CHARLES BAXTER
The Feast of Love

DEDICATION

In loving memory of my brother

THOMAS HOOKER BAXTER

(1939–1998)

Yes, there were times when I forgot not only who I was, but that I was, forgot to be.

—SAMUEL BECKETT, Molloy

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Beginnings

Preludes

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Middles

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-One

Ends

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Twenty-Four

Twenty-Five

Twenty-Six

Twenty-Seven

Postludes

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Praise

By the Same Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

BEGINNINGS

PRELUDES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ON THE FIRST FLOOR near the foot of the stairs, we have placed on the wall an antique mirror so old that it can’t reflect anything anymore. Its surface, worn down to nubbled grainy gray stubs, has lost one of its dimensions. Like me, it’s glimmerless. You can’t see into it now, just past it. Depth has been replaced by texture. This mirror gives back nothing and makes no productive claim upon anyone. The mirror has been so completely worn away that you have to learn to live with what it refuses to do. That’s its beauty.

I have put on jeans, a shirt, shoes. I will take a walk. I glide past the nonmirroring mirror, unseen, thinking myself a vampire who soaks up essences other than blood. I go outside to Woodland Drive and saunter to the end of the block onto a large vacant lot. Here I am, a mere neighbor, somnambulating, harmless, no longer a menace to myself or to anyone else, and, stage by stage, feeling calmer now that I am outside.

As all the neighbors know, no house will ever be built on the ground where I am standing because of subsurface problems with water drainage. In the fladands of Michigan the water stays put. The storm sewers have proven to be inadequate, with the result that this property, at the base of the hill on which our street was laid, always floods following thunderstorms and stays wet for weeks. The neighborhood kids love it. After rains they shriek their way to the puddles.

ABOVE ME in the clear night sky, the moon, Earth’s mad companion, is belting out show tunes. A Rodgers and Hart medley, this is, including “Where or When.” The moon has a good baritone voice. No: someone from down the block has an audio system on. Apparently I am still quite sleepy and disoriented. The moon, it seems, is not singing after all.

I turn away from the vacant lot and head east along its edge, taking the sidewalk that leads to the path into what is called Pioneer Woods. These woods border the houses on my street. I know the path by heart. I have taken walks on this path almost every day for the last twenty years. Our dog, Tasha, walks through here as mechanically as I do except when she sees a squirrel. In the moonlight the path that I am following has the appearance of the tunnel that Beauty walks through to get to the Beast, and though I cannot see what lies at the other end of the tunnel, I do not need to see it. I could walk it blind.

ON THE PATH NOW, urged leftward toward a stand of maples, I hear the sound of droplets falling through the leaves. It can’t be raining. There are still stars visible intermittently overhead. No: here are the gypsy moths, still in their caterpillar form, chewing at the maple and serviceberry leaves, devouring our neighborhood forest leaf by leaf. Night gives them no rest. The woods have been infested with them, and during the day the sun shines through these trees as if spring were here, bare stunned nubs of gnawed and nibbled leaves casting almost no shade on the ground, where the altered soil chemistry, thanks to the caterpillars’ leavings, has killed most of the seedlings, leaving only disagreeably enlarged thorny and deep-rooted thistles, horror-movie phantasm vegetation with deep root systems. The trees are coated, studded, with caterpillars, their bare trunks hairy and squirming. I can barely see them but can hear their every scrape and crawl.

The city has sprayed this forest with Bacillus thuringiensis, two words I love to say to myself, and the bacillus has killed some of these pests; their bodies lie on the path, where my seemingly adhesive shoes pick them up. I can feel them under my soles in the dark as I walk, squirming semiliquid life. Squish, squoosh. And in my night confusion it is as if I can hear the leaves being gnawed, the forest being eaten alive, shred by shred. I cannot bear it. They are not mild, these moths. Their appetites are blindingly voracious, obsessive. An acquaintance has told me that the Navahos refer to someone with an emotional illness as “moth crazy.”

ON THE OTHER SIDE of the woods I come out onto the edge of a street, Stadium Boulevard, and walk down a slope toward the corner, where a stoplight is blinking red in two directions. I turn east and head toward the University of Michigan football stadium, the largest college football stadium in the country. The greater part of it was excavated below ground; only a small part of its steel and concrete structure is visible from here, the corner of Stadium and Main, just east of Pioneer High School. Cars pass occasionally on the street, their drivers hunched over, occasionally glancing at me in a fearful or predatory manner. Two teenagers out here are skateboarding in the dark, clattering over the pavement, doing their risky and amazing ankle-busting curb jumping. They grunt and holler. Both white, they have fashioned Rasta-wear for themselves, dreads and oversized unbuttoned vests over bare skin. I check my watch. It is 1:30. I stop to make sure that no patrol cars are passing and then make my way through the turnstiles. The university has planned to build an enormous iron fence around this place, but it’s not here yet. I am trespassing now and subject to arrest. After entering the tunneled walkway of Gate 19, I find myself at the south end zone, in the kingdom of football.

Inside the stadium, I feel the hushed moonlight on my back and sit down on a metal bench. The August meteor shower now seems to be part of this show. I am two thirds of the way up. These seats are too high for visibility and too coldly metallic for comfort, but the place is so massive that it makes most individual judgments irrelevant. Like any coliseum, it defeats privacy and solitude through sheer size. Carved out of the earth, sized for hordes and giants, bloody injuries and shouting, and so massive that no glance can take it all in, the stadium can be considered the staging ground for epic events, and not just football: in 1964, President Lyndon Baines Johnson announced his Great Society program here.

On every home-game Saturday in the fall, blimps and biplanes pulling advertising banners putter in semicircles overhead. Starting about three hours before kickoff, our street begins to be clogged with parked cars and RVs driven by midwesterners in various states of happy pre-inebriation, and when I rake the leaves in my back yard I hear the tidal clamor of the crowd in the distance, half a mile away. The crowd at the game is loudly traditional and antiphonal: one side of the stadium roars GO and the other side roars BLUE. The sounds rise to the sky, also blue, but nonpartisan.

The moonlight reflects off the rows of stands. I look down at the field, now, at 1:45 in the morning. A midsummer night’s dream is being enacted down there.

This old moon wanes! She lingers my desires and those of a solitary naked couple, barely visible down there right now on the fifty-yard line, making love, on this midsummer night.

They are making soft distant audibles.

BACK OUT ON THE SIDEWALK, I turn west and walk toward Allmendinger Park. I see the park’s basketball hoops and tennis courts and monkey bars illuminated dimly by the streetlight. Near the merry-go-round, the city planners have bolted several benches into the ground for sedentary parents watching their children. I used to watch my son from that very spot. As I stroll by on the sidewalk, I think I see someone, some shadowy figure in a jacket, emerging as if out of a fog or mist, sitting on a bench accompanied by a dog, but certainly not watching any children, this man, not at this time of night, and as I draw closer, he looks up, and so does the dog, a somewhat nondescript collie-Labrador-shepherd mix. I know this dog. I also know the man sitting next to him. I have known him for years. His arms are flung out on both sides of the bench, and his legs are crossed, and in addition to the jacket (a dark blue Chicago Bulls windbreaker), he’s wearing a baseball hat, as if he were not quite adult, as if he had not quite given up the dreams of youth and athletic grace and skill. His name is Bradley W. Smith.

His chinos are one size too large for him—they bag around his hips and his knees—and he’s wearing a shirt with a curious design that I cannot quite make out, an interlocking M. C. Escher giraffe pattern, giraffes linked to giraffes, but it can’t be that, it can’t be what I think it is. In the dark my friend looks like an exceptionally handsome toad. The dog snaps at a moth, then puts his head on his owner’s leg. I might be hallucinating the giraffes on the man’s shirt, or I might simply be mistaken. He glances at me in the dark as I sit down next to him on the bench.

“Hey,” he says, “Charlie. What the hell are you doing out here? What’s up?”

ONE

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Difficult job.”

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

“His name is … what?”

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

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

“What things?”

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

“Okay.”

“Oh, you know. I was seeing spots.”

“Spots?”

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

“You mean like gears or something?”

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

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

“No, I didn’t.”

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

“No, I don’t.”

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

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

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

“Oh, I’m respectable,” I tell him.

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

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

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

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

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

“Right. I know where I am now.”

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

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

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

“Twelve years,” I say.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I have no idea.”

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

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

“That’s private.”

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

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

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

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

The Clever Men at Oxford Know all that there is to be knowed But they none of them know one half as much As intelligent Mr. Toad.

“Anyway, I got on her nerves after a while. And of course, she was a lesbian, sort of, a little bit of one, a sexual tourist, but we could have handled the tourism part, given enough time. At least that’s what I thought. The real problem was that she didn’t like how inconsistent I was. She thought I was the man of a thousand faces, nice in the morning, not so nice at night. Men like me exasperated her. She once called me the Lon Chaney of the Midwest, the Lon Chaney with the monster light bulb burning inside his cheekbone. The phantom, she called me, of the opera.” He waits for a moment. “What opera? There’s no opera in this town.”

He stares up into the night sky, then continues. “Well, at least I was a star. You know, women admire physical beauty in men more than they claim they do.” He says this to me conspiratorially, as if imparting a deep secret. He sighs. “Don’t kid yourself on that score.”

“I would never kid myself about that,” I tell him. “This isn’t Diana you’re talking about? This is Kathryn?”

“No,” he sighs angrily, “not Diana. Of course not. No, goddamn it, I told you: this was my first. My starter marriage. You met her, I know that. Kathryn.”

“No,” I say, “I don’t remember her. But you weren’t married to Diana so long either.”

“Maybe not,” he mutters, “but I loved her. Especially after we were divorced. A fate-prank. She loved someone else before I married her and she loved him while I was married to her, and she loves him now. The dog and I sit out here and we think about her, and about the business that I own, the coffee business. I don’t actually know what the dog thinks about.” A little air pocket of silence opens up between us. I hear him breathing, and I look down at his clasped hands. One of the hands reaches into his pants pocket for a dog treat, which he hands to Junior, who gobbles it down.

“You shouldn’t do that. Get lost in nostalgia, I mean. But Diana was beautiful,” I say.

“She still is. And I’m not nostalgic.”

“But she was unfaithful to you,” I tell him. “You can’t love someone who does that.”

“I almost could. She was powerful. She had me in a kind of spell, I’m not kidding.” He looks straight at me. “Nearly a goddess, Diana. I could let her destroy me. In flames. I’d go down in flames watching her.”

Just as he finishes this sentence, some noise—it sounds like a crow cawing—filters down to us from very high in the nearby trees. Odd: I cannot remember ever hearing a crow at night. At the same time that I have this thought, I hear a man laugh twice, distantly, from the houses behind us. A horribly mean laugh, this is. It makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

“Oh, by the way,” I say, “I just came from the football stadium. Guess what I saw.”

“They’re going to put a big fence around that place.” He laughs. “Didn’t you know that? A big fence. With a gigantic new Vegas-style scoreboard. People like you keep trying to get in.”

“There’s no fence around it now,” I tell him.

“I can see where this is going,” Bradley snorts. “Walking around at night, you’re soaking up material for your book, The Feast of Love, and what to your wandering eyes should appear? I know exactly what appeared. You saw some kids who’d snuck into the stadium and were actively naked on the fifty-yard line.”

“Well, yes.” I wait, disappointed. “How did you know? I mean, I thought it was rather sweet. And you know, I was touched.”

“Touched.”

“It’s hard to describe. Their …”

His curiosity gleams at me from his permanently love-struck face.

“Oh, you know,” I say. “The waning moon was shining down on them. Like A Midsummer Night’s Dream, or something of the sort.”

“All right, sure. I know. Love on the field of play. Happens all the time, though,” he says in a calmer and possibly sedated voice. For a moment I wonder if he’s on Prozac. “Didn’t you know that? I grew up around here, so I should know. Kids sneaking in, it’s a big deal for them, they can point to the fifty-yard line and say, ‘Hey, man, guess what I did down there with my girlfriend? That’s where I got laid, Bub, right down there where that big guy is being taken off on a stretcher.’”

“Well,” I say, “I gotta go.”

He grabs my arm in a strong grip. “No you don’t. That’s the most ridiculous claim I ever heard. It’s two in the morning. You don’t have to go anywhere.”

“My wife’s expecting me back.”

He sits up suddenly. “Listen, Charlie,” he says. “I’ve got an idea. It’ll solve all your problems and it’ll solve mine. Why don’t you let me talk? Let everybody talk. I’ll send you people, you know, actual people, for a change, like for instance human beings who genuinely exist, and you listen to them for a while. Everybody’s got a story, and we’ll just start telling you the stories we have.”

“What do you think I am, an anthropologist?” I mull it over. “No, sorry, Bradley, it won’t work. I’d have to fictionalize you. I’d have to fictionalize this dog here.” I pat Junior on the head. Junior smiles again: a very stupid and very friendly dog, but not a character in a novel.

“Well, change your habits. And, believe me, it will work. Listen to this.” He clears his throat. “Okay. Chapter One. Every relationship has at least one really good day …”

TWO

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

I DON’T THINK that Kathryn and I had been married more than about two months when this event I’m about to describe occurred. About five years ago, we were living in a little basement apartment, and we both were working two jobs. She had a part-time job at the library during the day and she was waiting tables at night. I was the day manager at a coffee shop—not the place where I am now—and getting headaches from the overhead lighting, and I was also doing some house painting, but it was late autumn and the work came in fits and starts.

Kathryn was strong and spirited, she once even threw a chair at me, but she had one fear. She was profoundly afraid of dogs. And not because she had ever been bitten. She claimed she hadn’t been bitten. No: it was just that when she saw one of these animals, on or off a leash, walking toward her, the hair on the back of her neck stood up. What you might call primal terror. She had no idea of the source of this fear. She just wanted to run away. I once saw her gallop down a steep hill in the Arboretum to escape a dog, a German shepherd puppy that had trotted up to her, its tail wagging, for a head pat. When I caught up to her, she was crying. “I don’t ever want to come back here again,” she said. “I can’t bear it.”

“It was a puppy, Kathryn,” I told her.

“I don’t care what it was. None of that matters,” she said. I had my arms around her, but then she turned so that she broke free of my embrace. She ran back to our car and locked herself inside, and I had to beg her to let me in. Man, I had to beg. And I ain’t too proud to beg. She had had her hair pinned up, but in her panic it had fallen down around her face, little tendrils, and her face was blotched with her crying. God, you know I hate to say it, but she was gorgeous like that, and I would have liked to help her. You need to do something for people when they get terrified, but terror is usually so vague, you can’t talk it out of anyone. What are you going to do when it doesn’t matter what you say?

But it’s a funny thing about other people’s phobias, when you don’t share them: you pick at them, like a scab. You want to remove them.

So on this day I’m telling you about, we were both free of our jobs, Kathryn and I, one of those late autumn midwestern Sundays, with a few golden leaves still attached to the trees, you know, last remnants, leaves soaked with cold rain and sticking to the car windshield or clinging to the branches they came from. She woke up and we made love and I said, I’ll make you breakfast, and I did, my specialty, scrambled eggs with onions and hot sauce, and then I made coffee, while she sat at the table, smiling, with her legs tucked under her. That was something she did. She sat in chairs with her legs tucked under her like that.

We lazed around and read the Sunday paper and I massaged her neck and then we made love again, and then she said, “I want to go somewhere. Toadie, take me somewhere today, please?” So I said, Okay, sure. We got dressed for the second or third time that day, and we cleared off the pizza boxes from the front seat of my car, do you remember it? that old Ford Escort with the bad clutch? and we drove off. By this time it was about noon, maybe a bit after that.

Without considering what I was doing, I found myself driving up toward the Humane Society, and I thought, the Humane Society? No, I really shouldn’t be doing this, but I kept driving because I was distracted by the leaves and by a knocking noise from the engine, which turned out to be the lifters, though I only discovered that later.

“Uh, excuse me, but where’re we going?” Kathryn asked.

“Up there,” I said in my cryptic secretive way. I did have those kennels and cages in mind but thought I should keep quiet about it. You can’t tell some women everything. You just can’t. Once we arrived, we parked in the lot, close to this animal bunker that the Humane Society is housed in, and you could hear the barking echoing off the walls and the trees. My God, could you hear it. A deaf person could hear it. It’s constant and unrelenting. When they’re in that condition, dogs have a kind of howl that’s close to human, and it makes your body grip up; your nerves get restless and uneasy, listening to dogs crying out, carrying on. The old alarms seep down into your bones, right into the marrow where fear is lodged. And what I did in the car was, I sneezed, and Kathryn watched me sneeze without saying anything. No gesundheit, no God bless you, no nothing. She let me sneeze. Then she waited some more. I waited, too.

“Is this what I think it is?” she asked. “Is this your great idea of where to take me on Sunday, our day off? Because, the thing is, I’m not going in there.”

“Kathryn,” I said, “it’s the Humane Society. They’re in cages.”

“No, Bradley,” she said. “I won’t. You probably mean well, probably, I’ll give you credit, but, no, I won’t go in there.”

“I’ll hold you,” I said.

“Hold me?”

“Honey, I’ll hold you around the shoulders. And I have an idea. Kathryn, I have an idea about what you should do when you get inside.”

“I don’t care what your idea is.”

“I know it. I know you don’t care. But let’s try. Come on, honey,” I said, and I took her hand for a moment. After we got out of the car, I could tell she was terrified because her knees were shaking. Have you ever seen a woman’s knees in a spasm? From fear? It is not a sight that lifts you up.

In the anteroom, which I remember because the floor was covered with green-mottled linoleum and also because the air was fragrant with a mixture of Lysol and Mr. Clean, the receptionist asked us what we were there for, and I said, well, we, that is, Kathryn and I, thought it was a little early to start a child, but maybe we could manage a dog. We were contemplating adopting a dog, I said, and Kathryn made a little sound, a sort of glottal grunt of apprehension, or a groan, but quietly, so that only I heard it. Guttural. And the receptionist, this young red-haired woman in a yellow jumpsuit, said, Well, it’s fortunate for you that these are visiting hours, so you can just go through that door there, and then turn to the left, and proceed down the hallway, and you’ll see them, the dogs I mean, because they’ll be on both sides. And if you want anything, you just come back and let me know.

So I put my right arm around Kathryn’s shoulders, and we went in through that door and down the hallway. It wasn’t very well lit. Bare bulbs screwed into the ceiling showered raw light downward so that the place looked like an aging army barracks. I don’t know what I was expecting. The floors were cement, so they could clean them easily of waste matter, and our shoes, our running shoes, were squeaking over that surface.

You can’t imagine the noise. They were all barking and howling and yapping, these dogs of every size, pure dog-desperation, muttmania, an army of refugee dogs, and we marched down that hallway between the cages, being roared at, like these dogs were screaming Save us save us, and I held on to Kathryn, and then we walked back, with me still holding on, and then we walked down the hallway a third time, and Kathryn said, “You can let go of me now,” so I did. I let go of her.

We kept walking back and forth. We weren’t about to get a dog. No. That wasn’t ever the idea, despite what I had said. We were just there, walking up and down that aisle at the Humane Society, for Kathryn’s benefit, and after about the fifth time it felt as if we were on inspection, in the dog barracks. Not all the dogs quieted down, but some of them did, and when they did, we began to peer at them, which we really hadn’t done before when they were making a racket and they were just generic dogs.

It’s when you start looking at dogs that you begin to notice their faces. Is that the word? Faces? Muzzles? And after all in a Humane Society they’re mostly mutts, so you don’t have anything like a breed to distract you, except for Dalmatians, because people are always buying Dalmatians, thinking that they’re cute, and then they get rid of them because they can’t stand how difficult and dumb they are. You do notice all the Dalmatians in the Humane Society.

Kathryn was still a bit scared, but by this time she was noticing their expressions. I didn’t prompt her. I didn’t say anything. And soon she said, I’ll bet that one likes a party. And I’d bet that one’s a bully. That one’s kind of stupid but has a good sense of humor. And that one, he’s a recluse. That one’s a pack animal. That one there, she’s stubborn and independent. That one likes to ride in cars. That one thinks all day about food.

She had her index finger pointed at them. And then she started to name them.

You’re Otis.

You’re Sophie.

You’re Lester.

You’re Duffy.

You’re Gordon.

You’re Daisy.

You’re Waverly.

And you, you handsome fellow, she said, pointing down at a dog on the other side of the bars, you, you’re Bradley.

There was a dog there, I admit it, that looked a lot like me, like my brother or cousin, these sort of eyes I have, and its voice was just like mine, a rumble, phlegmy, you know, but strong and commanding like my voice is. Brownish fur like mine, and friendly, like me, but prone to harmless manias, also like me, you could just tell.

And the thing was, as Kathryn was doing this, as she was naming the dogs, going up and down the aisles, something quite amazing happened. One by one, the dogs stopped barking. They just quit. At first I didn’t think it was happening, I thought it had to do with my hearing, you know, what do they call it, tinnitus, but it wasn’t that. The dogs were really going quiet. Kathryn would point at them, one at a time, at one dog, and give it a name—you’re Inez—and the dog would look at her, and after a moment or two it—Inez the dog—would clam up. And before very long, it grew really quiet in there, maybe a yip or two now and then, but otherwise no sound. As if, all that time, all they had wanted was a name. It was spooky.

“I think we had better leave now,” Kathryn said. I took her hand and we went back out to the car.

But before we got to the car the red-haired receptionist in the jumpsuit said, “What happened? What the hell did you do in there?” and she went rushing back toward the kennels, and the dogs started howling again, crying out to heaven as we unlocked the car and backed out of the parking lot and pulled out onto the road. We were gone, we were erased from the Humane Society. Meanwhile, the sky had mottled over with clouds.

We lived in a cheap place in one of those student neighborhoods, an old building, really antiquated, one cigarette would have set it afire instantly. I was driving, rushing back to our old building and that apartment, feeling gleeful, and at first Kathryn was annoyed that I had taken her there to see the dogs, you know, paternalistic or patriarchal or something equally criminal, but then she changed her mind, and in her excitement was actually bouncing on the seat, her legs tucked under her, and she said, “I’m still scared of them, but, Jesus, Brad, I was inspired. Those were really their names! I gave them the right names. I knew exactly what to call them.”

“There’s no such thing as the right name for a dog,” I said. “It’s all arbitrary. A name is arbitrary.”

“No, it isn’t,” she insisted. “There are okay names, approximate names, but there’s one correct one, and I hit it every time.”

And I thought: Well, I dunno, who cares, maybe she’s right, why argue. We got home, and we sat down on the sofa together, and she looked so beautiful in the blue sweatshirt and the blue jeans she was wearing, no socks, just her sneakers, these rags, these gorgeous rags that she had made beautiful by wearing them, and the cap she had on, her gray eyes, the delicate way she moved, and in a sudden heedless rush I said, “Kathryn, I love you,” and she nodded, she acknowledged it, she didn’t say she loved me but I didn’t care and didn’t even notice that she hadn’t said anything in return until about four weeks later when she moved out. But on that day, she leaned into me. We held on to each other. Clutching. We must have stayed together in one posture just holding each other, there on the sofa, for maybe an hour. When you’re in love you don’t have to do a damn thing. You can just be. You can just stay quiet in the world. You don’t have to move an inch.

Then eventually she said, “Look. It’s snowing.”

We disentangled ourselves and got up together and walked over to the window. The air had been abruptly filled, every square inch, with snowflakes, and I thought of how peaceful it was, even though the snow was just this humble artifact. “This is our first snow,” I said aloud, thinking that we would have many more years of seeing it together, that we would stand in front of windows year after year, watching the first snow, the two of us, watching the wind swirl it, then watching the spring storms, watching the snow melting and the water rushing down into the storm drains. From now and then onward into forever, this would happen. We would watch our children playing in the melting snow, splashing in the puddles. After we died, we would still be seeing everything together, Kathryn and me. Into eternity, I thought. Death would be a trivial event as long as I loved her.

She must have thought she loved me, too, because she wanted to cook a dinner for me, which she did, a quick Stroganoff, and then afterward, while I was doing the dishes, she was still sitting at the table, and she started to sing.

I had never heard her sing before. I didn’t know she could sing. I don’t think she knew that she could sing. She had a small, a very small, but a sweet voice, and in this small sweet voice she sang two songs, I guess the only ones she could think of at that moment, very slow and sultry, “You Are My Sunshine” and “Stairway to Heaven.”

Then in bed, later, she sang the Michigan fight song, “Hail to the Victors.” Softly and slowed down, in my ear. As a love song. You know: the way you’d sing to a winner. Because after all, I had won her, somehow.

Outside, the snow went on falling.

For days afterward I went back secretly to the Humane Society. I went back there and gazed at the dogs in their pens. I would look at all the dogs that Kathryn had named. Also I was looking for the Labrador-retriever-collie mix she had named Bradley. After me. Finally I went in and said I wanted him, and they turned him over to me, but only after they neutered him and gave him his shots. I persuaded my sister, Agatha, and her husband, Harold, to keep him for a while until I had convinced Kathryn about the wisdom of having a dog. I just knew I could talk her into it. I took Bradley up north, wagging and slobbering in the backseat, and left him with Agatha.

Back at the Humane Society week by week the other dogs were gone, one by one they disappeared, replaced by new dogs. The old dogs—the dogs that Kathryn had named—had found homes, I liked to think, where they were fed and housed and taken care of, but where they were occasionally unhappy about one thing, which was that they had the wrong name. The name they were supposed to have had been lost, and their owners had given them bogus names, childish names, lousy standard-issue dog names like Buster and Rover and Rex. The only dog who had the right name was Bradley, a name that he and I had to share.

Once in a while I would see a dog out on the street, and I would recognize it from the Humane Society, and I knew that it had seen us, Kathryn and me, two people in love, walking up and down between the cages, holding each other. It had seen that but didn’t or couldn’t remember. I was the person who remembered.

Now there’s Bradley the person, me, and Bradley the dog, him.

You know, that day was perfect. A breath of sweetness. That’s a phrase I would never use in real life, but I just used it. You can laugh at my wording if you want to, you can laugh at the names I have for things, I know you do that, but I’ll think of that day from now on as a perfect day. A breath of sweetness.

What I’m saying is: that day was here and then it was gone, but I remember it, so it exists here somewhere, and somewhere all those events are still happening and still going on forever. I believe that.

THREE

“DID HE TELL YOU about the dogs?”

“Well, yes. He did.”

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

“That was the gist of it.”

“Did he make fun of me?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes, sure.”

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

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

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

I tell her.

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

“Sort of.”

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

“No.”

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

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

“Yes.”

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

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

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

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

CHARLIE, I’LL START with a generalization here that maybe only applies to me. Maybe. Please don’t be too offended. I always found it a challenge to love men. At first I just thought I had to, that I had no choice. I thought that men in general—I’d really rather not say this—were unlovable. But I mean, look at them. If you’re a man you probably may not realize how they are. Amazing when any woman can stay married to one of them. Most of the ones I’ve known are bossy, or passive and obsessive, the men I mean, and after the age of twenty-five or so they are by most standards not beautiful. If one of them happens to be easy on the eyes, he gets hired by the photogenic industry. Beauty is not part of the show they do, most of the ones I’ve known. So you have to cross that off the list of accountables right away. And you’re left with their behavior.

They sulk, men, so many of them. They bear grudges and they get violent almost as a hobby, the ones I’ve known. Didn’t you realize this? Ask around. As a gender they’re—you’re—always scheming or at least they seem to be scheming because they never ever tell you what’s on their minds. The sample I’ve had. They just sit there day after day and they brood. After the brooding, then the firepower. Well, I know these are generalizations, but I don’t care, because they’re my generalizations, so I don’t have to prove them, which is exciting.

I will say that the one feature I like about men is that they can usually figure out how small appliances work. They’re good at fixing this and that. But that competence doesn’t lead to passion, just to gainful employment. Of course I’m only using the case studies here of the men I have happened to know in my brief lifetime. But a sample is a sample and what I’m describing to you is what I have observed.

They get to you in the small ways. They have their little bag of tricks. You take Bradley. In high school he sat behind me or next to me in English and biology. He was above average whenever he studied, which wasn’t that often because Bradley wasn’t and isn’t particularly studious. While everybody else was taking notes or being rowdy, Bradley was drawing sketches in his notebooks. Of me. Day in and day out he did pencil drawings of me in detail on paper. Even if his eyes were too large or too direct, he was a good-looking boy in those days when he remembered to comb his hair and to shave, and you should have seen the sketches he did of me. A few of them were confiscated by the teachers. Whenever they managed to steal a peek at what he was doing, the other girls were agog that he loved me so much. Everyone thought we were terrible sweethearts. Jesus. I never knew what I had done to attract his attention. In his hands a picture of a woman could often be more beautiful or arresting than the woman herself. It was hurtful, how beautiful he made me. I thought: that’s me? I was just Kathryn before but in his sketches of me I was a miracle. I was extraordinary. I just couldn’t get over what he did to me.

Do you understand what I’m saying? He confused me in the way that a lot of women get confused. He had a system going with these sketches so that if he happened to be distorting my beauty by making me more attractive than I actually was, I never had the brains or the wit to notice it. These pictures pretended to be mere records of my looks, standing or sitting or gazing downward in thought, but they undermined me. If somebody makes you beautiful or says you’re pretty and then repeats it insistently, you become his victim. He wasn’t always detailed about my eyes but I didn’t notice that at the time. That was my mistake. I should have noticed. Remember Picasso’s trouble with Gertrude Stein’s eyes in that portrait he did of her? Rembrandt’s portrait of himself in old age—I saw it in London—is as terrific as it is because of what he knew about his own eyes. Go look. Bradley didn’t know anything about my eyes and therefore avoided them. They’re not really in the pictures.

But because these Bradley-drawn pictures were celebrating me I fell in love with the pictures and then in a standard move I fell in love with the guy himself as the creator of the images in which a beautified version of me appeared. He drew one very elaborate sketch of me riding a horse that just about took the breath out of me. I was both beautiful and muscled, like the horse. A naked woman on a horse, two animals. I thought: if he can see me this way, then what else would I ever need?

Well, much else is necessary, believe me. He only loved his love for me and the pictures he was drawing. He loved those two. He loved the feeling he was having. I was a mere accessory to the feeling.

Loving him was extremely tricky because he was inaccessible in a sort of wacky way. Like so many of these twenty-something guys he was a perpetual traveler in outer space. What are you guys looking for out there? Trysts with aliens? I don’t get it. Never have. He was one of those men who could talk articulately about anything—food or movies or music or current events—but you could discern in the middle of his conversation that he had commenced to brood about something else that was not making its way into the mix. Right at the table he’d disappear on you and you couldn’t get him back. When he made love to me, he had this absentminded sex mannerism going on that eventually drove me crazy. And I don’t mean how, with sex, personality has to give way to your desire. That’s why it’s so hard to talk when you’re engaged physically.

Silent physical passion would have been just fine. But I felt insulted after a while: he made love the way you would drive a car to work. Autopilot stuff. Short-little-span-of-attention stuff. What I mean is that he was hardly in the same room with me when we were in bed together. He didn’t notice enough how I was reacting. It was boorish. He hummed while he was doing it, as if he were changing a light bulb. If he could concentrate on me in the pictures, then why couldn’t he concentrate on me in person when I was naked for him between the sheets? It made no sense. I assumed that this elemental problem with his absentminded love would improve, would go away, would dissolve.

I kept reaching for his heart and finding nothing there to hold on to.

Gradually I lost my confidence. That was about when he proposed to me and I said yes. Some mistakes are both simple and huge. The worst mistakes I’ve made have been the ones directed by sweet-natured hopefulness.

After we were married I realized that I had no particular idea who he was. I once called him the Lon Chaney of Ann Arbor, and instead of being hurt, he was pleased. At least I’m a star, he said. Days would go by without an endearment. He was too young to be a sleepwalker, so I’d try to wake him up. We’d have a nice dinner and we’d rent a movie and then we’d go to bed. We’d kick back the sheets and frolic like a good modern couple, and he would gradually fade on me, he’d look like he was thinking about the stock market. His distance took the wind out of me. And then I got this idea that the trouble I was having wasn’t just with Bradley but was a generic trouble. It was with men. He wouldn’t share his heart with me. He was preoccupied with the unspoken and would be all his life.

Believe me, most women know what I’m talking about.

AND THEN SOMEONE walks into your life and takes control of the situation.

This was a few weeks before he took me to the dog pound, this episode I’m about to describe. About at the end of the summer, the last week of August. He was correct about the two jobs I had and that he and I were married by then.

Oh, I should tell you one other story about that period. My grandfather was dying. He was getting Alzheimer’s and living in an assisted-care facility. I’d go over there to visit him. And one summer afternoon I drove over to see him and went up to his apartment and knocked and went in, because the door wasn’t locked. I heard the water turned on in the shower.

“Grandpa?” I asked. He wasn’t in the living room.

“I’m in here,” he said, calling from the bathroom.

“Okay,” I said.

So I waited for him. But he stayed in there. Stayed and stayed. So eventually I stood up, because I was worried and anxious about him, and I went into the bathroom where he had said he was. I looked in through the translucent glass of the shower stall and saw my grandfather in there, and I could also see that he had all his clothes on. Naturally, I was alarmed. I reached over and pulled aside the glass divider.

There—inside the shower—was my grandfather wearing his three-piece suit. He was standing under the spray of water, his wet hair hanging like seaweed down the sides of his head. Even his shoes were on. “Grandpa,” I said, “what are you doing in there?”

He looked at me. “The stars,” he said. “The stars are so beautiful.”

“The stars at night?” I asked.

“What other stars are there?”

I took his hand and led him out of the shower and took his clothes off and toweled him dry and into his pajamas. Then I went downstairs and told the attendants that they would have to take better care of my grandfather, that they would have to watch him more closely.

BUT BACK TO BRADLEY. In those days he had an idea that he was a painter. Of course he was a painter. That’s not what I mean. He labored as a house painter but his real love consisted of a variety of sly and very odd expressionism on canvas. He became proficient at it. He understood the ironies of his existence, painting houses during the day and making eerie images at night. When you’re as young as we were you have a strong sense of the pranks of fate. He had to prove that he could be a real painter and not a pretender, just the way that a lot of men feel they have to prove they’re real men. I’ve never known what that was about. I don’t think that most women have to prove that they’re real women. You live long enough, you graduate to being real.

Bradley comes on as a know-nothing but he really admired artists like Diebenkorn and Jennifer Bartlett and Hockney and all the other painters who knew how to use a light luminescent blue. He loved representational art that was full of problems you couldn’t solve just by looking. He loved stylization and stasis and pale pastel color, color that appeared to be temporary or about to fade, colors that might be in danger of becoming obsolete any minute now, blues that were endangered and inadequate. Did he mention that? Probably not. Because he had sold so few of his own works, he grew killingly modest. The more representational his art was, the more abstract he became. You couldn’t find him anywhere. He turned himself into the greatest abstraction.

As for his paintings, they filled up all the space we had. It was really tricky for me to adjust my attitude toward his accomplishments because I really wasn’t sure whether his work’s self-consciousness was intelligent or just gawky and shy. He had given up hyperrealism and had gone in for social commentary in faded hues. I remember that he splashed Tip of the Andes coffee on one of his canvases as a judgment against the proliferation of big coffeehouses like Starbucks, but how would you ever know that unless he told you, since the painting was of a window? All his canvases required an explanation or a commentary. They accumulated in the house. They even occupied the bathroom. And his art took up most of his free time. So when he was painting I found other diversions.

I had squeezed in some soffball as my one evening sport. I’m a bit of a jock. As a girl I swam constantly and played basketball when I could. I used to love to watch gymnastics. I would rather watch the women gymnasts than the men. I would rather watch women playing basketball than guys. When sports are played by women it speaks directly to my condition. I like to watch their fierceness and the animal pride of female physical movement.

Our softball team was doing pretty well that particular summer. We were blowing everybody else into the ash can. That week—the one I’m telling you about—we had this night game with the Brackner Buick Devils. They were another women’s team and supposedly our rivals. What I liked was simply getting out on the field under the lights during those summer evenings, playing the game, watching the evening come down to earth, the moths flittering in front of the floodlights. I was psyched for it. I had let Bradley know how much the game meant to me.

So on this occasion it was the bottom of the eighth inning. We were ahead, five to four. Bradley sat in the stands watching. He cast his husbandly gaze on me and maybe paid more attention to me as a Softball player than as his wife and lover. He had a curious budget of attention, Bradley did, maybe it was the painter in him, maybe he thought of Softball diamonds as geometrical abstractions. I was up to bat. Their pitcher was throwing some skillful stuff and they were concentrating hard in the infield and I could hear Bradley from the stands clapping and encouraging me. That was sweet. Give him credit. I had my patient husband the Toad in my corner. So I thought I’d show them, and on her next pitch I connected with what I thought was a line drive.

Their shortstop was a sort of lanky woman. She had that specific appearance of physical confidence as if she never thought twice about making a move before making it. All her moves were ones she did purposefully. First thought, best thought. She did them quickly. Body and mind together. It was certainly beautiful to watch. As an athlete she had no hesitation of the kind that sometimes hobbled me. After my hit, I was two steps off for first base when she ran backward and leaped to her left for the ball. She extended herself and went airborne and caught the ball smack in her glove. Thmp. My line drive.

I was out. I was absolutely out and out. What she had done was there and then the most amazing physical move I had seen for I don’t know how long, in its concentration and certainty and grace. Most people would have been crushed that they were put out in a game that close. Not me. Not that time. I am telling you it was heart-stopping. To watch that goddess in her ponytail doing that one leap caused me to halt in my tracks. I was almost irrelevant to what she did. I did the hit. She did the move on it. She had conviction. God, I loved that. So I stood there like a waxwork. I stayed right on that spot halfway between home and first base. They could have put me into Madame Tussaud’s, I was so unmoving. She got up from the ground and dusted herself off. She rubbed her forehead with her forearm. She held the glove up and then threw the ball to the pitcher. She smiled at her teammates and girl-whooped the way you do when you’re the champ of one particular action that you can do in front of other people. Then she smiled at me.

If a guy did that smile to another guy it might be a challenge to him and an insult. But not hers. Not her spun-steel-and-stardust smile. She was displaying what she could do for me. A very pleasing and smiling woman. And I thought: this certainly ain’t your regular sort of day. Or your regular sort of game either. Because that night with the moths clustering in front of the lights, when she smiled at me I felt that smile go down through me and out the other side. Some sort of competitive drive in me gave way to something else. As if I was transparent. A burning. Permeable to her smile.

We ended up losing that game. Six to five. Even while it was happening the game was already a quickly fading memory. Losing. Winning. Who cared? Because by that time I was watching her stealthily. I was trying to recover that moment by sheer willpower.

AFTERWARD THEIR TEAM and our team went out for beers at the King’s Armor Bar. As it turned out her name was Jenny. I’d seen her before. She worked as a meter maid. Almost like a song: Lovely Jenny, meter maid. Pitchers of beer circulated all around the table. I was the pretty woman in a baseball uniform sitting with her husband and surrounded by other girl-jocks. We were smoking and laughing and consuming the beer. I was being cool. My husband—Bradley—was scrunched up against my left side where I could lean into him and he was talking to the other husbands and boyfriends and girlfriends who happened to be stringing along. Jenny the meter maid had taken a seat on my right. I had not the slightest clue what I was going to do next. Except for my involuntary stomach flips it might have been any night at all. I was ignoring the stomach flips.

Peanut shells all over the floor. Smoke everywhere. Hubcaps decorating the walls. The cap-gun clang and bonk of pinball machines. People saying “Fuck” every five seconds and then laughing haw haw haw after they pour beer down themselves.

After all, I was just married. Some women never even get that far. The wedding ring felt new on my finger. That little diamond? I could still feel it planted against my skin all the time. When you’ve got it there for the first few months it feels a little bit like a gender award that you can carry around and display. It has clout. My ring—outside the mitt—broadcast its glitter as if I had just won it in a small-town raffle, the only prize most women get. He had gazed at me fixedly for hours on end and then he had just made me princess of some personal half-secret kingdom. Look, I could say. I am very young but singularly acclaimed. This absentminded man, he’s mortgaged his life to me. On me Bradley’s pale light has fallen. I’m subject voluntarily to his gaze from here on. It’s happy-ever-after time.

She sat on my other side. She had freckles in star-field patterns on the back of her hands, different patterns for each hand. On her right cheek was an odd dimple that appeared whenever she frowned, a dimple to break your heart. Her hair was mostly brownish but with a streak of something blond running through it to punctuate it. Up close I could see her eyes more closely, brown with a tiny flaw of blue in the right one. She was small-breasted like so many athletic girls and she held her shoulders together as if she were cold. She leaned forward and encouraged me to talk about anything. It was odd: she felt like the sun to me. I glanced down and saw Cassiopeia’s chair in the freckles on her left hand.

Jenny and I did a conversational dance, something very formal. She didn’t say anything about her leaping catch. She was talking about her cat instead. She had a calico cat named Ralph with urinary tract problems. She went on about this cat. Women often do. It’s polite to listen. I don’t like cats much but I listened to her talk about this cat Ralph and I hung on every word. She got the cat at the Humane Society, by the way. You might be interested in that literary coincidence. By listening to the stories of the cat I learned that she lived by herself in a sort of spare apartment on the north side. One of those apartments decorated with line-strings of plastic hot peppers up near the molding to provide cheer. I was imagining it. She kept her radio tuned to the jazz station. Too much traffic noise in her neighborhood made it hard to sleep. Hard to sleep. She said she tossed and turned. Uh-huh. I see. It would be sad to be alone in that bed with the ionizer buzzing in the corner.

And I was thinking: Oh, this is a wonderful moment. I have a new woman friend and I can talk to her about anything, by which I mean all the subjects that Bradley never managed to pay any attention to.

In the bar she was still lanky. Big feet. Long legs. And they all moved in a pleasing languid dramatic graceful performance. As if her body also were busy having a conversation. First it talked to itself and then it talked politely to me. Beneath that politeness glided schools of fish.

I told her that Bradley and I had just been married and that we lived in a basement apartment just as spare as hers, except for his paintings. She appeared to be quite interested in Bradley and so I told her about his work and his art and the jobs we did. She yelled across me to say hi to him, and they shook hands over my lap. Then I explained again about our apartment. Ours was just as spare and empty as hers, I repeated without thinking why. For some reason we got on the subject of female medicine and I gave her the name of my gynecologist, Dr. Moosbrugger. I said I worked a couple of dumb jobs. She listened to me as if every time I made a commonplace observation it was the most noteworthy event of the day. We talked about cloning, hair dye, and personal web sites. As if we were two musicians, we kept striking chords. I don’t know how else to say it. She leaned forward toward me. She laughed and nodded. For the first time in my life I felt myself hanging on to somebody’s words, hanging on for dear life. By her expression, you could tell that she hung likewise on mine. Tightrope hanging, as we reached for each other’s hearts.

You don’t know that you’ve crossed a border until you’re over on the other side. At that point you see where you’ve got yourself to and whether you’re done for or not. Plenty of friendships have a latent erotic component. But before I had even quite realized that I was attracted to her—well, I knew I was because I wanted to be more like her than I was like myself—the old terrible magic coalesced into the air, and I realized with a sort of shock what I wanted to do. Dear God, I wanted to put my hands on her as a trial, just as a test. I wanted to put a hand on her face or on her arm because I thought that if I did that, I would be so happy. I just wanted to feel her skin but of course I wanted to feel the muscle beneath her skin and I wanted to get at the soul underneath that muscle because I could smell it. I had never gotten a whiff of Bradley’s soul and at that moment at the table in the King’s Armor I had a flash that I never would. The menu of sensations in this post-softball evening was mostly new to me. But at that table I could smell her soul and I wanted it. She being a woman, et cetera, it was scary. But it was uplifting too. That’s what you have to know.

When she laughed she opened her mouth and I saw her teeth. Well, now, and hello. I had a new thought: I love those teeth. Never in my life have I felt so private to myself with those feelings banging around in my skull. They were white and straight, those teeth, and I thought of a line of French poetry I had learned in junior high: God, how good it is to look upon her. I can’t remember the original, only the translation. I shuddered with the excitement and fear of it. I was inventing each moment as it arrived as if I were in a car shooting down the side of a mountain without brakes.

I also felt as if I had been shot. That’s how strong it was. Or maybe punched. Poor Bradley, he had no idea what was happening to me. Poor me also.

Well, she said, I believe I will put some money in the jukebox. She stood up and sauntered through the cigarette smoke over to the Wurlitzer. Behind her the smoke swirled as it filled the space behind her. As I watched the smoke eddy in those patterns in her wake, I realized that my new friend was just about all that I wanted forever and ever and ever. You can’t dictate to yourself what you want. You either want it or you don’t. I suppose I was drunk by then. She put a dollar bill into the jukebox and started programming. She stood in front of that jukebox with her hip canted to the right. She was profiling for my benefit, I noticed.

She walked back slowly to the table. Her ponytail bobbed a little as she walked. I’d never seen a woman walking that comfortably before. Oh she was secure in herself, and in despair and exaltation all at once I wanted to be free of Bradley and secure in her, and I shocked myself so much with that thought that I quelled it. She did a promenade thing through the smoke and the noise. The noise quieted in my head when she walked. I had the sudden perception that she was my royalty. I would bow down to her somehow. I would do it without drawing attention to myself or to her. She cleared a path through the room and the smoke swirled in to fill the space behind her as previously. Nobody noticed her all that much except me. Majesty and control in a woman was for me a suddenly disarming sight. That, and the way she looked into my eyes as Bradley never had. She saw my eyes.

My grandfather was dying. He took showers fully clothed. Our time here is short.

WE’RE TALKING ABOUT an ordinary summer night in the Midwest now. In a bar. Peanuts fell to the floor. Drunk men roared with laughter. The TV was showing ESPN cars crashing and burning at the Destruction Derby. Inside my head the room grew quite still and warm. She sat down. She put her hand ever so lightly on my knee. I doubt you or anyone else in the known world would have ever noticed, her touch was that deft and soft.

She leaned toward me grinning wickedly. The co-conspirator grin. The we-are-in-this-together-now grin. I could feel her face close to me. Feel its presence close to me. I couldn’t remember being flirted with by a woman before. Nor did I think that anyone was noticing. Here I was in the New World and no one had noticed I was gone even for a second from the Old World. How did I get here? How did it happen? Someone caught a line drive? Please. But the sequel wasn’t the sequel. It was a prelude. Just then the song she had ordered came on. It was Springsteen’s “Jersey Girl.” Now this song happens to be about a guy who persuades a single mom to leave her baby somewhere with a neighbor so that he can take her—this young mom—out to the docks. They stand out there at the docks and look at the water together and they get gooey.

“This song is going out to Kathryn from Jenny,” Jenny whispered. She smiled her mischievous smile.

Now if you’re asking me I would say that at that point I could’ve just taken Bradley’s hand and said Hey I’m tired of this scene, let’s go. I could’ve told him that I had work tomorrow and had to hit the hay. But at that moment I felt I had some power too. In that little bar competence and majesty were the songs she sang over in my direction. Authority radiated from her, plus this pixie impishness that was both sexual and scarily adult. She had some sort of mean blank-check knowledge of neighborhoods I’d never been to but should have seen by now. I felt girlish. I smiled back at her. And then I leaned back into Bradley. He was stroking my arm with one hand and peeling the label off his beer bottle with the other. The kind of absentmindedness I was used to. He continued to stroke my arm. I was his wifely assumption. He was still stroking my arm when I leaned forward in the other direction toward Jenny and put my lips up to her ear and whispered my phone number to her. She smelled of sweat and crushed roses and the future. The lights in the ceiling illuminated the tips of her hair. Then I leaned forward again. Again the sweat and crushed roses. Two women in baseball uniforms, one of them nervous. And told her when to call.

I wasn’t even drunk. I had sobered up instantly. I was scared.

At home I stayed awake all night and wondered what in the name of the living God I had just done.

JENNY SUGGESTED THAT we drive out to an apple orchard. This was a month later. She called me and asked if I wanted to get out for an afternoon. Innocent, innocent. She picked me up in front of our local McDonald’s. I wanted a touch of anonymity and you can’t get much more anonymous than sitting inside a McDonald’s waiting for a woman to pick you up. I got in the car and said hi. I was scared but also not scared. She gave me confidence. She had girled herself up for the day. She was driving her car barefoot. A warm September, this was. Her painted toenails made a strong impression on me as they pressed on the accelerator pedal. I resisted her for a while by thinking that she was bullying me, erotically. Her clothes were carefully disordered with her blue chambray shirt slightly unbuttoned and her hair loose, and the sun drenched her side of the car.

We talked about books, how boring they were to read but how you loved them anyway.

A few miles out of town, geese patrolled the riverbank. I sat on the passenger side with my legs tucked under me. A couple in a canoe floated down the river. We passed a little Lutheran cemetery on the other side of the road where the headstones were all in German. Hier ruhet in Gott. A necklace of brilliant glass beads swung from Jenny’s rearview mirror: red and purple and blue. She said she used the beads for navigation. She didn’t explain how. One rose lay across the dashboard facing me. Freshly cut. Its stem was wet. She said it was mine. She said it was my rose. That I could have it. This gift was ordained.

She told me that she was the youngest of three daughters. I asked her if she had ever loved a woman before. Loved? Loved? she asked. She smiled and laughed. Is that what we’re talking about? I thought we were talking about being a daughter.

I got scared again. Being teased that way. But then she grinned squarely at the passenger side of the car, where I was.

JUST OUT OF TOWN is an orchard and a cider press. We parked the car and made our way out to the orchard. There’re paths between the rows of trees for the people who come to pick the apples themselves and on one of these paths you can tramp up a hill where you are able briefly to see in all directions. The humble soft modest landscape of Michigan surrounded us with indistinct vegetation: the farmlands laid out in their green rectangular symmetries until they faded into haze, then the ever-distant water towers and sky-poking radio transmission antennas. Down below us in the orchard the trees were being mechanically shaken one by one by a motorized device that clamped the tree around the trunk and then vibrated so that the apples fell into a spread piece of rough brown burlap cloth. We watched the apples raining down in a circle and then being gathered and loaded.

Jenny held my hand for a moment. Then she walked backward and leaned against the trunk of the tree that happened to stand there. She reached up and picked an apple and pulled it off the branch. She bit into the apple and smiled. Then she simply handed it to me. I held the apple in my hand and gazed down at the marks her teeth had made. I raised the apple to my mouth and put first my lips and then my tongue on the spot where her teeth had been. It had a familiar taste. The apple’s bright sweetness worried its way into me.

I hardly knew her. We hadn’t talked all that much.

Guess what, she said. I happen to know that this very tree is the very tree of life. What an amazing deal! Then she laughed and said, Come on. And then she said, You know that you and I are going to be the two best friends ever. We’ll share everything. The two of us?

Doing what? I asked.

Oh just being together. Having adventures, Kathryn. Kathryn and Jenny.

STILL BAREFOOT SHE WALKED into the barn where the cider press commanded the central room. They lowered the press over a layer or two of apples enclosed in burlap and held inside a wooden frame. They crushed the apples into mash and the cider flowed out through the slats into an immense wire-mesh drain beneath the press. The guy there operating it, his body looked like a sackful of gravel. The cider poured down into a containment tank. In the mass of details I lost my concentration because at that moment a dog happened into the room. A cocker spaniel. Jovial and harmless of course. That’s what they say. Just sniffing around the edges of the room for some doughnut crumbs. I turned quickly away from this dog. I can’t bear to be in the same room with a dog. I was on my way out.

Until then I hadn’t noticed that the room was filled with yellow jackets and bees. They flew onto the press and made their way onto the Dixie Cups on the corner card table and to the doorway where the late afternoon sun was shining in. I thought: Oh they’re just yellow jackets. But just then Jenny cried out. She bent down. She shouldn’t have been in there barefoot anyway. We agreed on that later, when we were less dazed. She walked out onto the driveway and sat down. She put her hand to her mouth. Her eyes were squinting at nothing. They squinted as she wept.

Stupid stupid stupid she said. To be stung in there. I am so oblivious. Good Lord it hurts. She glanced up at me. It’s just like being stabbed in the ankle with an icepick.

Then she said, I don’t suppose you can do anything.

Oh yes I said. Just wait here a minute.

I ran out of the pressing room and went to the back of the barn, the shady side that faces the fields and the orchard. I checked to see if anyone was there within plain sight. Nobody was. I took the cotton bandanna out of my hair. I looked around again and lowered my jeans and my underwear and I squatted and peed a little into the cotton. Funny about what you learn in Campfire Girls. Then I hitched up and ran around again and found her and dabbed at the spot on her ankle where she’d been stung. Her skin was as red as a little cloud at dawn. After about fifteen seconds she smiled and turned that hothouse smile in my direction.

Ah, she said, girl, it turns out that you are the life of me. What’s that miracle cure you’ve got there?

My secret.

I drove back. I drove her car. I didn’t let her drive. I didn’t drive to our apartment. Not to where Bradley and I lived. No. Not there. I drove to her building. Outside we sat down and talked. That was all we did. I was curious about conversation with her and the atmosphere of calm expectancy that it created. We told each other chapter-and-verse of our lives. What I’m saying is that we waited.

For days after that, I sat on the front stoop, my own, ours. I watched the sun setting while my husband Bradley sat next to me and we shared the small talk of that particular day. And then sometimes he would go inside and I would stay out there looking toward the west as the breezes wafted through the tree (there was only one) in the front yard. I was thinking about her and about the feeling that she gave me.

Two weeks later, after Jenny and I had done some gardening together at one of those communal gardens where you have your own section, collecting a few late-ripening tomatoes in brown paper bags we brought along, we went calmly up to her apartment. We took the tomatoes into her kitchen. I took two of them out and found a small plate and a knife, but my hand was shaking too hard for me to slice them. I put the knife down on the table and looked straight at her.

Then she took my hand and led me to the bedroom. She told me to forget about the tomatoes for a while. In the bedroom we lay down together and we shed our calm exteriors completely and I saw her and when she asked me what I wanted, I said: I want you.

Afterward she sang to me. What she sang was “Hail to the Victors.” She meant it as a joke and as an anthem. I learned how to do that from her. Her cat, Ralph, watched us from the dresser. I was miserable with happiness. Our souls had merged. I lay there and stared up at the string of red pepper lights attached with tiny hooks up near the molding, the ones I had bought for her, and I exchanged jealous glances with Ralph the cat who in agitation had knocked over a hairbrush, and I felt the cool autumn breeze blowing across my body and Jenny’s where our two souls were lodged, and I heard the Good Humor truck go by on the street, little glockenspiel notes.

Then we both went back into the kitchen and, naked, finished slicing and eating the tomatoes. They were delicious, and she had made me ravenous.

My idea was that I could save my marriage. In some respect I suppose I loved him still. Bradley took me to the Humane Society on a Sunday and we walked among the dogs as he held me, and I guess I named them individually even though I don’t remember doing so. I don’t see what importance it would have if I did do that, or if I remembered it.

We made love several times that day and each time I came—and I did, believe me—I thought of Jenny. I thought of the flower-garden smell of her soul and how I could just reach in and find her heart any time I wanted it and of how that would be the end of my loneliness here on earth. When he was on top of me, I would hold out my hands above him in the air and imagine that I was grasping her, her invisible spirit, in the air, terrible hypocrite that I am. No, actually, that I was. I stopped being a hypocrite. It wasn’t the right time to let him know that my soul had flown out of my body and taken up householding in Jenny’s. I sang “Hail to the Victors” to him because I missed her so much. I felt strong with her and weak with him. Empty and absent.

He said that he loved me but I don’t actually think that he did. Or maybe his love just didn’t manage to get into working order with me. By that time I had seen love in its final form. I knew what it looked like. It had freckles on its hands, the southern hemisphere on the left and the northern hemisphere on the right. And it wasn’t him. Or him with me. Or any combination of the two of us. She was flying my flag by that time.

He said he loved me and I stayed quiet and still. He had married me. You have to remember that. He had ringed me.

Several weeks later I told him. I told him about my beloved. His face fell in all its possible directions, my little husband Toadie, but then he composed himself and called me the only word he could think of, a lesbian. A goddamn lesbian. Well, when something hurts you, you can always find some dumb label for your accusation. Not just dumb but dumb. I picked up one of our vinyl kitchen chairs and threw it at him. It missed, by the way.

Anyway, what I’ve just told you was what prompted the chair incident. I had grown big, and he was trying to belittle me.

YOU THINK THAT what I’ve just told you is an anecdote. But really it isn’t. It’s my whole life. It’s the only story I have.

FOUR

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

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

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

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

“Kathryn. She’s still with Jenny?”

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

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

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

“No.”

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

MY SISTER AGATHA lives north of here, in Five Oaks. You’ve been there, I believe. She’s married to a guy named Harold, who happens to be a barber. A really incompetent barber, by the way, just as a barber, though he’s a nice guy in other respects, nice enough, anyhow, for what his daily life requires. “Nice” isn’t much of a virtue, though; kindness and mildness aren’t on the map anymore, not these days. They’re trivial. As it happens, Harold learned how to cut hair when he was in the Army. Certainly that could explain it. His father was a security guard, worked for Brinks. You let Harold cut your hair and you’ll emerge smelling of Clubman and looking like Boris Karloff out for a night on the town.

They have two kids, my nephews. Harold was in love with a married woman years ago, Louise, her name was, and Louise had a son I always thought Harold had fathered, but that’s another story, and I think he’s over that by now. He got over that when he met Agatha.

But this was about the dog, Bradley. I had taken Bradley out of the Humane Society and arranged to sneak him up to Five Oaks and to board him with Agatha and Harold, until I had accustomed Kathryn to dog householding, to living with a dog. My sister and Harold have a big house up there in Five Oaks, with plenty of room for a mutt. Their colonial is close to a WaldChem plant, and the house has five bedrooms and didn’t cost them too much, because of the chemical fumes or the poisoned groundwater or something, or simply because they’re located in central Michigan. It’s a huge house. Anyway, I thought it would take about a month for me to talk my then-wife Kathryn into tolerating a canine companion. I thought we needed a dog, required one. I thought our marriage required a dog. Young married people crave dogs. It cements them together. It gives them baby practice.

But I didn’t have to talk Kathryn into our having a dog because she picked up a chair and threw it at me and left me for Jenny. When she threw that chair, she missed me, by the way. She could’ve broken my head open. Besides, what was so bad about what I said? Was she a lesbian? Or was it me? As a man? I wanted her to clarify my thinking. I was just trying to get her transformation lucid in my mind. She says I cursed at her but that is not the case. I may have raised my voice, but I did not curse. Anyway, after that climactic moment, I was alone by myself in the apartment, and I wanted that dog, Bradley, back. I shouldn’t say this, but I felt grief. And I needed that dog. I had nothing to hold on to except that dog, that dog with my name on it, my secret sharer, you might say.

So on a bright Saturday morning in early winter I called my sister, Agatha. I told her I was going to drive up to her house in Five Oaks and get Bradley the dog and take him back home. Thanks for keeping him all this time, I said. I thought I should warn her I was coming, to ensure that she’d be around when I appeared on her doorstep.

“Uh,” she said, “I don’t know about that.”

“What do you mean, you don’t know?”

“You can’t have Bradley back, is what I mean.” There was a long pause, and I could hear domestic noise in the background.

“Excuse me?”

“I’m sorry, Bradley. But I can’t do it. You can’t have the dog back. We’re keeping him.”

“Agatha, Bradley is my dog.”

“Well, not really. Not anymore. He’s bonded with us.”

“Bonded with you? Wait wait wait wait wait,” I said. “We had a deal, Agatha. We agreed. The deal was, you were going to board Bradley for a month or two, you know, enjoy his company, like you would a foreign exchange student, and I would pay you for expenses if need be, and then you were going to give him back.”

“I know, but that was then. This must sound like a surprise,” Agatha said. “But, as I say, we’re not going to return him. We’re not going to because we can’t. I’m really sorry, Bradley, but we’re in love with him. The love is total and goes both ways. The foreign exchange student stays.”

“Agatha, don’t talk to me about love. Kathryn has left me, I’m alone here, I’m very upset, what with my marriage suddenly over, and I need a dog. That dog, that specific dog, and no other. Bradley.”

“Oh, sweetie, believe me, I understand. My heart goes out to you,” she said. “You know that. I think what Kathryn did to you was just unforgivable. And cruel. She was selfish. She was always selfish. Forgive me, but she was a real bitch, that woman, leaving you without so much as an apology. I’ll never speak to her again. But Harold and I have talked about this, and we think that you should go back to the Humane Society and get another dog. I mean, something truly extraordinary has happened here with us and Bradley. I can’t describe it. Besides, you can fall—”

“—Don’t say that. Don’t say I can fall in love with another dog.”

“I wasn’t going to say that at all,” she said, although, of course, she was. “I was going to say …” But my sister is not all that quick-witted and couldn’t think of a substitute for what she had planned to announce to me.

“Agatha, you gave me your word.”

“Well, I’m taking it back. It’s null and void.”

“You can’t take your word back after giving it,” I said. “That’s dishonorable.”

“No? Well, unless I miss my guess, I just did. And honor: well, that’s such a guy thing.”

“Agatha, I want that dog. For God’s sake. This is not a joke. I’m talking about my stability here.” There was a long pause. Then I said, “Now that I think about it, I could never count on you.”

“Bradley, really, I’m sorry, but as their mother, I have to think of the kids. They just love Bradley. He’s a great kid dog. They can pummel him and he doesn’t mind at all. He’s what they call a nanny dog. This dog contributes to family values.”

“Oh no. Jeez, this is like always. Damn it, you always took things and never gave them back. You took my toys and wrecked them. You wrecked the wind-up parking garage and then later you took my car, I mean my real car, the green Pontiac, when I was in college, and you dented it and you never told me until I saw the dent. I should’ve remembered how you do that. But I thought: this time I can trust Agatha.”

“Let’s not go over that dent business again. I am so tired of hearing about that famous dent. And about trusting me? I guess you were wrong. The dog is bigger than that.”

“Agatha, is Harold there?”

“Nope, he’s down at the barbershop. It’s Saturday morning. Busy time for haircutting.”

I heard Bradley barking. I sensed that he knew I was on the line, that I wanted him back. “I’m going to call Harold.”

So I hung up on her and called Harold’s barbershop.

“Harold,” I said, “I want that dog back.”

“Hey, bro,” he said in his friendly way. “Whassup? I’m kinda busy right now.”

“It’s about my dog,” I said. “I just talked to Agatha. She’s being stubborn. She won’t give me Bradley back, she says.”

“Oh, that. Well, I know, but, understand, she’s real insistent and everything, and she does have a point. She’s pretty hard to fight with when she has a point.”

“She gave me her word.”

“Yeah, well. Your sister does that,” he said with a sigh.

“Harold, I’ve got to have that dog. Kathryn left me and I’m a wreck.”

“You sound like a wreck, I agree with you about that. But listen, Bradley, the kids have gone all crazy about that animal, and I don’t think I can return him to you. It’s not all that easy, taking a pet away from children.” He waited. “You don’t have kids. You don’t know about how kids scream at you. I mean, they really scream at you. They know how. It’s like their job.”

I heard a sound from someone who was presumably in the barber chair.

“What’s that?”

“Oh,” Harold said, “that’s my customer. Guy named Saul. He says I should return the dog.”

“He’s right. A deal is a deal.” I waited. “There’s honor at stake here.”

“There is? Whose honor?”

In the background, I could hear the customer named Saul saying, “Your honor, Harold.”

“Listen,” Harold said, “it’s a busy morning and I have to go.”

“Harold, you and Agatha promised—”

“Good-bye, Bradley. I’m sorry. I truly am.”

And he hung up on me.

I HAD NEVER REPOSSESSED a dog before. But that was what I would have to do. First I had to go down to Jitters for several hours to supervise and manage the staffing and work on the books. Also, we were still training Chloé—she’d left Dr. Enchilada’s, as I said, to do bookkeeping for us at the main downtown Jitters. But by two in the afternoon I thought everything was under control in the place, the customers jabbering away on their caffeine highs, spraying bagel crumbs in every direction, and so I changed clothes in the back room and hopped in my car and headed up toward Five Oaks. I had taken along Bradley’s old leash, some Milk Bones and kibble, a bowl for water, and some squeak toys, including a squeak cat I thought he’d like to chew on.

The trouble was that I had lingered over a bit too much caffeine myself, with the result that my nerves were on fire, and I was pulled over and ticketed on 1–75 just north of Bay City for driving eighty-five miles an hour. Mr. Toad is a fast driver, I’ll admit that right now. The patrolman was a squat, bullet-headed youth with a mean and forthright expression of contempt. When I pulled out my wallet from my sport coat, several nuggets of dog kibble cascaded out. The cop, seeing this, intensified his expression of scorn. His face looked as if it had been made of concrete.

“Officer, everyone was driving that speed,” I said, sounding authoritative, like a war correspondent. “We all were. I don’t see why you singled me out.”

“Sir?” he said. Even his voice sounded concretelike. “Let me ask you a question. Have you ever gone hunting? Up north?”

“Hunting? Once or twice. But I don’t see what—”

“—Duck hunting?”

“No. Maybe once.”

“Well,” he said, “if you’ve gone duck hunting, and you were there in the marshes, let’s say in the early morning, you know, at first light? When you aimed your gun, would you shoot at the individual duck, or would you shoot at the whole flock? You’d aim at one of them, wouldn’t you? That’s what I did. I aimed at you. And it seems I landed you.”

So he opened his book and wrote out the ticket. But I explained to him as he wrote that I had been in a hurry to get a dog, my dog, and I explained about my wife leaving me—the caffeine still had me in its grip—but he seemed quite unsympathetic, and unmoved, and certainly not about to eat the ticket on my behalf. He was a callow youth with a simple idea of lawbreaking and had suffered no setbacks in the wars of love. He wore no wedding ring, I noticed. He said to me, after I had finished my presentation, “Things will go very ill for you if you are caught speeding again soon.” Where do they find phrases like that? He was still trying to act the part.

Also, to compound my difficulties, it had started to snow, and the snow reminded me of Kathryn and of how we had once stood in front of a window hand in hand after going to the Humane Society, and how she had betrayed me, and her betrayal got mixed up in my head with Agatha’s, with the result that the dog started to seem like the solution to just about every aspect of my life. How pathetically low the stakes had fallen. So after getting ticketed the first time, I forgot about how fast I was going, with the result that about thirty miles north of my previous encounter with the law, I was pulled over again, about half a mile south of an outlet mall, but this time by a different guy, a better guy, though not Highway Patrol fortunately, but a local cop this time. He was a cop with soul, a midwestern rural African-American cop I’m talking about now, married this time, who was more sympathetic to my story, and who, with a downcast expression, issued me a warning.

APPROACHING FIVE OAKS, I took the Oak Street exit off the freeway and drove past Bruckner Buick and crept past the Wald-Chem plant where Agatha worked as an administrative assistant to the CEO, this guy Schwartzwalder. There was a smell in the air of slightly rancid cooking oil mixed with the odor emanating from the paper plant near the river, an odor of cardboard and vanilla, a numbing upsurge of profitmaking industrial aerosols. I turned off the car radio so no one would know I was coming. I drove into town on little cat feet.

Unlike the cat, however, my car was slipping and sliding. My helplessness had lost its sense of comedy. It had become inane. I saw my reflection in the rearview mirror, and the expression on my face, of outraged innocent depraved desperation, frightened me. My car skidded and slipped onto a sidewalk. Fortunately, no one was walking there or I might have killed somebody. I threw the car into reverse and resumed my undertaking, my car yawing down the avenue.

I arrived in due course on their block, Agatha and Harold’s. It’s actually a nice enough neighborhood, tree-shaded, large old houses, solidly middle-class, lawns spray-painted with herbicidal chemicals in the summer. This being late fall, they already had their Christmas decorations assembled and displayed outside, with an enormous plastic sleigh and eight plastic electrified reindeer desecrating the roof. The noses on these reindeer blinked sequentially, and below them the MERRY CHRISTMAS sign burned brightly even in the daytime. The sleigh was cluttered with tinfoil gift paraphernalia. I think Harold put this up in September, a foible of his. Despite what you might think, I am not a cruel man, and I realized insightfully that I could not knock on the door and take Bradley the dog by stealth or force during the Christmas season. In front of the children, Tom and Louie, the event would be traumatic, it would spoil their holiday memories forever—Christmas would from this day onward be the time of year when they had lost the family dog—and I would eternally be the monstrous ogre uncle.

So I parked about two houses away and advanced toward the perimeter of the house, glancing in every direction. My footwear caused me to slip on the ice. I fell with a great snowy thump. I may have looked like a comic figure but my insides were churning with misery and gastroenteritis. Next time I fell, my coccyx would be smashed into pieces. I stood up and pretended that nothing had happened, wiping the tears out of my eyes, tears of pain and suffering and rage.

My inner life lacks dignity. There’s nothing I can do about that.

My hope was that the dog would be in the back yard, romping, alone by himself, available for capture.

No such luck. There was not a sign of Bradley. I checked the windows and walked around the house twice, stumbling once over the Christmas wiring. The house, despite its Christmas decorations, had an air of solitary warm security and the light of settled domesticity. It glowed in a way to break your heart. So after I had walked around the house twice, my spirit sinking, I saw Tom, my nephew, looking out the kitchen window quizzically at me. His scrubbed, freckled face appeared to float above a pot of dusty African violets on the sill. When he saw me, he smiled and waved. His hands had smears of dried chocolate pudding on them. I pointed at the back door. He ran back to let me in.

In the mudroom, he gave me a hug, God bless him.

“Hi, Uncle Bradley,” he said. “What’re you doing here? Did they invite you?”

“Is your mother around?” I asked. I heard the sound of the TV set in the living room.

“Naw, she’s upstairs, taking a nap.” He pointed at the mudroom ceiling. “I’ve been watching Power Rangers. Wanna see it? Louie’s over at a friend’s house.”

“Okay.” I breathed out. Things were going my way. “Where’s Bradley?”

“He’s—” And just then the dog padded into the room, as if by thought command. When he saw me, he wuffed once, and leaped up and put his front paws on my shoulders and began licking me on the face. It was just demonstrably what I needed. Passionate dog kisses were better than none at all, and were in fact more sincere than quite a few of the human variety I had been getting lately. Dogs don’t kiss you in public just for the sake of appearances. “There he is,” Tom said, with a child’s delight in noting the obvious.

I thought for a moment. I would have to explain a delicate matter to my nephew, whom I loved. And I decided that I would have to tell him the truth. I was on a rash mission, but I was probably not a despicable person, and I was not about to lie to a child, at least one who was my relative.

“Tom,” I said, “I have to have Bradley back.” I explained how Kathryn and I had found him in the Humane Society, how she had left me sad and alone, how she and I were getting a divorce, how I was feeling so awful that I couldn’t sleep at night, and that Bradley had always been my dog, because I had found him in the Humane Society, and that he had been boarding up here at Five Oaks for a few weeks, but now, I really really really needed to have him back.

“But he’s our dog now!” Tom said tearfully, and I felt my chance slipping away.

“You can get another dog,” I said.

“Where?”

“They have places,” I said, “right here in Five Oaks, Humane Society places where they have every kind of dog, especially sad homeless dogs. They’re in prison there. They cry all night. They want homes.”

“But they’ll be expensive!” he said. “We caaaaan’t do that!”

“Not that expensive.”

“Oh, yes, I know they will be.”

I took out my wallet and opened it. I showed him the money inside. “How expensive do you think another dog would be?” I took out a five-dollar bill. “Five dollars, you think?” I put it into his hand.

He gave me a measuring look. “More than that.”

I took out a ten-dollar bill. “Fifteen dollars?”

“That says ten on it.”

“But you already have a five. Five and ten is fifteen.”

“Oh. No, more than that, I would just betcha.”

I took out a twenty from my wallet and pressed it into his little child’s palm. “This much?” I asked. In the background I heard the Power Rangers killing something that sounded like a giant worm equipped with buzzers. “Think this is enough?” I wouldn’t do any more arithmetic to confuse him.

“Maybe a little more.”

I took out another five. “How about this?” He grabbed at it. “A five, and a ten, and a twenty, and another five. You could certainly buy a dog for that.”

“Not as good a dog as Bradley,” he said.

“Oh, better, Tommy, much better. Besides, that’s all the money I have. They have golden dogs, dogs who wait for you while you’re at school, and dogs that fetch the paper, and dogs that sleep with you at night and watch television with you, any show you want, and dogs that’ll sit at your feet at the dinner table and eat the food you can’t stand to eat. You can just buy a wonderful do-everything dog now.”

“Bradley does all that.”

“Listen,” I said. “You just go ahead and stuff that money into your pockets and then hide it and be sure not to let your mom put those trousers into the washing machine until you’ve taken the money out, and don’t tell your mom or anybody else that I’ve been here until she wakes up, and I’ll take Bradley with me, and he’ll make me happy again, and then you and Louie can go down to the Humane Society and pick out a dog of your own with that money I just gave you. No more blue Monday ever again. Okay?”

“Okay. I guess.” He scooped up all the bills and stashed them in his pockets, as I had instructed him. “Can I kiss Bradley goodbye?”

“Sure.”

Bradley sat with me in the front seat all the way down to Ann Arbor. I drove the legal limit. It isn’t every day that a toad can free up a dog. We listened to the jazz station from Detroit, and when he stood on his four legs on the passenger side, he smiled at me with his big dopey face, as friendly and as unsubtle as a billboard. His tail wagged, but not in time to the music. Let’s not get sentimental. That dog never had an ear for jazz.

SHE CALLED ME at dinnertime, as I knew she would.

“I cannot believe you did what you did!” she shouted. I had to hold the receiver away from my ear. Enraged spittle was teleported over the phone lines and was spattering out of the earpiece. “You stole the dog! Damn you, Bradley. What is the matter with you?”

“Watch your language. You have children. I didn’t steal him,” I told her. “I bought him back. It was Dog Liberation Day.”

“You bribed Tommy. Who would do that to a child? You are a monster. I am truly, truly angry at you.”

“Uh, no. I didn’t bribe your son. He shook me down.”

“You paid him fifteen dollars for Bradley? That’s a rotten trick. Goddamn you!”

“Honor is such a guy thing,” I said. “Uh, what did you just say?”

“I said you paid him fifteen dollars. That’s low. That’s the lowest you’ve ever gone.”

“Fifteen dollars, eh?” My nephew was a child of deep cunning, I was discovering. “You get what you pay for. What was Harold’s reaction?”

“You called him at the barbershop! You brainwashed him. He’s changed his tune. He never liked this dog anyway, he says. And now Louie is saying that he never liked the dog either. I think Tommy paid him off to say that. Only me! I was the only loving one! You guys are ganging up against me. You’re all against me!”

“Now you’re self-dramatizing,” I said coolly. She slammed the phone down.

THE UPSHOT OF IT WAS, I kept Bradley. I fed him and petted him and I built him a doghouse and called his name when I came home, and in return he loved me. My sister and brother-in-law found another dog, as I knew they would. Whom they also named Bradley. Now there are three Bradleys. Their Bradley is smarter than this Bradley, but I don’t care about that at all, not really, because at least with pets, and for all I know, people too, intelligence and quick-wittedness have nothing to do with a talent for being loved, or being kind, nothing at all, less than nothing.

FIVE

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

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

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

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

WE MET AT THIS fast-food place, Dr. Enchilada’s. They’d just hired him, Oscar, he was new. He had to wear the little paper hat over his semiblond hair. It’s the law in this state, for hygiene. He came in and he looked at the hat, turning it in his hands. When he finally put it on, he wore it an angle, like he was not wearing it. He had an attitude about the hat, which made it okay and unopinionated. He was above the hat, the hat wasn’t above him. That day, they gave him five or ten minutes of training, and then he was working the register, Mr. Can-I-Help-You, but looking bad and cool and totally unhelpful, and I was on the taco assembly line gooping on the guacamole. I was only looking at him occasionally, in secret, him being the new boy. It isn’t really guacamole, by the way. They call it guacamole to keep up appearances at Dr. Enchilada’s, which is owned by Citibank or somebody.

Anyway, we took a break together. We went outside to the parking lot for a smoke. He was still wearing the hat. To make conversation, he pointed at my ear and said, “Your name’s Chloé? That’s cool. Well, hey, Chloé, you’re pretty but you’re way underpierced.”

So I kicked the dead caterpillars in the driveway and said, Fuck you but, you know, giving it a friendly girlish inflection, a smile, an invitation, just the right tone to start flipping him out.

He said, smiling back, “No, no, really, just one isn’t enough.” And he raised his finger to my earlobe. His hand motion was halfway on its journey to being a caress. It was then I noticed how nice-looking he was. The blond hair, the snaggle-toothed smile, the bomb-shelter eyes. A cute guy who can look at a woman such as me directly and not turn away has the courage of a mountain climber. Sometimes they get scared off by the eyeliner and the mint-green glint in my cornea, and they worry that they won’t be up to the challenge. But boys in recovery have that reentry calmed-down zombie look, which you can’t buy in stores, and they do sometimes turn it to their advantage if they aren’t scared of girls. Oscar looked burned away and rebuilt, like a housing project. Survivors are sexy, sort of the way secondhand clothes are sexy because they hang right, you don’t have to break them in or get the sizing out.

When he looked at me, he was sending me a signal that extended into the future and made my teeth rattle. He said he was pierced all over the place. And he told me about where he was pierced, including his tongue stud, and also the secret tattoo he had, of the skull, which said “Die.”

I was deeply impressed. Also he had nice shoulders, despite everything he’d been through. He had been an athlete once, before indifference took him over and he absolutely no longer cared who won anything. I felt no lust toward him at that moment but knew that I would within a few brief hours, the itch starting in my heart and moving downward into my hands.

We went back to work. That afternoon it was kind of electrical as I watched him take orders and fuck up when he gave change.

That night when I told my best friend, the Vulture, about it, the Vulture said Oscar and I would happen, that we were inescapable and inevitable. She’s never wrong about things like that, the Vulture isn’t.

HE GOT MY PHONE NUMBER, in that house where I was living with about sixteen other people. They were all from high school, and we were existing genetically and domestically together before we found serious jobs and apartments and lives that we could claim as our own. Some of them were working at this coffee franchise, Jitters. For this guy Bradley. I ended up working there. I guess you know him, obviously.

At home there was this constant desperate party going on day and night, which can be depressing and effortful. You get tired of the burns in the furniture and how the bathroom is always locked, or, when you get in, there are potato chips floating in the toilet. Anyway, Oscar’d call and say, I want Chloé. Not, Can I speak to Chloé? Or: Is Chloé there? But every time: I want Chloé. I liked that, especially the “want” part. My roommates taught him to say Please. They’d imitate him, these girls. Give me Chloé I want Chloé, was their envious little whine. The Spice Girls I lived with—Dopey and Sneezy and Slutty and Bookish—they were so urbane that they pretended not to eat or to cook or anything—they subsisted on air and bulimia. So Oscar took me to some movies and we ate popcorn out of the same bag. As a gift, he gave me his syringe and his spoon and his rubber tubing thing. He put them in a box with a sort of rubber band around it. He told me never to give them back, that I was the new event in his life, the new car in his driveway. The old events were passé. Things developed between us. I’m summarizing here.

He told me that he was burning for me, and he meant it. When he was around me, he gave off a smell of young man musk, mixed of salt and leather and grass. He’d stare at me desperately, smoldering his life away.

To be more romantic than we were, you’d have to kill yourself in the middle of the street and then write about it. Shakespeare did that.

He took me out to dinner at the Happy Chef, for example. The Happy Chef himself is outside the restaurant on a concrete pedestal. He’s ten feet tall and made out of plastic and wood and glue. He’s the symbol of everything that happens inside. Oscar let me press the button at the side of the Chef that makes the Chef talk, from a recording. “Hello. While you’re at the Happy Chef, you may notice that some of the water glasses have no ice in them. This is not because we forgot to put ice in the glasses—all of our water comes with ice in it—but because the water got hungry, and ate the ice.” Like that. We laughed sadly at the lame-o humor, then went inside for hamburgers. Oscar put his foot between my legs, and he touched the inside of my wrist with his fingers. I loved it, how high he carried a torch for me. It was romantic, at least as romantic as my life ever gets.

But! He still lived with his father in Ypsilanti. He took me over there and showed me his knife collection stashed under the bed in this velvet-lined box. He wouldn’t let me touch his knives. Because I would hurt their aura. He said. As if I could blunt a knife! Also I got shown his stamps, that he had collected in fourth grade. Those I could touch. He still had his track team medals up, and his track shoes on his windowsill, all this boy-holy shit. He had run the relays. That was the last thing he did before he tried out syringes filled with mind-soak for a little while. But what really got to me? Was that he still slept with his Bert. Or maybe it was Ernie. It was the one that looked like President Bush, with the pinhead, whichever. Oscar gave it to me when I asked for it because it smelled like him, grass and vinegar and musk. It had Oscar-aroma.

His father dynamited tree stumps for a living, then hauled them away. That’s what Oscar said he did, though even Oscar wasn’t sure about his dad’s total occupation. Early on, I saw Oscar’s dad a few times, through the window, coming home in his truck. He didn’t come inside back then. I believed it: about the dynamite. Oscar’s dad had the strangest name I ever heard of on a man: Batholdt. And that was only his first name. Everybody called him the Bat. Oscar had to hide the fact that he slept with Bert from the Bat. The Bat was scary. The Bat is scary. Oh, you who are reading this book, brothers and sisters, look over your shoulder, for the Bat crouches behind you.

OSCAR SAID, You won’t believe this, but I think of sex all day long. I didn’t while I was temporarily a teen junkie but now I do again. Sex has made me totally pointless in the human realm. I would know stuff like the capital of Mormonism if I wasn’t Mr. Obsessed. My mind is a pornographic event. I’m an onionhead. Oh, Chloé, you set me on fire.

But I—me, Chloé—was sick that way too, though not about boys generally, just about love, and then sort of gradually about Oscar. He made me feel actual. When I was with Oscar I felt I was in prime time. So I told him that, and when I did, his eyes lit up as if we had a connection, a plug to a socket. Then a week or so later he said he thought of me all the time, how he wanted to be with me, and talk to me, and how he was distracted at Dr. Enchilada’s, thinking about me, how much I was a car that he wanted to drive, no, not a car—the car. I would take him to heaven. It was so sweet of him to say that. He had a streak of romanticism, it turned out.

By then I had earrings all the way up and down my ear. He had done his vibe on me and I had answered. Also, we had talked all night long twice, by phone. We said that no matter what, we’d be there for each other. So then we did the inevitable and fucked happily several times and he sort of moved in. Not that he really moved in, he was just there all the time day and night, touching me everywhere. My roommates, the Spice Girls, tried to ignore him. As if they could ignore a boy that beautiful, good in bed, as I carelessly bragged, a boy in recovery and therefore almost glamorous, a knight in shining armor galloping out of rehab.

But then we decided we had to move out, this particular night when the noise level was extreme, a headbanger party, bodies everywhere, every room a mosh pit. This couple, these two sexual fascists, they were kissing and molesting each other unobtrusively—they thought!—in the kitchen, standing up. But it was show-offy, whatever it was they were doing, and unsanitary besides. I didn’t even know them. They were friends of somebody. When I told them they should find a bed like everyone else, the girl stopped what she was doing and said that being a food-service professional had warped me and would I please keep my opinions to myself. How’d she know about my day job? It had to have been that they had seen me at Dr. Enchilada’s tricking out the tacos with the guacamole pistol. There and then I decided to get another position somehow. I don’t know, maybe the Spice Girls had been talking about me. But these two, they were blocking the refrigerator. You just don’t do that at a party. When you don’t know the people who’re doing it, sex, or whatever those two were doing, can be repulsive and karma-damaging, if I may be so bold as to say.

So me and Oscar decided to take a walk.

We went down the side streets in the dark. I could hear locusts, and the hot night air lay like a damp towel against my skin. I saw this pre-teen girl doing cartwheels on her front lawn, back and forth, slowly and sweetly, as if she were performing all those actions as absentmindedly as a Ferris wheel. She was wearing a charm bracelet, and tinkling came from her wrists. I said, “I used to do that. I used to practice back flips. I was into cheering.”

Oscar said, “You?”

“Yeah. Once upon a time, I wanted to be a cheerleader. So I was. For the wrestling team.”

“No kidding.”

“Yeah. But I guess I got degenerate, or something. That was when people didn’t believe my cheers anymore, I guess. My cheers weren’t infectious.”

We walked on quietly for a while, hand in hand.

Oscar said he’d read in the paper about the Perseid meteor shower. Because it was August or because it was time for them to die. The meteors were all suicidal. They were bored with space, he said, looking up toward the night sky. They were burning themselves up in the atmosphere. A meteor deathfest. It was romantic, the way trees are romantic, and the way Oscar could be romantic if he set his mind to it. Also cosmologica!, a word I once learned. He pointed out constellations to me, the ones viewed for centuries and named for kings and queens. We were walking hand in hand and then we were talking about this new music group, Castro District, that we both liked. Our conversations were getting deep and personal the longer we talked. I could feel his love entering me through my spine. And we’d look up to see a meteor, but, fuck and alas, all you could see was another street light.

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