"Tha.s.s right. Spin, like we said, he took early retirement."

"Phil and Deirdre?" Why did I care? My voice had trembled.

"They"re still around, maybe."

"Is the monthly charge the same?"

"We were thinkin" maybe it should go up a little. What with us providin" on-the-spot service."

He had mastered the corporate "we," which diffuses and masks all manner of brutalities and denials. "How much is a little?"

"We were thinkin", how about two thousand a month? You owe us for May. That makes four."

"Two and two still make four. That"s some increase, from thirteen fifty to two."

He shrugged. Though I thought of him as the big one, he was several inches shorter than I. Even weightwise, I was bigger than he, though my pounds could not be mobilized like the rubbery pounds of youth. The c.h.i.n.ks in the hut, I noticed, had been stuffed with moss-defense against insects if not yet the cold-and the gypsum-board roof replaced with some plywood scavenged somewhere. They were learning. America is one big education. Two thousand was a lot of welders, for a retired man in a chaotic economy, but it was still far less than the old government had extracted from me, in dollars, for its wars and universal medical care, its mad schemes of s.p.a.ceships in the sky and equal opportunity for everyone. It would be hard for a boy from Lynn to grasp how much a white financial adviser could stash away over the years. He was asking peanuts.

"I"ll have it for you tomorrow. I need to go to the bank for so much scrip. But I want something for it."

He was silent, blank.

"I want you and your buddies to stay down here on this side of the-" I didn"t think he"d know the word "escarpment." I gestured and said, "These big rocks. Stay away from the barn and the house. I haven"t mentioned any of this to my wife but if she finds out you"ll be in another ballgame. She"s a lot tougher than I-nowhere near as reasonable. She has that female thing of territoriality."

He still stared silently. There was nothing in my a.s.sertions and threats that deserved an answer perhaps. All the concessions had been made; I felt a certain craven pleasure and relief.

"Deirdre say," my opponent said at last, graciously to end the conversation, "you scared s.h.i.tless of your old lady."

The spring is so advanced into near-summer it has turned soggy and lost all shape. Azalea, dogwood, lilac, the blossoms of fruit trees are all withered and fallen into the detritus of moist earth. White is the color of the moment-lilies of the valley, bridal wreath, the maple-leaf viburnum that clings to the steep bank in drooping pulpy limbs that take root at their tips. This sinister plant, when on the way down to the mailbox I put my face close to one of its wide compound flowers, has an odor of decay, echoing the mephitic aura around Spin"s body. I can"t believe the boys are going to drag that body elsewhere, to prove themselves to another protection customer, but I would have heard, I think, the sound of a shovel digging a grave on my land; you can"t go down three inches without striking a rock. They came up, all three of them, as far as the barn to collect the packets of sepia paper I had withdrawn from the bank, and Gloria had spotted them from a third-floor window.

I explained who they were-the successors to Spin and Phil.

"I think you"re ridiculous," she told me, "to have anything to do with men like that. And now boys. I wonder if any of them would like to work for us a few hours each week, helping out on the grounds? I"m devastated devastated that Jeremy is thinking of giving up school and going to Mexico." that Jeremy is thinking of giving up school and going to Mexico."

Mexico, which had remained neutral during the Sino-American Conflict, was attracting many of our young people as a land of opportunity. Those who were denied legal admission were sneaking across the border in droves, while the Mexican authorities doubled the border guard and erected more electrified chain-link fences. They were talking of a Chinese-style wall, along Aztec design lines.

"I don"t think these boys want yard work. They"re into criminal activity, and very dangerous. You let me deal with them."

Gloria had been thought when young to have promise as a dancer, and until her mid-teens had taken ballet lessons. Whenever she wishes to a.s.sert herself, she straightens her back and splays her feet, as she did now. "Ben, you really shouldn"t be handing them money. It"s pouring it down the drain and giving them a false sense of reality. Call the police. You say there aren"t any, but I see them all the time-just yesterday morning, three of them, all young and in uniform, were directing traffic around the collapsed road on the way to Magnolia."

"They were moonlighting," I said. "Or else it was bandits in stolen uniforms. They rob the armored trucks and UPS vans."

"They were very very courteous to me." courteous to me."

Jeremy had come to us from a local fundamentalist college. He had a handsome but small head no wider than his powerful, flexible neck, so that at moments he displayed a serpentine grace. I had become dependent upon him; his appearance on a Sat.u.r.day or Sunday morning would galvanize me into an attack on the outdoors I no longer could muster by myself, however earnestly Gloria nagged. Together, Jeremy and I would lop, haul, dig, Preen, trim, mow. He had long slipped away from fundamentalism and would confide, if he seemed sluggish, that he had been hitting the bars in Gloucester and had gone on to some girl"s apartment. But his natural Christian mannerliness spared me any details that might have made me jealous-whether the girl had a roommate, if she got into the act, if the girls did anything to each other while he watched-details my thick skull craved, out in the laborious sunshine. Jeremy can start all the power tools-the leaf blower, the weed-whacker with its spinning nylon string-that gum up, for me, on their infuriatingly viscid and approximate mixtures of oil and gasoline. As we grub away side by side at some desolate patch of garden which Gloria wants to restore to the supposed state of glory it enjoyed in the fabled days of household staffs and freshly imported Italian gardeners, I reflect on how little it takes to breed a relationship: paternal and filial feelings flow between us like inklings of s.e.xual attraction. One day when a black hornet stung me below the eye, his voice shook in worry and concern, which I tearfully shrugged off. He admires my limberness as we scramble about on the rocks with armfuls of clippings for the burning pile or the compost heap, or together shinny into the ornamental apple trees to clip off the upright suckers that are poking into Gloria"s view of the sea. I encourage him to go to Mexico. I tell him he is lucky to be young in a world that is full of gaps and the opportunities underpopulation affords. My world when I was young, I tell him, was crammed with other so-called baby boomers, so that I advanced and made my little pile only by means of twelve-hour days and claustral conformity to the fully staffed pecking order. As he ducks into his old Nissan with a supple undulation of his sinuous bare-naped neck, I feel an erotic pang.

s.e.x seems everywhere, now that humid heat has become a daily thing. Warm weather creates s.e.xual hallucinations. In the waiting room of my periodontist, the smiling hygienist summons a male patient (not me) upstairs to a "b.l.o.w. .j.o.b," or so I hear her say. Near the beginning of my vast dental experience there was a Miss Edna Wade, a.s.sistant to Dr. Gottlieb, one of two Jews in Hammond Falls (the other ran the little local movie theatre, which closed in the Seventies). In cleaning my teeth, Miss Wade pressed her great round breast against my hot ear until its wax melted and I feared the zipper on my fly would rip.

With Gloria off to Boston on a cl.u.s.ter of her errands- shopping for slipcover material, having lunch at the Calpurnia Club and tea at the Ritz with a pre-war friend from the Winsor School, topped by a facial and a pedicure-and the outdoors a forbidding jungle, I went to my cache of p.o.r.nography, which is tucked behind a uniform set of st.u.r.dy Bible commentaries once owned by Gloria"s reverend great-uncle, and excited myself with the absurd combinational permutations of a paperback called Rex and Flora: Virgin into Vixen Rex and Flora: Virgin into Vixen. When my erection, in response to Flora"s expert administration of f.e.l.l.a.t.i.o to a delivery boy, had attained fall stretch, with my left hand cupped nurturingly about my b.a.l.l.s, I admired it-the inverted lavender heart-shape of the glans, the majestic tensile column with its marblelike blue-green veins and triple-shafted underside. Stout and faithful fellow! My life"s companion. I loved it, or him; erectile heat suffused my system with the warm blood of well-being; for these pumped-up instants I felt no need to justify my earthly existence; all came clear. I wished that my neck were as flexible as Jeremy"s so that I could dip down enough to do an adoring Flora on myself, imbibing at least that first translucent drop of pre-c.u.m (as the p.o.r.n books spell it) if not the thicker, curdled cream my swollen old prostate gland sluggishly releases, minutes after my climax.

If I did not have so many friends, at the club and at the office, who have had prostate operations and suffer the indignity of incontinence and the desolation of impotence, my erection might have been less prideful. Often enough in my youth it had been a mere embarra.s.sment, an inconvenience to be cleared away, dismissed with a hand or a handy v.a.g.i.n.a, so as to get on with life"s real business. What was so real, I now try to remember, about that business? Showing up on the dot of 8:35 a.m. at Sibbes, Dudley, and Wise, playing honest lago to the blind and innocent Oth.e.l.lo of the filthy rich, trying from the safe distance of State Street to outguess Wall Street in its skittery, dragonish gyrations-chimerical and numerical ephemera, in the backward glance. Nothing as solid and real, I feel, while my grip on my best self slackens, as this stiff p.r.i.c.k, a gleam of tasty pre-c.u.m unlicked at its tip.

I am conscious as my days dwindle of how poorly I have observed the world. The plants in their pulpy, modest complexity; the styles of sky and sea which like the whorls of fingerprints never quite repeat; the precise tint and fit of the rust-stained chunks of granite the vanished Italian masons built so lovingly into walls and terraces all over this property and its miles of brothers along the North Sh.o.r.e. Sitting on the toilet yesterday, I suddenly saw as if for the first time the miraculous knit of the Jockey underpants stretched across my knees. Tiny needles, functioning in cunning cl.u.s.ters at inhuman speeds, had contrived to entangle tiny white threads with perfect regularity to form this comfortably pliable, lightweight, and slightly elastic fabric. Engineers had planned and refined generations of machines, giant looms deploying batteries of hooked needles scarcely thicker than a hair yet containing moving parts, minuscule springs and latches, to duplicate mechanically the intricate knitting action of patient human hands. On all sides I am surrounded by such wonders of fabrication, those of human creation most decipherable but no less deserving of praise than those of that blind weaver, Nature.

But in fact I am dull and disintegrating. Strange complaints send dispatches along the neural network. A sharp little come-and-go pain beneath my left ear-the first cry from a lymph node choking on cancer cells? A sensation, upon awaking, of a film upon my eyes, obscuring vision for a half-hour into the day. Sudden thrummings and twitching just beneath the skin of my face. Sudden urgent urinary requests from below my belt. Not to mention arthritic finger joints, nocturnal stomach aches, and the mysterious murmurings and twinges the heart emits as it labors away day and night in the mushy total darkness within my rib cage. Which of my many interior slaves will first rebel and bring down in a chain of revolution my tyrannical reign? How much thankless effort these visceral serfs exert to maintain idle, giddy, fitful consciousness upon its throne inside my skull!

This morning a radio voice between doses of Offenbach and Buxtehude promised temperatures in the eighties; the sea, I noticed, was smoky in its flat calm, somewhat the way it is on the coldest January day, when the sub-zero air pulls vapor up up into its crystalline nothingness. The widespread mist this morning blurs the horizon and all but obliterates the little dark strip that is the South Sh.o.r.e-Hingham and Coha.s.set and all that-where useless old lecherous men are also rising and putting on exquisitely manufactured underpants. into its crystalline nothingness. The widespread mist this morning blurs the horizon and all but obliterates the little dark strip that is the South Sh.o.r.e-Hingham and Coha.s.set and all that-where useless old lecherous men are also rising and putting on exquisitely manufactured underpants.

Walking down to the mailbox for the Globe Globe, I pause to study the pink laurel, just now, in mid-June, coming into bloom. Each apparent single bloom, as with my spent rhododendrons, is a cl.u.s.ter of small sticky-stemmed pink-white flowers, each a strict pentagon with a deep-green center, a decorative circle of blood-colored angles and arcs, and ten stamens whose dark-red anthers are socketed halfway up the pentagonal vessel"s side, each white filament arched like a catapult spring, the pistils erect and ruddy-headed in the center, the whole formation as precise and hypnotically concentric as a Hollywood water ballet filmed from above. Amid such patterns infinitely multiplied we make our aimless way; nature"s graph paper, scored in squares finer than a molecule"s width, deserves tracing less coa.r.s.e than our erratic swoops of consciousness. All this superfine scaffolding, for what? The erection for a few shaky decades of a desperately greedy ego that tramples through the microcosmic underbrush like a blinded, lamenting giant.

The two pretty laurel florets I had on my desk to pose for my description yesterday are shrivelled today to the size of squashed insects. Their etched petals and pistils and anthers had been mostly water and are now returned to the vapor of the air.

And, walking down the driveway, I saw that though the Siberian iris are gone and the daylilies yet to bloom a few white iris have hoisted their flags-those floppy petals that each have, I discover in Peterson"s Field Guide to Wildflowers Field Guide to Wildflowers, distinct names. The upright one is a standard, the lower one a fall, and the smaller ones are called, it seems, style arms.

Gloria"s peonies are in full fluffy romp, and her roses a few days short of unfolding. A clump of great phallic lupine lords it over her small garden behind the former greenhouse, a garden fenced in by a bal.u.s.trade salvaged by the previous owner when he tore down the seaside veranda. The lupine petals are miniature pouches, purple and white distributed up and down the stalk like school colors in a cheerleader"s pom-pom.

And birds. It has been a wonderful spring for birds. The mother swallow pokes her tiny sharp head over the edge of the nest as she furtively sits hatching her clutch. A shiny brown bird hangs upside down in the farthest extension of the drooping hickory twigs outside my window, worrying at something invisible to me-a grub, an arboreal sweetmeat of some sort. Robins, it has come to me sixty years after my first-grade teacher, Miss Lunt, made so curiously much of them, spend more time hopping along the lawn and driveway than they do in flight or on a branch; and their flight has a frantic beating barrel-bodied quality, like that of pheasants. Without knowing it, they are forsaking the air. In some millions of years robins may be as wingless as dodos and great auks but, instead of extinct, as common as rats, and as little cherished. In n.o.ble contrast, the swallows dip and flip through the ether as if they own the invisible element.

Beatrice was in the neighborhood with her two boys and came by for tea. She and Allan live in Wellesley; of my two sons he has more nearly taken my path through life, beginning, however, not in semi-rural poverty but in suburban comfort. He works in Boston finance, not as I was, a hand-holder of individual rich widows and booze-sodden scions, but as the a.s.sistant manager of a mutual fund, that marvellous device whereby even the slightly monied ma.s.ses can partake in a conglomerate portfolio. His is called Pop-Cap, or Low-Yield, or Slo-Grow, or something. For a time he was in Chi-Hi, specializing in issues trading on the Hong Kong and Shanghai exchanges. The great war put a crimp in that. Yet, since by the terms of the Sino-American treaty the island was rea.s.signed back to our faithful allies the British, Allan sees sees wonderful opportunities ten or so years down the road, when mainland China becomes less radioactive and reacquires an infrastructure. wonderful opportunities ten or so years down the road, when mainland China becomes less radioactive and reacquires an infrastructure.

Beatrice is dark-haired and beginning to go stout. But just beginning-her face is a pearly madonnaesque oval with sumptuous long black eyebrows that thicken toward the bridge of her nose, giving her an aristocratically vexed look. Beneath her pinched white nose her rosebud lips are often pursed and sulky. Her figure"s growing opulence was emphasized in a crisp summer frock, coral in color, that exposed her upper arms and when she crossed her legs, as we sat on the side veranda, gave me plenty of pale thigh from which to avert my eyes. Having so ripe a young woman-"young" changes its meaning; she is about thirty-five-as my guest (Gloria being off to a Garden Club conference in Framingham on die diseases and parasites common to flowering shrubs) had a lyrical illicit side, an incestuous shadow we tried to disperse by sitting out here in the afternoon sunshine while Quentin and Duncan played on the lawn. Played, that is, in spurts of about five minutes; Quentin, though older, was sluggish and suspicious and kept dragging himself to his mother"s side, thumb in mouth though he is almost six, while his three-year-old brother hyperactively scampered and skidded from rock to bush to the croquet b.a.l.l.s and mallets I had brought out of a spidery corner of the gardening shed for their visit. I had also found a semi-deflated soccer ball, which in one minute flat had vanished into the nebulous, depressed area of p.r.i.c.kly wild roses just off the side lawn.

"Duncan hit me," Quentin said, removing his thumb for the time it took for this utterance. "With one of those sticks," he said, popping his thumb back in and rolling upward to his mother"s face eyes the same seductive sherry-brown as her own.

Beatrice still smokes, endearingly. Accepting the child"s heavy head on her bosom without burning him or spilling her tea intensified the look of black-browed vexation that I found attractive.

"Mallet," I said, pedantically grandpaternal. "Those colored sticks are called croquet mallets. You"re supposed to hit the ball through the little hoops with them. They"re called wickets. Shall Grandpa show you again?"

I had shown them once. Little hyper Duncan had listened intently and then with a whoop of glee had whirled through the layout I had set out, whacking each wicket until it went flying. Now the child, dressed in flowered bib sunshorts, had toddled to Gloria"s rose bed and was rapidly tugging off buds, chanting in antic.i.p.ation of our rebukes, "Naughty! Naughty!"

"Dunkie, you cut that out!" Beatrice called, but lazily, wearily, in a rote tone the child could ignore. She dragged on her cigarette and let her voluminous exhaling express depths of quiet desperation. The smoke made its way among Quentin"s glossy curls, and the child solemnly blinked his pink eyelids. The languor of the child"s frail, unambitious white limbs disturbingly suggested to me how my daughter-in-law would dispose herself in bed.

I raced off the porch to rescue Gloria"s roses, which had been a bit tough-stemmed for Duncan to damage much. He had p.r.i.c.ked himself on a thorn, and his little square stubborn face, yellowish with a child"s unthinkingly acquired tan, creased and wrinkled as a wail of protest built up inside his chest. He squinted up at me dubiously and then, with one shaky suppressed sob, held up his p.r.i.c.ked thumb to my face. It was sticky like an old penny candy against my lips; his face gave up on holding back tears. I lifted him into my arms and, though my knees threatened to buckle under the weight of his soul in that curious elderly reflex of mine, carried him into the shelter of the porch.

He showed his mother his wounded thumb. "Grandpa kiss," he said.

"Thank you, Ben," Beatrice said. "I can"t keep up with him."

"Beatrice, who could?" Our first names leaked into the sunny air like rumors of an affair. Undressed, she must have as many white k.n.o.bs as a thunderhead. "How"s, uh, Number One"s number-two problem?"

"Some days he seems to have the idea," she allowed, pa.s.sing the teacup and saucer around Quentin"s obtrusive curly head, "and then he loses it. When Al and I talk poo to him he looks at us as if we"re incredibly crazy and in very very poor taste. I guess it poor taste. I guess it is is sort of disgusting if you think about it. Like a lot of things. But don"t normal children, if it feels good, forget about its being in bad taste?" sort of disgusting if you think about it. Like a lot of things. But don"t normal children, if it feels good, forget about its being in bad taste?"

"I would think," I said, as if I personally didn"t know. I shied my mind away from picturing my daughter-in-law settling her white bulk on the toilet seat and letting her ample fundament part to give nature its daily toll of fecal matter. Feels good, does it? Here on the veranda, as the westering sunlight advanced like a slow tide across the porch boards and lapped at our feet, the click of her cup and the sigh of her exhaled smoke seemed embarra.s.singly loud. The buggy heat held the muted smells of excrement, s.e.x, death. The kousa dogwoods that Gloria had had the tree service plant, over toward the yew hedge that screened us from the Kellys, bloomed in their unsatisfactory way: white bracts strewn among the green leaves like pieces of paper sewn to the upper side of the boughs. I searched for a topic to fill our silence. "How"s Allan liking his work?"

Beatrice responded pouncingly. "He loves loves it," she exclaimed with exasperation. "All that computerized buying and appraising. He can"t stop talking about the wonderful Asians, the ones that are left, their enterprise and diligence and so on. I think he thinks Westerners are relatively decadent, and overweight. Like me. I feel I should be j.a.panese or something to please him. One of those little Thai beauties he comes home raving about after one of his trips to Bangkok." it," she exclaimed with exasperation. "All that computerized buying and appraising. He can"t stop talking about the wonderful Asians, the ones that are left, their enterprise and diligence and so on. I think he thinks Westerners are relatively decadent, and overweight. Like me. I feel I should be j.a.panese or something to please him. One of those little Thai beauties he comes home raving about after one of his trips to Bangkok."

Both boys had begun to wriggle in our arms at the mention of their father"s name. Duncan became a bundle of wiry muscle; as he and Quentin returned to the mallets and b.a.l.l.s on the sunstruck lawn, the older boy"s movements were by comparison mincing, female, constipated. He had inherited, perhaps, my melancholia. I thought of it as coming upon me in old age, but in truth I had always moved on the edge of depression. The house in the Berkshires had step-worn floors and moldy wallpaper clinging to the plaster walls of the narrow stairwell. Oilcloth on the kitchen table, linoleum on the floor. Fields of sallow corn stubble outside, and the unheeding rush and swoosh of traffic along Route 8. Great headlong loads of cut logs, tree corpses, went by, from the pine plantations to the north, whose murky aisles of trunks showed a few splotches of sun and hid bear-shaped intimations of mortality. The doll"s house in the neglected bas.e.m.e.nt. The marauding deer in a ruined world. The blurred corpse of the millipede. The laurel florets shrivelled to nothing. As a child I loved life so much the thought of its ever ending cancelled most of the joy I should have taken in it.

"Gloria"s not much here, is she?" Beatrice asked, showing me her profile as she gazed toward the boys, softening any malice in the question.

"Gloria," I said loyally, "is astonishingly busy. She works like a dog on this place, and then rushes over to the gift shop. Her two partners, she says, are utter featherheads. And then there are appointments with her hairdresser, her manicurist, her aerobics instructor-I can"t keep track of how many people she has on her personal maintenance crew."

"Gloria is very beautiful," Beatrice said, but listlessly. "Maybe an aerobics cla.s.s is what I need. That, or give up alcohol. They say you drop five to ten pounds right away. How do you find it, Ben, not drinking?"

"Like waking up in Kansas every morning. But at least you don"t have a headache or a lot of fuzz in your mouth."

"I need the lift," she confessed. "Allan says it"s all right, the Asians drink like fish. He says they never had their heads f.u.c.ked over by the Judaeo-Christian G.o.d. The j.a.panese killed the missionaries, and the Chinese let them in here and there but never let them get an audience with the emperor. Just kept them waiting outside the palace for generations. Duncan, stop that!" Duncan, stop that!"

The smaller boy was tormenting the older, by gleefully pretending to pull down his pants. Young as Duncan was, he knew where his brother"s weak spot was. Quentin wheeled frantically, trying to fend him off. The mockingbird had set up a sympathetic screeching from within the big yew bush the deer had nibbled. In mating season the bird had amused us by perching on the top of the flagpole, leaping up with a complicated call and turning in mid-air and then settling on the top of the flagpole again. The boys" agitated whirling was like that, only suffused with Quentin"s embarra.s.sment and little Duncan"s ferocity. "Poo!" Duncan kept shouting with fierce glee. "Poo!"

Sunlight had crept up our ankles and bounced dazzlingly off the gla.s.s top of the wicker table and the china cups and saucers. When Beatrice bent forward to douse her cigarette in the remains of her tea, sunlight plunged down her coral-colored neckline into the socket of damp, warm s.p.a.ce between her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. The kiss of the doused cigarette hung in the air. "They"re at each other like that all day," she said. "I pray for first grade next year." Her eyes stayed fixed on her plump hand, where it hovered with opened fingers above the cup of cooled tea. Her eyebrows had knit up a vertical wrinkle between them. How nice it would be, I thought, to be beneath her and feel her b.r.e.a.s.t.s sway, heavy and liquid, across my face, my open mouth, my closed eyelids.

In his desperation Quentin had seized a croquet mallet and I feared would do his savage little brother an injury; I raced out onto the lawn and took the weapon from him, while snapping, "Stop it! Enough is enough." enough." The boys, with their workaholic father, were so little used to masculine discipline that both made teary faces and ran to their mother, where she sat on the white wicker sofa in a kind of slumber, a non-intervening G.o.ddess. She took my intervention as a criticism, and bestirred herself to depart, replacing her cup on my tray, and attempting to stand. Quentin slouched against her so tuggingly that one strap of her frock slipped down a rounded brown shoulder and bared a milk-white strip of bulbous b.o.o.b. The darker, areolar flesh around her nipple would be pimpled, I figured, with a delicious roughness. "That was darling, Ben," she said, readjusting her strap without hurry. "Good tea. You must bring Gloria to Wellesley one of these days; I need all kinds of advice with the garden. It"s getting out of hand, just like the children. Allan works these beastly hours, but the fault is mostly mine. I"ve become such a slob; all I want to do is sleep all day and eat all night, and then throw up in the morning." She stood, and yawned. The boys, with their workaholic father, were so little used to masculine discipline that both made teary faces and ran to their mother, where she sat on the white wicker sofa in a kind of slumber, a non-intervening G.o.ddess. She took my intervention as a criticism, and bestirred herself to depart, replacing her cup on my tray, and attempting to stand. Quentin slouched against her so tuggingly that one strap of her frock slipped down a rounded brown shoulder and bared a milk-white strip of bulbous b.o.o.b. The darker, areolar flesh around her nipple would be pimpled, I figured, with a delicious roughness. "That was darling, Ben," she said, readjusting her strap without hurry. "Good tea. You must bring Gloria to Wellesley one of these days; I need all kinds of advice with the garden. It"s getting out of hand, just like the children. Allan works these beastly hours, but the fault is mostly mine. I"ve become such a slob; all I want to do is sleep all day and eat all night, and then throw up in the morning." She stood, and yawned.

"It sounds like-"

"It is. We"ve been keeping the news to ourselves, hoping it would go away. Seven and a half more months, I can"t stand it! I"m too old to be making babies."

"Bea, that"s beautiful." beautiful." I lurched toward her, barking a shin on the gla.s.s-topped wicker table. I lurched toward her, barking a shin on the gla.s.s-topped wicker table.

"Or plain stupid," she said, closing her eyes and letting herself be kissed on the cheek much as Duncan had let me kiss his p.r.i.c.ked thumb.

"How much of a secret is it?" I asked.

"You can tell Gloria, but not your children, if you don"t mind. Allan"s a little embarra.s.sed, he doesn"t want Matt especially to tease him. It wasn"t planned, of course. We don"t believe in more than two."

"That"s very old-fashioned of you. The world must be re-populated," I told her.

"For another slaughter of some kind," she sighed. "Still, I wouldn"t mind if it were a girl. Among the cousins, the tide seems to have turned that way."

"Give Jennifer a little compet.i.tion," I said encouragingly.

"Compet.i.tion," Beatrice said, closing her eyes once more and shuddering. Standing in the slant light, she was cut diagonally in half, like the big-eyed queen of spades. She wears her glossy hair centrally parted and twisted up into a chignon, so the nape of her neck shows, with its symmetrical swirl of fine uncaught hairs. To put one"s lips into that down: like an armpit, but softer.

"Makes the world go round," I finished for her. "That"s thrilling," I said, trying to strike the right briskly enthusiastic fatherly-in-law note, "about the baby." But the prospect of an eleventh grandchild made my life feel even more superfluous and ridiculous, lost in a sea of breeding. The three Wellesley Turnbulls buckled themselves back into their claret-red Mazda with a smoothing show of familial affection and sticky kisses, but the visit left me depressed. My exchange with Beatrice had been all irritable foreplay, ending in biological jealousy of my son; through the interplay of his two boys I had looked down once again into the dismal bas.e.m.e.nt of life, where in ill-lit corners spiders brainlessly entrap segmented insects, consume them bit by bit, leave a fuzzy egg sac, and die. All those leggy spider corpses, like collapsed gyroscopes, that we see dangling from cobwebs-did they perish of starvation, having spun a web in vain, or of old age, in the natural course of things, after years of drawing upon Medicare and Social Security?

Lonely, frightened, I walked into the woods and down the slope, grabbing branches to prevent a skid that might break old bones, to see if my friends from Lynn were at their post. I could hear voices, including a female voice, halt as my steps crackled on the sticks underfoot. An extension had been made to the hut, a wing roofed in the corrugated opaque plastic sold in lumber-supply depots and framed in crisp two-by-fours-no more dead branches as supporting timbers. There was a raised plywood floor and a wall of mosquito netting. Two shadows lurked behind the netting, and the face of the blonde girl appeared in a parting. "Oh it"s you," she said, in a voice flat but not especially hostile.

"Am I interrupting anything?"

"Just sittin" and socializin"," the other shadow called out. It was the loose light voice of the youngest of the three boys. "Wasn"t you just havin" company?"

"My daughter-in-law and two grandsons."

"That"s some red Mazda she drives. Drives it fast, too."

I didn"t like the sensation of being spied on; Gloria and I had bought this place because of its privacy. "Where"re your two a.s.sociates?" I asked.

"Out hustlin"," the boy said.

"Doing stuff," the girl amplified, distrustfully.

But I had paid up my tribute until the first of July and was determined not to be rebuffed. "I see you"ve added a screened porch."

"The bugs were gettin" bad."

"You said it." I slapped loudly at three, one real and two imaginary. "What"s it like in there? Must be nice."

They were reluctant to respond, but were too young to be coldly discourteous. "Have a look," the boy called, and the girl lifted a piece of the netting so I could stoop and step in.

It was heavenly inside the tiny shelter. The stolen wire lawn furniture made the perfect minimalist fit, and there was a spare chair for me. Sunlight filtered through the corrugated plastic roof as an underwater tint of speckled green; the trees in my woods took on a vaporous, gesturing presence outside the walls of mosquito netting, which had been fixed to the floor with a tidy row of rocks.

"Just thought," I said, seating myself, "I"d come down and see how you"re all doing."

"Not complainin"," the boy said. Until, the implication was, my visit gave him cause for complaint.

The girl was, a shade, more forthcoming. "Jose and Ray are off on business," she volunteered.

"Good, good," I said, stretching out my legs expansively. "That used to be me, off on the train to Beantown every day, working eight, nine hours at the least, eyeball to eyeball with the other sharks. The trick was to get control of some rich widow"s millions and then churn the money for the benefit of your broker friends. Or administer a nice juicy trust for point eight percent per annum. Pension funds and retirement plans-they were another boondoggle; the poor fat cats couldn"t make head or tail of the quarterly statements. People who have money, by and large, have a subconscious wish to lose it. A kind of financial death-wish-the species" way of balancing things out. You"ve heard the phrase "Rags to riches to rags in three generations." Or am I talking too much? I love the netting; it makes this into a really enchanted interior. Another couple of rooms and you might turn this into a little seafood restaurant." I noticed, through the opening into the first room, walled with branches and roofed in plywood, a bedless mattress striped with slivers of sunlight, like a nest of golden straws. "It must be tough at the end of the day for you guys to go home to your slummy triple-deckers, or wherever you live."

"Not too tough. Night is really spooky," the girl said. "There"s things things out there. Ticking things." out there. Ticking things."

"I squash "em with rocks rocks when I see "em," the boy announced, his spindly arms showing how, in vigorous arcs. when I see "em," the boy announced, his spindly arms showing how, in vigorous arcs.

"My name"s Ben," I told the girl. "I believe yours is Doreen. Nice to meet you. How old are you, may I ask? Fourteen?"

"Just about," she agreed.

"And you"-to the boy-"must be about the age of my grandson Kevin. He"s eleven."

The child wordlessly nodded, vaguely feeling that much more conversation with me would be a betrayal of his peers. He saw that I was a smooth talker when I wanted to be.

"I"m sixty-six," I told him. "Imagine that. When I was your age, if anybody had told me I"d be sixty-six some day I"d have laughed in his face. When I was young they used to say, "Don"t trust anybody over thirty," and now look at me."

He looked, with his eyes like globules of oil. I asked him, "Shall I call you Kevin Number Two?"

His eyes went to Doreen and outside to the spectral trees and back to me. He knew giving up your name was a possibly fatal concession. "Manolete," he murmured, just on the edge of my hearing.

"A great bullfighter, once upon a time," I told him. "A fine and famous name. Carry it proudly, Manolete, as you perform in the arena of life. May your pases pases always be pure and the crowd ever award you both ears and the tail." Lest he think I was mocking him, I explained to him, "It"s time that does it. It turns you from eleven to sixty-six in what feels to you a twinkling. Once gone, time leaves no trace. It"s out there in s.p.a.ce, out of reach. The arrow of time. Some scientists think its direction is reversible in quantum situations, and others think it would be reversible if the universe were as smooth at the end of time as it was in the beginning. I can"t quite picture it myself." I turned back to Doreen: "How are Ray and Jose doing, at business?" always be pure and the crowd ever award you both ears and the tail." Lest he think I was mocking him, I explained to him, "It"s time that does it. It turns you from eleven to sixty-six in what feels to you a twinkling. Once gone, time leaves no trace. It"s out there in s.p.a.ce, out of reach. The arrow of time. Some scientists think its direction is reversible in quantum situations, and others think it would be reversible if the universe were as smooth at the end of time as it was in the beginning. I can"t quite picture it myself." I turned back to Doreen: "How are Ray and Jose doing, at business?"

"O.K., I guess." She didn"t sound convinced.

Manolete, named, was liberated into one of his sudden large gestures, sweeping a hand toward the ceiling, whose tint seemed to hold us at the bottom of a dirty swimming pool. "A lot of old clients from Spin and Phil, they say, Tuck off." They say, "Show me." "

"Well, you showed me" me" I pointed out. I pointed out.

Doreen, not to be excluded from our male conversation, volunteered, "They"ve been killing the people"s pet dogs and cats and leaving them at the front door, but a lot of these rich people say all the same they don"t want to pay anything."

"People are selfish," I told them. "What you need to do in an operation like yours," I went on, "is to establish trust trust. Phil and Spin, people trusted them. They didn"t necessarily like like them, but they could them, but they could relate relate to them. You all have the disadvantage, may I say, of seeming a little young." to them. You all have the disadvantage, may I say, of seeming a little young."