We were running flat out. The opening was dazzling. The middle was dazzling. The ending was dazzling. It was like a steeplechase composed entirely of hurdles.

But that would not be a steeplechase at all. It would be more like a steep, steep climb.

They were shouting, Tell it, big momma, tell it. I mean, the child is only six years old.

Do I need to stylize it, then, or can I tell it as it was?

He knew that she had left him when she began to smoke again.

Look here, you know, I loved you.

I wonder whether he will ever ask himself, say to himself, Well, she wasn’t asking all the earth, why did I let her go?

My back went up, Viola Teagarden used to say, with a little thrill of self-importance, pride and pleasure, head raised, nostrils flaring, back straightening slightly, as though she had received a small electric charge right through her chair. My back went up. She also spoke with a kind of awe of what she called “my anger,” as though it were a living, prized possession, a thoroughbred bull, for instance, to be used at stud, or as a man who has married a beautiful, unpredictably unpleasant woman, far richer and younger than himself, might say “my wife.” Leander Dworkin, too, though he hardly knew Viola and in fact despised her, had what he called “my rage.” It resembled, sometimes a hothouse of imaginary grievances under lavish cultivation, sometimes a pulse which he measured constantly to see whether, with whom, and to what degree he must be angry, sometimes a source of astonishment and pleasure, sometimes just a horse to be taken for a canter or a gallop on the moors. In times of rage, he wanted nothing to distract or mollify him. Even flattery, for which his appetite was otherwise undiscriminating and enormous, would infuriate him on his way to an apotheosis. A few people humored him in this. They were his friends. Inevitably, it was with one or more of these few friends that he was angry—a source, at first, always of distress, since he broke off with words as harsh as they were capricious, and then, for the long quiet interval that followed, of relief.

To begin with, I almost went, alone, to Graham Island.

He thought of himself, even spoke of himself, as extraordinarily handsome. His hair, which grew to collar length, was reddish. His hairline was receding, his eyes, which blinked constantly over his contact lenses, were the palest blue. Though he was by no means a strikingly ugly man, the source of his belief in his physical beauty seemed to lie in this: that he was tall. Leander Dworkin was the amplifying poet. Willie Stokes was the poet of compression. Both taught poetry, and wrote novels, when we were in graduate school. We met in two improbable seminars, taught by great men. Notions of Paradise, and Sound in Literature. The first was literary utopias, essentially; the second, onomatopoeia. Both were so crowded at the start that students had to be selected on the basis of some claim of special knowledge. In Paradise, that year, we had one grandson of Oneida, one nun, one believer in the Skinner box, some students of Rousseau, the Constitution, Faust, and Plato, and one participant in experiments with a new drug, psilocybin, under the guidance of Leary and Alpert, two young instructors in psychology. In Sound, I remember just one specialist, a pale, dark-haired Latin scholar, who rocked continuously in his chair whenever he read us onomatopoetic phrases he had found among the classics. Fairly late in the semester, when we were asked what our papers were going to be about, this young man said he wanted to write about the sound of corpses floating through literature. Oh, the professor said, with some enthusiasm, after just a moment’s hesitation, you mean Ophelia. No, the young man replied, I want the sound of the sea.

To begin with, I almost went instead to Graham Island.

For a woman, it is always, don’t you see, Scheherazade.

In nineteen sixty-four, the dean announced to the trustees that, for all intents and purposes—meetings, sleep, meals, electricity, demands upon her time and one another’s—the students had abolished night.

“Brahms,” he said, in explaining to a colleague why he did not attend that autumn’s campus concert series. “All of it was Brahms. All, every. Eight. Things. Of Brahms.”

Though he was my friend, I did not see Leander Dworkin often. We found that our friendship was safer on the telephone. Sometimes we spoke daily. Sometimes we did not speak for a year or more. But the bond between us, I think, was less stormy, and in some ways more intense, than Leander’s relations with people he actually saw. Once every few years, we would have dinner together, or a drink, or just a visit. Sometimes alone, more rarely with someone with whom he was living and whom he wanted me to meet. One night, when we had gone, I think, off campus for hamburgers, I noticed on Leander’s wrist several thin, brown, frayed and separating strands, like a tattered cuff of rope. Leander said it was an elephant-hair bracelet, and that Simon, his lover, had given it to him. It was frayed because he always forgot to remove it, as he ought to, before taking showers. Elephant hairs, it seems, are talismanic. It was going to bring him luck. Elephant-hair bracelets are expensive; they are paid for by the strand. In the following year, Leander wrote many poems, and at last received his tenure. When we met again, months later, the frayed strands were gone. In their place was a thin, round, sturdy band of gold, which encased, Leander said, a single elephant hair. When I asked what had happened to the old bracelet, he said, “I lost it, I think. Or I threw it out.” For some time, Leander had spoken, on the phone, of a woman, a painter, whom he had met one afternoon outside the gym, and whom he was trying to introduce, along with Simon, into his apartment and his life. The woman was in love with him, he said. She was married to a real estate tycoon. Her name was Leonore. He was anxious for me to meet her. I knew that, in addition to his appetite for quarrels, Leander likes triads, complications, any variant of being paid for. But I looked at the bracelet, and I thought of Simon, and I thought, Leonore plays rough.

It was as droning and repetitive, in its way, as a waltz, as a country-and-western lament in waltz-time. It was as truly awful as a via. rose.

Well, what did you pull out ahead of me on the road for, from a side street, when there were no other cars in sight behind me, if you were going to drive more slowly than I did?

It was early evening, in the city. The TV was on. We watched The Newlywed Game. The moderator had just asked the contestant, a young wife from Virginia, What is your husband’s least favorite rodent? “His least favorite rodent,” she replied, drawling serenely and without hesitation. “Oh, I think that would have to be the saxophone.”

He knew that she had left him when she began to smoke again.

Is that where it begins?

I don’t know. I don’t know where it begins. It is where I am.

I know where you are. You are here. She had left him then?

Years ago, he had smoked, but not when they met. So she stopped, as people do when they are in love. Take up cigarettes, or give them up, or change brands. As people do to be at one at least in this. Long after that, she began to smoke again.

So he knew she had left him?

Not knew, not left. Not right away, or just at first.

Why don’t you begin then with at first.

Look, you can begin with at first, or it seems, or once upon a time.

Or in the city of P.

Or in the city of P. In the rain. But I can’t. It is not what I know how to do.

Well, you must get these things straight, you know, resolve them in your mind before you write them down.

From the moment she knew that she was going to leave him, she started to look old. There was about her a sudden dimming, as in a bereavement or an illness, which in a way it was. He. They. Look, I would start short, if I could, with something shorter. The story of the boy for instance who did not cry wolf. Except that, of necessity, we can have no notion of that story, since the boy of course is dead.

So is the one who did cry wolf.

True, but he lasted longer.

Probably. I suppose that’s right. He knew that she was going to leave him when she began to smoke again.

You can rely too much, my love, on the unspoken things. And the wry smile. I have that smile myself, and I’ve learned the silence, too, over the years. Along with your expressions, like No notion and Of necessity. What happens, though, when it is all unsaid, is that you wake up one morning, no, it’s more like late one afternoon, and it’s not just unsaid, it’s gone. That’s all. Just gone. I remember this word, that look, that small inflection, after all this time. I used to hold them, trust them, read them like a rune. Like a sign that there was a house, a billet, a civilization where we were. I look back and I think I was just there all alone. Collecting wisps and signs. Like a spinster who did know a young man once and who imagines ever since that she lost a fiance in the war. Or an old fellow who, having spent months long ago in uniform at some dreary outpost nowhere near any country where there was a front, remembers buddies he never had, dying beside him in battles he was never in.

Hey, wait.

All right. There was, of course, a public world as well.

I was there, in Montgomery, Alabama, on a summer’s day in the late seventies, when the Attorney General of the United States, a southerner himself, spoke at the ceremony in which a local judge, who had worked for more than twenty years, with courage and humanity and in virtual isolation, on the federal district court, was promoted to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. That court, like the district court under the local judge, had been a great court, decent, honorable, articulate, and brave. The Attorney General himself had, for some years, been a member of it— quite often, as it happened, in dissent. Here he was, though, in the late seventies, the Attorney General, Old Mumble, as the wife of one of the court’s more distinguished judges had always, somewhat injudiciously and in his absence, called him, here he was, the Attorney General of the United States, speaking at the inauguration of a great federal district judge into a great federal appellate court. He mentioned the Ku Klux Klan. He alluded to it several times. The Klan. And each time he referred to its membership, the members of the Klan, he called them Clamsmen. No question about it, that’s how he pronounced it. Clamsmen. It was no reflection on the Attorney General. True, the judge’s wife had never thought much of his diction. True, in the court’s most important decisions, he had been so often in dissent. But years had passed. He had come to speak well and to do honor. And this business of the Clamsmen, well, it may have had to do with molluscs, bivalves. Even crustaceans. I remember a young radical, in the sixties, denouncing her roommates as prawns of imperialism.

Alone. What an odd gloss we have here on Alone at last. Since alone at last, for every hero in a gothic, every villain in a melodrama, traditionally assumes a cast of two.

You know I hate wisecracks.

So do I.

One morning, in the early nineteen-eighties, Viola Teagarden filed a suit in a New York state court against Claudia Denneny for libel. Also named as defendants were a public television station and a talk show host. Viola Teagarder's lawyer, Ezra Paris, had been, all his life, a civil libertarian; in every prior suit, he had been on the side of the right to speak, to print, to publish. He was embarrassed by Teagarden v. Denneny, et al., which, as he knew, had no legal merit. He justified it to himself on grounds, of which Viola had persuaded him, that she was sad, hurt, pitiable, distraught. He also thought, in friendship, that he owed her something. Her current book was dedicated to him. But his province had always been the First Amendment, and he preferred not to think about who was paying his rather considerable legal fees, Martin Pix, a young, immensely rich, vaguely leftish media executive, who had recently come, yacht and fortune, into Viola’s special circle. That circle, as I gradually came to understand, was one of the most important cultural manifestations of its time.

Look here, you know, look here. All the things she had too much class to mention were the things he never knew.

Well, but that’s the point. I mean, it hardly takes much class not to mention things if he already knows them anyway.

It was as though he had been born in the presence of the doubt, the censor, the laugher at serious things, the unlaughing member of the audience of a comedian, the voluble warner against places where there is no danger, the reticent giver of directions toward a place through which no one has safely passed. The check was forever less than half a step behind the impulse. Clamped to the hoof of the Arabian horse of thought, report or feeling, there were always the teeth of the question: is this altogether true? The least of the harm in it was the waste of energy and attention, in having always to be doubly sure, in letting pass the moments of high possibility, in seldom taking action, in having always just a bit to understate and overprove.

Wait, wait, wait, wait. Can you not avoid, on the one hand, the florid, overly elaborate, on the other hand, the arid exploration of that after all limitless desert rock of desolation called Square One.

What are you, some sort of anti-claque?

Sometimes he loved her, sometimes he was just amused and touched by the degree to which she loved him. Sometimes he was bored by her love and felt it as a burden. Sometimes his sense of himself was enhanced, sometimes diminished by it. But he had come to take the extent of her love as given, and, as such, he lost interest in it. She may have given him this certainty too early, and not just out of genuine attachment. One falls out of gradations of love, and despair, after all, every few days, or months, or minutes. With courtesy, then, and also for the sake, for the sake of the long rhythms, she kept the facade in place and steady, unaffected by every nuance of caring and not caring. He distrusted her sometimes, but on the wrong grounds. He thought of her as light with the truth, and lawless. And she, who was not in other ways dishonest, who was in fact honorable in his ways and in others, was perhaps dishonest in this: that not to risk losing him, or for whatever other reason, she concealed, no, she did not insist that he see, certain important facets of her nature. She pretended, though with her particular form of nervous energy she was not always able to pretend this, that she was more content than she was, that her love for him was more constant than, within the limits that he set, it could be.

Well, he came to see me one night when he was drunk, bringing his dog and walking with his flashlight. We gave the dog some water, and I drove them home. He did that on several nights, over the years. Usually I heard footsteps, outside on the path, and the metallic collar of the dog.

She was going to leave him, she thought, on or about their thirty-fifth anniversary. Or, rather, his.

Bartok was what he played, Bartok and Telemann. But what moved him was Wasting Away Again in Margaritaville. What lifted his spirits one season was I’ve Got a Pair of Brand New Roller Skates, You’ve Got a Brand New Key.

When we had been in graduate school, in Cambridge, for just one year, Maggie, a friend from college, announced that she was quitting, moving elsewhere, moving on. I asked why. After all, Maggie, I said, this is Harvard, Cambridge. It’s been only a year, just two semesters. Why? “Well,” she said, “I’ve played this card now.”

This is the whole hand, so far as I know it, not played out entirely, of course. But the bridge, baccarat, double solitaire, twenty-one, old maid, hearts, blackjack, fifty-two pickup. Obviously poker. I’ve played this card now.

What do you tell the Sanger people? Lily asked. In those days, the only people who made love were these: in the colleges, stringy-haired, lonely daughters of leftwing urban parents; in the high schools, pretty girls who got pregnant and got married; in the adult world, women who, in typing, teaching, theater, publishing, art, were stymied in their jobs. The men who made love to the left-wing college girls were either medical students, who had contempt for them and forgot them, or jocks, who bragged falsely of having made conquests of quite other girls. The boys who made love to the high school girls were football stars, who settled down to families. The men who made love to women in the adult world were married men. Most children outside marriage, in those days, were conceived in drive-ins or in cars parked on country roads near reservoirs or other quiet places. The pill may have altered this pattern less radically than the proliferation, not just in sports cars but in all cars, of the bucket seat. Homosexuals may have made love in those days, but it was almost universally believed that the world included five, or at most nine, homosexuals. Brothers and sisters may have made love, but that would not have been widely known. As for married couples, there seemed to come to them, quite soon, a bitterness. What I’m trying to say is that sex among young people in those days was rare.

When you marry, the great Spanish scholar said to his seminar late one afternoon in spring, make sure your lives are different enough so that you have something to tell each other in the evening.

Maybe he was tired of being told things. Make a joke of it, perhaps, or an epigram. But not every time, for God’s sake, not every time.

Here’s what seemed to us, in those days, at a major college, with serious intellectual and feminist traditions, a daring story with an important denouement. The two professors were legendary, Dr. Vickers, Miss Collins. They had refused to marry, in the early nineteen-twenties, when the president of the college had insisted that they must. They had been anarchists, living together in a cottage some miles from the campus. Anarchists with principle. Anarchists with tenure. Anarchists in love. There was no certainty that the college president, or even the entire faculty, could dismiss them. The issues were profound: traditions of the community of scholars and independence; traditions of in loco parentis and the middle class. One evening, in the second autumn of this quiet scandal, the college president drove her Packard to the cottage. An early suffragette and a lifelong spinster, she spoke to them by their first names. Rufus, she said, Amanda, this cannot go on. Certain standards must prevail. She asked them, for God’s sake, for her sake, for all their sakes, to marry. Dr. Vickers asked her to sit down, and told her that they had in fact been married since last May. The three old friends had sherry and got drunk together. But for all time, from the twenties onward, the couple, both historians, were known as Dr. Vickers and Miss Collins, and treated as unmarried, as though their respectability were an embarrassing secret, and their intractability of many years a source of pride.

One morning in the late fifties, Bonnie Stone, an academically and socially ambitious senior from New York, who often overslept, or overate, or overdressed, but who relied in crisis on a certain flirting charm, was late for an appointment with Dr. Vickers. In fact, it seemed she might have missed it altogether. They stood, that afternoon, in the library corridor outside his office. Bonnie was explaining, loudly, volubly, elaborately, with an expression of perhaps too intense apology. “Don’t worry, sweetie,” the old professor said at last. “I’ve been stood up by betterlooking broads than you.” Apart from a remark by a lecturer, untenured, concerning speculation about Byron and his sister—a remark so daring in its cavalierness and obscenity that no two versions agreed as to exactly what it was—“Don’t worry, sweetie. I’ve been stood up by better-looking broads than you,” were the most shocking sentences, within the academic setting, that any of us had ever heard.

The world is everything that is the case.

And in the second place because.

Did I throw the most important thing perhaps, by accident, away?

Here’s how I know that I’ve already lost him. Jake is driving. I am in mid-sentence, or mid-anecdote, or halfway through a question. Though it’s neither the hour nor the half-hour, he flips on the radio news. I know I’ve lost him then, because I have. And yet, at five on a cold and snowy morning, Jake had picked me up for the long drive to the city. Cars were few. It was still dark. With the radio on, he talked. He pointed to a place where, he said, on the road to my house, he had seen two deer. That was all he said. A few nights later, we went to a party, at about an hour’s distance from our town. Jake and his wife had picked me up for the drive there. His idea. I have my own car. Late that night, on the road back, he said, “Honey, right there in that heavy snowstorm, I saw two deer.” There was a silence. I thought, he calls her honey. I could not imagine what his wife thought, or why she said nothing, or why the silence seemed so long and deep. His words were clearly not addressed to me. He had already told me about the deer. He has never called me anything but Kate. Then it dawned on me. He had told his wife, too, and forgotten that he’d told her. She must have thought he was telling me for the first time, and that, whatever honey has come to mean between them, he now calls me that. I could be wrong, of course. She may not even have been listening, or maybe she never answers at that hour. There we both were, though, together in our silence. There he was, a little drunk, unaware, I think, and happy, driving through the darkness down the road.

Crying was not, was by no means, her modus operandi. Nonetheless, she wept.

In the sixth year, I went to New Orleans by myself.

How could I know that every time you had a choice you would choose the other thing?

This is about the wildlife commissioner. And the houseguest, an animal. Henry James would have known what to do with him. Flannery O’Connor would have dealt with him in her way. New England environmentalist writers would have wrung from him whatever can be wrung from the birth of their meaningful foals in dark hours or from symbolic encroachments by highways on family meadows. For Conrad, perhaps, it might have been a man. But it was not a man, this creature with which I had a misunderstanding. It wandered, late one afternoon in winter, into the small room, almost a closet, which contained a stove, in the old bam where I used to live. The weather was gray, a few snowflakes fell. It was very cold. I sat in a shabby armchair, reading. I felt watched. When I looked up, I saw the animal, with delicate paws, a sharp face, and high, arched fluffy tail, sitting up, staring at me through the open doorway, from a place beside the stove. A moment later, he vanished. I thought I might have imagined him. After a while, I went to look. There was some reddish fluff, in a narrow gap between the insulation and the wall. I had switched on a small light bulb, which hung from the ceiling. I left it on, then closed and, to my surprise and half-smilingly, locked the door between that room and my own. I did not fall asleep until very late.

In winter, not wanting to slide the large barn doors open, I used to enter and leave through the back door of the little stove room. When I left, early the next morning, the creature was not there. I was not sure what he was. I was still not entirely sure I had seen him. I did not turn off the light bulb. I spent most of that day in the city. When I came home, long after dark, it was snowing, and he was there—sitting this time on the stove, slouched and leaning against the stovepipe, head lowered, great, dark-circled eyes blinking, swaying a little, I thought, like a drunk. He left through his crawl space almost as soon as he saw me. But because, on every subsequent evening, he stayed longer and left less abruptly; because he returned most nights, and slouched, on the stove, leaning against the stovepipe, all night, until morning; because he sometimes touched, though rarely, the water I left in a dish beside the stove for him; because he was, after all, a wild thing, growing ever more docile; we arrived at our misunderstanding. I thought he was growing to trust me, when in fact he was dying. So are we all, of course. But we do not normally mistake progressions of weakness, the loss of the simple capacity to escape, for the onset of love.

And the virtuoso, and the pachysandra, and the awful night of Eva dancing?

Not right here, I think. Not now.

I thought he was growing to trust me, when in fact he was dying. I had hardly an intimation of this until one night when, as usual by then, the light in the stove room was on, the door was open, and I again sat in that armchair, reading. About the third time I looked up, the animal, which had until then slouched, staring, blinking, against the stovepipe, was evidently trying to climb from the stove down to the floor.

I thought at first he was trying to reach the water dish, or that, startled by my looking up, he was going to leave through the gap between the insulation and the wall. But as he stayed there, head and front paws reaching, slowly, tentatively, toward the floor, his haunches, most of his weight still on the stove; as it seemed that gravity had somehow reversed for him, and that the simple act of getting down required all his strength, had become a slope too steep for him to climb; I began to walk toward him, intending, at that moment, just to lift him to the floor. He looked at me. I reconsidered. I moved quietly to the phone book and the phone. When I had finished dialing, a very young voice answered. “May I speak to Dr. Rubin?” I asked, meaning Ed, who had treated all our dogs and cats since I was in kindergarten; Ed, who had put his hand to the side of his face and said, “Oy veh geschrien, oy veh geschrien,” when my mother brought in Shaggy, the wonderful mongrel hit by a speeding pickup; Ed Rubin, who had let us stay with Bayard, our always slow-witted and timorous but now senile Great Dane, while he gave him the shot that put him gently away; Ed Rubin, whom I’d last seen with his wife Dottie, who always used to sing so lustily in the choir, not just of the local synagogue but of various other congregations, blinking, as the lights went up, at an improbable French movie in New York. “This is Dr. Rubin,” the young voice replied.

“Wayne, this is Kate Ennis,” I said. I had read to Wayne Rubin when he was five. “I’m living in a barn on King Street. There’s a raccoon here, and I think he’s sick. Could you come? He’s just trying to lower himself from my stove onto the floor, and he can’t seem to make it. I think I’m going to try to lift him down.”

“Don’t touch him,” Wayne said. “Don’t go near him. There’ve been a lot of sick raccoons around since fall. It’s distemper. ”

“Well, what shall I do, then?”

“Don’t touch him, Kate. Don’t go near him. Just stay out of his reach until he dies. Where did you say he was?”

“He’s here in the barn, with me. On the stove. He’s been warming himself here for days. Would you just come and have a look at him?”

“I can’t. Not tonight, Kate. But here’s what you do. Call the wildlife commissioner. He’ll help you out.”

“Will he come?”

“Yes, he will. That’s his job. Look him up, in the phone book. Under Township of Red Hill. Wildlife Commissioner.”

“Thanks. Wayne, how’s your father?”

“He’s fine. He and Mom are in Fort Lauderdale till March.”

“I see. Well, thanks.”

“Right. And Kate, don’t go near an animal with distemper. Or any sick, undomesticated animal. You know that.”

I did know.

About an hour after my call, an old battered panel truck came into the driveway. I was waiting outside by then, partly from impatience, partly because the bam was not easy to find, partly to stop standing and watching the by now obviously feverish and exhausted creature, which had somehow raised its whole body onto the stove again and sat up, precariously, leaning against the stovepipe, blinking. The night was very cold, windy. A grizzled old man, in a patched woolen jacket and an old cap with earmuffs, climbed slowly out of the truck. Out of the passenger side, equally slowly, similarly dressed, climbed a boy of about ten. I said, Hello, I’m Kate Ennis. “Well, ma’am, I’m the wildlife commissioner. And this is my grandson.” I mentioned the lateness of the hour. “That’s all right, ma’am. The family was watching the TV, but this is my job. And the boy likes to come. We’ll just take care of this for you, real nice.” The man fumbled for a time in the rear of the truck, then brought out a large, dented cage made of barbed wire and wood, and a long wooden pole, with a loop of leather at one end. He handed the cage to the boy, kept the pole for himself.

“Well, ma’am,” he said. “Where is he?”

“He’s inside. On the stove. I was wondering. What are you going to do with him exactly?” Something flickered in the man’s face: one of those. For the first time, he looked directly at me, from head to foot, then, for a moment, in the eyes.

“Why, ma’am, we’ll just take care of him for you,” he said.

The boy was already walking toward the bam. I opened the door for them. We approached the stove. The boy moved forward, crouched, then made a purring sound, and slid open a panel of the cage. The raccoon just sat there, shivered, stared.

“See his hindquarters,” the boy said. “Paralyzed. ”

The old man, standing in the doorway, said nothing, wheezed, then, not at all quickly, moved his pole, thrust the loop over the animal’s head, and, lifting him by the neck, let him dangle a moment, then dropped him into the boy’s cage. The boy slammed the panel shut. The raccoon turned around, stared out. “He’s very sick, ma’am, didn’t even fight me. Usually they do,” the old man said. The boy stood, blank-faced, purring. “Give him penicillin. That’s the best thing for him,” the man continued.

“Look,” I said. “I know he’s dying. What I meant was, do you shoot him, or give him gas, or just leave him alone and let him die?”

“Oh, no, ma’am,” he said, looking me up and down again, this time more slowly. “Penicillin. Then I’ll see if he’ll just eat for me. If I can just get them to eat for me, I know I can fix them. But don’t you worry. He’ll die humanely.” He laughed. The boy stopped purring. Holding the cage, he started toward the truck.

Outside, I asked the old man how much I owed him.

“Well, ma’am, I work for the town,” he said. “Whatever you think is appropriate.” He put the bill in the pocket of his shirt, inside the jacket. The raccoon looked out through his cage, in the back of the truck, beside some rags, an inner tube, some lengths of pipe. The boy sat quietly in his seat. The old man got in, and they drove away.

God knows what they did with him. Stoned him, probably. Unless raccoon pelts had value, more value than acts of cruelty, in their lives, in which case they would probably waste a single bullet on him, or let him starve. Maybe this isn’t about the wildlife commissioner. About betrayal, rather, on my part. Or on the animal’s, reproach. He did trust me, after all, in some sense, or was entrusted to me. We traveled a bit along life’s road together; at the time he came to visit, I even, as I rarely do, had my own few days of fever. But in making more frightening and miserable, probably, the last moments of this raccoon, well, I made an error. I should have let him die, of course, upon the stove. A mistake, a series of errors, first of love, then of officiousness, finally of language. I should have known, I ought to have known, but how could I? what is meant by, what are the official duties of the wildlife commissioner in this town.

Long after I wrote to London Exit, I heard from Los Angeles Hemlock.

Yet here I am after all alone at last on Orcas Island.

Be the first on your block to, what? Come out of the closet. Make a breakthrough in medicine. Go to West Point. Sell to a black family. Enlist in, or resign from the avant-garde.

We have the sins of silence here. Also the sins of loquacity and glibness. We have the sins of moderation, and also of excess. We have our sinner gluttons, and our sinner anorectics. We have the sins of going first, and of After you, Alphonse. We have the sins of impatience, and of patience. Of doing nothing, and of taking action. Of spontaneity and calculation. Of indecision, and of sitting in judgment on one’s peers. We try to be alert here for infractions, and when we find none, we know we have fallen among the sins of oversight or else of smugness. We have the sins of disobedience, and of just following orders. Of gravity and levity, of complacency, anxiety, indifference, obsession, interest. We have the sins of insincerity, and of telling unwelcome truths. We have the sins of ingratitude for our many blessings, and of taking joy in any moment of our lives. We have the sins of skepticism, and belief. Of promptness, and of being late. Of hopelessness, and of expecting anything. Of failing to think of the starving children in India, of dwelling on thoughts about those children, of failing to see the relevance of another spoonful to the situation of those starving children, or to Uncle Bill, or Granny, or poor Joel, or whomever we are being asked to take another spoonful for. We have the sins of depression, and of being comforted. Of ignorance, and being well informed. Of carelessness, and of exactitude. Of leading, following, opposing, taking no part in. Very few of us, it seems fair to say, are morally at ease.

I’ll get over it.

Will you?

Yes. I just don’t understand it. I guess I will never understand it. We’ve done the Blue Angel, somehow, in reverse. No, I don’t mean that. Nothing here, though, of frolic and detour, nothing of calm and beauty, where I might have joined you for a moment, or a weekend, or a night. You didn’t want it.

But I did.

Maybe we better start again.

At the time, we had a Secretary of State who was always saying hogwash. Hogwash, he would say when it was rumored that there were tensions between his own staff and another. Hogwash, that there was an Arabist tilt in the foreign service. Hogwash, that we would send military equipment to defend some vital interest somewhere in the world. Our chief negotiator for disarmament, at that time, thought that tensions in the world could be most productively discussed in terms of apes. “Apes on a Treadmill” was, in fact, the title of a piece he published in a respected journal of foreign policy. It was his earnest thesis that the relation between the great powers was, profoundly and in essence, monkey see, monkey do. Both these men had been in public life, in various capacities, for a long time. Both were lawyers and, when they served in government, gave up enormous private incomes. It seemed odd to me at the time, perhaps it was an Ivy League or legal scruple, or, since doctors and nurses had it too, a Hippocratic inhibition, or, since no one in the country or even in the world seemed to disagree, a universal scruple or perhaps a failure of imagination; in any event, it seemed odd to me that no one, in those early days, no statesman, diplomat, doctor, nurse, friend or enemy, wife for God’s sake, seemed to contemplate, in the night, a simple, gentle act of euthanasia for the Shah.

What do you tell the Sanger people? Lily asked.

You are, you know, you were the nearest thing to a real story to happen in my life.

Would it have cost him all the earth, some time in all those years, to take her to New Orleans for a week?

Look, the sun is a sort of bribe, you know, and so is a heavy thunderstorm or a snowfall. So is a dawn, though not I think a sunset. So is a warm bath or a shower, and a sound sleep. Bribes all, in the conspiracy of everything to continue to exist.

You’ve left out the B Minor Mass, Mozart, all kinds of music. Also pleasure in high speeds, the deeply comic, something to eat or drink, success in an enterprise.

Well, all of them have their ingredient of death, you know.

And you’ve left out love.

So I have, so I have.

“You owe me ten dollars, Leander Dworkin!” the blond young man was screaming, late at night, on the sidewalk on upper Broadway. That was in summer, the early sixties. Leander wanted no one to know he was gay, thought no one but the men he slept with, whom he always swore to secrecy, did know. How they hated him, those men in their Village duplexes, or on the beaches of Fire Island, for his insistence, for this particular form of the pretense. It mattered bitterly to them, the way, by the morning after, he denied them. But Leander insisted, and thought he could enforce the demand, that they keep his secret. Of course, they did not. And then, on that summer night almost twenty years ago, on account of his unwillingness to honor debts, his liking to be paid for, even his taste for threesomes, he found himself, after midnight, virtually running along a sidewalk on upper Broadway, pretending to ignore Simon, his principal lover, Simon whose feelings he had hurt even then by inviting Howard, whom he had met at the gym, to move into their apartment, Simon, to whom he owed debts of various kinds and who was now running in the dark beside him, screaming for all the world to hear, “Leander Dworkin, you owe me ten dollars! Ten dollars, Leander Dworkin! You owe them to me!”

Let me just say this about Homer. That part in The Odyssey, about the weaving and the unweaving, and the suitors. It cannot be true, not quite that way, and Homer, I think, never meant us to believe it. At home, the faithful wife, with their son, Telemachus. Weaving. On the road, Ulysses, fighting, all those years. Fighting, as it happens, to bring another man’s woman, Helen, back from Troy. But that is not the point. The point is that, through all the years Ulysses was away, doing battle in The Iliad, traveling and having adventures in The Odyssey, through all the years of the war and his return, his wife was faithfully at home. Weaving. Surrounded by suitors, it is true, but she explains the matter, or Homer does on her behalf, in this way: that she rejected the suitors, kept them all at bay, by constant daylight weaving, and the claim that she must refuse them all, until her work, this carpet, or blanket, or tapestry perhaps, in any event this piece of weaving, was complete. Then, at night, every night, she secretly unwove what she had woven by day. Unobservant, for some time, these suitors. Unobservant, too, Telemachus, a troubled child. It is hard to know, at this remove, whether the underlying situation was simply a conspiracy among the wife and suitors to conceal that she had been living with one, or maybe all, of them. It is only clear that, as a faithful wife, she had two difficult circumstances to explain. The presence of the suitors, and how very little weaving she had done. Enraptured as he always was with cleverness, Ulysses believed the story. Or pretended to. After all, he slew the suitors all the same. But that his wife did not unweave by night, and therefore by implication hardly ever wove by day, we’ve known ever since we learned, not what love is, but what reporting is and what public figures are, and how much more than we were ever taught to expect is really lies.

What I wish I had not lost is the photograph of him, the only nice one. What I wish I had not lost is the ticket for my raincoat at the shoe repair shop. What I wish we had not lost is the time, or the inventory of the lost things, or the consciousness of the things that are not lost. But nothing I had, I think, is anything Jake’s wife wants, or ever wanted. Nothing was lost, I think, by any of us there.

What do you tell the Sanger people? Lily asked.

Let me just mention people’s expression when they are bored by a confidence, or when their minds are elsewhere, or when they have been told it once already. Let me mention, too, a confidence of long ago, an intimacy, completely, as it turns out, misunderstood.

A rowboat, without oars. An outboard motor. As you can sit there for years, forever, with that outboard motor, pulling again, and yet again, that rope, or cord, or wire, or whatever it is, and winding yet again, and each time, every single time, the motor, though it may give a cough or two, will fail to start, though if it starts, and when it starts, you are, at whatever speed you choose, within the engine’s limits and the hazards of the course, well on your way, until it starts you are no nearer where you were going on the fifteenth try than on the first; the enterprise may last forever and yet never quite begin. The fact seems to be, however, that unless some apparently unrelated event should intervene—a bullet, a heart attack, a loss of interest, a cry from shore that dinner’s ready, or company has come, or Junior’s run away—the engine will eventually start. In the meantime, though, while you have been intensely busy, it is difficult to account for how the time is spent.

What do you tell the Sanger people? Lily asked, late one afternoon in those years. We were well educated certainly. We had read widely. And there was no “we,” of course, except in retrospect, since it’s just an I, alone, who reads. We had, all the same, failures of information. The books which determined to such a large extent what we would become were, well, sure, Beatrix Potter, Little Women, Dickens, war and frontier novels, Albert Payson Terhune dog books, Kipling; then, suddenly, poetry, great classics, any or all of them, Dostoyevsky, Conrad, Melville. With a transcendent, though far from complete comprehension. Hemingway, Salinger, Fitzgerald; then lastly, oddly, in some ways preeminently, John O’Hara. How could he have known that? He could not possibly have known it. For some, at an impressionable age, Ayn Rand. Also, inevitably, mountains of trash. The Amboy Dukes, for instance, forbidden in all schools and read by everybody. Forget it. Don’t think about it. There were other interdicted books, God’s Little Acre, even Sanctuary; but we didn’t understand them. We may have read and reread, with curiosity, D. H. Lawrence. But if we were, in the end, as young adults and in sexual matters, anybody’s creatures, we were also, though we would never have mentioned it to one another, John O’Hara’s. Highly educated. Even original or finely tuned. But his creatures all the same.

That year, finally, in those years, we knew it was absurd. We had been adamant about how our lives would be, not like the stereotype daughters of left-wing urban parents, not like the fallen woman in all of letters, not even like the adulterous women in O’Hara. So few of us anyway were married, as his women seemed to be. But, apart from everything else, we were beginning to sense in ourselves the creation, if not of another stereotype, at least of another predictable pattern. Unmarried. Waiting. Studiously cooking dinners. Going out. Working, on that carpet, or blanket, or tapestry perhaps, in any event, that piece of weaving. Keeping alive the sense of high romantic possibility. That possibility which, educated and even worldly though we were, we knew, from all of letters and from our generational respect for institutions, was a matter of not going to bed with people unless you were going to marry them. That year, finally, it became absurd. What do I have this apartment for, Maggie said, after a few months of her first job in the city, if I’m never going to sleep with anybody in it. We were drinking gin. We had been talking about people it seemed we were not going to marry. Confronted, then, with a lack of information, we remembered Margaret Sanger. So we took out the phone book, and found what turned out to be the Sanger Institute. At that moment, at that very moment, the phone rang. It was Lily, and she said, What do you tell the Sanger people? She was not that close a friend, and she was younger than we were. So Maggie replied in a way that, though worldly enough, was noncommittal. Anyway, we didn’t know what you told the Sanger people.

The next morning, Maggie called them to arrange for an appointment. And they asked her when she was getting married. Maggie paused. Then, with great presence of mind I thought, she said December ninth. And they said, they honestly really said this, that they were sorry but they didn’t make appointments earlier than five weeks before a wedding day. Maggie said, Oh, I see. Two hours later, she called and, not thinking she could use her own name again, made an appointment in my name. The next day, in a seizure of cowardice or paranoia, I called the Sanger Institute. The voice I reached had a German accent. I thought, oh my God, I know these refugee voices, this person is probably some immigrant doctor’s wife, some friend even of my own parents. So I didn’t cancel the appointment, or say anything at all. Since I hadn’t canceled, though, I felt obliged to go. When I got to the waiting room, there were so few people, nobody looked like me, my courage failed. I left. I called Maggie from a phone booth and we met for coffee. So that we were only able, after all, to inform Lily that what you told the Sanger people was that you were getting married in five weeks.

Twenty years later, I again spoke to the Sanger people. I was looking for a worthy, touching charity to receive a check on my behalf. The check was in settlement of my own suit for libel. Nothing like Teagarden v. Denneny. Libel actions, I knew, had always been one of the real slums of Anglo-Saxon law. From Oscar Wilde through Alger Hiss, they seemed almost always grim, misguided, profoundly tainted, in some way, at the source. The grounds for my own suit, however, against a rich sensational publication, had occurred to me, one afternoon, in a State of high hilarity, as the first sound and witty libel suit of which I had ever heard. I thought it only required just the right charitable beneficiary for a check in settlement.

Worthy, the Sanger people. Maybe. But touching?

Well, I know. I was looking for a home for babies, unwed mothers. Something on that order. I even called the Foundling Hospital, which I’d walked by a hundred times, and asked them if they really were foundlings. They said, Yes, but please hold, Sister Elizabeth would discuss it with me. And I thought, I can’t, in view of the present state of things having to do with abortion and birth control, send this check to a Roman Catholic institution. I called the Sanger people, and I said, I can’t tell you why, but I need a worthy, touching charity to have a check sent to. What is it exactly, apart from Planned Parenthood, that you do? And the voice said, Well, abortions. I said I didn’t think that was what I had in mind. She said, If you came down here, you would see some very touching, moving abortion cases. I said, I know, I know, but what is required in this case is something more like babies, foundlings, a home for unwed mothers. She said, Well, we have our fertility institute. And we do have a place for unwed mothers. I said fine. Worthy and touching. And they got their check.

Is he not going to call, then? I don’t know. I guess he is not. I seem to be having a harder time with this than I thought or it was worth.

In France, they have the story of a ballet dancer so moved by her role that, in a scene in which she was supposed to be touchingly reunited with her mother, she actually blurted Maman, and her career was ruined. It seems you have to keep, you just have to keep a distance.

I wonder whether he will ever ask himself, say to himself, Well, she wasn’t asking all the earth, why did I let her go?

Here’s how it is now, at the women’s college, which is still scholarly, still feminist. There has been a compromise with the nearest all-male college, which had threatened, otherwise, to go coed. Ten percent of the male students now live at the women’s college. Ten percent of the female students live at the men’s college. Since some of the feminist dormitories have chosen to admit males, while others have chosen not to, the campus is now divided into two groups, which refer to each other, solely on the basis of the singlesex or coed dormitory issue, as the lesbians and the whores. The antipathy between the groups is deep. Students are “coming out” as lesbians, who, in the old days, would have been thought of as shy, or bold, or having crushes, or simply loyal in their friendships, but who would not have been, probably are not now, lesbians at all. And students are declaring themselves whores as though that were the only heterosexual choice. The dean’s office believes that to the degree that it still has responsibilities in loco parentis it ought not to act but just sympathetically abide, providing a benign place for things to sort themselves out. The latest now is this: whores and lesbians have found an issue on which they are united, unanimous in fact. The issue involves shower curtains at the gym. Male gyms do not have shower curtains. Male athletes are not hidden in the showers from one another. As a symptom, a residue of shame about the female body, the shower curtains, the students say, as with one voice, must be removed.

Those of us who remembered how relatively worried for our privacy we were, in those years, suspected campus-wide intimidation. Those of us who are of an age to be trustees and to have young daughters, and those daughters timid, asked the most timid daughters what they thought of the shower-curtain crisis. And with one voice, they said: remove the shower curtains. So that’s what we’ll do. And, whatever may become of the declared whores and lesbians, what will happen if someday, somewhere, they are asked, Are you now or have you ever been one or the other, about the shower curtains, and that unforced unanimity, well, we know it’s fine.

Baby’s all right, Uncle Jacques and Aunt Zabeth used to say in times of worry or of crisis. Baby’s all right. A friend of theirs, an only child, had always said it, like a little incantation, when he was alone in the dark and frightened, from his babyhood, through his childhood, all his life. His friends took it up. Think of the RAF, my mother would say, for the same reason, at such times. Think of the RAF. Baby’s all right.

The world is everything that is the case. And in the second place because. In the sixth year I went to New Orleans by myself. Look, I can’t. The relation between storytelling and eroticism is always close. I mean, it’s not just a matter of spinning yarns.

Yes it is. Spinning yarns.

Not any more, I think. Not even in thrillers, which is the path the purest storytelling impulse took. Not even in thrillers. Where stories are, there is always sex, and sometimes mortal danger:

You mean in stories.

I mean in telling them. Sex, mortal danger, and sometimes reprieve. For a woman, it is always, don’t you see, Scheherazade. For a man, it may be the Virginian. There he goes, then, striding through the dust of midday toward his confrontation. Here I am, of an evening, wondering whether I can hold his interest yet awhile.

Did I throw the most important thing, by accident, away?

There was this about the infestation. First, the tent caterpillars, clustered black in gray-white webs at the clefts where trunk and branch, twigs and branches met, loathsome gossamer, sticking to hands, eyebrows, hair, as one tried with a broom or a branch to disengage them, everywhere, filmy, hopeless, travesty of silk. Sprayed them. Blasted them with torches. Must have missed a few or, more likely, they came again, borne by the wind. The crab apple was bare of leaves. The birches dangled leaves half eaten, covered now with creatures advancing by hump and stretch, never seen to eat, only seen to crawl and rest, leaving devastation, overnight. Then, new buds, new leaves, a second growth. Within days more, the gypsy moths. Little beige egg casings all over the bark of every tree; hanging from stringy webs, at the same time, capsules, lacquered, layered, like some strange dessert, eggs in the cases, caterpillars in the hanging pupae, powdered wings on the night air, so prolific an infestation that we had three simultaneous generations of gypsy moths. They ate nothing, of course, that summer, just left their progeny to sleep and wait, on virtually every surface, on the fence, the firewood, the wisteria, webs, adobe casings, pupae, waiting all winter as we brought in and burned the firewood, sleeping, repellent, waiting, just as we waited I suppose, for spring.

And if I had a complaint about the matter, it was only this: that you did not help me with it. Not that you needed to help me, not that I even needed help. In the end, I called the agriculture station, and they told me what to do. But the point is that, at the time, your land, your many acres of trees, were being sprayed against the infestation. And when I asked you the name of the people who were spraying your land, so that they might spray my acre and a half as well, you said you could not remember their name. Then, I asked where I ought to look in the yellow pages, and you said, and I’m afraid you said this with some small satisfaction, that it was probably in any event too late to look, because the infestation this year had been so widespread and intense that all professional sprayers would by this time be booked up. Can this be as I am telling it? That was not, certainly, at the time, how I perceived it, though I know that at the time I felt dimly, more than dimly but for obscure reasons, sad. And when the builders came to make the addition, the huge addition to your new house, with much digging, and blasting, and refilling, and moving of the earth, and you praised, rather daily praised, the young Irish contractor in charge, and I asked whether he might know someone who, when his job with you was done, could dredge the silt that has accumulated in my pond, you said, No, you thought the job too small for him. Months later, when you praised and praised two brothers, Finns, who had come with their backhoe to dredge for some source of water at your place, and I asked whether they might have or know someone who had a backhoe for my pond, you said you had forgotten their names as well, and they were gone. I thought for a time this was on your part some fastidiousness, some discretion, in not wanting to have the same workmen engaged at your house as at mine. Weeks later, though, you had no hesitation in asking Paul and his son, while they were working on my land and on my time, whether and under what circumstances they might come to cut, and split, and stack your firewood. You had asked me for Paul’s name, and I had given it, but you talked with him at my place. You did not call him at home.

It may still all be all right. I think I have found someone to spray my trees, and even someone to dredge the pond. All last night, an immense backhoe at rest towered over my house, and this morning it is at work, ringing and thundering out there. The contractor is unknown. I mean, no one around here seems to know him. It may be more expensive than it might have been. That is, when the kind old professor came to visit and suggested that, since I would have anyway to dredge the silt, I might as well at the same time construct a little island in the pond, he said to be sure to have a man arrange things, because contractors were somehow disinclined to work as well or as honestly for women as for men, and when I told you what he had said, you agreed that it was so. After the dredging is done, I suppose, the place will really look much better, and the danger of floods will have abated. But I guess I also know that the time has come and that I ought to sell my house. And there it is. Because if these were not failures of love, on your part or on mine, or failures of generosity, or at least of imagination or attention, well, of course, they were, and I didn’t want to know. And though I know my heart cannot have been broken in these things, these things of my house and of yours, no, it can’t have been, I’m sure it was not, I find that I am crying as I write, because, while it’s true I’ve managed, there is even that backhoe out there, droning, it cannot either, can it? have cost so much to say in some of these things, or in some others sometime, not grudgingly, and without reluctance, Yes.

Look here.

I know.

Would it have cost him all the earth, sometime in all those years, to take her to New Orleans for a week?

The world is everything that is the case. And in the second place because. And in the second place because is how the Nabokov story starts, and I hate the artifice, but it is a star turn. I mean, what a star turn, what a triple coup to begin a story thus, with “And,” when nothing at all has gone before, with “in the second place,” when there has been no first place, with “because,” when there has been no why and there will be no indication what, what thing, what happening, what act, what state of mind, will follow on account of that because. The world is everything that is the case, of course, begins the work of Wittgenstein, and more. So dry and flat, in its self-contained, almost impacted quality, there is nonetheless a kind of rolling thunder. True, self-evident, beyond any doubt, it creates a terrible sense of what it is possible, what it might be worthwhile, to say at all. Language, thought, advancing like bulldozers, like cement. Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist. Who could argue that the world includes things that are not the case, that some things that are not the case at all are hidden somewhere in the world? Only a specious poet or a trendy French philosopher, toying with metaphor, unworthy of the statement’s august truth. And yet, after the first flash of awe and admiration, the loss is inescapable. I mean, who wants to write specious half-truths. On the other hand, who wants to write cement.

The town-house twins played the purest countertenor, on the stereo. Also Germaine Montero singing Spanish folk songs. Men who sing like women, the super said, bewildered, and women who sing like men.

Here’s how it is in the city, on our street. For the eight years since I moved into this brownstone, they have been building a branch of the subway, to some obscure, unnecessary destination, no one seems to know exactly where. The project has meant, at least, those years of jobs for hard hats and of extra business for the deli. Hardly any inconvenience, apart from diminished parking spaces taken up by the large green structures in which the hard hats eat their doughnuts and drink beer. Hardly any noise, at least on our street. In deference to the block associations, which are strong here, the city agreed to muffle the nightly whistling and blasting, also, an expensive concession in this line of work, to save the trees. Inside, the first two floors are occupied by the landlady, one or both of whose late husbands must have said that what they loved about her was her temper. From time to time, she needs to throw an all-night party, with singing from the Fireside Book; at other times, though, far more frequently, she needs to provoke quarrels, pound on a tenant’s door, and scream. The house only has four floors. When I’m in town, I’m the tenant on the third floor, just above our landlady’s duplex. Brian and Paula, both young lawyers, both the first in their families to go beyond high school, are on the top floor, with Apple, their Afghan hound.

In the winter, right after New Year’s, our landlady likes to take a cruise around the world. She sublets her two floors for six months and goes. Whoever moves in then inevitably changes the character of the house to some degree. Last year we had a banker and his family, who were the children and grandchildren of a war criminal. This year, all day on weekends and sometimes after school on weekdays, a child comes and endlessly picks out Frere Jacques on the piano. Pausing, hesitating, never getting it quite right, using sometimes one hand, sometimes two, alternating, though this month is March, with a few notes from Jingle Bells. One night, when Brian went to look for something in the basement, he encountered an armed man, whom he took to be a prowler. The man was a bodyguard. The family in our landlady’s duplex this year, it turns out, lives under a pseudonym. Their real name is Somoza. Today, this morning, someone is using a hammer and a blowtorch on a house across the garden. Apple has begun to bark. And Madame Somoza cowers behind her shades and draperies at this quantity of noise.

Very amusing, the rich Italians always say now when they’re here. Or else, Not very amusing.

By the time the old couple moved to the suburbs, she had become flatly, almost by reflex, ornery. He was a sort of engine of cliche. “Rome wasn’t built in a day,” he might say, over his martini. And she would reply, without hesitation, “Yes it was. ”

Maybe he won’t be there when I get back. Maybe I won’t either. Who would have thought that every time he had a choice he would choose the other thing.

Did it mean nothing, then, that he came to see her every day?

Oh, it meant a lot, a lot. And I don’t hold with saying, at every mood and moment, this is how I feel, this is what’s happening now to me. I know reticence has its depths. I really do. But you can go too far with the undone and the unspoken things. What it comes to in the end is that there’s only an ambiguous footprint, a hair that could be anyone’s, a drunken moment that I couldn’t actually swear to, though it held me for a few years longer, to say that there was ever a living creature there. And while I was moved to tears when you walked here in the night, with your flashlight and your dog—not to tears,

I guess, but to a stillness of the heart—it was really with your dog that you walked in the moonlight and the woods, and I drove you home. A man I know used to speak of women as high or low maintenance. Since his world was city life, what he meant was that one kind of mistress requires furs, cars, constant small attentions; another kind asks much less. I guess I’ve been high maintenance in just this sense: that you’ve given me more time, on those rides, business travels, visits in the interstices of your life, than you ever planned to give. What you’ve done, though, is to arrange your life so that all the things with a little joy or beauty in them were the things in which I had no part. No, I don’t mean that. It is only that I didn’t think I set the price so very high. There wasn’t ever going to be a price. Yet here I am, after all, alone on Orcas Island. And it’s only that what happens now is just so bleak and ordinary, either way.

Hey, wait.

Well, love after all is a habit like any other.

A habit, maybe. Like any other, no.

Drivers of large cars drive extremely badly. So do old men, men wearing hats, men with thick necks and florid faces, drivers of cars with dented fenders, or with more than one generation in them, or with college stickers on their rearview windows, or with slogans on their bumpers, or with license plates of names or words instead of numbers, or with New Jersey license plates; I have left out matrons, nuns, dyed blondes, old women; their lapses tend to be blunt and unaggressive, like an inability to park or a wrong turn on a one-way street. That is all I know, categorically and without reservation, about drivers. Two other facts I think I know are these. Nobody ever confides a secret to one person only. No one destroys all copies of a document. Also, that it is children really, perhaps because so much is forbidden to them, who understand from within the nature of crime.

You are, you know, you were the nearest thing to a real story to happen in my life.

Yet here I am, for the first time and yet again, alone at last on Orcas Island.

Did I throw the most important thing perhaps, by accident, away?

Having read in the paper that a London society called Exit was about to publish a book of pharmacological instructions for terminally ill people who simply wanted to die, peacefully, in their sleep, I thought of Ed Rubin and old Bayard. Then, I misplaced the clipping and forgot. Months later, when I found the clipping and remembered, I wrote to London Exit. Nothing happened. No reply. Long after that, when I had again forgotten, I received a letter from a Los Angeles society called Hemlock, who said that, since I was an American, London Exit had forwarded my communication to them. I had a moment of hilarity about this. The clear sense of jurisdiction. Then, I read in a newsletter enclosed by Hemlock that London Exit had never published its instructions. They had been enjoined from publication, and suppressed. Exit’s officials, moreover, had been indicted under the English law of suicide, aiding and abetting. Los Angeles Hemlock, however, was going to go ahead and publish. I called and asked how they were going to keep from being suppressed under the California equivalent of the English statute. Their plan, they said, was to publish, not instructions, but short case histories: Harry, weighing this many pounds, took this many grams of this substance, and it wasn’t enough; Anna, who weighed less, took this many grams more, and it was. No law could prevent the publication of case histories. Not when we have the protection of the First Amendment. That was that. Hemlock published. There was, though, this improbable footnote from London: Exit, it seemed, may really have aided and abetted, even proselytized. Witnesses were coming forward to say that, in response to their phone calls of the most tentative inquiry, a voice would offer to come at once. Within hours, an elderly man would appear on their doorsteps, offering to help, urging them to be spared further misery, from their asthma, their sadness, their lower-back pain. Another moment of hilarity. And yet. And then it passed.

The lines, as usual, were long and extremely slow going into the island’s airport. Immigration officials considered each passport with an impassive but somehow insulting deliberateness. It was also possible, given the quality of local schooling, that they found it difficult to read. Lines for departure from the island were also, equally, slow, but they had about them always something of the frantic. Reservations, clearly marked on tickets and many times confirmed, were somehow missing from passenger lists; or even if they appeared on the lists, where passengers, reading upside down, could plainly see them, the airline employee would look up, with that impassivity, that insulting deliberation, and repeat that there was no record of the passenger’s name, that the passenger could wait, if he liked, on standby, for this flight or for the next in six hours’ time. It hardly mattered which island it was. Barbados. St. Thomas. Tortola. Martinique. Visitors, particularly those who most deplored the quality of island food, liked to say the French islands were different. But they were not. With the exception of Jamaica and Grenada, where violence was overt, the islands were the same.

What you found in all these places was, of course, the clear, warm sea, the sun, the long white beaches; and, in the water, always in recent years, at least one young, black, possibly feeble-minded person, smiling, playing with himself. Nearby, a large, loud transistor, a group of young blacks, some in bathing suits, a few in trousers, chattering in the island patois, moving gradually nearer a sunbathing young white woman, or a sunbathing white couple, until that woman or that couple, whose intention had evidently been to stay at some distance from the others, picked up their towels and moved toward the groups around the beach umbrellas, where the other white people were. Elsewhere on the beach, not all day but inevitably by noon, a second group of blacks, young, laughing, wading deep, splashing, shouting, embracing, taunting, concealing in a kind of ostentatious, faked exuberance the fact, true of so many places with sought-after resorts, sought-after beaches, that no native islanders knew how to swim. These were the tensions of arriving, staying, leaving. On the heavily frequented islands, where people went for nightclubs, gambling, golf, hotels. And on the remote, secluded islands of rented and guarded houses. Where people came to be undisturbed. And then became restless after dinner.

Look here.

How could I know that every time you had a chance to choose you would choose the other thing?

Do you know, he said, I have not made love with anyone since I first made love with you. I said, not anyone? He said no. I said neither have I. And there we were. And why is it not enough, for people of diffidence, hesitation, and reserve, to let it go, to let it be now, this way, for the rest of our lives? Perhaps I am wrong now. Every once in a while since the year we met, no, not met, since we didn’t for so long even like each other, since the year, then, that we began to go to bed together, I said that someday, in spring or autumn, I’d like to go to New Orleans. I had never been there. And you said, each time you said, why I’ll take you there, that’s easy. In the sixth year, in August, I went to New Orleans by myself. It was all right, though it was hot, since it was August. I just hadn’t thought it through. I invented errands, talked to those judges, spent a few days. It didn’t matter. Then, from time to time, I began to say, You know, someday we ought to go somewhere for a weekend, not for work, as when we fly to Cleveland, Chicago, or Atlanta, and we have an early dinner there or else I wait at the motel while you have dinner with the local people, and the next day I read while you do the work you came for, and the next night, or two nights later, we fly back. But a weekend of calm, as though you were in your houses, on your islands, your long walks. Sometimes, you said, I will, we’ll do that. Once or twice, you said, We’ll see. It became a sort of joke between us, that weekend. Sometimes it was reduced to just dinner at a restaurant in Pennsylvania, not far from the place where you sometimes spend a few days fishing; but we never went there, either. Other dinners, not that one. And it began to matter. I don’t know why. A child’s thing. On the other hand, I’m not sure you can say, as a not inconsiderable man to a grown woman, we’ll see.

And then one night, when you were about to leave for the island where you spend your weeks at Christmas, and your wife was already there but your children, the last of whom has now grown up, were not this year going with you, I said, I’m afraid I said, You know, we wouldn’t have to make love as much as this in a night, in a single night after a day of tiredness and errands, and before an early morning of more errands and long absence, we wouldn’t have to make love as much as this in a single night if someday we had a week. It was late. We were drunk, though not very. And then I said, You know. You said, What. I said, I guess we are never going to have a week. And then I’m afraid I wept. We were quiet then, as we usually are. But there are things you can say, I think, or suggest, or even contemplate aloud just once. And I had begun. So I said, because after all these years I had to say something, though it may be far too late to say it, When it’s time for me to go, do you want me to ask you or tell you or should I just quietly go. You said, But I don’t want you to go, I need you here. I said, no, and in a way you’ve wanted me to go for years, and I’ve known it, but I just couldn’t do it. Then you said, not speaking as to a child any longer, But you can’t go, everything will just disintegrate if you go. I was touched, and I said whatever I said, about how bored you are sometimes. You said, But you always have something new to tell me, and if you go I’ll just shrivel up, I’ll just shrivel up like a prune. We went to sleep. And by morning, of course, you had forgotten. Remembered by afternoon, I think, only that I had been unhappy, remembered a phrase or two, but remembered by then as though it were a childhood thing, one of your daughters homesick at school, perhaps, or briefly sentimental at parting when you and their mother went away, or, more recently, when they went away themselves, to their men or their jobs, abroad. So it was only as if I had said once again that, while you were gone, I would miss you. And we have said that so often, everyone says it, in such a formula way, it has almost no meaning. And to make me feel better, you said again that you loved me, and gave me, as a sort of Christmas present, that word about your having made love only with me in all these years. And I could not, how could I, turn away, so I just said, not anyone? and then, neither have I.

We had drinks and dinner early, because you had to get home, after your tiring day, in time to be picked up for your morning flight. And we talked, as we do, of the news, and our errands, and maybe something comic in them. Then, since I couldn’t stay with you, or you with me, on account of the driver in the morning, you took me home, and I gave you a chicken liver for your dog and a pill for the night, and you gave me some letters to mail. After which, I’m afraid, I cried again. You seemed bewildered by that. I said, You know, the thing is you build your life a bit. And you said, the thing is it’s built. After midnight, and this is very unusual for us, you called and said you loved me, and I said whatever I said, also, Catch a lot of fish on your island, and that I would see you when you get back.

I only don’t know if I will see you when you get back. That is all that is wrong, or some of what’s wrong. That I shouldn’t be here when you get back, that I ought not to have been here many times before, that I know and knew that with anything I have of instinct or of wisdom. The Germans say no one can jump over his own shadow, and I used to rationalize, no, not rationalize, think, that I couldn’t ask you to jump outside your way. But what I’m afraid I’ve done is lost, lost you something, lost me something, lost us, by what I did not insist, a possibility. Because there is no reason in the world why, in eight years, we have never had, and we will never have, a week. And because I am not one of your daughters, or one of your assistants, or your wife, or a dependent friend or colleague, or a litigant clamoring for your attention, or a politician who seeks your advice. Or even, as I once said, in the dark, with a smile, a secretary or a blonde in a chorus line with whom you are having an affair. You said you wouldn’t be having an affair with either of the last two, but the truth is, we would probably be better off if you were. If I were that secretary or that blonde, though, as you say, your life is built, you would have to find room, make some kind of room. The weeks on the north island in summer, the other island in winter, the hunting and walking weekends, even the occasional junket to the Riviera or to London. Somehow not with me, not with me. Not Christmas, of course, or birthdays, which I know don’t really matter. I just don’t know quite how I let it happen. Perhaps I had no choice, or perhaps you never loved me quite enough and I didn’t want to know.

So here we are. Or rather, there you are and here I am. And maybe the thing is simply not to think about it, and grow old, older still, like this. What we have now, it is true, is that you come to see me almost every day, and you bolt your morning tea or your evening scotch, and when I said the phrase that occurred to me, for the first time, to characterize the way you sometimes leave as Making good your escape, you did laugh. And you often spend the nights. But I may as well confess that, though I love you and seeing you changes the character of my mood and day, I sometimes dread, I don’t know how else to put it, sometimes dread a kind of visit that you make to me. I long for you to be here, miss you when you are gone, but sometimes to wonder whether I can amuse you, or whether you will be bored, tired, called away for bridge, or work, or tennis, or because one of your daughters has had a whim, well, sometimes I dread what will follow such a visit, and so I’ve come to dread a bit the visit, too. And while that may be true of any couple, any marriage, we have reversed it somehow. In the scheme of things, the mistress has something of the island; some of the strain, routine, and sense of long cold winter belongs with the wife.

When you are away, there are these traces: a few notes left on my front door, saying you’ll be late or asking where I am; a French pocket knife with a single all-purpose blade; two Liberty scarves bought with leftover currency at foreign airports; and, of course, the passage of the years, and the location of my house. You’ve moved the whole arsenal of the Other Woman, somehow, into your own house, and, at my place, when you come, there’s only me. I wonder if you know at all what is happening in my heart, what a word. I suppose you don’t. You’ve so many females, wife, sisters, daughters, cousins, dog, in your life that you’ve probably confused me with them all. I guess I like to think that you love me more than you know, though I suppose the grounds are pretty slim for saying that. Well, a child’s thing. But you are, you know, you were, the nearest thing to a real story to happen in my life. Also, look at it this way, just what is it that I, that we are going to have, to look forward to, to look back on, after all. I mean, here I am, for the first time and yet again, alone at last on Orcas Island. What are you going to do? What you’ve always done, I guess. But what am I going to do, what shall I do, now?

“I’ll get over it.”

“Will you?”

“Yes. And you’ll find somebody else.” Your face froze. You said, “I won’t.” I said, “You will. The thing is, I won’t mind so much. Because I won’t know.”

Look here, you know. I loved you.

Well, the question occurs, so many times, clearing desks, doing income tax, looking for letters, documents, some are missing, one doesn’t know for sure which are lost, doesn’t dare even to look too carefully, time and time again, there is this, Did I throw the most important thing perhaps, by accident, away?