the physics of sunset
by
Jane Vandenburg

Yes, Jane Vandenburgh populates her tale with characters named Alec and
Gin and Carlo and Veronique; yes, they all have glamorous occupations
such as poet and painter and experimental musician; and, yes, they dine
at Chez Pannisse.  But into the mix, the author stirs a bracing dollop
of irony and not a little satire.  Take, for example, this commentary
on Berkeley life: What one did in order to demonstrate that you were a
successful Berkeley couple, Anna noticed, was manage to stay together
long enough to get the family's portrait done by Elizabeth Smythe and
therefore have irrefutable evidence.

And then there are the chapter titles--spiky little headings, such as
"Technically Daylight" or

"Suicide Haiku" or

"Schmutz," that add a fris son of anticipation of what is to follow.
What does follow is the history of two marriages, and the point where
they intersect.

Architect Alec Baxter and his wife, Gin, have entered a lull in their
relationship; Gin, an artist, has become so involved in her latest
venture, Video Family, that "her love for this project--she called it
"Bungalow'--was so intense, her love for her own family paled by
comparison."  Though Alec is proud of his wife and of her dedication,
he is also beginning to think "vaguely of other women."  Enter poet
Anna Shay, a neighbor whose own marriage to her musician husband,
Charlie, is on the rocks.  Over a period of years, Alec and Anna--both
East Coast transplants to Berkeley--are drawn to each other and finally
into an affair that threatens to shatter the careful balance each has
achieved in life.  Though The Physics of Sunset is not a particularly
long book, Vandenburgh doesn't rush Anna and Alec--or the reader--into
this affair.  Instead she carefully lays the groundwork, introducing us
to her protagonists' pasts, to their friends and passions and
preoccupations, before finally allowing them to indulge in some very
kinky sexual adventuring.  Indeed, one could describe this book as an
erotic novel for intellectuals, for in between the graphic love scenes
are meditations on subjects as diverse as physics, architecture, and
ethnography.  In her second novel, Jane Vandenburgh has taken an old
subject and given it a uniquely imagined new twist.

ALSO BY JANE VANDENBURGH

Failure to Zigzag

I

The Physics of Sunset

JANE VANDENBURGH

PANTHEON BOOKS

Ne?  v Krk Copyright /C) I999 by Jane Vandenburgh All rights reserved
under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random
House, Inc.  , New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House
of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Pantheon
Books.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Vandenburgh, Jane.

The physics of sunset Jane Vandenburgh.

p. cm.

ISBN o-679-42483 I. Title.

PS3572eA65P48 I999 8I3 .  54--dc2I 98-4903I

CIP

Random House Web Address, www.  random house.  com Book design by Trina
Stahl Printed in the United States of America First Edition

2 46897 5 3 I

There was never any more inception than there is now.

Nor any more youth or age than there is now, And will never be any more
perfection than there is now, Nor any more heaven or hell than there is
now.

WALT wHITMAN, Leaves of Gruss Il

I.

Queens Rules That one body may act upon another at a distance through a
vacuum without the mediation of anything else, by and through which
their action and force may be conveyed from one to another, is to me so
great an absurdity that, I believe, no man who had in philosophic
matters a competent faculty of thinking could ever fall into it.

SIR ISAAC NEWTON,

in a letter written to Richard Bently while Newton was working on the
Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica VERONIQUE CEIAKRAVARTY
GREW UP in a little town in the south of France--she called it my
veellawwge.  The sun rose there over golden hills to shine on a river
crossed by a Roman bridge.

The scape of land eees similar to the es one, Veronique said.

She pressed her lips together, looked out from her hill above the water
of San Francisco Bay, then gestured in the dismissive way that showed
she, being French, was superior to either of the two perfections.

The light, she asked.  And this air?  Veronique smiled at Anna, who
examined the atmosphere as if it were gauze between her fingertips. The
light was clean and white, the air soft to the point of feeling
powdery, as if it contained particles that multiplied light's
brilliance.  California was dry, Mediterranean, and shadows did fall in
that sharp-edged, bluish way, but it was the molecular density of
Veronique's soul that had allowed her to be transported intact to her
new land from that more ancient one, Anna knew, and allowed her to feel
at home.

Springtime, a bright morning, the air cool on Anna's naked arms.  The
past winter had been rainy so the hills were lushly green.  A soft
breeze moved up the Chakravartys' canyon.

Veronique had attacked the landscape like one of her Roman ancestors
scooping out irrigation ditches, adding sand to the clay soil of the
deep beds she'd dug into the terraced hillside.  Her kitchen garden
contained the same herbs and vegetables her mother grew, to mates,
aubergines, persil, asperges.  Veronique came, behaved as a conqueror,
the earth responded, was changed by her.

And the local idiom was being altered by the force of Veronique's will.
Anna Bell-Shay was a poet and had a hesitation in her own speech that
encouraged her habit of listening carefully.  Head down over the
basting of a satin blanket binding or in the active grief that had
yawned open for no good reason in the middle of her life, Anna attended
her friend's various beats and breaths and emphases, unreasonably
imagining Veronique Chakravarty was somehow teaching her fluency.

English was becoming ever more complex to Anna as she grew older.  In
the matter of a dash, for instance, how much pause might a dash be
asked to carry?  The dash was modern, also seemed to contain all of
history.  All her favorite writers seemed to balance there and so exist
in the tentative.

Veronique didn't worry about this kind of thing.  She went crashing off
through the underbrush of everyday speech, imagining, for instance,
that people rushing to their therapists were going to see their
shrimps.  This was Berkeley in the 1990S, where everyone was, or had
been, or soon would be in some variety of therapy, the latest being
traveling to the far-off reaches of the world to walk the most famous
labyrinths.  Veronique's husband, who was from Delhi, had an almost
better than perfect English.  It was elegant, carefully nuanced,
slightly archaic.  Because of Ravi, Veronique said cawn't and shawn't,
she rode a lift, lifted the bonnet of the caw she'd hired.

Ravi's was a high old culture, his wife's more new and raw.  His eyes
gleamed, were deep-set, thickly lashed, so brown his dark glance might
catch, take hold.  His gaze possessed a person--Anna I felt it grab the
muscles of her lower belly in a cramp that was frankly sexual.  Ravi
and Anna sometimes locked eyes at dinner as Veronique plunged on and
on--he might lift a brow or move his full lips slightly at some thing
his wife just said.  Ravi very pointedly did not correct her, seemed
also arrogantly to defy anyone else to do so.

Anna understood this.  She suffered the same attraction.

Veronique's being so noisily alive being why each was drawn to her.

The Chakravartys lived up the hill from Anna and Charlie, whose older
house lay in the flats of Berkeley in the section of Northside called
the Gourmet Ghetto in the real estate ads.  Anna and Veronique had had
babies within weeks of one another, their friendship--Veronique called
it free-end-ship--had deepened over upchuck and earaches.

Nearly all aspects of early motherhood were without intellectual
challenge, they soon discovered--even talking about children was often
boring in the particularly overeducated way of the developmental
psychologist, whose clinical language made Anna feel she might need to
shoot someone.  She might feel better, she often thought, if she killed
some thing.  She would probably need to commit one small crime some day
soon.  She needed to turn criminal or she needed to go book an hour in
a Tokyo sleeper.  These were the modular sleeping capsules she'd just
read about.  Japanese salary men rented them so they could power-nap on
their lunch hour in order to be rested enough to go out drinking with
their bosses again.

Anna's own mother confirmed it, infants are no more wonderful than any
other subset of humanity.  God does, however, make all small mammals
look cute and smell good so you'll want to nurse them, Margaret Bell
said when she telephoned.  Also make you less likely to toss them out a
window.

Anna and Veronique sat together on the Chakravartys' wide deck, their
children playing nearby.  The light shone on water radiant as
aluminum--they seemed to sit in a bowl of noon.  Elth pregnancy Anna,
who was blond and fair, developed new sensitivities, she now had a form
of sun allergy.  She wore big loose dresses and a wide hat and huge,
very dark dark glasses to protect her pale eyes.  Charlie called this
Anna's Edith Phase--Edith was Anna's own unlovely middle name.  He
sometimes said to people that if life was a costume party, his gal
Edith was going to come dressed as the echt artist/ mental patient.
She'd arrive with her head swathe in bandages, ear gone, her face all
smeared with white stuff, dressed as Mrs.  Vincent van Gogh.

It was the chemistry of pregnancy that changed her, Anna thought.  Her
mind turned dull as her skin became more sensitive.

She was a prism now through which light fell and broke apart.  If what
Anna was experiencing was a natural splintering of focus, as her mother
suggested, when was it that she might begin to pull hers elf back
together?  Anna had once been smarter--of this she was nearly certain.
She recently called her mother to ask if this wasn't so.  Margaret Bell
now lived year-round in upstate New York in what had been their summer
house.

It was natural, her mother said, that the soul of a female person
should be riddled by empathy.  This was a natural adaption.  That
mothers were porous to the wishes of those around them was what had
kept humanity lurching from meal to meal all down through recorded
history.  She was hers elf now finished with that portion of her life,
Margaret said, having relinquished responsibility for the heavy organs
of appetite to the new generation.  This new lightness was one of the
surprising and very wonderful things about being a grandmother.

Days ticked by.  Anna's daughter was one year old, now turning two. The
photo sensitivity began to ease.  Anna often wanted nothing more than
to go alone into an art museum, to stand in front of a great painting
and be sliced apart by all the levels and degrees of silences. A great
painting made its own quiet room.  What she disliked most about poetry,
she'd discovered, was that it seemed to so depend upon the noisy
apparatus of language.

Until Anna witnessed it from within--experienced in her body the nubs
of what might have once been deemed a personality being so rubbed down
and burnished--she'd never been so attracted to people as ardently
selfish as Veronique sometimes seemed.

Anna became so diffuse at times that she felt intoxicated by the mere
presence of any other stronger individual.  She experienced this as a
profound psychological calamity, a loss of self.  The experience felt
tidal, she became rapt, went out, it might take days or even weeks for
her to come back in again.  This happened both with women and with men.
Writers, in particular other poets, in particular other women poets of
about her age, were most necessary to avoid, particularly those who
were beautiful or might turn out to be honestly talented or to exhibit
some originality.  It wasn't the threat of her own plagiarism, so much
as Anna's worry that she might be swept so easily into their sea,
actually begin to be subsumed by them.

Anna loved Veronique because she was French and the French are a
stubborn race that refused to be eradicated.  Veronique also refused to
kneel and worship at the altar of maternity.  She said the things that
Anna needed to hear in order to keep her sanity, that playing Legos
isn't fun, that almost all children's literature is intrinsically
inane.

The Chakravartys' house overlooked that of Alec and Gin Baxter.

Alec was an architect and theirs was a famous house in Berkeley, poised
on the opposite side of Ravi and Veronique's canyon.  Very chic,
Veronique said sometimes, looking down her French nose at it.  Very
BCBG, I suppose, but do you actually like eeet?

Anna was too porous to decide.  The house was clean and modern.  In a
certain kind of light at various times of day, its surfaces became
invisible, the glass side going sun-gone, the tint of the walls inside
matching that of a whitish sky.  The house shifted, changed size and
shape, was sometimes nothing more than the reflected patches of scrub
oak and evergreen standing against a brushy hillside.

The house was large enough to have been imposing except for its
tendency toward atomic dissolution.  It was also somehow a little out
of place in Berkeley, Anna thought, as if it landed there not from the
future but from another parallel reality, the lost world that would
have taken the place of this one had things gone slightly differently.
It was there, in the world beside the world, that Anna felt she
actually resided rather than in the real town of Berkeley,
California.

And while this town, with the university at its heart, harbored more
Nobel laureates than any other and there were other major and minor
geniuses of every kind all up and down its social ladder, Berkeley had
the pretense of hating pretense.  It preferred its geniuses dead, its
great houses to be wooden and old, foursquare and democratic, like
those designed by Bernard Maybeck.

I ted that ouse, Veronique said to Anna one day, ted them for making
it.  Then when the lorry comes and I see they ave that what eees the
eese thing?  the eese baby swing?  and my hurt breaks for them and
myope flies up again.

So it always honestly did come to the same sad questions, Anna
realized, the ones all the interesting women they knew struggled with,
How to negotiate the inward and outward currents, when the job of
making a household ran against the pull of a worldly ambition?  How was
anyone to accomplish this once mute and simple act, that of raising
children?  And how, in the face of the awesome privilege she and her
friends enjoyed, to justify these twin burdens of despair and
jealousy?

The disappearance of the mass of the Baxters' house seemed to be a
poetic technique Anna might study and employ if she ever wrote again.
She envied the painters, like Gin Baxter, or the architects, like Alec
Baxter, those who made wordless physical objects, who put walls up,
hung paintings there, things thick with dimension, dense objects that
didn't depend upon the little markings that made letters that stood for
sounds upon a page.

She and Veronique drank wine as the sun went down, Anna watching the
Baxters' house as its essence changed.  How to be completely and truly
present on the other side of the work, she wondered.  How to give away
nothing yet still speak with intimacy?

How to become spare and empty without indulging her own strong impulse
toward self-annihilation?

Anna had done her graduate work in Emily Dickinson--she hadn't finished
her dissertation.  Not finishing her Ph.  D. now seemed emblematic of
everything that was turning out to be wrong with her, motherhood being
corollary to that earlier vanishment.

When she was in graduate school, she'd once attended the reading of a
paper called

"On the Anonymity of Mothers, " concerning the mothers of various early
presidents of the United States about whom almost nothing is
historically known, often not even the dates and places of their
birth.

Anna, who was tall, had been taught by her mother to stand up very
straight.  Forgetting hers elf as completely as she did, she remembered
the length of her body sometimes only when she abruptly stood and was
made dizzy by the altitude.  As she stood to ask a question at the end
of the paper's presentation, and an old embarrassment swept through
her, that of the big, shy, sweating girl, the awkward adolescent with
enormous feet who'd always tried so hard to stay anonymous.  She began
to blush, to stammer, spoke softly, haltingly, then sat down, having
become too nervous to even listen to the answer.  And so it was, she
saw, that selfconsciousness might prove terminal, the inescapable
gravity of constant self-reference.  She was flame-faced as she left
the hall, ashamed, ashamed too of being ashamed.  Her hot face pulsed
with every heartbeat going me, me, me.

Ravi traveled, Veronique was stuck up the hill at home with the e
keeed.  She now had two babies, but Veronique didn't bother with an's
to form the plural.  Veronique, who was bored, sometimes watched her
neighbors with binoculars.  The Baxters had uncurtained windows.  They
were an attractive couple, one so big he was almost lumbering, the
other diminutive, each dark-haired but with mysteriously fair-haired
children, all moving through the spacious wood-planked rooms as if on
their way somewhere.  Alec was well over six feet, so tall he needed to
bend over with his face gone grave and solemn to listen as his wife
spoke.  Gin was stylish, antic.

She talked and talked, Alec listened.  Gin had stopped growing quite
early in adolescence, Veronique said.  It was all her various
tragedies, she added, somewhat callously.

Gin Baxter was now very busily accruing some notoriety, having
recently gone beyond painting to work both behind and in front of the
picture plane.  This was her return to realism.  Gin did seem poised
on the brink of some thing--her friends had begun to eye her
cautiously. The odds against her turning out to be any good at all
were, of course, absolutely astronomical, Anna knew, the Bay Area being
some thing of a backwater in the plastic arts.

The lucky people, Anna thought, were people like Veronique who never
noticed the difference between what was good enough and some thing that
might actually matter.  That was art's secret trick, Anna thought, that
so few did it well, that no one knew exactly why.

Ravi, in electronics, was getting quietly rich.  Veronique had never
been more miserable.  Come up ere, Veronique demanded.

Bring that one up ere to play with the ees one.  Stop and buy me a pack
of cigarette.  Do this, Awe-naw, or I "vill keeeel myself.

Veronique, who'd quit, was now back smoking Marlboros she called them
the e Red Death.  She smoked as she painted cowboys and Indians in oils
on the walls of one bathroom.  She paintedfazDc naif tepees and saguaro
cactuses, all of this awkward, childlike.

She used unmixed colors straight from the tube--raw umber, burnt
sienna, cadmium red--and as she painted er operose up again.

It was art that did it, Anna knew, the act of being within the moment
of creation, that lit the dim places in the brain with the thought of
the other, better, more fully imagined West, the place the real desert
sun still rose and set.  It was there, in art, that the neurons gained
the power to come alive and fire across the great bow of eternal
darkness.

Despite hers elf, Anna found her own hope rising too.  She had Maggie,
the little girl born as a kind of miracle so late in her marriage she
had already lost all hope.  Her book of poems would be published by a
respectable press in a year or two.  She had a marriage that was
probably as good as most, at least as good as the one her parents
had--she thought of her own marriage not as a deepening spiritual bond,
rather as a kind of equity of all the many years she and Charlie had
each put in.

Anna believed in making poems as anyone might hold to any religious
faith, that a hurt and broken world was made more whole by these
irrational acts of faith.  God existed, if He existed, in all
enactments of love and grace, in every gesture made toward creation.

Anna believed this.  She also believed writing a book of poems was
almost exactly like lighting a box of kitchen matches, one by one, and
pitching them down a well.

They sat out on the Chakravartys' deck in good weather while Veronique,
who had never heard of sunscreen, became tan, and their children grew
and Anna basted satin binding onto the quilted baby blankets she made
for charity.  Maggie was getting bigger.  A poem, or some lines in one,
sometimes broke free, ran wildly, then came back to her in snatches,
like the lyric of a song she was only now remembering.

Anna slept with a hand some man who, while mocking, was nice enough. 
He was reputed to be her husband.  Charlie Shay was an experimental
musician who taught at a women's college in East Oakland.  He was
startlingly good-looking--she'd recently begun again to notice.  He was
even better-looking than he ever used to be.  This was not a man who
was going to lose his hair or thicken around the middle.  Charlie got
on his mountain bike nearly every morning and rode it straight uphill
to Grizzly Peak, his bright cheeks there cooled by the dazzling fog.

Anna's mother called to ask what fruits and vegetables were arriving in
the market, to hear what Maggie was now up to.

Margaret Bell fretted over her daughter's lack of happiness, more
noticeable since Maggie had been born.  It was a nullity that came and
now resided.  It manifested physically, an emptiness framed by the
muscles of Anna's lower abdomen.  She could never tell her mother
this.

She often felt a little sick, also ashamed of feeling sick.  Her mother
was Yankee, tough-minded, stoic.  Arma had nothing real to complain
about.

The Cold War had ended, the wall in Berlin came down, but Anna was
still at times so panicked her hands shook, terrified she couldn't save
her daughter from an ecologically imperiled world.

She awoke in the middle of the night to the indelible vision of a black
sun rising over a nuclear desert, the sky a cold and quiet blue.

This was the color Georgia O"Keefe discovered by looking through the
white eyehole of a sun-bleached cow's skull.

Anna still referred to her own husband by both his names, Margaret
mentioned.  Was it that Charlie's first and last names were like his
longitude and latitude?  she asked.  Was Anna, after all these years,
still trying to get a fix on him?

Anna was startled by her mother's comment.  If she complained, she
didn't mean to, as complaint made her feel petty and disloyal.

She did lately worry that the man she thought of as

"Charlie Shay"--this went back to their days at Stanford when there
were several Charlies in their circle--might lack some thing that
seemed increasingly essential, the vacuoles of irony that bubbled up in
a personality at the level of the cell.

When, for instance, Anna told him she intended to call her book of
poems Outdoor Survival Skills, Charlie lifted his clean, strongly
muscled face and gazed off so intently that a hot saltiness rushed to
fill the back of her mouth.  She looked down at the uselessness of her
upturned hands, long fingers that lost feeling in the cold or rain. 
The two were out to dinner, were having lobster and champagne.  She
swallowed hard against the same ache that rose from her belly and now
settled in behind the muscles of her jaw.

Her throat closed, she'd never known such emptiness.  Would she ever
meet a man for whom she didn't need to explicate?

Anna's throat ached, her heart ached.  She was thirty-eight years old.
She'd been married for more than fourteen years, and still hadn't found
the road, she recognized, the one that would lead her home.

Important Documents EACH HAD BEGUN to do things that startled her.  He
had their old house tented for pests, forgetting to mention it.  Then
the house was elaborately rewired, then wrapped in tarpaper and
completely reshingled.  Anna was trying to work.  The hammering seemed
to happen directly in her skull, within which Charlie's workmen had
also come to take up residence.

He went to great expense to put in a security system, bought her a new
computer as a present, had her files converted to its systems.  Anna,
who had been in the mountains teaching at a writers' conference, came
home to this upgrade, found she had been too dispersed by traveling
vhe'd lost her watch, also a pair of sunglasses-and now possessed too
little craft or gravity to bungle her way through all the new layers of
complication.  And so it was out of his great enthusiasm and generosity
that her husband managed to bury her work in the deepest levels of some
new electronic hell.

Charlie built the studio in the backyard against the fence in the
footprint of what had been their old falling-down garage.  Anna
happened to miss the ramshackle building held together by the
twining of wisteria, its shingles so weathered that thin yellow
capillaries of electric light showed through.

Charlie began to send her flirty e-mail from his soundproof studio. She
wouldn't answer him.  It was the look of e-mail, the ugly way it
printed out with its bulky ding bats and gizmos, its evanescent nature
told her nothing lasts and nothing matters.

E-mail was such an impulsive form, it caused a person tO appear to be
so naked, exhibited his weak spelling, also the twisted spine of his
sentence structure.  It made a person so easily rude.

There was always so much noise that surrounded Charlie.  She hated the
demanding little chime that said electronic "things" were in her
"mailbox.  " Charlie sat less than fifty feet away from her, she had a
deck off her study, he might simply open the door and let his voice
carry.  Instead he'd invaded Anna's one final secret place.

At the jingle she could feel him on the other side of the monitor,
Charlie's watching, breathing, waiting.

Something might be really wrong with her.  Stalled, she began to watch
her own long white hands with an air of detachment, were these the
hands of a murderer?  They seemed to now move independently, as if they
might suddenly shoplift or begin to yank the cork from a bottle of cold
white wine to toss back a quick one.

She seemed to be sending out weak flares of defiance in no particular
direction.  She and Veronique drank red wine now in the middle of the
afternoon, becoming more and more entwined in their mutual cynicism.
They gossiped so destructively she came home feeling as sick as if
she'd eaten a pound of chocolates.  Veronique liked to talk about sex.
Anna couldn't, wouldn't.  Veronique wasn't verbally modest.  Anna
admired this but couldn't match it.  She had nothing much to say. She'd
known a few boys, but that was so long ago.

Her marriage wasn't ardent.  If her marriage, like so many others in
the last few days of the American century, was guttering out, why
should the cosmos care?

Anna shopped for groceries, lost interest, hated being made low, drawn
down to gossip, stopped anyway to read entertainment weeklies in the
magazines aisle, became filled with revulsion over the baseness of
humanity, over her own shameful staring in bald fascination at the
faces of all the famous people she could never get hers elf to fully
recognize.  She fixed on the unexpected deaths of famous people, how
fame was intended to make one buoyant and large and therefore somehow
inoculate against mortality--this was once religious faith's
responsibility.  A poet could not be famous, by definition.  If
Dickinson walked down the streets of this town, she wouldn't be noticed
in any particular way.  She would seem like any one of the legion of
other neurotic women, all tight-lipped and sexually repressed, dressed
in white, unfit to inhabit the physical world.  Milvia had been
designated Berkeley's Slow Street to make a place for them to walk.

Anna had always imagined vanishing, disappearing one day, then to come
alive again, completely reconfigured in some lost future.  It may have
been this that prompted her to annex Charlie's last name, to give hers
elf more letters.  She needed consonants, she imagined--unlike the
airiness of vowels, a string of louder consonants might add a little
heft.  What seemed to keep her in place now was her own place-keeping,
that she stood in the pattern of generations--Anna bridged the moment
between the two more luminous Margarets, the sun that was her mother,
the moon of her own daughter's ascendancy.

Anna, stuck in this earthly paralysis, stood fixated in the magazine
aisle of the grocery store, suddenly unable to buy any of its garish
items.  There was so much wrong with food these days, no one knew where
anything really came from.  She decided most food was unappealing
because it contained no particle of God.  There was no God at all in
the particularly American habit of eating way too much, then dieting.
Anna took her purse and left the grocery store, abandoning her
half-full shopping cart.  Charlie complained that she had no other job
but couldn't keep milk and eggs and bread in the house.  When was it
that Charlie's demands had become so childish?

 The cultural moment now carried a waft of incense, a mood toward a
paring down, a spiritual simplifying.  Anna wanted to become a
Budthist, but her friend Serene Hoberman was already one and she didn't
want to emulate.  Serene made an altar in her bedroom to remind her
that every act of sex should carry God within it.  Anna imagined her
own Zen existence, how she and her daughter could make do on the $423
per month in income she received from an annuity her father left.  She
wanted a life filled with right action, so unlike the life she
currently led.  It was wrong, she thought, that she and Charlie bought
so much and owned so much and were so dependent on his parents.  They
had no money of their own.

They lived beyond their means because his parents were much too
generous, really.  Anna needed to simplify, she believed, to get back
to whatever was essential.  She had never felt so tight, so unloving.

There was nothing she needed, nothing she could get hers elf to even
remotely desire, yet she had begun to charge random items to the Amex
card, things she could not imagine owning, merchandise she barely
recognized after she brought it home.

Anna now sometimes caught hers elf in rooms into which she could not
remember going.  She stood at the window of her study, looking east,
watching her fingers lying along the windowsill.

These fingers trembled slightly.  She had come searching for important
documents.

She was staring up toward the houses that had been built back into the
shadows of the hills.  These hills burned completely in I923 in the
fire that raced down the canyon and took half the buildings on the
campus.  Now the windows of the houses up by the Chakravartys glinted,
caught the sunlight, tossed it back at her somewhat knowingly.

Anna studied the hills as if they were more than a lesson in
geography--an old volcanic uplift and wear-away, of granite
outcroppings and of what was changed by heat and what was laid down by
sediment and how over history topsoil ran off those old burns and into
the gushing mocha-colored creeks that boiled out into the alluvial
marshes rimmed seasonally by fire, and that on these trembling flat
lands her house had been built.  In an earthquake the ground her house
stood on experienced liquefaction.

Anna had come to unreasonably believe there was some thing to be
learned about happiness by studying these hills, that people with good
houses somehow had a better chance at decent marriages.

She lost things, bills, money, pages of manuscript.  Charlie made love
to her.  Was there God in it?  She couldn't force hers elf to pay
attention.  She had her thirty-ninth birthday, two months later her
book was published.  She held her breath, listened carefully, but no
phone call from Heaven came.  Anna felt oddly vindicated, as if she had
run for her life through a thunderstorm and had somehow made it
indoors, even if she was completely soaked.

"A poet lives nowhere, knows no one, " she said aloud.  Someone another
poet--once leaned across two empty chairs at a reading at Black Oak to
whisper this to her.  Anna turned forty, promised hers elf she would
never write again.

She wasn't altogether certain she had ever loved her husband or that
the man named Charlie Shay was someone she'd ever known or that she
would even miss him if he left.  She developed the unnerving habit, he
said, of distractedly asking

"Excuse me?  " whenever he spoke to her.

They should have divorced that year.  Instead they embarked on a
complete remodeling of their kitchen, borrowing tens of thousands of
dollars from Charlie's parents.  Their architect was Carlo Empy, the
other partner in Alec Baxter's firm.

IT WAS A few minutes after five on a warm October afternoon, the first
unremarkable day in that remarkable week, the only one in which Alec
Baxter's whole evening had been laid out pleasurably and he knew just
what to expect.  The A's were two games up.

Instead of sitting shiva on the cardboard boxes the rabbi dropped off
at the house on 2 19th Street in Queens, instead of observing phone
silence, staying home in order to say prayers and light a memorial
candle for his father, Alec flew right home.  Back at work, he seemed
to have forgotten all about it.

A brilliant California day, with the sky towering up into great struts
of cumulus.  Alec was happy, was walking free, had come out the other
side of the worst of the suffering.

He was free, also hungry.  He was out on Solano Avenue going into
Zachery's to pick up a couple of half-baked pizzas.  He was making his
way to Fran and Jerry Bloom's, who lived above him up the hill on
Descartes.  It was at the Blooms' that the members of their two
families would convene to eat stuffed pizza, Chicagostyle, and worship
in the Church of Baseball.

The streets were strangely empty.  Thinking of nothing so much as his
hope for a Giants win, he heard the clap of its coming before he even
felt it.  This was just as he walked through the open door of the pizza
shop.  It slammed in, faltered, then seemed to renew itself by taking
hold of the ground where he was suddenly rooted.

There were two girls at the register, each one gripping the countertop.
"Get down, " he ordered them.  He bellowed this as if to steady not
only them but the entire world.  Their open faces emptied of
expression--girls with big eyes only staring up at the place where the
pendant lights were swaying.  These were jokey Tin Man light fixtures,
ones hung on long attachments, galvanized, swinging in a perfect
description of the waves of shock.

His heart went out to them.  All these loud and buoyant girls-were they
all to die like this with their hopes unmet?  He thought of his own
daughter, his son.  Parents in Berkeley sometimes dreamed their
children's names, so the children were named with hope for an imagined
future--the parents' own longings and wishes written out in a way that
was achingly transparent.

The interior walls were eighteen feet high, the ceiling open to the
metal roof, its members cross-beamed by structural steel.

There was such a hollow at the core of so much in California that even
the word building didn't necessarily mean what it might have in the
East.  Stores and even schools were cheaply and idiotically made of un
reinforced masonry--these were the very places his wife and children
spent half their waking lives.  Across the room the ten-foot stacks of
cardboard pizza boxes began to shake apart, slick white boxes skewing
out across the tile floor, as if an imperious God was giving a
demonstration of the verb to undulate.  The boxes, two-feet square,
tumbled out, strewn like a deck of waxed and magnificent cards.

The floor was cool, smelled of bleach.  It was concrete, scored to
resemble bricks and dyed Tuscan red, so well waxed it looked like
tanned leather.  Materials were a matter of life and death to Alec--you
could literally die here of the shoddiness of the solid
world, of the duct-tape-patched-together life, the one lived on the
cheap.  Concrete was one substance he ardently loved, this love gave
him solace now.  Alec let his cheek rest on the floor against the hard
chill of it.  He loved its pliability, how it started out as such thick
liquid to be molded, poured, pressed, shaped, scraped for texture--a
stone that could resemble anything, depending on the craftsman's
artistry.  Concrete had such flex before it hardened, such give, like a
young person's life.  Now it was only the fragile skin beneath which
beat the heart of the living world.

The quake boiled for a good fifteen seconds.  Plaster, already brittle,
cracked.  The high walls that had been sheared shook but held.  They
were stabilized too by the grids of the brick-red metal roof.

Tears had suddenly come to him, began to stream his face.  It wasn't
grief that rocked him, rather the keening disappointment that his
evening's selfish pleasure had been so quickly wrecked.

What was wrong with him, that his best and truest feelings were left
like luggage in the East?  It is by losing faith, his father said, that
a Jew becomes American.

Alec was alone except for the pizza girls.  He was hungry and he was
tired, he'd wanted only such a simple thing, to go up to Jerry Bloom's.
Jerry worked at the Lawrence Berkeley Lab.  He was a Bronx Science whiz
kid, a type of goofy genius--he and Fran always laid out quite a
spread.  Jews knew a thing or two, the close relationship between loss
and gluttony, also, the way you had to bury quickly to get it done
before sorrow annihilates.

Jerry always kept a fifth of Stolichnaya in the freezer.  The two might
have taken that bottle and tiny glasses stuck like thimbles onto
Jerry's big cartoonish fingers and gone alone out onto the deck into
the fading light to smoke cigars.  They would look out over the water
as its color deepened and the bay filled with dusk, they might speak
with hushed voices while staring off, speak of Ted Williams and John
Coltrane, then offer a few toasts to Alec's father as the sun went
down, never mind they lacked a minyan.

Alec lay with his palms flat, his rough cheek against the cool floor of
the pizza shop.  The girls called out to him, asking if he'd been hurt.
People came out from the kitchen, streamed around the counter, Alec
wrongly becoming the focus of their attention.  Had he been hurt?  they
kept asking.  He struggled to sit up.  He was weeping, he couldn't
answer them.

Later he came to think it was the earthquake that had broken him, that
in that moment the abyss had opened and he glimpsed the moment of his
own death.  He had been terrified.  He saw that he lacked a certain
structural integrity.  He thought of himself as morally
scrupulous--Gin called it rigid.  Alec had always been more strict
with himself than he was with other flawed and more primitive beings, a
group that included his wife and children.

The rules with women were more fluid, he felt.  Women were hard on one
another, yet made allowances.  They were more elemental, less
high-minded, which is why Alec had been able to forgive Gin for her
crimes against him.

He raised his palms, which were bruised from the panic with which he
suddenly hit the floor.  He was shaking his head to try to say it, my
father is a few days dead, I don't know where my family is.  He was a
man who never wept, who hadn't cried at his father's funeral.  How many
days now since he'd eaten.  How long since he'd slept.  Alec was hardly
recognizable to himsel He needed some thing to eat, needed also to sit
quietly for another minute to adjust to this world, the new and vaulted
emptiness in which no father stood above him.

fore closure.  In architecture, this term refers to the property of
perception which causes the tendency for an open or incomplete figure
to be seen as a closed or complete and stable form.

FRANCIS D. K. CHING,

A HIsual Dictionary of itrchitecture WHAT THEN WAS Alec guilty of--that
he was a less-than perfect husband?  That once, in the long distant
long ago, he made his wife Gin suffer a specific cruelty for which she
then very amply repaid him?  That the last time he saw his father Alec
had gone out of his way to fight with him?

Stuart Baxter, once a man of sophisticated political opinions, seemed
in old age to become more and more simplistic.  In the last few years
of his life, Alec's father began to rigidly divide the world into what
was Good for the Jews and Bad for Them.  Stuart began to loudly admire
the Hasidim, to go on and on about their purity.  The Hasids of
Brooklyn were notoriously wealthy as diamond merchants, and were often
robbed, yet they walked to shul on Shabbat without carrying money, not
even a fake wallet to give up in case they were hit again.

"Which, " Alec mentioned to his father on his last trip to Queens,
"might be viewed as being a simpleton.  " "Now Alec, " his mother
said.

"It causes war, Pop, " he told his father.  "Remember war?  " he asked.
"W-A-R?  And that it's usually the religious fundamentalist who's happy
to kick it off.  " He felt like he was talking to a four-year-old.

When had his father become like this strict Jew off a TV sitcom?

The house where Alec grew up on 2 Igth had aluminum siding.  Why?

Because, as Stuart said, paint costs money!  And their interior
decoration ran severely now toward the Oi, Gottenyu!

-with everything done along the lines of his parents' cultural
allegiances, brush stroke prints of kitschy Chagall-like brides flying
upside down, or the made-by-kibbutzim crap his parents got in the
airport shops in Tel Aviv.  Oi, Jesus!  the jumble of occasional tables
for which there was no occasion.  Hadn't their parents once been more
aesthe ically interesting than this?  he asked his sister Betsy.

Now their reading was of the most pious kind.  The silver-bound Israeli
Hagaddah sat out conspicuously alongside their book club books, nearly
every one of them written by a conspicuously Jewish author and very
often on Jewish themes.

For the rest of that visit his father was polite if cool.  First Alec
insulted the Jews, then he criticized Stuart's driving.  It was Betsy
who asked her brother to speak to their father--their father stopped
listening to Betsy when he turned into what she called the Jewish Mr.
Magoo.  When he got lost or confused, Stuart now impulsively braked to
a stop, never mind that he was on the turnpike.  Their mother, who did
not drive, encouraged and colluded.  "You can go now, Stu, " Mlvian
chirped.  "The coast is clear, " she said.

Stuart yanked the wheel, making an abrupt left in front of three lanes
of oncoming traffic.

"The coast is not clear!  " Alec bellowed from the backseat.

"Pop!  What's going on here?  Are you trying to get us killed?  " "Will
you look at that?  " his mother asked as Stu pulled ahead and blandly
kept turning.  Brakes squealed, horns blasted, curses were hurled at
him.  "See?  " she sniffed.  "They won't give an inch!  " Alec and his
father quarreled in July, Stuart Baxter died of a heart attack on a
Saturday morning in October, no angina, no prior history.  Alec flew
out on the next plane east feeling only mildly startled.  Their father
died while praying, Betsy said.  Stuart was
wearing his white and ivory prayer shawl, his wrist and hand were
wrapped in phylacteries.  Could this be literally true, Alec wondered,
or was his father really somehow alive and still manipulating, going
into disguise as a thoroughly pious man in order to become the stuff of
family legend?

Alec got off the plane to discover that the sunlight and all colors had
gone watery, that the whole of Long Island seemed bent and drenched and
held underwater by the enormity of this news.

His father had really died and so was really dead.  Grief twisted him,
might have broken him, had he had no give.  The look of the world
changed, objects seemed to float just as Alec too now did.

He took a cab in, went right to the funeral home, bent to kiss his
father's face.  Stuart lay in a plain pine box, his beautiful head
wrapped in the same silk shawl he'd had since he was a bar mitzvah boy
on Oak Street in New Haven.  The skin was cold to the touch of Alec's
lips, his father's features so pure and still.

"Oh, Pop, " he said.  "How I loved you.  I am so sorry I was rude to
you.  " Alec flew home, staring out the window of the plane, went right
back to work in order to forget himself, to forget the ways in which he
didn't live by the other nine of the Ten Commandments.  Then just as
everytEung began to settle back and coalesce into the ordinary, Alec's
whole bright world again began to shift and buckle, as if without the
rules given by God to Moses, the earth would never again be stabilized.
Thou shalt honor thy father and thy mother, the strata thundered. This
quake measured 7. I, lasted a full fifteen seconds.

Earthquake time is like all other kinds of time that lie within a frame
of violence.  A second goes on and on, trails away as far as one can
see into the future.  One reasons that the moment now must end but it
doesn't end and even when it then does end, the event is never really
over with, as both history and the future are bent at that point, and
all of time is therefore altered by what has just transpired.  This is
known in physics as the Frozen Accident.

It is chaos, Fran Bloom told him--if the quantum works for anything,
it's to prove there is no cause and effect, no way the world reflects
the inner state except that we view it intra psychically.

The cause and effect of guilt was a human construct, a mathematical
calculation, she reminded him.  It happened in the one-an
done-equals-two of the realm of the superego, which--in Alec's
case--was becoming strangely harsh and punishing.  Fran Bloom was a
psychoanalyst, one of the old-fashioned Freudian, lying-on the-couch
school.  She did the talking cure, left off with the pharmaceuticals.
Alec admired that, admired the fact that Fran Bloom still used both
names to identify hers elf when she called the house though he'd known
her for years.  The name Fran Bloom, he thought, was as comforting as
the lub-dub, lub-dub of heartbeat.

He sometimes wished he had married a woman who possessed such wisdom,
such certainty.  Alec had begun to go up the street in the evenings to
visit with the Blooms because he needed now to actively obsess and they
were older and would listen patiently.

Alec had to go over and over the various events to find his place in
them.

He went back mentally, a bit forward, then back again, all the way back
past Peter's birth, back before Gin went to finish her schooling, back
to the winter Cecily was conceived in his office at Cal.

The redwoods were hung with glittering raindrops.  Had there been some
kind of entrapment for which each of them secretly blamed the other?

Alec seemed to be fingering a chain of evidence, here the fight he and
his father had, here his father's startled look that his son could so
caustically talk back to him.  Alec was simply hurt that his father
turned away from him, that when Stuart rejected his earlier liberalism
to return to the warm comfort of the fold, he left his son's children
outside in the chilly zero.

Buried in the past were all those hurtful things that Alec had almost
entirely forgotten--such as that when Gin was finishing her schooling
she'd once known someone named Timmy, known him much too well.

The quake struck like a hammer drop, centered near Santa Cruz, its
shock waves radiating outward for hundreds of miles.

The shifting occurred on the Loma Prieta Fault, this was part of the
same splintering system that includes the San Andreas and the Hayward,
the strike-slip fault that ran directly beneath the Baxters' house.

That was October I7, I989.  The clockwork of events might have been
constructed differently, might have sprung out and dinged and been
plotted to produce a different result.  Alec-might have been at the
ball game at Candlestick Park, might have taken his son Peter with him.
He loved this boy so much it made Alec much too wlnerable to loss.

They might have gone with his partner, Carlo Empy, who had tickets,
might be stuck there in the darkened stadium with fifty thousand
others, phones and bridges down or clogged and no way to get word home
to Gin and Cecily.  They might have driven there and have parked and
gone in and might have therefore lived, but it was also conceivable
that they would be running late since they were with Carlo, who ran
late.  Carlo was half Italian.  They might have been rushing to the
game and so just hitting the upper deck of the Bay Bridge when the slab
fell in.  They might have hit the connector just there where it
pancaked, at the I-880 interchange, killing forty-two people.  The
Cypress Structure stood only two or three minutes from Alec and Carlo's
Fourth Street offices.

Before that day, no one knew such a thing as the

"Cypress Structure" even existed.

This would have happened because Alec had Peter with him, Peter had
psychic wlnerability, might be charged, even, in the particular way
that draws lightning down.  Alec was meant for nothing, he often
thought, aside from keeping his children safe in this shifting world.

Alec would have taken his son to the Bay Bridge World Series game--he
seemed to need to repeat this for weeks to anyone who would
listen--except his father had just died and Alec was just back from his
trip east, was home without eating or sleeping, was bordering on near
exhaustion.  "You don't border on near exhaustion, Alec, " Gin
mentioned in bed one night.  "That's like your saying de thawed when
you mean defrosted.  " He made only the slightest little grunt.

"You might begin to feel a whole lot better, " Gin was going on to
say, "if you went out and got a little strenuous exercise.  You need to
eat more greens, lose a few pounds.  You need to drink more water and a
lot less coffee.  " Alec was lying in bed with his hands behind his
neck studying the shifting gray geometries of shadow and deeper shadow
on the ceiling.  These came from moonshine caught in the light well he
placed at the center of the house.  Light invaded each upstairs room at
night by falling through the transoms in luminous Rothko-like floating
recti lineals.  He was guilt-wracked, vexed.  Just when Alec relaxed,
settled in to witness the many and very obvious pleasures of his life,
a word or phrase (such as Timmy, the fucking boychik, such as Despite
his better nature, my father had come at the end to perfectly despise
the goyim) would bubble up to punish him.

"Know what Voltaire said when they told him he was killing himself with
coffee?  " "What?  " Gin asked.  She was falling asleep.

"I was born killed.  " She made some small sleepy acknowledgment. "Know
what U. S. Grant's last words were?  "* Alec asked.  He was a
specialist in this kind of knowledge for which he had yet to find any
real application.  Gin's breaths slowed, evened out, she was lost to
him.

Who or what was it Gin dreamed of these days?

Never mind, he told himself, I'll go find someone else to tell.

* U. S. Grant in a note written to his doctor on the day of his death
from throat cancer, July 2 7, I 885,

"I do not sleep though I sometimes doze off a little.  If up I am
talked to and my efforts to answer cause pain.  The fact is I think I
am a verb instead of a personal pronoun.  A verb is anything that
signifies to be, to do, or to suffer.  I signify all three.  "
Celestial Elevations HE HAD KISSED another woman once, someone he
hadn't yet known well enough.  Anna Bell-Shay was shy, squirrely, a
close friend of their neighbor Veronique.  Anna and her husband had
come to dinner a couple of times at Carlo and Julie's.  She was a
writer, a poet, one of the vague women Alec thought of as being members
of the Horizontal School.

He'd found Anna sitting outside on a low stone wall at the party of
friends in the neighborhood.  This was after the earthquake when
whatever held Alec attached to the earth had begun to let loose of him.
For a week or ten days when rescue teams were still pulling living
people out of the rubble, everyone exhibited a great capacity for joy.
People were talkative, briefly united by the shared catastrophe that
seemed to reach so deeply into every aspect of their lives.  This was
later in November, the Bay Bridge had been reopened, things were
settling back, modern life again began to atomize.

It was a big party on a mild night.  She had excluded hers elf and was
sitting alone in the quiet dark, drinking wine and staring in through
the big window of the dining room at the crowd around the buffet
table.

Anna and her husband had the lookalike marriage Alec called the Bub and
Sis, like a type of deli sandwich.  Each was tall and blond, each had a
wide angular face, strong, purely American features.  Her eyebrows were
so pale they scarcely showed.  This was an endogenous marriage, like
that of first cousins, rare in California, more common in the East.

Bub was of one type Alec actively despised--Columbia had its share of
these.  They were feckless, good-looking, rich--they never balanced
their checkbooks.  Blue-eyed, ankles tanned, they golfed, went sock
less, came mewing around women who seemed to like them, though what was
the exact appeal?  Bub, in Anna's case, was a musician who taught at
Mills.  She was clearly too smart for him.

He was charming, nothing more.  At dinner Alec had been bored and more
than a little annoyed that men of this type exhibited such ease in
getting good-looking women.

Anna patted the spot on the low wall beside her.  Alec sat.  It had
been a clear fine day and still was warm enough that they could sit
comfortably outside.  The evening was peaceful, light through the
window pooled on the flagstone and moss just beyond their feet.

Neither felt moved to speak.  The clouds above were still brightly lit,
but here below in the shadow trail of the house next door, they were
sequestered by the quiet and by the gathering darkness.

The sun was going down and the last light glinted like hammered copper
along the rippled glass of the upstairs windows.  This was a big hills
house, a Maybeck, brown-shingled, effortlessly perfect and of its time.
That he be half as good as Maybeck or Julia Morgan was all a man might
really hope for.  Birds were screaming raucously.  This was only a few
blocks below Descartes--Alec had come out the kitchen door to see if
there was a way to sneak home by going over a back wall or up the path
past Indian Rock.  He could go home and sit in his car for a little
while, read a couple of paragraphs of physics--this was the end of the
eighties, so he'd
have been reading A Brief History of Time, which was simply too
difficult.  Or he might go home and listen to the ball game on the car
radio, drive back down to get her.  He could be gone an hour before
Gin even missed him.

"Nice party, " Anna said.

"Tip-top.  " Each fell silent once again.

"Actually, " she said.  "I left because I couldn't really stand another
second of listening to the sound of my own voice.  " "That's the one
good thing about smoking cigarettes, " he said.

"It gets you bounced right out of a place like this.  " "Do you have a
cigarette?  " "I don't smoke.  " "Neither do I, " she said.  "But I
would if you happened to.  If you smoked, you might have run out and
you'd have to leave to go buy some and I could get a ride down the hill
with you.  " "Too bad about cigarettes, " he agreed.  "I liked it when
there were cigarettes.  " They were both quiet again.  Alec felt
compelled to add,

"There isn't anything that's come along that helps so much with social
awkwardness.  " "Don't talk if you don't want to.  What I hate most
about parties, really, is that everyone nervously talks so much.  " He
nodded, each was silent.  They stayed that way for a little while, then
Anna said, "I was stuck in a corner with people discussing the
homeless, and someone said they'd been put on earth to teach the rest
of us gratitude.  " "Gevalt " She smiled at him.  "The whole discussion
began to make me so angry I started stammering, and I tossed my drink
back so fast my brain felt like I'd been given a lobotomy with an ice
pick.  " Her face was now alive with self-amusement.  "Then someone
else told that person to stop calling them the homeless' since this
term can be seen as one of derogation, both fixed and judgmental.  I
honestly could not stand it.  So I came out here in order to drink
antisocially.  " She swirled imaginary wine in a glass that was now
completely empty.  "God, how I wish there was still some thing at times
like these.  Hashish was great--I wish there was still hashish.

People were no less stupid when there were drugs, but at least we
didn't have to notice everything stupid everyone said and then remember
it in such exquisite detail.  " Alec groaned.  "Christ, " he said. "I'm
just too old to be doing this again--my memory's shot.  I honestly
can't remember the names they changed everything to the last time.  I
can't even remember that they changed the name of Grove to M. L. K. The
whole title of that street is now written out Martin Luther King, Jr. ,
Way (Old Grove Street)' on the plans at City Hall.  It happened ten
years ago, more!  I should have adjusted by now.  My father spoke
Yiddish first, then English, but at least he only had to learn his
second language once.  And now my nine-year-old daughter comes home to
inform me in her superior nine-year-old way that I have to upgrade to
the new format.  " "Format?  " "She tells me I have to go out and re
buy all the music I own on records and on tapes or I'll die without
getting to ever hear what music really sounds like.  " Each was silent,
each thinking about what music really sounds like.

"Life does sometimes seem like it's becoming one constant upgrade, "
Anna said.  She sighed.  They were quiet, then she said, "It was better
when there were cigarettes.  " The birds had quieted.  The night was so
peaceful, they both heard it when his stomach rumbled.  "Are you
hungry?  " she asked.

She dug around in her bag and brought out a packet of airplane nuts.
Anna handed these to him.  "The crowd's gone from the table.

We can go back in if you like.  " She said this, but neither of them
stood.  She dug around in her bag again, pulled out a tangerine and a
pack of saltines, handed them to Alec.

 They spoke quietly for another little while, had those few moments
full of humor and good will.  He kissed her when they each stood to say
goodbye and go back in.  They kissed, this felt perfectly natural. They
may have lingered slightly, but not long enough that anyone watching
them through the window would have been able to really tell.

WASN"T LIFE ITS own grand and spacious miracle?  That she who needed
nearly perfect silence in order to work had somehow married a musician?
This had honestly never before occurred to her.  Being weak-minded,
Anna was as bullied by music as she was by being in the room with an
attractive person.  Music approached her, tried to get inside her just
after she'd gone numb.

Music wanted her, wanting her to become lost to its fluency.

Fluency was what Anna always lacked.  She had, in speech, not so much a
real stutter as the need to halt, wait, pause at the blockades put up
by any kind of disjunction.  In high school this evolved from a slight
stumbling to a need to fully stop at any kind of punctuation so she
could peer out cautiously over the line to see what lay ahead of her.
The speech pathologist taught her how to slow down, press her lips
together, focus, breathe, go on.

The whole course of her life now seemed to come down to these matters
of hesitation.  It wasn't that Anna hadn't been able to finish a
dissertation as much as she hesitated to even really start one.  She
always felt the need to eliminate as silly or wrong or
33cliched or probably more untrue than true more words and phrases
than she could bring hers elf to produce and so ended up, year after
year, with fewer and fewer pages tO show tO her advisor.

This man came to her wedding, held Anna's hand for a long time at the
reception, staring down into her palm as if reading her future.  He was
more than a little drunk, became too effusive in praising her
interesting mind.  He wanted to ask some thing of her, he said.  He
wanted to ask Anna to not go into the house and never come back out
again.

But what did she have to say about Dickinson that hadn't already been
better said?  And why should anyone whisper another syllable about this
poet, surely our most silent and importantly vanished one?  Could
Anna's thesis be only two lines long, say just that?  Could she submit
one holograph page of her own loopy handwriting marked by her own
wavering and infinite dashes?

She became perversely proud of it, the Ph.  D. dissertation that went
backward year by year toward its own inevitable nonexistence.

She fell out of touch with her department, then with her advisor,
finally deciding she was incapable of inflicting any part of her
critical stammerings on an un waiting world.  The universe would be a
better place, she knew, if less of this was written.  The world also
required fewer books of poetry.  It wasn't that poetry shouldn't be
made but that no one else should ever be made to actually look at it.

At forty Arna still dreamed guilty dreams of what she'd left
unfinished.  She dreamed of her advisor, that she saw him in the
library and tried to hide within the stacks that were not stacks
because they changed into the showers in the women's gym.  Through the
warped optics of the glass bricks, Anna became poisonously objective.
She watched her own naked body go cubist, breaking apart in a shower
stall.

Why had Anna married Charlie?  Was it that she once imagined Charlie's
happiness was like a language that he would be able to teach to her and
that it turned out instead to be an aptitude?

Like perfect pitch in music, some people had it, while most did not.

They married, made accommodations to one another, grew older, had a
baby who then became a toddler.  Then they went to Europe late one
summer.

This was the third or fourth of the recent honeymoons given them by his
parents as anniversary gifts.  The two of them were Sitting in a cafe
in Prague eating dinner when Charlie decided it was time to say he'd
been having an affair with one of his graduate students.

Anna licked her lips, steadied hers elf.  It wouldn't have been
entirely honest to say she was completely shocked by this revelation.

Because her sense of smell had become hyper acute when she was pregnant
with Maggie, she had on occasion detected a kind of perfume on the
tweed of Charlie's jackets that smelled quite a bit like Play-Doh.

She studied the laced fingers of her hands that lay in her lap, palms
upward, then looked over Charlie's shoulder in order to catch the eye
of the waiter.  If this was to be another of those everlastingly
introspective evenings, they were going to need another bottle of wine
in order to get through it.

This was exactly what he had always loved about Anna, he said, this
great calm of hers, her maturity, her self-possession.  He didn't
actually say

"Old Girl, " but that did undoubtedly occur to him.

This was a crisis surely, but it need not be the end of them.

Their baby was two and a half years old--they needed to consider, he
supposed, a separation if that's what Anna wanted, they would do
whatever Anna wanted, but he wanted really to think long and hard about
Maggie.  There was the new study on the children of divorce, its
long-term consequence.  As for the student?  Charlie was embarrassed to
say he hadn't been in love with her, nor she with him.

Anna was too astonished by all this to know exactly how to respond.

She was suffering from a kind of aural reverberation a bounce, then
delay, then echo, that came with extreme self-consciousness in which
she had to hear everything she thought of two or three times in an
outwardly transmitted ripple.

She might say this or she might say that.  If she heard hers elf
speak, she might be able to determine what she actually felt.  She
thought of saying this, Well, that's good, or she might say, Oh well,
too bad, then, for each of you--Anna's tone might be either blithe or
sarcastic.  What she really wanted to know, of course, was had there
been God in it, but this question seemed much more personal than any
she might ask about their specific sexual customs and/ or practices.

There were gas lamps on the corner and there was hokey Czech folk music
tumbling from a stat icky speaker and an old Michael Jackson song
blasting from the open door of the disco across the cobbled street.
This was the New Czech Republic, Anna struggled to remember.  All the
old names of the same old countries had gone away into the Dark Zone
behind the Iron Curtain but now were coming back, just as heroin was
back and crack cocaine was back--she'd just read this news in one of
her several trashy magazines.  Whole countries were re materializing
with the New Nationalism--some had been submerged for generations--yet
a blanding was happening in Europe so the countries now seemed to her
to have been transported from the different parts of Disneyland.

Anna was having trouble listening.  She was thinking of swimming in
Sand Pond during summers when she was little and how she had always
known beneath knowing that her mother took Anna and her brother Davis
up there sometimes to punish their father for things he'd done.  She
also knew without knowing that it had to do with sex.

Sex was the Dark Zone, was buried in the layers of what was known and
what was not known and what was spoken and was not spoken and in this
was like the distinct layers of temperature of the water in the pond.
The water was meant to remain cold, the dark and secret place.  The
warm layer was clear, through it the shallows displayed their golden
pebbles, and that was where the reeds grew and the babies sat.

The warm layer of water was ne.  ver more than a foot deep even in
August at the peak of summer.  The X-shaped insects skated, balanced
their infinitesimal weight, the bubbled X's haloed, echoed, on the sand
below, held aloft by pods of surface tension--because of water bugs, X
was still one of Anna's favorite letters.  Through the clear water the
exaggerated shadows of the water-skaters bumped and abruptly moved.  It
was easy knowledge that lay in the shallows, and this easiness lay atop
the deeper water of the quarry.  The deeper things were cold, were
dangerous.  Sex was dangerous, was singular, was why you learned to
swim, why you were frightened, why you jumped off the raft and why you
disappeared into blackness as you went off and into it.

She was thinking how very much she now wanted to take her own baby
daughter and go home to East Eden, except that Anna was ashamed to have
made so little evolutionary progress and to do so would mark her
forever as her own mother's girl.

She was ashamed of hers elf, also ashamed of Charlie for being unable
tO keep his word.  He'd promised tO change when Maggie was born she
more than half believed him.  She forgot the most basic truth of what
it meant to grow older, one does not change except to become more
intensely what one has always been.

"You're not angry then?  " someone asked.  It was Charlie.  He was
here.  She'd forgotten all about him.

Angry?  Anna wondered.  She turned the word over and over, counted its
various letters, rubbed it until it became as polished as a river rock.
What was he talking about again?  She was remembering some thing else.
This was a huge man, both tall and fat, who once danced with her at a
roadhouse.  This man was maybe forty or even fifty--Anna was not yet
seventeen.  It was upstate near the border of Canada.  She and her
mother driving north in her Grandmother Rutherford's big old-fashioned
boat of an American car, having left Rhinebeck abruptly.  Neither Davis
nor Anna's father was with them.  They'd been driving aimlessly,
heading toward the border, flying northward as if it was as "up" as the
way it lay on the flat of the map, having lost all sense of internal
gyroscope and with it the natural horizon.

The big man spoke to Anna in French as they danced, spoke suggestively
of the things he'd like to do to her.  He could not have
known how completely she understood him.  They danced and Anna was
beautiful to him, no longer the tall shy girl with the frizzy hair, no
longer awkward in speech or tripping on her size-ten feet.  Dancing
with that elegant man was like being danced with by the ocean.

Had he simply led her away with him, she would have gone.

She would have gone anywhere that night to escape getting back into the
car again with her mother's desolation.

"Well, good, " Anna told Charlie.  She heard the word recede in re
verb, going good!  good!  good!  This might be a kind of echolocation,
she guessed, like the system of sonar used by bats.

She reached over to borrow his reading glasses to look again at
dessert--the waiter had taken her plate and she was suddenly starving.
"Good, " she said again.  "That's settled then.  " She squinted,
looking for a list of pastries she wanted some thing gross, some thing
that came served mit Schlag.  Some unspoken cue caused her to look up.
She peered over the readers to look at her husband.  Was there some
thing wrong with him?  There in the Weinstube in Prague was the first
time Anna could remember ever seeing Charlie look actually
frightened.

There was more, evidently, that needed to be said, Charlie hadn't
brought this up in order to hurt Anna or cause her distress but because
she was going to find out anyway.  The girl told her parents, who had
threatened Mills with a lawsuit.  Mills was arranBg her admission at
another school, one that was, Charlie said, really first rate, one she
probably wouldn't otherwise have been admitted to.

Anna positioned her tongue and lips.  She breathe .  She was
experiencing a moment of hesitation.  She needed to spend a couple of
moments organizing hers elf, her internal pacing, commas, periods, and
the question marks, how they might pose what kinds of expectations. She
was also de constructing this last part, this current girl's various
chances and hopes for advancement and future happiness.  And the
strange twist of her good fortune.  The bend this girl's life road took
there when it came to Charlie, that there was this small thing back
then that her parents made into this big legalistic deal--though not
serious in that it barely mattered since no one's heart was broken, the
one small irony being that what wrecked her professor's marriage turned
out to be her trampoline.

Charlie was going on.  The lawyers for Mills were talking to the
parents' lawyers and both were talking to those of Charlie's parents.
It was Charlie's parents who came up with the idea of the cash
settlement for the girl and endowing Mills with the practice rooms.

Anna's mother was a hand some woman, an accomplished pianist and a
sophisticated milliner.  Margaret wasn't beautiful but was tall and
thin and she carried hers elf well.  She had a kind of wry solemnity,
Anna thought, as if she had secret value.

Anna was thinking of her mother, how each seemed somehow fated to stand
in the rising damp of a cabin in a logged-off hardwood forest picking
men who turned out to be as useless as this one.  Men like this were
nothing special, men like this were a dime a dozen.  Anna felt very
close to her mother then.

Anna quietly gathered hers elf, as her mother might have, and stood up
from the table.  The night was warm.  She remembered to take along the
cardigan she'd hung on the back of her chair.  This sweater had been
crocheted by her mother.  It was a creamy white and had tiny buttons
made of pearls.

Charlie began hurriedly throwing money down on the table.

He threw down great bunches of large bills printed in blue on pale
pink, and green on pale blue.  The paper was as crinkly and thin as the
tissue used to wrap Italian almond cookies.  These were made of egg
white and air and sugar, weighed next to nothing, these, with Jordan
almonds, were Anna's mother's favorite sweets.  The look and feel of
money was simply better in Europe, Anna thought.

There were so many kinds of currencies, so many shapes and weights,
bills printed so beautifully on so many kinds of paper, yet the global
commerce was soon to convert it all to Mousk"Dollars.

Anna--tall, proud, chin up, back straight--stumbled slightly on the
uneven cobblestones.  She had gone a ways down the block when he caught
up to her.  Charlie reached to take her elbow, leaned in, needing to
confide some thing.  He needed to tell her
this, if Anna was set on walking back to their pension, she was going
in the wrong direction.

She steadied hers elf, licked the dryness of her wine-tart lips.

Anna too had some thing she needed tO confide.  She leaned over tO
whisper it,

"Fuck you, " she said.

They were a hand some couple, or so they were always told, and they did
mirror one another in a certain way.  She saw the two in her mind's
eye, blond, large-faced, freckles scattered across their good
cheekbones.  The clinical name for what was happening to her, Anna
remembered, was disassociation.  Anna and her husband turned, she
thought.  Anna and her husband began to walk the cobbled streets of
this ancient capital back toward their room, which lay in the Dark Zone
beyond the thumping disco.

"Excuse me, Charlie?  " she asked after another moment.  "But do you
know what?  " His head was down to listen carefully--he was clearly
penitential.  "You?  " He nodded.  "Your parents--her parents-that
whole sad story?  " He nodded.  "It's completely sordid.  " She
listened, heard her words veer off, going clipped and strange.

This old and dignified capital had been so carefully rendered in this
phony theme park of this jigsaw Europe that the phony flickering gas
lamps were turning out to be real.  She watched these lamps as they
begin to halo.  There was a shine on the street and on the sidewalk and
on slick wet roofs, which were made of what?  Some kind of slate or
tile?  The shine began to blur, certain places in her vision began tO
bounce and magnify.  She PUt one hand OUt, long fingers facing up, tO
feel if anything was falling.  Had it been raining?  Anna couldn't
remember.  The water shortage was so extreme that year in California
that half the counties ended the summer in .  .

emergency ratlomng.

"Charlie?  " Anna asked after another moment.  "You know what else?  "
He nodded a little too eagerly.  "My mother has never liked you.  "
Then she leaned over and, as if to make a physical point of this, she
threw up onto his shoes.

These Shades Of Frustrated by the melancholy traces left by his
faithless pencil while sketching on the shores of Lake Como.  . . .

FILIP PINO LIP PI,

exhibit caption at The Metropolitan Museum of Art EV-VEN-NING,
VERONIQUE SAID.  Eeeeev-ven-ning, as if it was an evening out, the
place where light came to its great pause, a halt, a shift, a place the
world balanced, waiting before it went ahead and plunged headfirst into
Thc shades these Laws of Return ONE SUMMER ALEC and Gin moved with the
kids up from Oxford Street, then almost immediately his parents came.
The new house, built only a quarter mile from the strike-slip fault,
was bolted to bedrock, as he pointed out to Stu and Viv.  Its idiom was
post modern, Alec said.  Its materials, he told them, were Wrightian.

He enunciated as if his parents were hard of hearing.  The two of them
were small and sweet and clean, they blinked in stupid unison.

The house had been shot for Architectural Record, he embarrassed
himself by mentioning--this didn't impress them either.

The house was simply perplexing to his father, hidden as it was up a
drive in the center of a block so it didn't even seem to sit on a real
street and did nothing therefore to proclaim itself.  Alec could see
Stuart struggling to find adequate words of praise, saying it was
unlike any house he'd ever seen, more like an art museum with the big
rooms and Gin's work put out on the floor around.

"What's the matter with them, Stu?  " he heard his mother whisper.

"That they don't own furniture?  No furniture, no drapes or curtains,
but they have these naked women sitting on the floor with their legs
spread wide?  " These were abstract landscapes, actually, hills,
valleys, new mountains, the more ancient ones.  What threw Viv off was
that Gin called the pieces, which were done in rough plaster, The
Great White Nudes.

It was August, yet his parents went around bundled up indoors,
shivering dramatically.  Alec once found them sitting in his car, where
they had the motor on and the heas,er going, reading the travel pages
of the newspaper as if plotting their escape.  They found their son
residing with his family in a hardship post, Stu said, in his most smug
and jocular tone, the one he got with his degree at Yale.  This was
Alec's father's little joke, he repeated it to

M1V

nearly every single day.  Ulysses S. Grant's proclaiming San Francisco
a hardship post meant he and his men got extra pay when they were
stationed at the Presidio.  Stuart found this fact by browsing in
Alec's life of Grant.  Stuart was also reading whole stories from the
Chronicle aloud to M1V at breakfast so they could laugh together at the
ridiculousness of Californians, never mind these were Gin's people.
"Oh look, Stu!  " M1V said one day.  "That must be the mayor!  " They
were on Telegraph Avenue on their way to a concert at Zellerbach Hall.
She was pointing at a barefoot, obese, homeless man sleeping on the
sidewalk.

Alec's parents, who once traveled and were sophisticated, now spent
their time whispering between themselves about anything
unfamiliar--what was the strange orange meat in the Chinese food?  They
shielded their eyes dramatically from the glare of the afternoon sun
glancing off the too-bright bay.  Because the house followed the hill's
slope, there were a few steps between the two main rooms.  Alec's
parents couldn't go up or down between the living room or dining room
without remarking upon these steps, always in new surprise.  More
disturbingly, MIV had begun to keep her pocketbook clasped tightly to
her side indoors, as if she expected to meet muggers in the hallway.

"That's Mount Tam, Grandma, " Cecily pointed out helpfully.

"And that's the Golden Gate Bridge.  " Cecily was so little then, her
beauty seemed heartbreakingly pure to Alec--why didn't her
grandparents seem to really care for her?  Had they become utter
narcissists, entered the mirror world in which no one else any longer
exists?  They did now look almost exactly alike.  MIvian couldn't get
over Cecily's long blond hair, kept asking and asking when she was
getting it cut, couldn't believe her granddaughter was allowed to keep
rats as pets.

"Oh, I know, dear, " M1V sniffed.  "And believe me, by my age, if
you've seen one mountain, you've seen them all.  " His folks sat over
bundled with their hands clasped in their laps, bolt upright on the
plain, straight-backed Stickley furniture in an attitude of bland
endurance.  Alec squinted, tried to see the place as they saw it, a
trick he used with clients, a house built of rocks and metal and glass,
as cold and blinding as a snowstorm.  Home, on their tree-lined street
in Queens, people sat out on the stoop in shirtsleeves on a summer
evening to escape the air-conditioning.

Home, there were lightning bugs, robins, real blue jays, the air was
thickly humid.  In Queens light was soft, old green trees over arched
the pavement.  The ice-cream truck would be along and Stuart would buy
her one.

This was in I987, a couple of years before the earthquake completely
wrecked the transportation systems of the Bay Area, both freeways and
public transit.  Peter had just been born.  Alec had never known such
joy as that event aroused--their little family now was mathematically
balanced in a way it hadn't been before, and Gin had the second child
she so desperately wanted, the baby who canceled the bad reproductive
luck she thought she might have inherited from the unbalanced equation
that was her parents's tragic lives.

The house faced the bay, one blank wall sitting recessed behind an
apron of glass panels facing the fall-away into the steeper part of the
canyon.  Alec called the entry the Water Room.  He remembered the words
etched on the first sketches he ever did of this house.  The room
preexisted in a Platonic sense, it seemed to him--he had simply been
always striding ahead into the future in order to discover himself
within the room he would one day make.

The room was positioned to catch sharp-edge morning light that poured
in as the sun rose over the shaggy treetops.  Light pooled, spilled
back into the house from a line of interior dormers that ran just below
the roof line.  The floor was slate, stepped up from the entry door
along the angle of the hillside.  You stood in the entryway and saw the
little creek foreshortened as it came at you, its streambed lined with
rocks.  The water was then pumped back up again out of the pond,
which--he wished he could tell his mother this and have her understand
him--said some thing about what might be known about eternity.

In this pond Carlo's girlfriend, who then became his wife, had planted
water lilies.  Julie Empy was a landscape architect who had trained
with Garrett Eckbo.  The entry was an empty box.  It held nothing but
light and air and the sound of the flowing water.  It was in this pond
that Alec kept his three meaty carp, large fish that were each
astonishingly individual and pet like.  The arc of their flashing
colors, a yellow gold and a reddish gold and a white that was
opalescent, often made Alec feel he was present at a moment of
creation.

His mother frowned at the whiskered ones, waved her tiny hand before
her face as if to wipe the wet away.  She was terrified of rats, fish,
all of wild nature, of snakes and bugs and of the savage giant ness of
a redwood tree.  This was the reason Alec and his sister were never
allowed a dog when they were growing up, nor a cat, nor even a
parakeet.  Water running within a house?  M1V asked, the baby might
totter in and drown.

Alec's house was as pure as koi, he consoled himself.  His real father
might have admired it had he lived past I974.  His true spiritual
father--Alec often almost actually believed this--was the visionary
Louis Kahn, the most important American architect since Frank Lloyd
Wright, as he tried to instruct his parents.  They nodded, their faces
poised and blank to show they weren't actually
listening.  Why was he not Alec Ben Kahn or Alec Son of Rothko (who
was born killed) or of Charles Moore, with whom Alec had briefly worked
when each of them was at Cal?

His parents liked Alec's house, they said--it just wasn't particularly
homey.

"Homey?  " Alec choked.  This was years later, years even after his
father died, but Alec found he was still stung by his fatherjs saying
this.  He was on the phone to Betsy.  They were laughing at their
parents.  Laughing at their parents was the way the two of them had
always kept themselves from going straight to Queens to kill them.

"What can I tell you, Alec?  " Betsy asked.  "It's ten, eleven years
and she's still fussing about the wall-to-wall.  She thinks you don't
have drapes because you ran out of money.  " Betsy and her husband
lived out in Riverhead.  Betsy and Ben had the wall-to-wall.  "She
worries people across the way could look in and see her use the toilet.
" "Homey?  " Alec said again.  Tears of sick mirth stood in his eyes.

Alec objected to just exactly that blend of schmaltz and wishfulness.
The experience of home or homeland might come to those who were
particularly blessed.  Jews, however, had such a talent for exile that
the memory of loss seemed to him to be embedded within their bones.
Every one in Berkeley, aside from Gin, had moved here from somewhere
else, many from far-off countries.

Alec hated the way a word like "home" or "family" was warped the way a
logo was by computer graphics, twisted, whizzed away by clients who
were veering off into the purest state of self-delusion.

Clients came to him insisting on a study in which they would never read
a book or even manage a moment to quietly sit.  Every one these days
was too busy being gone, out making money or writing the screenplay for
the movie of the story of their own lives.

Alec was a big man, nearly six feet three.  He often scaled rooms
outward from the sense of his own anatomy--he made rooms big enough to
accommodate his stride and physical restlessness.  This was to relieve
him of the Queensish feeling of having the ceiling come down on him. He
and Gin furnished the rooms of their house slowly, sparingly, with a
few good things that having little kids wouldn't immediately wreck.
Alec needed the sense of open spaces, needed to continue to witness the
terrain and vistas, access, egress.  These were what Moore called the
spiritual matters of architecture, those concerning path and axis.  How
people might come and go within a room, how they might actually sit and
breathe and read and be alive in one.

Try as they did, his parents were too old to ever learn the map of his
house and so seemed to wander in that place as if they'd been lost for
days.

Alec had always been a good student, never got in much trouble.

He was a citizen, a mensch, had always been their good and loving son
who was dutiful and never fucked around much but had kept his head down
and had worked hard and had achieved much of what he'd set out for
himself--his work and getting to see some thing of the world.  He
married, had two children, including the son that would carry on his
father's, okay goyish, name.  He was hardworking, a good provider, had
stayed married when it might have been easy enough for him to have
found the reasons not to, but all this just wasn't homey enough for Stu
and Mn?  It occurred to him he may have stayed with Gin in order to
somehow spite them.

The two always subtly blamed Gin for whatever lack of the domestic
touch they missed, usually some thing as cornball as tea towels
embroidered with the Hebrew letters "chi, " or that there were the
wrong birds on this side of the Rockies.  This was because Gin was an
orphan and wasn't Jewish.

Or there may have been some tiny precipitating event, some thing about
how Gin had once worn a sheer nightie down the hall on 2 Igth to use
the toilet without pulling a bathrobe on--his parents were both
dumbstruck by her immodesty.  "Oh hi, folks, " she said sleepily as she
passed the open door to their bedroom.  She was full-bellied, hugely
pregnant, exhibited no shame in it.

 "What can I tell you?  " Mn told Alec's sister.  "She's from
California.  " Betsy, who may have been ambivalent before, became, at
that moment, Gin's most staunch defender.

The house was acclaimed both for the purity of its design and for the
theoretical efficiency of its energy use.  It was heated by a system
of water pipes running beneath the hardwood floors.  The designer of
this particular heating system was Frank Lloyd Wright, but Alec's
parents had already dismissed him from any importance since, unlike
Kahn, he lacked the requisite Jewishness.

The house was cold because its systems worked imperfectly-Alec went
back to the drawing board, above which he had push pinned this, his own
carefully written-out motto which was DON"T SELL THE BIKE SHOP,
ORVILLE.  He worked patiently.  Alec was nothing if not patient, if
patient in a few matters only.  This was one, the time and money and
psychological distance it took to build a real house, a real house
being one that actually deserved to exist and take up space in an
already too-crowded world.  A real house was one that had achieved its
own perfection.  Often it was very simple.

Alec didn't actually believe in perfection but thought of it as he did
the Unified Field Theory--he'd bet a lot of money the Unified Field was
never going to happen.

Alec saw the house broken back down again into its elements, the
softest graphite riding the smoothest sheet of vellum.  As long as Alec
lived and drew breath, there was still the possibility of actually
achieving an exquisite balance of planes and shapes and formulae, and
this lay in the same place off where the quantum met the Theory of
Relativity, Hawking and Einstein touched, meshed.

Every one would know the moment though no one would at first believe
it, just as Newton didn't actually believe anyone sound of mind could
believe in the Laws of Gravity.  The truth in math could, however, be
proved and proved and proved.  Jerry Bloom said they'd most likely find
the Theory of Everything by looking in an unlikely place.  How Alec
loved all math, particularly geometry and trigonometry, how he hoped to
believe these manmade languages spoke of rules that accurately
described the structure of the universe, as gravity did, in that it
could be proved and proved and proved.  It was this he loved, the
theoretical rush of a torrent of light just as it struck the
three-dimensional.

He imagined the house just as he had once dreamed it, a simple set of
luminous volumes floating behind the oaks as seen from the road
downhill.  The house showed only on the private side, turning its back
to the public street in a manner that was both Mexican and Japanese.
Descartes looped up around the hill behind his house, dead-ending at
the Blooms' and the Chakravartys', whose houses sat on the
cul-de-sac.

He saw the house to be as elemental as the perfect chair he had not yet
designed but might one day, the old joke being that the most brilliant
of architects was incapable of making a chair that not only looked good
in a room but was actually comfortable for a human being to sit in.  A
chair had every physical and aesthe ic problem pared down, reduced to
simple form, context, balance, materials, scale, all the problems in
the physics of stress and of fabrication.  Most chairs, if not purely
imitative, were simply breathtaking in their ugliness.  The comfortable
chair often looked as ridiculous as a Laz-E-Boy.

Perfecting the systems took Alec and Carlo almost eighteen months.
Carlo was a saint, he had also trained at M. I. T. in structural
engineering.  The floorboards came up, the pipes were then re laid.  He
and Gin and the kids camped out on the lower level during the mess of
reconstruction--this space would later replace the place on McGee
Avenue that she was using as her studio.

McGee was Gin's house when she was growing up.

Finally, the concrete was poured again, the floorboards reset.

It was a wonderful house, was acclaimed as such.  People wanted
one--this surprised him since Alec had such a generalized contempt for
so much of the taste of his fellow man.  He and Carlo went on to build
similar houses in the hills of Oakland and Orinda.

There was one in Marin County, another larger one faced north in
Encino, overlooking the San Fernando Valley, this one done for a movie
star.  The glow at night could be seen for miles.

The Baxter House had been perfected, but that ruined first visit was
the last trip his father ever made to Berkeley, a place so Bad for the
Jews that Stuart would evermore refuse to come.

Irrational Numbers ALEC CLIMBED THE slow slope of his hill, thinking of
the beauty of the most simple physics, of how he might have built his
house before the Industrial Revolution, before the Age of the Machine,
how the pharaohs had built the pyramids using only levers and the
inclined plane and the sweating deaths of a million slaves.

He was walking home from the bus stop down on Shattuck Avenue as he did
every evening--he walked in order to keep his heart and lungs in good
working order.  He also liked the speed of walking, that it took his
mind home at the same slow pace as his moving limbs so all of him
arrived more or less together.  The wisdom of slow locomotion, Alec
knew, was what the Amish practiced.

Stuart's mother, Grandma Leah, born in Minsk, once traveled to Lebanon,
Pennsylvania, and there mistook the Amish for Orthodox Jews and so
spoke to them in Yiddish.

Alec was fit but not lean, as Gin recently told him.  She went to the
gym to work out to get the job more quickly done.  His wife simply had
no tiffleX as she had started to exclaim.  His wife, these days, had
infinite things to do on her path to some kind of high art
righteousness.

5I

 Alec had a Fiat Sport in the carport but didn't drive it much.

The model was no longer imported from Italy, so its parts were hard to
come by and the car was now so old and frail it seemed increasingly
precious to him.

His house sat at the end of the curving drive, lying above a line of
trees--stands of pine and oak and eucalyptus--in the cleft of two small
rises.  It was built back into the hillside on two pieced-together
lots, lots so steep they were hitherto deemed un buildable by the City
of Berkeley.  The house wasn't so much on the hill as of it, as Wright
would say.

Alec and Carlo had to work for more than two years in order to get a
variance.  "All right, Alec, " Carlo said at one point.

"You're American, you tell me--who is it I must sleep with in order to
get this done," Carlo, half-Italian, half-British, was born in Surrey,
educated at Oxford.  He was likable and hand some, the shining, affable
partner who presented well, leaving Alec to loom and brood, bite the
earpiece of his glasses, grunt, yank his hair.

The glass panels hung before the concrete like a curtain.  The concrete
walls had been tinted Haze Blue, the surface then burnished to a sheen
like the final bright etch of sun clearing away the last licks of fog.
Alec had always loved this color.  It lay, in both hue and saturation,
very close to the metallic paint on the undercarriage of a B-s2
bomber--Gin called it camouflage.  The house was best at night with
everyone at home, when the gray was warmed by incandescent floods.  He
imagined swooping in, flying toward it, seeing it as another might.

When he was able to imagine it like this, Alec could almost believe in
its reality, could imagine it did cohere and that it was more than the
sum of the materials and labor costs, that it did rise up and look
effortless.  It looked effortless, he thought, to everyone but him.
Bolted to bedrock, safe as a bunker, he wanted his house to seem to
accelerate.

Alec stopped on Spruce to look up past the treetops to pray, Please,
God, might I get liftoff?  He didn't believe in God any more than he
believed in perfection or the answer at the end of the square root of
two, yet did half-expect God somehow to signal him, for his house to
appear to magically levitate as the Taj Mahal is said to do at dawn.

The house was dark, heavy, his dread set in.  His mother was in there,
visiting.  This would be her last trip west.  His mother was a
nightmare, a sump hole in the Universe.  The evening before, upon
arriving, she started right in.  Viv tipped up her long beak of an
aristocratic nose, sniffed at the barrenness of floors, the old and
threadbare kelims, the bay side wall of windows.  She had been a
redhead and her nose was still dramatically freckled.  It had grown
such knobs and knuckles it now resembled one of her twisted fingers. 
Herself the daughter of a prosperous butcher and more than a little
spoiled, Viv pitied Gin for being an orphan, an urchin, but once kept
this more to hers elf.  The night before at dinner, Viv began to
rehearse the old complaints, that Gin hadn't even owned a good winter
coat until Alec came along and bought her one.

The kids looked startled, Gin smiled brightly, bitterly, at Viv's
condescension.

With the New Haven relatives, Betsy said, Viv could really get going,
that Gin went barefoot in all weather--not her fault, no one raised
her, what with the mother dying when she was young and the father being
a drunk.  And this was why Gin didn't know any better than to nurse
the babies in public restaurants.

Alec let himself into a darkened house--Gin clearly had taken the kids
and fled.  The kitchen was cold, it smelled of apples.

Why couldn't he and Betsy have had a dog when they were kids, why
couldn't they have had real parents?

He found his mother in the living room staring bewilderedly out the
window, back on the drapes again, wanting him to help her with the
measurements.  The sunset across the bay was gaudy and lovely, exactly
the kind of thing Viv would somehow find offensive.

Viv asked after Alec's girlfriend--girlfriend or boyfriend is what Viv
called Gin or Ben when she, for whatever reason, preferred to pretend
not to remember the names of the people her children had married.

 "Ma?  " Alec asked.  "This isn't about Geee-nh.  " He said it very
carefully, letting his hand sweep through fading light.  "Ma?

This is how we like it.  I mean the both of us.  " His chest felt so
constricted with anger he could barely manage to let the words go.

Viv squinted, peered up at Alec.  How could two neat, nearly matching
people have produced this hulk?  At thirteen Alec towered over them. By
fourteen he was so tall he'd begun to shadow corners.  It was then Alec
had begun to feel hunched and odious in his little mother's presence,
as if he bore no physical relationship to her tidy person. Alec very
much wanted her to talk about some thing, anything, aside from Gin, so
he wouldn't have to hate her.

New Haven in the old days when she went to the movies at Jimmy's
Nickolette?

Stuart was dead, the house completed years before.  What was wrong with
his mother that she had to keep having the one same conversation?  She
kept complaining about Cecily having rats when she hadn't had rats for
years.

"Hey, Ma?  " he asked.  "How long have you and I been acquainted?  "
"Oh, I don't know, Alec, " Viv said.  She seemed irritated at being
pinned down like this.  "Maybe a dozen years by now?  " Alec was
forty-seven years old.  He guessed Viv was kidding, though his parents
were too carefully behaved and Yaley to have ever come up with much of
a sense of humor.  He walked quickly to the study, where Betsy was on
auto dial.  He wanted to tell her he figured their parents were
clinical narcissists, that this is why the two of them had to raise
themselves. He also wanted to check a few things out with her.  There
was the matter of Viv's sense of time, that it fell away into
absurdities, that she seemed so out of context.

He also needed to ask his sister if her little girls had helped with
their grandma's packing.

When Mlvian arrived the day before, Alec hoisted her bag off the
luggage carousel at SFO, making the exaggerated grunt meant to impress
his mother with how hard he always worked and how well he had succeeded
against such great odds.  She hummed to hers elf tunelessly, as usual,
stared off, as usual, in her superior rich girl's way.

Alec hoisted the bag.  It was huge yet weighed next to nothing.

It came off the carousel effortlessly, wanting to fly into orbit in an
arc way ahead of its plastic handle.

Once in the parking structure, he stashed his mother in the front seat,
leaning forward to belt her in when she couldn't work the mechanism.
Her bad breath had taken on its own menacing proportions.  He shut the
car door, went then to shove her luggage into the back of the station
wagon.

These were old-fashioned hard-sided bags made of cardboard printed like
leather, then plasticked, both cases now badly gouged and dented.  The
basement on 2Igth was full of cheap crap like this--Alec's father would
buy set after set of luggage, essentially throwing away his money,
refusing to ever invest in a single hand some piece.  Why?  Because,
Alec, if you have some thing good, they know by that and that's when
they rob you.  These had to be the oldest ones, suitcases with
steamship stickers that showed they'd taken Stu and ViV to pre-Castro
Cuba, to Bermuda and to Europe when it was cheap, more places than Alec
would get Gin to ever go.

They were Road Runner cartoon bags, weightless as Wile E. Coyote before
Isaac Newton came to believe in gravity and therefore defiant of all
haptic expectation.  Her luggage, made of paper, was filled with
nothing.

Alec clicked one case open to make certain his mother's things had not
actually been stolen.  In the overnight bag were a few old
underclothes, a strange spider work of twisted and yellowed bras.

In the other, bigger suitcase someone equally demented had packed a few
old towels wrapped around a red-waxed ten-pound brick of Poverty
Program cheese, date stamped from when Stuart was still alive.

"Mom?  " Alec said.

THE EAST WAS thick with humidity and guilt.  In Berkeley, you didn't go
by that.  If you were guilty or felt ashamed, you just spent more money
on therapy in order to get over it.

Alec had himself recently done a few bad things, but because he had
Fran Bloom to confess to, he didn't need therapy.  He had, for
instance, started stealing from his parents' house on 2Igth whenever he
went home to visit.  He'd taken a crystal decanter from his mother's
sideboard just the week before.  This wasn't some thing he could really
tell anyone.

He and his sister had each agreed to reclaim the book or clock or the
milk ware pitcher they'd given their parents as presents over the
years. They accomplished that much, then stopped, so much of the stuff
in their parents' house being so bad neither of them really wanted
it.

But this was new, Alecb stealing his parents' actual objects.  It
started when he realized his mother no longer possessed the self with
which she might really own some thing, either to keep it or to give
away.  In this she was like an infant, or less than an infant, 56 l
really, since a baby would still be attached to its mother or bottle or
blanket.  M1V was out there now floating umbilically in the ether of
disinterest.  She still had style, gesture, but lacked the weight of
ego heavy enough to achieve either desire or possessiveness.

"I guess I'll take this then, Ma, if you're sure you don't need it?  "
He waved the decanter her way, nonchalantly.  It was dusty, filled with
soured wine.

M1V had come downstairs while he was robbing the sideboard and was
staring at him from the living room, needing .  . . ?

she stopped, moved her hands up and down in front of hers elf in order
to try to complete the faltering thought.  She seemed bewildered by
Alec's question, both bewildered and annoyed.  Why was he bothering her
like this when she had more important things on her mind?

Her modesty having left her, M1V now stood before her son in only a bra
and a pair of torn and baggy pantyhose held together at the one big rip
in the calf with a rusted paper clip.  She had on lace up walking
shoes. He tried not to notice how the see-through nylon matted her thin
gray pubic hair.  When Alec mentioned that he thought she might have
been looking for her dress, she stared at him dismissively.  "What I
need, " she said, "is my nightingale.

" Her hat, as always, sat at a jaunty angle.

He and Betsy had been interviewing people to live in.  The women who
wanted this job appeared to each of them to be so obviously bored or
criminal, so emotionally ill or mentally deficient they seemed of a
lesser order than those who make a life's work of passionately grooming
dogs.  His sister found someone who was adequate, and in so doing
redefined the word adequate.

Alec flew home sadly, carrying the decanter on his lap.  He and Carlo
had been using the Duct Tape Airline because their offices had become
somehow entwined in the complications of its frequent flier program.
They found themselves, therefore, flying in and out of the most cracked
and broken parts of airports, places that seemed much less than First
World.  The Employee-Owners of TWA had also just added another row of
seats, he noticed, making the cabin so small Alec had to get a bulkhead
seat in order to fit his legs in.  He was going to have to begin to
upgrade to First Class.

This would cost him some of the miles he'd been trying to save for a
vacation.

He'd only set the decanter down on the floor for a single moment to go
to the toilet, but while he was gone one of the Employee Owners rammed
the decanter with her drink cart.  She'd smacked it, took a chip out of
it, still, it hadn't broken.  It was good stuff, cut crystal, heavy,
leaded, not pressed glass.  His father came up a bit in Alec's
estimation.

Home, Alec filled it with a good amontillado.  He liked an excellent
sherry now and then when he came in from work.

It was Alec's now, yet his father hadn't actually given it to him.

He drank too much one evening while brooding on the death of
cities--Gin was out at an opening, Cecily gone, Peter on an
overnight--why was no one ever home anymore?  He needed to call his
sister, needed to have a nice long talk with her.  He had this specific
guilt, his grave-robbing, his vulturing of the not-yet-dead.

He hit her button on auto dial, then--realizing how late it would be
for her--began to hang up, but Betsy had already answered.

"You what?  " she asked.

He began again to recite the story--it was circular and he hadn't quite
come to the point of it--when his sister cut him off.  "Alec, do you
understand that you just woke me up in order to tell me some thing so
trivial that it is putting me back to sleep just listening to it?

Where's Gin?  Tell her to make you go to bed.  " "But it's probably
worth some thing, " Alec whispered.  "This isn't the usual junk Pop
would get.  It's nice, maybe even a gift from somebody high up in
Housing?  " "Alec, listen to me carefully.  This is anxiety talking.
Anxiety is the modern malady.  My doctor suggests half a Xanax, a cup
of hot tea, two cookies, to be followed by a good night's sleep.  My
doctor talks like this.  " She was talking very fast.  "You're my
brother and

I

love you and I honestly mean this so listen to me carefully, I don't
care.  I have three kids, plus Ben, plus Mom, plus the girl at Mom's
who isn't fat like we thought but is soon to become what used to be
called an Unwed Mother so I don't want anything else, all right?

So you have Pop's whachacallit, so keep it, all right?  So we settled
that, so I love you and now I'm hanging up.  " Alec listened to the
dial tone for a little while before remembering what it was he had
meant to say.  The curt voice of the woman he most especially hated
came on to nag and vex him, If you wish to make a call, please do so.
Please hang up and dial again.

It was so simple to dial Betsy, he felt so close to her--just the
single button, the long-distance dialing system beamed up and down from
the satellite.  He admired the way it worked instantly, gathered no
time to it, took nothing like the decades that used to erode when he
was leaning over his desk, frowning down, patting his head and various
pockets to try to find his glasses, laboriously dialing this number and
then this number on the rotary--years fell away while he waited for the
return after a nine or a zero.

Alec punched, got the little snatch of now-familiar music that spelled
his kid sister's number out.  He'd made her life miserable when they
were growing up.  He was so sorry now--he was a nice person, a good
person, he adored his little sister.  He was proud of her and
grateful--how had he forgotten to mention this?  Betsy was
curly-headed, tom boyish, a little bug-eyed, smart-mouthed .

Growing up, she'd hung around him all the time.  He was constrained by
his father from ever belting her, though it often occurred to him.

He had swatted her a few times, she had always yakked at him, talked
with her mouth full.  She also lied.  She had actually been as annoying
as an insect.

He was talking into the lightweight plastic of the handset--the phone
felt ridiculous in his clutching hand.  "But she might miss it, " he
whispered.  "Since it was Pop's, " he added.

"Know what, Alec?  " Betsy asked.  "She doesn't miss anything.

She doesn't miss you and she doesn't miss me.  The other day when I
took her grocery shopping on Hillside Avenue, she tried to pay the
cabbie with the red of her dialed-out lipstick.  Only, know what?  I'm
telling you this, then I'm hanging up.  The cabbie was Ben and the taxi
was our station wagon.  " She hung up.

Alec held the buzzing nothing of the (wait, wait) telephone.

He was remembering the last time he took his mother out to lunch at
that fish place in Queens Millage he'd been to a hundred times, the
name of which now escaped him.  She shook out her napkin, placed it in
her lap fastidiously.  His mother still had lovely manners.  She looked
around the room in her superior way, then leaned forward
confidentially.  She reached out one hand, Alec took it.

It was a strange object, this hand, large and out of scale against his
mother's shrinking body.  The fingers stuck out almost directly from
her palm, which emerged flipper like from her wrist, each segment going
off at what seemed like an increasingly useless angle.

She pressed her lips together, nodded at what the waiter had set before
her, winked to show Alec she was no one's fool.  This was a plain salad
of lettuce and tomato with Thousand Island.

M1V watched the waiter leave, then leaned forward to ask Alec some
thing.  Her face was humorous, even wise.  He leaned forward
eagerly--now she was going to tell him some thing.  "Alec, " she asked,
"say again?  What's the name of what I'm eating?  " TIME FELL AWAY in
chllnks big as islands, the globe was warming, Antarctica's ice shelves
breaking off entirely and floating away so the microscopic life forms
might try all over in order to get it right this time.  Alec sat in his
Le Corbusier chaise in a darkening room, thinking of various women.

He thought of women in the East, how they softened and their hips
spread, how they had once seemed so womanly to him.  In Berkeley, women
remained tense, wise-mouthed girls of forty, who all seemed poised in
the act of still becoming.  They were all potential runaways, all still
climbing out the bedroom window of their father's house on the way to
meet someone down at the 7-Eleven.

Women had certain problems.  It was up to Alec and Carlo to listen very
carefully to these problems, then offer the wise solution.

It was the duty of the architect to find the artistic answer, then
express it in the practical world.  These women wanted certain things,
got them, wanted other things.  They wanted an entirely new house that
would contain no impress of the controlling fuck head they'd just been
married to.

6I

Alec looked away from this client--rich, beautiful, underdressed, and
over forty--to glance at Carlo.  Carlo would not look back at him. Each
had learned not to move a muscle of his face when one of their
prospective clients made this kind of announcement.  A woman such as
this did not need to be encouraged to elaborate.  She elaborated.  In
her new house she needed a special nook in which to achieve her yogic
moment.  She crossed and uncrossed her long, very well tanned legs. She
leaned forward to tell them this, she now found exercise to be more
pleasurable than sex ever had been.

Houses, kitchens had now achieved a pushed and stagy valence, with
black rock and pink marble and wild cutaways done in the dulled and
gorgeous shine of the newest metal, which was titanium.

The kitchen was one topic that often came up hot.  No longer was it
necessarily a woman's job to cook for her family--she might become
offended if this was even suggested.  One was not to assume, however,
that she wasn't an excellent cook.  She was very good at cooking, at
household, at everything, and she was going to come back and cook very
brilliantly again right after she lost those last few pounds.

Gin's own meals had become like art lately, taking on a certain As-If
quality, while having departed the realm of taste and sustenance.  This
came from working on the Mldeo Family--her love for this project--she
called it

"Bungalow"--was so intense, her love for her own family paled by
comparison.  The muscles in his face grew so heavy when he gazed down
at Gin's food that she snapped at him.  "Stop that, Alec, it's just
insulting.  " "This is good, " one of Gin's women had recently said
about whatever it was Gin was currently passing around at one of her
many parties.

"It is not, " Alec countered.  "It isn't good and it isn't really
food.

It's much too vivid to be food.  It's a Serving Suggestion, it's made
of Animal Screams.  Time goes, et voila!  We are arrived at the heure
of lay DIN-nay.  It's the Dinner Hour, so get the fuck out of my house.
" Alec did not, of course, actually say any of this aloud.

I

Animal Screams were the simulated, very lifelike recordings of the
stuck-in-the-sludge woolly mammoths and saber-too the tigers he and
Peter heard at La Brea Tar Pits.  These screams were activated by
pressing an innocent-seeming button--the screams were so immediate and
real it did seem to be a matter of life and death, and Alec's heart
beat hard and fast in response to them.

It was terrible to hear these mammals going extinct, mammals gone
extinct being the animals with which Alec had always most closely
identified.

Gin--who began art school as a print maker, became a painter, then a
sculptor of plaster and fiberglass and metals--was working in mixed
media now.  What most bothered Alec was that Gin had begun to
incorporate "text" in this new project.  The real meals she cooked had
become some thing like text, they were like the food she might serve to
the host of her simulacra, les produits chimiques, food styled on tape
loop, cooked up of ephemera, done in the vast elsewhere, made--like the
chemical sugars that Cecily wouldn't allow anyone to use since they
were tested on animals--to closely imitate the Good and True.  Was
their marriage good and true?

Alec could no longer tell.

Dinner had somehow turned into a joke on dinner.  Peter dreamed off,
ate nothing that anyone could discern, becoming quietly terrified of
various mundane things that had always been around.  Cecily was loud,
her manners slovenly.  Gin did nothing anymore to unite their
household, was hers elf a vacancy.  She was always rushing through
dinner, it seemed to Alec, so she could get back to work.  She was
working on her installation, videoed faces shot from stills in ragged
scrapbooks and projected on the stuffed heads of muslin dummies that
had been positioned in lifelike rooms, was preoccupied, seemed gone
before she was even gone.

"Mom!  " Cecily would yell at her, "Hey, Mom!  Remember me?

I'm your daughter, you know, your real one?  " Gin was short-tempered,
huffy about the needs they had-here she was trying to do some thin ,
and they kept treating her like the mother ship where they cam to get
supplies.  Why weren't \ \ they becoming more self-sufficient?  She
was sick of being indispensable.  Here were three able-bodied people
who lived and breathe and spoke and ate, all sucking up huge quantities
of food and milk by the way but increasingly unable to help around the
house.  When she was Cecily's age.  So forth.

Gin recently weighed a bag of groceries on the bathroom scale,
multiplied that by the approximate number of bags consumed per week
over the years of their marriage, stuck her computations on a Post-it
on the door of the Sub-Zero, her on-site mothering expressed in a
matter of tons.  Gin began to let house plants die.  She did this, it
seemed to Alec, by aggressively withdrawing all nurturing.  "You're
supposed to talk to plants, " he suggested.  "You're supposed to give
them a little spritz or some thing.  " She gave him a withering look,
got up to leave the room-she had more important things to do.  "Go
spritz yourself, " she said as much to him as to the ficus.

She was just on the verge of some thing.  She had almost achieved some
thing she'd worked so long and hard for--naturally this was the exact
moment her family would decide to collectively decompensate.  The kids
were both awful, but Alec was worse, frankly, the way he sniffed a
bottle of milk suspiciously before he poured, just as his mother always
had to demonstrate her ability to discern.

She needed time, Gin said.  If someone bumped into her in the house,
she snapped, just a minute before the question had yet been asked. When
Cecily went downstairs to hang out with her after school, Gin told her
to go back up, to do her homework, to learn to work more independently.
 Peter was booked into infinite classes, had some thing going every day
after school.  Gin needed time, space.  They were impossible to cook
for, with Cecily, who was vegetarian, having to vet ingredients written
on the side of the package looking for Pony Hoofs and Parts of Kitten,
and Peter becoming phobic about the garbage disposal and afraid of
clowns and of the shoe store and eating nothing, even rice, without
considering each grain's place in the cosmic suffering.  Was Peter
going to turn out to be one of those spooky little Berkeley kids, Gin
asked, who chewed the buttons off his shirts?  If so, he was obviously
getting this from his neurotic Jewish side.

"Clearly, " Alec said, "since your family exhibited such a pure mental
health pedigree.  " Privacy while she worked seemed absolutely
necessary.  It was the constant interruptions, the phone, the vibes of
people right upstairs just waiting to interrupt her.  She needed to
move off-site.

She decided to rent studio space away from the house.  She needed this
space and much more uninterrupted time than had ever been allowed her.
She needed to scale back, lead less of a big life.

Alec didn't mention that the source of much of their big life was Gin
hers elf.  When Alec asked what she wanted for her birthday, Gin said,
time out.  She looked at him in her level way.  I mean this, Alec, she
said.  I want the entire month of May.

So she rented a loft in Emeryville, a place where she could walk to get
a latte at Camera's.  Camera's had great panini.

And this broke Alec's heart a little--he'd already bought her an
espresso machine for her birthday--it was hidden in the carport where
he kept the regular gifts and the backup gifts for when she or Cecily
didn't really like some thing.  Alec could usually tell.

Peter, being a boy, was much easier to shop for.  The espresso machine
was restaurant-quality, Italian, gorgeous really, and expensive, copper
and stainless steel.

Time passed, Alec's life was falling away.  He was lulled now, waiting,
keeping the home fires burning.  Marriage was a longrange bombing
mission, he was listening to the drone of engines.

He was actually proud of her and of this determination--it was the
hallmark of Gin's character, had kept her going in circumstances that
might have destroyed a weaker person.

Alec was proud of what they had, two great kids, this house, two
full-blown careers.  They'd survived Timmy, survived fifty seven
straight days of rain, also mud slides, earthquake and now the latest
wildfire that might have taken their own hillside.  If their house had
been lost, as Carlo and Julie's was, ten years of Gin's artwork would
have gone up with it.  She was moving her art onto the flats, out of
the fire zone, down to where the next big quake might bury it.

Alec settled in.  He listened to jazz on the radio, to Coltrane on
vinyl, to the hiss of the needle whispering across those ancient
grooves of a record that he'd nearly played white.  He waited for her
in the living room as he watched the sun go down, thinking vaguely of
other women.

Technically Daylight WHAT ONE DID in order to demonstrate that you were
a successful Berkeley couple, Anna noticed, was manage to stay together
long enough to get the family's portrait done by Elizabeth Smythe and
therefore have irrefutable evidence.  Elizabeth Smythe was a good
photographer whose work completely lacked the irony Anna believed was
probably necessary to endure life in these last few years of tMe\
twentieth centur, v.

Anna was g'ttting a ver, v good chance to study the work of Elizabeth
Smythe, as she sat outside across the street from the photographer's
stud iA on Hopkins Street.  It was four o'clock--for nearly two hours
Anna had been waiting in the rain.  She was on the sidewalk under the
covered awning of the baker, v, sitting on a damp wrought-iron cafe
chair.  This was exactly the kind of chair her mother had in the
kitchen in the cabin at Sand Pond.

Sitting upright in the wobbling chair reminded her of the humid summer
evenings when the cabin became unbearable and Anna's brother had taken
the car somewhere and her-father was still in town.  The men in her
family were usually out while she and her mother stayed home with their
books and sewing.  This seemed then like a matter of choice--each was
socially reticent, each superior, believing they were probably at least
as interesting as whosoever else they might have gone out to see and
needed then to talk to.

Anna and her mother would drag the kitchen chairs out onto the screened
porch to sit in the thick night air, to drink limeade and read
companionably.  They read Marianne Moore aloud or Pound or H. D. , and
Anna, who hadn't set out to be a poet, sometimes thought she'd been
made into one by the strength of her mother's hopes for her.

Because her mother was Yankee and being Yankee was like religion, the
chairs the Bells sat in were always church like and strictly upright.

The cabin was in what was left of a logged-off forest, the pond formed
by the digging of a limestone quarry.  The heavy air in the larch and
hemlocks was alive with the rolling blink and scream of electric
insects.  Anna listened hard, hard, trying to pierce the deafening,
straining to hear some thing beyond that mechanical whirling.

The noises of the night seemed to be set out in a formal code.

Anna was on Hopkins Street waiting for Triple A, her old car having
broken down once again.  The battery was dead, she was also locked out
of it.  She had nothing to read, no money to spend on a coffee at the
bakery, no checkbook to balance, no pen or small scrap of paper on
which to write a suicide haiku.  She'd been flustered by the engine's
refusal to turn over, had left her keys and bag lying in Maggie's car
seat when she went in to call emergency roadside service.  She had
locked the doors in the dazed automatic state she often found hers elf
in those days.  Veronique pronounced the phrase "these days" as "those
days" for some reason no one had never been able tO figure OUt.  The
phrase as Veronique said it did impart a funereal sense that seemed to
Anna to properly fit the present moment.

She'd called Veronique for help, but she wasn't home or wasn't picking
up.  This meant Ravi was traveling--Veronique became mysteriously
unreachable whenever Ravi was traveling.  Veronique did this, she said,
in order to heighten her allure.

If the pond of Anna's childhood once offered the temptation of
nonexistence, she seemed to stand on that same sand these days,
watching ripples of diamonds beckon to her.  She had, at times, the
most profound sense of being no one aside from her daughter's mother
and her mother's daughter.  Through the process of divorce she was
losing the accouterments of Somebodyness--money, property, husband.
Anna imagined this being no one happened to poets more easily than it
did to other people--it was occupational, that poets remained
permeable, open to their surroundings.  Marianne Moore once wrote in a
letter to Elizabeth Bishop,

"Even just standing still and refusing to disappear is one's greatest
triumph of fortitude.  " The faces in the photographs across the street
were having a too-strong effect on her, Anna noticed, reminding her of
the strong ones who taunted her for stuttering when she was a kid.

These portraits were big, self-congratulatory.  It was color work,
photographs of weddings, of new well-rested moms and dads with their
tidy babies--everyone good-looking and happy and prosperous, it was a
matter of Trickle Up.  These weren't the kinds of people who would be
susceptible to psychological disintegration--their flesh was ample, too
well fed and solid.  They undoubtedly owned the things they imagined
might save them.

When was it, by the way, that everyone began to look so Republican?

"Large Bad Painting, " Anna said aloud.  It was the name of one of
Bishop's poems.  If her mother were there, she would understand exactly
what Anna meant.  If Margaret were there, she would arch an eyebrow and
say, Nice enough, I suppose, if you happen to care for that kind of
thing.  < Anna stood up, forced hers elf to move, to go back to the
real estate office to borrow the p one again.  She called Julie Empy
to say she was still waiting for the tow truck, Julie brought Maggie
home with her from nursery chool to play with her own daughter.

Anna stared at the snapihots of houses in the real estate display.

All houses in Berkeley--and these houses were nothing special seemed to
cost half a million dollars.  This news gave her the same dizzying
feeling she sometimes got when she stood up too quickly.

She went back to sit outside under the awning to watch for the tow
truck.

Their own house and the price it might or might not bring was a matter
of contention in the divorce, as was every other thing she and Charlie
had ever owned, including this old and broken car.

This was a sixteen-year-old Suburban in two colors of dirt, a relic
built to run on leaded gasoline.  It was a heap, as everyone kept
saying--still, Anna wanted it.  She was used to this car, understood
the kinds of demands it made--it suited her in the way her own clothes
did.  She didn't understand why she kept having to keep explaining this
to Charlie and to Charlie's lawyer and to her own lawyer, all of whom
looked at her as if she was childlike and hence pa the ic.

Though it was technically daylight, the day was suddenly dark as
Prague.  Anna tried actively to believe in her mother's Episcopalian
God.  She tried to imagine the earth as her mother's God might see
it--He lived off in the leafy precincts of heaven, out beyond any place
so far detected by the Hubble telescope in its travels, in the spheres
beyond the stars.

Anna imagined the spreading light of the world's cities, the glow made
fuzzy by the glaze of dust and the smoke of forest fires and all the
industrial pollutants--smog softened, made light diffuse, as did the
ice on the inside of an incandescent bulb.

This gauzy curtain would work both ways, she knew, as the combined
lights of the world's merging cities worked to eliminate all visible
star shine.  What people did in the terrestrial realm would become
increasingly hidden from His eyes.

CHARLIE SHAY STILL stopped by without calling, entered without
knocking.  Oh, he might tap once as a courtesy before letting himself
in with his own key.  And why not?  The house still legally belonged to
him and he had maintenance to perform.  His synthesizing and recording
equipment was all still set up out back in his soundproofed studio,
waiting for him to move it.  Anyway, Charlie's wife had never been the
kind of person who had anything much to hide, which was, Anna guessed,
probably at least half their problem.

"How many feminists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?  " Charlie
asked her pleasantly.  He was standing on the pie table in the middle
of the kitchen changing the overheard bulb to a one hundred-watt.  Anna
was watching from the doorway.  She was wearing her bathrobe, had her
arms across her chest in what she hoped was obvious belligerence.  Her
chest, her entire body, seemed suddenly light and huge, so filled was
she with luminous rage.  What if Anna preferred her kitchen dim?

She was having a very I [u'd smr not speaking out in defense of

7I

her costume, her wattage, her basal metabolism.  It was the weekend,
after all.  She and Maggie slept in--what business of his was this?
They slept in, then had a little breakfast, then Maggie sat down to
watch cartoons while Anna went back upstairs to work.

Her "working explained why they were still in nightclothes though it
was nearly one in the afternoon, not that she owed Charlie any sort of
explanation.

"That's right, Edith, " he said.  "The right answer is, That's not
funny.  " Charlie pronounced the name Aay-dit, as in Edith Piaf.

He sometimes called Anna his Little Sparrow to kid her about her height
and that she had no singing voice.

She smiled up at him on the pie table in her most thin and brittle way.
Charlie was such a good sport, he joked and teased, which he honestly
believed was affectionate.  During the week, Anna and Charlie were
engaged in complicated and acrimonious divorce negotiations.  During
the weekends, however, when he cheerfully came over to pick up his
daughter, they were still best of friends so he often stayed for a cup
of coffee.  They were best of friends though Anna couldn't actually
stand the sight of him.

Charlie came, Charlie went--his life had never been so uncomplicated.
Charlie was a twentieth-century man completely unburdened by the weight
of an unconscious--he was pre-Freudian, as he was quick to say.  He
couldn't see the unconscious, wasn't literary, wasn't interested in
pausing long enough to witness its effects.

Charlie was simply simple, had no tragic flaw, spent no time and effort
being in turmoil as Anna had always been.

Charlie was also as good at ownership as she was bad at it.

And he was a man with those secondary sex characteristics and that kind
of muscle mass, so it was Charlie who acted upon the mute objects of
the household, imposing his will, doing the screwing in and hammering.
This was probably why all the mutual tools of their community had been
listed in his column on the draft of Schedule C, Personal Property.
Schedule C was only one small part of the intimate and deeply
embarrassing document that would someday end up filed in the courthouse
of Alameda County as a matter of the public record--that is, if she and
Charlie ever finished this never-ending process.  Their divorce was
eas, v compared to many, her attorney told her--a clean California
dissolution without grounds, without matters of custody, without much
real property.  Still, it was seeming to take years and every cent they
ever hoped to have.

Charlie got the tools on the advice of Anna's lawyer, George Beemus,
who said getting her half of them would cost more money and more effort
than it would take just to drive to Pastime Hardware and simply buy the
various ones you needed all over again.

So Anna acquiesced, though she didn't have the slightest idea of how to
re buy tools--where was Pastime?  Did it have a parking lot?  Did the
lot require a validation?

George Beemus often took this tack with her, that of an understanding
condescension, Why don't we let Charlie have this or that because it
seems to matter so much more to him.  Let's save our energy, he said,
for the Big Ticket Items.

Anna smiled weakly at George Beemus.  Nothing, frankly, aside from the
person of her daughter, had ever struck her as being a Big Ticket
Item.

She loathe her own attorney, loathe her husband, loathe the tarnished
objects left from their sad marriage, imbued as they were with the
sense of the profundity of their failure.  She gave in also as a matter
of breeding, having been raised by her mother to a habit of polite, if
angry, relinquishment.  Her mother found the material world to be
tainted by the greed of men.  Anna's father had been an insurance
executive who worked in Manhattan during the week, insisting his wife
stay home in the suburbs of New Jersey.

Anna had broken out of that paralysis, the particular stasis created by
each bad marriage.  She was no longer frozen, fixed as the sad-sack
wife of the feckless Charlie Shay.  She might, therefore, turn into
anything.  She might go live in Brazil like Elizabeth Bishop.  She
might turn out to be lesbian.  She might begin to act any way at all,
might--one day--yank on her clothes and pull up her boots and drive to
Pastime, buy tools, become handy and thereby really shock her
friends.

Many women in her caste and class, she knew, were very good at spending
money.  Anna had been trained by her mother to be frugal, however,
taught that buying things wasn't a very good use for either the money
one spent or the time a purchase took.  Anna was now often in such a
mindless panic about money that the job of shopping became increasingly
difficult.  It was never the clean transaction, rather became
metaphoric.  She wanted it to be as simple as it was in preindustrial
times before the invention of inflation, when there were simple
economics, a bartering, the plain trade of this piece of money for
those goods or services.  She had to think about all aspects of any
deal she was involved in, so filling the van's gas tank or picking up
the dry cleaning might take much longer than a day.

Anna had so long been the disembodied member of the Bell Shay household
she'd lost whatever corporeal edge she might once have had.  She didn't
quite understand the evolution, how over the years of her marriage she
turned into exactly the type of female person she never much cared for,
one of the women poets with three names, with an allergy to sunshine,
the one bewildered by the complex trappings of upscale poverty, the
frayed divorcee with an incipient migraine caused by drinking too much
wine, the single parent summoned to school to get her child on account
of head lice, who drives there and back on an empty tank, with the
brake light flashing alarmingly.

This marginality was in her nature and so predated the divorce, as she
and Charlie were both aware.  Marriage was the long dark cave into
which Anna had once been happy enough to climb.  The world outside was
bright, it hurt her eyes.

Charlie Shay had the habit of telling the same jokes over and over. "My
wife's a poet, " he'd tell someone needlessly.  "And two poets don't
make one entire person.  " Then he'd beam at Anna as if this was her
finest quality.

Head of a Young Man Turned Left and Looking Down (Recto), 1504 SHE D
BEEN ALEC S student when he was at Cal, might have been good had she
decided to go back and finish after Cecily was born.  She certainly
understood the goof on the middle class that ran fault wise across the
warp of the post modern, understood the bland and ugly path most
commonplace building took in California after the end of the Second
World War.  It was here in the emptiness of the West that the
fraudulent misapplication of Wright's aesthe ics had produced such
utilitarian miscreants they seemed like his legitimate offspring
systematically poisoned in the womb.

Gin sat in the back of class turned away from her drawing board so she
could rest back against the wall.  Alec's nostrils flared when he saw
her.  She noticed, tipped her face up, her smile knowing, sardonic. She
crossed one of her little hamburger bun shoes across the other knee the
wide way--these were thoroughly beat up oxfords.  She was the only
woman in the class, men teased her for the shoes but she didn't stop
wearing them.  She was friends with men, smoked with them, laughed
raucously with them in the hallway--there were still so few women in
architecture then.  Gin swore rather remarkably in those days,
humorously and loudly, and this did somehow contribute to the
attraction Alec felt for her.

He found himself listening for her barking laugh in the hallway, for
her husky voice to carry down to him to alert his body that she was
coming.

When she came in, her hair was often wet.  She swam laps at Hearst Gym,
he overheard her to say.  Julia Morgan was too gay!

This loud remark of Gin's once punctuated the argument she was having
in the hallway.  Her own sexuality was inscrutable.  She wore the same
clothes to class day after day, brown pants with a soft looking
feltlike surface, a big flannel over shirt.  Her breasts were small,
the nipples pointy.  The fabric of her much-washed pullover was so thin
Alec could make out the distinct geographies of skin and bra.  She
stood close to him in order to ask a question.  There was smoke in the
fabric of her shirt, chlorine in her still-wet hair.

Her eyes were fearless as they flicked over him.

She came up, fell into step, walked out of class with him as he went
back to his office.  She carried an old-fashioned leather briefcase
clutched to her chest like schoolbooks.  She stopped to fish around in
it, then light a cigarette.  He watched her lick her lips, saw the
shine left on the bottom one.  She said she was born in Berkeley, that
she had raised hers elf.  Her face was virtually expressionless as she
told him this.  Life was rough.  Gin glanced over at Alec to see if he
was prepared for this.

He was so junior in the department he'd been assigned an office in the
basement in old unsafe Wurster Hall that was to be torn down as soon as
New Wurster was completed.  The joke among architectural students was
that New Wurster was built to be the ugliest on campus.  It was huge
and it was sprawling and visually incoherent--was it British Modern or
somehow Aztec?  It looked like it had been designed by a team of
quarreling imbeciles.  It had the grace of a prison, the obvious
cheapness of cinder block.  The words FASCIST ARCHITECTURE were
regularly spray-painted onto its ugly walls all the time it was going
up.

If the job of a building is to interpret a community to itself, the
school that built this was in terrible trouble.

Alec came to Berkeley from the East imagining an Athens.

He wanted only to sit in the same light as Charles Moore on the same
hopeful side of the continent, but found a school riven by factions, a
department torn by rivalry.  Moore was already seriously
disaffected--he was brilliant but was rumored to be queer, was denied
tenure because of this.  Moore resigned and was immediately hired to
head the school at Yale.

Alec was retained but passed over for promotion twice--who could say
why?  The signals and signs of his department baffled him.  He had
never felt so lonely or as Jewish as he did at Cal among the fey WASP
elite, many of whom had gone to Princeton.

He was baffled by the mores and manners, their goofy WASPy bow ties,
the complete in comprehensibility of the broad vowels and the flatness
of what he guessed passed as jokes between them.

Where, he wondered, did they even get these people?  The only friend he
made in the department was Carlo Empy, a fifth-year teaching fellow.

In the dank basement of Old Wurster, Gin used the men's room.  So, she
used the men's, so what?  She didn't pee in the urinal but went right
into a stall.  So what if some guy was shocked when the stall door
opened and a girl came out?  That was his problem, wasn't it?  Her eyes
were brown, her gaze direct and challenging.

She placed her lips together in a certain way.  Her face was small, her
chin pointy.  Alec could have covered it with just one outstretched
hand.  He could imagine playfully doing this, her playfully biting the
pad of muscle at the heel of his palm--his right palm looked bruised
because of the smudge of graphite.

Gin was as tough in her way as his Russian grandmother, who came to
this country as a girl and had broken English.  Gramma Leah had no
doubt at all about what was right and just.  She was old-world, looked
like Mammy Yokum.  She once came into the offices of the New Haven
Power Company and set her newsstand up.

Oh no, Madame, they said, you can't do your selling here.  Vy not?

she said, ven yesterday you people plant a power pole in the corner of
my front yard vidout knocking the door to ask me?

On the way to his office, Alec bought each of them a tea brewed with
powdered instant in a paper cup, then stopped to browse the Servomation
snack go-around.  This was the purest junk, Gin said, he really
shouldn't be eating it.  Alec smiled at her, bought a packet of six
Oreos anyway, and--once in his office, with each of them seated--he
opened the cellophane and divided the cookies equally, balancing three
cookies on the soft brown fabric of her knee.  Alec felt the heat of
her skin beneath his fingertips.  Her leg moved almost imperceptibly.
His balls hardened, lifted.

Her still-damp hair dangled down, darkening the fabric of her shirt.
She left the cookies on her knee for a moment, then moved them to the
desktop, reached down into her satchel to get her cigarettes, tapped
one out.  She lit it with her father's silver lighter--she showed Alec
the engraved looping intertwine of initials, JJT IIJohn Joseph
Tinnerley, the Third, she said.  She half smiled, looked at him,
appraising him from under the hem of her dark bangs.  She squinted out
at Alec through the smoke she blew.  So a man's putting cookies on your
knee was some new way of his coming on to you?

She smoked, watched Alec carefully.  Her eyes were dark and darkly
fringed.  He was older and from the East.  He heard himself begin to
try to impress her.  He'd gone to Columbia, traveled all around in
Europe spending four months in Rome, three in Florence, had taught one
year in Japan.  He knew people, knew Moore, he said, though this wasn't
strictly true.

She swept her bangs back out of her face.  Her dark brows were thick
and ran straight across.  Her eyes were solemn, even when she was
smiling.  Men were weak, weren't they?  They went bad on you, didn't
they?  She assessed him.  She took her own drawing from him, holding it
open to look at it again with his criticism in mind.

He could see her mind work, the way she used his eyes as she studied
it, looking at it hard again.  As he spoke, she turned to watch him.
She wouldn't say his name, didn't call him anything.  They each
mentioned their parents, the way they were all ridiculous, laughing at
the way every family was so comic when eavesdropped on, when viewed
from right outside the window.  She was going to be different from her
parents, she said, in that she was going to live long enough to finish
a couple of things.

He heard the whole story later.  Her telling of this tale was almost
affect less, how Sylvia and Joe Tinnerley met at Cal, came from certain
privilege, had promise, turned out to be charming, witty failures. Each
wrote, each painted, each died with little to show for it.  She called
them the beautiful corpses, though neither death was pretty. Gin was
twelve when her mother died of a swift reproductive cancer that
mimicked pregnancy.  Her father, having thought Sylvia was going to
have a son, went into a speechless shock.

After that, whenever friends asked Gin what her father did, she said,
He sits in a chair and reads.  He read shelf after shelf of books from
the various Cal libraries.  By the time he died, Gin told Alec, her
father knew just about everything.

Joe Tinnerley, who was alcoholic, died before Gin was seventeen.

She was underage but needed only a year to finish high school.  Her
lawyer, the father of a friend, helped convince the county agency that
Gin was capable of caring for hers elf, as demonstrated by her savvy
in getting a lawyer to argue the case for her.  As an emancipated
minor, Gin was allowed to handle her own money.  She got some thing
from a trust her mother had, enough to pay the mortgage.  She began to
receive survivor's benefits from Social Security.  She rented out one
of the two bedrooms in the little house.  She reminded him of Leah, who
was a scrambler.  Leah supported the family with her newsstand on Oak
Street in New Haven.

Leah's husband was bookish, a rabbi who taught one class in Aramaic at
Yale year after year for which he never received a penny, each side
being too gentlemanly to ever discuss the matter of money, Yale
imagimng its quaint little Jew was paid enough by the honor its name
bestowed on him.  Alec hated Yale for that.

Her motherless ness showed in the confusing way she dressed, the
fatherless ness was in there too.  She had the Little Man shoes, the
big briefcase, his lighter, her watchfulness.  Boys Gin's age didn't
seem to interest her.  They were too young, too unformed.

She understood boys, the shallowness of their motives.  She understood
almost everyone.  She had always known what people wanted, she told
Alec soon after she'd met him, which is why she would probably have
made a really great whore.

She flicked her eyes at him as she said this--was he a prude who might
be easily shocked?  She looked away, stared off.  People had always
been transparent to her, she said, which came, she guessed, from having
ghosts as parents.  She spoke out of the side of her mouth, like a
little tough girl.

Her hands were small and bony.  She had a bright patch on either cheek
that looked like a hectic flush.  She clearly smoked too much, was
almost runtish.  She looked starved but wouldn't eat.

Never before had Alec become ardent about a student.  There was no
abuse of power--he had no power over her.  He was the one transfixed,
while Gin could come and go at will.

But his patience did feel grand, almost godlike.  He didn't impose
himself.  Instead he waited for her to come around.  Gin seemed
already to exist for him as if she had been laid out on the high table
where he stood to draw.  He would tape a big sheet of thick vellum
there--he never used a lesser sheet even for the roughest sketches.  A
plan was always already there.  A plan lay beneath the surface.  All
Alec had to do was wait and the body of it would rise to him.

She was wary, an animal that had not been mistreated but left alone too
long.  She watched his mouth as he ate a cookie.  He chewed.  She
watched his eyes as they traveled over her, the dampness of her shirt,
how it stuck to her collarbones, the hardness of her nipples beneath
the scanty fabric, and the cleft made by the soft l brown of her pants
where they shaped to her cunt lips.  He wanted to get in there, at it,
taste it.

She saw him looking, watched him in her level way.  She wasn't modest,
didn't cross her knees in order to keep his eyes off her.

It was weeks of his habitually buying them before she ate one of the
cookies.  He put the three on her knee each time, using this as his
excuse to touch her.  Sometimes she held them on her knee for a moment
before moving them to the surface of his desk, where she stacked them
up like poker chips.

Gin was laughing--she was very pretty when she laughed.

They were laughing together at the ugliness of buildings, the new ones
in San Francisco's downtown which were uniformly mediocre and hokey if
not downright wretched.  Architecture was such a public act, Gin said,
weren't people ashamed of themselves for erecting such great huge shit
that really messed up a skyline?  Who would want to be the person
responsible for some thing as bad as the Transamerica Pyramid?  It was
so bad it turned sentimental and over time people became fond of it.

Her cheeks were bright with the heat of feeling.  He watched as she
dunked her cookie into the tea and ate the soft wet part of it-she'd
forgotten she didn't eat this.  Alec's mouth yawned open.

He had hardened, the warmth radiating outward across his thighs,
flowing up into the hardness that was the flat muscle of his stomach.

She looked off--he thought Gin had forgotten him as well.

Instead she seemed amused when she looked back.  She fixed him with her
large and steady eyes.  So this is it, Baxter?  she asked.

This is where you fuck me?

HE LAY IN his Le Corbusier chaise, having a single sherry.  The peace
of the empty house had been satisfying for a little while but had now
begun to plague him.  He wanted some thing, needed some thing, couldn't
think what it might be.

Alec was reading physics in preparation for a class he planned to take
at the Lawrence Hall of Science.  He needed a more active hobby, Gin
had begun to tell him.  He needed to get busy, to stop mooning around
feeling sorry for himself.  The physics class kept being postponed.  So
what?  she asked.  So why not sign up for botany?

He'd been in California all these years yet hadn't learned the names of
trees.  Out this window he could identify oaks, a bay laurel, two
different maples, but what was the name of the one Peter called the
shine-bug tree, big and flame-shaped, its leaves flicking from silver
to green in Cliff Peech's side yard.  Peter was still magical, still
half-believed this tree was animated by spirits.

He was a quiet boy, observant if fearful, good at languages, as Alec
was.

Small like his mother and, like her, adept at water sports.

It was only the shine-bug tree that guarded Alec's house from the
snooping of Basta!  whose house sat next to it on the street below, and
the tree, being deciduous, worked as a curtain only half the year.
Basta!  was the too-loud city planner.  Her lot was an aggressive wedge
cut back into the block.  Alec called her Basta!

for the terrible way she screamed her cat's name right beneath his
bedroom window.  Her voice was industrial-strength, you could use it
for spots on carpets.

The trouble with city planning, Alec and Carlo agreed, was city
planners.  Planners knew everything about human will and motivation,
couldn't refrain from telling you.  Berkeley contained literally
thousands of people with just this kind of societal certainty.

Planning meetings were a particular nightmare.  Planners yakked and
talked and yentaed.

His house staggered downhill diagonally too close to the Peeches' and
to Basta!  A big house like his in the East would have demanded a
better margin in order to make the clear transition.

What was lost in California was the stately middle distance, no time
for adjustment of figure/ ground or for gradual revelation.

Wham bang!  it was all immediate.  It was because of the pretense to
classlessness.  It was also the fault of the society of women.  His
wife's friends all slammed right into intimacy, wouldn't identify
themselves when they called on the phone, assuming their voices to be
known by him when in fact he couldn't tell them apart.  More than once
he'd come home to find Veronique Chakravarty in his kitchen when Gin
wasn't there.  This was a perversity, he believed, the desire to
overflow the banks of warmth, to fan out in one's closenesses and cover
everything.  Even men in California came to love this stylish blur of
custom and distinction.

This poly morphism was political in Berkeley, it was philosophic.

The town was invented as a place of egalitarian Arts and Crafts
bungalows that all workers could afford, the modest well made houses
designed to fit a standard lot.  Wealth came after the Second World
War, with it scarcity.  In the real estate boom of the mid-Iggos,
property had become so astonishingly expensive the town was threatened
with losing its scholarly class as profs lost out in buying when up
against the baby businessmen.

His windows stood open.  Birds in the Peeches' trees were calling out
raucously.  The sun was going down.  His house stood right at the Jay
Line, where the scrub jays and Steller's jays overlap and vie for
territory.

Birds become increasingly agitated and noisy at sundown.  The same was
true of their mother, Betsy recently told him.  She and Ben had
recently brought M1V to live with them.  Alec's sister mentioned this
when she called to give him the progress report.

"Progress?  " Alec asked, his voice a croak.

The senile are disturbed by twilight--when the light thins and the
vision dims, a person's sense of self diminishes, the margins between
what is inside and outside growing fuzzy.  Their mother was losing the
haptic sense, the feeling of having weight in her own body, what it was
to have an earthly presence that was held in place by terrestrial
gravitation, some thing rooted by its mass, an object planted in the
physical world.

Their mother's self was eroding.  As Viv came apart, time became the
thing subject to gravity.  Time was the sandstone cliff that continued
to give way beneath her feet.  She panicked and her terror was made
worse by her loss of the words with which she might express her
helplessness.  Light granulated after sunset.  The minutes flew away,
passed wildly, the moments quickly telescoped.

As daylight leeched, the rooms of their mother's life compressed, each
growing smaller with the duskiness, a set of darkening boxes, each one
smaller, each one fitting within the one before.  Light's leaving
became a single terrifying rapidness.  Daytime fell away.  The rooms of
night came increasingly to resemble life's final one, the plain pine
box where her husband lay.

She might have wanted to go lie with Stuart except she could no longer
remember him.

The magic of telling time has been so important to the ease of
suffering that this power is described as the absolute work of God.

But time is only the tale of human history told another way, the one
pronounced in the language of numbers, another story mankind has
invented to while away the hours spent squatting by the fire.

Other animals have had no need to invent the timepiece that might chart
whatever emptiness.  Mathematics is only another of humankind's
intricate inventions, yet we, as any band of faithful, believe in it,
believe it stands above us and is overarching, and are unwilling to
admit this to be no more true or beautiful than any of our other arts.
It was when science began to rival the older forms of God sometime
after Darwin that mathematics became a form of modern prayer, so
absolute it is regularly viewed as some thing that exists outside human
invention and so seen as a discovery, as real and infinite as stars.
What did his mother have aside from counting, her past making her days
add up, making this finite tally, each one made sacred by the fact that
it is counted.  Viv was Joshua, Judges, Ruth.  She was Numbers,
Deuteronomy.

And now she would, like any animal in a slow and agonized death begin
to disconnect her consciousness from matters of her anatomy.  She could
no longer localize discomfort, had forgotten the word for hunger,
misplaced the one for thirst.  She still held her hands in her certain
way to light the Sabbath candles, Betsy said, but now stumbled through
the rhythmed mumbling in that no longer-remembered language.

Sundowning is so common among the demented, Betsy told Alec, it's
called a syndrome.  How many parts did Alec imagine a thing had to have
to qualify as a syndrome?  His sister's voice sounded like she was
fried, she was tense, short, brittle.

Their mother's dying was taking so long, these exhausting days followed
by equally exhausting nights.  She had someone in to help with Viv, but
there was no escaping the overwhelming responsibility, as with an
increasingly babyish child.

"She only says pat phrases, " Betsy said.  "Her same old cliches.

" "I'm so sorry, Bets.  " "She still has her pert voice, her little
robin's chirp.  The songs are still in there sometimes, as if the music
somehow helps her keep the words glued together.  The other day she
singsonged this out at me, I don't know if I am coming or am going. She
chanted it like a cantor, Alec, but you could tell from the look in her
eyes she knew what she was saying and that she actually really meant
this.

" "I'm so sorry, " he said again, helplessly.  "I wish we could do more
to share this.  " "We'll send her, " Betsy told him.  "How do you want
her, Fed Ex or Next-Day Air?  She weighs nothing, she's so skinny I
could almost fax her.  She's still stacked, though, and she still has
her finishing school posture.  You should see her, Alec, straight back,
chin up.  I put her ratty old mink on her shoulders when Ben and I take
her for a walk, and the old guys driving by slow down to ogle.

Maybe one of them will decide she's a wealthy widow and want to marry
her.  She always made such an excellent bride.  " "It's really good of
you both, " Alec told her.  "Betsy, you're a wonderful person.  So is
Ben, " he added.  "That Ben, " he said.

"He's one in a million.  " Alec waited, waited.  He said this and he
meant this but didn't actually get the recoil of feeling it.  His
emotions were being effaced, just as their mother's had been.  Her
flatness of affect, her becoming increasingly self-involved and inward
were some of the first of her symptoms.

"Oh, never mind, " Betsy said.  She said this after a long moment
during which she may have been either laughing or sobbing in an
air-gulping and almost noiseless way.  "Okay, don't tell me how many
parts a syndrome has, " she said.  "I'll find out myself.

I'll call up the Car Guys.  " "I just want to state how much I
appreciate all this.  " Alec listened to himself, wondering where all
this fulsome sincerity was coming from.  They were true words, he meant
them, but once uttered they fell away.  My mother is dying, Alec told
himself.

He said it, then stood coldly at the door of that room.  What was he
supposed to be feeling.  Alec was a mensch, well meaning, hardworking,
had always been.  He was an attentive son, a faithful husband.

He was dutiful, also increasingly resentful of the dullness of a life
lived by the rules of obligation.

Timmy--the word came unbidden.  It seemed like a song drifting in from
far away, one that might somehow free him.  The boychik who painted
with his clothes half off.

The next time Alec phoned, he found this greeting in Ben's voice on
their machine,

"And I quote, " Ben said.  "Nihilism leads to the wholesale warehousing
of the elderly and insane.  "

SEE THE MOON, PLANETS, STAR CLUSTERS, GALAXIES

THROUGH ASTRONOMICAL TELESCOPES

SATURDAY EVENINGS BEGINNING AT 8 P. M.

THE LAWRENCE HALL OF SCIENCE PLAZA (WEATHER PERMITTING)

THERE WAS ONCE no one, nothing, that had ever come between them.  It
made his hands ache to think of how they were then, when his love for
her was so large that all women seemed to belong to him.  Women then
were impossibly lovely, in that last season of their ease when the
world shimmered under a great blue heaven, a vaulted sky patterned by
green leaves and a moon etched in daytime.

He and Gin could speak of anything.

Alec and Carlo were also working on putting their firm together.

They were taking long walks in the cool evenings along Berkeley's
streets, up past Indian Rock, then winding down to Solano to get
coffee.  They spoke of architecture in America, of which buildings they
loved and which they loved to loathe and of what was wrong with cities
and with residential building and who was paying for the new
cathedrals, to which the answer was always either government or
commerce. They were similar in their tastes, both being early admirers
of the work of the two L. A. Franks, Frank Israel and Frank Gehry.

It was when Cecily was little, and he and Gin were still down 88 on
Oxford Street.  This was before Timmy, and before Alec found the
property on Descartes and bought it without her say-so.  After Timmy,
Alec knew one thing only, he needed to build this house.

He bought the lots, then settled in to wait for the variance.

He'd go there straight from work, sit straight down in the waist-high
grasses, his body so suddenly heavy he couldn't carry the weight of it.
He often forgot to eat, thought of it later as the Starving Time.

He could no longer imagine what was going to happen.

"Know what you are?  " Gin said then.  "You are a decent man.  " She
made it sound like criticism.

Before, when they were too poor to own anything but one beat-up car,
Gin used that old Dodge station wagon to haul her canvases back and
forth from the College of Arts and Crafts.  She'd started casting the
torsos of women in amber resin, half-bodies that hung flat against the
wall.  She--who had no mother and was scrawny as a kid--fell in love
with the voluptuous, lay the forms on their side on the floor, turned
them into mountains.  She was in a group show, she sold a couple of
pieces while she was still in school.  She moved across the bay to
finish at the Art Institute, where she studied with Joan Brown and
Manuel Neri.

They had no money.  Alec had failed at Cal, was in the process of
leaving, was struggling to start out, to try to find commissions.

She used the house on McGee as her studio at first, but they were so
poor they needed the rental income.  She moved her painting into the
dankness of the basement apartment on Oxford.  It sat right above the
water table of an underground stream.

He was so in love with her then, he'd walk home from lunch on a sunny
day in order to surprise her.  He'd feel lucky if she and Cecily were
alone, lucky too if she was out back in the garden with her women
friends.  The energy of his love for her radiated, pulsed, gave off.
People knew.  Her women raised their eyes to look at him.

The house on Oxford had a tiny backyard, half-shaded by a young
redwood.  Gin and her friends would be lying out on the chaises on the
bricked patio, the kids from the neighborhood play group naked,
splashing in the wading pool.  The little silver sprinkler at the end
of a snaking hose gushed against the sweet peas, the blooms standing
out, stems bobbing all along the fence, the purest of pinks and whites
and lavenders.

What a beautiful race the children of this town were.  That
neighborhood was less rich, less estranged than the one they found when
they moved farther up the hill.  It was more nicely integrated, with a
Cal-based buzz of brains and cultures and languages.  So many of the
kids in Berkeley were ethnically or culturally mixed, and Alec's
generation had rid the place of prejudice--these kids would grow up to
speak all languages.  AIDS, drug deaths, traffic accidents, the Twelve
Steps, families in crisis--none of it yet pertained to them.  Alec's
generation had saved the world, now its children would go out and
inhabit it.

They were naked, their bodies and minds as innocent as primitives,
slick wet bellies sticking out, big eyes, big heads, their short arms
and bowed legs, their little cocks peeing out, little cunts full as
nectarines.  This was before Calvin Klein, before kiddie porn on the
Internet, when Alec could take photographs of the wet beauty of these
children and no one would think of arresting him.

This was before the hole in the ozone layer, when Gin and her friends
still went out to sunbathe.  That was the last season of her laziness,
of her yawning, stretching, and of the salads she sprinkled with petals
of violets and the homemade pasta she flecked with basil and served
with tomatoes still warm from the garden--he hadn't seen a tomato that
red in years.  It was when they drank white wine ice-cold and she might
run her fingers back through her bangs, look at him frankly and ask if
he was finished, and, if so, would he like to come upstairs with her
and commit an act of sodomy.

It was before Gin and her friends got busy, packed up, before they
began to watch carefully as others began to tote up their
accomplishments.  There were new girls coming in.  They who once
defined what it was to be young and promising were somehow no l longer
current, were suddenly shocked to realize they no longer knew the names
of rock stars.

He found her outside in the garden.  She was barefoot, without makeup.
She'd let her hair grow long when she was pregnant with Cecily, it hung
in a ponytail down her back or she wrapped it in her fingers, making a
twist at the nape of her neck that she stuck with brushes or pencils.
From this bun-thing tendrils fell.  My wife, Alec thought.  He yawned,
slung his jaw out and around to move against the joy he felt.

One of the kids had splashed her.  He witnessed her, long neck,
declivity behind water-beaded collarbone, angle of her nose and chin.
Then as he came out onto the porch, her eyes half shut, "Hey, " she
said, her voice low, intimate, though she had women there.

"Heyyourself, " he answered her.  "So how's your morning going?  "
"How's my morning going?  " Cecily put in, jealously.

Gin was hungry then, she was passionate.  She had everything she
wanted, she loved everyone and everything.  She wanted to spend the day
in bed with him, wanted too to get up and go back to work.  She loved
being home, also wanted Cecily in nursery school.

She wanted another baby, the son her parents never had, the child Alec
didn't think they could yet afford.  She didn't want to wait-waiting
would hold her up--she wanted to get on with it.

She was seated at the edge of the redwood deck.  She was sunbathing,
lying back in one of the reclining chairs, the straps to her summer
dress were undone and these dangled down.  Her skirt was hiked up, her
thighs spread so the long muscle along the inside showed.  She got up,
went out to move the sprinkler.

She sat at the edge of the deck, the air perfumed by sweet peas Cecily
was picking and bringing.  Cecily was softly counting, saying
Same-same, each-each, one bunch for hers elf, one for her mother,
dividing the beauty equally.

Gin's feet stuck out into the grass that was wet from the splash of
the kids in the wading pool.  The tops of her feet were tan.  He loved
her feet so much he told her he'd have them bronzed for the mantelpiece
if some thing ever happened to her.  She cast one foot in the resin she
was working with at school, it was bubbled, as clear as honey.  He took
this foot to his office where he lay it on its side so he could look up
and see the instep.

It was such a simple pleasure, to walk the twenty minutes home in the
middle of the day from his new office down on University Avenue.  The
house on Oxford was so dark it always took his eyes a moment to adjust
as he entered--he walked blindly through the rooms, as if in a railroad
tunnel, made it to the kitchen, stepped out again into a wince of sun
so bright it always took a while to find her.

She was down sketching at the table on the bricked-in patio, brought
one tanned arm up to shade her eyes.  Her chin was tipped up, her gaze
as level as that from the back of the room when she was still a wary
girl at Cal.  Gin had hiked the hem of her dress up out of the water
the kids made by splashing.  The kids and their mothers all were gone,
Cecily down for her nap.

Gin lifts one beautiful foot, then the other, placing each on the
chair in front of her, toes curled.  Her skirt is hiked and he can see
the white of her underpants.  She wraps her arms around both bare
knees.

His heart catches.  Gin smiles at him, her lips pressed together.

She gestures with her chin to ask him to come on down to her.

The Center of Effort A MILD FALL DAY stinking of geraniums and dust.
They are driving downhill with the windows unrolled.  The station wagon
inside smells of dirt and gym clothes and of the hot bright stink of
bubble gum, all stuff Peter's father cannot stand.  His knuckles are
white on the steering wheel as the car heads down Marin Avenue, as if
the brakes are just about to go.

There are pools of fallen yellow leaves lying in quiet patterns that
pop and stir beneath the tires of the Volvo.  Peter turns to stare back
uphill, where particles of crushed leaves lift and eddy.

They haul their bikes across the bridge to San Francisco, where a race
has closed the streets to cars in the Marina District.  They ride the
wrong way along the race route to find a place to eat breakfast where
the racers will pass by.  Peter has on shorts and a tee shirt, but his
father is dressed wrong for fun in a doofy short sleeved sports shirt,
slacks, the wide leg held by a bicycle clip, in the beat-up shoes he
calls his "sneakers.  " Oh, my God, Mama!

Cecily screamed when she saw their father.  Can you please not let him
go out looking like that?

His dad dresses as he does so he can move along the poles of
melancholy, going from place to place in his life as if connecting the
dots on whatever map might give him the sense of what is familiar. This
is why his dad picks where he does to eat breakfast.

Some dump, huh?  his father asks, with his turned-down smile, as if he
himself is proud to have invented it.  A blue-collar cafe full of
dock-workers at the foot of a pier, avec ps du Yuppies, he says, et
sans le water view.  It reminds him of a diner on Hillside Avenue.

All that grease and disappointment.

Peter's father gets a particularly long look on his face when he is
thinking of the East.  He eats hungrily, almost angrily, his head down
gobbling biscuits with butter and jelly, eating the eggs and hash
browns and bacon to show he's not afraid of dying the same way his own
father did.

The two eat silently, Peter moving the scrambled eggs around on his
plate--he ordered the same thing his father did, but the plate looks
sickening.  His dad hates Peter's squeamishness--Peter's trying to be a
mensch.  Ein Mensch means simply man in German, is some thing else in
Yddish--a mensch being a whole person, his father says, one who is
complete.

They're watching the racers streak by in neon pink and orange and green
out the cafe window, a close race among the first bunch of five or six.
Alec asks Peter to pick the winner.  He wants Peter to be a winner, to
know a winner when he sees one, but Peter secretly favors the underdog
because of what was done to Jews.  His father gives him money, sends
him to the register.  It's easy to be a mensch, his dad says.  You
honor your father and mother.  You stay married, you set your kids a
good example, you don't lie or cheat or steal.  And every once in a
while, Cookie, you gotta pick up the check, his father says, then
winks.

They get back on their bikes to ride the wide and empty streets along
the water to the Marina so they can watch the winners cross the finish
line, then they'll make their way back to the place they think they've
left the car.  Peter's good at directions.  This comes from being
native for generations by way of his mother's family, who came westward
on the Oregon Trail.  His father is often entirely turned around, which
comes from being born in the East and having the ocean lie on the other
side of you.

Peter is learning sailing in the Boy Scouts, is good already, has
sailing in a kind of internal memory that seems more like instinct.

His Grandfather Tinnerley had his own skiff when he was Peter's age, he
kept it at the old boathouse at the Berkeley Marina.

Peter's father gets seasick, doesn't understand the basics of
navigation, that the Telltale Compass is made to be read upside down
since it's mounted on the ceiling in a wheelhouse.  He'd never heard of
the Center of Effort.  This is the point in the sail plan where you can
visualize all the forces coming together to drive the yacht forward.

Peter knows his own coordinates, I20 201 37 50 at the Jay Line, IO3
feet above sea level.  They called the Naval Air Station at Alameda so
his dad could set the barometer Peter and Cecily gave him for his
birthday.

San Francisco is particularly easy for them to get lost in, the steep
streets dead-ending into walled terraces from which bright flowers over
well like a kind of brilliant trash.  Peter is confused but doesn't
want his father to know it.  The alleys twist off, leading away uphill
in two wrong directions past houses painted in slick pastels.  They
can't find the Volvo.  Peter and his father ride steep alleys and flat
places, crowded streets.  His father yells at Peter to stay close, be
careful.  In North Beach along Columbus, traffic snarls and they are
the cause of it and his father's clothes look ridiculous and his dad's
face goes pale with the worry that looks like both rage and loss. Horns
honk.  Oh, bite me, his father says right into one driver's rolled-down
window.

"It's towed, " Peter says when they pull up, dismount.  "She's going to
kill us.  " "They couldn da towed it, " his father says.  "They don't
tow on a Sunday.  " "It's towed or wed've already found it.  " "I don't
think so, Honey, " Alec says.  "They don't tow on Sunday.

The cops in this place are all Irish, like in Queens.  They go to mass.
Anyway, I parked legally.  I'm pretty sure.  " "No, you didn't, " Peter
says.

His father makes them look for another hour before they call the
impound lot.  They call, but the police have no record and they can't
yet report it stolen since they can't say even roughly where they might
have left it.  "Why would anybody steal Mom's car?  " Peter asks.

"Beats me, " his father says.  "You don't joyride in a Volvo, Peter.

There'd be no joy in it.  " "She's going to kill us.  " "We didn't do
it, Honey.  Anyway, your mother's a reasonable person.  " "No, she
isn't, " Peter says.

Her face looks flattened when his mother gets there, as if she's driven
the top deck of the Bay Bridge in the Fiat speeding along without the
buffer of the windshield.  "Okay, okay, we know, so don't say it.  "
His dad holds his hands out to ward her off.  They chain the bikes to a
down spout, take off their helmets, go climb in the little car.  His
mother is a small person, but she is able to completely fill any room
with her furious ness.

Peter gets in back, his father in front.  It is only then they dare to
look at one another, to smirk their conspirators' smile.  They are
adventurers, a team, partners, they're Orville and Wilbur at Kitty
Hawk.

"Why is it, " she asks, "that no one ever remembers that I may have
been doing some thing more important?  " "Because, Gin"--he says this
Gee-naw--"you are always doing some thing more important.  You have
been doing some thing more important for the past sixteen years.  " "I
wish you would think about the kind of example your losing things sets
for Peter.  " "We will talk about examples set, and all that later.  "
She stares at him.  "What is this, Alec, tit for tat?  " His father
turns away, looks out the open window.  "You figure it out, " he says,
then adds, "Now will you please settle down here now, Gin, and help us
find the goddamned car?  " "Why should I?  " "Well, it'syours, for one
thing.  If you no longer want the Volvo, Peter and I'll take our bikes
and make our way home by Bart.  " "What?  and leave me with some big
car mess to straighten out?

This is so passive-aggressive of you, Alec.  You just never liked the
Volvo.  " "Gin, " he says very quietly.  "Gin, please, please
listen.

Listen carefully.  This isn't the time or the place to be having the
car choice discussion.  Can we please have that discussion later?  We
can have it after we have the argument with Cecily about what hippies
wore.  " The virus for the flu shot is grown in egg yolk, Peter knows.
He is staring off, remembering the eggs he tried to eat, remembering
the ache in his bones the last time he was sick, how the cold and hot
came in waves and his head hurt and his joints hurt and his skeleton
felt as light as it might when death hollows a body out.

His mother was there in the daytime, but it was his father who slept in
Peter's room so he could hover with sips of water and a wrung-out
washcloth, which is how to be a mensch.

"Don't sell the bike shop, Orville, " Peter tells him from the
backseat.  This is what Wilbur Wright actually said to his brother
after one of their many crashes.  His father turns, looks into the
backseat, his lips pressed into a little oh, cheeks sucked in and
hollowed.  Veronique the French calls this Alec's gaunted look.

Peter thinks of the silver metal being stored within the porous web of
his long bones so they are mirrored with a lacy silver ness like leaves
eaten to dust by insects.  He has always been afraid he might have to
bite the thermometer and break it in his mouth, that he then wouldn't
be able to keep himself from sucking the mercury out.  Peter learned to
sit quietly when he was little, learned to concentrate holding his
teeth and tongue very still.  He kept his eyes shut, watching his bird
bones light up and become miraculous, watching how their hollowness
filled with a million tiny particles of the silver heaviness.

Peter rides in back but can't buckle up because the seat belts are lost
down the crack.  He worries they'll notice he isn't strapped in, that
they'll both turn and yell at him.  His parents believe in seat belts,
they are not the French.  The French refuse to buckle, neither will
they snack or queue, which is why Euro Disney will fail, Veronique
always says.  Veronique explains the French as she drives the car pool.
She speeds, is reckless, which his parents do not know.

They don't have Halloween in France, but in Peter's school they do.
Christophe, the teacher Peter had when he was in kindergarten, came
nearly naked one year, dressed as Christ crucified, on a cross and with
his side stabbed.  When asked at school what he was going to be this
year, Peter told them a traffic light.

His mother drives, his father's face contorting, going

"Easy, Gin, easy, " every time she clutches or brakes or shifts.

"Oh, knock it off, " she says.  "I know what I'm doing.  " "Well, it's
old, Gin, " he says.  "It's a sweet old car and the transmission's
fragile.  Can't you be a bit more gentle?  " His father can't get a new
car, Peter knows, because his license plate wouldn't then mean the same
double thing if he didn't have a Fiat.  The license plate reads FLT LUX
"Why is it, exactly, that we have to go through this kind of thing?  "
His mother holds up one hand, it's stained mahogany up past the wrist
from what she was working on.  "Do you realize that no one in our
family ever really even looks for some thing before asking me to come
help them find it?  " "We did, Mom, " Peter offers.  "Mom, we actually
really, really looked.  " "And the one thing you two may have noticed,
while you were really, really looking is that this particular item is
much bigger than a breadbox.  " "Know what I was always wondering?  "
Peter asks his father.

"How big is a breadbox?  " "About so.  " His father twists in the seat
to show him.  "A little smaller than a microwave.  " They smile at one
another, his father winks.  They're a coupla comedians.

His father likes to give Peter the words he himself grew up on, range,
harror, armund, jukebox, icebox, breadbox, shmata, mishuga.

Tsouris is one you'll need, his dad recently said, this being the
particular heartsickness only your family can cause.

"And I want you to learn some thing, Peter, from this excursion, " his
mother is going on to say.  "There is sometimes a deep and somber truth
lying at the heart of certain ethnic jokes, such as the one where the
punchline goes, When Daddy's standing with the door open staring into
the fridge asking Mommy, Where's the butter?

and she's busy doing some thing in a completely different room.  "
"That, " his father says, "will be about enough of that.  " "Mom?  "
Peter asks.  "Mom?  Did you know that it makes it hard to understand a
joke when you tell it backwards?  " "Daddy knows exactly what I am
talking about.  " "You're not supposed to get it, Peter, " his father
says.  "Mommy only told part of the joke and the rest is anti-Semitic.
" "That part goes like this, " his mother adds.  "How can you tell a
Xewish prince?  " "Stop that, Gin, " his father says.  "That will be
enough of your insulting ness.  " "Peter, listen to me--this is urgent!
" his mother says.

"Insultingness is not a word.  " And then his father turns around to
smile the turned-down smile to tell him the bickering is okay, even
funny, and that they will never split up, never get divorced though
they often fight like this.  His father has promised this, given his
solemn oath, Queens Rules.  He holds two fingers up when he promises,
like a Cub Scout.

The squabbling is meant to be amusing, but Peter's gone trancelike, off
to argue technicalities with himself, how a half a Jew such as he will
ever get into heaven according to Israel's laws concerning who's to be
regarded as Jewish.  Paradise is called Jerusalem, one place his father
has never gone.  Israelis speak Hebrew, which is written right to left.
Yddish looks like Hebrew, sounds like German.

Since Hebrew is written right to left, the silver Hagaddah of his
grandparents opens backward the way this joke of his mother's goes.

"The reason you can't find anything, Alec, " his mother is saying, "is
that you're made so angry by anything that's lost.  To find some thing
it is necessary to go down, get calm, be low.  When you go low, " she
says, "it'll be like whatever you want came looking for you instead.  "
"Calm?  " his father asks.  He is looking out the window.

His mother has no religion aside from being from California.

Californians are the best drivers in the world.  Riding with his mother
makes Peter completely confident.  She goes fast and this causes a
thrill to run through him.  His father putts along like an old man.
Could you pick up the pace?  Peter sometimes says.  He drives slowly
because he respects crash energies, what he calls the Cold Laws of
Physics.  He recites the words of physics to Peter sometimes, velocity,
thrust, lift, acceleration.  He hopes Peter will be a scientist.  He
says he himself picked the wrong job because architecture is about
finished now that nearly everything has been built.  He's going to be a
physicist in his next life, he says, freelance, part-time.

His mother revs, corners completely fearlessly, jams the gearshift
forward, shouts out, "Oooops!  " when she sees she has mistakenly
turned into a one-way alley.  "Okay, Peter.  Now walk backward in your
mind, like they used to do on Sesame Street.  Honey, I need you now.
Close your eyes.  Let your heart speak.  Let's go there, Sweetie. Let's
go to the Knee of Listening.  " "Would you please not teach him that
kind of gobbledygook?  " She tips her chin up.  "There is so much more
going on here, Alec, than you will ever learn in science.  " "So now we
have some thing against the Scientific Method.  " "Mom?  " Peter asks. 
"Mom?  " he says again, hearing his voice sound wheedling and babyish. 
He's going to ask if they can't go back and check the bikes when the
Volvo re materializes.  The station wagon stands just where they both
now remember leaving it, tucked safely up an alley between two
dumpsters just where North Beach meets Chinatown.  Peter and his father
have ridden by the two entrances to the alley at least a half-dozen
times.  His father's face is so happy, so joyful, to have lost some
thing so completely he had abandoned hope, then to have it come back to
him intact.

"See?  " he asks as he turns around.  "It's the Law of Return.  " And
he reaches back and touches Peter's knee.

"That, " his mother says, "is not a legal parking space, so you two
must be blessed.  " "Yes, blessed, " his father says.

Everything tends to become real, or everything moves in the direction
of reality.

WALLACE STEVENS, Opus Posthumous JUST BACK FROM a weekend conference on
solar at Asilomar.

Never again would Alec ask himself to sit in a hot tub under the
redwoods in the evening with the other naked, aging architects with
whom he was supposed to discuss the intricacies and beauty of the
photovoltaic cell.

Boom time in the belly culture, architects were plump and wet.

He'd climbed into the hot tub after a couple of quick wines, had taken
off his steamed-up glasses and scale suddenly vanished.

Golems appeared.  Architects were beasts, their heat-reddened torsos
became hairy faces, their nipples the eyes of these.

Alec shut his own eyes against the vision, but once seen he couldn't
stop seeing it, the faces of beasts, the slit of a bellybutton making
the goatish nose and the hair of a dripping pubis, its beard and
mustache.

"Know what your problem is, Daddy?  " Cecily asked by way of
conversation.  She was fifteen, was bent over dialing the radio
receiver on the stereo in the living room.  He was lying in his chair
in a lambent state, dreaming of going on a real vacation.

"You're just so negative, " Cecily said.  Then she turned away and went
down the steps into the dining room.

And why not?  Alec felt like shouting after her.

Before going, Cecily tuned to easy listening on The Quiet Storm--this
to demonstrate what fools the grown-ups be.  "Cecily!

" he yelled.  "Get back up here, would you?  Would you get in here and
change it or else choose a record?  I can't stand this dreck.

" But she had gone on into the kitchen.

Cecily was dressed as a pile of laundry--wide-legged low rider pants
that she wore down on her hips, layers of shirts, her face dusted with
what looked like particles of silver.  Roughly cut and sticking out
from her head like straw, she styled her hair with little pieces of
metal junk and plastic.  That her hair was bleached the golden white of
wheat drying in the sunshine was what Alec tried to remember from hour
to hour and day to day, but the sight of this strangely luminous girl
still often came as some thing of a shock to him.  Her hair was dark
blond naturally, or had been until she ruined it--who knew what color
it might be when it grew out?

The white part made the growing-out roots look black.  It looks fake,
he pointed out.  It's supposed to look fake, Daddy, she told him, fake
is the whole idea.

Cecily believed he was negative because he'd just had the temerity to
criticize her Social Living teacher, an icon in Berkeley, popular, as
Cecily said, as well as famous.  Social Living, which was required for
graduation, encouraged high school sophomores who lacked all life
experience to counsel one another on sex and self esteem and heroin and
venereal disease and all other intensely private matters in a very
public classroom in a way that sounded to Alec way too much like a
twelve-step program gone non-anonymous.

"Get me some thing, will you?  " he called down to her.  "Bring me some
crackers and some cheese.  " Gin hated their shouting from room to
room, but he was tired and Gin wasn't home.

"Bring that chunk of Gorgonzola, " he yelled.

"Threw it out, " she yelled back up.  "Smelled like toe gunk.  " Alec's
front teeth braced edge to edge.  Why wasn't Gin ever around?  Why
didn't she take the time to teach Cecily not to yell out

"Toe gunk!  " and

"Crud!  " and

"That sucks!  " The children of Berkeley were encouraged to be this
raucous, particularly the girls.

The mothers were determined that no one was to going rob this
generation of girls of self-confidence.  Cecily was honest and she was
direct.  Still, he told her, she was going to turn out like that loud
planner down the hill if she didn't learn to modulate.  Now Basta!  was
one noisy dame.  A voice like that could pop fillings out of molars.

MacArthur Park was melting in the dark and someone left the cake out in
the rain and Alec honestly could not stand it.  He heaved himself up
off the chaise and went to tune the radio to the last Bay Area jazz
station, the other recently bought up and replaced by Christian
programming.  His house had survived the earthquake of I989 the
wildfire of I99I but now felt poised on the brink of some new disaster
that might be precipitated by another coming of the Jesus Christers.

He went down to poke through the liquor cabinet in the dining room,
finding the sticky half-empty bottles of peculiar drinks his wife
passionately loved for some short while.  Gin spent one summer
drinking bright syrupy green creme de menthe poured over chips of ice,
making everyone try it, insisting it tasted exactly like mint ice
cream, when it actually tasted more like alcoholic toothpaste.  She
went through a period of making a great peach-tinted martini she and
Veronique devised.  Alec and Ravi both liked the martini phase, in
which they eagerly participated.  That phase had a certain sort of
Kennedy-era elegance.  Now there was only an inch of gin, no vermouth,
onions but no olives.

Alec needed a vacation.  The only places he ever went, these days, were
east to see his mother or to L. A. on business.  Alec was hungry,
thirsty, but what was it he wanted?  "To Exit Program, " he said aloud,
"Press Here Now.  " "What's wrong with now?  " Cecily asked as she came
in.

"I don't know, " he said.  "The house is cold.  The fire seems to have
gone out.  " He looked at the fireplace that opened from the living
room into the dining room.  The firebox was immaculate.

"Daddy, " she whispered.  "There wasn't one.  " She opened her own eyes
wide to register his surprise.

Cecily had a way of pressing her pale lips together at the center in a
gesture much like Gin's when she used to smoke cigarettes.

Cecily's cheeks sparkled, her lips were shiny.  She turned.  He
followed her upstairs back to his chaise.  Even these few steps
separating the levels were a physical effort at times like these.

Pick your feet up, Gin told him.  You're slouching, Alec, lumbering.
Hey Dad!  Peter told him, you got to pick up the pace.  Cecily just
looked at him, just raised her no-eyebrows.

She'd brought a platter of crackers and cheese, pate, a little pot of
mustard, both red and green grapes.  She gestured for him to sit, then
showed him how to move his feet, all wordlessly like a little bossy
wife.  The cheese was two very orange, very thin slices of American,
each one still in cellophane.  He unwrapped one, sniffed it, got
nothing.  It wasn't actually a slice, he noticed, but a thin molded
slab of "cheese food, " some thing formed by being poured wet onto the
sheet of plastic that was then heat crimped at two edges.  This was
low-fat, undoubtedly.  Cecily probably bought it.

He put it back.  It was amazing to Alec that in the I 990S YOU could
stumble onto Burt Bacharach on the radio, that--in the city of
Berkeley--food as wretched as this could be sold legally.

"So how was my day, by the way?  " she asked.

"So how was your day, Lee-lee?  " "Okay, " she said.  They waited in a
companionable silence.

"Oh, I don't know, not much, " he added after a little while, answering
the question she hadn't asked.

She was down at the end of the chaise, bent over concentrating as she
spread pate on a cracker for him.  He hoped she wouldn't start on how
geese were imprisoned and force-fed to fatten for foie gras.  Cecily's
fingernails were metallic blue.  He loved her more than life itself.

This was his sturdy, menschly kid, yet even she exhibited elements of
the Berkeley wick-wack.  He'd been working in his study off the dining
room the weekend before when the house had rapidly darkened.  Through
the skylight above his worktable Alec watched the towering front of a
thunderstorm come in, its blackness then breaking.  The sky became
electric, the black clouds spilled white out blindingly.  His papers
lifted.  He could smell ozone in the wind that was moving swiftly from
room to room.

Alec went upstairs to close the window that must have blown open only
to find Cecily at the end of the bedroom hallway.  She stood like a
figurehead at the prow of the house before two flung back windows, her
face wet, her plastered hair looking white and sculpted.  The storm was
so loud she didn't hear him coming.  She was t"Lking to hers elf,
breathing in a measured way, saying as he approached, You are a good
person.  Even now, in remembering, Alec's cheekbones ached with grim
love, a sensation so close to sorrow that it prickled across his face
like hot sand flicked.

"It is always a matter of life and death, " he said now as then, "as I
had forgotten.  " Alec could discover himself so easily in her, she was
so present one moment, so alive and intelligent, then gone, hollowed
out by this adolescent vacancy defined by nothing so much as
appetite.

He'd been like that, a hidden, twisted, day-blind thing, some thing
hand-sized and rival rous, set loose in his father's house in order to
ruin it.  By day he excelled, was president of everything, but when the
sunset came he went back up to haunt and study.  His room in Queens was
miniature, only large enough for a little desk and his single bed, and
seemed to easily fill with the stink of him.  He kept the shade pulled
down.  He ate candy bars.  He hunched there brooding over what he
thought of as his privacy.

Alec studied, got honors, won scholarships that stood for money, but
all this value was shoveled into the bottomless hole of his negative
quantities.  He was a piece of night--long columns could be added of
his pus and shame.  Goodness subtracted, hatred took up residence.
Queens was still in love with the war in Mletnam.  His father
vacillated, but he was a good liberal then and finally could not
support it.  Alec might have stabbed his father in the heart had he
enlisted instead of going to college.  He told his father he was
considering it.

Alec had always known that fighting a war would provide his soul with
the good of a palpable enemy.  Alec wasn't drafted, did not enlist.
Instead he rebelled against his father by refusing to apply to Yale,
saying he didn't get their Yaley jokes.  Being a town boy from the
ghetto on Oak Street in New Haven who graduated Yale was Alec's
father's proudest achievement.  Alec hurt him terribly in choosing
Columbia where, as he told his father, more of the boys spoke Jewish.

Alec studied, the antiwar movement swept him in.  He marched, he hated,
the boys who had the girls he wanted, the girls who were cold to him.

His daughter was now here, now not.  She was a good person, but her
physical self was crowding him.  "Sweetie-hurt, " he told her, saying
it in the way of Veronique the French.  "This is my own area.  Do you
think you could find another distinct three dimensional space that you
could stake out and solemnly occupy?  " It was what everyone needed,
Gin was always saying, his or her own private space, everyone
working--he guessed--toward independent status as a city-state.

Cecily moved off--she sometimes seemed so slumped it looked like she'd
lost skeletal integrity.  She now sat cross-legged and so close to him
on the floor that he could hear all the different parts of her eating,
sucks, licks, cracker crunches, small interior smackings.

The view of the sunset through the treetops was gorgeous but did not
distract him from his irritation.  He was going to have to ask the
Peeches to window their redwoods.  He was going to have to ask Cecily
to chew less noisily.

"Do you know what today is?  " he asked.

"Hitler's birthday?  " she asked.  She didn't miss a beat.  It was the
rhythm of the TV laugh track, he guessed, that conditioned children to
cynically quip like this.

"This, Cecily, is November nineteenth, " Alec said.  "The first day of
the Arctic night.  " Cecily was intently spreading mustard on a
cracker.  With the low-fat cheese food gone, she was eating the rest of
the crackers as small mustard sandwiches.  She was nothing but
appetite--she could eat twelve of these sandwiches.  She could eat
thirty or ninety.

He breathe in, breathe out, began again.  "When the sun goes down today
in Barrow, Alaska, the people won't see it come up again for almost two
months, not until the seventeenth of January.

" "I know, " Cecily said.  "We had a unit on that in science.  " You do
not know, Alec wanted to yell at her.  "Cecily, " he told her quietly.
"You did not have a unit on Sunset Physics.  No one has had the
opportunity to take that unit yet.  That's the class they keep
canceling at Lawrence Hall because not enough people are interested.  "
His choked voice sounded almost breathless.

For longer than a year now he had himself been trying to take the class
in sunsets that was offered in the community science lab not ten
minutes away, set on a ridge at the top of the hills.  The lab was
close, the class scheduled in the evening on a weeknight, slotted to
meet a quarter hour later each week in the springtime, fifteen minutes
earlier each week in the fall, so the moment of the sunset across the
bay could be noted, tracked, jotted on the special maps they'd make as
its transit moved north or south.

The registrar sent him the syllabus, he bought the books it mentioned.
"Sunset Physics" had been offered three times so far.

Each time Alec enrolled, each time it was canceled.  He did
irrationally blame his wife's generation for this--she was nearly a
decade younger.  Gin hers elf couldn't find time to go with him.

It was Gin's women friends who were all busy slamming their Volvos and
SWs up and down the hills, going from one important place to the next
important place, all the while yakking on their portables.

Lawrence Hall was going to arrange to offer it one more time, this time
it would be taught by an eminence.  Alec was collecting data on sunsets
in order to have some thing to share with others in the class, people
who would be similarly interested.

In Norway, for instance, Alec had learned, the liberal and oil rich
government paid its northernmost citizens a certain stipend during the
winter months.  Alec wasn't going to waste his breath telling Cecily
this.  She was at an age when she was just too self involved to
understand the cracked beauty of some thing called Sadness Pay.  Of his
two children it would be Peter, Alec knew, Peter, the smaller and
somehow more broken one, who'd be the one to get it.

IT WAS WHEN Cecily was still a toddler, when they were still down on
Oxford Street, that Alec began to understand that the societal net that
confined a contemporary marriage had weakened its hold on them, as on
all of the members of this, their little tribe.

It was during the first E1 Nino, the first winter of awesome climatic
change.  A marriage was so easily damaged, he saw, it hit any sort of
bump--an illness or mild good fortune, some small fame visited on only
one of them--and the spell of love was broken.

There were no rabbis any longer or witch doctors, no leaders of
whatever community they might claim.  There were only therapists who
offered words that you paid money for, words that weren't holy enough
somehow to ever really render anything whole again.

Not that the economy of the second family wasn't good for his business.
A man who was a father again at fifty-five or sixty could afford the
good big house to put the new babies in.  And there was this swarm of
the blond divorcees, growing young on protein drinks and exercise, who
also needed the new and perfect house to which they had always been
entitled.

Now the sun had nearly set.  "Point being, " he said to Cecily, "it's
almost winter.  " "I know, " she said.  "And it was seventy-eight on
the savings and loan when the bus went by and I was completely sweated.
The maniac who is our substitute gym teacher made us run laps with the
football team to be like, you know, equal?  What an .  . . " Her voice
dropped off, but he believed she said asshole.  Alec couldn't swear to
it.  He was conveniently losing hearing there in the high range, right
where women hector and babies cry.

"So these huge black jocks run right up behind us going, Hey, mama,
give me bawd-dee.  Then one of them goes, in a little high voice, Hey
baby, how come such a fine young Negress as you gots such a flat little
white girl's ass?  And the third one says, She not white, she too fine
to be white.  She must be Por-tow Rican!

Which is, of course, harassment.  Which, of course, the dumbass teacher
doesn't do a thing about.  " Cecily looked at him, must have read his
skepticism, opened her hand, flattening it against her chest, and told
him solemnly,

"I

swear to God, " she told him, "they said these things to me.  " She had
filaments of mustard at the corners of her mouth.

"Cecily, they were teasing.  " "What about my feelings--what if I felt
threatened?  " Threatened?  Alec thought.  This kid of his could easily
flatten any three black jocks.

"We can always take a look at College Prep?  " he said.  Alec offered
this about once a week after some new horror story about her
school--she was proud of these stories.  Her job was to tell the
stories, his to be horrified.

"No thanks, Daddy, really, " Cecily said.  "Berkeley High may be a shit
hole, but it's my shit hole.  " "Cecily.  " "Sorry.  " "Well,
really--where is your mother, by the way?  " "Maybe she went after
Peter.  Maybe he had cello.  " "Did she leave a note?  " She lifted her
shoulders and let them drop to show it would be impossible for her to
be less concerned.

His irritation welled up again.  "You know, it's all catch-as catch-can
around here, no one's ever knowing where anyone is?

Isn't there some special place your mother leaves a note in order to
tell you where she's gone and when it is that she'll likely be home?

Did she get some thing out for dinner?  " His voice, he heard, was
Cecily glinted at him, her irises the same hard hazel as his that Gin
defined as smoky topaz.

"I wouldn't know, Daddy, " she told him.  "If there is some special
place, I guess it's so incredibly special I just haven't found it yet.
" He ran the fingers of both hands back through his hair, then pressed
the fingers of either hand hard on his closed and weary eyes.  He
pushed on the eyelids, his fingertips rounding the solid smooth of the
orbs.  He pressed until he began to see the view out the window in
reverse, black sun burning in a less dark sky, its setting against the
glowing white hills of Marin, the Golden Gate Bridge, a lace work
etched.

Alec pressed harder, pressed until his eyeballs ached.  How were they
going to get through Cecily's adolescence, he wondered, without his
smacking her?

His father taught Alec never to hit his sister.  He was never to strike
a child or any person who was physically weaker.  He had smacked Timmy,
Gin's doped-up painter friend back during the first year of storms
when it rained every day of January, every day of February, then the
mud slides came.  Alec might have killed him.

Instead he punched him in the face, then threw him into the trash cans.
He remembered this, that he had practiced a godlike restraint.

He was like God too in his forgiveness.  He often came back to how good
a man he was, at the lack of effort it took to lift Timmy and throw
him, to the huge and rattling, triumphant sound of a body's smashing
trash cans, the great crash of metal and percussion, Alec's New World
Symphony.

ALTHOUGH IT WAS soul murder to build in the hills of deforested Los
Angeles County, Alec and Carlo kept doing it.  It was in L. A. that the
intellectual life of the American century could be seen to be
subliming.  Subliming is the process by which a solid becomes a gas
without its passing back through the liquid state-this is the way
plastics naturally break down.  Plastics rotting is what Alec held
responsible for the sticky black film that seemed to coat nearly
everything.

He and Carlo traveled to L. A. together, Carlo serving as interpreter
and guide on what felt like a safari.  Alec rode shotgun in the rental
car, Carlo drove.  Alec could not drive, because, as Carlo said, he
took it all too seriously.  Alec could so easily imagine driving down
Sunset and becoming suddenly one of them, the Jews of the Entertainment
Industry who have lost their bearings, himself getting drunk, himself
picking up a prostitute, a girl who was still technically a child,
himself having sex with a girl who turned out to be Cecily's age.

"Christ Jesus, " he said.  "Even the respectable women dress like
whores here.  " "Alec, " Carlo said, "these women are whores.  What's
more, a few aren't exactly women.  " He and Carlo were driving down
Santa Monica Boulevard past a neon-lit sexual paraphernalia shop called
La Sex Bote.

Dickshaped objects are grandly displayed on satin pillows, these set
into Claes Oldenburg-scaled candy papers.  The building was elegant and
new, done in L. A. vernacular--a duck, according to Venturi's lexicon.
The shop's roof tipped upward like the left-open lid of a chocolate
box, as if God himself had succumbed to retail.

"Did you know that Hebrew has no name for the genitals?  " Alec
asked.

"Really?  " "No words for the unmentionables, polite or impolite, none
scientific that are not borrowed.  " Alec was watching whores on the
sidewalk and was speaking wistfully.  "No cunt, " he said.  "No cock. "
"Putz?  " Carlo offered.

Yddish, Alec said.  "Like shmuck.  " "Pity, " Carlo said.

Carlo loved the spectacle of Los Angeles and entertainment entertained
him.  After his hidebound upbringing in Surrey he loved too being taken
as an exotic.  One of their clients spent seven months calling Carlo

"Carlos, " thinking Carlo was some weird kind of Mexican, one who was
intelligent.

Carlo's mother had been sent out of Italy to England at the beginning
of the war to finish her education.  She always phoned her son in
Berkeley early on his birthday to lovingly describe to him, in her soft
Italian, the way the snow covered England on the morning he was born.
One Jewish uncle died in a camp, but the rest of her family had
survived.  Old men in L. A. loved Carlo when they found out he was
Jewish.  Alec's father had been like that, loving nothing more than
finding a semi secret Jew hidden high up in famous places.  Tbey Too
Were jews was one of the books Alec was given when he was a little
boy.

The night before he and Carlo flew down, Alec dreamed a dream so
clearly anti-Semitic he was ashamed to have been the one to dream it.
He was in a Hollywood peopled by loud, thick-browed Jews out of Nazi
propaganda, Jews with big noses and Groucho glasses, spitting on the
glass at Cantor's deli on Fairfax,

"I was here before the whole line was here--waddamI?  Invisible?  "
Then the dream transfigured, became the hard, hot glittering streets of
yet another stern reality--crass hipsters, old men dressed like
geriatric gangsters--these were their rich clients, Alec guessed,
producers and the sons of producers, decked out in the stereotypical
way the goyim could so easily caricature, tight jeans riding below
their bellies, yellow cashmere sweaters worn without undershirts.

They had deep leathery tans, the daughters of these had noses and chins
and tits all paid for by their fathers and made of synthe ics.

These Jews of Industry wandered aimlessly in this place that was so
recently a desert, doing no philanthropy, marrying blonde after blonde.
 The serial blondes came by bus from small towns in the Midwest, but
where did they get Jews like these?  Devoted to money only, Jews who
found no time to read?  They were rich beyond anyone's dreams of
avarice, but not one of them had ever asked Carlo and Alec to make a
place in his house for a library.

Half-sickened, he woke up.  Hollywood was a geriatric asylum, just like
the Jewish Home for the Aged in Queens, Alec realized.

His father was in Heaven, and West L. A. was the locked floor in some
Old Folks Home.  It was the Hell on Earth he and his sister had just
consigned their mother to.

--21-At Home in the Proximate World THE DRIVEWAY he saw, was full of
them, the stylish cars of her stylish, dykish women, Volvos, Broncos,
an old Suburban, a Range Rover, the new off-road Lincoln.  He'd just
read about a lawyer's first blond wife, married sixteen years then
abandoned, who'd driven her four-wheeler uphill in the early morning
light to the new and bigger house of her ex and his new blond wife and
shot them both to death as they slept.

But then he read too much and knew too much about the wrong kind of
things, that the family name was Ickes, that the license of the first
blond's Jeep Cherokee read LODEMUP He should have being reading Torah,
should at least have turned, in his physics text, to the chapter on the
properties of light.  He needed to know less about the geography of
entry and exit wounds and the lividity of bodies and more about
colliding galaxies.

This was the time of year when night poured quickly into the canyon,
and a new and liquid darkness spilled upward from the place carved by
streams, filling the world to the top of trees on the still luminous
hills.  His house was, simply put, a jewel.  The outer walls emanating
a hot gassiness, the blue concrete looking warm in the way of new stars
or neon.  He stood at the end of the walkway.  Her women were in the
Water Room.

He'd once imagined that vaulted entry as a kind of small cathedral, a
place free from real use of trade and commerce, lying between the house
and the proximate world.  Life was simpler once, down on Oxford Street,
before he needed this kind of buffer.

-That was when Gin was home with Cecily, who was a soap-smelling baby
already bathe when he came in, already dressed for bed in her fleecy
Dr.  Dentons.  Gin used to stand on tiptoe to kiss him, to pull him to
her so she could whisper,

"Wanna?  Want to help me get the baby right to bed?  " Her breath moved
the hairs in his ear.

"Wanna skip dinner and come upstairs and mess around?  " Her voice was
huskier then.  She would still lie down with him in the afternoon,
would still stay in bed for a moment on a weekend morning.

He suddenly understood, this was an art tour of hers, the kind of thing
she did that was most excruciating to him.  Gin was wearing
tight-cropped pants and a little gray silk top so short the curve of
her belly showed.  She was gesturing toward one of the resin pieces.
She had so little modesty.  Gin walked like a model, with the bones of
her hips pushed out.  Her dark hair was shaved up the back of her neck
boyishly but with the bang left long.  His urchin looked so styled now,
so carefully tended.

Alec patted his own hair down.  His thick hair was often messy.

He worried his hair the way people smoke or bite their fingernails,
pulling at it as he sat thinking at his drawing board--Carlo said he
also made grunting sounds when he was most actively thinking.

Alec discovered himself in the mirror, wide eyed, the tufts of graying
hair sticking out owlishly.  Who was this solitary one he had come
upon, the one looking so nervously rearranged?

He rubbed his face hard to clear it of expression.  Gin's friends
simply exhausted him.  He cleared his face of this, she was sensitive
to criticism.  She once overheard him trying to explain her work to

I

l someone at a party, stumblingly, incoherently comparing it to
Duchamp's Ready-ma des, saying it had elements lately of both
autobiography and of interior decoration.  She had come apart driving
home recently, crying out, "Don't you fucking condescend to me, Alec.
My work may not be big as a fucking house, but that doesn't mean it
lacks moment!  " "Moment?  " Alec asked quietly.

"Don't, " she breathe almost inaudibly.  "Don't criticize my word
choice.  " "All right, " he told her.  He said this very carefully,
knowing it was dangerous at times like this to say much of anything. He
once said the wrong thing driving home from a party and she'd lurched
out with bunched fists, striking the windshield with such force she
shattered it.  This was back when he still had the little blue
Volkswagen and he knew that any fight with her would always be fueled
by the secret rage her parents' leaving caused.  She learned from that,
would never be left again, he knew, it would always be Gin who did the
leaving.

It was an accident, they told one another, she'd caught the glass with
the hard line of diamonds in her wedding band.  They did, however,
become more tentative then, knowing how easy it was to &d themselves
sitting behind a wall of cracked glass lit by the red of brake lights,
like a spiderweb hung with drops of terrible rain.

Gin was as socially adept as he was awkward.  She didn't talk so much
as she did what he thought of as wording, an accelerated
intellectualized babble about artistic theory and its practice that
caught the listener up in a lurching and chaotic logic.  People stared
at her, he couldn't bear the thought that they were merely being
tolerant of her.  He honestly didn't know if she was really good or
not, honestly didn't want to know how she might rank in the larger
scheme of things.

Alec began to trudge his slow way in out of the darkness, stopped where
the walkway divided, running by the side of the house to either the
kitchen or the carport.  He kept extra presents in the carport, things
he bought sometimes, imagining the occasion for these gifts would
eventually offer itself to him.  He needed to go into his house, but
his wife was having a party.  The language making part of his brain
seemed to have shut down.  This was word blindness.  It happened at
work on the phone sometimes when he was talking to clients.  It may
have been that he was being short circuited by the waves of cold fury
he sometimes felt.  The richer his clients were, the cheaper they
seemed, the more demanding they became, the more he hated them.

Words swarmed, became as dense as thickets.  Every one he knew was
suddenly a lawyer or had a lawyer very prominently on his board or
payroll.  Lawyers generated documents.  Why didn't everyone quit this
and go back to writing in longhand, he asked Carlo that morning.  He
thought they should retreat, go back before typewriters, back before
carbon paper.

He stood for a moment in his carport.

Longhand, Alec thought, and the word was like the name of God, Blessed
Be He King of the Universe.  The word rose, worked its magic.  Alec's
mind suddenly cleared and began to fill with great stretching hums and
clicks of emptiness, like sonar or whale song.

SHE HAD PARTIES tO which she invited women only, then wondered why Alec
didn't want to be at them.  He wouldn't go in, he'd go instead to sit
in the Fiat in the carport, where he kept a long yellow tablet.  He was
self-sufficient.  He had several of his lay physics texts there, also
the mittens Betsy recently sent, as well as a box of Triscuits.

He would study physics.  He loved the old ways of science, of the dusty
model his sixth-grade teacher had in P. S. I35 his book Our Friend the
Atom.  Alec was current up to the discoveries of Isaac Newton, who both
believed and did not believe in gravity at the same moment and with
equal fervency.

Like Newton, Alec found the new discoveries logical but also baffling,
apprehension of the quantum, he knew, would forever lie beyond him.
Even the story of relativity--about the spaceship and twins aging at a
different rate and the baseball being thrown from the train--seemed to
be what Alec had to learn, then forget, and so need to learn all over
again.

People who really got higher math, who were able to walk inside the
mind of it and live and breathe and really participate were simply of a
different sort than he.  This became abundantly clear to Alec when he
was at Jamaica High.  Alec studied, learned what he needed to get good
grades, knew what he needed for engineering, but understood nothing in
the muscles of his heart past solid geometry.

He understood gravity, understood the properties of light, believed it
when light turned out to be both particle and wave.

Light had always had this thing ness for him, so it seemed logical that
it proved to be as material as air or water.

In matters of the quantum, however, Alec had the sense that the truth
being set down now was subject to infinite revision, that the Unified
Theory would forever recede, that it was the illusionary point where
the parallel train tracks met on the horizon, il n'existe ps except in
the mind of God, who also did not exist, except in the mind of man.

Jerry Bloom tried to explain it, speaking as slowly and as patiently as
he did to the undergraduates he taught.  The two sat out on the deck at
the Blooms' smoking Cuban cigars Jerry brought from Germany, and the
gorgeous concepts of physics were placed before Alec, that Time was as
a river rushing one way only, that Time went only onward toward the end
of Time, that this happened at the edge of the Black Hole where Light
disappeared and Time was anointed with the density of matter.  Time
there became like some thing solid, could be changed therefore, could
also be transported.  It might flow backward or move sideways or become
gaseous and disperse from its own center, flowing every which way and
all at once.  Conversely, Matter at the Event Horizon--and Light was
part of this--was swept in and began to flow time wise, away from us
forever.

Alec could make himself believe only in the thing ness of the physical
world, the one he could see and touch and feel.  He believed in the
most simple machines that mankind made and used to act upon the objects
the world held.  Society was too abstract, it was an invention women
had devised, an elaborate town the mothers made so they could yak and
raise their babies.

Her women had invaded his house.  They were too complex for him.  He
read to escape from them.  Reading, learning, reminded him of Saturday
mornings studying at shul.  He copied passages from books, hoping that
the physical act of spelling out the words and placing them in
sentences next to one another would help him to better understand them.
He took paragraphs he copied by hand to the office with him, typed them
up on his computer, sent these passages around to friends by e-mail.

Alec was reading physics, was also taking notes for an article he might
one day write.  It might be called

"Frank Lloyd Wright, Materials for the American Century.  " His
pleasure came from copying out Wright's own sentences, letting the
other man's thoughts run down the muscles of his arm and into those of
his moving hand.

Monks had done this work before the advent of the printing press.

Alec wrote neatly with a good fountain pen.

Wright knew the intrinsic beauty of materials, loved the strength of
concrete and its marriage to galvanized steel.  Wright called concrete
Aggregate, imagined its becoming the man-made marble of the Machine Age
cheaply produced at the site, made lovely by the work of the hands of a
gifted artisan.  Wright was a visionary, a futurist, an optimist
despite his personal hardships.

Wright was just Alec's age--not quite fifty--when his hope all but ran
out.  These were the wilderness years during which Taliesen burned, he
divorced, then went bankrupt.  Then he was brought up on federal
charges for crossing states lines with "an immorality of purpose, "
meaning he traveled from one state to another with a woman while each
was still technically married to someone else.

After the Mann Act charges, Wright's commissions all but stopped.  It
was then he began to abase himself and to misuse his talent by taking
any job offered him.  A lesser man might have been destroyed, but
Wright was too arrogant.

Wright kept working well into his nineties.  When his world flew apart
when he was nearly fifty, he still had four decades of his best work
ahead of him, Taliesin West, Fallingwater, the Guggenheim Museum, the
work of another entire lifetime.  At seventy-two, Wright proclaimed
that genius had become so easy he could shake a design out of the cuff
of his shirtsleeve.  He had at that point twenty more years of plans to
give unto the world.

Alec was sneaking in the back way, coming into the house through the
service porch and pantry to avoid her party.  He found Veronique
sitting on a high stool talking on the phone in the kitchen.

Veronique pointed, wagged two fingers at him meaningfully, jabbed the
air hard, pointing again.  She was pointing behind him at her leather
bag on the floor--he brought her this.  She dug in her bag, took out a
cigarette, then began to gesture again.  What?

he mouthed .

The noise of Gin's women was behind the door to the dining room.

Veronique pointed again.  He brought her the ten-inch torch Gin used
to light the pilotless stove.  All this happened as she sat upright in
her imperial way arguing vehemently in French with one of her
children.

The mail lay unsorted on the counter.  On top was the newsletter from
Peter's Boy Scout troop, mailed from Piedmont.  Piedmont is its own
municipality, with its own police and fire, entirely surrounded by the
city of Oakland.

Peter belonged to scouts in Piedmont because the city of Berkeley, in a
moment of typical righteousness, had thrown scouting out of its
schools.  Berkeley was anti-BSA because it was paramilitary, also in
reaction to the Scouts' recently voted policy of being pro-God and anti
gay.  Peter went to scouting in Piedmont to learn to sail and ski, to
learn the names of trees and birds, to become a more American boy than
his father had ever been.

The unsigned newsletter had been written from on high in that passive
Founding Father's broad-voweled, bowed-tied kind of voice.  Where did
they get these people?  Alec tried to read it through but kept coming
back to Item Six.  Item Six had been slipped in between Five, which
concerned the credits earned working the Christmas tree lot, and Seven,
proposing a trip to Squaw Valley during Ski Week.  Item Six read in its
entirety, Please Note, There is to be NO PAUSE between the words "one
nation" and "under God" when the troops are reciting the Pledge.

Alec looked up, stared all those years back toward Queens, to the
auditorium of P. S. I35 where, during the I9SOS, he and all the other
Boy Scouts of America paused to breathe right where they obviously
shouldn't have.  They didn't know any better.  They were still so
earnestly American, then, being the sons and grandsons of .  .

u grants.

Now in his own immaculate kitchen, Alec tested himself by pledging, One
Nation (one breath is taken).  Under God (another breath is taken, the
breath used to fuel the sincerity of the words that are to follow it. )
It seemed impossible not to breathe like this.  But was Under God
always in there?  Did Alec remember some thing about that being added
by Joseph McCarthy so the Scouts wouldn't fall to godless communism?
Wasn't Under God the opposite of Jeffersonian democracy somehow?  How
had people let this happen?

Alec pledged again, taking out the Under God.  One Nation (one breath).
Indivisible (all Scouts were to breathe correctly there, weren't they?
) With liberty and justice for all.

"I knew the ese, " Veronique said disdainfully.  She'd come to stand by
him and was reading what he was reading, smelling of smoke and perfume.
"We shouldn't ave let our keeeed do this.  " The smokiness of her was
intoxicating.  No one in Berkeley smoked any longer and nobody drank
aside from Veronique Chakravarty and Chakravarthi Chakravarty and the
rest of the French and East Indians and the upscale Japanese and the
wealthy Chinese fleeing Hong Kong and the Moroccans and Brazilians
whose children went to the French bilingual school with Peter, those
citizens who imagined they inhabited not just Berkeley but the larger
and more interesting world.

"We don't ave the ese in France, " she said.  "Oh, we ave plenty of
fascist organization, but we do not ave the es one.  The French believe
only in style.  " She began to whisper.  "The woman may all be
beautiful, Ah-lik, but they don't brush their teeth.  My mother?

jramais!  Which is why my keeeed ate to go there.  " Alec filled a big
kettle from the Inst' Hot, put it on the stove, then leaned over to
watch himself touch the gas jets of the burner with the long flame from
the torch.  "Where's Ravi?  " he asked.

The party became suddenly loud in the other room, then the laughter
died away.

"India, " she said.  "That man is alzvays in India, where I imagine he
as a mistress.  Thees does not shock me.  I ate the French but at least
they are not prudes and Calvinists like everyone in the es place.  "
Veronique stared off.  She was watching hers elf in the night blackened
window, smoking dramatically, being sophisticated and liberal-minded.

Alec poured the boiling water over the tea bag in the mug, then opened
the cupboard and got himself several thin ginger cookies.

He came back to the stove and began to thoughtfully dunk his tea bag up
and down, watching the amberish blush begimung to bloom and undulate.

"Want one?  " he asked.  He showed her the round of one brown cookie.

As her nostrils flared, Alec remembered her saying the Frencn do not
snack or graze.  "A mistress eees what you need, Ah-lik, " Veronique
told him.  She was staring at him diagnostically.  "Your wife appens to
agree with me.  " Alec, dunking, said nothing--what was there to say?

"But ooo?  " she asked.  She was back on her stool flipping through the
French school directory.  "There ees the es one!  " she said.  She
thumped the page with her smoking hand.  She was wearing a short black
skirt.  The line of her thigh muscle was etched as a deeper shadow in
the darkness of her hose.  She walked her dogs uphill and far into
Tilden Park each day, rain or shine.  The mothers in Queens didn't have
legs like this, didn't sit on a high stool in her friend's kitchen with
the school directory picking out a mistress for her friend's husband.

"Or the es one, the es!  " she said.  "Theeese one as a glorious voice,
a voice for the theater, really.  Gladden?  Blaudette, what eees the
name of er?  Divorced, she took er old one back.  She as a pompous
one--French, I've occluded it.  Very chi-chi.  I ate er, actually.
Never mind, Ah-lik, I know this woman and she is one pure snob.  She
thinks Ravi is a black man and that all Indian woman are the servant of
someone.  Also, she doesn't wash--I mean the s.

She as good style but her neck is dirty here.  " Veronique reached out,
lightly touched the naked skin of Alec's neck right above his shirt
collar with the flat of her fingernails.  His heart kicked as if he
suffered an electrical shock.

"No, never mind!  " she was back turning pages.  "Bon chic, bon genre,
but not for you.  And, oh, she's an artist, like Gee-na, only worse!  "
Veronique looked at Alec.  Her eyes, marked all around with black
smear, widened as she heard hers elf.  "Oh, " she said.

"That's a good one.  " Then she lowered her head and asked him,

"Please, Alec, don't ever tell Gin I said that thing.  " Then she was
off again, quickly paging through.

"But she does!  Lauden?  Blander?  What eees the name of er?

She paints the es orrible ugly thing, Tahiti landscape or she might do
That Little Boy Sitting Like a Black Beggar in the Corner.  So Victor
Ugo!  " She got up then and went to run her cigarette under the water
in the faucet, shoved the butt down through the rubber lips of the
garbage disposal.

he had been standing very close to her, smelling the twining way of the
smoke and perfume held in perfect balance.  The party erupted into
laughter again.

He removed his tea bag, put it in the sink.  Alec took his tea and
cookies, and in as polite a manner as possible he moved away from
Veronique to sit at the kitchen table.  He felt overheated suddenly and
reached up to feel his own forehead.  Might he be getting sick?

"Talk about ugly!  Veronique was saying.  "I went at their ouse but I
couldn't eat there.  Cheesus!  So Goy.  . i de teste Goy!

de teste Utrillo!  You ave to admit it, Ah-lik--Utrillo is the most
Joan Collins of painters.  " She poured hers elf more wine, lit another
cigarette and came to join him at the table.  "And who is that other
one I hate?  That Spaniard.  " She pronounced it Spin-yard.  " Greco! "
she said.  "I hate E1 Greco!  " Veronique came to sit right next to
him.  She'd brought the directory.  Her eyes held his for one long
moment.  "Or do you even want a French?  " she asked.

His already-hot face flushed.  Alec was dumbfounded by this
lawlessness.  Women had their own system of mores that men had only a
glimmer of, were their own tribe with rules and laws they kept secret.
Was Veronique's offering hers elf to him to free Gin from the clammy
grip of his possessiveness?

But, no, Alec misunderstood.  Veronique was thumping the book again.
"Oh, the es one!  She as nice airs, blond, but she does not brush them.
French, good style, but perhaps too adolescent.

" She raised her eyes to appraise him.  "She as a good shape when she
is walking away, but when you look at er face?  Holy Jesus!  "
Veronique then leaned in and began to whisperEr us band is a
Jewish, quiet, somewhat dour like you, but not so and some.  But she
divorced him, so she may be anti-Semite, most French hare.  Or rather
they do not believe there is such a thing as a Jewish--One Jew?  II
n'existe ps! A French never heard of it.  " She blinked to show him
the disappearance of a whole great lot of them.

She took his hot hand with her two colder ones.  "Alec, aren't you
feeling well?  " He shook his head.  He could no longer follow her, he
spoke French, but he did not spik this.  He wanted to go out, then come
in again.  He wanted, for the love of Ravi, for Veronique to please
vous him.

Item Ten, Where's the Butter?

Any of a class of naturally occurring, extremely complex combinations
of amino acids, which are essential constituents of all living cells,
both animal and vegetable, and also of the diet of the animal
organism.

ALEC MOVED AWAY from Veronique, got up from the table, went to stand
before the fridge.  Good, it was still there.  He'd written it out in
his careful architect's hand, printing it neatly on a scrap of thick
vellum and underlining the words essential, diet, and animal organism,
then stuck it to the face of the Sub-Zero with a highly realistic
chocolate-chip-cookie-shaped refrigerator magnet.

This, he thought, was the kind of basic information people should send
around on the Internet instead of all that porno.  It was the
definition of protein.

Alec wrote it out a couple of days before in response to yet another of
Gin's white or nearly white dinners.  She'd served a pale creamed soup
called potage de cres son.  Alec scrolled through, looking for
substantial pieces.

"Is this the main?  " he asked.  He looked up, his voice hopeful.

Gin squinted, angled her small face at him.  "Don't be churlish, " she
said to him.

He needn't have asked--of course it was the main.  Gin served only
cold white food these days because she needed to rush through dinner in
order to get on to the more interesting parts of her life.

He'd had two ginger cookies, the cup of tea.  He was under the
influence of Veronique, who sometimes sat out on her deck and smoked
marijuana.  The scent of it drifted down along the same breeze that
wafted through the chaparral, carrying the low jazz of Jerry Bloom's
saxophone, the two together seeming to rope everyone into the same
luxuriant memories.  People once worked less, Alec thought.  Music was
sexier then.

"I guess it's just about dinnertime?  " he said hopefully to Gin when
he found her in the dining room.  "So I guess they were just about
going?  " His cheeks were sunken, his face wan and thin.  He was
becoming consular This is what Gin called it when Alec turned into an
elective mute.

"You knew about this party.  " She narrowed her eyes as she accused
him.

"No, " he sniffed.  "I actually did not.  " "Why don't you get yourself
some thing to eat?  " There were plates out on the dining room table,
he saw, the little white ones from her grandmother's buffet china. 
Gin's women were careless.  Her women would break them, probably.

"No, thank you, " he said.  "I have certain dietary restrictions, " he
added.

"That was your fazv-ther, Alec.  " Her voice was crisp with
impatience.

He leaned over so he could whisper right into her small and perfect
ear.  "Is there a toilet on this train?  " Gin stopped, raised her
dark and guarded eyes to his.  Her lips parted.  The skin of her face
seemed suddenly young and expectant.

They had such a long history now, almost half their life times--did
they still have a long and brilliant future?

For this moment at least they were still together, each staring into
the same deep past, far beyond the current night that lay sequined and
blinking below them on the flats spread out in illuminated grids.

R

They were together, walking again down the dirt lane in the Santa Cruz
Mountains during the last days of summer.  They had just moved up the
hill from Oxford Street.  They had their new baby, their marriage and
lives had both been saved.  Peter was such a stately child they joked
he was like a little pope riding along in his Strollee, bestowing lazy
blessings.  Peter's calm as a baby did make him seem good and wise.
Cecily was wild, her long blond hair flying as she ran ahead.  She
would run until she hit some thing.

"Easy!  " her father called out after her.

They'd come to the mountains to take his parents to ride the
sight-seeing train.  The lane was lined with poplars, their branches
tossed with wind rush, leaves wild, turning at the top, a few of them
already bright as mango.  This gold against the evergreen was shocking
to the eyes.  Alec heard the rustle, felt his heart fill, happiness
pumping like blood through all the various parts of him, nothing was
wrong, nothing could ever go wrong again.  He and his family had found
safe haven, would go into the new house he'd built for them that was
like a bunker.  They would close the doors, never let a Timmy inside
again.

They sat at tables to eat the picnic Gin prepared--the lunch was
spoiled by Viv and Stuart's fussing about what they could and could not
eat.  His parents also had to excuse themselves frequently to go off to
gossip and confer, then they left to go buy the tickets for the
excursion.  Alec and Gin stayed to pack the picnic up, to change the
baby, wash Cecily's hands and face and comb her hair.

They were struggling to make Cecily into the kind of child her
grandparents might like, though Stu and Viv obviously no longer cared
for little children.

Our treat, his parents came back saying.  They offered the tickets,
they themselves would not be riding.  They wouldn't say why, then
Stuart confided, they couldn't go on the short train ride since it
lacked facilities.

Alec argued, reasoned, there was no getting them to budge.

He'd send Gin and the kids and he'd stay behind with themj he said.
No, Alec, we prefer that you not.  What kind of parents were these, he
wondered, who would talk to their own son with this kind of bland
formality?

They were suddenly so old, were becoming frail before his eyes.  He
thought his heart might break.  They needed to go bundle up, needed to
go wait in the car.  They'd cash the tickets in, Alec said, they'd all
start home.  Oh, no, Cecily would be disappointed.

His parents somehow insinuated that a five-year-old's wanting a train
ride after being promised a train ride demonstrated the degree to which
she was already spoiled.  His fury rose again.

Alec and Gin took the tickets and the kids and went off just to spend
the time away from them.

His parents waved and waved in their phony, joyless way as the train
chuffed off into the redwoods.  His father needed a toilet, Alec said,
which might be natural enough, but his mother couldn't go because of
her fear of trees.

Enjoy!  his mother chirped as she waved goodbye.  Enjoy!  Enjoy!

Gorgeous Things IF YOUXLL JUST relax for one single second and act like
a human person, I'll pay you, " Gin told him.  "I'll osv voll ten
thousand dollars.  " rw Alec looked down at the face of this, his
bride, offering to pay him money to act like a human person.  Her face
was lean, its muscles active.  Her eyes darkened with the same mix, her
love, her loyalty to him, her loss of that single chance, the one
moment she might have broken free of him, her resentment too at being
forgiven.

He turned away from her.  "Qu'est-ce que c'est?  " he asked Cecily, who
stood at the door to the study.  "Ear of human?  " Alec poked a small
fork into a slice of fresh mozzarella, lifted it with great delicacy.

"That is so not funny, " his daughter told him.

"I am so funny, " Alec told his daughter.  "I am deeply, bitterly funny
and probably as profound as Shakespeare.  " "God, Daddy!  It's Mama's
group!  Why aren't you more supportive?  " Alec didn't bother to reply,
supportive being one concept he'd long since lost interest in.

Through the open door of his study he saw a little girl sitting on the
piano stool that had been moved in there and raised.  She sat at his
library table coloring with crayons.

"What's this?  " Alec asked.

"It's Maggie, " Cecily said, going in ahead of him.  "I'm baby-sitting.
" "Not in my study, you aren't.  " "Uh-huhh, " she said.  "Ask Mama.
Mama told us to come in here.  " Gin, in the living room, called for
Cecily to come help someone find her coat.

"Don't even think about leaving me with this.  " "Daddy, she's just a
little girl.  " Her mother called again.  Cecily stomped off, saying,
"See?  See how you and Mama both keep giving me simultaneous jobs?  "
She was gesturing as she went, her be ringed fingers spasming as if she
was giving gang signs or being electrocuted.

"Get back here!  Cecily!  I won't be stuck with this, " Alec said.

He may have been bellowing.  This may have been why, when he turned,
the little girl's eyes had begun to brim with tears.  Each of her small
fat hands now gripped a number of crayons.

"You need your mommy?  " he said.  She nodded.  "Let's go find her.  "
"The hair of my blonde is as cow's spittle threading the wind.  " He
whispered this fondly into the little girl's hair, which smelled like
baby shampoo.  This was a piece of fond nonsense he used to whisper to
his blond babies.  His face had gone gruff with love, he held her
tightly to himself and did expect some small gratitude for this act of
comfort.  The little girl stiffened as he picked her up, and she now
tried to tWiSt away from him.

She was three or four, somewhere in there.  He'd just heard the name
but had already forgotten it.

He started in softly singing the ABCs--the juvenility of this seemed to
offend her.  Her whole body was tense, her face suspicious.  They went
looking, moved through the crowd in the dining room, went up the steps
into the living room, out to look in the entry.

Her face was bright and sweaty.  He had bellowed.  He was babbling,
random, a person who made no sense, as Cecily liked to tell him.  Alec
was too tall, his voice too low, was a man among women, completely out
of scale with the rest of the population.  She felt lost, was trying
not to cry, but her nose and eyes were running and her cheeks were
slick.  Alec patted her.  Her hands smelled like sugar, were sticky as
dampened jellybeans.  He smoothed the blond curls back from her hot
face.  Her mouth had gone boxlike-her eyes began to glitter like she
was revving up to scream or to bite him.

"She's here somewhere, " Alec said.  "What's your mommy's name?  " She
stopped crying, took her hooked fingers from her mouth and said with an
eerily perfect pronunciation,

"Anna Bell-Shay.  " "Anna?  " Alec asked.  His mouth went wide.  He
moved his jaw around.  "Anna?  " he said again.  She never came to
parties.

His house was currently peopled by fashionable women dressed either in
black or in the New Black which was gray, as Betsy had just explained
to him on the telephone, gray being fashion's long overdue rebellion,
as she said, against black's hegemony.  He needed Betsy to explain
these things to him, to tell him why women all had the same haircut and
liked to dress alike and crowd into rooms like this one.  They were all
so animate.  The haircut they all had was the same short sleek cap Gin
and Veronique now wore.  It was either that hairdo or the other one, he
noticed, the one with the big and curly.

In the hall that led to the entry, he found the one who looked like a
little Betsy, Something Hoberman, he thought.  "Hey, Alec, " she said.
"L'chaim.  " "Mazeltov, " he said back at her.  This was Jewish as high
sign, as hand jive, the last traces of the language in which neither
had ever had fluency.  Still, they were of the same people, still
recognized one another in that racial way and so still spoke wistfully
across the ever-widening crevice of what would by the next generation
be completely lost.

"One mother seems to be missing, " he said.  What was this one's name?
Something invented, some thing end-of-the-alphabetish, maybe? 
Something starting with an S or T?

"Anna?  " the woman asked.  "She was down in Gin's studio a minute
ago.  Maggie, want me to take you to get her?  " "I'll take her, " Alec
quickly said.

So what was this woman's name?  He knew so much else about this woman,
that she did kick-boxing, that her new first name was some thing really
arch or stupid, he even remembered where the name came from, deriving
from the mispronunciation of her real one by the much younger Japanese
lover with hair to his waist.

This aging boy was conspicuous in his beauty, he could be seen sitting
out at almost any time of the day or evening drinking coffee at the
tables by the dumpster in front of the French Hotel.  How did these
people support themselves?  His hair was turning white so rapidly it
sometimes seemed to Alec like time-lapse photography.

"This is such a great house, " she said.

"Thanks.  " Alec smiled his tightest smile.

She was wearing thin-legged black cotton pants, her hair was a mess of
shiny curls.  She was chewing gum, not some thing Alec really admired
in a girl.  She scuffed her flat-bottomed Chinese shoe off, rested one
socked foot against the other knee so she stood stork like--it was the
flat of this white foot that she moved up and down seductively.

"You and Gin have such beautiful things, " she said.  Her eyes flashed
now with some dark humor only she could see, the lids so shiny they
might have just been licked.  "All these gorgeous things, " she said.
She said it goyjusss, which is how he first knew he was being led
along.

"Whenever I come here, " she said, "I always wish I'd remember to bring
a bigger purse.  " She winked, her tone was layered and confidential.

Alec started, squinted.  His face turned bright.  He smiled the cold,
shocked smile of the prideful.  He was susb an asshole, some thing she
clearly knew.

The girl whimpered.  Alec remembered Anna, who had always liked him. He
went to find her, suddenly knowing she might save him.

Hue, Saturation, Brilliance THEY MET ON the stairs leading down into
the old studio that occupied the entire downstairs space.  Gin had
recently set it up as a gallery space.  She was having these monthly
gatherings at which she showed her own work, that of others too.

Anna was coming up the stairs as they were going down.  The baby lunged
out and Anna took her, as Alec tried to formulate an apology.  He was
still stung, felt graceless, charm less, large-faced as a golfer.  He
suffered from the sin of pride, he probably needed to apologize for
whole realms of nebulous crimes, for the fact that while deeply married
he had once presumed to kiss this woman, the one who stood now before
him.  She was shushing her daughter, who sounded desolate.  Anna was
looking at Alec, however, her eyes seemed slightly amused.

She was very pretty in the naked-faced way of blond women who wear
little makeup.  She was tall and had on a long dark green sweater,
around her neck were a silken scarf in a darker shade of the same deep
green and several strands of malachite spaced with long, slender beads
of gold.

l l Light fell on these and upon her hair, which was kinked out in wiry
curls.  There were new track lights in the stairwell that led into the
gallery.  Gin had hired a lighting engineer so her pieces could be
shown in the way she liked--this lighting was shapely and subtle and
cool.  Anna stood in the glow of one of these spots--it made her hair
look so golden it almost seemed metallic.  She lifted her eyes to him,
touched her lips with the tip of her tongue, as if she too might be
remembering.  Her eyes were pale green, this same color smudged at the
edges of her lower lashes.  "Maggie, please stop now, you're okay,
you're fine.  You're scaring Cecily's daddy.  " "My fault, " Alec told
her, shrugged, lifted his shoulders, twisted his mouth in a way he
hoped was rueful.

"Oh, no, " Anna said.  "It's us, we're just cross, aren't we, Maggie?
It's just that time of evening.  I'm sorry, Alec--we're both just
generally wrecked these days.  We just don't bounce back the way we
used to.  " "Sorry, " he also said, one more time.

Anna passed him, went on up the stairs.  She was very close to him but
for only an instant, his arms felt suddenly empty.

He turned to watch the movement of her hips beneath the draped material
of her sweater.  Her skirts, in several layers, were see-through,
curtained liquidly around the articulation of the knees that moved on
ahead of him.  He witnessed the faint backs of her upper thighs, backs
of knees, calves and ankles.  Her legs were long and pale and naked
beneath the fabric--she wore no hose.  Her shoes were ordinary shoes.
There had never been a place of more ugly-on-purpose shoes, he thought,
than those on the feet of otherwise beautiful women in Berkeley at the
end of the twentieth century.  Shoes no longer made sense to him, now
that women wore Fuck Me lumber jacking boots with all their most dainty
outfits.  He honestly didn't get it.  Was it Fuck Me, or actually more
Fuck You?

Alec followed her as she made her way back into the study.

Gin was in there along with several other of her women.

"Cecily bit me in the bank line once, " Alec mentioned.

"She did not.  " Gin was gathering dishes off the top of Alec's desk.
"That's my story, Alec, " she said.  "And, anyway, it was Peter.  "
"Jock used to do that, " one of the other women said.  "Expropriate my
stories.  " This one was sitting in the red leather chair where Gin's
father read himself to death.

Rather, this other woman wasn't properly sitting in the chair but was
crouched squatting on her bare feet, huddled back into the chair with
her bottom poised on one arm of it.  She was wrapped up around hers
elf, dressed in a white silk sari, wearing a necklace of what looked
like eucalyptus pods.  She had elaborate henna tattoos on either
hand.

She was smoking, pulling hard on one of the long white plastic As-If
cigarettes that had no kick to them and weren't therefore one bit worth
it.  She knocked the imaginary ashes off into the palm of her cupped
hand.

"Expropriation, " this woman drawled dramatically, "being only one of
the many reasons I divorced him.  " "Community property, " Anna said.
Anna was talking, Alec noticed, to him alone in that she was all but
whispering.

She and Alec both turned to watch as this vision got up off the chair
and followed Gin from the room, trailing the scent of Sen-Sen.

"She just got back from Tangiers, " Anna said.

"Where she obviously left some luggage, " he said.

Her humorous eyes sought his.  Her mouth was very wide.  He knew so
much about this mouth, the soft give of her lips, the slight pressure
of her teeth and tongue.

She put her little girl down in the leather chair, went to the table
and began picking up crayons, putting them carefully back into the
crayon box.  Her fingers were long and pale.  She wasn't wearing a
wedding ring.  He folded his arms across his chest, leaned against the
wall.  He watched her fingers, their care, imagining she might take the
same care with him.  Then, as if hearing him think this, she raised her
eyes to his.

She stood over the library table, he was across from her.  Other people
were in the study, they suddenly no longer mattered.

"Cecily was supposed to be minding her, but then went to do some thing.
Loss is what set her off.  " "Loss.  Abandonment, " Anna said.  "Those
are the tough ones.  " "It's Cecily's age, " Alec told.  "She's
impossible.  " "Maggie too, " she said.  "She's almost four.  It's the
worst, but then isn't every age just the worst?  " "Cecily's fifteen.
Fifteen's volatile.  " "We know some thing about volatile, don't we,
Maggie?  " The little girl, sucking the first three fingers of her
hand, shook her head, took them out to be able to say

"No" with her great precision.  This child spoke the opposite of baby
talk.

"It really is just impossible to ever tell if you're winning or losing.
" Her face was thoughtful, maybe more careworn than when last he saw
her.  She was getting divorced, but Charlie was no great loss.  Still
he hoped for her sake it was Anna who'd been the one to initiate.

Her face was sober, but her eyes did blaze out.  He felt almost burned
by them.  The color was the early green of apple trees.  He saw her
swallowing, saw the muscles of her long white neck as they moved.  In
any social gathering over the long, non intimate past in which they'd
sat at dinner kitty-corner across the table, things had passed
unspoken.  She would glance at him sometimes and her face would seem
amused.  He knew her in the material way, knew how she felt as her body
relaxed against him.  It was from the time he held her in his arms. She
was tall, shy, didn't like most people much--he could see it in the way
she held her mouth in a kind of patient but humorous scorn.

That one evening on the back wall outside the party, she had relaxed so
completely.  He'd held her gently and for a moment longer than he would
have had they both not been slightly drunk.

He remembered her thighs lying along the length of his own thighs, the
slight press of their bodies meeting, the almost imperceptible weight
of her as she gave hers elf up to him, a relinquishment so sexy he had
always remembered it, holding the memory in a place so deep within
himself he hadn't thought of it in years.

PEOPLE CAME TO Gin's parties who were frankly important to her career.
Though she prided hers elf on deferring to no one, these were people to
whom she did defer.  Was it this kind of nakedness then--that one might
witness the degree of the other's vain ambition--that was the true
intimacy of a marriage?  It was knowing the depth of her ambition that
most shamed him, he found.

There was one among the women on this night, an older woman with
silvery hair, very elegantly dressed in a suit and high heels, who had
some thing Gin wanted.  She held it out to Gin-was it fame or money
or another kind of magic?  Alec's own stomach had begun to ache for
Gin, for the way such a person mattered and for the way it all seemed
so immaterial, so much a matter of illusion.

Her name was Dolora Conningham, and Alec was going to run her down the
hill and drop her at her hotel on his way to pick Peter up from soccer.
Gin insisted.  This was no trouble for Alec at all, Gin said.

A few people were still leaving.  Every one had been leaving for such a
good long while.  Time was suddenly as huge as the universe and the
universe was large as it was old.  The extent was being continually
rediscovered, continually expanded, realigned in the human imagination
to picture what might be either proved or somehow witnessed.  But the
realms of heaven held steady for this moment, were, for this brief
time, as perfectly understood as they had been in the time of Dante. It
was because Anna was still there with him.

Anna's car was blocked in high up the drive--she couldn't get it out
until the others moved.

Someone had turned on the television, tuned to the News Hour on Channel
9. Had someone died?  Alec wondered.  Had we just bombed someone
again?

"Why is that puppet talking out a radio?  " Maggie asked.  She and
Cecily were sitting together in Gin's father's reading chair.

"It isn't a puppet, Maggie.  It's actually a regular man who's just
disabled.  " Alec turned and saw what they were seeing, Stephen Hawking
being interviewed on public television, his huge head lolling to one
side of his doll's body, his mouth a toothy grimace, shiny bangs
hanging down into brilliant eyes.

"Isn't it amazing that he's still alive?  " Anna said.

"Is this nine?  " her little girl asked.  "Where's Mr.  Rogers, Mommy?
Is this the Children's Television Workshop?  " "Mr.  Rogers will be
back tomorrow, Sweetie, " her mother said.

Anna turned to Alec.  "We depend on Mr.  Rogers always being the same.
" She began to sing softly then,

"Won't you be my, won't you be my?  won't you be my?  " "Neighbor?  "
Alec asked.

She broke off, her eyes bright in the flush that was spilling up her
throat and onto her cheeks.

"I want Mr.  Rogers, " her daughter said.  "I want Big Bird back.

" "Okay, Honey.  We are going, we'll be going in just a minute.  " Anna
was on the floor picking up the small bright crackers that had spilled
out of a Baggie onto the museum-gray carpet of Alec's study.  She sat
back on her heels, pushed her splayed fingers back through her kinky
hair.  She looked around.  "What else?  " she asked.

"Help her, " Gin ordered.  Alec was already down, trained, uxorious,
dutiful as always, doing what he could to help the women who were
always off unto themselves and secretly sufficient and who could
therefore be actually reached or touched or moved.  A man could fuck a
woman and not have it change her in any way-she might not even notice
him.  He'd brought Anna's things, her big purse, her daughter's
backpack.  She seemed intent on picking up all of the crumbs of the
crushed Goldfish.

"Leave it, " he mentioned.  "I'll get the shop vac out.  " The
patched-together phrases of Stephen Hawking's electronically
synthesized voice had the same plain middle-American accent as the one
on Gin's first answering machine, a model equipped with its own phone.
"You have a telephone call, you have a telephone call, " it said
instead of ringing.  "You have a telephone call, you have a telephone
call, you have a telephone .  . . " it would insist until the machine
clicked in to answer it, all of which drove Alec insane.

The phone was cheap plastic--Gin had bought it for hers elf at Costco.
It destructed easily when Alec broke it apart with a hammer at the shop
bench in the carport.  He smashed it impulsively one day after it had
sounded off one too many times.

Alec smashed it, then put the pieces into Cliff Peech's patented
FanciCan, embarrassed that she would see the broken phone in their own
trash.  He felt so unglued, so deranged by the time he threw the phone
away, he half-expected Gin, who knew everything about him, to already
know he'd smashed her telephone and call right then and confront him.
He half-imagined that its pieces would ring from the trash can, so
stood by its side for a while with his head cocked to listen, then
drove to San Francisco to buy her a better one.  He got a beautiful
MOMA phone made in Italy of titanium.

That Stephen Hawking had been given computer speech that lacked his
native accent made Alec more than a little sad.  He mentioned this to
Anna, then told her the abbreviated story of how Gin got the MOMA
phone.  They were still sitting on the floor very close to one another.
He could speak to her, no one else could hear him.  He asked if she
wondered if Hawking could even recognize these utterances as coming
from himself.

"Echolocation, " she whispered.  "Like bats have.  " It was part of
another conversation they had, this was from years before.  With her he
seemed to have continuity.  She was drawn to him, Alec was certain of
it.  He knew from the way each of them stayed close to one another on
the floor, in close proximity but without actually touching.  Their
eyes held one another's, they looked at one another for too long, their
needs became naked, he felt his heart race, heard his own blood
rushing.

Alec was becoming transparent to himself, he understood the mechanics
of his body, one of his knees first popped then clicked as he knelt
beside her.  He was very close to her, could smell the heat of her
sweater, the bright color of her hair, the faint traces of her
botanical fragrances, lemon and maybe sandalwood.

" What he actually is, " a bossy voice was saying, "is specially bled.
" It was a bullhorn voice.  Holy Jesus!  It was Basta!  The real live
Basta!  And she was in Alec's house!  How had this happened?  That the
planner from down the hill--the one who stormed into the Loud Library
on Hopkins Street on a Saturday morning, who came to yell at the Loud
Librarians who then yelled back at her-was now in his house, right here
at Gin's art thing?

"And what you are, " she was braying at Cecily and Maggie, "is
temporarily bled.  " "The fuck, " Alec said out loud.  "What they are
is children.  " "Know what I was thinking?  " Cecily asked, but the
planner went right on.

"No, what!  " Alec yelled, though he was technically not part of that
other conversation.

"People in wheelchairs, " Basta!  yelled, "are just like the rest of
us.  " "Actually, Sweetie?  Honey?  " Anna was speaking to her
daughter--calmly, but somewhat insistently.  "There are all kinds of
people with all kinds of disabilities, some old or young, some very
brave--most of us do have some thing or another or we probably will if
we live long enough.  Some of us, for instance, need to go home right
now and take a good long nap.  " Anna had veered off somewhere, had
subtly changed direction, Alec noticed, and was now talking to him
again.  "And some people are smaller than they used to be, " she was
saying.  "Hawking, for instance, has become very small while his mind
keeps growing.  His mind is now so large it can almost encompass the
whole huge idea of their being a real size to the universe.  " "And
some of us, " Alec added, "have lost our voice box due to an advanced
case of ALS and now talk like a puppet out a radio.  " "Daddy!  "
Cecily said.

Anna's face was alive.  She thought he was funny.  Basta!  clearly did
not.  Basta!  was lecturing again.  Why wouldn't she go home?

"Wanna blow this joint?  " he said to Anna.

"Wanna go sit outside and smoke?  " This was probably the sexiest thing
a woman had ever said to him.

"Was Hawking ever not sick?  " she asked.  She was watching the TV,
sitting back on her heels.  She turned to him.  "Did you hear he left
his wife to run off with his nurse?  " "To run off?  " Alec asked.

Each looked at the other, then carefully away.  They were unruly, it
had all gone slightly out of their control.  Over the open Baggie their
fingers touched.  They lifted their wet eyes to acknowledge this. Other
people spoke, moved.  He glanced at his wife and daughter--his family
was so far away back in the other country, the name of which was
Duty.

The air of the room expanded.  Light shimmered strangely, all things
turning luminous.  This was the Power of Nothing, Alec understood, this
is what balanced the weight of the known Universe.  He felt the urgent
need to tell her this, physicists at Stanford had just created two tiny
specks of matter--an electron and its antimatter counterpart--by
colliding two beams of light in a vacuum.

It was into this vacuum that he and Anna were clearly moving.

It seemed destined, written.  They were going without any evidence of
will.

She dropped her eyes, pressed her lips together, began to say some
thing, then stopped.  She had the slightest suggestion of a stammer, he
only now remembered.  Her face carried a high flush.

All this was attractive, that he would be the one to know how to step
back, give her time and room in which she might feel free to say
anytlung.

He was awake, alive.  The world was immediate and dangerous.

He was animal, pure and conscious less.  He had tightened along his
seam and scrotum--cock, balls, ass--this was where he'd begun to think.
Light changed, time shifted, particles had been created.

Whatever the other said mattered greatly, all words becoming now both
reckless and sigiuficant.

She could say anything she wanted, they could take all kinds of time.
They were in that furthest and most roomy place, where there was only
dark above them and the galaxies were colliding and the stars were
brand new and therefore bluish and the shape of the heavens looked so
different now.

27-Social Living THE LAST FEW were in the Water Room, where a big piece
of Gin's hung.  It was resin, it dated from when she began to hide all
meaning behind several levels of abstraction.  The piece was large,
geological, and it lay almost flat against the concrete, as if it was
some thing the wall itself was in the process of ex foliating.

Alec wanted to speak of his own work to Anna, to tell her he'd made his
house in a place as arid as the Holy Lands, then ran a stream through
it.  The stream, he'd tell her, demonstrated the Onrushingness of Time,
how it pooled at the bottom of the Universe somewhere, then was pumped
back up the incline to flow downhill again.  There were rivers within
rivers in any stream, he might have said, currents that ran faster in
the center or slowed at the edge.

Time was speeding up, time was sweeping by them.

She was dressed in what his mother would have admired as a good winter
coat, gray kid gloves.  She held her daughter to her chest, chin
resting on her curls, hands cradling her bottom.

Anna was rocking slightly and Maggie's mouth was open, her eyes nearly
closed.  He stood next to them holding their bags, dutifully as a
husband.

Gin became anxious at moments of departure, and in this he could
always see the girl she was in the halls at Cal, loud, raucous, telling
stories with extreme animation, as if the pull of this mass of energy
would serve to keep people close to her.  Her need was age old, beyond
remedy, the hole dug by her parents' dying so deep nothing would ever
fill it.  Dolora mattered too much, it hurt Alec now to witness it.
This woman, whoever she was and whatever she had to offer, didn't have
enough.  His eyes stung, he wanted suddenly very much to escape this
zone of heartbreak.

But Gin was telling a story.  This was a Berkeley story about the ways
of parents and their children, about Cecily's friend Gretel's getting
her nose pierced on Telegraph.  And Cecily's father can only imagine
the worst case, in which the person doing the piercing has AIDS and has
decided to use a kit he's dug out of a trash can in the park, and this
piercer's name is Jawn, J-A-W-N, and he's a really nice, really caring
person, and Alec yells, Hold it right there, this is already much more
information than I can possibly use, but Cecily goes right on to
describe their relationship with Jawn, and Alec begins huffing and
snorting and Gretel, who's a child of divorce and can't bear conflict
as she holds hers elf responsible for the cracks she finds in
everything, is cowering in a corner and Cecily steps right up to defend
hers elf and all young womanhood, yelling at her father, Why exactly
would we be so stupid, Daddy, as to go out of our way to go get AIDS?
And Oh my god!

you'd have to like go so out of your way to go find a junkie if you'd
think about it for even two seconds and what are we like idiots to you?
And it's obvious you don't respect us and how is that supposed to make
us feel?  And, anyways, Jawn's like this incredibly artistic person
you'd probably like if you got to know him and Alec says,

I

sincerely doubt that.

Alec turned to Anna, their eyes caught helplessly.  Life was too thick
to solve--how might they extricate?  Water in the creek was almost
soundless as it slipped over the rounded stones in the streambed.
Blameless, blameless, these things happened, were no one's fault.  He
simply couldn't take his eyes from her.

Alec reached out, stopped himself, touched his fingertips instead to
the cold glass of the window.  Gin was going on.

And anyways we already walked in the AIDS Walk and made money for the
cure and our Social Living teacher knows so much about teenagers and
AIDS and shit she was in People magazine and she wrote this book and
shit and why can't Daddy like respect this?

And Alec shouts, That will be about enough of that!  I won't stand for
it!  She was not in People magazine!  And Cecily says she was like so
totally in People magazine, wasn't she Gretel?  But Gretel won't answer
because Alec's bellowing, and Gretel's terrified and Alec's yelling,
When is it that high school teachers began to actively participate in
the Culture of Glamour Trash and whatever happened to adults acting
adult for a goddamned change?

The women laugh together, aside from Anna, whose eyes burn on the side
of his face, and Dolora, who was looking around the room like she was
seeing but was not listening.

Maggie had fallen asleep.

He walked them out to her passenger van, an older Suburban parked
behind the line of shrubs up behind the carport.  He wanted to say some
thing to Anna about his wife's doggedness, how it was this same
determination that always kept her going, but to praise Gin in this
moment would sound like exactly what it was, a piece of hollow
hypocrisy, also self-serving, intended, really, to show Anna what a
good husband he really was despite what they were now about to do.

He'd first kissed her in all innocence.  He'd meant only to thank her
for her thoughtfulness, to show how much he enjoyed the pleasure of her
company.  It began as a ritual Berkeley kiss.

Women in this town always kissed one another on the mouth like this, as
did parents their children, as did certain men whose relationship was
really no one's business.  Okay, there was sex in it.  She'd shivered,
was cold, as was he.  They were hairless mammals, they'd left their
coats inside.  They held one another for a moment, the time somehow
extended.

A storm had been moving ashore that night, branches high above them
rattled and sent acorns and tassels of eucalyptus flowers showering
down on them.  The moon slipped from behind a cloud as with intention.
He held her, closed his eyes, she relaxed against him.

Now they were walking out to her car, their faces grim.  Alec put the
bags down, then took the sleeping child from her.  Anna went around,
opened the door for him.  He put Maggie into the car seat and strapped
her in.  They were each so well practiced at the mechanics of
parenthood they had no need to speak of it.  Anna unlocked her own
door, climbed up behind the steering wheel, rolled the window down.  In
the car seat next to her, Maggie had not awakened.

Alec came back to the driver's side, opened the door to the second
seat, picked up the sack, then the backpack, stashed them both in.  He
carefully shut the door, closing it solidly.  He dusted his hands off
somewhat elaborately.  There was nothing now to keep her.

Hers was an old-fashioned van such as the ones nuns drove in Queens
when Jews were Jews and nuns were nuns who prayed in Latin and were
still habited and empty-bodied and so held off at a safe remove from
the embarrassment of any needs that might seem base or animal, also
from the language needed to speak of these kinds of things.  Alec
faltered, words were failing him.

Anna sat on the high bench, staring ahead.  "Can I call you?  " he
asked through her open window.  "Can I see you for coffee?  " "Coffee?
" Anna asked.  She seemed to think about this in a weighty way, as if
assessing how much harm each of their lives was going to be able to
accommodate.  There would, of course, be damage.

Anna was looking straight ahead into the darkness of the shrubs.  Her
gloved hands lay high on the steering wheel, one holding the car key,
silver, pointing straight up.  She had excellent posture.  She turned,
opened her mouth as if to speak yet said nothing.

She was going to refuse him--she was serious-minded, Gin's friend, she
needed to refuse him.  There were responsibilities to be borne, lives
that made demands.

i i What mattered more than sex to the kinds of people they were was
the bonds of friendship.  Every one's family was so far away, it was
only by friendships this town was knit together, friends were what made
these precincts a good place to raise their children.  No one they knew
went to shul or church--there was no other congregation.  Friendships
needed to endure, friends were all anyone had to depend upon.

And Alec already happened to know the true arc for people such as they,
the well-mapped path of graphically delineated pain.

He knew the pain that burned like bones on fire, knew it from what Gin
had done to him.

But he also knew the slow throb of the pulse at the side of Anna's
throat and the long whiteness of her body and the ways in which she fit
his hands and that the pain they shared would be part of their hell and
thrill.  Pain would change them.  Alec wanted it to change them, wanted
it to make them people whose desire was finally greater than their
will.

His eyes found hers, he saw her recklessness.  There were no words for
what rose in him.  Her eyes widened as his face drew close to hers,
they glittered as if struck by the cold night air.

Their need was now a force that would deform them.  He leaned in, his
mouth found her mouth.  They were wind-charmed, lawless.  The old
physic ks did not apply and in this new realm she already belonged to
him.

This way, we can divide matter again and again, but we never obtain
smaller pieces because we just create particles out of the energy
involved in the process--the subatomic particles are thus destructible
and indestructible at tbe same time.

FRITJOF CAPRA, The Tao of Physics SLEEP WAS THE high silvery breath at
the bluest edge of heaven, anger ruined it.  Anna was so angry now she
popped awake, lay there alive and ticking.

Anger floated, might fix on anyiing.  It could wipe out control, could
make her feel actively dangerous.  It ruined pleasure, all sense of
peace.  It throbbed through her like the heat of alcohol, and Anna
could no longer drink even a single glass of wine without finding she
had direct and lethal access to an anger that felt corrosive if not
nuclear.  Fury lay beneath the surface of everything the world was made
of, like an inchoate form of the final remedy.

It was Saturday morning, the morning after Gin's salon, Alec's kissing
her.  She could hear Charlie downstairs in the foyer--he'd let himself
in.  Maggie heard him too and had come running from the back of the
house, where she'd been watching cartoons.

Anna stood in the upstairs bathroom splashing water on her face and
shoving at the odd shape her hair took on while she'd been sleeping.
She would need to get it wet, then to poke and spritz and fluff it, to
get it to dry again into its springy curls--hers wasn't hair she could
just go run a comb through.  It was so kinky her brother Davis called
it the Pubic Dog when they were in high school.  She'd grown tall so
early, had become so quickly conspicuous.  Her adolescence was the one
long painful public agony she recently believed she'd somehow made it
through.

Now she was sweating and blushing again, shamed that Alec kissed her.
Gin was a friend of hers.  Anna didn't respect people-Charlie--who did
these things.  She had always believed she was more strictly moral than
Charlie was, that good behavior had been completely inculcated by her
upstanding mother.

Anna pulled her robe around her and started downstairs.  She brought
her fingers to her lips, pressed, still feeling the hard push of Alec's
mouth on hers.  The fact of Alec's living in a house with his wife and
children only a mile or so up the hill disturbed Anna so much she'd
taken a sleeping pill when she got home and had gone straight to bed
though it was only eight o'clock.

She slept hard and almost instantly, then awoke before dawn.  It was
shocking that Alec's attention--she'd always known he was slightly
interested in her--was turning out to be some thing actual.

This kind of affair was always hopeless.  Still, she seemed to think of
him when she should not think of him, and she couldn't seem to stop
hers elf from having the slim bright hope that registered like a series
of tiny fluttering heart attacks, that there might be some little piece
of life ahead for the two of them.

"Are you decent?  " Charlie called.  She turned on the landing, saw him
there below.  She smiled in the calm and superior way she knew he
hated, the small smile that he said made her look contemptuous.

His looks were easy, unstudied.  He'd always been particularly
attractive to her in the morning.  Bed-warm, he smelled wholesome, like
milk or toast.  His smell was a matter of his good physical health and
of his skin's chemistry, his good teeth, fine soaps, his expertly
laundered shirts.  He probably didn't actually believe his family's
wealth indicated God loved him more than He did someone else, but it
did give Charlie a certain confidence that she'd never had, that the
earth would stay beneath his feet as he walked along.

She came down, stood there, kissed him in the cool perfunctory way that
was their courtesy--this was to teach Maggie to be kind and mannerly
even in difficult circumstances.  Anna and Charlie were very close in
height.  Their kisses were always companionable.

"Hey, " Charlie laughed.  "And what have you been up to?  " Her face
was still hot from thinking of Alec, some thing stirred in her.

She began to move away, but Charlie placed his hands around on her
shoulder blades, held her so hard against himself that her breasts
flattened.  Then he kissed her as if he was actually interested in the
answer.  Her lips parted reflexively and there was the heat of his
tongue against hers, softly textured as a gumdrop, as he searched for
the truth of her.

Charlie clearly had just come from being in bed with someone elsc his
face, lips, mouth were all softly perfumed with the blunt fact of his
nuzzling another woman's cunt.  Anna was drawn in by this, also
repelled.  Why did Charlie always need to involve other people?  And
what an ass this man was to leave some poor girl before he was even
done.

She turned her face away, stiffening, pushed at him.  "All right, " she
said aloud.  Charlie wasn't as smart as he was clever.  He smiled now
in his clever way, teasing her for her Puritan ancestry, his pushing
her toward the secret knowledge of what he thought she was all about.
He knew nothing, really.

Anna knew what Charlie thought.  He thought she was moral, but for
shallow reasons, that she'd been dulled down by having come from the
middle classes.  My wife derives from a long line of shopkeepers and
Yankee spinsters, he liked to tell people, those kind and dotty sisters
who crochet doilies and have perennial borders and keep house for their
brothers who are deacons in the church.  Anna's family, he added, has
been in this country since 1644 reproducing by parthenogenesis.

And Anna would smile weakly, murderously, at him, at his twisting any
slight particle of truth about her almost opaque history.  Charlie made
her ashamed of her own dear mother, who actually was devout and did, as
a matter of fact, happen to embroider vestments for the altar guild of
St.  Nicholas Parish.

Maggie was there, carrying her father's parcel self-importantly.

The two of them smiled at this over her, turned and went into the
kitchen as comfortably as the married family they still legally were.

She put water on for coffee.  Maggie put the package down and went back
to watching television in the sun room off the kitchen, this room added
to the back of the house in their last attempt to save their marriage.
Charlie had, he said, a surprise for her.

She turned, narrowing her eyes at him.  Charlie's lips were full, well
sculpted.  His mouth was wide and turned up naturally at the corners,
so he often seemed amused.  His brow was clean and, at forty-four,
virtually unlined.  Beneath the skin at his smooth temple a visible
pulse beat slowly.

Charlie took out a set of two keys from his pants pocket and shook
them, then put them on the table.  Then he opened one end of the long
thin cardboard box he'd had Maggie carry in for him, tipped it, and
metal license plates clanged down onto the marble tabletop.  The
license plates read RAW THUR.

"And what is that supposed to siglufy?

Charlie was sitting at the pie table in the little alcove of the
kitchen.  He'd had the table made for her, it was inlaid with a slab of
green veined marble that came from the quarry near her mother's place
in East Eden.  The windows were open and the lemon tree right outside
was blooming, though these were the last few weeks of what was still
technically winter.  She had chosen this house for that lemon tree.  It
was one of the few things about the house she still recognized after
all the renovations.

"You need a new one, " he said.  "I thought it might be tough for you
to go look at cars, then close the deal.  " "So you went out and bought
me a new car?  " she asked.  "Doesn't l that strike you as a little . .
. ?  " Anna stumbled, struggled to continue.  She was breathless,
furious.  Anna believed she might, right then, begin to shout or stab
him.

"A Toyota, " he said.  "A little sports car in a bad ass color.  "
Charlie grinned his most asinine grin.  "Hoping you might, you know,
try to learn to live a little.  " Anna turned back to the coffee beans.
Her hands shook as she held the grinder.  She pressed it until the
motor screamed, then screamed even higher.  Live a little?  she
thought.  Not fucking likely.

"It's a stick?  " she asked.  She looked over at him warily.

Charlie nodded, he was, by nature, just so pleased with himsel She
pushed at her hair, sighed hugely.  "I don't think this is going to
work out.  " Her voice had gone soft with fury, her enunciation of each
word precise and schoolmarmish.

Charlie scratched his chin, moved his jaw around.  He ran his fingers
back through his streaky hair.  How had she married a person with such
small eyes.  He was as blandly hand some as some TV doctor, also oddly
almost as unrecogluzable as one.

Later when she called George Beemus to rant about Charlie's
unilaterally buying her a sports car with a stick shift when she had a
small child in a car seat and was going to need to car pool, her lawyer
listened for a while, then suggested that the Toyota might not actually
carry that much symbolic value.

And this insulting license plate?  Anna broke in to ask him.

Its cost merely made for an easy tabulation, George Beemus was saying.
Anna got the new Toyota on her side of Schedule C, while Charlie kept
the BMW, two years old but worth about the same.  Didn't Anna recall?
Charlie and Anna had agreed to buy one new car, then go ahead and try
to sell the old Suburban in the want ads or at the Buggy Bank on
Shattuck Avenue.  George reminded Anna that he said he'd help arrange
this for her.  They needed to sell it before it blew a gasket or its
brakes failed utterly.

Failed utterly.  Anna did actually now remember this part of that
conversation.  It was Sheila Krasner who pronounced those words.

Sheila Krasner was Charlie's lawyer.  Anna remembered almost actively
not listening to the two lawyers as they argued over which things of
hers and Charlie's they were and were not going to be able to
individually go on owning.  They were in Sheila Krasner's Montgomery
Street offices in San Francisco.  Anna had been staring out the
window.

She was staring out over the bay at a shifting super flock of two
or-three thousand birds.  The birds flew as one thing that veered in,
folded, fanned out in a great sweep like huge shakes of pepper, dashed
through the middle distance of the blue sky over the water, birds as
tightly clumped as the stars once were.

These were starlings, she knew, brought to the New World from England,
here to multiply unchecked, here to dominate, to drive out the native
species.  Starlings are known as one of the requiem birds because they
feast on garbage.

29 Many Simultaneously SHEILA KRASNER WAS short, dark, brainy.  She had
the silky voice and large breasts of someone who slinked through USC,
First in Class, Phi Beta Kappa, Sex Kitten, Law Review.

When angry, she answered the phone like this, Kramer!  Anna made her
angry.  Sheila Krasner clearly took the state of Anna personally,
feeling implicated, undoubtedly, as a fellow woman, in Anna's low
achievement.  Sheila Krasner was continually angered on Charlie's
behalf over what she called Anna's under employment.

Sheila Krasner was small-boned, dainty, but had the ability to puff up
in anger with the pseudo-ferociousness of certain toads and fish.

She seemed to tower over Beemus, yelling down at the cringing man,

"What are we going to have to do here, George?  Go to court to force
your client to retool?  " Retool?  Anna thought.  This was months and
months after they settled the tool issue--could they really be back on
tools again?

Anna had been thinking of more interesting things--the birds of
America, whether or not crows actually do post sentries, as she once
heard.  If she knew more about birds and nature, she could write poems
about birds and nature.

Anna looked at Charlie, who wouldn't lift his eyes to her.  This was
because he was a poor excuse for a human being.

"Your client is educated, after all, " Krasner yelled at Beemus.

"Are you trying to stipulate that being a poet is a form of disability?
" Beemus started, then began again, begging to be allowed, please, to
merely finish this one sentence.  He was patient with Sheila Krasner,
explaining over and over again that Anna, as a person trained in
literature, had simply acquired ver, v little in the way of marketable
skills.  "My client, " George Beemus said, "can barely use a computer.
She doesn't even type particularly well.  " "Which, " Krasner shouted,
"doesn't happen to be my client's problem!  " Anna thought about what
she knew about various kinds of birds, how pigeons, for instance, eat
gravel, and these little rocks moving in the gullet act as millstones
aiding in the process of digestion, then are eliminated as waste is
passed.  This is one of the miracles of a bird's design that makes them
light enough to fly.

It had always been remarkable to Anna that, with so much bird life, you
saw so few dead ones lying around.  Where, exactly, did all the dead
birds go?

Anna thought about her own skills.  She was an excellent laundress.

She did do the wash just as her mother taught her.  Cooking took some
degree of attentiveness while, to accomplish the laundry, Anna only
needed to rouse hers elf every now and again and drift off down to the
laundry room in the basement where some wash was always waiting.  She
then moved one small, well-sorted pile from washer to dryer to the
growing stack of still-half-damp things she probably would not get
around to ironing.  When these dried out, as they inevitably did, she
put them back through the wash again.

These meetings were endless, with the same issues endlessly revisited
and rehashed.  This happened for one reason only, billable hours were
adding up.  Charlie's parents were rich, as all parties were aware, and
cost was not an object of anyone's concern since his parents, one way
or another, would end up paying for all of this.

Anna prayed for a solemnity of purpose, prayed to the God of I her
mother for the ability to pay attention.  It was a prayer Margaret
taught her.  Originally in Latin, it came from the fourteenth century,
God be in my mind and in my understanding.

God be in my eyes and in my seeing.

God be in my ears and in my hearing.

God be in my heart and in my knowing.

Anna prayed to be attentive--attentiveness was bestowed on her.  She
began, however, to notice all the wrong things, that the Krasner-Beemus
relationship was like one variety of bad marriage in which the couple
must actively involve everyone around them in their constant arguments.
Sheila made fun of George, who was plump and a little dopey.  George,
obligingly, became plumper and dopier, Krasner more brittle, more
shrill.

Nearly everything Krasner said came with a little barb.  "Right.

Now, if we can now please turn to some important matters, " she would
say after George had gone on with some degree of eloquence.

He seemed so helpless at times, Anna had to resist the urge to fire
him.  She wanted to fire him and hire Krasner, who was a monster but
would probably win every little battle and then the war.

A divorce was agony.  The worst of everyone was revealed.  How could
people specialize in a part of the law that showed everyone to be base,
selfish, morally lazy, and less than honest?  People, Anna thought,
should simply set all this stuff on fire and go off on their separate
ways.

Yes, but what I actually need from your client, George, Sheila Krasner
would say, then she would begin to list so many items that Anna's
attention began to drift.  What interested Anna was Krasner's habit of
always getting the jab in.  She was reflexively offensive, Anna saw. It
was a work technique, a skill that came like intuition, as when one
needed to gauge the proper sheen and loft and stiffness of the beaten
egg whites when making a souffle.  Krasner used this, her beauty too,
to keep George on the defensive.  Really?

Krasner might add scornfully, or she'd say, All right, yes, yes, I see,
but can we just speak frankly now?  as if they hadn't been.  But to put
it bluntly, George, she might say apropos of nothing.

The language of the items being listed was so ponderous, Schedules for
Renewed Mediation Concerning Spousal Support, Proposed Terms of Pension
Buyout, Hours of Child Visitation Adjusted for Proposed Nursery School
Vacations (Actual Dates TK).

Projected Tuition Costs for Pre-Kindergarten (With Two-Day-"Week
Aftercare).  Who knew getting divorced would be so tedious and
boring?

Krasner had been reading just such a list one day, item by wearying
item, when she suddenly looked at Anna with eyes alive and deadly. "Ms.
 Bell-Shay, " she said, "Clorox is hiring.  " ANNA WAS READING from the
morning paper she'd laid out on the counter while waiting for the
kettle to boil.  "I see, " she said to George Beemus, though she wasn't
paying much attention to Beemus.  He'd phoned so early she hadn't yet
had time to make a pot of tea.

This call was about the title to the house.  The house and its
ownership were the Big Ticket Items, the last major things at issue.

Though Anna lacked the means with which to buy his interest out,
Charlie probably was going to turn out to be too decent to force Maggie
and Anna to move.  The divorce was a sniping petty battle of tiny
selfishnesses.  Lately they'd been attacking Anna's competence in
household management as if this had some thing to do with what she was
going to get in spousal support, though George assured her it did not
and would not--this was just a ploy.  It was a ploy and Anna felt aloof
from it, hardly believing it concerned her.

It was more of the same--hour after hour of costly foolishness.

She was reading an article in the morning paper, HARD DRINKING

MANSERVANT ENRICHED BY HEIRESS S SUSPICIOUS DEATH

She had the phone cradled under her chin as she warmed the pot with a
rinse of boiling water, then spooned black tea leaves into its bottom.
"I think so, " she told George, but she was thinking about Alec and
wasn't listening closely to what George was saying.  "I'll have to look
that up and call you.  " She was actually thinking of Walt Whitman's
proclaiming

"I am a poet of the body, I am a poet of the soul.  " This was the kind
of poet Anna had always aspired to be.  She was thinking of the line of
Whitman's that went

"Urge, urge, urge.  " Civilization was only the thinnest overlay, she
thought, the gauzy clothes that only slightly hid the nakedness of
everyone's self-deception.  Anna's desire for Alec was selfish, he was
another woman's husband.  Still, her eyes narrowed when she thought of
him, her face shut down into some thing tight and small.

Anna was trying to pay attention to George Beemus, who might be saying
some thing important.  She should be taking mental notes.  She was
making tea, while reading, The pony tailed butler, who is said to be
only semi-literate, seemed an unimposing man in an ill-fitting suit as
he watched from a corner of the courtroom while highly paid lawyers
argued abstruse points of law.

It is being asserted that not only is Mr.  Lafferty a binge-drinking
alcoholic, he also takes three sleeping medications, seven
anti-depressants, three anti-psychotics and six anti-anxiety medicines,
many simultaneously.

"Ha!  " she yelled right into the mouthpiece.

While reading, she'd accidentally poured hot water to the side of the
teapot instead of directly into it, and this was flooding the
countertop.  Anna mopped the water off the first few pages of the draft
of the proposed settlement agreement, then wiped some other counters
with the same wet tea towel.  She was still talking to Beemus on the
phone, she was thinking of Alec again.

She cleaned up, went back to reading, kept coming again to the
addictive patterns of Mr.  Lafferty.  She wanted to call Alec when l
she got off and read him this aloud.  She looked at the clock to see if
he was in his office.  She could leave it on his voice mail so she
wouldn't have to speak to him.  She'd read the entire article, then
ask, "Many simultaneously?  " It was six days now since Alec kissed
her, a moment's impulsivity he'd clearly regretted.  He would have gone
back into the house, settled in with Gin at the kitchen table, poured
them each a glass of wine and asked, So what's up with Anna?  Then Gin
would have outlined some of the nastier parts of the Bell-Shay divorce,
he'd then confess to the kiss part and his own culpability in that, and
then they'd work it around to the place where they each were both
pitying of her and forgiving.

Anna was now the woman all of the other women of Berkeley feared, the
man-hungry divorcee looking for her next meal.  Such women showed up
alone at parties, talked too much, drank too much.  Their language was
always a little off, like they'd been raised speaking English but in a
foreign country.  They acted verbally prim, swearing not at all, or
they swore liberally and oddly.

They dyed their hair, became massage therapists, took tap dance
lessons, picked up younger men while shopping for groceries at the
Berkeley Bowl, then told everyone all about the weird kinds of sex they
had.  These women were as charged and free as ions and they evinced the
same kind of atomic instability, and becoming one of these lay simply
beneath Anna's intrinsic dignity.

Anna didn't even necessarily much want Gin's husband, she was sick of
men and they were time consuming.  She didn't want Alec to love her as
much as she wanted him to come over to her house and fuck her violently
once on the cold marble of the tabletop, one time only, then she'd send
him home to his wife and children where all good men belonged.  Alec
was a good man.  Anna didn't care for the other kind.

"Sure, " she said to Beemus.  "All right.  I know.  Sure.  I've made a
mental note of it.  But I really have to go now, George, and get Maggie
up and get her dressed for school.  " George Beemus called Anna so
often she knew he was either in love with her or he had no other
clients--all these billable minutes did add up.  He was exactly the
type of man who always fell for her, drawn as Charlie had been by the
trick of her anatomy, her coloring, the patient look her face took on.
Men believed Anna would be kind, soft, maternal, as she may once have
been.  She was becoming more complicated now, more like her mother,
who'd been through some thing similar and had turned out to be tough
and flinty.

Beemus's call concerned the substantial mortgage she and Charlie still
shared.  Their house was a plain two-story box built for a working
man's family at the beginning of the century--it was evidently warmer
in I907 since the house was poorly insulated and lacked all heating
except for a floor register that sat between the living and dining
rooms.

It may have been warmer then, or Americans were simply more tolerant of
cold or were more stoical or were equipped with better character then
than now.

The turn of the century marked the end of what scientists called the
Little Ice Age, the period of advanced glaciation that spanned the four
hundred years from Copernicus to Shakespeare to Pasteur, Freud,
Einstein and les Freres Lumieres.  The fact of there even being Ice
Ages wasn't discovered until the I850S proved by the fossil record--by
I900 scientists could convincingly demonstrate that the world was
warming, the ice caps shrinking.

Western science in I900 was a product of the same thinking that had
shaped the Industrial Revolution.  Science needed to believe in
material progress, to believe that nature too was working toward
perfection, and that all of this was somehow united in God's creation,
so the warming trend was interpreted at first as a sign of God's
approval of the Western world.

Directly ahead, of course, lay the most deadly century in all of human
history.

The mind of man was an amazing thing to witness, Anna thought, and she
wondered always at the evidence of its workings, its ardent love for
peace and war, for both order and for chaos.

Their old house, she thought, was proof of it, they'd had it torn up so
many times before, but it was only now, as their family flew apart,
that they were getting around to installing central heating.

SHE DROPPED MAGGIE at nursery school and drove directly to Mirginia
Cleaners on Shattuck.  Anna needed to get there, park, get out of the
car and actually get the job done before her will failed utterly.  Anna
now had to perform what Serene Hoberman called the Activities of Daily
Living while listening to the snide voice of Sheila Krasner, which Anna
had completely internalized.

Charlie's faults were so large they seemed to go unspoken, but Anna's
needed to be itemized.  The quarreling over spousal support had somehow
recently been diverted into a peculiar reactionary eddy where Anna's
domestic shortcomings were all brought out and were being enumerated,
that Anna sometimes left clothes at the dry cleaner's for so long she
forgot what was there, that Anna had, upon occasion, served Raisin Bran
for dinner.

"Which is perfectly nutritious, " she said, "with two percent and a
banana cut up over it.  " She stared at Charlie, who wouldn't raise his
little eyes to hers.  "Charlie, do you realize this stupidity is
costing each of us more than two hundred dollars an hour?  " Anna
pulled into the driveway in front of Mirginia and parked under the
overhang.  She was heartsick, it felt like a physical state that
involved the working of her internal organs, her breathing, the walls
of her chest and abdomen.  Anna had begun to weep sometimes in just
this sort of place, weeping with the desolation of arrival, crying over
such small things, the claim check hopelessly lost or a parking stub
she could not now lay hands on and the full day's rate she would now
have to pay.

Just the week before, Anna had arrived at the toll booth on the Bay
Bridge on her way to meet George at the actuary to have Charlie's
pension evaluated only to find she was literally penniless at that
moment, having left her bag at home.  The kindly maternal woman in the
booth who had the most fabulously cloisonned fingernails, each a
different gold-leafed jewel, said to Anna, You got to pull yourself
together, Baby.  One long, curved fingernail then hooked and flashed,
hypnotically, to illustrate to Anna how she was going to accomplish
this particular miracle.

From childhood Anna had nurtured a small faith that some kind and
beautiful stranger would be along soon to rescue her from misery.  For
an instant she believed this might be the angel, like the one on the TV
program, come to show that Anna was delivered, that the world had
proved to be good and whole.  Then she noticed that the woman was
indicating to Anna how it was that she was going to need to maneuver in
order to turn the van around to drive back to Berkeley the way she'd
come.

Anna didn't miss Charlie so much as she missed the girl he married, the
one who still half-believed in angels.

The three dry cleaning ladies--one dark, one light, one in
between--were all dressed in starched French blue smocks that matched
the blue of the paper with which they wrapped the shirt boxes.  Their
patience with Anna was excruciating.  She'd left so much there for so
long she had to fight the urge to lie.  She thought of telling them
she'd been out of the country, but this was a Berkeley euphemism for
time spent in a mental hospital.

The ladies offered not a single word of criticism.  Instead they worked
as a team to gather and retrieve from the computerized go around,
carefully checking that they weren't handing her anything of Charlie's.
They found so many items, arranged in collated bunches, dresses and
blouses and slacks, clothes so out of season and style, Anna'd
forgotten she ever owned them.

"Hello, " he said.  He'd come up behind her, may have been standing
there awhile.

"Oh, hi, " she said, turning to see him, saying it casually.

"Are you dropping off or picking up?  " "Neither, actually, " he said.
He took another step and so stood very close to her to say this, his
low voice going lower so Anna seemed to be listening to him with all
the hollows of her empty body.  "Frankly, Anna, " Alec said, "this
place is so expensive it gives a whole new meaning to the expression
being taken to the cleaners.

" He'd said her name, pronounced in that voice of his--Alec had the
voice of Gawd, as Veronique liked to say.  It thundered softly, Anna
heard it echoing around in her.

"Expensive?  " she breathe .

"We use Bing Wong up the street.  " "Which is cheaper but just as good?
" They were whispering so the dry-cleaning ladies wouldn't hear them
and in order to give themselves a reason to stand very close to one
another.  "Well, of course Mlrginia would be the most expensive, " she
said, "which is undoubtedly why Charlie has always insisted on this
place.  " She took a breath, went on windbaggishly.  "This is what
Charlie wants written on his tombstone, ONLY REGRET MY ECONOMIES Anna
said this lightly but felt an almost keening sorrow begin to bloom
below her heart, that--when tested--she was turning out to have so
little loyalty, to Gin, to the dry-cleaning ladies who'd been so kind,
even to Charlie in so swiftly revealing his penchant for shallow
excess.

"I was on my way to the bus stop when I saw your van.  I stopped in to
see if I could talk you into that cup of coffee I still owe you.  "
"Oh, yes.  Well, that.  " Her face was hot.  "The matter of that
coffee?  " She had been struggling with the Four Principles of
Confucianism.  Anna had printed them on a Post-it recently, stuck this
up on her bathroom mirror.  "Shame" was one she came by easily, it
brought blood rushing to her face even as they spoke.

"I don't think we really made a plan to go out to have coffee, did we?
" she said.  "I think we thought about coffee, then each of us thought
better of it rather quickly.  " Alec was so tall he had to bend forward
so she could hear him.

His face was open, so boyish and unguarded--she had to resist the urge
to put her fingers out to touch his cheek in gratitude for the way he
looked at her, without guile, with nothing but perfect eagerness.  He
had a great curly bang of dark hair that was going gray.

His brows were dark, very shiny--the ridge of his forehead shadowed his
brown eyes, which were deep set and tawny.

"So how's about lunch?  " he asked--one side of his face hiked up, one
side of his mouth, one cheek, one eyebrow, to indicate the two of them
were implicated in this, were together as antic participants in sex,
which was, after all, only one of life's most comic foolishnesses.

"Alec, " she whispered, "lunch is more than coffee.  " Anna said his
name, though she had not intended to.  He had said her name and she had
said his name and each heard the tenderness with which the other spoke
and his eyes filled slightly with what she imagined was a solemn
gratitude and she was afflicted with a profound understanding of how
lost they already were.  Each was going to protest a little, mildly,
then they would go ahead and do what they very much intended to do
because each believed they were going to get away with it and neither
of them believed in sin or God or hell.  Their affair was risky, would
be destructive, and each was drawn to this in it.  Having pronounced
one another's names in a dry-cleaning establishment, they now joined in
some small way for a little while.

Behind them the three dry-cleaning ladies were all lined up like the
witches in Macbeth, who had seen everything and already knew and would
speak, if asked, to tell in the truest riddles the ruin that lay ahead
for the two of them.  Any one who was not a fool could see that no good
was going to come of it.

This was a slow time of morning when shut-ins and convalescents might
turn on their favorite talk shows to get a sense of real life.  These
weird sisters had no need of that--real life came to them, displayed
itself.

This strip of North Berkeley was their own show, and they knew the
names of all the players and all their troubles and excitements.  When
Enrique Zambrano, the waterfront commissioner and building contractor,
bludgeoned an elderly Cal professor and his wife with a hammer in a
typically Berkeley argument over class and caste and kitchen
renovation, the parties were Virginia customers.  And the dry-cleaning
ladies were there the day the Secret Service closed the street for
three blocks and President and Mrs.  Clinton rode in one of the two
black limousines, the extra one a decoy to confuse some random angry
person, the kind who'd suddenly one day shoot fourteen cats, then get
in a truck with his shotgun and drive for the Capitol.

Northside belonged to these three chroniclers of its history, and they
knew its rhythms of clothes and sheets and the protocols of
divorcement.  They also knew with complete certainty that what stood
before them was not a legitimate couple, in that the clothes of these
two had never been slipped together into the plastic shine of one of
their wedding sheaths.

Anna wrote out a check.  These checks still disturbingly had Charlie's
name on them though he was now using a different account.

She was going to need to muster the energy needed to get hers elf to
the bank and do some thing about this one day soon.

Alec had already picked up the cleaning, had gone ahead to hold the
door for her.  "See you later, " he told the ladies pleasantly.

Face flaming, Anna couldn't look at them.  She carried the flat
packages out.  Her linens were wrapped in azure paper, were tied with
bright white string as carefully as presents.

He held the door as she passed by, then he followed her to the car. She
opened the side door for him, stepped aside.

Alec was like a character out of an American tall tale, his legs so
long he simply stepped up into the van and began to organize its
interior spaces, putting toys and books and the shrink-wrapped juice
boxes she bought by the gross from Veronique who bought them by the
hand-truckload at Costco where Anna hers elf was too agoraphobic these
days to ever go into the way back, taking the flat packages of folded
laundry from her and stacking them neatly there.  Everything about him
spoke of ease, reminded her that he was a man for whom the solidly
geometric presented no unsolvable problem.  Alec could plan and neatly
pack and he could successfully visualize and he was going to fuck her
soon.

He was crouching in the second seat in order to rehang the cleaning in
two well-balanced bunches.  He stacked the blue paper packages on the
bench, then sat down.

"All set?  " he asked as he pulled the door shut after himself.

The other three Confucian Principles were these, Anna was now
remembering, Sympathy, Courtesy, Knowing Right from Wrong.

They were atheists, unbelievers.  How honestly were the ancient wisdoms
supposed to be made to apply to the lives of moderns?

It was the accident of Maggie's car seat that made him ride as he did,
in back hidden by the long drape of cleaning.  He was hidden, so their
behavior was already somehow covert, defiant of snoops and the jealous
enemies of love--the world was full of these and it was important to
act against them.  There was such joy that spilled out of one small
defiance, as if in Alec's hiding they were being released by a blanket
acknowledgment of their wrongdoing.  Anna's transgressions had always
been so intricate and private, she hadn't broken large rules as a
teenager because she hadn't wanted to cause her mother any more
heartache than the males of their household routinely did.  She hadn't
broken rules as a girl in her mother's house, hadn't broken rules as
Charlie's wife, aside from spiritually deserting him.

Besides, they weren't currently interested in consequence.  It was more
plain than that, Anna was clean from her shower and she felt
intoxicatingly desirable, she could smell the soap she used, he was
tall and eager.  She was made to feel beautiful when Alec looked at
her.  And Alec's wrist bones were showing out the white cuffs of his
dress shirt--this sight moved her so.  He was wearing a lovely tie, a
nice suit, but he was clearly a man who had never enjoyed a shirt that
really fit.  Alec was too long-limbed, too wide across the shoulders,
someone who really would have been better off having his shirts
custom-made, as Charlie always did.  This was one small thing that she
might tell him after he fucked her, before she sent him home.

She'd already started the car.  "Where to?  " she asked, but she didn't
listen to the answer.  She wanted to get off Shattuck before someone
they both knew came up to say hello.  This was such a small town that
running into someone she knew happened all day every day and was the
main reason Anna largely stopped leaving the house after she and
Charlie split up, so she didn't have to look into any more faces marked
by curiosity or pity.  Pity had always seemed to Anna to be one of the
most hostile emotions.

He was so tall he nearly blocked her vision in the rearview mirror.

He was leaning forward so she could feel his breath on the skin of her
neck.  "I'm not very good at this, " she said.  "At least not practiced
yet.  This is the way Charlie acted and I've spent a long time
believing I was better than he was.  " "Me too, " Alec said.  His mouth
was right next to her ear, his fingertips were resting lightly on the
skin of her neck just where it curved into her shoulder, resting as if
they were helpless not to.

"So we aren't pretending this is justified, are we?  " she asked.

"Or that we just get to do what we're doing for high-minded reasons or
that this is anything but the most base kind of selfishness?  " "Guess
not, " Alec said.

"That's good, " she said.  They rode quietly along so they could each
think this over for another little while.

"Because nothing will ever be the same again, Alec, and you and I will
never get to sit on a wall outside a party and flirt a little.  " His
low voice moved against the inside of her ear.  "We're here, Anna,
because neither of us seems to be able to help it.  " Then he said,
"I'm sorry, I am really sorry.  " He was saying this now, she knew, so
he would have it said later when it was harder to say and he might mean
it more truly.

They drove for a block before she said,

"If we're careful, she won't find out and she won't be hurt.  " "I
don't want anyone to be hurt.  " "Neither do I, " she said, which
wasn't altogether true.  Her voice had taken on a hard, new edge in
getting divorced.  This demonstrated the degree to which Anna was being
changed by her life's events.  She was a different person now, not
necessarily one she liked very well or very much respected.

The past steamed by in the rearview mirror.  She and Alec had no past,
would have no future.  There was nothing but this blurring now, the
place the van drove into, the rushing now and now of the present
moment, which is where everyone in Berkeley was always urging one
another to go and try to live.  Anna just wasn't usually very
interested in a place like the present moment, being by nature so
bookish and abstracted.

His fingers were in her hair, which was still damp from the shower--she
felt twisted, nearly sick, with desire for him.

"You're married, " she said, "so we both know what's wrong with you,
but I probably should mention that I sleep way too much and that things
aren't turning out the way I planned and I'm not going to have the
future I thought I wanted, which was to write a few good poems and have
a long marriage with its ups and downs and maybe one more baby.  And
I'm now economically dependent on a man who's increasingly sarcastic on
the subject, and the state I find myself in can't be very attractive or
romantic.  And sneaking around, while maybe sexy, has never struck me
as particularly adult.  So we really ought to think for a second about
whether we're really the kinds of people we ought to get involved with,
people who can't be responsible for one another and are about to lose
every scrap of dignity.  " "Anna, " he said, "I don't think dignity is
what either of us is looking for.  " HER VAN SWEPT in under the new
dangling blooms of wisteria, beneath the twisted root wood, roped and
old, the bark grayed but leafing now, pale blooms hanging skeletonized,
still green, still only tinted by the brush of the bluish white they
would soon become.  Anna bumped up the drive at the side of the house,
having left the gate open for the workmen.

Her neighborhood was filled with these big houses built for families
with many children, trades people who would never recognize these new
inhabitants or understand their conflicts and the degree to which their
lives became complicated by privilege, that it often took two
professional salaries to pay the mortgage and that there was no parent
home with the single perfect child who was being professionally raised.
These young families seemed to be able to afford only the big house but
not the kids to really fill them.

The many square feet of these houses were dedicated, therefore, to the
storage of hundreds of millions of things.

With the children in day care and all the more able-bodied souls off
earning money, no one was home by day but the very young and the very
old and those who cared for them.  It wasn't until sometime after
Maggie was born that Anna became alert enough to actually notice
this.

She spoke to most of her neighbors only at times of natural or man-made
disaster.  She hadn't spoken to many of her neighbors since the days of
the quake and then the wildfire.  The earthquake hit at five in the
afternoon when those who were employed were still in their offices.
Anna and the old people in her neighborhood, those with canes and
walkers, and the new people in her neighborhood, mostly au pairs
clutching babies, all came out into the middle of the street to confer.
Several of these women held the big wrenches they needed to turn the
gas off with, but no one seemed to honestly recognize a gas turnoff
valve.  Then one man came striding through walking his Airedale very
quickly downhill toward the bay, as if nothing at all had happened, and
he yelled at them not to turn their gas off, that they'd never get it
turned back on again and they had listened because this made a kind of
bossy and masculine sense.

The only men she knew in her neighborhood were the ER doctor who lived
next door to her--he worked nights--and Jody Ingersoll across the
street.  Jody Ingersoll was a retarded boy of more than forty who lived
at home with his aged parents.  This sweet, frail couple packed Jody's
lunch and stood together by the front gate to wave him off as the
little yellow school bus drove up and toodled its horn for him.

Simon Heller, her next door neighbor, had bought himself a pressed-tin
sign at the Ashby Flea Market and got one for Anna too.  These were
from the Second World War, were given out to the night workers in the
shipyards in Richmond.  Anna left hers in the front window in order to
bother Charlie, but she saw it now as Alec might and it no longer
seemed entirely funny.  The sign read

DAY SLEEPER

The backyard into which she drove Alec was in a block of backyards that
blended together into one long half-wooded lot without an alleyway,
traversed by falling-down fences that ran with vines, the field marked
with young redwoods that were draped by ivy and morning glory.  These
were easy fences to see over, easy for a child to climb had children
been home to climb them.  She pulled up and parked on the concrete pad
in front of the garage to keep Alec safe from being seen.  She had
driven into the heart of the yard, a place where the trees on the lot
seemed to be returning.

Anna went to the window of Charlie's studio to make certain he wasn't
in there, then went to close the gate.  Charlie had moved into a rental
house on Marin two years before but hadn't found a place to move the
equipment in his studio.  The house on Marin was, ironically, one he
and Anna used to laugh at--it had been remodeled in a way that added a
huge picture window diagonally to the structure that looked out over
the bay, making the house resemble a swiveling TV set done on a Claes
Oldenburg scale.

Alec climbed out of the back and began bringing the cleaning in.  The
crocus along the stone path were finishing and now the daffodils stood
up on the little mound that was Anna's rock garden, the yellows and
paler yellows only beginning to show in slits out of the green lips
and, yes, it all looked sexual.  The thin tendrils of the sweet peas
had started up the trellis beside the Japanese deck.

This deck, with its one-person soaking tub, was added to the back of
the house when they did the sun room.

The trapdoor in the deck had been left open by the Hungarians who were
working on the foundation.  These men had been hired by Carlo Empy and
it was he who came by to check the job every once in a while, though he
wouldn't charge Anna for his time or for the plans he'd drawn.  She had
begun explaining all this to Alec, then realized she was undoubtedly
boring him with what he already knew.  She rushed on, trying to get to
the explanation of why her house was this shambles, with its piles of
debris of old brick and dirt and mortar lying in mounds on tarps at
various stations around the yard.

"Guy's a mensch, " Alec said.  He hung the cleaning on a wooden towel
hook, knelt to look into the hole, professionally interested, then
straightened, dusting off his hands and pant legs.

"I

love him.  I've actually known him longer now than he's known Julie.  "
"I love him too, " Anna said.  "I love all of them.  Maggie calls them
the Empties.  She says their house is funner than this one.

She'd like to go live with the Empties.  Many days I would too.  " Anna
said this, then instantly regretted the pa the ic way it made her
sound, never mind that it was untrue.  She would never be part of a
large and happy family, she knew this in her soul.

She opened the double doors to the sun room she hadn't bothered to lock
and went in ahead of him.  They stood together in this place, stopping
as if it might be somewhere, might become significant, looking around,
as if they couldn't tell what sort of reverence might be expected of
them.  It did look as if grave robbers had just left.  Maggie's pink
nightie lay on the floor in a fluid heap, her snuggly blanket next to
it, grayed and fraying.  A half-filled glass of orange juice, the
picture books and blankets and pillows that made the little den into
which Maggie liked to crawl.  She wasn't yet selfsuffficient and needed
all this because she had parents who divorced and a mother who, while
home, was preoccupied.  It was her sad fate that Maggie was going to be
an only child.

The odd black shape that lay in the center of the carpet took form
gradually, revealed itself to be the remote control broken open at the
back, with its bright wires and batteries spilling out like electronic
guts.  Anna stooped to pick this, at least, up.  "Did you know that
some woman in Memphis put a bullet in her husband's head last week, "
she said.  "It wasn't in the course of an argument.

She shot him when he flipped the channel one too many times.  " Alec
smiled at her, his eyes alight with the two of them, with what they
were doing.  He still seemed to stoop a little from crouching forward
in the van.  "Nice house, " he said.

"Well, " she said, "I wasn't really expecting company--it looks lived
in, I suppose.  " Anna looked around.  "I really don't get it, " she
said.  "How we are expected to manage all this stuff we're supposed to
own.  People never used to need to have this much, did they?

Or if they did, labor was still cheap enough that you could hire
someone else to do the maintenance and the actual physical handling?  I
mean this as a question of architecture, Alec.  When did this happen?
There just wasn't a need for all these closets, was there?  And the
garages and storage slots?  Just one wardrobe per person where they
might hang up their one or two changes?  Did you know that Samuel
Beckett refused to own any more clothes at one time than a single pair
of work boots, two identical pairs of pants, one jacket and two black
turdenecks and that this is probably why he got so much writing done? "
Anna was going on, but so what?  She lived alone with a three
and-a-half-year-old and on many days talked to no one aside from her
lawyer, who was so boring she couldn't be bothered to actually listen. 
Besides, Alec was smiling encouragingly.

"But this isn't actually the way I had imagined I would raise my
daughter, " she said.  "Alone in a messy house in an empty
neighborhood?  " "It's a nice house, " he said.  "A little dark though.
" And she followed his eyes as he looked around.  He did seem to be
seeing diagnostically, imagining it as it might have turned out had
things gone well, had she married a better man, someone more like Alec,
who had had, up until now, the ability to remain true to his wife and
hmily.  She imagined the milk-white gloss of new paint on woodwork.  A
patient man like Alec would take the time to prepare the surface, to
apply the paint in calm and steady strokes.  He would see that the
right walls were taken out and the skylights added and closets made and
the rooms opened to the light so the air Anna breathe would no longer
feel so damp and contagious as it did some days.

In the dining room the newspaper lay open on the table.  Anna put the
linens down, then folded the paper in neat quarters and stacked it on
the piano bench.  She witnessed the eccentricity of her saving things,
the layers and layers of books and papers placed in a way that seemed
almost archeological, all lying atop one another, and the way this, her
working mess, had spilled into every common room and so clearly allowed
for no other adult person to ever live with her.

Beneath the paper on top of various other things was an art book opened
to a painting of Turner's, Slave Ship Zong, I739-Slavers throw
overboard the dead and dying--Typhoon coming on.

Anna put her hand on the color plate.  The image was so powerful she
felt almost hypnotized by it.  She wanted to tell Alec this--I know
some thing about this.

Turner's image of the ship had been almost entirely abstracted in its
detail.  Turner was embarrassed, she knew, by these abstractions, as if
they were imprecise and done in daydreams.

The abstractions now looked modern because they reflect the unknowable
nature of the contemporary world.

Turner here had put in only the sketch of rigging, one dark and
flailing limb, a short length of chain.  A poem might go with this, it
might tell the truth of those basic economics, that this country was
built on the backs of slaves who were insured as cargo if they drowned
but not if malaria killed them.  So, feverish and dying, these slaves
here were being tossed in chains into the water with J. M. W. Turner
there as the only witness.

"I keep these things for scrap, " she said to Alec.  She was slightly
embarrassed, largely defiant.  She marked the book with a strip of
paper napkin, then closed it.  She put the Turner into a dark bookcase
in a room so dim she needed the overhead on to read the spines at any
time of day.  "Did you know, " she asked, "that the American doctor who
saved General Tojo's life just died?  " He smiled, shook his head,
"Missed that, " he said.

"But you did know Tojo was the head of the Imperial forces during World
War Two and that Tojo attempted hari-kari at the time of Japan's defeat
and that an American surgeon saved him.  " "Vaguely.  " She needed to
speak quickly, she believed, in order now to get it all in before the
rapidness with which she could suddenly speak shut down, except what
was the real urgency?  "They flew this surgeon in from somewhere,
hari-kari being designed to kill you now or later in either of two
ways, by gravely damaging so many organs of the abdomen and bowel that
you either quickly bleed to death or if you do survive you'll still die
slowly of the collateral damage.

So we saved him, did it so Tojo could be tried for war crimes.  He
lived, was tried, found guilty, was hanged.  Now isn't this just a
miracle of perversity, Alec?  That we are the animal with such a
complex morality that we invent both these surgeries, then the notion
of the war criminal who is first saved then killed by it?  " She was
speaking quickly and breathlessly, enunciating carefully.

It was like the same clipped way she ate, Charlie said, cutting little
bites on the plate, chewing thoroughly, only one of the many things--he
yelled this during the only raging fight they had ever had--he
specifically hated and had hated since their very first date.

She heard hers elf as Charlie might have, Anna speaking, talking, in
this clipped way, Anna going on and on in the highly articulate drone
of National Public Radio.  Shut up, she thought.  Stuttering corrected,
a monster was created, one who went on at such intelligent length,
largely managing to ignore hers elf just as she might ignore an actual
radio set at KQED, 88.  5 FM on the radio dial, tuned in there in
another room and only occasionally overhearing hers elf to say some
thing that was interesting.  Shut up, she told hers elf again.  She
wanted to die or at least to go to sleep, which would get her racing
mind to stop.  She always needed to go through the house whenever
Charlie left to teach or go out to the studio, turning off all the
radios he'd turned on in all the various rooms.

It took hours then to get any real silence back.

Alec was still holding the bundles of cleaning folded on his arms
before him.  "Oh, here, " she said and led him through the living room
and into the entry, taking the bundled clothes from his arms, dividing
them in the way of plants left in their pots too long, working together
to get them up on hangers on the coat hooks.

She walked away quickly to pick up Maggie's cereal bowl and put it into
the kitchen sink.  She filled the kettle from the tap and put it on the
stove, got the bag of Peet's beans out of the freezer.  "Or do you even
want coffee?  " she called out to him.  "Would you rather have tea?  "
Her voice flew up, went into the imperial range that scraped along next
to hysteria.  This man person wasn't even a friend of hers, she didn't
know even the most basic thing about him, such as how he took his
coffee.  When was it a person became just too old to learn this kind of
thing?

"Oh, and I do have scones, " Anna remembered.  "Or are you even hungry?
" His coming to her lay in the realm of perception where sex really
lies, below the range of reason and normal hearing, where the animals,
blessed by muteness, live out their days always knowing exactly how to
be the exact animal they were born to be.

Alec was simply there.  It was suddenly elemental, they wanted one
another and weren't going to talk anymore in order to try to justify,
they would have this no matter who was injured.  Anna wanted to be
injured.  She had known this for some time, believing that in pain she
might begin to come alive.

He was there pressing against her from behind.  "We can eat some thing
later, " he said.  He spoke with his face in her hair, his mouth
against her throat and neck, so she seemed to hear him as she heard
hers elf, muffled by the density of muscle and bone.

She turned and saw that his face was solemn, as if he was struggling
with strong emotion.  His white shirt was very bright in the morning
sun.  The sight of him like this, she thought, is one thing I'll always
own.

He was hard, and as she turned in his arms she was already wet.

Anna raised her face and his mouth was there, his tongue softly heated,
his lips engulfing.  It was as she imagined, his hardness, the
intensity of his concentration, that he kept his eyes open, his glasses
on to see her, that he stared down with a hawkish ness in his hand some
face that looked like it could ax into her with what looked like
cruelty but was really ardor.  She had honestly never witnessed this
before, Charlie having needs that were so simply met.

They kissed, were pressed together against the stove, and because Alec
was a thoughtful man who was calm and organized, he reached behind her
for the knob to turn the burner off.  This moved her.  She could give
hers elf up to him because he so clearly knew what he was doing.
Everything about him was known to her, yet gorgeously strange, his
mouth on her neck and throat, his big hard fingers poking at the steel
studs of her soft, much-washed jeans.  Her arms crossing his and Anna
adept and calm, pulling his belt out, already confidently knowing the
two spaced buttons of his waistband and the easily working zipper of
the pants that made a soft woolen sound as the fabric fell directly
down.  She would never have to pretend anytlung with him, to be shy or
modest or interested when she wasn't interested.

This was all a part of a new rapture, the way her woman's clothes were
peeled away and were so much more like skin than his and she would now
become so sincerely naked.  A man was never naked in the same way,
never so vulnerable, still armed as he was with the hard muscles of his
hairy legs and with his cock and with what that gave him of a warlike
nature.

The skin of Alec's inner thighs was taut beneath her fingertips, his
balls cool and heavy in her palm and fingers.

Her face was pinned there hard against his shoulder as his hands got at
her.  He smelled like tangerines and wood shavings, wore a beautiful
suit of a dark fabric with muted colors flecked deeply into it.  He had
the ties and suits and needed only this.

He needed Anna, for her to help him find shirts that fit, for her to
lead him where she knew they had to go, to go lie down in the dark
place that lay right next to death.

THEIR CLOTHES WERE as immaterial as each had known them to be and these
clothes flew off as clothes do in such a circumstance, but each had the
worry that the workmen might then come and that this was the Hungarian
crew Alec himself employed, so they needed to get out of the view of
the uncurtained door and windows in the foyer.  The contractor was from
Budapest.  He took off his baseball cap when he came up to speak to
her, and carefully stamped his feet before he came in to use the toilet
because he was from a class society where all was held more rigidly in
place.

Alec had used Istvan Kirali and his men for so many years he now knew a
few words of Hungarian.

They got halfway up the stairs, then collapsed on the landing, made
helpless by ardor.  Anna lay beneath him, half undressed in her
half-wrecked, half-owned house that seemed glorious for once, or at
least humorous, so alive was it made by the fact of him and of her and
that each had a body and they still weren't too old to be loved and
that each still had hands and mouth and ass and belly and eyes to
witness as they were being swept off in this wordless rush of need.

Alec was talking, using his calm low voice to say, telling, asking,
saying, and she was pressed hard beneath him lying against the carpeted
steps and could hear only the determination in his voice but no words
distinctly.  She had never known a man who wasn't almost perfectly
silent in bed, as if men believed women to be less animal than they
were and so were ashamed to speak except in words of false and pretty
sentiment, language that was what everyone thought women were meant to
hear.

She was still in her bra and panties, jeans off, one sock gone.

One of his hands was up inside her underpants, down and hooked up in,
his two fingers carving into her.  She moved against this hand.  She
moved, then cried out as he shoved in more and his big fingers moved
and moved and there were the sharp edges of his nails and she twisted
to get both more and less of it.  He held her hips and waist with the
other arm and she fell back in order to be able to watch him, and his
face came toward hers with his mouth made grim by what he felt and she
was heavy in his arms.  There was no hurry--they could take the time
they needed.

Alec wore pale blue boxer shorts and the old-fashioned ribbed white
cotton undershirt, the material felt thin as it slipped beneath her
fingers.  His shoulders were very broad, well muscled, his dark skin
smooth, immaculate.  He worked her right to the point of coming, saw
this in her face and took his hand away.

He had skill, was confident, and because of this she floated there
right at the peak of it.  She found his hardened penis, thick and
blunted, the skin smooth and taut and velvety, so weighted it bobbed
with the gravity of its own heat and blood.  His skin was darker than
that of her pale hand.  She pushed his blue shorts down, used both
hands to hold his balls.  She rested her cheek against his thigh, the
hair of his groin was perfumed by laundry soap.

She sat back, brought him forward to her, saw the deep and ruddy skin
of the heart-shaped head of it.  Her tongue touched the heat of the
slitted hole, went in, stayed there.  She moved back and was sitting on
her heels, he was on the steps below, his ankles wrapped in his suit
pants and pushed-down shorts.  They had waited so long for this.  He
let his cock remain lying quietly in her mouth for a while, neither
moving.

Neither moved.  He throbbed--she looked up to watch him as he
grimaced--he was ready, was nearly coming.  She waited, was completely
still while holding him, her mouth feeling its subtle twitch and
pump.

"Where?  " The word seemed suddenly torn from him.

It was part of the same conversation they had been having off and on
for years, since before Maggie was born, since the time Alec first
kissed her in the backyard of the party when Anna had gone to sit
outside because she was so furious with Charlie she believed she might
toss a glass of wine in his face.  From where she sat on the low wall,
she could see Charlie inside standing at the buffet table, having
bumped into one of the women he had fucked or was fucking or soon would
be fucking--Berkeley was simply full of women like this, women so
numerous they popped up in any movie line or in the vegetables at
Andronico's or in the sea-kayaking section of REI.  Charlie always
struggled to introduce them.  He couldn't always even recall their
names, but his face had come alive with that special kind of interest
when his search engine was engaged and he was drifting back and back
and trying to fix on a couple of details, and she'd watch for the tiny
smirk and for the slow quickening in the pulse that stood in his
temple, and she'd sometimes see the quick shared glance of mutual
recognition.  His flagrancy carried its own attraction.  Charlie sent
out waves and waves of welcome, a woman was drenched in it, it was a
radiance that was almost indiscriminate and simply expanded outward as
from a large brick launched from the diving raft anchored in the
deepest part of the flooded quarry.  Anna didn't always care or
couldn't figure out if she cared or only believed she ought to care,
but they'd been trying to have a baby so that night it made her
furious.  She felt she might become insane, might drink and drink and
never get enough, that she might lift two glasses to her gaping mouth
at once or eat all the food set out on the table or that she might hers
elf fuck the next person she ran into whether it was a man or a
woman.

So she went to sit in the backyard, then Alec came along.

It may have been a matter of calculation, that Anna, feeling ruined by
sex, set out then to wreck the next whole thing she saw and this was
the Baxters' marriage.  The true reason may have been as simple as
this, it lay in the path of her destruction.  But there was such
simplicity to Alec, it seemed to her, in the plain way he showed both
his desire and his disappointment, and so she'd begun to think of
him.

And now after years of looking at one another across the room at the
Empys' parties or the Chakravartys' parties, each knowing or almost
knowing what the other one was thinking, this active waiting becoming
part of the twisted rope of their lovemaking that now had everytlung
wrapped up in it, including months and months during which she was so
busy or distracted she never thought of him at all, waiting was built
in.  Waiting was part of the one long fuck they'd then initiated, that
now entwined each in these days and nights of absence.  The absence was
the palpable thing they shared, the having and not having both being
theirs, with the having now being what they could no longer live
without.  They could wait now because they were older and had learned
to wait and their years of waiting had made them patient.

She was patient, she held his cock quietly in her mouth, she could do
this for hours for him if this is what he wanted.  She wrapped her
fingers around his wrists and held his arms down at his sides to keep
him there and still.  She imagined Gin's watching and this excited
her.  Anna moved her mouth to show Gin the pleasure of kneeling before
a man and allowing him to believe you were supplicant.  She imagined
Gin would not know this, that Alec was too large for most women and
too gloomy and intense.  Gin might resist him, Anna thought, or might
be sullen, or might not want to lose hers elf to an enchantment.  Anna
wanted to hurt Gin, to teach her, wanted to make Gin watch the
violence with which her husband was going to fuck a woman who was not
his wife.

His cock lay quietly, resting, only her tongue and cheeks making the
most subtle movements against the shape it held.  His face was fraught,
his cheeks sucked in.  He had his eyes open, he took his breath in
sharply, made one small cry.

Anna rested, leaning back against her own arms.  "Here?  " she said. He
glanced around.  She took his fingers in her mouth, moved her tongue
over his fingerprints, his fingers were thick and long-she sucked them
tasting her own glistening.  He pulled to raise her, she stood, turned,
brought him to the top of the stairs where he sat down out of view of
the glass door.

She helped Alec untie his shoes.  He took his shoes off, then his
pants, shoved down his boxer shorts, kicked them away.  He folded his
suit pants over one arm, carrying his shoes in the other hand.

The muscles of his ass were shapely.

They went down the hallway as quietly as if on tiptoe, Anna leading him
to her bedroom at the back of the house where the windows faced south
and east and there was a view of the bell tower on campus and the
greening and oak rippled hills beyond, riffled at the top with the
fringed stands of eucalyptus that moved like they were liquid.  Each
was comfortable now and safe and felt no awkwardness or strangeness, as
if this was as it was meant to be.

He sat on the unmade bed, lying back on the pillows so he could watch
her.

She reached behind her back to unclasp her bra, looked at hers elf in
the angled mirror on her grandmother's dresser and saw the underside of
her luminous chin, eyes half shut, lips slightly parted, as beautiful
to hers elf as she had ever been, if looking slightly messy and gone,
like she was halfway drunk.  She saw him watching her--wide hips,
narrow waist, good breasts, belly and ass and thighs all firmly
fleshed.  Her hair was kinky, her throat and cheeks and breasts all
slightly flushed.

"You have a nice long back, " Alec told her.  Anna closed her eyes, it
was the sexiest thing a man had ever said to her.

"Know what I always wanted?  " he asked.

"What?  " "I wanted to keep traveling, " he said.  His voice had been
made soft by wistfulness.  Anna was so moved to know this, the deepest
secret of this man's broken heart.  He lay back with his hands behind
his neck, solemnly watching her.

"All right, " she said to him.  As Alec watched, she put her hand down
and began to touch hers elf on the bump with her own wet fingers.  She
came to him so he could see, her own fingers there in the lips, the
cleft.  She twisted her pubic hair, pulling at it so she was open and
could show him this.  Let's go, her eyes urged him, let's go
everywhere.

Alec's face was grim, he closed his eyes and swallowed as if this was
somehow painful.  She climbed onto the bed, pressing him back by the
shoulders to keep him there, touching his nipples, his belly, his hips
and balls.  She took his penis in her hand, it was a little soft again.
He lay on his back, legs apart, feet at a certain angle.

Alec was still wearing his dark socks.  These were the long thin socks
her father called his hose--they came halfway up his well shaped
calves. She pushed the socks down--they felt silky, seemed to slip with
ease off his smooth dry skin.  His feet were long and large, highly
arched, each one heavy as she lifted it, weighed it.

She knelt to cradle his foot in her lap, putting her finger between
each toe.  His mouth went slack and grave with the intimate feel of
it.

He now wore only the undershirt, the same one her father wore to do
yard work in the summer when he came up during the last week of August
to spend it with his family in East Eden.  There was no washer or dryer
at the cabin then, so she and her mother did the laundry by hand in the
stone sink on the outside porch, then hung it on the clothesline strung
out beyond the fruit trees, yellow jackets swarming at ankle height
right above the sweet mess made by the windfall peaches.  Anna always
was her mother's good girl.

Her father bought these shirts at Brooks Brothers in Manhattan, she
remembered.  Girls in New Jersey called them the guinea tee, her father
said sing lets.  Why did Anna's mind run like this during sex, to
Gin's watching and to Charlie's other women and to the ones her father
had who were somehow predictable and common and to her own mother's
upset over her father's inevitable lack of better taste and judgment
and why had sex never been real enough to really shut Anna's mind up
before?

Alec lay back on the comforter, propped on pillows watching, his arms
behind his head.  His eyes were hazel, seemed to glint in the morning
light.  He was tenderly exposed, trusting.  Anna smiled at him, she had
a nice long back.  She leaned over, began to touch the largeness of
him, the smooth skin of it, the one vein standing up, the vague pulse
there.  The skin was taut and hairless, the same smooth inside/ outside
skin as mouth or throat or cunt or asshole, derived heart like,
gutlike, from so far within oneself, going so far back in the history
of what a person is, back before eyes and therefore blind, before brain
and perfectly wordless therefore and therefore free of guilt or shame. 
She wanted for once to be as plain as this, a simple thing in nature
that was both beautiful and silent, some thing that existed for this
alone and for him alone and for her own love of pleasure, and those
things becoming the three winding strands of this one long rope.  She
wanted to live without the remove that language made, to smack at that
skin until it was frayed and finally gone, to no longer have everything
so said and therefore shadowed and so haunted.

She squeezed his balls, squeezed them until he groaned in a way that
moved her.  Her own face concentrated, came down into the small and
perfect mirror of the serious look his had, and this was how they both
knew power would pass back and forth between them.

He moved over on his side, turned her, watching her body as he
positioned it.  She lay beside him.  She wanted to take his penis in
her mouth and make him wait again for all those same long years, but he
took her arms and raised her, positioned her now where he wanted her.
He knelt and his face opened and his nostrils flared and he took her by
the structure of her bones, his hands at the base of her skull, one set
of fingers along her neck and jaw, and he pushed in so his penis went
into the back of her throat and he was l holding her roughly and with
great and trembling strength and now he'd clearly had enough of
waiting.

He held her hair at the nape of her neck and moved her as he wanted her
to move in order to pace it.  He moved, arching his back, watching, his
face distorted, keeping his cock in so deeply and for so long she
gagged, then drawing it back out again.  He kept one hand at the back
of her head, but slipped the fingers of the other hand down and in her.
"I'll fuck you like this first, " he said in his low calm voice, "then
I'll shove my whole fist up.  " He came as he said it, exploding into
the back of her mouth.  He had several long fingers in her and she came
around them.  She came, then came, falling away into the place where
she was both intact and completely gone, never having had so much of
someone all at once and in her and this is how she learned she had
never before been filled.

The Sign You Stare at in Stores in Berkeley While Paying at the
Register This Is an Unreinforced Masonry Building Which Under State of
California Law Constitutes a Severe Threat to Life Safety in the Event
of an Earthquake of Moderate to High Magnitude.

ALEC S EYES WERE tightly shut, the muscles around his mouth still taut,
slightly twisted.  She waited apprehensively, he looked agonized. Was
it remorse over what they'd just done. he opened his eyes and saw her and
his face relaxed.  He looked calm, even grateful.  Seeing this, her
lips trembled with strong emotion and she leaned over to kiss him.

"Are you all right?  " Alec asked.

"Of course, " Anna said.  "What a question.  Did you think I was
somehow delicate?  " Anna got up from the bed and walked naked over to
fold open the accordion doors--these closed off the kitchen alcove that
lay along one wall of the bedroom and was where there was a sink.  She
let the water run over her hands, testing it as it cooled.  She pushed
her wet fingers back through her hair, filled a tall glass, carried it
back to Alec.

"This is how I'm going to make a lot of money, " Anna told him as she
climbed back up onto the bed.  She handed him the water, then watched
him drink.  "Isn't that about the best water you've ever tasted?  " she
asked.  "I think the real future is in pure water.

I'm serious, Alec, " she said because he'd begun to smile at her.

"You could bottle it and ship it east.  You'd have to get a great label
design, market it as Berkeley Tap.  " Anna took the glass and drank
from it as if to test it.  BOTTLED AT THE SOURCE itS label would say.

"I think you're probably onto some thing, > he said.

"I'd get people to do testimonials.  " He nodded.  "Blurbs, you know,
quotes.  " East Bay water came from the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir in the
Sierra above Yosemite.  Their own fresh water that flowed from the snow
pack in the Sierra down the Sacramento River delta was diverted south
via the California Aqueduct to Los Angeles, where it was used to fill
swimming pools and water millions of acres of lawns.

"Sorry about that, " he said.  He nodded behind him in order to
indicate he meant their most recent intimate moment.  "I didn't have
anything.  " "It's fine, Alec, " she said.  "I'm okay.  Better than
okay, actually.  " "I didn't want you to get pregnant.  " "That will
not happen.  " "It has, " he said.  "It did, to some of us.  " Somehow,
from someone--Serene or Veronique--Anna already knew this.  "It's all
right, really, Alec, " she said.  "All that's been taken care of.  "
She was looking eastward out the window where the Campanile was chiming
the hour of eleven.  Anna would never again become pregnant, but she
didn't know him well enough yet to be able to say this.  Formality had
come back, they were civilized again.  It made her sad, that you could
fuck and fuck and finally seem to get somewhere but you could never
stay poised there at that far place of real intimacy where anything at
all might be said or done--it had too much God and not enough self in
it.

"Are you hungry?  " she asked.  "Shall I make coffee now?  " "You put a
kitchen in your bedroom?  " "Not us, the people before.  The people
before rented the upstairs to students.  " "What's that?  " he asked.
Alec was pointing at the iron Anna used to caramelize the tops of the
little individual desserts she long before stopped making--Charlie
loved a perfect creme brulee, said he could judge the quality of a
restaurant by the musical tone the caramel made as he shattered it with
the back of his well-tapped spoon.  Anna's mother had given her this
caramelizing iron along with nearly all the other fancy kitchen things
Anna owned--the souffle dishes in various sizes and the pizza stone and
the tin she once used to bake madeleines.  It was all part of Margaret
Bell's wishfulness, that Anna have a more stately life than she hers
elf had managed.

Anna took the iron up, felt its sturdy weight, the smooth wooden handle
fit perfectly in the cleft of her palm.

"Looks medieval, " he said.

"It does have a certain dark kind of heft, doesn't it?  " she asked.

The iron was twenty inches long, bent at an angle, its head was solid
and weighed nearly a half a pound.  That weight, balanced by the
fulcrum of the wrist, made it a perfect extension of the line of one's
upper arm--the weight was distributed all along its length as it rested
against her palm.  Anna picked the iron up sometimes to offer hers elf
some potential for violence, particularly when the anger she had
recently stumbled into made her feel she might shake apart.  The iron
was at once so heavy and so light.

Anna showed him its weight by handing it to him.  He felt it, then
leaned over, kissed her deeply.  Their eyes met as they sat back.  It
was astonishing how all proximate objects were now catheted, were now
imbued with significance, how can our love make use of this?  Amazing
too that they'd each thought this, that each understood that the other
thought this, that there might be in this unspoken understanding some
way out of loneliness.

She smiled at him, then took her robe from the hook on the back of the
closet door and went down the hall to the bathroom.

There she peed, then sat with her arms across her belly as if she had
menstrual cramps, stricken suddenly, rocking on the toilet, thinking,
Oh Christ Jesus God, no.  what have we done?

It wasn't Gin she was thinking of, and of the pain they might cause
her, but the faces of Alec's children.  She was thinking of Cecily in
particular.  Anna was probably just Cecily's age when she came to know
with certainty that her father was unfaithful to her mother, that he
had a woman he was living with in town and that this is how her mother
knew this one was suddenly more serious than the rest had been.  How it
became known to Anna was always some thing of a mystery since she
couldn't remember any of this being actually spoken of or discussed.

What the drug companies needed to come up with, Anna often thought, was
the little pill that combated fits of conscience.

You could dissolve it under your tongue like nitroglycerine, and it
would cause an instant loss of a little patch of specific memory, one
small piece of the very recent past in which your life, progressing
along one certain course, was all of a suddenly flung by events off in
another, much altered direction.  This pill would keep you from
remembering how your selfish actions changed the lives of others.

Global capitalists could use it, bosses who were downsizing,
adulterers.  You could dissolve a pill whenever the pounding of guilt
and grief threaten to overwhelm.  That pounding had begun in her, it
was the pump of pure fear that was bearing down on her--in a moment it
would overtake her.

Anna tried to breathe through it as she'd learned to breathe through
the physical pain of childbirth, to find the hypnotized and abstracted
place where sensation stood apart.  Its name was panic, though she
hadn't known that until Charlie left and Anna saw her life laid out and
she noticed how alone she was now going to be.

Until Charlie left, she'd believed her racing pulse and shallow
breathing were merely death's percussion becoming part of her.

These little deaths happened so frequently they seemed familiar, like
the pounding of the Kodo drummers, kodo meaning mother's heartbeat.

She rocked and tried to pray aloud against the waves of it, prayed for
her mother's God to come to occupy her heart and mind, taking the place
of hers elf and self and self, and how she hated being so trapped by
it. She'd sought to be passionate as another animal, forgetting beasts
lack a sense of consequence.

Time was absolute and mathematical, was breath, and would go on and on,
whether Anna was alive or dead, whether she and Alec had sex or not.
Time was utterly neutral.  Breath was a person's measure--so many
breaths allotted, then knowledge and sensation are extinguished.

Anna breathe for a moment, stood up, washed her face, then brushed her
teeth.  The Four Confucian Principles were posted there on the Post-it.
Her conscience nagged her, Knowing Right from Wrong.

Knowing Right from Wrong, Anna knew right from wrong but seemed to lack
the moral strength to do anything about it.  She needed to change the
way she was leading her life.  She needed to get going, to become
active, but this day's work was already nearly finished, she had only
the one thing left to do and this was getting rid of Alec.

She opened the cabinet, took a little bottle out, took one white pill,
drinking tap water from the heel of her hand.  She waited a moment to
begin to breathe less desperately before she left the bathroom.  She
knew right from wrong, the right thing to do was to send Alec home, to
make him promise he'd never come again.

Alec had straightened the bed and fluffed the pillows before he got
back in.  He opened the covers for her in welcome, making a tent--she
could see that he'd taken off his undershirt and was now entirely
naked.  Her eyes stung.  Flesh was weak, she thought, then backspaced
and deleted, it was the conscience that was weak while the flesh was
proving almighty.

Anna smiled warmly, dropped her robe, crawled in with him.  Alec
covered her carefully with first the sheet, then the comforter.

He was patient, thorough, and this was its own nightmare, she could
find no bottom to her feelings for him, no foothold or remove caused by
suspicion or distaste--there was going to be no easy way to get out of
this.

It may have been they slept, or they simply lay in bed wrapped together
in the light from the east that filtered in through the open window.
The muslin curtains lifted slightly out, settled stiffly back as if the
world itself was breathing.  She lay in his arms, feeling hers elf
relax into his long body as he curled against her back.

His breathing was slowing, she measured her breath to his so they could
sleep as one thing united for this one brief time.

If this wasn't yet sleep, then it was the state that lay right at
sleep's margin where the half-dreams open and beckon for you to come to
them.  She willed hers elf to be able to relax enough to go on out into
the water, walking into it, her ankles, knees, the water was there at
her fingertips.  It was Sand Pond, her mother's house, the only place
on earth Anna felt entirely safe.

She remembered that everyone she loved was safe and even happy--her
mother was safe in East Eden and Maggie was safe at nursery school and
she would be safe at the Empys' when Julie picked both girls up and
took them home to play and Alec hadn't driven over so his car wouldn't
be discovered so his life was still safe and had not yet been wrecked.
Anna was in his arms--he held her and she was safe with him and he was
a decent man who meant harm to neither her nor his wife and she'd taken
the pill that, in a moment, might begin to calm her.

The last thing Anna saw before she fell asleep was the caramelizing
iron.  She didn't actually know him, she remembered, only intuited the
twist of his soul, the way it would lie along the same twist as her
own, how this was their beginning and this would probably be their
end.

AND NOW IT was springtime and because they were selfish and weak-willed
and therefore unable yet to pull themselves apart, they went forward
aimlessly.  After three times they stopped pretending they were going
to see one another only this final time and his visits then took on the
pattern of the habitual.

He came first thing in the morning or at lunch once or twice a week
during the hours Maggie was in school.  He told his office he was out
with clients or out of town or off visiting a building site, then drove
to Andronico's and left the Fiat hidden on the street behind the
parking lot.  This was reckless, stupid, his car, with its personalized
license plate, was easy to recognize.  They were risking much too
much.

They made love, then lay in bed to share a little breakfast or a little
lunch.  She was the perfect woman, who lived to cook for him.

He was hungry, couldn't even remember when last he'd eaten.  She told
him all the secrets of her dark soul, her mute fury that her marriage
to Charlie had ended as her own parents' had, that she'd seemed to
learn nothing at all from her mother's example.  She told him she never
should have married and never would marry again, that she'd always
understood the solitary nature of her maiden aunts, her grandmother's
virginal sisters.  Agnes and Maude lived in New Rochelle.

She told him of the pain she felt in growing up, that she was the
tallest girl in middle school, got her period very early.  She blushed,
sweated, her lips twitched so badly when called upon she was sent to
the speech therapist, who wanted to refer her for counseling.

She told Alec this, she wanted to tell him everything--that her height
was an agony, that her hair was white and frizzy, that she was fully
formed in her body at age thirteen, with hips and breasts, and that
boys teased her without mercy and that her own brother Davis was the
worst of them.

She once thought of studying either architecture or medicine, she told
Alec, had taken advanced math and science and mechanical drawing but
had to drop out because she couldn't bear the pressure of being in a
classroom dominated by boys who taunted.  She was the only girl in the
mechanical drawing class.  Boys waited for her to look up, when she
did, they mouthed words at her, ass, boobs, tits, butt.  Words chosen to
accuse her with the fact of her own anatomy, chosen to be assaultive.
The boys pushed them at her when they saw they could make her color.
She tried to keep her eyes down, tried to concentrate on the matters of
the drawing.

Screzu plate, they mouthed .  Shove it up your hole.  These boys were
pimpled, ugly, immature, they presumed Anna's interest in them and it
was terrible that she was interested, that she did go home and imagine
sex with one of them or with all of them.  She imagined sex, though it
also made her sick--pornographic language had always stirred her, had
always had this dizzying effect.

Her brother was a year behind her in school, she told Alec.

Davis was smart-mouthed , antic, had many friends, while Anna was so
tall for a girl, she seemed freakish.  Davis ignored her when they met
in the hallway.  Their father was almost never home by then, and Davis
was completely out of their mother's control.  He was younger than Anna
but claimed to remember things she didn't, Anna didn't remember
anything.  She went from class to class with her books and notebook
held to her front to try to hide hers elf, she kept her coat on all day
long.

Anna Bell was the World's Whitest Black Person, Davis said.

Her real father was Wilt Chamberlain.  There was a time when she
couldn't stand to hear the word fuck said aloud, so Davis said it
constantly.  Fuck, fuck, fuck, he said.  He could have no idea how the
vision of what that might mean swam up and overcame her, the sickening
faces of the boys in her various classes, none of whom actually ever
took a second to speak civilly to her, the chop and thrust of that
Anglo-Saxon verb, the brutish smack of some of its nouns, slap, stick,
whip, slit.  The world was a movie made of blunt and soundless images,
those same stinking and faceless boys becoming the herd of animals who
fucked her in a barn against the bales of hay.  She didn't like them.
The boys she liked were in her English classes, the boys she liked were
gay.

"Be nice to your sister, " their mother ordered.  "Your sister's
sensitive.  " "Aw, sure, Ma, " Davis said.  He reached out, cheerfully,
ruffling their mother's head.

Her home life was a mess, she felt friendless at school.  She found
refuge in the discipline of a driven kind of scholarship.  This was in
Lakewood, New Jersey.  Their father worked in Manhattan, came home
increasingly infrequently.  Davis was the drummer in a garage band,
took drugs by the handfuls.  Anna couldn't take drugs, couldn't even
drink successfully, so afraid was she of total disintegration.

Davis now lived in Austin, Texas, the only academic Anna knew who
carried a shotgun.  He was a sociologist specializing in deviance, so
specialized because, frankly--Davis himself said it--he happened to be
one of them.  The shotgun was a gift from the Hell's Angels.  Davis
once packed with the Angels while studying them.  Anna and her brother
were closer now.  Davis called Charlie that asshole.  Davis had a
million frequent flier miles.  He volunteered to use these miles to fly
in, pepper Charlie's butt with buckshot.

Davis rode a Harley like in Easy Rider.  Life was large from his
vantage, a road movie starring him and Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda
and the Angels and filled with biker chicks and metal.

Things had always happened to Davis.  When he was in graduate school at
UCLA, he had a summer job doing field work in a hospital in Long Beach
and accidentally sparked a mob action to which riot police were called.
Her brother told the story in a rapture of hilarity.  The king of the
Gypsies had been admitted with congestive heart failure--the whole
tribe came to sit vigil.

More than a hundred Gypsies were in corridors stealing food and
anything they could lay hands on--paper dressing gowns, cotton balls,
boxes of latex gloves.  There were little old Gypsies in Old World
costumes, toothless and wizened as apple dolls.  There were Kmart
Gypsies, who almost looked like anyone, there were children and there
were able-bodied men.  The tribe was directed to the cafeteria that had
been closed to others.  The condiments, napkins, utensils, every single
little half-and-half--the Gypsies stole all of this, anything that
might be picked up and put in a pocket or handbag.  Their king was
already dead, of course, and had been for a while, but the hospital
kept meeting and meeting trying to decide how to tell them this.  It
was a weekend, so the regular psychologist who did bereavement
management was not available.

"They needed a grief counselor so they decided to send my brother Davis
in, " Anna told Alec.  "You'd have to know my brother Davis--believe
me, this wasn't the job for him.  He's not someone who's big on tact.
And he called everyone Man then, Man or People.  Hey, People!  he
yelled.  Hey, I need you to listen up.

Your king?  Hate to say it, Man, but, that's it, E1 Kingo's gone, zip,
kaputo!  And what a long strange trip it's been.  " No one had seen
anything like it, more than a hundred Gypsies acting as one mass,
screaming, rushing the door, keening, weeping, ripping at their clothes
and faces, storming the corridors to find their king's body to drag it
home.  The chaos became huge, churning, operatic--Davis in its center,
enjoying the spectacle.

The riot swirled around him, masses dressed in their identity outfits,
hospital people in their uniforms who called the riot squad, who came
with Gestapo shields and nightsticks and began battering Gypsies who
could easily be identified because their faces were already gashed and
bleeding and who, though armed with only the things they'd stolen,
turned on the cops and the nurses and doctors and scratched and pelted
them with plastic knives and stabbed them with surgical instruments
still in antiseptic plastic wrappings.

The most seriously hurt were dragged onto elevators that carried them
right to Urgent Care to be first sedated then bandaged.

And Alec told Anna stories too.  He told of the first girl who ever
loved him, Layla Verdonner, who came to P. S. I 3 5 in the middle of
the school year.  She arrived from Holland, spoke to no one, then lured
Alec home to Hillside Avenue with the promise of chocolate pudding.

Her mother, Layla said, served real chocolate pudding the one correct
way, still hot from the stove.  It was made with Dutch cocoa and had
cold thick cream stirred in.  Layla was the girl for him, the thin,
almost blue-white legs, the folded hands composed upon her desktop, the
neatly turned-down anklets.  It was her mother who had actually been
hidden before Layla was even born, but Layla too was held captive in
the attic that still seemed to wait for them.

The story told at the Queens Village Jewish Center was that Layla's
mother, having lost her husband and her two boys in the camps, also
lost her mind.  Relief Services brought them out and put them into a
furnished apartment.  The ladies of Hadassah gave Mrs.  Verdonner
shoes, new reading glasses, tried to help her find a job.

Layla was what was then known as a bastard, but she was superior to
Alec, superior to all Americans.  She had her precise, accented speech,
her autocratic attitude toward the correct method of making pudding.
She sometimes let Alec come over, sometimes scorned him.  He loved the
rounded collars of her white blouses.

He loved her snobbishness.

Their windows faced east, and Layla's mother used to stand for hours at
her drawn drapes peeking out, wrapped in a blue-gray sweater that was
too small for her.  Hadassah bought her a new set of teeth, but these
were Not Correct so Mrs.  Verdonner set them on the windowsill in the
kitchen.  Alec thought they may have talked to her.  It was the
so-called Free World, but what meant this wordpree, she asked him.  The
sun was also Not Correct, the light's falling down in the wrong
direction.  It was moist, marine, ever whitening, pressing strangely
down into the neat Queens streets.

These were greens she didn't recognize.  She missed the look of certain
streets as much as she missed her poor dead sons.  She missed a good
loaf of bread and a certain butcher shop more than she missed her
husband.

Layla's mother stood watching the cape light arch over Long Island, the
long hum and bending song of an unwelcome sun rising one more time. She
stared back into the morning of her life toward the time when her sons
might still be found alive or had not yet been born.  She was looking
backward.  Alec was only nine or ten years old, yet he already
understood this urge.  He understood that there was a time when Mrs.
Verdonner was not crazy.  That was when she had a country, a house, a
street, a family.  There was history and a world and that world had a
future and the chocolate pudding she made was somehow proof of it.

This was Queens Village, I958 The streets were Gestapo-free, all had
returned to normalcy and order.  People smiled too much, Alec decided
then, and he never revised this opinion.  He took smiling to mean they
were seriously frightened.  His own mother was terrified, he noticed.
She chirped like a bird, going

"Yup!

yup!

yup!  " People were afraid of the Bomb and of their own relatives
turning out to be the next Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and of the power
they'd already relinquished to the government.  There was everything to
fear including fear itself.  President Eisenhower warned on television
of the military-industrial complex.  Their New Haven relatives hadn't
yet de-Stalinized.  Stuart worked in government.  Alec was given a book
about the life of Uncle Joe by his Great Aunt Sadie.  His father took
it down the alley to put it into someone else's ash can.

Mrs.  Verdonner heaped the clothes given her by Relief in a pile in the
middle of the street, added leaves, then dog shit.  She peered out all
day trying to decipher the manlike shapes in the forsythia, the sliver
of day-blind moon, the paling light, this new wrong green.  Layla
begged, pleaded with her to remember they were pree, safe here in
America.  The mother's eyes were blue, cold as gas jets.

She folded her arms, was unpersuaded, still watched out the window,
still waiting to be arrested.

She was one of the numbered ones, still possessed by history.

Free World?  She never heard of it.

Five-Year-Old, Put Out on Highway, Clings to Fence for Hours Before
Rescue IT WAS A world beside the world in which they spoke in the
shorthand way of twins who share a private language.  They discussed
such matters as the properties of the quantum and of the color green.
Each knew some thing about green--about hue, saturation,
brilliance--and neither could quite get over the pleasant shock of
finding someone else who so deeply cared about this kind of thing.

What California lacked, he said, was variation in the color green.
Green here was of a limited spectrum, so his eyes had waited all these
years with their old Queens instinct for the spring that never came.
Then he began to notice that these were desert colors, duskier and
subtle.

Did he know, she whispered, that Van Gogh read green for blue?  They
had just made love, she was speaking directly into Alec's ear.  Mmmmm,
he said, less a sound than a pure vibration.

They talked about color and about the properties of light and of the
Perfect Mirror into which light might vanish and never reappear--though
theoretically impossible, researchers in Japan were very close to
actually making one.  They clipped items from the paper about this kind
of thing.  Each saved them for the other, secreting them away like the
bright trinkets hoarded by magpies.

They shared updates on physics from the science pages, spoke of the
Hubble telescope and its Deep Field images, the objects only now being
identified.  They talked about the Dark Zone beyond the edge of the
visible universe and baby galaxies born out of star collision and about
irrational numbers, such as the size of the object that is known as the
square root of two.  How had Alec been so lucky as to have found such a
miracle, he asked, a woman who was not only good in bed but was
interested in physics?

Perhaps Anna hadn't been that interested in such a concept as the size
of the object that is the square root of two before but only because no
one else before Alec ever reminded her that it was, like pi,
endless--the idea of endlessness had now taken on heightened meaning.

Each avoided speaking much of the end of things, of his marriage or of
her divorce or of mundane objects and occasions such as money or his
need to put gas in his car or her need to take hers in for brakes or of
what she was going to do with the sports car Charlie gave her.  The
Toyota was currently parked up the street from her house a ways, un
driven and gathering dust.

They had sex and they ate what she made, sitting cross-legged in the
bed, and they spoke of the search for intelligent life in the universe.
This seemed to her to be just another name for the unending quest for
God, she said.  They spoke of their own religions and of their own
parents and their various problems and of their kids and their past sex
lives, and everything about themselves was suddenly much more
interesting.

Alec didn't criticize Charlie except to say he couldn't understand how
she'd stayed married for so long to a man who was so casually
unfaithful.  Jews were unfaithful, sure, just never casually so.

Alec admitted he admired a certain casualness.  Jews couldn't carry off
casual, didn't do anything without the oi vey and the oi vey is mir.

To be without guilt, he said, had always seemed so Christian to
him--Christianity did seem to be a rather babyish religion to him
because of this.  What was the deal the Christers had with forgiveness.
Jews didn't go by forgiveness--he, for instance, had pretended to
forgive Gin though it was now clear he never had.

Also, Alec just didn't get the business with the Christian practice of
mindless faith.  What was the good of a God if not the back and
forth--the Jewish God was one who liked to be yakked and vented at. And
why did the Christers insist on portraying Their Lord as a kind of 9I I
Rescue Squad?  The parents of this five-year old, for instance, the
little girl in the news story who'd been judged not sincere enough in
her dedication to the Lord Her Savior, whose parents had dropped her
off in the middle of the night on the meridian divider of an interstate
highway, to live or die as the Lord saw fit, and this really happened!
By morning--after clinging to the fence for hours--the child had to
have her fingers forcibly pried open to get her to let loose of the
chicken wire.

Well, what about Abraham and Isaac?  Anna said, if they were discussing
God's capacity for cruelty toward an innocent.  And what possessed Alec
anyway to imagine sbe might know anything about Jesus?  Episcopalians
didn't care about Jesus, they didn't read the Bible--they read the Book
of Common Prayer.  Besides, being Episcopalian had always actually
seemed to her to have much more to do with table manners and the
history of the kings and queens of England than with all the darker
peoples running around in the Holy Lands.

It actually surprised Anna that Alec imagined she was "a Christian, "
she told him.  One was Protestant when she was growing up in Nowhere,
New Jersey, or one was Catholic--and Episcopalians were a subset of
this since they thought of themselves as Anglo Catholic--but no one she
knew was

"Christian.  " Christian meant being Born Again.  Episcopalians were
born once, then christened.

She had no idea where all these Christians had come from, but it did
seem like a rather recent development.  According to Davis, many
Christians lived in Texas, where they packed handguns and practiced
execution as a sacrament.

Theirs was like a sexy childless marriage--it was fun and it was
selfish.  He brought flowers.  She cooked for him.  He fussed over
which airline she would take when flying back to spend the summer at
her mother's.  She was going to Sand Pond so Maggie could learn to
swim.  The legal part of Anna's divorce was nearly finished--Beemus's
bumbling had evidently lulled Sheila Krasner into dropping her guard,
and Anna was ending up with clear title to the house as part of the
settlement.  There were still a couple of leftover details.  She and
Alec didn't speak of the fall, or if, when she came back to Berkeley,
she would be coming back to him.

Anna shopped.  She cleaned house.  She took down her curtains and
washed and starched and ironed them so the light in the morning fell
through stiffened muslin.  They sent e-mails back and forth, these were
erotic only in that his or her fingers had touched the keys that called
for those specific letters, those spaces, those marks of punctuation,
This came.  It was from Lewis Mumford, The difficulties of transport
and communication before I 850 acted as a selective screen, which
permitted no more stimuli to reach a person than he could handle.  A
certain urgeney was necessary before one received a call from a long
distance or was compelled to make a long journey.

This condition of slow physical locomotion kept intercourse down to a
human scale and under definite control.  Nowadays, the screen has
vanished, the remote as close as the near, the ephemeral is as emphatic
as the durable .  . .

the sudden annihilation of the usual perception of distance and
closeness, the bursting of the iron bands that once made rigid the
containers of knowledge, the trickling away of the perception of time
and space .  . . the widening crevices in what was believed, now here
and there, the homely words of the language of time appear useless
heaps of rubble.

This was sent in return, What did one paranoid say to the other
paranoid?  I'm not following you--we just seem to have common
interests.

They did have common interests.  Water.  Physics.  Bird life in
America.  Colors, such as the color of black that was called
crow-blue.

Neither was any longer young.  It was remarkable to each that they'd
met so far into their lives and kept having the same questions dawn,
Had anyone before ever talked to them?  Had anyone really listened?

TIME SURGED FORWARD during the spring they were together, time changed
and each of them changed with it.  Time, which had previously been
frozen in each of their lives, now advanced and speeded up and was
telescoped.  It bounced as if it were light, went looping out with a
slightly unsteady wobble.  Time went out as a tide might go, and when
it came flooding in, it brought love to them.  Love lit the world, it
turned her rooms bright, came to occupy all parts of Anna's small and
restricted life.  She marked the days of knowing him off on the
calendar in her checkbook, either adding them or subtracting them from
whatever total was actual.

The time they had been allotted was that one season, a springtime.

Maybe it would be infinite.  Did he know, she asked him, that Japanese
had twenty-four different seasons?

Time was speeding through space at the same rate as the atomic matter
the world was made of, hundreds of miles per hour.

Time acted upon them, bent them, they were subject to the laws of
gravity, were aging, were subject to particle decay.  They were mortal
and life was grave.  Alec moved between the macro and the micro, the
big life in the big house he'd built up the hill and the small life he
had with Anna in her bed.  The house on Descartes was singular, was not
a house that a man like Alec could ever sell.

He went back and forth, she existed in the one place only--her house
where she slept and she dreamed of him and in which she waited as an
empty shape.

What they required, she said, was the parallel world, and it already
existed and it lay on the other side of the Perfect Mirror, where light
vanished and did not reappear.  Her life was more than half over, she
spent so much of it asleep.  So much time was wasted.

Every one deserved another chance to try to get it right this time.

She had always been attracted to the notion of dying and this was why.
The two of them had died, she told him, and they'd been reincarnated
and they now lay in bed in the world beside the world where all parts
of them touched and were conjoined, their mouths and faces, their
bellies and hands and genitals, and their eyes and ears were open to
one another and their minds and hearts were eager and they didn't need
to say anything at all because they already understood.

They lay in the world beside the world and now had an improved way of
measuring the duration of a second--some thing else physicists were
currently working on.  Mlolence helped.  Mlolence slowed time, made the
details of the world more vivid.

They'd made love, he'd showered and dressed and he now lay back on the
bed with her.  He was fully clothe , she was still entirely naked.  She
was lying facedown on the rumpled sheets, her cheek cradled in her
folded arms.  His fingertips ran along the silky whiteness of her long
back--there had never been skin like this.

They had breakfast, he needed to get going.  They spoke lightly of
various things, their faces so close to one another's they seemed to
share the same warm air.  Her heart was still in rapture.

Anna still wanted him, she wanted certain things.  Alec liked her to
tell him what she wanted, to specifically ask, to say these things
aloud and graphically so he could view it first in the shadowed stage
of the pornographic imagination.  She said things, was hesitant, still
finding it difficult to be so nakedly revealed.

She told him about the Frenchman at the roadhouse near the border of
Canada who wanted to fuck her with a baseball bat.

He closed his eyes.  Mmmmm, he said.

Alec had some thing important going on, needed to get out of there and
go to work.  She wanted one more story, some thing that might last
until the next time they could be together.  She wanted to know
everything about him, everything about everyone he'd ever been with,
everything he'd ever done with them.

There was one girl he knew when he was at Columbia--she was a waitress
who became a daytime TV actress, he still saw her sometimes on
commercials.  She lived in Hell's Kitchen.  He'd walked her home more
than forty blocks from the club where they met.  She didn't want him to
know her real name, and she seemed to change it every week, each name
striking him as being more and more fictitious.  She was good-looking
and she was kinky, he said, but he didn't really like her.  She once
had him tie her up and cover her head with a pillowcase before he got
to fuck her.

Anna was listening carefully, eyes closed.  Sweat stood on her upper
lip.

Alec was resting back against the pillows, staring at the shapes of
light and shadow that played across the ceiling.  His hands were hooked
behind his neck.  He needed to get going.  An atom is always moving.
Had he mentioned the recent effort to stop the atom in its tracks by
subduing it with lasers made of certain photons.

An atom vibrates at hundreds of miles an hour even when chilled to
Absolute Zero, he said.  If they could arrest an atom--either by cold
or by nuclear bombardment--it could be made to stop and lie still.  If
an atom would lie still, this would allow scientists to scrutinize its
properties more thoroughly.

She leaned over, her eyes half-closed.  She kissed him deeply, then
offered her two crossed wrists to him.  Arrest this, Anna said.

"I

ANNA LAY ALONE in bed at night dreaming of Alec living just a ways up
the hill from her.  She dreamed of him and of him and Gin lying in bed
together and of whether they slept coldly apart now that she was in
their lives or whether they were still companionably entwined.  She and
Alec slept in a way that was as naked as they could get, as if they
were trying to get as large an area of skin as they could manage to
touch that of the other--Anna didn't imagine there were that many
people in one's life with whom one might wish to merge.

Gin was fine-boned and pretty in a hard-faced, girlish way.

She had very white straight teeth, but her smile was so small and
grudging she rarely showed them.  She was tough-natured, wise, had
always seemed to Anna almost as proud of her misfortunes in childhood
as she was of overcoming them.  Veronique had told Anna the stories of
Gin's childhood.  Even when it was the fashion to boast about
hardship, she hadn't boasted--still, everyone did seem to end up
knowing most of the details.

She and Gin were friends in the Berkeley way of circumstance and
mutual connected ness--they weren't closer because their kids didn't
match in age or gender.  Their relationship was pleezaunt, as Veronique
would say.  It wasn't a passionate friendship and they were not
intimate with one another, though Anna now felt she knew Gin almost as
well as she knew hers el She shared some of Alec's attitudes toward
Gin, she found, and did think of her sometimes as being some thing
akin to her own wife.  Gin's work was good, intelligent, dogged.  She
was famously competitive with Alec, with everyone--though Alec didn't
seem to actually notice this.

Gin worked hard.  She labored, it seemed to Anna, while Alec was
effortlessly brilliant.

Alone at night, as gutted and empty as the shell of a burned-out house,
Anna's pulse raced and she came alive with pain and she pulsed with an
active sorrow not only for hers elf but for Gin and for the kids and
what this love might do to all of them.  She knew right from wrong but
was still too selfish to get hers elf to behave like it.  She saw her
own childhood played out again, the love her father found in the other,
more willing woman, the one who wasn't busy being rule-bound and thin
and immaculate.

Anna was disembodied, felt her soul to hang loose as a kimono, her
limbs gone bony, drawn out in sacrifice.  She lay that way, arms
outstretched, legs down and tensed, as if she had been stripped,
skinned, raped, killed, but was somehow still alive and was now draped
like a silken canopy over the marriage bed that was both her parents'
and that of Alec and Gin Baxter.

Gin and Alec had been married in Queens by a rabbi, though Gin was
already pregnant and hadn't technically had time to convert.  Alec
didn't believe in conversion to Judaism anyway.

Jews were a people, he said, in the same way as were the Navajo.  Jews
use a canopy to create a space for marriage that is set apart and is
held to be sacred.  A marriage is only that one thing, a holy corner of
the marketplace, one set aside from the rest of life as a spiritual
room that no one else may occupy.

Now Anna hung there as that drape or canopy, there to watch the
particularly sexy agony of Alec as he fucked this other woman.

Anna, eyes wide open in the dark, imagined Alec and Gin's lovemaking
with such an active and participatory force that she seemed to be
watching a silent film of it projected onto the contours and shadows of
her own body.  Anna had awakened him, she understood.

There were times now when he fucked Gin while he thought of her.

In order to come back down the hill and to sleep inside her own skin in
the covers of her own bed, Anna tried to imagine a more orderly
progression for her life.  Sheila Krasner was right, much of what was
wrong with Anna had to do with her failure to ever earn any money.  She
had begun to think of selling the house--it wasn't a place she'd ever
been happy until this last spring, and her love for Alec had built into
it the agony of having to do without.

In order to distract hers elf Anna thought of various moneymaking
schemes.  She would design and market the St.  Elizabeth's watch, she
decided.  This was the watch that not only told time and showed the
date, but had etched into its crystal--in the tiniest, most
Bronte-sisters-like letters--the name of the current president of the
United States.

As her generation aged, Anna figured, more and more people would
require this watch.  Many people already did, particularly the
disembodied ones, the poets and madmen, who seemed to live both inside
and outside their skins.  She needed a watch like this, she never left
the house anymore without forgetting some thing she would absolutely
need.

If you were a poet or madman and were slapped into a jail or hospital
suffering from any number of mental or emotional incapacities, knowing
the day's date and the name of the current president was how social
workers determined you were enough in possession of your wits to walk
the city streets.  Anna would name the watch after the psychiatric
hospital in Washington, D. C. , where they kept Ezra Pound locked up
for nearly thirteen years.  It would sell well, she believed, in that
it would be the right watch for these times--smart and funny, stylish
and actually useful.

It was an early afternoon in the middle of April.  Alec was on the
phone in her bedroom talking to his office.  They'd made love--he still
had his glasses off.  He was sitting in his boxer shorts in the big
wicker chair in Anna's bedroom talking to Carlo about a trip they
planned for the coming week.  She got up and began to pull the bed
together.  In the wicker throne in his boxers he looked like Huey

P.

Newton in the Black Panther portrait.

Davis had that poster of Huey up on the wall of his bedroom when they
were kids, also one of Eldridge Cleaver.  No one ever infuriated their
father as much as the Black Panthers--he seemed to think they had
organized in order to enrage him.  Frank Bell came home on weekends to
their house in the suburbs to find music blaring and his wife drinking
vermouth at the kitchen table while she played solitaire.  There were
revolutionary posters on the walls of the house Frank Bell bought and
paid for, and his daughter was still in nightclothes and no one had
even missed him.

He started bellowing almost as soon as he hit the door.  "Hi, Dad, "
Anna stammered.  "Would you like some thing to read?  " she asked and,
as if she was a stewardess, she offered him a book or magazine.  He
stormed off through the house, ordering Davis to get his hair cut, to
turn the stereo down, to get his freeloading friends off the sofa in
the finished basement.  They were slovens, ingrates, they were going
nowhere, would never amount to a hill of beans.  Not one of them knew
the meaning of work.  Margaret stood, gripped one thin arm at the elbow
with the hand of the other one, raised her chin.  Work?  she asked him
coldly.  Anna's father demanded that her mother quit medical school
after her first year because the thought of being married to a doctor
somehow emasculated him.  He wanted her to stay home and raise the
children.

Davis was like an ape, drugged and dreamily defiant, he made mocking
noises at their dad, then ran out the back, took his car and drove off
with his friends to the pizza place.  Anna believed her father might
kill him if he caught him, if they started fighting.

She wanted her father to stop coming home, which he then abruptly did.
He yelled this at Margaret the day he left, Each civilization meets its
crisis in every teenaged boy.  Anna had been thinking of it ever
since.

Anna finished tidying the bed.  She slipped her bathrobe on and went
downstairs.  A great sadness welled up in her.  She walked barefoot out
through the sun room doors into the still wet yard--she left those
doors standing open.  She picked flowers for the lunch tray that she
was putting together to bring back up to him and walked the wet brick
path among the golden and blue-green tufts of ornamental grasses--Julie
designed it.  It was a drought garden, planted in a dirt mound held
together by rocks--it held natives mostly, grasses, perennials, both
fall-and spring-flowering bulbs.

Anna picked sweet peas for the pale blue vase--these pink, white and
lavender stems were the last of them.  They were lightly fragrant and
were Cecily's favorite flower--Alec had told her this.

The windows upstairs were open.  She could hear him talking upstairs.
He was going to New York and she wouldn't see him now for a week or
more.  Summer was racing toward them.  Anna's divorce would be final in
June.  Maggie's nursery school was ending, she would be going to the
French bilingual school in the fall where Alec and Gin had their son
Peter.  Maggie had been put in the same class with Clara Empy and
Demian Chakravarty.

Neither she nor Alec spoke about the months of summer and what might
lie ahead for them.  Summer belonged to their children and to long days
lying out by the swimming pool, to the outdoors, the sunshine, not
things Anna and Alec would ever share.

Alec devoted himself to his family on weekends, busy with Peter's
soccer schedule.  Cecily was rowing crew, Alec up at dawn to drive
her.

Maggie was now spending the greater part of one or both of the weekend
days with Charlie, and the sudden silence of these childless weekends
was as eerie as deafness, so loud was the clamor of the other families
all around her.  Anna became invisible without a child or husband.  She
became one of the women out on weekends doing things alone--she used to
stare at them, envying their self sufficiency, the way they seemed so
calm and able to keep themselves so quietly together.

Anna had begun to go shopping early on Saturday morning to beat the
crowd at the market at the Berkeley Bowl.  She shopped by going slowly
up and down the aisles in a love-struck daze, ignoring her shopping
list.  She then cooked for Alec in the afternoons so she could do some
thing mindless while she thought of him, of the stories she wanted to
tell him.  Each had lived so long already, each had lots of stories the
other had not yet heard.

She'd baked whole-wheat bread and poppy-seed cake, made lemon curd. The
Saturday before, she made chutney, then chopped grapefruit rind for
marmalade while listening to nothing except her own carefully rocking
knife on the cutting board and the breathing tick of the empty church
that was now her house, a place that--like her body--had never been
more alive and well organized.  The Hungarians were almost finished
with the basement.  The title had been transferred so the house was now
Anna's alone.

She gardened, recycled, and while busy, Anna prayed, not for guidance,
but for silence in which to work.  She was too distracted to read or to
write a line of poetry, his face swam before her, or a memorized aspect
of the way his body worked, the line of his neck meeting his naked
shoulder as he turned to look at her.  She possessed Alec now, had him
in eidetic memory, heard his voice, having memorized his word choice
and its cadences.

Throughout the week he sent her e-mail from his office, often passages
from his science texts.  These were never signed.  She found things in
books she had to share and sent these back to him, these might be
captions from plates in art books.  These came and went as anonymous
postings, were almost never in their own words, always the language of
others that was somehow more succinct.

Now, standing at the sink in the downstairs kitchen, she filled the
vase with water, then watched her hands, palms upward.  There was so
little respite from the loneliness.  Nothing filled it except for work
and reading, sex and talking.

l

I

Why was one marriage lost and another saved?  There were some
marriages, some that hadn't even looked particularly shaky, that the
fire in the hills destroyed as surely as it burned the houses in which
those marriages had existed.  The insurance companies came forward with
cash settlements that took into the accounting not just the houses and
the furniture, but the housewares and linens and artwork, even dead
cats and dogs.  And more than a few of the couples looked at one
another, then at the settlement, hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Their middle-class lives assessed as being worth this implausible
amount of money, with freedom beckoning, they sometimes just nodded,
divided it equally since California was a community property state, and
went off alone.

Anna had been just up the hill from Alec's house on that Sunday when
the fire erupted in Vicente Canyon in October of I99She and Veronique
were both newly pregnant--they had been out for a walk in the gusty
morning along Grizzly Peak.

Anna was dressed in a big straw hat and dark glasses, her skin was pale
from her smearing it with zinc oxide.  It was noon.  She and Veronique
had walked and were back on Descartes, sitting outside on the deck,
drinking iced herbal tea, eating some thing French Veronique's mother,
who was visiting, had made for them.  The hot wrong-way winds were
gusting up again, these were unseasonable for October.  Ravi and
Charlie were off in Tilden on their mountain bikes.  My God, Veronique
said.  What is that?  She pointed to show Anna.

The cloud of smoke staining the sky to the south and east was so large,
so dense, it was impossible for a moment to even get a sense of the
scale of it.  Then they saw two helicopters silently working against
the smoke, dumping water on it as from thimbles-these helicopters were
so dwarfed by the cloud's vastness they appeared only as the tiniest
mechanical glints.  The fire was obviously huge but also miles away.
They couldn't hear sirens or the noise of the helicopters--it was
clearly far off and being fought in an eerily perfect silence.  Another
disaster, as terrible perhaps as the earthquake but once again held at
a distance from Anna, whose life's events happened without ever seeming
to actually touch her.

The hot winds out of season whipped up the canyons and swept up the
drying leaves--these lifted and swirled erratically and Veronique
screamed out then that their husbands were on the trails that led right
into it, and Anna held her and spoke to her and comforted her with
logic, that the two were fast, that they'd know enough to turn around,
that they'd be right back, that they would know not to ride into a
firestorm, all the while ripped by the grief that ran through her that
she too was pregnant and her husband too was riding there yet she
didn't feel what she ought to feel.  The grief was for hers elf, that
she didn't love her husband as she ought to love him if she was having
a baby with him, love him as Veronique did Ravi, physically, ardently,
with this whole portion of the one person she would ever be, her single
chance at a passionate existence.

Anna stood at her kitchen sink knowing that it was luck and chance that
bent a life, sent it this way or that way, and that if the
fifty-mile-an-hour winds that day had turned, her own life might now be
so different.  The winds that day drove the fire across two freeways
and the Bart tracks and down to Lake Temescal and southward along the
freeway on both sides into the hills above and then down into
Montclair, and it also whipped this way from that first canyon, driving
down along Ashby Avenue where they were able to stop it at the
Claremont Hotel.  The grand old hotel was gone, the news kept saying,
but the hotel wasn't gone, simply cloaked in smoke so thick the news
cameras couldn't see it.

The winds started one way, changed, turned.  Had they not shifted,
those winds might easily have found two small men on their silver bikes
on a remote fire trail and pushed the fire there instead of back into
the canyons where the eucalyptus stood ready as tons of oily fuel.  The
experiment of planting eucalyptus failed--the trees were now part of
the revenge effect, nature scoffing at mankind's meddling.  Eucalyptus
had no purpose at all aside from providing fuel for an inferno. Tilden,
Redwood, Joaquin Miller--each park was full of these trees, full too of
starlings and English sparrows, imports that were all too successfully
challenging the native species.

Had the Baxters' house burned that day, Gin and Alec's marriage--Anna
was sure of this--would not have survived.  If her work burned, Gin
would have blamed him, would have left him, would have moved to New
York where she would be an art star, better appreciated by better
people.  Work could be redone, lives remade, but the house was
irreplaceable.  Anna heard Gin when people praised the house too
effusively.  Sure, sure, Gin said, but it's such a monument to Alec's
genius it's like living in Grant's Tomb with him.

Anna stood at the sink and remembered all the households lost to fire
and to divorce and of the children of these houses that were torn apart
and of the charred forests at the edge of deserts, all part of the
water wars.  California was a checkerboard chaos of water politics,
Berkeley and Oakland unable to fight the fire in concert because their
radio communications didn't interface and their hoses didn't match the
diameter of the other's hydrants, the adapters somewhere in storage.

The burned hillsides were studded with so many thousands of stark
chimneys it looked like war had come to the East Bay hills.

Anna went with Julie to drive those desolate roads, thinking of the
artwork lost and of the books left open on an armchair, only half read
or half-written.  Nearly everyone who died in the fire was old, some
found still curled upon their bedsprings.  One policeman, one fireman
and the younger ones, who--in the curious vanity of youth-had tried to
save their cars that noon when the sky came down.

There was a traffic jam high in the hills on the narrow streets that
wound through Hiller Highlands, a development with green ways and
hiking paths, where, in order to slow auto traffic, the planners put
in cul-de-sacs.

Anna saw Julie and Carlo's house in the Oakland hills only once with
the furniture moved in.  The Empys lived in their new house for a total
of fourteen days before it not so much burned as exploded, a big piece
of the new refrigerator found almost two blocks downhill.

Gin had given them a housewarming gift of a metal sculpture that hung
in their new bedroom above their new bed--one thing of Gin's that Anna
wholeheartedly liked.  It was in the shape of a seated woman's torso
seen from behind from buttocks to neck, slightly larger than life. This
piece was hollow, cast in bronze, darkly burnished.  It was of the
scarified back of a Sudanese woman of the Nuba tribe--row upon row of
raised scars in a lacy pattern as precise as ironwork completely
covered the body.  It was edgy, more personal, more passionate, closer
to some thing that might turn out to matter, Anna thought.

Gin called it Erotic Braille.

L

ANNA WASHED HER face in the kitchen sink, then put a tray together to
carry up to him.  Alec was talking to his assistant.  He was staring
down at his feet and didn't look up at Anna as she came in.  This was
the first time this had ever happened.  We shall grow old, she thought.
We will not grow old together.

It may have been that the pain of seeing her now when he wouldn't see
her for so long was too terrible for him, or he might be getting sick
of her.  This would eventually happen.  He would grow tired of her and
she would grow tired of him.  He might leave Gin and marry Anna, but
the inevitable would not be forestalled, love was by time eroded.
People were vain and each was selfish and all bodies decayed and minds
grew hazy.  Anna was repetitive, she was tiresome in her same small and
very predictable concerns, and Alec would be bored one day.  She was
almost eager for this time, as it would free them each from the current
intensity, the ardor that she constantly felt hurt and ruled by.

Or Alec might simply have begun to be ashamed of himself and the lies
he told.  It shamed Anna that he was forced to lie to the people he
loved about where he was and the work he was supposedly doing.  He hung
up, began to rub one hand across his face and eyes.  He looked very
tired to her.  He looked so apprehensive.

The phone rang.  It still sat on his lap with the other hand resting on
top of it--Alec was so startled he visibly jumped.  Her heart seized,
they both stared at it.  It was only Beemus, Anna knew, it was always
Beemus--that or Gin, inviting Alec in her husky voice to come on home
to her.

The machine answered, the tape swirled, clicked.  "Pick it, Anna!  Do
this!  Pick it.  " Veronique waited now for Anna to do as she was being
ordered.

"I just drove by and I saw your cars so I know you are there.  "
Veronique waited.  "You are there and I am coming in because if I must
do eeet then you must do eeet.  We will pick our keeeed up from school
and go where the fishes swim round and round--what is the name of it?
If I must do it, then you must do it.

Cheezus!

Just the thought of fishes makes me want to shoot myself.  " She
waited.

"Anna, I know you are not out.  " She waited.  "AX right!  " Veronique
finally hung up.

Neither of them could breathe or speak.  I know you are there,
Veronique had said.  They couldn't have felt more caught had she said,
I know who is there with you and what you are doing.  Of all people,
she and Alec knew, it would be Veronique who would drop by unannounced,
find the open doors downstairs and simply come upstairs uninvited.
She'd been on the phone in her car, not even a block away.  Thees is a
veellawwge, Veronique told Anna one day as she came up the driveway
unannounced.  Thees is ow one acts in a veellawwge.

"She means aquarium, " Anna whispered.

The two kept staring at the phone believing it would ring again, that
Veronique was still there on the other end, that if they spoke aloud
while she was being recorded she would somehow hear them.

When they finally did look at one another and she saw how afraid Alec
had become, her heart tightened just one notch against him.  His eyes
were wide, his cheeks looked slightly hollowed--this made him look so
tired, so worn out.  Anna would not know Alec when he was older, lost
or lonely, frightened or confused.

She had made a salad for them with dried cranberries and smoked duck on
mesclun, went to the little alcove to begin serving it.  This was a
beautiful salad, but the red and green of it made her eyes hurt--it
looked so much like Christmas, another feast about which Anna always
felt ambivalent.  Christmas seemed to her to have been invented by the
rich merchants to make others envy the goods they so effortlessly came
by.

He poured himself a glass of wine, drank two big gulps down, filled the
glass again.  Then he asked her if she wanted some.

Anna shook her head,

"I don't drink, " she told him.  How was it possible that Alec didn't
know this about her?

They said almost anything about sex but didn't speak of ordinary
matters, of money or the future or what might happen after the summer,
or the way Anna had begun to leave the room when he spoke on the phone
to keep hers elf from hearing the lies he told.  He lied to Gin, whom
he loved, lied to his children when they asked what he'd done that day.
He lied to Carlo, who was like a brother, and to Jerry Bloom, who was
like a father.

Alec and Anna had been sleeping together for several months, they'd
each confided this to exactly no one.

THEY SEEMED SO criminal in their actions so lawless and unbounded by
convention, that Anna was only slightly surprised, as she drove down
her street one Saturday coming home from shopping and running errands,
to find her house crawling with police.  It was late in the afternoon
and there were two patrol cars in front of the house, parked
haphazardly, another halfway up the driveway, all with new-star blue
and infrared lights swirling to set off migraine.

When the first car arrived in answer to the burglar alarm, one cop
explained, they found the sun room doors standing open and heard noises
upstairs, so they called for backup.  No one seemed to be inside, he
told her, but they were in there still searching from room to room.
There were a couple of lids to pots or pans that may have fallen into
the steel sink in the kitchen--this sound will trigger the
glass-breaking sensor in some systems.  Did she have cats, he asked
her.

"No.  But there are some Hungarians, " Anna told him.  "These workers
who come.  But I didn't arm the system and they wouldn't know to arm
it.  Anyway, this is Saturday and they would never come on a Saturday,
would they?  " The policeman looked at Anna in the certain deep way
people sometimes had of looking at her that made her refrain from
saying the next thing that occurred to her, which was, Unless Saturday
isn't Saturday to a Hungarian.

"Probably juveniles, " he told her.

"Probably, " Anna said, though there were no juveniles in her
neighborhood and she had nothing in the house that they would want to
steal.  Charlie's electronic equipment had been moved from the garage
room, and kids wouldn't break in to steal an art book, Anna knew, no
matter how valuable.  It also wasn't logical to imagine that kids would
break in, then arm the alarm so it would go off with themselves inside.
She had probably forgotten to lock the sun room doors and a gust of
wind must have blown the doors open, though there had been no wind and
she hadn't armed the system.  Still, a Pacific storm was forecast,
she'd heard on the car radio, and she had just heard of lightning
seeming to seek someone out, striking a man on a ladder under a
cloudless Florida sky, with the electrical storm still ten miles
offshore.

Anna hadn't seen Alec in a couple weeks.  She was imagining their
affair was over, that they'd finally been able to come to their senses.
She was slightly relieved, passion being, well, so passionate, so
all-consuming.  As soon as she was sure it was really over, she could
begin to count the days of agony and the days of missing him and
eventually the longing would abate.  She would come to days when she
didn't think of him for hours, eventually there would be a string of
days in which she didn't think of him at all.

Cops in Berkeley were well educated, well spoken, often graduates of
Cal in Criminology.  She now imagined hers elf to be a kind of study in
criminology, guilty of thefts, of spiritual arsons and shop liftings,
of the larceny she carried right below her heavy heart.

She spoke with one cop, noticing how this act brought out all the guilt
she'd ever felt, how too the junk of power he wore, the gun and cuffs,
was sexy to her.  She was thinking of this cop, trying to ignore the
one who was crawling up the front stairs with a gun drawn.  Anna was
nonchalant because no one else seemed to think a policeman crawling up
the stairs with gun drawn and the front door open was a very big
deal--the one with her gun out happened to be a woman.

All this was being treated very casually--no one even kept his voice
down--so it was clear they weren't trying to sneak up on the
perpetrators.  The one with the gun out was noisy hers elf, rattling
all the noisy cop stuff hanging off her belt--nightstick and squeaking
leather holster and squawking radio.  They'd heard voices upstairs in
the front bedroom, the cop on the porch explained.

This was probably the kids who'd broken in and might be up there scared
to death, unable to come down.  Juveniles these days were sometimes
armed.  The cops often sent a woman in first so she could call out
comfortingly--kids instinctively believed a woman was less likely to
open fire on them.  Kids believed it though this wasn't necessarily
true.

Then the policewoman was back down the stairs, holstering her gun.  "I
almost shot your computer when it squawked at me, " she said to Anna.
"It seemed to say, Beam me up, Scotty'!  " "That's exactly what it does
say, " Anna told her.  "It's the Star Trek screen saver.  My former
husband put it on my computer without asking me.  He was afraid I'd
burn lines into the back of the brain of the monitor like the shadows
of corpses etched into the sidewalks of Hiroshima.  " Facile, Anna
thought.  She hadn't spoken to an adult in days, so she was going on,
saying all this with mindless ease.  She, who no longer stuttered, now
spoke with the flashy skill of a rodeo cowboy with a lariat roping
nothing since the herd was forever gone.

The male cop was writing, had stopped listening, but the woman nodded.
Anna spoke again, obviously doomed to be one of the garrulous ones
babbling to strangers in checkout lines.  "The timing mechanism has no
patience with mind drift.  If I sit there for just one second too long,
the sound effects begin.  You can shoot it if you want to--I actually
wish you had.  " "It's a power thing, " the policewoman lowered her
voice to say.

"A guy's messing with your equipment?  It gives them the illusion they
have some kind of control over a situation.  You can turn the sound off
if you want.  " "I can?  " "Sure, " she said.  "I'll show you if you
like.  " "Why do you suppose he never told me that?  " "General
dickheadedness, I'd guess.  " "False alarm, " another of the cops was
saying into the radio he had clipped to his shoulder.  "Coded to the
security system.  " He then began writing some thing up on the
clipboard that looked very much like a ticket.

Coded to general dickheadedness, Anna thought.  The new security system
had never worked right, it was all complicated, system layered upon
system, no longer the one beautiful and exterior logic, like that Dante
mapped in his levels of heaven and hell, the map believed to show both
the interior and the real world.  It was all electronic solipsism, with
the hard and software designers so far removed--the way an audiotape
never fit into a tape deck in one consistent way a hand could memorize
and mechanically learn and therefore do it mindlessly, as vinyl records
once plunked simply down on a record changer ruled by simple rules of
gravity.  When a system became abstract, Anna's mind could no longer
engage it.

She came more simply armed, with the caramelizing iron she kept by her
bedside, with the concrete anger that came from her rather classic
disappointment.

"This is your free one, " the policewoman was saying.  "When it rings
at the station house and there's no intercept, we're required to
respond, so the city has to bill you.  We give you one free one, then
begin to charge a hundred dollars for each false alarm.  " "One hundred
dollars?  " Anna said.  "Then you won't be seeing me again.  " AFTER
THEY LEFT Anna brought the groceries in and put them away and went from
the back to the front of the house admiring the dusky rooms lit only by
light through their spotless windows.  The house was hers alone.  She
had never owned a whole house before.

In the middle of the dining room table Anna found a dozen peonies in a
tall glass vase that had not been there when she left to go shopping.
Their beauty was staggering--they seemed to be opening as she
watched.

The flowers were from Alec, had to be from Alec--peonies signifying
what was stable and everlasting.  Alec must have stopped by, must have
triggered the alarm in trying to set it when he left.

Setting the alarm as he went out in order to protect her did seem
somehow so much like him.  This was the kind of man he was, this showed
why she had always known he would never leave his wife for her, yet
still wanted to responsibly care for Anna in these small, symbolic
ways.

Alec was both things, all things, a good husband, her lover.  He was so
civilized.  He also sometimes hurt her during sex.  He did it because
Anna encouraged him to do so.  She thought of that as she went
upstairs, that it would be hard to do without the love of a man who was
all things, so confidently extreme, so clear about what he wanted.

She stood at her computer staring into the black of the screen saver on
which the Starship Enterprise now traveled through Radio Galaxies in
complete and utter silence.  The temperature between stars was three
degrees above Absolute Zero, Absolute Zero being as cold as anything
could ever possibly get.  He'd just sent her this news by e-mail.  It
stood for what they were when they weren't together.  The universe was
flying away from whatever science might one day find to exist at its
center.  Science was the God this century worshiped, its newest
creation myth.

The Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxies had recently been found to be
on a collision course.  Researchers now had evidence that black holes
and other massive objects such as neutron stars drag space and time
around with them as they rotate, a phenomenon they call "frame
dragging.  " Anna glanced at her clock--there was some thing very wrong
with the time it kept.  She stared at it as bewilderedly as Emily
Dickinson might have before she learned the trick of telling time when
she was fifteen years old.  Most people over history have told time by
the sun and by the clocks within their bodies--Anna wanted to live one
day soon without a clock to wake her.

This clock was black, plastic, cheap but well designed with a clean,
blank, modern face lacking numerals.  It had only four tick marks,
inscrutable silver hyphens at the twelve and three, the six and nine.
James Joyce either so hated or so revered the hyphen that he used it in
one word only, this being no-one--she would send this information to
Alec if she could somehow find the quote.  No-one aside from Alec had
ever been amused to have this kind of news come to him unbidden. No-one
aside from Alec had ever made her feel there was beauty and order and
love in her dark longings, or that there might be poetic logic in the
way her mind worked, a mind with this kind of broad-based,
all-inclusive association, this dragging off a loopy frame.

Anna picked the clock up, staring hard at itS face.  There was some
thing so very wrong, she needed to study it hard to make sense of it. 
Then she suddenly saw that the little word QUARTZ read upside down and
backward.  The clock had been resting upside down in its cradle. Time
was still rushing forward as she watched, but it was exactly six and a
half hours off, being dragged forward but wrenched off the frame of
time mankind set down arbitrarily at some point, then made into law.

Where had that time gone?  Down with the great slow sweep of molasses,
spiraling down what cosmic drain?  Could there have been some kind of
Supernatural Intervention that had worked to bring Anna to this
juncture?  What was the point of it?  What was she supposed to learn?

She stared hard into the black of the clock's face to try to see it.

Her life was no longer operating according to the rules and laws set
out by her mother's church.  Episcopalians worshiped the body wrong,
she thought, worshiped the sex of No Sex, which was like a life spent
owning property as an absentee landlord.

There was drag in the frame of time, then the old Episcopal rules of No
Sex but for procreation flopped, red shifted so now it was Sex All the
Time.

It just sounded much more crazy for a person to say she longed to
follow a traditional religious practice with its notions of right and
wrong and of sin and redemption than to claim she'd just witnessed time
stolen by aliens.  Someone brought Anna twelve white peonies edged with
the palest pink, traded these for six and one half hours of one
Saturday--a poem might rest there somewhere in the mathematical
equation.  Six and a half hours over N plus or minus peonies was the
only kind of fraction this would, one day, ever amount to, the time
Anna once spent in recovery from her lost marriage.  Their love was
doomed, had an edge of violence, wasn't yet destructive.  It wasn't yet
destructive, she thought, because there was still the search for God in
it.

Had someone actually been in Anna's house?  Her hands were cold, her
underarms went clammy.  She had the iron she kept on her bedside table.
She had anger, her wits.  She had the up-and down spine of her own
self-righteousness.  She felt briefly haunted, then reason came
flooding in, it was a chain of events that had happened in coincidence,
that Alec brought flowers, triggered the alarm, that the policewoman
knocked the clock over as she sat at the computer to turn the sound
off, then put it back together wrong.  Event simply followed event
along a life's course.  The storytelling came afterward.  It was up to
the storyteller then to make it seem neat and orderly, to convincingly
deliver Anna to the moment when it would seem perfectly necessary to
her that she leave and .  .

never see llm agam.

SHE WAS STILL thinking of the clock's time being stolen then returned
to her by turning it right side up and of the Little Ice Age she had
already lived through and how during it she'd gotten some writing done,
and of the coming and going of various glaciations, and of what hour it
might be in Antarctica where all the longitudinal lines converged, when
the phone began to ring.

It was Alec and he was up the street in the cafe at the French Hotel.
He'd been shopping at Andronico's Park and Rob.  He wondered if Anna
and Maggie might want to wander up and run into him and he could buy
Anna that coffee he still owed her.  Maggie could probably use a hot
chock it.

"Well, " Anna said.  She breathe , trying to keep the walls of her
stomach and bowel from shuddering--she had just been working on getting
her body numb.  "I, of course, would love to, but I'm afraid our little
chaperone has gone off to spend the night at her father's, so wed
probably better decide to take a rain check.  I mean realistically,
Alec?  You know?  Knowing the two of us?  " "Gone?  " Alec said.

Less than five minutes later he was at Anna's front door, his sides
heaving, having sprinted the blocks between them.  "What, " she asked,
"do you think we're doing, Alec?  We need to actually sit and talk
about this and what's going to happen to each of us.  " He couldn't
seem to answer.  He was winded, and his face and shirt were spattered
with big drops from the rain that had just begun to pelt down.  These
huge storms thundered in regularly off the overheated Pacific, their
rains ruining the plantings in the half rebuilt hillsides of the
burned-out canyons.  The underground creeks and sewers of Berkeley had
backed up, the soil was saturated, runoff gushed through manholes, the
mud in the bay fanned out in a blond alluvia.  Inland, in the
Sacramento Delta, hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland were under
water, millions of dollars in croplands drowned.  Drought, quake, fire,
flood, a Biblical cycle of California's disasters.  Why, she wondered,
did anyone want to live here?

Anna let Alec in--how could she do otherwise?  Her having no will to
resist him was part of the compact they'd made, their specific
clockwork.  He kissed her face, her neck, her mouth, half holding her
body up to his, one hand beneath her thigh, so her hips and belly were
raised to him.  She was wearing jeans, a shirt Charlie once gave her as
a joke on which were written these words, A TEE

SHIRT NAMED DESIRE

They stood in the entryway, their bodies entangled, with the hall
lights on.  Danger surrounded them, heightened their lovemaking, made
sex better, as did Anna's passivity and the way she placed hers elf in
the path of Alec's selfishness.  It was raining hard and noisily, but
people still walked by on their way up to dinner in the restaurants and
cafes on Shattuck Avenue.  The light in the entry was the only one on.
The rest of the downstairs was sucked into sudden darkness.

Anna waited to be swept away, her protests nullified.  She couldn't
help but be distracted by thoughts of her house, how it had begun to
seem like an exoskeleton that she was growing, as she-crabs make new
hard shells after the time of molting.

She kissed him but her mind still roamed, a house with peonies, l how
good and thick the quiet was, how far she'd had to travel in order to
come to it.  A house going suddenly dark like this reminded Anna of the
winter her mother spent drinking too much vermouth by hers elf at the
kitchen table.  That was the year her father asked for a divorce in
order to marry the woman who'd been his secretary for a dozen years,
his mistress for ten of these.  Her parents' divorce was the first ever
in Anna's family.  There were elderly aunts still appalled by the fact
of it.

Anna kissed him, her body warming to him, grateful he'd come back to
her.  Her mind watched them.  It was sexy to watch them, his rapturous
intention, his ability to so concentrate, hers to become so completely
pliable and vacant.

"I got in last night.  I couldn't wait until next week to see you, " he
said.

"Let's just hurry, Alec, all right?  Where did you park?  They tow, you
know, at the Park and Shop after an hour.  " She was in drift, thinking
of Gin being left, of her own mother at the kitchen table getting
quietly drunk, this being Margaret's sole avenue of defiance, how a
woman acted inward, taking whatever blows there were into the softness
of her body, while a man might more easily go out and commit his hate
upon the world.

Anna's body let him, let him, let him draw her on and up the stairs,
but the major part of her attention had gone home, was now drifting
through the rooms of a darkened house turning lights on for her mother
so she could find her way to bed.

ALEC FLICKED ON the overhead as they came into her bedroom-they'd never
made love in the dark.  Anna had socks on, no shoes.  He kissed her,
pushed her back onto the bed, pulled at her pants, its zipper, he
yanked her jeans off, pulled her panties down.

He put her panties in her mouth so she could taste the way she
tasted.

Anna had nice full breasts, they hung down a little, were sore
sometimes during her period.  He pushed her bra up off them, pulled her
shirt off.  Her eyes were large, expressive.  He liked to see reaction,
his own power shown back to him.

He leaned forward holding her breasts in each of his moving hands, was
on her then, breathing hard against her hair, brought his face to her
belly, his mouth to her breast and nipple, bit her.

She thought of the long needle she once gave him, his pricking her
there with it--remembering this, she started to rise to him.  He was
hungry, needy, nothing about him was gentle.  This was what Anna loved
in him, also what she hated.

Alec moved down along the midline of her naked belly with his lips and
teeth, pulled at her pubic hair to open her to his teeth and tongue. He
found her bump and lips, his fingers opened her, she stayed as he
showed her, poised just as he placed her.  He told her in short words
that were the code they used for his command, stand, sit, kneel, he'd
say, and she'd wordlessly do these things.

Alec stood.  She watched him, watched him, her eyes hooded, her body
heavy and inert, lying before him like gravity.  He-began to look
around.  She saw he was going to make some thing with her body, use it
as part of his construction.  He planned all this when he was away,
remembering the height of her bed, her weight, the way he would place
her, correct for the discrepancy.  He began to systematically gather
pillows from the top of the bed.

He placed pillows as he wanted them, stacking these along the edge of
the mattresses.  He reached to move her, putting her hips along the
edge on the pillows so she was at the right height for him.  He placed
her arms above her head, told her to keep them there.  Anna floated
above them, watching.

Alec was still fully dressed.  She watched him as he methodically
unbuckled his belt.  His hand slowed on the buckle.  She watched him.
Their eyes caught.  She moaned the slightest moan--she was being caught
up now, as a car on the roller coaster is caught on a hook at a certain
place in the track and will then be ratcheted up.

It caught her, dragged her, body first.  His big hand worked his
button, the zipper.  His hands, his voice, were huge and beautiful, she
felt them fill the deepest parts of her.  Alec dropped his pants and
undershorts but didn't otherwise undress.

His penis, solidly engorged, stood out from beneath his shirt tails.

He stroked it absently as he looked around, casting his eyes over the
pillows, the bedding, to see what else he might need, his eyes coming
back now and then to assess the shape Anna's body made.

"Here, " he said, moving her up and toward himself by taking her by the
hips.  Then his concentration broke.  He smiled, leaned forward,
touched her lips with his knuckles, "God, " he said, "I love you so, "
and she squeezed her eyes shut against the blinding pain of that and
the sound that rose in her throat.  Love was anguish, was some thing
they would never get free of.

"Here, " he said, "Scooch up, good.  " He held her, her hips were
tipped forward and raised.  "Now, spread, " he told her.

She opened her legs to him, her arms still poised above her head.  He
pushed her legs down, open, knees bent.  He pressed, touched her,
watched her eyes as he did -his to see what would move her.  She was
helpless, open, his.

His long fingers moved in and out of her.  His eyes narrowed as he
opened her, bent over just a little, shoved his penis in, his face
closed down, was sucked back into itself.  "My God, " he said.

She cried out with the heat of that first thrust--her cry excited
him.

The lights were on, the curtains open.  The widows on Anna's block
might see if they were interested in watching.  God too was watching,
Anna thought, before remembering there wasn't One.

There was only the fact of their two bodies, the urge and what the two
of them made of it, the this and this and this.

l The Uncertainty Principle THE STORYTELLING IMPULSE Anna noticed,
pretended to go forward but actually worked backward.  It was the net
cast back over a life or world in order to connect events, choose,
bring coherence, an appearance of logic and order to what otherwise
might seem a random chaos.  It gave shape, provided the vast mess with
the look of an internal logic that seemed as neat as clockwork, if

B

follows A, then C follows D. Alec told her the story of Timmy while
they lay together in her bed.  Anna played the movie of that event on
the ceiling of her bedroom, lit with white and moving orbs that were
sunlight reflecting off the birdbath.  She listened to him, and because
she was beginning the practice of trying to hate him, she listened
carefully to the story for a tone of self-justification.  She needed to
hate him in order to get free.

It was the winter of the first big rains.  Cecily was a toddler, Gin
had started back to school at the California College of Arts and Crafts
in Oakland.  She had gone from architecture to fine art, was finishing
her degree at CCAC in painting.  Alec had left Cal and was trying to
get his practice going.  Life was difficult in every way--she was torn
between wanting to be back in the excitement of her artistic promise
and becoming more entrenched in the domestic by having another baby.
She wanted another baby because she didn't want Cecily to go on seeming
like an accident.  She wanted another baby so her new family wouldn't
mirror the fact that she was an only child, believing another baby
could break the curse of her own childhood.  She wanted the geometries
changed from the triangle she'd had growing up to some thing more like
a parallelogram, some thing with four sides, Gin thought, might prove
to be a more stable form.

They were still on Oxford Street, not yet dreaming of Descartes.

Alec had his one-man office in the low-rent part of University, in
that little Moderne tile-faced storefront down the block from
Ristorante Venezia next to the violin shop, empty now.  He had his
models set out in the deep recesses of the plate-glass windows.  He
worked standing up at the drawing table he still had.  He would walk
home for lunch to see Gin when the weather was good.

It rained, he remembered, for weeks without letup--Gin was going
crazy, stuck as she was in the house with a toddler, having no time to
get any of her own work done.  Gin drove Cecily around in the Dodge to
get her to go to sleep, took her to the indoor malls to let her run up
and down the wheelchair ramps and to the University Art Museum to run
through the sloping galleries.  That was when Gin decided she was a
better painter than Hans Hofmann.

She was a better painter intrinsically, though she hadn't yet learned
how to paint.  Gin was working like a maniac.  She painted downstairs
in an in-law apartment in the basement built back into the hill so the
light was lousy, even on a sunny day.  They didn't have money for a
studio, didn't have money to hire a sitter--she tricked Cecily into
sleeping so she could get an extra hour in.  Alec couldn't see why she
needed to add another child to these pressures and burdens.

The house was already too small, then the rains began.  The sky didn't
clear for months.  Their neighbor's sister came from Argentina to help
with his children.  Angela expected the normal summer of January and
February in the Southern Hemisphere, couldn't speak a word of English,
was too depressed to learn, took pills one day in an accidental
overdose.  Gin drove her to the ERat Alta Bates and her brother sent
her home.

Alec walked home at night to the ungodly mess in the living room made
by Cecily's play group, the toys and food left strewn around.  His life
was in free fall, he'd tumbled out of Columbia, arrived at Cal and had
ended up somehow in a small cold dump on the Left Coast of Nowhere,
still waiting for a phone call from the good father he never had.

It seemed such a vast dull wilderness to him at times.  There were no
paintings in the art museums, no important theater, no new buildings he
honestly admired.  The best work in the Bay Area was modest and
residential and had all been done so long before.

The best work by modernists was in Los Angeles, was being done by those
who followed Neutra and Wright, but that was a city Alec actively
hated.  He had been passed over for tenure at Cal.  Even two years
after Charles Moore left, Alec was still expecting the call that would
ask him to come back to New Haven.  This was an irrational hope since
Alec had yet to do any kind of remarkable work and Moore had only known
him to nod to in the halls.

Then one morning he awoke to the radio report that one of his former
colleagues, a China scholar at Cal, had been killed in the night when
the hillside behind his house collapsed and buried it.

Alec lay on the damp sheets looking at the geometries of the face of
Gin, who seemed both too young and too old for him.  She said git it
and ohrnge for range and ant for azvnt.  He thought of Professor Wing
Li Po, who survived the Cultural Revolution, got to the Gold Mountain
only to be buried in his bed beneath a sea of mud and books.  Alec
wasn't up to this.  He couldn't make enough money to take care of a
wife and kid.  He was a failure and was filled with dread for his
future.

And what was he doing here at the melting edge of the continent living
atop a strike-slip fault?  He easily could imagine being buried beneath
his own stacks of books--he read the spines to himself in the half
light only because he had memorized their order on the shelf--24
Pattern Language, Michael Graves, Wright's Usonian Houses.  Whatever
pressed on his chest gained weight.

If awake, Gin was talking.  She was talking, yakking, hawking him,
wanting another baby, needing another baby, to undo the old bad magic.
Actually, he said to her, we happen to need another baby about like we
need a hole in the head.  Where did she imagine the money for all this
was going to come from?  He turned sarcastic, taunting.  She said he
had started to do crazy things, doodling his name in Cyrillic on a
napkin instead of talking to her in a restaurant like a normal person.
He was also yelling at her, she said, bellowing when he got in from
work and found the glass table in the living room smeared with shmutz
and paw prints from the little kids, Never again!  he was supposed to
once have bellowed--Alec believed it, he supposed.  It sounded somewhat
like him, though he had no memory of actually having said it.

He had just begun working with Carlo, who was still single, as Alec
should have been.  Carlo was free to travel to visit his family in
England and in Italy, free to relocate to New Haven or Manhattan.

Free to come and go and frequently visit in L. A. , where Frank Gehry
and Frank Israel were doing some interesting things.  Gin wouldn't go
there, wouldn't actually go anywhere.  She had her dead mother and her
dead father planted in the cemetery, the one you got to by driving down
Pleasant Valley.  It was all Pleasant this or that around here,
Pleasant Hills and Pleasant Grove.  The very word made his teeth ache
in the way of cotton candy at Coney Island.

Gin couldn't travel because of her painting and the baby, she couldn't
move because she had her network of school friends and art friends and
mom friends, women named Yasmeen and Brittle and Sod, women who
suffered from allergies to house dust or house guests, all of them
self-proclaimed survivors of this and that.

"Oh, fuck you, Alec, " she'd begun to say.

Alec's future was finished, while Carlo's stretched out before him like
velvet gliding along the tight rump of a beautiful woman.

Carlo went places, dated various ones--his taste in women was achingly
exquisite.  Alec watched him jealously.  His own life had compacted
down into an existence, a same deadly present, attending the same
goddamned Berkeley party at which people discussed a few things, public
versus private schools, the capabilities of their personal computers,
the safety of their Volvos.  Or they tried to tell you the whole plot
of a movie in their largely incomprehensible foreign accents.

Once when someone asked him what he thought, Alec said, Frankly, I was
just thinking how much I'd like for someone to shoot me so I won't have
to take part in this conversation.

He was of course quite drunk.  Gin gave him a poisoned look.

He'd actually been thinking about Carlo's women friends, especially the
long-legged blonde in a little black dress and black hose and pneumatic
shoes who was flirting with Alec from across the table.  She had taken
one shoe off and had put her stockinged foot up into Alec's lap, where
he secretly cradled it back against his stiffening cock.

In those days he always felt strapped, robbed, chintzed.  He watched
himself begin to go into panic mode while spending, to irrationally
stock up on paper products or to charge cheap junk off late-night
TV--he once bought the Ginsu knives, put them on his credit card.  Alec
already felt haunted by the father who wasn't even dead.  He was losing
faith in himself, in everything he'd hope for.

Alec knew he was objectively more talented than many Cal had retained.
He watched who it was they did promote--it was as bad as Yale, not one
was Jewish.  This was their loss.  Cal lost Alec, but they'd lost
Charles Moore too.  Alec was ashamed of himself.  He'd knocked a
student up.  Still, he did then go ahead and do the honorable thing by
marrying her.

He and Gin caught the other staring at one another in the
night-blacked mirror of their living room window, each wondering if the
other was them who they might have freely chosen, each probably
thinking, Maybe not.

He blamed her, but blamed himself more.  His heart actually went out to
her--she needed the more stable forms so a Queens boy would appeal.
Gin acted tough but didn't really know the first thing about how to
take care of hers elf, her baggy cotton underwear and the fact that she
didn't even know how to put her bra on right, having had no mother to
show her.  Instead of putting her arms into the straps, then reaching
up behind to fasten it like a normal female, Gin stood staring down at
the mechanism, hooking it at her waist as if it was a puzzle she had to
solve.  She fastened it, then moved it all the way around so she could
push hers elf awkwardly into it.

He may have said never again but he didn't mean it, very obviously.  He
may have said he wanted no more babies until they could alford it--this
is what he'd meant, at least.  He may have complained that he'd never
been to India or hadn't yet seen the Centre Pompidou.  She hated
traveling even then.  He wanted to take Gin on the real honeymoon they
missed because she was so sick when they spent those few days at
Wellfleet.  He understood that on the Caribbean Islands or anywhere
else along the Equator the sun plunged suddenly down like Icarus
without a transitional dusk or twilight.  He only wanted to show her
the falling of the most swift night.

He'd begun imagining traveling to Italy with the long-legged girl Carlo
was no longer dating, to envision his escape from the milk stink in the
Dodge station wagon, the smear of gummed cookies on glass table tops,
the cracker crumbs being continually ground into the leather seats of
the chrome chairs designed by Mies van der Rohe.

Gin was always witchy, could probably read his mind.  She narrowed her
eyes at him, Fine, she told him, you go do what you need to do and I'll
get my own stuff done and maybe we'll hook up later when it's more
convenient.

She was so Californian, so intrinsically hip and cool about the fact
that their marriage was falling apart.  It was nothing, a spat, an
extended low-grade argument that lasted a couple of weeks, a month or
two at most.  Alec wasn't cool at all.  He may have said no to a baby
but he clearly hadn't meant it.  He was a Queens boy, a family man.

The rains continued, that winter becoming the wettest on record.  It
rained for twenty-eight days without ceasing.  Books in the basement
molded.  The water table rose.  They slept in the same bed but never
reached across the clammy distance, speaking only in cold courtesy.
December became January that eroded into February.

The Sacramento and American Rivers overflowed their levies.

More lives were lost.

Gin seemed so tough, but had been harmed so deeply and so early and
was still so easily wounded.  She was an orphan who didn't always dry
hers elf thoroughly after she bathe .  The wet of her pubic hair
dampened her underpants.  He was almost ten years older.

He'd been in the world, he could teach her things.

Gin's face swam as he sat working at his drafting table, her big eyes
watching him as they once had from the back of the classroom, her
hamburger shoes, the femininity that she warded off so successfully
until he made a house for her and she felt safe in it.

He blamed her though he knew she was as ambivalent as he was, hadn't
set out to trap him.  They were careless, so passionate, reason was
simply overwhelmed.

He sat working as rain washed the plate-glass windows in great sheets,
and suddenly understood it, he'd been cruel to her, withholding.  She
needed him to want to marry her--this is what a new baby would do.  The
night before she and Alec married in Queens, an old aunt from New
Haven--a Bolshie and true vulgarian-began to talk at the rehearsal
party about shiksas.  You had da watch out for a shiksa because that
item came with the goyishe hartz.

"Excuse me?  " Gin asked.  It may have been that she had honestly
never heard the term before.

"Cold fish, " the aunt retorted.  Stuart and Viv were dumbfounded,
stumbling, such words of derogation, they told Gin, were never uttered
in their carefully tolerant household.  Gin looked up the word, she
told Alec later.  Shiksa derived from the German for blemished.

Gin was an orphan who didn't hold hers elf in high regard and so
believed he'd married her not for love but because he was Jewish and
bound by duty to marry the blemished girl he had knocked up.

He knew it now, Their needing another baby, he understood was a matter
of spiritual calculus.  Another baby who was wanted and planned for
would subtract all the other negatives, split the two of them off from
the sad path her parents' lives had taken.  They would be
intentional.

They'd do it right this time, he thought.  Go away to a Caribbean
island where the sun fell straight into the sea, have candlelight and
romance and she'd slip her shoe off at dinner and he'd cradle her foot
against his balls and they'd make each other hot by talking about the
ways they might fuck, get the check, rush off.

Alec was so excited by realizing he actually had what he wanted that he
locked the office without calling first, wanting to rush home to
demonstrate his desire for her.  He took his umbrella and set out, up
University to Shattuck, winding up Oxford in the soaking rain.  Cars
whooshed by him.  The floods swept up onto the sidewalk, drenching his
slacks and shoes.  He was a neat man but didn't care.  Alec's heart
overfilled with goodness, he was a family man, he had a wife and infant
daughter, and his love for them had conquered selfishness so he'd left
the Dodge home for Gin to use.

The house was brown-shingled and stood on the uphill side of Oxford
above Indian Rock.  She was a scrambler, able to work so few hours in
her painting studio she rented time in slots to other students from
CCAC, so Alec wasn't altogether surprised to see the battered VW bug
sitting in their driveway.  DEFY AUTHORITY one bumper sticker read.
Another said ATOM KRAFT?  NEIN DANKE!

The rest was simply harder to factor, that Gin was standing outside in
the steady rain at the door to the studio with water dripping from the
peak of the hood of her blue parka, face wet, her legs bare.  She had
been laughing, he supposed, or crying.  She stood rattling the handle
of the glass door to the studio on the street floor of the house,
pounding on the glass, calling for the person inside to unlock it.  It
was a baby trick, locking someone out, so Alec knew it had to be
Cecily--she was a toddler.  But why was Gin dressed the way she was?

Then Gin turned, saw him, her face changed in a way that no amount of
time passing would ever undo.  Alec saw her fear of him, the tall dark
man striding up the walkway--he was a monster, everything a woman
dreaded.  It would have been easy enough to strike her.  She was
trapped back against the garbage cans with nowhere to go.

Time froze then, went glacial.  Seconds expanded.  He saw it all in
perfect detail, her hands that were small and wet, how they clutched
childishly at the front of the parka to keep it closed--she was wearing
nothing at all beneath it, he saw, and his heart over welled with pity
for her little body, its silliness, its frailty.

Only the rain stood between them.  Her bare legs were stuck down into
huge red rubber rain boots much too large for her.

"Alec, " she said, moving back from the door, moving back into the
recess that was the other door into the basement.  "This is not what
you think.  Believe me, Alec.  This is nothing, I swear to you.

I

was modeling for him, Alec, posing, like I used to do in college?

Nothing is going on here, Alec.  Don't go crazy with this.  A person
has choices.  You can honestly choose to not go crazy here.  I was
modeling for him, like I did for the life-drawing classes to earn money
when I was in school.  " He saw him through the window, it was the boy
she'd met at CCAC.  Gin thought Timmy was amusing, Alec had always
hated him.  Alec had no use for the Satellite Male.  She let Timmy use
the studio but didn't charge him because he never had any money.  This
was because Timmy was a mooch and loser.  He snuck around, coming over
only when he knew Alec wasn't home.

Alec's rage was a perfect thing, towering, reasonable, cold.  He could
murder the boy, even kill the both of them and get away with it, he
knew--the cops would understand it.  They were like the guys he grew up
with in the neighborhood--that you could kill a wife who was fucking
around was another of the rules in Queens.  This boychik didn't deserve
to live on purely aesthe ic grounds, the greasy blond hair, the shitty
posture.  He was one of the fashionably pseudo-homo types who came off
opportunistic ally bi so women felt so safe with them when he was
actually the most ruthless kind of predator.  How tediously predictable
this shit was, how Oedipal, how Iagol.

Alec glanced at Gin.  The pathos, really, that the attentions of a
little creep could make her look so flushed and alive.

They each heard Cecily calling for her mother from inside of the house.
Alec could actually hear his daughter twice, once in the room above and
then again on the baby monitor Gin kept in the painting studio. Timmy
was trapped in there, having locked this woman, a mother, his kindly
benefactor, outside in the rain as some kind of twisted joke. Alec
looked at her--wife, orphan, mother of his child.

Alec became perfectly cold.  He raised one long leg, aimed, kicked the
glass door apart right at the doorknob, aimed perfectly, recoiling just
so, and was therefore uncut.  Timmy was trying to push up a window that
was fixed open a few inches with crime nails.  His shirt was open, his
jeans big and loose and hanging off his hipbones.  Where did they get
these half-dressed slobs?

Alec strode to him, grabbed him by the hair at the nape of his neck and
by the waistband of his baggy pants.  Timmy was long, stringy, but
didn't weigh anything.  Alec tossed him in a heap in the corner. "Stay,
" he ordered as if Timmy were a dog.  The kid reeked of turp and the
sweet stink of marijuana smoke, his face gone white.  Timmy's eyes gave
off that flinty video-came raed sheen that came from being really,
really loaded.

Timmy curled on the floor to guard himself.  Alec's rage was beautiful,
just as judicial as when he smacked his cousin Pauly, shoved him face
first in the snow bank, then hauled him out and patiently ran him,
fully dressed, under the warm water in the shower, before he got him to
sit corrected in warm pajamas to write out this pledge,

"I, Paul S. Dershowitz, do solemnly swear never to throw ice balls
vichiously as it might hurt someone.  " Alec went to the easel to look
at the canvas, took his reading glasses out of his suit pocket.  The
nude was recognizably Gin, head tipped back, legs spread, the flesh
done in ripe swatches.

"You fucking little shit, " Alec said.  He picked up a palette knife,
but the edge wasn't going to be sharp enough.  Alec looked at it
carefully, appraisingly--the work was good.  The boy was talented and
he'd clearly studied his Lucian Freud, his Francis Bacon.  "Too bad, "
Alec said aloud.  He went to get Gin's matte knife.  She used this to
nick the fabric in order to start the rip in the canvas she bought by
the roll and stretched hers elf.  Her clothes and hair in those days
often smelled to him like canvas dust, like sizing and gesso.  He
strode back to Timmy's painting and began to stab at it.

Cecily was crying on the intercom.

"Don't hurt him, " Gin said.  "If you hurt him, I'll leave you.

" "You'll leave me?  " Alec stopped in order to ask her.

"Why can't you listen, Alec.  He didn't do anything to me.  We didn't
do anything.  He wanted to paint me, he asked me to sit for him.  He
was doing it for us in trade--he was going to give me the canvas.  "
"Oh, I'm absolutely sure he was, " Alec told her.  He was peering over
his glasses.  He went back to slashing at the picture.

"It wasn't sex, Alec.  " Alec turned and stared at her over his reading
glasses.  "Gin, " he said, "this kind of thing is always sex.  " "You
don't kill a person over a painting.  " "Oh no?  " he asked.  He
continued hacking the picture up.  He was in a kind of rapture, the boy
was good, good, good, he thought as he stabbed it.  He was good and
Alec was a failure and his wife, in her disloyalty, had exposed this to
the world.

Gin abandoned Timmy, went upstairs to Cecily.  That's what saved their
marriage, Alec later thought.

"Hey, no really, it's cool, man.  No, really.  " Alec turned to look at
him.  Timmy had gotten up.  "Picture was turning out shitty anyways, so
who gives a fuck.  " He shrugged elaborately, was slinking over to
Alec, one hand shoved down into his pants pocket to show he meant no
harm, the other extended as if to shake hands with him.

Alec blinked, took his glasses off, put them carefully into the paint
tray of the easel, turned, lay one big paw on Timmy's shoulder so he
could carefully aim, hauled off, struck him.  The blow caught Timmy on
the hard orbit of his eyebrow and cheekbone.

He staggered backward, hit the wall and slid so he was sitting in the
splintered wood and shards of glass from the kicked-in door.  He was
barefoot, Alec saw.  The red rain boots--like those of a huge
child's--were his, quite obviously.

"You asshole!  " Timmy yelled indignantly.  He stared down at his
bleeding feet.  "You hit me!  I'm cut.  You wrecked my painting, man.
I'm gonna fucking sue you!  " "Oh, " Alec breathe , as he walked toward
him, "I so sincerely hope you do.  " On the Mystical Shape of the
Godhead The increase of disorder or entropy with time is one example of
what is called an arrow of time, some thing that distinguishes the past
from the future.  . . . Why does disorder increase in the same
direction of time as that which the universe expands?

STEPHEN W. HAWKING, A Brief History of Time This Do Not Work and It Do
Not Play WHEN YELLED AT by clients given to raging, Do you know who I
am?  on the telephone, Alec had begun to gaze off toward his far
wall--he kept it largely blank for just this kind of staring.  He'd
hung a print, one of the numbered but untitled Rothkos from his last
and most bleak period--Alec thought of that time as Dark over Black--on
a bulletin board where he also tacked obituaries.  His current favorite
was that of Blanche Hunter Stern, who had been voted Miss Sunset
District in I928 The language was perfumed by nostalgia, sweet and
dense as cake.

Oh, no, please!  Oh, do rave on, Carlo might have said aloud to this
client, one of the several they had who was not just rich but ncb! Alec
had just read that I24 of the world's richest people owned more than
everything owned by all the peoples and the governments of the world's
forty-five poorest countries, and it could be that this guy was one of
them.

These people were part of the mushroom cloud that was global capitalism
in which all corporations merged into the same few people and they went
ever upward to sit on the right hand of God in heaven where they became
One, having achieved Singularity.

Alec put the rzch man on the speakerphone so the man could somehow
cosmically hear his own foolishness, then set about tidying up his
desk.  His eyes fell on a handwritten note on his bulletin board, stuck
there with a pushpin, some thing he and Jerry Bloom had found taped to
a slot machine in Reno.  THIS DO NOT WORK AND

IT DO NOT PLAY

"This do not work and it do not play, " he read aloud.

"What?  " the rich man said--his voice bounced around all the corners
of Alec's office in the way a rich man liked his voice to do.

Alec, startled, hit the button and picked up the handset, then became
transfixed by the shape of it, thinking, this lack or absence.

The client had begun talking again.

Didn't a person like this stop to consider the cost in man hours before
he called long-distance?  Alec had better things to do than pretend to
listen to him.  With deregulation, phone minutes had become just much
too cheap and there were too many people in the world and they were all
talking on the phone that minute or forwarding this or that unfunny
joke by e-mail, everyone was simply much too close at hand and not the
slightest bit particular.

How did anybody hope to ever get anything doneD Couldn't this man be
quiet now?  Conversations lasted way too long.  Language was now the
same flimsy junk as what everyone bought by the tons and tons in the
millions of aisles in all the tens of thousands of malls and Wal-Marts
and super stores where Americans shopped and shopped with carts
overgrown by giantism into personal handcarts, this crap lugged home,
kept for a short while, then carted off to the bay, where it was
shoveled in as landfill.  His next-door neighbor, Cliff Peech, had made
a cool couple of million manufacturing extra large-sized household
HandiCans.  They were equipped with handles so the garbage trucks could
lift and dump without any of the contents touching human hands.

So much junk was bought and sold--people could just buy it, then drive
it straight to the water and push it in without ever bringing it home,
thereby cutting out one whole level of bullshit.

Words were junk, as infinite as stars, and they were being uttered and
said and written that very moment, tapped in, put out, sent, going out
into the ether that was either nowhere or was the porno chat room where
the lid was completely off but no actual intimacy of the mouth-to-mouth
or the skin-on-skin would ever transpire.  What he needed was
what--before Anna--he used to lie on his chaise and long for.  He
thought of this as Sex with an Actual Person.

He'd sent Anna an e-mail that morning, but he needed now to go see her,
needed to speak with her, not electronically, but face-to-face, in
their mother tongue, with their lips nearly touching.

His assistant Sandy buzzed him the moment he got off to remind Alec of
his meeting with Carlo, also to say the registrar had called from
Lawrence Hall to say the class in sunsets had been canceled again so
she was crediting the charges to Alec's credit card.

"Sorry, " Sandy added.  "I know how much you were looking forward to
it.  " Alec felt the old sorrow welling up.  His tears might fall onto
the blueprints spread out on his worktable, Was this to be his
contribution?  Two kids and the one big house that was so good he was
now doomed to build it over and over again?

He had the newspaper article he'd knifed out with his X-Acto blade to
go on his Blanche Hunter Stern Memorial bulletin board.

An earthquake in Assislyesterday killed four men fiho zDere examining
the basilica after an earlier tremor had cracked a fresco of SL
Francis.

The second quake destroyed that fMresco and others, and dust billored
up in the church.

He was not to mark himself in grief--so instructed the Torah.  He was
not to gash himself with mourning, or Alec might, just then, have
struck his face with his glass paperweight, while keening and saying
these words, Giotto, Pietro Lorenzetti, Cimabue.

"You read it, " Alec said to Carlo a few minutes later.  They were
staring dully at a thick packet of pages that lay equidistant between
them on the conference table, pages held together with the biggest
paper clip--a Bull Dog clip, much bigger than any paper clip would have
dreamed of being when Alec was a kid.  More Big Dickism, Alec
thought.

"You read it and tell me what it says.  " Alec pushed the pages more
toward Carlo, took his glasses off.  He put his cheek down on the cool
of the marble.  The table was Italian, pure, clean, classical.

He and Anna could run away, go off and live in Tuscany.

After a moment of Alec's lie-down, Carlo cleared his throat and
remarked, "One of us is probably going to have to decide to be the
artistic one.  " Carlo waited.  "One artistic?  " he asked.  "The other
the reasonable businessman?  " He picked the pages up, riffled them,
set the packet back down again.  "We could flip for it?  " "I'm in
trouble, " Alec told him.  His cheek still lay on the hard cold stone.
Carlo waited.

"I've fallen in love with a woman not my wife, " Alec said.  He watched
the molecules of his breath fog the glassy surface.

"I know, " Carlo said.

Alec sat up and stared at him indignantly.  "What do you mean, you
know?  " he asked.  "You can't know, Carlo.  How can you know if I
haven't told you?  " "Well, firstly, you're pa the ic--just look at
you. " Alec put his head down again.  After a moment's rest he riff
fled through the pages, looking at them from the same flat plane.  They
measured nearly a quarter inch.  This was a modified policy that would
provide their company with its very intricate liability insurance,
protecting them against malpractice claims.  It was statistically
impossible, their broker said, that they would not now be sued for
architectural malpractice.

The pages were black with type in the ugliest of faces, set with tiny
margins, no human wrote these words, Alec could see, and no human would
ever read them until a house fell in or burned up or was swept away by
mud and the claim reached out and through and touched everyone and
finally was brought back to them.  Then the words would be combed with
the avidity of the office staff at Ecole Bilingue searching the kids'
scalps for lice.

He and Carlo were going to be sued.  They would be sued sooner rather
than later.  They would be sued because they had malpractice insurance
and they worked for rich people and rich people all had lawyers who
needed to earn more money and everyone had unreasonable expectations,
these days, about what was and was not preventable and because Alec's
and Carlo's insurance company was going to settle any claim.  Alec's
father was right, everything did cost you money, especially having
money.  They were going to have to hire a lawyer, a specialist in this
kind of thing, to protect them from the people who were protecting
them.

"Secondly, " Carlo added gently, "Julie tells me this is so and I have
learned to listen to my wife.  " Alec sat up, pushing the pages across
at Carlo.  "Here, " he said.

"Fair's fair.  You do it this time, what do you think?  And you can
take the next turn too.  " It suddenly seemed vitally important that he
go in and tap out another e-mail to Anna regarding the earthquake in
Italy--it was imperative.  He needed her to have all the words he ever
knew, to have her eyes running over them, for her to be able to say
them in the clear voice of her mind, the voice he found very pure and
musical,

"The Basilica of St.  Francis of Assisi contained the most important
and extensive early Renaissance decorative cycles in Italy outside the
Sistine Chapel, where, art historians agree, Italian painting was born.
" "And dust billowed up in the church, " he said, to excuse himself,
grabbing his suit coat off the rack.

Carlo cleared his throat.

"Every one knows then?  " Alec asked as he got to the door.

"Did you honestly expect it not to show?  " "Every one?  " he asked
again.

"Well, " he said, "I suppose that would depend on what you mean by
everyone?  " "The women?  " he asked.

Carlo nodded.  "No one told Julie, " he said.  "It was just that Anna
had begun, well, radiating happiness.  " "Veronique?  " Alec asked.  He
said this name because he couldn't bring himself to pronounce the two
syllables that belonged to Gin.

"I don't think so, but who can say?  " They both waited, listened.

"She knows, " Alec decided.  "That woman knows everytlung.  " He had to
go see Anna.  He was nearly to the door before he thought to ask, "How
did you figure it was the two of us?  " "Simple logic, " Carlo told
him.  "Easy to deduce, actually, since neither of you has ever much
bothered to speak to anybody else.  " SHE WAITED LYING flat-out
facedown on the bed.  He'd asked her to wait, she was very good at it.
He was doing things, bringing things he thought they might need.  He
picked up the caramelizing iron, the sash to her white bathrobe, a jar
of waxy cream.

She offered her wrists to him and he tied them with one end of the
bathrobe, secured the other, which he knotted, by closing it in the
sash of the window at the head of the bed.  Their eyes met over the
iron--the shaft of it was bright black, its wooden handle blond and
smoothly polished.  He waxed the handle carefully with the fragrant
cream, placed the iron on the nightstand, began to undo his belt.

"Turn back over, " he said.

She lay on the sheet, head turned, faced away from him.  He was all
things to her, all men she'd known, all she would ever know, and she
was all women.  She was hers elf and she was Gin and she was the kinky
one in Hell's Kitchen that he'd fucked with her head covered by a
pillowcase.  She had been transported, was in the trance of it.  She
heard him slipping his belt through its loops, sitting on the creaking
chair to remove his shoes.  He unzipped his pants, slipped out of
them--she heard the soft sound as he folded them, his walking over to
hang them on a hanger on the knob of the folding closet, then his
footsteps as he came back to her.  Her face was still averted.

"How many?  " he asked.

"Ten, " she said.  She waited, the word catheted.  Numbers were pure
sex to them.  There was the faint whoosh as the leather was raised, the
higher whirl as it flew, cutting the air as he brought it down on her,
then the loud wet smack as it struck.  Heat jumped, spilled out,
spread, was rapturous, she moved against the agony that bloomed, turned
sweet, lessened.  Then nothing for a minute, then the burn that began
to burn more deeply, into the muscle and toward the bone.

"Count, " he said.

"Nine, " she said to him.

She waited for it to come.  It was as carefully placed and well
considered as he considered everything, how he'd built his house and
how he'd made his life and how he'd come to love a woman who would be
leaving him.  Each had always known it.

There was the whiz of its singing, the slap, its sting, her cry, then
the deeper burning.  Then a softer one and another soft one, then a
waiting.  It was music, it was lovely, he was perfect at it, he moved
them patiently over her.  He could do it forever if he wanted--raise
his arm and lower it until he tired of it.  He moved them over her
covering her with heat, it was all part of one song, the stinging, her
counting, waiting.  Finished, he shoved the window up, didn't free her
wrists.

"Now kneel, " he said.  Anna knelt on the bed with her head down,
bottom up, her head cradled forward, resting on her elbows.

Soft air moved in through the open windows, was cooling the heat of her
thighs and buttocks.  She waited.  He held her by the hips in either of
his two big hands.  The girl in Hell's Kitchen once asked him to fuck
her with his whole hand.

His fingers found her clitoris, moved it, he shoved his thumb into her
ass, put two fingers in her cunt, fucked her slowly, exploringly.

He stopped, moved away, opened the jar again, asked for her hands.  She
rested forward on her cheek and shoulder, put her hands back between
her knees.  Alec put some of the cream on her fingers and held them
against his cock tip--the waxiness melted between them, into him.  He
smoothed it into himself, then began doing this to her, doing it
carefully as if polishing a beloved object, the hood of her clitoris,
her lips, the puckered rim of her anus.  He pulled her hips to move her
toward him.  The bed shuddered as he climbed up onto it to kneel behind
her.

She waited for the smooth shape of the polished wooden handle.

Instead he touched her with his finger, entered, shoving in past the
sphincter that locked tightly down to keep everything out and so was
like her soul.  She needed him, needed this violation.  He turned,
pushed himself in and out of her, then removed his finger.

She felt the bluntness of Alec's cock bump at her.  Her cunt was an
open wetness that throbbed now wanting him, his fist, his arm, his
entire person that would be the merging that was the opposite of birth.
He wanted this smaller place, its tightness, also to give the pain of
it to her, ripping her, the pain and the sexiness of asking her to
suffer it for him.  She'd asked--he made her wait.  She'd asked for it
knowing it would change her, she wanted to be changed by him, for his
imprint to stay on her no matter where she went.

"You need to scooch back, " he said.  She reached out and brought
pillows to her stomach to arrange hers elf.  "Good, " he said, "now
press back into me.  " The pain was searing, she couldn't help but move
forward to get away from it.  "I can't do this.  " He had softened.
"Say no, " he told her.

"No, " she repeated.  "Don't, " she said.  "I can't.  " No was what he
needed.  No hardened him, made him into the long black stick that
finally stuck.  He held her hips and shoved up deeply in and it was
better then.

They waited.

"Are you all right?  " he asked after a small moment.  He said this in
his real voice, not the altered one he used for sex, the voice that
became thick and ropey.

"Don't move just yet.  " Anna needed to wait, to be able to relax, to
let the feeling spread.  She was holy, her body holy, her asshole holy,
holy as the earth to which she was being united by virtue of death and
dirt and shit and by this which was the opposite of birth.  She needed
to wait while she got used to feeling illuminated, full, bright with
the feeling that stood right at the edge of pain but did no longer
really partake of it.  Their love was drastic, risky.  It was singular,
there would be no other.  The daytime sky outside was bright as heaven,
stars lay in their infinitude on just the other side of the thin glaze
of vanishing atmosphere.  Her asshole, one light within such enormous
darkness.

"All right, " she finally said.

"Okay.  Now press back into me.  " Time stopped, might or might not
ever begin again.  Numbers changed, became erotic.  She began to count
the long slow strokes he took, she was counting, waiting, needing to
come to the place where the pain would open out and become wordless and
soundless and she would need more rather than less of him.

"Here, " he said.  "Give me your hand again.  " She reached back to
give it to him.  He had the jar open, put the cream on her fingers,
held her fingers with his fingers atop them, placing them down against
her clitoris, now bulging, heated, throbbing.  He moved her fingers
there, he'd stopped with his penis shoved deeply inside her.

She moved and moved and began to move on her own and began to feel it
then.  She was opening as if she was a flower.  The peony stood for
what was everlasting.  She was becoming known to him, he to her, as
completely known as she'd ever known another person.  She needed to
stop thinking.  She had become the silent earth, also its vaulted
heavens.  She was changed now, was nothing but the shape he made, she
could feel him in every part of her, in the architecture of her body.

"Can I come now?  " she asked, but she was already coming.  She came
hard in both cunt and ass and he came as she did and they were a single
thing in coming, a single pulsing, one pulse, first bright then bright
then dimming.

AND IT WASN"T just a house's size, Gin once told Anna, but the
pretense it made to permanence.  A building wouldn't last, but it did
want to pretend it would.  A house took so long to build, cost so much,
depended on so many other people for its making.  The architect was
really the most tragic of artists, she thought, everything he did was
so publicly displayed, set out to be judged and ridiculed.  He might
have to drive by it again and again and see its strengths and
weaknesses and the way it became old so soon or dated and still stood
there in all its shame and failure.

It was estimated, Gin told Anna, that the average viewer in an art
museum looks at a piece for eleven seconds.  Someone clocked it with a
stopwatch.  The visual arts showed, were set out, displayed.

Anna was lucky to be a poet, she said, because writing was so much more
hidden, so much harder, really, for the other person to ever get at.
Reading just took so much more time.

Time was the money of the nineties, its drug, its currency, and there
was no one in Berkeley as busy as Gin.  She was accelerated in her
ascendancy.  Of all their friends, they agreed, it was Gin who was
going to make it.  Because of this a vein of envy ran 274 through the
women in their circle, it was delicate, barely perceptible, an antique
tracery.  Gin had what they all wanted, kids and husband, the house
and the career.  She had also eerily ceased to age.

Julie sometimes called Gin Baxter our prodigious friend.

Veronique once left this message on Anna's machine,

"Oh, and I ave one other new"--this was the singular of ners.  "She is
having another show, can you be live it?  What eees the matter with the
es woman?  " Veronique hadn't even needed to say who it was she was
referring to.

Alec called Gin a scrambler, he admired her.  Anna admired her too.
How could you not admire her?  She was like the home team you couldn't
help rooting for.  She would let nothing stop her.

She'd hauled hers elf up from the house on McGee, the place where her
father lost the keys to the car, never bothered to replace them, so the
old Studebaker rotted on its tires and weeds grew up through the
floorboards.

Gin didn't get sick or nap or waste a day nursing a bad mood or a
hangover.  Her canvases were large, she worked indoors.  She wasn't one
to sketch, so she didn't travel well.  She had worries, it was work
that saved her.  It was when the kids were little she realized she
could barely endure vacations--she was just too anxious to relax and
put her feet up anymore.  They went away for two weeks, she always
said, and she fell four or five weeks behind.

Home with two little kids, Gin had no time to paint but painted
anyway.  She took classes in drawing, painting, glassblowing,
printmaking, changed from CCAC to the San Francisco Art Institute,
studied under Joan Brown and Manuel Neri.  She used resin and plaster
and various metals in her castings.  She used her life, her own
childhood tragedy, as if it was physical matter.

Her childhood was a disaster, and she had long ago become determined
that her children would suffer none of that.  She would, she told her
friends whenever a couple split, do anything she needed to in order to
avoid divorce.  Her voice was low.  She completely meant it.

The jealousy of Gin showed only in little things--the tiny glee that
ran through their circle that spring when it was rumored that Alec was
seeing Anna, the one small fissure in the so-far-perfect edifice known
in Berkeley as the Baxter House.

Gin never worked harder than she did that spring.  She was talking
seriously with Dolora Conningham--everyone met Dolora at that party
Gin gave for her.  Dolora was a high-powered someone from somewhere
amazingly important.

Serene called with an even newer new, the Whitney was buying a piece of
Gin's--it was part of the video thing she called "Bungalow.  " Why is
it, Anna asked, that Gin's success always seems to convince the rest
of us that we've already failed?

Ah well, Serene answered, Remember what Balzac says, that fame's the
only sunshine of the dead.

l A WEEK BEFORE the kids got out of school for the summer, Gin phoned
to ask Anna out to lunch.  Gin never went out to lunch anymore, she
told Anna.  She'd dropped off the face of the earth, had been working
day and night getting her show together, hadn't seen Anna, hadn't seen
anyone.  She just heard from Veronique that Anna was selling the house.
They needed to catch up.

Anna was so flustered by this call she had to slow down and speak
deliberately to avoid stammering.  Her lips, her entire face, felt
suddenly huge and rubbery.  She slowed down, lowered her voice in both
volume and in range, spoke slowly, but her mind was in a wild tumble.
What did this mean?  That Gin knew?  Her voice was entirely friendly.
Did it mean she didn't know or that she knew and didn't care?

They spoke lightly of various things, the new head at the French
school, Veronique's being pregnant again, Carlo's buying the sports car
from Anna as a surprise for Julie's birthday.  She heard hers elf
speaking slowly, even humorously, but when she got off the phone, she
noticed that she'd been holding the phone so tightly the muscle in her
upper arm had begun to cramp.  They had agreed to meet at Chez
Panisse.

Nor could Alec decipher it.  He'd believed, when Gin mentioned it, he
heard Gin say she and Anna were going out for lunch and a shave.

Alec was standing at the sink in the kitchen drinking a glass of water
when Gin told him this--he spat water against the splashboard, then
nearly choked trying to draw his next breath.

You what?

he would have bellowed at her in any other circumstance.  How could
women be so insane?  His mind reeled, a kaleidoscope porno of
skin-flick images, mouths and limbs, their intersection, the cunt lips
and asses of these two women whose bodies--both his, not his--he knew
so well.  He hovered above them looking down as they lay together naked
to have their bikini wax, if this is what having "a shave" might mean?
His soul was the small brown thing that witnessed from the ceiling,
blinded, a nothing, only fur and a heartbeat.  Men were nothing,
unnecessary.  Women went off, spoke their truer secrets each to each.
They would have lunch together--might they talk about him?  Waxing?  It
was California that invented this type of thing.  This plagued him
until Alec had a chance to go sneak a look at Gin's date book to see
when this bizarre event was booked to happen.  Alec had misheard, as
usual.

In her messy lefthanded scrawl Gin had jotted, Anna, lunch @ the
Chez.

Of course, the Chez--Alec heard it all over again.

"Neither French, neither English" is what Veronique had to say about
this particular construction.

Anna had been rereading her introduction to Confucianism--it was
astonishing the degree to which she often misunderstood the most basic
things about any kind of spiritual practice.  She read as a Yankee, a
Calvinist, believing she needed to improve.  She needed to plan and
adjust, then go and do.  She needed to accomplish, she believed, needed
to get better organized, as if her spiritual life were the kind of
business plan devised in the MBA program at Wharton.

She needed to study the Four Principles, to study hard, then practice,
eventually might learn to incorporate them into all parts of her
being.

Confucianism had no tense like the future perfect.  This was it, her
one life.  Courtesy, sympathy, shame, and knowing right from wrong are
already innately part of it.  These traits were what made a person
human.  Anna needed to run a few errands.  She needed to walk up to
Shattuck and buy cut flowers for the dining room.  The real estate open
house was the next day.

She bathe , began to dress for her luncheon date.  Every article of
clothing she brought out of her closet looked gauzy and transparent.
Her skin was hot, seemed to still burn from the last time Alec touched
her.  Veronique said she could immediately tell whether a woman was
well or poorly fucked--the idiom in French was more delicate, mal
baisee, poorly kissed.  Anna had told her nothing.  Still, Veronique
now looked at her differently.

California, that spring, was poised in a moment free of F. E. M. A.
disaster.  The work on the house was finished, its title transferred.
Anna was legally divorced.  The inflationary bubble of the Bay Area
real estate market was shimmering and pure.  It was like the stock
market, where the baby businessmen were getting richer by the hour in
the pump and thrust of the engine of the American economy.

Anna needed to go there armed.  As she was sitting at the vanity in her
bedroom putting in her earrings, turning her head this way and that
way, trying to assess the swish and dangle, the broker on Hopkins
Street called.  She needed to tell her that although the house hadn't
yet been officially listed, a client and his agent were coming into
her office in a half a minute in order to present an offer.

It is related, O King, that the wife then uttered some words over the
lake, and the fish began to dance, and at that instant the spell was
lifted, and the townspeople resumed their usual activities and returned
to their buying and their selling.

ANONYMOUS

SO IN THE Nuba tribe a zvoman s marital and maternal status is actually
%vntten on her body.  Gin wasn't really shouting at Anna, but her
voice did seem to have a precise geography and was the territory Anna
had now entered.

Anna felt polarized to Gin, as if she were True North, as if Anna
might look down or look away but could do nothing about the thin and
quavering needle of her rapt attention.  No one else seemed to matter
so entirely.

They were in the upstairs cafe.  Anna tried to sip her water, but her
lips, as she touched them to the water glass, had begun to tremble. She
had on a beautiful dress that was hand-painted in washes of gray and
blue, the colors of weather.  One very good thing about being tall,
Anna knew, was that it allowed a person to wear clothes well.

Gin had a husky voice, grave and surprising in a woman who was so
physically childlike.  She'd brought a portfolio of drawings and photos
to show Anna.  She'd brought these because Anna'd mentioned how much
she loved the piece Gin gave to Carlo and Julie, how it had come to
stand for everything lost in the wildfire.

At the words "everything lost" Anna felt her throat begin to ache.

The photos were of the research Gin did on scarification of the Nuba
tribeswomen.

These women, who live in the southern part of the Sudan, receive their
final set of scars after weaning their first child.

While the patterning of scars is begun at pubelty, it wasn't until
after childbirth that a woman ascended to the position of actual and
legitimate wife, when the scars adorn much of her body, including the
entire back.  Because the process is expensive, the scars denote caste
as well as marital status.

Anna looked at the photos, courteously, as if this might be mildly
interesting if it weren't so far beneath her.  She glanced around the
restaurant, looking for the famous people who were always there but
whom Anna would inevitably fail to recogiuze.

Famous people ate at Chez Panisse so often one felt almost famous just
to be there breathing the air of them.  Her eyes came back to Gin.

Gin was dressed stylishly in a silk top that showed the muscles of her
arms and shoulders.  She opened her purse, took out the most startling
glasses in order to read the menu.  The lenses were little rectangles
that seemed to be made of sheer panes of completely see-through glass,
these affixed to her face by only the thinnest silver wire that ran
back into her hair behind small, perfectly shaped ears, the lobes of
which were not pierced.

Gin's dark hair was slicked straight back.  It looked wet, but when
her head moved, the comb lines didn't.

They talked about food for a moment, what each would like, how hungry
they were, what they might get to share.

She started in again, tapping the photograph.  If he wishes to keep his
wife, Gin was saying, the Nuba tribesman has to pay materially while
her bond to him is made with pain--this is a custom untouched by a
thousand years, she mentioned.

At the word pain, Anna's eyes widened, the room bounced and began to
shimmer oddly.  Sweat pear led on her upper lip.  Anna touched her lip
with the tip of her tongue, tasting the salt of it.

Gin watched her through the wobble with half-shut, heavily lidded
eyes, she seemed to somehow know her.  Anna was more than
listening--she was rapt, transfixed.

The pattern is made by a specialist in cicatrization--this is what the
making of kelo ids or raised scars is called.  This specialist is
always another woman--some are justly famous for their artistry.

This is the most important art of the Nuba, who are nomadic, the
scarring of the skin of its women its most enduring medium.

Women come from far away to seek out the best artists.  The better the
artist, the more spiritually connected she is assumed to be.

The scarring is painstaking.  The artist catches the skin of the back
with a hooked thorn, pulls it up to just the right height, then slits
the epidermis.  Gin seemed to whisper if she spoke at all.  It takes
hours and hours.  If the wounds heal properly, this beautiful pattern
of kelo ids appears.  Gin spread her hand over the color xerox of the
photograph as if she hers elf had made the pattern.

The wife spends the days after the procedure in isolation.  She goes
off to pray the surgery has gone well.  Conditions are primitive,
things can, do go wrong.  When things go wrong, it's read as a
spiritual calamity.

Anna had begun actively searching for some thing wrong, some flaw or
imperfection that would free her from this woman's spell.

Her eyes fell on Gin's hands--they were small and hard and as wrinkled
as a crone's, with paint worked deeply into the cracks of them.  These
were a worker's hands.  Anna looked down at her own.

She admired her own hands, which were long and aristocratic like her
mother's.  When in the throes of the most acute self-hatred, the beauty
of her own hands seemed to offer one small reason she might go ahead
and live.

"We forget how basic makeup is, that the word cosmetics derives from
cosmos.  These are cosmetic scars in the most real sense, " Gin said.
"The geometry of the scars is a mirror of the Nuba notion of

I

the order and harmony of the universe.  " She raised her eyes to
Anna's.  As they looked at one another, Anna felt her face heating up
again.  Gin knew nothing, she knew everything.  How had they even
begun talking about these things, Anna wondered.  Had they even taken a
minute to greet one another--she couldn't quite remember.

Anna glanced down at the painty hands, the hard look the skin had from
its years of baths in paints and solvents, saw the fan of fine wrinkles
splintering outward at the corners of Gin's eyes.

She was squinting, staring off, as if toward Africa.

Berkeley was the town that had helped transform the world by listening
to the wisdom of its youth--now this youth was growing old.  Gin was
aging, Anna saw, they all were aging, Gin was no different, she was
going to die like everybody else.  Death underlay every act, Anna
thought, all art, all sex that had a prayer of meaning anything, having
a name for it is both mankind's curse and its blessing.

Gin knew this material inside and out--it had to be part of a lecture
she gave at the Art Institute, where she was now teaching, Anna
realized, where a class like this would give the Goths a sense of
historical legitimacy.

"The Nuba designs are like clothes that fit the body perfectly, " Gin
said, showing the parallel lines beading along the woman's shoulders,
then dipping inward toward the spine.  Gin moved her fingers along the
line of the back.  "The Nuba have names for not only all the muscles of
the body but for all the depressions and declivities between each
muscle--no other language is so rich in this knowledge, better able to
detail the inches of specific surface, to name the skin in this
intimate way.  The kelo ids are spaced along a horizontal line that
curves according to the individual's musculature.  They rise, harden as
they heal, becoming about the size and shape of pearls embedded within
the skin.  " The Nuba's back was so dark it looked honestly black.

"No longer nursing a child, " Gin went on to say, "no longer
prohibited from intercourse, a married woman signals by her scarring
that she is again available by being made erotically exciting to touch.
" "Caucasian skin just doesn't scar like this.  " She raised her eyes
to Anna's, whose vision had begun to pop and dazzle.  "More's the pity,
" Gin added.

Their eyes locked, each knowing below knowing just what the other knew.
Anna's lips were open, she nodded slightly, having agreed to that which
had no need of being spoken.

And there was the bounce and warp in the air and light of the cafe when
the gods looked down and life was suddenly completely what it is and
shows as such.  Their food arrived, never was food so beautiful, the
people more beautiful, both patrons and servers, both women and men.
Color sparkled as if they were stoned or drunk.  Voices came and went
like music offered, snatched away.

They had a pleasant lunch, two salads, one of three citruses, mint and
avocado, the other of smoky bacon and the slightly bitter frisee.  They
had the goat cheese calzone, having easily agreed to share everything.
They ordered coffee, the peach ice cream.  It came with thin, fragile
almond cookies, drizzled out like lace, then frozen by the heat of
baking.  Anna was going to miss living in a town where people knew how
to eat.

Chez Panisse honestly was the crossroads of this town, their village,
the place where, if you waited, everyone would eventually come along,
even the president of the United States.

They spoke then of their children and of their work and of the school,
Anna telling Gin what she'd said to no one else, that her daughter
wasn't going to be going to the Ecole, since Anna and Maggie were
moving to New York to be near Anna's mother.

Alec's name was mentioned by Gin three times, casually.  Anna said his
name not at all.

Gin paid--she insisted, though Anna had a huge wad of money.  She had
cash because she had sold the van that morning to a Vietnamese man
named Howie, who gave her thousands of dollars in twenties and
fifties.

She and Gin kissed in parting, which was a bit like kissing oneself,
since they'd eaten the same things.  They held one another tightly in
saying goodbye--Anna had to shut her eyes against the pain that came
bounding out of nowhere.

Anna walked home past the French Hotel, where therapists and writers
and computer programmers sit drinking coffee all day beside Andronico's
dumpsters.  While he lived, this is where you might find Eldridge
Cleaver, who had his Bible since he'd become a Christian minister.
Nowhere did people talk as they did in Berkeley--the world Anna and
Alec had was made of it.

She walked past the cars in the lot of the Park and Shop, crossed
Cedar, noting the stores one by one, saying their names to hers elf in
order to remember them.  She turned right at Virginia Cleaners.

Home, Anna went to the shelves to look up the Nuba in her book on
African art.  She became transfixed again by the photographs that lay
alongside the text, identical to some of the xeroxed images Gin had.
This was the state where Anna floated outside her body--it was exactly
to be in the heightened place that meant she was in the possession of a
poem.  Anna didn't ever own a poem to write it--the work was the
master, she its instrument.

She remembered what she was doing, roused hers elf, went upstairs to
type.  She hadn't written anything in a long, long time.

She typed these words, copying them directly from the book, Although
various groups in the Sudan engage in the "personal art" of body
painting and scarification, none do so as elaborately or as often as
the Southeastern Nuba.  This may be due to their geographic isolation
from Christian missionaries during the colonial period, even now, they
are relatively unimpressed by Islam and by a central government that
would rather not be reminded of tribal differences.

At birth a Nuba child's body is oiled (having the skin oiled makes one
culturally normal, a sort of proper "dress" among these otherwise naked
people) and red or yellow ocher, depending on clan membership, is put
on the infant's head.

While adorning the body is itself painfully initiatory--as in the
application of tattoos (among lighter-skinned peoples) or the cutting
of kelo id scars (among the darker-skinned, upon whose skin tattoos do
not show up well)--we feel the importance of waking up out of the dream
of nature, hozv diffiicult it is to do this, and vp hat a high price
must be paid zoithout much complaint, for complaining comes from the
infantile psyche that the initiate is trying to leave behind.

Displayed is a highly visible, collectively sanctioned record of pain
successfully endured for the sake of psychological adulthood.

The italics, she typed, are mine.  But there was some thing else, she
thought, some thing she was forgetting to tell him.  Anna waited.

Certain phrases occurred, none adequate.

She pressed Send.

The type of nest a particular species builds is determined by heredity,
the raw materials available, the nest site, the experience and ability
of the builder, and--perhaps--by imitation of older birds.

LESTER L. SHORT

The Lives of Birds, Birds of the World and Their Behavior ALL IS LOST
to him, gone, can be regained now only in memory.

Time is thick as ice, moves, has turned, backs up, carves valley,
pushes mountains aside.  He now remembers more than perfectly--he
relives.  The years empty out, he comes to the cabin he and Gin rented
from a hunchback and his wife in Wellfleet on Cape Cod.  The man was a
painter, shortened, twisted, who, by rights, should have been some kind
of Lautrecky genius as recompense for the way he was physically canted
and wrung.  But life is not fair and though Alec can still see him, he
can also see his painting, which was nothing better than mediocre.  He
cannot recall this man's name, a name that will not live.

The artist and his wife lived in a beautiful setup, a cluster of cabins
they called Pilgrim Pines.  They also seemed to have been given the
gift of domestic happiness.  They were utterly devoted, Alec noticed,
blindly in love.  These two seemed to think of love as an abundance,
and were charmed by the idea of Gin and Alec's being on their
honeymoon.  They seemed to have forgotten that people on their
honeymoon often like to be left alone.

They tried to keep their distance in the mornings, but would show up
together at noon to try to get Alec and Gin to come out and enjoy the
place, to ride the bikes they'd be more than happy to lend them, to get
them to walk on the best seashell beach or to come out to play doubles
on the weedy tennis court--all part of the honeymoon package at Pilgrim
Pines.  There was some thing about the purity of their expectations
that brought out the worst of Alec and Gin's joint cynicism.

"Jesus, " Alec asked.  "Tennis with those two, What a nightmare.  "
"Tell them!  " Gin groaned.

"I do, they just keep asking.  " "Tell them anything, " she said. "Tell
them I died.  " This was in April on spring break from classes at Cal
and the weather was chancy, most days cold and rainy, the sky close in
the way of the East, its air being weightier than in the West, more
moist and dense.  One late afternoon with the sky threatening to clear,
the painter and his wife showed up on the porch of the little cabin
with a picnic basket and a hand-drawn map.  Their faces were so bright
it almost hurt to witness them.  Gin and Alec had to take these
things, had to go off right then to this one specific spot.

They pointed down the road, showed on the map where they were meant to
park.  Alec and Gin needed to leave right then, they had to go!

or they'd miss the sunset.

This was another bad day for Gin, who was almost four months pregnant
yet still had morning sickness.  Some days she was sick the whole time
she was awake.  The artist and his wife were like twin suns on the
porch, their enthusiasm blinding them to Alec and Gin's distress.
Dutifully, and not to be disappointing, Alec and Gin took the basket
and the map from them and got some woolen blankets from a chest and
loaded them in the car.  They drove down the narrow road, needing to go
and act like newlyweds.

"We're headed west, then?  " Gin asked him.  They were driving through
a tunnel of stick like branches that hadn't begun yet to leaf out.  The
woods seemed woven into a soft gray thicket above their heads, like
smoke, he thought, or death.  She was still so young--Alec kept
forgetting this.  She'd hardly been out of Berkeley.  Alec was so moved
to think he had married her, that she was pregnant, that they were now
to be a family.

It was a cold day in April with flurries--a real snow was threatening.
The heater in the little piece of junk they'd rented made a whirling
noise but put out no heat.  She was mottled with fatigue and rolling
waves of nausea.  Why exactly, she asked, did we let them talk us into
this?

Alec pulled the car into a sandy clearing on the water overlooking Cape
Cod Bay.  It was here they needed to park to see it.

The sun, they'd been told, was going to blaze out when it hit, merging
with its own reflection on the water.

"Shook foil, " Alec said.

"What?  " she asked.  Her little face sometimes looked elfin to him, as
if she might sprout the soft horn bumps at the moment of her next
enchantment.

"Gerard Manley Hopkins, " Alec said.  "One of your people, I believe. "
"What's that supposed to mean, Alec?  " she asked.  "He was British
Catholic, wasn't he?  He lived in the mid to late nineteenth
century--how exactly, does that make him one of my people?  " He didn't
answer.  "Might be God's Grandeur, " Alec said.

Alec had become preoccupied with the length of his legs and torso and
the matter of the track the car seat rode on and the seat being moved
back as far as it could be made to go.  He was always concerned with
the matter of his limbs, what to do with the length of them.  He
twisted to reach through into the back.  He took the champagne from the
picnic basket, began unwrapping its foil, untwisting its soft wire,
concentrating then on the heaviness of the bottle and the way the
closing wire was at once malleable and resistant.  He popped the cork,
making the face that exaggerated his effort, this for Gin's benefit.

Life was, for him, always the same ordeal, this valiant struggle toward
mastery.  Each day Alec had to begin anew, as the physical awkwardness
threatened to overtake him--he had to shift and alter the world in
order to try to find both the equipment and the open area where he
might have room to accomplish any one of life's small tasks.  Pouring
the golden bubbling light was the work at hand, it went well, champagne
came out flowing liquidly.  Alec had long before decided gravity and
light were time's most beautiful objects.  He watched as the sparkling
wine sought its level in the bathos of the two plastic glasses.

"But that would make it dawn?  " he asked.  He looked at Gin, who
didn't answer him.

Neither had mentioned the most obvious thing, what they'd been too kind
to tell the innkeepers, The spectacle of a sun setting into the water
was absolutely commonplace on the coast where they lived, they actually
saw it nearly every day from their own living room on Oxford
Street--saw it, that is, if they took a moment to look at it.

They waited.

She was thirsty, but there was nothing else in the basket to drink and
she wouldn't take the glass he poured for her, so he drank that off.
Then Alec sipped his own champagne, ever the sophisticate.

They waited beneath an Atlantic sky so quilted with darkness the
bottoms of the clouds seemed heavy-bellied as they bumped along the
tops of the spindly, well-spaced trees.  The grayness was becoming so
complete Alec could no longer make out the sun's trajectory and it was
getting hard to read.  He looked again at the map--it was not well
drawn.  How did this man dare call himself an artist when he had no
respect for basic letter forms?

It was so cold their breathing showed as plumes.  Gin didn't have
proper clothing for the winter and had pulled the sleeves of one of his
big woolen sweaters over her bluish hands.  They'd said they loved one
another, but neither was certain they really were in love.  They didn't
know one another well enough yet to tell if they were even going to
enjoy being in the other's company.  And going out to view a sunset?
Again, what was it this was supposed to make them feel?

Behind the clouds and hidden from their sight, the sun was clearly
sinking, light being visibly leeched from the thin stand of pines and
birch saplings in the sandy clearing.  Alec waited for the darkness
that was so often present in his chest to be lifted away from him.  He
waited, breathe , sighed deeply, and was suddenly surprisingly filled
with the hope that the pledges and vows they'd made might be honestly
realized.

My wife, he thought.  He reached out to Gin, took her hand in his. She
was so cold her skin had taken on a waxy look.  Her cold knuckles were
surprisingly sharp.  She shuddered--he felt it roll through her--then
she opened her hand and turned it over.  Their palms were both smooth,
he could feel the slight friction of the two different textures.

They waited, watched, and the clouds suddenly eased and the gold-white
and silver of an astonishing light streamed out as from under the
opening door of heaven and the world was wild with it.

So it is here and now, he thought, that my life begins.

the end.