"The Human Stain" - читать интересную книгу автора (Roth Philip)

4. What Maniac Conceived It?

I SAW COLEMAN ALIVE only one more time after that July. He himself never told me about the visit to the college or the phone call from the student union to his son Jeff. I learned of his having been on the campus that day because he'd been observed there — inadvertently, from an office window — by his former colleague Herb Keble, who, near the end of his speech at the funeral, alluded to seeing Coleman standing hidden back against the shadowed wall of North Hall, seemingly secreting himself for reasons that Keble only could guess at. I knew about the phone call because Jeff Silk, whom I spoke with after the funeral, mentioned something about it, enough for me to know that the call had gone wildly out of Coleman's control. It was directly from Nelson Primus that I learned of the visit that Coleman had made to the attorney's office earlier on the same day he'd phoned Jeff and that had ended, like the other call, with Coleman lashing out in vituperative disgust. After that, neither Primus nor Jeff Silk ever spoke to Coleman again. Coleman didn't return their calls or mine — turned out he didn't return anyone's — and then it seems he disconnected his answering machine, because soon enough the phone just rang on endlessly when I tried to reach him.

He was there alone in the house, however — he hadn't gone away. I knew he was there because, after a couple of weeks of phoning unsuccessfully, one Saturday evening early in August I drove by after dark to check. Only a few lamps were burning but, sure enough, when I pulled over beside Coleman's hugely branched ancient maples, cut my engine, and sat motionless in the car on the blacktop road down at the bottom of the undulating lawn, there was the dance music coming from the open windows of the black-shuttered, white clapboard house, the evening-long Saturday FM program that took him back to Steena Palsson and the basement room on Sullivan Street right after the war. He is in there now just with Faunia, each of them protecting the other against everyone else — each of them, to the other, comprising everyone else. There they dance, as likely as not unclothed, beyond the ordeal of the world, in an unearthly paradise of earthbound lust where their coupling is the drama into which they decant all the angry disappointment of their lives. I remembered something he'd told me Faunia had said in the afterglow of one of their evenings, when so much seemed to be passing between them. He'd said to her, “This is more than sex,” and flatly she replied, “No, it's not. You just forgot what sex is. This is sex. All by itself. Don't fuck it up by pretending it's something else.”

Who are they now? They are the simplest version possible of themselves. The essence of singularity. Everything painful congealed into passion. They may no longer even regret that things are not otherwise. They are too well entrenched in disgust for that. They are out from under everything ever piled on top of them. Nothing in life tempts them, nothing in life excites them, nothing in life subdues their hatred of life anything like this intimacy. Who are these drastically unalike people, so incongruously allied at seventy-one and thirty-four? They are the disaster to which they are enjoined. To the beat of Tommy Dorsey's band and the gentle crooning of young Sinatra, dancing their way stark naked right into a violent death. Everyone on earth does the end differently: this is how the two of them work it out. There is now no way they will stop themselves in time. It's done.

I am not alone in listening to the music from the road.

When my calls were not returned, I assumed that Coleman wished to have nothing more to do with me. Something had gone wrong, and I assumed, as one does when a friendship ends abruptly — a new friendship particularly — that I was responsible, if not for some indiscreet word or deed that had deeply irritated or offended him, then by being who and what I am. Coleman had first come to me, remember, because, unrealistically, he hoped to persuade me to write the book explaining how the college had killed his wife; permitting this same writer to nose around in his private life was probably the last thing he now wanted. I didn't know what to conclude other than that his concealing from me the details of his life with Faunia had, for whatever reason, come to seem to him far wiser than his continuing to confide in me.

Of course I knew nothing then of the truth of his origins — that, too, I'd learn about conclusively at the funeral — and so I couldn't begin to surmise that the reason we'd never met in the years before Iris's death, the reason that he'd wanted not to meet, was because I had myself grown up only a few miles from East Orange and because, having more than a run-of-the-mill familiarity with the region, I might be too knowledgeable or too curious to leave his roots in Jersey unscrutinized. Suppose I turned out to have been one of the Newark Jewish boys in Doc Chizner's after-school boxing classes? The fact is that I was one, but not until '46 and '47, by which time Silky was no longer helping Doc teach kids like me the right way to stand and move and throw a punch but was at NYU on the GI Bill.

The fact is that, having befriended me during the time he was writing his draff of Spooks, he had indeed taken the risk, and a foolish one at that, of being exposed, nearly six decades on, as East Orange High's Negro valedictorian, the colored kid who'd boxed around Jersey in amateur bouts out of the Morton Street Boys Club before entering the navy as a white man; dropping me in the middle of that summer made sense for every possible reason, even if I had no way of imagining why.

Well, to the last time I saw him. One August Saturday, out of loneliness, I drove over to Tanglewood to hear the open rehearsal of the next day's concert program. A week after having parked down from his house, I was still both missing Coleman and missing the experience of having an intimate friend, and so I thought to make myself a part of that smallish Saturday-morning audience that fills about a quarter of the Music Shed for these rehearsals, an audience of summer folks who are music lovers and of visiting music students, but mainly of elderly tourists, people with hearing aids and people carrying binoculars and people paging through the New York Times who'd been bused to the Berkshires for the day.

Maybe it was the oddness born of my being out and about that did it, the momentary experience of being a sociable creature (or a creature feigning sociability), or maybe it was because of a fleeting notion I had of the elderly congregated together in the audience as embarkees, as deportees, waiting to be floated away on the music's buoyancy from the all-too-tangible enclosure of old age, but on this breezy, sunny Saturday in the last summer of Coleman Silk's life, the Music Shed kept reminding me of the open-sided piers that once extended cavernously out over the Hudson, as though one of those spacious, steel-raftered piers dating from when ocean liners docked in Manhattan had been raised from the water in all its hugeness and rocketed north a hundred and twenty miles, set down intact on the spacious Tanglewood lawn, a perfect landing amid the tall trees and sweeping views of mountainous New England.

As I made my way to a single empty seat that I spotted, one of the few empty seats close to the stage that nobody had as yet designated as reserved by slinging a sweater or a jacket across it, I kept thinking that we were all going somewhere together, had in fact gone and gotten there, leaving everything behind ... when all we were doing was readying ourselves to hear the Boston Symphony rehearse Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev, and Rimsky-Korsakov. Underfoot at the Music Shed there's a packed brown earth floor that couldn't make it clearer that your chair's aground on terra firma; roosting at the peak of the structure are the birds whose tweeting you hear in the weighty silence between orchestral movements, the swallows and wrens that wing busily in from the woods down the hill and then go zipping off again in a way no bird would have dared cut loose from Noah's floating Ark. We were about a three-hour drive west of the Atlantic, but I couldn't shake this dual sense of both being where I was and of having pushed off, along with the rest of the senior citizens, for a mysterious watery unknown.

Was it merely death that was on my mind in thinking of this debarkation? Death and myself? Death and Coleman? Or was it death and an assemblage of people able still to find pleasure in being bused about like a bunch of campers on a summer outing, and yet, as a palpable human multitude, an entity of sensate flesh and warm red blood, separated from oblivion by the thinnest, most fragile layer of life?

The program that preceded the rehearsal was just ending when I arrived. A lively lecturer dressed in a sport shirt and khaki trousers stood before the empty orchestra chairs introducing the audience to the last of the pieces they'd be hearing—-on a tape machine playing for them bits of Rachmaninoff and speaking brightly of “the dark, rhythmic quality” of the Symphonic Dances. Only when he'd finished and the audience broke into applause did somebody emerge from the wings to uncover the timpani and begin to set out the sheet music on the music stands. At the far side of the stage, a couple of stagehands appeared carrying the harps, and then the musicians entered, chatting with one another as they drifted on, all of them, like the lecturer, casually dressed for the rehearsal — an oboist in a gray hooded sweatshirt, a couple of bass players wearing faded Levi's, and then the fiddle players, men and women alike outfitted, from the look of it, by Banana Republic. As the conductor was slipping on his glasses — a guest conductor, Sergiu Commissiona, an aged Romanian in a turtleneck shirt, white bush of hair up top, blue espadrilles below — and the childishly courteous audience once again began to applaud, I noticed Coleman and Faunia walking down the aisle, looking for a place close-up to sit.

The musicians, about to undergo their transformation from a bunch of seemingly untroubled vacationers into a powerful, fluid music machine, had already settled in and were tuning up as the couple — the tall, gaunt-faced blond woman and the slender, handsome, gray-haired man not so tall as she and much older, though still walking his light-footed athletic walk — made their way to two empty seats three rows down from me and off to my right some twenty feet.

The piece by Rimsky-Korsakov was a tuneful fairy tale of oboes and flutes whose sweetness the audience found irresistible, and when the orchestra came to the end of their first go-round enthusiastic applause again poured forth like an upsurge of innocence from the elderly crowd. The musicians had indeed laid bare the youngest, most innocent of our ideas of life, the indestructible yearning for the way things aren't and can never be. Or so I thought as I turned my gaze toward my former friend and his mistress and found them looking nothing like so unusual or humanly isolated as I'd been coming to envision the pair of them since Coleman had dropped out of sight. They looked nothing like immoderate people, least of all Faunia, whose sculpted Yankee features made me think of a narrow room with windows in it but no door. Nothing about these two seemed at odds with life or on the attack — or on the defensive, either. Perhaps by herself, in this unfamiliar environment, Faunia mightn't have been so at ease as she seemed, but with Coleman at her side, her affinity for the setting appeared no less natural than the affinity for him. They didn't look like a pair of desperadoes sitting there together but rather like a couple who had achieved their own supremely concentrated serenity, who took no notice whatsoever of the feelings and fantasies that their presence might foment anywhere in the world, let alone in Berkshire County.

I wondered if Coleman had coached her beforehand on how he wanted her to behave. I wondered if she'd listen if he had. I wondered if coaching was necessary. I wondered why he'd chosen to bring her to Tanglewood. Simply because he wanted to hear the music? Because he wanted her to hear it and to see the live musicians? Under the auspices of Aphrodite, in the guise of Pygmalion, and in the environs of Tanglewood, was the retired classics professor now bringing recalcitrant, transgressive Faunia to life as a tastefully civilized Galatea? Was Coleman embarked on educating her, on influencing her — embarked on saving her from the tragedy of her strangeness? Was Tanglewood a first big step toward making of their waywardness something less unorthodox? Why so soon? Why at all? Why, when everything they had and were together had evolved out of the subterranean and the clandestinely crude? Why bother to normalize or regularize this alliance, why even attempt to, by going around as a “couple”? Since the publicness will tend only to erode the intensity, is this, in fact, what they truly want? What he wants? Was taming essential now to their lives, or did their being here have no such meaning? Was this some joke they were playing, an act designed to agitate, a deliberate provocation? Were they smiling to themselves, these carnal beasts, or merely there listening to the music?

Since they didn't get up to stretch or stroll around while the orchestra took a break and a piano was rolled onto the stage — for Prokofiev's Second Piano Concerto — I remained in place as well. There was a bit of a chill inside the shed, more of an autumnal than a summery coolness, though the sunlight, spread brilliantly across the great lawn, was warming those who preferred to listen and enjoy themselves from outside, a mostly younger audience of twenty-ish couples and mothers holding small children and picnicking families already breaking out the lunch from their hampers. Three rows down from me, Coleman, his head tipped slightly toward hers, was talking to Faunia quietly, seriously, but about what, of course, I did not know.

Because we don't know, do we? Everyone knows... How what happens the way it does? What underlies the anarchy of the train of events, the uncertainties, the mishaps, the disunity, the shocking irregularities that define human affairs? Nobody knows, Professor Roux. “Everyone knows” is the invocation of the cliché and the beginning of the banalization of experience, and it's the solemnity and the sense of authority that people have in voicing the cliché that's so insufferable. What we know is that, in an unclichéd way, nobody knows anything. You can't know anything. The things you know you don't know. Intention? Motive? Consequence? Meaning? All that we don't know is astonishing. Even more astonishing is what passes for knowing.

As the audience filed back in, I began, cartoonishly, to envisage the fatal malady that, without anyone's recognizing it, was working away inside us, within each and every one of us: to visualize the blood vessels occluding under the baseball caps, the malignancies growing beneath the permed white hair, the organs misfiring, atrophying, shutting down, the hundreds of billions of murderous cells surreptitiously marching this entire audience toward the improbable disaster ahead. I couldn't stop myself. The stupendous decimation that is death sweeping us all away. Orchestra, audience, conductor, technicians, swallows, wrens — think of the numbers for Tanglewood alone just between now and the year 4000. Then multiply that times everything. The ceaseless perishing. What an idea! What maniac conceived it? And yet what a lovely day it is today, a gift of a day, a perfect day lacking nothing in a Massachusetts vacation spot that is itself as harmless and pretty as any on earth.

Then Bronfman appears. Bronfman the brontosaur! Mr. Fortissimo! Enter Bronfman to play Prokofiev at such a pace and with such bravado as to knock my morbidity clear out of the ring. He is conspicuously massive through the upper torso, a force of nature camouflaged in a sweatshirt, somebody who has strolled into the Music Shed out of a circus where he is the strongman and who takes on the piano as a ridiculous challenge to the gargantuan strength he revels in. Yefim Bronfman looks less like the person who is going to play the piano than like the guy who should be moving it. I had never before seen anybody go at a piano like this sturdy little barrel of an unshaven Russian Jew. When he's finished, I thought, they'll have to throw the thing out. He crushes it. He doesn't let that piano conceal a thing. Whatever's in there is going to come out, and come out with its hands in the air. And when it does, everything there out in the open, the last of the last pulsation, he himself gets up and goes, leaving behind him our redemption. With a jaunty wave, he is suddenly gone, and though he takes all his fire off with him like no less a force than Prometheus, our own lives now seem inextinguishable. Nobody is dying, nobody—not if Bronfman has anything to say about it!

There was another break in the rehearsal, and when Faunia and Coleman got up this time, to leave the shed, so did I. I waited for them to precede me, not sure how to approach Coleman or — since it seemed that he no longer had any more use for me than for anyone else hereabouts — whether to approach him at all. Yet I did miss him. And what had I done? That yearning for a friend came to the surface just as it had when we'd first met, and once again, because of a magnetism in Coleman, an allure that I could never quite specify, I found no efficient way of putting it down.

I watched from some ten feet behind as they moved in a shuffling cluster of people slowly up the incline of the aisle toward the sunlit lawn, Coleman talking quietly to Faunia again, his hand between her shoulder blades, the palm of his hand against her spine guiding her along as he explained whatever he was now explaining about whatever it was she did not know. Once outside, they set off across the lawn, presumably toward the main gate and the dirt field beyond that was the parking lot, and I made no attempt to follow. When I happened to look back toward the shed, I could see inside, under the lights on the stage, that the eight beautiful bass fiddles were in a neat row where the musicians, before going off to take a break, had left them resting on their sides. Why this too should remind me of the death of all of us I could not fathom. A graveyard of horizontal instruments? Couldn't they more cheerily have put me in mind of a pod of whales?

I was standing on the lawn stretching myself, taking the warmth of the sun on my back for another few seconds before returning to my seat to hear the Rachmaninoff, when I saw them returning — apparently they'd left the vicinity of the shed only to walk the grounds, perhaps for Coleman to show her the views off to the south — and now they were headed back to hear the orchestra conclude its open rehearsal with the Symphonic Dances. To learn what I could learn, I decided then to head directly toward them for all that they still looked like people whose business was entirely their own. Waving at Coleman, waving and saying “Hello, there. Coleman, hello,” I blocked their way.

“I thought I saw you,” Coleman said, and though I didn't believe him, I thought, What better to say to put her at her ease? To put me at my ease. To put himself at his. Without a trace of anything but the easygoing, hard-nosed dean-of-faculty charm, seemingly irritated not at all by my sudden appearance, Coleman said, “Mr. Bronfman's something. I was telling Faunia that he took ten years at least out of that piano.”

“I was thinking along those lines myself.”

“This is Faunia Farley,” he said to me, and to her, “This is Nathan Zuckerman. You two met out at the farm.”

Closer to my height than to his. Lean and austere. Little, if anything, to be learned from the eyes. Decidedly uneloquent face. Sensuality? Nil. Nowhere to be seen. Outside the milking parlor, everything alluring shut down. She had managed to make herself so that she wasn't even here to be seen. The skill of an animal, whether predator or prey.

She wore faded jeans and a pair of moccasins — as did Coleman — and, with the sleeves rolled up, an old button-down tattersall shirt that I recognized as one of his.

“I've missed you,” I said to him. “Maybe I can take you two to dinner some night.”

“Good idea. Yes. Let's do that.”

Faunia was no longer paying attention. She was looking off into the tops of the trees. They were swaying in the wind, but she was watching them as though they were speaking. I realized then that she was quite lacking in something, and I didn't mean the capacity to attend to small talk. What I meant I would have named if I could. It wasn't intelligence. It wasn't poise. It wasn't decorum or decency — she could pull off that ploy easily enough. It wasn't depth — shallowness wasn't the problem. It wasn't inwardness — one saw that inwardly she was dealing with plenty. It wasn't sanity — she was sane and, in a slightly sheepish way, haughty-seeming as well, superior through the authority of her suffering. Yet a piece of her was decidedly not there.

I noticed a ring on the middle finger of her right hand. The stone was milky white. An opal. I was sure that he had given it to her.

By contrast to Faunia, Coleman was very much of a piece, or appeared so. Glibly so. I knew he had no intention of taking Faunia out to dinner with me or anyone else.

“The Madamaska Inn,” I said. “Eat outside. How about it?”

Never had I seen Coleman any more courtly than when he said to me, lying, “The inn — right. We must. We will. But let us take you. Nathan, let's speak,” he said, suddenly in a rush and grabbing at Faunia's hand. Motioning with his head toward the Music Shed, he said, “I want Faunia to hear the Rachmaninoff.” And they were gone, the lovers, “fled away,” as Keats wrote, “into the storm.”

In barely a couple of minutes so much had happened, or seemed to have happened — for nothing of any importance had actually occurred — that instead of returning to my seat, I began to wander about, like a sleepwalker at first, aimlessly heading across the lawn dotted with picnickers and halfway around the Music Shed, then doubling back to where the view of the Berkshires at the height of summer is about as good as views get east of the Rockies. I could hear in the distance the Rachmaninoff dances coming from the shed, but otherwise I might have been off on my own, deep in the fold of those green hills. I sat on the grass, astonished, unable to account for what I was thinking: he has a secret. This man constructed along the most convincing, believable emotional lines, this force with a history as a force, this benignly wily, smoothly charming, seeming totality of a manly man nonetheless has a gigantic secret. How do I reach this conclusion? Why a secret? Because it is there when he's with her. And when he's not with her it's there too — it's the secret that's his magnetism. It's something not there that beguiles, and it's what's been drawing me all along, the enigmatic it that he holds apart as his and no one else's. He's set himself up like the moon to be only half visible. And I cannot make him fully visible. There is a blank. That's all I can say. They are, together, a pair of blanks. There's a blank in her and, despite his air of being someone firmly established, if need be an obstinate and purposeful opponent — the angry faculty giant who quit rather than take their humiliating crap — somewhere there's a blank in him too, a blotting out, an excision, though of what I can't begin to guess ... can't even know, really, if I am making sense with this hunch or fancifully registering my ignorance of another human being.

Only some three months later, when I learned the secret and began this book — the book he had asked me to write in the first place, but written not necessarily as he wanted it — did I understand the underpinning of the pact between them: he had told her his whole story. Faunia alone knew how Coleman Silk had come about being himself. How do I know she knew? I don't. I couldn't know that either. I can't know. Now that they're dead, nobody can know. For better or worse, I can only do what everyone does who thinks that they know. I imagine. I am forced to imagine. It happens to be what I do for a living. It is my job. It's now all I do.

After Les got out of the VA hospital and hooked up with his support group so as to stay off the booze and not go haywire, the long-range goal set for him by Louie Borrero was for Les to make a pilgrimage to the Wall — if not to the real Wall, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, then to the Moving Wall when it arrived in Pittsfield in November. Washington, D.C., was a city Les had sworn he would never set foot in because of his hatred of the government and, since '92, because of his contempt for that draft dodger sleeping in the White House. To get him to travel all the way down to Washington from Massachusetts was probably asking too much anyway: for someone still fresh from the hospital, there would be too much emotion stretched over too many hours of coming and going on the bus.

The way to prepare Les for the Moving Wall was the same way Louie prepared everybody: start him off in a Chinese restaurant, get Les to go along with another four or five guys for a Chinese dinner, arrange as many trips as it took — two, three, seven, twelve, fifteen if need be — until he was able to last out one complete dinner, to eat all the courses, from soup to dessert, without sweating through his shirt, without trembling so bad he couldn't hold still enough to spoon his soup, without running outside every five minutes to breathe, without ending up vomiting in the bathroom and hiding inside the locked stall, without, of course, losing it completely and going ballistic with the Chinese waiter.

Louie Borrero had his hundred percent service connection, he'd been off drugs and on his meds now for twelve years, and helping veterans, he said, was how he got his therapy. Thirty-odd years on, there were a lot of Vietnam veterans still out there hurting, and so he spent just about all day every day driving around the state in his van, heading up support groups for veterans and their families, finding them doctors, getting them to AA meetings, listening to all sorts of troubles, domestic, psychiatric, financial, advising on VA problems, and trying to get the guys down to Washington to the Wall.

The Wall was Louie's baby. He organized everything: chartered the buses, arranged for the food, with his gift for gentle camaraderie took personal care of the guys terrified they were going to cry too hard or feel too sick or have a heart attack and die. Beforehand they all backed off by saying more or less the same thing: “No way. I can't go to the Wall. I can't go down there and see so-and-so's name. No way. No how. Can't do it.” Les, for one, had told Louie, “I heard about your trip that last time. I heard all about how bad it went. Twenty-five dollars a head for this charter bus. Supposed to include lunch, and the guys all say the lunch was shit — wasn't worth two bucks. And that New York guy didn't want to wait around, the driver. Right, Lou? Wanted to get back early to do a run to Atlantic City? Atlantic City! Fuck that shit, man. Rushin' everything and everybody and then lookin' for a big tip at the end? Not me, Lou. No fuckin' way. If I had to see a couple of guys in tiger suits falling into each other's arms and sobbin', I'd puke.”

But Louie knew what a visit could mean. “Les, it's nineteen hundred and ninety-eight. It's the end of the twentieth century, Lester. It's time you started to face this thing. You can't do it all at once, I know that, and nobody is going to ask you to. But it's time to work your program, buddy. The time has come. We're not gonna start with the Wall. We're gonna start slow. We're gonna start off with a Chinese restaurant.”

But for Les that wasn't starting slow; for Les, just going for the take-out down in Athena, he'd had to wait in the truck while Faunia picked up the food. If he went inside, he'd want to kill the gooks as soon as he saw them. “But they're Chinese,” Faunia told him, “not Vietnamese.” “Asshole! I don't care what the fuck they are! They count as gooks! A gook is a gook!”

As if he hadn't slept badly enough for the last twenty-six years, the week before the visit to the Chinese restaurant he didn't sleep at all. He must have telephoned Louie fifty times telling him he couldn't go, and easily half the calls were placed after 3 A.M. But Louie listened no matter what the hour, let him say everything on his mind, even agreed with him, patiently muttered “Uh-huh ... uh-huh ... uh-huh” right on through, but in the end he always shut him down the same way: “You're going to sit there, Les, as best you can. That's all you have to do. Whatever gets going in you, if it's sadness, if it's anger, whatever it is — the hatred, the rage — we're all going to be there with you, and you're going to try to sit there without running or doing anything.” “But the waiter,” Les would say, “how am I going to deal with the fucking waiter? I can't, Lou — I'll fuckin' lose it!” “I'll deal with the waiter. All you have to do is sit.” To whatever objection Les raised, including the danger that he might kill the waiter, Louie replied that all he'd have to do was sit. As if that was all it took — sitting — to stop a man from killing his worst enemy.

They were five in Louie's van when they went up to Blackwell one evening barely two weeks after Less release from the hospital. There was the mother-father-brother-leader, Louie, a bald guy, clean-shaven, neatly dressed, wearing freshly pressed clothes and his black Vietnam Vet cap and carrying his cane, and, what with his short stature, sloping shoulders, and high paunch, looking a little like a penguin because of the stiff way he walked on his bad legs. Then there were the big guys who never said much: Chet, the thrice-divorced housepainter who'd been a marine — three different wives scared out of their wits by this brute-sized, opaque, pony-tailed lug without any desire ever to speak — and Bobcat, an ex-rifleman who'd lost a foot to a land mine and worked for Midas Muffler. Last, there was an undernourished oddball, a skinny, twitchy asthmatic missing most of his molars, who called himself Swiff, having legally changed his name after his discharge, as though his no longer being Joe Brown or Bill Green or whoever he was when he was drafted would cause him, back home, to leap out of bed every morning with joy. Since Vietnam, Swift's health had been close to destroyed by every variety of skin and respiratory and neurological ailment, and now he was being eaten away by an antagonism toward the Gulf War vets that exceeded even Les's disdain. All the way up to Blackwell, with Les already beginning to shake and feel queasy, Swiff more than made up for the silence of the big guys. That wheezing voice of his would not stop. “Their biggest problem is they can't go to the beach? They get upset at the beach when they see the sand? Shit. Weekend warriors and all of a sudden they have to see some real action. That's why they're pissed off — all in the reserves, never thought they were going to be called up, and then they get called up. And they didn't do dick. They don't know what war is. Call that a war? Four-day ground war? How many gooks did they kill? They're all upset they didn't take out Saddam Hussein. They got one enemy — Saddam Hussein. Gimme a break. There's nothin' wrong with these guys. They just want money without puttin' in the hard time. A rash. You know how many rashes I got from Agent Orange? I'm not goin' to live to see sixty, and these guys are worryin' about a rash!”

The Chinese restaurant sat up at the north edge of Blackwell, on the highway just beyond the boarded-up paper mill and backing onto the river. The concrete-block building was low and long and pink, with a plate-glass window at the front, and half of it was painted to look like brickwork — pink brickwork. Years ago it had been a bowling alley. In the big window, the erratically flickering letters of a neon sign meant to look Chinese spelled out “The Harmony Palace.”

For Les, the sight of that sign was enough to erase the slightest glimmer of hope. He couldn't do it. He'd never make it. He'd lose it completely.

The monotonousness of repeating those words — and yet the force it took for him to surmount the terror. The river of blood he had to wade through to make it by the smiling gook at the door and take his seat at the table. And the horror — a deranging horror against which there was no protection — of the smiling gook handing him a menu. The outright grotesquerie of the gook pouring him a glass of water. Offering him water! The very source of all his suffering could have been that water. That's how crazy it made him feel.

“Okay, Les, you're doin' good. Doin' real good,” said Louie. “Just have to take this one course at a time. Real good so far. Now I want you to deal with your menu. That's all. Just the menu. Just open the menu, open it up, and I want you to focus on the soups. The only thing you have to do now is order your soup. That's all you gotta do. If you can't make up your mind, we'll decide for you. They got mighty good wonton soup here.”

“Fuckin' waiter,” Les said.

“He's not the waiter, Les. His name is Henry. He's the owner. Les, we gotta focus on the soup. Henry, he's here to run his place. To be sure everything is running okay. No more, no less. He doesn't know about all that other stuff. Doesn't know about it, doesn't want to. What about your soup?”

“What are you guys having?” He had said that. Les. In the midst of this desperate drama, he, Les, had managed to stand apart from all the turmoil and ask what they were having to eat.

“Wonton,” they all said.

“All right. Wonton.”

“Okay,” Louie said. “Now we're going to order the other stuff. Do we want to share? Would that be too much, Les, or do you want your own thing? Les, what do you want? You want chicken, vegetables, pork? You want lo mein? With the noodles?”

He tried to see if he could do it again. “What are you guys going to have?”

“Well, Les, some of us are having pork, some of us are having beef—”

“I don't care!” And why he didn't care was because this all was happening on some other planet, this pretending that they were ordering Chinese food. This was not what was really happening.

“Double-sautéed pork? Double-sautéed pork for Les. Okay. All you have to do now, Les, is concentrate and Chet'll pour you some tea. Okay? Okay.”

“Just keep the fucking waiter away.” Because from the corner of his eye he'd spotted some movement.

“Sir, sir—” Louie called to the waiter. “Sir, if you just stay there, we'll come to you with our order. If you wouldn't mind. We'll bring the order to you — you just keep a distance.” But the waiter seemed not to understand, and when he again started toward them, clumsily but quickly Louie rose up on his bad legs. “Sir! We'll bring the order to you. To. You. Right? Right,” Louie said, sitting back down again. “Good,” he said, “good,” nodding at the waiter, who stood stock-still some ten feet away. “That's it, sir. That's perfect.”

The Harmony Palace was a dark place with fake plants scattered along the walls and maybe as many as fifty tables spaced in rows down the length of the long dining room. Only a few of them were occupied, and all of those far enough away so that none of the other customers seemed to have noticed the brief disturbance up at the end where the five men were eating. As a precaution, Louie always made certain, coming in, to get Henry to place his party at a table apart from everyone else. He and Henry had been through this before.

“Okay, Les, we got it under control. You can let go of the menu now. Les, let go of the menu. First with your right hand. Now your left hand. There. Chet'll fold it up for you.”

The big guys, Chet and Bobcat, had been seated to either side of Les. They were assigned by Louie to be the evening's MPs and knew what to do if Les made a wrong move. Swiff sat at the other side of the round table, next to Louie, who directly faced Les, and now, in the helpful tones a father might use with a son he was teaching to ride a bike, Swiff said to Les, “I remember the first time I came here. I thought I'd never make it through. You're doin' real good. My first time, I couldn't even read the menu. The letters, they all were swimmin' at me. I thought I was goin' to bust through the window. Two guys, they had to take me out 'cause I couldn't sit still. You're doin' a good job, Les.” If Les had been able to notice anything other than how much his hands were now trembling, he would have realized that he'd never before seen Swiff not twitching. Swiff neither twitching nor bitching. That was why Louie had brought him along — because helping somebody through the Chinese meal seemed to be the thing that Swift did best in this world. Here at The Harmony Palace, as nowhere else, Swiff seemed for a while to remember what was what. Here one had only the faintest sense of him as someone crawling through life on his hands and knees. Here, made manifest in this embittered, ailing remnant of a man was a tiny, tattered piece of what had once been courage. “You're doin' a good job, Les. You're doin' all right. You just have to have a little tea,” Swift suggested. “Let Chet pour some tea.”

“Breathe,” Louie said. “That's it. Breathe, Les. If you can't make it after the soup, we'll go. But you have to make it through the first course. If you can't make it through the double-sautéed pork, that's okay. But you have to make it through the soup. Let's make a code word if you have to get out. A code word that you can give me when there's just no two ways about it. How about 'tea leaf for the code word? That's all you have to say and we're out of here. Tea leaf. If you need it, there it is. But only if you need it.”

The waiter was poised at a little distance holding the tray with their five bowls of soup. Chet and Bobcat hopped right up and got the soup and brought it to the table.

Now Les just wants to say “tea leaf” and get the fuck out. Why doesn't he? I gotta get out of here. I gotta get out of here.

By repeating to himself “I gotta get out of here,” he is able to put himself into a trance and, even without any appetite, to begin to eat his soup. To take down a little of the broth. “I gotta get out of here,” and this blocks out the waiter and it blocks out the owner but it does not block out the two women at a wall-side table who are opening pea pods and dropping the shelled peas into a cooking pot. Thirty feet away, and Les can pick up the scent of whatever's the brand of cheap toilet water that they've sprayed behind their four gook ears — it's as pungent to him as the smell of raw earth. With the same phenomenal lifesaving powers that enabled him to detect the unwashed odor of a soundless sniper in the black thickness of a Vietnam jungle, he smells the women and begins to lose it. No one told him there were going to be women here doing that. How long are they going to be doing that? Two young women. Gooks. Why are they sitting there doing that? “I gotta get out of here.” But he cannot move because he cannot divert his attention from the women.

“Why are those women doing that?” Les asks Louie. “Why don't they stop doing that? Do they have to keep doing that? Are they gonna keep doing that all night long? Are they gonna keep doing that over and over? Is there a reason? Can somebody tell me the reason? Make them stop doing that.”

“Cool it,” Louie says.

“I am cool. I just wanna know — are they gonna keep doing that? Can anyone stop them? Is there nobody who can think of a way?” His voice rising now, and no easier to stop that happening than to stop those women.

“Les, we're in a restaurant. In a restaurant they prepare beans.”

“Peas,” Les says. “Those are peas!”

“Les, you got your soup and you got your next course coming. The next course: that's the whole world right now. That's everything. That's it. All you got to do next is eat some double-sautéed pork, and that's it.”

“I had enough soup.”

“Yeah?” Bobcat says. “You're not going to eat that? You done with that?”

Besieged on all sides by the disaster to come — how long can the agony be transformed into eating?—Les manages, beneath his breath, to say “Take it.”

And that's when the waiter makes his move — purportedly going for the empty plates.

“No!” roars Les, and Louie is on his feet again, and now, looking like the lion tamer in the circus — and with Les taut and ready for the waiter to attack — Louie points the waiter back with his cane.

“You stay there,” Louie says to the waiter. “Stay there. We bring the empty plates to you. You don't come to us.”

The women shelling the peas have stopped, and without Les's even getting up and going over and showing them how to stop.

And Henry is in on it now, that's clear. This rangy, thin, smiling Henry, a young guy in jeans and a loud shirt and running shoes who poured the water and is the owner, is staring at Les from the door. Smiling but staring. That man is a menace. He is blocking the exit. Henry has got to go.

“Everything's okay,” Louie calls to Henry. “Very good food. Wonderful food. That's why we come back.” To the waiter he then says, “Just follow my lead,” and then he lowers his cane and sits back down. Chet and Bobcat gather up the empty plates and go over and pile them on the waiter's tray.

“Anybody else?” Louie asks. “Anybody else got a story about his first time?”

“Uh-uh,” says Chet while Bobcat sets himself the pleasant task of polishing off Less soup.

This time, as soon as the waiter comes out of the kitchen carrying the rest of their order, Chet and Bobcat get right up and go over to the dumb fucking gook before he can even begin to forget and start approaching the table again.

And now it's out there. The food. The agony that is the food. Shrimp beef lo mein. Moo goo gai pan. Beef with peppers. Double-sautéed pork. Ribs. Rice. The agony of the rice. The agony of the steam. The agony of the smells. Everything out there is supposed to save him from death. Link him backward to Les the boy. That is the recurring dream: the unbroken boy on the farm.

“Looks good!”

“Tastes better!”

“You want Chet to put some on your plate, or you want to take for yourself, Les?”

“Not hungry.”

“That's all right,” Louie says, as Chet begins piling things on Less plate for him. “You don't have to be hungry. That's not the deal.”

“This almost over?” Les says. “I gotta get out of here. I'm not kiddin', guys. I really gotta get out of here. Had enough. Can't take it. I feel like I'm gonna lose control. I've had enough. You said I could leave. I gotta get out.”

“I don't hear the code word, Les,” Louie says, “so we're going to keep going.”

Now the shakes have set in big-time. He cannot deal with the rice. It falls off the fork, he's shaking so bad.

And, Christ almighty, here comes a waiter with the water. Circling around and coming at Lester from the back, from out of fucking nowhere, another waiter. They are all at once but a split second away from Les yelling “Yahhh!” and going for the waiter's throat, and the water pitcher exploding at his feet.

“Stop!” cries Louie. “Back off!”

The women shelling the peas start screaming.

“He does not need any water!” Shouting, standing on his feet and shouting, with his cane raised over his head, Louie looks to the women like the one who is nuts. But they don't know what nuts is if they think that Louie's nuts. They have no idea.

At other tables some people are standing, and Henry rushes over and talks to them quietly until they are all sitting down. He has explained that those are Vietnam veterans, and whenever they come around, he takes it as a patriotic duty to be hospitable to them and to put up for an hour or two with their problems.

There is absolute quiet in the restaurant from then on. Les picks at a little food and the others eat up everything until the only food left on the table is the stuff still on Les's plate.

“You done with that?” Bobcat asks him. “You not gonna eat that?”

This time he can't even manage “take it.” Say just those two words, and everybody buried beneath that restaurant floor will come rising up to seek revenge. Say one word, and if you weren't there the first time to see what it looked like, you sure as shit will see it now.

Here come the fortune cookies. Usually they love that. Read the fortunes, laugh, drink the tea — who doesn't love that? But Les shouts “Tea leaf!” and takes off, and Louie says to Swift, “Go out with him. Get him, Swiftie. Keep an eye on him. Don't let him out of your sight. We're gonna pay up.”

On the way home there is silence: from Bobcat silence because he is laden with food; from Chet silence because he long ago learned through the repetitious punishment of too many brawls that for a man as fucked up as himself, silence is the only way to seem friendly; and from Swift silence too, a bitter and disgruntled silence, because once the flickering neon lights are behind them, so is the memory of himself that he seems to have had at The Harmony Palace. Swiff is now busy stoking the pain.

Les is silent because he is sleeping. After the ten days of solid insomnia that led up to this trip, he is finally out.

It's when everybody else has been dropped off and Les and Louie are alone in the van that Louie hears him coming round and says, “Les? Les? You did good, Lester. I saw you sweatin', I thought, Umm-umm-umm, no way he's gonna make it. You should have seen the color you were. I couldn't believe it. I thought the waiter was finished.” Louie, who spent his first nights home handcuffed to a radiator in his sister's garage to assure himself he would not kill the brother-in-law who'd kindly taken him in when he was back from the jungle only forty-eight hours, whose waking hours are so organized around all the others' needs that no demonic urge can possibly squeeze back in, who, over a dozen years of being sober and clean, of working the Twelve Steps and religiously taking his meds — for the anxiety his Klonopin, for the depression his Zoloft, for the sizzling ankles and the gnawing knees and the relentlessly aching hips his Salsalate, an anti-inflammatory that half the time does little other than to give him a burning stomach, gas, and the shits — has managed to clear away enough debris to be able to talk civilly again to others and to feel, if not at home, then less crazily aggrieved at having to move inefficiently about for the rest of his life on those pain-ridden legs, at having to try to stand tall on a foundation of sand — happy-go-lucky Louie laughs. “I thought he didn't have a chance. But, man,” says Louie, “you didn't just make it past the soup, you made it to the fucking fortune cookie. You know how many times it took me to make it to the fortune cookie? Four. Four times, Les. The first time I headed straight for the bathroom and it took them fifteen minutes to get me out. You know what I'm gonna tell my wife? I'm goin' to tell her, ‘Les, did okay. Les did all right.’”

But when it came time to return, Les refused. “Isn't it enough that I sat there?” “I want you to eat,” Louie said. “I want you to eat the meal. Walk the walk, talk the talk, eat the meal. We got a new goal, Les.” “I don't want any more of your goals. I made it through. I didn't kill anyone. Isn't that enough?” But a week later back they drove to The Harmony Palace, same cast of characters, same glass of water, same menus, even the same cheap toilet water scent emitted by the sprayed Asian flesh of the restaurant women and wafting its sweet galvanic way to Les, the telltale scent by which he can track his prey. The second time he eats, the third time he eats and orders — though they still won't let the waiter near the table — and the fourth time they let the waiter serve them, and Les eats like a crazy man, eats till he nearly bursts, eats as if he hasn't seen food in a year.

Outside The Harmony Palace, high fives all around. Even Chet is joyous. Chet speaks, Chet shouts, “Semper fi!”

“Next time,” says Les, while they're driving home and the feeling is heady of being raised from the grave, “next time, Louie, you're gonna go too far. Next time you're gonna want me to like it!”

But what is next is facing the Wall. He has to go look at Kenny's name. And this he can't do. It was enough once to look up Kenny's name in the book they've got at the VA. After, he was sick for a week. That was all he could think about. That's all he can think about anyway. Kenny there beside him without his head. Day and night he thinks, Why Kenny, why Chip, why Buddy, why them and not me? Sometimes he thinks that they're the lucky ones. It's over for them. No, no way, no how, is he going to the Wall. That Wall. Absolutely not. Can't do it. Won't do it. That's it.

Dance for me.

They've been together for about six months, and so one night he says, “Come on, dance for me,” and in the bedroom he puts on a CD, the Artie Shaw arrangement of “The Man I Love,” with Roy Eldridge playing trumpet. Dance for me, he says, loosening the arms that are tight around her and pointing toward the floor at the foot of the bed. And so, undismayed, she gets up from where she's been smelling that smell, the smell that is Coleman unclothed, that smell of sun-baked skin — gets up from where she's been lying deeply nestled, her face cushioned in his bare side, her teeth, her tongue glazed with his come, her hand, below his belly, splayed across the crinkled, buttery tangle of that coiled hair, and, with him keeping an eagle eye on her — his green gaze unwavering through the dark fringe of his long lashes, not at all like a depleted old man ready to faint but like somebody pressed up against a window-pane — she does it, not coquettishly, not like Steena did in 1948, not because she's a sweet girl, a sweet young girl dancing for the pleasure of giving him the pleasure, a sweet young girl who doesn't know much about what she's doing saying to herself, “I can give him that — he wants that, and I can do it, and so here it is.” No, not quite the naive and innocent scene of the bud becoming the flower or the filly becoming the mare. Faunia can do it, all right, but without the budding maturity is how she does it, without the youthful, misty idealization of herself and him and everyone living and dead. He says, “Come on, dance for me,” and, with her easy laugh, she says, “Why not? I'm generous that way,” and she starts moving, smoothing her skin as though it's a rumpled dress, seeing to it that everything is where it should be, taut, bony, or rounded as it should be, a whiff of herself, the evocative vegetal smell coming familiarly off her fingers as she slides them up from her neck and across her warm ears and slowly from there over her cheeks to her lips, and her hair, her graying yellow hair that is damp and straggly from exertion, she plays with like seaweed, pretends to herself that it's seaweed, that it's always been seaweed, a great trickling sweep of seaweed saturated with brine, and what's it cost her, anyway? What's the big deal? Plunge in. Pour forth. If this is what he wants, abduct the man, ensnare him. Wouldn't be the first one.

She's aware when it starts happening: that thing, that connection. She moves, from the floor that is now her stage at the foot of the bed she moves, alluringly tousled and a little greasy from the hours before, smeared and anointed from the preceding performance, fair-haired, white-skinned where she isn't tanned from the farm, scarred in half a dozen places, one kneecap abraded like a child's from when she slipped in the barn, very fine threadlike cuts half healed on both her arms and legs from the pasture fencing, her hands roughened, reddened, sore from the fiberglass splinters picked up while rotating the fence, from pulling out and putting in those stakes every week, a petal-shaped, rouge-colored bruise either from the milking parlor or from him precisely at the joining of her throat and torso, another bruise, blue-black at the turn of her unmuscled thigh, spots where she's been bitten and stung, a hair of his, an ampersand of his hair like a dainty grayish mole adhering to her cheek, her mouth open just wide enough to reveal the curve of her teeth, and in no hurry at all to go anywhere because it's the getting there that's the fun. She moves, and now he's seeing her, seeing this elongated body rhythmically moving, this slender body that is so much stronger than it looks and surprisingly so heavy-breasted dipping, dipping, dipping, on the long, straight handles of her legs stooping toward him like a dipper filled to the limit with his liquid. Unresisting, he's stretched across the wavelets of bedsheets, a sinuous swirl of pillows balled together to support his head, his head resting level with the span of her hips, with her belly, with her moving belly, and he's seeing her, every particle, he's seeing her and she knows that he's seeing her. They're connected. She knows he wants her to claim something. He wants me to stand here and move, she thinks, and to claim what is mine. Which is? Him. Him. He's offering me him. Okey-dokey, this is high-voltage stuff but here we go. And so, giving him her downturned look with the subtlety in it, she moves, she moves, and the formal transfer of power begins. And it's very nice for her, moving like this to that music and the power passing over, knowing that at her slightest command, with the flick of the finger that summons a waiter, he would crawl out of that bed to lick her feet. So soon in the dance, and already she could peel him and eat him like a piece of fruit. It's not all about being beat up and being the janitor and I'm at the college cleaning up other people's shit and I'm at the post office cleaning up other people's shit, and there's a terrible toughness that comes with that, with cleaning up everybody else's waste; if you want to know the truth, it sucks, and don't tell me there aren't better jobs, but I've got it, it's what I do, three jobs, because this car's got about six days left, I've got to buy a cheap car that runs, so three jobs is what I'm doing, and not for the first time, and by the way, the dairy farm is a lot of fucking work, to you it sounds great and to you it looks great, Faunia and the cows, but coming on top of everything else it breaks my fucking hump ... But now I'm naked in a room with a man, seeing him lying there with his dick and that navy tattoo, and it's calm and he's calm, even getting a charge out of seeing me dance he's so very calm, and he's just had the shit kicked out of him, too. He's lost his wife, he's lost his job, publicly humiliated as a racist professor, and what's a racist professor? It's not that you've just become one. The story is you've been discovered, so it's been your whole life. It's not just that you did one thing wrong once. If you're a racist, then you've always been a racist. Suddenly it's your entire life you've been a racist. That's the stigma and it's not even true, and yet now he's calm. I can do that for him. I can make him calm like this, he can make me calm like this. All I have to do is just keep moving. He says dance for me and I think, Why not? Why not, except that it's going to make him think that I'm going to go along and pretend with him that this is something else. He's going to pretend that the world is ours, and I'm going to let him, and then I'm going to do it too. Still, why not? I can dance ... but he has to remember. This is only what it is, even if I'm wearing nothing but the opal ring, nothing on me but the ring he gave me. This is standing in front of your lover naked with the lights on and moving. Okay, you're a man, and you're not in your prime, and you've got a life and I'm not part of it, but I know what's here. You come to me as a man. So I come to you. That's a lot. But that's all it is. I'm dancing in front of you naked with the lights on, and you're naked too, and all the other stuff doesn't matter. It's the simplest thing we've ever done — it's it. Don't fuck it up by thinking it's more than this. You don't, and I won't. It doesn't have to be more than this. You know what? I see you, Coleman.

Then she says it aloud. “You know what? I see you.”

“Do you?” he says. “Then now the hell begins.”

“You think — if you ever want to know — is there a God? You want to know why am I in this world? What is it about? It's about this. It's about, You're here, and I'll do it for you. It's about not thinking you're someone else somewhere else. You're a woman and you're in bed with your husband, and you're not fucking for fucking, you're not fucking to come, you're fucking because you're in bed with your husband and it's the right thing to do. You're a man and you're with your wife and you're fucking her, but you're thinking you want to be fucking the post office janitor. Okay — you know what? You're with the janitor.”

He says softly, with a laugh, “And that proves the existence of God.”

“If that doesn't, nothing does.”

“Keep dancing,” he says.

“When you're dead,” she asks, “what does it matter if you didn't marry the right person?”

“It doesn't matter. It doesn't even matter when you're alive. Keep dancing.”

“What is it, Coleman? What does matter?”

“This,” he said.

“That's my boy,” she replies. “Now you're learning.”

“Is that what this is — you teaching me?”

“It's about time somebody did. Yes, I'm teaching you. But don't look at me now like I'm good for something other than this. Something more than this. Don't do that. Stay here with me. Don't go. Hold on to this. Don't think about anything else. Stay here with me. I'll do whatever you want. How many times have you had a woman really tell you that and mean it? I will do anything you want. Don't lose it. Don't take it somewhere else, Coleman. This is all we're here to do. Don't think it's about tomorrow. Close all the doors, before and after. All the social ways of thinking, shut 'em down. Everything the wonderful society is asking? The way we're set up socially? ‘I should, I should, I should’? Fuck all that. What you're supposed to be, what you're supposed to do, all that, it just kills everything. I can keep dancing, if that's the deal. The secret little moment — if that's the whole deal. That slice you get. That slice out of time. It's no more than that, and I hope you know it.”

“Keep dancing.”

“This stuff is the important stuff,” she says. “If I abandoned thinking that...”

“What? Thinking what?”

“I was a whoring little cunt from early on.”

“Were you?”

“He always told himself it wasn't him, it was me.”

“The stepfather.”

“Yes. That's what he told himself. Maybe he was even right. But I had no choice at eight and nine and ten. It was the brutality that was wrong.”

“What was it like when you were ten?”

“It was like asking me to pick up the whole house and carry it on my back.”

“What was it like when the door opened at night and he came into your room?”

“It's like when you're a child in a war. You ever see those pictures in the paper of kids after they bomb their cities? It's like that. It's as big as a bomb. But no matter how many times I got blown over, I was still standing. That was my downfall: my still standing up. Then I was twelve and thirteen and starting to get tits. I was starting to bleed. Suddenly I was just a body that surrounded my pussy ... But stick to the dancing. All doors closed, before and after, Coleman. I see you, Coleman. You're not closing the doors. You still have the fantasies of love. You know something? I really need a guy older than you. Who's had all the love-shit kicked out of him totally. You're too young for me, Coleman. Look at you. You're just a little boy falling in love with your piano teacher. You're falling for me, Coleman, and you're much too young for the likes of me. I need a much older man. I think I need a man at least a hundred. Do you have a friend in a wheelchair you can introduce me to? Wheelchairs are okay — I can dance and push. Maybe you have an older brother. Look at you, Coleman. Looking at me with those schoolboy eyes. Please, please, call your older friend. I'll keep dancing, just get him on the phone. I want to talk to him.”

And she knows, while she is saying this, that it's this and the dancing that are making him fall in love with her. And it's so easy. I've attracted a lot of men, a lot of pricks, the pricks find me and they come to me, not just any man with a prick, not the ones who don't understand, which is about ninety percent of them, but men, young boys, the ones with the real male thing, the ones like Smoky who really understand it. You can beat yourself up over the things you don't have, but that I've got, even fully dressed, and some guys know it — they know what it is, and that's why they find me, and that's why they come, but this, this, this is taking candy from a baby. Sure — he remembers. How could he not? Once you've tasted it, you remember. My, my. After two hundred and sixty blow jobs and four hundred regular fucks and a hundred and six asshole fucks, the flirtation begins. But that's the way it goes. How many times has anyone in the world ever loved before they fucked? How many times have I loved after I fucked? Or is this it, the groundbreaker?

“Do you want to know what I feel like?” she asks him.

“Yes.”

“I feel so good.”

“So,” he asks, “who can get out of this alive?”

“I'm with you there, mister. You're right, Coleman. This is going to lead to disaster. Into this at seventy-one? Turned around by this at seventy-one? Uh-uh. We'd better go back to the raw thing.”

“Keep dancing,” he says, and he hits a button on the bedside Sony and “The Man I Love” track starts up again.

“No. No. I beg you. There's my career as a janitor to think about.”

“Don't stop.”

“'Don't stop.'” she repeats. “I've heard those words somewhere before.” In fact, rarely has she ever heard the word “stop” without “don't.” Not from a man. Not much from herself either. “I've always thought 'don't stop' was one word,” she says.

“It is. Keep dancing.”

“Then don't lose it,” she says. “A man and a woman in a room. Naked. We've got all we need. We don't need love. Don't diminish yourself — don't reveal yourself as a sentimental sap. You're dying to do it, but don't. Let's not lose this. Imagine, Coleman, imagine sustaining this.”

He's never seen me dance like this, he's never heard me talk like this. Been so long since I talked like this, I'd have thought I'd forgotten how. So very long in hiding. Nobody's heard me talk like this. The hawks and the crows sometimes in the woods, but otherwise no one. This is not the usual way I entertain men. This is the most reckless I have ever been. Imagine.

“Imagine,” she says, “showing up every day — and this. The woman who doesn't want to own everything. The woman who doesn't want to own anything.”

But never had she wanted to own anything more.

“Most women want to own everything,” she says. “They want to own your mail. They want to own your future. They want to own your fantasies. ‘How dare you want to fuck anybody other than me. I should be your fantasy. Why are you watching porn when you have me at home?’ They want to own who you are, Coleman. But the pleasure isn't owning the person. The pleasure is this. Having another contender in the room with you. Oh, I see you, Coleman. I could give you away my whole life and still have you. Just by dancing. Isn't that true? Am I mistaken? Do you like this, Coleman?”

“What luck,” he says, watching, watching. “What incredible luck. Life owed me this.”

“Did it now?”

“There's no one like you. Helen of Troy.”

“Helen of Nowhere. Helen of Nothing.”

“Keep dancing.”

“I see you, Coleman. I do see you. Do you want to know what I see?”

“Sure.”

“You want to know if I see an old man, don't you? You're afraid I'll see an old man and I'll run. You're afraid that if I see all the differences from a young man, if I see the things that are slack and the things that are gone, you'll lose me. Because you're too old. But you know what I see?”

“What?”

“I see a kid. I see you falling in love the way a kid does. And you mustn't. You mustn't. Know what else I see?”

“Yes.”

“Yes, I see it now — I do see an old man. I see an old man dying.”

“Tell me.”

“You've lost everything.”

“You see that?”

“Yes. Everything except me dancing. You want to know what I see?”

“What?”

“You didn't deserve that hand, Coleman. That's what I see. I see that you're furious. And that's the way it's going to end. As a furious old man. And it shouldn't have been. That's what I see: your fury. I see the anger and the shame. I see that you understand as an old man what time is. You don't understand that till near the end. But now you do. And it's frightening. Because you can't do it again. You can't be twenty again. It's not going to come back. And this is how it ended. And what's worse even than the dying, what's worse even than the being dead, are the fucking bastards who did this to you. Took it all away from you. I see that in you, Coleman. I see it because it's something I know about. The fucking bastards who changed everything within the blink of an eye. Took your life and threw it away. Took your life, and they decided they were going to throw it away. You've come to the right dancing girl. They decide what is garbage, and they decided you're garbage. Humiliated and humbled and destroyed a man over an issue everyone knew was bullshit. A pissy little word that meant nothing to them, absolutely nothing at all. And that's infuriating.”

“I didn't realize you were paying attention.”

She laughs the easy laugh. And dances. Without the idealism, without the idealization, without all the utopianism of the sweet young thing, despite everything she knows reality to be, despite the irreversible futility that is her life, despite all the chaos and callousness, she dances! And speaks as she's never spoken to a man before. Women who fuck like she does aren't supposed to talk like this — at least that's what the men who don't fuck women like her like to think. That's what the women who don't fuck like her like to think. That's what everyone likes to think — stupid Faunia. Well, let 'em. My pleasure. “Yes, stupid Faunia has been paying attention,” she says. “How else does stupid Faunia get through? Being stupid Faunia — that's my achievement, Coleman, that's me at my most sensible best. Turns out, Coleman, I've been watching you dance. How do I know this? Because you're with me. Why else would you be with me, if you weren't so fucking enraged? And why would I be with you, if I wasn't so fucking enraged? That's what makes for the great fucking, Coleman. The rage that levels everything. So don't lose it.”

“Keep dancing.”

“Till I drop?” she asks.

“Till you drop,” he tells her. “Till the last gasp.”

“Whatever you want.”

“Where did I find you, Voluptas?” he says. “How did I find you? Who are you?” he asks, tapping the button that again starts up “The Man I Love.”

“I am whatever you want.”

All Coleman was doing was reading her something from the Sunday paper about the president and Monica Lewinsky, when Faunia got up and shouted, “Can't you avoid the fucking seminar? Enough of the seminar! I can't learn! I don't learn! I don't want to learn! Stop fucking teaching me — it won't work!” And, in the midst of their breakfast, she ran.

The mistake was to stay there. She didn't go home, and now she hates him. What does she hate most? That he really thinks his suffering is a big deal. He really thinks that what everybody thinks, what everybody says about him at Athena College, is so life-shattering. It's a lot of assholes not liking him — it's not a big deal. And for him this is the most horrible thing that ever happened? Well, it's not a big deal. Two kids suffocating and dying, that's a big deal. Having your stepfather put his fingers up your cunt, that's a big deal. Losing your job as you're about to retire isn't a big deal. That's what she hates about him — the privilegedness of his suffering. He thinks he never had a chance? There's real pain on this earth, and he thinks he didn't have a chance? You know when you don't have a chance? When, after the morning milking, he takes that iron pipe and hits you in the head with it. I don't even see it coming — and he didn't have a chance! Life owes him something!

What it amounts to is that at breakfast she doesn't want to be taught. Poor Monica might not get a good job in New York City? You know what? I don't care. Do you think Monica cares if my back hurts from milking those fucking cows after my day at the college? Sweeping up people's shit at the post office because they can't bother to use the fucking garbage can? Do you think Monica cares about that? She keeps calling the White House, and it must have been just terrible not to have her phone calls returned. And it's over for you? That's terrible too? It never began for me. Over before it began. Try having an iron pipe knock you down. Last night? It happened. It was nice. It was wonderful. I needed it too. But I still have three jobs. It didn't change anything. That's why you take it when it's happening, because it doesn't change a thing. Tell Mommy her husband puts his fingers in you when he comes in at night — it doesn't change a thing. Maybe now Mommy knows and she's going to help you. But nothing changes anything. We had this night of dancing. But it doesn't change anything. He reads to me about these things in Washington — what, what, what does it change? He reads to me about these escapades in Washington, Bill Clinton getting his dick sucked. How's that going to help me when my car craps out? You really think that this is the important stuff in the world? It's not that important. It's not important at all. I had two kids. They're dead. If I don't have the energy this morning to feel bad about Monica and Bill, chalk it up to my two kids, all right? If that's my shortcoming, so be it. I don't have any more left in me for all the great troubles of the world.

The mistake was to stay there. The mistake was to fall under the spell so completely. Even in the wildest thunderstorm, she'd driven home. Even when she was terrified of Farley following behind and forcing her off the road and into the river, she'd driven home. But she stayed. Because of the dancing she stayed, and in the morning she's angry. She's angry at him. It's a great new day, let's see what the paper has to say. After last night he wants to see what the paper has to say? Maybe if they hadn't talked, if they'd just had breakfast and she'd left, staying would have been okay. But to start the seminar. That was just about the worst thing he could have done. What should he have done? Given her something to eat and let her go home. But the dancing did its damage. I stayed. I stupidly stayed. Leaving at night — there is nothing more important for a girl like me. I'm not clear about a lot of things, but this I know: staying the next morning, it means something. The fantasy of Coleman-and-Faunia. It's the beginning of the indulgence of the fantasy of forever, the tritest fantasy in the world. I have a place to go to, don't I? It isn't the nicest place, but it's a place. Go to it! Fuck until all hours, but then go. There was the thunderstorm on Memorial Day, a thunderstorm ripping, pounding, volleying through the hills as though a war had broken out. The surprise attack on the Berkshires. But I got up at three in the morning, got my clothes on, and left. The lightning crackling, the trees splitting, the limbs crashing, the hail raining down like shot on my head, and I left. Whipped by all that wind, I left. The mountain is exploding, and still I left. Just between the house and the car I could have been killed, by a bolt of lightning ignited and killed, but I did not stay—I left. But to lie in bed with him all night? The moon big, the whole earth silent, the moon and moonlight everywhere, and I stayed. Even a blind man could have found his way home on a night like that, but I did not go. And I did not sleep. Couldn't. Awake all night. Didn't want to roll anywhere near the guy. Didn't want to touch this man. Didn't know how, this man whose asshole I've been licking for months. A leper till daybreak at the edge of the bed watching the shadows of his trees creep across his lawn. He said, “You should stay,” but he didn't want me to, and I said, “I think I'll take you up on that,” and I did. You could figure on at least one of us staying tough. But no. The two of us yielding to the worst idea ever. What the hookers told her, the whores' great wisdom: “Men don't pay you to sleep with them. They pay you to go home.”

But even as she knows all she hates, she knows what she likes. His generosity. So rare for her to be anywhere near anyone's generosity. And the strength that comes from being a man who doesn't swing a pipe at my head. If he pressed me, I'd even have to admit to him that I'm smart. Didn't I do as much last night? He listened to me and so I was smart. He listens to me. He's loyal to me. He doesn't reproach me for anything. He doesn't plot against me in any way. And is that a reason to be so fucking mad? He takes me seriously. That is sincere. That's what he meant by giving me the ring. They stripped him and so he's come to me naked. In his most mortal moment. My days have not been carpeted with men like this. He'd help me buy the car if I let him. He'd help me buy everything if I let him. It's painless with this man. Just the rise and fall of his voice, just hearing him, reassures me.

Are these the things you run away from? Is this why you pick a fight like a kid? A total accident that you even met him, your first lucky accident — your last lucky accident — and you flare up and run away like a kid? You really want to invite the end? To go back to what it was before him?

But she ran, ran from the house and pulled her car out of the barn and drove across the mountain to visit the crow at the Audubon Society. Five miles on, she swung off the road onto the narrow dirt entryway that twisted and turned for a quarter of a mile until the gray shingled two-story house cozily appeared between the trees, long ago a human habitat but now the society's local headquarters, sitting at the edge of the woods and the nature trails. She pulled onto the gravel drive, bumping right up to the edge of the log barrier, and parked in front of the birch with the sign nailed to it pointing to the herb garden, hers the only car to be seen. She'd made it. She could as easily have driven off the mountainside.

Wind chimes hanging adjacent to the entrance were tinkling in the breeze, glassily, mysteriously, as though, without words, a religious order were welcoming visitors to stay to meditate as well as to look around — as though something small but touching were being venerated here — but the flag hadn't been hoisted up the flagpole yet, and a sign on the door said the place wasn't open on Sundays until 1 P.M. Nonetheless, when she pushed, the door gave way and she stepped beyond the thin morning shadow of the leafless dogwoods and into the hallway, where large sacks heavy with different mixes of bird feed were stacked on the floor, ready for the winter buyers, and across from the sacks, piled up to the window along the opposite wall, were the boxes containing the various bird feeders. In the gift shop, where they sold the feeders along with nature books and survey maps and audiotapes of bird calls and an assortment of animal-inspired trinkets, there were no lights on, but when she turned in the other direction, into the larger exhibit room, home to the scanty collection of stuffed animals and a small assortment of live specimens — turtles, snakes, a few birds in cages — there was one of the staff, a chubby girl of about eighteen or nineteen, who said, “Hi,” and didn't make a fuss about the place not yet being open. This far out on the mountain, once the autumn leaves were over, visitors were rare enough on the first of November, and she wasn't about to turn away someone who happened to show up at nine-fifteen in the morning, even this woman who wasn't quite dressed for the outdoors in the middle of fall in the Berkshire Hills but seemed to be wearing, above her gray sweatpants, the top of a man's striped pajamas, and on her feet nothing but backless house slippers, those things called mules. Nor had her long blond hair been brushed or combed as yet. But, all in all, she was more disheveled-looking than dissipated, and so the girl, who was feeding mice to a snake in a box at her feet — holding each mouse out to the snake at the end of a pair of tongs until the snake struck and took it and the infinitely slow process of ingestion began — just said, “Hi,” and went back to her Sunday morning duties.

The crow was in the middle cage, an enclosure about the size of a clothes closet, between the cage holding the two saw-whet owls and the cage for the pigeon hawk. There he was. She felt better already.

“Prince. Hey, big guy.” And she clicked at him, her tongue against her palate — click, click, click.

She turned to the girl feeding the snake. She hadn't been around in the past when Faunia came to see the crow, and more than likely she was new. Or relatively new. Faunia herself hadn't been to visit the crow for months now, and not at all since she'd begun seeing Coleman. It was a while now since she'd gone looking for ways to leave the human race. She hadn't been a regular visitor here since after the children died, though back then she sometimes stopped by four or five times a week. “He can come out, can't he? He can come just for a minute.”

“Sure,” the girl said.

“I'd like to have him on my shoulder,” Faunia said, and stooped to undo the hook that held shut the glass door of the cage. “Oh, hello, Prince. Oh, Prince. Look at you.”

When the door was open, the crow jumped from its perch to the top of the door and sat there with its head craning from side to side.

She laughed softly. “What a great expression. He's checking me out,” she called back to the girl. “Look,” she said to the crow, and showed the bird her opal ring, Coleman's gift. The ring he'd given her in the car on that August Saturday morning that they'd driven to Tanglewood. “Look. Come over. Come on over,” she whispered to the bird, presenting her shoulder.

But the crow rejected the invitation and jumped back into the cage and resumed life on the perch.

“Prince is not in the mood,” the girl said.

“Honey?” cooed Faunia. “Come. Come on. It's Faunia. It's your friend. That's a boy. Come on.” But the bird wouldn't move.

“If he knows that you want to get him, he won't come down,” the girl said, and, using the tongs, picked up another mouse from a tray holding a cluster of dead mice and offered it to the snake that had, at long last, drawn into its mouth, millimeter by millimeter, the whole of the last one. “If he knows you're trying to get him, he usually stays out of reach, but if he thinks you're ignoring him, he'll come down.”

They laughed together at the humanish behavior.

“Okay,” said Faunia, “I'll leave him alone for a moment.” She walked over to where the girl sat feeding the snake. “I love crows. They're my favorite bird. And ravens. I used to live in Seeley Falls, so I know all about Prince. I knew him when he was up there hanging around Higginson's store. He used to steal the little girls' barrettes. Goes right for anything shiny, anything colorful. He was famous for that. There used to be clippings about him from the paper. All about him and the people who raised him after the nest was destroyed and how he hung out like a big shot at the store. Pinned up right there,” she said, pointing back to a bulletin board by the entryway to the room. “Where are the clippings?”

“He ripped 'em down.”

Faunia burst out laughing, much louder this time than before. “He ripped them down?”

“With his beak. Tore 'em up.”

“He didn't want anybody to know his background! Ashamed of his own background! Prince!” she called, turning back to face the cage whose door was still wide open. “You're ashamed of your notorious past? Oh, you good boy. You're a good crow.”

Now she took notice of one of the several stuffed animals scattered on mounts around the room. “Is that a bobcat there?”

“Yeah,” the girl said, waiting patiently for the snake to finish flicking its tongue out at the new dead mouse and grab hold of it.

“Is he from around here?”

“I don't know.”

“I've seen them around, up in the hills. Looked just like that one, the one I saw. Probably is him.” And she laughed again. She wasn't drunk — hadn't even got half her coffee down when she'd run from the house, let alone had a drink — but the laugh sounded like the laugh of someone who'd already had a few. She was just feeling good being here with the snake and the crow and the stuffed bobcat, none of them intent on teaching her a thing. None of them going to read to her from the New York Times. None of them going to try to catch her up on the history of the human race over the last three thousand years. She knew all she needed to know about the history of the human race: the ruthless and the defenseless. She didn't need the dates and the names. The ruthless and the defenseless, there's the whole fucking deal. Nobody here was going to try to encourage her to read, because nobody here knew how, with the exception of the girl. That snake certainly didn't know how. It just knew how to eat mice. Slow and easy. Plenty of time.

“What kind of snake is that?”

“A black rat snake.”

“Takes the whole thing down.”

“Yeah.”

“Gets digested in the gut.”

“Yeah.”

“How many will it eat?”

“That's his seventh mouse. He took that one kind of slow even for him. That might be his last.”

“Every day seven?”

“No. Every one or two weeks.”

“And is it let out anywhere or is that life?” she said, pointing to the glass case from which the snake had been lifted into the plastic carton where it was fed.

“That's it. In there.”

“Good deal,” said Faunia, and she turned back to look across the room at the crow, still on its perch inside its cage. “Well, Prince, I'm over here. And you're over there. And I have no interest in you whatsoever. If you don't want to land on my shoulder, I couldn't care less.” She pointed to another of the stuffed animals. “What's the guy over there?”

“That's an osprey.”

She sized it up — a hard look at the sharp claws — and, again with a biggish laugh, said, “Don't mess with the osprey.”

The snake was considering an eighth mouse. “If I could only get my kids to eat seven mice,” Faunia said, “I'd be the happiest mother on earth.”

The girl smiled and said, “Last Sunday, Prince got out and was flying around. All of the birds we have can't fly. Prince is the only one that can fly. He's pretty fast.”

“Oh, I know that,” Faunia said.

“I was dumping some water and he made a beeline for the door and went out into the trees. Within minutes there were three or four crows that came. Surrounded him in the tree. And they were going nuts. Harassing him. Hitting him on the back. Screaming. Smacking into him and stuff. They were there within minutes. He doesn't have the right voice. He doesn't know the crow language. They don't like him out there. Eventually he came down to me, because I was out there. They would have killed him.”

“That's what comes of being hand-raised,” said Faunia. “That's what comes of hanging around all his life with people like us. The human stain,” she said, and without revulsion or contempt or condemnation. Not even with sadness. That's how it is—in her own dry way, that is all Faunia was telling the girl feeding the snake: we leave a stain, we leave a trail, we leave our imprint. Impurity, cruelty, abuse, error, excrement, semen — there's no other way to be here. Nothing to do with disobedience. Nothing to do with grace or salvation or redemption. It's in everyone. Indwelling. Inherent. Defining. The stain that is there before its mark. Without the sign it is there. The stain so intrinsic it doesn't require a mark. The stain that precedes disobedience, that encompasses disobedience and perplexes all explanation and understanding. It's why all the cleansing is a joke. A barbaric joke at that. The fantasy of purity is appalling. It's insane. What is the quest to purify, if not more impurity? All she was saying about the stain was that it's inescapable. That, naturally, would be Faunia's take on it: the inevitably stained creatures that we are. Reconciled to the horrible, elemental imperfection. She's like the Greeks, like Coleman's Greeks. Like their gods. They're petty. They quarrel. They fight. They hate. They murder. They fuck. All their Zeus ever wants to do is to fuck — goddesses, mortals, heifers, she-bears — and not merely in his own form but, even more excitingly, as himself made manifest as beast. To hugely mount a woman as a bull. To enter her bizarrely as a flailing white swan. There is never enough flesh for the king of the gods or enough perversity. All the craziness desire brings. The dissoluteness. The depravity. The crudest pleasures. And the fury from the all-seeing wife. Not the Hebrew God, infinitely alone, infinitely obscure, monomaniacally the only god there is, was, and always will be, with nothing better to do than worry about Jews. And not the perfectly desexualized Christian man-god and his uncontaminated mother and all the guilt and shame that an exquisite unearthliness inspires. Instead the Greek Zeus, entangled in adventure, vividly expressive, capricious, sensual, exuberantly wedded to his own rich existence, anything but alone and anything but hidden. Instead the divine stain. A great reality-reflecting religion for Faunia Farley if, through Coleman, she'd known anything about it. As the hubristic fantasy has it, made in the image of God, all right, but not ours—theirs. God debauched. God corrupted. A god of life if ever there was one. God in the image of man.

“Yeah. I suppose that's the tragedy of human beings raising crows,” the girl replied, not exactly getting Faunia's drift though not entirely missing it either. “They don't recognize their own species. He doesn't. And he should. It's called imprinting,” the girl told her. “Prince is really a crow that doesn't know how to be a crow.”

Suddenly Prince started cawing, not in a true crow caw but in that caw that he had stumbled on himself and that drove the other crows nuts. The bird was out on top of the door now, practically shrieking.

Smiling temptingly, Faunia turned and said, “I take that as a compliment, Prince.”

“He imitates the schoolkids that come here and imitate him,” the girl explained. “When the kids on the school trips imitate a crow? That's his impression of the kids. The kids do that. He's invented his own language. From kids.”

In a strange voice of her own, Faunia said, “I love that strange voice he invented.” And in the meantime she had crossed back to the cage and stood only inches from the door. She raised her hand, the hand with the ring, and said to the bird, “Here. Here. Look what I brought you to play with.” She took the ring off and held it up for him to examine at close range. “He likes my opal ring.”

“Usually we give him keys to play with.”

“Well, he's moved up in the world. Haven't we all. Here. Three hundred bucks,” Faunia said. “Come on, play with it. Don't you know an expensive ring when somebody offers it to you?”

“He'll take it,” the girl said. “He'll take it inside with him. He's like a pack rat. He'll take his food and shove it into the cracks in the wall of his cage and pound it in there with his beak.”

The crow had now grasped the ring tightly in its beak and was jerkily moving its head from side to side. Then the ring fell to the floor. The bird had dropped it.

Faunia bent down and picked it up and offered it to the crow again. “If you drop it, I'm not going to give it to you. You know that. Three hundred bucks. I'm giving you a ring for three hundred bucks — what are you, a fancy man? If you want it, you have to take it. Right? Okay?”

With his beak he again plucked it from her fingers and firmly took hold of it.

“Thank you,” said Faunia. “Take it inside,” she whispered so that the girl couldn't hear. “Take it in your cage. Go ahead. It's for you.” But he dropped it again.

“He's very smart,” the girl called over to Faunia. “When we play with him, we put a mouse inside a container and close it. And he figures out how to open the container. It's amazing.”

Once again Faunia retrieved the ring and offered it, and again the crow took it and dropped it.

“Oh, Prince — that was deliberate. It's now a game, is it?”

Caw. Caw. Caw. Caw. Right into her face, the bird exploded with its special noise.

Here Faunia reached up with her hand and began to stroke the head and then, very slowly, to stroke the body downward from the head, and the crow allowed her to do this. “Oh, Prince. Oh, so beautifully shiny. He's humming to me,” she said, and her voice was rapturous, as though she had at last uncovered the meaning of everything. “He's humming?” And she began to hum back, “Ewwww ... ewwww ... ummmmm,” imitating the bird, which was indeed making some sort of lowing sound as it felt the pressure of the hand smoothing its back feathers. Then suddenly, click click, it was clicking its beak. “Oh, that's good,” whispered Faunia, and then she turned her head to the girl and, with her heartiest of laughs, said, “Is he for sale? That clicking did it. I'll take him.” Meanwhile, closer and closer she came to his clicking beak with her own lips, whispering to the bird, “Yes, I'll take you, I'll buy you—”

“He does bite, so watch your eyes,” the girl said.

“Oh, I know he bites. I've already had him bite me a couple of times. When we first met he bit me. But he clicks, too. Oh, listen to him click, children.”

And she was remembering how hard she had tried to die. Twice. Up in the room in Seeley Falls. The month after the children died, twice tried to kill myself in that room. For all intents and purposes, the first time I did. I know from stories the nurse told me. The stuff on the monitor that defines a heartbeat wasn't even there. Usually lethal, she said. But some girls have all the luck. And I tried so hard. I remember taking the shower, shaving my legs, putting on my best skirt, the long denim skirt. The wraparound. And the blouse from Brattleboro that time, that summer, the embroidered blouse. I remember the gin and the Valium, and dimly remember this powder. I forget the name. Some kind of rat powder, bitter, and I folded it into the butterscotch pudding. Did I turn on the oven? Did I forget to? Did I turn blue? How long did I sleep? When did they decide to break down the door? I still don't know who did that. To me it was ecstatic, getting myself ready. There are times in life worth celebrating. Triumphant times. The occasions for which dressing up was intended. Oh, how I turned myself out. I braided my hair. I did my eyes. Would have made my own mother proud, and that's saying something. Called her just the week before to tell her the kids were dead. First phone call in twenty years. “It's Faunia, Mother.” “I don't know anybody by that name. Sorry,” and hung up. The bitch. After I ran away, she told everyone, “My husband is strict and Faunia couldn't live by the rules. She could never live by the rules.” The classic cover-up. What privileged girl-child ever ran away because a stepfather was strict? She runs away, you bitch, because the stepfather isn't strict — because the stepfather is wayward and won't leave her alone. Anyway, I dressed myself in the best I owned. No less would do. The second time I didn't dress up. And that I didn't dress up tells the whole story. My heart wasn't in it anymore, not after the first time didn't work. The second time it was sudden and impulsive and joyless. That first time had been so long in coming, days and nights, all that anticipation. The concoctions. Buying the powder. Getting prescriptions. But the second time was hurried. Uninspired. I think I stopped because I couldn't stand the suffocating. My throat choking, really suffocating, not getting any air, and hurrying to unknot the extension cord. There wasn't any of that hurried business the first time. It was calm and peaceful. The kids are gone and there's no one to worry about and I have all the time in the world. If only I'd done it right. The pleasure there was in it. Finally where there is none, there is that last joyous moment, when death should come on your own angry terms, but you don't feel angry — just elated. I can't stop thinking about it. All this week. He's reading to me about Clinton from the New York Times and all I'm thinking about is Dr. Kevorkian and his carbon monoxide machine. Just inhale deeply. Just suck until there is no more to inhale.

“‘They were such beautiful children,’ he said. ‘You never expect anything like this to happen to you or your friends. At least Faunia has the faith that her children are with God now.’”

That's what some jerk-off told the paper. 2 CHILDREN SUFFOCATE IN LOCAL HOUSE FIRE. ‘Based on the initial investigation,’ Sergeant Donaldson said, ‘evidence indicates that a space heater...’ Residents of the rural road said they became aware of the fire when the children's mother...”

When the children's mother tore herself free from the cock she was sucking.

“The father of the children, Lester Farley, emerged from the hallway moments later, neighbors said.”

Ready to kill me once and for all. He didn't. And then I didn't. Amazing. Amazing how nobody's done it yet to the dead children's mother.

“No, I didn't, Prince. Couldn't make that work either. And so,” she whispered to the bird, whose lustrous blackness beneath her hand was warm and sleek like nothing she had ever fondled, “here we are instead. A crow who really doesn't know how to be a crow, a woman who doesn't really know how to be a woman. We're meant for each other. Marry me. You're my destiny, you ridiculous bird.” Then she stepped back and bowed. “Farewell, my Prince.”

And the bird responded. With a high-pitched noise that so sounded like “Cool. Cool. Cool,” that once again she broke into laughter. When she turned to wave goodbye to the girl, she told her, “Well, that's better than I get from the guys on the street.”

And she'd left the ring. Coleman's gift. When the girl wasn't looking, she'd hid it away in the cage. Engaged to a crow. That's the ticket.

“Thank you,” called Faunia.

“You're welcome. Have a good one,” the girl called after her, and with that, Faunia drove back to Coleman's to finish her breakfast and see what developed with him next. The ring's in the cage. He's got the ring. He's got a three-hundred-dollar ring.

The trip to the Moving Wall up in Pittsfield took place on Veterans Day, when the flag is flown at half-mast and many towns hold parades — and the department stores hold their sales — and vets who feel as Les did are more disgusted with their compatriots, their country, and their government than on any other day of the year. Now he was supposed to be in some two-bit parade and march around while a band played and everyone waved the flag? Now it was going to make everybody feel good for a minute to be recognizing their Vietnam veterans? How come they spit on him when he came home if they were so eager to see him out there now? How come there were veterans sleeping in the street while that draff dodger was sleeping in the White House? Slick Willie, commander in chief. Son of a bitch. Squeezing that Jew girl's fat tits while the VA budget goes down the drain. Lying about sex? Shit. The goddamn government lies about everything. No, the U.S. government had already played enough bad jokes on Lester Farley without adding on the joke of Veterans Day.

And yet there he was, on that day of all days, driving up to Pittsfield in Louie's van. They were headed for the half-scale replica of the real Wall that for some fifteen years now had been touring the country; from the tenth through the sixteenth of November, it was to be on view in the parking lot of the Ramada Inn under the sponsorship of the Pittsfield VFW. With him was the same crew that had seen him through the trial of the Chinese meal. They weren't going to let him go alone, and they'd been reassuring him of that all along: we'll be there with you, we'll stand by you, we'll be with you 24/7 if we need to be. Louie had gone so far as to say that afterward Les could stay with him and his wife at their house, and, for however long it took, they would look after him. “You won't have to go home alone, Les, not if you don't want to. I don't think you should try. You come stay with me and Tess. Tessie's seen it all. Tessie understands. You don't have to worry about Tessie. When I got back, Tessie became my motivation. My outlook was, How can anyone tell me what to do. I'm going into a rage without any provocation. You know. You know it all, Les. But thank God Tessie steadfastly stood by me. If you want, she'll stand by you.”

Louie was a brother to him, the best brother a man could ever hope to have, but because he would not leave him be about going to the Wall, because he was so fucking fanatical about him seeing that wall, Les had all he could do not to take him by the throat and throttle the bastard. Gimpy spic bastard, leave me alone! Stop telling me how it took you ten years to get to the Wall. Stop telling me how it fucking changed your life. Stop telling me how you made peace with Mikey. Stop telling me what Mikey said to you at the Wall. I don't want to know!

And yet they're off, they're on their way, and again Louie is repeating to him, '“It's all right, Louie'—that's what Mikey told me, and that's what Kenny is going to tell you. What he was telling me, Les, is that it was okay, I could get on with my life.”

“I can't take it, Lou — turn around.”

“Buddy, relax. We're halfway there.”

“Turn the fucking thing around!”

“Les, you don't know unless you go. You got to go,” said Louie kindly, “and you got to find out.”

“I don't want to find out!”

“How about you take a little more of your meds? A little Ativan. A little Valium. A little extra won't hurt. Give him some water, Chet.”

Once they reached Pittsfield and Louie had parked across the way from the Ramada Inn, it wasn't easy getting Les out of the van. “I'm not doin' it,” he said, and so the others stood around outside smoking, letting Les have a little more time for the extra Ativan and Valium to kick in. From the street, Louie kept an eye on him. There were a lot of police cars around and a lot of buses. There was a ceremony going on at the Wall, you could hear somebody speaking over a microphone, some local politician, probably the fifteenth one to sound off that morning. “The people whose names are inscribed on this wall behind me are your relatives, friends, and neighbors. They are Christian, Jew, Muslim, black, white, native people — Americans all. They gave a pledge to defend and protect, and gave their lives to keep that pledge. There is no honor, no ceremony, that can fully express our gratitude and admiration. The following poem was left at this wall a few weeks ago in Ohio, and I'd like to share it with you. ‘We remember you, smiling, proud, strong / You told us not to worry / We remember those last hugs and kisses...’”

And when that speech was over, there was another to come. “...but with this wall of names behind me, and as I look out into the crowd and see the faces of middle-aged men like me, some of them wearing medals and other remnants of a military uniform, and I see a slight sadness in their eyes — maybe that's what's left of the thousand-yard stare which we all picked up when we were just brother grunts, infantrymen, ten thousand miles away from home — when I see all this, I am somehow transported back thirty years. This traveling monument's permanent namesake opened on the Mall in Washington on November 13, 1982. It took me roughly about two and a half years to get there. Looking back over that time, I know, like many Vietnam veterans, I stayed away on purpose, because of painful memories that I knew it would conjure up. And so on a Washington evening, when dusk was settling, I went over to the Wall by myself. I left my wife and children at the hotel — we were on our way back from Disney World — and visited, stood alone at its apex, close to where I'm standing right now. And the memories came — a whirlwind of emotions came. I remembered people I grew up with, played ball with, who are on this wall, right here from Pittsfield. I remembered my radio operator, Sal. We met in Vietnam. We played the where-you-from game. Massachusetts. Massachusetts. Whereabouts in Massachusetts? West Springfield he was from. I said I was from Pittsfield. And Sal died a month after I left. I came home in April, and I picked up a local newspaper, and I saw that Sal was not going to meet me in Pittsfield or Springfield for drinks. I remembered other men I served with...”

And then there was a band — an army infantry band most likely — playing the “Battie Hymn of the Green Berets,” which led Louie to conclude that it was best to wait till the ceremony was completely over before getting Les out of the van. Louie had timed their arrival so they wouldn't have to deal with the speeches or the emotional music, but the program had more than likely started late, and so they were still at it. Looking at his watch, though, seeing it was close to noon, he figured it must be near the end. And, yep — suddenly they were finishing up. The lone bugle playing taps. Just as well. Hard enough to hear taps standing out on the street amid all the empty buses and the cop cars, let alone to be right there, with all the weeping people, dealing with taps and the Wall. There was taps, agonizing taps, the last awful note of taps, and then the band was playing “God Bless America,” and Louie could hear the people at the Wall singing along—“From the mountains, to the prairies, to the oceans, white with foam”—and a moment later it was over.

Inside the van, Les was still shaking, but he didn't appear to be looking behind him all the time and only occasionally was he looking over his head for “the things,” and so Louie climbed awkwardly back up inside and sat down next to him, knowing that the whole of Les's life was now the dread of what he was about to find out, and so the thing to do was to get him there and get it done with.

“We're going to send Swift in advance, Les, to find Kenny for you. It's a pretty long wall. Better than you having to go through all those names, Swiff and the guys'll go over and locate it in advance. The names are up there on panels in the order of time. They're up there by time, from first guy to last guy. We got Kenny's date, you gave us the date, so it won't take too long now to find him.”

“I ain't doin'it.”

When Swiff came back to the van, he opened the door a crack and said to Louie, “We got Kenny. We found him.”

“Okay, this is it, Lester. Suck it up. You're going to walk over there. It's around back of the inn. There are going to be other folks there doing the same thing we're doing. They had an official little ceremony, but that's finished and you don't have to worry about it. No speeches. No bullshit. It's just going to be kids and parents and grandparents and they are all going to be doing the same thing. They're going to be laying wreaths of flowers. They're going to be saying prayers. Mostly they're going to be looking for names. They're going to be talking among themselves like people do, Les. Some of them are going to be crying. That's all that's there. So you know just what's there. You're going to take your time but you're coming with us.”

It was unusually warm for November, and approaching the Wall they saw that a lot of the guys were in shirtsleeves and some of the women were wearing shorts. People wearing sunglasses in mid-November but otherwise the flowers, the people, the kids, the grandparents — it was exactly as Louie had described. And the Moving Wall was no surprise: he'd seen it in magazines, on T-shirts, got a glimpse on TV once of the real full-sized D.C. Wall before he quickly switched off the set. Stretched the entire length of the macadam parking lot were all those familiar joined panels, a perpendicular cemetery of dark upright slabs sloping off gradually at either end and stamped in white lettering with all the tightly packed names. The name of each of the dead was about a quarter of the length of a man's little finger. That's what it took to get them all in there, 58,209 people who no longer take walks or go to the movies but who manage to exist, for whatever it is worth, as inscriptions on a portable black aluminum wall supported behind by a frame of two-by-fours in a Massachusetts parking lot back of a Ramada Inn.

The first time Swift had been to the Wall he couldn't get out of the bus, and the others had to drag him off and keep dragging until they got him face to face with it, and afterward he had said, “You can hear the Wall crying.” The first time Chet had been to the Wall he'd begun to beat on it with his fists and to scream, “That shouldn't be Billy's name — no, Billy, no!—that there should be my name!” The first time Bobcat had been to the Wall he'd just put out his hand to touch it and then, as though the hand were frozen, could not pull it away — had what the VA doctor called some type of fit. The first time Louie had been to the Wall it didn't take him long to figure out what the deal was and get to the point. “Okay, Mikey,” he'd said aloud, “here I am. I'm here,” and Mikey, speaking in his own voice, had said right back to him, “It's all right, Lou. It's okay.”

Les knew all these stories of what could happen the first time, and now he is there for the first time, and he doesn't feel a thing. Nothing happens. Everyone telling him it's going to be better, you're going to come to terms with it, each time you come back it's going to get better and better until we get you to Washington and you make a tracing at the big wall of Kenny's name, and that, that is going to be the real spiritual healing — this enormous buildup, and nothing happens. Nothing. Swift had heard the Wall crying — Les doesn't hear anything. Doesn't feel anything, doesn't hear anything, doesn't even remember anything. It's like when he saw his two kids dead. This huge lead-in, and nothing. Here he was so afraid he was going to feel too much and he feels nothing, and that is worse. It shows that despite everything, despite Louie and the trips to the Chinese restaurant and the meds and no drinking, he was right all along to believe he was dead. At the Chinese restaurant he felt something, and that temporarily tricked him. But now he knows for sure he's dead because he can't even call up Kenny's memory. He used to be tortured by it, now he can't be connected to it in any way.

Because he's a first-timer, the others are kind of hovering around. They wander off briefly, one at a time, to pay their respects to particular buddies, but there is always someone who stays with him to check him out, and when each guy comes back from being away, he puts an arm around Les and hugs him. They all believe they are right now more attuned to one another than they have ever been before, and they all believe, because Les has the requisite stunned look, that he is having the experience they all wanted him to have. They have no idea that when he turns his gaze up to one of the three American flags flying, along with the black POW/MIA flag, over the parking lot at half-mast, he is not thinking about Kenny or even about Veterans Day but thinking that they are flying all the flags at half-mast in Pittsfield because it has finally been established that Les Farley is dead. It's official: altogether dead and not merely inside. He doesn't tell this to the others. What's the point? The truth is the truth. “Proud of you,” Louie whispers to him. “Knew you could do it. I knew this would happen.” Swift is saying to him, “If you ever want to talk about it...”

A serenity has overcome him now that they all mistake for some therapeutic achievement. The Wall That Heals — that's what the sign says that's out front of the inn, and that is what it does. Finished with standing in front of Kenny's name, they're walking up and down with Les, the whole length of the Wall and back, all of them watching the folks searching for the names, letting Lester take it all in, letting him know that he is where he is doing what he is doing. “This is not a wall to climb, honey,” a woman says quietly to a small boy she's gathered back from where he was peering over the low end. “What's the name? What's Steve's last name?” an elderly man is asking his wife as he is combing through one of the panels, counting carefully down with a finger, row by row, from the top. “Right there,” they hear a woman say to a tiny tot who can barely walk; with one finger she is touching a name on the Wall. “Right there, sweetie. That's Uncle Johnny.” And she crosses herself. “You sure that's line twenty-eight?” a woman says to her husband. “I'm sure.” “Well, he's got to be there. Panel four, line twenty-eight. I found him in Washington.” “Well, I don't see him. Let me count again.” “That's my cousin,” a woman is saying. “He opened a bottle of Coke over there, and it exploded. Booby-trapped. Nineteen years old. Behind the lines. He's at peace, please God.” There is a veteran in an American Legion cap kneeling before one of the panels, helping out two black ladies dressed in their best church clothes. “What's his name?” he asks the younger of the two. “Bates. James.” “Here he is,” the vet says. “There he is, Ma,” the younger woman says.

Because the Wall is half the size of the Washington Wall, a lot of people are having to kneel down to search for the names and, for the older ones, that makes locating them especially hard. There are flowers wrapped in cellophane lying up against the Wall. There is a handwritten poem on a piece of paper that somebody has taped to the bottom of the Wall. Louie stoops to read the words: “Star light, star bright / First star I see tonight...” There are people with red eyes from crying. There are vets with a black Vietnam Vet cap like Louie's, some of them with campaign ribbons pinned to the cap. There's a chubby boy of about ten, his back turned stubbornly to the Wall, saying to a woman, “I don't wanna read it.” There's a heavily tattooed guy in a First Infantry Division T-shirt—“Big Red One,” the T-shirt says — who is clutching himself and wandering around in a daze, having terrible thoughts. Louie stops, takes hold of him, and gives him a hug. They all hug him. They even get Les to hug him. “Two of my high school friends are on there, killed within forty-eight hours of each other,” a fellow nearby is saying. “And both of them waked from the same funeral home. That was a sad day at Kingston High.” “He was the first one to go to Nam,” somebody else is saying, “and the only one of us to not come back. And you know what he'd want there under his name, at the Wall there? Just what he wanted in Nam. I'll tell you exactly: a bottle of Jack Daniel's, a pair of good boots, and pussy hairs baked into a brownie.”

There is a group of four guys standing around talking, and when Louie hears them going at it, reminiscing, he stops to listen, and the others wait there with him. The four strangers are all gray-haired men — all of them now with stray gray hair or gray curls or, in one case, a gray ponytail poking out from back of the Vietnam Vet cap.

“You were mechanized when you were there, huh?”

“Yeah. We did a lot of humpin', but sooner or later you knew you'd get back to that fifty.”

“We did a lot of walkin'. We walked all over the freakin' Central Highlands. All over them damn mountains.”

“Another thing with the mech unit, we were never in the rear. I think out of the whole time I was there, almost eleven months, I went to base camp when I got there and I went on Ramp;R — that was it.”

“When the tracks were movin', they knew you were comin', and they knew when you were going to get there, so that B-40 rocket was sittin' there waitin'. He had a lot of time to polish it up and put your name on it.”

Suddenly Louie butts in, speaks up. “We're here,” he says straight out to the four strangers. “We're here, right? We're all here. Let me do names. Let me do names and addresses.” And he takes his notepad out of his back pocket and, while leaning on his cane, writes down all their information so he can mail them the newsletter he and Tessie publish and send out, on their own, a couple of times a year.

Then they are passing the empty chairs. They hadn't seen them on the way in, so intent were they on getting Les to the Wall without his falling down or breaking away. At the end of the parking lot, there are forty-one brownish-gray old metal bridge chairs, probably out of some church basement and set up in slightly arced rows, as at a graduation or an award ceremony — three rows of ten, one row of eleven. Great care has been taken to arrange them just so. Taped to the backrest of each chair is somebody's name — above the empty seat, a name, a man's name, printed on a white card. A whole section of chairs off by itself, and, so as to be sure that nobody sits down there, it is roped off on each of the four sides with a sagging loop of intertwined black and purple bunting.

And a wreath is hanging there, a big wreath of carnations, and when Louie, who doesn't miss a thing, stops to count them, he finds, as he suspected, that the carnations number forty-one.

“What's this?” asks Swift.

“It's the guys from Pittsfield that died. It's their empty chairs,” Louie says.

“Son of a bitch,” Swift says. “What a fuckin' slaughter. Either fight to win or don't fight at all. Son of a fuckin' bitch.”

But the afternoon isn't over for them yet. Out on the pavement in front of the Ramada Inn, there is a skinny guy in glasses, wearing a coat much too heavy for the day, who is having a serious problem — shouting at passing strangers, pointing at them, spitting because he's shouting so hard, and there are cops rushing in from the squad cars to try to talk him into calming down before he strikes out at someone or, if he has a gun hidden on him, pulls it out to take a shot. In one hand he holds a bottle of whiskey — that's all he appears to have on him. “Look at me!” he shouts. “I'm shit and everybody who looks at me knows I'm shit. Nixon! Nixon! That's who did it to me! That's what did it to me! Nixon sent me to Vietnam!”

Solemn as they are as they pile into the van, each bearing the weight of his remembrances, there is the relief of seeing Les, unlike the guy cracking up on the street, in a state of calm that never before existed for him. Though they are not men given to expressing transcendent sentiments, they feel, in Les's presence, the emotions that can accompany that kind of urge. During the course of the drive home, each of them — except for Les — apprehends to the greatest degree available to him the mystery of being alive and in flux.

He looked serene, but that was a fakeout. He'd made up his mind. Use his vehicle. Take them all out, including himself. Along the river, come right at them, in the same lane, in their lane, round the turn where the river bends.

He's made up his mind. Got nothin' to lose and everything to gain. It isn't a matter of if that happens or if I see this or if I think this I will do it and if I don't I won't. He's made up his mind to the extent that he's no longer thinking. He's on a suicide mission, and inside he is agitated big-time. No words. No thoughts. It's just seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling — it's anger, adrenaline, and it's resignation. We're not in Vietnam. We're beyond Vietnam.

(Taken again in restraints to the Northampton VA a year later, he tries putting into plain English for the psychologist this pure state of something that is nothing. It's all confidential anyway. She's a doc. Medical ethics. Strictly between the two of them. “What were you thinking?” “No thinking.” “You had to be thinking something.” “Nothing.” “At what point did you get in your truck?” “After dark.” “Had you had dinner?” “No dinner.” “Why did you think you were getting into the truck?” “I knew why.” “You knew where you were going.” “To get him.” “To get who?” “The Jew. The Jew professor.” “Why were you going to do that?” “To get him.” “Because you had to?” “Because I had to.” “Why did you have to?” “Kenny.” “You were going to kill him.” “Oh yes. All of us.” “There was planning, then.” “No planning.” “You knew what you were doing.” “Yes.” “But you did not plan it.” “No.” “Did you think you were back in Vietnam?” “No Vietnam.” “Were you having a flashback?” “No flashbacks.” “Did you think you were in the jungle?” “No jungle.” “Did you think you would feel better?” “No feelings.” “Were you thinking about the kids? Was this payback?” “No payback.” “Are you sure?” “No payback.” “This woman, you tell me, killed your children, ‘a blow job,’ you told me, ‘killed my kids’—weren't you trying to get back at her, to take revenge for that?” “No revenge.” “Were you depressed?” “No, no depression.” “You were out to kill two people and yourself and you were not angry?” “No, no more anger.” “Sir, you got in your truck, you knew where they would be, and you drove into their headlights. And you're trying to tell me you weren't trying to kill them.” “I didn't kill them.” “Who killed them?” “They killed themselves.”)

Just driving. That's all he's doing. Planning and not planning. Knowing and not knowing. The other headlights are coming at him, and then they're gone. No collision? Okay, no collision. Once they swerve off the road, he changes lanes and keeps going. He just keeps driving. Next morning, waiting with the road crew to go out for the day, he hears about it at the town garage. The other guys already know.

There's no collision so, though he has some sense of it, he's got no details, and when he gets home from driving and gets out of the truck he's not sure what happened. Big day for him. November the eleventh. Veterans Day. That morning he goes with Louie — that morning he goes to the Wall, that afternoon he comes home from the Wall, that night he goes out to kill everybody. Did he? Can't know because there's no collision, but still quite a day from a therapeutic point of view. Second half being more therapeutic than the first. Achieves a true serenity now. Now Kenny can speak to him. Firing side by side with Kenny, both of them opened up on fully automatic, when Hector, the team leader, gives the screaming order “Get your stuff and let's get out of here!” and suddenly Kenny is dead. Quick as that. Up on some hill. Under attack, pulling back — and Kenny's dead. Can't be. His buddy, another farm boy, same background except from Missouri, they were going to do dairy farming together, guy who as a kid of six watched his father die and as a kid of nine watched his mother die, raised after that by an uncle he loved and was always talking about, a successful dairy farmer with a good-sized spread — 180 milking cows, twelve machines milking six cows a side in the parlor at a time — and Kenny's head is gone and he's dead.

Looks like Les is communicating with his buddy now. Showed Kenny that Kenny's not forgotten. Kenny wanted him to do it, and he did it. Now he knows that whatever he did — even if he's not sure what it was — he did it for Kenny. Even if he did kill someone and he goes to jail, it doesn't matter — it can't matter because he's dead. This was just one last thing to do for Kenny. Squared it with him. Knows everything is now all right with Kenny.

(“I went to the Wall and there was his name and it was silence. Waited and waited and waited. I looked at him, he looked at me. I didn't hear anything, didn't feel anything, and that's the point I knew it wasn't okay with Kenny. That there was more to be done. Didn't know what it was. But he wouldn't have just left me like that. That's why there was no message for me. Because I still had more to do for Kenny. Now? Now it's okay with Kenny. Now he can rest.” “And are you still dead?” “What are you, an asswipe? Oh, I can't talk to you, you asswipe! I did it because I am dead!”)

Next morning, first thing, he hears at the garage that she was with the Jew in a car crash. Everybody figures that she was blowing him and he lost control and they went off the road and through the barrier and over the embankment and front-end-first into the shallows of the river. The Jew lost control of the car.

No, he does not associate this with what happened the night before. He was just out driving, in a different state of mind entirely.

He says, “Yeah? What happened? Who killed her?”

“The Jew killed her. Went off the road.”

“She was probably going down on him.”

“That's what they say.”

That's it. Doesn't feel anything about that either. Still feels nothing. Except his suffering. Why is he suffering so much for what happened to him when she can go on giving blow jobs to old Jews? He's the one who does the suffering, and now she just up and walks away from it all.

Anyway, as he sips his morning coffee at the town garage, looks that way to him.

When everybody gets up to start for the trucks, Les says, “Guess that music won't be coming from that house on Saturday nights anymore.”

Though, as sometimes happens, nobody knows what he's talking about, they laugh anyway, and with that, the workday begins.

If she located herself in western Massachusetts, the ad could be traced back to her by colleagues who subscribed to the New York Review of Books, particularly if she went on to describe her appearance and list her credentials. Yet if she didn't specify her place of residence, she could wind up with not a single response from anyone within a radius of a hundred, two, even three hundred miles. And since in every ad she'd studied in the New York Review, the age given by women exceeded her own by from fifteen to thirty years, how could she go ahead to reveal her correct age — to portray herself correctly altogether — without arousing the suspicion that there was something significant undisclosed by her and wrong with her, a woman claiming to be so young, so attractive, so accomplished who found it necessary to look for a man through a personal ad? If she described herself as “passionate,” this might readily be interpreted by the lascivious-minded to be an intentional provocation, to mean “loose” or worse, and letters would come pouring in to her NYRB box from the men she wanted nothing to do with. But if she appeared to be a bluestocking for whom sex was of decidedly less importance than her academic, scholarly, and intellectual pursuits, she would be sure to encourage a response from a type who would be all too maidenly for someone as excitable as she could be with an erotic counterpart she could trust. If she presented herself as “pretty,” she would be associating herself with a vague catchall category of women, and yet if she described herself, straight out, as “beautiful,” if she dared to be truthful enough to evoke the word that had never seemed extravagant to her lovers — who had called her éblouissante (as in “Éblouissante! Tu as un visage de chat”); dazzling, stunning — or if, for the sake of precision in a text of only thirty or so words, she invoked the resemblance noted by her elders to Leslie Caron who her father always enjoyed making too much of, then anyone other than a megalomaniac might be too intimidated to approach her or refuse to take her seriously as an intellectual. If she wrote, “A photo accompanying the letter would be welcome,” or, simply, “Photo, please,” it could be misunderstood to imply that she esteemed good looks above intelligence, erudition, and cultural refinement; moreover, any photos she received might be touched up, years old, or altogether spurious. Asking for a photo might even discourage a response from the very men whose interest she was hoping to elicit. Yet if she didn't request a photo, she could wind up traveling all the way to Boston, to New York, or farther, to find herself the dinner companion of someone wholly inappropriate and even distasteful. And distasteful not necessarily because of looks alone. What if he was a liar? What if he was a charlatan? What if he was a psychopath? What if he had AIDS? What if he was violent, vicious, married, or on Medicare? What if he was a weirdo, someone she couldn't get rid of? What if she gave her name and her place of employment to a stalker? Yet, on their first meeting, how could she withhold her name? In search of a serious, impassioned love affair leading to marriage and a family, how could an open, honest person start off by lying about something as fundamental as her name? And what about race? Oughtn't she to include the kindly solicitation “Race unimportant”? But it wasn't unimportant; it should be, it ought to be, it well might have been but for the fiasco back in Paris when she was seventeen that convinced her that a man of another race was an unfeasible — because an unknowable — partner.

She was young and adventurous, she didn't want to be cautious, and he was from a good family in Brazzaville, the son of a supreme court judge — or so he said — in Paris as an exchange student for a year at Nanterre. Dominique was his name, and she thought of him as a fellow spiritual lover of literature. She'd met him at one of the Milan Kundera lectures. He picked her up there, and outside they were still basking in Kundera's observations on Madame Bovary, infected, the both of them, with what Delphine excitedly thought of as “the Kundera disease.” Kundera was legitimatized for them by being persecuted as a Czech writer, by being someone who had lost out in Czechoslovakia's great historical struggle to be free. Kundera's playfulness did not appear to be frivolous, not at all. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting they loved. There was something trustworthy about him. His Eastern Europeanness. The restless nature of the intellectual. That everything appeared to be difficult for him. Both were won over by Kundera's modesty, the very opposite of superstar demeanor, and both believed in his ethos of thinking and suffering. All that intellectual tribulation — and then there were his looks. Delphine was very taken by the writer's poetically prize-fighterish looks, to her an outward sign of everything colliding within.

After the pickup at the Kundera lecture, it was completely a physical experience with Dominique, and she had never had that before. It was completely about her body. She had just connected so much with the Kundera lecture and she had mistaken that connection for the connection she had to Dominique, and it happened all very fast. There was nothing except her body. Dominique didn't understand that she didn't want just sex. She wanted to be something more than a piece of meat on a spit, turned and basted. That's what he did — those were even his words: turning her and basting her. He was interested in nothing else, least of all in literature. Loosen up and shut up — that's his attitude with her, and she somehow gets locked in, and then comes the terrible night she shows up at his room and he is waiting there for her with his friend. It's not that she's now prejudiced, it's just that she realizes she would not have so misjudged a man of her own race. This was her worst failure, and she could never forget it. Redemption had only come with the professor who'd given her his Roman ring. Sex, yes, wonderful sex, but sex with metaphysics. Sex with metaphysics with a man with gravitas who is not vain. Someone like Kundera. That is the plan.

The problem confronting her as she sat alone at the computer long after dark, the only person left in Barton Hall, unable to leave her office, unable to face one more night in her apartment without even a cat for company — the problem was how to include in her ad, no matter how subtly coded, something that essentially said, “Whites only need apply.” If it were discovered at Athena that it was she who had specified such an exclusion — no, that would not do for a person ascending so rapidly through the Athena academic hierarchy. Yet she had no choice but to ask for a photograph, even though she knew — knew from trying as hard as she could to think of everything, to be naive about nothing, on the basis of just her brief life as a woman on her own to take into account how men could behave — that there was nothing to stop someone sufficiently sadistic or perverse from sending a photograph designed to mislead specifically in the matter of race.

No, it was too risky altogether — as well as beneath her dignity — to place an ad to help her meet a man of the caliber that she'd never find anywhere among the faculty of as dreadfully provincial a place as Athena. She could not do it and she should not do it, and yet all the while she thought of the uncertainties, the outright dangers, of advertising oneself to strangers as a woman in search of a suitable mate, all the while she thought of the reasons why it was inadvisable, as chair of the Department of Languages and Literature, to risk revealing herself to colleagues as something other than a serious teacher and scholar — exposing herself as someone with needs and desires that, though altogether human, could be deliberately misconstrued so as to trivialize her — she was doing it: fresh from e-mailing every member of her department her latest thoughts on the subject of senior theses, trying to compose an ad that adhered to the banal linguistic formula of the standard New York Review personal but one that managed as well to present a truthful appraisal of her caliber. At it now for over an hour and she was still unable to settle on anything unhumiliating enough to e-mail to the paper even pseudonymously.

Western Mass. 29 yr. old petite, passionate, Parisian professor, equally at home teaching Molière as

Brainy, beautiful Berkshire academic, equally at home cooking médaillons de veau as chairing a humanities dept., seeks

Serious SWF scholar seeks

SWF Yale Ph.D. Parisian-born academic. Petite, scholarly, literature-loving, fashion-conscious brunette seeks

Attractive, serious scholar seeks

SWF Ph.D., French, Mass.-based, seeks

Seeks what? Anything, anything other than these Athena men — the wisecracking boys, the feminized old ladies, the timorous, tedious family freaks, the professional dads, all of them so earnest and so emasculated. She is revolted by the fact that they pride themselves on doing half the domestic work. Intolerable. “Yes, I have to go, I have to relieve my wife. I have to do as much diaper changing as she does, you know.” She cringes when they brag about their helpfulness. Do it, fine, but don't have the vulgarity to mention it. Why make such a spectacle of yourself as the fifty-fifty husband? Just do it and shut up about it. In this revulsion she is very different from her women colleagues who value these men for their “sensitivity.” Is that what overpraising their wives is, “sensitivity”? “Oh, Sara Lee is such an extraordinary this-and-that. She's already published four and a half articles...” Mr. Sensitivity always has to mention her glory. Mr. Sensitivity can't talk about some great show at the Metropolitan without having to be sure to preface it, “Sara Lee says...” Either they overpraise their wives or they fall dead silent. The husband falls silent and grows more and more depressed, and she has never encountered this in any other country. If Sara Lee is an academic who can't find a job while he, say, is barely holding on to his job, he would rather lose his job than have her think she is getting the bad end of the deal. There would even be a certain pride if the situation were reversed and he was the one who had to stay home while she didn't. A French woman, even a French feminist, would find such a man disgusting. The Frenchwoman is intelligent, she's sexy, she's truly independent, and if he talks more than she does, so what, where's the issue? What's the fiery contention all about? Not “Oh, did you notice, she's so dominated by her rude, power-hungry husband.” No, the more of a woman she is, the more the Frenchwoman wants the man to project his power. Oh, how she had prayed, on arriving at Athena five years back, that she might meet some marvelous man who projected his power, and instead the bulk of younger male faculty are these domestic, emasculated types, intellectually unstimulating, pedestrian, the overpraising husbands of Sara Lee whom she has deliciously categorized for her correspondents in Paris as “The Diapers.”

Then there are “The Hats.” The Hats are the “writers in residence,” America's incredibly pretentious writers in residence. Probably, at little Athena, she hasn't seen the worst of them, but these two are bad enough. They show up to teach once a week, and they are married and they come on to her, and they are impossible. When can we have lunch, Delphine? Sorry, she thinks, but I am not impressed. The thing she liked about Kundera at his lectures was that he was always slightly shadowy, even slightly shabby sometimes, a great writer malgré lui. At least she perceived it that way and that's what she liked in him. But she certainly does not like, cannot stand, the American I-am-the-writer type who, when he looks at her, she knows is thinking, With your French confidence and your French fashions and your elitist French education, you are very French indeed, but you are nonetheless the academic and I am the writer — we are not equals.

These writers in residence, as far as she can surmise, spend an enormous amount of time worrying about their headwear. Yes, both the poet and the prose writer have an extraordinary hat fetish, and so she categorizes them in her letters as The Hats. One of them is always dressed as Charles Lindbergh, wearing his antique pilot gear, and she cannot understand the relationship between pilot gear and writing, particularly writing in residence. She muses about this in her humorous correspondence to her Paris friends. The other is the floppy-hat type, the unassuming type — which is, of course, so recherché — who spends eight hours at the mirror dressing carelessly. Vain, unreadable, married by now a hundred and eighty-six times, and incredibly self-important. It's not so much hatred she feels for this one as contempt. And yet, deep in the Berkshires starving for romance, she sometimes feels ambivalent about The Hats and wonders if she shouldn't take them seriously as erotic candidates, at least. No, she couldn't, not after what she has written to Paris. She must resist them if only because they try to talk to her with her own vocabulary. Because one of them, the younger, minimally less self-important one, has read Bataille, because he knows just enough Bataille and has read just enough Hegel, she's gone out with him a few times, and never has a man so rapidly de-eroticized himself before her eyes; with every word he spoke — using, as he did, that language of hers that she herself is now somewhat uncertain about — he read himself right out of her life.

Whereas the older types, who are uncool and tweedy, “The Humanists”... Well, obliging as she must be at conferences and in publications to write and speak as the profession requires, the humanist is the very part of her own self that she sometimes feels herself betraying, and so she is attracted to them: because they are what they are and always have been and because she knows they think of her as a traitor. Her classes have a following, but they think of that following contemptuously, as a fashionable phenomenon. These older men, The Humanists, the old-fashioned traditionalist humanists who have read everything, the born-again teachers (as she thinks of them), make her sometimes feel shallow. Her following they laugh at and her scholarship they despise. At faculty meetings they're not afraid to say what they say, and you would think they should be; in class they're not afraid to say what they feel, and, again, you would think they should be; and, as a result, in front of them she crumbles. Since she doesn't herself have that much conviction about all the so-called discourse she picked up in Paris and New Haven, inwardly she crumbles. Only she needs that language to succeed. On her own in America, she needs so much to succeed! And yet everything that it takes to succeed is somehow compromising, and it makes her feel less and less genuine, and dramatizing her predicament as a “Faustian bargain” helps only a little.

At moments she even feels herself betraying Milan Kundera, and so, silently, when she is alone, she will picture him in her mind's eye and speak to him and ask his forgiveness. Kundera's intention in his lectures was to free the intelligence from the French sophistication, to talk about the novel as having something to do with human beings and the comédie humaine; his intention was to free his students from the tempting traps of structuralism and formalism and the obsession with modernity, to purge them of the French theory that they had been fed, and listening to him had been an enormous relief, for despite her publications and a growing scholarly reputation, it was always difficult for her to deal with literature through literary theory. There could be such a gigantic gap between what she liked and what she was supposed to admire — between how she was supposed to speak about what she was supposed to admire and how she spoke to herself about the writers she treasured — that her sense of betraying Kundera, though not the most serious problem in her life, would become at times like the shame of betraying a kindly, trusting, absent lover.

The only man she's been out with frequently is, oddly enough, the most conservative person on campus, a divorced man of sixty-five, Arthur Sussman, the Boston University economist who was to have been secretary of the treasury in the second Ford administration. He is a bit stout, a bit stiff, always wearing a suit; he hates affirmative action, he hates Clinton, he comes in from Boston once a week, is paid a fortune, and is thought to make the place, to put little Athena on the academic map. The women in particular are sure she has slept with him, just because he was once powerful. They see them occasionally having lunch together in the cafeteria. He comes to the cafeteria and he looks so excruciatingly bored, until he sees Delphine, and when he asks if he may join her, she says, “How generous of you to endow us with your presence today,” or something along those lines. He likes that she mocks him, to a point. Over lunch, they have what Delphine calls “a real conversation.” With a thirty-nine-billion-dollar budget surplus, he tells her, the government is giving nothing back to the taxpayer. The people earned it and they should spend it, and they shouldn't have bureaucrats deciding what to do with their money. Over lunch, he explains in detail why Social Security should be given over to private investment analysts. Everybody should invest in their own future, he tells her. Why should anyone trust the government to provide for people's futures when Social Security has been giving you x returns while anybody who had invested in the stock market over the same period of time would now have twice as much, if not more? The backbone of his argument is always personal sovereignty, personal freedom, and what he never understands, Delphine dares to tell the treasury-secretary-who-never-was, is that for most people there isn't enough money to make choices and there isn't enough education to make educated guesses — there isn't enough mastery of the market. His model, as she interprets it for him, is based on a notion of radical personal liberty that, in his thinking, is reduced to a radical sovereignty in the market. The surplus and Social Security — those are the two issues that are bugging him, and they talk about them all the time. He seems to hate Clinton most for proposing the Democratic version of everything he wanted. “Good thing,” he tells her, “that little squirt Bob Reich is out of there. He'd have Clinton spending billions of dollars retraining people for jobs they could never occupy. Good thing he left the cabinet. At least they have Bob Rubin there, at least they have one sane guy who knows where the bodies are buried. At least he and Alan kept the interest rates where they had to be. At least he and Alan kept this recovery going...”

The one thing she likes about him is that, aside from his gruff insider's take on economic issues, he happens also to know all of Engels and Marx really well. More impressive, he knows intimately their The German Ideology, a text she has always found fascinating and loves. When he takes her out to dinner down in Great Barrington, things turn both more romantic and more intellectual than they do at lunch in the cafeteria. Over dinner he likes to speak French with her. One of his conquests years ago was Parisian, and he goes on endlessly about this woman. Delphine does not, however, open her mouth like a fish when he talks about his Parisian affair or about his manifold sentimental attachments before and after. About women he brags constantly, in a very suave way that she doesn't, after a while, find suave at all. She cannot stand the fact that he thinks she's impressed by all his conquests, but she puts up with it, only slightly bored, because otherwise she's glad to be having dinner with an intelligent, assertive, well-read man of the world. When at dinner he takes her hand, she says something to let him know, however subtly, that if he thinks he is going to sleep with her, he is crazy. Sometimes in the parking lot, he pulls her to him by cupping her behind and holding her against him. He says, “I cannot be with you time after time like this without some passion. I can't take out a woman as beautiful as you, talk to her and talk to her and talk to her, and have it end there.” “We have a saying in France,” she tells him, “which is...” “Which is what?” he asks, thinking he may pick up a new bon mot in the bargain. Smiling, she says, “I don't know. It'll come to me later,” and in this way gently disentangles herself from his surprisingly strong arms. She is gentle with him because it works, and she is gentle with him because she knows he thinks it is a question of age, when in fact it is a question, as she explains to him driving back in his car, of nothing so banal: it is a question of “a frame of mind.” “It's about who I am,” she tells him, and, if nothing else has done it, that sends him away for two or three months, until he next turns up in the cafeteria, looking to see if she is there. Sometimes he telephones her late at night or in the early hours of the morning. From his Back Bay bed, he wants to talk with her about sex. She says she prefers to talk about Marx, and it takes no more, with this conservative economist, to put a stop to that stuff. And yet the women who don't like her are all sure that because he's powerful she has slept with him. It is incomprehensible to them that, bleak and lonely as her life is, she has no interest in becoming Arthur Sussman's little badge of a mistress. It has also gotten back to her that one of them has called her “so passé, such a parody of Simone de Beauvoir.” By which she means that it is her judgment that Beauvoir sold out to Sartre — a very intelligent woman but in the end his slave. For these women, who observe her at lunch with Arthur Sussman and get it all wrong, everything is an issue, everything is an ideological stance, everything is a betrayal — everything's a selling out. Beauvoir sold out, Delphine sold out, et cetera, et cetera. Something about Delphine makes them go green in the face.

Another of her problems. She does not want to alienate these women. Yet she is no less philosophically isolated from them than from the men. Though it would not be prudent for her to tell them so, the women are far more feminist, in the American sense, than she is. It would not be prudent because they are dismissive enough and seem always to know where she stands anyway, always suspecting her motives and aims: she is attractive, young, thin, effortlessly stylish, she has climbed so high so fast she already has the beginnings of a reputation beyond the college, and, like her Paris friends, she doesn't use or need to use all their clichés (the very clichés by which The Diapers are so eagerly emasculated). Only in the anonymous note to Coleman Silk did she adopt their rhetoric, and that was not only accidental, because she was so overwrought, but, in the end, deliberate, to hide her identity. In truth, she is no less emancipated than these Athena feminists are and perhaps even more: she left her own country, daringly left France, she works hard at her job, she works hard at her publications, and she wants to make it; on her own as she is, she has to make it. She is utterly alone, unsupported, homeless, decountried—dépaysée. In a free state but oftentimes so forlornly dépaysée. Ambitious? She happens to be more ambitious than all those staunch go-it-alone feminists put together, but because men are drawn to her, and among them is a man as eminent as Arthur Sussman, and because, for the fun of it, she wears a vintage Chanel jacket with tight jeans, or a slip dress in summer, and because she likes cashmere and leather, the women are resentful. She makes it a point not to be concerned with their ghastly clothing, so by what right do they dwell on what they consider recidivist about hers? She knows everything they say in their annoyance with her. They say what the men she begrudgingly respects are saying — that she's a charlatan and illegitimate — and that makes it hurt more. They say, “She is fooling the students.” They say, “How can the students not see through this woman?” They say, “Don't they see that she is one of those French male chauvinists in drag?” They say that she got to be the department chair faute de mieux. And they make fun of her language. “Well, of course, it's her intertextual charm that's gotten her her following. It's her relationship to phenomenology. She's such a phenomenologist ha-ha-ha!” She knows what they are saying to ridicule her, and yet she remembers being in France and being at Yale and living for this vocabulary; she believes that to be a good literary critic she has to have this vocabulary. She needs to know about intertextuality. Does that mean she's a phony? No! It means that she's unclassifiable. In some circles that might be thought of as her mystique! But just be the least bit unclassifiable at a backwoods hellhole like this place, and that annoys everyone. Her being unclassifiable even annoys Arthur Sussman. Why the hell won't she at least have phone sex? Be unclassifiable here, be something they cannot reconcile, and they torment you for it. That being unclassifiable is a part of her bildungsroman, that she has always thrived on being unclassifiable, nobody at Athena understands.

There is a cabal of three women — a philosophy professor, a sociology professor, and a history professor — who particularly drive her crazy. Full of animosity toward her simply because she is not ploddingly plugged in the way they are. Because she has an air of chic, they feel she hasn't read enough learned journals. Because their American notions of independence differ from her French notions of independence, she is dismissed by them as pandering to powerful males. But what has she ever actually done to arouse their distrust, except perhaps handle the men on the faculty as well as she does? Yes, she'd been at dinner in Great Barrington with Arthur Sussman. Does that mean she didn't consider herself his intellectual equal? There's no question in her mind that she is his equal. She isn't flattered to be out with him — she wants to hear what he has to say about The German Ideology. And hadn't she first tried to have lunch with the three of them, and could they have been any more condescending? Of course, they don't bother to read her scholarship. None of them reads anything she's written. It's all about perception. All they see is Delphine using what she understands they sarcastically call “her little French aura” on all the tenured men. Yet she is strongly tempted to court the cabal, to tell them in so many words that she doesn't like the French aura — if she did, she'd be living in France! And she doesn't own the tenured men — she doesn't own anyone. Why else would she be by herself, the only person at the desk of a Barton Hall office at ten o'clock at night? Hardly a week goes by when she doesn't try and fail with the three who drive her nuts, who baffle her most, but whom she cannot charm, finesse, or engage in any way. “Les Trois Gráces” she calls them in her letters to Paris, spelling “gráces” maliciously “grasses.” The Three Greaseballs. At certain parties — parties that Delphine doesn't really want to be at—Les Trois Grasses are invariably present. When some big feminist intellectual comes along, Delphine would at least like to be invited, but she never is. She can go to the lecture but she's never asked to the dinner. But the infernal trio who call the shots, they are always there.

In imperfect revolt against her Frenchness (as well as being obsessed with her Frenchness), lifted voluntarily out of her country (if not out of herself), so ensnared by the disapproval of Les Trois Grasses as to be endlessly calculating what response might gain her their esteem without further obfuscating her sense of herself and misrepresenting totally the inclinations of the woman she once naturally was, at times destabilized to the point of shame by the discrepancy between how she must deal with literature in order to succeed professionally and why she first came to literature, Delphine, to her astonishment, is all but isolated in America. Decountried, isolated, estranged, confused about everything essential to a life, in a desperate state of bewildered longing and surrounded on all sides by admonishing forces defining her as the enemy. And all because she'd gone eagerly in search of an existence of her own. All because she'd been courageous and refused to take the prescribed view of herself. She seemed to herself to have subverted herself in the altogether admirable effort to make herself. There is something very mean about life that it should have done this to her. At its heart, very mean and very vengeful, ordering a fate not according to the laws of logic but to the antagonistic whim of perversity. Dare to give yourself over to your own vitality, and you might as well be in the hands of a hardened criminal. I will go to America and be the author of my life, she says; I will construct myself outside the orthodoxy of my family's given, I will fight against the given, impassioned subjectivity carried to the limit, individualism at its best — and she winds up instead in a drama beyond her control. She winds up as the author of nothing. There is the drive to master things, and the thing that is mastered is oneself.

Why should it be so impossible just to know what to do?

Delphine would be entirely isolated if not for the department secretary, Margo Luzzi, a mousy divorcee in her thirties, also lonely, wonderfully competent, shy as can be, who will do anything for Delphine and sometimes eats her sandwich in Delphine's office and who has wound up as the chairperson's only adult woman friend at Athena. Then there are the writers in residence. They appear to like in her exactly what the others hate. But she cannot stand them. How did she get in the middle like this? And how does she get out? As it does not offer any solace to dramatize her compromises as a Faustian bargain, so it isn't all that helpful to think of her in-the-middleness, as she tries to, as a “Kunderian inner exile.”

Seeks. All right then, seeks. Do as the students say — Go for it! Youthful, petite, womanly, attractive, academically successful SWF French-born scholar, Parisian background, Yale Ph.D., Mass.-based, seeks...? And now just lay it on the line. Do not hide from the truth of what you are and do not hide from the truth of what you seek. A stunning, brilliant, hyperorgasmic woman seeks ... seeks ... seeks specifically and uncompromisingly what?

She wrote now in a rush.

Mature man with backbone. Unattached. Independent. Witty. Lively. Defiant. Forthright. Well educated. Satirical spirit. Charm. Knowledge and love of great books. Well spoken and straight-speaking. Trimly built. Five eight or nine. Mediterranean complexion. Green eyes preferred. Age unimportant. But must be intellectual. Graying hair acceptable, even desirable...

And then, and only then, did the mythical man being summoned forth in all earnestness on the screen condense into a portrait of someone she already knew. Abruptly she stopped writing. The exercise had been undertaken only as an experiment, to try loosening the grip of inhibition just a little before she renewed her effort to compose an ad not too diluted by circumspection. Nonetheless, she was astonished by what she'd come up with, by whom she'd come up with, in her distress wanting nothing more than to delete those forty-odd useless words as quickly as possible. And thinking, too, of the many reasons, including her shame, for her to accept defeat as a blessing and forgo hope of solving her in-the-middleness by participating in such an impossibly compromising scheme ... Thinking that if she had stayed in France she wouldn't need this ad, wouldn't need an ad for anything, least of all to find a man ... Thinking that coming to America was the bravest thing she had ever done, but that how brave she couldn't have known at the time. She just did it as the next step of her ambition, and not a crude ambition either, a dignified ambition, the ambition to be independent, but now she's left with the consequences. Ambition. Adventure. Glamour. The glamour of going to America. The superiority. The superiority of leaving. Left for the pleasure of one day coming home, having done it, of returning home triumphant. Left because I wanted to come home one day and have them say — what is it that I wanted them to say? “She did it. She did that. And if she did that, she can do anything. A girl who weighs a hundred and four pounds, barely five foot two, twenty years old, on her own, went there on her own with a name that didn't mean anything to anybody, and she did it. Self-made. Nobody knew her. Made herself.” And who was it that I wanted to have said it? And if they had, what difference would it make? “Our daughter in America...” I wanted them to say, to have to say, “She made it on her own in America.” Because I could not make a French success, a real success, not with my mother and her shadow over everything — the shadow of her accomplishments but, even worse, of her family, the shadow of the Walincourts, named for the place given to them in the thirteenth century by the king Saint Louis and conforming still to the family ideals as they were set in the thirteenth century. How Delphine hated all those families, the pure and ancient aristocracy of the provinces, all of them thinking the same, looking the same, sharing the same stifling values and the same stifling religious obedience. However much ambition they have, however much they push their children, they bring their children up to the same litany of charity, selflessness, discipline, faith, and respect — respect not for the individual (down with the individual!) but for the traditions of the family. Superior to intelligence, to creativity, to a deep development of oneself apart from them, superior to everything, were the traditions of the stupid Walincourts! It was Delphine's mother who embodied those values, who imposed them on the household, who would have enchained her only daughter to those values from birth to the grave had her daughter been without the strength, from adolescence on, to run from her as far as she could. The Walincourt children of Delphine's generation either fell into absolute conformity or rebelled so gruesomely they were incomprehensible, and Delphine's success was to have done neither. From a background few ever even begin to recover from, Delphine had managed a unique escape. By coming to America, to Yale, to Athena, she had, in fact, surpassed her mother, who couldn't herself have dreamed of leaving France — without Delphine's father and his money, Catherine de Walincourt could hardly dream, at twenty-two, of leaving Picardy for Paris. Because if she left Picardy and the fortress of her family, who would she be? What would her name mean? I left because I wanted to have an accomplishment that nobody could mistake, that had nothing to do with them, that was my own ... Thinking that the reason she can't get an American man isn't that she can't get an American man, it's that she can't understand these men and that she will never understand these men, and the reason she can't understand these men is because she is not fluent. With all her pride in her fluency, with all her fluency, she is not fluent! I think I understand them, and I do understand; what I don't understand isn't what they say, it's everything they don't say, everything they're not saying. Here she operates at fifty percent of her intelligence, and in Paris she understood every nuance. What's the point of being smart here when, because I am not from here, I am de facto dumb ... Thinking that the only English she really understands — no, the only American she understands — is academic American, which is hardly American, which is why she can't make it in, will never make it in, which is why there'll never be a man, why this will never be her home, why her intuitions are wrong and always will be, why the cozy intellectual life she had in Paris as a student will never be hers again, why for the rest of her life she is going to understand eleven percent of this country and zero percent of these men ... Thinking that all her intellectual advantages have been muted by her being dépaysée... Thinking that she has lost her peripheral vision, that she sees things that are in front of her but nothing out of the corner of her eye, that what she has here is not the vision of a woman of her intelligence but a flat, a totally frontal vision, the vision of an immigrant or a displaced person, a misplaced person ... Thinking, Why did I leave? Because of my mother's shadow? This is why I gave up everything that was mine, everything that was familiar, everything that had made me a subtle being and not this mess of uncertainty that I've become. Everything that I loved I gave up. People do that when their countries are impossible to live in because the fascists have taken change but not because of their mother's shadow ... Thinking, Why did I leave, what have I done, this is impossible. My friends, our talk, my city, the men, all the intelligent men. Confident men I could converse with. Mature men who could understand. Stable, passionate, masculine men. Strong, unintimidated men. Men legitimately and unambiguously men ... Thinking, Why didn't somebody stop me, why didn't somebody say something to me? Away from home for less than ten years and it feels like two lifetimes already ... Thinking that she's Catherine de Walincourt Roux's little daughter still, that she has not changed that by one iota ... Thinking that being French in Athena may have made her exotic to the natives, but it hasn't made her anything more extraordinary to her mother and it never will ... Thinking, yes, that's why she left, to elude her mother's fixedforever overshadowing shadow, and that's what blocks her return, and now she's exactly nowhere, in the middle, neither there nor here ... Thinking that under her exotic Frenchness she is to herself who she always was, that all the exotic Frenchness has achieved in America is to make of her the consummate miserable, misunderstood foreigner ... Thinking that she's worse even than in the middle — that she's in exile, in, of all things, a stupid-making, self-imposed anguishing exile from her mother — Delphine neglects to observe that earlier, at the outset, instead of addressing the ad to the New York Review of Books, she had automatically addressed it to the recipients of her previous communication, the recipients of most of her communications — to the ten staff members of the Athena Department of Languages and Literature. She neglects first to observe that mistake and then, in her distracted, turbulent, emotionally taxing state, neglects also to observe that instead of hitting the delete button, she is adding one common-enough tiny error to another common-enough tiny error by hitting the send button instead. And so off, irretrievably off goes the ad in quest of a Coleman Silk duplicate or facsimile, and not to the classified section of the New York Review of Books but to every member of her department.

It was past 1A.M. when the phone rang. She had long ago fled her office — run from her office thinking only to get her passport and flee the country — and it was already several hours after her regular bedtime, when the phone rang with the news. So anguished was she by the ad's inadvertently going out as e-mail that she was still awake and roaming her apartment, tearing at her hair, sneering in the mirror at her face, bending her head to the kitchen table to weep into her hands, and, as though startled out of sleep — the sleep of a heretofore meticulously defended adult life — jumping up to cry aloud, “It did not happen! I did not do it!” But who had then? In the past there seemed always to be people trying their best to trample her down, to dispose somehow of the nuisance she was to them, callous people against whom she had learned the hard way to protect herself. But tonight there was no one to reproach: her own hand had delivered the ruinous blow.

Frantic, in a frenzy, she tried to figure out some way, any way, to prevent the worst from happening, but in her state of incredulous despair she could envision the inevitability of only the most cataclysmic trajectory: the hours passing, the dawn breaking, the doors to Barton Hall opening, her departmental colleagues each entering his or her office, booting up the computer, and finding there, to savor with their morning coffee, the e-mail ad for a Coleman Silk duplicate that she'd had no intention of ever sending. To be read once, twice, three times over by all the members of her department and then to be e-mailed down the line to every last instructor, professor, administrator, office clerk, and student.

Everyone in her classes will read it. Her secretary will read it. Before the day is out, the president of the college will have read it, and the college trustees. And even if she were to claim that the ad had been meant as a joke, nothing more than an insider's joke, why would the trustees allow the joke's perpetrator to remain at Athena? Especially after her joke is written up in the student paper, as it will be. And in the local paper. After it is picked up by the French papers.

Her mother! The humiliation for her mother! And her father! The disappointment to him! All the conformist Walincourt cousins — the pleasure they will take in her defeat! All the ridiculously conservative uncles and the ridiculously pious aunts, together keeping intact the narrowness of the past — how this will please them as they sit snobbishly side by side in church! But suppose she explained that she had merely been experimenting with the ad as a literary form, alone at the office disinterestedly toying with the personal ad as ... as utilitarian haiku. Won't help. Too ridiculous. Nothing will help. Her mother, her father, her brothers, her friends, her teachers. Yale. Yale! News of the scandal will reach everyone she's ever known, and the shame will follow her unflaggingly forever. Where can she even run with her passport? Montreal? Martinique? And earn her living how? No, not in the farthest Francophone outpost will she be allowed to teach once they learn of her ad. The pure, prestigious professional life for which she had done all this planning, all this grueling work, the untainted, irreproachable life of the mind ... She thought to phone Arthur Sussman. Arthur will figure a way out for her. He can pick up the phone and talk to anyone. He's tough, he's shrewd, in the ways of the world the smartest, most influential American she knows. Powerful people like Arthur, however upright, are not boxed in by the need to always be telling the truth. He'll come up with what it takes to explain everything. He'll figure out just what to do. But when she tells him what has happened, why will he think to help her? All he'll think is that she liked Coleman Silk more than she liked him. His vanity will do his thinking for him and lead him to the stupidest conclusion. He'll think what everyone will think: that she is pining for Coleman Silk, that she is dreaming not of Arthur Sussman, let alone of The Diapers or The Hats, but of Coleman Silk. Imagining her in love with Coleman Silk, he'll slam down the phone and never speak to her again.

To recapitulate. To go over what's happened. To try to gain sufficient perspective to do the rational thing. She didn't want to send it. She wrote it, yes, but she was embarrassed to send it and didn't want to send it and she didn't send it — yet it went. The same with the anonymous letter — she didn't want to send it, carried it to New York with no intention of ever sending it, and it went. But what's gone off this time is much, much worse. This time she's so desperate that by twenty after one in the morning the rational thing is to telephone Arthur Sussman regardless of what he thinks. Arthur has to help her. He has to tell her what she can do to undo what she's done. And then, at exactly twenty past one, the phone she holds in her hand to dial Arthur Sussman suddenly begins to ring. Arthur calling her!

But it is her secretary. “He's dead,” Margo says, crying so hard that Delphine can't be quite sure what she's hearing. “Margo — are you all right?” “He's dead!” “Who is?” “I just heard. Delphine. It's terrible. I'm calling you, I have to, I have to call you. I have to tell you something terrible. Oh, Delphine, it's late, I know it's late—” “No! Not Arthur!” Delphine cries. “Dean Silk!” Margo says. “Is dead?” “A terrible crash. It's too horrible.” “What crash? Margo, what has happened? Where? Speak slowly. Start again. What are you telling me?” “In the river. With a woman. In his car. A crash.” Margo is by now unable to be at all coherent, while Delphine is so stunned that, later, she does not remember putting down the receiver or rushing in tears to her bed or lying there howling his name.

She put down the receiver, and then she spent the worst hours of her life.

Because of the ad they'll think she liked him? They'll think she loved him because of the ad? But what would they think if they saw her now, carrying on like the widow herself? She cannot close her eyes, because when she does she sees his eyes, those green staring eyes of his, exploding. She sees the car plunge off the road, and his head is shooting forward, and in the instant of the crash, his eyes explode. “No! No!” But when she opens her eyes to stop seeing his eyes, all she sees is what she's done and the mockery that will ensue. She sees her disgrace with her eyes open and his disintegration with her eyes shut, and throughout the night the pendulum of suffering swings her from one to the other.

She wakes up in the same state of upheaval she was in when she went to sleep. She can't remember why she is shaking. She thinks she is shaking from a nightmare. The nightmare of his eyes exploding. But no, it happened, he's dead. And the ad—it happened. Everything has happened, and nothing's to be done. I wanted them to say ... and now they'll say, “Our daughter in America? We don't talk about her. She no longer exists for us.” When she tries to compose herself and settle on a plan of action, no thinking is possible: only the derangement is possible, the spiraling obtuseness that is terror. It is just after 5 A.M. She closes her eyes to try to sleep and make it all go away, but the instant her eyes are shut, there are his eyes. They are staring at her and then they explode.

She is dressing. She is screaming. She is walking out her door and it's barely dawn. No makeup. No jewelry. Just her horrified face. Coleman Silk is dead.

When she reaches the campus there's no one there. Only crows. It's so early the flag hasn't yet been raised. Every morning she looks for it atop North Hall, and every morning, upon seeing it, there is the moment of satisfaction. She left home, she dared to do it — she is in America! There is the contentment with her own courage and the knowledge that it hasn't been easy. But the American flag's not there, and she doesn't see that it's not. She sees nothing but what she must do.

She has a key to Barton Hall and she goes in. She gets to her office. She's done that much. She's hanging on. She's thinking now. Okay. But how does she get into their offices to get at their computers? It's what she should have done last night instead of running away in a panic. To regain her self-possession, to rescue her name, to forestall the disaster of ruining her career, she must continue to think. Thinking has been her whole life. What else has she been trained to do from the time she started school? She leaves her office and walks down the corridor. Her aim is clear now, her thinking decisive. She will just go in and delete it. It is her right to delete it — she sent it. And she did not even do that. It was not intentional. She's not responsible. It just went. But when she tries the handle of each of the doors, they are locked. Next she tries working her keys into the locks, first her key to the building, then the key to her office, but neither works. Of course they don't work. They wouldn't have worked last night and they don't work now. As for thinking, were she able to think like Einstein, thinking will not open these doors.

Back in her own office, she unlocks her files. Looking for what? Her c.v. Why look for her c.v.? It is the end of her c.v. It is the end of our daughter in America. And because it is the end, she pulls all the hanging files out of the drawer and hurls them on the floor. Empties the entire drawer. “We have no daughter in America. We have no daughter. We have only sons.” Now she does not try to think that she should think. Instead, she begins throwing things. Whatever is piled on her desk, whatever is decorating her walls — what difference does it make what breaks? She tried and she failed. It is the end of the impeccable résumé and of the veneration of the résumé. “Our daughter in America failed.”

She is sobbing when she picks up the phone to call Arthur. He will jump out of bed and drive straight from Boston. In less than three hours he'll be in Athena. By nine o'clock Arthur will be here! But the number she dials is the emergency number on the decal pasted to the phone. And she had no more intention of dialing that number than of sending the two letters. All she had was the very human wish to be saved.

She cannot speak.

“Hello?” says the man at the other end. “Hello? Who is this?”

She barely gets it out. The most irreducible two words in any language. One's name. Irreducible and irreplaceable. All that is her. Was her. And now the two most ridiculous words in the world.

“Who? Professor who? I can't understand you, Professor.”

“Security?”

“Speak louder, Professor. Yes, yes, this is Campus Security.”

“Come here,” she says pleadingly, and once again she is in tears. “Right away. Something terrible has happened.”

“Professor? Where are you? Professor, what's happened?”

“Barton.” She says it again so he can understand. “Barton 121,” she tells him. “Professor Roux.”

“What is it, Professor?”

“Something terrible.”

“Are you all right? What's wrong? What is it? Is somebody there?”

“I'm here.”

“Is everything all right?”

“Someone broke in.”

“Broke in where?”

“My office.”

“When? Professor, when?”

“I don't know. In the night. I don't know.”

“You okay? Professor? Professor Roux? Are you there? Barton Hall? You sure?”

The hesitation. Trying to think. Am I sure? Am I? “Absolutely,” she says, sobbing uncontrollably now. “Hurry, please! Get here immediately, please! Someone broke into my office! It's a shambles! It's awful! It's horrible! My things! Someone broke into my computer! Hurry!”

“A break-in? Do you know who it was? Do you know who broke in? Was it a student?”

“Dean Silk broke in,” she said. “Hurry!”

“Professor — Professor, are you there? Professor Roux, Dean Silk is dead.”

“I've heard,” she said, “I know, it's awful,” and then she screamed, screamed at the horror of all that had happened, screamed at the thought of the very last thing he had ever done, and to her, to her— and after that, Delphine's day was a circus.

The astonishing news of Dean Silk's death in a car crash with an Athena college janitor had barely reached the last of the college's classrooms when word began to spread of the pillaging of Delphine Roux's office and the e-mail hoax Dean Silk had attempted to perpetrate only hours before the fatal crash. People were having trouble enough believing all of this, when another story, one about the circumstances of the crash, spread from town up to the college, further confounding just about everybody. For all its atrocious details, the story was said to have originated with a reliable source: the brother of the state trooper who had found the bodies. According to his story, the reason the dean lost control of his car was because, from the passenger seat beside him, the Athena woman janitor was satisfying him while he drove. This the police were able to infer from the disposition of his clothing and the position of her body and its location in the vehicle when the wreckage was discovered and pulled from the river.

Most of the faculty, particularly older professors who had known Coleman Silk personally for many years, refused at first to believe this story, and were outraged by the gullibility with which it was being embraced as incontrovertible truth — the cruelty of the insult appalled them. Yet as the day progressed and additional facts emerged about the break-in, and still more came out about Silk's affair with the janitor — reports from numerous people who had seen them sneaking around together — it became increasingly difficult for the elders of the faculty “to remain”—as the local paper noted the next day in its human interest feature—“heartbreakingly in denial.”

And when people began to remember how, a couple of years earlier, no one had wanted to believe that he had called two of his black students spooks; when they remembered how after resigning in disgrace he had isolated himself from his former colleagues, how on the rare occasions when he was seen in town he was abrupt to the point of rudeness with whoever happened to run into him; when they remembered that in his vociferous loathing of everything and everyone having to do with Athena he was said to have managed to estrange himself from his own children ... well, even those who had begun the day dismissing any suggestion that Coleman Silk's life could have come to so hideous a conclusion, the old-timers who found it unendurable to think of a man of his intellectual stature, a charismatic teacher, a dynamic and influential dean, a charming, vigorous man still hale and hearty in his seventies and the father of four grown, wonderful kids, as forsaking everything he'd once valued and sliding so precipitously into the scandalous death of an alienated, bizarre outsider — even those people had to face up to the thoroughgoing transformation that had followed upon the spooks incident and that had not only brought Coleman Silk to his mortifying end but led as well — led inexcusably — to the gruesome death of Faunia Farley, the hapless thirty-four-year-old illiterate whom, as everyone now knew, he had taken in old age as his mistress.