Copyright

4th Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.4thEstate.co.uk

First published in the United States by Random House in 2017

This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2018

Copyright © 2017 by Matthew Klam

Drawings copyright © 2017 by John S. Cuneo

Cover design by Jack Smyth

“Sea-Level Elegy” was first published in Stag’s Leap (Jonathan Cape 4th October, 2012). Reprinted by permission of Jonathan Cape and Aragi Inc.

Matthew Klam asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

Source ISBN: 9780008282516

Ebook Edition © March 2018 ISBN: 9780008282523

Version: 2018-03-23

Dedication

FOR DANIEL MENAKER

Epigraph

Once, each summer, I howl,

and draw myself back, out of there, where

desire and joy, where ignorance, where

touch and the ideal, where unwilled yet willful

blindness – once a year, I have mercy,

I let myself go down where I have lived, and then,

hand over hand, I pull myself back up.

“Sea-Level Elegy”, Sharon Olds

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Forty

Acknowledgments

About the Author

By Matthew Klam

About the Publisher

ONE

Fog blew in Saturday morning. I sat under a big white tent and drank some coffee while my chair sank into the lawn. I talked to a kid with a heavy beard in a mangled straw hat who last year for some reason we started calling Swaggamuffin.

A girl wearing a name tag passed out rosters to faculty. A guy walking behind her handed me an info packet. I sat there eating toast, looking at my notes. Other people were out there too, chatting and smoking. I said hello to a dozen familiar faces from over the years and drank several more cups. The fog burned off. A lawnmower buzzed. The sky was a flawless aquamarine blue.

I’d written a three-part lecture, on drawing techniques, brainstorming, and plotting, and also found some handouts with exercises from last year or the year before that. We supplied them with pencils, erasers, pens, nibs, brushes, and paper—100-pound acid-free Bristol board for comic applications—and a little plastic thing called the Ames Lettering Guide, which I still had no idea how to use.

We were gathered on the campus of a college you’ve never heard of, at the end of a sandy, hook-shaped peninsula, bound by the Atlantic and scenic as hell. It was my fifth straight summer running a workshop at an annual summer arts conference, and once again my class was full. The conference had begun fifteen years before as a one-day poetry festival and had grown every year in size and popularity, although the college itself had not fared as well. Over time, pieces of it had been boarded up to save money until the entire school was abandoned, then reopened in a limited capacity as a satellite of the nearest state U. The college had kept its name, which was the name of the town, which had been named after the people who’d been here since the beginning of time, who’d made peace with the English settlers, teaching them to fish and hunt, helping them slaughter neighboring tribes, before they too were wiped out by disease or dragged off and sold into slavery.

Nada Klein, with her long French braid and dark wolfish eyes, walked through the tent with her shawl dragging on the ground. She beat cancer every year, and showed up late to her own slide talks, and was widely mocked and imitated. Larry Burris was back, too. He skipped his meds one year and wore a jester’s cap to class and lit his own notes on fire, and had to spend the night in a hospital. He stood beside me now, beneath the tent flap, patiently signing a copy of his book, and handed it back to a woman who hugged him. On the faculty were many friends I’d come to know over the years as intellects, historians, wordsmiths, talented performers, storytellers with big fake teeth, addicts, drunkards, perverts, world-famous womanizers, sufferers of gout, maniacs, liars—embittered, delusional, accomplished, scared of spiders, unable to swim, loveless, and cruel. I noticed Barney Angerman, who’d won the Pulitzer for drama the year I was born, and Tabitha Portenlee, who’d written an acclaimed incest memoir; she was helping Barney through the breakfast line as he gripped her arm. This past winter the conference director had asked me to name another cartoonist I could vouch for to teach a second comics workshop, but I didn’t answer him. I worried, because of the way my career had gone, that I’d be hiring my replacement.

A little before nine I went to the Fine Arts building. Hurrying down a long hall, past students and teachers, I looked for my studio. There were classes in the annex now, landscape photography, felt making, fresco on plaster, whatever that was.

When I got there they were pulling out their stuff, giving each other the once-over. I flipped through my notes. A woman who lived in town was complaining about beach traffic. A skinny kid stared at me, wearing a sundress, mascara, and a pearl choker. A young Asian woman stared at him, clutching her pencil case. A young man in a white polo, a craggy-looking old guy, and a girl with button eyes and tiny feet were talking with affection about their dogs.

I opened the info packet and read the bios of the other teachers and guest speakers printed in the conference pamphlet. There were different levels of us, unknown nobodies and one-hit has-beens, midlist somebodies and legitimate stars. As I read, I could hear my own labored breathing. I tried to slow it down but felt worse, graying as the blood left my brain. I read my course description from who knows when.

MATTICOOK COLLEGE SUMMER ARTS CONFERENCE

CARTOONING STUDIO: SEMIAUTOBIOGRAPHICAL COMICS

with Rich Fischer

July 18–21. Tuition: $1,500. Ages 18+. For-credit option:

$1,900.

Are you ready to take your cartooning to the next level? Start from scratch, or bring your own comic in progress to our 4-day summer intensive, and we’ll help you do just that …

A murmuring of bodies came from the hall. Fans turned slowly over us. An old galvanized ventilation system snaked around the ceiling. A thin woman stepped cautiously into the room, walked out, then came back in. Wild brown hair, sharp elbows, bony wrists, redness around her mouth, raw, wounded-looking lips, a long skirt, moccasins. Was she the kind of person to take time out of her busy life to make a fictionalized comic about herself? Apparently.

I moved across the studio, faking a slight limp in order to give my movements in flip-flops and canvas shorts a more tweedy gravitas, and adjusted the blinds. In this way I became the parent, the benign elder, with knowledge and some intangible quality of goodness that would allow my students to project onto me the power to contain their aspirations. I’d be the vessel, I’d hold their dreams, whatever. When it was quiet, I asked them to go around the room and introduce themselves.

I wasn’t a teacher. I didn’t belong here. I’d ditched my family and driven nine hours up the East Coast in Friday summer highway traffic so I could show off in front of strangers, most of whom had no talent, some of whom weren’t even nice, while I got paid almost nothing. They’d blown their hard-earned money to come to this beautiful place not to swim or sail but to sit in a room all day writing and drawing their guts out, telling themselves it was a dream come true.

I’d driven up here for the first time the summer after my only book came out. This conference was one of many good things that had come to me in those days. It was maybe the only thing left. Every time I pulled into town and saw the blinking neon lobsters, the bowling alley, the giant plastic 3-D roadside sandwich, it gave me a big feeling, reminding me of a once-limitless future.

Melanie Lenzner taught high school art in New Hampshire and went on too long, acting like it was her class, not mine. Helen Li, a biomolecular engineering student, said she didn’t want to start med school in the fall. Nick, the trans kid, said his father had thrown him out of the house and that he—or she—lived in her car. Carol, faded red hair cut short and stalky, looked alarmed, and asked how long he or she’d been homeless. George had gone into the army at eighteen, had fought in Vietnam, lost his wife twenty years ago, and had a daughter named Sonya who lived in Buffalo. Sang-Keun Kim, mustache, ponytail; I thought I’d seen him back in the eighties in porno movies. Frances, a granny in a white cardigan, so happy to be here. Vishnu wanted us to know that he’d taken workshops from cartoonists more famous than me. Rebecca, the skinny one, worked in Hartford as a midwife. Behind the sinks, a teenage girl wearing a wool hat, deerskin slippers, and flannel pajama pants looked up through a face screened in acne. I asked her to move closer. She said no. Her name was Rachel.

I passed around a ream of eleven by seventeen and asked everybody to take some.

I hadn’t published anything in six years. I worked as an illustrator now, at an esteemed magazine of politics and culture, a venerated institution of American journalism and the second- or third-oldest magazine in the country. Illustration is to cartooning as prison sodomy is to pansexual orgy. Not the same thing at all. Anyway, you might’ve seen my magazine work but didn’t know it—unless you happened to be scanning for names with a microscope. Some watered-down version, muted to satisfy commercial demands.

I’d been so full of promise, so amazed to have graduated from the backwater of fanzines and college newspapers to mainstream publishing. I had an appointment with destiny, I’d barely started, then I blinked and it was over. Nobody writing to beg for a blurb, no more mysterious checks arriving in the mail, no agent’s letterhead clipped to the check, no more calls from my publisher, not even to say go fuck yourself. What I missed most of all, had lost or forgotten, was the making of comics, triangulating the pain of existence through these bouts of belligerence, shame, suspicion, and euphoria, writerly noodlings and decipherable images organized into an all-encompassing environment. No more bragging, no more swagger, no more tasteless personal revelations. Cartoonists still made comics, and I hated them to the core of my filthy soul, and prayed for the return of 1996, when everything that would happen was about to happen, when I’d try to imagine how far I’d go.

If you’ve experienced precocious success, you know it’s rare. At first it seems like there must be some mistake, but you get used to it in a hurry; you’re sure it’ll always be this way. You travel, and meet famous cartoonists; they praise you, you chat like old friends and get to know them personally, you get sick of their whining and quickly lose respect for anyone on earth who struggles or complains. You come to expect fan mail, strangers popping up to kiss your ass, a certain deference or tone of voice. You start to think that anyone making comics who is without a national reputation, or miserable or obscure and lacking attention from jerkoffs in Hollywood, is a fucking moron.

I wrote on the board, Plumber, Hitler, moneybags,

“Let’s just take a couple minutes here—”

hayseed, hottie, hobbit,

“—to sketch these—”

lunch lady, Nabokov, beer wench,

“—keep the pencil moving—”

Sasquatch, sous-chef, snowman.

Then I walked around, trying not to look accusingly or even curiously at anyone, offering praise, encouraging spontaneity, saying positive stuff.

“Love it” … ​“Yes!” … ​“Lusty!” … ​“Good!”

The whole idea of this doodling was to lower the anxiety level in the room, to lighten the mood, to give them a feeling of poise and excitement, to discover in any character the autonomous core—

“Maybe another minute to wind up the one you’re on—”

—to raise the body temp and get the molecules bubbling. Then I went to the board and drew a snowman with a grin made of coal, and an indent where the nose should be, and this huge honking carrot, slightly bent, sticking out below the equator, you know where. Underneath the snowman I wrote, “Hungry?”

They laughed.

“Humor arises from the surprising juxtaposition of text and image.”

I drew a rabbit with a worried face, staring at the carrot. Then I erased the rabbit and put the carrot back where it belonged. I drew Satan in an overcoat, with a scarf around his neck, leaning on the snowman, complaining on the phone that the thermostat was broken. Then I got rid of Satan and drew a second snowman saying to the first, “Why does everything smell like carrots?”

“When you look at a comic, do you read the words first? Or look at the drawing?” We went around the room and shared our thoughts.

Then I broke them into groups, and for the next twenty minutes they made a racket, shouting, telling tales, arms flapping. They exchanged ideas, offered feedback and helpful insights, discussed, dissected, and ripped each other to shreds. In an email I’d sent out a month earlier, I’d asked them to bring along notes, a script, and some art, exhorting them to bravely mine their personal experiences for therapeutic and artistic gains, in order to come up with the one important story they’d develop this week.

Rebecca had in mind a moment inside an ambulance, her younger self in a paramedic’s uniform, leaning heavily over an old man, working to restart his heart, failing to, panic setting in. Sarah wanted to do something light and fun about her job in a bookstore. Brandon, in the white polo, made notes on his first gay pride weekend, bleaching his hair, snorting amyl nitrate, realizing, in the end, If you’ve seen one drag queen, you’ve seen ten thousand. They had four days to turn their thumbnails into finished pencil drawings, which they’d then ink and letter, scan and reproduce, and present to the world by Tuesday afternoon, in time for open studio.

I asked if anyone needed help. Mel fumbled with her pencil sharpener. I heard crickets chirping in Sarah’s empty head. Then I walked to the back of the room and looked at the floor. I heard pencils and paper, the steady breathing of humans at work. I stood behind the printing press, my hands on the wheel, like a sea captain trying to get on course.

TWO

By the time we took a break, other classes had also made their way outside to the picnic tables in the courtyard. A breeze as light as champagne bubbles swept over us from the bay. Sailboats dotted its sparkling waters. I felt relieved. I’d been nervous before class, and almost puked at breakfast. That first lecture always unhinged me, but I’d gotten through it.

But there was something else not right, and it took me a second to figure out what it was: Angel Solito, walking out of Fine Arts, squinting into the sun, coming toward me. He wore a navy blue hooded sweatshirt with long white strings. His arms hung down at his sides, and he wore eyeglasses. I said something, and he reached out a hand. His face was bumpy, as if a rash was trying to come through from underneath, and his hair had been slept on or pushed up into a ridge.

I couldn’t tell if he had any clue who I was, but I knew an editor of a British anthology who knew him. I said her name, like I didn’t care either way, and sternly congratulated him on his book.

“Uh-huh.”

He was the cartoonist who Carl, the director, had hired. Solito was young enough to be my son, if I’d had a son at fourteen, and on closer inspection the whites of his eyes were laced with red threads and his head tipped forward as if he had horns. Maybe he’d been heading to the big black plastic coffee urn on the picnic table behind me and I’d gotten in his way. Maybe he didn’t care, and just needed to vent, and would’ve talked this way to anybody. He shook his head and said, “Man, it’s been crazy,” and told me how exhausted he was, how he ran out of money two days ago and was waiting for a check from his publisher. As soon as the conference ended, he’d be hitting the road again.

“The book rolls out overseas, in Sweden and Denmark—”

At some point I realized he was confiding, I was being confided in, and I guess I appreciated that.

“—then the big rollout in Europe, at the end of the summer, beginning of fall—”

Chewing his lower lip, blinking at me, talking about some French fellowship, oblivious, harassed, as if French people had been calling all night and he hated to disappoint them, as a woman appeared at his side, with flyaway hair and skin so fair she was glowing, hugging his book to her chest.

“I’m so tired, man, I haven’t done any work in, like, months—”

As another young woman walked past us in pigtails, then stopped short when she realized it was him.

“—new idea for a book but I need to get into a quiet place, and hopefully kind of erupt—”

“Sure, of course.”

“You’ve been living the life for, like, ten years!” he said, taking a step toward the picnic table and his waiting fans. “You gotta tell me what it’s like. That’s why we gotta hang out!”

“Absolutely!” Fuck you.

He gave me a tired wave, a polite smile, almost sad, and I gave him a reassuring nod.

Tell you what it’s like, Angel. I sold ten thousand books in the last six years. He sold a hundred thousand copies in hardback in three months and foreign rights in thirty-eight countries. That’s, like, a million bucks in royalties. The woman in pigtails hesitated, but the blond one had her book ready and jumped.

I’d seen his work somewhere, maybe I saw an excerpt in some anthology, or maybe his publisher sent me a galley, or I might’ve seen it in a bookstore, in a stack on a table in front, and stood over it for however many hours it took to read the thing from start to finish, before stumbling back out into daylight, shivering and mumbling to myself, groping my way out the door.

Ran out of money. That fucker!

Angel Solito traveled from Guatemala to California, mostly on foot, mostly alone, eleven years old, walked a continent to find his parents, and finally did but never found the American dream. His story was rendered in clear bold lines, with faces delicately hatched, with big heads and a ferocious expressiveness. Reviews of his work had been universally frothy. In the days after I read it I had strange moments, traveling to some breathy place, almost happy, imagining that it was my book, my story, that I’d walked three thousand miles to find my parents, four and a half feet tall, eighty pounds, and alone.

He stood by the picnic table as more bodies surrounded him. He had caramel skin and shiny black hair. I felt the thrill of being him, like they were digging me, thanking me. I’d dreamed of the big time, and here it was, so beautiful, so real! Then I remembered that I didn’t get robbed by soldiers and chased by wolves. I didn’t crawl across the Sonoran Desert. Where I came from, eleven-year-olds could barely make their own beds.

I grew up in a middle-class suburb with good public schools an hour north of the G.W. Bridge, under a stand of white pine trees in an old house with wavy wooden floors and a loose banister. Walking thousands of miles to find my family would’ve been unnecessary. My brother lived across the hall. My father sold life insurance and other tax-dodging instruments from a skyscraper in New York City. My mom taught music to fourth, fifth, and sixth graders, in an attempt to make up for her own artistic failures. We lacked for nothing in that house except talent.

Back in the studio, a dozen people sat bowed, bent over their desks—doing what? Trying to pump life into a poorly realized, made-up world. Brandon didn’t know where to put his word balloons, and Rebecca needed a beveled edge, and Sang-Keun couldn’t figure out how to draw a cowboy hat.

“It’s round but curved,” I said, leaning over his shoulder. “Like a Pringle potato chip. A disk intersecting an ovoid.”

What did he see as my hand flew across the page? Several cowboy hats, spilling out of a pencil. Did he notice how each one was unique and expressive, reflecting the life of its owner? Did he note the skill or understand how hard I worked to make something difficult look effortless?

He touched the collar of his T-shirt, staring at the drawing as I moved to the next desk. He didn’t know anything. He didn’t care. I showed Sarah how to turn on the light box, and walked to the sinks and looked out the window, and tried my best to stay out of the way as a new generation of artists pounded at the gates of American graphic literature.

THREE

After class I cut across the lawn with a girl who wore cat-eye glasses and had small, pointy teeth, and a man with clay dust all over him, whacking it off his clothes, and Vishnu, who kept bumping into me.

“Professor,” he said, “in an interview you said male cartoonists are derivative whereas women are all original. Isn’t that kind of sexist?”

“I think I said guys have to shake off Batman comics. Women don’t have that as much.”

“Did you ever play Five-Card Nancy or stay up all night to do a twenty-four-hour comic?”

“No.”

“Why not?” He gave me a canny look, one cartoonist to another.

“There’s no point.”

“I couldn’t agree less.” He was a thin, beaky young man with a hollow-boned lightness and no romance in his heart. His hair was thick, blue black, and chopped above the ears. “Do you use a drawing tablet?”

“No.”

“Well, what’s your favorite inking tool? And what kind of ink, and which nibs, and how do you hold and use the nib? Can I get a demo tomorrow?”

“Sure.”

“Have you ever used a toothbrush for texture?”

The problem of walking and talking on a hilly, shifting terrain presented itself.

“Do you like to use a smooth paper or something more grainy?” He thought I knew the secrets and could lay them out for him like coconut macaroons. I told him we’d discuss it in class.

At the beginning of class he’d corrected my pronunciation of his name: “Not Veeshnu. Vishnu.” At the end of class he’d asked if I planned to cover self-publishing and self-promotion, and if I had advice on how to get his self-published work into circulation. I said no, but I only said it because I felt that a person who showed up with a stack of sophisticated mini comics to a class advertised for beginners could go fuck himself.

For the rest of class he’d just sat there, though when I asked if he had an idea to work on, he seemed to nod toward his massive accomplishment, his minis, and said he was deciding between a few possibilities, then asked if I had a pub date for my next comic, to draw a comparison I guess, that I wasn’t producing anything at the moment, either. When you’re the new guy, with a new book out, they treat you one way. When you’re the same guy six years later, it’s something else.

In the main office, a blond kid had me sign a tax form so I could get paid. He told me without smiling that they needed people after lunch for softball. According to the contract, teachers were expected to play.

FOUR

In order to reach this place I’d crossed several state lines, mounted several bridges, exited highways, and ridden others until they ended. I eventually headed down a coveted stretch of land, surrounded by water on three sides, known by painters for its light, somewhat unto itself most of the year but overrun in July and August, and finally reached my destination.

Everybody knows a spot like this, a fishing village turned tourist trap, with pornographic sunsets and the Sea Breeze Motel. Out of respect for the powerful emotional attachments people form to such places, I’d rather not say exactly where I went, in the event that the detailing of my location causes even more congestion on the streets of that nicely preserved, remote southern New England coastal town.

A Dutch windmill stood at the highest point on campus, a replica or maybe the real thing, brass plates screwed to its siding from an ongoing fundraiser to repair it. On the distant practice fields, yellowing in the heat, the college held a lacrosse camp for high school boys and girls. It sat along some quaint national seashore, amid a high number of colonial-era buildings, among shifting mountains of sand, speckled with dune grass. A frolicsome place, a remote place, a place I’d barely heard of before coming here to teach. We arrived by bus or ferry or train or car, or airplane service direct from Boston. Because of its location, the conference had an easy time attracting artists, oil painters, memoirists, old guys, skitterish teenagers in search of illicit pleasures, driftwood sculptors, printmakers, actors, and playwrights.

They offered a filmmaking workshop. They taught all kinds of crafts. In the afternoon there were shuttles to the beach and a Ping-Pong table in the main building and shows in the gallery and staged readings of plays in the auditorium every night. The writers took classes in red brick buildings with white shutters. Other buildings were crumbling or had been condemned and were barricaded behind tall metal fences with posted signs. The actors camped out in the auditorium. The studios were over the hill, on the far side of the windmill, in what had once been a shipyard. Fine Arts occupied a long, skinny two-story wooden structure that creaked like a sailboat, shingled and faded, and there were cinder-block dorms where they’d put me the first two years, and a wharfy, flaking cottage where they stuck the gang of interns.

This year they’d put me in the Barn; it really was a barn, chopped into apartments for staff during the year, and still partly unfinished. The door to the top-floor apartment wasn’t locked, it didn’t even close, it thunked against the doorframe, swollen from the seacoast weather. It was one big open room with the angled walls of an attic, rusted skylights and a windowed cupola in the peak, and a narrow swath running down the middle of the room where you could stand up straight. There was a kitchen, frying pans whose handles fell off when you touched them, a coffee table and dresser, a white plastic fan, a filthy plaid couch, and two twin beds crammed in along the eaves.

I’d arrived on Friday at five and hung up my shirts, my head at an angle, hitting it once hard enough on a beam that I expected my skull to crack open and my brain to fall out. I stood on the bed and with some effort cranked open the skylight, stuck my head through, and looked out across campus. I heard a seagull bark like a dog. Over the rooftops of the little town I saw blue water, the harbor jetty, and a dinky lighthouse I’d never noticed before. I felt like I’d shimmied up the mast of a ship.

No humidity, no horrifying summer heat, no buses banging down the avenue, no garbage trucks, no marital rancor, just a clean white mattress on a low metal frame, and nobody to wake me up in the middle of the night by punching me in the head, or barfing down my neck, or giving me a heart attack every two hours with his bloodcurdling screams. Nobody else yelling “Daddy!” through the shower door. When I tell her to stop she begins kissing the door, because that’s how much she loves me.

I loved them, too. What would I do without them? All last week, I’d had moments of fear and excitement, waking up with a stomachache, worrying how they’d live without me, while peeling Kaya’s carrots, packing Beanie’s diaper bag, but also feeling less owned by them and maybe cocky and probably gloating, unintentionally ignoring Robin, and she’d noticed it, shaking her head and muttering how I’d already checked out or was too lazy to marinate the fish, rolling her eyes when I forgot to put ice in her water, not wanting it when I came back with the ice tray. Kaya picked up on it too, woke up in the night and needed to pee, wondering if she could have some potatoes, telling me about Louis, the turtle at camp, as we walked back from the bathroom and I tucked her into bed. Maybe it was all in my mind.

We shared our babysitter with the family of a girl named Molly. Robin had picked them up from Molly’s on her way home from work on Friday. I’d called them from the highway in the last hour of my drive. Her mom and stepdad were coming for dinner if they could get it together. I heard Beanie, grunting and sucking, and Kaya going, “Horsey horsey,” which meant Beanie was on Robin’s boob and Kaya was on Robin’s knee.

“Maybe they won’t come,” she’d said.

Her mom was in the late stages of dementia, and her stepfather was attempting to drink himself to death. Her sister lived three thousand miles away and never called. Her brother had faded into myth.

“It’ll be fine,” I said. “Make your frittata.”

“All right,” she said to Kaya. “Knock it off.”

“Kaya,” I said, knowing she could hear, “get off Mommy so Beanie can eat.”

“She used to make jokes: ‘When I’m drooling in the corner, smother me with a pillow.’”

“She’s not drooling.”

“Yet. But maybe this is when I’m supposed to kill her.”

“Don’t kill her tonight.”

“All right.”

“Or at least make it look like an accident.”

“Don’t tell me what to do. Kaya, stop it.”

“Sorry.”

“What’s wrong with you?”

I didn’t know who she was talking to.

If Robin needed help she’d call Elizabeth, who lived eighteen feet away. They liked to stand in the alley between our two houses and talk intensely as the girls rode up and down on their tricycles. Robin talked about Beanie’s sleep patterns and Kaya’s emotional IQ. Elizabeth talked about her fourteen-month-old’s language problems and her seven-year-old caving to the mind games of her five-year-old. They talked about clients Elizabeth saw for psychotherapy and a story editor who tortured Robin. They discussed clothing, did fashion shows for each other: can I get away with this, is this consistent with my persona? They talked about cutting off their hair, glass beads, making jewelry, maternity undergarments, the anti-inflammatory properties of turmeric, hot yoga, colon cleansing, the perils of a Montessori education, the naughty spanking trilogy, the sexy vampire movies, postpartum body issues, hip pain, back spasms, stretched stomachs, cosmetic surgery where they freeze your fat. If you got her talking long enough, Robin mentioned her weight, that she was bigger now, so she thought her head looked too small. They talked about sex and marriage, aging parents, the transformation of a loved one in decline, the terrible suffering of their mothers, helplessness and guilt.

I hung up and drove the last fifty miles to campus. After unpacking the car I went to dinner and ate barbecued chicken under the big white tent, at a table with Howard, a bald guy with a tanned, polished head, and Tina or Dina, who’d come here last year and made sculptures out of wire. After dinner we crowded onto the porch, where a poet read a poem. Carl gave his welcoming remarks, urging us not to climb through windows if we lost our dorm keys. Then we went off to see the theater company do a mash-up of Chekhov plays, set in the 1930s, with Uncle Vanya shooting himself in the second act, wandering in and out with a bandage on his head. In the big hall of the main building I heard Tabitha give the same talk she gave last year, about her spiritual journey beyond incest, into alcoholism, then past that, into group sex and casino gambling, ending in healing and forgiveness. In the gallery there were photos taken by an American soldier during some of the hundreds of trips he’d made while bringing fuel to stranded convoys all over Afghanistan, of the landscape, people, and culture, before he himself was finally blown up and killed. The photos survived. I ate some chocolate-dipped strawberries and talked to a woman with blue streaks in her hair.

Then I went back to the Barn, hung my pants on a nail in the wall by the refrigerator, and thought about Robin, what she was doing, what I’d be doing at that hour if I were home. It was just the usual struggle to stay in love, keep it hot, keep it real, the boredom and revulsion, the afterthought of copulation, the fight for her attention, treating me like a roommate, or maybe like a vision of some shuddering gelatinous organ she’d forgotten still worked inside her.

First a guy sticks something in you. Then a thing grows inside your body. Eventually it tears its way out, leaving a trail of destruction. Then it’s outside your body, but still sucking on you. It makes you weird, these different people in you and on you. Robin had had two C-sections and felt that they’d put her back together wrong the second time. A cold electric twinge shot down her back, down her leg, while walking, sitting, standing, or lying down. It defied any cure, painkillers, epidurals. For a while she wore a small black box on her belt that electro-stimmed her buttocks.

In a previous life, she bit my neck and licked my ear when we did it. After Kaya, I worried about courting her in my pajamas, with our little angel breathing down the hall, and lost focus and cringed as Robin’s patience ran out if I finished too fast or not fast enough and overstayed my welcome. Bad sex was better than nothing, but Beanie effectively ended the badness. Fuckless weeks, excused by parenting, turned weirdly okay. Like our anniversary, we weren’t sure anymore when it was supposed to happen. And, with the exception of my tongue on her clitoris every who knows when, she didn’t need to be touched. She had vibrators for that. I think she mostly thought of what I did as a way to save batteries.

Our sex life hadn’t been mauled by depression, routine, or conflict as much as it had been mauled by distraction, diffusion, a surfeit of beauty. Was that it? Our children’s vitality and strangeness, their softness, shocked me every day. Their lightness and willingness and spirit and stupidity surprised me, their readiness to bravely step into a world they couldn’t understand, packed with swimming pools, speeding cars, blazing sun, fanged dogs, stinging bees, heat, silent anger, slammed doors, inexplicable demands, funny hats slammed on their heads, and constantly from every direction these giants with twelve-pound heads, ten times their weight, five times their height, grabbing, pushing, shoving past, talking loud, telling them how to think, what to want, how to treat their own impulses, which ones to kill, which to love. No to crawling inside a dishwasher or smacking your food when you chewed. Yes to climbing trees and sucking your toes. I was sad for the bleakness of a little kid’s bumbling existence, envious of the simplicity of their cause. They faced the world because they had no choice. Someone was crying. Someone had pooped his pants. They were explorers in a new land. Robin and I stood by them, in parallel formation, to witness and guide them.

Parallel, as if on the same track, running at the same speed, but not touching and having no way to touch. Parallel like people who went to bed without remembering to say good night, or saying it without meaning it, or meaning it but not saying it. I appreciated how on those rare occasions when my wife would kiss me, she did so with flat lips, popping them the way she did when she smacked at her ice cream. In this way she turned my face into something more palatable.

Was it a good life? Was I more joyful, sensitive, and compassionate in my deeply entangled commitment to them? Was there anything better than seeing the world through the eyes of my nutty kids? Was my obligation to Robin the most sincere form of love? Or was I living despite their obstruction, intrusion, whatever? Had I instead been saved by the transcendent power of my ideas and work connected to the larger world, drawings I’d done for the magazine that illuminated trivial or important events of our time? Was I doing all I could to enrich and enhance and enliven my time on earth, or was I doing all I could to destroy, limit, or block any growth or connection? Or was I doing nothing, imitating real suffering while my time ran out, goofing around, rotting, sexless, ugly, and bitter?

Was this as close to love as I was ever going to get? The closer I got, the more I wanted to destroy the things I loved. Something rose up in me, threatening me. I had to deflect it somehow.

I’d never been able to beat back the loneliness of a solitary life, but as part of a couple I felt invisible and deformed, and even at those times when I meant what I said, my words of affection had to be forced through sarcasm and shame. When I misbehaved, acted out discreetly, impulsively, I felt unbreakable and invincible, although of course the guilt eventually tore me apart. And sometimes I examined those parts, and sometimes I pushed them away, but that was just pushing myself away, the pure, monstrous reality, the real me, and without those parts I was an empty shell. The longer it went on, the worse I felt, until I was out of control and panic seized me and I ran back home.

FIVE

I’d spent the winter engaging in daydreams, fantasies, alternate realities, while flipping through emails in a secret folder, and looking at selfies of this same beautiful woman, barely clad in a towel at a fancy resort in Zurich, or on the swings with her kids at the park, or modeling the necklace I’d sent her at Christmas.

We met here a year ago. She took a class in the studio next to mine and pulled some late nights; we shared a bench in the courtyard, downwind of a cigarette. She was a nice woman with a few complaints, suggestible, not finished, wrapped up in her kids. She was unmoved by her own painting and thought her classmates were hilarious if a little hard to take: the lady who painted in her bra, the hipster who flirted with her in his little fedora. We bumped into each other in the laundry room, and went for a walk on the jetty at sunset, and talked about marriage, and stayed out late, and spilled our guts.

Wasn’t that the whole point of this place? To take a break and clear your head? And who really gave a fuck what two people did at an arts conference in some swinging summer paradise? Real life was so lonely anyway, and I figured I’d never see her again, so on the last night we went back to her dorm room and goofed around.

When the conference ended, we started zipping notes back and forth, just a few, then more and more. For a while I thought she’d leave him, and if she left him, maybe I’d leave Robin. But then she didn’t, and I didn’t, either. I saw her once in the fall, for an hour of furious hand holding and making out in a candlelit booth in New York City. And once in March, at her house in Connecticut. Then things got heavy and she stopped talking to me.

In June I sent her a birthday card and asked if she’d be coming back to the conference. It took her three weeks to say maybe. And now, after signing my contract and promising to play softball, as I headed to the tent for lunch, I thought about what might happen if she did. It didn’t help to think about it, but I’d spent a lot of time thinking about it anyway. I got excited. I still had passion. I came over a rise and the whole town lay beneath me, the buildings old and stinking of charm and practically spilling into the bay. I caught a whiff of sea life, a funky low-tide odor. For so long, I’d been deprived of even accidental physical contact. I needed love; short of love, I needed something. I saw myself as adventurous, amorous, and brave. I got stuck in some loop of possibilities and had to stifle a ridiculous little moan. I felt a dog-eared excitement, and rode that familiar surge of energy. By the time I reached the tent, people had worn a muddy track across the lawn between the check-in table and the buffet.

“Ha ya doin’? Everything good at home?”

“Yes!”

“You believe we’re back here again?”

I got something to eat and scanned the tent for the face I’d kissed and held, for those long legs of such smooth, glassy skin, striding briskly in the fresh breeze off the bay, for that stranger who’d hovered over me, gasping and weeping.

I didn’t see her, but students sometimes walked into town for meals. I went over by the brick wall and sat with some other faculty members, Vicky Capodanno, a painter, Tom McLaughlin, an old guy who’d written a memoir of his childhood, and this idiot biographer named Dennis Fleigel, who was waving his sandwich in the air. He had his foot propped on Vicky’s chair as she cut her salad.

“I read your book,” he said. I put my bag on the wall and downed my lemonade. I just wanted to eat. “Graphic novel, comic book, whatever you call it. What do you call it?”

“I’m not in that argument.”

“Do you check the number on Amazon?”

“It’s not in print.” I was eating some kind of chef’s salad, dry raw beets, chunks of cheddar, and these mysterious white cubes of something. This was a new, wholesome food service. “Hello, Vicky. Hi, Tom.”

“Richie,” Tom said. “How are you, bud?”

Vicky looked at me with deep intensity. “How are you?”

I couldn’t remember if I’d ever responded to her last email, from Vermont, where she’d gone to take a break from New York, trying to quit smoking, childless and out of romantic options, wondering how I was, asking for photos of me with my kids, or just my kids, or any cute kid stories—and I grinned at her like a lobotomized dope.

“I was just saying,” Dennis said, “that my book was selling, it sold pretty well, Amazon number below ten thousand for two straight years, word of mouth was good, but then that movie came out.”

“What movie?”

“Ring-a-Ding Ding. It’s about Sinatra, and when it came out, my Amazon number went from ten thousand to a hundred and fifty thousand, and it never went lower ever again.”

Charlene Wetzel joined us, smiling, and said, “I think I have a stalker.” More people sat down. “He wore sunglasses in class,” she said. “Last year, it took a few days. This year, first day: stalker.”

Heather Hinman, who taught poetry and had a coiled energy that included her hair, said that one of her students asked what font she typed in. Roberta Moser put her plate down and told us that she’d just finished an interview with the local NPR and that the questions were dumb.

I began to feel hopeless and desperate in a familiar way.

Dennis explained that NPR was fine for pushing an art film or a book, but that the machinery that promotes a studio movie is so much bigger. “Ring-a-Ding Ding the movie killed Ring-a-Ding Ding the book, and it never recovered.”

“What are we talking about?” Roberta asked.

“My book Ring-a-Ding Ding,” Dennis said, “and how it got killed by Ring-a-Ding Ding the movie, which I also wrote.”

Roberta smiled at Dennis. “I still don’t understand.”

Tom McLaughlin brought over a bottle of wine. Frederick Stugatz sat down with Ilana Zimmer, who put some wine to her lips and said, “I just got back from six weeks as artist in residence at the University of Bologna.”

Heather took a drink and said, “After this I go to Ole Miss.”

Frederick said, “After this I go to Berkeley.” He turned and stared at Ilana, who ignored him.

Dennis said, “Ring-a-Ding Ding the book is about a sensitive brute who happens to be the twentieth century’s greatest entertainer. The movie Ring-a-Ding Ding is a piece of shit. But that’s not my point. My point is that the kid who’s supposed to be eighteen was played by a twenty-six-year-old, and the eighteen-year-olds who saw it thought the guy looked like a senior citizen.”

Dennis had red hair and a pink forehead and surprisingly bright blue eyes. If you tried to make eye contact, he couldn’t see you. I liked to think of this as the result of some head trauma. It was a kind of blindness that made him unlikable but high-functioning. He’d written four biographies and two screenplays and went on morning talk shows when his books came out. I could imagine back in caveman days someone like him being cut from the tribe, dragged away, and thrown off a cliff.

Heather buttered a roll. She used to be a drunk but now wrote poems about bartending, drinking binges, blackouts, and AA. Roberta was a filmmaker. She’d been making a documentary for the past nine years about corrupt black mayors of major American cities, filming them in jail, running for office again, taking walks with their aged mothers. Frederick taught the musical book, whatever that was, and had been the genius behind last year’s musical about Karl Rove. Ilana Zimmer had headlined an indie rock band, with one hit in the eighties, then had a ho-hum solo career, and now dabbled in kids’ music. She ran a songwriting workshop every year in Frederick’s class. Vicky had paintings in museums around the world that were violent, cartoonish, biting, dark, and funny, that dealt with war, religiosity, porn, rape, but also the cost of art education, women’s bodies, and people who lived in garbage dumps. And Tom McLaughlin had been a high school English teacher for forty years, then retired and wrote a rambling memoir of his childhood growing up over a pool hall in Alffia, Texas, population 71, with wrenching scenes about killing cattle and the death of the town; it became an instant classic, then a hit movie. He sat there like the most relaxed guy in the world, his face heavily lined, familiar in a way from posters of him around the conference—they were hard to miss, his head gleaming and speckled with age spots.

The thing to do here was relax and not worry about where I ranked among them. I pushed my plate away and started drawing on the tablecloth. I drew the bay, a single steady line, wispy clouds in the distance, and walking along the shore I drew Batman, the Caped Crusader, looking a little haggard and overweight. Last year’s tablecloths had been made of a thick, toothy paper, with a spongy plastic coating underneath, but this was thin one-ply, and the ink bled like I was drawing on toilet paper. It was a waste of time, but I didn’t care. Batman was the first superhero I’d ever drawn. I hadn’t drawn him in thirty years. Why now? Drawing him middle-aged with a big keister seemed to answer something. He stood in the surf at low tide with a touristy camera around his neck and his tights stained dark from wading.

One line led to another, the feeling of deadness went away, and this arrangement of markings became a scene with a little girl about Kaya’s age holding Batman’s hand. Was it a memory? Was it cathartic? Did it work? I didn’t care. I kept going, surprising my eyes with what my hand could do. In Batman’s other arm I drew a little boy in a swim diaper—my knees bouncing under the table—until, shading in the bay around their ankles, I pressed too hard and tore the tablecloth.

Then I thought of home and felt my throat close up. I wondered how I’d protect my kids from hundreds of miles away. I worried that Kaya would ride her tricycle into the renovation pit from the construction next door. I worried that Beanie would suck the propeller out of my old tin clown whistle. Joey, the high school kid down the block, sometimes cut through the alley in his Subaru with his foot on the gas, even though a dozen kids under the age of ten jumped rope and played games there. A spasm of electric jolts shocked my heart, from the heady mixing of blood and guilt that brought on flashes of horror and feelings of dread and excitement, the fear that I would do something sexy and rotten and get away with it.

Stewart Rinaldi pulled up a chair and said, “What did I miss?”

“We’re talking about my book,” Dennis began, “Ring-a-Ding Ding.”

No one could stop him from explaining that the movie killed the book. When he finished, no one spoke. Beside me, Charlene folded things into a sandwich.

“Pass the salt.”

We had nothing else to say, or didn’t want to try for fear of starting Dennis up again. We didn’t discuss the news of the day or the presidential campaign or politics in general, power, money, greed, or war. As members of the cultural elite, we didn’t believe in any of that. We’d been teaching together for years. We sat in circles, bragging about things that mattered only to us. We were artists. We believed in ourselves.

And yet, things were happening out there. Obama had drawn a red line but Assad refused to back down, while hundreds of thousands fled, in what was looking like a massive refugee crisis. “Call Me Maybe” held steady at No. 1. Ernest Borgnine died. Kim Jong-un had been named Supreme Being of North Korea. The Republican primary had been brutal, awash in dark money, the first since the Supreme Court decided that mountains of secret cash in exchange for favors was totally fine. Romney emerged as the nominee, a hollow, arrogant flip-flopper. He’d spent the summer refusing to release his most recent tax returns, while his legal representatives explained away the Swiss bank account stuffed with tens or hundreds of his own millions. He was in London this week, having FedExed his wife’s half-million-dollar dressage horse over to compete in the Olympics.

We didn’t care about that stuff. We cared about art. We cared about lunch. Finally Dennis stood, picked up his bag, and walked out of the tent, past the drinks cooler, toward the library.

“Ring-a-ding ding,” Roberta said. “Does that ring any bells?”

“Forget it,” Tom said.

People liked Dennis as a teacher. Around the faculty, though, he lost control. He engendered pity, which must’ve bothered him. The interns were clearing off the buffet table behind us, watery bowls of lentil salad no one wanted. Roberta said Dennis’s wife had moved out, and Charlene shook her head and said it was a long time coming. Frederick turned to stare at Ilana, who pretended not to notice. Vicky asked why we had to sit here, year after year, talking about Dennis Fleigel, and wondered if anyone wanted to go for a swim in the ocean, and gave me a deep, meaningful look, but I didn’t want to linger, to catch up, didn’t want to be her beach pal. I couldn’t listen to the grievances of childless grown-ups anymore, their boredom with their free time, wondering what they’d missed. Whatever had caught up with them was making them depressed.

SIX

In college I couldn’t figure out what to major in. Over in English they were complaining that language itself had become brittle and useless, and over in art, so-called postmodern painting was being taught in a way I didn’t understand, as the subject as object ran into ontological difficulties that couldn’t be solved with a paintbrush. I started making comics for some relief—leaning heavily on my own journals, since I’d never learned how to make up anything—an episodic, thinly veiled series of stories about a girl and boy who fall in love, stay up late, eat pizza in their undies, make charcoal drawings, create installations of dirt and lightbulbs, hate their fathers, move into an apartment together, build futon frames, flush their contact lenses down the drain, throw parties with grain alcohol punch, get knocked up, have an abortion, read Krishnamurti, graduate, break up, fuck other people, and move together to Baltimore, to an abandoned industrial space where sunlight comes through holes in the roof, dappling the walls.

After college I published it myself, on sheets of eight and a half by eleven, folded in half and pressed flat with the back of a spoon, stapled in the middle, and handed it out personally at conventions for a dollar. Making comics kept me from going apeshit. Later, at the ad agency where I worked, I upped the production value, made the leap to offset printing, sending it through on the invoice of a client in St. Louis, who, without knowing, paid for my two-color card-stock cover. I didn’t dedicate myself to it, didn’t plan on toiling for years. I figured I’d do a few more, get a job as a creative director, drill holes in my head and use it as a bowling ball.

One day I got a call. “We like your comic. We’d like to publish it. Would you be interested in that?” I remember walking around the office, heat boiling my face, wondering who to tell. Soon my work began appearing in a free alternative weekly. A year after that, I cut a deal with a beloved independent publisher for a comic book of my very own. When I finally held it in my hands, twenty-four pages, color cover, I lifted it to my face and inhaled. I caught the attention of agents and editors, and a couple of big-name cartoonists, who championed my work, and the thing took on a life of its own.

All of a sudden I’m cool, phone’s ringing, there are lines at my tables at conventions. My cross-hatching improved; my brushwork became fearless. I put out two issues a year. The comic grew to thirty-two pages, then forty-eight.

TV and film people started calling. I quit my job and helped write a pilot. I flew to Brussels to be on a panel of cartoonists. I designed a book cover for a reissue of On the Road, did a CD jacket for a legendary L.A. punk band. I lived on food stamps, even as my ego ballooned. I broke into magazines, and caved to the occasional job for hire, and torched my savings, and somehow got by.

But in my own comics, I handled the hot material of my life. My characters were shacking up, doing PR for the Mafia, suffering premarital anxieties and fertility issues. My publisher suggested collecting these comics into a book. The book held together like a novel. It came out six years ago.

They couldn’t sell the TV pilot. The book went out of print. I couldn’t tell stories about myself anymore. I’d flip through my sketchbook, dating back to before Kaya was born, life drawings, junked panels, false starts, art ideas, rambling journal entries, then babies in diapers and crawling and wobbling, and all this tearstained agonized writing about how tired I was. Then I’d start to think about What I’m Capable Of, but then I’d think, Who cares. Fuck comics. I couldn’t write about these scenes of domestic bliss, maybe because they lacked the reckless, boozy, unzipped struggle of my youth, or maybe because my wife and kids were some creepy experiment I couldn’t relate to, or maybe because they were the most precious thing on earth and needed my protection from the diminishing power of my “art,” and writing about them was evil.

In my stories I’d been some kind of wild man, some bumbling lothario wielding his incompetence, mistaking his sister-in-law for a prostitute, knocking over the casket at the funeral of his boss, battling suburban angst and sexual constraint in a fictionalized autobio psychodrama. My success at selling that renegade message opened up a sustainable commercial existence, the very existence I’d been trying to avoid. Instead, I embraced conformity, routine, homeownership, marriage, and parenthood, in exchange for neighborly niceties and a sleepy, toothless rebellion in the pages of a crusty political magazine trying to be hip. I worked as an illustrator now, or what might be referred to as an “editorial cartoonist.” I’d also done other types of unclassifiable commercial whore work, promotional posters for a Swedish reggae festival, fabric patterns for a hip-hop clothing company. I had a handful of regular clients from over the years, a hotel soap manufacturer, a Canadian HMO, a fried chicken chain in the Philippines whose in-house art department called when they got totally overwhelmed, although it had been a while, actually, since I’d done any of that crap.

Magazine work asked less of me, and paid more, and at times could almost be fun. I’d done drawings of Anthony Weiner, the Arab Spring, bedbugs, the uprising in Syria, Walmart slaves, Obama as a jug-eared mullah, Obama in his Bermuda shorts in the Rose Garden burying tiny flag-draped coffins, the whole clown car of Republican kooks who’d been rolling across the country all year—Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, Newt, Rick Perry, and several of Mitt. In one he’s waving from his yacht, and in another he’s wiping his ass with an American worker, and in yet another he’s burying his loot in the Caymans. I’d also done full-page drawings for longer features, assigned by Adam, my art director: Somali pirates, Gitmo prisoners force-fed on a hunger strike, and a dozen covers—“The CIA in Damascus,” “Stop Eating So Much Meat,” “The Breast Issue,” “Our Complicated Relationship with Drones.” I could make a living if I worked fast, on three things at once, and didn’t mind the art department yanking my chain.

SEVEN

At midnight Beanie got hungry, and at three A.M. he made a sound like a cat being run over by a car, for an hour without stopping. At six he got up for good.

“I hope you have a better night tonight.”

“Please don’t talk about it.”

I regretted having called. They were at the park now, in unrelenting heat and humidity. I sat on a low brick wall by the flagpole, the Place of Good Reception, overlooking the sweep of the harbor, the bridge in the distance, seagulls curling in arcs under high pressure and plenty of sunshine, the temperature a breezy seventy-eight degrees, a skosh below the seasonal average.

First thing this morning they went off to gymnastics camp, where we’d enrolled Kaya for the next four Saturdays, and met a nice blond lady who knelt beside Kaya when Robin tried to leave, and a dark-haired unsympathetic woman collecting the pizza money, and a teenage gymnast, holding a sobbing girl, about Kaya’s age, in a pink tutu with a blue lump on her forehead and an ice pack on her wrist.

Kaya had enjoyed the trampoline but not the rope thing. Then some boy shoved her, waiting in line for a cookie. She’d let another boy lie on top of her during circle time, they bumped heads, and now she had a swollen lip. She quit after lunch and said she’d never go back.

Robin’s parents had made it to dinner last night after all, but it seemed that Dave hadn’t changed Iris’s clothes, and her hair was dirty. The last time I’d seen my mother-in-law, she’d used mascara to draw on eyebrows, and wore eye shadow that looked like fireplace ash, and had a bruise from a fall discoloring one side of her face. Every time she walked into a room Robin would walk out, as if an alarm had gone off, explaining loudly that one of the kids needed a cracker, and her mom would sit and tell me how fat people were in Florida, or call Robin’s stepfather Dan, or tell me she had a baby in her belly that was painful sometimes.

Robin mentioned the urinary tract infection her mom had, a result of Dave’s neglect. He’d done his best to nurse her along, while also resisting and denying the obvious. By the time he’d finally given in and had Iris tested, she’d been tying her blouses in front for a year because she couldn’t figure out how to button them. I’d gotten used to the pantomime at dinner, nodding and smiling when she abandoned her fork and pawed through her plate.

Dave and Iris had worked hard all their lives, and this caretaking and dementia were their only retirement. He didn’t have religion or children or close family of his own, but he’d confided in me that after Iris died, he planned to take a bicycle tour through the wine regions of Tuscany. He enjoyed the light-tasting Chianti of Florence, as well as the more full-bodied pinot chiefly associated with Pisa. He’d already done the research.

“I need to talk to her nurses,” Robin said. “I have to call the house when Dave’s not there.” I could hear Kaya singing in the background. I could picture the bench where Robin sat at the park by a sweltering playground. “If he’s home, they won’t say anything.”

It was the song Kaya had been singing in the kitchen before I’d left. “Shakira, Shakira!”

“They’re not nurses,” she said. “They’re probably corn farmers. Or soldiers. When did the war end in Sierra Leone?” I said I didn’t know. Kaya yelled for Robin to watch her climb.“He’s so incapable of dealing with his grief.”

Actually, I thought Dave was holding up pretty well, considering. The steroid he took to suppress whatever was choking his lungs had terrible side effects. His face was bloated and his skin had turned red, thin, and fragile. His beard had gone white. He looked like Santa, if Santa started drinking every day at lunch, which Dave did.

“How come this morning at an air-conditioned gymnastics place for seventy-five bucks an hour she wouldn’t get off my lap, but we come here in a million degrees and she can’t stay off the monkey bars?” I figured it was because she knew the layout, but kept it to myself. “I got so mad at her for quitting. I started screaming, ‘You never try. Why is that?’ I’m sitting outside gymnastics, sweating my ass off, holding Beanie, she can literally see my head from the window, and twice she came out crying, saying she missed me. I just wanted to close my eyes for five seconds. You know how you say I never admit I’m wrong? Well, I was wrong, and I’m not just telling you I abused her to make you feel guilty. I went too far.”

“I’m sure you didn’t.”

“I had to shove him into his stroller so I could deal with her, but he wouldn’t let go, and I pressed down so hard I thought I broke his rib cage.”

“Jesus.”

“At lunch, the nice counselor let her sit on her lap, but the mean one told her she was a big girl and should stop crying. I’m going to find that one and explain to her that it doesn’t do any good to tell that to a four-year-old.”

“You tell Kaya that all the time.”

“That’s different.”

“Why is it different?”

“Because she woke me up five hundred times last night. Oh, here she is. You woke me up five hundred times last night.”

“I’m sorry, Mommy.”

“You don’t sound sorry.” It was true: Kaya didn’t sound sorry. I looked out at the bay, the sky, the seagulls, thankful for the distance between us.

“I’m locking her in her room tonight.”

“With what?”

“I’ll buy a hook.”

“Why didn’t I think of that?”

“I don’t know.”

“Because I wouldn’t do that to a dog.” Two sailboats tacked at the same angle as they cornered around the jetty.

“She’s not used to being ignored in the middle of the night. One peep and you’re there, hovering over her. Maybe now she’ll finally get sleep-trained. Now she’ll learn to spend the night in her bedroom alone.”

“You’re going to sleep-train her in one night?”

It went on like this for a while.

“It’s you, you feed and flirt and sing and have conversations at three A.M.—”

The bay, the water, the seagulls.

“When you’re here, it’s always ‘Daddy Daddy,’ keeping them out of the basement so you can work, brokering that. When you’re not here, it’s quiet and I feed them early and put them to bed early, not at nine o’clock—”

“Hey, why don’t you take the night shift for the next four years?”

“Because I need drugs to sleep.” Beanie let out that piercing cat scream. I heard her whacking him on the back. “And when I take medication, I need more sleep. I’m not doing this for you next summer, so have fun.”

“I’m having a blast.”

“I don’t care what you do up there, but if you give me a disease I will cut it off. Got it?”

“Fine.”

“Or shoot you. Or chop off your balls.”

“Understood.”

Beanie remained quiet, and then we were all quiet.

“I wouldn’t mind going to some makeout festival if my body wasn’t broken.”

“Go ahead.”

“As long as you take care of them while I take care of me.”

“I should probably get back to it.”

“You didn’t say how your first class went.”

“My class?”

“Yes.”

“Fine.”

“You say that every year. You worry about that class for weeks, slaving over your notes, ‘What do they want from me? I forgot how to teach!’ It hardly pays anything, and you’re up there having a blast and I’m here killing myself and for what?”

“At least it gets me thinking about comics again. I used to love making comics. I don’t know what happened. I have to get a break from the magazine. I have to start something I care about. I have to find a way back in.”

“Maybe you’re not supposed to write stories about your life anymore. Maybe you outgrew it. Maybe it bubbles up because you’re there and you should force it back down where it came from.”

“Thanks.”

“Or maybe being around those people, you’ll have an epiphany.”

“Sure.”

“Go on, shove it down. Next to your childhood. Next to your parents. Keep shoving.”

“You don’t know anything about me.”

“I know all about you. That’s what you’re trying to get away from. You think you’re worthless, so you make me feel worthless, and when you’re gone I don’t have that, nobody second-guessing me or giving me nasty looks or turning off my music or criticizing my soul. It’s more work, but there’s no time to be depressed or think, although I actually can think. Four producers are coming from L.A. on Monday, I’m meeting with the network, it’s the busiest time and budgets are insanely tight and Realscreen is right around the corner. I can keep fairly complicated ideas in my head without having any obligation from you to talk and listen. I’m myself. I get love from people at work, and Karen Crickstein wants to meet me for lunch, and Elizabeth comes over and we do the knitting tutorial, and have conversations that matter, and she doesn’t wish I would shut up and go away.”

EIGHT

The first time I saw her, standing in my foyer, she was holding a giant stick bug in a wooden frame. Robin Lister had moved to Baltimore for a job at the public television station, and knew somebody who knew the sister of this lunatic, Julie, who lived in our group house on Chestnut Ave. Robin took the room of the guy we called Lumpy, who was headed to law school in Denver, which meant we’d be sharing a bathroom.

I helped carry in boxes from her U-Haul. That night I heard her spitting into the bathroom sink, and the next morning I found her in the kitchen, in a thin yellow robe with tiny blue fishes, staring into the garbage, trying to figure out how many cups of coffee she’d already had by the look of the used filter. When I think back to whatever it was that brought us together, it probably happened in the kitchen. She’d been hired to write and edit bilingual scripts for a local children’s television program and had tape drives of old episodes to study, but she already had a few things to say about the show’s three main characters, a hyperactive skunk, a Hispanic beaver named Anselma, and a wise old chipmunk who protects the young explorers.

I found myself sitting across from her, lingering over breakfast, offering piercing analysis of our roommates’ psyches: Nedd, the ladies’ man; Rishi, an account exec at the ad agency where I worked; and Julie, the emotionally stunted MBA who talked like a baby. Robin had questions, and I projected a confiding warmth and a loud, Jewish, overcompensating wit.

She was seeing a guy named Jim, who deejayed on the weekends. He was followed by Digger, a cameraman from the Czech Republic who worked in war zones and had always just stepped off an airplane held together with duct tape. He’d been to the Congo, had ridden a horse across Afghanistan. Somehow, a year passed. I’d been dating Eileen Pribble, an elementary school art teacher who stuck refrigerator magnets to the outside of her car.

Robin and I were friends, although she was too good-looking for that. She needed company. I thought I might earn something, through my loyalty, that someday I would collect. At first I didn’t know what to make of her, but after a while I noticed how much I looked forward to her coming home at night. After dinner, the two of us would sometimes walk down the street for ice cream. She had hazel eyes, thin, wavy brown hair, and olive skin. The hair resting thinly on a delicate skull held an introspective, self-doubting, reasonable, forceful, somewhat dignified mind. She wanted to get out of kids’ programming and work in hard news, wanted to see the world. Digger had friends who could help. In the fall of that year, two Sudanese guys had blown a hole in the USS Cole as it refueled in Yemen. The new trend in terrorism, Robin said, was asymmetrical, like a bottle of botulism in a New York City reservoir. She wanted intensity and danger. She was so pretty that guys would stare at us as we walked down the block. Sometimes I worried that one of them would try to kill me.

Eileen and I split, and I thought for sure it would change things. I remember standing in the bathroom when no one else was home, examining Robin’s tongue scraper, and found myself pondering the wall that separated our bedrooms, wondering if I could tunnel through it to find her there asleep. There were moments where I’d given up, moments where I got obsessed, moments where I was repelled, moments where I’d grown too emotionally attached. I felt feverish and sick whenever Digger spent the night, trying not to listen while brushing my teeth, long sick sleepless nights until he left for some war zone in East Timor, until he moved back to Prague for good. In the mornings Robin and I had those nattering exchanges old couples have, bickering in front of our housemates or alone, about the missing butter or how long to boil an egg. If her insomnia plagued her, she’d shoot me a look—and I can remember now, the rush of blood in my face. I felt somewhat powerless, and assumed it would pass.

She’d ask my opinion on her clothing before work in the morning, she’d notice my haircut or suggest I stop chewing ice before I cracked a tooth. I wanted her to love me. There was this basis forming beneath us. Sometimes we walked together to the nearby community center for our morning laps. I’d spy on her from underwater, her thin arms balletic and almost lazy in their strokes, a weird, improper technique, her legs kicking furiously, frothing the water around her.

Julie took a job in Atlanta. Nedd moved out. The housemate thing collapsed. Rishi and I found a place in Fells Point. Robin moved into an apartment alone, two rooms with a refrigerator under the counter and the smallest kitchen sink you ever saw. It was fall. One night I brought her flowers and beer and got a home-cooked meal. She was my friend, she took pity on me, I was a pitiful tortured person who could make her laugh. A wall of books greeted me when I walked into the apartment, film theory, life on the Serengeti, prehistoric pottery of the Colorado Plateau, whatever she was interested in.

She didn’t want me, maybe didn’t trust me, saw something missing, wanted less, a lighter commitment, or was holding out for someone who could take care of things down the line. I couldn’t cope with her withholding, couldn’t talk to her about us. I played the part of the ironic, submissive romantic, and she played the partially compliant friend of the opposite sex, sexually complicated, rigid, obsessive, a tease. I was protective and patient but losing hope. She was emotionally damaged by the death of her brother and her parents’ divorce.

On a weekday morning in December, some lady blew through an intersection and T-boned Robin’s Jetta. Thus began the period of her concussion. It lasted through the spring with a sort of merciless momentum. The nausea alone almost killed her. She wore sunglasses at work, had trouble looking at a screen, couldn’t tolerate light or music or ambient noise. Went to neurologists, did brain-rehabilitation exercises, memorized colored playing cards. I came and went, brought groceries, made phone calls to her auto-body place and health insurance. I still recall the soft shush of a beanbag she tossed from one hand to the other, crossing the midline.

Indoors at night she wore shades under a floppy wide-brimmed hat, looking like a Russian double agent, one I called Farvela Du Harvelfarv. By cooking for her in the stuffy apartment, I earned the right to sit quietly while she talked to her mother, rubbing a certain spot on her temple while she cried, wondering whether she’d ever recover. She became softer, less guarded, quietly resting beside me, resigned to a constant migraine-type vertigo. But because it wouldn’t end, it seemed to get worse. She couldn’t exercise. Went to bed at eight. Was sad and strange to herself.

Overcome by a wave of anguish, she slept with me. In that way, we began sleeping together. I think it was, even for her, a consolation. And yet, I couldn’t help feeling, as I learned to take on her bottomless fears of permanent damage, that the inordinate conditions under which she lived had forced her to surrender. I remember pulling her onto my lap, kissing her head in different places. She was so vulnerable and open. I wished we could always live that way.

NINE

What I knew about Robin at twenty-six has since been overwritten by our twelve years together, by the fuzzing of boundaries that separate us, by events we faced beyond our abilities, by the sound of a four-note wooden xylophone our son liked to beat the shit out of at five A.M., and by the immutable cycles of birth and sleep. It’s not an excuse, for anything really, but there were nights Beanie woke up screaming every fifteen minutes. I could count on one hand the times in his life he slept more than two hours straight. It became a secret among us, like domestic beatings, what went on in our house after dark.

Sometimes I blamed our daughter, who fell between the mattress and the wall, or had bears in her dreams, or the rain upset her and drove her out of bed. Sometimes I blamed my wife, who never did figure out how to sleep, who needed protection from the chaos, and wore earplugs and a satin eye mask, and had a bag of prescription drugs she kept hidden in her underwear drawer, and in an emergency had to be shaken awake, and couldn’t go back to bed or take naps during the day, and in sleep debt quickly spiraled into anxiety and short-term mania.

But I woke up smoothly and easily when he screamed, and took him from the crib at the foot of our bed and carried him away and fed him or sang him a song, and he went back down for a while. Then I wandered from the bedroom to the couch to the futon in the basement, helpless and itinerant, waiting for his cry, so that the silence became loud, and the quiet throbbed and roared through the stillness like a marching band. If I lay there long enough, I split the worry into so many pieces it started to glitter, and I got dizzy and hopeful and felt grateful for the sounds of cars, birds, dawn.

I did the nights. In the morning I rested on the couch half-dead while Robin got them dressed. Sometimes as I lay there, my daughter came close and made a little ponytail on the top of my head. There were mornings when I wished I could escape or be put out of my misery, but the accumulation of good behavior, the years placed end to end, had also made me strong, although sometimes it occurred to me that it was all too fucking weird, as I struggled to stay the course, all this goodness and responsibility; it seeded an impulse toward endless badness and rebellion.

Sometimes as I lay there Robin bent down to see how I was, touching my hand with a look of eagerness or tenderness in her eyes, almost like hunger or lust, a look I didn’t see much in any other context, asking gently for a recap of how bad it had been. Sometimes she brought me toast. I think my pain meant something to her. I think she enjoyed my suffering almost as much as I did. Like lovers using clamps and whips, it somehow brought us closer.

She gave them life, gave them milk from her breasts, nursed them through sickness and colds, made a throaty sound when she hadn’t seen them all day, moaning, kissing them all over. She did the days. I handed over my paychecks, any option money or royalties that hadn’t dried up; she pooled it with her money, paying the bills, taking them to kid parties, doctors, setting up playdates, hanging with other mothers, deciding on Kaya’s preschool, wondering if I could take a more active role in decisions. Sitting in a little chair by the door of Kaya’s classroom last fall for three straight weeks, her back breaking, trying to get Kaya to calm down and hang in there. She was strong, strong-willed, and shouldn’t have been surprised that her daughter was, too. She got field producers and actors to do what she wanted, took hours of incoherent B-roll and turned it into tight twelve-minute arcs, understood how the wildlife conservation movement had failed African lions.

For several years, following her time in children’s television, Robin worked for an international news agency, and went all over Latin America, and held a camera and got dengue fever and hired soldiers to take her into the mountains. She had friends who were stabbed, kidnapped, or disappeared. Later she worked at the bureau, going out on assignment once a month, and until Kaya was born she ran the desk, Central and South America and the Caribbean, sending out other people to risk their necks the way she once did. Eventually she burned out and quit.

She wound up at the Nature Channel, which was perfect for a mom with a small kid. Her co-workers sometimes arrived still wearing their morning tennis outfits. The newsroom had been exciting and desperate and prone to burnout, but the Nature Channel was ergonomic and well lit and had the congenial atmosphere of a shoe store. She didn’t make films anymore; the channel didn’t make anything. It bought the finished product, shows about water buffalo, flora and fauna, and also, increasingly, the stuff that filled prime time: a “science” show about people too fat to wear clothes, a “history” show about bombs that fit up someone’s body cavity. A show about a man with huge testicles was not yet considered a celebrity vehicle. She still got to travel, but not to the Galápagos. Twice a year her department went to Wheaton, Maryland, for an afternoon of paintball.

Then she had morning sickness, puking her guts out for eight or ten or fifteen straight weeks, it’s hard to remember now, wishing she could give me a nonlethal form of salmonella so I could know her pain. After Beanie was born she took time off again, and for the last six months had been edging back in, happy to work part-time at Connie’s small production company, whose only client was the Nature Channel, making a sweet little PSA she loved, destined for the wee hours of the night, about girls in poor countries who were victims of early marriage. A former executive producer for the channel, she was now a so-called independent producer, with no benefits, no contract, no real job, at the mercy of bland, plodding, overpaid executives on staff.

Between us we’d had terrifying gaps in employment, clients who’d gone bankrupt, work stoppages, lean times, hospital bills, economic downturns, crises of confidence, bosses who’d lied or disappeared, and projects mercy-killed.

There were moments when I too somehow failed to understand my place in the world or see what lay ahead, when I thought my own good luck would never end, when I mistook the work I did for a skill that builds on itself. I had years where money dropped from the sky, but also disappointments, broken dreams, ill-advised spending on copper saucepans and breathable raingear, troubles with the IRS, and a house we owned whose value had dropped below what we owed the bank. Six years ago, we’d borrowed from Robin’s mom to buy it. After the mortgage crisis we were underwater, and nobody would refinance the loan. A year or two later, we went back to Robin’s mom. She took out a second mortgage to bail us out. We got money from her dad to buy Robin’s car. We got a title loan against the car to pay bills. We set up a payment plan with the IRS guy, asked the worst credit card companies to cut our spending limit, begged them later to maybe raise it back up so we could eat, which, thank God, they refused to do. The magazine paid me on the twenty-eighth, like a monthly salary, although I wasn’t an employee, so a third of it needed to be set aside to pay taxes, which was completely out of the question, and would have to be dealt with down the road.

TEN

While I sat there by the flagpole, a pair of gladiator-sandaled feet appeared on the grass in front of me, and two legs, and above that, Amy. She held up a finger for me to wait. She was being polite. She pulled the phone away from her ear and said, “Somebody wants my money.” I feigned outrage. She shook her head. “I’m on a conference call.”

She was tall, with a long neck and good collarbones. She wore a gray sleeveless T-shirt and close-fitting blue-and-green plaid shorts. She had the bent posture and crimped mouth of a forty-one-year-old mom with three small kids. She didn’t look like her photos—ones she’d sent me, from a skating rink, or her bedroom, or with her oldest kid and a dog—which now seemed like one more problem to deal with.

She’d tied up her hair for painting class. It looked smooth and glossy. Her cheekbones were high and soft, her arms tanned and freckled. She went back to the phone call, nodding her head as hair spilled from the knot, her wrist bent against her waist, and turned on her toes on the grass, twirling cutely. It bugged me. Her movement said, “I’m busy. I’m needed. I have a life.”

In high school she was scouted at the local mall, and got hired to do some modeling, boat shows, department store flyers. Her parents didn’t approve. Her father stocked shelves in a grocery store and died young. Her mom was still living, and also tall. Amy had swum competitively, and set a national record in the short-course two-hundred-meter something. Then came a job in finance, to erase the deprivations of her childhood, and marriage to that jackass who made her a fortune. Then she set her sights on becoming some kind of activist, straddling the classes with money and love.

Lately she’d been infusing her artwork with one of her charity concerns. The toxic-sludge painting she’d started here last summer showed aquatic life along the Connecticut shore, deformed by PCBs—which, I guess … ​if you like that sort of thing. Over the winter she’d sent me pictures of another one, more sludge infecting life-giving waters, with these intestinal shapes framing her screwy self-portrait, head too long, one eyebrow raised, a kind of eco-friendly Frida Kahlo thing.

She turned to me and rolled her eyes. I shrugged like, “Oh well.” She grabbed her throat and stuck out her tongue. I pretended to gag. She motioned to throw the phone in the direction of the bay. Then she hit Mute and said, “It’s beyond partisan politics, but working together to protect our environment I want to thank you all for blah blah—”

She pressed a button on the phone again.

“Ugh. Yes honey, sorry, I’m here.”

When the call ended, she groaned. “We’re trying to get muckety-mucks to buy a table, and if you really want to know, we can’t decide whether to put a seashell in the middle of each table and decorate the seashell with the table number or put the fucking number on a stick.”

“Oh.”

“Board service.”

“You sound bored.”

“I like to serve on small boards, with a clear give-get, for a year or less.”

“Whatever that means.”

“I think it means I have to give them something. Let me tell my assistant the password to my bank account.”

For a long time, I didn’t think about her money. Then I thought it was ridiculous and disgusting. Although later, I just wanted to get paid. Maybe somewhere in the middle there, for a while anyway, I thought anything was possible, that we were bigger than money, that if we got together, whatever she had would somehow melt away in the heat of our passion. She didn’t wear an engagement ring or fancy clothes, and she carried up from birth a grinding Catholic guilt that equated frugality with goodness. She wore diamond earrings, although her generous earlobes made them look smaller.

She ended the call and asked how I’d slept, and I asked how her class had gone, her narrative painting workshop. “You look tired,” she said.

She looked thin. She survived for stretches on Twizzlers and Diet Coke. I studied her chipped fingernails, the part in her hair, until I recognized her, the long thin nose with a knob on the end that I’d kissed, and big gray eyes on either side of her head like an extraterrestrial.

I should’ve asked more questions, wondered how her kids were, the baby who looked like a monkey and ate bananas, the girl Kaya’s age who never remembered to wear underwear, or the oldest, who’d had a health scare but was fine now. Or maybe it was better to keep things light, so I did my impression of Beanie eating his first solid food, a Cheerio, chewing it for a minute or two before it flipped right onto his chin, entirely whole. And I told her how Kaya made a schedule of the hairdos of her favorite doll, every day there was a different hairdo, but I didn’t go into what they were.

“That’s cute.”

“Yeah.”

“You’re a good father.”

I hated this fake chitchat. Before she put the phone away, she showed me a photo of her brand-new bald-headed niece in a pink onesie, with a little pushed-up nose, surrounded by her own children and many other neighbors and nephews and other suntanned people, beside their swimming pool. It was nice to see her older daughter looking healthy, bright-eyed, and beaming.

“And who’s this?” I asked, but I didn’t care. I let her talk. There were more photos of kids on horseback in the neighbor’s paddock, and girls with juice-stained faces in fancy dresses on the beach at sunset. This one in pigtails was underweight and got gummy vitamins and a chicken leg whenever she came over to play. She lived next door. The mom ignored her but had just bought a $90,000 horse. This boy came to practice piano. He cried if you touched his towel. His dad had moved in with the CrossFit instructor. The lady two doors down had had so much plastic surgery she looked like a marionette. I recognized Amy’s garden, now in bloom, her walkways and meandering stonework. She wanted to move the trampoline so the kids could bounce into the pool, but she worried that if somebody missed the water they’d hit the patio or impale themselves on an umbrella.

“When a big kid bounces a little kid,” she said, “we call it popcorn.”

In photos the girls danced around in towels or naked; no one cared. “I just let ’em do whatever.” She’d grown up in a big family with no money and liked to pretend she still lived on the fly. She wanted me to know that she was the real thing, that all the fancy ladies in the neighborhood had been born rich and ignored their kids. One took the infant and the night nurse with her on business trips. The point was, only Amy with her fun yard could protect the children of utmost privilege from abandonment and cushy neglect. “The nannies like hanging with my nanny, they’re all friends, so guess who ends up making lunch for everyone and keeping an eye on the pool?”

“The pool boy?”

“You’re getting warmer.”

“Looks like fun.”

“Honey, I’m always having fun.” Her eyes narrowed. Seagulls wheeled over us, screeching like monkeys. A single airplane, high up, left a puffy trail.

“Your pool looks even bigger with the cover off.”

Her eyes were pale and slitted. “It’s the same.”

“And your house looks bigger. Have you been feeding it vitamins?”

“Same pool. Same house.”

There were voices coming this way, people walking to the flagpole to make phone calls. She’d spent time thinking about this very thing and wanted it settled.

“It’s not my house. It’s his. He wanted it. He wanted an even bigger place, but I said no.”

“That’s a beautiful story.”

I knew all about her lonely life in the big empty house in the woods. I knew what kind of soap she used on her son’s eczema, and the name of her husband’s investment fund, and the humiliating details of their sex life, and how many billions in assets, and his unpublished annual haul. I had a hard time imagining that there was anything left to tell me. I knew she’d played trumpet in the marching band in high school, and spit had run down her chin. She’d told me about the ex-boyfriend who stalked her, the summer after high school ended, finally cornered her, tore her clothes, beat her badly, and probably worse—and how she refused to seek justice or retaliate. She missed her father, he’d died a few months after the attack, and in her mind somehow those awful events were connected. One night, when her second kid was an infant and Amy had a bad stretch, her father appeared to her as a ghost at the foot of her bed. She had a high, hard, shining forehead. Some of her hair had fallen out after each of her kids was born.

I noticed her cracked lower lip and remembered my mouth on her salty neck, holding her smooth, bony hip. We locked eyes. I felt it zooming through me again. I heard pretty violin music in my head, the back of my throat went soft, I tried to swallow, and wanted to bury my face in her hair.

A man paced back and forth, talking with one finger in his ear. A white-haired lady stood on the other side of the flagpole in a long denim skirt. “Hello? Hello? Are you there? I’m only hearing parts of what you’re saying.”

“But you’re doing okay?” Amy asked. “And things are good at home?”

“Is that a joke?”

“But how is it for you?”

“I already told you,” I said. “I gave her everything I had.”

Amy said, “You’re a good person.”

“No I’m not.”

“I’m glad I met you, whoever you are.”

“You look beautiful. I’m glad your daughter’s healthy.”

She nodded. “She’s at sleepaway camp, hating every minute of it.”

“You got through it. I knew you were scared.”

“Yeah, well.” She glanced around. “I started to wonder.”

“What?”

“You know.”

“Huh?”

“If there was a connection.”

“To what?”

“To us. All the emails and everything.”

“You mean, like, punishment?”

She looked up, chin raised. “I’m not blaming you.”

“I understand.” She didn’t want to be mocked.

In March, a week after I saw her at her house in Connecticut, her oldest kid walked off a soccer field and puked and passed out and almost died. Texts and lengthy emails flowed night and day with no punctuation, starting in mid-sentence, referencing jargon and arguments about emergency surgical techniques to relieve swelling in her daughter’s brain. Then notes from the hospital at all hours, waiting to speak to the doctors. Her husband was in Milan, working on a deal. Then I heard nothing from her for four months, not a word.

We’d put a lot into our emails. It was a gigantic pain in the ass. If either of us slacked off, the other one got offended. You had to be timely and consistently thoughtful. Although it was nice to know that on nights when I couldn’t sleep, at least someone out there was listening. When I started spiraling into my own black hole, or when Beanie went loco at two A.M., or when Kaya cried because her pillow was too hot, or when the magazine sent back my drawing thirty-seven times for revisions and then killed it, or when I received actual death threats for a cartoon I drew mocking military methods of interrogation, or when the dental surgeon sent me a bill for two thousand nine hundred fucking dollars, or the neighbors hated me because my car blew clouds of whitish-blackish smoke, or when Robin said I tasted like something she had for dinner that she didn’t feel like tasting again, when I thought that nobody would ever want me again, that I’d never crawl into bed with someone and fall into her arms, grateful, protected, in love—I could say it, through that doohickey in my pocket, and by the power of instantaneous electronic transmission it would find her, rising out of a dead sleep in the middle of the night, and she’d zap back a little something to cheer me up, and that would be enough. Giving voice to every thought in my head, having a place for that, meant a lot to me.

Her kid recovered quickly, and in May Amy took to Facebook to celebrate. In June I wrote to her, wondering whether I’d see her here again, and waited patiently for that iffy response.

“I want to hear more about His holy vengeance, but I have to go play softball. It’s in the contract. Part of the fun.”

“Oh.” She looked miserable.

“You should play. It’s the Naked versus the Dead.”

“Some people from my class signed up.”

“Come on.”

“I’d probably hurt myself.”

“I hurt myself every year.”

“Look,” she said brightly. “I took your advice and went to a chiropractor.” She turned her head from side to side. She seemed to grow even taller.

“Praise the Lord.”

“Although that’s as far as it goes.”

“Any farther and it means you’re possessed by the devil.”

Almost sincerely she said, “You are not the devil.”

“No, I’m not,” I said. “Although it’s interesting how you turned that against me, slightly demonic.”

“Sorry. It’s the possessed part.”

“Either way, you’re safe from me.”

She looked pained. Not too pained, not like she might keel over with blood pouring out her eye sockets, but maybe more like the electric toothbrush she’d been hoping for was permanently out of stock.

“You know what?” Her eyes narrowed again. “I was doing fine until now.”

She had been mine. There was that. So it was nice to be close to her, and it was nice to see it causing her pain.

ELEVEN

I went into the dugout and looked through the mitts for one with no cracks in the leather. Tom McLaughlin sat on the bench, reading his phone. Frank Gaspari walked by with his socks pulled up. “Are we ready for this, or what?”

On second thought, I felt scummy and rejected and ashamed. Worse-looking every day, I had a cartoonist’s body: shoulders hiked up, head hung forward, face drooping, fuzzy gray hairs coming in on the sides, yellow toenails, my potbelly blousing my T-shirt, forcing me to suck in my gut, to fight the constant hunger of a tired middle-aged man. To be ugly in such a beautiful place was worse, among the shifting sands and rotting kelp and hopeless erosion.

The baseball field was at the far end of campus, inland, breezeless, and hot. You could smell fertilizer baking in the dirt. I watched an airplane fly along the bay towing a Geico banner.

Carl, the director, came across the field, lugging a duffel bag full of bats. He dropped it and jogged around the infield, ass bouncing, change jingling in his pockets, throwing bases on the ground. Then he sat, sweating heavily, on the other side of Tom and told us how much the bag of bats weighed, and where he’d lugged it from, and how an intern named Megan Donahue had locked the keys in the shuttle bus and the cops were on the way, and how the stage in the theater building had been shellacked two weeks ago but according to the theater people was still tacky, so the actors had to act in their socks so they didn’t stick to the floor. And the playwrights were all assholes. You had to call them “theater artists” or the “Drama Department” or they got angry. Then he pushed his long gray hair out of his face and went through the faculty, listing who was a piece of crap; anybody demanding a room change or failing to address students’ needs qualified, and this year, some of the new teachers seemed to be showing up with dietary restrictions or three names, like Alicia Hernandez Roulet. And the poets pronounced it “poe-eh-tray.” If it wasn’t for nice guys like Tom and me, he’d quit.

There was a certain headache you got after a day or so, the conference headache, which Carl already had. After three days you got a certain taste in your mouth, conference tongue. He told us how the administrators at the state U had lied and screwed him on funding, they were nickel-and-diming him to death, he had booze in his car that he’d stolen from Marine Bio and Sustainability—then we were quiet there on the dugout bench, and Carl asked Tom how much they paid him at other summer conferences. Tom laughed and said he never left the house for less than five grand but made an exception for this, since we had parties in the windmill.

More people straggled across the field; they seemed fine with the heat, pulling bats out of the duffel bag, dumping the bag to find helmets, testing swings, throwing and catching. Stan, a poet, claimed the mound to calibrate his underhand lob. An old lady with knee braces waited at the plate for batting practice. A security guard stood along the fence, and two women in beach clothes and visors sat in the stands. An able-bodied kid passed in front of the dugout, shirtless, barefoot, wearing jeans that had been shredded below the knee like a castaway’s—a fundamentally beautiful young person, covered in downy golden peach fuzz, handing out bottles of water.

A couple of conference-goers in bikinis sat on towels on the third-base line in front of the other dugout, and the able-bodied kid went over and gave them water, then spilled water on them and they screamed. He ran but they chased him and pulled him to the ground and pinned him and poured water on him. Everybody was having fun.

They were perfect and beautiful, whereas I was already a little revolting, although better straight on, but worse from the side. I was forty-two years old, obstructed by the limits of love, grasping at lust, scared to work on a crumbling marriage I’d be sure to hang on to for whatever remaining time we had here on earth.

A young woman dug through the mitts beside me and kept flapping them open and closed until I told her that a righty wears the thing on her left hand. I got a ball and went out onto the grass and showed her how to throw and catch. Her name was Eva Rotmensch. Some people pronounced it “Ava,” she said, but they were wrong. She walked with turned-out feet and had a flat pale face with a sharp jawbone and bluntly cut hair. She wore a cropped white blouse and pink shorts so fitted and tiny it would be difficult to imagine any underpants surviving inside them. When she raised her arms, her shirt went with them and I saw her thin torso. She needed me to know that she belonged to the theater company, as opposed to the theater workshop. Never played softball before, no sports, spent the first twenty years of her life in a dance studio. She pranced around on long, strong legs, like she was still onstage, mimicking my exaggerated throwing motion, elbow back, above her ear, and threw it over my head, then threw it into the bushes, then under the stands, waiting each time for me to go get it, like my daughter, who didn’t know how to do anything and needed me to show her, as though she were doing me a favor, turning whatever should’ve been fun into a pain in the ass.

I asked polite questions about her acting career, and mentioned a few out-of-the-way spots where people go to sunbathe, smiling at her, wondering whether she liked the beach, whether she liked swimming in big waves, feeling invisible and ignored, wondering what it would be like if for some reason she put down the mitt and lay on the grass and pulled down her shorts and begged me to fuck her.

Art historian Marilyn Michnick sat behind the fence, smiling and serene, and nearly blind, needing a cane, beside Alicia Hernandez Roulet, whose ugly little walleyed dog yapped around the field. Mohammad Khan, a theater critic, cleaned his eyeglasses with long, delicate-looking fingers, complaining about having to play. “I don’t like to get sweaty. I don’t like to be wet.” Vicky Capodanno came toward us from right field, in the baggy black T-shirt and shorts and combat boots she wore every year for softball, and a few steps behind her, Tabitha wore a baseball cap and a long thing you toss over a bathing suit that looked like a tablecloth. I recognized a couple stragglers, among them a taller lady moving stiffly, hunched and broad-shouldered in her gray sleeveless T-shirt and blue-and-green plaid shorts, who I’d spoken to a few minutes earlier: Amy O’Donnell, who I’d once held as we caressed in the dark, trembling and naked, and later while sleeping in the quiet dawn. I wanted another moment with her, something I could look back on later, to get me through another year, a scene, a place to park my soul through winter months of diapers and screaming.

I looked across the road, beyond the trees, to houses and a cornfield in the distance. Whatever hadn’t been watered was dead. A guy in a jungle hat took batting practice, drilling balls into left field, where eight or nine people stood chatting in two clumps, some of them not even facing the batter, and I wondered if one of them would be hit by a ball and killed.

Amy went behind the dugout and started stretching, some kind of hurried knee-bend squat. She was so tall. Her people could be traced back to the northern coast of Ireland, where shipwrecked Vikings raped the villagers, which made them tall and fair. She bent, she hunched, she made horrible faces. Now she squatted side to side.

The guy with the water came through the trees from the parking lot, and one of the girls in a bikini tried to make a run for it, shrieking, and he tackled her and spilled water on her and she screamed. They were young, although not so young, but like a different species.

“What’s his problem?” I asked Eva. “Why isn’t he playing?”

She watched him, lips parted, not smiling. She said his name was Ryan.

“Is he in the theater company?”

“He’s in something in New York, so he’s going back and forth, taking the train, so he can’t be in anything here.”

He rolled around on the grass—he had fine golden skin and a Chinese tattoo on his neck—as she watched him, her poor little blouse straining at every button, her ass floating in the air like a helium balloon. I threw the ball, but she wasn’t looking and it flew past her and pegged Stan in the back. He wheeled around, scowling, and kicked it away.

One of these nights, maybe after a rehearsal, under glittering starlight, Ryan might meet Eva walking from the theater to the dorms. And may it not turn into a long-term monogamous relationship, and may it end in a mutual hatefuck. Amen. Behind us, a group of interns stood blocking the dugout, looking sweaty, stealing our water, complaining to Mohammad Khan about having to clean up the tent after lunch.

“The kitchen is a total slime pit!”

“We’re totally covered in slime!”

They went on complaining as they tipped up bottles of water: a young woman in a torn miniskirt with torn black stockings and heavy mascara, and her sleepy-looking friend, filling out a T-shirt with the school’s name across her chest, and a third one with bouncy, eggy, shiny hair. It was as if the water they poured down their throats went right into their sumptuous breasts to keep them full.

Four more days of this. Then I could go home and choke my wife.

There were enough of us now to split into two teams. People wandered out to take positions so we could start.

I pictured myself heaving over some sullen nineteen-year-old, my baggy old face hanging down, and went along the dugout thinking filthy thoughts, grabbing helmets and lining them up beneath the bench, and asked nicely if anyone had the order, and saw that I was batting seventh. On this broiling Saturday afternoon, where were the cuties of my youth? Women in their forties had replaced them, hunching toward the grave. For so long I’d been young, but that was over, and the thing to do now was teach a little comics and go home, where I could drop my eyeglasses in the toilet, and fall down the stairs in my pajamas, somebody wailing in the background while I stood in my kitchen, in a state of shock, loading the dishwasher.

Vicky came over and put her mitt on her head and said, “Let’s get on with it already.”

I needed to find someone at this conference, someone who wouldn’t harm a married man, or hated being married, or couldn’t bear to be alone for three or four days. I didn’t have any big strategy here. I liked to flirt. I needed to stay alert every second for a potential alliance in this war against morbidity and death. Were there rules or prohibitions? Some of my colleagues preyed upon the young, their own students, the low-hanging fruit, which struck me as a real character flaw. I wanted a grown-up, maybe with children of her own, someone who was needed somewhere else and wouldn’t get hooked. I’d driven the many miles here with purpose and concentration. I had to make the most of my time away from home. Over the last ten years, the stuff I’d done could be counted on one hand: a couple of late-night goodbyes that never got past the talking stage; a wriggling blond woman at a convention in Brooklyn who edited textbooks for a living; Ruth Gogelberg, Gunkelman, whatever, at this very conference three or four years ago. It started when I was sixteen. It started when I was five, the need for a girl to save me, the need to escape, in a panic to get away from my mother and father, out of this empty shell. I always had a girlfriend, always fell in love, and even at my most saintly and sexless, I always liked someone out there, was working at something, moving toward it with intention and forethought, nibbling around the edges until I hated the whole thing, until everything I did became about not cheating, not doing something, until it was pretty much a foregone conclusion, and all I had to do was pull the trigger and get it over with, so I could slink back to my safe and stable perch and pretend it had never happened and hate myself and think of someone new.

Amy finished stretching and pulled her hair back into a rubber band. Our thing went beyond lusty one-liners and therapeutic confessions. I’d been in love with her for a year. Not love. Whatever it was. And it just so happened that her personal misery, hidden behind a windfall of prosperity, was ironically charged, luridly beguiling, and possibly useful in a practical sense, as fact-based material for the once and future semiautobiographical storyteller. She walked into the dugout. I stood and walked out, pretending not to know her. She found a bat and went behind the backstop and took practice cuts, swinging so hard her helmet fell off.

The game started. A big sandy-haired kid stepped into the batter’s box and golfed the first pitch high and gone; it landed in the parking lot, where it bounced as people cheered, as he ran around the bases with his arms hanging down, like a pigeon-toed ape. Mohammad Khan could barely lift the bat, and tapped a base hit. Tabitha got up and somehow outran a dribbler down the first-base line. Then Amy went to the plate, grimacing into the sun, and took a wild cut.

She hit it pretty well. The second baseman knocked it down but couldn’t hold on. He picked it up and tagged Tabitha softly on the shoulder, then threw the ball over the first baseman’s head, over the dugout, where it beaned the golf cart that had driven Marilyn Michnick here. Mohammad limped home. When the ball is thrown out of play, the runner is awarded the next base. Amy waited at first. I couldn’t stop myself and yelled, “Take second!”

She looked at me as though the last thing in the world she needed was a man yelling at her in public; she got enough of that at home. It was a confusing moment. I still had some investment or pride in her, I wanted her to thrive, succeed, whatever, so I stood in front of the dugout waving her on. She ran down the base path, unsure, reached second, and stared right at me as she stomped testily on the base with both feet. Stomped as though to defy me. But no one had bothered to anchor the base, so it skipped out from under her and she fell.

And didn’t get up.

The pitcher, Stan, walked to second base. The shortstop knelt. Nobody seemed to be moving. As I got closer, I saw that her whole mood had shifted; she’d come to a sitting position, her arm in her lap. She seemed drunk, the way a drunk is soft, sleepy, in shadows, fighting to stay awake; she was staring down into her lap as if a haze floated in front of her. Looking at her arm, I had to force myself to breathe. It was my fault, I’d done it. I pushed that thought away.

“What’s up?” Carl asked, standing so close he was brushing my shoulder. He hadn’t seen her fall. Then he looked. I watched his face change. She was sitting with one leg folded under herself, foot turned, knees bent, so that the whiteness of her inner thighs showed.

The girl kneeling beside her talked in a loud voice, holding Amy’s forearm. “Tip your head forward, that’s good, now deep breath, just relax, you’re gonna be fine, don’t look, it’s okay, I’ve got your arm,” and Amy saying, in a kind of husky, sleepy voice, “I don’t want to look,” and then a guy in a Red Sox cap came over and draped her arm with a T-shirt.

The security guard called for an ambulance. Vicky walked across the infield dirt, squinted at Amy, then turned to me. Our former and potential closeness made me think she could read my mind. My thoughts were slow and bleating and obstructed, but I noted, finally, that Amy had been a kind of home, a vessel for my discombobulated mind, that my own family treated me like a footstool but this stranger had cared for my soul. At some point, we could hear sirens on the highway. They decided to get Amy out of the sun, and with heavy assistance, she stood and took a few unsteady steps and began lowering herself down to the grass, her legs bending, collapsing, as her handlers bumped into each other, holding her arm, wavering, guiding her down, her legs folded beneath her, all wrong. They raised her up again as though it had been their fault.

“Ready?”

“Sure.”

And again she went down, and this time she tucked her chin and went completely out.

“Amy?” the girl said, kneeling. We all waited. “Can you hear me?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Do you faint easily?”

She nodded.

“I wish you’d told me that before. I wouldn’t have moved you.”

Amy’s gaze drifted down to the T-shirt covering her arm, as if it were some new friend. “I didn’t know until I fainted.”

An EMT and three paramedics arrived, asking a series of questions—name, day of the week, name of the U.S. president—and each time Amy answered politely.

“Can you move your fingers?”

“I can but I don’t want to, but thank you.”

The slapstick fainting, the bone snapped at nearly mid-forearm, crooked and flopping in the sleeve of her skin, not life-threatening but stomach-churning, her broken summer day, her arm lying in her lap, all of us standing over her as Carl used the security guard’s walkie-talkie. They strapped her to a red steel chair on wheels. I knelt down and attempted to communicate without making known any extramural bond between us.

“Do you want me to come with you?”

She shook her head. The whole bottom half of her face was trembling. Sweat or some kind of moisture pooled in her eyes. Carl signed off and handed the radio back to the guard. The hell with it. They wheeled her out.

Vicky stood beside me, sighing loudly, and when I looked at her she gave me a deep, penetrating stare. When I couldn’t come up with anything to say, she went behind the dugout and started smoking.

We resumed the game. Other people fell to the ground with injuries. Stan stumbled off the mound, holding his elbow. Luther Voigt pulled a hamstring. During my turn at bat I hit a fizzing pop-up, and felt something go in my back, and couldn’t stand up straight, and walking back to the dugout I used the bat as a cane, and watched from the bench as a string of elderly, scarred, limping septuagenarians hit and ran to the satisfying cheers of our team. I had one decent catch in left off a whistling line drive, and another off a deep fly ball. Both times I thought my legs would crumple and I’d fall to the ground, waiting for those balls to bang into my mitt, but I didn’t.

TWELVE

In February, I’d spent a week in New Hampshire, freezing to death on the campaign trail, sketching the GOP candidates as they trained their fire on Mitt. The front-runner tried to float above the fray, blaming Obama, smiling with dairy farmers, suggesting that ten million undocumented immigrants self-deport. The same speeches at horrible parties with terrible music and bad food.

Then in March I spent five days at the trial in Boston of the guy who tried to blow up Faneuil Hall, making drawings of the calm, fat-faced, and deliberate attorney general, of the bearded and scowling bomber, and the stolid and weeping families of victims. I wore credentials on a string around my neck, and got there at dawn to stake out a seat, and had nowhere to put my elbows, and learned about forensics, and a training camp in Yemen, and the destructive power of half a ton of nitroglycerin. After three days, my back was so stiff I couldn’t turn my head, which other members of the media found amusing.

I finished the assignment and drove south, toward Providence, and a little while later I was following Amy’s directions, imagining her on those roads, thinking that this was wrong and delusional, and also sleazy and immoral, which made me dizzy, but who cares. As I got closer, I thought of how racy it was, that the kind of guy who did this kind of thing was usually more chiseled. Turning deeper into rolling hills, darker woods, I figured I could get caught and lose everything and end up alone in a studio apartment with rodent feces and crackers in my beard. People make you do things you don’t want to do.

Over the winter, our ten thousand texts and emails had covered a lot of ground—holiday cookie recipes, the tale of the nanny who set the pizza box on fire and almost burned down Amy’s house—but also her hopes, regrets, embarrassments, and lots of stories about the man she’d married. She told me stuff she’d never told anybody, suicidal feelings in college, her father’s last words, a pitch meeting when Henry Kissinger spoke directly to her tits. By the time the weather changed, the novelty had worn off and our communications had hardened into something else, dogged, rambling, what we had for lunch, but also her fittings for ball gowns and other name-dropping tidbits of the .003 percent, the neighbor who bought a 737, the fund manager who poisoned a local river to get rid of some mosquitoes.

Amy had married a banker who made $120 million a year. He funded tea party candidates and didn’t believe in climate change. She’d left a good career to stay home and raise their kids in style. Sometimes, when he walked into a room, she felt goose bumps rising on her skin, a seething animal hatred, although it hadn’t always been that way. A world-class salesman, he’d sold her a bill of goods. He had a charitable heart, and a hospital in Latvia named after him that always needed cash. He was a soft touch on early childhood education, the third world, the urban poor. Although when I pressed her, she admitted that there were other things they agreed on. The federal government sometimes got in the way. The answer to our stalled economy would come through less regulation, with certain safeguards, which the president didn’t understand because he’d never run a business.

It was easier to ignore things in an email, elliptical phrases, insinuations. Her friends were generous, too, engaged in civic improvement in the Bronx, in farming projects in Togo. It had a certain logic, billionaires to the rescue, that kind of thing.

The emailing of our minutiae had a way of leveling the disparity in our fortunes. I told her how much it hurt to step barefoot on a piece of Lego, so she told me how much it hurt to trip over her son’s Exersaucer. We liked to pretend we lived parallel lives. My daughter and Amy’s younger girl, Emily, began worrying around the same time that if their baby teeth fell out, their tongues would fall out, too. How many times did we trade photos of adorable kids in pajamas or the bathtub, or end the night with a few pithy words, “dying for you” or something, that kept me buzzing for hours? How many nights did I lie in bed like a twelve-year-old boy from the pain of a thing so stubborn, imagining her over me, pressing myself flat, the cat draped across my dick, getting a contact high from the waves of desire coming off me—either that or its purring gave me a boner—but it was so real, I found myself whispering, almost touching her, knocking myself out in the dark.

She grew up in Leominster, Mass., the second oldest of six, or seven. A grandmother with a brogue lived down the hall. The family car had holes in the floor. She made sure I knew where she came from, that she’d had it rougher than me, which wasn’t saying much. Her dad stepped off the boat from Ireland, got drafted into the U.S. Army and shipped to Vietnam, and came home a patriot. Her mom missed Ireland, she thought Americans were crass, but loved nothing more than to sit down on a Saturday night to watch Lawrence Welk. Amy’s favorite sister, Katy, two years younger, married a cop. Her older brother sold fighter jets and missile parts to Taiwan. Lots of sidebars about her other sisters’ knee surgeries and blockages of breast-milk flow, their kids and husbands, their crummy office jobs. High school swimmer, track hurdler, vice president of her senior class. She was attacked the summer after high school ended, in a field beside the town pool. She told me how she thought he meant to kill her, and recalled the boy who found her, and wrapped her in his towel, and brought her home, and cleaned her up.

She put off college for a year. Worked in a photo lab, took up painting, dated a guy a few years older, but wouldn’t let him touch her. Went to a state school on a swimming scholarship, worked nights on campus security, wearing the orange windbreaker. Majored in econ, spent three years analyzing reports at an institutional bank, swore she’d never considered banking until she took the job. But hers was a small unit within a bigger bank, growing rapidly, and soon they moved her into sales, making presentations in high-yield. The women in her department were tall and good-looking, the men were retired professional hockey players, and they all did vicious things to try to steal one another’s clients. In place of any sort of imagination for a career path, she’d taken the formulaic route to some abstract idea of success, maybe hoping that one day she’d have security. Or a red Lamborghini. Earnest young people were drawn into an abusive, sexist, money-crazed environment, worked to death to prove themselves, to separate out the weak so that the only ones left were greedy, scrappy, stubborn maniacs.

On the rebound from some long-haired Australian deadbeat, she met whatshisface, Mike. He was tall and dark and strong as an ox. He could work a hundred hours in a row without setting foot outside the building. Even in the short time she knew him, she could see him changing for the worse. She didn’t consider him a friend or a mentor, and he didn’t know how to talk to women. Was he shy? Was he tired? That first Thanksgiving with her family, when he wouldn’t make small talk, she knew it was wrong but went ahead with it anyway. Planned the wedding, got cold feet, refused to back out. Or maybe the Australian guy had mistreated her and Mike was nice at first. I forget. She filled out reams of forms for an annulment, met regularly with her priest that whole first year, trying to figure out how to get out of it, then got knocked up, and was either pregnant or nursing for the next seven.

Last summer, lying on the beach with her classmates, she wore Italian movie star sunglasses and a white wifebeater, tight against her freckled copper skin, over a screaming blue-and-white flowered bikini, the string loops tied behind her neck as if she’d been dressed that way by some larger being who’d stood over her and tied that bow and then pushed her out into the world. After the beach, a few of us went to play putt-putt golf, where she towered over me by half an inch, and I couldn’t stop looking at her legs.

On the final night of the conference we skipped the festivities, went to a fancy restaurant, then drove out to the point. She didn’t hesitate, just stripped and ran right into the big booming ocean in the dark. Her bra and undies were white. When we got out of the water I forced myself not to look, forced my eyes up, above her chin. But then I looked. She was breathing strangely, said she hadn’t kissed anyone else in nine years. I noticed her breathing, and looked at her hands, and then it hit me: Duh, she’s shaking, she’s telling the truth.

This stuff happens in movies all the time, but what’s interesting about real life is that the longer you live, the cornier life becomes, although that corniness, what once seemed corny, now comes from a deeper place. Desperation doesn’t mind corny. Desperation trumps style. We owned the beach, foam breaking around our ankles, delirious and alone in the moonlight.

Her bunkmates had already gone home, and Amy had the room to herself. There were problems with the lighting, curtains, noises in the hall. Over the next several hours she became awkward, worried, antsy, horny, offended, confused, athletically engaged, panting and moaning, weepy and angry, relieved and exhausted, until we passed out like two crazy drunks. Then, last fall in a bar in the West Village, while trying to wrap her legs around me in the booth, she tipped over a candle and set the table on fire.

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