

ASSEMBLAGE

Thirteen More Stories

by

S. P. Elledge

Assemblage: Thirteen More Short Stories

Copyright 2013 S. P. Elledge

Smashwords Edition

for Jonathan, forever

Table of Contents

1. August, Night, Approaching Storm

2. Memories of the Minotaur

3. Coleslaw

4. The Work in Progress

5. Jesus and His Brother

6. June's Child

7. Buck Bartlett: At Home! At Work! At Play!

8. An American Sadhu

9. The Pin Man

10. Recognizing the Stranger

11. Sycorax and Caliban

12. Madame Moitessier's Portrait

13. Radiance
August, Night, Approaching Storm

For this is when we know the darkness best, when fear is the white moth hovering above your open mouth as you sleep, when you awaken after midnight to the pelting of beetles against the screen doors, forty minutes before the storm. The house has been filling with an almost sexual thunder; fever penetrates to the secret bone beneath flesh. These silent rooms haunt you like the rooms of a hotel where you feel the presence of all those who have come before. You await the advance of the storm, feeling the summer night press against the windows. In the distance, the sky blisters with heat lightning, and you wonder at your senseless dread of bicycling boys in the empty streets below. Insects dizzy with flight circle the yellow porch bulb; they fall on their backs down the steps, whirring like lost kites. Are you waiting for the sky to break, for fire from the heavens, for a mystery to be revealed at any moment? We all wait for these things and don't realize it.

Somewhere, possibly in a dream half-remembered, a voice was saying, "I am walking on air, I am walking on air..." The night is holding its breath. A telephone rings—once—and you fight the gasp.

You walk through the gardens where lovers on their benches have separated and are gone. Perhaps they, too, are remembering the high-ceilinged rooms of childhood, an abandoned book in the rain, a doll dropped down an empty well—the sad simple things you have carried with you forever. And you have also waited without knowing for the stranger in the arbor at nightfall, to feel fingers circling the throat, a hot palm sealing the cry. When we are alone at the edge of the day, all things become possible: the abduction, the killing storm, the door which opens slowly, soundlessly on its own. The face of each watch and clock is becalmed, though still you want to hear yourself scream, again and again. The trees are charged with the drone of cicadas expecting wind and wet; but lift up your hand, show your palm so pale—still no rain. In anticipation of greater miracles, why all this longing for things intangible, unnamable?

In the darkness windows hang suspended in space, defined by blue cathode glow, where the mute lips of television actors repeat someone else's name—not yours. You walk, you breathe, you hum that maddening fugue you composed in your sleep. Down the sidewalks in the stilled heat: a telephone rings unanswered in an attic room, a radio plays for dreamers; beneath the streetlights the air is aflame, and clouds simmer white-hot above. There is the fear of forgetting this night, this hour, and the still greater fear of remembering everything.

At corners you wait for autos which do not pass, yet you remain wary of that blue-black coupe which mirrors the moon (or your wan white face?) and slides silent into distance, the perfect horror, leaving your skin chilled and your mouth dry and fists clenched tighter still. You walk and breathe and return to a bed so cool, so empty, thinking: rain rain rain. Afraid of voices which speak in the dark. Of the face white as the moon at your window. Again sensing that terror wafting close on white wings, praying not to close your eyes. When you do close them, your eyes are still watching, still waiting.

Across the deepest and farthest reaches of dreamless sleep arises that wasteland blackened with dying fires and ash-heaps and barbed wire; burned and scratched and bleeding, you pass through smoke and cinders at that anxious hour when the storm is fast overtaking you, when the death's-head moth enters the night-blooming cactus. The rain, you know, will be a hard fall, it will burn. You must seek shelter in that adobe town which describes itself from desert with shadows and wind, where the old blind shaman seizes the iguana's arrow throat and says, "When the sun goes down here, señor, all the women become jaguars."
Memories of the Minotaur

"There are no more deserts. There are no more islands. Yet there is a need for them."

Albert Camus, 1939

"I bet you think this song is about you, don't you?"

Carly Simon, 1972

1. Being an introduction of sorts to educate and enlighten the reader.

We have never really met, the mythical Minotaur and I. Not officially met, at least. And yet we are sworn enemies: I, the faceless hero of my own tale, the tale we resume telling with every bruised and exhausted sunrise that struggles over our prison walls—and he, that miserable mutant, bastard semi-demigod, the famous and fabulous monster we must pity as much as fear.

Oh, call me the great Theseus of the warring nations if you like, but that's truly not how I picture myself. I wasn't the one dictating to the poet or posing for the urns. Only in the military did I pretend to be a killer, a conqueror, or a liberator. The ancient scrolls are no better or reliable than gossip columns. For one thing, I have always been a coward, a nobody, too, though never fallen in combat; perhaps the most crippling thing to happen to me was a severe case of undulant fever. My—or his—helpless Ariadne, the half-deranged half-sister I supposedly abandoned but never met, either, simply could not have existed the way she does in opera or oils, or if she did, she never offered so much as a yarn to me. Why I was sent here only the gods could say—and contrary to popular belief in Edith Hamilton, I've never known anyone who's spoken to a god. You might even say I no longer believe in gods at all, for I've been here so long I no longer believe the opening installments of my own story. When I try to remember what life was before I entered this abysmal labyrinth it's like trying to remember what life was before birth. Certainly something happened or was happening, but it's impossible to say what or how. For me now, here alone is life, now and always. Not even the philosopher could convince me that I can convince myself that I do indeed exist outside these crabbed, harried lines I scrawl devout as a penitent in my little Moleskine notebooks.

Still, I have imagined certain things with such clarity and detail that they sometimes seem like actual memories, like real snapshots fallen from a fictional being's wallet. They belong to a future concordance, assembled tear-and-patch no doubt by scholars who would not be able to identify me in a police line-up but who will say they knew exactly what I fantasized when I lay naked and alone in my bunk or what I ordered at the Double-Axe Bar the day I turned twenty-one. But it is only you, my Moleskine, faithful blackskin companion and only possible reader, to whom I devote these perhaps falsified, perhaps sincerely recovered yet imaginatively embellished recollections. Will you carry these humble notations far from me and into the future while I retreat even further into the past?

Picture with me then a phantom ship in my dreams, or if you like, my memory: a swift sleek Attic galley, I am sure it should be—and then mounting waves, thunderheads, a vengeful squall, yellow bluffs, red sands, rough land, months and years of walking deserts and plateaus and scrublands and riversides, until... Well, was it a shipwreck? Or was the shipwreck no more real than my birth? If you were to wander as long and hungry as I have, you too might question if this stone in my hand were black quartz or a cockatrice's egg or, alas, merely sand I dribble onto the hard ground.

2. A further study of one's private mythology, fully illustrated.

In my aloneness I have invented many memories to comfort and entertain myself; I begin with a few from youth and its melancholic hours of study and solitary torments of the flesh. First I should tell you that I had been adopted at a late age from the orphanage and then only because I showed promise as a rhetorician. My new mother hated me, my father spoiled me, I was the center of constant squabbles, but I suppose I can save all that for other stories. Soon enough the solution was to pack me off to boarding school. There, I was admired only by teachers, and then only begrudgingly. The Minotaur and I were in the same year, so it would seem, at this gymnasium, me always snub-nose to parchment, he reclining like a senator at a brothel among the benches, chewing his cud, spitting with irritation when the lecturer asked a question concerning the shortest distance to the moon or the history of the antediluvian and chthonic races. He took no notice of me, of course, this idol of schoolboys, soon the most powerful quarterback of the intramural battlefield. The teachers and I despised him for the way he mocked the odes, for his easy way with the handsomest of youths, the indolent charm in his gait and insolent twitch of his tail, for how he would saunter across campus with a jug of ouzo from his rich parents and a dirty poem he'd plagiarized under his arm and all the world to spear on his nascent horns. Most of all we hated him because he ignored us: the ugly, ungainly, or old.

Austerius, Junior (as he was placed in the ledgers and yearbooks) or just plain Aussie (no one dared call him anything but then) would taunt the pubescent underclassmen, when he noticed them, by acting the bull at a bullfight, charging them from around corners or sneaking after them across a paddock like the punch-line in a pastoral anecdote. They would shriek and run, those unctuous sissies on the junior varsity would hoot and applaud, and he'd accept the tiara of buttercups tossed over his forelock in a game with secret and suggestive rules of order. I remembered when "Aussie" was somewhat younger but no less cunning or agile and how I had once even torn his photographs from the school paper and pasted them upon my wall, where my many certificates of scholarly excellence should have hung. (All came down as soon as I saw how spectacularly he flunked that year's exams and still advanced with the rest of us.) No one had ever dared to question his heritage, though we all knew his very wealthy, very blue-blooded parents had separated at his birth and his mother was the object of several cruel stories whispered among us smaller but cleverer boys. He had been a late transfer to our dormitory, probably expelled from a larger and more prestigious academy for colorful crimes the rest of us could only long to commit in our prayers.

Once I was assigned bucket-boy at a wrestling meet. I suppose I was being punished for something, though it is hard to imagine what I, a punctually perfect student with the highest marks, could have done to incur such a fate–nevertheless, there I was, slopping and mopping and moping. It was long after the last grapple and I thought everyone had gone home, but as I was collecting the last of the towels I saw his steam-obscured form sitting on a bench at the end of the shower-room, bulky head bowed over his large hands and large knuckles, which he'd apparently scraped during some scuffle in the game. He was fumbling with a makeshift bandage torn from a towel. If you l-like, I stuttered, daring to come closer and kneeling before him with a bottle of some miracle emollient, I c-could... Suddenly he was looming over me, sweat-dripping and naked as Hermes but for a simple strap.If you like! he bellowed at me, seeing me for the first time in our lives and seizing me by the shoulders with just the tips of his fingers, as if I were nothing more than an undersized rasher of bacon. You'd like that wouldn't you? he said with an enormous laugh which echoed against the tiles and porcelain, and thrust his loins (how well I can still picture the red "Titan" logo on the waistband of his supporter) to within an inch of my trembling lips. I remember too the stained white corrugated fabric of his pouch and the smell like the smell of cattle too long in the stable and how he shoved my face downward, but I was instantly sick from the stench and he was so disgusted with my amateur performance that he'd already been long gone by the time I dared once more to look up from the puddled floor.

None of this could be true, of course, for as you remember we've never met. I invent these memories just to keep myself sound and sober, perhaps, in an effort to find my right place in what we'll for sanity's sake call history. In the interest of accuracy I shall henceforth remain diligent to every nuance of time and its deceptions. That faint brush on my bare shoulder might be just a monarch's saffron wing and then again maybe it is his fiery snort as he approaches...

3. Herewith until further delay a summary description of the labyrinth itself.

This vast Daedelian construct is not at all what it seems: once upon a time I scaled a granite-crowned peak that thrust like a gray fist far above the endless plain I'd been traversing for endless months and looked down like a god upon the landscape far, far below, arranged and executed exactly like those unnatural views seen from the clerestory windows and minarets of an Old Master's painting; you know the ones–the sunstruck Tuscany of a Fra Filippo Lippi, the faded forests in the Lombard da Fabriano's frescoes, the aquamarine summits and rocky crenellations seen beyond the Gioconda's hushed Florentine balcony. Below me, meandering throughout the hills and valleys, I could see the myriad broken paths I had followed or been lost upon in my search for a village, an oasis, a seaport, anywhere I could escape from my aloneness and my fate. But there were no signs of campfires or smokestacks from my lookout, just this topographical conundrum of dead-ends and false starts, narrow canyon trails that lead only to the edge of storm-rattled chasms, old roads that lope across fields for days in one direction and then lug you along like a stubborn pachyderm toward another, to no place and nowhere. So, you see, it is a maze, but an ingenious one because it is for all practical purposes invisible to the eye and not at all as obvious as those to be found in a book of optical illusions and a thousand times more complex than any to be found in the heart of a classical garden or where nave and transept intersect in a basilica. Even if I were unwinding a scarlet twine through the twists and turns to find my way back to the half-remembered shipwreck, it would be hopelessly tangled by now. "Lost" is not a strong enough word, for "lost" implies the existence of a home–and home I was no longer certain existed, if it ever had. Though I had already been in this land for eons and was prepared for any disappointment, the sights laid out below my granite crag filled me with unutterable despair, assuring me that it would be a very unlikely mathematical possibility, if not to say a far too convenient and coincidental plot maneuver, if the Minotaur and I ever were to meet, or even to pass within several leagues of each other in this wide and wretchedly barren countryside.

However it may be or was, I still knew that I would never fulfill my destiny if I did not meet and kill the Minotaur, the bully who had terrorized the corridors of my youth, the scourge of this land, exiled here like myself, a brother to me, the very reason my tale must be recorded–for without him, my opposite and my desire, there was no reason to exist, was there–is there? I know I must slit his throat with the blade I have fashioned myself from naked obsidian, slit his throat and behead him and take the dripping obscenity back to my people and my kingdom. No, there is no question of failure–it is only a matter of finding him before he finds me.

4. In which is encountered an incidence of cowardice, humbly related.

After all I have told you, you would mock me if you heard I might once have been able to extinguish my enemy and my rival as easily as you might squash a bluebottle, and yet it is true. Despite the phenomenal odds, the inhospitable circumstances, I did come across him once... and I failed my own self–and you as well, my faithful hearer, these pages that quaff my ink as indiscriminately as an undergraduate does his tankard. Well, murder might not have been as easy as all that, I have assured myself later–I was within arm's-length of him, it is true, but he is hardly as small and defenseless as a fly and I have surrendered my apocryphal strength to frost and famine. This all happened toward the end of another uneventful day when the sun had played tricks on me–first feinting to the east, then diving toward the west, in a ruse designed to confuse any chance I had of orienting myself to the sea–near the close of another tiresome day I had been scaling an escarpment above a copse of cypresses, when I saw not twenty feet below me, in a sun-splashed break in the foliage, my friend the Minotaur. He lay prone on a grassy sward with dotted pattern of dandelions, very much as cattle will do on a hot day under a spreading oak. His gargantuan head was inclined to one side, great eyes closed, tongue lolling, great velvety nostrils quivering with each intake of breath. His horns, I saw again, were as long as Minoan pottery attests, black as ebony and also burnished with reflections from the setting sun. His spectacularly muscular shoulders, so developed to support his heavy bovine head, were those of a man but as broad and powerful as any ox, and below them his shoulder blades were as wide as a galleon's deck-planks. His limbs, too, were mighty enough to conjure metaphors concerning trees and architecture. But his buttocks–callipygian, awe-inspiring, stupendous marvels of nature and the designs of conniving deities–those were keystones, as it were, upholding this languid monument of fleshly perfection. In other words, even Praxiteles couldn't have bested this creation.

Gazing upon him thus, with more reverence than ever could I have mustered had I been one of those freshmen he would lead to his couch, I felt the sharpened stone cut into my palm and slip from my fingers. All thoughts of bloodlust and revenge left my consciousness, blinded as I was by this new and more brilliant sun. But it was not exactly his masculine beauty alone which had quelled my murderous desires; it was also the feminine play of light upon his cinnabar-colored hair, the coquettish way that evasive light teased and tipped each shaft with a highlight of bronze, and the exquisite trail of shining hairs which led from the architrave of his shoulders, down his serpentine vertebrae to the delta of his coccyx, where the brilliant shadows lost themselves in the mystery of his nethermost region. In his sleep his tasseled tail still switched an occasional gnat. And then in his sleep he turned over! As a ship might heave upon a surging tide, his enormous body shifted and repositioned itself until his massive marmoreal chest faced me and an eventide sun now as much voyeur as myself. For there at last was revealed, unashamed and lustrously illuminated, his prize bull's balls and pizzle–for it was not only his head and tail, I saw now, that was that of a beast. Evidently, too, he was dreaming of someone appetizing (a single seed-pearl glittered on the apex of that porphyritic flesh)–and here I flatter myself to think it could have been me he dreamt of, for after all I was the only other resident of this land, was I not? Who else, then, could be a more immediate object of my Minotaur's passion? (His dimwitted half-sister? I think not!) In his sleep, in his dreams, he grew yet more concupiscently virile and full, and I would say that I might have swooned if I were more the Grundyian sort–in truth, from my perch in the glowering sky, I admit I may have taken matters in my own hands and consummated the act he might not have been able to complete in his own dumb slumber. Now can you blame me alone for not doing soon enough what the oracle said I must do to complete this timeworn tale? I stumbled humiliated into the darkness before his big sad bovine eyes even opened.

4a. An epistolary renunciation of most of the above, effusive and sadly after the manner of a madman.

My Sweetest Ari,

I can still pretend that some miraculous day you might discover this footnote to the chapters of my life here on these sands, if by some unforeseen tragedy you should be deposited upon this inland island, too, and these black books survive wind and wuthering to speak again to a receptive ear. Meeting you here this way may not be as unlikely as it might sound; plot any two people's lives with lines and graphs charted in time and space and you'd be astonished at the mazy web that is drawn. I imagine the reception out here is terrible, were we to have our Nokias again, and so I beg your favor in taking the trouble to read instead these humble words, when I know that not even People or Us could hold your attention for long in days gone past. Come closer. That's a good girl, adjust your tinted contacts, because even without them I hope to make your brown eyes blue.

I suppose you're expecting me to tell you I still love you, even now that I speak to you from the other side of life, but that I cannot do. How can I know what love is? I gave you up, threw you over, left an innocent girl wounded and deceived and so very alone, and perhaps for that reason I am punished by those on high to inhabit this wasteland until my demise at your brother's hands. This is my fate, as certain as if it were set in galleys and published far and wide. I plead for your forgiveness though I know hope is the final, worst vanity. Look back and appraise the past, please—like so many newlyweds, you must admit we hardly knew each other's middle names before we found ourselves sharing the same bed. You were so pretty then (still are?) I hadn't thought of what happens between the first kiss and the last sigh. I was little more than a child myself. What were you to make of me—and what were we to make of our lives? I could never comprehend that a mind like yours could be as convoluted as a triton's shell, as riddled with winding passages and chambers, whorls and coils, and as empty. At my age, how was I to know that your half-brother got all his brains from his father's side of the family? That I needed someone who could tell a hexameter from a handsaw? I longed to thread my careful words through those hollows of your head with the power of poetry or song, and to reach some hidden part of you that could tremble like malleus to incus to stapes with equal passion, but you know precisely what you hear in return when you press your ear to a seashell. And besides, there was that matter of how we put those puzzle-pieces together in between the sheets; from the first run-through nothing seemed to fit or feel right, at least by me...

Scheming already, I told you that inevitably I would be conscripted, that indeed I could be stolen away by the government at any time, that even my nine-stone of flesh was fine for the fodder; I told you a lot of other lies—but the truth is I enlisted to escape. You know the senseless wars we were fighting then and are still no doubt fighting. Let me think of how to phrase and not just to parse the truth: I ran away and I did not miss you! I liked the navy; being surrounded by hearty men made a real man out of me at last, and I learned the love of brother for brother. Muscle and sweat, the stink of the latrine and the heaven of a hammock, drunkenness and profanity and all the masculine wonders of the world, these too I learned to love in the navy. For the first time in my life I felt whole, away from the books which had made a weakling of me and the music which had seduced and sickened me. You would like me better this way! I no longer want to write, except in these inconsequential diaries, and I may no longer need to compete. I am certain that if you are reading this now you have already found perchance at least fleeting happiness in life. Somehow by now I know you will have married again; it would not be too late for you, as it was for me. You were only seventeen...

Albeit, albeit—sometimes I wish you were still waiting, perched upon that precipice leaning over the sea when I'd told you I'd gone to buy cigarettes, up there in your microkini and as enigmatic behind your Foster Grants as an Antonioni actress, always pale and always beautiful... In battle, I'd wished I had a creased Polaroid to show my mates on deck, to say, "Now there's your home-front!" Sometimes I wish you were still waiting up there, feeling unloved and unwanted, yes, feeling that briar twisting and twisting around your heart, because I want or wanted you to hurt just as much as... he... hurt... me.

Ari, my lovely Ariadne, you never were born, your legendary beauty never will command pearls or perfume; you will pose for no paparazzi; you are not this year's model or any other's—but I can dream you up on these pages just as I dream up my own past, can't I? Don't forget me.

Signed, Most Affectionately,

T.

5. Following, a series of dramatic tableaux, in the grand vaudevillian tradition.

Among my disorganized memories, that towering cabinet of curios with rusted locks and spidery cubbyholes and warped drawers that nevertheless can spring open with no warning, I raise my old friend Austerius from the half-forgotten mementos now and then: I see him in light as murky and mottled as that of a ferrotype, yet unmistakable even in those dated clothes and slanted tarboosh. In this dusty souvenir, for example, I find him here, in an upscale bookseller's atrium, under harsh halogen light and serenaded by distant and invisible choirs more Mantovani than Monteverdi. It has been not too many years since we both graduated from the barstools and bordellos of higher learning, though I have oddly enough neither seen nor heard anything of him since we were nearly ripened boys. (I will not go here into my tragicomic misadventures as an AWOL art student, a sensitive songwriter, a slam-poetaster, and that series of other failures which invariably devolves into one becoming an angry writer of letters to the editor.) Today I have come here merely to browse those bestsellers written by authors either better or luckier than myself (you be the judge) and perhaps to pluck up an impressionable young four-eyed something-or-other among the aisles, but not–I repeat, not–to join the youths and maidens who just happen to be standing in line over there for the Minotaur to sign what would be the first of his innumerable books.

Nevertheless, there he is–slim virginal volumes stacked before him and restacked periodically by a simpering nymph who presses her décolletage into his Hong Kong-tailored shoulder, their expensive scents mingling and wafting even where I stand far to the side, among the ruined and remaindered. The Minotaur's Montblanc descends like a dive-bomber upon the flyleaves with a lusty swoop and a swirl and I can hear the lovely lasses ask him if it is/isn't true that he thinks true love isn't/is terribly passé and the somewhat more diffident but even lovelier lads beg to have this début intimately autographed "for a friend," though I am sure they are all wondering: bull or bullock? Patron by patron the Minotaur wears a look of amused enervation upon his face, or as much of a look of amused enervation as such a brute might be able to accomplish, and the comely shop assistant lights him a seriously Churchillian cigar and I slam the worstseller I am not really reading back down into the bin.

Here, in a hidden recess I have only lately re-accessed by secret key, might be produced another scenario from out of the terrible, tenebrous past: It is some years later and I have grown used to the magazine covers and theatrical adaptations and awards appearances and reviews that might glow in the dark. "Precious," I say to the few friends I can maintain, or "pretentious" or, perhaps when I'm in the bitchiest of moods, "predictable, contrived, and pernicious." Via world satellite, whenever he holds steady for some infotainment steadycam, he grins and I wince and volley the remote. When that sonorous voice comes sinuous and insinuative over the radiogram, advertising an aphrodisiac or just himself, I whimper and immediately kill the speaker. Where his billboards loom I flee like a villager from an erupting Vesuvius. "Poseur!" I yelp to anyone within earshot. Inevitably, when he fronts his "post-rock" band (behind an antique mini-moog, in clockwork codpiece and snapping a riding crop like an irate Griffith or de Mille), I add, "cliché," "derivative," and with great finality, as if slamming shut the Lindisfarne Gospels themselves, "also unlistenable." I watch from afar with the rest of the world as the goddesses and groupies come and go, whistling a bolero, as it were, queuing for any quick fook or foodle they can get. The final straw: a positively pornographic foldout in the bachelors' design magazine of choice–his airy cliffside Gehry above the Aegean. Is it any wonder I want to erase him from history, to destroy him so completely it will be as if her never existed? But I promised a real moving picture, and here it is, as permanently blazoned in my mind as an instructive vignette in colored glass in a chapel window:

I have stayed up too late in the overpriced, over-starred hotel's lounge, in a touristified foreign capital where I am new and just as unknown as anywhere else I've traveled in search of love or inspiration or maybe just something as prosaic and humbling as an overseas correspondent's job interview. Perhaps the city is Wahran, perhaps it is Ottawa; probably it is neither. There is no one in this room or this entire province, I have slowly come to realize, who would even care to learn to spell my name, and I am exhausted from a round of museums and galleries (where the best of this place's culture was looted long ago) and bistros and boutiques whose exchange rates have nearly brought me to the point of begging or worse. In the smoke and gloom, made blearier by too much brandy-and-Benedictine on an empty stomach, I see the old familiar form hunched over a fancy Utrecht sketchpad, coarsely replicating the angles of a few lingering habitués from the turret he commands in the darkest corner. (Obviously he would soon take the art world by storm, as he had all else.) By this time he has affected the fashionably minuscule Menshevik spectacles and the glistening pomade in his fashionably retro-Presleyian pompadour. His clothes are as always as meticulously bespoke as he is meretriciously well-spoken. Just seeing how perfectly and artificially assembled he is, I should know better than to go any further. Drink however has made me bold as the legend I never was, and so I approach his little table on sailor's legs and thrust my shot-glass toward him. "Hey! You! Minotaur!" I shout at him above the roar of the air-conditioning vents. "You pretend you don't remember me, don't you?"

Heavy lids unshutter to assess me, this drunken fool bobbing three feet before him, spilling warm liquor down his already soiled trouser-front. He gives what I assume is a negative shake of his trendy asymmetrical Vandyke and hunches back over his charcoal and one-hundred percent recycled cotton-rag paper. I remain where I am, feeling as if I am swaying on a tightrope far above him and the rest of the mocking onlookers below, and dare to seize his nearest horn (where has my drink gone?) both to balance myself and to look him straight in the eyes. That is the frame you must freeze in your mind, your memory, as I have. His eyes, I see for the first time, are not those of an animal's, but very human, very vulnerable, pale polished blue moonstones–and a bit bloodshot themselves. But his muzzle and teeth are those of a beast's, and they snarl with contempt as only a beast could. He holds my gaze and speaks at last, in a thrice-removed accent he's picked up from others of his phony continent-hopping literati: "Pardon me, sir, I do not know you. We have never met. And I advise you to depart me before I call security." With that, he thrusts me away from him with a toss of his horns and I go somersaulting back against the sticky carpeting, back onto the wet pavement outside, back into the mildewed sheets of my insomniacal bed in a much cheaper hotel in a much less brochure-friendly neighborhood of that Michelin fraud of a foreign city...

Tear out that last page! None of that ever happened, I confess, you who would be my Father Confessor. Couldn't, wouldn't happen like that, except perhaps under another proscenium in another world's theater. Would chance have ever been so slickly stage-managed? Dialogue have been so obviously scripted? Forgive me. And turn now from this imaginary zoetrope's dizzying window and look through my myopic stereopticon instead: a far more static scene, certainly, but with truer perspective.

I am up late again–here you can mouth that luscious but somehow lurid word, lucubration, with its echo of a more common midnight vice–up late not at my desk but in my bed, laptop on a board across my knees, like Marat in his bath, rewriting once again the epic sonnet-cycle that will surely change the world. As would have my epic novel, had I ever completed it, or my epic short-story collection, had it ever found a publisher. Have I mentioned that all of them are dedicated to an Ariadne who never existed but is the only person who could ever love me? The Givenchy-gowned ghost I used always to meet and lose again at cocktail parties and cotillions? What you need to know about my immediate surroundings is minimal, and mostly aural because it is darkest night: the familial purr of the warm laptop, a refrigerator too close at hand that rumbles like the subway car a thousand feet below, an echo chamber of a courtyard outside with its chorus of tomcats, the couple next door battering our adjoining wall either in love or anger, and underneath it all the soprano ostinato of a car-alarm which has been sounding since the dawn of time. My outmoded LCD screen gleams with cold fire in the darkness, awaiting its tutelary genius to kindle the flame, but my dictionary's all dried up and I feel wordless as a basenji. At such times as this, I do what only seems natural: my hand lingers over the tremulous keyboard, I feel the anxious electrons dance in my fingertips, I taste my own bitter tongue, squint my eyes moleishly, then feel myself pulled into the nefarious netherworld of the universally omniscient everlastingly ubiquitous interweb. Like one who has been hexed, I am led to the Minotaur's website in just four magic clicks, though I swear that was not my destination tonight at all; I was only going to check the weather in Knossos.

His website is a labyrinth of links and false links, dead links and slow links and hidden links, all of which inevitably only link back to the hypnotic homepage itself. Like a bird bound within an invisible but intricately, ingeniously designed cage, I am forced to make calling-card stops at his publisher, his publicist, his press agent, his personal assistant, and even his personal trainer, but keep landing home again. Mouse over his portfolio of headshots available for use by booking agents and lifestyle editors and bookstore managers, scroll down for a sampling of the Flash animation and Java code he does "to relax" in his spare time, cursor back to find audio-video-textual downloads to enjoy on your iPod or iBook, gratis. Here, too, is his digital forum, open to pseudonymous sycophants and anonymous "trolls" alike: more pages of maddeningly mystifying chatter than a dozen Compton-Burnetts. His webcam is date-stamped six months prior, frozen in time (a hairy shoulder, a joystick, perhaps the radiant tip of a horn all I can make out in the tiny window), but his blog is current with details, if you are as adept at reading between the lines as I am, of whom he has recently bedded and whom he's bedding now and whom he will no doubt bed before long. (Like as not these reports are updated by some long-suffering ghostwriter.) The red carpets he has stamped upon! The runways and catwalks he has stalked! The film festivals and Lollapaloozas! The absolute crap! He names no names but makes it clear whom exactly he slanders by obliquely mentioning their latest browlift or multileveled option or divorce. Despite myself I am impressed; he's quite egalitarian in his tastes and doesn't mind an occasional has-been, wannabe, or never-was. His canned observations are witty and concise and inventive and charmingly self-deprecating, and I hate him now more than ever. "Remember, I'm always just around the corner," a banner at the bottom of each page reminds us–and with a double-left-click on a thunderbolt trademark, I am far from home, homepage, and the present tense, damned to wander forever this madman's mapface. Hark, here is Helios astride his shining juggernaut, sundering the tender morning mists once again!

6. Herein a further exploration of the labyrinth, including an important discovery.

The randomly scattered ironical poppies amidst disconsolate lavender fields one could only call Flaubertian, nostalgic Chekhovian orchards long past their prime, Kafkaesque ramps and ramparts which reach toward unreachable heights or sickening abysses, sun-drenched vineyards abandoned by Calvino, gardens overburdened with Shakespeare's myriad flowers, endless deserts even Cervantes would find too repetitive, dismal Hawthornian glades haunted by wraiths and demons in wimples and snoods who are not really there: it shouldn't have taken me so long to realize that the Minotaur's labyrinth was actually a library–for aren't all libraries labyrinths? (Stop thinking what you're thinking, my smart-alecky Moleskine; I refuse to sully that blind Argentine curator's good name here.) To continue: And what more awful prison than a library, trapped in other people's invented worlds on one side, hemmed in on the other by too much scholarship and erudition, choked by the book-dust and helpless before a bastillian fortress of information–cyclopedias and glossaries and compendia and indices and codices and thesauri and lexicons and almanacs and atlases and all manner of crumbling archives documenting prehistory, history, and even histories to come, knowledge that will confine you and incapacitate you and corrupt forever. By my infernal librarian's double scimitar, I vowed to read my way out from this hell, and thereby to outwit him with my learning, to write sentences more daring and opulently informed and spellbinding than those he ground out sausage-like to the delight of half-witted critics everywhere. Know your world and you shall conquer it. Take the bull by the horns, eh? I will burn this library like Alexandria's Erostratus before it witnesses my own demise.

I am getting ahead of myself, though. My somewhat nitpicky p'tit ??? carnet noir informs me that the abovementioned is just an overextended if not gaseously bloated literary device, alas. The landscape is a library of sorts, it is true, as all landscapes are, but the only books I have found dropped in my path are his works, starting with that slender collection of collegiate poetry (which somehow gained him instant success); continuing with the hastily assembled juvenilia; the autobiographical first novel; the ambitious second; the tour-de-force of a trilogy; more novels and yet more novels, long-listed then short-listed then Whitbreaded and Bookered then Pulitzered to death ("After the Nobel," I once heard you quoted, surely only half in jest, "it will all be coasting"); the selected stories; the one-acts and five-acts; the matching pastel-jacketed volumes which could only be housed on the "belles lettres" shelves; the elegantly spare penseés; the profligate diaries; the revised reprints; the philosophy of, the art of, the wit and wisdom of... and so on and on as he taunted me with his illimitable talent, bound together and kept apart as we were in this mad maze of overly picturesque mountains and coolly deceptive valleys, fells and fens, savannahs and swamps, mesas and moraines....

Did I once say this country resembled those faraway vistas in quattrocento paintings? Could I have also compared its lonesome barrens to a surreal Tanguy or the long view toward the haunted horizon as one in a de Chirico, or even claimed its jungles were dreamt by the Douanier Rousseau? Assign those latter-day comparisons to a later epoch and allow me presently to amend another layer or two of varnish to my Renaissance pentimento, for these days when I look out across this land from a breathless summit I've obtained with creaking knees and callused feet, I see something more like one of those fantastic creations of Arcimbaldo; you remember, nobility's portraits composed of fruits and flowers and vegetables–a zucchini a nose, a cauliflower an ear, daisies for eyes, and so forth. Seeing what I today saw in the world spread below me neat as a blueprint, it strikes me the way the discovery of perspective must have amazed the Medici, and with but a little of that anamorphosis Leonardo employed, I could make out the carven headlands with their hornlike twin peaks, the blue buttes shouldering their way into the stony backbone of the sierra, a valley like an immense groin, another range of cloud-grazed hills majestic as the thighs and legs of my compatriot the Minotaur. He is the labyrinth itself, you see, and so I have never met him because he has always been here with me; he is all around me, he is in all things, the enemy of life, the eater of time, boredom and inertia, death.

Decades, centuries intrude here. Only after long, long ages, after iron turned to bronze and bronze turned to gold and then that gold was transmuted hard and lusterless into the incipient senility of the new stone age, when we were both much older and humbler than when we had entered this godless land, did it occur to me one early blue evening as I leaned against the colossus of a beech-tree and scanned the bucolic sheep-decorated horizon-line Constable might have borrowed from Capability Brown, only then did it occur to me in my welcome weariness that these books were strewn like place-markers and sign-posts not to dazzle me with their worldly profundity, but to enable me to know the lapidary contours of his mind–yes, of course, at last, and therefore, to understand him, to understand and know him, my Minotaur, my comrade Austerius, and so, I suppose, to sympathize, even to love. His poems, I must admit, have grown like classic ruins more beautiful with the decades. They have learned to sing and soar with a nearly divine afflatus. Flattering myself, I kneeled beneath the tree and asked the flocks: Could they have all been addressed to me? Was I akin to that sloe-eyed lady of the sonnets? To sweet "W. H." himself? (Or was this the mere solipsism of old age, more pathetic than that of any adolescent?) Had I still been young, I might have cried, I might have promised to beg his forgiveness for pursuing him with even more murderous intent than he pursued me. Instead I took out my Moleskine and began these notes I faithfully record here, starting first with the following arguments I must now make:

7. Argumenta: several and diverse reasons why the Minotaur could never exist. Concise.

Let us examine the myth at last: that albino steer from the Sea of Crete who impregnated Queen Pasiphäe was sent by Poseidon—or was the prize Poseidon himself? If so, Poseidon would know why he himself couldn't have been sacrificed by an awestruck Austerius the Senior, and so the Minotaur might not have been born a monster, but a handsome half-god Poseidon might have been happy to call son and Ariadne a truly charming brother. And the queen might not be thought kinky but blessed, even if her husband seethed.

Be that as it may, in constructing the labyrinth, how did the workmen avoid becoming lost in it themselves? We cannot expect simple slaves from Tripoli to navigate such an architect's perplexing floor-plans. Nor could we expect that no matter how complex and deep the prison, the citizens could sleep easily at night, completely assured their bogeyman would never, ever escape. Considering the creature's terrible strength coupled with its human intelligence, how then was the Minotaur placed within the heart of his prison? Did the seismic thunder under the palace's floors, like a stampede of hooves in Hades, remind the king and queen too much of their guilt and thwarted desires to ever forgive the gods? Would then the queen still have loved her son despite it all? Did she ever go in the middle of the night to visit him and perhaps hold out a sugar-cube in her palm? How do we know the Minotaur even cared to eat the seven maidens and seven youths he was fed every nine years? Would there not have been better uses for them? What sustained him between these feasts? What saved him from the utter loneliness, the ennui, the monotony? Was he then driven insane—or always insane? I suspect what has come down to us in the mouths of storytellers were once all lies one could say the "hero" Theseus used to propagate, just to make himself look good. Now, only after many trials, am I ready to admit this.

But mostly the Minotaur couldn't have existed because no one was around to take notes and "word of mouth" or the "oral tradition" is no more than a very prolonged and very tedious game of "Chinese whispers." You just can't trust what has come from the likes of Homer or Herodotus and those other wise-guys; they were first and foremost courtyard entertainers, after all, before history had a name for itself and fiction found its proper masks. The literary forgeries of Septimius telling us of the glories of Minos were more real than the "real thing" because the real things were lost, never seen at all except in shattered sarcophagi or in miniature toreadors of ivory or terra cotta. A story that is never witnessed cannot be said to have really happened; a memory that is false has all the weight of one that is true. When my notebooks are full and there are no more pages herein to flatter, then my own story ceases, as well. It will be just as if I need no longer breathe or ever breathed.

He couldn't have existed because he never knew or cared to know that I existed.

8. Incidents possibly transposed from a nightmare: perhaps believing our hero is another, the Minotaur Himself speaks. A phantasie in waltz time.

Oh yes, I remember my hare-brained sister speaking all those nights on her diabolical cell-phone; she'd pace the tiled and carpeted floors of our parents' villa, now loud now softer now loud again as she roamed though the torchlit parlors and along the loggias, up and down the many Piranesian stairways of that place, across the courtyards and porches, from wine-cellar to maids' quarters, from gatehouse to carriage-house (palaces are of course labyrinths, too), that silvery rhinestone-studded beetle pressed to her peony-petal cheek, talking talking talking to someone, the same person every night, I was dead-certain—and I was consumed with equal parts rage and curiosity—for I knew it must be only one person, a man, and who was he? How could I find and kill him? From my terrace-side bedchamber I listened for her footfall and prattle, the echo of her coloratura against the ivy-smothered garden walls. In desperation, in frustration I would throw down my ink-blackened calamus or Firbank's latest, trying to decipher where the next day's assignation might be or what color panties she told her listener she was wearing. (Aldehyde green, aniline mauve, Herr Fuchs's finest fuchsia... ) Our parents, reconciled after years apart, watched late-night cable movies in their tower room, oblivious of this drama in their midst. Why would she barely give me a grimace and a grunt at the breakfast buffet and nothing kinder than a sneer on the patio when she passed me, while her secret boyfriend, the one our parents forbid her to have or to see, she could speak whole Vedas of inanities to? Yet I knew there were only words to bind her to this illicit lover of hers, for her days were spent as cloistered as a novitiate's, guarded by gigantic imported Nubians even I could never manage to bribe.

And all along it was you! At what debutante ball or ice-cream social did you two meet, under cover of muslin-and-crinoline propriety, her duenna undone by champagne and a sweaty frug? Had I guessed which one was you I would have broken your pretty little neck. She looked like Brigitte Bardot at her buxom best then, when she sang for Serge, and likewise Ari should never have settled for anyone less resplendent than myself. How I wanted her! No one had a waist as whip-thin as hers, no one wore silken kilts cinched in so tight or Gaultier brassieres so pointy they could gouge out an unwanted suitor's eyes. We don't have the same father, I told her once at one of these events, it's all right to be seen dancing close, and she smacked my snout hard with a lacquered fan. The travesty of seeing all those ephebes swarming around that girl, looking as kid-glove soft and gilt-edged as separate bound annuals of the social register, all uncut and equally indistinguishable! I never met you, indeed, but I knew your type, the type she liked: soft boys better with words than their hands, mama's boys who would want to dress her up in gowns by Adrian and hats by Edith Head, boys who were not like me. Who were not me. A year later, after the elopement and your abandonment (what was the matter? gone all nelly in bed?) she married again, quick as that, to the alcoholic preacher from Attica. Finished at last with my precocious degree, summa cum laude, I had left home for good by then, off to places where they appreciated monstrous talents such as mine all the more and the money was good and you could pick your vices and victims as easily as grapes off a vine. I told myself I had forgotten her.

Something happened between your leaving her and my leaving it all, however, and I might as well spill my glistening guts now. Metaphorically, that is. The second marriage wasn't as quick as all that; there was a sultry estivation there when we, demi-siblings, found ourselves living within the same high stone walls once again, before that holy man she met at the local wine-shop laid his healing hands on her. Our parents were off taking in the Orient, incidentally, if that matters, and the servants I had dispatched so no one else could trip my snare... Do you know what it is like to see a hummingbird after the first frost, long after her family and friends have all bought first-class tickets south to some more tropic poolside? How such a bird will flutter in circles and beat itself against the hot-house's plate-glass windows until her heart that beat two-hundred times a minute, beats one-hundred-seventy-five, then ninety, then thirty... Well, that's how Ari was that last summer between my semesters at university, when she stopped hearing from you and she was at last drained of all tears and sank into that sleepless sleep naturalists call "daily torpor," rousing herself only for tortured moonlit somnambulations, my voice at her keyhole acting like a fakir's flute upon a cobra. It is true that I preyed upon her weakness, made her believe you had never loved her and she had never really loved you, but then I really did think I might yet be able to shock her out of her stupor. I pretended I was doing this out of kindness, like a good doctor. I would cure her by ousting you from her system. So, you might as well know, I eventually subdued her and her hummingbird heart, worked my way into her bed with such skill it would never seem like rape. Still, I suppose it was. Still, I was well-used to having my way and didn't know the meaning of remorse. Still—you want to know what she told me that one night I had her pinioned against her headboard? That she thought you had married her just because you were really in love, at a comfortable distance, with me! I roared so hard she had to pummel and scratch my chest before she ran all boo-hoo-hoo from the house. It came as no surprise to me that very soon after, as so many people do, she would turn to religion and the mysterious rites of a man who could promise her more than either of us ever could: the opportunity to see and converse with the divine. No surprise, for, you see, when I am lying there on sheets turned cold after my latest conquest, I too often wish I could look someone like my father up in heaven in the face and say, "This is all your fault!"

9. Penultima. A valedictory, a destruction, a warning.

When I was new here, when I was still new to the world myself, without so much as peach-fuzz on my cheek or a cloud in my eye, I wrote these violent words down so I should never forget them. Now every hatch-mark seems false. Goodbye, then; I should drown my books. I should burn them as an offering to some gentler god I haven't heard of yet. Instead I shall now happily tear the delicately lined leaves from this my last Moleskine and, making a paper airplane of each one, sail them into the brisk austral wind that even here, far from Crete, perpetually blows up hot and arid from lands off the map and toward the middle of earth and the Cyclades, toward those peaceful city-states I once loved, toward a childhood I no longer remember, toward home and oblivion.

9a. Envoi.

Curse all wars. Curse sacrifice to fatherland and noblesse oblige. Curse the Athenians and Minoans alike. Curse flags, weapons, and every treaty, broken or not. Curse all architects and oracles. Curse the myth-maker, the bookseller, and the blind public. Curse The Children's Illustrated Tales from the Greeks. Curse the Phalarian bull and its many martyrs. Curse Sir Arthur Evans for what was better left unexcavated. Curse The Bull from the Sea and all its inaccuracies. Curse Fellini's Satyricon. Curse Ariadne auf Naxos, curse Picasso, curse Señor Cortázar, and curse Señor Jorge Luis, too. Curse, curse, curse God and all gods.

Alas, we shall never meet, my eternal rival and impossible lover the Minotaur and I.
Coleslaw

Things are of course not always as they seem: the two very blonde girls in matching sleeveless polo shirts and fixed with identical pouts were not twins; that man who looked nothing like them with his coarse black hair and Mediterranean complexion actually was their natural father, not even an uncle and certainly not a kidnapper; and this quaint Bavarian inn with its exposed rafters and tankards of pewter or pottery lining the mantel was no more real than the fireplace with its electric yule log. Das Eatenhaus was wedged between Y-Pay-Mor Shoes and Slipped Discs Records at the Carl Sandburg Mall in a far western suburb of Chicago–so those were not authentic fräuleins, either, but local teenagers working summer jobs. What, however, was unmistakable and not open to misinterpretation was that the man and his two young daughters were having a miserable time.

The girls, sisters eleven and twelve years old, were silent as they picked at their food, but that does not mean much communication was lost between the two. Like twins, they had a nearly psychic bond; a nudge could tell a story, a glance could speak volumes, as people say. Each infinitesimal move their father made, whether it was the way he might lower his aviator glasses or the sound he made while clearing his throat, a covert warning or implied approval, was immediately semaphored to and decoded by his daughters–all of this done of course without a word, but with no loss of subtlety. For instance, the way he slid his empty chinette plate away from him now, so that it just touched the edges of both their plates, was a powerful message neither girl could ignore: Hurry up and finish, you know we promised Sheilagh we wouldn't take all damn day. Tracy's right eye in this case met Tammy's left–a familiar, mutual, instantaneous gesture that said it all–their hatred for their father, their utter contempt for his tactics, their loathing of this food–and yet nothing was revealed to the outside world, not even to their father, who now belched gently and dabbed at the corners of his Mediterranean moustache with his oversized handkerchief. And why, a second glance added, can't he use a napkin like everyone else and why is he always so awful and disgusting when Sheilagh isn't around?

At least the other people in this overlit restaurant were too busy eating their heaps of food to notice them; the other customers were mostly overweight middle-aged or older women who seemed to actually like sauerkraut and sausage. The girls could not stand to look at these women–they thought how Sheilagh might compare them to certain farm animals–or their own plates, but stared instead out the big windows, which tinted the hot August afternoon a hazier blue and afforded a fine panorama of the Sandburg parking lot, now half empty, just a few shoppers returning to their sedans and station wagons, filling backseats with packages and wriggling toddlers. All those people out there were so fat, too, everyone at this stupid mall was–Tracy, the elder, would have said this to her sister aloud if their own paunchy-around-the-middle father were not present; but then Tammy was probably thinking the same thing. Like Sheilagh, they abhorred the presence of fat, the profusion of fat, the very idea of fat. They lived in a magazine ad world, or would have preferred to, one in which all men were as trim and cute as British pop stars and all women were tall, young, ever-so-thin, perfectly perfectly blonde. Like Sheilagh. Like they would be. Tracy and Tammy often discussed what they might say to Johnny Carson on that show they were never allowed to stay up to watch: Oh, yes, it's wonderful being a model, I'm thinking of singing a hit record or maybe making a movie with Rob Lowe and Molly Ringwald. No way would they ever have children or get a little fat, the way their own real mother had. Sometimes, they had to admit, they were glad she was a long way away, in Akron, in a neighborhood without even a 7-11, with that guy who actually wanted them to call him daddy.

Their father had finished wiping his lips, he'd folded his handkerchief but not put it out of their sight, and now he was meaningfully drumming his hairy fingers against his broad temples. Eat, his dark eyes said behind their prescription sunglasses (the kind that become lighter but never light enough when worn in from outdoors). The girls had managed to swallow the majority of their potato pancakes (take big bites and try not to think of paste), but the coleslaw, of which there was a towering mound, a virtual Everest, on each plate, was impossible–it tasted cool and creamy at first bite, not so bad, but that aftertaste, the sensation of a viscous and acrid abrasion down the length of the esophagus, was too much to bear. It made their eyes water, it made their throats itch. They simply could not go on with this meal, and their lime gelatin and diet cola had already vanished–nowhere else to turn. Well, maybe one more bite or two of the pancakes. Meanwhile, their father's eyes never left them as he fumbled with the pack of Tareytons he always kept beside him–he smoked the brand not so much because he liked them, but because he saved the coupons–for what no one ever knew since they accumulated in shoe box after shoe box and that barbecue grill or assemble-it-yourself stereo receiver or chaise longue-rocker never materialized.

Separated from their father's eyes by the Formica tabletop, Tammy tapped her sister's bare ankle with the toe of her sandal; simultaneously she placed the new white vinyl purse which had been on her lap onto her sister's. The purse was a cheap, hideous one their father had bought them without even asking at one of the mall's discount department stores an hour ago–the idea of it, two girls expected to share one purse, a purse even a nine-year-old would refuse–which is why Tammy had so graciously presented it to her sister. Tracy, with a year more of accumulated wisdom than her sister, should have left it at that, but instead took the purse and set it on the table, directly between their two plates. As if she wanted to remind her father what a monstrosity it was. For a moment, while their father was preoccupied with ripping cellophane with his arthritic fingers, the girls eyed the purse, glaring under the bright fluorescent and utterly detestable–a symbol perhaps of their hatred for their father–and contemplated unlatching its big fake-gold clasp. Inside, they knew already, were nothing but wads of tissue paper, a pretend compact case with no makeup, even, and a sticky red plastic wallet complete with photos of the ugly actors from "Gunsmoke," a show that must have been on a hundred years ago. After a second's hesitation, Tracy moved to open the purse when her father's large, hairy hand descended over hers like a tarantula's and pressed its warm and menacing weight against her frosted glass-chilled fingers. Eyes met again, blue eyes and brown, girls' and father's, so Tracy seized the purse with her other hand and slammed it to the floor, while Tammy slid back in her seat with a huff like air out of a balloon (she knew this would happen) and soon enough kicked the purse back over to her sister's side.

Having finally extracted a cigarette from the pack, their father concentrated on lighting it with one then two then damn three matches (a little damp from having been in his shirt pocket on a sweaty day), and frowned enough to tell the girls how much he disapproved of this purse business. A frown like that, with downward tilt of cigarette and blue smoke coming from his hairy nostrils, was definitely not to be misunderstood or overlooked. Now they would have to scale those mounds of coleslaw immediately, and though Sheilagh might temper any punishment later, it would nevertheless be bad enough on the way home. And still later, in unpredictable ways, when they least expected it, when they wanted to order Domino's or watch Molly Ringwald in "Sixteen Candles" yet again. White flag, for now. Honestly, Johnny, I don't know how I stay so thin–I eat like a pig. Both girls sat up straight, gripped plastic sporks, faced their fate. Their father surveyed them as if he were checking for quality control on an assembly line. Like finicky rabbits, they nibbled at the coleslaw with their front teeth, trying not to taste the cabbage coated with something like mayonnaise, and they spread the slaw around on their plates, if just to give the impression of progress. Tracy and Tammy both knew they might not ever be able to eat it all; even their father guessed that and would not make a scene in this place. As for the scene to come back in the car–well, they would have to take their chances.

But they would receive a short reprieve–their father stood without warning, touched his belt, took the cigarette from his mouth, belched again–and that meant he was going to the restroom. The girls were smart enough not to sigh or relax even one muscle until he turned the corner, searching for Herren. Tracy kicked the purse hard against the chair where their father had been sitting, and for the first time that afternoon both girls giggled–just a little, for he still might hear them. Then their eyes met–as usual, reading each other's minds. The very idea!

These girls, their father thought as he shut the door behind him. Would it have been easier with boys? Boys eat anything, don't they? Back when he was growing up in Wicker Park, long before it started filling up with yuppies and boutiques, they lived by hard strict rules, and chief among them was: Clean your plate. They were so lucky to have, back in the depression, back when twenty-five cents made a quarter, back when we were still on the Southside etc etc etc. His parents had memories as extensive and monotonous as phonebooks. To be honest, he didn't really care what his own girls ate as long as they didn't starve; he just felt it was important for children to learn through commands and limits. Discipline. After he had washed his hands, he stood before the restroom mirror and lit another cigarette–this time on the first match . . . Boys, for instance, they might have shown more interest when he finally got his own franchise; the teenage boys he had working for him were nuts about these new Atari and Colecovision games he stocked, and he sold them almost as fast as he rented movies (VHS and beta). Well, it was 1984. Brave new world, or something. Maybe not a good time to raise kids, what with Russia and crack and all that stuff the girls probably saw on MTV. Tracy and Tammy hardly seemed to notice or appreciate all their nice new things, even the nice new house–a perfectly fine purse from Kresge's wasn't good enough for them anymore. That was Sheilagh, he supposed, stubbing out the cigarette on the rim of the sink. The idea, she'd say to him. What was that supposed to mean? Sheilagh indulged the girls even more than their grandmother had. No wonder they didn't want to live in Akron.

It seemed their father was taking an eternity, and the girls were more than ready to go now. What a bore, as Sheilagh liked to say. This afternoon would never have been like this if their stepmother had been the one to take them Saturday shopping, as she usually did–but she had to go join that jazzercise class. For one thing, she would never have taken them to this tacky mall where their father had his store, but to the bigger newer one further out of town, the one with a fountain and a Marshall Fields and a food court. There, they paid three dollars apiece for potatoes with yummy do-it-yourself toppings–instead of gross-out food like kielbasa and coleslaw. Once Sheilagh had even taken them to a fancy restaurant on the second level (one with candles on the tables and where everybody might have been in church, they dressed so well and spoke so quietly), where she had let them order pretty pink cocktails called Shirley Temples, like ones those actors on "Dynasty" would drink. Sheilagh was so special–even the way she spelled an ordinary name like "Sheila" was special. It was the one redeeming thing about their father–that he had married her. Last time at that same mall, Northgate Plaza, their stepmother had seen to it that their hair was lightened and bobbed just like her own at a place that wasn't a beauty parlor but a beauty spa, run by exotic, maybe foreign men; next time she promised to buy them not one but two of those new Cheryl Tiegs purses at Sears, and outfits to match.

On his way out of the men's room and around the long tables of Das Eatenhaus, their father thought of what he would say to the girls once they were in the car. No more trips to the town pool for a week? Extra chores around the house? It was really inconsequential, their behavior today–in fact, it was probably about the way girls that age are supposed to act, but he was still one to feel every wrong move must be checked. Discipline. Not pampering, not expensive hairdos, nail polish, R movies. But it was more than that–below Tracy and Tammy's every action, every sentence, he felt a stronger undercurrent, a response directed toward him: could it actually be that they hated him? Maybe that was normal, too, something Phil Donahue could understand maybe but not him. He had to admit he had once hated his own father. Very much. As soon as he saw the girls on the opposite side of the room, standing on either side of the table like bookends, and giggling, he'd decided it–no tickets for Duran Duran, after all.

They stood that same way a short while later, waiting at the doors of the Bonneville under the hot sun: hands crossed alike, hair pulled behind one ear alike, a perfect impersonation of the twins their stepmother pretended they were. Smirking at him whenever he turned his back, most likely. Still, they had finished their meals, eaten every lick, so he could say nothing. He flicked out his handkerchief again. It must be ninety-five degrees out. The air-conditioning worked its magic, however, and they glided in arctic coolness down the wide flat shimmering streets–nothing but cornfields here just two or three years ago, he remembered. In the rearview mirror he saw the girls sitting there on the broad corduroy seat (why didn't either of them ever want to ride up front with him?), good girls in clean clothes with a shiny new purse poised between them. The girls stared straight ahead, not even giving each other the occasional nod or sigh, tight in their separate corners, ignoring the old songs on the radio he loved and knew they hated. At least he could deny them WLS and that crap they'd blast on their boomboxes, Cyndi what-was-it Looper and that guy who dressed like a girl. For some reason he felt like a victor, but he wasn't sure exactly why the battle had to have been fought. The bank sign read "We've got the beef," but he missed the temperature. That new development next to theirs, "Meadow Grove" was looking good, though even he had to admit they were stretching it when there wasn't exactly a meadow or a grove in sight.

The Bonneville turned the corner at the strip mall with the tanning salon and nail salon and hair salon and drove a little further, to the house with the largest satellite dish on the neatest lawn in the neighborhood and two girls' pink Schwinns blocking two of the three garage doors. The third bay of the garage was still filled with packing boxes, so he parked in front, next to his wife's new Rabbit. He wasn't going to say anything about the bikes; the girls would know. In fact, before he'd collected his keys and glasses case and carton of Tareytons and big bag of crew socks he'd bought at the outlet store because they were on sale, the girls had hopped out of the car and onto their bikes, and were halfway down the block, racing across the treeless landscape as if on a mission, as if Dobermans were nipping at their heels.

Sheilagh was home, all right, but she was lying on the big cushy couch in the tv room, meditating to a tape on her Walkman. She still had that Oliva Newton-John thing going with the headband and legwarmers, but after two years he had to admit she looked no different than when he'd first met her–at the aromatherapy booth next to the Spencer's novelty store he used to manage. And of course, she smelled good then and she smelled good now–that new perfume from some underwear-maker or actress. Oh, she said with her lips but not her voice when he entered the spacious room with its cathedral ceiling and Palladian windows with their Laura Ashley drapery, but didn't move–she was in the middle of an affirmation. She might be in outer space somewhere, or the Taj Mahal. He kissed her, went to take a Jacuzzi; he needed it after all that walking in the mall.

Later, while he stood with his electric razor for the second time that day at the master bedroom's bathroom window, he looked down over the redwood deck, past the patio, over a corner of the garage. The little Japanese tree they'd planted on the front lawn cast a long twisting shadow over the asphalt in the late afternoon light. The girls were still nowhere in sight, but he could see what might have been Sheilagh, jogging up the street, in the direction of the sports complex. He could see the automatic sprinkler system doing its acrobatic shimmy across the wide lawn. The light was so clear and vivid, he could see right down into the Rabbit and the Bonneville–and saw something shiny white in the backseat there. The purse, wouldn't you know.

Once, a long time ago, back in dirty old Wicker Park, back when the neighborhoods in Chicago were even more finely delineated by race and ethnicity than they were today, he'd wanted a bb gun so badly. There it was, taunting him in the back of a comic book. A boy smiling with his smiling dad and a bull's-eye target. But his parents said no, there wasn't any place to use something like that on these streets, so anyway . . . so anyway he'd had to save over one birthday and one Christmas and one confirmation before he had the money to secretly send off for that gun . . . where was he going with this story in his thoughts, standing here while he shaved? Nowhere maybe, just that the lesson might be you didn't really appreciate something fully until you'd earned it. His parents had been right, there wasn't anything more to shoot at in Chicago than pigeons and starlings, and rats if you were lucky, but he'd never forget that gun . . . Well, the least he could do is get the purse and hang it prominently between the girls' bedrooms on the hall hat-stand, so maybe, somehow . . . something.

It was still at least ninety degrees outside. The sun was starting to set over the old water tower, down where the horse pastures once began–once here meaning less than five years ago. The girls were probably at their friend Jayla's house. They'd better hurry back, or they'd miss out on the takeout pizza he was planning–now, he knew they liked that stuff. And here was Sheilagh, tripping back down the block again, Walkman on, energetic as goddamn Jane Fonda in those workout videos he rented by the score. She'd nag him as always about the cigarette in his hand. But–no–it was one of their neighbors, someone from that large Pakistani or Indian family whose father did something with computers in a new office park nearby. He walked to the Bonneville, gleaming there as brilliantly as if he'd bought it new. Some things are not what they seem, and others are indisputably what they are, and life might never really be a surprise: there was no mistaking the smell of mayonnaise gone bad, of German coleslaw, sealed tight in a vinyl purse, left for an hour or more in a hot car on a hot day in August.
The Work in Progress

Excerpts From Our Author's Notebooks

June 16, 19— Resolved: Today I begin the Big One. Every writer must vie for greatness at some time, leaving his or her indelible ink-smear across the pages of history. Yes—to take the primal plunge! At very least to test the waters of inspiration... after months, years, a lifetime of deliberation. Came up with some scathingly good ideas whilst lathering this afternoon, thinking of Danielle and why she had to leave when she did that awful hour. The mnemonic mirror. My mind is all agog with imagery and impressions screaming like Parnell's banshees to be unleashed from my Waterman: Deafness or madness awaits me if I don't act this instant. So much much much to write! This will make my mark (not like those inane "feuilletons" of the past). Consider posterity, the muses counsel: Throw those bookish wags in the next century a nice big juicy bone to squabble over. Dare I contemplate queues at the bookstalls in, say, a year or two, reviews in all the better reviews? Well, who knows—maybe this time I can make some real money.

"That fateful morning Russ McCoy could not help but conjure up Milly's face in his bedchamber's pierglass. Miss Blaum—as she never liked to be known—was perhaps the prettiest, freshest, most charming deb in Mayfair's smart set those happy years just after the war (when all the world was off on holiday), and no one doubted in the slightest that to top it all off she was, in the now-popular American-inspired argot, 'one swell kid.' All spring he had been watching her in a kind of enchanted stupor, for she was the cynosure of every dinner and dance she blessed with her presence: If she snubbed you or your soiree it would be the final insult—though she seldom if ever did give anyone the "brush-off" because not only did everyone like her (the girls as well as the boys), but she genuinely seemed to like everyone in return. Her Rapunzelian hair had just been bobbed, she now showed her knees (ever-so-lightly dusted with talc), and rumor had it she was intime—but never too seriously—with a host of celebrities from the continent, including one scandalous White Russian pianist. And today, a rapturous day in mid-June, Milly—divine, divine Milly—had asked him, out of a myriad underclassmen, to 'go for a spin' with her in that little silver sedan her parents had just given her for her eighteenth birthday. Already, beyond the blurred bevels of the mirror, he could see himself plucking one of those yellow tea-roses poised in Lalique vases next to the auto's rear windows and adding it to her décolletage when the chauffeur turned away... "

June 17 Wrote twenty-some stinking pages yesterday, might have gone on to complete the whole damn thing if I hadn't been interrupted—though my visitor was not the proverbial Porlockian but a Manhattanite, Mulligan by name, and ten minutes later his wife, friends of friends of friends of Gibbons, my agent. Crashing bores—albeit the wife (Chloe or Cleo) is dishy enough. We ended up at some beastly café on the Rue Brassai, talking 'til dawn, lubricated by highballs and gin fizzes. Felt the wifey's knees once or twice—I think. Revealed my latest project to them, read the first chapter aloud. She liked it, not Mulligan, who's a bit of a bounder but savvy to all things Moderne. Says it's strictly those-eyes-those-lips Sunday supplement stuff. Yours truly inclined to agree in this cold dawn of objectivity, I'm afraid. In fact, it is pretty horrific—can't believe I got carried away with such short-pants tripe, staring into my shaving glass and thinking of Danielle's knees, wrists, et alia. Vowing never to complete anything unless I have utter Jesus-Joseph-and-Mary faith in it through and through, I've decided to alter my methods and approach thoroughly. In short, to nip that canker in the bud and repot—that is, replot. Sharpen your nibs, o future criticasters and poetasters!

"On a soft and slow-waking, drizzle and mist morn in June with the hushings and shushings of sibilant sea-waves lisping in the gray distance, Buck McCoy emerged from his chrysalid bedclothes and yawned, scattering the phosphorescent nymphs of his dreams in the pale aureate light: rosebud lips, so it seemed, implanted a lingering fare-thee-well kiss on his nape, tickling and tempting him—though that was only a housefly (bitter charade) which he sent off abuzz toward the door left ajar after last night's heave-ho into the hay. He palpated his chin, anticipating the frothy coolness of sea-foam lather and slick steely slide of a straight-edge, followed by the quick revue of cold tap, warm towel, and talcum. Before the tonsure, though, he would ring up Milly regarding their rendezvous in her new automachine (visions of the still and stately gardens of her country cousins' manor gliding silently by in the rear-view mirror); yes, her highly polished little Beaufoy, a pure automated joy, which he loved to see gleaming like a jeweled scarab in the summer sun... "

June 21 Wouldn't you have guessed it, this time I was well into a Socratic dialogue between B and M stuck in a lift at Harrod's when the rat-faced concierge knocks and says I've got a ring-me-up; it's Boylan (this long after twelve-strokes) about the farewell party for Sheila and Lynche. He was in bed with a girl—maybe two. (Three? Not even him!) Seems there's a problem with the catering. Can't get alligator pears this season at any price. What a bore. Then he puts one of the girls on the line—asks is it true there are no snakes in Eire.

At least not since Boylan left, I say. Later in the a.m., hours later, we ambulate down to Montparnasse to bother Carruthers. Did the usual rounds. A toast to my new novel, his new novel, Boylan's, Mulligan's, et cet. Then very tight to the library to look up a few nagging trifles in the O.E.D. Back very late shepherd's pie with the waxed paper wrapping sticking to it, begged from Sheila. Ate and reread my opening pages, getting sicker all the time, uncertain which was more rancid: pie or prose—just can't abide by that phoney, tony tone at all. Such a falsely charming smarminess might be acceptable for a lady novelist, but not me. Carruthers is right—I've got to consider the loggia as well as the loges and conduct from the pit.

" 'Zounds, would you check the clock!' Buck exclaimed aloud to himself when he finally opened his eyes and observed the mantel. 'I've got to collect Molly at the depot in half an hour!' He lurched out of bed, greeting the bright blue June morning with a grimace. Oi, what a night last night of all nights had been. These boys he knew from the anatomy lectures could carouse like sailors who hadn't been in port for years. If Molly hadn't made certain rather special promises to him concerning today's outing, he would have collapsed right back into bed. He felt his chin—could use one close shave, if there were time. Slap that cream on. Sharpen the blade. Bow to the basin and try not to drown. Get dressed, wear something flash—where the blazes were his yellow braces? Buck yawned again with an ursine stretch, noticing that his shaving strop was missing from top of the bureau. His pal Stevie must have been about helping himself to things again. Ruined simply bloody everything! Maybe he should stay in bed after all..."

June 30 Shame I fell asleep so soon the other night—it wasn't going half so badly as before, if a bit rough 'round the edges. Yesterday a total, total loss—a frightful picnic on the Seine with some aspiring poets—and me the only prosewriter there. Awful silly mixup and a blasted bore besides. All sorts of affectations and theories and pretenses. The ineluctable modality of this and the epiphanal metempsychosis of that. Tried to chat up some buxom poetess with red hair, rather Rosettian, but she thought I meant Verlaine and I thought she meant Vuillard and neither of us could remember that it was really Villiers. Solicited quite openly I believe by a pederast or two. Could strangle my ape of an agent for asking me to take his place at the last minute. Everyone ranting on about the avant-gardists and all that tommy-rot. Some exasperating exchanges. Speaking of which I might as well kick about that opening chapter a tad more. Don't want to sink my heels too deep into the mire before I build a clean stride.But first a drink—or twee.

"Arise and awake, still unto stilled dawn. Embers of remembrance (last night oh!) sparking in the darkling—yes Molly's eyes. An oriental dusk—torchlights, jasmine poppies in those dark eyes. And two three four fingers to the scarlet slash of her mouth, the parted lips, the white whitest teeth, the quick little crimson tongue—and then tongues of flame of desire as she consumes us, gold moons burning burning within moons within moons within moons... And our blowsy frowsy hero leaps full-blown from his beddings, seaborn, earthcursed, anticipatory of a depilatory... ? Oui, oui, a shave—the mirror and the strop and the barbarian edge of the razor. The flesh is. Women are. Again the refrain of Molly's last words last night: Bleeding cats tipped over the milk bottles again..."

July 3 Back again, back again. Last night: Jimmy's—L'argent Noir—Mimi's—The Chicago Caff—La Chauve-Souris Dorée—a bordello or two and hell knows what on earth else. With the Mulligans—Boylan—Danielle that minx that vixen, Carruthers—Madame X (let 'em guess)—Magee's cousins right off the dinghy, Sir and Lady C—a lion-tamer—an aerialist, Count Wotsizname and heaven knows who else. Painted this whole damme town red white blue purple silver gold. Ended up starkers under a tigerskin rug in a corner with some little forgetmenot on the Hemleys' barge. My soul, as a poet once said or should have said (maybe it was me), has plummeted from Quasimodian heights to the Stygian depths of our beloved sewers. Anyhoo, Mulligan was tickled pink, or better, green over my latest revision, which went down a bomb. Helpmeet however didn't "get it" (but prettier this matins than ever—viva the ascent of hemline and descent of neckline). P'raps I am on to something bold and original, if a wee bit rarified, but what the hay as Lynche always says in his broken Americanese. Their suggestions are keen, nevertheless: the locale, characters, plot, theme, everything has to change. This could really be It—The Masterpiece—but it's such a bore bore bore to start all over again. Will simply have to prod and push myself. Still have that "poppy powder" one of those cousins left—inspiration from the enchanted East?

"And our tempest-tossed hero leaps fullblown fullgrown from his beddybye, earthborn, seacursed, yassir that's my baby now baby. (?) Crick-crack-crick in the neckity-neck. Ha-rum. (??) A shave? M'haps. Ha-room. Nosiree don't mean maybe now and how. The strop where's that confounded strop? Calloo-calais. Chortling in his joie de vivre. (???) Yassir! Ecce homo, sans strop but o wot a sharp young blade am me. Il faut laver son linge sale en famille (sign seen tacked above a bedsit bidet) reductio ad absurdum crux criticorum ciao bambina, aloha sonores, auf Widdershins messeurs and masseurs, toodeloo ol' pal, o buddy o' mine. Enio! Meenio! Minio! Mo—ma—mam mum—mom—mother macree..."

July 5 Wicked whacking hangover overhanging me! Memorandum: look up synonyms for "intoxicated" in the Dictionary of Slang. YeGods I do be sick. Louche loup in the loo all forenoon. Lynche and Sheila all to blame—well, we gave the wankers one bravobravura send-off. Chez the Hemley houseboat with everyone under the sun and moon, from dusk to dawn to dust to rust to bust. Whose idea was it to paint ourselves blue and silver and black and what were those Lesbians doing inside the Steinway ("Music For Sappho" by Kandinsky or whoever) and when did those petites chocolats from the Bal Negre arrive and how will the Hemleys ever get the stains off the ceiling? Mass migration to Madame Fifi's or Mimi's—by Jesus and Jove those girls are clever: the things one can do with mustard plasters and éclairs and a chandelier. Some surrealists declaimed manifestos from a balcony and Boylan christened a new cocktail after himself and Madame Ex went off with Lords Whye and Zedd and the Count certainly looks provocative in a peignoir and too bad the gendarmes had to go and spoil all the fun. Wound up bonkers under a leopardskin in the corner with a little knownothing at the Club Rabelais. Everyone to the Ritz garden for un petit déjeuner! (Or was it supper?) Hired a hearse to take us there (memento mori)—scads of hot jazz and crocodile pears (not tears) at last and I never drank so many gin fizzes in my life and I am right out of pocket. To my bath—paint damned hard to scrub off even with help from friends—and my bidet: I dub thee vomitorium. In want of a shave. And now this bleeding sheet of blank rag glaring at me. Worse than those unopened bills. Blast it all.

"There once upon a time or two was an Hibernian gent who spent all his livelongday (and money) ambling and shambling and scrambling about town, where he meets a queer lot of people indeed and gets hell-raising riproaring barnstorming drunk. Oh yes he was a very very strange manling. The End."

July 10 Sticking meself back together with bits of twine and mucilage and barbed wire today am I. A weedy-seedy-looking man in a mac in the mirror, brown and glowering and spotty. The agent says he might just might be able to get me a small advance when/if I get something first-class off to him third-class post and if/when it's considered "sale-able." Has a heart of gutta-percha, has he. The baboon wouldn't lend me any more quid so borrowed another thousand francs from Polidari against my inheritance. (Wonder how mon oncle Sean's gout is.) Mulligan sold a critique ("Cherchez les Futuristes Recherché") to the Count's quarterly so we celebrated, him and the wife (looking better every day), Madame X—not Danielle—and me, and whilst knocking them back at the Chicago (memento vitae) we hash—or bash—or thrash—my ever-elusive plot about a bit. She (Cleo or Chloe) thinks the heroine (Milly or Molly) could be a chantoosie, her mobster boyfriend stars her in the follies he's backing, but another tall-dark-handsome comes along and so on. He thinks it could be psychological, very deep inner turmoils, Freudian fantasies, Holy Roman guilt slash sexual repressions, and so forth. Then me wideboy Boylan comes along in a Prince of Wales suit to put his two shillings' worth in. Says I should give up fiction and do up some scenarios instead, movies are where the money is, the City of Lights is the next City of Stars. We argued. Debate: are motion pictures Art? He—or was it me first—left in a huff. A teensy bit fried now (bamboozled skunkified bushwhacked stratosphered bacchianated pixilated and other synonyms) but determined to make a spanking new go for it. Hip flask at hip—though this black market stuff dreadfully hard to swallow...

"He rose and put on his amber-colored dressing gown, a gift from Milly, approached the stairs thinking of his imminent shave, whistling a tedious te deum and—"

#### Right back, I swear—just have to nick round the corner for a nip (refueling, don'tchaknow) and m'haps a tuck—

July 14 The empty recto (or is it verso? never could remember) represents my accomplishments of the past few days, friends and future readers: in short, the big Nothing. Mea culpa, sweet Jesu in Heaven. Is it any wonder why I deplore myself?

##### July 21 Bosh it all. Life is a bore. Been on the wagon as they say but just decided to fall off—taking instead the next haywain to Hell (that's right—Bosch-it-all). Moving from one cheap maisonette to the next, ashes to ashes don't you know as Danielle (did you hear that sigh?) used to love saying. We all fall down. That hag of a landlady wants her centimes by midnight or out with the lout. Wonder if Boylan will spot me for a few more bob. Sure that Fury's been going through my dustbins again. More to find there than what's on the desk.

Why should I write anyway when it's all like they say been done enough times before. Can't even get past that first paragraph in the last rewrite (of a rewrite of a rewrite of a rewrite ad infinito or is it infinitum—balls! can't even remember my first-form Latin). Nothing bloody makes sense any more at all and the bloody rum in this bloody joint is the worst rotgut I ever tasted and where is that bloody bloody garçon? God there's Magee—must avoid him as I'm still head-over-arse in debt to him. Wish I had some kind of "human interest" piece to place in one of those arty little arse-wipes crowding the kiosks. Father wanted me to take the medical exams (instead I went for the bar—haha) and tomorrow I'm off to see about that position in the bloody bloody bloody fromagerie.

August 1 Been on something of a binge, Dear Diary. Yesterday or was it the day before Carruthers found me in the Tuilleries posing as the Laocoön with a garden hose. They say I knocked down a flowergirl on the Rue Malaise thinking she was the Kasier in disguise and attempted unspeakable acts with the marbles in the Louvre and fell in with a band of gypsies in the Metro who claimed to be the escaped Romanovs and who robbed me of what little I had including my new serge trousers. An odyssey of madness. Afterwards dreamt endlessly about H. M. Anastasia and an orang-outan and I alone atop the Eiffel while the rest of the world slept below like the courtiers in "Sleeping Beauty." Boylan that bugger has rescued me (hair of the mongrel what doth bite mine) and tomorrow (??) will be taking me to a sanatorium outside Zurich. At least the nurses are reputed to be quite Rubensesque. Meanwhile Sheila and Lynche have arrived from Pamploma (never heard of gin fizzes there, can you imagine? I can) to run their own bull here again and also meanwhile the Mulligans have returned to New Gotham—I shall miss the bores immensely; rather, I'll miss the missus, who was becoming a right proper muse in her metal-grey stockings and short skirts. Sitting up in bed now, thinking. My writing seems all so far-gone and forlorn. The novel, my novel is a thing of the remotest past. Poor Molly, poor Buck, at a standstill, purgatory. I do hope I enjoy doing watercolours.

August 18 The rest and therapy have done worlds of wonders for me; I am practically a new man already. Even my watercolours are praised by the nurses, who by the way are more Raphaelian than Rubensesque. The patients here sleep on hard sanitary cots just like in the war and the therapists as they call themselves nowadays are devout disciples of the Viennese messiah. Letters from friends: Danielle forgives me at last; "The French are becoming worse than the English," Carruthers writes, and a billet-doux in code from Anon which I haven't deciphered yet (or is this one of Boylan's pranks?). In the shower this morning I breathed deeply a cake of citron-scented soap and it was a whiff of life, a walk along the Liffey once upon a morning in May. I am totally confidant now that the novel, my novel will be a success, a great gleaming success. Polyhymnia or is her name Melpomene has whispered in my ear; my temples are pounding like tympani. I have only to begin.

"Stately plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressing gown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned:

Introibo ad altare Dei.

Halted, he peered down the dark winding staircase..."

August 24 Into the maelstrom again. Impossible to sleep visions of cot as coffin, sheet as winding sheet, nightshirt as shroud. Orang-outans and agents screeching scratching everywhere when the lights go out. Herr Doktor Tremens took away my notebooks, which is why this is written with a nurse's stolen lipstick on a pillowslip; he says writing puts too much of a mental strain on me, that it would be dangerous to keep going at the furious pace I was. Boylan in a pneumatique said as much. This is devastation—it was going so perfectly, as if transcribed from the tablet of a greater genius, unknown to me; I could have written for hundreds of pages more. Too late now, all is utterly lost, that butterfly called afflation so fragile so rare has fluttered on gone gone gone. The doctor is right: let someone else write the frigging novel. You toss in your hat, you throw in the towel, you renounce glory. Hell, I'm dying, dying I tell you for a good stiff drink. When I get out of here I'm going into something promising like the kinema—not photoplays but yes oh yes managing a movie house might rather be ducky.
Jesus and His Brother

The story goes that Jesus and his brother, despite being very much alike, were constantly arguing about this or that. They even looked the same, people said, but from birth had always been at odds. Perhaps it was because their mother had a favorite, or that one of the two was slightly more handsome or witty tha n the other, or perhaps—as it was rumored—they disagreed so often because they were only half brothers. Whatever it was, it wasn't because they didn't love one another; anyone could see that they did.

By the time they had grown into men, so it is reported, they were no closer in coming to an agreement about anything in this world: Suppose, for instance, that they were to pass a fallen woman begging by the wayside. "Why didn't you give her alms?" Jesus' brother would turn and say. "I never see you give alms. Everybody gives alms but you. If you do give alms, why have I never seen you?"

Jesus would fix his gentle eyes upon his brother. "That was not a woman," he would say with a smile. "That was an ass. Have you been eating hashish again?"

Whether he had been eating hashish or not, Jesus' brother never understood. "An ass?" he would shout. "Asses do not beg alms!"

"Then do not give them alms."

Suppose they were to pass thieves dividing stolen goods outside the city walls. "Such evil everywhere!" Jesus' brother would exclaim. "Go to them and tell them one of your stories, brother. At the very least, drive them away!"

"What?" Jesus would ask. "Bother those women at their spinning wheels? What harm have they done?"

"Now I am certain I myself have not been eating hashish," said Jesus' brother, "so it must have been you."

"Tell me then the difference between a thief and a spinning wheel," Jesus would say. His brother, who did not like riddles or puzzles of any sort, would turn and walk away.

Suppose they were to climb at sunset to the summit of a high hill and look down upon their city. Jesus' brother would be transfixed by the sight, while Jesus himself absently traced circles on the ground. "Why are you not witnessing our Lord in all His glory?" Jesus' brother would say. "I see archangels in those clouds and the eye of God himself in the sun! If you were truly devout you would see even greater visions. Why, then, do you scratch in the sand like a fool?"

Jesus would look up, brushing away his drawings with a sweep of his hand. "Go on and eat your hashish," he would say. "What do you and I both see but this dust in our eyes?"

Such answers never failed to madden his brother, who even their mother said did not have Jesus' sense of humor, but who was much more serious about his studies.

Once Jesus and his brother were invited to the wedding of a rich man. Several calves were slain, wine flowed like a river, blossoms were strewn in all directions, and shepherds and shepherdesses whirled under great tents. A band of traveling musicians in multi-colored cloaks who had descended from the hills played nonstop as if in a trance. Much hashish was smoked, and no one acted with much dignity.

Jesus' brother frowned upon the mob. He said: "Why, the groom is kissing his sister on her breast and the bride's mother has drawn up her skirts. There are goatherds fornicating in the date-palm grove, and I saw soldiers casting dice by the well. And yet you, you who once drove sinners and swine from the temple, have done and said nothing!"

"I will say I want more wine," Jesus said, "for it is already growing dark. And I will dance with the women and with the men and with the children."

"You are dancing with devils," said Jesus' brother, who was known less for his innocence than for seldom having had his innocence tested. He watched with increasing anger as his brother moved among the pretty women; he watched as the wine was spilled on his brother's beard and down his chest; he watched the way the pretty women moved with his brother, their painted mouths, their blazing eyes all about him.

"Brother, come and join the dance!" cried Jesus from the tumult. "I have never seen you dance. It would do you good to dance."

"I should rather pray than dance," his brother called back. "As so should you!"

"Indeed, this is a form of prayer!" And Jesus was swallowed up again in the dancers.

Such arguments never seemed to be of any consequence to Jesus. But his brother took them to heart and pondered them for days. He was never sure if Jesus was mocking him or merely trying to teach him a lesson, but he did not like it either way. He thought Jesus sometimes received far too much attention for the poetry he wrote and the stories he told, and it only angered him when Jesus seemed nearly oblivious to it all. Travelers and persons from their city alike were constantly knocking on their door, interrupting Jesus' brother in his study of the prophets and drinking up all the wine and eating up all the food. After enduring this for a long time, he saw that he would have to leave the city and go sit in the desert to receive divine inspiration the way all holy men are supposed to, though he had never known Jesus to do so. In the wilderness he knew he could live an ascetic life, blessing nature and begging mercy from a cruel God.

And so he left for the desert, much to the protests of Jesus and their mother, and he lived there for three years.

In the desert he grew very thin and very feeble, but he never refrained from contemplating God or praying for the fate of the world. Not much happened, though; he never felt any different, really, than he had in the city. He wondered why Satan did not tempt him, for Satan tempts all holy men and wise men, but Satan never came to him in the guise of a beautiful woman or a pretty boy or a rich man with jewels, and so he was never given a chance to prove himself. All that changed was his appearance: His beard and cloak became like those of a madman and his skin turned black and his hair turned white. He shunned the bandits and merchants who occasionally crossed his path and never took their offers of food and shelter despite his hunger and the cold. In time, he thought, if I ignore the ways of this wicked world long enough, I may have a true vision and see more than just the eye of God.

But it was difficult not to speak to the other holy men he sometimes encountered as they crossed the desert on their pilgrimages and on the way to their own retreats, for one of them one day might be a herald of God's one true message—even if most of these men were charlatans. Not long after he left for the desert he began to hear strange tales concerning a certain Jesus—without a doubt his brother. An Abyssinian mystic, black as the new moon, told him that he had witnessed Jesus changing water into wine at a wedding. The Abyssinian had been there to deliver gifts and got drunk on that very wine. A good trick, his brother thought, and typical sleight-of-hand. A Greek soothsayer, white as the sun at noonday, told him that he heard this Jesus could heal the sick and calm storms. "That sounds like my brother," Jesus' brother told the Greek. "It's all meant merely to confuse the skeptics and impress the impressionable."

"But how do you explain that he walks on water?" a merry Egyptian priest who had happened by protested—at times the desert seemed crowded indeed. "A cousin of mine says he saw it himself."

"Why of course he did walk on water," said Jesus' brother, "for devils held up each heel."

Lastly there was heard from a caravan of Pharisees the story of Lazarus. "Then he is truly a magician," Jesus' brother thought to himself. "For this is surely magic disguised as a miracle, and magic is a corruption of God's will, and anything which is a corruption of God's will is evil. The dead should remain dead." With such recurring news of greater and grander deeds, and because he had still seen no more than the eye of God, Jesus' brother was compelled to return to his native city.

Immediately upon entering the city gates he began his inquiries: "Where is my brother? Where is he who looks just like me?" But no one recognized him, he had changed so much in the desert, he was so thin and dirty and so transformed by the sun. He went to his mother's house, but no one was home and the rooms were all bare. He searched the streets for Jesus' friends, but people ran from him, frightened by his torn dress and matted beard. "But I am a holy man!" he shouted to the children who fled before him in the street.

At last he heard the news from someone at a potter's wheel in the marketplace. Certainly, such second-hand news is not entirely to be trusted, so he set off at once to the tomb to see if this story could possibly be even half-true.

By the time he arrived there it was dark and cold, so he crept into a crevice in the rock, drew his tattered cloak over himself, and slept. There he dreamed that his brother Jesus came to him, showed him the wounds and crown, and softly, softly kissed him.

That was all, and he was awake. Whereupon he discovered there was no body in the crypt, if there ever had been, and no sign at all of his brother. Maybe I am at the wrong place, he considered. This all made him feel rather stupid and angry, too angry to return to the city, so he became a wanderer and a seeker of wisdom in far-off places. He begged along the way as he went from city to city, subsisted on little more than nothing, and spoke to no one of his brother or his dream. He contemplated God but was no happier for it. He saw many wonders of the world, and many sorrows, too many to report here, but felt no wiser for it all. Often he would think of his family and of his lost brother, and this made him feel, if not exactly sad, more than a little lost himself. All he learned was to hate this world more and more as something that lay between himself and Paradise, much as a traveler hates the rocky and assassin-plagued road which after many twists and turns leads him to the oasis. Hoping to find the answer, he spoke to as many people as he could, though most people avoided him; it did not matter, for he hated everything—this world had been made by Satan, and he longed to meet people who saw that this was true as surely as he did. So he went from one land to another, searching for a meaningful salvation, something he doubted his brother had ever found.

After many years, the second part of this story goes, Jesus' brother came to a country in the east where all men were happy and the emperor himself was no richer than the least of his subjects. They knew great wealth and comfort, yet holy men who abstained from all worldly pleasures were venerated and treated as gods. Outside the walls of the great golden city in the middle of this country, his body finally betrayed him, and he collapsed in exhaustion, emaciated and bleeding. The good people of this city found him, put him to bed, dressed his sores, and fed him with strange delicious foods. When he recovered he thought for a while he must be in Paradise, and these people must be angels they were so kind and beautiful, but when he realized his old torments were still very much a part of him, he knew that it could not be, for in Heaven surely all his pains would be assuaged.

It so happened that an earthquake which the country's holy men had predicted for the day Jesus' brother arrived in their midst never came about, and the people saw a connection—his frightening appearance could only mean that he was holy or mad—he no longer knew for sure himself which he was—and that he had saved them from the wrath of the gods. It could even be that he was one of the gods himself. Once he was strong enough to sit up, they bedecked him with garlands and sprinkled him with gold dust. When he protested in his nonsensical tongue they offered him perfumes and incense and a silver crown. Jesus' brother was not pleased with idolatry of any sort and grew angry when he was lifted up, carried to a temple, and surrounded by a thousand candles. He was still too weak, however, to do anything more than close his eyes and pray this was a dream from which he would soon awaken. Possibly this was the temptation from Satan he had long feared; if so, he would refuse all these gifts with even greater repugnance.

The emperor of the great eastern land soon heard of this wild holy man speaking in the tongue of the gods, this man with black skin and white hair who had saved them from the earthquake and yet refused all tributes, unlike all other holy men, and who so humbly protested his benign captivity. The emperor, a young man who had lived a long life, demanded this most holy man's presence in the royal court. Jesus' brother, much against his wishes, was brought to the royal palace in a gilded palanquin and installed in a sumptuous chamber attended by twelve lovely young women, sisters of the emperor. By this time, Jesus' brother had learned something of their language and now was made to understand that he was to instruct the nephew or sons (possibly they were the same) of the emperor, a dozen smiling boys who all aspired to be holy men, too, for wealth here was such a common thing that it was noble to give your riches up to the gods. Jesus' brother explained as best he could that he was nothing special, just a simple man of God who wanted to be left alone and allowed to go on his way seeking truth. This amazed the children, who knew of meekness and humility, but who had never seen such a show made of it. They merely wanted to learn the meaning of life in a few short lessons, as one learns to pick out a simple melody on a flute.

The children formed an audience about him, fanning him and anointing him with oils and kissing his feet while he glowered at them, too weary to shoo them away.

"What is love?" they would ask, one after another, heads bowing and bobbing around him.

"An ass,'' Jesus' brother would answer, eschewing a silk cushion for the cold marble floor of the palace chamber.

"What is death, then?" they persisted, hoping to understand.

"A spinning wheel," he said.

"But what is that which is beyond and behind all things?"

"Dust in your eyes."

This did not seem to satisfy the royal nephews, and yet it would hold them in contemplation until the next lesson. When the children, who were too young to be completely reverent, at last complained that somehow they weren't able to understand this most holy of men, the emperor himself decided to interview the holy man in private. Jesus' brother was curious, as well, and glad to meet the man, for maybe then he would be given permission to leave this beautiful prison. The emperor's appearance was strange, like all these people, Jesus' brother observed, with their differently colored skin, different eyes, a different way of looking at you. Still, he did not seem a bad man or a devil, this emperor, and he asked nothing much but about the weather and his diet, mostly just sat on his silk cushions, smiling sweetly as a doll. Jesus' brother concluded he must be a simpleton and therefore he could say anything if it meant he might be set free to do as he pleased and not have to suffer any more of the children's inane questions."

"Why trust me?" he asked when the emperor had run out of pleasantries. "I am just a man, and no man is to be trusted."

The emperor waved a pretty fan of peacock feathers, but was otherwise immobile as a doll. Jesus' brother saw he must go farther and thought for a moment before speaking again.

"How do you know I am not evil?" he asked the emperor. "I am no holy man, for I tempted my brother and mocked him, and it was I who most wanted to see him dead. At least this is what I sometimes believe; I don't know my own tortured mind. Why do you trust me then with your nephews?"

Still the golden-skinned emperor sat there, fanning his face with the feathers, as if deaf, as if a simpleton, with a simpleton's trusting eyes. What could he want? Jesus' brother thought. It could be that the words of this language were too beautiful to convey suffering. He could tell this man anything, tell him all manner of horrors, and still be thought to be speaking words whispered directly to him from whatever gods these people believed in. It occurred to him then that these people were the gentlest he had ever known, they knew no evils and had no wants, they were fair and just, and they loved one another like children. And like children, they could be just as easily corrupted. They must then learn to hate the world as he did, to feel pain as he did, to curse God as he did.

Jesus' brother thought for a while, and then he spoke: "You must build me a school," he told the emperor. "Build it of your finest white marble, stud it with rubies and emeralds as are figs upon a rice-cake, and fill it with your ministers and princes and whoever else seeks the truth. I shall be the instructor of this school, and I must be allowed to come and go as I please, for as much as I appreciate your generosity, I desire my freedom. Build my school well, for this will be a new type of school, a school for sinners. Your people know no sin, you scarcely know the meaning of the word, but I have learned that it is only through sin and vice that man may arouse a wrathful yet disinterested God and demand room in His kingdom. This world is a hateful place. Truly, what is there to love that lasts?"

The emperor's pretty, doll-like eyes narrowed, and he dropped the peacock feathers upon the silk cushions. He was no longer smiling, and though he couldn't have understood all these words, now he was really listening. Maybe, Jesus' brother thought, he is tired of so much love, it is too easy, and he would like to learn to hate, too.

In a year the last stone was laid, the school was finished, and the princes and ministers were summoned. The holy man began by explaining to the saffron-robed figures him around that he was from another world, a world which in their confusion they seemed to take for a strange sort of heaven. In that place, Jesus' brother told them, men cheat, lie, and steal—he would describe all those interesting things in time. Where I come from, he said, we have armies made up of the poor to protect the wealth of a few. And we fight other countries, to take any other wealth we can, for unlike you we do not share our jewels and gold, they are not as common as dirt, so we try to have more jewels and gold than anyone else. But that is not all—we kill one another because we hate one another and oddly enough we also kill for love. We love to kill and we hate to love. Like you we have many gods, but we call them all by the same name. Most of all we like to kill for these gods, for God himself taught us to kill.

The princes and ministers, who had never even considered the possibilities of such things, listened enraptured. Jesus' brother went on, creating a world even more wicked than the one he actually remembered. What did he care if these people or all of mankind be damned or exalted? There were only two choices he could imagine: existence or nonexistence, and neither could fully satisfy him.

"But this world is all an illusion," his students said. "How can we hate what we do not believe in? Why should we covet what is not real?"

"Sin is real," Jesus' brother said. "Sinning will vanquish those illusions of yours. I see the truth; you have deluded yourselves. And now let me tell you about money."

His students believed he was an excellent teacher, and they spread the word far and wide across the country. They learned to lie, cheat, and steal, for the idea of accumulating wealth seemed a novel and good one. They also learned to kill, for this was often the most efficient way to obtain what they coveted most or to rid themselves of what they most hated. They raised armies and raided surrounding kingdoms, and when that was not enough they fought among themselves over the wealth they had obtained. They used the spoils of their greed to buy artists and musicians from other countries, for their innocent kingdom had produced almost no art of its own, and these artists in their captive misery created works the wondrous likes of which they had never seen or heard. The emperor, too, studied the teachings of Jesus' brother and so believed he must be moving step by step closer to the Kingdom of Heaven. For all the sins and vices and rivalries of its citizens, the empire grew more glorious and more beloved by its peoples, who saw that when man defies God, he learns to create beautiful things.

Jesus' brother, however, was still unhappy despite his fame and repute, for he saw that even though he was free to do as he pleased, he was not a free man within; God still had him pinned. He had become more and more like these people in the eastern city. He wore their clothes, ate their food, and acquired their habits of speech and gesture. Over the years he nearly forgot his native tongue, even forgot about his own city and his mother and the brother with whom he had so often disagreed. He was fated now to spend the rest of his days far from his real home, for he was too old and weak to leave this place. There was no turning back—exile is exile, whether it be to Hell or Paradise. He saw now that even in openly defying God he could not remove that which was between himself and God; God took no notice either way. Oddly enough, over his years of teaching sin he was burdened less and less by torments and sorrows he had known in the past, and so he found himself doing small good deeds here and there—for the country was in great need of the kindnesses it had lost. Perhaps he did this out of the boredom that comes with luxury, or perhaps he really did find the desire to do good within him. He had been a sinner only secondhand, and as he grew older he was becoming someone else, someone who would have greatly surprised the troubled young man he had once been. True, he could not walk on water or turn water into wine or revive the dead, but he could gather flowers for an offering to a palace god or bandage a young prince's shoulder or give comfort to the poor and the old and the diseased.

Many years after first reaching the gates of the city, so it is said, the brother of Jesus lay old and slowly dying in his dark room in the darkest corner of the royal palace, not alone and yet alone unto himself. He had tried to find goodness within himself and had done a few good deeds, yet he had brought misery to the whole of the country; this his god would not let him forget. Damnation and salvation alike seemed inappropriate fates. Because he was now so well known even to peoples in the farthest corners of the empire, strangers were often requesting an audience, even a few curious foreigners who understood nothing about him other than that here was a holy man like no other.

One afternoon another sort of foreigner arrived; he was not a trader or a warrior, but a sort of teacher himself, and he had come ahead of a caravan of still more peculiar foreigners who had nothing to offer but incomprehensible words. Someone saw a similarity between the young man and Jesus' brother, so guards led the foreigner to the palace, to a palace minister, and at last to the dark little room, lit by only one smoldering candle. Since Jesus' brother was so old now, it was difficult for him to understand the young man's language, though it had once been his own as well. He tried to remember the correct words and managed to ask the young man why he had come so far to visit an evil and dying man and not the god he must have expected.

After the young teacher recovered from the shock of hearing familiar words and seeing eyes and skin that were not like these people's, he brought out a scroll to consult and began to question Jesus' brother.

"You are, I have heard from a palace minister, the worst of sinners," the young foreigner said, neither doubt nor forgiveness in his voice. "But I know little of the language. They praised you for this. Maybe I was mistaken?"

"It is true I tried to be a sinner, but I was better at being sinned against," said Jesus' brother as best he could. "I spat in the eye of God, but God does not blink."

"Then you are locked outside the gates of Heaven," the foreigner insisted.

"I am locked inside the gates of this kingdom. But what is outside, really? What is inside? When I look out, you look in, you look out, I look in. We stand apart and then we stand together and next we are apart again, but God stands everywhere ever and always and nowhere always and never."

The young teacher believed either the old man was trying to confuse him or he could no longer control or understand his own words. Rightfully, for in his dying days Jesus' brother was not sure himself what made sense and what did not. So the young teacher took another approach: "Your time on earth may be almost up, but you do still have time for salvation."

"My life is over, that is true. But what is time to me now? Besides, who has time? Time has us."

The foreigner saw that he was being mocked, however gently. He was very young indeed and despite his convictions uncertain if he could live up to them; this Jesus' brother could plainly tell. The young man sat there for a while with his eyes closed to shield himself from the old man's questioning stare and at last spoke: "There is one who could save you. You have only to invite Him into your heart and all the love of God is yours."

Jesus' brother said nothing.

The young man went on: "I have traveled far to spread the good word. I have come from the other end of the world. You see, I may look poor, but I am richer than your emperor will ever be. If you want to be rich like me, to be saved, you will be. You have only to ask."

"Go away, you are a devil, and you've come too late to tempt me! I won't be tempted even by salvation. What is your heaven but the greatest temptation of them all?"

Jesus' brother was very near death, and it took all the strength he could summon from his failing body to lean toward the brash young man and kiss his smooth cheek. There was nothing more to be said.

Guards seized the foreigner on his way out of the palace, for it was rumored he was not only a barbarian but a rich one. The caravan which he had accompanied was attacked a few days later, and when no jewels or gold were discovered, the foreigners were all of them tortured and flayed alive on a hill above the city. They had nothing to offer the kingdom but nonsensical words. The foreigners did all go to their deaths with an inspiring serenity the citizens had never before witnessed, but such silent death, however impressive, was still tiresome, not even worth watching to the end.

Jesus' brother heard of none of this, for he was already dead and resting in a massive marble mausoleum that had been built especially for him. Half the empire came to see his embalmed body, which was clothed in radiant silks and heaped with flowers, coins, and jewels. By imperial decree, Jesus' brother was henceforth to be spoken of as a god.
June's Child

They were a happy family. A family right out of a cereal commercial on TV, not the kind which usually exists in real life. A nuclear family in a post-nuclear age. The perfect family in an imperfect world. That's how their friends saw them and this is how it went: June loved Stewart. Stewart loved Kyle. Kyle loved June. June loved Kyle, too. And Kyle loved Stewart, who also loved June. That's how things go in a happy family, a TV commercial family. Kyle was June and Stewart's first child. Kyle would be their last child; that had been agreed. They lived in a big apartment in a big apartment complex in a big city, and they believed they lived much as any other family in a big apartment in a big apartment complex in a big city would. Stewart worked and June watched Kyle and Kyle ate and played and slept. Everyone was content with the arrangement. Everyone loved each other very much. The photos of themselves on the apartment walls looked like they should all bear captions: "Happy," "Happier," "Happiest."

But who were they, really? Were they typical or atypical? Were they any happier or unhappier than most people? TV families never asked themselves such questions, but families in the popular novels June and Stewart had read in college would always end up asking such questions about themselves. When they were first married June and Stewart had wondered about such things, too. They had wondered so long they thought maybe having a child would help them find out some answers. The answers to exactly which questions they couldn't quite say, but it was worth a try. So the child came, and he was a lovely child, and for a time they believed they surely must be happier than most people are. Or at least a lot better off than most people are in books.

Kyle was more than just their son; he was something to do. He gave them a focus when so many other things felt unfocused. He was a center and he was a reason. He was life—their life. Stewart and June enjoyed taking little Kyle out with them in the big city. Parks were all right, but shops were better, and museums were best. What a darling! people in museums were likely to say, simply because they were not that used to seeing such a small child in a museum. Even the doormen and the guards smiled.

This made Stewart and June feel they were doing something right. Back in their big apartment, June would smile down at Kyle in his crib while he slept. She had a particular way of looking at him. Stewart had noticed this particular way June had with Kyle.

Couldn't you just ...? he would ask June.

Just what? she would say, not looking up.

Just—that. And he would leave the room. After all, he did love them both. June knew this. Kyle knew this. Stewart knew June and Kyle knew this.

Kyle was known among their friends for his hair, which was rather thick and shiny for such a small child. June had insisted on letting it grow past the time most boy children receive their first haircut. His hair caught the eye of park and museum people. It made him look "like a little angel," a couple of them had said. Stewart was not sure if he liked this. He thought this made Kyle look somewhat like a girl. He knew at Kyle's age it didn't make much of a difference, if it ever did, but he was a traditional sort and did not know if he could tolerate it for long, this looking like a girl. Eventually, he let June know this. June could not even see what there was to argue about.

Sometimes Stewart liked going out at night alone with June, as they had before Kyle came along. June, however, insisted on including Kyle. It was difficult to sit through a two-hour movie or concert with a toddler who was not the least bit interested. Stewart suggested babysitters. June suggested staying in, then. Stewart took to attending movies alone, then.

Kyle was a messy eater, as most infants are, and once he seemed to take great delight in ruining one of Stewart's best and favorite ties. June apparently found this more than a little amusing. Stewart told her it was not amusing at all—ties are expensive and Kyle shouldn't be encouraged. The worst thing was, June didnot appear to be paying any attention to him when he said these things.

Can't you feed the baby after we're through with dinner? Stewart would ask in vain. Can't you put him down for a minute and help me over here? Can't you quit fussing with his hair?

Don't you love your own son? June would say. Of course she knew Stewart loved Kyle. And Stewart knew June knew he loved Kyle. They all loved each other, of course. But it was never such a bad idea to ask now and then, June believed.

June had not returned to work after the birth of their child, even though that, too, had always been part of the plan. Stewart did not ask June about this because he knew June knew that he would ask if he wanted to. It was obvious that Kyle was June's fulltime occupation now. They didn't need a nanny or au pair or housekeeper like the other couples in their big apartment complex. That was too bad, because Stewart liked the idea of a nanny or au pair or housekeeper even if they didn't need one. He wished he could show their neighbors what he and June could have, too, if they wanted. Sometimes it seemed June didn't even care about such things.

Everyone still thought Kyle was an adorable child, even if he was getting so much bigger. He's an adorable child, people would say, even if they had nothing else to say. Those were often June's own words, as well. She sometimes had friends over in the evening, since she and Stewart didn't go out alone together anymore, and Kyle was always the object of attention. People would stand around his playpen or crib and comment on how adorable he was. There didn't seem to be much else to talk about other than Kyle. Stewart would stand back and sip from his glass very slowly.

June spent more and more time and energy and money on Kyle's hair. She tried every new hair-care product on the market, although Stewart believed Kyle's hair was fine as it was and didn't really need anything special. Kyle would stare blankly at his father as his mother combed and brushed his long hair. She would even do this when friends or relatives were over. People liked seeing how brilliant and full June could make Kyle's hair. Stewart half-expected her to try ribbons or braids. But, then, such things helped her pass the time.

Kyle began to lose interest in his father, so Stewart thought, so he determined to win back his son with candy and toys and new clothes. This worked for a while but then it didn't and Kyle was giving Stewart that blank stare again. And June was quick to bustle Kyle off in her arms or to her side of the sofa. Stewart soon saw it was no use. Even though they all loved one another and knew it, Kyle was June's child—of course, he was Stewart's child, too, but not in the way he was June's child.

So Stewart thought of asking June for another child, preferably a daughter this time, a child who would be his child, or at least their child. June refused. This had not been part of the plan. One child and one child only. She did not want to go through all the trouble again. It was tiresome, being pregnant. He should try it and see if he liked it. June laughed at that. She laughed at him a lot these days. Stewart wondered if he liked that or not.

Once Kyle bit Stewart's finger, hard enough to make it bleed. There had been no apparent motive, and Stewart struck the child on impulse. He hadn't meant to, but he did, and June did not like it. One whit. She accused him of pent-up hostility, paternal jealousy, projected self-hatred, and many other things. She recommended a therapist. She threatened to call her mother, who was a social worker and knew how to deal with people like him. Stewart left to go see a movie (he was doing that kind of thing more and more). Much later he returned and cried and begged her forgiveness. They made love for the first time in weeks.

The next day Kyle discovered his father's briefcase on the floor and tore the papers inside to shreds before June put a stop to it. This angered Stewart, not so much because of the torn papers, but mostly because he suspected June of waiting too long before she stopped the child. He wondered in a way if it weren't some sort of set-up. He told June she should be a more careful mother. June protested that she had been in the bathroom preparing to condition Kyle's hair when it happened.

In the midst of their argument Kyle began to cry. Stewart was struck with the thought of how much Kyle looked like a toad when he cried. It was an awful thought for a father to think but true enough. Stewart wondered at that moment if theirs was indeed a happy family, a TV-perfect family.

The nanny arrived the next day. June sent her away, saying it must be some kind of mix-up. The next day she was back. June understood it was Stewart's doing, but sent the nanny away again. That night June and Stewart had words. Another nanny came the next day, and she was a very big woman. She had a big face and big arms and big hands and June felt too belittled by her presence to send her away. So she put her to work making lunch for Kyle while she debated how to get rid of her. But June was never able to come up with a decisive plan, and within a few days the nanny, whose name was Rosita, had firmly attached herself to the household. She came at eight and left at six. She made the meals, cleaned the house, bathed and dressed Kyle. June felt left out but found it absolutely impossible to stand up to this woman. June was a small woman and big women had always intimidated her. Her own mother was a big woman.

Stewart liked Rosita. When she was around they joked and laughed a lot and sometimes went so far as to poke fun at June. Kyle liked Rosita, too. He hung onto her big beefy arms and let her swing him around the room, something June would never have done. Rosita began taking Kyle out to the city park and to the grocery store with her. June felt more and more superfluous.

She missed going to museums. She missed hearing people admire Kyle. She missed being admired herself. She wondered what life was all about. She thought about going back to work.

When Rosita's sister left town she had to bring her own child, Rafael, to work with her. Rafael was a couple years older than Kyle and good at introducing him to all sorts of mischief. June did not like the idea of Rosita bringing her own child to work with her and eventually got up the nerve to tell her so. But Rosita took the matter to Stewart, who decided Kyle could use the companionship of another child. So Rafael stayed. June spent a lot of her time cleaning up after him and even more time worrying about what she might have to clean up. She was afraid of what the neighbors might think of this child playing in the park with her own son. Would they think Rafael was hers, too? Or did they think both children were Rosita's?

A temporary assignment in June's old advertising firm was offered to June and Stewart suggested she take it, it wouldn't hurt to have some extra money and take a vacation from the apartment. June could think of no good excuses and the assignment was only for a week, so June gave in and accepted it. Unsurprisingly enough she felt good to be back in her old office, hearing the praise of her colleagues, writing clever things for happy families in TV commercials to say. She did miss Kyle a lot, though, and worried what sort of influence Rosita and Rafael were having on Kyle when she wasn't around. Nevertheless, she couldn't resist when she was offered another week, and then another, and the temporary assignment seemed to be turning into a permanent one.

In addition, Stewart's job was demanding extra hours of him. Sometimes he did not arrive home until midnight. He saw very little of June and even less of Kyle. He was surprised when Kyle seemed to be glad to see him in those rare instances he was still awake when Stewart arrived home. Stewart left notes to June and Rosita on the refrigerator and received messages from them in the same way. On weekends Stewart and June and Kyle did go to visit their old shops and museums together as in times past, but fewer people seemed to notice them or their son. Though Kyle's hair was still luxuriant and long, maybe it was no longer so shiny. Maybe Kyle was getting too old to be called "angel" or even "adorable." June was soon asking Rosita if she could work weekends, too. June and Stewart began to go to movies and concerts together, alone, now and then.

This was their life. They were a happy family after all. They all loved one another: Kyle and June and Stewart and Rosita and Rafael and even Rafael's puppy Tiger. They all lived in a big apartment in a big apartment complex in a big city. And their lives were full. Their lives were busy. Yet things had changed and though not particularly for the bad, not particularly for the best, either, and Stewart and June wondered why. What could they do to make their lives better? What would people in books or on TV or in advertisements do? Everything seemed perfect and still nothing quite was. Maybe June would have another child. Maybe then life would be better.

One afternoon Rosita cut Kyle's hair. Stewart had mentioned what a mess it had become lately and Rosita had taken that as a hint that she crop the child's hair as short as her son Rafael's. When June arrived home she saw the golden curls limp on the newspaper on the floor, the silver scissors and comb on the table, the short-haired boy laughing in his high-chair. Rafael was playing with Tiger in a corner, pretending to be cutting the puppy's hair with his fingers. Stewart was there, too (having come home to pick up some important papers), and he was laughing along with Rosita and the children. Kyle looked strangely older. June wanted to kill them all. She picked up the scissors and wondered if she should stab herself, instead. She was crying. Something was lost forever, never to be found again. This thought came to her as perfectly and unforgettably as a good advertising slogan would.

How could you? she asked them. How... how?

Ah, the kid loves it, Stewart said in a tough-guy voice. He was holding Kyle now and Kyle appeared to be enjoying his father's attention once again. At the same time he was frightened of his mother's reaction and turned away when she tried to hold him. Kyle said something in Spanish to her, something that sounded like a complete sentence when he had never used more than a few simple phrases of English before.

Oh! Rosita said. He says his mother has a monkey-face! It is something Rafael always says of me when I scrub the floor.

Worse than murder, June said mostly to herself, not really hearing what Rosita had to say. June was on her knees, sifting through the hair on the newspaper with her fingers. Kyle was giving his father hugs. Rosita hustled Rafael and Tiger off to the bathroom.

It'll grow back, Stewart said, roughing up the boy's hair.

Not the same. My only baby's hair. June began to fold the sheets of newspaper around the hair. She creased the paper with her thumbnail and stood face-to-face with her husband, holding the makeshift parcel to her breast. Yes, now they would have another child, a girl, but not for Stewart. For her. Stewart and June were thinking exactly the same thing, as some couples are sometimes apt to do. Stewart could think of nothing to say to June. June had nothing left to say to Stewart.
Buck Bartlett: At Home! At Work! At Play!

Scenes From An Impossible Screenplay

Scene One: Buck Bartlett—whirling a lariat over his head. He stands tall as his marquee posters, boot-heels spread, on the Vistavision-wide lawn of his Cimarron County ranch. Looming behind him and to the left, across the parched bluegrass, are his Olympian stables, to the right a well-worn polo field. His three children—two rangy teenage boys in bleached dungarees and pearl-snap western shirts, girl in sweetheart-of-the-rodeo fringed vest and skirt—are revolving equidistant around him, lariat hoops whirring over their heads as well. In unison, for our camera, they all demonstrate that newsreel-famous, billboard-wide, strictly Bartlett-ized "aw shucks" grin, eyes asquint in the Californian sun and dust: white sun (in this black and gray world) blurred by the dust which blinds and stings in the hot dry Santa Ana wind and veneers everything within range of the wide-angle lens. It is high noon. There are no shadows as well as no colors. Mrs. Bartlett cautiously circles the far perimeters of her vertiginous family (as a distant satellite orbits planets which in turn orbit a sun), holding forth a Coca Cola tray set with a pitcher of iced lemonade and five chilled glasses. She is diplomatically turned out in a tailored suit, beads, riding boots, and a fanciful flowered sombrero. Her husband whistles her way; he sports a deteriorated Stetson, dusty cowboy duds, fringed chaps, and a bolero tie with a clasp made of a small scorpion embedded in amber. The sky behind them is cinematically vast and pearl-gray, the sierras outstretched like lions at slumber in a haze far to the north. There is absolutely no sound but the wind and zipzipzip of the ropes. This almost static scene lasts several minutes... until Buck's youngest son's rope slips, corralling his sister as well as himself, pulling them fast and close as an embrace. The children try to tear apart, but the lasso only grows tauter. Their father laughs his celebrated mulish laugh, cracks a quick joke obscured by the wind, and his wife chuckles so hard she does a sort of curtsy, splashing lemonade about. From one end of the frame to the other, a sheaf of white pages goes twirling by in a dust-devil—the script girl can no longer contain herself, either: We see her (my still very young and lovely mother) go chasing after the papers in the foreground, joined by other previously unseen members of the crew, all of them, inexplicably, in bathing suits. (My father is there, too, looking more like Douglas Fairbanks Jr. than even a stunt double needs to.) The eldest son's lasso slips next, knotting all three siblings together, but Buck's trademark halo of hemp goes right on spinning over his head. The scene dissolves in laughter, dissolves into—

Scene Two: Buck Bartlett—on the motion picture set. He is slouched in his monogrammed deck chair, the Burbank Guardian and Variety at his feet, before a trompe l'oeil backdrop of an archetypal small-town America Main Street, complete right down to the candy-cane barber pole, obsolete hitching post outside the chromium soda emporium, a Bluebird Cafe, a New Deal post office, and a Carnegie library. All decked out in ill-pressed summer-weight seersucker, a tie with a bird of paradise painted on it, and canvas plimsolls, he has thrown back his sunburnt face, stubbed out his Havana, and tossed down his Panama, guffawing at something the director (with phony megaphone) just insinuated about a fading starlet. And I am at his side in crisp white organdy, my small chubby hands grasping his lanky shoulder. My renowned auburn curls spring up and down with each giggle; his huge ruddy ranch-worked hands muss them up, clip my cheeks. Stark unfiltered light from the spots overhead isolates us from the darkness all around, whitewashing shadows and colors alike. Certainly it is very hot but I am such a good little actress I do not even perspire. Actually we are not making a movie at all—nothing would have been this stiff and still if we were and the props are merely that, what the public expects, for we are posing for promo pix to advertise war bonds and a work-in-progress, a homefront comedy (title forgotten, something about singing aerobats, one of Mother's creations) soon to be forever left unfinished with the South Seas invasion. (So there were indeed other reasons besides the fact that I was getting too old to bounce so innocently on Buck's knee.) Around us, a few other actors, a couple bigwig producers, script girls, best boys, my gentle tutor with his finger always in Prosper Merimée, and an awful cooing cosmetician have assembled, and they are all laughing and smiling and poking each other in the ribs, as if they had been left over from the last scene (meanwhile back at the ranch... though that had been years earlier when my parents were newlyweds, and years and years before their ship went down). Ah, mère and père are off gliding in their newest silvery toy plane because outside the studio it is a beautiful oh such a beautiful day. How I wish I were away from here! But not with them, of course. A continuity photographer I recognize from the questionable goatee ignites his flash bar. Moments of blindness. As Buck's hand leaves my chin and descends the back of my cherubic neck, dipping within my lacy collar and lingering beneath my shoulder strap just a moment too long. We were Hollywood icons, Buck and I, box office gold, the highest-paid slaves of prosperous Merry-May Motion Pictures. Preposterous, really! We despised one another. The scene cuts to—

Scene Three: Buck Bartlett—on tour with Pecos Pete's Way Out West Revue during the first decade of this glorious century. He and his fellow Westerners are taking the night off from their peripatetic itinerary in a Reeperbahn cabaret recommended by a star-struck bürgermeister Pecos has befriended. The tattered Kineflick assumes an indigo filter here: Small, dull facets of light gleaming in the nightclub gloom—candles sunken in Lalique vases on each undersized table—meekly supplement the single lavender spotlight illuminating the stage, where an epicene liedersinger veiled and kohled to impersonate Salome has straddled a chair, lip-synching to ersatz Offenbach on a shellac 78. (History is a re-invention of sound as well as vision, and in my staging all is possible.) The firm-jawed young waiters wear starched shirtfronts and dinner jackets but no trousers; they strut gaily about in prismatic silken drawers, all part of the quasi-gallic pseudo-fin de siècle atmosphere (the neon above the bar reads BRASSERIE DE CHARLUS). The decor is strictly old-hat art nouveau and there is not a straight line in sight, enough to make one queasy. Buckskinned Buck shares an assortment of tables pushed together like puzzle pieces with sharpshooter Pete; several beery troupers—one of them, a smooth-cheeked runaway from the St. Petersburg circus, is my father; a bareback acrobat; and two Zulu warriors Pete picked up in Boer country to play redskins after the originals defected to a gypsy Chautauqua (the Europeans have so far overlooked the substitution). Buck is from simple teetotaling prairie stock, unlike his bacchanalian mateys, and the Hamburg ale has swiftly loosened all his knots—he is as thoroughly pixilated as this old footage. Slipping into his role as the Bronco Kid (Fancy Lasso Artiste and Roughrider), he usurps the operatic imposter from the stage (zip goes the needle on his Edison disc). The Kid warms up by cakewalking to his favorite "coon" song ("Ol' Banjo Eyes"), accompanied by the Apache-painted Zulus on mandolins borrowed from the house orchestra, which leaves its barstools and (slightly out of tune) joins in: oboe here, bassoon there, violins everywhere. Jereboams and Methuselahs of Moët Chandon fire off a 21-cork salvo; octopi-tentacled hookahs and racks of opium pipes are introduced to curious effect. The cabaret's bored clientele is roused from its ennui. The busboys mazurka with the cigarillo girls. The sommelier sweetly pirouettes the maitre'd. A few steps into his antics, Buck presents his trusty lariat and begins to rope random members of the audience: including a Valkyrian mezzo-soprano (melodious screams of delight), an absinthe-addled fauvist escaped from a Lautreckian nightclub portrait, two pretty girls, one giggly ensign, and lastly a portly Prussian steel baronet who is amused not one iota to have his vermouth in his lap. Here, the scene is spliced into frantic fragments: the baronet spouting anti-Yankeeisms, his mistress's string of pearls disseminated by someone's clutching hand, Zulus on the warpath, clarinet wails, a fist (my father's?) striking a cheek, cymbals, snares, more fists, a torn veil, a cry cut short... and the bouncers depositing the still-lassoed Prussian on the boulevard without. Pecos Pete escorts the shell-shocked mistress under his table. The two pretty girls (not girls at all) turkey-trot with the Zulus. My father seems to have disappeared between the Valkyrie's heaving breasts. Decades later on the Trans-Europe Express I tried to replay this from Father's memories. How does it end? Oh, yes—Buck buying a round he can't afford for all present and giving Salome a fat kiss on his painted mouth. We have what used to be known quite prettily as an "iris out."

Scene Four: Buck Bartlett—at a Beverly Hills polo match for a dustbowl charity. As part of the promotion the Bartlett family team has agreed to compete against the Barrymores, that Hollywood dynasty ruled by Queen Ethel and administered by her brothers and their starry-eyed paramours. At first glance the Bartletts look highly unprofessional, clad in frayed denim and faded suede, astride a motley of gangly ranch steeds—a black beauty for Buck, pintos for the boys, matching appaloosas for the gals. They smile Cheshire-wide for their "March of Time" public, but there is a disturbing maleficence in the way they swing their mallets about like headhunters' machetes. Contrastingly, the Barrymores are regal in resplendently clean white helmets, jerseys, and jodhpurs. Their English saddles are mounted on colossal white Lippizzaners loaned from a von Stroheim production, and their mallets are raised high like crucifixes: a tapestry of crusaders charging into battle (trumpetous blazonry on the soundtrack, please). In fact, they are far too stylized, even for polo—Ethel actually rides sidesaddle—and the mighty but lumbering Lipps are no match for the Bartletts' quick-witted and sure-footed cow ponies. Needless to say, the Barrymores are being royally whalloped. The playing field is fringed with spindly palms, the sun is discolored a venomous green (is it memory's fault or the aging Vistacolor's?), and the crowd is as vociferous as several busloads of Midwestern tourists can be. There I am on the sidelines, accompanied by my second or third nanny and my father. (Where is my mother? my utopian Kansas-bred mother in her mannish hats—working on her first screenplay?) I'm cheering on my new costar Mr. Buck for the camera's benefit though it's Queen Ethel I love despite or perhaps because of her fruity speech and minty breath. Nanny Two or Three is pinching me on my frilly bottom because I am tired from the hisses and huzzahs and last night's thousand-and-one retakes. Above us all glides a low-flying monoplane trailing a golden oriflamme which reads, "GO WEST YOUNG MAN." It's mother! Father informs nanny and me, and we wave skyward. Meanwhile a midnight-blue Bentley has crept up beneath the bleachers and out steps a Ruritanian couple I've seen at these or those parties, who've just recently been freed of tragic mismarriages and even more constricting contracts. In the moment of raising his battered derby to simultaneously greet the couple and wipe his brow with his bandana, Buck nearly misses the ball soaring past him—a wicked strike by Princeling John B—and gives it a haphazard, hazardous blow which sends it rolling croquet-style far across the field and into the stands. There, it ricochets off a nonplussed Louella Parson's huaraches. She plucks the ball from the ground with two white-gloved fingers, as if she were handling a live grenade. Buck dismounts and sashays over to her with exaggerated bowleggedness. Taking her notepad pencil and the ball, he autographs it and hands it back to her—The crowd applauds; Louella, known for making hotter scenes than Mae West, is decidedly charmed. So are the Ruritanians, who invite Bartletts, Barrymores, and me to brunch at Ciro's. Buck can kiss a hand as elegantly as any lesser noble. Father says nothing to Buck and I wonder why. Perhaps I can already guess. In time, I will swear to hate this fairyland known as Hollywood forever and ever. The putter and purr of Mother's plane is a long way off now, heading for Venice Beach or Canoga Park, and we are running out of film. Let us allow your narrator a shift in seating and the projectionist a change of reel.

Scene Five: Buck Bartlett—at the Louisiana Purchase One-Hundredth Anniversary Exhibition in St. Louis, Missouri (1903, and the new century has barely cracked its shell). Imagine if you will a silent film this time, sepia-tinted, with inserted cards detailing the dialogue and other points of interest, the theater organ imitating a calliope rendition of "Meet Me In St. Louis." Onscreen, an ever-shifting montage of sights and sightseers: glass and plaster palaces of the future; the giant pinwheels of Monsieur Ferris; bratwurst vendors who look like the Kaiser; a Tyrolean inn set in alabaster Alps; rococo fountains peopled with whole congresses of neoclassic gods; whole family reunions from Rome, Iowa and Paris, Texas; storybook recreations of corners of Cairo, Rio, Bora-Bora, and Pango-Pango; stick-taffy vendors who look like the Tsar; and faux-marble museums honoring the new gods of Electricity, Sanitation, and the American Way. Before a reproduction of the Grand Trianon of Versailles (larger than the original), living tableaux of gilded, artistically half-nude vaudeville chorines depicting the Reign of Terror have coalesced. This libertine assembly, however, is dramatically disassembled by a whooping, hollering band of mounted cowboys and Indians which has just galloped down the midway from the tents and teepees of the Way-Out-West Show. Buck is leading the posse, duded up to the nines in satin-lined calfskin with tooled-silver embellishments and firing blanks from a pearl-handled Smith and Wesson. Among the rowdies trailing behind him on their sleek mustangs (a quick pan here) are Pecos Pete (riding shotgun on a stagecoach, rifle in either fist and reins in his teeth), my father Ivan (a grand jeté on a palomino), and Chief Sitting Bull and his bovine daughter (moonlighting behind Col. Cody's back). Two of the Injuns blow bugles and carry a banner between them proclaiming Manifest Destiny Day; after them lopes a herd of tassled and bangled dromedaries and their Bedouin jockeys, borrowed from a Middle-Eastern sideshow. Watching from the steps of the Trianon, grasping the elbow of a very faint Marie Antoinette (saved from the guillotine!) the novice nickelodeoniste Hal—or is it Max?—Roach furiously jots notes down the length of his detached cuffs. Marie (my mother the martyr) tears away after a camel-driver who, only too glad to help a little lovely in dishabille join the parade, gives her a lift. Buck and the roughriders race on ahead down the pike in a flurry of gunsmoke, past a bevy of young suffragettes (including the future Mrs. Bartlett, fresh from Oklahoma Territory) who faint and fall against one another like dominos, arrowing toward the cathedral-sized lobby of the Temple of Commerce. There, a creaking, cranking John D. Rockefeller Sr. is making a speech on the Old World Threat before a congregation of bankers, investors, and brokers fanning their top-hats before them. They stampede in disbelief as the horsemen roar into the temple and even up into the loges, but John D. is so deaf and blind or else so caught up in his sermon he pays no attention to the onrush of hoof beats and Arapaho war cries. He goes on delineating the profound dissimilitude between the American and European races, only pausing to cough and wipe his monocle with his breast-pocket handkerchief. Taking a loaded Colt from Pete, Buck tosses a quarter into the air above the millionaire's head and blows a hole through it before it lands. The businessmen cowering against the far aisles hush. Father—he seems so much older here than decades later (life could use a continuity man sometimes)—stuffs gloved fingers into his wide Russian mouth. Without so much as a caesura, Rockefeller mechanically bends over and pockets the coin, expounding further upon the benefits of isolationism. My mother and father are about to meet. Of course, it may not have happened like that at all, for the script—Mother's, mine, or Providence's?—is constantly being revised, expanded, abridged. It's my property, damn it; let me tell it the way I like. Memory falters, memory fails. Memory and fallacy commingle and there, perhaps, you have art. Even if it is only the movies. The scene has already jump-cut to—

Scene Six: Buck Bartlett—on location, as the movie people say, or still said when I knew the movies, when I was in the movies. Wistful, whistling an old prairie air, he is sitting cross-legged on a rusty bench within the inner gardens of a deteriorating hotel on the outskirts of an English university town— Oxford, Cambridge, Oxbridge, I can't remember. Buck is bearded, bent, ashen-faced and ashen-haired, looking as ancient as stone in this gray rain. Surrounded by moss-bewigged and vine-bearded trolls and dwarves, the sculptural sort found in British gardens worldwide, he is barely distinguishable from them. Well, the effect is largely accountable to the makeup he is wearing, rather than his fatigue: There is some tiresome grade-Z movie (operetta derived from opera) being shot over in the next shire, in which he plays a bit part as an American uncle who is neither rich nor quite dead, but very old. (The usual dénouement of an actor's career, an obligatory farewell known in moviedom as "fulfilling the contract.") Buck whistles low, whittling in the rain, magically transforming a pine knot into a figurine of his favorite bucking bronc. His nervous knife flicks up and down between his fingers in a controlled frenzy; the embryonic horse seems to be pushing its form from the inside out. Eventually we hear the pit-pat of India rubber soles across the flagstones—a young, not altogether comely girl dressed in argyle and Fair Isle and lugging a book satchel as if she has just left her Harvard Classics and Bryn Mawr campus is coming down the path in stork-legged strides. Actually, I look somewhat more like an eccentric emu with my long, thin neck and quizzical, almost comical green eyes behind thick prescription lenses—for I have grown up completely, too old or too graceless for the silver screen. That last movie we made the year or so before, an embarrassing bit of film noir fluff which would become our mutual bête noire (the trades gleefully called it a "flop"), will be my last, indeed. Buck looks up as if expecting one of the hotel's retainers, and only with much hesitant shuffling does he make room for me on the bench. I shake my damp hair (back to its natural mousy color for the first time in over twelve years), take a book out of the bag, and, opening it to an appropriate page, balance it on his knee. (He has not yet put down his knife, as if he might need it for other purposes.) It's the chapter on the final departure of my father from Buck's sight, told so delicately in Father's customary continental manner no one reading this best-seller is ever really any the wiser on the subject. The wind intercedes for us here and, providing a clue, turns the page to a photograph of Mother—dear Mother ageless as amaranth, umbrella and lunch basket on the beach at Atlantic City, squinting out from the depths of the snapshooter's shadow... and Buck and I both know who is casting that shadow. Dear ageless Mother, the belle of Manhattan, Kansas—I can hear her speaking to Father in imperfect French, which they seemed to have made their own private language, spoken by no one else; I can hear her saying to him, "ne m'oublie pas, ne m'oublie pas." But I have not forgotten: My parents had been lost at sea by then and so what if I preferred to believe he had killed them, however vicariously; it makes no difference now what we all believed then, what games were played, then. All the same, I cannot hold back those words I practiced and practiced facing the wind-hollowed deck chairs on the voyage across the Atlantic—words I spoke aloud then in an attempt to exorcise myself of them: of how he wanted me and got me through her despite him, because of him maybe though that was still not enough. No. No, not right, this senseless chain of pronouns. There's no one's honor to defend; we all used or were used equally. Besides, who among us could define "honor"? The overeducated and overanalyzed screen brat can rant all she likes, but Buck is canny enough not to even deny the denials. Nevertheless, his knife slips and then there is blood mixed with the rain. I watch my colorless, frightened face in his little round reflective sunshades. He places his rough rawhide hands over mine, which are nervously flopping about like small pale fish out of the water, capturing and subduing them. The knife is stuck into the sod between our feet and I wonder if I should seize it. Is it possible to love someone you have always hated so very much? What are we searching for in each other's eyes, what are we waiting for—a clapboard click, a cue from an invisible director on the other side of the shutter? To speak again? To kiss, to scream? Oh, it does not matter now that it's only left in the gray and grainy archives of memory... And another unseen director has given the final cue years later: my last, messy scene in a candle-lit motel room far beyond the bedrooms and backlots of Burbank or Beverly; Buck's last soaring through the air with the greatest of ease like all daring young men... Once we were lost hitchhikers along the highway, trying to get home, to find home when there was no home—Buck and Mother and Father and me—but now we are all at home in the afterlife of darkened theaters, together, forever, ever... Next reel, shall we?

Scene Seven: Buck Bartlett—on a holiday trip through Mesoamerica with Ivan Ivanovitch Kerensky, my father. They pose for the photojournalists next to my parents' world-famous Monroe Doctrine, which Father has just flown directly from Washington, DC. Father is boyishly charming (or charmingly boyish) and really quite natty in his corduroy "jumpsuit" with black silk scarf, goggles dangling from his blistered neck; he is flushed with that ruddy vigor which lingered in him whenever he had just completed a particularly foolhardy stunt, whether on horseback or in the heavens. Buck is much cooler and constrained—he looks more like a history professor in his tweedy traveling jacket and bow tie than an intrepid performer. The Doctrine (named and first flown by my mother the visionary) is so highly waxed and polished its sheen is hallucinatory, like a gleaming crucifix in the sunlight when it flies over you. The playing field is carpeted with the damp iridescence of jungle flowers; reporters crush the blossoms underfoot to touch the aeroplane and address the pilot as if he were a visiting pontiff, while photographers kneel reverently to snap low-angle shots. On the sidelines, a petulant débutante, the American ambassador's well-scrubbed and well-schooled daughter, leans against her crooked old father as a sapling might against an oak, waving a cardboard fan illustrated with the sacred heart of Jesus before her mute face. When Buck approaches her she reaches out to impress his ranch-roughened hands between her sticky palms (her name is Ann Morrow); their eyes cavort and it is another moment before she shies away. The mayor of Mexico City welcomes my father with much bowing and many apologies for the thin air and the beggar children encircling their knees. Father seems most intent on trying to divert Buck's attention from Ann... Excuse me, an awkward splice here: we are back now at the landing field at sundown as Buck, in a different suit, his hair brilliantined and ringed by golden flies in the late golden light, kisses Miss Morrow adios and enters the machine's cockpit carrying a newspaper, all the time shouting and saluting to the reporters as the prop begins to whirr and the Fokker slowly vibrates and rolls away. Buck is still jabbering—to no one, apparently as the Doctrine quivers and takes to the air as gracefully as a silver-plated damselfly. Beneath them the ambassador's daughter is showing her duenna a watch fob in the form of a miniature stallion which philhippic ol' Buck carved himself. Momentarily blinded by the sun they seem to be flying directly into, Father has a fleeting yet ineradicable vision of the future, of myself in the far, far future: a cool and echoing chamber ablaze like a Hindu temple with thousands of candles, candles which are stars and eyes, too, and my face greatly enlarged as if in Panavision, very white and very still. When he tells me of this years later half in imperfect English and the rest in perfect Russian which I of course barely understand, I am not surprised, as if already aware of the fate I was planning for myself, planning without knowing it for most of my adult life. A few moments after take-off (somewhere over the great pyramids of Tenochtitlan) Buck loses the copy of the Tribuna Democratica—dated All Souls' Eve, 1929—he was trying his goldarnest to read in the failing light, and the pages waft to the dead city below like a flock of silent white doves. And I wonder, while this scene fades, why Father did not envision instead his own private blue death in the depths of Marianas with Mother—alas, the cutting room floors of our dreams are littered with disturbing and inexplicable episodes. Mother used to say, to put me to sleep: "Turn off the lights now and imagine you're a producer with an unlimited bankroll and whatever actors you desire and any screenplay at all..." And the next scene is already upon us:

Scene Eight: Buck Bartlett—aboard a Cunard Line steamer called the S.S. Diplomacy. He is speaking into a large metallic microphone shaped like an ithyphallic artifact. "Glad to be [something] this great land of ours," he is saying into the wind in his humblest great plains accent, "but [something something] I wonder too if it wouldn't turn more Nat-zee heads if we sent Miss Veronica Vale instead, I mean what's-her-name, that actress with one eye anyhow." Confetti snows down upon him and the din from the New York harbor is so deafening he once or twice pokes a finger into his ear and rattles it. At his side on the main deck are the unsmiling, unconcerned faces of an elderly Henry Ford; Max or Hal Roach the movie mogul; and an old, impossibly old, thoroughly corroded John D. Rockefeller Sr. (an Amazonian nursemaid props his swathed figure up in his cane-back wheelchair and swats the movie mogul's hand for offering a cigar; John D. reaches for it too late, like an automaton winding down.) The ship's bow is flounced with tricolor bunting. A military band stands at uneasy attention in the cold, navy blue and brass and bronze. It is despite the Fourth-of-July trappings a grimly gray November day with a brisk wind, although Buck is wearing nothing over his gabardine suit. His speech, half lost to the wind, has gone on to concern critics, theatrical and political. Unexpectedly, energetically, the first lady boards ship, cloistered by more women fans than bodyguards, and is invited to share the mike, which she takes up with lusty relish. Her oversized hat's pheasant feathers tickle Buck's cheeks several times, until she gigglingly consents to remove it. The two remark upon the European climate, meteorological and sociological, and of the foppish posturings of Il Duce and his sidekick the mad little Hun. Oh! and there is so much lovely art in Europe to be saved as well: Picassos and cathedrals and the Cordon Bleu. Now for the splitscreen... All the while Father and I are listening to their goodwill speech on the Stromberg-Carlson in Father's den in our dear Palo Alto; outside the milkglass panes the sky is a darkening violet as an autumnal storm steals light from the canyon. The room smells of oak leaves and pipe tobacco in here although no one in this house smokes but me and no one is supposed to know but me. Father has begun to wear a shirt-ad eyepatch and the ice in his bourbon chimes all too theatrically. Mother is somewhere on that ship, we both know, though she is supposed to be in Point Loma lecturing beneath the glass domes of the Universal Utopian Society. I can picture her outstretched on one of those hard cabin cots, cold compress across her eyes, the Dramamine useless and her very close friend Ann M nowhere in sight. (Though she was a fearless aviatrix and never got airsick, Mother was so easily seasick.) Father chimes. I am dying for a smoke. And we are both profoundly silent in our jealousy. End splitscreen: Father has snapped off the radio. I am émigré, a pioneer, he says, and not used the ways of this wonderful strange country. He would only speak so quaintly when he was drunk. Yet I loved him more than I ever did Mother. I knew of his "mistake" with that Ruritanian countess and despised him for it, though not for his love of Buck—for his love was surely purer than Mother's or mine. I was always certain I knew more about either of them and Buck than they knew about each other and Buck, and naturally I believed they knew nothing of Buck and me. Mother had her "nerves" and her "spells" and relied far too heavily on masseurs and mediums, certainly, but it was Father I cared for most when I'd return from another appalling opera-box fumble and find him alone, dark eyes shining, tracing impossible air routes to Archangel or Ulan Bator on a globe and heedless of the Petruschka piano roll running down inside the player... until each chord rang slower than the last and finally splintered note by note into faint, sustained echoes. Enough pity—the pretty young actor (last seen in a blackface version of Bizet which was one of Mother's crazier dream-plays) who will be escorting me to what would be my last premiere is knocking on the portal of our chateau, the sound rumbling down the empty halls, and I stare into the space on father's desk where her picture had been and find myself laughing when he calls for the poodle which died a year before. A poetically framed fade-out fade-in to—

Scene Nine: Buck Bartlett—his dream, our dream. In it, he sees himself from far above—a distance, perhaps, more in time than space, when the virgin Mary was thirty playing thirteen, just as at thirteen I played thirty—offscreen, of course. (Maybe this dream operates from one of Mother's copycat scripts.) I am an heiress who followed the wrong man, discovered too late I was walking on thin ice. This is absurd, frightening, this scene collaged onto Buck's. I must reach him, but one of my anachronistic high-heels is broken and I am stumbling, crying, laughing I am so cold. I must reach him but cannot: these are separate scenes, different movies. This sort of thing shouldn't be happening to me—I paid for the option with my lifeblood, damn it. The ice under my feet sunders and I plunge downward, down into the frigid salt water, knowing this is the meaning of the moment of death, of finding home at last. Hello, Mother; hello, Father—have you been waiting up for me? But there is no answer. There is nothing left at all after the credits have rolled. There is still nothing, nothing but the purest whitest light, and the projection lamp burns up the celluloid, blinding our eyes.

Scene Ten: Epilogue—Buck Bartlett in the Nevadan desert. He stands along Route 66, a silhouette alone and tall against the endless horizon, propped against a billboard advertising an antifreeze and a lipstick. Grinning, hands on hips, in dusty denims, bedraggled fedora, and Gila-monster-skin boots, he shields his eyes from the blowing sand, the howling wind, and enormous, acutely setting sun. His lean shadow stretches far across the mesquite-mottled earth. Off in the purple distance, juxtaposed to the mesa, oil pumps bob like monolithic birds at water; farther down the long lonesome highway the neon lights of an all-night truckstop have just been ignited. Buck is humming soft and low ("Ghost Riders In The Sky," an old Sons of the Pioneers tune). Tumbleweeds skitter like armadillos across the asphalt, a whippoorwill calls somewhere, Buck spits tobaccy into the sage. Come in closer now, to an extreme close-up of his cool gray eyes: In them can be seen the tiny twin images of a sky-blue 1948 Laredo brougham whistling down the wind, and I am at the wheel, radio on a station reporting the death of my gangster boyfriend back in Reno—the opening tracking shot from that last movie we made together, a thriller called Night Beat. But that was long, long ago in another place, another scriptwriter's dim fantasy. Buck smacks a mosquito at his neck, takes the rope from around his shoulders, and begins to twirl it; he lassos a saguaro already frozen in the gesture of surrender. The sun has been exchanged at the opposite horizon for a moon as big and bright as a klieg light, rising up from the sierra with the speed of a nightbird. Time's a wastin', as Buck would say. Our hero sticks his thumb out toward the empty highway. Somewhere out there is a pair of diamantine eyes, a coupe or sedan, perhaps. It is growing cool and he is a long way from home. So far from home, as were we all. The scene fades to gray, then black so slowly into silence we are unaware it is happening until it is over. Darkness now. The spinning of an empty reel. Neither memory nor conjecture will serve further. There is that space one discovers at the end of a motion picture, after closing the last pages of a book—like saying goodbye to a loved one, and the great wide world opens up into emptiness where we parted. I want to go back home now, too, so don't put on the light. Leave me here in the dark among these dear dead souls I call friends. Darkness forgives faults, allows gentler alterations; isn't that what you told me, Mother? Father liked to sit in the dark, too. In the dark, it is possible to believe—in the movies, in Mr. Buck Bartlett, in any of this. Outside, beyond this imaginary theater, there is light, there is life. You can go there now.
An American Sadhu

Beds of nails! he told the small crowd in a voice emphatic as a salesman's, daggers through the forearms, spikes through the cheeks! Hot coals, he said, ritual scarification, lead ingots strung from the chest, meticulous holes drilled through the palms. Atrophy of the limbs, compression of the chest, sewing up the eyes and cutting off the ears, any conceivable form of self-mutilation—it's all been done before.

The human body, he continued, is not so fixed and unpliable as it might appear. With the aid of weights, straps, ropes, and bandages amazing constructs can be achieved. The world has seen ten-inch necks and twelve-inch waists. Earlobes can be stretched to the shoulders, dinner plates can be inserted between the lips, foreheads can be flattened, feet constricted with iron shoes, limbs twisted like strands of rope. Through protracted mechanizations, he whispered, the male member can be stretched indefinitely, tied into a knot even, carried in a basket hung around the waist.

Such things are possible—all is possible; look it up in books. In India for instance, the poorest country, artists fall back upon the only materials at hand: their own flesh. By forcing the body to endure unspeakable horrors and degradations, it is written, the spirit can be set free. With the body in bondage, he continued, a sudden phlegmy rattle in his throat, with small but increasing doses of pain expertly applied, your awareness of the world is increased to such a level it is, some aver, like experiencing an eternal (excuse me) orgasm—but it would be closer to say that the holy man is experiencing death while still in the land of the living—look at the eyes of those truly holy men—they are obviously not focused on things of this world.

We had gathered haphazardly around him in the park on a sunny day; he spoke from the crumbling steps of a half-collapsed gazebo. No one was paying much attention; many beggars and loonies plagued this park. Children chased balloons, dogs scampered amongst the flower beds, old men played chess under the shade of the oaks. Early summer. Soon it would be Independence Day.

Modern science, he resumed, carries to greater heights what the Indian artist only dreams of. Plastic surgery can easily alter the facial structure, reshape contours, build up or take away. Skin is stretched and stitched and patterned like patchwork. The skull beneath can be re-sculptured by a hand less cruel than our creator's. The entire body can be overhauled in a matter of hours or weeks, not in the decades it takes a holy man just to wither one arm. But that is not all—we can do even more on the inside, where mankind before us never reached. Hearts may be exchanged, organs removed or transplanted, bones and whole limbs replaced with more permanent plastic substitutes, and who knows how long before we can trade brains for better bodies? Maybe I am straying, he said, searching his "audience" for anyone who might be listening, but I mean to emphasize that it is all a matter of transformation through pain or will or desire.

Some of us had grown bored as the afternoon lengthened and the man on the steps droned on; the dogs had chased the balloons away and the old men had folded their chessboards as families gathered to go.

So what could I do? he raised his voice, realizing the impromptu crowd was starting to break up. As an American, I was compelled to go farther, further, be better, be the best. There must be new frontiers to explore, new realms to chart. After years of study and practice, I knew that beyond mere mortal pain is immortal ecstasy, that the celebrated "near-death" experience is the closest we may get to seeing the face of God, or whatever lies beyond the end of time. To maintain my body at the perfect equilibrium, balanced between life and death, that is what I sought at first. Neither life nor death interested me in the midst of such typical American boredom—only that portal between the two. But after contemplating and experimenting with poisons, pills, blood-letting, the usual lot, I gave up and resumed my studies, taking a different approach.

He continued: The fakir or sadhu is, scientifically speaking, in a sort of waking dream-state, all the better to merge with the infinite, but it is achieved crudely, and at great cost. It is better, I thought, to start from the inside and work my way out—that is, by using my soul as clay instead of my body, that is to push the thing we term a soul to the limit. This may sound rather simple-minded, but it is the ultimate trick, is it not, to affect a transformation of the invisible? I will not say how I did it, I could not say how I did it; it took, generally speaking, years and years of intense concentration. It was a matter of squeezing my soul through that portal, while maintaining my body on this side. But what you do not realize, you people turning away, is that this is a dead man up here speaking, long-distance as it were, and that I have achieved what no one else has: I have like a good American gone farther than anyone has before. I am the walking dead, a sadhu who has so mortified himself that he no longer exists in this world at all except as an animate body which walks and talks and breathes yet is not truly alive, not where you are, anyway. I speak to you from across the great divide. It is very nice here, clean, not much really, but very comfortable.

Most of us had left by this time, and the rest were not paying attention to him anymore, if they ever had. His flyers had promised a performance, and it seemed none was forthcoming.

Wait! he shouted, seeing he was losing us. I'll show you, and he removed a pistol from his jacket. I'll shoot myself here, if you like, just to show you I don't feel a thing.

We were not impressed, and the last of us were packing picnic hampers and knapsacks.

No, but that's not what you want, is it? All right, then—I'll try another tactic. I'm not an evangelist, I'm not trying to convert any of you, I'm not even sure if there is a God or anything I can describe in words here, but even so—and suddenly he transformed the pistol into a bouquet of roses, as any reasonably good magician might. Two or three children turned from their retreating parents and stared. Next there was a string of plastic fruit produced from thin air—or maybe his pockets. Then an endless strand of multicolored kerchiefs from up his sleeve. The children were beginning to smile. A few people applauded nervously.

He juggled three balls, which disappeared one by one, then tore up a newspaper and reassembled it in a top hat which we hadn't noticed before. He was getting better. A silver globe floated down from a tree and he waltzed with it a while before changing it into a bowl of fish. A cane grew up from the floor and sprouted paper flowers. Bunnies hopped out of his pockets and doves flew out of the top hat. Eventually we all had stopped what we had been doing. Some of us were even transfixed. The tricks went on and on, most of which we'd seen before, but were nevertheless interesting to watch up close; and he bantered with us, told jokes, danced a little soft-shoe on sand he flung up into the air. He was quick; he was agile; he amazed us—for at least a minute or two.

But an American audience becomes bored so easily. When would he do something truly different? Could he perform contortions, stretch his limbs before our eyes, twist his neck 360 degrees? Would he saw himself in two, hammer nails through his forehead, set himself on fire?

Perhaps he felt just a twinge of our growing apathy, for he suddenly stopped the show and looked out across the park, into the setting sun, deep into the white-hot blaze of the eternal. It could be he looked a little sad.

If it's cheap tricks you folks want... he said, and unfolding a long blue drape in front of him, vanished—instantly replaced by a voluptuous showgirl in spangles and feathers. It's, she said, cheap tricks you'll get.

The Pin Man

Conclusion:June 10. Terrible, rapturous joy! At last he is dead and I am free and sane as any man! No longer shall I have to cower in the dark, shivering in fear of his footsteps, for tonight when he found me at last (I'd heard the crystalline shatter of glass, a cough, and a wheeze) I had my sword in hand. I surprised him outside the map room and went for his throat, I did, before he could draw his own weapon, and he fell at my feet with a thunderous bellow like a stag shot down in a forest. That surprised me, the energy I found in myself, after having eaten so little the past few days, but once I saw his glass eyes agleam in my flashlight's glare (where had I seen those eyes before?) it was as if I had stolen strength from the heroes in the portraits around me. I kicked his ridiculous body (all stuffed with straw, after all; he fell apart under his tartan cloak like all these moldering books) and laughed until I was heaving. He no longer exists, you see, and now that I am not afraid I can surrender myself up to a greater power.

Before I send this failed apologia and all the rest of these maddening words up in flames I must offer up a prayer of sorts, as the puritans and patriots in these stern portraits surrounding me did upon accomplishing a great and noble feat: O Essence of Life Eternal guide my steps as I make my way once again in the world, endow my mind with diligence and steady my hand when I my foes meet, watch and keep me from harm; let me, in peace and without pain, be swallowed up into the void of time, which makes all things meaningless. Amen.

So I am whole, Alex, and clear-headed again, am I not? Perhaps tomorrow you will survey these ashes, blaming them with everyone else on an unseen enemy, and come desperate in fear to my usual bench in the park. There you'll fall crying and forgiven into my arms one final time before I leave you and the last of my merry men for good. You see, before, like most of us, I feared the future; only the past to me was real, bearable. Now that I have consumed all there is of the past I am done with it, I am weightless; as I prepare to strike the match and fan the fire I am already ascending like smoke.

June 9. My last cent has been spent and I know my trial is drawing to a close. Early tomorrow morning I must face fate with dignity and not disgrace, I must be on guard when again I hear him whistling in the dark, prowling by the library doors and rattling the windows as if it were just the wind. The penny I had grown to despise and fear—it was the only thing holding me back from complete poverty, complete freedom—and I knew when it was gone I could finally face him with immunity. It took me quite a while to find a place to dispense with it (I couldn't just toss it down a grating), until I found an old weight-and-fortune machine outside an abandoned drugstore not far from here. My weight was one-hundred, twenty-three pounds, a good thirty or so less than two months ago. This did not surprise me: there has been nothing to eat again today. I am still not really hungry. My fortune, printed on a slip of paper which the machine expelled, read: "You constantly struggle for—" And the rest was torn, left inside the mouth of the machine. Struggle for what? Money? Happiness? Love? I cannot say now; at any rate, it wasn't really a prediction at all. Perhaps because this is because I have no fortune, no future simple enough for predictions.

June 8. A long bus ride around town. This took all but one cent of the money I had left. It was a worthwhile extravagance and I have polished the penny well. The large Coptic eye, for so long a symbol of our beloved backwards country, stares at me unblinking, my sleepless guardian. Heed my words, you won't be watching me for much longer! I felt as if I were looking at all the streets and houses and parks for the last time—maybe I was. Looking at something in the end is much like looking at it in the beginning: one has an appreciation for details and uniqueness which is lost when that thing is seen but not seen when immersed in the quotidian. At first one's senses are alert to novelty; at last, to nostalgia. The humble storefronts and shadowy porches bespoke long-ago conversations or parties or confrontations; the voices of people I had not seen or even thought of for years came back to me, or else my mind flashed with wordless faces that once meant something to me and taunted me now with the promise of memories which would not surface. However, I did hear distinctly other voices, the soundtrack to this lonely travelogue, as it were: from the whimper of my pettish father outside my bedroom door to Dr. Pierce's dry confidences and Alex's wet confessions to the Sultan's articulate ravings. At the end of the trip I was exhausted, as if I had just had to explain myself and my actions to dozens of different people in dozens of places in as many ways. Then I realized that what I was doing was saying farewell to them all, farewell for you won't be seeing me again, and it was very sad, as if I were on the deck of a ship which is pulling away from well-wishers at the port towards an unknown shore. But I am not really sad! I look forward to reaching that other shore with all my heart. And even he won't stop me—why, it's necessary that I say goodbye to him personally.

When the bus approached the library, its tarnished silver dome gone gold with the sunset, I remembered not the first time I had seen the place (for I had seen it all my life in this small town) but the first time I had entered it as an employee, ten years ago this autumn. I had completed my meager state training and was put in charge of conservation, with an assistant and an office and a salary which I thought ridiculously high at the time. I soon realized no amount of money was enough to make up for the hard work and frustration. "Preserving history" (as absurd a concept as any) is a futile race against time and decay—everything was crumbling, disintegrating, falling to pieces around me. Maintenance of its godfearing, inglorious past had never been one of our country's priorities. Once I looked up after endless hours of framing yellowed and illegible documents with their wax stamps and ribboned seals, saw the towering stacks of old gilt-edged, leather-bound volumes closing in on me as if the walls themselves were moving, and it occurred to me: I am working in a mausoleum, a repository for the dead, and like a vast corpse it is collapsing in on me. That was before I grew used to the sharp smell of my embalming fluids, before they began to act upon my brain like a drug. Now I like living here, like the notion of history as an affront to death, history as the most unnatural science of them all. It makes me feel something like happy. When the Pin Man comes, I'll greet him at first with open arms.

June 7. Yesterday the last day I will eat until—until? Tomorrow I have other plans for this loose change weighting down my pockets. Besides, it is no longer necessary to eat. I've gotten by on so little for so long that the hunger no longer bothers me in the least. At first I did feel a bit dizzy, but then there was nothing except a high buzzing in my ears that came and went and a peculiar tightness in my abdomen, as if I had swallowed something large and very hard. Now I do not feel even that. As long as I have water to drink—and there is plenty of it free for the taking—I will be able to hold out, to outlast him, to show him what I am made of. He is following me, of course. I hear him in the middle of the night, with the soft steady footfall of a night watchman, the slow steady breathing of a burglar. At first I wondered if it could be the ghost of the Sultan, but what have I to fear of ghosts when the Pin Man is so much more terrifying? He looks like you or me but there beneath his cloak he carries his weapon, long and lethal, though I refuse to be afraid anymore.

The tower room has become more of a home than that wretched hole the state leased to me ever was. I've moved all my favorite books and portraits up here—including the one of old Increase. He doesn't frighten me any more—in fact, I think of him as a sort of protector, this library's guardian spirit. When I first came to work here, when I was still memorizing the labyrinthine design of all these winding bookshelves, corkscrew passages, hidden stairwells and secret cellars, I remember discovering the door beneath the faded tapestries quite by accident when searching for a light switch, and following the dark steps beyond the door up to this room beneath the dome. There I first met busy-busy, semi-retired director emeritus Dr. Pierce (a collateral descendent of the Mayhews themselves and one of the few survivors of the last century) asleep at his desk, Sage's Compendium to the Philosophy of History sleeping face-down beside him. With a polite cough I woke the old man, who was glad to meet me, had heard all about me, was so happy to have new blood in the aging society. He would speak of long-dead presidents and scholars as if he had been chatting over the telegraph wires with them yesterday, though there was nothing quaint or senile in his enthusiasm. As he talked on, I surveyed his office: a circular room with oak-paneled walls and a great curvilinear mahogany desk in the center; light flickered through slits cut into the rain-splattered dome above, lending a gaslit effect to the room that made it feel as if it, too, had never left the previous century. I understood why Dr. Pierce (he died two summers later at ninety-nine) liked the tower so much—it is like going back in time and, positioned high above the rotting library below, it alone remains incorruptible. (Memory makes all of us walking time machines, wouldn't you say, Mr. Wells? The only problem is, as mere human clockwork, we all run down.)

June 6. He won't have me, I won't allow it. The Sultan was formidable, but he had grown old and slow. I am quick and still young. My ears hear things far away; my eyes can see in the dark. The weaker my body grows the stronger and more sensitive my faculties seem to become.

June 5. This morning I came upon the Sultan's body sprawled lifeless on the steps of the library—the Pin Man had succeeded once again and I know I will be his next target. I may indeed be doomed to grow no older, but my curse is not immortality like these histories. There will be no true successors to Sultanamus the Sagacious: the monarchy is defunct and now all will be anarchy. Police officers were chalking a line around the Sultan's massive body as I passed by (curious beneath my hat and sunglasses but not wishing to be seen); it was a difficult feat because the body lay across four or five steps and next to the Sultan they looked like children coloring chalk pictures on a sidewalk. The few survivors of the Sultan's old court, underlings too trivial for the Pin Man or the police to bother with, were passing a paper sack among themselves like a sacrament. If they had seen me, they would have wanted me to join them, since I was unwilling crown prince. I could see no blood on the Sultan—his thick layers of clothing must have soaked it all in. His death has upset me greatly, for even though I hated the Sultan I admit I admired him—the Sultan was heroic in his vulgarity. It must have taken many jabs of the Pin Man's pin to assassinate him.

After the crowd had finally gone home and the sky began to darken I slipped into the alley behind as usual and let myself in. Through the windows in the lobby I could see the chalk-marks the police had left, but a rain came up and soon washed them away—then it was as if the Sultan had never existed. This made me feel a little calmer, and I went from room to room with my flashlight, surveying this place I love. Now I think I'll be here until I die, too—what other place could give me such asylum, such peace? I belong among the dead. I know these books and documents more than anyone alive, more perhaps than old Dr. Pierce or the Sultan himself had. Like an Egyptian skilled in the arts of mummification I have halted time's progress as best I can. Look down upon me with your vulture's eyes, Increase Mayhew—I am no longer afraid of you, for you now owe a debt to me! I found a last bottle of wine in the back of the director's safe, good stuff reserved for eminent visiting officials, and raised a goblet in the reading room before the empty fireplace, to the memory of the Sultan, author of Mnemonicus Historias, to the memory of my former life among the living and certifiably sane.

June 4: Every now and then I wonder what has happened to them, our beloved staff now set free to starve or go mad in this modern world. Some of them, though old, were no doubt conscripted (as I surely would be if they found me). Though I resolutely refuse to live in this century, I sometimes can't help seeing the grim oversized headlines, like tombstone epitaphs, on the newsstands: for in its declining days our little country has become like the schoolyard bully who, though smaller and weaker than the rest, frightens everyone with his terrible temper and brand new jackboots—and that awful weapon no one has seen but he swears is kept in his back pocket.

There were the weird sisters, though not sisters at all: Miss Victoria, the sniffling, dewy-eyed reference librarian who lived for her cats, and Mrs. Virginia, her darker twin in circulation, who kept five foul-smelling terriers in her tiny attic apartment (I was never able to stomach going back for a second tea-time visit). When I first came there were assigned to various lamplit dungeons several antediluvian archivists, all that sort of intellectual androgyne for whom the smooth calfskin and soft morocco had replaced any sort of desire for what humans are bound in—shriveled, kindly old things whose names I can no longer even recall. Then there was our fearless director, Lord Daniels, almost as old as Dr. Pierce, who despite his position and title had once been a botanist and tennis champion; he had a distaste for history which showed in his lack of preparation for the inevitable ravages of the future. After he was felled in a suspicious accident on the subway, I was elected to replace him, since besides Miss Alexandria, our rare-books expert, I was the youngest by at least three decades (and no one else would accept such a thankless job). It was supposed to be a "temporary" substitution until someone else was duped, but which I kept two years until they rudely chained and padlocked us. With deaths from old age and bystander bombings, we were down to a staff of five by then, servicing the few professors and writers left in our country who had the impertinence and the courage to delve into our sad and now officially discredited past.

June 3. When she left, Alex called me the last Puritan, not without some irony, and with more than a little truth—I suppose that I too am seeking to create a new world by abandoning all but what is most essential of the old. Those periwigged and peruked sourpusses in this former British colony had reduced and circumscribed their world even more than their counterparts in New England had: music, dance, art, theater, and all love but the love of God had no place in their world. Pleasure of any sort was suspect, if not a mortal sin. Almost all books but their own peculiar version of the Bible were banished. Machines and science were considered works of the Devil. In a sense, it was a retreat to Eden; Increase Mayhew in his Encyclopedia (to which I am still devout between excursions into more recent conquests and adventures) even ponders if man and woman should go naked and sleep in trees, exposing themselves undisguised to God and His elements—though he admits our climate and lustful proclivities might not be conducive to such a radically revisionist experiment. My parents' church was a brutish, inbred descendent of the one which the Reverend Mayhew once led, though he would have been shocked by its modern laxity and air of capitalist laissez-faire (its theology may have been crude, but its patrons were wealthy, after all). The Sunday mornings of my childhood were always rainy and always spent between dozing relatives inside our family's old-fashioned pew enclosure, which was something like a railway compartment, two high-backed cushioned seats facing one another in a little room along the aisle, and the only way I suffered the interminable sermons was by hiding a grade-school history book behind my open hymnal and pretending I was on a long train ride into the past.

June 2. Today I am tired, having slept very little on Dr. Pierce's old leather office couch—for Alex dared to visit late last night (though she swears she will never come back). She must have been rapping gently at the back door for some time before I heard her from my basement laboratory—I was afraid it might be the night watchman until I went up to the roof and made out her figure in the dark alley far below. I let her in with some misgivings. She looked dazed and emaciated, though she says she is being cared for by a wealthy white-bearded veteran, "more of a father, really, than a lover." It is the only way to survive now that the war has been brought home and rations have been cut once again, she says. The Major does not let her paint on his penthouse walls but otherwise he is of a kindly disposition, hasn't hit her yet. To calm her, I uncorked the next to last of the wine from the director's safe and sat her down between candles in the rare-books room, what had once been her domain and still the only place where she can close her eyes and breathe in the sedative of the past. Alex told me she had come against her wishes and only because a few quibbling ounces of compassion remained within her. I suppose in the candlelight and with a flush upon her cheeks she was still attractive, though with her thin lank hair, shiny pimpled brow, and myopic squint (so unbecoming of an artist) she had never been seen as pretty by anyone else (even by her make-believe major). She placed my hands back in my own lap and told me she was coming with a warning: She had heard through her father-lover-major that the military was hard-pressed, and certainly the library, as a sound government facility, would soon be used as a barracks or armory. I would have to give up my "home," rejoin the world, get a job rolling bandages if I must. It was then, looking at Alex's whitened lips puckered with sour words, that I realized if she hadn't already betrayed me, she would soon. She had probably even suggested to her keeper, if he is real, that the library be turned over, all these glorious histories she had once cared for burnt for fuel. Had she been bought with the promise of canned goods and cosmetics? I did not voice any of these criticisms; I was not really surprised or angered; instead, I took her by her cool elbow and led her silently away from my kingdom. We did not even kiss at the border. Now I am certain she will never return.

June 1. I have lived here only a little over a month now, though it seems years since I said goodbye to Alex (who refused to follow me) and that basement apartment with its musical pipes running overhead and the lead-footed giantess who lived on the first floor. As acting director I still had the keys to the library even after all funds had been cut, and in the police's haste to close us down, they had missed the hidden door far in back. What better place was there to go? This place has been my real home for a decade now, anyway, since my parents died and most of the people I went to school with perished in one of the wars or were wise enough to emigrate before it was too late. I enter and exit through the rear service entry, the one below alley level, at night or at dawn when the park across the street is empty but for a few drunks, and I know well the watchman's rounds, so no one at all sees me or suspects. I keep my candles low and move quiet as a shadow. Here I am surrounded by all that I love and I finally have the time I've needed to read and reread; I also continue what I can of my preservation duties, for now that the library's sensitive climatic controls are no longer functioning the rooms have grown damp and musty, or else overheated and arid as deserts; it is all I can do to keep pace with the mold and dry-rot attacking our most valuable holdings, and even so most of the other books and documents are disintegrating around me. Often as not when I'm reading a centuries-old volume each page crumbles as soon as I turn it, and when I am through the book is nothing but the skeleton of a binding, with only the ghost of a history within. This is why I must read as many as fast as I can, and still I know I cannot possibly begin to carry a tenth of our country's legacy within my own faltering brain.

May 31. No, I've decided after all these years that Dr. Pierce must have been playing one of his celebrated practical jokes on me: that outcast in rags couldn't possibly have been the leading philosopher of the nature of time, author of The Long Dream of History and The Secret History of Mankind. I've come across both books recently, but haven't dared to reread them. The former I remember is a work of genius, the latter of despair. But now that I have observed him more closely, I cannot match that man in the park with the professor gone mad.

May 30. I have not written again for a few days, for I felt sick—perhaps only sick with fear, histrionic as that sounds—for I have again borne witness to the cruelty of our times. I have stayed on my couch reading, eating leftover crackers from the larder in the kitchen, burning candles until dawn. A few nights ago I heard the sirens and watched from the fourth-floor windows as the police dragnet swept through the park, swift and merciless as the hand of our Puritan God. Only at night would they be so bold; in the daytime the police seldom bother anyone. I watched the vagrants running: some were shot—I saw Dizzy spinning out of control like a top wound too tightly—others were maimed and loaded into the waiting vans, those shiny black bugtraps that remind me of hearses and death. I saw a few bums escaping into the bushes along the river, but did not see the Sultan anywhere. If they didn't get him tonight, though, I know the Pin Man will have him soon, for the Pin Man, vengeful as Kronos, hates those who do not honor him in their fearful prayers and dreams.

May 26. There is this scene from one of those old American movies Alex coerced me into seeing a while ago which I keep thinking of: A great man—former poet, publisher, politician—has entered the palatial hall of his largest estate before it is to be auctioned off to his debtors. The man, played by an actor who resembles a younger Dr. Pierce, has assembled and packed into crates all the fruit of his life's long searches—works of art and personal memorabilia, essentially all evidences of his misbegotten life, which now must be given up. Rather than succumb to that, however, he begins to feed the flames of a cavernous fireplace with the contents of the boxes, at first a childhood sled, then his mother's sheet music, next his father's stuffed birds, until soon he is destroying the entire contents of his many libraries and galleries. The last shot I thought far too blatant: a row of chimneys like organ pipes, belching black smoke. "It's all dreams, you know, it could all go 'Poof!'," Dr. Pierce told me once, standing under the gaslit dome and waving his arthritic hands at nothing, nothing in particular.

May 23. Nothing to write of for a few days, but a most humiliating episode today—I was sitting in the park at noon, reading a sturdy edition of Julius Caesar's letters home from Gaul, a diversion from weightier stuff. (I am confident that the government is too busy with other matters in these hectic times to bother seeking out in a town park a former minor employee such as myself, at least for now.) Looking up every other paragraph, however, I noticed that the Sultan had positioned himself directly opposite me, and page after page the park was invaded by his court. Of course I had been foolhardy to think of choosing the sunny part of the day to occupy my bench, but it was too late, and they all know me well by now. Every time I left the unspoiled hillsides of France and repositioned myself in the park's trampled modern world I saw the Sultan grinning at me, his great bearded face insipid and comical like a circus bear's. Next there came Picasso and the separated Bookends, circling close, trying to see what it was I was reading. Soon, like one of those covered wagons in movies of the American West, I had been corralled by the enemy—there was no choice but to interrupt Julius, rise, and attempt to break through without acting as if I were aware of anything but the vacuous sky-blue thoughts in my head. But the Sultan reached out a huge paw as I passed, scooped my feather-weight body into his lap, and as his courtiers laughed, took a look at my book, kissed me on both cheeks, and crowned me with his wreath of dead graveyard lilies. "Hail the conquering hero!" he announced to his cohorts in perfect academy French. I fought myself down off his mountainous stomach and stumbled away, and I would not have been surprised to discover tears streaming down my face if I had had the courage to look at my reflection in the now empty department store windows. Looking back from a safe distance, I saw that the Sultan was apparently reading passages from Julius to his men, as if he knew Latin, too, and his followers were nodding off over their brown-paper wine like Greek thinkers at a symposium.

May 22. The thought occurs to me: instead of lessening my load, perhaps I am weighting myself too much with these books and their endless pasts, losing myself in the mazes of their pages and of these four floors, these winding, deceptive forest paths between the dark shelves of this library. At times, deep into the night, the old building seems to be growing in size—I can hear it heaving and creaking as its crowded rooms beget other rooms, hallways leading to doors leading to stairways, gallery upon gallery, chamber upon chamber, tower upon tower. In lucid sleep I go walking through new collections, of histories not yet written, filled with portraits of leaders not yet born. I am filled with dread and horror; there may be no way to stop it but one. Isn't there a Tarot card (major or minor arcana?) of the Burning Library? Or am I thinking again of Egypt and the ancient world?

May 21. I never liked him, Increase Mayhew, never liked his ferret's nose, his weasel's chin, his skunk-collar overcoat and especially that badger-like tenacity so evident in his dull narrowed eyes. Ever since I came to the library he has been glowering down upon me from his imperial position above the unused fireplace in my crowded laboratory; he must have been placed there decades ago when Mrs. Victoria and Miss Virginia upstairs got tired of having him glare down on them in the reading room. He was last of the Puritan forefathers of Nova Albion, pious men every bit as humorless as their more celebrated American cousins. I suppose I could have had his portrait replaced or covered with velvet as our more photosensitive paintings are, but after a year or so I began to think of him as a hated but somehow necessary adversary, the glowering Cerberus guarding our priceless manuscript repository.

Once Dr. Pierce surprised me dreaming at my desk and gazing into Increase Mayhew's fierce countenance; the old man, Mayhew's last living relation, had come bearing me a gift: a detailed family tree (more of a spindly birch than a massive oak) of the Mayhew clan, since in our frequent talks he knew I had become interested in the subject. And there indeed, in darker ink near the top edge of the stained parchment, was a single leaf with "Pierce, Emanuel Mayhew" imprinted upon it, a leaf so fragile and high on the tree that I knew then it would not be long before it fell. After thanking him profusely I caught Dr. Pierce staring at my desk blotter. I can't say exactly why, but it was then that I told him about the Pin Man, just a vague memory at the time, which like a spirit at a seance sometimes manifested itself quite unheeded in my sketches and doodles, as well as my daydreams. Unlike Alex much later, he seemed to understand immediately. "Yes, of course," he said, "I've come close to seeing him once or twice myself." I did not know what to say, now that I had so dangerously exposed myself, but led Dr. Pierce to the door under his great-great-great grand-uncle's watchful eye. "But," he said, pushing up his spectacles and turning to go, "you must do your best not to believe in him, just as I refuse to bow to Father Time." With that, he was gone.

May 20. Day after day nothing happens, and still I wait. I spend my days wandering the town, exploring half-empty stores for the hundredth time, unafraid somehow in broad daylight, although the country is crumbling, terrorists ticking in every other block, soldiers are everywhere, the police have been transformed into baby-faced stormtroopers (few are older than twenty), and half the shops are closing. The weather, however, is beautiful, as if nature is mocking the devastation of man. And yet I never hear of the enemy even when I do pick up a paper from a trash-barrel; the enemy is invisible, you might be led to think, they might not even exist—but why else does the populace quake in fear? It's nothing so simple a psychologist could solve it in ten easy sessions. I've analyzed my own problems beyond that point long ago. Perhaps this fear is merely a part of our cultural heritage, something which has invaded our inbred, rarefied genes. So I stay here in the historical society's library, home sweet fortress. Tomorrow—who knows? They (the police, the military, the "enemy") could break in, knock over shelves and busts, and carry me away to prison or slavery or the front lines; they could even open the doors to the vagrants who once begged on our front steps—soon the Sultan might be ensconced on his throne in this tower room. Tomorrow I might have to flee from here and leave this place behind to be burned or bombed.

May 19. Nothing again—excuse me, please, imaginary readers, but I have had much to think and little to remember.

May 18. Nothing, nothing!

May 17. Nothing.

May 16. Now that I have so much time to spend alone I find myself living increasingly in the past—not just my own personal past, but the entire tangled fragmented patchwork past of our angry and lopsided little country. Who is to say that one does not create history as much as one creates art, and consequently to live one's life in the past is as powerful an act of the imagination as the storyteller's determination to invent worlds and histories of his own? To read the past is to convince oneself that it really did exist, just as the storyteller deludes you into believing what he says is true. All of these books on all of these shelves contain their own separate fictions; only together do they bring into existence a concurrence which we dare to call History. I am not a historian like the scholars who used to research their own corners of the past here; I am a lover of tales at best, and I suppose I find the same thrills of deception and artifice in such books as novel-readers do in theirs—or scientists studying camouflage do in nature. As for the work I do here, I sometimes feel most like a taxidermist, stuffing and mounting the past, healing books and documents and creating the illusion of time stopped. It could be that all such work is a falsification of evidence, that all my work is for naught, but I go on, I go on. Sometimes feel tired enough for death, though I once thought I'd never grow old in this place. Still, I go on, I go on...

May 15. I can't say I miss Alex. We were never in love. Today I thought of her when I pulled back the wrought-iron accordion gate and entered the rare-books room as if entering a chapel, the first time I have braved myself to go there all month. There was still—if I am not fooling myself yet again—a trace of her sour body odor in the stale air, and I thought of how we had once read Blythedale's epic Romance of the Western Isles (an extremely valuable original edition and one of only two extant copies) together at a study carrel in the back of the room, a shimmering, carbuncular light coming through the ruby-glass oriel, and her shiny brow bent very close to mine. We were never really in love.

May 14. In a secret corner of the Encyclopedia Arcana, in writing so tiny, so feathery (clearly indicative of the syphilis which finally turned old Increase's brain to water) that I am not sure if my scan is correct: "A warning: Don't believe a word of it, neither this world, not this book, nor the world of this book."

May 13. And a Friday, happy day... I go up and I sink back down. But today, now that my money is nearly gone, I feel an incipient joy within me expanding, and I grow ever more elated, as if weights had been lifted from my back and I might fly free as a balloon up to the sun. When I was rich, when I was my parent's spoiled smirking child, I was never so happy, so expectant. We lived in a grim castle-like house that looked down on the rest of the town as Increase Mayhew has looked down upon me for so many years. My father had made his fortune in publishing, but he despised books as much as I loved them; his factories printed up trash as if their very purpose was to overthrow our long-embattled culture. His highly moral authors wrote so much and sold so much that they smothered the good beneath the bad until even our teachers were forced to teach the stuff, the old was now so hard to get. But I visited the nearly forgotten branch libraries, I uncovered what had been buried under garbage, and I read the classics right under my father's nose. He considered this a personal affront, and he was right. (My mother shrank before him, unable to defend herself or me.)

When my father died after my mother (who seemed less to have died than to become so invisible she disappeared) he left his entire legacy to the state, never realizing how much this pleased me. By then I was deep into my studies, deep into this past he had tried to deny.

May 12. It occurred to me today that if I really wanted I could sell any of the contents of this library on the black market—even during this wartime depression such goods could bring huge sums from the right collectors (preferably foreign). One volume, one decorative sword (there's one I took from above a fireplace which I keep nearby to protect me if the need should arise—and it will) could support me for months. It is a tempting thought when I am debating what to order from a cheap cafe's menu, but of course it is impossible. Selling off any part of our fabulous collection would be like selling off my limbs, my vital organs, my very soul.

May 11. Besides his entertaining treatises on imperialism, all that is left of Dr. Pierce is his official portrait in the main lobby: a petty clerk's cheap gray suit, crooked wire spectacles, mouth pursed slightly to hold in his ill-fitting dentures. I have covered it with black velvet. What is happening to his domain would be too much for him to witness.

May 10. Like a good historian, I have been doing my research, daily, in the park. The Sultan has his coterie: the first I think of is a swollen hag in ribbons and rags (how does she stay fat? by chewing bones from garbage pails?) whom I heard being called Dizzy one day, perhaps because she walks around with her arms before her and with a bad limp, making her look as if she had been spinning around in circles and she is trying to regain her balance. There are also two dark-skinned, bearded men who always situate themselves at opposite ends of any gathering of street people—so I call them the Bookends, and they are still and solemn as fakirs. Queenie is an ancient wrinkled man who wraps himself in filthy flowing blankets that trail behind him like a royal train. He has a constant hankering for fellatio in the rhododendron. Martin is a skeletal, hollow-eyed youth who babbles constantly in tongues only other addicts might be able to translate. There is another named Bob, a chain-smoker (he picks his stubs carefully out of the gutters with the air of a connoisseur) who lets out a howl like a chimp in a zoo from time to time, and others named Tutu and Jimbo and Picasso (because he can dribble his initials in the dust with his piss), as well as many other anonymous and indistinguishable individuals (these lost, homeless souls, most of them veterans left in the wake of all our wars) who gather around the Sultan when he holds court on the polished marble steps of the library. Before the society shut itself down we were always having to call the police—being too timid to chase them back to the park across the street ourselves. Of course, the Sultan, who is as large and slow-moving as a beached manatee, is no real ring-leader, but his presence does mean a certain measure of protection for his companions: the police might shoo anyone else away from buildings and benches, but no one ever seems willing to say a thing to the Sultan—he is so saturnine and somehow (perhaps because of his turban) too imperial and imposing to approach, like an ebony idol in a forbidden shrine. Or maybe it is simply his great stink that keeps everyone else away. But who dares guess the truth about the Sultan? Who would be willing to ask him why the others gather around him like disciples, too awed by the presence of their mentor to do any more but lay there immobile at his huge feet? Every day the Sultan gives me that look with his murky opalescent eyes as I pass the doors of the library, having crawled down from the fire-escape on the alley side: I know who you are, his eyes say, and you do not belong here any more than I do.

May 9. At night the library is cold and uncomfortable, but a much more civilized alternative than a bench in the park or an embankment below a freeway overpass. I am no vagrant; I still have money in my pockets; I will not become like these men I share the public drinking fountains with. They are lost, befuddled, broken, stupid, and drunken; I am none of these except perhaps lost—though I know exactly who I am and where I am going and I see everything all too soberly and clearly (perhaps my chief problem in the first place). Still, it is disturbing the way these miserable people point me out to one another as I walk past them in the parks and alleys, as if they are counting the days until I fall in amongst them. There is that one, here for decades, who has always reminded me of a tyrannical sultan from the Arabian Nights, a giant black man swathed in black or blackened sweaters and blacker overcoats despite the heat, his enormous feet encased in plastic litter bags, wilted wreaths stolen from a local heroes' cemetery around his neck, and a dustbin-liner turban around his head. (And his smell! Like the latrines unavoidable during the last war, filled with fecal matter and rotting corpses.) He has a way of looking at everything which terrifies me, though it is hard to say exactly how. His eyes are a milky, glaucous color, probably stunned and blinded by the wine he subsists on, though still they bore right through me, as if to say: I know you, I know your secret fears, you can fool everyone else but you can't fool me. The only other time I have seen eyes as ultimately corrosive and damning as his were in my fathers' gods, those icons of the temple of my youth—great gruesome saints and angels with coronas of fire around their heads and Jehovah himself with blood dripping from His mouth. But could the Sultan possibly know his riddle was solved long ago for me?

May 8. My father once gave me an oversized bill and asked me to run out and fetch a paper, I could keep the change. I did not return for three weeks. Were you lost? was all he said when I came swaggering back. Only in time, I replied.

May 7. They interest me more and more, these strange beings I meet on the streets and am forced to confront; now that I am hopeless in a hopeless world I spend my days crossing and recrossing the paths of men and women who might be like me, if they had only my intelligence and diligence. At first I avoided them whenever possible, but lately that has become impossible and with the return of warmer, drier weather they are everywhere in the city, exchanging glances with me in the parks, bumping into me in the public restrooms, sitting on the opposite end of my bench. There is no use any longer in pretending we do not recognize each other. Sometimes I fear that I may one day be sitting among them, passing on the bottle of cheapest wine in the requisite paper sack, smoking the butt-ends of gutter cigars. It is all very pleasant and bucolic in a way, like wild people from the hills, quaint and of a simpler time. When they start to speak to me, though, I walk away very quickly, acting deaf. What do they want of me? Why do I constantly fear that in spite of my superior brain they are privy to secret systems and truths of which I have not the faintest inkling? Until a few weeks ago I held a respected job, I guarded the history of our despoiled but vain country, I walked through these parks like a protector and a patron, and I bestowed my blessings even on them—dropping into their filthy palms the golden coins with their golden eyes, eyes which only as a young child I really believed watched over us all with supreme and egalitarian grace.

May 6. For a while I had a fantasy of Alex coming to live with me here: we would separate the library into apartments for the both of us, grow vegetables in pots on the roof, learn to cook and eat the pigeons cloistered under the eaves. We'd wander through the stacks, naked, hand in hand, reading passages to one another and cataloguing bequests. Our lives would be a paradise of books; we'd never have to return to the outside world at all. In time, who knows, we might have had a child, many children (as do all those who'd like to supersede the existing order), started our own bibliophile dynasty, created a race with no future, perhaps, but more than enough history to make up for it.

May 5. I would make a most uninteresting character in a work of "popular" fiction (of the sort my father's hired guns produced on their assembly-line typewriters), for those characters are always having beautifully cinematic and instructive dreams, perfectly translatable and analyzable, and these dreams usually include clearly recognizable symbols involving friends or family members in transparent disguises (the queen in the bloodied gown is Mother, the ape in a judge's wig the minister who once heard your confessions). My dreams, such as the one I had last night, are dull, dense, and exceedingly stupid. Remembering my dreams is like trying to look through several layers of translucent pages in an illustrated book, for upon waking my dreams seem to be all superimposed one upon another, none of them bright enough for the watermark of sensibility to shine through. I wish I could say I dream of the Pin Man, so there could be a leitmotiv of artistic nightmares running through this journal, but I do not and there is not. Or perhaps the Pin Man is in all my dreams, that it was he whose face stared up at me from the book dissolving into sand in my hands or his thumbprints all over the curling documents I was unable to flatten no matter how many dream-years I spent at the task. One thing I do recall clearly about last night's failed premieres: each dream started and stopped, or faded and merged, on one frustrating act after another. Now, even I know what that means.

May 4. The night watchman has been helping himself to the wine kept for visiting dignitaries and society seminars we keep stored in a cellar below the director's office. I hear him below, uncorking another bottle nightly; once or twice he was still sleeping in the director's oversized armchair at dawn when I crept outside to go seek a cheap breakfast. Yesterday I saw the empty bottles lined up along the floor of the cellar—there were only three untouched bottles remaining. I wish I could take them, but that would only make the guard suspicious (even though he is the same old fool we've had for decades who never looks beyond the first floor), and besides there are a few of the most valuable bottles in the safe which he doesn't know about. I was saving them for when Alex would join me, but I may drink them all myself before she decides she must leave whatever hulking brute she has most recently attached to herself. Well, I hear Old Tom's hated keys chiming below me now, so I must put out my candles and retreat to my sanctuary in the sky. I swear I'd as soon kill that fool as the Pin Man himself.

May 3. Today I read that Increase Mayhew was personally responsible for sending two-hundred and twenty-six alleged "soothsayers" to their deaths (by various interesting means, such as by being pressed between gravestones, nailed into coffins, and buried alive in mass graves). I've read all that before, of course, but this time it was in his own proud hand, in the manuscript of his monumental Encyclopedia Arcana, six green silk-bound volumes which I have been slowly maneuvering my way through for the past few days. The Encyclopedia is nominally an autobiography, not, however, of the ho-hum humdrum "I did this, I did that" variety, but a concentrated effort to recreate exactly what significant as well as trivial details his mind was taking in at each and every moment of his long, cheerless life. It is a maddening mnemonic task, and the tiny, spidery handwriting does not facilitate making sense of the ten-thousand crowded pages. In fact, he mentions the witch trials only in passing, between lengthy enumerations of the many types of lightning and its beneficial effect on crops, and of the increasing number of instances in his life when he has that inexplicable and distinctly human sensitivity to knowing he was being watched before ascertaining it to be true. It is no wonder that the artist who did his portrait (adding a head to shoulders and background painted by another artisan back in England, as was the practice) was able to capture so well the watchful eyes of his patron. Mayhew's clear cold gray eyes seem to twitch in their painted sockets, searching out the minutest imperfections of the world and damning them.

May 2. Every day my wallet like myself grows thinner and lighter but I do not care. It feels good to purge myself of everything of this world, our collective anonymous pasts, and my own useless individual past—and money, even new money, carries more of the filth of the ages than anything else. I have never believed in banks—more precisely, I do not understand their mysterious and intricate workings, a microcosm of the world at large. Banks have something of the stench of the charnel house about them; I cannot explain it, but money smells like blood to me. Since I left home I have always carried all the money I own on my own person, so that I do not have to enter banks and write checks and if I see something and want to buy it, which has never been often, I can satisfy my whim on the spot. Thieves are too smart to look twice at me; they know somehow I can no longer really be a rich man's son. Yet day by day I feel more of an impostor as I walk the streets of this city, impersonating the well-to-do young man with a job and a future, which I used to be, albeit a little odd and wary of the scent of others.

May 1. Patience, strength, purity, weightlessness. You see, Alex, to give it all up, one gains back so much. Fine, fine, another May, another April lost, time is unstopped...

April 30. I know now that I was correct in the beginning: that the changes I have made are irreversible, there is no turning back—I have given myself entirely up to chance (the only true system in the universe) and now I will blow like a leaf hither and yon, and end up, I suppose, where all dried-up old leaves end up. A former school friend (one of a very few left) whose name I cannot remember saw me sitting in the park near a gathering of vagrants, and there was some embarrassment: was I possibly one of them? That much was not said; the friend (now a lieutenant) did ask, however, what I had been doing, how I was getting by. I'm not doing anything, I answered with complete candor, and I am getting by. The friend had left with further awkwardness, coughing and covering his mouth, and we had both looked back surreptitiously at one another as he walked away. If there are still more old friends of mine out there, they have not crossed the streets or stopped their cars or come out of their houses to acknowledge me—and that is all very well. I am nearly happy, I am growing content.

April 29. I have never known what it must be like to spend money freely and without guilt, even though my parents once forced money on me as if they could not stand to have its stink on their own hands. When I enter the cool, fluorescent halls of large and expensive department stores, I always feel like a thief, although shoplifting is something I have never attempted even now that most of my money is gone—nothing has ever appealed to me so very much that I would steal to have it. When the salesclerks stare down at me like caesars at the Coliseum, however, I know I do not belong where my feet have led me; I do not belong any more than a beggar belongs at a charity ballet. I spend most of my days of late wandering from store to store in my rounds of the city; they are air-conditioned and inviting, as hushed as reading rooms, as oddly calming as a little white pill placed under the tongue. Today I went into the men's department of the most prestigious store in the city and began to cry: the fine white cotton shirts (the sort my father would wear) in their cellophane wrappers stacked in their wooden cubbyholes were just too beautiful; I wanted to press my face into the cool white shirtfronts of the clerks because their shirts, too, were so beautiful. And I was unshaved and unwashed and unloved by them or anyone else.

April 28. Even in this remote corner of town I am not completely safe. Every night police cars cruise through these alleys, searching for crimes only they could imagine, and I know that other officers are out there on foot, patrolling the warehouses and docks and abandoned state buildings like this one. I must blow out my candle and put away my book after a certain hour, for then I hear the creak of patent leather on concrete and I quake in fear of being discovered by men more astute than our night watchman; I shiver on my tower-room couch like the quivering lighter-than-air baby balloons in their bassinets in that old animated fable.

April 27. Alex refuses to visit me here again, refuses to see me anymore at all. She says I am ruining my life; I could be working with the government to save what we can, instead of running away from it. I had her wrong from the start; she is not driven by the divine insanity of an artist, but is every bit as dull and sane as that ant or that wall. She has never loved me, that I know, but once I thought she was genuinely interested in me from—dare I say?—an historical perspective.

April 26. The rent on my subterranean hovel has been due for four weeks and the tenderly phrased eviction notice from my kind landlords was slipped under my door yesterday, so today I packed all I needed (limiting myself to one suitcase) and walked away from the place. I had thought of doing what all vagabonds must dream of doing at first: finding an abandoned warehouse down a forgotten street, a place to enter unseen—it is clean (very important that the place be clean), the floors are white-washed concrete, the windows painted over, the ceiling a network of girders and ducts and pipes. In a nearby refuse heap, the homeless man finds all he lacks: a mattress, a slab of wood and concrete blocks to serve as a table, a crate that would serve excellently as a chair. He sets them up in a corner of the warehouse, in a partitioned area that had once been an office, and feels proud of himself: at last he has a home which is his and his alone. But I have cheated, for I have the perfect place waiting for me already. It is of utter importance not to spend a penny more than absolutely necessary, so I bought only a box of candles to cope with the night, when the flashlights at hand won't do. If anyone goes so far as to ask me where I am living, I will answer: In my own way, in my own place, in my own time.

April 25. Goodbye, battered, shattered old self. Goodbye, tyranny of the future. I know what it is I must do next.

April 24. A Sunday, another Sunday, the apartment is stifling and the stores are closed and there is nothing for me to do but walk the empty streets of an empty city, staring into storefronts at the mute and mysterious appliances and beautiful, cadaverous mannequins. I ask myself if I am happy still and still I answer yes, though I know I am lying. Someone has left the shoppers' music playing over the city's speakers and I dance with the ghost of Alex through the empty mews and malls and across the quadrangle, delirious and angry. I do not care what happens tomorrow or next week when the notice comes or next month when I face unforeseen dangers or unheard-of delights. Here, this very moment I am alive and spinning in a void and nothing matters, nothing much.

April 23. We argued and argued (over money, promises, my prospects, hers, the world's) until we both fell asleep, and then argued more in our dreams, thrashing our limbs and twisting the sheets around us as if the bed were a net and we were both caught. At dawn she must have torn free, dressed, packed the few things she kept here, and left me to wake at noon—my head aching as if I had been drunk the night before and my hands tossing this and that about in a fury—while some other part of me looked on, slightly amused and slightly saddened by this pathetic cartoon figure going through all the cliché actions of a spurned lover. Later I calmed myself with a history of our colonial wars and drew up the plans for my new life.

April 22. Though I must limit my expenses so drastically, Alex convinced me to go with her to the movies last night. I don't like movies—I can never follow them no matter how simple (I get so caught up in the trivial details of items placed on a desk in the foreground or the background birdsong, but just to sit alone and in the dark did appeal to me, so I went with her.) I think we sat through an American western and an Indian musical and a French comedy one right after another (there is no cinema industry to speak of in our art-starved country), and I at least was in a sort of trance, transfixed upon the senseless motions of the giant screen, occasionally dozing off and waking up into new scenes that were inexplicable and therefore strangely poetic. When you don't know what is going on in a movie, you watch everything more closely because everything has possible significance—the repetition of a word, that painting on the wall, the bouquet of balloons sailing into the sky outside the window of a motel room. I have often thought it would be interesting, were I a projectionist, to run a movie backwards—what a marvelous puzzle that would make! Relationships would take on new meaning in reverse, characters would gradually act more and more absurd, the plot would degenerate from complex to simple. I have tried reading books backward to simulate this effect, but it is impossible to do: you must still read sentences one at a time in the usual way, for there is not the smooth reversibility possible in running film backwards, in which water would flow up falls and food would be regurgitated whole upon the actors' plates. Maybe what I am trying to do is reverse my life, to return to the simplicity of childhood—ha! but that is a falsity for sure, for, if anything, childhood is the unhappiest, most complicated phase of our lives. Once more, anything and everything is of possible significance and truth is slow to teach us and fear is our closest friend.

Thinking of that preposterous animation I saw as I child: what if I were to reverse it? Out of thin air happy spherical families would be created, a prick of the pin, and—presto new life. What wonderful magic, what horrors!

April 21. Why, I sometimes wonder, do I continue to keep this journal when at the end of this self-imposed trial (in whatever way it does end) I fully plan to burn it? What would a stranger make of these ramblings and rumblings if he were to bludgeon me and steal my precious notebook? Perhaps he would think that these are merely notes and suggestions for a novel or short story, rather than something more real, more ridiculous.

April 20. I have often considered committing some heinous act—murder or some other violent crime—merely to examine the consequences something so rash and unexpected would have on the rest of my life. But I am not a violent person and my temperament only begs me to withdraw, to silence myself, not to act.

April 19. Alex is the only other person I have told about my insanity, because she, too, I believe, is insane in her own lovely way. Among her rare and precious books, she, too, has discovered the world to be solid and impenetrable while we are amorphous, diaphanous, ephemeral. Mere shadows on a screen. We used to make love rather haphazardly, in our first days together, but for both of us it was as if we were standing outside our bodies as we lay together, watching two strange ungainly creatures coupled as one, as wholly inexplicable a union as two unknown little polyps viewed through a scientist's microscope. Within the past year we have not known each other carnally more than five or six times, for it makes us both feel a bit grotesque. I don't know why we have continued to see each other as often as we do. Now she tells me to eat even though I wish to be more careful with my money, not to spend it too quickly or unwisely: eating seems to be the most controllable of all expenses—hunger does not bother me as much as walking when I could ride the bus. A tin of oatmeal and a loaf of bread can be stretched to last a long time.

Alex has little more than I, but what can I do for her? Now that the library has closed she mops floors so she can paint on her walls—if she painted on canvas, then maybe she could make some money, but she doesn't want to and I am not the one to persuade her to do otherwise. You shouldn't call it insanity, though, she has told me; it's merely a different way of looking at things. But that is not it. I am not an artist like she is. I have no talents. My perceptions are not original, I don't even write prefabricated fictions (they call them histories) like the ones I read; I once wanted only to live a normal life and yet I have no desire left in me to pursue one; I have no desire left in me at all. Alex wants to help me, I can tell that, but I don't need help. Instead of casting off the weight of the present, I sometimes feel I've tied this anchor to my ankle so I can sink out of sight. There is of course the possibility that I might be headed for my own demise, from starvation or a quicker form of suicide, but that is not really my purpose at all. I only know that a change was inevitable, that life will go on without any effort on my part even after I have irreversibly altered it. Death is all very romantic and noble but not for me. There is no sense in taking myself so seriously. When nothing matters, then it does not matter that you mock yourself.

April 18. You (whoever you are) must know that illustration—it's a favorite from a book everyone, even in this country, used to read, and Alex had pinned it to the wall above our bed: the mad child, crowned queen, pulling the tablecloth as in the old stage trick, but upsetting all the ornate winged dishes and the world at once—I may, I confess, be confusing this illustration with that other one of the same mad child, condemned by a queen, knocking over the house of cards, shattering the looking-glass illusion, wakening into reality. Wake up, wake up, wake up! I want to say to the world, even if I may be the only one sleeping.

April 17. I have tried to give it up, this sad excuse for a journal—it seemed so senseless, trying to tell my story to no one for nothing. But lost in a forest of words, other people's words, as I have been for so long, one finally reaches the point where one must raise his own voice, cry out above the learned din: I have a tale to tell, too! Or else one is swallowed up, dissolved among the stars, in the "anonymity of the ages," as a great scholar once put it.

April 12. He glares like a sphinx at me, the Sultan does, stretched out upon the library's cool marble steps again. Could he know that I know his secret, as Dr. Pierce once revealed it to me: that he, yes he, had been one of our best and most honored? He'd become confused in the labyrinth of time, the old doctor told me sotto voce, as if drawing me into a cabal of two: Professor Sage had been driven to desperation by the futility of his research into an indecipherable past, something so dark and esoteric we could never understand, something which no doubt our government had always suppressed. He was caught blathering in the basement, matches and kerosene at his side.

April 11. Believe me, I've tried to find motives, a reason, an excuse: as you would ask of any self-made fabulist. Perhaps I could blame it on the pious guilt of my father or my mother's weakness before him (I picture her on her knees, though I'm looking through her, I see only the shadows of their mythic bedroom), even blame it on Alex's hysterical decline. There must be some other reason why I am doing this, disappearing into the other side of sanity. Am I falling down a hole or playing games with mirrors? Alex has painted my walls with scenes from her dreams—the predictable neo-classical Freudian variety, full of centaurs, satyrs, and naiads, all wandering through the torch-lit passages of a cavernous library (stalactites hanging like chandeliers, darkly luminous pools between gilded stacks). I took up her palette last week and added an important detail lurking beneath a stairwell carved out of rock—his cloak hiding his face, weapon at his hip. She has still not noticed.

April 10. What I must do now will be the hardest thing I have ever done: to reduce my life to the simplest components, to pare myself to the bone, hone conceivable reality to a fine sharp irreducible point and make the world dance on it. What is "conceivable reality"? It is not this and not that, but it must be something—that is, it is possible to make myself as real and solid as the world. I will purify and regenerate, arise from my own ashes. There must be more to life, I tell myself as I sit in the hot sun with the sweat beading up on my forehead, there must be more than... than what? I must find the universal common denominator, the philosopher's stone of the heart, that indivisible element which dissolves all truths down to one truth and one truth only—it could be that soldier's smile as he feeds the pigeons on the courthouse lawn, it could be the wave in the air that little girl makes to him with her tiny pink hand, it could be the way the roofs of that block of buildings slant up at just the right angle to catch the sun at this hour and reflect it back into the river below, it could be called some kind of poetry. No one out there can understand what exactly it is that I am hoping to find now, but maybe everyone is hoping to find it whether they are aware they are looking or not. I know I am not making enough sense, at least not enough to satisfy my own mercurial mind, a mind impossible to grasp, to understand, a mind like anyone else's, and yet unlike. The sun itself is alone and indivisible, and it feels invigorating on human skin. It is time to begin casting things off, to toss all that's in the hold overboard, to sacrifice the very planks I stand upon, if that's what it takes to sail on alone and true to myself and completely free.

April 9. Today I watched them board up the front doors and windows of the library. Alex was with me, though she made us leave when the street people began to follow us at a distance. For some reason I was not remorseful; Alex told me I didn't even seem to care. I took her to the banks of the river and in an ugly scene forced myself upon her ultimately willing body for the first time in months.

April 8. A beginning: today I woke up knowing that I had been wrong, after all, for most of my life—the world is not insane, but I am. The world is finite and ordinary. Molecules lock onto molecules locking onto molecules to form the basic material of life; everything is of a densely patterned system, fitting perfectly and neatly into place like the links in chain-mail. But my mind is infinite, inconstant, neither here nor there. That is, I observe the world from the twin peepholes of my skull, but my mind does not always mesh with my perceptions; my consciousness often seems to be both in and out of place. If I gaze at a mountaintop a hundred miles away, is my mind—and hence, that cowering, insubstantial thing our forefathers called a soul—out there looking back down on me? And if I stare into the microscopic prisms of an insect's eyes, is that myself looking back out at me? These thoughts stupefy and sicken me, and they have become the root of my insanity—though it is a genteel sort of madness I have contracted, more of a perceptual malaise than a psychological or emotional problem. I am not about to go out into the streets shooting people at random, nor am I going to sink into fantasies that I am emperor of the universe and keeper of the key to life. This is not a matter of delusions or neuroses at all: indeed, it is more as though I have injected a euphoric into my veins that has cleared my brain and enabled me to study the mottles on a fly's wings at twenty paces or to reflect on death with no human or animal instincts of fear. I am perfectly fine, perfectly healthy, and yet I know I can no longer go on living and working in the world the way I have always forced myself to do in the past. Not because they would ever suspect my insanity (if they suspected anything at all they would only call it an oversuggestible imagination), not because I cannot work or communicate well with others—though problems might arise if things do not change soon—but because, quintessentially, it does not matter. The fact is, nothing matters. There you have it! It does not make any difference that my humble job has been taken from me, any more than it did that moment a week ago today, that cruelest day of the year, when I walked out in the middle of a conference of esteemed historians and antiquarians to go sit in the park with the vagrants I saw from my office windows, because I have realized that I am insane and it does not matter, that it makes not a crumb of difference in this world of concrete and brick and stone that I am so very, so very...

So I left the library for the last time to go sit in the park across the street, with my satchel and under my arm a volume of Macaulay I had no intention of ever reading; the sun was bright and warm—but it was my body that got hot, not my mind, so there was no reason to move into the shade until my body acted on its own accord. A lanky bum in a long plaid greatcoat, wheezing over his whiskey, was observing me from under a dying elm; he grinned at me as if we had met before, and there was indeed something familiar in his eyes.

I got out this journal and drew the bum but the bum turned into a character in a cartoon we have all in this country seen many times as children: the Pin Man. He is lean and angular and carries a great long pin like a sword under his cape. At least that is how the other cartoon characters imagine him, for no one has ever really seen him. Nevertheless, that makes him no less real. The cartoon concerns a world of balloon people in balloon houses, all who are very happy except at night when a fierce wind blows and they tell tales of the Pin Man to frighten one another. Tucked into their little cribs in their little houses, all the little balloon children have nightmares about him, of how transparent and fragile and temporary they are. The Pin Man! Silently to the trees and clouds and the old bum I declared: Beware the Pin Man, beware! I drew him again and again across the pages of my journal until I was laughing fit to burst.

# Recognizing The Stranger

Be thankful when approaching the foreign boulevard which beckons between trees and statuary aflame in the late autumn afternoon. Be certain to remember everything. Admire the clarity. Touch things. You cannot stay—you must be prepared to leave without thought or desire, in an instant. There are no return visits, for that gateway ahead swings open only once in each person's lifetime, and then most often silently, unnoticed.

So: you see the house on the hill? The grape arbor? The broken things on the lawn? The laundry on the lines, like the flapping of wings... Then you have arrived. Look around. Remember everything. It is so still, as if a storm were looming just beyond those catalpa trees. Walk more slowly. No need to hurry. (And yet, you feel you've been away for too long, as if the hours are drying up like seconds back there, where you left off.)

Will this house open up to you, then? Don't knock—just enter. Yes, you must become part of something larger, be greeted by a careworn woman in an apron, asked to come in now, wipe your feet, wash your hands, they're all waiting for you. Somehow you understand the origins of the hanging ferns, the rag-rugs, the framed tintypes of an unknown family.

Who is to say this isn't where you've always been, though? That this is no fever you will awaken from, crying out to an empty room?

Now, take your place at the supper table, nod to your daughters and the dog asleep at your feet, dip your head for a moment's silence, in thanks, again. And start to live your life in a different way.
Sycorax and Caliban

Reader—yes, you, Kind Reader! Tell me please if this is enough of what I suppose I must call a "grabber" for an opening line that will make you just want to drop everything and cradle this poor story in your arms:

I murdered my mother for a thousand reasons, but mostly for her taste in books.

Wait! If you only knew how important this is to me! You see, Potential Reader, all this long month, jammed up into what used to be the maid's chamber, I've been studying Sell Your Story Today! by R. Lester Aldredge (Crown Books, 1974) and have learned how important these opening paragraphs are: "One must not lose the reader's patience with unnecessary exposition, especially in the first two pages."

All right... Perhaps, then, if you will indulge me still further, Most Discerning Reader:

Yeah, sure, I murdered my mother, judge—but believe me, if you had known my mother, you would have murdered her, too. (Sorry—couldn't help myself!)

Or, seriously now, just one more try:

I murdered my mother because she never loved me.

Have I got your sympathy—or at least attention—yet? Doubtful. Still, I've been trying so hard and have torn up so many pages already. Honestly, I know there must be ten thousand other true-to-life stories being written at this very moment, and, honestly, I know there's no reason for me to go on or for you to follow me... though for some reason, you see, I am going on, alone or with you. I can't help myself now. This can't be stopped. Look—there's—another—word! And another! That wasn't hard. It's still much easier than some people make it out to be, this writing business. I should have tried it long ago.

Hey, you—Reader! You good-looking, sexy, smart Reader, you! Don't walk away yet; it's not as bad as all that, but if you promise to sit back and listen to me for just a short while, I promise to give you your money's worth, as long as you're reading this in a cheap magazine and not one of those fat arty ones that cost as much as a good lunch. Believe me, this story is original! Well, "original" is what people say when they can't exactly say "good" or "pleasing," don't they? As in, "That painting certainly is... original, isn't it?" However, just because I'm a murderer doesn't mean I'm not entirely trustworthy. Because I am, you know. Trustworthy, I mean. Though a murderer, too.

In addition, lest you fear you're within earshot of yet another Unreliable Narrator, let me assure you I maintain that approach has been done to death. We live in an age where there is so little to have faith in: where the nightly news is less fact than fancy; where each history of political atrocities undoes the one which came before it; where I am told no one, not even a dog, is who one claims to be on that endless enigma called the Internet; where people have learned to read only between the lines; where novels are memoirs and memoirs are novels and even the authors aren't sure which is which. And so I must, must, must insist that you take everything I state here if not as gospel—for gospels lie, too—then as sincerely as you would the confessions of a condemned man, after the last meal has been cleared away and already the guards are rattling their keys. I am not Unreliable! I merely misquote myself at times.

Now that we've made the acquaintance and cleared a few things up, let me tell you a few more things about myself. We'll get to you later—scout's honor.

Now, where really to begin? All the great writers must ask themselves that at the onset, before aiming their hesitant darts toward your head or heart; they used to be all around me, by the way—those Great Writers—all four walls closing in on me like one of those torture rooms you see in movies, spikes on all sides moving in on the Hero. In my case, each of those spikes was a little paperback god, bought cheap and fourth-hand in this little college town, bought when they were already well-aged, stiff in the spine, cracking in their forewords and afterwords, already losing their leaves. Once I started reading an ancient Norton's on the way home from Schmook's Books, only to find I'd left a trail behind me—all the way up the forty rickety steps to our teetering front porch—of the pages I'd dropped along the way; any undergraduate passing by would have gotten a pretty good sense of early to medieval English literature, from Beowulf to "The Pardoner's Tale," merely by tracing my route.

Mother, of course, hated those books. All books, in fact. As naturally she would, being a long-tenured professor in the English department here in this coldest, wettest corner of the Midwest. (Don't bother looking for it on the map; it's most often cut off in the margin.) The only book she ever gave to me was one on toilet-training when I was three, as if I could have read all of it even then. (It was a bore, by the way, nothing on the more coprophagic passages in Bataille.) As for reading nursery rhymes or fairy tales aloud to me, she'd already shed her Feminine Mystique like a frilly negligée, conscious that such a bedtime ritual was too much an embodiment of the heterosexist male patriarchal power system—the female tucking the offspring in bed while the male labored late at the office—and so she left me to the "edutainment" of Play-Skool mobiles and other plastic devices guaranteed to improve hand-eye coordination or invoke infantile insanity, while she studied her Benjamin or Barthes. And so you see me today, the clumsiest morloch on the Buildings and Grounds Crew, the one hunched like Quasimodo over a faulty lawn sprinkler system, as twisted up in the serpentine hose as the infant Hercules battling Hera's snakes.

No doubt the curious Reader summoned by R. Lester Aldredge is already impressed by my literary allusions. You see, despite my mother's best efforts, I didn't grow up as ignorant as she had wished, her revenge against all men, especially my father, whoever he was. Oafish yes, undereducated yes, in the formal sense, but not stupid—not so stupid, Mother! I learned to read while still in training pants by looking through the current Chronicle of Higher Education on her desk, a journal she used to read religiously, the way others read obituaries, with a mixture of humility and schadenfreude. Soon enough I was reading the discarded novels (always big, doorstopper books by very serious men or featherweight, intimate books by inconsequential women, never the other way 'round) which her colleagues had forced upon her when they still believed in such things. I was forbidden to have an account at the miniscule town library—too much of the bourgeois-leaning Seuss and Sendak and Silverstein there—but by the time I was seven I knew what was worth my quarters at Schmook's Books. (Though she hated books, she knew that otherwise I'd be spending my allowance on candy and gaining even more weight.) By ten it was already getting difficult to walk to my bed, though I always kept all authors in neat stacks, scrupulously segregated by nationality, era, and subject matter. School, when I managed to stay awake in class, taught me next to nothing. Much like Shelley's monster, I became a somewhat over-opinionated autodidact, wishing I were much smarter but conscious that I was not quite stupid—and Mother, not being stupid herself, knew this, too. "Fat" and "lazy" and "psychotic" were far easier epithets to hurl my way (weren't they, Mother?), even if I knew while still a child that she lanced me only to drain her own moral suppurations. Please excuse my extreme metaphors, but it wasn't nature made me this way. You might have turned out even worse, Reader.

Sometimes our cozily coniferous neighborhood, on the highest ridge here between the lake and the marshes, and dotted with the former summer retreats of small businessmen from Bismarck to Duluth, would resound with our screams, as if every night were Walpurgisnacht. Mostly, our protests were less articulate than painfully shrill, more howls than words. Or failing words completely, purely physical, and so I grew up with never a complete set of dishes in the house and most of the screens ruptured. Listen, Old Mother Grendel, I longed to expound more eloquently, had I but the agility, you're cannibalizing me with your recriminations and accusations, your hexes and hoaxes, your banshee shrieks and witchdoctor oaths. You barnacle-encrusted old grampus, you, you cloven-tongued krampus of the campus, you hideous Hecate of the campus, may all the infections that the sun sucks up make you inch by inch a disease. Why did you ever curse me with my birth? Why didn't you just noose me on a rusted coat-hanger before I was born or smother me in my bassinet, if I am such a pain to you? You put rocks in my boots, roll spiny urchins across my path, call forth serpents to entwine and envenom me. Begone!

Mother would often end arguments by hurtling my books down the stairs after me. Down they came like a hard rain of words: the Brontës, the Rosettis, the Bensons, the Sitwells, the Waughs, the Amises, the rest of English literature, circa 1840 to 1980. I knew what they represented to her; she was one of those academics whose narrowing circle of authors they consider acceptable was tightening by the year, until even Shakespeare's time was sure to come. To speak his name would be like invoking an ancient god who nevertheless might do severe violence to one's person, and yet she dared the heavens. "Romeo and Juliet?" she would ask the Pernod at one of her infamous summer soirées. "A terrible, awful, inept play. Nothing but a Harlequin Romance without the harlequins and far too much romance." Her weak jokes might elicit a titter or two from amongst the untenured and adjunct. "Then there's Joyce, of course... What do I think of Ulysses?" She had that way some politicians have of both posing and answering their own questions. "It's one long onanistic exercise, isn't it, and then the climax doesn't even come until the very last word." She would swat a mosquito or deerfly for emphasis. "Paradise Lost? Pilgrim's Progress? Proust, you say! Never was quite that bored!"

If you've been so gracious as to come this far, Reader, you might be wondering how a murderer such as I, with a past such as my own, goes about everyday life, accepting menial dockets every morning from the jolly foreman of the buildings and grounds crew (who for some reason feels sorry for me and so has kept me on despite my ineptitude), dutifully going about my business, removing old blackboards, replacing fuses, resetting thermostats; or raking leaves, shoveling walks, mowing the quad, season in and season out. That's the easy part. The hard part is being alone in my stuffy little room like this, trying to force my mother into the prison of the past. It is hard so much of the time to remember that she is dead, can't hurt me now, they say, but harder still to realize I will never see her again. Part of me wants to keep on imagining her body, her face, and most of all her words, though I can't exactly say why. Is this self-inflicted torture as much a comfort as a hurt? R. Lester Aldredge might ask me to consider. Sometimes I used to just want to simplify everything by killing myself, too.

Again, if only I could have cursed her more eloquently when she still lived, cursed her with all the splendor and spleen of the Bard or one of those French guys, Molière or Jarry... But mostly I was only as foul as the accepted boarding school vocabulary allowed me, and besides, there was nothing I could say which would not be an echo of some damnation she had once called upon my head. She was angry, I knew, not just at me, but at the whole world, and especially at being stuck in the middle of this remote archipelago dangling from the northernmost point of the conterminous United States, frozen eight months a year and the air too full of needling insects to step outside the other four. Stuck at a college which never even cared if she ever produced a follow-up to the book which sealed her tenure—Against Poetry: Firing the Canon, From Poe to Pound. (She was always all over the map.) A college where the departments are so small everyone hates everyone else, the way any species kept in too close quarters, given time, will gnaw each other to bits. A species of academic which has lost its sense of wonder but whose wits are sharpened like fangs and nerves are splintered like glass. It was the only world I had ever known, this isolated island nine miles in circumference, and this feudal fiefdom called College of the Isles.

We lived together, mother and son, in this crumbling school rental on this shabby little hillside, for twenty-three years, and for twenty years before that in various equally dismal quarters nearby or, before I remember, in other college towns. I know what that makes me look like—you've seen other creeps like me: the pimply, pasty ones who live deep down in their parents' rec rooms, last renovated during the Ford administration; the ones who keep rereading A Confederacy of Dunces or Infinite Jest (never been tempted by either myself) in the media room of the town library; the ones who have every Star Wars figurine all the way back to the first movie still in their original containers; the ones who hang out at the Comic Books and Baseball Cards shop, schlurping on a Super Schlurp from the nearest Casey's or Stewart's. To you, I'm unwashed, unshaven, unkempt, blemished, balding, bad-breathed, bloated, big-bellied, fusty, farty, froggy... and unlaced, absent-mindedly unbuttoned, shirt awry, pants slipping down my hairy backside, of simian scratch and brontosaurus step. You would avoid me down at the "Anime and Cult" end of the video store, wouldn't you, Reader? But that's not really me—I never go to the one movie theater in town and I've never learned to "surf" the Internet, ready to be harpooned by an FBI agent posing as a thirteen-year-old. So how dare you presume; I'm typing this on the prelapsarian Remington in my room, not on some portable television set tricked up with buttons and dials like a science project. (If you see real italics, not underlining, someone else put them here along with the tidy margins.) How I love the smell of this well-oiled machine, its little silver gears and levers inside that do mysterious things, the black wings of its carapace which lift up like a scarab's, the cool ceramic keys with their careworn letters (even if a few keys are missing, and I must pound the broken stems), the ribbons I can still get at the last stationery store in the county, the moist ribbons with their yeasty smell that empurple my hands as I toil eternally in the vineyards of prose! For years, see, I've used it only for endless lists of my books, updated and revised quarterly, painstakingly annotated. And today I sit before my black idol again. From here, I can see a nest of new pink goblin-eyed blue-jays within the dark interior labyrinth of the balsam I look straight upon. It's a normal sunny day off from work and I'm not such an abnormal guy.

Sell Your Story Today! counsels me to give a little more background. Here's some: She—my mother—had me when she was seventeen or eighteen, a breech birth, my big clumsy feet first, and it felt like she was being "ripped right in two, like a carcass in a charnel house" as she often so poetically put it. There was no family there for her to witness or confirm this for me, as she was an orphan. Boo-hoo again. She'd been all alone throughout the pregnancy. She hated me before I was even born. She named me Caliban. She was, of course, already an English major.

So now you know why the third party to this story—my accomplice in crime, as it were—is named "Ariel," and that really is her name, though you'd never believe me. You might sooner believe that she was a nimble-footed, nubile nymph of the dormitories, wouldn't you, the first girl I'd ever had back to my book-lined room, a girl who might actually listen to my theories of time and the universe—but I'm jumping the smoking gun. She, Ariel, was mistaken about me, that you will surely believe, and yet I can't say we haven't enjoyed a certain intellectual rapport. She had wished my mother dead, too, if only in that petulant schoolgirlish way all college students three credits away from graduation who have plagiarized a sorority sister's term paper might wish someone who suspected them soundly dead. But I digress. (That's something I've always longed to say in company—at a book-signing at the campus store, say, surrounded by Chablis-soaked acolytes—"But I digress." Doesn't it just sound so worldly?)

Before I say anything more about Ariel allow me first another attempt to describe my mother—age before beauty, as they say. When I happen upon my reflection I don't see that maggot-white, bespectacled, blubber-lipped behemoth you've already imagined, but my dear departed mother. We really did look quite alike, if you put me in a sort of Susan Sontag fright wig (a negative version, with a lock of black in a field of gray), with Camille Paglia scare-the-boys makeup, and a sort of Simone de Beauvoir-goes-wild-at-Banana Republic wardrobe, including seriously lesbian sandals on the most enormous aircraft-carrier feet a woman ever possessed. The Devil knows why men ever found her attractive, but they apparently did on occasion—hence myself, hence the series of visiting lecturers I was predictably instructed to call "uncle" before I greeted them with a bite on the ankles. I suppose she had that old Gorgon trick to fall back on, boiling men over with her stare before she pecked their hearts out like a harpy (and, yes, I know I'm conflating mythology a bit here—but it's my story, sold or not, damn it). She really was at her worst, though, during her celebrated Sapphic period, when I was in my teens and that sort of behavior was still considered daring; she eviscerated a coed or two and devoured the gamier meat of the local Lambda Society before deciding that she'd made her point about feminist theory and moved on to a bearded Baudrillard scholar from Oberlin or Aberdeen. Over the years the uncles came farther and farther apart, and she probably hadn't had a man for ten years when she died. And the occasional man was the only thing that ever calmed her down and shut her up.

Reader! R. Lester Aldredge! You can't leave me now—I'm not really that much of a reactionary; I'm old enough to remember BJK-Riggs way back in my childhood and Reagan before he was on a stamp and when Liberals ruled the earth. I hate women, it is true, but I hate them all—straight, bent, or just plain twisted—fairly and with total equality and so would you if you had my mother. Had had my mother. Besides, if you are reading this, you're probably one of those lefty types who never forgot how to read and no doubt feels it your blessed duty to enquire into the criminal minds of the promising young writers of today. Otherwise, you'd be downloading porn or watching Pox News, wouldn't you?

And anyway, if it comes to that, I don't care much for myself or other men, either. Except my father, Whoever. I just feel sorry for him.

If every year is a century to a child, then my personal cinquecento came when I was still a mere forty pounds overweight, had most of my hair—albeit, oily as an otter's—and, incredibly enough, skin entirely unscathed, as smooth and pretty as an Elle cover. (The acne would consume me soon enough, once I realized skinny girls really had been sniggering at my much ampler breasts for years.) Summers between boarding school—it was a different one every year, since classroom fistfights and cafeteria fires seemed to pursue me in those days—I was forced to wait hand and hoof on my dear mother, shaking the Ritz crumbs from her bed-sheets, dusting her Selectric, scraping her bulgur and pilaf from the dishes, sucking up the dust and debris she left everywhere in her titanic wake. Once or twice a summer she would host a garden party—a backyard party, really, because she never had time to plant a garden in that pine-shaded, sun-scarred patch of sandy soil—and I was forced to balance the tray of bad gin and warm tonic water with a pitcher of homemade sangria, a recipe she was supposedly celebrated for up and down Professors' Row. "Don't quake so, Cal!" she'd bellow, and I'd slosh even more down my favorite "Too Many Books Not Enough Time" T-shirt.

Ah hah, you're saying to yourself, Reader—at last a scene! That's what I came here for. Here's where sales are made, right, R. L.? Sorry, summary's really more my style, I guess, but here goes...

So, when I'd spilled half a liter in some little out-of-his-element assistant provost's lap, Ma Ubu hauled herself up from the webbing of her lawn chair (leaving a latticed imprint on her wide back between the shoulder straps) and roared at the both of us, "I'm so sorry, Henry, but you know, he's at that shaky stage, a compulsive masturbator! Isn't that right, Cal? Cock-a-diddle-do, eh?"

I stood there stammering while she dived into his lap with a woefully inadequate cocktail napkin. "You'll have to excuse the little bastard," she was saying, rather less than soberly, even for her. "It's all Doctor Spock's fault, the way I coddled him." All the other ends and odds of the summer population of College of the Isles gawked at us both equally—mother with her head practically in the assistant provost's loins and me with, I noticed too late, my fly half-zipped. They were all there—the assistant professors too poor or too under-funded to be off doing research in Bloomsbury or Montmartre, a pitiful recent graduate or two still within my mother's evil thrall, a token Indian scholar from one of the adjoining reservations, the proprietor of Schmook's Books (who already knew me so well he might as well be writing this story), and a smattering of hirsute secretaries and tonsured librarians—none married and all given up hope. Luc Ferrier, too: Mother's closest friend on campus, probably her only true friend anywhere, one-third of the Romance Languages Department and half its Drama Department, "that old pederast," as she affectionately called him.

Luc, bless him, tried to come to my rescue. "Could you go fetch me that bottle of good vodka your belle dame sans merci keeps hidden in her cellars?" he asked in an accent that pretended to be more authentic French than the French-Canadian it really was, thus allowing me an exit into the house and out of the public eye. Even then I was always grateful to Luc for tempering my mother's worst tantrums, though I knew from her how he supposedly maintained a "fairy ring," hosting after-performance parties for thespian revels, and was always pleased to rent a houseboy's room to any youth comely and stupid enough to stumble into his charmed circle. Still, I liked him as much as I ever liked anyone; at fourteen I'd already read his sole book, that study on Prosper Mérimée which had secured his position here (what was its title? The More the Mérimée?), and seen its dedication and forgiven him for that. Somehow I knew kind Luc wouldn't mind missing his prized screwdriver while I threw myself on my bed to—well, never to cry.

Not much of a scene, I admit. But that was nearly three decades ago, and how could I possibly be getting the details right? The humiliation, however, lingers like a skunk you left squashed down the highway twenty miles back. It must have been that very year, to give myself an escape from her tirades and tantrums, when I first concocted my scheme of adding a little Nyquil or Nytol to her Pernod, stuff already so strong she never noticed the altered taste. Mother never failed to have a shot of the brew before our habitually late dinners, and as soon as she had finished the cutlets or fish-sticks I'd served her, she would stumble to her bedroom, far down the hall and around a corner from mine. She would sleep soundly, waking just in time to go teach her eleven o'clock class, and then proclaim to her insomniacal colleagues at faculty meetings that she always slept like a dormouse because she herself had "nothing to be feeling she'd forgotten to carefully credit in a footnote." As if she were really writing anything at all, ever!

Years later I might very well have told Miranda all this, while she smiled but refused to take my sweaty hand, allowing me instead to walk her once again from her office in the humanities building to her communist sympathizer's moped in the employees' parking lot. Miranda? Now, that is a pseudonym, most doubtful Reader, to protect someone I once loved. Protect her from I know not what, for I like to imagine her dead now, a suicide at twenty-nine, having given up her life to poetry in a garage apartment somewhere far to the sunny south, in Minneapolis. Yes—she's writing ottava rima as delicate and exquisite as the skeleton of a bat, but at the last line can't find the rhyme, can't find the rhyme, can't find the rhyme, tick tock... then finds a razor instead—and gives up as romantically as Chatterton. We used to talk a lot about poetry, Miranda and I. She believed it should be revolutionary within the strictest, most conservative forms. Once upon a time I might have even typed her an uneven haiku or two on my gap-toothed machine. This was years before Ariel, so Ariel would understand. Mother had used her always formidable clout to get me into the college's copy center just in time for my thirtieth birthday, my very first job that lasted more than a month, and Miranda would often drop off the instructors' hefty "student packets" there for me to duplicate—lovingly duplicate, oh gentle spirit Miranda, for you, Miranda! We'd laugh together about the selections each quarter; the stilted subtitles alone were enough to throw us into cataracts of merriment: "The Golden Bowl: Toilet Habits in the Late James"? "Pansies in Lavender Twilight: Ernest, Scott, and Djuna Meet at the Pissoir"? "Following the Ga(y)ze—Vita Sackville-West's Dialectical Discovery of Vaginal Space"? And so forth; in those days, Queer and Gender Studies was still something trendily "transgressive" at College of the Isles. Miranda had gone to a much better school, she all but told me, and she knew some day her poetry would elevate her above these third-rate scholars and pseudo-intellectuals all around us.

And so I began following her about campus, odd half-hours when she hoped we wouldn't be seen sharing our burgeoning private jokes. Miranda was the kind of girl always called "mousy" by her so-called betters, but she was more of a sleek, slender sort of mole; nearly blind behind her tinted lenses; preferring the cool, dark corridors to the bright sun of the campus green; dressed in suede jackets that could pass for moleskin; a voice like a squeak (do moles squeak?); but un-mole-like, she walked with gazelle-like grace and gait—or was she merely trying to outpace me as I led her like a knight errant to her waiting chariot? Mother noticed changes in me the few precious months I knew Miranda—she told me I was "nearly intelligible" now when I answered the phone and remarked that I'd finally learned to align buttons both above and below the equator, and once even asked if I'd been rolling "like a bull-calf in a field of buttercups." It must have been the deodorant I'd finally dared to buy with my humble wages.

Soon enough, Mother discovered me before the vending machines in the basement where the copy center is located, discussing Edna St. Vincent Millay and Mayakovski with Miranda, while debating salty or sweet or healthy. I know Mother must have heard words like "imagist" or "proletariat" or something ending in "-esque" before she wisely took a right toward the ladies' room. Miranda, her back turned both to me and to Mother, peering into the wonderland behind the glass, while my hand tentatively fluttered on her shoulder-blade, noticed not a thing as Mother shot me the most withering Medusean glance she could muster before she disappeared. She'd long warned me about consorting with either faculty, staff, or students; so it was not much of a surprise when I saw her in her office later that day (I'd come to deliver photocopies to the floor above her), with Miranda meek and small and mole-ish, hardly a leader of the Red Guard, before Mother's Brobdingnagian desk, like a student who'd been summoned to discuss a failing grade. My mother, who'd yet to see me, was spelling out the word "g-o-n-o-r-r-h-e-a" as if to a child and waving a handful of STD pamphlets from Student Health before Miranda's bowed head. If someone as large as I am could be said to be capable of drifting away silent as the breeze, then I did indeed rise up the stairs like smoke and curl into a far corner to curse once more that monster my Mother.

At home later that evening, when I'd finally crept back from the bookstore with only slightly foxed copies of Defoe's Crusoe and Plato's Republic in my backpack, I found an ashtray filled with generic condoms atop the table on the landing and a sampling of feminine hygiene products I wouldn't comprehend on my bed. Mother was off at an all-white student production of The Blacks with Luc; so I hurled the sprays, jars, and prophylactics into her room and smashed a vial of her favorite perfume (Eau de Medée or whatever) against her dresser mirror for good effect. Within a week or two Miranda had quit her job, I heard too late, so I can only assume she moved to Minneapolis to join a commie punk cell there. She had been talking about doing that ever since I met her, after all; she'd finally had a poem accepted at an ultrahip "zine" there and was certain such was the route to fame—and the greater good of the world, of course. I never heard from her again after that moment at the vending machines, thus I can only surmise she is dead and her poetry has been lost, as so many great works of art are, like this story will be, inevitably, to indifferent history.

The new century had already come upon us before I met another girl I'd dare to speak to and who was brazen enough to initiate a conversation: Ariel, of course, who was unafraid of anyone, professor or plebeian, man or superwoman. Neither rodents nor insectivores come to mind when one pictures Ariel: borzois, perhaps, and swans and butterflies and other things elegant and swift. The other girls in her sorority, the only sorority in town, were afraid of her, and I was, too, but actually she was the one who accosted me while I lingered outside Luc Ferrier's lecture on Genet and Anouilh, supplementing my Modern Library education as I often did while pretending to be fixing a hall-light or plastering a hole. She must have been watching me for some time as I kneeled perplexed over a frayed coaxial cable running along the corridor of our completely wired campus. (Just see the brochures or watch the promotional DVD sent out to prospective freshmen: "College of the Isles on the Cutting Edge!" This was before the "completely wireless" campus, of course.) At some point I heard Ariel tapping her long encrimsoned nails against her enormous and perfect rows of well-bleached teeth. (I remember Luc was speaking in that plaintive, elegiac way he has, as if every address is valedictory: "We see in France at this time theater's precarious balance between the nihilism of the Dadaists and the encroaching existentialist and brute sexuality of... " Luc is very old-fashioned and always reads from notes he must have typed thirty years ago. He's probably never even heard of Queer Studies.) "He's so gay," she whispered, quickly adding, "I don't mean gay stupid, I mean—you're gay, too, right? It's all cool." She was wearing velveteen hot-pants and had her frizzy, gingery hair in an afro the likes of which I hadn't seen since I was a small boy a little bit smitten with Angela Davis and Christie Love. Whether she is vanilla or chocolate or some delicious kind of twist I never have been able to tell.

"Well, actually—" I began, before she hushed me, finger to her glittered lips. "The man speaks," she said, twisting her long necklaced neck to see around the doorway and into the classroom. We both listened for a while as Luc touched lightly upon Cocteau and Juliette Greco. Then, abruptly: "Let's like get lost. So what if I'm ditching that slut I was supposed to rush. I've got better things to do, like file my pretty nails. Smoke?" and she offered me a cigarette from a well-crumpled pack of low-tars she withdrew from the waistband of her lacy thong, which was just visible above her hot-pants when she leaned over, and below the tattoo of a smurf swinging on a rainbow, square in the center of that bare area of a woman's back just where things start to get interesting. We retreated to the college's solitary designated smoking area, a secluded courtyard between the two gothic wings of the humanities building. There, we sat on rusted cast-iron, eyeing each other as we smoked or pretended to smoke.

"I know a lot of faggots back in the hood," she said, "not that I mean anything bad by that—it's just what you all call each other down in the clubs, right?" I knew enough by then not to disabuse her of certain facts about myself, but smiled vacantly, as if I felt a real buzz from the clove-scented tobacco smoke. What could this girl possibly be talking to the geekiest geek on campus for, someone biologically old enough to be her father? She wasn't wearing a bra, and in the deepening afternoon looked strangely older herself, almost middle-aged in a voluptuous kind of way—Madame Récamier on an iron bench instead of a velvet-upholstered divan. For the second time in my life I was in love, and I suddenly saw Miranda as the ratty-haired little mouse she had been. Here instead was the Black Aphrodite, the Blonde Venus, all six-foot-two of her in platform soles. And she was talking to me as if I were just any other guy!

"You're the son of Professor ____ , aren't you?" and here I leave a blank for you, dutiful Reader, in my own studiously old-fashioned way, just so you don't try to google any of us who may stand to be incriminated. "She's a real ball-buster, isn't she? Man, I feel real sorry for you!" Ariel rolled her glittery eyes (matched her lips) and laughed almost diabolically. It was late September and chill, and I thought I could feel tiny drops of her warm spittle on my cheeks.

I hardly knew what to say. How could she know this, or even care? Why I had never noticed her over the years while she must have been doing her research on me seems unimaginable now. Right then, I must have choked on my borrowed low-tar. "She's having us watch all this shit all the time," Ariel went on. "As if I haven't seen all those Matrix movies a dozen times before. And those creepy 'graphic novels,' as she calls them. 'Looks like comic books,' I say, and she gets all weird on me. Damn, I'm already a senior and sometimes I just want to relax and read a fucking book, you know?"

I saw then that we were soul-mates. "She's just being Post-Literary," I managed to say through a nimbus of blue smoke. "It was the only way for her to go after rehashing Derrida and Society of the Spectacle. That or Multi-Culti, and she didn't have the stomach for all that third-world stuff. It might as well be written in another language, she says. But I like Mrabet and Tutuola a lot. How come they never teach those guys here? You know Amos Tutuola? His Bush of Ghosts series?" I knew my forehead must be as red as a rash and furtively checked my fly to ensure my jeans were fully buttoned. I also knew I was talking too much and too fast.

"Yeah, sure," Ariel said apropos to nothing, as her cigarette reached its end and a cold wind announcing the end of the season reached even our cloister. "Whatever. I could have gone to Stanford or Tufts or something, you know, I'm smart enough outside of my grades. But my parents are cheap and don't trust me at a bigger school. Tell me, what is someone like me doing stuck on this goddamn pet-turtle island?" And at that she had disappeared, just like a light gone out, and I was alone in the chirping dusk.

The deeper into this story I go, the more I write and the longer it gets, the more I realize I must leave out. So much damaged footage left on the cutting-room floor, so many wasted pages filling my basket and my brain. Goddamn, as Ariel taught me to say with regularity. So many subtleties and complexities I wish I could delineate and unravel—but couldn't in ten stories, or a whole novel, or several novels. Mr. Aldredge says to cut, cut, cut, and cut some more, as if writing were all a process of bloodletting. Which I suppose it is, now I'm starting to see how it's done. Mother is laughing at me somewhere. The mirror of memory is cracked and dusty, a lunar world of smoke and ectoplasm and shadows. I could still kill myself. The sound of my typewriter keys is like kettledrums and artillery fire, and I am driving myself either deaf or mad.

All right. Some more time, please, to clear my throat and my head. Ahem. That's it... Follow me now, Reader, down another wormhole in time, because I want to tell you about when my father—yes my very own father—came to town to read from his unexpected bestseller, Full Fathom Five. Linger about these pages for just a while longer; I'm still trying to get the hang of this storytelling thing, even if I have read countless stories and myths and legends and fables and parables and parodies over the years—especially those years just after I left those discredited or condemned problem-child boarding schools and fat-boy camps for good and for the sanctuary of my room, without a diploma or a clue, trying to retreat from the world and especially my Argus-eyed Mother. Father's book isn't really called that—I just like the sense of my father drowned, sea-changed, body turned to coral, eyes pearly... so I'll call him Richard Strange. And that bestseller I mentioned? Not even a proper, legitimate novel, but that two-headed hybrid, a "literary" mystery, a genre that even Mother overlooked in her rush to get to the New Age of Illiteracy. This book is the last of its series, all of them with titles drawn from Shakespeare, and being the last, it brought a little autumnal fame to its author, who'd already signed a contract to visit little godforsaken College of the Isles before he made it to the cover of TLS and could triple his reading fees.

The detective in this series is a popular magician of the debonair Harry Blackstone variety who charms the ladies and almost incidentally solves murders on the side. The conceit is that, although ostensibly just a stage trickster who has studied the secret handbooks especially well, he really is in league with the powers of the deep and like a Warlock of Endor can summon daemons at will. Right—it sounds hokey to me, as well, but then I find Raymond Chandler's gumshoes and gun-molls as hard to follow as all the Russian patronymics in War and Peace.

Mr. Strange was an old friend of Mother's from college days, I somehow discovered—maybe Luc Ferrier had recently told me in the backyard when he'd had too many screwdrivers and was only hoping to leave me so stunned he could hurry off to that rent boy in his attic. That news really did surprise me; I hadn't figured she'd ever had any friends in school, and by the time I was thirty I'd given up guessing or begging and had decided I was the result of either rape or an artificial insemination she'd later regretted. So as soon as I told Ariel about Richard Strange—by the first snow we'd become close friends, of a sort, in the halls and courtyards and on the walkways, though I was careful to maintain my guise as a rather bearish homosexual, so as not to frighten her—she took one last deep breath from her illicit cigarette, crossing her artificially eyelashed eyes to watch it glow, and told me that this man was obviously my father.

I folded my big bearish arms across my chest and examined her, reclining there so calculatedly languid in the darkest corner of Java Jive, the student union's calculatedly hip coffee shop. Of course, by this time I knew she had ulterior motives for wanting to have some leverage against my mother; she had already told me how doubtful her teacher, my mother, had been about that last paper she'd handed in, an analysis of hermaphroditic themes in Japanese manga. The fact that Ariel had indeed printed a copy of the report from her national sorority's well-known cache of digitally archived papers was secondary; it was insulting to be suspected by a instructor like that, as if she couldn't have written a paper every bit as good, had she had the time between parties and "hookups." And she had been counting on graduating only two years later than she should have, that midwinter. She feared it would be only a matter of time before Mother tracked down a duplicate of the paper which had been used at another school. I frowned and took the book back from her to reexamine in the subterranean light.

The man with the curious mustache in the dust jacket photo didn't look anything like me, though I suppose Mother's genes would crowd out any lowly man's. He was as frail-looking as a Denton Welch grown old, the somewhat blurred portrait more like one snapped in the solarium of an old-world sanitarium than one commissioned by a publisher with all the money of an oil conglomerate behind it. In the photo, he was distinctly not smiling. Naturally, I was intrigued, and Ariel was determined to lay a trap.

"You could get him for child support," she said as we left the cafe, "same as my sister did when her bitch of a husband walked out on her." She impaled her cigarette butt on a stiletto heel in the gravel of the forecourt, shivering either with rage or from the fact that it was five below freezing and she was wearing fishnets.

"Not to overstate the obvious, but I'm not exactly a child," I said, handing her back Father's latest book, which she'd borrowed from the library.

"Still, you're entitled to some of all that bling blang, even if he did disown you for being gay. Man, this would make a great book in itself." Then she started in on an elaborate scheme involving her easy seduction of my Father, my hiding in a hotel closet, and even my mother, the local sheriff, a reporter from The Los Angeles Times, and Dominick Dunne.

I wanted to clarify a few issues with her, thought better of it, and told Ariel I'd see her at the reading that night but not to call anyone. She stomped back to her sorority house unimpressed by my attitude of calm forbearance, but not before promising to sit in the back of the theater with me, anyway—and to bring an Uzi if she could fit one into her purse.

Wait before you write one more paragraph, I can hear the author of Sell Your Story Today! say, with editorial pipe clenched firmly between molars, let's pause for a bit here in your narrative, such as it is. You've told us a lot about your supposedly dreadful mother, you've described her, but we still haven't really seen her enough. You must develop her character! But, observant Reader, though she may be nearly as round as I, she is very flat as characters go. She doesn't or didn't change. She was the same to me at four as at forty. Then, she blamed me for stealing her time; later she blamed me for ruining her life. What was she to do, a woman still in her prime at less than sixty, with a slug of a son who never left her space to think or write or just be? We lived together like two wolverines in cages next to each other, trying to pretend the other doesn't exist but still kept watchfully awake all night by the snoring and the stench. I suppose I could have left that drafty old Victorian shack, run off to a glorious new life somewhere else—but if so, what would I do, where would I live, who could I blame for my many failures?

A few weeks before the reading, Momzilla had glanced into the greasy windows of the coffee shop while on her way to a seminar on supposed campus transgender "issues" (never problems—issues) and saw me discussing writing and sex with Ariel in a corner; and I had seen Ariel in my Mother's office a few weeks before that, leaning over Mother's desk with breasts and nipples barely restrained by either sports bra or halter top, as Mother pretended to be engrossed in the grade book. I had shambled off down the hall, unseen but probably heard. It was nearly December now. "Stay away from that girl," Mother hissed at me while I scrambled her morning eggs. "Despite the way she dresses, she can be a serious student and, furthermore, is a Lesbian," and I knew by the way she said it she was mentally capitalizing the word Lesbian. Mother took the skillet from my trembling hands and scraped the eggs onto her plate, leaving less than a third for me.

"For a lesbian, she does pretty well with the hockey team," I said, familiar with Ariel's boasting about her exceptional physical feats. Just trying to be popular. "Besides, she only wants to talk about books, since most of the other kids, even her sorority sisters, won't talk to her about anything but guys and clothes."

"I could have you fired," Mother said, absently drowning her eggs in Tabasco sauce. "In fact, I think you should be fired." She was speaking now with her mouth full, and though I might have heard the words wrong, I'm sure I got the gist. It took her a whole glass of grapefruit juice before she was able to speak again: "You're getting awfully close to being a child-molester, you know."

I smashed my own plate upon the linoleum, hungry as I was. "You're afraid that I might ever interest anyone, aren't you?" I said, my mouth still full of egg. "You want to keep me a sideshow attraction, just to be pitied or laughed at by everyone. It makes people feel you're doing something noble, like you're raising a mongoloid, microcephalic, thalidomide retard. Poor you! No wonder you always drove all the men in your life away. My father probably left you the minute your alarm clock went off!"

Hold it there: I admit I didn't say all that at once, though I'd said nearly as much many times before. This morning, however, with my job in jeopardy—not that I ever wanted one, although it made me just a bit less dependent on Mother—and, furthermore, my relationship with Ariel in real danger, I must have said enough to drive her from the kitchen, into the hall for coat and hat, and out of the house.

As I watched Mother from the kitchen window, trundling down the front steps and huff and puff off into the piney blue distance, I remembered a child clinging to the side of her desk and asking why he hadn't a father like the other kids at daycare. I remember her swatting that child with the reflexes of a boxer and saying that daddy was nothing but a meteorologist (a word I hadn't read yet), never predicting anything but stormy weather. At other times he was a gravedigger who only dug graves for bad little boys or an exterminator who led cockroaches like the Pied Piper into people's houses. She could laugh like a whole theater. Well, she hit the child with a newspaper or magazine, not her fists, and I suppose she was only trying to keep it all a private game only two can play, but I was never any good at crosswords or acrostics or literary theories or anything else that involved much obliquity. So I learned to hold back the tears; they'd only be wasted on her.

My impatient Reader waits. I shall now step back into the narrative stream and try not to slip again into murkier currents... To continue: Humanities Department readings at College of the Isles are notorious failures: the unknown poets and first-time novelists the meager honorarium manages to entice this far north rarely draw more than a half-dozen or so very earnest students, a wayward staff member who also happens to Want to Write (such as the late Miranda), and at most two or three faculty members, one of whom must make the feeble introduction. Even the students in creative writing classes, so Luc—who is more faithful than anyone else—tells me, give the readings a wide berth, as if the premature failure of the young man or woman behind the podium were contagious. The locale is always the tiny theater of sorts beneath the eaves of the east wing, once just a rehearsal space for the Drama Department, before they fundraised themselves into larger quarters. The venue is an airless, ill-lit storage area that is gradually being filled with the technological missteps—obsolete computers, fax machines, printers, scanners—once so expensive and now too worthless to pay to have hauled to the recycler. For years, the English department has debated giving up on this space and this series, but it was endowed so long ago no one has the heart to just let the poor thing die the same natural death as do "little" magazines and "great books" clubs. I go once in a long while, hoping to see where these books I buy for a dollar a pound originate, but am always disappointed by how young these readers are, or if not so young, how they speak their own words as if afraid of them. (Luc admits he often attends only hoping to meet someone comme ça to discuss Gide and maybe other things, over cordials at his place.) Oddly enough, despite Richard Strange's recent quasi-fame, this evening's audience was still nearly as threadbare as usual, although a little grayer and a little slower to settle into their folding chairs between the boxes of last year's bones and modems. Mystery fans who'd only haphazardly followed the author's career, I suspected. Although we were getting close to winter break, the theater was warm enough to grow orchids. There was not much oxygen at this altitude and there was a smell like decades-old mimeograph ink in the air. Meanwhile, the windows shuddered incessantly from the icy storm tormenting branches outside.

Ariel and I had come in last, and although we sat far in the rear, our backs up against VHS and Beta abominations, it didn't take me long to see that Luc was absent, while Mother was present, big as life in a chair with her faithful inflatable hemorrhoid ring under her colossal buttocks. Somehow even though I knew what I knew, I hadn't expected her to come, hadn't thought she'd have either the nerve or the energy. She was sitting next to my good friend, Mr. Schmook, and to my horror I saw that his arm was resting on the back of her chair—it's just resting casually, I assured myself, though it looked a little too territorial. Thankfully, Mother didn't turned around to see me and had no idea I'd be here, since I'd told her I'd be doing some overtime tending furnaces. The room was also dark enough, perhaps, to disguise the fact that I was here with that dark spirit, Ariel. Reader, listen on...

At last, that silence which seems to collect itself from nowhere but always announces the person of note even before he or she is noticed. That suddenly expressed lull. He was both older and more childlike than I had conjectured from his book jacket, this Richard Strange, my Father. There was something of the distant past in his antique Van Dyke and herringbone suit, though ultimately indefinable, and something else quite elfin in his stature and stance. A youngish assistant professor who taught a course on the mystery novel was giving the usual overly effusive introduction, obviously gleaned from the press kit: innovative, underappreciated, perseverance, distinguished, emeritus, belated are the only words I remember. I knew already the cities and dates, all available on the inside flyleaf of FFF. This introduction, like even the feeblest, went on for a little longer than was necessary. The writer twitched and he twittered thanks and he tapped his finger up and down his tie as if playing a little flageolet. For anyone reading this from the big city, he was obviously just another one of those busy, fussy, harried men you'd hardly notice scurrying past you on the way to a lieder recital or a commemorative unveiling, someone if not exactly in the arts, of the arts. To me, he was extraordinary. I instantly liked having a father like this: some minor, troubled character out of Woolf or Forster; someone who might soon be writing (with calligraphic exuberance, no doubt) long letters to me concerning the Epicureans vs. the Stoics or The Mauve Decade or why only fools and frauds believe in the Earl of Oxford. Ariel whispered to me to stop shifting in my seat.

"Doubtless," he said in a voice that might have been eighty years old or merely a precocious eight, "many of you assembled here late this afternoon because you hoped to hear me read from my last—and in this case, I do mean last—novel. Much as you may want to hear the most recent spellbinding spell-breaking of my master magician, the ratiocinator Seb Sebastiano, I want to speak to you instead of the Death of the Author." Here I detected a far-off grumble of thunder, as any old or would-be new fans braced themselves for a lecture rather than an entertainment. Mr. Strange made a high gargling sound, something like the cry of a lost bird, and moved on: "Not in the post-structuralist, anti-literate, deconstruction-worker sense of things, however much they may have informed this highly educated audience. Though I must say that had my books been written by a committee of the collective unconscious, or by society at large, as I think you say they have, I would have expected them to have been a bit more remunerative. No, I'm talking about the Death of an Author, actually. Myself. And not here and now, not on this stage, but soon enough, my doctors say, soon enough." Here Ariel squeezed my hand—she was touching me!—and I felt rhinestone cutting into my flesh. She meant well. Father paused, made that gargly sound, took his time pouring from a golden carafe, sipped the water as if it were an elixir of life, was revitalized by it, and twittered on: "And with me, with everyone who dies, as you know, a library is extinguished. Alexandria was not the first nor last; even illiterates have their small hidden stacks. In my case, real books in real tattered jackets will linger on for a while, maybe for decades or even centuries; but eventually they, too, those slim repositories of all my intelligence and all my memories, will be gone, too, crumbled into dust or burnt on some pyre by a generation who no longer even recognizes these objects of yellowed paper and faded ink, earthy things, wormy things, things that smell as good as fresh Gorgonzola when they are new and as bad as rotten corpses when they aren't." He smiled then like a little boy who has been fitted with the shiniest dentures money can buy. "Well, words stink, don't they? That's why we prefer them all clean and sterile on a liquid crystal screen, even me. Thank goodness I will be dead before we have vanquished them entirely to the ether, or they are beamed from one brain to the next without the intermediary of publisher or bookseller."

Don't be self-consciously "literary," admonishes Sell Your Story Today!, and avoid distancing your reader with arcane knowledge or quotations, but here, I swear, is where my father, the so-called Richard Strange, eventually plucked actual fruit from Prospero's epilogue; you can choose to believe me or think I just put this in for effect—I don't care:

" ... I'll break my staff,

Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,

And deeper then did ever plummet sound

I'll drown my books, blah blah ...

My charms are all o'er-thrown,

And in this bare island, by your spell,

Blah blah blah blah blah,

My ending is despair ...

As you from crimes would pardoned be,

Let your indulgence set me free."

I was trying hard to determine how Mother was taking all this as her former lover, the father of her only son, rambled on. She had a most expressive back in most circumstances—giving a cold shoulder was her specialty, after all—but she remained stiff and upright as a trouser press, and her thick platinum-gray hair with its one raven lock was similarly mute. Even when the applause came—belatedly, somewhat muffled due to lack of enthusiasm, the small crowd, or just the acoustics—she seemed to be as immobile as a mummy, though I suppose her pudgy little hands were going patty-cake. By then, Ariel had already lit a low-tar and was dragging me out of there and down the five flights of stairs, off into the storm. "You go deal with the oedipal stuff some other time," she told me, pushing me down the path. "That old man creeps the hell out of me. No wonder you're a pervert. I can't deal with this all now. I don't want to think of dying before your mother kills me. Text me tonight, when I stop spazzing." All of her jewelry, besides her teeth, was clattering in the cold. Her cigarette winked in the dark before the freezing rain quickly extinguished it. We parted by the now-frozen fountain dedicated to islanders lost in the Mesopotamian wars, and I hulked behind some bushes to avoid being seen by my mother, who I now saw rolling like a juggernaut down the sidewalk behind me. I have to admit that, like Ariel, I was feeling a bit drawn and quartered.

Father, I'd heard, would be staying like all guests of the college in Timbers, the dilapidated post-and-beam dormitory now so lacking in amenities it was used as barracks by all but the most important visitors to campus. The inn had no WiFi, no satellite, no cable, no private baths, and needless to say no Nautilus or cappuccino machines, so naturally it was perfect for ensuring visitors felt humbled; Father, I somehow knew, would love it. He was apparently already in his room—one incandescent square signaled a presence within the dark facade—by the time I'd summoned the courage to go down the cold, silent corridor and knock on his door.

"Room service!" I barked, having long practiced the line—though my voice was so choked, the words came out more like "rum server." The old man opened the door so suddenly I was still raising my fist to knock again, and nearly punched him in the nose. "But I didn't call for—" he started to say, before taking in my bulk, half parka, half belly. And since I was sweating profusely under my parka, I must have stunk like a weasel, if weasels sweat. In the dismal hall light no one could have seen much, but he appeared to be in striped commedia dell'arte pajamas of the type and fit only a toddler or clown might wear; they flowed over his arms and legs, and he had on beaded Indian moccasins like those sold on the duty-free reservations around here. "May I help you?" he said, realizing I didn't look much like room service, while stepping back a good meter across the bare pine floor.

I must have looked even more miserable than usual—soaked through, nose running, glasses frosted over so I could barely see, my galoshes caked with half-frozen mud. Without thinking, I spun and sat down heavily (well, how else could I sit?) on one of the guest room's twin camp beds—the one which hadn't yet been disturbed. "Really, this is highly unexpected," this man, Richard Strange, said, though apparently more amused now than disturbed. Then he gave me a longer, less angular inspection through his own glasses, and I noticed he'd already removed his teeth and had a glass of flaming copper in his hand. "Didn't I see you at my reading earlier?" he asked. "In the back row, next to some Amazon with honeyed hair."

After regaining my breath and my sense of balance, I threw myself back on the narrow bed and tried to focus, though my glasses were still misty and the room resembled the interior of an igloo which was rapidly melting, melting to reveal a bead-board ceiling, a bureau with blank accusatory mirror, a writing desk, one raggedy rag rug, and lastly, this figure in mocs and rajah's pj's two to three sizes too large. "Are you all right, son?" this man who was my father asked as I lay there, whirling, as if I too had already drunk from that firewater.

"I know who you are," I said at last from my deathbed.

"Really? I've always wanted to know the answer to that question, as well. Tell me, who am I?" He was now reaching a hand through the fog, holding out a glass of the brandy or grog to me, and without thinking I took it and swallowed it down in one gulp, although the Reader should already know that I never drink. Leave Mother to run the gamut from apéritif to dinner sangria to post-prandial.

Setting the empty glass on the one rag rug, I belched solemnly and answered: "I can't say for sure. But I know all about you when you were at Madison."

"Madison? Wisconsin? America? That was a long, long time ago. You must have read that on my book flaps... Madison—it rained or snowed all the time. Oh, dear—Madison!"

Now I was speaking steadily and more clearly, the fog and mist having lifted and revealing again this little man now opposite me on the other twin bed, like a small child waiting to be tucked in. "You knew a girl there, once. A very young girl, just a freshman."

"And I suppose you're now going to say I had carnal relations with this fairy and produced you, her vengeful son."

Something in his practiced manner unnerved me. I tore off my perspiring galoshes and parka like Hercules tearing off that poisoned skin, to create a distraction and give me time to think. But the little boy—I mean, old man—was telling me: "I've been accused often enough, though more often when I was a younger fellow. You see, I once did play the prodigal son, and I've had my share of retributions. Deputy policemen, certified letters, a little bribery, all that. Tell me, what was your mother's name?"

I told him.

He thought for a while as I stood there and then said with a sudden gesture of pleasure, a sigh and a thrust of his arms, "Oh, that girl! I remember that formidable lass very well, indeed. So that's still her name. In fact, I was just thinking of her; she was in my survey of the Romantic Poets—did she ever tell you that? Thought not. After she won the prize, after her book of girlish verse was published, after you were born, I daresay, she never wrote poetry again." With that, he handed me another, taller tumbler of amber fire and once again I drank it so fast I tasted nothing.

"My mother wrote poetry?" I was flabbergasted, and it's a rare thing—to be truly flabbergasted. Makes one burp rather loudly.

"I'm not surprised she never told you. The book only got one review, and that one was very negative, indeed. Written by a former friend, to add insult. More tenderhearted poets have killed themselves over kinder reviews. No wonder she's turned against books in her later years—oh, yes, I admit I saw her curriculum on a door in the English office today—it's very sad, because she did have talent. I wonder if you inherited any?"

"I've never written a thing," I said, and it's pretty much the truth.

"Oh, well. Albeit I must amend myself—she was no fairy even then, though she's always had something of Titania in her. Still, your mother had, possibly still has, a certain attraction, a way of taking men over—and you know men always like that. In another life she would have been a barkeep or shot off Clyde Barrow's head... Oh, dear—she must have made an awful mother."

"That's neither here nor there," I said a little too testily. "So you're not denying you're my father?" It seemed all the knots in the knotty pine paneling were eyes and all the eyes were watching him and me, demanding justice.

The little Pierrot before me almost spilled his drink down his tunic, he laughed so hard. At that moment I wanted to hit him—or smother him with a pillow—but to do so, I know, would have been unnecessary, because it was patently obvious this frail octogenarian before me would be expiring soon enough on his own. He needn't have even told his audience about the tumor or heart problems for anyone to guess. "Dear boy," he said once he had positioned his glass and, exhaling all the air out of his tired old lungs, propped himself against his bedstead like a manikin or marionette with no means to support itself, to continue: "Dear, dear boy. Trust me, I've heard it all before. Believe it or not, when I was younger I cut quite the dashing figure, and every now and then some bothersome hussy would try to trick me into marriage or child maintenance. But, you see, I am a veteran of that unpleasant conflict of nations known as the Second World War. I rode into Berlin long before Adenauer did, already wounded—the wound rather ungraciously making me incapable of fathering any child, not even you. You don't believe me? I'll show you my certificate, which I've always carried upon my person, in my wallet along with my passport, just for whatever sense of security it gives me."

"I don't believe you," I said.

"No need to, boy. I'll gladly unzip and show you in person." He stood to demonstrate. Unnecessary to point out here that pajamas rarely, if ever, have zippers.

"No!" I said, backing to the other side of the bureau, whose mirror was threatening to swallow me whole. "Besides, it could have happened at any time—your, uh, wound." My voice seemed to be coming from inside the writing desk, as if I were a ventriloquist, and I noticed with some discomposure that Richard Strange had now divided like an amoeba into two figures in identical striped pajamas: a shrunken old man and a leering, bearded second-grader.

"But I have the certificate!" the child taunted me, and the man concurred: "As I've said, I'm prepared, though the last time anyone tried this on me must have been forty years ago." Together, they said in unison: "Go ask Luc Ferrier, if you like." I shook my head and kneeled dizzily, one leg and then another, on the rug before his bed opposite. Suddenly the bodies, joined like a zygote, were one again. "You know I knew Luc, once," the writer was saying, "though he wouldn't speak to me today, the old invert... Or go ask your mother—she'd probably smack you for even suggesting it. If I'd even once consorted with her she would have bitten off my head like the female of the praying mantis... Oh, yes, she loved me, anyway, and it was probably at least partly my fault that she wound up unmarried and pregnant the way she did, since I suppose she was trying to prove something to me. But she was far too young, and she knew it, and later she forgave me—for what and why, I don't know. We conversed just tonight, after the reading. A jolt to the old memory cells. Not enough time, I suppose, to mention you. I'd always presumed she'd given you up. How extraordinary—if only my eyesight were better, I should have recognized the resemblance much sooner. A bitter, bitter woman, I'd say, not that I can entirely blame her." He sank again into his bed, the fire in his glass and in himself all but gone out. Now he looked even more desiccated in his newly bought pajamas, a veritable homunculus, as if he were getting even younger and smaller before my eyes, not child now but child's doll. I rose and came back to the other bed, to sit on it again in violent silence. The man who was no longer my father looked at me with sclerotic eyes through his thick tortoiseshell spectacles and said, "You'll have to excuse me, but I seem to have forgotten your name." With that, he held out a clawlike, tremulous hand.

I shook it. "I'm Cal. Short for, uh, Caliban."

One last sip, draining the glass. He couldn't help but giggle and then grimace, swallowing the name as if there had been bitters in the dregs. "Caliban! You poor boy. I remember now how pretentious she was. 'Sinjin' Perse, Transit of Venus, Dahlberg, all that... Oh, so very naughty of her. But, then, you must forgive your mother—for, after all, what does that make her?"

Ah, an entire scene, beginning middle and end, accomplished! Just as outlined in Chapter Four. Yet I am not finished.

To resume—just a few minutes later, if you can still read the stopwatch of this story, weary Reader. (Don't worry, I have a thumb set to press the button soon.) Having no idea how to 'text' someone in this age of nonreaders, I called Ariel on her mobile instead and had no need to convince her to come over once I'd assured her my time-tested sleep-inducing potion had worked its magic—Mother's rhinoceros snores always rattled the entire house, solid evidence. Ariel's sorority wasn't far and she had wisely worn air-cushioned soles to float upstairs. She found my room as if following the scent of moldy books. "Holy skullbusting Jesus," she said, wending her way through minarets and towers and citadels to sit on the edge of my unmade (in fact, never made) bed with me. "You ever hear of those crazy old people who collect old Readers' Digests until there's no room to get out the door? I'm afraid to smoke in here, but I'm going to, anyway, damn it. This place stinks enough already." I had never had a girl in my room before; I had never had anyone in my room since the last time my mother had visited it, when I was about eleven or twelve. Only at that moment did the room suddenly shift its perspectives enough to take on the appearance of a chaotic annex of Schmook's Books. I did have too many books, far too many books—and so many yet to read. But no matter about that—there was still a little fire in my belly and here was a twenty-three-year-old non-virgin upon my bed on the night I had learned that I absolutely had no father, had never had a father. Parthenogenesis is not beyond Mother's powers.

Ariel smoked and fidgeted with her frizzy hair and tightened the laces of her air-floats as I told her of my encounter amongst the knotty pines of Timbers. Even by my squint-eyed reading lamp I could see she had removed her makeup for the night, removed her jewels and barrettes and other accoutrements, and looked no older than thirteen. I have read Lolita. I understood it then. Ariel, here, now, was too beautiful for me. Perceptive girl, she saw that I was crying behind my glasses—crying as the result of some unforeseen alchemical process for the first time since I was a little boy—before I realized it myself. "Poor baby," she said, and put my bald head on her bird-boned shoulder to stroke it. "But maybe it's like high time now for you to straighten up your act, work out some, buy some really fly clothes, get yourself a boyfriend. Nothing's impossible." She was using a dirty cereal bowl to tap her ashes into, and the smoke stung my eyes so I could have convinced myself that was why I was crying. I don't know why I was letting her fondle me like a puppy; she was a rich brat from Berkeley, I knew by this time, her parents were a surgeon and a docent, she had been adopted when Balkan war children were fashionable. Her biological father, she had told me once, was a mercenary from Roxbury, Boston; how that all added up, how much to believe, I can't say—but at least she knew she had a father, maybe two. And here I was, twice her age, repugnant to all the senses, slightly inebriated, a lowly groundskeeper, about as attractive as a naked mole rat (Mother had called me one for years after walking in on me in the bathroom when I was sixteen), a loathsome nose-picker, a mouth-breather, an armpit-scratcher, an ogre, an idiot. No wonder Ariel pushed me away when I leaned across her breast to kiss her and leapt to her feet, knocking her smoke and the ash-filled bowl to the floor. No wonder she said something hurtful about gender confusion and misplaced urges and little lost boys before she backed out of the room, upsetting a stack of molting Penguins and Pelicans on the way. I followed her down the stairs, blubbering like an imbecile, like a man in love, pleading for her to reconsider, to forgive and forget. "Oh, it's not the kiss that freaked me out," she said on the creaking porch. "It's your whole mama's boy crybaby thing. Man, oh man. Those girly boys back in the hood would've had to be doing a hell of a lot of crystal before they ever acted so, so—weak." She pronounced the last word as if it were the filthiest word in her extensive vocabulary. It implied ineffectual, unmanly, impotent, thoroughly sissy in a butch world. Ariel strode ahead of me down the forty steps, down the sidewalk, around a hemlock-obfuscated corner. Even though I'd never walked so fast in my whole fat life, I soon lost her in the distant dark pines. She didn't answer my pleas, or maybe she never heard them above the wind. Standing there like a fool in the intersection with cars honking at me and sleet trickling down the back of my neck, it didn't take me long to decide to go to the college library instead of back home, where I'd have to listen to that pachyderm snorting and wheezing down the hall the rest of the night. The library stays open until three am and I've been known to fall asleep there, an O.E.D. for a pillow.

Here is as good a time as ever to admit to my Reader that Ariel actually never really existed, or rather, that she was two or three misplaced or misguided girls who had for some reason latched onto my teddy-bear avuncularity over the years. Some girls mistake girth for cuddliness, piggishness for ursinity (a word I discovered or invented that night), and can't tell stuffed animals from ones that are merely frozen in terror. Somehow they're approachable, too, these lonely girls with their thrift-store clothes and no more real education in them than sex education—one was a "tranny," she told me, long before I caught up on modern slang. Not even the registrar's office knew she wasn't a she. Another confessed she wore boys' briefs. But all of them were lovely and all of them were Ariel to me, and to package them as one makes this story tidier and more thematic, compactness of theme, I have learned, being a very important value to R. Lester Aldredge. (Why exactly theme means so much to a writer, I have missed somewhere in the chapters, but it always sounds good.) And Ariel (she has graduated now, the plagiarism case no longer a threat) is here with me—us, now—and happy. If anyone beats you to this story, Reader, it will be she.

My books, of course, caught fire from Ariel's filter-tipped stub (though I still can't blame her), and I can see the flames leaping from the American realists nearest my bed to European authors in translation, hopscotching from world histories to philosophy to the natural sciences, consuming encyclopedias and atlases and dictionaries alike. I see Alice brave as a sorceress who dies on the pyre and Anna Karenina curling and turning black with fury and Pangloss and Candide happily submitting themselves to oblivion in this happiest of worlds, along with untold thousands of other martyrs. Mother, too, who, still sleeping soundly as a sloth, died when the walls of that frail old house collapsed upon her; and with her demise I was suddenly freed of my past, my education, and my vexations. All but the guilt, of course, which is why I write this, if it isn't already obvious—because there is no question that I'm a murderer, a criminal with a Christmas list of motives. I hated and still do hate my mother, I hate to admit. Though I can say the more I understand about anything that annoys or destroys, the harder it is to blame that thing. Duh, as the real Ariel says. Hate, however, is not altogether an unpleasant sensation; it gets one up in the morning as regular as an alarm, it burns some calories, it makes one want to change one's world.

So I'm living up here in what I call Luc's "garret" now, his recently dismissed houseboy's cramped room at the top of this prim Victorian, which is the rehabilitated replica of the house Mother and I shared all those decades. I have no books here and no longer miss them. Libraries are enough. Ariel is directly below me in the guest bedroom; Luc finds her—or him, I'll let you wonder—amusing now that a botched prostate operation has left him disinterested in any gender. She needed a place to go after she had graduated and her parents divorced. Until she decides what to do with her life, she's working in the varsity store and doing a little dancing on weekends in the lumberjack bars on the Manitoban side of the mainland—the money's good, she says, and she's saving to get the fuck permanently out of Bush's America. Luc cooks us gourmet meals the likes of which I've only read about in French novels and asks only that we do a little house- and yard-work in return. So we're one small happy family—Luc, Ariel, and Cal.

Luc tells me he's my father, a fine fairy tale, though it's not really necessary for me to believe him or not believe him. A lifetime ago, he told me soon after the fire left me homeless, he'd been a student at the beautiful University of Wisconsin, too. He'd screwed anything not nailed down, as he put it, in those more fluid times; he might have even screwed Prof. Strange if he remembered correctly. They were both in that survey of the Romantics, he and Mother, and she'd come on as strongly to him as she did any other creature in trousers. He was still young and naïve enough to give things like that a try, but he'd messed it up, he'd left a little something behind at her place, as he put it, and she'd had to drop out in that not completely enlightened age, to go back to the nuns in the orphanage on an island in Iowa where they'd raised her. Nine months, anyhow, was enough for Mother to complete her sonnet cycle. Somehow she managed to wrest me from papist clutches and took me with her when she returned to school—Colgate, I knew, an ironic name because she always said it knocked the teeth right out of her. But, she'd add, a good lesson in life. She pretended to be a Korean war widow, though she was too young even for that. (Nevertheless, she always looked quite old enough.) Mother slaved in school cafeterias and waitressed all summer and lunged at every financial bone thrown her way. Luc (by then heavily involved with the SDS on his way to joining the ranks of the Weathermen) had tried writing her, tried sending her what small sums he could, but she'd refused all advances and invitations, and miraculously, after many years of gypsy scholarship, they both were surprised to find themselves as if shipwrecked on this godforsaken spit of land, neither of them particularly recognized or distinguished—but then again this was when there were still jobs in academia. They immediately fell into an agreement not to discuss me or their mutual past. She might have even forgotten I was his, if I ever was. Once in a while she let him visit me, play with me, but always only among others. Poor Luc, trying his best to be gallant: I see I've never really described him much here, and it's too late now. He is a soft-spoken, gentle-hearted man away from the classroom, eager to take early retirement next year so he can at last devote himself to turning his memories into memoirs. He wears moth-eaten cardigans now and a "deaf aid," as he mockingly calls it. He likes hearing any kind of sound in the house: fends off les revenants, he says in his superstitious Quebecois way. There is something in him of the ancestral voyageur, canoeing through silent waters with his hull full of stoat and coney, every snap of a twig an Ojibway or a rival trapper. A constant steady sound, therefore, soothes him, even when he has the aid turned down. Me, I'm surprisingly quiet for my size, but Ariel always has a radio or stereo or television going somewhere. Sometimes the twangling and humming is enough to drive me crazy, but I can draw up my hatch and live with it. What choice do I have, anyway?

R. Lester Aldredge is strict about endings. He says they should wrap up the story, "but don't pull the strings too tight;" they should leave the reader feeling satisfied, with "just the right balance of questions answered and still unanswered;" they can surprise or sadden—but never, never should one anger a reader by making him or her feel he or she has "entirely missed the point and could have been watching an episode of Kojak instead." I have no reason to wish to anger poor Mr. Aldredge stuck back in 1974, whether he is among the dead or the living. But I'm not feeling very resolved myself; I feel a little like Andromeda still chained to her rock although the kraken has mistakenly drowned in a storm, far at sea. Mr. Aldredge, let me spell this out for you: the rocks are my fears, the leviathan is my Mother, and I am filled with guilt and rage in equal measures. Luc will not listen to such things. He pats me like a real father on my bald pate and tells me I should write when I'm unhappy, as he does, for that dispels all demons. I'm trying, I'm trying...

I would like to find that book of poems by my mother, though even Luc claims he has never seen it, nor does he exactly remember it. Maybe the professor was being colorful. What might it have been called, her book, if it did exist? Something modest or direct, I somehow think: simply Twenty Poems or, more appropriately, Sonnets to Satan. By the time she had me she wouldn't have wanted to think of anything clever. I can see her even now scowling down at my playpen, trying to type her dissertation on a gray-green Smith Corona whose rhythm was like a heartbeat to me. Her hair is even more of a packrat's nest than usual, she's never been able to lose that extra fifty pounds she gained carrying me, and she's in a batik-print muumuu that she might have cut out of old curtains. This is before she gave up smoking, and the occasional discarded butt lands within my netting. She kicks the pen and tells me to stop howling like a damn lemur. Lemur, an interesting word I learn then and look up later—from the Latin. It means "ghost." She kicks and kicks at the playpen until she is screaming louder than I am. What a brute of a beast of a bitch—see, I can still be cruel as the truth, as well. My memories did not perish in that fire. She should have given me up to the Sisters of Eternal Pestilence. I could have become a bishop, defrocked for something untoward in the vestry, or simply a bumbling bumpkin of a parish priest. I could have written heavy books with weighty titles, had I but the language. My indestructible black beauty of a Remington was the only thing of value which survived the fire. Funny, I've always thought, how both typewriters and rifles rolled off the Remington company's conveyer belts. Which is more dangerous? Luc says its survival was an important omen, and R. Lester Aldredge considers an omen an important card kept tucked beneath every gambler's armband.

Alas, both this story and myself remain unresolved. You know something peculiar, though? The murderer's dreams are every bit as sweet as an infant's. There, in soothing sleep, sleep which loves to lie to us, this story is perfected. It is published, it is praised. Maybe the movie is made, maybe I'm interviewed, fêted, festschrifted, maybe even forgiven by an adoring public. Sometimes, it is true, when I wake and see what I have and have not written and have and have not done, I cry to dream again. Reader, tell me what you think.

Madame Moitessier's Portrait

Or, The Erasing Of Catherine

Author's Note: Although most of the characters in this story were indeed real people, their actions, as detailed here, are not intended to coincide with what is called historical "fact." There is, however, such a portrait, and it did take seven years to complete.

Madame de Flavigny (née Catherine Moitessier) has been quoted thus: "One day the old man, in his cotton cap, became angry and he declared that I was unbearable and that he was going to erase me."

Part One

Madame Ynez Moitessier was, at last, to be painted. For years her husband had been searching for a suitable portraitist, but of all of those he had interviewed, none would do: This one was a careless colorist, that one had dubious references, the other one was known for his terrible temper and making his women look like harlots, and so on. Henri Moitessier was a man known for long deliberations, but in the end, he usually made the wisest choice, or so his business partners were glad to tell his wife when they came to dinner. Henri also liked to think he knew about art—specifically, what was and wasn't deserving of that label, and whenever he visited a gallery or museum (which he seldom did with his wife because she was too slow in coming to a judgment) he hurried through the rooms ayeing or naying one painting after another, as if ticking them off on a tally sheet, and would delight in pronouncing to his companions if they had been "taken" or not. They usually deferred, because Henri had all the appearances of a man who was an expert on art or anything else, for that matter. He had been frustrated in his attempts to convert his wife's family's house into his own art gallery, for it was already full of dreadful old landscapes and ancestral portraits which no one, most of all his wife, had let him replace. So what little art he did manage to squeeze into the odd corner or alcove had to be bold, up-to-date; it must let his colleagues know that here was a man who moved with the times, took risks when necessary, yet had tastes that were timeless and true. It was no surprise to his friends, therefore, that he was not satisfied until he had managed to procure as his wife's portraitist France's leading living artist: Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, a man also known for being at the forefront of progress, without peer, yet discriminatingly classical in his talents. It would be terribly expensive, of course, but Henri Moitessier considered the undertaking a sound investment—and after all it was his wife's money he had married into. The portrait would also surely be pleasing to the eye, since Ynez was a beautiful woman and still young. All beautiful young women, he liked to believe, are vain, so she would be happy and her friends would be envious and that would make her happier still. If Ynez were that happy, he reasoned, then surely she would overlook his own occasional indiscretions. Indeed, it would be worth every bit of the money.

Henri knew that like a schoolgirl Ynez enjoyed surprises, so he decided to wait until the eve of their eighth wedding anniversary to announce his plans. Then he would pull off his spectacles, take her cool soft hands in his, and casually mention it, as if he were slipping her something as bright and tangible as another piece of jewelry.

When the news was disclosed, however, Ynez was more than a bit shocked and skeptical, though she feigned delight until her husband left for his offices in the city the next morning. Ynez knew as little about art as she did about Henri's business, but she had heard much about this Monsieur Ingres. Rumors of all sorts had whirled wildly through her ladies' circle in the parlor while the men smoked and posed heroically among the hunting trophies in the game room. A few of her more worldly friends knew Paris well and frequented the city's art studios; they had commissioned rather explicit statues of gods and goddesses and did not blush about it, but even they insisted upon the indecencies and lunacies of the most famous artist in France. Monsieur Ingres, they had insinuated, was known for his "gothic" tendencies and predilection for voluptuous harem girls, which was questionable enough, but worse was how he was wont to overemphasize certain features of his models' anatomies. One Turkish odalisque, for example, was said to be endowed with an unnatural number of vertebrae and simply impossible breasts. Add to these excesses the proliferation of exotica in his paintings—ornate silks and tapestries, jade and jasper and oversized jewels, peacock feathers, porphyry, censers, hookahs, eunuchs, anything eastern and strange he could crowd them with—and France could only be pitied for having a madman as Director of the Academy.

Ingres had also been involved in a few rather disagreeable political and social intrigues that had not benefited his character. Only a woman who enjoyed inviting humiliation and public shaming into her life would welcome a portrait by that man, Ynez had been told more than once—and yet she sensed that many of them would be happy to be so scandalized.

Until her husband's announcement, Ynez had felt certain that she was one of the few truly content young wives in her set, one who didn't care to invite or invent gossip just because it made life more interesting. Henri was perhaps not the most attentive husband, and it would not have amazed her if he kept a mistress or two in the city, but he was never one to embarrass or neglect her—or take her for granted. He was generous, he handled her family's money and investments wisely, and without a doubt, he loved her and their daughter. It was not necessary to prove that love in a portrait. She would rather spend her days unbothered by boring sittings and radical artists, but go about as usual, watching over the vineyards and orchards and terraced grounds of her family's estate outside Nice, seeing to it that her parents' house looked the same as it always had, and tending her endless beds of lilies—which was her greatest talent and no small one. As did all her friends, she kept up on the latest styles of hair and clothes from Paris, but was discriminating in much the same way Henri was about his business ventures; she often told Henri she'd rather have one simple but well-made gown than a dozen attractive but cheap ones. All the same, her closets were full. Her husband, she knew, thought she was vain, but that was not the case at all. She had been taught a love of nature in the gardens of her convent school and wanted only to live up to its beauty as it might be expressed in her. In a sense, such was her duty. She was as critical about her looks as she was about her lilies, and though she knew she was not unattractive, she also knew that despite fluctuations in the weather the lilies would always look very much the same year after year. Ynez looked into mirrors as she would into the sky—searching for changes, clues to the future.

Now she was a little horrified to think of herself frozen in time, as any portrait in oils would be, something to compete against for the rest of her life. And if it were true that this artist had a way of "enhancing" natural defects and adding improper elements, whatever beauty she had been blessed with by God would be distorted, even perverted. Would not such an artist trample an innocent lily? Ynez also thought it a real possibility, if not a matter of routine, that she be asked to pose in the nude. Perhaps it would absolutely be required. Certainly the paintings Henri most often spoke of as having almost purchased were nudes (she was invariably relieved, though her friends all had at least a couple—they did serve an educational purpose, they said, in illustrating certain charming old myths). Ingres himself was probably an old and hideous hunchback, but with lusty young desires. He would attempt to take liberties with her, to compromise her standards. She would cry out, there would be no more portrait, and Henri would be furious—more with her than with the artist. Oh, it was unbearable!

After breakfast on the day of their anniversary, while changing from her morning wrapper into something more appropriate for the garden, Ynez glimpsed herself naked before her full-length dressing room mirror. She seldom took much notice of her body when it was unclothed—even when she bathed—and today the sight especially startled her. Henri himself knew little of the secrets of her physical being; she was as careful at lovemaking as she was at dinner with distinguished guests and knew all the right tricks of candlelight and draperies. All her life, she had been told she was quite appealing and she had accepted the compliments without much thought, though now and again she did doubt her flatterers' words. What difference did it make—but if it didn't make a difference, why was she sometimes so concerned? She hurried into her gardening outfit, trying not to appraise the imperfections of her body. But it was too late; the mirror had revealed them. For instance, she was aware that one of her breasts was more than slightly imbalanced by the other (what would Monsieur Ingres make of that?) and maybe she was getting far too fat after all, though most men said they liked ample wives. There was a maroon asterisk, a birthmark, on her left thigh, and her calves were much too thick even for a body growing as fashionably plump as her own. What a sight she was! In dark humors like this she would think of herself as a mistaken experiment; if she were a lily she would cut herself back to the bulb. God is perfect, she had often enough been told as a girl in the convent, but if He really were perfect, why were not all His creations?

Once, during one of their rare trips to Paris together, she and Henri had become separated while walking through the Tuilleries. When she had left off tossing sous into a fountain and caught up with Henri, she discovered him staring up at a monument to Victory, in the form of an nude, angel-winged woman. He appeared somewhat abashed when his wife turned him away—she had seen the intense expression in his eyes; he only looked at her that way in certain circumstances, and even then seldom with such hunger. "Such fine craftsmanship!" he had exclaimed as she led him out of the park.

Ynez had wanted to ask him if he thought she were as perfect in any way. "One of her fingers is missing," was, however, all she found herself saying.

For several days after their anniversary, Ynez tortured herself by envisioning the finished painting. She would be demoralized into a slovenly and contorted gypsy girl or a goose-necked freak or at the very least a filthy, sluttish Woman at her Toilette. If this Ingres failed to see her imperfections, he would invent his own. All future generations would see her so: Her own daughter's husband would no doubt pause before the portrait's place in the parlor every morning on the way to work and suppress a snicker. In a vision that woke her an hour before daybreak, she saw herself sprawled naked and vulnerable amidst her finest calla lilies, her body as twisted as a cripple's. Would Henri still insist on hanging such a thing above the mantel?

They had no need for such a portrait anyway, although she had been amused when Henri proposed the idea several Christmases ago. He had been flattering her again, and she took it as just another idle promise. After all, she had been sketched in pastels quite nicely by a lady friend of her mother's when she was sixteen, and that was all a portrait of herself they would ever need. Besides, Daguerreotypes were all the rage—it would be easier and more progressive of them to take that course; all their friends were having theirs done, naturally enough.

Henri, however, was used to getting his way, as all men were, and she could only hope now that with a few carefully chosen words on her part he'd come around to changing his mind on his own. She no longer truly loved him in the way she had as a naïve debutante (remembering the tiresome ballroom circuit and the boastful young student who finally lured her into his sleigh one snowy midnight), but unlike many of her friends' husbands, she still respected and admired him. He was a good man and he was good to her. Never, never would she want to hurt him. Ynez was certain he felt the same way about her, and for all its faults, she thought theirs an admirable arrangement, if rather ordinary. Once or twice she had wondered what it would be like to take on a lover, as a few of her friends had, though there were no candidates around but ruined squires and crude sportsmen—and despite the free, very modern spirit of the times, she still considered the idea more than a little immoral.

After visiting her priest (who was more concerned about her negligence in attending mass than any suspect artistic endeavors) and considering that she had suffered enough in silence, she closed the doors of her chambers one evening after supper and confronted Henri. She had rehearsed her tactful questions for hours.

"You needn't remove one earring," Henry assured her. "Master Ingres has painted many highly respected citizens and they are all without complaint as far as I know. I have studied a few and they are much more lifelike than these Daguerreotypes anyone could do—scientific hocus-pocus and all that, it's not art and it's not progress as I see it. True artists rely on talent, not gimmickry. Moreover, anyone can have his or her 'photograph' taken; it is common. Very few could be immortalized by a great artist—don't you understand what an honor such a portrait would be?"

Ynez freed a tortoise-shell comb from her hair and her careful black tresses unwound down the back of her neck and the very white tops of her shoulders (her peignoir revealed no more). "But Henri... " was the most she could think of to say, despite all her prepared speeches.

He turned to her. His face looked as if he had been holding his breath for some time. "When I was in Marseilles last month I visited Claude d'Haussonville at his apartments there. In one of the sitting rooms there is a portrait of his wife, done by the Master. In fact, it was Claude who enabled me to contact him, if I failed to tell you before. You went to school with Madame d'Haussonville, did you not? It's a remarkable likeness, quite stunning."

"So Leila has been painted by this Ingres," Ynez said, tossing the comb onto the bed. She found an interesting detail of the mahogany bedpost to trace with her finger: ivy entwined about a pineapple. "I've been wondering..." she began, measuring the spaces between her words as cautiously as the words themselves. She had a reserve argument in her arsenal, more of a compromise, actually. "Henri, don't you think Catherine should be included in the portrait? Of course, when you first proposed the painting she was much too young, but I think she's ready for it now... That is, I think she should pose with me. I'd be much less nervous then."

Henri studied her pale moonlike face, with its full cheeks and small solemn mouth, for a moment before speaking. "Two heads would probably cost twice as much," was what he said.

"Oh, but Catherine is so small, she couldn't be much of a bother. Artists like children. Besides, they're saying portraits of mothers with their daughters are the latest thing in Paris." She had heard nothing of the sort, but knew Henri would never truly want to seem behind the times despite his mockery of photography.

"Well, dear, I shall consider it then." Henri bowed and brushed the top of her head with his lips. His fingers began to loosen her peignoir further down her shoulders, but something tensed and stiffened in her and he appeared to think better of it. "Good night, love," he said, kissing her again.

"Then you will say yes!" she cried, leaping up and kissing him in return. "Good night and thank you, Henri my darling."

She closed the doors after him. While brushing her hair before the boudoir mirror she envisioned a glorious, resplendent, and still very respectable portrait of Catherine and herself, something so magnificent that not even all the gods in the Greeks' heavens could have accomplished it.

Many weeks would pass before the first sitting, but Ynez did not think she had nearly enough time to prepare. She was a novice to the art of posing, but assumed it would require hours of unblinking eyes and shallow breathing. Art was slow—this had been the primary lesson of her convent classes, when she and the other girls had been commanded to draw a bunch of wax grapes for the hundredth time. Her primary task in posing was to perfect her ability to stand still as a marble column. She practiced every day, with determination and diligence, until sometimes she was doing her lessons unconsciously while weeding her lilies or simply staring out a window. One morning a servant girl approached her from behind as she stood immobile before a vase of wilted lilies she had been about to discard before the trance overcame her. When the girl touched her elbow, Ynez jumped as if she had seen a spider in a hatbox and lily petals and the girl's impertinent laughter rained down around her.

Catherine's approach to training was less professional, for Catherine was not quite seven. Even in sleep she was in constant motion. It was all her mother could do to get her to stand up straight before the girl would be hopping on one foot or spinning like a weathervane in a mad wind. She quickly exasperated her mother; Catherine's upbringing and disciplining had, after all, always been in the hands of governesses. Ynez had borne the child for Henri almost as if it were a contractual obligation: Soon after the birth she had decided she wanted no more of a career as a mother than most of her friends, all of whom deposited their children in boarding schools as soon as it was humane to do so. Catherine had always been uncontrollable. When the child went off on one of her screaming and howling fits just because a toy had been denied it hardly seemed possible the creature could be hers. However, her mother did love Catherine—to an extent. It was just, she reasoned to herself, that having been raised by cold parents and soon sent off to even colder nuns at the convent she had certain difficulties in expressing maternal love and returning affection. Ynez had thought of asking the latest governess, who was English and therefore highly pragmatic, to practice posing with her charge, but she was afraid an Englishwoman might not take the arts seriously enough.

Sometimes Ynez wondered how Henri would handle Catherine if he were in her position, and she supposed he would be much stricter and less given to impatience. Women are weak and high-strung, he often reminded his wife, and it was because of this tenet of his, he said, that he tolerated and forgave her ignorances and mistakes. A man has clearer vision than a woman, Ynez was led to reason; his vision is not colored by frivolity and emotions—if she were a man, she would want most to be a mathematician or accountant, someone who deals with figures instead of feelings. Life would be much easier that way. Surely, Henri did not seem as anxious of the artist's arrival as she was. In addition, when Ingres did arrive, how long would the sittings take? Claude d'Hausssonville had told Henri that Ingres sometimes took as much as a decade to complete one of his so-called masterpieces. Ynez feared her beauty, such as it was, would not have that long. Bearing Catherine had already taxed her dearly and her first bloom of youth was perhaps no more. In ten years she would have grown entirely too obese and soft and the portrait would be there to mock her, listless and unchanging as a clock while her body fell silently with the years into ruin.

Part Two

On the afternoon the artist did arrive, Ynez was on her knees among her lilies, cutting the best examples to the quick and placing them in a basket. Such work she did not trust to the gardeners, who valued vegetables more than beauty and who would just as soon mow the whole bed to plant turnips instead if she did not watch them. (As her mother had before her, Ynez guarded her lilies above all.) Just as she had severed a calla so rare and pure it seemed an object of devotion, she heard the clatter of horse and carriage and saw red dust rising from the road—a shiny black coupé like a lacquered Chinese box was emerging from the dust. She had no time to alter her appearance; she had been expecting no one. The stable boy cantered ahead of the carriage on his pony and shouted to Madame Moitessier that the artist had arrived. A week ahead of schedule—already he was not to be trusted. She was in a dingy cotton smock, wearing no powder or perfume, with what she considered her best feature—her thick glossy black hair—up in a practical but unbecoming bun; a peasant's straw bonnet dangled from a ribbon around her neck, but it would be a horrid disguise. It was a surprise the boy had even recognized her.

Within her wardrobes hung the silk brocade gown she had ordered especially for the occasion of meeting the artist; within her vanity drawers rested the colors and scents for her cheeks, lips, eyes, and throat. She would somehow have to ascend the stairs to her chambers surreptitiously, perhaps pretending to be a homely servant, if she were to avoid making the wrong impression. Monsieur Ingres had come to paint a lovely, demure woman of good breeding, and she would not dare disappoint him.

Ynez covered her dusty hair with her bonnet and left her basket in the sun, the lilies scattered. First she started for the stables, ran half the way there before remembering a fence would stop her progress, whirled, turned toward the house again, then decided to cut through the old hedge maze to the west wing, taking a route she had learned as a child which would lead her to a hidden basement door. The hedge was overgrown—something she would have to take up with those lazy gardeners—and she could not see over the rows. It was hot within the leaves and the gardeners seemed to have redesigned the maze, or else she had misremembered; she was quickly lost, praying no one had seen her enter. Well, at least the servants would be handling the visitor and she could sit and rest now. The maze was not really that big or complicated; it was just that she was tired and angry that she had been disrupted without warning.

"Madame Moitessier?" a voice came from around the corner. She turned, and there her visitor was, sitting on a bench in the center of the maze, as if he had been dawdling there for hours. "It must be you, I was certain," he was saying, somewhat out of breath. "I saw a pretty young lady run into this confounded maze and I'm afraid I got quite lost and dizzy. Still, pleasant in the shade, isn't it?"

Ynez was too surprised to do more than give a perfunctory curtsy. He was old, but not nearly so old as she had imagined, and he was no cripple. Neither was he half so ugly or bent as most men his age; indeed, his gestures were animated and lively, and his outmoded clothes were colorful but comical—he seemed a figure right out of Molière. If she had seen his picture in a book, she might have laughed; instead she bit her tongue and introduced herself. Then she remembered what she was wearing and stepped away. "I'm sure I look more like a scrubwoman than the fashionable heiress you were expecting," she said, trying to make comedy of the situation but regretting each word as it slipped from her mouth.

"In Paris," he said, "we would be fortunate indeed to find a scrubwoman half so lovely."

Ynez pondered his remark. "I've never been painted," she said. "Just sketched by a lady friend once when I was still young."

"If I were half so young! Why you have never been painted before in a country where every other ninny begs to be immortalized in either paint or marble is a mystery." The artist looked around him, trying to see over the hedge. "Excuse me, but could you show me to the house? I must haste to unpack my alchemist's supplies."

"It is rather close in here," she said, and led him from the center of the maze. She was soon lost again, however, and it was he instead who was able to find their way out. She felt even more ridiculous. "After you, Ariadne," he said, bowing to her once they were back in the sunlight. "I hope I haven't been too bullish, charging in here like this." He gestured her forward, toward the sandstone portico of the house. Ynez, who had been confused by his allusions, followed, trying to look at him more closely.

In time, she would determine that he had light gray, almost colorless eyes, more rheumy than limpid, a grandfather's eyes. There was nothing in those eyes to suggest a vision any keener than the next man's, though it would surely seem more fitting if an artist's eyes were his most distinctive feature. His hands, though, were more peculiar: long and white as a woman's, but expressive as an actor's. Her husband's hands were uncallused, but they were clumsy and fat and damp; she had never been touched by hands like this artist's until he first took her own hand in his and passed dry lips over her rings. It was a most unpleasant experience. All in all, she was disappointed that so much about him was so vulgar, despite the affected day-laborer's clothing and those interesting hands. His behavior, she guessed, would be the best topic of future parlor conversation. Naturally, he would have to be a very peculiar man.

She knew few men; she spoke to or was spoken to by fewer. Yet, she could usually sense the difference between a sincere compliment and a specious one. This man puzzled her. He did not like her at all—she could instantly tell that much, anyway; he hated her and all foolish rich women like herself because he depended upon such women and their husbands for a living, and they had no cultural values or sense or courage to do anything but pay him for forcing them to pose as inert and insentient as vases or stuffed nightingales. Artists, she had always been told or had assumed on her own, were misogynists and misanthropes. Women and decency were their principal victims.

Ynez still had one hope: that he would like Catherine. Artists must like children, she presumed, since artists are so childlike themselves, and few of the paintings she had ever bothered to examine closely lacked children, or at least cupids or cherubs. Even the landscapes about her parents' house usually contained the requisite baby angels blowing pinkish clouds aside like soap bubbles. "You must meet our daughter Catherine," she stated once they were standing in the shadowy foyer of the house.

"Yes. It was certainly a surprise to learn I would be requested to paint her, too, and I normally wouldn't, but then..." He stopped before a sun-bleached old country scene hanging in an alcove (surely enough, it had a couple little maidens, now faded to little more than ghosts, at a brook) and sighed. "She—Catherine—she is seven, is she not?"

"Oh, but not for a few more months. And she is a very pretty and well-behaved little girl. Most exceptional."

"Ah. And tell me—is she like other children at seven?" His hands, those strange hands, fanned the air before him for a moment. Yes, he was like a bad actor. Then she remembered what he had asked.

"How do you mean, like other children?"

"Nothing. Never mind, my lady. I'm just an odd old fellow, you'll get used to me." He followed her into the rooms at the top of the house which they had reserved for him; immediately she wondered if perhaps the heavy drapery and dark furniture did make the place too gloomy and if he might have mistaken this apartment for former servants' quarters. "I shall have to see the child soon," he said as the stable boy entered with one of his trunks. So he hated children, too, she thought on her way to her own rooms to change. Those adorable cherubs are nothing more than sentimental props. He was a cruel man, she felt certain. Henri might disagree, but then men are never as perceptive about these things as are women.

The cook had prepared a special menu for the artist's first supper—Claude d'Haussonville had said the artist had a weakness for fine cuisine—but Ingres was so engrossed in conversation with Henri during the meal that he barely touched his servings (though he did gulp several glasses of their finest Spanish amontillado, which did not seem to affect him in the least). Henri and the artist took to each other from the start; soon they were discussing plans for the painting like a couple of old soldiers—and as if she were just a still-life arrangement of cut flowers whose opinion did not matter. Her husband's behavior did not greatly surprise Ynez—it was part of his business to be affable, though he did carry such an approach too far; even the footmen and groundskeepers were as brothers to him (such theatrical over-familiarity was, she believed, one of the primary defects of his character, and only ended up seeming insincere). The artist's reciprocal attitude, however, was unsettling: Ynez had always taken it for granted that artists were much different from ordinary mortals, and here was the person one might consider the most notorious artist in the country acting more like one of Henri's prank-playing office associates than an old and libertine eccentric. Monsieur Ingres was not playing either part correctly. Madame Moitessier knew her role in society; it annoyed her when others failed to recognize theirs. Rather than say something that might be misconstrued by the painter—and anything might—she remained silent, although now she wore her silk gown and was properly coiffed and colored. This finery was meant to be armor between the artist's eyes and her body, but still she felt him disrobing her item by item every time he looked at her across the linen and cutlery—first the earrings, then the brooch, next the amethyst bracelets, her necklaces, her hair-combs, her gown... She was sure he could read her thoughts as well, as if she had a cut-glass skull. He despised her, she felt assured, the way he lavished fulsome flattery on her, and he wished to debase her.

To Henri, not herself, Ingres insisted that mother and daughter pose separately, with sessions every morning and afternoon. Henri needed no persuasion, however, since he so readily agreed with everything, no matter how preposterous, his employee had to say. Ynez would have liked to protest—raised eyebrows were not enough—but Henri discussed these finer points with such nonchalance, such presumption of trust, the way he dealt with all business matters at the dining table, that she felt she had no part intruding just now. Later, behind closed doors, she would beg him to see to it that Ingres's ideas were altered. Anyway, it was their money—or rather, her money—and if she wanted to pose with her daughter, she should be allowed to. When Ingres gave her one of his forceful clairvoyant stares, however, she knew he would end up having things his own way, and hope sank within her like so much ballast.

By the time the meal was nearly finished, quickly before their molded ices were melted, Ynez was compelled to ask one question. "Sir," she said, attempting to retain a flatness and lack of anticipation in her tone, "I beg your pardon for asking what may seem to you an obvious and juvenile question... But how long do you suppose this engagement will take?"

Ingres stared at her again, this time stripping everything away, even her rings. He folded his long, slender hands and rested them on the table. "That, my dearest lady," he said, "depends entirely upon the fickleness of those nine ladies of questionable virtue we call the muses. Though I'm courting only one." He began to laugh; Henri quite unreasonably, she thought, joined in. Even the serving girl seemed to be giggling under her breath.

She did not try to understand the answer or their laughter. Instead, she looked down at her half-consumed ice, which was greenish and in the shape of a carp, and it stared back up at her with its raisin eye. Excusing herself for the night with some suddenness, she left the table with a napkin pressed to her lips.

Nothing she did was right. The first day of the sittings, she needlessly wore the gown made for the occasion by a popular Parisian dressmaker, long before, her portraitist reminded her, he would finish just one sketch of her head or hands. The wide bustle of the dress nearly upset his easel as she entered the drawing room and she was sure she heard him whisper a curse. He told her to relax, but that was impossible. She stood stiff as a caryatid before the windows in the empty room (Ingres said it had the best light in the house and, before seeking approval, had the maids remove most of the furniture and all of the drapery); nothing about her, not even a finger, moved, though her heart was racing within. At first she strove to make her expression as blank as the large sheets of brown and yellow paper Ingres spread before himself at the easel, but was not at all sure she was successful.

"Are you expecting to be measured for your coffin, Madame?" he asked after a half-hour of such posing. With a smile on his face, yes, though it was a crooked, tentative smile.

"I am trying to pose correctly," she stated.

"Nonsense. You're not getting paid to model, you are paying me, I believe."

"I see," she said, but did not. She attempted raising one leg an inch in the air to prove she was animate, but the painter's gorgon glare paralyzed her again.

Minute after slow minute passed; Ingres made no marks on his paper whatsoever, all the time gazing somewhat cross-eyed at Ynez. His eyes were dull, slow-moving, emotionless, the eyes of an old, old tortoise. It was possible to determine his mood only through his hands, and they were each tightly gripping a pencil. Finally, unnerved more so than she had been on her wedding night, Ynez spoke: "Are you finished?"

"I have yet to begin!" he snapped, quickly adding: "Please, Madame, your hour is not yet up. Even so, feel free to breathe." He was no longer smiling. Her eyes avoided his eyes and picked out the stuffed head of a wild boar on the wall. The boar did not look sympathetic, either.

Posing, in itself, was surprisingly enjoyable. She had discovered in the weeks before that she actually liked assuming complete inertia; she had controlled and conquered this discipline, and was proud of her newfound expertise. Her expression would eventually lock into what she considered the perfect attitude of gentle nonchalance, yet with a trace of mystery in her half-smile; her hands were caught midway between making the sign of the cross and granting benediction; her posture was influenced likewise from religious statuary she had memorized from countless convent masses, all those graceful obscure prophets and genuflecting martyrs. Like a storybook fakir who could tread on hot coals or pierce needles through his cheeks, she had attained the power of mind over matter. Her new ability soothed her the way deep prayer and meditation upon the Virgin had when she was a girl. Despite her accomplishment, Ingres did not seem impressed. At last, he waved her away.

Catherine could achieve no such balance of body and soul. Her body ruled her: She seemed at times to be utterly mindless, a wind-up automaton. She was an acrobat and a clown from her first minute to her last, at once tumbling here and the next moment stumbling there, far across the room. Ynez watched her from the doorway on the afternoon of the first day, and saw that Ingres tolerated the child after all. Her daughter, who was a very pretty girl with her sleek black hair and quizzical eyes like those of some trusting woodland creature, soon took to Ingres, too, and would do whatever he asked before being asked again, something her mother could only rarely manage.

During this first session the artist dashed off one lively sketch after another, barely keeping pace with the girl's gyrations. Outside the window, lying beneath a willow, the stable-boy was chirruping on a panpipe he had carved himself, and Catherine danced to his repetitive, discordant little tune, which gradually built up into a jig and then extinguished itself in boyish snores. Ingres listened with obvious delight, sketching the girl in all manner of unruly, contorted postures—twirling, turning cartwheels, skipping—for a solid two hours. He had begun only one sketch of her mother. When Ynez saw how well the two cooperated she felt somehow defeated, though she could not think exactly why; it seemed unfair, that was all.

She rapped on the door's glass panel. "It's past time for Catherine's nap," she told Ingres over the child's protests. Henceforth, Ynez decided, she would tend to her lilies, not her daughter, in the afternoon. Not much later she asked the boy to please practice his pipe back of the stables.

Supper that night was a repeat of the night before. Once again the two men prattled on like ambassadors from two very different but friendly countries and once again Ynez was silent, staring into her soup-bowl as if waiting for an answer to spell itself out there. She felt the artist's eyes on her like a weight, a physical pressure against her body, and soon had to excuse herself. She was positive she looked, acted, and spoke like a fool. And if only the serving girl would quit smiling that way! She would have to be sent back down to the farmyard.

Before, between, and after sessions, Ingres was seldom to be found; how he spent most of his time was a secret even to the sharpest servant in the household. There were rumors, however: how he had ripped the curtains from the windows at the top of the house, how he had been heard in the middle of a midnight rainstorm reciting what sounded like catechism Latin, how he had been seen pulling apart a magpie in the middle of the vegetable garden. Ynez was not sure if he avoided seeing her or if she actually set out to avoid him; whatever, the less she saw of him those first few weeks, the more relaxed she felt (though it was difficult to relax at all knowing there was a stranger and an artist in the house—there did not seem to be enough locks on the doors; she fully expected him to come dashing into her bedchamber at any time). He had taken to requesting that his meals be served in his rooms, where he ate but morsels, and where Ynez presumed he spent most of his time at his profession, doing whatever artistic things it was artists did. She thought more than once of casually investigating his attic domain while he was not around, but the fear of accidentally being seen there by a maid kept her away—why risk even the possibility of talk among the servants? Several times, Ingres requested use of the carriage to visit Nice, and he sometimes did not return until late at night, but she never dared to ask him where he had been or what he had been doing—perhaps gambling at some casino or lurking about brothels. She hated to think of it.

Henri, being a busy man, seldom saw Ingres, either, though it was up to him to provide reports on how well Catherine's sessions had been going. He attended her hours with Ingres whenever he could, which was still infrequent, and explained to his wife what they were like: "Simply the most entertaining demonstrations. He catches her every movement—sometimes I think his pencil directs her actions, rather than the other way around. Plays her like an instrument. And the power in his hands! Have you ever seen hands like that on a man? He's patient, too—even lets her dance and sing..." Ynez would try to pay attention to her husband during these reports, but her mind would invariably wander back to her own sittings, which if anything, had grown more lifeless since the first day.

"It certainly surprises me," Henri continued, wiping his little silver spectacles with his cravat, "and even the Master admitted he had his doubts about Catherine at first, but that now he finds the task invigorating—rejuvenates him, I suppose. I actually think he is rather fond of her. 'Children are so beautiful before we teach them all the wrong ideas and make them so moral,' he told me the other day. Isn't that peculiar! I wonder what our dear freckled Miss Burroughs must think. Oh, I do admire him... Although there's a strange quality to those sketches I can't quite put my finger on..."

"What do you think of the ones he has done of me?" she asked, staring out the window at nothing.

"Oh, those are nice, too."

Even as the daily pattern of sittings was becoming a routine, Ynez was experiencing a curious turn in her relationship with Ingres. Each morning, she would enter the drawing room early (she ate nothing and began no projects now before noon) to perfect her position before the artist arrived. While preparing herself, she would try to think of things to say, topics of conversation. "How do you find your rooms—comfortable? I used to enjoy doing watercolors at school, but the sisters were not encouraging. You didn't think the pheasant last night was too spicy, did you?" She never dared broach a subject, however, not even the weather.

Ingres, instead, had begun to utilize the sittings as a forum for spouting his political, religious, and esthetic ideas. After all, Ynez reminded herself, he was probably used to lording it over his subjects and here he had a captive audience—a small one to be sure, but not one apt to disagree openly. Obviously he was bored by her and had to do something to make their sessions more tolerable. He would draw as he talked and he drew very slowly, as if with arthritic hands, erasing more than he drew—or so it seemed. One sketch would take days: Ynez began to fear that ten years was an underestimate.

"France is a nation of idiots," Ingres might say one such morning while choosing between conte crayon and charcoal; France, Ynez had already learned from the master, was a nation of galoots, baboons, pinheads, dunces, and morons—the synonyms changed each day, but not his sentiments. "Why, we praise mediocrity," he might say, "and we honor those fools who are competent enough at their craft, but show no original spirit. I would rather revel in something truly bad than be forced to consume something that has never challenged me to think and never will. Meanwhile, France is changing into a nation of swine at their slops." Yet, Ingres was the most devout chauvinist Ynez had ever met; he would begin by denouncing his motherland but always end up defending it: "At Europe's dining hall, fair France is the only guest with manners, while all around are barbarians who eat with greasy fingers." By the same token, he sometimes proclaimed that Napoleon never should have retreated at Moscow, but instead should have rallied his troops to march as far as Mongolia (crowning the Asian dragon with fleur-de-lis, as he put it), and other times he complained bitterly that the emperor had not been exiled to St. Helena soon enough. His opinions on art were just as strong and contradictory as his opinions on politics: He hated "that devil Delacroix" and his storm-wracked, turbulent, blood-splattered paintings with their rotting corpses and equestrian antics, but confessed that like Satan himself Delacroix's talents were prodigious. He worshipped the illusive brushwork of the Italian mannerists, the Flemish realists, the German primitives, yet also revered the archaic, anonymous work of Greek vase-painters, Byzantine iconographers, and medieval illuminators. Ingres was a one-man debate, which was just as well, because she wasn't interrupting.

So much had happened over the nearly seven decades of his life that he readily confessed that the difference between truth and mistruth had became a mere matter of perspective, and that artists were obliged to replace the relative truths of the world with truths that were eternal: "For instance," he explained, "I may well forget the color of your eyes by the time I complete this portrait in my own studio back in Paris—but then all future admirers will have to check your eyes against the veracity of the painting's—and your eyes may change in time, they may even lie, but not your likeness's. So which eyes are telling the truth?" Ynez felt mildly insulted to hear that; she had wanted to tell him that just because he was too old now to tell faded memories from bright if distant realities was no excuse for justifying falsifications.

When the master was not discussing more general topics such as beloved relatives he had lost in the Reign of Terror or the friends he had lost to the ultraroyalist cause forty years later, he would routinely delve into his own wicked past and his relationships with various models and mistresses (Ynez could never quite make the distinction and neither, it seemed, did Ingres). For instance, he had wildly professed his love for Claudette with the face of Diana but whose right leg and breasts had withered from an unmentionable disease, and he had known an equally wild lust for Odette, who had a magnificent body but Medusa's countenance; posing Odette and Claudette together, he could construct the perfect woman on paper, a woman who exists nowhere else, he told her. In the end every one of these women, even his wife, had turned traitor and left him for younger artists or other cities—"But how jumbled are my memories! Maybe I'm inventing everything." There was always more than a hint of tawdriness to these anecdotes, and Ynez was tempted to cover her ears and walk out on him. But she learned there was a soothing rhythm beneath the coarseness of his sentences; after a while words shed their meanings, became mere chains of vowels and consonants, and he was lulling her into a half-sleep like a Hindu snake-charmer.

So Ynez remained silent. On days when she didn't sink into her trance she thought Ingres said things just to infuriate her, knowing she would not remonstrate, or else was trying to goad her into retaliation. He was taking liberties with her, after all, but in an entirely different manner than she had prophesied.

"These so-called 'aristocrats' have always been leeches on society," he announced in one bold moment, "draining the lifeblood from agrarian, artisan, and artist. I am not the first to say this, but I have understood more than most what this means, how it breaks your spirit." Though her family was firmly merchant-class, some of her friends were titled, and she felt somehow implicated in his attack; her cheeks grew hot, but she set her jaw even more firmly. "I should be working on my grand scenes from history," he went on, "and not always painting pretty people." Ingres seemed to be testing her, and she resented playing the dumb schoolgirl.

Her friends, even the comtesses and marquises, failed to recognize her problem with the painter as a problem at all. They insisted his conversation, all he had seen over the past half-century, must be fascinating. It had never occurred to her that to have one of France's most famous artists in her household should be anything less than fascinating, a source of pride and not consternation. Perhaps it was merely their ballroom spirit; perhaps they simply wanted to make themselves appear too sophisticated to be bothered by such things, but they would always glide away and Ynez would be left there, convinced that the rules of the dance simply hadn't been explained well enough. One friend who had been painted several times (and had even opened her salon to an artist or two) told Ynez that all artists had the minds of children, they were filled with fantastic ideas incomprehensible to ordinary souls, and a person should never take anything they said any more seriously than a nonsense poem. Ynez thanked her friend for being sympathetic, though she still felt her situation was peculiar and not altogether healthy. If not, why else was she unable to bring herself to ask Henri's advice?

Nevertheless, she arrived for her posing exactly on time each day, and her mute anger increased if Ingres overslept or took too long setting up his easel. At first, she had declined to inspect any of his sketches (which he often left in the drawing room) but eventually she was idly, then defiantly, investigating them before he came down in the morning. The sketches of Catherine were multiplying extravagantly, done in every medium, style, and size, from every conceivable angle, using innumerable props: hobby horses, drapery, seashells, tabors and fifes from the music room, kittens and goslings from the barnyard. Ynez brooded over these—playing, that's what he was doing, wasting too much of his time playing games that could have very little to do with the final portrait. The drawings had a certain charm, she had to admit, but it was strictly artistic indulgence. Besides, Henri was right—they had a queerness about them, as if Ingres did not really have Catherine in mind at all while working on them.

The sketches of herself satisfied Ynez even less. When she sat before her looking glass fixing her hair, she saw what she had seen for years—a pretty young woman who compared favorably with any of her aristocratic friends: the sort of gentle-lady who decoratively took her husband's elbow at fancy balls, who spent her yearly holiday at a reputable hot-springs in Westphalia, whose only public passions were for clothes, flowers, and jewels. This was all she chose to present to the world. Her imperfections were carefully hidden from scrutiny. Ingres saw someone else: a girl with serene, even features set in a moon of a face, a girl not of this time nor of Madame Moitessier's social set. This girl was not unattractive, but Ynez sensed no flattery. Such a girl did indeed belong to another era, a darker era; she contemplated her impressions for days, and then she had it—the girl looked more than something like the fresco saints on the ceiling of a cathedral she had visited somewhere, probably in Nice—St. Cecilia's or St. Catherine's? Was it possible that Ingres was spending his time in cathedrals, instead of at the casinos? She had long ago quit going to church with any frequency; that was how the convent had affected her, though she still believed she had retained a quiet, modest piety. Perhaps soon she should go back to St. Cecilia's for a look.

Henri would no longer examine the sketches, "as a matter of principle," he said, "it being unfair to the Master." He now said he would look at none but the finished portrait. "To formulate an opinion beforehand, as I found myself doing," he told her one evening after dinner as they took a turn through the garden, "would be like judging the belly of a pregnant whore and saying 'there's a worthless bastard for you.'"

"Henri," she said, disturbed by his crudity and not quite convinced.

"Well, then," he said, "just to take a peep would be like the bride being seen naked by the groom in her dressing room before the ceremony."

She knew he was trying to come up with something to shock her, so she refrained from comment, knowing her husband would go on and on in his roundabout way to tease and gently torment her. They walked up a flagstone path with gentian and foxglove all hazy blues and grays in the twilight, to a small ruined temple set on a hillock among funereal pines. Ynez's father had had the ruins constructed after an Italian model when such things were in style. The temple looked silly and outdated, Ynez had long thought; anyway, she had never liked Roman ruins, real or fabricated, just as she had never liked learning the Latin mass at the convent. This evening, however, the ruins reminded her of something entirely new.

"Your Master ranted on about something curious this morning," she said as she settled herself on a marble bench beside the temple. Henri was pacing around the broken columns, obviously uninterested in whatever it was she had to say. The moon was just rising over the grove of black cypress. "He said the principles of art, discovered by the Greeks, were lost not long after the Roman Empire fell. Then he went on to say that they remained hidden or else twisted and corrupted during the Dark Ages, and despite the glories of Raphael and the Renaissance, it wasn't until the last century in France and England that these principles were rediscovered and began to be put into practice. And presently, he says, they're in danger of being lost again, this time forever. It's all very complex, and I think he blames the government." She looked up at her husband, a disdainful smile on her lips, pleased to have been able to make more sense of the painter's words than he probably did himself.

"Oh, well, he is an artist," Henri said, annoyed, not having looked at her as she had talked. "They're entitled to say quaint things now and then, even if he does gets his facts mixed up. Why do you bother to worry about such blithering?"

"I simply found it amusing, to think of art as something you lose and find and lose again, like a button or a brooch—"

"You've quoted our Master several times lately," he said, staring into the full moon. "He seems to keep your mind occupied during your sittings. I suppose that's all right." His spectacles were two shining discs reflecting the moon's light, his voice was low, almost a whisper; he was stroking his beard. "I thought you told me you disliked him?" He looked at her, but all she saw were the silvered eyes of a blinded man.

"I didn't at... at first," she answered him, and that was all she cared to say. Art and Ingres were not again discussed after that evening. Ynez believed Henri would only pretend to understand.

The things Ingres talked about during his hours with Ynez often did recur to her. Sometimes she did not appreciate such mental intrusions because he set her to thinking about matters she usually chose to ignore or at best to gloss over. She rarely agreed with him, and she still considered him forward, but it was not at all discomfiting to listen to him while she posed, for he had that snake-charmer's flutelike voice, with the persuasive power of an actor or orator. While her body stood immobile as a dressmaker's dummy, her mind spun with arguments and ideas those arguments engendered. Time was nothing—the hour she regularly posed passed more quickly every day. In the meantime, she found herself dawdling, and her lilies, which often went neglected, no longer fully satisfied her. Neither did Henri. When she thought of her husband, she thought of his little bobbing beard and his cool silver eyes, but when she thought of Ingres, she saw the vibrant white flash of his butterfly hands.

In the midst of a July thunderstorm, which pummeled the drawing room windows like a barrage of pebbles, Ingres's hands turned against him. They had grown swollen and cramped, preventing him from making more than a few rudimentary marks on the paper. Therefore, without stopping to ask if she wanted to hear it, he told her a story:

"Once in Montmartre—oh, this was many years ago, if I remember correctly—it seems there was this peculiar young woman whose husband was a tobacconist who loved her but who she found to be dull and businesslike even in bed. As can be expected, she was very bored with life. She had once been a popular debutante and was still pretty, if rapidly losing her looks. She was the type who thought a little more belladonna in the eyes and a tighter corset erased years, and was disappointed when they actually did not. Poor soul, she had married beneath her and after a few years regretted it. She wanted to attend theater premieres and have an opera box again, but her husband was too old and poor and tired from working in his shop for that sort of thing. He would spend most evenings sucking a little foul-smelling hookah and going over his books. This man, this tobacconist, also had consumption, which left her fearing for her future and having to take care of him while her old friends were off dancing and touring the colonies. She was despondent. Need I say that boredom is always married to unhappiness?

"When she could take this sort of life no more, she thought a while and then carefully dressed herself in her husband's clothes, after which she entered the tobacco shop, making quite sure a few people saw her as she did so. In the shop, she cornered her husband, who was too sick and weak and surprised to fight back, and stuffed a few handfuls of snuff down his throat until of course he was suffocated. She was a free widow now and able to sell the shop and claim her husband's life insurance money, which would allow her to live for a time in grand style. People had seen a man last entering and then leaving the shop, so naturally she went unsuspected.

"However, she found she enjoyed impersonating the male of the species so much that she began to live the life of a dashing if somewhat lumpy and stout man-about-town. She had her hair cropped, pasted on a false beard like some Egyptian pharaohess and even took to cigars and brandy. Much to her pleasure, she discovered that while she was at an age when she was losing her charms as a woman, she was universally regarded as a man just approaching his prime. It certainly did the trick better than a corset, which she had no further need of. Why, she could even hold forth opinions now and other men would listen to her. Or him!

"She soon became a member of an intellectual circle which was the brightest and gayest in all of Paris. Artist and critic alike sought her opinion, and her own verse was printed, circulated, and widely discussed. Her great celebrity was only exceeded by her talent for discourse and her passion for knowledge. She was invited to lecture on classicism at the Sorbonne. She traveled to countries and cities no single woman of the civilized world had ever been allowed to visit freely. All the genius and virtue she had suppressed as a woman was allowed to flourish once she had changed her sex. It sometimes seemed incredible to her that she had ever been anything so petty and vain as a woman. Their golden necklaces and silver bracelets, she said, are nothing but fancy shackles. She began to hate women as much as any man.

"And yet, she missed certain privileges she had had as female: the right to express fear and passivity, the dignity of a quiet and sensitive nature, the ability to show affection and devotion. Most of all she missed the comfort of a man's arms. As a man, she also had to support herself once the money ran out and could not rely on the sympathy of either individual or society. So she sometimes donned her old clothes, enjoyed what she was missing as a man—even if it just meant the delight of pinning a new jewel to her breast or earrings to her ears—and thus she attempted a balance in her life, to have the best of both worlds.

"Her erratic and sporting behavior was, alas, her downfall: An embarrassing episode at a mineral baths occurred and she was recognized, exposed. A confession was extracted and the crime solved, and she was promptly led up those three short steps to the guillotine, since the penalty for murder is the same for either sex. Before she extended her neck, however, a quick-witted journalist asked which was better—leading the life of a man or leading the life of a woman?" Here, his tale appeared to end and there was no sound but the receding thunder, the rain drizzling from the eaves, and his resumption of a few desultory pencil scratchings.

After a few minutes she could take no more torture. "Well," she said, amazed to hear her own voice, "go on. Which was her answer?"

He laid his pencil in the easel's trough and made a thespian gesture of despair. "I am afraid that journalist should have caught an earlier hansom to the site of the execution, for his question was too late in coming. The next second, the very next second, her head was in the basket. This was not one of those macabre cases where the lips manage to make an utterance from that particularly grisly little chicken crate before they are forever silenced. Sad to say, we'll never know what her—or his—answer would have been, if he or she had been able to decide at all."

Ynez shuddered. "My word!" she exclaimed, fuming at what she took to be his ruse. "I believe, sir, that you made that tale up."

He gave her a thin smile and a wave and left the room.

The next day, after the hour was up and she had felt herself suspended in midair as usual, she noticed that he had left a small book on the chair next to his easel and dashed after him to return it. "Oh, that," he said, giving it a curious look. "I ran out of my own books and borrowed it from your own library, though I doubt if you've ever looked at it yourself, have you?" He flipped through it for her benefit, and she saw there were none of the nice illustrations she liked in a book. "Here, " he said, handing it back to her with a frown. "I've read it before. Someday you'll have to take a look at it yourself, though it couldn't have been popular in that nunnery your husband told me about." The book was forbiddingly full of small print, but the marbleizing was rather elegant, the edging golden, and the pigskin binding soft and attractive; the book was written by Voltaire, an old author she had heard much of but never read. Since it was written by someone her own husband had professed a fondness for, she thought she might indeed look it over, if only to prove she could tackle such a thing. "Women needn't have the intellect of imbeciles," Ingres had once told her he had been told by a female acquaintance, as if she were to take no offense herself. "And the chief and perhaps only difference between your everyday imbecile and your ordinary genius is that an imbecile does not read, this same woman told me." Just this once, she thought, walking away with the suddenly very heavy little book in her hands, she'd see what a man like Ingres considered a product of this genius he claimed was so rare in France or the world.

She had to admit she did enjoy the book, though it was truly ridiculous, about a man who loses bit after bit of his body by one accident after another and his joining up with some equally ludicrous and hapless friends. It took her several days to read it all, though it was short enough and not difficult. Nevertheless, she could not see the point in anyone writing such a thing where the moral was so slow in coming and then questionable in and of itself. There was also a violent tone of irreverence about important issues she did not appreciate in the least. In the meantime, not bothering to ask her what she thought of Voltaire, Ingres began to leave other books behind for her to gather up daily; eventually he was more forthright, foisting them on her whether she liked them or not: Rousseau and Hugo and Plato and a morbid American named Poe, books she was sure she might riffle through but never really find the time to finish. The parts she did read were sometimes interesting, though the prose and especially the poetry was sometimes horrid, sometimes infused with an eerie, phosphorescent loveliness (like certain beautiful toadstools that glow in the dark of forests), a loveliness she had never experienced in the quiet countryside of southern France; still, she kept her comments to a minimum, and yet another handsome vellum volume was pressed into her half-willing hands, "Because it is about time you developed some opinions of your own, my dear young lady."

This went on for several weeks and Ynez never mentioned what was going on to Henri; he did, however, catch her reading a time or two—he did not act surprised, though she knew he was. Meanwhile, her lilies were burning away in the hot July sun and not even the gardeners were bothering to water them. Noticing them on the way to her session one morning, she grew angry with herself and was determined to tell Ingres right then and there to stop it—whatever it was he was doing—but there he was again, with yet another book in his hand, half-concealed by his chalk-smeared apron, as if he were offering her a bribe.

Ynez was irritated by his attitude, but once again took him up on his offer and brought the book to bed with her that night. All through the next morning's session, she wore a stern, tight-lipped expression on her face. Ingres, for a change, was busy with his hands and said nothing much to her until the hour was up. "Enjoy your book?" he then asked, rolling up his sketches. Lately, he had been careful to take the drawings upstairs with him, though she was more curious about them than she had ever been.

"Throwing a few flowers in to disguise the dirt," she said after a moment's composure, trying to beat down the anger coursing through her, "doesn't make such filth any more acceptable... That author is obviously demented. His philosophy, if you might dignify it by that word, is reprehensible, revolting... I do not think such things—"she stumbled, searching for euphemisms—"such practices are even possible. You may be right in saying I know nothing of life or literature, but this I can only hope is not drawn from the former and certainly not to be classified among the latter."

"But you read it all, didn't you?" The artist clapped his pencil box shut and took the tattered volume of de Sade from her trembling hands.

This time it was her turn to leave the room without another word.

Haphazardly at first, then with more design, she began to inspect other books in the library to take with her into the garden maze or to her father's beloved ruins, where she was hidden from the servants' as well as Henri's inspection. The books had been bought more or less by the pound by her parents when they had first furbished the house and she had never noticed them much more than the wallpaper—though since the painter's arrival she had become intimidated by their beautifully bound spines, lined up on the shelves like gleaming rows of carnivorous teeth. They seemed to be challenging her to read themselves. She had never had any intention of giving a one of them a thorough reading, she was so busy with other aspects of her life—gardening, planning dinners, Catherine—but she found herself picking out the prettiest ones from the shelves to scan their print and engravings enough to ensure herself, and later the artist, that she could indeed recognize true literature, and it was not the same as what he had fed her. Frequently, however, she would close a feral-smelling morocco cover and realize she had read a third of a book in the matter of an afternoon, almost as if by mistake. "One mustn't read! It might make one think!" she heard Ingres declaiming over and over in her mind.

Their sessions together became, verbally, if not physically, much livelier, for she was too angry now not to talk back. Ingres would bait her with phrases he guessed she had come across, she would retaliate with the conflicting words of another author, he would praise the work of a writer she hated, she would condemn for their moral indiscretions the poets and philosophers he loved most. She realized it was a losing battle, especially since a number of these writers had once been intimate friends of his, or so he claimed; the thought always danced through her mind that he was experimenting on her for reasons only he could fathom, but it was a new and somehow enjoyable experience to be discussing things other than food or the weather with a man.

The summer was passing more quickly than she originally had hoped it would, and there were times when she hadn't the energy to maintain her facade as merely her husband's ornament and her friends' mirror at the parties they attended. She felt she had so much to say if only someone would listen, and yet what would it be that she could tell them? Nothing important, after all, just that she missed something of the simplicity of her old life, her mornings among her lilies, her long afternoons of doing up her hair, trying out new jewelry. She was staring out the oriel of the library, a book yawning in her lap, thinking of these things on a torrid and windless afternoon early in August when friends still windblown and wave-splashed from the seashore appeared without warning at the door—for even the servants had gone off to sleep away the heat; when they inquired about Catherine and the famous guest, Ynez felt it necessary to interrupt her daughter's hour. What she saw was enough to make her feel that the temperature had abruptly risen another twenty degrees: for there was the little girl, just then stepping into her frock (its lacy frothiness spread on the floor) as into a pool of cool water. Propped on the easel were several studies of a very naked little girl.

"What is this?" Ynez asked, outraged to the point of tears. She saw then that the governess was nowhere to be seen, when she was supposed to watching over her little charge at all times. "Where is Miss Burroughs? What are you up to with my daughter?" She hoped the guests she had left in the parlor were not able to overhear this conversation.

"She was of course posing in the nude," Ingres said conversationally. "It is a common practice, I believe, and one I am quite used to dealing with." He was still working on the last sketch. "Oh, yes, Pamela—Miss Burroughs—said the heat was too much for her so I gave her permission to go lie down."

Ynez glared at him. "I'm afraid I must tell Monsieur Moitessier about your... your misjudgment. I cannot allow my daughter to be subject to—"

"But, mother," Catherine announced, "it was my idea! Like the wading fountain."

"Don't lie, Catherine. If you—you said what?" Then she understood: There was a fountain in the garden with a naked nymph at the top of it, pouring water from a mossy vase. It was another of her father's antiquated landscape flourishes, and she had been meaning to have it replaced for years.

Ingres stepped aside, and she was able to examine the sketches on the easel in more detail. Catherine's physique looked a bit too mature for a girl her age (when was the last time she had seen her own daughter in the bath?) and the child had a certain grace that few chubby little children could be said to have. That must have been the skill of the artist, she granted him that. At last, however, sudden recognition astonished Ynez—the faces were so mature they were very much like her own; that accounted for the odd element both she and Henri had previously sensed. Doubtless, it would be best not to tell Henri about Catherine's exposure, after all, but to discourage the Master from ever doing it again. When she got back to the parlor her friends remarked upon her flushed features, her glistening brow, and told her she must be working too hard at her flowers again—she really should let the gardeners worry about that.

In late August, nearly two months since Ingres had arrived, Henri left for a fortnight's business trip to London. At any other time, Ynez would have wished to accompany him, but he appealed to her to stay behind and finish her sittings. In a way, she was relieved. London (which most of her friends had seen and disliked) and especially London at the height of summer, with its coal-smoke atmosphere and rat-faced urchins infesting the slums and eternal fog rising from the filthy Thames (all had been described to her many times), sounded incredibly abhorrent at this time of the year. And oddly enough, after Henri's carriage had retreated over the last rise in the road she felt that suddenly she had been given license to do something extraordinary—but what she could not begin to guess.

The day after Henri's departure, Ynez assembled herself as was her custom, dressing in private (she did not like maids waiting on her in her chambers, handing her this or that intimate item), enjoying the feel of the cool smooth fabrics against her flesh. Ingres was now drawing her figure—indeed, he had just graduated to the canvas surface itself, and despite some problems with Catherine's positioning, was progressing more rapidly than he had from the start. The understated white ensemble Ynez had had designed for the portrait had been vetoed by the painter, in favor of a gown he had seen her in one evening on the way to a midsummer dance in Monte Carlo; in fact, he had demanded that she wear it for her sitting every day since, though she found it constricting and somewhat itchy. It was a very very deep blue tulle—almost black—worn low on the shoulders, exposing her milk-white throat and shoulders, with Spanish lace that blossomed about the elbows. Ingres had added the other accouterments of the evening: a strand of Asiatic pearls which hung to her waist; three tooled gold bracelets ornamented with jewels, coins, and a tassel; a tiara of August tea roses in her hair (the lilies she had wanted included in the portrait were all wilted now); an amethyst brooch bright as an eye, pinned to the center of her bosom; and her favorite fan with mother-of-pearl spine. Her hair was fashioned by Ingres himself: parted in the middle like a marble Venus's and swept up halfway over the ears—it looked more sculptural indeed than the thick black braids she usually kept it in. Ingres had positioned her before the drawing room's garnet-red damask wallpaper and blue dado with gold trim, next to an embroidered chair with her dress gloves casually tossed across the cushion. Ynez thought the entire arrangement was perhaps a bit too stagy for a portrait—"Woman On Her Way To A Ball"—and would have preferred something simpler and more sober, more befitting a modest young mother, but the painter had persuaded her that the effect was something her friends would find enchanting, alluring, somehow timeless. Only such skillful flattery kept her from begging to differ.

Ynez finished dressing and hurried to the drawing room, humming to herself—something she was surprised to find herself doing. On this day, like any other, the painter strode into the room, bristling with energy—flinging up blinds, opening windows, parting shutters, rattling his easel, rattling his crayon box, rattling his pencils. He wore the old-fashioned cloth cap he hid his baldness with and a charcoal-smudged linen jacket and trousers, over which he had tied a baker's apron that served as a smock. "Today is August the twenty-fourth," he stated, tearing a sheet of paper in half, "and it reminds me of the sunny, sunny day so many years ago when I first discovered the ruins of an old monastery in the darkest depths of medieval Paris—where I was to found my own academy, for David's atelier could no longer contain my youthful energies. There I was among other artists and musicians, full of aspirations, dreams, and whatnot. The critics were not always kind, but we persevered. I was told my paintings were overblown, bizarre, that I sought to annihilate nature with my art, that it was all effect and hollow cleverness, but all the same, I grew rich. Everyone wanted me to draw him or her, as if I were a chalk artist on the banks of the Seine! I tried to escape them; I went to Rome—oh, the English tourists! But the museums, the museums... Ah yes, so long ago... In the decades which followed—" he placed the canvas on the easel— "I've painted nobility and serfs, fallen heirs and parvenus, I've been praised and slandered, I've seen good men go unheralded and impostors celebrated by society. I've seen many of my best friends die unwanted, disillusioned, broken men. I've loved many women—one or two who loved me in return. My wife was once young like you..." He trailed off and drew furiously for a few minutes, then returned to his speech: "I've been thinking of all the models I have known. Models are not to be stereotyped, you know, each is unique—each is another unique problem, that is. Very few, moreover, have that magic which sparks greatness...

"Have you seen my Maid of Orleans? Of course not—that was a deaf and dumb girl I found in a Catalan marketplace, selling rotten cabbages—yet she was beautiful and graceful as the legendary Helen. She wore a red silk ribbon around her neck and slept with her stockings on. My sultanas, on the other hand, invariably seem to be fallen baronesses, or so they claim... But you are different. You are—" he scratched the underside of his chin with a pencil— "inscrutable. Day after day, you fall into a catatonic stupor, so motionless I have to check my pocket-watch to see if time really is passing. It is all I can do to get you to breathe. I rant ceaselessly, I mock your beliefs and embarrass you, I hand you books calculated to arouse and anger, yet until very recently you have remained completely passive. Mind you, you have far to go. You know nothing of the arts, almost as little as your husband, but you aren't really dull-witted like most women, I can sense that. Just undernourished... You've never even been to the museum of culture in Nice, have you?" He set to darkening a contour, his agile hands defining shadow and light like magic.

"Yes, I have," she answered, lowering her eyes, and her voice became distant and reflective. "Once or twice, I think, when I was a girl, just after I left the convent, years ago. My mother hadn't wanted me to, she never approved of such things, but I begged my father, he always indulged me, and it was my sixteenth birthday. I think Father felt a little silly there, out of his element... Oh, I don't know why I'm telling you this—it was years and years ago..." She remembered dark portraits heavy with varnish, guards who seemed to be watching her every move, her father's nervous cough, a giggling gaggle of maidens as they passed a row of Olympian gods.

Ingres put down his chalk, a smile breaking on his face. "Why, you must see it—come with me, then, this very hour," he said. "It's an ideal summer's day, the sun is shining—we can take the carriage and a picnic and be back this afternoon. The museum in Nice is nothing compared to the ones in Paris or Rome, of course, but it will do... Shall we please, Madame Moitessier?"

Ynez looked around, smoothing the folds in her dress, tucking in a loose lock. She had never thought about being seen in public with Ingres; she suspected he had planned this proposed escapade far in advance, but to her wonderment, she spread the fan playfully before her face and answered, "Yes, if you insist. I should be honored to accompany you." What better way, after all, to tour a cultural museum not with your stuttering father but with a great artist—and, oh, how her friends would envy her, scandalized as they might be.

Their short trip by carriage passed like a set of blurred landscape prints flashing before their windows—sun-dazzled vistas of green and gold, chiaroscuro hollows between the oak groves, a multicolored whir of wildflowers in a meadow—and as they bounced and creaked along, admiring these unframeable views, they shared an impromptu lunch, complete with wine resurrected from the cellar just before they left. "Ah," Ingres said, after having taken a long breathless sip, "I can taste the Hellenic surf in this, the mortals' nectar. Pretentious old geezer, aren't I, but I do feel life in my veins again." They rolled on. Ynez felt a lingering chill from the liquor and the wind in her face as they entered the sleeping city, dead quiet at midday—an enchanted city, it seemed to her now, one that had appeared on the horizon like a wondrous mirage from the Arabian Nights, replete with delights and dangers. She felt like a character in one of those romances she had been dallying with of late—perhaps a lost princess about to discover long-forbidden treasure. This day, this new city revealed to her by Ingres, was surely as unreal as anything she had ever read in a book.

Noon hour had vacated the streets of Nice, which were white with dust and heat, though the museum was cool and bare, like a monastery she had once visited which had been cut into the side of a mountain and where the monks burned candles in the stone-walled passageways. The guards, sleepy and docile, took no notice as Ynez and Ingres entered. Her arm trembled when the artist took her wrist and led her through the galleries like bridegroom escorting bride into his ancestral home. Paintings she had probably not thought interesting enough to pause before during that cursory trip with her father were now wonderful, living entities, divine little dramas being played out within their frames. Ingres was stage manager and magician both, knocking life into the scenes as one would with toys run by clockwork and making things appear in each painting she never would have seen otherwise. Not only was he an authority, but he had also been close friend and confidant, he said, of many of these artists. Most of them were long dead. Ynez, for the first time, felt a little sad for the old man by her side, the droll old man fumbling with his handkerchief and spectacles (which she had never noticed before, though it was quite possible, she realized, that he had been wearing them all along).

"Dear Francisco," he murmured when he stopped in front of an aristocrat's stiff and sullen portrait: The subject's flesh was oily and loathsome, the baroque pins in the hair ludicrous, like jewels stuck on a sow, and the look in her eyes told you she must have been mad. "I met Señor Goya when he was an old, old man, even older than I am now. It was in Italy. He was living in a dirty, shabby pension. I didn't know what to say; I felt a fool. Poor man, he aspired to saintliness and all he could show for it were horrors." They passed into a larger, wider, brighter gallery.

"It will be an acceptable museum," he stated, "as long as the curators keep out that devil Delacroix and these so-called 'realists' or 'genre painters' or whatever the upstarts are calling themselves nowadays. Tell me, how is a painting of a group of peasants bundling wheat in a field any more 'real' than a scene such as, say, the coronation of Zeus? No real peasant ever stood for a painting any longer than Zeus did. I call it a lack of imagination—and our chief task here on earth is to re-imagine it in our own, individual way, as did the early Greeks and the painters of the high Renaissance, not to studiously copy what we call 'nature' as if we were her slaves. The realities I have invented are brighter and more convincing than any blurred second-hand impressions of would-be artists who think they can slap tracing paper on life and do it justice." He took a breath, turned, and pointed to a painting across the gallery: "Then, again, plenty of crimes have gone unpunished in the past. Just look at that old Fragonard over there—dreadfully silly and frivolous. His women are all so hollow, soulless, like Dresden figurines."

"But I think it's quite lovely," Ynez protested. "The light, the shimmering colors—as if the artist were painting with gemstones instead of oils. I've read in one of your very own books that art is the pursuit of beauty, so what's wrong with such a beautiful painting as that?"

Ingres sighed heavily. "Beauty—bah! Beauty, my dear, is relative, and it has little to do with life as we ordinarily see it. The sort of beauty you are thinking of, like flowers, wilts too soon. Art is the search for truth, as I have said, and truth is not relative but constant. Truth and beauty are not necessarily the same thing..." He had crossed the room and was rubbing the baroque carved frame of the Fragonard with his slender fingers. "Come, let me show you a painting on loan here from the Louvre. I was present at its installation last month. You might, I think, be rather surprised." Clasping Ynez's hand in his own, he walked with her to a room under a dome off the main entrance.

There was only one painting in the otherwise empty chamber, in a simple gold frame not half as nice, Ynez thought, as the intricate ones in the last room. The frame, however, was of little importance—it was the painting that arrested her attention. It depicted a reclining female nude on a cushioned chaise, illuminated by a Roman torchiere with a tall bronze stalk. The woman's face was gentle and handsome, meditative, serene; her figure was that of a Roman goddess, her complexion as white and lustrous as the throat of a lily. Ynez saw nothing sluttish or unseemly about this nude; the woman was the epitome of chastity and decorum. She felt no discomfort whatsoever, even though there was a man standing next to her, touching her shoulder. She felt a quiver, a tremor, a singular, liberating thrill rushing through her body for some unknown reason, as if she had drunk from a strange and powerful potion once she set eyes upon the composition.

"This was painted by my teacher and mentor," Ingres said, transfixed by the sight, "the greatest painter France will ever call her own, Jacques-Louis David. Father of all my inspiration, and yet I was his Judas... I shall never do him full justice as his student, though I swear to you I never meant to leave him." He wiped his thick, ormolu-rimmed spectacles with his breast-pocket handkerchief; whether he had been weeping or not, Ynez could not tell. "Do you know who this woman is?" he suddenly demanded of her.

Her attention had not strayed from the intelligent eyes and inquisitive lips of the nude to the small gold title plate. Now she read it aloud: "The Empress Josephine, Wife of Bonaparte." Her mouth fell in amazement.

"Of course," Ingres explained, "she is a bit too idealized, a bit too imitative of Madame Recamier. Yet, she was a woman who appreciated her beauty, who accepted her beauty as a gift of this 'Nature' you revere. She realized that truth is found in beauty's one constant and highest achievement, the human body...

"You look troubled. Does this 'truth' I am always babbling on about disturb you?"

"The late empress, I have often heard, was an admirable woman. But did she not object to being so depicted? Many people might have scorned her, said she was going too far..."

"I assure you, David told me she reveled in the opportunity. She was, after all, a patroness of the arts. This was painted while her husband was on the campaign, without his knowledge. I helped my master on it when I was not much more than twenty. There's another one just like this which David did for public consumption, except in that one she's wearing a clinging white gown which I consider much more obscene than this. For years the original unexpurgated version was hidden in a hayloft—Bonaparte was enthralled at first, and then thinking twice about it all, infuriated with David for various reasons, though David assured him he'd never had a more compliant model. It is my own belief that this painting was a chief cause of the Bonapartes' divorce. It is, as they say, all ancient history now... Though I have employed some excellent models, they are as nothing compared to Josephine Marie, or at least the Josephine who inspired this masterwork, if she ever really existed. How have I longed for such a model!" He turned his back to the painting and held Ynez's gaze. "You have never considered posing so? A beautiful and sensitive woman like yourself? When so many of the women of France are running about shedding their wraps like birds amoult, screaming to be immortalized?"

Ynez had never been spoken to so directly by a man other than her husband, nor had she suspected Ingres regarded her as truly beautiful or sensitive. "No," she said in a whisper. An aftermath of wine seemed to run through her veins, making her giddy, and she felt a flush on her brow in the cool chamber. "Of course not."

Ingres's face loomed over hers, mesmerizing her. "Do you believe beauty has an obligation to art?" he said, and she smelled wine warm on his breath. "Would you be so willing, if you were asked, to give yourself to the cause of truth?"

Ynez lowered her eyes. Again she felt like one of the characters in the novels she had left mid-plot, challenged to do a great deed or simply to decide between two possible fates. She saw that the black and white tiles on the floor were decorated with dolphins—black dolphins on white tiles, white dolphins on black tiles, and they all seemed to be swimming around her. She raised her eyes. The dome above her was translucent as an eggshell; a golden glow like candlelight shone through the dome's glass and even, it seemed, though the surrounding stone, illuminating the painting below, which burned with a brilliance of its own. A monastic silence filled the building. Not a guard was to be seen. "Of course, it would be an honor, I do realize that," Ynez said aridly and pressed a finger to her lips, as if she had said or implied too much.

"Then you must," he said, his voice whispering across the dome, falling on her as palpable as snow, tingling her flesh. He touched her bare shoulder once more. A current bolted through her.

Neither spoke on their way back home. Once, Ingres tapped her elbow with an artfully outstretched finger, but Ynez pretended it was an accident. That was all. She drank still more of the wine and looked out at the rolling countryside, rich in summer flowers and paled by the heat, and did not look at him. It was not until she sighted the rose-pink columns of the house in the distance like the upraised fingers of a giant that she could let go her tight grip on the empty wine glass. When they had arrived, he told her two short things and was off: "Meet me if you like in the drawing room at half-past three and we'll make up for this morning, Madame. You might even send Catherine away with Miss Burroughs to keep the child from interrupting us."

To her astonishment, Ynez followed his instructions as if they had come from the mouth of a mother superior: she sent Catherine and Miss Burroughs off to visit neighbors down the road and she prepared for the upcoming sitting. At nearly three-thirty she found herself in Ingres's makeshift studio, drawing down the blinds which the painter had first raised months ago and which the maids would have to lower each afternoon when it got hot. The light now was subdued, warm and watery, and no one could see in. With the sun blocked, the heat relaxed, though the air grew stale and made her feel slightly dizzy. This was a slow time of day for the help: They would be in their rooms above the carriage house, making lace or playing endless card games. Ynez wondered what all this activity of hers was leading to, but she did not stop to reflect upon any possible consequences; she would allow things to happen without trying to stop them, for once. She would do what she would soon be doing because fate had willed it that way, as it had with all servants of art down through the ages of man. Henri, naturally, would never, never know of any of this. And like the crudest of her husband's friends, she could always blame everything on the wine. Reclining on a window-seat to await the artist, and feeling drowsy from the heat and their long silent carriage ride, she drifted away amid the cushions like someone in a little boat caught up in a strong current.

Ingres arrived in his ordinary manner, making his familiar sounds and movements. For a few minutes, it looked as if they were only going to be making up for the lost morning session, nothing more. When he was ready, he smiled at her, unsurprised, unamazed. "Good," was all he had to say. She stood frozen before him, yet with her strength melting away like ice. "First the shoes," he gently ordered her, and she knew her unrehearsed performance was to begin.

Ynez had been raised to take her time dressing and undressing, often as not with the help of a maidservant or two, and today she made it an art nearly as slow as painting in oils. She removed her shoes as if they were made of crystal and might crack if forced too vigorously in any one direction. Avoiding the staring gray eyes across the room, she lined the shoes up neatly under a chair.

"And now your gown," Ingres commanded, as if he were a stage wizard and she his mute assistant. She obeyed, and it seemed her whole body was melting away now—by the time she had removed everything, there would be nothing left of her.

"Your chemise," he continued, and so on through her various articles of clothing. She dallied with each pearl button, each tricky hook and eye, every reluctant clasp; she unwrapped her layers of lingerie delicately and seriously, as if she were peeling a fruit; and she unrolled her stockings with the utmost patience, like a snake shedding its silky skin.

"Your necklace." Done.

"Your bracelets?" Done.

"Your earrings." She plucked the rubies from herself. And miraculously, as if it took the earrings to make it true, she was naked.

She paused, took a breath, and began. It seemed Ingres had multiplied, become a whole audience of artists, each of them looking upon her with awe and anticipation, or curiosity and admiration—even happy disbelief—and when Ingres clapped his hands once to break her spell it was like the thunder of applause. She practiced a few small steps that turned into a stride and was overcome with a sense of freedom. The stride accelerated into a minuet with an invisible partner, the minuet into a more rapid waltz, soon more like a curiosity-show dervish. As if on cue, the stable boy was back playing his panpipe under the windows. She felt as young and playful as she had a decade or more ago, as young and playful as her own daughter.

Ynez remembered a time (in fact, she seemed to be floating into that time, for she saw the landscape emerge so clearly now from the mist of memory), a time when she was sixteen and vacationing at a villa on one of the islands off Hyères with her family. It was late one tired afternoon, and she was walking along a rocky beach with her sister Manon. The sand burnt their bare feet. The sun beat down so that to look out upon the sea was like looking into a blazing mirror—but their parasols had been left far behind. When they reached a deep clear tidal pool, they silently took off their dresses and undergarments. Ynez had never been naked outdoors in the sunlight, had never known the delight of sun on her whitest skin. They dived; the water was ice-cold. Little fishes nipped at their breasts and toes. They laughed and hugged each other afterward until they were warm and dry.

And now the surf broke against the windows of the drawing room of her parents' house, where an old artist was sketching her as swiftly as he could while she skipped around the room to the music of a panpipe. It had been many months, maybe years since he had known the pleasure of a model like herself, Ynez presumed. The drawings flowed from his eyes to his hands to the paper, and soon the floor around him was covered with them. She imitated what she remembered of Catherine's scamperings, but with a litheness and sensuality Catherine had not yet cultivated. Ynez was in a daze of vertigo and energy reborn; she no longer was the reticent and modest Madame Moitessier, wife and mother and bored socialite—she had no idea where her senses had gone. It did not matter; she was trying very hard not to think. She danced, she swam through the air, she floated toward the heavens painted on the ceiling, up past the painted angels and putti, up through the ever-stilled painted clouds, toward an unseen sun.

"Madame Moitessier?" a voice called, as if from down a long corridor, across many empty rooms. A hand touched her shoulder and then she left the sun, descended from the heights as if pulled by a string like a Japanese kite, opened her eyes, yawned. Had she fallen asleep? She felt very dull and sluggish; Ingres was standing before her, pencil in hand. "I should have drawn you as you rested," he explained. "For once you were at ease with your body. An emperor's most exquisite concubine, if I may flatter you, a sultan's dream. Oh, I do go on!" She stood up, blinking, wondering whose dream it had been. When she tried to focus on the dream itself, it swam away from her like a mote in the eye; she could only remember its form, not its content, and though it seemed to have been some sort of brutal witchery, it had also been quite lovely.

Ingres was speaking to her, his tone somewhat arch, as if he were parodying himself: "Now, if I may forego any further hyperbole and get down to business... I've been wondering if you could recall your recent casual state of disrepair on that window-seat and assume a studied yet let us say careless sort of contraposto," Ingres asked after she had been standing there some time, staring at the dust floating in the dim light. She had shifted weight from one foot to the other while he was speaking, turned to him when he had finished, then tried to imagine herself like a model plucked from a Catalan marketplace, willing to allow her body to be manipulated like a marionette's. "Of course," Ingres said, when he saw she did not quite understand him. "You would know nothing of these terms we artists toss about. Allow me to show you, Madame."

He left his easel and circled at a short distance around her like a suitor about to cut in on a dance. He touched her inquiringly here and there with his theatrical hands, fluttering them like restless wings seeking to alight somewhere, trying to convey exactly how she should stand. His fingers traced a line from the nape of her neck to the hollow of her back and across her tensed hips. Once again it was as if she were being galvanized with electricity; tiny icy bolts were left in the wake of his fingers. He pulled gently on her earlobes, tapped her earrings, patted her shoulders. Before she knew what he was doing his arms had circumscribed her waist, then slowly tightened their grip, and he drew her close before she could protest. He kissed her strongly and expertly on her mouth, and despite herself she acquiesced for a moment; she relaxed in his grip and felt his hot breath—his very spirit—flowing into her body. Then she could not breathe and she hardened under him; he might as well have been kissing her image on the canvas. And suddenly she hated him with all her might—hated him with a strength now grown tenfold within her, hated him for having tried to force his body on hers as he had tried to force an education on her, hated his wretched opinions on art and life and love, hated the subtle corruption he had brought to her household. However, she had no need to push him away—he had already separated from her, his eyes glimmering, and she realized the kiss was the least of things that made her despise him.

"No, no," she said, gasping for air. She felt as if only now was she waking from a long, drunken slumber, after one hundred years, like the princess in the fairy tale. He stood watching her with eyes, which were, after all, remarkably expressionless, remarkably dry. Why did everything immediately seem her fault and her fault alone? "I trust you will never, never, never remind me of any of this," she stated, brushing back her fallen locks. And she was gone.

The supper sent to Ingres's room that night was returned untouched (Ynez too could barely stomach the unnamable fish on her plate), though he requested that the maid assigned to his care bring him a bottle of his favorite amontillado. Ynez in return sent the maid to him with a curt message declining her morning session because of a prolonged aching in her temples. An envelope from Ingres arrived from the same maid a couple hours later as Ynez was undressing for bed; Ynez crumpled the envelope in her hands and threw it in the fireplace, where she dispassionately set a match to it—whatever he had to say to her now, be it an apology or a confession, she did not want to know. When she slept, she again dreamt of that summer when she was sixteen, of the slippery kiss of fishes and walking in the hot sand along the Mediterranean, with nothing to do.

Ingres did appear for his afternoon session the next day with Catherine, which her mother had quite forgotten about. Catherine and her governess had lived a life almost entirely separate from her own this summer, anyway; their paths seldom intersected except to give the girl quick kisses goodnight. The blinds were still closed in the drawing room and the light was dim; Ingres did not bother to alter the situation. Catherine, led by shy freckled Miss Burroughs, entered the studio trailing a toy tin coach that by design chirped like a cricket. The artist stood, a little bent over, at his easel. He was drumming his fingers along the edge of his canvas. "Please take that toy with you, Pamela," he told the governess. "Such contraptions were invented, I swear, to torture the ears of parents who give their children objects instead of affection—don't you think?"

Miss Burroughs knelt to pick up the toy. "No!" Catherine wailed. She addressed the old man: "You let me have it before."

"Give it to me, Catherine," Miss Burroughs said firmly in English, seizing the toy. Catherine cried behind clenched fists for a minute; when she opened her eyes, the governess had left and Ingres was busy at his canvas. "I hate you," she said in a barely audible whisper.

Ingres ignored her. He still had not found a suitable position for Catherine on the canvas. No matter where he put her she threw off the balance of the painting. He had drawn her beside her mother, against the damask wall and between the folds of her gown and the edge of an armoire, but she still seemed to be suffocating there, caught between the dense fabric and baroque details of the furniture. The artist had given up achieving a better position, however, and was now busy deepening his pencil lines, trying to bring the girl out from the shadows, into focus. Meanwhile, Catherine was running around the room, singing a British nursery rhyme: "Blind man, Blind man, Sure you can't see?" She swung on the bell-rope like an orangutan, shouting louder, more shrilly: "Turn 'round three times, And try to catch me!"

"Will you hush?" the artist demanded at last. "And stand still, for heaven's sake."

"No!" Catherine shrieked. "No, no, no!" she reiterated, mocking the way her mother scolded the cook or chastised one of the gardeners for accidentally trampling her lilies.

"Stop, Catherine," Ingres said.

"I want Miss Pamela!"

"Stop it, child."

"No, no, no!"

"Stop it, you damn little fool!" And the artist flung his linen cap to the floor. Catherine cut short a scream and stared at him in frozen terror. He was trembling. He took his gum eraser and furiously rubbed Catherine's sketch from the canvas, and when he lifted his head, Catherine had disappeared, as if he had erased her from the room, as well.

The artist took his leave of the Moitessier estate that evening, carrying with him his luggage, his boxes of books, his art supplies, and his rolled-up, unfinished canvas. He assured Madame Moitessier (who seemed more relieved than taken aback) that he could complete the painting more adequately at his studio in Paris, where the light was better and paints were readily available; besides, his fingers were curling with pain and needed a rest. He failed to tell her that he had erased Catherine and had no intention of putting her back. His chief regret, he said, was that he was unable to bid Henri a personal goodbye, but she would extend his apologies to her husband for him, would she not? A chill autumnal rain, quite early for this time of year, was dripping off their big black umbrellas as they stood outside the carriage house, waiting for the coach to be prepared. It was all like a play, with everything, even the weather, on cue. Madame Moitessier was very formal and he was very polite, and he left her with best wishes for the future and a kiss still warm on the back of her wrist, though to her it felt more like the sting of an angry insect.

Part Three

The better part of a decade—seven years—passed before the Moitessiers heard from Monsieur Ingres again. They seldom spoke of the artist after his departure, despite the fact that he remained very much on their minds; however, each preferred not to bring the subject up before one another, only before friends—and eventually before no one. Catherine did ask about him frequently for a few weeks, because she professed to miss the funny man who did the funny drawings very much, but in time she, too, grew almost fearful of mentioning his name, as if it were another one of those English words one wouldn't use in polite company. Henri had been surprised to hear the artist had left in such a hurry, but that's the way artists are, he said, and went back to his work with few interesting anecdotes to tell his colleagues. Eventually, it was as if the artist had never been there. As the years passed uneventfully and no painting arrived, they forgot altogether about Ingres (so Ynez believed and even hoped); the artist never requested any payment, and so they never got around to inquiring after the painting. It was all somewhat perplexing, but the portrait was not really that important to either Henri or Ynez: Henri had made his loving gesture, and that had been enough.

Ynez could of course not help but reflect upon that strange, sleepy, disturbing afternoon in late August every now and then, though she could never summon the old convent school guilt she felt would be necessary to atone for her sin—if it had been sin. Perhaps she had been luring the artist all along, but if it were unconscious, could she have been responsible for his actions? She probably would have worried more if she hadn't convinced herself that she had not participated in the kiss at all and recalled that a time or two before, other men than her husband had also tried to kiss her. Such things happened to all women, married or not. Moreover, it was probably part of the routine for an artist to test his model at least once. The kiss, she told herself, meant nothing, really; in perspective, it had not even seemed a thing of lust, but of control. He had wanted her mind and she had not allowed him dominion over it. Had she given up her body it would not have meant half as much. The still-unfinished painting, Ynez supposed, was leaning forgotten against the wall of a dusty Parisian garret—by now the portrait would be blackened and cracked with time, aged horribly while she still felt very much the same as she always had. It did not matter; it was just another picture. Art, after all, had never interested her that much, and she would not pretend to be interested, as so many of her friends did. She did not return to the museum in Nice, nor to the books in the library—well, she had tried to return to the books, but they no longer tempted her with secret knowledge the way they had when Ingres was around. The books, for all their fancy bindings and gilt edging, had grown silent and dead as their authors and they became an unpleasant reminder of a time she had otherwise chosen to forget. She rarely even entered the house's library. She did, however, search for the cathedral or church with the fresco saints while visiting her sister once in Nice. The cathedral the two women found appeared to be the one she remembered, but the saints were different and part of a mosaic; either her mind had tricked her or the old ones had been covered up.

Her lilies occupied more and more of her time in the spring and summer months and in winter, she busied herself with social affairs. The balls grew gaudier and more tiresome with each passing year, but Ynez continued going to them and with a renewed passion, knowing it would not be too long before she became one of the older women who sat in chairs along the wall and made comments about this season's crop of debutantes. Henri, she knew, tolerated, even encouraged these silly pursuits. He peered at her from behind his little spectacles with (she thought whenever he teased her too much about this or that) a mixture of condescension and the pride a horseman has in a prize mare. They never talked much to one another anymore, and that seemed as natural as growing old. Lately she had begun wondering who would die first.

Catherine was going on fourteen, a resident at a strict school in Marseilles for girls from moneyed families. She looked nothing like her father, people said, and everything like her mother. In not too many years she would marry, Ynez predicted. When she did become betrothed, Ynez hoped it would be to a man with a practical and unimaginative mind, a mathematician or engineer, someone who could provide Catherine with pretty things and devoted friends enough to keep her distant from worries and wonder. We must see to it that Catherine remains happy, she told Henri more than a few times. Their daughter must have been happy at boarding school. She almost never wrote home.

Sometimes Ynez would be planting new fall bulbs or snipping summer's withered stalks when a gray cloud passed between herself and the sun. Eventually she would look up into a clear sky, see that the sun was much closer to the horizon than she had remembered, and that neither one bulb more had been planted nor one stalk more cut. It was as if she had just stumbled like a bewitched goatherd in a folktale out of what had seemed years of oblivion underground in a dark cave. She had lost hours and could not think why.

Once, and only once was Ingres the artist mentioned, and then only in passing. During a trip to Paris, Henri related to his wife, he had met his old friend Claude d'Haussonville, and they had gone for a long walk through the Père Lachaise, ostensibly to look for the grave of one of Claude's relatives. Sooner than finding that grave, however, they had stumbled upon the tomb of Ingres's first wife, who had died some years before. Henri did not go on to tell his wife that Claude had mentioned that he had been to a recent exhibition of Ingres's paintings and had been shocked, the artist's work had degenerated so. No, it was not that the paintings were any less accomplished; if anything, they fooled the eye more than ever with their detailed depiction of flesh and fabric, but they had become absolutely grotesque: There was one of the apotheosis of Napoleon that looked like a Greek myth transformed into a circus act with flying horses and the emperor naked but for a crown of laurel; there were other bizarre mixtures of history and mythology, as if the old man could no longer tell one from the other; and yet more of the artist's famed scenes from harems and seraglios, grown more lavish and ludicrous than ever. One was a particularly frightening glimpse as through a keyhole into a Turkish bath, a hell of writhing limbs and opulent orientalia—and there were surprising lapses in the painter's knowledge of perspective and anatomy. They were not at any rate happy paintings, Claude told Henri, but the product of a deranged and deeply depressed human being. "They smack of overt sentimentality," he said, "and covert sensuality." Of course, Claude had previously only been acquainted with Ingres's sedate and serene portraits of real people in real places, so he had not been prepared for the painter's darker side. Claude had also heard that Ingres had become hysterical about his great rival, Delacroix, claiming that he could smell sulfur in the younger artist's very footsteps, and that smell was always at his back. Ingres had purchased Raphael's ashes at an auction in Venice and was known to haunt the marketplaces of Montmartre, accosting farmgirls and other unsuspecting maidens. Claude was dismayed because, he said, he had liked the old fool quite a bit. After bidding his friend farewell, Henri had decided it would not be worth troubling his wife with the probably awful fate of her long-unfinished portrait.

Later that same summer Henri took the train to Paris to check into his shipping concerns at a branch office there, but more importantly, to visit his mistress of several years—a big, buxom, bad-mannered, Titian-haired, pale-skinned woman (the daughter of a shopkeeper he knew) who flattered him even though his hair was thinning and his skin was growing sallow and blotchy. She was the effusive, chatty sort who dabbled in culture (she sang snatches of Meyerbeer and had a reproduction of Rembrandt's "Windmills" above her bed in the flat Henri kept for her), so for a treat Henri agreed to spend an afternoon with her at the Louvre. This took a certain degree of effort on his part, since his mistress had a habit of dawdling before paintings in museums and giving her detailed appraisals; he also had always found the Louvre overwhelmingly large and remarkably cheerless. The dim hallways and labyrinthine passages reminded him of the catacombs beneath Rome; at nearly every turn he expected to meet up with a moldering heap of martyrs' skulls.

They had been walking the galleries for hours and Henri wanted to hurry on—he was anxious to find a cafe, hire a cab back to the flat, and then get to bed—but his mistress had an opinion for everything and though he had long mastered the hedge maze back on the estate, he failed to find a quick way to lead her back outdoors. "I guess I'm no Theseus," he told the unwitting woman, who had halted among a throng of tourists to condemn a Géricault. A doorway Henri mistook for an exit led them through what looked like a storage room, filled with abandoned paintings and sculpture; and a flight of stairs in a corner took them up to an empty balcony which opened onto a large, darkened, tomblike room free of tourists and guards. Henri collapsed exhausted onto a marble bench while his mistress paced and fumed about being lost; then he noticed the large oil painting opposite him and stood again to study it—the work turned out to be by the artist he had once known but not especially liked. His mistress was more concerned with hearing gossip about the painter she'd already heard quite a lot about than looking at the painting, which Henri thought stunning. Depicted in rich (what some might call lurid) colors was a slave girl of indeterminate race, wearing nothing but sparkling red earrings and fine silver ankle fetters on a chain attached to a pillar she balanced one shoulder against. The figure was monolithic, yet graceful, like a dancer carved out of a great block of alabaster, and she had one fettered foot raised, as if straining to leap and spin for an unseen captor; her face was expressionless and she was delicately treading on a tiled floor scattered with lilies and lotus blossoms. One of the girl's breasts was more than slightly larger than the other—an artistic defect, Henri presumed—and there was a disquieting medieval quality to her flat pallid face, something like the unholy, whitewashed faces of the whores he had seen in London. The woman in the painting was still quite beautiful. "I can't think," Henri told his mistress. "She seems somehow familiar ..."

And then less than a year later, on an otherwise ordinary Tuesday afternoon in May, the painting came. Ynez was among her lilies when she heard Henri arrive in the coach, calling for her, and she stood up only with much reluctance, for storm clouds were drawing near and she had much to do. Henri descended from the coach with a package wrapped in brown paper, securely bound with twine, obviously a canvas which had already been stretched; Ynez was not surprised, because he had brought home several paintings for the house like this in the recent past; he'd have the canvas stretched and framed (if necessary) in the city so he could make a more dramatic presentation of his gift. But today was no anniversary or birthday, and Henri was behaving rather cryptically, not joking with the stable boy as he usually did. Ynez left the garden, brought the package into the house, and steadying herself to act pleased even if she wasn't (after years of Henri's reluctance to impose too forcefully his tastes on the house, its empty corners were gradually being filled with brownish peasant scenes she was not fond of), cut the twine with her garden shears, and carefully tore away the paper. Henri stood next to her, whistling a maddening little tune of his own devising and trying to keep a smile from curling his lips. The painting was wrapped in black velvet and this too Ynez carefully unwrapped. "It came by special messenger to my office the day before yesterday," Henri told her. "Why after all this time I can't imagine, but just the same I'm glad it was finally finished. It also came with a bill for no less and no more than we had agreed upon."

Ynez was astonished to see the painting after she had long since quit imagining it, though here it was, freshly framed and brilliant enough to have been painted the week before (which for all she know it might have been); she kept looking back and forth between the portrait and Henri, not knowing exactly what she was supposed to say. She did recall that Leila d'Haussonville had asked about the portrait when she had visited the previous winter. Leila had not been surprised to hear it was unfinished—after all, she had gone from ingenue to mother while awaiting her own—but assured Ynez that she would pass a note on to the artist, whom she liked for mysterious reasons and with whom she sometimes communicated. Ynez had quickly changed the subject and hoped that Leila would forget. "It's rather larger than I had expected," was all Ynez could think of now to say to Henri about the painting. He, however, claimed that he loved it in every way and swiftly, without asking, and whistling all the while, replaced the blurry old garden scene above the fireplace in the formal parlor with his wife's likeness. Either he had forgotten Catherine was to have been in it, too, or he did not think it was worthy of mentioning to his wife and possibly upsetting her. Ynez, for her own part, had noticed Catherine's absence immediately but did not want to say anything to Henri for fear he might want to send it back to the artist and who knows what might have happened then. Catherine, at least, would not remember or care.

Ynez stared above the mantel for a long time after Henri had returned to the city (in the midst of an angry storm, despite her wishes), comparing the portrait with her dusty image in a mirror nearby. She was dismayed to see what had apparently happened in seven years. As her husband often reminded her, she was still beautiful, but it was an overripe beauty, the foul blowsiness of a lily which has bloomed past its prime. She was thirty-five. Instead of growing fatter, she had grown lean and gaunt. Lines on her face she had not known seven years ago were old enemies now; she looked spare, picked clean by time, compared to the appealing, well-rounded young woman in the painting—a young woman who had ceased to exist, if she ever had at all. Furthermore, her earliest misgivings about Ingres were proven: The positioning of the arms and elbows, bent awkwardly at the waist, defied normal anatomy. The portrait retained something of that aloof, saintly quality she had noticed in the first sketches, and she did not like it. She did not deserve the canonization, the reverence, she thought; it was distasteful, especially in that horrid party gown, which had long gone out of fashion. The accessories were gaudy and cheap-looking, her hair an absurd helmet topped with a halo of artificial roses. Yes, the outcome was thoroughly distasteful, the false life in the woman's face like rouge upon a corpse. She was not greatly surprised that Ingres had left out Catherine (though it was a shame she was missing); a child would have looked out of place with this woman, who was too pure and virginal to be a mother. The virgin would never be again; she was dead. Ynez sighed heavily, combing her hands through her graying hair, frowning at the mirror and again at the portrait. Then she slowly became aware of something peculiar: At a certain angle, in the correct light, another aspect about her portrait was revealed—there was an unfamiliar pattern within the pattern of the rose-damask wallpaper behind the woman in the picture; twin rosettes like elaborate, ornamental eyes peered out from the choking, vinelike flourishes of the deep red wallpaper. And there were darker eyes beneath the rosebud-eyes, seen only with great effort. Looking even closer, Ynez saw the faintest vestiges of Catherine's lost image beneath the varnish, lacquer, and translucent oils, an outline which had left its ghost even after it had been erased all those years ago. A fathomless sadness overtook Ynez. There was no way to free Catherine now, she saw; she had disappeared beneath the wallpaper forever.
Radiance

If my reader were here and not there, I would say: Come, hear what I have to say to you. I want to tell you that life is sad; life is infinitely sad. This should not surprise you, but allow me to go on. The things which seemed sad to us years ago only grow sadder with time, I've learned, and whatever happiness we attain must be measured against such grief. When I die I wonder what it is I'll take with me beside sorrow—this sorrow that clings to me like cobwebs, penetrates my bones like poison, burdens me like sin.

We could start anywhere, so it might as well be with that man in my head. For twenty years now he's been there, leaning back in his chair, stirring his coffee with a fat finger, reciting the names and glories of ancient cities: Lisbon, Madrid, Paris, Rome, Athens... Europe, a million miles away, where I've never been, neither then nor now. The wonders of those cities, like the things promised beyond death, seemed even more unattainable to me twenty years ago—yet he's bored with them all, bored! Life, to this man, is sad, infinitely sad. It's one sad hotel room, one sad airplane ride, one sad broken affair after another. He stirs his coffee, leans so far back I'm afraid he might tip over, and then he sighs heavily and long to express his unutterable, heartfelt sorrow about it all.

For twenty years and then some this man has been living inside my head, the way certain things do, and I've grown older—so much older—while he remains the same. I see him with his chair pushed away from the table, hand dangling a cigarette over the half-eaten plate, legs crossed in a way men in the Midwest don't cross their legs, talking loudly to the head of the local Kiwanis club—who is nothing, who is faceless, forgotten, who might as well not be here, though like me he's been listening intently for a very long time.

It's late. The steakhouse has closed and the electric sign is dark. It's November. Outside, a sickly rain is invisibly and soundlessly falling over the hills of our little town. Across the highway the cornfields lie black and muddy after the harvest, and on the highway there are fewer cars, though they are faster because it is so late. I want to leave here. I want to get out of this awful glass-walled, fluorescent-lit place. I want to escape 1974. My mother is clearing tables, and I am refilling ketchup and mustard bottles from the big plastic containers. We are waiting for the world-traveler to leave, so we can vacuum, mop the kitchen, run the dishwasher, empty the ashtrays, lock this place up, and quietly go home.

Of course I've said already that life is sad. But it is also hateful. And I hate this memory of the restaurant, at night, two full decades ago. I hate this dead-tired man who lives on within me, blowing smoke-rings and ticking off foreign capitals as if they were local bus-stops he couldn't wait to get through. The man, handsome enough, well-dressed, well-spoken (yet even then I wondered how much was faked and how much was real) is still there, speaking to the forgotten clubman, pouring forth this stream of anecdotes; and my mother is inside this memory, too, scrubbing tabletops, piling up dirty dishes. You could stop me there and say yes, but inside your head is inside nowhere, really; and I would say yes, you're right—and I only choose to remember this man because I want, even need, to remind myself of something which was once important to me. To keep me from forgetting how it was: that rainy night, that hushed restaurant, the reasons why I wanted to escape.

My mother looks up, frowns at the man who will not leave, though certainly he does not even notice her; he thinks she's anyone, and could never guess I'll be writing this and remembering bits of him twenty long years later. Playing a time-traveler like this, slipping into my old self as if I were trying on old clothes, is a little depressing, and it's disturbing as well to see my mother suddenly so much younger, before her hair turned gray, before her middle thickened and her eyes dimmed. Hello, mom! I'd like to say—here I am, older, too, going gray myself already, though you can't see that from where you stand in this memory. Did we ever expect to meet again in this place, in this way? You were so youthful and I didn't realize it! If only I really could go back and take your younger self out for a nice dinner, buy her things, tell her that despite how much I despised everything about this beautiful world I still loved her.

She's not listening. She's not listening to anything except maybe the bland radio music murmuring over unseen speakers—certainly not to this globe-trotter who drops ashes onto his unfinished potatoes and won't finish his coffee even now the waitresses have all gone home and the manager—forgotten him, too—is adding figures in the office and we're all so very tired. (Did I mention that I hated this job, hated my life?)

Once in a while I find some tip money a waitress has missed, which I'll happily pocket so I can save to buy a record I want; I have to split what I make here with my mother, and she uses her half to pay the rent. Dad's sick in the hospital again. Nothing new there. There are still five of us at home. Debts eternal to pay off... How I hate those foodstamps, the big tins of government-surplus butter and lard, the black-and-white boxes of cheap generic food from the supermarket! I've been spoiled by fifteen years of TV: I want everything and I want the best. I want a new bike and a digital watch and lots of new records and a record-player that sounds bigger and better. I want I want I want. Sure, I try to save, but it's always trickling away, somehow, though I don't waste it on candy or clothes like my younger sisters or squander it on cars and movies like some people I know at school. Despite all I've learned in church and at catechism, I love money, I dream of money, I worship money, I'd roll in a bed of it if I could. I convert all my quarters, dimes, and nickels to pennies just so it will seem I have more, and I see my glass jar of pennies rise and fall with the course of the seasons and their temptations.

But the subject was this man inside my head. If it were possible, I would try to give an idea of the visitor's style by quoting him directly, though it is not his words I remember, or even their general content, but only the relentless flow of his speech, the effect on me of his world-weary despair. Time has darkened details as always, perhaps mercifully so—though the details still discernible are not necessarily always the most important—and I'm left with just the ragged silhouette of a man. This man, he is bored—that is enough to know; he is exhausted from that slide-show he delivered for the untraveled people of our little town far from cities old or new; he would like to go see what kind of motel room they've provided him and if there's a motel bar.

Instead he feels compelled to try to impress whoever might be listening; he can't keep from talking on and on, barraging his table-partner with foreign words, glamorous incidents, exotic characters. I am pouring ketchup slowly into the bottles, trying to overhear without seeming too interested, as my mother whirls around me, wiping down this and sweeping off that. She is glad to have me here to help, the oldest of her children remaining at home, but she might like it better if I weren't so easily distracted and worked a little harder. After all, she has houses to clean in the morning, and I have to go to school—which incidentally I hate as much as anything else, and can't wait to escape, either.

But I am not old enough and I have no money and no means and rent's due, and here we are cleaning the damn steakhouse five nights a week. Which is where the traveler comes in.

Came in twenty years ago, I mean. Time did move on; I did escape 1974 (if not everything else) but I'm still hearing that man inside my head, I tell you. Maybe this is why: While I was filling the ketchup bottles I began to feel a little sick, as if an anger which had been smoldering inside me for a long time was being fanned by the sounds of those foreign cities and their impossible delights, and a hot blush came to my brow like a fever. I felt embarrassed to be so young and poor and stupid when the radiance of another world was glowing all around me, yet just out of reach—and though I could feel the flames, I could not enter such a lovely fire and be consumed in wonder, as I so bitterly desired. And finally my mother had to say something, and so the man stubbed out his cigarette without another word and went off to his unknown and certainly unhappy motel room.

You probably hoped there would be more to this little story, that something more exciting was going to happen or that I'd realize something significant, but now this story seems so close to me it's more like a prayer, a prayer for no one and to nothing, but a prayer nevertheless. Maybe all prayers are just to postpone sorrows, the sadness which inevitably comes in the course of our lives, when we are on this side of death, and we still have the desire to see beyond, across the glimmering waters, and over the fabled walls of those ancient, radiant cities.
