a sudden. They found out my whereabouts from my sister and drove forty miles from their home downriver to see me. They brought cooked chicken on a tray.

On this Sunday, my mom came in dressed to the nines, wearing her church dress and plum-colored lipstick and some sort of hair thing tottering on her head, and carrying, like I said, the chicken, which she deposited on the kitchen counter. She shrieked when she saw me as if I was the surprise of the month. “You’re so grown up!” she said. Yes, I was. She planted a kiss on my face and put her hand on my tummy, which you could tell she was dying to do. Then she looked around at our apartment, Oscar’s and mine, and said it was cute, and she took my hand to look at my wedding ring, doing an ooh and an aaah five months late, long long long past the deadline when I could’ve used it, that admiration. She asked me where he had bought it, and I told her truthfully, at the jewelry counter. She nodded wisely.

My dad, Chester, was behind her. I don’t know if I love my mom, but I have loved my dad even when he was angry at me and was a misogynist when he said I was no good. I go back and forth about him.

He’s confused all the time about life and doesn’t pretend to know anything except his job — he works on the line at Ford — and how to fix household appliances and moving-parts things, and he knows sports. With my sister and me, and how to raise us, I think he took his orders from Geraldine, my mom. He would’ve been okay with sons, but with two daughters he was clueless and sweet and so generous it was a compulsion with him. Anyway he was standing there in the doorway as if I hadn’t invited him in, wearing his hat and cleaning his glasses with his shirt flap, very shy and embarrassed about his previous anger toward me. So I said, “Come on inside, Dad,” and he walked in, all two hundred and twenty pounds of him, wearing his sheepish look. A sheepish look on a dad can bring you into a state of startled puzzlement. You could tell he was ashamed. Ashamed that he had once hypercursed me, but mostly ashamed that he had never met Oscar and had taken no interest in my life for the last year or two, because his wife had told him not to. He didn’t even look around at our little apartment. I guess he thought he didn’t have the right to look around. But I’m not squalid. Neither was our apartment. I couldn’t stand it, so I ran over to him and gave him a hug.

My dad smelled of grease and dime-store aftershave. Hugging him, you kind of collide with his stomach before you get to his face, but that was okay. My dad’s stomach is like the foyer to the rest of him.

That Sunday afternoon proceeded in a normal fashion until my mom asked if I had a picture of Oscar. I went to a drawer and pulled out his high school graduation photo, where he’s smiling in a smug way I never saw him smile, and his hair is watered down, and he’s basically pre-me, pre-Chloé, so he doesn’t look like himself, he doesn’t look transformed, except by the drugs he was using right about then. He was a little gaunt in those days, at least in the off-season, away from the track team, feeding his body with drugs. Later, Oscar in love went out of two dimensions into three or four. We made love in the fourth dimension, for example. But anyway this graduation portrait’s the only picture of him I have, except for one of him that Scooter took at our wedding, in which me and Oscar are kissing and Oscar’s got his hand planted on my tits, which I wasn’t going to show to my parents, the picture I mean, for safety’s sake.

“He looks very nice,” my mom said.

“Kinda thin,” my dad said.

No point in telling them about the drugs, so I said, “He’d just had flu.”

They nodded.

They spent the rest of the afternoon with me, making mature efforts to reconcile. We talked about boring stuff like my dad’s job, my mom’s job (she’s sort of a cashier-receptionist at a car dealership), and how the house was empty these days and if I wanted to move back, just before or after the baby was born, I could do that, and I could use the crib for my baby that they used for me. I almost said, “Thanks very much, that’s very sweet, but, you know, it’s too late for that,” but I didn’t, because they were trying to be solid and correct with me, turning over a new parental leaf, now that I was my own woman and not their little girl anymore. Besides, I wanted to show them how mature I’d gotten by not saying fuck all the time, a habit that’s hard to give up. That’s scary for parents. You have to be careful with parents once you’re grown up into mature adulthood. They get sensitive. Almost anything you say, you hurt their feelings. Their aging hearts get broken. They just crumple up. Besides, I was about to become one of them.

I KNOW ONE UNASSAILABLE TRUTH: Help your friends and those whom you love; hurt your enemies. The very banality of this formulation ensures that most academics — who enjoy hurting their friends — will ignore it.

For days, in any case, I lay awake, thinking of Aaron and of how I might have done him indeliberate harm. I awoke, nocturnally fevered, my forehead sweating, perspiration soaked into my pajamas, in my unforgiving mind’s eye the spectacle of Aaron being ill served by my negligence. On my son’s behalf, I had performed no heroic measures, the ones that, bright with prudence, you wisely do not perform in the daytime but whose nonperformance terrorizes your conscience following the arrival of dusk. Disquieted, assailed, I would rise out of bed and aimlessly walk down the hallway to the bathroom. I would switch on the light. All bathrooms, whatever their minute variations, are overilluminated at night, just as, at night, all telephones when they ring are too loud. The existential nocturnal glare of bathrooms has a certain ghastliness built into the shadowless illumination. Under such lights one discovers the first signs of cancer.

Moody and forlorn with middle age, baffled by the enigmatic Christian knight of faith, Kierkegaard, who nevertheless came to grips with spiritual psychologies as few thinkers ever have, battered with visual memories of Aaron, I would walk back to the bed, comically abandoned by sleep. It occurred to me that my lifelong tramps through the landscapes of philosophy had set Aaron off in the direction of counterphilosophy, of Scientology and Theosophy and Anthroposophy and the other occult sciences he favored. Who knows, who knew, what set him off? Perhaps he loved men and not women. But who would care one way or another about such a choice, in this era, except the unenlightened? We would have accepted him gladly, accepted his homosexuality, if that’s what it was. We would have welcomed him back to the house. He knew that. He could have come back, our own beloved prodigal, bedecked with strange clothes and jewels, dressed like a gypsy, and we would have swung wide the door and hugged him and kissed him. But no, he preferred to hate and to be hated.

This is the only cure for insomnia I know. Lying on my back, I would imagine myself in a cosmopolitan but still rather lethargic city, a city that had long ago given up worldly ambition, a city in genteel decline, Lisbon, for example (which I have never visited), where I am sitting at an outdoor café during a mild summer afternoon, drinking bitter coffee and reading the paper in Portuguese. Esther sits there with me, commenting on the architecture of the square — shabby Baroque — and on the passersby. Some are solitary. Others, the lovers, walk arm in arm. They all have an inaptitude for work. The women wear bright scarves tangled around their necks, the young men wear peacock-colored shirts. Occasionally we witness a group of three or four, laughing quietly as they pass in front of us. Then I revise the city so that the square faces the estuary. Boats sail in and out past the anchorage, near a breakwater at whose end is a harbor light. I am also on some of these boats (I am subdivided), and I wave to myself affably. No one has to go anywhere, no one has to accomplish anything. One has, it seems, an entire lifetime to sort through the major questions and to develop a coherent set of opinions and judgments on these matters. The meaning of everything will arrive in due course.

Gulls land and then take flight from the quay at Alcântara. The waiter brings another cup of coffee, a boat toots in the distance over the lapping waves, there is a hint of rain beyond the wharf, a bank of clouds developing over the horizon suggests but does not threaten the relief of a storm. At the next table over a man feeds olives to a gray pet parrot perched on his finger. Esther murmurs something to me, a consoling phrase, I don’t quite attend to it, though I may register the words later. I look around again at the harbor and now at the buildings behind me. Nearby, children are playing hopscotch. Two scholars of the Talmud stroll by, arguing in Portuguese flavored with Yiddish. A small band of musicians is tuning up, a trio of vagabond string players enjoying the outdoors, intending to perform Rossini. I am not particularly hungry, but when the solicitous waiter comes by I order a plate of the local delicacy, a rolled pastry with honey tucked inside.

I take another sip of coffee.

Usually this little nighttime fantasy is enough to send me off to sleep. But on certain nights, following fierce committee meetings at the Amalgamated Education Corporation, I must calm down by closing my eyes and reading the imaginary paper in imaginary Portuguese at length. I don’t read Portuguese, but in my insomnia cure I do. I scan the paper at my sidewalk café near the harbor. The paper I imagine has trivial matters reported in a lively and almost comically beautiful prose. This is paradise, to read a newspaper containing matters of no consequence written by vainglorious prose stylists. A woman has her purse stolen in a leather shop, all this reported in a fashion that would have done honor to Gibbon, if the great man had written in Portuguese. A man falls off a balcony, breaking a bone or two, and the account has the melancholy wit of Saint-Simon. In another section of the paper, a cat is reported missing, but the story has been written by G.W.F. Hegel, and one can barely discern the cat. Well, no one admires Hegel’s prose style, but it is pleasing and relaxing to imagine Hegel, humbled at last, having to write for a newspaper. Hegel also reports on the doings at the racetrack. Elsewhere, a soccer match is narrated by Proust, an apartment is offered for sale by Heine, a quarrel between two neighbors is accounted for by Colette. Virginia Woolf has control of the financial columns, which, in this newspaper of mine, detail how money should be spent, and on what items, not how it should be invested. In this city of my making, my imaginings, there are no major investments. Savings are minimal. The bankers are as poor as mice. They must go begging, organize bake sales.

But then, or now (I am still awake), I lower the paper and look into the harbor, and there, in a rowboat without oars or motor, is Aaron, drifting away from shore, and shouting. Behind me the great clock tower in the central square sounds its lugubrious and melancholy bells. These are large bells, with a complex layering of overtones, and their announcements dictate the timing of the social life of the city. It is four in the afternoon. Aaron is shouting or screaming. The bells clang repetitively, going past the hours into tollings of sorrow. I cannot make out any of his words. My son is shouting at me. He is drifting out to sea. He is gesturing. My G-d, I must help him. I am sweating, I have a fever.

Somebody save him.

LOOKS LIKE I GET the curtain speech.

Some nights I walk around town, protected by my malachite machine-made bracelet that Esther gave me and by Oscar’s track team relay baton, which I could use as a weapon. The obstetrician said I should exercise for the baby’s sake, and when I do that, I sort of accidentally see into people’s living room windows even though I don’t always want to. But because it’s spring, the windows’re open and the curtains are pulled aside, flufftering in the breezes, and it’s that movie, Rear Window, by Hitchcock, except in my case everything’s out front, Front Window, by Chloé. Generally people are just practicing their slumping vegetable life by watching TV, or they’re mowing down the lawn or grubbing in the grub garden, but what’s amazing is how often you see people sitting on the front stoop staring off into space. I guess you’re not supposed to do that, stare into space, because it’s not-for-profit, but believe me, that’s what people do with their unapplied leisure time. They look like human-sized possums. And when they see a pregnant woman walking by unaccompanied, pregnantly huge like me, carrying a track team relay baton, they usually give me a smile or a wan wave, like I’m contributing to the Gross National Census or the enlarging welfare of humanity. People go by, things go by, such as me. When people are staring off into their neighborhood infinity, before they see me, what are they thinking about? That’s what I’m trying to grasp. I think they’re stupefied, thinking about love, mostly, how they once had it, how they got it, how they lost it, and all the people they loved or didn’t love, how they ended up royally hating somebody, like, the weirdness and wetness of it. Bradley says they’re thinking about money, but I know they’re not. Love comes first. They’re humming their love songs, for example as sung by Frank Sinatra or the Beatles or Madonna — did she ever sing one? a love song, I mean, and not just sex and money? I guess so — and they imagine about how they’d like to be with somebody else, or truly the person they’re actually with, sitting there on the stoop, accompanying them on life’s journey by talking, talking about nothing special, just talking. Or sitting in the kitchen, making turkey club sandwiches for each other. Or watching TV together. Or dancing. Or in the bedroom, having sex merrily or maybe not so merrily as the case may be. One thing I never mentioned so far was that once Oscar and I made love so hard that I got out of bed with a sunburn. It’s true! If he hadn’t died, he could vouch for me. We had tried something we hadn’t done before, I won’t go into harmful detail, and when he was doing me he asked if I was happy and I said I was. We did it for as long as we wanted to and then when we were finished I went to the bathroom and I had acquired a sunburn. And I thought, this is totally inexplicable. But I had it. Making love with Oscar gave it to me. I wish I still had it. Now I’m as pale as a sheet. Maybe I’ll get it again when my baby is born. I’ll give birth to the baby and get a sunburn in the delivery room in the process. Positive ions will darken my skin and I’ll look like a native. So, as I said, I walk past these houses and I see all these domestic arrangements, I guess you’d call them. Women living with women. Women living with men. Men living with men. Women living alone. Men living alone. Sane people and crazy people, people who have lost what once remained of their minds. The crazy ones are mostly crazy because love made them that way. I believe that. Dan Cupid’s arrow can make you one bubble off-level, is what I’m saying. Love has some ingredient for flat-out lunacy in it. Everybody knows that. Look at the Bat if you need proof. I mean, you can say that love is obsolete and retro, okay, but everybody comes home at night wanting somebody there, even villains come in the door and say hopefully, “Honey, I’m home?” and either somebody is there to kiss you, or somebody isn’t. And if somebody isn’t, if there are no kisses, you’ve got to deal with it. Maybe you get a dog so that the dog kisses you, like Bradley did once. Maybe the cat dances around your feet, meowing with happiness. That happens. It’s no disgrace to kiss a dog in the evening. Dogs don’t mind. I’m not saying you can’t manage one way or another, I’m just saying you have to cope, such as the dog solution. So anyway, I come home to my basement that I rent from the Ginsbergs and of course Oscar isn’t there. Oscar isn’t there because he’s dead. I mean, I know that he’s dead because I saw his dead body, close up, but even though I know he’s dead, I don’t believe it. I don’t believe he’s dead. He’s around here somewhere. I just know that, don’t ask me to explain. I sleep with his Bert or Ernie doll, and I can smell him on it. And so that’s part of the reason I’m out there walking. I’m gonna find Oscar. It’s partly because of what I did to him, how I changed him. That boy befriended me. I suppose that I made a man out of him, but I don’t think that’s really much of an accomplishment. Oscar could’ve made it to manhood on his own, without my help. I keep talking about all the sex we had, but what I forget to mention is what else we did together. We danced and listened to music and played cards (I taught him gin rummy) and went to movies and we talked all the time, complete with our opinions about things. Oscar had a lot of opinions. Some of his opinions were unique and experimental. He said that the universe was expanding, it had to expand, to make room for all the souls, human and animal, that had died in it. Each soul took up considerable space. The universe had to accommodate that. He thought that the rich had invented poverty in order to get poor people to do terrible and stupid jobs no one would consider doing unless they needed the money. Money, he said, was God’s worst invention, the only way he could think of to get people to work. Get out! I said, but no, he meant it. He thought that when the world came to an end, everybody would sort of forget about Australia, and it’d survive the end of the world through sheer negligence. He didn’t believe in cars, Oscar didn’t; he thought cars would contribute to the end of the world as we know it. He thought that there were time zones on the moon, but only two. If it was midnight on the dark side of the moon it’d always been noon on the other side. Two time zones on the moon, two times of day or night. You wouldn’t need daylight savings time on the moon because you couldn’t save the lunar daylight just by adjusting your watch. He wasn’t zany. He used common sense. He could be old-fashioned despite his tongue stud and his outward appearances. Like, he once brought me flowers in a vase. He once brought home a lobster for us to eat, but we couldn’t put it in the boiling water to cook it — we didn’t have the heart — and so we put it in the bathtub with some water for the night and returned it, alive, to the grocery store the next day for a refund. As for sex, except for when he got excitable, Oscar believed in extensive foreplay, he was a real traditionalist in that respect; the drugs had helped him to see there was no point in ever rushing anything. He didn’t ever beat me up. I can’t remember him ever hitting me once. Oscar the Gent. When I think about him now — and I think about him way more than I ever think about myself — I think of him like he’s standing on a hill somewhere, this cow pasture, looking into the future, and telling me what he sees. I have my hand on his dick and I can feel his heart murmur through it, his blood bounding joyfully. I’m sorry he didn’t make it to the year 2000 because he thought for sure there would be major changes in the cosmos, everything, down to physics, would be revamped. All the same, despite his radical-traditional belief system, I think I’m more of a visionary than he was. After all, I once saw Jesus at a party. There was another thing I saw there, which I’ll tell you about eventually, once I get up my nerve to describe it. This thing I saw, it was probably the whole point of the party and of Jesus being in attendance and alerting me to it. But back to my walking around town. My point is, Oscar is here somewhere and that’s why I’m strolling hereabouts looking for him. You can’t have a body and a soul like that and just die and disappear. It’s much too wasteful, psychically. God won’t permit that. God’s no hambone: God believes in soul ecology. Something has to happen to you after you die, something mysterious and so far unexplained to us humans, and I’m determined to find out what it might be. I’m the woman to do it, I’m the woman for the job. I think maybe Oscar has taken up residence in some other guy, or he’s going to, and I have to find him there, though the search will be hard, because the guy will deny that he’s Oscar, of course. He’ll claim to be himself. I won’t know if it’s Oscar at first, because it’ll look like someone else, but it will be Oscar, the guy will have Oscar-essence. That can happen. I’ll strip him of whatever girlfriends he has and get him into my arms, as long as he isn’t dismayed by my having a baby. He won’t know what hit him once I go to work on him. I have enough goddess stuff in me to manage. Because he’ll be Oscar without knowing it. That’s why I go in search of him. Sometimes, when I don’t want to walk, I get into the Matador on evenings when the car agrees to start, and first I head down toward Ypsilanti. I drive past where Mrs. Maggaroulian once worked. She isn’t there anymore. She isn’t anywhere. Mrs. Maggaroulian has disappeared from our planet. She can’t tell me where Oscar is. I have to do the search by myself. Wait a minute. I have to take a breath. Just a minute. I need to breathe in.

There. I took a breath. Sometimes I get light-headed and I think I’m going to faint. Anyway, you can’t figure out love without figuring out death, too, but the effort it takes can knock the wind out of you. Love is the first cousin of death, they’re acquainted with each other, they go to the same family reunions. Mrs. Maggaroulian’s office is empty, her sign’s been removed, and another sign, THIS SPACE FOR LEASE, is up there instead. I wish she were still there, with her Laurel and Hardy clocks. I could use some help and advice from her. I could use a few e-mails from the future, a few pennies-per-serving tidbits from the prophet of Ypsilanti, where the three Christs once lived. We’re constantly getting bulletins from the future, in case you haven’t noticed, but mostly we ignore them because of the unsightly messengers, the slobby crackpots who get the information and have to pass it on with their bad breath and missing teeth. Harry Ginsberg, the professor who lives upstairs, is always going around saying, “Chloé, the unexpected is always upon us,” but what he really means is that the future wants us to know what is about to happen and it, the future, sends us people like Mrs. Maggaroulian to help us out. I suppose he really means that I am the unexpected and that I am always upon him, but maybe he wants to say that he expected his son Aaron to show up one day and what he got was me, instead. He lost a son but he gained a sort of daughter, which was myself. You can’t always get what you want but sometimes you get what you need — truer words than that have been spoken, but not much truer, and for sure not in my lifetime. Here’s what I think: every once or so often, the Mrs. Maggaroulians appear in your life to help manage your most exciting and troubled times and to help you get through them. Ever notice how drag queens and street people and madmen typically show up at your doorstep just when you’re about to take a new job or go on a long journey? They’re there, as a rule, to tell you how it’s all going to turn out. You’ve got to cock an ear in their direction, despite the bad oniony smells they give off. If you ignore them, good luck, you’re on your own, that’s all I can say. Here’s another example of what I mean. Oscar had a cassette player installed in the Matador, so he could listen to music dimensionally when he drove to his various destinations. After he died, and I got the car, being his widow, I started to motor around town listening to the audition tape Oscar made at the Arbogast School of Broadcasting, where he was, like, practicing to be a DJ. On this tape, Oscar tries out different names for himself during his broadcast. Sometimes he’s Sam Loomis. Sometimes he’s Mister Van Damm or Bone Barrel. Oscar didn’t think “Oscar” was a good name for a radio personality, it had something dreadful about it. It’s funny. He plays music and does the weather and reads commercials that he wrote himself for clubs and used-car lots and window shade companies. God, I love hearing his voice. He’s mellifluous. I found that word in a dictionary, where it belonged until I used it just now. He announces songs but he doesn’t play them, not on this tape, except for one. In the middle of the tape he says that the next song is going out for Chloé. He doesn’t say who’s singing it. It’s not rock or Goth or heavy metal or anything like that. What happens instead is, this old bluesy guy comes on and sings it. It’s an old blues song, I guess. “Ain’t No Grave Can Hold My Body Down.” I guess Oscar liked it because of the title or the tune. Anyhow, on this tape he plays it, and it’s for me, and the reason it’s for me is that Oscar knew he was going to die, but that he would come back some way or other and find me. No grave would hold his body down. It’s also a sexual boast. I have to take another breath here, I’m feeling a little faint.

Okay. I know it’s audacious for Oscar to say he was going to be resurrected. But why shouldn’t he be? Resurrection is a form of recycling. There’s an efficiency to the cosmos. Souls don’t get thrown out in the garbage dump. They get reused. The universe does not believe in waste, as you have no doubt noticed from observing the stars and the way they’re always right back in the same places night after night, on the job for stellar occasions. One Sunday morning I was driving around on the other side of town and noticed this little church, the African Baptist Hope of Resurrection Church, and I figured, okay, sure, it’s true that I’m white, but, hey, it’s a church and that happens to be the place where people think about souls being recycled. It was, like, February, when you really need a resurrection or two. So I parked the car and quietly crept in, trying not to track in the snow. Inside they had an organ and a choir singing, they were so beautiful in their robes, and near me there in the back was Dr. Ntegyereize and the only other white person, her boyfriend, my boss, Bradley the human. Bradley the human, being white, couldn’t dance around and hold his hands joyfully in the air the way the black people could, but, and this is the important thing, he was doing these little steps, like he was concentrating on them. He was concentrating on joy for once. He was doing it in a white-guy way. It was because he loved Dr. Margaret and had resurrected himself for her sake. You could hear the shoes of the celebrators tapping on the wood floor. He and Margaret noticed me, but somehow they also didn’t notice me, they were so into the spirit world, so I turned around and got back into my car and drove to Harry and Esther’s, with the singing still in my ears and the sight of Bradley the human doing his little dance inside my mental framework. Hey, sometimes I’ve wanted to throw off my clothes and dance in the street out of pure happiness at the holy spirit moving inside of me. I understand dancing. Harry was reading the New York Times when I got back, which I guess is his form of Sunday morning joy. It reminded me of something Oscar and I had done after we were married. It was Halloween. Oscar and I didn’t have to work that night. We decided that you’re never too old to go trick-or-treating, and besides we both liked candy, the same brands. Oscar decided to dress up as a big powerful dragon, the one with the eraser for a nose, and I decided to dress up as Venus. In day-to-day life Venus the goddess wears tight sweaters and skirts but, and this is the most important feature, you can recognize her because there’s usually an invisible star in the middle of her forehead, a silver one, that she hypnotizes you with. I wore that. Oscar had a big eraser attached to his nose, held there by a rubber band around his head, and a green cape, for scales. We went to a few homes of friends we knew, and we collected treats. It turned into a party. I kept thinking about the Dragon with the Rubber Nose, in Bradley the human’s drawing, because actually the poem is about things about to disappear and not just signs and billboards being erased, it’s about death. The Dragon with the Rubber Nose is found in most mythologies. We were Venus and the Dragon, and it wasn’t until November or December that I realized that Oscar’s costume was another form of prophecy, because the Dragon with the Rubber Nose self-erased Oscar. In another month he was gone.

But no dragon ever dies, either. That’s how I know I’ll find Oscar somewhere. I don’t want to tire you out, so I’ll finish this as soon as I can. Diana says I should sue the Bat in a civil action, but I won’t. Suing the Bat would be like trying to collect damages from a cold virus. The Bat is just there, in whatever form he takes, such as Oscar’s dad, and because I haven’t seen him lately, I think he’s gone in retreat back to his cave. Soon he may appear in another shape. That’s Oscar’s plan as well, of course. I know you’re wondering why I dressed up as Venus and why I think the Bat will appear in another shape. It’s because the shapes we have are, like, fragile. I once was Venus. I didn’t look like her. I was her. These friends I had, these dropouts, they lived out in this rental farmhouse west of here, and a summer or two ago they decided to throw this summer solstice party, and as the night went on, it got pretty wild. We were all drunk or stoned, which helped. People were getting naked and running through the woods and the fields, and the girls had braided garlands for themselves and the boys had God knows what, and there was dancing and gallons of wine and beer and outdoor fucking and singing most of the night. That happened in my party days. Around midnight I went out into the woods and someone naked ran past me in pursuit of someone else who was also naked, and I thought: This sure is old-fashioned.

And I could point to a boy and then point to a girl, and they’d look at each other and it’d happen, they’d be locked, helplessly locked, and I had the power to point to a boy and maybe another boy, and even if they had been straight they’d decide, that very night, to try it, to try love on each other just once, flesh against flesh. To see two guys kissing is sometimes a big relief, for a girl. It takes the burden off womanhood. Or it might be girl on girl, because it was the summer solstice, and that’s what Venus requires, though Venus prefers boy on girl because Venus is into procreation. I ruled that party. I had a star in my forehead. People saw that it was me, that I was making it happen, and they were in awe. Look out, I’m coming, it’s Chloé, and I’ll make you come, too, and I’ll point at you and you, and you can just try to ignore it, but you’ll be helpless. Ha. Slowly and then more quickly you will approach each other, you’ll make these efforts at conversation, and your mouth will be dry because you’re so scared and excited. You’ll have your heart cut out with a grapefruit knife; love does that. You won’t have a chance against me until you’re very old, if then.

The dawn arrived and we all dressed and went home and took showers and then went off to minimum-wage work, dressed in our clothes of the day, our workers’ uniforms, like the worker bees we were. Mostly we all had crummy jobs and mostly in our day-to-day lives we’re irritable and humble and bummed. We just sit around and watch television and argue about who’s going to go to the store to get potato chips and ketchup. I’m on, like, the bottom of the socioeconomic scale, as they call it. I can’t do the money thing. That’s not where my power resides. But that night, that summer solstice, we traded in those costumes of nothingness we usually wear for our nakedness, and that’s how we became gods and goddesses for a few hours, and of all the goddesses, I was the supreme one and everybody knew it. They bowed down to me. You would too. Okay, give me a chance to get my breath, one more time.

There. I think I’m all right. I was going to tell you about this other party, this one other party, where I saw Jesus and then saw this other thing. I won’t say that I was clean and sober that day, because that would be, like, false. Jesus had already come and gone. I was sitting outside, almost passed out, in my chair, smoking a cigarette and eating a chunklet of cheese. I don’t believe I ever bragged about my virtue or my party manners. Anyway, I was sitting there with, I don’t know, a beer to wash down the cheese, and a cigarette there somewhere, and because it was a Sunday afternoon, I thought I would check out the sky. Which was blue, with clouds. I’d just said something really dumb and nonsensible when I looked up. There was something up there. It was scary. I looked and looked. This thing was made of cloud matter, but the longer you looked at it, if you were as high as I was, the more it became circular. I know you’ll say, Get real, Chloé, you saw a cloud. Hey, that’s all you saw. Okay, okay. Maybe. I said, “Hey, look at that cloud,” but no one looked up, they were all too out of it to bother. So like I said, it was circular, white and burning, like a fiery merry-go-round, with, if you looked closely enough, people attached. And cogs. You could see them, these people, getting on and off the inflamed cloud wheel in the sky, and they’d be strapped in facing out, and they’d be turning slowly because it turned slowly. It turned slowly like a huge grinding thing, and there were other wheels and gears in the sky, and they were all meshing together. And these people, they were all naked, walled up in the sky, attached to the wheel. I wished I hadn’t seen it, the wheel turning in the sky, because even if you’re stoned as I was, it fills you with majesty and terror, but that was the day I knew I had a goddess in me, because I had seen that. Oceans and rivers and fires of light, and I swam in that river from then on.

I asked Harry Ginsberg: Who saw the burning wheel? Because I knew someone else had. Harry is very educated, he would know. He was reading something else, a book, and for a moment he looked up. And he said, Ezekiel, Chloé. Like two people had seen it, Ezekiel and me. I know he was speaking to me, addressing me, but I took it another way, that it was a list of two people, very exclusionary, a tiny club in which I was one member, Ezekiel being the other.

So now I work at the coffee shop where Oscar’s ashes are in a pretty wooden urn on a shelf up near the listings of coffees we offer, and nobody except Bradley and me know that he’s there, my husband Bone Barrel. Down here in my basement — I’m doing Harry and Esther a huge favor by staying here, by the way, because they’re lonely and they need contact with the youth culture — I’ve set up a crib and a changing table and I have baby toys ready. My breasts, they’re huge, they’re ready for lactating and nursing. I smell of milk. I’m careful about what I eat and drink: lots of milk and Caesar salads and steak and fruits and vegetables. I quit smoking. It wasn’t needful. I wait for the baby and I wait for the return of Oscar. Oscar wasn’t unsung. I sang him, so he’ll be back. In whatever form he takes this time, I’ll welcome him. Sometimes I think of what Harry likes to say, The unexpected is always upon us, and I think, Yeah sure it is, but maybe he’s right, and one evening I’ll be down here, and, who knows, Charlie, I’ll be gazing toward the ceiling, just thinking about nothing, feeling my baby’s kicks as she or he gets ready to be born, this baby that’s half Oscar and half me, and I’ll be thinking about the baby’s name, and I’ll hear somebody outside, somebody who’s, like, approaching the front door, and maybe it’ll look like Harry and Esther’s son Aaron, who they’ve been waiting for all this time, who had previously invisibled himself but now has reappeared. He’ll come to the door, he’ll come in, they’ll welcome him back, but it’ll be me who’ll know who he really is. Once someone has bound your heart, he’s the only person who can let it loose again. I’m waiting, Charlie. I’m patient. I don’t ever want my heart unchained, except by him.

The song was right, sweet Jesus. Here’s your lemonade.

Ain’t no grave will hold his body down.