"Gerbil," Cammy said. She sat at the foot of the bed while he undressed. Every year was the same; they offered to visit his parents in Kentucky, and his mother hinted that there was not enough room. The year before, he had said that they"d bring sleeping bags. His mother had said that she thought it was silly to have her family sprawled on the floor, and that they should visit at a more convenient time. Several days ago, before Cammy and Peter left New York for Boston, they had got presents in the mail from his parents. Each of them had been sent a Christmas stocking with a fake-fur top. Cammy"s stocking contained makeup. Peter"s was full of joke presents-a hand buzzer, soap that turned black when you washed your hands, a key chain with a dried yellow fish hanging from it. Peter"s stocking had had a hundred-dollar bill folded in the toe. In the toe of her stocking, Cammy found cuticle scissors.

While Peter showered, she wandered around her old room; when they arrived, they had been tired from the long drive, and she went to sleep with no more interest in her surroundings than she would have had in an anonymous motel room. Now she saw that her mother had got rid of most of the junk that used to be here, but she had also added things-her high-school yearbook, a Limoges dish with her Girl Scout ring in it-so that the room looked like a shrine. Years ago, Cammy had rolled little curls of Scotch Tape and stuck them to the backs of pictures of boyfriends or would-be boyfriends and then pushed the snapshots against the mirror to form the shape of a heart. Only two photos remained on the mirror now, both of Michael Grizetti, who had been her steady in her last year of high school. When her mother had moved them and put them neatly under the frame of the mirror, top left and right, she must have discovered the secret. Cammy pulled the larger picture out and turned it over. The hidden snapshot was still glued to the back: Grizzly with his pelvis thrust forward, thumbs pointing at his crotch, and the message "Nil desperandum x x x x x x x x x x" written on the snapshot across his chest. It all seemed so harmless now. He was the first person Cammy had slept with, and most of what she remembered now was what happened after they had s.e.x. They went into New York, with fake IDs and fifty dollars Grizzly borrowed from his brother. She could still remember how the s.h.a.g carpet tickled the soles of her feet when she went to the window of their hotel in the morning and pulled open the heavy curtains and looked across a distance so short that she thought she could reach out and touch the adjacent building, so close and so high that she couldn"t see the sky; there had been no way to tell what kind of day it was. Now she noticed that there was a little haze over Michael Grizetti"s top lip in the photograph. It was dust, not a mustache.

Peter came out of the bathroom. Over the years, he had gotten his hair cut closer and closer, so that now when she touched his head the curls were too tight to spring up at her touch. His head looked a little like a cantaloupe-a ridiculous idea, which would be useful just the same; she and her friends always said amusing things about their husbands when they wrote each other. She saved the more flattering images of him as things to say to him after making love. Her high-school English teacher would have approved. The teacher loved to invent little rhymes for the cla.s.s: Your conversation can be terrific;Just remember: be specific

Peter"s damp towel flew past her and landed on the bed. As usual, he discarded it as if he had just finished it off in a fight. The week before, he had been in Barbados on a retreat with his company, and he was still very tan. There was a wide band of white skin where he had worn his swimming trunks. In the dim afternoon light he looked like a piece of Marimekko fabric.

He pulled on sweatpants, tied the drawstring, and lit a cigarette with the fancy lighter she had bought him for Christmas. She had given it to him early. It was a metal tube with a piece of rawhide attached to the bottom. When the string was pulled, an outer sleeve of metal rose over the top, to protect the flame. Peter loved it, but she was a little sorry after she gave it to him; there had been something dramatic about huddling in doorways with him, using her body to help him block the wind while he struck matches to light a cigarette. She took two steps toward him now and gave him a hug, putting her hands under his armpits. They were damp. She believed it was a truth that no man ever dried himself thoroughly after showering. He kissed across her forehead, then stopped and pushed his chin between her eyebrows. She couldn"t respond; she had told him the night before that she didn"t understand how anyone could make love in their parents" house. He shook his head, almost amused, and tucked a thermal shirt into the sweatpants, then pulled on a sweater. "I don"t care if it is is snowing," he said. He was going running. snowing," he said. He was going running.

They walked downstairs. Her father, a retired cardiologist, was on his slant board in the living room, arms raised to heaven, holding the Wall Street Journal Wall Street Journal. "How do you reconcile smoking a pack a day, and then going running?" her father said.

"To tell you the truth," Peter said, "I don"t run for my health. It clears my mind. I run because it gives me a high."

"Well, do you think mental health is separate from the health of the body?"

"Oh, Stan," Cammy"s mother said, coming into the living room, "no one is trying to argue with you about medicine."

"I wasn"t talking about medicine medicine," he said.

"People just talk loosely," her mother said.

"I"d never argue that point," her father said.

Cammy found these visits more and more impossible. As a child she had been told what to do and think, and then when she got married her parents had backed off entirely, so that in the first year of her marriage she found herself in the odd position of advising her mother and father. Then, at some point, they had managed to turn the tables again, and now all of them were back to "Go." They argued with each other and made p.r.o.nouncements instead of having conversations.

She decided to go running with Peter and pulled her parka off a hanger in the closet. She was still having trouble zipping it outside, and Peter helped by pulling the material down tightly in front. It only made her feel more helpless. He saw her expression and nuzzled her hair. "What do you expect from them?" he said, as the zipper went up. She thought, He asks questions he knows I won"t bother to answer.

Snow was falling. They were walking through a Christmas-card scene that she hadn"t believed in in years; she half expected carolers around the corner. When Peter turned left, she guessed that they were heading for the park on Ma.s.s. Avenue. They pa.s.sed a huge white clapboard house with real candles glowing in all the windows. "Some place," Peter said. "Look at that wreath." The wreath that hung on the front door was so thick that it was convex; it looked as if someone had uprooted a big boxwood and cut a hole in the center. Peter made a s...o...b..ll and threw it, almost getting a bull"s-eye.

"Are you crazy?" she said, grabbing at his hand. "What are you going to do if they open the door?"

"Listen," he said, "if they lived in New York the wreath would be stolen. This way, everybody can enjoy throwing s...o...b..a.l.l.s at it."

On the corner, a man stood staring down at a small brown dog wearing a plaid coat. The blond man standing next to him said, "I told you so. She may be blind, but she still loves it out in the snow." The other man patted the shivering dog, and they continued on their walk.

Christmas in Cambridge. Soon it would be Christmas Eve, time to open the gifts. As usual, she and Peter would be given something practical (stocks), and something frivolous (gla.s.ses too fragile for the dishwasher). Then there would be one personal present for each of them: probably a piece of gold jewelry for Cammy and a silk tie for Peter. Cammy occasionally wore one of the ties when she dressed like a nineteen-forties businessman. Peter thought the ties were slightly effeminate-he never liked them. The year before, when her parents gave her a lapis ring, he had pulled it off her finger to examine it on Christmas night, in bed, then pushed it on his little finger and wiggled it, making a Clara Bow mouth and pretending to be gay. He had been trying to show her how ridiculous he would look wearing a wedding ring. They had been married three years then, and some part of her was still so sentimental that she asked him from time to time if he wouldn"t reconsider and wear a wedding ring. It wasn"t that she thought a ring would be any sort of guarantee. They had lived together for two years before they suddenly decided to get married, but before the wedding they had agreed that it was naive to expect a lifetime of fidelity. If either one became interested in someone else, they would handle the situation in whatever way they felt best, but there would be no flaunting of the other person, and they wouldn"t talk about it.

A couple of months before the last trip to her parents"-Christmas a year ago-Peter had waked her up one night to tell her about a young woman he had had a brief affair with. He described his feelings about being with the woman-how much he liked it when she put her hand over his when they sat at a table in a restaurant; the time she had dissipated some anger of his by suddenly putting her lips to the deepening lines in his forehead, to kiss his frown away. Then Peter had wept onto Cammy"s pillow. She could still remember his face-the only time she had ever seen him cry-and how red and swollen it was, as if it had been burned. "Is this discreet enough for you?" he had said. "Do you want to push this pillow into my face so not even the neighbors neighbors can hear?" She didn"t care what the neighbors thought, because she didn"t even know the neighbors. She had not comforted him or touched the pillow. She had not been dramatic and gone out to sleep on the sofa. After he went to work in the morning, she had several cups of coffee and then went out to try to cheer herself up. She bought flowers at an expensive flower shop on Greenwich Avenue, pointing to individual blossoms for the florist to remove one by one, choosing with great care. Then she went home, trimmed the stems, and put them in little bottles-just a few stalks in each, all flowers and no greens. By evening, when Peter was about to come home, she realized that he would see them and know that she had been depressed, so she bunched them all together again and put them in a vase in the dining room. Looking at them, she suddenly understood how ironic it was that all during the past summer, when she was falling more deeply in love with Peter, he was having a flirtation and then an affair with someone else. Cammy had begun to be comfortable with how subtly attuned to each other they were, and she had been deluded. It made her embarra.s.sed to remember how close she felt to Peter late one fall afternoon on Bleecker Street, when Peter stopped to light a cigarette. Something had made her poke him in the ribs. She didn"t often act childish, and she could see that he was taken aback, and that made her laugh and poke him again. Every time he thought she"d finished and tried to light another match, she managed to take him by surprise and tickle him again; she even got through the barrier he"d made with his elbows pointed into his stomach. "What can hear?" She didn"t care what the neighbors thought, because she didn"t even know the neighbors. She had not comforted him or touched the pillow. She had not been dramatic and gone out to sleep on the sofa. After he went to work in the morning, she had several cups of coffee and then went out to try to cheer herself up. She bought flowers at an expensive flower shop on Greenwich Avenue, pointing to individual blossoms for the florist to remove one by one, choosing with great care. Then she went home, trimmed the stems, and put them in little bottles-just a few stalks in each, all flowers and no greens. By evening, when Peter was about to come home, she realized that he would see them and know that she had been depressed, so she bunched them all together again and put them in a vase in the dining room. Looking at them, she suddenly understood how ironic it was that all during the past summer, when she was falling more deeply in love with Peter, he was having a flirtation and then an affair with someone else. Cammy had begun to be comfortable with how subtly attuned to each other they were, and she had been deluded. It made her embarra.s.sed to remember how close she felt to Peter late one fall afternoon on Bleecker Street, when Peter stopped to light a cigarette. Something had made her poke him in the ribs. She didn"t often act childish, and she could see that he was taken aback, and that made her laugh and poke him again. Every time he thought she"d finished and tried to light another match, she managed to take him by surprise and tickle him again; she even got through the barrier he"d made with his elbows pointed into his stomach. "What is is this?" he said. "The American Cancer Society sent you to torture me?" People were looking-who said people don"t notice things in New York?-and Peter was backing away, then doubling up, with the cigarette unlit in his mouth, admitting that he couldn"t control her. When she moved toward him to hug him and end the game, he didn"t believe it was over; he turned sideways, one hand extended to ward her off, clumsily trying to thumb up a flame with his right hand. This was the opposite of the night she had s.e.x with Michael Grizetti: she could remember all of this moment-the smiling fat woman walking by, talking to herself, the buzzing sound of the neon sign outside the restaurant, Peter"s stainless-steel watchband sparkling under the streetlight, the this?" he said. "The American Cancer Society sent you to torture me?" People were looking-who said people don"t notice things in New York?-and Peter was backing away, then doubling up, with the cigarette unlit in his mouth, admitting that he couldn"t control her. When she moved toward him to hug him and end the game, he didn"t believe it was over; he turned sideways, one hand extended to ward her off, clumsily trying to thumb up a flame with his right hand. This was the opposite of the night she had s.e.x with Michael Grizetti: she could remember all of this moment-the smiling fat woman walking by, talking to herself, the buzzing sound of the neon sign outside the restaurant, Peter"s stainless-steel watchband sparkling under the streetlight, the de-de-de-deeeeeeh de-de-de-deeeeeeh of a car horn in the distance. "Time!" he had shouted, backing away. Then, at a safe distance, he crossed his fingers above his head, like a child. of a car horn in the distance. "Time!" he had shouted, backing away. Then, at a safe distance, he crossed his fingers above his head, like a child.

Now Peter slapped her bottom. "I"m going to run," he said. He took off into the park, his running shoes kicking up clods of snow. She watched him go. He was tall and broad-shouldered, and his short leather jacket came just to his waist, so that he looked like an adolescent in ill-fitting clothes. She had on cowboy boots instead of running shoes. Why did she hold it against him that she had decided at the last minute to go with him and that she was wearing the wrong shoes? Did she expect him to throw down his cape?

She probably would not have thought of a cape at all, except that his scarf flew off as he ran, and he didn"t notice. She turned into the park to get it. The snow was falling in smaller flakes now; it was going to stay. Maybe it was the realization that even icier weather was still to come that suddenly made her nearly numb with cold. The desire to be in the sun was almost a hot spot between her ribs; something actually burned inside her. Like everyone she knew, she had grown up watching Porky Pig and Heckle and Jeckle on Sat.u.r.day mornings-cartoons in which the good guys got what they wanted and no consequences were permanent. Now she wanted one of those small tornadoes that whipped through cartoons, transporting objects and characters with miraculous speed from one place to another. She wanted to believe again in the magic power of the wind.

They went back to the house. Music was playing loudly on the radio, and her father was hollering to her mother, "First we get that d.a.m.ned "Drummer Boy" dirge, and now they"ve got the Andrews Sisters singing "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy." What the h.e.l.l does that that have to do with Christmas? Isn"t that song from the Second World War? What are they doing playing that stuff at Christmas? Probably some disc jockey that"s high. Everybody"s high all the time. The guy who filled my gas tank this morning was high. The kid they put on to deliver mail"s got eyes like a pinwheel and walks like he might step on a land mine. What about "White Christmas"? Do they think that Bing Crosby spent his whole life playing golf ?" have to do with Christmas? Isn"t that song from the Second World War? What are they doing playing that stuff at Christmas? Probably some disc jockey that"s high. Everybody"s high all the time. The guy who filled my gas tank this morning was high. The kid they put on to deliver mail"s got eyes like a pinwheel and walks like he might step on a land mine. What about "White Christmas"? Do they think that Bing Crosby spent his whole life playing golf ?"

Peter came up behind Cammy as she was hanging his scarf on a peg on the back of the kitchen door. He helped her out of her coat and hung it over the scarf.

"Look at this," Cammy"s mother said proudly, from the kitchen.

They walked into the room where her mother stood and looked down. While they were out, she had finished making the annual buche de Noel: buche de Noel: a fat, perfect cylinder of a log, with chocolate icing stroked into the texture of tree bark. A small green-and-white wreath had been pumped out of a pastry tube to decorate one end, and there was an open jar of raspberry jam that her mother must have used to make the bow. a fat, perfect cylinder of a log, with chocolate icing stroked into the texture of tree bark. A small green-and-white wreath had been pumped out of a pastry tube to decorate one end, and there was an open jar of raspberry jam that her mother must have used to make the bow.

"It was worth my effort," her mother said. "You two look like children seeing their presents on Christmas morning."

Cammy smiled. What her mother had just said was what gave her the idea of touching the Yule log-what made her grin and begin to wiggle her finger lightly through a ridge, widening it slightly, giving the bark at least one imperfection. Once her finger touched it, it was difficult to stop-though she knew she had to let the wild upsweep of the tornado she might create stay an image in her mind. The consolation, naturally, was what would happen when she raised her finger. Slowly-while Peter and her mother stared-she lifted her hand, still smiling, and began to suck the chocolate off her finger.

In the White Night

"Don"t think about a cow," Matt Brinkley said. "Don"t think about a river, don"t think about a car, don"t think about snow...."

Matt was standing in the doorway, hollering after his guests. His wife, Gaye, gripped his arm and tried to tug him back into the house. The party was over. Carol and Vernon turned to wave goodbye, calling back their thanks, whispering to each other to be careful. The steps were slick with snow; an icy snow had been falling for hours, frozen granules mixed in with lighter stuff, and the instant they moved out from under the protection of the Brinkleys" porch the cold froze the smiles on their faces. The swirls of snow blowing against Carol"s skin reminded her-an odd thing to remember on a night like this-of the way sand blew up at the beach, and the scratchy pain it caused.

"Don"t think about an apple!" Matt hollered. Vernon turned his head, but he was left smiling at a closed door.

In the small, bright areas under the streetlights, there seemed for a second to be some logic to all the swirling snow. If time itself could only freeze, the snowflakes could become the lacy filigree of a valentine. Carol frowned. Why had Matt conjured up the image of an apple? Now she saw an apple where there was no apple, suspended in midair, transforming the scene in front of her into a silly surrealist painting.

It was going to snow all night. They had heard that on the radio, driving to the Brinkleys". The Don"t-Think-About-Whatever game had started as a joke, something long in the telling and startling to Vernon, to judge by his expression as Matt went on and on. When Carol crossed the room near midnight to tell Vernon that they should leave, Matt had quickly whispered the rest of his joke or story-whatever he was saying-into Vernon"s ear, all in a rush. They looked like two children, the one whispering madly and the other with his head bent, but something about the inclination of Vernon"s head let you know that if you bent low enough to see, there would be a big, wide grin on his face. Vernon and Carol"s daughter, Sharon, and Matt and Gaye"s daughter, Becky, had sat side by side, or kneecap to kneecap, and whispered that way when they were children-a privacy so rushed that it obliterated anything else. Carol, remembering that scene now, could not think of what pa.s.sed between Sharon and Becky without thinking of s.e.xual intimacy. Becky, it turned out, had given the Brinkleys a lot of trouble. She had run away from home when she was thirteen, and, in a family-counseling session years later, her parents found out that she had had an abortion at fifteen. More recently, she had flunked out of college. Now she was working in a bank in Boston and taking a night-school course in poetry. Poetry or pottery? The apple that reappeared as the windshield wipers slushed snow off the gla.s.s metamorphosed for Carol into a red bowl, then again became an apple, which grew rounder as the car came to a stop at the intersection.

She had been weary all day. Anxiety always made her tired. She knew the party would be small (the Brinkleys" friend Mr. Graham had just had his book accepted for publication, and of course much of the evening would be spent talking about that); she had feared that it was going to be a strain for all of them. The Brinkleys had just returned from the Midwest, where they had gone for Gaye"s father"s funeral. It didn"t seem a time to carry through with plans for a party. Carol imagined that not canceling it had been Matt"s idea, not Gaye"s. She turned toward Vernon now and asked how the Brinkleys had seemed to him. Fine, he said at once. Before he spoke, she knew how he would answer. If people did not argue in front of their friends, they were not having problems; if they did not stumble into walls, they were not drunk. Vernon tried hard to think positively, but he was never impervious to real pain. His reflex was to turn aside something serious with a joke, but he was just as quick to wipe the smile off his face and suddenly put his arm around a person"s shoulder. Unlike Matt, he was a warm person, but when people unexpectedly showed him affection it embarra.s.sed him. The same counselor the Brinkleys had seen had told Carol-Vernon refused to see the man, and she found that she did not want to continue without him-that it was possible that Vernon felt uncomfortable with expressions of kindness because he blamed himself for Sharon"s death: he couldn"t save her, and when people were kind to him now he felt it was undeserved. But Vernon was the last person who should be punished. She remembered him in the hospital, pretending to misunderstand Sharon when she asked for her barrette, on her bedside table, and picking it up and clipping the little yellow duck into the hair above his own ear. He kept trying to tickle a smile out of her-touching some stuffed animal"s b.u.t.ton nose to the tip of her nose and then tapping it on her earlobe. At the moment when Sharon died, Vernon had been sitting on her bed (Carol was backed up against the door, for some reason), surrounded by a battlefield of pastel animals.

They pa.s.sed safely through the last intersection before their house. The car didn"t skid until they turned onto their street. Carol"s heart thumped hard, once, in the second when she felt the car becoming light, but they came out of the skid easily. He had been driving carefully, and she said nothing, wanting to appear casual about the moment. She asked if Matt had mentioned Becky. No, Vernon said, and he hadn"t wanted to bring up a sore subject.

Gaye and Matt had been married for twenty-five years; Carol and Vernon had been married twenty-two. Sometimes Vernon said, quite sincerely, that Matt and Gaye were their alter egos who absorbed and enacted crises, saving the two of them from having to experience such chaos. It frightened Carol to think that some part of him believed that. Who could really believe that there was some way to find protection in this world-or someone who could offer it? What happened happened at random, and one horrible thing hardly precluded the possibility of others happening next. There had been that fancy internist who hospitalized Vernon later in the same spring when Sharon died, and who looked up at him while drawing blood and observed almost offhandedly that it would be an unbearable irony if Vernon also had leukemia. When the test results came back, they showed that Vernon had mononucleosis. There was the time when the Christmas tree caught fire, and she rushed toward the flames, clapping her hands like cymbals, and Vernon pulled her away just in time, before the whole tree became a torch, and she with it. When Hobo, their dog, had to be put to sleep during their vacation in Maine, that awful woman veterinarian, with her cold green eyes, issued the casual death sentence with one manicured hand on the quivering dog"s fur and called him "Bobo," as though their dog were like some circus clown.

"Are you crying?" Vernon said. They were inside their house now, in the hallway, and he had just turned toward her, holding out a pink padded coat hanger.

"No," she said. "The wind out there is fierce." She slipped her jacket onto the hanger he held out and went into the downstairs bathroom, where she buried her face in a towel. Eventually, she looked at herself in the mirror. She had pressed the towel hard against her eyes, and for a few seconds she had to blink herself into focus. She was reminded of the kind of camera they had had when Sharon was young. There were two images when you looked through the finder, and you had to make the adjustment yourself so that one superimposed itself upon the other and the figure suddenly leaped into clarity. She patted the towel to her eyes again and held her breath. If she couldn"t stop crying, Vernon would make love to her. When she was very sad, he sensed that his instinctive optimism wouldn"t work; he became tongue-tied, and when he couldn"t talk he would reach for her. Through the years, he had knocked over winegla.s.ses shooting his hand across the table to grab hers. She had found herself suddenly hugged from behind in the bathroom; he would even follow her in there if he suspected that she was going to cry-walk in to grab her without even having bothered to knock.

She opened the door now and turned toward the hall staircase, and then realized-felt it before she saw it, really-that the light was on in the living room.

Vernon lay stretched out on the sofa with his legs crossed; one foot was planted on the floor and his top foot dangled in the air. Even when he was exhausted, he was always careful not to let his shoes touch the sofa. He was very tall, and couldn"t stretch out on the sofa without resting his head on the arm. For some reason, he had not hung up her jacket. It was spread like a tent over his head and shoulders, rising and falling with his breathing. She stood still long enough to be sure that he was really asleep, and then came into the room. The sofa was too narrow to curl up on with him. She didn"t want to wake him. Neither did she want to go to bed alone. She went back to the hall closet and took out his overcoat-the long, elegant camel"s-hair coat he had not worn tonight because he thought it might snow. She slipped off her shoes and went quietly over to where he lay and stretched out on the floor beside the sofa, pulling the big blanket of the coat up high, until the collar touched her lips. Then she drew her legs up into the warmth.

Such odd things happened. Very few days were like the ones before. Here they were, in their own house with four bedrooms, ready to sleep in this peculiar double-decker fashion, in the largest, coldest room of all. What would anyone think?

She knew the answer to that question, of course. A person who didn"t know them would mistake this for a drunken collapse, but anyone who was a friend would understand exactly. In time, both of them had learned to stop pa.s.sing judgment on how they coped with the inevitable sadness that set in, always unexpectedly but so real that it was met with the instant acceptance one gave to a snowfall. In the white night world outside, their daughter might be drifting past like an angel, and she would see this tableau, for the second that she hovered, as a necessary small adjustment.

Summer People

The first weekend at their summer house in Vermont, Jo, Tom, and Byron went out for pizza. Afterward, Tom decided that he wanted to go dancing at a roadside bar. Byron had come with his father and Jo grudgingly, enthusiastic about the pizza but fearing that it would be a longer night than he wanted. "They have Pac-Man here," Tom said to his son, as he swung the car into the bar parking strip, and for a couple of seconds it was obvious that Byron was debating whether or not to go in with them. "Nah," he said. "I don"t want to hang out with a bunch of drunks while you two dance."

Byron had his sleeping bag with him in the car. The sleeping bag and a pile of comic books were his constant companions. He was using the rolled-up bag as a headrest. Now he turned and punched it flatter, making it more a pillow, and then stretched out to emphasize that he wouldn"t go in with them.

"Maybe we should just go home," Jo said, as Tom pulled open the door to the bar.

"What for?"

"Byron-"

"Oh, Byron"s overindulged," Tom said, putting his hand on her shoulder and pushing her forward with his fingertips.

Byron was Tom"s son from his first marriage. It was the second summer that he was spending with them on vacation in Vermont. He"d been allowed to decide, and he had chosen to come with them. In the school year he lived with his mother in Philadelphia. This year he was suddenly square and st.u.r.dy, like the j.a.panese robots he collected-compact, complicated robots, capable of doing useful but frequently unnecessary tasks, like a Swiss Army knife. It was difficult for Tom to realize that his son was ten years old now. The child he conjured up when he closed his eyes at night was always an infant, the tangled hair still as smooth as peach fuzz, with the scars and bruises of summer erased, so that Byron was again a sleek, seal-like baby.

The band"s instruments were piled on the stage. Here and there, amps rose out of tangled wire like trees growing from the forest"s tangled floor. A pretty young woman with a blond pompadour was on the dance floor, shaking her puff of hair and smiling at her partner, with her Sony earphones clamped on, so that she heard her own music while the band took a break and the jukebox played. The man stood there shuffling, making almost no attempt to dance. Tom recognized them as the couple who had outbid him on a chain saw he wanted at an auction he had gone to earlier in the day.

On the jukebox, Dolly Parton was doing the speaking part of "I Will Always Love You." Green bottles of Rolling Rock, scattered across the bar top, had the odd configuration of misplaced bowling pins. Dolly Parton"s sadness was coupled with great sincerity. The interlude over, she began to sing again, with greater feeling. "I"m not kidding you," a man wearing an orange football jersey said, squeezing the biceps of the burly man who sat next to him. "I says to him, "I don"t understand your question. What is tuna fish like like? It"s tuna fish." " The burly man"s face contorted with laughter.

There was a neon sign behind the bar, with shining bubbles moving through a bottle of Miller. When Tom was with his first wife, back when Byron was about three years old, he had taken the lights off the Christmas tree one year while needles rained down on the bedsheet s...o...b..nk they had mounded around the tree stand. He had never seen a tree dry out so fast. He remembered snapping off branches, then going to get a garbage bag to put them in. He snapped off branch after branch, stuffing them inside, feeling clever that he had figured out a way to get the dried-out tree down four flights of stairs without needles dropping everywhere. Byron came out of the back room while this was going on, saw the limbs disappearing into the black bag, and began to cry. His wife never let him forget all the wrong things he had said and done to Byron. He was still not entirely sure what Byron had been upset about that day, but he had made it worse by getting angry and saying that the tree was only a tree, not a member of the family.

The bartender pa.s.sed by, clutching beer bottles by their necks as if they were birds he had shot. Tom tried to get his eye, but he was gone, involved in some story being told at the far end of the bar. "Let"s dance," Tom said, and Jo moved into his arms. They walked to the dance floor and slow-danced to an old Dylan song. The harmonica cut through the air like a party blower, shrilly unrolling.

When they left and went back to the car, Byron pretended to be asleep. If he had really been sleeping, he would have stirred when they opened and closed the car doors. He was lying on his back, eyes squeezed shut a little too tightly, enclosed in the padded blue chrysalis of the sleeping bag.

The next morning, Tom worked in the garden, moving from row to row as he planted tomato seedlings and marigolds. He had a two-month vacation because he was changing jobs, and he was determined to stay ahead of things in the garden this year. It was a very carefully planned bed, more like a well-woven rug than like a vegetable patch. Jo was on the porch, reading Moll Flanders Moll Flanders and watching him. and watching him.

He was flattered but also slightly worried that she wanted to make love every night. The month before, on her thirty-fourth birthday, they had drunk a bottle of Dom Perignon and she had asked him if he was still sure he didn"t want to have a child with her. He told her that he didn"t, and reminded her that they had agreed on that before they got married. He had thought, from the look on her face, that she was about to argue with him-she was a teacher and she loved debate-but she dropped the subject, saying, "You might change your mind someday." Since then she had begun to tease him. "Change your mind?" she would whisper, curling up next to him on the sofa and unb.u.t.toning his shirt. She even wanted to make love in the living room. He was afraid Byron would wake up and come downstairs for some reason, so he would turn off the television and go upstairs with her. "What is is this?" he asked once lightly, hoping it wouldn"t provoke her into a discussion of whether he had changed his mind about having a child. this?" he asked once lightly, hoping it wouldn"t provoke her into a discussion of whether he had changed his mind about having a child.

"I always feel this way about you," she said. "Do you think I like it the rest of the time, when teaching takes all my energy?"

On another evening, she whispered something else that surprised him-something he didn"t want to pursue. She said that it made her feel old to realize that having friends she could stay up all night talking to was a thing of the past. "Do you remember that from college?" she said. "All those people who took themselves so seriously that everything they felt was a fact."

He was glad that she had fallen asleep without really wanting an answer. Byron puzzled him less these days and Jo puzzled him more. He looked up at the sky now: bright blue, with clouds trailing out thinly, so that the ends looked as if kite strings were attached. He was rinsing his hands with the garden hose at the side of the house when a car came up the driveway and coasted to a stop. He turned off the water and shook his hands, walking forward to investigate.

A man in his forties was getting out of the car-clean-cut, pudgy. He reached back into the car for a briefcase, then straightened up. "I"m Ed Rickman!" he called. "How are you today?"

Tom nodded. A salesman, and he was trapped. He wiped his hands on his jeans.

"To get right to the point, there are only two roads in this whole part of the world I really love, and this is one of them," Rickman said. "You"re one of the new people-h.e.l.l, everybody who didn"t crash up against Plymouth Rock is new in New England, right? I tried to buy this acreage years ago, and the farmer who owned it wouldn"t sell. Made an offer way back then, when money meant something, and the man wouldn"t sell. You own all these acres now?"

"Two," Tom said.

"h.e.l.l," Ed Rickman said. "You"d be crazy not to be happy here, right?" He looked over Tom"s shoulder. "Have a garden?" Rickman said.

"Out back," Tom said.

"You"d be crazy not to have a garden," Rickman said.

Rickman walked past Tom and across the lawn. Tom wanted the visitor to be the one to back off, but Rickman took his time, squinting and slowly staring about the place. Tom was reminded of the way so many people perused box lots at the auction-the cartons they wouldn"t let you root around in because the good things thrown on top covered a boxful of junk.

"I never knew this place was up for grabs," Rickman said. "I was given to understand the house and land were an eight-acre parcel, and not for sale."

"I guess two of them were," Tom said.

Rickman ran his tongue over his teeth a few times. One of his front teeth was discolored-almost black.

"Get this from the farmer himself ?" he said.

"Real-estate agent, three years ago. Advertised in the paper."

Rickman looked surprised. He looked down at his Top-Siders. He sighed deeply and looked at the house. "I guess my timing was bad," he said. "That or a question of style. These New Englanders are kind of like dogs. Slow to move. Sniff around before they decide what they think." He held his briefcase in front of his body. He slapped it a couple of times. It reminded Tom of a beer drinker patting his belly.

"Everything changes," Rickman said. "Not so hard to imagine that one day this"ll all be skysc.r.a.pers. Condominiums or what have you." He looked at the sky. "Don"t worry," he said. "I"m not a developer. I don"t even have a card to leave with you in case you ever change your mind. In my experience, the only people who change their minds are women. There was a time when you could state that view without having somebody jump all over you, too."

Rickman held out his hand. Tom shook it.

"Just a lovely place you got here," Rickman said. "Thank you for your time."

"Sure," Tom said.

Rickman walked away, swinging the briefcase. His trousers were too big; they wrinkled across the seat like an opening accordion. When he got to the car, he looked back and smiled. Then he threw the briefcase onto the pa.s.senger seat-not a toss but a throw-got in, slammed the door, and drove away.

Tom walked around to the back of the house. On the porch, Jo was still reading. There was a pile of paperbacks on the small wicker stool beside her chair. It made him a little angry to think that she had been happily reading while he had wasted so much time with Ed Rickman.

"Some crazy guy pulled up and wanted to buy the house," he said.

"Tell him we"d sell for a million?" she said.

"I wouldn"t," he said.

Jo looked up. He turned and went into the kitchen. Byron had left the top off a jar, and a fly had died in the peanut b.u.t.ter. Tom opened the refrigerator and looked over the possibilities.

Later that same week, Tom discovered that Rickman had been talking to Byron. The boy said he had been walking down the road just then, returning from fishing, when a car rolled up alongside him and a man pointed to the house and asked him if he lived there.

Byron was in a bad mood. He hadn"t caught anything. He propped his rod beside the porch door and started into the house, but Tom stopped him. "Then what?" Tom said.

"He had this black tooth," Byron said, tapping his own front tooth. "He said he had a house around here, and a kid my age who needed somebody to hang out with. He asked if he could bring this dumb kid over, and I said no, because I wouldn"t be around after today."

Byron sounded so self-a.s.sured that Tom did a double take, wondering where Byron was going.

"I don"t want to meet some creepy kid," Byron said. "If the guy comes and asks you, say no-O.K.?"

"Then what did he say?"

"Talked about some part of the river where it was good fishing. Where the river curved, or something. It"s no big deal. I"ve met a lot of guys like him."

"What do you mean?" Tom said.

"Guys that talk just to talk," Byron said. "Why are you making a big deal out of it?"

"Byron, the guy"s nuts," Tom said. "I don"t want you to talk to him anymore. If you see him around here again, run and get me."