Come to me 03

The sight of you. It was 97° and I took my kids to the club for a swim. Everybody was there, including my lover, Henry, his wife, Marie, and their two boys, whose names I forget. My husband David stayed home to mow the lawn and read the Times.

Henry and I didn't really see each other that much during the two years we were lovers. We could have, I think. I'm a musician. I could have practiced a little less. Henry ran a construction company. He was his own boss. All of our time together was shaved off something bigger, slivered into pieces so thin you could look right at them and never even see.

Those two winters I would look out my window at dawn and see his crew plowing driveways. They were like angels in the snow, their little white and yellow lights turning softly in the storm right into my bedroom.

I was watching Henry from the clubhouse deck as he showed the youngest boy how to swim. His big arms carving renels in the water, clearing a path for the little arms to move in. I wore huge sunglasses so I could watch him. That was all I really wanted, just to watch Henry forever.

I grew up on the plains and didn't know how I'd long for the ocean until my foot felt the first wave's edge. And I hadn't known the wordless, leaping power of beauty until I saw Henry.

Marie walked past my shayes, looking the other way, and I tried not to blame her for her bad manners and tight red face. Grief made her ugly, and I know that she was not always ugly. I lay back, calculating whether I had time to talk to Henry while Marie was wherever she was. I thought so, and dove in from the pool's edge surfacing next to him.

Under his little boy's splashing, he put his hand on my waist, watching for Marie, who seemed to have a sick sense about us. She worried that we were having an affair and complained obliquely about my presence. She never saw anything between us. I could have kissed him on the mouth that day in front of all the neighbors, and everything would have been different. He stood close to me and smiled. We could both look down and see his erection, even in the cold water.

Marie came zipping out of the snack area, a bag of chips in one hand and a racket in the other. "Hank, we've got a court. Go dry off and I'll get your sneakers." Among the club set, she was a serious tennis player. She stood there looking down on us, her hands on her hips. She didn't move until Henry headed for the wall. Then she smiled at me and walked toward the court.

I followed him to the wall, watching the small drops quiver down his back. I didn't know I was about to speak. "Henry, I don't think this is working. What about our time together?" We were both surprised. "If you still want me to leave him, I will."

I swam across the pool and went back to my shayes. Henry was still standing in the water, looking dazed. He hoisted himself out, emerging smoothly like a big dark dolphin, all muscle and flex, no visible bones. He glanced at me and then headed for the court, his tennis shirt clinging to his wide wet back.

I put my chin on the deck's redwood railing and watched them play. I always felt powerful with Henry, powerful and grateful. That day I felt like God Almighty, holding a crowd of tiny people in one huge hand. I had wanted to hold just Henry, but somehow another six had climbed aboard.

David had given me the only home I'd ever had. But like the little mermaid in the fairy tale, I was prepared to cut my true self in two and walk in pain and artifice just to dance with Henry, dazzled by all that unfamiliar light.

I thought about the girls and hoped they'd be all right. The three of us had been a team, and that wouldn't have to change. David had been a good father, better than most I've seen. He played Scrabble with them, went to their concerts, picked them up from swim team when I was touring, hugged them every day, and knew how to braid their hair. I thought Henry would help out the way he did with his boys, and nothing would keep David from Rose and Violet.

I used to think the girls were like my arms. I didn't need anyone's help growing them or taking care of them. When Rose was an infant, she would sleep through my practicing, but wake up as soon as I started to vacuum. I stopped vacuuming and Violet, my baby, used to help the ushers at my concerts, tripping over her Mary Janes and her lavender orundandy skirt, but knowing where every seat in the hall was. I took the most everywhere I went. We all loved music and new places and hotel rooms. David usually stayed home. He's a psychiatrist and never likes to leave his patients for too long.

I didn't know what would happen when Henry finished playing tennis. We would have to talk on the phone, work out the details. The girls would go to music camp for a month, and I could move out then if David wanted the house. Or maybe he'd move out. The house didn't matter much to me as long as I had my piano in a bedroom for the girls. I have to force myself to sleep in a bed even now.

When I got home, I sat down at the piano and stared at the keys, waiting for a wave of guilt or panic that would tell me to stop. Henry loved me the way I was taught Indians love nature. I was everywhere for him in the air, in the light, seeping right into his skin. It scared me a little how much he loved me, handing over everything he had. He would kneel in front of me, big man, putting his hands around my waist as though to snap me in two, and he'd say, "There is nothing I wouldn't do for you." And I would rest my hands in his black curly hair. "Nothing," he'd say again. And I said, "I know." And he'd relax and lay me on the bed.

It was like nothing else in my life. That river of love that I could dip into and leave and return to once more and find it still flowing, undisturbed by my comingings and goings. And when we made love, it was the same. He would wash over me and into me. And he didn't need me to smile or cry out or move. I lay there like the riverbed.

I was orphaned at 16 by two lonely, curdled people who had hoped to divorce without too much scandal when I finished high school. Instead, their car hit a tree. I was sent off to boarding school by a committee of relatives and came home to visit Mrs. Wallace, the one my father hoped to marry, and Dr. Davidson, the one my mother had in the wings. I went on being their memorial tribute to thwarted love and bad planning until I turned 18. I escaped to Giuliard and didn't answer their letters.

Being an orphan didn't bother me. While I was at Giuliard, I met David. He was finishing his residency in psychiatry and I was one of his guinea pigs. I was 19. He was 29. My faculty adviser had noticed that I never went away for holidays, never had family in the audience, never had trouble paying my tuition. I told her the highlights of my personal history, and she turned her face away and suggested that I talk to someone at the Washington Square Clinic. I thought it had something to do with piano playing, so I went.

It was April and the big waiting room was still wintry. All the chairs were gray plastic. As I put my feet up on one of them, I heard two men talking on the far side of the room. My hearing is acute and I eased dropped. "I'll take her," said the tall, chubby one. "No," said the other one. "David, you're full up this week. And anyway, you couldn't handle your counter transference." "My counter transference, please. All right, you take her. Take her."

I was smiling when David invited me into his cubicle. "You have a lovely smile," he said, and then he frowned. "Thank you. Why are you frowning?" "I'm not. I'm uh Dr. Silverstein and you're Galen Nichols." "Yes. Well," he arched his fingertips together the way they must have taught him in practical psychiatry. "What can I do for you?" "I don't know," I said, and I didn't say anything else.

We had three sessions like that, and at the end of the third, I got up and shook his hand. "Thanks for your time," I said. I liked him. He acted just like me. Two weeks later, he called and asked how I was doing. A few weeks after that, he invited me to go for coffee. I went and we sat in the Big Apple coffee shop for 2 hours while he told me that he was married, but just couldn't stop thinking about me. I thanked him for the coffee and went home and listened to my most recent performance tapes.

After two more coffee dates, he asked me to have dinner with him. "I can't take a break for dinner these days. We're rehearsing, but if you want to get something for yourself and come listen, you're welcome to." David sat at the back of the auditorium until 1:00 a.m., and he walked me home. "You play so beautifully. May I please come in?" "Sure."

By then, I had figured out that he wasn't really like me at all, but he was a gentle, sweet man, not like the cowboys at home. He touched me as if I were made of glass and gold dust. At about 3:00 a.m., he jumped out of bed and into his jeans, mumbling how sorry he was. I was too tired to walk him to the door. So, I blew him a kiss and told him to take the extra key. "I'll call you," he said. "All right."

When he called though, I couldn't see him because I'd gotten a grant to study in Paris for the rest of the summer. I gave him my address at the Pension and told him to take care. 3 weeks later, Madame Lever whispered that I had a visitor waiting in the courtyard. There was David, unshaven, an enormous bouquet of flowers in his shaking hands. I was glad to see him. He said that he'd asked his wife for a separation, and that she'd agreed. I didn't want to talk about it. We found a couple of jars for the flowers and walked along the river. He took a room down the hall and stayed for 10 days. I'd practice or go to class during the day, and he'd visit museums and read. At night, we'd eat in the cafe and then have sex in his room. I slept in my own room. We had a nice time and when he was leaving, I said I'd call him in September. I remember how he smiled then. "You've never called me." "I will. Okay, I'll be in my own place by then, and I'll list the new number with information right away so you can get it." He was swinging my hand back and forth. "Coming to Paris was the best thing I could have done. I love you, you know." "I'm glad you came," I said. "Don't miss your plane." And he stroked my hair and cried for a minute before he left.

When I got back, I did call him and we spent most of our evenings together. For a year, he asked me to marry him and I ignored him. I thought I'd be dead by the time I was 25. I couldn't see getting married. One morning, David started banging his fists on my kitchen table and said, "You are killing me. All I want is to love you, and you won't let me." I got dressed and left him sitting in the kitchen. I bought a white silk shirt to go with my white jeans and called them from Macy's to meet me for a blood test.

10 years later, we had two girls, quiet like me, but friendly. David is a good person, and I knew that women would be lining up six deep with casserles the minute I left him. I walked into the kitchen, still thinking about the nice, normal woman who would become David's next wife, and watched him carry a plate of chicken to the grill, balancing tongs and a fork and a bottle of barbecue sauce. He had sent the girls to get out of their wets suits, and while I chopped red peppers and hold strawberries, I kept my head down, wondering if it'd be better to leave a note. He watched me putter, and after he had washed and dried his hands carefully, he rested them on my shoulders for just a second. Then he went into the living room and put on Vivaldi while I set the table. After dinner, we let the girls bike around the neighborhood and we washed the dishes together. David went to work on an article and I sat in the bedroom in the bent Willow rocking chair that we bought when I was pregnant with Rose and waited for the phone to ring.

"Hi, it's Hank D. Martino." We were always very careful in case a spouse picked up simultaneously. "Hi, David's in his study." The study didn't have a phone so that he wouldn't be disturbed. "How'd the tennis game go?" "Not bad considering that I was out of my mind. You looked so beautiful today and you've made me so happy. You did mean it. You'll leave." "Yes. I can't believe that I'm going to wake up every morning for the rest of my life and look at your face on the pillow next to mine. I want to marry you as soon as we can." I was picking dead leaves off the fig tree in our bedroom. "I'll be yours until the stars fall from the sky, Henry. I don't have any thoughts about marriage."

I also had some doubts about sleeping in the same bed. David was used to my slipping onto the floor during the night. "I want us to belong to each other." "That doesn't make any sense. You belong to Marie and you're ready to divorce her. I belong to David and before that he belonged to Nah. It's really silly the whole idea." "Yay. Honey, I want to be with you and I want it to be forever." "I want to be with you too, Henry. And I did."

David came into the bedroom. He mouthed, "For me?" And I shook my head. He stood in the middle of the bedroom looking at me before he went back to his study. "I have to go. David's wandering around." "I'll drive by the construction site tomorrow. Coline Lane." "Right. Right. That'll be great. I love you." "You." "I know. See you tomorrow."

David came to bed a little earlier than usual and he laid his hand on my breast. After a while, he put his hand on my thigh, his sign, and I shifted my legs to let him enter me. It wasn't as nice as cooking to the Vivaldi, but it was really all right. I awoke on the floor. David had put a quilt over me and tucked his sweater under my head. I put the sweater on and practiced for about 3 hours after the girls went out to play and David went downtown to see patients. This was one of my favorite times and I didn't want to cut it short. I practiced some performance pieces I was having trouble with and threw in a little jazz at the end. My fingers were getting stiffer as I got older.

I showered and went to meet Henry wearing a shapeless blue shift that he hated. I drove over to Coline Lane where he was building a house. His crew was there taking a coffee break. Most of the guys knew me or my car by sight. Henry and I counted on the fact that most people, especially men, don't like to get into other people's business. I came and went freely, undisguised. Usually, I just pull over onto the ridge near his trailer and sit in the car waiting. Henry would come out after a few minutes and scrunch down by the window to talk to me about our schedules and try to work his plans around mine. Once in a while, if we had a chunk of time during the day, we'd go to a hotel. I would have gone to a motel or even to the park, but Henry felt we deserve better. I didn't think it had much to do with what we deserved.

He saw me right away and hopped down from the unfinished patio. I could watch him run toward me and never tire of the sight. His right leg slightly stiff at the knee from an old baseball injury, his muscles flowing beneath his clothes. I wanted that ease, that perfect unconsciousness to transform me so that I would never again find myself in the middle of traffic, paralyzed by the risk and complexity of the next step.

Once the summer before, I'd been watching him from the clubhouse as he did his laps. He felt my eyes on him, and he got out of the water, face turned to me, and came up the stairs to the deck, dripping water through the building. No one else was around. "I can't not come to you," he said. "I just don't have any choice about it." And he gathered up my hair into little bunches and pressed them against his wet face like flowers.

After Rose and Violet, I love that kind of love the most. It wasn't his wanting me that got to me. That was nice, but not so rare in my life. Men see something in me or something missing that they like. It's that he didn't fight the feeling. A lot of times men want you and then they get mad about wanting you whether they have you or not. He had never been angry with me or disappointed or blame me for what I couldn't do. And more than that, it was that he was so beautiful and that beauty belonged to me.

When he got to my car, I swung the door open and he knelt in front of me. I put my hand on his arm, breaking our public display rules, which now seemed irrelevant. He smiled down at my hand, a sunny white smile that was like nothing I'd ever seen in my mirror. "Ready to take the plunge?" he asked. "I'm ready to tell David after the girls go to camp. I can move out then. Or he'll move out and we can get started." "Started? Helen, we're a lot further along than getting started. I really do want to marry you and I want us to try and get custody of the boys."

I thought first of all, Marie does a perfectly fine job with the boys. It's not like they need to be rescued. And second of all, I could just see myself spending the next 5 years of my life trying to win over the older one. Making hot dogs and burgers when I've trained my girls to eat French, Thai, Indian, and whatever is put in front of them. Having to wear a robe when I take a shower. Going to tennis matches every weekend. Stepping over Gobots and Pieces of GI Joe. "Henry, let's wait and see. Let's give ourselves a chance to enjoy ourselves. Just be together and see how it goes."

He got very dark and his brows drew down. "I don't know what else to say. I don't have much choice, do I? If you don't want to take what I want to give you, I can't make you. But I'm going to keep asking you, and one of these days, you're going to say yes. It's meant to be, sweetheart." He was smiling again. He believed everything he was saying. "Like hell," I thought. I was touched, of course, but I could never answer the same question over and over. And I don't believe that anything's written for us. Certainly nothing good.

I slept on the floor. I lost track of time. And love and death had always looked pretty much the same to me. David needed to marry someone crazy. Henry had mistaken me for someone interesting. He put his big hand over mine, and I watched a little cloud of plaster dust settle on us. "I have to go. I'll talk to you tomorrow." I slammed the car door and drove off, watching him shrink in the rear view mirror.

My arms and legs were cold driving home through the woods and I thought about what I was going home to. I pulled the car off the road, picturing Henry and his boys and his kids with my kids and Marie bitching about money and Henry sitting in a studio apartment with mismatched plates waiting for me to make his divorce meaningful, valuable, decent, waiting for me to make his life beautiful. And when I'd finally get up to leave, he'd watch me go, letting me know that I was supposed to stay with him, that I was hurting him.

I got home about 10 of 12 and called David between appointments. He picked up on the first ring. "Dr. Silverstein here?" "Miss Nicholls here?" He sounded surprised and he laughed. I didn't call him often since he was calling home once or twice a day at this point. I used to hate that when we were first married and he finally stopped. But that year he has started again and I didn't say anything about it. He was right to be afraid. I could call Mrs. Stevenson for the girls and we could go to the am just the two of us. I said okay that would be fine. That would be nice. I hadn't expected more than that. "Good. See you at home." "Okay. I'm glad you called. See you at home. I love you." He said, "I know. See you soon."

I practiced for another hour and when the girls came in, we took turns playing duets for a while and then I had to go lie down. I fell asleep for about an hour and when David woke me up, I tried to focus and made the girls stir fry vegetables and fried dumplings. Our own dinner was pretty nice. Smooth white platters of dark peppery food, cold beer, and enough room for me to lie back against the cold vinyl seats. David kept reaching forward, touching my temples and my wrists, where my veins are big and blue. "How do you keep so cool?" he asked. It was an old joke between us. "No heart," I said. He smiled and I thought, I cannot do this again. I smiled back at him.

I drove down to see Henry the next day and the guys waved to me. I got out of the car and went over to Henry and kissed him on the mouth and then on both cheeks and then at the corner of each perfect eye. He didn't smile. "You're not going to leave him, are you? You're going to tell me that you can't do it. And I just don't want to hear it. Please, Galen. Please, baby, don't say it." "I won't say I can't. That's too easy. I have to say I'm choosing not to. I'm so sorry." He looked me up and down for a minute, and then he put his warm face into my neck. I could feel every bone in his face pressing him, but I stood fast.

"I had an offer for the business, a pretty good offer. I could go down to North Carolina. I could go back into business with my dad. Should I take it?" "Do you want to?" I could see him going, striding loosely down a back road, the sun shining on him wherever he was. "No, godamn it. I don't want to. I want to stay here and marry you and have a child with you. That's what I want. That's all I've wanted for 2 years. And if I can't have that, I don't even know what to want." "I don't know what you should do."

"Does Marie want to move?" "Of course. I haven't even told her about the offer. You know, Marie, she'll have us packed before the inks dry on the contract. Getting me away from you will make her very happy." We smiled. Marie had been suspicious long before there had been anything between us, and somehow that had left us feeling slightly less guilty. "I know." And I thought about having him near and him looking at me like he had a splinter in his heart. And Marie looking at me the same way, only without the love. "Take the offer," I said. "Move." "Okay," he said like a threat. "Okay," I said, and I kissed him just one quick time, and I closed my eyes until he walked away.

Silver water. My sister's voice was like mountain water in a silver pitcher. The clear blue beauty of it cools you and lifts you up beyond your heat, beyond your body. After we went to see La Traviata when she was 14 and I was 12, she elbowed me in the parking lot and said, "Check this out." And she opened her mouth unnaturally wide. And her voice came out so crystalline and bright that all the departing opera goers stood frozen by their cars, unable to take out their keys or open their doors until she had finished. And then they cheered like hell. That's what I like to remember. And that's the story I told to all of her therapists. I wanted them to know her, to know that who they saw was not all there was to see. That before her constant tinkling of commercials and fast food jingles, there had been Puccini and Mozart and him so sweet and mighty, you expected Jesus to come down off his cross and clap. That before there was a mountain of Thorazine fat swaying down the halls in nylon maternity tops and sweatpants, there had been the prettiest girl in Arendelle Elementary School, the belle of Landmark Junior High. Maybe there were other pretty girls, but I didn't see them. To me, Rose, my beautiful blonde defender, my guide to Tampax and my mother's moods, was perfect.

She had her first psychotic break when she was 15. She had been coming home moody and tearful, then quietly beaming. Then she stopped coming home. She would go out into the woods behind our house and not come in until my mother went after her at dusk and stepped gently into the briars and saplings and pulled her out blank-faced, her pale blue sweater covered with crumbled leaves, her white jeans smeared with dirt. After 3 weeks of this, my mother, who is a musician and widely regarded as eccentric, said to my father, who is a psychiatrist and a kind, sad man, "She's going off." "What is that? Your professional opinion." He picked up the newspaper and put it down again, sighing. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to snap at you. I know something's bothering her. Have you talked to her?" "What's there to say, David? She's going crazy. She doesn't need a heart-to-heart talk with mom. She needs a hospital."

They went back and forth, and my father sat down with Rose for a few hours, and she sat there licking the hairs on her forearm, first one way, then the other. My mother stood in the hallway, dry-eyed and pale, watching the two of them. She had already packed, and when three of my father's friends dropped by to offer free consultations and recommendations, my mother and Rose's suitcase were already in the car. My mother hugged me and told me that they would be back that night, but not with Rose. She also said, divining my worst fear, "It won't happen to you, honey. Some people go crazy and some people never do. You never will." She smiled and stroked my hair. "Not even when you want to."

Rose was in hospitals great and small for the next 10 years. She had lots of terrible therapists and a few good ones. One place had no pictures on the walls, no windows, and the patients all wore slippers with the hospital crest on them. My mother didn't even bother to go to admissions. She turned Rose around and the two of them marched out, my father walking behind them apologizing to his colleagues. My mother ignored the psychiatrist, the social workers, and the nurses and played Handel and Bessie Smith for the patients on whatever was available. At some places, she had a Steinway donated by a grateful or optimistic family. At others, she banged out, "Give me a pigfoot and a bottle of beer on an old scarred box that hadn't been tuned since there had been English-speaking physicians on the grounds." My father talked in serious, appreciative tones to the administrators and unit chiefs and tried to be friendly with whoever was managing Rose's case.

We all hated the family therapists. The worst family therapist we ever had sat in a pale green room with us, visibly taking stock of my mother's ethereal beauty and her faded blue t-shirt and girl-sized jeans, my father's rumpled suit and stained tie, and my own unreadable 17-year-old fashion statement. Rose was beyond fashion that year, one of her dancing teddy bear smocks and extra extra-large Celtic sweatpants. Mr. Walker read Rose's file in front of us and then watched an alarm as Rose began crooning beautifully and slowly massaging her breasts. My mother and I laughed, and even my father started to smile. This was Rose's usual opening salvo for new therapists. Mr. Walker said, "I wonder why it is that everyone is so entertained by Rose behaving inappropriately." Rose burped and then we all laughed. This was the seventh family therapist we had seen, and none of them had lasted very long. Mr. Walker, unfortunately, was determined to do right by us. "What do you think of Rose's behavior, Violet?" They did this sometimes. In their manual, it must say, "If you think the parents are too weird, try talking to the sister." "I don't know. Maybe she's trying to get you to stop talking about her in the third person." "Nicely put," my mother said. "Indeed," my father said.

"Rose," said Rose. "Well, this is something that the whole family agrees upon," Mr. Walker said, trying to act as if he understood or even liked us. That was not a successful intervention. "Ferret face." Rose tended to function better when she was angry. He did look like a blonde ferret. We all laughed again. Even my father, who tried to give these people a chance out of some sense of collegiality, had given it up. After 14 minutes, Mr. Walker decided that our time was up and walked out, leaving us grinning at each other. Rose was still nuts, but at least we'd all had a little fun.

The day we met our best family therapist started out almost as badly. We scared off a resident and then scared off her supervisor who sent us Dr. Thorne. 300 lb of Texas chili, cornbread, and lone star beer. Finished off with big black cowboy boots and a small string tie around the area of his neck. "Oh, fragous day. It's big nut." Rose was in heaven and stopped massaging her breasts immediately. "Hey, little nut." You have to understand how big a man would have to be to call my sister little. He christened us all right away. And it's the good doctor nut and mad damn hickory nut cuz they are the hardest damn nuts to crack. And over here in the overalls and not much else is no one's nut. A name that summed up both my sanity and my loneliness. We all relaxed. Dr. Thorne was good for us. Rose moved into a halfway house whose director loved big nuts so much that she kept Rose. Even when Rose went through a period of having sex with everyone who passed her door, she was in a fever for a while, trying to steal the voices by [ __ ] her brains out. Big nut said, "Darling, I can't. I cannot make love to every beautiful woman I meet. And furthermore, I can't do that and be your therapist, too. It's a great shame, but I think you might be able to find a really nice guy, someone who treats you just as sweet and kind as I would if I were lucky enough to be your beau. I don't want you to settle for less." And she stopped propositioning the crack addicts and the alcoholics and the guys at the shelter. We love Dr. Thorne. My father went back to sing Rich Neurotics and helped out one day a week at Dr. Thorne's walk-in clinic. My mother finished a recording of Mozart concertos and played at fundraisers for Rose's halfway house. I went back to college and found a wonderful linebacker from Texas to sleep with. In the dark, I would make him call me darling. Rose took her meds, lost about 50 lbs, and began singing at the AM Zion Church down the street from the halfway house. At first, they didn't know what to do with this big blonde lady dressed funny and hovering wistfully in the doorway during their rehearsals, but she gave them a few bars of Precious Lord. And the choir director felt God's hand and saw that with the help of his sweet child Rose, the Prospect Street Choir was going all the way to the Gospel Olympics. Amidst a sea of beige, umber, cinnamon, and espresso faces, there was Rose, bigger, blonder, and pinker than any two white women could be. And Rose and the choir's contralto at Robisho laid out their gold and silver voices, and wove them together in strands as fine as silk, as strong as steel. And we wept as Rose and Addie in their billowing garnet robes swayed together, clasping hands until the last perfect note floated up to God. And then they smiled down at us.

Rose would still go off from time to time, and the voices would tell her to do bad things, but Dr. Thorne or Addie or my mother could usually bring her back. After five good years, Big Nut died, stuffing his face with a chili dog sitting in his unairconditioned office in the middle of July. He had one big Texasized aneurysm and died. Rose held on tight for 7 days. She took her meds, went to choir practice, and rearranged her room about a 100 times. His funeral was like a lure for the mentally ill. If you were psychotic, borderline, bad off neurotic, or just very hard to get along with, you were there. People shaking so bad from years of heavy meds that they fell out of the pews. People holding hands, crying, moaning, talking to themselves. The crazy people and the not so crazy people were all huddled together like puppies at the pound. Rose stopped taking her meds and the halfway house wouldn't keep her after she pitched another patient down the stairs. My father called the insurance company and found out that Rose's new improved psychiatric coverage wouldn't begin for 45 days. I put all of her stuff in a garbage bag and we walked out of the halfway house, Rose winking at the poor, drooling boy on the couch. "This is going to be difficult, not all bad, but difficult for the whole family. And I thought we should discuss everybody's expectations. I know I have some concerns." My father had convened a family meeting as soon as Rose finished putting each one of her 30 stuffed bears into its own special place. "No meds," Rose said, her eyes lowered, her stubby fingers, those fingers that had braided my hair and painted tulips on my cheeks, pulling hard on the hem of her dirty smock. My father looked in despair at my mother. "Rosie, do you want to drive the new car?" my mother asked. Rose's face lit up. "I'd love to drive that car. I'd drive to California. I'd go see the bears at the San Diego Zoo. I would take you, Violet, but you always hated the zoo. Remember how she cried at the Bronx Zoo when she found out that the animals didn't get to go home at closing?" Rose put her damp hand on mine and squeezed it sympathetically. "Poor Vi. If you take your medication, after a while, you'll be able to drive the car. That's the deal. Meds. Car." My mother sounded accommodating but unenthusiastic, careful not to heat up Rose's paranoia. "You got yourself a deal, darling."

I was living about an hour away then, teaching English during the day, writing poetry at night. I went home every few days for dinner. I called every night. My father said quietly, "It's very hard. We're doing all right. I think Rose has been walking in the mornings with your mother and she watches a lot of TV. She won't go to the day hospital and she won't go back to the choir. Her friend, Mrs. Robisho, came by a couple of times. What a sweet woman. Rose wouldn't even talk to her. She just sat there staring at the wall and humming. We're not doing all that well, actually, but I guess we're getting by. I'm sorry, sweetheart. I don't mean to depress you." My mother said emphatically, "We're doing fine. We've got our routine and we stick to it and we're fine. You don't need to come home so often, you know. Wait till Sunday. Just come for the day. Lead your life by. She's leading hers."

I stayed away all week, afraid to pick up my phone, grateful to my mother for her harsh calm and her reticence, the qualities that had enraged me throughout my childhood. I came on Sunday in the early afternoon to help my father garden, something we had always enjoyed together. We weeded and staked tomatoes and killed aphids while my mother and Rose were down at the lake. I didn't even go into the house until 4:00 when I needed a glass of water. Someone had broken the piano bench into five neatly stacked pieces and placed them where the piano bench usually was. "We were having such a nice time, I couldn't bear to bring it up," my father said, standing in the doorway, carefully keeping his gardening boots out of the kitchen. "What did mommy say?" "She said, 'Better the bench than the piano.' And your sister laid down on the floor and just wept. Then your mother took her down to the lake."

"This can't go on, Vi. We have 27 days left. Your mother gets no sleep because Rose doesn't sleep. And if I could just pay $27,000 to keep her in the hospital until the insurance takes over, I'd do it." "All right, do it. Pay the money and take her back to Hartley Reese. It was the prettiest place and she liked the art therapy there." "I would if I could. The policy states that she must be symptom free for at least 45 days before her coverage begins. Symptom free means no hospitalization." "Jesus, Daddy, how could you get that kind of policy?" "She hasn't been symptom free for 45 minutes." "It was the only one I could get for long-term psychiatric." He put his hand over his mouth to block whatever he was about to say and went back out to the garden. I couldn't see if he was crying. He stayed outside and I stayed inside until Rose and my mother came home from the lake. Rose's soggy sweatpants were rolled up to her knees and she had a bucket full of shells and seaweed which my mother persuaded her to leave on the back porch. My mother kissed me lightly and told Rose to go up to her room and change out of her wet pants. Rose's eyes grew very wide. "Never. I will never." She knelt down and began banging her head on the kitchen floor with rhythmic intensity, throwing all her weight behind each attack. My mother put her arms around Rose's waist and tried to hold her back. Rose shook her off, not even looking around to see what was slowing her down. My mother lay up against the refrigerator. "Violet, please." I threw myself onto the kitchen floor, becoming the spot that Rose was smacking her head against. She stopped a fraction of an inch short of my stomach. "Oh Vi, mommy, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Don't hate me." She staggered to her feet and ran wailing to her room. My mother got up and washed her face briskly, rubbing it dry with a dishcloth. My father heard the wailing and came running in, slipping his long bare feet out of his rubber boots. "Galen, Galen, let me see." He held her head and looked closely for bruises on her pale, small face. "What happened?" My mother looked at me. "Violet, what happened? Where's Rose?" "Rose got upset, and when she went running upstairs, she pushed mommy out of the way." I've only told three lies in my life, and that was my second. "She must feel terrible pushing you of all people. It would have to be you, but I know she didn't want it to be." He made my mother a cup of tea, and all the love he had for her, despite her silent rages and her vague stares, came pouring through the teapot, warming her cup, filling her small, long-fingered hands. She rested her head against his hip, and I looked away.

"Let's make dinner, then I'll call her, or you call her, David. Maybe she'd rather see your face first." Dinner was filled with all of our starts and stops and Rose's desperate efforts to control herself. She could barely eat and hummed the McDonald's theme song over and over again, pausing only to spill her juice down the front of her smock and begin weeping. My father looked at my mother and handed Rose his napkin. She dabbed at herself listlessly, but the tears stopped. "I want to go to bed. I want to go to bed and be in my head. I want to go to bed and be in my bed and in my head and just wear red. For red is the color that my baby wore. And once more. It's true. Yes, it is. It's true. Please don't wear red tonight." "Oh. Oh, please don't wear red tonight for red is the color." "Okay. Okay, Rose. It's okay. I'll go upstairs with you and you can get ready for bed. Then mommy will come up and say good night, too. It's okay, Rose." My father reached out his hand and Rose grasped it and they walked out of the dining room together, his long arm around her middle. My mother sat at the table for a moment, her face in her hands, and then she began clearing the plates. We cleared without talking, my mother humming Schubert's Schlummerlied, a lullaby about the woods and the river, calling to the child to go to sleep. She sang it to us every night when we were small. My father came into the kitchen and signaled to my mother. They went upstairs and came back down a few minutes later. "She's asleep," they said, and we went to sit on the porch and listen to the crickets. I don't remember the rest of the evening, but I remember it is quietly sad, and I remember the rare sight of my parents holding hands, sitting on the picnic table, watching the sunset.

I woke up at 3:00 in the morning, feeling the cool night air through my sheet. I went down the hall for a blanket and looked into Rose's room for no reason. She wasn't there. I put on my jeans and a sweater and went downstairs. I could feel her absence. I went outside and saw her wide, draggy footprints darkening the wet grass into the woods. "Rosie," I called too softly, not wanting to wake my parents, not wanting to startle Rosie. "Rosie, it's me. Are you here? Are you all right?" I almost fell over her, huge and white in the moonlight, her flowered smock bleached in the light and shadow, her sweatpants now completely wet. Her head was flung back, her white white neck exposed like a lost Greek column. "Rosie, Rosie." Her breathing was very slow and her lips were not as pink as they usually were. Her eyelids fluttered. "Closing time," she whispered. I believe that's what she said. I sat with her, uncovering the bottle of white pills by her hand and watched the stars fade. When the stars were invisible and the sun was warming the air, I went back to the house. My mother was standing on the porch, wrapped in a blanket, watching me. Every step I took overwhelmed me. I could picture my mother slapping me, shooting me for letting her favorite die. "Warrior queens," she said, wrapping her thin, strong arms around me. "I raised warrior queens." She kissed me fiercely and went into the woods by herself. Later in the morning, she woke my father, who could not go into the woods. And still later, she called the police and the funeral parlor. She hung up the phone, lay down, and didn't get back out of bed until the day of the funeral. My father fed us both and called the people who needed to be called and picked out Rose's coffin by himself. My mother played the piano and Addie sang her pure gold notes and I closed my eyes and saw my sister, 14 years old, lion's mane thrown back and eyes tightly closed against the glare of the parking lot lights. That sweet sound held us tight, flowing around us, eddying through our hearts, rising, still rising.

Henry and Marie, fault lines. Only you fault lines. Henry D. Martino said buying a lottery ticket gave you permission to dream of a better life. His wife Marie bought a lottery ticket every Friday morning on her way to work at the library. Henry never bought one. In order to dream of a new life, Henry contemplated having an affair with Mary Nordstrom, the lawyer for his construction company. Henry had had an affair 5 years ago with a woman he wanted to marry who didn't want to marry him. He had stood in his son's bedrooms, looked at their beloved faces, and thought, "I can do this. I can leave you." It took two years for him to stop being ashamed that the only reason his children had a father to play ball with every night and to help them with their homework was that the woman he loved didn't love him back. When he realized he wouldn't die of heartbreak, but would live with some of it forever, he promised himself that

The next time, if there was a next time, he wouldn't fall in love. After five or six lunches, quick Chinese food across the street, and pizzas in the office, Henry invited Mary and Nathan to dinner for the second Saturday in October. Marie started cooking Friday afternoon. Henry had designed their house, and the kitchen was the size of two full rooms, and the countertops were marble. It was his tribute to Marie's magnificent cooking. She made baby artichokes and yoki with basil and cream and ve ala masala, and a radikio and orange salad. She made a peached tart with a hazelnut crust. Henry spent two hours choosing wines he thought Mary would like. He came upstairs, his arms full of wine bottles. Marie waved to him silently as he put the wines in the dining room, and he waved back, excited and relieved. Marie was being so good about this. The whole evening looked different. They could all become friends. No harm would be done. He would go on flirting harmlessly with Mary, and he and Marie would go to St. kits in November and make love in a big room overlooking the warm blue water.

Marie tried to make her voice cheerful as she called out to Henry. "So, what's she like?" Marie knew that she was a terribly and unfashionably jealous woman, and she also knew without admitting it, that her jealousy made Henry curl up inside himself like a mollusk avoiding a pin. She could never decide, could never let herself know if it was her jealousy that made her suspect he was having an affair when they lived in Connecticut or if he really was. She didn't confront him because they moved away and really because she could almost hear Henry admitting to the affair, could almost see him turning away from her without apology.

At night, as they got ready for bed, Marie would scowl, thinking that it was so unfair that they had both started out as attractive, athletic teenagers. But Henry had matured into a startlingly handsome, broad-chested man with a permanent tan, white teeth, and black curly hair, made more beautiful by a few silver strands. Marie looked like a fairly trim, better-dressed version of her late mother. Henry didn't love her less for that, she knew. But his eyes didn't linger upon her when she undressed. And she knew that too, and he knew it. And they both felt ashamed and beyond that, obscurely resentful. Henry encouraged Marie to work out with him, but she always made it sound like a vain and childish thing for a grown-up to do. Henry did 200 sit-ups and 100 push-ups 6 days a week. 4 days a week, he rode his exercise cycle for 45 minutes.

Henry had no wish to tell Marie what Mary was like, but he couldn't resist talking about her, sliding his tongue over her name the way he dreamt of sliding it over the pulsing vein above her collarbone. Henry knew, having been married to Marie for 20 years, that the moment he described Mary, the day would be ruined. And if he said nothing, the evening would be ruined, perhaps more dramatically when Marie laid eyes on Mary. As Henry played with the wine bottles, he assessed his choices. Ruin the day now and hope that by dinnertime Marie would have pulled herself together, or enjoy the rest of the afternoon, ignore the hot hole of his ulcer, and watch the evening collapse as Marie was helplessly rude to Mary and in a state of relentless hysteria until 4 in the morning. Henry poured himself a small glass of port and decided that a carefully crafted description of Mary would be better than just surprising Marie when Mary walked through the door. He went into the kitchen. Marie braced herself for Henry's answer. "Not a blonde, please." "She's tall, kind of skinny, very short hair. She's smart. She did a great job with the contracts for that development in Laurel Springs. Her husband seems like a nice guy. He came by the office once. He's a writer. He writes about his family," Mary said about growing up Jewish in North Carolina, which must have been a trip.

Henry leaned against the counter, willing himself to look into Marie's eyes and smile, feeling the warmth of the port and of having said her name. He could have said, "She is a pale, pale blonde just like the other one. But Gay was soft and dreamy and made me want to wrap her up and carry her off to a better world. This one is cool and tough and loves baseball and runs 20 miles a week. When the light shines on that cap of blonde hair and her pale blue eyes lie right on me like I am the only person in the room, I stop breathing because the tension in my chest is so great. And if I don't run into her, I drop by. And if that doesn't work, I call and beg her to share a pizza with me. And as we sit there and drink beer from the same bottle, I think about those long white legs wrapped around me. And she grins like she knows what I'm thinking and she doesn't mind. Also, something else you don't want to hear because you will feel about this exactly the way I do. Nathan isn't her husband. They've been living together for years, but you and I know that's not the same. And even though she says, other people say it makes no difference. I hug that fact. She's not really his. And even though I don't love her, don't want to grow old together. If I don't have her, I will never draw an easy breath again. That's what you really wanted to know. A blonde so pale she doesn't have to shave her legs." Mary was Marie's nightmare, and Marie knew it, and so did Henry. And so, in a way, did Mary, although she didn't want to know it, and felt both flattered and guilty. Nathan would know it after the dinner party, since he was a good observer most of the time, and not unused to men being attracted to Mary. Nathan thought Mary was very good-looking, beautiful in her way, but he loved her for her brains and her humor and her easy competence. Henry thought she was flawlessly beautiful and would have traded away her humor and her competence for one night beside her. When Mary looked at Henry, the longing in his eyes moved her terribly, moved her away from Nathan, even though she knew that what Henry was longing for would be gone in another 10 years.

Marie tried not to start screaming when she heard what Henry said and what he didn't say. If he didn't mention hair color, the woman was obviously a blonde. She went to the stove and cooked with skill and hatred. She would give that [ __ ] and her cast husband a meal they'd both remember. A peached heart that would melt on her lying tongue. That would rest lightly in his gutless stomach. May they choke on it all and never find water. Henry announced that he was going to take a look at the garden. Before he went outside, he slipped into the bedroom to think about what to wear for Mary. He knew he looked good in his suits, something Nathan, the writer, probably never wore. He couldn't very well wear his $800 Italian suit for a casual dinner. Marie would tear it off his back. He wanted to look relaxed, but not like some bricklayer, some greaseball tidied up for a special occasion. Henry wanted to lay out his clothes and fuss over them, but Marie would be listening for him to go out and garden. Mentally, he took out his black flannel slacks, a white shirt with a thin red stripe, and a red cashmere cardigan that Marie had bought for his 40th birthday. He loved that sweater. The shape reminded him of his father and grandfather in the back of his grandfather's grocery store. The soft, moneyed material reminded him of how far he had come from sawdust and overripe vegetables. He checked to see if his black lizard belt was in the drawer and looked for his black socks with the small gray pattern. Henry hurried out to rake leaves and to dream of Mary unbuttoning his shirt, her fingers pulling at his belt buckle. He enjoyed talking to her and admired her quick wit, but he never daydreamed of their conversations. He thought only of her square, dimpled chin, her powerful legs, her small white breasts and pointy nipples.

While she pulverized basil and sauteed pinoli, Marie also thought about what to wear. She couldn't wear white because she was bound to spatter something on it, and she wouldn't wear pants because, as far as she was concerned, she looked like a cow from the rear. She would not look bad in front of this woman. She would wear the heavy gold necklace Henry bought her in Florence for their 20th anniversary, and she would add the diamond and gold earrings they picked out together in Bermuda. Let her look. She decided to wear a black and red blouse and a black pleated skirt. Marie always wore heels, even at home.

Mary was also thinking about what to wear, but she was able to talk about it with Nathan, who was bemused, but willing. "I don't know how formal they are at work. Henry's always in a suit, but I don't know." While she was talking, Mary was fingering a pale blue silk dress with short sleeves and no back. It showed off all her best features and created the illusion of a bust. She would have preferred darker eyelashes and a smaller ass, but she had been using mascara since she was 12. And since the men in her life had always liked her ass, she had come to like it, too. It was ridiculous to wear the silk dress. Nathan would think she was crazy. She took out high-waisted gray gabardine pants and a white silk blouse, and she put on dangling silver earrings that Nathan had given her a few birthdays ago. And a wide gray suede belt to emphasize her small waist. "You look great," Nathan said, smiling. "Of course, if they're both in formal evening wear, we'll be a little embarrassed." Mary smiled back. She loved Nathan and his fine searching mind and his sweet humor and his endless patience. She could tell that Henry was smart enough but not brilliant, that he had a highly conventional sense of humor and an ugly, arrogant streak. She had told Nathan all those things about her new office friend, but she didn't say, "He is so hot for me. He's smoking, and when he comes into my office, Alice, who wouldn't bring coffee to the Pope, falls all over herself to bring him coffee just the way he likes it. He is the sexiest thing I've ever seen. And I guess I know that I've just got to have him just once. Nathan, I swear. And then I'll be right back. You won't even notice I'm gone." She smiled at Nathan and buffed her nails while he put on the gray corduroy pants and the black turtleneck he wore from now until April, at which time he switched to khakis, sandals, and a white cotton shirt.

Nathan and Mary found the house easily and congratulated each other since neither of them had a sense of direction. Mary reached into the back seat for the house gift, a pot of white mums resting prettily in a black straw basket. She wanted to please Marie, and she wanted to show Henry what a nice person she was. And beyond that, she would never dream of going to a dinner party without a gift. And if Marie wasn't pleased or wasn't smart enough to pretend to be pleased, well, that would be her mistake. There was enough bustle over the introductions and admiring of the house and exclaiming over the mums that the first eight minutes went smoothly and they all revised their opinions about how the evening would go. It was only when they all sat down in the living room and looked at each other that the mood began to swing downward. "What lovely earrings!" Mary said to Marie and Marie touched her ears proudly. "Henry got them for me in Bermuda. I just love them." Everyone smiled at Henry, and the two women talked about jewelry, which they both liked, although their tastes were rather different, and they talked about Italian leathers, about which they agreed. And then the four of them talked about Italy and the air pollution in Rome and about travel in general. Nathan told a few funny, self-deprecating stories about his backpacking days in Europe when he didn't speak any foreign languages, and Marie smiled at him. While everyone beamed messages at him, Nathan tried to keep track of Marie's emphatic enthusiasm and Mary's affectionate appreciation and Henry's watchful smile. All through dinner, Marie talked to Nathan and to Mary, and Mary focused on Marie, and the only one who talked to Henry was Nathan. Red wine gave Mary migraines, and Marie never drank wine if she could help it. And the two men finished a bottle and a half of St. amour, which Nathan praised, making Henry like him a little more. Henry missed having someone he could talk to about wine, someone to go in on a case with him. When Nathan said he fished, Henry found himself thinking that this was really quite a decent guy, not exactly a ball of fire, but a good guy and much more down to earth than he expected a writer to be. Henry thought maybe they could go out fishing together some Sunday morning. Nathan thought Henry was a salt of the earth type and certainly a very decent guy even if he wasn't the brightest or most interesting person around and that sour was superb. Nathan hadn't had wine like that since he moved back from New York 10 years ago. When Henry said he also liked to fish, Nathan wondered how it would be to fish with a companion. The dinner conversation swirled around work briefly, which bored everyone, around Nathan's writing, which embarrassed him, around the D Martino children at Marie's insistence, and then around great Italian red wines, at which point both women raised their eyebrows and cleared the table, bringing them all back to a safe and mildly diverting conversation about kitchen appliances.

"Henry bought me a pasta machine last Mother's Day. I like it." "Really? Can you use it for..." Nathan liked talking about kitchen appliances? Mary had lived on yogurt and frozen dinners until she met Nathan. "Yes, I just love it. It even comes with a ravioli press, and you hardly have to clean it. Everything goes into the dishwasher." "You're kidding. I'll help you with the coffee, and you can show me before I rush out and buy one in an impulsive fit brought on by your marvelous cooking." "Really, Marie?" "Just fabulous." Marie, charmed by Nathan's southern manners and amazed to find a man who cooks, lets him lead her into the kitchen, almost forgetting that Mary and Henry will now be alone together. As the kitchen door swings shut, Henry calls out, "All right, you guys get dessert and I'll show Mary the garden." Mary smiles politely, not at all the impish, promising grin she has given Henry at their lunches. Marie is just too nice. And they have these great kids who now have names, Claude and Julio. And even though Henry's still incredibly handsome, that doesn't mean she has to sleep with him. They can just be good friends and flirt a little bit. And since Nathan seems to like Henry and hasn't had a male friend for ages, the four of them will have dinner from time to time. Mary follows Henry through the French doors onto the patio to look at the brilliant zinnias and amber mums and the soft tenacious clematis which has woven itself along the side of the house. He flicks on the patio lights and hands her a match for the squat citronella candles. As she is lighting them, Henry tells Mary how much he enjoys Nathan's storytelling. Mary praises Marie's cooking and says that it will be hard to keep up with her when Henry and Marie come to their house for dinner. As they turn to go back to the house, one thin black heel catches on the edge of a flagstone and Mary stumbles. He catches her and his right arm goes around her waist and the other behind her neck and she lets her head fall back into the damp crook of his arm. The flowers and the thick lemony air hum in their ears, drowning out the hiss of the espresso machine and the faint clinking of small cups into saucers. A perfect kiss, like a perfect beach or a perfect diamond, is not so common in our lives that it can be ignored. As Marie calls them for dessert, they loosen their arms, but discover they cannot part. They are as inseparable as color and light.

Only you. Marie, who is not a very sexual person who cannot forgive her body or its middle-aged alterations, gets almost all her needs met at the Cut Above, Alvin Meerson's beauty salon. When Alvin opened the shop, some friends told him to change his name to Andre or even to Ella. He couldn't be bothered and put his license with Alvin Roy Meerson printed in large type in the very front of the salon. "I traffic an illusion," he said, "not in lies." Marie, who cherishes her sons and loves and resents her husband, likes Alvin. She thinks they have something in common. All of Marie's women friends seem happy enough with their lives. Those who aren't come over to Marie's house to make eyes at her handsome husband, who sometimes makes eyes back at them. Marie knows what attracts Henry, and it isn't women like her friends. They are all too maternal, too dark, too much like Marie for her to worry about.

Marie has gone in to discuss for the third time whether or not she should dye her gray and brown hair. She has been looking forward all day to feeling Alvin's strong hands on her shoulders as he pulls her head from side to side, describing the elegant, youthful woman she will become when he uses just a rinse to restore her natural color. Alvin makes it sound like she is only retrieving something that belongs to her, not doing something foolish and vain. Marie's fear of appearing vain, her conviction that she has nothing to be vain about, keeps her from making more than the slightest effort to look attractive. "Come on," Alvin had said last week, bending down to whisper in her ear. "Let yourself be beautiful." "Henry's the beautiful one," she'd said in a voice so hard and scared that the women sitting near her thought that she must hate her husband. When Joyce, the receptionist, tells Marie that Alvin is home today with the flu, Marie stares straight ahead at the racks of mousse and gel so that she won't cry. It's ridiculous to cry because your hairdresser isn't there, even if he is your good friend and you haven't seen him in a week.

Marie drives much too fast to her father's bakery. "Hi, sweetheart. No work today. I'm on a break, Pa. Let me have two of the baguettes, please." "Sure, two baguettes. The boys like the white bread, you know. Hank likes the raisin pumpernickel. Having company on a Wednesday?" Marie's mother died two years ago, and her father is in her house more than he is in his own. "No, I've got a sick friend, so I'm bringing some bread and soup." Marie carefully skips pronouns. Her father wouldn't approve of her having a male friend, not even a hairdresser. "Good girl. Just like your mother, taking care of everyone." "Hello, Mrs. Lehman." Marie goes home to defrost a container of chicken and rice soup. She calls Alvin and tells him she'll be right over. "I'm a mess, darling." "Really? This place looks like [ __ ] and I look worse." "5 minutes, Alvin, and don't get out of bed. The super can let me in." Marie grew up in Brooklyn and believes that all apartment dwellers are watched over by her uncle Sario or the local equivalent. "Marie, there is no super. This is a condominium and the manager whom I have never ever seen lives on the far side of Chapel Hill. I'll let you in and then I'll crawl back into bed. God bless you."

Marie puts a few magazines and a quilt in the car while the soup microwaves and writes a note for Henry saying she'll meet him at Claude's softball game. Alvin looks just as bad as he said. His sandy brown hair is plastered to his skull, exposing his receding hairline, usually hidden by his bangs. At the shop, he wears loose white wool pants and looks like the captain of the cricket team. Lying in his king-size bed, he looks like a dying John Barrymore. The face ravaged, the bones magnificent. Marie slices bread, reheats the soup, and gives the kitchen counters a quick wipe down. She bustles, parodying her maternal self so that he won't be embarrassed. She cannot bear to embarrass him. She cannot bear for him to ask her to leave. She carries in the quilt and holds it up for his approval. Marie wants to tuck it in around him to smooth it down the length of his torso. "Gorgeous pattern, rose of Sharon, right? You stole it from some old lady." Since Alvin is trying to smile through a cold sweat, Marie pretends to be indignant. She puts the quilt over him, touching his damp cheek by accident. Alvin takes both her hands and his and bends his head over them. "You have nice hands, Marie. Can I say something?" "Sure. Say anything." "No more of this coral [ __ ] on your nails. Okay. You have small, pretty hands and pale olive skin. True reds and clear only. Okay. And let's keep the nails oval, not pointed." He kisses the back of each hand and slides down beneath the quilt, which smells slightly pleasantly like the soup. "You're a doll," he says, closing his eyes. Marie pats the quilt down around his shoulders and washes all the dirty dishes she can find, and straightens up the living room, which doesn't take long. Alvin is as neat as she is. She doesn't want to leave. She writes her home number by the kitchen phone, wraps the baguettes in foil so they can be reheated, and meets her sons and her husband at the softball game, thinking of Alvin's wet white face. And she cheers whenever Henry cheers.

After he gets over the flu, Alvin won't let Marie pay for her haircuts or for the coloring she finally agrees to. They are friends and he is going to make her beautiful. Marie comes home with shining mahogany hair shot with copper highlights cut short to show off her slender neck. And the women at work say she looks completely different. Henry says he never knew she had such a pretty neck. Alvin even leaves in a few silver strands so that no one will think she dyes her hair. On Wednesdays, they have lunch together in the back of the shop. And on Sundays, Marie assists Alvin with the brides and the mothers of the brides. She hands him bobby pins and rat tail combs and spritzes hairspray so clear and strong you could keep a full head of hair standing straight up if that was the look you were after. Alvin teaches her to do chignons and twists and French braids and to arrange white flowers in the bride's hair. All the women are happy despite their nervousness and very, very grateful to Alvin and Marie. Alvin says the next van is going to say "Alvin and Marie's Wedding on Wheels." Marie has fallen in love with beauty. Henry notices that she has stopped going to mass, but he doesn't say anything. He doesn't mind since helping Alvin makes her happier than church ever did. She looks better, too.

Marie has no occasion to go back to Alvin's apartment and he never comes to her house. One Sunday morning, Marie is running late and Alvin rings the doorbell. Henry, in his black velour robe and bare legs, opens the door. Although Henry has never even wondered about Alvin's appearance, he knows immediately who he is. Alvin thinks Henry looks just the way he thought he would. Maybe a little grayer, just as handsome. "Come on in. She's almost ready," Henry says. "Coffee?" "Coffee'd be great. I've got a bride, a mother of a bride, and two bridesmaids waiting for me in Laurel Springs. Hair and makeup. You don't want to get into that without coffee." "Intravenous bourbon wouldn't hurt." Henry laughs, surprised. He didn't expect Alvin to sound like such a regular guy. "Come into the kitchen. I was just making a cup." "Nice house. Marie said you designed it." "Yeah. When we moved down here, we saw this lot. It came out all right. My father's in construction, too. We did the work ourselves. No point paying someone else to screw it up." "Right. I'd rather do for myself, too. I worked in someone else's shop for 2 years. That was enough for me." Henry is suddenly glad to be pouring a cup of coffee for Alvin, a fellow entrepreneur and probably a tough little bastard in his own way.

Marie comes running down the stairs just as Alvin is taking his first sip of coffee. "Hi." Alvin doesn't stand up and kiss her cheeks the way he always does. And Marie is so hurt she wants to slap them both sitting there like the Goomba Brothers. "I'm ready," she says, jamming her hands into the pockets of the fawn suede jacket Alvin told her to buy. "Let's go, Alvin." "Let the guy finish his coffee, honey. You two have a big morning ahead of you. You want another cup?" "Shut your face," she thinks. Alvin takes two more quick swallows and winks at Marie. "Let's do it, Henry. Thanks for the coffee. Good to meet you." "Same here." They shake hands while Marie finds herself rocked by feelings that make no sense to her. "Bye, honey," Henry says, lifting one big hand to wave to her. "Bye," Marie mumbles, forcing herself to wave back. "The boys won't be home until 2." Henry smiles and reaches for the newspaper as they leave. The house is his.

"I love that jacket on you," Alvin says as he pulls the car into traffic. "You do? I'm glad you made me get it. Everyone loves it and it is the softest thing. Okay with these pants." If Marie had her way, Alvin would lay out her clothes every morning. They don't talk about Henry.

When the invitation to the International Stylist Convention comes, Alvin hands it to Marie. "Come on, we're going to Miami. You'll be my tax-deductible guest. Get a little sun, mambo at night. You have to come. I can't do it without you." "Do you really mambo?" "Darling, you are looking at the Latin ballroom king of Jersey City." "All right, tell me what to pack," says Marie, wondering what Henry will have to say about this, seeing herself dancing with Alvin beneath the Miami. The lobby is a white and silver cavern with plexiglass stalactites spiraling down to meet the tips of silver-sprayed palm trees bearing sparkling white coconuts. Alvin begins laughing in the lobby and is still grinning when they are shown to their adjoining ice-blue rooms, both accented with raspberry flamingos etched in the mirrors and applied onto their queen-sized bedspreads. Alvin and Marie have a ball. Every night, Alvin does her hair a little differently and lays out her clothes. The second night, as she is watching in the mirror, Alvin picks up her turquoise silk dress and begins to cha-cha around the room with it. A Latin Fred Astaire. "Just my color, don't you think?" Marie can tell there is something he needs to hear. "It does go with your eyes. I guess turquoise is your color." He blows her a kiss, and they go out to eat stone crabs and drink just one mai tai a piece. When Marie is out with Henry, there's always a big fuss over the wine list, and she has to have a glass of something bitter and flat so that he can enjoy the other three glasses. Henry makes fun of her daiquiris and Singapore slings. After their triumphant bacelli bridal arrangement, Alvin orders room service champagne, and as they sit on the tiny terrace, he toasts her. "To my darling Marie, the most beautiful woman in North Carolina." Marie blushes with pleasure and looks down at the hem of her ivory dressing gown. "What would you like?" Alvin asks, his voice so soft that Marie isn't sure what he's saying. "I have everything I want. This has been the most wonderful three days of my life, and I owe it all to you." Alvin smiles and kisses her hand. "What would you like?" she asks, knowing that whatever he says, she wants to give it to him. Even if what he wants is sex, she wants to give it to him. Never mind Henry. Never mind her own well-known lack of interest, which is at this very moment dissolving. Alvin tells her what he wants is to dress in her clothes, in her lingerie, that she is so beautiful he wants to feel what it is to be her, to be even closer to her. He looks right into her eyes at first, but he ends by looking down into the courtyard. Marie has no idea what to say. She refuses even to think the hurtful words that Henry would use. Whatever Alvin wants, she wants to give him. She nods her head, hoping that that is enough. Alvin walks over to the dresser and takes out a chemise and a half slip and a pair of pantyhose. Marie watches the waves beyond the terrace. She doesn't trust her own face. Alvin goes into the bathroom, wanting not to frighten Marie, wanting not to embarrass either one of them. He knows what he needs to do. Slowly, he sweeps foundation up from his jawline over his high cheekbones all the way back to his ears, making sure there's no line on his neck. He takes out a new sharp-edged pink lipstick, brushes on one coat, presses a Kleenex to his lips, and puts on a second coat to last. He doesn't do much with his small blue eyes. Just a little dark brown mascara and the pale rose eyeshadow he's taught Marie to use to make her eyes look brighter. He passes the blush-on brush over his cheeks lightly. Alvin pauses, looking at himself, closing his eyes a little. There's so much he can't fix. Can't fix right now anyway. He takes out the wig he bought in Germany 5 years ago. $600 worth of beautiful long blonde hair. No frizzy polyester. Just some young frame's decision to go short one summer and there it was. He puts on the pantyhose and the half slip and the matching chemise he had persuaded Marie to buy, hoping that he would be wearing it with her. He wraps his navy silk robe around him and finds the navy silk mules he got while picking out the ivory ones for Marie. He loves Marie's small round feet and spares himself the sight of his own well-shaped but too large feet sliding into the heels. If he wore anything larger than a 10, he would go barefoot rather than be one of those jumbo transvestites, big-knuckled hands made pathetic by pale pink nail polish, thick necks hidden by carefully tossed scarves. Alvin lets himself think only about Marie, about how much she loves him and admires him. He knows she does. You can fake a lot of things, Alvin knows, but you can't fake love. He adjusts the wig quickly, tucking up his light brown bangs, and walks out of the bathroom, away from the mirror toward Marie. Marie has turned down the lights and drawn the sheer white curtains closed. In the gold shining moonlight, Alvin really looks for one moment like a pretty woman, strong-shouldered with a narrow waist and long legs under her rustling silk robe. "You look beautiful." "Marie, Angel, right now I feel beautiful. I feel like you, you know, I think you're a beautiful, beautiful woman. I want us to be closer. I want to be very close." Okay. They look at each other directly, breathing uncertainty and tenderness. Alvin kneels down carefully, hoping he won't tip over in his heels, and he removes Marie's ivory slippers. He takes her by the hand and lays her down on the bedspread. Marie relaxes a little more. When Henry wants to make love, he always pulls the covers back. Marie cannot stand to watch Alvin's lipstick mouth moving down her breast, but she responds to its warm shape, pressing and gently tugging. The muscles in her back ripple, and her brown hair flutters like the leaves of a small bronze tree in the wind. As the tips of his long blonde hair brush lightly across her chest, Alvin looks up just in time to see Marie's slight, astonished smile. And he pulls her closer, opening her robe. "Beautiful," he whispers. "Beautiful," she says. Light breaks where no sun shines.

I didn't expect to find myself in the back of Mr. Klein's store, wearing only my undershirt and panties, surrounded by sable. "Sable is right for you, Susila," Mr. Klein said, draping a shawl-collar jacket over me. "Perfect for your skin and your eyes. A million times a day, the boys must tell you. Such skin." No one except Mr. Klein had ever suggested that my appearance was pleasing. My mother, who was small and English, had decorated half the houses on Long Island with small English cashmeres and porcelain dogs, bought me clothes at Lord & Taylor's Pretty Plus and looked the other way when the saleswoman dragged me out in navy blue A-line dresses and plaid jumpers. My eyes, which are almond-shaped and dark, were concealed by grimy pink-framed glasses, and my creamy, rolling flesh was too much a reminder of dead Romanian relatives and attic photographs to be appealing. I stood on a little velvet footstool and modeled fur coats for Mr. Klein. He had suggested I take off my perpetual green corduroys and hooded sweatshirt so that we could see how the coats really looked. I agreed, only pretending to hesitate for a minute so I could watch his thin gray face expand and pinken. I felt the warm rushing in my chest that being with him gave me. He also gave me Belgian chocolate because he felt Hershey's wasn't good enough for me. And he told me that if only God had blessed him and Mrs. Klein with a wonderful daughter like me, he would be truly happy. Kanahara, my mother never said I was wonderful. My father, who greatly admired my mother for her size and her accent, was not hurt to thank God for giving him the gift of me. "This one next, Susila." Mr. Klein handed me a small mink coat and set a mink beret on my unwashed hair. "This is my size. Do kids wear mink coats?" If you had to dress up, mink was the way to go. Much better than my scratchy navy wool designed to turn chubby Jewish girls into pale Victorian wards. The fur brushed my chin, and without my glasses, Mr. Klein and I agreed that it was a shame to hide my lovely eyes. And so we put my glasses in his coat pocket during our modeling sessions. I felt glamorously Russian. I couldn't see a thing. He put the beret at a slight angle and stepped back, admiring me in my bare feet and my mink. "Perfect. This is how a fur coat should look on a girl. Not some little stick girl in rabbit. This is an ensemble." I turned around to see what I could of myself from the back. A brown triangle topped by a white blur and another smudge of brown. I modeled two more coats: a ranch mink, which displeased Mr. Klein with its careless stitching, and a fox cape, which made us both smile. Even Mr. Klein thought the floor-length silver fox was a little much. As always, he turned his back as I pulled on my jeans and sweatshirt. I sat down on one of the spindly pink velvet chairs, putting my sneakers on as he put away the coats. We said nothing on the drive home. I ate my chocolate, and Mr. Klein turned on WQXR, the only time I have ever listened to classical music with pleasure. Mr. Klein rounded my driveway, trying to look unconcerned. I think we both always expected that one Monday my parents would come rushing out of the house, appalled and avenging. I went inside, my shoelaces flapping against the hallway's glazed, uneven brick. Could anything be less inviting than a brick foyer? It pressed into the soles of my feet, and every dropped and delicate object shattered irretrievably. I don't remember which cleaning lady greeted me. We seem to alternate between elderly Irish women who looked as though they'd been born to rid the world of lazy people's private filth and middle-aged Bolivian women quietly stalking dust and fingerprints. I cannot remember the face that came out of the laundry room to acknowledge my existence, but I know someone let me in. I didn't have a house key until I was 19. Every dinner was a short horror. My eating habits were remarked upon, and then my mother would talk about politics and decorating. My father's repertoire was more limited. He talked about his clients, their divorces, and their bank accounts. I would go to my room, pretend to do my homework, and read my novels. In my room, I was the Scarlet Pimpernel. Sometimes I was Sydney Carton, and once in a while, I was Tarzan. I went to sleep dreaming of the 19th century, my oldest, largest teddy bear held tightly between my legs.

Mr. Klein lived two houses down, and usually drove up beside me as I was walking to the bus stop. Every time I saw the hood of his huge, unfashionable blue Cadillac slide slowly by me and pause, I would skip ahead and throw my books into the front seat, spared another day of riding the school bus. If you have been an outcast, you understand what the bus ride was like. If you have not been, you will think that I'm exaggerating even now, and that I should have spent less time being sorry for myself and more time being friendly. He dropped me off in front of Long View Elementary School as the buses discharged all the kids I had managed to avoid thus far. The mornings Mr. Klein failed to appear, I kept a low profile and worried about him until the routine of school settled upon me, vulnerable again only during recess. The first two days of kindergarten had taught me always to carry a book, and as soon as I'd found a place on the hardtop, I had only to set my eyes upon the clean black letters and the soft ivory page, and I would be gone, spirited right out of what passed for our real life. Our first trip to Furs by Klein was incidental, barely a foreshadowing of our afternoons together. Mr. The client had passed me on the way home from school. Having lost two notebooks since school began, I missed the bus while searching the halls frantically for my third bright red canvas designed to be easily seen. I walked home a couple of miles through the sticky, smoky leaf piles and across endless emerald lawns. No one knew I liked to walk. Mr. Klein pulled up ahead of me and signaled shyly. I ran to the car, gratified to tears by a smile I could see from the road. "I'll give you a ride home, but I need to stop back at my shop. Something I forgot." "All right." I nodded. It was better than all right. Maybe I'd never have to go home. He could have driven me to Mexico night after night over the great plains, and I wouldn't have minded. Furs by Klein stood on the corner of Shore Drive. Its curved, pink-tinted windows and black-lacquered French doors the height of suburban elegance. Inside stood headless bodies, six rose velvet torsos, each wearing a fur coat. There were mirrors everywhere I looked, and a few thin-legged, armless chairs. The walls were lined with coats and jackets and capes. Above them, floating on transparent necks, were the hats. Mr. Klein watched me. "Go ahead," he said. "All ladies like hats." He pulled a few down and walked discreetly into the workroom at the rear. I tried on a black cloche with a dotted veil and then a kelly green fedora with a band of arching brown feathers. Mr. Klein emerged from the back, his hands in the pockets of his baggy gray trousers. "Come, Susie, your mother will be worried about you. Leave the hats. It's all right. Mondays are the day off. The girls will put them back tomorrow." He turned out the lights and opened the door for me. "My mother's not home. I'm really an orphan. Adopt me. I'm so absent-minded." "Mrs. Klein tells me your mother is a famous decorator." "Of course, she is out decorating." He smiled just slightly, and I laughed out loud. He was on my side. Almost every morning now, he gave me a ride to school, and without any negotiating that I could recall, I knew that on Monday afternoons, I would miss my bus, and he would pick me up as I walked down Baker Hill Road. I would keep him company while he did whatever he did in the back room, and I would try on hats. After a few Mondays, I eyed the coats. "Of course," he said. "When you're grown up, you'll tell your husband, 'Get me a sable from Klein's. It's Klein's or nothing.'" He waggled a finger sternly, showing me who I would be, a pretty young woman with a rich, indulgent husband. "Let me help you." Mr. Klein slipped an ash blonde mink jacket over my sweatshirt and admired me aloud. Soon after, he stopped going into the workroom, and soon after that, I began taking off my clothes. The pleasure on Mr. Klein's face made me forget everything I had heard in the low tones of my parents' conversation and all that I had seen in my own mirror. I chose to believe Mr. Klein.

At home, to conjure up the feeling of Mr. Klein's cool, round fingertips on my shoulders, touching me lightly before the satin lining descended, I listened to classical music. My father made vaguely approving noises from behind the Wall Street Journal. I lay on the floor of the living room behind the biggest couch and saw myself playing the piano, adult and beautifully formed. I am wearing a dress I saw on Marilyn Monroe, the sheerest clinging net with sparkling stones coming up over the tips of my breasts and down between my legs. I am moving slowly across the stage, the wide hem of my sable cape shaping a series of round, dark waves. I hand the cape to an adoring Mr. Klein, slightly improved and handsomely turned out in a tuxedo cut just like my father's. My mother stepped over me and then stopped. I was eye to toe with her tiny pink suede loafers and happy to stay that way. Her round blue eyes and her dread of wrinkles made her stare as harsh and haunting as the eyeless Greek heads she put in my father's study. "How are you keeping busy, Susan?" I couldn't imagine what had prompted this interest. My mother always acted as though I had been raised by a responsible and affectionate governess, and guilt and love were as foreign in my house as butter and sugar. "School books." I studied the little gold bars across the tongues of her loafers. "And that's all going well." "Fine. Everything's fine. You wouldn't like to study an instrument, would you? Piano. We could do a piano in the library. That could be attractive. An older piece, deep browns, a maroon paisley shawl, silver picture frames. Quite attractive." "I don't know. Can I think about it?" I didn't mind being part of my mother's endless redecorating. In the past, her domestic fantasies had produced a queen-sized brass bed, which I loved and kept into adulthood, and a giant dollhouse, complete with working lights and a chiming doorbell. "Of course, think it over. Let's make a decision next week, shall we?" She started to touch my dirty hair and patted me on the shoulder instead. I have no idea what she thought of me.

I didn't see Mr. Klein until the following Monday. I had endured four mornings at the bus stop. Leaves stuffed down my shirt, my books knocked into the trash can, my lunch bag tossed from boy to boy. Fortunately, the bus driver was a madman, and his rageful mutterings and obscene limericks captured whatever attention might have come my way once we were on the bus. It was raining that Monday, and I wondered if I should take the bus. I had never thought about the fact that Mr. Klein and I had no way to contact each other. I could only wait in silence. I pulled up my hood and started walking down Baker Hill, waiting for a blue streak to come past my left side, waiting for the slight skid of wet leaves as Mr. Klein braked to a stop. Finally, much closer to home than usual, the car came. "You're almost home," he said. "Maybe I should just take you home. We can go to the store another time." He looked rushed and unhappy. "Sure. If you don't have time, that's okay." "I have the time, Susie. I have the time." He turned the car around and drove us back to Furs by Klein. I got out and waited in the rain while he unlocked the big black doors. "You're soaking wet," he said harshly. "You should have taken the bus." "I missed it," I lied. If he wasn't going to admit that he wanted me to miss the bus, I wasn't going to admit that I had missed it for him. "Yes, you missed the bus. I pick you up. Susila, you are a very special girl, and standing around an old man's shop in wet clothes is not what you should be doing." Usually, what I did was stand around with no clothes on at all. But I could tell that Mr. Klein, like most adults, was now working only from his version of the script. I sat down uneasily at the little table with the swiveling guilt-frame mirror, ready to try on hats. Without Mr. Klein's encouragement, I wouldn't even look at the coats. He didn't hand me any hats. He pressed his thin, sharp face deep into the side of my neck, pushing my sweatshirt aside with one hand. I looked in the mirror and saw my own round,

Wet face, comic in its surprise and pink glasses. I saw Mr. Klein's curly gray hair in a bald spot I would never have discovered otherwise. "Get your coat," he rubbed his face with both hands and went to the door.

I don't have a coat. They let you go in the rain with no coat. Got to know. Let's go, please. He held the door open for me and I had to walk through it.

The chocolate wasn't my usual Belgian slab. It was a deep gold foil box tied with pink and gold wisps and crowned with a cluster of sparkling gold berries. He dropped it in my lap like it was something diseased. I held the box in my lap, stroking the fairy ribbons until he told me to open it. Each of the six chocolates had a figure on top. Three milk, three bittersweet, each one carved with angel wings or a heart or a white rimmed rose.

In my parents' fat-free home, my eating habits were regarded as criminal. They would no more have bought me beautiful chocolates than gift wrapped a gun for a killer. Susla.

He looked out the window at the rain and I looked up at him quickly. I had obviously done something wrong and although my parents' anger and chagrin never bothered me a bit, his unhappiness pulled me apart. I crushed one of the chocolates with my fingers and Mr. Klein saw me. "Nah nah nah," he said softly, wiping my fingers with his handkerchief.

He cleared his throat. My schedule is changing. I won't be able to give you rides after school. I'm going to open the shop on Mondays. How about in the morning? I had not known that I could talk through this kind of pain. I don't think so. I need to get in a little earlier. It's not so bad. You should ride with other boys and girls. You'll see. You'll have a good time.

I sat there sullenly, ostentatiously mashing the chocolates. Too bad. They're very nice chocolates. Toyers, remember? Sable from Klein's chocolates from only the best for you. I'm telling you, only the best. I'm not going to have a good time on the bus. I didn't mash the last chocolate. I just ran a fingertip over the tiny ridges of the rose bud. Maybe not. I shouldn't have said you'd have a good time. I'm sorry. He sighed and looked away.

I bit into the last chocolate. Here, you have some, too. No, they're for you. They were all for you. I'm not that hungry. Here. I held out the chocolate half and he lowered his head, startling me. I put my fingers up to his narrow lips and he took the chocolate neatly between his teeth. I could feel the very edge of his teeth against my fingers.

We pulled up in front of my house and he put his hand over mine for just one moment. I'll say it again. Only the best is good enough for you. So we'll say, Susan, not goodbye. Ovoir. Thank you for the chocolates. My mother's instructions surfaced at odd times.

I left my dripping sneakers on the brick floor and dropped my wet clothes into the lilac straw hamper in my bathroom. I took my very first voluntary shower and dried off slowly, watching myself in the steamy mirror. When I didn't come down for dinner, my mother found me naked and quiet, deep in my covers. Let's get the piano, I said.

I took lessons from Mr. Ketti for 3 years, and he served me wine-flavored cookies instead of chocolate. One day, he bent forward to push my sleeves back over my aching wrists, and I saw my beautiful self take shape in his eyes. I loved him, too. Seer fidelis.

I shop at night. Thursday nights, I wave goodbye to the nurse and drive off, feigning reluctance. The new mall has three department stores, a movie theater, and hundreds of little shops, and I have been in all but the complete sportsman. It makes no sense to me, but I cannot sit through a movie knowing I'm supposed to be shopping. I eat warm peanut butter cookies and wander around for almost 2 hours, browsing through the very slim jazz sections of the mall record stores, skimming bestsellers. At 9:30, when the mall is closing and it's just me and the vagrant elderly and the young security guards, I go grocery shopping. All night grocery stores seem to be the personal savior and favorite haunt of dazed young women of all colors who haul their crumpled sleeping babies like extra items in the cart. Of single, middle-aged men and women too healthy and too lonely to fall asleep at 10:00. And of people like me who are scared to go home. It's my belief and sometimes my wish that my husband will die while I am out on one of my Thursday night sprees.

Max and I have been together for almost 10 years since I was 18 and he was 50. We are no longer a scandal or a tragedy. His wife's friends and the other witnesses have moved away or fallen silent or become friends. The limited choices of a small town. Max and I are close to ordinary, made interesting only by our past and its casualties. Women who would have may have spitten my soup at painfully quiet dinner parties 10 years ago now bring pureed vegetables for Max and articles on the apricot pit clinics of Mexico. I have become a wife, soon to be a widow, and I feel more helpless and unknowing after 10 years of marriage than I was at 18, moving into Max's apartment with two t-shirts, a box of records, and no shoes.

On our first outing, Max introduced me to the chairman of his department and bought me sneakers. He has not been out of bed for 3 weeks, and he has not spoken since morning. I always pictured myself as an Audrey Hepburn type widow, long-necked and pale in a narrow black linen dress. Instead, I am nearly drowning in a river of sugar and covering myself in old sweatpants and Max's flannel shirts. I only dress up on Thursday nights to go out in an oversized sweatshirt and black tights, playing up my legs with high-heeled black ankle boots. I have never dressed like this in my life, and I am glad to put my sneakers and my jeans back on before I go into the house.

Ray at the deli counter is the one I've been looking for. He first admired my boots and then my whole outfit, and after three Thursdays in a row, I felt obliged to buy another top for him to look at, and he leaned over the counter to tell me how much he liked it and winked as he went back to work. Ray can't be more than 22 and I assume he is a recovering addict of some kind since he is presently the picture of good health and says things like "easy does it" and "one day at a time" which are the kinds of things my brother a recovering alcoholic says whenever he calls to wish me well or borrow money. I think Ry is a good choice. I think we would not discuss poetry or symbolism or chemotherapy or the past. And I think I would have a beer and he would not. And I would lay my hand on one thick thigh until I felt the cloth tighten under my fingers. And when we were done, I would climb out of his van or his room in his mother's house and thank him from the bottom of my heart and go home to Max.

I come home to see the nurse leaning over Max, smoothing his covers as her big white nylon breasts swing slightly and shadow his face. He smiles and I see that he is unaware of my presence and the nurse is not. "The pearls," she says, continuing their conversation, "were extremely valuable and irregardless of the will, my sister and I both think the pearls should have come to us. Our mother's pearl should have come to us because they were already ours." I cannot even begin to understand what she's talking about, but it feels ominously metaphorical. Maybe the pearls represent Max's health or his first marriage, or our vow to cleave unto each other, things irretrievably gone and valued more in their absence than in their presence. I want to shut her up to keep her from tormenting us both. But Max smiles again, a quick softening of his bony gray face, and even I can see that he is not tormented.

I knock against the door frame, knowing that Max, as he is now, is too innocent and the nurse too self-absorbed to appreciate the irony of my knocking. I am performing without an audience, which is how it has been for some time. If you feel sorry for yourself, can it still be a tragedy? Or are you reduced to a rather unattractive second lead, a foil for the heroes, blind and beautiful, courageously polishing the brass as the icy waters lap at their ankles. It seems to me, and I would not be sorry to find out, that I have disappeared.

"Sweetheart," he says, and the nurse frowns. "He's been asking for you," she says. And I forgive her bitchiness because she seems to care about him, to feel that it matters that he misses me. The other nurses are solicitous of his health, of his illness, but his feelings are nothing more than symptoms to them. For one minute, I love her for loving him. He has made me love people I would dislike if he were going to live.

"Dawn's mother passed away recently," she was telling me. Shaken by love, touched by his effort to keep us together and to keep us his. I smile at Dawn. "I'm so sorry," I say, trying to be good. "I lost my mother just last year, and I've got a sister, too." "That's it. I cannot think of any more astonishing coincidences that will bring us together." "My sister's my best friend," Dawn says, sitting in the armchair near the bed as though she dropped in on Max for a visit. "Mine, too. Amazing. Don and I must have been separated at birth." My sister Irene is my best friend.

And while my father wept and my mother murmured congratulations from the far side of a scotch and soda, my sister took me upstairs to what had been her room to discuss my marrying Max. "You can have anyone you know. Even after all this, you can transfer to a school in California and no one will ever know. You don't have to marry him." "I love him, Marine. I want to marry him." "Okay. Okay. I'll be there. At least he won't leave you for a younger woman." "Not without being arrested." "Is this justice of the peace or a train and veil?" "Justice of the peace. Wednesday. All right. How about a suit? Silk suit, roses in your hair. It won't kill you to go to a beauty parlor." And my sister got my legs waxed, my pores cleaned, and my eyebrows shaped in less than 48 hours.

In the photographs, I look radiant and only a little too young for the ivory silk suit, which Irene found unpinned from a mannequin and paid for in less than 45 minutes. I have ivory roses in my upswept black hair, and Max is laughing at the camera, which is held by his oldest friend, who is astonished, amiable, and drunk for the whole afternoon. My sister looks like the mother of the bride, exhausted, vigilant, more pleased than not. My parents weren't there because I didn't invite them despite Max's pleas. I should have invited them. I am almost 30 now and I am coming to think that one should when in doubt invite them whoever they are. The distant relatives, the cocktail party stalwarts, the friends who failed to send Christmas cards two years in a row. Invite them while you can.

Dawn rises to leave and I can see that she doesn't love Max. He is just a better than average case. Less trouble than some of the others. I am free to hate her and I walk her to the door and open it for her without speaking. A form of civilized rudeness I've picked up from my mother.

"Tamir," Max says, "But I cannot lie in that bed. I'll use the cot." When we left the hospital, a smart angry woman in the support group told me to get a cot and didn't even pretend to listen when I said that we would continue to share a bed.

"Undress slowly, sweetheart." I can still look in the books I keep hidden, the guides to grief, the how-to books of widowhood and the period that comes before. The authors mention delicately that the healthy spouse usually suffers hurt feelings and frustration due to the dying person's lack of sexual interest. This doesn't seem to be the case with Max. I throw off my clothes and lie on the cot like a girl scout still in my t-shirt, panties, and socks. I hear a wet bubbling noise, which is how he laughs now. Max rests one cool, brittle hand on my stomach. "How was the supermarket?" "It was okay. I got some groceries." "And the mall?" "It was fine. I got some socks." He strokes my stomach with just two dry fingertips, and I feel the flesh at the end of each finger dragging slightly after the bone. I want to throw up and I want to weep.

"Do you ever meet anybody?" "Like who?" I ask. Despite everything, I don't think of Max as a jealous man. We have simply misunderstood each other most of the time. He would remind me as we drove home from parties that he had made a point of not admiring the younger women, so people wouldn't think that I was part of his youth fetish, that I was less than unique. He said I owed him the same consideration and should conceal my impulsive sexuality less people think that my marriage to him was just hormonally driven adolescent mindlessness. We agreed many times that he was not jealous, not insecure, not possessive, and we must have had that conversation about flirting a hundred times in our 10 years together.

Max pokes me lightly. "I don't know. Like anybody. Some nice young man." "No, no one." I roll over on my side, out of reach of his fingers. "All right, don't get huffy. Dawn gave me my meds already. Good night, sweetheart." "Good night, you sadistic old [ __ ]." I lie on the cot listening to his chalky, irregular breath until he falls asleep, and then I go downstairs to pay bills. His room, our room, fills up at night with a thick, wet mist of dark fluids and invisibly leaking sores. This is something else I don't say.

The next Thursday, I smile encouragingly at Rey, who is very busy with the second shift shopping crowd. I find myself taking a number behind a dark, dark boy, so dark the outline of his whole brown body seems drawn in charcoal. He is all roundness. High full island cheeks, round black eyes, rounded arms and shoulders, his pants rounded front and back. My own fullness has begun to shrink and loosen. Muscles sliding down from bone a little more each year. I want to cut this boy open like a melon and eat him slice by slice. Cut him and taste him and have him and hurt him. I could tell Max that I understand him better now than I did 10 years ago, but he would be horrified that I think this mixture of lust and resentment is anything like his love for me. I am only horrified by myself. What I want to do to this boy, Max would never do.

Ry and I exchange several devoted, affectionate glances. As aspiring lovers, we are so tenderly playful and wistful. It seems odd that all we really want is to [ __ ] each other senseless and get home before we're caught. My attitude is not good. I go home to Max and Dawn. She is in my kitchen sipping tea out of my mermaid mug. A gift from Max after a terrible rainy week on Block Island. The iridescent blue tail is the handle, and Dawn's smooth fingers cling to it.

After she leaves, Max questions me again. "I don't meet anyone for Christ's sake. I'm not a girl. I'm 28 and I probably look 90. Who would I meet?" "You might meet anyone. Look at me. I'm 60. I'm a dying man riddled with cancer. And I met Dawn." "Great. I hope you'll be very happy together." I turn out the light so he cannot see me change. And I wonder if he gets Dawn to strip for him on Thursdays.

"Really?" he says, completely surrounded by pillows so he can't lie down and be engulfed by his own lungs. "Tell me, why shouldn't you meet someone?" I try to see him in the dark as he is. Everything that was broad and hard-boned, now transparent at the edge, softly dimpled and concave at the center. "Who would I meet?" "Some good-looking young man at the mall. Not a salesman. You never like salesmen. They try too hard, don't they?" "Yes." I want to tell him to rest, but I don't think I would be saying it for him. "Big and dark, sweet-natured, not terribly bright, not stupid, of course, but not intellectual, not an academic. I want to spare you a long, pedantic lecture when you've only got a few hours." "Good idea. How long do I have?" "Well, you know your schedule better than I. 2 hours at the mall, an hour and a half at the supermarket. We can skip aerobics. I think I cannot picture you with a man who goes to aerobics class." He's right. I like them big and burly or lean and lithe, but I cannot bear the compulsively athletic. The ones who measure their pulses and their biceps and their cholesterol levels. "Tell me, sweetheart. Tell me about the man you met in the supermarket." "Not the mall. Don't play games with me. Tell me what happened." "He's dark-haired but fair, black Irish and big, not tall but wide, built like a wall." I realize that I am describing the Max I have seen only in photographs. A big wild boy with one cocky foot on his army jeep ramming his way through Harvard a few years later grinning like a pirate as the wind blows both ends of his scarf behind him.

"Go on," Max says. "I do see him at the supermarket. I change my clothes to go there and I tell Max the truth about my clothes and he says 'yahoo' when I come to the black ankle boots. We are having some kind of fun in this terrible room." "That'll get him. Do you wear a bra?" "Come on, Max." "Of course I wear a bra." "Just slows you down." "All right. At least it's one of your pretty ones, I hope. Not those ace bandage things. How about the purple and black one with the little cutouts?" Max likes silky peekaboo lingerie and I buy it, but I do not wear $70 hand-finished bras and garter belts for everyday. Most of the time I wear cheap cotton tubes, which he hates. I do wear the black and purple one. "And the panties?" "No panties." "Wonderful. The first time I put my hand on your bare ass, I thought I had died and gone to heaven. And then I was afraid that it wasn't for me, that you just never wore them." "Max, you asked me not to wear them. Remember?" I always wore underpants. I'd had some sex, more than enough, with boys and by myself when I met Max, but I had never had a lover. Everything important that I know about literature, about people, about my own body, I have learned from this man. And he is leaving me the way we both expected I would leave him. Loving, regretful, irretrievable.

"Tell me about this big guy." "Big guy is what I used to call Max. Having been married to a woman who called him 'my dear' and pursued by highly educated young women who called him 'Professor Bole' and thought he was God, he found terms like 'big guy' and 'Butch' refreshing endearments." "He's the night manager. I have given Ry a promotion. I'm sure in time someone with his good looks and pleasant manner will be made manager, and a sexual encounter with Ry, the head roast beef slicer, seems to demean us all." "Fine. Where did you do it?" "Jesus, Max, what is wrong with you?" "Need you ask? Come on. Come on. Don't get skittish now. Where did you do it?" That angry, pushing voice used to scare me to death, and I cannot bear that it doesn't scare me anymore.

"We went to Wadsworth Park where Max and I used to go when I was still living with my parents and he was still living with his then wife. Just recently while sorting out his pills or shaving his distorted face, I find myself thinking, 'This is what a wife is.' Now that we cannot see ourselves in the curious, excited eyes of other people, the differences that defined us are fading away. We are just a man who is dying and a woman who is not."

"A little buggy. Not too bad." I stall to avoid making a mistake, afraid that I am not telling the right story. "You had a blanket and you didn't notice the bugs." "Max, what do you want from me?" "I want you to tell me what happened when you got into the woods. You led him to those big rocks by the stream." The woods are thick on both sides of the water, sheltering twin slabs of granite. When we were there, Max would press me so far backward that the ends of my hair trailed in the cold water, collecting small leaves as I lay under him. "All right, we went to the rocks and we made love. Then I changed my clothes and came home." "Don't tell me like that," he says and begins to cough loosely, his whole body bouncing on the plastic-covered mattress. He falls asleep, still coughing, and I go downstairs and do nothing.

For the rest of the week, he floats in and out of conversations, and Dawn turns out to be very good at injections and bed changes, which should not surprise me. On Thursday, I put on my shopping costume while Max watches and smiles alertly. Dawn is reading magazines in the kitchen, waiting for me to leave. "Tonight," he asks, barely pushing the words through his lips. I don't answer, just tie my boots and sit down to brush my hair.

"You know, Dawn reminds me of not coloring, but the build. Your roommate or Ren, remember?" "I remember." And I keep brushing my hair. "I wonder where she is." "I don't know. Maybe she went back to Turkey." "Don't think so. She wrote to me from California, teaching at Berkeley. Marvelous girl," he says, struggling with each consonant. I walk out of the room. I put up some hot water for me and Dawn and go back to check on Max, afraid that he will die while I'm angry with him. "Ready?" "Yeah, I'll be back in a couple of hours."

"I slept with a Ren," he says, "and size." "I know," I say, although I hadn't known until then. And I know that he is pushing me away furiously, as though I will miss him less because he had sex with a Ren. He can no more lose me than I can lose myself. If we are like those house keys that beep in response to your voice, they practically find you. I kiss the air near Max's face and return to Dawn, who has made tea. We chat for 2 hours in between her runs upstairs, and she doesn't ask me why I don't go out. I send her home at 11.

Max barely opens his eyes when I turn on the nightlight to undress. He lifts one hand slightly and I go to him, still in my underwear. "Off," he whispers. He turns his head and coughs, the harsh, rude sound of a straw in an almost empty glass. I take everything off and climb into the bed, trying not to press against him now that even the sheets seem to hurt him. "Did you?" I slide closer to him until we are face to face, and I kiss his dry lips and feel the small bumps and cracks around his mouth. "Yes, I found him. The one I told you about, the big one. He was getting off work early just as I got there. I didn't even have to wait." Max closes his eyes and I put his hand on top of my leg. It was so dark we didn't go to the park. We went to a motel. There was tacky red wallpaper and the bed was a huge heart with a red velvet bedspread. Route 68. "He says that one. Remember that big bed and the headboard with the little posts the hand holds?" I moved his hand up and down my leg very gently. He undressed me, Max. He knelt down and took off my shoes and then he laid me on the bed and undressed me. He was still in his suit. "Suit?" Max whispered? "His work clothes? I mean, not a suit." He left the light on and began to kiss me all over, but every time I tried to touch him, he'd grab my hands. He wouldn't let me touch him until later. Max moves his head a little to nod and I prop his pillows up. He kissed the insides of my thighs and the backs of my legs. And then he kissed my back for a very long time. And when he turned me over, he was undressed. And he pulled me up to him about 2 feet in the air. And then he threw us both down on the bed. And he came inside me and he just kept coming and coming at me until I started to cry. And then we got under the covers and we both cried until we fell asleep. I lay my wet face next to Max's and listen for his breathing. It was the best, Max. Nothing in my life was ever like that. Do you hear me? Nothing in my life was ever like that. When you do whatever.