Paul Silverman Stories

As Jacob Kopens emerged from the soup of foam and sea-spinach a large man came over a sandy rise and headed straight for him. To Jacob he was a complete stranger, a man he had never seen on the club beach before, never seen anywhere. But there was nothing about him that remotely fit the word trespasser. The man moved with such aggression he seemed to possess every inch he walked on, no matter what any club deed said. He was in a plain white t-shirt and battleship gray swim trunks, and his legs were menacingly overbuilt, a human being with the underpinnings of a draft horse. The man towered over Jacob, and he had a facial feature even more outsized than his legs. His forehead was more prow than brow. A white brush-cut shock of hair accentuated it, like an ax blade.  He bore down on Jacob, a ram-headed cruiserweight looming over an eagle-nosed welterweight.

“How’s the water?”

“Fine, but a little scuzzy.”

“Scuzzy. How so?””Oh, temperature’s fine. But because of the storm, lots of seaweed. So it feels scuzzy on your skin.”

“Scuzzy. Really?”

“Well, yes. Really.”

The large man’s brow pushed out at Jacob like the bow of a surfacing submarine. The mass of bone and skin formed a dark, inquisitorial hood over his eyes.

“That’s what makes a beach a beach,” he announced. “You must be new to this area.”

New was a word Jacob didn’t like to hear. Not after having fought as hard as he had fought to be taken into the club.

“No, not really,” he said.  “I moved here in 1984, and I’m from Boston, born and brought up there. I’m a native New Englander.”

What Jacob didn’t say is, are you a member of this club? I am.

“Really. Well, seaweed is what makes a beach a beach. I hunt up in Maine and come back down the coast. There’s always seaweed. That’s the charm of it.”

“Charm. Is that what you call it?…”

The man shook his head gravely, as though he were in deep disagreement with Jacob over a point of politics. Or morality.

“Well then, you should jump right in,” Jacob said. “You’re really going to love it today.”

He extended the sentence by four words - you son of a bitch –  spoken only to himself - as he shook the man off and paraded away over the dunes.  He chugged up the planked pathway to the old shabby-chic asphalt circle, cratered like the moon, and began the leg home over the old town road.

Normally, the bracing sea water worked like a mood-changer on him, a natural shock treatment. But today he stayed on edge, fretting over minutia, all courtesy of the six feet of feces in the plain gray trunks. A beach fascist. He had never met the species before, and having met him he couldn’t forget him. Not him in particular. But everything he stood for. It lingered like Hurricane Isabel’s last dirty gust. Not the mood he wanted to be in with the son and the new flame driving up.

So the goal of the day was to get happy or else by dinnertime. Joyce expected no less. The son blew in from his wandering once in four seasons or so, maybe, and he was even overdue on that. As Jacob speed-walked he repeatedly looked up into the clear, strong blueness, seeking solar assist. But each time his eyes came back down they bumped into a piece of Isabel’s debris.

Where the road turned away from the church steeple and plunged into the Burnham Woods – where what was left of the old townie population still lived, in their shacky houses with tar-paper peaks and wood-burning stoves  - he had to climb over the trunk of an oak whose fall had squashed two roofs in one blow, totaling a worm-eaten single-car garage and the old Dodge pickup sticking out of it. The faded gray Dodge was a dead-on color match with the gray swimming trunks of the seaweed chauvinist, not a good coincidence. It made him obsess more darkly over where the lout had come from, how he could walk the club beach as though he owned it, all without Jacob ever having seen him at the club. It disturbed him, too, how this frenzy called Isabel had reshaped the tall old-growth trees, snapping and ripping up so many of them there was a canopy of tangled branches overhead, blackening everything and giving the whole place the look of a medieval forest. Not New England but some schwarzwald. On this stretch of road – well below the hill that Jacob’s home and lawns dominated - the human structures were humble and few and far between. Rickety houses and camps that, in the witchy shadows of the crippled trees, knocked the lenses of his mind off kilter – and gave him an alien’s sense of entering a foreign domain, some third-world Appalachia or Transylvania in a new continent or hemisphere, for the very first time.

So the old boyish spine-shivers were already there when Jacob’s left sneaker hit something both pliant and stiff. Before he actually saw the big dead crow his feet were in the air, twisting and jumping to avoid further contact. When he hit ground again he had cleared the bird corpse, but stumbled so violently his bare shin hit the feathers and felt the toughness of the muscle and bone below, the presence of a true chest and shoulders – things he had never associated with any creature light enough to fly. Reflexively he slapped his leg, batting at the invisible demon presence of rabies and cadaver germs. Then he saw more – a garter snake cutting graceful S-curves, not ten inches from his right heel. He and the snake froze at the exact same moment, and the creature did something he had never thought was even in a garter snake’s repertoire. It coiled and confronted him, head aimed like a pistol and tongue flicking defiance, a bizarre skinny imitation of a rattler on red alert.

 

 

Even breaking through the Burnham Woods and returning to his property, the greatest home of his life, even getting inside the gloriously arching mahogany door gave Jacob Kopens no sense of sanctuary. Not today; not after the bastard on the beach. He escaped upstairs to the shower and turned the sleek controls until the downpour was scalding, vaguely hoping the torrent of heat would burn away the dark thoughts, the way the ocean sun burns off the morning fog. As he toweled and dressed he could hear Joyce addling the cook over menu and table settings for the evening. They had plans for a quick lunch together but even that was impossible. He had hardly popped an olive in his mouth when the bell and the big dogs went off at once, the big dogs whimpering like spaniels, reminding him that today was the day the disaster afflicting the great room would be diagnosed at last.

Dan Gannett, the architect who had designed Jacob’s grand door, and every last inch of the massive rehab, had pronounced the sickness in the beams to be outside his competency. Over malt with Jacob at the club bar he had said, “we can’t solve this alone – you and me and The Balvenie. You need a structural engineer, the best in the business. You need Stanley Orne.”

 

 

“I want to warn you,” Gannett had said as the club valets brought around their cars – and Jacob would remember and replay the warning as if he had it burned into a disc - “Stanley Orne isn’t a Balvenie man. He’s more old school, straight rye and a beer chaser, a boilermaker kind of guy, and he looks it. But he knows his shit.”

Like a man possessed, Jacob ran from Joyce and the lunch table and gripped the hand-cast brass pull of his proud door. The wide mass of mahogany swung open, and now he stood face to face with an all-too-familiar man –  that man; the sub-human who had roiled him on the beach about swimming and seaweed. This time, the draft horse legs were hidden under canvas pants, but the forehead that loomed like armament was as battle-ready as before.

In their shared moment of recognition, Jacob watched the visitor’s brow stiffen and jowls redden, just as he felt his own skin pull tight and white with the frost of contempt.

“You don’t know my name, do you? It’s Orne.”

“I know the name,” Jacob said. “I didn’t know it was yours.”

He held out a hand for Jacob to consider shaking, but it seemed as much a challenge as an offer – as in touch me, if you dare to.

Jacob considered a joke about orne, ornery to lessen the tension, or perhaps intensify it, but dropped it for no other reason but contempt. He brushed the extended paw and inched back from the threshold. This Orne had ruined his morning; why should he make Orne’s entrance to his home even one hair easier?

He threw Joyce a dark look. She caught it and nimbly brought her usual greeting flurry down several registers, turning it to an exercise in mere diplomatic politeness. With a flip of her cornsilk hair, Joyce could turn from hostess to helmsman to hellion. Her people came from the sea, just as Jacob’s had once come from the desert. Joyce’s father had been the club commodore. But even so, Jacob had had to claw his way in, winning votes one by one, always doing this or that to smooth his rough edges. His given name, after all, had been Jack Kopinsky … a name from the days of phylacteries and stuffed cow’s gut and chicken neck. The deli days from the old pushcart part of Boston, the part these North Shore clubbers hardly knew existed. Jacob’s ladder … that’s what he called Joyce. His shore wife, who’d smashed his old city-sidewalk wife like a thundering wave. And now he had a home and lands he called Burnham, trumping the very woods of the townies.

Orne acknowledged Joyce courteously, but did it all without managing to hint at a smile. Then he became businesslike, fixed his hands on his hips and aimed his brow down the hallway like a surveyor’s instrument. Although the entire reason for Orne’s visit was the great room, they moved towards it at the glacial, hateful pace set by Jacob. When minutes had passed and they were still within sight of the mahogany door, Orne made a digging comment, and bluntly turned his head Jacob’s way to show his words were meant for him. “If we stand here too long,” he said, “it all might fall down.”

“Mount Rushmore will fall down first. My architect made me that promise.”

 Old school, boilermaker kind of guy. Who was Gannett kidding?  Orne was a savage, a bully. Right under Jacob’s Galicia slate roof, Orne pulled out that word - McMansion - to describe the space he was standing in.

“Snazzy door you put on. What were you thinking? – new knobs on an old actress?”

It was as if the morning on the beach had never ended. The bile surged in the pit of Jacob’s stomach, sending waves of fire up his gullet.

“We’ve got a job here,” he said. “Let’s get to work.”

They entered the great room, the capstone of Gannett’s magnificent revision of a hulking townie wreck, the biggest Burnham Woods relic ever condemned by the building inspector. Orne cast his eyes up and down and around, finally fixing them on the tortured beams. “Did you retain anything from the old house?”

“You’re looking at them,” Jacob said, waving his hand at the beams. 

The engineer moved from the center to the periphery. He took measurements, made a few cuts in the wall to look behind the blueboard, and scribbled his calculations on a wadded bar napkin produced from his back pocket. As he went through the numbers he thought out loud, muttering. “You have a wall, you have a roof, you have pressure per square inch. If it were blood pressure, you might be dead.”

Orne took delight in proclaiming his diagnosis. The beams were twisting, ripping and heaving from stress he described as dangerous in the extreme. The PSI was unacceptable. The word he used was shear.

“Like the blades of a scissors,” he said, “One force from one direction, the other from the opposite direction. Together they shear the beams, like pieces of paper. This happens quickly, the beams can go just like that, no warning whatsoever. Your McMansion has overloaded them…”

Jacob wanted to say,“you’re overloading me - with this bullshit.” Instead he sucked in his hate and hissed, “And what if I don’t believe you?”

Orne narrowed his eyes. “Shear gives no warning. But you’re a lucky man. You have your warning. From me. I’ll send a full report to you and your architect.”

Orne made his exit like a storm trooper, thumping down the hall so loudly the paintings shook. On the way he noticed the kitchen wall, slashed by the fury of Isabel. The storm had thrown a maple limb against the house, slamming the wall so hard the phone had flown across the room like a catapult had hurled it. The receiver struck and shattered one of Joyce’s favorite pieces, a China Trade bowl originally brought over from Canton by one of her sea captain ancestors. The wall’s paint and plaster bore a long fissure, jagged as a lightning bolt.

“That wall …” The engineer stopped dead in his tracks, like a lion considering prey. “That wall was where my father kept his guns.”

And without further word Orne loped for the arching mahogany door. He reached it before either Jacob or Joyce caught up to him, and he didn’t wait on ceremony. He twisted the knob in his big right hand as though he were opening the main valve of a steamship’s boiler, and he barged over the threshold. The engineer walked away without once looking back, and whether he planned it or not, he slammed the door in Jacob’s face. The slamming wood actually grazed Jacob’s nose; for a moment the intricately finished mahogany could have been blunt steel, could have been the door of a prison or a vault.

 

 

“These townie men, they have their gripes,” Joyce said, “but don’t let it rattle you. Why is it your fault his parents couldn’t afford the taxes on their own house? Three centuries in America and what did they do? They dug clams.”

“He’s not a clamdigger. He’s a structural engineer. And he still sees his father’s guns hanging on our wall.”

“He’s a clamdigger to me. I can smell the pitchfork and the muck.” Joyce flipped her flaxen hair. “Now go be the old Jacob and call Gannett, and let’s get a plan for those beams.”

Jacob did indeed want to call Gannett, but only because he wanted to verbally kick his ass like a soccer ball. Blowing the mathematics of beam stress was bad enough. But on top of that he’d given Jacob a problem beyond architecture. A problem worse than buried hazardous waste or termites. He’d given him Stanley Orne.

“We’re in a club. Our club. Why couldn’t he send us someone who’s in the damn club?”

As he spoke he watched the blue in Joyce’s eyes turn from the color of sky to the color of steel. Whenever this happened he understood, from a place deep in his gut, what the term blueblood really meant. It meant that every drop in Joyce’s veins could turn blue as cold steel when the circumstances required it; when that which she considered hers was being threatened. As long as Jacob was in the category of that which was hers, this show of blood was a good thing, a thing he could welcome.

“Listen to yourself,” she said. “The club, the club, the club. Twenty years ago you weren’t talking like that. Were you? You, Jack Kopinsky?”

“Why would I? I was an outsider looking in. Through the glass of my father’s pastrami counter. But you fixed that. You and the Commodore.”

“Nobody wanted to be in the club more than you, Jack. You worked it like a man running for President. You changed your name for it. Your name. And I didn’t even ask you. I never would.”

“I didn’t change it. You’re dead wrong. I adjusted it, I gave it a new shape.” He gave a bitter little laugh and brushed his hand over his nostrils.  “It was like a nose job.”

He stared into her face, searching for a hint of détente, a faint mirror of his grin. But the blue steel didn’t bend.

“It’s still my nose,” he said. “It’s still me. I’ll always be me. And I mean it.”

 

 

He had wanted the mahogany door. He had wanted mastiffs, and still did, even though now he recognized his choice had been driven by perception and not reality. The beasts proved to be fey, fussy eaters; they whined and were disease-prone; they crippled young at the hips. He had also wanted an early Mulliner Park Ward Corniche, the Rolls of Rolls, and Joyce had indulged him, even though she knew this was the car of heavyweight boxing champions and gutter entrepreneurs.

Jacob Kopens sat thinking of these things, the stupid minutia rich people obsess about, as Joyce and her cook snipped the watercress and chose the candlesticks. He sat in the gathering dusk opposite the wall that had disgorged the phone, staring at the jagged scar left by Isabel, the long lightning-bolt of a crack that glared back at him like a gaping fault line. He had combed through the town phone books, but he had found no Orne listing at all, not a trace. When the huge house made a sound in its bones, any sound in any room at all, Jacob heard it as a growl or a groan, a bestial utterance he connected with the storm-mangled woods and the tribal rage of Stanley Orne.

Tribal was his word for the nausea that gripped him, the sense of vertigo he felt even though he was up no further than a kitchen stool’s height from the French-polished teak and ebony floor, Macassar ebony. In America you could change tribes; that was what America was all about. You could keep your right foot in one tribe and plant your left in another. Do that in the Congo and they’ll nail your head to a tree. In the Congo, they’d hunt you down. But never here. Or so he’d thought. But he had never accounted for the Orne tribe, the evicted ones; and now he saw Stanley Orne more as structural avenger than structural engineer. He saw him as the raging townie exile stalking the dunes and the woods torn up by Isabel, finally getting his chance to crash inside the hated mahogany door and call his chits. This, the call, was what Jacob felt in his skinny legs. The bony thighs were crossed tight as blades of a scissors, shivering.

Night fell and the son came to dinner. So did the flame, who turned out to be a brown boy with sharp, painted nails. Joyce was cordial and her eyes stayed steel blue, inscrutable as the edge of a dirk. Jacob’s vertigo worsened. The sense of staring down from a fearfully nauseating height afflicted him, even though he was only seated in his customary Chippendale at the table’s head. He looked at the brown boy as if he had emerged from somewhere under the earth, blasted out through the crack in the wall by a demonic force. The plan was for dinner at home and late nightcaps at the club. He thought of brown-boy fingers and painted nails passing under a gauntlet of hating eyes: the Commodore’s comrades, with their blazers and Nantucket reds. As he sat and sipped he could feel the foreshock of tribal catastrophe vibrating the rails of his Chippendale. It was even making its way across the teak and ebony to the panels of the mahogany door.

Now he had a name for it too. Shear.

In an earlier life Phil Blodgett was just Blodgett, because it suited him better. It was a time when he felt preyed upon by men in black suits, and when he was wild about cherrystone clams, the raw, pink wet ones.

Blodgett couldn’t resist those clams. He was a pig for them. On any given night he’d go by the kitchen raw bar ninety, a hundred times. At least three of those times he’d grab a juicy, just-opened cherrystone and suck it down before Gus the Shucker even noticed. Waiters were no more allowed to eat clams, oysters or shrimp from the kitchen than they were allowed to help themselves to Stoli or Wild Turkey from the bar.

Blodgett acquired his own black suit, his waiter’s tux, at Keezer’s used clothing store in Cambridge. The head waiter, Bobby, gave him no choice in the matter of career apparel. “Fredo’s is a class place,” he said. “We all wear tuxes. You put your little ass in a tux if you want to work at Fredo’s.”

Blodgett considered himself an actor at the time, which meant he took a class or two at B.U. or Emerson extension, paid to have head shots taken and showed up now and then at auditions for local commercials and industrials. He had a couple of screen credits but had yet to be cast as a principal player; he was still waiting, and longing, for the camera to look on his handsome face for at least a full second - while he spoke a real line.

He told his acting friend Erica - the one who made him pose for her, oiled all over and stroking his penis - that he looked forward to wearing a tux each night because it made him think of English plays and films with butlers in them. “I’ll be the butler of Fredo’s,” he said. “What do you think of that?”

Erica frowned with those pouty, princess lips of hers. “Phil the butler. It doesn’t sound right.”

“Then I’ll be Blodgett,” he said. “Blodgett the butler.”

So it began. Just Blodgett. And he joined the black suit brigade. French-serving the vegetables. Boning a whole sole calabrese. Swiveling around the tables like a matador with his little towel. He had the waiter’s gene. Working when the rest of the world was partying. Groveling suavely for tips on nights like New Year’s Eve, those American ceremonial nights when all wait-people are left out and very alone. De-shelling the lobster for New Year’s couples and lovers. Fussing foppishly over the bananas flambé while the girl gropes the boy under the table. “I wait,” said Blodgett, assuming a Shakespearian pose in front of Aldo, the half-wit dishwasher. “I wait, therefore I am.”

“Fuck you,” said Aldo, plunging both bony arms into the gray, greasy water.

Every time Blodgett put on his well-worn tux he could smell the armpits of the last three men who had owned it, and no amount of dry cleaning could erase the stink. It was the penalty for buying Keezer’s absolutely cheapest, most-used model. But Bobby had told him not to go overboard. “You’re only going to get it stained with lasagna anyway, honey,” he had advised, and sashayed away with his armful of menus.

After just one month on the waitstaff Blodgett left his roach-ridden Chelsea rooming house. He was a convert to Little Italy and the waiter’s life. He moved to the North End and to the domain of a new landlord, some Baciagalupi who lived off the rents squeezed from three tomato-stained tenements. Blodgett’s place was right across from an Italian butcher shop, where the window was crammed with skinned lambs and rabbits strung up for Easter. It made sense to be there, just around the corner from Fredo’s and a stone’s throw from the other Italian restaurants too, just in case things didn’t work out. The apartment Blodgett found was a pre-urban renewal classic; so small the toilet, sink and stove were all in the same room. He could piss and fry an egg at the same time.

The waiters were fed at five sharp, giving them ample time to finish and set up for the dinner rush. Lino, or one of the other fat-armed cooks, would do up a trough of baked ziti, always overcooking it because he had better things to think about. The waiters would line up with plates and the cook would shovel and dump, distributing the burned ziti more in the manner of a zookeeper than a chef.

Carrying his ziti plate, Blodgett would always do a sly detour by the raw bar, but there were times Gus would catch him in the act.

“You like a fucking seagull, stealing clams from the boat.”

“What’s a clam to you, Gus? One lousy clam.”

“If I had a cleaver I chop your fucking hand.”

But Gus would always relent. “Take your fucking clam. Fucking seagull.”

Among the black-suits was one genuine black-shirt, an old Neapolitan they called Dutchy, after the Italian Duce, because he was a major fan of Mussolini and his causes. This meant Dutchy after all these years was still fighting the Ethiopians, whom he saw as all the African people walking the face of the earth, including every last black living in Boston. “Mussolini, he clean ‘em up,” Dutchy said to Blodgett. “He come here, make ‘em all into soap.”

“Mussolini’s dead, Dutchy.”

“You think he’s dead? Not dead around here.”

That very night, Bobby steered a party of Harvard professors to Dutchy’s station. The academics all loved Dutchy for his age and his humbled English; he was their peasant Methuselah, straight out of Fellini. It made them feel they were more in the grottoes of Italy than a plastic booth nine hundred feet from Boston Garden, and they always went with his recommendations, dishes he claimed weren’t on the menu.

Blodgett heard Dutchy say to the eldest prof, “hey, tonight you get Steak Africane. Lino make it for you special.”

The whole party ordered it – tenderloin in a black butter sauce, deep and dark.

“See, I serve them niggermeat, a la Africane,” Dutchy said to Blodgett, stacking his tray and pushing through the kitchen doors. “Make Mussolini proud.”

In front of the professors he did a little bow, sized up the generous tip possibilities, and ordered Blodgett to run back for sides of linguine vongole, on the house.

“Make it al dente,” he hissed. “Not the fucking steamed shit in the steamtable.”

Blodgett did as he was told and even helped Dutchy clear the plates, dumping the uneaten Steak Africane in a doggie bag. At two in the morning he closed up and left the North End for the South End and the Fenway. He followed a small rat into a Symphony Road apartment house and shared the contents of the doggie bag with Ollie, his new friend from the Beth Israel Hospital film. The B.I. was doing a twenty-minute industrial for staff training. A down and dirty production; no union amenities, not even a box of free doughnuts for the cast. Blodgett and Ollie were playing orderlies, chosen at callbacks under the usual Oreo strategy: one white youth and one black, both equally handsome, both equally stuck in jobs spilling piss and shit out of bedpans.

“You’re eating niggermeat, you know,” Blodgett said, swigging a fat hit of jug wine. “That’s what he calls it. I mean it.”

“Tastes good,” Ollie said, his mouth full of the tenderloin. “Tastes like me. Can I visit you at your job some day?”

“You can go anywhere you want. They’re not all racists like Dutchy, you know.”

“Yes they are,” said Ollie. He grabbed the jug and thrust the neck in his mouth, like a gas pump into a tank. “But I want to see the motherfuckers for myself.”

They wound up back in the North End, both sleeping in Blodgett’s dwarf apartment. At noon the next day they trudged across to the Café della Sport - to pry open their eyelids with double espressos. And if all the other customers’ eyeballs had been bullets, they’d have been shot dead a thousand times.

“It’s 1986,” said Ollie. “But in Little Italy it’s 1886.”

Blodgett couldn’t believe it. “You can stay with me all you want,” he said. “You got a rat in your place.”

“It’s not a rat. It’s a large mouse. And if I stay with you I might wind up cooked in a Calzone.”

“Calzone a la Africane.”

After espressos and biscotti they made their way to the hellish Auto Mile in Norwood, where Blodgett handed some huckster on a windswept lot all the tips and wages he had to his name. In return he and Ollie chugged back to town in the lemon of lemons, a kicked-around, rusting MG roadster.

“I wanted an actor’s car,” Blodgett said. “It’s the best I could do.”

“You’re not an actor,” Ollie said. “You’re a waiter.”

Blodgett had one good reason, one only, to justify the midget car. It was like his apartment. Sized to fit cramped Little Italy, the fruit-strewn alleys and backstreets that were skinny as capellini.

As it turned out, the initials MG were significant. A portent. He spied them that very night, embossed on a cigarette case of phony gold. Mando, the head of the back room, stole into the storeroom where Blodgett was sneaking a break among the onion sacks, trying to cop a few minutes of peace away from Dutchy, his dictator. Mando slid out the gold-toned case with his spindly, tobacco-yellow fingers and lit up.

“Clam boy,” Mando said, and muttered something rank about pink, juicy cherrystone clams and the female sex organ. With a shrug, Blodgett suggested the raw, open clam could also be compared to the male baboon’s ass.

Then he asked, “You slow tonight too, Mando?”

“Slow, fuck yes. I can’t live on this shit.”

Blodgett asked him what the G on the cigarette case stood for.

��My last name. Fuck, what you think?�

Mando was the waiter who ran the back room the same way Dutchy ran the front room. They were the two field generals, and the other waiters were the troops. As for Bobby, he talked a big game up front, the day Blodgett was hired, but in reality he was head waiter in name only. He bossed no one, because he dished and swished too much for Nicky, the big boss, to take him seriously. Bobby was more like the male hostess than the head of anyone, lisping and hugging the menus to his chest as he wiggled down the aisle, leading the parties to their tables.

“Hey, clam boy,” Mando said to Blodgett, “you suck one tonight yet?”

“Had three tonight. Gus was in the walk-in freezer digging out shrimp. I could have had six.”

Although Mando looked like a pimp he was actually a family man, a career waiter with four kids. He worked every split shift, sometimes seven days a week, and every holiday. Mando was a pro; he could carry six zabaglione up his long arm. So Blodgett was flattered when Mando asked him to leave Dutchy and come work the back room with him.

“I got the okay from Nicky,” he said, “don’t you worry. Tonight I fire two guys, they suck cock anyway. Then it be just you and me. We work the room, maybe we can make a buck.”

Mando wasted no time showing him how to pork up the tips. There were the legal ways, such as passing out thin chocolate mints at the end, making sure you placed an individual mint in front of each diner. Always good for a few extra bucks. There were times when eye contact worked, or kneeling, or simply touching a shoulder. There was knowing which people to keep out of your station, if possible: two old ladies splitting a check, for sure; and all parties of sailors, and any and all people from Maine.

As for those who tipped the best – without question guys who were dating each other were very good. And guys who were dating each other who were priests were so good they could duke you a hundred percent - and more than that if there was something about you.

Mando waited till the dead part of the evening to instruct Blodgett in the less than legal way to pork up a tip. He took him outside and showed him Rico, the man in the cap who parked cars. Rico was a cross between a jockey and an ape; tiny-assed with wide shoulders and hands like gorilla paws.

“Ever hear of Willy Pep?” asked Mando. “He could have been the next Willy Pep. Fast as a plane, punch like a train. Instead he parks cars for Nicky. And other things.”

Mando let the comment sink in. Then he stubbed out his cigarette, lit another and went on, explaining that all over Boston the restaurants were switching to computerized registers. Machines that automatically priced the items and spit out the checks. But the North End guys like Nicky were so goddam cheap they still had their waiters scribbling out the bills by hand. Every man, even the ancient Dutchy, carried a pencil and a bill-pad in the breast pocket of his tux.

Fredo’s also didn’t take plastic, none of it. Nicky always said he would rather break sidewalks with sledgehammers than hand over four percent to American Express.

Mando fixed his pimp eyes on Blodgett and spoke gravely. “When the fucking computers come in I go looking for a new job. Open a grocery store or something. Get my own computer.”

But until that day, Mando continued, he would go on applying both ends of his pencil. Using the lead point to tack on an extra ten percent or so to the bill. Then using the eraser to remove the ten percent once the customer had handed over the cash.

Blodgett found he had no moral objections whatsoever to being double-tipped. He kept his eraser clean, pocketed the bonus cash, and made sure his addition was exactly right when he finally handed in the checks to the cashier. Even on shit nights he came out with a decent wad in his pocket. Two tips for every one.

Three weeks into the scam Blodgett asked Mando what would happen if Nicky found out what they were up to.

“Then you see Rico,” he said, “and Rico see you.” Blodgett could feel the bolt go up Mando’s spine and leap into his own. He had the sensation they had both been hanging out for the subway and suddenly they’d been shoved, from behind, onto the third rail.

From that moment on, Blodgett was seized with a touch of that third-rail feeling again and again. It hit him every time he stood before Ralphie the cashier, who was a kissass first cousin of Nicky, waiting to turn in a fucked-over check.

“Hey, clam boy, you got to take a chance to make a chance,” Mando said, attempting to settle Blodgett down.

On St. Anthony’s Feast Day, Fredo’s was a zoo. Outside, the trumpets blew somberly and the holy procession marched through the angel-hair streets, one street skinnier than the next, holding the saint high in the air above the sweating crowd. The tenements emptied as crones in shawls and men in Bicycle Thief undershirts clawed into the sea of people, begging for room to pin their dollar bills over every exposed inch of the sacred figure.

The image of the saint covered with money was still in Blodgett’s head, shortly after the huge dinner rush died down, when two tall priests came in and were seated deep in the back room, in the darkest table. Even in the shadows Blodgett could tell they were flush-faced Irishmen. They wore civilian jackets over their black shirts and white collars; they smoked Gauloises and French-inhaled languidly, and they sent Blodgett to the bar for two Negrones, the pungent, ruby-hued martinis of Italy.

“Make them with Tanqueray and Cinzano, real Cinzano,” said one of the priests as Blodgett pivoted and headed off. He felt the fatherly eyeballs lasered on his back. Feeling so coveted brought out the actor in him, and he gave his hips a little bounce, a la Bobby, even though it made him feel sluttish.

Suddenly Mando swept alongside, whispering stage directions. “Those two spend,” he said. “Do the antipasto yourself, in front of them.”

“I think I am the antipasto,” said Blodgett.

It was Blodgett’s luck, not good luck, that Nicky himself was tending bar tonight. Nicky was so much the owner, his every action seemed motivated by divine right. The way he patrolled the long stretch of mahogany made it all look smaller, more a podium for an iron-fisted tyrant than a long counter staffed by a human in an apron.

“Two Negrones,” Blodgett said. “Straight up. With Tanqueray and Cinzano.”

Nicky nodded, but ignored the bottles of Tanqueray and Cinzano displayed on the mirrored shelf behind him. Instead, he reached under the bar and came up with two no-names, Mount Vernon Gin and Rossini red vermouth. Blodgett knew Nicky was boosting the margins by slipping in rotgut, but the murderous way Nicky squeezed the necks of the bottles as he worked told him something. Told him to keep his mouth shut.

Following protocol, Blodgett took a small round cocktail tray off the stack. He held it, in respectful obedience, as Nicky loaded on the pair of Negrones, but he became embarrassed when a sudden case of the shakes seized his tray-hand. The liquid, which should have been still as the glass itself, shivered visibly. Blodgett turned away to hide the panic - too quickly, and Nicky caught him.

“Hey, kid, no cocktail napkins? Where’s your manners?”

Blodgett grabbed two napkins and fled back to Mando and the priests.

By the time he reached tableside he was calm and suave again, so much so that one of the priests, the most fatherly of the two, stopped in mid-sentence and followed Blodgett’s every move in serving the drinks, the way a camera shooting slow-motion follows the twists and turns of an athlete or a muscular horse.

“You have a classic North Italian face,” the priest said. “Classic. Does that make you blush?”

Blodgett said nothing and smiled modestly. To his knowledge he hadn’t a touch of Italian in his veins, North or otherwise, and if he had a church at all it was Congregationalist.

He set down the cocktail napkins and backed off a good ten feet. The Irish priests said “Salut” to each other and lifted the Negrones to their lips. Suddenly the one who had oozed over Blodgett’s facial features turned dark as a demon.

“Waiter,” he snapped, “what’s in these drinks?”

Blodgett rushed back, putting on the best poker face he could. He mumbled and fumbled with his order pad.

“This isn’t Cinzano,” the priest declared. “It’s not Tanqueray either.”

Without a word of protest Blodgett swept up the drinks and trotted back to Nicky’s bar.

“These are priests,” he said, holding out the tray. “They say it’s not Cinzano and it’s not Tanqueray.”

Nicky was dead-silent for a moment, still as stone. Then a smile crept on his face and he spread his palms over the two drinks, as though he were a priest himself, the bar was his altar, and he was blessing a pair of sacramental goblets.

“Now it’s Cinzano,” he intoned. “Now it’s Tanqueray.”

And with a wave of his hand he sent Blodgett off to complete his mission.

The mood, back at the priestly table, was no better than when he had left. Blodgett put down the drinks gingerly, the way one would serve raw meat to snarling wolves. And he put down new cocktail napkins as well.

The fatherly priest sipped first and closed his eyes, de-constructing his long, slow swallow.

Finally he looked up and spoke.

“Grazia,” he said. “This is what we ordered.”

And Blodgett bowed.

“Let me bring you bread and olio,” he said. “And I’ll toast it for you too.”

The priests dined and drank like cardinals, running up the largest tab Blodgett had ever seen from a deuce, a party of two. In the lulls between courses and wine changes they called Blodgett over, just to look at him, contraposto, as though he were a marble statue in a ducal garden, and not just an acting student in a tux that smelled like it once belonged to an old man with a goat.

“Jim would like to photograph you,” said the less boisterous priest, speaking of his companion, the fatherly one who had sent back the Negrones. “Would you like that? Jim has a big Hasselblad.”

Blodgett had noticed that the less he spoke the more he intrigued them. So he said nothing, nothing at all, and went away to add up the bill. He tried to walk the way the statue of David might walk if it came to life.

“These are your padres,” he said to Mando. “Do you still want to add the spiff?”

You’d be stealing from your church.”

Mando reminded Blodgett of the saint being paraded in the streets, money pinned on him everywhere.

“Tonight I be his partner,” Mando said. “So what’s wrong with that?”

Thanks to the priests, when Nicky finally locked the doors Blodgett had so many bills in his pocket he couldn’t stand it. He shot home, raced up the four wooden flights to the dwarf apartment and turned the key, eager to grab Ollie and slam down to the after-hours joints deep in the old Roxbury, the dusky, jive-dive Ollie places. There he would slug Jack and Coke, suck up some more cherrystones, oysters too, and duke a few other waiters as royally as the priests had duked him.

In no time flat his plans went down the shitter, big time. There sat Ollie, cowering on the can in the kitchen, his eyebrow torn open, balling up his socks and throwing toothbrush, razor et al.into his gym bag.

“Who kicked your ass?” Blodgett demanded.

“Nobody in particular. A hundred flying beer bottles.”

“Let me fix you.” Blodgett reached for the torn eyebrow, the gash in the butterscotch skin, but Ollie pushed him away. At this phase of Blodgett’s life it was the skin that got him going more than anything else, the sheen and polish of it. It wasn’t a gender thing – at least he told himself it wasn’t. It would have been no different if Ollie were a girl named Mollie, as long as she had the tone, the buff. Skin to skin; mirror to mirror, I am you and you are me – it was easy, so easy why even think about it?

“I’ve been waiting for you all night,” Ollie said. “I want you to drive me out of here. I’ll never sleep in this hellhouse again.”

He trembled as he spoke, sweated and shook blood on the floor, and when he explained how they had come at him Blodgett couldn’t deny Ollie had every right in the world to shake, to shit, to run like the wind itself.

They had been crouching behind crates and garbage cans and cars on the narrow side street, all hopped up with fervor from the Feast Day, the berserk posse of Little Italy kids who had seen Blodgett and Ollie come and go, come and go, night after night. The moment Ollie popped out on the stoop they let the bottles fly like burning arrows, doing the whole nigger go home thing, the vigilante rant from another century. Nothing you would ever see in Cambridge, in Brookline, not even in fucking Charlestown, not in this day and age. Only here, in the North End; and only there, in the other end, South Boston, probable home of the Negrone-loving priests.

While Ollie stuffed his gym bag and steeled his nerves, Blodgett went back down and brought the MG right alongside the stoop, like a police boat at a dock. The shitbox sounded its standard death rattle, but it moved. Blodgett scanned the streets like a getaway man, beeped the horn and Ollie sprinted down. He jumped in and Blodgett floored the pedal, nearly crushing a mangy cat. As the North End receded from view, Ollie went from panic to funk. He flat-out refused to party. Blodgett left him on a street corner, skulked back to his empty bed and slept horribly, nothing in his stained black pants but cash.

He awoke to a sky that filled his postage stamp of a window with the color of pent-up pus. The bulges of yellowish gray threatened a furious downpour. But the storm hadn’t broken yet; it was all in a state of suspension and foreboding; and not a drop had been shed on the filthy panes.

This was his day off, and “off” was the operative word. He wanted to dump his tux in the drycleaner, and scoot away in his roadster to points unknown. He pictured a part of the Cape, beyond the storm clouds, that corresponded to his images of the Riviera. Endless asses bronzing in an infinite tanning booth.

He swigged and spat mouthwash, threw something on, grabbed the musty tux and the car keys and hit the stairs, bounding as though he were breaking jail.

In the street Blodgett’s shoes turned to stone; and he could no more move than a fly whose legs were stuck to flypaper.

But it was his eyes that were freezing him in place, not his feet.

He was staring straight at the MG. It was there, right where he left it. Same car, same color: rust-pocked racing green. But its position had changed; it was on its back, like an insect that had been flipped over by a shoe or a shock of wind.

The first wave of nausea slammed Blodgett then and there. He felt nausea as though it were a human hand, long fingers in a sleek black glove, reaching right through the skin of his abdomen and grabbing the organs, clamping them so tight the blood stopped and the nerves howled.

He almost doubled over, but the imagined hand loosened and withdrew as swiftly as it had come. Blodgett walked to his car, walked all around it and finally knelt beside it, at the point where he could best read the letters scrawled on the windshield.

Niggerlover, the letters said, although the scrawler had messed up the spelling, leaving out one of the g’s. For a fleeting moment Blodgett’s optimism gene kicked in, telling him he was only being accused of loving some place called Niger, a river in Africa, or an old name for Nigeria. The next moment he was back realizing that Niger, in this neighborhood, could only mean Nigger, and that Nigger could only mean Ollie.

A jab of something purely animal told Blodgett to make tracks at once, to run with all his might; but a counter-jab of something very human told him no way, not without my car. So he scurried for the cover of his building and his apartment, where he hoped he could phone a tow truck.

Just before turning heel he ran his finger over the white scrawl, wondering if it was paint or just chalk. The waxy feel and the smell showed him it was neither. It was soap.

Mussolini, he clean ‘em up. He come here, turn ‘em all into soap.

As Blodgett hightailed it up the steps, he kept whipping his head around, looking for the ghost-gang he knew was after him, the hundred teenage Mussolini’s of whom Dutchy would be proud.

Back upstairs he slammed the dead-bolt, and the very phrase scared him, signifying he might be bolted in dead. Then he began calling around, telephoning garages in neutral neighborhoods. Finally, someone sent four apes who picked up the puny MG as easily as a side of beef and dumped it upright. The vehicle bounced on its tires and shook off a side mirror and a shard of rear bumper, brown as a rotted tooth. But every other appendage, including the windshield wipers, seemed to stay attached. Blodgett watched the operation from his high narrow window, and as soon as the tires hit the ground he was down the stairs like a gazelle pursued by cheetahs. He took a wet rag to rub out the soap-scrawl and his pantload of cash to placate the apes; and to get them to stay right where they were, guarding his escape, at least until he was around the corner and in high gear.

Twenty minutes beyond the North End, where the Southeast Expressway opened up, a welcome wave leaned into Blodgett, and he in turn leaned into the accelerator. It was the sheer force of the moment itself, the moment in which he saw the facts for what they really were. He was out of harm’s way, he could still be a waiter and a young actor anywhere on this earth, he was heading south and the bloated yellow-grey clouds were heading north. Blodgett could even see streamers of blue at the horizon, and the streamers to him meant the festive fuck-all party that was Provincetown. The scent of it was already in his nostrils, that beach in the dunes of Truro; the sunbathers topless, bottomless, limitless.

Blodgett had forgotten the black-gloved hand; but it hadn’t forgotten him. It let him get as far as Hyannis, just about half way down the peninsula. There the clenching fingers reached right through Blodgett’s wall of skin and stomach muscle, found the raw, coiling intestine and began to squeeze. Here, there and everywhere, sometimes lightly and other times so hard it wrung perspiration out of every pore on Blodgett’s body, and strength from his muscles. He pulled into a Mobil station and parked on the side, where the rest rooms had handwritten signs that said customers only. Inside the station he purchased a candy bar just to get his hands on the key to the toilet, one of those keys they affix to a crude chunk of wood so big you can’t pocket it. Walking around to the rest room door he had the sense Hyannis was in a different galaxy, one with a system of gravity that made putting one foot after the next a stunningly exhausting exercise. He also had an urge to get the candy bar out of his sight – just drop it on the ground, anything – because even the feel of the wrapper in his hand was nauseating.

Inside the cool, solitary cell of the men’s room he discovered just how topsy turvy this new world was. Blodgett took a shit and it was white, white as limestone. He pissed and it was brown as cola.

The men’s room mirror showed him the new Blodgett. A person with skin befitting a wax museum, steeped in a yellowness he associated with infection, the yellow that oozes out of a dirty wound. The taint was deepest in the corners of his eyes.

For the first time in his life Blodgett felt so bad he wanted to go to the doctor, and he was fearing bad things. The A-word. He bought a little gas from the Mobil attendant for no other purpose than to insure he got accurate directions to the Hyannis Hospital. The oily-faced attendant, as he stuffed the fat nozzle into the rickety MG, made a point of rolling his eyes and generally acting insulted, as though he were being called upon by some diseased dandy to jam good U.S. gas into a thing that wasn’t even a car, a contraption no better than a shitpiece roller skate.

But the roller skate rattled away and found the hospital.

To Blodgett, the doctor they gave him might just as well have been an undertaker in a white coat.

“You’re a sick man,” he said, but the pitiless look on his face - a melodrama face with a villain’s mustache - seemed to say, “you’re a sickening man.”

Shivering in the johnny they had made him wear, Blodgett heard the doctor’s voice swerve in mid-sentence and turn as metallic as the steel examining table, which made him shiver all the more. He paced back and forth in his medical white coat and began to speak gravely of the blood tests. They had been positive. Blodgett slumped, doubled up by a new wave of cramping.

But the morbid doctor never proclaimed that Blodgett had the A-word. It wasn’t on his clipboard that day.

The disease he had come to discuss was from another part of the medical dictionary.

The H-word.

“Hepatitis is serious,” said the doctor, in his chilliest undertaker voice. “If you don’t take care of it, it can take your life.”

Given the diagnosis Blodgett had expected, this grim pronouncement seemed like a reprieve from the gallows, a mere slap on the wrist. The H-word may have been Hepatitis, but for him it was Hallelujah.

Yellow skin, white shit, brown piss. Now Blodgett wanted answers. Who did all this to him?

Not Ollie, it turned out. Not Erica. Not Jim the priest. Not the Navy captain or the Navy captain’s wife. Not the stylist who smeared her powder over the hot spot on his forehead for his bedpan-emptying part in the B.I. movie. Not the three-chinned state rep who stalked him, begging to suck him off, in a long black official car all the way from the Golden Dome down the slope of Beacon Hill to the Haymarket pushcarts.

It was Gus the Shucker who did it.

“Tell me your favorite food,” asked the doctor.

This was the last thing Blodgett wanted to discuss. His appetite was obliterated. The very thought of food made him want to hurl.

“Tell me.”

Blodgett told him but the doctor already knew. Bootleg clams from contaminated beds. Sewer food. They’d been dropping people like flies all month. Greater Boston was a hepatitis hot zone.

All those smart, suave moves. Hovering at the edge of the raw bar like a seagull, waiting for Gus to duck into the refrigerator for a new bushel of oysters. Then swooping in on the cherrystones.

Perhaps it was Gus himself. His fingers. Maybe Gus never used toilet paper.

“I’m admitting you for a few days,” the doctor said. “We need to check your bilirubin.”

Blodgett thought he was talking about a Jewish kid. He had never been with any Billy Rubin, far as he could remember. But after two days in an isolated room – they installed him in a special wing for communicable diseases – he began to get a handle on hospital talk, on the neat little shorthand hospital people have for the most calamitous events. Room 356 stroked out. Kill that monitor, will you?

Not drinking alcohol for a solid year – the doctor’s orders – didn’t seem hard to bear, not at the time, because the very thought of a Jack and Coke sliding down his throat brought the bile sliding up. As for work, the doctor said nothing about that, but Blodgett felt no more capable of carrying a food-laden waiter’s tray than lifting the iron-framed bed they had him in.

For all he knew they had already canned him. Unlike cooks, waiters were seen as being a dime a dozen; and he had been AWOL two days. With his yellow left hand Blodgett picked up the phone on his bed table. With his yellow right index finger he dialed Fredo’s. He wasn’t sure who picked up, so he asked for Mando.

There was a long silence, followed by rustling and muffled voices. Then Bobby came on and asked him where he was.

“I’m in the hospital,” Blodgett said. “Sick as puke.”

“Isn’t that interesting. That’s where Mando is too. The one next to Campagno’s funeral parlor.”

“You’re kidding? I never saw Mando eat any clams.”

Bobby laughed a bitter laugh. “Clams? Mando didn’t eat clams. He ate knuckles, honey. Served by Rico.”

Just the way Bobby said that gave Blodgett the whole picture. Ralphie the kissass cashier, starting to punch in a check, spotting something that makes him tilt his bifocals, wrinkle his nose and squint. Split-second later he’s zooming in like a high-powered lens on a faint gray blotch, the telltale erasure mark. Next comes Rico, the axe-fisted little ape, the bantam who could have been Willie Pep, taking Mando apart on the asphalt of the parking lot.

And Nicky licking his chops. Pouring Rico a Strega.

“If Mando wakes up at all he’ll be lucky. Or unlucky. If he wakes up, he won’t be Mando.”

The words carried such a bolt of terror Blodgett almost dropped the phone, as though it had suddenly turned live and hot with deadly electricity. He thought of the subway and the third rail, of big hands pushing him off the platform.

“You don’t fuck with our checks. You don’t steal our money.” Bobby’s voice became thin, cool and sharp, a stiletto voice, stabbing at his ear.

“And if I were you, honey,” Bobby said, “I’d get my little ass to another planet.”

Which Blodgett tried to do. Tried to do in spite of the black-gloved fingers laying strangle-holds on his sensitive stomach parts. In spite of his bloated liver making his feet so heavy he could hardly drag them out of the hospital door. Drag them he did, but this time he found the scabbed-up MG was as comatose as Mando. Dead-silent, not even a whirr or a whine. And Blodgett crept back to bed to hide behind the whitecoats and consider his options.

Everything was extra work, even the telephone. It had the leaden heft of a small barbell.

Ollie was not an option. He clicked off in two seconds flat.

Erica, the pouty princess, was so amused at Blodgett’s description of himself, yellow inside and out, she said she’d drive down from Boston just to see it. She called him dahhling, doing the theater-school Tallulah thing, and said she’d bring him daffodils, a big yellow bunch.

If he felt like it, she said, her voice shrieking into his ear, they could do the scene from Menagerie, the one about Amanda and her jonquils.

Haggerty was a Catholic patriarch, the old school. So when he found out Francine, his art-photographer daughter, had been seen leaving Room 303 at the crack of dawn, his face got as purple as a bishop’s cloak and he pinched his praying, sniveling wife. Haggerty’s style was to pinch instead of punch. Little merciless pinches all over Dottie’s spare tire and thigh rolls and bat wings. He would hold a pinch for thirty seconds and twist it. But this the world never saw. Assumption College loved Haggerty’s ass for the student reflectory he built, in a style the school’s consulting architect dubbed “medieval industrial park.”

It so happened Francine had the functional tits that were Jitzy’s favorite kind. They were thin and pendulous - nothing like the ones in the magazines, except National Geographic - and maybe they weren’t for everyone. To each his own. But when Francine was in Room 303 straddling Jitzy and they were swinging down around his head they looked about two feet long, like the party balloons you can squeeze and bend into animal shapes.

Theirs was a match made in black and white with a matte finish. Francine was of the Diane Arbus school – a freak to you is all of humanity to me. In her field of vision Jitzy was a subject sent down from Hasselblad Heaven.

And Haggerty was all wrong about his daughter and Jitzy anyway. Francine wasn’t doing one-night stands in the Holiday Inn. It’s not a one night stand if a woman of forty four is visiting a man of forty two in his home.

Why, it was Haggerty himself who had started calling Jitzy “the man who lives in the Holiday Inn.” Just to taunt him like a like a helpless dog - because he thought it sounded funny - because it made Jitzy into one of the lame ducks of life, as Dottie once put it. Secretly Dottie liked to think of Jitzy as a charity case. Every time she sent a casserole over to Room 303 it made her feel higher in the food chain. It was her form of pinching.

And then the workers and fellow salesmen picked it up and they always said it too - in a snide way - look, the man who lives in the Holiday Inn - as if they all dwelled in really, truly better places. With their split levels and their sump pumps. Well, as Jitzy’s mother used to say, they could all go shit in their hats and pull it over their ears.

It just made sense - given where he was, given what he was doing. He was staying in Holiday Inns all over Hell’s Half Acre anyway; crisscrossing the land from one to another. He was getting used to the way they did things. He liked the security of not being able to pick up a table lamp because it was bolted down to the nightstand. If you couldn’t pick it up you couldn’t knock it over, and if you went bananas or something, or someone else went bananas on you, nobody could grab the table lamp and crash it against a wall or break a skull with it. When you’re starting to think about living on some piss-poor pension and social security and Haggerty’s handouts these things become important to you.

Better to make some deal with a nice Holiday Inn in your local area now and move in and be done with it. Jitzy could count, he could add and subtract. He could see the cruel path of inflation written on the wall - on the happy Holiday Inn wallpaper - and he wasn’t about to wait until it dropped him down the chute to Motel Six or Econo-Lodge or worse.

His furnishings needs were minimal. A closet pole and hangers, and a bed that was hardly king-sized. He had smoked since he was nine years old and maybe this had stunted his growth. He still bought his clothing items in the boys’ department. But being a shrimp had advantages non-shrimps can’t even imagine. It made Francine’s breasts seem even longer, like the drooping ears of a giant rabbit. When she loomed over him on all fours he pillow-talked her about tying them around his head.

Do your ears hang low?

Do they wobble to and fro?

Can you tie them in a knot,

Can you tie them in a bow?

Can you throw them over your shoulder

Like a Continental soldier,

Do your ears hang low?

For a shrimp, Jitzy could carry one whale of a bag, because he was born for it. In younger days , when he was a bellhop at the Ritz, the elevator broke down and he carried a bag that was bigger than he was up eleven floors. He carried it for an old man with a stained tweed suit who wanted him to stay and play for his tip. Jitzy did what he had to do and got out of there. Why is it the whole world thinks aging bachelors who move into the Ritz to live out their lives are privileged and elegant? But a man who lives in the Holiday Inn is daft and dangerous, a pervert who might prey on kids at the pool? When Jitzy finally quit being a Ritz bellhop you could drive a truck up his ass and there would be passing lanes on the sides. In the Holiday Inn you carry your own bags and stay out of trouble. It’s the American way.

If Holiday Inns are anything, they’re convenient. Jitzy’s was equi-distant from the Springfield and Hartford airports and a stone’s throw from the Dispoz-a-flame headquarters, warehouse and showroom. Room 303 was not too high and not too low. It gave its permanent occupant a sweeping view of the Oldfield strip mall and the dirty gray hills beyond.

It was the strip mall that was the bonus. The Holiday Inn was so contiguous it felt like a limb jointed to the K mart. On cold days Jitzy could walk from his room to the Kmart to the food court without spending more than six seconds outdoors. Francine would send him down for props – Halloween masks – while she set up the tripod.

Be that as it may, Jitzy still picked Haggerty’s cotton. He lugged the big Dispoz-a-flame and Dispoz-a-flash cases from Skowhegan to San Bernadino, humping to make quota and beyond. Only Haggerty himself was a better salesman, because he was so evil.

“Those Frenchies can make pens,” he’d say to customers, dissing the Dispos-a-flame’s rival lighter, the Bic. “But trust them with lighter fluid, never. Remember the War.”

Jitzy never changed a sheet and he never cleaned the toilet. He had new neighbors every night, on both sides and up and down. He always had fresh mini-packs of shampoo by the tub. He stubbed out his cigarettes in ashtrays he didn’t own, and the maid dumped the ashes and butts. He never unpacked his suitcase. He traveled four days out of every seven, carrying Dispoz-a-flame lighters and Dispoz-a-flash flashlights to smoke shops across the land. Wherever he went, they put him in Room 303, so he was home and away from home at the very same time. That was the marvel of the Holiday Inn. Let Dottie Haggerty prattle and cross herself about family dinners and tree houses and peewee hockey and her thirty grandchildren bobbing for apples in front of the hearth. Let Haggerty throw another log on the fire and pound his chest about owning the prettiest piece of God’s country east or west of the Yangtze, where Red slaves fabricated the Dispoz-a-flame gold-toned caps.

No one has a deed on God’s country, he told Francine.

 “Twist your body,” she said, aiming the Leica. “Contraposto. Now put on the space helmet and think of landing on a distant star. Do not smile.”

All Jitzy had to do was pick up the phone for a wakeup call. Long as he lived he would not have to purchase toilet paper.

Haggerty wanted you to think he, King Haggerty, owned everything. He owned a race horse at Saratoga. He owned Francine until the church might join her hand in marriage - and he swore such a union would not be, not while he drew breath, to a cretin half her size.

One day Haggerty called Jitzy into his Normandy Tudor office and held an eight by ten glossy of the horse under Jitzy’s nose. “Can you find the nuts?” he asked.

“Not on him,” said Jitzy.

“Fair warning,” said Haggerty, flicking a custom true-gold Dispoz-a-flame under the tip of his Cohiba.

But Francine still spent that night in Room 303. And Jitzy dreamt of the starry desert, his tent a canopy of teats. But only for so long.

For this was a night to remember. The night of the Big Boom.

The ear-splitting force of it nearly broke the Richter Scale at the Assumption College lab. Next came the marshals, the ATF and the regular cops, who did enough interviews to make a case file taller than Jitzy. They dug into everything and everyone. And why not? The conflagration, after all, was the biggest ever in regional history. A pre-dawn blast that lit up the countryside, rocked the dirty gray hills and even made the Holiday Inn buckle.

During the dead of night the Dispoz-a-flame warehouse had burst like a nuclear bomb. A half million gold-toned lighters exploded sky-high. Barrels of fluid ignited and launched the roof like a NASA space station. Everything blew to smithereens and there was nothing left, not even the bronze miniature of the race horse Haggerty kept next to the Archbishop’s autographed picture.

Jitzy’s phone rang at 4a.m., some time after the thunder-sound. He tumbled out from under the fleshy arbor that was Francine and drove to the disaster site, now a hosed-down, smoldering heap. The cops threw yellow tape around the whole perimeter and seized everyone inside it as arson suspects. As the first rays of sun peeked over the dirty gray hills, Jitzy had to sit captive while a raincoated shrew with big ATF letters on her back jabbed at him with trick questions:

“So when you got out of your car and approached the building how tall were the flames?”

“What flames? I didn’t see any flames.”

The fire police grilled him three times. Ditto Francine. Ditto Dottie. They went after anyone and everyone whom Haggerty had usuriously screwed. But in the end, like all cops, they targeted the candidate most vulnerable to a case they could actually win, guilt or innocence aside. And this was Haggerty himself.

The motive the D.A. cited in court was the kind that always sways juries of common citizens. A whopper of an insurance policy whose sole beneficiary was Haggerty. So fat was the award he actually doubled his net worth the moment the last lighter blew towards Jupiter.

Haggerty pulled every string in his vest pocket, but even the Archbishop’s secret visit to the judge’s chambers could not stem the onslaught of pyro-experts brought to the witness stand by the blood-sniffing D.A.

“I personally found accelerant traces at various points in the rubble,” testified a state college prof, the very one who taught the six-week arson crash course that gave the fire marshal his credentials for office.

“Jesus Christ knows I make cigarette lighters,” screamed Haggerty, terrifying the jury. “Accelerants are my business. “

In the end the gavel banged and Haggerty drew a ten. All his uptown lawyers could do for him was win Corrections Department assurance that he’d do his time in a facility where he’d be safe from assaults on his property and his bum.

So the feudal baron Haggerty, like the peon Jitzy, went off to spend his sunset years living in a room he didn’t own - a room so many notches down from Motel Six and Econo-lodge it made the Holiday Inn seem like The Four Seasons. Like Jitzy, he never had to buy toilet paper.

And all he could do with his Normandy Tudor mansion was continue making the payments, using the sum from the insurance settlement, which a civil judge reduced considerably after the arson conviction.

One day well into year three of the sentence, Jitzy came to see him in an entrepeneurial flush. He proudly pulled out a smashing sales report and traced the columns with a pencil, giving Haggerty the history as he went along. Ever since the lighter business went to hell the night of the blaze, Jitzy had quietly thrown his energy into the second and weaker product line, Dispoz-a-flash flashlights - whose warehouse and inventory sat in another town, uncooked and clean as a whistle.

Watching the firemen comb through the black wreckage with their long heavy lamps had given Jitzy an idea. He began calling on municipalities, positioning his compact, featherweight disposable flashlights as a space-age ergonomic tool enhancing firefighter agility. At first no one listened. But inevitably…

“Detroit wants twenty thousand,” he exclaimed across the table to Haggerty, pushing the spreadsheet under the prisoner’s mortuary eyes. “We can roll this out everywhere.”

But all Haggerty rolled out was a cello-pack with his daily meds, the generic uppers and downers dispensed by the state. He swallowed three tabs and sat like a stone statue, cold as one of the lions that flanked his former driveway, until the guard said time was up. In captivity, all the fire and brimstone was gone.

Even wearing his highest elevator shoes, Jitzy was a peanut compared to the burly penitentiary officers. He trotted past the last of them and then ran into one more, at the dirt lot beyond the ancient brick and shiny razor wire where they had made him leave his car. He was patted down and finally allowed to set forth on the long ride home, a solo journey that gave him three good hours to reflect on Haggerty’s complete implosion behind bars.

The man was a yellow bag of bones, as burned out as his storehouse of Dispoz-a-flames. He was Haggerty mourning Haggerty.

More than ever, Jitzy saw it was immaterial whether Haggerty had ever lit the match. His crime wasn’t arson; it was ownership: the belief in his own divine right to possess whatever he touched: people, places, chunks of the earth - as if the whole round world - the oceans and seas and trees and warehouses and slaughterhouses and even the Big House - weren’t what they were: all one fucking Holiday Inn where everybody was just a guest with a checkout time.

Jitzy drove under the happy green sign and found his favorite space, right under the tier of balconies. The year was rolling around to the season of cheer, and the air was crisp as a red apple. He went up three flights in the elevator and unlocked the door to Room 303. A present was waiting for him on the freshly made bed - Francine on all fours, her hair long and silvery as tinsel. He ripped off his suit from the boys’ department and slid under her, watching the hair cascade around his face, a forest of tinsel just for him. Then he moved down and found her breasts, dangling before his eyes like Christmas bells. Flat on his back he inched forward - until they just bumped the sides of his face.

What she said to him was out of a dream. And maybe it was a dream.

 “My father was a big man. I want a little man.”

When he raised his head a bit he could see between her legs to the wall, where his sturdy Dispoz-a-flash case stood filled with flashlight samples in engine red and safety yellow, everything ready to go. On top of the case was his plane ticket.

Tomorrow, the Chicago Fire Department. Chicago, Chicago, Chicago.

As Steve jogs around the room he grabs glances of the daddy of love. The TV host is asking Barry White the secret of his success as a recording artist. Steve sees Barry really think about this. Barry wants to give the true answer – a legend has a responsibility to history - and this legend does speak the truth, if his body language is any proof, and Barry’s body does not to need to utter many words to sound big. After a long, serious silence he looks the host straight in the eye and gives a three-word answer, pausing between each word to let it really sink in.

 “Music,” says Barry in that deep, deep voice. Pause.

 “Lyrics,” says Barry. Pause.

And finally:

 “Groove,” says Barry. After the longest pause of all.

The pregnant pauses give Steve the opportunity to see, not just hear, Barry’s articulation and delivery of each of the three words. The space he’s moving in is not exactly a running track, even though it includes the galley kitchen and island counter. By the time Steve circles the counter and gets back to passing the TV, Barry makes his next booming pronouncement in the verbal triptych. His timing of “Music … Lyrics …Groove” fits right into Steve’s jogging rhythm. Each booming word becomes the keyword for a lap.

Long after Barry leaves the screen, Steve is still jogging around the front part of his condo, and, in his head, hearing Barry sonorously call each word out. At first it’s like a loudspeaker in a stadium; then, after a while it’s just part of the routine, a mantra, no longer Barry’s voice but Steve’s. A quiet inner voice, an echo settling down to a murmur carried on the breath.

But the longer he jogs one thing is clear. One of the three words is even bigger than the others. Says it all, in fact:

Groove.

Steve really gets inside that word. As the clock ticks on and the sweat starts to dampen his tee shirt, it’s the only word of the three he hears. Groove … Groove … Groove.

Today, Sunday, Steve’s groove is jogging around the inside the living room/kitchen combo. He doesn’t want to jog in the street. He doesn’t want a course that stretches over hill and dale, with vistas far as the eye can see. He wants the eye to hit a wall and bounce right back into his head, where the word groove is pulling him around the entertainment center, the bookcase, the kitchen counter, pulling him as though he were the needle on an old vinyl Barry White record, locked in the track of Barry’s song.

Before Steve knows it, it’s the top of the hour. A Sprint commercial. Then Dell. Then Jeep. They bore him, but something in the back of his head automatically guesses what each cost to make. Then some talking head comes on and starts babbling about the price of natural gas. Steve pivots on the sole of his left sneaker, makes a neat angle around the stereo and lifts the remote off a shelf. In no time flat he’s approaching the TV again, he aims the remote at the face of the talking head and fires. The TV fades to black and oblivion, and Steve picks up the pace. He’s jogging so fast in so small a space it’s almost as though he’s not moving – he’s fixed in an orbit forever, like a planet. This is the true meaning of groove, Steve thinks. And I’m there.

What’s a dinner hour? Steve hardly notes its passing. And why should he? Planets don’t need food, don’t need Chefs on Wheels buzzing the bell. They’re fed from within, from fires burning deep down at the core. Steve tears around the condo like a comet, feeling lighter and brighter with each step. He thanks the lucky stars above he’s on the bottom floor of the building. No broom banging on the floor knocking him out of orbit, out of the groove. Above him are fifty one floors; fifty two in all, a condo deck of cards. Each one is a story and each one has a story. But right now Steve could care. It’s dawning on him, as the night turns from black to gray and the laps cease to be laps and become pure centrifugal force, that of all the six billion people on earth, he may be the only one swooping around his living room/kitchen combo at this hour, at any hour ever, like a fiery star. In terms of sheer distance traveled he could be notching more miles than a marathoner; and at a recordbreaking pace. At Steve’s age, that’s no small feat. In cosmic terms, it could be the greatest accomplishment of his life. But if a tree falls in the forest and no one sees it, does the tree really fall?

Next day, Steve’s on the plane, Philly to Denver, with his watch. He can’t believe it; they really did give him a Rolex watch. Steve feels like a living, breathing Fortune Magazine cartoon. They gave him a Rolex Oyster with a platinum band, along with a golden parachute that would, among other things, cover his ills and woes for the three years until Medicare kicks in. What’s more, they threw in four paid weeks so he could fly hither and yon, say goodbye to his accounts and paternally pass the baton to his successor, no less a suit than Steve but a four-button one.

Thinking of the days left, Steve fixates on a metaphor. Bathwater swirling out of the tub - how you hardly notice a trickle when the tub is full, how fast it goes at the end. Steve is a shower guy, but the tub sticks in his head like a brain bruise .

He’s buckled in the aisle seat at the bulkhead, accepting pretzels and headphones. But he declines the offer of steak or chicken, preferring to sip water, pop a caffeine pill (Steve will drink no airplane coffee) and partake of the gleaming Oyster. A shaft of high-altitude sun from the window seat bounces off the round face so hard and sharp it’s like a knife to the eyeballs. He blinks, squints, shields his eyes with the inflight shopping mag and finally locates the month, day and year. He used to hate the office shitheads dissing him for being on the Back Nine, but now it’s all down to days, the last putt of the Back Nine, with four Big Berthas on the seventeenth teeing off and itching to rain golfballs on your head. Steve stares at his Oyster and contemplates living life watching the CNBC stock ticker. Taking breaks to queue up for proCardia at Walgreens. He feels like he’s spent thirty years in a seat belt, husband of the road and the sky. Actually he turned sixty and married the Marriott – not only his destination in Denver and other points west but also the owner/manager of his condo. Same furniture as in the hotels, but the upgraded stuff only. As in Club Marriott, suite class.

Steve has been doing commercials too long, babying the writers and art directors and babysitting the clients. He wants his Oyster to be a food of love, to roll back time and give him another shot at Barry’s Groove.

Last night with Barry’s booming words, and with his sneakers streaking like jet engines around the suite-class carpeting of the Marriott-owned condo, Steve was a fiery planet. Today, five miles high in mahogany Cole Haan slip-ons it’s weep weep and he’s the monk of advertising. Not straight, not gay, just not. Life as a thirty-year business trip. Nose candy in the Winnebago when the crew breaks the set – (Snuffling and snorting the white stuff for what? It burned his cilia and made his old teeth ache). Those wipe-my-ass media luncheons on the Forbes Yacht. Holiday cards from Christie Hefner. And to think: he did it for the miles.

There was a would-be wife once, but not the kind he would take to The Effies. He left her in coach to go sit up in first.

Steve needs a microcosm, a metaphor, a place where he can win. On this winged shuttlebus there’s only one such place, but the sign says occupied. He stands up and waits beside a beverage cart in the cramped galley area, fiddling with his Oyster, pulling it off and on his wrist. He imagines all hell going on behind the folding door; a simple, stand-up, salesman’s whizz would surely never take this long. Finally the panels rattle, the mom and toddler squeeze out and Steve barges in, not even stopping to put his watch back on, smack into the cloud of baby powder they left behind them.

Steve has only two hands, and one of them has to slide the lock while the other waits in idle mode with the watch, dangling it between thumb and forefinger. But then he gets that ribcage flutter, that left-arm sizzle that tells him Medicare had better hurry up, and the thumb and forefinger snap open like a shark mouth, releasing the Oyster to gravity, to the innards of the aeronautic toilet bowl. On this particular model, the removal mechanism is a trap door; an automatic whoosh-flush at the merest hint of contact. The Oyster plunges in, hits the flap and is swept away. Like a drowning, it all happens in a split second. Steve hunches over and peers into the dark empty well, the thunderous sucking sound still in his ears.

He knows the drill. This is no Timex here. He alerts the flight attendant, who alerts the pilot, who alerts the United gate in Denver. The plane lands. A courtesy rep meets Steve in the jetway and makes sympathetic eye contact – we understand your loss. Meanwhile out on the roaring tarmac some poor gaffer in a slicker and long rubber gloves sticks his arm past the elbow into the fecal buckets. He fishes the first two buckets: no luck. Third try, bingo, he comes up with the Oyster, rusted brown and half-eaten by the shitkilling chemicals.

Steve’s an account guy; he knows how to fake pleasure. He takes the watch, wrapped in plastic like medical waste, and dukes the gaffer a twenty. Once the rubber glove comes off, he shakes the guy’s hand and palms him a tenspot for good measure. At the first recycling bin he stops and unloads the whole business. He hears it clank into the Pepsi cans.

After all this dicking around at the gate he’s the last one down to the baggage carousel. Only the stragglers are left, the lost-baggage folk and the ones who checked pool cues and ten foot fishing poles. Steve scans the moving belt for his Tumi two-suit wheelie (a monogrammed spiffo from the reps at Money Magazine). He draws a bead on it just as it makes a U-turn around the mom with the tyke, the one who poofed up the toilet with baby powder. Her eyes do something, a little dance of dread, that makes him let the bag go by for another round. She has the Patagonia sexy-woodsy look, but the way she’s flicking those deer-in-the-headlight eyes it seems that no amount of Gore-tex and Thinsulate can protect her now. It’s beyond a baggage problem, Steve surmises, because she’s eyeing the entrance/exit to the bus and taxi stand much more wildly than the wobbling belt.

Something about the endlessly revolving track and the cavernous emptiness of the place does something to Steve and the mom – to the space between them. He can feel the change in the air molecules. They’re so alone they’re suddenly together. And when their eyes meet from a good forty feet away, it feels as close, to him it does, as when they traded embarrassed smiles squeezing by each other at the threshold of the airplane john. What the hell, she’s at that age when she could be his daughter, but in L.A. she could also be his wife. Like an eagle – or a vulture - he hones in on the left hand, the one securing the kid at her hip. No ring. Steve finds himself squinting like Clint Eastwood. His shoulders feel bigger, and he takes that first long stride in his Cole Haans, the one that sends the signal he’s moving her way.

He manages just three giant steps before the boyfriend, husband, whatever, emerges from behind a thick pillar way off to the side, rushes in like a blitzing left tackle and scoops up mom and offspring together in his ham arms. Steve adjusts course as best as he can, trying to make it look as if his forthright advance was only made out of desire to reconnect with his luggage. He chases the Tumi down the belt and yanks it, just as the happy couple begin their long, hungry mouth-to-mouth. Steve trots away with the wheelie behind him, morphing from Clint Eastwood to rickshaw puller in twenty seconds.

At the Denver Marriott he’s up in a deluxe room on the V.I.P. floor – one of the travel bennies that came with purchasing the condo. He skips dinner for now – why rush a nothing night? Room service comes till midnight. Besides, there’ll be V.I.P complimentary continental breakfast in the a.m. Energy enough for what he has to do: go see the client and do a backslapping farewell, take his game from the Back Nine to the Back Door.

So Steve pulls open his complimentary USA Today and finds a story he reads seven times. It’s about some man arrested for snapping the necks of four pet birds – one parrot, one parakeet and two lovebirds. He did it during a war over a parking space with a fellow tenant in his apartment building. The accused pushed into the guy’s unit and went berserk, getting crazier with each bird. The parakeet came last and fared the worst: head torn off completely. Crazy man shoved it in the neighbor’s face, stabbing his eye with the beak, then he ran downstairs to the lot and heaved a cinder block through his windshield.

Steve puts the paper down because he remembers something. He goes into the beige, gleaming all-marble bathroom, takes out his toothbrush and wads up a piece of Kleenex, rolling it in his fingers until it’s a hard little white ball. Then he sits on the bathroom rug, adjusting his position until he finds the angle where the vertical surfaces of the bathroom, the walls, the glass door of the shower and the sides of the tub all meet in such a way that he feels he’s sitting inside a miniature baseball park. He scooches up his haunches and turns the rug so it’s pointing like an infield diamond towards a corner formed by the tub and the longest stretch of marbled wall. This he deems center field, so when Steve sits down again his hand holding the toothbrush is at home plate and his hand, the left one holding the hard white Kleenex ball, is on the mound.

He cocks the fingers of his left hand. He makes them rear back in a kind of windup, then uncorks and fires the little white ball, fast as he can. With the right hand he swings the toothbrush – crack – the pellet arcs deep and careens off the side of the tub, about an inch from the top. He retrieves it, throws again, swings and misses. Again and foul-tips into the rug. Next pitch he sends to the moon - over the side of the tub and out of sight. Steve licks his lips. He keeps pitching and hitting. He’s everything in this park; pitcher, batter, ump, manager, bullpen staff and thousands of screaming fans. He hasn’t done this for fifty-four years. And he knows, he knows – the hand/eye thing is working, connecting, he hasn’t lost a fraction of a fraction. He’s fast as ever. Steve feels if a mosquito flew in and divebombed him he could take it out with one swing of the toothbrush, crack, just like it was a Kleenex knuckleball fluttering from one hand to the other.

It’s not even close to sunset yet and the settling of the forthcoming Benz. The Garrets have broken from work – because they can – and finally arranged their lone son Andrew’s student visa. To Johannesburg, which he says is a pinnacle music city. That took so long they’ve decided to kill the whole morning on mall errands, both office and personal. They’ve bought a whole box of Starbucks Breakfast Blend at Staples – to keep the office team in high gear - and now they’ve progressed through the CompUSA queue to the number one spot, face to face with the one and only checkout lady on duty. Suzi Garret, at long last, has found the gender adapter IBM told her to get, and Gavin Garret is brandishing his old sad clown pose, cracking stupid Luddite jokes about it. As Suzi whips out her Garret Group Visa and slaps it on the checkout counter next to the little shrink-wrapped adapter, like a poker bet, Gavin proclaims to the checkout lady, “hey, I thought she liked me the way I am. I thought she was here to buy something for her laptop.” Suzi, who’s just entered her third decade of enduring such passive-aggressive monologuing, and knows all the landmines, plants her left hand on a cocked left hip and throws him the wifely glare. “Hahahaha,” she says, “a gender bender.” And there they are in the broad morning daylight of CompUSA, the two principals of the Garret Group, staging their little ironic show for the checkout lady. As for her, the narrowed Eurasian eyes show she’s not even noticed the joke-attacking Gavin, who’s embarked on a follow-up crack about the copy on the pack…for use in male to male connections.

No, the skinny, hipless checkout lady aims her two onyx eyes in a squint-lock on Suzi’s shelf of a hip, specifically on the no-nonsense hand that’s planted there, on the lanky, luminescent wedding finger.

 “It’s blinding,” she says, “what is it?”

 “What do you mean what is it,” says Suzi, shedding the poofy irony for cold steel. “It’s my engagement ring.”

 “He gave you that when you got engaged?”

 “Hardly,” says Suzi, in the iciest whisper she can find. She recalls her first engagement ring, roughly as dazzling as the pop-top on a Coors can. Gavin, his joking tongue tied by the twist in mood, pensively recalls the slow but relentless rise of their household income - the metamorphosis of two ragtag student publicists into a real Garret Group. This was the tide that swept them at long last to the sacred Tiffany counter, that shimmering glass shrine on which he planted his two hamhock elbows and infamously made the joke-jab about sixty five grand for a blue cardboard box. Whereupon the salesman, acting the Gielgud butler, replied, “you’ve done your duty, sir.”

At this point Suzi and Gavin have noted the absence of any adornment whatsoever on the bony, nervous fingers of the CompUSA checkout lady. They’ve also begun to cast fearful looks at the queuing shoppers behind them. Are the shoppers sullen about the delay? Are there jewel thieves back there?

Persisting, the checkout lady inquires, “how much?”

 “How much?”

At last, she picks up Suzi’s deep-freezing, darkening mood, and drops her voice. “I just mean, you know, karats…”

Gavin, switching to the subtle cover of sign language, holds up four fingers for all to see, and Suzi elbows him in his meaty flank, savagely.

The four fingers collapse at once, and the checkout lady proceeds to swiping the card through the slot. But while the authorizing software does its endless click-clack-click, she bears down on Suzi and drills even deeper.

 “I’m not a ring person,” she declares. “It’s because of my father and mother. Once, my father threw my mother’s ring down the sink with the soap. She wanted to kill him for it. I saw everything and I sided with my father, I wanted to defend him. What’s more important, a ring or my father? My mother was from Japan, during the war, and she saved everything. My father was Italian and he threw away everything. He either threw it down the sink or into the garbage. My mother and father, they fought like armies. They fought all the time.”

To tell this story she lifts her voice again, amplifying it enough decibels so it resounds down the queue, which becomes transformed into the checkout lady’s audience. In a matter of seconds she’s told her life story, or at least enough of it so that a reasonable person could deduce the rest of her history from it, more or less. Her confession reverbs like waves in a pond struck by a rock. The vibes pursue Gavin and Suzi out the door of CompUSA, and even sneak into the air of Suzi’s Land Cruiser and accompany them back to the Garret Group world headquarters, a six-room office suite in a clapboarded suburban micro-mall over a yoga studio.

 “Do you think the mother went at the father with a knife?” Gavin asks. He’s trailed Suzi into her office – pumpkin-colored with pictures of Andrew all about – and he watches in awe at how adroitly she installs the gender adapter.

 “That’s what I saw in my mind too – the way she told it. I couldn’t feel for her, though. Who the hell is she? She insulted my ring. She was a bitch, if you want to know the truth.”

 “True,” says Gavin, “but only on one level. On a deeper level she was fighting for her father’s life. I’ll tell you this, though. With an attitude like that she couldn’t work at the Benz place. And that reminds me…”

 “I know. It’s tonight. Don’t worry, I’ve cleared the decks.”

 “No, not tonight. Tonight is too late. We have to be there before sunset.”

 “Why before sunset? What’s going on? What are you hiding, Gavin?”

 “You’re insane today. This isn’t about hiding. It’s about an appointment. I made an appointment.”

 “I’m insane. Then why are you twitching? I know you, Gavin. Why?”

 “Are we fighting? Are we being like the Japanese woman and the Italian man?”

 “Why are you making such a big deal over this? Over picking up your new car.”

 “It’s not my new car, it’s my new Benz. Did you make a big deal over your new ring? Did you?”

 “You must have ordered something crazy. I can tell.”

 “There’s nothing crazy about a tint.”

 “A tint. You ordered a tint? You’re out of your mind. You don’t tint a Benz. No one tints a Benz. It’s disgusting. Only a pimp or a rapper would tint a Benz. Are you a pimp or a rapper, Gavin?”

 “No, I’m not. I’m a father, that’s what I am.”

Suzi blinks, thinks, but pushes on, the way a drug-sniffing dog pushes on. “How dark is the tint?”

 “How bright are your karats?”

 “Mafia dark? Elvis dark? Will you be able to see the road when you’re driving?”

 “We chose the darkest legal limit. And I stress the word legal.”

 “We?”

 “Andrew and I. I chose this with him. When he was on spring break we went together to the dealership. He wanted to be part of my personal milestone. I was very proud.”

Gavin has that look on his face. The holy look, like he’s reciting the pledge of allegiance. Like he’s been chosen Dad of the Year.

 “You let Andrew spec out your new company car? You’ll be driving clients to dinner in that car. Andrew lives his life on KazAA. His pants are so big Eminem’s house could fit in them.”

 “The tint works. I’m speaking visually here. It really sets off the silver. If you can only see it while there’s some daylight left you’ll agree. I know you’ll agree…”

The Garrets are interrupted by Melinda, one of “the kids.” The others in the kid category are Tory and Ben. These three are not kids in the sense that Andrew is a kid, a kid who has Gavin’s and Suzi’s last name, a kid not old enough to buy liquor yet. These are the working kids, the young and hungry publicists who give the Garret Group the fire in its belly. And although Gavin and Suzi lump them with Andrew’s generation, not a one of them, in fact, is younger than twenty six.

Normally, Melinda would be hard-pressed to disrupt the Garrets in serious crossfire, but today something about her bearing is especially intrusive and even commanding. In place of her windblown mane, her trademark wakeboard-girl hair, is a neo-perm that projects cutting-edge efficiency; and her makeup says she’s not at a keg party, but at work in serious enterprise. The reason is Melinda’s just back from her honeymoon. She’s now a married woman. “I’m Mrs. Giamante now,” is how she explains it.

 “Time out you two,” Melinda barks. And she has a shiny white piece of plank in her hand. “The Kleertek meeting is in five minutes in the conference room. We need you guys, no kidding, okay?”

As Melinda spins to exit, the white plank, which is her sample piece of Kleertek, brushes a plexiglass square on Suzi’s desk. It contains a picture of a smiling Andrew at age twelve, riding a horse through an open ranch gate, straight towards the camera. The plexiglassed photo teeters then lands askew, tipped against Suzi’s telephone. “Oh I’m sorry,” says Melinda. And Suzi shoots back, “it’s nothing. Go.”

Melinda hastens out and Suzi fusses over putting the picture straight. The action causes a ceasefire, a cessation of angry air molecules which at first, to both Gavin and Suzi, feels formless and dead, like a stopped heartbeat or a vacuum or even a black hole. But the lull suddenly becomes a vortex of nostalgia, sucking them both into its lyrical, backward-yearning whirl. They stare at the smiling boy on the horse and see, as they’ve always seen, that luck has handed their Andrew all the physical positives they happen to possess - but scant few of the negatives. He has Gavin’s broad back but none of his devious, potato-serf loutishness. He has Suzi’s long, restless limbs, but on Andrew the spindly bones project innocent prowess rather than a grabby, mantis-like persistence.

 “Our baby,” says Suzi, “our buckaroo.”

 “You can’t tell me he wasn’t happier then,” says Gavin. “So were we, maybe.”

 “Just the three of us, and the Wyoming sky. Out there you can really see the sky.”

 “And the horses. Remember their names?”

 “They were all like breakfast. Cocoa, Oatmeal. I can’t remember the third.”

 “Doughboy, he was mine. He had a big ass.”

 “No comment,” says Suzi derisively, still in partial battle mode. Nevertheless, she does indeed make no comment, at least no further comment, for what seems like a very long while; perhaps enough of a while for a remembered whoosh of wind to ricochet from one end of a Wyoming canyon to the other. Suzi’s mind’s eye has fled the eastern seaboard office park and crossed the Great Divide. She scuds along a trail of memory under a racing herd of clouds, cottony puffs gone from bright, lazy white to red-hot copper, stirred to stampede by the giant red stallion of a sun, vamoosing at day’s end behind the black mountain peaks. With his canine nature, Gavin – adept as a terrier at reading wordless human cues – mentally joins his wife on this long forgotten trail, joins her and Andrew and their three rented horses under the very same copper-waning sky at the very same ranch they visited years ago, having noted even back then how cruel it was of Travel and Leisure to call something so authentically moving and family-bonding a dude ranch.

Time passes; minutes with just the two of them and the photograph, until a bugling speaker-phone snaps the reverie. This time it’s Tory, announcing that the conference-room corkboard has been pinned wall-to-wall with Kleertek concepts.

Gavin and Suzi turn reluctantly from the picture of Andrew-as-cowpoke. They exit her office and she asks, “what in the world were you driving back then - besides Doughboy? I can’t even remember.”

 “A Pacer,” says Gavin. “Used. I actually bought a used Pacer.”

 

 

Remembering their days in the Pacer tax bracket has a salutary effect on the Garrets, extending the state of truce they’ve stumbled into – if not full concord at least partial ceasefire. Unlike the warring parents of the ring-phobic Staples employee, Suzi and Gavin are a united front as the Kleertek meeting settles down to business; Suzi flashing her rock like a challenge at the up-and-comers; Gavin sermonizing on the need for a “tipping point” of an idea, something to break the Kleertek business wide open. Until he runs out of gas on this harangue, Melinda, Ben and Tory shuffle papers and nod obediently, the latter two steaming like horses from the lunchtime run they take together, whenever their busy schedules permit.

The urgent purpose of the meeting is to arm Gavin with concepts he will attempt to sell tomorrow at lunch, a summit of a lunch with the Kleertek CEO and three of his sub-commanders. Gavin will be picking up the execs in his new Benz. They will see the tint glinting at them in the Kleertek corporate lot. They will be encompassed by the tint during the entire ride to the lunch destination and back. Gavin wants to go on his mission with a tipping point idea – no small task for a product that is wood-like without a trace of tree in it – but even more pressing is his hunger for Suzi’s blessing on the trappings of his silver chariot. It’s his canine nature again – he’ll fawn for approval, and bow and scrape with bared teeth when he doesn’t get it. As the conference room turns tense with the wham-bam of brainstorming and the nostalgia over the photograph fades, Gavin wonders about Suzi, Andrew, himself and the Benz. Andrew has already sided with him over features and options – more than sided, he has dictated the choices. Years from now, will Andrew be making the same kind of manic, morbid confession as the checkout lady? I wasn’t just defending a car, I was defending my father.

Gavin’s throat tightens as Suzi lights into him publicly over something completely unexpected – his slam of a Kleertek tag line proposed by the hard-working Ben. Think beyond wood is the line, and Gavin sees it pinned to the wall and hates it so much he ridicules it. “We’ll be thinking beyond this client if we ever bring that in. This is no tipping point, guys. It’s a firing point.”

For two decades, Suzi has been content to run infrastructure and let Gavin play idea director. But this time she sees him as bullying the young and lets fly an icy, “and you have better?” Of all humans only Suzi, thinks Gavin, would have the nuggets to demean him this way – in front of the kids.

 “Not just better, bigger,” he fires back, picking up a Magic Marker. He scribbles and speaks simultaneously. “The look of hard wood. Without the hard work.”

 “What have you been smoking, Gavin?” says Suzi. “That line is so Zen. Worse, so Woodstock. Talk about a non-event strategy. I say we have a vote.”

And they cheer her, and vote – and Think beyond wood wins four to one. Gavin sweats at the corners of his mouth, which gives his face a dewlapped look. He pants like a hound that’s been chasing a flea on his tail. Even the old clown disguise won’t come to him; the smile muscles just won’t go up. Gavin yearns for the company of his son, who’s at college; not the beaming lad in the horse picture, but the style-savvy hip-hopper of today. If only Andrew were here with him, he thinks, he’d have a champion, a kid on his side; he just knows it.

 “I just hope your tint isn’t as bad as your line,” says Suzi. She too has her mind fixed on the present-day Andrew. But she views him through a different lens than Gavin – as a sweet-child-turned-courtier who’s duped Dad into pimping out a Benz, only so he can borrow it to impress his rap-happy friends.

The Garret Group is about to adjourn with the principals in near civil war when Ben stands, takes Tory’s hand and says he has an announcement to make. The two of them sigh and heave – and Melinda joins with her own oohs and ahhs – as they let Gavin and Suzi in on their double secret. They are engaged to be married. And not only that, they are pregnant. The news hits the two Garrets hard at the heart, but not nearly in the same way as the Andrew photograph. Instead of pushing the sweet gush-buttons this news sends them to a hollow, jealous place. They explode with fake jubilation, the requisite hugs and toasts. While the kids are bonding and baby-making, they worry, what are they? What have they become but two shot shells? Two bruised casings minus the bullets. A pair of relics who can only carp at each other or long mawkishly for their own Ben and Tory days.

For the rest of the afternoon Suzi so busies herself with the gender adapter and other plugs and ports and discs that Gavin is nearly pawing at her door as the daylight starts to fade.

 “It’s so unflattering when you beg,” Suzi says. “You ought to see yourself in the mirror.”

 “Bitch,” says Gavin, his lip starting to curl upward, exposing fang. “You can’t see a tint when its dark out.” Once again, he envisions how Andrew would present this schism years from now, how he would speak – hopefully as passionately as the checkout lady - in his father’s defense.

Finally they clamber into the Land Cruiser and barrel-ass down the atrocious, clotted highway – past the plastic cows grazing on steakhouse lawns, past the huge inflatable whale guarding the water slide, past the neon Full of Bull sign over the roast beef drive-in – until they reach the even more atrocious Auto Mile where the car dealers keep their acreage and stock.

Overhead the sky is blood-orange, streaked with purple-gray starting to feather to black. “Hurry,” says Gavin to the crunching traffic. “Hurry up, you bastards,” as if every rush-hour car were on its way with them to the Mercedes dealership.

At a red light, Suzi looks at the sky and remembers Wyoming. “We used to chase the sunset to see a herd of elk,” she says. “Now we chase the sunset to see the tint on a Benz.”

 “Pull in there,” yells Gavin as the light changes and a Silverado lurches into their lane. “Don’t let him block you.”

Suzi wrenches the wheel and screeches into the long driveway that slopes to the showroom. Gavin curses each speedbump in their way, and there are many of them. As the glass doors part at their approach Suzi throws a fleeting glance back at the fast-changing sky. “The stupid things rich people do,” she says.

And when she finally stands in the lot and stares at the gangsta tint – still discernible in the half-light – she reacts as expected. She hates it – but she lies; and Gavin, in turn, lies about knowing she’s lying. They drive the Benz to a celebratory restaurant, empty two bottles of wine and eat beef – because this is an occasion. Over coffee and cognac they phone Andrew at college and praise his knack for accessorizing contemporary luxury cars.

Next day, the Kleertek CEO sits in the passenger seat and coaches Gavin through the numerous twists and hairpin turns that lead to his toney and secluded club. For a reason Gavin can’t pinpoint, the CEO’s tone somehow gives the creepy impression he might be addressing a chauffeur; and the manner of the club parking valet makes it even creepier by not discounting the impression.

Over glasses of seltzer and lime the CEO states to his colleagues – as he has in the past – that he believes the strength of the Garret Group is in its young blood, and he praises Gavin for having the guts to hire associates who aren’t just yes-men.

 “So what’s new with them?” he asks, actually ticking off the three names, and correctly too.

 “Big news,” says Gavin. “Melinda’s back from her honeymoon. Ben and Tory are getting married, and they’re having a baby.”

 “Hey,” says the CEO, grinning. “Hey, wow.” And his trio of honchos chime in, heying and wowing.

 “And what about you, Gavin – anything new?”

Gavin sips his seltzer and thinks. “There is,” he says. “I just got the Mercedes.”

The CEO puts down his drink and mock-wipes his forehead. “This is too much in one day,” he says to the table. “One is back from a honeymoon. Two others are getting married and having a baby. And another one has a brand new Mercedes.” He leans forward and asks his brain trust, “now which of those biggies will be smooth sailing?”

The meeting ends on an up-note, because the execs all see huge possibilities in Think beyond wood – “an idea with legs,” as one puts it. In fact, the CEO strongly hints he will nearly double the Garret Group budget for the coming fiscal year. Gavin chauffeurs them back from the club and takes the long way back – the longest possible, because it takes him into the thick of the city to Copley Place and Tiffany’s. There he does the high-five in dollar signs for something to drape around Suzi’s neck. At the crucial moment they imprint his Platinum Amex, he pictures her neck as swan-like.

At the time, Jack Kopinsky was still little enough to confuse the world gallach with challah. So when his mother said they were going to Boyle’s house to see the gallach he thought she meant they were going for another holiday feast of some kind, where there would be bumpy bread. But it was growing cold and the holidays were over, as far as he knew it, although they were recent enough – not even a month ago - so memories still lingered in his body. These were not the succulent memories of fat honey cakes or warm puddings dusted with almonds, dark sugar and cinnamon. They were the stinging memories of a whipped and welted hand, a hand so punished it had hurt to make a fist.He got that way from the handkerchief game, his first. The boys played it each fall, in the school-free holiday season, when they filed out in their gloom suits after shul and tasted the sunlight. They took off in droves, a dark-draped, edgy tribe, for the cracked sidewalks of Hancock Field, a field where the cigar and cigarette butts had long ago burned the green out of the grass. Their ordeal of being cooped up bowing and praying for entire mornings and afternoons, bombarded with the acrid breath of their eternally rebuking elders, did not leave the boys in states of holy radiance when they finally were released to the open streets. As they surged towards Hancock Field they mangled the white handkerchiefs their mothers had primped and fluffed and stuffed into their breast pockets. They rolled and braided the crisp cloth into long, white cylinders, taut as rope, then knotted the ends hard and tight. And sometimes even dipped these ends in vinegar brought from home, to make the knots harder and tighter, like cured rawhide.With these self-fashioned knouts they played their palm-flogging game. They bucked up, yelling numbers and shooting out one or two fingers to determine whose turn it was. Jack had never played before. They way it shook out, he found himself bucking up against the identical twins, Marvin and Milton, two snake-eyed creatures lanky as pythons and twice his height. They were so identical they even drooled the same way, the spittle boiling over identical creases in the left corners of their mouths as they brayed through their adenoids about their buck-up victory over Jack.“We won,” said Marvin – or Milton. “Both of us.”One snagged Jack’s arm at the elbow. The other looked as though he would smash Jack’s face if he didn’t open his hand.“Both of you? Why both of you?”“It’s the rules. You lost. We won.”He knew the rules, but not the nuances. He had watched the game since kindergarten, itching to play, just as he was itching to smoke, and smoke soon. He was in the Fourth Grade. Marvin and Milton were in the Sixth. They snapped their knotted handkerchiefs like they were cattle whips. And their whole lanky bodies snapped like even bigger whips, giant belts of human skin coming down on him.The game was the game. The more lashes you took, the higher your score. Those were the rules, even when it was two against one. Jack had never known it could be two against one. But Jack had never played before. This was his very first year. And Marvin and Milton weren’t exactly two, either; they were one, in a way. They were the same one, but double.He gritted his teeth, offered his palm and took it. Until the tears dribbling from his eyes matched the drool coming from the mouths of the twins. Marvin and Milton raised their knouts higher, snapped even harder taking turns; attacking his hand like it was a scorpion they had to kill.“This will get you ready for Feeney. It’s good practice. You should thank us.”Feeney was the principal of Jack’s school, the only male on the faculty. Every other teacher in the Charles Sumner school was an ancient Miss. There was Miss Murphy, Miss Flanagan, Miss O’Shaughnessy, Miss Donahue, Miss O’Hara. They were Boston schoolteachers. Not nuns exactly, but seldom-smiling women who easily could have been nuns. And all their pupils were Feinbergs and Steinbergs and Lishnoffs and Lefkowitzes. That was how the Boston Schools ran its diocese of Little Israel, an enclave in the Roxbury district.Feeney was the man the Misses made you see when they deemed your misconduct too severe for normal punishment. Feeney had the bulging figure of a jolly Santa man and the grim, thin lips of a prison warden. He had the brilliant, glinting eyes of a scientist and the blunt jaw of a cop. In his office closet he kept a tapered rattan stick, said to cut the hand three times harder than the toughest knotted, vinegared handkerchief. The boys who were sent to Feeney wore the stripes on their palms for weeks. They were icons, like penitentiary heroes in the movies who survived torture and solitary confinement.But of all the boys in the school, Jack was likely the last who would ever be sent to Feeney. Miss Flanagan had pulled him to her bosom – so hard his teeth hit the pearl buttons of her dress – on the day she announced to the class that Jack had won the Courtesy Award – for model behavior, the best behavior in the whole Fourth Grade. But three days later she caught him whispering during a silent period and said, in a voice meant so everyone could hear it, “Jack, do you want to be sent to Mr. Feeney?” He shook his head, folded his hands and bent his brow like a slave as Miss Flanagan marched back up the aisle to her blackboard.So Feeney was always a threat, even to a winner of the Courtesy Award. And, in a way, the twins were right – the handkerchief game at Jewish holidays was practice for the even greater whipping possible at school.The outcome of the holiday contest was never really in doubt, not from the moment Marvin and Milton lit into him. Jack held his hand out until the twins thrashed it to the color of raw steak. But a point came when he had to give in. He sank to his knees sobbing. Then it was his turn to hit. His strokes were so pitiful the tall twins could have stood there all day, laughing and drooling as he fanned the air, doing no more damage than a feather or a falling leaf.So he took his hand home and his mother flew into a great flutter over it, shrieking and wailing, behaving like a giant barnyard bird whose chick had been bitten by a pair of foxes. She swooped him up and brought out cloths and witch hazel and mercurochrome. She prepared an icy potion and made him soak his fingers until the tips numbed over.As the day waned, Jack didn’t need to ask where his father was, because he already knew. Harold Kopinsky would be out all night, as he was every night, working the counter at his business, feeding the shady after-hours people, the miscreants too big for Feeney’s rattan. Then there was the business after the business…“Is he going to Chinatown?”That was all Jack had to ask. He wasn’t sure what going to Chinatown meant. He only knew it was his mother’s way of saying his father would be much later on this night than on others. Not home by dawn when his all-night shift ended, perhaps not even home by noon.“Yes, Chinatown,” Sylvia Kopinsky said, hovering over the gas jets and stirring the last of the holiday soup until it steamed. She poured the mixture into two bowls and they sat close, watching each other eat.“It’s sundown. The holiday’s over,” she said, her tone as flat and automatic as the clock hour-hand advancing to a new numeral.“Does he like Chinese food? Does he like it so much?”But the only answer Jack got was a shrug and more soup. “It’s all for us, every drop,” she said, tipping the pot so the last of the pearly liquid spilled into his bowl. “All this soup is for you and for me. Lehs im zu.”Jack knew enough Yiddish to grasp what she had said. Let him go, let him do.After dinner they sat close on the couch and watched programs on the television set, the new Philco Harold had brought home one day, completely unexpected, and months before Jack’s friends’ families had even thought of buying themselves televisions. His father was that way, and even with things bigger and more expensive than televisions. He could change cars as abruptly as if they were hats or socks. A new chrome-boat would show up out of the blue, fenders and whitewalls gleaming. As Jack sat on the couch with his mother she kept opening his beaten palm and kissing it, until he began to yawn and doze, and finally he felt ripples of sleep lap at him and take him like a dark, rising lake. When he awoke in the morning he found himself in his own bed, under the covers, and she was looking at him sleepily from a chair in the corner of his room. He sat up in bed and noticed he was now in his pajamas. The string at the waist was tied in a neat bow.That day his father did not return at all. But the phone rang in the evening and his mother said he was back in the deli as usual; something had made him late, too late to come home, and he had gone straight to work, not even able to manage a change of his counterman clothes.“Chinatown,” she said – in answer to the question Jack had in his mind. “Chinatown with Cats.”She pronounced the word as though it were the name of a human being, not the word for felines, domestic and wild - and Jack never forgot it. One night he overheard her Bridge Club friends buzzing about a place in Chinatown, a restaurant that the police had shut down. In the kitchen the police had found skinned cats hanging on meat hooks. Cats. He turned the word around in his head as though it were something solid, an oddly-shaped piece in a jigsaw puzzle, but so oddly-shaped he could not fit it anywhere. A puzzle-piece from a different puzzle entirely, accidentally put away in the wrong box.

---

Why did the gallach, with his priest’s collar, bear such a striking resemblance to Feeney? It was as though they were cut from the same black cloth. The thin lips that seemed to be frowning even when they were smiling. The eyes that seared and pierced. Only the jaw was more refined; more a detective’s probing, reflective jaw than the blunt shovel jaw of the cop on the beat. In its contour there briefly emerged something other than Feeney’s darkness. It was a glint of reprieve. But it sank away and the resemblance gnawed at him again the moment Boyle and Boyle’s wife ushered them into their chairs at the lace-draped table. The gallach first, in his black everything, the only white on his body the stiff collar that seemed to squeeze his face even redder than it already was.What brought them to Boyle’s house for dinner at all was a mystery to Jack. By everything he believed, it should have been the other way around, Boyle coming to the Kopinsky house hat in his hand, because who was Boyle but a peon of Harold Kopinsky?When Harold ranted about the dumb help he had working for him Boyle was always high on the list. Boyle was fat, Boyle was lazy, Boyle sat all day in the deli kitchen holding court like he was some kind of little Mayor Curley. Boyle never peeled enough onions, never chopped enough carrots, Boyle never got his white apron dirty because he was too busy chatting up cops and cabdrivers and two-bit City Hall workers who sat on their porky asses in city buildings just as Boyle did in Harold’s building, fed and clothed by graft and Civil Service. These human leeches kept calling on Boyle, paying him homage, pushing their way through the door of the deli kitchen to get to him. Around election time they swarmed around him. One man in particular, a white-haired polio cripple, was with Boyle so much Harold shook with rage. “He rolls in there in his wheelchair every day, white flower in his lapel, like he owns the place.” And Harold never put a stop to it, he only ranted and said some day he would kick Boyle’s ass back to Ireland.On top of everything Boyle was stupid as a beast of burden. Once Harold asked him to change the lettering on the large bill of fare that hung above the glass counter and steamtables. He was supposed to make the letters say there was a dinner special of baked macaroni. “He spelled it baked maracorn,” his father said. “Maracorn. What the hell is that? Nobody knew what the stuff was, nobody ordered it. I had to throw the whole thing in the swill. Somebody else would have docked the son of a bitch. Docked him or clocked him.”As the Kopinskys sat down at the dinner table the gallach crossed himself. Then Boyle and Mrs. Boyle crossed themselves. There were crosses all over the Boyle house. Wooden and metal and porcelain, and pictures of crosses too. They reminded Jack of the day the runt of a girl, her eye swollen black and blue, ran up to him at Hancock Field and asked him why he had killed Christ. She ducked her head, dodging a punch he never threw and never intended to, and she skipped away, not waiting for the answer he couldn’t give. When he told his father about the girl his father was cocking a razor in his hand and his face was thick as a snowdrift with lather. His shirt was off too, and the big eagle tattoo on his right arm bulged every time he put the razor to his face. “Your mother keeps telling me this is a sin, a Jewish sin,” he said, nodding at the winged tattoo. “It’s a blue scar, that’s all it is. Don’t believe everything you hear.” He slapped on shaving lotion and peered into the mirror, admiring his own jaw line and his fine Clark Gable mustache, flexing his blue scar every time he stroked the newly shaved skin.But Harold Kopinksy flexed nothing at all during this strange, unfathomable dinner; not even a black, rakish eyebrow, let alone his proud blue scar of an eagle. Neither did he flex the inner power Jack knew he had, his old, swaggering authority over Boyle and all Boyle’s kind. For the first time in his life, Jack watched his father cower and grovel. Before the gallach, and even before Boyle, in the way the schoolboys who had faced Feeney cowered and groveled in Feeney’s presence.“Do you like corned beef, Father?” Boyle addressed this question to the gallach collegially and fraternally, as though the two of them were on a higher plane than anyone else at the table. As though the gallach was the only one Boyle and his wife had to concern themselves about pleasing.Mrs. Boyle, a wan sheet of a woman, her arms half the girth of Jack’s mother’s arms, brought a huge platter of meat and vegetables to the table, all of it colorless. To Jack it was an apparition of food – food the way it might appear to people who were color-blind, everything as drained as newsprint. As Jack watched her bring in the platter he was aware of her wake, the wider space she walked through. In this space he saw patterned shapes of linen and lace the color of parchment. They were doilies, and they were everywhere, shrouding every piece of furniture. Years later, as he remembered Mrs. Boyle in a dream, the image his sleeping mind conjured was of a woman draped in gray, with an apron of doilies hanging from her shriveled stork neck and tied around her wan waist.The meat on the platter was gray as a dead dog, as was the rest of the steamed material surrounding it, the cabbage and the potatoes. In the deli Jack had seen his father lord it over the huge wooden barrels of Jewish corned beef, ordering minions like Boyle to pop the staves and fire up the kitchen burners under large silver vats filled with water; and he would have them boil a dozen of the large meat slabs at a crack. The cooking smells, the sharp vapors of brine and pickled meat would drive Jack delirious. The briskets themselves, gleaming in their jackets of white fat, were a bright reddish pink when they emerged from the bubbling water, alive with a salty heat that reached beyond the kitchen and made the very air of the restaurant delectable to inhale – even in nooks and corners where there were phone booths, a juke box, a cigarette machine.In the deli, if Boyle had ever presented Harold with gray corpse-meat such as this Harold would have had him shaking in his boots and begging for his job. Yet here, at Boyle’s table with the gallach - the man Boyle called Father - Harold kept his head bowed, his eyes low and his lips silent; and he picked at his food with an obedience Jack had never seen before. He seemed uncomfortable in his clothes too, a dark suit Jack could not recall him wearing before. To him it was a shul suit, but Harold never, ever went to shul. He was never, ever home when Jack’s mother lit the Shabbas candles and mumbled her brochah, covering her eyes before the fiery brass and dancing shadows. It was a matter of business hours, the dinner rush. Each afternoon Harold rose from sleep and put on his deli whites; white canvas pants and a short-sleeved white shirt; and when he returned the next day, from work or from Chinatown – from Chinatown with Cats - the white shirt and pants were stained with splattered meat juices and blotches of mustard.Jack ate at Boyle’s table as his father ate, as if submitting to a punishment. When he looked up at his mother, he saw a different woman than the one he knew, the buxom woman whose skin gleamed with the same joyous white fatness as the deli briskets. Today her lips became pursed and pinched every time she raised her fork, as though the food she was forcing into her throat was decayed or poisonous.The gallach put down his fork and knife and stared directly at Jack’s father, a stare so piercing it seemed to lift Harold’s head.“Food is a blessing, Mr. Kopinsky, not to be taken lightly.”Jack watched his father stop chewing, but not a word came out of his mouth. At that moment his lips could have been stone or ivory, hard and immobile as the teeth behind them.“You are a man who feeds people, Mr. Kopinsky. You give the blessing of food.” The gallach folded his hands and straightened his back, as though he were about to say a prayer.Instead he said two simple words. “It counts.”He delivered those two words as though he were standing on a mountain. Then he leaned forward and smiled, and Jack saw a smile creep onto his father’s lips as well. And onto Boyle’s lips.“It counts,” the gallach said. “It’s a beginning.”“Thank you,” Harold Kopinsky said. And lowering his voice to a near whisper he added, “Thank you, Father.”Jack thought of the words Our Father who art – and wondered if he had just heard his own father say a prayer, or at least a kind of prayer, for the first time ever.When the plates were cleared Jack asked to go to the bathroom. As he left the table he could hear Boyle boasting to the gallach:“Nice son he has, you see? And he feeds the poor too, Father. I’ve seen him give away bread, but he won’t tell you himself. He won’t, but he should. Go ahead, Harold, tell him about the bread, tell him yourself…”Boyle’s wife led Jack to a narrow, unlit hallway. But even in the shadows he could make out the stark elements of the large poster framed on the wall, the sea of skeletal hands reaching up past darkened skyscrapers, reaching towards a face in the sky, huge as the sun.It was the face of Curley, the old boss of Boston. Above the face and above the begging hands was a headline in bold, defiant type: Curley, Mayor of the Poor.On a white patch in the right side of the poster was a prominent message, hand written with pen and ink. To Pat Boyle, one of the best. My gratitude always, James Michael Curley.

---

Soon after the meal with the gallach, Jack heard his mother smirk, “no more Chinatown,” and his father began to appear in the shul suit again and again. Not that he wore it to synagogue, however. From the whispered Yiddish that went between Sylvia and Harold, Jack gleaned that his father wore it downtown to one of the big marble Boston city buildings. At least twice a week he put the suit on, right after returning from work at dawn, and left the house without sleeping at all. On those mornings he was monochromatic inside and out, suit as black as ink and face as white as paper or a bursting flashbulb, the nightlife swagger so absent from his eyes and lips it was as though acid had etched them away. And Jack, without knowing exactly why, began to feel the acid eating at him too, burning an emptiness into the part of his heart that had nothing to do with pumping blood, but was the axis on which all things turned.This was the point in time when Jack learned that Cats was only the pronunciation, but the name was Katz. He learned it from the twins, Marvin and Milton, whose tongues lolled as they gloated over the dark, ink-smeared newspaper photo showing Katz’s arrest. He was surrounded by cops, who were pulling him towards a police car. It was forty years from the time Katz had been lightweight boxing champion of New England, and still he was a blunt bulldog of a man, a man who chewed his cigars as though he were trying to bite them to death. His punch-flattened nose and slits of eyes, hooded by scar tissue, made him seem armored in his own skin, and impossible to hurt. Jack sensed these things about Katz just from staring at the murky newspaper photo; and when he stood ten feet away from the flesh-and-blood Katz in the yellow glare of the deli he saw how right his impression had been. Even indoors, Katz had a dapper Fedora planted on his squat head. Its elegance was in such contrast to the caveman savagery of his face it made the caveman stand out all the more.Jack’s mother had hurried him out of the house and taken him along with her to the deli, saying she had papers for his father to sign at once, lawyers’ papers. But Katz stood in the way, snarling at Harold over something, a point about money Jack couldn’t fathom. “Let her wait,” Katz said. “This is more important, you idiot fool.”When the argument was over Katz had Harold make him up a platter on a tray: black bread, an onion and a large bowl of sour cream. “Put the whole pint in there, you chicken bastard,” he said, and swiped the tray off the counter. He pushed his way to a table and ate rabidly, the white sour cream smearing his lips and chin like foam from his mouth. Watching him eat, Jack recalled words from the caption accompanying the newspaper the leering twins had thrown into his face. Shrapnel-words, they came shooting out of the paper and tore into him. Katz, underworld figure, drug ring. Herman Savitz, a druggist whose pharmacy stands next to the restaurant/delicatessen. Harold Kopinsky, the owner…

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When he balked at the squealing steel tracks in the cobblestone avenue his mother grabbed his sleeve viciously and yanked him onto the streetcar. The first time she told him where they were going he didn’t even hear it right; he was mixing up everything. She said, “we’re going to Charlestown.” He thought she’d said, “we’re going to Chinatown.”The streetcar rattled and swayed and the air inside was thick with decades of sweat, but it only led to yet another streetcar, and after that the screeching subway from Dudley Station – so many transfers to get across the river to Charlestown. Why were they on the streetcar anyway? Why not the car, the chrome-boat? Where had his father’s car gone, what had happened to the car – to all the cars?“Ask Judge Mulcahey,” his mother said. “I’m sure he prefers it to riding around in his wheelchair.”“What Judge?” Jack tugged her sleeve, begging her. “The man in the kitchen? The man with Boyle?” But by then they were in a swirl of people, transferring again, pushing against legs and handbags to get through the turnstiles at Park Street – and she ignored his questions about the judge; no matter how wildly he asked her, no matter how frantic he got.“You just keep your little mouth shut,” she said. “For your own good. And your father’s.”She thought he knew something, but what he knew amounted to no more than the few slips of the tongue she scattered his way, puzzle-pieces that were never enough to make a picture he could really see. On the last leg of the subway she muttered something about the gallach too, what a good gallach he was, how he had done what he could do…“Thank the gallach he’ll get out of here long before Katz will.” She said this as they trudged across the dismal span called Prison Point Bridge and approached the vast black wall, the wall that stretched like a tidal wave turned to gravestone.At school the next day Miss Flanagan marched down the aisle with her pointer, ordering them all to fold their hands and be silent. Compared to the aisle-marchers in operation behind the black wall, what was Miss Flanagan? As he did what she ordered with his hands, interlocking them, he opened his mouth and said in a sing-song, “yes, Miss Fuckbitch.” She pulled him up by the ear and dragged him out of the near-rioting room, down the long corridor to Feeney.  

When I catch up to Al, what a day, what a mood I’m in. The mood I’m in comes from that feeling we all know. That feeling you have on that bad morning in a strange city when you walk into a barber shop you know is a shade dirtier than your safety zone allows. But there’s no one there except you and the barber and some man-to-man thing goes on and it’s impossible to turn your back on this barber, a grimy man from the old school plying the only trade he knows. So you sit down and he drapes the vaguely soiled cloth over you and no one else walks into the barber shop the whole time you’re in the chair. And in the last two minutes of the haircut, the scant few moments that stand between you and the door and the street, he nicks you ever so slightly with the straight razor he’s using to clean the fuzz off the back of your neck, the straight razor he took off the vaguely soiled napkin on the shelf. And while you’re paying him you stare wildly around the barber shop, looking for the sterilizer or the germicide but all you find is the blood-stained tissue on the floor with your strewn hair, that and the door and the street and the rest of your life, which is different now, psychotic and philosophical, and all because you decided to kill time with a haircut, and you’re overawed at the vastness of the time you possibly did kill, all of it in one shot.

When I catch up to Al he’s outside an elementary school or community center, I can’t even tell which, in a bad, broken-down part of L.A. He’s there because the school or community center has a broken down running track, an oval of cracked asphalt sprouting grass tufts in the fissures, as part of its outdoor recreational facility; and this is just the kind of place low budget production companies look for when you’re on a job with a shoestring budget. It’s only a casting session anyway, not the actual shoot; but shoestring is a good word for this entire project. We’re doing Bristol bargain dress shoes, the shoes that are knockoffs of knockoffs, the shoes you wear if your job is to sit at the security desk in the lobby of a giant office building and point out the right elevators to visiting bigwigs clicking across the marble in Ferragamos and J.M. Westons, just so they can soar above you to floors you will never, ever walk on or even see.

So the hero of this commercial, by definition, is an earnest junior executive on the move. On the move to such a degree, with such ambition and aspiration, that he runs, in full business attire, to every meeting he’s asked to attend in the various buildings that comprise the vast campus of office buildings where he works. He breaks records sprinting from Building A to Building C, all so he can be first in the room with the doughnuts and the slide projector, all so he can escape the fate of sitting at the security desk while the rest of the world runs by and soars above him in rocketing elevators. He wears shoes, these bargain dress shoes, that are so well built, so ergonomically advanced, they perform even better than real running shoes in getting him to first place in the rat race.

Al sits in a black canvas chair sipping designer water, which will surely activate his bashful kidney. He sits next to the haughty director, who’s in a matching black canvas chair sipping a secret formula energy smoothie. I’m the latecomer so I join them in a third black chair, sip a tall iced mocha, and watch them for a while to get the hang of this casting session, so I won’t say anything stupid or, worse, uncool. I watch them as scores of struggling actors, boiling in the high sun, submit to the various ordeals required of everyone auditioning, the last of which is a full run around the oval track at top speed wearing a shirt, a tie, a business suit and the miracle-working bargain dress shoes.

What a crew, what a gang of thespian-athletes shows up for this low budget bonanza. There are those who haven’t run ten feet in the last ten years. They wheeze and turn purple and sweat through their business suits, drawing yucks from the gallery of homeless and jobless guys shooting hoops and peering at the proceedings through the fence, the chain link fence that separates the oval track from the other main component of this recreational yard, the basketball court. There are those who show up who are the kid brothers of famous millionaire movie stars; brothers who have virtually the same face as the big star, but nothing else, not a shred of the magic, and you see them at all the auditions and they never get it right. Then there are those who can run but don’t run correctly, not like a real runner. They’re either flatfooted or chicken-legged or bowlegged or pigeon-toed and they waddle or stomp or bounce in an unseemly manner, which the camera picks up right away, even a handheld video camera. Of the sixty or so contenders who try out only two break into a true competitive stride, long and open, a gallop as opposed to a fast trot. And of those two, one is incapable of sprinting in a business suit without looking as if he just robbed a bank.

So we have our hero, by default, and Al and I and whoever else is thirsty can head for the Sky Bar, where we can sit all afternoon like the jackals and hyenas of the movie business, dissing the losers at the casting session, feasting on the bones and offal of the Hollywood scene until evening brings somebody important who wants our table and ousts us.

And sitting there in celebrity heaven Al suddenly has better things to pay attention to than me. Down the stairs from the Sky Bar, in the pool area, they have an unusual piece of poolside furniture. In addition to the lounges and chairs there’s one industrial-size mattress, for good-natured Hollywood sport, and it’s become occupied by another shoot gang. They’re in town for a print shoot obviously, an even cheesier project than the one we’re on. Tits and ass instead of heels and soles. Rolling around on the mattress in thongs of dental floss thickness are the three models. As butts go, theirs are double scale or better on the standard compensation system, but the faces don’t even make scale, which tells you what this shoot is about.

On break from the lenses and lights, they form a meaty, jiggling, salon-tanned orbit of tush around the grinning guy who sits in the center of the mattress in a Hawaiian shirt, sipping a pink drink, the bar’s famous and delectable Cosmopolitan. He’s either the photographer himself or his assistant, and right now Al wishes he were that guy.

“Think they’ll model for me?” he says. “I want to get back into serious stuff. Caravaggio on Sunset Boulevard.”

We snarf, we sip, we stare.

“Jesse Ventura says he wants to be reborn as a bra,” says Al. “I want to be reborn as a thong.”

Everybody’s looking at the frolic on the mattress. The business guys from the East in their blue blazers are looking. Even the stoic Sky Bar bouncer is stealing a peek.

Before I can comment on Jesse Ventura, Al’s halfway across the room - call of the bashful kidney. Leaving me to my gin and my hopped-up ruminations. I run my fingertips over the nick on the back of my freshly shaved neck, which is where this all began, and observe the shenanigans on the mattress as they turn spicier and pull more eyeballs from around the pool and cocktail patio.

One of the models is on her tummy, pushing her thonged, creamed, oiled and bounteous booty towards the smiling sun. She yelps merrily as another model peppers the photogenic cheeks with little sharp slaps, turning them plum pink. Everybody’s into it now. The blazered Eastern businessmen are falling out of their lounge chairs. Security guards are leering around corners. Brainy lady executives from the media and entertainment world, gym-slimmed and sexy in their bikinis - sexy until now - roll their eyes and put down their ice teas and leave.

The clatter of fast footsteps spins us around. And out of nowhere it’s the audition, déjà vu. Men running in street clothes. But the action is right here at the high-budget Mondrian, not the low-budget school or community center with the shabby oval track.

Two guys in full business suits and dress shoes are going like hell, sprinting across the open cocktail patio towards the pool. They race right past the fun-filled mattress, their attention so riveted on something else they don’t even notice the buns and the giggles. Or the waiters with their round cocktail trays, dumbfounded and teetering.

It’s déjà vu kicked up a notch. Yes, the very thing we were casting a few hours ago - but these two bulging jocks, half bald and fortyish, don’t look like actors at all. They’re too beefy. Not workout-beefy but truckdriver beefy. Their business suits are too tight in the gut.

And by the time they reach their target, a table near the diving board where a young couple is drinking and smooching, their big police automatics are drawn and pointed, and the whole Sky Bar goes into a freeze.

The young man at the end of the gun barrels is up on his feet at once, pleading no contest, offering his hands to the cuffs. He has that guitarist vegan look, scrawny, sensitive and devious. He doesn’t seem surprised at the intrusion, not at all, but his beautiful girlfriend is. She screams and then weeps as they lead him away. For dealing whatever.

Even though we’re all in the same afternoon, it’s as though someone has cued a column of light on her alone. Whoever she is, she has gifts of the highest cinematic value. The eyes, the exquisite bone structure, the natural aristocratic slenderness. Everything the camera loves. You just know the cops despise their thin little prisoner, this scum of the earth, for his power to attract such a woman.

For a while she sits at the poolside table, sobbing quietly at the empty chair. Then she stands and walks across the patio towards the lobby and her future - Juliet in a pink gingham slip dress. The waiters stop in their tracks as she goes by. A balding man in reptile shoes stands up and slides out a business card. Upstaged, the party girls on the mattress turn their bouncing butts around and sit normally. They seem modest and glum. And overweight.

Once again, Marnie and Jon had traveled light, not even bringing spouses. They knew the drill and booked adjoining hotel rooms on-line - at the bereavement rate – in the same motel as before. The Standish was one notch up from no-frills. But with the Wake, the Mass, the burial, and then everyone to see and kiss, how much time would they spend in the rooms anyway?

At fifty seven, their old friend Gary Lassiter had looked so fit he seemed headed for a hundred. His sudden demise cast family and friends into numb surprise, and now threw them into the hard chill of a long graveside ceremony. Pushing its way into the cemetery was a mean wind straight from the heart of the Arctic. It snarled at the priest’s every word, stole hats and turned lips and fingers blue.  But late in the day the scene shifted to a softer, warmer venue. The Bellington Country Club. Enticing the mourners was a long table bearing minted lamb chops. And creamed potatoes with truffle specks black as coal.

Just seeing the crystal and candelabra ignited Marnie’s chatty side. She had endured enough long faces and was ready to sip and snipe. Jon was more fretful. Post-mortem patter and chatter disturbed him. Worse, this all felt like something he and his older sister were starting to learn by heart.

 “Why,” Marnie asked, “is there always a priest at these things? The Mass was hours ago.”

 “Priests need to eat too, you know.”

 This time, Marnie let Jon have the last word. But only because she was famished.

Mouth filled with pink lamb, Marnie turned and feasted her eyes on the table’s far end. Tracy Lassiter seemed to be bearing up, as expected. And if she ever foundered, as was not expected, Father Oscar was there at her side, cool and strong as a steel beam. The kind that supported new wings on sacred buildings, she said to herself.

When Marnie had heard about Gary, she sank into a bleak and even meditative few minutes. But then she bounced up and began planning outfits, convinced the Lassiters’ dinner would surpass the Fortiers’ dinner. (Beth Fortier had gone to her rest early too, even earlier than Gary Lassiter did, but her case surprised no one; the writing had been on the wall of her room at the Bellington Hospital ICU.)

As the funeral day unfolded, Marnie did her best to be solemn and discreet. In her own mind she was no less subdued than the long, slow line of cars, headlights ablaze in the pronounced November murk. But that was then, out in the wind; and this was now, here in the glow. And from the moment they entered the club she didn’t exactly walk so much as prance. Over at the coat-check by the dining room she went and grabbed Jon by the sleeve, same as she did  ages ago – when she was hauling him out of trees or into the latticed outdoor shower. Now as then, she started tooting her old brass horn about being right again. Or smarter. On any subject whatever.

And she kept at it.

“Same old club, new caterer,” she burbled, while tearing a piece of her skinny brother’s (pre-anorexic, she called him) untouched dinner roll. “It makes all the difference. What did you think of the shrimp bisque?”

“Please!” Jon said in a stage whisper, a rasp deep with gravitas. “You almost wiped my tie in the gravy. Can’t you contain your glee over the food? This isn’t about how many stars the chef gets.”

“Oh you like it too.  Come on. There’s nothing wrong with enjoying food at a time like this. That’s what these meals are for. To relieve the gloom.”

“This is our life, Marnie. I used to swim laps with Gary. Right there – right outside the window you have your back to.”

Marnie could almost see the old yearbook pages scrolling inside her brother’s head. Talk about gloom that needed relieving.

“They keep telling you about everybody living longer and longer,” Jon went on. “Plenty of people drop dead at fifty plus, though.”

From across the floral arrangement came a lupine sigh, deep and old. Gary’s aunt Florence, eighty nine. Her son James, who’d once freestyled the club pool right along with Jon and Gary, had heard the comment as well. “You’re so right, Jon,” he said, and stared into his Cabernet and beyond it.

This being a repeating occasion, a pattern had clearly developed. Marnie liked to sit next to her brother – and at as far a distance as possible from the truly bereaved: the spouse and offspring. With each death and each trip she – and he too, despite his dyspeptic pieties - was getting more adept at the diplomacy of where they should sit and next to whom.

If they became bored with each other, even for a moment, there were copious other mourners to talk to. But mutual boredom had never been a problem for Marnie and Jon. From all appearances, it never would be.

On days such as this the club always had to haul out its longest tables and extra silver. Big families had always been the rule in Bellington; and the rule still held for the Bellington natives they had known growing up, the ones who stayed in town and became lifelong residents and permanent club members, as had their parents before them. Why they stayed was another matter - not answerable, not logically. Bellington was the hole in the Bay State doughnut, the empty, unemployed center of a munificent Commonwealth.

Marnie, however, had escaped. So had Jon. She’d fled to the coastal end of the state, Arlington, Mass., and assertively planned her family to fit a four-bedroom home. (Tubes tied at two.) Jon had run in the opposite direction and become a dentist in the genteel hills of Lenox, where he married late – to a woman whose children had grown and gone. And there was talk – a phone call here, an email there – that the woman had grown and gone too. Leaving Jon standing all day in his office, having one-way conversations with patients muffled by rubber dams.

But the stories of the deceased comrades were different.

In the fecund Bellington tradition, Gary Lassiter had stayed to carry on the Lassiter Budweiser distributorship and wound up the dad of six. While Beth Fortier, a Bellingtonian who ventured into Boston or out to Lenox about as often as she flew to Peking, found herself the mom of four. These two were preceded in death by Harold Armitage, the native-son pole vaulter who’d landed inches short of the Olympics. He departed Bellington two months shy of sixty – survived by a brood of seven.  All of the funerals had occurred in a space of fourteen months. But as they left St. Anne’s cemetery, Denise LePonte, the Board of Health secretary, assured Marnie and Jon that the longevity odds were way in their favor. As she put it, the three-death domino sequence was a fluke, not the first strike of a scourge erasing the town’s sons and daughters. Gary, Beth and Harold had only been statistical blips in the Great Bell Curve of Bellington.

“Make you a bet we won’t see you two back here again for a couple of decades,” Denise said. 

Judging from the scattered evidence, Marnie wasn’t the only ravenous mourner in attendance. The truffled potatoes proved popular, the chops even more so. The plates, and even the tablecloth, were strewn with bones. At a signal from the club manager, white-shirted busboys cleared the remains. The manager signaled again and white-jacketed waiters rolled in two dessert carts.            

Marnie gleefully steered Jon to the profiteroles, but he ate his as though it were a punishment. Baked in castor oil.

“Stop scraping off the crust,” she lectured. You already look like a scarecrow.”

“The priest is looking,” he shushed. “Now will you calm down?”

“Why do all you health freaks look like asylum inmates? Nothing is fun anymore.”

Father Oscar’s glare had succeeded in making Marnie’s face red and her voice slightly lower, but her mouth was still in rapid motion. “I see people like you stalking the aisles at Whole Foods in Cambridge,” she declared to Jon. “None of them ever smile. They’re not even looking at the food. They’re all reading labels.”

The piece of profiterole on Marnie’s dessert fork was six times the size of her brother’s, but she downed it, undaunted. “I know,” she said. “Death is stalking. You don’t want to wind up like Gary. But that’s not the way to do it, Jon – making yourself into a skeleton.”

 “Be happy. Right, Marnie?” The interrupter was the retired Bellingham Chief of Police, Harry Shannon, who was in the chair at her immediate left, and sitting exceedingly close. He had found a second career with Edward Jones Investments, but lost in a recent bid for mayor. And decades ago he had lost in his bid for Marnie. He was still aghast that the winner had been a professor who bicycled each day from the hills of Arlington to the Harvard Yard, a bookworm from another hemisphere named Carlos Azevedo, who had skin like a ginger snap.

 

The late afternoon meal stretched into the middle of the evening, increasingly disconnecting itself from its austere purpose. At the point where there were no dishes left on the table – only glasses and cups – the widow, the priest, and the surfeit of offspring and offspring of offspring, rose and straggled away, back to their black cars. Watching the slow exit of Tracy Lassiter and Father Oscar, Jon had an instant’s vision of a stricken English queen being consoled by the Archbishop of Canterbury. The experience felt slightly hallucinatory, so he proceeded to drop the wine and switch to Diet Cokes. But Marnie went in the opposite direction, shifting into the higher gear of Remy Martin – as much to wrap her fingers around the fat, dazzling snifter as to drink the brown liquid.

Drinking any brown alcohol could flip Marnie’s mind back to the codeine-laced cough syrup of years ago, the one her pediatrician always prescribed when she and Jon traded mumps and measles and chicken pox.

As more refills were poured, they watched Harry the Police Chief lumber up to the coat-check and disappear around the corner –and, eventually, one by one and two by two, every other attendee followed the same path. Then the pair of them sat there by themselves like old hands closing the club, Marnie with her ritzy-titzy snifter and Jon with his straw and ice and foodless Coke. The busboys and waiters cleaned up around them and stacked chairs against the wall.

“Harry’s got you under surveillance. Better watch your step,” Jon said.

“Once a cop always a cop. Now why do you do that with your straw?”

“Why do I do what?”

“Make sucking sounds with the ice.”

“I don’t make sucking sounds. Look, they’re starting to shut down the lights.”

She had lied to him, lied to her brother, but it was just a minor lie. It wasn’t the sucking sounds that got to her and lit her up, not really. It was something else – that he hung onto that straw at all. And for so long.  In fact, it was exactly what Jon used to do so many years ago, and she remembered him doing it in the kitchen and at lunch counters and in grade school - her little brother slurping his chocolate milk, drilling away with his straw after the glass was drained dry.  Even then he managed to make the straw seem like a pacifier. But had he ever changed, outgrown it? What amazed her was he had never noticed he hadn’t changed. But she noticed. With each sip of Remy Martin her eyes sharpened, until they were x-ray eyes, peering ever deeper into her brother’s soul.

“Time to go. Come on,” Marnie said. “I have big plans for us tomorrow.”

Jon had no comment. Now that they were alone, he seemed less peevish. He looked up at her and turned the corners of his mouth slightly upwards, forming a daffy half-smile. Then he drilled at his glass, taking a long, burbling pull on his straw.

Like a parade marshal, Marnie led the way and they walked out.

 

Back in the Standish, Marnie’s heart raced the whole time she dressed for bed. She knew she would be chasing sleep past storefronts shuttered long ago and across meadows now smothered under asphalt. The creaky adjoining door did little to mute her brother’s ablutions. She heard a suitcase unzip, a drawer open, a faucet turn on, and loudest of all, she heard Jon gargling. It came back to her that he had been an obsessive gargler always - ages before he had ever given one thought to any endeavor as adult as dental school. She pictured him with the old mouthwash bottle, red Lavoris, swigging and throwing his head back, barely tall enough to see himself in the medicine cabinet mirror. At that point in time she had towered over him, and for the merest moment, a loopy Remy Martin moment - she felt if she were to push through the adjoining door she would find herself towering over him again. And of course it was right that she was too worked up to sleep; right that he would likely drop off at once. How many times had she babysat him in the ghost-glow of the console TV while their parents danced at the club?

 

Over breakfast, Marnie came up with a game. She got Jon to play quiz show -  he the contestant and she the host - speculating over which Bellingtonian would fall to the reaper next, and when it would be.

More than once he said, “Think it will be one of us? We’re getting up there.”

Each time she answered with a bold swallow of coffee and a mountainous forkful of blueberry pancakes. She shoveled the mass resolutely into her mouth and found it extra delectable. It occurred to her that she had never woken up so refreshed after so little sleep.

Her plan was to take her car, not his. To get behind the wheel and drive and drive all morning, up and down the old streets, and then tool in for lunch at the Burger Belle, one of the last original car-hop places on earth, heralded in gift books and on Food TV. Her menu choice would be the Flying Saucer with extra cheese, the greasiest of them all. Her very favorite treat after field hockey practice.

Would Jon whine? So what, she thought – don’t little brothers always whine? But a little Flying Saucer grease might give them both some color. It might even shrink a forehead wrinkle or two.

She flipped open her little makeup mirror and immediately liked what she saw in the glass. The plumpness included. Of all the genes that had been given out in Bellington, she thought, the ones that had gone her way weren’t bad at all. In fact, they were to be valued, even celebrated. Most of all, she enjoyed the sense that last night and this morning the great river of time seemed to be surging in reverse.

“Are you aware you have orange juice on your chin?” As Marnie spoke – in a tone as bossy as a teacher’s – she gave Jon a vintage big-sister frown.

She reached across at him with the paper breakfast napkin and wiped it, boldly, before he could yank his head back. She couldn’t wait to get him to the Burger Belle, and see him with his skinny face plunked over a big chocolate milk shake. Sucking his straw.

In fact, it was right after their last bite at the Burger Belle that Jon first said it, the S word, dismally remarking that no members of the old crowd had died by their own hands yet. For all the two of them knew, he said, now in his very worst whining voice, Bellington would soon be visited by a string of suicides, which would make the funerals even more depressing. Before he even finished the sentence, Marnie had her palm pressed over his lips, the old five-finger gag she used to use on him all the time. “Now you listen to this,” she said, “and I’m not making this up.”

She lurched into her anecdote with so much gusto it was as though the Remy Martin was still swirling in her veins, surging back, like a storm reversing course over the ocean to re-attack the shore. “There was this man, and I’m not kidding, who wanted to do it so badly he did it three different ways at once. He went to a cliff overlooking the ocean where there was a tree. He swung a rope over the tree and tied a noose around his neck. He’d brought a gun too, stuck in his belt. He also had a can of  kerosene, and he doused himself all over. Then he flicked a cigarette lighter on the cuffs of his pants and, in the same instant, jumped off the cliff and shot himself in the head – except the bullet just missed his head and hit the rope instead. The rope split in two, the man plunged straight into the ocean, the flames went out, and, like it or not, that sad soul lived to a ripe old age.”

Her brother listened and said nothing, not a word. The new look in his face – he was positively salivating – told her he may well have not even heard a syllable of her story. Abruptly, he waved over the car hop and ordered another Flying Saucer, which he devoured in savage bites. And when he finished he ordered one more for the road, to which Marnie whooped in approval. They returned to The Standish, as usual, and went their separate ways. Not quite a year later, they called Marnie with the news that Jon, with a deft self-application of dental anesthesia, had taken himself out in a flash – and they wondered if she cared to contribute some sisterly insights to his obituary.

 

The wind that gusted around Jon’s graveside was the kind that hurt the teeth of any mouth that opened to talk – so the speeches were muffled and the prayers were efficient. From the moment Jon died, the widow’s role had been a question mark. As suspected, the official widow was significantly elsewhere – on a North African odyssey with a Springfield endondist. Nothing could convince her to choose the cemetery over the desert, so the role defaulted to Marnie. For solace, she had the strongest of pillars on either side – her husband, the professor, and Father Oscar, the consummate professional of lugubrious occasions. Except to Marnie, they weren’t pillars so much as posts.

The day unfolded according to a script Marnie knew by heart. The black cars proceeded at the pace of elephants, the club opened its venerable doors, and the staircase led them all to a space that was the welcome opposite of the windswept cemetery. Every corner of the hall was aflame with silver and crystal, the same dazzling deployment that, for Marnie, had always managed to outshine the most tear-filled eye.

But today she was in the Tracy Lassiter position, or at least she was supposed to be. In its own way, sitting at the head of the richly laden table felt more punishing than standing in the gale by the coffin. She felt mercilessly pelted with condolences, the earnest homilies of friends and relatives touching and kissing her at every turn. Mid-way through the roast, which was a monument of beef drenched in port and lingonberries, she grew severely bloated. And not in her stomach, because she had one of iron, but in her brain. It was there that the speeches of sympathy landed and sank like hard, heavy stones, and the hardness of them gave her a thundering headache. She didn’t want to hear another word about her grief and her loss. This prattle was beside the point. What mattered was that she was in the wrong seat next to the wrong people. Where she belonged was down the end with Jon, as always. She couldn’t believe she was actually attending a Bellington funeral without him to talk to. He was a brat, he was, and she wanted to wring his little neck. 

Gil Bounsall, the man who named the Chicken Amigo Sandwich, was giving his opinion of Shula Kaplan’s Happy Playgrounds video.

“I’m closing my eyes and not seeing it,” Gil said. “You got a problem here.”

They were in the new business conference room - now officially called “war room” by the agency bosses - but the idea of a Happy Playgrounds war room wasn’t sticking happily in agency peoples’ heads. Some of them, like Shula, even thought it was defamatory. The Happy Playgrounds account wasn’t just an account to her. She loved it the way you’d love a kitten or a bunny; not a piece of business that boiled down to decimal points but something huggy and fuzzy with ears and fur.

HUGGY and FUZZY were the last words you’d use to describe the grim, pedantic shits who ruled Happy Playgrounds. They were like network execs the world over. They were at their happiest when they were kicking the agency around.

The new business conference room didn’t look like “war.” Strewn over the long table were press kit sheets of characters in scenes from the Happy Playgrounds’ lineup of fall shows. There were also a few old call reports, glossy photos of plush toys and other licensed merchandise based on Happy Playgrounds’ themes, plus some scrunched-up paper, ballpoint pens, magic markers, and a small container that looked like a cylinder of whiteout or the sticky stuff art departments still use, even in this age of cold, totally electronic page design.

There in support of Shula was her buddy Emmy Cooper, wincing right alongside her as Gil gave his pissy comments on the tape. Shula, the copywriter, had on one of her outfits that seemed to suggest she had just stepped off a horse-drawn wagon in Romany - by way of Club Monaco. Emmy, the account executive, was doing something more urban. It broadly hinted she had just jumped off a Vespa in Milan - by way of “Banana.”

Gil, the veteran creative director, had that Spielbergian look of the fifty-year-old boy. Today his baseball cap was on straight, brim pointing forwards. Shula bitterly wondered if this meant the director part of his title was running his brain today. Which would mean only the left side was operating.

“The soundtrack,” said Gil, “I’m not hugging it. I close my eyes and I think stiletto heels.”

“When you close your eyes don’t you always think stiletto heels,” said Emmy.

“Just joking.”

Shula said nothing. She knew the clicking Pygmy music was a master stroke. It said everything about the rhythm and energy in the pictures - the syncopated joy of little kids cutting loose all over the world. Running, jumping, rolling and tumbling. Gil was so not getting it. Shula stared morosely at Emmy. For the moment, she was too upset to even look at Gil.

“Do you want her to play it again?” asked Emmy.

“She doesn’t need to play it again. I get it. When I open my eyes I can love it.”

Shula turned dourly to the monitor and videotape player. She pressed the eject button and the tape popped out with a short, sad sound.

Gil put his arm on Shula’s shoulder. She moved out from under it and sat down at the table, leaving Gil’s arm in mid-air, looming over her like a medieval instrument of pain. She arched her back in a pouty position and pulled in her head - a turtle saving its neck by scooting into its shell.

“You’ve got to realize she’s been through a lot,” said Emmy. “This is the client from hell.”

“So Happy Playgrounds isn’t happy?”

Gil looked pleased with himself, as though he had said something witty. Emmy caught this and automatically beamed. She was outcome-oriented. In this playlet she was the defending attorney and Gil was the judge. Emmy wondered how far she’d be willing to go to get a favorable decision for Shula.

Shula, the moody defendant, reached idly into the pile of magic markers. She fidgeted with this and that while the opinions about her work flew back and forth above her. She didn’t even know what she was fidgeting with. She had been up all night piecing together the soundtrack and Happy Playgrounds expected the finished tape by three in the afternoon. She was tired and sweaty. That was all she could think about.

“So what are you saying, Gil,” asked Emmy. “Are you saying we shouldn’t present it?”

“That’s not what he’s saying,” muttered Shula, not even bothering to raise her gold-hooped, bandanna-topped head. She had been through this scenario before with Gil. She knew his passive-aggressive, wishy-washy M.O. It was crueler than anything.

“That’s not what I’m saying,” said Gil, trying to look biblical but only achieving pontifical. “I’d never tell you guys to not present something. It’s your call. I’m just giving you a little perspective from someone who’s been around. I mean do you really want this on your reel? Hey, but maybe you do.”

It was vintage Gil. Stick it, but never stick it out. He wins if Happy Playgrounds hates it. He wins if happy Playgrounds loves it. Gil’s leadership motto was said to be, “if I am weak, others will be strong.”

But when you come up with something like the Chicken Amigo Sandwich it forgives many sins. In the world that gives a shit about Ad Age and Brand Week, Gil had achieved coast-to-coast fame. But this was the cross Shula and a lot of Shula-like peons had to bear. In her anguish she twisted and twirled the cylinder of whiteout in her hands, until she realized she wasn’t holding whiteout at all.

“Holy fuck,” said Shula, dropping the container and jumping up from the conference table. She dropped it the way you’d drop the finger of a corpse.

Gil and Emmy, who were already standing, seemed to be blown back by the sheer force of Shula’s outburst. Suddenly they were twice the distance from the table as before, as though a wind had taken them or the earth had moved.

“Do you see what that says?” said Shula. She pointed at the label on the container. She pointed at it the way you point at a cockroach emerging from your salad.

Emmy moved forward, brows raised and bewildered - as though the defendant had suddenly spoken out of turn and torpedoed her attorney’s brilliant argument. Gil moved forward squinting. His neck suddenly seemed twice as long; it was craning and bobbing over the object on the table. He appeared to be frantically foraging for something, like an anteater zoning in on a juicy swarm.

“Nobody touch that,” shrieked Gil. “Keep your hands off.”

In an instant the precious videotape had become history. They were united by a common cause. To judge from their faces, Gil’s especially, there was a rattler in the room.

The label on the container had one line of large type, one line of medium-sized type and a block of type that was microscopically tiny - the kind of type meant only for paralegals and government drones.

The large type said ORA-SAN. The medium type said H.I.V. Oral Specimen.

“What the fuck,” said Emmy. “What is that?”

“I touched it,” said Shula. She giggled manically and her face flushed a funny color, more purple than red.

“You touched it?” demanded Gil. His face was losing blood by the nanosecond, turning a chalky yellow.

“Of course she touched it,” said Emmy. “Jesus, didn’t you see her touch it.”

“Go wash your hands,” screamed Gil. “Go wash them now.”

Shula stopped her insane giggling and froze, as though her face had been slapped. It was the most decisive thing Shula had ever heard Gil say. She wiped her hands on her gypsy skirt and raced out of the room.

Emmy, far more level-headed at this point than Gil, tried to collect the facts, analyzing them as she went along.

“It’s definitely not a whiteout tube,” she said. “We know that.”

Gil’s neck was still craning furiously. His hands, though, were out of range - in a knot behind his back.

“It has a little tip at the top,” said Emmy, “like a syringe.”

“A fucking syringe,” said Gil.

“And it has this little fluorescent green label that’s been broken.”

“A broken seal,” said Gil.

“Not a seal, really,” said Emmy. “More like one of those little labels pharmacies put on with those price-marking guns.”

“Pharmacies. Which goddamn pharmacy? And who the hell was using this stuff - right in this room?”

Gil and Emmy looked at each other, their eyes blinking as their brains scrolled through the two hundred and seventy one agency employees, trying to pinpoint the leper among them.

“H.I.V. in the Happy Playgrounds war room,” said Gil. “It sounds like a joke.”

“Maybe that’s all it is,” said Emmy. “It could be pure bullshit nonsense. H.I.V. oral specimen - what does that mean? Is it something they give you? Or something you give them?”

“Specimen means something very specific. A specimen is a specimen. You’re saying this came from a joke shop?”

“I thought that’s what you were saying.”

As soon as Gil thought Emmy wasn’t looking at him, he inspected his hands for cuts. He had a couple of definite skin breaks; raw, pink patches where he had chewed the skin near the cuticle of his right thumb.

The door opened and a wave of crowd noise surged in, followed by an actual crowd. At the front of it was Shula, returning from her Gil-mandated trip to wash every millimeter of her hands. Once again, she was giggling manically, and that strange purple flush was all over her face and neck. Emmy greeted her with a concerned look. The look said Emmy was officially switching from defense attorney to nurse-therapist.

The instant Shula re-appeared Gil reacted by thrusting his hands in his pockets. With sly facial gestures he tried to disguise this thrust of terror as merely a casual hands-in-your-pockets attitude - “just us creative guys hanging out.” And it may have worked with the crowd of employees, who were newcomers to the situation. But it didn’t fool Emmy or Shula. To them it was plain as day what Gil was doing. He wasn’t just keeping his distance from the little ORA-SAN tube that lay there, like a tiny stick of dynamite, among the innocuous magic markers playfully cluttering the table - (did he think H.I.V. could jump through the air?). As if that behavior wasn’t crazy enough he was hanging back from Shula too, from her actual body - not going within three feet of her.

And Gil was known as a touchy-feely kind of guy. When he whined about something in your work that made him nervous he made you feel doubly bad, because he touched or even hugged you while delivering the news. Complaining and pleading; praising and nagging - all in the same mouthful. Mixed messages were Gil’s forte. There was no one better at it. When you think of it, even the Chicken Amigo Sandwich was a mixed message.

Whether you called the room “war” or “new business,” it was clearly buzzing with more energy than the Happy Playgrounds account had ever seen, certainly out of this agency. The curiosity seekers swirled about the table like hyenas around a kill - hyenas who happened to be dressed like fashionistas. There was even someone with a video camera - Carlos, the in-house editor from the broadcast production department. Mostly, the crowd was composed of lower level people. Clericals and junior account grunts, the strictly nine-to-fivers who were bored out of their minds with the daily rah-rah crap of agency life. They had spotted the crazed, purplish look on Shula’s face the moment she passed them en route to the ladies room, and it had been more than enough to rouse them from their cubes. They followed her down the corridor to the ORA-SAN site like rodents behind the Pied Piper, squealing questions before they even crossed the threshold.

“Did any spill out on the table?”

“Was there a needle? There could still be a needle.”

“What does all that small type say?”

“Why don’t you just pick it up and find out?”

“That is the real thing. I used to mark prices in Walgreen’s.”

Within two minutes after entering the room, each of the dozen or so employees performed the exact same action, like attendees at a funeral or a wake. One by one, they filed past the assorted art supplies and strewn paper, stopping at the ORA-SAN tube for a quick scan and some expression of surprise, shock or disbelief. While this was going on, Shula, for no reason in particular, grabbed a magic marker and pulled off the cap. Emmy, whose nurse-therapist role demanded she not take her eyes off Shula, tried to do her duty, but three women swooped across her line of vision and nailed her with a babbling burst of hypotheses about which employees were shoe-ins as H.I.V. suspects. Out of the corner of her eye Emmy could manage only a partial glimpse of Shula, who seemed to be backing off to a far window and working her hands furiously.

Gil had backed off too - he was over by the now-silent and dark TV monitor where Shula’s two minutes of tape had lived and died. He had his back to the crowd and his hands in his pockets. Apparently, this was his subtle-as-a-steamroller way of striking a philosophical pose. The message of his pose was that this was all silliness and hysteria. And everyone should just get back to work.

Eight seconds of this pose was about all Shula could take. She burst into the blur of people and came out flying at Gil like a screaming banshee, waving her hands in his face, touching his face. Her hands were an unearthly color - a brown glittery gold. It made her face and neck look even more purple. Shula even had streaks of brown glittery gold on her cheeks and forehead, bristling like war paint.

“Surprise - it’s magic marker,” she shrieked, as Gil jumped a foot in the air and bounced against the TV screen. Gil’s hands flew out of his pockets and batted at Shula - but they only batted at her clothes, not at any surfaces of exposed epidermis.

Shula’s maniacal giggling hit an operatic crescendo as Emmy raced over, like a human ambulance, and took a position between Shula and Gil. She then put a combination neck and armhold on Shula that looked quite professional, the kind a real psychiatric nurse might employ.

“Okay guys, party’s over,” Emmy shouted to the group. “Some of us have work to do.”

The hyenas stopped yelping and began to skulk and slink.

“No way,” shouted Carlos, “the party hasn’t even started - but it will now. We’re doing a chocolate video. I’m not here for this stupid Aids shit.”

Carlos was nicknamed “Noir” because of the way his obsessively whitened teeth contrasted with his huge nest of jet black hair. People joked that he took his hair off at night, walked it and fed it ferret pellets.

Flashing his 1000-watt teeth he cranked up the videocam and gave the high sign to anorexic Lissa, the account assistant on the Geneve Chocolates pitch. Lissa produced a tote bag, raised it over the table and tipped it. Out came a barrage of gaily wrapped balls, about the same size as the giant bubblegum balls in the vending machines you see at every mall. The balls were wrapped in various colors of glittery tin foil. There were reds, pinks, blues, greens - and a few were a glittery brown-gold fairly close to the color Shula had smeared on her hands and face. The balls flew out of Lissa’s tote bag and bounced all over the conference table, landing randomly among the papers, the magic markers and the menacing ORA-SAN tube. A single ball came to rest actually touching it - and this was the ball Carlos reached for.

“Let’s eat chocolate,” he said. “I want comments from everyone. Tell me how much you love Geneve.”

Carlos tore off the tin foil, threw the brown ball in his mouth and devoured it.

“Yum,” he said. “This is good shit. Come on, guys, try one.”

From the look on Gil’s face, Carlos might just as well have popped an infected testicle in his mouth. Emmy was still restraining Shula, and still very immersed in her nurse-therapist persona. She mentally reviewed what action she would take if Gil were to wipe out.

“This is a new business video about us ,” piped Lissa. “We want to show Geneve how much this agency adores its chocolates. So everybody eat and adore, adore.”

The one and only ball that had had contact with the ORA-SAN tube was gone forever. It was melting inside Carlos. But the vast multitude of Geneve balls hadn’t even come close. All around the table hands flew, scooping up the free chocolate. Geneve was a premium brand. Swiss and dark, with divinely sinful centers. Within thirty seconds the secretaries were munching and cooing. What could be better - a surprise chocolate party on a Thursday morning.

Carlos and Lissa were ecstatic. They worked the room like TV journalists at a political convention or the Oscars, thrusting the camera into the munching faces and recording the slurps and inane comments.

“We’ll cut later,” Carlos told Lissa. “Let’s just shoot all we can now. And we need Mr. Big too.”

Mr. Big was cowering in a corner. He, Shula and Emmy hadn’t moved from the TV monitor. They stood there in panic mode, frowning and glowering at each other, although Emmy had ceased holding Shula under physical restraint. Her arms swung freely as the mood changed - as the party atmosphere overpowered the ORA-SAN crisis. It picked up steam by the moment, a funky human steam. Soon a boombox went on at full blast, blaring something raunchy. Shula’s hips started to swivel. Her eyes seemed to catch fire. With her magic marker war paint she looked like a gypsy girl who had migrated to Polynesia.

In a few moments Emmy caught the bug too - at least enough so her head began to nod. Soon she was jiggling and swaying and making little uhhh noises, doing her best to keep up with Shula.

The force that turned the tide totally was Lissa, who came out of the crowd and barged up to Gil, Shula and Emmy with two big handfuls of chocolate balls.

“Let’s go, guys,” she demanded. “Indulge.”

Lissa held her palms out as Shula and Emmy pawed at the chocolate balls. But Gil’s hands were out of sight. They were back in his pockets.

“Come on, big guy,” said Lissa. “You’re the star of this.”

“She’s right,” said Emmy, now bouncing to the boombox. “You’re the face the client wants to see.”

Reluctantly, Gil picked up one green-wrapped ball and stared at it.

“Unwrap it,” said Lissa. “You have to eat it. You won’t die.”

The gyrating Shula quickly downed two Geneve balls and was ripping open a third. She had a new color smeared on her fingers. A dark chocolaty brown.

Noir as ever, Carlos surged in and out of the feeding frenzy, attacking gluttonous faces and mouths with his camera, spinning around and aiming a shot whenever he heard a new cry or comment. Hearing Lissa yell over to him he broke away from the pack and walked backwards, executing a long, shaky swoosh pan. Then he turned and moved in on the foursome by the TV monitor, doing a quick zoom on Shula’s hips.

From the hips he panned slowly upwards, capturing undulations of Shula he knew he’d never use on the client video, but who could resist this? By the time the camera got to Shula’s mouth she was sucking the smears of chocolate off her fingertips and licking her lips, rolling her tongue like a porn pro.

“Don’t just dance,” yelled Lissa, “say something.”

“Mmm,” said Shula, “Geneve chocolates. Melts in your mouth, melts in your hands, melts …everything.”

“All right,” said Lissa, nudging Carlos towards Emmy, who had just bared her third ball and was in mid- bite.

“Quote, quote,” urged Lissa.

Emmy polished off the rest of the ball. “One moment on your lips,” she said brightly, ” a lifetime on your hips.” With that she did a pelvic thrust worthy of Shula and shouted at Carlos, “did you get it?”

“Got it,” replied Carlos, raising the camera and panning over to Gil, who froze in the shot like a deer in the headlights.

“This is the big moment,” said Carlos. “You’re the man. Hey, he doesn’t even have one.”

As far as chocolates were concerned, Gil did not have one. He had gotten rid of the green-wrapped ball from Lissa, and his hands were back in his pockets.

“You eat it?” demanded Carlos. “Then eat another one.”

But Gil’s green-wrapped ball was sitting on the TV monitor. “Mother,” said Carlos as he discovered it.

Lissa pushed a blue-wrapped ball in Gil’s face. He looked at it the way a dog looks at a slice of cucumber. Finally, he extracted a hand from his pocket and took the ball between thumb and forefinger. The gesture seemed strange for someone in a baseball cap. He could have been an old lady picking up a teacup.

“What are you, a diabetic?” said Carlos. “This is the money shot, babe. They want the boss man.”

“I’m thinking,” said Gil. By “thinking” he meant trying to come up with a killer line. His eyes darted back and forth - the firing squad look. Carlos’ camera might as well have been an M1.

“Don’t just think, ” said Lissa. “Unwrap. Eat.”

But Gil didn’t eat. And the fact was, he couldn’t even think. His darting eyes kept finding spaces in the crowd and searching for the ORA-SAN tube. Monitoring its whereabouts among the magic markers. In the end he just held the little round unwrapped chocolate up to the camera and said something lame like, “Geneve. Because life’s a ball.”

While he stood there in his baseball cap, not daring to eat and looking so pathetic, Emmy thought of the Happy Playgrounds tape and how Shula had stayed up all night sweating to make the Pygmy music just right. She thought of this paranoid bag of nerves, Gil, having absolute power over Shula’s work. If he chose to, he could nag her to the point where she was as crazy as he was.

Several weeks ago at a departmental money meeting, the managing director had stood up with a fat smile and made a big announcement;

The Chicken Amigo Sandwich had already netted the agency thirty million dollars.

“That’s a lot of champagne corks,” the managing director told the group.

Emmy remembered this and wanted to do something violent. Unwrap a chocolate ball and stuff it in Gil’s mouth. Slam it right in his face.

It was one of those revenge thoughts you never really carry out. Instead, Emmy pushed her way through the swaying crowd to get more Geneve balls for herself. Because her mouth was salivating for it.

A new tune came on and Emmy took a big scrumptious bite. The room steamed with music and sweat. She swallowed the chocolate, did a little shimmy and threw her arms above her head. Shula’s hips, they were coming at her again.

The ferry lurched into its berth like a drunk-driven vehicle and Gert tottered down the gangplank wanting to throw up. Kit paraded down onto the wharf like an admiral and got her and the luggage into a cab and over to the hotel. Before Gert could even get her legs and back comfortable in the restaurant Kit had picked out, there he was leaning and breathing garlic in her face and pushing foccacia at her. He seemed ready to eat a food truck, doing that expert menu scan of his.

 “A fusion place,” he said, “Lots of curries. You should get the striper.”

Gert, still rolling with the sea, picked up the menu and took a look.

 “The plain bland striper?” she said. “Wood-grilled and drizzled in oil. That’s it? Why would I want that?”

 “You’re not a cardamom person,” he said. “Be honest.”

She felt something in her stomach beyond the nausea rise to her throat. It was called rage.

 “I love spices,” she said. “I’m not what you think I am.”

He put a hand up as though he were calling time. Or saying please don’t shoot. Her rage always killed his rage. Then he would take his dead rage and bury it somewhere, the way a big dog buries a bone. And go on.

 “The striper is native to Nantucket,” he said, making his voice merlot-smooth. “Hey, it was probably alive today.”

Gert slugged her sharp gin and ate her salty olive.“It’s just a fish, Kit.”

Next morning, gulping the Zantac and still tasting the burn of Indonesian peppers and five-alarm prawns, part of her she wished she had done what he said. The part that ran from the solar plexus to the neck. But the rest of her was glad she had not done what he said. She soothed herself in ad talk, her native tongue: “I’m not a striper, I’m a snapper.”

This was so true. Ever since the failed Brunswick pitch she had wanted to snap at someone, anyone. And there was Kit right on her plate, big and oozy and tame as a halibut. He was so big when he stood up he blocked her view of the beach.

For sixteen days she had been taking little chomps out of him. Ever since Brunswick had shitcanned her whole campaign idea, hers and no one else’s, and picked the other gang. The touchy-feely people who wanted to film the Brunswick product line– those gritty kickass boat shoes – as if they were parlor fuzzies that came from some Pottery Barn of feet and never stepped off the cushy wall-to-wall.

The island getaway had just started but it didn’t seem to be helping. At their barn of a Jersey home they could be fifteen rooms apart. In the White Elephant mini-suite they felt as close as two fish in a bowl.

And so, with the gray murk of pre-noon Nantucket filling the wide window, she broke out of sleep picturing Kit as one of those hopeless blubbery Melville whales, the ones who preceded Moby Dick, harpooned and strung alongside the predator ship, a fat feast for every shark in the neighborhood. Who could resist such a banquet? Gert gargled, brushed and flossed. She leaned into the bathroom mirror and flashed her newly whitened teeth at herself. Then she cinched her White Elephant Turkish-towel robe, marched out of the bathroom and found him, exactly as expected, standing by the little nook table. Holding out a tray, two cups of coffee, croissants.

Could your man be as dependable as your Maytag?

There was something in that. Gert envisioned it in Times New Roman Italic, running across the glow of a million laptops. She hit her mental save button. She scribbled and sketched on White Elephant stationery. She unsheathed her laptop.

 “I thought we came here to get away from all that,” Kit said.

 “I didn’t think we came here just to eat,” was her answer. He stood up and went into the bathroom, staying behind the shut door so long it ended the conversation.

When he came out there was a smear of foam on his lips. Toothpaste or shaving cream.

 “Look at yourself,” she said.

 “I hope it’s not rabies,” Kit replied, lightening the tone more than he needed to, just to secure peace. He always gave in first. But today his fists stayed clenched. He looked at the Toshiba out on the mahogany desk, ready to boot up and go. It’s not that he wanted a second honeymoon, he said, just a weekend. She had set the Toshiba right on top of the leatherbound guest services portfolio.

At the Whaling Museum the guide, a tall mannish lady who was Nantucket-born, stuck out a finger long as a spar as she indicated the different harpoons, scores of them, standing like sentries against the wall. They came in all sizes and styles, some straight and some curved, some with a simple spearhead and some with intricate barbs, all depending on the function they had to perform. Only a select few were for killing. Most were for softening up the victim or for gaffing and slashing afterwards.

That was the part Gert remembered most. Seeing so many harpoons stored in one spot brought her mind back to the agglomeration of evil implements strewn in a Hollywood prop warehouse she had once toured. She had been shoot-prepping for a big sneaker flight slated to blanket the networks pre-Halloween. In those days –when the Pumas and the Brunswicks of the world were saying yes to her - she had been in the L.A. shoot world all the time; always prepping, always casting and cutting, always on the West Coast while Kit stayed east on home watch. He could work out of the house, no trouble, no problems. All he did anyway was tinker with clip-art and the obvious Macintosh typefaces; nothing more was required for his strata of clients, all the nice nobodies of commerce. The neighborhood bank, the mall Italian restaurant, the brochure and business-card set. A natural home office guy, he was. He made a pittance compared to her. But to his credit, everything he did was a writeoff, right down to the offering of gin and vermouth he stirred so faithfully as Gert, ever so horny from weeks in the Santa Monica sun, would come rumbling down the driveway in the long Lincoln limo all wrapped in her tan, ready to climb all over Kit before she even ate the olive.

Could your man be as dependable as your Maytag?

There it was again, brought back by the automatic way he held the door for her as they left the dank Whaling Museum and re-entered the light of day and the cobblestones. This was the Kit she had built a life on, the big guy who liked to cook and pal around with his own kids, the Kit who thrived on being her life accompanist, the pianist off in the shadows of the stage, as well as her life partner.

As for Kit, the part of the museum tour he said he remembered most was the history of an odor. The guide’s description of the horrible smell rising out of Nantucket during its heyday as the world’s premier whale processing center.

It would simply not be possible, the guide said, for today’s genteel visitors to even imagine the enormity of the stench. The reek of rotting whale-flesh and boiling blubber in every crease and crevice. Fouling the streets, your socks, your spouse, the hairs of your nose.

Kit said he kept thinking about it as they strolled back to the White Elephant for a fried-oyster snack and a change of clothes. He believed a smell that overwhelming could not have disappeared entirely, not even after all these years. He was talking about this, the smell and its whereabouts – even picturing it festering somewhere under the lush green lawn of the White Elephant - when Gert went into the bathroom of their mini-suite and met the unthinkable – a horsefly.

Somehow this major insect had gotten past White Elephant security. Not to mention the double-thick glass, the climate control system and the arsenal of sprays and solvents applied everywhere in the place morning, noon and night.

Gert threw open the door and cried out.

Kit raced in from the sitting room beyond the bedroom, bursting like a bear through the French doors.

 “Kill it,” she commanded.

Normally, Kit would have just done what she said. With a tissue and a courtly swipe of his paw. This time his face sharpened with irony and he pushed back:

 “That fly could be two hundred years old. He could be the last fly left from the whaling days.”

The fly dive-bombed and careened off the mirror. Kit shrugged and picked up a newspaper. “You’re only a thousand times the fly’s size,” he said.

The horsefly hit the mirror again and Kit struck it an enormous blow. He swung the rolled-up paper with all his might, as though it were a lead pipe or an axe and the fly were the size of an eagle. The look on his face was new to her. It was a Mr. Hyde look.

She watched him put down the newspaper. He seemed to do it in slow motion, reluctantly. He had a look that seemed to say now he had killed one big fly he wanted to kill more.

 “Why don’t you go for a walk,” Gert said, summoning a burst of shrillness to hide the wobbly sound in her voice. “But first would you please clean this up?”

The fly was unrecognizeable as anything but a pulverized, bloody gob on the mirror. As Gert examined it she couldn’t help peering at her own face, and it gave her a little shiver.

From where she was looking, the gob seemed to be right on her forehead. She ducked away. She didn’t want a dead fly on her head, it really made her shiver, even if it was just an optical illusion.

Without a word, Kit did what she said, wetting a clutch of Kleenex, removing all evidence and exiting the room.

No sooner had he shut the door than she flung open the laptop. Could your man be as dependable as your Maytag?

Despite all the strangeness – his agitation, whatever - it still seemed to make sense.

So she went ahead and did what she had been dying to do for hours. She plunged into Google and raced hungrily from site to site, soaking up the patter and the chatter, making her own mental map of the competitive universe, spatially arranging the drivel-rich net communities as though they were so many cereal boxes vying for attention on the supermarket shelf. Only by doing this could she determine if she had a shot, a niche, a few cyber-inches on which to squeeze and display her brainchild.

She clicked like a demon through all the big e-worlds, the usual suspects – Ciao U.K., Women.com, I-Village, Moms Online, Femail, Grrrltalk, Oxygen – and a smattering of wannabees. She read the mind-numbing crap the chatters chat about: the superior roll-on action of Secret Powder Fresh vs. Dove Original; the dreaded white stripes left by Ban Wide-Stick under the armholes of black sateen.

But getting more, always more, out of your deodorant paled before the topic of getting more, more everything out of your man. Gert knew the territory; knew she was onto something rich.

She turned the Maytag line over and over in her head. Turned it over like a rock under which the real idea was hiding, the tunnel to Wonderland. More than a site, yes, it would be an electronic solar system, a site so compelling other sites would revolve around it like moons. A portal. With a constellation like that you could talk to Paul Allen, Barry Diller; you could tease Viacom. But it needed a handle, a name and tag; the hook and the bait.

Suddenly the Maytag line opened like a door and out marched the bigger line, sassy and fast:

Trophy Husband. That was the name.

For stay-at-home men and the women who love them. That was the tag.

Gert opened Word and typed that out, along with a few dozen other candidates. But they couldn’t come close to Trophy Husband.

For men, a Trophy was a Barbie on your arm. But for women it would be the household genie on the bottle. Mr. Clean.

Kit with a bald head and an earring, arms folded. Could she get him to do it? Not do it, the actual modeling. But marvel, even worship her for it, and be the model in her mind.

She loved it because it cut two ways. Women would log on for tips on how to create the new order and prop it with love, real or otherwise. Men would log on for tips on how to keep buff and keep house – no, not that at all - on how to run the physical plant.

Next day over his offering of croissants she announced they would be touring old houses.

Getting the usual antiquarian blather, the earfuls of mansion gossip from the local historical society – that was all fine with Gert. She could endure it. But her real purpose was to scope out ideas for her planned outbuildings at home. As they headed out, she even popped a White Elephant notepad into her straw bag to sketch a valance or note a color scheme.

She set so fast a pace over the cobblestones they found themselves standing all alone at the appointed granite steps, at least ten minutes early. No guide, no group, and only themselves to talk to. A smiling sky as well, optimum conditions for a trial balloon, so Gert let it fly. She gave him the full windup, same as she’d do if he were Michael Eisner and the Disney board, describing the two-gender audience, the unmet need, the glaring hole in the opportunity spectrum. After five minutes in the stratosphere, she brought it home to bread on the table.

 “You like driving your Benz, don’t you? You like Emmy in Groton, it’s so obvious you do.”

Sell the benefits, that was her way. She fired them off like bullet points. Advertising sucked, the agency could not be trusted. If advertising dumped her even the White Elephant would be out of their price range, except in the off-season. If her web idea worked they could buy the White Elephant.

But the only moment that mattered was when she spoke the title – Trophy Husband. And the tag - For stay-at-home men and the women who love them. She filled each syllable with import and vision, as though her voice were a paintbrush, laying down the words in mega-type on a ten-story billboard in Times Square.

Up to that point Kit’s reaction, on balance, was in the applause range. He showed her a lot of nodding and grinning. But when the first two words rolled out, the title words, he blinked hard, exactly as if he had been stung or smacked. Meanwhile the small tour-crowd gathered and they were swept up into the mansion – it was a musty hulk with a Nantucket name, Meader or Bunker or something.

Their guide, a chilly blue-hair in full Talbots, ushered them into the front room first, because it was the fanciest. Even in the Nineteenth Century, she said, Nantucket entrepreneurs had the American penchant for showcasing their glitz, putting it right in the shop window, so to speak. Gert saw much to make note of in the wainscoting and the interplay between textile and wood, but Kit stood motionless and froze a smile on his face.

At the top, the guide revealed that, in the old days, the steep structure was known as a “his and hers staircase,” for obvious reasons: At bedtime the husband and wife would walk up together, bid adieu and each go to their separate rooms. In the morning they would meet again on the stairwell and descend together.

Gert, catching sight of whimsical bedpost carvings, couldn’t get into the “hers” bedroom fast enough. The rest of the group followed the guide into the husband’s quarters. Kit, however, loitered outside on the stairwell by the so-called “coffin corner.” This was a nook, centered off the stairwell between the bedrooms, where two coffins – his and hers, of course - were stored in a custom built-in, so that when the final breath of either spouse came, the trip from deathbed to dead-box would be as quick and convenient as possible. “Yankee ingenuity,” the guide had clucked.

Kit was standing there, fixed as a statue, his face to the coffins and back to everything else, as Gert emerged with her notes, and, sly as a wisp of smoke, she stole right behind him. She playfully poked her pencil between his shoulder blades. As she poked, she whispered, “Are you my trophy?”

Kit let out a wounded-animal sound and wheeled around.

His collision with her had the force of a car’s bumper hitting a dog or a small deer. It lifted Gert off her feet and sent her into a backwards fall, the kind of fall that can be brutal, even fatal, on such a towering staircase. But a second tour-group was on the way up, charging eagerly to the summit, and Gert merely bounced into a pillow of sun-screened humanity.

 “I’m not a trophy,” Kit thundered at her, stopping everyone in their tracks. Later he denied uttering this. And back on the cobblestones he swore he wanted to handcuff himself, and he let loose a barrage of apologies that didn’t let up, not for the entire rest of the day. He said he loved her web idea and kept saying it, even when she asked point-blank if he was lying. At dinner he ordered her a gigantic lobster, de-shelled it for her and tried to feed her bites of the meat with the little lobster fork. She lost all appetite when she saw the fork coming at her in that huge hand.

As they readied for bed in the White Elephant he announced, “I went through what I had to go through and now I’m behind you. I’m behind you a hundred percent.” But Gert could only ponder the double meaning of “behind you” as she felt the throb in her bruises and re-pictured the sheer height of the staircase. She gritted her teeth and went to bed, next to him, the Mr. Hyde she now knew was in him, struggling with an impossible problem. She posed it as something from an insane math test. She had two eyes to see with. How could she get her sleep, shutting just one of the eyes, while keeping the second eye wide open and watching?

At dawn, in the half-light, Gert was no closer to solving the problem than she had been at midnight. And Kit was standing over her with something, possibly the tray of croissants.

Who were they shitting? They said it was a rare whale, but all it turned out to be was a juvenile humpback from out on the Stellwagen Bank, one of the forty-foot regulars that the Whale Watch crowds from Kalamazoo all go ooh and ahh over. They said the poor bastard had gotten rammed somewhere off Rockport. 

There was all this blah-blah about “scientists” taking blood samples. But when George Smoller got there the scientists, far as he could tell, were just orange-vested garbage guys with chain saws, spilling blood on the sands of Lobster Cove as they carved the hulk up, pissing off the flies and seagulls zooming in from all over the world for the hold-your-nose banquet of the year. George stood on the dunes watching the forklifts load the huge fetid chunks and vertebrae onto Wentz Waste Management trucks that hauled them off, presumably north to Gloucester.

Marini, the head of the DPW, put a ho-ho-ho arm around George’s shoulders and said, “Hey Noodle, if you go up to a Gloucester fish place for lunch and see whale steak on the menu, don’t even think about it. Get your ass out of there and head for a hamburger stand.”

“Noodle” was the nickname Marini had given George about a year ago – for obvious reasons. Zero body fat was a no-brainer for George, and zero meant zero. If it could ward off long-term care later on, even a week of it, why, it was worth having hunger pangs.

When George got back in the car, which was old and gray but lubed and Febrezed, he sniffed the tops of his shoulders for remnants of Marini’s odor. The thought of it lingering there made him more nauseous than the stench of the rotting whale, but only because the whale hadn’t touched him. He sat there behind the wheel, rubbing, brushing and whisking the whole shoulder portion of his shirt, as if he were cleaning it then ironing it with the flat of his hand. It made no difference that this absolute waste of time made him feel desperate and foolish. It was just something that had to be done, a personal care necessity, and if he didn’t do it now he’d only think about needing to do it, and sooner or later he’d feel the thinking was more of a pain in the ass than the doing, and finally he’d stop the car and get it over with.

“Can’t you see yourself? Can’t you? Can’t you see anything?” George’s wife, Holly, screamed questions like that at him all the time these days, often in triplicate for vicious emphasis. She had screamed such a question at him just this morning as he was packing his bag, folding and refolding everything so much he could have packed five normal bags instead of one.

“Where are you going?” she demanded. “Where are you going off to? Where?”

But when he’d answered and she’d calmed down and thought about it, about his decision to go by himself all the way to Ketamesset Island, Maine, she came around and relented. In fact, she did a stunning turnaround. She said the kids and their school projects needed her, oh did they need her - free and clear of the distraction George had become - and she urged him to “go, go, go.” Perhaps if he went back in time to the boonies, she said, he’d settle on a period, on a state of mind when things had been good and even great between them. When he’d still been the George she’d married. The footloose George. The George who didn’t give a fig. The George who was a cabbage and not a pansy. Who’d roll deodorant under one arm and forget the other.

George’s Mass. Driver’s license described him as six feet tall, while Holly’s had her at five four.

As he left the house that morning, her parting words to him were:

“Don’t come back until you weigh more than I do.”

 

Ketamesset Island was a journey and then some. It was way, way up there. The ferry times were set by the mood of the sea.

George traveled swiftly, making better time than he expected. He did this in spite of all the mind-fucking crap that slowed him down far more than any convoy of Downeast logging trucks ever could. When bugs splattered against the windshield, he attacked the mess at once, flicking on the wipers and the spray switch. But if that didn’t work, he swerved onto the shoulder and leapt out with his Windex and Brawny, sometimes finishing with a squeegee to make the cleanest possible sweep. Then he’d randomly scratch an itch on his chest or thigh and feel a bump on a bone. With no more free will than a slave he’d slow down to a pathetic crawl and palpate himself – until he was assured the knobby thing was just a harmless node. These days, George was never more than a month away from a physician’s appointment. Preventive care, that’s what it was, that’s what he told himself.  Even for a man twice his age, he booked an amazing amount of doc time, pushing his health plan to its absolute limits.

But Ketamesset Island was going to be his baptism, his release. He had a plan. Either it would work or it wouldn’t work. He got out of the car in the dank twilight and peered into the swirl of fog. It was cold enough to make him think of fumes rising from dry ice.  He found the fog had a sound to it, a moan of January in the middle of June. He peered until a surge of walrus-cold water brought the Ketamesset ferry crunching into the dock. The crunch made him think of the whale getting rammed off Rockport – back where the waters were chicken soup compared to the puffin-dotted swells that goosed the rocks up here.

 

For sure, this ferry was not of the Staten Island variety. It took a half dozen cars, max, and packed them like frozen tuna bodies headed for the Tokyo fish market. Down below it was even tighter. George was wedged on a bench between two young women. The skinny little one on his right must have had a rare metabolism. Overheated all the time. Even in the glassed-in cabin the penetrating sea mist gave George the shivers, like ghost fingers, but this woman kept wildly fanning her face with one of those laminated cards that carry the safety instructions. While she fanned she talked in business buzzwords to the old goat on her right, who had that native Mainer look. A central casting face that could have been on a can of chowder.

She seemed like an eager beaver on break from her first professional job. “I am the bridge between process development and manufacturing,” George heard her say to the old goat. To which she received no reply, not even a quiver of his bushy eyebrow.

If the young woman on George’s right was skinny and little, the one to his left was ridiculously large. She was of the largest human beings he had ever encountered, men included. And she was young too - a girl really, student type, maybe just out of college, which made her largeness all the more striking. In her case, large didn’t mean tall and it didn’t mean fat, in the sense of rolls of flesh sagging all over the place. The girl was hefty, you would certainly say that, but what struck George wasn’t the heftiness either. It was the scale at which she happened to be built. Monumental. Every physical feature was super-sized, as though she were from a different race of people. Making this effect even more bizarre was her face, which was sweet and shy, the face of a regular girl with simple dark hair and glasses. An Asian-looking girl, slightly, her skin tinged Hawaiian or Latino or even Eskimo, for all George knew. He thought she looked studious and sincere, an earnest person.

The girl wore normal blue jeans, but enormous normal ones, and a jumbo college sweatshirt to match. The college’s name was none George had ever heard of. He pictured it as an obscure campus in one of those underpopulated prairie states, where such a huge girl could have vast spaces to roam.  

While the ferry hands were still casting off, the girl and George had a brief conversation, initiated by her. It was when it was obvious to both of them that for the rest of the trip the sides of their bodies would be in serious contact – squeezed together, really – with no room to make it otherwise.

“I’m sorry it’s so tight,” the girl said, looking down on him – and he was a six-footer - from her superior height. Her voice was sweet and painfully embarrassed.

“Everything’s fine,” George replied. “Don’t give it a moment’s thought.” Their eyes met and he saw in them the deep sorrow of a female who longed to be pleasantly average, who hungered to be demure, yet was condemned to live life as a giantess.  Pulling back his gaze George couldn’t help letting it wander, couldn’t help surveying the circumference of her thighs, the great mass of denim it took to form the basin of her lap. As for his own thighs, his noodle thighs, they were thinner at all points than her arms. The contest wasn’t even close.

There followed several moments of silence. Silence it was, yes, but hardly the silence of non-communication. As the tough little ferry bulled its way across the swells and troughs, their legs were thrown into involuntary action, bumping and rubbing, bumping and rubbing. They hit a wave that bucked the boat so violently it threw the two of them all over each other – so much bouncing and jouncing their only face-saver was to commence nervous small talk. He soon found out what she did – marine botany. It turned out she was a graduate student on a thesis mission: She was on the prowl for algae – red, blue, green, many colors – in particular she was stalking some rare variant that was indigenous to Ketamesset.

At the end of a studious monologue on kelp, underwater grasses and assorted Gulf of Maine flora, the girl told George her name was Sandrina.

 

Ketamesset Island featured as many choices of hotels as ferries. The Inn At Ketamesset was it, the only game in town – and in spirit and structure it had much in common with the dank ferryboat. Compact, barebones, functional. About a dozen rooms in all, each sparse and monkish throughout. No AC anywhere – why would one need it?  Prim curtains, a beat-up bureau the color of crusted brown shoe polish, well-worn plaster walls with fresh white paint slapped over the copious chips and dents. All the rooms were the same, all the beds were old style institutional, metal-framed – no kings and no queens. George watched Sandrina stretch herself out on the neat chenille spread, and it was a sight to behold. The bed seemed to shrink to a cot. He slipped his noodle skeleton beside her, such a feeling of pliancy in his bones he felt he could conform to her every jut and rise, as though he were a seaweed blade in dark waters.

They were fully clothed. Neither of them made a single effort to remove a single piece of attire. Neither of them attempted a caress of any kind. What was between them was still as formal as it had been when the ferry set forth - and yet he had wandered in behind her when she had opened her room door and she had said nothing, nothing at all, just hitched her backpack over a wall hook and unfurled herself onto the bed, hitting it with immense grace - the ease of a sea lion slipping into the surf. Soon he was aware of no sound but the crashing waves below the Inn and her deep somnolent breathing, accompanied by the huge heave of her torso, swelling and compressing with each slumber-breath. Before nodding off, she raised her arm to give him an extra corner of space. This George used efficiently, parking his snoot in the giant armpit of Sandrina’s sweatshirt. It was an armpit he trusted, and it acted on him like chloroform. He became drowsy at once and sank into a different kind of heat: the Saharan kind that produces wavy dunes and mirages.

As the first light of day streamed in, he remembered having dreamt something bizarre: That he was floating in a snifter of some exotic liqueur, overpowered by dense herbs, alcohol and unfamiliar sweetness. But by then he was stretched on the chenille bedspread of his own room, alone, not quite sure how he had managed to get there.

George made himself rise to unpack and wash up. The tang of Sandrina was still in his nostrils. He inhaled it with the salt air, and the combination threw him into a rare flight of optimism. The good mood might have lasted all day if he hadn’t decided to change his underwear from the night before. He found a shit-stain in the crack of the tighty-whitey and plunged into an immediate panic attack, freaked that it wasn’t the right hue of brown. Something about it was purplish. He scrubbed and re-scrubbed it, wrung and hung it. Then he had a second-stage freak over the panic attack itself, fretting and sweating that the palpitations would shoot his blood pressure to kingdom come. Maybe even burst some valve in his temple.              

In this anxious state he descended the creaky staircase to the breakfast room. He entered and found Sandrina, enshrined by the early sun. She was dressed to hit the rocks and the algae beds - no longer last night’s behemoth of mystery and languor, just the scholarly mega-girl of the ferry ride. She dwarfed the table she sat at, like a grownup forced into nursery furniture. In front of her was a teacup and a bowl of austere flakes. To George, this breakfast looked incapable of fueling one of her calves, let alone the entire Sandrina. “Stop trying to become smaller,” he wanted to tell her. “Accept it. Have a fucking omelette. Have two.” But then he himself rummaged at the buffet, passed up everything hot and buttery and came back with the identical no-fat special. At the other tables sat the handful of guests, all sleekly athletic and surrounded by wetsuits and related paraphernalia. The bleak island was known for one thing above all else: the most grueling performance kayaking on both sides of the Atlantic. The water so frigid and wild at all times of year, even summer, that one spill could kill.

George sipped his tea and told Sandrina his plans. For today, tomorrow – for whenever he had the balls.

“I’m a nervous wreck,” he said.

“Now tell me something I don’t know.”

He said he would take out a kayak and attempt an Eskimo roll. He would only be doing it for the second time in his life. The last time was in the relatively tropical fiords of the Cape Ann marshlands, bathwater compared to the lethal eddies off Ketamesset – and he had botched it. He had swung himself half under and run out of steam, unable to complete the arc. He had had to hold his breath for what seemed like forever, undoing the cockpit skirt and wriggling out. For the Ketamesset attempt he would wear nothing protective, not even a wetsuit. The act would be totally out of character for him, and that was the whole point. It would be like ECT, a total system shock, body and brain. If he survived the deep-freeze plunge perhaps he’d be purged, rid of his mind-fucking rites and rituals, rid of the pussy-George he’d grown to be - the George that lived life as if a fart from a bird had all the power to blow his head off his neck.

She listened. Professorially, sympathetically, and answered him only with her warm bespectacled eyes. They said, “best of luck, but I doubt you’ll do it.”

He felt what she was really saying was, “You’re not my giant. You’re not my Jack. I thought you could be my beanstalk, maybe. But all you are is…”

 

Three days later, the closest he had come to voyaging off in a kayak was a mere dory ride, courtesy of the innkeeper who had gotten fed up watching him, hour after hour, languishing on the porch, staring into the air while all the other paddle jocks churned the waters to a frigid boil. George frittered away two full afternoons peering into a trench flanking the garbage shed, where workmen were installing a septic tank big as a torpedo. The brand name of the tank was Hercules, made in Minnesota. When he wasn’t watching the workmen shovel dirt around the tank, every move of theirs so baleful you’d think they were burying some mythic body, he turned his thoughts to the kayak ordeal and tried to juice himself up for it. He used visualization, a trick he had read about. He tried to picture himself in the upward arc, emerging triumphantly from the grip of the sea, washed clear of fear - as pumped as some ocean monster ready to chomp. But then he’d walk to the boathouse, pick up a paddle and freeze in his tracks.

The innkeeper manning the oars was no minnow himself, although he wasn’t Sandrina-sized either. And he got to know you quickly in an earthy kind of way, his voice cutting the fog as he rowed.

“Let me tell you something,” he barked at George, “You have absolutely no buttocks.”George listened to the moaning fog and felt it had seeped into his head. He fumbled for a comeback line, without success.

“You and I could have surgery together,” the innkeeper went on. “They could take some meat from my buttocks and graft it onto yours. But then you’d have another problem. For the rest of your life you’d never get me off your ass.”

 

The very next day George was back on the ferry, alone and bummed, plowing through the dry-ice fog for the mainland and home. His state of alert, if not red, was at least yellow, over a pair of concerns on the health front. First - island tap water – he had brushed his teeth with it and swallowed a goodly amount. Second - septic backup – a known source of giardia and other bugs galore. He’d seen it with his own eyes, those shovelers right under his nose. Why had they suddenly freighted in the Hercules? Why were they planting it with that look on their faces, like the plague had struck?

Normally, these woes would kill his appetite, numb it like a gut shot of novocaine. But as George drove off the ramp he became ravenous – and not for a celery stick or a bowl of flakes and flax seed. For the first time in eons he had a craving for one thing only. A honker of a bologna sandwich.

The road he was on was one of those early backwoods highways, one step up from the logging roads, its shoulders sagging, its yellow line three decades overdue for a paint job. Yet, eighteen miles of it took George to a diner with a tar roof topped by a tin chimney, a cigarette machine from the Truman era, and a wolf-sized watchdog chained to a rusty tanker anchor. Up at the counter they had a Kaiser roll, size of a flotation cushion, and they crammed it with so much bologna George feared the dog might break its chain when he caught a whiff. “More mustard,” George said. “Slap it on.” He salivated as the old gaunt woman, her nicotine fingers yellow as the mustard, threw on an extra-heavy slather and packed it up in wax paper with pickles and chips.

George had a plan – drive till noon, stop, and attack the sandwich. Suck it down with the Pepsi at his hip, secure in the console beverage hole. But the bologna smell made him salivate like the diner dog, and soon he was groping the passenger seat as he sped along, tearing at the wax paper, liberating the naked sandwich and hefting it to his bared teeth. One hand on the sandwich, one hand on the wheel, was this earth or heaven? – all he lacked was a third hand to operate the Pepsi.

            Then came the ringing in the ear. Tinnitus, he had read about it. Mostly harmless, but sometimes, sometimes, the sign of something deeper than the ear, maybe even growing in the brain. He discovered the ringing in mid-bite, and it jangled everything. Even his eyes. He glimpsed new faded lines in the road, not just yellow but white. Letters so washed out they seemed obsolete and expired, not meant to be noticed anymore. He drove over them and sank his teeth in all the way, sending a gusher of mustard out the sides and onto his shirt. Shit! Fuck! The shirt would be ruined. He flailed about, he stretched for the glove compartment. He wanted soda water, a napkin – first aid for the stain, but all he could grab was the fucking brown Pepsi. And the sandwich, where would he put it? And the wheel in his left hand, what to do with it? He suddenly noticed the ghost-pale white letters and even the yellow line had vanished, and now different marks were passing under the car. Railroad tracks – he felt the bumps as he sped across them, and an instant later he glimpsed the monster blur in the rearview mirror. With it he heard the tinnitus change from separate beats to a single screaming, raging bellow. He saw red warning lights too – where had they come from? As the train roared through, the words stamped on the mirror howled in his brain, scaring the shit out of him even more. Beware of objects in rearview mirror. They may be closer than they appear.

George pulled over to the weeds and rocks, stopped the car and got out when the spaghetti in his legs turned to bone again. His eyes panned and re-panned the scene -  the tracks, the warning lights, all of it silent and still again, as empty as if a locomotive hadn’t thundered by in fifty years. No gate arms at all, down or up, just the now-darkened flashers and the long, bleached-out letters on the road. Now he saw what they spelled. S-L-O-W. His ears were dead quiet, tinnitus vanished, the only pounding deep in his rib cage as he eyeballed the distance from his car door to where the locomotive had nearly flattened him like a penny on the tracks. How close had it been – one breath, two?

George Smoller looked down at his shirt, white as the driven snow except for the yellow drool of mustard winding past a three-button stretch. He thought of all the doctors appointments he had made, all of his scares with bumps and lumps, all the Styrofoam-tasting fiber he had forced down his gullet, all the capsules and ampules and powders he had bought, all the preventive crap he practiced daily, obeying every word of every brochure from his HMO, kissing every ass of every sawbones wagging a finger from the WebMD screen.

Then he thought of the rest of his sandwich.

He climbed back in his car and seized it. He took fat, jagged bites of the white roll and pink meat. He ate the way a predator would tear apart prey. The mustard squirted on everything, his shirt, his pants, his fingers, his chin. He licked his lips and went on, wishing he had another sandwich – an even bigger one. He took a huge swig of the Pepsi and gnashed his teeth.

It was all about Cal being littler than Nicolene was, and thinner too. She was one of those former field hockey types, trim and toned and big. It intrigued her that in any actual physical contest she could likely overpower him. She found it alluring, in fact. It also didn’t hurt that he made ten times the money she did, or that there was an aura of semi-fame about him - in trade circles, at least. He was always being written about for winning this or that. His formula for success as a leader, he once told her, was that “if I am weak, others will be strong.” And when he said things like this he laughed that deft, sly laugh of his and she was electrified.

They both lived around Boston. But they saw each other thousands of miles away in other cities like Vancouver, places that were important to the advertising industry. Once they were eating gobs of Vancouver sushi after a long, mean day at the sound stage. He told her his battleaxe story and nearly made her choke laughing on a purple slab of maguro.

“All I’m doing,” he said, “is walking with my dog on a leash, and the dog wanders over to the battleaxe’s property. And not even her fucking property - the town grass that edges her sidewalk.

“So she comes running out to her precious rhododendron bushes yelling, ‘get him away from there.’

“So I reel in the leash and yell back, ‘it’s a SHE.’ And then the battleaxe screams, ‘well I don’t give a damn.’ And then I scream, ‘well I don’t either.’ And then she screams even louder, ‘you’re going to be reported.’”

She saw this as his unreal suburban side, the side that was totally unconvincing, almost as if he were making it up. Walking a big panting retriever, mowing a lawn, where did it fit? She had never observed those thin, hairy wrists lift anything heavier than a cigarette. Or a champagne flute.

He should have been gay. He had all of the markings. When Nicolene was taking film production at B.U. theater school, creatures like Cal were always camping it up on Symphony Road and Gainsborough Street, cruising the Fenway on balmy nights. They were pals of hers. She loved the patter and pomp. But there was something about Cal that was not that way. She couldn’t put her finger on it, but it was something she found accessible. She could almost smell it in his hair and taste it when he pecked her on the lips in that showbizzy way. On the set in Vancouver, during the tedium of pre-lighting, he flitted over and plopped himself in her lap. He sat there in his skinny black jeans and ate a Twizzler. He was a darling imp. It seemed utterly unreal that he was married.

Vancouver was typical. They were there for two weeks, scouting, casting and shooting. Then they went to Santa Monica for two more weeks of post production. They had down time and gorgeous weather the day before the Santa Monica flight. They made a quick visit to Stanley Park and watched the two Beluga whales, one male and one female.

“I hear they screw like maniacs,” he said. “The water sloshes everywhere.”

She watched his fox eyes for the innuendo, and it was there. But as usual he kissed it off into a not-serious-at-all work comment. “We need a condom account. We could go upscale and call it Beluga, the caviar of condoms. Tested at ten tons of pressure - a whale of a screw.” The way he said it, it sounded like junior high shock talk. Something he had read ina dirty comic book.

They walked farther and found a bridge over a chasm. One of those shaky hammock-like bridges you always see being blown up in Southeast Asia war movies. Tourists were picking their way across.

“You first,” he said, and she marched across, as fearlessly as she used to march across the field hockey grass. But he went out a third of the way and stopped dead in his tracks. “You’re the producer, save me,” he yelled, doing his best to be ironic. But she didn’t like the way he was clutching and swaying, and she ran out and grabbed his skinny elbow, not even aware of the wobbly slats and cables rocking underfoot. He was ashen and clammy as they hit terra firma. They sat close under a big tree for a half hour, dappled by light and shade. His head grazed her breast and she reached for the scruff of his neck and pulled him to her, as though his head were a buzz-cut kitten. Cal didn’t resist. Hardly. He leaned in and let her rub the bumps of his scalp. She was wearing a sleeveless top and it was hot out. There was a moment when she thought he was sneaking a sniff of her deodorant. She also thought she saw a bulge in his khaki shorts. She went with it and cradled his head even tighter. As usual when they got to that point, he pulled his rabbit move, shouting “shopping time,” and jumping up. They found their rental car and drove back downtown. According to protocol she drove and he was driven. She was merely the producer, a freelancer at that. He was the creative director. The Number One.

In Santa Monica they had an editor who was known in the feature film business. His girlfriend was a minor starlet, the kind that came from commercials and would soon go back. Cal took one look at the cut and threw it out. “Smart, smart, but too slow for us,” he said, in a voice that purred and snipped all at once. “It takes thirty seconds to get going. But honey, thirty seconds is all we have.” And the way he said “honey,” spinning his head so it was exactly mid-way between the editor’s eyes and Nicolene’s eyes, made the little sting of blame - and more -apply equally to both. The editor, of course, had been her recommendation.

To make amends, the editor’s rep took them to dinner at Chinois. Cal said he felt feverish and picked at his vegetable straws and purply lamb nuggets. Between bird bites he smoked and twirled his ebony chopsticks. The rep was a dime-a-dozen bodybuilder in a Versace mesh tee. Everything was sculpted, including the nose. He wrangled the food choices so that he and Nicolene were feeding off the same catfish. All through the catfish the rep couldn’t take his eyes off Nicolene and her breasts. And Nicolene couldn’t take her eyes off Cal and his feverish face. She watched the way he cooled himself with gin, pressing the frosted martini glass against his cheek. These little things he did - they knocked her out - and it was the littleness that did it more than the things. Cal was a bonsai person. Size-wise, the rep could have been the dad, Nicolene the mom and Cal the son. When the catfish got nibbled down to all bones, the rep and Nicolene went off in his Boxster to do what they would do. And Cal left his pile of lamb and straw vegetables and cabbed back to his room at Shutters On The Beach, sighing feverishly. Around this time in the Shutters lobby she caught that news story about some Japanese making a sculpture of a bull the size of a single blood cell. It stuck in her mind. She saw this project as very Cal, something he might well do with just a pair of chopsticks.

Before they flew out of L.A., she bought him a black silk shirt in Beverly Hills. Because she wanted to.

“What will your wife say?,” she said, buttoning his chest button.

“My wife,” he said, “Mmmm.” The sound came out wolfish and perturbed, a mixture of opposites in the exact same proportions, perfectly balanced. Nicolene offered up her American Express card at the sales desk. They both knew the purchase would slip into the shoot budget and be passed on to their rich, innocent client. But Nicolene did not know what Cal meant with his “Mmmm.”

On the United flight she coaxed him to show the wife pictures, half-hoping they would neither be with him nor even exist. But he produced this shot of a small skinny thing with buzz-cut hair, cute legs in rolled-up dungarees and subtle saucer breasts. Like Cal, she had straight lines and angles where Nicolene had circles and curves.

Like Cal, in fact, was the operative phrase. The wife could have been the girlish brother or the boyish sister. Nicolene looked down at the snapshot and up at Cal. She had a sense of impending triumph and held back the tease-question she wanted to ask - whether Mr. and Mrs. Cal both bought their duds in the Boys’ Department. She had to exercise caution, she was still the freelancer, slave to the per diem. Without the Number One’s initials on the P.O. she couldn’t step on a plane or bill a nickel.

“What size are you anyway - in suits?”

She flipped this out as they passed somewhere over upstate New York, co-browsing the Italian GQ she had stuffed in her bag at LAX.

“Size 6 in Chanel,” he said, batting his eyes in that way he had of letting you know he was but he wasn’t.

At Logan Airport they went their separate ways for two or three months - this was the customary cycle - until somebody came up with a budget again. New projects always began with an homage trip to his office, where he personally walked her through the approved storyboards, suggesting changes as fast as they flew into his head - “if I put in redwood trees what will it cost?”- whereupon she gave the appropriate maternal lecture about vendors, locations and fiscal realities. This ceremony was the true and authentic contract between them.

The walls of his office still looked as though he hadn’t even moved in yet. They were high and bare as blank sheets of giant paper. The only ornamentation was a simple slate gray table crammed with brassy, tacky statuettes, bowls and cubes, his arsenal of awards. He said it was his statement, his decorating philosophy - the Zen of Ego. This time she believed him in spite of the mocking tone, but the concept of his being the one and only excited her. In his blank walls she saw loneliness on an architectural scale. Thirty feet long and ten feet tall.

She also saw opportunity. He was, after all, wearing the black shirt. The Orlando shoot kicked off as pure farce. Afternoon Florida electrical storms pushed the Delta back to the Boston gate. The passengers stayed imprisoned so long the crew finally showed mercy and let people off with their boarding passes. The pilot himself told Nicolene she and Cal could venture beyond the gate area, things were so socked in. They went past security into the main terminal and ate tepid Legal Seafoods chowder, thick as Elmer’s Glue. They peed and returned to the gate, where they found the Delta had up and gone; no announcement, nothing. They whined and were put on a later plane, but at the carousel in Orlando they were told their luggage had come in on the earlier Delta, the one that had abandoned them. And when nobody claimed it, the luggage was re-loaded and sent back to Boston on the very same aircraft.

Squinting at his thin vintage watch - it took a womanish band to fit his wrist - Cal estimated the luggage had actually passed them in the air. They checked into the hotel, one of those tropical Hyatts, with zip, zero, not even a razor blade in their possession. It meant she could take him shopping on the client’s nickel- for everything from toothpaste to skinny underwear; and in the mall, at least, he let her have her way. At Saks she splashed sample cologne on his neck.

They had midnight get-acquainted drinks with the director and the A.D., a South African who was entitled to his sweaty safari shirt, having just copped a Golden Globe for a jungle movie. Cal made napkin sketches for the A.D. while the Hyatt parrot squawked in their ears. They adjourned, turned in, and five minutes later the A.D. was on Nicolene’s phone. She went to his room and he machine-fucked her right through the sunrise. “Roll credits,” she said, and limped back down the corridor, remembering she was supposed to wake Cal in forty eight minutes.

He got up with a backache which he said he felt all the way through to his stomach, left side and low. For two days she made him swallow green tea with his Motrin. She had a P.A. run out for liquid echinacea, said to be stronger and faster than the tablets, and in the Winnebago she rubbed his skinny vertebrae down to the tailbone.

This at least got them through the start of the shoot. Enough so the cast and crew had a sense of what The Number One wanted. On day three he couldn’t stand up without doubling over. She found him on a couch in the lobby and took him back to his room. He rolled onto his bed and lay there whimpering, knees pulled up like a jacknife blade towards his chin.

Nicolene would always remember the words the hotel doctor chose to describe this particular pain, calling it the closest a male can get to experiencing childbirth. The doctor addressed his diagnostic comments to her more than to Cal himself, assuming her presence in the room and on the edge of the bed meant she was the wife.

“This is codeine, not as strong as morphine,” he said, filling and jabbing in the hypodermic without breaking the cadence of his sentence. “I hope it gets him through the day. With a kidney stone you can’t predict.” To present his cheeks for the shot, Cal had had to pull down the underwear she had bought him. Nicolene, acting under her new authority as deputy wife, bent across the sheets to help. The waistband had left marks in the skin of his hips. Reddish tracks. Studying these marks, she felt as though she had somehow signed her name on him.

The doctor extracted the needle and applied an alcohol-soaked gauze pad. Nicolene pushed his hand away and took control of the compress. She was still holding it there, pressing and rubbing, as the doctor closed his bag and made his exit. The bum she was viewing for the first time was runty, built for speed. To her it looked half the size of her own.

“You’re drinking nothing but cranberry juice,” she said. “Quarts of it.”

“What if it never comes out?”

“What?”

“The stone. If it doesn’t pass, they might have to snag it with a wire. I think that’s what they do.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

She couldn’t resist the opportunity. “What would Mrs. Cal say then?”

He was not too sick to pick up the ball. “Who’s Mrs. Cal?”

“You know who.”

“Mmmm,” he said, but the sound came out in the same cryptic way it had in his office, exactly. To Nicolene it was a signal, though no more readable than a white cloud in a gray sky.

He didn’t roll over on his back and neither of them pulled up his underpants, not even when he yawned under the rush of the codeine. She left him there with his tush, dozing, and wrote a “feel better” note on a yellow sticky, which she hung on the edge of the nightstand but considered affixing to his needled cheek. Then her pager went off and the panic hit, the panic of a $500,000 day that was half over. With Cal out of the picture the proverbial hot turd was in her pocket, and there was no one to pass it to. She raced off straight to the shoot and spent the whole lunch hour calming down the half-crazed client.

Cal phoned at twilight from his bed - the ailing Napoleon hectoring the troops. “I hope you covered my ass with them,” he said to her. This was no small shoot, and Nicolene did the rest of it all by herself, essentially. Cal checked out and flew back to Logan, shot up with a ton of codeine. He had her book him two first class seats, which he used as his mile-high hospital bed, sucking vodka and cranberry juice through a straw until he passed out.

Late in the post-production process he returned to the arena, ever the matador, and nailed the soundtrack in ways that made the picture twice as good.

When the next job came through - and this time it wasn’t for four months -the assignment was Tokyo, the very home of bonsai.

But like bonsai, the four months felt miniaturized. Stepping into his office she felt it had only been four days. Four days since Orlando. Four days since her last trip to his domain to let him walk her through the boards. Decoratively all was the same. Clean and bare, unfinished as ever. Walls the size of cinema screens - open to all possibilities. “I made one addition,” he said, with a juvenile cackle, like the cub scout who’s swallowed the worm. From the trophy heap on the slate gray table he plucked a slender stem of crystal, clear and empty, except for a tiny charcoal speck at the bottom. He held it up and gave her a loupe so she could examine it. Under magnification the speck was rough and sharp at the edges, like a chunk of mineral.

“It’s my stone,” he said beaming. “I pissed it out in a urinal at the Ritz.”

She did the obligatory “yuck” and mock-slapped his wrist. As she did she had the weirdest feeling someone else had just been here, someone she could sense but not see. The hotel doctor who had mistaken her for the wife. It was eerie - as if the doctor had just snapped his black bag, shut the door and left them alone. The echo of this feeling stayed with Nicolene all through the Tokyo shoot, occasionally rising to the surface, sometimes plunging to depths almost out of sight.

Tokyo was a film shoot that was like a film itself. The client was a Japanese electronics giant with buildings everywhere. Nicolene and Cal were taken from building to building like diplomats, whisked about in shiny black cars with white doilies on the headrests of their seats. When they weren’t shooting or client-stroking or fighting with the director, they went to tepanyaki bars and watched the live prawns wiggle and sizzle and die on the grill right under their eyes. Then they chewed and ate them. What went down Nicolene’s throat felt more like the remains of large prehistoric bugs than normal shrimp. And she had a sense of herself moving like a sea creature on an aimless, endless prowl.

The last shoot day was an all-nighter and then some. Nicolene and Cal dragged themselves through Narita and sank asleep on a couch in the first class lounge. They walked, when it was time, like two zombies drifting down the jetway. Ensconced in the front of the plane, they refused juice and nuts and curled up like snails in their side-by-side multi-position seats. They were out cold during taxi and takeoff: seemingly a pair of sleepwalkers who had just returned from a brief twilight-zone stroll, safely back in the bed they had just left.

Neither of them really became fully awake during their sixteen hour flight. They lay side by side, dreaming and tossing, asleep with each other if not sleeping with each other. When the plane pitched or dipped they would shift their positions under their respective blankets. Their knees and shoeless feet would bump and rub. Through the veil of a feral half-delirium Nicolene smelled Cal, his spice and his musk, heard him breathe, reached out to touch and arouse him. She dimly perceived that under his cover of sleep he was taking pre-conscious license, fumbling in his ever-adolescent way to do the same with her. As the plane flew high above the ocean it was as though they were deep beneath it, cavorting in a wavy, watery world where they were the only two people. And in this subterranean dimension the little man, at last, belonged to her.

So it was simply unacceptable for it all to end when they surfaced, came up to earth as the wheels touched the Logan runway. There had been too many days and nights and months, too many shared dilemmas and delights. Nicolene felt it had all built up to a dizzying point, as if her account with him contained more frequent flyer miles than she could ever use -but what she had earned, what she was owed, was far more than a trip to Tokyo and back.

In their own world, the bonsai world, they had become part of each other. The doctor in Orlando had seen it and reacted appropriately. But outside the terminal Cal stood on his toes and kissed her - and then he kissed her off. His exit line came courtesy of the car service: a placard with his name on it, misspelled. “My fan club,” he said, and chased after the bobbing sign and the rumpled driver in black who carried it. Nicolene held her hand to her face. It was the hand that had given him his wet dream, still dense with the odor of his prick. If things followed their normal cycle this would be it, period. It would be all she would have of him for three months or more. All the way home in the cab she thought about him standing on his toes at the airport, caged for a second in her arms. He was so much lighter than she was - and faster. It made her lick her lips like a big cat.

Nicolene lived with it for seven days and realized she could not live with it for seven more. She called Cal’s secretary, made up some story about a new digital imaging thing from Europe, and got on his calendar. She went there early and stalked the lobby until it was her turn, too itchy to sit with the Elles and Vogues and trade rags on the coffee table.

The secretary opened the office door and Nicolene passed through. She had expected to pounce on him the moment she saw him, but instead she spent a vast wordless spell not noticing him at all. It was because the once-blank walls now nearly pulled the eyeballs out of her head. The wide white spaces were plastered all over with photographs, huge blowups that looked like stills from a home videotape. Some of the shots were shaky-cam and out of frame to impart the required edgy feel, but the subjects were family-album vanilla: Picture upon picture of Young Mom holding her newborn at the hospital and at home. Now and then Cal the Dad was there too, beaming at the two beloveds.

Nicolene tottered on her dagger heels, the heels that had made the A.D. in Florida want to eat her calf muscles. The mom all over the walls had the same features as the buzz-cut android whose snapshots she had dissed on the plane. It was her indeed, the same person. But now there was this radiance thing, the whole crock, the glow, the suck-me, drink-me thing - and everything about the formerly boyish wife was oval, even the hair, everything had a sacred round ripeness to it. The biggest picture of all was a classic three-shot of mother and baby in a ladderback rocking chair, father peering proudly. Cal had the grin of a giddy simp. He held up a big cigar. He wore the checkered shirt you see in weed-whacker ads.

When she turned to him and talked the picture was so big and loud she could almost hear it, its color erasing her own voice.

“These weren’t here the last time I came.”

He shuffled two steps back. “Well, they are now.”

Nicolene looked at the dial of her watch. 11 .am.

“Let’s go get some lunch.”

“Lunch?”

“Let’s just get out of here.”

He wouldn’t budge, of course. He wouldn’t even let her get within three feet of him. He had the gall to burrow into his official corporate place of refuge, the seat behind the ebony desk, big as a concert piano. If Nicolene wanted to so much as touch him she would have had to make a scene, stretch herself across his plateau of papers. She was compelled to sit at the foot of the black fortress in the vendor’s chair. As the blood drained from her face she felt as though she were being stripped, not of clothes but of hard-won status, banished from her own life.

He let her sit there and play cat and mouse with him, because he knew he was uncatchable. She would have done it all day had she not seen something - first in the pictures of his face and then in his real face. It gradually gave her the sense she was looking at time-lapse photography, a computerized image of passages through adulthood. A droop, a long shadow had crept into the skin under his eyes. Overall he looked thicker and pudgier, even his quick wrist did- as though in the twelve days since she had been with him he had crossed some divide, a picket fence, and entered that place where small, confused men gratefully turn into nut-gathering squirrels.

Eventually Nicolene skulked off and ordered lunch alone. The moment the lunch came she asked for the check. Then she went to F.A.O. Schwarz, to the baby department, and found one of those bears they sell. All through the store they were playing that song of theirs. The one with the child voices, “Welcome to our World.” After she dealt with the bear - sending it to The Spouse with a note and smiley face - Nicolene left and crossed over to Saks. She was still hearing the F.A.O Schwarz song, “Welcome to our World.” The voices chimed and whined in her head like a holiday migraine.

At Saks Nicolene went to Chanel and picked out a black dress, size 6. She dropped her business card into the Saks box and told them to courier it to Cal’s office. To remind him who he was.

The nick on the back of my neck has healed, healed a long time ago. But it’s only disappeared on the skin. Under the skin, where the nerves feed my brain, the nick festers and oozes and makes me wash my hands all day long and focus on nothing but what I might be catching from these people, what monkey ass plague or scourge of the human race. Catching what deadly pestilence from these barbers who use straight-edge rusty razors, who slit the back of your neck just scraping the fuzz and don’t even know the word germicide; from these fistfucking waiter-muggers who try to accost you in your hotel room and leave dubious hairs on your cheese plate. It’s having an effect, taking its toll. I’m now using men’s rooms in a most guarded fashion; after I wash my hands I’m careful not to shove the wadded-up paper towel into the receptacle with the old, bold thrust of days gone by; most careful not to stuff it into the mass of wadded-up paper towels left by other blokes who pissed and shit and washed before me. Instead, I suspend the bunched, drenched paper gingerly and let it drop, like a lady or a fop dropping a gossamer handkerchief, and keep my fingers at safe distance. Hidden in the mound could be an infected hypodermic needle, sting of the asp, unsheathed and pointed right at me. And the barber and the waiter, every time I think of either of these gentlemen I want to take a shower and get hospital tests.

With a shooting schedule like I have, this distraction is not good. With a partner like Al, this distraction is not good. On our last night off in L.A. he drags me down the darkened aisle of a place that feels like a bus station men’s room with a floor show. I don’t know why; I just write the spots, he’s the art director, so it must be a visual thing–or else he’s been hanging out with the suits, unbeknownst to me.

The theme of the evening is water and wetness, and a liquidy blue phosphorescence spills over the small stage and its central icon, a phallic fountain consisting of a round basin mounted on a single pillar, suggesting a penis or a birdbath, depending on your point of view. Inside the basin, water burbles up out of a single spout, like a drinking fountain, a detail I could testify to in court because Al has us sitting so close–so close my chair actually touches the stage and my elbow, when I raise my glass to drink, passes over one of the blue footlights and turns blue, as though it were part of the show. This I don’t like, not at all. I’m in no mood to be part of a show, certainly not this show, where the saxophone brays like a dirty donkey in heat, telling all us bad old men we’re headed for the bad boys’ island in Pinocchio, a blue phosphorescent island ruled by the porn princess, Madison, named for the avenue we all worship.

Out she comes, toting the usual stripper’s body and the expected paraphernalia, which she casts off as she bumps and grinds around the phallic birdbath, rubbing the pillar with her ass, squeezing it between her tits, hugging it with her thighs. Finally, she loses all clothing and restraint and jumps on top of it, squirming in the water of the burbling basin and moaning at the action of the spout on her crotch. For the gawkers three tables out this may be eye candy, a pure visual delight, but I’m so close that every time Madison swivels her butt in the birdbath she sloshes water and whatever’s hidden and crawling around in the water on my face, which means my lips and tongue, and I don’t want to have an oral experience with a woman I don’t know, a woman who screws every birdbath in town and who, basically, is doing a bidet ablution and making me drink from the bowl. And who is Al to laugh at me as I go through this paranoid shit, as I order a bottle of spring water and wash out my mouth, gargling and spitting into my glass of flat tonic and bar gin, and running my fingers over my cheeks to check for shaving cuts and any and all microscopic perforations. But he does laugh, laughs like a bastard older brother at me–laughs as he sits safe and dry on the leeward side of the table.

Finally, thankfully, the blue light special ends and the pillared geyser hydraulically disappears into the stage as Madison, flaunting her wet, glistening ass at the assembled boozers and losers, dances away to the rimshot rhumba and melts into the curtain. The lights come up, glaring and natural, removing the blue glow from my elbow, and I’m more than ready to pay up and get out, believe me, but grinning Al doesn’t budge, and neither does anyone else in the house. A minute or so goes by and the donkey saxophone brays its raunchiest salute as the curtains part, revealing a dried-off Madison utterly free of adornment; nothing but skin, hair and raw spotlight; and she tells the audience this time it will be just her, the way she really is, Madison unplugged.

That means no drums, she says, and no saxophones. No ass wiggling, tit shaking or lap dancing. Nothing to dilute the experience or spoil her concentration, her meditation, as it were, and she sits, exactly at the spot where the birdbath sank into the stage, with her eyes closed, her legs open and all the fingers of her right hand at work.

I’m still less than ten feet from her, same place as in the blue routine, but the harsh, clinical quality of the light she’s chosen makes it feel even closer, because now I can see every dot and splotch on the skin, the hairy moles, sweat beads, blackheads and whiteheads breaking through the melting makeup. In choosing to forego all of the usual amplification, Madison creates its opposite, the amplification of negative space; a soundtrack where every note is dissonant and edgy; sporadic coughs and whispered curses from the audience, a deep burp wrapped in silence, a dropped, shattering beer glass.

And through it all she sways and moans and works her fingers in earnest, doing it for real, traveling light years from the audience into the caverns of her own images, not theirs. And the farther she travels the closer she gets; not a stage act anymore but a documentary; a nice-looking American girl, college age, masturbating in public, gritting her teeth so hard the tough truckdrivers and bankers start to ahem and turn their heads, ashamed to be revealed as intruders by a moment so private. As if the spotlight, in fact, had turned on them, like the beam from a police car.

When she comes it’s with a grimace and a crescendo of grunts and sharp yelps. The effect is alarming; more like watching a seizure than a burst of human ecstasy; and the crowd mutters and drinks up to keep the mood high. They came to stomp their feet, but Madison has them scratching their heads.

And then she makes them wait. Until she’s ready. To open her eyes and step out of the dream, rising to her feet and holding out the right hand so the spotlight shows how it glistens.

“I’m all wet,” she says. “I need to wipe it.” She scans the audience left, right, then rushes at the nearest target, me, and smears her hand across my brow and down my cheek, smearing it twice to get a good, complete wipe; and I sit there and let her smear to her hearts content, because she ambushed me and what else is there to do.

But the moment she turns and bolts through the curtains, giving a little kick with her bare heel to trigger a riot of applause from the pent-up crowd, I take off running for the men’s room and do whatever disease prevention I can manage with available soap and water. The greasy men’s room mirror, however, can never give me the reading I really want, the lab quality magnification that proves, beyond a doubt, that every millimeter of skin she touched was fully sealed and one hundred percent virus-proof. Because even when I finish washing I can still feel the places where Madison’s sharp nails scraped the side of my face.

From the get-go I know I won’t be putting this one on my reel because we’re shooting in Queens, and Queens is where I always end up with what the old Catskill guys used to call a wish sandwich. You know - two slices of bread and you wish you had some meat.

Maybe it’s Queens, maybe it’s me. Maybe it’s the fumes and mold from the old flour silo. It just happens.

Once we shot a talking horse spot out here. It was for an upstate beer and the horse was supposed to be singing ” a hundred bottles of beer on the wall.” He did it like an orator when he was rehearsing up on the animal talent farm, up in Hamilton by Syracuse. Same place they train the camels for the Radio City Christmas Pageant. But here in the Silvercup Studios with those LaGuardia planes stacked high over the roof he turned into a mule and wouldn’t open his trap. They had to tickle his lips with filament from a fishing line and it still took forty four takes to get it right, which added a half day (read half a hundred grand) and made the Buffalo beer baron bullshit.

Pardon the illiteration, I should know better. My job is to write the lines, which in advertising is shit, really. But I still get excited. The day before shooting began I saw a great one scribbled on a wall in the men’s room of The Blarney Rose on 32nd. It said, “Please do not throw cigarette butts in the toilet as they get wet and are hard to light.” I don’t get a chance to write lines like that. As they say, it’s not creative unless it sells.

We don’t all go out to the Silvercup building right away. Before Queens there’s always the pre-production muzz-muzz in Midtown.

So the three of us are sitting in the hotel cocktail lounge sipping cocktails after finally checking into the Royalton on 44th Street, where we live as much as we live anywhere, weary and jet-lagged after the flight across the whole North America. We came in from Tokyo and then from Santa Monica, where, you have to believe this, I always have better luck than in Queens.

I’m telling people about the yak shoot we did once at Silvercup, where we trucked in a real yak from some farm in Ohio and had him stand next to a real Sherpa dressed in the client’s product, fleece outerwear, which we had the client do up custom in authentic Himalayan yellows and reds.

The Sherpa looked ridiculous and the yak was pissed about the long night in the truck, so he kept snorting and pawing and hooking his long, pointed horns to the left.

The left, in this case, was exactly where the Sherpa’s crotch was positioned, under a thin layer of fleece. Take after take the horns came hooking in and each time they came so microscopically close to the gonad zone if it were me I’d be jumping out of my fleece if not my skin. Through it all this Sherpa doesn’t flinch. Maybe that ’s why he leads rich guys up K2 and I lick up their crumbs at places like Silvercup Studios.

At any rate, the conversation is starting to calm us down when into the Royalton bursts Wayne, the head account guy. He’s wearing seersucker and a bow tie, the kind of duds they don’t want to see in this starfucking hotel, where the boss used to run Studio 52 and they give discounts if you wear Prada. It’s as though Wayne must be staying across the street in the New York Yacht Club, in one of those preppy-shabby rooms they keep for members. Wayne sits down and proceeds to announce that he never washes his hands after taking a piss. He calls it “number one.”

“We want to thank you, Wayne, for ruining these nice gin and tonics,” says Joline, the art director. Gin and tonics are back in Manhattan. They came back up from Mercer Street, the point of re-entry for whatever used to be cool.

“Remind me to never shake your hand again,” says Kim, the producer.

“Why wash my hands,” says Wayne. “My hands don’t touch anything when I pee.”

“You’re telling me,” says Joline, “that when you take a leak with your dick you don’t touch your dick. Is that right?”

Joline is my 98-pound art director partner, who stands five foot one in her stockinged feet and about six foot one in her Fleuvogs. To her there are two kinds of people, the cool and the dead. Joline sees me as some sort of advertising antique, like a Buick ad from the 1950’s. If I were a hotel I’d be the Waldorf, not the Royalton. Valid only as retro.

Three years of shoots with her have left me on the verge of clinical depression.

Wayne throws a quick funny look at me. Fifty percent for verification, fifty percent for permission to continue the conversation. Wayne is twenty years younger than me. Joline and Kim could both easily be my daughters, and Joline could even be my granddaughter. Although Kim works in back of the camera, she’s already starting to do voice-overs on local radio ads; and what she really wants to do is some sort of hip celebrity gossip show, the kind you see on E!

As for me, I couldn’t make the horse move his lips. But I can’t make Wayne stop moving his.

“Are you trying to get out of this, Jake? Are you trying to avoid the question?”

He bears down on me like some preppy D.A.

“Okay, sometimes I wash and sometimes I don’t.”

“Eeew,” says Joline. “Grody.”

She looks at me the way you’d look at your great grandfather if his teeth fell out of his mouth, shiny with mouth goo. Kim’s look is even more degrading. Her eyes fill with sympathy, the kind a nice young person is supposed to feel when she sees an elder being treated with disrespect.

Finally, Wayne rests his case. We sip and smoke. I fiddle with the gray skin of my shaved head, the successor to my gray ponytail of two years ago. I don’t want to smoke anymore so I grab my cell phone and check voice mail.

You have two saved messages. One from my bank; one from some intern in the direct mail department. From a coupon writer; it’s come to that.

This afternoon it said the same thing. And this morning.

So what message is the message machine really playing when it keeps telling you have the same two messages?

     Later that night the client flies in from Sacramento. He’ll be here in The City for the whole shoot, all nine days, and for part of the edit leading to the rough cut of film, which is only the beginning for this project since only half of the action will actually be shot by the camera. The other half, same as in Titanic, will be generated by computer artists pounding Power Macs in some digital paint shop in The Bowery, the place no bum can afford anymore. The client, simply because he’s a client, behaves anally from the moment he arrives, forever fighting for a bigger logo or an extra millisecond of exposure for one of his products. His name is Mike, and he looks like a Mike. He’s a chunky guy and he has nice, normal gray-red hair, the kind that was cut in a barber shop, not done in a salon. He’s wearing golf slacks and a green checkered golf shirt with the company name and logo embossed on the right sleeve. The epitome of what New Yorkers call an out-of-towner.

Around midnight, we three creatives plus Wayne gorge on sushi at Kuruma Zushi on East 47th Street, the secret hole-in-the-wall Joline says the Silvercup Studios people say suddenly became better than Nobu a few months ago. Mike, who’s sitting with us but would have preferred Smith & Wollensky’s, holds forth in the most gentlemanly way about the vast differences between the number 7006 saber saw and the number 7009 saber saw. He wants both shot even though both look exactly the same to the camera. No raw fish for Mike; he calls it bait; just give him some Teriyaki salmon and a fork, thank you very much.

The sea urchin creeps down my gullet and the wasabe fumes slash at my sinuses. Mike moves on from saber saws to routers. Bored and exhausted as I am, I have to envy this man. Looking at myself in the restroom mirror, dressed in my Mercer Street this and my Melrose Avenue that — wardrobe items selected for me on previous shoots by the studded, tattooed Joline — I do indeed envy this nice, normal man. On my feet are black boots so heavy you could moor a boat with them. Mike, he’s in Cole Haan summer loafers.

Next day, bleary-eyed, we all come down in the charcoal gray “light” of the Royalton elevator, which is designed to conceal your wake-up face. We’re gathering so we can meet the director. The production company has taken over a conference room and covered every available inch of a long side table with bagels, croissants, honeydew and cantaloupe, the usual things no one ever eats, except account guys and clients.

Wayne is there, looking like the junior commodore of the yacht club. With him is a preppy junior account guy, Derek, who politely takes notes for Wayne. Both are eating.

Mike is there with his power tool catalog open to the drill page. Eating.

Wayne offers Kim a piece of his croissant. “From your hands ?” says Kim. She rolls her eyes and swigs her Evian. I’m drinking New York City tap water, because a piece in The Post said it tastes better than Evian, which of course reads “Naïve” when you spell it backwards.

Joline rolls her eyes in response and swigs her Evian. She thumbs through a stack of Polaroids the production company has brought to show work in progress on the set. On their side there are five people, on ours six, including Mike. Everyone’s there except the director, who’s stuck in yellow-cab gridlock because he will stay only in Soho on the top floor of the Soho Grande.

The bloom is well off the cream cheese by the time, Perez, the director, finally does sweep in, and all the fawning agency people, me included, line up to shake his hand. Wayne lets Mike go first, then goes himself. “You don’t want to shake that hand,” says Joline, giggling. For an instant Wayne’s eyes go ballistic. “Agency humor,” he says to the director. “You don’t want to know.”

Perez has an international flavor, like a fusion restaurant. He’s Asian, he’s Cuban, he’s 125th Street. In The Business he’s mostly known for two bad kung fu movies and one promising kung fu movie that crossed over into the general action/thriller market. In the ad biz he’s mostly known as a problem solver for big technical shoots. Not an actor’s director, but a gizmo director, fearless around big sets with cranes and humans and animals flying through the air and enough lights to light Yankee Stadium. Which is why Perez could do all the music videos he wants, except music videos don’t pay.

Perez is about the same age as Joline, and he has even less body fat. He looks like he could fight welterweight on ESPN. We’re both wearing the same Versace black tee shirt; his makes him look like he just came from a filmfest, mine makes me look like I just came from Bergdorf’s men’s store.

Funny thing, he knows who I am.

“I was looking through the Clio book, 1978. You were all over that, man.”

“That’s me, the world’s oldest copywriter. I invented rich, pure and creamy.”

In 1978, the Clio awards ceremony was in the Waldorf and the Royalton didn’t even exist. Hotel toilet seats were warm porcelain, not the cold Royalton steel they also have in jails. Gin and tonics weren’t back in because they’d never gone out.

Out of the corner of my eye I notice Kim watching us. She has that same look of sympathy she had during the dick conversation in the cocktail lounge. Kindhearted and earnest, the look you give the elder statesman who’s not quite with the program.

“It’s an honor, sir,” says Perez. He actually says, “it’s an honor, sir.”

I learn more about why Perez shoots so much kung fu - and so little stuff with dialogue - later in the day when we cast the leading lady at a cattle call in the rag district on Seventh and 37th, near where they have the giant bronze thimble in the street. I once did a Calvin Klein thing there with Calvin himself, but that’s another story.

The casting specs call for an upscale type, an executive socialite, part SciFi and part Sharon Stone. The kind of face you see at charity balls in the Styles section of the Sunday Times. Her big line is, “Oh, Clyde, we forgot the foie gras.”

Okay, so it’s not “Where’s the beef?” But when is the last time you saw foie gras in an ad?

Perez goes for an elegant brunette with large dark eyes and a speech impediment. And he puts his foot down.

“She says foie gras like a deaf person,” says Wayne. “It sounds like fah gah.”

“You won’t notice it,” says Perez. “What you will notice is the reflection of the power drill in her eye, full frame.”

How can the account guy argue against a sexy product shot. Wayne shuts up.

“I think she’s perfect,” says Joline. She can’t wait to tell her friends she worked with a guy who did a P. Diddy video.

I say nothing, not wanting to be seen as the creative suit. I just wish they had let us go double scale on the talent, instead of putting all the money into sets and special effects.

And Kim looks at me. Kindhearted, earnest.

Very late that night, she really wants to talk to me.

We go to my room and talk about her days as a rich horse girl, mucking out stalls of jumpy Arabians. We sit on the charcoal gray sheet squinting in the charcoal gray light and talk about her rich father, the importer with the secret Asian connections, gone for months at a time, like Marco Polo. We talk about her days as a student nun, and we talk the low-rent industry gossip agency producers always hear third hand from other producers; the stuff Kim would be dishing if she had her dream job on TV.

“Perez’ girlfriend is flying in from L.A. Saturday night. She’s the hot one from Shanghai Warrior.”

I tell Kim I missed Shanghai Warrior.

“Why do you keep on working, ” she says. You act like someone who wants out bad.”

“The agency certainly thinks so. They keep sticking me with Joline on these shitty power tool shoots.”

“You don’t know how much she looks up to you as a teacher.”

“And down to me as a toilet.”

“Even Perez sees you as a teacher. And he sings Nat King Cole songs with Lauryn Hill on a beach in Mexico.”

Right. It’s an honor, sir.

We talk and talk. We talk a real long time about her wild and crazy life as a 29-year-old producer building connections with the hot directors on all continents.

“My voice mail is insane,” she says. “Hundreds of calls.”

Stick the knife in deeper.

Kim orders champagne and a fruit plate from room service. An out-of-work actor in a charcoal gray Frankenstein suit delivers it forty minutes later. All the fruit, mostly mango and kiwi, looks charcoal gray. She asks me again why I keep doing this job. I tell her it’s for the free champagne and fruit plates. Then I become maudlin and ask, “do circus people leave the circus? This is what I do.”

Kim finishes her second glass of champagne and wants me to tell her about the period before she was born.

She asks, “isn’t that when women threw away their razors?”

I remember the chanting streets of the East Village, nod yes and pour the third glass of champagne.

“There are days I’d like to do that,” she says, sounding slightly like Kathleen Turner. For some reason I hear this as a possible hint that Kim wants to stay in my room. For more than conversation.

But a few moments later she has her hand on the doorknob, yawning, batting her sleepy eyes in a happy and wholesome way, like a girl saying goodnight in a dorm, after tea with one of the deans.

Her parting words are that she looks up to me as a teacher, too, just like Joline.

For the hell of it, just before going to bed, I check the Star-tac again.

You have two saved messages. I could erase them, but I don’t want to.

The next day, which is the first day of the shoot, Day One in Queens, Mike the client wears his blue checkered golf shirt, company logo on the chest. Why he looks so entertained is anyone’s guess; he’s watching the client monitor, which means he’s watching white snow on a gray screen. They’ve strategically placed the monitor so it’s half a football field away from where Perez, the maestro of visual pyrotechnics, is working out the first shot with his director of photography, the gaunt and haughty Phillippe.

Of the eighty or so cast, crew and agency people hopping or dawdling around the set, Phillippe is the only Frenchman and the only person with a cigarette butt hanging out of his mouth. Evidently, he’s so important to Perez he’s been granted divine dispensation from the no smoking rule posted at every exit.

Shitty as I feel, I can’t possibly feel quite as shitty as the 300-pound guy dangling twenty feet above the cement floor a good hundred feet from where Perez and Phillippe, with their respective lackeys, are doing the photo-geometric calculations needed to make a flying camera sweep around four carpenter-astronauts erecting part of a skyscraper on some distant planet, each armed with a different power tool, each requiring a zoom-in, zoom-out on the tool; all to take place in a single move for which the script girl allows no more than 6.3 seconds.

Of the four guys swinging on thick wires, three are clearly athletes as well as actors, and their natural body strength and conditioning have allowed them to twist and turn into various gravity-defying positions, exactly on cue. But the 300-pounder looks like a former high school tackle whose eating life has been one big off-season since 1985. (He also looks like a real construction guy.) And every time they rehearse the shot he keeps wrecking it by doing the same thing, the only thing his body will let him do; an enormous bellyflop that pitches him head over heels and cinches the wire up his crotch.

Maybe his problems, like mine, are made all the worse by the fact we’re working at a sound stage that used to be a giant bakery; i.e.white-bread factory. Silvercup Bread, the old sponsors of the Lone Ranger on radio. Jingle, circa 1955, by Rootie Kazootie. Maybe the old smells of fresh-baked loaves haunt the upper air where he’s hooked and wired.

I take up a position behind Perez and Phillippe and their fortress of rigs and booms and terminals and monitors, the better to hear them conspire on this poor trooper’s torture. Since the cigarette butt is permanently attached to Phillippe’s lips, he is a man of few words, especially when speaking English into the mouthpiece of a walkie-talkie phone.

“Move heem five inches, no, six.”

Forty yards away a trio of crew members spring into action. They know what they’re doing. They worked out here on Men in Black and When Harry Met Sally. They yank the ropes that control the fat guy’s wire and move him into a slightly different position, like a hog on a meat processing line. He winces, he sweats, he clutches his groin with his silver astronaut gloves; and it’s all to put bread on his table and keep working until the big movie offer comes along.

What’s odd is that he’s a player you do see in feature films all the time, as the janitor or cop who has one line and does something so funny with it he steals the scene. By far, he’s the best actor of this bunch.

I’m telling you, he even reads. During pre-light we were munching breakfast burritos from the catering truck and he told me Saul Bellow had Moses Herzog eating Silvercup Bread in Humboldt’s Gift. News to me. I’d only heard about Rootie Kazootie. Saul Bellow is not in my universe.

Of course, he’s not in the Clio book either.

When I can’t watch any more of this I turn and walk as far away from Perez and Phillippe as I can. This puts me back near Mike’s territory at the client monitor, and before I can duck out of his line of vision he waves me over with a big, friendly smile.

“Jake, how’s the shot going?”

“Going like it always goes,” I say. “Like watching grass grow.”

“It’s been nearly all morning,” Mike says,” and they haven’t shot one take.”

“So what else is new. They’ll get it right. One way or another they always do.”

By the time we reach the last day of the shoot, they do get it right. As the hours wear on, some combination of fear, passion and scrotal irritation causes the fat actor to get his act together. Lo and behold, on take 9002 he soars like an eagle and wields his radial arm saw like an old pro carpenter, pleasing Mike, Perez, Phillippe and the relentless script girl with the stopwatch all in one fell swoop.

According to the plot of our seven-figure, sixty second epic, fat boy and his cohorts have left their homes in the U.S. to build a skyscraper hotel on some distant planet, the first Ritz or Four Seasons not on this earth. When they finish, the lady hotel manager and her lackey tour the place to make sure the hotel is fully stocked and ready for its first contingent of space-traveling V.I.P. guests. That’s basically it.

Shortly after six in the evening of the very last day, the day the budget runs out, Perez and Phillippe begin shooting the tall, elegant brunette, our kung fu director’s personal choice as leading lady and hotel manager. The camera follows her and her foppish assistant as they officially inspect the kitchen of the intergalactic royal penthouse suite, ten zillion miles from earth. A few minutes after midnight she throws open the refrigerator door at just the angle Phillippe wants, gives Perez the big eyeballs for the reflection shot, and nails her line.

“Clyde, you forgot the fah gah.”

“Wrap it,” says Perez. And they do. They don’t even do a safety.

And why should they? This isn’t 1978.

Wham bam, they break the set and Joline and Kim swarm Perez and Phillippe, hot to party. I head for the Blarney Rose on 32nd Street, where you couldn’t see the big Silvercup sign if you had a telescope.

After the cab gets out of the tunnel I check the Star-tac.

Longing to see some people with clothes on, Amrhein Sharkey tugged the brim of his salt-stained Braves cap, grabbed his lunchpail and hit the reeking public beach. To him the cap was as functional as it was for Johnny Sain, or any Braves star. He wore it as work clothing, not a smarmy souvenir, to shield his eyes from the August harbor glare. He also wore it to put an added layer of something besides his scalp and hair over his brain, just as a matter of safe-keeping. Not that he was a bookish twerp or anything smacking of mixed gender. Amrhein came from Southie in the days of Joe Palooka, and you couldn’t survive Southie in those times being less than a power puncher. And he worked at City Point Beach – at the famous L Street bathhouse – in the days of Charles Atlas; and it was a fact that nobody kicked sand at Amrhein Sharkey, not unless they wanted to chance losing a nut or an eye. But he had tested his brain in wondrous ways and was of the opinion his cranial organ was at least as big as either bicep, because of the things he could do with it.

Why, he had a mum who couldn’t cook her way out of a paper bag, even after cooking for seven children - one now a big priest - of which he was the seventh. Such are the failings of a woman who works nerves and fingers to the raw crux in the warrens of City Hall, dawn to dusk, for the glory of the Mayor and his Knockos and Jockos. She boiled everything until it was the exact same shade of gray, corpse gray or dead stinking-fish gray. Amrhein had this trick he’d do with just his brain and one of his mother’s cookbooks, those volumes of browned pages from which she’d learned utterly nothing. He would sit with a plate of her corpse-gray waterlogged cabbage and laundered, desiccated, leather-sole beef – inedibles, his runaway pa had called them – he would sit alone with this gray heap and a fork and knife and the cookbook open to some mouthwatering section such as the lobster thermidor page. And using just his brain and the description of the ingredients of the succulent claw-fish, Amrhein would transform the nauseating mouthfuls of cabbage and beef into sensational swallows of lobster thermidor. It was too real to be fantasy; what fantasy could ever rile a taste bud so? He could feel the crustacean tang and sherry infusion penetrating his glands and releasing torrents of hunger juice. Sometimes it was so delectable he would shake. He told no one of this alchemy; he kept it under his Braves hat. But he knew he had a brain of power and torque to go with his Palooka muscles – for how else was he, a summertime shithouse sweeper, able to flip a switch in his head and turn inedibles into incredibles?

When Max Baer left the prize ring for the movies, a thread of history came to the end of its spool. The species known as the fist-fighting Jew became so rare as to be considered extinct in America. But one still flourished far under the radar, the Mattapan teenager Keppy Zass, king of Cutler’s Pool Room at the Little Israel intersection of Morton and Blue Hill. For how many times could a strapping boy who was a kosher butcher’s son hear, “I kicked Keppy Zass from Franklin Field to Savin Hill” without stepping up to the bag and honing his uppercut into a lethal weapon?

To escape the suffocating steam of landlocked Mattapan, Keppy’s girlfriend Marsha Winkler, dragged by her sunworshipping mother Doris, boarded a Blue Hill Avenue streetcar bound for M Street Beach, which was in Little Ireland but legally open to all creeds from all sections of town. Their fingers grabbed for the straps on the screeching rattletrap at about the same time as Amrhein - whose three-decker was just a walk from the sea - pushbroomed his first load of pissed-on morning sand out from under the twenty-foot urinal, the marbled cascade where the L Street men in droves unburdened themselves of the previous night’s Gansetts and Guinesses. He had put up a handwritten sign – “those with short horns stand close” – but a bareassed off-duty cop had confiscated it as indecent for so municipal a space in so Catholic a district.

Leaning on the staff of his pushbroom, Amrhein stood back in a corner of the lav and counted nine sets of lined-up buttocks, ranging from scrawny to gargantuan, not a one of them near worthy of appearing in public unclad. For the ten thousandth time, he shook his head over one of the great paradoxes of his era, the era of banned in Boston. In Amrhein’s Boston, the Papal duchy of Southie, books were banned, shows were banned, nations were banned. But nudity raged – it was blessed by church and state. On any given summer day, hundreds of Southie males wearing only a St. Christopher’s medal sprawled elbow to elbow behind the high creosote fences of the Men’s Side, their hairy jewels browning in the sun. (Hence the term L Street Brownies, or so Amrhein had thought as a little boy brought in to bake by his pa). The only exceptions were the dungareed operatives, he and his mates of the shovel and broom. On the Women’s Side there was an even vaster sea of skin, a huge Coppertoned harem basking like seals in a zoo of maximum-security cedar, where the DPW night crews, under pain of clerical-secular excommunication, made sure not a single knot-hole went unplugged.

Although joined at the middle by a double-thick fence, the two stockades of sunbathers could have been on opposite continents, for all the interaction that took place. A labyrinth of tiled firewalls, patrolled by fierce matrons with direct phones to the stationhouse, prevented all hope of male entry into the distaff side, even entry by a probing, binoculared eye. “You’d have to fly over in a plane, Rhino,” was the brogued comment of Timmy, the pipe-puffing head janitor. “And many of them do, which is why I suspect they put the airport right across in East Boston. From June through September they fly in mighty low.”

When Amrhein wasn’t swabbing the crapper under the sagging behinds of naked, sun-stinking men, he was out loitering by the partition that divided the sexes – pawing the hot sand and brooding hormonally over what lay behind it, so near and yet so far. He pressed his nose to the sticky fence-planks and trolled for aromas he knew could not be washed-up kelp. They were as tantalizing as the urinal was depressing. They seeped through the wood and hinted at moist thighs and exposed rills and ravines a mere arm’s-length away, tickling the cilia of his nostrils but detectable in no other way; and when the clock struck noon he was a pressure cooker whose needle was rising beyond the red zone.

 “I’m out of here,” he told Timmy, seizing the lunchpail and a rolled-up copy of the Boston Daily Traveler – for its reader-submitted recipes, to mentally ingest them and alchemize the fishy pork sandwich from his mum into something palatable. He pushed through the big double door on the Men’s Side, hit the traffic din and the public beach, and headed up the boulevard alphabet, from L to M Street.

An hour and a half earlier, Doris Winkler was peering out the open streetcar window and caught the hot glint off the sea. “It’s a scorcher, Marsha. We’re gonna get black today.” The two of them clambered off the running board and Doris drew a bead on an open patch in the choice middle of the M Street beach. Hauling the pouty Marsha and three shopping bags of food and paraphernalia would have worn Doris out had she been aided by a second Doris every inch her size, a size that was considerable. But she persevered without complaint, knowing the good to be gained outweighed the pain.

After all, it was approaching lunch, and what a lunch she had in those bags. Kreplach, fisselach, taigelach, rugelach – she could have been catering a small Bar Mitzvah. But Doris loved to do it. To do it and then to eat it; and to watch as others ate it, and they’d better eat every last crumb. This was a mother whose idea of Mother’s Day was to cook all the harder, to cook for a solid week – so her grown daughters, mothers themselves, wouldn’t have to lift a finger on their day. “That’s what a mother does,” she would cluck, glorifying herself as the others nodded and chewed and sipped in homage. Marsha, her youngest and still at home, couldn’t chill Jell-O. “A queen shouldn’t have to do that,” Doris said.

 “I’m not hungry in this heat, Ma. And why do I have to get blacker? I’m black enough.”

Doris sat on the cluttered blanket, slathering goo the color of chicken fat across her youngest daughter’s bony shoulders. She played dumb, not even acknowledging the heretical question that had just been asked, as though it had come from the lips of someone too insane to talk with normally. For in Doris’s world view, everyone should want to wear frying oil and get as black as they could. Except the blacks, of course, of whom there were so few in Boston at this point in time as to be near invisible. The waves would soon come, however, unleashed from the Mississippis and Alabamas like squadrons of weevils. In that sense, Doris and her yentas were prescient, as were the colleens-sans-swimsuits behind the L Street stockade. Were they psychically blackening themselves for the forthcoming African-American invasion? Was it an act of symptomatic sympathy or camouflage? Whatever it was, getting merely tan was not enough. The idea was to blister and burn and char. To get black was to get beautiful. It was the Boston woman’s goal of every moment of spare daytime, June through September.

 “Have a fisselach, Marsha. It’s good for you.” She held up a slow-braised chicken’s foot. It looked like a little hand with pointy digits, beckoning to Marsha.

 “No, Ma, I’m still full from breakfast. I’m going in the water.”

 “You’re thinking about something. I can tell. Something’s on your mind.”

Marsha denied it and went off in a huff. But something was on her mind, the thought that never exactly shook her to pieces, but never went away either.

Love-wise, she was on an alright path. Except for what she saw at the end of the path.

Marsha Winkler didn’t want to be called Marsha Zass. She could hear the whispers and snickers, a lifetime of them, and peals of outright razzing. Why was fate pulling her towards a name that would spoof her anatomy like a personal bumper sticker? Through sheer willpower – closing her mouth every time her mother tried to put food in it – Marsha had cultivated a willowy figure for herself, the proof of which was evident as she swiveled towards the jellyfish-strewn dregs of Massachusetts Bay in her Filene’s Basement one-piece. All the way from the tide line to the boulevard, the eyeballs of rummies and beachbums turned so fast the socket-grinding was audible. And if that wasn’t the entire cause of the screeching roar Marsha heard, the source became evident soon enough – in a gust thrown up by a sudden squall churning the sea off Castle Island. The blast of wind stopped Marsha in her tracks and she covered her eyes against the whipping sand. As she pulled her palms back to peek out, something blue and fast came rolling over a chunk of flotsam and was halted by an MDC refuse barrel just to her left. She squinted and became curious enough to reach down and pick it up. It was a Braves cap.

Right behind it came a huffing young man with a lunchpail and a rolled-up newspaper. Even with his city worker shirt and dungarees he projected more muscle than nine out of ten of the males dozing in their shorts on ratty towels or parting the sluggish waves with their sun-pinked beer bellies. Those lumberjack wrists and hands of his were all the bare parts she needed to see for that special shiver to prance across her skin.

“Amrhein?” Marsha had never heard that word as a first name before.

“You can call me Rhino.”

She liked it. It left no doubt.

 “Hey, Rhino. What are you doing with a Braves cap? Does anyone go to Braves games anymore?”

 “Last night in the fifth inning the announcer gave the official count in the stands. It was 248 paid, 62 unpaid. That’s why I have a Braves hat. Everyone and his brother has a Red Sox hat.”

“So you’re not like everyone, huh?”

“Never was, never will be.” He firmed his Southie chin as he said this and squinted eye-beams of pheromones right at Marsha. These were the rays she far preferred over the skin-blackening August sun her mother had forced her to boil under. Like some atomic burst from a Buck Rogers comic strip, they zapped the name Zass and its owner Keppy, who suddenly vanished from her mind.

“This must be your lunch hour.” Marsha took a step forward and playfully made contact, first touching the lunchpail, then the hand that held it. “Do you have something good to eat?”

“Don’t I wish it.” Amrhein was in no mood to mince words about the sad sandwich his mother had made him. When he said the word pork, Marsha frowned and looked furtively back up the beach. Her eyes and Doris’s met like the crossfire of two machine guns.

 “I think I may be able to help you in the food department,” said Marsha. “Come on.”

Feeding taigelach to an obvious Gentile was not Doris’ idea of a fun lunch. But what could she do? Southie was their territory, not hers. Besides, she was incapable of resisting flattery, and the voracious Amrhein, chowing down as though making up for seventeen years of food deprivation at one shot, was beyond lavish in his gratitude.

“Eat mine too – I’m just not hungry in this heat,” said Marsha, pushing a juicy chicken foot at him; and while he nibbled that she rummaged and found him a helzel, a stuffed chicken neck. But her remark - and even more than that her stubborn abstaining from anything but a thermos cup of grape soda - caused Doris to make a fist and strike her own breast in an age-old ritual of maternal grief.

When the clock finally yanked Amrhein away from the savory shopping bags and back to his bathhouse pushbroom, a romantic exchange had taken place. First item: Marsha had been responsible for Amrhein getting the best meal of his life. Second item: Without him even asking she handed him her phone number, wrote it right on a piece of wax paper torn from the kreplach bundle. In return, Amrhein felt moved to give something of himself that wasn’t claptrap, something that held true meaning for him. He took off his Braves hat and set it on her head. Although her skull was way smaller than his, the hair-do more than made up the difference. She wore it the rest of the broiling day, except when she was in the water.

And she was still wearing it three nights later when she emerged from the Little Brown Jug, which was right next to Cutler’s Pool Room, having eaten Chinese – but only a few forkfuls of vegetable chow mein - with her girlfriends, Minna and Bunny. As she sashayed down Morton Street the pool room door flew open with unusual velocity, as though the shoulder propelling it belonged to a claustrophobic Brahma bull. Out burst Keppy Zass, and he had more on his mind than shooting a few racks of eight-ball.

 “Since when are you a Braves fan?”

 “Everybody in the world wears a Red Sox hat. Don’t you want your girlfriend to be different?”

 “Don’t shit me. Some potato-nose with a city janitor job gave you that cap on the M Street beach. You think I was born with a finger?”

They were standing right under a street lamp, and Marsha felt her face turn hot as a frying pan. She was sure it was beet red, exposing her crime. In actual fact, her tan was so deep and coppery, well on its way to black, that the blood rush hardly showed. But Keppy kept up the barrage, no less aggressive in love than in the ring at the Young Men’s Hebrew Association.

 “You don’t talk but your mother does. She was in my old man’s buying a roast and she told him everything. You think I’m Mickey the Dunce?”

 “I think I want to go for a ride,” she said, going chest to chest and tongue to tongue with him right under the street lamp. When their mouths finally pulled apart, emitting the sound of a plunger disengaging from a drain, she asked him if he happened to have the yellow Studebaker tonight. “We could drive to Wollaston,” she said, “right across from Howard Johnson’s near the old pier. We’ll go way out. I can show you what to do with that finger…”

Keppy smiled, and Marsha took the Braves hat off her head and put it right on his; and they locked lips again.

Meanwhile, Amrhein had dialed the numbers scribbled on the wax paper and was asking Doris if he could speak with Marsha. Back clacking the Mah Jong tiles in her native turf, Doris was feeling little need to play politics with the Hibernians of L Street. “She’s out, with her boyfriend,” she replied, and slammed the phone as heartily as if she were pulverizing coconut for Passover macaroons.

Although the Jews of Mattapan trolleyed all the way to M Street to catch the rays, they stopped short of the nude encampments of the L Street Bath-house. Among the men it was said you had to be wagging a full foreskin to be welcome in the stockade. Conversely, Southie-ites ventured to Morton Street but steered clear of Cutler’s Pool Room. There the skinny was you could get brained with a cue stick if the shiny thing around your neck wasn’t a mezuzah.

Those were the rules of peace, however, and as the Marsha-less days and nights went on and on, Amrhein was brewing for war.

Jocko Dugan, who had gotten him the L Street job, had his feelers deep into the trenches of Ward 14. It was he who had read the chatter and told City Hall of the three- thousand-vote swing riding on how promptly His Honor found a new hippo, replacing the one that had died face-down in his tub at the Franklin Park Zoo. This bit of sleuthing was widely credited with saving the Mayor’s ass, and Amrhein knew it, so he paid heed when the naked Jocko shook off after a long leak and motioned him over to the showers for a private word.

 “There’s a hooknose wearing your Braves hat. He can run a whole rack of solids and stripes and he drives a yellow Studebaker.”

Jocko was no more a fighter than Marsha, but he had a spy’s mind and two hands, and that was all Amrhein required.

“Find out how he drives home at night,” Amrhein said. “Where and when. Exactly.”

Two in the morning on a secluded stretch of River Street, Mattapan. Streetlamps face each other from either side of the road. So do Amrhein and Jocko, spotlit in the electric glow.

 “It’s all in the mind,” says Amrhein, calling out across the street. “Just like Blackstone the Magician. We’re creating an illusion.”

As the yellow Studebaker zoomed into view they clenched their fists as though tugging on a cable stretched between them. They arched backwards, straining to make that which was nothing more than air appear knotted and tight. Even though the illusion was all about hands and posture, Amrhein went full throttle on his most powerful weapon, the noggin. He concentrated, visualizing rope, rope and more rope. He concentrated and conjured, until he saw the same braid, taut as a tugboat line, Keppy Zass saw as he slammed the brake and spun into a screeching, tire-eating pirouette; which ceased only when the Studebaker nose buried itself in a huge breast of earth left by Boston Sand and Gravel for a future sewer control station.

Street lore has it that Keppy came wading out in the Braves hat, shooting hooks like Jake LaMotta. There was copious blood shed that night, but it was only the first of three slugfests between Keppy and Amrhein, all over the hat and Marsha. By the time they’d punched to a gory draw in the third, both battlers concluded that at least one of the two prizes, the one that was tan as coffee, probably wasn’t worth it, and they shook hands and went to a Braves game together.

And bought a second hat.

Both men went on to enroll in the work-study program at Northeastern, high on practical experience and low on Ivy League frippery. They considered applying to Suffolk Law and starting a practice together, but a firm that would be called Sharkey Zass seemed to carry the seeds of its own demise, right in its proposed shingle.

     So, parlaying their natural strengths, they settled on opening a deli called the S & Z. It meant Rhino giving up his track to City Hall – maybe even the White House, for history and Tip O’Neill show that what starts at L Street ends at Beacon Street and even Pennsylvania Avenue ; and in true Boston fashion the place wasn’t exactly kosher, but “kosher-style.” Hot corned beef with mayo on a white roll. Egg trilby with bacon on a bagel. It was pragmatics, pure and simple, since Boston was no New York and the Jewish wards paled in size before the vast Irish district.

Marsha, meanwhile, got tight with a budding hotel entrepreneur who had also attended Northeastern. She avoided the Zass trap, and she acquired a rock that stood out like the Custom House tower at high noon; but her last name, sadly, became Lipschitz.

The S & Z Deli was a smash hit because Northeastern had taught Amrhein and Keppy to play their born advantages. Amrhein had the taste buds; and Keppy’s father, the kosher butcher, had old, arcane ties to smoked-meat vendors that got them credit terms and extensions to die for.

But the coup de grâce was the cook they were able to hire. With Marsha off in Chestnut Hill and Palm Beach being Mrs. Lipschitz, Doris needed something to do.

The mountains seemed toy-sized, like sand castles, or topographical formations in a model train set, and part of Gene wished he could stay up there forever - dawdling with a gin and tonic, making molehills out of the mountains.

But soon enough they were taxiing to the gate at the Bozeman airport, and then they were all dragging bags and piling into the ranch van and making jet-lagged small talk with the old hand and driver, Fritz, who expressed the same amazement he did every year about how tall Mikey and Karen had grown - even if they hadn’t grown that much at all.

The biggest talkers were Ann and Fritz, and they seemed to prattle about everything under the sun that was insignificant.

No one talked about the one thing that seemed so significant to Gene there could be nothing else out here without it. The sky, the great Western sky.

Looking out from the window seat of the plane, Gene’s view had been blue, cloudless and vast. Looking out from the window seat of the van, the sky he saw was now a sulfurous yellow, thick and low.

“What the hell’s going on out here,” he finally said.

“Oh, the fires,” said Fritz. “Nature takes its course.”

Gene lowered his window less than an inch. It smelled as though someone had just struck a match.

Where Gene and his family came from, fires were put out by fire engines. But these fires were so vast they could only be put out by a change of season. When the snows came in the late fall, the fires would eventually die down. There was no other way. Not even a monster rainstorm would stop the burning, not in the summer season. Gene was told this same story, in slightly varying versions, by the ranch owner, the recreation director, the head wrangler, the bartender, and the waitress who served them the first evening’s meal, which was bison medallions in a port wine reduction - not quite what you’d call cowboy food. The fires, they said, were at least one hundred and fifty miles away. They were so huge and so hot, however, that they were devouring whole forests - one after the other - as though each forest were no more than a backyard pile of raked leaves. And the flames were belching enough smoke to cover half the state.

After traveling one hundred and fifty miles the smoke was strong enough to block the view of the stars as Gene and his family strolled back to their cabin after dinner. By then, the stench had seeped into every piece of clothing they had stuffed into the bureaus and closets. When the four of them turned in, exhausted, they smelled it deep in the mattresses and pillows. The ranch had over a dozen guest cabins, but year after year Gene and Ann returned to this one cabin, their favorite, because of its relatively secluded location under a canopy of trees beside a mountain stream. Normally, the rushing water lulled them to sleep. But this time they found the runoff as lively as a trickle from a Trenton sewer pipe. It was the driest summer in a half century, the bartender had said. Guests were consuming beer and every known form of alcohol at a record clip.

     Next morning, the smoke turned the Western sun into a tiny red dot, like the point of a laser or the eye of a rabid animal. But Gene was on the trail as scheduled, riding a horse whose hide had the reek of bacon. It was as though the horse had spent the night in a smokehouse instead of an open corral. In the evening there was a get-acquainted barbecue on the hillside with a string band, and his wife coaxed him into a foxtrot.

“I’m going to do you a favor,” Ann said, slipping her fingers between the buttons of his denim shirt. He clamped his hand on hers so hard she cried out.

Breakfast, like all meals, was in the big cabin, a large common area built of logs the size of tree trunks. The kids sat at the kids’ table, and Gene and Ann sat with a couple from last year, Europeans enamored of the American West. They sat at a round table near the massive fireplace, which at this hour gaped like the mouth of a cave. “Well they won’t be lighting any wood this year,” said the man in his Dutch accent, “unless it’s the whole building.” He was pinkfaced and double-chinned, but his wife was beautiful in a Russian way, with almond eyes and raven-black tresses. Things about her - the cheekbones, the candle-length fingers, the way she wore gold - made most women who sat next to her, Ann included, take on that demoted look, the look of the wholesome servant girl. Nevertheless, Gene remembered one dinner last year when the pinkfaced man - his name was Henny or something - spent the better part of two courses with his eyes fixed on Ann’s cleavage. It hadn’t pissed Gene off in the slightest. From a European with so gorgeous a wife this fixation had come across as flattery, and Gene had left the table puffed and gloating.

Alone together after breakfast, it wasn’t two minutes before Gene and his wife were quarreling over minutia. Ann hissed at him about making a scene. When he wouldn’t lower his voice she announced it was very obvious he needed some space. They walked to the sign-up desk in silence, cancelled the horseback ride they were to take together and signed up for separate activities. Ann chose to go on a half-day float trip with Karen. Gene signed up for an all-day all-uphill hike with Mikey.

“He’s seven years old,” said Ann. “He’s never gone on a hike in his life.”

“Mikey can walk me under the table,” Gene said. For an instant, he felt Ann looked at him as though he had turned into a werewolf.

As usual, there was a bumpy van ride of a half hour or so to reach the trailhead The eight hikers, seven grownups and Mikey, piled out and straggled around with their gear until Harris the guide called everyone together for the standard speech about bears and sticking together and avoiding dehydration.

A couple of women who knew Ann stared daggers at Gene for bringing a child, but Harris didn’t seem to mind.

“This isn’t Everest,” he said. “The little guy can make it fine. Right, little guy?”

A patent lawyer from Connecticut asked about the air quality and whether it was wise to overwork the lungs when every breath was filled with toxins.

“Hey, you’re only here for a week,” said Harris. “They make me do this all summer long.”

“Once we get to the top, will we see anything?” Gene asked.

“You’ll see yellow,” Harris said. “Pretty much what you see now. But every calorie you take off you’ll be able to put back on tonight. That’s a promise.”

“Now I’m motivated,” said the lawyer, and they set off in the reeking, jaundiced haze. Like pack animals, they fell into a ragged single file, kicking up stones and powdery dust with their too-new hiking boots. The dust was gray and dry as ashes. It plumed up, stung Gene’s eyes and stuck to his sunglasses. He knew it had to be even worse for Mikey, simply because he was closer to the ground, but Mikey said nothing and Gene didn’t ask. He let everyone plod by- led by Harris with his enormous calf muscles - and then took Mikey’s hand and fell in at the back of the line, just behind a husband and wife who were new this year. “We’re the caboose,” he said to Mikey, who didn’t look up.

After ten minutes of marching in silence, the husband and wife screwed their heads around and introduced themselves - Trip and Kitty from Fort Knox. They were rigged to the teeth in matching high-tech shorts and layered tops, strategically color-coordinated to let the world know they were a true outdoor couple. Just before they had turned around, Gene overheard them making muttered plans about getting coins for the laundry room the instant they got back.

They weren’t five hundred more yards up the trail before the outer layers came off, revealing matched khaki tee shirts, wet from the heat.

As it happened, Trip was the head of sales for a specialty semiconductor manufacturer. “Trip the Chip,” drawled Kitty. Gene laughed aggressively, sniffing a writeoff in the wind.

“What kind of chips,” said Gene, “analog or digital?” He purposely cast the question in a tone that sounded more professional than conversational. It suggested he was only on the hike for business purposes.To get input for a project or a pitch.

But Trip was the laconic one and it was Kitty who answered. “Chocolate chips,” she said merrily, aiming the comment right at Mikey. “I brought some cookies with the chips, too.”

She offered him one, but Mikey said he had his own, which was true. Ann had stuffed them in his backpack.

“Love or money couldn’t get my little boy to go hiking,” said Kitty. “That’s some son there.”

Gene was about to agree with her when Harris interrupted, pointing out grizzly claw marks on a tree. “I wouldn’t worry,” Harris said, running his fingers over the broken bark. “He’s long gone from here. Three days at least.”

“How does he know it’s three days,” Gene wondered aloud, keeping his voice down so only Trip, Kitty and Mikey could hear. “Hey, if I were a bear I’d be gone too. I’d rather be in a zoo than this inferno.”

Trip managed a smile, but his eyes said he thought Gene’s remark was an act of treason against the guide.

“I call this part of the hike the Saddle Blanket,” Harris proclaimed to the group, pointing to a steeply rising meadow. “We’re about to climb over a saddle. Which is under a blanket of smoke.” Harris took a long swig of water and wiped dust from his sunglasses. “Apologies from the management.”

The plan was simple as can be. Walk against gravity all morning, stopping only for nature commentary by Harris and bathroom breaks as needed. Reach the top at one and have lunch while viewing 360 degrees of smog (”literally a breathtaking view,” Gene observed, eking a nervous smile from Kitty and a pout from Trip). After lunch, turn around and pick your way down. Total length: eight miles. Total elevation change: 6600 feet to 9300 feet. Estimated difficulty: moderate to strenuous.

Gene had done the hike in prior years. It was basically a steep old horse trail zigzagged with innumerable switchbacks, shaped like a big bolt of lightning etched in the rocky dirt. He knew the grasses and vegetation - by sight if not by name. At every turn he was struck by how withered everything was. And unreal; like a fable in which the land gets incinerated by the mighty dragon’s breath days before the dragon even arrives. He began to feel bad for Mikey, who was hauling ass like a little trooper. “How you doing?” he asked. “Want some trail mix?” Mikey nodded and Gene scooped some raisins and nuts out of a plastic bag.

“Make sure you drink water,” Gene said, but Mikey said he hated water. “Then drink this.” Gene cracked a can of apple-cranberry juice Ann had put in Mikey’s pack.

No longer than two summers ago Gene had been on this same trail, but today his body was telling him he had aged more than that - so much more it was alarming. Something was going on inside - something he couldn’t blame on the smoldering sky and bad air - and it dragged at his feet like a mooring rope. He had woken in the middle of the night feeling bloated, as though he had swallowed something large and indigestable. It was one reason he had wanted to hike today - to sweat off some gut.Yet, if anything, the effort of trudging uphill in the dust and the heat made him feel even more swollen. In frustration he loosened the drawstring on his hiking shorts but felt no relief. It was as though the real drawstring was deep inside his abdomen, where he couldn’t reach.

After a long hour they came over the saddle and the peak was visible, but only if you squinted into the murk and knew exactly where to look. This was the payoff part of the hike, where there was less than a mile to go but the angle tightened defiantly and the switchbacks disappeared. Mikey, heretofore the stoic of the expedition, clambered a dozen steps up the steepened grade, lost his footing and fell painfully into a nest of spines and thorns. But more than skin was torn. As the scratches dribbled blood, Mikey finally began to act his age, whining and clutching, bringing the march to a we-told-you-so halt.

“He’ll be fine,” Gene said to the group. “I have bandaids. You guys just keep going , we’ll catch up.”

“No no,” said Harris, his lawsuit antenna going up. “I have great stuff in my kit.” He extricated himself from his bulging pack and began unzipping pouches.

“Shoot him the morphine,” said Gene, trying to joke the crowd into a better mood as he swabbed lamely at his son’s leg.

But nobody joked back, not even as a gesture to make Mikey feel better. A pair of twitchy tri-athletes, newlyweds, jogged in place and rolled their eyes and gravely consulted their sport-watches, as if time was body fat.

At last the first aid ended and the ascent resumed, but now Mikey was a different animal. He balked at the slope and faked a stumble, just so he could whimper again. Gene felt the waves of bad karma and ostracism radiating from the disapproving guests. In response, he snatched Mikey’s hand and tugged him along like a stubborn, braying burro. Mikey tripped and fell on his knees again. Gene swept him up in his arms. With the noon heat and all the pumping straight uphill, Gene’s soft huggable child hung against his soaked shirt like a sentence of hard labor, an armload of stones hammered from the rockpile.

“We’ll do this for a little while,” Gene panted, “but then you have to try again yourself. Okay?”

Mikey said nothing. He buried his head against Gene’s collarbone and locked his two arms into a tight clamp on the back of Gene’s neck. Gene took deep breaths and tried to pretend he was on a kind of stairmaster, torturing his thigh muscles for some ultimate aerobic good.

Worse than the leg pain, though, was the storm in his abdomen. It was as though some invisible machine was pumping the acrid bilious air from the sky into his gullet, bloating it like sausage casing. Inside, the tunnels of his gut alternately rumbled and clenched, shooting pain all the way up to his shoulder blades.

“I have to put you down,” he said to Mikey. And he did, because the contractions were doubling him up and he had to bend forward. As he did something high in his left side plunged, like an elevator out of control, and landed hard down low on the sphinctre, which kicked open like a trap door.

Gene left his son sobbing and charged into the unfriendly brush.

He tried to scramble until he was out of earshot, but his sick entrails, at that point, were no longer answering to his brain, or anything but their own impulse to spasm and purge. The need to crouch stopped him right in the open, just short of a scrubby tree. The sounds his body gave out made him shiver with embarrassment, as though they were being broadcast over loudspeakers strung up the mountain.

When he was able to pull himself together and limp back, Gene found that Kitty from Fort Knox had put herself in charge of coaxing Mikey up the trail, and neither of them were happy about it. Mikey broke away with a cry and jumped at Gene, begging to be picked up. Gene managed to hold him but nearly fell over doing it. Instead of feeling relieved after the violent emptying, he felt maimed by it, as though the attack had torn out parts of his stomach and spilled them on the ground. In a matter of minutes the bloat and the pain returned, as savage and insistent as before.

As he strained to put one foot in front of the other, Gene was aware of heat in his forehead and face that had nothing to do with the distant forest fires, or with the tongues of scorching air that lapped at the mountain. This was a fever from some furnace within - or so he pictured it in the red flash of dizziness that accompanied his next desperate race for a bush, any bush to hide his misery.

When he staggered back from the cramps this time Harris gravely stopped the group and pulled him aside for a conference, like a baseball manager who’s about to send in a new pitcher.

“I want to turn this sucker around and go back right now,” Harris said. “They’ll understand.”

“No they won’t. They’ll want to kill me. If I have to, I’ll go back down myself. I know the way.”

“Doesn’t matter,” he said. “There has to be a guide at all times. You could sue our ass.”

“Go back to the front, Harris,” Gene said. “It’s my own fault for eating the elk stew.”

Harris had some Imodium in his first aid kit. Gene gulped a double dose. But three minutes later he was back in the brush, squatting like a dog. On this visit he erupted from both ends, gushing shit and vomit simultaneously. Afterwards, as he looked around for dead grass or stray pieces of bark, anything to clean up with, he noticed a stick-like object, parched and white, jutting out from behind a rock. He crept closer and saw it was a bone, about the size of a forearm or shin.

If the bone were an animal’s, not a single patch of fur remained to identify it as such. Harris the naturalist would know the answer, but whether the bone came from a human or an antelope seemed at the moment cosmically insignificant, not even worth the energy it would take to ask the question, because Gene was in too much physical torment to care. So he re-tied his drawstring and trudged back again, without a word.

All he found was new mayhem: Harris and every one of the hikers huddled around his son, who had gone absolutely hysterical. The little boy face that looked up at him was so monstrously swollen he almost didn’t recognize it as his own flesh and blood.

It was more like a rubber mask Mikey might put on for Halloween. The lips and cheeks puffed and stretched into a hideous grotesque, a mutated face from a horror movie; the eyelids hooded and hard as shells, squeezing the eyes into lightless slits. Somebody had yanked off Mikey’s tee shirt, exposing skin that was a riot of hives, streaks and welts.

“Can you breath, can you breathe?” Harris was shouting.

Mikey’s reply was a bloodcurdling scream.

“Thank God,” Harris said. “He couldn’t do that if he couldn’t breathe.”

In normal adult society, a hurting child wins instant sympathy and succor, even if the effects of the hurt are so horrendous the adults want to look the other way. But a full-grown man who has uncontrollable diarrhea and shit-stained hiking shorts is an instant pariah, a feared, hated and untouchable being. Gene felt the annihilating force of this paradox all the way down the mountain. At the front of the pack stomped Harris and his mighty calves, clutching Mikey as though he were the infant Jesus, cracking the whip like an Olympic coach:

“Chop chop everybody, cell phones don’t work up here. We’re the only ambulance.”

Far in the back, Gene straggled and wandered like the outcast hyena, making his nasty side forays as required, returning with such a bellyful of pain he was too weak and distracted to fight for his rightful blood status. It was as though Harris had become the father and Trip the uncle - of Gene’s own son. And even the selfish tri-athlete newlyweds were now soothing and stroking Mikey as though he had always been their cherished little cousin.

If Kitty could have had her way she would have given Mikey a quart of Benadryl and put him asleep with painkillers. She begged every step of the way for codeine, or whatever narcotic relief lay in the guide’s stash, but Harris would hear none of it.

“Masking the symptoms is the worst thing you can do,” he said. “We’re not stopping now. Our job is to get him to the hospital - alive and kicking.”

A cheer went up when they reached the trailhead and sighted the van. Everyone piled into the oven of sealed air and sizzling seats, keeping roughly the same pecking order as in the race down the mountain. Harris drove and Mikey sat gasping and trembling between the newlywed wife and Kitty. Last to climb in was Gene, who got a slightly vile look from Harris as his body made contact with the upholstery. He felt they would have left him to writhe in the dust and dirt if he hadn’t managed his own entry.

At the hospital, the emergency room doctor pushed a needle of adrenaline into Mikey and handed Gene a piece of paper. The paper was a photocopy of a page from the Mayo Clinic Health Book describing allergic reactions. The doctor had drawn blue ballpoint pen lines under the word Anaphylaxis and its accompanying paragraph.

Anaphylaxis is the most severe and frightening allergic response. A mild reaction may cause only generalized hives and intense itching. A severe reaction is life-threatening because its most characteristic symptom is constriction of the passageways in the bronchial tract or in the throat, or in both. It is often accompanied by shock and cardiovascular collapse. These can cause death if not treated immediately. Almost any allergen can cause the response, including insect venom, pollens and certain foods. Some persons have anaphylactic reactions of unknown cause.

“Forget the death part,” said the doctor, in a voice that came straight from the old cowboy movies. “You folks are on your vacation, and that just wouldn’t be fair.”

To Gene, with his Atlantic Coast view of life, the doctor looked like a ski instructor masquerading in a white medical coat.

But as he spoke, Gene saw the needle work its spell. The metamorphosis of Mikey went into reverse gear, like film spooling backwards. All the huffing and gasping eased back into an automatic, almost inaudible hum, the wondrous, miraculous boredom of exhale ceaselessly following inhale. And Mikey’s swollen monster face flew at light speed through thousands of frames of transition until it was human and child-sized again, with gentle weeping eyes instead of gargoyle slits.

But for Gene himself there was no similar resurrection and certainty. No diagnosis, no handy photocopy of causes and symptoms, and not a single pill or potion to take for the stomach torture, not even when Gene described it as feeling like he had swallowed a bucket of steak knives.

“If it’s a garden variety G.I. thing you should be off the pot in forty eight hours. If not, we’ll do tests. Meanwhile, stick to the BRAT diet.”

Bananas. Rice. Apple juice. Toast.

“Can you remember that? Want me to write it down?”

Gene shook his head and doubled over, pulling his knees tight to the stomach.

“You two can sit here as long as you like,” said the doctor. “I assume you have a ride home.” He engaged Gene in a handshake that felt like a wrestling hold, broke the hold abruptly and swept out of the examination room, closing the door behind him.

Mercifully, the spasms subsided - at least enough for Gene to turn his attention to Mikey and really mean it.

His son was sitting up on the examination table, his bare legs dangling over the side. The ugly marks were still in evidence, but only as fading reminders of the fullblown inflammation.

“How do you like that,” Gene said, “they’re kicking us out of here. I thought we were staying for about a month.”

His symptoms receding, Mikey fiddled with the blood pressure cuff, the cotton balls, the tongue depressors. It occurred to Gene that for the first time in their lives he and his son were actually wearing matching outfits. When they had come in, the admitting nurse had shooed them both into hospital gowns, the disposable kind made out of blue paper.

After getting Mikey into the gown, Gene had attended to himself, ripping away the hated, filthy trail clothes. Even his watch felt heavy and cloying, something he couldn’t wait to tear off and stuff in his pack. The despicable garments lay on the hard tile floor, scattered in a corner of the narrow room like medical refuse, something poisonous and totally resistant to the cold fluorescence, the disinfected ambience that hovered over the room like a cloud of dripping ether. From where he sat he sensed the heap of clothing was as actively engaged with him as ever, reading him by arcane means, like a giant spider he had brushed from his skin but failed to kill.

Gene turned away from the rancid heap and went to sit beside his son. With the shut door, ice-white cinder walls and unrelenting coldness of the overhead light, the two of them could have been prisoners as well as patients - or perhaps both. For the first time all day, Gene found himself overcome by a feeling that was unattached to panic or even to himself. It was melodramatic in the best of ways, like organ pipes, commanding and forlorn. He looked down at Mikey’s skinny kid wrist and at the pale hospital identification band wrapped around it, a band that was the twin of the one the nurse had placed on his own wrist. The way Mikey raised his slight hand and forearm when their blue hospital gowns touched - the gesture was soothing to Gene because it was so old and deep. It made Gene think of the hospital where Mikey had been born; and he was certain Mikey had reached for him in a similar way when he had been barely an hour old. It was the reaching out of someone starting to swim as opposed to the grasping of someone starting to drown.

They emerged from the hospital and found Fritz and his shuttle van near the parked ambulances. Sent by Harris to take them back.

“You two get yourselves better real fast,” Fritz said, “or else you’ll be missing the dinner of your life. This is trout fry night. Guests have been known to kill just for the green tomatoes.”

“You eat mine,” said Gene. “Just give me tea and a mattress.”

Doing a run from the hospital instead of the airport seemed to alter something in Fritz’s driving style. He gripped the wheel like someone on a dangerous mission of mercy. For no reason at all he took a corner on two wheels, sending a geyser of bitter-tasting bile up Gene’s throat and onto his tongue.

“Hey, there’s no siren on this van,” said Gene. “Have pity on the sick and the dying.”

“I’m not dying,” protested Mikey. And he wasn’t, not at all. The features of his face were perfect again, sweet and ready to play - as if the welts and hives had been nothing more than a bad dream. “Daddy, can I go in the hot tub with the other kids?”

     Gene got the yes out of his throat but then grimaced and scrunched forward, jack-knifed by a new squall of pain. It took all his will power to keep from asking Fritz to pull over and let him run into the National Forest. As he bent forward and down over the floor mats, the rushing blood tossed up a message that broke through the dam of time. Like a man forewarned by an oracle he knew precisely then that this thing plaguing his insides would not be over in forty eight hours - perhaps not in forty eight days or forty eight months. He shut his eyes to check the surging dizziness and nausea, and when he opened them again the thing that caught his first glance was the plastic hospital band. It was still on his wrist - he had forgotten to take it off and give it back with the examination gown. But Mikey’s was still on too. Gene reached over, took his son’s hand and became maudlin again, shuddering with sorrow and triumph - as though the pair of hospital bracelets were in fact medals of valor, souvenirs of a battle hard fought, of love and comradeship surpassing the generations.

At mid-afternoon, the ranch was a ghost of itself, haunted by a chemical sky and a deserted corral. Due to the aborted hike Gene and Mikey were back earlier than scheduled, even with the time spent at the hospital. The horses, wranglers and most of the paying customers were still out on trail rides. A lone produce vendor’s truck was parked at the side entrance to the ranch kitchen. Fritz had let them off in the torrid, treeless common area separating the individual cabins from the big main cabin. A few guests labored across it, heading towards the thick log steps for mid-afternoon beers in the broiling atmosphere of the veranda bar.

Hot as it was, Mikey begged to make a beeline for the hot tub.

“Nobody’s even there yet,” Gene said. “The kids aren’t back.”

“I want to be first.”

“Bathing suit?”

“Mom put one in my pack.”

Gene let him run off, and was glad to do it. As he watched his son skip away he began his own slow march to find privacy and a roof over his head. But when Mikey had put some distance between them Gene saw him yank at his wrist and drop the plastic band into the dry dirt. Immediately he doubled over again, gulping for air. Nothing had even touched him, yet the pit of his stomach felt under siege - as though Mikey had taken his little fist and rammed it neatly into his gut. Whatever job Mikey had begun, Gene yearned to finish it. Approaching the canopy of trees and the shaded cabin he drifted into a fantasy of paradise: a place where he would take a butcher’s knife and cut out all the organs of his intestines. The bloody guts he would put aside, so the rest of him - legs in particular - could take him as far as he needed to go to find peace, because there could be no peace under this reeking sulfurous sky.

A fresh shock of pain, pain that felt so deep and sharp no butcher’s knife could ever reach it, reminded him that this was Montana, and in Montana there was no escaping the sky. The sky went on forever.

Death professionals are so cool. In Gary’s view, the ability to do death was what separated the men and women from the boys and girls. Gary was at his Aunt Minna’s apartment the day after his Uncle Ernie died. The undertaker came by to talk about the funeral. Right away he zeroed in on an object that to Gary looked like nothing anyone would ever notice. A cheap plastic soap container, the kind you’d take in your travel bag if you weren’t sure that the place you were traveling to had soap. It was sitting there on the living room credenza with several other objects, all of them similarly undistinguished. A cut glass bowl, a parrot statuette, a couple of pencils, a Walkman, a pack of playing cards, a box of pink Canada Mints. The green soap container was half-obscured by the bowl and the statuette, but the chubby undertaker zoomed in on it like a beam of light. “Is that his teeth in there?” the undertaker asked, in a cheery, matter-of-fact tone - as though he were asking a simple everyday question, such as “if I go out the door and turn left will it lead me to the elevator?”

Aunt Minna, slightly taken aback, replied “why yes, that is his teeth - how did you know it wasn’t just soap?”

“Well I’d better take it then, don’t you think?” said the undertaker. And without batting an eye he slipped the green container with the teeth into the right jacket pocket of his dark suit.

Aunt Minna had brought the teeth back from the hospital along with the Walkman, the playing cards, the Canada Mints, the parrot statuette, a robe, slippers and assorted other personal items that belonged to Gary’s uncle. There hadn’t been much time for tears and final farewells. Minna was too busy scrambling to get those things out of Ernie’s closet and nightstand in a hurry, because the nurses had made it clear that another customer was on the way, rolling down the corridor.

     Gary had sat with Aunt Minna in the intensive care room for Ernie’s final hour. Several hours, actually. When Ernie stopped living you could see it right on the monitor. All the constantly changing numbers went into a free fall and froze into a column of zeroes. Two seconds later the nurse flipped off the monitor and it all went dark. Game over.

Gary and his aunt just sat there in a daze, wanting the nurse to turn it back on. All afternoon the drama of Uncle Ernie’s last hours had played itself out as numbers on a screen. Up or down, ahead or behind. Two points up for blood pressure. Three down for oxygen saturation. Heart rate down two - no, up one. Because of the constantly rising or falling numbers, they watched the screen more than they watched Ernie himself, who was on a morphine drip and merely looked asleep. But even on TV with its tight scheduling and expensive time slots, when a big game ends they give you more than two seconds to digest the scoreboard. They have commentary, interviews, instant replays - at least a minute of post-mortems before they cut to commercials and the next show. In the intensive care room, everything just shuts off.

Always polite, Uncle Ernie passed on right before the nurses’ shift change. It flung them into a whirlwind of activity. Shutting down the monitor was only step number one. Then, with incredible speed, they yanked out all the tubes and unplugged all the wires. Gary wondered if they were trying to hide something. One of them stopped and stuck her head out of the room to call out, “we’re sorry,” as Gary and Minna, who was hauling the teeth and all the other items away in her United Savings tote bag, staggered away towards the elevators. The “we’re sorry” had a slightly upbeat curl to it. It was the way you’d spin the phrase if you were telling someone, “drive safely.”

Death professionals are so cool. They have it knocked. They can flip off the monitor, pull a sheet over the customer, drive home, fall in love over spaghetti and wine and come back the next day and do it all over again.

As the undertaker sailed out with the teeth Gary wondered if his hips were going to fit through the door. He was shaped like a giant pear, but he moved fast - very confident - like a tanker going through the Panama Canal for the thousandth time. The captain knows the beam is okay, so full speed ahead and no need to check the sides of the locks. From where Gary sat the undertaker’s passage looked pretty tight, but the hips went through, which probably meant he wouldn’t need a custom-made coffin when his time came. “See you, Bruce,” Minna called after the undertaker, “and thanks.” A minute later, Gary grabbed a Canada Mint and left too. Just like the undertaker he had a job to go back to, and he was beyond late for it. Aunt Minna understood and let him go without sobbing or clinging. She was a tough old lady. Other than Gary she didn’t have a true friend or relative in the world. Not even a cat. Uncle Ernie had been it.

Steering onto the highway Gary had his big insight. It seemed so big he felt it must have been building under the surface for years. All because Gary had made the mistake of studying Nietzsche in junior college. It kept him thinking he was the new Nietzsche, the Nietzsche of our time, just bursting with blockbuster insights. He listened in the car to some news story about tsunami fatalities. As always, on came the Red Cross doctor recounting the devastation and toting up the body count. Now there was a death professional, and a very noble one at that. But Gary suddenly understood there was more to it than he had thought. It wasn’t just a matter of death professionals and life professionals. In this world there were really only two kinds of people. Death people and life people. That includes everybody and you’re either one or the other.

Death people are comfortable with death. They prepare for it and they feel at ease with corpses. Life people are just the opposite. They want to be as far away from death as possible. Without a doubt, death people have the advantage. A huge one. They are on the majority side, and it’s not even close. Starting from the Big Bang, the dead in this universe outnumber the living by a staggering margin.

Aunt Minna was definitely a life person. She did everything possible to keep death at bay. Including not even acknowledging it. When Uncle Ernie turned sick years ago she went on permanent death patrol, fighting off the Grim Reaper twenty-four hours a day. She waged war on Ernie’s pot belly. She refused to let him eat a morsel of food unless she approved it for portion size and nutrient content. During the last two years Ernie was not allowed to even open the refrigerator.

She was denying death right to the point where her husband went into intensive care, refusing to even talk about purchasing a cemetery plot. To Gary this seemed bizarre, even for a life person.

As for this wide undertaker, Bruce …Just from the way he’d pocketed the teeth, just from the way he smiled and moved, Gary considered him to be a death person extraordinaire. The polar opposite of someone like Aunt Minna. Gary figured Bruce was the type who probably owned his own cemetery plot from the time he was old enough to vote. Bought at a discount, no doubt. He pictured Bruce sailing around town with his wide hips, bragging about his plot, about its proximity to tall ancient trees or a water view. Proud of his gravesite the way other people are proud of their second home, their cottage by the lake.

Because he was so deeply a life person himself, Gary was proud to help Aunt Minna out during this dark period. Minna was one of those old ladies who had a license but was definitely not a driver. The day before the funeral Gary called her from the car and said he would be happy to be her wheels for a while. He heard her fighting back a sniffle as they hung up.

The funeral was a piece of work. Even more abrupt than the finale in the intensive care room. For all his chumminess with Minna, Bruce didn’t even show up. His black-suited colleagues patrolling the entrance to the chapel said this was merely routine. The funeral home had many branches and duty had called him elsewhere. Or so they said. They tried to deliver this news in an official manner but only succeeded in appearing shifty. Aunt Minna, who already looked lost, now seemed on the verge of panic. Gary held her arm tight as he could, right through everything. He managed to get her out of the chapel, the black car and the vast cemetery scared but in one piece.

On the next weekend Gary was spending the afternoon having a few pops and browsing the tabs. There were a bunch of them, strewn over the near empty bar. His cell rang sharply, echoing through the tavern. It was Aunt Minna reminding him he owed her a ride. He paid up and hit the road, pushing down all the windows and flooring it to clear the pot cloud from the morning.

While Aunt Minna wheeled a cart around the Super Harvest he sat on a bench by the gumball machine browsing the same tabs. A story stopped him, a local chiller picked up by the nationals. It was the one about the girl found in her half-filled bathtub by those eager EMTs. They took all the vital signs just before dawn and concluded she was dead as a doornail. Her lanky, fun-abused body the color and texture of raw dough. Under orders of the cops they packed her in a body bag, zipped it and dropped it at a funeral parlor. Towards noon, the undertaker entered his back shop and heard something highly unusual.

Breathing.

At which point the undertaker himself turned the color of raw dough, and even on heavy meds he wasn’t right in the head yet - far from it. He was a born mortician, a natural in his field. His brain had been hard-wired for a life among corpses. Seeing the dead come alive was not part of the program. To unzip her and find a heartbeat questioned everything. He told reporters he could still hear the heart thundering so loud it made him hold his ears all night long.

The undertaker getting all this publicity had been a beefy type - but the tab said he was shriveling day by day, sleepless and without appetite. The girl, on the other hand, was back to her old self, drinking, doping and doing.

But as Gary read and then re-read the story he kept picturing the wrong undertaker, not the one shown in the paper. He kept seeing the undertaker from his own life, the one who had come to Aunt Minna’s apartment and swept out with the green container of teeth, sailing away on his broad hips like a ship of death. Gary knew his mind was messing with him and scrambling things. The undertaker in the story was beefy, while the one who pocketed the teeth had those hips, but couldn’t be described as beefy. Yet the moment Gary took his eyes off the newspaper page the undertakers were one and the same. They shared a single photographic image in his mind’s eye.

Loading her groceries into the trunk, Gary asked Aunt Minna if she needed to stop at the Walgreens. Then he found the question he knew was troubling him, way down deep.

“How is it you’re on a first name basis with an undertaker?”

But Aunt Minna had a ready answer. “When you’re my age you go to a lot of funerals,” she said. “We all know Bruce.”

“Next time you go to one, why don’t you tell me. I’ll go with you. That way you won’t have to walk.”

Aunt Minna looked at him as though he were a stranger who had just dropped down from Mars.

“I’ll do nothing of the kind,” Aunt Minna said. “A person your age has better things to do with his time.”

Now there was Aunt Minna being a life person again. Denying and double denying. But in his shoes Gary could feel the shift in the asphalt of the parking lot.

“Maybe yes, maybe no,” said Gary. “Right now what I want to do with my time is bring this stuff up to your apartment. I won’t let you carry a thing. Not a crumb.”

“Well then come up for fruit cocktail,” she said. And they drove in silence from the mall parking lot to the parking lot of her apartment. Gary had the feeling she was thinking about the same thing he was thinking about - how the undertaker with whom she was on a first-name basis had managed to avoid showing up at Uncle Ernie’s funeral.

“Seen Bruce lately?” he said, pushing the heavy glass doors that led to the stone staircase of her apartment house. It was the kind of place completely occupied by even older people than you see staring out the window on motorcoach tours. Small ancient people, small ancient apartments. On average, there was one human per unit. In the entry way there were only about six stone stairs to climb, but even that could be a chore for someone Aunt Minna’s age. After the stairs came an elevator that smelled like a cave and moved as though it had arthritis.

“We only see Bruce when there’s an apartment available, if you know what I mean,” said Aunt Minna, as the elevator creaked and groaned and took forever.

Together they put away the groceries, except for one can of fruit cocktail. She waved him out of the cramped galley kitchen, opened the can and dished some fruit out in two small bowls.

“Stop looking so restless,” she said. “You go and sit down.”

They sat together and snacked without appetite. Gary felt hemmed in. It was the same living room they sat in after the hospital and before the funeral, and nothing in the arrangement had changed. But today everything seemed smaller - the couch they were sitting on, the space between the four living room walls. He felt enlarged and clumsy, unable to avoid the corner of the credenza. It kept getting in the way of his elbow every time he lifted his little tarnished teaspoon.

After the fruit cocktail, Gary took a Canada Mint, just as he had on his previous visit. As he put the box back in its place on the credenza he noticed Aunt Minna following his hand intensely, even blinking at the exact moment the Canada Mint box landed on the wood veneer of the credenza surface, making the faintest thud. The thought occurred to Gary that the box was back in its family; reunited with the other objects Aunt Minna had dutifully toted home from the hospital. From what he remembered of his visit that day nothing had moved even a millimeter. The Walkman, the playing cards, the pencils and the parrot statuette were all in their places, and now the Canada Mints had gone to its place and rejoined them.

For several moments, the two of them, Gary and Aunt Minna, sat on the couch with their empty bowls and said nothing. They simply watched the objects and sank into the silence around them, taking comfort in the fact that nothing had moved and nothing had changed. The objects were fixed in time and space like tiny planets, and they had quietly assumed identities of significance. They had become more than household items; they had become memorials to Uncle Ernie: the last objects he cared about before he passed on. As the Canada Mint dissolved in Gary’s saliva he knew there was much more to what he tasted than sugar and food dye, and that he should think twice before taking another one.

The light dwindled and slipped out of the room as the afternoon wore on. After a time Gary became aware of a sound enveloping the gray silence, the kind that sneaks up on you and takes over, like summer rain.

It was Aunt Minna weeping.

“I shouldn’t have let him have them,” she said. “They belong here, right here with everything else.”

Gary handed her his napkin.

“Aren’t I being silly?” She wept and sniffled. “Over a set of false teeth.”

Gary didn’t know what to say. But he so agreed with her. Without the green plastic container something vital was missing from the credenza. Something important about Uncle Ernie’s life and final hours.

“I couldn’t even tell if they were in his mouth, could you? It’s not like they had him smiling in there.”

Gary remembered the quick funeral and the coffin. Open and shut. He wasn’t aware of any teeth either. He stared at the credenza and agreed with Aunt Minna that something was wrong. There was a void. It was as though one of the little planets had been ripped from the sky.

Aunt Minna dabbed at her eyes with Gary’s napkin. “The least they could have done is bring the container back.”

Gary thought of the wide undertaker scooping the green container into that hip pocket of his. Here one moment, gone the next.

“He had those teeth for forty seven years of his life,” Aunt Minna said.

As Gary remembered it, the green of the container was nearly identical to the green on the wing of the parrot statuette. His mind clicked on this like the shutter of a camera.

And that was the moment Gary decided to go looking for this Bruce and do him some serious damage. It wasn’t even a decision. It was a plea from the credenza. He heard it again just as the last sliver of light left the room. It was steady, like breathing.

What did Harv know? Carol was supposed to know - and she said it would be okay so it would be okay. He and Carol would go to New York for the show and the kid would stay home with the dog. Thea was a good kid - she was a stylish, capable kid and she was seventeen years old. She had her own Honda Passport and she bought her prom dress on Carol’s Visa at Saks. When Harv was seventeen years old he was driving across the country in shitboxes and stealing batteries out from under the hoods of nice cars when the batteries in the shitboxes went dead. At the last moment Thea said she wasn’t even going to stay in the house all alone, it was too spooky - even with the dog there. She would take her Pooh bear in the Passport and stay at her friend Alexis’s house and, maybe, just maybe, Thea and Alexis would go back to the house if they had nothing to do that night and have a few girlfriends over for pizza and cokes. They would play with the dog and give him a bowl of dog food. At midnight they would go back to Alexis’s and sleep.

Just before they left the kid, the house, the dog and Cape Ann for Logan Airport and the Boston-LaGuardia shuttle, the wife got off the phone with Alexis’s mother. There were now plans for an old-fashioned weekend breakfast at Alexis’s house when the girls woke up. Harv thought of Alexis’s mother, the sparky realtor, and couldn’t quite see her flipping blueberry pancakes, but that was neither here nor there. So he pulled out the Quattro while Carol painted her nails - an event in itself - and off he went. He took the 3:30pm.shuttle and the wife would take the 4:30. The shuttle planes ran every half hour on the hour, like commuter buses, and at that blue-sky point in time the planes seemed even safer than buses. The worst thing that ever happened was the huge traffic jam at peak hours, the long chain of planes the pilots called the elephant walk.

All the same, Harv and Carol took their usual precaution. Since Thea was their one and only they had made a pact never to be on the same plane together unless Thea was on the plane with them. This would end very soon - when Thea reached age eighteen, the age of consent, whatever that meant. Like most of the rules in the house this flying thing was the wife’s rule. Harv’s big rule was to let Carol make all the rules. While Carol was running around making the rules Harv was usually dawdling in the master bathroom with a Q-tip in his ear. When his ear itched in a place where a Q-tip was unavailable, such as in the driver’s seat of the Quattro, Harv would use whatever was handy. Usually, that was his 18-karat gold Cross pen, which was a gift from Carol for the nice bonuses Harv brought in. That was Carol’s view of business - a Cross pen set. While the Q-tip or the pen was twirling in his ear Harv’s brain was twirling too. Among other things, it was spinning out infomercials and two-minute spots, the ones that run post-midnight when the media is cheap and people don’t mind seeing an 800 number come up six times in the same ad. But with Harv, among other things was not a small item.

While Carol was floating around on the 4:30 Delta, Harv stomped around the Marine Air Terminal at LaGuardia like a caged lion who hadn’t eaten for weeks. In order to save space for dinner in New York he had resisted the chicken fingers and dried berry snak-paks they had passed out on his flight. All the resisting did was make him doubly ravenous. For a while he stood in front of the hot pretzel cart, drooling. Then he haunted the smeared glass of the hot dog rotisserie at the bar. Finally he sat down on a barstool and drank a Bud, under the theory that it was only a drink and yet it was also a chunk of white bread in liquid form. At the bar a Merck detail man from Minnesota, the land of the blond eyebrows, got to talking about kids and families - and Harv couldn’t resist. He pulled his wallet out of his rear pants pocket and spread his stash of seventeen dog-eared, wallet-sized photos over the sticky surface of the bar.

Harv set down all seventeen Thea photos in perfect chronological order, right in front of the Merck guy. The guy was so impressed he bought Harv a new beer. Harv’s little square pictures stretched from the edge of a filthy ashtray to an abandoned, half-drunk glass of scotch and water the bartender hadn’t cleared yet. They ran left to right like frames of a storyboard depicting the life of a pretty teenage girl - a storyboard in which all the shots were closeups of the girl staring straight into the camera, either smiling or trying to smile. For sheer uninhibited glee nothing matched the very first frame - in which the girl, at the age of one, is clearly in love with an unseen Sears photographer who sat her down in front of a backdrop of sunflowers. The seventeenth and last shot had a different mood entirely. Thea was still smiling, but in a way that was so clouded and complex it made you think about what seventeen years on this earth can do to uninhibited glee.

There was another shot that Harv carried with him, but he couldn’t show it to the Merck guy, because he carried the shot in his mind instead of his wallet. He hadn’t had a camera on him at the time. The three of them were on a flight to San Fran, a junket on frequent flyer miles. When the stewardess cleared his food away Harv placed the newborn Thea on the tray table extended above his lap. There she slept as they crossed the Rockies. The tray table was her private Pullman berth. Thea slept away, totally trusting everyone, until the voice came over the speakers requesting that tray tables be returned to their full, upright and locked position. Even then she kept on sleeping. These days Thea took Tylenol PM to fall asleep. If that didn’t work she took an extra Zoloft.

It was a hot day in the East and the Merck guy loved beer, and Harv was powerless to refuse.

“I hope you don’t think I’m a doctor,” Harv said. “I have a different specialty. I’m the ad doctor.”

“Well, you never know who you know,” said the Merck guy. “If you’re from Boston you’re a doctor to me. And you’re a doctor to my expense report.”

Harv and the Merck guy were in sync, mentally and physically. At the exact same moment the two of them sucked the second beers dry and picked up the two new ones slapped down by the bartender. They both wrapped their paws around the brown longnecks. It was a really hot day, too hot for the terminal climate control system. The chilled brown glass took some of the heat out of Harv’s hand, which always felt two sizes bigger on a scorcher like today. Big hands were one reason - but not the only one - why Harv had always been a ham-and-egger as an art director. Some asshole of a client once said he would have done better as a house painter.

Visually, Harv was an accomplished multi-tasker. His profession required it. Whenever he sat at the Marine Air Terminal bar he kept one eye on the person he was with and the other on the crowds trudging to and from the Boston gate. Harv’s eye was trained to disregard every human being who was not attached to a large black portfolio case. The Marine Air Terminal played a key role in the life of anyone who worked in advertising in and around Boston. It was like the Khyber Pass. It was the place the agency people had to get through to enter New York, where all the production facilities were located, the shooters and cutters of commercials. If you were looking to hit someone up for a job or a project, you could always call them on the phone, but it was better to lie in wait at the Marine Air Terminal and strike when you saw them troop by.

As the clock ticked towards Carol’s 4:30 ETA, the straggle of Boston-bound passengers turned into a swarm of suits and black jeans converging on the gate. Before they could file on board, the incoming plane would have to disgorge its New York-bound passengers and, for several sullen moments, the New York-bound and the Boston-bound would jam thighs and rub elbows, each crowd blocking the other’s way. Looking past the Merck guy’s shoulder, Harv zeroed in on a couple of chieftain-level portfolio cases. They were carried by a towering blonde woman and a jockey-sized man. In the tribal Boston ad hierarchy Harv could never work for or with either one of them, not until Untouchables were allowed to work for or with Brahmins. The Amazon blonde and the dapper shrimp were celebrated in awards books all over the Western World - fawned over like gods for the commercials they made, the kind that cost a million dollars a day and are really only understood by people who work for MTV London. With six repeats of the 800-number in most of his ads, Harv was likely to go through life without ever copping a single bowl or statue, not even one from his local Rotary Club.

Harv watched the cool couple rush by, then slow down as they hit the logjam at the gate. The blonde and the shrimp reminded him of streams of mercury, silver and sleek and flowing, until the mercury runs smack into the bulb at the end of the thermometer and stops. Out of nowhere the blonde did an unusual thing. From Harv’s barstool it looked like a modern dance move. She pivoted on one high heel and stormed away, but in a swift measured prance, like the jilted, enraged lover. Her high dancer’s legs cut though the crowd like scissors. Until they stopped six inches from Harv, and she was so close to his eyes, nose and mouth the air he was breathing seemed to change.

But the blonde was looking past him at the pyramid of liquor bottles behind the bartender. She started to order a drink. Then she looked down and her eyes met Harv’s.

“Nicolene,” Harv said. No response.

He said it again. New sweat seeped out on his face. He said his name and said it again. “You probably don’t remember me.”

And she didn’t - but she said she did. In actual fact, they had been introduced at a sound studio three years ago. They just happened to be working in adjoining suites. Harv wasn’t surprised. Top-tier creatives like Nicolene never remembered peasants like Harv.

Nicolene stood there, her high heels planted like tent spikes. She flipped open her cell, palmed it and did a swift thumb-dial. Harv watched in beer-clouded awe. It looked as though the thumb didn’t need to push the buttons, just wave over them like a wand. The wand effect was so powerful it vaporized the Merck guy. He made a lame excuse about a flight, backed off his stool and was gone. While Nicolene snapped orders into the phone she looked down at Harv, at his empty beer bottles and the seventeen pictures of Thea. She ended her call sharply. The long thumb reached up and slapped the phone shut. Harv felt the impulse to do something servile - wipe off the red vinyl of the empty stool - just as Nicolene and her legs sat down beside him.

Nicolene was still trying to order a Martini with gin and Campari. She called it a blood something.

Finally she got the bartender’s attention. “Campari at the airport?” he said, making the thumbs-down sign. Nicolene told him if he didn’t have Campari to just pour the gin so it was cold.

Harv yearned to swig from the longneck, but he stopped himself in mid-suck. He grabbed a plastic glass, spilled in some beer and took a small, painfully delicate sip.

“I gather you forgot something,” he said.

“Me forget? Don’t get me started.”

But she started anyway, ranting about the diminutive genius Cal and his megalomania. “He reserves the right to make changes even after the client approves. So who do you think has to go back and do them?”

Her incredible leg - tanned, smooth, long and strong - was inches from him, swaying like the bough of a tropical tree. He tried to force his mind to not make cruel, anti-family comparisons, but it was impossible. Nicolene’s leg made Carol’s seem like a pallid, freckly arm. Harv wanted to gulp the whole glass of beer, but he forced himself to take another small sip.

“If they’re his changes,” he said, “why doesn’t he go back?”

“The boss never goes back, Harv, don’t you know that? He’s the creative director, I’m the producer. If he wants a point-size change in the mousetype I’m the one who has to go sit with the fucking button-pusher. This will be my tenth straight night in New York. On a weekend. Double overtime for the engineer, but who cares.”

“Where do you guys stay?”

“This time the Peninsula. For the pre-pro we were at the Mercer.”

Poor you. That’s what Harv thought of saying. But instead he said, “You guys have those Peninsula budgets. It’s not my world.” He and Carol would be splurging on the big Marriott in the theater district. Usually they went to the Hilton, where wingtippers like the Merck guy stayed.

Harv was suddenly embarrassed by the Thea pictures. He saw his personal life spread out all over the bar. He reached to sweep the pictures up, but Nicolene stopped him. She cupped her long, manicured hand over his thick mitt and pinned it to the bar. And Harv felt the voltage shoot up his thighs. He thought of his pert, stern, flat-hipped, freckly wife circling overhead - nose in an Irish novel and sneakers on her feet - and he wished he could stop time. For just an intermission - ten or fifteen minutes all to himself.

“Is she yours?” Nicolene asked. “She’s beautiful. You’d better watch out.”

Nicolene picked up the seventeenth photo, the shot of the seventeen-year-old Thea. She held it up in the light and studied it the way a photographer studies a Polaroid of a model, thinking of the different possible angles for the real shot, the one with the Hasselblad. Harv had a rush of pride. Thea had her red hair from Carol, but thanks to him she was big-boned, even statuesque.

“You’d better watch out,” Nicolene said again. “Does she have a boyfriend?”

Harv said he didn’t know. He told her about the pizza and coke night with her girlfriend Alexis.

“You don’t believe that one, do you?” Nicolene said. “I used to be her age.”

“I like the age you are now,” Harv said. The comment brought an immediate response. Nicolene’s leg brushed against his leg. Harv’s bodily functions shot into a confused state. Too much was going on. The flood of beer he had drunk was pushing on his bladder. The little signals from Nicolene were causing sexual frenzy in the same zone. Harv wanted to excuse himself at the same time he felt pulled by a magnet.

Nicolene kept peppering him with questions about Thea. More questions about his daughter, he felt, than anyone had ever asked him. The longer the questioning went on the more he felt the real subject was the unspoken one, the erotic come-on he saw in every roll of Nicolene’s eyes, every touch of her tongue on the gin glass.

Why him? He looked down at his dumb shoes - size twelve Rockports. He didn’t understand.

Harv was half listening as Nicolene started speaking about her newest venture, a small design shop. It would have nothing to do with film production, the thing she was known for.

“You - a designer?” he said. “I never knew.”

“Nobody knows, but they will. I shoot my own pictures too. I want you to think of me if you have a project.”

This was a switch. Harv wanted to say he had a project in mind right now. Then it occurred to him he had gotten the intermission he had wished for. Ten or fifteen minutes must have passed - Carol would be deplaning any moment. When it occurred to him to check the time, he looked at Nicolene’s watch instead of his own. It was an excuse, the cheapest of excuses, to get his face closer to her skin, its scent and color roused by the summer heat and the alcohol.

“Is your watch fast?” he said. The time he was looking at was bizarre - 6:05. Harv, the multi-tasker, stared at the empty Boston gate in disbelief. His eyes whipped around the terminal. The new arrivals were just straggling in for the 6:30. The crowd waiting to board the 5:30 to Boston was nowhere to be seen, vanished. Where was Carol? Where had she gone?

“That rat Cal is halfway to Logan,” said Nicolene. She toyed with her drink, licking the rim of the gin glass, while he soaked up the sweat on his chin with a cocktail napkin.”Waiting for someone? The Spouse?”

Harv couldn’t believe the Boston plane had come in. But it had. Obviously it had. It had come in, emptied out its passengers, loaded up new people and taken off again. Harv had missed it, missed everything. Two hundred people parading by him, exiting the terminal. Had Carol been in the crowd? Had she seen him with Nicolene and run out to the cabs and buses in a rage? Carol didn’t carry a cell phone. She could be in a cab right now, heading for the Marriott. Or she could be on the ground in Boston because she never left.

Harv couldn’t help himself. He took a massive swallow, pouring a river of beer down his throat. He wiped his lips with the fat palm of his hand while Nicolene sat and watched him, cool and bemused. “Am I blind?” he asked, forcing his voice to soften, to sound concerned rather than desperate. “Where is everybody?”

“They all went by,” she said. “Like they always do. Buy you a beer?”

He wanted to say no but he said yes. He took her offer as a proposition, an invitation to something far more intoxicating than a new bottle of beer. He was on shaky ground - unhinged about Carol - and it kept getting shakier. And hornier. He wanted to get up and do something about his wife. But he was mesmerized by Nicolene - and he stayed put. Harv forced himself to shake his head. To chuckle. He hit his head with the palm of his hand, play-acting the oafish clown. But there was panic surging in his throat. His mind had made two hundred people invisible, and his wife could well have been among them. But he didn’t know, not for sure - and Harv didn’t really believe Carol had simply raced by and walked out. It wasn’t like her, it didn’t add up. In his heart of hearts he felt she was still in the sky, stuck in a holding pattern. Circling and circling.

Harv hadn’t directly answered Nicolene’s question, “The Spouse?” In fact, he hadn’t even acknowledged it. He hoped she wouldn’t ask it again - he didn’t want to hear it. There was no gold wedding band on his finger. He never wore one. If she didn’t bring it up again, why did he have to? But as it turned out, Nicolene didn’t bring it up again. She asked more and more questions about Thea, who seemed to fascinate her. She studied the last of the seventeen photos again, pincering it with her long dark nails, delighted with herself when she found a racy clue to ask a question about.

“This girl cares about her eyebrows. She’s a little fashionista, no?”

“Is she. She can drop a fifty at CVS and not buy a single pill. The Visa people love her.”

“Does she have her own card?” In fact, Carol allowed Thea to use her charge cards, and forge Carol’s signature too. But Harv nodded yes to the question, fibbing to keep his wife out of this.

“Does she have the ad thing - the bug? Is she like us?” When Nicolene said the word “us” Harv got a lust rush that wobbled him on his stool. She said it with her eyes and legs as well as her lips, and Harv felt a circle drop down around the two of them, a magnetic play zone which excluded everyone else in the entire airport. He knew now all this Thea talk was at least half a ruse, a decoy language Nicolene was using to slyly tease and torture him. To mess with his mind. In his little life Harv had never gone near a geisha - he had never even been with a common hooker, not one - and yet the thought of Nicolene as a kind of geisha kept running through his mind, driving him wilder. At the same time the Carol situation got scarier by the minute, and this drove him wild through a whole different set of wires. The overload of sex and anxiety almost made his limbs shake.

But he was determined to keep one eye on the gate no matter how discombobulated he was, to not to let the 6:30 arrival pass him by. The New York passengers bound for Boston were on the move, gathering down at the gate in droves and milling impatiently. As he watched them circle on the ground Harv became more certain Carol was circling in the sky - she had undoubtedly missed the 4:30 and caught the next one - but he didn’t see this as a happy thing. In the best of possible worlds she would be up there, safe, but somehow unable to land. Zapped and stopped - for as long as he required it - high above his private magnetic play zone with Nicolene.

Harv’s beer-filled bladder burned like it had a cattle prod stuck in it. He had reached the point where hitting the men’s room was no longer optional. But suddenly there was action at the gate. The gate door swung open and an airport worker in a blue uniform walked out. It had arrived, the 6:30 from Boston. The plane was in and unloading. Out came the first passenger, then three or four more.

Harv locked his legs on the rails of the bar stool, grimly fighting his own plumbing system. He knew he was trying to do too many things at once - like a juggler working simultaneously with rubber balls and flaming sticks, a half dozen of each. He watched the gate like a hawk. At the same time, trying to appear nonchalant and unattached and so very available, he delved into Nicolene’s question about whether Thea had “the ad thing - the bug.” Whether she had it in her blood like Harv had it in his and Nicolene had it in hers. As he talked he realized how much the wife didn’t have it in hers. The wife with her inspirational car tapes and her pillow-stitching group. In Harv’s world of work Carol was the audience, the consumer/foreigner who buys magazines for the actual articles, not for the neat blow-in cards and double page product spreads, the things that mattered to Harv.

“You won’t believe this,” he said about Thea, “but she’s had this thing, I call it the knack, for as long as I’ve known her. I mean even when she was three. Last year she plastered Absolut ads all over her wall.”

The trickle of deplaning passengers turned into stream, then a torrent. But there was no Carol and no sign of her. And then the arrivers had all marched by the bar and out to ground transportation, every last one of them. All Harv could see back down at the gate was the swarm of travelers pushing against each other to get on board and shoot up to Boston.

“I have to meet this girl,” said Nicolene, still carrying on about Thea. But now there was no air, no space at all between Nicolene’s leg and Harv’s. She pressed against him and he pressed back. The heat from her skin went through the fabric of his slacks like a furnace blast.

Where could he take her, where could he go? There were no more telephone booths to sneak into - they were things of the past, vanished relics from his student days. Everything was in the open. And he couldn’t leave the Marine Air Terminal. He was stuck waiting for Carol, stuck on a barstool. Harv’s dick felt as big as his foot.

Then, without warning, Nicolene did a three sixty on him. She might just as well have thrown the glass of gin in his face.

“I’ve got people waiting, Babes,” she said. “I’m out of here.”

“Hey.” It was all he could say.

Nicolene peeled her long legs off the stool, stood up and snapped her phone open. “It’s clear you’re on some mission,” she said. “You should stay here. But I can’t.”

Harv watched haplessly as Nicolene spun on those javelin heels of hers and loped away, like a white tigress receding into the jungle. He was suddenly alone - abandoned -and famished - as though meat had been torn from his jaws. He staggered into the men’s room and pissed like a horse. Then he came back to the greasy hot dog rotisserie and devoured three in a row. So much for dinner with Carol. The hot dogs were fat and salty. He quenched them with two more beers. The last thing he wanted to wait for was dinner with Carol.

But he sat through two more arrivals, the 7:30 and the 8:30. He ate and drank like an animal, and he called the Peninsula four times, but Nicolene hadn’t checked in yet. He telephoned home too and got Carol’s pert “we’re not home now …” But there were no messages. Harv didn’t want to leave his own message asking about Carol - he was afraid that would terrify Thea. He listened to Carol’s voice and hung up when the beep came on. Every scrawny syllable made him want to be with Nicolene, whose big satin voice matched her legs.

After the 8:30 came and went he dismounted his barstool and headed for the gate. He gave them Carol’s full name, even the middle initial. They had no record of her being on any shuttle, but they said their records could be wrong. They directed Harv to the ticket counter and to some central airline phone number. At that moment he faced his big decision - he could take the next flight back to Boston or he could go to the Marriott as planned. But for Harv there was no decision. He turned, marched out to the taxi area and cabbed to Manhattan and the Marriott. As he sat in the back of the cab he wrestled with his panic over Carol - with the deepening sense of true tragedy unfolding. At the same time he exulted in every second he felt the panic vacate his body, pushed out by his exploding hunger for Nicolene.

Within ten seconds of arriving at his room he was on the phone to the Peninsula, but the situation was no different than before. He ripped a beer from the minibar and threw himself on the bed. He started to reach for the clicker to click on a porn movie, but he hardly needed to. The biggest porn movie of all was already playing in his head. All the hours he had spent at home slumming in the lust pits of the internet - while Carol had been fashioning her festive Autumn wreaths or preparing her spreadsheets for the PTO auction - came back as a raging orgy starring Harv and a dozen Nicolenes. He was priapic and beyond relief. He had never, ever been with anyone other than Carol - not once in twenty years. Yet he had fantasized about it every day, sometimes many times a day. Carol was his life and his jail. Now the lock was off and the gate was open. Harv thought about all the cliches of flirtation. Phrases such as one-night stand and low-rent rendezvous and casual sex. It made no sense to him. Nothing about what he felt was casual at all. It was eating him alive.

Above all, one thought dogged him to near delirium. Carol’s size - her birdlike arms and legs, thin as stems of glass, her tissue paper skin. Compared to Nicolene she was a gift shop figurine. More than anything, what mattered about Nicolene was that when Harv stood facing her, when he looked into her eyes, he actually looked up.

Shortly before 1a.m. the Peninsula reported Nicolene had finally checked in, but when they put him through to her room phone all he got was the voice message. Harv called again and described Nicolene to a desk clerk. The desk clerk knew her exactly, and he was certain she had checked in, but just as certain she had quickly gone out again. Harv tore open a glass jar of cashews and poured them into his mouth. He chewed minimally and swallowed the half-chewed cashews in big gulps, as though he were drinking them. He finished the pair of beers left in the minibar and moved on to the nips of scotch, mixing them with water from the bathroom sink. His clothing felt heavy, tight and hot, but he kept everything on, even his tied shoes. It helped him keep hoping that the night was not over, that Nicolene would come back to the Peninsula and take his call. As the minutes ticked by he made desperate deals with himself. One night with Nicolene and he would go back to a lifetime with Carol. He would not waver or stray. He would turn the country upside down to find her.

In the end, Harv spent the pre-dawn hours with neither Nicolene or Carol, only his drastic images of the two of them, both swirling in the great lake of alcohol that pitched and boiled from one side of his stomach to the other. The last thing he remembered seeing was the sky outside his room turning from satin black to sorrowful gray. Then the lake rose up in a giant wave, a crashing curtain of gray that slammed his eyes shut and tore the phone from his fist.

Harv woke up to the sharp bleating of the uncradled phone. He slammed the handpiece back in place, unglued his eyes and found a sky that was like a fat blotch of pus, sickly and yellow-white. He recalled the marks on Thea’s swollen tonsils when she was eleven years old and miserable with strep throat - they were almost the same sickly color - and he began to weep. The night of Nicolene, whatever it had been or meant, was now over. It was time to enter the day of Carol.

Time to find his wife.

Harv dressed, paid his bill, climbed into a taxi and headed for the Marine Air Terminal. All through the ride through the tunnel and over the littered expressway he was uncomfortably aware of the wallet stuffed in his back pocket, pressing against him like a growth. No matter how he positioned his legs he couldn’t get away from its cumbersome thickness, its mound of money and cards, its stack of seventeen pictures, none of which were of Carol - not a single shot.

When he landed at Logan and got home, he turned the key in the door and stepped into the aftermath of Thea’s outrageous party. In every corner of the house he bumped into wreckage. The broken glass, the puke and the blood. After an hour of hard labor, he felt he would never stop pulling beer bottles out of vases and ceramic umbrella stands, never stop digging up the charred marijuana snipes wedged into the kitchen tile cracks and the mossy squares of patio bluestone.

There was a message on the voice mail - not from Carol but from the local police. At the station he found Thea wasted and weeping, in a state of terror about whether there would be consequences in court. The police, speaking in that cold, official way, let him know drug paraphernalia had been found within a quarter mile of the house. They were pokerfaced and secretive about all issues except one, Harv’s culpability, his legal and moral failure as a parent. While Thea watched and sobbed, the sergeant ranted about selfish parents who jet off on weekends and leave teenagers with empty houses and open liquor cabinets.

When Harv announced that Carol was missing the sergeant seemed uninterested, as though it were a far lesser calamity. Or worse, a crude attempt at an alibi. He filled out a form and asked Harv for a picture of his wife. Harv wanted the picture to be in his wallet, he wanted to just reach in and pull out a snapshot. But the object in his pocket no longer felt like a wallet. It was too heavy, the way a stone is heavy. He told the sergeant he had pictures of his wife, there were pictures all over the house - he just had to go back and look for one.

“Danny’ll get you. You called his little sister a whore, and he’ll get you.”

Robert leaned on the window sill and listened to the horseflies make that angry zooming sound, little fighter planes on the attack. He stared out the screen through the fire escape grates, down at the wide, ragged lot steaming in the sun, the weed-blades soaked and bent from a thunderous cloudburst that hadn’t cooled the air one degree. Across the lot was a fortress of blunt brick buildings studded with fire escapes exactly like his own. On the second building from the left a cellar door opened and out poured a ragtag platoon, seven in all, one of them toting a boombox that grew louder as they shuffled deeper into the weeds.

“Danny’ll get you. You can’t stay inside all summer. If it isn’t today it’s a week from today. Danny never forgets. For what you said about her, his sister …he’ll make you bleed like a pig.”

Robert squinted into the window screen. One of the Sitka twins was at the head of the pack, a mitt tucked under his arm. On the outside, the bastards were so identical Robert – and everyone else – still had trouble telling them apart. You had to be close enough to see the moles, the blackheads on the noses. Or hear them talk. But Daniel was colder and wilder; in a game he’d slide at you and cut with his big legs – or throw at your head. This Sitka was Daniel and not Darrell, Robert was pretty sure of it. The mitt he carried, that was Daniels’s yellow leather. Darrell’s was saddle color, a russet.

As Robert began to move, he went through the possibilities. Mouth full of blood, punched-out eyes, the kick in the balls that took your breath away. Whore, whore, whore.. He wished he’d zipped his lip.  But he kept going – down the stairs, out the cellar door, out into the weeds. He hadn’t even meant anything. It was just a moment, it was just a word, it was the fucking summertime.

 

“Hey, kid…”

Daniel didn’t even run at him. He just stood there wagging his fat finger. He stood there - like King Kong - right in the center of the part they called “the field,” where they threw and caught, where the weeds were shorter and the ground was studded with rocks.  Even at this distance he threw a big shadow, and Robert didn’t break stride, walked right into it.

“I take care of my sister, kid.”

Robert wondered how it would start – with a punch or a kick. Where it would come – high or low. There were six others there in the field, his friends. Shuffling and gloating, smelling blood, he could sense it. His friends.

“I didn’t mean what I said. I just said it. I’m sorry…”

“You will be sorry, kid. You will be…”

“You weren’t there. You only heard…I’m sorry…”

Daniel’s fat hand shot out and locked on his collar. Robert heard cloth rip. He blinked and winced. He braced for the thunderbolt.

“Show me how sorry, kid. Show me.”

Daniel yanked his neck with one hand and pushed with the other. Robert wound up on his knees in the dirt.

“Now you be the whore, kid.”

He unbuttoned down below and stuck the thing right in Robert’s face, and Robert had a split-second where his mind said no, never. But in the next split-second the no, never was gone, and Robert opened his mouth, just opened it.

The moment his mouth tasted skin, Daniel pulled it away from him, reached down and slapped his face. The slap cut like a scythe, went through Robert’s whole body and down to his toes. Even the weeds seemed to shake.

Daniel turned to the shufflers, the friends, and pointed down at Robert.

“The whore, there she is, you saw it.”

A few of them cackled. Robert saw it like a silent movie. He couldn’t even hear the boombox. His ears thundered with the slap.

“Every whore gets paid, kid. So here’s your pay.”

He leaned on Robert’s neck, threw his whole weight into his arm, pushed down until Robert’s face was in the dirt.

“Now eat, kid. Eat your pay.”

Daniel grabbed a clump of the stuff, a handful chocked with grass and rubble and earth slime. He slammed it into Robert’s teeth. “Eat it, chew it. Let me see it go down your throat.” 

Daniel never hit him, never hit him once. He knelt there, making Robert eat dirt until he started to puke it back up. Then Daniel stood up, turned, kicked more dirt into his face and moved off – slowly, letting the scene sink in with the herd.

At that moment Robert was one living, breathing being. But his right arm became another. His right arm shot out, swiveled like a reptile, found a fist-size rock and stiffened around it.

None of them had ever let Robert pitch, even for kicks. He was small, he was no thrower.

But the right arm on this day belonged to another Robert, he could feel him, swelling and flexing. This was a Robert who dwelled deep in the earth, far beneath the puddle where his vomit seeped into the soil. 

From somewhere outside his head he watched the underground Robert stand, cock the arm and release the rock. It flew at a velocity that was unthinkable – on a straight-line course that was just there in the air, pre-existing, the way a railroad track is just there in the ground. The track ran from the fingers of his throwing hand to the back of Daniel’s skull. There the rock crash-landed – with such force it would soon be noted and named. Exhibit A. 

When the police came it was Daniel’s face they pulled out of the dirt.

Robert watched the blue lights and the glinting badges from back at his window, peering through the dark steel rods of the fire escape, watched the mother and the sister too, kneeling and pawing at the dirt-smears, slathering their spit and tears over the face.

The twin Darrell loomed over them, pacing and stalking, like a new Daniel risen from the weeds.

“Now Mr. Nguyen, here, he could benefit from a little trip over to Harold’s Running Bull. Quaff a few, soak up the local culture, and shake hands with the biggest griz ever shot down in this valley. Stands eleven feet if he stands an inch. Fangs dripping right over the blackjack table. That Harold knows how to stuff ‘em.”

Rick Sproule pushed his barrel belly against the formica table, a four-seater. He drained his coffee and waved at Essie for more. She finished chatting with Valley Pest Control and brought the pot.

“How tall do you stand, Mr. Nguyen? Not eleven feet, I’d say.”

“Try five,” said Pete Rimer, not really barrel-bellied but definitely barrel-shouldered. These Valley men were big. Hulking over the formica table, the three of them dwarfed Mr. Nguyen, an Asian elf in his restaurant whites, constantly pulling elegant French inhales, engulfing himself in mysterious curls of smoke. Essie had given her new cook – chef -  a coffee break so three of the locals could say hello. “It’s Noo-Yen,” she’d told them.

“Try four-five,” said Cameron Billey, whose forearms were probably twice the thickness of Mr. Nguyen’s thighs. “Just kidding, Mr. Nguyen. Bet you were a regular ferret in those underground tunnels.”

“Come on, Cam, he was just a baby then. Not a Cong. Don’t bust his chopsticks.”

Mr. Nguyen slid a new Marlboro out of the pack. He didn’t smile. He didn’t not smile either. He smoked so elegantly, in that French Asian way.

Pete Rimer waxed nostalgic for his eighteen-wheeler, which used to yield him sixty five dollars an hour on long hauls before insurance made it ridiculous. “Mr. Nguyen should have been there the day I was rolling down Highway 301 and felt a bump. Rolled into town with a godawful scraping down below, with the wheel shaking the whole cab  at 55 and I said, ‘shit damn, got to get ‘em balanced again.’ But I stopped out by the Mountain Mall to look and fuck me if there wasn’t a big sow griz jammed under the front end. Fur scraped off, skin raw and bleeding. Goddamned mess. must have dragged her two mile, and she was dead as the stuffed one at Harold’s place. Just a mess of bear meat.”

Mr. Nguyen nodded, acknowledging that he understood. He took the longest drag, creating an ember that glowed like a little furnace.

“People came running from all over that mall,” Pete Rimer said, “You know what I’m talking about.”

“Big,” Mr. Nguyen said, which was just the word Pete wanted to hear, so he continued. “Well, everyone’s standing around, gawking at the bear I mowed down and all of a sudden we begin to hear this unholy sound, kind of a low rumble. And then it builds to kind of a rumbling thunder and the front end starts to lift, and out comes this freight train of fur and fangs and blood. You should have seen them folks run back into the mall. That was one pissed-off bear.”

“And what did you do, Pete?” asked Cameron. Big sly grin.

Pete hulked over the formica. “Stood my ground. Was my truck, not his. Climbed back in and rolled out. Worse thing you can do is run from a griz, unless you can run forty miles an hour.” Although Cameron had asked the question, Pete directed his answer straight at Mr, Nguyen, staring downward. Mr. Nguyen inhaled anew, after which he said, “Big,” indicating he was impressed.

Cameron lit a smoke of his own, a Merit Light. He leaned in hard on Mr. Nguyen and blew a Merit Light cloud straight at him. Mr. Nguyen sniffed it and shifted just a little, where he could breathe alone in his own Marlboro cloud.

“At my height I bump into ceiling fans sometimes,” Cameron said, “but there’s an advantage when you’re alone in the woods talking to elks.”

Mr. Nguyen looked up at Cameron, who stood a good six-five.

“Was over by the Caldron one day, in deep where the grasses grow real high. Me and my bow and arrow. I was talking to this bull elk about a mile and a half off. We were bugling each other.”

The three big men had their elbows on the table, listening hard. Mr. Nguyen stayed right as he was, back to his chair in his own smoke cloud.

“Then those grasses started bending and there was a sound that wasn’t wind,” Cameron said, “and first I said here’s my elk. But then I saw that silver hump and he was up on his two hind legs. Swear he looked big as the stuffed one at Harold’s.”

“That’s why I’m no bow and arrow man,” said Rick. “Give me a 44.”

“I had a 44 – was three miles back in my truck. So I put my bow up on my head, way up, stood tippy-toe and barked at him. What I was saying was, ‘I’m a bigger bear than you.’ Damn if he didn’t turn tail.”

All three glared at Mr. Nguyen for a reaction. They got a polite smile and another “Big.”

Suddenly there was movement across the floor, a small blur of fur streaking underfoot.

 The three, Rick, Pete and Cameron, bucked like rodeo bulls, nearly bucking over the formica table. They sprang to their booted feet. The sugar bowl slid and crashed.

Mr.Nguyen, who had worked in the teeming cafes of Saigon and Shanghai, continued sitting and smoking. He looked down at his small pointy black shoe, the left one. There, on the flat part, the mouse had stopped running and climbed aboard. The mouse seemed to have fallen asleep.

To Jenna, Heckie would always be the man made of river rock, even though all he did now was hang around the Pin n’Cue like a fat Buddha in a baseball jacket and shoot eight-ball now and then, his belly hanging out and blocking the pockets, or else sit in the diner part and eat those frosted crullers they called Lead Bellies. Then doze off right in the booth. Oh once in a while he bowled a string but it did nothing to change his new shape, which was more like a bloated duckpin than the man-mountain he was of old, when Jenna used to send him to all her customers, and they were a long, long list. Why a man made of river rock would melt like the cheese on an English muffin was a mystery Jenna didn’t even try to solve. Rock was rock was rock. So went the laws of nature. It was beyond her, as in beyond-this-world beyond, and when it started to really panic her she began glomming onto every supermarket tabloid that trumpeted the dangers of radioactive scanning of food - and even those common warming stations on restaurant counters gave her a freak. A freak over pink light. She wouldn’t take a dinner if she saw it sitting there under beams of pink light.

Pink light was something Jenna no longer considered an option, even when the colors of the room or the natural surroundings called for it. The subject was off the table, period, end, over and out, even if the customers begged for it. But it did rile her so much that Heckie wouldn’t get his Velveeta torso out of the Pin n’Cue. If he wouldn’t help himself, who would? There he’d sit, shoving in his crullers, melting and melting, and all of it started by her. Just because she’d done so well they gave her the Flying Carpet Award.

It was no accident Jenna had come in first, took the prize and got sent to McCormick Place for the Decorator’s Show. She knew how to slide it in there with the customers – the old soft sell – she was a master at it. A nice, fat bonus was in the package too – enough to give Heckie a Chicago vacation and one side of the king size bed. Open his eyes a little. All his life, child and adult, he hadn’t budged out of the Thunderhead   Valley. He’d been as stuck as one of those rocks in the shallows of the Thunderhead River.

Heckie and the river rocks. Nobody could work those ancient stones  like he used to. He was something to see. The flat ones he’d skip a country mile, scaring the trout. The round ones, cannon-ball size minimum, he’d scoop out and haul in armfuls and work with the grout he mixed and colored himself. Heckie made fireplaces so spectacular everyone wanted them. One or two became towers forty feet high. But not everyone could afford them, with Jenna repping and pricing him. Hardly. She aimed him right at those Google billionaires, that tribe of pioneers crossing the Thunderhead in search of the next Promised Land of western living, Aspen now being old-hat. Fish in a barrel, they were. Powerless in the face of Jenna’s renowned soft sell.

Jenna: Now what do you think of that vegetable-dyed Tibetan, the way it just lays there under the Charlie Russell and picks up the colors of those willows off your porch?

Google billionaire: I don’t think so.

Soft-sell Jenna: Oh, I didn’t think so either.

Google billionaire: Then again…

When Jenna and Heckie became a real couple she took him to a tattoo artist, the only one in The Valley. She sat him down and had the artist do the mountain lion, best as she could recall it over the blur of years. Heckie put forth his chest and then one of his big arms, but Jenna chose the back, so she could have the lion bounding from shoulder blade to shoulder blade. In those days, Heckie’s man-mountain days, his was a back to behold, a canvas like no other. “What does it feel like?” she asked, as the needle drilled away. Heckie looked up and answered, “Cat scratches.”

 

Heckie was over-affected by Chicago right off the bat. But you couldn’t say Chicago didn’t feed the flame. After all, the award was The Flying Carpet, not the Oscar or the Grammy, so the hotel was not the Ritz or the Four Seasons by any stretch. Jenna laughed that it wasn’t even the Three Seasons. But the laugh shot off her face in a hurry when they opened the door to their room and found something even darker than the alley-view darkness, a shape at the end of the bed. Not until it slipped by them, weaving like an otter, did they realize it had been a male human, half-clad, feeding on the remains of their room service tray. Jenna fumbled to the phone and screamed into the mouthpiece, but Heckie just stood there, a tower of stone, as though he had turned into one of his own fireplaces.

Over at McCormick Place, the trade folk told Jenna she’d be a fool to leave Chicago without an Oak Park stop. There they have the Frank Lloyd Wright residential architecture, even Wright’s own house and studio. You never know, the trade folk said. Could be the coming wave for the Thunderhead Googlers, soon as they weary of their McLogs and McCabins.

So off they went on the Lakeside EL, a mass-transit first for Heckie, and a day so frozen Chicago could have used a river rock fireplace tall as the Sears tower. They were dogged from the start by tramp-men plying scams with the turnstile cards, and stunned to see the vast squalid neighborhoods, so unlike the Valley, flying by beneath the hurtling train. For Jenna, it was worth it – just to stand in the Wright house and behold the master’s stylings of glass and natural light, marketable in the Valley indeed. But Heckie seemed cornered by all the small nooks, like a stallion in a trailer, and couldn’t wait to return to the EL.

There on the platform they stood waiting in the early arctic dark, thinking they were alone. But a man came upon them – so suddenly he seemed to have risen from the tracks. He was brownish all over. His face, his worn, torn overcoat. It looked like he had been in the matted coat so long it had become part of him, like an animal’s coat.

The man stalked them like a big dog, like a Rottweiler or a Mastiff, but a big dog who wanted to play. “Talk to me, man,” he said to Heckie. “I don’t bite. All I want to do is get a bite. Can you help me out?”

Jenna tugged at Heckie’s sleeve, but the man caught something in Heckie’s eyes – a glint of pity, and he kept dogging. “You’ll get your train. They come every seven minutes. I ride them up and down, back and forth, just to keep warm. Sometimes I go to the library. But they don’t like me in no library.”

Heckie’s hand went into the pocket that held his wallet.

“Come over here and get warm. You’ll get warm in here. You don’t have to freeze…”

The man waved them towards one of those heated shelters where people wait for trains. In the frigid dark it had an eerie pink glow. It was open and empty and gleaming. Jenna thought of a yawning monster mouth, felt panic all over and dug in her heels.

“Come over here. I just want to get a bite. That’s all.”

Heckie’s wallet was out and he followed, leaving Jenna behind him on the open platform. Jenna watched the two of them disappear into the gleaming pink mouth. The light was so pink and radiant Jenna thought she saw it ripple, as though it were emitting its pinkness in waves and beams. Then came a roar, Heckie’s voice, a roar of sudden pain and rage. She caught a glimpse of Heckie’s leg, kicking outside the shelter then twisting and kicking back in. Next she caught a shot of Heckie’s right arm, raised high and coming down fast. She expected a sound like a sledge-hammer landing but at that instant a train screamed by on the other side.

Jenna ran to Heckie, entered the pink, throbbing light and felt she had stepped into a crematorium. An oven with a body cooking in it. She and Heckie fell to their knees, flailing like a single dervish with four hands. Quick as they could, they worked the motionless man’s position so the blood wasn’t apparent. Angled him so it seemed he had only collapsed into a drunken sleep. They pulled the collar and the lapel of the brownish overcoat up around the brownish, bleeding face.

Then they paced and waited interminably for the train that comes every seven minutes. Eight went by and the man didn’t stir. Not a quiver from his nostrils or lips.

“What did he do?” Jenna demanded. “What did he do to you?”

From the man-mountain there was only panting and pacing, and an occasional sound that couldn’t be called human language.  

When Heckie finally said something it was in the gray of the next morning, back in the hotel room. At first the words were garbled and wild. He was like a man speaking in tongues. The actual English language came back to him in time, but it settled onto his lips the way a huge summer rain cloud settles over the Valley. Heckie said nothing of the night before. He used all his words to complain of an enormous bloat, saying he’d awoken “fat with sleep.” There was so much sleep in him, he claimed, that he could feel it swelling in every limb, organ and vein – as though he had been embalmed with it. So much sleep he could never sleep it off.  He described the sleep as a bottomless lake inside him, glacial and black. Monsters of the deep were down at the bottom of it, swirling, and sleep became his principle state of being for so many seasons afterwards Jenna grew to see him in a brand new way – not as the real Heckie but a mutation, a species that didn’t so much as live but exist. Fattening then hibernating then fattening.

Eventually, the Google billionaires tired of the Thunderhead and set off elsewhere. Their departure sent Jenna back among the regular people to acquire new customers. Every day she’d let Heckie off at the Pin n’ Cue, then hunt around Home Depot to pick out the bull-nose for their backsplashes and cabinets for their kitchens. In a dream one icy night she saw the mountain lion, just as she had on that silver night ages before Heckie. After hours of homework she had crossed to the icicled window and stood on a schoolbook, staring through the veil of frost. Long as a train it looked, the creature loping across the snowy crest of the mountain, casting a shadow that soon swallowed everything, even the window. Just before the dream broke into daylight, Jenna heard the Home Depot public address system call her name. It asked her, in an accusing tone that issued from the last crags of the mountain, why she had ever believed she could find home in a depot. 

If he told the story once he’d told it a hundred times, told it while they scribbled: the day Abraham grabbed the leather case, shuttered the store early, and shooed Jacob towards his car, which he called “the machine,” a midnight blue Pontiac with an Indian head crowning the hood.

“No more setting rat traps in the cellar,” Jacob’s grandfather announced, without even bothering to attempt English. “I’m going to show you something today.”

The Pontiac plunged into the sea of inner city traffic, rolling across the cobblestones and occasional manure piles from the horse-drawn peddler wagons that still plied the Boston streets. Abraham drove past the vast shark-noses of battleships crowding the harbor berths. They stopped at corner after corner as flocks of sailors in their whites trotted past the chrome Indian head, making their way from the water to the watering holes of Scollay Square. They drove on and put a good hour of distance between the Pontiac and the great gilded clock of the Custom House, and then Abraham veered onto a broken street of broken buildings in a place Jacob had never seen. From one end of the windshield to the other he encountered looming edifices of soot-smeared red brick; dark hulks set against a river that looked infected. Its olive-drab churn and yellow foam made Jacob think of a dirty city gutter surging after a hurricane, flooded to ten thousand times its normal size.

After reaching the river, Abraham wrenched the car from a pot-holed yet paved road onto a narrow alley of hardened muck, studded with craters and ruts. When he finally pulled up the emergency brake they were outside a brick behemoth the color of a rusted barrel. Rows of windows, several stories of them, stretched into the distance on either side of the entrance, which was a slapdash-painted metal door shielded by a padlocked chain link enclosure. Each and every window revealed nothing but the same yawning blackness within.

Abraham produced a ring of keys. He unlocked the chain link fence; he studied the different configurations strung along the ring and selected one, which he pushed into the keyhole of the entrance door. But before he could turn it the door swung open on its own. Behind it came a filthy, gaptoothed man who had a flashlight and a hammer jammed in his overalls – a watchman. When he recognized Abraham the man slinked and ground his fists into his eyes, as though he had been caught sleeping in a coal bin.

They climbed a buckling staircase, followed the flashlight through a suffocating corridor filled with the watchman’s smell – an aura of engine oil laced with harsh onion - and came out on an interior balcony where there was enough light to reveal a cavernous space below. The area was as large as a warehouse or a small stadium. It was inhabited by gargantuan shapes, ponderous angular contraptions shrouded in dusty canvas. Months later Jacob would begin to understand what they were: looms for spinning, winding and twisting, machines for dyeing, finishing and cutting, and a sparse herd of worn-out pallet trucks.

But today he was too terrified to care. The terror did not abate until the watchman had gone away and he was alone with Abraham in an office that looked out across the arena of canvas-draped machines. Inside the office everything was draped too – until Abraham, in a moment of drama, pulled away the canvas that hid the big oak desk. His desk, he announced proudly.

“No more piles of rags in a store,” he said. “Now we make the goods. We make miles of them. You’ll see.”

He tried to calm Jacob with a wave of his paw. He plunged it into the leather case and produced the framed picture, which he set down like a prize in the center of his new desk.

“You’ll see,” he said, and stood next to his grandson, tall as a tower. His pose was not unlike the one in the photograph. 

                                                  

 

“How tall were the flames?”

The toxic air made Jacob’s eyes sting, but the ATF agent, a woman, asked the question in a matter-of-fact tone. She could have been blandly asking Jacob directions to one of his mill buildings, or to the cafeteria, or to the steepled tower where he was accustomed to governing from the topmost suite, peering out like a restless eagle to scan his domain and the river rushing at its side. But all of it was now an acrid heap; smoldering hulks and dying embers. The firepit was as gargantuan as the mill complex had been less than twenty four hours ago, when it was humming along. Even the giant steel machinery – some of it dating from the Abraham days, Bapa Avram, avasholom - had melted. The flood of smoke still smothered the sky; for miles, the black fumes ruined the rising dawn.

Avasholom. Rest in peace.

Or in piece goods.

Or in pieces.

Even at this dreadful, harried hour Jacob was suited up impeccably. Double-breasted Italian cloth, the sure hand of his Milano tailor in every nub and stitch. A waste of the needle indeed; the suit was as smoked as a Russian sturgeon, and no chemical on earth could get the damage out. The ATF agent wore something more economical: a blue-black hooded rain-shell with the huge letters of her department stamped across her back. It made her seem even stouter than she was. Even under the massive stress of the catastrophe, Jacob couldn’t help but regard her as a slightly amusing creature, a sweating, breathing toy to sport with. And why not? – it made no difference now. He had seen the grotesque rail of iron twisting upwards, clawing haplessly at the putred sky. It was all that was left of his tower office, a single trace of the winding stairs that once climbed to it. Stairs he had purposely placed above and beyond the soaring elevators.

“What do you mean how tall were the flames?”

“You were here, you saw them. Take a guess.”

A guessing game. That’s what she wanted. Then that’s what he would give her.

But in fact, when Jacob had arrived on the scene there were no more flames, and no more buildings either.  Only the smoking ruins, a rancid shroud over the spume of the Merrimack. Well after midnight he picked up a voice mail. He was at his summer home and the drive was unbearably long. The firefighters had already been on the scene for hours, hacking and hosing. A ring of police cars blocked him from his own property.

From the outset, the police surprised him. He had expected deference, but they were gruff and rude. One of them ordered Jacob to identify himself, but after examining the license the officer refused to let him drive through the cordon. In fact, he directed him into the back of one of the police cars. “I’ll take you up,” he said flatly, slamming his hand on the button that locked all four doors.  But as they drew closer to the hell zone, the policeman grabbed his dashboard mike and Jacob heard a very different voice. Bristling with an eerie glee. “I’ve got the owner,” the policeman said.

The ATF agent stiffened her legal pad and raised her ballpoint pen.

Jacob almost hissed, “You are what my taxes pay for.” The words were on the tip of his tongue. Drops of acid he wanted to spit.

But instead he fixed his eyes on her and declared, “the flames were 148 feet tall.”

In a flash the pen dropped to the pad and went wild.

“You know the exact height,” the agent said. “That’s really something. How do you know all that?”

Jacob had merely given her the distance from the parking lot to the top of the tower. The woman was an ignoramus; so thrilled at her question – and at his answer - that a bubble of saliva leaked out of the corner of her mouth.

When she finally released him from the interview he felt the skin of his hand sweating against the skin of the fine Hermes wallet. He was unaware of ever having pulled it out of his pocket, but there it was, wet and thick in his palm; and he was also unable to determine whether it was his hand or the wallet that shook so hard. The wallet was in his left hand. He pulled out the old picture with his right hand, and now that hand shook wildly. Until two months ago the picture had been in a small frame in his tower office. The wallet – he picked it up in Paris – happened to have more slots than its predecessor. On a whim he had removed the picture from the frame and slipped it in, one slot from where he had put his wrinkled social security card, signed with his teenage signature.

 

Morton, the uncle with the sharpshooter’s eye, the soldier boy, he was the one who’d snapped the picture with the Leica, the camera he brought back from Rotterdam after the war. It was a time exposure, carefully composed, and though the print was small it was rich in the dark energy that makes the old photos deep as oil paintings, even in  black and white. The scene is the tall grandfather, his sideburns not yet grey, and his scrawny grandson, the two of them posing monumentally on the steps of the shul. The pillars are at their back, their velvet tallit bags are under their arms, their dark suits and hats are a perfect fit, collars and ties smooth and tight. Abraham was so pleased with the picture he brought it to the store, and eventually had it matted and set in an ornate frame. He chose to keep it in a corner on top of the safe, a private space far from the cash register.

On busy days, Abraham patrolled the sales floor, which consisted of large tables piled end to end with the goods, a hive of shelf-cubes spanning floor to ceiling on all available wall space, and an overhead squadron of paddle fans that rustled the goods and cooled the women as they pecked around, enjoying the escape from the street.

The inventory was large – which Abraham preached was the key to piece goods retailing. His sales floor stock alone was the largest on the avenue, and half as much again was stored in the cellar, down steep and shaky wooden stairs. At the bottom it was cold as a well, even though there were no paddle fans to chill the air, only the dank stone and rubble of the foundation. The cellar was Jacob’s domain, except when the old man was setting or emptying the traps. From time to time the boy would hear a snap and a squeal, or smell a carcass, as he clambered up the ladder to fetch a bolt and bring it to the world of light above.

Carrying the rolls of cloth, Abraham said, would give him practice for carrying the Torah scrolls at shul, which he would do when he was of age.

On slow days the two of them would sit in the corner by the safe and the picture. Reports from Jacob’s school – where they all called him Jack - written comments from teachers to his mother, singled out his odd habit with words. His mind seemed to snag on certain ones, but not because he was slow at reading. It was more that he fixated on the spaces in them as well as the letters, as if the spaces made the words into games and puzzles. This amused Abraham. He saw it as brilliance and curiosity in his grandson, so he encouraged it. He delighted in letting Jacob take him on, the native-born juvenile lecturing the immigrant elder.

A woman came in, a regular customer, and finicky. She combed through the table-stock, her mind set on a particular linen and none other, and when nothing filled the bill she turned to Abraham, exasperated from the luckless search.

He smiled to settle her down and turned to Jacob at the cellar door.

“Geh fur,” he said, penciling the stock number on a slip of paper. “Geh fur.”

But Jacob didn’t move. He saw the moment was right to make a point.

“Why do you say geh fur, Bapa? Talk English. Say, ‘go for.’”

Abraham set his lips and spoke just above a whisper, so the woman wouldn’t hear. “Go fur,” he said.

“No, Bapa. “Go for. Go for.”

He tried again, and it was the best he could do. “Go fer. Go fer. Gofer.”

                                               

The arson investigator they assigned to dog him was fat and loathesome, a ham -faced Southie thug in a tight crewcut, the hair tonsured one level up from skinhead. To look at the two of them across a desk – Jacob in his Italian suits and Eagan in his stained, lumpy jerseys and big-and-tall jeans – one would have assumed Jacob was dressing down a janitor or hiring a legbreaker. Eagan had earned the right to boat around in unmarked cars and plain clothes, but for Jacob’s taste his body would have been better packaged in a uniform and badge.

They would meet in a sweat-reeking windowless room at the State Police barracks, or among the French-polished antiques in the partners’ parlor at Jacob’s lawyers’ suite. In a blink, the walls of the contrasting rooms demonstrated just how horrid or splendid the color green can be.

Eagan would always begin with a personal detail that made Jacob turn to his defense counsel and indicate, with a wince, that half-digested food was now coming back up the tract to his mouth.

“Guess what my doctor told me, Jacob. He said cut out coffee, but not because the coffee was giving me diarrhea. He said it was making me constipated.”

“We don’t need any coffee, please. You don’t have to apologize. Just do what you have to do. Get on with it.”

“Tell me again about those accelerants you use in fabric production. Did your grandpa use them too? Jacob, I never knew I was a walking torch in my fleece parka.”

My grandfather never made fleece parkas, Jacob wanted to say. But the very idea of conducting a textile economics lesson for this Neanderthal repelled him. When Abraham bought the mill in Lawrence the whole industry was on the run, fleeing beyond the Blue Ridge Mountains, even crossing oceans to find peon labor. But woolens were still woolens, bolts of cotton originated only in the black earth, and the world knew nothing else. Did Eagan have an inkling that the fleece in his parka was made by alchemists re-deploying molecules harvested from plastic soda pop bottles? Alchemy was what Jacob had brought to his grandfather’s business, when it was as dead as he was. And it was alchemy that had brought the business back to the Merrimack River. And grew it till it could grow no more – and was worth more as ashes.

Jacob and Eagan sparred over each other’s qualifications. Far as Jacob could see, Eagan’s sole credentials were a six-week course at the Northeastern University law enforcement program.

A night course.

“That’s what made you a state fire marshal? That’s it?” He finished the question despite the under-table foot nudge from his counsel.

“Getting back to business here…What time was it you got to the mill, Jacob… What did your platinum Rolex say?”

“Once again, Mr. Eagan, around 4a.m.”

“Once again, how come you saw flames?”

The counsel had worked against Eagan before, and considered him viler than vile.

As they drove away from the interview he warned Jacob that Eagan would sacrifice limbs to win an arson case.

“You’re the biggest target he’s ever had. We’re not even at the Grand Jury yet and he’s stoking the press. I can’t hide this from you. I’m very sorry.”

The reporter, Riordan, who looked and sounded so much like Eagan he could have come from the same uterus, popped out of his sewer before twenty four hours had passed.

“One way or another I’m going to do a piece on this,” the reporter said, and Jacob slammed a door on him. Soon afterwards he said the exact same thing on the phone, word for word, and Jacob slammed the receiver on him. But that word the reporter used - piece –  it stuck into Jacob’s brain like an icepick. It dug around under his skull and tripped wires. It sent Jacob to his knees on the living room carpet, in front of a roaring fireplace. As he went down he heard a seam rip in his hand-made suit. In that sound of rending cloth he heard something else, a murmur from the marrow of his own bones, that made him pull the picture out of the wallet, just to defend himself against what he had heard. And once he had it in his hands, he tore it into so many pieces, fingers twisting and shaking, that no one piece was bigger than a snowflake. Each time he ripped the photographic paper, the sound of rending cloth grew louder. After hundreds of rips the roar was so loud Jacob knew the next thing that might rip was the seam that held his skin together. He gathered up the pieces and fed them into the red mouth of the fireplace, scorching the cuffs of his shirt.

                                                           

On the day of the Grand Jury, the counsel ordered up a car long enough for them to have privacy. Behind glass, and out of earshot of the driver, he peppered Jacob like a boxing trainer working to revive his contender.

“If the insurance company has to pay you it will break their bank. That’s why they’re pushing Eagan so hard, and soaping him too, but I can’t prove it. On paper they can show motive, nine figures worth. For a grand jury that’s too good to let go. I’m very sorry, very. Do you know what I’m saying, Jacob? Do you hear what I’m saying? Answer in English.”

                                                       

When he was let out and formally hospitalized, Jacob Kopens had a whole team of psychiatrists to hurl his thunderbolts at. “My childhood was so powerful I could never escape it,” he intoned, as if no mansions had been accumulated, no worlds had been traveled, no wives won and not an offspring launched.

“That is your perception now because you are depressed,” the senior psychiatrist said. “These are extreme feelings. Will they burn out? – I don’t think so. They’re your eternal flame, so to speak. But they will die down.”

And under his breath he added, “one way or another.”

“You can’t change me,” said Jacob, grey and gaunt from pushing away so many trays of the bothersome food that accompanied his meds. “I am that thing…”

“That animal, yes. We’ve heard about him.” The senior psychiatrist wiped his glasses and leafed back through his yellow legal pad. “The gopher.”

“No,” spat Jacob. “No, no, no, no, no.”

The psychiatric team members hummed and nodded at each other, concurring the interview had hit a stone wall. They rose as swans rise from an open cesspool, imperiously miffed. They marched away and left Jacob alone, sniffing his sour pajamas. He had the look of a gulag prisoner; all skin and bones, nails and nose hairs growing wild. The tinnitus, now in both his ears, had reached the pitch of a war alarm. The shocks and aftershocks from the treatments refused to stop; he claimed they felt alive and permanent, like a subway third rail that was always being stepped on. Long after the psychiatric team’s departure, he heard the electricity screeching and squealing in every cranial blood vessel.

An orderly finally ejected him from the empty treatment room. He escorted Jacob down the stairs to the institution’s manicured grounds.

Jacob went back to his room, but he didn’t rest. He exploded into a frenzy of clawing and digging, turning the place upside down. He was after the picture. He had to find it. If not the whole picture, at least a piece of it. Any piece. He tore into the sheets, the mattress. When they yielded nothing he tore into the walls, or tried to, even though the walls were painted cinder block. A piece of the picture, any piece. He pawed the oak finish of his bureau until it was covered with jagged scratches and there were splinters under his broken nails.

In the morning they found him burrowed into a tangle of bloody rags, the remains of the sheets he had ripped and shredded. Jacob’s fingers bled and his eyes rolled.

“It’s happened before,” the senior psychiatrist said, “and it will happen again.”

 

“You’re getting too used to being confined,” said Jacob’s wife, the daughter of the yacht club commodore making a brisk change of course. “You’ve spent your entire parole in this place.”

She had a plan, and approached the senior psychiatrist with it. When he balked, she snapped him to attention with the nib of her gleaming fountain pen. A few swift strokes and the dip in the institution’s capital campaign was no more.

On the kind of day she believed in, a day of fair winds, the wife, Jacob and the driver pulled up at Abraham’s gravesite. Jacob was on double meds and slouched like a sack for most of the trip, even when they passed under the cemetery arch.

They extracted him from the car and the wife took his arm. The sky was a blue jewel.“When you see that he’s resting under the sun,” she assured him, “you’ll rest too.”

She held onto his arm, and the driver held him too. But Jacob broke away and fell on all fours before the stone. He blathered something about a piece, a picture, and pawed the grass and the ground beneath it, pawed it like an animal, screaming he was a gopher. 

Alf had just finished telling the two guests how he’d ordered the biggest cage in the dog catalog, “big enough for the Hound of the Baskervilles,” just so Fargo could be comfortable.

“Oh let him out,” said Lali, still chewing her crab-dipped cracker. “He wants to come out, the poor thing.”

“He can’t come out,” said Alf’s wife, Ginny. “If he comes out and jumps up he’ll pop his pins and spoil the operation. His surgeon says it takes six weeks for bone to heal.”

“Poor thing.” Lali swallowed and stifled a hiccup. “He’s chocolate, isn’t he. He looks like a piece of Godiva.”

“A Chocolate Lab,” said Ginny, jabbing toothpicks into two anchovy-stuffed olives and offering them to her guests.

Lali’s husband, Hank, tossed his down like a frog snarfing a fly. Licking his lips, he turned to Alf.  “Have you ever had smoked turkey?”

“Hasn’t everybody? I get it for lunch all the time, with honey mustard and alfalfa sprouts on a four-grain roll.”

“No no,” said Hank, pounding another handful of cashews and speaking with his mouth full. “I’m talking about a whole turkey, a twenty pounder, smoked all day in the smoker.”

Hank swung jubilantly into a description of how expertly he smoked turkeys and how Alf and Ginny would have to come over next time he did one. Hank apparently had every gadget televised on the Food Network. He handled all the cooking in the Lali-Hank family - which only consisted of Lali and Hank - yet Lali had all the body fat. Ginny described Hank as living in permanent training mode, running over hell’s half acre each day at the crack of dawn, forever revving himself up for his next road race. Meanwhile, Lali spent the whole day plumped on a wicker sofa with her paints and sparkles, concocting her Lali Pops – whimsical glass flowers in popsicle colors. Alf thought the flowers looked like tail lights that had been run over by a food dye truck.  

“They don’t want to hear about your cooking, Hank,” snapped Lali. “They invited us over to eat theirs.”

“That’s not the only reason,” Alf said, remembering a choice moment from the pre-dinner briefing Ginny had given him. “We also invited you because you and Fargo had the very same operation. We wanted to compare notes.”

Ginny, showing her fear of where this was going, gave Alf a sour look. “This must be a boom year for ACL injuries,” Ginny said, coating her words in a bright, soothing lilt. “Why, everyone’s going under the knife.”

“That’s not what Alf’s saying,” said Lali, her bosom heaving mountainously. “He’s saying I’m a dog.”

“Best in Show,” said Hank. He snickered so zealously a piece of chewed cashew shot out of his mouth and landed in Lali’s lap, smack in the middle of her voluminous costume, an arty mu-mu-like affair in flamboyant reds and browns.

“Divorce lawyer, Hank,” said Lali. “See him?” She pointed out the window. “He’s sitting up there on those rocks. Right now he’s opening his briefcase.”

Oh come on,” said Hank, emitting a second cashew burst. “I think it’s time for your Percocet.”

“I think it’s time I brained you with this crutch.”

Hank reached his long, lean runner’s arm over and patted Lali’s mu-mu, squarely on the thigh. “Woof woof,” he said.

She pushed his hand away.  “The briefcase is way open now, Hank. He’s taking out the papers. Where I come from, heckling is grounds for divorce.”

“Heckle and Jeckle, that’s us,” said Hank, winking at Alf.

“Hey I remember those two birds from the movies,” said Alf. “A couple of crows.”

“Everybody, it’s ready,” chirped Ginny from the counter. “Belly up. I hope you like beans.”

Lali leaned on her crutches and struggled to her feet. “A murder of crows,” she said to Alf. “Ever hear of that? You may see one yet tonight.”

Although he affected a poker face, Alf latched onto her comment and thought about it. But all he said was,”Go get yourself some of those spicy beans.” And with a gulp he drained his red wine down another two inches.

At the mention of spicy beans Hank popped up on his bouncy runner’s feet and stepped out ahead of his hobbling wife. He made a beeline for Ginny’s buffet, spread artfully across the counter and festooned with sprigs of this and that, looking for all the world like an entry in the annual church food fair.

Ahead of everyone else, he grabbed a plate and a big serving spoon.

“Hank wins another race,” said Alf to the group.

From the oversized cage in the corner came a moan, even more pathetic than before.

“The poor thing is starving,” said Lali, stopping on her crutches to rest. “Please, please give him something.”

“If you had it your way he’d be too fat to play,” said Hank.

Lali blinked. The way you blink when dust kicks up and stings you in the eye.

Picking up a plate, she tottered along the counter using just one crutch. With her crutchless arm and hand she alternately gripped and filled the plate. She loaded it with beans, with a hill of lamb, and with copious roast potatoes. For some reason, she skipped the red cabbage entirely. When they were all seated at the table, Alf looked to see if Ginny noticed. She returned the look with a strangely twisted smile. Family recipes, like her Aunt Dodie’s red cabbage with strudel spices, were serious business with Ginny.

Alf raised his latest glass of big red, and they all reached out and clinked. All except Lali, who said she was on too much Percocet and other goodies to drink wine.

“Here’s to the two patients,” said Alf, moving his raised glass so it pointed first at Lali, then at Fargo, who smelled the lamb and whined voraciously, nose pressed to the cage. Unfortunately, the table in the family room was not ten feet from the Fargo corner. Ginny had concluded the casual family room chairs would be kinder to Lali’s injuries than the stiff dining room Chippendales. But now she clearly regretted her decision.

“Will you give him a piece of lamb for cry eye,” Lali pleaded. “What’s it to you?”

“Doctors orders,” said Alf. “He still has seven pounds to go. As of two hours ago he’s had all the Fit ‘n Trim he’s allowed for one day.”

“What do doctors know? A surgeon is nothing but a carpenter.”

Hank chimed in on the side of fitness and fasting, slamming half the parents in the U.S. for what he called “the pandemic of juvenile obesity.”

As he ranted and raved about fat children who never walk, except to the vending machine, he fed himself monumental forkfuls. And soon he went back for seconds.

“Tell me some more about the cage,” Hank said to Alf, wiping a smear of lamb grease off his chin. “That’s the biggest damn dog cage I ever saw.”

Alf puffed out his chest and said, “That’s because it’s the biggest dog cage made. Fargo may be a Labrador, but that doesn’t mean he has to spend two months of his life in a Labrador cage. I said, ‘I’m gonna get him a Great Dane cage, and I did.”

Ginny smiled at Alf approvingly.

“It was the least I could do,” said Alf, looking squarely at Lali for more approval.

But Lali was off in a different world. Her gaze was glommed to her plate and she seemed weirdly contrite, as though she were a little girl being reprimanded for failing to say grace.

“I’m sorry about not eating your beets,” she said. “I’m just someone who can’t stand beets. Anyone’s beets.”

Except for Fargo and Ella Fitzgerald, there was a brief, deep silence in the room. Like one of those quick blackouts that last only long enough to knock out the clocks.

“But they’re not beets.” Ginny’s face reddened and her voice suddenly swooped higher, as though she were subconsciously aping the siren of a fire truck.

“Why would you think they’re beets?” Hank pointed his fork sternly at his own plate. “It’s red cabbage, can’t you see?”

“Compliments to the chef.” Alf raised his glass again. “She worked hard over this.” Alf was not one to up and rave about his spouse’s culinary achievements. But he knew that any recipe from Aunt Dodie, if it happened to be attacked or ignored, could blow Ginny like a hand grenade.

“Well shoot me,” said Lali. “It must be the Percocet.”

She slumped in her chair and emitted a deflated, hissing sound – the hiss an inner tube might make when it springs a leak. “My knees are killing me,” she said. “Life sucks.”

“Here, let me get you some cabbage.” Hank adopted the scoutmaster-ish tone of an eager personal trainer. “You could use the fiber.”

“Could I?” Lali put the flat of her hand over her plate, blocking Hank’s hand. “Look out the window. The divorce lawyer just left his rock. Now he’s walking our way.”

By hook or by crook the meal moved along, and soon Ginny folded her napkin and cleared her throat, a sure signal she was preparing to announce they were at the poached-pear stage. But Fargo intervened with a new burst of whimpers, distinctly different in timbre and tone from the racket he had been making so far.

“Oh-oh,” I think he’s getting ready to go,” said Alf.

Hank was mystified. “How do you know?” he asked.

“You just know. Right, Gin?”

“It’s like a baby,” said Ginny.

The whimpering intensified. At a certain point in the chorus, known only to Alf and Ginny, they both rose like soldiers.

Alf announced “sling time” and pulled a bright blue strip of heavy-duty fabric out of a basket by Fargo’s cage. Meanwhile, Ginny slid the latch of the cage open and attached the leash. Alf worked the sling around Fargo’s hind-quarters and off they went, the three of them, out to the yard.

When Fargo’s “business” was over, Alf and Ginny maneuvered the sling-hobbled animal back inside the cage, which stood nearly as high as Ginny’s shoulders, and sat down again at dinner.

“It’s all in the line of duty,” Alf said, inciting a new surge of junior high cackles from Hank.

Once again, Ginny began to proclaim they were at the pinnacle moment, the moment of the poached pears - but Lali wouldn’t let her finish. Wheezing and groaning with each push, she levered herself up on her crutches and announced, “it’s contagious.”

“Right around the corner,” said Ginny, heavily sugaring her tone. “The half bath. Can you manage?”

Lali threw a look at Hank - about as subtle as a switchblade. “At least I don’t need anyone to help me with a sling.” She limped away to the john.

Ginny and Alf cleared the dinner plates. As they reached the sink they heard an awful thud in the hallway by the half-bath.

The two of them – and Hank behind them – found Lali heaped across the Oriental runner, a mass of moaning mu-mu, her crutches splayed to either side of her like broken wings.

Before anyone could give the usual first aid instruction - don’t move - Lali moved. She heaved herself onto one elbow, then up into a seated position. She resembled a huge red and brown hen nesting on eggs.

“Stay right where you are,” Ginny commanded. “This is absolutely terrible. Did your knees give out?”

Lali howled bitterly. “My knees had nothing to do with it.” She lifted the mu-mu to expose a nasty shin gash. 

“You tripped on something.” Hank finally knelt beside the victim, the last of them to do so.

“Obviously,” snapped Lali. “It was this.” She snatched up one of her crutches and smashed it across the corner of an ancient chest, one of Ginny’s Pennsylvania Dutch antiques. The corner had a metal plate that was pure rust.

“Did you cut yourself on the rust?” Ginny demanded.

“I’d say the rust cut me. This chest makes the hallway kind of narrow, don’t you think?”

Ginny dashed back to the pantry and returned with a first-aid kit and two pink tablets.

“Tomorrow morning you call your doctor and get a tetanus shot, that’s an order,” she said. “Right now you swallow these pills.”

“What pills? What for?”

Ginny explained that the pills were Ceftin, an antibiotic, and that they would fight anything awful Lali might be exposed to from the rust coursing through her bloodstream.”Hank, get me some water,” Lali said. “Will you do something?”

Hank may have been the runner, but Ginny got to the water first. And Lali gulped down the pills.

“Poached pears will  be served,” Ginny declared, as soon as order was restored and all were seated again.

But Lali wanted to know more about those pink pills. “You are organized,” she said. “Antibiotics right in the house, just like your house was a little hospital.”

“Remember, she’s a medical professional,” Alf said proudly. “She still assists the school nurse three days a week.”

“Well, that’s not why, not exactly,” said Ginny. “Those pills are for Fargo. He had complications from the surgery.”

“You gave me a dog antibiotic?” Lali rose and worked the crutches as fast as she could, pushing herself away from the table. She headed like a broken locomotive towards the darkness of the rest of the house.

“It’s the same Ceftin they give to humans,” Ginny pleaded as she chased after Lali. “It’s even the same dose, I swear it. This is so silly. You come back this minute.“

Lali escaped into the darkened dining room, the place with the formal chairs, and she refused to come out. “Just let me be,” she said. “It’s been a bad, bad day.”

“We can have dessert right in here,” Ginny said, in a forced, therapeutic voice, the voice psychiatric nurses use to mask utter exasperation and contempt. “Can I turn on the lights?”

“No,” cried Lali. “No, no no.”

Alf remained mute, but stood three steps behind Ginny on the dining room threshold. Hank was considerably farther back, closer to his seat at the table than to the deep shadows where his wife had fled.

Shrill as a factory whistle, Hank piped up, “Hey, what about that dessert?” At that moment it was unclear whether Hank was desperately hungry or desperate to move the evening along. But  Ginny seized the opportunity. With her hand sliding up and down Lali’s mu-mu sleeve, she announced that coffee and dessert would be served on the other side of the house, in the living room. “You join us anytime you want,” she said, “and I hope it’s soon.”

But Lali did not join them. Not when they turned from her, walked off and took their seats in the stuffed living room chairs. Not when Ginny marched from the kitchen to the living room - and purposely passed right by the dining room - with the pungent, fresh-brewed coffee. Not even when Ginny spoke a very voluble voila presenting the much-heralded poached pears, and then announced a surprise second dessert, a chocolate mousse that Alf and Hank devoured once and promptly devoured once more.

Towards the end of his second helping Hank piped up again - same shrieking, steamwhistle voice. “Honey, we’re eating your dessert,” he yelled, but he stayed seated and kept his spoon going. Even for Hank he ate at buzz-bomb speed.

 Ginny kept them away from the last of the pears and the last of the mousse, just in case there was a change of heart in the dining room. But time passed; more coffee got poured; Alf brought out his arsenal of brandies and liqueurs, and the snifters clinked. Over and above the clinking sound they heard something metallic – it could have been the shutting of a rattly gate.

Then Fargo sounded out too. Once again, it was not the usual bark or moan.

“Better see what that is,” said Ginny.

Alf set his Grand Marnier down on a coaster and left to investigate. He came to a screeching halt at the doorway to the family room, stunned by what was before him.”You better see what it is.”

Ginny and Hank turned the family room corner and stopped alongside Alf. All three of them stood speechless, gawking at Fargo’s roomy cage, which now contained a second occupant. Like some Greco-Roman empress, Lali lay the full length of the cage floor. She lay regally propped up on one elbow, the folds of mu-mu fabric flowing over her like a grand toga, her chin poised over the buffet platter that held the rest of the lamb. With her fingers she picked off morsels of meat and fat and fed them to Fargo and herself.

In between bites, Fargo slurped at the lamb grease on Lali’s lips.

“You’re so yummy,” she cooed to the dog. “My big piece of chocolate. My Chocolate Lab.”

Every three bites or so, Lali looked up at her audience of humans, but said nothing.

Alf stood dumbfounded. He couldn’t make up his mind whether the scene before him was pitiful, decadent or outright depraved.

Ginny was more resolute. She had the grim face of a schoolmarm about to take out the ruler.

And Hank bounced up and down in his Saucony sneakers - as if ready to take off at the sound of some starting gun cocked in his own head. Ready to run the longest marathon of his life, and never stop.

After a time, Alf retreated to the living room for another brandy. He quaffed it, had a refill and his mind spooled back like an old movie house projector, replaying all the Heckle and Jeckle cartoons he had watched as a boy. He grabbed a dictionary encyclopedia and looked up a murder of crows – but found nothing exciting. Murder was no more than the official name for a flock of crows. Like a brace of quail, a pride of lions. But as Alf sat and let his mind ride the surging alcohol he realized he’d actually witnessed the murder of Heckle and Jeckle, and right under his very own roof.  In a burst of remorse, he went back to the cage to say a few words to Lali. Something kind, to get her to snap out of it; to become her old self again, snipping about the divorce lawyer and such. But no one, not even the swat team of ambulance-borne paramedics eventually summoned by Ginny, could get her to pay a whit of attention to anyone.

Only to Fargo.

I’ll go into this, Dear B., in some detail, because it’s all about you – what you might not know about yourself.

I can only tell it the way it was, the way I saw it, sitting there watching the wind whip Huntington Avenue so hard even the cabs stayed away.

Right in front of me they came, to a table even closer to the window than mine.

There were three of them, toting their computer briefcases and assorted PDA’s, and to this day I remember each by the first word that came to mind.  One was hungry. One was tits. One was fat.

Yes, your old man was on his own that soaking night, riding out Wanda in a “swank” place, nibbling crostini but really digesting what he had just read in a French film-buff magazine. It was a factoid of significant value – possibly the ultimate excuse when your wife catches you watching Adelphia XXXX.            

According to the magazine, an American university (unnamed) is reputed to collect every porn film there is, as soon as it comes out. They’ve been doing it for decades. But not for the reason you’d think. The department that does the collecting specializes in the history of furniture, and porn films are always shot in low-brow rooms filled with the stuff real people really use – as opposed to the furniture used in regular movies, which always reflects the snooty fantasies of stylists and art directors. So when the profs and students sit down and view a film from their school’s collection, all the writhing bodies on the screen are beside the point. What they say is, “look at that table over there. That chair… the tufted fabric…”

I was jollying off over that strange piece of information. It was making my Pinot Noir taste perkier. Even adding zip to my flattish chickpea dip. Desperate? What do you expect? It’s what happens when your dinner companion is a magazine for foreign film nerds.

I know what you’re thinking, what you could be thinking if you knew more – if you knew anything at all about me. Where was Jennie?  Jennie, a name you’ve never heard of, but where was she? That’s definitely what you’d ask. Well, she was at the seminar, exploring new techniques. This one had nothing to do with films or film-making. The seminar of the arid, I’d say, one of the many adult education courses offered each season at our local community college.

We had a date for around midnight – hopefully earlier, since it was a work night. Just the three of us. Jennie, me, and Mr. Mercury.

The hungry one, of course, was the guy. He was beefy and big – dressed as guys in the post-Google age were wont to dress on a business trip. Dark gray suit with a one-size-fits-all look. Shirt that was white, but not quite a dress shirt. And no tie – no finish, so to speak. Probably like the wine he ordered, the Mondavi, Woodbridge label, which the tooth-flashing waiter poured as though it were a priceless Petrus. The one with the above-mentioned tits was a Jewish girl in an Irish knit sweater (the kind they sell in the Westin gift shop, next to the lobster bibs). And the fat one – there is just no other word for it - well, she probably was less fat than she’d been a week ago, because she was clearly doing an Atkins-type thing. With a vengeance. Anything to shrink out of that pale purple tent she had on – it had a bauble or two but no more shape than a blanket made with a hole for the head. When her steak came there was a mountain of white potato on one side and a mountain of green peas on the other. She mowed through the steak like a hamburger grinder, leaving a valley of empty white china between the untouched potato and peas.

For dessert she got the raw berries. Zero sauce. The other two split a Matterhorn of chocolate cake, tall as it was wide. Hurricanes bring people together. By cake’s end the one that was tits was putting her dessert fork in his mouth, while the hungry one’s elbow pressed against the swelling cables of the Irish knit sweater. The fat one retreated into her blonde mullet, and stared out at the last crumbs on the cake plate.

That’s it, that’s all there seemed to be going on. It was watch these out-of-towners  while I shoveled in my bouillabaise or watch Wanda beat up the street and toss the paper cups and broken umbrellas around. They were in the window table, while all I had was a table that let me see the window from a slight distance back, bobbing my head to look between their heads.  

I could also look over their heads, of course, at the rows of empty Stairmasters and ellipticals on the second floor of the building across the street. Except for the slight veil of rain streaks the view was unimpeded, because the window arched high. But who wants to watch a gym on a hurricane night, as devoid of human beings as if it had been run out of business? The storm-hype around Wanda was a little much, I remember thinking. She may have blown away half of Florida, but by the time she was hustling through Copley Square she was no more than a slam-bam Nor’Easter. Gusting 60, maybe 70 – nothing that might sweep you off your feet on Huntington and drop you on your ass over by Columbus or Shawmut.

The burst of pink and black occurred as I was delving into the fourth of the eight mussels adorning the top of my bouillabaisse bowl. I saw it just that way, somehow emerging from a deep corner of the mussel being tickled by my cocktail fork. It must have been how Botticelli first imagined Venus on the half shell. And it suddenly occurred to me that the empty black shells on my bread plate now looked a little like castanets.

It was an everyday occurrence, I know. Just a lone woman suddenly appearing on one of the exercise machines. From where I sat, she was slightly above the blonde mullet, which ultimately is why the word “everyday” isn’t quite right. That aside, Jennie and I were members of our community health club – as if Jennie’s stick figure needed to get any skinnier - and I’d seen more ladies working out than I could ever recount – wives and girlfriends “sweating to the oldies,” as they used to say. But this was the first and only one that ever made me wish I was the Stairmaster under her feet.

She wore black tights and a pink top that displayed copious back and shoulder skin. Mediterranean skin that shone as the workout wore on; and a braided horse-tail of hair, black as ripe olives, that swished back and forth with each pumping step. Those steps – that’s what got me going. In a few moments I was working up a sweat of my own, just lifting the spoon and the wine glass, and I remember rolling the cuffs of my shirt up to the middle of the forearm to let in a little ventilation. As I said, I’m telling you just what I saw, the way I saw it, and what it felt like. This woman, this Mediterranean exerciser, what she had was – she had one of those asses that cause traffic jams and collisions. Riotous rolling haunches that swelled with every step like the chambers of a giant beating heart. Put those moves on a Stairmaster, make the steps deep and steep, and …well, at the very least you’ve got a dry cleaner to pay. I had no idea there were saffron-red rivulets of bouillabaisse forming on my shirt.

What would Jennie say? Actually, on that night, I’d still bet she’d have said  all well and good, more power to the watcher and the watched, to anything that stokes the boiler.

The tooth-flashing waiter must have vibed into my rising fever. I never saw him approach me, never heard him ask or offer, but there he was splashing more Pinot in my glass – at the exact moment I wanted it. All I did was nod and suck it up. Other than this and the churning black tights the only other thing I saw, out of the corner my eye, was the departure of the blonde mullet. Stage left.  Maybe she was slinking away for the evening. Or maybe she was off just to pee and briefly escape the torture of the empty cake plate - and the proximity of her two nuzzling colleagues. But now there was nothing else on the screen - excuse me, within the frame of the window - nothing but the Stairmaster lady herself and the eye beams I was throwing her way, bullets of desire not even Wanda could blow off track.

As workouts go, this was no aerobic quickie. She was serious up there, cranking and crunching, and it went on and on – all of which was A-okay with me. The in-town film-houses weren’t showing much I cared about, and I was comfortable right where I was. I’d even lucked out on the Pinot – it was a Saintsbury, not easy to find by the glass in the Bean City. With the blonde mullet gone my view was as good as front and center. The chair was cushioned and upholstered. I slid into lounge position and even loosened my belt a notch.

All was most copacetic. And the truth is, I was so into the scene in the gym that when the soft hand touched the back of my neck it seemed normal, just another dollop of sensation, and I hardly flinched. As you can imagine, I also didn’t turn my head. Then the hand started to move, fiddling with my hair, even dipping just below my collar, and the movement seemed to release an exquisite scent. Part of it was a perfume I had never encountered before, but the other part of it was the steam from a human being. In the haze of the first instant I took this as the scent of the Stairmaster lady, somehow transporting itself across the stormy street into the air I breathed.

My impression changed fast - with the murmur of fabric in motion, then the pressure of a significant mammal docking alongside my thigh. Not six inches from my face came the blond mullet. The one that was fat – there isn’t, there just isn’t another word for it  - and her pale-purple outfit, that tent thing, now enveloped an adjacent chair at my table. And now that she was sitting right against me, her hand slipped around from the back