90

Publication of TriQuarterly is made possible in part by the donors of gifts and grants to the magazine. For their recent and continuing support, we are very pleased to thank the Illinois Arts Council, the Lannan Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Sara Lee Foundation, the Wendling Foundation, and individual donors. Major new marketing initiatives at TriQuarterly have been made possible by the Lila Wallace,Reader's Digest Literary Publishers Marketing Development Program, funded through a grant to the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses.

NOTE: TriQuarterly welcomes financial support in the form of donations, bequests and planned gifts. Please write to Reginald Gibbons, editor. Please see the last page and the inside back cover for names of individual donors to TriQuarterly.

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TRUDY LEWIS

Private Correspondences

WINNER OF THE 1994 WILLIAM GOYEN PRIZE FOR FICTION

When Ifirst got your letter, I was onlyfifteen.

Libby Martin is a state senator's daughtermaturing in a world of barely sublimated violence and sexuality-aprecocious observer of the routine corruption and compromise of local politics and of their effect on her family and on herself. Her tangled and largely unexamined emotions about her charismatic, faithless father, his self-possessed assistant (herself the daughter of an opponent), and the roil of sexual and social politics that surround them are brought into sudden and startling relief when she receives a shocking anonymous letter.

It said it knew what I was after, what kind ofgirl I was justbywatching me walk.

Horrified and fascinated, Libby works to discover both the identity and the motivation of the letter writer, at the same time struggling to interpret the dense and conflicting layers of deceit and manipulationenveloping her.

TRUDY LEWIS holds degrees from Vanderbilt University, the University of North Carolina and the University of Illinois. Her stories have appeared in New Stories from the South and Best American Short Stories. She is an assistant professor at the University of Missouri. Private Co"espondences is her first novel.

In prose thatswings between lyrical moments ofillumination and grittysexual insight, Lewis explores the dark heart of a misogynist culture. Stark, powerful, impossible to forget, Private Correspondences is a major work by a thrilling new writer.

September 1994 5 x 8 / 196 pages $19.95, cloth (0-8101-503�)

CYRUS COLTER

The

Hippodrome

Set in a Chicago seething with physical and psychological violence, Cyrus Colter's The Hippodrome is an examination of power and exploitation and their entanglement with sexuality. The central character, Yeager, has murdered his wife and her white lover. Fleeing the police, he is both offered refuge and held captive in the Hippodrome, a ghetto house where a troupe ofblack men and women stage sexual theater for white audiences. The murderer becomes a victim; the fugitive becomes a performer.

Colter so carefully delineates each character's self-contradictory motives that the reader cannot entirely condemn or entirely approve of any of them, but is forced instead to reflect on their power-the power to redeem and the power to destroy.

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., has said of Colter's short stories: "When I came upon his tales I suddenly found myself having a lovely time. He was telling me all sorts of magical things about life I'd never known before."

In the tradition ofhis fictional ancestors, Dostoevsky andFaulkner, [Colter] hasproduced a work which uses the world ofeverydayreality in a manner beyond the scope ofjournalism or sociology-as an entree to the soul.

-James Park Sloan Chicago Sun-Times

October 1994

51/2 x 81/2 / 214 pages $13.95, paper (0-8101-5036-0)

A distinguished attorney and public servant, CYRUS COLTER took up writing in midlife and, after retiring from the law, devoted himself to his art and to teaching. He held the Chester D. Tripp Professorship in the Humanities and chaired the Program in AfricanAmerican Studies at Northwestern University. His first book, The Beach Umbrella, won the Iowa School of Letters Award for First Fiction in 1970. His other works include The Rivers ofEros, Night Studies, The Amoralist, and A Chocolate Soldier. He lives in Chicago.

Displacements: South African Works on Paper, 1984-1994

Edited by David Bunn and Jane Taylor

This volume,published in conjunctionwith the Mary and Leigh Block Gallery's 1994 exhibition, offers significantinsights into politics, subjectivity, and aesthetic practice in contemporary South Africa. Photographs of over 125 imagesexplore the dimensions of possibility of a singlemedium, paper. Essaysby the editors and others shed insight into the complicated relationship between figure and ground, and body and landscape, in works produced within a political and historical situation which has, for generations,legislated space and subjectivity.

In addition to including work bySouth African artists such as Alan Crump,TommyMotswai, GideonMendel and PippaSiopis, the volume extends the definition ofwork on paper to include a selection of new works of fiction byJoel Matlov, Zoe Wicomb, Ivan Vladislavic,John Miles and others.

DAVID BUNN and JANE TAYLOR teach in the Department of English at the University of the Western Cape in Bellville, South Africa. They are at work on a collaborative project on poisons and the colonial imagination.

September 1994

83/8 x 11 /300 pages

125 illustrations

$4D, cloth (0-8101-5012-3)

A Rainy Day at the Farm, Gail Caitlin, 1988, pencil and charcoal

TINO VILLANUEVA

Chronicle ofMy Worst Years I Cronica de mis aiios peores

TRANSLATED AND WITH AN AFTERWORD BY JAMES HOGGARD

In this bilingual edition, an established Chicano poetwith passion and elegance describes some of the American realities that remain absent from mainstream poetry. Villanueva voices complex and compelling historical, literary and cultural questions as urgent personal utterances.

Tino Villanueva won the 1994 American Book Award forhis recent book, Scenefrom theMovie Giant.

October 1994

51/8 x 7 3/4/96 pages

$29.95, cloth (0-8101-5009-3)

$10.95, paper (0-8101-5034-4)

MARC J. STRAUS

One Word

This first collection ofpoems by a physician combines poetic craft, medical expertise and a keen sense of human vulnerability to pain and suffering in an uncommon portrayal of the complex and often troubled relations between physician and patient. With directness and power, Straus confronts matters rarely encountered in poetry. These poems are a fine addition to the scant body of imaginative work that speaks with authority from within the medical world.

October 1994

51/8 x 73/4/80 pages

$29.95, cloth (0-8101-5010-7)

$10.95, paper (0-8101-5035-2)

WILLIAM GOYEN

Arcadio

Completed while he was dying, William Goyen's Arcadia is one of the most affecting and imaginative farewells to life ever written.

Arcadio, whose voice is inimitably Goyenesque, is a creature from beyond the normal walks of life.

Half man, half woman, raised in a whorehouse and for years the veteran exhibitionist of an itmerant circus sideshow, he has escaped from the show and has been wandering in a quest for his lost family. Speaking intimately and secretly to the reader, he tells the bizarre and fantastic tale of his life.

148 pages $12.95, paper (0-8101-5006-9)

WILLIAM GOYEN

Half a Look of Cain: A Fantastical

Narrative

Chris, whose leg is injured, and his lover Stella, with whom he lives in a ruined, abandoned house; Chris's male nurse; Marvello, the circus aerialist; a lighthouse keeper; a flagpole-sitter in small-town America-these are the creatures of William Goyen's visionary fable of love, lust and loneliness. Because of its central focus on the erotic and its unusual novelistic form, Halfa Look ofCain was rejected in the 1950s by Goyen's publisher. The first publication of this novel inaugurates a TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press plan to publish and reprint all of Goyen's out-of-print work.

[Arcadio) virtuallypulses with lifo; it is both audacious and wise; a timelessfable that manages to be boldlycontemporary as well.

-JOYCE CAROL OATES

WILLIAM GOVEN (1915-83) was one of the most innovative American writers of fiction. Read and acclaimed abroad, while remaining too littleknown at home, his work has transformed his readers' understanding of inner life and of the novel itself.

220 pages $22.50, doth (O-8101-5031-X)

New Writingfrom Mexico

Edited by Reginald Gibbons

This large anthology is a carefully chosen and scrupulously translated sampling of the most vigorous and exciting new short fiction, poetry and essays being written in Mexico today.

Gibbons has been guided by a healthy eclecticism and a sense offreshness and authenticity ofconception and execution.

-HARVARD REVIEW afeastofreadingenjoyment. Gibbons's collectiongives us people worth caring about and writing not afraid to be at once serious andjoyful.

-SMALL PRESS

448 pages

$15, paper (0-916384-13-6)

ANNE CALCAGNO

Prayfor Yourself

Anne Calcagno vividly captures the textures of women's lives in this exhilarating collection of short stories. Her characters grapple with problems ranging from domestic violence to obsessiveness with body weight; the dramatic situations are extreme, edgy and utterly convincing.

Calcagno has the clean voice and sharp unblinking eye of a true storyteller.

-LARRY HEINEMANN

Language as maddeninglyfascinating as a fifty-car locomotive, perfectly carved, from a singlepiece ofwood.

136 pages

$26.95, cloth (0-8101-5OOO-X)

-LYNDA BARRY

$12.95, paper (0-8101-5003-4)

CAROL FROST

FOT all poetry collections.

-LIBRARY JOURNAL

PETER READING

A fierce, passionate series of meditations on experience and consciousness, morals and customs, and on the natural world that surrounds and shapes human life. Frost's poems bear the stamp of a thoroughly original artistic vision and style-they are discursive yet filled with concrete images; they inquire into moral issues (responsibility, pleasure, guilt, jealousy) without moralizing; they catch the echoes of western myths in domestic and quotidian events; they sharply diagnose relations between the sexes.

64 pages

$26.95, cloth (0-8101-5029-8)

$10.95, paper (0-8101-5004-2)

Ukulele Music • Perduta Gente

This double volume of poems is the first u.s. publication of an important English poet. "There is nothing safe about Peter Reading's work," one reviewer has written, and a storm of letters to the London Times and the Times Literary Supplement, attacking and defending Reading's work, has made him the most controversial English poet of the age. Rarely has any poet found a way to address the most appalling and dispiriting aspects of life with such astonishing artistic virtuosity, bitter humor and disconcerting honesty.

112 pages

$26.95, cloth (0-8101-5030-1)

$1l.95, paper (0-8101-5005-0)

The Urgency ofIdentity: Contemporary English-Language Poetryfrom Wales

EDITED BY DAVID LLOYD

This anthology of poems and interviews is a double revelation for U.S. readers, presenting for the first time in this country the importantEnglish-language Welsh poetry of the 1980s and 1990s, and illuminating the complexity, constant flux and politicalimplications of the poet's sense of inherited culture. These superb poems have been rigorously selected to showcase the Welsh poets' skill and seriousness, and the sensuous density of their language, which, like that of contemporary Irish poets, offers the reader memorable expressive riches and a strikingdepiction of landscape and society.

The featured poets practice their craft amid a lively cultural and political debate: although the number of Welsh citizens who do not speak Welsh has grown substantially in recent decades, cultural nationalists view English as the language of oppression. Thus, like Latino writers working in English in the U.S., the English-language Welsh poets create a divided art. Included in the anthology are John Davies, Gillian Clarke and R S. Thomas, among others.

244 pages

$39.95, cloth (0-8101-5032-8)

$14.95, paper (0-8101-5007-7)

ALAN SHAPIRO

In Praise ofthe Impure:Poetry and the EthicalImagination

A collection of passionate, rigorously argued essays on the situation of poetry in American culture today. These essays speakforcefully to the literary debates concerning the use of tradition, the openness of American poetry to diverse subjects, and the teaching of creative writing. This book should be read by any poet who teaches in the United States and by anyone with an interest in contemporary poetry. It will become a benchmark for discussion of contemporary American poetry.

200 pages

$39.95, cloth (0-8101-5025-5)

$12.95, paper (0-8101-5028-X)

ANGELA JACKSON

Dark Legs and Silk Kisses: The Beatitudes ofthe Spinners

Winnerofthe 1993 Chica�o Sun-TImes Book ofthe YearAward m Poetry

AngelaJacksonbrings remarkable gifts to the articulation of African-American experience. Her poetry features an impressive variety of characters exploring social identity, the rituals of race relations, the female psyche, creativity and spiritualexperience.

Angela Jackson is a poet, novelist and playwright who has known,forlong, what is rightforher attention and scrupulous investigation.

--G�NDOLYNBROOKS

120 pages

$25, cloth (0-8101-5026-3)

$10.95, paper (0-8101-5001-8)

TIMOTHY RUSSELL

Winnerofthe 1993 TerrenceDes Pres PrizeforPoetry

Adversaria cel�brates the roughbeauty of ordinary life and laments its inevitable decline. These poems, titled in Latin, combine colloquial style with a late imperial tone to capture the stark contrasts and contradictions of a life lived between a steel mill and the quiet, graceful natural world.

To read Adversaria is to be in the presence ofa lively and supple and various mind, as tough as it is American.

-Ll-YOUNG

LEE

104 pages

$25, cloth (0-8101-5027-1)

$10.95, paper (0-8101-5002-6)

Adversaria

EVAN ZIMROTH

Dead, Dinner, or Naked

We hear in these poems a song of tenderness, anger, intelligence and wit. Evan Zimroth's erotic, intense poems are rooted in history, myth and everyday life. Her strong, singular voice makes us look where we might not have looked, see what we might have missed, face what we would avoid.

I love the combination ofsmartness, pain, and what one might call conscious postmodem trashiness in this book A profoundly urban book, ofharsh memory andfantasy, set in harsher reality. -AUCIA OSTRIKER

80 pages

$15, cloth (0-916384-10-1)

$8.95, paper (0-916384-14-4)

BRUCE WEIGL

What Saves Us

In these wrenching,elegant poems Bruce Weigl writes out of uncompromising memory and vision. From bars and bedrooms, in Ohio and Nicaragua and Vietnam, his voice rises through the noise of history and habit to reach us with impeccable grace and remarkable invention.

Song of Napalm made almost everythingelse that has been written about the Vietnam War seem irrelevant. What Saves Us moves right alongfrom that achievement. Bruce Weigl has become one ofthe best poets now writing in America. -DENISE LEVERTOV

80 pages

$17, cloth (0-916384-08-X)

$10.95, paper (0-916384-09-8)

MURIEL RUKEYSER

Out ofSilence: Selected Poems

EDITED BY KATE DANIELS

-ELEANOR WILNER

In a recent article, someone defined the deplorable state ofpublishing (and the Republic) by a singlefact: Muriel Rukeyser's poetry was out ofprint. So this is notjust another book: it is a restitution.

Thepublication ofOut of Silence is an event worthyofcelebration. Finally one ofthis century's most distinguished, misunderstood and undervaluedpoets is back in print The timefor a just estimate of Rukeyser's contributions is long overdue. Out of Silence is a necessary start. -THE woMEN's REVIEW OF BOOKS

192 pages

$28, cloth (O-916384-11-X)

$14, paper (0-916384-07-1)

LINDA McCARRISTON

Winner of the Terrence Des Pres Prize for Poetry

Eva-Mary

Winnerofthe 1991 Terrence Des Pres PrizeforPoetry

NOW IN A FOURTH PRINTING!

An extended poetic meditation on suffering and change, on cruelty and innocence, on love and endurance.

An immenselymoving book,fearless in its passion. Linda McCarriston accomplishes a near miracle, transforming memories oftrauma into poems that are luminous and often sacramental, arriving at a hard-won peace.

-USEL MUELLER

80 pages $10.95, paper (0-8101-5008-5)

Linda McCarriston

Fiction ofthe Eighties

Edited by Reginald Gibbons and Susan Hahn

This landmark anthologyhonoring TriQuarterly's 25th anniversary includes 47 of the best short stories to have appeared in the magazine over the past decade. The stories range widely over the experience of modem life, and share a high level of artistry. An incomparableprimer of the contemporary possibilities of fiction.

Forcontemporaryfiction [Fiction of the Eighties] is a standard-bearer The multiplicity and depth ofthefictional lives here are astonishing wisdom and wildness ofwriters too numerous to thank. -PUBUSHERS WEEKLY

592 pages

$26.95, cloth (0-916384-05-5)

$16.95, paper (0-916384-06-3)

Writersfrom South Africa

Based on the proceedings of a literary conference hosted by TriQuarterly magazine and Northwestern University in the autumn of 1987, this collection of speeches and dialogues by fourteen leading South African writers, poets and intellectuals opens up the world of contemporary South African literary culture to U.S. audiences, outlining such concerns as writing and censorship, worker poetry, the place of poetry in society and many others.

Writers from South Africa

CULTURE. POLITICS AND LITERARY THEORY AND ACTNITY IN SOUTH AFRICA TODAY

128 pages

$6.50, paper (0-916384-03-9)

Tn(Ju.iJrkrl. Sr:�/, "II CntK'u ,-",dCullu,..- No 2

Stephen Deutch, Photographer:

From Paris to Chicago, 1932-1989

A stunning gift book-with photos of Chicago over decades of change, including Deutch's Pulitzer-nominated photos from the Daily News. This collection and analysis of Deutch's work, with plates both in duotone and in color, is the first full record of Deutch's achievement to be published. 144 pages $45, cloth (0-929968-05-0) $23.50, paper (0-929968-06-9)

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Editor

Reginald Gibbons

Managing Editor Kirstie Felland

Executive Editor Bob Perlongo

Special Projects Editor Fred Shafer

Reader Bobby Reed

Advisory Editors

Spring/Summer 1994

Co-Editor Susan Hahn

Assistant Editor Gwenan Wilbur

Design Director Gini Kondziolka

TriQuarterly Fellow Deanna Kreisel

Editorial Assistants Hans Holsen, Sarah Kube, Kemba Johnson, Amy Rosenthal, Kelly Riggio, Brittany Walker

Hugo Achugar, Michael Anania, Stanislaw Baranczak, Cyrus Colter, Rita Dove, Richard Ford, George Garrett, Michael S. Harper, Bill Henderson, Maxine Kumin, Grace Paley, Michael Ryan, Alan Shapiro, Ellen Bryant Voigt

TRIQUARTERLY IS AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF WRITING, ART AND CULTURAL INQUIRY PUBLISHED AT NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY.

Subscription rates (three issues a year) - Individuals: one year $20; two years $36; life $500. Institutions: one year $30; two years $48; life $500. Foreign subscriptions $5 per year additional. Price of single copies varies. Sample copies $4. Correspondence and subscriptions should be addressed to TriQuarterly, NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY, 2020 Ridge Avenue, Evanston, IL 60208. Phone: (708) 491-7614. The editors invite submissions of fiction, poetry and literary essays, which must be received between October 1 and March 31; manuscripts received between April 1 and September 30 will not be read. No manuscripts will be returned unless accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope. All manuscripts accepted for publication become the property of TriQuarterly, unless otherwise indicated. Copyright © 1994 by TriQuarterly. No part of this volume may be reproduced in any manner without written permission. The views expressed in this magazine are to be attributed to the writers, not the editors or sponsors. Printed in the United States ofAmerica by Thomson-Shore, typeset by TriQuarterly. ISSN: 0041-3097.

National distributors to retail trade: Ingram Periodicals (La Vergne, TN); B. DeBoer (Nutley, NJ); Bookpeople (Berkeley, CAl; Ubiquity (Brooklyn, NY); Armadillo (Los Angeles, CAl; Fine Print (Austin, TX).

Reprints of issues #1-15 of TriQuarterly are available in full format from Kraus Reprint Company, Route 100, Millwood, NY 10546, and all issues in microfilm from University Microfilms International, 300 North Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, MI 48106. TriQuarterly is indexed in the Humanities Index (H. W. Wilson Co.) and the American Humanities Index (Whitson PublishingCo.).

Trudy Lewis of Columbia, Missouri, has won the 1994 William Goyen Prize for Fiction for her novel Private Correspondences. This fall she will receive a cash award, and her book will be published by TriQuarterly Books/ Northwestern University Press. The prize is given biennially for a novel, novella or short-story collection.

TriQuarterly awards the The Terrence Des Pres Prize for Poetry for a booklength manuscript of poems (original or translation). Translators must include written permission to publish from the author and/or publisber of the original text. The MS should be at least 48 pages in length, submitted in typed or clearly photocopied form and postmarked during August 1994. The prize consists of a $2,000 cash award and publication by TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press. Runners-up will also be considered for publication. MSS will be read only if sent with a check for $15, payable to TriQuarterly.This is a reading fee, but it includes a discounted one-year subscription to TriQuarterly. (Those already subscribing need send only a $5 check with their MSS.) If more than one complete MS is submitted, each additional MS must be accompanied by a reading fee of $5. MSS will be returned only if accompanied by a SASE. The winner will be announced in January 1995. Send MS and check to: The Terrence Des Pres Prize for Poetry, TriQuarterly / Northwestern University, 2020 Ridge Avenue, Evanston, IL 60208-4302.

TriQuarterly Books' Dark Legs and Silk Kisses by poet Angela Jackson was among four winners of the first combined Chicago Sun-TimesIFriends of Literature Chicago Books of the Year Awards, for the best books published in 1993 by Chicagoans or about Chicago by writers living elsewhere.

A poem from TriQuarterly #86-"Demographics" by Catherine Bowmanhas been selected for inclusion in the forthcoming anthology Best American Poetry 1994, edited by A. R. Ammons.

Texas Review will publish a special issue in spring 1995 on William Goyen. The editors are Paul Ruffin (editor of Texas Review), Irving Malin and Brooke Horvath. Contributors will include Madison Smartt Bell, Fred Chappell, Kelly Cherry, David Cowart, Joseph Dewey, Ellen Friedman, George Garrett, Donald Graham, Donald Griener, Steven Kellman, John Kuehl, Robert Phillips, Sanford Pinsker, Patrice Repusseau, Dave Smith, Victor Strandberg and others. The price will be $10.

Editors

Reginald Gibbons and Susan Hahn

FICTION

David

The Mill.Race; Sonnet: Three Images ......•••••••••••

Manufacturing

Fever Dream in Hanoi; Three Meditations at Nguyen Du; What I Saw, What I Did, in the Alley; Words for the Husky Girl. .•••••••••••••••••••.•••

Bruce Weigl

The Bogeyman; A Big Black Crow; Dr. Gold and Dr. Green; Dr. Gold and Dr. Green, 11

Marc J. Straus Fury; Truth; Judgment; Apology; Crying Wolf •••.

Carol Frost

For My Lakota Woman; Spirit-Deer Deep in Pine Forests; How Verdell and Doctor Zhivago Disassembled the Soviet Union; The Boys Cruise Seattle; A Savage Blood Thirst; Last Song of the

From The Rourul Bam

Jacqueline DouganJackson

From Shaving

Stephen Berg

CONTRIBUTORS

Cover art and cover design fry Gini Kondziolka

In Bed with Lola

Daniel Hayes

There's a point in any romantic relationship wondering what the other person is doing for you why you're what exactly is the rationale behind the fact that, good or bad the way these things happen you're with this other person and it's not really not the same as when you ask yourself, years into a relationship, what the person has done for you tallying it up changing your life, even improving it everything up to that point, summed up in a language of a kind of scorecard approach to love but by then it's become a more distant

it's a more pragmatic way of it's an easier question to answer and early on, it's harder asking the question because you you think you realize it's strange, isn't it, the way you need to see this person thinking about her talking to her on the telephone, day after day, as though she was she's been sent from heaven, you tell yourself, to right your life bringing the pleasure you'd always who knows, maybe you'd even deserved it which is why it's finally it's arriving a little late, but still someone telling you that you yourself a story about how you'd

descended from heaven and somewhere along the line you'd simply forgotten.

You find yourselfrelying on a perfect stranger or maybe she's not perfect what's perfect about a stranger but someone who almost a stranger, a few weeks or months ago she was to you a perfect stranger, and you think thinking of how it's about it's a question of trust, about how you yes, that's it thinking, Well, yes, she was once a perfect stranger and somewhere along the line I gave her testing her two hundred and seventy-five times taking a chance on her, and now I can see answering the question of why, for what reason she is trustworthy, and so that's why I rely on her why it's this particular woman living with me, eating dinner with me the secrets of my life safeguarded in her heart and so it seems reasonable, making perfect sense it didn't before, but that was before proving herself, earning my trust, and now I realize just

what a wonderful woman she is, even if she's not nobody's perfect.

Except that's not it, because the question isn't about how she might making a fool of you, broadcasting your every secret

given the fact that she might, for all you know, stab you in the back

but that isn't it, because the question's about not trust, but the way you the way I look at people, and what is it I see when I see them

what do I think I see and I can't be alone in having this

what is it I want to see it's as though I were once again it's a childlike reliance on other people

a visitor from heaven, swooping down needing this one particular person and then very soon, as time passes, habits taking over forgetting what a strange thing it is how strange it once was and then bills to be paid, clothes to buy, vacations to plan, meals to arrange starting to take the whole

thing beginning to take it for granted, more or less thinking about how it's a proposition it's an arrangement that works.

You don't take her for granted no, never but more than that it's a matter of well, sometimes you do taking the tie for granted, the thing that binds you attraction of opposites, or whatever the sheer necessity of the feelings you feel and how it gets to be difficult figuring it out, making sense of why going beyond love, and even that word obscuring what it is

how it has you in its grip covering it up in nice sentiments allowing you to reach a point of composure, whereas before back at the beginning of things you were utterly shameless feeling crazy reaching for the phone again, against my better intentions, and I'm feeling so those voices inside of me asking, Who is she, and why are you calling her and couldn't someone else just as easily be visiting from heaven

and isn't it just the luck of the giving you her telephone number instead of and isn't it childish to dial her number feeling that desperate need dialing her number hard to live without dialing, without hearing her voice, hearing that particular hi the one that greets you changing your disposition a miracle in a world where nothing changes, and things written in stone whereas her voice, that particular hi allowing you to breathe easily again, even as it managing, at the same time, to take that very same breath away.

That's what happened with Lola taking my breath away, almost immediately thinking it would be another kind of woman surprising me, because she wasn't Lola look my breath away, but I resisted her dismissing her, trying to tell myself that she wasn't going to enter my life and because she couldn't, and I was smart enough leveling with myself, calling a

spade a spade, because she was to begin with, she was too earnest an initial impression or I thought she was earnest, because I hadn't yet seen not understanding her skepticism blind to what was in the cards, a habit of mine and the contempt she felt an intolerance she showed toward people who were themselves as she got to know me, better and better feeling contempt for me and I began to feel her contempt, maybe especially after she apologized for it never having really considered myself far from earnest, or I'd never thought of myself as earnest until I met and Lola was also a little maybe not the right word an initial impression swearing a lot, getting angry with slight provocation, easily excitable finding her a little coarse seeing humor in others' misfortune, telling dirty jokes and nevertheless, at the same time, a streak of sincerity in everything when it came to the big picture

becoming humorless when it got right down to it and so she was herself earnest, even if she wasn't exactly no sewing, no cooking trying to imagine her as a little girl, but I can't not having the demeanor of a girl scout impossible, or at least hard to imagine selling cookies door to door, earning merit badges, putting a bandage on the skinned-up knee of a doll even looking at the pictures on her bedroom wall in her apartment, wandering around, collecting initial impressions looking when she wasn't looking pictures of herself as a little girl, one after another, hanging on the wall.

There was something about Lola how her apartment seemed everything a little haphazard, willy-nilly uninviting chairs, an uncomfortable couch suggesting that she wasn't her kitchen, nearly bare, minus the rudimentary appliances she wasn't getting around to not taking an interest in creating a more stable

TRIQUARTERLY

establishing a horne for herself too fickle, too wacky believing in grand sentiments, nonetheless, and especially in her ability telling a story about how she'd managed wresting control of her life from the others their attempts to have control over her, to keep that control telling her, silently, what to do and I thought, a gripping, personal tale of such an unsympathetic way of thinking her story was a little simplistic, slightly naive everything wrapped in complexities is how I usually saw everything nothing dramatic, nothing simple never enough of the clean, clear and bright ideas that tell the story the very idea of having power over ourselves dreaming of getting to that point

wresting control, convincing ourselves of how and feeling bad for thinking that a gripping, personal tale of I mean, what's wrong is there anything is there something wrong with taking control of your life?

I liked the spareness of Lola's kitchen, and the fact that she didn't frilly apron, sound of kitchen drawers opening and closing when I see a woman cooking, it makes me think of giving me the shakes making me feel the fatigue of feeling like a child all over again my mother doing what she does cooking in the kitchen, in the dull hours of afternoon the smell of meat sizzling the hour corning, sooner and sooner

my father walking in the door, briefcase in hand, stories of his own and so I liked Lola's refusal to do the kinds of things bucking against expectations, and how she was a little coarse

maybe not the right word showing a fierceness in almost everything never mincing words, never flinching from a fight even if it did bother me how she wasn't she wasn't the opposite of what she was never having thought of myself as sentimental until I met even if Lola had moments of being romantic and

visions of seeing her father, looming, I think vulnerabilities out the window a strong man, even if he wasn't a face that said let's get it done! foreign language to my ears and so men roaming around in her mind, opening doors and flourishing flowers and, above all, the idea of stability wanting me to be romantic, but her own ideas were including one in which together in a big old house, and she turns to me a fantasy about being old and married not saying, Goodnight, as you'd expect end of the evening, time for bed but instead, Fuck you and these words are to which I reply, Fuck you they're said softly, in the spirit of love being large enough encompassing the hatred we inevitably feel it's no use denying the fact that sharing our every emotion, even the ones that why is it that the ones with whom we share the people closest to us are almost always the brunt of telling me her fantasy but not

wasting time on explanations, exegesis what's the point, exactly not explaining it, discussing the intricate motivations just a fantasy, a spur-of-themoment making her laugh in the telling, as though she'd let something slip out of control, minus the responsibility and feeling absolute envy for that, even if it wasn't her fantasy wasn't one that routinely sprung to my mind, but still not calling it my own, but then maybe never having thought of myself as sentimental until I met not my idea of love even if I could easily imagine Lola's fantasy liking it, chuckling at it, imagining it as my own, and that meant something.

My fantasy was much more immediate, and simpler alone with Lola, removed from the trials of everyday a beautiful house up in the mountains, or maybe it's near the beach it doesn't really matter quibbling over details, squandering the currency of fantasy

it's somewhere remote, that's the having this supply of cocaine, but not enough it's an extravagance, that's the point sitting down and figuring out parceling it out, deciding that we get so many lines so many days a week and Lola thinks I'll hog it because she wants to hog it, and I like that the feeling of competition camaraderie is maybe a better way of like children willing to openly admit our greed, and like reasonable adults coming up with a canceling out each other's greed, ensuring equal distribution scarcity, the mother of all pleasure a point we agree on when often it seems there's nothing we forced to compromise, and feeling the pleasure of that miracle passing each other in a hall and saying hello, chatting not in each other's way, within the bounds of our beautiful house a day going by and we haven't really talked never getting tired of each other sleeping eight, nine, even ten

hours

maybe it's this bed, this immense, king-size boat ofa going to bed at one in the morning, having finished an exhausting game of cards the feeling of competition the deepest sleep, and then finding ourselves in each other's arms, opening our eyes, one at a time looking at a clock that tells us it's almost noon and when it comes to O.K., so no monkey business, but lots of kissing here and there, in the interstices of the day reaching out with her hand, touching my face, bending down to kiss me standing barefoot in the kitchen, cutting fruit for her own consumption not even asking if she can be so selfish arguing about that, maybe touching her, underneath some little dress she's wearing arguing sometimes, maybe because it's there it's a possibility, and you wouldn't want to miss out on one but then Lola says, You're an idiot and that's pretty much the end of

I say, Hey fuckface as simple as pie, as easy as not nearly as frightened as we once were, which is what makes it it's just a fantasy.

We were, both of us in the beginning, and even later, in the real world of inviting me over to her apartment, before we went out to scaring me a little frightened down to our socks asking, over the phone, whether it might be better to meet at the restaurant the intimacy of someone's apartment, a woman's and she said no, why don't you just incense burning when I arrived walking into her apartment, and smelling it wanting to tum around, go out the door and leave because of the a bad sign, anathema everything the incense represented walking into the wrong world feeling the impulse to stop things wishing for the strength of my instincts ending things before they'd even why make a mistake when the instinct itself becoming a

kind of challenge but then turning things upside down in my mind, and so I'm no longer sure if it's really shuffling the deck, shaking out the rugs I mean, how would I would I know an instinct if one bit me on the nose?

And I remember seeing them again a dozen rings the same as I'd seen them the first day I met her her hands, so small in the kitchen, at the party, looking for ice seeing Lola's rings the first night I met her a dozen rings on her right hand, not to mention maybe not that many, even on her right hand, but it's the impression that and now, showing up at the door, shaking hands the incense wafting the apartment cluttered, the same as her hands, so small she never throws anything away, that's for sure feeling as though I've walked into the world of a woman who has a history, and maybe it's what if her life's as cluttered as overrun with men and

disappointments, scars and expectations sitting down, on uncomfortable furniture she was doing most of the talking, and so I listened, asked questions trying to think of what to say making an impression, accounting for myself anxiety at the heart of taking its toll, turning me into a gentleman looking off at the walls, at reproduced artwork a polite mute, nodding his head

having a private conversation is she, or could it be a kind of tussle between me and me

needing to use the bathroom as soon as I arrive, and again fifteen minutes later and so something must be going through my slight embarrassment in that, the second time what's going through my mind

source of the embarrassment not that I know what it is but something must be, since I'm not particularly interested in this woman

seeing this encounter, in Lola's apartment, as just another calling it friendly telling myself that, a story I've written inside my

romance not in the cards, because of the incense and the rings shaking hands and getting to know each other writing about it, inside my heart the cluttered apartment her hands, so small as I sit and listen to a nonstop delivery of information talking too much, revealing too much a crash course in Lola.

If she was nervous then, she wasn't nearly as nervous as two nights later waiting for Lola, at the restaurant, glancing at my watch is she irresponsible, am I doing the right not a good sign that she's and finally she walks in, looking harried trying to slide between the two tables, knocking over the woman's water apologizing to the woman, yes, but hitting the glass with her bag a crotch full of cold, icy water a look of shock on the woman's face and wanting Lola to apologize more to the woman, because she looks the woman's distraught and angry, and apologies are

very important as a test of character and so I watch carefully thinking, Who is this woman, and why is she coming to sit at my table?

I was scrutinizing Lola's behavior, wondering whether on some superficial wondering if she were a nice person and it's not a good idea there are people in this world who aren't nice, and probably it's not a good idea to get into bed with someone who worrying that Lola might eventually spilling water on me not seeing that she'd hurt me, not noticing the damage and so there it was, Lola's obliviousness not that big of a deal, mountains out of molehills appearing nonchalant, and when a woman women shrug their shoulders and I find myself gasping for air

hurting me even more than whatever it was, the original thing and there's nothing worse than a woman unaware of herself except if she's oblivious to me or that's not really

and Lola relayed to me worse yet is a woman who disapproves of me warning me that she was critical slipping them into her sentences a series of minor complaints, almost from the beginning wearing too many loafers and I hadn't thought of myself as wearing too many loafers, but within days thinking that, yes, there were a lot of more like minutes right now, at this point in my opening my closet, looking down at all of them bending down and counting them and even the word loafers suddenly sounded stupid cringing to think that sometime in the future I'd think back to now and see sad, scary image an army of open-mouthed loafers and feeling like a fool for wearing those loafers almost every day for a period of my life

telling me, confessing to me I wore too many loafers, Lola said, and then telling me a few weeks later that she was a go-go dancer during one period in her life listening, slack-jawed

she was a go-go dancer before I knew her, and not believing her, not at first she didn't seem like a person who was who could've been in the past a go-go dancer and wondering, getting competitive, even in moments of intimate exchange asking myself, What's worse, wearing loafers for too many years or dancing dark, sleazy bars the tongues of men hanging out of their mouths?

What would I have done if I'd just met Lola in the kitchen, at the party, looking for ice the words dribbling from her mouth the first night I met her what would I have done telling me that she was right then, right at that moment of her life the period she was going through she was a go�go dancer and maybe, for a moment, the idea might've struck mE as unlike the other women I've known this one's unusual, exciting you can get into a rut, I tell myself, when you might benefit from occasionally

but I've never at the time I'd never had a fantasy of being with a go-go dancer but close to another one, adjacent a different fantasy about being with a prostitute she's your girlfriend, but she's also sleeping with zillions of other for purposes of making money, let's be clear and it disturbs you, for the obvious how she's a prostitute but flattering, as well, so many men wanting to sleep with your but no, that isn't that's never been one of my favorite a virtual line of customers wrapping itself around the block imagining what it would be like

O.K., yes, I've thought about it, but nice to have men who want to sleep with your girlfriend, but why does it have to be why do they get to sleep with your girlfriend?

Lola said she didn't enjoy gogo dancing, like some of the other girls exhibitionists, taking pleasure in the

getting a kick out of it

making a bundle of she kept using that phrase, a bundle of money in a single evening, in a few short hours and once you started making that kind of money, it was hard to not having other talents with which to make that kind of at least at that time in your life an explanation that made sense, though not enough of it and she said, Do you hate me now that you know that once I was a go-go dancer?

When she first she's telling me about it imagining these girls you sometimes see when you go to nightclubs or dance clubs up in elevated cages, wearing short yellow dresses and boots

making you think, creating the illusion it's 1967 or thereabouts the world's on fire and you're young and a whole bunch of people aren't staring up at this girl, watching her dance, and she's very good at she's moving her body so that and it's a little strange, since she's in a

staring at the animals at the zoo

it's tongue-in-cheek

it's a parody after all, and so you can relax, loosen your tie, enjoy the voyeuristic shtick

you were a little boy in 1967, and now a boy all over again, and this larger-than-life girl is dancing away totally oblivious to you it's enough to bother you, but then it doesn't really if suddenly she waved letting you know that fantasies, thoughts of you streaming through her mind, just at that point when fantasies about her were streaming through your you wouldn't know what to do, how to react if suddenly she waved realizing that it was precisely cherishing the distance that anonymity provides imagining that kind of go-go dancer, but it wasn't Lola wasn't the kind who dances in a staring at the animals at the zoo

dancing up on a platform, instead, or maybe on the bar itself

Lola telling me that she was never completely beers and shot glasses and

napkins with the logo of she wasn't naked, and it wasn't exactly a striptease the slipperiness of exactly a cross between a striptease and the girl in the yellow and it did bother me men looking up and watching and tossing dollar bills at her feet telling myself, Don't let this bother you warts on the bottoms not having that kind of control thoughts coming into my head without even asking permission couldn't stop myself, couldn't help myself beside myself with and so it did bother me, just as it bothered me that this one other thing finding out about the other men it bothered me, just a little, that Lola slept with men I wouldn't have telling me about some of the men who not many, many men, that's not my point but seeing myself as these men not quite in the category that I saw myself in, which made me wonder maybe I'd placed myself in the wrong lying to myself, seeing myself as

walking around in a stupor my whole adult life or maybe it was that she was breaking free of a bad run, a string of a collection of undesirables a long streak of the worst kind of luck wishing to be special, to be different, a visitor from heaven and Lola and I had that in common

a dozen porcelain angels sitting on her entry table, just for starters a visitor arriving at exactly the right moment, and so maybe I was myself tom wing, the overall whiteness dirtied a shade or two asking myself, Am I only more of the same, or am I different?

That was the question that ran through my meeting a woman, feeling a little wondering about myself, getting a little self-conscious, worrying about a version of that question zooming through my mind whenever popping up, out of nowhere, as though I hadn't asked that same question every day of my fooling myself that way

wondering, Is it that you're fucked-up in major ways, or that you're aware of yourself the degree to which you're somewhat and that's better than if you didn't know how tucked-up you were, how would you such an ugly way of putting it and I sometimes wish a mind isn't a pretty place, let's face it always wanting to get to the point of speaking my mind, but there's this feeling immediately afterwards your mind having dribbled its dribble thinking it would come out a lot better more sophisticated, and sounding coming out ugly, and there's not much except maybe go back, clean it up having decided not to do that shaking the person's hand, so to speak, even if your own is a little wet.

So Lola said, Do you hate me now that you know that once I was

I don't hate you, I said and she said, But you're disappointed Well, I'm just trying to get my bearings

you were once a go-go dancer and hard to imagine you as you don't seem like a go-go dancer and it's slightly disappointing to know that you were once but it was a period of your life, and now that period is and I wouldn't have guessed, wouldn't have wanted to guess knowing how once you were a go-go dancer and she said, You hate me but I could see that she knew that I didn't hate her, and that

knowing I didn't but asking anyway that seemed like a good sign a strange habit of hers liking the way she managed to have it both ways knowing that I didn't but asking anyway and knowing better but not being able to stop myself.

I'm in the bathtub, and she comes home and walks into the bathroom sitting down on the toilet, the lid down and I remember how she sitting there and looking beautiful hair everywhere, black sneakers another of her bulky

sweaters, a pair of orange sweatpants small holes here and there, as though at some point she'd tossed acid on them having seen better days and I have the feeling that Lola isn't beautiful she shouldn't be not now, as tired as she absolutely disheveled but she is beautiful, and I can't look at her without seeing it, sensing it the beauty beneath everything every bit of evidence to the contrary creating the impression in my mind, irrespective of and I can't look at her without wanting to tell her, to pay her the compliment explaining the discrepancy pointing out the clothes, the fatigue, lines around her eyes, thinness of her lips when you can't help wishing for and yet the beauty that I sense, looking at her knowing that at that moment I'm utterly beside myself with hair everywhere, black sneakers desire mixed in, too, swirling around and telling her, or imagining it if I told her, she'd only belittle it

her sickness, her resistance making fun of it, calling it craziness to feel that way she's frowning and listening intently and then Lola's having difficulty with one in the middle of everything I've just my heart emptied out she's having difficulty with this one particular word not important which one and saying, in summation, that the thoughts and sentiments are nice but one of her favorite words, corny using that word in talking of how I and I think to myself, What's wrong with this woman listening to her, and watching the way she scrunches up her nose when she says corny my heart emptied out a dismissal of everything and so out of anger I say, Lola Green's a woman incapable of loving herself, and so when a man expresses and when that love is genuine, or as genuine as it ever under the scrutiny of someone like the way that she's so resisting what I say because it forces her to thinking of herself as lovable,

and it's virtually impossible for her to do that and then she reacts by getting angry at me, saying that I'm cold-hearted the tone of your voice, just listen to it that flimsy kind of dime-store, psychological analysis not an entirely unfair assessment, but I'm not in the mood for I won't admit the degree to which and so an argument begins, if that's if what's been going on isn't already and arguing with Lola is like having your head pulled in two different never hearing, not even for a single moment, that voice inside your whispering to you, You're totally right and she's totally wrong and wanting to hear that voice.

She hated the way that I kept saying that how I'd tell her she was sweet and thinking this time it'd be different that was a little stupid of me her above me, moving slowly, swimming on my wanting to tell her fucking me, and I'm telling her not knowing exactly how to

saying to her, You're so the look on her face at that moment, after I'd said, You're so sweet a little corny, I guess the word loosened, lost, floating out into wanting to grab it back and put it in my mouth, which was where my heart under scrutiny even though later, only a few weeks calling her sweetie, and somehow

I'm not sure exactly why or how, but it was different in her mind passing the test, overcoming whatever it was saying to me, Say it, please say it again loving to hear it come out of my mouth, and maybe the gift of sweetie knowing better but not being able to stop herself from smiling time passing, defenses loosening or maybe there's some other reason the linguistic subtleties I don't know.

There were times when she'd ask me why you love me but why and I couldn't very often think of

let alone a convincing response, and what was it she wanted me to say something, but what and what did I want to say because I wasn't sure why I loved her, and if you stop to think

wondering why you love this or that person it's magic, or it's an arbitrary this one particular person and you can't exactly say but Lola wasn't asking for maybe she was asking for that, but a habit of hers, realizing her mistake

asking you if you hated her when she knew you didn't letting you know, as she's making it it's an outrageous or unreasonable request trusting her, as a consequence, more than if she asking for something and not seeing how it was nearly impossible winking her eye instead, letting you know that she knew and knowing that, that she knew

making you happier than if it was only a matter of a question of Lola's intransigence getting into arguments, suffering her anger losing hope in everything,

thinking that she was hating each and every bone in her and then looking at her and seeing just a hint of it getting this little glint in her eye

having it both ways yelling at me, and meaning what she said, but also realizing having the presence of mind to see showing me that she didn't hate me as much as I hated her, which made me hate her less than I might've maybe even less than she hated me.

I was a different kind of person around Lola because she wanted to see getting me to see that it was O.K. to let things everything getting a little out of control wanting to see my anger, out in the open and exhilarating to feel, at least for a moment, like a different kind of someone who'd do exactly what he wanted not looking in the mirror every day and seeing the same liking the idea of leaving myself, getting away from you know who

and I remember one night going to a movie feeling that feeling, afterwards without Lola, as it turned out having become a different kind of person walking out of the theater, into the night, and feeling becoming like the male protagonist in the movie his girlfriend asking him, point-blank looking directly into his eyes, to conjure honesty asking him if he's seeing anyone else and he maintains the eye contact and says, No saying it firmly, insistently, in order to create the impression that but we know he's lying the audience gasps shuddering at this betrayal, whereas it didn't bother us fucking with the other woman, tearing at her clothes we liked seeing the first betrayal a shared silence, in the dark, mouths agape because seeing what's not supposed to happen is it's exciting to see life getting a little out of control but this betrayal lying to his girlfriend is somehow and what is it, anyway a good man would've betrayed

his girlfriend and then offered prompt notification and afterwards, feeling like a different kind of coming out of this movie with two friends and a friend of theirs inviting me at the last minute to this movie in no way trying to set me up with their friend Suzanne and so it was incidental; then I'm a man and she's a woman even if it doesn't feel incidental, because it never does, even if you trying to hold onto the feeling that it's only sitting in the theater, next to her, and I don't know this woman, and it's chatting, getting to know each other and it's always intense, even when it's taking place in the five minutes or so finding seats, waiting for the previews to screen she's a woman and I'm a man, whereas if we were both at least from my standpoint the conversation wouldn't feel so direct, and I wouldn't feel why is this other person so her face two, maybe three inches away it's hard to get that close and not think of not meaning to, not really, but what if

things getting out of control opportunity knocking mouths moving closer, in a sudden, abrupt the surprising warmth of it kissing for the very first time my friends looking over in utter surprise or no, leave them out of it, and so make it after the lights have in the darkness, feeling her hand suddenly in mine fingers in between fingers squeezing in a kind of secret language we're making it up, just the two of us.

A friend told me a story about visiting a college giving a lecture on the plight of a presentation on the reasons behind the necessity for and afterwards going out a group of the students, administrators, professors at a table, sitting next to a woman he found attractive, but he hadn't giving her no sign, and having no intention of but a half-hour later, feeling her hand it was a secret, he thought reaching over, reaching under, taking hold of his, squeezing it and he told me this story, and

he said sounds silly now, I know, looking at it from a more mature perspective it was the single most exciting whether or not anything ever came of it another story, another kettle of the surprise of finding out that someone the sheer unlikelihood of her hand in his and so it's not just the whims of your and now imagining that at that moment you'd want to squeeze her hand just to keep yourself from crying confirming that it is there someone thinking the very same thoughts as you a moment like the moment when it's a sudden convergence, a confluence of and later you talk about it early in a romantic relationship talking about how it happened a secret history of what took place before you even you didn't even know it was taking place the mutuality of the feelings you felt she was thinking of you at the same moment as and your finger, together with her finger, running down a list of salient moments

bumping into each other on the street, and then the telephone conversation supposedly incidental, purely business and it's only now that you can seeing the true story, the deeper meaning and imagining what it's like when that meaning isn't most of the time it's simply drained off bleeding into oblivion and how awful, to suffer the fate of thinking thoughts that never reach the point of only one person thinking too much, thinking extravagantly and you tell yourself, if you're that one person and she's thinking about telling yourself, Stop thinking, but it's not that easy thinking what a weird face you have, or about meeting someone else the next day, someone truly exciting remembering an errand that she needs to do the dog must be getting hungry, or God knows what.

We came out of the movie and talked about going out to get something agreeing on a restaurant a few blocks away telling them to go ahead, that I'd only be a minute needing to make a phone call leaving me alone to call Lola,

who answered on the very first

saying she'd been trying to call me, and hadn't we agreed to talk this evening saying she was worried about or, worse yet, I'd been killed fantasies about how I'd met another woman spinning it out, telling me about how I'd met this woman in a cafe getting to know each other in a hurry, and then making a serious attempt nice of Lola to imagine it trying to stop things from tumbling in the direction of not a total louse but not trying hard enough, and so this woman and I it was about how your life can change in an instant we'd gotten somewhere we hadn't even imagined getting an hour of conversation driving you it's almost the way a marble works its way down a maze, Lola said and she was describing I realized that this was how Lola and I not in a cafe, maybe, but talking in her apartment, before going out one form of hunger in lieu of meaning to leave but talking much longer than we'd planned the incense wafting

and I felt myselffalling for her, and it wasn't neither of us intending for it to happen no consolation in having consciously decided and a voice inside my head said, Slow down wanting to close my eyes and find out where it was I'd end up paying little attention to that voice opening them and seeing how far I'd gotten and that was very much the idea, whether or not I wished at the time to admit it and now Lola was saying imagining that it could've just as easily been another woman

falling in love as a kind of daily a habit of mine, which it wasn't and so I told her that I hadn't met another woman, and I wasn't dead and she asked who I went to the movies who was I going to dinner with my friends and a friend of theirs, Suzanne, I said and there was a silence at the other end knowing what was wrong, what was going through her liking what was going through

her mind asking her what was wrong knowing I was being disingenuous she was jealous, whereas too often it was I was usually the jealous one in those first few withdrawing, making me wonder if conjuring up the worst fears and so I liked the silence on the other end of the phone, even as I felt the need to say something and finally Lola asked who was this woman telling her about Suzanne, what I'd picked up in the five or so minutes of and Lola said, You're double, dating and I said, What?

She said, You're double, dating and that seemed I couldn't help finding that a very hilarious an odd way of putting it I wasn't double-dating, and I hadn't ever double,dated, and to this day choosing to refer to it as I wasn't the kind of person who dated, let alone and when my mother asked me if I was dating anyone, I never what in the world was she

talking about image of a single malt, two straws and so no, I wasn't doubledating and right then, at that very moment, feeling as though I were lying it wasn't true, but I felt as though realizing how much I felt like the male protagonist taking on the same gestures, the same mannerisms lying to his girlfriend, shamelessly leaving a movie and feeling like someone in the movie and now I was on the phone with Lola answering his girlfriend's question, as though from the heart

feeling as though I were the whole time speaking through his hat feeling more vapid than I'd ever never having been a particularly adept liar slightly amused, dumbly smiling, phone in hand not really feeling much of but somewhere in the back of my mind lying to her, but not feeling much of imagining what it would feel like if you were the other person

the pain of betrayal but I wasn't feeling the pain, and I wasn't lying and I told her that I was wild about her, trying to reassure her, but it sounded a little I was feeling vapid, spewing out sentiments, even as I knew I was wild about her knowing she could hear the insincerity in my imagining this as a dramatic juncture in my life standing at the phone booth, the moment of betrayal lying to my girlfriend, in a movie, and the audience can see and she knows it, too, since she is the audience listening to me and feeling the lie behind the saying I felt as though I were lying and so I told her a funny, exhilarating feeling of and Lola huffed, asking whether I was lying and I said no asking whether I would ever lie to her about something like that a kiss out of nowhere, an instance of betrayal and I said no asking what would happen if a familiar, imagined scenario, believe me in a cafe, sitting down, and a beautiful woman sits next

to me and starts talking and I said yes, that would present a definite and Lola seemed pleased with the honesty of my even if it sounded a little vapid.

She asked me if I loved her asking me even though she already telling her that I did and I couldn't immediately think of asking me how much how do you quantify a thing like quantifying the love that I felt for Lola and a moment later I said, A carload of love, that's how much I out of nowhere, a carload of love an entirely stupid way of feeling like a puppet, manipulated by an idiot drowning in my own and so I said, I love you very, very trying to cover up the stupidity of what I'd just a carload of love and then Lola said, You sound like an airhead right now, and I liked the idea of being the kind of man who couldn't express himself trying unsuccessfully to reassure his girlfriend saying a carload of love, and

thinking, Yeah, that's a great way of and I wasn't that kind of man thinking too much, or taking things too Lola often accused me of analyzing things unnecessarily saying she wanted me to focus less on and so maybe it was a good idea, showing her just how easily I could think less about me, she'd say

becoming vapid with a vengeance imagining myself as a man who didn't keep her in mind, forgetting about her for long stretches and if I didn't think of her, didn't call her, or if I wasn't worrying that she was the farthest thing from my mind a peculiarity of her psychology worrying and not being able to stop thinking of me because I wasn't thinking of her and so I'd met a woman in a cafe

kissing her, or even worse lying on the bed, on my stomach, and asking her to lie on my back, like a koala bear on a branch and when I'd first asked Lola if she'd saying how strange it was, being asked to lie on my back

but then telling me once, later

TRIQUARTERLY

on, how it would be far better it would bother her less if I cheated on her, sleeping with better to fuck someone than to ask someone to lie on my back, like a koala bear on a branch

liking it when she said those kinds of things to me imagining Lola's anger, rage coming out of every exciting me with that kind of what made her tick, or what I thought made her tick wondering what it was exciting me, scaring me, frustrating me sequestering myself, asking myself shaking my head and asking, What exactly do you want from Lola?

I wanted her to adore me, even if I didn't want to want that knowing there was nothing wrong with wanting that and sometimes I wanted to stop giving her things so that she'd ask and wanting to give her things whether she asked or not that was generous of me exploring every permutation, touching every wanting to tease her, and have her tease me

losing control and watching her lose control wanting to want to tease her and not being able to not wanting to give Lola what she wanted as much as wanting to want what she wanted, as though you could thinking you knew what you wanted a worn-out, private catalog of wants but the whole time you really had no idea what you could want and wanting to watch Lola indulge herself becoming a person she'd always wanted to be, or even someone saying the things, and feeling the things, that made her embarrassed making Lola want things she never thought she'd want, never before allowed herself a little corny, I know indulging me as she indulged herself and wanting to go places with Lola eyes closed, fingers crossed, leaping out getting there and not being able to figure out how a blindness to who was who, who'd stumbled along the way, who'd helped who up not wanting to have doubts

about her, but also knowing wanting to reveal those doubts, listening to hers and somehow accepting that fact

shrugging our shoulders, in unison, and then talking about nonsense, the price of tea in China.

I wanted all of these things, not to mention that was the other thing wanting them right now, in a wild flurry, and that was knowing that that was part of the problem, and wanting the patience never giving up on all the things I wanted weathering their absence, or even getting tired of wanting to get tired of wanting knowing that there would soon come a time when all of it would interest me again, and just as intently but meanwhile, wanting Lola to tell me things letting me see inside her mind, revealing things about herself telling me she was once a go-go dancer and if she didn't do that and she wasn't always forthcoming telling me about the warts on her feet, but never letting me

covering them up with little bandages because of her embarrassment making fun of herself and her complex joking along with her, and trying to get ahold of one of her

calling it that, a complex trying to pull back the bandages to look at the each one an excuse not to love her

reason enough, Lola said thinking of the warts, imagining what they look like and yet I do love her, in spite of the warts, and even if using the phrase warts and all a dozen rings on her right hand, the cluttered apartment trying to get used to the idea of who she is and she wasn't always forthcoming imagining myself as someone else, someone I'm not.

As a boy, I had a tiny wart on my wrist and then a slight scar reminding me of telling me about a time when I was wanting no one to see me reveling in embarrassment, prone to it, lying in it, wallowing in any number of my vanity, for instance looking in mirrors, seeing me,

or maybe not a residue of adolescent anxiety, I tell myself and a stutter that still shows up a dozen or so times a year, unannounced forgetting how that happens, and then it happens at the most inopportune moments, which is why I guess that's why it happens if it's not one thing, it's reveling in embarrassment, prone to it earliest forerunner of all masturbating as the very epitome of seeing, of course, that there's nothing wrong with it coming upon that realization, like spotting a twenty'dollar bill in the gutter and if I had a nickel for every it helps, I guess, but it doesn't help you the way you realizations piled up high, and meanwhile a hole in my pocket and it's my only hobby, even if it makes me feel making me wonder, if it didn't make me feel guilty, would I like it as much?

I found myself wanting to O.K., I didn't find myself wanting to, but not all at once, not every last detail, but

wanting to hear about Lola's own habits of broaching the topic, you might say asking her about playing with herself and so I asked her, and she said, It's none of your business the limits of intimacy when it comes right down to just like that, a frank denial a question of how far Lola wanted to how much she wanted to say and that could be frustrating, but talking about go,go dancing, constipation, previous boyfriends, the painful procedures of extracting money, for instance, which for some reason I've never understood why people get so and masturbation was a touchy topic, too, and if I asked methods and such, the intricacies associated with any hobby interrupting me and saying, I don't want to know about any of this hands over eyes, the scary parts of movies and if I asked Lola a question about how was it that she or when exactly was it what she thought about when

she masturbated one day telling me" how once it wasn't that Lola never said anything her mother seeing her, catching her this once she'd been doing it since childhood warning her about how habits can form that might possibly stunt the natural that was all that Lola said, its beginning and end, and I wanted to hear wanting doors swung open, and then wanting to open my own and I, too, found it difficult to find the words as a general rule, I mean opening those doors, my doorsfinding it difficult, but not so difficult when someone else it's a life inside someone else's head, and you could never begin to listening to the complexity of you could never have guessed at the contents sneaking a look, sticking your head around the comer and as a boy I knew a girl who asked if I wanted to in the privacy of her bedroom saying she'd show me hers if I showed her mine except for the presence of her little brother, edging in on things an early, sexual regret

waving him aside, having already seen his always wishing I would've made the trade.

Sometimes, in the middle of making love, I'd abruptly stop telling Lola that I was very feeling excited, as though I might even though I had no interest in coming and wanting very much not to come, to be able to continue to not at that point, anyway without the worry of and the only way I could do that was to tell her revealing the fear, the sense I had that I was on the edge falling over that edge bridging some imaginary or not-so-imaginary gap between us telling her, and then no longer feeling all alone that was always the problem, that feeling feeling excited, as though I might talking like that, as I and by the end of this little speech I was nowhere near coming, though I wasn't any less funny how that works, a trick at your disposal admitting a secret, an

embarrassing worry, and then when it comes down to it, it's really the only trick I've ever and it's always exhilarating to suffer zero consequences, or at least not the ones imagining them, mapping out the disasters having nothing better to do with my spare time a series of terrifying scenarios, like out of a child's head and the saying, An idle hour is a devil's playground, or whatever it that's not it, I know warning against masturbation, as though a hand with nothing better to do and as a kid with lots of spare time the dull hours of afternoon, cooking in the kitchen the hour coming, sooner and sooner

frightening me, as a child, making me wonder filling up spare time like a blank chalkboard just asking for it

a series of terrifying scenarios thinking too much, analyzing things unnecessarily better to masturbate, probably, but at the time unlike the quick-fingered Lola the difference between us.

I was waiting for a time when she'd feel more and at the very beginning Lola was more comfortable, but then

scaring me to see she wasn't exhilarated by confession getting excited by my own guilt, my own shortcomings, not to mention embarrassing to put it that way, exhilarated by confession turning things upside down in my mind, and so I'm no longer sure if it's really asking Lola if she could whether I could get to the point of forgiving myself living a less terrorized existence, feeling the acceptance of coming to accept my silly mind

working, meandering, stumbling, tripping over its own

not to mention the pleasure it gives me.

It was strange how Lola was sometimes prudish, even if at other times she was having it both ways asking her to do things, sexual things and I asked her to tell me wanting her to ask me but she never did that, except when she'd ask me to hold her, hug her

except when she'd ask me to be inside of her, above her she did ask for that, but there were other things and knowing she enjoyed many of the other she couldn't ask, or she thought those things were just meant to not to say that Lola didn't have her own little whims, strange proclivities telling me how she'd slept with making a list of them in my head, pencil scratching the history of these things unraveling, like a ball of not many, many men, that's not my point meeting the man, going to bed

it's the first time, and it's the start of it's the feeling of the beginning of hope, but mostly one-night stands, it turned out having next to nothing to do with go-go dancing, she said just a period in her life telling me, laughing, closing her eyes and shaking her head and that's when I wanted to hear about it

getting more and more curious, it seemed, while we were it didn't seem that way, it was

that way wanting Lola to tell me about the others, while we were making love stories of pleasure, and how she'd gotten excited and you'd think I would've feeling like just another man, another in a long list of another prick in a long succession of and so maybe it was a way of getting beyond telling me about the other men

privy to everything, and so doubly inside of Lola true to the feeling I felt telling me about these men, feeding me and one time telling me a story and saying out of the fucking blue Lola said, I walked into a room and Paul working on his bicycle, across the room, and I just stood there and watching him as he ignored me, working on his bicycle, using his hands, engrossed in his one ofher most cherished memories telling me this story while making love, right in the middle of out of the fucking blue not seeing at once what exactly

reasoning it out in my head, or trying to, as I kept moving watching him work, oblivious to her, engrossed in his and telling me that she wants to watch me

wanting me to make love to her as she wanting to watch me doing it and feeling strange at that moment including me in one of her a door swinging open hearing about one of her fantasies in all of its and at first I'm self-conscious at the idea relaxing, then, as she watches me, as I watch her watching me getting dizzy, and realizing that Lola makes me feeling a little angry because of that, the confusion confusing me, sending a whirlwind into my head, and into my heart trying not to do things, so that she'd begin to getting to the point of having to ask me begging is closer to the truth of what I mean but giving in long before that, finding it next to impossible wanting to tease Lola, and also wanting to punish her having it both ways, but not getting it feeling a little angry because

of that, the confusion and then, in a flurry, giving her whatever gives her pleasure and she feels it, too, and so she asks me, Are you angry with me?

And I'd say, Yes but then when she asked that same question it's the middle of the day, and it's got nothing to do with saying, No, I'm not angry saying that because it's true, not feeling particularly but when we were in bed, and I was or even when I was trying to tease her but feeling teased myself things getting twisted around, which was how it usually and I was angry, and I could feel it in my body more than and she liked that answering with my body when Lola asked that's why she kept asking, or I think that's why wanting to feel it in my body, in her body not hurting her, never pushing beyond a certain point, never saying, Yes, I am angry a bite, maybe, an urgent thrust, a furious kiss and Lola would do the same, since anger was her gift releasing the aggression, all at

once, in a single and even when she was giving me everything wanting her to see the extent of what it was not knowing what I wanted, but wanting to show her what I wanted, even if I couldn't and there were no words for that, and so stopping, sometimes, right in the middle of one of us stopping, suddenly disengaging, withdrawing to where now two of us, not one not feeling close enough, or it was feeling too much of everything and so the pleasure was homeless, meaningless, free-floating, or it was everything getting to be too much struggling to make sense of it, wondering where it was going Lola stopping things and saying to me, Talk to me and so it wasn't true that she never asked wanting me to fill her up with words saying, Talk to me, insistently and I'd talk, but sometimes I had nothing worrying that the pleasure she felt wasn't the same as the pleasure I felt telling her that that was O.K.

wanting her to relax and believe, even if she didn't have a reason a condition of life, isn't it, being alone in that kind of shaking her head no, and I wished she wouldn't do that, but then two of us, not one, and the standards to which she held us

never allowing herself to never having met anyone quite so nothing routine about what went on, in bed with Lola not knowing where we were headed, if anywhere playing with each other, for long, long increasing the danger, upping the ante the pleasure keeping up, doubling back on itself the whole idea of destination I couldn't even tell you thinking about pleasure, and anticipating it, getting close to it, thwarting it and afterwards, feeling sleepy, feeling small losing myself in it, and then regulating it, delaying it and afterwards, wanting to be touched and talked to, as though I were feeling pleasure the way I felt it, running the gamut a boy, a man, and then a boy again sometimes wanting to cry and

not knowing why not part of her fantasy tears welling up, and it's a total surprise and wondering whether she might whether my tears might wishing for her to see me wanting to be special, to be different even if Lola's fantasies ran the other way a man standing stoically, dry, eyed, at her side, as tears run slowly down her face and wanting the opposite from Lola, and asking for it the things you need, the things you want asking for whatever it is imagining the feeling of getting it closing your eyes in disbelief, in sudden gratitude or shaking your head at the unlikelihood, the sheer impossibility and that was the story of Lola and me.

Two Poems

Anne Winters

The Mill Race

Four-fifty. The palings of Trinity Church BuryingGround, a few inches above the earth, are sunk in green light. The low stones like pale books knocked sideways. The bus so close to the curb that brush-drops of ebony paint stand out wetly, the sunlight seethes with vibrations, the sidewalks on Whitehall shudder with subterranean tremors. Overhead, faint flickers

crackle down the window-paths: limpid telegraphy of the late afternoon July thunderstorm unfurling over Manhattan. Its set and luminous velocity, the long stalks of stormlight, and then the first drops strike their light civic stripes on the pavement. Between the palings, oat-panicles sift a few bright grains to the stonecourse. Above it, at shoulder height, a side door is flung open; a fire-exit: streaming from lobbies

come girls and women, black girls with ripples of cornrows and plaits, ear-hoops, striped shadowy cotton-topped skirts, white girls in gauzy-toned nylons, one girl with shocked-back ash hair, lightened eyebrows; one face from Easter Island, mauve and granitic; thigh on thigh, waist by waist; the elbow's curlicue and the

fingers'; elbow-work, heel-work, are suddenly absorbed in the corduroyed black,rubber stairs of the bus. Humid sighs, settlings, each face tilts up to the windows' shadowless yards of mercuric green plateglass. In close-up

you can see it in the set and grain of each face, despite the roped rainlight pouring in the bus,windowsit's the strain of gravity itself, life-hours cut off and offered to the voice that says, "Give me this day your life, that is LABOR, and I'll give you back one day, then another. For mine are the terms." It's gravity, spilling in capillaries, cheek,tissue trembling despite the makeup, the monograms, the mass-market designer scarves, the army of private signs disowning the workplace and longing for night

But this, at least, is the interspace. Like the slowing of some rural water mill, a creaking and dipping pause of black,splintered paddles, the irregularly dappled off-lighting-c-bottle-green=-the lucid slim sluice falling back in a spittle-stream from the plank-edge. It won't take us altogether, we say, the mill,race-it won't chum us up, altogether.

We'll keep this glib stretch of leisure,water, like our self's self-to reflect the sky.

But we won't (says the bus,rider, slumped, to herself). Nothing's left over, really, from labor. They've taken it all for the mill-race. Even now,

as the driver flicks off the huge felt-edged wipers, the rain slackening, lifting, labor lengthens itself along Broadway. Fresh puddles mirror in amber and crimson the night signs that wit has set up to draw money: O'Donnell's, Beirut Cafe, Yonah's Knish. People dart out from awnings. The old man at the kiosk starts his late shift, whipping off rain' streaked Lucite sheets from his new stacks of newsprint.

If there is leisure, bus,riders, it's not for you, not between here and uptown or here and the Bronx Outside Marine Midland, the black sea of unmarked corporate hire-cars waits for the belated office-lights, the long rainy run to the exurbs. Somewhere it may be, on a converted barn,roof in Connecticut, leisure silvers the shingles, somewhere the densely packed labor,mines running a half,mile down from the sky to the Battery's bedrock rise, metamorphic, in water-gardens, lichened windows where the lamp lights Thucydides or Gibbon.

It's not a water mill really, work. It's like the nocturnal paper-mill pulverizing, crushing each fiber of rag into atoms, or the smooth,lipped workhouse treadmill, that wore down a London of doxies and sharps, or the paper-mill, faerique, that raised the cathedrals and wore out hosts of dust-demons, but it's mostly the miller's curse-gift, forgotten of God yet still grinding, the salt, mill, that makes the sea, salt.

Sonnet: Three Images

One: A tenement door, a door set on its hinge in the nineties, sheathed with brown-painted iron and dented by the brooms of nocturnal drunks You must have lain almost embracing it, the way our breaking,in rolled you onto your back; left arm flung out. Two: unspeakable inner map of left arm: darkened veins and reddish-rimmed punctures and your fingers still slightly curled, on the floor beneath the swaying receiver You reached me, Marina, but

no one reached you. No one wanted to reach you. Just an old classmate too remote to hang up; and then, three, and all I'll keep of the whole thing, please God-the long pre-dawn bus ride across the upper city to your place. The strange fawn light falling everywhere, on empty comers and diners. The first coins dropping in the driver's metal bowl.

Rapid Transit

DanChaon

The night he got mugged, Alan Lowe had stolen his manager Mr. Dugan's long, hide-colored trench coat, which had been thoughtlessly left on the coat tree outside Dugan's office. Alan knew he was doomed; it was only a matter of time before Dugan fired him, so he thought: "Why not?" He'd been the last to leave that evening, and he'd taken the coat off the hook as if lost in thought, swinging it casually over his arm. Afterwards, he'd gone to a bar where he was sure he wouldn't see anyone he knew. He felt impressive and elegant in the coat. But by the time he left the bar, he had begun to worry again. He had to find some way to make Dugan like him. He had to find some way to hide how much he hated working at Pete Preneta and Co. He needed his job. He was thinking all this when he was thrown to the ground.

He didn't have any money on him. In fact, he'd awakened that morning in a cold terror over it. Apparently, he'd been dreaming of his bills, because they were on a circular track in his head, like an image from a nightmare he'd been startled out of. Even before he'd showered or brushed his teeth, he found himself at his desk with all his bills piled in front of him, calculating. It was the first time in his life that he saw no escape from his own irresponsibility, and he panicked. There were utility bills and rent that would be due in a few days. There was a government loan from college that was several months past due, but he hadn't really looked at it carefully. DEMAND FOR PAYMENT, it said. He had three credit cards that had already reached their limit, and a few days before a waitress came slinking back to his table to inform him that Visa had instructed her to retain his card. He

saw that even if he sent in the minimum payment every month, the balance wouldn't change very much: the rate of interest was too high. That morning he'd sworn to do something. But that evening, after he'd stolen the trench coat, he'd used a credit card to buy some drinks. One last time, he'd thought.

In the comic version of the story, Alan was a typical, wide-eyed Nebraska boy, and it took him a long time to register what was actually happening. The men grabbed him around the neck and waist, and as he was thrown to the ground he was aware of his arms and legs waving languidly as tentacles. "Wait a minute," he shouted. "Hold on, I'm ·slipping." That was when he struck the pavement and one of his attackers kicked him in the head.

Afterward, when he described the mugging to his co-workers and to his family back home, he found himself leaving out a good deal of what had really occurred. For example, he kept the part where the muggers found his wallet empty, and began to kick him over and over, shouting, "Where's the money?" But he didn't mention that as the men continued to kick him he'd cried, "Momma," and, "Oh, Mom, please help me," with each blow. The character he played in the story had a certain dry wit, enduring the attack with a startled, dignified innocence. When, in the story, the men shouted: "Where's the money?" the narrator responded: "I spent it!" He didn't want anyone to picture him as he often saw himself: squirming through the bits of garbage on the sidewalk, weeping, calling out for his mother. He didn't want them to imagine him playing dead less than two blocks from his apartment, his cheek pressed into a pool of his own vomit, staring at the things scattered in the patches of scrubby winter grass: a chicken bone, cigarette butts, the neck of a broken ketchup bottle. Every time he thought of himself this way, it made him actually dizzy with humiliation.

He wasn't seriously injured, though he looked terrible the next day, his face covered with bruises and scabs. His ribs and head were sore from being kicked, but he was sure nothing was broken: It would have hurt more if there was, he thought. The policemen who'd come to his apartment later, after he'd managed to run the few yards to his door and call them, had suggested he go to the emergency room, just to be safe. But he refused. He didn't have any insurance, and he knew how much those things cost.

The truth was, the policemen were somewhat annoyed with him. He

wasn't able to tell them what the men looked like, and he wasn't even sure in what direction they'd run off. The policemen kept exchanging ironic looks.

"You gay?" one of the men had asked him, and when Alan exclaimed, "Of course not," the man had shrugged.

"That's who they tend to go after," the policeman had said pointedly. "Fags."

"I have a girlfriend," Alan told them.

He and Sandy hadn't dated in almost six months. But he did consider calling her that night. It would have been nice to have someone sleep over. There was a telephone pole outside his window, with rusty metal stakes driven into it so someone could climb up. In the next few days, he began to dream that he woke to find a face peering in his third-floor window, a grimacing man with a knife clenched in his teeth like a pirate. And when he was outside, even in a crowd, he often felt as if the space around him were shimmering, as if at any moment the people nearby might grab him and throw him onto the cement, kicking him with their sharp shoes.

At least it was a good story, one he could tell exceptionally well. The morning after he was attacked, Alan was the center of attention, and the older secretary, the one who always called him "honey" and "sugar," was very concerned about the neighborhood he lived in. When she first saw his face, she'd let out a small cry of shock. Even Dugan had listened to Alan's story, and Dugan, who was white, like Alan, said he was reminded of the time he himself was held up on the el platform by five Puerto Ricans with knives. Dugan pulled up his shirt to show them a pale, leech-like scar above his left nipple. They'd tried to stab him in the heart. "Luckily," Dugan said, "I don't have one."

As they all listened to Dugan, Alan found himself wondering what Dugan and his co-workers were thinking of him. There were often times when he would feel as if he were lifting out of his body and observing himself from above. He could see himself clearly at this particular moment, standing there in a business suit he'd bought from a secondhand store. Though it was a Brooks Brothers suit, it was illfitting, and he was certain that everyone could tell that it was used. They were polished, had gone to fancy schools, had rich parents. They were going to be wealthy and successful, and Alan wasn't. Though he was twenty-two, he looked younger: big and gangly like a teenager who

hadn't yet grown into his body, with a round freckled face and cheeks that would not grow hair. His smile was broad and simple. He looked, people told him, like he was from Nebraska; a redneck, as someone had once unkindly put it. Standing there, he was aware that each of his coworkers had probably developed an unflattering version of him in their minds.

The co-workers were generally cordial, though, even if they weren't friendly. They kept their opinions to themselves, unlike Dugan, whose advice to Alan had the jovial, insulting edge of a football coach. "Lowe," he'd said once, "get another after-shave. You smell like a teamster. What the hell is that, Old Spice?" It was-a Christmas gift from his father, who was, in fact, a teamster. "Lowe," Dugan would say, "do you own an iron?" Or: "From now on, Lowe, don't bring a brownbag lunch. You want the clients to think you're Bob Cratchit?"

Dugan was a small burly man in his mid-forties; the backs of his hands and fingers were covered with dark bristly hair, and the day after the mugging, when Dugan leaned the ham of his palm against the top of Alan's computer, it seemed his hair had a burnished glow, as if he'd moussed it. "Lowe," he said, in a confidential, fatherly voice. "Look, I don't want to seem insensitive or anything, but you've got to get some more professional-looking bandages, man. We can't have clients coming in here and seeing you like this. You look like 'Welcome to My Car Accident."

Alan looked up. He had been staring at the blinking cursor on his computer for well over half an hour, and he didn't want Dugan to see how blank his screen was. "What?" he said.

Dugan told him again. He hated having to repeat himself; he'd take on the expression of a comic who had to explain his punch line. "This is the name of a drugstore on Superior," Dugan said, and handed him a slip of paper. "I'm sure they have something decent. Where'd you get that stuff? Woolworth's?"

"I just had a first-aid kit at home," Alan said, and Dugan nodded, flexing his hand as Alan smiled sorrowfully. The hot core of loathing Alan felt for Dugan was often cooled by the knowledge that Dugan was probably right. In his own way, maybe Dugan was really trying to help him. And everyone else on the floor seemed to like Dugan. Dugan had nicknames for some of the employees, little private jokes, and Alan would watch them laughing together beyond the glass wall of his cubicle. Some of them even called Dugan "Dave."

"I'll take care of it," Alan said agreeably. He gave Dugan a thumbs up, having seen Dugan do this himself on occasion, and tucked the slip of paper into his pocket. But Dugan just stared at him.

"Good man, Lowe," he said.

Sometimes Alan imagined that it was a small thing, a matter of shifting his attitude a few degrees to the right or left. Then Dugan and the rest of them would accept him. He had not been unpopular in college; he'd been in a fraternity, had even been elected secretary. He'd been the only guy in his house to date a Tri-Delt, the most beautiful sorority on campus. And though his girlfriend Sandy had eventually decided she was really more interested in women, she still liked him; as did many other pretty girls in her sorority. They had never commented on his clothes.

A terrible thing had happened to him when he graduated from college, he sometimes felt: a part of him had been stripped away, exposing the soft, ugly inside. That autumn, a homeless man had walked up to him and spit in his hair, for no reason. Apparently, the man just hadn't liked his looks. Another time he'd been by himself in a restaurant, sipping coffee, when a smartly-dressed, grandmotherly woman had glared at him from a nearby table. "Please don't watch me while I'm eating, sir," she said coldly. And even his old friends from college called him less frequently. They had jobs they were settling into, new lives.

So why wasn't Alan settling in as well? What was wrong with him?

In the mornings; he always resolved that his day at work would be a good one. Even that day, the morning after he was mugged, he'd tried to imagine himself as a young executive, purposeful, eager, the Pete Preneta and Co. Person they often spoke of in their memos. He loved the moment when he reached the elevator banks, the brush of shoulders as a group of people moved toward the opening doors, the sudden tingling in the pit of his stomach as the elevator glided upward. This was how he used to imagine himself when he was in high school, when he was riding in the passenger seat of his father's pickup with empty beer cans and .22 shells rattling on the floor. He would see himself in a suit and tie, sitting down at a desk on the upper floors of a skyscraper; he would see himself rich, his office full of gold-plated pens, large, intricate mahogany globes and a silver-leafed appointment book. He sat at his desk and took the stack of papers from the in-box,

smoothed and straightened them in the center of his desk. But when he looked down, it seemed as if these were the exact same memos and computer manuals he'd gone over the day before. He'd only been working there for six months, but already it seemed there was no discernible beginning, middle or end. Minutes and words began to melt into one another with the hallucinatory tedium of a lava lamp. By ten, Alan would find himself falling into dreams, his eyes closed, his fingers poised above his keyboard as if in brief, brilliant thought.

He spent a little time applying his new bandages in the shining, brassy bathroom. Dugan had been right: the old ones looked awful-dingy. A crust of blood had appeared through the gauze he'd taped to his forehead. But after he'd finished, the afternoon extended like a dark tunnel in front of him, and he found himself on one of the long errands he often felt compelled to make at this time of day.

That afternoon, he'd gone to the supply closet. He did this usually once or twice a week, and if he was lucky he would kill almost an hour collecting fine-point felt pens and stationery, Post'it notes and erasers. Noone seemed to notice how much he took, just as no one seemed aware of how little work he'd done, or where he was at any given point in the day. He always left his desk in a bit of a clutter, as if he'd be returning any minute; but no one, not even Dugan, seemed to be watching him. It was strange, he thought, because there had been no mention of Dugan's missing trench coat, either. Perhaps Dugan had forgotten about it.

At home, after he had put away his cache of office supplies, he tried on the trench coat again. He had hurried back to his apartment in the waning late January light, his back prickling as the streetlights began to hum, turning blue in the dusk. He'd jumped when a dour young woman had rushed past him on the sidewalk. Now, it was dark, and he pulled down the shades in all three rooms, fingering the black buttons of the trench coat through their holes.

In the mirror, he could see the trench coat had been ruined by the attack. It was wrinkled, scuffed with dirt. The sleeve had been tom a little, and the collar marked like a map with dark islands of blood. He doubted that a dry cleaner could bring it back to life, now.

He was in the habit of going out at night, sometimes with his old college friends, but most often these days, alone. There were a couple of bars he frequented-e-quiet, bluesy places that made him feel there was a

certain melancholy elegance to drinking by himself; there was an Italian restaurant he liked, and a Thai place. Sometimes he'd go to a movie or shop at a big used-record store he knew. This was city life: he was independent, faceless, and yet always a part of some larger organismlike coral.

But tonight, he felt too nervous to go out. His muscles tingled as if something were about to pounce from the darkness, and when he tried calling a couple of friends, there was no answer, only the sound of rings, each one like the threatening purr of a cat.

The next day, rent was due. But he didn't have enough money in his account, and he had even tried calling his parents. "Boy, I know it can be tough financially those first few years out of college," his father had said. "You know we'd help you out if we could, but we just can't." He couldn't bring himself to tell his father how desperate things were. How would he explain where his money had gone when he didn't know himself?

He decided that rather than panic, he would just have to wait a few weeks until his next paycheck. Then he would just go without groceries for a while, that was all. He tried not to let himself imagine his debt rolling over and over, accumulating. It would be all right, he told himself.

He was thinking this, actually whispering it under his breath, when he rounded the corner on the way to work and bumped into two boys. They had been walking close together, their shoulders almost touching, and he stepped into them as if into an invisible wall.

"Oh," he said. "Excuse me!" He grinned. They seemed young, maybe seniors in high school.

"You better take care, mister," said the taller of the two. "Your head in the clouds."

"Yes, well," he said, a bit flustered. They were at the mouth of an alleyway, near a liquor store that hadn't opened yet. In the distance, people were striding toward the rapid-transit station. "I guess I'm a little spaced out," he said. "Sorry." The boys exchanged glances, and it was then that he began to have a feeling. He hadn't been able to see his muggers-it was too dark and fast-but an image flashed through his mind, like a single frame of film, and he had the sudden intuition that these boys were his attackers. It was the way they looked at each other, as if trying not to chortle; it was the way they had their eyes fixed on

him. Yet they were so young and clean-cut. He told himself not to be paranoid.

"How much do you want for those sunglasses?" the taller one said. He was wearing a pair of yellow,tinted sunglasses that made him, he thought, look sort of hip. Sandy had given them to him. He took them off, and he sensed how easy it would be for the boys to pull him into the alleyway. He put his fingers on the grate across the liquor-store window. "They're not for sale," he said. "Thanks for offering."

"I'll give you ten dollars for them," the taller one said. The boys smiled, and Alan watched as the taller one took a black leather wallet out of his back pocket. Of course, many people have black wallets, Alan told himself. But it looked very much like the one the muggers had taken from him.

"Those are the nicest sunglasses I've ever seen," said the boy. "No, no," Alan said. "Seriously. They have sentimental value."

The two boys stood there, and Alan wondered whether he could grab something- a blade of broken glass, a stone- to fend them off. Then they turned. "Stay cool," the smaller one said. When they turned the comer, walking toward the space of ground where he'd been mugged, he thought he heard them laugh.

This was not a story that would amuse people, he thought: it made him sound insane. Often, he would finish relating some anecdote and the silent faces of his co'workers or friends would be like the heavy ticking of a clock. It made him cringe. Once, he'd told someone about the time he had worms as a child. It had seemed comical in his head, but afterward, when he was alone, he was so filled with disgust at himself that he'd struck his idiot mouth with his fist, making it bleed. Once, he was trying to tell Sandy about the Pete Preneta Trainee Week-how the company had shipped them all to Atlanta, where they lived in dorms and learned about Firm policy-but Sandy stopped him halfway through. She shook her head. "You know what's weird," she said. "You're not who you think you are." She wouldn't explain what she meant.

Alan gazed out the window of the train. He'd taken this trip hundreds of times now, but nothing ever looked familiar. They could be taking him anywhere. At some comers, buildings slid by only a few feet from the window; walls shuffled past in a blur of colors and textures-grimy red brick or wood or ancient brownstone, the crowns and curlicues and stylized letters of gang graffiti, billboard models with their eyes and teeth

blocked out. Then suddenly, there would be a flash of open sky, and an empty school yard would appear, or a street, tunneling its way toward Lake Michigan. Then, just as abruptly, the train descended into the underground, and there was only darkness, or in a sudden flicker of light, the crumbling damp walls and shadowy nooks and crannies of the subway. The train conductor mumbled out the names of the stops in bursts of static over the PA system, but Alan could never understand the words. Often, it wasn't until he recognized his stop that he was sure he wasn't going the wrong way.

The rent-of course it came back to him in the middle of the day, while he was trying to talk to Dugan. There was this buzz in his head, like interference from a distant station on the radio.

"So---like, my father," Alan was telling Dugan, "is in the unions? An organizer. He's, you know, fairly big." He wasn't sure how this conversation had started, how it had led into this lie about his father.

"What union?" Dugan said. He seemed vaguely interested, turning the heavy gold ring on his finger around and around.

"Teamster," Alan said quickly. "A real old-time progressive, you know."

"The unions are dying fast," Dugan mused. He looked at Alan pointedly, and Alan tried to remember where the conversation had been going before this terrible detour. It had been something about Dugan's parents.

"Well yeah," Alan said. 'That's what I tell him. He's always giving me crap about working here, for a corporation and all. But I tell him, you know, this is the nineties." This was one of Dugan's phrases, and Alan waited a moment for some slight acknowledgment.

"Hmrnm," Dugan said. This was the longest and most personal conversation Alan remembered he and Dugan ever engaging in. But it was fading fast. "Well, anyway," Dugan said.

"Hey," Alan said. "You know what I wanted to ask you." He hesitated for a moment, but the buzz in his head had grown loud enough that he thought he could risk it. "You know those emergency loans they talk about in the employee handbook?"

"Yeah?" Dugan said.

"How do you get one?"

Dugan considered him, his expression flickering. He looked suspicious, and Alan could sense that the rapport had been killed. So that's why he came to my office, Dugan was thinking. "What's the

emergency?" Dugan said at last.

"I don't know," Alan said weakly. "I'm out of money?"

Dugan's face was blank for a long second. Then, as if Alan's voice had just reached him from a long distance, he chuckled. "Nice, Lowe," he said. "Very cute."

A few days later, on a Saturday, Alan saw Dugan walking down a street. This was in Alan's neighborhood, far from the Gold Coast condo where Dugan lived. What was he doing here, Alan wondered, and he felt a trickling sensation go through him. He'd never before seen someone from work in the civilian world, and there was something unsettling about it. He saw Dugan come out of an occult bookstore wearing a thick leather jacket with a fur collar, striding slowly, purposefully away from him. He waited for Dugan to get a bit ahead of him, then he followed.

It was an unseasonably warm day for January, and Alan had been wandering the street all morning, trying to stay out of the apartment for fear his landlord would come looking for him. But he'd felt edgy and vulnerable out in the open, and he'd been trying to stick close to people. For a while, he'd browsed in windows beside an elderly lady in heavy makeup and a fur. Perhaps, he imagined, people passing would think she was his mother, and he tried to look bored and impatient. It wasn't long before he'd made her nervous, however, and she hurried away.

He'd followed Dugan a few blocks when he remembered that he was wearing the trench coat. The realization branched across his skin like frost: it was impossible, but he had actually forgotten that it was stolen. When he paid for the dry cleaning, it had been as if he'd purchased the coat. It felt like he'd always owned it, now.

He stopped and swiftly shed the coat. For a moment, he considered stashing it somewhere. But of course it would be stolen. He folded it a couple of times, and then rolled it up tightly, as his father had taught him to roll sleeping bags, on camping trips when he was a child. He bent down and picked up a piece of newspaper that was lying on the street, wrapping it carefully around the bundled coat. When he tucked this cocoon-like creation under his arm, it looked like he was just carrying a newspaper-the Sunday edition, but a paper nevertheless.

Dugan had stopped too. He was peering into a storefront window, absently drumming his thighs with the heels of his hands, as if trying to remember a tune. From a distance, Dugan's mouth looked odd, doll-like.

It took Alan a minute to realize Dugan was whistling.

Alan hung back. He knew he should take his opportunity, tum back before Dugan caught sight of him. And yet there was something exciting about this. For once, it was as if he knew more than everyone else on the street, he had his own secret purpose. He was transformed into someone shadowy yet magnetic, someone larger. Maybe this was what his muggers had felt.

Dugan was completely unaware. He walked on, pausing sometimes in front of a store. Where was he going? Alan cruised easily around the little islands of walking people, sometimes letting Dugan drift far ahead, sometimes drawing close enough that if Dugan turned, he would surely see him. But he didn't tum.

At the end of the block, Dugan went into a coffee shop. When Alan got to the entrance, he peered in the doorway just in time to see the hostess leading Dugan to a booth. The angry-looking Greek man at the cash register looked over at Alan. Alan smiled. He'd been in this coffee shop several times, and the man, the owner apparently, was always nasty to him.

"You coming in or going out? What?" the man said to him. "You want me to heat the whole world?" Alan pulled back uncertainly, but he surprised himself by giving the man the finger. Then he went out quickly, imagining for a moment that the man might come after him. But the man just waved a tired hand at him, making an ugly face from beyond the glass doors. Alan tapped his crotch, as he'd seen disgruntled people do. "Heat this," he said, and then he stepped back a few paces, out of the man's line of vision, and leaned against the wall. He didn't want to get in a confrontation and risk drawing Dugan's attention.

But he was pleased with himself. "Heat this": it was a very urban thing to say, the kind of response Dugan himself might have for such a person. Generally, Alan never thought of quick comebacks until long after the fact; often they would come to him when he was trying to go to sleep, and he lay there with his eyes open.

People walked by and he looked at their shoes. Sandy had once told him that if you make eye contact with people on the street, you're asking for trouble: that was in July, when he'd nodded at a man in a big Russian-style fur hat as he and Sandy came out of a bar. The man had followed them for blocks, asking for money, and they hadn't been able to go to the automatic teller machine until he'd finally given up on them. "What's wrong with you?" Sandy had said afterward. "Do you like being harassed?" But it was hard to avoid looking into people's faces;

often he'd find himself smiling and saying "Morning" to those he passed, as his father used to on the streets of their small town.

But now, he didn't look up. He leaned back against the wall, hardening his face, narrowing his eyes as if he were concealing a weapon. It made him smile a little to imagine that some redneck was walking by, trying not to look at him.

When Dugan came out, that warm sensation of menace rose up in Alan like a rush of adrenalin. It was the opposite of what he'd been feeling on the street for weeks now. He followed Dugan again. The people strolling by seemed as vulnerable and trusting as the pigeons that waddled around statues downtown, moving out of the paths of passersby so slowly you could kick one, if you wanted.

It wouldn't feel bad to kick Dugan, he thought. There was something annoyingly mincing about the way he walked. He was so proud of those dainty, slipper-like Italian shoes, with their ridiculous sheen, and Alan could tell he was keeping an eye on the ground to avoid stepping in something that might mess them up a little. It wouldn't feel bad to take a blowtorch to those shoes.

Nothing bad could ever happen to Dugan: that was how he acted, that was what he said with his pace and his whistling. He would never lock eyes with a crazy man on the street; such a person didn't quite exist in Dugan's dimension. He never shuddered as strangers brushed past. Not even a knife in the heart could faze him.

Alan's hands were shaking, but it was a good feeling. When he was little, his father imagined he was going to be an athlete, and taught him how to box. If he let down his guard, his father struck a good one to his face or chest, and by the end of a session, Alan's hands would be shaking like that. "You got the butterflies?" his father would say, feigning punches. "You nervous?" That was good, his father told him. It meant his body was getting him prepared.

Prepared for what?

He wasn't going to do it, he thought. But then Dugan was slowing down, flexing his shoulders luxuriously, as he always did when he'd made some nasty comment. Nice, Lowe. Very cute, Alan thought, and then he knew he was going to do it after all. They had strolled off the busy street, away from the shops and people, and when Alan saw Dugan tum down a narrow alleyway, toward a parking lot, Alan quickened.

He felt his hand pull the trench coat from under his arm; he worked swiftly to unravel it as he came up on Dugan, stretching it out, and just as Dugan heard the rushing footsteps and began to tum, Alan pulled the

coat over his head from behind.

This muffled Dugan's surprised cry; Alan jerked back on the coat, and he could see the shape of Dugan's face, like a mask emerging on the surface of the canvas. It was easy to knock him to the ground. Alan had once helped one of his father's friends clip the ears ofhis calves, and this was much easier than throwing a calf. Dugan struck earth, and Alan landed on his back with both knees, knocking the wind out of him.

"Help!" Dugan gasped, and Alan struck him with his fist.

"Shut up!" Alan said in a deep voice. He was trying to imitate a street accent, but it came out more like a Southern one. "I've got a knife, you motherfucker, and I'll use it."

"This is a busy street!" Dugan cried. "Someone will be coming!" His voice was barely intelligible: Alan had tightened the belt of the coat around Dugan's neck, creating a sort of bag over Dugan's head. But when he realized what Dugan was saying, it made sense: he had to hurry. They were kneeling beside a trash dumpster, and he maneuvered behind it with Dugan still beneath him, shoving toward the blackened back wall of the building as one might push off from a dock. Dugan's hands clawed the cement, and Alan picked up a long shard of broken glass and pressed it against Dugan's back.

"You think you're so great," Alan said through his teeth. "You really need to suffer a little, man." His accent wavered, and he knew he shouldn't talk; Dugan would surely recognize his voice. Alan pressed the glass harder against Dugan's back, and Dugan let out a small shriek, though he wasn't cut.

"For the love of God," cried Dugan. "I've got money! Credit cards! Take them! Take them!" And Alan did reach into Dugan's pocket and draw the wallet out.

But that wasn't what he wanted. He didn't know what he wanted, really, or how this could possibly have happened. He could feel the adrenalin ebbing away, and he felt as if Dugan was a raft he was kneeling on, adrift on the open sea.

He did want Dugan to suffer-but there was nothing he could bring himself to do that would hurt him enough. He wished he could think of some word, something that would go straight through Dugan's heart as no weapon could.

"You he said, and he hoped his voice boomed. But he couldn't think how to finish the sentence, and there wasn't time to ponder it. "Say 'Momma,"'Alan said at last, and Dugan paused for a moment, then did.

"Momma," Dugan said woodenly. Alan wanted to make him repeat it with more conviction, but his stomach was beginning to feel heavy, and all he could think was to reach down and pull off Dugan's shoes. He wasn't wearing socks, and his pale feet lay there like beached fish. Alan slipped his belt off and knotted it tightly around Dugan's ankles. That would give him time to run, he thought, and he could picture himself melting into the groups of people on the distant street, walking lightly in Dugan's shoes, off toward where the train was pulling into the station, waiting to bear him away.

Two Poems

Alan Shapiro

Lethe

You called me to come see the bees. Come out of the house you called once, in a bad time, when we were lost to each other, blurred by habitual regard, disgruntled and aloof though not from injuries, but from a hoarded sense of being injured, precious so long as vague, vague so long as silent.

By the marigolds you planted they were all hovering, hundreds of bees, it seemed, like bright flecks of the lavish blossoms they were drawn to, each long stalk tipping over under the pressure as they clung together, crowded and swarmed the way Virgil says the souls do by the waters in Elysium:

even there among the blessed groves, the lush green of bodiless pleasure, weightless now, unstrictured, free, they swarm to drink oblivion and again put on the body's weight. I leaned down close to look, to see what you saw, and as I did, unconsciously you rested one hand on my shoulder,

in an old way, dormant for how long? Time, unresting time, beautiful and perverse, how suddenly it could lift us clear of our own shade to a luminous attention it just as suddenly extinguished, as the bees moved on, the shade, now, darker for that briefrespite. Poor souls, Aeneas asks, how can they crave our daylight so?

Manufacturing

Up in the billboard, over old South Station, the Captain, all wide grin and ruddy cheek, held up a golden shot of Cutty Sark high as the skyline where the sunset spread a gold fan from the twig-like spars and rigging of a departing clipper ship. Above the picture the dull haze of a real sun rose, dragging the day up with it. Seven o'clock. The agitated horns, brakes, fingers and catcalls down below me were already merging and channeling everybody on to warehouse, factory, department store and office.

My father and uncle talking over all the goods to be received that day, the goods delivered, their two reflections in the window floating like blurry ghosts within the Captain's grin, their voices raised a little above the soft erratic humming of the big machines, the riveters and pressers, warming, rousing: The Century order, did it get out last night? And had the buckles come from Personal? Who'd go do Jaffey? Who'd diddle Abramowitz and Saperstein? Those cocksucking sons of bitches, cut their balls off if they fuck with us

How automatically at any provocation I can aim the words at anybody now, woman or man, the reverberating angry this, not that, in "pussy," "cocksucker," "fuckhead," hammered down so far inside me it's almost too securely there to feel. But I was thirteen then, and for the first time old enough to have my father say these things in front of me, which must have meant I was man now too, I listened (blushing,

ashamed of blushing) for clues of what it was I had become, or was supposed to be:

It did and didn't have to do with bodies, being a man, it wasn't fixed in bodies, but somehow passed between them, going to by being taken from, ever departing, ever arriving, unstoppable as money, and moving in a limited supply it seemed to follow where the money went. Being a man was something that you did to other men, which meant a woman was what other men became when you would do them. Either you gave a fucking, or you took one, did or were done to, it was simple as that.

Somebody shouted from beyond the office that Tony had passed out in the can again. The lush, the no good lush, my uncle said, get him the fuck out of here for good, will ya. The stall door swung back, scrawled with giant cocks, tits, asses and cunts, beyond which in the shadows my father was gently wrestling with the man, trying to hold him steady while his free hand shimmied the tangled shorts and trousers up over the knees and hips, and even got the shirt tucked in, the pants zipped deftly enough for Tony not to notice, though he did.

Even then I knew they'd fire him, and that it wasn't gratitude at all that made the man weep inconsolably, his head bowed, nodding, as my father led him to the elevator, still with his arm around him, patting his shoulder, easing him through the door. I knew the tenderness that somewhere else could possibly have been a lover's or a father's could here be only an efficient way to minimize the trouble. And yet it seemed

somehow my father was too adept at it, too skillful, not to feel it in some way.

And feeling it not to need to pull back, to separate himself from what the rest of him was doing, which was why, I think, his face throughout was blank, expressionless, like the faces of the presidents on the bills he handed Tony as the door slid shut. The men fast at the riveters and pressers and the long row of women at the Singers were oil now even more than men or women, mute oil in the loud revving of the place, a blur of hands on automatic pilot, slipping the leather through the pumping needles,

under the thrusting rods, the furious hammers, the nearly invisible whirring of the blades. Come on now, AI, it's time, my father said, and the Captain seemed to grin a little wider, as if his pleasure there at the end of his unending day grew freer, more disencumbered, because he saw me at the start of mine, under my father's arm, his soft voice broken against the noise into an unfollowable tune of favors and petty cash, and how much ass he had to kiss to get me this, and I should be a man now and not disappoint him.

Three Marys

Terri Brown Davidson

In the blackening light that dapple of blemishes on their backs made her want them. And, rose-gray or red, how easily she tipped them to their glistening pale underbellies silvered with moon. A "huddler," they called her-a Mary who loved rocking, awaiting any toad that eyed her bulbous-mouthed then sank. All three Marys huddled. In their sixth-grade homeroom the redheaded Mary shrank from stark noonlight as though she were a blood-sucker, The blonde Mary, a giggler, snorted over Classic Comics while, in her skull, reflections roiled of her breast-budding, mirrored torso. Brunette Mary, the "Anguisher," dreamed noon and night of animals. In the silence of her soiled kitchen she felt herself flush from socks to undershirt as if boiling out of her body to gaze down at her momma's parted hair, forced to swim farther and farther out from the boozy table glass to see her own dwarfed body cradle, stroke, a rubbed-velvet doe muzzle or wonderfully hefty toad.

It was their eyes she kept craving. Mauve and bubble-soft. In art class her watercolors only soiled clean paper. Where have you been, her mother demanded when, that Thursday, October 27th, she materialized at the screen in her fuchsia sweater and jacket, cupping a sealed jar. Mary didn't answer. She'd left, she knew, her friends on their beds, 75

each stiffening with a sorrow she could scarcely describe to the gaunt coveralled woman whose red-rimmed eyes swam a little sauced. The clock chirped out its cuckoocall angst as Mary carried the jar to her room. Inside, a fat-bellied garden spider struggled to attach her web. Tossed her silk everywhere. But the slick-glassed jar sides furnished no twigs. Mouth pressed to her palms, on her bed Mary watched the spider circle faster and faster. No fly to catch her. In that glass, alone,

the three Marys crouched. Passing her hand through topsoil and moss, seeking halved squirrel-shells nutmeat had abandoned, Mary the Giggler, bored with the game, proposed another to that darkening silence. To take off their clothes. To stand naked under starshine's tentative glow. To reveal their scars. Mary the Giggler removed her plaid jacket. Brunette Mary noticed with quickening interest how Mary Giggler's breasts puffed up her 'Tshirt. Red Mary sheared the dead foliage off a branch, stabbed it into the dirt till it broke. Dusk broke then, flinging its violet gauze, slightly startling, over Mary Giggler's body as she peeled off her black T and stepped out of her underpants. Red Mary glanced. The freckled moon of her face stole white glow from those legs, her mouth moved left and right as she circled with Brunette Mary the trunk of Mary Giggler's body, the paling slash where she'd driven her left knee into a barbed-wire mesh, the long twist back of her calf where Mary had fallen on broken glass and tom herself open on the street.

Then-Red Mary's turn. That's what Brunette Mary recalled though, on her bed, the spider discombobulated in her unfurnished jar, she could scarely remember dusk deepening then or how the whitish tree trunks sank outlined to shadow. Red Mary, trembling, circled a sagging oak. The clothes that she dropped on one tree side blossomed holes. A ripped, filmy undershirt, pinkish shredded panties. Brunette Mary pictured herself outside her body, her lips swallowing blackness as they rounded

their O's. Red Mary sidled. It was a velvet-black evening, and her body shone lovely as a planet, a star, as she floated into their midst. Brunette Mary gazed up that V to her breasts at the extraordinary crimson of Red Mary's body. Crisscrossed with scars lacing and looping, like paint splashes they blotched or ran, some ragged where the wounds were still fresh, some scabbing over, frayed and crusty, others half-pried as if Mary had picked them. And beyond that, the starkness of Red Mary's white body, the translucence of what must have been her skin beneath wounds, the thick-throated hoarseness of the toads near the banks, their gusty bellowing shifting distant and closer, closer and away, as the three Marys, in a tightening cluster just beginning to shiver, listened and listened.

Stink

John Engels

My father, I don't want to, won't, can't talk about him, know it's wrong of me, isn't Christian, I've confessed it once a week now my whole life, but he was a bad man, and I hated him-so this

is a punishment, that I can't wear my glasses anymore, the sores on my nose won't allow it, I can't read the Blade anymore, can't read anything, can't see to get around the house, though you'd think I'd know

my way blindfolded after seventy years in this one place, but my shins tell the story, a mess of blood and scabs, and I blacked an eye last week on the bedroom door, can't see

the garden, only smell it, of course the garden's another story, I know where everything is, remember the layout perfectly, it's where

I really ought to live, and if I were all blind I could still find my way to anything, give you all the names of the big smells-lilacs, of course, but alyssum, too, and iris, and the rose, the climbing Blaze, only

the one, never cared or could get interested in any but this old climber, takes no care, I spend more time propping up the trellis than on feeding and pruning and all the rest you've got to provide those delicate, fainting hybrids. As for me

and my own trellis, well, I never was much of a bloomer even when I was young, but never delicate, either, and occasionally you could have found me

easy enough by the smell-I carried peanuts in a pocket every day for seventy years, smoked Holiday pipe tobacco, sweetened myself up with witch hazel or Mennen Skin Bracer, produced my good share of sweat, made fragrant more than one shirt, hat, pair of shoes, have given off

more than a faint stink of sin, I'm sure, only one truly big one, though, not prideful to say I always tried to be a good man, good to my daughter, now dead, to my wife, now dead, my friends, most of them dead too, and to the world in general, as much as I could be-with failures plenty, of course, plenty

to be ashamed of, but I tried my best, my best gift the garden, full of good smells and colors. But I never once tried not hating him. I won't list the miseries he made for me, but it does go on, this anger, this sinful hatred, I'd make him die

every day over a lifetime if I could, toothless and weak and helpless in his bed, and all of us out of cold duty in the room, that stinking room, old sweat, the rot of his old meat breaking down, rubber tubing, piss and shit and through

the window, faint as anything could be and still be said to be, that contrary fragrance of the lilacs, big hedge of them outside the sickroom window-now

I can't get the smell out of my nose, I think it's coming off of me, even in the garden on the warmest days of warm soil, the greenest days of the fullest blossoming, I can smell myself beyond hope of washing it off. Damn

to hell these sores on my nose that keep me from seeing, the cankers eating in, almost to the bone by now, every morning I expect to see white bone each side of my nose, under my eyes, except of course

I can't see, not the rose blooming, not the bone baring itself, I'm here sort of in between, squeezed between the sweet scents of rose and iris and lilacs and my own rising stink, my own slow ingrowth on the trellis, so to speak, or maybe

the trellis is coming out, whichever way I need to look at myself will do-this day or that one, the blur in the mirror, scaly, thin, harless, blind, its insides

breaking out or the outsides drawing in, sucked in, I think it's that latter, like something at the roots feeding, the gopherous soul, anyway something that's been in there so long

it's forgotten the differences between itself and the darkness it gives off and thinks of itself if it thinks at all

as a power ofhunger, pulling everything that's outside in, swallowing, a nonstop feeding, a horror of piss and shit around it, under and inside, the bone

gnawing its slow way out, the meat shrinking in, in the end each neither one nor the other, and here it is

starting on my nose, pretty soon will follow the cave-in onto the hollowness, the skull flooding with a true circulation of sweet air, with garden smell, no in and out to it, only a fullness of rose, iris, lilac, fine

slow rot of fall leaves. He beat me, took me out of school, made me walk behind the buggy all the way to town breathing the dust, sweating, stepping around the horse turds, but that's the nature of my complaint, petty, not near enough to account for eighty years of rage and hate. I could say he went at his food like a pig, came home drunk, pissed under my window, stank, most of all stank, never washed, stank like feet, tobacco, stale drink, mud and cowshit, old clothes, soggy papers, hair and rat-bones, stank

like he rotted where he stood-you can see

this can't be true, I've been out of control on this subject for seventy years, that's why I won't talk about it, can't talk about it, it's bad enough

to know I'm going to burn for all this hate. Meantime I'm given to making myself smell good, colognes and aftershaves leave a trail behind me through the house-I don't care,

after that last shave

I want the undertaker to slap it on, a good big dripping palm full of Mennen's Skin Bracer or lacking that a good Jamaican witch hazel, provide me the best smell that can be managed, given the circumstance, then close the lid on it,

though probably something will linger out there along with the roses, or lilacs, or maybe, if I manage to check out at the right time of year, some nicotiana, sweetest of all, maybe will linger

a faint sour edge to the place, some whiff of what they used to call miasma, noxious vapor, but for lack of the proper term, shit I said then, and I say it now.

Four Poems

Bruce Weigl

Fever Dream in Hanoi

The gold red and green carp surfaces in the lake where I struggle. Angry and impatient with me he shakes his head big as a baby's head towards the lake's center. I'd been half,swimming, half,treading water to try to make the shore where small lights blinked around the perimeter before tiny stands where women squatted in that particular Vietnamese way selling their few packs of cigarettes, their few bottles of warm beer.

Lovers linger too among banyan trees tangled. They nuzzle each other. They coo and laugh for these stolen minutes away from the crowded family houses. The lights and the confessional lovers

all seem to call to me when I wake in the lake of the returned sword. The carp shakes his head towards the shrir on the island lit only with the light of the Buddha's eyes.

I thought my life was calling from the lamp,lit lover's shore. I thought my death called too from the dark water, deeper. The carp shakes his head, old hooks and fishing line strung in the moon like a beard. He swishes the fan of his tail splashing green water across my face. I'm on my back, floating somehow towards the temple, the face of the carp changed, a human smile on his lips, the Hanoi moon slashed across his back so I see scales shine and the blood gills pulse. The lovers tum away from each other to the lake's black edge, and the old women blowout their small lanterns and tum too towards the lake as if in prayer. I'm being towed now, the gold carp's hooks snagged through the skin on my back. With his eyes he tells me not to fight. He tells me of my perfect death waiting at the shrine like a lost spirit and then I wake, burning with fever in the guest house on Nguyen Du

by the lake where lovers walk in the dark evening's desire. Two men and a boy hold coal-hot doss sticks to points on my wrists and feet where my cold blood is still. Another man taps needles deep into my back, down my spine until a cry or grunt escapes my lips and he nods his happy affirmation as my gut begins to stir, a snake coming alive, uncurling itself inside me, my head swimming, my skin hot then cold then hot again, musky waves of sickness through which he tows me with his needles and I float.

I let go of everything. I let go of my family the thousands of miles away. I let go my days and my hours and my sad minutes and I let go the love of those in whose minds I can't find myself. I let go the songs, each note a white bird diminishing. I let go the words. Every word ever uttered. I let go the world. I spin off the world, the hooks in my back pulling me upwards, upwards and away.

Three Meditations at Nguyen Du

I have loved more than a few good men who were boys in the green slanting rain of bullets, cut through yellow bamboo.

On the street of a thousand sighs in Hanoi

I found a simple Buddha high on a gold lacquered shelf in a small room of prayer. Pulled down to my knees by a girl in a yellow ao dai, I was no longer afraid of the spirit I was, trying to become the man

•

Before me, my father's unlikely immigrant father appeared in the rosy incense smoke.

He who made shoes from sheets of hard leather with his hands and a knife.

He who fixed all broken things and butchered lambs in spring. He who in his anger had made my father kneel down on dry com his raging hands had shucked

•

I have never knelt on dry com, and he has never prayed on the floor of a stranger's house, in Hanoi,

yet through the years that cling to the razor sharp kernels

came the belt and the backhands out of nowhere, my father, beating like an angel for heaven, through me.

What I Saw, What I Did, in the Alley

Some lonely boy from the neighborhood with the St. Vitus Dance from when a truck backed over his wagon nearly crushing his skull made a crossbow from the leaf springs of a car and haunted our summer dusk streets beyond the long mill. I found the cat dead in the alley, a homemade arrow nicely through its skull. Running home late, I stumbled on the cat and had to stop. By the scruff of his alley neck I held Mr. Unknown Cat and looked into his eyes green as bamboo and reckoned our kinship of killing in that alley and beyond where needful of love and of blood I stunned the brown sparrow, the robin and wren, the wild canary in spring. Don't ask how they felt in my hands, still warm, bubble of blood on their beaks, to nowhere their dead wings unfold.

Words for the Husky Girl

I see her pretty bulk back there in the summer drunken days. Her mother dressed her like a princess, so the bows and rows of white and pink chiffon would make her seem as thin and light as air that raised her skirts. Our sins are great. We taunted her like hungry wild dogs at flesh fresh tom and trembling in high grass. Our sins are great. Our dreadful hunger fades.

Four Poems

Marc]. Straus

The Bogeymen

Sometimes the sound of violence is so soft it barely tips the antennae of a summer's moth. There's a pattern to its thud that mixes neatly with coffee machines and children's laughter. Then, at that moment of conscious recognition we know the tune is old and familiar-and we avoided itdid we not? A certain quiet, a lost adjective, an eyelash an angstrom off.

Sometimes the silence is hidden in the eyes, a tiny blepharospasm that we physicians see. And yet, it eluded me for 23 years. I remember how she hid behind the screen, as I intervened when the fury focused at her. I'd protected my sister from the bogeymen, real and imagined. Why did she endure this indignity alone while I shed the ghosts of my scars?

We're told that we get used to things, like the noise of the subway rattling by or the wash on the neighbor's line, the first gray hair, and the second. The first lost hair. What choice do we have? We can choose not to smoke. We can choose to move. We can put up our hand and say, "Silence is only broken by clarity, and by me."

A Big Black Crow

My portion is small. A couple of worms. Some maggots. Nothing that would interest you. I sat on this old carcass once, on a quiet highway, hardly having to move all day for twelve wheelers. I almost fell asleep and some kid pulls up on a bike and watches me. I watch him. He's too young to be disgusted, not tainted yet by adults pouring cream in coffee, dipping meats in alcohol, frying perfectly fresh food until it drips like sap from an old maple, licking hot fat off their lips. So I stare at him, nice kid with red hair and brown eyes, as if to say, I cherish my portion. It's small. A maggot here. A maggot there.

Dr. Gold and Dr. Green

You know, when I first became ill I went to see that pill Dr. Gold. He'd never smile like you. He'd come in with a long face being evasive, always staring at his shoelaces. I know I shouldn't say that to you, but what can I do? I never knew what was going on. I was ready to quit, and then you'd come in and sit here and make me feel it was worth it, the pain and nausea, the awful mouth sores and diarrhea, and those low counts and fever.

I always say God bless you Dr. Green. Dr. Gold has track shoes on. You never seem to be in a hurry even

though you're so busy. I trust you, but you know how nervous I get when you tell us the results of the tests. I know I can be such a pest, but I'd like a little rest before the next treatment, at least till I'm stronger. You know I'm responsible and I'll come in when I'm not this ill.

Dr. Gold and Dr. Green, II

Eleanor, did you mean that I'm Dr. Gold or Dr. Green? It certainly seemed that when you described how Dr. Green always tried to spend time with you, it applied to me. I thought I did my best to review the results of the tests with you, knowing how depressed you were. I was cautious to avoid the one word that would always perturb you. I heard the pain pressing on your trachea and saw the waves of nausea, the mouth sores and bouts of diarrhea.

But some days I suppose I too had track shoes on. Were those the days you chose

to call me Dr. Gold? Now, I only wish you told me how impersonal, how controlled

I'd been. I guess there were times, dear Eleanor, that I was simply unable to do more. I didn't recognize this before your poem Dr. Gold and Dr. Green. You tried to say that each of us has two sides. I wish I understood this before you died.

From Working Papers

John Skoyles

Beckman's Funeral Home was bordered by Red Hickey's Garage on one side, and by the train trestle of the Long Island Railroad on the other. Mrs. Beckman had planted roses along the cyclone fence that surrounded it, in the dream of softening the noise with a floral barricade, but the men from Hickey's yelled and buzzers rang all day amid the clang of dropped tools. A neon sign read, "Cracked Blocks and Heads Repaired." The train station was a popular hangout, and the twenty-foot concrete walkway beneath the trestle overflowed with colorful graffiti, the scrawl of gangs and lovers. The initials L.A.M.E followed most names: "Monk and Joanne L.A.M.E" and "The Gladiators L.A.M.E" Like A Mother Fucker. Quartets of thugs harmonized there for the resounding echo and boys lay between the rails for fun, letting trains pass over them. Grass sprouted in patches near the railroad ties, a soft bank for making love.

Beckman's was one of many funeral homes in Elmhurst, Queens, an Irish and Italian neighborhood where Beckman, a German, was a third party who made everyone comfortable. His slight lisp was impeded further by an accent, and he wore horn-rimmed glasses. He had given me an unforgettable ride home one summer day after a baseball game at Newtown Field, setting the air conditioning so high I could see my breath.

Mr. Beckman greeted us at the door, looking just like one of his boys, three flabby lummoxes who played endless games of stickball in the schoolyard. Even on Saturday, when everyone stayed far from school, the three of them pitched and swung their broomhandles feverishly.

The batter stood before the brick wall's chalk rectangle; if he didn't swing and the ball went in, it was a strike. They spent most of the time arguing, proving their points with evidence of chalk dust which they wiped off the ball with spit, rubbing it on their stomachs after each pitch.

My Uncle Jinx talked to a policeman in a comer of the chapel. As we passed, Jinx held a radio up to the cop's squinting eye, saying, "And here's a compartment for keeping valuables."

"Do you know what I'm doing?" Jinx asked my father.

"I'd say you're selling," my father answered and kept walking.

Tall, bald, elegantly dressed, Jinx stood apart. His head was all skin and teeth. His mouth always seemed to be open, hovering on the brink of a big "How are you?" to be followed by a strong handshake or hug from the crook of his arm. His double-breasted gray suit fit his large shoulders easily. In him the great rude strengths of the laboring classes were cloaked in the pampered fabrics of the rich.

Jinx didn't hold a real job. My father said he'd gone into "The Rackets." I liked the sound of it, and said it over and over to myself: The Rackets.

After kneeling at the coffin for a prayer, I walked past him, but he reached around and yanked me from my parents, introducing me to his friends, and saying to each, "Say hello to my nephew."

One of the men was Joey Archer, the former middleweight champion. To my shock, he was shorter than me.

"Howald are you?"

"Sixteen."

"Big boy," Joey said, slapping my shoulder. "All you need's a couple more pounds."

I had seen him on TV, on the Friday-night fights, and couldn't take my eyes off his twisted nose, his very pink face made brighter by the thick white scar tissue above his eyes.

I heard shouting, and turned to see Linda and Mae, my two aunts, arguing.

In their forties, neither had married, and they lived with my grandmother on the first floor of our railroad flat. My aunts took the same subway line, but left for work separately each day: Linda on time, Mae late. Prim and curt, Linda never said more than a word. She had used her influence to get me a summer job in the mailroom of

Paramount Pictures, where she worked, and soon I would be leaving with her for Manhattan every morning. Mae's personality had two sides: hilarity or depression. She either made jokes to steer a serious subject aside, or was overwrought and unable to speak, but at the wake she spoke in even tones, insisting that Grandma should be wearing her glasses, since that's how everyone knew her. Out of her purse she pulled the wire spectacles which she began to unfold. Linda slapped at them, saying that glasses were for seeing, and now that her eyes were closed, what was the point?

Mae raised the open glasses above my grandmother's face while Linda tugged at her forearms and looked around for help. I leaned between Mae and the coffin until my mother ran over, saying they were being silly, and everyone began to cry and sat back down.

Crying, too, carne suddenly from several rows back, where Jinx's blond wife, Margie, sat next to an older man, who draped his arm around the back of her chair, patting her shoulder sympathetically.

I had once overheard my mother and Linda discussing Margie. My mother said "her eyes are so hard you could scratch them with a pin," and Linda said she had "a bad skin." I didn't like the phrase "a bad skin." The article was the startling bit of diction to me. It separated her from her skin, which I thought looked just fine.

On the way horne, I said, "Did you see Joey's nose, Dad, how it was all twisted."

"It's been broken a lot."

My mother said, "Some fighters have their nose bone removed, after it gets broken too many times, and that's what's happened to him. He has not a bone left in that nose at all." And she shrugged.

"Jinx said that I could go with him and Joey to the fights sometime," I said.

"Did he say that?" My mother looked at my father.

"It won't happen," my father said to her. "Jinx is all talk."

"It won't happen even if he does invite him." She turned to me.

"I won't have you with those characters, did you see them fidgeting the whole time?"

"I'll bet Joey Archer gets ringside seats," I said.

"No fights with Mr. Archer and that's it. Conclusion."

When my mother said "Conclusion," she drew a box in the air with her forefingers. Her two fingers started out together, traveled apart, down and then back along the base of the imaginary rectangle until

they met again. In it, all rebuttals shriveled and vanished.

I woke to music from the radio in the kitchen, which faced the backyard and was bright with summer light banging off the sheets hung just outside the window. The bathroom sink fumed with shaving cream and bay rum. My father had already left for work and these were his only traces.

I pulled on my chino pants and knotted one of my two ties, choosing the Hawaiian pattern over the paisley, and I could hear my mother's favorite disc jockey, Herb Oscar Anderson, singing his theme song:

Hello again, here's my best to you!

Are your skies all gray?

I hope they're blue!

Take my hand, I'll say once more: Hello, Hello again.

Good morning, everyone, this is H.O.A. on WABC, your morning mayor of New York. Seventy-seven on the radio dial, ninety degrees on the sundial.

Earlier that spring, we had moved for the first time. We were excited about the change; it meant leaving our downstairs landlady, Mrs. Oakes, who blew one note on her flute every night, holding it as long as she could, hour after hour. We moved across the street, into an identical apartment, above my grandmother and two' aunts. My mother notified magazines of our hundred-foot move by clipping address labels, registering our change from 43,26 Judge Street to 43,27. In the new rooms, the furniture was placed exactly as it had been before, and when I got everything settled in my bedroom, I faced the same mirror, although now it was on the left wall instead of the right.

No matter how humid the day, my mother insisted I eat a hot breakfast, and a square of last night's polenta, freshly fried, steamed into my face. Even the blandest muffin in our house had a tinge of garlic, a smell never wholly removed from the counter or cutting boards. Evenings, the fragrance of onions and peppers frying in olive oil streamed down the stairs and into the vestibule. My grandmother used to say, "A woman will never lose a man as long as he smells onions and peppers when he comes home at night." My mother took those words to heart.

This morning she hurried through the apartment, surrounding the beds with snapping sheets, bringing in thickly coated bowls of last night's ice cream from the living room, and sloshing them with soapy water. Her conversation involved only my appearance, and she said of the pattern on my tie, which was printed with the heads of exotic gods, "Next time, try to get a face directly on the knot."

Downstairs, my Aunt Linda stood by the newel post. She held the outside door for me as I rushed through and, just as I passed, she announced her slogan for my first day to the back of my head, "Today I am a man!"

Linda had an hourglass figure, wore fitted suits, and carried herself erect with a strictness she practiced, walking through the apartment balancing The Complete Lives of the Saints on her head. Making her even more forbidding was her sharp widow's peak, so that her profile, body and carriage combined into a presence of unapproachable angles and rigid softnesses. Quiet and uncomplaining, she shared a bed with her mother all her life. Mae had the other bedroom to herself.

The boys on the block asked me if she had any boyfriends, and told me their fathers inquired about her, to make their mothers jealous. Little by little it dawned on me that she was an attractive woman. I thought back to my Uncle Winn's wake, when a family friend, Alfred Lundy, had followed her around the funeral home, finally cornering her by the guest register. A few minutes later, she grabbed my arm and pulled me outside. Lundy waited on the front steps and we all walked home together. He tried to give Linda some extra holy cards he had begged from the funeral director, but she set a fast pace as he scrambled alongside, chattering to her profile.

Now Linda took my arm as we walked to the subway, down our block of twenty row houses, all with the same small stoops flanked by white columns supporting a tiny tar overhang. A minute garden framed the front, and a narrow backyard stretched under a crisscrossed web of laundry lines. Several of the gardens contained homemade shrines: bathtubs buried vertically into the ground, forming an arch housing the statue of the Blessed Virgin.

Every apartment was identical: five rooms in a line, so that to reach either end, you had to pass through all of them. This gave the feeling of Pullman cars, and so the name "railroad flats."

It was early and the street was still quiet. Later, the grandmothers took up their stations, leaning out, watching boys play ball. When a scuffle

went on too long, they blew whistles or rang heavy bells, which summoned one of the bachelor uncles, who stumbled into the street, frowning .at the sun. These were the only men home until our fathers returned from work, walking from the subway or parking in the space that two garbage cans had saved since morning. Seeing them, we ran and kissed their edgy, minty mouths. Each time a boy embraced his father, he ran back to the pack and punched an arm.

Unlike the others, my grandmother used to spend her days in an armchair facing the backyard. She sat next to a console model Grundig radio tuned to the Italian station, and read the Italian paper, II Progresso. A portrait of my grandfather, whom she had married at fourteen, right after they arrived from Italy, stared from the polished surface of the radio. He was a roofer and died in a fall from the Jack Frost building when he was thirty-nine, leaving her with four boys and four girls, all of whom she enrolled in business school. Everyone of them became a secretary, except for Jinx.

On her end table were wax statues of St. Francis, who held a sparrow on his finger; St. Peter standing on a rock; Jesus exposing a red knot of a heart by parting his robe; and St. Sebastian. Sebastian, martyred by an executioner's arrows, had been knocked too close to the radiator during vacuuming. Now he stood at half his original height, arrows still protruding, but his legs melted into a puddle, his face and torso dripping. Once, on scanning the altar, my grandmother shook her head, obviously moved, and said, "What they did to that poor man!"

Each afternoon, she brought bowls of peppers, celery and onions to her seat by the window. She rested a chopping board along the arms of her chair, and went to work. No one mentioned it, but she sometimes placed a few sprigs of parsley, slivered carrots, or a couple of cannellini beans in front of her husband's photograph, offerings from the large dinner that would be ready when Mae and Linda returned from work.

Since my grandmother's death, Linda stopped at Hom & Hardart each night, picking up trays of baked macaroni or a roasted chicken. Every inch of the bag I carried for her was printed with the Hom & Hardart slogan: Less Work for Mother. When I placed it on the kitchen table, I couldn't help looking into the dining room, at my grandmother's chair. The kitchen, soundless and odorless, resurrected Linda's grief, and when she sighed as I left her, I knew it was more from missing her mother than about the empty evening ahead ofher.

Although each dish my grandmother prepared began with the

sauteing of onions and peppers, she still lost her man, but it was not to another woman.

As the E train pulled into the platform, Linda's eyes moved manically from right to left, scanning the passing cars for an empty seat. Then she traveled sideways, edging everyone out of the way and craning by the side of the door. Her purposefulness was scary, and most stepped aside. Each morning, she read the Daily News, folding it lengthwise, and licking her fingers as she turned the pages, anxious to finish before we got off, when she whacked the paper into my stomach, as if handing off a football. She was especially feverish about her reading on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, when all three gossip columns appeared: Ed Sullivan, Liz Smith and Walter Winchell. Her passion for getting a seat on those days made her brutal, all elbows and shoulders. My ungainly embarrassed strides in her wake maddened her with disappointment as passengers rushed forward, slamming down. At times, she'd save two places, by extending her leg across the base of the seat beside her, and then I sat for the half-hour ride from Queens to Paramount Pictures, on Forty-fourth Street and Broadway, Times Square, where Linda had worked since she was sixteen, and where she would work for fifty years.

Walking into the mailroom for the first time, I tried to place the smell: a very strong cigar, a very strong cigar doused with water, ancient Parmesan, burning rubber, cat box. It was a small room in which four ping-pong tables abutted each other, forming one gigantic square. Posters from Paramount's films covered the walls, except for the back which held a rack of pigeonholes. A dumbwaiter lifted packages to the floors above. In the front, pneumatic tubes fired capsules of "Rush" envelopes up to the receptionists, and every so often one of these quart, sized brass and leather containers shot back down, landing heavily in a deep trough of rags.

Off to the side, a cubicle of frosted glass marked the telegraph office, and a long shelf held postage,metering machines, tape dispensers, and packing materials. At four o'clock each night, when the day's mail was sent out, this shelf would be whirring.

Bob McHugh, in charge of the mailroom, stood before his desk at the entrance and greeted me. Red-haired, with a red moustache and a black patch over one eye, he twinkled and menaced. He took the pipe from his mouth as he shook my hand. He was an old friend of my aunt's and, according to her, had wanted to be a copywriter in the advertising

department, but because of his part in forming a union years before, had lost all chance of promotion. Now he wrote the retirees' newsletter, the bowling-league newsletter, and contributed a column of nostalgia to the house organ, Paramount World, called When the Times Were Square. His missing eye was no handicap in detecting the messengers' shenanigans around the table Whenever voices rose too loudly, Bob cocked his head to the side, like a bird, and soon the worst offender's name would be called for an errand. His assistant, Andy, a tall thin man, glanced over at me, bobbed his head, and then spun his chair back to the window, which overlooked Broadway. Andy kept this position all summer. His phone never rang, and he never spoke except when he sorted stamps, thousands of them, and then he cursed under his breath. This was the only time he'd be in a discernible mood: bad.

I was early that first day, and Bob showed me the cafeteria, the time clock, the men's room, and left me in the personnel office. When I returned, having signed my "working papers," the table was surrounded by messengers drinking coffee and reading tabloids. Bob introduced me to each of the boys, all in their late teens.

"Did you ever see a white asshole?" Harold asked me as we shook hands. Since he was black, I thought it over for a second.

"Me neither," he said, "I'm looking for a white asshole. Let me know if you see one."

Sitting there, listening to them discuss the Mets, I looked over my clothes and winced. The others wore T-shirts, or bright tops they called "Italian knits." My outfit didn't match theirs, but I would wear my madras jacket, the narrow Hawaiian tie and the tan poplin pants all summer.

Mario, who ran the dumbwaiter, leaned over and whispered, "When were you born?"

"December eleventh."

"What year?"

"Nineteen forty-nine."

He thought for a minute and said, "You were born on a Sunday," and he smiled.

Mario hardly talked, unless to figure the day someone was born. He had been a passenger on the Andrea Doria, and when pressed, he described the sinking ship. He was in his twenties, but he had the face of a child's drawing: round with round eyes. Most of the time he was expressionless, but when he smiled at some joke or pratfall, everyone

noticed, and the dim room brightened.

Soon the phone rang and Bob called out, "George, pick up Evelyn on ten." And then, in a clear afterthought, "And take John with you."

Pomade from George McCarthy's swept-back blond hair surrounded his sideburns and forehead. Short and husky, he swaggered, grinned and loitered at the desk of every secretary. Although I associated his turquoise muscle shirt and white jeans with the gangs in my neighborhood, I admired his assurance in this sanitary, official world, and I followed him around, my smile jerking up at the comers and falling back.

Evelyn's hair was cut short, and her lips always seemed to be moving, rippling, as if she were going to say something provocative, but had thought better of it.

George took me past her desk into a larger room where he introduced me to Stephanie. A heavy woman heavily powdered, her bouffant hairdo was divided into twin beehives.

"Steph runs the company," he said, but she said simply, "Beat it, McCarthy," and continued dialing.

Evelyn handed George a packet addressed to the comedy team Allen & Rossi, Sutton Place.

As we walked away, George said, referring to Stephanie, "How'd you like Mickey Mouse?" Then, "You pick up what they give you and bring it to Bob. If Bob sends you out with it, he gives you carfare. If you walk fast, you can skip the subway and keep the money. It adds up."

On the way back, I asked myself, "Was George sophisticated?" He was similar to Uncle Jinx, in that nothing surprised him. He seemed at home in these daunting halls, but there was an unseemly current running through George's banter, talk that embarrassed me, as well as talk I savored.

In the afternoon Brian Beardsley came back from a crosstown pickup, lifted himself onto the table, and said, "You know Evelyn on ten? She said, 'I'm glad to see you back, and you haven't lost your good looks.'" That spring, Beardsley had been thrown through a windshield in a wreck that left a deep and still raw scar furrowed diagonally across his face. His right eye fluttered and strained in its wake. He carried photographs in his breast pocket taken just after the bandages had been removed.

"Bullshit," Reuben said. "She wouldn't give you a second look."

"Bullshit yourself. I know women, man, and she's got it for me."

"From the way you talk, you know nothing about shicks and that's the truth."

"Shicks! You can't even speak English, you dumb spick."

"Knows nothing about them," Reuben said again, shaking his head. This angered Beardsley, who said, "You probably don't even fuck your girl."

"If I do, saboo."

"I knew it, he doesn't fuck her! Reuben doesn't fuck his girlfriend, everybody!" Beardsley cupped his hand to the side of his mouth, broadcasting, although Bob and I were the only ones there.

"Hey man, I respect my girl. I French-fuck her."

"Prench-fuck? What's that shit?"

"I just put the head in, man. I don't go ape on my girl."

Reuben spoke with such conviction, that Beardsley looked as if he were thinking it over as he stared at the table, chastened and brooding. He looked down at the Billboard magazine spread before Reuben. Pointing, Reuben said joyfully that Jay and the Americans had another number one, and he made a drumroll with his fingers.

"Reuben, pick up Harris on eight," Bob called.

As Reuben walked out, Beardsley yelled after him, "If you like that crap, why don't you go to the opera?" and he made a donkey sound.

Alone with Beardsley, I found how quiet the mailroom could get. There was nothing to do but read, and comment on the reading. We leafed through the well,worn morning papers, stepped-on, splashed pages which the boys picked up on trains, buses and in waiting rooms. When Bob went to lunch and Andy took charge, Reuben's radio blared, and pornographic magazines appeared before everyone's face. When George read his magazines, all clowning stopped. More than once, he didn't hear his name called; then he scanned the room, transported. I read the News in the morning with everyone else. On my errands, I passed newsstands hung with papers of different sizes and typefaces. I discovered the Herald,Tribune, taking pleasure in Breslin's columns, particularly those about Fat Thomas and Marvin the Torch. Other days I read the Times and, once, the Wall Street Journal. I also stumbled on the Sporting News, whose box scores of minor'league teams gave me information which would impress my friends in the fall. I scanned the sex magazines when someone tossed one down, and feigned indifference, but I swallowed and trembled before the spread vaginas,

enema bags, and Nazi paraphernalia. George and Harold kept a locked briefcase of pornography to themselves, careful to hide it from Bob even as they made a big deal about tossing the key back and forth. The secret cache of magazines and the calm that held at odd times allowed me to reorganize myself. I was used to hiding things, and accustomed to silence, which I had practiced since I first entered school. In the mailroom I was silent in the quiet and silent in the roar, listening, turning pages, shrugging and smiling when the din was turned on me. George and Harold's stealth gave the mailroom a schoolroom air, in which I felt secure.

At the end of my first day, I waited for my aunt outside her office. I was glad for the job. I had spent the previous summer sitting in the park with other boys from St. Bartholomew's or hanging around Rockaway Beach, hoping to drink beer and to talk to girls. I stopped by the pale and acne-ridden boys of Elmhurst Lanes, guys with pencils behind their ears, who were getting interested in horses and learning the numbers. We visited the trestle, where Gary Linski held court. Almost twenty, he drank at the boarded-up station, both a moral force and a drunk. He lived in a furnished room nearby and spoke against guns, chatted with priests, and shooed his friends away from girls who were underage.

My best friend Cooney was imprisoned by his father's tasks. His father, a patrolman who had risen to police commissioner through a series of scandals and deaths, feared his son's association with gangs. Cooney scraped and painted the garage, weeded the garden, scoured the basement. His mother assigned him to catch a pigeon for his little brother; he was hardly seen.

I did not mind leaving these things behind.

When my aunt appeared, I told her the others dressed casually. I was drenched from my fast pace through the simmering streets. On a few trips I had walked through the glare and exhaust instead of taking the subway. Each morning, the Daily News ran a cartoon of the skyline that illustrated air quality. That day, and almost every day throughout the summer, the artist shaded in the entire atmosphere, so the graph read "Poor."

Linda was appalled at my suggestion to remove my coat and tie. She said, "Make a good impression in case you want to work here someday." And then she added, "It'll keep you from having to take the service elevators. You'll see the hotels and penthouses as if you lived in them."

I got my chance to see an executive up close when Bob called my name, saying, "I have something a little different for you," and smiled.

"Do you know who Adolph Zukor is?" he asked.

"Zukor on nine," I said. "Nine-ten."

"That's his office, yes. He founded the company, must be in his nineties now."

"I've never seen him," I said.

"He doesn't come in much anymore," Bob said, "but he's here today, and he needs an escort. I want you to go with him."

"Where?"

"Not sure yet, but it will be in his limo and you just have to go along for the ride."

Bob couldn't stop smiling and I said, "Come on, Bob," but I knew he was serious.

Adolph Zukor founded Paramount Pictures in 1916, when he was forty-three. That made him ninety-two in 1965 when I stood before Marcie, his secretary, who was in her seventies. A large mirror, mounted on her desk, faced her, and as she spoke she glanced left and right at two smaller mirrors. They were a set, each framed with pink scallop shells and pearls. A case of manicuring instruments covered most of the green blotter in front of her.

"Take Mr. Zukor to the front of the building. There's a car there and you're to help him in. When you get where you're going, help him out."

"O.K.," I said.

"Mr. Zukor has business. Hank will drive. You just watch out for Mr. Zukor." Then she whispered, "See that he doesn't fall. Make sure he holds your arm."

I tried to get enthused, thinking I'd get to see what Mr. Zukor's day was like. He was the first executive I'd spend any time with, and I knew my parents and aunt would want to hear about it.

Mr. Zukor walked out of his office. He was a tiny man, thin and bald. He wore a black suit, which made him look whiter. I had never seen anyone so white.

He moved very slowly, in half-steps, letting one foot catch up with the other. The soles of his shoes never left the floor.

"This is John, Mr. Zukor," Marcie yelled, "Bob's best boy."

I reached out my hand, and he extended his, but my eagerness and his shaky, slow motion created an odd timing in which our hands passed

right by each other. Quickly, though, he grabbed the back of my wrist and gave it a shake.

"Goodbye, Mr. Zukor," Marcie called after us, and he saluted in farewell.

I took his arm, and started toward the elevator, but he tugged in the opposite direction. "This way," he said. He had a German accent.

I let him lead me. He gripped my forearm tightly, and I could tell he was light and I wouldn't have any trouble catching him if he stumbled. We walked down the hall like bride and groom, him sliding across the floor, and me taking a step and waiting for him to catch up. Three or four secretaries passed us as they crossed from one office to another, each saying loudly, "Good afternoon, Mr. Zukor," and smiling at me as people smile at someone with a toddler or a dog.

I thought I'd been in all the offices, but he opened a door I hadn't seen before. There was no name on it, and it turned out to be a restroom. It had two stalls and two sinks. I wondered if anyone in the mailroom knew about it.

He let go of my arm and backed into a stall, holding onto its sides. I didn't know whether to stay but when he didn't say anything, I walked over to the sink and looked in the mirror. I had gotten the Hawaiian god perfectly centered on the knot that morning, and I tightened my tie.

After a few minutes, I tiptoed over, but Mr. Zukor faced the floor and didn't seem to need me. I went back to the mirror.

Finally he called, "You! You! Are you here?"

"Yes, Mr. Zukor," I said.

"Help me up."

I pulled him by his hand. He face was red.

"Nothing today," he said as he shifted and buckled his pants. "No dirty bunnies today."

For the first time all summer, the elevator operators did not joke with me. They knew Mr. Zukor.

The car was right at the door and I was relieved when the chauffeur, Hank, introduced himself. He wore a full uniform and cap in spite of the heat.

"Hello, Mr. Z," Hank said and Zukor raised a finger.

"I'll ride with you," I said, opening the front door.

"Oh, no," Hank said. "Mr. Zukor likes the company."

The limousine was plush and cool and rode so softly it was like being in a living room. We were separated from Hank by a Plexiglas panel.

I looked out the window with pleasure as we passed the doorways to lobbies I entered on errands: The National Screen Building, The Hollywood Reporter, The Motion Picture Association of America.

"Tell me your name again," Mr. Zukor said.

"John."

"Know how long I've been here, Johnny?" he asked.

"No, Mr. Zukor."

"Since 1916," he said. He had a warm smile. He got a kick out of that date.

"You like pictures?" he asked.

"Very much."

"I like pictures too. You know what I like about pictures? They're different from anything else."

"Yes, they are," I said.

"They're different from furs, or garments, or the auto business," he said.

"It must be great to see the whole movie come together," I said, remembering how Linda described films being shot in pieces, and not in the sequence the audience sees it.

"In a regular business, like furs," he said, "if the customer buys a coat and 'doesn't like it when he gets home, he takes it back. In pictures, if they don't like it when they get home He shrugged.

We were stopped at a light, and a man on the sidewalk next to us was walking in stiff, exaggerated, mechanical steps, a briefcase at his side. When he passed, I saw an enormous gold key in his back, unwinding slowly.

"Look, Mr. Zukor," I said, "Look at that man!"

Hank's voice came from a speaker. "It's some kind of publicity stunt." He had been listening.

Mr. Zukor didn't budge. "I can't tum my neck that way," he said.

When Mr. Zukor and I arrived at Barney's Men's Shop, three men ran over to greet him, and he nodded happily as I moved from his side. One of them, whom I understood to be Barney, took his arm. They walked deeper into the store, but when Mr. Zukor stopped and turned, so did they. He said, "You can wait there, Johnny," and pointed to some red leather chairs near the front.

"Make yourselfcomfortable," one man came back to say to me.

TRIQUARTERLY

Mr. Zukor had disappeared so I thumbed through the magazines, all business and sporting journals.

Two salesmen chatted near the window, and one looked over at me, nodding toward my jacket, "I'll never understand it. In India, only the poorest people wear madras."

Another salesman wearing tasseled shoes that covered only his toes and heels walked beside a customer trying on a herringbone sport coat. As the customer turned left and right before a three-sided mirror, the salesman stroked the stiff, pressed back of his jacket, saying, "Glass!"

After an hour, Hank came in.

"Not ready yet?" he asked.

"I haven't seen him since we got here," I said.

"He goes in the back for a little schnapps," he said and sat down next to me. "Should be any minute."

When Mr. Zukor appeared, he was escorted by his old friend.

"All set, Hank," Barney said.

"Give me a hand," Hank said to me.

In the back room we picked up shopping bags full of boxes and brought them to the car. We returned for long, heavy cartons which must have contained overcoats. There were shoeboxes and hatboxes. We filled the Cadillac's huge trunk.

As Hank slammed the lid, and we stood there sweating, I said, "How much stuff can Mr. Zukor wear?"

Hank looked at me as if I were crazy. "It's gifts," he said. "Mr. Z's a generous man."

I went inside to escort Mr. Zukor back to the car. On our way out, I saw the same salesman pushing a square of fabric toward a customer, rubbing it between his thumb and forefinger. "Butter," he whispered.

In the car, Mr. Zukor said, "There's something I've heard of, something I want to try."

"What is it, Mr. Zukor?" I asked.

"Marcie told me about a dessert. I forget the name. She says it's very good, so we'll try it together. You try it with me, and Hank too," he said, smiling.

"Thanks," I said.

Mr. Zukor seemed a pleasant man. He enjoyed things, and spared no expense, that was clear. I wondered where we were going, and was flattered to be going with him. I pictured those little glass cafes along Lexington Avenue, and their flaming desserts.

"She says there is a layer of cake, and then a layer of ice cream, and then a layer of cake. The cake is very very thin, she says, very thin." He put his thumb and forefinger together, raised them to his eye, and squinted.

"A pastry?"

"Maybe like a pastry, I don't know."

We drove for a while and then he said, "It must be like a pastry, because you pick it up.

"Yes," he laughed, "without a fork."

Hank's voice boomed from its speaker. "It's an ice-cream sandwich!"

"That's it," Mr. Zukor said, turning to me. "A sandwich, with ice cream in the middle." He sat back in the seat with satisfaction.

Hank double-parked at Woolworth's and brought back three icecream sandwiches which we ate on the way up Broadway.

"Very good," Mr. Zukor said.

"Very good," I agreed.

That night I told my aunt about the errand.

"Now you see how the other half lives," she said.

The Round Barn

Jacqueline DouganJackson

There is the land. In the center of the land are the farm buildings. In the center of the buildings is the round bam. In the center of the barn rises a tall cement silo. On the side of the silo are printed these words:

THE AIMS OF THIS FARM

1. Good Crops

2. Proper Storage

3. Profitable Livestock

4. A Stable Market

5. Life as Well as a Living -W. J. Dougan

Jache could read these words before she could read. She said, "What do they say?" and her older sisters read them to her, or a hired man, or whoever was there. She learned them by heart without trying. She did not ask what the words meant.

W. J. Dougan is Grampa. He had the words lettered there, inside the bam on the silo, when he had just built the round bam. That was 1911, when Daddy was nine years old. Jackie sees these words every day. Sometimes twenty times, on a day when she and Craig and the others are playing hide-and-seek in the bam. Sometimes not for several days in a row. But add up the times she has seen them, and the days of her life, and they will come out even.

"Inside the round barn, with the tall cement silo on which Grampa Dougan printed 'The Aims of This Farm.' We climbed the ventilator at the left to get into the silo."

"This is a view of the west side of the barn, with barnyard and outside silo. Later improvements included the installation of a cow tank and the paving of the barnyard."

Jackie is fifteen. She sits on the arm of Grampa's easy chair. She rumples his thinning hair and shapes it into a kewpie-doll twist. This is a ritual, with all the grandchildren, ever since they were little. Grampa laughs with his stomach, silently.

An idea strikes Jackie. She takes a pencil and paper. These are always near Grampa, for Grampa is deaf. They are always near Jackie, too, for Jackie writes things down. Maybe she has this habit from writing for Grampa all her life. Being his ears. She writes, "Grampa, I am going to write you a book. I am going to call it The Round Bam."

Grampa studies the paper. He takes a long time to ponder it. Then he nods slowly. "The Round Bam," he says. "Yes, the round bam will have a lot to say." He crinkles all over his face and laughs silently. He is pleased, she can tell.

"I can write," says Jackie, "what the round bam sees. Not just what I know it sees. But what Grampa knows it sees. And Daddy. The milkmen. The cows. All of us! For the round bam is in the middle of us all, and it sees everything. It is the center."

* * *

Jackie thinks, here are the circles of the book. She draws a picture, starting with the silo and going out to the barn, and beyond.

"That's it," says Jackie, "if it were just flat. But the book isn't flat, just as the barn isn't flat."

She takes another sheet of paper. She draws another picture. It looks a bit like the round barn, but without any hip roof. It looks a bit like three-dimensional tic-rae-toe.

"It's like this," says Jackie. "We'll go back and forth in time, and wherever we are, it's the present. Here is when Grampa is young.

And here is 1911, when Daddy was nine.

Here's when he married Mother.

Here's when I was born.

Here's where I'm in high school.

J)JAnd all this is what goes on while I'm writing, and years after."

For the circles go out, concentric, in space. But they also go up and down in time. Like an onion.

But not like an onion completely, for onion parts are too cleanly separated. They pop apart.

It's more like elm wood. Elm logs can hardly be split, for the fibers interpenetrate, ring from ring, and bind all the circles together.

The story, the farm, Jackie decides, is like a log of elm wood. Everything, in all directions, in all dimensions, is bound together

It is 1909. Ronald is seven. For his birthday, he has a new jackknife

"The Dougan family in September 1915. From left: Ronald, Eunice, Esther (and cat), W. J. and Trever {and cat)."

from Aunt Ida. Trever is jealous.

"I want a jackknife too," he declares.

Aunt Ida assures him, "When you're as old as Ronald, I'll get you a jackknife. Five is too little for one."

Trever has heard that story before. When he is seven, then Ronald will be nine, and Aunt Ida will have forgotten all about the knife. She'll be buying Ronald an air rifle, and telling Trever that seven is too young for an air rifle, she'll get him one when he's as old as Ronald. Trever knows he will never be as old as Ronald.

"Let me use your jackknife," he wheedles.

"No," says Ronald. "Five is too young to play with a knife. You'll cut yourself."

Ronald uses his new knife at every opportunity. He sharpens sticks, he tries to make willow whistles, he fashions parts for his wagon.

One morning at school he raises his hand. Miss Church excuses him and he goes to the boys' backhouse. While he's sitting there, his jackknife falls out of his pocket onto the floor. He picks it up, opens it, and begins carving an R on the inside of the door. He stays a few minutes longer than his business necessitates, to get a good start on it. At recess he finishes the R and starts on an O. O's are harder, because

they are entirely curved.

Whenever he has to raise his hand during the day, and at lunch and recess, he works slowly and meticulously on the backhouse door. Sometimes he raises his hand when he doesn't really have to go. He's careful not to stay in the backhouse too long.

The other boys are much interested. They envy him his jackknife. They make bets on how long it will take him to finish his name.

At last it's complete. The backhouse door is chiseled out in large, deep block letters. RON A L D D 0 U G AN. Ronald is satisfied with his workmanship. The boys are respectful.

That night after supper Trever shouts into Grampa's ear, "Ronald carved his name on the backhouse door!"

"Shut up! Shut up!" Ronald shrills.

"What?" says his father.

Trever shouts as loud as he can. "RONALD - CARVED - HISNAME - ON - THE- BACK - HOUSE - DOOR! WITH - HIS - NEW - JACK - KNIFE!"

Understanding breaks over Grampa's face. He looks sternly and sorrowfully at his elder son. "Ronald, is what Trever tells me true?"

Ronald hangs his head.

"The schoolhouse. I can't identify Ronald and Trever for sure, but since Grama says they're there, Ronald has to be standing on the porch roof to the left, with Trev seated in the middle-although Ron could be upper right."

"Outside the schoolhouse. Ronald, in the middle of the first row, is about the age when he carved his name on the backhouse door. Trever is on the left of the first row."

"I am disappointed in you," says Grampa. "You'll have to remove it. Come along." He takes Ronald's hand. They go to the tool shed. "Select a plane," says his father.

Ronald looks at the three planes on the worktable. They are all large. They are all heavy. He takes the smallest one.

Grampa keeps ahold of his hand. Together they walk across the plowed furrows of the East Twenty toward the schoolhouse. Grampa takes long strides. Ronald has to trot fast. The plane in his other hand gets heavier and heavier. He cries. Behind him at a safe distance Trever capers and flings taunts.

At the boys' backhouse Grampa opens the door. There is the name, RON A L D DO U G A N. They survey it together. To Ronald the once splendid letters now seem to move and dance, to be red with the licking flames of hellfire, like the printing of the devil's whispers in one ofhis storybooks.

Grampa shakes his head. He says, "'Fools' names and fools' faces always appear in public places.'" He lets go Ronald's hand and stands holding the door steady.

Sobbing louder, Ronald begins to plane the letters. On the farm, he

TRIQUARTERLY

has always liked to use the plane, to run it along a board and have the sweet smelling curl form behind and fall off. But he's never planed on a vertical surface before. It's terribly hard. He tries going from bottom to top. He tries going from top to bottom. He tries going from side to side. That's the worst, for the plane is heavy and keeps slipping. His father gives no advice.

Ronald settles on bottom to top, crouching before the door in order to get more shove-pressure. The wood curls fall down around his knees. Slowly, very slowly because he carved them so deep, the letters erase. He has to come at some parts of them from all different directions. The plane grows so heavy he can hardly move it. Often it nicks and chips and is balky. He can scarcely see through his tears. Grampa stands silent. Ronald knows he will not be finished till nothing more can be seen. The swatch he planes gets larger and larger, in order to reach the bottom of the letters.

Finally his father says, "There."

Ronald gets up, stands back, wipes his eyes and nose with his sleeve. The spot where his name was is smooth and light,colored against the seasoned surface. No trace of RON A L 0 0 0 U G A N can be seen. Grampa closes the door. He points to the mound of shavings left on the ground. Ronald scrapes them up and hides them between the bushes by the fence. Then he and Grampa start across the field again. His

"Seated on the ramp leading into the round barn is Ronald at about twelve or thirteen, with Bob the dog, and a calf."

father still holds his hand, but now he walks more slowly, matching his stride to Ronald's, and he carries the plane. Trever is nowhere in sight.

In the middle of the field Grampa stops. "Look. There's an oat, just starting to come up." He kneels.

Ronald kneels, too. A little green shoot is pushing its way out of the furrow. The hull is still clinging to the blade.

"It's such an ordinary thing, crops coming up in the spring," his father says, "yet every time a seed sprouts, it's a tiny miracle. Look down the furrows-all the seeds are pushing up. It was the rain yesterday."

Ronald looks, and in the slant evening sun sees the faint green flush of oat seedlings all over the field.

"Grow, little fellow," croons Grampa to the oat, touching it gently with his finger. "Grow strong and sturdy in the sun and the rain! Grow to make feed for the cattle and bedding for their stalls! Grow to do your little bit in the universe!"

Ronald thinks how little a bit it is, one oat plant! But multiplied by a field of oats, by fields and fields of oats, the granaries overflow, the strawstack is a golden mountain. He does not know why, but his spirits lift.

They stand up, return to the farm, replace the plane in the toolshed. Nothing more is ever said about fools' names.

It is 1913; it is spring. Grampa has not been working outside at the planting or manure spreading or in the barn. All afternoon he's been laboring at his desk against the north wall in the back section of the parlor. It's a large roll-top desk. Ronald and Trever are once in a while allowed to roll up the top, so that it's magically swallowed inside the desk, and then they get to pull it down again. The desk has many cubbyholes along its back, which the boys are not allowed to explore. Each cubbyhole has different papers and receipts in it. The drawers at the side hold large cloth-bound ledgers held together with fat steel pins. All afternoon no one has disturbed Grampa at his desk.

Suppertime comes. Grama and Ronald and Trever and the hired men are waiting. Grampa is a few minutes late. Grama goes and calls him again.

Grampa comes into the dining room holding a legal-size envelope. His face is severe. He puts the envelope beside his plate and sits down in his seat at the side of the table. Ronald feels uneasy. The hired men stir. All eyes are on the envelope.

Grampa bows his head. The others bow their heads, too, except for Ronald. He cranes his neck to see the address on the envelope, but

Grampa has placed it face down.

Everyone waits for one of Grampa's usual weekday blessings, the one that starts, "Bless the Lord, 0 my soul," or the one that starts, "Praise the Lord, all ye nations, praise Him, all ye peoples." But Grampa pauses a long time, then clears his throat and says something new.

"Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's, and unto God that which is God's. Amen."

Everyone looks up, startled.

Grampa picks up the envelope. No one moves to pass the platters of food.

"Our government has just instituted an income tax," Grampa says gravely.

Everyone nods. The income tax has been a topic of discussion before, at the table, and Ronald and Trever have talked about it in school.

"I have spent the day computing my income tax," Grampa continues. "I completed it just before supper, and I have written the check and placed it in this envelope." He holds up the envelope and studies it, then reads aloud the address.

He raises the flap and plucks out a large tan farm-check. He surveys the check even longer that the envelope. Ronald can't see what is written on the check. Nobody can see it.

"For mercy's sake, Wesson!" cries Grama impatiently. "Get on with what you're going to say!"

"Grampa at his desk."

Grampa can't hear her. He examines the check another serious moment, then casts a sudden mischievous glance at the assemblage.

"My income tax for this year is thirteen cents," says Grampa.

The table dissolves in laughter, with Grampa laughing the hardest of all. When order is restored and the dishes begin to move, Grampa looks around merrily.

"I am happy to do my share," he says.

* *

*

Original Income Tax Form 1040 (1913).

TRIQUARTERLY

Ronald is eleven. He's in the buggy with his father, west of town.

"We're going to stop by and say hello to Mr. Wieland," Grampa says. "I like to visit with him when I can. He has a handicap, too, and turned to farming as I did. But his handicap is not the same as mine. He has no legs."

Ronald is astounded. He sticks his own legs out straight and shakes his head disbelievingly.

"How can he do it?" asks his father. "Well, you shall see. And he is fortunate-he has a good wife, and a flock of little lads and lasses to help him."

He tells Ronald that Henry Wieland had a successful bakery in Chicago. But he had an illness, called Buerger's disease, and the doctors told him he had only a year to live.

"And he decided," says Grampa, "for that short year he had left, to do what he'd always wanted to do. And so he sold his bakery and bought land in the Beloit area, and livestock, and started to farm."

Grampa tells how he heard about Mr. Wieland, right after he'd arrived, and had been one of his first visitors. He'd given him some help in selecting livestock after an unscrupulous farmer unloaded on him a half dozen horses with heaves. He'd told Mr. Wieland of his own mistakes, and encouraged him. Mr. Wieland had had hard times. There were the horses lost. Then his crick fed Beckman's mill, and the dam backed up, making a swamp of his pasture. He'd lost more animals to the swamp. And he'd had to have both his legs amputated, first one, then a year later, the other.

Ronald, looking puzzled, waggles one finger.

"One year, yes, that's what they said. But it's been four years so far and he's prospering, both in his body and in his farming. The doctors have changed their minds; they see no reason now why he shouldn't live to a ripe old age, provided he doesn't fall out of the haymow."

Ronald shows astonishment. "Haymow!"

"Yes," laughs his father, "the last time I visited, I saw him haul himself right up a ladder to the haymow!"

Ronald is goggle-eyed as they drive into the Wieland farmyard. He scrambles out, looking all around for the no, legged farmer while Grampa hitches the horse to the gatepost. Mrs. Wieland comes out on the step and greets them. She says that her husband is in the bam.

Ronald follows his father through the dutch door. He immediately sees the children. Nearby a girl his age is milking, and at the end of the aisle of cows a boy somewhat older is emptying a pail of milk into a milk can. A younger boy is in front of the cows, shoveling grain.

"How are you, my friend?" shouts Grampa.

Ronald sees an arm wave from between two cows as a voice booms,

"Right here, Reverend!" Ronald follows to stand before Mr. Wieland. He isn't sitting on a milking stool but on a backless kitchen chair with all four legs sawed off at a few inches. He's a chunky, ruddy-faced man, and looks even chunkier, like Humpty Dumpty, for he has no legs sticking out in front of him, only six-inch stumps. His denim overalls are stitched neatly over the ends and disappear beneath him.

"I've brought my lad Ronald to meet you," says Grampa.

Ronald tries hard not to stare while introductions are made. The children are named Katie, Fred and Robert. Henry and Walter are out fixing fences, Margaret is helping in the house, and Lillian-well, Lillian is the baby.

"I have only Gussie here, and old Blossom left to go," Mr. Wieland says. He turns back to his work. Ronald notes how rapidly he milks. He finishes, lifts the partly filled pail, and shoves it ahead and under the cow. Then his hands grasp two blocks of wood that Ronald has not noticed till now, one on either side of his chair. They are two-by-fours with holes cut through them to make handles. With powerful arms Mr. Wieland launches himself off his chair, scoots the empty seat under the cow, then ducking his head swings himself under too, grazing his shoulder on the udder. He plops down onto the seat in front of the next cow, adjusts the bucket, and begins to milk.

Ronald is startled. But Gussie isn't startled at all. She goes right on munching grain. Nor is Blossom disturbed by the unorthodox arrival.

Ronald has no eyes for the Wieland children doing their chores. His attention is riveted on Mr. Wieland.

"You have a wonderful father," Mr. Wieland says. "I don't know what I'd have done without his help and encouragement, every step of the way. He told me what to do about bloat, and to plant corn when the oak leaves are as big as a squirrel's ear. But more than that, he's been an inspiration. I always said, if the Reverend can succeed without his hearing, then I can succeed without my legs. It doesn't take legs to milk a cow Are you ears for your father?"

Ronald nods.

"These are my legs," says Mr. Wieland, pausing in his milking to make an inclusive sweep of his children. "They fetch the cows and carry the pails and shovel the manure."

Ronald nods some more. He does his share of all that, too, even though his father has two good legs and hired help.

Mr. Wieland gets the last milk from Blossom's udder by stripping down the tits as if they were rubber.

"Yes," he says, "your father is a fine Christian gentleman and a true friend."

He scoots under Blossom as he did Gussie, vaults the manure trough, 123

and joins Grampa on the walkway behind the cows. Grampa hunkers down so that he's on a level with Mr. Wieland. They talk cows and crops and weather. Mr. Wieland writes on Grampa's pad.

Katie and Fred empty the buckets and stagger off with a milk can between them. Ronald is not tempted to follow. He hopes that Mr. Wieland will climb a ladder, but no ladder is in sight. While the men talk he picks up and closely examines the polished handholds that allow the farmer to swing along.

"Noticing my shoes, eh?" says Mr. Wieland. When he leans to one side to scratch a buttock, Ronald glimpses that the overall leg is folded back and forth and quilted to his seat, to make a pad. Everything about Mr. Wieland seems eminently sensible.

At last his father stands up.

"Will you lead us in a word of prayer before you go, Reverend Dougan?" asks Mr. Wieland, and writes the request on the pad.

Grampa takes off his hat and closes his eyes. Ronald takes off his cap, too. Katie, running into the bam, halts and closes her eyes.

Grampa prays, "Our Heavenly Father, our hearts go out to Thee in thanksgiving. We thank Thee for life, with all of its opportunities, with all of its responsibilities. But most of all we thank Thee for Thy gifts of courage and love in the human heart. Amen."

Ronald is more used to his father as a farmer than a preacher, but somehow it doesn't seem strange to be praying in a bam with his father and Mr. Wieland and Katie. They all go up to the house. Mrs. Wieland serves them dishes of rhubarb sauce and cookies and glasses of milk. Robert shows Ronald the air rifle and jackknife he got as premiums for selling subscriptions to Hoard's Dairyman. Ronald tucks away the thought that he might become a subscription seller, too. Katie has him crawl into the downstairs closet to see her father's artificial leg. It's standing behind the coats and boots, and is a metal contraption with leather straps.

"But he never used it," says Katie. "He said he did better without it."

Ronald has no reason to doubt it. Then he and Grampa leave.

"Whenever I start feeling sorry for myself I think of Mr. Wieland," says his father, "and that man's courage puts me to shame!"

At home, Ronald tells Trever all about it. The next day they saw off two-by-fours and gouge them out to make handholds. They take turns swinging along. It's not easy, for their legs keep getting in the way, and it's also very hard on the wrists. They find a kitchen chair with a split seat on the farm dump. They saw off the legs at four inches. They saw off the back. They repair the split.

Ronald carries the seat to the bam and sits cross-legged on it while he does his milking. It's awkward. He finishes Daisy, edges the pail to the

side, slings the seat, and scoots underneath her.

Daisy is so startled that she kicks Ronald head over milk bucket into the gutter.

Jackie is fourteen. She changes into her jeans after school. The Paint doesn't want to go, but she rides him from Chez Nous down to the Dairy. She sees the vet's car near the cowbam door. She tethers the horse to the elm, goes down the step to the bam washroom, and into the bam. Whenever the vet is around it's interesting. She's known Dr. Knilans since she can remember.

The cowbarn is empty except for Jackie-cow and Doc Knilans. He's busy on the walk behind Jackie-cow, with his doctor's kit. A vet has a large doctor's kit.

Jackie-cow is the smallest and homeliest cow in the bam. Billy Beadle

"The round barn's roundness is underscored by this view of cows with milking machines hooked up."

named her that, to tease Jackie. You can't tell whether she's a Guernsey or Holstein or some strange breed entirely. She has a bob tail and bob ears; she lost the ends from frostbite before Grampa bought her. But she's one of the best milkers in the barn. She's a funny little cow. Jackie is pleased that she's called [ackie-cow, But now she's concerned about Jackie-cow's rear end.

Jackie has looked at cows' rear ends all her life. It's the major view when you are in the round barn, forty cows' rear ends. But jackie-cow has a lot of grayish tissue hanging out of hers, below her anus. It hangs in folds and loops halfway to the gutter. It's a little bloody. The cow seems unconcerned.

"What's the matter with her?" Jackie asks.

"It's the afterbirth," the vet says. "It didn't come out when she calved. I have to clean her. Unbutton her."

Jackie is astonished. "Unbutton?"

Doc Knilans makes a fist. "See this fist? A cow has knobs sort of like that on the inside of her uterus."

Jackie nods.

Doc Knilans cups his other hand over his fist. "This is the placenta, the sac the calf grows in. It grows around the knobs."

Jackie nods.

"Now, take your hand and peel the placenta off the knob. Gently."

Jackie carefully peels Doc Knilans's hand off his fist.

"There," says the vet. "That's how you unbutton a cow. Nature usually does it, but when nature doesn't quite manage, we have to help."

Doc Knilans gets out a long rubber glove, the sort Amos wears when he inseminates a cow. He dusts his arm with talcum powder.

"Is this cow a friend of yours?"

"Yes," says Jackie. "She lost the end of her tail and ears from frostbite, and they call her [ackie-cow, For fun."

"Would you like to unbutton jackie-cow? She's small enough-your arm might reach. And you have a gentle touch."

J ki id "v" h ac le const ers. res, s e says.

Doc Knilans tales her arm. He puts the rubber glove on her. It comes up and over her shoulder. He fits the fingers. He soaps all over the glove and arm. "Now," he says, "put your arm down and feel around for one of the buttons." He moves the hanging afterbirth and shows her where to insert her hand.

She makes her fingers into a point and pushes her hand gingerly into jackie-cow's vulva. Her arm slides easily down the vagina. The passageway holds it snugly. She's surprised how warm it is inside the cow; it's like a warm bath. She's amazed how far the passageway goes. She reaches down, down. Doc Knilans holds the tail aside. Her shoulder

is right against the cow's anus.

"Are you there? Can you feel any buttons?"

Jackie gropes around. She feels a fleshy knob, like a mushroom. She nods.

"Now feel if there's anything to unbutton. Some of the knobs may be free already."

She feels something over the top of the mushroom. She works it gently with her fingers, feels it loosen.

"It's come off!" she says, grinning.

"See if there's another."

She feels around. It's working in the dark, by touch only. It's very warm. She unbuttons another knob. She feels further. She can't find any others. She pulls out her arm.

Dr. Knilans puts on the glove and reaches down. "One more, I think," he says.

He works around a bit. Then he pulls his arm out and all the afterbirth comes with it. "There," he says, dropping the gray mass in the gutter. He takes a tablet of medicine, big as a bar of soap, puts it deep in the vagina, and then peels the glove.

Jackie watches till he's done. She walks out to his car with him and watches him stow his equipment.

"Do people have buttons?" she asks. "Women, in their uteruses?"

"No," Doc Knilans says. "The placenta sticks without them." He leaves to go to another farm.

Jackie goes to the milk house and gets a bottle of chocolate milk from the cooler. She drinks it, climbs on the Paint, and rides back home. She tends the horse, practices her cello, takes her tum to set the table.

At supper she says, "I unbuttoned a cow this afternoon."

"Many's the cow I've cleaned," says Daddy.

"What's unbuttoning a cow?" Joan asks.

Jackie starts to tell her.

"Oh, not at the table!" Joan says. "Mother, make her stop! I can't stand to hear it!"

Mother asks Jackie to tell about it later.

Jackie explains after supper.

Joan is revulsed. "Honestly, Jackie, how can you stand to do those things?" she asks. "Why do you want to?"

"The cow needed it," Jackie says. "And I'd never felt a cow's buttons before. It was interesting." * * *

Dr. Knilans has a son named Dick. He's Joan's age. He's going to be a veterinarian too. Sometimes he comes along with his father and helps with the sick animals.

Craig and Jackie are in the barn once when Dick is there. He tells them a joke about a farmer whose wife is going to have a baby. But when her labor pains begin there's a terrible blizzard raging. The farmer can't get out and the doctor can't get in. They talk on the telephone.

"Don't panic," says the doctor. "You've helped a cow deliver, haven't you? It's just like that, like a cow delivering a calf. Just follow that procedure exactly, and you shouldn't have any trouble. Call me back when it's over."

After a while the farmer calls back. He's jubilant. "Doctor!" he cries. "I have a little baby boy! He's perfect! Everybody's fine."

"You see?" says the doctor. "It was simple, wasn't it?"

"Well, yes," says the farmer, "up until the very last, and then I had a hell of a time getting her to eat the afterbirth."

Jackie is just thirteen. She is in love with Billy Beadle. She has never been in love before and she doesn't expect her love to be requited, for Billy is nineteen and going to the Ag School at the University of Wisconsin. She is content to follow him around the barn, where he's working for the summer.

There is nothing about Billy that is not beautiful. She admires his jaunty whistling, his joshing back and forth with the other barn hands. She admires the way he slaps the cows around, not hurting them but making them step-to. She admires the even rhythm he keeps up as he jabs the manure brush along the watery gutter, and the rhythmic ripple of his shoulder and back muscles under his white T�shirt. She admires the easy grace of his jeans clinging low on his hips, and the worn leather belt that holds them there. She admires his big rubber boots. She marvels at his strength when he pitches great waffles of hay into the chute, or, down by the crick, slings the milk cans of slops for the pigs up and over the fence as effortlessly as if he were pouring out a half-pint of chocolate milk. She loves to hear him sing the theme song of the band he stays up so late every night to listen to on the radio:

Welcome all you listeners

And here I am once more; It's quarter-past-eleven time And I'm knockin' on your door.

She knows every delineation of his profile. His haircut is perfection. Billy is kind to Jackie. Sometimes he says something directly to her and she glows all over. Sometimes he asks her to run an errand, for a pitchfork or a missing tit cup, and her feet are winged. Sometimes he

teases her and she is filled with joy. He names the littlest and homeliest cow in the barn, the one with bob ears and bob tail from frostbite, "Jackie-cow," and Jackie is honored. She gives Jackie-cowan extra scoop of grain when she's allowed to go around with the grain trolley and feed the cows their ration.

Jackie follows Billy on his work around the farm like a devoted puppy dog. The other farm hands kid Billy about his shadow. Billy laughs and says, "She's learning! Some day she'll grow up and marry a hayseed like me, and then she'll be able to run the barn single-handed!"

Billy's father, Leonard, is Grampa's farm manager and the best Duroc man in the county, if not the state. When he came to the farm from teaching Ag at Beloit High he brought his Duroc expertise, and the farm went whole-hog into raising Durocs for breeding stock. Billy is a good Duroc man, too, and teaches Jackie a lot about pigs when she rides along with him in the farm truck as it clanks over the ruts in the lane down to the back pasture. She laughs when he flips a pig out of the trough where it's gobbling milk up to its ears, keeping other squealing pigs from getting their share. There is always at least one pig that scrambles right into the trough at feeding time.

But Billy is more interested in sheep than hogs. There haven't been any sheep on the farm until Billy came along. Now there is one. He keeps his prize sheep, the one he's grooming for the State Fair, in the orchard across the road. This way he can give her special care each day.

Jackie loves to go with Billy to tend his sheep. He plays with the little animal, tussles a bit. The sheep trots along behind Billy when he goes to pick up windfall, just like Jackie does. Jackie loves the feel of the soft fleece, to bed her fingers in it, to test its depth. She loves the creamy whiteness under the grimy surface of the wool.

One day Billy has to go away for a week. "Will you take care of my sheep while I'm gone?" he asks Jackie. There is nothing she would rather do. Every day, after corn detasseling, she brings the sheep her rations and fresh water. She pulls grass and lets her nibble from her hand. She loves the soft breath on her fingers. Jackie has had goats, but there is a gentle nature to this sheep missing in her willful, sassy goats. She names the sheep Demi, after Daisy and Demi in Little Men. She prints "Demi" on the sheep's back in neat letters, by every day embedding her fingers in the wool and then parting it, so that the separated wool gets used to staying separated, and spells out the letters. She doesn't miss Billy as painfully as she thought she would; tending the sheep for him fills in the hollow.

Billy returns and thanks her. She prickles all over. He likes the name Demi better than the real one on the pedigree papers, and says he'll keep it for her nickname, but that he'll have to erase it from her back

Billy Beadle

before the judging. That's O.K. with Jackie. He cleans Demi snowy white and takes her to the State Fair. She wins a blue ribbon. Then he sells her. Jackie cannot see how he can do it.

"That's the way it is with livestock," says Billy. "You can't let yourself get too attached."

Inside Jackie knows she will always let herself get too attached.

Fall comes; Jackie goes back to school, Billy goes back to college. On December 7 bombs fall on Pearl Harbor. Billy enlists in the Army Air Forces. When he wins his wings, his picture is in the Beloit Daily News. Jackie cuts it out and puts it in her wallet, where it's not visible to her friends. She is now in love with the boy who sits across from her in English class, the one who held her hand in the darkened bus on the church choir trip, but her first love will always be in an enshrined place in her heart, and now in her wallet.

At the back of the First Methodist Church is an Honor Roll. There's a long list of names on it. Each serviceman has a green star before his name. When Jackie reads the names she can picture many of the faces, from seeing them growing up in the church, always as big boys much older than she. Billy's name is there, with its green star. Every Sunday she stops and reads it.

The war goes on. Billy goes to England and is co-pilot on a B, 1 7 bomber plane flying over Germany. One day Grampa comes into the kitchen at Chez Nous. Jackie is modeling a puppet head out of glue and sawdust. Grampa's face is heavy. He sits down slowly, says to Mother, "The Beadles just got word. Billy's plane is missing. It was on its seventeenth mission. It never returned to its base." He shakes and shakes his head.

Jackie's heart stands still.

There is a chance that the plane's crew parachuted down over Occupied Europe. There is a chance that Billy is a POW. On the church Honor Roll, every so often a gold star replaces a green one, and from the pulpit the minister talks about the young hero. Billy is Missing in Action. His star stays green.

The war years go by. The tide turns toward the Allies. They push across Europe. The POW camps are opened, one by one. Billy does not come home. Finally the war is over. Billy and the others of the crew are not found, there is no record of the plane. The government notifies the Beadles that it went down in the North Sea. But, maybe, something else happened, and the crew will still turn up.

Time goes on. Jackie knows Billy will never come home. Everyone must know it. She waits for somebody to change Billy's star to gold on the Honor Roll. Nobody does. The minister does not ever talk about Billy from the pulpit.

TRIQUARTERLY

More time goes on. Jackie is grown up and has moved away. It's many years past the war. She is older now than Billy was when she loved him, she is older than he was when he died. The old First Methodist Church has been tom down and a modem one built in its place. At a visit home Jackie stops in one day to look over the new church.

"Whatever happened to the old World War II Honor Roll?" she asks a secretary she's never met. The secretary doesn't know. The new minister doesn't know. Finally, the new custodian remembers seeing it in a storeroom. He offers to find it for her.

"No," says Jackie, "just unlock the door." She goes and buys a box of small gold stars, the kind her piano teacher used to put on a piece when it was finished. She returns to the church and finds the storeroom. She pokes around. The Honor Roll is tilted in a comer. Its glass is dusty. She wipes it clean with her hand, and unhooks the lid. She licks a gold star and presses it over the faded green one in front of the name of William Leonard Beadle. She closes the case again and stands for a minute, remembering that thirteenth summer, and Demi-sheep in the orchard, and Jackie-cow in the round bam.

"There, Billy," she says, and leaves the storeroom.

Jackie Dougan at twelve or thirteen.

Five Poems

Carol Frost Fury

And the whole night she had told herself to be pleasant as she lay beside the sleeping man, and she'd gladly have listened to herself, but as the enormous dawn sneaked into their darkness and seized them in its paws, she found herself with the old fury, past her carefullest politeness. She saw she'd need millennia to find a way to comprehend the reason for the difference between their early idealsa garden where plums and peaches grew well and tasted wild and they were unembarrassed by genitals-and what had become of them. This apple-pose. It was no good blaming God or Adam, she knew, but she couldn't help herself-: Why hadn't the one spoken forthrightly and had the other caved in? Then, hardly allowing him to fully awaken, she said her first sarcasm. Then another.

Truth

Those who can neither cast out of their hearts false feelings nor look beneath the riding images on a river, for the second life-all the details of scraping fin-are harried by the one who gropes, to no end save sight, the beginnings of beauty or truth. Ugh. The sorority girl has social obligations. The political-science majors have politics on their minds. Must they sit over a plot's depth and try to see its secret and raise it dripping, thick into the classroom? What if it quivers and still smells like the river bottom, the sky's leavings? Someone cracks a joke and they all laugh like inquisitors, like revolutionaries swept along at the surface of an immense current.

Judgment

The angel that rebellion raised was never able, right up to the end, to leave Him alone or help solidify, by saying either "yes" or "no," His cloudy sense of things, but kept intruding, even in His dreams, with doubts and questions. It was a nightmare inhabited by dolls and dead persons, winged souls, wretched lambs and lions that grew in Him and made Him waffle, and twisted with self-hate. In His mind it was the angel who pushed until He pushed back, then the angel flew off like a madman to earth and buried himself with the lowest creatures, as reproach; and in His mind the beauty of this arrangement suddenly shone in a fire's glare of His own powers to make judgments that no longer hurt Him, and so He gave it names.

Apology

Already the land is starting to forget gardens; reminiscences no longer hold the heart completely as someone held her a little roughly once in somber sweet groves, and the touch she was utterly dissolute to, that caused collapse behind her knees, sunslides in the lake, she feels a resistance towards, then apology, as if a thorn catching her sweater has tom a small hole-as if she shouldn't have worn the sweater. What induces then weakens the greater and lesser passions is what she'd like to know.

-Something like the green underneath red and yellow which is now wilting has left her body; and she is someone who had loved and is no longer availing and can neither take nor give away.

Crying Wolf

Not howling, but from within the deep wildness of all things, assailed on all sides by the nightmare of nations, walking and flying specters, chimeras, nils, which can't be outrun or waked, and which snows no longer bury, came a sound as forlorn as when the heart devours the prophet. He lowered his head at land's end after the wind took away the last of the sound and, in the silence, the hair on the back of the neck of the world froze.

Eight Poems

Adrian C. Louis

For My Lakota Woman

Early that winter we had fresh tomatoes. Whole plants yanked up by their roots hung upside down in our basement. Once rock,hard and green, the globes were slowly ripening. My woman sent me down to pick one. Trying hard to please after days ofbeing a bastard, I jogged back up carrying the red fruit like a faithful dog pleasing its master. She calculated then rubbed the tomato to my face whetting my boyish charm while her other arm flashed a knife and like a textbook wife she sliced my brain between the lettuce and tomato. I caressed the stained enamel of the kitchen sink and strained for pleasant conversation. On the counter tomato juice had dried into Rorschach: a pallid rose of my own weakened blood. In the housing unit down the road a white-haired unci, blanket bundled

against winter, was emptying the air of frozen diapers upon a line.

Jesus Christ on a totem pole!

This was the hundred-year anniversary of Wounded Knee and our lives flickered briefly in televised soundbites the Americans had written for us.

Spirit Deer Deep in Pine Forests

for Leslie Mannon Silko

The bad parts of the city are self,infected with drugs, murder, and laziness of mood, music, spirit. No wonder the riots occurred. The safe parts of the city are homesteaded by those who lobotomized America though movies and television. The city bus is a shaking sardine can of crackheads and derelicts with souls as scarred as the sands ofIraq. An article in the Times tells about huge mudslides in the hills surrounding the city. Like liquid croquet mallets, rains knocked huge balls of mud upon the homes of the rich making them all as brown as the Dakota plains where my small house stands and for a moment I am faintly amused by God's loose bowels brown-coating America's Babylon.

When I exit the bus at the university where they're paying me to enhance with safe distant words the romance they think they see inside my whirling soul's poverty, I can't help but wonder how much better off I'd really be if I were a quadruple amputee or a spirit-deer fucking deep in pine forests.

How Verdell and Doctor Zhivago

Disassembled the Soviet Union

You are the blessing in a stride towards perdition when living sickens more than sickness itself.

-Boris Pasternak

Last year, before cruising to the warehouse near the old Moccasin Factory, Verdell and I stopped at the bootlegger for a quick belt to cinch his stomach full of fears. He said the pint of rotgut whiskey tasted worse than gangrene but it did the job and choked silent the raging world around him. We meandered through tons of remaindered and donated tomes, a tax-deductible donation to destitute savages, these boxed words were stacked from concrete floor to sheet,metal roof.

Buzzed,up and warmed by his whiskey, Verdell came upon four cartons of Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago and became transfixed by the bright red fake leather covering.

But I saw dead ikons of the past in cardboard, and glory on the grandest scale. Deep in Holy Mother Russia marching through the bitter snow I saw peasant armies mouthing death songs while not knowing where their souls would go.

We lugged those four cartons of Zhivago bound in leatherette to his puke-stained Plymouth.

That spring, without an ounce of shame and some pride, Verdell related how he had liked the Russian story, but he said he ran out of firewood during the last blizzard of March and his hungry woodstove vaporized Yurii Andreievich, sweet Lara, and those eerie blue wolves howling at snowbound Varykino. Again and again, Verdell burned the books until the cast iron glowed a deep, dark red and the way he figured it, the heat from his woodstove melted the glue of the Soviet Union that spring.

The Boys Cruise Seattle

Ennut! Look, Jake, says Verdell. Isn't that Christ on that totem pole?

Not the one on top. That one there, squished between the thunderbird and the bear near the bottom. The one that's frowning like someone watching wine-stink cousins coming to a wake just to eat. Can you see his hands? Pull over. Let's check them out for nail holes.

A Savage Blood Thirst

The morning had taniga breath. Jake's lumpy bed was sweating. The Great Plains breeze lay red-eyed, unshaven in his yard. The living stink of hopelessness threw a rock though his window and crawled in to kiss him. Its chancred tongue licked his soul dry and he smiled.

He staggered up to close the window and saw a thirteen-year-old neighbor girl singing and skipping by. She saw him and grinned and waved. In mad, sober light his spirit air-danced and floated past ancient honor. His heart, once imbedded in dust, then cataloged for the last time the tarantula movements of his middle,aged lust.

He shook his head and took three aspirins and crawled back to bed.

Last Song of the Dove

During the second week of jets dive,bombing Iraq on CNN, Jake Red Horse said he stumbled to shave the face of a middle,aged drunk whose boyhood contempt of America had eroded, cracked, and fallen away like an old man's teeth. His evil twin smiled back at him from the bathroom mirror. He washed his dentures and injected them into his wordless mouth. When he returned from the toilet, Vice'President Quayle was sound-bitten, saying comforting, cheerleading war words to a group of some flag-waving yahoos. They fell for him, hook, line, and sinker and so did Jake's evil double.

In those weeks before Americans wearied of widespread massacre, Jake's doppelganger relished burned tanks and charred bodies with pure delight. He had wet dreams for the dark sex of war. Just because the President had jump-started a crusade against the peoples of Allah didn't mean his evil twin had any peace in his heart left over from the sixties. Both waved the flag in their own warped way while they silently prayed for an end to the war which came shameful and heartless in the folly of victory. It was televised, grandly choreographed and swarmed with invisible maggots. Six weeks later it was all but forgotten.

Graffiti Dialogue in a Nebraska Bordertown Laundromat

"Chester Crow suckes a peache. and he injoys it to."

•

"He's a lie. Indian men don't do that."

•

"He wrote himself he's bragging. We know Chester is queer."

•

"Try me and find out if I life."

•

"Indians are ignorent! Prairie niggers move back to Pine Ridge and eat dogs."

•

"Well screw you white trashes."

•

"C. Crow suckes a white peache to."

A Rudimentary Lesson in

American Indian Journalism

It was a bitter moonless night in that time of year some Lakota called "Moon of the Popping Trees."

At thirty-five below the dogs were kicked out the front door. They steam-streamed the frozen lawn and whined violently to be let back in. The air was so dry that we boiled water to breathe hints of summer.

At thirty-five below I left my beloved couch and entered the distant bedroom of my distant woman. The cats and dogs surrounding her bed glared momentarily and then welcomed a source of additional heat. Back to back we formed an ancient butterfly encased in ice but slowly melting. Joined at the spine, in fetal positions we breathed quietly in desperate hope. I knew we were both praying for sleep but the gods were not listening. In the automatic ritual of release our hands went about their business until they took recess and dangled cigarettes in the dark.

Later, when she began to snore, I rose to see millions of whispering snowflakes forming burial mounds over our unstartable cars.

I mixed a huge seven and seven and descended to the basement to write a news story due that morning.

Immediately dyslexic, I got progressively worse until the fumes of Liquid Paper fomented the Muses to rebel from unconsciousness. Groggy and stung silly by the cold, they stammered and glared and spat with alacrity, the famous five W's.

Who?

Holy Mary, Mother ofGod, we were the descendants of Oriental Eskimos who carried sushi and wore ribbon shirts and Foster Grants when they crossed the land bridge across the Bering Strait on their way down to Haskell Indian School.

Where?

Hey, open your eyes and smell the frybread!

Look for us in Bell Gardens, Schurz, Porcupine and Potato Creek, Ethete and Dulce, Wellpinit and Shiprock.

(We were the oldest kids on the block!)

Look in Red Lake, Blue Lake, Pyramid Lake, on the playing fields of Cleveland, on the silver screen with Kevin Costner. Ennut, we were always galloping through Gallup.

When?

Anytime you feel froggy.

What?

Chicken butt, that's what.

Ask me again and I'd tell you the same.

Why?

It's simply because we are so noble, Oh Jesus, we are noble red men.

Two Poems

Teresa Cader

Six Entries on the Invention of Paper

1

It begins with a wasp on a terrace in ancient China: a man invents paper after watching the wasp spin its white nest from mulberry bark.

2

Perhaps he has found bamboo too uneven for letters in black wax.

Perhaps he is weary of verticality. Perhaps he is ashamed of his private longings.

3

When his neighbor calls to him, "Ts'ai Lun, what are you boiling in that large pot?" he does not show him linen rags found in a basket, old fishnets hauled off the docks, mulberry bark stripped from the neighbor's tree.

4

His neighbor sees thin sheets of pulp strewn across the terrace, drying in the sun.

He does not perceive them as treasures. He is annoyed with the clutter.

His children are forbidden to set foot on the terrace. He whispers about Ts'ai Lun in the tea shop.

5

One evening after an inquisition at courtthe inventor has been implicated in palace unrestTs'ai Lun comes home, drinks poison, and goes to bed.

6

On a table lie stacks of the white sheets. The mulberry tree looks seamless in the moonlight. The wasp is poised to devour some workers at dawn.

Invisible Order

How ordinary the days were: afternoon rains, a rash of purple crocuses across the grass, pear blossoms adrift on the stone fence.

A paper wasp chose the overhang above the patio, obscured by wisteria and a sycamore.

In grief and weariness we sat on our porch. She darted between us and the wooden fence by the grape arbor and we did not thwart her. We barely recognized her for what she was.

We were inexact about ourselves, too. How had death taken us so by surprise?

We now know how hard she labored. While we rocked in our chairs or dozed, she sawed and mashed splinters from the fence and spun a white dome above our heads.

One day we heard a trembling in the eaves and took our binoculars out: hundreds of bodies strained against the nest.

In her paper universe she had built an order slavish to her will, while we, with keen eyes and ordinary preoccupations, suspected nothing.

She sometimes ate her sluggish offspring, we later learned, if she got too hungry; she forbade her daughters to reproduce; the doomed males fell to their passions.

But on the day we saw that teeming nest up close, we felt barren in our grief. Lacking words, we wanted to smash it, to let joy loose on the world.

Vital Statistics

Richard Dakey

I was glad when the divorce was done. Kathyrn took care of it. Over the months I hadn't appeared before the judge or even consulted a lawyer. I didn't protest anything. Once in a while pieces of carbon tissue arrived from a place called Bennett, Bennett and Shaw. I put the tissues into a bottom drawer of my desk. It was like getting billed by American Express.

It bothered me when the names appeared in the paper. There was an entire list of us, in fact-strangers, arranged alphabetically under Petitions for Dissolution. They also had lists for Births, Deaths, Marriages and Final Decrees. Recently they added Bankruptcies. I have become addicted to these lists and read them faithfully.

I moved into an apartment in town and Kathyrn kept the place in the country. I didn't like that. I've always needed room and despised the press of city life. People clutter up at intersections and elevators. I'm always stepping around them or almost bumping into them. It's impossible to walk in a straight line. Every place is like a restaurant or movie theater. You can't hear anything distinctly unless it rises above the general din, and the telephones are always warm.

In the country you can hear one thing at a time, like a train crossing an open field far away or a dog barking down the road. If I play it right, though, I may still get the house. Kathyrn has always preferred the city. I didn't really want to see her again. It wasn't hate or bitterness or even anger. I simply did not want to see her. There was nothing to talk about, since I had given it all away to escape, and though I did not blame her or myself, there was responsibility, and when we were together, I couldn't help thinking about it, and I wanted to be washed of

the whole thing.

Sometimes we had to talk, however, and she came to the apartment and sat in one of the swivel chairs I bought at Conrad's. On the day before she went to court for the grand finale, she brought some papers for me to sign.

She had lightened her hair and taken to wearing it pulled over to one side, which was most unflattering, in my opinion. She had gotten the idea, I knew, from the group she had begun attending six months before we separated, and when she told me she was dating her therapist "seriously," as she put it, I felt relieved and ashamed. I knew, then, that it was only a matter of time before I got the house, but I felt I had failed, in some deep place I did not understand, about being a man.

I was pretty much of a recluse in those days. I would,hang around the apartment, which was actually quite comfortable-it was high enough to have a good view of the lake-and I enjoyed watching the boats at sunset and reading. I also like my work and don't mind taking it home, though I am at a place in the firm that makes even conscientiousness unnecessary. There were a couple of small restaurants where I had become known, a little Italian place that didn't open until six and a Mexican cafe, where I used my college Spanish so well that one of the waiters always greeted me with "Mi querido amigo."

But then, two weeks later, when the final decree appeared among the lists, I felt terribly alone and knew that something had to be done.

The thought of sitting at bars unnerved me. Going to dinner with Kathyrn or stopping with Jerry Crampton or Bill Upham after work at a darkened booth, I had spent hours studying men with gray at the temples, the second button of their silk shirts open and rings on the third and fourth fingers of their right hands. They wore Vuarnets, drove white Corvettes or black Targas and lived in apartments with metal furniture.

The women were scary as well. They wore too much makeup. Their calves were muscled from aerobics or, worse yet, from running in the park at dawn. Though they were over thirty or nearly forty, they tried to look like something out of Seventeen, and they combed their hair oddly, like the lead singer of last year's rock group.

They were all divorced, separated, or on the way, and they appeared wealthy, in a kind of glitzy fashion. But I suspected them, and one night Bill pointed out his son's high-school P. E. coach drooling over an exotic blond in a backless dress. The truly wealthy, I concluded, have their places, and they're always private.

Bill introduced me to his cousin from upstate. She owned a sweet face, a slight lisp, attended community college at night and had a ten-yearold kid. We went to a spaghetti joint downtown and talked about divorce and Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. I was terribly embarrassed because, except for the obvious physical heat that passes between a male and female, which only makes me feel like a tomcat prowling backyards-my brother Frank calls it, affectionately, The Hunt-it was as though I were fifteen again. I had forgotten everything I ever understood concerning women, so I told her-a complete stranger-all about myself. Even while I spoke, I realized, stupidly, that it was a plea for mercy, and when I saw the look of relief on her face, I knew why monogamy is the curse of mankind. She slept with me that night, but I could not remember her name in the morning.

Jerry tried to get me into the singles group he had joined after his divorce from Margaret.

"That's where I met Irene," he said. "Everybody's loose and friendly. It's easy to meet people. You'll have a great time. You'll see. The people are mature. They're actual people."

That was risky enough, since I hadn't met many actual people in my life-mostly they were sort of people-but when I stood at the door on a bleak November night, I felt foolish. I was admitting defeat, wasn't I, going to a place like this? Wasn't it only a cut above having a dating service set you up? A failure of the heart, that's what I was. A wallflower of love.

I stood on the threshold with a fishhook in my back, and the only thing that tore me free and into the room was the image of all those Targas and Corvettes lined up in the garage at the Colony Club.

There are experiences that put a seal on things. They let you know that one part of your life is finished so that another can begin. Graduations and weddings are like that. Mustering out of the army, being fired or released from prison. A door closes behind you, and the light blinds your eyes.

It was a big room, like something attached to a church. On a table near the door were a large coffee urn and styrofoam cups. There were lavender cardboard trays filled with maple bars and glazed donuts and an open cigar box stuffed with dollar bills. On the other side of the room was a wet bar.

There was a jukebox, a genuine one, with colored water bubbling along the sides. The music, however, came from a cheap stereo. Tables and folding chairs were set along the walls. People were playing cards

and drinking. There were couples on the floor dancing. As I entered, I felt a little shock, as the faces, one by one, turned to regard me with longing or distrust. I backed out slowly and went home.

The following day the final decree appeared among the lists, and I was sure everyone I knew had snipped it from the paper. I decided to spend time alone. What I was experiencing, I knew, was not a problem with women, though, of course, it was.

I began to read in earnest. As an undergraduate I had had a passion for devouring the collected work of someone. I'm the only person I know, for example, who has read the novels of George Bernard Shaw. I had the delusion that I could consume every writer of importance, and there was a time there when I kept ten books going at once.

In addition, I assigned myself tasks, like going to museums or movies. I walked the streets. I watched the sun set every evening for a week. There was something I had missed along the way, something I hadn't learned.

One evening a few weeks later, I was sitting at home reading my lists when I heard a sound at the door. It was not a knock, not distinctly anyway. It was as though an open hand had been placed there several times, softly, and removed. I stood up, just a little apprehensive. A rash of burglaries had broken out in the neighborhood, and even old man Sexton, who lived in the apartment next to mine and has a license to carry a gun, was more than usually nervous.

I looked at the strange, myopic world of the hallway through the peephole in the door. Nothing. I opened the door carefully (the assassin might be pressed to the wall, a butcher knife clutched against his filthy chest). There was no one. I frowned. Such things, like the calls you get in the night when the other end just hangs up, annoy me. I began to close the door, when I noticed an envelope lying on the threshold.

I felt my neck hair shiver-you know the feeling-and looked up and down the hallway. The elevator was a couple doors away and across. The little squares with the numbers were dim. There was a stairwell at the other end of the hall.

I looked at the envelope. It was letter-size, plain and white. I picked it up and closed the door.

I went back to the leather chair under the lamp and sat down. I held the envelope to the light. Then I tore open one end. Inside was a note written neatly on a single sheet of twenty-weight paper.

Dear Bob,

I saw your name in the divorce column and was surprised. It always seemed to me, when we knew each other, that you were a rather straightforward, stick-to-it kind of man, you know, someone who didn't like defeat, no matter how small the contest. I'm sorry, of course. Such painful experiences are not easy to bear. Believe me, I understand. Perhaps, though, this is a good thing for you. I have learned that pain is a great teacher, even if this sounds a bit sophomoric. It is the only thing that helps us learn the final truths. You see, I'm not so silly as you once thought.

Love, An Old Friend

I went to the door, opened it and scanned the hallway. I returned, sat down again and read the note through several times. Then I went to the window.

The water around the edge of the lake was filled with crystal. The light spread out in ribbons from the shore, but the buildings above them were just so high, and finally the ribbons trailed away and left a vast, shimmering black pond above which there was only darkness.

The emotion I experienced was very curious. It was as though someone had rummaged through my closet while I was reading or had opened my desk drawer and played with my pipe cleaners and stamps. You couldn't get into the building without a key, and this time of night Jack Firestone was at his desk doing crosswords. Someone had deliberately tampered with my privacy and gotten away with it. The fact that it was a woman, a woman that I had once known and impressed in some way, kept me from becoming angry. That and the way it was handled.

I went to bed and fell immediately to sleep. But I came awake at three A.M. and could not drift off again. At three-thirty I got up and went into the living room and read the note. Then I lit my pipe and went over to the window. Except for a streak here and there, the lake was virtually black. A few lights crawled along Lake Shore Drive, leading poor souls, exhausted at last and wrung from life, to a fitful rest.

I finished my pipe, washed my face and went to bed. I was awake until five.

The day dawned clear and fair, and only a light wind blew across the water from the north. I went down in the elevator and caught myself

looking for some sign of my nocturnal visitor. I felt foolish. Jack was already gone.

I don't mind the office anymore and move through it with a fair amount of detachment. I went to Rustigian's for lunch with Jerry, and he told me about his sister-in-law, who had just separated from her husband.

"You're turning into a hermit, Bobby," he said, rolling the Stroganoff in his mouth. "It's not good for you. You need to get out. Circulate."

"What am I," I smiled, "a garden hose?"

"It's not good for a guy your age to be holed up."

"I'm not holed up."

"What do you call it, then?"

"Tactical withdrawal."

That night I decided not to go out for dinner. I fixed a ham-andcheese sandwich and settled down to watch Dan Rather and an early movie.

The phone rang. I picked it up, but there was nobody there. I slammed the receiver onto the cradle and went back to my sandwich. The phone rang again.

This time I let a few choice epithets fly. Then I stopped. I heard an intake of breath.

"Who is it?" I asked.

Then something clicked. I can't explain how I knew. Perhaps it was that I had taken the note from my coat pocket many times during the day. There must have been a sympathetic current in the telephone wire.

"It's you," I said.

There was no answer, and I set the receiver on the counter. I stepped to the front door and paused. My heart was racing. I opened the door, and on the threshold was a white envelope. I picked it up and returned to the phone. She had hung up.

I bolted for the door and ran to the elevator. It seemed an hour for the car to get to the lobby. I hurried to the desk, where Jack Firestone was doing crosswords.

"Hello, Mr. Carstairs," he said, looking up.

"Jack, did a woman come through here just a bit ago?"

"A lot of women come through here," he said. "What's a six-letter word meaning 'to show anger or fear'? Rhymes with 'idle.'"

"You wouldn't have known her," I said. "She would be a total stranger."

"I get lots of those too. Do you know the word, Mr. Carstairs?"

"She might have come in and then gone back out almost immediately, say in just the amount of time it would have taken to ride the elevator up and down."

"No, I can't remember anyone like that. But then I don't look up every time someone leaves. Just when they come in."

Perhaps she was clever, like a terrorist, and had ridden the elevator to the floor above mine, smoked a cigarette and then walked down the flight of stairs to deliver her white letter bomb to my door.

"Thanks anyway, Jack," I said.

"How about the word, Mr. Carstairs? Any idea?"

I put my hand on the envelope in my pocket. "Bridle," I said, and walked to the elevator.

I waited until I got back to the apartment. I went into the kitchen and finished the sandwich. I drank a glass of milk. Then I walked into the living room and sat down.

I tore open the envelope, and there was the handwriting on a piece of twenty-weight paper.

Dear Bob,

You must have wondered about me. I'm sorry I can't say more. I simply can't tell you who I am. I cannot. That's all. It's irrational, I know. Even bizarre. Maybe even crazy. But I know I'm not crazy. Not really. It's only life that becomes crazy, while all the time we stay quite sane. I would like to see you, but from a distance. If you could entertain a fantastic notion, do you know BeIdo's on West Kensington? It's quite a large place but very friendly. Will you go there tomorrow evening, say around 7:30?

I was astonished. And frightened. I studied the handwriting. The letters were evenly spaced. The words moved gracefully across the page. Her script was lovely and quite feminine, with nice loops and whirls. I felt stupid. I stared at my hands. They were sweating.

I went to the window. The darkness across the lake had an eerie quality I had not noticed before. There was no depth to it. Ribbons of light fluttered near the shore, but far across the water there was no light at all, nothing, only the darkness like a great black hole into which everything disappeared.

I wrote down the names of every woman I had ever made love to. For someone past forty, such a task was not easy. The longer you live, it seems, the more they become one, if only the last one, and I found

myself thinking about things I hadn't thought about for years. There were some two dozen of them, and I could not remember all the names, so in a few cases I put down visual clues, like The Irish Setter or Breasts the Size of Baseballs.

I looked at the list and tried to manufacture personalities. Could it be this one? I wondered. Or that one? But I found myselfremembering how they had all looked without clothes and what they had done, and I felt sensually but morbidly old. I dozed off and found myself surrounded by them. They all had the time of the relationship written on them. Eight months. A year. Two years. They looked at me and waved. Then there was Kathryn staring at me. She had twelve years printed on her back. I woke, read the note over several more times and switched on the television.

The following night I was at Beldo's at seven o'clock. I had bought a new camel hair coat the week before, and I wore that, with black wool slacks and a black tie.

I was overdressed, of course. Beldo's is not that kind of place. It reminds me a lot of Lefty O'Ooul's in San Francisco. Old wooden floors, a polished, dimly lit bar and framed black-and-white pictures of dead baseball players on the walls. It was cafeteria style, like O'Ooul's, with booths along the sides and tables crowded into the middle. There was even an upstairs. It had been a chic place thirty years ago, but the chic didn't go there anymore.

I sat at the bar and looked around. I hadn't been there myself in five years, and all the help had changed. I recognized no one. Whoever it was, though, I would know her as soon as I saw her, I was sure of it, and I wanted to spot her when she walked in.

She never did. I waited until eight o'clock and then eight-thirty. I got angry and depressed and a bit tipsy. There are just so many gin and tonics one can consume on an empty stomach. So finally I stood in line for a hot roast beef sandwich and cole slaw, and then I went home.

I do not like mysteries, and I imagine that's why I am not religious. The thought of forces lurking beyond that weigh and judge us has always struck me as unfair and capricious. It's hard enough getting through this life without mucking it up with the next.

I left for work late the following morning and had breakfast at Flag's. It's one of those places tourists never discover because it closes after lunch. The breakfast menu has two dozen omelettes and eight different waffles, and the coffee is the best in town. I lingered over a third cup and studied the vital statistics. By the time I got to the office, I was on a

pretty even keel.

But there on my desk, propped against the pipe rack, was a plain white envelope. My hand trembled when I touched it.

I buzzed my secretary. "Mary, who brought this letter?"

"It was special delivery, Mr. Carstairs."

"Did a messenger bring it?"

"No sir. An old man came into the office and handed it to me. He said it was important and that you should have it right away."

She had paid someone off the street to deliver it. "Thank you, Mary."

I left the envelope on the desk and walked to the window. The view from my office is one of the reasons I dislike the city. Crowded streets, tarred rooftops and sunlight smeared against glary windows.

I sat down and opened the letter.

Dear Bob,

Thank you for being so trustworthy. Whatever age does to us, it has done to you most kindly. You looked quite handsome in that beautiful jacket. It was such a delight to see you again after all this time. Isn't BeIdo's a quaint old place? I'm sorry I ever left it. I'm sorry too that you had to eat your roast beef alone. If it's any consolation, my dinner grew cold on the plate.

Included find a ticket to the new play at the Bradley Friday night. I hope you can go.

Love

I couldn't believe it. She had been there the entire time.

Oddly, I was not angry. I was not even depressed at having missed her. I was sad. I read the letter again. She-whoever she was-suffered more than I.

Thus began a series of meetings that were not meetings at all, but adventures, the like of which not I nor anyone else had ever encountered.

I went to the Bradley, of course. It's a small theater on the South Side that does avant-garde things by young playwrights who don't shave. This one was about a girl from the country seduced and abandoned in the big city. She was pregnant by someone who never appeared but whose presence was always felt, like a kind of deus mystenosus, and she lived with an old Mexican who had been with Cesar Chavez in

Bakersfield and was disillusioned. The girl felt her life was a useless mess, but she wanted everything for the baby, because it was the only thing she had truly loved. This touched the Mexican, since his son had been killed in a skirmish in a lettuce field. He wanted to take the girl someplace safe and pure, but he was dying slowly from having inhaled too much insecticide. She thought the son should lead the movement to save the world when he was born, for this was, she felt, the best part of the man who had abandoned her, a Vietnam veteran with no left hand. Despair, failure, anguish and longing. Tennessee Williams with acne.

I looked the house over. At intermission I strolled about the lobby studying each woman's face. I walked up and down every aisle. I found myself catching glimpses of things I thought I recognized, eyebrows here, a nose or cheekbone there, the way a head turned or an arm lay along a wooden seat. She was hiding again. Maybe she was even backstage. I thought about leaving, but decided that wouldn't be fair, to her or the playwright.

The girl died in childbirth and the Mexican adopted the son.

Cards began coming in the mail. One week a card arrived every day. They were the kind with funny little animals and clever sayings, like, "It's nice to know you're always around," and there would be a gray elephant on a trapeze swinging into the arms of another, or one with a bland, blue little cat being chased by a mutty dog with a pink collar and black nose and the caption, "Ours is a classic relationship." Sometimes tickets came with the cards.

I found myself attending volleyball games, badminton tournaments and platform-diving championships. I watched the shooting of a detective movie on location and the dedication of a new thirty-story building by the son of the Irish immigrant who had bought the land. I ate dinner at a half-dozen neighborhood restaurants I had never heard of, though I have lived in and out of the city all my life. I paid for nothing but I did not feel guilty, because I thoroughly enjoyed myself, which was totally unexpected. I had a patroness with eyes unlike my own, yet we were strangely compatible.

I struggled against it at first. The acceptance, I mean. That was natural. Every place we "went" I searched frantically for some sign of her. I carried binoculars and watched the stands. I badgered ticket sellers about reservations. I walked through stadiums, parking lots and stations. I waited outside restrooms.

I even called two names on my list of former lovers, the least remembered and the least gratifying: Carolyn Bally and Pat Thompkins.

I ran them down through old friends. They were both married.

"Did you send the letters?" I asked.

They said I was crazy, but they knew of the divorce.

At a modem,art exhibit I saw a woman who strangely attracted me. It was the way the hips moved, I think. I followed her from room to room. She looked back at me nervously. Her chin seemed familiar, as though I had once touched it. Her hair was cut across her face, like a helmet. I wanted to cradle her head in my arms.

She paused before the splashes of color framed upon the walls, turning her head this way and that. I felt a little madness come over me. I went up and stood next to her and turned my head this way and that. She looked at me and smiled. She walked quickly into another room and I followed. Her skin was like cream in firelight. I knew I had never seen her before, but I was thoroughly convinced she was the one. She was beautiful, full of passion and joy, and I had always wanted her.

She walked briskly toward a guard in a green uniform and I stopped. She turned to look at me once more, meaningfully, then stepped into an adjacent room. I went out the main entrance and waited.

I waited forty-five minutes before she came out. I had it all planned what I would say.

"Would you like to see a table,tennis tournament? Perhaps you'd care for dinner at a little Hungarian restaurant across town? Would you enjoy a Buster Keaton film festival?"

She stopped and looked at me with fear.

"Will you?" I wanted to say. "Will you just please pretend to be the one?"

But I heard my name called, and when I looked back, she was gone.

It was Jerry, wife in tow.

"Glad to see you out, kid," he said. "This is just the very kind of thing you need."

"Hello, Jerry," I said, looking at his new wife, who was rather mousey but pleasant.

"Yessir, the very thing. He who expands his mind never lives alone."

"Confucius?" I said.

"No, Crampton."

And that's when I was struck with a desperate idea.

Jerry and I were about the same size. When the next invitation and ticket arrived, I dressed him in my trench coat and blue pinstripe, and I went to a novelty shop and bought a makeup kit.

I decided on an old man, with gray hair and beard. I bought a black

fedora, rented a cape and wore my tuxedo. I carried a silver-headed walking stick shaped like an acorn, stooped over a bit and resurrected my foray upon the boards of college theater. I felt absurd but oddly free.

lt was a dog show. Jerry sat in my seat, a cap pulled forward on his head, and I prowled through the hall, limping slightly, like the Phantom of the Opera. Between wizened cheeks and powdered brows, my eyes burned like coals. Nothing escaped me. I was a fiend of curiosity. I lurked behind cages. I huddled in corners. I watched every woman who was under fifty. I felt exultant, invisible. This time I would have her. She could not escape.

And she didn't. Only forty minutes after I had begun, I saw a tall, slender figure standing quite still, out of the line of sight of the judges' area, staring intently at the man in the trench coat and gray cap.

I had come up behind her. I could not see her face, but it was she. I had the same feeling I had had that night when she called.

I stood suddenly erect, filled with elation, and threw off my cape. There was a sound, several sounds, a general surf of sound that broke toward her. My instant rejuvenation had startled the people near me. I saw her turn slightly, the wide brim of her hat lift just enough. There was the line of a white chin, the glint of a dark eye. She put a hand to her face, spun about and broke for the exit.

"Wait," I pleaded. "Please wait."

I began to run. I could have caught her easily, but I stopped. There was something about her flight that was almost hysterical.

The next morning the letter came. It was so strangely painful and frightened that I decided never to trick her again.

She forgave me and we went on, always separate, and I never recognized, among all the faces, who it could be. We settled into a companionship of untouched life, like two deaf mutes in parallel universes. I always knew she was there because she told me what I was wearing or mentioned something I had done. Her loneliness was so great that it overcame my own, and one night, in the middle of an Audubon slide show about the Yukon, I stood up and shouted, "Listen, it's all right!" Everyone stared. "Listen!" I repeated. The lecturer, a gray-headed old man with a handlebar mustache, broke into a raucous laugh. "It's all right!" I yelled, spinning around like a dervish: "I love you! I love you!"

Then, smiling, I sat down. I didn't feel like a fool at all.

And that was the end.

The letters stopped. I grew frantic, thinking I had done something wrong. I stayed home from work, hoping there might be a call. I spent

hours staring at the lake. I missed her terribly and realized that somehow everything had been quite perfect. We never met or talked, yet, by intention, we were always in the same room, seeing the same things and sharing life together. It was a proper relationship for our time and place. Then the name appeared in the paper, and I was stunned. I hadn't gone back far enough. It had been that first semester at the university when I had rushed a fraternity and been turned down. She was the girl in the lit class I had dated a few times, never seduced and completely forgotten. She had become prominent socially and had married several times.

Anne Charles. Her name on that list affected me more than would have divorces from a dozen Kathyrns.

I thumbed through the paper. There was the article. She had been ill, quite ill. She had played it this way, I decided, because she had fouled up everything else, and there was no more time. I didn't blame her. I would have done it the same way. A white envelope came in the mail a week later, but I destroyed it.

I've decided to travel. I want to take a long ocean voyage. I want to see the old, old world. Istanbul. Damascus. Cairo. Nairobi. I want to find a place in the desert and dig for bones. I want to uncover the skull of a man who lived a million years ago and hold it in my hands.

Four Poems

Anne Reynolds Voegtlen

Red Dahlias

Below the black raven, two red dahlias sprawl at the roadside, fallen or tossed on a shoulder otherwise clear, backlit by a rising sun, an almost missing moon. It used to be I thought I could pick up my life like a handful of blossoms and settle it lightly into different water. The dahlias unsettle me. They gleam like fuses or wayward lighthouse eyes, burning through fog for the crack of ribs against rock. The asphalt laps them, haloes the red commotions with gray. It used to be, I thought I could tuck the beams in a buttonhole, hold them like roses without pricking anything, without drawing blood. As I pass by, the dahlias do not move. Their ends are cut, their stems bent back akimbo. They sink for hours, apparently arrived at what's intended for them, laid open into the only original night.

Night Dive

No world but the one scooped out by halogen spots. No human forms but what we find by tracing torchlight back to the narrowest neck, the floating holder. Each of us only a lamplit faceeyes and mask and limited expressions. Two red rock crabs ignore our light for the sake of staying locked together. The lingcod looks at first as ifhe's similarly flagrant, maybe engaged in some kind of crazy spawning thing. He has hold of another fish almost as large as him. The fish's head dangles out, its body more than half-hidden in the pouch of the lingcod's mouth. Both their bellies are white as moondust. The fish in the mouth has glittery eyes, green rims shining round a black center. It is heaving, shocky, but putting up no fight-there's no blood or tom flesh anywhere. When the cod wallows off to a convenient nearby dark, we follow once then let it go. We have no right to rescue here. Left to ourselves, we douse the lights and raise around us a dazzling black, the only white at hand a moon print wobbling down, vestigial, a smear, a smudge, a changing shape formed and reformed by layers of brine. When we wave our arms, sparks and charges fly off in all directions as if our hands held magic. Then the pinpricks fade and we are once more whom we brought here, grave and laden, a faceless cold already tugging at our limbs.

Moonsnail and Cockle

Rivet and drill built in, the moonsnail fancies shellfish. The moonsnail foot has overrun its shell, surrounding it with fat muscle, a mound of pearl gray pinking. It bores the sand for sweetmeat. From long before itself, cockle knows the moonsnail taste and touch, the smooth, dissolving tongue. The two shells often lie together empty on the shore, but both for now are full and cockle lies on the bottom clapped shut as tomorrow.

When the cloudfoot nudges up, cockle does a thing against our sense of likelihood-it opens (how long a move was this to learn?) it opens the lids of shell and issues a soft inner foot, an unprotected projection. Random and wild, this new foot pushes off the bottom, catapults the whole thing away to where it can close again around itself, lap and loll in something like safety, indolent but watchful in a solidly marginal way.

Kit

When the weariness of earth is on me and each step another mere mark drawn in dirt, when the hover has become unimaginable again,

I will take one tank, one rack of air, two fins and gloves, some looking glass, some weight to help the falling faster, a compass, knife and lamp. I will find a canvas bag to carry them, a kit where each thing fits and each will answer as it should. I will make from them a sort of order, a song of sorts to limited things kept well and trim.

Retrieved from bone,bright cold, I will be an upright thing, wear my old weight lightly, suckle air and hold it sweet as if it came contained and tucked in tanks. I will not come up too quickly or let go the attentions of the deep.

Two Poems

Pamela Bernard

Ghosts of Las Colinas

This morning, a woman with soft eyes tells me she's longed to have the things she photographs, like the bronze horses she came upon in the open country of west Texasthe largest equestrian sculpture anywhereher arms stretching out to contain the thought: wild mustangs, eight or nine of them, just as they were when they ran free. Not to own them, she says, but to carry them inside somehow. And now she says she feels them in her throattheir withers and hoofbeatsas if they were a terror she could speak. I can tell by the way she carefully smooths her skirt and loosens the stiff collar of her winter coat that nothing has worked, that she's got them inside and can't let them out.

IS, BIG and FATAL

The writers go underground, snake through miles of subway tunnel, flatten themselves against damp walls when the trains come screaming through blacknessgo piecing-looking to hit the cars fenced in at night, the lay-ups behind barbed wire. Straddling the distance between two parked trains, they hold on with one hand, spray with the otherpuffy tags and phrases that will erupt in electric colors down the cars' sides as they later emerge from the train yard at dawn. Then they'll see who burned, who's up, who's got fame.

These are the boys who jump the rooftops over the skulls of buildings-South Bronx, Bed Sty, Harlem-who shimmy up the fire escape to a ledge to dangle awhile and finally crawl over, then race across hot asphalt shouting and cursing. The one who killed a kid for his coat jumps first, then a hush as they wait for the next to come forward, all muscled up and shaking his fists. It's the first jump of the night that's the hardest. And now the rough boy, who scratched his tag in broad daylight on a window of the 0 train, next to IS, BIG, and FATAL, so he'd be the most famous person on the glass, the boy who's swung from overhangs and driven his feet through shop windows on Queens Boulevard.

One by one, they break from the group, run to the far ledge, and jump: just a small vibration across the planet before the night sky bares its teeth.

Two Poems

Bruce Smith

After the Evening News

Lovers were not, Marina, are not permitted to know destruction so deeply.

-Pasternak to Tsvetaeva

I knew the face I used to watch the young Colombian, Omira Sanchez, die could not be used again. While she was the bright event, I was the impotent hindsight from the voice-over announcement of an act ofGod. She was neck deep in the mud from the volcano's eruption and flood; she was the buoyant face above, and not an arm's length beneath, the embrace of her grandmother's corpse. What day is it?

I'm afraid I'll miss my math test, she said, and I kept watching the television until I saw the New York Giants disfigure Washington.

Not once and forgotten like a man's orgasm ten years, twenty years later. Not twice or a third time-water under something, wind around. Not notches on the pearl-handled gun, deed, date, the Kings and Queens of England, G.!. crosses at Normandy, or the wings

of moths stretched and smudged above their Latin. Not in history but in time. And not the bright momentred giant, nova, white hot starbut the black gravity of who you were, Omira Sanchez, an eternity, a mouth, a lover's mouth.

Delinquent

Sometimes the gun is pointed at the temples when I want the silence its chambers can bring and sometimes it turns itself on the evening to shoot out the imperial streetlights and the beautiful neon in emotionally neutral cafes whose redolent light is as difficult as smoke, as stammering language to hold. Now I can be delinquent in the dark, except for the star point flashing from the neck of the broken bottle on another century's mill dam in Lawrence, Massachusetts, where I hear looms like axes grinding with complaint into my temporary little hell. The sound is like the sharpening of my pencil I tum and point down and away from myself.

Two Poems

Dorothea Edmondson

Mulgrave

for my grandparents

If I could return and get lost among these hills with the bird that inscrutably stares at me from the old naseberry tree

If I could really get lost in this St. Elizabeth back-bush with the audacious mongoose that inches forward to size me up

If I could lose myself myself in this Mulgrave back-o'-wall with the nonentities the nobodies the all-a-dem who think me queer

To even think of living here, I'd come to understand among these weathering tombs on our burial ground who I am

Why my grandfather's and great-grandfather's land stretches east west as far as eye can see, the wrong or right how the land came by

Why all the bones that remain in this nourished landland that flowers pimento, hoards cassava and yamexcite, invite

Why Pride-of-the-Mountain palm'high over tree, shrub, bush, reveals to me

Grandma Rachel Samuels

Who loved to get all dressed up and church,walk to companiment bells on Sundays

While husband, family, everybody on property and in bush, all-a-dem in Mulgrave district bowed, looked up to say good-rnahning Miss Rachel.

She, the pride of Mulgrave in her Sunday hat, looking like Pride-of-the-Mountain, the flower that wears with flair

Its bom-and-growya omatious garden-party hat fashioned with a palm swathe feather sash in bold lilac, dressed to kill

Among these no-name hills on this back-bush air as if St. Elizabeth, her Mulgrave land, were ever so posh, God's own sphere.

And I'd come to know why Pride-of-the-Mountain flowering nowhere else, planted and rooted in these hills, calls and thrills me to get lost here.

Footbottoms Up

Footbottoms up, white soles bared up at the sun's workplace the working world.

Shocked?

Of course, a nobody dared to mock the bustling-by nation-builders black as he with white soles socked and shod.

He foorbottomed-up motorists too! Those brand-new executives on the rise, those groomed young men jacket and tied scented like the American guys.

Who does he think he is? Why isn't he one of us hardworking honest immigrants pushing up? What makes him sprawl at noon and overlooking our best thoroughfare bare two great toes at our workforce, the trafficking sky?

Gesturing worse than the obscene finger

You will admit, to be foorbottomed-up from an unemployable unemployed, shocks. Not his knotty unkempt beard and matted locks, not his dread Rastafarian sneer, burr-fuzzy nakedness layzee chair but his great toes' jerk at our prideful workforce at the sun busy at work beaming on all the ingested stresschoked acidic pressurepacked prewrapped work ethic that he of all people should do it when you and I good immigrants in the force know the farce and wouldn't.

Poetry Overdose

Tom Wayman

Each day on the planet Earth a million poems are written Of these, English-speaking North America accounts for roughly ten percent: a hundred thousand poems In a year, then, more than thirty-six million appear on this continent on lined paper, notebook pages and computer printouts I have no proof these numbers are correct but they sound right to me And, as any poet knows, if something sounds good it must be true

Of the thirty-six million poems produced here annually maybe one day's worth succeed in being published -in a plum, mass-circulation magazine or in the fifty copies of the first and last issue of a photocopied venture intended to save the art form from being marginalized Perhaps ten thousand of these printed poems appear again in their authors' books during the following three years: whether volumes issued by a nationally distributed press

or a collection the poet pays for herself or himself tries to sell at local readings and eventually gives away About a thousand of the poems in books get chosen over the next five years for anthologies -thematic, ethnic, geographic And at the end of ten years of these thousand anthologized poems only sixteen are still being reprinted although during this interval a few thousand others have flashed an additional time and died in a handful ofpoets' selected poems

From more than thirty-six million to sixteen in a decade is such a rate of attrition no wonder we never stop jotting down phrases jabbing at keyboards

With poems, as with mosquitoes, millions must be born each breeding season so a pitifully small percentage can annoy you when you try to sleep give you satisfaction when you smack them down draw blood

Four Poems

Pat Mangan

Acid

It looked like a movie to us blue barricades cordoned off the street floodlamps were everywhere tilted and humming though most trained to the face of one building up there men were working their yellow ponchos and hoods protective goggles making them look surreal as they applied burst after burst of steam the scaffolds rocking the spray drifting around them in mists rainbows then slatting down in the street "It's lovely" you said and then "Let's get closer" but as we skirted the barricades a man came running up dressed in the same yellow rain gear He gestured toward the men on the scaffolds said they were using acid if any fell on us our skin would begin to bum then deep sores open pits in the flesh and then something I'll never forget he said "You have pretty skin stay here and watch" Then goggles down he strode away leaving us there just inside the barricades at our Own risk I don't remember how long we stood there looking up at the building those men with their steamy iron wands moving across the scaffolds jets of spray pummeling its surface the black stones growing whiter and whiter But I do remember the flush on your face bright red that spread across your cheeks up into the hairline

(those lovely waves of hair) and how your hands traveled your face over and over: two strangers discovering then rediscovering the skin you'd been born with and always surprised

Thompson

Watch she said he'll bum himself up smoking and drinking at all hours the old fool and one day he did the firemen came they axed in the door a couple of windows for good measure with steel hooks they threw out his mattress onto the snow that was piss-stained from top to bottom the filthy blankets still smoking they wrestled a gutted chair up the basement steps heaved it onto its side left it there vomitmg springs singed cotton batting and with not much effort they carried him out in a plastic bag and lay that there on the icy walk next to the fire engine while one lit a cigarette tilting his helmet back shifting his respirator another walked over to use our phone he wanted to call the morgue Wipe your feet my mother said I've just waxed there were white spots on her knees and one blue vein that flickered then shot off down her leg

Roots

The street was a mess of heavy equipment a back-hoe at one end opened a trench but not too deep to reveal gas mains rusty corroded-over then abruptly churned to a stop one of its teeth snagged in tree roots I could see the effortless tangle a few feet deep that spread I imagined under the street (the street was lined with elms) I could see the gray tooth wrist-deep jammed into one of the roots brown bark white meat peeking out but nothing spectacular I thought in the few bright sunshiny hours I'd given myself to walk just something that'd happened a fluke that within hours would be covered up forgotten Then a man in muddy coveralls came running up brandishing like a hard-on a javelin's length steel bar pointed at one end red-faced out of breath he straddled the ditch and with several short vicious thrusts sent the bar thunking down into the ditch against the roots and what came out was more tom flesh a white milk-like fluid

coating the tip of the bar I don't know how long I stood there watching long enough I suppose to feel a characteristic tic in my groin long enough to remember Iowa the farmhouse about this time of year and one of our fights: we sat in your study on the second floor and the light then as it entered the cold unfeeling panes of the window to fall diagonally across our knees to the floor had the same weight as we sat there talking hour after hour and growing further and further apart

Boil

It's all right he says it doesn't hurt a little redness some pus it doesn't hurt just touching it now grazing it really with his fingertips but she his wife I suppose seems fascinated keeps staring at the red purplish nob on the man's neck though suddenly and without him seeing her she's in her purse lifting things out dumping them back in keys compact a comb where is it a tissue ah she has it now and leaning quickly over she starts to press on it Bitch he screams jerking his head around fast Bitch bitch waving her hands off the flimsy paper But wait a minute she coos and goes right back staunching pressing Momma's almost done the tissue as she speaks turning gray vile dirty with the eruption as she wipes it off sitting and turns to show him See Boopy

The Snow Goddess

Dennis

Hathaway

The snow. The scalloped drifts, the blinding desert of whiteness in the sun, the silent rain of flakes through headlights and streetlamps, the dry crunch underfoot. What else did she deeply miss, other than a particular friend, after months of living inside the vast, crowded, cacophonous tanning parlor of Southern California? Her lover, a native named Thorn, promised to take her to the mountains that sometimes emerged from a first-stage smog alert and hovered vaguely on the horizon beyond her apartment window-he would take her as soon as his projects achieved equilibrium. He used this word--equilibrium--causing her to think both of chemistry and the inner ear. Rain that had fallen for twenty-four hours with a disappointing absence of sound and fury would tum to snow upon reaching the mountains, Thorn said to her, as she stared at a sky so colorless and lacking in depth that she imagined the earth to have skidded off its orbit, into some inexplicable, twilightish zone of the universe.

He's thinking of skiing, she said to herself. Craving the thrill of descent which was an idea that made her shudder, wind like a maniac's hands at your throat as you plummeted, out of control, into an inevitable spiral of darkness and death. She had always been prone to cosmically apocalyptic fantasies-the earth radically tilting, for example, or veering dangerously close to the sun, or colliding with another planet like Saturn or Jupiter, an event comparable in her mind to the crash of her Volkswagen Rabbit with a semi-trailer truck on a stretch of freeway where traffic sometimes did about eighty miles an hour. A propensity she blamed upon a childhood visit to an observatory, where everything, she told Thorn, the heavy black gears of the

telescope, the slit in the dome high above her head, the photographs of pockmarked astral bodies, the wealth of facts printed in inch-high letters under plastic, had disrupted her sense of proportion-her equilibrium-so profoundly that she had thrown up on an animated model of the solar system, the sun a white-hot basketball around which the planets revolved-Mercury a pea, Jupiter a jumbo grapefruit, and so forth. She remembered the tone of a woman's voice saying "For goodness sake!" and then the sight of another child empathetically throwing up on the opposite side of the display. She could see the absurdity and humor of this scene, but the recalling of it only made her feel, particularly when Thorn didn't laugh, queasy and ashamed.

She hadn't known him long enough to believe everything he said, absolutely, but when she turned the TV on to the six o'clock news there it was-people stuck in it, throwing it, sliding through it-snow; white, pristine, glorious snow. Next weekend, he said, a little distantly, distracted by other ideas that often seemed to ring like a telephone in his head. She thought of his profession as busyness. Waiting for his coffee on a weekend morning he would poke the buttons on his wristwatch calculator while delivering a monologue containing such phrases as "front end" and "capital enrichment." The first time she saw him she was amazed by his golden, shaggy hair; his George Hamilton tan; his baggy shorts and 'Tshirt that her mind removed in an act of giddy, pubescent daring that turned the imagined scene into a fifties beach party, replete with longings that in the spirit of those Eisenhower years had to be tortured into a phony Gidget-like wholesomeness.

"Are you a surfer?" she had asked, a few months removed from ice, naked trees, and a man who liked to cite a study purporting to prove that the mind works most efficiently between forty and sixty degrees. A man who had grudgingly turned his thermostat up to sixty-three when she came to spend the night. Whose face had faded, along with his letters, leaving the memory of shivering, shivering-her body wrapped around his, trying to steal his heat; then sitting at his table eating breakfast in double layers of wool with icy fingers that fumbled with the butter knife. This man had promoted the idea of marriage-selling it like a used car, she thought, glossing over its obvious defects and magnifying its few good points into grandiose virtues-but the longer she had contemplated this the closer she had edged toward a decision to escape; to escape the cold, the cloudy huffs and puffs of lungs and engines, the skeletal landscape, that which seemed to have frozen not only the earth but time, making change unthinkable.

"I surf," Thorn had said, his interest in her appearing to have been nudged upward a notch or two. "If that's what you mean." She hadn't conceived of any distinction between one who surfs and one who is a surfer, but had simply imagined a lazy passage of hours spent in anticipation of the ultimate wave, entire mornings or afternoons of sun and lassitude. But that, it turned out, wasn't Thorn. On a certain day of the week, at a certain time, he would call a number on the telephone and if certain conditions were present would tie his surfboard to the roof of his car and drive to the ocean, always to the same place, always for a specific, prearranged amount of time. The first time she had gone with him she had sat cross-legged in cool sand as he waded through the surf and paddled through swells, and she had imagined that when he came in they would lie together and watch the sun sink into the sea, and maybe even wait for dark and build a driftwood fire and make spontaneous love if there wasn't anyone else around. Gidget, submitting to desire, shedding that giggly innocence that was just a euphemism for lust. She had watched a gathering of teenage boys in wet suits, their wholesomeness oddly undisturbed by the unselfconscious passing around of a joint. Then the curling edge of a wave like a long, green snowdrift had delivered Thorn like a gift to the beach, but instead of sitting down and putting his arm around her after unwrapping himself and drying off, he had begun to describe a piece of property that he had arranged to see before dark, and she had felt suddenly abused, the way she had felt in bed with the other man, with the vast darkness and cold weighing in above her like a punishment meted out by adults, arbitrary, incomprehensible, richly undeserved.

"Thorn!" She called through the open bedroom door. "Come look, Thorn!" A miracle, or at the very least a phenomenon, the repatriation of the sun as if nothing at all had happened. The basketball ablaze above a panorama that she had seen only once, on a postcard bought for the man who had regarded her shivering as something mental, a quirk. The mountains normally obscured by haze a ragged slash of glistening white across a page of sky so blue that she had a sense of the infinite depth and time that constitute the universe. Standing in her robe at the window, staring at the sun restored to its proper place between the flat, gray roof of the parking garages and the thin, black lines of high-tension wires stretched between a forced march of poles, she felt almost giddy, and she opened her refrigerator and then various cabinet doors, assembling utensils and ingredients for a breakfast certain to warm Thorn's heart. He appeared, a grumpy apparition, and she nudged him

into the little nook where the table was wedged, brought him a glass of orange juice, got the newspaper from the balcony and poured coffee into the largest cup she could find. She mussed his hair and nibbled his ear, but midway through the pancakes that had turned out much too heavy he said that he couldn't possibly leave, his projects hadn't achieved equilibrium. That word again.

"The snow will be there for a while. It's not going anywhere."

She could neither agree nor disagree. Disappointment forced her to withdraw like a punished child into a barren little room with a chair and a book she had read so many times that all the dialogue was committed to memory. "Good morning, dog," said the cow. "Neigh," said the horse, "I'm not giving rides today.". After a while she noticed that impatience had spread like a blush across Thorn's face, the way it did whenever she was dreamy or distracted. "Meg. Megan. Did you hear what I said?"

"I want to go," she answered, aware of her capacity to loathe himhim and the other man, or even the entire gender.

"You want. You want." He raised the cup to his lips and his face was drastically altered by a scowl, causing her to wonder if the coffee was too weak, or too strong, or if he only liked the kind you bought in paper bags in little shops for what she considered exorbitant amounts of money. Her fear of his displeasure formed a hollow in the center of her self-esteem. She gazed at his chest, a triangular field of hair and a single, pink nipple exposed by the gape of his robe. The fear was displaced by a sudden, surprising glow of contentment, and she got up and went around the back of his chair and inserted her hands beneath the lapels of his robe and breathed into the conjunction of his shoulder and neck.

"Megan. What are doing?"

"I want to go," she whispered.

"Megan are you trying to manipulate me?"

But he said this with an inflection that descended with her hands, a tone of acquiescence to accompany them to the disarray of the bed and its promise of pleasure made inconsequential by the fact that her mind had already leaped the sunlit sea of roofs and trees and wires and reached the mountains, a brilliant, silent whiteness that was, she thought, suddenly, momentarily, the only pure thing that she would ever know.

Thorn decided that the mountain highways would be clogged with skiers and therefore they would drive to a place in the desert where an

aerial tramway ran to a summit upon which she would find a surfeit of her beloved snow. From his detached tone of voice, his asymmetrical smile, his lackadaisical posture, she inferred that he believed himself to be indulging her. On the freeway he made calls on his cellular phone, leaving her nothing to do but gaze at the endless suburbs sliding past her window. She heard the word "Aspen" and wondered, without warning, if there were other women in the periphery of his life, women like shadows or ambiguous noises that make you uneasy in the night. On a recent weekend morning in bed he had begun to compare herfavorably, it seemed-with a certain woman from his past and she had clapped her hand across his mouth, a desperate act that he had laughed at, not taken seriously. As he talked on the telephone to someone about plumbing fixtures she began to imagine herself married to an entirely different person-a plumber-and living in one of the houses that were all identical, or at least so similar that she felt monotony and boredom hovering over her like a cloud. She and the plumber would have three children, a girl and two boys, and when he came home from rooting out drains they would eat the casserole she fixed and watch TV and worry about paying the mortgage and the latest dentist's bill. The life she had imagined with Thom was quite different, of course. There would be tony restaurants, airplane trips, hotels with doormen, women and men to clean the house and trim the lawn. A picture of ease and luxury marred only by the scratch of his voice on the telephone, always on the telephone, seeking, explaining, threatening, directing elsewhere the attention that she deserved an undivided portion of. The plumber would detail his struggles with a stopped-up toilet but would also listen with compassion to her account of whiny kids. Would Thom? Would he? The question loomed like the cloud she noticed for the first time in a distant corner of the horizon; a drab, possibly innocuous cloud that nevertheless threatened to spread like a stain across the sky, to swallow the sun and manufacture more of the dispiriting rain.

Outside the car the air was distinctly cool. She stared upward at sheer folds of rock and stunted vegetation beneath the initial section of the tramway-a pair of spindly erector-set towers and a black thread of cables that dangerously sagged. She followed Thom into a stream of people entering a cinder-block building. Standing in line to buy tickets, she hugged his arm.

"Scared?"

"I'm nervous."

They followed arrows into a barren, chilly, cavernous space containing a fenced-off pit in which enormous gears turned, groaning and creaking. The telescope again. She took slow, measured breaths.

"Meg," he said, as they were carried in a surge toward the car that looked to her incapable of lifting all that weight to the top of a "} h ld mountam. ust 0 on to me.

She felt charmed, softened, afraid in that deeply primal manner but willing to trust him without condition and reflection, as a child trusts an adult. She glimpsed the patriarchal lopsidedness of this relationship, but before she could examine it there was a little jerk, the car swayed forward and then back, and the landscape outside and below the panoramic windows began to slip away under their feet. She shut her eyes for a moment and breathed deliberately.

"Megan? Are you O.K.?"

"A little dizzy." When the car reached the first of a series of towers from which the cable was hung there was a little hitch in their forward motion, then a momentary sinking that elicited a chorus of "oooooh" from the passengers and promoted in her mind the fantasy of being dropped like a toy from the hand of a careless child, onto the fatally jagged rocks below. It would be totally inappropriate, she thought, to throw up. She concentrated on feeling the air grow steadily colder on her skin. The cold implied snow, and as their motion swelled and sank past another tower-"oooooooh"-she disregarded Thorn's warning and looked down to see, in the shade cast by a boulder, a palm-sized patch of white.

Within minutes they were lifted to the edge of a forest where black trunks of coniferous trees were painted upon an undulant field of white. Directly ahead was a long, low building around which figures in down jackets and ski caps moved like extras in some cinematic extravaganza, milling about in costume, waiting to be told what to do. The car slowed with a jerky motion that caused it to swing precipitously, and then the sun was erased by the wooden ceiling and walls of a cave in which more of the dark gears revolved.

"How about a drink?" Thorn asked, when they were once again on solid, immutable ground.

"No, Thorn!"

They were in a building crowded with movement and noise that echoed from a vast ceiling of wooden beams and planks, and they passed an opening to a bar that emitted voices and the odor of cigarette smoke and beer. They passed a cafeteria that smelled of hot dogs and then a

gift shop displaying mugs and T�shirts and silver jewelry in a long, glass case. They followed another couple through a pair of doors that sucked shut with a hiss behind them, leaving them in a stillness and cold that felt to her profound and absolute before she became aware of voices rising from below. A sidewalk darkened by rivulets of water curved down into a bowl-like depression filled with adults and children engaged in various activities-building snowmen, throwing snowballs, constructing forts. A branch of the sidewalk led to another area where the snow was disturbed only by the tiny scratch-like tracks of birds or other small animals.

"Oh Thom!" she said, hugging him with a sudden, giddy, adolescent passion. "I want to make an angel!"

She lay on her back and fanned her arms and legs. Thom, remaining aloof on the sidewalk, said, "I hope you're not going to complain about being wet and cold." He said this in a grave, parental voice, but the cascade of sunlight through the trees felt almost hot on her face and she couldn't take him seriously. He's bored, she thought, her heart nibbled just for a moment by sharp teeth of disappointment. She lay staring at the immaculate sky until she noticed off to one side a contrail beginning to break into little cirrus shreds, and she stood up and brushed the snow from her arms and legs. Thom's face looked slack and vague. The word "Aspen" rose in her mind like the moan of a foghorn. She looked at some people waiting to take turns sliding down an incline in a plastic laundry basket. Beyond them she saw a group of teenagers dressed in jeans, boots, down jackets, but without anything on their heads. Their voices formed a little cloud of noise above their heads.

She looked at Thom, who appeared engrossed by the sight of a blond woman preparing to take her tum in the laundry basket. The basket was a green that she associated with such items-laundry baskets, garbage cans, pails. The teenagers also watched. One of them, a girl so strikingly beautiful that Megan felt a catch in her throat, opened her mouth and laughed, a sound that echoed like a flutter of birds taking off from the trees. Thom turned his head to gaze at this girl, to stare at her with excessive seriousness, to appear to desire her, to be inflated with lust that made him look buoyant, ready to float away.

"Thorn!" The woman in the laundry basket set sail down the slope with a shriek. "I want to make a snowman." She bent to form a lopsided sphere that she pitched at him, but she had never been able to accurately throw any kind of ball and it struck the sidewalk and broke into harmless shrapnel of white. He turned his head slowly and gazed at

her with a slightly puzzled expression.

"A snowperson," she said, bending to make another snowball. She pushed the rapidly expanding cylinder in a crooked path until she could push no further. She rounded the edges of the irregular mass, feeling momentarily omniscient, as if the lumpy expanse between her mittens was an entire world that she had been empowered to create. The sculptural activity had a pleasant, soothing feel. She felt creative, a feeling that unpredictably visited her but hardly ever amounted to anything because it lacked a purpose. Thorn casually bent and patted snow into a sphere the size of a grapefruit-Jupiter! She felt immensely expectant. But then he stopped to watch the blond woman drag the laundry basket back up the slope from where it had spilled her into a mixture of hoots and applause from her friends.

"Thorn," she said, hearing her voice to be slightly shrill. "What are we going to use for arms?"

He didn't answer. Finally he bent again and urged his snowball forward so that it enlarged itself, picking up bits of leaf and twigs from the ground. She began, not for the first time, to imagine the women who preceded her, women not necessarily beautiful but glamorous women, self-possessed women, the sort of woman she would herself become ifshe only she could figure out how.

"Thorn," she said. "That's big enough. Come put it on top." The teenagers had wandered away; voices had all grown distant, leaving her with the feeling that she and Thorn had entered a kind of irrevocable solitude. He lifted his egg-shaped contribution and set it onto her base. She was pleased by the way he had finally gotten into the process if not the entire spirit of the enterprise. She started a snowball for the head, beginning to think of something more complex, more highly rendered than three spheres of diminishing size with twigs for arms and rocks or whatever else they could scavenge for nose and eyes and mouth. She thought of the Venus de Milo, and then of a goddess, white and pure and unbesmirched, radiating some sort of power.

"Fros-ty the snow-man," sang Thorn off-key, gazing past her. Some kids were now careening down the slope on garbage-can lids. She didn't want Thorn's attention to wander.

"Frosty the snowperson," she said, with a definitive feeling in her mind.

"Snowlady," Thorn said. He grinned, and became suddenly industrious, forming a pair of snowballs that he patted and shaped and then stuck, side by side, onto the middle section of the body. "Snowwoman,"

TRIQUARTERLY

he said, stepping back to admire his work.

Megan stared at the figure, feeling that she had initiated something that she might not be able to control. "I don't know," she said. The breasts looked ridiculous, and after a moment of contemplation she decided to try to sculpt them into a more realistic shape. One dislodged and fell and he said, "She's had a mastectomy." He was standing, hands in the pockets of his jacket, looking pleased or at least satisfied with himself, but it was not an out-of-the-ordinary look and she was not quite ready to see him as callous, or insensitive, or any other thing that he might, indeed, be. She retrieved the roughly conical snowball and stuck it back into place. She sculpted hollows for eyes, formed a rudimentary nose and plowed a groove with her mittened fingers to make what she hoped to be an enigmatic smile. She stepped back and stood, staring. A prolonged shriek arose from a child sliding headfirst down the slope in one direction while a green garbage-can lid spun off in another.

"Nipples," Thorn said.

"What?"

He scooped up snow and concocted a pair of grape-sized spheres that he pasted to the snowy bosom. He appeared to admire this refinement, which looked to her like buttons you were meant to push in order to animate something.

"They're too big, Thorn. They look silly."

He squatted, squinting with concentration, then with a gloved finger poked a hole into the belly and engraved on the base below it a V. She felt suddenly apprehensive.

"What do you think?" Thorn said.

She didn't know, not really. She felt a little squeeze of pressure around her heart.

"It makes me feel strange."

"Yeah," he said, as if she had just commented that she was cold, or had a pain in her toe. He stood beside the white, inanimate goddess with protruding belly, asymmetrical breasts and smile that made her look deranged. He put his arm around Megan, causing their jackets to squeak.

"Come on. Let's go inside and have something to drink."

"Thorn?" In the puff of steam that was her breath the name sounded like a stranger's.

Irish coffee

She heard this among other words that failed to make an impression. Her feelings, like his voice, had an undecipherable

quality that made their intimate knowledge of one another seem facts memorized for no particular reason, mental exercise.

"It's getting cold, Megan," he said, in a voice turned up in volume just enough to imply some sort of threat.

But she didn't want to leave. The teenagers were returning on the sidewalk, the girls walking behind the boys. They all turned their heads to look at Thorn and Megan, at the snow goddess. The beautiful girl laughed, a high-pitched, bird-like sound. Thorn bent at the waist and formed a snowball that he tossed from one gloved hand to the other. She felt a pang of vulnerability, the way one feels passing the scene of an accident, or hearing a siren in the night. He pitched the snowball at a tree, accurately, so that it struck and left a chalky smudge on the rugged blackboard of bark. Another thing he was good at. Surfing. Skiing. Throwing a ball.

"Let's go," he said.

"In a minute She tried shaving snow from a shoulder but instead of imparting realism the change made the snowwoman look skinny, deformed. Within a few days, she guessed, the goddess would age an entire lifetime-shrink, diminish, melt to a shapeless lump. Or perhaps among the people in the meadow below was a zealot who would think her pornographic and push her over. Megan imagined doing this herself, denying anyone else the satisfaction, but she thought that Thorn would view such an act as childish, and she told herself that goddesses are immortal, that they can protect themselves from any sort of danger, that they, unlike herself, need never be afraid.

They sat at a window in the bar that overhung the edge of the mountain, and beyond a drift of snow and boulders that looked like whales. The desert spread out below, a flat plane of brownness stretching away into a hazy infinity. Near one comer, partially cut off by the gray hump of a particularly old and mossy whale, the brownness gave sudden way to green, an oasis sprinkled throughout with white dabs of roofs, and shiny pencil lines of streets. A wider line crossed the desert floor and on it she could see crawling points of reflected light.

"See the road down there?" A voice at her back, from an adjacent table. "Beyond the parking lot." A male voice, a teaching, explanatory voice. Thorn was gazing, not through the window, but at something in the room-a woman, she thought, a woman with an interesting face, and the long, slender, model's figure that seemed to appeal to him.

"Look where the road curves just beyond the parking lot."

She wanted to keep looking at Thorn, to capture his attention, but instead she complied with the stranger's command, looking down, beyond an approaching tramway car, beyond another descending car the size of her thumb, beyond the low, beige building they had originally entered and beyond a glitter of color that was the parking lot, a series of flat places cut into the initial swelling of the mountain's base. Beyond this the ribbon of road curled downward.

"That first curve. That's where it happened."

"What happened?" said a female voice, a bored, indifferent voice that she suddenly wanted to imitate.

"That accident with the school bus. Where all those kids got killed."

"What kids?" This voice, detached from any physical presence that Megan was aware of, was cool and seemingly disinterested.

"School kids. The bus lost its brakes and went off the road. About forty or fifty kids were killed."

A dense silence followed, then ice tinkled in a glass.

"Nine," said Thorn. Megan became aware of eyes upon her in some manner that felt investigative and judicial. The man's voice at the next table, and the woman's murmured responses, rose and faded like music from the cars with boom boxes that regularly passed her apartment house.

"It happened last year," Thorn said, in the calm but emphatic voice he used to straighten out facts. "Nine kids were killed. Not fifty."

"That's awful," said Megan, suddenly imagining herself pregnant, getting ready to give birth to a child who would always be in danger, imperiled by something.

Thorn shrugged. She briefly thought of the child that they would produce, a male child. She did not picture specific physical features but only a certain sort of personality. She felt herself frown.

"Thorn," she said. "What were you talking about Aspen?"

"Aspen?"

"On the phone in the car."

"Hmm." Again he was looking past her. Evaluating the invisible woman at the table behind, a woman whose voice had been huskywith a cold? With sex? "I'll probably go in a couple of weeks."

"To ski?"

"Uh�huh."

A picture of plummeting figures sunk like a stone to the pit of her stomach. If something happened-but the worst was breaking your leg, wasn't it? An image of him immobile in bed with an enormous cast on

his leg had a disconcerting quality that she tried to shake out of her mind, like a cobweb or something caught in her hair. She listened to his voice describe the condominium his friend had arranged to rent, and in a tone ascending with enthusiasm he spoke of getting up, up, up for the challenge so unfortunately lacking in the local mountains. She wanted to listen more carefully but her mind was monopolized by a single factthat he had not invited her. Had not enabled her to say, no, I couldn't ask for time off work, I'll miss you but don't worry, just have fun. Had not even said, You could corne if you knew how to ski.

"Who else is going?" she said, knowing how distasteful he would find her little blossom of jealousy.

"David Gray," he said. "You've met him. And his girlfriend."

She had never been to Aspen but she had read about it in magazines and suddenly concluded that she would hate such a hopelessly snobbish and artificial scene. There would be Thorn, David, David's girlfriend, but who would be the fourth? There would be a fourth, wouldn't there? She stared out through the window at the enormous bowl of crusted sand and stunted vegetation that was the desert, rimmed by the lumpy, dark, mashed potatoes of mountains upon which she could not detect a single patch of white. Someone thin and glamorous, an expert skier. Her own defects-legs too short, bottom too wide, bosom too small, neck too long, hair tending not to shine-lined up in her head like a clique of girls from junior high school, self,appointed to taunt her.

"Thorn." She stared at his skin, at this manifestation of health that had shone like a beacon the first time she saw him, in a room full of other people whose faces had all vanished from her mind. "It must have been awful. Those kids. For their parents."

"Of course it was awful," he said. "What else would it be?"

She felt the floor tilt as the earth rocked slightly on its axis. She turned her head from the window and saw, standing at the bar, a young woman with a waterfall of tightly curled hair, crimson lips and a body that looked ripe, like a piece of fruit. A young man with a thin mustache appeared to be pushing himself against this woman, and Megan felt a sudden stab of violation. She looked at Thorn. He was drumming his fingers on the tabletop, gazing at her or past her-she couldn't tell which. She looked again and saw the young woman place her hands against the young man's chest, as if caught between the acts of resisting and giving in. She thought of the goddess alone outside in the snow and something entered her body and ran like a shock of electricity up her spine and shook, jolted, vibrated like the string of an

TRIQUARTERLY

out-of-tune instrument in her head.

"We could have done something great," she said. She imagined others looking at the sculpture, concluding that it was a joke created by sophomoric boys, young men such as the one at the bar.

"What are we talking about?" Thorn didn't look at her.

"The snowwoman. If we had spent some time we could have made her beautiful, instead of just something like a cartoon."

"Is this important?"

"Yes," she said. She pushed back her chair. She was aware of having stood up and of Thorn's hand constraining her, but she slipped loose and crossed toward a slightly blurred rectangle of light. A man stood in her way but she brushed past him, through the doors that swung out into the daylight and the snow and trees. The cold caused her to gasp. The sun had sunk completely out of sight, and the faded white between the trees made everything look abstract and gloomy. She stepped across frozen trickles of water, heading toward the goddess whose expression at a distance was vapid and unconcerned. Another man stood in her path, a large man who filled her with fear, as if it was night in the city and she would have to pass him to get to her car. The man alarmed her by setting himself into motion, but he merely passed with a flicker of his eyes and a bland, impersonal tug of his lips and she stood very still and listened to the sound of his feet on the sidewalk and finally the hiss of the pneumatic cylinders of the doors. She sniffed and brushed an icy dampness from her eyes.

She stared at the goddess, and the emotion that had propelled her so abruptly out of the bar became an intense dismay, and then an anger that flared up and expired into a feeling of vast fatigue. Someone had poked a dark blunt stick into the point of the V that Thorn had furrowed, and this violation made the goddess look abject and helpless. Was it the man she had passed on the sidewalk? The boys she had seen at a pinball machine just outside the doorway to the bar? The young man pressing himself upon the young woman? She grasped the stick and pulled, wincing. Then she put her hands on the face of the goddess and shoved, and the head, beginning to freeze, tumbled and split in half as it struck the ground.

"Megan!" He had waited, she supposed, certain that she would return, and when she hadn't he had grown angry and thus the tone of parental frustration, an end-of-the-rope quality, in his voice. "What the hell is the matter with you anyway?"

"She was raped," Megan said, feeling resigned to a condition that felt

TRIQUARTERLY

like indifference to his anger, and to his self. On some level, she thought, it mattered enormously what had happened, and on another it didn't mean anything at all, and she felt suspended between these two extremes. The headless body didn't really look like anything at all and she kicked it, feeling nothing as pieces broke and scattered.

"Come on," said Thorn. "There's a car going down in a couple of minutes."

"No."

"What's the matter with you, Megan?"

She didn't answer. She heard his foot scuff back and forth on the sidewalk.

"I'm going," he said, with the precise enunciation of a parent instructing a child. "I'm going down and then I'm going to get in my car and drive down the road and get on the freeway and head for home. If you're with me, fine. If you're not, I guess you'll have to figure out how to get there by yourself. But I'm not waiting, Megan. I'm going. Now."

"Go," she said.

"All right." But he didn't move.

"Go!"

He nodded, as if in recognition that something had not quite met his expectations. A set of waves. A ski run. He walked back along the sidewalk and she watched until the doors swung shut behind him. He knew exactly where he was going, she thought, exactly what he was going to do, while her own future remained as unclear as ever; the immediate future particularly, what she would do when she got to the bottom of the tramway, alone and feeling anxiety just now beginning to form like ice on the surface of her mind. She saw the building, the parking lot, the descending road and the school bus out of control and smashing with a horrific gnashing of metal against the boulders that she had noticed on the way up, all shapes and sizes, geological litter. She gazed at the broken pieces of the goddess and decided that it was a mistake to leave anything-yourself, especially--exposed to ridicule and violation. To imagine an inanimate object with some kind of power to protect not only yourself but others from tragedy, distress, unhappiness. She turned and walked quickly back through the pneumatic whoosh of the doors and found a line of people waiting to leave the mountain. At the end of the line stood the large man who had frightened her outside, and a few places ahead, the group of teenagers. Silently she said to one of them, "Could you give me a ride?" Further explication came to her mind. "My lover-Boyfriend? Companion?-and I had a fight and

he left without me." A ball swelled in her throat and a mist developed in her eyes. As an antidote she tried to picture a map but beyond a large amorphous blob that was the city she saw nothing but the green and yellow and brown of unidentified land, wilderness.

"Megan."

She looked up and saw Thorn's face. She didn't know if what she felt was relief, because the part of her that craved predictability was in some way damaged. He hadn't left her. Did this mean that he loved her, as she had desired, at least until that afternoon, or did it mean that he couldn't imagine her being able to fend for herself? Because she had begged him to take her to the mountains, resorted to bribery when she could have just come by herself, driven her own car, done what she pleased and not found herself at the dizzying, nauseous brink of a predicament?

They silently moved along and when they were in the tramway car and descending she could see a sprinkling of lights throughout the oasis that had turned from green to black on the floor of the desert. People in houses, cooking dinner, reading, watching TV; people talking, arguing, making love. She listened to the voices of the teenagers, giggles, murmurs, sudden squeals. Then she saw the obvious. That it was all a fantasy that had closed, like an amusement park-the trees and snow manufactured for a moment's diversion in the lives of people like herself, like the people with the laundry basket, like the teenagers, all tourists in this landscape. As she pondered this thought Thorn put his arm around her shoulder and his face close to her ear, as if to whisper something, but he didn't; she could only feel his breath, and hear it move, slowly back and forth, in a rhythm so regular that she began to feel warmer, and, despite some contrary tone deep in her body, safe.

Whorl

Steve Fisher

Another black, pasty morning shrouded the camp. And Nacho, like always, was up early, getting ready for his job as a porter in the library. I saw him with a can of Magic Shaving Powder: he shaved about every fourth day, but the job was a daily thing, and at least twice a week the librarian threatened to write him up over his beard stubble. Usually with a guard present. Finally, he would shave. I never liked that aspect of working, either: just tighter confinement around the rules of prison, like a hat size that was constantly being reduced.

But I knew Nacho. He had lived across from me, in the dorm, for close to a year. One of the first things I had noticed were the two teardrops he had, green teardrops, tattooed below the corner of his left eye: each drop represented five years in stir. He also had a large cobra, coiled in the small of his back, that lifted up his spine to the slender area of his neck. His arms were designed with affiliation symbols, club symbols, and during the lockdowns-when separated from his homeboys-we sometimes kicked it together. But since I wasn't working, I had Nacho get me up that morning for breakfast. He'd said that the school, across from the library, might be looking for another porter. The plan was to check it out with him after chow.

The rest of the dorm just snored contentedly, like apes stretched out in a tropical lull. I lay in bed scratching, not at all eager to work or to hustle up one of their jobs.

I knew that porters were a special type of janitor who hung out a lot on the job, after they cleaned and mopped and did the rest of their schedule. They were often contacts between yards, running a sort of messenger service for small favors: no room for scrubs in this line of

work. But most of them had been fucked over at one time or another, say, by a twenty-year-old guard, fresh from the academy, who confused prison with the duties of a high-school hall monitor. Yet Nacho had tried to school me, the previous night. He explained it this way: "Capone, Atwood, all them old gangsters used to be porters. Now you have Crips and EI Rukins, Bloods who are porters."

"Yeah?" I had told him.

"Shit," he said, "it's an honorable tradition, a tough tradition." He then leaned a little closer:

"I heard that James Brown worked as a porter. The Godfather, ese. A real classy bro in the union."

I had told him all right, I might become a porter, but as usual I was thinking about my own ass. We were in a high-medium institution, and you got fucked around badly if you didn't hire on somewhere. They started by having you rake rocks, on the track by the dorms which enclosed our yard. Then, when you refused, they took an amount of "good time" and put you on the shotgun crew. When you told them to jam that crew you were taken off the yard, placed in a higher, supermaximum run, and given a cell with some headcase. I knew there were plenty of nuts around our camp, and felt no need to be on a permanent, lockdown basis with one. So I figured the sensible thing would be to cover myself, to just fart along with the game until I made a lowersecurity yard. And since jobs meant bosses and authority, I also thought it would be sensible to work as little as possible.

It was barely seven o'clock in the morning. Nacho came back wearing blue-striped boxers, scuffling the floor with his shower shoes. He dumped the shaving material on his bed and sat down. Opened his locker. I saw the roll on his stomach, and the old knife wound which glowed like cartilage upon his left side: someone had once caught him from behind on a third tier in the walls, some shit or the other about who had the claim to a job opening. I exhaled sawdust from the last of my cigarette, thinking of breakfast, peeling slowly, at first, from my sheets to get dressed. Our shirts were blue. The air was black. My rug was a towel I had folded under the bunk. And the dorm was freezing when you had hot, Arizona skin. I got into my clothes as quickly as possible, the light from the bathroom like a white frosting on my eyes. I glanced at Grissom, my cellmate, as I tied on my boots. He was all right. He just snored under the hairy, black blanket. Nacho still sat on his bed in his boxers, unfolding T-shirts, his television on. I tucked in my shirt and called him a cold, calloused motherfucker. He put his teeth together

and hissed at the wall.

"Five minutes," he said, adjusting the volume on his set. Always this nervous bit of fiddling.

"All right," I told him, "but I need some air. I wanna breathe air again.

"Su aliento huele a mielda," he said. Your breath smells like shit. "No doubt."

I put my jacket on and went outside, spitting at the trash can that stood near our walk. I glanced at the sky. The world up there was like an asphalt parachute. Rugged, wet charcoal. The yard and the trailers looked worse, like filmed reports I'd seen of outback Nicaragua. The smarter convicts wore stocking caps, going into and coming out of the chowhall. I drifted, looking for my breath against the clouds. And porters went through this shit every morning? Nacho came out jacketless, wearing his shades. "Fuck," he said. "Cold out here." But all he did was shrug. We footed it the short distance to the chowhall.

There was a short line when we arrived. We walked up the cattle ramp, which was built against the wall, hooking at the comer to the right. It was spacious, almost elevated in there, though a hundred steel tables were cemented in the floor. Each table was fitted with four attached stools, and glowed under these snarling, length-long fixtures of light. It was like looking at a train of fluorescent cigarettes up there, but the overall feeling-with the thirty-foot walls and the ticking echo, the rafter vents and the smell of blower fans-was that of being dropped into a huge, Styrofoam cup.

I leaned against the half-wall, looking in at the workers on the serving line, watching the pancakes cook behind them on the grill. No, that wasn't the job for me either. I still felt about four-inches numb and wanted, in particular, to listen to a woodwind quintet: it was sound that I needed, just a form to balance my rhythms against, but all I heard was an inmate up front who'd been shorted a container of milk by one of the bluecap, civilian employees: "I ever catch you out here," the inmate hollered, "I'll strip the bark from your ass!" There was a solid panel-no glass-above the serving window, so the bluecaps could have limited contact with us. They could pretend, for instance, that they were hiding behind trees. The inmate plowed along, out through the turnstile, but only with a partial tray.

"And don't forget my MILK, asshole," Nacho yelled in when we stepped up to the window. He got his stuff, but I had to reach in, because the bluecap pulled my tray from the ledge and walked off. The

guards just stood there, writing down names that they knew the faces belonged to.

"Later," said Nacho, looking across the room.

Some of his pardners were sitting upper-center in the chowhall, so I grabbed a table in the corner and agreed to meet him in the library. Breakfast was the time for fruit, cereal, for sugar. The little packets went into socks, pockets, up sleeves. Various bags were brought in for cereal, which were then crotched or otherwise handled. I took my banana and dropped it through the booster slit I'd cut in the lining of my jacket. A white guy, decades older than me, set his tray on the table. I sliced at my pancake with a small, plastic Spork. The old guy didn't say a thing.

One side of my pancake was tough. The other was mostly batter. It was like chewing a brown leaf that had been coated with paste. I dropped it from my mouth grotesquely to my tray.

"Who can stand to get out of bed for this shit?" I asked.

I caught this wild, emerald span of oval, when the old guy raised his eyes up to mine. His head was still bent.

"They know how to scam a pancake," he said. "You didn't really expect breakfast, did you?"

"Guess not," I said. "Not when they know we could eat a whole slaughterhouse."

"Took twenty years for me to choke one of these down," he said, sporking at the pancakes, "but less than a morning to regret it. Now I just stick to the cereal. You can eat it dry, when the milk's sour."

His head was still down. I splashed the milk on my flakes.

The chowhall guards, like those in the rest of the joint, thrived on this game of lower polarity. Their trick was to block your needs, AS THEY CAME UP, through personal interpretation of the policy manual: raw pancakes. Spoiled milk. It was strictly an authoritative game, based on the idea of depriving the residents. I didn't quite understand it, but one of the advantages to working in the kitchen was being able to pre-step the bluecaps and the guards and to eat, regularly, before the food went bad. But I had long ago learned how to fast on tobacco.

I carried my tray up to the dish window, hungry, chewing some dry cereal. A green banana slid by on the floor. The guard I passed in the exit ramp said nothing, his chin pointy and angular, resembling a garden trowel. Outside, three other cops looked me over. A thin crack of light divided the sky, and I imagined being trapped under a black beetle's shell. I went back to the dorm and picked up my cap. Grissom was still

sleeping, grinding his teeth, his arms stretched up like a forked branch.

Another black, pasty morning. They could go on forever, especially when you started out tweaked. And who really wanted to work an institutional shift, anyway? I snagged my cap, then walked out into the dayroom.

The library and school were located outside the yard, on a restricted and fenced,off section of the camp. You needed a pass from the house cop to get up there. I tracked him down, got one, and headed across the yard. Other convicts, wearing orange jumpsuits, milled around the west perimeter, waiting for various crew bosses. I looked away from them, no way, and crunched along in the frozen Arizona mud. More residents hung around the South Administration, waiting to get in to see their counselors. Prison counselors were supposed to help you get paperwork and so forth to places like the parole board and the classification committee, though I never saw an enthusiastic,looking face over there. But the turnstile I needed was just off to their left, below one of the gun towers. I dropped my pass into the slot. The guard pulled it in, examining me. She looked down at my boots, yelling through the glass.

"Lift your feet!" she hollered.

I showed her my brogans.

"Go!"

She pushed the button and I rolled the gate open. I passed through and closed it, watching a cop patrol the North Visitation Center. Three fences beyond me lay five other yards, including a minimum and a drunk-driving facility: cash yards, the way Nacho had it figured. I walked along, past visitation, past another locked fence at the edge of the school. I stopped between the school and the library. A sort of divider terrace was cemented between buildings, where a few students hung out, smoking. I glanced through the school window, into the office where the secretary worked: just a short blond in a loose red skirt, cafeteria-plump, talking on the phone. Probably to a cop. Definitely not worth getting out of bed for, every day. I grabbed open the door on the library.

Officially, the library was still closed. Nacho and one of his homeboys were sitting at a far table, near one of the few walls that held books, smoking, drinking coffee, bullshitting. The parole board, to my left, was locked. So was the office, on my right. And they were building another wall, an inner door, just in front of where I stood, though nobody was working on it at the moment. The library hung gray with outside light, light that drifted in through the rectangular, back window. Next to

Nacho stood an industrial-sized vacuum cleaner. The guards weren't around.

I walked on the thin carpeting, just as Nacho rose for another coffee.

"C'rnon," he said. "I'll fix you up."

"You know I don't fix with that shit," I told him.

"Might as well, until Busch gets here. There's milk, ese."

We hopped over the checkout counter and went into a large room behind the magazine stand. The room had a series of locked, wooden cabinets, and a small window that overlooked the yard. It was cold in there and I felt lost, like a tiny bug on a dark blanket. Nacho opened one of the cabinets with a key, then whipped out a full pot of coffee he had stashed. I suddenly remembered who Busch was, as Nacho poured us a round.

"Ain't Busch the one who had the top of his ear sawed off with a comb?" I asked.

Nacho's eyes slickened with coffee oil, like he was laughing at a private joke.

"Don't have to let it bother you," he said in his light, Spanish accent. "You can just mop up. Take care of other business."

"Jesus Christ, Nacho. I thought you were my friend."

"Just don't pay any attention to him, that's all."

He handed me a cup with fold-out paper handles. I sipped at the coffee, yawning, certain that the gray dawn was likewise smogging my head.

The reason they had squared Busch's ear 'off had to do with his thing about queers: he had only a Christian understanding of homosexuality, was loose in the head, and-on top of that-wasn't sure whether he was knickknack or not. He'd walk up to people and start in on this line about dick sucking. Very quiet-like, as in perverse, and usually about someone they knew: "I know why your buddy got rolled up," he'd say. "They caught him in the supply closet, sucking dick. You oughta be careful, 'cause he's come on to me. He's as queer as they come, man, and I just wanted to warn you that he's always ready to give head." He would then stare at you with puffed cheeks, forearms extended, the right side of his sunglasses balanced on top of that squared-off ear. Next time, in a group, he'd be speaking about the lord. And how you can be SAVED IN PRISON if you attend the Bible studies which are offered in the Chapel. A lot of people with strange ideas hid in that Chapel, but with Busch, as he spoke, you felt he'd want to jack you off with a handful of Bible ink. I just couldn't picture myself, alone, in a schoolroom

with him, dipping rags in the same bucket and washing down the chalkboards. And besides, I liked women: they sometimes said funny things when they got hungry, and to me they tasted a lot better.

I took a serious step back from Nacho.

"Listen, they should have put that guy in the dribble unit a long time ago. How am I supposed to work with a fruit basket?"

Nacho laughed.

"Sadistic motherfucker," I told him, but I also laughed a little. I was getting a short wire from the coffee.

"A job around here is a job," he said, as we headed back to the counter. "Avsides, you're the one who asked me about it."

"But you're the one who sold me on it. Just what the hell were you thinking about?"

We hopped over the counter. Nacho said, "I was thinking if you got the job, we could run him off. Only reason I haven't's 'cause it's an anglo job over there. And it's a good one, 'cause it starts at fifteen cents an hour. Plus benefits, ese."

"But you know I'm not gonna step on anyone's shit unless they crowd me, even his," I said. "Now what?"

Nacho sat down and kicked his feet up on the table. His homeboy only grinned.

"Easy. Fuck Busch. Fuck the crew. Just work the job your own way."

It's what I would figure, but I knew that these things seldom worked out. Nacho said something in Spanish to his pardner. They nodded at each other.

"Know who was working here when I started? Little Sulfur Scottie. There was a case for you."

"Oh, yeah," I agreed, and then thought: every show in this camp is like pulling roots from someone's head: there's always a state of pre; existence to transform, in order to get your shit out of the old headlocks. You either did it, or punked-out. I squatted against the wall, looking off into the law library. "All right," I told Nacho, "who's the cop that does the hiring around here? I'll check it out with him."

"I hear ya," he said. "Just go over to the school and look around. I think his name's Colon."

"Officer Colon?"

"Shit yeah," said Nacho. Even his pardner was laughing.

"Fuck an A," I said. Officer Colon. The perfect man for the job.

I set my coffee down and walked to the door just as two residents wearing tool belts swaggered in. Another carried the electric drill. They

stopped at that inner doorframe, ready to bolt up the wall. It looked like a loud project, deafening. Then I saw Big Ed, outside. He was leaning against the schooL I went over and he told me he'd seen Officer Colon around.

I walked in and got a drink from the fountain. The school was just a corridor with six rooms on either side, most of the rooms now filled with students. I could hear the tin of programmed music, softly from the office, but the classroom doors were closed so it was fairly calm, fairly quiet in there. I stood at the bulletin board as a door cracked open down the halL A cop with a square cap looked out, almost as if he was hiding from someone. It was usually the other way around. I made a slight move, turning my head from the board. The cop's face was as shiny as a summer squash.

"Hey, Colon."

He had large eyeball sockets, and his pupils floated as they rolled over to mine. It really looked like he'd been drinking from a two-dollar bottle. He just gazed at me, holding the door against his shoulder.

"Understand you need a porter," I said.

"We can talk in here," he said, pushing the door open. I walked over to the door.

Colon was standing in the center of a small, windowless room, which had been converted into an office: institutional books, a calendar on the wall, stuffy. Next to the typewriter sat a stack of incident reports, still blank, just waiting to be filled out. It looked like a trap to me. Colon adjusted his cap, assuming this very superficial tone.

"So, you'd like to be a porter," he said. "I'm not in the habit of hiring just anyone."

I thought of Busch, putting his statement to terms right away. I looked him over in the low, pulsing light.

"I'm not in the habit of working just anywhere."

Colon wasn't that tall, but his head tapered in. Ears, Christ, pointing out like rudders. His nose cast a shadow, a triangle, on the right side of his cheek, and with the fluorescence humming down he seemed to whorl before me like a cigar tube.

"What makes you think you can cut it as a porter!" he asked.

"I know I'll work hard for my store money," I lied.

"Tell you what," he said, in a lingering, boxed accent. "You go over to South Admin and put your name on the list for education porters. You come back this afternoon, after I've had a chance to think it over. We can then discuss you as an applicant."

"Fine," I told him. "I'll get right over to that list."

I looked at him in the room and, as I left, decided against the whole thing. I'd really only been trying to get out of the morning, but with just a squint of the Colon (and fueled by the yee-haw of the bluecaps in the chowhall) I took it further than any cubic, state lives: prison, I realized, could be approached as a sort of museum of the reductive: you consistently found people who could do nothing more than meddle with you, simply because they were small. Colon, Busch, tower guards, bluecaps: all became exhibits, to me, of people with lower instinct, of people whose lives fed on a need to reduce and constrain. I'd need an appointment to get into South Admin and sign on the book. It could take months, and I'd have to push more cops, including my counselor, to arrange it. Colon, apparently, assumed he could just spin me in all directions, but I now had the high angle and it helped distance me from their worlds: they all led a fractional existence, a melon slice, deathly.

The door closed behind me. Colon was on the other side. I relaxed in the hallway, the canals in my head flowing warmly with blood. I saw Nacho outside with a rag and some glass cleaner. I lit up a rollie, walked over.

"What up?" he said, turning back to the window. I liked the way that sounded.

"Colon wanted to take me down through it," I told him, "so I left him in that little closet they use. He's in there now with the Book of Mormon, waiting on Busch."

"I just barely thought of something else," said Nacho. "You might be able to work out of maintenance."

"I'm not cut out to build walls."

I pivoted, just as the secretary came from the school. She was running a handful of papers across the terrace, very official, very red in that skirt, too important to even look in our direction. But fortunately my thinking had a wind of solar flare and I woke up, remembering who I was. Remembering something that could solve my whole problem. I watched as she walked along.

"You have an office clerk named Mango?" I asked. She stopped, clutching the papers in her chest. I'd only known Mango a short while.

"Jeffrey Mango? Wears glasses?" she asked.

"Yeah. What kind of hours you have him on?"

"Is there something I can help you with?"

"Not really," I said. "This is more of an academic matter."

"He's here in the afternoon, usually no later than one."

"Thanks," I told her. She opened the door to the library. It sounded like auto shop in there, with all the drilling, the hammering going on. Nacho put his rag to the window, looking in after her.

"Culo pacoso," he said.

"All right," I told him, "I've got an idea. No more of this portering shit. No more brownsuits, bluecaps, and especially those graylegs, over in maintenance. The bastards only trick-bag a motherfucker."

"You're gonna max-out," Nacho said enthusiastically.

"I'm gonna sleep in, if I'm lucky," I said. Nacho stepped out of the way.

"How's this window look from back there?"

I looked it over. It was as clear and clean as fifty million FM watts, though it really didn't interest me.

"Really tits," I told him. "Don't fall in."

Nacho pulled a cigarette from behind his ear, looking proudly at his work. I walked out of there, through the turnstile, past South Admin and the line waiting outside. I wanted to separate from authority as much as possible, hopefully using Mango as my blade. My idea, his execution, something like completing a musical phrase. I looked to the south, to the mountains in Mexico. It was still grisly, tar,like up there, the sky loaded with thick, Mexican clouds. I walked back to the dorm raw,throated, thirsty for salad. I entered my cube. Pulled down a book. Settled out on my bunk. But my bunk, as usual, was like lying in the cup of a plow. I opened to a page, glancing at Grissom. He just snorted and rolled over, like a drugged beast that was chained to the wall. Who the fuck wanted to porter under the obligation of grief? I aimed my lamp on the book and opened to a page.

"Wake up man, chow. They're gonna close in fifteen minutes."

"Go burn the warden's dog."

"C'mon, Holmes, they're serving cheeseburgers." Grissom tapped on the tubing of my bunk. It hollowed out in my head.

"You're a henroid, Grissom!"

"What's a 'henroid'?"

"You're a henroid," I said.

"Well, I'm telling you. It's almost one o'clock."

"All right "

Grissom was only a youngster, but we got along. He'd done his work one

day with an ice pick, after a therapy session with his court-appointed counselor. He was then issued to me by the state.

I put my feet on the floor and locked up my rack.

"Cheeseburgers, huh?"

"Yeah," said Grissom, "let's scarf."

"Sure," I said, standing up. We headed through the dorm. I didn't see Nacho around.

"And before you ask," said Grissom, "neither of us got any fucking maiL"

"Yeah."

The dayroom and guard's cage were dark, but a slit of light shone from the doorjamb. I was ready for the yard. Grissom and I stepped out, into a tremendous chrome October, the sun a hom of silver-blue embroidery. It was hot. I felt like an isolated, solar being. The call over the yard barker said the hall would close in ten minutes but we made it inside, into the line. When we moved in front of the serving cage, Grissom knocked on the glass.

His roaddog was in charge of putting the burgers on our trays. He gave a nod and Grissom laid two fingers, very casually, against the window pane. The dog looked at me, counted the trays in front of us, feeling around for the cops. There was one at the serving window, along with a bluecap whose lips had caked like a dried cheese. Others drifted behind the bluecap, but no one looked over his shoulder.

We moved along.

Grissom's roaddog pressed two hamburgers apiece on our trays, passing them quickly to his pardner on the left. The pardner had the lettuce. He reacted coolly, though scrambled, stretching the lettuce across the burgers into a natural, resilient, form-fitting leaf dome. As my tray slid down I walked forward, watching it through the glass. The bluecap pushed it out and I grabbed it, then walked into the center of the chowhall. Grissom's roaddog had risked a thirty-day lockdown, but the risk was minimal because the dog knew his art. The afternoon was already looking better than the morning.

I ate quickly with Grissom. He told me the story of a female cop who had inflated a basketball the previous night in recreation, where he was employed, but I didn't want to hustle work there either. Grissom sort of jutted his whole upper body as he spoke, like he was walled in to a speed-metal sound track. I gave him my cookies right before I left, knowing that he got off on the sugar. The same cops working breakfast were again standing at the door, and as they looked me over I thought of

them in their tiny, fractional headtombs. What a way to die death! I got away from them, fast, and onto the yard.

It was a little after one when I got back to the school. Education, like the yard, was now jammed with inmates, but the library was also open. I saw Nacho leaning shirtless against the fence, collecting cigarettes from two people I didn't know. Benefits. Then Mango came from the school, looking pissed. He took long strides with his short legs, ripping the library door open. I got a smoke from Nacho, waited five minutes or so until Mango came back. This time, he strolled.

"Mango," I said.

He looked over. We crossed to the dirt by the fence. Even with good posture he only came up to my chin.

"You're another that looks satisfied," he said. "Or did I confuse that with disgusted? What's new?"

"I should be asking. You sure looked hot a minute ago."

He looked sharply toward the school, then up at the yard. His brown hair was blowing in the afternoon wind. Beyond him lay miles and miles of unwanted state desert. He gazed back, toward the school.

"The cop in here complained to the secretary that someone got a grade because I did their work," he said. "Can you imagine that? The students take the tests, not me, but this idiot Colon thinks he's busted a conspiracy because I helped someone solve a problem. My boss doesn't care, but I do, only because he's harassing me. And it's not even his job. We hate each other's guts."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah," he said, looking into my eyes. "We got into it another time, over pretty much the same thing."

"What happened?"

"I told him to eat shit with tacks through his tongue. I wanted to offend him for being such a punk."

Someone opened the door to the library, and I again heard the plomb plomb plomb of inmate construction. What shit.

"He's only a fraction," I told Mango, "not a total human being. His thoughts on everything are governed by a fucking state handbook. Makes for some strange reactions."

Mango put his hands on his hips, making small circles in the dirt with his feet.

"A state fraction," he said. "Kinda funny, when you think about it like that. Still, too bad he's gotta work up here."

"I figure he'll be working here no matter what. The next one to come

along is pretty much the same formula."

"Yeah," he agreed.

"The exceptions seem to hang back a little, but I'm sure as hell not finding many. That's why I need a favor."

"Let's make it quick," said Mango. "I've got to get back before class starts."

I noticed Colon at the door, staring out the window at us. Even here, the fucker wanted in. I turned my back to him.

"Register me for drafting," I said. "Just put it on the computer, so I won't get in any jams when classification looks through my file."

"You want to cut away from this yard, huh?"

"You bet. Can you do it?"

"Sure," he said. "Tonight, after the shift change."

"Perfect. What am I gonna owe you?"

Mango reached in his shirt pocket, dug out a cassette.

"Know John Handle, over on your yard? Give this to him."

He handed me the tape.

"Nothing to it," I said, and Mango, in his own way, simply walked off. That's all there was, no pulling of teeth.

Drafting.

In exchange for a porter-type favor.

The afternoon classes began, and Mango headed into school with everyone else. That left me and Nacho, and also his pardner, out on the terrace. But my ass was now covered, and I had no immediate plans. None, whatsoever. Nacho came over with a bag of Mexican hot chips, offering me a pull. I'd been down long enough that I thought my taste buds had turned to wax, but I nearly jumped from the spice when I chewed them. Nacho laughed. His homeboy laughed. We watched as an old, flatbed work truck drove slowly along the perimeter, taking a load of convicts out to a crew site. They stood on the wooden platform holding a single rail, jumpsuits creased in the wind. Colon still looked out from the school: insulated, protected, mindless, dangerous.

I turned and walked off. I passed Busch on the walk and said nothing, leaving him and his ear to the regulations of Colon. Good pair, I thought, choosing my time, not theirs.

Which meant drafting. I knew it would keep me off the street in the mornings. And that was the only thing that mattered.

I cut lazily with the tape to John Handle's. Through the bright, nearly effortless, helium afternoon.

From Shaving

Stephen Berg

At the Door

One moan or muffled sob or wordless blur is all I hear come from behind my parents' locked bedroom door-it's amazing-standing there, listening, my ear stuck hard against the cool creamcolored wood, waiting on tiptoe, hoping to hear that noise interpreted, hear words civilize it, tum it into talk, change what I know it is-the unassimilable, gut grace note of orgasm, yearning, penetration, what's always being sung beneath all we are, the cry of our craving for release, our being here, our lust for and our fear of oblivion. When I hear it I see what my mind saw, leaning against the wood, closing my eyes, trying to pick up shreds of audible evidence, trying to prove they were doing it. What I saw was doll-like, a cute mechanical pair who couldn't-no matter how real, how human I told myself they were-actually fuck, make love, be on and in each other. Nothing passed through the door after that first husk of a voice, nothing except that clue could prove they were doing it. Around that time I started going with a girl from Camden, a butcher's daughter who had thick black wiry hair, the kind that always glistens, is pubic. She was short, lustful but shy, athletic. They lived above their shop. The first night I picked her up she let me into her house through the door of the shop. Its gritty white tile floor and walls, little hexagonals, its stainless, glass, porcelain cases, vacantly lurid in the dark, shone dully while I groped my way to the tall doors of the freezer, pulled one open (a light went on inside) and saw, stacked, hanging, carved into roasts and steaks, the bright meat. Gore waft, sawed ribs, corpse, a rawness we connect with war, fornication, with the pink hands of butchers, with the permanent dirt of blood under their fingernails, made the air even in summer have the metallic damp chill

scent of beef: like inhaling a violated soul's birth secret. One afternoon in Philly we ride up on the elevator to my folks' apartment, go into my bedroom-across the hall from theirs-close my door and start playing with each other. We're in that mood when anything seems funny, we sit naked on the floor face to face touching crotches, thighs, breasts, not a trace of shame or fear. Then we hop into bed, my narrow Hollywood bed, and lie there gossiping like two old friends alone on a camping trip. Unannounced, my grandmother opens the door, a crack, then wider, then sticks her head in, looks straight at us, the sheets pulled up to our necks, and asks Ellen if she's seen me-"Have you seen Steve?"exactly like that, staring directly at us-and Ellen replies, "No, I haven't seen Steve." And my grandmother thanks her and quietly shuts the door as she leaves. God, how we laughed. Our awesome blindness-not seeing what we really see, not hearing what we hear. My time suspended at the door, listening, wasn't conversion, revelation, no crisply detailed story concluded with a twist to make me feel reality is allegory, a version of the holy. I only stood there, waiting in silence after their one rush of shocked unconscious breath, of speechlessness, mostly lost in forgetfulness-like facing a trackless, endless field transfigured by new snow. A man stands on the edge of it, looking out across far undulating distances-the first mists of twilight rising-feeling his mind grow blank like the simplified land, hearing his mind grow quiet and disappear, letting his mind become silence equal to the silence of the ground under his feet. Soon he's forgotten he's there. Soon all he is is listening, is the sensation against the side of his face of cool pale wood. That was my moment at the door, a man pondering a white field, blindly, nothing but that place, the world flowing in all directions, hollow and still the way it must be inside a huge clapperless bell. I forgot: Along with that voice behind the door there was rustling (sheets probably, bodies shifting) and the dink of glass hitting metal. My cheek and ear. Layers of old flaky paint had been scraped away down to the bare wood in one area near my head-thick streaks and random gouges, nail holes, furrows of crisscrossed scratches, as if a beast had tried to claw through, any way it could.

Heaven

For four months I worked as a chauffeur in Mexico City for Hal B. Hayes. I was on a writing grant, it was our honeymoon; one of our friends, Octavio, a tourist guide and driver, heard Hayes was looking for a driver and knew I needed money. I called, went to his hotel on the Reforma-a penthouse suite-and he hired me, gave me plane tickets to L.A. the next day to pick up his new black Caddie limo and two female friends plus a list of personal belongings at his house. The driveway spanned a mazy stucco grotto painted blue, blue water and caves, exotic fronds, potted on the bottom, spaced at irregular points in the water. In the house, wall controls at the touch of a switch could lift the rugs against nuclear attack to cover the high picture window on three sides. Soon someone came in and handed me a leather satchel, which I opened to check: one hundred blue plastic baby combs, black pearl cuff links from Zsa Zsa (his wife-to-be), vitamins for sex, a manual on how to set up blind trusts, guidebooks, shoelaces, ties, etc. In one of the upstairs bathrooms a wall-length closet bulged with a row of suits fifty feet long, grouped by color, at least eighty or ninety pairs of shoes shone like big toy cars lined up on a wire rack an inch above the floor. I took the car back to my hotel, The Biltmore, Pershing Square, Sunday-left,wing Christian nuts were raving and carrying signs-had a few drinks and went to sleep. Next morning I picked up Hayes's friends, two women dressed to the teeth in silk dresses, jewelry, heels, tinted hair, makeup done so thick and careful it looked like fine icing on a celebrity's birthday cake. Bursts of acidic perfume. Doris Day voices. Giggling, as they slid their tight sleek asses onto the leather. Luggage stashed in the trunk we took off for the border. The plains of Mexico up north stay dry, weary, dignified, numb, scrub, cactus, hills scalloping the distance, faded brown, now and then flowers, streaks of grass, elated sadness coming in whiffs, little airy wisdoms approximating joy coming from inside, coming from the land, a sense that out there in the emptiness man doesn't matter any more than the earth matters to itself. Look up and it's all endless famous blue, clarity, the crisp bright air, always a chill in it. Death scents, pungent collaborations of plants, dirt, dung, absences, silence, space-strange to be riding in that car then and there, strange to be me. Sometimes we'd buzz through one of the dusty sleepy villages past the red Coke cooler and its knot of people, scare chickens, dogs, a farmer or kid walking the road, leading a donkey cart,

and once one of my silly passengers tossed a sandwich out the window to help, she thought, an old campesino squatting on the roadside, scooping water out of a ditch into a tin can. Through my window the deeper chill of rain approaching from beyond the hills caught my cheek. Back in Mexico City driving for Hayes became a weird day-long nearfantasy routine. The first day I showed up for work I was told to wait in one of the bedrooms of the suite. A man in a dark blue suit was eating breakfast. He had a skeletal, yellowish face, a short-order cook's face. I introduced myself, he introduced himself and told me he was Hayes's "full-time pimp." That day I drove Hayes out to a hidden golf club in the suburbs, waited a few hours, as usual, taking notes, trying to write poetry, anything to justify my image of myself as the writer. When he got back I asked how it went and I remember his "I bought it," in a tone like a dull bell being struck. He stepped into the back, I got in, and as always he opened the miniature twinkling bar tucked into the back of the driver's seat-its crystal tumblers and decanters recessed in silver trays, the shine of its varnished fold-down walnut shelf a mirror-and poured himself a full glass of gin. All day long he'd drink until by nightfall he was like a rubber doll, slurring the simplest words, collapsing into stupor. Five days a week at nine I'd report and wait to take him somewhere, to bribe this official or that, to start a hotel then abandon it at the girders-and-floors stage. There he was, this self-made redneck South Carolina boy, who started by making mud bricks with his hands and worked his way up to building barracks for the Air Force, office buildings, hotels, who rarely spoke, drifting through the world like a drunken ghost, blue blazer, pearl gray flannel pants, blue shirt, striped rep tie and cordovan loafers. Silence went everywhere with him. Whether it was blindness or reticence or inarticulate fury about something he never revealed, I can't say. It was vicious like the ominous hollow pause poised before a storm breaks when the air stops moving and nothing seems to breathe. One night I took him "home"-he was renting a house as well as the suite-and instead of leaving after he went in, I snuck up to one of the living-room windows and waited. He stood there, arms at his sides, dangling a bottle in his hand; then a lovely dark-haired girl, the maid, I guess, came up to him, talking about nothing I could hear, and he dropped to his knees, clung to her legs and seemed to be begging, begging, until she stepped back-he had thrust both hands up her dress-and kicked off his arms and left him weeping on the floor. I remember having an image in my mind of his unfelt genitals, of a blunt blank fist-like crotch or ridge made of nothing but

bone. A few days later he called me into the living room of his suite and asked me to read a speech he had written for a business club. It was strong, clear, practical prose, short sentences, everything in the present, unmistakably superficial, about money-its value, how to make it-five pages long. The last paragraph, though, where he raves, extolling money and religion, yoking them, defining the sacred meaning of cash, cursing most men's understanding of money, describing how to make millions, proving that a man who amasses wealth is holy, heroic, like a great general, he said, or "someone from Homer," ends, I have to admit, with one overwhelming sentence, clinching his argument-"Money is God in circulation." What else? In flight from the U.S. government because he had built substandard Air Force base barracks that collapsed and had pocketed the money he should have used to build them properly, this stupid, empty man, a fugitive, didn't move me at all then, not consciously. I was twenty-four, just married, having a high old time writing, traveling, bumming around, not ready to know who I was. I was a naive witness to his descent. Now that my own slide downward has begun, a little, or even more, I've seen how chance and choice can ruin you, can maim you permanently, tilt the delicate array of mind, so things change and you have to work like a maniac inside your head to see life a new way, you have to build a whole new attitude before you and your life are buried. That's the histrionic metaphor I think ofHayes was already caught in the slide, but he managed to look elegant each morning, sober, perfectly dressed after his barber came to shave him, trim his hair. Once, one late afternoon, the women I had delivered from California came to his suite. We had just returned from Acapulco where he was trying to finish a hotel- zoning problems, legal problems, were holding it up. From my room across the hall, I watched them enter his room, a clear glass filled with ice and gin tinkling in his hand. They shut the door. Muffled quarrels and laughter trickled through the door and, about an hour later, an hour of relative silence, the ladies came out and one of them tittered to the other passing my door, "Christ, after all that work he couldn't even get it up!" Soon, after that, he fired me for running a red light and crushing the door of a Mexican's old muffin-like Nash. I missed the great Hayes. It was like being an extra in a movie about the American dream, like actually being in the dream, or whatever you call a nobody-from-nowhere's rise to the top-engaged to a movie star with big tits, mega-rich, keeping his own pimp and barber. He often grumbled about his fear of going bald, he believed those babyblue combs with fine delicate teeth would help retard it. Every morning

his personal barber would arrive for the daily shave and haircut, spend one hour keeping his hair the same length, refining, hair by hair, his hair, to stop it from growing at all. That's how Hayes wanted it. The barber would always use a blue baby comb. I could hear (sitting with the pimp) the scissors' precise hiss hiss pass across words whispered between them as the blades crisscrossed in tight flourishes near his head, as the barber, like some mustachioed comical god in a white apron, stood there intently shaping the world's most perfect haircut, inspecting the head, much of the time, I'm sure, cutting air, held away from the real hair, making sure he hadn't missed a single strand, again and again, obsessively measuring, pinched between his index and middle fingers, the length, so it came out even everywhere, absolutely even everywhere.

Heat

Jennifer C Cornell

She looks like a young one, my father told me, while I was still too far behind him to see-Careful now, he said, try not to frighten her. She was smaller than I had expected, and more fragile. Among the chestnut hairs that cloaked her back and shoulders there were longer, thicker strands of black, yet they too had an unexpected softness, and when the light breeze from the hills above the gully blew over her from behind, the smoky down of her inner coat stirred like a living thing against her skin. Be very quiet, my father said softly, but already her ears lay flat against her skull and her thin lids were drawn so tightly away from her eyes that the jaundiced whites jumped and flashed each time a sudden noise startled her into movement.

She was the first thing we'd captured since we started setting traps six weeks before. My father'd told me what Albert Freel had said, that April was too early, that animals grew sluggish in the summer heat and it was foolish to stalk them while they were still lean and wary with the memory of winter. Albert Freel had a stable of greyhounds, every one the color of foam in the harbor at Lame, and when he walked them all together up the Shankill to the Woodvale Park he moved in the midst of a small, private sea. The false spring had tricked us, Albert said; five days of warm winds and sunshine and half the dogwoods in the cemetery had begun to bloom, and on the edges of tarmac all over the city bold blades of grass had suddenly appeared. Then the cold had unfolded with the weight of wet fabric, and those who'd been counting on the coming of summer barely had time to get out of the way.

The corridors of the traps we used were long and narrow; collapsible doors at either end sprang up when unsettled and shut the unsuspecting

in. Sheets of metal covered the inner mesh frames, all four panels made for removal: Captives could be viewed that way without risking release. The plates slid in their grooves with the sound of knives being readied, yet every morning when we went to check them the doors of the traps had snapped shut on nothing, or else were still lying open, though the bait inside was gone.

This is how we came to set them. My father had been fixing the floor of a barn when a nest fell down from above straight into his arms. He'd held out his hands when he'd seen it coming and then there they were: a trio of fledglings, still blind, open-mouthed, psoriatic with first plumage and the eczema of recent birth. A man from Ardoyne had been on the job with him; hearing the whistle of small things in motion, he'd practically bolted when he'd seen my father with a dry puff of dust rising up from his palms. The man's wife had had triplets and he needed the work-he'd spent three weeks fitting windows in Ballysillan, ten days in east Belfast on a decorating job; his wife had been sick with the worry of it but he'd kept his head down and his mind on the wage-but he was growing convinced that his luck was finished, and he'd taken the nest falling as some sort of sign. Just get rid of them, for chrissake, he'd argued, they're done for now, sure, anyway. But my father was thinking of a goldfinch he'd bought when he was first married, how the smell of fresh linen had made the bird sing whenever my mother brought clothes in from the line. So he'd shaken the rubble from his cap and whiskers, nestled the birdlings in an old canvas sack, and brought them back home as a present for me.

The first evening we had them we boiled porridge and my father tried to feed them with a kitchen spoon. They opened wide when their lips touched silver, but the cartilage kept catching on the spoon's heavy basin, and the hard, yellow corners of their mouths pulled away. So he made up a potion of egg yolk and mince, a few drops of milk, a bit of sugar, and with the aid of an eye dropper squeezed the pulp in. He fed them steadily till their hunger subsided and their heads started to loll, nodding in time with their impatient breathing and the shudder of their shoulders in somnambulant flight. Well, wee woman, my father said finally, covering the box he'd found for them with a bit of muslin secured with twine, that'll be your job from now on.

They died on a Saturday about a week later while we were out shopping down in the town. There was a disturbance in the Castle Court complex-a suspect parcel had been found on a bench-and to pass the time we'd gone to Bewley's, where hundreds and thousands roll

out from under whenever a teacup or platter is lifted, where even the dust is finely ground coffee and whatever's left over when chocolate is shaved. But after an hour my father decided that the purchase he'd forgotten in one of the dressing rooms when the security officers had asked us to leave was unlikely to be there when we were let back inside; so we paid our bill and headed back up the Shankill, through a thickness of people in optimistic attire-e-bright-colored jerseys and unbuttoned anoraks, a few boys in Tshirts, a few girls in shorts-all moving with the rustling sound of large, leafy vegetables packed upright in bags. Crossing Berlin Street we heard the explosion. Wouldn't you know it, my father said, turning back towards the city to look for the smoke. We could have just waited; it's all over now.

The shock must have shaken the legs of the table, for the box lay on its side on the floor when we got home. We found one of the babies up in the rafters, bits of another behind the sink. The third they'd taken to the back of the house where they'd left what remained of him in a heap by the door. They'd eaten only soft things, like the eyes and the belly; they'd left the feet, the fused rubber fingers, the spurred, calcareous prominence of the spine. Woodrats, my father said, but later that evening Albert said no. Albert Freel read spoors like an oracle, and the droppings he'd found were small and spherical, occurring in piles like end-of-day fruit picked over and scattered by some quick, careless hand. It had to be rabbits, given the evidence. Rat droppings had a longer, less generous shape. The rat is a small-minded animal, he said. Even its feces reveal what it is.

It couldn't be rabbits, my father answered. A rabbit would never do such a thing.

All the same, Albert said, it's been a bad year. Skunk, fox, weaselrabbit, too-everything's been living off garbage for the past four months. You know what a bad winter can do to a beast.

But they're vegetarians, my father said. They eat grass and tree bark. Forest fruits.

Look where you're living, Albert said. There's no bilberries or bramble round here anymore.

Still, when we set the traps it was woodrat we hoped for. My father had chosen the type of trap carefully, rejecting a range of more sensitive models for one which would neither injure nor maim. I imagine his intention was much as it had been the previous autumn, when he'd caught a boy stealing apples from the tree behind our house. The tree itself was unclaimed property-the land it stood on had never been

ours-but the boy had crossed through my mother's garden to reach the low branches and swing himself up; the tender shoots of asparagus and aubergine, the ascending strands of the tomato vines she'd planted that spring, before she died, all had snapped with the weight of him when, awkward with apples, he'd stumbled and fallen as he made his way down. The following evening he'd come back with a basket. My father waylaid him, seized him by the collar when he tried to run away and hauled him into the house. I know you, Trevor Irvine, he'd said, then he'd made the boy sit at the kitchen table while he tried to explain about respect for others, how nothing should ever be taken for granted, how he could have had all the apples he'd wanted if only he'd called in first to ask. In the fifteen minutes before we released him I watched the blue veins at the boy's temple flutter while his eyes scanned the room for an unguarded exit, his raw reddened fingers gripping his knees.

We didn't know what to do with the doe, but my father supposed that Albert Freel would. Albert lived with his dogs and a coop of pigeons in a house at the end of the Glencairn Road. The house had been built on a crest overlooking the city, between two fields of dry gorse and heather where in the summer cows were taken to graze. His dogs were his livelihood, and he housed them with him. When my father and I came into his sitting room all six of them rose with the smooth, fluid movement of silk through a belt loop, scattering like ash to other parts of the room.

Now what did I tell you? Albert said when he saw her. What did I say all along?

So what should we do with her? my father asked him.

Whatever you want. The shops down in Smithfield might give a few quid; there's that butcher on the Road does game now and again. Or I've got a Rex out the back, if you want. Belongs to my nephew. We could try for a litter, though you never know. That might be the best thing, but, with the child and all.

Aye, let's do that, my father said slowly. Shall we do that, daughter? You've never seen wee babies being born.

Whatever youse want, Albert said. Just so long as you realize there's no guarantee.

The buck was housed with the pigeons in an ancient enclosure, one of the last thatched structures east of the Bann. Thin beams of light from the chinks in the stonework transected the space inside its four walls, casting a pattern of loose woven baskets which moved over Albert as he stooped and shuffled, while I thought of magicians crouching in boxes,

halt-moons and comets decorating the sides, and wondered what they did, where they went to, when the razor-sharp swords plunged in all around.

O.K., Albert said, you can put her down here.

The buck kicked like a marlin when Albert lifted him out, a lefthanded grip round the base of its ears, his other hand grasping the loose skin on its back. I heard its teeth striking metal as he pushed its head down, into a cage so unfit for the both of them that small squares of pelt were pushed out through the mesh. When Albert stood up, rubbing his hands, a tuft of mahogany slowly descended, tumbling dreamily on long spider legs, and I followed its tentative passage while I listened to the rattle of metal rocking. The sound of the pigeons rose behind me, the air shrill in their talons and bright background laughter in the noise of their wings. Then an acrid smell of discharge rose from the cage, and it was over.

Albert reached in again and pulled the buck out. Give it a month, he said. If there's no litter by then you'll know nothing happened.

What do we owe you? my father said finally.

Would you listen to him, Albert said. You owe me nothing. I reckon norhing'll come of it anyway.

Somebody called for him then so he left us. I stood by my father as he gazed at the doe, feeling the weight of his hands on my shoulders and the twitch of his fingers each time his lips failed to find something to say.

You stay here, he said after many minutes, don't you move. I'm just going to go thank him properly then I'll be back straight away.

When he was gone I went to the doe. I tried to hold her the way he had shown me, cradling her hindquarters in his oversized hands, but as she was heavier than I had expected it was all I could do just to press her close, feeling the comfort of claws in her protest, the gradual relaxation in her shoulders and ears. I knelt down then, slowly, laid her out on my knees, examined the places where his teeth had bitten her, exposing the intimate undersilk to the surface like so many delicate, floss-tufted seeds. She did not flinch when I touched her, when I lifted her feet and observed their texture, the way the thick fringes of hair curled round to cushion her toes. She lay still when I held her ears to the light and traced the orchid spread of her veins, petal soft and just as intricate, feeling the throb of her pulse in my hands. By the time my father returned to collect us, she had placed her paws on my chest and stood up, looking all around her with dark, intelligent eyes.

Sap

Beth Simon

Good Friday, the conifers are rich in resin. A cemetery near my house hides a stand of long leaf and spruce.

Sly young girl, I sneak out of school, go home, make myself clean. I snag the old man's raveling cardigan off the back-porch nail, wrap up like a secret, and slip out through the root cellar, past the crab apple full of jays who suddenly cry my name, and enter the rutty field. I am lost in frost fog, the dead brass of bean waste, dry wind fills my ear, my feet grow hard, cold, heavy, they rise, fall, rise on chalky furrows, jabbed by sharp,edged clods thrown up by fall plowing.

Then, I'm across. I scramble up a small hill and emerge, sweaty, blown, at the graves. At the tree, the white pine, its harp-shaped body dark in thin sunlight. The lower branches swirl the ground and I crawl under.

Dim. A held breath of cinnamon and rot. Around the base, a rug of needles, and I lie down, face to them, smooth as rice. I roll to one side and clutch a low bough. I trace its silk across my cheek. Again, then again, then curl to the trunk.

An amber rill has flowed down a crevice and congealed on a knee above the base. I press against the bark-a fragrance of earth, of mintand lick. Nothing. I jab it with my tongue, scrape pitch up on my teeth, and it is cold. Rank.

Such bitterness that my jaws snap shut. My mouth swells with saliva. I cannot swallow, cannot spit. Vegetal, animate, a deep unfamiliar life, here is the heart.

The Product

Eleanore Devine

for Philip E. Devine

In late November, as Audrey Michell stripped a golden leaf from a croissant, a young couple passed and repassed Boudin's window, then came and sat beside her as if in all Chicago they sought only her. They stared. Audrey stared back. The young man ducked his head in apology. The woman touched his sleeve. She was wearing a diamond as big as the Prudential Building and a wide gold band.

He said, "I can't."

"I will then."

"When we're sure," he said.

That fall Audrey had been lunching on Michigan Boulevard, around the corner from her office, arranging, as was her wont, to arrive early and avoid the inconvenience of standing in line for her salad and sourdough bread. If she timed her lunch precisely she could sit alone, facing the window, watch the people go by and ask herself, "What now?"

Sometimes she asked, "What now, Richard?"

She used to love Richard.

Richard still wanted to love her, but not exclusively. His card at Halloween said, "Money minimal. Still no tenure. Not in academe. Not in romance," and she knew she had made the right decision four years ago. Richard gave her headaches. Academia gave her headaches. "No wonder," her colleagues used to say. "You work too hard."

The young couple came back the next day.

And the next.

They were a proper pair, overdressed as was Audrey for standing in line for a sourdough sandwich. Both wore Guccis. He had the amiable,

Victorian look of a ringed seal. He would probably wear black slacks and loafers in the Amazon jungle. She had high sharp cheekbones, thin lips, a thin nose and a debutante crouch.

On the third day they found Audrey far back in the restaurant. As the woman put down her tray, she said, "We want you to have our baby."

Audrey's voice was ice. "Why?"

"Because," the young husband said, "we can't."

"We've looked and looked for the right person," the young woman said.

He blushed and tore his pink napkin into thin strips. "And you look remarkably like my wife."

The woman's hand on Audrey's arm was firm. "Look, please." She held out the mirror from her purse.

What Audrey saw shocked her. She had the same lips and nose as the stranger. The same faint lines at the corners of her mouth. But her own lips were shiny purple-pink. Her own hair was long, frizzy and black. Her own eyes were shadowed with pink and purple. "I'm all she could be if she tried,"Audrey thought, and stiffened her spine to sit straighter. Spiked heels. A purple pant suit as well-bred as the other woman's wheat-colored tweeds, but not so polite. The mirror trembling in her hand, Audrey had to admit that this waif whose every movement was an apology could have been her younger sister.

"Please," the young couple said as if in one voice, a habit Audrey would come to find endearing. The man tore his napkin strips in half.

The wife said, "You're the only one we've found who would be right."

"You don't have to do anything with me." The young man blushed again. "Could you trust us enough to come to our house and talk about it? When we got engaged, I promised Jenny I'd buy her a baby."

Their card said: LLOYD AND JENNY COMRICK.

They lived on Cleveland, three blocks south of Fullerton.

Their house had been gutted. A stairway coiled up past bedrooms, baths, leafy corners for music-listening or solitary desk-and-computer work, to a stained glass dome. Downstairs, the entire north wall was a lighted aquarium for Lloyd's tropical fish. The furniture seemed to be on loan from the Art Institute.

Audrey might have served the same old-fashioned dinner: Scotch on the rocks and shrimp in the shell. Beef medallions, rare, with giant mushroom caps. Carrots, Cuisinart-sliced by Lloyd as the women enjoyed a second drink. Jenny's dressing for the tossed salad-Maille

mustard-with-seeds vinaigrette-left not a single excess drop on the plate. Small strawberries came with creme frafche. Jenny served grapes with the coffee.

It was true that the Comricks could not have a baby. At sixteen, while on cruise aboard a schooner among the Aegean Isles, he had suffered mumps. ("An ailment no longer in fashion," he called it.) A horse falling on her had damaged a kidney. Otherwise they were in perfect health and eager to start a family.

"We'll meet every day," Lloyd said. "Get to know each other to the point of boredom. Then you can decide."

Audrey already knew that he was a Republican and an Episcopalian. He wanted Nixon to advise the president on foreign affairs. She liked him anyway. Even Republicans and Episcopalians, she assured herself, can be good parents.

Both their fathers were bankers. Their forefathers had come from Rhode Island (Lloyd) and Virginia (Jenny) to make printing presses and tractors. Audrey's forefathers were from Kansas. Her parents taught eighth-grade math and English.

Jenny worked in a PR office and always guided the conversation to please her husband. She crouched because she was the taller.

Lloyd managed an estate: his own. He had inherited a box at the opera and a seat on the opera board. His name on letterheads was as ubiquitous as his generosity. He was innocent in his leisure and always behind in his reading. He was good with horses, dogs, children, cars and boats. He could not keep his hands offJenny.

The three did indeed meet almost every day.

They went to the theater. To the Chicago City Ballet. The symphony. They planned to see the American Ballet in February. All were addicted to Twyla Tharp. All worried about Baryshnikov's knee.

Mostly they liked the same movies: The Killing Fields, Au Revoir Les Enfants, Cinema Paradiso, White Nights. Lloyd pretended to think favorably of The Color Purple.

They exchanged books (the Comricks disliked Richard's single tome), magazines, college records, club affiliations, blood types and family histories. (Audrey's older sister had four vigorous children.)

They agreed that Audrey should not use a sperm bank. "No bottled sperm," Jenny said.

Lloyd said, "I want it to be a love child."

By Christmas week, Audrey needed no PR questionnaires nor help from her computer to tell her she was ready to reprogram her life. Her

job for the coming year was to deliver a perfect child.

The family planning went smoothly until, after an excellent dinner at Audrey's Presidential Towers apartment, she presented her production schedule. Depending, of course, upon start-up date, she planned to work as usual until March or April. May through September, maybe October, November, she would be in Paris.

"Paris?" Lloyd exclaimed. Then, "Yes. You remembered. My year at the Sorbonne. 1982."

"But I want to visit the baby every day," Jenny said.

"In utero?"

"Talking to the baby is essential," Jenny said.

Audrey was firm. "I'm taking on this project to earn a sabbatical in Paris and to add to my nest egg. I want to start my own agency when I return."

"I must visit the baby."

"Jenny." Lloyd patted her knee. "Jenny, you work every day."

"I'll visit evenings."

"The baby'd be asleep. We'll visit. Often. I promise." He kissed his wife. "We can't expect Audrey to have this baby here in front of everyone."

"My best college friend lives near Lyons. A backup resource," Audrey said. "Besides it's difficult enough for a female executive

"I know," Jenny said and that was that.

"Now, money." Lloyd blushed. "We propose a fee of one hundred thousand dollars."

"Plus expenses, hospital and doctors."

Audrey's hand moved to her belly as if the child were already there. Lloyd topped her hand with his, then Jenny, then Audrey again and the parents-to-be. "Like a high-school pledge," Audrey said. Neither Jenny nor Lloyd laughed. They signed the contract over late brandies. "Hey, Dad," Jenny said, and then to Audrey, "You must be careful about alcohol. The baby."

"As if it were my own."

Audrey was not going to let just anybody father the child. Once she accepted the project, she set about its implementation with her usual finicky care: Gene research. Conception. Prenatal environment. Delivery.

Perfection, as always, was her goal-and the genesis of many a migraine headache-but in this particular assignment her theme was

the old one: only gaining weight is more fun than getting pregnant. As a one-time assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Stout, she did not anticipate an ethical problem.

Audrey suggested she would like access to the child to observe the interaction of heredity and environment. Lloyd was adamant. "We'll send you a monthly report."

Audrey already knew that any child she carried for the Comricks would never wave its arms nor jump about as she did. Such shows of emotion would be bred from the blood by positive reinforcement. She wondered if it would sidle like Jenny. Or would it, like her, joy in its own body? Sometimes, just before dawn, the hour when even philosophers woke to questions they should answer, she wondered if she might help the Comricks but not accept their money.

The product file was almost complete. All that was needed was a begetter. It was time for market research.

She had not dated seriously since Richard had interrupted her Commitment Speech with a discussion of Sartre. The men she knew in Chicago were like second-hand cars, rife with problems. She would have to comparison-shop.

The next Saturday night she dressed for The Limelight. Thigh-length leather skirt. Black camisole with pink ribbons. Fishnet stockings. Pictures of Madonna pasted above her eyelids, swatches of brocade on her fingernails. Then she lay on her bed and kicked off her purple pumps. Darkness would make it impossible to find the University of Chicago men. (She was convinced academia was unmatched as a gene pool.) She could never compete with the Limelight regular who wore a live cobra as a scarf. She did not want to give birth to something with a strobe-light twitch. The New Wave music might deafen it. Besides, the certified good health the Comricks demanded would require more quick-dancing than she knew. She stayed home and read In Search of Excellence. Jenny was already reading You and Your Fetus and had joined the West Lincoln Park Parent and Childbirth Education Center.

Sunday Audrey went to the Art Institute. One of her friends had followed a man, obviously an American (it was summer and he wore white shoes in Paris) from the d'Orsay to the Marmottan Museum by Metro. When she caught up with him in front of a water lily, she breathed deeply and murmured, "Oh, oh, oh," until he said, "Let's have tea." His wedding gift was a loft on Printers Row.

Audrey, however, was not skilled at establishing eye contact. She had spent too many hours in the library ignoring men to be able now to

brush her hand against the arm of the bearded youngster who stood beside her. She could never, like Cathy, the comic-strip single, have sent a prospect in a crowded restaurant a bowl of potato salad.

The father would have to be Richard.

She had already done gene research on Richard. All his family, three generations of it, was in good health. He ran forty minutes a morning. The darker hair and the two inches he had over Lloyd's five-ten would be a good genetic input. She hoped Richard's chin-dimple was dominant. She, Richard and Jenny would make up for Lloyd's lack of professional commitment. Lloyd's contribution would be his easy disposition, his enthusiasm for mechanical problems, and his devotion to family. Even Richard had his own brand of fidelity to offer: he was Big Brother to two boys from southwest Chicago.

Gene manipulation was proving more stimulating than threedimensional chess.

She did not call Richard's apartment in Evanston, nor his office at Northwestern. (Office hours, Monday and Wednesday, 3�4.) He was reading a paper at the Philosophy Association Convention at the Palmer House at ten o'clock, Friday, December the twenty-seventh. A Philopsychological Protasis: The Logic ofLiberty.

Checking her calendar, she confirmed her expectation: late December was the optimum time to catch a baby.

She sat in the back row.

He'd grown a spade beard. He was taller than she remembered. His eyes were still deep and brown. "Epictetus the Stoic," he began, "tells us that liberty is the right to live as we wish." He smiled his sweet smile. A thumb fondled his beard. "Ethics suggests a certain decorum."

When he saw her, he stroked his beard. "Aseitv is not enough." Then, speaking directly to her with his Richard-look ("I don't have to explain this to you"), he spelled it out. "Ass-ee-l-tv, a self-derived existence." He spoke of Heidegger, Wittgenstein, St. Paul and Paul Feyerbend, with quotations from Shakespeare, Donne, T. S. Eliot, and, for Audrey's sake, Gwendolyn Brooks. His theme was: Ni dieu, ni maitre.

She wrote in her notebook, "Richard's philosophy: I want what I want when I want it and I want it right now."

When the colloquium broke for lunch, she congratulated him. She touched his hand. She said, "I've missed you."

Talking with Richard the week he stayed with her was like returning

to teaching minus the bloodletting at tenure time. Each day they talked faster and faster, later and later. He charted the path for her from Voltaire's Candide to nihilism to existentialism to deconstruction and minimalism. He brought her up to date on the PoMo-Homo Conspiracy theory and the gossip about Foucault's playing Russian roulette with unsafe sex in the bathhouses of San Francisco. In the mornings, as he lectured, she ground fresh coffee and cooked blueberry pancakes. In the evening, talking by the fire, they lay together on the hearth rug, happy as tumble bugs. She loved talking with Richard, loved loving with Richard, loved his musky smell. It was she who smoothed the sheets, pulled up the blankets as they snuggled in and slept. She picked up his towels in the bathroom and didn't fuss when she found clippings from his beard in the sink. Richard talked openly of other women and with the new beard seemed to have developed a new sense of frugality so she cooked most of the meals. When he took her out, they ate Chinese. (Richard was good with chopsticks). They took his little brothers to see A Christmas Carol and a hockey game.

He moved her chairs so they faced each other, catty-comer. She proofread his latest article, "From Candide to The Bonfire of the Vanities." When she said, "Richard, you're the last person in the world I'd expect to match he and she to they, to abandon whom," he misquoted Nietzsche: "So long as you believe in grammar, you'll never get rid of God."

Their last night in bed, she asked, "Do you truly believe in nothing? I don't mean as a philosopher, as a person."

"Nothing out there but meaningless chaos."

"Hasn't it made your life barren?"

"Not at all. I like checking my belief against my hypothesis. Day by day, watching myself, watching others." He moved to top her.

"That's deductive reasoning. Gathering information to prove what you think you already know."

"Just checking," he said as he settled in deeper.

Later he said, "Inductive means eliciting some reaction within an organism.

The next morning, after their long goodbye-kiss, he said,"You're the best of my lovers. I never have to explain."

In her teaching days she'd wondered if ideas were contagious. Richard said ethics had nothing to do with the messes people got themselves into. She did not want to be like Richard. Grateful he was not staying, she locked and double-locked the front door, slid in the security bar, and ran to return her furniture to straight lines, properly squared.

She sent him a card from Charles de Gaulle airport. Her large room at the Madison, overlooking Saint-Germain-des-Pres, was on the top floor, almost above the sound of the boulevard, with a distant view of Sacre Coeur. So began her happiest time.

Jenny wrote, "My Family Focus Support Group says you should feel good about yourself; otherwise you can't communicate a good feeling to the child."

Sometimes at three in the morning Audrey thought of Richard with an uneasiness she understood all too well. If she could tell him about her pregnancy, would she become special, not just one of many? She wished he could know the new richness of her breasts and thighs. (Jenny: "It would be good now for you to have sex. Even an orgasm is safe." She sent almond oil. "Rub this in each night. It prevents stretch marks.")

Paris was chill and damp. (Jenny: "Please wear boots.")

Audrey walked all day, swinging along as if she were the Winged Victory. The child was not going to slouch if she could help it. (Jenny: "You were wise not to exercise much during the first trimester to give the baby a chance to be securely implanted. Now you must exercise regularly, but no jogging, no jumping.")

Audrey did not expect Yvonne, thin as Piaf in a black suit as intricately cut as a diamond, up from Lyons on the TGV to see her young friend Alain, to bring problems. Her friend was a Christmas-Eve Catholic. Besides, by now, the rightness of her project had come to seem self-evident. The two friends met at the Crillon. A waiter-obviously a duke during nonworking hours-poured tea. As Audrey explained her project, Yvonne began to sob. Her crying grew louder and louder, more wet and sloppy than seemed possible from such a small woman, until, at last, Audrey offered the duke a sheaf of bills and, abandoning their tea, they headed back to the Hotel Madison. Bony shoulders shaking, Yvonne sniffled and snuffled all the way, stamped her needle-heels, stopped every few feet to blow her nose and whisper, "A baby is not a product."

In Audrey's room, each woman staring steadfastly out the window at Sacre Coeur instead of at each other, Audrey presented again her plans for her own agency and her need to be financially and psychologically self-sufficient. She described the Comricks' sweet need and, hands cupping the ripe-melon swell of her breasts, she said, "There's no true love in Richard." She said, "I've never felt so well."

Yvonne, smoothing her skirt over meager thighs, said, "I've never seen you so beautiful."

TRIQUARTERLY

The following evening they argued over cocktails and dinner at the Ritz, wine and snails at Tour d'Argent the next, until at last Yvonne said, "It is, chere amie, a little late to change your mind."

At midnight they met Alain at the bottom of the stairs to Sacre Coeur and together they climbed to the terrace to see the city under a full moon. From this high place, all of Paris lay at Audrey's feet, its ancient islands like ships forever heading toward the sea. The renovated Eiffel Tower might have been a queen from a chessboard. For the first time, Audrey had grown fond of the light-spangled tower. No matter where she walked, a vista opened before her and there it would be, lighter and more exciting than ever.

It had been a sober evening, indeed a sober season for Audrey, yet hugging her knees, looking down at the life she was earning, breathing in the smells of spring, she grew drunk with moonlight. It seemed as if she had known her friend's petit ami as long as Yvonne had.

"C'est vrai? You are in Paris to have a baby?" he asked.

"Mais oui."

"And papa? Where is papa?"

Audrey's Gallic shrug began with her feet and rolled up her spine.

"Combien?" he asked. "How much for a baby?"

"That's my secret." She knew then that Yvonne had told Alain about her project.

"You are a very beautiful woman," he was saying. "I would like to take your picture."

No one had ever asked to take her picture, but then she had not had a headache since early January.

"Now?"

"And later."

"But I'll be thick. Then large. With child."

"Please," he said.

"Nonsense."

"You will grow more beautiful with child."

"No pictures."

"It would help other women to see your strength." He flipped a thumb at her as if by pictures alone she could help women everywhere. "I'll be shooting with a telescopic lens, so far away you won't even see me. I'll never show your face." He was with Paris Match. The check was excessive. The moon over Paris was full. Alain to her left,Yvonne to her right, pleasure bubbling up into a hiccup, Audrey linked arms and pulled them closer. No one in the philosophy department at Wisconsin-

Stout had ever proposed such an ethical dilemma. Richard was right: two steps down the slippery slope and the rest of the fall was fun.

Having helped her petit ami, Yvonne went to Majorca. Audrey resumed her solitary walks. Often, turning a beloved corner, she pretended to see Richard. He always said, "Audrey, you're beautiful," and then, being Richard, "What happened?" At the tip of the lIe de la Cite, she ate a French loaf with ham, cheese, lettuce, pate and tomato (Jenny: "Please don't gain more then twenty-five pounds and cut down on salt") and lectured the fetus: "This is where Paris began." At the Parvis de Notre Dame, she described the statues on the cathedral's facade, especially the little devil who with his thumb tipped the scales ofJudgment Day to win more souls for his master. "The Sainte Chapelle has another one," she said. "We'll go there tomorrow."

Richard sent her his critique of Paul K. Feyerbend, which denied the authority of method and science in a free society. In a small Chinese restaurant behind the Cluny, she propped Richard's article against her black mushrooms-with-ginger and thought about his hands, so deft with chopsticks, so deft in her body. "So, Richard, no God, no master, no method, no science. What now?"

Richard knew what he was saying: there is nothing in the universe except myself and I'm not much. But he didn't feel it. He didn't care. Even if she could tell him about her project, and she couldn't because she'd promised not to, he'd probably think being a biological father was meaningless. Looking ahead to the days when she must leave Paris, she promised herself never to be like Richard.

Jenny telephoned. It was two A.M. in Paris. "I forgot to ask. Do you dye your hair? Coal tar can cause birth defects."

One warm June night, Audrey lay on her bed and listened to the sounds from the street below. Girls giggled, then screamed. Young men shouted, "Merde alors." Motorcycles roared and brakes screamed. Fists struck flesh.The fetus within her moved and she thought about Richard, smelled his aftershave, saw Richard, naked, reaching down for his slippers, his body's cleft so vulnerable.

She bought another purple pantsuit, this one maternity-style with a full top that swung as she walked. She bought low shoes and, forgoing a permanent, braided her hair in a fat black pigtail. Thus clad, she took the fetus to the new Picasso museum in the Marais. To the Victor Hugo. Giverny. Chartres. Versailles. The American Embassy to pay their respects to Ben Franklin's statue in the courtyard. Mornings, when it rained, she read aloud from Flaubert and de Maupassant, newspapers

from left to right: Le Canard Enchaine, Liberation, Le Figaro, Le Temps, Le Monde. A child should have perspective; the closer Lloyd came to fatherhood, the more conservative he became.

She wrote Jenny, "I'm beginning to walk like a duck."

As Lloyd had promised, he and Jenny visited every month. Jenny always checked Audrey's pulse; she never counted more than seventytwo beats per minute. Audrey retraced her walks with them. She showed them the graffiti behind Shakespeare and Company: Rends�moi le sperme de mon mario (If Richard knew what she was doing, would he ask her to return his sperm?)

The three of them discussed the dangers of spiral staircases. "We'll move," Lloyd said.

"Hey, Dad," Jenny said. "You're right,"

"Do you sleep on your side?" she asked Audrey. "It directs more blood to the uterus." She bought half a dozen Dior support hose for Audrey. She showed her how to lie on the floor and rest her heels against the wall. She worried because Audrey was living in the cholesterol capital of the world.

"And Saint-Germain-des-Pres is so noisy," Lloyd said. "Noise can hurt a baby." Audrey suggested she visit Yvonne, home again in her small villa near Lyons, for the last month of her pregnancy.

They stood before the Sainte Chapelle. "I explained to the baby about the thumb under the scale," Audrey said. (This was the first time she'd referred to the fetus as baby.)

"Audrey, do you believe in hell?" Lloyd asked. She and Jenny answered in unison. "Not after life."

They decided that once Audrey delivered, she would stay in Paris for a month before going back to work. Truly, the scales of life had tipped in her favor.

"Be sure to keep up with your Lamaze," Jenny said. "Asking Lloyd to help would demand too much. It's up to you to have a painless birth. We want our baby to have the least possible trauma. No drugs." And then, "I envy you so."

Audrey delivered at the American Hospital in Paris at four in the morning, September ten. The three of them, Jenny and Lloyd and Audrey, joined hands over Audrey's belly and Jenny and Lloyd matched their deep breaths to hers. It was a normal birth. Afterwards, Jenny and Lloyd laughed and cried and stroked the baby's bald head.

Alone at her desk in her new office, red pencil slashing at her first layout, Audrey was doing what she did best: product development. With a thumb she lifted a photo and eased it down one-sixteenth of an inch, then, mock-up in hand, she paced the small room. Last April this twoyear lease had seemed a bargain: one hundred and ninety-six square feet with a window to the lake, $24 a month per square foot, total $112,896, not much more than the price of a baby. Now the office felt cramped and barren. The lake was iron gray.

She had made an analysis in depth of the French way of making rumpled boxer shorts erotic; the promotion-crumpled green-gray shorts beside a champagne glass on a crimson carpet-had come out exactly as she had planned; she hated it. With her usual precision, she initialed the layout, placed it face down on her desk, and, small hammers pounding in her temples, picked up sketches for her next project. Her real job in the years to come, she knew this now, was never to beg to see the child.

The Intruder

David Gates 1

They had the air conditioner on Hi Cool and the whole downstairs smelled of roasting turkey. Friday afternoon. Finn sat in the blue armchair, which rested on Teflon wafers to protect the floor he'd finally gotten around to sanding and refinishing. With spar varnish, not that damnable polyurethane. He was reading, of all things, Timon of Athens, which he had remembered as being much better. So this would probably be the last time in his life he would read Timon of Athens; that made it seem sad and precious, if not especially enjoyable. As he read, he also worried: that there would be too many leftovers, that Thanksgiving dinner in July wasn't charming but simply outre, that none of the guests would know he'd been interested in American cooking before it had become fashionable, and that he had been boring James by saying so repeatedly.

James sat cross-legged in the maroon armchair with his earphones on. Among the few possessions he'd brought along when he moved in was his collection of books on tape. Lately he'd been reading-if that was the word-Edgar Allan Poe.

"Plugged-in and passive," he'd said. "I'm the first to admit it. The MTV generation. Before your very eyes." Affected decadence was one of James's comic turns.

"But Poe?" Finn had said.

"It's camp, what can I say?" said James. "I thought all faggots were into camp back in your day."

On the floor by his chair James had set a sweating glass of seltzer. He

was forever setting his glass on the floor and Finn was forever nagging; today especially he should just bite his tongue. He'd invited Peter and Carolyn, of course, and some people from the Drama Department-Bill and Deborah -Whitley, Byron Solomon-although he'd told no one it was an occasion. An anniversary, for James and Finn, could only be the anniversary of one thing, and Finn was-he called it considerate, James called it chickenshit-about shoving in people's faces what they didn't want to know. They'd decided to make today their anniversary, although it could also have been yesterday; by the time that had become important it was too late to pin it down. James had gone to the library and looked at the microfiche to check the movie ads in the paper that week. Rebecca and Notorious had been Wed-Thur, but they couldn't decide which it had been. For once Finn hadn't been teaching summer school and James said (his decadent routine again) that he hadn't cared what day of the week it was since the last time he'd held a job.

James's sister Carolyn lived on the next street, one house over from Finn's: their backyards touched at a single point. A year ago today-or yesterday-Finn had been out back taking down, at long last, the swing set that had been there when he'd bought the place. With a sledgehammer he'd pulverized the concrete plugs that anchored the thing in the ground; it lay on its side like a dog killed by a car, two stiff legs in the air. He was trying to decide whether it could be knocked apart with the hammer or whether he'd have to take a hacksaw to it when he noticed this-Finn hated the expression "young man"dressed only in shorts and running shoes mowing the Sykes's lawn. Finn nodded and received a nod in return. Carolyn had forewarned him that her brother would be coming up to stay in the house for a few days while she and Peter were in Umbria, and encouraged him to go over and introduce himself. It seemed uncivil not to make use of this opportunity, but the brother's very good looks made Finn disinclined. That night, Wed or Thurs, he went to what he still thought of as the Central but was now called the Symposium: the musty, velvety old theater in town had become a revival house with air-popped popcorn and a beer-andwine license, run by a graduate-school dropout convinced that civilized people were getting tired of VCRs. Ahead of him in the ticket line was the young man. When he turned away from the window with his ticket, he saw Finn, smiled and nodded, and walked over.

"1 think you're Finn McCarthy," he said.

"Well, that makes one of us," said Finn. "However. Yes. And 1 think you're the person who was so diligently mowing the Sykes's lawn this

afternoon. "

"James Chase," said the young man. "Carolyn's brother."

"Yes, Carolyn had prepared me," said Finn. "Somewhat." Should he have? Well, it was said now. "I ought to have come over and said hello, but I was preoccupied."

"You did look kind of menacing with your sledgehammer," said the young man.

"That was my John Henry mode," said Finn. "Otherwise I'm harmless enough. So Peter and Carolyn euchred you into looking after the old homestead while they traipse around sunny Italy."

"It didn't take much euchring," said James Chase. "It was this or muggy Manhattan. Carolyn told me I should be sure and look you up."

"Ah," said Finn. "Here, why don't we go in?" Was he overreacting, or was this a bit gauche of Carolyn Sykes, to have steered this obviously gay boy in his direction when the first move, if any, ought to have been Finn's? On the other hand, he couldn't afford to think ill of Carolyn Sykes: except for poor Byron Solomon, and of course now the Whitleys, Peter and Carolyn were as close as Finn had to friends in this community. As Carolyn undoubtedly knew. Which was why she had taken such a liberty. Although she had surely meant well. (There: he was coming around already.) And as to the boy's being obviously gay, would that have been so obvious to a less knowing eye? Did Carolyn herself know it? One's family had a gift for not knowing these things, or so it had been in Finn's family. This brother of Carolyn's was certainly presentable-whatever he meant by that-and obviously conversable.

When the lights came up at intermission, Finn turned to James Chase and said, "I'm going to give Rebecca a miss, I think. I remember this as being the better of the two, and even this is starting to show its age. All this malarkey about how magical the two of them are together. Didn't seem so bloody magical to me. Ingrid Bergman reconciles me to living in the age ofjulia Roberts."

"It really wasn't all that hot, was it?" said James Chase. "God, I feel like a heretic."

"Bracing, isn't it?" said Finn. "Tell you what. Since you're new in town. There happens to be quite a wonderful diner here. A lot of the old features pretty much intacta. And they make a mean rice pudding. And there's a jukebox thing in every booth, with all sorts of marvelous old songs. It still has 'Ring of Fire.' Do you know 'Ring of Fire?' Johnny Cash?"

"I must have heard it," said James Chase. "But, you know. I'm into

Garth. Mr. Va Va Voom."

"Well then," said Finn. "We must educate you. Are you game?" "Always," he said.

From the diner they went back to Finn's house, to hear "White Circle" by Kitty Wells, which Finn insisted was a minor masterpiece. He opened a bottle of wine, and soon he heard himself calling Willie Nelson a "nasty old bird," and was aware for the millionth goddamn time that he tended to sound like an old queen when he'd been drinking. And so to bed, a surprise to both of them. Finn had stopped doing this kind of thing years ago, and James, it turned out, had promised himself that he had not come up here to cruise. And he had sworn off older men.

Later that same night-actually it was beginning to tum gray outside the windows-when they got around to comparing stories, Finn's misgivings came back more sharply. James had been vague about his involvements in New York, but from what Finn could gather it was clear that he might really have been taking his life in his hands with this boy. But truly, wasn't AIDS simply the extreme, the mortal, instance of what had always been the case: that your new love's irrevocable past determined your future? But this James was his first adventure-was it possible?-since he'd moved here. Finn was so out of touch that he didn't even have a condom in the house. James, thank God, had come equipped (despite what he'd promised himself): he carried them in his wallet, like the flamboyantly heterosexual boys of Finn's high-school days.

Finn found James's corning-out story unsettling, too. His own announcement to his parents (he'd been forty; they'd been too old to hear it) had been like something out of a sensitive made-for-TV film: the father's anger, the mother's self-castigation. James had been in his last year of high school; he'd soaked the labels off of a Fibber McGee and Molly cassette and stuck them on a tape called Top Sergeant (which purported to be a recording of randy Marines in the barracks), then wrapped it and put it under the Christmas tree. As James told the story, his parents had waited to play it until his Aunt Alice showed up for Christmas dinner, and she had been so shocked that her dentures fell out. Finn suspected he'd invented at least part of this: Aunt Alice was clearly a stock character, a Margaret Dumont or an Edna May Oliver. And it mayor may not have been true that his father's slapping him across the mouth had been the pretext for James's quitting school and moving to New York. But true or not, the story made Finn feel both

excited and intimidated, the way he had felt as a child when Ricky Morrison had seduced him into playing with matches. From the can Finn's father had kept in the toolshed, Ricky had poured out a wide circle of gasoline onto McCarthy's lawn and tossed match after match until it roared up. It left a telltale ring of charred grass which Finn rubbed at in vain with the soles of his sneakers; he'd caught holy hell, named his accomplice and that was the end of his friendship with Ricky Morrison.

That first night, with Kitty Wells keening, it had been James who committed himself first: he took a deep breath, put a warm hand on the back of Finn's neck and pulled him close. Yet it had been James who had said, "I want to put this on you, can I?" So neither of them, Finn reminded himself, had all the power. That is, if you believed it was all about who fucked who.

James's Walkman gave a snap. Finn looked up from his book and saw him take off the earphones, stretch his arms up over his head and stand up. "The willies," he said. "So what time are people supposed to be arriving?"

Finn, still holding his book, rolled his wrist to check his watch. Ten after four, which of course had no bearing on the question. "I told 'em all six o'clock," he said. "I hate this malarkey where you have one coming at six o'clock and one at six-fifteen and so forth." It was endearing that anyone could still get the willies from Edgar Allan Poe.

"Six o'clock," said James. "Listen, if you don't mind I think I'm going to go up and nap for a little. Will you come wake me?"

Finn rested the open book against his stomach. "What time?" he said, hoping he didn't sound disapproving. He'd gotten up at three in morning to take a piss; when he came downstairs for a swallow of wine from the refrigerator he'd found James in the study watching Star 80. The room had stunk of pot.

"I'll leave that," said James, "to your discretion."

Oh.

"Actually I might come up and join you," said Finn. "I'm pretty much at a stopping-place. Just let me baste Junior again."

"Don't feel obliged," said James.

"Now what's all this?" said Finn.

James shook his head.

"Nothing," said James. "I must be on the rag."

Oh fine, Finn thought. So now it was up to him whether to allow James to get in a jab for free or whether to tum this into another battle

royale. Since there were guests due in a couple of hours he should just drop it. But. But but but.

"Am I being unreasonable?" said Finn. Like a damn fool. "To want to know what I'm being told?"

"You're never unreasonable," said James.

"And what is that supposed to mean?"

"What I said," said James. "You're never unreasonable. I am unreasonable. As we all know."

Finn closed his eyes for a count of three and blew out his breath for J ames to hear.

"Now I've done it," said James. "Enter the Bickersons."

"Why are you doing it?" said Finn.

"What a reasonable question," said James. "Why doesn't James just go take his nap and wake up cheerful and refreshed? If there's anything the world doesn't need it's another scene with the bitchy faggots trying to keep it together in front of company."

"That's not what I'm concerned about," said Finn.

"Right," said J ames. He started up the stairs, then stopped and looked back. "Hey Finn?" he said. "You would be welcome to tuck me in."

Finn decided. "O.K.," he said. "Just let me deal with Junior."

J ames started up the stairs again. As his feet disappeared from sight he called back, "Don't be too long."

Finn closed Timon ofAthens, not bothering to mark his place, and got up. Truly, that turkey smelled splendid. On his way into the kitchen he picked up James's Walkman from where he'd left it on the floor. Which story had given James the willies? Finn hit Eject and saw it wasn't the Poe at all, but just a tape tape. On the label someone had written "WORKOUT MUSIC/C. LAUPER ETC." The name seemed antiquated, even to Finn: wasn't she the Gracie Allen one? The writing was faded, and it wasn't James's. 2

Finn McCarthy was a maker of documentary films. Or had been until six years ago, when he was looking for a place to land and was approached by the college's Department of Communication Arts. That was the year his film about children's street games had been nominated for an Academy Award. He'd meant to show these children (filmed in Newark, Liverpool, Mexico City and Connecticut) as members of a

savage tribe with alien customs and ceremonies; it had bothered him, therefore, that two of the three reviews he'd gotten had called it "sensitive." For whatever reason, he hadn't been able to get going on a new project since. It was his course load, his inability to travel. It was the too-comfortable life here: dinner parties with tolerant acquaintances in a tolerant college town. It was his house, the first he'd ever owned, which had needed everything done to it. It was James.

But at long last he did have a new project in mind. Which would damn well not be called "sensitive," either. And which would get him once and for all, at the age of fifty-two, out of the closet, not that he was truly in the closet. (James gave him guff about that, but that was just James.) Finn had ignored the whole Stonewall business and everything thereafter; bully for them, of course, but. He was damned if he'd be ghettoized as a quote unquote gay filmmaker; his work was not political. Lately, though, he was beginning to wonder whether avoiding the subject of homosexuality in his films-well, not avoiding, just not obsessing-hadn't been a mistake. A mistake aesthetically. When he looked at his old work nowadays (which wasn't often) it felt impersonal to him. Put-together to a fare-thee-well, of course. But surely there was a way to get closer in without being either confessional or, God forbid, polemical. Assuming he wasn't too old to want to.

What he'd come up with was a film about the makers of gay porno films. Which, if it worked-if he could get the time and the funding and of course the access-would be a sort of oblique self-portrait in addition to whatever else. His films had always been about subcultures: American Indians who worked building skyscrapers, a leprosarium in what was then Southern Rhodesia, country-music fans. The children and their street games. But a subculture based on being homosexual and making films: how could this not end up being his best work? Or so he thought sometimes.

He'd gone so far as to begin collecting videos; he'd also written part of a first draft of an essay on the implicit formal conventions of pornography. If he could finish this and get it decently published-he'd try Film Quarterly first, obviously, then Sight and Sound-it might help with the funding. The biggest problem, aside from outright censorshipthe Mapplethorpe business still had everybody running scared-was that these days such a subject could only be a downer: even safe-sex porn had a sort of "Masque of the Red Death" feel about it. Which was all to the good as far as the film was concerned. But it made the project a tougher sell, even with the Award nomination. If anyone still remembered it.

Another problem was that James was against it; it would set things back twenty years, he said. (Finn's first reaction was to be flattered that James thought a film of his could have any impact at all in the world.) "What if you were a black person?" James had said. "Would you make a movie about welfare cheats eating watermelon in their Cadillacs?"

"If I could get a grant from General Motors," said Finn.

James looked at him. "It's not funny, man. You ever stop and think about where you are? You drive ten minutes outside this town, man, and you're in fucking Jesse Helms country. They don't like faggots out there, or haven't you heard?"

"You've lived in New York too long," said Finn. "I've never encountered the least-I mean I don't go to workingmen's bars on a Saturday night, but who in his right mind does?"

James was still looking at him. "You are so blind, man," he said. Finn had never seem him this exercised. And only once before had James called him "man."

That was when James had first moved in. He'd gone down to the city for a weekend to pick up the rest of his things and the weekend had lasted until Thursday. When Finn came to get him at the airport in Albany, James's explanation was so carelessly thin that Finn (who'd had a half-carafe of vile Paul Masson red wine while waiting in the lounge) had called him a slut.

"Listen, man," James had said, "this slut was good enough for you when you picked me up at the movies." James had had a gin and tonic on the plane.

"I picked you up?" said Finn.

"You don't know how lucky you are," said James. "You're getting a live-in slut all your own, man, complete with checkered past. Just don't push it."

This, of course, had been absolute malarkey. Finn knew what it was to be excited by beautiful bad boys, but at his age he also knew better than to let one move into his home. To take a lithe, treacherous animal to bed was one thing; to wake up next to one was something else again. James's good looks, in fact, had bothered Finn until he got used to them. (One thing that had helped humanize James was when Finn walked in on him spraying Right Guard into his running shoes.) In fact, after the first few days, Finn had been about to hint that it was getting time for James to go back to his sister's house. He changed his mind one afternoon when he came inside from mowing the lawn and found James in the darkened study. On the screen the little black girls from Newark

TRIQUARTERLY

were jumping double-dutch. James looked up, saw Finn in the doorway, thumbed the remote control and froze a little girl with her teeth clenched and one foot in the air. "This is amazing," he said. "How did you get this to be so scary?"

Finn dropped into his Zen pedagogical manner. "Just by looking at it," he said.

"Gol-ly, professor," said James. He looked back at the frozen image. "I wonder how you look at me," he said. "I'd like to be looked at with kindness."

"Of course when I first saw it listed," Byron Solomon was saying, "I was quite humiliated."

"Why?" said Bill Whitley. "God, to be able to say you worked with John Ford."

"Worked flatters the case, I think," said Byron. "At any rate, I very nearly made a great fool of myself by calling them up and lacing into them about it. Jeannette, of course, talked me around. She said, 'Good heavens'-you remember-'Good heavens, how were they to know?' Because naturally for mere movies I never used Byron Solomon. Never sullied the great name." He laughed. It didn't sound bitter, and Finn wondered if that was even more depressing. "So she said, 'How were they to know, for heaven's sake: You remember the way she was."

"I wish I could've known her," said Bill Whitley, apparently meaning it as a tactful reminder.

"God yes, I can hear her now," said Finn, throwing in a chuckle to boot, though in fact the imitation had sounded more like Marie Dressler than Jeannette; Byron Solomon, after all, hadn't been much of an actor. Bill Whitley, like the other newer faculty, tended to treat Byron as if he were senile, which was terribly unfair. It was true that he had slipped a bit since Jeannette died. But the man had to be sixty-five: who didn't slip? Really, Finn should have exerted himself more to find Byron a dinner partner. But one no longer worried about pairing people off for dinners, just as one no longer worried about going boy-girl-boy-girl at table, although Finn in fact had seated Carolyn between himself and Bill Whitley, and Deborah Whitley between himself and Peter Sykes.

"At any rate," said Byron, "my curiosity of course got the better of me, and down I went. And do you know, I thoroughly enjoyed myself? In

both senses. I was on screen for all of three minutes, and let me tell you I was as bad a bad guy as ever chewed the scenery." Finn had heard Byron tell this story before, in exactly the same words. "And do you know what happened?" Finn knew. "A rousing cheer went up! The house lights came on! And there stood my entire class, applauding. Jeannette, it seems, had called one of my students-Finn, you remember her, a Susan somebody? Lovely girl-who had in tum called the fellow at the theater and arranged the whole thing. Jeannette had been prepared to drag me there bodily, if necessary, sick as she was. Well, let me tell you, it was like the Ed Sullivan Show. Toneet in air steeyewdio audience

Even Byron's Ed Sullivan was no good.

James was staring down at his plate for all of this, mixing together his turnips and mashed potatoes with his salad fork. Must he show his boredom so plainly? Finn had civilized him in some respects-he no longer drank Kahlua, for instance-but his table manners were still an embarrassment. Not just the elbows, but the face hanging over the plate and the clumsy business of having to switch his fork to his right hand after cutting a piece of meat because no one had ever taught him to use his silverware properly. That, of course, was a lost cause nowadays.

James began mixing in his cranberries, turning the whole mess gray. Finn leaned over to Carolyn and said, "I think your brother's attention span has reached its limit. I should never have put him between Byron and Bill." Before Byron had gotten the floor, Bill Whitley had been holding forth on Simon Callow. Which Finn couldn't help but think punningly appropriate, though to say so later to James would be a cheap shot.

"But God help me," Byron Solomon was saying, "if there's a kinescope floating around of my episode of Judge Roy Bean. Also pseudonymous. 'Law West of the Pecos.' Now that's one I do not care to have revealed."

"Edgar Buchanan!" cried Bill Whitley. Everyone but the Whitleys had heard about this, too.

"Suppose I mobilize him to help me clear," said Carolyn to Finn. "Meanwhile you can rescue poor Deborah."

Deborah Whitley, whom Finn had seated at his left, had her golden, mostly naked back to him, leaning into her conversation with Peter Sykes. Who had filled his and Deborah's wineglasses twice now, and was speaking too low for the rest of the table to hear. He made a fist, then stretched forth the fingers like a tenor hitting a high note. Muscles bulged in his forearm: Peter Sykes was a sculptor who'd spent the past three months working in an auto body shop to sharpen his welding

skills. Deborah Whitley laughed.

Finn admired Carolyn for her civilized pretense that her husband was a bore, bending the unwilling ear of the large-breasted, precariously halter-topped Deborah Whitley. Carolyn's intelligence would probably get her through until her looks began to go. Good Christ, one's friends.

After dinner, Byron nodded off in Finn's chair; then his eyes flew open and he said he guessed he'd better toddle along. The Whitleys had brought him, but Bill looked so crestfallen-Finn was flattered that he was enjoying himself but appalled by his bad manners-that Peter Sykes offered to drive Byron home. This jogged Bill into a belated sense of the decencies, and that was it for the evening: one couldn't very well ask Peter and Carolyn to stay on with the Whitleys standing right there. Carolyn offered to help with the cleanup, but Finn wouldn't hear of it. She said she'd be glad to. Finn said they had things well in hand.

"Oh, don't be such a macho-man," she said. "You'll be up till all hours."

"Well ," said Finn.

"Shoo," said James. "No girls allowed."

"If you're sure," said Carolyn.

James rolled his eyes. "Ve vant," he stage-whispered, "to be alone."

Carolyn looked down at the beautiful wood floor.

After closing the door on all of them, Finn turned to J ames and said, "There was no need to be brutal. Couldn't you see she was upset?"

"What?" said James. "What are you talking about now?"

"Oh come," said Finn. "Even you couldn't have missed what was going on at dinner. I assure you your sister took note."

"What, Stanley Kowalski and Little Bo Peep?" he said. "Oh for God's sake. Parties are for flirting. That's what they're about. I mean when there's anybody there under fifty. Or wasn't it like that back in your d 7" ay.

"This was a social evening," said Finn, hating this tone he was being maneuvered into taking. "I don't regard that as giving people license to hurt other people's feelings."

"Ooh," said James. "Well I guess that tells me. The Queen of Feelings has spoken." He walked into the kitchen with that walk Finn hated. That goddamn faggot walk, where the shoulders didn't move. The fourth bottle of Montalcino-Finn also hated white wine-had just about that much left. He picked it up, glanced at the kitchen doorway, and polished it off. What would the Italian be for A meme la bouteille? He carried the dead soldier into the kitchen, not even looking at James

(who fetched a loud sigh as he bent over the dishwasher), and on through into the mud-room, where he dropped it, clank, in with the green glass. All this environmental malarkey was accomplishing exactly nothing-Was he the only one who noticed it hardly snowed up here in the winter anymore?-except to give a bunch of small people the power to tyrannize you when you went to the dump. Even grocery bags had turned self-righteous: "We Recycle," with the arrows going around. Finn hated that "we." 4

On Saturday morning the phone rang while Finn was standing at the refrigerator eating cold stuffing with his fingers. "Hi," said Carolyn. "I hope I'm not calling too early."

"No-no-no," said Finn, who'd just corne in from the backyard. "I've been up since seven-thirty." He looked at his watch: eleven on the dot. "Didn't you see me out back with my trusty wheelbarrow? That bloody sandpile is finally going the way of the swing set. This time next year we'll have a civilized backyard, by Jesus." He hated saying "we" to Carolyn, but "I" would have been worse. "Did the Rinaldi children really play on that flimsy little swing set?"

"And every place else," said Carolyn. "Four of the little monsters. From sunup to sundown. Peter and I used to pray for a rainy day."

"Ah, but sure they were precious souls for Holy Mother Church," said Finn, breaking into his Oirish tum.

"Listen, Finn?" said Carolyn. "There's something-listen, James isn't standing right there, is he?"

"Christ no," said Finn. "Lazy son of a bitch is still asleep." The lumberjack mode, he felt, compensated for the we. "You want me to call him? It's about time he-"

"No," she said. "No, what I mean is, could I talk to you about something?"

"Of course," he said. He edged over to the kitchen table, watching the coils of the telephone cord stretch, and sat down. He put his hand to his shirt pocket as if pledging allegiance. Only the rattle of a matchbook.

"There was a message on the machine when we got horne last night," said Carolyn. Finn was scanning the room: damn it, his cigarettes were over there on the counter, far out of reach. "My father went in for some tests a couple of weeks ago. And now they want him to go back and

have some more done. And-you know, it just doesn't sound very good."

"Tests," said Finn.

"Well, he's had, you know, rectal bleeding "Right," said Finn.

"And I just thought James ought to be told."

"Right," said Finn. "Well, I agree. Do you want to, or shall!?"

"Well ," she said.

"I don't mind," he said. "I take it there's been very little contact?"

"Well, I guess it's been a little better since-you know, since he's been living up here," said Carolyn. "If anything, they're-"

"Would you excuse me a moment?" said Finn. He put the receiver down, wedging it between the heavy cut-glass flower vase and the dinerstyle metal napkin dispenser so the tension in the cord wouldn't pull it off onto the floor, went over and fetched his cigarettes.

"I'm back," he said, holding the receiver to his ear with his shoulder to strike the match. "Well, Carolyn, I'm very sorry to hear this about your father." He took a deep, welcome drag and considerately raised the mouthpiece as he blew out the smoke. "We'll hope it turns out to be nothing serious. And I will speak to J ames as soon as he comes down. Now are you all right?"

"Well," she said. "I'm just trying to, you know, wait to hear something concrete and not panic until there's actually something to panic about."

"Good girl," he said. "It's a harrowing thing, I know. I went through this with my father." Well, that was hardly a reassuring thing to say. "I can't honestly tell you that the waiting is the worst part"---Christ, he was getting in deeper-"but in your case I truly hope it will be." He had extricated himselfby inspiration.

"So do I," she said. Then she said, "I'm sorry about your father."

"Oh this was years ago," he said. "So meanwhile. What do you recommend? Should James go down there, do you think? Are you planning to go down?"

"No," she said. "I think at this point all it would do is get everybody upset. You know, people showing up like ..... Had she been going to say vultures? "Besides, Fort Myers isn't all that divine in July. But I do think that if he would call or write-I don't know, I just think it would mean a lot. If only for his own sake, you know? Like later on."

"Right," said Finn.

"I think he really is very ill. I just-something just tells me that."

"I'll go upstairs right now," he said. "And you'll let me know if there's anything further I can do."

"I will," she said. "Thank you."

"Ciao," he said, and stood up to put the receiver back in the cradle.

"So what's going on?" said James. Finn turned: James was standing, barefoot, in the archway leading to the dining room.

"I didn't realize you were up," said Finn. "That was Carolyn. It seems your father has gone in for some tests, and they're not certain at this point what if anything is wrong. But apparently your mother is quite upset, and your sister seems to think it sounds serious enough that she thinks you ought to get in touch with them."

"And say what?"

"I honestly don't know, Jamie," said Finn. "That would be up to you."

James went to the refrigerator, took out the carton of orange juice and drank from it. "Sort of tests are we talking about?"

"Again," said Finn, and spread his hands, palms up. A long ash fell off his cigarette and he saw it shatter softly on the floor. "It seems to be some sort of, colo-rectal thing."

"That figures," said James. "So we're talking about cancer."

"Again," said Finn.

James said, "I want to talk to my sister."

The test results weren't in until the following Saturday; on Sunday morning Finn drove James to Albany. He put James's ticket on his Discover card, and got him two hundred dollars, the daily limit, from a cash machine. After a goodbye hug at the gate, Finn walked back out to the car, sat on the front fender and watched the plane out of sight. Watched himself watch the plane out of sight.

5

The drive down to JFK used to take Finn four and a half hours; today it had taken five. He no longer had the energy-no, the foolhardiness-to roll seventy and seventy-five all the way. Even so, he was half an hour early, so he tried to get comfortable on the narrow aluminum ledge of a giant window near the security station, and to involve himself in the last act of Timon of Athens. He'd deliberately brought nothing else: damned if he would allow himself to get that far and not finish. But how was he to concentrate? About fifty other people were clustered here, including whole families with whining children; some sat against the wall, some paced, some just stood and shifted their weight from foot to foot. Only ticket-holders were being allowed to go through security and

down to the gates where there were seats. And ordinary people, waiting for their loved ones, were denied a modicum of comfort all becausewell, enough. It was unattractive to be querulous.

He'd driven all the way down here because James couldn't find a direct flight. Getting to Albany would have involved shuttling from JFK to La Guardia, sitting at La Guardia for another two hours-ridiculous. If the lights started to bother Finn's eyes on the drive back, they could always stop and put up at a motel. He'd also driven all the way down here because he wanted to make another foray into Times Square.

James had seemed in fine fettle on the telephone, but now that it was certain the old man (he was five years older than Finn) had only months to live, God knows what buried feelings were bound to come out. Finn was truly sorry for James: he himself had been forty-five before he'd had to go through this. But he hoped that whatever James had to go through-and he was ashamed of how selfish this sounded-he hoped it would not be disruptive. During the week and a half James had been gone, Finn had written another three pages of his essay and had composed the covering letter. No doubt James would be upset that he intended to run an errand-particularly this errand-before going home. Damn: had he not taken so much wine last night, he would've been able to get up earlier, to finish picking up the house earlier, and to make his stop before coming to the airport. But if there had to be a showdown, then there would be a showdown. This was his only life, and there was only so much of it left.

He couldn't concentrate on Tzmon ofAthens.

At last passengers with suitcases and garment bags began straggling down the long passage from the gates to the security station. No one had even bothered to announce the arrival: the slipshod way everything was run these days would make a saint querulous. Yet he mustn't visit this querulousness on James, who would need his support. And would find it unattractive. And there was James now, his canvas duffel bag slung from his shoulder, and in his other hand-what? A net bag of oranges.

Finn gave him a brotherly one-armed hug. James bent to lay the oranges on the floor, straightened up, gripped the back of Finn's neck and kissed him on the lips.

"This is New York City," said James. "Remember?"

"Forgive an old man," said Finn, giving his still-one-armed hug another pump. "When ye git my age, sonny

"If," said James.

Finn let go. James's tan, he noticed, was even deeper than when he'd left. So something more had been going on, apparently, than just the compulsive Tv-watching and the silent family dinners he'd re-created so amusingly on the phone.

"Ah, nature's bounty," said Finn, bending to pick up the oranges.

"My mother insisted," said James. "She was very particular that they were for both of us."

"Well well well," said Finn. "God and sinners reconciled. But wouldn't pink grapefruit have been more appropriate?"

James began walking. The sight of his firm buttocks under his white shorts made Finn suddenly furious.

"Your tan looks splendid," he said, catching up. "So how are the beach girls down there? Really stacked, I'll bet."

James stopped. People went by on both sides, paying no attention.

"Hey Finn?" said James. "Why don't you give it a rest, O.K.? I'm just really not up to it. It's been a bad week."

"Yes, I can see it must have been hell," said Finn, appalled that he couldn't shut up.

"I don't believe this is happening," said James. "I've been off the plane for two minutes and already we're in one of these things."

"I'm sorry, Jamie," said Finn. "I don't know what the hell's wrong with me."

"Can we not stand here in the middle of all this?"

"Sorry. Here." He touched James's shoulder to guide him. "We're parked down this way."

They walked a few steps towards the escalator and James stopped again. "Look," he said, "would you rather I just took a cab into the city and got out of your life?"

"Jamie, I'm truly-"

"Because I don't seem to be making you very happy, and you're driving me out of my mind."

"You're shouting," said Finn.

"What, these people have never seen a pair of bickering faggots before?" Well, he was shouting now, at any rate.

"James," said Finn. "For Christ's sake."

"You want to know about my tan?" said James. "Well my parents have a pool, man. In their backyard. Which is where I sat for nine days, man, watching game shows with my mother. She keeps a TV out there so she can work on her tan. She looks like distressed leather. My father, meanwhile, sits in the den with the blinds closed watching, I kid you

not, old Super Bowl games on his VCR. He's got tapes of all but four of however fucking many Super Bowls there are. And he's scared shitless and he eats so much Valium his flesh is turning to balsa wood."

"I'm so sorry," said Finn.

"Look," said James, "do you mind very much if we get out of here?"

In the parking garage, Finn unlocked the passenger door first. James in turn reached over and unlocked the driver's door, which Finn took as a sign of conciliation. He decided not to nag James about his seat belt. He reached over and stroked the back ofJames's head. James allowed it.

When they came out into the sunlight-it was still only five o'clock-Finn put on the air conditioning. James had taught him that it was more fun to keep the windows open when the air was on, even though it wasn't fuel-efficient. On the Grand Central, traffic in the other direction was motionless, but inbound it was moving right along.

"I hate to backseat-drive," said James, "but shouldn't we be in the other lane?"

"Ordinarily," said Finn. "But I need to make a quick stop-off in midtown."

"For what?"

Finn drew a long breath, let it out. "For something you don't approve of," he said.

"Oh," said James. He looked at his watch. "You know it's going to take hours to get in and out of Manhattan at this time of day. You couldn't have done this on your way?"

"I'm sorry," said Finn. "I'll make this as quick as I possibly can, but I get to the city so seldom that I really mustn't pass up the chance."

"So this is why you were so anxious to come down and pick me up," said James. "Tell me something. Do you ever think your tastes might be a little depraved?"

"We've been over this," said Finn.

"Well let me put it in another light for you," said James. "Did it ever occur to you that it might be insulting to me?"

They were caught behind a huge yellow school bus. The lanes on either side weren't moving any faster, but Finn cut to the left in front of a cab-s-the driver leaned on his horn-just to get behind something he could see past.

"You're not going to provoke me," he said. "We disagree about this project. I respect your view. I'm asking you to respect mine."

"Project?" said James. "What project? This isn't a project, for Christ's sake. It's one more old queen who likes to watch young dudes get it on.

You can dignify it because you used to be some hot-shit filmmaker."

Finn looked over at him, this idle boy with his dirty blond hair blowing. Who made him waste his time and now held him in contempt for it. He had let himself become an aging man with no family, who no longer prepared before meeting his classes and whose taste for good wines was giving him broken veins in his nose. He was this young man's sugar daddy. He turned back in time to avoid ramming the BMW ahead of him by lifting his foot quickly from the gas pedal: to hit the brakes would call James's attention to his bad driving.

"For whatever reason," said Finn, his heart beginning to pound in delayed reaction, "I have done almost no work in the time I've known you. This is going to come to a screeching halt."

"You haven't done any work for five years, man," said James. Seven, thought Finn.

"I'm not putting it off on you," he said. The pounding was now in his throat. "But I won't allow you to interfere with what I need to do." James said nothing. "And I might add that it might be time for you to start thinking about what you're going to do when you grow up. It's a waste of life, and it depresses me severely."

"Would you like me to go to night school," said James, "and study hairdressing?"

"That, my dear, is up to you," said Finn. "What I mean to do is to make a stop in midtown. For one hour, no longer. And then we'll be on our way. If you're coming."

"Finn," said James. "It's your car, it's your life. I don't really have anything to say about it."

"Now if you'd prefer," said Finn, "it is getting late-ish. We could have dinner in the city, leave when the traffic's thinned out, and maybe put up for the night somewhere along the way."

James didn't answer. Finn looked and saw that he was crying. Not sobbing, just letting the tears go down his face.

"Just please do what you're going to do," said James. "All I want is to get home."

6

James had been back almost a week before Finn had time to sit down and go through the videos he'd bought in Times Square. Made time, he corrected himself. But James had come down with a summer cold, Finn

did have to nurse him, bring him ice cream and ginger ale and magazines, go to the drug store for cough syrup and Comtrex. And they did have to ask Peter and Carolyn over to hear James's report and to discuss what might have to be done in the time remaining. Which of course involved preparing a decent meal, and what with the shopping and the cooking that was another day shot to hell. And the lawn had needed another mowing: he'd neglected it the week before.

But now, at last, a quiet day. James, recovered, had borrowed the car for the afternoon. Acting mysterious about it, too. Perhaps out buying a thanks-for-raking-care-of-me gift, since before leaving he hadmehercule!--done the breakfast dishes and straightened up the bedroom. So Finn, having run out of distractions, sat alone in his study with a notepad, watching something called Hellfire Club. Two men lay side by side on a bed as cheap, nasty music went wacka wacka wacka on the sound track. One, with mustache and short hair, decked out in leather jacket, leather pants and motorcycle boots, was propped up on a pillow angrily puffing a cigarette. The other, with a platinum-dyed Mohawk, wore only a black leather collar with diamond,shaped silver studs. He lay face-down, his body a uniform dingy white; you could see the sores on his legs. (At least this film wasn't arty.) The leather one took a final drag, tapped off the final ash and stubbed his cigarette out on the Mohawk one's white buttock. The Mohawk one twitched, then lay still again.

Finn suddenly felt sick to his stomach: these were only the opening minutes of a sixty'minute film. He hit Stop and the screen went snowy. Was his discomfort a sign that here was something worth his attention? Had he needed to tum the thing off because it was too powerful? Or was it just ugly and frightening, period, without significance? Why did these films fascinate him? Did they fascinate him, or was he in fact burned out and desperately willing himself to be fascinated?

Well, good: simply to ask such questions was to work. Unless it was one more way not to work.

Perhaps the thing to do was to look at something less harrowing and allow his unconscious to process this.

He ejected Hellfire Club, put it back in its case, and looked through the rest of the new ones. Well, what about Sean in Love? If nothing else, it ought to be sensitive. Perhaps instead of films that were manifestly sordid, you wanted to look at the capital-S sensitive ones and spot the details that showed they were sordid, too. Or was that too easy?

Probably that was too easy.

The premise of Sean in Love was that "Sean," a Wall Street typethere was some malarkey at the beginning about "mergers"-took an island vacation and kept falling for lifeguards, Rastas and what-not. He would gape at them, then the image would go wavy and dissolve (harp glissando on the sound track) to show that what followed was fantasy. In the third such fantasy he was in a sauna getting fucked by a Nautilus instructor-it seemed to Finn that the wooden bench must have been hell on his back and shoulders-when there was a cut to outside the door (through which their stagy moans could still be heard) where a third young man, in tight shorts, was reaching for the door handle. (This annoyed Finn: up to now the fantasies had been presented strictly from Sean's point of view.) "Oopsy-daisv," said the intruder-and Finn leaned forward. Cut from their surprised faces to the smiling face of the intruder: James, of course, of course, of course. Younger, but James. Finn had never been fool enough to think that particular smile had been turned on no one but him. He watched the scene through to the end, with its combinations and recombinations. All very predictable.

7

Finn was still sitting in his study when he heard the car pull in. He'd smoked all but one of the cigarettes that should have lasted him until sometime tomorrow, and he'd tossed the pack with the last cigarette inside it onto the floor just out of reach; that way he wouldn't smoke it until he really needed it. Well, now he would take the keys from James, saying as little as possible-he hoped James hadn't in fact brought a present-drive over to the Cumberland Farms for a fresh pack, and maybe by the time he got back he would have figured out what to do next. He heard the screen door slap and James calling "Hey, anybody home?"

He stood up and felt suddenly lightheaded. He'd been sitting there ever since-ever since. He opened the door and saw James coming through the kitchen. The living room between them, with its narrow glossy floorboards, looked as vast as a basketball court.

"So guess what?" said James.

"Suppose you just tell me," said Finn.

"I will," said James. He wasn't picking up Finn's mood at all. Or he was choosing not to pick it up, in order to make his own mood prevail. "You're looking at a productive citizen."

"A productive citizen," said Finn.

"Well, a soon-to-be productive citizen. I've got a job."

"Do you," said Finn. He remained standing in the doorway. James went over and sat down in the maroon armchair, draping one leg over the side and letting the foot swing.

"Well, aren't you curious?" said James.

Finn said nothing.

"I would've thought you'd be pleased," said James, who now seemed to be catching on.

Finn thought for a second. "I can understand that," he said.

"What's up?" said James. His foot stopped moving. "Oh Jesus," he said. "My dad."

"Say again?" said Finn. Then he remembered. "No," he said. "No, there's no news of your dad."

"Jesus," said James. "You scared the hell out of me. So listen, do you want to hear this or not?"

Finn stretched forth his hands as if supplicating and let them drop. "Fire away," he said.

"Well," said James, "There was an ad in the paper that they were looking for an assistant manager at the Symposium. So I went down and checked it out. You know, because I thought it would be like running the popcorn machine. But it's actually a serious job, like bookkeeping and shit. I will have to run the ticket window, but he said I'd have some input on the programming and I'll definitely be writing some of the little synopses in the schedule, and it's just-I think it's really going to be good."

"You've taken a job," said Finn.

"Assuming the reference I gave him checks out," he said, and laughed. "Right," said Finn.

"So anyhow, I promise that every July I'll get them to run our Hitchcock movies again that we didn't like. God," he said, "I'm getting sentimental in myoid age."

"Perhaps you could make it a triple feature," said Finn. "With Sean in Love."

James cocked his head. "I don't get it."

"Sean in Love," said Finn. "It's a video I picked up in Times Square. I think it would interest you greatly."

James took a deep breath and let it out.

"Oh," he said. "Always wondered what they ended up calling that thing."

"So what do they pay for work like that?" said Finn.

"They paid me a hundred dollars. Which I needed very badly at the time. It was my first year in New York."

"A hundred dollars," said Finn. "Did you enjoy your work?"

"Did you?" said James. "What do you want me to tell you? That they were holding a gun to my head like Linda Lovelace? You know, I was eighteen, and this friend of mine asked me if I wanted to be with him in this movie-"

"Which friend was that?"

"He was supposed to be playing this exercise teacher or something," said James. "He actually was an exercise teacher. I used to go to his workout."

"I can imagine," said Finn.

"Maybe you ought to sit down," said James. "You look really pale."

Finn walked to the blue armchair-his footsteps seemed to echo and the journey seemed to take a long time-and sat down. Sparkles swam before his eyes.

"How many of these friends of yours," he said, wishing he had that last cigarette, "are dead?"

"How would I know?" said James. "This was one afternoon, like five years ago. Don't you think I think about it every day? Plus all the other stupid shit?" He reached into his jacket pocket and tossed Finn first a book of matches, then an unopened pack of cigarettes. "You know, everybody's got dead friends," he said. "Except you, right? Since you don't have friends."

Finn got the pack open, worked a cigarette out of it, lit it, took a first deep, wonderful drag and glanced around for an ashtray. The late afternoon sun glinted off the varnished floor. He became conscious of the faraway drone of somebody's lawnmower; for a second there he thought of nothing at all. Then he realized he was staring at the overlapping white rings by the side ofJames's chair.

"So," he said. "I suppose this explains why you were hellbent on getting me sidetracked from my project."

"One reason, yes," said James.

"Why didn't you simply tell me?"

"Because look at you," he said. "You know, I know about men who like naughty boys. And the bottom line is, that they don't like 'em to be too naughty. So." Quick shrug. "What? Would you like me to go over and stay at Carolyn's while I make other arrangements?"

Touching up just that little bit of floor, Finn thought, would be simplicity itself.

"I don't know what I would like at this point," he said. "I would like to believe that none of this really happened."

"Oh," said James. "Well if that's all. You can manage that O.K. Whether I'm around or not. I imagine you've already started."

Contributors

Daniel Hayes lives in Los Angeles and has published fiction in several literary journals, including the Massachusetts Review, Epoch, the Malahat Review and Western Humanities Review. A story of his appeared in the Pushcart Prize XV collection. * * * Anne Winters is the translator of Salamander: Selected Poems of Robert Marteau (Princeton University Press, 1979), and the author of a book of poems, The Key to the City (University of Chicago Press, 1986), which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Prize. Her poems have appeared in the Paris Review, Kenyon Review, the New Republic and other magazines. She teaches in the English Department at Northwestern University. * * * Dan Chaon's stories have appeared in TQ #68 and #76, and in other journals, including Ploughshares, Story and American Short Fiction. He lives in Cleveland, Ohio. * * * Alan Shapiro's most recent book is a collection of essays, In Praise of the Impure: Poetry and the Ethical Imagination (TriQuarterly Books/ Northwestern University Press, 1993). He is the author of four volumes of poems, including Covenant (1991) and Happy Hour (1987), both published by the University of Chicago Press. The latter book won the William Carlos Williams Award of the Poetry Society of America. He teaches at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. His poems and essays have appeared frequently in TriQuarterly.

Terri Brown-Davidson's poems and essays have appeared in several journals, including Puerto del Sol, Prairie Schooner and TQ #86. She has received fellowships to Yaddo and the Millay Colony, the Anne Lillis Memorial Scholarship and an AWP Intro Award in poetry. She is the Fling and Johnson Fellow at the University of Nebraska, and has

completed her first volume of poems, The Bright Clay Forest. * * * John Engels teaches writing at St. Michael's College, in Vermont. His most recent collection of poems is Walking to Cootehill: New & Selected Poems, 1958� 1992 (University Press of New England/Middlebury College, 1993). * * * Bruce Weigl's book in progress is Sweet Lorain, from which the poems in this issue are taken. His most recent collection is What Saves Us (TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press, 1992). He teaches at Pennsylvania State University, where he directs the graduate writing program. Poems of his have appeared in TQ #59, #65 and #72. * * * Marc J. Straus is a medical oncologist who lives in Chappaqua, New York. His poems have appeared in Field, Ploughshares, the Kenyon Review, the Greensboro Review and other journals. His first collection, One Word, will be published by TriQuarterly Books/ Northwestern University Press in fall 1994. Three of his poems appeared in TQ #86.

John Skoyles is the author of two books of poems, A Little Faith (1981) and Permanent Change (1991), both published by CarnegieMellon University Press. He is the executive director of the Fine Arts Work Center, in Provincetown, Massachusetts. The excerpt published in this issue is from a recently completed memoir. A poem of his appeared in TQ #88. * * * Jacqueline Dougan Jackson has published ten books, including one for children and adults, Tum Not Pale, Beloved Snail: A Book About Writing Among Other Things (Little Brown, 1974). She is a professor in the English Department of Sangamon State University, in Springfield, Illinois. The memoirs in this issue are taken from her book, The Round Bam, which will be published by TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press in fall 1995. * * * Carol Frost's book of poems, Pure, is being published in spring 1994 by TriQuarterly Books/ Northwestern University Press. In 1993 she received a National Endowment for the Arts grant and a poem of hers was selected for the Pushcart Prize XVII collection. Two of her poems appeared in TQ #86. * * * Adrian C. Louis is a mixed-blood American Indian, an enrolled member of the Lovelock Paiute Tribe. He lives in a small house in South Dakota, on the Great Plains. A book of his poems, Blood Thirsty Savages, is being published by Time Being Books in 1994. * * *

Teresa Cader's first book of poems, Guests, won the Ohio State University Press/The Journal Award in Poetry in 1991 and the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America in 1992. She received creative writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1988 and 1994. Poems of hers have appeared in TQ #54,

#67 and #81. Richard Dokey is the author of a collection of short stories, August Heat (Story Press, 1982). His novel, The Adidas Kid, is being published by Delta in 1994. * * * Anne Reynolds Voegtlen is a lawyer specializing in corporate finance, mergers and acquisitions who lives on Bainbridge Island, Washington. Her poems have appeared in Poetry Northwest and the Seattle Review. She is enrolled in the MFA program for writers at Warren Wilson College. * * * Pamela Bernard, a poet and painter from Boston, has been a finalist in a Massachusetts Artists Fellowship competition in both poetry and painting, and has published poems in several periodicals, including Yankee and Sojourner. She is currently enrolled in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. * * * Bruce Smith's third book of poems, Mercy Seat, was published by the University of Chicago Press early in 1994. His other collections are Silver and Information (University of Georgia, National Poetry Series, 1985) and The Common Wages (Sheep Meadow, 1983). He teaches at Boston and Tufts Universities and is the writer-inresidence at Andover. * * * Dorothea Edmondson is a Jamaican poet whose work has been published in journals in the Caribbean, Canada, East Africa, England and the United States. She teaches English and is presently living in Toronto.

Tom Wayman's most recent books are a collection of essays, A Country Not Considered: Canada, Culture, Work (House of Anansi Press, 1993) and Did I Miss Anything? Selected Poems 1973-1993 (Harbour Publishing, 1993). He teaches at Okanagan University College, in Vernon and Kelowna, British Columbia. His poems have appeared in TQ #64, #72 and #86. * * * Pat Mangan's poems have appeared recently in the Iowa Review and New York Quarterly. He teaches at the Writers Studio in New York City. * * * Dennis Hathaway's collection of stories, The Consequences of Desire (University of Georgia Press, 1992) received the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. He lives in Venice, California. * * * Steve Fisher's stories and poems have appeared in Shenandoah, the Iowa Review, Epoch, Witness, Ironwood and TQ #74 and #76. After serving time in the Arizona state penal system for illegal purchase of drugs and undergoing a renewed battle with addiction, he took his own life in Tucson in 1993. He was thirtyseven. * * * The prose pieces by Stephen Berg appearing in this issue are from his recently completed book, Shaving. A collection of poems, Oblivion, is being published by the University of Illinois Press early in 1995. Porno Diva Numero Uno, a collaborative arts project based on imaginary visits with Marcel Duchamp, is being illustrated by the artist

Eileen Neff. Berg has been the 1993-94 poet-in-residence at Loyola College, Baltimore, and a Pew Fellow in Poetry for the same period. His translations from Sappho appeared in TQ #81 and his prose pieces in TQ #55, #64 and #63 (the twentieth-anniversary anthology, titled TQ 20).

Jennifer C Cornell's fiction has appeared in Quarterly West, the Massachusetts Review and the New England Review. Her contribution to this issue, "Heat," is from the collection Departures, which has won the 1994 Drue Heinz Prize for Literature and which will be published later this year by the University of Pittsburgh Press. She will begin teaching at Oregon State University this fall. * * * Beth Simon has published fiction in North Dakota Quarterly and poetry in Alaska Quarterly Review, Kansas Quarterly and other journals. She teaches at Edgewood College, in Madison, Wisconsin. * * * Eleanore Devine is the coauthor, with Martha Clark, of The Dolphin Smile: Twenty-nine Centuries of Dolphin Lore (Macmillan, 1967). Her book of fiction, You're Standing in My Light and Other Stories (Beacon Press, 1990) received a Friends of Literature Fiction Award and was a finalist in the Chicago Sun-Times's Book of the Year competition. Her stories have appeared in Indiana Review, Kansas Quarterly, Southwest Review, Whetstone and other journals. "The Product" is from her second, as yet unpublished volume of stories, I Miss Saturday Night. She is a member of the staff of Other Voices.

* * * David Gates's novel, Jernigan, was published by Knopf in 1991. His short stories have appeared in Esquire, GQ, Ploughshares and Grand Street. He writes about books and popular music for Newsweek.

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