She remembered this:  The time she stepped onto the roof of her childhood home in San José, the time she felt the tilting shingles under her feet as her father held her tiny hand in one of his and kept his other hand broad and strong at the small of her back.  Katherine was five, and her brothers, eight and ten, had been throwing a Frisbee across the back lawn while she sat on the cement slab patio and toed the soft grass with her sneakers.  “You’re too young to play,” they’d said.  She watched with some resentment the disc spinning back and forth in the lowering sunlight as they all waited to be called in to dinner.

It was the end of August, 1961, and the air in California was still and full, broken only by the distant chirr of power lawnmowers.  In a week, her brothers would begin school again, and she would be left behind.  Katherine missed her brothers when they were off.  Even if they treated her like a pest and left her out of games, she still liked to study what they were doing, plan what she would do one day when she was their age.

The backyard was narrow and completely fenced in by six foot lengths of cedar running along the property lines, separating it from similar backyards on either side and behind it.  As the boys grew bored, they began to throw the Frisbee in elaborate curves out over the fence and back into the yard.  They called to Katherine to watch, then spun it up at a steep angle so that it descended right back into their hands.  They tried for diving catches, leaping catches, they sprang straight up and grabbed the Frisbee between their legs.  Katherine felt a little happier they were at least including her as an audience.

Then her oldest brother tried to curve the Frisbee over the roof, and it caught on the low peak and skidded against the wooden shingles and came to a rest three feet from the gutter.  The two boys looked at each other.

“Who’s going to tell Dad?” the older one asked.

“I didn’t do it,” the younger one said.

Katherine’s oldest brother looked at her, as though considering the possibility of including her in the blame somehow.  He looked up at the roof, hoping for a sudden gust of wind.  Then he trudged into the house through the sliding glass patio doors.

After a minute, Katherine heard the side door to the garage open and saw her father appear through the gate, carrying a wooden ladder over his shoulder like a heroic fireman.  The tips of the ladder were swaddled in cloth fixed with tape, and he laid the ladder gently against the eaves above the stucco siding.  Then he scaled it nimbly, bent forward as he stepped from the ladder, and stood up against the sky, high as a tower.  He was taller than anyone Katherine had ever seen, and now, on the roof, he looked colossal.

He walked easily over to the Frisbee, tossed it down, then shaded his eyes with a flat hand.

“Hey,” he said.  “You can see a blimp from here.”

There was something special about seeing a blimp in the early sixties.  Only a few blimps were in existence, all owned by Goodyear Tires, and unlike airplanes that appeared only as vapor trails, a blimp flew low and lazy and dreamlike.  It took up a piece of sky, like a planet you could visit.  And it usually had a message, in electric lights across the side.  When they saw a blimp, they would all gaze as it floated toward them, and Katherine would wait impatiently for the moment when her father would clear his throat and state “Here’s what it says…”

“Is it coming this way?” the older brother asked.

“It’s going toward the bay.”

“Can we climb up?” the younger brother asked.

Her father hesitated.  “Keep one hand on the ladder at all times,” he said.  “And let me help you over the edge.”

Katherine’s older brother scrambled up and within seconds was standing next to her father.  Her middle brother climbed to the top of the ladder, then waited until her father grasped his hand strongly before he stepped out.

“Don’t stand close to the edge,” her father warned.  “And don’t forget you’re standing on an incline.”

“Daddy,” Katherine said.

“You’re too small to come up,” her older brother said.

Her father looked down at her.  She stood next to the ladder, twisting on one foot, hoping to be taken up.  She could see her brothers, watching the blimp, and she looked in the same direction, but she could see nothing but empty sky.

Then her father was climbing down.  “Promise me you’ll be careful,” he said.  “I don’t ever want to see you hurt.”

“I promise,” she said.  It was an easy promise to make.  She didn’t really believe she could be hurt with her father near her.

He picked her up and placed her on the fourth rung, then climbed up behind her so that his body sheltered her.  He helped her to the next rung, then climbed up one himself.  Rung by rung, she rose up.  Her older brother’s head loomed over the edge of the roof.  He seemed an obstacle at first, but then he held his right hand out to her.  Her middle brother was sitting on the roof as an anchor, holding her older brother’s left hand in his.  The sky grew larger as she reached the top of the ladder.  She took her brother by one hand, while her father held her other hand, and with a step she was on the roof.  The wooden shingles crunched and felt oddly fragile, even under her soft-soled Keds.

Her father stood beside her, and she felt utterly safe as they all watched the blimp meander to the north.  Katherine could see some lighted lettering on the side, even though it was far away.  The lights were flashing on and off, and would show up better in the twilight and early evening.

“Here’s what it says…” her father said.

They all looked at him.

“It says, the Watson family is ready for dinner.”

Her two brothers objected.  Katherine smiled and looked about.  The view from high up was new and different.  Stretching to the north, to the west, to the east, there lay a plain of roofs, all low-peaked shingled roofs like her own.  The roofs extended as far as she could see, humping up and down, an uneven shingle prairie, until the roofs no longer belonged to distinct houses but simply blended in with each other.  Here and there, the green crown of a tree broke the line of weathered cedar wood in the still-recent housing tract, and the Coast Range rose to the west.  But it was mostly roofs, a landscape of roofs, with a slow blimp floating free above them.  Had the person who drew these streets on a map imagined this strange landscape?

She heard the patio door slide open, and her mother call that dinner was ready.  Then the voice stopped.

“Where is everybody?” her mother asked.

*

See her now:  In the late afternoon, Katherine parks her ten-year-old Saturn in the driveway of the same house.  She stands, forty-seven years old, fifteen pounds heavier than when she was twenty, highlights in her blondish hair, dressed in colors of rust and green with long earrings of silver and onyx dangling in the late sun of September, 2003.  She takes from the car two plastic sacks of groceries and walks to the front porch, concrete with a peeling wooden park bench filled with odd potted plants sheltered by a low overhang.  From the eaves, there hangs a redwood sign her father had custom-made in Felton that reads Peaceable Isle.

When she walks in, she feels that odd sensation of being a teenager again, walking into her old living room.  But also the sensation of being her mother.  Her mother always disliked the way the front door opened right onto the living room, with no entry foyer that would allow her to put down her bags, hang up her coat, and not track right over the carpet to get to the kitchen.  Katherine finds herself displeased in the same way.  She walks in with groceries now, not schoolbooks, and she feels oppressed by having to decide what to make for dinner.

Katherine had moved into her father’s house ten months earlier, in debt, with a missing husband, with Betty, her disdainful daughter of seventeen, and with Carter, fifteen, becoming secretive and withdrawn.  An events planner by profession, in charge of organizing the annual user’s conference for BPI, a software firm in Milpitas, but unable to plan for the events in her own life.  Her own mother dead when she was her son’s age, absent and therefore eternally wise and silent, always keeping to herself some bit of guidance that would have kept Katherine from error.  Her father, a Pearl Harbor survivor, still living in the house that he had bought with a V.A. loan after the War, now eighty and beating back lesions every three weeks with chemotherapy.

When she moved back in with their father, her two older brothers were delighted.  One brother was working in story development in Los Angeles.  The other was a college professor in Ohio.  They had moved on, they were successes, blight had not touched their well-fashioned lives.  The national mourning of 2001 they wore lightly, and neither had a child in the Army, or nearing eighteen years of age.  They had moved on, and looked back at the house on Catesby Street as old and squat and not the kind of place they would ever live again.  And she wondered if her brothers didn’t think sometimes that it had all fallen into place rather nicely:  her missing husband, her need for a place to live, their father’s need for a caregiver, the tract home that was all paid off with low property taxes.  She was the daughter, and she was convenient.

Now she hears her father, Henry, rumble from the sunken den.  “By God, who is that in the house?”  He is up and walking toward her before she can put down the groceries, wearing one of his bright Hawaiian shirts covered with flowers.  He likes wearing Hawaiian shirts, and shirts open at the throat with a silk scarf, and a beret to hide his hair loss.  He takes her in his arms and hugs her roughly, as he often does.  Then he turns her loose and looks at her.

“You’re losing too much weight,” Henry says.  “You’re wasting away.  Soon there won’t be anything left of you.”

“Ha,” Katherine says.  “I feel like a water buffalo.”  She has been trying to stay a size 8 for years, sometimes coaxing her weight down so that she can fit her clothes and sometimes finding her weight floating up so that half her wardrobe is too tight.  When she is thinner, she tends to buy clothes that are brighter in color, cornflower blues and turquoises and aquamarines.  When she is forced into the rack of tens, she finds herself buying plainer stuff, beiges and creams and blacks.  Her closet looks like a struggle between her aspirations for how she should look and her frequent admissions of defeat.

“You have a secret admirer,” Henry says.  “Water buffalo or no.”

He points at a gift-wrapped box on the dining room table.  Katherine crosses to the table, picks the box up, shakes it.  Something shifts inside, heavy and muffled.

“Not a bomb, is it?”

“Hope not.”

“This was on the front porch?”

Henry shakes his head.  “It was right there.”

It takes Katherine a moment to process what her father has said.

“He broke into the house?”

Henry shrugs, nods.  Katherine sits down heavily.  She picks up the envelope, the paper thick and textured, and flipped it to look at both sides.  Her name is on the front.  She slides a finger in and rips it open.  The card slips out, a romantic card with heart and flowers and the Eiffel Tower on the front.  Inside, it reads “I’ll be seeing you in all those old familiar places” and it is signed “Love, Scott.”  There is no phone number, no address.

Inside the box is a small, expensive, cut glass bottle of perfume.

“So he’s back,” she says.  “And this is what he thinks is a good way to get back in touch.  Break into the house and leave gifts.”

Henry sits down opposite his daughter, at the same table where he had once sat with his wife to talk over what to do.  The table has a cloth spread over it because it was old and the finish worn through.  It is a solid maple table, the first part of a maple dining room set he and his wife began but never completed.  He has never wanted to replace the table.  He once thought about refinishing it, but never quite managed to do it.

“What do you think we should do?” he asks.

“I don’t know,” Katherine says.

She lifts up the bottle of perfume, looks at the label.

“Passion,” she says.  “Incredible.”

*

Scott Claussen, Katherine’s husband, had run through their money, including retirement accounts, investing in Internet startup companies.  It was that time in Silicon Valley.  Every day, there were stories about twenty-four year olds who had made millions overnight.  The largest legal creation of wealth in history!  Scott read and re-read these stories, and convinced himself that those kids didn’t deserve all that money, certainly not any more than he did.  He began to feel old at forty-eight, as though he had been born twenty years too late, as though the golden opportunity had somehow skipped his generation.

He found his first investment through some cassette tapes he listened to while doing the Stairmaster at the gym.  It was an Internet store that would grow through word of mouth.  Each store owner would have a portal which would offer name brand products at rock bottom prices that could be drop shipped from a secure location.  Name Brand.  Rock Bottom.  Drop Shipped.  Secure.  But the real genius was that each storeowner could sign up additional storeowners.  If you had a friend or neighbor who needed a Sony television, you could ask them to buy it through your store at a better price than they could get at Target.  You then asked them if they would be interested in owning their own store.  As they began to sell things, some small percentage of their profits would come to you.  And as they signed up storeowners, you would get a percentage of their percentage.  If you were in on the ground floor, the profits would soon be tremendous.

With each store you bought, you also received a number of shares in the company.  Pre-IPO shares.  Scott listened to that on the tape as well.  Pre-Initial Public Offering.  And when the IPO came through, and each of your shares was suddenly worth thousands, you would read about yourself in the newspaper.

Scott listened to the tape as he worked out, taking one of the elliptical trainers in the big front windows and wearing classic black Ray Ban Wayfarers so that he would look good from the parking lot.  The words Name Brand, Rock Bottom, Ground Floor, Limitless Potential, hypnotized him.  He bought one portal, and then another, since he couldn’t buy more shares in the company without buying more portals.  Katherine never paid much attention to the financial statements, and didn’t notice when the balances began to go down.  She trusted him for that.

They had moved to a new house in a development called Oak Commons in 1999, where Carter and Betty, their son and daughter, could go to better schools.  Betty was beginning high school that year, so it seemed like the right time.  The house had a two story front foyer that opened onto a great room with a fireplace and vaulted ceilings.  The master bath, on the ground floor, had a Jacuzzi tub with a garden view, and the bedroom had a walk-in closet large enough to sleep in.  They were able to sell their first house for three times what they’d paid for it, and they had a down payment and money to spare.  Scott told Katherine they were being smart, could afford it, and deserved it.  And she trusted him for that as well.

While waiting for his stores to make good, Scott began to make other investments.  There were always tips in Internet chat rooms, and he decided that buying lots of different recommended stocks was a way to be safe.  If even one hit it big, it would make up for dozens of losers.

Then, early in 2002, he was laid off.  He had an engineering degree from Chico State, but for many years he had worked in the marketing side of a company that created software to teach people how to use computer programs.  The company had been acquiring other firms that sold training software, expanding into online education products, and reporting record profits.  But when clients began to reject the standard three-year license deals, and competitors cut prices, it turned out the record profits were an illusion.  Sales orders had been booked on products still in development, defective products were returned and the returns never recorded, phony invoices were created by sending orders between fax machines in the same office.  The company announced that revenues were down one third from the previous quarter, and marketing personnel were the first to go.

That same year, Scott and Katherine were hit with a huge tax bill.  There were penalties for withdrawing funds from retirement accounts, but Scott had decided that the penalties could be easily paid for with the profits he would be making.  He asked for one extension for filling out their income tax, and then another.  He spent time at an outplacement firm, posting resumes to Monster, Career Builder, Hot Jobs, and also checking his investments.  At the end of each three-month extension, the actual value of the stock he had bought was less.

Scott tried to avoid telling Katherine until he at least had found another job, but a job offer never materialized.  His engineering skills were considered out of date, and his marketing skills tainted.  When he finally told her, he said one option was to sell the house.  It turned out there were no other options except bankruptcy.  They had refinanced once to pay off credit cards and a car loan with home equity, and there wouldn’t be much from the house after the bills were settled.  And Katherine refused to go into bankruptcy with a man who was so ready to hide the truth from her because he was convinced he knew better.

Scott disappeared soon after the house closed, before Katherine could move forward with a divorce.  The studio apartment he’d rented in Cupertino, one small box among many others overlooking a small landscaped commons, was empty after a month.  He’d left the house on Catesby Street as a forwarding address, and for months, overdue bills for electricity and gas came, red lettering on the envelope stating 2^nd Notice or Final Notice.  Katherine wrote not at this address on the envelopes and left them outside for the letter carrier.  Sometimes she wrote He’s not here and I don’t give a damn where he is.  Other times, she wrote If you see him, say hello, he might be in Tangiers.  She was certain he would turn up sooner or later.

*

Scott had gone back to a barely remembered time of his life, a phase that was over before he even met Katherine.  In 1974, he’d enlisted in the Navy just in time to aid with the evacuation of Saigon, and after his hitch he put in a year working aboard combat support ships as an Able Seaman with the Military Sealift Command.  He’d been aboard a fleet oiler in the Indian Ocean in 1979, when the Iranian hostage crisis struck, and had spent months servicing aircraft carrier battle groups.  Some part of him was disappointed that no action was taken, that he hadn’t come back with stories to tell.

The attacks on New York and Washington coincided with his investments dwindling toward zero.  After he lost his job, he began to follow the military buildup in the Indian Ocean and the Arabian Sea, the same waters he’d sailed in twenty-three years earlier.  He visualized the aircraft carrier battle groups converging on the region, and wondered if the same great names were there that had been there in 1979:  the Kittyhawk, the Nimitz, the Enterprise.  And he visualized the fleet oilers, like the ship he’d sailed on, standing off over the horizon, ready to rendezvous at dusk to fill a carrier’s vast tanks with jet fuel, while fighter jets swarmed overhead to provide cover.

The war in Afghanistan resolved itself quickly, according to reports.  But the war in Iraq, foretold in newspapers and magazines and network news, was just ahead when he had to admit to Katherine how much money he had lost, how much they owed, what a mess he’d made of things.  He was broke and living in a one-bedroom apartment.  He was unemployed.  He saw the age of fifty looming, a narrow doorway to a narrower corridor.  He was still seeking a life of consequence.  And he found a website for the Military Sealift Command.  With battle groups in the Indian Ocean indefinitely, he knew there would be a need for experienced seamen.

*

Katherine received the first letter from Scott soon after the war began.  After that, they came weekly.  Scott’s letters described the long hours of work, the nights when they stayed at the refueling rigs until dawn with an aircraft carrier to port and a destroyer to starboard.  They described the empty sea between refuelings, the kinds of routine maintenance he was always occupied with, slushing the rigging, chipping rust and painting with red lead and a top coat.  They described the sunsets over the Indian Ocean, and how bright the stars were at night, the sound the ship’s wake made as it spread out from the stern.

Katherine wrote him back and told him that he should under no circumstances consider himself welcome to stay at her father’s house.  It wasn’t his home.  She wrote that she hoped he would stay safe, and settle somewhere nearby when he came back, so that he could stay involved with the children.  Money was also a problem, since her father had to keep most of his money for his own medical expenses, and she’d like to be able to help with college for the kids.

His letters back didn’t acknowledge her letters at all.  He told of watching a helicopter hover over the ship’s flight deck, forward of the bridge, and lower canvas bags of mail, and pick up bags of outgoing mail.  And he told of his hope, as he watched, that the mail contained a letter from her.  He didn’t mention that she’d written him that he wouldn’t be welcome.  It was infuriating.

Then, in August, the letters stopped.  A week went by without a letter, and then another week.  Carter was getting ready to begin high school, seeming a little adrift since they’d had to move.  Betty had graduated and moved to Aptos, living with her boyfriend in a house owned by his parents, waiting tables at a small Szechwan restaurant on West Cliff Drive.  Henry had his chemotherapy sessions.  Katherine didn’t notice that weeks had gone by without a letter until the month turned and she stopped to wonder if he was well.  The news coverage of the war rarely showed ships, but she thought she would have heard if a support ship had sunk.  She watched CNN several nights in a row but didn’t see anything.  There was news from the Middle East, but it was contradictory and confusing and didn’t tell her anything about the man she was still technically married to.

After a few days, she forgot to wonder about him.  A phone call would come, sooner or later, and he would be over his big adventure, and they would settle some things.

*

Most afternoons when he felt well, Henry had lunch with a regular group in the Garden Spot Café at the Blue Skies Bowl, a bowling alley surrounded on one side by subdivisions and tract homes and on the other side by the Western Horizons Shopping Mall.  The Blue Skies Bowl was built in the early sixties, the name chosen to appeal both to those ‘Blue Sky’ families moving to San José to be part of the aerospace industry and to those older residents who remembered the Irving Berlin song from the Bing Crosby movie.  After four decades, the bowling alley was slated for demolition, to be replaced by townhouses and condominiums, and the regulars at the café had not yet decided where they would gather once it was gone.

In the café, Henry had a Reuben or a hot pastrami sandwich, bad for his heart, he knew, but since his prostate was going to kill him first it didn’t buy antibiotics online from india matter much.  The group he met there were all of an age more or less, some city workers, some in real estate, one who had managed the produce section at a Safeway.  They were veterans, all had served overseas during World War Two.  They weren’t the sort who joined the VFW or the American Legion, but they held that time in common, and though they didn’t discuss it amongst themselves, a number of them gave talks about the War through a Veterans-in-the-Schools program.

Henry’s prostate cancer wasn’t the first in the group, and probably wouldn’t be the last.  A man who liked a dirty joke, Al Dayton, told them all that it was the pissing that first let him know he had a problem, the pissing and the backaches that weren’t just the routine.  And he said he finally understood a limerick he’d laughed at as a kid:

There was an old man from Stamboul

Who soliloquized thus to his tool:

“You stole all my wealth,

“You ruined my health,

“And now you won’t pee, you old fool!”

 

Henry found the gift box of perfume one afternoon when he came back from The Garden Spot.  He knew it wouldn’t be hard to tell that nobody was home.  He kept his Buick LeSabre in the driveway, since the garage was filled with things he’d never thrown away, and he drove the few blocks to the bowling alley.  When he was younger, he had enjoyed the walk, but the chemotherapy left his feet swollen and tingling, like a thousand small knives were cutting into the soles.  Neuropathy, he was told.  And so he began wearing oversized slippers with rubber bottoms and driving over.  Anyone could see that the driveway was empty during the day, anybody could see when the house was vacant.

*

Katherine had thought about support groups when Scott left, but she decided against it.  There were probably support groups for women whose husbands had blown all their money on Internet stocks.  She was sure of it.  But there wouldn’t be support groups for women whose husbands had run off to sea at the age of forty-seven.  Pretending they were twenty-five again.  That’s not normal.  Running away to sea.  The whole thing seemed archaic.

When two days passed since the perfume was left, and Scott didn’t try to contact her like a normal human being, she decided to try to catch him in the house.  Perhaps they could talk to each other like adults.  Her father insisted that she take him with her, and so she left work at noon and met him at The Garden Spot.   She liked seeing her father sitting at the same round table in a vinyl-lined booth in the corner.  He always seemed perfectly content there, happy that his little haven hadn’t yet changed, happy to meet old friends, even if the talk was no longer about problems with business or the kids and now centered on doctors and medical bills and retirement accounts.

Henry stood up when Katherine came in.  “See?” he said.  “I told you an attractive young woman was going to be picking me up today.”

The other men laughed and asked Katherine to sit down, join them, have a cup of coffee, but she told them next time, when she wasn’t so busy.

They left together in his Buick.  Henry still liked to be the one driving.  When they went in for his chemo treatments, he drove to the oncology unit and they took his car, even though they both knew that she would be driving back after he’d had the shunt in his chest hooked up for three hours.

They saw an old green Plymouth Fury in front of the house.

“Look at that beater car,” Henry said.  “You think he’s driving that?”

“I don’t know, Dad,” Katherine said.  “But I guess I’ll find out.”  She flipped down the sun visor and looked at her hair in the mirror and grimaced.

When she moved back into the house, she had to adjust to opening the front door.  During the years of living on her own, and then with Scott, she had evolved from just walking in as though she still lived there, to giving a quick knock and then walking in, to ringing the doorbell and waiting for her father to let her in.  After moving back, it took her some time to be able to simply open the door.  At first she felt some reluctance about it – she didn’t want to admit that, yes, she had moved back home at the age of forty-seven, and those other houses and apartments she’d lived in were only temporary.  But after months of unloading groceries or walking in with two briefcases and bracing the screen door open with her hip while she fumbled with her keys, her resistance vanished with the press of the everyday.

Now, absurdly, she knocked three times before turning the key, as though Scott had some rights over the house she was entering.  She patted her hair once more and opened the door.

*

Scott had been at sea longer than he expected.  Baghdad fell in May, and he thought that the aircraft carriers and their battle groups would soon head for their home ports, and his own ship would make the long voyage back to Subic Bay, in the P.I., and he could get paid off and back home.  But after May, the carrier groups stayed in the region, circling around, and he heard they were still flying sorties day and night.  And his ship stayed in the area too, having its own massive tanks refilled by a commercial tanker out at sea.  The only land they saw in months was the coast of Oman, which looked like a giant sand dune to Scott.  They sailed east out of the Arabian Sea only after another oiler came out to relieve them.  The nearest he’d been to Iraq was hundreds of miles south.  The war continued on without him, without the promised end.

The first thing Scott did after he flew in to San Francisco was buy a car.  He knew his credit was short.  He didn’t have a bank account.  He had no place to live.  But he had six months wages, almost twenty thousand dollars, in cash in a pouch hung around his neck.  He picked the Plymouth Fury because it was the biggest thing on the lot.  It reminded him of something his father would have owned, with a hood that stretched out long in front of the windshield and covered a V-8 engine, sharp lines and square corners, a roar when he turned the key that the dealer couldn’t guarantee was not due to a faulty muffler.  The vinyl top had peeled, and the metal underneath showed rust, but the air conditioning worked, and the radio was tuned to KNBR, the San Francisco Giants station, and the utter rightness of sitting in a big car listening to the pre-game show in late September sold him.

Scott’s insurance had expired, but the dealer arranged to sell him two weeks worth of coverage through the Internet, so he could get off the lot and have something until he got settled.  Then he took off on Highway 101 and headed toward the Santa Clara Valley, San José, home.

He checked into the El Rancho motel, about ten miles from where Katherine was living with her father.  The El Rancho was one of a few old motels, built along freeways in the fifties in California, that had survived into the age of franchises and centralized registration systems.  He took a room on the second floor, paying for a week in cash.  The room had heavy plastic drapes covering a single window, a sheet metal box that controlled both the heat and air conditioning, a lowboy chest of drawers with a twenty-three inch T.V., and a king-sized bed.

Scott had only a large duffel bag for luggage, and he threw it onto the dresser, kicked off his shoes, and fell back into bed.  He breathed in and out deeply, softly, trying to feel he was at a homecoming, trying to feel he had accomplished something, trying to feel he was in control.

The following afternoon, he drove by the house on Catesby Street.  The driveway was empty, though he noticed one oil spot that looked fresh.  Katherine probably still hadn’t repaired the oil leak in her Saturn.  The blinds were drawn, and the aluminum frame windows were cracked open.  That told him the house was probably empty.  The lawn was a little ragged, and the rose bushes along the side of the house were growing tall and awkward, with spindly sprays of faded blossoms hanging down, and the other shrubs needed pruning.  There was work he could do.

Next to his father-in-law’s house, someone had bought two of the old ranch houses from the original subdivision and razed them, and was erecting a two-story house in their place.  This had happened since he left.  The house was already framed up and sided, and it pushed out close to the property lines on both sides with a steep-pitched roof towering over everything else on the street.  Scott looked at it as he drove by slowly, wondering about the square footage, the number of bathrooms, the number of bedrooms.  But he had no doubt, he was looking at a million dollar house.  Once a house was grand enough to deserve that title, any further precision about the actual price seemed superfluous.

At the end of the block, he turned the Fury around and cruised back by his father-in-law’s house.  He envisioned rising from the land a house even larger than the one being built.  And he thought that if the old slab house could be torn down, or if a fire should strike it, it could be worth a fortune.  A fortune.

Scott left for an hour and came by one more time close to five.  A Buick LeSabre was in the driveway; his father-in-law was home.  Scott looked at his watch.  He knew his father-in-law’s habits, and he knew he had been at the Garden Spot all afternoon.

The next day, Scott parked the Fury right in front of the house, so that anyone who saw him would think he had nothing to hide.  A narrow walkway alongside the garage where the garbage can sat led to a gate into the fenced backyard.  A single-paned, aluminum sash window opened from the sunken den onto the cement slab patio.  It was simple to jimmy the screen – the aluminum bent easily, and he would re-shape and reinstall it before he left.  He grasped the window frame and hoisted himself up, ducked his head through and put a foot down on a black sofa before stepping onto the floor.

The house was weirdly quiet.  He had been in his father-in-law’s house many times, but never alone.  He took two steps, then stopped.  His steps seemed loud, loud enough for someone outside to hear him, and he sat down on the edge of a step and took off his shoes.  In his stocking feet, he made a round of the house, crouching down near any windows that faced the street.  He saw that Henry remained in the master bedroom.  His wife’s room held objects he knew from their own room together.  A wooden tree that held bracelets and necklaces, a frame screwed to the wall with earrings hanging from it, three bottles of perfume, a small lamp shaped like a tulip.  There was nothing from Betty.   She must have moved out, as Katherine said in one of her letters.

He wondered whether Katherine slept in the upper or lower bunk bed.  Both of them were neatly made with bedspreads that probably dated from the time she’d lived here as a girl, purple chenille with a fringe of small dangling balls.  He lifted a corner of the bedspread on the top bunk carefully and saw that there were no sheets underneath.  The bottom bunk had sheets, and Scott smiled, pleased with himself.  He sat down on the edge of the bed, and swung his feet onto it, and lay still.

He felt the house breathing all about him.  The stillness that earlier had seemed weird and threatening now felt warm, enveloping.  He didn’t feel like a sneak or a thief.  He felt like he was right where he belonged.  He felt he could go to sleep peacefully here, and wake up peacefully.

His watch beeped, and he opened his eyes.  He had set the timer to remind him when he had an hour left before he had to go.  He made the bed carefully, so that the bedspread was arranged identically to the one on the upper bunk, and he went into his son’s room.

There was a twin bed on one side of the room and a cheap computer desk in the corner.  Nothing on the walls except a poster with a saying by Chief Seattle that he remembered from Carter’s room in their old house.  He looked in the closet and didn’t see anything that would let him know what his son had been thinking or feeling while he had been gone.  Just jeans, t-shirts, a windbreaker, sweatshirts.  One sports coat that he wore to church, with a clip-on tie attached to the lapel.  Scott made a mental note to teach Carter to knot a real tie as soon as possible.

He looked at the computer on the desk, a bulky Dell in black plastic.  There might be more of Carter’s mind in the computer than anywhere else.

He looked at his watch.  Then he tiptoed back to the den, put his shoes on, and replaced the screen, pushing it back into shape.  He left by the back door, walked back out to his Fury, and drove back to the El Rancho.

The next day, Scott entered the house the same way.  He went to Katherine’s bed and lay down for half an hour.  Then he went into his son’s room and turned on his computer.  As the screen brightened, he got down on his knees and looked at the back of the computer tower.  They still had dial-up Internet service.  At their house in Oak Commons, they had always upgraded to the fastest possible service as soon as it was available.  For the kids.  Was this a measure of how Carter was suffering?  Slow and outdated Internet service?

He clicked on Explorer to look at the favorites, what was bookmarked, what sites had been recently visited.  There were a couple of sites related to Shakespeare.  A school project.  Scott nodded approvingly.  He opened up Word and looked at the documents Carter had recently written.  There was one on The Tempest opened last night, probably still in progress.

He began to search through other documents on the hard drive.  He didn’t admit it, but he was looking for something about himself.  Some kind of journal, a letter never sent.  He was searching for the profile he formed in his son’s imaginative horizon, the dark cutout figure of the absent.  He wanted to know he was missed, and he wanted to know exactly how he was missed, the quality of his son’s regret for his departure.  He felt he didn’t know his son very well, felt he had only completed the forms and ceremonies of being a father.  If he knew how his son missed him, he might know how his son needed him to be.

When his watch beeped again, he had found nothing, and he had to shut the computer down.  On his way out, he stopped where keys hung from a row of hooks and found a ring with a number of similar keys.  One fit the back door, and he took it with him.  He could make a copy and return it before anyone noticed.

Scott continued in this half-life for several weeks, occupying during the day the space his family would occupy at night.  He came every two or three days after replacing the key, so that his car wouldn’t become too conspicuous.  He grew comfortable with the routine.  The house changed about him as he spent time in its rooms, mellowed into a warm, familiar place.  He left his Fury, walked around the back, opened the door, kicked off his shoes.  He glanced at the books on his father-in-law’s desk in the den, looked at the catalogs and magazines that had come in the mail since his last visit.  He peeked inside the refrigerator, always pretending to himself that he might want a snack of some kind, always pretending that he wasn’t really hungry.

He circled back continuously to his wife’s bed and his son’s computer.  In other places, the bad moments could suddenly rear up, force themselves before him with their awful presentness:  the way he’d managed to lose money, the way he’d been laid off, the way he felt when he received the tax bill and knew that he couldn’t hide anything from Katherine.  But he found, when he lay in the lower bunk, where Katherine had slept a few hours earlier, his mind quieted.

At his son’s computer, he felt more urgency.  He was continually hunting for how Carter felt about him.  He read school papers Carter had written six months ago.  He visited the websites Carter had been on.  He tried logging onto his son’s email a number of times, thinking that somehow he would guess the password.  But it all remained obscure to him.  He wanted to find something magical, like a golden key in a children’s fairy tale, which would let him into the tower.  So that when he saw Carter again, they could share a perfect understanding.

On a hutch by the dining room table, there was always a stack of unopened mail addressed to Katherine.  Offers to open new credit card accounts, offers to transfer balances, envelopes full of coupons, bulk mailers promising to help you lose weight, promising a face cream that made wrinkles disappear, promising an herbal supplement that would cure the terrifying diseases that threatened you.  There were statements from credit cards, unopened bills.  Scott began to rifle through the envelopes on every visit, shaking his head when he found the same unopened statements in the pile after three days.  This had always driven him crazy about Katherine.  He didn’t understand why she couldn’t just open up junk mail right away, glance at it, and toss it.  He didn’t understand why she couldn’t just open up a credit card statement when it came, instead of waiting, as though the amount due was going to go down if she let it ripen a bit.

After three weeks, he found in the pile a bank statement addressed to himself, forwarded from the address in Oak Commons.  He had finally opened a bank account and deposited the thousands of dollars in cash he’d been carrying, and he’d used the Oak Commons address since it was the address on his driver’s license and passport.  In Katherine’s hand, he saw ‘not at this address’ scrawled.  He pocketed the envelope.  He was at this address, even though she didn’t know it yet.  He wondered if she would notice the missing envelope, and found himself hoping she would.

Two days later, he found a credit card statement of hers that had been opened but remained in the pile.  Carefully, he slid the statement out of the envelope and scrutinized it.  He saw where she had shopped last month, the kinds of things she had spent money on.  Clothes for herself, clothes for Carter, school supplies, new tires for the Saturn, gasoline.  It all added up.

Then he saw that last month, she had paid only the minimum on the balance.  That was crazy.  She had never been good at managing credit.  That was something else that had always frustrated him.  They were going to have to sit down and talk over how to manage money.  He found himself beginning a conversation with her right there, completely convincing her of the need to pay off balances every month, the foolishness of considering clothing ‘an investment,’ the vicious cycle that the credit card companies were sucking her into.  The responses he imagined from her tended to be questions he was able to answer, and she never brought up the fact that he’d cashed out their retirement accounts.  The entire conversation was very satisfactory.  So satisfactory that he promised to pay part of her balance if she would change her ways.  And he wrote down the payment address and her account number.

Her obvious need for him made him feel like he was already part of the household again.  They had just been having such crazy schedules that they had hardly seen each other.  But that was something they could work on, spending more time together, quality time.

When he left, he forgot about paying her bill and instead drove to Macy’s to buy perfume.  A woman about Katherine’s age was behind the counter, and he told her that the perfume was a gift for his wife, that he gave it to her only on special occasions, like their anniversary.  She misunderstood, and thought that their anniversary was coming up, and he found it easy to go along with her mistake, so easy to talk about their twenty-third anniversary, two children (teenagers, you know), a cozy house.  As he talked, it all sounded right and good, and he loved the approving smiles she lavished on him.  When he left, she said “She’s gonna love it,” and even though he had been telling her lies, he believed she was speaking the truth.

The next day, he left the perfume, gift-wrapped, on the dining table.  Something was going to happen now.  He was sure of it.

*

After Katherine knocked, she opened the door.  The living room was empty.  She glanced at the kitchen and down into the den, but he wasn’t there.  She had expected him to be waiting for her.  What else could the perfume have meant but a desire to meet.  And the knocks on the door were a way to alert him, so that he’d be standing, ready to talk.

But he wasn’t standing, ready to talk, and as she paused in the kitchen, she grew furious.  Everything about the way Scott was going about this was so typical.  He could never be open and up front about anything.  He always expected things to fall into place, expected Katherine to fill in the gaps in their relationship, and then he turned passive and whiny when something went wrong.  He hadn’t told her about their money troubles up front because he thought she’d just know somehow.  He avoided agreeing to a divorce because he would rather have things work out, and then disappeared after losing his job without telling her that he was leaving.  When she was young, that attitude that something magical would happen for them was enchanting, but now it just pissed her off.  And his bright idea of breaking into her father’s house was just a way to provoke her into recognizing his presence and his right to be here instead of being an adult, a man, and taking some god damned initiative.

She stalked into Carter’s room.  Nothing.  Then she looked into her bedroom.

Incredible.  He was sleeping on top of the bedspread of her bunk.  As she stood in the doorway, he stirred but didn’t open his eyes.  She had seen this face in this attitude thousands of times over the years.  It occurred to her that she had seen this face asleep more than she would ever see any other face in her life, more than either of her children, more than any new love she might find.  This face would stay at the gates of her dreams.  It was still a handsome face, sharp black eyebrows and a straight nose and a jawline that somehow evaded the sagging fleshy wattle that came to men in their forties.  And his body seemed tauter, as though some months at sea had tanned him like leather.

Then she thought of his card – I’ll be seeing you in all those old familiar places – and here he was, in that most familiar place, without even bothering to ask, without even bothering to say hello first.  It was too much.

She snatched the pillow from the upper bunk and hit him across the face with it.  He sat up, startled, and she smacked him again.

Sitting outside in the Buick, Henry witnessed a miraculous sight.  There was his son-in-law, bursting out the front door and running with his arms raised about his head.  Followed by his daughter, splendid in her anger, raging after him with a pillow in both hands.  When he slowed to try to speak, she whaled away at him, buffeting him about the shoulders, until he finally broke into a run for the Fury.  He locked the doors and started the car with a smoky roar while she beat upon the driver’s side window.  As the Fury pulled away, she raised both arms, like a goddess rampant and triumphant.

The big Egyptian appeared suddenly. Arm extended like a sentry, palm held up – halt! –  the man blocked Harold on the sidewalk, glaring as though the mere sight of the American made him angry. Harold was hurrying to catch his bus, which he knew would be crowded with Asian workers, some carrying tools and buckets. The prospect of the grimy bus – he kept a handtowel in his briefcase to wipe off the seat before sitting – reminded Harold he’d promised Annie he’d have a car by the time she joined him. Except once over there, he’d found traffic so wild, the idea of driving in it a terrifying prospect, he’d never seriously considered buying a car.

So Harold was considering how he’d get Annie around town – city buses, like the one he took to campus, had small segregated women’s compartments at the rear, out of the question for Annie – and realizing he’d be doing a lot of wrangling with Bedouin cabdrivers, when the Egyptian stepped in front of him with the blocking hand. Had Harold committed some offense against local etiquette, some other crazy thing? At seven in the morning the next prayer call was hours away, it couldn’t be that.

“Sorry,” Harold mumbled, making to go around. But the man moved with him, hand out, blocking. Harold stopped and took a look at the guy: classic Egyptian features, full but well-trimmed beard, tall and husky enough that, with a suit and an earpiece, eyes scanning the crowd, he might’ve been a bodyguard protecting a visiting Egyptian leader. But President Mubarak was nowhere in sight, the big frowning man wore a green smock over loose pantaloons, and Harold, a retired teacher from Scheuertown, Pennsylvania, was an unlikely assassin.

The big Egyptian and the smaller American clutching his worn briefcase were in front of a row of shops on palm-tree lined Khazzan Street. The Arabian capital city’s morning traffic – expensive German sedans, beat-up Bedouin pickups, minibuses stuffed with workers – raced by a few feet away.

The big man launched a torrent of Arabic, ending with a question, definitely a question. The fingers of the outstretched hand implored: answer me! Harold, in spite of long evenings with his Arabic textbook before Annie’s arrival, could make nothing of this harangue. “I’m sorry, I don’t understand,” he said, trying to smile nicely. It only sparked another tirade. A customer leaving the pharmacy nearby regarded the two warily and went around. The blocking hand inched closer. Reflexively, Harold stepped back – and collided with another passerby, a local dressed in the modern style (loafers instead of sandals, neatly-pressed robe, headcloth arranged up off the ears); he patted Harold’s shoulder, apologized in English (“So sorry!”), already moving past.

Harold seized the man’s arm. “Please,” he gestured at the Egyptian, “ask what he wants.”

The local and the Egyptian, taken aback, stiffened, then exchanged greetings – Salaam Aleikum! – shaking hands as though Harold had just introduced them. The local asked a question, and the big man, suddenly abashed, answered meekly, an employee answering his boss. The local listened, nodding sympathetically, shooting Harold a reassuring glance: don’t worry, we’ll straighten this out.

Looking past the pair, Harold spotted his bus at the intersection. When the light changed, it would halt at the corner, then lurch onward – without Harold. He’d have to take a taxi, all because of this big lunk and some ridiculous misunderstanding.

The Egyptian, growing impassioned again, seemed to be begging for understanding – wouldn’t you be outraged? A pair of tall Sudanese with tribal scars on their cheeks stopped to listen, giving Harold fierce looks before moving on. The blocking hand had moved away, emphasizing points made to the local. At the intersection, the light changed. The inspiration came suddenly. Harold raised his arm, pointing into traffic. “Khatar!” he cried – danger! – the word popping into his mind from his phrasebook. The other two, startled, looked that way, and Harold sprinted past for all he was worth.

From the doorway of the bus, Harold glanced back, half expecting to see the Egyptian in pursuit, but the man stood at the same spot, arms hanging, looking more dejected than angry. The local, nearing the corner, flicked his headcloth and shrugged: don’t blame me!

A moment later, from his seat halfway back in the bus, Harold looked out and saw the Egyptian approaching. The big man raised his hands, imploring. Safe inside, Harold did something, like his sprint to the corner, inconceivable in his previous life in Scheuertown. Face pressed to the window, he gave a wide grin and, fingers wiggling, a mocking little wave. As the bus lurched away, the dwindling Egyptian raised his fists, shaking them furiously, not at Harold alone, it seemed, but at the sky, at everything.

 

The bus lumbered through the old city, passing Soudah park, a verdant rectangle amidst the drab, sand-colored buildings. Harold’d taken Annie to the park just the day before, and that memory added to his jubilant mood as the bus turned onto a wide boulevard lined with gleaming modern buildings, fountains, and palm trees. But the image of the Egyptian – the angry face, the blocking hand – lingered. Probably some beef about US foreign policy, something from TV or the papers. The wisdom Harold had acquired in his months there was that you navigated around such people, like steering a boat around snags in a river, which, in fact, he’d done pretty well just now. At least Annie hadn’t been there – the last thing he needed was some loony Egyptian frightening her away!

Putting his hand in his jacket pocket, Harold was briefly puzzled to feel a folded square of silky cloth inside. Then it came back: the black abaya he’d bought for Annie in case she got hassled at the airport… the image of another unhappy face replaced the Egyptian’s: Annie, in the exit from customs, scanning the arrival hall for Harold, beside her a soldier with a machine-pistol ensuring she didn’t run off on her own. Harold had waited for several hours in the crowd of locals in robes and foreign workers in orange coveralls, policemen all around, everyone jumpily eying each other.

“Find husband, bring him,” an old hand at the office had imitated a customs inspector telling an arriving wife, her passport held until she returned with her man. Or the husband’s name was read over the loudspeakers, which was why Harold, besides keeping an eye on the exit, had been straining to hear the address system’s every squawk, mostly so distorted he couldn’t tell what language it was.

But there was Annie. Spotting him, his wife of twenty-some years made a brusque gesture: get over here, buster! Hurrying over, he sidestepped her attempt at a serious hug (it just wasn’t done in public here) and followed the soldier in, dreading a bureaucratic snarl, the wrong signature or stamp. But after a glance at Harold’s residence permit the official waved them through.

Moments later they were in a taxi speeding into the desert night. He made no comment on how Annie was dressed, a short-sleeved blouse and bluejeans, to his new eyes a tad too formfitting. In his pocket, folded into a compact square, was the black abaya, the garment most Western women wore draped around their shoulders in public to appease the mutawaa, the religious police. A matter Harold had never quite managed to bring up with Annie. Luckily – no fanatic had challenged Annie’s immodesty – he hadn’t needed to take the abaya out.

They rode in silence into the sprawling capital, well-lit highways branching off in every direction like necklaces of light. Annie seemed hurt at Harold’s standoffishness, but as they entered the city she peered out the window with interest. Harold was realizing something that, focused on the abaya and other worries, he’d seen but not really grasped: the pleasantly chubby wife he’d left in Scheuertown was noticeably slimmer, had a toned-up look that could only come from constant workouts. Annie’d talked about it for years but never managed to stick to it. She’d also cut her hair short, shorter than ever in all their years of marriage.

Harold’s months in Arabia were among the most momentous in his life. He’d imagined Annie continuing her humdrum existence in their old house in Scheuertown, but it seemed those months had been equally momentous for her. She was still angry when he left, he knew that, for the first time he now imagined her anger, far from diminishing in his absence, actually intensifying as she worked out each day, pedaling furiously on the stationary bike, focusing on Harold like a boxer visualizing his opponent when he punches the bag….

In the lobby of Harold’s apartment building, they happened upon Larry and Marcia, an American expat couple in their mid-thirties, waiting for the elevator. After the silent taxi ride, Harold was grateful for the encounter. Marcia was the only other American woman in the building and although she was fifteen years younger than Annie, he had high hopes the two’d be friendly, especially since Marcia seemed so well adjusted to Arabian life. Indeed, tall and slim, one hand on a two-wheeled grocery cart, she stood smiling at Annie, unaffected by the long-sleeved, high-collared abaya she was wearing, covered in black but for a few inches of jeans peeking out below. After introductions the couples chatted about Annie’s flight and the travails of arrival.

“We better take our groceries upstairs,” Larry said finally. “But we’ll have you over soon.”

“We were just at the supermarket where you’ll probably do your shopping,” Marcia said.

“Really,” said Annie, and Harold knew instantly that the new, slimmed-down Annie wasn’t inclined to what the old Annie called biting my tongue. “In that getup I thought maybe you were returning from a Halloween party.”

“I see you won’t be coming over after all,” said Marcia, eyes flashing.

“Now, Marsh,” Larry chided, but when the elevator came, they got in while Harold and Annie waited – too much luggage for everyone to fit, Harold said.

Upstairs, Annie unpacked, hanging clothing in the large closet beside Harold’s few things. He hung his jacket, the abaya still folded in the pocket. Watching her move about, put things in the dresser, inspect the bathroom, he was suddenly overcome with fatigue, as though a narcotic had kicked in, more tired from his anticipation of her arrival than she by the long flight.

“I…I’m going to have to sleep,” he said, as Annie, nightgown in hand, headed for the bathroom for a quick shower. His short-haired slimmed-down wife stopped as though derailed – that’s the welcome I get after hours of planes and airports? – then sighed and said, “Okay, Harold.”

 

That morning in class, in the back of his mind Harold looked forward to having, for once, a tale to tell the guys during office hours – not, as he’d expected, about an incident at the airport with Annie, but about the loony Egyptian. He imagined himself imitating the big man, holding his arm out – halt! – taking Frankenstein steps. The guys’d be in stitches – a couple times his students clearly wondered what Teacher Harold was grinning about. But when office hours came that afternoon, the colleagues at their desks around the teachers’ room, drinking coffee, sharing the latest rumors, Harold visualized himself sprinting down the street and it no longer seemed funny. In fact, it seemed pathetic: scared little newcomer Harold, running away. He kept quiet about the Egyptian.

A couple colleagues took off early, leaving the others to cover if Dr Amoudi, the Vice-Dean, popped in to make sure the foreign teachers weren’t slacking off again. Harold had always done his obligatory daily office hours – why rush home to an empty apartment? Until recently afternoons had been too hot for his walks in the city anyway. He’d imagined leaving early once Annie arrived. But that morning, groggy with jetlag, she asked when he’d be back, and he’d said: “We’re in the office ‘til four.”

Tony Hewett, a thin, white-haired Brit, had the desk across from Harold. Hewitt, always in vested banker’s suits, was the department’s oldest hand; even other veterans asked his world-weary advice on navigating the bureaucracy. Nearby, at a desk wedged against the photocopier, Dan from Iowa, in his first job fresh out of grad school, sat typing at one of the office’s two computers.

Hewitt was holding forth about a colleague who’d been fired after one of his diplomas turned out to be a forgery. “Not a soul would’ve known but for a fit he threw in the Snake Pit” – Hewitt’s code for the personnel office – “about his housing allowance. That roused the sleeping vipers: hang on, let’s give this noisy bugger’s file another look.” Hewitt peered at Harold as though he was the one getting another look. “He was on a flight out within the week. Decent enough chap, really, only trying to leave the past behind.”

Hewitt, a chainsmoker, lit a cigarette and regarded Harold skeptically. “Very American idea, isn’t it? New start, frontier, Wild West sort of thing.” He leaned forward, his piercing blue eyes implying this had direct application to Harold. “Here in the Wild East, the past is always with us, like the poor according to the Pope. We’ve all got a past, a scandal, a defect perhaps, otherwise we’d not be here. I always ask about a colleague: Why’s he here? What’s he hiding?”

Young Dan looked over, grinning at another of Hewitt’s droll monologues. Harold felt as though a rubber-tipped arrow was quivering in the middle of his forehead – bullseye! Hewitt took a long pull on his Dunhill and smiled, suddenly sinister looking.

Harold had the impossible conviction: Hewitt knows. He saw himself back at Scheuertown High, in the hallway, wrestling with that smirking student, Blarty, the weasel-like girlfriend reaching to pull Harold’s hair, around them a circle of students, rapt, as though watching some special performance. Even now, Harold didn’t remember the moment he’d snapped – one minute he was trying to retrieve the gradebook that had disappeared from his desk, certain it was inside Blarty’s bookbag, then he was coming to with a jolt, atop Blarty’s chest. Nor did he have any memory of flinging the girlfriend into the lockers. Roger, the former principal, Harold’s boss for fifteen years, wouldn’t have forced him into retirement. Roger stood up for his teachers. Unfortunately, in the two years after Roger’s departure Harold had never cultivated his replacement, had never hidden the fact that he didn’t take the new principal – barely thirty-five, a kid really, spouting silly educational slogans – all that seriously….

Hewitt couldn’t know, no-one here could. It hadn’t appeared on Harold’s application, or in his recommendations, which showed him as a perfectly ordinary early retiree, bored with sitting around the house in Scheuertown, taking a job abroad. Hewitt couldn’t possibly know.

“I can’t imagine what I’d be hiding, Tony,” Harold finally managed. “I wouldn’t know about anyone else-”

“Oh quite,” said Hewitt, with a devilish smirk, “I was speaking generally.” He looked at Harold with an expression of shock. “My dear man, you can’t have thought I was referring to anyone personally?”

“Of course not,” Harold said.

“What on earth could young Dan here possibly have to hide?”

“Nothing,” said Harold under Hewitt’s ironic gaze. “Nothing at all.”

 

The girlfriend told the new principal her boyfriend had stood up for her after Harold tried to extort sex for a passing grade – the sliver of truth being that both Blarty and the little witch (she’d actually pulled out a clump of Harold’s hair) were on the verge of failing Harold’s American History class and needed to do something. The idea that Harold’d want anything to do with that repulsive creature was beyond laughable, not that it prevented the excuse for a principal from taking it perfectly seriously (“I must be evenhanded here, Harold, you do see that?” he asked in their last meeting). Annie’d always said she believed him, had reassured him repeatedly. Yet he found her studying him as though examining an object fallen from space. Suddenly together in the big old house all the time, they led separate lives. Annie in the family room watching TV (or, at least, sitting with the TV on), Harold in the study reading ancient history, his new passion.

Both daughters came home for Easter and held whispered conferences with Annie around the house. Harold wasn’t invited and when he passed conversation ceased. Young Angela peered at him much as her mother had: who is this man? The older daughter, Cindy, a grungy geek in college, now a sharp dresser and hard-headed high-tech salesperson, explained the facts of life.

“Did you know mom’s thinking of applying for jobs around town? Menial stuff or as a greeter? Her friends advise her to kick you out and sell the house. The bills keep coming, your savings are disappearing. I can help with Angela’s tuition, but you’ve still got a few years on the mortgage and the school district isn’t paying your health insurance anymore.” She gestured at the thick volume open in Harold’s lap. “You can’t sit around reading Gibbon for the rest of your life, daddy.”

A couple days later – in the last issue of his subscription to an education journal – he saw the ad: teachers, attractive tax-free salary, Arabian Peninsula….

 

Over there, restless in his apartment, the long evenings and weekends – even Gibbon unappealing – Harold wandered the streets. Not the gleaming new districts but the old town, its marketplaces crowded with human types and costumes from around the region, its narrow streets drawing him in spite of occasional hostile looks. Walking those streets became his routine. Strolling there, passing palm trees peeking over crumbling walls, crooked lanes of mud houses with crenellated rooftops, he often felt on the verge of understanding something, nothing he could state precisely (much less in words that’d make sense to Annie).

There were still long hours in the apartment when he missed her. Things didn’t seem real until he imagined telling her. But in their weekly phone calls, his biggest fear was her suddenly announcing: I’m not coming after all, see you in Scheuertown during summer vacation, and he never quite got around to mentioning things that would only upset her anyway. What if, when she came, she hated the place? He couldn’t make her feel what he did in the old city, but he could try to make sure nothing went wrong once she arrived.

 

That first weekend in his apartment, it became clear Annie’d come with a prosecutorial agenda, above all the question: why hadn’t he fought for his job instead of meekly taking early retirement? At the time, stunned by the entire turn of events, she’d accepted Harold’s arguments that it wasn’t such a bad deal, better to avoid lawyers and lawsuits. Apparently, brooding during his absence, during all those hours working out, she couldn’t get past that question: why didn’t you fight them? Harold had no new answer. Okay, she’d finally say, what’s done is done, but later she’d bring it up again. Sure, the checks he’d been sending home had ended their financial problems, but at what cost? He was here in this awful place, if she stayed it meant giving up everything else in her life: daughters, house, friends. If only he’d fought for his job….

He’d never told Annie how relieved he’d been to be forced out. In the last few years at Scheuertown High, students had paid about as much attention to him as to some nut holding forth in the city park in summer, like picnickers oblivious to someone mumbling as he stumbled past. His students slept, talked on their cellphones, texted, listened to headphones, while he went on about Valley Forge or Gettysburg. He’d developed the habit of fixing his eyes on the clock high on the rear wall, talking to that clock, sometimes so focused on it he came to with a start when the period buzzer sounded (no doubt why he hadn’t actually seen Blarty snatch the gradebook).

Three days after the incident, officially on paid leave, in a conference room with the boy principal and the lawyers (one from the teachers’ union plus a local Republican worthy on the school board), Harold was astonished to feel an immense joy welling up, as though he were a prisoner unexpectedly paroled, when he understood they were forcing him to retire. But even as he struggled to hide the elation surging to burst out, he knew Annie wouldn’t understand.

Now, facing the new Annie, he simply stated, lowkey, his case for Arabia: colleagues of mine’ve been here for years, have a tolerable life; we can, too. A slow life, with time to get to know each other again. It’s too late for my old job, but I can get through two or three years here, save a lot of money. Then my pension will start, the house’ll be paid off.  Even after listening to him lay this out, once he paused, Annie’d start up again: if only you’d….

A day and a half of that, cooped up, felt long. A stroll to get out, to stretch their legs, show Annie the neighborhood, seemed natural. Harold worried about unpleasant incidents: any stray fanatic, deciding to enforce public morality, could walk up and announce: ‘Your wife must cover.’ He still hadn’t brought up the abaya, folded in his pocket. Sunlight streamed through the windows as the noon prayer call echoed from nearby mosques. Annie listened wide-eyed to the sound, huge, raw. Harold reflected: it was the day of worship, shops were closed all afternoon, the one time in the week hardly anyone was around. “How about a walk?”

“I was wondering what a girl had to do to get asked out around here!” Annie put on a light trenchcoat that, falling to mid-calf, approximated modest dress. Harold could have hugged her. Outside, they were nearly alone walking along usually bustling Khazzan Street. Harold pointed out the shops – the grocery, the Lebanese bakery, the butcher’s, the barber’s – all dark with their grilles pulled down. It was pleasantly warm for a walk, but there wasn’t much else to see. He didn’t want to take her through the old city just yet.

Then he remembered Soudah park a couple blocks further. On weekends the main section was packed with male Asian workers sitting on the grass, huddled together, laughing. The park’s northern end, behind high hedges inside wrought-iron fences, was a ‘family area,’ open only to women and children and their male relatives. Unaccompanied men were rebuffed at the gates. Harold had once earned a guard’s warning when he tried to peer inside.

“I could never go in by myself,” he told Annie as they walked up to the entrance. “You’re my chaperone.” She gave a puzzled smile, not appreciating his excitement.

A tall Sudanese guard stood at the gate. Inside, a gravel pathway snaked past a dozen benches, creating nooks where visitors faced the hedges, away from the path. In the center was a playground: swings, a slide, and painted, bobbing animals with seats. A kebab stand was next to a booth selling soft drinks and cotton candy.

Women and girls outnumbered the boys who played at the playground while the girls sat with their mothers. Half a dozen bored adult men sat scattered on benches, their wives in groups talking animatedly. Most women wore black, a few full veils; only Annie had her hair uncovered. Younger girls, some holding smiley-face balloons from the candy stand, wore frilly dresses and ribbons in their hair.

At the kebab stand Harold ordered Annie her first local food. As they stood eating falafels, a girl of ten or so, buying cotton candy, stared at Annie. “Hello, lady!” she said in schoolbook English, then ran off, giggling. Moments later, she was back, holding her hand out to Annie. “Please, lady, speak with mother my!” She led Annie over to two women and another girl on a bench. Harold clearly wasn’t invited and he looked about for a bench. Annie and her friends were joined by another woman entirely in black except for her face, a pale oval; she sat on a blanket facing them. Their conversation took off.

“Please, sir, to be seated!”  A man in a faded pinstriped suit, sporting a well-trimmed little moustache, beckoned Harold to his bench. Another abandoned husband, he was a retired Egyptian judge, now working in a local commercial court. Most cases, he explained, were foreign investors or workers suing locals for breach of contract. “Cases are simple in Egypt,” he said, “here they’re even simpler: the foreigner’s always wrong! But never fear,” he said, clapping Harold on the shoulder, “I guarantee any foreigner the right to lose a case in my court!”

Harold listened to the judge’s stories of locals fleecing foreign partners. Fifteen minutes later, he looked around, trying to pick out Annie’s trenchcoat, but every woman in sight was shrouded in black or dark blue. “Where’s my wife?” he cried, on his feet.

The judge, evidently accustomed to recognizing covered wives, eventually pointed at a group of women. “There, I think.” Heart thumping, Harold made out Annie, enshrouded in a black abaya, beingfitted with a headscarf by the cotton-candy girl. A moment later his piously covered wife spotted him standing there staring and waved both hands enthusiastically: look at me! Isn’t this fun? He waved back in a daze.

Annie’s girl linked arms with another girl and started dancing the steps of some Middle Eastern dance. The other women clapped their hands in rhythm, and Annie joined in. Vaguely saying goodbye to the judge, Harold walked toward the women as though floating on the park’s well-watered grass, giddy as he watched Annie clap with the others. After his endless fretting, here was his wife wearing an abaya, her new haircut beneath a headscarf, having the time of her life; in his pocket he felt the abaya he’d never dared show her.  It seemed so funny Harold was overcome with laughter. Gasping, he sank to his knees.

A boy approached, concerned: was mister all right? His laughter a breathless heaving, Harold wheezed “My wife!” and pointed at the clapping women, where Annie swayed with the others. The sight set off a new laughing fit. One woman ululated, the otherworldly sound adding to the unreality.

Suddenly, from around the park, angry husbands arrived. Arguments flared. The women talked back, with a tone of ‘are you serious?’ but before long wives and daughters were being hustled away. The men kept looking Harold’s way, and he had the bizarre impression their anger somehow focused on him.

He stood, his laughter fading to hiccups. Annie, beside him now, slapped his back. She no longer wore the abaya, but still had the scarf over her hair. “Was I that funny?”

“It wasn’t you,” he said hoarsely. “It’s hard to explain.” They headed out, nearly the last ones. The others had left as though fleeing a crime scene.

“That was really fun, Har,” she said, taking his arm. “What a great idea to come here!”

“I’m glad you enjoyed it.” They walked back along Khazzan Street. “Did they give you the headscarf?”

Annie reached up, surprised to find the scarf still there. “Why, I forgot all about it in the rush at the end…” She brightened. “But I have their address, they said it’s not far. I can return it when I visit.” She gave Harold a little smile. “They’re going to teach me bellydancing.”

“That should be fun.” As they came up to his building, Harold experienced a worry-free glow along with the odd sensation of having a chastely covered woman on his arm. In his pocket, he felt the silkiness of the folded abaya. For the moment he left it there.

 

In the afternoon bus home, Harold watched Soudah park go by and smiled at the memory. At his stop, squinting in the afternoon sun, he got out near the very spot where the big loony had stood shaking his fists. The sidewalk was busy with people trying to finish shopping before stores closed for late afternoon prayer. He’d promised Annie he’d pick up some groceries and headed into the little grocery store. Twenty minutes later, holding his briefcase and a bag of groceries, he walked past the pharmacy and the bakery. The prayer call sounded, fierce, mournful, as Harold passed the butcher’s doorway, where a man in a green smock was reaching up to roll down the storefront grille. A voice boomed, and Harold was grabbed and spun around. The big Egyptian, angry as ever, stood wagging his hand in Harold’s face. Whee? the man demanded, towering over him. Whee?

Harold felt anger rising – even he could take only so much – when he noticed the man’s smock, spotless that morning, now splotched with brown – no, reddish brown. He was covered with blood! And, in his left hand, a long knife, bigger than any household knife, not brandished, just dangling there.

At some level Harold understood the big man was a butcher. He worked in the butcher shop, which explained the bloodstains and his appearance there: he’d seen Harold passing and hurried out, knife in hand, as innocent as Harold leaving a classroom holding a piece of chalk. He wasn’t waving the knife, wasn’t threatening Harold with it. Yet Harold’s chest constricted, his heart pounded, the entire scene – the shops, the angry face, the wagging hand – flashed and bounced as though in a strobe light.

Harold turned and fled. Something grabbed his jacket but he threw his weight forward and, with a tearing sound, pulled free. He raced down the sidewalk, people moving aside, faces looming eerily, past his usual crossing place, down the long block until, abruptly, the sidewalk ended. He found himself facing plywood thrown up around a construction site. Traffic zoomed by right there, leaving no place to walk.

Harold looked back. The Egyptian stood in front of the butcher shop, hands hanging, nearly alone on the street. Then he turned and disappeared, inside the butcher’s apparently. Harold slumped against the plywood, catching his breath. Cars sped by. A pair of Yemenis in colored skirts jogged across, laughing at close calls. The hell with this! Harold decided, and ran through a gap in traffic. Horns blared, but he made it, and felt a surge of exhilaration. At the door of his building, he remembered the groceries, and quickly looked himself over: he was clutching his briefcase but the bag of groceries was nowhere in sight.

 

After getting off the bus, he told Annie, he’d come within inches of being run over by a speeding car. He’d fallen, tearing his jacket, so rattling him he’d forgotten to buy groceries. She readily believed him: “You’re so pale, Harold, I knew something was wrong the minute you came in. The last time you looked like that was, well, you know, the day of the incident…”

“Dammit anyway,” he said, stamping his foot. “They drive like maniacs here!”

Annie understood that he didn’t feel like going out again. They’d go shopping tomorrow. Harold removed his jacket – his favorite – and Annie inspected the damage. It was torn from beneath the sleeve all the way down to the pocket. Then Harold noticed that the sole of his right shoe hung flapping, separated from the upper. “Damn that big oaf!”

“Big oaf?”

“The driver, I mean.”

“What’s this, Harold?” Annie was unfolding the abaya from his jacket pocket.

“I…I bought that for you… in case you wanted one.”

“You want me to wear this?”

“Only if you want to.” Seeing her face harden, he said: “Look, I almost got run over just now, can we talk about it later?”

“Okay, Harold,” she said evenly. “We’ll talk about it later.”

 

The next morning he walked to a bus stop blocks away from the butcher shop, and that afternoon got off at the same distant stop. At the apartment, Annie was waiting to go shopping. He led her a ways down Khazzan Street before crossing over and doubling back. She wanted some things at the pharmacy first. Afterwards, standing with her peering into the bakery window, he nearly jumped every time someone came out of the butcher shop further along.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “What did you say?” Annie was staring at him.

“Can we go to the butcher shop?”

“Uh, actually, that place has always looked unsanitary to me.”

“Didn’t you say they had good sliced turkey there?”

“Did I say that? It’s just… They have all these, you know, actual animals, with fur and eyes and tongues, hanging in there…like some zoo of the dead. It’s unsettling.”

She eyed him uncertainly. “I really wanted to get some sandwich meats. I don’t eat at the faculty cafeteria every day. I can’t exist on pastry and yogurt, Harold.”

“Tell you what,” he blurted, “you go in there, buy all the meat you want! I’ll get started in the grocery store on the corner. When you’re done, come find me!”

“But you said I shouldn’t go around alone, to avoid getting hassled by the religious police-”

“Not in the butcher shop. Don’t worry about the religious police in the butcher shop.” He patted her shoulder.  “It’ll be fine.” He hurried off as she stared after him.

Inside the grocery store, he pushed one of their small shopping carts along an aisle.

“Please, mister,” said someone with an Arabic accent, behind him. Harold whirled clumsily, sending cereal boxes tumbling. It was Saleh, a little Yemeni, the shop manager. He and Harold had become friendly, exchanging greetings and pleasantries. He regarded Harold with concern.

“Everything okay, mister?”

“Just fine, Saleh.” He picked up cereal boxes, replacing them. “Sorry.”

“No problem, mister.”

Saleh held out a grocery bag to Harold.

“Your grocery.”

“Excuse me?”

“From yesterday.”

Peering in the bag, Harold saw his groceries from the day before.

“I left these in here?”

“No, butcher bring. He find and bring for you.”

“The butcher?”  Harold asked dumbly.

“Yes, Egypt butcher. Big,” said Saleh, raising a hand high, “two of me. He bring for you.”

“Well…how nice of him.… Thank you, Saleh.”

“Welcome, mister,” said Saleh, backing away with a little bow.

Harold stared at the bag, then put it in his cart.

A moment later Annie arrived. “What’s in there?” she asked, pointing at the bag.

“Ah…I …I already paid for some things. Now I’m shopping some more.”

“Are you all right, Harold?” She gave him her inspecting look.

“I’m just fine. It’s hard to explain. Let’s just shop, okay?” He heard sharpness in his voice and tried to smile.

“Okay, Harold.” Further along the aisle, she said: “You were right about the butcher shop.”

“Oh?  It was unsanitary-”

“No, it was unsettling. One of the butchers, a big man with a beard, holding this big knife, ogled me the whole time I was there, like the mere sight of a Western woman made him angry. It was unsettling.”

“That does sound …unpleasant.”

“I almost gave him a piece of my mind, but it seemed best to avoid trouble. It’s more than unpleasant to be ogled like that. I can’t imagine getting used to it.”

“Well, there are some unpleasant characters here…we’ll avoid that shop.”

When they’d paid, Saleh held the door open as they left with their bags.

“Bye, mister! You can thank big butcher!” Saleh said, pointing down the street.

“Sure,” said Harold quickly, “no problem! Bye!”

“What did he say about the butcher, Harold?”

“Nothing, don’t worry about it.”

“He said ‘big butcher,’ that-”

“Annie”, he said, putting one bag down and grasping her wrist, harder than he intended, “you must understand, people say crazy things here, things that don’t mean anything! You just have to ignore it, okay?”

“This is the place you want me to stay?”

“Well, no…I mean, yes, I want you to stay, but…. Can we talk about this later, instead of on the corner with our groceries?” He picked up the bag and started walking.

“Harold, where are you going?”

“Back to the apartment.”

“Your building’s over there. Why are you going the other way?”

“I…I like to walk this way. It’s further, but…”

“You want to go for a walk carrying all these groceries?” She gave him a look, then took his elbow. “Come on, Harold,” she said, leading him toward the butcher shop.

“Ah…oh,” he mumbled, reluctantly going. Just then, the Egyptian came out.

“That’s him!” said Annie. “The one who ogled me!”

The big man strode toward them, hand held up: halt! Harold dropped one bag, grabbed Annie’s arm, backing away. Then he saw, in the man’s other hand, not the knife but a cleaver. He threw his remaining bag at the advancing Egyptian and dragged Annie with him. Her bag of groceries fell, spilling onto the sidewalk. “Run!” he cried, pulling Annie into the street, holding up a hand as he dragged her through traffic. Horns of speeding cars blared past them.

“Harollld!” Annie cried, but let him pull her along until they reached his building. There, she yanked her arm free. “Have you lost your mind?”

He pointed behind her. Down the block, now on their side of the street, the Egyptian was coming.

“But what does he want?” she asked, raising both hands to her face.

“Who knows? He’s a crazy Egyptian!”

Thirty feet away, the man strode toward them, face set with determination.

Harold pushed through the doors. “Quick, get upstairs, inside the apartment! I’ll lead him away.” Starting across the foyer, Harold saw the office of the manager, a local who wheeled and dealed in everything from cars to real estate. Various uniformed men, police or military, relatives and pals, often hung out there, lounging around with their shoes off, drinking tea.

The Egyptian loomed outside. Harold ran for the office. The manager and two other men, one in a khaki uniform with a gold star on each shoulder, looked up in surprise at Harold’s sudden entrance, growing more astonished as he rambled: “Egyptian! Coming! Help!”

Then the Egyptian was in the doorway. “Help!” cried Harold, dodging around the manager’s desk. At the sight of the locals the big man was suddenly abashed. Everyone stood, exchanged politenesses: Salaam Aleikum!  Aleikum Salaam!

The policeman did the questioning. The larger Egyptian seemed unable to look him in the eye. The officer turned to Harold. “What he did to you exactly?”

“Harassed me on the street! Yesterday! Today! With a knife! Look-” Harold started to point at the cleaver, but the big man’s hands hung at his sides, empty.

“He say you laugh at his wife in Soudah park.”

“Laugh? Me?”

“Yes. In park, you point at his wife and laugh. He want to know why.”

“Whee?” the Egyptian asked, glaring at Harold. “Whee?”

“He ask why you laugh at her,” the policeman said, “why his wife is funny.”

“But…I wasn’t laughing at her. I was laughing at…my own wife.”

The locals looked at each other as though this was the craziest thing yet, but it was translated. Suddenly the big man’s body was shaking, his face in his hands. The policeman put an arm around him, patting his shoulder. Speaking softly, he led the Egyptian out. The manager gave Harold an indulgent look and shrugged.

Harold shuffled out, lightheaded. Beside the door, Annie was leaning against the wall, listening. He started to speak, but seeing her face, he stopped, knowing nothing would keep her from leaving. Then he saw himself, returning from seeing her off at the airport, wandering the old city’s narrow streets in search of an inkling, of some glimpse of illumination.

Matt and Irene’s daughter Lizzie was away at a slumber party – an Astronomers’ Party, she and her friends called it; they were going to stay up late and record in their Star Books all the planets and constellations they could identify, and any flying saucers that happened to be in the neighborhood.  As far as Matt and Irene could tell, the sixth grade, under the eccentric guidance of their teacher Mrs. Kemnitzer, was spending one hundred percent of its time discussing the moons of Jupiter, the rings of Saturn, and the fact – so Mrs. Kemnitzer claimed – that President Eisenhower himself was a believer in life on other planets, though he wouldn’t come right out and admit it.

Or maybe it only seemed that way.  Lizzie tended to be obsessive in her interests, and Mrs. Kemnitzer’s Star Book assignment had caught her attention in a way Matt and Irene hadn’t seen since she’d thrown herself body and soul into the study of ballet.  It was possible that Mrs. Kemnitzer tossed a bit of social studies and math into the curriculum now and then, but if she did, there was no evidence of it.

The thought of Lizzie out doing something creative and adventurous made Matt feel restless.  He was envious of his own daughter – when he was a child, the world’s imagination had not yet been captured by the notion of UFOs and life on other planets.  He could only imagine the collective fear and excitement Lizzie and her friends were experiencing tonight, peering up at the night sky that teemed with so much life and possibility.

With Lizzie gone, the house was unnaturally quiet.  Sitting across from Irene at dinner, Matt felt strangely off-kilter, and he suspected Irene did too, both of them searching for topics of conversation the way they’d done when they were first dating and still shy with each other.  After dinner he tried to settle in with the evening paper, still feeling edgy, and saw in the movie listings that The Magnificent Seven had just opened at the Esquire Theatre. “That’s a movie I’d like to see sometime,” he’d said.  Irene, after a pause, said, “Well, it doesn’t start for half an hour.  We can make it if we go right now.  We can leave the dishes till later.”  He looked up from the paper, surprised.  Irene was a planner; she never suggested doing things spontaneously.  He couldn’t remember a single time in their entire marriage that she’d let the dishes go unwashed after dinner.

Irene didn’t especially like westerns, and he assumed she’d suggested the movie just to be nice, because she knew it was something he wanted to do.  But during the movie, Matt cast sidelong glances at her, and each time she was watching with rapt attention, her eyes never leaving the screen.  He didn’t catch her yawning, or looking at her watch, even once.

Afterwards, Irene took his hand as they walked out of the theater, and that was unusual too.  She’d always been uncomfortable showing affection in public, even when they were first dating.  “You know what would be fun?” she said.  “To go to Wong’s.  We didn’t have much for dinner.  Fried rice sounds good, don’t you think?  That barbecued pork with the hot mustard.  Egg foo yung.  I could eat an order of chop suey all by myself.  Are you hungry?”

Irene had less interest in food than anyone Matt knew.  Sometimes he thought that if she didn’t have him and Lizzie to cook for, she would forget to eat half the time.

The prospect of a late dinner out sounded fun, adventurous, something they never did.  “Starved,” he said.

There was a big crowd, by their town’s standards, spilling out of the theatre.  The movie really had been exciting, and, as everyone walked out together, the air sparkled with energy, a rare occurrence in McClary, where the liveliest thing that usually happened on a Friday night was bored teenagers dragging Main, blaring Elvis out of their car radios and making nuisances of themselves.  But tonight it felt to Matt like he and Irene were on vacation in a big city, part of an after-Broadway-play throng.

The other movie-goers seemed to have the same idea as Irene – a late dinner, a drink at the Tam O’Shanter, an ice cream soda at the Corner Drug Store if it was still open.  When Matt and Irene walked down Sixth Street toward Main, most of the crowd drifted along with them.  Matt was relieved that there was no one in the crowd he and Irene knew, no pressure to stop and make conversation.  It heightened the feeling of being in the midst of an after-theatre city crowd – bustling, comforting anonymity.

The night was surprisingly warm for late September, and Irene wore a soft white sweater with pearl buttons – no coat, as though she’d known it would be a warm night.  Helping her on with it after the movie, Matt had been surprised by how soft the sweater was, like cashmere.  Irene didn’t bother much about clothes, and he hadn’t known she owned such an elegant sweater.  He couldn’t remember ever seeing it before.

The warmth of the night was a gift.  “It feels like being on vacation, doesn’t it?” said Irene, echoing his thoughts as she often did.  She squeezed his hand.  “You know how when you’re on vacation, and you only have a few days, the weather is so important?  Every day counts double because there are so few of them.  And when you have a warm day, or a warm night like tonight, you feel lucky.  Extra lucky.”

It was as if those words – extra lucky – triggered something in Irene.  (But this he realized only later, thinking back after it was all over.)  She wrenched her hand free from Matt’s and darted ahead through the crowd, dropping her handbag.  That was how he knew something was truly wrong – Irene never let go of her handbag.  He’d teased her about it, the way she always clutched it to her as though afraid of being robbed.  She jostled people as she ran.  “Hey,” someone said, sounding angry.  And someone else said, “Watch where you’re going, lady!”

In an instant the mood in the air changed from celebratory to annoyed, and then to something else.  Irene’s urgency spread through the crowd like smoke.  Matt’s eyes were on the man who’d said, “Watch where you’re going, lady,” and when the man looked up, Matt looked up too.  Just in time to see something fall from the sky.

* * *

            The next day, Saturday, around five, Matt and Irene’s uphill neighbors Paul and Helen Brashler called within minutes of the evening paper’s arrival, as Matt could have predicted they would.  “I can’t believe this!” Helen said.  “You have to come up for drinks right this minute and tell us all about it.”  Matt knew, from the familiar flirtatious-but-determined tone in Helen’s voice, that there was no point in resisting.  Anyway, even if Helen hadn’t insisted, he would have said yes; Irene hadn’t wanted to talk about last night, but Matt thought it would be good for her to be forced to put her feelings into words.

Usually it was Paul’s picture in the McClary News Herald, or Helen’s.  Paul was president of the Downtown Merchants’ Association, the Elks Club and a couple of lesser clubs, and he was a member of the City Council.  He was also a pal of Chuck Teeters, the News Herald’s editor, and Chuck often called Paul when he needed a quote.  Helen’s pretty face regularly graced what passed for the News Herald’s society page.  Everyone said Helen looked just like Natalie Wood.  Matt and Irene’s pictures had never appeared in the paper – Chuck Teeters was not interested in the doings or the opinions of a couple of underpaid social workers.

The newspaper was spread out on the Brashlers’ wet bar when Matt and Irene arrived.  Irene’s picture was on the front page – though, with her face turned away from the camera, you wouldn’t know it was her without the caption.  Matt was in the picture too, in the background, looking a little foolish holding Irene’s handbag; somehow amidst the chaos, he’d had the presence of mind to pick it up from the sidewalk.

Paul was already pouring their scotch and sodas.  “Why so camera shy, Irene?” he asked as he set her drink before her with a bartender’s flourish.  Paul liked making drinks for people; he often joked that if Brashler Furniture ever went bankrupt, he would apply for a job mixing drinks at the Tam O’Shanter.  He could joke about such things; Brashler Furniture was so successful that Paul could, and did, buy a new car every year.  He bought expensive presents for Helen, like diamond earrings and mink stoles.

“I didn’t want my picture taken,” said Irene, and touched her fingers to her forehead.  “I told that reporter, but he did it anyway.  Are they allowed to do that?  To take your picture if you don’t want them to?”

Irene had spent the day in the garage, refinishing a table she’d bought for two dollars at a flea market.  Matt had observed over the years that the furniture-refinishing was not so much a hobby for Irene as a retreat – she occasionally needed those hours of solitude in the garage, and tended to go there when she was upset or needed to think something through.  Sitting next to her now at the Brashlers’ bar, Matt smelled an odd, rather tantalizing, combination of paint thinner and Ivory soap.  She had a smudge of sky-blue paint on her cheek.

“‘Accidental Heroine,’” said Helen.  “What a headline.  It just makes me furious.  It’s so like Chuck Teeters to be grudging.  Why can’t he give credit where credit is due?”

“It was accidental,” said Irene, sounding irritated.  “There was nothing heroic about it.  It just happened.  Anyone would have done the same thing.”

“No, they wouldn’t,” said Helen.  Her voice was louder and more impassioned than usual; Matt wondered if she was on her second scotch.  “I’ve been thinking about this ever since I read the article, and I think it’s a matter of who you are.  At times like that, it’s a matter of who you are.  Don’t you think so, Paul?  Most people would react by flinching and ducking and trying to get out of the way.  My first reaction would be that something was about to come crashing down on my head – a brick or a pane of glass.  Self-preservation.  That would be almost anyone’s first instinct.”

“Helen’s right,” said Paul.  “I couldn’t have reacted the way you did, Irene.  Incredible reflexes.  Quick thinking.  Not to mention the bravery.”

“Oh, I hate this, I hate it,” said Irene.  “Can we please talk about something else?”

“And anyway,” Matt said, “it wasn’t like that.”

Everyone turned to him, curious, even Irene.

He felt slow-witted, only now putting everything together.  How easy it was for things to get distorted, for stories to change and shift.  Matt himself had been an eyewitness, and yet when Irene had said to the police officer who arrived so quickly on the scene, “It was just luck.  I was in the right place at the right time,” Matt and everyone believed her.  It had all happened so fast – time a jumble instead of a clear straight line – that Matt hadn’t trusted his own senses.  And when Irene’s statement to the police was quoted in the newspaper, set in print, that was that.

“What I mean is,” Matt said slowly, “you are brave.  I didn’t mean you weren’t.  But it wasn’t a reaction.  You didn’t react.  You acted.  You ran toward that building, Irene.  Before the child ever fell.  As if you knew what was going to happen.”

* * *

            In her white sweater, alone, running ahead of the crowd, reaching up and out, Irene had looked like a ghost in the dark.  There were gasps from the crowd, and shouting, though no one yet realized exactly what was happening.

Matt ran to her.  He jostled people as she had jostled them, but now everyone drew aside to let him pass, as though he were someone official and important.  He arrived in time to steady her.  She leaned against Matt, regained her balance, stood straight, cradling the baby who’d just fallen from the sky.

Not quite a baby.  A toddler, heavy in her arms, a little boy with black hair, staring up at her, stunned, and then, miraculously, laughing.  Infectious, gleeful laughter, as though this were some wonderful game.  Matt glanced up again and saw something in a second story window.  A face, maybe, or maybe just the flutter of a curtain.

* * *

            After Matt’s words, nobody said anything.  Even Paul, never at a loss for something to say, was silent.  Finally Helen, her eyes wide, said, “Maternal instinct.  That’s what it had to be.  I’m not a mother, so I can only imagine, but I’ll bet that’s what it was.  You’re a mother, and you had some sort of heightened sensitivity.  You felt something was going to happen to a child.  A kind of ESP that only a mother would have.”

“I don’t believe in ESP,” Irene said, sounding annoyed.  She put a hand to her cheek, then rubbed it.  “Oh, lord,” she said, “do I still have paint on my face?  Why didn’t anyone tell me?”

“We thought it was cute,” said Paul.

“It is cute,” said Helen.

Matt agreed.  He had never quite gotten used to the fact that Irene spent so little time on her looks.  She was a pretty woman, but Matt himself sometimes forgot that.  It was possible that if Irene spent as much time on clothes and make-up as Helen did, and if she stood straight and proud instead of slouching, she would get noticed the way Helen did.  Helen probably couldn’t imagine what it would be like to spend so little time looking in a mirror that you didn’t know you had paint on your face.

Irene glared at all three of them.  “Honestly.  I’m going to the bathroom to wash it off.”

“She is a heroine,” Helen said softly when Irene had stalked off.  “She’s just being modest.  I can tell she doesn’t want to talk about it, but that child would have died if she hadn’t been there.  She did sense what was going to happen.  I have always known there was something extraordinary about Irene.  Right from the very beginning.  Haven’t I always said that, Paul?”

Paul nodded, and Matt looked at them both in surprise.  It had never occurred to him that the Brashlers spent any time talking about them.  When he went out on their front porch with Lizzie after dinner to help her search for planets and UFOs to record in her Star Book, they sometimes looked up at the lights in the Brashlers’ showplace house above them, and listened to the splashing fountain in the Brashler’s reflection pool.  It had never occurred to him that the Brashlers would have any interest in looking down on their bungalow, their sagging front porch, or that the Brashlers thought about them at all except as the downhill neighbors who could be counted on to feed the cat when they were away, or to come up when they were in the mood for an impromptu drinks-before-dinner party.

He wondered how the subject of Irene’s extraordinariness had come up.

* * *

             What happened after Irene caught the child in her arms was a blur.  Matt must have made his own statement to the police, though he couldn’t remember for the life of him what he’d said.  The reporter had arrived on the scene, breathless, badgering everyone with questions.  The frantic parents had shown up (Mr. and Mrs. Scott Chilcote, the paper said – a name that sounded vaguely familiar, but maybe not – McClary was such a small town that most names were vaguely familiar), and the child, Ryan, suddenly turned shy and scared, and buried his face in Irene’s neck, so that his own mother had to pry him away.

“A fifteen-year-old babysitter, the paper says,” said Paul.  “They don’t give her name. Says she had no idea the window was open.  Says she just looked away for a minute.”

“A minute’s all it takes,” said Helen.  She clicked her little gold lighter and gazed into its flame for a moment before she lit her cigarette.

When Irene returned, her cheeks were scrubbed pink, but there was still the faint shadow of the blue paint smudge – she hadn’t been able to get it all off.

“All I know is,” said Paul, “I wouldn’t leave a child of mine with a fifteen-year-old.”

“Oh, Paul.  That’s easy for you to say,” said Helen.  “It’s easy to pass judgment when you don’t have any children.  When I used to babysit, I’d sneak boyfriends over, play music, dance.  I was so irresponsible.  It’s frightening to think about it now.  I’m lucky nothing like this ever happened to me.  Purely lucky.”

“It’s true.  Parents always take risks when they hire a babysitter,” said Irene.  “Remember that grandmotherly woman we hired once when Lizzie was little, Matt?  We thought she’d be so reliable, and then she fell asleep on the sofa with a lighted cigarette and almost burned the house down.”  Irene stopped short, pursed her lips.  “Oh, please,” she said, “let’s do talk about something else.”

“Look,” said Helen, pointing.  “The weather’s changing.”  She gave a little shiver, and her gold bracelets chimed.  They all turned away from their drinks to look out the sliding glass doors at the gathering darkness.  Matt caught a glimpse of Bunny, the Brashlers’ fat tabby cat, stalking something in the grass, looking wild.

“Threatening,” said Paul.  He turned back to his drink, lit a cigarette.  The first drops fell against the glass.

What if last night had been like tonight? Matt thought.  There wouldn’t have been that restless, Indian-summer feeling in the air.  They’d have stayed home and watched “77 Sunset Strip” as they usually did.  There would have been no one to catch a child falling from a window.

On the other hand, if last night had been like tonight, maybe no one would have opened that window in the Chilcotes’ apartment in the first place.  It would have been too cold and wet.

Matt and Irene’s home, so much smaller and more modest than the Brashlers’, was cozier than the Brashlers’ on a rainy night.  Matt glanced at Helen, who was often alone in the evenings while Paul went to his City Council meetings and his Elks meetings.  A five-thousand-square-foot house was too large for one person, especially on a rainy night.  But Paul didn’t seem to going anywhere tonight, and that was good.  Helen wouldn’t be alone.

“We should go, Matt,” said Irene.  “It’s going to start pouring any minute, and we didn’t bring umbrellas.”

“Have one for the road,” Paul urged, as he always did.  “It’s a short walk home, and we can loan you umbrellas.”

Paul always hated to see his guests leave.  It was why he was such a popular host, the life of every party.  Even when it was just the four of them getting together for impromptu drinks before dinner, he made it seem like a party, and he never wanted it to end.  Matt and Irene had learned the hard way that they had to be firm with Paul.  Early in their friendship there’d been too many hangovers the next morning after that one for the road, and then another one for the road, just because they hadn’t wanted to be rude.

“No,” said Irene.  “We really do have to go.  Lizzie’s home, and I don’t want her to be alone.”

“Of course you don’t,” said Helen.  “I’ll bet you don’t want to let her out of your sight after what happened last night.  We understand.”  Paul helped Irene on with her coat.  A raincoat, Matt noticed, as though she had known the weather would turn.

* * *

            Later that night in bed – the rain had subsided to a light pattering against the window that would normally have lulled Matt right to sleep – he said to Irene, who was working, or pretending to work, a crossword puzzle, “I’d forgotten about Mrs. Nash – that was her name, wasn’t it?  That grandmotherly babysitter when Lizzie was little.  She would have burned the house down, if you hadn’t had a feeling something was wrong and insisted that we cut our evening short and go home.  I remember that I was annoyed.  I thought you were being overprotective.  And then when it turned out you were right – well, I thought, what a lucky coincidence.”

Irene yawned and put aside the crossword puzzle.  “Yes.  I remember that.  The rain sounds soothing against the window, doesn’t it?  Good sleeping weather.”  She turned out her light.

“But it wasn’t a coincidence, was it?” he said after a minute, in the dark.

He heard her sigh.  “You’re not really going to pursue this, are you, Matt?”

“Maybe Helen’s right.  Maternal instinct, a kind of ESP only mothers have.  Except there’ve been other times.  That time we were going to drive to the coast for the weekend, before Lizzie was even born, and at the last minute you said you had a headache and we stayed home.  And the very next day the axle broke on the car on the way to the grocery store, and the mechanic said if we’d been driving any faster, both the back wheels would probably have spun off.  We said, how lucky we hadn’t been at the coast, on one of those winding roads high above the ocean.  You didn’t have a headache at all, did you?  You never have headaches.”

“Oh, Matt.”  She sounded exasperated.

“And what about the time Paul was telling us about the new salesman he was about to hire, and you suddenly warned him he should have the man’s references checked more thoroughly, and sure enough it turned out the guy had a criminal record.  I thought it was strange at the time – so unlike you to give Paul unsolicited advice about his business – but I thought, well, that’s just Irene being cautious and practical.”

“If I’m so prescient, why do I bother to work crossword puzzles?  If I have ESP, I should know the answers already.  Why didn’t I know I had paint on my face tonight?  I’m tired, Matt.  Please let’s go to sleep.”  She turned over, her back to him, the way she did when she was angry.

A year or so ago, Lizzie had gone through a period where she found it necessary to recount movie plots to Matt and Irene.  She would come home from the Esquire Theatre, breathless with excitement, and treat them to excruciating blow-by-blow accounts.  It seemed to be a universal phase children went through, and Matt and Irene indulged Lizzie as graciously as they could manage.  One of the movies, Matt recalled, featured a man who marries a beautiful young woman.  When the newlyweds give their first dinner party, and while everyone is enjoying cocktails in the living room, the beautiful young wife excuses herself to go and check on dinner.  After a few minutes, one of the guests discovers that the ice in his drink has melted and wanders into the kitchen to replenish it, where he witnesses the wife, who has not heard him come in, take the roast in its pan out of a hot oven with her bare hands.  She is a Martian!  Matt wished he’d paid more attention to Lizzie’s account of the plot at the time; he couldn’t remember now whether the guest had confronted the wife and been turned into a Martian himself, or whether he’d backed out of the kitchen and spent the rest of the movie wrestling with his conscience – should he tell the poor husband the truth and ruin his happiness, or should he keep his knowledge secret?

More likely the movie had ended with Martians invading Earth, and people running up and down the streets of their towns screaming.  Which was a shame, because the whole point of the movie, Matt realized now though he had not watched it, was that you didn’t know the person you were married to.  You didn’t begin to know the person you thought you knew.

In the darkness, the minutes went by, and he waited.  Irene would either talk to him or she wouldn’t.  If she didn’t, they would both pretend to sleep, and maybe, eventually, they really would sleep.

At last she rolled over onto her back – not towards him, but halfway, at least.  She sighed and said, so softly he had to strain to hear the words, “I don’t know if you can understand this, Matt, but the only thing I’ve ever wanted was to be ordinary.  To live a normal, average life.  And that’s what I have – a normal life.  And now I really am going to go to sleep.  Please don’t ask me any more questions.”

It was the last time she was ever going to talk about it, he could see that.  “All right,” he said.  “I won’t.  But–”

She sighed.  “Matt.”

“I was just wondering about that little boy.  Ryan.  Do you think he’ll remember any of what happened?”

“No,” said Irene.  “He’s so little.  Two, maybe.  They say you don’t remember anything before the age of four or so.”

“How does anyone know that for sure?” Matt wondered.  “And who are ‘they,’ anyway?”

“I don’t know.  But that’s what they say, so it must be true.”  He could hear the smile in her voice.  Then she yawned, and a few minutes later her breathing was so soft and regular he knew she was truly asleep and not faking it.

* * *

            There was no denying it; there had always been a rift between them, and as he lay there in the dark Matt marveled at how thoroughly and completely he had misunderstood the nature of that rift.

Of the two of them, Matt had always thought of himself as the one with the complicated inner life.  He was the daydreamer, the one who could lose himself for hours in books and fantasies, the one who went outside on the porch with Lizzie to gaze at the night sky and imagine other worlds, the one who often felt nameless longings he couldn’t begin to talk to Irene about.   Lizzie, he’d always thought, was more like him than like Irene.  It was always he and Lizzie stargazing, he and Lizzie listening to the plaintive, minor-key folk music they both loved, he and Lizzie collecting UFO stories to tell each other.  Always at such times it seemed that Irene sat apart, sewing a ballet costume for Lizzie or balancing their monthly budget, a faint frown of disapproval on her face, and he had felt angry at her willingness to settle for a world so small and ordinary.

When instead it turned out that she saw things he and Lizzie could not begin to understand.  She saw, and didn’t want to see, whereas he wanted to see, and couldn’t.

They would sleep through the night to the soothing sound of rain pattering against the window.  Tomorrow the McClary News Herald would have a new front-page story – nothing so dramatic as Irene’s accidental or not-so-accidental heroism, but something.  There was always a new story.  Tomorrow the world would be ordinary again, just the way Irene wanted it.  In the children’s stories Lizzie had always loved the most, a child went on a midnight ride, on a magic carpet or clinging to the wings of a fairy, and returned just as dawn was breaking, to an adult world still asleep and oblivious.  It was as though nothing had ever happened at all, except for a tiny bit of evidence – the corner of a silver star that the child finds in his pocket, or a small piece of moonbeam still glowing faintly.  Proof, if you wanted to believe.

What would happen to the little boy Ryan?  Irene was probably right that his conscious mind would not remember.  His guilt-ridden parents wouldn’t bring it up – it was not the kind of family story anyone would be anxious to tell.  But Matt couldn’t believe that an experience like that could be erased so completely.  Maybe throughout his whole life, or maybe not for another ten or twenty years, Ryan would have flying dreams and never know why.  In the dreams, he was an adventurer, jumping from an open window, flying through the air, feeling nothing but exhilaration, landing at the end of his flight in the soft feather bed of a woman’s capable arms, never knowing there’d been any danger at all.

And what about the babysitter, who would grow up with only a shadow of guilt instead of a huge weight that would haunt her for the rest of her life?  Wouldn’t she feel a chill now and then, especially on Indian summer nights, and think, What if?  What if?  Irene had saved her life too.

Matt’s extraordinary wife, the accidental heroine, had a gift she didn’t want.  She knew that when you looked into the future, you saw death and disaster.  Who would have ever guessed that the present moment was so precious?  For now, Irene would think as she fell asleep at night, as she brushed her teeth, as she made dinner, as she watched Lizzie do her homework at the dining room table, everything is all right.  No one is falling asleep with a lighted cigarette in her hand; a car is not about to crash; a child is not climbing onto a second-story window sill.  Our bills are paid; our life is on solid ground.  We are safe, for now.

Picking up loose change — it was Henry’s idea.  An activity — not a crime, not even a misdemeanor.  And any sport that aroused his enthusiasm was worth playing.  It was so easy.  The stuff lay all around them.  It lurked under the mailboxes, and in the corners of the elevator, and on the sidewalk.  It could be fished from chair cushions at the movies.  Dorothy found oily coins in the gutter.  She washed them and sometimes polished them.  Once, in a diner, two quarters were lying on the counter near Henry.  Henry picked them up.  The counterman held out his hand.    “Those are mine, my tip from the guy before you.”  Henry relinquished the money.  On her stool Dorothy stared straight ahead.  Henry would have kept those quarters –would have stolen them.  Stealing was a crime.  Yet it was the counterman who looked ashamed … ashamed for Henry, maybe.

The next morning she went downtown to do an errand.  On a busy sidewalk she  found herself plucking a purse from the gaping backpack of a careless young woman striding ahead of her.  The young woman was wearing a red knitted hat with a royal blue pompom.  Dorothy – who had owned such a hat, a lifetime ago — drifted sideways to a window display.  Heavens, she thought to herself, counting the money in the purse.  What are you doing.  Run after her, run after her.  Forty dollars and change.  Ahead, the pompom bobbed above the crowd of shoppers.  Dorothy stuffed the purse into her own handbag.  Take it to the police station, say you found it on the street.  Instead she entered the underground and boarded the trolley that would trundle her home.  Failing to hand the police a dropped purse was not a crime.  She could keep the thing; it might even be legally hers.  Or if she turned it in at the police station and that devil-may-care pompom didn’t bother to report her loss, the purse might devolve to Dorothy, the honorable rescuer of a found object.  Not until the trolley emerged from the underground into the light did she remember that she had not found the money.  She had swiped it.

She confessed to Henry that night.

“How much?”

“Forty dollars, but even if it were forty cents …”

“Some spoiled college girl.  Her daddy will make it up to her.”

“Henry …”

“Let’s try the horses.”

The next day they took the train out to the race track and bet twenty dollars twice, and lost both times.  “So now you’ve made retribution,” said Henry in a merry voice.  They rode back in warm silence, holding hands.

“Gambling is unreliable,” Henry pronounced that night.  “Picking pockets – that’s the solution.”

“To what problem?” He glared at her, but she went on.  “Pocket picking takes training by a master, and Fagan’s been hanged.”

“I’ll learn it on my own.  Remember how I used to play Debussy.  I can be light-fingered.”

He’d made Debussy sound like Sousa, and he’d known that at the time.  Now

he reformulated the past – a habit of the elderly.  Morality too got reshaped, and ethics.  “Filching money from individuals is dangerous,” she said in a knowledgeable voice.  “Let’s bypass cash.”

“Bypass?”  It was not a popular word.

“Cash is useful only to buy merchandise,” she explained.  “Let’s go directly to the merchandise.  Stores.”

He grinned at her. “What a girl I married.”

She grinned back, but her heart was wilting.  This crumbling of old values must be a sign of dementia, mustn’t it.  Perhaps his was an encapsulated dementia, confined to mild misbehavior.  Maybe petty crimes would stave off worse senility.   She knew some poor old fellows who tried to fondle waitresses.

 

Sometimes she still felt a craving.  Early in the morning, say, when dawn turned their gray walls an intense lilac she liked to think of as whorish.  Her hand would creep across the bedclothes like a blue-veined mouse.  He’d be sleeping on his back, which he wasn’t supposed to do because of the apnea.  Snoring, stopping, snoring, stopping.  She’d shake his shoulder just hard enough to make him turn over – away from her – onto his side.  Usually he didn’t wake up.  That was okay.  He needed what rest he could get.  He slept so poorly, waking frequently, finally waking for good — for bad, really: waking cranky and staying cranky until the lunchtime beer, which turned him cheerful for a little while and occasionally even amorous.  And so, sometimes, in the early afternoon …  But he always needed the pill, and they had to wait an hour, and she was dry no matter how much of that old lady’s gel she slathered on; she might as well just brush her teeth with it.  And at that hour the light pouring into the bedroom showed them plainly to each other.  The grooves on his face were often greasy.  His scalp was pale as an oyster under what hair was left.   Keratoses lay on her chest like pebbles.  Her own hair had never achieved whiteness; sunlight cruelly revealed its similarity to straw.  And if he were to kiss the hollow of her neck, which he had loved to do long ago, entering the silk purse above before the silkier purse below, that’s what he used to say – he’d find the hollow filled with loose, shuddering skin like crème fraîche.  And it took him so long to come, pounding insistently as his younger self would never have done; and it would have taken her even longer, probably forever; but, spent, he rolled away, leaving her chafed and sad.    Long ago, during the decade following their marriage, they’d had to snatch  pleasure between jobs and child care and the sleep they were always short of.  In the several decades afterwards sex was peaceful and considerate.  Even ten years ago they were still warm with each other.  But the best years were long ago, in college — parietal rules still in force, then; immoral behavior still punished by expulsion.  In college their problem was finding a site for immoral behavior.  They had a few favorite places.  The top floor of the University art museum, a storage space for painting and sculpture waiting to be repaired, where they kept company with dark Annunciations and cracked nudes.  The boat house down by the river – they lay under overturned canoes.  In early fall and late spring they visited the ocean, just a bus ride from school, its beach deserted by the end of the afternoon.

She liked to recall a particular October day.  The water, too cold for more than a dip, rippled in shades of Wedgewood and slate.  They watched it for a while.  Then he fell asleep.  She grew chilly, and the one beach towel they’d brought lay on his chest.  Carefully she slid it off, pausing to admire the auburn hair that curled there; then she wrapped her own body in the towel.  “Dolly,” he said, opening one morning-glory eye.  “You thief.  That towel is mine.”

“Not any more,” and she was on her feet and running.  It took him a few groggy minutes to get up and run, too.  They ran across the length of the beach, half-naked boy chasing girl in bikini.  Her long brown hair, thick then, flew behind her: the striped towel waved from her hand.  She was headed towards a wall of low rocks that led from the road to the sea.  He’d catch her when she started scrambling over them.  Wisely she didn’t try to run further.  Instead she turned abruptly and faced him, and he thudded against her as if shot by a cannon.  She dropped the towel.  They stood in a panting embrace.  It wasn’t foreplay, really: it was simple hugging, love throbbing from one heart to the other.  When at last this exchange satisfied both, their thumbs entered each other’s waistbands; in seconds the lovers were lying on the sand beside their apparel.  Who cared if anybody  walked by.

Soon afterwards they married.  They raised two calm daughters.  They traveled some, bought new books at the bookshop, made charitable donations.  As they aged they went on doing what everybody in their cohort did – paid the condominium fee, shopped for groceries, went to a movie and modest restaurant once a week.  They joined a bird-watching group.  They tended their ailments.  But they’d become too weary for travel, and their tastes in reading had narrowed – thrillers, now, and old novels: all available free at the public library.  They cancelled their subscription to the Symphony; they had an excellent stereo system at home, and the series cost so much.  Tuesdays were free at the museum, so they dropped that membership too.  They dropped the New York Review.  Staying au courant could break their fragile budget.  The pensions, the annuities, the long-term health insurance: all were sufficient; and yet – again like their cohort – they felt pinched.

“I’ll try it first,” said Dorothy.  “I’m an experienced shopper.”

 

At a convenience store Dorothy waited until she was the only customer.  Then she slipped a quart of milk into her reusable shopping bag and pushed the little cart to the cash box behind which stood a melancholy Mexican woman – no, indigenous: she had an Aztec face; she was ready to be plundered.  Dorothy turned her cart around and wheeled it to the refrigerated items and shoved the milk back into its case and removed it again and this time placed it in the cart.  She pushed the cart to the woman and paid for everything that was in it.

She tried sneaking milk from the Russians, too.  Again her nerve failed.  A stout orange-haired woman stood behind a counter dishing take-out chicken and kasha, and her twin served up last week salads.  The whole place smelled of fish.  Dorothy thought helplessly of the suffering of these people, generation after generation.  At the cash register stood  a younger sister of the other two.  Dorothy took the quart of milk from her shopping bag and laid it on the counter with the rest of her groceries.

At the 7-11 the cashier looked slightly feeble minded.  There was no way Dorothy would prey on him.

Each time she told Henry she’d stolen the milk.

His own effort had been a failure.  At a department store he put two pairs of socks into his jacket pocket and walked out.  But when he got to the subway station the socks were gone.  Somebody had picked his pocket.  Somebody who knew what was in it.  Somebody who had seen him pinch the socks.

“We’ve got to work as a team,” he said to Dorothy.  “One the distraction, the other the sleight-of-hand artist.”

She was silent.

“Do want to run your own operation, Dolly?” he said, and chucked her under the chin.  “Is that what you want?”

She wanted him, as he once was, but she didn’t say that.

 

Department stores became their theatre of operations.  They learned on the job.  Some merchandise could be delicately edged off a counter by Dorothy while Henry and the salesperson discussed the similar items lying there for inspection.  In this way they acquired a pair of suede gloves, an infant jumpsuit, a pen, a small picture frame, a jar of imported chutney.  At the fine jewelry department she charmed a pair of man’s cuff links into the right sleeve of her coat.  Then, reviving the ‘tell me all about yourself’ smile of her middle years, she rested her left elbow on the glass case and invited the jeweler to tell her all about semi-precious stones.  Meanwhile she thrust her right hand into the coat’s pocket and left it there until first one link and then the other dropped from the sleeve into her curled palm.

What to do with the booty?  Well, they ate the chutney.  The picture frame became a wedding gift.  They gave the infantwear and the pen and the gloves to Good Will.  Poor people would put them to use, not guessing their market value, appreciating only their utility.  Redistribution – that’s what Henry and Dorothy were engaged in, Dorothy told herself.  And although she worried about the immediate future of the duped salespeople she wasted no pity on the big stores themselves, who could swallow their losses.  Her sympathy centered on the agitated Henry.  His spirits soared immediately after a snatch but plummeted a few days later.  “We are not sufficiently exercising our talents,” he grumbled one day. “We should start thinking about banks.”

“Maybe stagecoaches,” she said lightly.  “What shall we do with these beautiful cufflinks?”

He shrugged.  “Good Will.”

“Somebody will spot their value and fence them.  You should wear them, Henry.  To a party.”

“When were we last at a party?  All we go to is funerals.  When it’s my turn – bury me in them.”

“Okay,” she sighed.  “Banks, then.”

He brightened.  “I’ll read up on alarm systems.”

So off they went off to the library, arm in arm.  And there was the latest Le Carré, with a waiting list six months long, traveling like an ordinary passenger in the returned books cart.  Henry picked it up, also found a book about installing your own alarm system, motioned Dorothy to exit blamelessly through the theft-detecting turnstile.  Then he carried Le Carré to the same stile and handed it across to her — “You forgot this, dear,” — and returned to the desk to check-out the alarm book.  Such darlings, anyone who saw the pair might have thought.

They read the Le Carré right away – Henry first – and then, early one morning, they slipped it into the library’s return box.  The book about alarms went in too.  “Too complicated,” said Henry.  “We need an expert,” he groaned.

“We need a vacation,” she offered.

“Where?” sounding sulky.

“I mean … time off.”

“To do what,” sounding exhausted.

“The other day … I found our old birding glasses.”

So they joined the birders again, and took some nice walks, and heard some lovely sounds, and made some new friends, and gradually went back to their old ways, thrifty but not stinted, careful but not stingy.  Honorable.

The remission lasted several months.  Then one day they read of a luxury hotel opening downtown, and within it a number of high-end boutiques.

‘Let’s look it over,” said Henry.  “For old time’s sake.”

“ ‘That old gang of mine,’ ” she sang.  “Can we declare our criminal career a success.”

“Some of it was cruel.”

“Cre-wel, also broidered,” employing new tangential, illogical speech she had recently developed.  It had alarmed him at first and now amused him.  “’By the pricking of my thumbs,’” she continued.  Quotations floated through her conversation as if dislodged from the walls of her brain.  She sounded learned until you noticed their irrelevance.  She often forgot where she’d put things.  Once he’d found her pocketbook in the freezer.

They went downtown on a Thursday afternoon.  They broke their date for a movie-and-early-bird special with the Halperins.  They gave the excuse that they needed to meet with their financial advisor — an imaginary personage.  They got dressed up for the expedition, and Henry wore his favorite vest, a fiery red.  He had acquired it in a busy men’s store simply by taking off his raincoat, putting on the vest, resuming his raincoat, and walking out.  Dorothy’s hair was in a loose bun these days.  She wore a long flowered skirt and snug black jacket, both of which she had purchased some years ago.  She could have passed for a Renoir girl grown old.  She had no idea how eccentric she looked, Henry thought – or how beautiful.

The large circular hotel lobby was beautiful too, in an austere way, all brown plush and rosewood.  In the smoking room, a nickel rested in an ashtray.  Smoking was not a crime here.  “Come, darling,” said Henry.

“O my darling, O my darling,” she sang, and put the coin in her pocket.

A corridor of glassy stores led away from the lobby: window after window of tempting things – leather bags, jade elephants, a pyramid of face creams.  “That substance promises the return of an eighteen-year old complexion,” Dorothy read aloud through the window.  “Complete with blackheads,” he promised.  Antique books, men’s accessories, luggage, timepieces.  A tiny place called Silk.  “There’s a Security Guard,” Henry remarked.  “Oh, look at that chess set.”

But Dorothy had dropped his arm.  She was lingering at the doorway of Silk: scarves, shawls, handkerchiefs, even gloves, even belts.  She floated in.  “Are your worms kept in humane conditions?” she asked the saleswoman.

“Madame?”

“I’d like so much to see the scarf in the window, the one where blues shade into one another – yes, that one,” and the saleswoman cupped the item in her hands as if it were a baby and then laid it on the glass case as if it were a baby’s blanket.  She from her side and Dorothy from hers marveled at the colors of the chiffon.  The woman seemed sincere, but of course she could not feel the power of the blues, the way they called forth Dorothy’s seemly life: the ink of the river at night seen from under a canoe, the ocean’s  mauve at sundown; the blue-green of shore reeds, the silver of spray.  The brightness of Henry’s young eyes and the cloudiness of his aged ones.  Her bridesmaids’ gowns had been robin’s egg blue; here was that shade repeated exactly in this fluid fabric.  Here were the veins on her hands.  Here was the sapphire of the Paris sky at evening.  Here was the blue-purple shadow of one statue’s head on another’s paler back in that storage room at the top of the art museum.  Here was the cobalt ring of the glaucoma probe.  Here was the blue-gray ash that covered the nickel in her pocket. Last was the lilac of her bedroom at dawn.

“How much?” said Henry from the doorway.

“Five hundred dollars,” said the saleswoman.

“Well, well,” he stammered, not knowing what to say next, wondering how much those damned cufflinks would fetch.  But he didn’t have to say anything or to fence anything; Dorothy was in charge.  She walked towards him, throwing the scarf over her shoulder as if to demonstrate its versatility.  On a hunch he turned sideways and she nodded and slid past him and began to walk very fast towards the lobby.

“What? – Madame! – shit.”  The saleswoman came out from behind the case apparently hoping also to slide by Henry.  But he had turned again within the doorway.    His hands gripped its silvered glass jambs.  His legs were apart on the silvered glass threshold.  “Do not pass,” he intoned.  The saleswoman ran back to the case and pushed a button somewhere behind it and picked up a glass telephone receiver that had lain unseen on its glass cradle.  Henry, having given Dolly time to mingle with the crowd, began to stroll.  Then he saw her loping ahead of him, the scarf bunched over her shoulder; again it was playing the part of a baby.  He exchanged a glance with it, and walked as fast as he could, his pulse objecting.  He could hear Security tramping after him, not too fast – an incident of thievery would be poor public relations.  Dorothy reached the lobby.  Henry had almost caught up with the graceful sprite, her bun loosening, the scarf now floating from her hand.  She wheeled suddenly, and they collided, breast to breast and heart to heart.  Mouth met mouth too.  The scarf fell to the floor.

Some people in the lobby looked up, as indifferent as aristocrats.  The Silk saleswoman edged past Security, dropped to her knees and crawled to the scarf and pressed it to her heart.  Then she stood up and walked away.  Security remembered something he had to do, and vanished.  Henry and Dorothy unstuck themselves from each other and left the hotel hand in hand and hailed a cab.

“You should have seen those geezers going at it in my back seat,” said the cab driver later to his partner.  “Something like that, it gives you hope.”