Curiously, there was, though he had no knowledge of Trevor’s pursuits and little enough of his friend Gordon’s, a character much like this in Ellsworth’s current novel-in-progress, The Artist and His Model: a mysterious unnamed personage, known simply at this point as the Stalker. Ellsworth had not invited him in, he had intruded upon the text unbidden. He was, so far, albeit deeply disturbing, no more than a minor figure, having made appearances only in one brief scene (which could get cut), a few unconnected fragments (in one, he asks the disconcerting question: How much does the child know?) and a handful of loose marginal notes, but he already posed a profound menace, not merely to the other characters in the novel (to wit, the Artist, his Model), but to the original plot as well, threatening it now with a total restructuring. Ellsworth had been seriously engaged with this book for over a decade, ever since words had failed him in the obituary of the car dealer’s wife, killed in an accident, and at one stage he had well over thirty pages which he considered “polished.” He had even had them set on the backshop linotype so as to contemplate them in printed form. Yes, they were fine. More than fine: classic. Then the Stalker crept in and, just by lurking obscurely at the edges, erased nearly half of them, and the twenty pages or so that remained, even if unchanged, no longer remotely resembled the twenty pages or so he had originally written. What did it mean, for example, to say that “The Artist, pondering the relationship between formal idealism and geometrical optics as he touched pen to paper, recognized that the triangle formed by his penpoint, the Model, sitting ten yards away, and his inner eye was in fact an equilateral one, but that when his stroke was untrue, or ink was spilled, or the Model started picking her nose, as she was doing now, it was not the equilaterality that was affected, but the triangle’s planeness,” when, suddenly, there was this other pair of eyes skulking about somewhere in the neighborhood? A debacle, as the great masters would say, but what could he do about it? When the Stalker first appeared and half his novel decomposed before his very eyes, Ellsworth panicked and, using all his authorial powers, forcibly threw the intruder out, restored the lost pages, and then added a few more (a productive period, though it proved illusory) as a kind of security fence around what he mistakenly thought of as his own private property, but all (he could have predicted this) to no avail. The Stalker was still there, inside the fence, which, far from keeping him out, served to encourage his interlopings, opening new pathways for him to explore, while yet hiding him from view. His Artist-character’s remark, responding to the naiveté of his overly admiring Model, that “artists do not ‘make’ art, my dear, but are made by it,” which Ellsworth had rejected as being overly melodramatic, now came back, in the person of the ineradicable Stalker, to haunt him.

Over the recent years, while a haunted Ellsworth, unbeknownst to the public at large, wrestled daily with a novel-once-in-progress now seriously imperiled by the Stalker’s trespass, a few discerning readers (his friend Gordon, for example) might have noticed a gradual decline in the quality of The Town Crier, but most in town, like the Artist’s admiring Model in the novel, were so in awe of anyone who could put two words together and spell them right that they found their old hometown rag, as they called it, not only as delightful as ever, but actually improving. In part, this was the Stalker’s doing, for Ellsworth, increasingly engrossed in his narrative dilemmas, had come to rely more and more upon other contributors to keep the weekly newspaper going, and they in turn had each their own fans, most especially their own immediate families. Thus, the high school journalism students, in addition to their traditional scholastic and athletic reporting, now provided regular book, movie, and music reviews (which amused their elders, even as they shook their heads at the dubious tastes of this new and noisy generation: The Teen Choir, some wryly called the paper now), the Chamber of Commerce secretary turned in a weekly business notes column called “You Can Bank On It!,” the meaning of life was explored, mostly by members of the Ministerial Association, in a back-page box entitled “Afterthoughts,” and just about everybody, sooner or later, wrote up something for the popular guest column, “I Remember.” Some of these recollections were quite frivolous, such as those having to do with past fashions, dead pets or prewar prices, vanished landmarks, grandma’s favorite recipes, and Halloween pranks in the days of outdoor privies, but others, such as Veronica’s description of overcoming asthma to become a high school cheerleader, or Otis’s as-told-to account of learning about his father’s self-inflicted death while lying wounded in a jungle hospital, or the nurse Columbia’s loving tribute to her dead brother Yale, were deeply moving and often clipped and kept by the townsfolk. Tributes to those who had passed away were a common theme of course in the “I Remember” column—the librarian Kate’s elegant remembrance, for example, only shortly before her own death, of her friend Harriet, the doctor’s wife, whom she called “one of those great humane readers, impatient with grandeur and pretense, who profoundly transform the simplest work, utterly and for all time, merely by the act of reading it with an open heart,” or John’s wife’s simple tribute to her Parisian friend, who on her visits to the town had won the hearts of all who knew her, or the editor Ellsworth’s own sentimental memorial to the long-suffering mother of his good friend Gordon the photographer—but there was room for the other emotions, too, everything from humor to horror. Beatrice the preacher’s wife recalled that day, just after they’d arrived in town, when she locked herself out of the manse by mistake with little Zoe inside and yelling her head off while her husband Lennox with the only other key was out making pastoral calls, so zealous in those early days that he didn’t come home until ten at night, and then without the car which he had apparently left somewhere that he couldn’t remember. “It was a real trip,” she said in her typed draft, which the editor altered to “a real experience.” She also said that what most impressed her about the place was that it was “a flat town, good for pushing babies around in,” and that it was so friendly that “God Himself would feel right at home here just like we do.” Trevor, the accountant and insurance broker, on the other hand, told of the horrific day he came upon the crushed body of the little six-year-old boy, killed on his bicycle by an unknown hit-and-run driver in a back alley behind the accountant’s offices. Trevor, as he explained in his graphic yet delicate “I Remember” column, was so traumatized by the experience that he lost the sight of one eye for a time, as though the eye could not bear to see what it was seeing, Alf explaining that what he had had was a sort of minor stroke and that it might eventually clear up, allowing him to drive again. As, over time, happened. Trevor had offered a personal five-thousand-dollar reward (he reaffirmed this offer in his “I Remember” column) for any information leading to the arrest of the guilty driver, but so far this had not been collected.

Floyd could top that one, but when asked, said no. Floyd now managed John’s downtown hardware store, but he was not from this town and no one in town knew much about his life before he came here, or thought much about it either. A traveling salesman who blew in out of nowhere, they knew that, an ignorant redneck with some familiarity with the Bible (the kids called him Old Hoot) and a marked reluctance to talk about his past, but once John had hired him, they all accepted him as he was (not much) and mostly forgot about him except when they needed a new door lock or toilet plunger or a lug wrench. But traveling, before he got here, was mostly what Floyd had done all his life, some of it selling, some trucking, a lot of it running from the law, the only settled times being those when they’d caught up with him and clapped his iniquitous ass into one prison or another, which was where he’d picked up his Bible knowledge and honed his cardplaying, the bowling came natural. Edna had been his girl in high school before they both dropped out, and she’d stuck with him through all the bad times, though not even she knew all he’d done. The things he’d been caught at, sure, the thieving and hell-raising they’d charged him with in one town or another when he didn’t get out fast enough, but not everything. Some things nobody knew. There was the woman trucker who lured him on her CB radio to that lonely highway pullover, for example, the filthy drunken whore. Had a wart on her eyelid and a tuft of black hair on her chin. The old fleabag wanted fifty bucks for a quick ride. Got a quicker one than she counted on. She still turned up in Floyd’s nightmares, wart and all, and sent him to his knees beside the bed in fervent prayer. It wasn’t so much the sticking, he’d killed others, God save his shit-soaked soul, but the way he cut her up so badly and the places he dicked her after. I Remember. There were others, too, and none of them pretty—that fat cowboy with the false dentures who waved him over to help with a flat tire on his camper, then offered him a blowjob, for example, or the rich bitch in Santa Fe with the hairless tattooed pussy who wanted to hire him to knock off her husband, or that snot-nosed longhaired kid with rings in his ears he picked up outside Cheyenne, who made the mistake of saying he didn’t think God existed, but if He did He was an asshole, that swoll-up shit-for-brains got it good. And that was the worst of it. Floyd repented of his sins but kept reliving them, knowing that for all his praying and promising, there was no meanness that had happened that couldn’t happen again, and same way all over. It scared the bejabbers out of him but also somehow gave him the juice to get from day to day, and that was worrisome, too. What no one knew, except Edna maybe, was how damned vulnerable he felt, how closely the dark powers dogged his heels. John had saved his life with this hardware job, but if he ever got let go or the store got shut down, Floyd strictly hoped somebody would kill him before he walked out that fricking door.

That store Floyd managed probably should have been closed long ago or at least moved out to one of the malls, but it had been in the family a long time, always on that same corner of Sixth and Main, literally the cornerstone—or cornerstore—of the family legend, so John was reluctant, history sparing what history had abandoned, to shut it down, at least so long as his father was alive, and Mitch, though he had turned over most of the local day-to-day operations to his son and had announced his retirement more than once, showed no intention of cashing his chips in soon, on the contrary. Mitch’s wartime profits had made him the largest landowner in the county and an influential business leader throughout the state, he was a major player in the area and felt that staying in the game was what kept him in the pink and his golf score down. He did not want to get in John’s way, though, so, complying with the old wild oats dictum, once his to lay on John, he moved his financial dealings away from home and out into the national and international markets, crossing paths with his boy only when it came to a profitable exploitation of his local landholdings. John was just a kid, still in his mid-twenties when they worked up their first big project together, a neighborhood mall on the road out to the golf course, the town’s first. Barnaby was still very much in the picture then, so it was a shopping center solid as Main Street and appealingly brick-cottagey, built in a semicircle around a parking lot with a fountain in the center and potted bushes lining the border, but it was soon found to be, as John had chafingly predicted, woefully inadequate. John called it a misuse of light and space, meaning he wanted more blacktop and more glass and less superfluous detail. The bushes blocked the display windows, the fountain (long since paved over) collected excrement and graffiti as wishing wells caught coins and used up valuable parking space, the heavy brickwork inhibited turnover renovations and the personal expression of the shopkeepers, and Barnaby’s ban on marquees and neon and rooftop signs, Mitch’s son felt, was like banning popcorn in the movie theaters. Worst of all was the lack of expansive unobstructed brightly lit shop floorspace, America’s no-tricks answer to all the mirrored Versailles of the world, a mistake that John, riding over his father-in-law’s muttered objections, put right on all his future shopping centers, but one never resolved in that first mall, now limited to arts and crafts boutiques, beauty parlors, and home video outlets. Barnaby’s latest fiasco, his attempted raid on the family company, Mitch found repugnant and in fact completely loony, as though Audrey’s death might have knocked Barn off his rocker, but, father to one, longtime business crony of the other, he did understand what divided John and his father-in-law, at least while the old curmudgeon was not yet himself so cruelly divided. John’s first constructions had been high school and college theater sets: fantasy structures thrown up and knocked down in a day, and sufficient unto it, as the saying went, constructions Barnaby would never even acknowledge as such. Barnaby’s first was his own home, a classic pictured to this day in books on twentieth-century American architecture, books John scoffed at as the purblind trivia of academic twinkies who wouldn’t know which end of the hammer to pick up.

Clarissa, diminutive queen of the mall rats and the pool punks, would have loved her grandfather’s description of her daddy’s constructions as “fantasy structures.” Especially the malls. Pure magic. They were, always had been ever since she was little. Like fairy kingdoms, sun palaces. They let her run wild in them back then and she could do no wrong and everybody smiled at her and gave her treats and presents, it was very exhilarating. Her daddy used to bring circus acts and musicians and famous comedians to the malls to draw the crowds, and there were always coin-operated machines to ride or play and free badges and balloons from the stores and special decorations for every season with Valentine redhots and chocolate Easter bunnies and Fourth of July fireworks and Halloween masks and corn candies and Christmas Santas. When she was only five years old she was a model in a spring swimsuit show out there, and she never forgot how they laughed and cheered, especially her daddy with his dazzling eyes lit up, when, in the middle of her routine, she tucked one arm in and, with a smile like the ones she’d seen on television, let the shoulder strap fall to her elbow. It was electric. Then her daddy built the new mall with the big food court in it and that became her favorite. Still was, even though there was an even fancier one now out by the highway. All the big kids started hanging out there in the food court, and lots of intense things were going on, grown-up things, though in the beginning she didn’t know exactly what. Just that they seemed too important to miss. And now, for the first time, she was no longer allowed to run free, she always had to be with her mother or Granny Opal, the only grandmother she had left, so that just proved it. Something was happening. Luckily, there was a video games arcade right next to the taco bar and she could always get them to take her and Jennifer there (they were best friends now and both curious as cats), and then go for a coffee and leave them alone. It helped when her granddad had his stroke, because the retirement home was out near the mall and Granny Opal or her mother, whichever one was with them, often slipped away then to pay him a visit. Anyway, Clarissa was in high school now and too old to be chaperoned, and she said so in no uncertain terms. This was her real life and it wasn’t fair to let her miss it. Jen, who was a preacher’s kid, loved it at the malls just as much as Clarissa did; her word for it was “spiritual.” She said she thought there was something phony about church and Sunday school with their blowhard Moseses and dead Jesuses, the malls were where God was going to show Himself (or Herself) if anywhere at all. You could just feel it. She and Jen figured out most things out there—the dare-me shoplifting, the ripped-off stuff for sale, the alcohol snuck into the rootbeers and milkshakes, the secret pot smoking and the funny pills and the furtive dealing, what was going down at the far end of the parking lot when people paired up and went out there for a while, all that—and they started dressing in printed album-cover tee shirts and leather jackets and chains and torn designer jeans so as to fit in better. Jen even got herself a nose ring, though she never wore it back home at the manse, she said it really freaked her mother. Clarissa was not so sure about this. Jennifer’s mom used to be a hippie, and she was still spaced out a lot of the time. Which could be fun, she now knew. There was a lot of cigarette smoking going on out at the mall, too, of course, it seemed like everyone had the deathweed habit, but Clarissa didn’t go that far. It was the one completely serious thing her father had ever said to her: “Clarissa, please. Promise me. Don’t.” And she had promised, and she’d never break her promise either, though she took it for granted if it wasn’t tobacco, it was okay. Her dad loved her, but he was no square.

Opal felt uncomfortable leaving her granddaughter and her little friend by themselves, dressed so provocatively, in that loud unseemly place, but she felt even more uncomfortable sitting there alone among all those ill-behaved children, so she often, whenever obliged to take Clarissa to the mall, fulfilled a second obligation, this one to her daughter-in-law, by visiting the child’s father, poor devastated Barnaby, at the retirement home, though it was hard to say in the end which experience was more repellent. The mall certainly was unbearably noisy and the air in the open restaurant area where the only chairs were was saturated with the fumes of fried fat and sticky sugars and cigarette smoke and a sour-milk smell that reminded her of sick babies. Outside there were no park areas or sidewalks or benches, or inside either, no place just to sit, but even if there were she would have felt conspicuous plopping herself down in the middle of all that mindless bustle. So, really, she had no choice, and anyway she did not really fear for her granddaughter, it was a public area, after all, dozens of people passing through every minute, and they all knew John’s daughter when they saw her, what could possibly happen? The town had changed dramatically, almost unrecognizably, since Opal was a girl here, but in some ways her son’s shopping malls, as Kate had pointed out to her when she was still alive, were a throwback to the village past of their youth, or perhaps even earlier. More anonymous maybe and off-center, but they were simple communal gathering places for scattered populations the way the old farm towns were (said Kate), this one among them, a place for barter and exchange, for the transmission of news and ideas, for ceremony and for courting and for friendly competition. When Opal, whose love for her son clashed with her distaste for his malls (if a throwback, certainly a parodic one), had objected that what was missing was that there were no churches out there, Kate had replied: No imported old world churches maybe, but holy places just the same, Opal, good old national temples with the sacred stuff of glorious enterprise heaped up at the altars and shopping baskets as communion trays and beeping cash registers like the ringing of church bells, moral lessons provided by merchant-priests and their security guard-sextons. And there are all the fastfood chapels for ritual feasting, inviolable in content as kosher or Eucharist, and the cinemas for divine specracle and iconic representation, with multiple screens for the different denominations, and mannequin angels and God’s omnipresent Muzak voice and the final benediction straight down from heaven of the accepted credit card and even, or maybe above all, the vast apocalyptic barrenness of the parking lots: go visit those prophetic fields on a Sunday morning sometime, “Opal, if you want a true”—and here she employed the very word that the preacher’s daughter (virtually unknown to Kate at the time, little Jennifer being a less than devoted user of the municipal library), was to use many years later, riding home from the mall, all ecstatic in her adolescent way, in Opal’s car—“‘spiritual’ experience.” Ah, dear impossible wicked Kate, who never ever went to the malls herself, how she missed her! And Harriet, too, the doctor’s wife, so many good friends gone! Even poor Audrey, difficult as she could be, Opal missed her, too, all her friends were slipping away, soon she’d be all alone. And now Audrey’s Barnaby as well, not much better off than dead; she visited him as often as she could, but he didn’t even seem to know who she was most of the time, it was very sad. It was while returning from just such a visit one day, Barnaby having mistaken her on this occasion for his dead wife, breaking into a violent tantrum and accusing her of betrayal and stupidity, some sort of division problem Audrey had got wrong or something, you could only make out about half of it, that Opal found the shopping mall surrounded by police cars with their blue lights flashing. She was in one of John’s cars that day, so they waved her through. She felt dreadfully guilty, though whether on account of Barnaby’s accusation or because of her abandonment of Clarissa or on behalf of her son whose mall was being so dramatically besieged, she couldn’t say. But when Clarissa saw her, she came dancing over as though nothing were happening, carrying a big plastic bag from Jeans City with what looked like a box of shoes and Jennifer’s folded-up jacket inside, Jennifer now wearing a man’s white shirt, knotted at the waist, over her printed tee shirt which on this day, as Opal remembered all too clearly, showed four naked men holding musical instruments in shockingly obscene positions. And she the minister’s daughter! These children today, Opal would never understand them. It was like there were no rules, no boundaries at all. And yet they seemed as innocent as ever. Clarissa, squealing something about finding “these really crazy walkers,” leaned in and gave her a big hug and kiss, just like she used to do when she was little, but hadn’t done in so many years Opal had forgotten what it felt like, and then insisted on skipping over to the police chief to show him her purchases. He waved her away with a weary smile, while continuing the conversation he was having on the walkie-talkie held at his mouth. Jennifer meanwhile, in the backseat, had a frozen smile on her face that made her look more dead than alive. Maybe she’d eaten something she shouldn’t have. All the way home, Clarissa kept wanting to know about Opal’s own adolescence, which Opal found flattering until Clarissa asked her: “When was the first time, Granny Opal, when you did it, you know, with a man, and what was it like back then?” “The first time was with your grandfather, of course,” she lied, feeling suddenly less flattered. “And it was just as it should have been.” The little rascal. When, a day or so later, Opal asked about the shoes, Clarissa shrugged and said they were the wrong size, she’d taken them back.

Opal’s occasional visits to Barnaby were among the few that shattered man now received, Alf being about the only person outside of immediate family who still looked in regularly upon the old master builder since the stroke that had ripped away the main connections. His patient now lived alone in a three-room unit in the “professionally assisted” retirement center his son-in-law had built, a morose and defeated man, severed from his simplest habits, his speech difficult to comprehend even when he was coherent, which most often he was not, so far as Alf could tell. The old fellow wept a lot, especially whenever his daughter was mentioned. He spoke of John’s wife as if she had been taken away and no longer existed, even though, on different days than Alf, she paid him weekly visits, according to the log in the main lobby. Barn sometimes wept over his wife Audrey, too, reenacting her deathbed scene, if that was what it was, but at other times he did not even remember who she was. He rarely remembered who Alf was, confusing him with old friends and relatives long dead, when acknowledging him at all. Others, still living, did drop by from time to time, at least early on, but the awkwardness of the exchange, its often bitter and bizarre nature, discouraged them. Barnaby had gone into deep retreat, making his visitors feel like intruders, disturbers of his misery’s sour peace, so most stopped coming, sent notes instead which Barnaby left unopened. Alf supposed at first that depression over Audrey’s death had fused the poor man’s circuits, but in time he came to understand that it had more to do with some final desperate conflict with John, real or imagined, who could say. Something maybe about the new civic center. Difficult as things were between Barnaby and his son-in-law over the years, they might never have reached such a crisis, Alf now figured, tuning in as best he could, had it not been for John’s paving over of the city park. Probably looked like outright treachery. Barnaby had drawn up the park plans while he was still in the army back during the war, and as soon as he got out he had razed the old wooden buildings that stood there, rolled the terrain out for the landscapers, personally planted the first tree and put the gingerbread on the bandstand, doing it all at cost or less, part of his vision of a builder’s place in his community, and now suddenly there was his son-in-law, moving his bulldozers in. Had to upset him, and maybe all the more so that his name was attached to it. John’s project was popular enough: a low-budget preformed concrete structure with an auditorium, gymnasium, Olympic-sized swimming pool with retractable roof (much ballyhooed, but more like a car sunroof, once in place), and ample parking space, which most people saw as a means of revitalizing the decaying town center, turning it into a kind of Main Street mall. John’s old high school coach and airport manager, now a councilman, had rallied city hall support, John’s father had helped the city get partial funding for it from the state, and downtown businessmen had put up a substantial part of the rest, using the Town Crier column header as a fund-gathering slogan: “You Can Bank On It!” As for the park, John’s argument was that it had become little more than an outsized litter basket, too expensive to keep safe and clean, and a breeding ground for crime and drugs. These days, nature lovers—and he (though armed) was one—went out of town for their rustic pleasures; the tired old park, ravaged by Dutch elm disease and a farm for vermin, was an anachronism. Saved them all money, too: the park land, he pointed out, was free.

There were plenty who disagreed. Committees were formed up to try to save the park, there were door-to-door campaigns, petitions for a referendum. Marge, needless to say, though Lorraine did, was mad as a wet hen. Lollie’s helpmeet Waldo thereupon started calling her a “wet Hun” and dropped out of the club golf tournament that summer in protest against her constant bellyaching, which he said was polluting the course with acid pain, and also his heinie. Marge had her small successes, but Barnaby, at the time clear-sighted still, saw clearly the futility of this homely town-meetinghall approach: John had the mayor and the city council in his back pocket, plus the full weight of state and national government behind him, probably even majority support in town, and the park had been allowed to fall into a state of serious disrepair—part of John’s strategy, Barnaby supposed. Had to credit the boy’s wile. First, he destroys the town center with his junky outlying malls, then he puts the squeeze on that center’s ruined faithful to buy themselves something back, cutting himself a handsome profit each direction. So ruthless was he, Barnaby actually began to fear for his daughter for whom, until then, he had only, John being the sort of husband that he was, felt sorry. Of course, there was nothing wrong with a civic center—hell, Barnaby would happily have built one twice as beautiful for half the money John was asking—but why, he wanted to know, did the town’s only park have to be sacrificed for it? Too few objected, and they objectors more by reflex than by rage. Even Ellsworth, who should have known better, homespun tree-loving eulogies aside, seemed unable to resist the appeal of John’s grand but fraudulent architectural drawings, which he published regularly in The Town Crier, fanciful as illustrations in children’s books. There was only one way to stop him, Barnaby came to feel, and that was somehow to wrest his old company back from John, something only he and, with Audrey gone, he alone could do. Wouldn’t be easy. It would mean risking everything he had. Might even alienate his daughter, an almost unbearable thought, she being all he had left in this world save his builder’s pride. But he glimpsed a way, lonely and heroic though it was. One last grand adventure, come what may: he saw a path and took it. Well. A catastrophe, of course, worse than ever he could have guessed. Ruined. Made the villain of a plot no longer his. Humiliated in front of his own daughter. Stripped of everything he had. Though he never figured out how or why. Betrayal probably. Didn’t matter. When it was over, half of him was crushed and embittered, the other half was dead.

Dutch, would-be emulator of John’s killer instincts, though only half so sure a shot, looked on admiringly as his ex-battery mate and fellow hunter gunned down his own in-law, toying with the hapless dodderer before finishing him off as one might shoot away the knees of a dumbstruck moose so as to create a moving target. Shot him down, then gutted him, cleaned him out. Many in town suspected betrayal, meaning Maynard, but Dutch knew better, having sat with John in his motel Back Room sucking a beer while on the other side of the mirrors poor old Barnaby with Maynard’s slick collusion spread the hand they’d hoped to play. Dutch, as always slow to pick up on the story stuff of numbers, was a bit baffled at the time, understanding the conspiracy’s dynamics but not the details, until the whipped and humbled Nerd, deftly pressed one afternoon at the motel bar, filled him in, at least enough to outline the plot by which the old man had hoped to retake the firm he had lost by an ill-writ will. Audrey’s doing. After the wedding, the construction business, enlarged by the assets John brought in, was still, as Barnaby thought, three-fourths in the family, jointly owned by himself, his wife, his daughter, plus her husband John, a quarter each. In effect, though, it was a troublesomely fifty-fifty partnership between the two men, Barnaby the senior partner and a bully of a sort, full of antique certainties, John forced to bide his time. Audrey, meanwhile, anticipating as most wives do a prolonged widowhood, with John’s advice so revised the family will as to change the shares to thirds on the death of any member, business a nuisance to her once Barnaby was gone and trusting her much-loved son-in-law to further gild her golden years, sparing her the details. And thus, when unexpectedly she popped off first instead, Barnaby was left with the short straw, a minor shareholder in the enterprise he had with his own hands created and by which he felt his life defined, now suddenly overruled by John at every turn, turns taken often and without remorse or pity, though always with a smile. Embittered, exasperated, but unbeaten (“It was the civic center that broke his water,” Nerd told Dutch over an unhappy happy hour martini, “worse than rape, he said, the town like some kind of woman to him, to do that to the city park …”), Barnaby, abetted by Maynard, devised a scheme to recapture what he’d lost.

The deal was this: Through a dummy put in place by Maynard, Barnaby bought up controlling interest in another smaller building firm, an upstate industrial and commercial paving business with other attractive holdings, at least on paper, staking on this bold maneuver almost all he had, much more to be sure than that down-at-the-heels outfit, soon to be John’s by default, was worth. Then, Barnaby still screened from view, Maynard approached John with a merger proposal, asking for forty-five percent of the new corporation, but “negotiating” easily down to thirty, giving John the illusion of continued control but Barnaby actually majority stock, once the masks came off. John still seemed reluctant, or else distracted, short on cash, he hinted, problems to be solved, so Maynard coaxed Barnaby into sweetening the pot with an investment offer: three hundred thousand dollars was the figure they came up with. Too much maybe, looked too eager. Probably what made John suspicious, though just how that wily fuckhead read their elaborately veiled stratagems as easily as the goddamn funny pages, Maynard would never figure out. John’s wife might have helped him somehow, Barnaby being a sentimental old coot who talked too much, but she didn’t seem quite in the picture, not these days anyway. Probably, as Maynard put it to Dutch out at the Getaway Bar and Grill that wet and gloomy end of day, remembering all the Monopoly games he had lost as a kid, it was just genius, intuition, John’s fucking gambler’s luck, and Dutch with a grunt agreed. “Or else there was a leak somewhere.” “Mm. Speaking of which,” Dutch rumbled, tweaking his crotch and sliding down off his stool. “Have another one on the house while I’m gone.” He nodded at his barkeep as he sidled away, and the woman down at the other end of the bar stubbed out her smoke and said: “Thanks, honey, don’t mind if I do.” Maynard’s bibulous and bilious ex. She often came in this time of day to wait for her husband Stu to drop in from the car lot and join her for a friendly drink or two before their serious swilling began, main reason Maynard didn’t stop in here more often. “Hey, Daph,” he greeted her, hunched over his glass, tearing the wet napkin under it with the pointed end of his plastic swizzle stick, “what’s your ass go for these days down at the used-cunt lot?” “More than you’re worth, scumbag.” “Hunh. You mean it’s overpriced like all the other junk your old man peddles.” “Hey, you want me to punch that fatmouth sonuvabitch?” asked some swarthy young guy in greasy workclothes, sitting over in the shadows with a bottle of beer in his mitts. Maynard hadn’t noticed him there before, didn’t know who he was, though he’d seen him around town from time to time of late. One of his cousin’s underpaid throwaway workers probably. “Nah, you better not, sweetie,” Daphne said, lighting up again, blowing smoke out through her flared nostrils like rocket launchers. “That’s the Nerd. Swing at him, you just get yourself all splattered in shit.” “Jesus, what a nice fuckin’ town this is,” the guy muttered, and slumped back into the shadows, sucking at his beer.

This was Rex. He’d blown into town a year or so earlier with Nevada, and it was true, as Maynard supposed, he’d worked for John for a time, sitting in as an apprentice joiner with John’s construction company, then driving a truck for the lumberyard for a while. John had taken a liking to him, or so it seemed, soon moving him out to his private airport as a kind of janitor and handyman, not the worst gig Rex had ever had. John met a lot of women out at that airport, Nevada among them, and Rex had the idea he staffed the place with trusties who kept their traps shut about his fucking around. Okay by him. Though he was no pimp, Rex was cool about Nevada’s operations, she had what she had, her own bod her ax, and she did what she could with it, professional as a dentist or a computer programmer, he respected that and helped her unwind when she came back from one of her hustles, all stained and rumpled and wired from the tension of it. She needed him then, or said she did, and so she took him along with her wherever she went, and he needed that, needed the needing, it got him up like nothing else did, except maybe a wailing horn, and made more bearable what he’d come to call the daily grunt, stealing the line from somewhere, a tabloid or a music mag probably, the least of his thefts. So being in the neighborhood when an old guy nearly twice his age was punching out his woman didn’t bother him, far from it—go to it, kid, pump the sucker dry, then come on home and lay your weary little chassis next to mine—no, what burned Rex’s ass was the way John yelled at him one day when he caught him tinkering around inside one of his private planes. Wasn’t even trying to steal anything, just trying to see how the fucking thing worked, trying to improve himself, as you might say, no call for John to get on his high horse like that, bawling him out and swatting at him with a rolled-up operator’s manual when he crawled down out of there, like you’d do to a dog that had just shat on your rug. Right in front of old Snuffy the schnozz, Rex’s windbag boss, and a bunch of the other dudes, grinning like fucking monkeys with grease guns up their butts. So then Rex did steal something after all: he copped some keys. And gave John the finger, went off to work as a mechanic in Stu’s Ford garage, where he soon found himself servicing more than the old juicehead’s cars.

That airport was John’s own special baby, literally his pride and joy, loved more than his offspring, no surprise he was touchy about it. It was the first thing he ever built on his own without Barnaby interfering, just a cleared sod strip on a piece of his dad’s land at first, not far from the new highway then being built, an arc of corrugated roofing tin added to an old collapsing barn for a hangar and a couple of construction trailers parked about, but as beautiful as anything he’d ever made before or since. Bruce had taken him up for the first time in his own Piper Cherokee a year or so before and, in midair, had handed him the controls, and John had experienced a rush unlike anything he’d ever felt before. This was on a visit to his old friend and fraternity brother up in the city, ostensibly a business trip, their first weekend together since John’s recent wedding, and though Bruce had laid on a lot of entertainments, including a crazy party at the mansion of a young porno entrepreneur, featuring a glass-walled bar below pool level with naked nymphets swimming by, a hot new British band out on the terrace, and a contortionist in the upstairs lounge who could lie on her back, put her knees by her ears, and finger a tune on a flute blown by her ass while smoking a cigarette with her cunt, nothing could top that morning in the air. By the time of Bruce’s first marriage a few months later, John had his first plane, a Sky-hawk bought secondhand with Bruce’s advice, Bruce joking that since he’d bought a secondhand bride with John’s advice, their consultancy fees canceled each other out, and so John and his wife were able to fly up to the wedding, Audrey and Barnaby fit to be tied of course, their only daughter put at such risk, John telling them not to worry, he’d stay out of the war zone. He wanted to fly all the way to Paris for their second honeymoon not long after that, but Audrey nixed it, buying him off with money for an electricity generator for the airstrip and a proper hangar with a paved apron. Over the years, she herself began to fly with him, and liked it, even took some lessons before she died, though she continued to beg John to leave her daughter on the ground.

Gordon had one photo of John’s wife taken at the airport, long ago, a chance opportunity. He’d thought, on the day, he’d got more, but when the developing was done, one was all he had. He had gone out there on a routine Crier assignment from Ellsworth to get shots of the new generator and the laying of the concrete foundations for the hangar being built, John agreeing to meet him there at noon to show him about. Ellsworth was giving him a lot of work for little pay in those days, but he was an old friend and Gordon did not complain. Must have been mid-February or so, the fields barren, but the day bright enough and not too cold. Not much to shoot at, even for a man who favored bleak abstractions, the new airport just another ugly scratch in a much-scarred landscape, but the occasion turned out to be a family event of sorts, Barnaby the only in-law missing, Mitch with a chewed-up unlit black cigar in his jowls, strolling about with his thumbs in his belt, admiring the premises, Opal and Audrey hovering maternally around John’s wife, heavy then with her first child, and Gordon was able to convince them that a kind of family portrait out there in front of John’s plane was in order. John’s wife protested shyly, placing her hands lightly on her belly as though restraining a balloon about to fly away (Gordon, to his deep regret, did not get this photo, his unloaded camera hanging heavily at his side), but all the grandparents-to-be laughed her protests away, insisting they’d never seen her more beautiful. Indeed, she was almost childlike in her beauty, Gordon thought, though perhaps he was only seeing in her the beautiful child he once knew and, back in those days as a tagalong at the games his schoolpal Ellsworth played with her, drew. Once, somewhat frivolously, with a pregnant tummy, a secret sketch. There was a young man helping John with the hangar construction, a greasy-haired beer-bellied fellow famous for his Saturday night binges called Norbert or Norman, who got drafted not long after, went into the army engineers and stayed in, never looked back, gone like so many from this town for good, and together he and John rolled the plane out of the old hangar, which was little more than a tin canopy attached to an ancient gray barn whose roof was caving in (piece of history, that barn, gone three weeks later), and moved it over beside the new hangar-to-be’s freshly spread concrete floor, still too wet to walk on. (Audrey had got them all to leave their handprints in the fresh cement, another photo Gordon had missed, having arrived too late, though he did photograph the handprint, the one he believed to be hers, many times over.) Gordon set about lining them up beneath one sleek white wing, worried a bit about the possible glare from the slanting sun off the shiny fuselage and trying to coax John’s wife out from behind the others. He’d just got something like the pose he wanted when the whole session was interrupted by another airplane swooping by, a racier model, wagging its strutless wings, then circling around for a landing, everyone in John’s party laughing and running out onto the packed-dirt airstrip to meet it, Gordon left with no one to photograph except the greasy-haired assistant, who stood alone beside the tail smirking stupidly. The new arrival, stepping dashingly out of his plane with a fistful of champagne bottles and a picnic basket, was one of John’s rowdy university friends, Gordon recognized him from the wedding. He also had a woman with him who, unlike John’s wife, wanted to be, front and center, in every photo Gordon tried to take, such that in the one photo he managed to get of John and his wife, there she was, throwing her arms around John and kicking one leg back, flapper-style, John’s wife a shadowy blur, vaguely smiling, behind her. Later, John and his friend went up for a spin with the young woman, John’s expectant wife declining, at the rather sharp bidding of her mother, the invitation to join them, giving Gordon hope that he might have her alone to his lens at last. But while, at their whooping insistence, he was photographing the three young people clambering up into the plane, the friend’s hand playfully cupping the woman’s behind, her mouth in a theatrical O, eyebrows bobbing and eyes crossed, the other two laughing back over their shoulders and waving champagne bottles at Gordon, the rest of the party made their exit: all he saw when he turned around was Mitch’s car pulling up off the dirt shoulder onto the road into town. Well. His camera was loaded. He photographed the barn. The handprints in the wet cement.

In the end, Ellsworth printed one of the barn photos: “UNSIGHTLY LANDMARK TO VANISH SOON.” But in the photo it was not unsightly. Gordon’s lens had so intimately caressed the structure’s ancient decrepitude one felt a compelling attachment to it, as though only now, in the fullest realization of its potential for rot and purposelessness, had it achieved its true beauty, its true meaning. The ruined barn lay, agonizing, against the white sky, Ellsworth realized with horror and fascination, like a dying body on a bed, like Gordon’s own mother, her mind long gone, empty as the loft of that dusty old barn, dying alone in her room above the photo shop that early spring under the steady morose gaze of Gordon’s cameras and lamps, the very reason Ellsworth was trying to keep his friend busy and out of the studio so much of the time. Ellsworth did not understand these photos Gordon was taking of his mother, now little more than a pathetic defecating vegetable. Gordon’s father had died in the war, she had raised him, had been all Gordon had of family. “Didn’t you love her?” he would ask. He remembered how, timidly, she would interrupt their play with cold milk and a tray of cookies, freshly baked. “Of course I loved her. I still do.” Gordon was photographing the poor addled creature, head to foot, back to front, over and over again through the months and days of her progressive decline, contorting her shriveled limbs into bizarre attitudes as though in bitter mockery of the classic poses (he insisted no mockery of any kind was intended), but focusing mostly on her collapsing face, her gaping mouth, her blankly staring eyes. Ellsworth had sat through one of these sessions, but only one, he could take no more. The theme of the day seemed to be armpits. His own, as he watched his ponderous friend, eye locked to viewfinder, bear relentlessly down, felt moldy and perishable. The woman was diapered and her legs were covered with a sheet, so at least he didn’t have to look at the bottom part, what he saw was sickening enough. Her breathing was shallow and raspy, punctuated by little snorts and grunts, but apparently unrelated to the awkward posturings her son was subjecting her to, just little mechanical tics and toes, like the creaks and knocks one heard in an old house. Or an old barn. Ellsworth proudly eschewed the moral position in art and life alike, especially around Gordon, so he could not openly say what was truly disturbing him, could not even admit it wholly to himself, and instead deflected his acute distress into an argument about artistic principles. This, damn it, was not beautiful. “Maybe not,” shrugged Gordon, framing armpit, chin, and nostrils, one shrunken breast, “but it might be. And if it can’t be, then beauty can’t be either. That’s all. Now do me a favor, Ell, and hold her arm up beside her cheek like this, see—come on, just take hold of the wrist here and hold it straight up, so that—Ell—? Where are you going?”

These photos, taken some time before she had met her photographer husband, were among those Pauline showed to Otis many years later, long after her own first modeling experience and Duwayne’s ruckus and arrest and her marriage, long after their periodic visits to the old trailer that followed over the years like a strange recurrent dream, interrupted finally by the death of the car dealer’s wife and Otis’s solemn promise to the Virgin, a promise he managed to keep for over three years, and then did not really break, not at first anyway, he and Pauline becoming friends again but only that, meeting for coffee now and then, enjoying relaxed comfortable chats like an old couple who had got used to each other. Otis was vaguely tempted at times maybe, his cock stirring faintly inside his stiff gray gabardines as though it had a memory of its own, a wayward thought it was trying fitfully to express, but he was able to keep things under control, and anyway Pauline, pushing thirty, was not quite the looker she used to be, especially in the midmorning glare coming through the plateglass window of the old Sixth Street Cafe, where they usually sat. No, he now saw Pauline from time to time, but he could still look the Virgin in the eye. Pauline had told him a lot of stories during these talks, some pretty disturbing ones, given the kind of life she’d had, poor kid, one in particular about the night before John’s wedding, back when Otis was away at war, that Otis didn’t know whether he should believe or not, and she had mentioned the photos several times before Otis finally realized that there was something about them that frightened her, a woman not easily frightened, and that he should maybe have a look. So, one morning when Gordon was busy all day at the high school taking senior class portraits, Pauline led Otis into the back of the shop and opened up the locked cabinets. There were hundreds of albums back there, an amazing sight (of course, he was a dogged fellow, her husband, turning up everywhere with his shoulderbag of fancy gear and rolls upon rolls of film, and he’d been at it for a quarter of a century, after all), but she went straight for the ones she wanted him to see. The pornographic photographs of the naked old lady Pauline showed him were pretty disgusting, all right, especially when Otis realized that the old thing was still more or less alive and must have been posing for that fruitcake, or been made to, but they were not, by themselves, what had upset Pauline. Pauline had told him about Gordon’s early photo sessions with her, how she had explained what she wanted but how Gordon didn’t seem to hear, how he wouldn’t even let her take her clothes off at first, but insisted on shooting nothing but her face, and how she had to admit later he had found a kind of quizzical beauty on a face she had never been all that proud of, but then how he had slowly begun to undress her, literally ripping her summer frock off strip by strip at first, as though unwrapping a present or peeling an apple (what she was worried about at the time, she said, was how she was going to get home after, and what Daddy Duwayne would say when he saw her), making her put some underwear on when he reached that part—she had come without any, but he had found an old yellowed bra somewhere, a petticoat, and some of those thick silky panties from the war years you sometimes saw at a rummage sale—and then working these things off her, inch by inch, photographing every step of the strip from every angle, favoring the close-up of course, yet never touching her, just pah-click, pah-click, pah-click with that camera until she had begun to feel something crawling over her, a real physical presence of some kind sliding over her body, exciting in a way, but scary too, and then how he had begun posing her on a bed in a room upstairs in all these odd positions, getting around at last, or so she thought, to those photos she had come asking him for in the first place, yet somehow not as sexy as she had hoped, weird even sometimes, like when he shot up into her nostrils or focused on her feet or on her Sodom-and-Gomorrah or her armpits. Now she showed Otis those photos, mostly huge blowups that turned her body into a kind of vast rolling landscape, gigantic in scale yet minute in its details, distant and dreamy as desert dunes yet intimate as a pubic freckle, a wet nipple, an anal pucker. And the point was, they were, many of them, exact positional replicas of his photos of the old lady. It was spooky. It was as though, you know, as though … But Otis by now was only half listening. He could not get his eyes off the giant enlargements of Pauline’s intimate parts. It was like some kind of magical voyage. He felt transported back to his childhood, until this moment all but forgotten, and to the stories of Merlin and Buck Rogers from the comicbooks, Sinbad and Plastic Man. So, when Pauline unzipped him, Otis knew he’d have to let the Virgin down.

Here, meanwhile, are some other photos from Gordon’s albums, taken over the decades of his career as the town photographer: (1) On the sidewalk in front of the wide plateglass window of a simple one-story stucco structure filling the space between two older two-story buildings, one of brick, the other covered with imitation stone siding, a woman turns back to watch her leashed dog, a terrier of some sort, sniff at the sidewalk sandwich board announcing a turkey meatloaf and “cheese spuds” special, together with (“Hey Sweet Stuff!”) homemade green apple pie with a cinnamon crust “all la Mode.” The rainbowed lettering on the plateglass window reads SIXTH STREET CAFE, and there are two or three indistinct faces behind the window looking out, one wearing a baseball cap. Posters in one corner of the window announce the junior class play and the high school football schedule. The woman, slender, young, or probably young, is dressed in light wool slacks, turtleneck sweater, and an open anorak, and is watched by an older square-headed man in droopy white overalls with a clipboard in his hands, who stands with his back to the camera at the right of the picture, near the hood of an old Ford pickup parked at the curb; he seems to be taking inventory of the items in the window of the hardware store beside the cafe. A sign above the handle of the cafe door between them, clearly legible, says GIMME A PUSH, I LOVE IT! The glass of this door has been cracked and taped. The building on the left of the picture, the one with the artificial siding, has a sign in its window that says CLOSING DOWN SALE! EVERYTHING MUST GO!, but this sign may have been there for some time; the building itself looks long since abandoned, casting an eerie shadowy emptiness on that side of the picture toward which the woman and dog are proceeding. The photo would appear to have been taken with an ordinary 50mm lens from across the empty oil-stained street, perhaps through a window. (2) A dark shallow puddle in what looks like an alleyway pothole reflects the corner of a brick wall or building and a creosoted pole, probably a light pole. In the stripe of pale light between these two imaged objects, rising (or falling) in their reflections like canyon walls, the surface of the puddle is broken by the tips of three larger stones, barren islands in the puddle’s dead flat sea. Bits of litter—cigarette butts, a bottle cap, gum or candy wrappers—lie scattered randomly about the rocky shores of this miniature sea like unplanned settlements, or their ancient remains, for nothing here seems alive. The only object in the photograph out of scale with this modeler’s perspective is the twisted bicycle wheel, its spokes broken and bent, only partly seen at one edge of the picture. It is vaguely abrasive, an irritant, like one idea rubbing up against another. It suggests that there is another picture, incompatible with this one, lying outside the one being seen; it suggests that there is always another picture lying outside the one being seen, that the incompatibility is irresolvable. (3) In a supermarket, a woman, possibly the same woman seen with the dog in the previous photo, though with longer hair now and dressed in pedal pushers and a sleeveless flowered blouse, squats to eye level with a small boy. Together they hold a tin can of something. Perhaps she is giving it to the boy to put into the shopping cart overhead. Or perhaps the boy has taken it off the shelf and she is putting it back. Her hair falls loosely over her back and bare upper arms, revealing more by seeming to conceal, just as her summer clothes, decorously loose-fitting, conceal as they seem to reveal: even where the heel of her shoe digs into one cheek of her buttocks, for example, there is no hint of the flesh beneath the cloth. The near aisle, the woman and the boy, the shelves behind them, the aisles beyond, all seem to be on much the same plane, suggesting the use of a telephoto lens. Into which the small boy is, wide-eyed but without expression, staring. (4) A heavy man in a plaid shirt and workpants sits on a straightback wooden chair in what seems to be the timbered inside of a rude garage or workshed. There are rough-hewn shelves overhead on which sit a row of gallon paint cans, most showing thick dull drips down the sides, though some with fresh spatterings, and next to them are crusted bottles of turpentine, small cans of stains and varnishes, a galvanized bucket half-concealing an old license plate pinned up behind it, and at the edge of the frame, a grimy dried-out fruit jar with the wooden handles of paintbrushes sticking out like black rabbit ears. The wooden wall beneath is damply stained as though a can of dark paint had been thrown at it. An old truck tire hangs there, draped by the twisted coils of a rubber garden hose, so long hooked on that spot above it that it comes to a sharply creased V over its nail. The man holds a double-barreled shotgun between his legs with unmistakable suggestiveness, stock between his knees, thumbed triggers at the crotch, barrels in his mouth. The top of his head is gone, though bits of it can still be seen on the underside of the shelves above and on the wall and elsewhere. The license plate with its meaningless sequence of letters and numbers seems to serve or to wish to serve as a kind of title for this photograph, but the title of the thick album in which it is archived is “The Environment of Violent Departure.” (5) The front of the photographer’s own shop, seen from the front corner, has been stove in by a panel truck belonging to the town paint and wallpaper store, according to the princing on the side. The truck, rearing up on its back wheels like a springing animal, is about halfway into the shop, and glass and photos and other odds and ends lie scattered about like bomb debris, but the driver’s seat is empty. A short stout policeman in shirtsleeves, suspenders, and gabardine twill trousers tucked into polished boots, back to the camera, ponders the mess with hands on hips, the closely shaved roll of fat on the back of his neck, under the cap, faintly flushed as though with exertion. The two top-floor windows have been shattered as well, and in one of them a young woman stands, gazing placidly down upon the policeman, her hands at her blouse buttons. The two windows are browed with decorative lintels and so give the whole building, with its crenellated parapet, hinged sign in the middle, and gaping mouth below, the look of a startled human face, obscenely assaulted.

Mad Daddy Duwayne. Just went berserk that day Pauline moved out of the trailer and into the photographer’s flat above his shop. He turned up in the street outside, red-eyed and bristling with weapons like a maniacal one-man assault team, and started blasting away, as though the building itself was something alive he was trying to kill. Sometimes he howled like an animal, sometimes like a preacher, bellowing then about the Whore of Babylon and God’s great rod of wrath and the desecration of the temple, by which he probably meant the farewell message she had left scrawled on the toilet wall of the old trailer, and about the Day of Rapture (which he always pronounced as “Rupture”) coming to cleanse the earth of false prophets and graven images and other dreadful abominations, otherwise just bellowing. Of course, Pauline had heard it all before, especially about the rod of wrath and the black stinking pits of hairy hell, Daddy Duwayne’s theological specialties. She was alone in the building, Gordon having locked her in for safety’s sake when he went off to photograph the funeral of the doctor’s wife, and after her crazed daddy drove her away from the second-floor windows with his glass-splattering gunfire, spitting out his rabid thou-shalt-nots like foaming swearwords, she just went into the back bedroom where Gordon had been taking her picture, shut the door, and lay down on the old iron bed up there. She closed her eyes and listened to Daddy Duwayne carry on down in the street like it was the soundtrack from some old TV movie playing somewhere else, a trick she used to use in the trailer park to distance herself from his bruising exhortations. Sooner or later, she knew, he’d be in to get her and drag her out and then whip her down the street all the way home like he always did whenever she tried to run away. And she didn’t think the photographer would come to take her back either; nobody ever stood up to Daddy Duwayne, he was too crazy. The bare mattress she was lying on had a kind of stale antiseptic smell, strange to her but not unpleasant. A lot nicer anyway than the trailer’s garbagey old-socks stink with its infested floor-mat for a bed and its damp reeking toilet, small as a coffin, where he sometimes locked her up while he went out to spirit up the dead, as he called getting drunk. There was a long silence then, just like those times in the toilet. The shooting stopped. The shouting. Her hopes were not raised by this. She had learned long ago to distrust such peaceful pauses. She waited for the door to open and the bad part to begin. Instead there was a tremendous explosion and the whole building shook like maybe her daddy was right about it being the Day of Rupture after all, and she didn’t know if she fell off the bed or leapt off, but she found herself on the floor on all fours, gaping at the door which had popped open by itself and expecting anything to come through it, maybe Jesus himself, or even worse. Nothing did. There was just the slow settling of plaster dust all around. She heard sirens. By the time she had crept through the broken glass to the front window and peeked out, they were carrying Daddy Duwayne away from the smashed-up panel truck on a stretcher. Out cold but under guard. He hadn’t seriously hurt himself, as it turned out, but once they got ahold of him, they never let him go, so she couldn’t help but have a soft spot in her heart for Otis after that. Daddy Duwayne got charged with a whole catalogue of crimes, just about all the Commandments getting mentioned, and all of which he was guilty of many times over, except maybe the charge on this occasion of attempted murder, which was a little unfair. Her daddy knew how to shoot. If he had seriously wanted to kill something, he would have.

Veronica was minding John’s paint and wallpaper store that day, most everyone else in town having gone off to the funeral of poor Harriet whom she hardly knew. Not one for funerals anyway, really. Old Alf, Harriet’s husband, she knew better; he’d done her a favor once. She sent him a nice card, expressing her deepest sympathy, but was happy to oblige when John asked her to watch the store. Veronica had returned home a year earlier after the failure of her first marriage, needing, for therapy as much as money, some kind of job, and John’s wife, a former high school classmate, had helped her get on at the paint store, in those days still downtown, she remembering that Veronica had once wanted to be an interior decorator, or perhaps it was Veronica who had reminded her of that. They had never been all that close, since Veronica never got along with her best friend Daphne, still didn’t, but she didn’t mind using what little influence she had because, anyway, she felt, John owed her one, that whole family did. Life had not been kind to Veronica. Braces, migraines, anemia, tonsilitis, asthma, she’d had it all as a kid. Then, once she got to high school, things were a little better, she was a cheerleader and a member of the choral society and popular enough, everybody calling her Ronnie back then, but though she was generous with her person (too generous, she always thought), she didn’t believe in going all the way, not yet, she was too idealistic, and so she got a P.T. reputation, ridiculed the more, the more she gave. Daphne, especially, was cruel to her, and one day at the country club pool, in front of all the boys, asked her if she thought orgasms were more fun to have alone or in company, and Veronica, who wasn’t really sure at that time what an orgasm was exactly (though when she did find out, she realized she had been having them all along, no big deal), could only turn red and stammer out something stupid about believing that was something one didn’t talk about in public. “Aha! Just as I thought!” laughed Daphne and all the boys started laughing with her. “Alone!” And then, finally, when she did start going all the way, the worst possible thing happened, and that was when she got Alf to do that favor, if a favor was really what it was, she still had nightmares about it (or him: she had named the thing as though thereby to put it to eternal rest, but rest it, or he, would not), and worried, to the extent that she believed in such things, that she might have condemned herself to everlasting hell. She was scared after that, and ran into marriage the first offer that came along, an older guy she met in college and hardly knew before they were suddenly man and wife, and again she was too idealistic, but he wasn’t, and when she couldn’t take any more, she came back home and hired Maynard and his father and got a divorce, which dragged on and was very messy and depressing and left her feeling old and used up when it was over. But, never say die, she joined the choir at church and the Literary Society at the library and got a job at the paint and wallpaper store and started going out some with Maynard, who had just recently graduated from law school, but already looked forty. Maynard had also gone through a wretched first marriage and divorce, and like Veronica, had suffered from name-calling and undeserved ridicule all his life, and he probably hated Daphne, whom he called his old ball-breaker, even more than she did, so at least they had something in common. Just the same, even though she sympathized with him, he was in many ways still the Nerd he had always been, at least everybody in town seemed to think so, the only difference being that he now had a permanent five o’clock shadow, and so, whenever he brought up the subject of marriage, always seeming to have some kind of nasty grimace on his face, like it was a dirty joke or something, she always said she wasn’t ready. That was until the day that crazy man came crashing into the store just as she had started to doze off, making her fall off her chair and nearly swallow her tongue. She couldn’t see anything for a moment—blinded with panic was what she was, she suddenly knew what that meant—and when finally her focus came back again, there he was, pointing a gun at her face and demanding the keys to the panel truck outside. She had no idea where they were, so he started shooting at all the cans of paint. She was crying and praying and trying not to have an asthma attack, not knowing what to do and hating John for leaving her in a mess like this, not for the first time. Finally, in desperation, she opened up the cash register to give him all the money, and there were the keys. When he was gone, she decided, collapsed to the floor under a dripping paint can, where they found her later, somewhat out of touch and spackled all over with Provincial Blue, that maybe the working world was not for her after all, and two months later, when she’d got her breath back, she and Maynard were married.

“Ronnie and the Nerd! Perfect! Hell on earth! I can’t think of any two assholes who deserve it more!” was what Daphne, on the telephone with her best friend and, as usual, doing most of the talking, said of the engagement news. Daphne had once been married to Maynard, it had lasted less than a year, a miserable time spent away at law school in a grad student flat, far from home, drunk most of the time or fucking around helplessly while that drudge hit—and hit and hit—the books. Later she would marry Nikko the golf pro, the one who ran away a few months later with the orthodontist’s teenage daughter in her psychedelic warpaint, and after that it would be old Stu the car dealer, whom Daphne generously called Old Stud, at least for a while. But back at the time of Harriet’s death and Duwayne’s deranged assault on the paint store, Daphne’s “current steady,” as she called her second husband when she wasn’t calling him Eric the Ready, the Rude, or the Rod, was the town’s new surgeon and resident oncologist, caught by her before he’d even got his bags unpacked. “Speaking of which, honey—assholes, I mean—I hope Ronnie’s isn’t as tight as it used to be, it’s in for some heavy drilling. Mange likes the back door, you know. Did I ever tell you about his enema routines? Talk about sloppy sex! Peeyoo!” The person on the other end of the line, the mother of a one-year-old by then (which had aroused strong but ambivalent feelings in Daphne, who longed to have children only so long as she did not have to be a mother), was probably not interested in this intelligence, there was some other reason Daphne had called her, but for the moment it had flown her mind, which in truth caged very little, even when soberer than she was now. “Still, it was about the only time old misery-guts ever let himself go, so to speak. That’s not Eric’s problem. You couldn’t ask for a more relaxed guy, so relaxed he’s asleep most of the time. Honest to God, I greet him in nothing but a dab of perfume when he comes home from the hospital, and all he does is give me this sweet sad smile and fold up like dropped pants. Hey, I know they’re working him too hard out there, but they’re not working that part of him, are they? Well, let’s face it, they probably are, it’s the only answer, isn’t it? He’s out there taking the temperature of all those hotpants nurses all day, dip-sticking himself to exhaustion, poor boy, nothing left for his house calls. They do the scoring, I get the snoring. So what’s a girl gonna do? Well, Colt was back in town a couple of weeks ago, that bastard, you know, for his aunt Harriet’s funeral. This is just between you and me, honey, not a word now—but Eric had the duty that day, so Colt and I skipped the burial part afterwards and went to have a drink together at the downtown hotel where he was staying. We sat there at that old wooden bar, not saying much, feeling nostalgic about that old place now that they say it’s going to be torn down, and while we were in that mood, he suggested we go to his room and get laid just for old times’ sake. What—?! Old times was a goddamned rape, for Christ’s sake, was he crazy? That’s what I told him. Still, forgive and forget, water under the britches and all that, right? Besides, he was looking pretty good, now that his hair was long. And he did say he was sorry, he was just a dumb little shit back then who didn’t know any better, he said, so I asked him what it was worth to him, now that he was a grownup shit. He kind of sneered and said, ‘You doing it for money now, Daph?’ and I said, ‘No, come on, you prick, you abused the hell out of me when I was just an innocent kid and now you come back here and I’m a happily married woman and you think you can just have me for a shot of gin or two? How cheap do you think I am?’ He studied me for a moment, and then he grinned and said, ‘Okay, how much?’ I didn’t blink an eye, honey. I just grinned right back at him and said: ‘A thousand bucks, sweetie. In cash. It’ll buy me my cherry back.’ I clinked his glass with mine, he stared at me for a minute, then he shrugged, winked, went off to the bank. And let me tell you. The sonuvabitch got his money’s worth. So did I. I’d forgotten it could be so good. Not since—well… Never mind.” She was about to say, not since the red, red robin came bob, bob, bobbin’, but having almost no friends left in this town, decided against it, a rare moment of prudence. “When it was over, I gave him half his money back. No kidding. Sheer gratitude. It was in small bills, so he flung it onto the bed and we fucked on that, pardon the French, it was like being a kid again and rolling around in autumn leaves. Except you don’t get dust up your nose. Oh, speaking of the French—hello? are you there, honey? yes?” Daphne asked, recalling at last the reason she had phoned. “That was terrible news about your friend, Marie-what’s-her-name, so sudden and all. I’m really sorry. No, really. I noticed she was looking a little green around the gills when she was visiting here last month, but who would have guessed, hunh? It’s crazy! What a world! How is John taking it? I mean, they’d got pretty close, hadn’t they? Speaking loosely, I mean, her love of flying, and all that. Well, hell, good old unflappable John, straight up as always, no doubt. What do you suppose it was that made her do it? Still carrying the torch for Yale, you think? Or …? Hello—?”

News of the sudden violent death of the French penpal, the one who had upstaged and jinxed Daphne at the wedding four years before, reached town by way of Oxford’s boy Cornell, back home from his educational graduation trip abroad in a state bordering on severe shell shock, such that the news itself was rather minimal and had to be imagined, or as Ellsworth, whose task it was to accomplish this feat week after week for the readers of The Town Crier would say, recreated. Selectively recreated, for there was news, intriguing as it might be in oral form, that did not suit the printed pages of the town’s weekly newspaper, the widely rumored events out at the Country Tavern during Marie-Claire’s visit to town the month before just one example, an episode referred to only obliquely in her obituary a few weeks later when Ellsworth wrote that the deceased was known for her “passionate zest for life and happiness, so typical of the natives of that great enlightened nation, and not always understood by simpler, more straightforward prairie folk.” That got him in a bit of trouble with the locals actually, but Ellsworth brushed it aside in his usual lofty manner, remarking to his friend Gordon, who had mentioned some of the complaints he had heard, that, suffocating as he was in the bloated provincial crassitude of this bumpkin town, he felt obliged to put the needle in from time to time, simply to survive. Ellsworth’s sympathies were perhaps affected by the fact that he was at this time hoping to season his own existence with a touch of French zest, his ancient dreams of the bohemian life having been revived that summer when his photographer friend suddenly took in a live model, a pretty little uninhibited gamine from the trailer camp. Ellsworth, foreseeing the delightful possibility of an old-fashioned beaux-arts ménage à trois, as Marie-Claire herself might have put it, once again took to wearing his beret and a kerchief tied round his neck (it was still too hot for the cape) and began paying regular visits to Gordon’s studio, having assisted in previous photo sessions and, for the sake of art and friendship, offering to do so again. Gordon, however, was less generous with Pauline than he had been with his mother, may she rest in peace, and did not seem enthusiastic about Ellsworth’s suggested new arrangements, which caused a certain distance to grow up between the two men for a time, though Gordon did show Ellsworth a few of his photos of the girl and asked him to witness his marriage to her the following year. About all Ellsworth got out of the whole affair was a paragraph for his novel-in-progress (at that time, several years before the crisis provoked by the death of the car dealer’s wife, a novel with only one character and as yet untitled, though perhaps to be called The Artist’s Ordeal), an aesthetic meditation on the teleology of models, which he read aloud at a meeting of the Literary Society at the public library (only John’s wife understood in the least his artistic intentions, he read for her alone) and then abandoned, the larger project as well, and not for the first time. At times, Ellsworth stepped forth onto the international stage to accept the world’s accolades for his innovatively designed yet classically structured masterpiece of creative fiction, and at other times he recognized that he had only managed to write about fourteen pages and probably only three of those were keepers, and gave it up. His journalistic recreation of the final hours of the French artist-friend of John and his wife, his primary sources being either incoherent or inaccessible, he also abandoned, limiting himself in the end to a brief obituary which remarked on the “shock and sorrow that rippled throughout our community when the tragic news, like a thrown stone, fell upon it,” and an “I Remember” column supplied graciously by John’s wife and published a few months later.

The suicide of Marie-Claire surprised many in town, perhaps even his wife, but not John. Marie-Claire was not strung together for a long life, John knew, something was bound to snap. He knew, too, he had had a part in it, he and hinky-dinky, but as usual John, whom some blessed and some did not, had no regrets. It would be like regretting the way the cosmos worked. If anything, he felt a vague sense of relief. Sex with Marie-Claire was like grappling with a wild thing: there could not be two survivors, something had to die. And, finally, John being who he was, it was her turn. Which was Bruce’s take on it as well, she having become their paradigmatic heroine of all such stories. One of Marie-Claire’s lovers, a young art student she’d known prior to Yale, had thrown himself under the Metro before her very eyes, and she had driven a married man, a friend of her father’s, completely mad. A psychiatrist, if the story could be entirely believed, not always the case, for even melodrama Marie-Claire melodramatized. These were the ones he knew about, no doubt there were other casualties in Marie-Claire’s passion wars, not including the ones he and Bruce had made up. Even Yale’s death, apparently so remote, seemed to John linked somehow to the way love and death got fused in that crazy furnace inside her, and indeed Yale’s last letters, sent from the combat zone, hinted at his own awareness of such a connection. He spoke not of “death’s embrace,” but of “embracing death,” as though it were some sort of compulsion (though his imperfect French might have been at fault here), and he described his army patrol’s search-and-destroy missions into the jungle’s “perilously erotic hot green thighs” as “lustful plunges into sweet extinction.” Of course, Yale always did relish the double entendre, all that may have been, even if a bit dark, just a joke. As was hinky-dinky at first. Apparently, at their wedding reception, the old Ford dealer had recited some verses from “Mademoiselle from Armentières” to Marie-Claire. Probably his idea of being friendly to a foreign visitor. All she could remember, as she told John and his wife one night in a Paris bistro during their second honeymoon three years later (they had just come from watching a troupe of “Troglodytes” perform a “Scène d’amour” in the airless underground cabaret beneath their garret flat), was something about four wheels and a truck—John could easily supply the missing rhyme—and the refrain line which, she said, had been puzzling her ever since. “Wut ees hainqui-dainqui?” she asked, smiling her mischievous smile. “Ees like hainqui-painqui?” “It’s the same thing,” laughed John, squeezing his wife’s hand beside him, “only you use your dinky, not your pinky.” Two days later, his wife went shopping for presents for their two sets of parents back home, planning to meet Marie-Claire at a gallery cafe in Saint-Germain-des-Prés for lunch, and an hour before that luncheon date, Marie-Claire turned up at the garret, where John, in his briefs, was shaving at the paint-stained sink. This in itself was not unusual. Marie-Claire often turned up, unannounced, at odd moments. Whenever she did, she always seemed to need to use the facilities, squatting quickly there behind the refrigerator, chattering gaily all the while over the splash of her pee, her head peeking out around the refrigerator door, telling them about things that had happened to her on the way over, a bit earthy, yet quite delicate, too, something John knew he could never carry off, he was very impressed. On this occasion, however, she stepped up behind him at the sink, ran her hands into his briefs as though crawling into the cellar, and, her smoldering dark eyes reflected in the scalloped mirror over his bare shoulder, whispered: “I am so lonely, dear Zhahn. Yell, he ees so far. May you help me? I am so much needing ze … ze hainqui-dainqui… Parlez-vous?” And so it became a kind of gentle joke between them, and a kind of bond, and when the news came through a couple of days later about Yale’s death in action, that bond was, in tears and frenzy, hotly yet somehow mournfully sealed, and thus Marie-Claire’s unhappy fate as well, forging thereby in John’s mind an indelible link between horror and compassion, compassion and horror.

Things were quiet in town that early summer, so many years ago, of the second honeymoon in Paris, almost like in the old days, for the place seemed to have a way of slowing down when John and his wife were gone. Or maybe it was just the warm season, school out, business slow, a time for taking it easy. And it wasn’t completely lifeless. The two cinemas, the Palace downtown and the Night Sky drive-in, both destined soon to disappear, still drew good crowds, the country club links and pool were busy, likewise the gun club and the driving range, beer sales were up, youngsters gathered as always at the bus station pinball machines, there was Little League baseball and softball for the fathers and the highway was slowly getting built, you couldn’t say nothing was happening. The town was growing, too, or so they said. But it was just quieter somehow, Opal thought, more easygoing, gentler, more like times past when this town was all there was and could set its own pace, and except for the turnover of births and deaths, the people within it were always the same. The war had changed all that, and then airplanes, TV, the new highways, the atom bomb, her restless son had. But the TVs, with the networks into their summer reruns and full of little else but depressing war news anyway, were mostly turned off now, the new war itself was far away, the streets and skies were quiet, her son and his young wife were on the other side of an ocean: it felt… it felt like those lazy summer days, not so long ago, when John was away at camp, Mitch frequently off at the same time on some trip or another, fishing or business or politics, and she was free to drift quietly for a couple of weeks through a life of her own, read a book from the library maybe, clean out John’s bedroom, sun awhile on a park bench as she was doing now, have lunch with friends (she was waiting for Kate and Harriet) and nothing she had to rush home for, nothing she had to think about. These last three years since the wedding had not been easy for Opal, adjusting to the life of an older in-law. Her son, toughened into manhood, was still recognizably her son, yet she felt increasingly estranged from him, and even from her memories of him as a boy, and that made her feel edgy all the time. She was fond of Barnaby’s daughter, always had been, steady as they come, that child, but she seemed to know her less well now than she had before the marriage. Fond of Barnaby, too, though as for Audrey, the less said the better. Certainly, give her credit, Audrey had adjusted to in-lawhood better than Opal had, she and John couldn’t be cozier. Free with her money, that always made a big impression on John, free with her flattery, too. Audrey seemed to share in the young couple’s lives as though it was the most natural thing in the world. Opal always felt intrusive if she stopped by to visit them, uncaring if she didn’t, she never knew what to do. And always when she visited, she couldn’t put her finger on it, but always she sensed there was something missing in that house. John’s room maybe. That house had been Barnaby’s house, still was really, she could feel her son’s discomfort there, so meanwhile, Mitch ridiculing her for it, she kept John’s old room at her house just as he’d last lived in it, not having any other use for it anyway. She sighed, distressed that she was spoiling this nice day with such thoughts (though she had once written an “I Remember” column for Ellsworth’s paper about the park, which she had always loved, saying that it was a place where one could bring one’s heavy thoughts and leave them behind, like an old newspaper left on a bench), and nodded politely at the young police officer who had tipped his hat at her, passing by on the park path. One of John’s school-friends probably. Oh yes, the one whose father… A disturbed family, as was true of so many of the poor. One wondered if it was wise to make policemen out of them. She started to point out to him the obscenity of the cast-off man’s sheath lying like a squashed grubworm by the steps of the bandstand, but thought better of it. He might think it vulgar of her to know what it was. On the other hand, as uninhibited as the young were nowadays, it might have been part of a public performance, she would just reveal, once again, what an old fuddy-duddy she was. It was true, she was, and she was proud of it. It wasn’t that she thought that people shouldn’t use such things, only that they shouldn’t display them rudely. She had always been a permissive mother, had she not, yet she had insisted always on a certain public decency. How can we bear one another without it? When Oxford, who sold those items openly in his drugstore, had proclaimed loudly one night out at the country club that dispensers of the things ought to be as common as gumball machines, she had responded that she had been pleased to notice that gumball machines were in fact disappearing and that soon therefore she might be able to agree with him, a reply that had earned her general approval, and even John seemed favorably amused. It was hard to tell what his wife thought, but of course that was always the case. She saw Harriet, all alone, coming down the leafy path from the direction of the library, where Kate worked. She didn’t look well. The rumors, alas, were probably true. Harriet and Alf had had three children, all of whom had long since flown the coop, at least Opal could be grateful that John had decided to make his life here at home. There were grandchildren, too, their latest photos an obligatory lunchtime ritual. Maybe that, she thought, not for the first time, was what was missing in her son’s house: three years and still waiting. Harriet seemed paler than usual and, as she drew nearer, Opal saw that she was crying. Oh dear. Opal rose in alarm and anticipation, smoothing down her skirt, mustering that reassuring stoic reserve for which she was, justly, so well known and appreciated.

Harriet, bringing the news, had heard about Yale’s distant death in the jungle from her husband Alf, he having been called out to attend to poor Kate, who had collapsed on receiving the notice. Oxford, too, though he fussed confusedly over his wife, seemed utterly stricken, and little Cornell sat in a corner staring mutely, unwiped snot running down his quivering upper lip like liquid glue. Only Columbia, home from university where she was studying pre-med, had had the presence of mind to call Alf and then use a little basic first aid for treating shock victims, feet up and all that, both parents submitting to her ministrations as though in a trance. After everyone else had been taken care of and the body had been brought back from the war zone and the memorial service held, Lumby fell into something of a melancholic stupor herself, though no one noticed by then or took it seriously, no one except her teachers at college who flunked her out of pre-med. But she couldn’t keep her eyes on the page, couldn’t even sit through an exam without her mind drifting off. Yale had been her favorite, maybe the only human male in the world she had truly loved and admired, and the world just seemed emptied out when he was gone, not worth the effort. When her mother asked her what was wrong, she said nothing seemed real anymore, she couldn’t believe in it, it was like everybody was just pretending. All life’s an artifice, her mother said. We are born into the stories made by others, we tinker a bit with the details, and then we die. She said this so sadly it made Lumby cry, and then that made her angry. Her mother never did really get over what happened to Yale, she just slowly declined over time, becoming ever more silent, until she died three years later, shortening her suffering at the end with a bottle of sleeping tablets from the drugstore, a withdrawal and departure that Lumby, needing her, could never quite forgive her for. Before that, however, there was one brief moment when the family pulled itself together to receive Yale’s French sweetheart Marie-Claire when she paid a return visit to the town a year after his death, staying with John and his wife, who was an old friend, and also coincidentally Yale’s girlfriend once upon a time. Lumby’s parents treated Marie-Claire like a daughter that week, hosting quiet, somewhat dreary dinners, taking her out to visit Yale’s grave, going through all of Yale’s belongings with her, presenting her with many mementos of him, and returning her letters to her. She received these things gratefully, tearfully even, trembling all over, yet left them behind when she went home, taking Cornell with her like something she’d won at the carnival but didn’t want; they had to bundle Yale’s effects up and mail them to her. She was not there to receive them. Lost forever, those things. Nearly lost her stupid little brother Corny in the bargain.

Paying her respects at Yale’s tomb was not the only purpose of Marie-Claire’s visit to town that year. She was also returning her friends’ second honeymoon trip to Paris of the year before and attending her little godchild’s christening (godmotherhood not really a part of that Protestant ceremony, but on the subject of religion John and his wife were generously broadminded and worked it in), which had been especially arranged for her arrival. The baby, named Clarissa in honor of Marie-Claire, was a restless child who kept the household up all night (“She is, what you say, a girl-party, no?” said Marie-Claire with pride), and all day, too, as though afraid that she might miss something if she closed her little eyes. When Marie-Claire, touring John’s airport, asked him what they would have called the baby had it been a boy, he jokingly replied, little Hankie, thank-ee. Though reminiscent still of the homemade dirt strips of aviation’s early days, John’s airport had been expanding. Over the year, getting friends to pitch in, and with money from his mother-in-law, John had been able to install a generator out there, build a new hangar, and clear enough land to extend his runway to nearly six thousand feet, about half of it paved. The paved length was all he needed for his little single-engine four-seater, of course, but he was already thinking far ahead to the time when jets and cargo planes would land here and he might even have a feeder airline of his own, or at least be operating some kind of air taxi service, linking his town to the great urban centers, which, from up on high, seemed to shimmer on the curved horizon like untapped treasure troves, spoils for the airborne adventurer. From up there, he could see, too, displayed like a briefing chart, how his town down below would grow, and in which direction, which properties he should buy, which sell, and where he should build his malls and housing developments. These revelations his wife missed out on mostly, grounded by her mother as she was, the doctor’s prenatal seconding of the motion, after the difficult birth, still in place as well. The way things turned out, John probably should have left Marie-Claire on the ground, too, but though John enjoyed women in every imaginable way, what he loved most at that youthful time in his life was getting blown at the controls a couple of thousand feet up in the sky, and Marie-Claire had a kind of crazy explosive voracity, as he had discovered already last year in Paris, which not only turned her small delicate mouth with its pebbly rows of teeth and muscular tongue into something between a hydraulic pump and an automatic carwash gone amok, but which seemed to possess her entire body, causing her to tremble violently from head to foot and, whimpering like an animal at the door, even as her mouth with its flickering tongue raced madly up and down his shaft, to clutch and claw at his flesh as though trying to dig her way inside. Of course, fucking Marie-Claire was, if sometimes a bit like throwing yourself off a cliff, an even greater treat, but this was not Paris and at home on the ground that late spring, everyone supposedly mourning Yale, he was trying, with only partial success, to keep his distance from this wildly unpredictable girl, so susceptible to contagious sorrows, and up in the air fucking was impossible.

Or so he thought. It was his new troubleshooter Nevada more than a decade later who finally taught him otherwise, though she was more an athlete than an inflamed and impetuous lover. By then John had bought and sold a fleet of planes (though he still had the little Skyhawk and even took it up now and then for old times’ sake), and the airport itself, now incorporated into the town and eligible for federal funding, had municipal electricity and water, its own septic system, parallel runways big enough for executive jets and small pressurized turboprops, a modest terminal and office building with toilets, payphones, and food and drink dispensing machines, a crew of mechanics and cargo handlers and a fulltime manager (his old football coach), parking lots for both planes and cars, fuel pumps and storage tanks, well-equipped hangars and repair sheds and warehouses, and new runway landing lights like glowing sapphires that could be activated from the air with a radio signal in the same way as automatic garage doors, a little parlor trick that always delighted the women when they found themselves caught out after dark, still dangerously high up off the ground, a trick that Marie-Claire, who would have loved it, did not live, poor girl, to see. Well, a sad story, but Marie-Claire was a lady of sad stories, excess and abandon the flame to her mothy passions, as Bruce once said of her when John told him of his Paris adventures. Not so their Nevada. Nevada was tough, smart, beautiful, efficient, cool. And spectacularly talented. There was no position she could not or would not assume, many of which neither Bruce nor John had ever enjoyed before, and she had a vagina clever as a trained circus animal. Bruce called it the “evil beaver,” and loved it at least as much as did John, who first sent her to him as a kind of comic valentine, telling him to go take a flying fuck. Out of this world! As John said after one of their weekend cabin revels, it was as though she were what he had been looking for all along, and Bruce thought so, too, even though John was speaking as a compassionate pragmatist, Bruce more from the nihilistic point of view.

Of course, she blew her cool that first time up, but lots of women must have peed themselves in John’s planes, probably he got a charge out of it. Certainly he liked to get them scared, she could see that right away in the sensuous menace of his crooked grin, it was a way of softening them up for what he wanted out of them, which was not just sky-high head, she sensed, but also a kind of quivering compliance, and scared was one emotion Nevada did not have to fake up there, that first time anyway. After a loop or a roll or two, most women, leaking helplessly from every orifice, probably went grabbing for his joystick like a security blanket. Any straw in a whirlwind, as they say. “Wow! What a trip!” she groaned as, her heart still pounding, she wiped her mouth against his strong lined throat and nuzzled in the graying hair behind his ear, wondering, somewhat lightheadedly as he took one hand off the controls long enough to give her soggy thatch a grateful squeeze, where her wet panties, flung from the window like a captured battle flag or a candy wrapper, might have landed. John had just told her a moment before, his free hand clenched in her hair then and his hips beginning to buck, that what he loved most in this world were the days of his life, and Nevada, glad merely that she was going to see another, now thought she rather liked the days of his life, too. “My turn,” she whispered, stroking him stiff again. “If you can manage it,” he laughed, somewhat surprised, and to show what a clever girl she was, she did a dexterous split across his lap, burying that magnetic pole of his, and, switching her torso from left to right without losing him or interfering with his piloting, corkscrewed him, as it were, thus providing him, as he dropped creamily (she seemed to hover for a moment, weightless, tingling all over), then pulled up fiercely, climactically, into her as her augmented mass bore explosively down on him, with the line with which he’d later send her up to Bruce. He loved it, loved her, she felt, he said he’d never known anyone quite like her, and she began to see how John might be different from the rest, how he might be pointing her toward something new, dizzyingly new, and how Rex might soon become a nuisance. Not to mention, of course, John’s wife.

When Nevada told Rex about the scare she got and what John had said up there about loving the days of his life, Rex said: “That’s his privilege, baby. He’s a rich fucker. His days don’t cost him anything. How can you help but love your life if every day’s like winning the lottery?” Rex, who loved Nevada in his bluesy downbeat way and so had his own notions about what love was, had started out here in town working for John, like most people did, but he had got fed up with the bullying sonuvabitch and so blew that shit off and now he worked for Stu, repairing cars at the old boy’s Ford-Mercury garage, working from a fake-book and a good right hand. No green in it. Nevada pulled down a lot more than he did, and sweated less doing it. But it kept him from wigging out, alone in a motel room or a lousy bar. Rex still wasn’t thirty, but one thing he had learned: making money was the easiest fucking thing in the world, but you had to have some to get some, and when it had come to handing out the stakes, he’d got left out, simple as that. Man, he really hated fat cats like John and his wife, not because they were loaded, but because they didn’t even know why it was they had it so good. He fixed their cars for them, all right, but in more ways than one. He’d put a new fanbelt on for them, but loosen a wheel or drain the brakes. He’d grind their valves, then leave the rocker gasket off, watching all the time for an angle, a gimmick, his break, access to a piece of the action. He hated Stu, too, but the old fart was a harmless boozer who spent most of his time dozing or telling his tedious cracker jokes, generally steering clear of the service area, so Rex got along all right with him. It was during one of Stu’s dumb jokes one day that Rex looked up and found himself staring, from under her Town Car, straight up John’s wife’s skirt. She was patiently tuned in to Stu’s bull, her back to Rex, and neither of them noticed him down there, so he had a good long look. He couldn’t say afterwards exactly what it was he saw, it was like staring at the Milky Way through a telescope that wasn’t quite in focus, but it made him feel like he was getting something for nothing, a piece of John’s goods, so to speak, and it got him so hot, he had to reach under and pull himself off to keep from howling or going for the pot and jumping her where she stood. That’d give old Stu a punchline he’d—ungh!—never forget, he thought as he came, exploding powerfully into his greasy overalls. He opened his eyes again, still holding himself, still coming probably, feeling loose and dreamy, wanting another look, one he could remember, but she was gone. His mouth was dry. He felt deflated. Like a loser again. Cheated and robbed. He took his screwdriver and punched a hole in her muffler, thinking: So that honcho motherfucker loves the days of his life. Terrific. Me, I just get through them. And he spat drily and punched another hole.

Though he seemed not to notice, Stu was aware all along of Rex’s hatred, thought of it as a sick streak in the boy, a transmission failure of a sort, knew also Rex was stealing him blind, but somehow, in spite of all this, Rex’s malice, his paranoia, horniness, thievery, Stu felt some kind of kinship with the lad, and generally let him do what he wanted. Even lent a helping hand, often as not, though it made him feel a little like his block was cracked. Sometimes, just to let Rex know he wasn’t completely stupid, Stu would try to catch him in some mischief or other. He’d leave a tenspot on a counter or a workbench, say, then demand to know what had happened to it when it disappeared. The kid would scowl at him, act like he was dealing with a crazy man, and Stu would have to reverse gears, back down, no longer sure whether he’d put the ten bucks there or only intended to. Same with the other stuff that went missing: Maybe it wasn’t there in the first place, or vanished years ago. Couldn’t say. Goddamn memory. Strangest maybe was the way he kept throwing that black-hearted whelp and his little darlin’ together. He knew Daphne had the hots for the young scamp, the way she dressed and teased and showed her backseat every chance she got. Broke old Stu’s heart to see them carrying on, but weirdly it gave him a charge, too, as though by giving Daph the keys to the inner office and leaving the lot on some invented errand or other, or letting Rex give her a ride to the Getaway, he were getting a stalled car moving again. Maybe, somehow, he was reliving his cheatin’ days through the tacky little hotrod, whom he hated and feared, yet felt close as a father to. Stu had this ambivalent relationship with about everybody in town. He thought John was a great guy, for example, top of the line, but he didn’t really like him. He did like John’s wife, liked her a lot, hell, he’d do anything in the world for that girl, yet at the same time he felt he couldn’t care less about her. For the most part, this relationship was mutual: everybody in town loved old Stu, their hearts went out to him, yet they all considered him a worthless old drunk who might as well be dead. He was everybody’s friend, but nobody knew him.

Maybe Stu’s ambivalent attitude toward Rex’s malice had something to do with his notion that as far as life expectancy went, bad luck was good, good bad, a notion Alf heard him trying to explain in the country club bar one night (an unusual night, as it turned out) to Trevor, the insurance salesman, meaning to put him straight, he drawled, about what was wrong with his damfool actuarial tables, meaningless as a used-car price tag. There were others standing around, too, or perched on barstools, most of them having long since stopped listening to the garrulous old lush, though he still had the polite attention of John’s wife beside him, always patient with the foolishness of others. Stu had just sold a Cougar and an Explorer XLT that day and so his rear axle was really dragging tonight, he said, since he thought of car sales as additions on the way to his own funeral: each man was given to sell so many cars in his life, and then: pfft! “Get ready to tow me to the junkyard, ole buddy,” he growled, clutching his chest and rolling his eyes as though it were one of his punchlines, “I feel another sale comin’ on!” And Trevor wheewheed in that silly sniggering way he had, covering his mouthful of bad teeth with his ring-studded left hand. Daphne, relatively sober and out of her usual baggy sweatsuit with the dirty seat and into a pink party dress for a change, told Stu to shut up, he was depressing everybody, and Stu sobered up for a second and gave her a look Alf hadn’t seen on his face since before Winnie died. Then he grinned his gap-toothed country-boy grin and, wrapping his drinking arm around John’s wife, asked her if she’d heard the one about the old boy here in town who’d died a few years back of diarrhea but his widow insisted they write “gonorrhea” as the cause on his inspection sticker. “Well, ole Doc here he wouldn’t have none of that, y’know, bein’ the—hee ha!—lawr-abidin’ sort and knowin’ the difference between them two ‘rhears’ and maybe even how to spell the little suckers, on accounta him havin’ a college diploma and all, and he reminds her that ain’t exactly the—haw haw!—gospel truth. ‘Aw, hellfire, I know it,’ she—whoof! wharr!—says, ‘but I’d—hoo!—I’d rather folks—yarff! hee! harr!—folks remembered the old clunker as a—heef!— as a—whoo!—”’ And, wheezing and snorting helplessly, he dropped his drink down John’s wife’s bosom and fell off his stool. Alf helped Daphne drag Stu out to his car and pour him in, and as he propped him up in the front seat, pushed the lock button on the door, and (Stu was muttering something incomprehensible about a fucked-up transmission) closed it, he thought: It’s silly to keep people like Stu alive. Alf felt ashamed for his own part in it. The old fellow, drooling, slid back against the door and batted his freckled head on the window. Stu’s wife Daphne, staring out at the little red pennant flapping over the eighteenth hole, now floodlit, said: “It’s a goddamn mess,” and Alf thought so, too. When he went back into the bar, vaguely uneasy about letting Daphne drive Stu home, he found John’s wife holding her silk blouse in her fingertips, away from her breasts, flapping it about as though to shake the gin out. There were a lot of jokes, or what passed for jokes, about the tonic virtues of gin, the new improved flavor of mother’s milk, and so on, and when they asked Alf his medical opinion, he sniffed and said that they smelled like martinis, okay, but he’d never seen them served in cups that big before. Trevor giggled like a moron at that one, and his wife Marge said: “Well, the party’s getting a little rough!” Marge’s cups wouldn’t hold a martini’s olive.

How much, his little darlin’ Daphne wondered, driving foggily home that night, did Stu know about her and Rex? Plenty, probably. Hard to say, though, if it mattered. Maybe it even gave the old coot a peculiar pleasure to star in one of his own jokes. Made him a kind of living legend. “There was this old farmer, doncha know, who took him a young bride, a hot-wired little sports job who just couldn’t get enough juicin’ and left the old yokel too pooped out from so much time down in the Red River Valley to get his chores done out in the back acres. Ffoo! Fuckin’ spread goin’ to hell in a hangbasket and him, too, see. So directly he went and took on this young hired hand …” Did old Stu take notice when she stood over the horny boy while the kid was down in the pit, offering him the view she’d seen him gobbling up from the other women who came out there to get their oil changed and their motors tuned? Was he watching when she squatted down, knees spread, while sexy Rexy was on his back under a car, to kid around with him about needing a valve job or getting her own underbody greased? And if he did, if he was, did he care? Daphne had slipped into the somewhat boozy habit over the recent years of wearing a floppy fat-hiding sweatsuit wherever she went, gave her the illusion of being an athlete by day and it cushioned her and served for peejays when she fell over at night. Now, though, she was back into skirts again, not the old ones, of course, which no longer fit, had to buy a whole new closetful of the damned things, new underpants, too, with ribbons and peekaboo crotches and cute little messages the randy mechanic could read. Which he did, at first by long eye-filling gazes, hand on his connecting rod, later by braille, as you might say, which led her to crack back, when he alluded, somewhat cynically, to the mystery of her being attracted to a guy like him: “Mystery? Hell, honey, I’m an open book!” As the boy laughed his snarling laugh and nibbled at her clit, Daphne lit up and, blowing smoke at the motel room mirrors, thought about the long stupid shaggy-dog joke she and Stu had been playing out for so many years. Some of it right here in these rooms when warhorse Winnie was still around, though it really went back much farther than that, back to her best friend’s wedding reception and her mythical handful of strawberries and cream, old Stu’s “day of destiny,” as he called it, half her goddamned life. Maybe it was time for the punchline. “Fuck me, sweetie pie,” she whispered, stubbing out the smoke and squinting appraisingly at the tense mirrored buttocks of the creature hunched over her like a powerful predator gnawing at a carcass. “Fuck me hard!”

Veronica had been a witness to Daphne’s attention-grabbing act with the strawberries that day of John’s wedding, a day that for Veronica was also, as it was for Stu, a day of destiny, but like all such days in her life, a dark one. She was still haunted by the consequences, it made her shudder to think about it. Or him. Gave her migraines for a week. Ronnie, as she was known back then to her classmates, Daphne being one of them, had always been intimidated by that brash, promiscuous, and unpredictable girl, a girl who always seemed to have so much more fun than Ronnie did, even when she did such awful things, things Ronnie could not bring herself to do, and then did anyway. It was a no-win situation. When she resisted Daphne she got ridiculed, and when she tried to keep up with her she got in trouble. Like that night before the famous wedding when Daphne subverted the hen party and led an assault mission out to the Country Tavern to invade the stags. Ronnie had argued against the idea, which she thought of as dangerous though didn’t say so. What she said was, let the boys be, they won’t like it. Daphne said the boys didn’t know what they liked until they saw it, and if Ronnie was chickenshit she could stay behind. So, naturally, she had to go, feeling she had a certain reputation to defend since that night at the drive-in with John which everybody seemed to know about, but first they argued about it for a while. There were others who had their doubts like Ronnie and a couple of them went home. Finally, when they did get out there, the party was pretty much over; certainly that guy Daphne had had her eye on all day was gone, and so was John. Daphne blamed Ronnie for that, said if she hadn’t been such an uptight pain in the patoot, they’d have got out here sooner and maybe had some fun tonight. Then they all got back in their cars and gunned it out of there, leaving her behind; Ronnie had to walk home all alone, kicking herself all the way, hating Daphne, but hating her own timidity, too. Now and then lights would appear on the road behind her, guys coming back from the tavern, no doubt, and she would have to hide down in a ditch or behind trees or bushes, not knowing how to explain herself out there and afraid of what they might do if they found her alone, drunk as they were. Sometimes she felt like just letting them do whatever they wanted, what did it matter, and she only half hid as they passed by, but no one stopped. Not until she reached town, a few blocks from Main Street. A car pulled over. A silvery Ford Mustang, looking like a ghost in the moonlight: Veronica recognized it, and her heart skipped a beat as the door opened to her. When she saw who the driver was, she realized she was about to do something Daphne would never have dared to do. A first. Though it would be hard to brag about it. Happened in another town. Something about wild oats, he said. She got home a little before dawn. And a few weeks later, she had to go see Alf, tears in her eyes, and ask him for that dreadful favor, he stubbornly reluctant (it was a big crime then, he had a lot to lose, she knew that) until she told him who the father was.

Ronnie had tears in her eyes again that night, years later, when her nemesis’s slobbering hubby, drunk as a dog, spilled his drink down John’s wife’s front in the country club bar, but this time they were tears of laughter. That it should happen to her! It was too funny! Everyone in the club was laughing, everyone except the father of the child Veronica finally did have, who was about to barf. Happened to Maynard from time to time. His “tender sensibilities,” as someone had cracked so many years ago, same cause then as now. A form of mourning, as he thought of it. He took a deep breath and held it, staring hard at the kid behind the bar, who was trying to act cool, wiping glasses, moving bottles around, but whose wide-eyed gaze was locked on the wet blouse. Whose wasn’t, but suffering Maynard’s? John’s linen-suited accountant Trevor was sniggering in his hiccuppy way while he stared at it, lard-ass Waldo was hee-hawing, John’s old man was grinning and grinding away at his cigar the way Maynard, back in school, used to chew rubber bands. Beside him, Maynard’s wife tittered and snorted like the witless beak-nosed twit she was, pushing her own cups forward, no doubt secretly jealous of the attention John’s wife was getting. Veronica was the material form Maynard’s bottomless misery had finally taken, the objective embodiment of his own self-loathing which it pleased him to strike out at from time to time, to slap and pummel and bury in curses, trying to purge himself of that which could not be purged, but giving him relief at least during the blind moments of his rage. The first wave of nausea passed (he was startled to notice Waldo’s wife Lorraine staring at him as though alarmed and he quickly looked away, that stupid cow, was he that transparent?), but then old Alf, coming back in from mailing Stu and Daphne home, jokingly poked his bent snout at her cleavage and sniffed, and the sickness returned, forcing Maynard, desperately clutching the frayed garter in his pocket, to swallow hard, then bolt down his own martini, hoping only it would not come right back up. His eyes watered and for a moment John’s wife was just a formless blur, not quite there. He blinked and brought her back, suddenly frightened about the risky moves (this was just before all the shit came down, when Maynard the eternally damned still thought he was going to whip his hateful cousin’s ass at last) that he and Barnaby were making. He was doing it for her sake, hers and her father’s, and John sure as hell deserved the pasting they were about to give him, but what would be her take on it? Well, she would be hurt, of course, that was unavoidable, but could she come to understand the issues at stake, the principles involved? In his fantasies, orphaned by the brawl between husband and father, she would turn to him for guidance and consolation (over and over, she had fallen, weeping, into Maynard’s gentle and caring embrace), but did she have even the foggiest notion of what John had done to her father? It might look like sheer madness to her. Well, they’d all know soon enough, it was fast coming to a head. John had invited them all over to dinner on the weekend to announce the merger. Barnaby would be there, John’s parents, his own dad, John’s accountant, people from the bank. There was no turning back. Maynard set his empty glass down on the bar as though to end a sentence, just as John’s depraved college buddy Bruce, a frequent hangabout in town of late, tucked his cigarette in the corner of his smirking lips, took the bar rag away from Kevin, and turned to John’s wife to help her wipe her blouse—Maynard headed for the men’s room, hoping his urgent stride would get him there in time.

Kevin, who doubled as country club pro and barkeep, was keeping a close eye on events that night, after what had happened earlier in the day. John’s wife had always been a mystery to him, more so now. Kevin had come to town a dozen years ago, just out of university and one boozily happy but ineffectual year in the backwaters of the pro circuit; he’d meant to move on, get back in the competition, never did. His father, an upstate political friend of John’s and a business colleague, had got him the job here, his predecessor having flown the coop that summer with a wild teenybopper, we should all be so lucky. The place sounded like more fun than it was, but given his prospects he might have ended up in scummier holes. He managed the club, gave lessons, ran the bar and the pro shop, entered a few smalltime tournaments just to keep his hand in and his name in circulation. Long hours, but they paid him for them. Women were easy enough to come by, everything from high school kids to their grandmothers, he got in at least seventy-two holes of golf a week, the food and booze were free, and there was a lot of loose change lying around, so not a bad life. Giving lessons could be a drag, but it was extra money, and it was sometimes a way of making out. He found that women often liked him to help them with their grip and swing by standing behind them and reaching around to take hold of their hands on the club, one thing sooner or later then leading to another. And that was why he was watching John’s wife closely that night that Stu gave her knockers a gin bath. She’d had a lesson with him that day and had seemed puzzled when he’d tried to correct her open grip. Almost without thinking about it, he had stepped behind her and reached round to cover her hands with his, and as he pressed up, almost ritually, against her soft buttocks in their pink and green Bermuda shorts, he was overtaken suddenly by a delicious sensation unlike any he’d ever felt before, not exactly sexual though it gave him a hard-on that nearly ripped his fly apart, more like the silky feeling he sometimes got when lying with a woman and staring at a starry sky. Then, just as suddenly, how could he explain it, she didn’t seem to be there. He was holding only the club. He let go of it in alarm: and there she was, going into her swing. And so tonight, a night at the club like any other, the noise, the corny jokes, the usual barbs, John’s wife the center of attention as she always was, Kev was just into his third scotch and beginning to relax—and then, suddenly, there was the spilled drink. Did she seem to dim slightly, to slip from view as the gin splashed down her front? Kevin reared up straight, grabbed a glass to wipe. No, there she was, plain as day, he was just imagining things. Maybe even trying to. Probably he ought to take it easy on the hootch. When John’s pilot pal snatched up the bar rag and dabbed at her boobs, no problem, they bounced like anyone else’s, and Kevin felt reassured.

John’s accountant Trevor had an opportunity that night to take a steady contemplative look at John’s wife’s breasts and, with a little more courage, might even have been able to dab at them with a cocktail napkin, too, like John’s happy-go-lucky friend, just in the spirit of the fun of course, and maybe that would have helped or maybe it wouldn’t have, but as it was, by the time they got home, he could no longer remember what it was he had seen, could not even be sure Alf’s rude remark about cup size was in any way descriptive. Vanished, yet again. If he let his mind drift, without concentrating, the expression on her face would come floating back: a kind of smile, or not a smile exactly, more like placid consent, or else a mild annoyance, politely contained. But the more he thought about it, of course, the less anything was there. Earlier in the day, he had seen the photographer take her picture during a golf lesson with the young pro, a picture he would very much like to see now, but he didn’t know how to ask for it. Perhaps he could do a study on golfing styles and life expectancy. He got out his graphs and charts while Marge was getting ready for bed and attempted to locate her point again. No use. It just wouldn’t stick. Too many variables or something. He recalled the old car dealer’s system of calculations and knew there to be a certain truth hidden in them: did this truth apply to John’s wife? He thought about her good fortune, her beauty, her wealth, her family, her seeming happiness, her sound health (he had seen the lab test results from her last physical, had perhaps a clearer image in his head of her blood and urine than he had of the expression on her face that night, thought sometimes he could even hear the beat of her heart inside the x-rayed chest or feel the squishy viscous dampness of the smear), and it occurred to him that all these assets were as equivocal as the “Negatives” on the lab test results: they revealed only absences, fixed nothing, contributed to the enigma of her existence rather than helping to resolve it. Marge was already snoring, sleep overtaking her with the same brute force that thirst or hunger always did. He knew about Marge’s life expectancy: she would live long and vigorously, but death would one day take her by the throat and ravage her mercilessly as though itself seized by a violent passion.

What were snoring Marge’s dreams? She claimed to have none, sleep for her a complete blackout, a departure into nonexistence, every waking a resurrection. For dreams, if she missed them (she didn’t), she had her friend Lorraine’s to wallow in, Lorraine a host to vivid nocturnal theater of the most elaborate sort and, while evasive on the subject of her waking life, a prolix reteller of her dreamtime adventures, often as not with a revelatory tag. Thus, the night that Stu spilled his drink down John’s wife’s front at the country club bar, she dreamt that she and Marge were in a breast shop trying on different sizes and models and joking about the bizarre value men in their foolishness placed on the silly things. John was there, and he told them it wasn’t the breasts that were important but the nipples, and with that they got serious about their selection. There were all kinds, heaped up in wooden trays. John tried to make Marge wear a pair that looked like golfballs, but she fought him off. Yet ended up with them, just the same, dazzlingly white and marked only with a crimson dot (they came in a package of three, not two, but the third had been used and had a deep dirty gash). Lorraine fancied ones that looked like little eyeballs with lids that closed (she somehow had the idea that if she could flutter her lashes from her breasts, she told Marge, she’d have more luck), but somebody stole them. Who? Everyone was laughing, so she was pretty sure it was Waldo. “The sonuvabitch is having an affair, or is about to,” is what she said the next day to Marge, which was not unlike prophesying the rising of the sun maybe, but Lorraine knew with a certainty now, because of the dream, that it was true. A pattern exposed by purloined nipples. John’s wife was in the dream, too, but Lorraine couldn’t see her, or at least couldn’t describe her that next day to Marge. “Maybe she owned the place,” she said with a shrug. What Lorraine didn’t tell Marge, not yet anyway, needing more time to think about it, was why Maynard had startled her so the night before, when all eyes were on John’s wife and her soaked blouse. Clear as a bell, amid the laughter and the joking and the scraping of chairs and barstools, she had heard it, like a cry of pain: “I love you!” She’d glanced around in alarm and knew as soon as she saw him that it was Maynard who’d cried out. But his lips were pressed together, his scowling face with its dark jowls was devoid of any hint of that tender emotion, and there were no signs anyone else in the room had heard it. She was sure of it, though. And the feeling she’d had about John’s wife just then, at least as she remembered it the next day, was exactly the feeling she had about her later in the dream.

Lorraine was right of course, dream prophecy or no, about Waldo’s infidelity, though she may have underestimated its extent. In truth, he was fucking around at every opportunity and the opportunities were far from few. Clarissa’s view of her father’s malls as magic spaces was one Waldo, had he known of it, would have shared. Since John had moved the home decoration business out to the new big one, Waldo was having a rousing great time, working some of the same turf Clarissa did, though at a different mall. He could have done with a more intimate business maybe than paint and wallpaper, but Waldo could work bedroom fabrics and bathroom fixtures like others worked novelties and lingerie, and there were always the food courts and the movie lobbies and the corridor outside his place of business which faced a bank of phones and a ladies’ room. Much of the traffic was off the highway, it was like meeting in an airport terminal, but his targets were less the transient crowds than the mall’s own working staff, a lot of them drifters themselves, migrant labor from out of town, just passing through. He’d hired a lot of them, with or without the telltale bruises on the inner arms that made them more vulnerable, and fucked not a few. He’d had some bad times, some of these gals being pretty tough cookies and a far cry from the sorority debs of the golden age, but mostly good times, hard, clean, invigorating, and without complicating residue. Quickies he took to a little office behind the stock room, a Vice Presidential perk (thanks, good brother John), but for true love he used Dutch’s motel, his old pal there having given him a key to use, asking only that he call ahead to be sure the room was free. It made Waldo proud to live in a place where folks went out of their way for you, just because they knew and respected you. Smalltown life: shit, you couldn’t beat it with a stick.

Dutch, who shared Waldo’s appreciation of smalltown life, was grateful to the paint-and-wallpaper man for taking up some of the slack at the motel with his impromptu midday affairs when otherwise business was slow, and when the room, even when curtained, was still pretty well lit. Like a clear stream on a gray day. Dutch now owned a piece of the new luxury motel up near the Interstate and had money in a number of John’s enterprises, including his cargo operations, but his little motel at the edge of Settler’s Woods with its Getaway Bar and Grill and secret Back Room was his real home and where you could usually find him any hour of any day when he wasn’t fishing. Dutch of course preferred his performers young, high school fumblers and nervous virgins festooned with zits, cocky college kids excitedly bringing home their newly acquired expertise, but this was prime-time pageantry mostly. For daytime shows you had to take what you could get. True, there was something drearily predictable about Waldo’s scores, but for Dutch, a movieseat connoisseur by now of meat fever’s finer points, there were never ever two exactly alike, and Waldo himself was always open to any kind of goofiness and generous with the money that perked these women up, losers mostly, or at least that helped them go along with Waldo’s games, which, depending on how much he’d had to drink, could be a bit rough but never mean. The most memorable of recent vintage was the woman with the colored dice tattooed between her tits and what looked like the Second Coming all over her butt (Dutch, silently, pleaded with Waldo to bring the woman over to the mirror to show him the sights, but no such luck), who told Waldo, in between humps, if he gave her a hundred-dollar bill she’d turn a trick he’d never seen before. Waldo, grinning expectantly, got one out. She rolled it up carefully, holding it up for him to see, then, spreading her legs wide to give him, and Dutch, too, a good view, slowly inserted it into her gash, pushing it deeper and deeper until it disappeared. Then she invited Waldo to try to get it out of there without using his hands. This was the sort of challenge the old sportsman relished, especially whilst recharging, and laughing his donkey laugh, he went after it with mouth, tongue, nose, cock, even his toes. “Give up?” “Naw!” He tried some of the gadgets that Dutch left lying around in that room (“No hands!” the woman giggled, the dice bouncing on her chest), but finally it was the simplest tool that worked: his own breast-pocket toothbrush clenched between his teeth. He worked the brush end in past the rolled-up bill and slowly eased it out of there. He unrolled it and what he found was a single dollar bill. “Haw!” he snorted in amazement and went fishing with his hands, causing the woman to whoop and squeal, but that C-note was gone for good. To Waldo’s credit: to his delight. He gave that apocalyptic high roller a good fucking after and tucked another hundred up her gully to match. Witnessing Waldo having a poke was, admittedly, about as much fun most of the time as watching slugs fuck, but Dutch admired the guy’s gutsy persistence, his bighearted determination to get it up, and up again. Too many wimps in this town got turned into grumpy house pets too fast, and as for their women, if they were having it off with other men more like men, this was not, for the most part, happening at Dutch’s motel, though there were entertaining exceptions, Daphne and her young well-hung mechanic most recently. Irregular showtimes, but most often between lunch and happy hour. Daphne’s ass had, to put it kindly, matured over the years, but then so had everyone else’s, Dutch’s included, he did not begrudge her this, especially given the exhibition the two of them were staging for him now. They went at it like animals, ravenous and wild, and Dutch, too, watching them from the Back Room, would often find himself up on his feet and pumping away like a madman, having to bite his tongue to keep from letting out a whoop when he popped his cork. And it was after one of these sheet-ripping furniture-wrecking sessions one afternoon that Dutch suffered a jolt of déjà vu that took him back a decade or more to the days when his motel was new, when old Stu’s Winnie was still alive and Stu and Daphne were going at it in this same room. It was Daphne who brought it up then, too, if he remembered rightly. Now, Daph and her grease monkey were stretched out smoking and Dutch had just zipped up and turned to leave the Back Room, go check on things at the bar, when, over his shoulder and on the other side of the mirror, he heard Daphne say: “Hey, lover. Listen. What are we going to do about the old man?”

Déjà vu, as Ellsworth could have told anyone who wanted to know, was French for “already seen,” and was properly used to describe that uncanny but illusory experience of feeling that something that was happening for the first time had actually happened before. It was in this sense that he had used it in his novel-in-progress when the Artist, leading his Model down to a riverbank and perching her on a stone there, has the sensation suddenly, as the Model leans forward to peer down into the gently flowing river, that he has witnessed this entire scene before, perhaps in a dream or a vision, but certainly at some psychic level profounder yet less concrete than the literal prospect that confronts him now. Alas, this was another scene largely obliterated by the Stalker: only the barren stone remained like an unoccupied pedestal, or something hard fallen into reality, inexplicably, out of a dream. Dreams and déjà vu often seemed to go together. The preacher’s wife Beatrice tripping or Lorraine in the middle of her histrionic nighttime theater often felt that they somehow “recognized” the scenes they were in, as though from another life, just as Floyd, slicing the throat of the redhaired faggot outside Wichita, had the uncanny feeling, and not for the first time in such matters, that it had all happened before, as if in a crazy dream he’d had. Or, weirdly, was still having. What caused Veronica to faint in church when Reverend Lenny quoted from the Second Letter of John the Elder to the Elect Lady and Her Children, if it was not this sort of déjà vu? When Opal remarked to Kate, back before the librarian died, that sometimes she felt like she’d dreamt her whole life before living it (she’d only meant to suggest how simple and predictable it all was), her friend had frightened her by replying: “You probably have some childhood story you don’t want to tell me, Opal…” That Kate. She’d also told Opal once that falling in love in a dream and then meeting that love in real life, an example of déjà vu often reported, if seldom believed, should not be regarded as an uncanny experience at all, and that those who did so held to an outdated, mechanistically passive theory of perception. “The percept is, always, a creation,” she said, or something like that. Over Opal’s head, really, and when she said so, Kate said: “We see what we want to see.” “Oh yes.” When Clarissa and Jennifer asked Uncle Bruce if he believed it was possible to fall in love in a dream, he said it was the only way he had ever fallen in love, all the women he had loved and even some of those he had married he had met first in dreams, and it was just a matter of recognizing them when they turned up later. In fact, he was still waiting for some of his dream loves to show up in the real world. Then a wink their way: or grow up.

That dreamlike “I’ve been here before” feeling that occasionally overwhelms travelers to strange realms was one that, with all its force, struck young Turtle, alias Maynard III, alias Little, alias Nerd the Turd (at the moment he felt most like Little), when he found himself at last face-to-face, so to speak, with that which he was certain he had never seen before, and by a route unavailable to him until just recently: a keyhole. He supposed there were a lot of houses in town with keyholes you could see through, but the houses his parents always lived in were too new, and maybe that was why they were so unhappy. Ever since his best buddy Fish pointed them out to him, Turtle had been peering through all the keyholes he could find, but mostly at the manse where he hoped he might see Jennifer in her underwear or Zoe taking a pee or something; there weren’t any girls in his own house either, just his old mom. Usually he did this when Fish was not around, because it seemed to make Fish mad for reasons Turtle could not understand, not after he’d told him about keyholes in the first place. For all the time he spent stooped over and squinting through them, though, it seemed that all he was going to get out of it was a bad reputation around the manse, since he’d seen nothing, but they’d all seen him (Jennifer snuck up from behind one day and gave him a terrific kick that made him wham his eyebrow into the doorknob, and she called him a turdy nerd and a jerkoff and a sick little weirdo, it was as bad as what his mom was calling his dad these days, and about all he could do, and it wasn’t much, was stick his tongue out at her and silently wish her pitched straight into hell on the end of a hot fork), but then one day there it was, like a magic show. It was the first thing he saw as he bent down to peek and at first he didn’t even know what it was until he finally recognized the big fat legs sticking out on both sides of it. Wow. It—she—was lying out flat on a bed with her knees over the side, completely naked except for a pair of bright red boots with paired horses’ heads burned into the sides as though with branding irons, and her eyes were wide open, but it was like she was asleep. By now, he was inside the room (that was how he could tell about her eyes), but he didn’t remember opening the door and coming in and he was pretty sure the door was still shut behind him. She didn’t seem to mind that he was there or maybe she didn’t even see him, so he leaned down to get a closer look and this was when he had that powerful sense of having been here before though he knew he hadn’t. Maybe it reminded him of something he had seen at the state park where they had all those funny rock formations and tall skinny caves. It was dark and damp-smelling and hairy all around, which made it seem secretive and hidden, but the thing itself, as best he could tell where the inside began and the outside ended, was soft and pink and puffy with a little lidded bump on top which he knew the name of from the books Fish had shown him but which felt different than he expected when he touched it. Under the bump, it seemed to become paler and paler in color the more toward the middle you got, almost like, deep inside, at, like, floor level, there was a light on. As Turtle knelt down as to a keyhole to see what he could see, he suddenly remembered old man Floyd hooting out in Sunday school: “If your right eye causes you to sin, pluck it out and throw it away!” Yikes. So he changed his position and, pushing her heavy legs apart so as to get in closer, peeked in with his left.

While the experiences of Little, Floyd, or Ellsworth’s Artist were classic examples of déjà vu, the term was also often used, more loosely, to take note of cyclical or repetitive behavior or occurrences, or to describe one’s sudden awareness of the similarity of events distant from one another in time. This was the sort of déjà vu Dutch was experiencing when he heard Daphne deliver a line much like one he’d heard a decade or so earlier but had since forgotten, a line with dramatic consequences then, perhaps again now. Or that which Nevada felt a short time later when, looking into the boyish face of a new sexual partner, she thought she found traces of an old love there. It was the sort of déjà vu that the police chief Otis suffered on that earlier occasion when dead Winnie’s expression behind the shattered windshield of the wrecked car recalled one he had been confronted with the day before when she was still alive, an experience that, for a while anyway, changed his life. It might well describe that initial shock that Pauline felt that same day when, her husband preoccupied with his photos of the wreck, she saw those pictures in his secret albums that he’d taken of his mother years before: déjà vu. Even Alf, much less superstitious or susceptible to emotional reactions than either Otis or Pauline, experienced something not unlike déjà vu that night of the wreck when, somewhat drunkenly, he was helping his driver haul old Stu out through the sprung door on the driver’s side and worrying how the hell they were going to extricate the pinned and crushed body of Winnie from the other side. Everyone else out there at the humpback bridge that night was wandering around in a state that reminded Alf of shell-shocked war victims, and when that dwarfish clubfooted woman, later known to him as Cornell’s new wife Gretchen, came stumbling down the side of the ditch to help, he had sudden total recall of a battle scene during the war when a limping gnomelike creature, apparently out there scavenging from the dead, took time out from corpse robbing to help Alf dig a survivor out from under fallen debris, and afterwards he could not remember if that battle scene had ever taken place or if it was something he had seen in a movie or read about or only imagined. As for Gretchen’s husband Cornell, gripping the steering wheel of his car up on the road that night of the wreck as though suffering a sudden seizure, whether or not he was experiencing anything like déjà vu at that moment, as his alarmed expression might have suggested, will never be known. Certainly the confused young man would have had no idea what the strange phrase meant, having repressed what little of that unfriendly language he learned in school after his postgraduation trip to Paris, retaining only a single French word, picked up over there on that awesome occasion, a word he never learned the meaning of, though forget it he never could. Returning with his bottle of wine that last night, though not the one she had in her perversity sent him out to find, he discovered that Marie-Claire had sprayed it gaudily on her studio wall: HINK. Probably there was meant to be another letter afterwards, but Marie-Claire’s paint ran out, so to speak. There was just a long red swath down to the floor where Marie-Claire lay, her naked body, cooling, whiter than one of her fresh unpainted canvases. All now slashed to ribbons, the painted ones as well.

One of these slashed paintings, the only one known to have survived the artist (big money alone rescued this one from her tight-lipped parents’ conflagration), found its way eventually to a back corner of John’s and Bruce’s fishing cabin, where Bruce was able to study it at his leisure, and his impression, after taking it down from the wall and folding its tatters back into place, was that it had not been slashed randomly: there was a pattern to the violence, as to the painting that preceded it. The original image on the canvas had been produced by the flinging of paint, from a can perhaps, or a loaded brush, maybe just by fistfuls (two parallel smudged fingerprints in a patch of green suggested this, a swipe at the ground itself as though to scar it), but there were powerful intimations in these blots and streaks and splotches of a life-crazed universe, utterly mad and made more so by the erotic urge, suggested by the vibrant untempered colors and their sensuous but frenzied encounters on the raw canvas, itself pale as bloodless flesh. The instrument Marie-Claire had used to rip up this cosmorama had been razor sharp, and she had blitzed it from the outside in, circling round in her offensive as though to entrap her prey before annihilating it. Her slashing, then, for all its daffy passion, appeared as a kind of hopeful, rational, and moral act, a defiant assault upon the heedless force that disturbed the universe at its core, seeding it with impossible dreams, and that deluded and destroyed its bearers incarnate. Of which, Bruce one: Marie-Claire had clearly been a kindred spirit, a pity he never knew her. He’d nearly had that pleasure. John had called him a few weeks before she died, asking him to come down and take her off his hands. She had returned to John’s town, it seemed, to pay respects at her ex-soldierboy’s tomb and attend the christening of her goddaughter, and, these pious rites accomplished, had progressed to more ecstatic ones, John the object now of her devotions. And thus his call to Bruce, committed at that moment, regrettably, to a high-risk Caribbean business deal and unable to rush to his old pal’s rescue, delightful though that task appeared. Clothing had become a nuisance that week to Marie-Claire, an encumbrance to be cast off that the spirit might soar (the skin would have to go, too, of course, Bruce foresaw that in his kindredness), and since the spirit might launch itself abruptly from any street corner or market aisle, taking her out anywhere was risky, while keeping her at home made home a wacky and sometimes dangerous place, John’s wife recovering still from the difficult birth, so somewhat remote and difficult even to focus upon (even more so nowadays for reasons Bruce did not understand) in the presence of that vivid dark-ringleted beauty, wet from the bath, say, dancing wildly through the house while singing “Mademoiselle from Armentières” in a schoolgirl’s sweet and vulnerable voice, and dressed only in bright silk scarves (the famous Marie-Claire palette) knotted round her thighs and throat. John, seeking escape and release as well, made the mistake of taking this manic creature up in his private skymobile: a glorious feast (quoth John), but she painted the landscape below with her flimsy things and might have flung her flimsy self out at that hard canvas as well had not John, his ardor cooled and flying one-handed, restrained her with a desperate fingerlock deep within her nether canals. He’d had to sneak her home that afternoon in greasy airport coveralls, plotting the while her quick return to Paris.

Accomplished, but not before further indiscretions, the most spectacular being the night the uninhibited young mam’selle danced bare-assed and -foot on broken glass out at the Country Tavern at the edge of Settler’s Woods, giving those old boys out there a vision that the next day they’d only half-believe, she having run away from John’s house in anger after receiving no encouraging reply to her demand, issued in their master bedroom where John was just stepping into pajamas and his wife was feeding the insatiable baby: “Wut ees happen to ze hainqui-dainqui—?!” The young rookie cop on the beat that night was Otis, recently returned war hero and onetime Tavern regular, and fortunately, when called out (“Get your ass out here, Otis! On the double! She’s smashing up the fucking place!”), he recognized the freaky girl from previous sightings around town and called up John, who called in Alf, who sedated her on a beer-stained table out there with a shot in her tight little fanny, Otis remarking to himself as he helped hold the wild thing down that this was the same table on which he’d carved the confession of his secret love many years before. Still in high school then, football over for the year, beer season begun. Yes, there it was, near the edge, much scarred over now with other hatchmarks and obscenities (a comically bespectacled cock-and-balls, for example, borrowing the V for one egg and poking erectly through the O of LOVE) and the accumulative hammerings of fists and bottles, and darkened with grease and beer and spit and sweat, but visible still and in fact grown more distinctive with age, he’d scored it deep. He hoped John, gripping the mad quivering girl on the other side, didn’t see it, though he wouldn’t know who’d cut it there even if he did. Could have been anyone, Otis had no monopoly on his love, any more than he had a monopoly on his religion or his patriotism, much as they may have defined him. And he was glad it was there, glad he’d done it, even if it was the sort of crime against property he was now paid to punish. He felt that for once in his life, he’d made a statement, definitive and true, a pledge of sorts that would ever guide him, and all the better only he could read it.

The interlacing of caricaturesque cock with Otis’s solemn declaration on the tavern table, rediscovered by the young police officer the night of Marie-Claire’s demented dance, had been accomplished four years earlier during the stag party the night before John’s wedding, Otis then away at war, the innovative artist one of John’s visiting fraternity brothers, known to all as Beans. The caricature, given away by the horn-rimmed specs: that of his best mate Brains, not, alas, in attendance at this historic occasion, being summer-scholared off to Oxford, thence no doubt to worlds beyond that bonehead Beans would never know, and so, sad times ahead. That anyway was Beans’s doleful mood the night he ravished Otis’s chaste troth on the tavern table with his own loving tribute to his friend. As Bruce to John, so Beans to Brains, pals inseparable, or so it had seemed to Beans until that fateful night. Or morning: the hour was uncertain. Beans sat in a stupor so thick it had evidently stopped his watch as well. Music played still on the old relic of a jukebox, a twangy stuff that scratched at Beans’s inner ear with the persistence of a gnawing rodent, while drunken cardplayers growled and snorted fitfully in a cigar haze nearby, and on the far wall blue movies flickered silently, bare botties humping away with the dull regularity of waves breaking on a rocky beach. On a drizzly day. Staring at them, Beans thought: nothing ever changes. The old bump and grind: all there is, and all there’ll ever be. Over by the ancient upright piano, a naked ex-wrestler, bruised and grimy, snored peacefully, his privates lidded with an overturned ashtray. Someone had tied his big toe to the tripodded cymbals: that hope that springs eternal going for one last moment of whoopee. Too late. It had been a glorious day full of song and laughter and world-class inebriants—in the hotel bar, on the golf course, at the wedding rehearsal and the dinner after (where Beans had stolen the show, he wished old Brains had been there to see it), and then out here at the Country Tavern, where, among his many feats of elocutionary prowess and athletic skill, he’d won with customary style the farting contest—but now the party was over. His fraternity brothers were all gone, and most everyone else as well. Did he see them go? Couldn’t remember. It was like they were here, and then they weren’t here. Like old Brains himself: it almost seemed like he never was. Beans was alone at table with his Swiss Army knife and a bucket of stale beer and a sorrowful heart, his future—dull, lonely, and utterly predictable—spread out before him like those rolling landscapes of cleft flesh on the far wall: pale fugitive routes to a black and bottomless pit.

It was the announcement of the farting contest, at which Beans was soon to excel, that finally drove an appalled and long-suffering Maynard out of the Country Tavern that night, but had he known the consequences of that hasty retreat, he would have been glad to stay and blow the fucking Ninth Symphony out his ass, and throw in the “Hallelujah Chorus” for an encore. He’d hated every minute of the night as he was to hate every minute of the wedding day to follow, and all he wanted at the time was to get the hell out of there and go home. So when he got in the way of John and his asshole buddies trying to sneak out of the place and insisted they take him along, he’d thought he was just catching a ride into town. He was so goddamned upset he was nearly bawling, so they’d finally given in, not out of charity or palhood, but so as not to draw attention to themselves, the chickenshits. And that was how Maynard, condemned to Nerdhood and member all his life of little else, became a member of the Dirty Six and, in the end, maybe the dirtiest of the bunch. Certainly the stupidest. How had he let it happen? If he hadn’t been keeping his distance from his insufferable cousin all night he might have noticed how weird they were all acting, and shown a bit more caution. Harvie the druggist’s son had apparently concocted some kind of hallucinogenic brew they’d been throwing down and they’d all blown their fucking gourds. When they tried to force some of the crap on Maynard on the way to the clubhouse, he pretended to drink it but didn’t. Later, though, when they’d pulled his pants down and got him between the legs of the girl, they’d shot it up his ass like an enema, using an old mosquito spray gun that hung on the wall out there and a lot of brute force. The gangbang was one thing, a helluva way to lose your cherry, but worse was to happen. For one thing, although everything suddenly had become lucidly clear to Maynard as though he’d just been given a total vision of the way the whole goddamned world worked, he found he’d lost control of his emotions. When he felt like crying or screaming, he heard himself laughing like a freaking maniac. When Harvie, testing the limits of the young kid’s womb with his impossible broompole during their climactic six-on-one (Maynard was in her right hand), leaned down deliriously in mid-orgasm toward John’s hairy ass, bucking away in front of his face, and took an ecstatic bite, Maynard, in horror and revulsion, let out an ecstatic yahoo of his own and blew jism all over what might be called the trysting place, coming for the first time really all night, though in truth it hurt like hell and gave him the peculiar impression for a moment that he was vomiting between his eyes. He loathed his cousin with all his heart, but when, over the little glassy-eyed guttersnipe’s exhausted body, greasy with sweat and cum, Dutch proposed a toast, in all fucking seriousness, to John’s bride of the morrow, Maynard found himself falling between John’s bare arms and weeping like a baby with loving gratitude. Gratitude—?! It was terrible. And the worse it was, the more he seemed to be enjoying himself. He was overswept by a mortifying shame, being a man who never let himself go in public, but hated it when he had to put his clothes back on, singing them all an Indian war-song while dancing around buck-naked, wearing his shorts on his head like a chieftain’s feathers. They had to wrestle him back into his clothes just as they’d wrestled him out of them. At Dutch’s insistence, they took up a collection to pay the little tramp, whom they’d just learned was only fourteen years old, though she looked too out of it to care one way or the other about money. Dutch started it by tossing two twenties and a ten down on her bare belly, John raised him twenty on her glistening pubes, Dutch matched him up her privates with a grin. That got everyone into it, and in the end they all emptied out their pockets on or in her anatomy, which seemed to be rolling and heaving like a storm-tossed sea. Maynard was only carrying about fifteen or so, but he threw in everything he had, slapping it down in the sticky place between her undulating breasts where John had been as though spreading a royal flush. He felt like he was being robbed and, god, it was wonderful. Sheer bliss. John cut out then with heartfelt well wishes and blown kisses from all and Dutch said he’d take the little jailbait home to the trailer park; he asked Maynard to come along: she was dead meat and he’d need help. Nothing Maynard wanted more than to spring his wretched ass out of that reeling hellhole, but he couldn’t move. Couldn’t leave his old pals Harvie and what’s-his-name and the other guy, could he? Christ, Dutch! Have a fucking heart! He was taking his clothes off again, but he had tears in his eyes. “Hey, buddy,” Dutch whispered in his ear, one heavy arm wrapped around his shoulder as though clapping him in irons, “the best is yet to come! C’mon, now, let go your dick and give me a hand.”

The dress Pauline wore to John’s bachelor party, torn and stained though it was after, lasted her all through high school; nowadays, her clothes didn’t seem to last her a week. She had been carhopping at a rootbeer drive-in that spring (Daddy Duwayne turned up sometime before Memorial Day, drunk and dangerous, and lost her her job), so when the fat boy invited her to the party, she used up all she’d saved to buy a sleeveless princess dress, a see-through bra, and new panties with a little lace fringe all round. She didn’t have enough left over for new shoes or tights, so she had to go in her old school shoes and socks, the ones with the school colors at the tops. These, one shoe, and the dress were all she got home with, the dress in bad shape already and even worse after Daddy Duwayne got done with her, but she mended it and washed it and went on wearing it right up until the time she moved into Gordon’s studio—in fact, it was still in the trailer when she and Otis went there after Daddy Duwayne’s arrest, only Daddy Duwayne had hung it up in the toilet and shot it full of holes. For three or four years after that, she and Otis were close friends and visited the trailer together a lot, until something happened, she never figured out what (when she went to the police station and asked him, Otis turned red and wouldn’t even look at her and said in his barking way that “that case was solved,” or something like that), and they didn’t become really good friends again for several years. In the meantime, though, the city cleaned up the trailer park and condemned Daddy Duwayne’s trailer and hauled it away, and Otis got them to give her compensation for it, which she appreciated, since Gordon was nice to her but never gave her any money to spend. She bought some new designer jeans, a quilted anorak, some pretty blouses and a beaded vest, new pantyhose and underwear, a slinky sweater, a pair of ankle boots and some wedgies, popular back then, and three new dresses, including one with screenprint reproductions of the World’s Fair, which was her favorite, and she was still wearing almost all these things seven or eight years later—really, right up until the last couple of weeks, when suddenly nothing seemed to fit anymore, not even the boots. Well, age was catching up with her, she supposed, you can’t stay in kid sizes forever, and she made a trip out to one of the malls to buy a few new things, using money from the cash register that Gordon never missed. She’d hardly got used to her new clothes, however, when they no longer seemed to fit either. She split the new pantyhose trying to get them on, the jeans seemed to have shrunk before they’d even been washed, she couldn’t get the nice sloppy sweater with silver tears and glitter on over her head, and her new full skirt suddenly wasn’t full anymore. So, in pinned skirt, bedroom slippers, and one of Gordon’s cardigans, she went hurrying out there again. As she passed through the food court with its delicious smells, she felt a terrible urge to stop for pancakes or a hamburger or maybe several, but she was afraid if she did she might not make it to the fashion shops in time. The safety pin popped on the skirt even as she ran past the video arcade. She not only needed new clothes, she needed them right away.

Clarissa, Jennifer, and Nevada were sitting at a table near the taco bar when Pauline went galumphing by, but only Nevada noticed her, the girls too absorbed with Uncle Bruce’s beautiful girlfriend, whom both supposed to be at least a famous model and maybe even a singer or a movie star. It was amazing running into her out here, and they were both flattered that Nevada recognized them and actually took time to sit down with them and have a smoke and a diet cola with a lemon slice in it. This was hardly Hollywood or the Riviera, and Clarissa suddenly felt embarrassed about this place that she and Jennifer loved so, but when she tried to apologize for it, Nevada waved at her own smoke and said very emphatically, “Your father’s a great builder,” and that made it all right again. Clarissa knew that everyone sitting around them was watching them, and she wished her dad had not made her promise not to take up cigarettes because she felt it would be really cool now to share one with Nevada. When Clarissa asked if Uncle Bruce was in town, Nevada exhaled with pursed lips, smiled, and said: “Well, he’s been in … and out…” When she smiled, you realized she wasn’t quite so young after all, but the little lines that appeared, Clarissa thought, made her more beautiful than ever in a kind of wicked and knowing way. It was how Marie-Claire must have looked. She could see why Uncle Bruce would be crazy about her, at least for a while, but she wasn’t at all jealous, or anyway not very. Jennifer was the real problem. When Nevada asked her where her mother was, Clarissa said she was pretty busy these days and didn’t seem to be around much (busy at what? Clarissa didn’t know), maybe she was on a trip somewhere, and Jen said, “My mom’s always on a trip somewhere,” which made Nevada smile again. Clarissa started to say that Granny Opal, who had brought them out here, had gone to the nursing home to visit her granddad who’d had a stroke, but thought better of it in the nick of time, and instead, pushing her hands into her leather jacket, she asked: “Did Uncle Bruce fly here in his own plane?” “Yes, we both did. He has a new one, you know, a jet. A real dream. Would you two like to go up with us sometime?” “Oh yes!” they both exclaimed at once, and Nevada smiled again, but this time more at Jennifer than at Clarissa, and this gave Clarissa a very unpleasant feeling. What was worse, she could see Granny Opal coming through the door at the far end with that dippy old-lady smile on her face, which for some reason made her want to hit Jennifer. Maybe Bruce’s girlfriend saw her, too, or saw it all in Clarissa’s face, because she stubbed out her smoke, tossed some money on the table (way too much, it was very flamboyant and showed the kinds of places she was used to), and rising in a very smart way that was almost like from a TV commercial, said: “Hey, it’s been cool, team. I like this place. It’s funky and real.” Was she making fun? It didn’t seem like it. Certainly Nevada seemed very sincere when she smiled down at them and added: “I’ll catch you here again sometime soon.”

It disturbed Opal to see the two children sitting with that older woman with the mask-like face who worked for John (when Opal asked her son one day what the woman did, he said she was his troubleshooter, and Opal wondered then: what trouble?), especially when the woman got up and left hurriedly without looking back as though sensing that Opal was approaching the table—what did it mean? what was going on?—but Opal was disturbed by so many things of late, this particular disturbance seemed relatively insignificant and was quickly shelved in a back corner of her mind: little Clarissa was a clever child and could take care of herself. Opal was less assured of her own ability to do so: she felt bewildered, apprehensive, and alone. She had just been visiting Barnaby who as usual mistook her for Audrey, and Opal, for one disorienting moment, had found herself answering back as though she were indeed Barnaby’s dead wife, defending her in her own voice, as it were, from Barnaby’s befuddled harangue. Then, that peculiar goggle-eyed photographer had lumbered into the room uninvited and started taking pictures of poor old Barnaby, standing there scratching his neck, unshaven and dentures removed, dribbling a bit, head cocked awkwardly to one side, bathrobe gaping and the fly of his boxer shorts, too, and Opal, finding this rude intrusion an insult to the old gentleman’s dignity, had upbraided the photographer smartly and sent him backpedaling out the door, again behaving more like Audrey than herself. She had felt certain she had done the right thing, but such outbursts were so rare for her, she had felt faint afterwards, her heart palpitating and her hands shaking, and she had had to sit down suddenly, while Barnaby, cursing her and the rest of the world, staggered off to the bathroom, dragging one leg like an accusation. What was worse, Opal had seen something inside the gaping robe that made her believe Barnaby might be contemplating taking his own life, and she didn’t know what to do about it, or whom to tell. The truth was, at this time in her life, Opal no longer had anyone she could confide in. Her grandchildren, though still dearer to her than her own life, had begun to distance themselves from her; her husband Mitch, having become very important up at the state capitol, was rarely in town anymore, much less at home; her best friends were all passed away; her brother Maynard, with whom she had never been close anyway, was slipping into senility; the young preacher, whom she had also run into at the retirement home, making his pastoral rounds, seemed to her to be on cloud nine most of the time (something Audrey always used to say) and of no use as a source of sane counsel; and even her son and his wife were rarely to be seen, seeming each to be living a life at some remove from her own—even when they were in the same room together, it was as though they existed on different planes, able to pass right through one another without touching. If she spoke up and said, “I believe Barnaby may be thinking about killing himself,” who would listen? She was invisible. Perhaps Barnaby felt the same way. He was very angry about something, and no one was paying any attention. It seemed to have to do with business. He believed Audrey had done something that had destroyed his company. But of course it wasn’t destroyed, it was ticking along very nicely, thank you, one reason Opal saw so little of her son these days. So maybe it was something that had happened years and years ago, if at all. Barnaby took business too seriously. As if he should be worrying about such things now, poor man! It was what had brought on his stroke, as best Opal could tell, she having been at that sad dinner when the old fellow collapsed. There had been some sort of bad news phoned in—Opal, distracted by little Mikey who had come into the dining room to show her his disappearing lipstick trick, not even trying to understand it—and down he’d gone. A shock to everyone. She herself had not been able to move, and later remembered what her friend Kate had said about the moment she got the news of her son Yale’s death: “Time stood still’ That hackneyed line from cheap novels. I suddenly understood it, Opal. Everything stopped. Cold. It was the freezing form that anguish takes in the human heart and mind, turning everything, even time, to stone.” When the ambulance came to take Barnaby away, Opal had found herself in the kitchen, washing dishes, though John and his wife had more than enough domestic help, and talking out loud about the strange but beautiful accidents families were. Was John’s wife standing there with her? She seemed to be. “He’ll be all right,” Opal had said, but perhaps only to her invisible self. And now, here he was, the shattered old man, consumed by rage and resentment, and much of it directed against his own son-in-law, in spite of all that John was doing for him, finding the best doctors, watching over his business, naming the new civic center after him (the dedication ceremony one of the few wholly happy events in Opal’s life of late), and providing generously for him now when he was no longer able to provide for himself. It was tragic, really. Opal hoped her own mind would be clearer when the time came for John to take care of her, so that she could let him know how appreciative she was. It was scary to think about. But it might not be the worst thing that had happened to her. She’d be free from her frettings, for one thing, which now, in her solitude, were quite getting her down. And even if she might not be able to understand it all perfectly, she and her son would be close again, for the first time really since he was a little boy.

Who was that tedious old woman who had just left him? Barnaby couldn’t remember, didn’t really care. Thought for a moment it was Audrey and he started taking his frustration out on her, but the words didn’t come out right. And then he knew it wasn’t Audrey, Audrey was dead, and he shut up, feeling like a fool. Or two fools, more like it, he seemed to have two brains working at once, and neither of them worth a bent nail. What was on his mind, or minds, when he first got out of hospital, was how to kill himself. Whatever he attempted, they’d try to stop him, he knew that, and though it wasn’t his intention, trying to outwit them probably helped keep his broken cookie from crumbling altogether, at least for a while. John had already arranged for his incarceration in this “assisted living” complex, as it was euphemistically called, and it was well-furnished but in John’s style, which is to say, as impersonal as a chain hotel suite. Barnaby told them with what words he could find and get out that he wanted some of his own things, and he insisted on being taken to his old home to sort through his stuff by himself. This was not easy. Nothing worked right. It took him hours to open and close a drawer. They wanted to help, or so they said. He had to throw tantrums to chase them away and let him be. Bad luck on the hunting rifle, they’d already found it. But not his handgun. Bit of an antique, but it still fired, and it was loaded. He smuggled it out in a shoebox which he hid at the back of the closet of a senile old granny who lived down the corridor, knowing they’d search his own place, and they did. Only trouble was, he forgot where he hid it, even for a time forgot that he had hidden it, demanded to be taken back to his old home again, and when he couldn’t find it anywhere, thought they’d confiscated that, too. But hadn’t he just seen it? It was all confusing. Then, on a more or less sleepless night at four in the morning, he suddenly remembered and he went staggering down the hall, dragging his dead leg behind him, and got it. The old lady was wide awake in there, sitting propped up in bed. He nodded at her, but she just stared dimly. It was a long painful shuffle back to his room, seemed like miles, but he finally made it and prepared to shoot himself. Trouble was, he didn’t want to leave without saying goodbye to his daughter. He wanted to warn her about what was happening and to tell her he loved her. He’d tried writing this out before, but his writing was illegible. Even he couldn’t read it right after he’d written it. The next time she visited him, he’d tell her, and then he’d shoot himself. If she ever did visit him again. It had been ages. Not, as best he could remember, remembering not being what he now did best, since those ruthless civic center dedication ceremonies, when she’d turned toward him for a moment and looked him straight in the eyes, and he’d felt then like his heart was cracking just like his brain had done. Meanwhile, he hid the gun under some old letters and photos in a desk drawer and then realized, even before he’d pushed the drawer shut, that he had almost forgotten already where he’d put it. So he spent the rest of that morning stitching a kind of holster made out of a thick sock into the inside of his lounging robe, under the armpit where it was less obvious, forcing his old builder’s hands to do what, clumsied by a sundered brain, they didn’t know how to do anymore.

An impersonation of his cloven grandfather was the centerpiece of one of little Mikey’s wordless plays, one of the more awesome nights in John’s house, of which Lorraine had seen a few when John’s wide-eyed deadpan boy took center-stage. Not all those present understood what he was doing, but those like Lollie who did, did not know whether to laugh or scream. He’d put on the old man’s famous barn-red hardhat, a toybox acquisition since the stroke, and with wooden blocks had nimbly built with Barnaby’s stubborn caution a fanciful village, intricate and solid. He’d taken measurements and stroked his chin and ordered up a toy earthmover to shift a block an inch and scratched his neck and perched a pediment on high and pulled his ear and smiled the old builder’s dry manly smile to see what he had done. Trixie’s little girl, meanwhile, stood by with kerchiefed hair and John’s wife’s nubbly autumn sweater falling to her ankles, an admiring gap-toothed smile pasted flatly on her freckled face, the object of her mimicry missing the performance. Where was she? Preoccupied maybe with caterers in the kitchen. Lorraine felt like something was slipping away, but she couldn’t put her finger on it. It wasn’t John. He passed through, big as ever, clapping backs and squeezing hands, harvesting congratulations for the recent acquisitions which had inspired the night’s festivities, a company party of sorts in honor of the expanding empire. He seemed distantly amused by his son’s show, watching it with one eye only, until he was dragged away by his father Mitch, who, back turned on his odd little namesake, gruffly asked him for another drink. Lorraine’s own kid came in then with a golf club, John’s visored golf cap down round his doggy ears, and Trixie’s girl, smile stuck on her face still like a sign on a door, stepped back. Lorraine, too, glimpsing the horror of what was yet to come: she stepped back, her own face rigidly rictus-gaped as though aping little Zoe. As her boy teed up and Mikey/Barnaby, looking like he’d got his sneaker caught under a railway tie with the night express bearing down, sought frantically to wall round his town with alphabet blocks, many at the party laughed and cheered and Waldo (“Don’t do that!” Lorraine was rasping, heart stopped, voice snagged in her throat: “You’ll break something!”) yelled out: “Chin down and elbow straight, son! That’s it! Now swat that sucker!” He did, grinning under the golf cap like a moronic pinhead, a blow that sent blocks splattering every which direction, causing the guests to whoop and duck, Waldo hollering “Fore!” and falling backwards on the sofa where John’s mother Opal in all her prissy dignity sat, insouciant as the storm’s dead eye, even as that dumb clunk crashed hooting down on her. A terrifying clatter as the blocks flew, but, miraculously, nothing seemed to be broken after. Except the little builder. He rose from the rubble, his hardhat cockeyed, stumbling confusedly like one of those malfunctioning movie monsters, dragging his dead foot like a sack of concrete, one arm seemingly shriveled, the clawlike hand trembling at his belt, his face so contorted that one half somehow hung lower than the other. Mikey opened one side of his mouth and, faintly, spoke the only word he spoke all night. Most present probably heard only an animal-like grunt, but spellbound Lorraine knew what word it was: Goodbye. Marge had told her all about it. Including the part her husband Waldo, that indispensable Asst. Veep for Sales (which Lorraine pronounced, “asswipe for sale”), had played in bringing the old fellow down. “Haw! Ain’t that cute!” that corkhead snorted now, lifting himself off Opal’s lap with a stupid wink and grin, as John’s boy slowly took his crippled twitching exit, applause polite but widely scattered, most witnesses frozen where they stood like Lollie. Little Zoe, meanwhile, was nowhere to be seen, her part not so much a walk-on, it seemed, as a walk-off.

Little Zoe’s big brother Philip missed his sister’s turn, putting on a show of his own at about the same time in the downstairs toilet at the back of the house, very embarrassing. And now he had a story to tell, not about his performance (forget that), but about how it happened he was in there in the first place and what happened afterwards, a weird story but nobody he could trust enough to tell it to, now that Turtle and his family were no longer invited to this house and Turtle anyway nowhere to be found, the dumb kid’s touchy parents just barking at him when Philip dropped by asking for him. Had they locked him in his room? Wouldn’t be the first time, Turtle’s dad could get pretty mean. Zoe said she’d heard he’d run away. Fish couldn’t blame him if he had, he’d thought about it plenty of times himself, but he was surprised and, if it was true, a little hurt that Turtle hadn’t asked him along. Not that he’d have gone. No? So what was keeping such a big fish here in this little puddle? Well, in a word, Clarissa. Philip couldn’t help himself, he lusted after her sweet bod day and night. It was hopeless, she hated him, but then, he had the consoling impression she hated everybody, everybody but herself, he wasn’t the only recipient of Ms. P. T. Big Head’s icy jabs. But someday she’d need him, or need someone, and he’d be there at her elbow, and then she’d love him for the good and faithful soldier that he was. This was the centerpiece of his intensest fantasies: repentant Clarissa melting in his arms. Meanwhile, though: whatever he could get wherever he could find it, young or old, of which in this town no shortage, or such was the story he told. The truth was a bit different, sorry to say, for though he laid claim to at least a dozen girls from school, all of whom had conveniently graduated or moved elsewhere, and had lots of stories about older broads in town whose lawns he’d mowed or sidewalks shoveled, Fish in point of fact had yet to score and wondered if he was the only guy his age in the Western world whose hand was all he knew of that great mystery. Such a mystery was not even on his mind, though, when that ugly old fart with the meaty honker walked in on him in the john a few minutes ago and started upbraiding him for weakening all his manly faculties with self-abuse. That dickhead was running for mayor? What a town. All Fish was trying to do at the time was pee through a hard-on. So how come he had a hard-on? For starters, because he always had one, or anyhow almost always, the main exceptions being in gym class showers, on trips to the dentist, and during his old man’s Sunday sermons. But also in this instance because of, one, Clarissa’s underwear drawer (he’d been pawing around in there while everyone else had headed into the living room to catch the kiddy mime show) and, two, Clarissa’s mom, who had smiled at him when he stepped out of Clarissa’s room with his hands deep in his pockets before she disappeared into the bathroom. That smile: it was weird, she’d never even looked at him before, his occasional brags notwithstanding. But now, wow … He’d waited there in the hall for a while, all alone, holding the hot pole between his legs as though, not to raise it, but to plant it, and when time passed and she did not come out he took a chance, walked over, and tried the door. It opened. As he entered, trying to seem casual while unzipping his pants (oops, sorry, didn’t know anyone was in here), he realized that his mouth was hanging open, something he always tried to stop himself from doing, since he knew it was not his most flattering expression. He closed it and the door, blinked: the room was empty. He glanced into the shower stall, the towel cupboard, did a slow three-sixty: how had he missed her? Well. Not the first time opportunity had slipped away as though it never existed. His pants were open, his rod poking partway out: he decided he might as well go ahead and do what he’d pretended to come in here to do. In case, he found himself thinking, he needed an alibi. Which is when the old fart who was running for mayor blundered in, glowered at what he was holding, and laid into him for betraying his own body, sapping its vital juices and turning red corpuscles white. “You’ll be old and dead before your time, son. Now put that little stick away before you break it, go wash your hands, and get your damned sissified butt outa here!” Fish was only too glad to oblige. Jesus. Didn’t bother to wash his hands either, just ducked his head and shot out of there, headed for the twilit backyard, pausing only long enough in the empty kitchen to glance back at the toilet door in time to see Clarissa’s mom come out of it, she smiling at him when she noticed him gawping there. Which was the strange yet true story he had to tell, but couldn’t, the middle of it being the difficult part to explain. He saw Jennifer and Clarissa back in the shadows of the rose garden gazebo, also giving little Mikey’s dumbshow a miss. He could tell by the way they were hunched over they were doing lines of coke. He approached them hopefully, trying to remember to keep his jaw closed, even though he knew they didn’t want him around and would only insult him. But what could he do? Could he help it if he was madly in love with the little fast-track queen of the mall rats? “Hey,” he said, drifting up. “Hey, it’s the Creep,” said his ladylove. “Get lost, asshole.”

The Creep’s mother, also Jennifer’s and little Zoe’s, once known as Trixie the go-go dancer and now as Beatrice the preacher’s wife, had arrived at that party straight from church choir practice, feeling exhilarated. The singing had been unusually harmonious that afternoon, as though God had got inside them all and made his presence felt, an experience that always had an agreeably erotic effect on Beatrice. After everyone had left, many to get dressed for John’s party, Beatrice, wishing to prolong this sweet musical communion, had stayed on to practice the organ for a while, letting the sacred melodies flow through her and into the organ pipes like the pumping of God’s blood, feeling at one with herself and with the universe. And with the organ, she becoming its adjunct, the instrument’s instrument, the pedals and keys her feet’s and fingers’ very reason for being, their raisin-something, as a teacher, one of her many teachers, once put it, and the same could be said for score and eyes, bench and bottom, music and mind—all of a piece, like some kind of magic! How happy she was! She’d never played better! Or been played better! As the music throbbed through her expanded body, her heart beating, her pipes resonating, in time to the turning of the spheres, tears of gratitude and intense well-being came to her eyes—and were still there, in the corners of her eyes, giving them an appealing twinkle, when she arrived at John’s party just before sundown, still a bit breathless and full of nameless joy. John squeezed her hand with both of his when she came in, gave her a hug; her husband smiled at her from across the room; her smallest child, dressed in a sweater miles too big for her, one of Mikey’s mother’s, came to ask for her help in tying a kerchief in her hair; someone brought her a glass of bubbly wine. It was as though Beatrice had foreseen all of this before she entered the house, perhaps during choir practice or while playing the organ, and it was all very beautiful. Her husband was beautiful, John’s house was beautiful, her friends were beautiful, her daughter was beautiful as she stepped into the luminous center of everyone’s attention. Beatrice loved this town, these people, this moment in her life. Things weren’t perfect, but Beatrice hoped they’d never change, not at least until she got to heaven. But of course they were already changing. That’s how the world was, you couldn’t stop it, harmony was unnatural to it, constancy was. A sudden presentiment of disaster sent a shiver down Beatrices spine and deep into that core of her which till now had been the seat of such holy ecstasy. She set her glass down, her eyes beginning to mist over. Her daughter had faded from sight somehow, even as she was watching her, her husband, too, though she was not. Something violent and irreversible was about to happen. Or had already happened but was about to be made manifest. Beatrice couldn’t see it, blind to everything at that moment except her own panic and despair (where was John’s wife?), but she could feel it. “Yipes!” she yelped when the blocks flew, and shrinking back, reached down with both hands to touch her tummy. Oh no, she thought. It can’t be. I’m pregnant again.

Beatrice’s apprehension of change, both imminent and immanent, was shared by many at that time, even at that moment, but not by all in town, lulled as they were by the walls around them, the immutable routines their lives were locked in, the regularity of their bowel movements. Even among those who acknowledged what Ellsworth called in his fortieth-birthday poem “the ever-whirling Wheel of Change” (which he sought “in vain to rearrange”), a poem published in The Town Crier a bit too close upon the automobile death of old Stu’s first wife Winnie and Stu’s snap remarriage to escape a dark joke or two at the time, many would have argued that change, too, was unchangeable, that like the heavenly bodies, it, too, had its enduring rhythms and routines, such that the very party at which Beatrice suffered her sudden perception of permutation-in-progress was itself a predesigned shaper and container of that change, and in its way unchangeable, in the way that the face of a clock, while never recording the same time twice, remained itself always the same. For some, this was terrifying, for others reassuring, just as these festivities, by which John and his wife solemnized for the town duration’s ticks and tocks, were for some a grim challenge, and for others a welcome release, tedium’s reprieve if not its remedy, and for not a few a taste of what might be but wasn’t. Waldo lived for John’s blowouts, whatever the hell they were or weren’t, Lennox surrendered to them with a passive smile admirers called beatific, Marge wished them over before they ever began, feeling herself dragged into a smug self-congratulating sacrament she didn’t believe in. John’s parties worried Otis the town guardian some, head counter and clock watcher that he was, amused Audrey in her time, provoked whimsical aphorisms from Kate (“The collective effervescence of these gatherings,” the late lamented librarian once remarked, “is like that of cheap champagne—it goes straight to your head, dissolving moral boundaries and separating self from body neat as an alchemical reaction, then awakens you, bloated and headachy, to an earthbound morning utterly without consolation …”), and whetted Veronica’s acquisitive appetites, those appetites that enraged her breadwinner Maynard so. What Veronica saw in John’s house, she sought to replicate in her own, even to the color of the bath towels and toilet paper, and by doing so thought of herself as a woman of taste. Well, no further worries for Maynard on that score: he and Ronnie had been permanently struck from the guest list since the recent company scandal, and had new things to fret and fume about: the wrecking of Maynard’s career in town since Barnaby’s stroke, for which he’d been largely blamed, their ostracization down on Main Street and out at the club, the disappearance of their son Little who had apparently run away from home when the scandal broke (Maynard, when gripped by his recurrent paranoia, could not escape the suspicion that his hard-assed cousin, in retribution, might have had the boy kidnapped), the bitterness dividing them as their social life withered and left them facing only one another. For Floyd the hardware man, who loathed every minute of John’s parties but hated it more when not invited, more and more the case with the passing years, they provided a stage for his imagined dramas of retribution, involving often as not some violation of the willing or unwilling hostess: on top of the rec room piano or the buffet-laden dining table, for example, or out on the croquet pitch in the middle of the Pioneers Day barbecue, her limbs pinned by wickets, steaks sizzling and beercaps popping. Is it the Christmas open house to which this year they had not been invited? Floyd saw himself unwrapping her beneath the decorated eight-foot tree with all the rip-it-off impatience of a kid on Christmas morning, then, the little brass bells overhead ringing acclamatorily—are you watching, John?—pumping sperm into her like great gouts of eggnog. Fantasies about banging John’s wife often enhanced Floyd’s nights with Edna, bringing a little fire and brimstone to their homespun copulations—at least at the outset, before Edna gave herself away with an airy rumble as she always did and reminded him where he was: his wife always belched when she fornicated, as though it gave her indigestion. Or cured her of it. Once, he had loved this: her vulnerability. Now it was just a part of her like her fallen arches or the fuzz on her upper lip; her chenille bedspreads, the paintings of flowers and dogs she hung on her plain papered walls.

Of course, taste like John and his wife had, that cost money: what chance did Edna have, really? Edna’s painted dogs cost five dollars each, frames included, John’s Early American portraits and cowboy pictures thousands. Nevertheless, though she greatly admired John’s house, and in fact considered it the most beautiful house she’d ever been in, more beautiful even than the ones they showed in all the magazines in the doctor’s office, Edna (perhaps unique in this respect) did not envy John’s wife and would not have liked to live in her house. Veronica might drive her husband to bankruptcy trying to duplicate it and Marge might be so embittered by all that inaccessible beauty that she had to punish herself with a kind of spiteful austerity, but not Edna. Edna was a simple woman who liked simple practical things, and John’s house was just too grand, too intimidating. She and Floyd would go to a cocktail party there or a company get-together such as the one in which their little boy put on that funny little show with his hardhat and building blocks, or maybe to wander down through all that sprawling multileveled space to the oak-paneled rec room with its upright piano and drum set and hi-fi, its antique barroom spittoons and standing ashtrays and modern Greek throw rugs, to watch (Edna by now feeling oddly transported to one of those tunnel-of-love carnival rides) home movies or a football game, or perhaps to play bridge for an evening up on the main level in front of the monumental open-hearth fireplace with its old Dutch tiles and heavy brass implements, and she’d come out feeling six inches smaller. “What’re you fidgeting about?” Floyd would ask her on the way home. “I don’t rightly know, Floyd. My girdle feels like it’s gone loose on me or something.” Sometimes Edna had the impression that John’s wife felt the same way about the house she did, that it made her feel lost and sad and small, and she understood (though not in the same sarcastic way) Marge’s cruel remark that John’s wife went well with the gold carpets: she did sometimes seem to melt right into them. In a manner of speaking, of course. Or, well, not entirely in a manner of speaking: one night playing bridge, for example, Edna had looked up from laying down her dummy hand (she’d just carried John’s wife’s opening bid to four hearts and was a trifle unsure about it) and John’s wife was not there. Or seemed not to be. Maybe she’s went to the bathroom, Edna had thought, and had glanced in that direction, but when she’d looked back, John’s wife was smartly finessing the king of hearts with a jack from the board. Edna had mentioned this to Floyd afterwards, but all he’d said was: “She was lucky to make it, you overbid the hand.” Maybe I should ought to have my spectacles checked, she’d thought, not knowing that Marge herself had had something like the selfsame experience, though at dinner, not at bridge.

Marge had missed Mikey’s sundered-grandpa skit, boycotting, over her husband Trevor’s soft but stubborn protest, that heartless victory whoop-up, the preliminaries for which, however, she had witnessed at the most painful dinner party she had ever attended, a ceremonial gathering called to celebrate the same loaves and fishes, one might say, though that first time not for real. A setup. She’d been, they’d all been. John’s parents Mitch and Opal were there, old Barnaby, looking a bit flushed and distracted, the bank president and his wife, Maynard and Veronica, Maynard’s parents, she and Trevor, a baker’s dozen. John had an offer, he’d said, that he wanted them all to consider. Thus, Trevor’s invitation as company accountant—or so she had thought at the time, wondering only what new environmental disaster John might now be hatching, and why wasn’t his Vicious President in Charge of Salaciousness there, she could have used Lorraine’s company. Later, though, she understood it all quite differently, understood that she, not Trevor, was the one John wanted present, she who’d joined Barnaby in his battle to save the town park, succeeding for a while, to John’s great annoyance, with her house-to-house petition drive, but unable in the end to buck city hall and the power of a bottomless purse. A target by ricochet, so to speak. There was a famous story about John from his childhood. His parents had given him his first BB gun for his eighth birthday and he had spent the following summer shooting starlings out of the trees and sparrows out of the bushes. True to form, he had even managed to turn play to profit, earning a dime a dead bird for knocking the pigeons off the roof of the flour mill, still in operation back then. His favorite game was to try to kill two sparrows with one shot, which he sometimes managed to do by popping them when they came together to mate. His nasty little pals always saw something hilarious in that. One day he bet a bunch of them he could kill two turtledoves, perched on a backyard clothesline, with one BB. Impossible of course, so they all took him up on it, wagering everything from camp-knife holsters and bike locks to baseball cards and bottlecap collections. Whereupon he nicked one of them, executed it in a manner Marge was later, to her unending horror, to witness, and with his jackknife dug out the spent pellet, put it back in his gun, and sat back waiting for the dead dove’s mate to return. “Hey! Not fair!” the other boys all complained, but they laughed, too, at John’s outwitting them yet again, and then, reminded that they hadn’t lost the bet yet, John still had to hit the second one and with a flattened pellet at that, they stuck around to see if he could do it. And no doubt hoped he would. They could say they were there. Which was when Marge turned up, only seven herself, but already on fire with her loathing of the local barbarians. When she saw what John had done and was about to do, she tried to stop him, but the other boys held her back, cursing her in their vulgar infantile way and clapping their filthy hands over her mouth when the widowed dove settled forlornly back on the wire and John took aim. All she could do was twist away and scream at the bird, but the stupid thing just sat there, asking to get hit, a crazy suicidal passivity she came to see over time as a peculiarity of most victims. John fired and the bird dropped, fluttering confusedly, to the ground, so they all let go of her and ran over to watch the end of this little life-and-death entertainment. The poor creature seemed to be trying to swim away from them, desperately flopping along ahead of its killers as they charged down upon it, shrieking out their monosyllabic ejaculations, like a company of battle-crazed comicbook soldiers. They caught up to it in a garage driveway, circling round, blocking its escape. John poked at it meditatively with his BB gun, then put his foot over its head, hesitating for a moment as though to feel the beat of its life under the sole of his sneaker. Marge begged him to let it go, it was only wounded, she could take it home and make it well again, and he smiled at her in a generous and friendly way and said, well, he’d be glad to, but then he’d lose his bet, wouldn’t he? And while he was smiling like that and giving every appearance of being reasonable and considering her appeal and the essential rightness of it, he shifted his weight onto the bird’s head. At that dreadful dinner party, she was thinking about this moment, not about the sickening little crunching noise like the cracking of a dried nut or the blood squishing out under John’s sneaker, nor even about the way the other boys howled at her to see her cry so, but about that warm considerate smile on John’s face as his foot came down, a smile he was wearing that night as he interrupted a rather stupid argument they’d all got into on the abortion issue, conventional hausfrau Veronica suddenly disturbingly shrill on the topic but as incoherent as usual, to tell them all about the extraordinary business opportunity he had been offered from a company upstate specializing in paving, roofing, and septic tanks, a merger of sorts which seemingly left their own partnership intact and gave them, along with a wide portfolio of valuable new assets, a substantial cash bonus to boot. “Almost too good to believe!” he said with that terrifying smile on his face, and then a maid came in to say that John had a phone call. He took it there in the dining room, switching on the speakerphone so all could hear. “You know the probe you asked me to run into that little construction outfit up north, John? Well, hang on to your fucking sombrero, ole buddy, I got a lalapaloozer for you!” It was Lorraine’s husband Waldo. The obnoxious lunkhead apparently wasn’t as thick as he’d always seemed. He knew more about the proposed deal than seemed humanly possible. Maynard blanched, then reddened, then went white again as the report came through. His father and John’s mother exchanged alarmed glances, Mitch bit clean through his cigar. Old Barnaby started, then slumped gray and shaken in his chair, a sponge for the terrible miasma of defeat and despair that had invaded the room like a gas attack. “The old judas is trying to snatch your goddamn company, John! Mange can give you the dingy details, since the shifty scumbag probably thought most of ’em up, but, in a word, the treacherous old buzzard is out to ruin you! You and his own daughter! Can you fucking believe it? Stealing every damned thing she’s got! Hello? John? You there?” Slowly Barnaby rose. It was almost as though something had got him by the nape and was lifting him, dead weight, from where he sat. He leaned blearily toward his daughter to utter his faint word of farewell (did she even hear it? She seemed almost to dim as a light might do, and for a strange moment, Marge could not even be sure she was there, the word more real than she was), then pushed away from the table, and turned toward the door. Which was further than he got.

It was not until Maynard’s unexpected backhand swat on the drive home afterwards that Veronica—who had simply remarked, as she’d remarked at table, that opposing abortion on grounds of family values was not only dumb but self-contradictory—began to have some intimation of the true consequences of that fateful dinner party. “You stupid woman!” her husband had cried as he belted her, catching her in the solar plexus, just beneath the seatbelt, and knocking her wind out. “Weren’t you listening, for Chrissake? Don’t you know what’s happened?” There were tears running down his cheeks. “You mean about Barnaby?” she gasped and he hit her again and then banged his head over and over against the steering wheel. “Be careful!” “We’ve just been fucking had, you dumb bitch! We’re ruined! It’s all over!” She tried to grab the wheel, but he slapped her hands away and screamed: “Fuck off! If I want to kill myself, I’ll kill myself!” Hysterical as he was, they were lucky to get home in one piece, if lucky was the right word. The piece they got home with was not all that great. It was true, Veronica hadn’t really understood what John was going on about, business never did make much sense to her, even paint and wallpaper was over her head, nor had she paid much attention to that irritating phone call that John took at table, which she’d thought was plain bad manners, she’d been too upset about other things, had been really since they’d gotten dressed to go, when Maynard had glanced at her in her slip and asked her with a mean smirk if she was pregnant again, an insensitive remark at any time, but though he could not have known why (she’d told Maynard a lot about her past life back in their courting days, a big mistake, he clubbed her with it all the time, but not, thank heavens, about Second John), all the more so given the company she had to face that night at dinner. As she’d done before, of course, playing the shy discreet maiden who’d forgotten everything, aren’t we all just friends, but what she’d done so long ago had been preying on her of late, making her feel haunted, like in that old expression about being haunted by your past. She was. How could one not be in a town like this, everyone’s lives so intertangled, no way to get rid of anything, it all just kept looping round again, casting shadows on top of shadows, giving hidden meanings to everything that happened by day, turning dreams into nightmares by night. Partly her fault, she had to admit: in her loneliness before her second marriage and sometimes after, she had tried to imagine what might have happened had she not done what she did, and so had for a while brought a fantasy to life, and though she’d long since banished it from her daytime imagination, it still hung around in her dreams like a kind of leprous cowled mendicant, asking for what she could not give it. But if it was partly her fault, it was mostly this town’s. If she’d got out of here, as she had intended, it would have all been ancient history by now, but that was not the life she got given. How could she have known back there on that night in the musty out-of-town motel cabin, just a scared obliging kid (she remembered crying silently, all scrunched up in a dark corner of that little metal shower stall afterwards, he’d sent her in there “to wash herself,” as he had put it, and then had brusquely stuck his head in and, chewing on a dead cigar, scrubbed her genitals for her, then slapped her on the butt as if she were a pal), that middle age would find her so consequentially in such company, pretending that the world began last week. Life was really strange, such a terrible gulf between inner and outer, she didn’t know if she could go on living it this way. How did John’s wife do it? And then, as though to prod her crisis onto centerstage, she got seated at dinner between them, father and son, John falsely cheerful and ingratiating, almost as though he were teasing her, leading her on, old Mitch grinding away at one of his nauseating cigars before and after the meal and ignoring her throughout, as though she were somehow beneath his notice. Finally she just blurted it out, she couldn’t help herself: “What do you think of the abortion issue?” Her husband snapped her a look meant to shut her up: what the hell are you trying to do, it said, don’t spoil things! She did not appreciate his nasty look one bit, but at the same time she was sorry, it wasn’t what she’d meant to say at all, nor how she’d meant to say it, why was she always so clumsy? “It’s not an issue, it’s a crime,” John’s father declared bluntly to the rest of the table but not to her, as though to put an end to this silly matter by merely speaking, and her dribbling father-in-law nodded his senile approval. The bank president said, “I suppose there must be exceptions,” and Mitch barked back: “None that I know of. People have to be responsible for their actions.” Marge dutifully took up the cudgels, but without much enthusiasm, she seemed unusually circumspect tonight, as Ronnie no doubt should have been; it was, to Ronnie’s surprise, John who laughed and said: “Of course anyone who wants an abortion should have one. Why not? Women can do whatever the hell they want with their bodies, who’s to tell them otherwise?” “Well, their husbands for one,” growled his father, “their parents if they’re not yet women, their religious counselors if they are, and the laws of the land if they’re heathens!” He pursed his lips and tongued the mashed cigar across his mouth from one cheek to the other as though turning on or off some switch. “It’s a question of family values, son, family values versus social anarchy!” “But that’s stupid!” Veronica exclaimed, emboldened by John’s complicit wink. “Most people who want or need—” “Most women, you mean, my dear,” interrupted Mitch condescendingly, turning to her at last, aiming the cigar obscenely at her face, and she thought: I’m going to tell it now. All of it. It’s time to let it out. Either that or she was going to cry. “Most women who want or need abortions and most men who want or need the women to have them either have no families in the first place or are trying to save the ones they have!” “Nonsense.” “But what would you do if you’d made some girl pregnant and she—” “Now see here!” Mitch bristled angrily. “What are you trying to suggest?” “You’ve never had to have one,” Maynard butted in, trying to cut her off, “so what do you care?” And just as she was about to tell him, tell them all, John rose and with a smile, the same smile he had on his face that night after the drive-in movie all those years ago, said he had an important announcement to make.

That chilling grin of John’s. Once seen, not forgotten. Bruce had been through scores of scrapes and trials with the man—national tournaments and final exams, disciplinary boards, hard-ass negotiations, business crises, high-stake poker nights that turned nasty, dangerous storms, barroom rumbles, and worse (the day Bruce’s old Piper Cherokee stalled out on them while buzzing the penthouse sundecks up in the city one blinding afternoon, for example)—and so had had ample opportunity over the years to witness it, but the most memorable occasion for Bruce was one morning during a fishing trip together up at a remote roadless place a day’s flight and boat trip north of their cabin, when John, while taking a crap, got set upon by an angry grizzly. Bruce had gone down to the river to wash out their skillet after breakfasting on their dawn catch, and on the way back to camp, detouring round to their chosen dumping ground for his own soil-blessing rituals of the virgin day, he had come upon John and the bear doing a little double shuffle, slowly circling one another like sparring partners, John with his pants around his ankles and tracking through his own shit, the two of them just a few feet apart and the bear closing in. John had made a fundamental living-in-the-wild mistake, having left his weapons back up at the tent, but Bruce had not. He knelt, lay the skillet quietly in the undergrowth, raised the rifle to his shoulder—but then, even though the bear was now close enough to take a swipe at John, Bruce hesitated, captivated suddenly by John’s intense concentration and incongruous smile as, in a half-crouch, hands out but elbows in and bent and gaze locked on his adversary’s navel, he continued his shackled, bare-assed chassé around the grizzly as though not he but the animal was this death-dance’s intended prey. As Bruce in utter fascination watched them through his rifle sights, he realized, somewhat to his horror, that however much he cherished his friendship with John, there was something else, something perverse, that he cherished more, and it had more to do with John’s smile than with John himself. The first time he told this story to a bunch of the boys from John’s hometown up at the cabin, he found John staring at him with that same smile iced on his face, and he knew that the story divided them and that it was also a kind of bond. The fat motelkeeper wanted to know if he shot the bear. Bruce wouldn’t say.

John’s troubleshooter Nevada (call what they had in their pants trouble, call what she did with the things shooting) had also, one chilly night after ass-slapping sex on the bear rug up at the cabin with the log fire dying, heard Bruce tell that story, but she took it as a simple confession of Bruce’s ambivalence toward his friend. Bruce was smarter, richer, handsomer, more cultured and more daring than John, willing to work the most dangerous of trades, even leaner, longer where it counted, and taller, but John, somehow, always had the edge on him. It was hard to explain, impossible to describe, but there was something about John, something like the aura that accompanies the heroes in folktales and popular novels (it was Bruce himself who once said, seemingly without bitterness, that “if John’s a story, then I’m an anecdote …”), that set him apart from all rivals, his terrifying grin a part of that, she’d seen it, too. When Nevada tried to find a phrase for that quality he had, all she could come up with was “John knows.” It was, more than John himself, what Nevada loved, maybe the only thing she’d ever helplessly and unconditionally loved in her entire life. And whatever it was, it meant that, no matter what wit, wealth, power, or pluck he displayed, Bruce was always, in the presence of John, number two, and number two, as any schoolkid knows, is just another name for shit. Still, being around John improved Bruce’s loving, and when she balled the two of them at once, it was Bruce who was usually the better performer of the two, John maybe holding something back on such (“joint-joint,” as Bruce called them) occasions. Bruce, when in John’s company, was passionate and generous and self-deprecatingly funny, with an ever-reliable erection no matter how conventional or how bizarre the scene, or whose the “glory ‘oles,” or how much dope he’d done—able to satisfy, that is, even when not satisfied himself—but when John was not around, Bruce was more conflicted, his dissatisfactions rising to the surface then, making him quirky, difficult, impetuous, sometimes even morose and impotent. At such times he often turned to bondage and ritualized cruelty as ways to quicken his jaded spirit; he was never really sadistic, but rather perversely playful, and therefore, Nevada believed, all the more dangerous, her response to which was always professional but never keen. The truth was, for all the tricks she knew, Nevada liked it plain and simple. What most aroused Bruce nowadays (and maybe this was always true: Nevada had also heard his droll account of John’s wedding-eve stag party all those years ago) was the abuse of childish innocence, and more or less by default, it had fallen to Nevada’s troubleshooting lot to become, with some success (children easier to come by of course than genuine innocence) a kind of procuress. Which was what she was doing out here in kiddyland at this sleazy podunk mall where the air reeked of grease, pot, and burnt sugar, and the deep electronic beat that thrummed volcanically beneath the ugly high-pitched racket was more like a living menace than music. She made sure there were no parents or grandparents around (a photographer: she waited till he passed), then made her move. The two girls sensed her coming and looked up, smiling, glassy-eyed with their puppylove crushes. They were cute. Well. Too bad. It was going to hurt. But it was going to be fun.

Gordon, feverishly pressing his shutter button, could not believe his fortune, and for it he had to thank his wife Pauline and her peculiar condition which had sent him, yet again, on a shopping trip to the mall. In the lot outside, he had spotted the parked Lincoln, and so had grabbed his camera bag out of the trunk, an old habit. In the food court, John’s young daughter was sitting with a friend, both in leather in spite of the summery weather, but their chauffeur was nowhere to be seen. It had to be John’s wife who had driven the girls out here this time, Gordon figured, for he had just seen John’s mother buying her little grandson an icecream cone downtown at the Sixth Street Cafe, and in fact had taken their photograph, something Ellsworth might use to fill space in The Town Crier during his annual summer slump, more serious this year than most. Ellsworth had apparently lost interest in this town and its inhabitants, his old boyhood pal Gordon included, and had in recent weeks become more eccentric and abstracted than ever, absenting himself from the streets and turning darkly inward as though harboring some secret grief or rancor. It was as though (and Gordon had been predicting this all along) he had lost his way. Gordon had not lost his. He now patrolled the corridors of this sprawling mall, steadfastly persevering in what had been his lifelong artistic pursuit, his camera hastily reloaded with a fresh cassette dug from the fast-film pocket of his bag and his finger on the button, but as usual of late, he must have missed her. Even when their paths crossed nowadays, for some reason they did not cross. As at the nursing home, for example: according to the log, they had both, more than once, been out there at the same time, yet somehow he had never caught so much as a glimpse of her, hover around stricken old Barnaby’s door though he might. He supposed that was where she had gone now and thought to chase after, but decided his chances might be better if he waited for her return to the mall. Perhaps, in so public a place, he figured, it would be harder for her to slip from sight, but he did not know why he thought that. Meanwhile, there was the shopping to do. Pauline was outgrowing all her clothes, even the new ones that fit yesterday, and she was now largely confined to the rooms above the studio, wrapped in sheets and tablecloths. Gordon was fascinated by what was happening to her body and was photographing it exhaustively, front to back, top to bottom, reluctant though his incurious wife was in her new enormity to expose herself to his lens. But she needed him now and this was the price he exacted. She could not even squeeze into the bathtub any longer, but had to stand in it while he washed (and photographed) her, her immense pale flanks, when soaped up, like a sweating mare’s, her belly a vast trembling panorama of gleaming slopes and gulleys. There was little hope of finding any feminine apparel that would still fit her, but the fat men’s stores were at the opposite end of the mall from the fast-food section and Gordon was afraid of missing John’s wife, having missed her so often of late. So, skipping the jeans, leather, and fashion boutiques with their improbable half-sizes, he took a chance on a more conservative ladies’ wear emporium, still within view of Clarissa’s table, that seemed to cater more humanely to all ages and sizes of women. When the salesclerk asked him what in particular he was looking for, Gordon replied, glancing back over his shoulder (some woman had joined the two girls, was it—!? no …), that he didn’t care what article it was so long as it was for a person somewhat larger than himself, anything would do, this was an emergency. The sales clerk smiled enigmatically, then brought him some clothing for pregnant women. Most items were cut too small in the chest and shoulders but there was a nightshirt that might cover her top half, so he asked to try it on for size. The saleswoman gave him a very peculiar look, glancing suspiciously at his camera bag (he didn’t even try to explain himself, what good would it do), but dutifully led him back to one of the changing rooms. He had stripped off his jacket and pulled the nightdress on over his shirt and was just about to step out into the light to judge the length and fullness when he saw her and ducked back into his cubicle, started fumbling with his cameras. He couldn’t believe it! It was like a wish come true! She was in front of the full-length mirror, pivoting from side to side, trying on a belted crêpe de chine dress with a bow at the neck. He found that if he pressed his lens up flush against the gap between the louvered doors of the changing booth, he could see quite well and ran less risk of being seen. In his first shot of her, his finger trembling on the button, she was presenting her body in profile to the mirror, hands pressed flat to her tummy. Beautiful! She turned her other side to the mirror, caressed the silky skirt down over her hips: puh-click! She faced the mirror, hands behind her, palms out, resting on her bottom, breasts jutting—puh-click!—then undid the bow—click!—and opened the dress at the throat, spreading it back to her shoulders: puh-click! puh-click! She turned toward Gordon (he winced), but continued to look back over her shoulder at the mirror, and he fired again and again, eye becoming one now with the viewfinder window. He had never seen her with such startling clarity! He felt, oddly, like a visionary. He photographed her as she undid the belt and stood facing the mirror, hands on hips, then turned the little collar up and peeked over it, folded the hem up a couple of inches, checked the price on the tag at the side. As she returned to the changing room across from Gordon’s, he shrank back for fear, of being noticed: the little louvered doors only went down to the knees. Luckily, there was a spare tubular chair in his cubicle: he set it near the door and perched his bulk upon it. When next he peered out through his viewfinder, she was back in front of the mirror, dressed in a knee-length white linen tunic with big pockets and a military collar, that snapped up the front like a coat. As he clicked away, she swung back and forth, making the linen balloon and flutter around her body, opened and closed the collar, shoved her hands deep in the pockets, unsnapped the tunic at the bottom and thrust her bare thigh forward. Already, Gordon was titling his photos: “John’s Wife Striding Through Diaphanous Clouds of White Linen.” “John’s Wife, Mirrored, Bares Her Clavicle.” When she returned to her booth, she pulled on a matching pair of white linen slacks under the tunic, and as she emerged, still tugging them up over her hips, Gordon was nearly blinded by the sight of the little lace fringe across the top of her briefs. He realized that his professionalism was being tested, his objective artistic principles were on the line, and he settled down, breathing heavily, to concentrate on f-stops, focus, and framing. As best he could. His heart was banging away like a jackhammer and his cramped body, asquat on the wobbly chair, was sodden with sweat. She was now, without closing her cubicle door, removing the tunic and replacing it (a glimpse of that precious back! it was his—puh-click! puh-click!—forever!) with a kind of long-tailed cotton twill shirt, which she again tried out before the mirror. Then, in front of the mirror, the pants came off (he photographed the reflected white puddle at her reflected feet, the luminous shadow between her reflected thighs as she stooped, limpidly reflected, to pick them up: and even her stoop was elegant, not a stiff bend from the waist, broad behind in the air like a billboard like most of the women in this town, but a kind of balanced genuflection, like a runner kneeling to her starting pads) and she had a bare-legged look at herself—and Gordon had a look at herself and herself again—in the shirt alone. She was literally aglow. Back in the booth, the shirt came off as the door swung closed (did he get that one? he wasn’t sure) and Gordon frantically rewound, fumbled for fresh film. But before he could reload, a glance through the louvered door told him she was gone. He leaned out the door just in time to see her leave the shop (was it she?) and fell hugely off his chair. By now he had the attention of everyone in the shop. What did it matter? He’d never be back here again, and this was, he knew, one of his life’s great achievements, let them think what they liked. Serious art was always misunderstood. He snatched up his jacket and camera bag, throwing everything into it, and, head ducked, went bulling out, only to be met by the salesclerk at the exit into the corridor: “Sir—?!” Ah. He was still wearing the nightshirt. “Oh yes, I’ll take it.” No time for credit cards, he paid in cash, probably too much, he didn’t care, keep the change, he was out of there.

Far from losing his way, as his friend Gordon supposed, Ellsworth had found it (dark inward turnings are not always what they seem), and thanks in large part to the nefarious Stalker. This unwelcome intruder had, more than a year ago, crossing some impossible barrier and against the author’s determined will, invaded his novel-in-progress, The Artist and His Model, threatening to destroy it from within, merely by lingering, leeringly, in the shadows at its periphery, seen and not seen, like some incipient but irresistible malignancy. Ellsworth’s courageous efforts to banish the trespasser (he was the author, was he not?) were not only ineffectual, they actually seemed to augment the Stalker’s sinister powers, confirming his presence here once and for all and emboldening his ruthless encroachments. Collapse set in for several months as Ellsworth watched his novel disintegrate before his very eyes, his Artist’s wise and eloquent quest for Beauty (this was the work’s tragic theme: the noble pursuit of the unattainable ideal) turned to hollow self-parody in the presence of the derisory Stalker. The Artist seemed somehow aware of the Stalker’s hovering contempt and grew increasingly querulous and impatient, tearing up what he had not yet begun, which confused his Model, who only wished to please, and brought tears to her eyes, which, on his seeing, caused him too to weep. “Stop! Don’t cry,” she pleaded, sobbing. “Why are you crying?” And gazing then, tearfully, into the child’s tearful eyes, he (the author now, not the Artist) perceived that the theme of his work had changed: the Artist’s arrogant quest for absolute Beauty had given way to a new understanding of the essential innocence of Art, an innocence embodied in this child and now in peril. Whereupon he (the Artist, of course, not the author) turned to face the Stalker. For weeks, then, Ellsworth had been struggling with this confrontation, finding it much more difficult than he could have imagined, but knowing that only by battling through would he rescue his life’s work. No wonder Gordon had found him distant and moody. The Stalker, far from fleeing the Artist’s bold challenge, had welcomed it, and indeed it was he who spoke most often, the Artist frequently reduced to a grave contemplative silence, perceiving that the defense of innocence was more the task of heart than mind, yet could not succeed by heart alone. He said: “Argument is useless. Art knows nothing, which is its power.” “Nonsense,” scoffed the Stalker. “Art, like your meaningless little aphorism, is an idle parlor trick, its so-called power nonexistent, once you escape the stifling oppression of the parlor.” “It is you who have brought the parlor to the forest,” said the Artist, and he took the Model’s little hand and led her back to the abandoned rock beside the riverbank, posing her there as he had done once before in pre-Stalker times, experiencing once again the dreamlike quality of the scene as he composed it. He leaned her forward so that she rested more on her hands and thighs than on her backside, and he twisted her hair into a loose braid that fell over her far shoulder, revealing the inquisitive delicacy of her profiled face, the poignant vulnerability of her slender throat. “Art is the expression of Nature’s exquisite insouciance,” he said, setting up his easel. “No kidding!” someone sniggered in his ear. “So, tell me, why is the insouciant little tootsie in the exquisite altogether?” He spun about, but there was no one near. Far away, on a crest bereft of trees, a shadowy figure stood masquerading as—what? a devil, satyr, fiendish critic? “Because Art is pure,” the Artist replied at full throat, “and begs no concealment or disguise.” “So you say,” laughed the voice in his ear, “but I find her maidenly flesh cushions, poised unconcealed above the stone there like the cloven earth rising behind the barren moon, a pure delight, if you’ll pardon my saying so, and so, I think, do you.” “Art, when pure, is delightful,” responded the Artist, refusing to be baited, and with his charcoal blocked in the principal areas of light and darkness, moved, as always, by luminosity’s contrast to its surrounding absence, the pluck of it, the audacity. The soft radiant curve of the child’s back against the dense forest on the far bank alone made his heart ache with something like remorse. He thought (it was perhaps at this moment that Gordon stopped in at the plant to ask if Ellsworth would like a photographic essay of the town’s flower gardens this summer and got such a brusque inattentive reply): Innocence is like the morning dew: it vanishes as soon as light is cast upon it. “Ah, well done there!” laughed the voice of the Stalker, as though peering at his canvas from behind his ear, the Stalker himself, up on the barren crest, dancing lewdly his faunlike dance. “See how you’ve captured the flushed glow of her juicy little buns, and the comic opposition of the shadowy gap between them, spreading naughtily like a dimpled grin! Ho ho! What a genius!” “Who’s there?” the Model asked, breaking her pose and looking round. “No one,” the Artist snapped, regretting his lie as soon as spoken, but suddenly afraid that the boundaries violated by the Stalker were but the first to fall. He reset her pose, but before he had returned to his easel, she had turned again to peer back over her shoulder. “Is someone there?” she called, and the Stalker replied: “Someone there!” “It’s just an echo,” said the Artist irritably, hearing, far away, the infuriating laughter of his adversary, itself echoing and reechoing as it died away. “Now resume your position, please!” But the child could not. Her foot had moved, her thigh was raised, her shoulder turned, her ear was cocked, her gaze restless. She seemed curious, annoyed, excited, amused, apprehensive, all at once. Her love and respect for him were unconditional, he knew that, yet her limbs would not stay where he directed them. “No, tuck your foot under here,” he insisted, showing her where he meant, “then lean forward onto your hands, that’s it—no, no!” He seized her thigh in both his hands and pulled it toward him, his sudden fervent grasp surprising them both. Except to take her hand or to push and prod a bit to set a pose, the Artist had rarely touched his Model. In fact, perhaps, he hadn’t really known he could. He stared now at his broad long-fingered hands and what they—yes, so ardently—encircled. Her childish flesh was firm yet resilient, silky smooth, luminous, cool to the touch yet pulsing with a hidden warmth, and palpably without history. He slid one finger along a pale blue vein on the inside of her thigh, thinking: Art, even when idealized, participates in the Real. But it is the vein, not the blood, the container, not the contained, the design, not the flux. Or, perhaps, it is the finger on the vein … He relaxed his grip but did not release it, allowing his hands to encompass the child’s tender thigh without quite grasping it (she was watching now, not his hands, but his eyes), the surfaces of their respective flesh in unbroken contact with one another, but only as a whisper is in contact with the ear, providing him with a direct heart-stopping apprehension of the radical sensuousness of all Beauty, and he knew then that he had not yet begun to be a true Artist, nor would he be one until he could approach his canvases with the same desire and the same restraint as he now held yet did not hold—as he now, in a word, be-held—his Model’s soft young thigh. Was that the Stalker laughing? No, it was Ellsworth! He was leaping about in his study above the printshop like the Stalker doing his taunting satyric dance, whooping and laughing and yelling all at once! He blew kisses at the Stalker: his savior! All around him, heaps and heaps of paper, scrawled on and typed on and scrawled on again: his novel! Underway at last! It really was! “I am a writer! I really am a writer!”

Old Stu the car dealer’s little tootsie (otherwise known as his little peach among the lemons), who would have agreed with Ellsworth’s Artist about the radical sensuousness of beauty (and/or the beauty of radical sensuousness) and also about the self-consuming allure of the unattainable ideal (e.g., why did she have cock on her mind all the time, it was driving her crazy), and who certainly was not lacking in pluck and audacity, was also—while dancing about naked after her morning bath with her hand between her legs and enjoying a snort (not the day’s first) of Amazing Grace—celebrating a creative turning point in her life: to wit, imminent liberation from the impotent old lush who was her legal mate in exchange for a gorgeous and obedient hunk who was the very embodiment of animal lust with an ever-ready giggle stick that would put a studhorse to shame, without at the same time liberating herself from the old soon-to-be-(alas)-late lush’s considerable wealth. Stu had taken all the risks for her a decade ago, and now Rex, who’d be by for her soon (in full sunlight, not caring who saw, the brazen boy) was doing the same again for her, she must have something after all. Yes, that old red red robin was throbbin’ and bobbin’ once again (must remember to give her best friend a call later and cheer her up), and so was she, her voluptuous parts—her still-youthful bosom, the cheeks of her abundant ass which her loverboy called “her funky rock-and-roll fin-tailed fanny,” her trimmed-down but still plush and velvety belly—rising and falling massively with each gladsome bounce and making her feel very much inside her body, her body as body, which she now loved more than she’d ever loved it. The doorbell rang—why didn’t the sweetie just come on in?—and Daphne went, lighting the trip fantastic (a joke from the motel, where they’d arranged all the lamps in the room around the bed like theater spotlights to set their bodies ablaze as they fucked, stoned, in front of the mirrors), to the door to let him in. Only it wasn’t Rex, it was some kid, vaguely familiar but not quite placeable in the lacy mid-morning haze of Amazing Grace. He stood there gaping at her, eyes half-crossed and hangdog jaw adroop, as though she were some sort of otherworldly apparition, reminding her of looks she used to get back in her high school days, long past, some sweet, some not, and when she asked him what he wanted, all she could make out through his spellbound stammer was something about mowing her sidewalks. Wait a minute. Wasn’t this Reverend Lenny’s oldest kid? Daphne grinned, staring down at the rise in his pants. Like father, like son, as it said in the Bible, though as she recalled it was the father who had all the fun in that story and the son who took the licking. “All right, all right,” she said, pushing the door open and stepping back, “but come on in, honey, don’t make me stand out here in front of all the neighbors!” Which was how it was that, one thing leading to another in the usual ash-hauling way, she was lying asprawl on her unmade bed with the bareassed boy kneeling, tallow-faced, between her thighs, clearly scared shitless but glassy-eyed with rampant desire, when Rex turned up, not bothering to knock or ring the bell, as she had anticipated in the first place. “Well, well, what the fuck have we here?” bellowed the grease-stained mechanic, grabbing the thunderstruck kid (whose name, she had learned in one of his few audible declarations, was Philip) by the back of his shirt and raising him a couple of inches off the bed. “The naughty boy was trying to rape me, Rex,” Daphne said languidly, and put her hand between her legs again. “No shit,” said Rex. “Hell, I’ve torn motherfuckers’ cocks out by the root and made them eat them for less than that.” Daphne grinned. The boy’s little bird had shriveled so, Rex would have a hard time finding it, much less getting a grip on it. His eyes were beginning to roll back as though he might be about to faint. “It’s the preacher’s kid,” she said, feeling very hot and not wanting to put this off much longer. “Why don’t we just make him pray for forgiveness of his sins?” Rex grinned down at her. God, he was beautiful! He pushed the terrified boy face down on the bed between her knees and yanked off his stylishly ragged jeans, which were still tangled around his ankles, then, after whipping the belt out, used the jeans to tie the kid’s ankles to the foot of the bed. He grabbed young Philip by the scruff, still wielding the belt, and propped him up on his knees again, set his dingy white underpants on top of his head like a nun’s bonnet. “All right, you know the chant to the Lord’s Prayer, jive-ass?” The kid nodded bleakly, his eyes tearing under the limp waistband of his shorts. “Well, then, give me a lick, my man! Take it away!” “Our… our Father…” “Louder! Lemme hear you blow!” “Our Father—” “Louder, damn you!” roared Rex with a wink at her over the kid’s shoulder and he laid the belt across the boy’s backside with a resounding whop that sent him with a yelp face-first into the bedding between Daphne’s legs again. “I said louder, I mean louder! Drive it!” Rex thundered, hauling the boy back up on his knees again. “Our … our … our …” And Rex cracked his butt again. Jesus, she was sopping wet, this was one of the best fucks she’d ever had and it hadn’t even begun yet. “P-please,” the kid whim pered. “I-I only—a j-job—” “You got a job, you miserable piece of pimpled rat-shit! It’s your break, you dig? Now, come on! I want you to wail! Punch it out!” In seeming fury, Rex took another mighty backswing, the leather whooshing fearsomely through the air above her, making her gasp, and a sudden spurt of pee rainbowed out between the boy’s legs and trickled warmly down her knees. “Now, look what you’ve made him do!” Daphne whooped, and Rex grinned, pushing the kid’s face into his own pee and snapping the belt smartly across his upraised fanny one more time for good measure, before stripping off his own greasy overalls: “Fucking goofball! What you call third stream! But he better keep ringing the changes on that tune, loud and clear, or the cat’ll pay for his goddamned clams with a shredded ass!” Nothing on under the overalls: Rex said he liked the rough feel of the denim on his bare body, helped him keep his edge when everything else was bringing him down. Not down now. Lo and behold! The sight of that glorious love-cannon brought tears of joy and gratitude to Daphne’s eyes: to get her bell rung like this at her age! Where did he come from? Hell, who cared? The important thing was not to wake up. “On earth as it is in heaven!” the kid was squawking through his tears. “Fuckin’ A!” laughed Rex. “And you better pinch that piccolo tight, junior! Anyone pisses on me, he’s a dead man!” Surely, the poor boy got an eyeful. She lost complete control of herself, they tore the bed up. Rex, stretching it out, so timed his climax as to coincide with one repetition or another of “Thy Kingdom come,” but Daphne had been coming since they began, maybe before, she’d never been so transported, so inutterably possessed. “Amen, amen, amen, goddamn it, amen!” she gasped when Rex exploded in her, her whole body coming in wave after wave from her ears to her toes. Holy shit, what a miraculous fuck. On and on. “Deep down, I realize,” she groaned (she would tell her best friend this, or anyway her best friend’s answering machine, that girl having gone into a deep fade of late, all but lost to sight), still gripping with both hands her sweet lover’s powerful ass, hallowed be its name, one of her legs curled over the back of his hairy one and toes stroking the skinny thigh of their supplicating witness, “I’m a very religious woman.” Her foot, creeping up the boy’s leg (she was feeling passionately motherly in her newfound piety), now found something there. She stroked it with her big toe, taking its measure, while writing her ineffable name, over and over, with her long painted nails on Rex’s firm glossy cheeks, which she knew from long devotion to be paler than the rest of him, creamy in color and hairless, except for a little black tuft at the bottom of his spine like the stub of a recessive tail. “Take a look at his wee-wee, Rex! Stiff as a pencil! What’ll we do with it?” “I don’t know,” said Rex, rolling off to the floor, the terrible abyss within her yawning for a moment as he pulled the plug. This was terrible. She needed it more now than she did ten minutes ago. Rex untied the boy, who was still timorously Our Fathering though no longer shouting. “But I think it’s bigger than both of us, Daph. Let’s share this scene with the neighbors.” And before you could say “Thy will be done,” young Philip was out in the front yard draped over the cute little sign with the brass-framed license plate that said DAPHNE AND STU with the company motto underneath, and his jeans and underpants were up on the porch roof, Rex himself, throughout all this neighborly sharing, in the devil-may-care altogether. (Had she asked him, while thrashing about: What about Stu? She had. And what, staggered among his own breathless grunts and snorts and in and around the squeaky “as we forgive others” and the “give us this days” of their little deacon, he’d said was: “Don’t worry about it, baby. Just go out and buy yourself something cool to wear at the funeral.”)

By the time Jennifer reached the mall with Clarissa for their date with Nevada, who was becoming one of their best friends, it seemed like everyone in town knew about her brother’s exhibition of himself and at least half of them claimed to have seen the show in living color; his scrawny butt was famous and she had to deal with a lot of tiresome wisecracks about it, which she did with as much of her customary good humor as she could manage, under the circumstances. Just how it had all happened was not very clear, but there were a lot of rumors, some of them pretty wild, the jerk might actually get some mileage out of this in the long run, though for the moment he’d run for cover. In a way it had been a break for Jennifer because her mom, who was now big as a barn and more spaced out than ever, had earlier talked her into taking Zoe to the mall for the afternoon, but then her dad had agreed that Zoe shouldn’t be exposed to all the inevitable dirty talk out there aimed at their own family, so she’d got out of it. One glance at her baby sister and Nevada might have withdrawn her invitation to Jen to go flying with Bruce the next day and Clarissa would have been able to go all by herself, something that would have really got up Jen’s nose. So thanks to the Creep for that if for little else in her life. (Already Clarissa was calling him the Croup; wouldn’t she!) Not to complain: Nevada had made her day, which otherwise had been turning pretty weird, what with her airhead mother and her brother and all the rest that was happening. Just coming out here to the mall, for example. Clarissa’s mom had brought them, instead of her grandmother doing it, which was unusual by itself nowadays, but it got more unusual. Clarissa had been painting Jen’s nails with a new black vampire polish so she hadn’t been paying much attention, but she had a funny feeling when they pulled into the parking lot that there was no one driving the car. Just a feeling: when she looked up, Clarissa’s mother was still there. But then, when they got out of the car, Jen turned back to look and she wasn’t. The car was empty, so was the parking lot all around. She tried to say something about this to Clarissa, but Clarissa was too pumped to listen: “Come on, Jen, for pete’s sake! Stop ruining things! We’ll be late!” Jennifer saw that this business with Bruce and Nevada was putting a strain on their friendship, and she was sorry about that, but now that it was happening, there was nothing to do but let it, just like her dad always said. Of course they weren’t late. They had to wait almost an hour, an hour filled mostly with explicit accounts of Philip up on the Ford dealer’s roof with his pants off and the dumb jokes that went with it. At least it helped Clarissa relax, so they were in a pretty good mood when Nevada finally arrived and told them that Bruce was definitely flying in from Florida the next day to give them the ride he’d promised. Nevada had seemed especially interested that Jen was coming along, as though the whole thing depended on her, which brought Clarissa’s fangs out again, but only for a moment because then Nevada turned her whole attention to Clarissa for a while, and said she loved the nail polish, whose idea was it, and so on, though once she winked quickly at Jennifer, making her feel suddenly ten years more grown up. About that time they all saw that fat photographer streaking through the mall with some kind of frilly nightshirt on over his street clothes. Nevada laughed and said: “Do you think he’s stealing it?” “That’s just old Gordo,” Clarissa said dismissively. “He’s pretty squirrely.” “This whole town is,” Jen said, then took a chance: “I only hope I get out of it before it drives me nuts, too.” And Nevada smiled.

When Trevor saw Gordon come careening out of the ladies’-wear shop like a foundering old tanker, blowing steam and wearing a pink nightie as regalia, he went immediately to a payphone in the restrooms corridor of the mall and called the police to leave an anonymous complaint together with the name of the shop where they could get confirmation of this bizarre behavior. He did not know why he did this. He did not even know why he was out here. He had been having a late lunch in the Sixth Street Cafe, his usual, a cup of soup (beef noodle today) and a chicken salad sandwich on whole wheat, with a slice of lemon meringue pie for dessert, no coffee, and he was still thinking about his wife Marge’s latest insurrectionary venture and what problems it might cause him with John, when John’s mother came in with her little grandson to buy him a chocolate icecream cone, followed almost immediately by Gordon and his camera, and they posed for pictures which Gordon said were for the newspaper, the chef, who was also the owner, coming out from the kitchen to get in them. Gordon had seemed to be in a hurry when he popped in, his mind elsewhere, but the moment he began the photo-taking session, frivolous though the occasion was, he became completely absorbed in his work and Trevor found himself becoming equally absorbed watching him. Gordon shifted his big hips about fluidly, searching out the best light, the right angle, moved a table and chairs, pulled down a sign taped to the counter near the cash register, took lightmeter readings with and without flash, switched lenses and filters, all in a matter of seconds, and before the icecream was even being scooped, he was already snapping away, bobbing, leaning, rearing, crouching, and it slowly dawned on Trevor that Gordon was not photographing the people at all, he probably didn’t even see them: his focus was on the cone, passing from hand to hand and hand to mouth. Where it went, his lens went, and as it did, Gordon asked the little boy where his sister was. Opal said she thought she was out at the mall, “Mikey, how did you get chocolate on your nose?,” and before she could scrub it away with a licked paper napkin, Gordon, without apology, was gone. The pie came, a house specialty, the meringue almost four inches high and light as air, but Trevor only poked at it. He was still thinking about the photographer, his amazing intensity, and the thought that came to him then, which he did not understand at all, or even quite believe to be true (there was the pie in front of him, for example), but which remained with him for all the rest of that day, was: I have never known delight. He knew of course where Gordon had gone, he’d made the same calculations Gordon had. Trevor paid his check, received an inquiry about his appetite, and went to pick up his car in the lot behind the bank building. He took his time, driving cautiously as he always did. At the mall, he spied John’s daughter at a table with a couple of friends, but did not find Gordon until he came flying out of the ladies’-apparel store in his pink gown, though Trevor had peeked in there earlier as he made his rounds. Alarmed, almost as though in self-defense, then, he put in that panicky call to the police, regretting it as soon as he had done it, he hadn’t even disguised his voice properly. This was not the first time, he had reported Gordon twice before, but those times only for fun. One day when, from his office window in the bank building, he had seen Gordon sidle swiftly into the card shop and travel agency across the street and, from behind the scenic posters of beaches and hill towns, aim his telephoto lens at the bank door (Trevor knew why of course: John’s wife’s car was parked at the curb below), he called, also anonymously (“a worried bank customer”), to report the “suspicious behavior” of a person “lurking secretively” near the bank entrance, last seen peeking out from inside the travel agents’ across the way. He was still giggling about it that night, it was the first time he’d ever done anything like that, and when Marge asked him what was so funny he fumbled for a moment in confusion and then said that John had taken out another half million of insurance and he was still feeling giddy. Then there was the even funnier time he’d called the police and in a high-pitched voice accused the photographer of sneaking around outside the women’s changing room at the civic center swimming pool, a complete fabrication, since Trevor himself had never even seen the pool in operation, his only visit to it being before the dedication ceremony when the retractable roof was being demonstrated. Though he had thought of that call as only a kind of practical joke, he nevertheless felt more or less justified because of things he’d seen the photographer up to elsewhere, and he told himself it was even possible he’d guessed at a truth. Not likely, though. Gordon was not an ordinary voyeur, any more than Trevor was. It could even be said that he and Gordon were both searching for the same thing, Gordon more directly, fully aware of what he was doing and why, Trevor more speculatively, but more prudently. Though he had begun this little game as a mere lark, Trevor had come to believe that if he took it seriously enough, something, he didn’t know what, would be revealed. It was as though Gordon and his camera were leading him, unwittingly, to buried treasure, and if he reported him mischievously to the police now and then it was only to remind himself that it was just a game, a harmless amusement. It was different today, though. He was frightened, he didn’t know why. Was it because of Gordon’s mad lumbering flight through the crowded mall, the disturbing impropriety of it, or had he suddenly become appalled at his own improper fascination with such madness? He ducked into the men’s room after the call, afraid of being seen near a telephone (had anyone recognized him?), and was shocked when he peered in a mirror and saw the panic in his face, his rumpled clothing. And was that a floccule of meringue on his lapel? Trevor was known for his cool aplomb, his tidy dispassionate composure—something was terribly wrong! “The trouble is,” he said to himself, dabbing at the sweat on his brow (he had sweat on his brow?), “you don’t know who you are.” “Who does?” asked some voice in one of the stalls, and Trevor, now thoroughly flustered, fled again.

The insurrectionary venture that troubled Trevor feared was his wife Marge’s decision to challenge Snuffy, the popular ex-high school football coach, airport manager, and can-do councilman, for mayor, not because she didn’t like Snuffy (she certainly didn’t), but because she could not let John’s handpicked candidate run unopposed. Was this a democracy or one bully’s fiefdom? She was afraid she already knew the answer to that, but even knowing it, she could not accept it, and she planned to run, not against Snuffy so much, he was just a proxy anyway, but against her old classmate and nemesis, the number one honcho himself. It would necessarily be a grassroots affair, she had no money for it, she’d have to confront all that wealth and power with a few volunteers (she had been trying to enlist Lollie’s help, but the woman seemed strangely aloof these days; she hoped her cretinous husband hadn’t finally turned her head), handmade posters and flyers, an exhaustive door-to-door campaign, tough talk, and an attention-grabbing platform, including a call for radical electoral reform. So far she’d kept everything under wraps, only Trevor knew, and he wasn’t all that excited about it. As she expected: Trev was an accountant and this enterprise looked to fall pretty much in the loss column, she understood that; in the end John would find some way to clobber her, and Trevor, who needed John, knew it. Probably she told her husband just so he could brace himself, though she could have used a little moral support. Trev was an older grad student up at State when they met, a teaching assistant for Marge’s Econ 101 class. She’d invited him to a civil rights rally and they had developed a kind of activist paldom, though Trev wasn’t even political. Probably just lonely. That was all right. So was she. Just why marriage should have followed the way a street march follows a resolution was not that clear to either of them, but they had got used to and respected one another, discovering that they were about the only persons they didn’t argue with, and the alternatives were few. Or rather: nil. No regrets. They were helpmeets in the true sense of the word, and now that she was finally launching her campaign, she knew he’d be at her side, no matter what his misgivings. She wanted maximum impact when she did announce formally, and she was doing that now with a concise but forceful and passionate position paper, the exact wording of which she had just finished drafting, to be published in this week’s edition of The Town Crier. She was determined that this was not going to be a negative campaign, but she was pointing out that her opponent had a lifelong reputation for dealing ruthlessly and arbitrarily with those who were younger and less powerful than he and had frequently shown alarming evidence of undemocratic gender-biased attitudes. There were other rumors about the old coach’s behavior that today would open him up to charges of sexual harassment, and she would not be disappointed if those rumors should come out as the campaign proceeded, and perhaps even be substantiated, though she herself of course would never bring them up. She had wanted something that would give the announcement of her candidacy a bit of a kick-start, so she had gone out earlier to see Barnaby at the retirement center to try to obtain his endorsement, but no help there. He seemed to think she was his bath lady, and he started yelling at her incoherently, something about his dead wife doing it, and probably telling her to get the hell out, which anyway she did. So she had called Trevor to tell him what she was doing and then delivered the document that would change her life and that perhaps of the entire town as well (she could beat that meathead!) to the newspaper office—which, oddly, was closed, no signs of life inside: she had to push it through the slot in the bottom panel of the door, her sense of drama offended, and angry that already, as she took her first dramatic step into bigtime electoral politics, she was being made to stoop instead of stride. Her fateful turn taken, she stood up, took a deep breath, looked around at the disappointingly empty sidewalks, and headed for the club where she could work off her tensions with a round or two of golf, have a quiet drink and supper with Trevor, lighten him up a bit (when she finally did see him, he seemed to be taking it much worse than she’d thought), and get ready for all hell to break loose tomorrow.

Kevin, the golf pro and manager of the country club, saw the dweeby linen-suited accountant come into the bar late that afternoon, looking a bit wigged out (he went straight for the gin instead of his usual mineral water at that time of day), but he paid him little attention, there was too much else to do, the new season was in full swing, first club tournament just two weeks away, his own urgent staffing problems were as yet unresolved (he’d appealed to the board, there was plenty of money for more help, what were they being so chintzy about), the greens and fairways were in shitty shape after the spring drought, the buttbrain groundskeepers handing him some crap about the water pressure being too low for the sprinklers to work properly, one of the local wives he’d been jamming was giving him a hard time since he’d tried to call it off, the new cook was threatening to quit (three in the last six weeks), one of the coolers was on the blink, also the pool filtering system, there were lights out over the east parking lot, potholes in the access road, dogshit in the sandtraps at the tenth and twelfth greens, Kevin hardly had time for that limp noodle, not even a golfer, more like a golf widower, husband of maybe the best all-round player at the club, her only weakness being her impatience around the edges of the greens. Her impatience generally: a pain in the hunkies. She was due in soon, old Marge—or Sarge, as some called her when not calling her worse—always one of the first ones back in, no matter when she went out. She just played through everybody like a bulldozer through butter: make way, you zombies. Big beef, Marge. This was one wife out here Kevin had not planted and would not. The crowds began to arrive, he was still shifting the beers into the working cooler from the dead one when they started pouring in, some clopping in off the course like old nags entering the feedbarn, others, as Trevor had done (he was over by the picture window now, staring blankly out on the dimming sky), joining them from town, full of all the usual asinine jokes and urgent demands. When John got back to town, Kevin would have a private chat with him about the workload out here. John always had a solution, and he didn’t need the goddamned board to get things done. Kevin missed him when he wasn’t around, the place always seemed a bit seedy without him. His wife had been out earlier in the day, or she probably had been, Kevin wasn’t taking any bets on that lady’s whereabouts anymore, or her ifabouts either, didn’t even like to think about it and mostly didn’t, but he was pretty sure he saw her, heading to the locker-rooms. He hadn’t seen her since, but only John’s wife could wear a gold lamé top over emerald-green slacks like that and look casual doing it. Another local hausfrau Kevin had not staked and would not, he knew, though would that he could. Just brushing up against her was magic. At the bar, the story of the day was about the bareassed preacher’s kid crawling up onto Stu and Daphne’s roof to retrieve his pants, and everybody had their own account of how those articles got up there in the first place. Some of them were pretty wonderful, and Kevin found himself loosening up a bit as the evening wore on, a tumblerful of iced single malt helping somewhat as well. Most of the stories had old Stu coming home from the car lot and finding Daphne in bed with the kid, throwing the pants on the roof himself, usually with some one-liner from Stu directed at Daphne or the kid. One version: “This time, son, you gotta crawl up there to get your britches back. Next time you’ll have to crawl up there to get your balls back.” Others said that Stu had tanned his ass before sending him up there, which accounted for the spectacular glow, or sent one of his mechanics over to do that bit of routine rear end realignment for him (that was another rumor: the brazen young mechanic), but others said they heard the kid threw them up there himself, a dare or something, or maybe just showing off: he’d also climbed up on the sign out in the front yard and started whacking off in full view, or so someone claimed who said they saw him. PKs: the same everywhere. An old regular out here named Alf said he didn’t know about the monkey business on the sign, but that the kid, feeling cocky, had tossed his own bluejeans up there himself before going on inside was what he’d heard, too. Said it was like a kind of signal flag, you know, like raising the old blue peter, which meant his ship was ready to sail and let the world know it. Kevin had been ready to believe half the stories being told, but he figured the deadpan doctor, known for his hoard of ancient anecdotes, was pulling one out of the hat here. Alf was a hopeless old bent-backed duffer who approached the ball in a slouch, swinging from the elbows and carrying his neck out in front of his shoulders like a turkey buzzard, but he was hell to beat with a putter. “Old Stu came home and said he’d give him a blue peter, goddamn it, if he caught him around here again! He didn’t mind him taking his wife for a spin with his little banger, but he’d be damned if he’d let him have free advertising!” There was also the more plausible rumor that Stu and Daphne had actually hired the kid to enrich their sex life, Stu himself was known to tell a lot of jokes on the subject, while someone who’d had a beer with Stu out at the Getaway this afternoon said Stu had claimed that it wasn’t what it seemed, the kid was innocent, only came by to mow the lawn, it was just another prank of Winnie’s ghost which even Kevin had heard Stu say was haunting him nowadays. “Knucksie’s kid? Innocent?” old Waldo snorted, already half-bombed. “Naw, haw! Gimme a break, fellas! That boy’s been cuttin’ scrub all over town, he’s a menace to virtue everywhere! But Daph was too smart for the rowdy little jackrabbit. When he tried to jump her, she told him first he’d have to put his pants on the roof, that was the only way not to have babies, and then when he’d got them up there, she told him old Stu had got wind of it and was on his way home with a bodyshop mallet to work his chassis over, but if he got his butt up there on the roof in a hurry and put those pants to use, she’d tell Stu she’d hired him to polish the shingles!” Well, while they were all laughing to beat hell at that one, who should come in but Stu and Daphne themselves, both shitfaced, hardly able to walk, Stu asking what’s the joke. The sudden silence was earsplitting, but Waldo, not losing a beat, boomed out: “Haw! Look who’s here! Hey, you hear what happened to old Stu?” People were choking on their drinks, Kevin included, ready to fall through the floor, and Waldo’s better half grabbed his sleeve to yank him out of there, but the paint salesman winked with half his face and said: “Well, he was out in the sticks a coupla nights ago, miles from nowhere, and his car broke down, goddamn tin buckets they sell nowadays, can’t trust ’em, and so, you know, he needed a place to stay overnight. But the rube at the only farmhouse in sight said, sorry, mister, all he had was two beds, one for him and his wife and the other one for his daughter. That’s all right, says Stu, I’m harmless, my dingus got shot off in the war. I’m dreadful sorry to hear it, says the rube, okay, you can sleep with my daughter.” By now, everybody was relaxed back into their drinks once again, laughing more than the joke was worth, most of them having heard it before, the old nine-inch stub gag, but so relieved to have Waldo cover for them everything seemed funny. But then, while everyone was still falling about stupidly after the punchline, Waldo turned to Stu and asked: “So what’s this I hear about you sellin’ fresh hotcakes off your roof, ole buddy?” Stu grinned blankly, pretending not to know what Waldo was talking about, started telling some tired old joke of his own about a pretzel salesman, Daphne meanwhile keeping her mouth shut through it all. Not at all like Daphne, most people were beginning to get the picture. The two of them threw down a couple of stiff ones and staggered out early, the cluster at the bar by then having pretty much scattered. And then, later, as Kevin more or less anticipated, some woman came in and said she’d found some green pants with a gold top hanging in the lockerroom, she’d have kept them for herself if she could have got into them, whose were they?

Nevada lay smoking that night in the brazen young mechanic’s rustic one-room cabin in a prehistoric motel cluster halfway into the next county on what used to be the main road through here before the interstate link got built and all the action slid to the west and the dinosaurs died out. John was off on a business trip somewhere, Bruce due in tomorrow, but had left no messages, they both were together maybe, probably not. Cool jazz played on Rex’s old hi-fi system (the CD player she’d given him sat, gathering yellow prairie dust, on a kitchenette shelf), punctuated from time to time by a dull metallic clang as Rex’s elbows hit the rusty sides of the ancient shower stall. Paranoia drove Rex this far from where his daily bread got earned or otherwise acquired, his qualms about humanity in general augmented by his more particular mistrust of hicktown collusion, hypocrisy, and stupidity, and by, above all, his deep misgivings about John, misgivings nettled by seething rancor (Rex forgave no trespasses), something they could not talk too much about, since John was Nevada’s principal ticket, and had come to mean more to her than that really, and Rex knew it. Made his heart heavy, she knew, but he never complained, needing her, as was mutual. John kept a suite out at the new luxury motel on the interstate where he could come and go without notice, and Nevada stayed out there when in town, but whenever, as now, she was tensed up and had to mellow out, she came here. Rex gave her soothing body massages, a skill he’d picked up in one of his previous careers, and they had sex that was long, satisfying, and blissfully unpretentious. Sometimes they jogged together, or worked out a light set or two, and there was always some quality dope to do and stories to exchange from their respective workplaces. Tonight, for example, after a funny story about a kid she suspected might be little Jennifer’s brother, Rex had shown her the contract he’d got the car dealer’s wife to sign, to be postdated later, which gave Rex half the dealership and sole ownership of the service department, but which, by description, obliged him to marry the woman first. “She’s an old pig, I know, and drunk more than not, but she’s got what I want. You’re drifting away from me, baby, I can’t help that, but I want to be ready to do right by you when the show closes down and you come back to me.” She’d started to protest, thought better of it, agreed instead that she was indeed feeling somewhat adrift but had no clear idea, as he seemed to, which way the wind was blowing (she felt unlinked with John away and as though jobless, somehow endangered), and then had asked him how they were going to get the husband out of the picture. “I’ve worked it out,” was all he’d say, his reticence causing her some unease, since mostly he told her what was on his mind. Now, when he came out of the shower and sat on the bed, handing her the towel to dry his back, she told him about the operations she was running for John’s pal Bruce, including their plans to take John’s daughter and her little friend from the mall for a skyride in Bruce’s jet tomorrow, providing that soldier of fortune got back from his Caribbean fun and games and the girls could escape their babysitters. Just a preliminary step; next move more serious, and nothing she could do really to stop it. She might, no choice of her own, be moving on. “Bruce is a cool guy but, deep down, something of a psycho. It’s like he’s always walking along the edge of a cliff and can’t think of one good reason not to step off except for something like plain old animal hunger: he still wants more than he wants not to want. But if his appetite ever fails him, so long, brother, he’s gone.” Actually, she thought Bruce and Rex were a lot alike, but she knew Rex would resent her saying so, since it was always the old apples and oranges argument with Rex whenever it came to rich folks and poor. “That makes him an easy spender with other people’s lives, too,” she added, reaching around to towel Rex’s drum-tight abs, “life itself probably being the thing he has the least respect for. He thinks life was some kind of fundamental mistake the universe made back when it orgasmed and the less of it the better.” Rex got up to change the record, choosing something a bit more progressive and so more to his tastes, but not so far out as to chafe her gentled spirit. She lay back on the bed, gazing at his well-toned lats, firm butt, and dark muscular thighs, thinking: Bruce was right about one thing. Life was not, as some poetical types liked to claim, a dream, but being rooted in dreams (and dead ones at that) and more like them than not, if you were crazy enough to live life out, you might as well be crazy enough to live it as though it were a dream. It eased the suffering, and nothing more meaningless in a meaningless world than to suffer for nada. A spin on things, she noted, that gave you a lot of license. Rex rolled a fresh spliff and lit it, passed it down; she took a deep toke, then coiled smoke rings out at his semitumescent cock. “Straighten that muscle up,” she said, “and we’ll have a game of quoits.”