The Typewriter Satyr

Also by Dwight Allen

The Green Suit
Judge

The Typewriter Satyr

A Novel

Dwight Allen

Te r r a c e B o o k s

A trade imprint of the University of Wisconsin Press

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Copyright © 2009 Dwight Allen
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted, in any format or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording,
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Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Allen, Dwight, 1951–

The typewriter satyr: a novel / Dwight Allen.
p.

cm.

ISBN 978-0-299-22990-0 (hardcover: alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-299-22993-1 (e-book)

1. Typewriters—Fiction.

2. Man-woman relationships—Fiction.

3. Wisconsin—Fiction.

I. Title.

PS3551.L39223T97

2009

813´.6—dc22
2008039536

“Come Quickly,” by Izumi Shikibu, is from The Ink Dark Moon: Love Poems, by Ono no Komachi
and Izumi Shikibu, translated by Mariko Aratani and Jane Hirshﬁeld, translation copyright 1990
by Jane Hirshﬁeld. Used with permission of Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc.

Chapter 11, “Self-Wash,” ﬁrst appeared in Epoch, in somewhat different form.

This is a work of ﬁction. While, as in all ﬁction, the literary perceptions and insights are based on
experience, all names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination
or are used ﬁctitiously. No reference to any real person is intended or should be inferred.

MICHELE

. . . and, forsooth! I wanted wings:
O folly! What is love! and where is it?

John Keats,

from “Ode on Indolence”

“There’s love, Bardamu!”
“Arthur,” I tell him, “love is the inﬁnite placed within the reach of

poodles. I have my dignity!”

Louis-Ferdinand Céline,

from Journey to the End of the Night,

translated by Ralph Manheim

Part 1

All the Things She Knew

nnelise was hungry. She wanted a grilled cheese sandwich and

pickles and a vanilla Coke and a slice of banana-coconut cream

pie, all of which, she knew, could be found at Moon’s Luncheonette,
four blocks away. She put on her sunglasses and went out the back
door of WOOP, the radio station where she worked for measly wages
as a late-night deejay (and daytime receptionist and dogsbody). She
walked up the alley, toward Fond du Lac Street, humming a Woody
Guthrie song called “Way Over Yonder in the Minor Key,” about an
ugly boy who charms girls with his voice. One of the nice things
about doing radio—or lefty, shoestring radio, anyway—was that you
could be gangly and goggle-eyed and no listener was the wiser. (Not
that Annelise was either.) Your voice was all anybody could “see.”
On her next show, she would pour Woody Guthrie (or Billy Bragg
singing Woody Guthrie) into the ears of her listeners. And then she
would do her monologue, maybe tell a story about how she was
walking down an alley early one summer afternoon, hungry for sugar
and pickles. No, she was not pregnant.

It was garbage day in this part of Midvale, Wisconsin, but the

garbage men hadn’t ventured into the alley yet. Among the things
awaiting them were a plaid dog bed and a scrap of green shag carpet-
ing and a three-legged chair from which the stufﬁng was spilling.
On the chair was a man’s white plantation-style suit, somewhat the
worse for the wear. Annelise, who was thirty-one, whose closet and
car were full of things she’d picked up at garage sales and scavenged
from the curb, didn’t know any men who might be willing to wear a
white suit. Her boyfriend, a Republican, had a sense of humor, but
he wasn’t going to dress like Tom Wolfe or Big Daddy.

A little farther on, she saw a typewriter on top of a garbage can. It

was a manual typewriter, a Royal, a relic from at least before her par-
ents were born. Somebody had put out a cigar on the platen and left
the stub in the typebar basket. Several of the keypads were missing.
There were streaks of Wite-Out—or was it bird droppings?—on the
housing surrounding the typebar basket. She pressed the space bar
and the carriage moved along, in a jittery, hesitant way. A little bell
rang before the carriage reached its endpoint.

Annelise shook the cigar butt out of the typewriter and carried

the machine back to her car. Its heft, all that dense metal from the
last century, would have made it just the thing for hammering out
a manifesto or a love letter as serious as a poem. Not that she felt
the urge to do either at the moment. (The last time she’d felt com-
pelled to tell somebody that she loved him, she’d done it via text
message.) But she had a side that was preservationist or maybe just
sentimental.

She put the typewriter next to a stack of LPs that would melt in

the heat if she didn’t get them out of the car soon. Then she walked
back down the alley to Fond du Lac Avenue and on to Moon’s
Luncheonette. When Mr. Moon stopped talking to her in his rapid,
Korean-inﬂected English, she thought about Rolf, the man she was
living with, who worked for a company that made stents. She was
not sure she and Rolf were a good match. She looked at other men
all the time, not only out of curiosity. Rolf had a birthday coming
up, his thirty-eighth. She could get him a shirt, maybe even one with
a little color, or she could give him a typewriter on which he could
type love letters to her. Though, of course, love letters (or even, for
that matter, text messages) were not his strength. But the Marvin the
Martian toothbrush she’d given him had amused him, and so had
the transistor radio.

Annelise licked the last coconut shaving of Mrs. Moon’s pie off

the fork, tipped Mr. Moon a dollar, and stepped out of the air con-
ditioning into the midsummer heat. She thought she’d sweat off half
the pound she’d just put on by the time she got back to the station.
She adjusted her sunglasses, cheap ones with big frames; she always
felt better behind them.

Despite her sugar habit, she didn’t need to lose weight. She was

short but lean and narrow everywhere, except in her bottom, which
was a little wide and quivery. Sometimes she could not help admir-
ing her legs and even her bottom, and sometimes she wished they
were not hers, or rather, she wished she wasn’t theirs. Her posture
was less than erect, and it and her gait, a slink with some droop in it,
suggested she had secrets that weighed her down.

As the commercial districts of Midvale went, Fond du Lac Ave-

nue was a bit of a backwater. On the block where Annelise was walk-
ing, there was a business that sold wheelchairs and prosthetic devices
and a tavern called Popp’s (the owner was a socialist who ran for
mayor every four years) and a tattoo parlor and a typewriter repair
shop called The Typing Poole. Annelise had walked by The Typing
Poole often enough to be mildly annoyed by the pun in its name, a
pun you might imagine was a typo if you had failed to notice on the
door the small print (in a font called Bookman Old Style) below the
larger print (in Bookman Old Style, too) of the shop’s name: O. W.
Poole, Prop. The Typing Poole didn’t promote itself with much ﬂair.
The window display consisted of three typewriters garlanded by two
thirsty-looking spider plants.

Annelise continued on to her car and then came back to The

Typing Poole with the Royal in her arms. (In addition to cigar, it
smelled of pee and a back-alley odor that she, despite her excellent
nose, couldn’t identify. Rum, maybe.) The Typing Poole’s reception
room was cooled by a ceiling fan. Its furnishings included a sales
counter; gray industrial-style shelving holding typewriters and type-
writer innards and adding machines; an orange vinyl armchair; a
framed poster of an early-twentieth-century woman with her ﬁngers
poised above an Oliver typewriter; a side table with a Christmas cac-
tus and a copy of The Nation on it; and a hat tree on which a gray fe-
dora and an umbrella were hung. The Typing Poole smelled of dust
and machine oil and Asian takeout. The proprietor was not to be
seen. Annelise took off her sunglasses. On the sales counter was a
bell and next to it was a handwritten note that said, “Please ring.”
Annelise rang, once, a polite tap that wouldn’t have awakened a ﬂea
from a nap. She heard music—trumpets and trombones, and behind

them, gravelly, scratchy voices harmonizing—coming from behind
a door that led into the back of the shop. She rang the bell again,
twice, quickly, hoping she wasn’t conveying urgency or impatience.
She thought a man who repaired typewriters in 2004 A.D. might be
testy, that he would have as ﬁrm an opinion about etiquette as, say, a
ﬂorist might. (The calendar on the wall behind the counter had a
ﬂower theme. Were those lush June sexpots peonies? Wasn’t today
July 18?) She imagined that the man—she assumed it would be a
man; a woman might choose to repair zippers or shoes or watches
but nothing so nearly obsolete as a typewriter—who came from be-
hind the door would have silver-rimmed glasses perched on his nose
and hair growing out of his ears and a scowl to scare away the curi-
ous. And if it were winter, he would be wearing a cardigan stained
with soup. But it was summer, hot as blazes, and she was sweating
under the arms of her T-shirt.

She rang once more, this time as if she meant it. When he ap-

peared, a tall man whose head skimmed just under the doorway, she
took a step back from the counter, as if ceding it to him. He was
wearing a green eyeshade and looked to be half-asleep. Tawny, gray-
streaked hair fell over his ears. He wore a blue polo shirt that had a
spot of sweat at the sternum. The fact that he looked at her from a
height—from an altitude, really; she came up to his Adam’s apple—
may have explained why he didn’t look directly at her when he spoke.
Or perhaps it was the sight of the Royal and the smells that emanated
from it that distracted him. The ﬁrst thing he said to her was “What
can you help me with?” As far as she could tell, he wasn’t trying to be
funny. He pushed the bill of his eyeshade upward with his foreﬁnger
and said, “Let me do that over. What can I help you with?”

She said, “I found this typewriter.”
He gave the platen a half-turn, pressed down on the Shift key. “A

Quiet De Luxe. Hemingway used this model, I believe. It was quite
popular in its day.”

He gave her a smile that didn’t even reveal the tips of his teeth—

maybe it wasn’t even a smile—and it was right then, she supposed
later, with those two ancient voices (one, she knew, was Louis
Armstrong’s) singing in the background, that she decided she

wanted to explore this man’s disappointments and desires. This was
less a conscious decision that she articulated to herself than it was
like something that spasmed way down inside her, though maybe
that was only gastric turbulence. But some moments later, when he
was again ﬁddling with the bill of his eyeshade like a baseball pitcher
looking in for a sign, while she was babbling about her interest in
old-fashioned things, the feeling that she might like to know him
had spread up into her shoulders and neck. She felt the skin on her
chest and throat pinkening, as if with desire (or embarrassment that
her desire might be too visible). She liked the sound of his voice, she
liked the shape of his mouth (small but not pinched), she liked the
silver spider-web-like hairs that ﬂourished in the hollow at the base
of his neck. She liked that he knew who the other singer was (Jack
Teagarden) and the name of the song that Teagarden and Armstrong
were singing (“Rockin’ Chair”). She liked that when she said (a bit
more forwardly than was her custom) that she did a late-night radio
show and that maybe she would play that song on it, he said, “I’d
listen, if I didn’t go to bed so early.”

He said he would have the Royal ﬁxed up within a couple of

days. “I’ll clear a space on my schedule for it.” Perhaps this was a
joke. He didn’t seem to be swamped by work.

It worried her that she liked a man so immediately, though this

worried her less than did the fact that he appeared to be married.
(The fact that he was older, a good decade and a half older, she
guessed, didn’t trouble her that much. Older men were a weakness
of hers and she didn’t try to ﬁght it.) She thought later that his wed-
ding band might have deterred her, but when she went out the shop
door and the heat smacked her in the face, she didn’t reconsider. She
wanted to see him again, right away, which was possibly why she’d
left her sunglasses on his counter. When she went back in to retrieve
them, he asked at what hour her radio show came on.

She said, “Eleven on Thursday.”
He said, “Maybe I’ll take an extra-long afternoon nap so I can

stay up late that night.”

She gave him her card, something a friend had designed and that

she had never handed out to anybody, as far as she could remember.

He said, “Annelise Scharfenberg.” He said it again, as if he was

trying to ﬁgure out how to get his mouth around all of it. “Do you
get a lot of mail from listeners?”

She said, “I get an occasional e-mail, mostly from this one guy

who hates that I play so many old fogies and dead people.”

Mr. Poole said, “I didn’t used to have a computer as a matter of

principle, but now I do. I keep it in back, out of sight. Maybe I’ll
send you a fan e-mail.” And then he asked her who the three people
on her T-shirt were.

She looked down at her bosom and said they were a local band

called No Shoes. “I know the drummer, the one in the middle with
the glasses. He was in my Shakespeare class in college. I play them
on my show sometimes, so the younger listeners won’t abandon me
completely. No Shoes does moody, jangly, retro-psychedelic, retro-
folk-rock, post-grunge stuff, kind of like My Morning Jacket. Do
you know My Morning Jacket?”

Mr. Poole said he didn’t, but he was looking at her in a way that

suggested he wanted to know all the things she knew.

Dog or Coyote

liver Poole dabbed his nose with shaving cream. Two hairs had

sprouted on the ridge, a little north of the swollen tip that a

softball had plunked the other evening during a game between the
Melody Bar Savages and the Old Hatters. This happened in the
third inning. Oliver, the left ﬁelder for the Old Hatters, had reached
ﬁrst when the Savages’ third baseman, an electrician named Crabbe,
booted a grounder. It was a tricky grounder, fast and side-spinny,
and Oliver would have scored it a hit, but the ofﬁcial scorer, the wife
of a Savage, put it down as “E-5.” The next batter, a used-bookshop
clerk named Garr, hit a blooper over the head of the Savages’ short-
stop, and Oliver got it into his head that he could reach third base
without even drawing a throw.

Oliver was tall, six-foot-six on most days, a bit shorter during

eclipses and tornado watches and before and during airplane rides.
He was thin, too, ten pounds thinner than he’d been twenty-two
days ago, before he fell in love. When he was younger—he was ﬁfty-
one now—he ran like a veldt animal, eating up ground with his long
strides, his shaggy, not yet gray hair ﬂowing out from under his cap.
Five or six years ago, he’d fallen off his bike and banged up his left
knee. Now he ran with a bit of a limp. Sciatica afﬂicted him from
time to time, too. The Old Hatters’ shortstop, Murray Gleason, a
ﬁfty-six-year-old painter known as the Rabbit Master and Oliver’s
best friend on the team, said, “O-Man, some day we’ll trade your ass
to the glue dealer, but in the meantime you’re our left ﬁelder. Take
lots of ibuprofen and hang in there.”

The moment before it had occurred to Oliver to sprint for third,

he had been thinking about his lover’s ears, about how small and

delicate they were, the lobes hardly big enough to hang earrings
from, the rims like tracery. Annelise’s thirty-second birthday was
coming up, and he had bought earrings for her, silver ones he’d paid
a fortune for. When Garr hit that blooper, Oliver’s mind was full
of the whorls that were Annelise’s ears, and then he was hooﬁng it
across the hard inﬁeld dirt (it hadn’t rained for weeks in Midvale),
one eye on the left ﬁelder, a stocky, lugubrious, gap-toothed plumber
who was all stick and no glove. But Belcher, the plumber, came in on
the ball more quickly than expected, and Oliver, who had by then
mindlessly rounded second, realized that his chances of reaching
third safely had diminished. He heard someone shout, “Go back,
you idiot, go back!” It was a kid’s voice. It might have been the voice
of one of his boys—he had four, and all but the seven-year-old tossed
the term “idiot” around freely—though none of them had come to
the game. But it was too late to stop. Oliver saw Crabbe, with his red
Fu Manchu and his jersey emblazoned with the Melody Bar mascot
(a neon green Neanderthal with a club in one hand and a martini in
the other), waiting for him at third, crouched like some bristly, thick-
set housecat watching a mouse hole. Having already crossed the line
into unreason, Oliver decided to slide headﬁrst. He had not slid
headﬁrst since high school, on a cold, sodden day in April of 1970,
when the ground was just beginning to thaw. He had been in love
then, too, with a girl who claimed to have a freckle on the bottom of
her big toe and about whose green eyes he had written a poem, and
it was at least possible that on that April day in 1970 love had ﬁgured
into his decision to dive headﬁrst into the ungiving earth. (He was
out by a mile, and a week later Karin turned him down when he
invited her to go to a Unitarian church basement to hear a folk mu-
sic duo called Phil & Sue.) When he dove on Wednesday evening,
thirty-four years later, he felt as if pricked all over by love’s arrows,
arrows tipped with adrenaline and crazy juice. His nose arrived at
Crabbe’s lowered knee the instant the softball did. But the ball drib-
bled away from the butter-ﬁngered third baseman, and Oliver was
safe.

After the game—the Old Hatters lost—Murray got out his dope

pipe and offered it around, to Savages and Old Hatters alike. Oliver

took a pass. Hal Sveum, the Old Hatters’ third baseman and a writer
for the alternative weekly, who took Pub & Grub League softball
more seriously than anybody, marched off toward his car, saying,
“We’re a bunch of dope-smoking cripples.” Crabbe patted Oliver on
the back and said, “Take good care of that proboscis, Poole.” Oliver,
dizzy with thoughts of his lover, said, “OK, thanks, I will.”

ormally, Oliver clipped the hairs on the ridge of his nose with his

nostril-hair scissors. He had an embarrassment of nostril hair. But
the scissors had vanished. Probably one of his children had found a
use for them, such as trying to sever a sibling’s artery. His wife’s
grooming scissors, whose precise use he didn’t know, were missing as
well. At any rate, he couldn’t ﬁnd them among the clutter of cosmet-
ics and analgesics on her shelf. So he’d resorted to a razor blade. And
with two strokes, he’d shaved the two hairs down to the holes from
which they sprang.

He toweled his nose dry. He studied a line that curved down

from below the outer rim of his nostril to the corner near where his
lips parted, a seam in which whiskers sometimes hid, like weeds in
a ditch. (He had rooted them all out this morning.) He tilted his
head back and peered into his nostrils, brambly passageways that
little animals or elﬁn people might scramble through on their way to
some foreign land. He ran the tip of a ﬁnger along a dusky eyebrow.
His eyebrows were thick and ﬂared a bit, like a schnauzer’s. Or a
satyr’s. In the early eighties, when he had worn a goatee, Loretta, the
woman who had preceded Diana as his wife, had referred to him as
her “typewriter satyr.” He had just taken over the Fond du Lac Ave-
nue shop from a German man who had retired to Florida. (It was
said then that Midvale, which abounded with academics and intel-
lectuals and old people determined to sidestep the coming digital
revolution, would always need a typewriter repairman or two. Oliver
was a tinkerer—a few I.Q. points shy of engineer material, he liked
to say—and it gave him pleasure to give a tiny screw a half-turn and
see the typebars strike the platen at just the right height.) “For my
bicycle-riding typewriter satyr,” Loretta had written in a birthday
card (this accompanied a new bicycle pump and a stylish French

beret), not long before asking for a divorce. He was used to people
hanging names on him. He had been called Stick, Tree, Pole Man,
Daddy Longlegs, the Big O, Stretch, the Jolly Olive Giant, My Fa-
vorite Luddite (this by Diana).

He wetted his ﬁnger and smoothed the wayward hairs in his eye-

brows. Wasn’t this what the villains in silent movies did before they
set out to ﬂeece virtuous men and tie their women to the railroad
tracks? Am I a bad guy, Oliver wondered, touching a blackhead near
his cheekbone. He had been in love with Annelise for three weeks,
or, rather, it was three weeks ago that he told her he loved her, in a
letter typed on a 1955 Remington that belonged to a customer, an oc-
togenarian poet. He could have sent her a text message on his just
acquired cell phone—he was among the last people in Midvale to
own a cell phone and was still learning his way around it—but he
thought she would prefer a more homemade declaration of love. He
hand-delivered the letter to the radio station in a bag containing two
peaches. The day after he made the delivery, she sent him a text mes-
sage: “Wow I think I luv u 2.”

He examined the blackhead further. He’d tried to pinch it out on

other occasions, but it was there to stay, a cindery blemish. He pre-
ferred not to examine in detail the question he’d asked himself when
he’d been spifﬁng his eyebrows. He was in love and it seemed as if his
head was always about to explode with this fact, something that he
didn’t recall himself feeling at any time in recent memory. It was true
that he saw in the distance, visible through the haze, a long-legged
ﬁgure resembling himself tottering among ruins. But if he shut his
eyes, the vision went away. He was hardly able to sustain a debate
with himself, a person he didn’t know particularly well.

It was six-forty-ﬁve on Saturday morning, and Oliver’s eyes were

bloodshot. He had not gotten a good night’s sleep. He didn’t sleep
much anymore, night or day. The thirty-minute nap that he used to
take in the back room of his shop after lunch at Moon’s didn’t hap-
pen anymore. The mere thought of Annelise, the thought of the lies
he would tell his wife or his children in order to see Annelise, kept
him awake. He splashed water on his face and looked again at his
eyes, as if he might have missed something. The hazel irises ﬂoated
in a sea of red.

Oliver was to meet Annelise at a coffeehouse called Tout de Suite

at seven-ﬁfteen. If he arrived ﬁrst, he would buy her a latte, into
which he would stir two packets of sugar (she had a sweet tooth). If
she arrived ﬁrst, she would buy him a latte (extra shot, no sugar). Ol-
iver depended on coffee. His head ached if he didn’t get enough of it
soon enough in the day. The only time he didn’t drink it was when he
was so ill that he couldn’t keep anything at all down. His head didn’t
ache now—yet—but his stomach was showing signs of distress. His
stomach had been full of butterﬂies for days now, clouds of them.

Oliver went into the bedroom. His wife slept on her side, turned

away from him. He saw the juts of her shoulder blades through her
ribbed tank top. He saw her bare nape—she had recently gotten a
haircut, a short one, which made her look boyish, younger. Above
her, on the bedpost, was a Santa Claus hat. Franklin, the second-
oldest of the boys, had bought it for her at a yard sale for twenty-ﬁve
cents.

“You’re up early,” Diana said. She had eyes in the back of her

head. Her voice was foggy, low. Her middle-of-the-day voice, which
she used with clients and judges (she was a matrimonial lawyer) and
her children, was also low but not at all foggy.

“I’m going to the shop,” Oliver said. A dozen butterﬂies roost-

ing in the vicinity of his lower intestine lifted their wings simulta-
neously. The blades of the ceiling fan turned and turned, making a
ticking noise; a screw in the switch housing was loose, apparently.

“Hmm,” Diana said. Oliver had been faithful to his wife for six-

teen years. Sixteen years seemed like an instant now.

“I’ll be back in time to take Franklin to his guitar lesson.”
Oliver descended the stairs toward the kitchen. He was barefoot,

dressed for a summer morning: khaki shorts, frog-green polo shirt.
The steps creaked and groaned. Into his head came his third-grade
teacher, Mrs. Luckett, who had been in his dreams last night. Why?
He had been one of her favorite pupils—he was quiet and polite and
undemonstrative, just the way she liked them—and he had often
been the one she chose to lead the class out to the playground for
recess or down to the lunchroom. In his dream, she had stroked his
head as if it were a dog’s and asked him if he’d done all his homework.
(He’d not done all his homework. He was completely unprepared, in

fact. It was one of those dreams.) He was thinking about Mrs. Luck-
ett and the look of disappointment on her face, and then he seemed
to be stepping through air. He had missed a step, and there at the
bottom, where he was about to put his size-13 foot, was a medicine
ball, an old-fashioned ten-kilogram leather one, duct-taped where
the leather had split. Franklin, who was twelve, had bought it at
a yard sale for ﬁfty cents—Franklin was a yard sale habitué—and it
had been rolling around the ﬁrst ﬂoor of the house for weeks. For a
while it had served as an ottoman in the TV room. When Oliver
spotted it now, looming in his path, he somehow adjusted his stride
and landed safely beside it on the hardwood ﬂoor. “Crimini,” he
said.

The day he and Annelise had gone shopping for picnic supplies

at Food Giant, the day they’d made love for the ﬁrst time, he ges-
tured too broadly in the snacks aisle and knocked a jar of salsa to the
ﬂoor. “Crimini,” he’d said, as he cleaned tomato and jalapeño bits
from his ankle. “Crimini?” she asked, as if she’d just caught the odor
of something musty and suspect. He often thought she would dump
him for being old, for the scent of decay she must have smelled be-
hind his ears and in the creases of his neck.

Oliver padded toward the kitchen, stepping over a ﬂip-ﬂop and

swimming goggles. The house was still. None of his children were
awake, not even Ham, the second-youngest and the earliest riser.
Why Ham, who had come into the world with a querulous look on
his face, felt the need to get up so early, Oliver had never been able to
ﬁgure. Ham would shufﬂe into the kitchen, open a cabinet or the re-
frigerator, and deplore something or other (the choice of cereals, the
pulp in the orange juice, a schoolteacher). And then he would plop
down at the table and hold his sleep-smudged head in hands, as if it
were too great a burden being an eleven-year-old named Hamilton
Poole. When his mother or father suggested he go back to bed, Ham
would say, “Are you joking me?” There were times when Ham disap-
peared into what Oliver thought of as Hamlet-land, where he sat
cross-legged and brooded and did not take questions from anybody.
Once Ham told his father about a dream he’d had in which he got
sucked into a black hole and tried to speak to his father but nothing

would come out of his mouth. Oliver had said, “It’s only a dream,
Hamlet,” and Ham had said, “Yeah, but it was real in my dream.”

Oliver turned on the light that hung above the kitchen table.

On the table, a scarred and stained butcher’s block, were his green
and gold Old Hatters cap, a golf club, Ferd the cat, an open bag of
Bugles, two drinking glasses stained with chocolate milk, and a meat
cleaver. The golf club was a wooden-shafted niblick, yet another of
Franklin’s yard-sale acquisitions. Yesterday evening, Robert, the old-
est, had decided to try the club out. He took a basket of yellow cock-
tail tomatoes into the backyard and hit them off a tee before Frank-
lin caught him at it. When Franklin told his father about it, Oliver
was in the middle of composing a text message to Annelise. Oliver
scrubbed the message and sent one later that night, long after he’d
asked Robert, whose face had become dark and long and furtive
the day he’d turned fourteen, why he couldn’t have golfed with the
desiccated pearl onions that had been sitting around the kitchen
since the previous Thanksgiving, and also after asking Robert to
please clean the tomato pulp off Franklin’s club, and also after walk-
ing with Ham and Franklin and Hank down to the lake to look at
Mars and listen to the carp roll and tumble. Mars shone brightly
that night, though not brightly enough for Ham. Hank said, “Dad,
if your nose itches, is it true that somebody is talking about you?”
Oliver said he guessed it was true. Ham said, “No Martian is talking
about you, Hank, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

Ferd jumped off the kitchen table onto the ﬂoor. Then he

hopped up onto the counter next to the sink. Ferd was black, thir-
teen years old, a bit overweight.

Ferd had a rabbit in his sights. The rabbit sat at the edge of the

garden. Sunﬂowers, top-heavy and dew-soaked, leaned over the rab-
bit. Ferd used to police the yard day and night, leaving on the Pooles’
back doorstep the leftovers of his kills, but coyotes had turned up in
the neighborhood lately and so now Ferd was kept inside. Oliver
used to regard rabbits as pests, but since he’d met Annelise, a vegetar-
ian and nominal Buddhist, he had come to see them as creatures
with grazing rights. It was OK with him if they ate his red-leaf let-
tuce or snap beans or fennel.

Oliver ﬁlled the coffeemaker with water. When he looked up

from his task, he saw that the rabbit had disappeared. He shut his
eyes and tried to picture Annelise, but for some reason she didn’t
come into focus. Her face was a blur, though he could see the deep
pink that ﬂooded her neck and cheeks when she was embarrassed or
anxious or excited, and he could see her brown hair tied back in a
ponytail. It made him nervous that he couldn’t conjure the face of
the person he loved, or that he could conjure only pieces. Would he
still love her if he were suddenly struck blind?

Some nights ago, there had been a discussion at the dinner table

about disabilities and about whether it would be better to go blind
or deaf. It was generally agreed that it would be better to go deaf,
though Ham said, “It wouldn’t be so bad not having to see Hank eat
spaghetti anymore.” When Oliver was polled, he said, “If I were deaf
and not blind, I could still see your cheerful puss, Ham. And I could
still ride my bike. And I could see your mom’s peonies.” Robert
snickered at the last item in this list—Oliver had sort of pulled it out
of the air, though Diana’s peony bushes, with their lush white and
crimson ﬂowers, did actually move him—and then Franklin snick-
ered, and then Ham let a smile escape, and then Hank laughed with
his mouth full of red sauce, as if they all knew (or at least suspected)
that seeing Mom’s peonies was code for some fabulous but illicit
event. (Diana was not around to clarify; she was at the ofﬁce, draft-
ing a settlement.) A night or two later, Oliver heard Robert say to
Franklin, who was about to knock on his parents’ bedroom door, “I
wouldn’t go in there, Frankenstein. Dad could be looking at Mom’s
peonies.” Oliver was actually looking at his sleeping wife’s shoulder
blades, but he was thinking of Annelise’s peonies. He remembered
the ﬁrst time he had gotten a glimpse of them, a couple of weeks
after she had brought him the Royal to refurbish. (He charged her
only $17.50, though it was a ﬁfty-dollar job, at least.) They’d met at
the park next to the zoo (it was the day that the zoo’s female giraffe,
the mother of a six-month-old, tripped and fell in her exercise yard
and died), and Annelise was wearing a button-up shirt that wasn’t
buttoned much beyond her sternum and he saw (though he looked
quickly away, toward the giraffe house) the pale hill of her breast in a

ﬂesh-colored nothing bra. This was the day he kissed her for the ﬁrst
time. No, he couldn’t live with the thought that he would not see her
breast again or the very faint down on her upper lip or the tiny scar,
like an unemphatic comma, on her chin. If he went deaf, if some-
thing exploded right next to his ear and knocked his hearing to king-
dom come, he would learn to read her lips. But he couldn’t live with-
out the sight of her.

When Oliver opened his eyes now, he saw his eldest son crossing

the yard. Robert was wearing a wool watch cap and shorts that fell to
his shins and a T-shirt that touted a drug that lowered cholesterol. In
Robert’s hand was a forked stick, which he held like it was a divining
rod. Was he coming home or was he setting out for somewhere? It
was way too early in the morning for the second of these possibilities
to be likely; in the summer, Robert rarely rose before Oliver had
drunk his ﬁfth cup of coffee, which he usually did with his eleven-
thirty lunch at Moon’s. Last night, Oliver had found Robert in the
den, watching a show about rap stars’ cribs. He’d said to his son,
“What’s up?” Robert said, “What? Nada.” Robert squeezed his empty
soda can until the metal popped, all the while gazing at a man in an
Armani sweatsuit who was explaining to an interviewer the virtues
of a ﬁve-hundred-square-foot walk-in closet. Then Oliver went up
to bed with his Everyman’s Pocket Library of Love Poems. (He was try-
ing to memorize one a week.) Just at the moment he was silently re-
citing to himself, with his eyes shut, a short Japanese poem called
“Come Quickly,” his wife had entered the room and said, “Robbie
said he’s going over to Ezra’s. I told him to be home at eleven.” A
picture of Ezra (dreadlocks, braces, a gait like that of an old man
hunched in thought) had come into Oliver’s head and wiped out the
last line of “Come Quickly.” He put the book aside. During the few
moments that he actually slept, he dreamed about his third-grade
teacher, two hairs grew on the ridge of his nose, and his eyes ﬁlled
with blood. He woke and walked barefoot down the stairs, looked
out the kitchen window and saw a rabbit and then his most distant
son. Now, as Robert followed his divining rod across the lawn toward
the back door, the last line of “Come Quickly” returned to Oliver:
“This world exists / as a sheen of dew on ﬂowers.”

The coffeemaker gurgled, then gave out a ﬁnal exhalation. Oliver

heard Robert enter the house and he watched him walk past the
kitchen door toward the stairs. The stick was still in his hand. Was
Robert stoned? The other evening, Oliver had puffed on a joint
with Annelise, before Annelise had gone off to do her radio show.
Oliver hadn’t smoked pot in decades, though Murray and other Old
Hatters had often tempted him. When he came home that night—
his excuse for being out was a meditation class—he was sucking on
cinnamon Red Hots that Annelise had given him. He’d met Robert
as he was climbing the stairs toward the shower—it was slow going;
the stairs seemed to have multiplied—and he had the feeling that
Robert had caught a whiff of him and seen what was boiling behind
his eyeballs.

Oliver considered himself a responsible father, but now was not

the time to make inquiries of Robert. Oliver had ﬁfteen minutes to
get to Tout de Suite. He took a sip of the coffee he had just made,
found his sandals in the mudroom, and slipped his feet into them.
He found his sunglasses in a cubby where somebody had decided to
leave four licorice Jelly Bellies. (Oliver happened to know that Ham
hated licorice.) He went into the study and took his cell phone from
a desk drawer and put it in his shorts. (He was a little worried that
this device had become like his blankie now.) He went into the ga-
rage and walked his old red ten-speed Raleigh out into the sunlight.
The seat on the bike had been raised so high that it looked as if it
were built for a circus performer. Oliver climbed on and coasted out
into the street. He went left, thinking of what it would be like to ride
a tandem bike with Annelise, who was ﬁfteen inches shorter than he
was. He imagined them going round and round a circus ring, a tall
older gentleman in tails and top hat and a young petite woman in
a spangled leotard. They might have been father and daughter, or
uncle and niece, or a couple of freaks. He heard titters, but it was
only birds chattering, speckling the air as they ﬂew from bush to tree
to gutter.

He bicycled past a modest Prairie-style house that had a Kerry/

Edwards sign in the yard. In the primary that spring, Oliver had
voted for Kucinich, the choice of typewriter repairmen all over

America. During the last three weeks, Oliver had not been able to
sustain a thought about politics for more than ﬁve seconds.

In the front yard of the red ranch house where two gay men, Ar-

thur and Cliff, lived, near a hydrangea whose blossoms were a wa-
tery blue, was a dog that could have passed for a coyote. Or a coyote
that could have passed for a dog. It was tawny, long-nosed, bushy-
tailed. It was stalking something that Oliver couldn’t see, and it had
frozen in midstride. In its shoulders and haunches and the planes
of its head was the purest sort of concentration, complete muscular
attention. The dog or coyote raised its right forepaw, as slowly as a
mime would, and set it down a few inches closer to its prey. Oliver,
who stood astraddle his bike now, swallowed. Should he intervene or
should he let nature take its course? What if the prey was a cat or a
puppy, somebody’s beloved pet? It would be simple enough to shout
at the dog or coyote. If it was distractible, the dog or the coyote
would ﬂee, and Oliver, having started the day by saving a creature
from death, could pedal toward Annelise and a latte, feeling at least
a little good about himself. But as he was thinking this thought, the
coyote or dog leaped toward the hydrangea. Shrieks ﬁlled the air.
The dog or coyote and its victim were a blur of fur, like in a cartoon.
In his thigh Oliver felt a buzzing, like a bunch of inﬂamed nerves
rising up in protest. (Sliding headﬁrst the other night hadn’t done
his sciatica any good.) A man in a nightshirt—it was Arthur, who
taught Spanish at the high school—came ﬂying out the door of his
house. Oliver realized that the buzzing in his leg was his cell phone,
and while Arthur was yelling (“Stop! Basta! Basta ya! Oh, Mickey,
my sweet! Oh, fucking A!”), Oliver took the cell phone from his
shorts and saw that he had a message.

Fire

hen Annelise left her house, late for her rendezvous with

Oliver at Tout de Suite (otherwise known as TDS, which

also stood for Two Delirious Syrians, though only one of the owners
was actually Syrian), she had been awake for about ﬁfteen minutes.
During that time she had prodded a small lump on her neck (a doc-
tor had told her it was nothing, she felt it was something), brushed
her teeth with her Scooby-Doo brush, put her hair in a ponytail,
changed her underwear (off with the plain white ones, on with the
lavender ones that featured a frog on the crotch), glanced at Rolf
lying on his back with his morning woodie making a teepee of his
Roy Rogers boxers, put on shorts and shirt (a scoop-necked one that
didn’t quite cover her belly), remembered throwing up at an IHOP
in Des Moines in 1979 (when she was seven, on the last trip her fam-
ily took together before her father ran off with another woman),
dabbed her neck near her lump with an Italian perfume that a boy-
friend (now dead) had given her, picked up Rolf ’s still damp sweat
socks from the living room ﬂoor and then on second thought
dropped them where they’d been, touched the space bar on the type-
writer she’d given Rolf for his birthday (he’d said, “Hey, sweet,” but
it hadn’t pleased him the way the pocket transistor radio she’d found
for him last Christmas had), let Cleo into the backyard so the dog,
a beagle-ish mix, could pee, tapped out a text message to Oliver
(“Runnin late luv u”), and remembered that in the dream she had
awakened from, a man had said it was much easier to kill the
thing—rat, snake, grifﬁn, mysterious lump, illicit love affair: it was
unclear what he was referring to—by electrocuting it than it was by
pouring gasoline on it and igniting it.

When she walked out the front door of the house, she was trying

to identify the man who had given her this advice. He was slim and
angular, leathery-faced, squinty-eyed, like a cowboy. His hair was
thinning, but it was also silky, like a puppy’s. He looked a bit like the
mechanic (a ﬂirt) over at the Shell station, and he also looked slightly
like Rolf, at least in the puckery mouth. She squinted back at him.
Last night, when Rolf tapped her on the shoulder and then kissed
her on the neck near where the lump was, she said, without turning
around, “I’m going to get up early and go downtown to the farmers’
market. Should I get some of that cheese you like?” Rolf said, “What
cheese?” And then he rolled away, disappeared into his disappoint-
ment. She liked Rolf, enjoyed the way his brown eyes came open in
the morning, all shiny from dreams he could never remember. She
liked him enough that they had discussed marriage (though not in
depth, which was where Annelise had a problem with it) and buying
a house and doing what Annelise called the whole bourgeois thing.
She could go there, maybe, to one of those tidy neighborhoods that
Rolf cooed over, if it would be OK with him if she put Professor
Longhair or Ma Rainey on the stereo at odd times of the day and
turned it up really loud and if she could put a bumper sticker on
Rolf ’s SUV which said “Re-Defeat Bush in 2004.” (Rolf allowed her
to tease him, up to a point, about his political inclinations.) But the
real problem was that she didn’t like Rolf more than enough. And
now she thought she was in love with an older married man—older
by two decades, married for almost two decades. Was she deranged?

Annelise shufﬂed down Winnequah Street, peering through the

fuzzy morning light at the extermination expert from her dream.
The neighborhood was quiet. She was aware of her sandals slapping
against the pavement. As she went past a car whose owner had de-
caled the rear window with the word “Fear” in huge, shivery-Gothic
letters, she became aware of crows crowing at her. How many crows
did it take to make a murder of them? She counted two in a box
elder, leaning together like hooded monks conferring, but believed
there was another lurking higher up. She walked past the house that
had a mailbox in the shape of a Packers helmet. She walked past the
house that had a mailbox in the shape of a cat; its mouth yawned
open. She walked past the bungalow where Max Moore lived. Max

did a show about vegetables—Minding Your Peas and Cucumbers—
for the radio station where Annelise worked. Annelise liked Max. He
was pink-faced and plump and wore a straw hat that something had
taken a bite out of. He would arrive at WOOP with sacks of his own
organic produce and set them on the tattered reception room couch
and say to all within earshot, “Take, eat.” He had given Annelise his
recipe for cold rhubarb soup, a dessert soup topped with vanilla ice
cream and sugared Brazil nuts, and told her that her boyfriend
would buy her a top-of-the-line Rototiller if she prepared this dish
for him. (She wondered if Max, who was divorced, had made this
dish for somebody in particular, such as that girl he once came to the
studio with, the one with the high-top black Chucks and the big tits
under the ﬁlmy blouse.) Max sweated a lot and ﬁne black glacial till
had built up under his ﬁngernails and he had a nose like a ﬁngerling
potato. She had wondered, just in passing, what it would be like to
sleep with him. Friends (and her mother) had commented on this
thing she had for older men, and she had said to one of them, not her
mother, “I prefer experience to beauty. All I want to do with beauty is
fuck it.” Before Rolf, who was six years older, there had been a derma-
tologist named Gerald, who was also six years older, with whom she’d
had many late-night conversations and not enough sex. (Actually,
Gerald had overlapped with Rolf.) Before Gerald, there was Grifﬁn
(hmm . . . Grifﬁn?), a bureaucrat in the administration of the Catho-
lic college in Midvale, who was fourteen years older, who had tried to
teach her ﬂy-ﬁshing, who for her birthday had given her an expen-
sively framed triptych of black-and-white photographs he’d taken of
a trout stream. The triptych had a pleasant meditative quality, like
an abstract, and she had put it on top of her dresser, so that it leaned
against the wall, and she had sometimes gazed at it in the morning
when her head was a-jumble with dreams, and then one day it fell
behind the dresser, and she forgot about it until she moved out, into
Rolf ’s house. And before Grifﬁn, there had been Joe, who had given
her the Italian perfume she’d dabbed her neck with this morning,
which he’d bought in a shop in Montenegro, shortly before he died.
Joe had been ﬁve years older than Annelise. He’d worked as a me-
chanic in a bicycle shop, and was as skinny as a whippet, in perpetual

training for triathalons, a short-billed bicycle cap almost always on
his head. Once, during a period when he was stepping up his train-
ing, he got into bed with his cap on and a water bottle in his hand.
Annelise had liked him very much, liked his bony hips and the swells
of his calves and his determination and the fact that he kept all the
ticket stubs (both hers and his) from the movies they went to. They’d
saved up their money to go to Italy and the former Yugoslavia for
two weeks in the summer of 2001. And on the ninth day of their trip
he was killed.

Annelise hadn’t told Oliver much of anything about her ex-

lovers. She had mentioned to him that she was drawn to older
men—“It’s a weirdness of mine,” she’d said, grinning, touching his
long earlobe—but she suspected the subject of her former boy-
friends made him nervous. And she knew for a fact that the subject
of her current housemate grieved him. She had watched the crease
between Oliver’s eyes deepen whenever she mentioned Rolf or “our
dog” (though Cleo was mostly Rolf ’s, since Rolf had acquired her
before he’d met Annelise). A shadow would pass over Oliver’s face,
and then she would have to coax him from the cave he huddled in.
The subject of Rolf grieved her, too. Did she really want to give him
up, which would also mean giving up Cleo and assorted perks, in-
cluding having to pay only one-fourth of the rent? (Rolf, a numbers
guy at the med-tech company, made good money and, unlike An-
nelise, had no debts.) And did she really believe that Oliver, a type-
writer repairman if you could believe that, the next thing to being
unemployed, would leave his lawyer wife and four children for her?
Did she really believe that their relationship would come to anything
more than a memory, something that she would wonder over in, say,
2007, while sitting in a coffee shop with a latte and a baby gazing at
her from under the cute ﬂoppy hat she would buy it? She really did
want a baby, looked forward to sitting and strolling with it and sing-
ing it her favorite tunes—and was there any real chance that she
would make that baby with Oliver, who in 2007 would be ﬁfty-four
or ﬁfty-ﬁve or something astronomical like that?

Annelise believed that love was a force you could ignore only at

some risk to your soul, but she was a practical young woman, too.

She was not going to burn herself on the altar of love. At least she
was going to try not to.

Tout de Suite was another four blocks away, and she was

already—she took her cell phone, which doubled as her watch, from
her pocket—eighteen minutes late. She believed Oliver would wait
for her even if she were a hundred and eighteen minutes late. Some-
times she wished he would dote on her less, but she picked up the
pace anyway. She walked past the ﬁrehouse (not one ﬁreﬁghter stir-
ring) and then past a rickety, faded-purple house full of elderly hip-
pies whose front porch was lost in pea vines and morning glories.
There was a Nader sign in the front yard, and Annelise, who went
for fringe candidates, said, “Go, Ralph.” She took a right at Sheboy-
gan Way and halfway down the block stopped under a mulberry tree.
She was thinking again about Joe, her late lover. She and Joe prob-
ably would have married, even though she believed then—and still
believed—that marriage meant the death of love, a surrender, a walk
off a plank.

The sidewalk was smeared purple-blue, and above her a bird was

singing “potato chip, potato chip, potato chip.” She looked up at the
bird, a goldﬁnch, a male, his chest a lusty yellow, sitting on a twig
loaded with berries, and remembered the parakeets in the pensione
in Venice where she and Joe had stayed. The mistress of the pensione
would cover the parakeet cage when the sun went down and then
unveil it at seven a.m., when the prima colazione was served. Joe
would get up for his morning run at six, and when he returned, all
warm and damp, smelling of the beautiful city that was sinking into
the Adriatic, the parakeets would be declaiming in a romance lan-
guage of their own.

The goldﬁnch ﬂew away, the twig quivered, and a mulberry fell

past her nose. If it hadn’t been so early in the morning, she might
have stuck her tongue out and caught it. She didn’t remember ever
having eaten a mulberry, unless it was in jam. She looked at the ber-
ries up in the tree (beyond her reach), looked at the berries on the
sidewalk, quickly picked up two and put one in her mouth. It tasted
like a blackberry, maybe a little more tart. She put the second one in
her mouth, bit down, and felt its juices ﬂare across her tongue. A

picture popped up in Annelise’s head, like some buoyant thing that
had been pushed under water—it was the man from her home town
who had taught her very little piano (with one hand ﬁrmly on her
leg) when she was a child, and now that she thought about it she saw
a faint resemblance between him and the extermination expert in
her dream. She hated it when this picture (or others like it) came into
her head, hated herself for being unable to suppress the picture be-
fore it appeared. What had happened to her as a child, she sometimes
felt, was like being born with some freaky disﬁgurement. It was like
going through life with a cleft lip, your hand over your mouth, pre-
tending that it was a yawn you were covering. She couldn’t forgive
herself for being the child it had happened to.

She glanced left and right, thinking that somebody was watching

her, a woman who picked mulberries off the sidewalk. The street
was empty and the picture was gone from her head. She missed the
goldﬁnch, she missed Joe, she even missed Rolf a little. But she was
going to see Oliver.

She walked on, trying to tease a bead of mulberry from a gap in

her teeth. She thought of Oliver’s lips and of the ﬁrst time he’d kissed
her. It was the third time they’d seen each other. They were sitting at
a picnic table near the zoo. It was the day that the mother giraffe fell
down and broke her neck, an incident that was front-page news in
the Pantograph. The kiss had surprised her—she hadn’t believed he’d
have the courage to do it—and her eyes, unlike his, had been open.
In the moments before and while Oliver’s lips moved toward hers,
she saw a black man slouching by with a grocery cart full of junk. He
was singing “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” in a high wobbly
voice, a kind of falsetto. The sight of this man with his bushy gray-
and-white beard and his mashed Afro and his childlike voice irritated
Annelise. She had been hoping that Oliver would kiss her, but then
this man had appeared, stinking of days-old sweat and drug-addled
thoughts. It was as if some tired reproach had come barging into her
daydream. Perdition lay ahead, didn’t it, if she kissed Oliver? She
didn’t return Oliver’s kiss right away, didn’t show him her excitement.
She just extended her lips to him, sort of like an envelope with no
letter in it. But his lips were so soft, like a baby’s, like nothing except

milk had ever passed over them, and she gave in to him. He was
sweet, he oozed sincerity (maybe a bit too much), he was crazy about
her—he’d said so, looking straight into her eyes, when their kiss
ended. “I’m crazy about you,” he said, in a slightly husky voice that
made her think of a man in an argyle cardigan on a bar stool in a
basement rec room humming along with Tony Bennett or Andy
Williams. She had almost laughed out loud at the picture that had
come into her head; it was like off a faded LP cover from the ﬁfties.
But she was crazy about Oliver, too. She turned pink thinking how
crazy about him she was.

She caught a whiff of chlorine; the public pool was nearby. She

stepped off the curb, the mulberry still lodged in her teeth, and then
heard a toy-like buzz. When she looked behind her, a red motor
scooter was within feet of her. A teenaged boy—wraparound sun-
glasses, no helmet—was riding it. She recognized him; he was one
of the blond Nordic demigods who sat in the lifeguard chairs at the
pool, twirling their whistles. As he buzzed by, close enough that An-
nelise (who on the occasional early morning churned down a lap
lane, under this or another boy’s indifferent gaze) could see the stub-
ble on his chin and almost smell last night on him, he lifted one ﬁn-
ger from the throttle, in greeting, presumably. Annelise didn’t return
the salute. She stared at his back; on it was a picture of Bob Marley,
his gaze clouded with ganja. Annelise smoked more than was healthy
for her. She’d had a few tokes with Oliver the other night. She felt as
if she was corrupting him—he hadn’t smoked weed, he said, since
about 1980, when she would have been eight and chewing on bubble
gum cigars—though it had made her laugh to see the way his eye-
brows traveled halfway up his forehead as he inhaled.

She looked down at an oil spot on the street. It was peninsular,

boot-like. It might have been a rough outline of Italy, and within an
instant she had crossed the Adriatic to an island off the Dalmatian
coast where she and Joe spent two days in the rain in the summer of
2001, before driving south to Montenegro, in search of sunshine.
They got a room on the beach near Budva. The hotel walls were
whitewashed cinderblock, and there were holes in the window
screens. Annelise and Joe spent the last three nights of Joe’s life there.
They shared the beach with a busload of retirees from Germany,

brawny pink-and-white people, and also with a group of short,
narrow-waisted, hairy, olive-skinned men, whose nationality was
unclear. In their bikini swimsuits and sleeveless T-shirts, the men
looked like circus acrobats. When Annelise saw them in the morn-
ings, in the breakfast room, they would be decked out in identical
double-breasted jackets the color of wet concrete. She didn’t know
why they dressed up for breakfast; two hours later they were on the
beach, all but naked, the hissed sounds of their language mixing
with the sound of the sea. For two days, Annelise watched these men
wade in and out of the brilliant blue water (they never fully im-
mersed themselves), smoke cigarette after cigarette, gesture at the
perfectly blue sky while discussing who knew what. Once, when the
two young British women who read Penguins under an umbrella
went down to the water’s edge, creamy shoulder to creamy shoulder,
the men grew silent. All you could hear was the sea sucking at the
rocks and sand. The next day, the day before Annelise and Joe were
to drive to Dubrovnik and begin their trip back to America, the
British girls and the Germans and the circus acrobats (or whoever
they were—secret policemen on a holiday?) departed. The beach
and the hotel seemed suddenly deserted, the dour chain-smoking
concierge seemed more dour than usual. Annelise sat on the beach,
reading a book on Buddhism, wondering if the people who had left
that morning knew something she didn’t. There had been an earth-
quake here some years before, and maybe the earth had trembled
during the night and only she and Joe had failed to detect it. The sea
was calm and it sparkled in the sunlight. Joe went running and then
he went swimming and then he ﬁnally sat down next to her and read
an International Herald Tribune from two days before. She kept see-
ing the seven men in their concrete-colored blazers zooming off in
two tiny black Renaults.

Annelise saw the scooter belonging to the lifeguard parked out-

side the entrance to the pool. Through the fence she saw the boy
himself, his shirt off, his muscled back a gold-bronze trophy color.
She wouldn’t mind doing him, just once.

She was two blocks from Tout de Suite now. How could she even

think of breaking up Oliver’s family? Was she actually thinking of
breaking it up or was she simply having a—well, what did you call

the twenty-two-day-old thing she was having with Oliver? She
wouldn’t think of it as an “affair” or a “diversion” or a “dalliance,”
words that signiﬁed insigniﬁcance, a momentary (and guilty) plea-
sure, a trip to Dairy Queen to get a cone with a cherry-red cap on it.
(She was one of the few people she knew who liked the cherry-red
topping more than the chocolate one. Rolf had said to her once, “It
looks like a byproduct of a nuclear meltdown. I expect to see you
glowing in about ten minutes.” He could make her laugh. Why
would she want to leave him?) Oliver was not a cone with a cherry-
red cap on top, was he? She wouldn’t just consume him and glow for
a while, before moving on, would she?

A block away, Annelise saw Oliver, sitting at one of the tables

outside Tout de Suite. He was capless, but sunglasses were propped
on top of his head. He was wearing a green polo shirt and his bare
legs were stretched out for miles in front of him, crossed at the
ankles. She remembered thinking the ﬁrst time they were naked
together—they’d had sex twice, the ﬁrst time in a motel in Blue
Earth, the second time in her Metro—how far his head was from his
toes. While trying to take him all in, she’d had the sense that she was
overlooking important parts.

Oliver was studying his cell phone, two ﬁngers curled around the

handle of a blue coffee mug. She slipped behind a tree, an old silver
maple whose roots had buckled the sidewalk. She punched in his
number and then peeked around the trunk. She felt very young all
of a sudden, a little scared, like a child hiding from an adult.

When Oliver’s phone rang, he abruptly lifted his head and drew

his legs in. He responded to his cell phone’s beeps and rings as if it
were alive, a demanding pet.

“Annelise?” he said. “Where are you?”
On the sidewalk on the other side of the street, in front of Vale

Liquors, was the homeless man who had crossed her vision when
Oliver kissed her the ﬁrst time. She was a superstitious young woman;
she sometimes held her breath when driving by cemeteries, kept in
her car a “lucky” three-legged ceramic pig that Joe had given her. The
man was standing there with his grocery cart full of junk, humming.

“I got delayed,” she said, picking at a piece of bark. Some of the

bark on the tree had ﬂaked off, or possibly had been pulled off by
children or by adults making furtive cell phone calls.

Oliver said, “So, are you coming?” She wasn’t sure what to make

of the fretfulness in his voice. He was shy—there was the way he
would look down at his hands in his lap when he was talking—but
what exactly was hiding beneath the shyness she didn’t yet know.
People were like artichokes: layers and layers of leaves, some of the
leaves sweet and meaty, some thin and hardly worth nibbling on,
and then there were all those bristles guarding the heart.

The homeless man was singing now, moving his feet in waltz

time, swaying a little, waving his hands above his cart, as if he were
warming them above a ﬁre. Didn’t he know some other song besides
“While My Guitar Gently Weeps”?

Annelise said, “My mother just called. I forgot I was supposed to

meet her at the farmers’ market at seven-thirty.” Her mother, Char-
lotte, was a nurse and worked nights and wasn’t usually awake at
seven-thirty on a Saturday morning. She lived with an ER nurse
named Reynard, who was ﬁfteen years her junior. Reynard was pleas-
ant, helpful around the house, sweet-tempered even when he’d had
too much to drink, but Annelise didn’t approve of him. She some-
times thought her mother was sixty going on nineteen. Annelise
hadn’t told Oliver much about her mother or about her father, whose
third wife had a gambling addiction, or anything about her own so-
called issues. She hadn’t told Rolf much, either. She hid behind trees,
made up stories.

“Oh,” Oliver said glumly.
“Maybe we can meet later,” Annelise said, though she had

made a promise to Rolf about the afternoon. They were going to a
fair out in the next county. They would eat sweet corn and drink beer
and throw rubber chickens at a wolf ’s mouth painted on a board.
Rolf would drink four or ﬁve beers, and would insist on having sex
with her. She wouldn’t say no. She couldn’t say no to him all the
time.

“I have to drive my children all over town today,” Oliver said.

“And tonight I’m having dinner at a lawyer’s house. Five lawyers and
a typewriter repairman.”

“I want to see you,” Annelise said.
“I’ll have to check with my lawyer,” he said.
Was he perturbed? She would take his hand if she could, stroke

the scar on his right thumb, which he got while sawing wood for a
birdhouse when he was a Cub Scout midway through the last cen-
tury. He also had a scar above his right hip, the result of a boyhood
bike accident. She would touch that spot, too, slip her hand under
his shirt.

She said, “It’s supposed to get to ninety today, I heard.” Was she

really going to spend the afternoon throwing rubber chickens with
Rolf ? And was she really going to be the little home-wrecker she
feared she might be at heart?

Oliver didn’t respond to her comment on the weather. He said,

“The guy with the grocery cart is across the street singing ‘While My
Guitar Gently Weeps.’ Not my favorite Beatles song.”

“I wish he would go away,” Annelise said, while ﬁddling with the

hem of her shirt that didn’t cover her belly, while thinking for no
particular reason of the sunburst clock above the stove in her and
Rolf ’s kitchen. Then she caught herself. “I mean, you never know
where he’ll turn up. Being homeless and such.” She should go back
right now and get into bed with Rolf and Cleo. What did it matter if
Rolf voted Republican and never read anything more demanding
than a dog-training manual? She remembered one of her former
boyfriends—it must have been Grifﬁn, who read books when he
wasn’t ﬁshing or taking photographs of trout streams—quoting
some Frenchman about how all the trouble in the world started be-
cause people didn’t stay in their own rooms. Grifﬁn had said this
with his hands surrounding his coffee mug, his blue eyes moist.
That was the day she’d met him in a coffeehouse—it was at Tout de
Suite, in fact—to tell him that she couldn’t see him anymore.

Her error slipped by Oliver. He said, “I wonder what he’s got in

there, in his cart.”

“Junk,” she said. “Stuff to build a palace of junk with.”
“A phone book, probably,” Oliver said. “A phone book has mul-

tiple uses. A pillow, a seat, a ﬁre-starter, something to read when you
get bored.”

The man who had taught her very little piano when she was a

child was coming into her head again. She remembered how she
would see him every Sunday in the dank limestone Catholic church
down by the river and how with one large veiny hand he would hold
the hymnal way out in front of his big moon face so as to better dis-
play his voice, which was in fact rather grand, big-bottomed, lordly.
She remembered getting his number from information a couple of
years ago, thinking that she would phone him and scream at him and
thereby purge him from her mind. His name was E.J. Demuth. He
was called “Eej,” a name that even now made her head feel sludgy, as
if she were trapped under her own thick, slow-moving thoughts. Ac-
cording to the phone company, Eej still lived at the same address he’d
lived at twenty-ﬁve years ago. She remembered that a crabapple tree
grew in Eej’s yard, remembered nibbling at the bitter fruit once, and
that some sort of vine climbed a downspout. The house was yellow, a
fake-cheery yellow. When she took so-called piano lessons with Eej,
she sat on a phone book. She never called him.

The homeless man was pushing his cart up the sidewalk. Among

the top couple layers of the stuff in the cart were a slab of Styrofoam
house insulation and a black garbage bag, its yellow drawstrings
dangling over the side.

“No antique typewriters?” Annelise asked.
“Then he’d be a true junk man,” Oliver said.
Eej once said to her, his hand on her bruised seven-year-old

knee, his voice all grave, “If you were my daughter, you would be
Annelise Demuth.” He was pleased with the sound this name made,
a name, she would think years later, that belonged in pornography.
She pressed her forehead into the tree bark and he was gone from her
mind.

Oliver said, “I can get out of some of my chauffeuring duties

maybe. What time could I see you?”

She peeked around the tree trunk. She saw his phone pressed

against his ear. She saw the V his bent arm made, and imagined put-
ting her ﬁnger in the crease, which would be slightly moist.

“Can I give you a call?”
“OK,” Oliver said.

“I love you.” She heard herself say this as if it might be a

question.

The homeless man pushed his cart off the curb, out into the

street. He stopped at the median stripe. With a lighter whose ﬂame
gushed high, he lit a cigarette or reefer. Then he said, blowing smoke
as he spoke, “Why does the homeless man cross the street?” He ap-
peared to be talking to Oliver, though the volume of his voice sug-
gested he would entertain answers from anywhere.

“I love you, too, Annelise.” Oliver said this softly, as if he was

afraid the homeless man might hear. But it was a statement of fact,
not a question.

The homeless man said again, “So why does the homeless man

cross the street?” His speaking voice was an octave lower than his
singing one. His tone was cultured, maybe a little studied, like an
actor’s—an actor who could also do a street prophet or bombastic
preacher at the drop of a hat. Annelise hardened herself in the pres-
ence of such people; they were way too much trouble.

The man took another drag on his reefer—Annelise could smell

it now; the smoke was drifting her way—and then said, “That ques-
tion stumps all the smart people.” He guffawed and his teeth ﬂick-
ered in his beard. He was standing a few feet from Oliver now.

Oliver was a pushover when it came to panhandlers. One recent

evening, Annelise was walking with Oliver on Winnebago Street,
near the radio station, when a pale, gnarly druggie, his teeth black
and rotting, made entreaties. Annelise ran into this guy regularly and
never gave him a penny. Oliver, emptying his pockets of coins and
bills, said, “Here you go. I hope you have a good night.” The drug-
gie, tipping his beaten-up Lester Young porkpie to Oliver and a
scowling Annelise, had said, “Hey, thanks, Cakes. And you, too,
Sweetness.” When Annelise said to Oliver that the man was going
to use the money to buy meth, Oliver had said, almost wistfully,
“Maybe he’ll change his mind and buy a hamburger.” Annelise wasn’t
sure whether Oliver actually believed this or was trying to impress
her with his generosity.

An old Subaru, pasted with stickers that said “Free Tibet” and

“Share the Road with Bicycles” and “Go Organic!” clanked past.

The driver was Max Moore, the radio horticulturist. Opera poured
out of his windows. (Sometimes to open his radio show, Max would
sing an aria from what he claimed was Puccini’s unﬁnished—now
mostly lost—opera about a tomato grower and his lover.) Max’s
mouth was open, his chin uptilted, as if he was singing along,
reaching for a high note. Maybe that explained why he came so
close to clipping the homeless man’s grocery cart. Probably, Annelise
thought, Max was headed downtown, to the farmers’ market, where,
she had now told the two men in her life, she would be spending the
morning. Maybe she should actually go. It was gladiolus season. She
loved glads. Sometimes she bought a bunch and put them in a vase
on the kitchen table. They made her think of tall, old-timey women
in long dresses and showy hats, women at garden parties. She was
not ever going to be a woman at a garden party.

The homeless man, having now parked himself in front of

Oliver’s table, said, “One reason the homeless man crosses the street
to the Tout de Suite coffeehouse”—his French accent was good—“is
so he can have a cup of coffee. I haven’t had my morning pick-me-up
and I got a headache, you know what I’m saying? Usually I get my
coffee from Antonio over at the Quality Court kitchen; he slips me
a cup, maybe a side of bacon, when he comes out for a smoke. But
he went home to Ecuador or some place far from America, the land
of hopportunity, if you’re a nice white rabbit. You aren’t one of those
Bush men, are you?”

Oliver shook his head no.
“You don’t look like one, but one never knows, does one?” He

held his reefer out. “You want to get high?”

Oliver lifted the mug that contained Annelise’s latte—an offer-

ing, perhaps, or an explanation.

Emile, one of the Two Delirious Syrians, the one who was actu-

ally Syrian, came around the corner of the building bearing a tray of
something. Pastries? Annelise smelled lightly burnt sugar and was
suddenly starved. Emile gave the homeless man a long look, then
entered his shop.

The homeless man wetted his ﬁnger and extinguished his reefer

and returned it to a hiding place in his Afro. Then he sat down in

the chair next to Oliver and said, “The other reason the homeless
man crosses the street is so he can make a telephone call. Might I?”
He took Oliver’s phone from the table and examined it.

Oliver said, “Shouldn’t you move your cart?”
Annelise imagined the homeless man running off with Oliver’s

phone. How would she reach him?

“Cingular,” the homeless man scoffed. “Man, nobody can spell

these days.”

She tapped in Oliver’s number. On the second ring, just as the

bead of mulberry in her teeth came loose, the homeless man an-
swered. “Midvale Cadillac. Sales ﬂoor. How might I service you?”

“May I speak to Oliver?”
“I’ll page him, Miss,” he said, in a solemn tone. He passed the

phone to Oliver—“Here you be, Mr. Oliver”—and then sipped An-
nelise’s coffee.

Annelise said to Oliver, “I’m not going to the farmers’ market

after all. Are you still at Tout de Suite? I can be there in thirty
seconds.”

Setting the mug back on the table and rising from his seat, the

homeless man said, “I generally like it a tad hotter, without sugar.”
He removed one of his shoestringless wingtips and shook a pebble
out of it and then he put the shoe back on. He took the roach out of
his hair and relit it and ambled toward his cart. The driver of a ﬁfty-
thousand-dollar car waited for him to cross the street.

Annelise stayed behind the tree for thirty more seconds, like a

child counting as her playmates went and hid. She tugged her shirt
hem lower, pushed a strand of hair behind her ear. She was not sure
who she was, or what she truly wanted or how to manage to get it if
she ever ﬁgured out what it was. But she believed that the man sit-
ting a few paces from her really loved her, and love was, after all, a
solace, even if you could hardly make heads or tails of life or what-
ever you called the murk that she woke up in daily.

When she came out from behind the tree, she felt mostly in

control of herself, except for her smile, which was like a wildﬂower
that a sudden shower of light had brought forth. She could feel her
teeth shining more than was perhaps comely. Oliver’s smile was shy,

untoothy. But there was something in his face—maybe it was the
bushy eyebrows, maybe it was the slant of his nose, maybe it was the
sunglasses sitting on his heap of graying hair—that made her wonder
for an instant if he would be loyal to her, if he wouldn’t abandon her.
All but one of the boyfriends in her life—Joe, run over by a truck
carrying ﬁsh to market—she had left before they could leave her.

Oliver rose from his chair and before he’d reached his full height

he kissed her on the cheek. His sunglasses slid off the top of his head.
She picked them up, and then she noticed the ﬁre. The homeless
man had set his cart on ﬁre.

It was a paltry ﬁre, mostly just smoke. The insulation hadn’t

caught yet. A small brown animal jumped out of the cart. It seemed
stunned when it hit the pavement. It looked around in alarm.

“That’s right, motherfucker,” the homeless man said to the ani-

mal. “It’s over.” He stood on the far curb, his hands in his Bermudas.
“Go on, scat. I don’t want to ever see your face again.”

The animal—it was a mouse, a brown ﬁeld mouse—ran to-

ward the homeless man, its tail standing straight as a radio antenna.
Then it reversed direction and scampered toward Annelise and Ol-
iver. Then, reconsidering again, it took a left and headed toward
downtown.

“You don’t know what love is,” the homeless man said to the

mouse. He said this once more, to nobody in particular. He re-
trieved his smoldering cart and pushed it back onto the sidewalk.

Oliver said, “Should I call the police? The ﬁre department?”
“No,” Annelise said. There was a green bug on Oliver’s forearm.

She blew on it and it ﬂew off. She looked into Oliver’s bloodshot
eyes. She touched the swollen tip of his nose. “Still tender?”

“Getting better,” he said.

Bump

omething had bitten Annelise on the forehead last night, while

she slept in Rolf ’s bed dreaming that all her teeth had fallen

out. In the morning, she wondered if she’d sleepwalked into a
door—the swelling was as hard as a knob. The swelling had gone
down during the day, but now, some hours later, at meditation class,
it itched. She tried to ignore it, tried to concentrate on her breathing,
but ﬁnally she gave in and scratched. The pleasure scratching gave
her opened her eyes. Before her was the monk who led the class, his
eyes half-shut behind his glasses, his hands in the “cosmic mundo”
position or whatever it was called when your thumb tips touched
lightly and your ﬁngers made a basket to catch the sweat that fell
from your brow. He and his maroon and pumpkin robes—what he
once referred to as “my bed sheets”—spilled over the sides of the
folding chair he occupied. He was husky, broad-shouldered, ruddy-
faced, a Buddhist from the American Midwest. He had a large head,
but his ears and nose were small and the cindery stubble on top
made him seem vulnerable and boyish, like a boot camp inductee.

The itch subsided and Annelise closed her eyes again. She kept

her mind on her breathing for two or three breaths, then heard Oli-
ver, who sat next to her, swallow. Oliver: her tall, thin, elderly lover.
Her mind went out the window into the summer night, out among
the people on the street, and then it came back inside and settled on
the monk.

In one of the smoky back rooms of her mind, Annelise heard the

monk say, “I grew up in a cave and then I saw the light.” He had said
this during one of his rambling between-meditations talks, when he

would ruminate on anger or ill will or suffering or lust. The cave was
a tourist attraction that his family had owned and operated. It had
twenty rooms. It was in the western part of the state, in the county
just to the east of the one where Annelise had grown up. During the
summers when he was in high school and college, the monk had
worked as a tour guide and a clerk in the gift shop. Annelise had
gone through the cave one spring day when she was in sixth grade,
twenty years ago. The monk would’ve been—Annelise guessed—
college age then. She didn’t remember the person who led her class
through the cave. She remembered the damp chill she felt through
her thin red windbreaker and the creepy, spotlighted stalagmites en-
crusted with fungoids and the fact that a boy named Roscoe kept
saying he was going to light another boy’s farts with his Zippo. She
remembered the relief she felt when she emerged from the cave into
the gift shop. She bought a polished ﬁfty-cent stone (an agate, im-
ported from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan) for her mother and
one for herself. She didn’t buy anything for her father, even though
her father was picking her up at school later that afternoon and driv-
ing her back to his house in the Twin Cities, where he lived with a
woman who blotted her lipsticked lips with monogrammed cocktail
napkins and left the napkins lying around. On the bus ride back to
school, Annelise couldn’t concentrate on her Ramona book. She
kept thinking about the house where the cave owners lived, across
the road from the parking lot. There was a two-person swing on the
porch. Daffodils bloomed at the foot of the porch. The monk’s fam-
ily had a Labrador retriever that hung out in the visitor parking lot
and loved schoolchildren, particularly, it seemed, girls in red wind-
breakers. Her father’s wife had a miniature wire-haired dog named
Tippy who danced on her hind feet and spun in circles, like a
windup toy.

When the monk said, “I grew up in a cave and then I saw the

light,” he had grinned, like a kid who kept a frog under his hat. One
reason Annelise was attracted to Buddhism was that the people who
practiced it—the monks, anyway—didn’t seem to take themselves
too seriously. Annelise was trying to ﬁgure out how not to take her-
self too seriously.

The monk said, “If you feel your mind becoming distracted,

gently bring it back to your breathing. Follow the stream of air as it
enters your nostrils and ﬂows into your body. When it leaves, feel it
warm the tips of your nostrils.”

Annelise—seated on a pillow on the ﬂoor, which was uncomfort-

able but probably not much less uncomfortable than the slat-
bottomed wood chair where Oliver, whose hip and leg were in-
ﬂamed with sciatica, sat—tilted her face up an inch and inhaled.
The class was held in a low-ceilinged second-story room above a
downtown New Age book-and-notions shop. Two of the windows
were open—though not widely enough; Annelise was sweating—
and sounds from the street ﬂoated in, along with the Midvale air,
which on this night in late August contained bus fumes, marijuana,
stir fry, cooling concrete, beer, horse droppings, and a tincture of
slaughterhouse. (Annelise’s nose was such that if you kissed her after,
say, sealing an envelope, as Rolf did the other day, she would smell
the envelope glue as well as what you had for lunch and anybody else
you had thought about kissing within the past forty-eight hours.)
The heavy air made Annelise feel irritable. How nice it would be if a
storm blew in. She wished fall would hurry up and come, wished for
cool air from afar to prickle her scalp and wipe her head clean, so
that she might begin to make decisions. Should she stay with Rolf,
whom she didn’t really love, though maybe he was the best she’d ﬁnd
before she turned into a crone—Rolf, who for all she knew was see-
ing someone at his ofﬁce? Or should she move out and wait for Oli-
ver, shallow-pocketed Oliver who had four children hanging all over
him, who was already receiving mailings from the AARP—Oliver,
with whom she had been in love for more than a month, with whom
she had been betraying Rolf for more than a month, with whom
she’d read aloud “How the Camel Got His Hump” one night last
week after fucking him so hard she thought she’d hurt him?

She breathed. She remembered a phrase from “How the Camel

Got His Hump”—“In the beginning of the years, when the world
was so new and all”—and then she saw herself standing under a blue
fall sky, bluer than any wish could make it, shivering a little, right at
the edge of the world, not a single other human being within sight.

Would she ever be able not to be afraid while standing alone? She
breathed and remembered that on the refrigerator in her and Rolf ’s
kitchen—what a pain in the ass it would be to pack up all her
stuff !—was a Post-it that said “Metro: oil change.” She breathed and
she smelled fried ﬁsh and in that smell was the sea, the salty, ﬁsh-
thick sea, ﬁve thousand miles away, the blue Bay of Budva, on the
day Joe was run over by a truck. She remembered the oysterish color
of his forehead when she saw him in the morgue; he was still in his
bathing suit and sandals, and it was the sight of his shapely calves
that made her cry. She breathed and out of some corner of her mind
came a memory of one of several jobs she had during college, to pay
for meals and books and beer. She’d worked for half a semester in
the phone sex business. She’d sat in a cubicle and talked dirty to men
and read de Beauvoir or Dworkin when she wasn’t on the phone and
sometimes when she was (if Heilman, the supervisor, wasn’t around).
She hadn’t minded doing that then; it was money and maybe in some
perverse way it also helped to prepare her for her career (if “career”
was the right word) in radio. But when she thought about it now,
about all the stupid things she’d uttered in a voice that was all soft
and sticky, the texture of cotton candy, she turned pink from ster-
num to ear lobes. She breathed.

he meditation the seven people in the class were doing was the

ﬁrst of two, a warm-up. It was for beginners (“We are all always be-
ginners,” the monk liked to say) and it was supposed to last for only
a few minutes, but to Oliver, whose sciatica had ﬂared up after he
did that belly slide into third base, whose stomach was reacting
loudly to the enchiladas he had for dinner, whose mind would not
stay still, it seemed like the meditation had gone on forever. Tonight
was the third time Oliver had gone to class with Annelise. He hadn’t
practiced meditating outside of class, even though the state of the
typewriter-repair business was such that he had plenty of time to do
so. On the other hand, it was hard ﬁnding time for meditation when
you were on the verge of blowing up your marriage.

Oliver breathed and tried to remember if he’d paid the utility bill

for his shop; he saw himself licking the envelope closed but he

couldn’t remember whether he’d dropped it in the mailbox outside
his shop. He breathed and he heard somebody on the street shout,
“Phoque Now.” He had seen the phrase “Phoque Now” written on
walls and sidewalks around Midvale. It was like, he supposed, the
“Make Love, Not War” slogan from long ago, only shorter and some-
what oblique and not clearly political. Sex was what people cared
about more than anything nowadays, perhaps even more than they
cared about money. They wore T-shirts that said things like “I Love
Pussy” and “Is That A Candy Cane I See In Your Pants?” They wore
these shirts as if they were no more than advertisements for a sports
brand or the University of Whatever. And then there were the people
who wanted to stamp out sex, or at least cover it up. Neither the sex
maniacs nor the prudes ever made much noise about the war in Iraq,
children dying, lives going up in ﬂames. And what had Oliver—
who, old fogy that he was, believed that you should not have sex with
another person if you didn’t really and truly love her or him—done
about the war? He had put an “Out of Iraq” sticker on the bumper of
his car, he had voted for Dennis Kucinich, he had nodded in agree-
ment while reading the antiwar editorials in The Nation.

Into Oliver’s head came a picture of his wife bent over in her

ﬂower garden, pulling a weed. She turned her face toward him and
he looked away. Into his head, as if another button had been pushed,
came his four boys, lined up in the order of their height, smirking,
grinning, punching each other. He looked away again.

Oliver knew that during the month he had been in love with An-

nelise that she must have had sex with her boyfriend, whatever his
name was, ﬁve, six, seven, nineteen times. His head throbbed when
he thought about these scenes. Once, when he’d nosed up to the
subject of her living situation, like a wary old ﬁsh inspecting what
was perhaps not a real ﬂy, she said to him, “What do you want me to
do? Move in with you and your wife and your children?”

Oliver sat up as straight as he was able. He tried not to think of

the pain that started in his right buttock and traveled down the side
of his right leg and ended in a ﬂaming pool in his ankle. The sciatic
nerve was the longest nerve in the body, he had read. Did tall people
with sciatica have more pain than short people? Why hadn’t he and

Annelise just spent this hour on the sofa in the storage room of his
shop, as they had the previous Wednesday? Annelise had said, “I
need to go to meditation class. My mind has been zooming around
like a chicken with its head cut off.”

Oliver opened his eyes that had long been in need of better lenses

to peer through (objects in the distance were often fuzzy) but were
still good enough to see that the monk’s eyes were half-closed behind
his glasses. (The monk had suggested that the students not shut
their eyes all the way during meditation, since this sometimes led to
sleep, and sleep was not the aim of meditation.) Oliver looked down
at Annelise. Her face was pink, as if she was embarrassed, ashamed,
excited—he didn’t know which. What was going on behind her
brow that an insect bite had made all puffy and red in the center?
He’d heard her scratching it just a moment ago. Once, scratching a
mosquito bite on her arm, she’d said to him, “Sometimes I just want
to scratch and scratch until I bleed. Is that gross?” Maybe it was the
heat that had pinkened her. The room was stuffy. The peace lily in
the corner looked to be in need of water.

But probably it wasn’t only the heat. Maybe she was ﬂushed be-

cause she was trying to ﬁgure out how to tell Oliver that they should
end it.

The other night, on the sofa in Oliver’s shop, after they had

made love, after they had both turned a bright pink, Annelise had
told Oliver the story of Joe. This was the ﬁrst time she had revealed
to Oliver her feelings about any of her former boyfriends. Oliver
had found it unsettling, as if Annelise were trying to keep him off-
balance and guessing about her intentions. “Joe was sweet, though
kind of obsessed with training for marathons,” she said. “I didn’t tell
him hardly anything about my past—none of the tawdry stuff, I
mean. We probably would’ve gotten married, if he hadn’t been
killed.” Oliver had seen in Annelise’s eyes that she still loved Joe and
that it was a burden for her to love him, Oliver, who did not have
any marathons in him, who was now the keeper of her “tawdry” se-
crets. After she told him about Joe, she asked him to read “How the
Camel Got His Hump.” She’d brought along the copy of Just So
Stories she’d had as a child. Oliver wasn’t sure if he liked the child in

Annelise, the mischievous smile that seemed to hide needs he knew
he couldn’t satisfy. But he almost admired the way she could change
the subject; it took his breath away, in fact.

Oliver followed Annelise’s jaw from below her earlobes to the rise

of her chin and then to the shadowy, succulent spot just below her
lower lip, a place that had a name (she’d told him what it was called)
if only he could remember it. Her lips were shut. He listened to her
breathing; the air riding up her nose whistled faintly, and when she
let it go, it came out with a sigh, as if it was leaving reluctantly.
Shouldn’t love be as simple and as steady as this, with no end to the
whistling and the pleasurable sighing?

nnelise said, “I’m hungry. Do you want something?” They were

walking on Hopwood Street, past bars and noodle joints.

Oliver said he wasn’t hungry but that he would be happy to

watch her eat for a few minutes, before he had to go home. It was
dark out and it would be darker by the time he got home.

She walked a step ahead of him. Did she walk ahead of him be-

cause she was ashamed of him, her tall graying lover hobbled by
sciatica? Meditation class had not smoothed her out. If anything, it
had riled her up. The back of her bare neck said, “Don’t ask me any
personal questions.”

“I wasn’t quite sure,” he ventured, “about the ﬁre-in-the-cave

metaphor that the monk lay on us. You know, where he was saying
about how a mind ﬁlled with anger or desire is like a ﬁre burning in
a cave, and how there’s enough oxygen to keep the ﬁre going, but the
smoke is such and the walls of the cave are such and your ﬁxation on
keeping the ﬁre burning high is such that you choke on the smoke.”

“Our spelunking monk,” Annelise said. She was still a step

ahead.

“Desire would be a coal ﬁre, maybe, and anger would be like

crackling wood, I guess,” Oliver mused. Across the street he saw the
homeless man who burned up his grocery cart; he was reading a
newspaper. “I’m the wrong size for spelunking.”

Annelise stopped and turned toward Oliver. “Do you want to go

back to your shop and fuck?”

The look on her face scared him a little. The red dot at the center

of the bump on her forehead was like an extra eye.

“I thought you wanted to eat,” Oliver said.
“You,” she said. She ﬂashed that smile at him.
They rode back to his shop in her tiny car. He felt like a contor-

tionist. His knees were up near his throat. There was a pile of stuff on
the ﬂoor under his feet and something sharp under his aching rump,
under the ﬂiers and magazines and CD cases he was sitting on.

In certain moods, such as the one she was in tonight, Annelise

was an aggressive driver, a tailgater. The bumper sticker on the car
just ahead of them said “Keep Midvale Weird.”

Oliver said, “Guy forgot to signal. Nincompoop.”
Annelise stepped on the gas and said, “Do you think it was hard

for the monk to give up sex?”

Oliver said he didn’t know. He was going to be so late getting

home tonight. He felt certain that he would be discovered. And then
what? He felt around for the thing pressing against his rump. It was
a dope pipe.

“I could never give it up,” she said, moving into the other lane

and gunning it past a horse-drawn carriage. “I didn’t know there
were Amish in Midvale.”

“It’s one of those tourist buggies,” Oliver said. He knew the

driver, a guy named Perry. He was a typewriter user.

“How’s your sciatica?”
“Fine,” he lied. His rump hurt less now that he was no longer sit-

ting on the pipe, but his ankle felt as if an arrow had been shot into it.

She put her hand high on his thigh as they pulled up in front of

The Typing Poole. “Why do we keep seeing that homeless guy? Is it
a sign?” She turned the car off.

“What would it be a sign of ?” he asked, as her hand slid beneath

the hem of his shorts. He didn’t much believe in “signs,” unlike An-
nelise, who would grab him just before he stepped on the pictograph
of a disabled person in a parking lot and who had informed him that
stray pennies found heads down were bad luck. He didn’t know
whether to regard her superstitious streak as charmingly unadult or
as simply unadult.

“Maybe he’s a warning that you and I are going to be pushing

grocery carts around Midvale, unless, you know . . .” She was unzip-
ping him. He felt himself trying to smile at her, as if she were taking
his picture and he wasn’t quite in the mood to have it taken. His
prick was standing up now, like a ﬂag on a mailbox. A car, its lights
on high beam, turned onto Fond du Lac Avenue, and he shut his
eyes, as if this would make him invisible.

The glove compartment door ﬂopped open, hitting him just

under his knee. His eyes came open and he saw her scalp where her
hair was parted.

Some moments later, he said, “Do you want to go inside? Did I

tell you that some guy brought me a 1948 Hermès Baby to ﬁx?”

Her face rose from his lap, but she kept her hand on his prick. “I

wonder if they make, like, tandem grocery carts for homeless couples.
In the spring we could forage for ﬁddleheads and dandelion greens.”

Oliver remembered a scene from a Swedish art movie he’d seen

when he was in high school—young doomed lovers barﬁng up ber-
ries they’d scavenged.

He said, “I’ve never eaten dandelion greens, to my knowledge.

Fiddleheads are kind of bitter.” He touched the bump on her fore-
head. She pulled back. “Maybe if you put a lot of cheese on them,
they’d be OK.”

“Where would two homeless people ﬁnd a lot of cheese?” she said,

laughing. She put the tip of her other foreﬁnger just below his lower
lip—his mentolabial sulcus: the term had come ﬂying into his head,
unexpected mail. “Do you want to go home? You seem anxious.”

“I want to be with you,” he said.

n Winnebago Street, two blocks from the radio station, there was

an all-night doughnut shop called Beaucoup Doughnuts. It was run
by two gray-headed hippies who used organic ingredients, and it was
popular with students and employees of the nearby milk factory and
health-conscious police ofﬁcers and WOOP personnel. Sometimes
after her Thursday night show Annelise stopped here to stuff her face.

It was still early: nine-thirty. Oliver had gone home on his bike.

Would he kiss his wife, with lips that had just kissed her, Annelise,
all over? Would he give Diane or Diana or whatever her name was a

courtesy kiss, a lie of a kiss? Annelise didn’t know whether to care,
though she felt her heart darkening with jealousy.

Annelise ordered two sugar doughnuts (made with potatoes and

buttermilk) and a doughnut ﬁlled with blackberry jelly and a small
carton of milk. She took her food—this was dinner for her; no won-
der she’d been feeling so out of sorts—back outside to a table that
was under an umbrella. In a book she had sort of half-read—was it
the one by that Vietnamese monk?—it had said that a mindful per-
son should chew each bite of food twenty-seven times. She believed
in mindfulness and in making eating a mindful activity, but she
thought that twenty-seven times was overdoing it and in the case of
a jelly-ﬁlled doughnut, even an organic one, it was hard to get past
two chews per bite. Her mind wolfed foods such as doughnuts; they
were gone even before she put them in her mouth.

She wiped her mouth with a napkin and then put a straw in her

milk carton. And when she got home, would she kiss Rolf with her
lips that were, until the moment she bit into the doughnut, all sugary
with Oliver? Would she give Rolf a courtesy kiss? How about a cour-
tesy blowjob? She remembered her father making her kiss Gloria, his
second wife, saying, “Mom needs a kiss.” Gloria didn’t “need” the
kiss at all—she was tall and remote, taller than Annelise’s short dad,
seemingly self-sufﬁcient, often veiled in cigarette smoke, her lip-
sticked lips an invitation (though not an open one) to only Annelise’s
father. Annelise almost always did as her father bid, though she did
her best to avoid calling Gloria “Mom,” as her father had said he
hoped she would. And now her father, whom Gloria left after a half
dozen years, was living in a trailer with a woman named Chery-
lynne, whom he’d met at an Indian casino in Minnesota. Annelise
had heard through the grapevine (well, via her mother, who some-
how kept up on the gossip about her ex-husband) that her father had
emphysema. Annelise hadn’t seen him in years. She wasn’t planning
to see him anytime soon. He had not loved her, his only child, prop-
erly. If she was cold and distant sometimes, what was he? Maybe
only merely neglectful?

If she was any kind of Buddhist, she thought, she could have for-

given him and moved on. The problem was that she wasn’t any kind
of Buddhist.

Annelise started in on a sugar doughnut. It was warm and it

made her happy for as long as it was in her mouth. She remembered
Joe standing before her, naked except for a bicycle cap, vigorously
brushing his teeth, as if dental hygiene were a form of aerobic exer-
cise, the last of the day, prior to sex. Sometimes he would try to talk
to her while brushing his teeth. His childlike aspect, his sincerity,
made her smile. He had been easy to love, for the most part. Any-
way, he hadn’t come with four children hanging from his belt.

Why was she in this bind, caught between Rolf and Oliver? Why

did it seem as if she was always in binds?

She thought that tomorrow night, on her radio show, she

would tell the story of the frog in the shoe, a story that Oliver had
told her, though she would need to tell it in such a way that it
wouldn’t be clear to her 266 listeners—or 267, if you counted Rolf,
who sometimes listened in—that she was having an affair (a rela-
tionship, whatever you wanted to call it) with Oliver. Or was Oliver
the frog in the shoe, a secret that she secretly wanted to get out in the
open?

How did such a secretive, shy person, a person who blushed so

easily, a person who had turned to jelly when teachers had called on
her in class, a person often afraid to speak her mind, how did such a
person become (for a few hours one night a week) a radio motor-
mouth, a virtual babbler? Well, when you were sitting there in your
swivel chair in your windowless room with the microphone sus-
pended before your mouth, not only were you invisible to your
audience, you were almost invisible to yourself. It was a little like
make-believe; you were sort of making yourself up as you went along.
The woman she made up in the WOOP studio one night a week was
generally lucid, candid, charming, sensitive—a well-adjusted twenty-
ﬁrst-century woman. If she could only spend seven nights a week at
the radio station.

Annelise looked up from the paper plate from which the dough-

nuts had vanished, leaving a trail of sugary shards and blackberry
smears. A noisy little car had pulled into the parking lot. From a gray-
ish Festiva emerged a large man in maroon-and-pumpkin-colored
robes: a monk, her meditation class monk, whose Buddhist name she

could never recall, though she did remember him once referring to
his pre-Buddhist name (Tom). He walked on his big sandaled feet
toward the Beaucoup Doughnuts door. He was about six-foot-two
and must have weighed at least 240 pounds, not a size that would
have made negotiating deﬁles in caves easy. Perhaps he had been
more slender in his youth. He walked sturdily upright and as if his
mind were focused only on the air he was moving through, as if he
were undistracted by thoughts of the future or the past. Or so she
wanted to imagine. He couldn’t have been thinking about a dough-
nut, could he? The hole in a doughnut, perhaps? He didn’t seem to
see her when he walked past and probably wouldn’t have recognized
her if he had seen her. He was carrying a small leather pouch, a purse
of sorts.

Her phone rang and she saw that it was Rolf. He would want to

know where she was. She didn’t want to tell him. She didn’t want to
be found.

The monk came back outdoors with a white paper bag and a

bottle of juice. She sucked up the last of her milk through her ﬂex-
ible straw. She wished she’d invented the ﬂexible straw or Velcro or
the Spork. She’d be sitting pretty (and probably elsewhere), happy
(maybe) in her own skin, her purse bulging with money that she
could give to people other than herself (and also to herself, a needy
person), happy to talk to a Buddhist monk if a Buddhist monk
wanted to talk to her. This time when he walked by, he glanced at her.
He nodded but continued on. Then he stopped and turned around
and said, “Thank you for being at class tonight.”

“I like your class,” she said. “Though I feel I’m still at zero,

meditation-wise, on a scale of ten.”

“There are no scales,” he said. “Come back next week if you can.”

He had a soft voice for someone who was so big and burly.

Annelise said, “OK,” though she didn’t know where she’d be next

week. She wanted to ask him to sit down and tell her everything he
knew about how to live happily. She wanted real advice, like how
to choose between two boyfriends, one of whom was married, like
what a good person would do in such a situation. She didn’t want to
hear any of that vague metaphorical stuff about caves and smoke.

“Maybe I’ll talk about my doughnut craving next time.” He held

the paper bag up and grinned. He had a wide mouth. She guessed
he’d been a good kisser before he gave it up.

She watched the monk get into his car and drive away. She

rubbed the bump on her forehead. It itched only a little now. She al-
most missed that it was no longer what it had been. It felt like after
sex, when the person you had been during sex had slinked away,
leaving a beetly shell behind.

The Frog in the Shoe

t was after midnight in Midvale and Robert lay on his bed, still as

a corpse, earphones clamped to his head. The red pepper party

lights strung between the windows were on. He wished they weren’t
on—he didn’t remember turning them on—but he didn’t feel like
getting up to turn them off. He was feeling a little queasy. A few
hours ago, he and his friend Ezra had drunk a bottle of warm char-
donnay that Ezra had stolen from his parents’ cupboard and then
they’d gone over to Hannah Woodcock’s house and watched an hour
of The Perfect Storm (which they’d both already seen, twice) and then
they walked down to the lake, where Ezra, who had chased the char-
donnay with thirty-two Oreos, threw up. The lake was scummy
with algae, and the Oreo bits and Ezra’s dinner (a submarine sand-
wich) mixed with the algae in the moonlight. Robert came home
with a headache that three ibuprofen hadn’t eased. His mouth tasted
of Oreos and spearmint chewing gum and Scope and coffee and the
wine. He had steeled himself against the thought of barﬁng. He
didn’t like the idea of his insides being sucked out in reverse. Ezra
had recommended it. “Just let it ﬂy, dude,” he’d said. Robert tried to
banish Ezra from his mind, but Ezra was hunkered down in Robert’s
front right lobe, grinning at him through his braces. “Just let it ﬂy,
dude.”

On the ceiling were the shine-in-the-dark stars pasted there when

Robert was a child. There were the seven stars that formed a “W”
and were supposed to represent a woman who got turned into stone
for bragging about her beauty. And there was the constellation that
was supposed to look like a horse and that Robert had always

thought looked like his brother Franklin’s head after it had been
twisted a few degrees to the right. Robert also thought there should
be a constellation called the Horse’s Ass. The horse’s tail would be
dreadlocked like Ezra’s hair. At Hannah’s, somewhere between the
twentieth and thirtieth Oreo, Ezra had stood on his head and sung
a Jurassic 5 song. He’d been hoping to impress Hannah’s friend
Merilee.

Robert was listening to the radio. A band called Talking Heads

was doing a song called “Totally Nude.” The song was heavy on
percussion and it had a kind of swinging-from-tree-to-tree jungle
rhythm. The guy singing about living free and naked had a high
voice that seemed like it might spin out of control any second. Rob-
ert stared at Cassiopeia, which, as everybody in Wisconsin knew and
as his dad had told him long ago, was a reminder to the rest of the
planet of the cosmic signiﬁcance of the Badger State. You didn’t see a
“NY” in the night sky, did you? Or an “IL”?

Robert felt a wave of nausea about to roll over him. He shut his

eyes.

“Totally Nude” was the third or fourth song in a row about na-

kedness. (The previous one was “You Can Leave Your Hat On,” by
an old rasper named Randy Newman.) The deejay, a woman named
Annelise, liked to play songs based on a theme. The other night, she
did a string of songs by people whose last name was Williams—Joe
and Lucinda and Dar and Victoria and Hank and Andy (crapola!)
and Mary Lou—and on another night she played a bunch of songs
having to do with ﬁsh or water. Even though she occasionally played
Macy Gray or My Morning Jacket or Modest Mouse or No Shoes,
Annelise deﬁnitely favored music by older people. She had a low,
soft, pleasing voice, like that of a professional counselor, somebody
who might try to talk you down from a tree or console you because
of a terminal illness your parent had. Robert imagined Annelise with
her mouth close to the microphone, her voice riding a wave out into
the night, ﬂoating into people’s ears like a vapor. She would say,
“This is Annelise, burning the midnight grease, and here is a song
for all of you who think you might wake up old some day.” (That
one was by a band called Wilco.) Or, “Hey, this is Annelise, and this

is WOOP, the whoop-de-doop on your FM dial, and this is a song
by . . .” This one might be by a fossil or a person she called “the late,”
the sort of singer Robert’s grandmother had listened to before she
got into religion: Peggy Lee, Vic Damone, Julius LaRosa, Mildred
Bailey, Bing Crosby. Annelise also played blues singers and people
who rubbed washboards or blew on the mouths of moonshine jugs
or shook rain sticks. She was all over the map. Once she played a re-
cording of Tibetan monks chanting, then some guy from Mongolia
singing in a voice that vibrated like an underground god’s, then Billy
Bragg singing a Woody Guthrie song about Ingrid Bergman, then a
Cuban rumba played by a band from Congo, then something from
Toad the Wet Sprocket. Some of the music was boring, but some
of it made Robert’s limbs feel light and buzzy. In elementary and
middle school, Robert had played the bull ﬁddle—his ﬁrst teacher
had decided that because Robert was tall, he should be a bassist—
but he’d quit after screwing up his solo in the eighth-grade spring
concert. At least he wouldn’t have to hump the ﬁddle to and from
school anymore.

“Totally Nude” ended and then Annelise said, “This is for the

fourteen-year-old boy lying in bed with a boombox on his chest.”
What Robert was listening to was actually a Discman, and the Disc-
man was on his bare stomach, but Annelise had come close enough
to the truth that Robert’s heart skipped a beat. It was almost as if she
had walked into his room and found him naked, his body dappled
with red pepper party lights. The song Annelise played was called
“Are You Out There,” by Dar Williams, which was about teenagers
who listened to late-night radio. Robert had heard the song dozens
of times. He’d bought the CD after he heard it on Annelise’s show.
He kept a picture of Dar Williams’s bare feet in his sock drawer. He
was not sure why he liked the picture—her feet looked like fairly
normal feet, with the usual array of tendons and veins and knobs,
except that her middle toe was wrinkled like a shar pei dog’s face. In
the CD picture, her rubber ﬂip-ﬂops were next to her feet, which
were next to a microphone stand. She had stepped out of ﬂip-ﬂops
to sing her songs. Robert had imagined Dar Williams going home
after a concert and sighing as she put her bare feet on an ottoman

and then thinking of a boy out in Wisconsin listening to late-night
radio. Robert felt pretty sure he could pick Dar Williams’s feet out of
a lineup.

Robert lifted his own feet from the tangle of bedding and con-

sidered them. They didn’t seem quite as walked-around-in as Dar
Williams’s, but they were, well, long, like boats, which is what some
short kid whose head was as big as a cinderblock had said, hoping to
convince Robert that he was a freak. Robert had inherited his length
and spindliness from his father, who, Robert would be the ﬁrst to
say, was sort of freaky when seen from certain angles, such as the
other night, when Robert was coming down the stairs and his father
was going up. His father was holding on to the banister, as if he was
afraid he’d miss a step, and his eyes were bloodshot beneath eye-
brows that stuck out like ledges, and his mouth was red, like he’d
been sucking on a cherry Popsicle. Oliver’s long hair, the gray begin-
ning to overshadow the blond or sandy or whatever color you called
it, looked windblown. Robert thought his father might have been
stoned—Robert had tried pot a couple times, with Ezra and Ross,
the dude who had said Robert’s feet looked like boats—and when he
glanced back at Oliver, after they’d wordlessly passed, he felt pretty
sure of it. On the back of his father’s shirt, between his shoulder
blades, was a sweat mark in the shape of a carrot. It was weird. It
wasn’t even hot that night.

Sometimes on her radio show Annelise read poems—the short

one she’d recited tonight was Japanese, something about the transi-
toriness of life and love, dew on a ﬂower vanishing before you knew
it—or she talked about stuff happening in Midvale. Once she’d
talked about this man she’d seen outside Walgreens brushing his
teeth with his ﬁnger, a guy who rode an old fat-tire bike with a little
rusted bell and jiggling blue fenders and a wicker basket roped to the
handlebars. He had a walrusy mustache (“He had to push his mus-
tache out of the way in order to brush, sort of lift it up like a skirt”)
and he wore his hair in a ponytail and he whistled energetically (“I
wonder if you can whistle more sharply with clean teeth and if he
would whistle even better if he trimmed his mustache”) and he kept
a toy rake and shovel and a beach bucket in his basket so that he

could remove dead animals from the road, should he come across
one in his travels around town. (Robert had seen him sitting on a
bench across from the Food Giant, reading Reader’s Digest, chuck-
ling.) Tonight, after the Dar Williams song ended, Annelise talked
about a mother giraffe at the Midvale Zoological Park, which had
died when it fell in its exercise yard, and then she talked about a
chicken-throwing contest she’d gone to over the weekend (“The
chickens were rubber, I’m glad to say”) and then she talked about
this other homeless guy, whom she saw the day the mother giraffe
died and then again a few mornings later, when she went for coffee
at Tout de Suite, and then a third time, just a couple hours ago, on
Winnebago Street, near the Greyhound station, when she went out
for a bite to eat.

“Do you ever think, when you keep bumping into the same per-

son, that it might be some kind of sign?” she asked her listeners. “Do
you believe in signs? Would it be just random luck that on two occa-
sions when you’re meeting your lover at some discreet location, you
see this guy in a purple wife-beater shirt and he’s pushing a grocery
cart full of stuff and he’s singing this Beatles song in a falsetto? I
know a man who repairs typewriters—I think he may be the only
one in Midvale—”

Robert, who happened to know that his father was one of two

typewriter repairmen in Midvale, the other being a Chinese man
whose wife did tailoring in a room above the typewriter shop, shifted
slightly in his bed. How would this disc jockey know Oliver, if he was
the person she was talking about? Robert scratched his armpit; a mos-
quito had bitten him there when Ezra was barﬁng into the lake.
Maybe Annelise was, like, into all kinds of old stuff, not just old
music. Maybe she was one of the ten people in Wisconsin who owned
a typewriter. Robert didn’t really understand why his father did the
work he did. It was almost like singing folk songs on the street and
waiting for somebody to drop a nickel in your hat.

“—he told me that one day he was riding his bike to work and he

saw a pair of green high heels in the middle of the road. They were
like party heels, with those pointy toes that hardly even your big toe
will squeeze into, something to dance in if you know how to dance

in those things. I don’t. I fall down when I try to stand up in ﬁve-
inch heels that are the width of sewing needles. Cyd Charisse, if you
recall, wore green heels in Singin’ in the Rain when she tried to se-
duce Gene Kelly. She looked so dangerous with those black bangs
and her long perfect legs, but it didn’t work out with Gene Kelly,
who liked his women a little less devilish. Anyway, the shoes were
just sitting there, on the yellow stripe, tumbled over but right next to
each other, like somebody had stepped out of them on her way to
bed, Mr. Poole said.”

So it was Robert’s dad whom Annelise knew. Robert thought it

was funny that she referred to Oliver as “Mr. Poole.” It made him
sound digniﬁed or something.

“Mr. Poole thought about those shoes all day while he was at

work, ﬁxing broken-down Royals and Olympias. He had a bunch of
theories about why the shoes were there, in the middle of the road.
They were somebody’s art project. Or maybe some kid with a pea-
shooter had set them there to entice someone like Mr. Poole to stop
and inspect the shoes so that the kid could shoot peas at him. Or
maybe the shoes had fallen off somebody’s shoe truck. Or maybe a
husband had thrown his wife’s shoes—the ones she’d cheated on him
with?—out the window of his car and they just somehow landed
next to each other, on the center line.”

Robert thought the theory about the kid with the peashooter

was better than the others. He used to own a peashooter. For a
while he had shot peas at a gnome statue that he bought for two
dollars at a garage sale because it looked like his algebra teacher,
Mr. Eckles.

“So, anyway, when Mr. Poole rode back home that evening, the

shoes were gone, and he thought, OK, well, maybe it was just some
random event. Like the death of an insect on your windshield.
Maybe a little weirder than that, but I don’t know, when you think
about a butterﬂy splattering against a car window, some beautifully
crafted piece of nature getting wiped out just because its ﬂight path
happens to coincide with where people drive their Dodge Caravans
eighty miles an hour so they can shop for shoes at the outlet mall. . . .
Anyway, when Mr. Poole went back to work the next morning, he

saw the high heels again. And this time he got off his bike to take a
closer look. He’s as curious as any cat with a nose, you know. Did I
say that Mr. Poole is well over six feet tall, unlike most cats?”

Robert wasn’t quite sure now about how he felt about the fact

that his father was the subject of a story on the radio—on late-night
radio, no less. What else did Annelise know about “Mr. Poole”? Did
she know that he liked Bugles and bought them in the party-size
bag? Did she know that he liked to sleep with his pillow folded in
half, that sometimes he slept with his mouth open (the gold cap on
a back molar glimmering like pirate treasure in the cave-dark) and
that when he slept in a supine position, he made death-rattle, cat-
expelling-a-hairball sorts of sounds? Did she know that Mr. Poole
had a son who listened to her show, who had size-11 feet, who had
spidery hairs sprouting in shadowy places, who was hoping to get
through the night without puking his guts out?

leo was having a dream, her forelegs twitching, her coat hopping

as if with bugs. When one of her eyelids lifted suddenly, revealing a
moist dark unseeing eye, Rolf, who was lying in bed, half-listening
to Annelise’s show, said, “Hey, girl, wake up.” He rubbed his toes
against her belly. Cleo shivered and then seemed to sigh, as if pleased
with the turn of events in her dream. Her eye closed again. Cleo
smelled of the lake, which she’d gone wading in about an hour ago,
during a walk with her master. Rolf had wiped her down when they
got back home, but not as thoroughly as he’d thought. There were
muskies and ducks and algae and drowned swimmers and motor-
boat fuel in the smell. There was a whiff of puke in the smell, too;
some kid just up the shore had blown lunch into the lake.

Rolf took a swig of Spotted Cow, then set it back on his belly.

This was his sixth or seventh bottle of the night. He’d had a few with
Sise and Carpenter and Braverman, while and after they played nine
holes at Hawkwood, which Sise, who was the chief of marketing at
the medical instruments company where they all worked, belonged
to. Sise was a pink-cheeked, pink-domed jellyman of jolliness, with
a passel of children (Rolf, an accountant, could never remember
how many: three or four, roughly) and a golf swing that was as

smooth as silk. Braverman, a computer tech guy who swung a 5-iron
as if it were a hatchet, said to Rolf as they were riding in a cart
between sand traps, “Why do you think overweight people are al-
ways so graceful?” Rolf said, “Because they want to make themselves
less conspicuous than they are?” Then Braverman, who wore tiny
square black glasses that Rolf found annoying, said, “Is it really
crude of me to say that I would love to get into Carpenter’s pants?”
It was unclear to Rolf why Sise had invited Braverman to play golf,
though it was true that Sise was nice to everybody at the company,
even to lowly tech guys. Braverman had been at Sise’s Halloween
party last fall, dressed as Ratty from Wind in the Willows, holding his
tail in his hand so people would stop stepping on it. Carpenter had
been there, too, in a lab jacket and bright green high heels and laven-
der latex exam gloves and, on her head, those sparkly heart-shaped
Styrofoam ears that bounce around on springs. (Rolf was unsure
what this costume was supposed to convey. Annelise had said, “Tarty
lab technician?”) Watching Carpenter swing her hesitant, hitch-
ﬁlled golf swing, Rolf said, “Yeah, B-man, it’s kind of crude.” An
hour later, in the Hawk’s Nest Grille, when Rolf felt Carpenter’s bare
knee touching his under the table, he’d smiled at her and hadn’t
withdrawn his knee (the right one, which had been scoped in 1999,
because of an old football injury). Carpenter, who was in her mid-
thirties, was unattached for some strange reason, but then so, techni-
cally, was Rolf, who was sneaking up on forty. Rolf was not at all sure
Annelise would ever commit to him. It kind of pissed him off, actu-
ally, her evasiveness, the way she was always saying her head wasn’t in
the right spot for marriage and babies and all that. Anyway, Annelise
was a liberal feminist wannabe-Buddhist Green Party–ite and he was
basically a Republican and also sort of a Catholic (though not much
of a churchgoer), and how they ended up in the same house he
couldn’t exactly say. (Well, he could: they were both drunk when
they met, and when they woke up the next morning, it seemed as if
they hadn’t completely satisﬁed a craving each had for the other.) It
was a peculiar relationship, when you got right down to it. Though
the sex, when it happened, was good.

On Annelise’s show, a woman with a guitar was whining about

love gone bad. Rolf had a fairly low tolerance for this sort of music

and he teased his girlfriend about it. He teased her, too, about the
old-time crooners she played. “I know you like older men, but these
guys are dead.” Not long after he’d said that, she gave him a tran-
sistor radio made in the sixties. “You can listen to me and some of
my favorite dead men on this, sweetheart,” she wrote. “Requires
battery.” For a few weeks, he had used the transistor to listen to her
show and to baseball games, but then he left it out on the deck one
damp night and it died. Now, he listened to her on the clock radio.
Usually, he didn’t make it all the way through the show, which ran
from eleven until two. After all, he had to get up in the morning for
work. Tomorrow, he had to get up earlier than usual. He was meet-
ing Carpenter for coffee at Tout de Suite at seven.

It was after ten when Rolf got home tonight. He’d taken Cleo for

a walk only because Cleo had given him that look that said, “If you
don’t walk me, I will chew a hole in your couch.” Rolf ’s legs had felt
heavy and his head was sodden with beer. He was short with Cleo
when the dog lunged at something she spotted under a bush and
shorter still when Cleo jumped at a cat hunkered on the hood of a
car ﬂying a skull and crossbones from its aerial. But he’d let her have
her way when they came upon a poodle and its mistress. The poodle
had one of those haircuts that made it look like topiary on four legs.
The poodle and Cleo went in circles snifﬁng each other, while the
poodle’s owner said to Rolf, “You’re the second beagle we’ve run into
tonight. Must be something in the air. I do like them, though.
They’re so doggy. It is a beagle, isn’t it?”

Rolf and Cleo had walked through the thick, buggy air toward

the lake, passing a tall man and a boy who were talking about the ef-
fects of zero gravity. The moon was up and shining, something Car-
penter had commented on in the golf club parking lot, near the end
of their conversation, which had been partly ofﬁce talk, partly about
Braverman’s outﬁt, the down-to-the-shins shorts and the grayish
polo shirt that had a zillion tadpole-like squiggles on it.

When Rolf and Cleo had neared the lake, he’d taken out his cell

phone and scrolled his way to Carpenter’s number. Should he cancel
the coffee date, or should he just get in the rowboat with Carpenter
and drift to wherever they drifted? He and Annelise weren’t going to
survive, were they? Didn’t he have the sense the other night, when

Annelise brushed him off in bed, that she was seeing somebody
else? He put his phone back in his Dockers, among the tees and ball
markers. As soon as he did, the phone jingled. He plucked it out
again. He hoped it might be Carpenter, but it turned out to be his
mother.

While Cleo explored the moon-whitened waters of Lake Winne-

bac, while twenty yards upshore some drunken kid puked and an-
other kid provided commentary (“I think you just killed three mus-
kies, Ezra”), Rolf talked to his mother. She wanted to know whether
he and Annelise planned to come up to the cottage on the St. Croix
next weekend. Rolf ’s sister and her husband would be there, with the
baby that Rolf ’s mother drooled over. Probably the Wendts would
come over on Saturday afternoon and they’d all go out on the ﬂoat
boat. Was Rolf still thinking that he and Annelise would get married
next summer on the pier?

Rolf thought of the third plank from the end on the Gravemeyer

family pier, in which he’d carved his initials with a buck knife in
1975, when he was nine. Twenty-eight years later, when he’d shown
Annelise the “RG”—the letters composed of straight little gashes,
softened by time—she had traced, with her ﬁnger, “+ AS,” and then
kissed him. She was a great kisser; you couldn’t teach what she knew.

Rolf had said to his mother, “There are a lot of variables.”
Now, lying in a bed that smelled of Cleo and the lake, he heard

his housemate, a late-night radio voice, say, “Do you believe in signs?
Would it be just random luck that on two occasions when you’re
meeting your lover at some discreet location, you see this guy in a
purple wife-beater shirt and he’s pushing a grocery cart full of stuff
and he’s singing this Beatles song in a falsetto?” Rolf scratched his
neck—a mosquito bit him while he and Cleo dallied by the lake—
and waited for Annelise to say more about the guy in the purple shirt
who turned up at these lovers’ trysts. She didn’t. Now she was talking
about a typewriter repairman named Mr. Poole—probably the duf-
fer who’d sold Annelise the antique typewriter she’d given Rolf for
his birthday, a gift that bafﬂed him—and the green high heels Mr.
Poole saw in the middle of the road. This was one of those ﬂaky
independent radio stories that Annelise would sometimes tell him

while they were lying in bed, almost as if she were babbling in her
sleep. Rolf heard the story with one ear, but what his beer-slowed
brain was trying to ﬁgure out was whether the lover Annelise just re-
ferred to was her lover. But why, if she were having somebody on the
side, would she reveal it on radio? Annelise tended to be secretive,
with him, anyway. He happened to know what music she wanted
played at her funeral (old stuff, including “Moon River”), but he
didn’t know anything about her parents or about the boyfriends who
had preceded him (except that a couple were, like him, older) or why
she would suddenly turn cold on him and show him her shoulder
blades and, if her hair was up, the knobs of a couple of cervical verte-
brae. He didn’t ask her many questions anymore; it was almost easier
not knowing whom he lived with.

As Annelise rambled on about the high heels and how the type-

writer duffer had found a dead frog in the toe of one, Rolf went into
the bathroom and peed. You only rented beer—a high school saying
that was actually true. Beer, love—the stuff passed through your sys-
tem, and in the morning you had a headache, maybe some regrets,
and then you started over. Annelise’s voice was faint now. When Rolf
ﬂushed, he could no longer hear her. He stood before the mirror and
leaned forward. He looked at his bloodshot eyes and the cleft in his
chin and his goatish running-back shoulders, on which dark hairs
were sprouting. He was somewhere between a moderately hairy per-
son and an immoderately hairy person, though the hair on his head,
where it counted most, was receding. Someday, he imagined, he
would stand before the mirror with his head looking like his shoul-
ders now looked and his shoulders looking like his head now looked.
He took his electric shaver from the drawer and ﬂicked it on and ran
it over the dark shoots on his shoulders and as far down his back as
he could reach. Then, quickly, like a kid seized by an impulse, he
shaved a C—for Carpenter? Cleo? cuckold?—in his chest hair. The
C was backward but in the mirror it looked correct. He put the
shaver away and brushed his teeth with his Marvin the Martian
toothbrush. Annelise was playing the Beatles song that the bum in
the wife-beater shirt sang. Rolf put his toothbrush back in the cup,
next to Annelise’s Scooby-Doo toothbrush. He took a bottle of

perfume from Annelise’s drawer full of perfumes and lotions and
magic potions, and went back into the bedroom. The perfume was
called Cielo and it smelled like Annelise the ﬁrst time they kissed.
Rolf spritzed Cleo with it. Cleo raised her head, looked at Rolf in
astonishment, sniffed her midsection, then laid her head back down.
“Would you like to go on a date with that poodle, Cleo?” Rolf asked.
He turned off Annelise’s show, set the alarm to a different station,
turned off the table lamp, and lay in the dark with his eyes wide
open, a burning sensation in his right knee, where Carpenter had
touched it.

liver sat under the catalpa, a bag of Bugles in his lap, Walkman

headphones on his ears. Annelise was at the point in her story where
Oliver found the dead frog in the toe of one of the high heels and
had said, “Jiminy!” In her balmy radio voice that a few tokes of mar-
ijuana had inﬂuenced, Annelise added, “Mr. Poole is the sort of man
who uses words like ‘Jiminy!’ and ‘Crimini!’ He is a throwback. He
is the one person in the world I would buy a used typewriter from, if
I were in the mood for a used typewriter. Which, on certain nights
of the week, I am. I like the way an old Underwood will transmit
thoughts or desires to paper, the way the keys kiss that fresh white
premium bond or the onionskin through the black (or red, if you’re
in the mood for red) veil of the ribbon.”

When Oliver had seen Annelise earlier this evening, at his shop,

she’d said, “Will you listen to my show tonight?” They were in the
back room on the sofa, a tattered plaid thing where, before he’d met
Annelise, Oliver took his almost daily post-lunch nap. The room
smelled of squash curry—takeout from a Thai restaurant down the
street. The food had arrived while Oliver and Annelise were kissing
against the tall metal cabinet where Oliver kept spare typewriter
parts. Annelise was on her tiptoes, biting Oliver on the lower lip,
and the cabinet, which was tippy, was wobbling. When Oliver came
back from paying the delivery boy (and putting the “Closed” sign on
the front door), Annelise had said, “Could we fuck now and eat
later? I’m kind of craving you.” It was only the sixth time they’d
made love—Oliver preferred this term to the ones that Annelise,

perhaps because of her youth, favored—and at one point, when
Annelise was on top, she’d put her hand on his throat and pressed
down. Her eyes looked glazed over, as if she were stoned. (She wasn’t;
she’d smoke her pre-show joint later.) She was gripping his throat
and staring at the wall behind him, where he’d hung the poster of the
monkeys in frilled Elizabethan collars gleefully banging away on
typewriters, and for a moment Oliver had wondered who the person
on top of him was. It was as if Annelise had been seized by a memory
and carried off and now there was an alternate Annelise on him. Her
hair was tied in a topknot, and the bones of her face seemed more se-
vere than they actually were. They were like corners he couldn’t see
around. He had to pry her hand from his windpipe, say her name,
draw her back from wherever she’d gone. When they were ﬁnished,
she began to sob. She said between sobs that she loved him, really.
Oliver said, “What is it? Tell me, please.” He’d stroked her hair, try-
ing to coax an answer from her. She was sweaty at the temples. Her
nape was damp. Her shoulders shook. He ran his ﬁnger along the
rim of her ear. “What is it?” he said again. At last, she said, “Nothing.
Everything. I feel so inarticulate.” Oliver said, “Tell me,” and she
said, “You don’t want to know. You don’t want to know who you’re
fucking on the side. Whom, I mean.” She snifﬂed, wiped her nose
on the back of her hand. Oliver said that he loved her, that he didn’t
regard his relationship with her to be “on the side,” and that he
wanted to know everything about her. She said, “No, you don’t, ac-
tually.” She got up from the sofa and took her hair out of its topknot
and then she put it back into a topknot. She dabbed at her eyes with
her ﬁngers. Oliver said, “I love you, Annelise. I’m crazy about you.”
At that moment he saw himself—a month from now? two months
from now?—eating out of cans in this back room that had one
window (so ﬁlthy it didn’t need a curtain); Annelise would still be
shacked up with her boyfriend, Oliver’s four boys would refuse to see
him, the typewriter repair business would be worse than the joke it
was now. She sat down on the sofa again. He was lying on his side
and his mouth was near her knee. She asked him to recite the Japa-
nese poem he’d memorized from the Everyman’s love poems. He said
the words to her knee (“Come quickly—as soon as these blossoms

open . . .”) and to her hipbone (“they fall”) and to her nipples. “This
world exists as a sheen of dew on ﬂowers.” She kissed him on the
cheek and asked him if he was going to listen to her show tonight,
and then she stood up and put on her blue underwear with the frog
on the crotch. She took a pen from her purse and wrote something
on the palm of her hand. She held her palm up, but he couldn’t
make the words out. His eyes, once as ﬁne as a pilot’s, were weaken-
ing. She moved closer. Her palm said “come quickly,” a reminder.
He saw her looking at his penis lying there like a little dog curled up.
She smiled at him. It was a wan smile. Was she remembering that, a
few minutes ago, she had nearly squeezed the air out of him? She put
on her No Shoes T-shirt and then her low-riding jeans and sandals.
Annelise said nothing and neither did Oliver. He heard a ﬂy buzz-
ing; then he heard Rick, the guy from the tattoo parlor next door,
humming the Willie Nelson song he always hummed when he went
out back to smoke a cigarette and pet his mutt. When Annelise left,
she said, “I love you.” She didn’t take any of the Thai food with her,
except for both fortune cookies. She had a collection of fortune
cookie fortunes.

Oliver didn’t eat any of the Thai food, either. He’d put the bag in

the mini-fridge, alongside his eyeshade. He didn’t remember having
put his eyeshade in the refrigerator, though, come to think of it,
wearing a chilled eyeshade on a hot day like today made sense. He’d
locked up the shop and mounted his bicycle and pedaled toward
home through the dusk, wondering if his wife would be able to see
on his face that he was in love with another woman. When would
everything be revealed? He thought of Annelise in her underwear
holding her palm out to him, as if to show him a boo-boo. As he
chugged up the hill where the green high heels had been set, he didn’t
think about them. They had long since disappeared, anyway. He
didn’t think about them again until later tonight, when he got out of
bed (Diana was soundly asleep) and got his Walkman and a bag of
Bugles and went outside and sat under the catalpa tree with its leaves
the size of funeral home hand-fans.

The chair Oliver sat in was one of two that he’d assembled from a

kit fourteen years ago, when Diana was eight months pregnant with

their ﬁrst child. They’d lived in a different house then, a ﬁve-room
bungalow that Diana had owned with her ﬁrst husband (an aca-
demic with a wandering eye) and which she’d ended up with in the
divorce agreement. There was an old apple tree in the backyard, and
Oliver had put the redwood chairs under it. Sometimes he’d sat
there with Robert in his lap, identifying sounds for Robert (“That’s
a crow and that’s a crow and that’s our neighbors, the Woodcocks,
yelling at each other”), cooing to Robert (“That’s a dad-bird”), wish-
ing that Diana, who slaved for a law ﬁrm, would come home early so
that they could make more babies like Robert. Oliver liked the idea
of falling asleep with a house full of sleeping children. And so—
bang, bang—Franklin and Hamilton came to live in the ﬁve-room
bungalow. The walls shook with shouts and Ham woke up from
dreams containing ambiguous creatures and Oliver’s back gave out a
couple of times because his children rode him like a horse and re-
quired him to play football on his knees. A year or so after Hank, the
last child, was born, they’d moved into a larger house, one with high
ceilings and plenty of closet space and hardwood ﬂoors for skating
around in sock feet on, a house suitable for four sprouting boys and
a matrimonial lawyer (Diana had made partner by then) and a cat
and a typewriter repairman who needed a spot to put his drills and
saws so that he could make more chairs and maybe a hat rack or
two. There were six heads under the roof of this house, and baseball
caps and tasseled wool hats and belled jester caps and stiff little cow-
boy hats and rain hats were proliferating, ﬂoating around like leaves,
settling where the wind or whim took them.

Oliver sat up straight when Annelise recited the Japanese poem

about the blossoms falling. (What a quick study she was! Ah, youth!
How he and his half-century-old head had labored to memorize
those lines!) Though her gloss on the poem, that love was like trying
to hold water in your hands and splash it on your face before it all
dribbled away, worried him. Was she falling out of love with him?
What was it that she couldn’t tell him about herself earlier tonight?
He worried again when Annelise referred to the homeless man who
had turned up at their trysts and he worried even more when Anne-
lise segued into the story about “Mr. Poole” and the green shoes. It

was as if she was leaking, in a you-connect-the-dots sort of way,
their relationship. Was she revealing it in order to end it? What if
her boyfriend was listening? Wouldn’t he—what was his name?
Rudolph? Ralph?—be able to tell from her descriptions of the “very
tall,” somewhat eccentric Mr. Poole that she was seeing him? Weren’t
the lines about sometimes being in the mood for a typewriter a dead
giveaway? Did that mean she was in the mood for him only now and
then?

When Oliver ﬁrst told Annelise the story about the high heels,

the day they slept together for the ﬁrst time, at the Blue Earth Motel,
she’d said, “Would you mind if I use that on my show, in the part
where I babble?” Oliver asked, “Will you attribute it to me?” and An-
nelise had said, “I will attribute it to a certain older, bicycle-riding,
typewriter-repairing gentleman I happen to know. I won’t say I know
you in a biblical way. I won’t say I love you, though it’s a fact that I
do.” She’d also said, “Maybe it’ll be good for business. Maybe there’ll
be a line outside your door the morning after. Maybe all 266 of my
listeners are members of a Secret Typewriter Society.” He asked her if
she wrote the stories down, reﬁned them before airing them, and she
said, “No. I do fringe radio. It’s not NPR.” She was different on
radio from how she was in, well, life—less shy, less circumspect.

After Annelise did her riff about sometimes being in the mood

for a typewriter and the charge she got out of the sound of the keys
striking the premium bond, after she played “Paperback Writer” and
then “People Will Say We’re in Love” (an odd choice, or perhaps
not, given the line about carving a lover’s initials in a tree, given the
fact that Annelise seemed to be carving Oliver’s initials in the air),
she said, “So here is the very tall Mr. Poole, in his go-to-work
clothes, bent over an Italian-made size-7 high heel that happens to
have a frog in the toe. The frog is not living, though it’s in pretty
good condition for a dead one. It hasn’t been squished or anything—
no obvious wounds, no blood. Was it gassed, chloroformed? In the
toe of the other shoe is a little chunk of concrete. What does all of
this signify, Mr. Poole wonders again? Is it, like, some sort of voodoo
thing? Is it performance art and maybe Mr. Poole is being video-
taped as he inspects it? Is some guy—only a guy would do this,

right?—conveying a message to his girlfriend for, let’s say, cheating
on him, maybe while wearing these particular shoes? Mr. Poole, who
sometimes wears a fedora when he goes out to lunch, scratches his
head. Mr. Poole has a lot of hair. It is sandy brown with a few threads
of silver in it. Did I say that Mr. Poole doesn’t wear a bicycle helmet?
In my opinion, typewriter repairmen should wear helmets.”

Oliver ate a Bugle, heard it crunch under the sound of the radio.

As the subject of his girlfriend’s monologue, he felt not only exposed
but also disembodied, as if he didn’t quite possess himself. He won-
dered if she was actually amused by him, by his height and his anti-
quated trade and his quaint expressions and his age. Did she simply
see him as, relatively speaking, good material? Wasn’t the “Mr. Poole”
of her narrative just one remove from some doddering joke? But he
had heard love and affection in Annelise’s voice, too, hadn’t he? He
had reason to believe that she loved him—loved him in fact for his
water-bird legs and the gray in his hair (more, actually, than a “few
threads”) and his old-fashionedness, all those things he was a little
thin-skinned about. He thought he would die if she didn’t love him.
He was at the point where he needed her more than he needed water.
He had gone halfway out of the house for her, and he was not sure
that he could or wanted to stop himself. He felt like he was stepping
off a high step and there, below him, was the duct-taped medicine
ball that one of his children had bought on a lark. If he didn’t adjust
his stride in midair, he would break his neck.

Annelise played “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” and Oliver

leaned his head against the back of the redwood chair—fourteen
years after assembly, it was wasp’s-nest gray and splintery and loose
at the joints—and looked up at his house, which was dark except for
the two windows lit by a string of red lights. That would be Robert’s
room—his oldest, least forthcoming child keeping himself company
as the moon, an eyeful, slid westward. Oliver wiggled his toes in the
cool grass. When he’d come home from the shop this evening,
Franklin was cutting the yard with the reel mower. “Hey, Dad,”
Franklin said later, when he was ﬁnished. Oliver, the scent of Anne-
lise still on him, was at the desk in the study, looking at a primer on
Zen meditation he’d borrowed from the library. “You owe me eight

bucks,” Franklin said. Oliver’s wallet had been empty. He’d spent all
his cash on Thai takeout.

t two-thirty, Robert, having barfed and then dozed and then

awakened as if renewed, went downstairs to the kitchen and made
two peanut-butter-and-butter sandwiches. (Fortunately, somebody,
probably Frankenstein, who had been known to lick butter right off
the knife, had left the butter out. It was easier to spread that way.)
From the fridge Robert grabbed a Mountain Dew and headed out
the back door.

Robert didn’t mind Midvale or the world in general when just

about everybody in it was asleep. He was a night person. In daylight,
he felt drowsy and brainless, with no more ambition than a dog
slumping around in the heat, trying to ﬁnd a quiet spot to nap in.
Robert’s father, presumably wishing to be funny, once asked him
if he was part-vampire. (Ham, with whom Robert sometimes felt
an afﬁnity, said, with a touch of indignation, “You can’t be part-
vampire, Dad. You are either a whole vampire or a human who stays
up late.”) When Robert was out walking at three or four in the
morning, he felt like his ears and eyes and nose were the doors of a
stuffy house that had suddenly been ﬂung open. The seven thou-
sand hairs on his body—on his legs and arms and head and in his
pits and on the tops of his big toes—were like antennae, picking up
signals from all over. He felt free. It was true that he had to be on
guard for the fuzz-man, though the chances of seeing one in this
neighborhood were low, about as low as the likelihood of seeing a
pair of green high heels in the middle of the street. Anyway, he didn’t
worry about cops much, even when he strayed from the neighbor-
hood and went across the railroad tracks and across the six-lane
boulevard that split the town (so local wags said) into Left and Left
Out. (The designation of Robert’s neighborhood as, politically
speaking, purely Left, was inaccurate; Mrs. Stark, who owned the
poodle with the freaky haircut, was a fervent Republican, in favor,
according to Ezra, of the electrocution of abortionists and sassy ado-
lescents.) When Robert was out walking in the midnight dark, he
felt smart, elusive, more or less invulnerable.

Robert turned off Wright Way, onto Wilder Lane. (Wright Way

was named after the architect dude who wore the cape and who had
built a few houses in the area. “Is this the right way?” Robert’s father
had said far too many times, as they made the ﬁnal turn for home.)
Robert stopped outside of Ezra’s house. Ezra’s bedroom window was
full of blue computer light. Robert wondered if Ezra had made it
up to bed without being found out by his parents. Probably. After
Ezra had barfed and they’d gone over to the PDQ to get a cup of cof-
fee, Ezra had said he was ready to go stand on his head at Hannah’s
again. Robert had said he would skip watching Ezra puke one more
time.

Robert ﬁnished his second peanut-butter-and-butter sandwich,

took a sip of Mountain Dew, and continued on up Wilder. At the
corner of Wilder and Winnequah, Robert went left. He heard in-
sects and air conditioners and a small dog, the sort that would yip at
a shadow of itself. He caught a whiff of Asian food; somebody had
had a late dinner of fried rice. He heard a door shut, a toilet ﬂush.
Above the trees, he saw the spaces between stars, all that blackness
between those white specks. What would it be like to ﬂoat around in
space, looking for a habitable star, one not too hot or too stony or
too cold? Mars, which had been so close recently, he couldn’t ﬁnd.
Probably he was looking in the wrong direction. He touched a mail-
box that was the shape of a cat—tapped it on its nose pull. He heard
a jingle, like the sound an actual belled cat might make. Or was it
someone jingling coins in his pocket? Up ahead, under the street-
light, was a man whose height gave Robert pause. The man looked
exactly like Robert’s father looked when Oliver was standing around
looking lost or puzzled or wishing he had a better place than his
pockets to put his hands. The man was clearly—infuckingdubitably,
as Ezra liked to say—Robert’s father. Robert stepped off the sidewalk
and crouched behind a car. His father was the last person Robert
wanted to come across in the dark; it was worse than bumping into
your algebra teacher at the mall and seeing that he moussed his hair
into spikes on weekends. His father was like a black hole, inescap-
able. First, he was on a radio show. (What was the point of that
story, anyway? Annelise, the disc jockey, said, at the end, “And the

moral is? I’m not sure. Don’t put a dead frog in somebody’s shoe
and leave it in the middle of the street, maybe? It may seem cool or
inscrutably clever or meaningless in a meaningful way, but it’s not
funny or kind or tender or loving.”) And now here he was again, the
tall, fedora-wearing celebrity typewriter repairman known as Mr.
Poole, standing in the three a.m. dark, sucking the air right out of
things.

For a long moment, Robert watched his father standing there,

motionless, like a lawn ornament. He was wearing shorts and san-
dals and his Old Hatters baseball shirt. He was either in a trance
or looking into somebody’s house. Was he a Peeping Tom? When
Oliver suddenly turned and started back up the sidewalk, Robert
ducked. He listened to his father’s footsteps. They soon stopped,
and Oliver said, “Hey, kitty. Hey, Mr. Kitty. You’re up late.” His
voice was soft and even, but he sounded crazy, too. And where was
the cat he was talking to?

A moment later, Robert stood where his father had stood and

looked at the house his father had been looking at. A man and a
woman—he was in boxers and nothing else; she was fully dressed—
were facing each other, like two actors in a play. She was small,
maybe a half-foot shorter than he was, even with the spray of hair
shooting up from the top of her head. A ﬂoor lamp with a shade like
a coolie hat lighted the room. On one wall was a black-and-white
photograph of clouds or the ocean, something vague and soothing.
The furniture was spare: a big brown couch and a matching arm-
chair and an entertainment cabinet. The couple seemed to be at a
point in their discussion or argument where silence had taken over,
where they could hear the blood rushing in their heads along with
the insects ticking in the dark beyond the windows. Robert pressed
his thumb into the Mountain Dew can. The metal popped and the
woman looked his way. Or perhaps she was just looking away from
the man. Her face had sharp edges.

The man said something and the woman ﬂinched, as if he’d

caught her having a nasty thought. She glanced back at the man,
then turned away again. The man continued to talk, aiming his
words directly at the woman’s proﬁle. His hands would jab at the air

and then suddenly come open, as if he expected her to ﬁll them with
something—answers, perhaps. At one point, a dog began to bark
and the man said—these were the ﬁrst words of his that Robert
could clearly make out—“Shut up, just shut the fuck up, you stupid
mutt.” Robert couldn’t see the dog, which continued to bark. When
the woman leaned down, disappearing from Robert’s ﬁeld of vision,
Robert thought she must be trying to comfort the dog. Probably the
dog didn’t like it when its master and mistress fought. Then the man
said something and the woman rose up and extended her hand to-
ward his chest. He pushed it away. A second later, there was nobody
in the room.

Robert felt stupid looking at nothing. He felt stupider than his

father had looked when he was watching these people. It was time to
go home. The night had been ruined.

The Weather in Iowa

t eleven on the morning after the night she did the show that

included the story about Oliver ﬁnding the dead frog in the

green high heel, Annelise put underwear and her toothbrush and a
week’s worth of tops and a book by a Buddhist nun in an overnight
bag, left the bed in the room where she’d slept alone unmade, ﬁlled
Cleo’s food bowl, wrote a note to Rolf on a Post-it and then recon-
sidered and stuck it in the pocket of her shorts, took her Bing
Crosby Christmas CD out from under a beer bottle and put it in her
purse along with the ﬁfty Rolf had left in a pickle jar for “a rainy day”
(thunderstorms were predicted), and went out the door and got into
her car. The Metro was, as always, a sty, full of paper coffee cups and
coffee cup lids and coffee cup jackets and oddments of clothing and
CDs and sun-warped LPs and receipts for things she shouldn’t have
bought (how many tank tops did she need?) and debris that must
have blown in during a tornado, but she found a place for her suit-
case on the back seat, on top of a sack of clothes she’d been meaning
to take to Goodwill. She glanced at herself in the rearview mirror—
puffy eyes, a blemish on her cheekbone, unhappiness written in
block letters across her brow from which her hair had been tightly
pulled back, as if in self-mortiﬁcation—and began a search for her
sunglasses. It wasn’t sunny out now—the sky was leaden, the air
thick with humidity—but she thought sunglasses would help her
mood. Coffee would help her mood. A Bing Crosby Christmas song
would help her mood. Leaving Midvale would help her mood. She
was planning to drive to Iowa to see her grandmother, who was
ninety-ﬁve.

Annelise found her sunglasses on the passenger seat, under a

hoodie (where she also found her lucky three-legged pig and her dope
pipe, which she then stashed under the seat). She reexamined herself
and saw a slight improvement. At any rate, she felt less exposed. She
started the car, put it into reverse, and the door of the glove com-
partment ﬂopped open. She’d bought the car used a year ago. It had
67,000 miles on it now. The salesman, a square-shouldered, crew-cut
older man named Gus, had taken a hundred dollars off the sticker
price after Annelise pointed out a cigarette hole in the back of the
front passenger seat and after the glove compartment door kept fall-
ing open during the test drive.

She put the car into neutral and pushed the glove compartment

door until it seemed to latch. She saw Cleo sitting at the living room
window, watching her. Dogs knew when you were getting the hell
out of Dodge, didn’t they? She put the car into reverse again. When
she turned her head and looked back, she saw a man standing at the
end of the driveway, arms folded across his chest, legs spread like a
cowboy who had just dismounted from a horse. He was looking her
dead in the eye. He was thin, fat, tall, short, fair-haired, gray-haired,
no-haired, pale, pink, tanned, café au lait, stubble-faced, clean-
shaven, smirking, difﬁdent, thin-lipped, toothy, toad-eyed. He was
the man who in her dreams gave her advice on extermination proce-
dures; he was the man who asked her to reach into his pocket and
help herself to a handful of fairy dust; he was the man who taught
her piano when she was a child, who had guided her hand toward
his one-eyed baby elephant, as he had so cleverly called it; he was
the man whom she blamed for her hesitations and fears and poor
decisions. If she’d been raised a nice upper-middle-class girl, pro-
tected from the world by money and watchful parents, would she
be having these hallucinations now, if they were in fact hallucina-
tions? She couldn’t say, though she knew a rich girl in college whose
childhood—whose life!—had been ruined by some fucked-up uncle,
a girl who was a total basket case. She slapped the steering wheel. The
glove compartment door ﬂopped open.

Her phone was ringing. She guessed it was Oliver, but she didn’t

open her purse to check. She remembered the time she and Oliver

did it in her car, the effort it took to get the jeans off his long legs.
She remembered him saying that his grandparents on his father’s
side had been short people and that a Metro would have been just
the car for them.

She didn’t want to think about Oliver or Rolf or Cleo or Oliver’s

wife or Oliver’s children or Oliver’s grandparents or Rolf ’s other girl-
friend if he had one. She wanted to go sit with her grandmother in
Iowa and eat applesauce and canned corn and mashed potatoes and
then watch the sun set on the pines behind the nursing home while
her grandmother described how she spoke German in her dreams to
her long-dead husband, a butcher.

Annelise backed out into the street and pointed the car in the

direction of Tout de Suite. She saw that the red ﬂag on the mailbox
was up. Maybe Rolf had renewed his subscription to The Weekly
Standard or maybe he had paid a bill. He was good at paying bills
and would sometimes (last night, for instance) point out that he
paid for almost everything, including her payments on (as he put it)
“that piece of shit Metro.” There was garbage, three black bags of
it, stacked next to the mailbox, and on top was the typewriter she’d
given Rolf for his birthday. It was in the garbage because, she as-
sumed, Rolf had correctly deduced that she was having a relation-
ship with Oliver or, as she called him on her radio show, Mr. Poole.
She had denied this when they’d had their standoff last night—“He’s
just a friend, Rolf, somebody to have a conversation with”—but she
hadn’t convinced him. She had even made (against her better judg-
ment, such as it was in the heat of the moment) some effort to mol-
lify Rolf. She’d been scared that he would put her out on the street
that very instant. He was drunk and the crease between his eyebrows
was as deep as a gash. His Adam’s apple stood out like a sore. The
words that came out of his mouth were stiff, combative monosyl-
lables. And then there was the backward C that he’d shaved into his
chest hair, which he got all angry about when she asked about it.
She’d felt weak, incapable of intelligent speech, so she had appealed
to his weakness, that weakness that every male she had ever encoun-
tered had, and offered him her hand, more than a simple kindness,
which he’d pushed away. She had gone then into the guest bedroom,

which was ﬁlled with things from his boyhood, including a mini-
ature canoe he’d made from birch bark and a photo of himself ﬁsh-
ing off the end of the Gravemeyer dock on the St. Croix. The canoe
and picture were on a small cedar desk, where, at four in the morn-
ing, Annelise sat writing, “I will not be a liar and a cheat anymore, I
will not be a liar and a cheat anymore,” until her hand began to
cramp. At one point—or did she dream all of this?—she heard Rolf
say her name, but she kept on writing and didn’t answer.

Crows had awakened her at ten-thirty. Rolf was long gone. There

were messages on her cell phone from Oliver, but she didn’t listen to
them. She had asked herself again why she had revealed in so many
words—broadcast, for all within ﬁfty-odd miles to hear—her rela-
tionship with Oliver, and she said, “Because I am a coward and it
was easier than telling Rolf directly? Because I am a coward and I
was hoping to expose Oliver so that he’ll go away?”

Annelise got out of the car and lifted the typewriter from the pile

of garbage. The only thing Rolf had ever typed on it, on the night
she gave it to him, was “I am 38 today!!!” (Rolf hadn’t seemed to be
the sort to use exclamation points, which on the Royal were fash-
ioned by typing an apostrophe on top of a period, but then it was his
birthday and he was high on tequila.) She put the typewriter in the
passenger seat, on top of her hoodie and the ﬂiers and magazines and
CDs. She didn’t know what she’d do with it, but she didn’t want Rolf
to be the one to dispose of it.

This was the second time she had rescued the typewriter from—

what was the phrase?—the dustbin of history. Now, not quite two
months later, driving down Winnequah Street, she thought it would
make good sense to stop seeing the typewriter’s restorer. She slid the
Bing Crosby disc into the player. (“This isn’t a top-of-the-line sys-
tem,” Gus the salesman had told her in a moment of candor, “but
you can play all your tunes on it. What would life be like without
music to drive around to, eh?”) She listened to Bing Crosby sing “Si-
lent Night.” His smooth baritone usually made her feel lucky and
carefree and charitable to all humankind, as if she had just downed
a shot of cherry-ﬂavored NyQuil. Now, when she heard his voice,
she thought she might cry. “All is calm, all is bright,” Bing Crosby

crooned so reassuringly. She hardly ever cried, but a tear was rolling
down her cheek when she drove by Max Moore’s bungalow. She
didn’t notice Max, who was on his knees, looking for his car keys,
which may have fallen out of his pocket last night while he and his
date lay in his hammock. Nor did she register the goldﬁnches swarm-
ing the mulberry tree she had eaten from not so long ago or the kid
on the bike who bore a striking resemblance to Oliver. She was crying
for herself, for the hash she’d made of her life. The world was a blur.

In the potholed parking lot behind Tout de Suite, she wiped

away her tears and stared at the yellow-brick wall before her. In big
black block letters somebody had written “Phoque Now.” She was
not interested in “phoquing” now or anytime soon, if “phoque”
meant what she assumed it meant.

With Rolf ’s ﬁfty, she bought a sixteen-ounce latte and a chaser

cup of Ethiopian and a pastry that looked like a hot cross bun and
was ﬁlled with honey and almonds and Middle Eastern mysteries.
Sugar would brighten her mood, she thought, as she drizzled the
ﬁrst of two packets of it into the Ethiopian brew. Emile, whose glis-
tening black mustache was as thick as a pelt, whose black wavy hair
looked sometimes as if it were ﬂecked with confectioner’s sugar, put
Annelise’s breakfast on a cardboard carrier. Emile, who had recently
come to believe that he was being watched by agents of the Bush ad-
ministration, said to Annelise, “I listen to your show last night. It
upsets me, this story about the frog in the shoe. I have bad dreams all
night. The police make me walk in ladies’ shoes to entertain them,
you know? And so I am wondering, when I see this very tall man,
this Mr. Poole, who buys his coffee here this morning, who I have
seen with you, I am wondering when I see his long face like his dog
has died this morning, I am wondering why. And you, my friend”—
he leaned forward, as if wishing to inspect her eyes and the drying
trails of tears below them—“I hope your dog has not died, too.”

Annelise said, “No, the dog is well. My allergies are acting up.”

She adjusted her sunglasses. “Do you think it will rain today? Will I
need my parapluie ?”

Emile shrugged and placed a folded napkin on the tray. “It made

me think, your story about the frog.”

“Thank you for tuning in, Emile,” Annelise said, and turned

away.

“Thank you for playing Miss Dolly Parton,” he called after her.

“‘Coat of Many Colors’ is my favorite. And you are my favorite
radio star, Annelise.”

She gave a tiny wave, that of a radio star who is going to Iowa to

escape her troubles. When she came around the corner of the build-
ing into the parking lot, she halted in her tracks. A man was leaning
against her car, smoking. It was the homeless man, the one who
turned up wherever she went. He had parked his shopping cart, a
new, unburned one, next to her car, and he was wearing a red child-
size cowboy hat that sat atop his Afro like a cherry on a parfait.

Annelise considered going back inside Tout de Suite and waiting

for the man to vanish. But she wanted to hit the road now, beat the
trafﬁc to Iowa, and so she walked toward her car with her tray of caf-
feine and sugar. Would he want money? She had some of Rolf ’s to
hand out.

When she was close enough that she could read the writing in the

dust that coated the car—“Wash me squeeze me love me,” it said on
the driver’s door—the man stepped aside. He doffed his hat but said
nothing. She thought she might get away scot-free.

She put the tray on the roof of the Metro and dug around in her

shorts for her keys.

The man said, “I was admiring your typewriter. I used to own

one of those, but some drug addict stole it right out of my cart.
Would you want to trade me yours? I got a two-volume Oxford En-
glish Dictionary I’m nearly ﬁnished with. It comes with a magnify-
ing glass, in case you can’t read type smaller than lice.”

Annelise pulled the clump of keys from her shorts. The Post-it

she wrote to Rolf fell, unnoticed by her, in the dirt and mashed
gravel. She said to the homeless man, “You can have the typewriter.
You want it? Yeah. It’s yours.”

The man said, “Hey, cool. My ﬁngers are itching to go. I got stuff

to write.” He licked his thumb and put his cigarette out on it and
stuck the butt in his Bermudas. “You got any paper? Some of that
nice premium bond?”

liver’s ﬁrst and only customer that day was his wife. She came in

around eleven, on her way to her ofﬁce, two hours late. Oliver was in
the back room, working on an IBM Selectric, cleaning the type ball.
(It belonged to the guy who drove the horse buggy.) He had the
radio on, though he wasn’t really listening to it. He had tried calling
Annelise several times and also sent her a text message: “Call me pls
I love u.” He didn’t know what her silence meant, though he feared
the worst. He was heartsick. He had turned on the radio to drown
out the sound of himself snifﬂing.

He had stopped snifﬂing by the time Diana appeared. She stood

in the doorway to the back room in a dark blue pantsuit (minus the
jacket; it was too hot for that) and her Dr. Scholl’s black ﬂats. Her
newly cut hair made her look younger and more vulnerable some-
how. But the expression on her face didn’t give away much. She was
a lawyer, and she was good at giving the appearance of dispassion, at
least in business situations. This seemed to be a business situation.

She said, “If you come home tonight, before dinner, I’ll know

that it’s over. If you don’t come home, I’ll know otherwise.”

Oliver said, “What?” though he had heard her perfectly. He got

up from his chair and crossed the room to where the radio was. He
wondered if she could see that he had been crying. “That’s the latest
from Moby,” a radio voice said. “Upcoming is the new one from My
White Lizard, and then a little something from Starbuck’s Fool.
Stick around.” Oliver turned the radio down.

“I think you heard me,” Diana said.
Oliver stood behind his chair, gripping the worn leather back,

as if he were holding it for a guest. His head felt like a gourd with a
handful of seeds rattling around in it. Was there really a band called
My White Lizard? He had not quite prepared for this moment,
though he had known it was coming. He had known that he was not
going to slip by his wife (a crack matrimonial lawyer, after all) an
inﬁdelity that was in fact abject love, a repudiation of his married
life and of her. He hadn’t had sex with Diana since the day he met
Annelise, had hardly touched his wife for the past six weeks. He had
slept in the same bed with her while memorizing love poems that he
could recite to Annelise. Diana had been reading a biography of

James Joyce. (They were planning a trip to Ireland, with the boys,
next spring.) One night, she’d said, “Did you know that Joyce and
Nora wrote pornographic letters to each other when they were apart?
Joyce was always afraid Nora was going to cheat on him.” Oliver re-
plied, “Wasn’t her last name Barnacle? Like the things that grow on
a ship’s underside?” Rolling over, rolling away from his wife, the love
poem he was memorizing having gone out of his head, he thought of
wayward sailors being keelhauled, their ﬂesh ripped by barnacles.

He couldn’t think of a sentence to go along with the thoughts

he was having now. He saw things moving that should not be mov-
ing: typewriter spare parts, a yogurt cup, a dust rag. It was as if he
was watching, or was in, a cartoon. The other afternoon, walking
back to his shop from Moon’s after a lunch of banana cream pie
and coffee, Oliver had felt dizzy. He had lain down on the storage-
room sofa. He’d been sweating and his heart was beating faster than
a newborn’s and behind his eyes was a room full of throbbing bass-
heavy noise and needling light. Perhaps that mug of scorched coffee
served up by Mr. Moon had put him over the edge. (It was his sixth
of the day.) He’d vowed to cut back. Now, on a morning on which
he had had three lattes (including one with a triple shot from Tout
de Suite), spools of typewriter ribbon and other junk danced in front
of his eyes.

He said, “OK.” All sorts of words were available to him, words

that he might have strung into an apology or an explanation or a
statement. But what came out of his mouth was this two-letter
non-word, which, as it hung in the air before him, sounded almost
Japanese.

“OK what?” she said.
“OK I heard you,” he said, adding, pointlessly, “is what.” He

sounded to himself like a petulant child, and perhaps he was, at least
relative to the adult wage-earning person his wife was. And then he
had a foolish—childish—thought. His softball team had a game to-
night. Despite being in love and having lost a good dozen pounds,
he was hitting .637. (He rarely swung for the fences; he was a banjo
hitter.) He had a shot at leading the Pub & Grub League in batting
average, though the electrician who played third base for the Savages

was breathing down his neck. If Oliver went three-for-three tonight,
he would probably nail down the title. This might be worth going
for, he thought, particularly in light of all his problems.

“So ‘OK’ means you’ll be home to set the table and shoot the

breeze with your four children?”

“I have a game tonight.” He had lost his compass. But the good

thing was that all those levitating, vibrating objects had settled
down. The room was still. My White Lizard or Starbuck’s Fool—
Oliver didn’t know the difference—came faintly from the radio. A
dump truck ground up trash in the alley behind the shop.

Diana took pride in her skills at argument. She was where she was

in the world, she believed, because of the acuity of her mind and her
willingness to speak it. And she didn’t often back away from a dis-
agreement with her husband, who tended to become ﬂustered at such
moments. She knew how to keep calm and, when necessary, could
cut Oliver into pieces in seconds. But all she said on this hot morning
in August, as she spun on her heels, was, “OK. OK. Goodbye.”

nnelise got pulled over somewhere south of Havana, Wisconsin.

She’d been following a detour that was supposed to take her back to
the four-lane that crossed the river into Iowa. Maybe she had missed
a turn because now she seemed to be almost in Illinois, if not actu-
ally there. A billboard that rose out of the cornﬁeld across the road
advertised a supper club in Galena called Herman’s. She had been to
Galena as a child with her father and his second wife and had walked
through Ulysses S. Grant’s house, the place where he’d lived after
he’d been expelled from the Army for more drinking than was
seemly. She remembered that her father’s wife had said, “I like our
house better.”

On the four-lane, however long ago, Annelise had had a few

puffs of weed to go with her coffee. It seemed like a good idea at the
time. She was listening to Bing Crosby, and then to Louis Arm-
strong and Jack Teagarden, and she was trying not to think about
the mess she’d left behind in Midvale. She wasn’t expecting a detour
or to see a pig on the roof of a shed or to be stopped by a police-
man. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been stopped by a

policeman, though she often drove at speeds that invited policemen
to stop her.

She stuck her dope pipe back under the seat and exhaled against

her palm to see if her breath gave her away. It didn’t, completely. She
pushed her sunglasses as close to her eyes as they would go and took
a sip of the sugary Ethiopian. The coffee, seventy or eighty miles west
of Midvale, was still warm. She watched the policeman approach the
car. He walked like somebody who was going out into his backyard
to, say, put a sick pig out of its misery. He had a gun in his holster and
the pig was in its pen, so why hurry? He was not wearing a hat. He
was thin and sandy-haired, like the ﬂirt at the Shell station, like the
guy in her dream who wanted to give her advice on extermination
procedures. His face was a chalky pink. He wore mirror sunglasses,
presumably so that you couldn’t see him checking you out. On his
hands were what looked like rubber exam gloves, such as what a
dentist would wear when he put his hands in your mouth. His badge
shone brightly in the sunshine.

When he leaned into the window and asked for her operator’s

license, she saw that he had what looked like a case of poison ivy.
His forehead and one of his cheeks and much of his neck and both
his forearms up to the creases were covered with pink calamine lo-
tion. She saw the blisters under the lotion, which were like bubbles
under a thin layer of paint. She thought he must feel miserable. Why
was he working? Didn’t the gloves make his hands feel all scratchy
and hot?

He took his sunglasses off and looked at her license. His eye-

brows were all but invisible, pale suggestions of eyebrows. His eyes
were as blue as postcard lakes. He asked her if she lived at 275 Win-
nequah in Midvale.

“Not anymore. My partner and I just broke up, like, last night,

and now I’m going to visit my grandmother in Iowa. I took a wrong
turn, didn’t I?” She felt herself becoming the color of the policeman.
Was she blushing because she regretted imparting this information,
regretted using it to appeal to the heart beating under the dark blue
shirt? Or was she blushing out of sympathy, because she didn’t want
him to feel like a freak?

The policeman had a blond mustache that was so wispy she

might have missed it if he hadn’t leaned close to her. When he did,
she caught a whiff of tuna ﬁsh, along with the sweetish smell of cala-
mine. She had an aversion to tuna ﬁsh. Her mother had served it to
her a thousand times when she was a child—in casseroles, on spa-
ghetti with red sauce, in sandwiches mixed with pickle relish—and
she had vowed never to eat it again.

He said, “You were doing sixty-ﬁve in a forty-ﬁve zone.”
Annelise said, “I was? Sorry.”
He backed away from her window and put his sunglasses back

on. She saw herself reﬂected in them, saw her top-knotted hair stick-
ing up like a clump of prairie grass, saw all the ﬂesh that was exposed
between her forehead and the neckline of her tank shirt. She couldn’t
see all the blotches and streaks of pink on her neck and chest, but she
knew they were there. Sometimes she wished she didn’t occupy her
own body. She had an urge to get out of the car and tear off through
the cornﬁeld, shucking her skin as she went.

The sky was full of thunderclouds, fantastic ships black and bar-

nacled on the bottoms. The corn stalks hissed as a wind blew through
them.

He placed a gloved hand on her door and said, “You don’t do a

radio show by any chance, do you?”

She took her sunglasses off. “Yeah, I do. How’d you know?”
“Your bumper sticker.” Among the half-dozen stickers on the

rear of her car was one promoting her employer (“WOOP IT UP
AT 87.9”). “And your name. There aren’t a lot of Annelise Scharfen-
bergs in the world, I’m thinking.”

“You can pick up WOOP out here? I thought you’d be beyond

range.”

He took a notepad out of his back pocket and a ballpoint pen

from his breast pocket. He put his sunglasses on top of his head and
there were his blue eyes again. You could go swimming in them, al-
most. “If you park up on a hill and raise your antenna real high and
the sky isn’t overcast, you can pick up all kinds of stuff. I got a Cleve-
land station the other night. Indians and Orioles.” He clicked the
pen and began to write in his notepad. He was left-handed.

She wondered if he was particular about pens. She wondered

what the speeding ticket would cost her.

She said, “I’m actually just a part-time deejay. I do secretarial

work, answer the phones, organize the library. I get paid beans.”

He kept writing in his notepad, citation book, whatever it was.

She imagined him out of his uniform, without all the crime-ﬁghting
gadgets hanging from his belt. She imagined him with his face
cleared up, sitting on the little concrete square of a patio outside his
apartment in his Bermudas and T-shirt—she ﬁgured he was a bach-
elor; his ring ﬁnger was bare—reading a crime novel, his pale eye-
brows moving inﬁnitesimally when some detail about police work
seemed wrong. He would make a tuna ﬁsh sandwich for dinner. Be-
fore or after he ate, he might do some sit-ups or lift weights. Then,
later, he would get in his police car and drive to the Pick ’n Save in
Havana, where a young woman he liked (but hardly ever talked to)
worked, and he would buy a bottle of apple juice and a candy bar and
a Sporting News and then he would drive out of town to beyond the
sausage factory and pull over at the top of the hill where the historical
marker was and dial up the Indians or (if it was after ten on Thursday
night) her, Annelise. She thought that if she were the Pick ’n Save
clerk, and if she was the sort who liked men her own age and men
with boyish cheeks covered in calamine lotion and men who bore a
resemblance to the extermination expert in her dream, she would
have already invited him to drive her home after work.

“I like your show, Miss Scharfenberg,” he said. He clicked his

ballpoint—he was done writing—and returned it to his breast
pocket. He tore off a page from the citation book and folded it over
and handed it to her. “I’ll be listening next week.”

She said, “Is there a song you’d like to hear? I do requests some-

times.” She hoped it was clear she wasn’t sucking up. It was too late
to suck up; he’d already given her the ticket. Which she didn’t have
the money to pay for. Where was she going to sleep tonight? With
her grandmother in the nursing home?

“I like everything you play, pretty much,” he said. “Maybe not

that group No Shoes. I’m not a big grunge fan.” He put a gloved
hand on his neck, as if to scratch, and then thought better of it.

“Yeah, they’re an acquired taste. I think of them as post-grunge

and more eclectic than anything in particular. Not that it matters.”

“To get to Iowa,” he said, “you want to go back to Havana and

take a left at the Stop-and-Go. You’ll see the detour sign.”

She said, “I hope your poison ivy goes away soon.”
He nodded and walked back to his cruiser. A gust of wind

pushed a plastic milk carton across the road. She opened the cita-
tion. It was not a citation, though it was written on the back of one.
It said,

When I heard you on the radio, I knew I would meet you
someday. My girlfriend, Tracy, and I broke up, so I know
what you’re going through. Please don’t drive fast and please
don’t ingest illegal substances when you are driving. (Try to
avoid them in general, for your own health and safety.) I hope
when I come to Midvale you will allow me to take you out to
dinner and a movie. Do you like Oriental food? I believe I
could help you solve the mystery of the frog in the shoe.

Yours truly,

James Vogelsang

He included his phone number.

It started to rain. She read the letter two more times. She heard

the rain spatter on her windshield, as if it were some distant occur-
rence. Later, as she crossed the river into Iowa, the rain picked up,
and by the time she reached the nursing home, on a hill outside Cas-
cade, it was raining so hard that she couldn’t see much beyond the
hood of the car. The plea written in the dust on its side—“Wash me
squeeze me love me”—had been erased.

n the ﬁrst, Oliver, swinging as if blinded by despair, hit a pop-up

to Crabbe, the Melody Bar third baseman. An ejaculatory “Ha!”
came from under Crabbe’s cap as he snatched the ball from the
humid air. Oliver’s average fell from .637 to .629. Oliver’s teammate,

Murray Gleason, the painter who for years had been working on a
series called the Rabbit Parade, one segment of which was of a tall,
skinned, embarrassed rabbit in a morning coat who had Oliver’s
long face, said to Oliver, “I think you need an ale or two, O.”
Murray’s girlfriend, Cassandra, who was almost as young as Anne-
lise, said, “No moping allowed in softball. Drink up.” She handed
him a bottle of Scapegoat, something brewed in Montana. Oliver
gazed at his cell phone. No messages from anybody.

Crabbe doubled in the ﬁrst, raising his average from .629 to .640.

A gnat ﬂew up Oliver’s nose as he stood helplessly in left ﬁeld.
Crabbe and Charlie Dibbelman, the Old Hatters second baseman,
the owner of a music shop that specialized in vinyl LPs, discussed
Neil Young. Crabbe said he loved Neil Young. He started singing
“Old Man.”

Nobody ever struck out in the Pub & Grub League, but in the

third Oliver struck out. His batting average dropped to .622. Garr,
the used-bookshop clerk who hit behind Oliver, said, “Hey, man, it
rained today, you struck out, and George Bush apologized for being
a liar. Unbelievable.” Cassandra said, “You didn’t strike out, Oliver.
It was an illusion.” She patted him on the arm, in a motherly way.
She worked in a day care.

Oliver wandered back out to left ﬁeld with a beer in his throwing

hand and his phone in his hip pocket. He passed Crabbe on the way.
Crabbe gave him a friendly glove-slap on the arm and said, “You
look like somebody ran over your dog, man.” Oliver said, “I have a
cat.” He took his place, a spot rubbed bare by dozens of left ﬁelders.
He thought about Ferd, the fore portion of him deep in the kitchen
sink, licking butter or mayonnaise or something delicious off a
knife. Oliver had eaten little today—a piece of pie at Moon’s and a
chocolate Easter egg that had been in his ofﬁce fridge for a long
time. At four, he had bicycled home to get his baseball equipment.
The children were all gone. Usually there was at least one around.
Ferd was there, of course, grazing in the sink, but the house felt
abandoned, as if the ship of family had run aground and the crew
had scattered. Franklin’s medicine ball sat in the front hall like bal-
last gone astray. A breeze rattled the Venetian blinds in the master

bedroom. In addition to his baseball equipment, Oliver collected
his toothbrush and deodorant and the Everyman’s book of love
poems and a change of clothes. He rode back to the shop with his
Big Banger aluminum bat sticking out of his backpack and an over-
night bag suspended awkwardly from the handlebars. It rained dur-
ing this trip, a ﬁfteen-minute shower that soaked him to the bone
but didn’t convince him that what he was doing—leaving his wife
and children—was doomed to a squalid ending. He was leaving his
family for a woman whose silence plainly suggested she was leaving
him. Why was he doing this? What did you call the combination of
passion, stubbornness, need, self-love, hope, and foolhardiness that
sent him spinning through the rain, away from home?

“Oliver! Jesus, man! Get on your horse, you goddamn idiot!” Hal

Sveum, the Old Hatters third baseman, was shouting at him. At
least it sounded like Sveum, the high-strung political affairs colum-
nist for This Vale, the alternative weekly. When Oliver, who still had
his beer in his hand, looked up, he saw Sveum and Murray, who
played shortstop, converging on him. Crabbe was chewing up dirt
between ﬁrst and second. By the time Oliver reached the ball,
Crabbe was near home (and batting .646). Oliver felt wobbly. He
wished he could say he was drunk.

“I guess I need to drink some more ale,” he said to Murray, who

was ﬂeet and spry despite being thoroughly gray-haired.

“More ale for your morale,” Murray said. “Was there a death in

your family today? Midlife crisis?”

Sveum, his thinning gray fringe leaking from underneath his cap,

muttered something about bringing one’s personal “issues” onto the
ﬁeld. “Jesus Christ! Standing there like a fucking tree!”

“Lighten up, Harold,” Murray said.
The Savages scored ten runs in the third. In the fourth, when

four more Savages crossed the plate, darkness began to swamp the
sky and mosquitoes began to feast on people’s necks and forearms.
The moon had risen, but it was a spectral thing, obscured by clouds.
The holes in the cloud cover above Midvale revealed violet, starless
patches of sky. In his last at-bat of the season, Oliver, who had found
the time to down two more Scapegoats, more than he hardly ever

drank in a whole weekend, swung just at the instant a mosquito
began to suck on the ﬂesh above his carotid artery. The ball dribbled
up the ﬁrst base line. “Leg it out, you goof,” Sveum shouted. “Leg it
out, you typewriter-ﬁxing freak!” Oliver jogged toward ﬁrst and was
tagged out by a guy who installed furnaces. Then, Oliver walked
over to Sveum and with a ﬂick of his middle ﬁnger ﬂipped the cap
off the third baseman’s head. When he saw Sveum’s dumbstruck
face and his bare pale dome encircled by the monk-like fringe of
hair, Oliver almost apologized. But instead he stared open-mouthed
at Sveum. The diamond chatter ceased. Bats had come out of their
roosting places, and you could almost hear them zipping through
the air as they gulped mosquitoes that had fattened themselves on
the blood of humans. Like a goat, Sveum butted Oliver in the chest
with his head, and soon they were in a clench on the dead grass, with
Sveum, who kept a set of barbells near his desk, on top. And then, a
moment later, they parted, like two drunken revelers who had dis-
covered they didn’t want to be in bed with each other. They were
both mostly unmarked, though Oliver’s ear felt funny (had Sveum
pulled it?) and his bad knee twanged as if a piece of ligament had
loosened. Worst of all, his phone, which had been in his hip pocket,
no longer worked, though it was still in one piece.

Oliver put his bat and glove and useless phone in his backpack

and mounted his twenty-year-old Raleigh. What a picture he made,
riding through the gloaming, half-blinded by his own tears, his
white, double-knit baseball pants torn and soiled, his cap on his gob
of hair. How much more ridiculous was he when, near a bar called
Happy’s by the Lake, while looking at a parked red Metro that was
just like Annelise’s (except that Annelise’s didn’t have a bumper
sticker that said “Don’t Postpone Joy”), he ran smack into one of the
few remaining pay phone booths in Midvale?

y early evening, the rain had stopped falling on eastern Iowa and

the sky above had turned a watery blue. There were pink and orange
smudges near the bottom of the sky, the leavings of the sun, visible
through the stand of tall pines that separated the nursing home
property from the world. The dying light and the way it softened the

trunks of the pines made Annelise think of Oliver. It made her want
to put her forehead against his chest, even though she’d given him
up, more or less.

Grandmother Fichte was watching a cartoon, something Jap-

anese and futuristic. The sound was off. When Annelise asked if she
didn’t want the sound on, Grandmother Fichte had said, “I don’t
want him to know I’m watching.” She was referring to the man across
the hall, who wore a beret and a moth-eaten Frank Lloyd Wright–
style cape and who claimed that gypsies had stolen him from his
apartment in New York when he was a child and traded him to an
Iowa farm family for two horses. “He’ll want to come over and mo-
nopolize the conversation.”

Annelise’s grandmother was sitting in a chair that had a high

back and armrests that were thick and round like jellyrolls. She was
a small woman and the chair, which had been her throne when it
was in her house, made her seem small as a doll. She wore a navy
blue tracksuit with white piping. White hair sprung from her head
in thin little coils. On her lap were an afghan and a small German
dictionary, which she would consult during commercials. On her
feet, which just reached the carpet, were fur-lined zip-up boots. An-
nelise had helped her grandmother into her boots, tucking the pants
into the tops, as instructed.

“Do you still have lots of boyfriends, Jobeth?” Grandmother

Fichte asked, confusing Annelise with another grandchild.

“I used to have some,” Annelise said. Her grandmother didn’t

seem to hear this. She refused to wear a hearing aid because then she
could hear things she didn’t want to hear, such as the parrot that
lived in the lobby. Annelise said, in an outdoors voice, “I used to
have some but now I have none.”

Her grandmother said, “Well, can any of them tanzen? That’s the

one you want, the one that can tanzen ein Bisschen. Now, Mr. New
York, that’s one thing he could do. I used to see him out at the Elks
Club on Saturday nights, tanzing with his second wife, some woman
from Wisconsin.” Annelise’s grandmother liked to suggest that Wis-
consin was a sinful place, more sinful, anyway, than Iowa.

“You liked to dance, didn’t you, Grandma?”

“I didn’t marry Ludwig because he could butcher a pig better

than anybody else.” She had said this on other occasions, and when-
ever she did, Annelise pictured a contest, with butchers in aprons
and paper caps racing the clock to carve a set of ribs out of a carcass.
It was an image that ﬁrmed up her resolve to become a strict vege-
tarian, rather than one who made allowances for bacon. “He had
nice soft big ears, like a Hase, and perfect teeth, not a cavity in
eighty years. Have you seen Mr. New York’s teeth? I think he ate too
much candy when he was a child out East. He scares me when he
smiles.”

On the TV screen, a ghoul with paws like backhoe shovels and

a snout like a horn of plenty chased two Japanese kids through a
city that was a maze of highways and catwalks and black menacing
skyscrapers.

Annelise said, “Grandma, what do you think of an older man

being with a younger woman? Or vice versa.”

Grandmother Fichte, who had been eight years younger than

Annelise’s grandfather when they married in 1937, did not seem to
hear the question. “When Ludwig visited me in my dreams last
night, he said, ‘Guten Abend, Schatz.’ I said, ‘You have color in your
cheeks.’ He had a gold pin under his tie. He was a formal man, you
know. Modest. Deaf in one ear from shooting a shotgun too much.”

Annelise didn’t ask her question again. It didn’t seem the sort of

question you asked in a nursing home in your outdoors voice. An
aide came in with a Dixie cup of pills. She was wearing a blue smock
with yellow ducks on it. Her jovial voice ﬁlled the room, bounced
off the old oak dresser with the glass knob pulls, struck the framed
picture of Jesus with his blue German eyes and his soft brown hippie
hair. The aide rested a ﬁst on her hip as Annelise’s grandmother
swallowed her pills.

More light went out of the sky. Grandmother Fichte went

with her walker into the bathroom. Annelise ﬂipped open the book
she’d brought with her, the one by the Buddhist nun. She’d read (or
skimmed) a number of books by Buddhists and they all made sense
but she never could put anything they said into practice. She could
hardly get herself to meditation class.

When her grandmother got into bed, she instructed Annelise (or

Jobeth, as she continued to call her) to lie down beside her. Annelise
removed her sandals and lay sideways on the edge of the bed. Grand-
mother Fichte handed Annelise the German dictionary and asked
her to test her vocabulary. “You can ask me any word, except those
starting with ‘O’ and ‘Q.’” Grandmother Fichte knew the German
words for “ham” (“too easy: Schinken”) and “bone” (“Bein, which is
also the word for ‘leg,’ but if I’m pulling your leg, I say, Ich nehme auf
den Arm”), but she didn’t know the word for “twitter” (zwitschern) or
for “scruple” (Skrupel ).

“If these pills don’t kill me,” Grandmother Fichte said, “I’ll re-

view the ‘S’ and ‘Z’ words tomorrow.” Soon her eyes closed. Her
whiskery mouth twitched as sleep took her down into its valley. In a
few minutes she was snoring; it sounded as if guttural letters were
trapped at the back of her throat, trying to form themselves into a
German word. Annelise shut her own eyes and remembered sleeping
all night next to her grandmother when she was a child. Her grand-
mother’s neck and shoulders had smelled of old rose petals and all the
deeds she’d accomplished since rising that morning: cooking, can-
ning, laundering, ironing, tidying, listening to concert music in her
high-backed armchair. Annelise would wake up to pancakes and to a
day of playing in the attic or under a trellis that grape vines climbed.
At her grandmother’s house, separated from her mother’s house (and
the man who lived down the street from her mother) by a river and
miles of cornﬁelds and pig farms, she’d felt safe and happy.

During the hour that she slept next to her grandmother, her

grandmother asked her if the older man Annelise mentioned wanted
her only for her body. Annelise answered, in a voice thick with
dream goo, “I don’t know why he wants me. He’s so tall. And I am
so short.”

When Annelise woke up, the room was blazing with lights and

a man was standing in the doorway. It was Mr. New York. He was
wearing his cape over his pajamas (but no beret on his mottled skull).
Annelise said hello, and he skittered away, shy as a child who’d been
caught looking at something that he shouldn’t have been looking at.
Grandmother Fichte had stopped snoring. Her lips puckered and

made a popping sound like a small ﬁsh did when it broke the surface
of the water to eat a bug. Annelise watched her grandmother’s lips,
waited for words of advice to take shape. “Go West, young lady.”
“Marry a butcher who can dance.” “Don’t get mixed up with mar-
ried men.” “Find some work you like and don’t worry about love.”
Grandmother Fichte’s lips puckered again, as if in anticipation of the
arrival of her long dead husband, come to woo her in German.

Annelise got out of bed and slipped into her sandals. She pulled

up the safety rails on the bed and then turned off the light. She went
into the bathroom and washed her face in the hope that this would
clear her mind so that she could decide what to do next. She came
back into the bedroom and kissed her grandmother on the forehead,
which was warm, teeming with long German words morphing into
longer German words. Some people in the family were rooting for
Grandmother Fichte to reach a hundred. The governor would call,
they said; reporters and photographers from the papers in Dubuque
and Cedar Rapids would descend on the nursing home. Grand-
mother Fichte had said, “I think I’ll sneak off in the middle of the
night when nobody’s looking, when Ludwig tells me the coast is
clear.” Annelise thought this was a good idea, stealing away when
nobody was looking. She gathered up her hoodie and her book and
went down the corridor and past the nurses’ station, past the parrot’s
covered cage, and out into the humid, buggy night.

o did Nixon really apologize today?” Oliver touched the bump on

his forehead, the only injury he’d suffered, besides scraped knuckles,
when he ran his bicycle into the phone booth.

The man on the stool next to him, the man who had picked Oli-

ver up off the sidewalk and brought him into Happy’s, had long gray
hair tied in a ponytail and a ﬁsh ornament dangling from his ear.
The man’s face was ruddy, dew-lapped, big-nosed, mid-ﬁftyish.

“Nixon is dead,” the man said. Oliver, who was not particularly

good at remembering names, thought the man had introduced him-
self as Jim. “I hope, anyway.”

“Right,” Oliver said. “Yes, he is dead. I was thinking of the cur-

rent president.”

“I doubt that he would’ve apologized for anything. He never

makes a mistake.”

Oliver glanced again at the ﬁsh hanging from the man’s ear. It

was made of a silvery substance and was tinier than the tiniest ale-
wife and it was attached to a hook.

“Bar bait,” Jim said. “You feeling OK?”
“Like a thousand dollars,” Oliver said, sipping his drink. “Except

my girlfriend has dumped me and I don’t know what to do.” Oliver
didn’t go to many bars and didn’t tell sad stories to strangers when he
did, but here he was, moving his jaw. Perhaps it was the whiskey Jim
had bought for him, combined with the adrenaline that the collision
with the phone booth stirred up. “I have four boys. They’re seven,
eleven, twelve, and fourteen. They’re all going to be lawyers, like my
wife. One might turn out to be an antiques dealer. He likes to go to
yard sales. None are likely to follow me into the typewriter repair
business.” Oliver looked around the bar and saw men in caps with
their heads bowed toward their drinks and three women at a table
plotting to put silver salutes under their husbands’ recliners. Fish
longer than a man’s arm were mounted on the knotty pine walls; the
neon beer signs gave them blue and red and green sheens. “My wife
knows I’ve been seeing this other woman, except I’m not seeing her
anymore because she has dropped me. Or that’s my impression. I
called her thirteen times today.”

“Thirteen times is a lot,” Jim said. He ordered another drink

from Happy, a plump, dour woman who wore a Packers sweatshirt
rolled up to the elbows. “Thirteen times might signify desperation.”

“I love her,” Oliver said, a touch defensively. “I’m crazy about

her. When I’m with her I feel like I’m bicycling in the air. No
hands.”

“Like in E.T.?” Jim asked.
“Yeah, I guess,” Oliver said. He hadn’t been thinking of E.T. He

felt the comparison diminished his ardor, somehow.

“If you will forgive my presumption, the question you have to

answer is who do you love more: your girlfriend who is letting you
go or your children?” Happy brought Jim his drink. It had a pickle
and a green olive in it. “You ready for another?” Jim asked.

Oliver shook his head. The bump in the middle of his forehead

was throbbing. It felt as if a horn were growing there.

“I like my wife. We get along. She makes a nice salary. She prac-

tices matrimonial law—law concerning the end of matrimony, that
is—and it’s lucrative. I cut the grass when my kids don’t, clean the
gutters, cook the brats, make the odd dollar or two repairing type-
writers, make hat racks in my spare time. Sometimes my wife and I
sit on the porch and drink a glass of wine and talk about the children
or gossip about the neighbors. We don’t pour our souls out to each
other or anything. The kids get in the way with their demands and
needs and arguments. So, anyway, about six weeks ago I fell in love
with this young woman. Young, as in twenty years younger than I
am. I had heretofore”—he paused, gave his whiskey glass a quarter-
turn, wondered why he was using a word like “heretofore” in a place
like Happy’s—“been completely loyal to my wife. But I think I
wanted to be in love again, though I didn’t really know that until I
met Annelise. Conked-on-the-head ‘in-love.’” A line from the Every-
man’s book of love poems came into Oliver’s head and then, just like
that, it squiggled away. It was from a poem by Neruda, entitled
“Drunk as Drunk.” Oliver glanced again at Jim’s earring, as if the
pucker-mouthed ﬁsh held the clue to the line. But it didn’t come
back to him. “What is life without that bliss that, like, that, like—”
Oh, he was sounding like some kid, wasn’t he, who believed that
happiness was, like, was, like—whatever.

Jim said, “I read somewhere that each of us is allotted a certain

number of heartbeats over a lifetime—I don’t know how many, but
say a few billion—and that being in a state of excitement, such as in
love, we tend to burn through our allotment more quickly. And die
sooner.”

Oliver said, “So, are you married, Jim?”
“I was married once, but it cut into my ﬁshing time.”
“I’m not much of a ﬁsherman,” Oliver said. “I mean, I don’t have

much success at it.” He looked up at the TV screen. The Brewers
were out on the West Coast, drowning as usual.

Oliver said he had to get going and thanked Jim for the drink.
Jim said, “Take care of that bump on your head.”

Oliver went out into the night with his backpack containing his

bat and glove and broken cell phone. His bike was where he’d left it,
unlocked. Bicycle theft was common in Midvale, but nobody appar-
ently wanted an old ten-speed Raleigh with its lofty and unadjust-
able seat. He found ﬁfty cents in his backpack and put it in the pay
phone slot and dialed Annelise’s number for the fourteenth time
that day. While her phone rang and rang, Oliver read the grafﬁti on
the booth: “Phoque Now,” “Bush Is a Dick,” “Die Liberal Scum,”
“Love Now.” Annelise didn’t answer. Oliver left a message. He said,
“I love you. That’s all. Isn’t that enough?”

t the Pick ’n Save in Havana, Annelise bought a bag of onion-

ﬂavored potato chips, a diet Sierra Mist, a quart of Miller Lite, a ba-
nana, a People magazine, and a bag of teriyaki-ﬂavored turkey jerky.
She also bought a spiral notebook and a bottle of NyQuil. When she
set her purchases on the counter, she looked at the jerky, remem-
bered her resolve to be a vegetarian, and said to the cashier, “I think
I’ll skip the jerky.” The cashier, whose hair was dyed the shade of
blue that the evening sky is just before it turns pitch black, pushed
the jerky to the side. Annelise doubted that Ofﬁcer Vogelsang would
be interested in a woman with purple hair, though what did she
really know about his tastes in women? And what did purple hair
really say about a person, except that she might have been led astray
by fashion or have bad taste?

“I’ve been wondering for years,” Annelise said, passing twenty of

Rolf ’s ﬁfty across the counter, “if there are any Cubans in Havana.”

“I doubt it,” the cashier said. “Do you have an I.D.?”
Annelise handed her license over for the second time that day.

She sighed, as if annoyed, but actually she was happy to imagine that
someone might think she was underage. She felt old today.

“I have to ask,” the cashier said.
“That’s OK. Do you know Ofﬁcer Vogelsang?”
“Yeah.” Annelise saw that the name stitched on her smock was

Tracy. “But he’s not Cuban, if that’s what you’re thinking.” Tracy,
who had a round, soft face and a milkmaid’s complexion, smiled, as
if to herself.

Annelise’s phone rang, but she didn’t answer it. When she left

the Pick ’n Save, the roots of her hair felt tender, like when she had a
migraine.

She used her credit card to get a room at the Tip-Top Motel, a

couple miles north of town. The room smelled musty, like a base-
ment. It was decorated primarily in a camouﬂage green or perhaps it
was a jungle green. Anyhow, the green bedspread put her in mind of
men with riﬂes hiding in bushes. She showered and put on clean
panties and a new tank top. She poured herself a cup of beer and sat
down at the desk and began to write in her notebook. She wrote a
letter to Rolf and one to Oliver. She apologized to Rolf for being un-
truthful. She felt contrite, but she didn’t feel like explaining herself
any further. She said she’d taken the ﬁfty from the pickle jar and that
she was sorry about that. She’d pay him back. It was a short letter.
She said in a P.S. that if they were both honest, they would have to
admit they weren’t really suited for each other. “You are suited for
that coworker whom you’ve been seeing and I’m suited for nobody. I
sometimes liked being with you though.” (She later crossed the P.S.
out, pressing so hard with her pen that she put a hole in the paper.)
In her letter to Oliver, she said that she loved him but that it wasn’t
going to work.

How are we going to be together? You have four boys. Are
you going to abandon them for me? What if we were to live
together and I went crazy on you, which I might do? I ﬂy off
the handle sometimes, I medicate myself more than is healthy, I
leave people who say they love me. I’ve told you the truth about
myself, Oliver—or some of it. But I’ll never be able to take that
step of self-forgiveness that Buddhists talk about. You can’t trust
me. Hell, one minute I’m committed to being a vegetarian, the
next minute I’m buying turkey jerky.

She went on in this vein for a couple of pages. Her handwriting,
which was small and cramped, like something to be hidden from

prying eyes, became loopier and less cramped as she went along. At
the end, during her fourth cup of beer, she wrote

P.S. I’m writing this in Room 14 of the Tip-Top Motel near
Havana. I wish you were here, lying on the bed with your bare
feet hanging over the edge. Though maybe you would want to
put them under the covers because there is no “Lo” on the air
conditioner. It’s “Hi” or nothing.

Annelise folded the two letters and put them inside the book by

the Buddhist nun. She put on her hoodie and pulled the hood over
her head. She went into the bathroom and looked at her eyes. They
had gray and yellow and green and blue in them; they changed ac-
cording to the light or her mood. Tonight they were a Siamese cat
gray; the whites were bloodshot.

She chased the beer with two doses of NyQuil. In her purse, she

found the note that Ofﬁcer Vogelsang had written her, and she
called his number. He picked up on the ﬁrst ring. His “Hello” was
stern. She heard music behind him. It was some country boy, whose
name she couldn’t recall, singing a love song.

“This is Annelise—you know, the person you arrested today?

The disc jockey?”

“OK.” He turned down the music.
“I wanted to thank you for not giving me a ticket.”
“It was a judgment call.” The voice was harder than his on-duty

voice had been. Where was the guy who wanted to take her out to
dinner and a movie?

“So, I was wondering if you wanted to come over and talk. I’m in

room 14 at the Tip-Top. You must have arrested people here before.”
She didn’t wait for him to reply. She said, “OK, bye.”

She sank back into the pillows. She had meant to ask him about

his poison ivy. Was it possible to make out with a man who had
poison ivy? Was a man with poison ivy what she wanted now? She
listened to two of the fourteen messages Oliver had left on her
phone that day. The desperation she heard in his voice made her

stop listening. She listened to a message from Rolf, who said he
wanted her to clear all her shit out of his house before he put it in the
garbage. How could somebody who said he loved you the day before
yesterday hate you so much today? She read in People about a movie
star who said she was completely happy with her new baby and
couldn’t care less if she never made another motion picture again.
People lied to themselves all the time. She put People down and
closed her eyes. She felt drowsy, mushy-headed. At least she hadn’t
smoked dope on top of the beer and NyQuil. She was stepping off
the edge of the world, nonetheless. Pigs and dogs and a man wearing
a fedora were falling with her. It was like they were all inside a snow
globe that had been shaken and shaken.

Somebody was calling her name. “Miss Scharfenberg?” Some-

body had come to save her before she fell too far.

The Satyrs’ Club

n Halloween, Oliver visited his mother at Blue Hills, a long-

term care and rehabilitation facility ﬁfteen miles from Mid-

vale. When he entered her room, she was sitting stiff-backed on the
edge of her bed, dressed as if for church. (She was a Presbyterian,
though she was always threatening to defect and start her own sect.)
On her head was her green Tyrolean-style hat with the pheasant
feather, and on her lap was her plaid handbag, and on her hands
were white gloves. She said, “I don’t know why you put me here,
among these people.”

“You cracked your hip. And you hit your head when you fell.

And you need someone professional to look after you for a while.”

“Professional,” she said, pinching the seam of her black trousers.
“Someone to tie your shoes, help you in and out of the bathtub,

help you with your exercises.”

Mrs. Poole said, “You need a professional for that? I don’t think a

beard suits you.” The beard, which was white and gray, the color of
the sky on a bleak winter day, was only a few weeks old. He had
grown it while living in the back room of his shop, eating peanut
butter out of the jar.

Some moments later, Mrs. Poole said, “I don’t know why you’ve

left your wife and broken the hearts of your children. I wish you
could tell me why.”

Oliver exhaled noisily, and some of the hairs in his nostrils ﬂut-

tered. He stood up as if to go, then walked over to the window and
gazed out. A man wearing a blaze-orange hunting cap sat in a wheel-
chair under a burr oak that the wind was shaking as if it were a willow.

An aide in a thin, pale blue uniform stood several yards from the
man in the wheelchair, smoking a cigarette. Beyond the nursing
home grounds was a new subdivision where a cornﬁeld had once
been. Some of the houses were unﬁnished, open to the weather.

From her purse, Oliver’s mother brought forth the bridge score

pad on which she made memos to herself. She said, “I don’t see how
you can live where you do, among all those dusty typewriters. What
do your customers think? Do you have any income? I don’t want you
to be destitute, along with me. I’m giving away a fortune to this
place.”

“I’m OK, Mom,” Oliver said. He bent down to tie her shoes and

also to hide that part of his face that his beard didn’t hide. Why
didn’t she wear slip-ons?

Mrs. Poole said, “My head is perfectly ﬁne, by the way. The only

thing I hurt when I fell was my stupid hip. I’m thinking of suing the
management company.” She had tripped over some plastic garden
edging outside her condo.

When Oliver stood up, he felt dizzy. The feather in his mother’s

hat appeared in triplicate. He said, “It doesn’t seem worth it—suing
and all that.”

Mrs. Poole put the score pad back in her purse. She said, “I’ve

been thinking about that club your father belonged to, the one in
that building on the frontage road, near all those automobile lots.”

“The Satyrs’ Club?” Oliver’s father had taken him there once

when he was a boy. They had watched a boxing match on TV. The
cigar smoke had been dense.

“Yes. What did they do there?”
“Played cards and drank schnapps. Watched boxing. It still ex-

ists.” Oliver’s father had been the last Poole to be a member.

“I never believed him when he told me that.” She pushed herself

up from the bed and hobbled over to the dresser. She opened the top
drawer of the dresser and took something out and put it in her
purse. She was afraid of being robbed. She said, “George Archer
died. Do you remember him? The tall golfer? He was about as thin
as you. I don’t see how he hit the ball so far. Have you been eating
anything?”

On the way out, Mrs. Poole, pushing a walker on which she’d

hung her purse, led her son to the picture window that a buck with
an eight-point rack had gone crashing through two weeks ago. Oli-
ver saw his reﬂection in the window—the glass had been replaced—
and he imagined the deer hurtling toward him, all four hooves off
the ground, its eyes glassy and maniacal. “I wonder what spooked
it,” Oliver said. His mother, from whom Oliver had inherited the
tallness gene, didn’t answer; she was headed toward a table at which
four residents in fright wigs and masks were playing euchre. At six
feet in her prime, Mrs. Poole had been almost a half-foot taller than
her dead husband, who had worked for thirty-six years for a com-
pany that made electric hand dryers for bathrooms. Perhaps she’d
turned away from the window because she, too, imagined the deer
ﬂying toward her.

n the parking lot outside Annelise’s mother’s apartment, a man was

peering into a dumpster, holding the lid above his head. He was tall
and wore an older man’s business hat and a brown sports jacket. For
an instant, the instant just after she’d pulled the curtains aside to see
what the weather was doing, Annelise thought the man might be her
not yet totally former lover, Oliver Poole.

Annelise had just awakened from a nap on her mother’s sofa. She

had a pain in her chest that she believed might be an ulcer and that
she had been trying to wash away with chocolate milk and Pepto-
Bismol. In one of her dreams, she’d stepped on the pedal of one of
those no-hands garbage pails and a baby with Oliver’s face had
popped up. When the man peering into the dumpster let the lid
fall—he jumped back just as he let go, as if away from something
that might swallow him—and then turned in her direction, she saw
what she already knew: he was not Oliver. The rubber mask he was
wearing, a ghoul’s face, gray and purple, full of deformities and
welts, hideous even at a distance, was not Oliver’s style. One of the
things she’d sometimes thought about Oliver was that he lacked
daring. He was quiet and cautious, careful to keep his dark side out
of view. Of course he had given up his wife and children for her, but
maybe that was not so much daring as crazy.

The man in the ghoul mask seemed to be looking directly at An-

nelise. He doffed his hat, then set it back on his head, squishing it
down over the top portion of the mask. The afternoon sky was full of
clouds being blown about like ﬂuff. The man in the ghoul mask was
so thin that she thought the wind might carry him off, like a plastic
bag, to the limbs of a tree, where he would hang, scaring children.

She closed the curtains and turned on the TV and there was Kath-

arine Hepburn talking to Cary Grant, who was on a ladder, assem-
bling the bones of a dinosaur skeleton. A woman who talked as Kath-
arine Hepburn did, as if her voice had been marinated in money and
drollery, would sail through life without having an ulcer, wouldn’t
she?

hat evening Oliver went to a party at Murray’s house. He had not

been out in society since he’d left his wife and children over a month
ago, and he was nervous. He didn’t have a costume. During a last-
minute search for one, he’d decided not to buy either of the two
masks on the shelf at the local pharmacy; one was a ghoul with a
hatchet in its skull, the other was Elvis Presley. So there he was, at
Murray’s red door, in jeans, a T-shirt (given to him some years ago by
one of his sons, which one he couldn’t remember) that said “I Didn’t
Do It,” a brown cord jacket, and a gray fedora. When Cassandra,
who was dressed as Murray (in his painter’s garb), opened the door,
she said, “If you weren’t so tall, I would have hardly recognized you,
Oliver. I like the rugged guy look.” She was smiling at him, but her
eyes were hidden behind sunglasses—Murray wore sunglasses when
he painted, possibly to cut down on the glare that his canvases gave
off—and Oliver couldn’t be sure that she wasn’t also laughing at
him. Anyway, Cassandra’s newly buzzcut ash-colored head, which
matched Murray’s down to the dab of white (a birthmark) at the
hairline, took Oliver’s breath away.

“Did you bring your girlfriend?” Cassandra asked. She peered

around Oliver, as if to see if his girlfriend might be hiding in the
shrubs.

Oliver said, “She couldn’t come.” He glanced behind him, though

not in any real hope that Annelise might somehow materialize.

Coming up the walk were a frog and a princess. The frog, who wore
black ﬂippers, raised his knees high as he walked; the princess, her
shoulders bare to the night, held his hand. Behind this couple, also
holding hands, were Dick Cheney and George W. Bush.

Cassandra stepped out onto the stoop to greet the new arrivals,

and Oliver, uncostumed, girlfriendless, went inside. He didn’t like
parties much. He wasn’t sure why he had come. For the candy and
the liquor? For the food? He hadn’t eaten since breakfast. He ate
sparingly these days; he was saving his money for the divorce lawyer
and a psychotherapist.

In the kitchen, he found Murray, dressed as Cassandra, in a short

skirt and a T-shirt that didn’t cover his belly. On the chest of the
T-shirt, it said, “Imagine.” Murray wore a black velvet cloche on his
bewigged head. He was talking to Hal Sveum, who was dressed in a
journalist’s autumnal rags. The gray hair that encircled Sveum’s skull
like a ﬂuffy halo that had slipped down seemed to have become
more emphatically gray during the off-season. Oliver hadn’t seen
him since their tussle on the softball ﬁeld.

Sveum said, “It’s the Big O.” Then he left the room, perhaps

in search of a scoop. Murray knew all sorts of important Midvale
people—the mayor, a college pal, had hung one of Murray’s paint-
ings in his ofﬁce—and several had come, in costume, to the party.

Murray fetched Oliver a beer and then offered him a plate of

crudités. Oliver set his fedora on the kitchen table.

“What didn’t you do?” Murray asked, pointing a long El

Greco–like ﬁnger at Oliver’s chest. Murray was slim and angular. He
looked good in a skirt. He had shaved his legs, at least as far up as
midthigh.

Oliver said, mirthlessly, “Oh, you know. I’m a regular screw-up.”
“I was going to say that I’ve seen you look better. What’s going on

on the domestic front, if you don’t mind my asking?”

Oliver said, “I’m sleeping on the couch in my shop. Sometimes I

sleep on an air mattress on the ﬂoor because the couch is short,
though so is the air mattress. Someone brought in a Woodstock
typewriter the other day, like the one in the Hiss-Chambers case.
That’s about it. So, how are you and Cassandra getting along?”

100

“Copulating like rabbits. We’re hoping to have a child.”
Oliver’s eyebrows rose a fraction. Murray was roughly Oliver’s

age, though, at the moment, in the skirt and wig, he could have
passed for forty. He had been married once before, but he didn’t
have any children. He had come from a family of ten—seven girls,
three boys. In some of his paintings, baby rabbit faces peeked around
corners and from behind furniture. A few years ago, he’d said to Oli-
ver, “I’m too selﬁsh to have a bunch of children scrambling around
at my feet, playing with my tubes of paint.” This was before Cassan-
dra had showed up at his evening drawing class at the Winnebago
Street Rec Center.

“Children keep you on your toes,” Oliver said, eating a carrot

stick.

“We’re having only one,” Murray said. “Then I’m getting ﬁxed.”
Oliver winced. He was pretty sure that his days of making babies

were over. For a while, in the delirium of his love for Annelise, he
had fantasized about having a child with her, but this was before he
had moved out of the house. Annelise had become decidedly less
interested in him when he took this step. On the very few occasions
this fall when they’d seen each other, she’d seemed angry with him
for leaving his wife and children. And though she’d said her absences
meant only that she was giving herself time to breathe and reassess
everything, he’d suspected her of seeing other men, even of returning
to Rolf or Adolf or whatever his name was. Many nights, Oliver had
cried into the camp pillow on his air mattress, thinking desperate
thoughts, thinking baselessly hopeful thoughts.

And then one morning Diana had called to tell him that Robert

had gotten sick drunk the night before. “He nearly killed himself be-
cause of you, because of your idiocy,” she told him. “I expect you to
keep this information to yourself. Your slut doesn’t need to know it
so she can blab it on the radio.” He had kept it to himself, not only
because Annelise was not around to impart it to.

The frog came into the kitchen. He had removed his ﬂippers and

goggles. His wetsuit was the pale green of early spring, with black
warty spots scattered about. He was young with thick dark hair and
expensive small black rectangular-framed glasses and a complexion

101

that a frog would envy. He worked in information technology, he
said, for a company that made stents.

“Tents?” Oliver asked. “Like wedding tents?”
“Stents,” the frog said, frowning. “They’re inserted into the ar-

teries to hold them open, like after an angioplasty. So blood can ﬂow
to the brain.”

Oliver looked over the head of the frog at the princess, who was

out in the hall, talking with Sveum, readjusting her crown. The
princess, who was older than the frog by a decade, was a poet of local
renown. Oliver had heard her read her poems at a bookstore a
couple of years ago—they were about love and ﬂowers and spring
peepers, all things that interested Oliver—and when she confessed
to the audience that she wrote her poems on a typewriter rather than
on a computer, Oliver had entertained the fantasy that he would be
called on to repair it (or at least supply her with a ribbon), but this
had not come to pass. She apparently used his Chinese rival, or even
the blasted Internet.

Oliver wanted to ask the frog how he’d hooked up with the prin-

cess, but he didn’t.

“What didn’t you do?” the frog asked Oliver.
Oliver said, grufﬂy, “Among other things, I didn’t recycle all my

cardboard. I put some of it in with the wet garbage.” He buttoned
the middle button of his jacket.

The frog grinned and then sidled on his bare feet over to the

princess. Oliver wandered around the house, avoiding the frog and
the princess and Sveum, before stopping to study one of Murray’s
paintings. It showed a sylph-like black rabbit on a beach towel under
an umbrella held by a white rabbit in livery. A brown rabbit wearing
a man’s long, suspendered bathing suit from another century stood
on his hind paws and gazed out at the blue sea. The brown rabbit
was bald and chesty and looked like Picasso as an older man.

“Hello, bearded one,” a woman said. She was dressed in a

double-breasted pinstriped suit, the kind a professional thug might
wear. The pinstripes were faint, like trails of phosphor in the dark.
Under the jacket was a piece of lacy black lingerie. Her short black—
blackened?—hair was parted neatly on the side and was so shiny that

102

Oliver, looking down from his great height, could almost see himself
reﬂected in it, though the smoke from her cheroot obscured his view.
She was his ﬁrst wife, whom he hardly ever saw, except at parties like
this, which was one reason that he didn’t usually go to parties like
this.

“Loretta,” he said. “Where’s Jack?” Jack was her longtime boy-

friend, a mechanic who specialized in Volvos.

“So glad you asked.” Loretta’s lips were full and red, and Oliver

was, had always been, a little afraid of them. “He ran off with a
younger woman.”

Oliver’s hand traveled to the top of his head and then down to his

beard. “Sorry to hear that.” His eyes were on Loretta’s shoes, yellow
Chucks.

“It’s an epidemic.” Loretta was employed by a department of

the Midvale city government. Oliver couldn’t remember which one.
She had a degree in social work. When Oliver met her, over three
decades ago, she was a student working as an assistant recreation di-
rector at a home for the elderly; she drove the van, led a book group
(which consisted of two ladies who wanted to read the complete
works of John Galsworthy), changed the television channel in the
common room. She got ﬁred for giving a marijuana brownie to her
favorite resident, a man who claimed he could whistle Charlie Parker
solos.

Lines emanated from the far corners of Loretta’s eyes, perhaps the

result of squinting (she had always been too vain to get glasses) as
well as simple aging. She was two years older than Oliver. Once she
told him that she wanted to be buried in a double-wide cofﬁn, so
that when he died, he could lie down next to her. And then she had
found someone else to lie down with in life.

“So, what’s happening with you? Did you bring your wife or

leave her at home to feed the goblins?” Another reason that Oliver
and Loretta had broken up was that Loretta didn’t want children.
Oliver had sort of known this before he married her. What he hadn’t
known before or during the marriage was how to say what he wanted.
He’d always lacked courage (and the bluster to cover up his lack).
Perhaps his timidity was compensation for his height.

103

“She’s at her house,” Oliver said. Loretta was squinting at him, as

if to see what was in the small print. “You look nice,” Oliver added.

“Thank you,” Loretta said. She exhaled smoke. Then, after

glancing around, she ashed in her palm, which had a love line less
distinct than her lifeline. “Give me a call sometime. We seem to be
in the same boat.”

liver left Murray’s house thinking, I should have eaten more than

one carrot. Walking down a sidewalk under trees that autumn winds
were in the process of stripping, he remembered the city agency Lo-
retta worked for: the Department of Family Enhancement. Could
that be right? Was there such an agency?

On Fond du Lac Avenue, a block from his shop, Oliver ran into

the homeless man who had set his shopping cart on ﬁre outside Tout
de Suite. He was leaning against a street lamp, in a contemplative
posture. He wasn’t wearing his usual tatters. He was dressed as if for
a stroll on a steamy Southern boulevard (cream-colored cotton suit,
blue cravat, shoestringless shoes, and no socks) or perhaps a hike in
the Baraboo Hills (long knobby staff ). Oliver generally walked as if
time were on his side, but now he lowered his head and speeded up.

“Hey, tall sir,” the man said before Oliver was within the light of

the next street lamp. “Hey, hey, hey, Long Daddy.” He banged his
staff against the post. Oliver halted. “I know you, even though the
last time we touched base, you were all smooth-jawed, like a hound
dog. How is your love life, if I might ask?”

“It’s OK,” Oliver said. “Please excuse me for not lingering.” But

he didn’t move on.

“She’s nice and young, that’s for sure.” The man took a cigarette

from out of his hair but didn’t light it. “Don’t fret. I’m not going to
chide you for your choice of companion. I might be a Saturday night
libertine, but I’m not a Sunday morning moralist. My tongue will
hardly wag on Sunday morning it’s so tired from all it did Saturday
night, heh-heh. But I bet you’ve been getting some looks, like you
and she were freaks, like you were an old lanky black dude, say, and
she was this pretty young white gal, and you were about to do some
miscegenating right there on the street.”

104

Oliver scratched his head, as if a proper response were located

there. He said to himself, “I forgot my hat.” It was true: he had left
his fedora on Murray’s kitchen table.

The man returned his cigarette to the bush on his head. Maybe

he was trying to give up smoking. He said, “If they take away your
right to decide whom you want to give your loving to, whom you
want to say all your ﬁnest thoughts to, even if it be a little old purple
person from far away, then they’re stealing your mind, you know?
Hey, call me a paranoid schizophrenic, but if you can’t choose a
pretty pink creature when you’re a ﬁne chocolate color, if you can’t
choose a gal younger than you’ll ever be again or a person who has
pockets full of gold when you got nothing but ﬂeas in every crack of
yourself or someone who is dandy and citiﬁed when you’re from the
hills, then you’re living under the yoke of some uptight cracker aya-
tollah who looks like Mr. Dick Cheney or some dicty reverend
brother, except he says he’s just a nice liberal feller who wouldn’t ever
put his nose where it isn’t wanted.”

Oliver, who felt forlorn without his hat, like a bare tree sticking

straight up in mud, wanted to express agreement, though he also
wanted to cut the conversation short and go home to his storage
room. He was about to speak up when a woman stepped out from
the shadows into the light that made the homeless man’s suit look
so new and tailored. How had Oliver not seen her earlier? She was
middle-aged, with frothy blond hair, and was clothed in a silver
tracksuit that looked hot off the rack.

“Wade must be running for ofﬁce,” she said to Oliver. “Elect the

loudmouth homeless guy. He won’t accept PAC contributions but
he will thank you for a toke, if you can spare one.” She laughed near
Wade’s ear and Wade took a bandana out of his coat and dabbed
his neck. “I got to disagree,” she said, “speaking as a female person,
about that part of Wade’s speech where he said it was OK for old
men to be chasing young girls, to each his own, and so forth. That
seems kind of weak to me, you know, all these gray-haired men toss-
ing their gray-haired women aside so they can take up with some fox
who wears jeans low. Hey, bad veins and death are going to get them,
too. Don’t leave your children, I say to all you upstanding men. My

105

daddy left my mother and look where I am, smoking reefer with
Wade in the bulrushes, weather permitting.” She cackled again and
revealed her teeth, an incomplete set; streetlight ﬁlled the gaps.

“You’re my fox, Cece,” said Wade, in a conciliatory if half-hearted

tone. He put his staff in his cart, ready to move on. In the cart, Oli-
ver could not help noticing, was a typewriter, a manual. It looked
like a Royal Quiet De Luxe, like the one he’d ﬁxed for Annelise.

“You got any Halloween treats for us, dear, because we don’t have

any for you,” Cece said to Oliver.

Oliver took out his wallet and saw that he had a ten and a ﬁve.

He held out the ﬁve to Cece.

“Five little Indians,” she said.
Oliver gave her the ten, too.
“And here come ten more, whooping it up.”
“You want to read my book?” Wade asked.
“One chapter is all you got,” Cece said to Wade sternly. She put

the bills in her pocket. “Thank you, dear, and let me say that I hope
you will be happy with your girlfriend. I didn’t mean to make you
feel bad or nothing.” She smelled of reefer and old sweat, but her
cheeks looked as if they were naturally rosy.

“I’m writing it fast as I can type with my two ﬁngers,” Wade said.

“It’s got everything: love, sex, violence, tragedy. You want to take it
home with you?”

“Maybe I should wait until you’ve ﬁnished,” Oliver said. In his

current state of mind, he found it hard to read anything.

“Suit yourself,” Wade said.
“I’d like to read it. Really,” Oliver said over his shoulder, as he

continued on down the street.

“Maybe I’ll send it to The Paris Review, get an expert opinion.”
“It’s just this crazy shit about me and him and this girl he’d bang

if he could,” Cece said.

“When it’s a movie, you won’t be in it,” Wade said.
Oliver heard them arguing as he walked, hatless, toward his shop.

zra said, “We could, like, put a bag of dogshit on your dad’s door-

step, light the bag, ring the doorbell, and watch him put out the

106

ﬁre.” Ezra was sitting at Robert’s desk, doodling. He had a graphic
bent. It was his style to mix the human with the animal. At the mo-
ment, he was drawing a top-hatted rodent-man who was wielding a
leaf blower.

“Who’s going to put the dogshit in the bag? You?” Robert said.

“Anyway, I don’t think there is a doorbell. Businesses don’t have
doorbells, you know.” Robert was lying on his bed.

“We could knock on the door. Whate’er.”
Robert studied the smeared blue-inked word on his left palm:

“play.” He was supposed to get his mother to sign a permission slip
so he could see A Midsummer Night’s Dream tomorrow, a freshman
class ﬁeld trip.

Ezra put an X through the rodent-man and began another

picture.

“We could use catshit,” Ezra said. “Or you could get drunk and

vomit into a bag.”

“Ha ha,” Robert said.
“Whate’er. Just a thought.”
“My dad is a nimrod. But I wouldn’t put dogshit on his doorstep,

Ezra. I thought you were a genius or something.”

“Only, like, in math,” Ezra said.
Ezra’s tie-dyed T-shirt made Robert feel queasy. It was as if cans

of red beans and green peppers and corn had exploded on the shirt.

“Anyway, I can’t go anywhere,” Robert said. “I’m grounded. Un-

like you.” When Robert had come home that night two weeks ago
and puked on the stairs, he didn’t rat out Ezra, who, along with two
other boys, had encouraged him to swallow half a bottle of vodka.
When Ezra’s parents had gotten wind of the episode, Ezra had lied,
with his usual ﬂair, and escaped punishment.

Ezra said, “What were you last Halloween?” When Ezra drew, he

bent down close to the paper, like a jeweler, and with his off hand
tugged at his dreadlocks.

“I wasn’t anything,” Robert said. “I was too old to be something.

What were you? Like, Barney?”

Ezra enjoyed dressing up. Even though he was shaving once or

twice a week, he was still, in Robert’s view, not much beyond third

107

grade. It had surprised Robert that tonight Ezra wasn’t pretending to
be somebody other than a tie-dyed bozo from Planet Ezra.

“I was a nun. Remember? Hannah would pop out from under

my skirt and say, ‘Hi, I’m her baby. Trick or treat.’”

“Sister Ezra Mary Jane Magdalene.”
“Handmaiden to the Pope.”
Robert noticed that Ferd, the cat, sat facing the door, apparently

waiting to be let out. How long had he been there?

A gust of wind, carrying children’s voices from the street, came

through the window. The doorbell rang. Robert heard his mother
say, “And who might you be?” His mother had stayed up late last
night making chocolate spiders for Robert’s little brothers and their
friends. The spiders were delicate, prone to collapse; their legs (some
had four, some had six) were made of chop-suey noodles. When Rob-
ert had gone downstairs to get a can of Mountain Dew, his mother’s
eyes were red and wet. He’d declined her offer of an entomologically
incorrect spider and left the room as fast as he could.

Robert hadn’t gone out with Ezra last Halloween, because, in ad-

dition to being too old to troll for candy, he liked Hannah and Han-
nah had apparently liked Ezra enough to spend time under his skirt.
Robert was over Hannah now. He was not really into girls anymore,
though he sometimes thought about his father’s girlfriend, whom
he’d seen maybe once (if that was actually her). He still listened to
her show sometimes, but it felt weird now, knowing that a voice on
the radio was connected to a body that his father touched.

Ezra made a paper airplane of his drawing and ﬂew it toward

Robert. It landed near Ferd. The cat glanced at it, then resumed star-
ing at the door.

Rising from the desk, Ezra said, “I need a Twix. A ﬁx of Twix.”
“Later,” Robert said.
“Later,” Ezra said.
Ferd, for his own reasons, didn’t follow Ezra out.
Robert unfolded Ezra’s drawing. It was a picture of a tall stick-

like guy with a long snouty dog face who was on all fours, licking an
empty high heel with a tongue as big as a shovel.

Robert let the drawing fall back to the ﬂoor. Then he went down-

stairs to see if there were any chocolate spiders left.

108

eynard, Annelise’s mother’s boyfriend, was on the sofa, watching

a football game, eating a caramel apple. It was eight-thirty, three
hours after he’d gotten home from the hospital, but he was still wear-
ing his nurse’s green scrubs and his I.D. tags. His feet were on the
coffee table. Also on the coffee table was the plastic Donald Duck
mask that he wore to the door when a trick-or-treater buzzed. The
elastic string that secured the mask to his head—Reynard’s head was
large and round, bald and shiny on top, a warm caramel color, in
fact—had snapped a while ago, so now he held the mask to his face
with one hand and with the other offered one of the apples that he
and Annelise and Charlotte had made last night. Reynard had a sur-
prisingly high voice, and when he did his Donald Duck imitation,
which the mask mufﬂed, he sounded, at least to Annelise’s ears,
scary. Annelise, who didn’t have a mask, accompanied Reynard to
the door, thinking her presence might reassure the children and their
minders (should there be any). Not that she herself, grimacing at
whatever the pain was that was eating at her chest, was a picture of
reassurance.

Early in the evening there had been a ﬂurry of trick-or-treaters,

but trafﬁc had fallen off in the last hour. Perhaps word had gotten
out to the street that there was an African-American dude in apart-
ment 103 with this whacked-out white girl, and they were handing
out caramel apples that were probably laced with LSD.

Reynard said, “Get that boy. Oh, get that jackrabbit. Give him a

little jolt for me, if you don’t mind too goddamn much. Oh, damn,
he’s gone. You are so sorry, Packers. Did you see that?”

Annelise looked up from the newspaper—ﬂoods, pestilence,

Bush’s war, corruption, and a woman in Midvale who turned one
hundred today. The woman said the key to a long and happy life was
staying unmarried.

Annelise said she didn’t see that play.
“Man,” Reynard said. He ﬂipped open his cell phone and

punched some buttons. “I’m going to check in on your mama.”
Charlotte was working the late shift this week.

Annelise went down the hall into the room where she slept. She

had been at her mother’s for six weeks now. She didn’t make enough
money at her job to pay for her own apartment, at least not a decent

109

one. She had hoped to ﬁnd roommates to share an apartment with,
but had so far struck out. When her sometime lover James Vogel-
sang had proposed that she come live with him in Havana, she’d
said, “Oh, I think that might ruin our friendship. And Havana is a
long way from Midvale.” But then, when she’d seen hurt skittering
across his face, she’d said, “Let me think about it some more.” It was
a ﬂaw, she knew, that she strung people along. She had not formally
broken off with Oliver. A thread still connected them and she hadn’t
been willing to cut it.

Annelise fell asleep. She dreamed that she was pregnant. Reynard

was the father. Reynard put his cheek on her belly and said, “It’s
going to be a Packers fan; I hear it jumping for joy.” She woke up in
a sweat, the pain in her chest having worked itself down into her
stomach. She went into the bathroom and threw up applesauce and
chocolate milk. She wasn’t actually pregnant, was she? She calculated
the days of her cycle. She considered her recent partners: James (one
week ago), Oliver (three weeks ago, a teary night). She was on the
pill. She couldn’t be pregnant. Though maybe she should take the
test to double-check. She threw up one more time.

After she’d cleaned up, after she’d placed a blanket on Reynard,

who was snoring almost loudly enough to rattle her mother’s collec-
tion of novelty salt-and-pepper shakers, she left the apartment. She
had decided to go see Oliver, though she was also thinking about
stopping somewhere for a drink. She would need something stiff
before she went to tell Oliver goodbye.

liver was boiling cellophane noodles on his hotplate when he

heard a banging in the front of his shop. Was somebody trying to
break in? Five years ago, somebody had come in through the alley
door (left unlocked by the forgetful proprietor) and stolen a mint-
condition 1957 Underwood Touchmaster and the jar in which Oliver
put coins for charitable causes. The thief had missed the drawer (also
unlocked, as it happened) where Oliver stashed his pouch of checks
and cash (though, as always, there was not much in the pouch). The
thief had stubbed out a cigarette in the jade plant that Oliver kept
on a table along with copies of The Nation and a newsletter for

110

typewriter enthusiasts called Typeface. A city detective had dusted
the place for ﬁngerprints and put the cigarette butt in a baggie and
taken it off to the lab, but the thief had never been found. The jade
plant had shriveled and died.

When Oliver went out into the shop proper, he saw somebody

standing outside the front door. He turned on the overhead light
and leaned the fungo bat against the orange vinyl armchair that no-
body ever sat in. He opened the door—he hadn’t locked it—and saw
that the person was his second-youngest son, Hamilton, who was
dressed in a yellow wig with corkscrew curls and a dark suit jacket
that fell to his knees.

Oliver said, “What the heck are you doing here, Ham?” He real-

ized he sounded almost rude. He said, “This is such a surprise. Did
you leave home or something?”

Ham said, “I’m not supposed to talk.”
“Ah, I see,” Oliver said.
Ham was holding a black top hat, as if it were an accessory he

wished to be without. He was, for an eleven-year-old, a little ascetic,
even dour. He had thick dark eyebrows, like his father, and he often
gave the impression that he was peering out at the world from be-
neath a ledge.

Oliver remembered a time he’d watched A Night at the Opera

with his boys. When the movie was over, they had draped themselves
over him, in imitation of the stateroom scene—all, that is, except for
Hamilton, who, brooding about something, sat apart. This hap-
pened two or three years ago. Oliver had been happy then, or happy
enough. He had not been troubled by Ham’s distance. It was just
Ham being Hamlet for a moment; everything seemed to be in order.

“You’re Harpo?” Oliver said.
Ham nodded. He entered the shop and, moving the fungo bat

aside, sat down on the orange vinyl chair. He looked thoughtfully at
the inside of his hat.

Oliver, still standing by the door, said, “How’d you get down

here? We need to call your mother. You shouldn’t be here. It’s late.”

Ham said, “I can’t talk, but I took the number 15 bus, if you need

to know.”

111

Oliver got down on his knees in front of his son. The ﬂooring

was old linoleum that had held up well, possibly because there had
been so little trafﬁc on it. “So, before you caught the bus, did you do
any trick-or-treating?”

Ham dug into his coat pocket and pulled out a Sugar Daddy.

The coat was Oliver’s, one he hadn’t worn since his father’s funeral,
six years ago.

“They still make Sugar Daddies? Gee, I didn’t know that.”
Oliver, who had last seen Ham and two of his other sons (Robert

had been absent) a week ago, when he took them out for pizza, said,
“So, do you have a horn in your coat?”

Ham did not smile or honk a horn. He looked more deeply into

the hat.

“A frog?” In one of the Marx Brothers movies, Oliver recalled,

Harpo kept a frog under his hat.

Ham looked at his father in a way that suggested the question

was beneath his dignity to answer.

Oliver switched positions, sitting back on his bottom. It hurt

to kneel. What was he going to do for medical insurance when the
divorce went through, if he went through with it? Look—look!—
at what he was throwing away for a woman who didn’t even seem
to want him anymore and who, even when she had seemed to want
him, continued to have sex with her boyfriend and who knew whom
else. How was it possible to be so cold-blooded? Was she any more
cold-blooded than he’d been, when he walked out on his children?

Ham pointed a ﬁnger at his father’s chest. Oliver tilted his head

downward. “Did you give me this shirt? Or was it Franklin?”

Ham shrugged.
Oliver looked down again and read the inscription backwards. “tI

oD t’ndiD I.” It was almost as if the shirt said he did do it, in some
archaic language.

Oliver glanced at the Christmas cactus, the successor to the jade

plant, which sat on the table next to the chair, along with old issues
of The Nation and Typeface. The cactus hadn’t bloomed in a long
time, two or three Christmases at least. It was hanging on by the skin
of its teeth.

112

Oliver said, “Do you want to talk about anything, Ham? School?

How is Miss Hagy?” Miss Hagy taught the ﬁfth-grade strings class.
Ham played viola, reluctantly. Oliver had asked Ham this same
question just a few days ago, at Muddy Slim’s, the pizza place. Ham’s
answer then was “She’s still a battle-ax.” Tonight Ham gave his father
a shrug, if that’s what the twitch in his shoulders was.

A light bulb in the ﬁxture above Oliver’s head was humming,

ﬂickering, dying. Oliver said, “Well, should we take you back to
your mother’s house?”

Ham reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a piece of paper

that had been folded into a square not much bigger than a Chiclet.
He put the piece of paper in his father’s palm. Then, before his father
could unfold it, Ham got up from the chair and said, “Something’s
burning.”

he charred noodles were cool to the touch when Annelise arrived.

With a spoon she’d found on top of the mini-fridge, she scraped the
noodles loose from the pot and dumped them into the wastebasket
under the bathroom sink, where Oliver bathed on the days he didn’t
go to the Y. A gray hair was embedded in the bar of soap, the only
thing she could ﬁnd to wash the pot with.

Ten minutes ago, when she’d pulled up in front of The Typing

Poole, she’d been surprised to see the lights on in the front room.
She’d taken a ﬁnal hit of reefer, the chaser to the whiskey she’d had
at Popp’s, and knocked on the door. When Oliver didn’t appear,
she turned the knob and entered. She said, “Oliver?” and when he
didn’t answer, when all she heard was the buzz of the light bulb above
her, she went into the back room, with a baseball bat in hand. She
smelled burned food, and she smelled the smell of calamity. She was
afraid that she was going to ﬁnd him in a pool of blood, his head
bludgeoned by some drug-addled thief. Was that what she hoped
for? Sometimes, she noticed, you had murderous fantasies about the
people you were closest to. Why was that? Was it because you be-
lieved you couldn’t possibly be worthy of the love they heaped on
you? Or was it because you imagined their absence would simplify
your life?

113

The room that was now Oliver’s residence had changed some-

what since Annelise had last been in it. Under the window that (when
it was clean) looked onto the tattoo shop next door was a squat
wood dresser, painted a luminous yellow. On top of the dresser, along
with a scattering of coins and a pocket Buddha made of lead (a gift
from her: $1.99 at Dharma Bum Books) and a business card from a
lawyer, were four framed pictures of Oliver’s four boys. She looked
away from the pictures. Clothes hung from a metal bar over near the
workbench. An air mattress leaned against the wall where the poster
of the monkeys in Elizabethan collars banging on typewriters was
tacked. On the couch were folded blankets and a small blue camp
pillow. The hotplate was on the workbench. Also on the workbench
were an open jar of peanut butter and a nearly empty bottle of red
wine. The wine sat next to a portable Smith-Corona in which was
scrolled a piece of paper that bore the words “My dog had the ypis.
My cat had no idea.” Above the mini-fridge was a black and white
photograph of Oliver’s mother and father. They were on a beach.
She towered over him. Mr. Poole stood in the shade of her sun hat.
He was wearing a white terrycloth beach jacket and had the mischie-
vous look—was it those thick eyebrows?—of a child who planned to
ignore his mother’s warnings about jellyﬁsh and undertow.

After Annelise had ﬁnished scrubbing the noodle pot, she poured

the last of the wine into a travel cup. She sat down in front of the
Smith-Corona and removed the paper on which Oliver had typed
“My dog had the ypis”—“yips” was what he meant, right?—and
rolled a fresh sheet into the carriage. She stared at the paper, took a
sip of wine, stared at the paper some more. A blank sheet of paper
was a beautiful thing, like an idea not yet exposed to the light of day.
Why spoil it?

Dear Oliver,

A few weeks ago, I wrote you a letter from a motel near

Havana. That was the same night I slept with a police ofﬁcer
who had arrested me earlier in the day for speeding. (I didn’t
sleep with him so he would let me out of the ticket. I have had

114

sex with men for stupid reasons or no reason, but I haven’t sold
myself. I like to think I haven’t, anyway.) He had poison ivy
on his face and hands, which made it somewhat complicated—not
that you need to know the details. Anyway, I wrote you a letter
before he arrived at the motel. I didn’t mail it. It’s still in the
book by the Buddhist nun which I still haven’t read much of
or absorbed any of, as would be clear from a glance at my life.
Among the things I wrote in the letter is that we should stop
seeing each other. I also said that I wished you were there, at
the Tip-Top Motel, with your long legs hanging over the end
of the bed, your feet cooling in the air from the air conditioner.
This was a bit of a contradiction—my saying on the one hand
that we should end it and on the other that I wanted you, while
I was at that very moment waiting for the policeman to knock
on the door. But that is pretty much who I am, a person to
whom the word “integrity” isn’t going to stick even if you try to
Velcro it to me. (Is there any integrity in admitting that you
have none?) A week or so after I slept with the policeman (I
have slept with him since then, too, just so you know) and after
I’d failed to return any of your frantic calls (in one of which you
revealed that you’d left your wife and family, a step that seemed
insane to me), I came to see you here at your shop, which you’d
turned into a home for yourself. We had a discussion. I told
you some bullshit story about why I hadn’t seen or called you:
I couldn’t pay my cell phone bill, I’d gone to visit my father
who was dying of emphysema in Minnesota. (Dad is in fact
still smoking and has enough wind to play eighteen holes of golf
a couple of times a week.) I didn’t tell you about the policeman.
I didn’t have the courage. I said I’d missed you and that I loved
you. Which was—is, still—true. You asked me to come live with
you and I said, not meaning to be mean, “Here?” You said, “I

115

gave up everything for you,” and I said, perhaps meaning to be
mean, “We all make mistakes.” And then I took it back and
kissed you on your ears and apologized some more and we made
love (to use your phrase) right here on the couch. You told me
how much you loved me, though I knew—my female antennae
never stop working—that you were angry with me, maybe more
angry than you knew, certainly more angry than you were
capable of expressing. And when I left, we both knew things
were over, even though I said I’d see you soon and even though
there was this look of hope on your face, which even your new
beard (I’m on the fence about it: has it grown in more?) couldn’t
disguise. Where do you get all that hope, Oliver?

So, now, I’m here, in your newly decorated living space,

and you’re not. (I have been meaning to tell you that you left the
front door wide open for any thief or druggie to walk through and
also that there is a problem with the d key on this typewriter.)
Is it time to cut to the chase? (Typing on a manual typewriter is
hard work. Did people complain of carpal tunnel syndrome
when typewriters were rampant or is it more of a Computer Age
ailment?) As I was saying, time to cut to the chase. (I think
they cut a nerve in the wrist to cure—or relieve—carpal tunnel
syndrome. I have a friend who has cut her wrists numerous
times in an effort to cure herself of her problems; carpal tunnel
syndrome isn’t one. She lives in South Dakota, where sunﬂowers
are an important crop. I love sunﬂowers. When I see sunﬂowers,
I think of Van Gogh, all that intensity, all that desire to see the
world so clearly that it hurts, poured out in paint that is denser
than light.) OK, so—

fter having a bite to eat, Ferd climbed the stairs, his belly fur graz-

ing the wood. Once upon a time, he bounded up the stairs two or
three at a time, but now, at thirteen and with arthritis beginning to

116

take hold, he went slowly. He hadn’t decided where he would spend
the night. It would depend in part on whose door was open. He pre-
ferred the master bedroom because now there was this vast space on
the bed where Oliver no longer slept. Ferd didn’t like to think too
much about Oliver, though there were moments when he would re-
member how, when he was a kitten, Oliver would hoist him on his
shoulder and Ferd would see a spider on the ceiling or a ﬂy caught in
a cobweb. The world seemed so amazing then.

liver sat in his car behind his shop, reading Ham’s note for the

second time. The wind was still blowing. It came down the alley,
along with leaves and bits of trash and pages from Wade’s book (Oli-
ver would ﬁnd page 9 in the morning, stuck to the recycling bin near
the back door), and it hastened through the half-open window of
the Corolla and buffeted his face. Oliver smelled the shank end of
fall in the wind, the long upper midwestern winter waiting in the
wings, sharpening its claws. He thumbed the fur under his chin,
wished he’d never left home, wished he’d never met Annelise, wished
he could see Annelise right now. He read for a third time what Ham
had written.

Dear Dad,

Happy Halloween. P.S. I think your beard is OK.

Signed, Hamilton Poole

Oliver folded the note into a square, just the way Ham had done

it, and put it in his jacket. When he emerged from the car, a ham-
burger wrapper smeared with mustard ﬂew onto his pants. He shook
his leg, but the wrapper stuck to him. He had a tantrum like he
hadn’t had since he was a child; he kicked his leg convulsively and
swore as he’d hardly ever sworn before. After he noticed that the
wrapper had blown away, he leaned against the car, as if to gather
himself. He thought he saw a deer, bristling with antlers, leaping
through the night at him, but it was only the wind, come to smite
him in the eyeballs. He shut his eyes. He remembered driving home

117

with his father after they’d watched the boxing match at the Satyrs’
Club—it was 1966, and Muhammad Ali had fought an Englishman
named Henry Cooper—and his father saying, “Don’t tell your
mother, but we Satyrs do watch the occasional stag ﬁlm. We don’t
get dressed up in goat costumes or anything like that, however.”

When Oliver began to shiver, he went inside his shop. He re-

moved the bat from the couch and lay down. The couch didn’t con-
tain him—his shins and feet spilled over. When he got up, ﬁfteen
minutes later, he had a feeling that someone was watching him
through the window. He didn’t go over to the window to see if he
was right. He went to his workbench and found a spoon and scooped
some Skippy out of the jar into his mouth. He said, “Anne-lethe?”
He didn’t hear anything except for the wind rattling the window and
the licking sounds he made trying to get the peanut butter off the
roof of his mouth and down his gullet. He said, “Annelise?” Annelise
didn’t appear. Oliver pulled a sheet of paper out of the Smith-Corona
and read, “My dog had the ypis. My cat had no idea.”

He thought of himself as a good typist, but sometimes he made

mistakes.

118

Part 2

121

Needs

he two feet of snow that had been there for weeks, that had

almost been a comfort to wake to, was melting all at once,

hissing as it went up into the air, gurgling as it went down drains.
Last night, while reading a biography of the young Stalin (the cob-
bler’s boy who wrote romantic verse and sang at weddings and was
employed, brieﬂy, as a meteorologist), Diana had heard the wind (a
southerly breeze, the TV weatherperson had said; get out your hip-
waders, he’d cheerily advised) nibbling at the house, shaking the win-
dows that no longer ﬁt snugly in their frames. This morning, when
she’d gone downstairs, she’d heard the sound of water dripping.
There was a leak in the front hall. She and Oliver had planned to re-
roof last fall, but then Oliver had left and she’d lost sight of the roof,
among other things. She put a mixing bowl under the leak. Then
she put on a coat and hat and fur-lined boots. Oliver had given her
the hat nine or ten Christmases ago, a tasseled wool hat made in
Nepal, bright as a prayer ﬂag, and she wouldn’t not wear it now just
because it had come from him.

Diana had gotten into the habit of taking a walk early in the

morning before the boys were awake. She walked whatever the
weather. She liked especially those very cold mornings that didn’t
allow for a lot of thought, when the cold made her forehead hurt and
her eyes water, when her breath froze almost before it was out of her
mouth, when the physical act of walking occupied all of her. She also
liked walking when the snow was falling, even when it was blowing
and blurring her way. She felt like a child on an adventure, as if she
were walking through the pages of a picture book full of danger and

beauty and were bound to come out alive and enlarged. She didn’t
often think about her law practice on these walks. Nor did she think
often, or at length, anyway, about her departed husband.

But those sorts of mornings, despite the recent snow and cold,

were less frequent than the milder, murky, dank ones. One day the
week before Christmas, she’d set off in the predawn dark, through
what felt like a spring shower, which later turned into a thunder-
storm, complete with lightning bolts, one of which hit close enough
to her that she felt that something apocalyptic was afoot (not that
she was religious). Today, the Sunday after Groundhog Day, with
the melt having commenced, it somehow seemed as if spirits were
departing the earth. She almost took this weather personally, as no
less an affront than a snowstorm in April was. At any rate, her mind
wandered from her walking as she went down Wright Way, the street
named after the womanizing architect, may he roast in hell along
with the rest of them.

She sneezed—she was coming down with something—and ban-

ished Wright and his brethren from her mind. She was walking in
the street rather than on the sidewalk since there was no trafﬁc at
this time of day. The fog was thick, but not so thick that she couldn’t
see the banks of snow that bordered the road. They were grayish,
gritty with road muck, the color of porridge, the color of the fog.
And there, still, was the Christmas tree that had been sitting at the
end of the Arthur and Cliff ’s driveway for a month. She had been to
a Christmas party at Arthur and Cliff ’s and had seen the tree when it
was inside, trimmed with old-fashioned big-bulb lights and trinkets
Arthur had brought back from Oaxaca and elsewhere. Arthur, a
jowly sentimentalist, had given a toast to his deceased cat, mauled
some months ago by a coyote (or a feral dog, nobody was sure).
Cliff, gravel-voiced, HIV-positive Cliff, had said to Diana, touching
her on the sleeve of her black sweater, “And how are you holding up,
sweetheart?” It was common knowledge on Wright Way that Diana’s
husband had abandoned her and their children. She’d said, “I’m try-
ing not to hate Christmas too much,” and Cliff had laughed and
said he put cotton in his ears whenever he went shopping during the
holidays, and she’d had two drinks (one more than she’d planned on

122

having) before walking home and taking off the dress-up shoes that
pinched her toes. She would’ve liked to have Cliff as a friend. Some
of her women friends, particularly those who wanted to console her
for the end of her marriage (the end of her second one, actually,
though the ﬁrst one hardly counted) or wanted to listen while she re-
viled Oliver, she was keeping her distance from. Cliff would listen to
her, but she guessed his presence—his condition—would defuse her
somehow, help her to be less angry. And as the date of the divorce
trial approached, she was becoming more angry. (She had hired a
man to represent her, a real hard ass, whom she would have otherwise
crossed the street to avoid. Though there was little she could take
from Oliver, it seemed useful to sic this guy on Oliver and his girl
lawyer, a total amateur.) She didn’t want to become any more angry
than was healthy or practical. Hence, these walks to start the day.

sually there was no line at Tout de Suite, where she sometimes

stopped midway through her walk, but today it was almost out the
door. Perhaps the sounds of the thaw had roused people from their
beds. Ahead of her were a young man in a suit (smelling like he’d
taken a dip in a pool of cologne), a youngish woman in one of those
pea jackets that had come back in style, a woman cardiologist in
running clothes whom she vaguely knew, a bearded black guy wear-
ing a Cat in the Hat stocking cap. Or maybe the length of the line
was due to the fact that Emile was working alone. Diana was aware
that his co-proprietor, Walid, a Lebanese, had quit. The two had
had disagreements, loud public ones, in French and Arabic and En-
glish, sometimes in all three languages at once. They would call each
other crazy, fou, stupide, ganache, bird-brain (this last from Walid,
whose command of English was better than Emile’s). Diana had pre-
ferred Walid to Emile, whose thick black mustache (like the post-
adolescent Stalin’s) and slightly disheveled black pompadour and
effusive pleasantries made her nervous. Walid was clean-shaven and
brusque. Emile looked needy, and to needy men she wanted to say,
“Read a book, go ﬁshing, put your hands to work in your off-hours.”
During most of the sixteen years of her marriage to Oliver, Diana
had not thought of her husband as being especially needy. And when

123

he did become ﬁdgety, he had picked up a book of poems (though
poetry made him a little moony) or had taken the boys ﬁshing or
gone into the basement and made something out of wood (a hat
rack, a bookshelf ). Maybe when she had caught a glimpse of some-
thing deeper stirring under his skin, she’d looked away too quickly,
as if she’d intruded on him in too private a moment. She had
popped out all those babies for him—she was thirty-eight when she
had the last one—but this was not enough. She’d taken care of him
ﬁnancially, too, underwritten his doomed business, but this was not
enough, either. Sometimes she’d laid her pride aside and worn a sign
around her neck that said “Love Me,” and he had looked at her and
grinned and returned to his book of poems or the baseball game or
to studying his long ﬁngers that she’d once loved the touch of. And
they’d gone on living together, making plans for re-shingling the
roof and touring Ireland. Well, enough of that.

As Emile was making a latte for the cardiologist, as Diana was

trying to remember the cardiologist’s name, the guy in the Cat in the
Hat cap reached his hand into the Tips jar. The man’s hand was
meaty and cut-up. Diana didn’t say anything because she didn’t
really approve of Tips jars and she also didn’t want to be a party in an
argument this early in the day. Not that she thought petty theft was
defensible, even if, as was likely, the man was one of Midvale’s indi-
gent. She’d seen him around, she was pretty sure—probably down-
town, near her ofﬁce, cup in hand.

Nobody else said anything, either. Then, when Emile gave the

cardiologist change for a ten, the cardiologist (her name was Frick,
Jane Frick; she was slender as a blade) handed the man in the Cat in
the Hat cap a ﬁve and said, “Don’t forget to leave a tip.” She turned
and headed for the door, as if she’d just sewn up an incision and was
done for the day.

Emile, who had been looking at the man with some distaste,

whose eyebrows now rose as if moved by an insight, said, “You take
money from my jar, Wade? Go. Leave the premise and do not ever
return.”

Wade said, “What do I want with your stinking money, mother-

fucker? I got some of my own now.” He held the ﬁve out and shook

124

it, like a baby’s rattle. He turned to Diana. “Will you lend me ﬁve
more so I can buy one of this man’s pastries? One of his lattes will
bankrupt me.” He guffawed. His eyes were peeking out from above
his beard. They could’ve been looking at the horizon or some sign of
the end of the world. Diana didn’t have a ready response, but she felt
her face freeze, become hard.

Emile said, “Leave my shop forever, Wade, and do not come

back.”

Wade was gazing now at the customer standing behind Diana.

“What are you looking at, Junior? You going to lend me ﬁve? You
going to let me sleep in your house with its seven bathrooms and ﬁne
chandeliers? You going to get me off the street before I drop a bomb
on all you people, particularly this motherfucker from Arabistan?”

The man behind Diana was too sleepy to get his tongue going.

He made a sound that lacked deﬁnition, a sort of animal grunt.

Diana sneezed and Wade glanced at her and said “God bless” and

then he went out the door, rustling in his soiled blue parka. The bell
on the door jingled more loudly than usual. He had dropped the
bills he’d taken from the Tips jar on the wet ﬂoor.

Emile said, “Bon débarras! ”
Diana ordered a cup of Kenyan. “Excellent choice,” said Emile.

“My favorite. Nice and sunny. Just right for today.” She stirred a
spoonful of honey into it. She gave Emile points for offering his cus-
tomers the option of honey. She was trying to give up reﬁned sugar.
She put a lid on her coffee, adjusted her hat, and went out into the
weather again.

Wade was sitting on a pile of snow near the door, like a child who

had been kicked out of school, his head in his hands. Diana consid-
ered whether to give him her change. And what was the downside of
parting with two-ﬁfty? Was she enabling a drug addict? Assuming
she was not, would two-ﬁfty salve her conscience? She’d had this dis-
cussion with herself before and more often than not did not end up
disbursing anything. She walked by the man and then came back
and said, “Here,” holding out her hand full of money as if it was she
who was begging. He didn’t take it and didn’t take it. Finally he said,
“You let me sleep in your house with its seven bathrooms and ﬁne

125

chandeliers?” He didn’t guffaw this time. His eyes were tinted with
blood.

She was usually pretty calm in situations in which one or more

parties were aggrieved, but lately she had lost her touch. A client (an
especially difﬁcult and high-strung one, but still) had dumped her
this month. This week, one of her children had said, “What’s your
problem?” and she had named some of her problems—Hank, Ham-
ilton, Franklin, and Robert (the one who had posed the question)—
and then she had gone up to her room to cry.

Wade said, “I’ll sleep in your basement, clean up, take care of

your children if you don’t got anybody to do it.”

How did he know she had children, or was he just shooting his

mouth off ? She closed her hand on the money and walked away. He
said, “I like your hat. Maybe I’ll steal it someday. This one doesn’t do
shit for me.”

he morning had warmed by a degree or two and the fog had thick-

ened. It was not possible to see anything higher than the trunk of a
tree. There was no sky, though there was evidence of light. What was
it that somebody had said was like a good walk spoiled? Golf, right?
Today her walk had been spoiled by the weather and by the fact that
she had stopped for coffee and by her own thoughts. If only the
world weren’t burning up and she had no need for caffeine and no-
body else had any needs, either, and her mind was as empty and as
clear as a clear, empty bowl.

When she was a child, she had sometimes gone ﬁshing with her

dad. His parents had a vacation house on a lake up in Iron County.
Her dad liked to go ﬁshing before the sun came up, before, as he said,
the ﬁsh had all their wits about them. Diana and her dad would glide
out into the lake in the dented Grumman canoe—the lake was al-
most always calm so early in the morning—with Diana in the bow
and her father in the stern, his second cigarette of the day between his
lips. (Diana’s younger sister would sometimes be in the middle, com-
plaining, but usually she couldn’t be roused from bed until much
later.) They would head for the point, a rocky stub of land where a
one-armed, one-eyed hermit supposedly lived (at least during the

126

warmer months, according to her grandfather, a teller of tall tales).
Diana and her father didn’t talk as they paddled through the dark.
Sometimes the early morning air would feel velvety on her face, and
sometimes it would be cool and make her shiver. She would listen to
the sound of her paddle pushing through the water, to a loon, to an
oar rubbing against a gunwale a half-mile away, to the sizzle of her
father’s cigarette when he dropped it in the slosh in the bottom of
the canoe. (The canoe leaked mysteriously.) Eventually, the pines on
the point would appear out of the dark—once she saw a black bear
standing on its hind feet under the pines, watching them come
closer—and then her father would start casting, ﬁrst with a ﬂy rod,
then with his spinning rig. Here, off the point, he said, was where all
the big old ﬁsh in the lake gathered at dawn to gossip. He hardly ever
caught one. She herself occasionally hooked a bluegill with a worm.
When she did, he would say, “Should we mount it on our wall or
send it back to school to think about its mistakes?” (He was an eco-
nomics professor at the college in Midvale, in an age before econom-
ics professors had acquired luster.) Sometimes, as they drifted down
the lake, past the point, her father would hand her the bacon, let-
tuce, and tomato sandwich he’d made before he’d wakened her. The
bacon would still be warm. He didn’t eat anything. He would smoke
and drink coffee from a little brown plastic cup that also served as
the cap for the Thermos. Sometimes he would ask her to tell him
about the book she was reading, and she would tell him the whole
story, every detail she could recall. Sometimes he would have to tell
her to not talk so loud so as not to disturb the other anglers who had
emerged from the morning mist. “You can tell how serious those
men are by the hunch of their shoulders,” he said. “They look like
they’re praying, don’t they?”

Some years later, after her mother had left Diana’s father for an

English professor (a dope; Diana herself had made the mistake of
marrying one of those her ﬁrst time out), she asked him why he had
hardly ever caught a ﬁsh on those mornings when they went out to-
gether. He said, “I couldn’t tell a Royal Coachman from a Swedish
Wobbler, sweetheart. I just liked being with you before the day got
started.”

127

Diana took a sip of Emile’s coffee. Her father had died ﬁve years

ago, from lung cancer.

She was back on Wright Way now. Just ahead, wandering like a

ghost through the fog, was a man saying, “Here, Frida, here, Frida,
Frida, Frida.” As Diana came closer, she saw that it was Arthur. He
was wearing a cardigan over a nightshirt that fell to below his knees
and unlaced boots and nothing on his shaved head. He was looking
for his kitten, he told Diana.

“I am so distraught.” Cliff had given him the kitten for Christ-

mas, a replacement for Mickey. “I went into the garage and I opened
the door for some reason and she got out—made a break for it, I
guess. I am so upset with myself.” Arthur, Diana thought, was lucky
to have Cliff around, somebody who could throw him a rope when
he was drowning in his own feelings. Though who knew, really,
what went on in their relationship.

“What does she look like?”
“Black. A little black cat with bells on her collar. How can I not

ﬁnd a black cat in all this fucking snow?”

“We’ll ﬁnd her,” Diana said, though she wasn’t quite up for hunt-

ing for an escaped cat. She needed to get home. Hamilton, the earli-
est riser among her crew, would probably be waiting for her to pour
his cereal out of a box. “She couldn’t have gone far, could she?”

Arthur said, “What is to be done with a fat old man who misses

his little kitty?” He took off his glasses and gazed at her through wa-
tery eyes. He was said to be an excellent teacher. Robert, a freshman,
was taking Spanish from another teacher this year—and pulling a
low C. Maybe, if Robert got Arthur next year, Arthur could light a
ﬁre in her son’s slacker head.

She noticed Arthur’s ears—bald men’s ears always seemed bigger

than were seemly—and it occurred to her that you couldn’t protect
yourself from your own or anybody else’s sorrows. You could not
keep sorrow from your life, but you could keep bitterness out,
couldn’t you? She stuck this early morning thought in her coat
pocket, to be checked at some later date. And then she gave Arthur a
hug—a quick one, though it didn’t lack sincerity, and said, “I think
I heard a meow. Over by the garage.”

128

block from her house, she passed a man walking a dog that was

part-beagle, part-some-other-kind-of-hound. The man was study-
ing his cell phone as if it were a sacred text, the map of the world.
She had thought recently about getting a dog, but then she had de-
cided that four boys and an elderly cat were plenty.

129

130

Butte des Morts

fter she’d ﬁnished with her radio show—she’d played music only

by dead people (“dead but still singing,” she liked to say), in-

cluding some of the songs (Professor Longhair’s “Bald Head” was
one) that her late boyfriend, Joe, had liked—and after she’d turned
the studio over to the two guys who did the two a.m. all-thrash
show, she got into her car and on the fourth try (it was cold out)
started it up and drove the two blocks to Beaucoup Doughnuts,
where she bought a large coffee and two blackberry jelly doughnuts.
She ate one before she put the key in the ignition again. The Metro
turned groggily over, like a sleeper surfacing from a dream, and then
it fell back into silence. Further attempts to start the car failed. She
leaned her head against the steering wheel. Into her head came Gus,
the man with the ﬂat-top haircut who’d sold her the car. She saw the
narrow band of pale ﬂesh on his ring ﬁnger and his large ear lobes
that looked like accidental pancakes, bits of batter that got away, and
she heard him say, “The moonroof is a nice feature.” She’d guessed
that Gus’s wife had left him for somebody less talkative and perhaps
more handsome, and this had made Annelise feel more sympathetic
to him than maybe she should have been.

She got out of the car and walked around it, as if this might calm

her. She had intended to drive a hundred miles west tonight, to
Butte des Morts, on the bank of the Mississippi River, to the door of
E.J. Demuth, the man who had molested her when she was a child.
She needed to go to E.J. Demuth’s house now and ring his doorbell
and hand him the letter she’d written. When she wrote the letter,
she’d felt brave, and she still felt mostly that way. She didn’t know if

she’d feel the same way tomorrow. She was planning to go to medita-
tion class tomorrow. The day after that, she was supposed to have her
wisdom teeth extracted, at a cost of two thousand dollars. The day
after that, assuming she had actually worked up the courage to sub-
mit to an oral surgeon, she would be recovering from having her wis-
dom teeth extracted. Snow was predicted for one or all of those days.

And what good would a letter do? If she wasn’t trying to be a

Buddhist, she might just shoot him in his blue eyes. (So she remem-
bered them.)

Annelise circled the car again, shivering. She was dressed as if it

were a mild March night. What could she have been thinking when,
ﬁve hours ago, she went out the door of her mother’s apartment and
got into her car on which she had another two years worth of pay-
ments and pointed it toward the radio station? Actually, she’d been
thinking about Joe, about how he would keep a dictionary next to
the bed so he could look up words he didn’t know and also about how
he would lay out his clothes for the next morning, which possibly ex-
plained why she was wearing the not very warm faux-leather jacket
he’d given her on her twenty-eighth birthday. (Joe was not an expla-
nation, however, for the thin, scoop-neck T-shirt she had on. Only
vanity—she looked good in a T-shirt, even in the cold—explained
that.) Anyway, thinking about her dead boyfriend had been less
painful than thinking about any of her living ex-boyfriends or James
Vogelsang, who was not yet an ex-boyfriend. Less pain was one of
her goals in life. One reason she’d chosen to spend her pittance of a
salary on having her wisdom teeth removed instead of on having her
mind examined was that you didn’t get anesthesia when you opened
your mouth for a psychotherapist. She’d tried psychotherapy once or
twice. You had to listen to your evasions and half-truths, the ringing
silences, the blurted-out truths, while your head throbbed, while you
sweated and turned a scalded color. And, anyway, she believed her
mind would hurt until she died, no matter what she did to relieve the
pain. And because she put some stock in the notion of an afterlife,
she also believed that her mind would hurt after her death.

She got in the car again and tipped her head back. No moon

shone through the moonroof. She got her wallet out of her bag and

131

looked at a picture of Joe, the only picture of anybody she kept in
her wallet. Joe was nine in the picture. He was wearing his basketball
uniform. “I still had all my hair then,” he’d said, ruefully. But you
couldn’t tell from the picture, not from his skimpy torso or his full
lower lip or his serious gaze, who he would grow up to be—a guy
who worked in a bicycle shop and saved the ticket stubs of movies
they went to and sometimes forgot to remove his cap when he got
into bed with her but didn’t forget to lay out his clothes for the next
day. She liked that she could not see his future, most of all his death,
in his nine-year-old face.

If Joe were here, he could get her car to run. So, too, surely,

could Oliver. So, too, for that matter, could Gerald, her dermatolo-
gist friend, who had shapely and highly skilled ﬁngers and who also
knew the answers to difﬁcult questions, such as how did the world
begin? (“With nobody watching,” he said, “unless you count God.”)
So, too, probably, could Grifﬁn, the tier of trout ﬂies.

Coming across the parking lot, pushing a grocery cart, was some-

body hidden under a fur-fringed hood. The hood had been detached
from a parka and was tied under the chin, like a bonnet. Otherwise,
the man—oh, damn, it was him, the homeless dude, whom she’d
hardly seen since the day she gave him the typewriter—was wearing
what looked like a Southern planter’s suit. The cart was aimed at her
car. Annelise put the key in the ignition and turned it, forgetting that
the engine was dead.

The Metro made a ghoulish throat-clearing sound. Excited,

she pressed on the accelerator, once, twice, and the engine jumped
all the way out of the grave. The homeless man—he was wearing a
name tag on the breast pocket of his coat: it said, “Hi, I’m Wade”—
was right outside the window now. He was motioning for her to roll
down the window farther, saying, “You want to read my novel? I got
it here in my cart. Except for page 9, which ﬂew away one night.
Hey, missy.”

His hand was on the window. It looked like something that had

just splatted and stuck there. There was an ugly cut at the base of his
thumb. How did he type? Presumably he was the hunt-and-peck sort.

Annelise said, “I don’t have time right now. Sorry.” She put the

car in reverse and backed slowly out. Don’t die, she said to the car.

132

Wade, walking alongside, said, “Well, OK. Maybe tomorrow. It’s

good, missy. It’s got love, sex, tragedy, everything.”

nnelise drove toward the river, urging the Metro on but never ex-

ceeding the speed limit, singing, “The moon don’t shine through my
moonroof tonight. No, the moon don’t shine through my moonroof
tonight.” She had smoked a little weed along the way, but this, she
felt, didn’t quite account for her giddiness, which was almost like
that of a child setting out on a vacation, imagining the motel swim-
ming pool and the trampoline-size motel bed and the mini-golf
course across the street. It was a giddiness that was sure to vanish if
she thought about it too much, so she stopped thinking about it.
Two miles east of the river, close enough to E.J. Demuth’s house that
she could almost smell him, she stopped at the Butte des Morts
Truck Plaza. It was four a.m. The scent of the river, of E.J., of this
little town where she’d spent her childhood, didn’t spoil her mood.
Walking across the parking lot, she thought, Don’t think.

She sat at the restaurant counter, two stools from a man in insu-

lated brown overalls who was reading Cat Fancy magazine, one stool
from a priest who was eating runny fried eggs and reading a free
weekly called The Constant Shopper. Annelise ordered coffee. The
priest glanced at her, then continued to mop up his eggs with a
wedge of toast and look through The Constant Shopper.

Annelise had brought in with her the book by the Buddhist nun

that she always took places and hardly ever read. She liked to look at
the photo of the nun, who had the full pink cheeks of a child who
has been running around in the cold, shouting with glee. The nun
had smile lines that were like big parenthesis marks, and within the
parentheses was a modest smile that seemed a little short of serene.
Annelise liked that the nun didn’t smile any more than she did. An-
nelise read part of the chapter called “Hopelessness and Death.” She
wondered if the waitress, who was rather heavily made-up for four in
the morning, was “addicted to hope,” the notion that one could be
secure and happy if one did only the right things, if one just changed
the music or the channel or the arrangement of the furniture. Anne-
lise had to admit that most days she was addicted to the hope that
weed and sex and doughnuts would make her feel better. What she

133

lacked was faith that she might actually be a decent person, despite
her mistakes and cravings and history. You had to renounce hope,
the nun wrote, especially the hope that we can be saved from being
who we are. To get anywhere—or, rather, to be somewhere—you
had to start from hopelessness.

The waitress said to the cook, “Burn me some toast, Miguel. Por

favor.”

The coffee tasted as if it had been made with last week’s used

grounds. But Annelise, waiting for the sun to rise, had a second cup.

The cook passed the toast out through the window, the waitress

asked the man reading Cat Fancy how Muriel was doing and the
man said (without looking up from the two-page spread on a cham-
pion Maine Coon cat) that Muriel was “getting along,” and the
priest rose from his stool and gave Annelise a pleasant smile. Had he
found what he’d been hunting for? From his black trouser pocket he
ﬁshed out a gratuity and left it beside his clean plate.

“God’s grace,” he said to Annelise.
“Have a nice day,” Annelise said.

alking toward her car, she smelled incense. Could somebody ac-

tually be burning incense in the truck plaza or had the priest opened
a trap door in her head and was she now tumbling downward into
her past? She remembered the almost cloying smell of incense in
church, a priest swinging a censer over a casket at the funeral for
some lady her mother knew, clouds of smoke mixing with sunlight,
and then she remembered that E.J. would burn scented candles, lots
of them, when she came over, in the middle of the afternoon. The
candles were votive-style candles, in little glass cups, some red, some
green. The candles would be on top of the TV and on the coffee
table, and there would be cookies on a plate, still warm. E.J. liked to
bake. He would sometimes greet her at the door in his baker’s apron,
confectioners’ sugar on his hands.

Sometimes when memories came rushing at her, Annelise would

freeze and go into a kind of trance; her eyes would grow and grow
until she felt that that was all she was, a pair of eyes tied to a stake.

There was light in the eastern sky. She put the key in the ignition.

The Metro started right up. She considered driving back to Midvale

134

and taking a long hot shower. She considered driving over to Ha-
vana to see her sometime boyfriend. And then she drove toward her
childhood home.

She turned off the four-lane at Water Street and crossed the rail-

road tracks into the old part of town, passing under a banner an-
nouncing the 2005 Butte des Morts St. Patrick’s Day Parade. She re-
membered marching through Butte des Morts with the high school
band as a member of the pom-pom squad. Sometimes it shocked her
to remember that she’d been a pom-pom girl. It was like remember-
ing something stupid you’d said when you were drunk, except that
she wasn’t drunk when she chose to be a pom-pom girl. How could
a shy, serious person such as herself have become a pom-pom girl?
Well, it was either that or playing cymbals in the band, and her good
friend Dierdre, who was now working in her father-in-law’s insur-
ance agency, was a pom-pom girl, and Annelise’s mom couldn’t af-
ford to pay for a guitar or guitar lessons, which was how Annelise
might have otherwise occupied herself on those days when the pom-
pom girls practiced.

On Water Street, which dead-ended at the river, she drove past

the bank and the ofﬁce of her ﬁrst dentist and a ﬁshing gear store and
the Ray of Sunshine (a tanning salon) and Dierdre’s father-in-law’s
insurance agency and the brick cube where a chiropractor named
Dr. Dove practiced his art and several taverns, including the one
(The Laughing Duck) where Annelise’s mother, following her di-
vorce, had found a boyfriend or two, though not one who cared to
split the rent with her.

There were people—drunks, suicides, the confused—who had

gone straight where Water Street intersected St. Catherine and had
driven, until a ﬂood wall was built in the mid-nineties, into the river.
When Annelise was young, she thought the best way to die would be
by drowning. Now she didn’t really have a preference.

Annelise took a right at St. Catherine Street. She drove past the

library, where Mrs. Billups, her hair in a chignon, a big bow droop-
ing from her blouse collar, had ﬁlled Annelise’s hands with books
and helped her with school reports (“My Visit to General Grant’s
House,” “Pandas,” “Catherine, the Patron Saint of Wheelwrights”)
when her mother was absent. Two blocks farther on was Annelise’s

135

elementary school. In the dim blue-gray early morning light, the
playground was full of ghosts. She saw a girl swinging on a swing,
touching a low-lying cloud with the tips of her shoes. She saw a girl
watching a boy trying to “train” ants to climb over a twig by tempt-
ing them with bits of food. (Victor was his name, and Annelise
would be mean to him in high school, just because she was some-
times overcome by the desire to be mean.) She saw a girl running in
tight circles around the tetherball pole, dizzying herself, hoping she
would turn into a stack of buttermilk pancakes, like the tigers in
“Little Black Sambo.” E.J. Demuth had said things to her like, “I
want you to eat me up like I’m your favorite food.”

She turned right again, at Parmenter Street, which her father

had referred to as Parmesan Cheese Street because he thought he
was being funny. “How are things on Parmesan Cheese Street?” he
would say to her after he’d moved out. She had spent her ﬁrst nine
years on Parmenter Street, in a house that her father called a “sardine
can.” (“If you got a decent job,” Annelise’s mother said, “maybe we
could move to a better sardine can.” He drove a potato chip truck,
but he wanted to go into sales; he was taking night classes.) The roof
over the enclosed porch was tin and when you were sitting under it
and rain was falling on it, you practically had to shout to make your-
self heard to your companion, which in Annelise’s case was some-
times an invisible person named Becca. “No, Becca,” Annelise would
say as the rain hammered the tin. “We can’t go out now. What if we
got struck by lightning?” Becca was based on an actual girl whom
Annelise saw around Butte des Morts. This girl had a stiff-necked
way of walking. Sometimes she would carry a baseball bat, as if for
protection or in the hope that someone would ask her to play. An-
nelise adopted her, the invisible Becca, when she was six or seven,
about a year after her father left, about the time that E.J. Demuth,
whose house was visible from Annelise’s porch, began to give her
piano lessons. Sometimes Annelise would take Becca along to E.J.’s.
Or Becca would somehow be there, watching impassively, pale as the
stupefying candlelight.

Annelise parked across the street from E.J.’s house. It was ﬁve-

ﬁfteen. Daylight, thin and watery, was spreading through the leaﬂess

136

trees and over the small front yards (smaller than Annelise’s memory
had made them) and across the bags of trash that sat on the curb.
Annelise looked at E.J.’s house—it was a modest ranch, painted a
cheerful yellow—and then she looked away.

She read the letter she had written him.

Dear——,

How does one begin a letter to the man who raped you when

you were a child? “Dear E.J.” seems a little too formal, too
polite. “Dear Eej”? I remember how you asked me to call you
“Eej,” which is what you said your best friends called you.
You told me that “Eej” rhymes with “liege.” You asked me
if I knew the word “allegiance.” You had shelves full of books
and knew lots of big words, such as “crocodile” (“Watch out
for the crocodile in the hall, Annie-belle”) and “eleemosynary.”
(“I’m in an eleemosynary mood, Annie-belle. Have a cookie. I
put golden raisins in it.”) You made me spell those big words for
you—you said I was “precocious”—and I always got “crocodile”
right but I would get lost in the slithery “eleemosynary” and
for some reason I could never spell “precocious” or “allegiance”
correctly, either. I remember that one afternoon—this was during
the portion of my visit devoted to music; you’d told my
mother, a churchgoer like yourself, that you would teach me
both (!) piano and voice, at no cost!—you asked me if I knew
the word “betrayal.” I said I didn’t, so you explained it, with an
illustration from my own life. You said my father had betrayed
my mother and me by leaving us for another woman. You said
there was hardly anything worse than “betraying” somebody
who loved you and depended on you. (You may have actually
accompanied this remark with some dark chord on the piano,
your ﬁngers having wandered for a moment from my leg. That
was your style: to underscore things.) You said that if a person

137

betrayed somebody who loved her, or, even worse, if a person
told “secrets” about somebody who loved her, that person would
very likely be eaten by crocodiles. And here you grinned and
then probably played the “croc” music from Peter Pan. And in
my confusion and terror I asked you if, in the event my father
was eaten by crocodiles, would I be able to get a new one?
Would you, Eej, maybe even ﬁll in?

I could have begun with “Dear Scumbag,” but that might

lead you to think that this is simply a piece of hate mail from
one of your victims, and into the garbage it would surely go. It
distresses me to think that something so heartfelt might not get
read.

In idle moments, I have wondered how many other children

you “abused” (such a trite word, but let’s go with it for the
moment). The literature on such things—and I haven’t spent a
lot of time reading it; I’d prefer not to—suggests that sexual
predators are the serial sort of criminal. Of course it is possible
that you are the exception or aberration or whatever the correct
word is. I don’t recall ever seeing another child go into your
house, a house of music and cookies and candlelight, a house
that no half-sentient child could resist. I had a good view from
my house of yours, at least until my mother, not far from
insolvency, moved us four blocks north. Had I seen another
child enter your house—I’d noticed only one other “student,”
an older woman who was hoping to land a plum role in the
summer stock theater up the river, where you, too, performed:
my mother saw you there in a Neil Simon play, and said you
were “wonderful”—I might have felt jealous. After all, my
mother, preoccupied as she was, hardly ever baked cookies for
me, and my father, absent as he often was, didn’t kiss me much.
There was warmth and music and good smells (the cookies, I
mean) in your house. Part of me, the needy seven-year-old

138

child, almost looked forward to coming over; another part of me
was afraid you would hurt me if I didn’t come over.

During other idle moments, I have wondered how, if in fact

you are a serial predator, you have managed to escape detection
all these years. I suppose it was a smart move on your part to get
married. Your late marriage must have served as camouﬂage,
though it must have brought complications, too. But let’s drop
the question of whether you molested more than one child and
concentrate on the fact that you raped at least one seven-year-old
girl whose name is Annelise. (For the record, this would have
been in 1979, a year in which all kinds of crazy, violent stuff
was happening in the world, close to one hundred percent of
which I, despite being a “precocious” child, was unaware.) Of
course by “rape” I don’t mean that you actually penetrated my
seven-year-old vagina. Was it tact that restrained you from
trying to enter me in that fashion? Or did you realize that you
already possessed me in every way that really mattered? And
what a bloody mess it might have been, had you tried, right?
You were in your own way quite gentle when you guided my
hand to your thing. “Shall we take it out of its cell now, Annie-
belle? Shall we . . . ?” Etc. You should know that writing
down the acts that you forced me to perform is not (despite what
the therapeutic literature about my “condition” supposedly says)
particularly liberating. Once in the course of writing this I had
to go to the bathroom to puke. Down the toilet went anger and
hatred and self-loathing—or some of it. I am supposed to get to
the point where I can regard you as a pathetic creature rather
than as a big scary monster, the crocodile who lives under the bed
or in the hallway. And then I come back to the computer and
there you are, squatting like a toad right in the center of my head.

Sidebar: You would think that I might have come to hate

music, given my early association of it with you. Not that we

139

ever “made” much music together in your parlor. (After sex,
you would usually allow me to watch a TV program, and then,
maybe later on, after you’d refashioned yourself into the music
teacher, we would practice scales or I would sing something while
you touched me wherever you pleased.) But it turns out that I
love music, especially music from bygone eras. In fact, it is my
livelihood—I have a radio show. Aren’t you proud of me?

I thought I might end on this note: Sometimes when I am

having sex with a man, you will appear in my head and I will ﬁll
up with anger and I will take it out on my partner. For instance,
if I’m on top, I will put my hand on his windpipe and squeeze.
It’s not quite as calculated as I make it sound; it’s almost as if
I’m in a semiconscious state. But I am conscious enough that
I want to hear him cry out in pain, I want to hear him say,
“Stop.”

Annelise S.

Annelise refolded the three pages of the letter and stuck them

back inside the envelope, on which she’d written “Mr. E.J. Demuth”
and his address. She felt lightheaded, though the weed had long
since worn off, and she rolled down the window. And there, on the
sidewalk on the other side of the street, was E.J. Demuth.

He was wearing a blue ﬂeece vest over plaid pajama bottoms, and

on his head was a tweed motoring cap. On his feet were leather
mules. He was studying the morning paper while an unleashed dog,
a Yorkshire, inspected the bags of garbage. Then, after looking sky-
ward, as if to check if the weather was in fact what the meteorologist
said it was going to be, he folded up the newspaper and said, “Let’s
go, Angel-belle. Let’s do it.” On cue, the dog—was its name Angel-
belle or was that merely a term of endearment?—turned two circles
and then hunkered down and relieved itself.

While the dog crapped, E.J. gazed at Annelise. Annelise didn’t

look away. E.J. gave no sign that he knew who she was. Annelise saw

140

in his pale, jowly face—he was well over sixty now, thicker, doughier
than when she’d last seen him, of course—the imperturbable bland-
ness of the highly skilled liar, the straight-faced arrogance of some-
one who had never been caught at his crimes. His eyes were remote
and indifferent. Only his heavy eyebrows, now a peppery-gray,
which had fused during his climaxes (he always kept a white hand-
kerchief on his person for the occasion: “I stole it from a magician,”
he’d said to Annelise), gave the impression that something might be
weighing on him.

When the dog ﬁnished its business, E.J. told it to stay and walked

toward Annelise’s car. Annelise froze. She was a pair of eyes tied to a
stake.

E.J. touched the bill of his motoring cap, as a gentleman of the

old school might, a gesture so false it almost broke the spell he’d put
on her, and said, “May I help you?”

“A glass of water,” Annelise said. There was a noise in her ears,

like waves crashing. Her memory was correct: his eyes were a watery
blue.

A garbage truck was hurrying up the street. The driver seemed to

be in a fury. He braked suddenly, jumped out of the cab, and began
hurling bags of refuse into the truck’s maw two at a time.

“Water? You need a glass of water? Are you ill?”
She shook her head. She saw the night’s growth of whiskers in the

folds of skin on his face. She closed her eyes. How was it possible
that he didn’t see, if he didn’t, the child peeping out from the thirty-
two-year-old woman she was?

When she opened her eyes, she saw the Yorkie out in the street,

nosing a cardboard box with a plastic window in it. Had the box
once contained something sweet and delicious, perhaps? Dough-
nuts? The garbage truck was rumbling up the street and E.J. De-
muth was leaning close to her, saying, “Are you ill, miss?” She saw
the truck bearing down on the dog and then she heard Joe’s voice. It
came out of the slosh and mist in her head. “I wonder how the kit-
ties are,” his voice said. This was one of the very last things he had
said to her. They were on the beach in Budva and he looked up from
his crossword puzzle and said, “I wonder how the kitties are.” Then

141

Joe went and walked in front of a truck. And after she’d ﬂown back
to America with his body and seen him buried, she took the two kit-
ties, Lance and Louisa, to the animal shelter. “I’m sorry,” she’d said
to the shelter person. “I can’t take care of them.” And when two
weeks later, in a ﬁt of remorse and longing, she went back to the
shelter to retrieve the cats, she was told that the shelter wasn’t like
day care where you just parked your animal while you went and did
whatever; there was a “protocol” for taking (or retaking) possession
of pets, and she would have to submit to an interview. Annelise had
gone home, without the kittens.

She could tell the man at her car window—his face was like a ba-

nana pudding, with some sort of black spice sprinkled on it—that
his dog was about to be squished or she could put her car in gear and
drive away. Whatever she did, she wouldn’t also give the man at her
window the letter she’d written him, at least not now.

142

143

Batting Practice

he evening before his divorce hearing, Oliver called Murray to

see if he wanted to go to the Pitch & Putt to hit some baseballs.

It was mid-April, almost spring in central Wisconsin. The air was soft
as the inside of a cat’s ear. The Pub & Grub League began its season in
two weeks, and Oliver wanted to test his shoulder in the batting cage.
He thought he might have a rotator cuff problem, to go along with
his sciatica problem. Anyway, his right shoulder often ached, particu-
larly in the morning, after a night of sleeping on the air mattress on
the ﬂoor of his shop. He had turned ﬁfty-two during the winter. He
felt like he’d spent the winter inside a steamer trunk, growing his
beard and hair and ﬁngernails. He’d had dreams about his children
locking him inside a steamer trunk, kicking the sides of it and chant-
ing, “Eat shit and die, Dad, eat shit and die.” He’d died many nights,
and then this morning, when he stepped out into the alley to stretch
his legs, he felt spring kiss him in the parts of his face where hair
wasn’t growing. He’d gotten into his batter’s stance, ﬂexing his knees,
ﬂapping his back elbow like a big bird about to take ﬂight. He took
note of the pale blue morning sky, the sunlight that warmed the slov-
enly backsides of the neighboring businesses. And then the guy with
Tourette’s came down the alley, his head hidden under the hood of his
sweatshirt, his morning doughnuts in a bag in his hand. Oliver had
waited for the guy to start barking and swearing, but he had passed by
without making a sound. Maybe he was cured, and maybe Oliver’s di-
vorce trial would be canceled because of good weather.

Murray said he couldn’t go out tonight. He said that Cassandra,

who was pregnant, was feeling ill. He also said that he was having a
vasectomy next week.

“Did you know that you have to have about twenty ejaculations

after the operation before you can achieve sterility?”

Oliver said he didn’t know this. He was standing beside his work-

bench, which doubled as his kitchen counter and dining room table,
watching his cat, Lester Young, lick leftover macaroni and cheese
from a bowl.

“And you’ve got to jack off for the lab two times to prove that

there’s no sperm ﬂoating around in your stuff. I don’t know. Maybe
it would be better to use condoms. Anyway, it looks like I’ll be on
the DL for a while.”

“So, when did you say the baby is due?” Oliver asked, in part to

steer the conversation away from sperm, in part because he’d forgot-
ten how far along Cassandra was. During the winter, while living in
the steamer trunk, he would ask someone a question and immedi-
ately forget the answer.

“October. Roughly. The date of conception was mid-January,

during that blizzard. I’ve been painting like crazy ever since. Nudes,
mostly. I’m off rabbits, for the moment. I’m doing a series of Cassan-
dra pregnant. In the one of her in her ninth month, her belly will ﬁll
the whole canvas. It’s kind of overwhelming, becoming a father at
ﬁfty-six or -seven or however old I am. I thought I was going to avoid
this problem. I mean, I’m just a selﬁsh artist-type. Well, I’d better go.
I hear her retching. Usually this happens in the morning. She is radi-
ant and beautiful when she isn’t sick. Have you ever wondered what
it’s like to be pregnant? Like you’re growing this creature inside you
that starts out the size of a coffee bean who will one day speak words
like ‘dude’ and ‘Hodag,’ who will wave to you from a school bus one
morning and maybe the next morning, too. Imagine growing one of
us inside your stomach. OK, keep your head still and swing level.”

Oliver said, “Good luck with the vasectomy.”
“Good luck with the divorce, I meant to say before,” Murray

said. “I mean, I’m sorry about it, you know. Come over for a drink
tomorrow if you need one. Cassandra can’t drink but I can. And you
can. And should, maybe. Have an ale for your morale.”

Oliver went into his bathroom, which consisted of a toilet and a

sink and Lester Young’s litter box and a footstool on which Oliver

144

kept his Dop kit and a straw basket that contained back issues of
The Nation and a copy of the now defunct Typeface. He stood in front
of the mirror and tried to imagine himself—thin as a peashooter,
hairy as a hermit—being pregnant, a belly swelling beneath his Old
Hatters shirt. The thing he’d noticed about himself when Diana was
pregnant, at least during the third and fourth pregnancies, was that
he would eat like a ﬁend and not gain an ounce. He hadn’t been able
to compete with Diana, had never attained roundness or fullness of
being. He had been a spoon to stir the pot, handy, but not much
more.

“So, not to change the subject,” he said to Lester Young, “why

did I leave my wife and four children? Why am I getting divorced
tomorrow?”

Lester Young was sitting on the toilet top, licking his chops after

his macaroni and cheese feast. He was a middle-aged gray cat whose
last home had been the Humane Society. He had a large squarish
head that he sometimes tilted to the side, as if to hear better, the way
his namesake had done when he was playing saxophone in the Count
Basie band.

The cat said, “I don’t know, man. I’ve lived with you for only

two months and I don’t really know your history. But let me ask you
this. If you decide to go back to your family tomorrow, following the
court hearing, are you going to return me to the shelter? I can’t stand
those dogs with their tiresome howling.”

“I wouldn’t return you to the shelter,” Oliver said. He gazed at

the lines that had formed in his forehead on all those winter nights
when he couldn’t sleep, when even the pills he’d gotten from Wade
(in exchange for a typewriter and some typing paper) didn’t work.
The lines were faint, trails not yet worn, and not the reason a tear
was working its way down his cheek.

He said, “Most people have a pretty good idea who they are at

ﬁfty-two. I don’t, I guess. I used to think I could be summed up as a
dutiful husband and a good father and a guy who repaired typewrit-
ers, if not for a living, then as a kind of tech support for the people
who continued to use them; I would be useful to those admittedly
eccentric few, until they all died off. I had a role in life, and I was OK

145

with it, except that I wasn’t happy enough. How can you tell when
you’re happy enough?”

The cat had gone out the bathroom door, tail swishing.

liver put a token in the box and quickly took a stance on the

sullied green plastic mat. A ball shot out of a tube that looked like a
snout on a monster from the deep and ﬂew by before Oliver could
get the bat off his shoulder. The pitch was inside and groin-high. Ol-
iver moved a few inches farther from the plate. He swung at the next
ball—which, like the ﬁrst one, went by at ﬁfty m.p.h., the slowest
speed the machine operated at—as it struck the backstop. He was
way late, but at least he didn’t feel much pain in his shoulder. He
choked up on the bat. He missed the next two pitches, but he got a
piece of the ﬁfth one even though it was, again, inside and he had to
ﬂail at it. He stared at the pitching machine, as if it might have a
mind of its own, as if it might be tricky and malevolent.

Oliver would never see pitches like these in the Pub & Grub

League, a slow-pitch league, but once upon a time he had been able
to hit sixty- and seventy-m.p.h. fastballs, high school stuff. He rode
the bench until his junior year at Midvale Central, and then the
coach of the Pioneers, a guy named Gus, who would later go into
the used car business, said, “Stretch, you’re in left today.” That was
in 1969, the spring after the winter that Oliver, a late bloomer, had
grown an extra ﬁve inches. Pitchers seemed to be distracted by Oli-
ver’s height or perhaps by the inﬁeld chatter of which Oliver was the
subject. “Hey, it’s a pencil.” “No, it’s an X-ray of a pencil.” “No, it’s a
peninsula. No man is an island, you know.” “No, it’s a pencil dick,
pencil dick.” Pitchers tended to groove fastballs to Oliver—belt-high
to him was close to chest-high to everybody else—and Oliver hit
them in the gaps and, occasionally, over the amazed heads of the out-
ﬁelders. He had a nice level swing; it seemed to have a touch of Zen
in it or, at any rate, more calmness than seemed normal in a gangly,
long-haired freak of a teenager. In his senior year, he made All-
District, though he was not much of an outﬁelder. (He was in fact a
highly distractible one; it was in left ﬁeld that he thought about girls
and composed a couple of poems that he hoped the girls he liked

146

would admire if by chance they saw the poems in The Mulberry, the
high school literary magazine.) He tried out for the baseball team in
college—he’d gone to a branch of the state university—but didn’t
make it. So he’d concentrated on poetry and Frisbee-throwing and
girls, one of whom would turn out to be his ﬁrst wife, though they
didn’t get around to marrying until ﬁve or six years later. Now and
then he remembered—the memory would jump out of the closet at
him, like the electric-blue suit with the bell-bottom pants he’d some-
how acquired in the seventies and thought he’d thrown out ages
ago—that he’d had a wife before Diana. Loretta had left him, two
years after they’d married, but not because he’d spent a lot of his free
time in the batting cage. No, Loretta had wanted someone a little
more adventurous and possibly a little less tall (she was forever say-
ing, in her needling way, “Can you hear me up there?”), someone
who would talk dirty to her during sex, as well as someone who
didn’t want to have children. He couldn’t bring himself to talk dirty
to her, and he wanted kids he could some day bring to the Pitch &
Putt. And he had found a woman to have kids with, a woman who
was a couple of inches taller and several degrees more temperate than
Loretta, who supported his typewriter-repair enterprise with her law
practice, a woman he didn’t have to talk dirty to when they were in
bed, a woman who didn’t mind too much when he spent part of Sat-
urday in a batting cage, as long as he took a child or two with him.
He remembered swinging at a few while Robert, his ﬁrst-born, sat
outside the cage in one of those metal-frame baby backpacks that
you could stand upright. When Oliver hit one on the nose, he would
look at his child and say, “Double, off the wall,” or, “Double, in the
gap,” or, “That’s gone, nobody’s gonna touch it. Can you say ‘gone,’
Robert?”

And now, Oliver felt certain, Robert, who had been slow to

speak, hated him. Oliver didn’t know how to get his son back. Rob-
ert was gone, untouchable.

Oliver put another token in the box. He hit ﬁve straight pitches,

though none of them so solidly that any would have reached any
gap. He fed the machine again. He got into his stance—his knees
slightly bent, his weight back on his left, rear foot, his furry chin

147

tucked into his shoulder, his hands held high as if to ward off
trouble—and became a picture of stillness, except for his lips, which
moved, twitched, as if he were trying to ﬁnd the word or phrase that
would help him survive the rest of his life.

“Only connect,” said a voice outside the cage, just as the pitch

came rushing out of the tube. Oliver had turned the speed up,
maybe by accident. He didn’t connect.

Oliver looked behind him and saw Hal Sveum. Hal had a

bat in his hand and was wearing his sun-and-sweat-faded Old Hat-
ters cap. And the woman behind him, of whom Oliver got only half
a glimpse because here came another pitch, was—crimini, when it
rained it poured—Loretta, wasn’t it? Oliver had heard, probably
from Murray, that Sveum and Loretta had become a pair over the
winter. Well, the winters in Midvale tended to be long, and the
glare of the sun off the snow sometimes led people into unlikely
couplings.

Oliver waved at the pitch, heard the seams on the ball sizzling as

it ﬂew by.

He glanced backward again and said, “Hello, Hal.” He con-

ﬁrmed that Sveum’s companion was indeed Loretta. He saw the
straight black hair cut skullcap-style and the lips that were red and
full and always hungry-looking. The glasses, with little red frames,
were new.

He hated that he was seeing his ﬁrst ex-wife on the eve of his sec-

ond divorce. He hated Midvale, its smallness. He hated the smug
self-importance of Sveum, who, approximately once a week, saved
Midvale from corrupt ofﬁcials, or so his column suggested. He hated
that he cowered when he ran into the friends or colleagues of his
almost-second ex-wife. But the thought of moving out of Midvale
didn’t appeal to him. His children were here and he was rooted here.
His sleeping pill supplier was here, too.

Oliver was late on the next pitch.
“Tuning up, O-Man?” Sveum said.
“Hello, Oliver,” said Loretta.
Oliver said, “Yep. Hi.” The fourth pitch of the series Oliver con-

nected with, though he hit it off the skinny part of the bat.

148

“Hang in there,” Sveum said, almost kindly. Maybe Loretta had

taken an edge off him. And maybe Sveum had whispered dirty noth-
ings in Loretta’s ear and made her happy.

“OK,” Oliver said, and he swatted one. It might have reached a

fence. He didn’t feel any pain in his shoulder.

“The Splendid Splinter is back,” Sveum said in apparent admira-

tion. “Just the other day I was thinking about Ted’s cryogenically
preserved head in that freezer in Arizona. You been tomb robbing,
O-Man?”

Oliver said no, he hadn’t been doing any of that.
“If I could just get Ted’s eyeballs to replace my own,” Sveum said,

“they couldn’t get me out. I’d hit ’em where they ain’t every time.”

“Maybe you should look into getting glasses,” Loretta said.
“Too vain,” Sveum said cheerfully, kissing Loretta on the cheek.

They moved along to another batting cage.

Oliver, still ﬂoating in the euphoria of his last swing, put his

last token in the box. He swung so hard at the ﬁrst pitch that his
hat, a light blue Milwaukee Brewers cap from the glory days of Cecil
Cooper and Gorman Thomas, fell off. When he leaned down to
scoop up the cap, the next pitch hit him in the jaw.

here was a tavern not too far from the Pitch & Putt called the

Ru-Barb Inn. It was on a frontage road, among used-car lots and
auto glass businesses and only a quarter mile from the Satyrs’ Club,
the private men’s association Oliver’s father had belonged to. Oliver’s
mother used to say to her husband, “If you just watch boxing and
play euchre there, why do you call it the Satyrs’ Club?” Oliver’s dad
had replied, “The name is a joke, Kitten. We men are great jokers.”
Oliver was thirteen the one time that he’d been inside the club—to
watch the ﬁght between Muhammad Ali and Henry Cooper—and
he hadn’t been impressed. The TV reception had been poor and the
chairs were the meeting hall fold-up variety and Oliver’s root beer
had been served in a glass from a Midvale drugstore soda fountain.
(Had the glass been stolen?) There was a blackboard on which mem-
bers wrote notes to each other. “Hey, Orville, where in the heck is
the socket wrench?” “Hey, Myron, get me a schnapps and shut up!”

149

When Oliver and his father left the club that night in 1966, Mr.
Poole, after confessing that the Satyrs did watch a stag movie every
so often, had tried to talk to his son about girls. He asked Oliver if
he had any questions on the subject, and Oliver had said he couldn’t
think of any at the moment. His father had said, “Well, if you do
think of any, let me know. Shall we go to Burger Palace to top the
evening off ?”

When Oliver drove by the Satyrs’ Club tonight—the old white-

washed cinderblocks had recently been painted a forest-green and
on the roof was a satellite dish—he noticed that the front door was
wide open. (Had he stopped and gone inside, he would have found
four men—two Republicans, one Democrat, and one Libertarian—
planning the Satyrs-Only Spring Gala, which would feature a couple
of professional lap dancers. The door was open to admit fresh air.)
When Oliver sat down at the bar in the Ru-Barb, he felt woozy. He
felt like Henry Cooper must have felt after Muhammad Ali had
slugged him. He ordered a whiskey and a beer and a glass of ice.
With his right hand he held the glass of ice to his throbbing jaw and
with his left he sipped, with the delicacy of a tea drinker, ﬁrst the
whiskey, then the beer. It hurt to move the muscles that opened his
jaw and he considered asking for a straw. He wondered what shape
his jaw would be in tomorrow morning, when he had to appear in
court and testify. When the judge asked him whether his marriage
was “irretrievably broken,” would it be easier, physically speaking, to
answer “yes” or “no”? He mouthed those two words silently and
could not help noticing that it hurt more to say “yes”; you had to
open your mouth a bit wider to say “yes” than you did to say “no.”
But of course it did seem as if his marriage was broken beyond re-
pair. And so, apparently, was the relationship that had broken the
marriage apart. As for himself, he was nearly broke (lawyers and
therapists, even the low-rent ones, were expensive). Maybe he would
ﬁnd Jesus. Oliver’s mother, who lent him money, liked to say, “The
Lord is never far, dear. You don’t even have to raise your voice. A
mumble will get his attention.”

Oliver thought that if Jesus were here, in the Ru-Barb, he would

appreciate the clean air. Midvale bars had gone smokeless this year.

150

The guy sitting two stools from Oliver was commiserating with
Rudy, one of the owners, about this. “Pretty soon you’re going to
have to start serving chardonnay, Ru. And ﬁnger food on tooth-
picks.” Rudy snorted.

It took Oliver two glances to realize that the guy sitting two

stools from him had been his high school baseball coach. Since Mid-
vale was the sort of burg where it was possible on the same evening
to run into one’s ex-wife and one’s sixth-grade ballroom dance
school instructor (she and Oliver had pumped gas side-by-side at the
U Pump an hour or so ago; Oliver didn’t identify himself, but Mrs.
Pettite, whose high heels lifted her several inches off the oily pave-
ment, kept looking at him, as if she knew the tall fox-trotting boy
beneath the hermit’s beard), it didn’t seem so strange to Oliver that
he would be drinking next to Coach Gus Bailey. Oliver had bumped
into Gus a number of times over the years, often enough that he
knew where Gus went snowmobiling (“Wherever there’s snow and a
tavern to refuel at”) and how sales were at the lot (“Never better,” he
always said) and what Gus thought of whoever was managing the
pro baseball team over in Milwaukee (“Some of his players are going
to lead him to drink, if he hasn’t already been led there”). Gus was an
amiable enough man, though a bit too garrulous for Oliver’s taste.
And the tall guy quips were tiresome. Oliver hoped his beard would
camouﬂage him until he ﬁnished his drinks and could make a break
for the door. But Gus sniffed him out.

“I thought that was you under all that fur, Ollie. You shrunk a

little? How’s the typewriter business?”

Oliver got an “OK, Coach” out of his mouth.
Gus’s cheeks had a reddish tint, which participation in too many

Happy Hours had contributed to. Some of Oliver’s Midvale Central
teammates had referred to Gus as Beets as well as Beetle and El
Gusto. He had been a decent coach, however. He had known some-
thing about the game, having played minor league ball in Iowa for a
year, before, as he put it, taking a whack at the education business.

“I was trying to remember the name of that guy who lived in the

woods, a Polack or something, sent bombs through the mail and
typed on an old-fashioned typewriter. Ted Something.”

151

Oliver knew the Unabomber’s last name—Kaczynski—but de-

cided not to attempt to say it. He shook his head.

“You must have a fair number of loons among your customers,

no offense. I mean, who uses a typewriter anymore? It’s like driving
a car with a three-on-the-tree.”

Oliver considered his customer base, the hard-core users of type-

writers in Midvale. There was a poet—come to think of it, there
were two poets—and a Unitarian minister and a retired Catholic
priest and the guy who drove the horse-drawn carriage and an eld-
erly Russian chemistry professor (whose typewriter had a Cyrillic
keyboard) and Wade the homeless man. Two longtime customers,
Oliver had learned recently, had died; their survivors told him that
he could do whatever he wanted with the typewriters the deceased
had left to be ﬁxed.

Oliver attempted an entire sentence—“It’s a niche business”—

but had to repeat it because he mumbled the ﬁrst time. It hurt both
times.

Gus changed the subject to Ted Williams’s cryogenically pre-

served head. Had there been something in the papers about this?
Hadn’t Ted Williams died a few years before? Oliver hadn’t kept up
with the news lately. Gus said, “Ted Williams was a hero of mine.
Why didn’t they freeze all of him if they were going to freeze one
part of him?” Oliver didn’t know the answer to this question. At
some point in the conversation, Rudy took over for Oliver, who was
not holding up his end. Oliver half-listened, while watching Gus’s
thick ﬁngers—he had been a catcher and was in fact shaped like an
old-time baggy-pants catcher, well padded in the middle, stubby
legs—travel from the shiny wood surface of the bar to his white
brush-cut hair to his beer glass to, when Rudy made a comment
about the Splendid Splinter’s prowess as a ﬁsherman, the air next to
his ear, where he made a little casting motion. Oliver followed the
line as it spun away, riding a draft out the door—a man and a
woman were entering, bringing the spring night inside—and across
the parking lot, past Oliver’s car (the only one in the lot with an “I’d
Rather Be Typing” bumper sticker), and down the frontage road,
past the Satyrs’ Club. And then the line, zooming the way longing

152

does, skipped over miles of Midvale houses and businesses and took
a quick left onto LaFollette Boulevard and landed, softly as a mayﬂy,
on the porch of the ramshackle three-story frame house where An-
nelise lived with a handful of medical students. Oliver knew where
Annelise lived because, crazy with grief over the loss of her, he’d fol-
lowed her home from the radio station one winter night. On other
occasions, he’d walked past the house, a stalker as tall and as obvious
as the curbside saplings, watching people in blue scrubs come and go.
He’d imagined her in her room, entertaining a stream of lovers: med
students, interns, residents, med techs. Now, as Oliver gazed up at
Annelise’s window from his stool at the Ru-Barb Inn, he saw himself
kissing her for the ﬁrst time (at a picnic table by the zoo) and trem-
bling with excitement and fear. Now, as he examined the fresh blister
on his right hand, as Gus talked about Ted Williams giving the ﬁnger
to Boston newspapermen at the tail end of his career, Oliver saw
himself (seven months ago) trying to remove his wedding band. He
couldn’t get it over his knuckle. Had his ﬁnger thickened during his
sixteen years of marriage? (His nose had grown for sure, a sign of
aging, it was said.) The ring ﬁnally came off when he put a dab of
butter on his knuckle. Later, when Annelise saw his bare ﬁnger, she
said, “I feel terrible about this. It shouldn’t be like this. I think we
fucked up.” Oliver had tried to talk her out of her view, but he failed,
and it soon became clear that while Oliver continued to love Anne-
lise, Annelise was in the process of talking herself out of Oliver.

n the way home to his shop that night, Oliver stopped at the

Food Giant to buy Aleve and cat food. On the way back out to the
parking lot, Oliver ran into a girl brandishing a ﬂier. She said, “Sir,
have you let Jesus Christ into your life? Would you like to, sir?”

Oliver, who had had a second whiskey at the Ru-Barb, said, “No,

thanks.” He stared at the girl, as if he were waiting for the next pitch
to come shooting out of the tube. She wore glasses and had a friendly
smile and her blonde hair was in a perky ponytail. She seemed a little
underage for a Jesus freak—and what was she doing out on a school
night? She might have been sixteen. Was that her “guardian” (or em-
ployer?) watching her from the Econoline van over there?

153

Oliver felt something whirling inside him, his stomach tumbling.

He felt as if his brains were about to be sucked out of his skull and
scattered around the parking lot. He recalled the guy with Tourette’s
who had come down the alley that morning. Maybe the guy had
been quiet because he’d somehow exchanged his brain with Oliver’s.
Oliver heard himself say to the girl, “No, no, no, no, goddamnit,
no.” The voice didn’t sound like his own.

“Sir, please don’t swear.”
Oliver said, “Sorry.” He accepted a ﬂier from the girl, but he

didn’t look at it and he didn’t say anything (or nod or grimace) when
she said, “Jesus loves you.” He walked over to his car and drove home
and ﬁlled the cat’s bowl with hairball formula liver-ﬂavored nuggets
and took one of Wade’s sleeping pills, saving the other for the next
night, when he would be divorced again.

154

155

Self-Wash

arl, the manager of the Rub-a-Dub Self-Wash, looked a bit

like Santa Claus, a resemblance he made use of at Christmas,

when he worked as a Santa at the Sugar Creek Mall. “Got the beard,
got the gut, got the glasses wherever they are,” Carl said to Oliver,
dragging on a cigarette, coughing. Oliver told Carl that his glasses
were on his nose, which was holiday-pink, but Carl didn’t seem to
hear him. “I’ve even got the suit,” he said. “It’s hanging right there in
my camper. Have suit, will travel.” Carl thumbed one of his red sus-
penders, which he wore year-round. Today they held up bright green
basketball shorts.

Carl and Oliver were standing outside the door of the Laundro-

mat, in the Sunday morning sunshine. It was mid-June, two months
after Oliver’s divorce had gone through. Sometimes Oliver did his
laundry at his mother’s, though doing it there made him feel like a
college student home for the weekend. It was a little less stressful and
more convenient if not cheaper to do laundry at the Rub-a-Dub—it
was only a few blocks from Oliver’s shop, which continued to serve
as his residence—though coming here did involve the risk of being
buttonholed by Carl.

Among the things that Oliver had learned about Carl over the

past several Sundays was that Carl had gotten laid a lot when he
arrived in Midvale (“a goddamn cock’s-man’s paradise”) thirty-ﬁve
years ago; that he had started taking antidepressants after he’d been
canned from a printing press job (“for rabble-rousing”) and that he
still took them, if not always in a regimented way; and that he was on
a handful of other meds, including pills for his heart and trick knee

and liver; and that he parked his camper in his ex-wife’s driveway
most nights. Last Sunday, Carl had revealed that Dorie, his ex-wife,
sometimes invited him in for wafﬂes on Saturday morning with her
and her lover, a woman named Oracene. Carl had then described
in detail a time when he was on a ladder cleaning out his ex-wife’s
gutters—he did odd jobs for her—and had observed Oracene and
Dorie making love. Oliver had looked down at his feet during Carl’s
narration.

Today, after loading two washers, Oliver had stepped outside,

wishing to put some distance between his ears and the rock-and-roll
oldies station that Carl piped into the Laundromat. Oliver had sat
down in one of the two plastic chairs under the eaves and opened the
book that Franklin had found for him at a garage sale. It was called
Hooking the Big Ones in the Lakes and Streams of Wisconsin. Then
Carl had appeared at Oliver’s elbow and said, “Beautiful day, isn’t it?”

Oliver had agreed, before putting his nose back in the book. The

boards were slightly warped, perhaps from exposure to the elements.
Carl had gone on to discuss children, in particular the three who
were inside playing with one of the laundry carts. The two older ones
were taking the youngest for a ride around the premises while their
mother folded clothes. The older ones, boys, had ﬂashing lights
in their sneakers and whooped on the straight-aways. When they
almost spilled their baby sister at a corner, their mother, who was
hooked up to an iPod, snapped at them.

“It’s lucky I’m tolerant and like children,” Carl had said, exhal-

ing cigarette smoke. “I wouldn’t be much of a Santa Claus, if I was
otherwise.”

At this point, when Carl got onto his job as Santa Claus, Oliver

had risen from the chair. He was close to a foot taller than Carl. But
he was not tall enough to escape Carl’s smoke.

Carl told Oliver that he was among the very few Jewish Santa

Clauses in America. “Jewish-atheist-socialist, which I don’t mention
on application forms,” he said. “Pagan-hedonist also, when it suits.
Don’t fence me in is my motto. I can be as good a Santa Claus as any
god-fearing whatever. I’m not a Jew with Christmas envy. I don’t
need Christmas, but Christmas needs me, apparently. I don’t have

156

any certiﬁcate from some fancy Santa Claus school, but I got ears that
little children can say their wishes into.” Carl crushed his cigarette
beneath his sneaker and pushed it under Oliver’s chair. He said,
“What are you?”

“What am I?” Oliver said, trying to collect his thoughts. He

couldn’t remember Carl ever having asked him a question.

“Religious afﬁliation, if any.” Carl frowned a lot and had fur-

rows in his forehead that Oliver thought children sitting on Carl’s
knee might ﬁnd disconcerting. The furrows didn’t go away when he
stopped frowning. The purplish bags under his eyes, which the small
steel-rimmed glasses didn’t hide, were unsettling, too.

“I was raised Presbyterian,” Oliver said.
Carl said, “Given your height and that beard, I was thinking you

might be Mennonite. I was in Florida last winter and I saw some
Mennonites frolicking at the beach. The men and boys were in the
water and the women and girls were on the shore in their bonnets
and long skirts. I’ve always said the more nudity the better—among
the consenting, naturally.”

Oliver looked up the sidewalk at the old man who was sitting

outside the Hmong convenience store, reading a Hmong news-
paper. He was wearing house slippers and a truck driver’s cap. He
looked imperturbable.

One of the boys who had been pushing the laundry cart stuck his

head out the door. A low-riding car was going slowly by, blasting
hip-hop. The boy’s mother said, “Ali, get your butt back in here.”

Carl said, “I hate that shit. That’s the worst music ever invented.

Some moron with a drum machine talking about ‘bitches’ and ‘hos.’
That would be garden hoes, I guess. And all these white music critics
slobbering all over it.”

Oliver hadn’t listened to much hip-hop, at least not on purpose.

He went for old school stuff, like Otis Redding and Sly and the
Family Stone and Al Green, music that seemed half a world away
from hip-hop, but he didn’t say this to Carl, not wishing to encour-
age him.

Carl went on. “Did I tell you I used to be a music critic? I wrote

for This Vale, back when it was starting up. I covered the classical

157

stuff. I was a piano prodigy when I was a child, then I rebelled. I play
that lame-brained oldies station here because it’s just white noise,
basically. If I played Stravinsky, the Rub-a-Dub would go broke. Not
that I’m ﬂush with customers as is.”

Oliver excused himself, saying he needed to check on his wash.

Carl followed him inside and hobbled back to his ofﬁce at the rear of
the Laundromat. The two Speed Queen top loaders containing
Oliver’s laundry were on the “spin” cycle. Oliver sat in one of the
chairs lined up along the front window. A Fontella Bass song, which
he had liked when he was a boy, was playing. Oliver opened the ﬁsh-
ing book to a black-and-white photograph of a man holding up a
trophy muskie. The graininess of the photo made Oliver think of
pictures of extraterrestrials in supermarket tabloids. He was not, to
tell the truth, an avid ﬁsherman, though he was grateful for any gift
any of his children sent his way.

Inside the book was a wallet-size pamphlet, something the

previous owner had perhaps used as a bookmark. On the front of
the pamphlet it said, “How to Be Saved and Know It.” A drawing
showed a guy on a ﬁshing boat throwing a drowning person a life
preserver. Oliver skimmed the tract—“There is nothing you can do
to save yourself, you cannot be good enough”—and then he stuck it
in the back of the book. He got up and went over to the bulletin
board, which was in a nook, near the money-changing machine.

On the bulletin board was a ﬂier for a reptile show and an article

from a magazine about the connection between Alzheimer’s and
obesity. Somebody was selling a “contemporary” loveseat (“Come
take a look!”) and somebody else was selling a 1985 Mercury Marquis
(“Car runs excellent”) and a man named Oscar was teaching salsa
dancing at his studio. Oliver didn’t care for reptiles and he was hardly
obese and he didn’t need a loveseat or a car and he wasn’t in the mood
to take up salsa dancing. He didn’t want to sell Avon products and he
didn’t want to go to a poetry slam. He didn’t want to receive the word
of God at the Fountain of Life church and he didn’t want to buy any
of Carl’s used CDs or his George Foreman hamburger cooker. What
Oliver wanted was his old girlfriend back. He wanted her back even
though she had hurt him down to the bottoms of his feet.

158

He took his laundry out of the washers and put it into two

dryers. He watched his jeans and shirts and boxers and towels and
socks go round and round, tumbling, ﬂopping downward when
they reached their apexes. The rise and fall and rise and fall of his
dark wet empty clothing mesmerized him. It was like some sort of
dumb show that was being performed for him alone. He could not
say what, if anything, it meant.

He did eventually wonder where his whites were, and concluded

that he had left them back at his shop or possibly out in the car. Or
maybe he’d put them on top of the car—they were in a pillowcase, if
memory served—while he’d gone back inside his shop to get coins
from his jar of coins (used, until the last few months, for charitable
causes) and then he had driven off and now his athletic socks and
T-shirts lay like so much refuse in the streets of Midvale. Maybe there
was a connection between thinness and Alzheimer’s.

He went outside to his car, which was parked in front of the

Hmong convenience store. The man reading the newspaper had dis-
appeared. Inside the store some people were huddled around a small
TV set, as if warming their hands. The bag of whites was on the back
seat. He decided he’d do them some other time. He sat in the driver’s
seat, safe for the moment from Carl, and listened to sparrows chirp-
ing. He noticed a ream of typing paper on the ﬂoor of the car—a
typewriter repairman didn’t go anywhere without typing paper; he
had once actually made house calls—and he took a sheet and went
back inside and wrote a notice and tacked it to the bulletin board.
The notice said that The Typing Poole was being liquidated. It said
that all his typewriters (“classics, antiques, modern electric models,
foreign-language models”) had to be sold. Also for sale were ribbons,
typing paper, dust protection covers, Liquid Paper, cleaning sup-
plies, an armchair, ﬁve adding machines, a desk lamp, a rotary
phone. “Everything Must Go!” he wrote.

Somewhere between watching his clothes being tumble-dried

and walking to the car to look for his whites, Oliver had decided that
he would bite the bullet and live with his mother. His lease was up
later this summer. He didn’t have any money and wouldn’t have
much more after he sold his business.

159

Oliver opened a dryer and began to stuff his warm clothes into a

duffel bag. He was the only customer at the Rub-a-Dub now. The
three children and their mother had departed. Oliver looked at a
blue dress shirt Diana had given him some years ago and saw a black
spot—ink?—on the breast pocket. His mother might know how to
get it out.

The music on the Rub-a-Dub sound system was not Fontella

Bass or John Fogerty or the Eagles. It was woodwinds squealing,
brass ﬂaring, strings plucked pizzicato. Oliver, who liked music from
long ago, recognized it, but couldn’t identify it.

Carl stepped out of his ofﬁce and said, “Le Sacre du Printemps.

Can you dig it?”

Oliver remembered a fact from his college Music Appreciation

class. When The Rite of Spring was premiered in Paris, not quite a
hundred years ago, tomatoes had been thrown at the orchestra and
the dancers, and audience members had hit each other with canes
and top hats, and the composer had escaped through a window in the
rear of the theater. Sometimes a graceless exit was the only solution.

Oliver didn’t think Carl’s question required an answer, even

though Carl, in deﬁance of the “Do Not Sit on Machines” rule
posted on the wall, had perched himself on a washer near Oliver and
appeared to be waiting for an answer (or else was about to begin a
lecture).

“A little Sunday morning fertility music,” Carl said. “I’m think-

ing I might close early and go sit on the beach.”

“Sounds good,” Oliver said. “Well, I better hit the road.”
“What’s on the docket for today?” Carl asked, the merest touch

of lonesomeness in his voice.

“Not a lot,” Oliver said. He hefted the duffel bag onto his

shoulder.

Carl said, “Hey, do you know what might belong to the marine

suborder ‘nudibranch’? Two words and seven letters. Second letter of
the second word is an l. It’s got me stumped.”

Oliver said he didn’t know. He said, “Well, see you,” and went

out the door, with kettledrums booming at his back. The spar-
rows dining on tidbits of something in front of the convenience

160

store scattered when Oliver approached. By the time he was back
at his shop, he realized that he’d left Hooking the Big Ones at the
Laundromat.

t was Wednesday night and it was raining and the Rub-a-Dub was

crowded. Annelise had been waiting for ﬁfteen minutes for a dryer to
become available. A few moments ago, a guy who had taken his wash
out after she’d taken hers out had commandeered the only dryer not
in use. He wore plaid pajama bottoms that started halfway down his
ass and a sleeveless T-shirt and ﬂip-ﬂops and sunglasses. He was blond
and beautiful, the male equivalent of Venus on a half shell. Adonis on
a Boogie Board? He looked like one of the boys who lifeguarded at the
pool where she swam, the boy who drove the zippy Vespa, though
they all looked alike, so she couldn’t be sure it was he. She tried to stare
holes through his back, but he was impermeable. She put her nose
back in her book, the one by the Buddhist nun, which contained the
letters Annelise had written and failed to send to Rolf and Oliver and
E.J. Demuth. She was reading a chapter about laziness. There was a
quote from a Tibetan monk named Chogyam Trungpa. It said, “In
the garden of gentle sanity, may you be bombarded by coconuts of
wakefulness.” If a coconut of wakefulness had fallen on her a few
minutes ago, she would’ve gotten to the dryer before the blond boy
did. But here she was, reading about her bad habits, feeling resentful
and angry, scratching her knee where something had bitten her. And
next to her was a Hispanic man reading a ﬁshing book who every so
often made a sound that was like ﬁshing line spinning out. Szzz. Szzz.

Annelise had recently broken up with James Vogelsang. Rather

than write him a letter, she had asked him to drive up from Havana
and meet her at a coffeehouse called Ms. Bean’s, a new place with
bright walls and deep plush sofas you could fall asleep in. When
James, who was not a coffee drinker and who did not take a sip of the
Italian soda she’d bought for him, said, “But I love you, Annelise,”
she had said, “We can still talk and stuff.” She had not meant to
sound harsh, but maybe harsh was simpler.

When he’d asked if she was seeing somebody else, she’d said,

truthfully, that she wasn’t. At the moment, however, which was two

161

weeks later, she wouldn’t have minded doing the boy in the pajama
bottoms. Though this was just pure nasty whim, wasn’t it?

Once, many months ago, when she’d said, jokingly, to Oliver

that she wanted to “do” him, he’d been offended. “You can’t ‘do’ a
person,” he’d said. “You can do something, such as work or, I don’t
know, the Limbo.”

She’d puffed her cheeks out in mock exasperation and said, “Or

it. As in, ‘Let’s do it, my tall language policeman, my antique type-
writer man.’” Which had also rubbed him wrong, though she’d
pulled his mouth onto hers before he could protest.

Being in a Laundromat sometimes made her feel horny. She

couldn’t quite explain the feeling, since there was little in life that
was more tedious than doing laundry. Probably there was a connec-
tion between tedium and horniness. Maybe the sloshing of the sudsy
water in washing machines, the people in their bedroom clothes fold-
ing their intimate things, the ﬂuorescent light that brought moths in
from the street and made everybody look like a lab subject, contrib-
uted to her mood. The music, an oldies station, depressed her. It was
like stale cookies. She wondered if horniness and depression went
hand in hand, though she knew there was some evidence that de-
pressed people tended not to be interested in sex.

She had a radio show to do tomorrow night and she needed a

story to tell during the storytelling segment. “There was a young
woman who was washing her clothes at the Rub-a-Dub on Flam-
beau Street, and in walked . . .”

Annelise went over to the nook where the money-changing ma-

chine and bulletin board were. A palm reader named Miss Flora
(“bilingual”) had posted a ﬂier. Partly out of curiosity, partly out of
desperation, Annelise had once consulted a palm reader, a woman in
a pantsuit whose ofﬁce was a storage room at a New Age bookstore,
and had been told that she would have a husband and a child by the
time she was thirty, a prediction that was now two years overdue. The
palm reader had also said that there was something “puzzling” about
Annelise’s lifeline but had offered no further analysis. Annelise ﬁg-
ured she wouldn’t go see Miss Flora. Nor would she sign up for salsa
dance lessons or purchase a sugar glider or a ferret from a guy named

162

Duane (or from anybody else for that matter) or buy any CDs or
tapes (“classical, jazz—expand your mind!”) from Carl (the white-
bearded coot who was the Laundromat’s manager, who had leered
at her more than once). Nor was she in the market, at the moment,
for dress shoes (“all sizes, Prada, Blahnik, Lauren”). The ad for the
shoes—they fell off a truck, perhaps—reminded her of the story
she’d told on her radio show last year, about the green high heel with
the dead frog in it. She had hoped to do a follow-up but nothing fur-
ther had come to light about the shoe. No one had come forward to
explain the meaning of it, though one of her 266 listeners had writ-
ten in an e-mail, “A Republican did it. That’s what Republicans do
when they aren’t stealing money from the poor or invading your pri-
vacy or whining about the media, both mainstream and small fry!”
James, who was a Republican and a member of the National Guard
who would soon be shipped to Iraq, said he thought the perpetrator
was probably a kid who had too much time on his hands. James was
a “mentor” to a teenaged boy whose father was in prison. James was
sensible and earnest, a good cop, if a little pig-headed on certain sub-
jects. But he was not the one for Annelise. He didn’t understand
her—her fears, the secrets she carried around, her anger.

Near the bottom of the bulletin board, next to a ﬂier for an aikido

class, was a going-out-of-business notice. Her former lover was sell-
ing the contents of his shop. Annelise looked away from Oliver’s no-
tice as if it were something from a collection agency detailing her un-
paid debts. What trouble she would have saved herself (and him) if
she hadn’t found that typewriter in which someone had stubbed out
a cigar. Of course the business had been headed for extinction, any-
way. Oliver obviously needed a new career and she obviously needed,
needed . . . him, if she needed anybody, which apparently she did. He
would put up with her, maybe even somehow help her to be happy. If
only she could shave ten years off his life, if only he didn’t have four
children, if only he had an income, if only she hadn’t dumped him.

A dryer opened up. After Annelise had ﬁlled it and put a coin in

the slot, the boy in the pajama bottoms, who was folding his clothes
at the long table, said, “These dryers suck. It took forever for my
stuff to get dry.”

163

There was something about the silkiness of his blond hair and

the near-absence of a beard, the English boy complexion, which
made her want him (and want to strangle him).

When she said she hoped the rain would let up, because if it

didn’t, she’d be carrying her partly dry laundry home through it, he
offered her a ride.

“Matt,” he said.
“Jobeth,” she said.
Fifteen minutes later, when they went out the door, Wade (who

was wearing a nametag that said “Hi, I’m Dr. J”) was talking with
the manager of the Rub-a-Dub. They were standing under the eaves.

Wade said, “Hey, hey, missy. Long time no see.” He turned to Carl

and said, “She’s my benefactress. She gave me a typewriter, which I
used until some drug addict stole it. So I got another one and some
paper from her ex, the typewriter man, and, what do you know, here
comes a book, no lies, just the truth.”

Carl said, “I could use a benefactress.”
Wade’s Afro sparkled with the rain he’d just stepped out of. He

was wearing a sleeveless blue T-shirt with the Nike swoosh on it, and
the trousers from his planter’s suit and bedroom moccasins. There
was a purplish knob high up on his forehead, perhaps the result of a
fall. “You want to read my book, missy? I got it here in my basket.”

Annelise said, “Sure, I’ll read it.”
“Damn,” he said, rubbing his hands together. “You’ll be my ﬁrst

reader, except for old Cece, who’s gone back to the man who beat
her in Milwaukee. They’re living in a nice storage locker, I hear.” He
removed the painter’s tarp that covered his grocery cart and began to
dig through his belongings. There was a jump rope and one volume
of the two-volume OED and a copy of Toni Morrison’s Song of Solo-
mon (the yellow dust jacket wrapped in protective plastic) and a red
throw pillow and the red cowboy hat and the typewriter (in a dry-
cleaning bag) and two cans of Reese’s artichoke hearts and the white
suit coat. There was a high heel, too, the color of tarnished silver,
with black smudges on the toe and heel. (The smudges were due to
the ﬁre that Wade had set in his cart, months ago.) He held the shoe
in the palm of his hand and said, “This was Mama’s. I haven’t seen
the other one in twelve years. It eats me up, looking for a lost shoe.”

164

Carl said, “Bring your cart around back, Wade.” Carl picked up

an empty pop bottle sitting under one of his sidewalk lawn chairs
and went inside.

Wade said to Annelise, “I give him some pills for all that pain in

his head, he lets me do a wash. You think that’s a fair trade?”

“Maybe two washes, plus dinner,” Annelise said.
“That’s more like it,” Wade said cheerily, handing her the manu-

script. It was in a brown paper grocery bag. “I’m a good speller, so
you don’t got to worry about that.” He gave her a prideful grin and
Annelise thought there were more teeth missing in his mouth than
the last time she’d seen him. “Be nice to it. I haven’t Xeroxed it.”

Annelise said she’d make a copy. Matt was ﬁdgeting, like a child

waiting for his mother to ﬁnish talking with another adult.

“You’re better than a benefactress,” Wade said to Annelise. “OK,

I’ll see you around the streets.”

To Matt, he said, “You watch out for her now, young’un.”
Matt said, “Peace up.”

fter Oliver had dinner at Muddy Slim’s with three of his boys—

Robert had skipped it—and had driven them back to their mother’s
house, he stopped off at the Rub-a-Dub. He was hoping the ﬁshing
book was still there. At dinner, Oliver had suggested to the boys that
they take a trip up north this summer, maybe rent a boat and do
some ﬁshing. Only Hank had been enthusiastic about this idea.
Franklin, who had spent most of the dinner doing Sudoku, said,
“Five people in a boat is a lot, if Robert comes.”

Two people were kissing against a Grand Am parked in front of

the Laundromat. The car shook with hip-hop. They didn’t stop kiss-
ing when Oliver walked by. The girl had a tattoo—some sort of
bird?—that rose from beneath the top of her low-riding jeans.

There was nobody inside the Rub-a-Dub, though a couple of

washing machines and dryers were running. Oliver didn’t see the
book in any of the obvious places. He walked back to Carl’s ofﬁce.

The door to the ofﬁce was shut. It was made of the sort of thin

synthetic wood that you could almost stick a pencil through. A sign
that said “Manager” had been glued to it, just above a hole the di-
ameter of a tire iron. Through the hole Oliver saw Carl sitting in a

165

plastic lawn chair, his bare feet on the large metal desk. His glasses
were on the desk near his feet, which looked puffy and were pearly
white, like things that had lived at the bottom of the sea. He had un-
clipped his suspenders from the waistband of his green basketball
shorts. His hands covered his face. He was crying. Oliver could hear
him; the sobs were unmistakable. The sobs jiggled his shoulders.
One of the suspender straps had slipped off his stomach and dangled
in the air like a loose piece of tackle.

Oliver could not guess which of a thousand things might have

caused Carl to cry. Looking at Carl, Oliver felt like a child sitting on
Santa Claus’s lap, a little afraid of what might really be in the great
man’s head. He didn’t see how he could help Carl now; he needed to
attend to himself before he went completely down the tubes.

On the way to his car, Oliver noticed the Hmong grandfather

sitting outside the convenience store. He was reading, or perhaps
only looking at, Hooking the Big Ones. Oliver didn’t ask for the book.

He drove in the direction of his mother’s house, then stopped at

El Tigre Negro for a beer. (His mother didn’t keep alcohol in the
house.) He nursed that beer and then another through most of a
Brewers game. He recalled that while he was at the library the other
day, doing research on changing careers, he had looked up “nudi-
branch” in the dictionary. A nudibranch, he learned, was a naked
marine gastropod (no gills, no shell in its adult state), such as a sea
slug. He wondered how long this piece of information would re-
main in his head and what other piece of information it might have
displaced, since there was only so much room there. He wondered if
Carl had been crying because of all the useless information in his
head. If you didn’t have love, what good was it knowing what subor-
der a sea slug belonged to?

liver found his mother asleep on the sofa, her mouth ajar, her

book (something inspirational) having slipped from her lap to the
ﬂoor. He turned off the TV and led her into her bedroom and re-
moved her shoes. Then he went into the kitchen and poured himself
a glass of lemonade and made a peanut-butter-and-butter sandwich.
(His mother still bought the cheap white bread of his childhood, the

166

stretchable, snowy-ﬂuorescent bread with the negligible crust that
was almost like Play-Doh and which you could poke holes in and
put over your face like a mask. He loved the sweet taste of it.) He
took the lemonade and the sandwich into the guest room, where he
had been sleeping for the last three nights, his new home.

The guest room had twin beds that were about the right size for

half-grown children or very short adults. Whenever his boys, all of
whom would exceed six feet before they turned sixteen, had stayed
over at their grandmother’s, they slept in the living room, in the glow
of the television set. Except, that is, for Hamilton, who, though he
was afraid of the dark, found the solitude of the guest room prefer-
able to the clutter of people in the living room.

The guest room was where Oliver’s mother kept her sewing

machine and a dresser full of clothes that she didn’t wear anymore
and a tiny antique marble-topped desk ﬁt (if there had been a chair
to go with it) for a writer of billets-doux. On top of the dresser was
the Remington portable that Oliver’s father had used to type the
annual Poole family Christmas letter (he always signed off, “Ed, a
typing Phoole”) and the minutes of the meetings of the Satyrs’ Club.
(He had been secretary of the club for almost thirty years, until the
mid-nineties, when he began to fade and had to turn the job over to
a Satyr who used a computer.) On top of a bookcase was a photo-
graph of Oliver in his high school baseball uniform, on one knee,
his long hair spilling out from under his red Pioneers cap, his expres-
sion that of someone who wasn’t going to swing at a curve in the dirt
if he could help it. Between the beds was a nightstand on which sat a
lamp and the clock radio from Oliver’s boyhood bedroom and a
Gideon’s Bible that Mrs. Poole had left a motel with some years
back.

Oliver turned on the radio. Tonight was the night, he well knew,

that Annelise did her show. Ever since she’d dumped him, he had
tried not to listen to her show. He had succeeded at this most Thurs-
day nights. If by ten, he’d taken a couple of the painkillers that Wade
had given him in exchange for typewriter supplies, he could be asleep
by the time Annelise came on the air. But he was afraid of becoming
a drug addict, so he sometimes didn’t take the pills and even on those

167

nights when he did, he would occasionally ﬁnd himself awake at one
in the morning, searching for the dial in the gloom of his shop. He
wasn’t going to take any pills tonight. He’d just gut it out.

Annelise played a Marvin Gaye song called “Sexual Healing,”

done by a guy named Ben Harper. Then came Peggy Lee singing “Is
That All There Is.” (Oliver remembered his mother humming along
to this song in the car, back in the days before she’d turned to religion
for solace and guidance.) Then came Dylan’s “Forever Young.” Then
came “Way Over Yonder in the Minor Key,” the Woody Guthrie
song about the ugly boy with a voice so sweet he can get girls to go
into a “holler tree” with him. This last one lightened Oliver’s mood a
little, made him think of high school days when he stood in left ﬁeld,
writing poems to girls who weren’t really interested in going out with
him, not even into a Unitarian church basement.

Annelise went into her monologue. She said, “So I was at the self-

wash a while ago, doing my sheets. It was eight in the evening and
the rain was falling and I was nervous as a cat. Rain makes me ner-
vous. Hey, do you remember the drought we had last year? It seems
like so long ago. All those dry days where you could lie on your back
in the burned-out grass and read poems and think about your sweet-
heart, the puppy dog tattoo on his ﬂank, the hungry kisses—I miss
that weather.”

Oliver had never quite understood Annelise’s radio voice, or,

rather, why it seemed so different from her everyday out-in-the-
world voice. Her radio voice was assured, calm, reﬂective, conﬁdent,
forthright—almost that of, say, a radio professional. The secretive,
hesitant, cagey, hot-and-cold person she otherwise was she left out-
side the radio door. Pot eased the transition, of course. But still. And
which among her lovers had a puppy dog tattoo on his ﬂank?

“I was leaving the self-wash with my freshly laundered sheets

when I ran into this homeless man whom I will call Wade because
that is one of the names he goes by. Wade and I had bumped into
each other before. Last summer I’d given him an old banged-up
typewriter (long story how I came by it) because he said he was a
writer and some scurvy so-and-so had stolen a typewriter from him.
He asked me if I wanted to read what he’d written and I said, OK,

168

sure. What else was I going to do on a rainy night in Midvale? Drink
beer with twenty-year-olds in a college hangout, which, I’m sorry to
say, was actually a choice? It’s true that I missed a certain former boy-
friend and that I could have gone knocking on his door and said,
‘Open up, o my former boyfriend, let’s read “How the Camel Got
His Hump,” let’s renew our relationship, try again.’ But I lacked the
courage to do this, which would have involved my saying ‘Sorry’ to
him and a long discussion before we would have ever got around to
‘How the Camel Got His Hump’—the camel got it, if you don’t
know, by being lazy and saying ‘Humpf ’ a few too many times—
and courage, if you lack it, isn’t something you can just whip up like
a soufﬂé. Not that soufﬂés are easy to make, or so I’m told. So, I
went home with my bed sheets and Wade’s manuscript, and I made
up my bed and I lay down with the manuscript and I began to read
it. I wish I could say that it is a terriﬁc piece of writing and that if only
some sharp-eyed book editor in New York got hold of it and pitched
it just right with that American knack for pitching, it would startle
millions and Wade would go on Oprah and Good Morning, America
and we would all shout with happiness for him. It’s not terriﬁc, but
it’s not bad at times, either. It’s the story of Wade’s life, from crib to
homeless man’s grocery cart, and it includes descriptions of every
woman Wade ever said hello to and how he cracked up when he was
in the army and all the books he has read and how his daddy died in
the electric chair in Texas. ‘He deserved it,’ Wade writes. ‘He was the
meanest’—there are a whole bunch of words here that I can’t say on
the air—‘in the world, and we were all hoping to see him fry. I don’t
hold with the death penalty, except in some select cases, and he was
one.’ The stuff about women is on the unsavory side and kind of re-
petitive. I don’t see how an editor could ﬁx it to make those women
seem like women instead of receptacles for Wade. But then there is
all this stuff about Wade’s childhood. ‘One day when I am four, I
wake up with the sun coming through the cracks in our shack and
my daddy is hitting my mother like he doesn’t know how to do any-
thing else.’ And, ‘One night when I am seven, my mother whispers
in my ear that I cover with my hand when I sleep, “We going now.
Get up.”’”

169

Annelise paused. Oliver took a drink of lemonade. He heard the

rain pattering on the roof. He remembered how when, in the very
ﬁrst weeks of their relationship, he and Annelise read “How the
Camel Got His Hump,” Annelise had fallen asleep on his shoulder.
This had happened near the point in the story where the Djinn in
charge of All Deserts had come rolling up in a cloud of dust. Oliver
had kept on reading aloud, as if to keep himself company.

Annelise said, “Excuse me for that dead air. We’re not really pro-

fessionals here; we just pretend to be, sometimes. There was a mouse
loose in the studio and I needed to scream. I scared it, so we’re even.
Anyway, after reading Wade’s book, I needed to stretch my legs, so I
put on my high-waisted dress like the Morton Salt girl wears when
she goes tripping through the rain and went outdoors for a walk
and a cup of tea and a doughnut at Beaucoup Doughnuts. The dress
was a bad idea—I got whistled at—but the hat and umbrella were
smart. Beaucoup Doughnuts is open late into the night, as you surely
know if you’ve ever had a late-night craving for something warm and
sugary, and it attracts an interesting crowd: cops, insomniacs of all
stripes, the guys from the milk factory, the homeless, people from
the local independent radio station, teenagers at loose ends. So, well,
when I walked into the doughnut shop that night, there was Wade,
and there also, at the same table, was the Buddhist monk whose
meditation class I went to once upon a time. And before I could
place my order, Wade says, ‘Hey, missy, fancy meeting you twice in
one rainy evening. You read my book yet?’ And I say, lying through
my teeth, ‘I haven’t had a chance to get to it yet.’ The monk is sort of
smiling-grinning at me, not exactly inspecting me, not exactly not
inspecting me, his big pudgy hands folded on the table, a cup of tea
nearby, and I say to him, ‘I’m sorry I haven’t been to your class in
a while. I feel guilty about that.’ And he says, ‘Don’t worry. The
Dharma-Cam isn’t keeping track of you.’ He gives me a Buddhist
chuckle. And Wade says, ‘I see that the boy-child who was with you
at the self-wash is absent.’ I say, ‘He just gave me a ride home.’

“‘A ride,’ Wade says. ‘OK, well then. I won’t stick my nose in your

business, but here’s the topic I and the Buddha man been discussing.
If you don’t got love, how can you be happy? And if you do got love,

170

maybe you don’t got it in just the right ﬂavor or amount, so maybe
you want more of it or less of it or none of it. Maybe we should all be
a monk with our nice hot tea from China, and then we can skip
wanting love.’ The monk was keeping his thoughts to himself. You
could see them moving like wise tactful ﬁsh just under the surface of
his forehead. His tea looked to be growing cold. I bought four warm
doughnuts made of potatoes and buttermilk and the sweetest sugar
you can imagine; I was starving. I gave one to Wade. (The monk de-
clined. ‘I ate, thank you,’ he said.) Wade said, ‘I hope you love my
book, missy. Man, I hope you love it.’ I walked home, my hands full
of tea and doughnuts and an umbrella to keep the rain from falling
through the cracks in my head.”

Annelise played some rainy-night-in-the-empty-city jazz—Chet

Baker blowing his trumpet—and over it she read Robert Creeley’s
“The Rain,” in which the speaker asks his lover to be like rain, mix-
ing wetness with something like happiness. Oliver took his father’s
typewriter from the dresser and set it on the antique writing table. In
the desk drawer he found several pieces of pale blue stationery—
“Evelyn Joy Poole,” it said at the top in a frilly font. He got down on
his knees and rolled a piece of stationery onto the platen and blew
dust from the typebars and typed “Dear Annelise.” The ribbon was
old and the impression the ink left on the paper was faint. Oliver
turned the ribbon reel until he found what looked like a less-used
stretch of ribbon. The type that came out on the stationery was still
faint, but if you looked closely at what he’d typed, it was clear that he
would go crazy if he didn’t get to see his former girlfriend again.

171

172

Saturday Market

here wasn’t a drop of honey in the house. The dispenser, a plas-

tic bear with bug eyes, was empty. Sugar was no substitute, in

Diana’s view. So she drank her morning coffee black. It tasted little
better than a medicine. A second cup made her sweat. She was sit-
ting in the backyard, out of the sun, watching a rabbit eat a hosta.
Her garden was a disaster. She had not had a second to weed it. If
only the rabbits ate creeping Charlie and garlic mustard. She went
inside and rounded up the two of her four children who were awake
and enticed them into the van with promises of sweets and drove to
the greenmarket on the courthouse square. Honey was on her list.
So were cut ﬂowers. Some of the Hmong farmers sold enormous
bouquets for a song.

Diana and the boys walked counterclockwise around the square,

counterclockwise being the way most other Midvalers walked.
Among the exceptions was a man who pulled a red wagon that
contained a cardboard efﬁgy of President Bush. The man whistled
blithely and Diana gave him a stern look when he snarled trafﬁc near
her.

A Peruvian band played sunny music on the courthouse lawn. A

woman opposed to capital punishment was handing out ﬂiers, and
Ham took one. Hank carried his mother’s canvas tote. Slowly, they
walked by tables laden with tomatoes (Diana bought three Purple
Russian heirlooms from a man who looked like he’d fought at Stalin-
grad) and sweet corn (the ﬁrst of the season: she bought eight ears,
one for every ear on her boys’ heads) and honey (from a man wear-
ing a straw beehive-shaped hat, she bought two jars, one scented

with mint) and cheese and ostrich burgers and buffalo steaks and
emu ﬁlets and rainbow trout that had been swimming around the
night before and ﬂowers (she couldn’t make up her mind) and straw-
berries (the last of the season: she bought a quart for Franklin, who
ate them like popcorn) and a lot of vegetables Hank wouldn’t touch
with a ten-foot pole. What Hank was hoping to get for being his
mother’s sherpa was a hot chocolate topped with whipped cream
and a croissant ﬁlled with chocolate, both of which, he happened to
know, were available at a café on the other side of square, under his
mother’s law ofﬁce. Ham, who had come along because Diana had
promised she would take him to the bookstore on the way home,
said to his brother, “Why would you want a hot chocolate? It’s a
hundred degrees out. I’m sweating like a cow.”

“Moo,” Hank said. Since the divorce, Hank had become some-

what more vocal.

“You’re still a toadstool,” Ham said.
“Either of you cheeseheads interested in a bite of cheese?” Diana

asked. She had just seen her ex-husband. He was several booths
ahead, carrying a bouquet of glads. He was easy to spot in a crowd,
tall as a clown on stilts.

Ham studied the prices on an array of goat cheeses. He was inter-

ested in money, how much bang you could get for a buck. It looked
like a dollar would get you a nibble of the rosemary goat cheese. Two
or three bucks would get you a full bite.

“It’s too early for cheese,” Ham said. Though Ham was almost al-

ways the ﬁrst among Diana’s boys to rise, he did so in a spirit of
contrariness; it was as if he needed to prove, daily, that life was not
really worth getting up for. He didn’t begin to mellow until about
noon.

The cheese vender, a woman with a blue bandana around her

throat, said, “I know of a man who has cheese on toast along with
his coffee every morning.”

“There you go,” Diana said vaguely, looking upstream, in the di-

rection of her ex-husband. He was with someone, a woman wearing
a wide-brimmed, going-to-market hat. Diana saw him bending
down toward this person with his torch of glads. He had chosen a

173

hodgepodge of colors—red, purple, yellow. Glads were a bit showy
for Diana’s taste.

From behind, the woman with Oliver looked somewhat shape-

less in a summer shift, but she was clearly more young than old.
She walked as if she were pregnant, a little sway-backed. Diana as-
sumed it wasn’t her, the disc jockey. Sometime ago, Diana had
heard—overheard, really, despite half-covering her ears—that Oliver
and the deejay had broken up and that Oliver had not found a sub-
stitute. How many thirty-year-old women were there in Midvale
who would attach themselves to a ﬁfty-two-year-old divorced father
of four, an unemployed typewriter repairman who lived with his
mother?

Ham said, “I don’t care for coffee.”
“It’s an acquired taste,” the cheese vender said, smiling at Diana,

whose head was beginning to pound a little.

“The world is run by people who like coffee and cheese,” Ham

said, into the one dangling-by-a-thread button on his polo shirt. He
was a believer in conspiracies.

Diana found a ﬁve in her purse and handed it over to the woman.
“The rosemary?” the vender asked.
“The pepper, I think,” Diana said.
When Diana dropped the four ounces of cheese into the tote,

Hank said, “This is too heavy.”

“Give it to your brother.”
Ham rolled his eyes, hefted the bag to his shoulder. “Toadstool,”

he said to his brother.

When Oliver had told his four boys last fall that he was moving

out of the house—this announcement had been delivered in the
kitchen and Diana had monitored it from the doorway, arms crossed
under her bosom—Ham had burst into tears and thrown himself
on his father’s chest, like a projectile, as if he’d hoped to nail his
father to the spot near the sink where he stood. Diana had thought
Ham would be the least likely of the four to react in that way. He
was skilled at hiding behind orneriness, or, when something else was
required, behind silence. Ham’s brothers had listened to their father
explain what he was doing (though not really why he was doing it),

174

and then the three of them, with Robert in the lead, had left the
kitchen, marched past their mother, and gone up to their rooms or
outdoors to consider where they stood in the world. Ham had exited
weeping, burying his head in his mother’s stomach. By later that fall,
following the Halloween episode when he rode the bus down to his
father’s shop in the Harpo Marx costume, Ham had mostly reverted
to his old self. He griped, he brooded, and he usually went along
with the program. Recently, however, he’d announced his displeasure
with his father’s Monday-night pizza dinners—“He takes us to
Muddy Slim’s, we eat the Muddy Slim’s Special without the olives,
Franklin does Sudoku, we talk about the Brewers, we come home”—
and had found reasons for skipping them. Robert had been boycot-
ting them for months.

Diana continued around the square, her boys ﬂanking her. She

saw a lawyer she knew, waved to a judge before whom she often ap-
peared. The judge looked so diminished out of his robes; the bare
legs sticking out of his Bermudas were almost obscene. She saw a
man who was on Oliver’s softball team, the guy with the white birth-
mark at his hairline that looked like a paint splatter. Oh, what was
his name? He did paintings of rabbits in silly getups, didn’t he? She
couldn’t say why, but she would not have trusted a man who painted
rabbits in costumes.

She came abreast of a table behind which sat Max Moore, the

guy who did the radio show about vegetable gardening, which she’d
tuned in now and then. He was sunburned and plump and was
dressed like an amiable old scarecrow, in denim and plaid and a straw
hat. He was answering questions from passersby, promoting the
station where Oliver’s erstwhile girlfriend worked. Was the young
woman at Max Moore’s elbow her? Diana had never actually laid
eyes on her. She had never heard her show, either; she had no desire
to, and she didn’t stay up that late anyway. When Diana found her-
self awake at one in the morning, listening to crickets or the rain, she
would open her ancient Greek grammar. She was taking a class,
though her attendance was sporadic.

The woman at the table had auburn hair top-knotted like a sumo

wrestler’s and an oval face that was edged with wariness (or irony or

175

something not too far removed from adolescence) and a tattoo
(something greenish: a head of broccoli?) above her right boob that
was partly covered by a black tank top. (Black was a poor choice on
a hot day like today, wasn’t it?) Diana had heard it said that Oliver’s
deejay was small and pretty, and Diana supposed that the descrip-
tion, such as it was, might ﬁt the professor’s sidekick, colleague,
whatever she was.

Or was the deejay the un-tattooed woman standing off to the

side, reading the local independent weekly, her face under a ballcap,
the sun shining on her bare arms and clavicle?

Diana kept moving. From an elﬁn Hmong lady, she bought a

bouquet—it had daisies, bee balm, phlox, blue bachelor buttons,
meadowsweet, yarrow—and then she saw her ex-husband coming
toward her. The woman she’d seen him with, the woman in the shift,
was no longer beside him. He still had the glads, though, and it was
as if he were searching for the recipient. He looked anxious, quizzi-
cal, unsteady, like somebody you would probably give wide berth to
on the street. The longish hair and the beard, which was grayer than
she would have imagined it would turn out to be, made him look
like an old-timer, like someone who spent afternoons in the public
library dozing off while doing research on panning for gold or rais-
ing llamas. (The divorce agreement had left him largely without re-
sources, unless you counted the trickle that was his moribund busi-
ness, though Diana happened to know that Oliver’s mother had
squirreled away money and that she would leave some of it to her
son, unless she gave it all to her church or the Midvale Zoo.) Seeing
him in this state, bearing ﬂowers against the tide of market-goers,
like a shaggy-headed dog with a Frisbee in its mouth looking for
the person who had thrown it to him, elicited a twinge of sympa-
thy from Diana. Well, perhaps “sympathy” was too strong a word,
though it was true that the sight of him here didn’t stir up the usual
unsympathetic feelings, among which was ﬂabbergastedness, if that
was a word. How did an arguably sane man walk out the door on his
four sons who loved him and on his wife who loved him at least a
little and put the food on his table? (On his two long legs, his shoul-
ders hunched like a perp’s, was the short answer.) How had he not

176

known that you didn’t break up a marriage just because you fell in
love with some hot little number? (How often had she, a specialist in
matrimonial law, told him stories about families being shattered be-
cause the husband or the wife—but usually the husband—“found”
love with somebody else? Maybe she’d told him one too many sto-
ries. She had a schoolmarmish side that she didn’t always keep in
check.) Not that she had done anything to persuade him to stay or
would have considered taking him back, had he pleaded. Some-
times, it was true, she felt his absence, but how could she not, given
all the space he had occupied?

Hank saw his father before Oliver saw Hank or Ham or his

ex-wife.

“It’s Dad!” Hank said.
Diana and Oliver looked at each other, each clutching their bou-

quets. She thought she didn’t really know him after all, and she felt
certain that he didn’t really know who she was, though perhaps this
was only her pride rearing its head.

“Hello, Hank,” Oliver said.
Later, she reevaluated that revelation she’d had on one of her

morning walks last winter, about how while it was not possible to
keep sorrow out of your life, it was possible to keep bitterness at bay.
Possible, but not easy.

nnelise left the WOOP table in the hands of Max Moore and an

intern named Gaby. Annelise said she’d be back soon; she was making
a coffee run. Did anybody want any? Max said he was happy with his
bottle of water, and Gaby, who was hung over, whose tattoos (a palm
tree on her chest, a monkey on her shoulder) were the residue of other
late nights, was OK with her twenty-ounce bottle of Mountain Dew.

Annelise had been out of town for three weeks. She’d gone away

the night after the night she’d done the show in which she related the
story about running into Wade and the monk at Beaucoup Dough-
nuts, which was the night of the day that Oliver had left on her
doorstep a copy of the Everyman’s book of love poems and a typed
note saying that he had been missing her “baldly.” (For a typewriter
repairman, Oliver wasn’t a particularly good, or careful, typist.) She

177

had planned to be gone for only a week, back in time to do her
show, but after visiting her grandmother in Iowa and her lesbian
friend in South Dakota, she’d kept going west. (The station had
ﬁlled her time slot with the guy known as Mr. Melliﬂuous, who at-
tracted the elderly insomniac demographic with readings of Trollope
and James.) She made it all the way to the Oregon coast, where she
camped and ate sauerkraut out of a can and read the book by the
Buddhist nun from beginning to end. She liked Oregon (it wasn’t
the rainy season) and she thought she might settle there, and then
she got drunk in Portland one night and called Oliver. She said, “I
miss you baldly and I want to be yours,” and he, not quite asleep in
the guest room of his mother’s condo, said, “I want to be yours, too.”
Annelise drove back toward Midvale in her Metro that the ﬂirt at the
Shell station had somehow made purr like it had never purred be-
fore. She drove it eighty miles an hour past her father’s house, a
trailer in eastern Minnesota, where he, dying of emphysema (golf
was out now) and hooked up to a tank of oxygen, lived with his third
wife and a couple of German shepherds. She said to herself, as the
hot, truck-perfumed air rushed in the windows, “Dad, I’m not stop-
ping. You don’t call me. You don’t send me birthday cards, except for
that one a couple years ago. I’m thirty-three almost. You have hardly
seen me since when I wore my hair like some country music singer
and did my nails the color of blood. I’m sorry you’re sick, but I’m not
stopping. I’m going to see this man who loves me. Maybe I’ll invite
you to the wedding. Or maybe we’ll just live in sin.”

Annelise had got back into Midvale last night, just in time to do

the Saturday morning greenmarket promotional gig for WOOP.
(She owed them; they’d let her go AWOL, after all.) She’d called Ol-
iver and asked him to meet her at the Tout de Suite coffee cart at ten.

It was close to ten now, according to the clock high on the face of

the courthouse, an early twentieth-century neo-Gothic chunk of
yellow limestone that was topped by a statue of a trapper-explorer
swathed in beaver and rabbit pelts. This ﬁgure was modeled on Lu-
cretius Mudd, one of the fathers of Midvale. Research had recently
turned up the fact that Mudd had murdered an Indian woman and
her baby (thought to be his own child), and there was a movement

178

afoot to have the statue removed from the courthouse. The Repub-
licans in the city council, who held a slim majority, had argued that
the statue should be seen as “generic.” A Democrat on the council
said, “Well, at least the Republicans aren’t proposing that we change
the name of the city to Muddville.”

Annelise walked clockwise, into the crowd, past a table where you

could sign a petition to have the statue of Lucretius Mudd removed.
She snaked along for a while, absorbing glares. She pulled her cap a
little lower. The sun was on her neck and she felt sweat gathering in
all her secret places and her heart beating like some wild thing ﬂap-
ping its wings. Finally, she stepped off the sidewalk, onto the matted
courthouse grass. This was just before she saw Rolf.

Midvale was a relatively small city, but it was possible for months,

even years, to pass before you bumped into an ex-boyfriend. (An-
nelise couldn’t remember ever having seen Grifﬁn after they split up,
three years ago. But then Grifﬁn was, like herself, not naturally gre-
garious.) Annelise had seen Rolf only once—he’d been in his SUV,
with Cleo, the dog, in the passenger seat—since the day he’d put her
belongings out in the driveway. She hadn’t missed him at all, but she
had on occasion felt a pang of remorse for the fact that she had
cheated on him. She’d felt this pang even though she guessed he’d
cheated on her.

She didn’t feel a pang this morning when she saw him with his

arm around the bare shoulders of someone who looked like that
woman from his ofﬁce, the one who had dressed up as the ditzy lab
tech at the Halloween party. (Annelise had gone as a shrinking vio-
let, paper violets pinned to a white blouse with a Peter Pan collar.)
Rolf looked happy, in his blustery, proprietary way. She was glad he
was happy. When he noticed her, she surprised herself by giving him
a wave. He didn’t wave back. He looked at her with the sort of dis-
dain that used to come across his face when she expressed, ever so
tentatively, one of her opinions about the economy or the war in
Iraq. Or perhaps “disdain” was too nice a word.

She looked away and tried to collect herself, even as anger, that

million-petaled ﬂower, was blooming inside her, turning her pink
from chest to jawbone. The anger was mixed with self-loathing,

179

which darkened the pink, made it seem almost lurid, like a bad
sunburn.

She heard ﬂutes and guitars—the Peruvian band—as she walked

across the courthouse lawn, past idlers and cranks. In the distance,
she saw the Tout de Suite coffee cart, with its white awning on
which was a picture of a beret ﬂoating on a column of steam above a
demitasse cup. She didn’t see Oliver. On the phone last night, when
they talked about when and where to meet this morning, he’d said,
“I’ll be the guy singing the theme from Rawhide”—a little joke.
She’d remembered him singing the opening bars of the theme from
Rawhide in the bathroom of the Blue Earth Motel, some minutes
after they’d had sex for the ﬁrst time. “Rollin’, rollin’, rollin’, keep
them dogies rollin’” was about as deep into the song as he got before
starting over. He sang above the sink tap running. She always found
it interesting what men at their ablutions sang to themselves. Com-
fort music, mainly. Oliver had watched Rawhide when he was a boy,
many years before she’d even been born. And in his voice there was
some feeling from long ago, the happy lonesomeness of a child on a
couch watching TV cowboys keep order in some dusty black-and-
white fantasy of a world. She’d listened to him sing while she lay
naked on the motel bed, wondering what lie she would tell Rolf
when she got home that evening, wondering if she would ever hear
Oliver sing again. She wasn’t sure she wanted to, though his voice
was sweet in a croaky way.

But here she was, not quite a year later, coming back to him,

wanting to hear him singing in the next room. Maybe you had to go
away from somebody for a while—a thousand old songs had said
this—to understand if you loved him enough to want to hold his
hand after you’d tired of seeing his hairy nostrils or his comical eye-
brows or his skinny bottom headed for the bone pile. Maybe if, after
passion had gone out the door like some child grown up, love still
remained in your head—and in your touch and your words—you
could live on that. Though, to be honest, passion was hard to beat.
And there was passion in what she felt for Oliver, maybe more pas-
sion than love actually, because love was harder and trickier, and she
was, she often believed, a freak who could neither give nor receive it.

180

Emile was whisking a bird away from his cart. (The cart was a

new venture, an extension of his brick-and-mortar business.) His
wavy black hair was in disarray and his moustache drooped. And
there was something ﬂickering in the bristly folds of his face, some-
thing jumping under his skin, which suggested dyspepsia, trouble
with his wife, money problems.

“Here is my favorite radio personality,” Emile said. “The last

three Thursday nights I go to bed without your voice to keep me
awake. I listen to that guy reading those novels and I am snoring in
ﬁve minutes.”

“I was on sabbatical,” Annelise said.
“You look more beautiful than ever,” Emile said.
“You are too kind, Emile,” Annelise said. On more than one oc-

casion Annelise had felt that Emile, a husband and the father of two
girls, went overboard with the compliments, though effusiveness
was his style and she tried not to see in it anything other than every-
day ﬂirtation, a sweet that went along with a business transaction.

Annelise ordered a large cup of Ethiopian.
“The story about the frog in the shoe,” Emile said. “It still haunts

my dreams.”

“It remains a mystery,” Annelise said. She dumped a packet of

sugar into her coffee. “The perpetrator was never found.”

“And the boyfriend? How is he looking?”
“How is he looking?”
“It is not my business. Pardon,” Emile said, taking a rag from his

pocket and wiping the deck of his cart.

“I don’t have a boyfriend at the moment, Emile, though I am

hoping an old one will show up here in a minute.”

Some light went out of Emile’s face. “That would be the tall one,

the older gentilhomme?”

Annelise said, “Yes, that would be the tall one.”
Emile reached into the cabinet under the cart and took out a pair

of binoculars. “You want to look for him?”

Emile explained that he kept binoculars with him because the

American government was spying on him and he felt it was his right
to watch them doing it. He said the FBI had been looking into

181

the books he’d borrowed from the Midvale library. One of his cus-
tomers, a librarian, had tipped him off. He said it was illegal for him
to reveal that he was the subject of an investigation.

Annelise said, “That’s crazy. What can I do to help?”
“Don’t say anything. If you say anything, they will ship me to

Syria and electrocute my testicles.”

Was it possible that what Emile described could happen? She had

not kept up with the Bush government’s latest schemes.

A sparrow landed on the cart and began to peck at Emile’s

breakfast, a Rice Krispie square. “Go on, American bird,” Emile said.
“Eat.” The sparrow, a Saturday morning greenmarket regular, con-
tinued to peck.

“Maybe it’ll turn out OK,” Annelise said, thinking, hoping,

Emile’s problem would somehow vanish. There was hardly room in
her head for it.

Annelise looked through the binoculars as Emile talked about the

books he’d borrowed from the library (“A tourist guide to Disney
World—maybe they think I am planning to decapitate Mickey
Mouse?”) and dreams in which he watched himself try to Scotch-tape
bombs to his body (“they always fall off, so I jump up from my dream
before they explode”). When Annelise ﬁnally located Oliver—he was
zigzagging across the courthouse lawn, a bouquet of ﬂowers held
aloft—Emile was occupied with another customer, a man who wore
sunglasses, crisp new blue jeans, and a Midvale Muskrats cap. (The
man let it slip that he was from Illinois and in town for a farm imple-
ments convention. Emile eyed him suspiciously.) Emile’s binoculars
were expensive and quite powerful, and when Oliver was a good
hundred feet away, Annelise could see the worry lines in his forehead
and a dog-like confusion in his eyes. She could see—or was she only
imagining that she could see, because she knew it was there?—a
black hair that grew on the ridge of his nose, like a lone ﬂower on an
outcropping. He looked old and a little needy. What was she getting
herself into, giving herself to this man? She put the binoculars down
and watched him come toward her. He became less distinct and
more like the picture of a lover bringing ﬂowers to his beloved, his
imperfections and deﬁcits blurred. She liked glads very much. She

182

felt her mouth widen when she saw Oliver’s mouth, furtive beneath
that beard, widening into a smile. One of her former boyfriends
passed before her eyes—it was Joe, dead now for four years—and
she whispered to his sweaty ghost, “I think it’ll work out.”

hen he was buying ﬂowers, a woman had said his name and he

had turned around and there Cassandra was, with her pregnant belly
and a wide-brimmed straw hat covering her face that was ﬂushed
pink, like that of a Renoir model overﬂowing with life. Oliver
had not seen Cassandra since the early months of her pregnancy—
Murray was sitting out softball this summer, having put himself on
the Disabled List following his vasectomy—and her beauty startled
him. They had walked together for a while toward the smoothies
stand where Murray was supposed to meet her. Oliver had insisted
on carrying her sack of produce. She asked him whom the ﬂowers
were for and he said they were for Annelise. She said, “I thought that
was over.”

Oliver said, “We’re going to give it another try.”
Cassandra said, “I remember you telling me that she had all these

issues. I thought it sounded like you were doing social work or
something.”

They’d stopped next to a table stocked with green onions and a

hill of sugar snap peas and bundles of carrots. Cassandra bought
some carrots and a head of bok choy. She tore off a leaf of the bok
choy and ate it as she walked on with Oliver. “A pregnant rabbit
needs her iron,” she said.

Oliver said, “I’m not any good at social work; I love her, really,”

and Cassandra said, “OK, I believe you,” chewing the bok choy in a
contemplative way. Then she said, “I think Murray loves me. But
sometimes I’m not sure. I know I serve his artistic purposes. Has he
shown you any of his paintings of me pregnant? They’re all neck-
down paintings. Torsos. Except for one, which has my head and this
hat mounted on a giant pregnant bunny.”

Oliver gave Cassandra a reassuring touch on her upper arm,

which was as silky as a rabbit’s ear, and said, “I’m sure he loves you.
Maybe he’s freaking out a little about having a child.”

183

Cassandra stood on her tiptoes and tipped her hat back and

kissed Oliver lightly on the lips. She said, “You might be good at so-
cial work.”

When Cassandra kissed him, the three hairs in Oliver’s ears vi-

brated. (They were an old man’s kind of hairs, wispy, ﬁlament-like;
earlier that morning when he tried to cut them, he’d managed only
to stab his concha.) As he walked back the other way, toward his
rendezvous with Annelise, he ran the inside of his thumb over his
mouth in the hope that this would wipe Cassandra’s kiss away. It had
been a thrilling moment, but he wanted Annelise, didn’t he? He felt
the weight of the glads in his hand, the rubber-banded stems. He re-
membered that there was something he was supposed to buy for his
mother, and then he heard his youngest son’s voice. He saw Hank,
thin as a switch, his hair mowed to within a millimeter of his life. A
moment later, he saw Ham and Diana.

Oliver didn’t often see his ex-wife in unplanned-for situations,

but when he did, he tended to become shorter; some essential part
of him ﬂed, leaving behind a craven, hunch-shouldered creature.
An encounter with Diana meant that he would once again have to ex-
amine the reasons for breaking up his marriage and throwing into
disarray the lives of his children. When he was honest with himself,
he had to admit that he missed his children terribly. He didn’t miss
Diana that much. Sometimes a marriage just withered and died. In
their last few years, she hadn’t seemed to care much if he were around,
except as a helping hand, and he hadn’t cared much if she were
around, except as a helping hand and a provider of income. They’d
muddled through their thousands of days, like a hundred million
other married couples presumably did. There was tedium, affection,
laughter, silence, work, busywork, torpor, snow, rain, tornado warn-
ings, long gray stretches, illness, complaints, occasional sex, children,
children, children. Love was in there somewhere, but then it got put
down in the basement, like a plant that is allowed to go dormant in
winter, and when spring came around again, nobody brought it up
into the light. And then Oliver—who was perhaps more scared of
death and old age than he should have been, who was perhaps more

184

susceptible to other women than his record of ﬁdelity would indicate,
who had had for some time an unarticulated need to be in love again
before the earth swallowed him and made powder of his bones—fell
in love with a young woman who brought a typewriter into his shop
for repair. There was no real justiﬁcation for what he’d done, and yet
he felt he couldn’t have done otherwise. Love had chased him down
the block and made him pant, possessed him, inhabited him, made
him happy, made him crazy, made him look foolish standing there
in his underwear. For his role in this he took responsibility and would
not apologize.

Though he was often sheepish about it. And he shrunk in the

presence of his ex-wife, who seemed to give him the sort of look—or
was this his imagination?—that suggested he’d committed the sort of
crime for which a plucking of all the white hairs in his beard might be
a suitable penalty. She had this same look, too, in his dreams, where
she turned up more than he would have wished.

He said hello to Hank and then to Ham, who, unlike Hank,

hung back, and then he said hello to Diana.

Diana gave him a “hello” back. Market-goers navigated around,

between, him, her, their children; one of the swarm, perhaps not a
midwesterner, muttered something impolite.

Hank said, “Did you buy ﬂowers for someone?”
“Yeah,” Oliver said, staring at Hank’s smooth, hard, sun-

browned head. Hank was on the swimming team at the community
pool, and Oliver had missed all but one of his meets. “I got them
for your grandma. So”—he searched for an exit from this hothouse
in which a lie was blooming—“are we going to the Muskrats game
tomorrow?”

Hank said, “Yeah.”
“I can’t go,” Ham said. Ham didn’t care for sports, though that

was perhaps not the reason he was begging off.

“Did you ﬁnish that book?” Oliver asked Ham.
“What book? I’m reading three now.”
Oliver said, “I think it had some mice in it. Yeah, it was about a

medieval society of mice or something.” Oliver almost looked to

185

Diana for help. She was grinning. “The main mouse was a detective
maybe.” Or was that—whatever “that” was—what Franklin was
reading now?

“He’s reading a book about owls,” Hank said. “Owls can turn

their heads one hundred and eighty degrees.”

“Both ways,” Ham said. “They can see everything.”
Diana pushed a strand of gray hair off her forehead. Her fore-

head, smooth and hard as a river rock, not something you’d want
to bump up against in a courtroom, shone in the morning sunlight.

“Time to move along, boys,” she said. To Oliver she said, “Hank

will see you tomorrow afternoon.”

Goodbyes were said. Hank and then Ham offered themselves to

be hugged by their father.

Oliver stepped off the sidewalk onto the courthouse lawn. If he

had looked behind him, he would have seen Ham turning his head,
watching his father go wherever he was going. Oliver was tempted to
look behind him, but he was late for his meeting with Annelise and
up ahead, scattered across the lawn like obstacles to be got around,
were recumbent ﬁgures, pamphleteers on break, a guy with a red
wagon in which a smirking cardboard Bush lay, babies in prams the
size of automobiles, and Oliver’s pediatrician, who was in a wheel-
chair, wearing a pith helmet, watching a guy known as Organic Man
juggle eggplants, a striped Italian variety. The pediatrician, Dr. Am-
brosius, was an old friend of Oliver’s parents, and Oliver might have
stopped to say hello, if his divorce hadn’t made him less sociable. So
he skirted Dr. Ambrosius, stepped around a couple who were kissing
as if there were no tomorrow, and then altered course again when he
saw that Wade was just ahead, stretched out alongside his grocery
cart, barefoot, in a basketball jersey whose purple and white threads
sparkled in the sunshine like a clerical vestment. Wade was reading a
book. Oliver hadn’t seen Wade since Oliver had moved into his
mother’s house, and Oliver really didn’t want to catch up with Wade
right now. Things were complicated with Wade. At one point this
spring, Wade was living in Oliver’s shop—Oliver had let him come
in out of the rain one night—and then Oliver had had arguments
with Wade about Wade’s hygiene and work habits (Wade liked to

186

write late at night, with the radio going), and eventually Oliver had
asked his guest to leave, which was the same day, perhaps not coinci-
dentally, that Lester Young, Oliver’s cat, had slipped out the door,
never to return. When Oliver was nervous, he sometimes hummed
songs that came to him out of the blue, and as he walked by Wade
now, Oliver hummed the melody of “Way Over Yonder in the
Minor Key.” But Wade, who was chuckling to himself, whose ears
were full of the sound of his own self-amusement and the Peruvian
music in the background, didn’t look up.

Oliver didn’t look back. There was nothing between him and

the Tout de Suite cart now. He was looking at a person—a woman,
yes—standing next to the cart who seemed to have ﬁeld glasses
trained on him. As if he were a bird or a horse or some strange crea-
ture that had gotten loose from a child’s picture book. He touched
the ridge of his nose. Had he clipped the two hairs that grew there,
stubborn as weeds? He remembered getting ready for Annelise this
morning, the satyr at his toilette, but he couldn’t remember conclu-
sively whether he had clipped the nose-top hairs. He also remem-
bered that after he had ﬁnished grooming himself and gone into the
kitchen, his mother had said, “Would you mind picking up two cab-
bages for me? I thought we could have coleslaw with some of that
leftover scrod tonight.” She had given him money for the cabbages
and for a hearing aid battery, and he had said, “I can pay for it my-
self, Mom.” Though just about all the money he had in his pockets
was from her. And then he was walking through the early morning
heat toward his car, wondering why coleslaw was spelled the way it
was, wondering if Annelise would want to have leftover scrod and
coleslaw with him and his mother tonight, wondering if he and An-
nelise would love each other a year from now.

hen Murray saw Cassandra kissing Oliver, he saw a man who was

almost as old as he was, kissing a pregnant woman almost twenty
years younger, and he had an urge to report them to the police. Some-
thing in nature was being violated, wasn’t it? OK, he was a hypocrite,
but still there was something grotesque and deplorable about this,
wasn’t there?

187

He hurried away from the smoothies stand, where he was

supposed to meet his partner. (Murray had come to hate that word;
it made his relationship with Cassandra sound like a business en-
terprise. But it was he who had insisted they not give in to conven-
tion and get married, and now it was she who sometimes referred
to the seven-month-old in her belly as “our unborn bastard.”) He
walked into the crowd, passing a policeman who was busy eating a
loop of string cheese. A woman handed Murray a ﬂier that said, “Lu-
cretius Mudd was a rapist and a murderer. Let’s take him down from
our courthouse.” The stuff people get worked up about, Murray
thought.

From behind, he saw a woman he would paint, if he could. The

center of the painting, where the viewer’s eye would linger, would be
the woman’s nape. He would paint her from the shoulders up, but
the nape was where the essence of her—her vulnerability, anger,
beauty—would be concentrated.

When he went past this woman and her two children—he’d de-

cided he was going to walk down to the Melody Bar, have a drink—
he didn’t look at her. He didn’t want to see what was in her face; he
wanted to remember only the nape.

Probably, Murray thought on reﬂection, the kiss Cassandra

had given Oliver was merely a sociable one. Oliver, that tall fuzzy-
headed stiff, was too nice to steal his friend’s partner, and Cassandra
wasn’t going anywhere with their little bastard in her tummy. Never-
theless, the sight of those two kissing had provoked an idea for
a painting, something to add to his Rabbit Series. He imagined a
hugely pregnant rabbit in a big hat embracing an Irish wolfhound
holding a bunch of ﬂowers in one paw. The wolfhound would be
wearing a fedora (Oliver wore a fedora in cooler weather, like an in-
surance man from the middle of the last century) and in the wolf-
hound’s face you would see nothing but love and husbandly devo-
tion. But the focus of the painting would be the rabbit’s belly, and
no viewer would be able to look at it without imagining what sort of
creature was inside.

Murray turned this idea around in his head and then dismissed

it. It was like Beatrix Potter on weed, which was how his work had

188

once been described in the alternative paper. His child wasn’t going
to be covered in hair and its ears would be standard size.

He cut across the courthouse lawn. He saw the old black guy he’d

seen the other night at Beaucoup Doughnuts, when he’d gone there
to get something to stem Cassandra’s sugar craving. The man had
been standing outside the shop, reading from a manuscript, and at
his feet was a red cowboy hat into which nobody had dropped any-
thing. Murray’s head had been full of a painting he was in the midst
of—it was part of the Pregnancy Series, featuring Cassandra’s torso—
and he didn’t pay any attention to what the man was reading, but he
did put ﬁfty cents in his hat. The guy had looked up from his manu-
script and said to Murray, “Hey, pops, you’re making me feel like a
professional writer. Have a nice night.” Later, it occurred to Murray
that the guy must have been the homeless man who had stayed at
Oliver’s shop for a few days, until Oliver kicked him out. Murray
had asked Oliver why he’d taken this guy in in the ﬁrst place, and
Oliver had said he’d traded him a typewriter (and some typing paper
and a desk and an air mattress) for some OxyContin. Murray said, “I
can probably get you a better deal than that, if what you need are
pain pills.”

Murray sat down under a tree, at a safe distance from the homeless

guy. It was perhaps a little too early for a drink, though the thought of
being in the air-conditioned dark was appealing. He gazed at a baby
whose head was resting on its mother’s shoulder. Murray wiggled his
ears at the baby, a trick he regarded as at least as impressive as some of
the things he could do with his double-jointed ﬁngers, but the baby
didn’t crack a smile.

Murray thought he should get back to Cassandra. Her pregnancy

had made her a little nutty, even nuttier than it had made him (if his
vasectomy was any indication), but the woman he had fallen in love
with three years ago was surely waiting for him to take her hand and
walk her home through the heat. She might need him to fetch her
another ﬁx of sugar tonight.

Murray got to his feet. He didn’t notice Oliver, on the edge of the

square, next to the Tout de Suite coffee cart, bending down to kiss a
woman in a baseball cap. Murray’s mind was on all the paintings he

189

wanted to do before he died. Love, not to mention marriage or
“partnership,” was so delicate and frangible. Who knew why it ever
lasted, or what hollows in a person it ﬁlled up, if it did?

190

191

Conspicuous

zra said, “Dude, was that your dad in the ditch? There was a guy

in the ditch. Rangy dude with a beard. Did you see him?”

Ezra was riding shotgun and Robert was in the back. The driver

was an older boy named Clayton, a junior, who lacked friends his
own age. Clayton had lured Ezra and Robert from the beanbag chairs
in Ezra’s basement by proposing that they drive to New Berne in
Clayton’s mother’s Beetle. Clayton said he knew a girl in New Berne
whose mother had, like, an art studio in the barn and they could mess
around with the potter’s wheel and drink the dad’s homemade beer.
“Potent shit,” Clayton said. Clayton was tall—taller than Robert,
who had reached six-foot-two this spring, when he turned ﬁfteen—
and his head was aﬁre with crinkly red hair. Clayton’s head seemed to
take up much of the space in the Beetle. Ezra’s dreadlocks took up
much of the rest.

Robert said, “No,” though he had noticed a man in the ditch and

the bicycle he’d apparently fallen off. In fact, he had noticed right
away that the man was his father, who was conspicuous whether he
was sprawled in a ditch on some country road or walking around
Midvale with a fedora on his head and his brains leaking out of his
ears. Robert had not looked back at his father. He had avoided look-
ing directly at his father ever since Oliver had walked out of the house
to be with the deejay. It was particularly difﬁcult to look at him now
that he wore the derelict’s beard that was like some sort of disguise.

Ezra said, “It was him, dude, I swear. Maybe we should go back

and see if he’s hurt or something.”

Clayton was banging out the beat of a Led Zeppelin song on the

steering wheel. The windows were rolled down and the wind that

rushed in made things all blurry. The joint they’d ﬁnished a couple
miles back wasn’t helping Robert put two thoughts in a row
together.

“It wasn’t him,” Robert said. “Anyway, we can’t help him if we’re

stoned.” He had been ﬁne with sitting in the beanbag chair in Ezra’s
basement, watching The Jerk for the third or fourth time, eating
Oreos, just whittling away another Sunday afternoon in the dark.
And now here he was, ﬂying down County Road F with sketchy
Clayton, having visions of his father wiped out in the goldenrod like
some extraterrestrial fallen from the sky.

“I thought you said you didn’t see him,” Ezra said. Ezra had cork-

screwed himself around in his seat so that his face was now almost in
the back of the Beetle. Ezra was growing a mustache to go with his
dreadlocks, but it had been slow to materialize. It was like a penciled
thought above his wide mouth. At least Ezra no longer had braces.

“I didn’t,” Robert said. “You look kind of fucked-up, dude.”

Ezra’s pupils were as big as planets.

“At least I don’t have to wear glasses to see, like, the back of my

hand.” Robert’s mother had made him go to the eye doctor when he
said he was having migraines and could hardly see the blackboard at
school. The glasses had clariﬁed some things, but he still sometimes
had migraines, and he was still getting C’s and D’s in his classes.

Ezra grinned, did something funky with his eyebrows.
Robert watched ﬁelds of harvested corn and unharvested pump-

kins go by. In one cornﬁeld he saw four large birds milling around—
wild turkeys, possibly. He wondered if his father had been run off
the road or if he’d tumbled into the ditch without assistance. He had
noticed that his father wasn’t wearing a helmet, as usual. His father
had been sitting there with a pack on his back and nothing on his
head except the gray hair that he wore long like some old-school
hippie. Or maybe he hadn’t fallen and he was just taking a rest, in a
ditch full of weeds and trash people tossed from their cars.

ast night, Oliver had proposed to Annelise. He’d taken her to a

Vietnamese restaurant that was in a strip mall, between a Christian
Family discount goods store and a ﬁfties-theme diner. Right after

192

they ate the garden rolls, he reached for her hand that lay ﬂat on the
table and while looking straight into her blue-gray-green eyes re-
cited the medieval Japanese poem about the brevity of life (the one
she had read on the air over a year ago) and then said, “You would
make me very happy if you would be my wife, Annelise. I hope I
would make you happy, too.” Annelise had looked at him for a full
ﬁve seconds—he was afraid he’d sounded too formal—before say-
ing, “Are you sure you want to do this? Marriage is such a strange,
you know, contraption, whatever the word is.”

He supposed his proposal had caught her off-guard; maybe it was

the low-budget setting and maybe she hadn’t expected the proposal
to come on this night in October when the moon was in the back of
beyond, not even a shadow of itself, though they had often talked
about when and where he would propose to her and she’d once said,
“Surprise me.” He talked some more, kept hold of her hand. She
didn’t pull her hand away and didn’t cast her eyes toward the door or
even toward the next table where a lone diner read a novel between
bites of stir-fried Vietnamese sausage. Oliver had a ring in his pocket,
but he was keeping it in reserve. He didn’t want to dangle a ring be-
fore her eyes like some cheap inducement. He wanted her to believe
his words, even if he himself wasn’t sure he believed them all. He
hoped his words would drown out his fear that she would abandon
him when she felt the urge to run, which he knew she would feel
at some point. He wanted her to believe that his love for her was
enough to live on, that with love you could put a marriage on your
back and climb mountains. (Had there been no love in his ﬁrst two
marriages? Not enough, apparently.) So words poured out of him.
He wasn’t particularly eloquent or entirely honest about his fears,
and there was some desperation in the way he expressed his desires.
“I just want to say,” he said, seeming to be near the end of his speech,
“I just want to say that if I were a writer instead of an out-of-work
typewriter repairman . . .”

She said, “Uncle, uncle, uncle. I love you, Oliver, but marriage is

scary, like going on a long plane ride with only so much gas and one
of the pilots is prone to ﬁts—but still I am saying yes, because you’re
the only man I could ever try this with, the only man who wouldn’t

193

divorce me if I went mental on you.” Oliver said, “I think it will be
more like a tandem bike ride.” He was trying to put the engagement
band on Annelise’s ﬁnger—was it too small?—just as the entrees ar-
rived. The waitress said, “You want to kiss now? I keep it warm.” Ol-
iver leaned across the table and Annelise’s lips came toward his and
they kissed. They kissed later, too, in Annelise’s car, and then she
said, “I think we should sleep on this.” He sighed, his agitation a
puff of air that grew into a bubble that ﬁlled the car. He felt the ring
box that bulged in his pants pocket—they would have to get the
ring resized, if Annelise ever relented—and said, “Why? What
haven’t we slept on already?” She put her hand on his thigh and said,
“One more night of thinking and dreaming before we jump into the
ﬁre, OK?” She drove Oliver home to his mother’s. Oliver slept little.

In the morning, they talked on their cell phones. Oliver said,

“Did you have any good dreams?” and Annelise said, “When you are
old and maybe a little inﬁrm and when and if they take your driver’s
license away, I will drive you to the Big and Tall Men’s Shop. I will
clip your toenails when you can’t bend over to do it. If your eyes go
bad, I will read you your favorite poems. When we walk down streets
full of rowdy people, I will hold your hand.” Oliver took this to mean
that she would marry him and do her best to love and cherish him
and ﬁgure out his Medicare bills, and he said, “You make me happy.”
He was happy enough that he agreed to attend the late-morning ser-
vice with his mother at Second Presbyterian. Afterward, the sermon
and prayers of contrition having settled at the bottom of his stomach
like a heavy breakfast, he went for a bicycle ride. He didn’t often take
long recreational bicycle rides, but today he wanted to feel the Octo-
ber air blowing in his face for ﬁve or six hours; he wanted to see what
it felt like to be an afﬁanced man for the third time, alone in the cow-
smelling countryside, working his old legs to exhaustion.

He had headed toward New Berne and the William Tell Café,

where he would have a soft drink and a chocolate bar. He had made
it up a couple of challenging hills and he was coasting down another
one, moving along at a pretty good clip, when he heard his cell
phone ringing. Oliver had not reached the point in his relationship
with his cell phone that he was able to regard it as a simple nuisance

194

and leave it where it lay, and so he hastened to answer it whenever
it rang, certain that the call must be urgent. The phone was in a side
pocket of his backpack. He was able to reach back and pluck it from
there without stopping, but when he tried to punch the Connect
button, he lost control of the bike. This happened a moment after
the driver of a car traveling the other way yelled, “Hey, freak! I am
the walrus, kook-kook-a-choo!” Oliver fell among the last of the
wild carrot and goldenrod. It was a relatively soft landing. He could
have fallen on stinging nettles or rusty cans or on the dead deer that
lay another ten feet down the ditch. Many of the bones in his body
had been rattled, but none of the parts of him that regularly ached—
his back, his knee, his shoulder—hurt more than usual, as far as he
could tell.

He still had a grip on his cell phone. The screen said “1 missed

call.” He pressed a button and heard his ex-wife’s voice. She said,
“Didn’t you tell Franklin that you were going to take him to his soc-
cer game this afternoon and buy the treats for the team? And I need
to talk to you about Robert. He isn’t doing well in school, in case
you don’t know. Call me.”

A breeze was drying the sweat on Oliver’s skin. He had been

pedaling hard. A green Beetle went by at sixty, seventy miles per hour.

He had not meant to miss Franklin’s soccer game, though it was

possible that he had failed to keep it in mind because he didn’t par-
ticularly enjoy being in the company of those soccer parents who re-
garded him as a man of loose or no morals and who no longer struck
up conversations with him while they stood on the sidelines, urging
their children to run faster and kick harder. And it was true that he
didn’t know much about Robert’s schoolwork because on those rare
occasions when he saw Robert and made inquiries about Robert’s
life, Robert was not forthcoming. Oliver wanted to be a responsible
father, a reliable and attentive father, but he had not ﬁgured out how
to make his children more a part of his and Annelise’s lives. Anyway,
he had the sense that his children, with perhaps the exception of the
youngest, didn’t relish his company.

He didn’t call Diana back. He would call Franklin later and

apologize.

195

He gazed at a ﬂapping black plastic bag caught in the mesh of

the fence across the road. It had a humanoid shape, almost: arms,
legs, a tatter of a head. What might have been in it originally? He
could not imagine. He picked up his bike and checked some of the
movable parts to see that they still moved. They did. He squeezed
the black bulb of the horn that Franklin had given him a couple of
years ago, and it scared two crows from the bloated carcass of the
deer.

hen Clayton placed his hand on Carla’s shoulder, as if he were

staking a claim, the ferret that was sleeping inside her shirt poked its
dirty-white, possumy head out. Then, after looking around with its
eyes that could see nada (according to Carla), it returned to its nest
between her tits. She looked like she had three. The other ferret, a
nippy male named Chester, was hiding somewhere in the house.
Carla said Chester liked to sleep in the laundry basket and once her
mom had almost put him in the washer.

Ezra said, “I was thinking of getting a giant millipede. Very low

maintenance. They eat, like, one leaf of lettuce a week. It feels cool
when they walk around on your chest.”

Robert knew the owner of the millipede. The kid also kept

snakes. Robert didn’t trust ferrets—he sat cross-legged on the couch,
in case Chester decided to make his presence felt—but he preferred
them to snakes.

Carla said, “Ferrets are sweet. They don’t bite or anything unless

they get scared.” Robert thought Carla was interested in Ezra. Maybe
it was the tie-dyed shirt that she liked. Maybe it was the dreads.
Maybe it was that weird nervous thing Ezra did with his ﬁngers,
where he could make a couple of them slap together like Popsicle
sticks. And maybe she knew Ezra was the sort of person who was
able to stand on his head and sing a Jurassic 5 song at the same time,
though he hadn’t got around to that yet today.

They were watching a movie about a Mexican painter named

Frida Kahlo, a total babe except for the way her black eyebrows
joined like two caterpillars nose-to-nose. Carla had to write a report
on the movie for her Spanish class. The movie made Robert want

196

to go to Mexico and live in a hammock with a person like Frida
Kahlo (or Salma Hayek, who was playing her). He would be more
faithful to her than her tubby painter husband was, a guy who wore
a big broad-brimmed hat like the one Curious George’s master wore.
Robert wasn’t sure what he would do with himself in Mexico—work
on his Spanish, probably. Maybe he would invite Ezra down and
Ezra could do his art thing, draw pictures of melones or gourds or
whate’er, though the problem with that would be that Ezra would
try to impress Robert’s girlfriend.

Robert said, “If I was her, I wouldn’t, like, let him treat me like

I’m one of his fuck bunnies.” He was surprised to hear himself
speak. It was like his voice came from somewhere behind him, and it
had a trace of a foreign accent. He almost turned around to look.
Did he really care that Diego Rivera cheated on Frida Kahlo? He was
still a little stoned.

Ezra said, “Dude, what?”
Clayton and Carla were looking intently at the TV screen. Diego

Rivera was in a bathtub and Frida Kahlo was washing his back, tell-
ing him that she wanted to have his baby.

Clayton said, “I’d have her baby.”
Carla said, “There’s a reason boys can’t have babies, besides the

fact they couldn’t stand the pain.”

Clayton put his hands on top of his big red head, as if he was

hoping to squish it and the rest of himself into a little ball.

“Pain sucks,” Ezra said.
Robert said he needed to use the bathroom. He walked through

the kitchen—there was Chester on the counter, with his pink snout
in a plate of coffeecake crumbs—and out the back door. He walked
across the yard, passing the barn-like garage where Carla’s mother
had her potter’s wheel. The dad was inside, working on a motor-
cycle, listening to the Packers game. He didn’t see Robert, who kept
moving, quiet as a wraith.

Robert had remembered two things while he was in Carla’s

house. One was that he had to write a paper for his World History
class tomorrow and the other was that yesterday was his mother’s
birthday and he had blown it off. He would get his mother to help

197

him write the paper; maybe she could think of a topic, too. Maybe
she would be more agreeable about this if he found a birthday
present for her. New Berne was full of shops that sold things from
Switzerland. Maybe he’d get her some chocolates. He had a twenty
in his pocket. He’d taken it from her purse today.

liver was sitting on the deck of the William Tell Café, all but his

head in the sunlight. A young woman in a dirndl, a high school stu-
dent with a tattoo on her calf, had brought him a raspberry soda and
a cup of coffee. He thought he might need the caffeine to make it all
the way back to Midvale. He’d wondered if the fall might have re-
awakened his sciatica, which had been in remission these past few
months. As he’d ridden the last couple of miles to New Berne, he’d
felt the old burning in his hip. He felt it even more now, but he was
determined to ride back. He had a date with Annelise tonight. He
would sleep in her apartment; they would share the mattress on the
ﬂoor. He couldn’t wait to lie down beside her.

He turned the pages of the New Berne Blatt—the Zimmers had

had a baby boy, the Frisches’ eldest daughter was playing ice hockey
at the U—and then he looked up at the sky, so blue it made your
eyes ache. If the sky were this color every day, would he do more
with his life? Such as? Help the homeless? Meditate more? Write the
poem about love that he could never get beyond the ﬁrst two lines
of, which sometimes went “Put a collar on me and take me for a
walk / Down that alley where ﬁres burned in cans”? He bent forward
to sip his coffee; the sun dazzled his face. When he leaned back into
the shade, he saw a tall, gangly boy with a purple gift bag in his hand
coming out of the chocolate shop across the street. It was his eldest
son, wasn’t it? Though if it was in fact Robert—and it surely was—
the glasses and the severe, almost skinhead haircut suggested a new
version of him. Oliver hadn’t seen his son in at least two weeks. Rob-
ert was always busy whenever his father invited him to dinner or a
movie. Or so he said.

And what was Robert doing in this little tourist burg on a Sunday

afternoon? Shopping?

Of his four boys, Robert and Ham were the ones whom the di-

vorce had affected the most. Ham had at ﬁrst tried to hold on to his

198

father and then when Oliver, disoriented and crazy with love for An-
nelise, had failed to hold him closely enough, Ham had pulled away.
Robert had been growing distant before Oliver moved out—a teen-
ager disappearing down a rabbit hole, or into a ﬁeld full of rabbit
holes—but the divorce had made relations even more awkward. A
therapist Oliver occasionally saw, a guy on his softball team, who
charged Old Hatters less than the going rate, told Oliver that Ham
and Robert would come back eventually if Oliver kept showing up.

Oliver wasn’t sure how to approach the showing-up part. For in-

stance, was now a good time to go running after his son and grab
him by the shoulders and tell him that he loved him? What if he did
that and Robert told him to fuck off and not bother showing up
anymore?

Oliver ﬂagged down the waitress and paid his bill and put his

pack on his back and set off in the direction Robert had been walk-
ing. At the end of the commercial street, Oliver looked left and right,
but didn’t see his son. He decided to go right, up Zwingli Street, past
small, tidy clapboard houses. A man was on a ladder, cleaning his
gutters. Another man—Mr. Zimmer?—was sitting with his baby in
a lawn chair, listening to the Packers game. Oliver walked past the
elementary school, a red brick fortress that looked as if it had with-
stood seventy or eighty winters as well as the shouts of several gener-
ations of children heading for the exits. Robert was on a swing in the
playground adjacent to the school. He was not swinging. He was sit-
ting there with the gift bag in his lap, his feet scufﬂing in the wood
chips.

Diana had once told Oliver that a good time to talk to your chil-

dren about difﬁcult issues was when they were in the car with you.
They couldn’t escape but they didn’t have to look at you, either. Was
an empty playground a good place to talk to a difﬁdent child? Was
now the time to tell him that his father was going to get remarried?
Perhaps Oliver would just say hello.

hen he saw his father coming across the playground, Robert

looked down at his feet. They were the size they were because his
father had endowed him with them. He would have preferred smaller
and swifter feet, feet that he could scoot out of sight at a moment’s

199

notice. Ezra had told him that the size of a dude’s feet corresponded
to the length of his twizzler, so what did it matter if he ran like a spaz.
Ezra was so full of shit.

The fact that Robert was seeing his father for the second time

today, in a place where he wouldn’t have ﬁgured on either of his par-
ents being, reinforced his feeling that fathers had a power over chil-
dren that you couldn’t do anything about. You couldn’t outsmart that
power, you just had to endure it. It was like some sort of voodoo.
(Mothers had it, too, but it was easier to ignore or laugh at, despite
what The Runaway Bunny said.) The fact that his dad was limping
like some pathetic old man made the situation worse.

Robert didn’t move. He studied the untied laces on his sneakers.

He felt the sunshine on his neck, heard a bird twittering.

“Hey, fancy meeting you here,” Oliver said. “I saw you come out

of the chocolate shop and I thought, Great minds think alike. I need
to buy a chocolate bar for the ride back to town, need a little energy
boost. How’d you get out here?”

“I came with Ezra.” There were scratches on his dad’s shins and a

greenish-blackish spot near his knee. Robert didn’t lift his eyes any
higher.

“Ezra has his driver’s license?”
“This other guy drove. We’re, like, visiting this guy’s friend and

then we’re going to buy a pumpkin.” There was too much explain-
ing to do, too many lies to tell. He reached into the bag and pulled
out the box of chocolates. He untied the gold ribbon on the box. He
would offer his dad one of the chocolates he’d bought for his mother,
and then he would depart. Maybe if you gave the voodoo man a gift,
the spell would be over. “You want one?”

“You weren’t saving them for someone?”
“Like who?” Robert glanced up at his father’s face. His mouth

was like a ﬁsh’s in the gray sea of his beard. He had a slightly dazed
look, maybe from the bike fall or whatever happened back on the
highway. You could have tied his shoelaces together, slapped a sign
that said “doofus” on his back, and he wouldn’t have noticed. Robert
wasn’t sure how to square the dazed, lost look with the voodoo side.

Oliver shrugged. “How are the glasses working out? You can see

the blackboard now?”

200

201

“Yeah,” Robert said. He took a chocolate from the box and held

it out to his dad in his palm. The chocolate, which had a coffee bean
on top, was in a ﬂuted, gold foil cup. “Espresso,” Robert said.

Oliver said, “My favorite.” He popped the chocolate in his

mouth. “Thank you.”

“Gotta go,” Robert said. He jumped out of the swing and trotted

toward the street, trying to suggest both that he needed to get some-
where in a hurry and that getting there in a hurry was no biggie. He
heard his father say something. It might have been “Be safe,” which
was like some sort of slogan every parent tossed out at you as you
went out the door. Then he clearly heard his father say, “I love you.”

So? Robert didn’t turn around. He didn’t trip and fall, either.

Part 3

205

Wedding Guests

n the autumn of the ﬁfth year of the Bush II administration,

Emile dreamed that he and Annelise were married in a simple

ceremony on the newly laid patio behind Tout de Suite. The
weather was Indian summer-like. Oliver, who had helped Emile lay
the bricks for the patio, attended the wedding. He wore a baby blue
tuxedo and sat alone at a tottery table (the bricks were uneven) clut-
tered with absinthe glasses. Later in the dream, after the oud player
had fallen asleep over his instrument, the FBI agent who was posing
as a farm implements dealer arrested Emile and took him away in a
taxi. Annelise said, “Adieu, Emile, bon voyage.”

The morning after the night he’d had the dream, Emile thought

of telling Oliver about it. Emile saw Oliver four mornings a week,
because Oliver now worked part-time at Tout de Suite, grinding
beans, making lattes, cleaning the bathroom. (Once a week, Oliver
took a class in Realtime Reporting at the Midvale Technical Insti-
tute.) Emile had the notion that if he revealed his dream to Oliver,
made a joke of it, he could purge himself of his unrequited feelings
for Annelise. He needed to let her go. Though Emile still didn’t ap-
prove of Oliver as a mate for Annelise, neither did he in the end ap-
prove of himself, a married man with two young daughters. Anyway,
he had enough to dream and worry about with the government
snooping into his life.

Emile didn’t confess the dream to Oliver that morning—the

milk steamer on the espresso machine malfunctioned, an FBI agent
in a miniskirt (a receptionist at the nearby chiropractor’s, suppos-
edly) came in the door, Emile’s head was throbbing—and by that
afternoon the dream had become a thread of a thought lost among a

hundred other threads. He had gone home that night, played soccer
with his daughters in the park near their apartment, and slept badly.
The next morning, when Oliver told Emile that he and Annelise
were going to get married and that they were hoping to hold the
ceremony and reception on the patio behind Tout de Suite, the
dream came rushing back to Emile. Seeing it all again—Annelise in
her enormous white dress that was like an upside-down mushroom
cloud, his wife crying over the punch tureen, the FBI agent with the
pasted-on mustache—caused the nerves above Emile’s left eye to
spasm. But he kept the dream to himself. He embraced Oliver,
slapped him on the back American-style, and said, “Coffee on the
house for everyone!” Oliver had ﬁxed the steamer.

Seven months later, in May of 2006, Emile sat in the sunshine on

the patio behind Tout de Suite, next to a man who had an oxygen
tube attached to his nose. He was Annelise’s father. A woman with a
pink shawl around her shoulders, who represented a religion Emile
didn’t know anything about, was reading something that she said
was a part of the Jewish wedding ceremony and that was a prelude to
the bride and groom drinking from the same cup. A bottle of red
wine sat on a table in front of the minister, along with a wineglass
into which a ﬁne-toothed green leaf had ﬂuttered some minutes ago,
during a musical interlude, a random note from above. Oliver, who
was wearing a dark suit and brown shoes, stood on one side of the
table, his hands crossed below his waist. He had shaved off his beard
and cut his hair and he looked some years younger now. Alongside
him were three of his four sons. The missing one, the oldest, was at
a track meet and would arrive later.

The bride wore a silver dress that was designed to keep shining

after the sun went down. It clung to all of Annelise’s curves, some of
which Emile had previously only guessed at. When he caught him-
self gazing at her body, he would shift his focus to her face. But she
was so nervous—she looked as if she would give in at any moment
to the emotion that was like a river rising pink from her chest—that
he would look away or down at her knees or her feet wobbling in
satin high heels or at her maid of honor, a woman who had come
from South Dakota and who wore square-framed glasses and had a
man’s haircut and a tattoo on her forearm that said “Love Now.”

206

Later, after the sun had gone down, and Annelise, glowing like a

Chinese lantern, was wandering among the guests, sometimes on
the arm of Oliver, sometimes not, and during a moment when the
band No Shoes was taking a break, Emile, who had had a few drinks,
told a young woman with a baby in her lap that he had recently had
a dream in which he turned into a deer. He said that he had been
walking down the road and the next thing he knew he was covered
with fur and had antlers on his head and he was jumping in front of
a car driven by a person he was sure was Annelise. Oliver was in the
passenger seat.

The baby, a boy named Roger, was tugging at the neckline of

Cassandra’s dress.

“Should I ask what happened next?” Cassandra said.
“Maybe not,” Emile said, looking away from Cassandra, who

was unbuttoning the top buttons of her dress. Emile saw what he
supposed was Venus twinkling in the blue that was turning bluer
above the Tout de Suite building. The truth was, he couldn’t remem-
ber what had happened next in the dream or even whether he had
been all-deer or part-deer. He remembered watching himself leaping
in front of the little car. Possibly he had slid across the hood and then
gathered himself and stumbled into the woods, where he had bled to
death, alone. But you couldn’t die in your own dream, could you?

obert arrived at the wedding a few minutes after the cake was cut.

He came with Ezra, who pointed out two turkey vultures circling
the sky above Tout de Suite. The boys sat at a table with Robert’s
grandmother and two of his brothers. Ham had disappeared. Also at
the table was a woman with a pink shawl around her shoulders.
Robert sort of recognized her. She introduced herself as the minister
at the Unitarian Society on Gray Street and said that she had met
Robert’s dad years ago, when she brought him her typewriter to re-
pair. She still typed her Sunday talks on her trusty old Remington.

“Cool,” Robert said. Her son, he remembered, hung out with the

African-American kids at school, who called him Wonder Bread
Child behind his back.

Ezra said, “Dude, you want some coffee?” “Coffee” was code for

anything, including coffee, that would get you high.

207

Mrs. Poole said to her oldest grandson, “You missed the cere-

mony. Your father read a poem he wrote to his new wife.” Under her
hat, which was as broad as a squirrel bafﬂe, her face was thick with
thought. She was drinking a glass of wine, but only, as she had ex-
plained to the minister, to ease the pain in her hip.

“I was at a track meet,” Robert said. He ran the high hurdles for

the junior varsity. Ezra did the pole vault: comic relief.

“It was a sweet poem,” the minister, whose name was Ann Lamb,

said. “It reminded me a little of another Oliver—Mary. Do you
know her, Mrs. Poole?”

Mrs. Poole, who had turned off her hearing aid earlier, when No

Shoes started to play, said, “Oliver doesn’t project his voice very well.
He never has.”

“Birds and stuff,” Franklin said to Robert, speaking of the con-

tents of their father’s poem. “Tweet, tweet.” Franklin eyed a yellow
rose on Hank’s slice of wedding cake. He wanted to put his face in it.

“Poetry bites,” Robert said.
His grandmother said to nobody in particular, “I used to read

Edna St. Vincent Millay when I was a girl.” She gazed at the unlit
candle in the glass at the center of the table.

“Her name alone is a poem,” Ann Lamb said.
“Dude,” Ezra said, tapping Robert on the shoulder. “Time for a

cup of joseph?”

“I liked the dark ones when I was young,” Mrs. Poole said. She

tipped her head back and inhaled, as if there were a poem in the blue
air above her. She recited lines from “Spring,” about how it wasn’t
enough that April came around every year, babbling like an idiot,
strewing ﬂowers.

“There’s always that yearning for something more,” Ann Lamb

said.

Robert and Ezra excused themselves. They went over to the bar

and ordered Sprites, and then they sat down at an empty table in
front of where the band (on break) played. Ezra took two airline
bottles of Scotch out of his cargo pants and poured the Scotch into
the Sprites. They drank their drinks fast, and then Robert went and
got two more Sprites and when he came back, the band was tuning

208

up and his father was sitting at the table with Ezra. His father’s
de-bearded cheeks and newly exposed forehead gave Robert a start.
Robert had only recently gotten used to the shaggy look, that of a re-
ligious scholar lost in his thoughts or the homeless guy he and Ezra
had seen talking to himself across the street from Tout de Suite when
they’d arrived.

Oliver said to his son, “Glad you could come. How’d you do in

the hurdles?”

“Lost,” Robert said. Sometimes he wished the high hurdles

were lower, but most of the time he didn’t care. He sat down next to
Ezra, two seats from his father. The bassist, a woman who was slinky
and slim, hit a warm-up note that was like a stiff falling out of a
closet.

Oliver said, “Annelise went to college with the drummer. That’s

how we got the band to play.”

“Cool,” Ezra said.
Robert didn’t say anything. He wished the band would play

something loud so that his father would give up trying to talk to him.
He gazed at the drummer, a young guy with a goatee like a Chinese
sage, and wondered why Annelise couldn’t have married him. They
could have had little drummer babies with goatees or nice tits or
both. Robert had to admit that Annelise had nice tits, though they
weren’t big. And he also had to admit that she had a good voice for
radio, though he didn’t listen to her show anymore. Though he’d
told her he did, during the one conversation he’d had with her when
his dad made him and his brothers have dinner with her at a Viet-
namese restaurant. It was ridiculous, with everybody trying to eat
noodles and bean sprouts with chopsticks and nobody saying any-
thing when his dad tried to start a conversation about sports or mu-
sic or school or whatever. She was probably OK, actually, though
kind of shy for a person on radio. It was just that she and his dad had
fucked things up and it was like he, Robert, was trying to ﬁgure out
why things kept moving on him, why nothing was the way it was
yesterday or the day before yesterday.

Oliver had asked Ezra what sort of music he was listening to

nowadays and Ezra was saying, “Do you know Sergio Mendes?” Ezra

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had stolen a Sergio Mendes CD from a rack at Starbucks but hadn’t
listened to it.

“That’s pretty retro of you,” Oliver said, glancing at Robert, as if

for support.

“Yeah,” Ezra said. “Thanks.”
Robert looked at his father’s face, the bones and ridges and

hollows and lines, and into his head came a memory of riding on his
father’s back in a swimming pool, Oliver with his mouth at water
level making outboard motor sounds, carrying Robert out of the
shallow end toward the bluer water of the deep end, saying (when he
wasn’t making those bubbly little noises), “Do you want to look for
giant squids or mermaids?” And Robert, who was four or ﬁve or six,
who was barely a beginning swimmer and not an adventurous child,
who was trying not to give away his fear by gripping his father’s slip-
pery body too tightly, said, “Either.” And then his father made a
U-turn, saying, “I think I left my mermaid hunting license on shore.
Better go back and get it.” And this seemed only to reconﬁrm an un-
articulated feeling in Robert that his father could be relied on, that
he was predictable and sensible, a feeling Robert had not previously
doubted and didn’t doubt until the night two years ago when he
passed his father on the stairs and his father looked and smelled
stoned and it was as if his father was the teenager and Robert was
the adult (though it so happened that Robert had himself smoked a
little weed that night). Maybe what had happened when they passed
each other on the stairs was that they exchanged brains, though Rob-
ert would have rejected that part of his father’s brain where all the
bad jokes and pithy sayings were located. And then his father really
did become the teenager, a runaway teenager who had hooked up
with a girl almost half his age, an old runaway teenager whom Rob-
ert once actually saw walking along the railroad tracks with a stick
that was like a hobo’s staff.

The band had started playing again. It was a slow number, and

Robert guessed it was called “Blue Moon,” because the singer said
those words a bunch of times. Near the end of it, Oliver got up and
came over to his son and put his hand on his shoulder and said,
“Thanks for coming.”

Robert said, “Sure, Dad.”

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he drummer said, “That was an old Rodgers and Hart tune, from,

like, around Before Elvis (or B.E., as we say), and it’s for Annelise,
who is our favorite older younger person. Wherever she is. Where
are you, Annelise?”

Annelise didn’t raise her hand and say “Here.” She was out in

front of Tout de Suite with her father, who wanted to go back to
the motel. He had removed the oxygen tube from his nose. The
little wheeled tank, which he referred to as Fido, stood at his side.
“Come, Fido,” he would say when he took his daily walk down the
driveway from his trailer to the mailbox. Her father’s wife, Chery-
lynne, had told Annelise that. Cherylynne had also said that his ac-
tual dogs, a couple of drug-snifﬁng German shepherds put out to
pasture by the Rochester police force, would accompany him and
Fido to the mailbox. “I always worry if he’ll make it back up the
hill,” Cherylynne had said with a catch in her throat that didn’t
seem entirely spontaneous. Annelise had imagined her father falling
to the pavement, Fido rolling into a ditch ﬁlled with crap thrown
from cars, the shepherds circling her dad’s wheezing body, trying to
decide whether to eat or abandon him. Annelise had the impression
that Cherylynne might be eager to get her husband into the ground.
But what about her, Annelise, what did that fantasy say about her
wishes or fears?

Annelise hadn’t expected her father to come to the wedding—she

had hardly seen him in the last decade and had considered not invit-
ing him at all, in part because she also had to invite Cherylynne—but
there he was, a short man with an emphysemiac’s barrel chest, his
shoulders slightly hunched under his blue suit jacket as if he were
somehow trying to get his mouth closer to his lungs so he could talk
to them and urge them to work better, his few strands of hair arrayed
across his skull in a protective fashion. During the ceremony, during
the moment of silent meditation or prayer (“Whichever you prefer,”
the minister had said), Annelise had thought she heard her father
struggling for air. But the sound she was hearing was her own lungs
laboring as her head welled up with crying, a mess of sorrow and joy
and fear balled together, which she managed to suppress, by pinching
her thigh. After the ceremony, her father had kissed her and called
her “Sweetie” in a voice that was growly and furry, and then he had

211

shufﬂed off toward the bar. As the afternoon wore on and then
turned suddenly into evening, Annelise would see her father, usually
next to Cherylynne, nursing a Pabst Blue Ribbon. Annelise had gone
over to talk to him on one occasion, but on the way she’d been pulled
aside by Emile, who’d had a lot to drink and wanted to tell her some-
thing of great urgency. (It was a question about her mother’s boy-
friend, Reynard. What was his line of work? He was so big. Was he in
law enforcement, maybe? Annelise said he was a nurse.) Another
time she had seen her father stumble as he crossed the patio. Murray,
still standing despite having smoked some strong weed with the
band, caught him before he hit the bricks. Later she saw her father
(without Cherylynne) talking with his ex-wife. She had not seen her
parents together since the day of her graduation from college, twelve
years ago. She stood with her third or fourth or ﬁfth glass of wine in
her hand, not really listening to what her friend Vince (the drummer
with No Shoes) was saying about some pop star, watching her par-
ents talk, watching them lean toward and then away from each other.
She felt tired. She wanted to undo all the things that had gone wrong
in her life, set them right. She shut her eyes and watched herself walk
across the grass toward the patio, a little girl in dress-up clothes, to
tell her parents that she was ready to leave. She saw herself pull on the
hem of her dad’s jacket. She said, “Can we go now?” They drove
home in the Caprice, which her father washed almost every week,
and when they got there, they sat on the couch (second-hand, but in
good condition) and watched a TV show—something with a dog in
a choice role. She sat between her parents and eventually fell asleep
and dreamed about her wedding, a church affair, in which she mar-
ried a tall handsome young man who was planning to be a doctor,
who had long sideburns the way some men in the 1970s did.

But it was her father who had walked over to her this evening and

tapped her on the shoulder and announced that he was ready to leave.

“So soon?” She tried to remember where she’d left her sweater.

The wine, good as it was, was no longer keeping her warm.

“I’ve drunk my limit,” said her father.
She’d walked him to the street, where they waited for Chery-

lynne to come round with the car. He said he had eaten two pieces

212

of the wedding cake. “You must’ve remembered that chocolate is my
favorite.”

She had actually not given it a thought, but she said, “Yep.”
“Your husband,” he said. “I didn’t catch what ﬁeld he’s in.”
Annelise said, “He’s gone back to school. He was in typewriters,

but the market for them kind of disappeared. At the moment, he
works here, selling coffee. He’s looking around.”

“Coffee’s a good ﬁeld.” Annelise’s father took a white envelope

out of his coat pocket and handed it to her. She heard him say “Don’t
spend it all in one place” before he actually said it. She saw him going
out the door of their shotgun house in Butte des Morts, toward his
potato chip truck parked by the curb, the name of the company em-
broidered in an oval on the back of his green shirt. Her father was
going to see his girlfriend before he made his deliveries. Though An-
nelise didn’t actually know this—she was six or seven—she could
tell, from the tilt of his head and the quarter he’d put in her palm
and the parting words tossed over his shoulder (“Don’t spend it all in
one place, sweetie”) as the screen door banged shut, that something
was taking him away from her, that he loved what was beyond the
screen door more than what was behind it.

She said now, “I’ll save it for a rainy day.”
He chuckled, then wheezed, then coughed. He was only in his

late ﬁfties, not much older than Oliver, but he looked twenty years
older. When he coughed, it seemed as if he were being beaten from
within. She put her hand on his back to steady him.

An old Astrovan pulled up to the curb. Cherylynne was talking

on her cell phone. The van rattled as it idled.

“Might have to get a new one someday,” Annelise’s father said.

Annelise assumed he meant the car. It occurred to her then, for the
ﬁrst time that day, that she was Oliver’s third wife. She wasn’t sure
how to “process” that fact, but for a moment she felt a connection to
Cherylynne.

Annelise’s father was hoisting himself into the van when he

said, “Sorry I haven’t been much of a father.” No Shoes was playing
Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” all three band members singing the
chorus like they meant it. Cherylynne was saying to whomever she

213

was talking to, “Tell him he can’t go ﬁshing. Tell him he’s got hus-
band duties.”

Annelise held the oxygen tank, waiting for her father to get settled

in his seat. She wasn’t sure how to react to what he’d just said. It was
both too much and not enough. She said, “I’m glad you could come,
Dad.”

Cherylynne put down her phone at last and said over the top of

her glasses, which she wore for driving, “Come see us, hon. Don’t
forget to bring that tall handsome man with you.”

Annelise kissed her father and then she turned and walked to-

ward the entrance of Tout de Suite. Through her tears she saw wed-
ding guests inside the coffeehouse, people who seemed imaginary.
She saw Reynard’s large brown head next to her mother’s, which she
had recently dyed strawberry blonde, though in this light it was
mostly strawberry.

Annelise heard voices coming from over by the tree where she had

once hid from Oliver, trying to decide whether Oliver was the one
for her and she the one for him. She turned around. She pinched her
thigh.

liver had gone looking for his bride, but he was waylaid ﬁrst

by Max Moore and then by Murray. Murray’s pupils were as big as a
cat’s roaming the dark. From his pants pocket he took a little spiral
sketchbook and showed Oliver the sketches he’d done of the bride
and groom during the ceremony. In one of them, Murray had out-
ﬁtted Oliver with a Mad Hatter’s kind of hat and Annelise with an
Alice in Wonderland dress. Murray gave Oliver a hug.

Oliver headed for the bathroom. He needed a moment or two

alone.

He stood over the toilet that he, as Emile’s right-hand man,

had cleaned numerous times. Above the toilet was a photograph of
railroad tracks disappearing into a forest. Oliver had looked at the
photograph a hundred times, as if there were a clue in how to conduct
one’s life in it. Where did those tracks lead? Now, looking away,
scratching his neck with his off hand, he thought of Lester Young,
his cat, who had disappeared. Oliver had walked the railroad tracks

214

over near his shop, calling for his cat, tapping the ties with a hobo’s
makeshift staff he’d picked up somewhere. The cat had not come to
Oliver’s calls.

Oliver zipped up and then looked behind the toilet to see if

there was a mouse in the mousetrap. There was not. He remembered
somebody saying that what he was doing when he left Diana and his
kids for Annelise was just following his dick. This had stung, but
when the swelling went down, he had asked himself if it might be
true. He had concluded that the person who had said this had no
idea who he, Oliver, was. On the other hand, neither did he have a
clear idea of who he was, though he felt sure it was not his dick that
led him where he went. His dick was a triﬂe.

He splashed water on his face, remembering something Annelise

had once said on her radio show about how holding onto love was
like trying to keep water in your hands. He dried his face and hands
with the pull-down cloth towel, remembering for the umpteenth
time what his father, who had worked for a manufacturer of auto-
matic hand drying machines, had said of such devices: “I don’t want
to wipe my hands on somebody’s boogers.” He wondered what his
father might have said about his third marriage. On the occasion of
his second, he’d said, “I think you got it right this time, Ollie.” His
father had been an optimistic man, in general.

Oliver noted two pieces of grafﬁti on the wall (“Phoque Now,”

“Je m’embrasse”) that he would likely have to expunge on Monday
(he and Annelise were delaying their honeymoon), after having to
listen to Emile complain again about the immaturity of Americans.
He wondered if janitorial work was his destiny. Not that it was be-
neath him.

He left the restroom and went outdoors. He was thinking of

himself and Annelise on a tandem bike. They’d rented one a couple
of weeks ago and had pedaled in happy synchronicity for miles be-
fore failing to steer successfully around a dead squirrel and falling,
unharmed, into a bed of pine needles.

He sat at a sidewalk table, the one (wasn’t it?) where he’d sat on a

Saturday morning two years ago, while waiting for Annelise to show
up, while sharing coffee with Wade, who, moments later, would

215

incinerate the stuff in his grocery cart. Oliver had been scared that
morning, scared that Annelise wouldn’t show up, scared that if she
did show up he would go tumbling with her into some hole in the
earth where adulterous lovers tumbled and from which they would
emerge, if they emerged at all, soiled and bruised. And she had, at
last, showed up, in a shirt that didn’t cover her belly button, and they
had gone tumbling down that hole and there was nobody there ex-
cept them (anyway, Oliver didn’t notice anybody else) and there
were times when they were happy and when the hole seemed to be
upholstered and full of unusual and beautiful light, and then they
wandered deeper into the hole and got separated from each other
and eventually they climbed out, separately, soiled and bruised. And
later, after some months of misery, they had (as the saying went) got
back together again.

No Shoes was playing a medium-fast blues. Oliver tapped a shoe

whose lace had come untied. He and Annelise hadn’t danced a dance
yet, not today, not ever that Oliver could remember. Maybe he would
be brave and ask her to dance when he found her. He bent down to
tie his shoe.

Something silvery was ﬂashing under the old maple whose roots

had heaved up the sidewalk, a tree that children went round and
round as their minders discussed Midvale politics or the weather and
that cell phone users leaned against when talking to their lovers or
plumbers, a tree that a neighborhood citizens brigade had recently
saved from municipal saws (to the chagrin of Emile, who liked clear
vistas, who believed that trees were places for government agents
to hide). The ﬂash of silver, Oliver came to realize, was his wife. The
silver, that is, was the dress into which Annelise had poured herself.
At one point during the marriage ceremony, Oliver’s eye had fallen
upon Annelise’s hipbones, the juts of which her dress didn’t conceal.
Her hipbones always took him by surprise, made him consider the
skeleton beneath the ﬂesh, made him anxious. How near death was
all the time. And love, if you were so lucky to dwell in it, was just a
stop on the way to death and no more ﬂesh to hold onto, not even a
crust of bone. When he had taken his vows, he had promised to hold
onto his wife through thick and thin. And she had promised to hold
onto him. And why wouldn’t they be able to do that?

216

“I come home crying, I want a man to love me, not ask me why,”

the No Shoes’ bassist sang.

Under the tree with Annelise were—Oliver took his new distance

glasses out of his coat pocket—Ham and Wade. Wade had set a dish
towel under the tree, and there he sat in his plantation owner’s suit,
eating wedding cake, drinking wine. Ham stood to the side, in the
shadows, like a waiter. Leaning against the tree was Wade’s three-
speed bike, which he’d found in an alley; it had come with saddlebags.

Wade was talking to Annelise, though not quite loudly enough

that he could be heard from where Oliver was sitting. The little red
cowboy hat was propped on his Afro. Oliver walked toward the tree.

“So here comes the bridegroom, all shaved and with a ﬂower in

his buttonhole.” Wade put aside the paper plate with the cake on it.
“I was telling your bride how beautiful she looks, and now I get to
tell you how you’re looking not so bad yourself, with your whiskers
all gone. If I was feeling ornery, I might say you’re looking like a real
polished white man, Mr. Oliver. But I’m going to skip right over not
receiving an invitation from you and get to the important stuff.”

Annelise protested. “We didn’t know where to send it.”
“You heard of hand delivery?” He took a sip of his wine, a red.

“OK, no matter. I’ve been talking to my man Mr. Hamilton Poole
over there being so quiet now. We’ve been talking about love and
truth and justice and all that. He’s a nice young man, Ollie, a smart
one, too. When I asked him what ‘truth’ is, he said, ‘Whatever isn’t
false.’ And I said, ‘Good, let’s move along to love. What do you think
about it, all in all?’ He passed on that one because, well, it’s stumped
the best.”

Oliver motioned for Ham to come stand next to him and Anne-

lise, but Ham ignored him.

“So I asked if he minded if I told him what I think and then he

can go get me some cake and refreshment.” Wade adjusted the collar
of his planter’s jacket. “I’ll just sum up, skip over some of the ﬁner
points, and let you get back to your guests.”

There was a gleam in Wade’s eye that Oliver couldn’t account for,

something crazier than usual.

“So the question is whether you’re up to dying for love. You

might say you’re ready to die for truth and justice, ready to go march

217

for your rights and take a bullet in the head. Some have gone and
done that and I drink to them.” He sipped again from his plastic
cup. “But love’s a little harder—loving everybody, I mean, the stink-
ing as well as the nice-smelling. Let’s say you come home one night,
if you got a home, and ﬂames are coming out the windows of your
house. If you got a heart, you go into your burning house to save
your child, right? Even if he’s one hundred percent rascal or varmint,
you save him. If your wife’s in there, you save her, too, right? But
what if you can save only one? Who do you pick, Mr. Oliver?” Oliver
didn’t have an answer on the tip of his tongue, and Wade didn’t wait
for him to come up with one. “Who do you give your love to, who
do you burn up and turn into a cinder for? And let’s say also in that
house is this homeless brother, down in the basement. Are you going
to let his sorry ass roast? Speaking for myself now, I let the coon die
for sure. It’s most likely a coon who was stinking up the house before
the ﬁre came to clean it, and how’d he get in, anyway? I probably also
hurry on by the room where the wife is sleeping, though it’s easier to
get her out than the child, who is sleeping way far back in the house,
and even though you like banging on the wife a lot and like her home
cooking and the way she does her hair and so forth. And if you save
the child—hey, there’s a slogan for your charity—and you’re some-
how still living yourself and you’re standing out on the street smell-
ing all that ﬂesh inside burning, what do you do next?”

Wade had pulled a gun out of his coat pocket. Oliver didn’t

know the ﬁrst thing about guns, except that he felt they should all
be banned and melted down into cooking pots. Wade’s had a snub-
nosed barrel. Did that make it high-caliber or low-caliber? Wade
twirled it on his foreﬁnger.

Annelise said, “Wade. Jesus. Put it away.”
“It’s a toy, missy. Stay cool. What I’m thinking out there on the

street with ﬂames shooting out the windows of my home is I can’t
get the loving thing right. Love wants too much from me, like I’m
a bottomless damn cup. I’m not up to making any more choices.
Choices are hard. So what I do is while I’m smelling that human
ﬂesh burning and my child is nearby wrapped in somebody’s blan-
ket, I walk down the street and have some wine with this homeless

218

person I know. Escape my re-spon-si-bil-i-ties.” He put the barrel of
the gun under his chin. Oliver didn’t think it looked like a toy.

“You have children, Wade?” Annelise asked.
“It’s been claimed so. You didn’t read that part of my book?” His

tone was offended. “I thought you read my book, missy.”

“I did. I just forgot that detail.”
“I forgive you,” Wade said, “since it’s your wedding day. I told my

young philosopher friend maybe my book will be published posthu-
mously. I asked him if he knew what ‘posthumously’ meant and he
said no, but he could spell it. I like a man who can spell.”

Oliver found his voice at last and said, “Why are you doing this,

Wade? Why?”

Wade took another sip of wine and said, “Why. The longest

three-letter word in the world. Why is there badness on the earth?
Why are people not invited to their friends’ weddings? Why do I live
in a storage locker some nights?” He laid the gun in his lap. “I hear
you read a poetic work of your own composition at your ceremony.
I was wondering if you could read it to me.”

Oliver took the poem from his jacket pocket and read it. He

shook almost as badly as he had shaken when he read it to Annelise
during the ceremony. When he was ﬁnished, Wade said, “I don’t care
for birds much. They’re always pecking at me.” Then he got on his
bike and rode off.

219

220

Bedtime

he stood naked at the foot of the bed, brushing her teeth. He

was in his underwear, reading a book of poems by E. E. Cum-

mings. He’d had one and a half bottles of beer with supper and his
eyes were tired from gazing at the computer screen all afternoon—
he’d been reﬁning his résumé and writing cover letters: who would
hire a ﬁfty-three-year-old former typewriter repairman whose cur-
rent position was at a coffeehouse?—and not all of Cummings’s
words lay ﬂat on the page. Some seemed to want to rise and shake
their feathers. Others were hard things he stubbed his head against.
At least twice he had come across the word “anent,” a shard from an
old world, the meaning of which he did not know. He was looking
for a poem to read to her, a poem in which she could hear his love
for her. It was part of their bedtime ritual that he read a poem to her,
after she brushed her teeth, which she sometimes did while standing
naked before him.

The ﬁrst few times she’d stood naked at the foot of the bed,

brushing her teeth, he’d wondered if she expected him to watch her,
the way, say, an only child expected a parent to watch her eat. He felt
that it was somehow wrong to watch, but he always did, a little. He
would peep over the top of his book of poems, run his eyes over the
juts of her pelvic bones and her fair bush and her stomach that time
had softened a little and her breasts that were like peaches. He loved
her body—loved her—but he did not wish to take her in his arms at
that moment. It was hard to feel desire for somebody who was brush-
ing her teeth (or ﬂossing, which she sometimes also did, naked).

Sometimes when she was standing naked at the end of the bed,

applying her Scooby-Doo brush to her teeth, her mouth foamy at the
corners, it was as if he wasn’t in the room. She seemed to be lost in
thought, and the thoughts made her eyes wide. She would stare at
the wall above the bed. Or perhaps she was staring at the window,
just to the right of the bed, beyond which lived creatures of the
night, including, she might have noted, a number of bad men. There
were times when fears overtook her and she believed that the world
abounded with bad men—killers, child molesters, wife abusers, rap-
ists, torturers. There had been moments recently when she believed
that one or two of them probably lived, at least at night, in the strip
of woods twenty feet beyond her apartment window. (In fact, the
manager of the Birnam Woods complex had recently sent around a
notice saying that residents had reported “a white male of indetermi-
nate age” looking into windows.) Her view of the world didn’t come
from nothing, and Oliver sometimes wondered if, when his wife
went into these trances, she saw the man who had hurt her when she
was a child. But he didn’t probe, and of course it was possible that the
images that ﬁlled her head at these moments were pleasant ones or, at
any rate, unrelated to the man. (“Do you think,” she’d once said to
him, “that because some asshole molested me twenty-ﬁve years ago, I
spend every waking minute thinking about him?” She didn’t require
an answer and he didn’t give her one, but what he thought was, No,
not every waking minute.) Maybe when she went into one of her
trances she was thinking about her radio show or about whether she
could talk him into springing for the loveseat she’d seen at the furni-
ture store or about the sweet little cottage she drove past on her way
to the radio station and wanted to live in instead of this apartment
with the creeps who lurked outside the window and the couple up-
stairs who shouted at each other in a Slavic language, possibly Bul-
garian (or, as Annelise called it, “Vulgarian,” since the man’s tirades
were dotted with “fucking”s and the like). What did Oliver really
know about what was in his wife’s head at these moments?

Tonight, when he peeped over the top of his volume of Cum-

mings, his eye went straight to her face. She was saying something to

221

him. The toothbrush in her mouth made it sound as if she’d said,
“Wadoofalaydacrypt?” It was like one of those compound Cum-
mings words that keep traveling across the page and sometimes spill
over into another line.

“Say what?” he said. It was September and a cool breeze was

rattling the metal slats of the window blinds. He hadn’t lowered them
all the way because he was claustrophobic.

She didn’t stop brushing to clarify what she’d said. She was a dili-

gent, by-the-book brusher, even when her mind was elsewhere. She
left no tooth untouched, not even her wisdom teeth, which she’d de-
cided against having removed, after all. She had imperfect teeth and
she worried about them, had dreamed more than once that they fell
out in clumps.

He looked back down at his book. He thought he might have

found a poem to read to her. It was called “as freedom is a breakfast-
food” and it contained a line about hat racks growing into peach
trees. If Midvale were ﬁve hundred miles south, he would plant
peach trees in his yard (if he had a yard) and in a few years he would
be able to pick peaches for his and Annelise’s breakfast. But Midvale
was where it was, among the drumlins and moraines of central Wis-
consin, where a peach tree didn’t stand much of a chance.

She took her toothbrush out of her mouth and said, “What are

we going to do with Wade’s manuscript?”

This seemed an odd question to have to try to think of an answer

to at ten-thirty at night, even if it wasn’t the ﬁrst time it had come
up. His brain got sleepy so much earlier than hers did. When he
stayed up late to listen to her radio show, which was now on twice a
week and which somebody at the station had decided should be
called Midnight Goil, he usually dozed off during the ﬁrst or second
hour. Often he missed hearing the old songs she played for him—
Jack Teagarden singing in his lazy man’s drawl or Bubber Miley
growling into his trumpet. Once in her capacity as Midnight Goil,
she said, “This goes out to my favorite geezer—wake up, sleepy-
head,” but he missed that moment, too. Of course he did have to go
to work early in the morning, even before a lot of birds were fully
awake.

222

“I don’t know,” Oliver said. “It’s not publishable, is it?”
“No,” Annelise said. “Not really. Maybe a few passages of it are.

But it’s what he had to give to the world. It’s what he worked on
when he wasn’t wasted.”

Wade had died a couple weeks after Oliver and Annelise were

married. His body had been found in a refrigerator box in the alley
off Winnebago Street. It looked as if he’d shot himself in the head—
the gun he’d waved about at the wedding wasn’t a toy—and then the
police thought someone had helped to shoot him in the head. A per-
son came forward to say he’d heard a man and a woman arguing in
the alley the night of Wade’s death. The woman was brought in and
questioned. She said, “He thought I was some kind of whore and I
said he was mistaken and I sure didn’t spend no time in a refrigerator
box with him.” Fibers were analyzed. The woman was released. The
murder investigation was ongoing, though Annelise believed the po-
lice weren’t doing due diligence.

Among the items found in Wade’s saddlebags—he’d been paring

down lately, traveling even more lightly—were an unsigned greeting
card that said “Here’s to the Bride and Groom!” and a baggie con-
taining two dozen tablets of OxyContin and a piece of copper pipe
and the silver high heel belonging to his deceased mother and an
unopened sample bottle of mouthwash and his manuscript and a
paisley necktie that he’d used as a headband and a bottle of Liquid
Paper and the Midvale Public Library’s copy of Song of Solomon and
a Last Will and Testament dated June 5, 2006, and signed “Wade C.
Evans.” The will, handwritten on shirt cardboard, designated An-
nelise as executor of his estate. He instructed Annelise to “burn and
cremate” him. (Annelise and Oliver had paid for the cremation.)
Wade hadn’t given any instructions about what to do with the ashes,
so Annelise had kept them, in a jar on the shelf on her side of the
closet. About the manuscript, the will had said, “My only wish is
that my book be published.” Oliver had shown the manuscript to
Hal Sveum, and Hal had written a column about Wade in This Vale,
or, rather, about the failure of so-called liberal Midvale to care for
lost souls such as Wade and about one liberal city councilor with
whom Hal had been feuding for years. Hal told Oliver he would

223

look into Wade’s death, but nothing had come of his investigations
yet. As for the manuscript, Hal said it was unpublishable.

Oliver worried more about what to do with Wade’s ashes than he

did about the manuscript. Though, as Annelise had pointed out,
Wade did ﬁnally have a home.

Now, Annelise said, “Did I tell you what music I want at my

funeral?”

Oliver didn’t know if this was simply an aside or the subject that

had been uppermost in her mind as she’d brushed her teeth. How
could you know even a fraction of the thoughts and sensations ﬂying
around in someone’s head, much less in the head of your beloved,
who became stranger and more complicated the more you thought
you knew about her?

Oliver said, “I don’t remember the speciﬁc songs. Oldies, right?”

He was grinning at her, trying to humor her. But there she stood,
naked, holding her toothbrush next to her thigh, the thought of
death ﬁxed in her eye. “You got a couple more decades before you
need to think about it too much.”

She was gazing at a spot above Oliver’s head. Then her face

seemed to unclench, as if an alien thought had just been released.
She looked at him with a certain kindly, wifely indulgence. “Yeah,
oldies, right. Very loosely speaking. I was just testing your memory,
sweetheart. A spiritual, maybe. I’ll make a list someday.”

She put her toothbrush away and lay down beside him and put

her hand on his leg and said, “Will you read to me now?”

f sleep is six feet deep, Annelise’s sleep never went much deeper

than the top six inches. A puff of wind and the rattle of the blinds
would startle her into wakefulness. She would lie there with her eyes
wide open, remembering that in her dream she had tried to do her
radio show without teeth and that the sounds that had come out of
her mouth were like little waves, ﬂuted ripples, barely audible, lap-
ping against the sides of a boat lost at sea. She would lie there in bed,
rehashing her dream, listening to the wind blowing or to something
(an animal?) scratching somewhere or to the breathing or snoring of
her husband. Oliver slept far beneath the surface, and the sounds he

224

sent up from there—bubbles, whistles, warbles, phlegmy, strangu-
lated noises—led her to think of him dying, leaving her, abandon-
ing her.

Tonight the sound of a baby crying caused her to sit up from a

dream in which a man, her old tormentor with the face like banana
pudding, was playing the piano, some saccharine tune from a musi-
cal. She peered into the darkness that surrounded her, as if the baby
were right there, in the closet, perhaps, or out in the living room. The
music from her dream was no longer in her head. She waited for the
baby to cry again but what she heard when she pricked up her ears
was a cricket chirping and, far away, a train horn. The Bulgarians, she
knew, didn’t have a baby, though they’d loudly discussed the woman’s
multiple miscarriages. Neither, as far as she knew, did anyone else in
the building have a baby. Perhaps the sound she heard wasn’t actually
a baby. Maybe it was she herself who had cried out while dreaming.

She lay back down, but then the cricket and Oliver’s snoring

began to drive her crazy and she got out of bed. She closed the bed-
room door and went into the living room. She thought she would
watch TV, something to put her back to sleep, perhaps the home dec-
orating channel, which made it seem as if all you had to do to change
your life was put a fresh coat of paint and a couple of sconces on a
wall.

There was a man sitting in the armchair, the chair she’d found on

the street around the time she’d moved out of her mother’s apart-
ment into the house full of medical students. She used it as her read-
ing chair. It smelled faintly of dog. On the occasions when Oliver’s
boys came over for dinner, which was usually eaten around the TV,
there was competition for the chair, mostly because the other op-
tions were an old couch and the ﬂoor.

The man’s foreﬁnger was raised to his lips, which were beneath a

stocking. A gun was pointed at her. Nothing came out of her mouth
when she tried to speak. It was as if she were without teeth and
tongue and vocal cords; her mouth was a hole that ended in the pit
of her stomach.

The sliding door that led out to the so-called patio—a few square

feet of concrete on which she’d put a pot of petunias and a pot of

225

herbs and two plastic chairs—was partway open. She could still hear
the cricket.

The man told her to turn on the TV.
“My husband,” she said, her voice rising up suddenly, like a burp.
“ESPN,” he said. His voice was low but without much authority.

She’d expected it to be thick with self-assurance or at least with fake
self-assurance. He was wearing loose, dark, pajama-like pants and a
striped collared shirt and no shoes. She saw what were presumably
blades of grass on his bare pale feet. He had thin forearms and was
not otherwise physically imposing. She didn’t look directly at his
face, even though it was covered with the stocking. She felt that
there was a possibility that the person in her reading chair existed
only in her imagination.

He told her to take her clothes off.
“No,” she said. A white-haired guy on Baseball Tonight was going

on about how a particular team had no lefties in the pen and how
this was hurting the team down the stretch.

The man in the reading chair made a threatening motion with

his gun, inscribing a zero in the air with the tip. She thought that the
thing that was happening to her had always been bound to happen
to her—of course, it already had happened to her, when she was a
child, though not exactly in this manner; at least her piano instruc-
tor had not used a gun—and that it had been most likely to happen
when she was married, safe and off the streets, so to speak. Marriages
were glued-together Popsicle-stick structures or they were concrete
bunkers or they were rental apartments into which rapists and bug
exterminators walked whenever they felt like it. Oliver had appar-
ently failed to lock the sliding door. He’d sat out on the so-called
patio until after dark, thinking, brooding, running his ﬁnger along
the ridge of his nose, picking the ﬂowers off the last of the basil.
There were cracks in their marriage already. There had been argu-
ments out of which they’d both come reeling. She’d always been
afraid that he wouldn’t stand up for her when she most needed him
to, when demons swarmed around her like bees, and there he was
now, on the other side of the wall, asleep.

“Off,” the man said.

226

She took off her T-shirt but left on her panties. They were the old

frayed lavender ones, with the frog on the crotch. Two-ninety-nine
at Penny’s. She stood before him with her arms across her breasts.
The gun was pointed at her face.

“What do you want to talk about?” she said.
The question seemed to make the man ﬂinch. He lowered the

gun. It was now aimed at her chest.

“Let’s talk before you rape me,” she said. She had the sense that

her voice was no longer something she could control. And yet she
was talking quietly, calmly, almost in a murmur.

“Shut up,” he said, with a little more determination. “Take your

underwear off.”

“I want to know if I know you, if I’ve ever seen you.” A face had

appeared in her head, that of the surfer boy who had tried to pick
her up at the Laundromat many months ago, before she and Oliver
got back together. But the hard contours of the face beneath the
stocking—she was looking straight at him now, brazenly, trying to
peer into the tiny gaps in the mesh—didn’t seem to be those of a boy
just out of adolescence. No, he was older. And then it occurred to
her that the man might be Rolf. But Rolf was beeﬁer. Unless he’d
gone on a diet or taken up jogging. No, it wasn’t Rolf. What about
that meth addict she always stiffed when he was trolling for change
on Winnebago Street? There had to be an explanation.

“I want you to take your panties off and do yourself,” he said.
“Oh, Christ,” she said. And then she said, her voice rising, “It

would be better if I knew who you were, or if you gave me some sort
of explanation, so then I could pretend you had some reason for this.
Just some random fucked-up asshole coming into my apartment is
too crazy to deal with.”

He stood up and stuck his pistol in his pants pocket, as if he were

putting away a handkerchief. Then he slugged her in the face—his
ﬁst came at her like a bird out of mist; she could hear it before she
felt it—and then he turned and walked across the carpet and out the
sliding door.

Her face hurt so badly—blood was gushing from her nose, teeth

were loose in her mouth, her head weighed a hundred pounds—that

227

she couldn’t ﬁnd her voice to say Oliver’s name for a long time. And
when her voice did ﬁnally come back to her again, she had to say his
name seven times before he appeared.

he landlord wouldn’t let them out of the lease, but he was willing

to put them in a different apartment within the complex (and, he
added, he wouldn’t charge them for cleaning up the blood on the
carpet). The new apartment was on the second ﬂoor of another
building; from the balcony you could see, beyond the top of a line of
arborvitae, a strip mall and a large ugly building that housed an in-
surance company. Annelise hadn’t put her pots of petunias and herbs
on the balcony, because a freak September frost had killed them be-
fore she and Oliver moved. She’d thrown the pots into the dumpster,
along with her old reading chair and the book by the Buddhist nun.
Annelise was angry that Oliver hadn’t wanted to hire a lawyer to sue
the landlord or the management company or somebody. Oliver had
pointed out that the management company wasn’t responsible for
his own failure to lock the sliding door, and Annelise said, “Well,
maybe I’ll hire a lawyer to sue you.” Once, late at night, he had
found her on the ﬂoor of the closet looking at stuff in a shoebox—
movie ticket stubs, a picture of a dead boyfriend named Joe grinning
on a beach in Montenegro. Several times she had told her husband
that she wanted to move out of Midvale—to Wichita, to Odessa, to
anywhere. Oliver said he understood her feelings, but that he wanted
to be near his boys. He told Annelise that they would look for a
house sooner or later, though paying for one would be a stretch until
his mother died, not that he was wishing for that. Oliver had then
talked about rising interest rates and property taxes and the other
costs of owning a home, and Annelise had said, “Don’t be so fucking
sensible, don’t be so—nice, or whatever it is you think you are. OK?”
And then she had dropped her fork onto her plate—on the fork was
a piece of chicken Oliver had baked a bit too long—and, a minute
later, she walked out the door.

When she left, she was wearing a thin black T-shirt and jeans and

ﬂat-soled red-and-blue scoots that looked like bowling shoes. Her
hair was held in place by a large clip on the back of her head. She was

228

carrying a small black purse and a jean jacket on which was pinned a
button that said “WOOP It Up: Indie Radio for Indie Minds.”
When she went out the door, she didn’t say anything to Oliver or
turn to look at him. Oliver didn’t say anything either, though seeing
the stray tendrils of hair on Annelise’s neck almost made him want
to grab her and bring her back. At ten that night, after discovering
that Annelise hadn’t taken her cell phone with her, he poured him-
self a couple inches of Bushmills, a wedding gift from the right ﬁelder
on his softball team. At eleven, he called Annelise’s cell phone, which
was on the table next to their bed, and left a message. He said he
loved her and that he hoped she would call him. He fell asleep in his
clothes.

It was the next morning now. He was sitting out on the balcony

with a mug of coffee in one hand and his phone in the other. It was
a bright, warm October day. Summer had come back that week to
plant a ﬁnal kiss on the paling upper Midwest. The sky was a gentle
blue and there was a breeze. Oliver smelled cow, that cloddish, stink-
ing, ruminative creature that still inhabited the fringes of Midvale,
giving milk, suffering indignities. Oliver smelled cigarette smoke,
too. This came from the apartment below, where Mrs. Moss lived.
Often, at least when the weather was nice, Mrs. Moss sat on her
patio and smoked while talking on the phone to her lawyer (she was
in the midst of a divorce) or to a daughter (who was apparently not
in favor of the divorce) or to a friend (who was apparently in favor of
soaking the bastard for every penny he could be soaked for). The
sound of Mrs. Moss’s raspy voice almost made Oliver long for his
former neighbors, the Bulgarian couple.

Earlier this morning, Oliver had called Emile to say that he had a

stomach bug and would try to get to work later in the day. Then he
had called Annelise’s mother and the radio station to see if he could
learn anything about his wife’s whereabouts. (He didn’t say anything
to his mother-in-law about Annelise walking out, in order not to
alarm Charlotte; he and Charlotte had discussed apples, in particu-
lar the kind, Macouns, that Charlotte liked to use for pie.) He had
gone over the list of Annelise’s former boyfriends (the ones he knew
about, anyway) and vexed himself with the thought that she had

229

spent the night with one of them. He had considered calling the
ones named Gerald and James—their names were in Annelise’s cell
phone address book—but he couldn’t bring himself to do it, and,
anyway, if it turned out that Annelise had spent the night with an-
other man, everything would be over, probably. A few minutes ago,
he had called Murray, but Cassandra had said that Murray was out
of town. Oliver had told Cassandra about what had happened, and
Cassandra told him to come over, if he wanted to. “Don’t sit there by
yourself, worrying,” she said.

When Oliver left the apartment, he found Mrs. Moss downstairs

in the foyer, collecting her newspaper. Oliver said hello, against his
better judgment, because there had been occasions when Mrs. Moss
had not returned his greeting, and Oliver took this personally. Mrs.
Moss didn’t raise her eyes from the paper, which, Oliver could see,
contained the usual terrible news as well as a story of a dog rescued
from a burning motel. Possibly because his head hurt and also be-
cause he felt he was teetering near some precipice, Oliver then said
to Mrs. Moss, “Mrs. Moss, just for the record, is the reason you won’t
speak to me that I am married to a younger person?” Mrs. Moss, who
was perhaps a few years older than Oliver and who hadn’t yet got
around to making up her face for the day, looked up from the Panto-
graph while cocking her head slightly, as if something strange had
just entered it, and said mildly, “What’s that?”

Oliver repeated the question and Mrs. Moss, tightening the belt

on her wrapper, said, “Yes, for the record, I do disapprove of you,
Mr. Pole. For the reason you mention. And I do hope for your sake
that you got a prenuptial agreement.”

“It’s Poole,” Oliver said, feeling that he couldn’t control his sput-

tering lips. “Like swimming pool, only with an ‘e.’ And what busi-
ness is it of yours what I do?”

“You brought it up, Mr. Swimming Poole with an ‘e.’”
“I wish you wouldn’t smoke,” Oliver said. “I can’t stand the

smell. Anyway, my life has left me.”

“Your life,” Mrs. Moss said with a quizzical air, folding the paper

in half.

“My wife, I mean,” Oliver said. “My wife, for God’s sake.” He

went out the door and got into his car and drove across town toward

230

Murray’s house. Halfway there, he rolled down his windows. All his
thoughts about Mrs. Moss ﬂew out, and warm fall air, along with
thoughts about Annelise, rushed in.

When the police had come by their apartment that night six

weeks ago, the woman cop had looked at Oliver in a way that made
him imagine that she thought he was the perpetrator. Or was at least
guilty of some crime. Abduction of a minor? Annelise, who was hold-
ing a bag of ice to her swollen face, may have added to the woman
cop’s presumed impression by sitting apart from Oliver during the
interview. And when Oliver, at the moment during the interview
when Annelise started to cry, reached across the table—they were in
the dining nook, under the twenty-nine-dollar candelabrum that
would bob when the Bulgarian man was watching a soccer match—
and tried to take her hand, Annelise had pulled her hand away.
Later, when they went to bed—the sky was lightening, birds were
singing—Annelise slept with her back to him, though she did not
shake off the hand he placed on her hip.

Before the intruder had sat in Annelise’s reading chair and made

her strip and then punched her in the face, Oliver and his young wife
had been mostly happy. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say
that they were mostly not unhappy during those times when they
weren’t having arguments or stewing in the wake of those arguments
and that there were also moments among the not unhappy ones
when they were intensely happy. Bliss had sometimes intervened,
but to be honest, Oliver sometimes felt that his marriage to Annelise
was, to use a dusty phrase, a train wreck about to happen. The image
of a train wreck occurred to Oliver while he sat at a downtown cross-
ing, waiting for a Mississippi & Midvale coal train to pass. As the
gondolas heaped with coal creaked and wobbled by, he remembered
that when he and Annelise had moved from their old apartment to
the new one, the jar that held Wade’s ashes had spilled in the box
into which Annelise had also put several pairs of her shoes and that
when she had discovered this, she had blown her top. “How can I
wear these sandals again? Fuck.” Oliver had thought she was going to
hit him for her own failure to tape the jar lid shut.

The crossing gate lifted at last and Oliver drove slowly along

Fond du Lac Avenue, past Moon’s Luncheonette, past the Dirty

231

Dawg tattoo parlor (still in the black, apparently: Rick, the owner,
was sitting on the glider out front, taking the sun), and then past his
old shop, which was now some sort of performance space. Mudﬁsh
Theatricals, it said on the window. Oliver didn’t really miss the work
he had devoted so many years of his life to. He could hardly conjure
the smells of the old machines into which he had put his nose. He
rarely gave his former trade more than a thought. The question was:
whither now? He had dropped out of the stenography class at the
tech school. A couple of weeks ago he’d gone for an interview at a
company that sold ofﬁce supplies, and the interviewer, a woman who
was perhaps thirty, had asked him what his “long-term ambitions”
were, and Oliver, having ﬁgured out a few minutes before that he
wasn’t going to be hired, had said, “Well, I guess my ambition would
be to make money for my wife and me and my children. Unless
typewriters make a comeback, the way LPs have done, sort of. Then
I could go back to typewriter maintenance.”

A block from Murray’s house, Oliver saw Carl, the manager of

the Rub-a-Dub. He was sitting on the curb in front of Popp’s tavern.
He was wearing his Santa Claus hat. Perhaps he was waiting for
Popp’s to open. A breeze had come up and a shower of gold leaves
fell from a maple onto Carl.

There were two uncarved pumpkins and a rubber-banded Panto-

graph on Murray’s stoop. Oliver brought the paper inside, looking
again at the front-page story about the dog rescued from the motel
ﬁre. Cassandra said she no longer had time to read the paper. “But I
can recite all of Goodnight Moon and several Dr. Seuss books.”

She suggested that they drive out to Blue Earth and pick apples.

Roger, the baby, who was now a year old, was being fussy, and Cas-
sandra thought a drive might calm him, maybe even put him to
sleep. “I wouldn’t mind a nap myself.” She yawned. “Followed by
ten weeks of vacation from motherhood.”

Murray had gone down to Chicago to talk to a gallery owner who

wanted to hang Murray’s Pregnancy series, the nine paintings of
Cassandra’s gravid torso. The ninth one had been mounted, tempo-
rarily, on the living room wall, and while Cassandra gathered provi-
sions for their trip, Oliver gazed at the painting. Cassandra’s belly,

232

which ﬁlled almost all of the canvas, was as bright as a moon that
pressed itself against a bedroom window, and Oliver felt a desire to
lay his cheek on the incandescent skin. When Cassandra caught him
with his nose next to the painting, she said, “When I was a blimp, I
ﬂoated like a blimp. Now that I’m a mom, I have to carry all this stuff
around. Would you mind taking this?” She handed him a diaper
bag.

Roger cried as they drove out of Midvale. Mozart didn’t soothe

him. His mother’s rendition of “Simple Gifts” didn’t impress him.
She asked Oliver if he knew any lullabies, and Oliver sang a verse
of “Bye, Bye, Blackbird,” a favorite of his dad’s (who would sing it
in the morning while shaving), which Oliver, despite having a voice
like a frog, had sung to his boys when they were little. Roger became
quiet—“I scared him into sleep,” Oliver said—and Cassandra
reached over and touched Oliver’s knee and said, “You’ll have to
record that for me.”

For a while, at least during the time when Roger was making a

fuss, Oliver had forgotten about his missing wife. Now, at Cassan-
dra’s touch, Annelise came back with the force of a memory. He saw
again the tendrils of hair on her neck as she went out the door last
night. He could have said to her, “Don’t go, please.” But he hadn’t.

He extracted his cell phone from his pants pocket, thinking that

maybe he had failed to hear it ring, but nobody had called.

Cassandra said, “Probably she just spent the night at a friend’s

house and she’ll be home when you get back.”

“I feel weird going apple picking when she could be, you

know—”

“It’s better to stay busy than to go crazy sitting around waiting for

news, don’t you think?”

They drove past cornﬁelds harvested and turned over, past the

assisted-living home where Oliver’s mother had rehabbed her hip two
years ago, and into Mount Bethel. They drove past the John Deere
sales lot, past a shop that sold trolls carved out of wood, past another
shop that sold trolls carved out of wood, past the Troll Museum, past
the Trolling for Gold Bar & Grill. Mount Bethel was, according to
the Chamber of Commerce, the Town that Trolls Built.

233

Oliver said, “The guy is still loose.”
“What guy?” Cassandra asked.
“The guy who came into the apartment and pointed a gun at

Annelise. The police have no clues. She wants to move to Kansas or
something.” They were a couple of miles from the turn for the or-
chard. A sign had appeared, along with one for the Blue Earth Motel.
Oliver and Annelise had slept there two years ago, their ﬁrst time
together.

“It’ll be OK, O,” Cassandra said, again laying her hand on his

knee. It rested there for a good quarter mile.

Perhaps it was this gesture, which seemed to contain more than

comfort, that kept Oliver from telling Cassandra, when they passed
the motel, that one of the two cars in the parking lot was Annelise’s.
Or perhaps it was the thought that he didn’t want to have to ﬁnd An-
nelise, particularly not in a motel. He didn’t want to have to imag-
ine what was behind the motel room door, and the sight of her bat-
tered Metro had made him imagine.

It wasn’t until twenty minutes later, when they were walking

between rows of Jonagold trees—Roger was in a pack on Cassandra’s
back, still drowsy, unaware of a dragonﬂy attracted to his red cap—
that Oliver said, “I think I saw Annelise’s car at the motel.”

“What motel?” Cassandra said. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
A lot of the trees had been picked clean, or the fruit had fallen

into the thick grass below. There were a few apples at the tops of the
trees, but not even Oliver could reach them.

“I wasn’t sure it was hers,” Oliver said, lying, holding a bag con-

taining a few fallen Macs.

“Shouldn’t we go look?” Cassandra said.
Oliver gazed down at the apples browning, turning to mush, in

the grass. He remembered reading somewhere about deer getting
“drunk” on apples that had fermented. Could that be true? He won-
dered if Annelise was in the room they’d stayed in two years ago. He
couldn’t remember any details about the room, other than the fact
that it smelled of cigarettes despite being a nonsmoking room. His
eyes had been only for her. In his life, he had never been so excited in
the presence of another human being as he was that afternoon with

234

Annelise. The moment he touched her skin, when they were just in-
side the door, he felt he would never go back to where he’d been.

He toed an apple with the tip of one of his brown shoes, the ones

he’d worn to his wedding. A bee rose and wobbled off toward the
next tree.

Where did bees go in the winter? Or did the shock of the cold do

them in?

Cassandra took his arm and led him toward the car. On the

way, Roger awakened. He was in an agreeable mood, and when his
mother said they were going home, after a quick stop, Roger said,
“Vavava.”

hen Annelise left the apartment the previous evening, she drove

to Iowa to visit her grandmother. The extension to the four-lane
highway had been ﬁnished, so she didn’t need to take the detour
that led through Havana, where Ofﬁcer Vogelsang had arrested her
for speeding. She hadn’t heard from James in well over a year, so of
course she was unaware that he’d gone to Iraq with his National
Guard unit and that an “improvised explosive device” had blown off
both his legs his second month over there and that he was now in a
hospital in Minneapolis, learning to do things without his legs. As
she sped by the exit that would take her toward Havana, she re-
membered Ofﬁcer Vogelsang approaching her car, remembered his
blond wisp of a mustache, remembered the calamine lotion on his
cheeks, remembered the smell of tuna ﬁsh on his breath. She re-
membered seeing later on that night the tattoo on his right ﬂank—
it was of a puppy dog, with a bone in its mouth; he’d gotten it one
night in Tijuana, on his one and only trip out of this country, be-
fore Iraq—and how it had made her smile. She didn’t usually go for
men with tattoos, even discreet ones, but she had gone for James for
a while.

She arrived at the nursing home just before the doors were shut

to visitors. A janitor was running a vacuum cleaner over the carpet in
the dining area. The parrot’s cage had been covered. The two nurses
at the nurses’ station were talking about a country music singer who
had refused to sign an autograph for somebody’s daughter. “I was so

235

disgusted,” one of them said. The other eventually looked up from
the computer and told Annelise that she doubted Mrs. Fichte was
still awake but that Annelise was free to look.

The door to her grandmother’s room was open a sliver. Annelise

stood in front of it for a moment, looking at a drawing done by
Annelise’s cousin’s daughter. The drawing, some months old, showed
a rabbit, or a bunny-like creature with ears the size of banana leaves,
in a ﬁeld of eggs. “Happy Easter Great Grandma,” it said.

Annelise felt someone behind her, and when she turned she saw

the man whom her grandmother called Mr. New York standing in
his doorway, leaning on a walker. He was wearing his Frank Lloyd
Wright cape over pajamas. He said, “Get me out of here.”

Annelise said, “Just a minute, please.” She pushed open the door

to her grandmother’s room and ducked inside. The room was dark
and Annelise had to wait for the darkness to thin before she could
see more than the outline of her grandmother on the bed.

Annelise had driven a hundred and some miles to ask a question

that she felt her grandmother, after ninety-six years of living, might
have an answer to: Why do we get up in the morning? Why, instead
of waking up from our dreams at night and gazing blankly into the
dark, don’t we just take some pills and evaporate? This was a ques-
tion that nihilistic adolescents, not responsible grown-ups, asked.
However that may have been, Annelise didn’t have a good answer at
the moment.

When Annelise was a little girl, her grandmother took her

hunting for morels in the spring. Grandmother Fichte always knew
where the morels would be: on the north sides of dead elms in the
woods belonging to her neighbor, Mr. Ponson. One May day, after
an hour of hunting and not ﬁnding a single morel, Annelise began to
complain. “There aren’t any,” she said. “Let’s go home.” Her grand-
mother, a straw basket on her arm and a green felt elf ’s hat on
her head, said, “We won’t ﬁnd any at home. Better keep looking.”
They kept looking and they still didn’t ﬁnd any. They had a picnic—
delicious baloney sandwiches with lettuce and pickles—and when
they were ﬁnished, her grandmother suggested they take one more
look. They still didn’t ﬁnd any. Later, when her grandmother was

236

checking her for ticks, she said, the whitening hairs above her lip
catching the light, “Shall we go look for morels tomorrow?”

Annelise sat beside her grandmother’s bed for more than a min-

ute, trying to think of how to phrase her question, before she real-
ized that her grandmother wasn’t breathing. Annelise put her ear on
her grandmother’s chest, trying to detect a beat, a murmur. Annelise’s
nose was in the blanket, a thin, wafﬂe-textured thing, and into her
head rushed the smell of her grandmother’s fancy Parisian perfume,
which Annelise had doused her neck and chest with one day, causing
her grandfather to put his newspaper down and laugh. Annelise
could hear her grandfather’s laughter now, but her grandmother
didn’t make a sound.

Annelise raised her head from her grandmother’s chest and as she

did, her grandmother’s eyes came open. They were clear pools in
which Annelise thought she could see the answer to her question:
Keep waking up, keep looking.

Grandmother Fichte said, “Guten Abend, Ludwig,” as if Annelise

might be her husband, dead for many, many years. “Ich bin bereit.”

When Annelise said who she was, Grandmother Fichte didn’t pay

any attention. But her eyes remained open and clear.

Happy that her grandmother was breathing, content (for now)

with her grandmother’s answer to her question, Annelise kissed her
grandmother on the forehead and took her leave.

Across the hall, Mr. New York was still in the doorway. He had

put a beret on his head and an overnight bag was alongside his
walker. “Are you ready now?” he asked Annelise.

Annelise said, “But you don’t have any shoes on.”
He looked down at his feet. He was wearing yellow socks,

bright as goldﬁnches. She hoped they had those little grippers on the
bottoms. He maneuvered his walker around and shufﬂed back into
his room. Annelise slipped down the hall and out the building.

At a gas station, she bought a phone card and, on one of the last

pay phones in eastern Iowa, called her ex-dermatologist, a man with
whom, some years ago, she had brieﬂy had a relationship that was, as
she put it to herself, mostly platonic. Lately, following the incident
with the intruder, she had resumed the relationship, though in its

237

current phase it had never gone any further than coffee. She had met
Gerald when she’d had what she thought was a cancerous mole on
her thigh checked out. He said it wasn’t. She’d volunteered that she
was kind of a hypochondriac. He gave her the barest smile and said
that moles always bore watching. When they started going out to-
gether, he’d resigned as her dermatologist.

Gerald was single. He traveled a lot, especially overseas, especially

to poor and tropical places, where dermatological disorders were
rife. He did a lot of charity work.

He was home tonight, reading a book about the Hindu Kush.

When she asked him if he would meet her at the Blue Earth Motel,
he said, “Don’t you want to come to my house?”

She said she didn’t.
He got to the motel before she did—there, parked out front, was

his old Subaru wagon with the bike rack on top. She didn’t remem-
ber which room she and Oliver had taken, but she was fairly sure it
was not this one, near the end of the building. She remembered that
outside their room there had been an old metal chair, the kind that
was spring-loaded and bounced; she’d bounced in it, post-coitus.
There was no chair by the door of the room Gerald had been given.

He’d left the door open, and when she came in, he got up from the

bed, his book in hand. He was a short man, handsome, with longish
and wavy blond hair, a narrow nose, watchful gray eyes. He had ex-
cellent skin, not a blemish anywhere. He was compact and ﬁt—he
climbed rocks, he rode a mountain bike, he beat other doctors in
racquetball—but he wasn’t particularly vain or obsessive about his
body. He knew a million things related and unrelated to medicine,
but he wore his knowledge lightly. He studied Buddhism, though
not religiously. And he liked the music she played on her show; he
had been known to dance to it by himself. The fact that he was “con-
stitutionally opposed” to the idea of marriage hadn’t bothered her
much, since she, too, had been opposed then, if only in a provisional
way. They’d had several all-night conversations but they’d had sex
only twice, and then he had gone away on a six-month sabbatical to
Africa (he worked in a clinic that treated people with leprosy) and
she had started seeing more frequently the person she’d been seeing

238

during the time she was also going out with Gerald. She didn’t know
how much ﬁdelity she had in her.

She put her arms around him, rested her nose on his Adam’s

apple, and said, “I’m thinking of killing myself. Can you get me
some hemlock?”

Gerald was silent, but she felt his larynx move.
She said, “You’re supposed to say, ‘No, I’m a doctor, I can’t do

that.’”

“No,” he said, with solemnity. “I can’t do that.” He tilted his

head back and looked at her with a certain scientiﬁc detachment.

“I was joking,” she said.
“I wasn’t sure,” he said. She was dark around the eyes, like a rac-

coon, but there was no obvious sign of mischief on her face.

They opened the wine he’d brought, a white from Dalmatia.

He’d bicycled the Dalmatian coast last summer.

“This guy I dated once long ago, before I knew you, we went to

the former Yugoslavia, to Montenegro, after all the crazy shit in Bos-
nia and Kosovo had happened. He was a triathlete and he got killed
crossing a street, coming back from the beach. A truck ran him over.”
If Joe hadn’t died, she felt, her life might have gone a less strange di-
rection. “Have I told you this before?”

“No, I don’t think so,” Gerald said. “I’m sorry about your friend.”
“C’est la vie, ou le mort.” She didn’t mean this—she had truly

loved Joe—but she didn’t take it back.

She drank her ﬁrst cup of wine in about three gulps. Before she

ﬁnished her second cup, which was after the moment (to amuse
him, to change the mood a little) she tried to balance a Gideon’s
Bible on her head while walking to the bathroom, she said, “I need
to think out loud for a while. Do you mind?”

“So,” he said, “I shouldn’t interrupt you? I should let you ramble?

It’ll be like your radio show. Not to say your radio monologues don’t
have shape and form.”

“Thank you for being polite,” she said. “Shape and form are acci-

dental in my case.” There was a grimness in her voice that she didn’t
intend. Or did she? In the bathroom, she had decided that she
lacked the determination to kill herself, if not the desire to do so.

239

She kissed him on the mouth and then leaned back against the bed
board.

“There are complications here that maybe we should consider

before proceeding.” He was sitting on the edge of the bed, a day’s
worth of sandy stubble on his face. “I didn’t bring my pajamas.”

“I just wanted someone to talk to,” she said.
“A therapist, perhaps,” he said.
“Too expensive,” she said. “And not generally available at ten on

a weeknight.”

“So you didn’t actually mean to kiss me while we sat drinking

wine in a motel room,” he said.

“I’m not a reasonable person,” she said.
“Go ahead. Talk. I won’t try to kiss you back.” His pale eyebrows

lifted, as if he were trying to separate himself from the annoyance
that had ﬂared in his nostrils. “And then you can go home to your
husband and we can maybe have coffee once in a while and life will
go on.”

Annelise fell quiet. Her head was ﬁlled with a hundred slippery

thoughts, like noodles in a soup.

“Go ahead,” Gerald said. “Talk.” He touched her on the knee.
She swirled her wine, but didn’t drink it.
“My husband hasn’t fucked me in weeks because of that guy

coming into the apartment. Oliver thinks I’m not interested, that
I’m all fragile and crazy and want to be left alone. Which is partly
true.” She looked at the hand that wasn’t holding the cup of wine,
the one with the wedding band. It seemed to be a remote part of her.
She made a gun out of her thumb and foreﬁnger and pointed it at
her temple. “Ka-boom,” she said.

Gerald was studying the weave of the bedspread. He raised his

head when she made the comic book noise, but he had missed the
gesture that went with it and he looked at her with something other
than comprehension.

“This motel is where Oliver and I came to fuck the ﬁrst time—I

don’t know if I told you. The room was all stuffy and hot when we
walked in and it smelled of cigarettes even though it was supposedly
nonsmoking. Oliver said, ‘Do you want to get another room?’ and I

240

said, ‘No, I want you now.’ Oliver is very polite and thoughtful of
the other person, like you are, but I don’t think he understands me at
all. He didn’t understand that no amount of love and thoughtfulness
is going to cure me of even half of my problems, that I am a magnet
for trouble, that living with me is like living with a time bomb, to
coin a phrase.”

“You’re depressed,” he said. “I know a therapist, a woman, she’s

good.”

“You said you wouldn’t interrupt. Pretend it’s me on the radio.

This is my last radio show, and it’s for an audience of one.”

“Stop,” he said softly.
“I wish there was another bottle of wine.”
She saw him digging around in his head for answers, while trying

to look calm.

“I went to see my grandmother tonight. She’s this German lady

who was born, like, before jazz. She’s been in a nursing home for
years, watching TV and reading her German dictionary. I always go
see my grandmother when I don’t know what to do next. She watches
cartoons. She doesn’t know who George Bush is, but she remembers
Helmut Schmidt. I think she had a crush on Helmut Schmidt. Any-
way, I was remembering the chicken soup she used to make when I
was a child. It had bones in it and potatoes and celery and okra. Being
a picky eater, I would just kind of dab at it, and she would say, ‘If you
don’t eat, you will become a spore in the air.’ I thought this might be
an old German saying. Or maybe she’d seen a TV special on spores.
She liked to watch science shows; the interest in cartoons came later.
When I asked her what a spore was, she said it was so tiny it would
make my eyes go bad trying to see it. Anyway, I always ate her Ger-
man desserts and I grew up into the strapping, sugar-addicted woman
I am now. Tonight when I went to see her, she didn’t know who I was
and I didn’t get around to asking her my question, but out of despera-
tion I imagined that I saw an answer in her eyes. It was along the lines
of ‘Don’t Give Up. Eat. Drive Safely.’ I love my grandmother, but—”

“Perfectly good advice,” Gerald said.
“I can’t hear you,” Annelise said. “I’m in a radio booth and voices

from outside don’t penetrate.”

241

There was a long silence. Finally Gerald got up and went over to

the window and parted the curtains and peered out. “I think you
should go home to your husband.”

“I was going to make a comment about men, but I think I’ll take

a shower instead.”

Gerald was sitting down in an armchair by the window when she

got off the bed and went into the bathroom. She wondered if he’d be
around when she came out. He was a nice man, but she didn’t really
care if he stayed.

She stood under the shower for a long time, with her eyes closed.

She remembered Oliver singing the theme from Rawhide while wash-
ing his face at the sink after they’d had sex. And then he’d come back
into the room and gotten down on his bare knees and kissed her bare
shoulder and said, “I love you a lot,” in his honest-to-goodness voice.
With men, she was always trying to suspend disbelief.

The hot water pinging on her skin made her moan, as if in plea-

sure. She lacked all resolve. She hoped to melt.

242

243

The Color of the Grass

t was late July in Midvale, only eighteen months shy of the end of

the Bush II administration, and what was left of the grass on

the softball ﬁeld at Hesselberg Park was an umber color. Or was it
more like burnt sienna? Or ocher? Oliver would check with Murray.
Out in left, where Oliver stood with his green and gold cap on his
gray head, there were tiny islands of crabgrass in a sea of dust. A
couple of innings ago, Oliver had, with the toe of his cleated shoe,
written in the dust a part of the Japanese poem he had once memo-
rized so that he could say it to his girlfriend. He had said it to her
while they lay on the sofa in the back room of his typewriter repair
shop. They had been naked, but there was tension in the air. “Come
quickly” were the poem’s ﬁrst words. He had been ﬁfty-one then,
mostly able-bodied, if thinner than usual because of the effects of
love. In the dust in left ﬁeld he had slowly written, with his right
foot, “Come quickly—as . . .” Then a pop ﬂy had fallen into
Murray’s glove to end the inning and Oliver had trotted toward the
shade and the beer cooler. When he’d returned to his position some
minutes later, the words he’d etched into the dirt were gone. Perhaps
the heat was affecting him and he hadn’t actually written anything.
Or perhaps he was looking for the words in the wrong patch of dirt.
One thing he knew for sure was that his girlfriend, who later became
his wife, was gone. Annelise was out in Oregon. She was working in
a drive-up coffee hut. She was supposed to return for their divorce
hearing in a couple of months.

Though it was early evening in Wisconsin, it felt like noon in

Alabama. A breeze—a gust of hot air—stirred the leaves of the ash
that Hank, Oliver’s youngest, and Roger, Murray’s son, sat under,

drinking from juice boxes. Emerald ash borers were in the process of
reducing the tree to sticks. A black oak, its leaves having been turned
to brown crisps, was being eaten by gypsy moths. There was blood
on the sun, which was ﬁnally going down behind the browning
pines in right ﬁeld. Oliver was feeling woozy. He sipped from the
sweating bottle of water he’d brought with him to the outﬁeld.

The Old Hatters were playing the Boys of the Slipper Club. The

Old Hatters were dead last in the league, and the Slippery Boys,
whose players were almost all gay, were near the top. The Old Hat-
ters had not kept up with a trend in the league, which was to stock
the lineup with the young and the strong and the sure-handed.
When Garr, the used-bookshop clerk who played ﬁrst base, died this
spring in a boating accident, his position had been ﬁlled by a sixty-
ﬁve-year-old sculptor who was a friend of Murray’s, who had himself
celebrated his ﬁfty-eighth birthday just last week.

Oliver had gone to the party. Two beers had nearly put him

under the table, though not before he saw his ﬁrst ex-wife on the
arm of Hal Sveum. Oliver couldn’t believe that he was about to be
divorced for a third time. He thought he might as well be stood
against a wall and shot. In his obituary, it would say, “His three mar-
riages ended in failure. He himself ended in failure.” He was leaning
against a wall on which was hung one of Murray’s early Rabbit Pe-
riod paintings (it was the one of a tall, skinned rabbit in a morning
jacket; the rabbit bore a resemblance to Oliver) when Cassandra
came by and touched him on the arm. “Everything OK, O?” He had
had just enough beer that he might have permitted himself to bend
down and kiss her on the top of her head, right where the white line
of her part was, but he had, only the moment before, sworn off love,
all hoping and wishing. He left the party and drove to his mother’s
house. He’d moved back in with her.

Oliver watched Sveum smoothing the dirt near third base with

his shoe. Sveum had mellowed, in his personal behavior if not in his
work. Loretta had tamed him. And he had made a loyal sidekick of
her. There she was, in a lawn chair by the backstop, glancing up
from her book to see her lover smoothing the inﬁeld dirt with his
shoe. Oliver had heard Loretta tell someone that she and Hal were
taking a salsa dancing class.

244

A Slippery Boy in a sleeveless T-shirt, muscular, graceful, barely

old enough to drink beer, hit one so far over the centerﬁelder’s head
that Oliver felt that just watching the ball ﬂy aged him another few
days. Anyway, in order to conserve energy he didn’t move from his
position.

A cardinal in an upper bough of the ash tree sang the opening

notes of its come-hither tune, then broke off. The obits page of the
Pantograph ﬂuttered by Oliver and out toward center ﬁeld.

When the next batter hit one toward the pines in deepest right,

and while Dibbelman, the bowlegged owner of the shop that spe-
cialized in vinyl LPs, chased the ball, Murray, pulling a handkerchief
from under his cap and mopping his brow, walked out toward Oli-
ver. He said, “Steroids. We need to have a team meeting and inject
each other with steroids.”

Oliver, into whose eyes salty sweat leaked through the thickets of

his eyebrows, smiled wanly.

“You feeling faint?” Murray asked. “You look like you might fall

over.”

Oliver denied it.
“What would you say the color of the grass is?” Oliver asked.
“Toast,” Murray said.
Oliver watched Murray return to the inﬁeld. On the back of

Murray’s green shirt was a stencil of his painting of Roger as a bald
baby smiling like a Buddha. (On the front was a stencil of his paint-
ing of Cassandra in her ninth month, all incandescent belly.) Mur-
ray had been selling some of his paintings at prices that he wasn’t
used to, and he had become immodest to the extent that he didn’t
think twice of wearing a shirt that advertised his work and his fam-
ily. The arrival of Roger had made him happy; he’d told Oliver at his
birthday party that he wished he could get his vasectomy reversed.
At that moment, Murray had had his arm around Cassandra. What
Cassandra’s opinion of Murray in this buoyant papa phase was, was
not completely clear to Oliver, though she did give her partner a
peck on the cheek and Oliver did then allow himself to imagine the
couple humping like mad after the party was over.

Oliver would not think any more thoughts about Cassandra. He

would avert his eyes when confronted by the front of Murray’s shirt.

245

He was not a satyr. If he had ever been a satyr, he had been a poor
one. He had too much of his mother’s Presbyterianism in him to
amount to anything as a reveler. He had fallen in love with women
and he had fallen out of love with women while stumbling through
life, looking for a foothold. The only woman he had not fallen out
of love with was Annelise, but he had agreed to her request for the
divorce. He had not agreed with her that it was “best this way,” each
of them in their own separate cell, but he had for the time being lost
the will to talk her out of it. He would eat scrod dinners with his
mother, see his boys whenever he could, grind beans at Tout de
Suite, and maybe resume taking the course at Midvale Tech in Real-
time Reporting. Stenography might be his niche.

A bearded Slippery Boy, the token straight guy on the team and

the least fearsome hitter, stroked one toward third. Oliver watched
Sveum jump as if he were actually going to catch it—he jumped no
more than an inch off the ground: he’d gained weight while in the
company of Loretta—and then Oliver realized that he was the Old
Hatter closest to the hard, fat ball meeting little resistance from the
hot, dry surface of the earth.

The ball rolled a long way. It rolled over a piece of lanyard and

past a beer can and what was possibly a desiccated chaw of tobacco
and bubble gum. It jumped over a dead frog that the sun had baked
to a crisp. Oliver pursued the ball. He knew he was running because
he could feel it in his bad knee and in the darts of pain in his face, as
if the nerves there had gone haywire. He hadn’t felt those darts when
he was standing still. He heard Hank’s voice—“Go, Dad!”—and he
heard other voices, too, though he couldn’t place them. But then all
the voices faded and it seemed that there was nothing to be heard
except his own breathing. He felt almost calm, as if he’d slipped into
a meditative state. (He still occasionally went to meditation class,
partly to see if he could go ﬁve minutes without thinking about An-
nelise.) Then he caught sight of the ball again, a reminder of why he
was moving.

The ball raced along the foul line, a strip of lime that faded into

obscurity before it reached the fence. The fence was there to separate
the ball ﬁeld from the cemetery. If you hit the ball over the fence into

246

the cemetery—it was three hundred feet from home, and was a poke
even for a Slippery Boy—you were said to awaken the dead. “That’ll
get their teeth chattering,” somebody always said. Oliver had been in
the cemetery this spring, just as the ground was thawing, for the
burial of his high school baseball coach, who had died of a heart at-
tack while taking a young woman for a test drive in a used Focus.

Oliver was gaining on the ball when he glimpsed up ahead, short

of the fence, a hole wide and deep, with ragged edges, like some-
thing dug by a drunken gravedigger or a dog wishing to bury a large
collection of bones. The hole was black, like nighttime, like sleep. It
beckoned. The softball, its cheap blue stitching turning and turning,
hurried toward the hole. The ball had a tropism for the hole, and so
did Oliver, who was running out of gas, who needed a cool place to
lie down in. He had long ago sweated through his faded Old Hatters
team shirt and his too-tight, patched-up, double-knit baseball pants,
both of which his mother had washed for him last night, and what
he felt coming out of his pores now, as if out of vents, was the slightly
burned smell of his overtaxed organs. His head pulsed; he heard
sounds within his rickety frame that were like the sounds of a tree
cracking before it succumbed to gravity and fell.

Sitting there on the rim of the hole, looking fresh as a daisy, look-

ing cool and beautiful and smart and sexy, was Annelise. She was as
she had been the ﬁrst time he had ever kissed her, on a park bench
near the zoo. He had taken her from her boyfriend and she had
taken him from his wife and family, and they had caused trouble for
a number of people, including themselves, and at times the love they
felt for each other seemed incidental, clearly not protection against
further trouble, clearly not glue enough. But more than once Anne-
lise had told him that she would care for him when he was an old
man tottering around in beltless brown pants, that she would drive
him to the Big & Tall store when he could no longer drive, that she
would sneak him coffee if he ever went into the hospital for surgery.
He had believed she would do these things when the time came, be-
lieved she would hold his hand when he was dying. And what would
he do for her when he wasn’t dying? Could he have always loved her
all those times when she was angry or grumpy or beset by fears? He

247

had thought so, though perhaps he didn’t really have the strength for
it. Still, he had given his promise (as he had done with his two previ-
ous wives). She had said, “It’s not you. It’s just time to pull the plug.”

He didn’t know whether he was having a heart attack when he

fell. He hoped not. He recalled a conversation he’d had with his four
boys at the dinner table three years ago, around the time he’d begun
seeing Annelise, about whether it would be better to lose your hear-
ing or your eyesight. Everybody, including Oliver, had decided that
it would be better to be without your hearing, though Ham did say
that it wouldn’t be so bad not having to see Hank eating with his
mouth open. Oliver couldn’t hear anything now, not even his own
breathing, but he could still see. And there was Annelise’s face, her
blue-yellow-green-gray eyes whose color changed according to the
light, her lips that were parted enough that he could see the tips of
her teeth that she worried about so much, her chin that jutted just a
little as if in deﬁance, her sharp nose that could tell whether you’d
had your nose in a day lily or a sluttish peony, her cheeks that were
pink perhaps from the heat or some embarrassment that she felt
about his presence. Who would not want to kiss a face such as hers,
make it all right for her, make it all right for yourself ?

At some point, as the hole was ﬁlling up with darkness, Oliver

heard a voice.

“Oliver,” the voice said, “who’s the president?”
Oliver didn’t respond. It was not a name he wished to say.
“Oliver,” the voice said, “who are you?”
He wiped dirt from his mouth, shifted his sore, cramped legs that

were too long to ﬁt comfortably in the hole. “Left ﬁelder for the Old
Hatters. Father of Robert, Franklin, Ham, and Hank. Husband of
Annelise, until she divorces me.”

248

249

Epilogue

ll during the time that Oliver and Annelise’s marriage was com-

ing apart, up until about a month before the divorce hearing,

Oliver ground beans for Emile and cleaned the bathroom and kept
the napkin and honey dispensers stocked. Then Emile told Oliver
that the landlord had decided to convert the property into condo-
miniums and that Tout de Suite would have to close before the end
of the year. Emile’s lease was supposed to last for another two years,
but there was a provision in the contract that allowed the landlord to
evict Emile if the property wasn’t kept up to code. (The handwritten
“Bush Is Terrorist” sign in the window hadn’t helped Emile’s cause
with the landlord, whose Republican sympathies ran deep.) Oliver,
who had resumed taking the stenography class in the hope that he
would eventually ﬁnd a position in that ﬁeld, told his boss that he
would stay at Tout de Suite as long as Emile needed him. Emile said,
“Maybe I will write you a recommendation for Starbucks.” A Star-
bucks had opened up a few blocks away, and it, along with another
new coffeehouse that had a romper room and many of the appoint-
ments that digital moms and their children required, had been
squeezing Emile’s business. “You can sell a Ray Charles CD with a
soy mocha, get health insurance.”

The afternoon Emile gave him the news, Oliver went home to

his mother’s house and ate an early dinner and watched Antiques
Roadshow with her. Halfway through the show, during a segment
about a whirligig from the 1920s, he realized he had forgotten about
Hank’s basketball game at the Y. He didn’t get out of bed the next

morning or the following morning. He felt like a teenager who had
come down with mono, but the thing that made him want to sleep
so much was not a virus. He stopped drinking coffee and spent sev-
eral days going through withdrawal, holding his head in his hands as
pain beat against his eyeballs and temples. Emile sent Oliver a Get
Well card, but didn’t suggest that Oliver’s assistance was needed at
Tout de Suite. Oliver got out of bed for his court date, long enough
to say again that, “yes,” his marriage was “irretrievably broken,”
though he said it only because Annelise had asked him to say it.
After the court hearing, he went to a bookstore and bought a combi-
nation address book and desk calendar as well as a book about how
to have a second (or third) career. In the desk calendar, he wrote down
the future dates of Hank’s basketball games and all his children’s
birthdays and Annelise’s address in Oregon. He was already thinking
about what he would send her for Christmas.

hree days later, a snowy November afternoon, Annelise came into

Tout de Suite. The snow was the ﬁrst of the season. Annelise looked
as if she’d been walking through it for hours; the black scarf that cov-
ered her throat and chin and the tasseled wool cap that was pulled
over her ears and down to her eyes were crusted with ice. Emile
didn’t immediately recognize her. When she unwrapped herself,
Emile said, “Ah, it’s you, Annelise! At ﬁrst, I think it might be a lady
in a hijab come to read to me the words of the Prophet. Who comes
out in weather like this except the religious?” Emile came around
from behind the counter and gave Annelise kisses on both pink cold
cheeks. “I am happy to see you. I miss your radio show.”

“I like your Bush sign,” Annelise said, pointing to the piece of

cardboard in the window.

“I keep it there until my shop closes,” Emile said. “Free speech

for Syrian-Americans, too.”

While Emile made a latte for Annelise, they talked about the de-

mise of Tout de Suite and what Emile planned to do next. He said
maybe he would move to Portland—Oliver had told him she was
living there—and start a coffeehouse.

250

“The coffee scene is sort of crowded in Portland, Emile, though

it would be hard to top your brew.” Annelise wiped her runny nose
with the back of her hand. She added that she herself was in the
business now. “I’m a barista at a drive-up coffee hut. Maybe Oliver
told you that.”

Emile said that he was sorry that her marriage turned out as it

did, and Annelise said, “I am sad, too.” She didn’t elaborate. Of
course there was more to say, but she didn’t want to say it to Emile.

She drizzled sugar into her latte. The room was quiet as a church,

so quiet that she heard the sound the sugar made—the sea swirling
at her feet—as it fell out of the packet into the foam. She took her
coffee and the Comments book to a table at the back of the shop, to
a seat under an early Rabbit Master painting, the one of a bunny
wearing a bishop’s miter. There were three other customers in the
room, including a postal carrier reading Kurt Vonnegut’s Slapstick
and a retired state legislator whom Emile resented because the legis-
lator brought his own snacks. (“I sell him a Rice Krispie square.
Cheap bastard.”) The legislator had fallen asleep over the personals
in This Vale. Outside the snow fell steadily. The room was warm and
the windows were steaming up.

Annelise opened the Comments book and read some of the en-

tries. There were philosophical comments and remarks of a practical
nature (“Emile, you need to water your philodendron”) and testimo-
nials (“If the rest of the day could only be like the two minutes of
drinking your joe . . .”) and the ravings of a person who hated art
with rabbits in it (“First, let’s shoot all the painters who think the
world needs one more painting of a goddamn rabbit”). In an entry
of a month ago, an anonymous writer said, “I like tall men. There is
more to like.” Was this a reference to her ex-husband? Or did the
writer have a generic interest in men so proportioned?

She didn’t feel jealous.
The bell attached to Emile’s door jingled and Annelise looked up.

A man of average height walked in, his face reddened by the weather,
his long ponytail sparkling with snow. She didn’t care for men with
ponytails; it was a prejudice, she knew.

251

In the Comments book, she wrote,

Dear Oliver,

Is there any more to be said? Maybe this?
The night after the divorce hearing, I was at Beaucoup

Doughnuts and I ran into a man who, it dawned on me, was
the Buddhist monk who had led our meditation class, except that
he was wearing jeans and a plaid Elmer Fudd–style cap. You
remember him, surely. Bulky, buzzcut, glasses. We talked. It
turned out that he had left the monastery. I asked him why and
he said, Well, because he didn’t wish to be a monk anymore.
He was a little brusque. He apologized for his tone and grinned.
We were both eager to eat the delicious sugary things that were
in our bags, so we sat down together and ate them. Eventually,
he told me that the real reason he had left the monastery was that
he had fallen in love with somebody, a non-monk, as he put it,
and that he had not been able to “overcome” his feeling for this
person. He was beaming in a way that seemed almost childlike,
with doughnut all over his mouth, and I said that he seemed
quite happy. He beamed even more. I asked him if, as a monk,
he’d ever been as happy as he appeared to be now. He said that
he had sometimes been happy as a monk, at least until he fell in
love with a certain man.

“So,” I said, “it’s not possible to be in love and happy at

the same time?”

“No,” he said, “it’s not easy to be in love and be a monk at

the same time.”

I said that I had recently been in love with a man but that it

hadn’t worked out. There had been so many complications. And
he said, “If I was in a position to give you advice, I would tell
you not to give up on love.”

252

So, there you have it, Oliver. There’s someone out there for

you. Maybe she won’t be like me, like water in your hands.

253

Acknowledgments

I would like to express my gratitude to the Wisconsin Arts Board for
a grant during the writing of this book. Many, many thanks to my
agent, Betsy Amster, for her patience and wisdom and hard work.
Thanks also to my editor, Raphael Kadushin, and the staff at the Uni-
versity of Wisconsin Press, especially Sheila Leary, Adam Mehring,
Chris Caldwell, Andrea Christofferson, Kjerstin Marie Moody, and
Carla Aspelmeier. I am very grateful to friends and fellow writers
who took the time to read and comment on all or parts of drafts of
this book: Judy Goldman (who also took the time to read the proofs),
Dale Kushner, Ann Shaffer, Lisa Ruffolo, Agate Nesaule, Elizabeth
Macklin, Judith Mitchell, and Rosemary Zurlo-Cuva. A special
thanks to Allyn Roberts. Thanks also to my sister, Angela Allen, and
my mother, Betty Anne Allen, and to my in-laws, the Gassmans, for
their support. I thank my children, George and Nora, for their beau-
tiful selves, and I thank again and again my wife, Michele Gassman,
for her love and encouragement.

255

Document Outline

Part I
Part 2
Part 3
Epilogue
Acknowledgments

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