On an afternoon when Catherine was able to duck away from the Quiet Adventures tour group, in between two lectures she was signing for the traveling hearing-impaired, she took a taxi to a village outside of Taipei, to a small English school where she’d once taught.  She’d lived on the third floor in a room with a bare bulb, an electric kettle, and a mosquito coil.  There was a hole underneath a loose floor tile, the kind of place you could stash your valuables and return to find them twenty, thirty years later untouched.  This was back during a brief hiatus from college, after the doctors informed her she was going deaf.

But the taxi pulled up to a luxury boutique hotel, the school building long gone.  There was a manmade waterfall at the entrance, and a long semicircular pond resembling a moat with three large, radioactive-orange carp.  She had to cross a cobbled footbridge to reach the door.  Once inside, she was greeted by a line of staff who, in blue vests, resembled cheerful, well-groomed train conductors.  It was a flashy hotel, full of etched glass and angled lights.  Corners were softened with feathery tropical plants; the air smelled of nectar.  Catherine heard a whirring sound that she at first mistook for tinnitus before she looked up to see the ornate wooden paddles of a ceiling fan.

There was a burst of music, something harsh and jarring, without words, a song that could have passed for a car crash.  She settled into one of the modern foam lobby chairs—comfort apparently out of style—and inserted an earplug.  The world around her became muffled and indistinct.  It was then that she saw something—the only thing—she recognized: the old marble drinking fountain.  But there were no kids lined up, pushing each other’s faces into the water.  It was cordoned off like a quaint oddity now, an antique of which no one knew its function.  The school had had two classrooms on the second floor and a small kitchen down below.  Bare bones.  Nothing like the mirage of smoke and mirrors she was sitting in now.

She was forty-eight.  Against the advice of everyone she knew, she’d taken a leave of absence from her job as a speech therapist to volunteer abroad, float around Asia alongside half the world’s population of aimless twenty-three-year-olds.  The term “mid-life crisis” had cropped up among her friends and family to help explain her erratic behavior, which began when both of her children went off to college and she asked her husband of twenty-five years for a divorce.  But Catherine saw it more as a need to take a break from the superficialities—the tablespoon of flaxseed meal on her cereal each morning, the all too frequent trips to the car wash and the hygienist, the discussions about whether the kids should be allowed to have credit cards or, for the older one, a motorcycle—each day a carbon copy of the one before.

The last time she’d been here, she was a girl too young to know any better.

She read the lips of the concierge: he wanted to know if he could be of help.  She told him she was meeting someone, a guest.  She was early; she would wait.  He bent in to listen, which meant her voice was too low.

Outside, a tour bus pulled up and a line of people stepped off with cameras like medallions dangling from their necks.  Brides in gauzy finery posed for pictures, standing, sitting, kneeling, with bouquets and without.  Children ran around with flower chains in their hair.  Apparently the hotel was a popular destination for weddings.

The concierge nodded and backed off.  She knew she would be taken at her word because she was a foreigner.

She’d come to Asia the summer after junior year in college, after her body unexpectedly failed her, to see (and hear) the world while she could.  In her case, it was a great pressure on one side of her head, a heaviness that threatened to topple her over, draw her ear like a magnet to the ground.  She lost all hearing on her right side; the doctors gave her prednisone, predicted another four, five months until it progressed to her left.  So she bought a plane ticket to Kathmandu, granting herself the rest of summer and fall to live life before the silence arrived.

It was hard to believe she was going deaf; at that age, the worst thing she’d experienced was breaking up with boys.  (She tried to explain it wasn’t their fault.  She was immature; she tended to lose interest.)  But it was a good excuse to take a semester off from a small liberal arts college where she had developed a crush on her boyfriend’s roommate.  She trekked in Nepal for a week before getting robbed by a British couple, drunks.  She knew if she called her parents, they would beg her to call it good, come home, put the pictures she’d taken in a fine leather album to show her future children.  They would give her the latest news on a handsome neighbor she’d once kissed—Bobby Anderson—who was about to graduate from law school at the top of his class, the implication being she should rush home and snap him up in the little time she had left.

Instead, she went to Taipei because she’d heard Americans could make quick money teaching English.  For two weeks, she stayed at an overcrowded youth hostel, where the only way to have privacy was to loop a towel through a slat from the bunk above and pull it down like a shade.  The first night, a Danish woman instructed her to sleep clutching her money belt to her chest.  In the mornings, she woke up with cramped fingers that would not straighten until afternoon.

Everyone in the hostel was looking for work, looking for a way to get out, to find a place where they might have a proper bed or a room with a door.  Taipei was a mob scene; any time she waited in line for a bus, she got trampled once it arrived.  Cars and motorbikes clogged the streets, an endless, stalled parade.  Because the Foreign Affairs Police had been cracking down, jobs for foreigners were scarce.  She was turned down at four schools, where they told her they were hiring only English-speaking Chinese until the police stopped their raids.

Then, a stroke of luck.  Walking a rented bicycle through a street market, a man approached her.  He had nice eyebrows, thin, quivery lips, the unlined forehead of someone her age.  “My English is very poor,” he said, hoarsely, handing her a square of paper:

 

THE BEST ENGLISH SCHOOL IN THE WORLD IS LOCATED IN A SMALL VILLAGE OUTSIDE OF TAIPEI WHERE THE HOT SPRINGS CAN BOIL EGGS AND THE CRICKETS OUTNUMBER THE CARS.  IF YOU AGREE TO TEACH ENGLISH CONVERSATION, I WILL PAY YOU AND PROVIDE ROOM AND BOARD.  MY SISTER, MEIMEI, WILL COME MOST WEEKENDS TO PREPARE DELICIOUS FOOD.  YOU HAVE TWO MINUTES TO DECIDE.

 

Before Catherine could finish reading, the man passed her an envelope, which, she was embarrassed to discover, contained a hundred-dollar bill.  No one else seemed to notice: the street sellers went about their business, shaking tea in canisters and steaming buns.  Catherine’s taking the envelope in her hands—it would have dropped to the ground, otherwise—seemed to seal the deal.

Mr. Wang—that was his name—escorted her back to the hostel on his motorbike, and told her he would come in his car to pick her up the following day.

“He wants something from you,” the girls in her dorm room said.  “You don’t get money for nothing here.”  They sat on a cot playing cards and blowing smoke rings, and didn’t invite her to join them.  That night she lay awake, thinking: a brothel?  No.  The man was clean-shaven, soft-spoken.  He wore a light blue polo shirt buttoned up to his neck.  She could tell by his lopsided smile that it had been hard for him to approach her.  And she with her baseball cap and ponytail was hardly the prostitute type.

He came as promised in a small, cream-colored car.  She had one bag, a green knapsack, which he ceremoniously hoisted into the trunk.  During the forty-minute drive, for most of which they were stuck in traffic, he reached into the backseat (which was too small for passengers) and offered up bags of peanut candy and seaweed crackers, enough food to last a week.  He chewed noisily in place of conversation.  They left the city, passing large warehouses and rice fields, until they reached a village that was just an intersection.  He pointed out the noodle stall and the small market displaying oscillating fans and fly swatters in pastel colors.  There was no traffic light.

“You won’t get lost,” he said, his voice catching.

“Yes, I think I’ll be able to find my way around.”

It was unmistakably a school, she was relieved to see, brand new, chalky white, with stately-looking columns bracketing the entrance.  There was a Z-shaped wheelchair ramp that emptied out by a swing.  She could already envision the mad rush: students bursting out the door and jumping the rails, vying to be the first to hop in the canvas seat.

“All yours?” she asked, because she owned only the contents of her knapsack.  And she wondered how he—not exactly the go-getter type—could have so much more.

His parents had given him the money, he admitted sheepishly.  The car was theirs too.

“My parents won’t give me anything until I get married,” she said.

He lowered his head, as if to duck her comment.

The walls inside the school were rough and unpainted.  There were metal chairs stacked by the door, unopened boxes of cleaning and classroom supplies.  He would spend the week setting up and preparing for the school to open the following Monday.  He hoped he would get it done in time.

She’d painted for two summers in college; she was happy to help.

He almost flinched at her offer.  And so that was what he had wanted.

The following morning, she awoke to the smell of hot soybean milk and fried dough sticks from the market.  He had set breakfast out for both of them downstairs in the foyer on a cardboard box turned upside-down.  It didn’t matter if she sat with her good ear to him: the place was so quiet, his voice—hoarse as it was—seemed to surround her.

“What kind of name is Catherine?”  He had only the faintest hint of an accent, the lilt of his intonation a fraction too slow.

“I don’t know.  A long one.  My friends call me Cat.”

“An animal’s name?”

She explained it was short for Catherine.

“Surname?”

“Davis.”

“Are you engaged to be married?”

“No.  What’s with all the questions?”

“I want to learn everything.”  He coughed into the back of his hand.

They scraped and sanded and painted until evening—no lunch—at which point he more than made up for the skipped meal with Styrofoam containers of noodles and dumplings and fried rice and clear soup.  Sometimes, he leaned back and ate with his eyes closed.  Other times he hovered over his soup, so close she could see his eyebrows reflected in the broth.

“Is your tatami comfortable, Miss Davis?”  He pointed overhead, referring to the mat she slept on two floors above.  His voice surprised her, sounding like it was teetering on the edge of something, about to fall off.  He was sleeping in the kitchen, she noticed, on a tatami identical to hers.  He rolled it up during the day and stuffed it behind the fridge.

“It’s fine.”

“Much harder than a mattress.”

“Where did you learn to speak English so well?”

He flushed.  “I have trouble with my pronunciation.”

“You speak perfectly.”

“I have good days and bad.”

With that, he was silent for the rest of the meal.  He cleared his throat when he got up from the table, tipped an invisible hat to wish her a good night.

 

The next day, he scared her by stepping out from the second-floor bathroom, where he’d been installing a paper-towel dispenser, to thrust a piece of paper in her hand.  She fumbled, almost dropped it, said, “What’s this?”  He didn’t answer, stared at the paint-flecked knuckles of her hands until she unfolded it and read:  FROM NOW ON, I WILL COMMUNICATE WITH YOU ONLY IN WRITING.  IF YOU FIND AN ERROR, PLEASE CORRECT AND RETURN IT TO ME.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” she said.

To practice my spelling.  He wrote in his notepad, nodding grimly, as if the burden were all his.

“You don’t understand.”  She exhaled audibly.  “I might be reading notes for the rest of my life.”  But even saying it out loud didn’t make her believe it.

He offered to pay her additional for her trouble, but she shook her head vaguely, internally scolding herself for not taking the money, which—if she saved enough—would allow her to fly back to Nepal and pick up where she’d left off.  She convinced herself he would grow tired of writing, that it was a passing phase

In the days that followed, he’d come to her unannounced, once or twice a day, standing quietly in her vicinity, a square of paper in hand, until she looked up.  She learned to detect his presence in the stillness, to feel the vibrations of his padding feet, to sense his arrival like dawn.  He had a habit of pausing outside of doorways, as though to catch his breath.  Sometimes he didn’t appear, instead leaving his notes folded up on the overturned box by the breakfast he’d set out or pinned to the bulletin board he’d nailed to the wall in the hallway.  On those occasions, she found herself carrying the note upstairs to her room and opening it in secret like a schoolgirl.

At first, he wrote necessary information: the Spackle was located in the kitchen drawer, the heavy-duty primer under a tarp out back.  If the fumes got to her, he had a variety of masks.  He let her know by early afternoon what they would be eating for dinner.

Then, a question: Do you prefer the color olive or beech?  He’d been staring at the entryway to the school—the last section to be painted—and wanted her opinion on what was, apparently, a momentous decision in his life.  To humor him, she gazed at the paint cans he labeled in English for her, the sample swatches he taped to the wall.  In the end, she chose beech after lying awake and thinking about it all night.  They worked on the front hall together, meticulously—beech it was—spent practically the same amount of time it had taken them to paint the rest of the school.

There were observations:  This morning I woke up to jubilant clouds Parading across the heavens like peacocks.  The jet Plane that tore up the sky (with jealousy?) was no match.  He related obscure facts: did you know by counting the times a cricket chirps it is possible to tell the temperature outside?

The notes looked like formal invitations, painstakingly printed in all capitals, the letters spaced far enough apart that they stood alone at the same time they formed words.  He never made a mistake, not once.  They came on crisp squares of rice paper, which she inevitably touched with her tongue and held up to the light.  He signed each one with the Chinese characters of his name, as if there were a chance she might think they were from someone else.  Unable to find a trash can, she stashed them underneath a defective floor tile in her room; the concrete underneath was sunken like a bowl.  By the time he bought a wastepaper basket and placed it at the bottom of the stairs, she’d amassed a collection and thought it would be a shame to throw them away.

At the end of that first week, after he’d laid down fresh carpet in the classrooms and she’d caulked around the bathroom sinks, he drove into Taipei and brought back Peking duck.  He showed her the proper way to fold the duck in a pancake with a piece of scallion and sauce.  They had a wordless celebration.

 

Overnight, the school changed from pristine and quiet—just the two of them clicking chopsticks—to being overrun with rambunctious children with runny noses and sticky hands.  At first, it was hard to watch the smudges and scuffs that appeared, all the damage tiny hands and feet could inflict.  But it was also gratifying to see the results of their hard work put to use.  She drew on whiteboards he had hung; his students sat in small chairs she had assembled.  Across the hall, he held up a flashcard of a yellow cat she had laminated and his class said C-A-T.

The children loved to touch the hair on her arms, or draw pictures of her with bright green eyes steering a spaceship towards Earth.  They were sponges, and could mimic the intonation of her voice exactly within three tries.  She said something, they repeated, and they didn’t forget.  Their parents drilled them at night.  By the fourth class, they had mastered animals and colors, and moved on to the rooms of a house, learning at three times the rate she had originally planned.  They begged her for English names.  She borrowed heavily from the JV field hockey team on which she’d played sophomore year, tossing names out to the kids like chocolate coins.  A few times after class she walked outside past the intersection with the intention of searching for the hot springs, but midway there she always found a reason to rush back to the school.  Mr. Wang would write down what had happened in her short absence—a plugged-up sink or a new item in the lost and found—wielding his pen as if the possibilities were endless.

At night, she and Mr. Wang met at the cardboard box for dinner, exhilarated by their sense of purpose.  She showed him a picture one of her students had drawn, a dog with Xs for eyes frying in a pan.  Mr. Wang imitated the way his students scratched their heads when they’d forgotten how to spell a word.  He scribbled: THERE APPEARED TO BE A MEASLES EPIDEMIC DURING THE MORNING’S QUIZ.  He wrote quickly in her presence, sacrificing symmetry for speed.

Jacket or blazer, he wanted to know, producing a flashcard from a folder under his chair.

She wondered if that was what he would wear—an old-school blazer with gold buttons—if he were to take her to a nice restaurant.  Or maybe he’d be more comfortable in a white button-down since he didn’t seem the type to draw attention to himself.

“Take your pick,” she answered.  “What difference does it make to a bunch of kids?”

Enormous difference, he insisted, and she couldn’t help laugh at the way he’d written the word “enormous,” the letters so large they extended across the page.  She moved her chair closer to see what came next.

I am serious.  He added that as teachers, they opened up minds, transformed lives.  There was nothing else that left such a mark on the world.  One day, when she was older, a former student would come up to her and thank her.  Then she would understand the significance of it all.

She read along as he wrote, disappointed when he set down his pen.

“Okay,” she said.  “I’d go with blazer.”

Within days, people were dropping off padded boxes of imported apples and Japanese pears.  Someone donated a marble drinking fountain to the school.  They received a songbird in a cage, a tin of green bean cakes, a bottle of plum wine.  A small truck delivered a pile of painted scrolls.  One morning they stepped outside to find roses and orchids planted around the front entrance.

“So many presents!” she said.

They celebrate my success.

“How do you know this many people?”

Most I have never met.

“Then why do they give you things?”

There was an article in the newspaper.

That night, they drank the plum wine out of patterned teacups.  She showed him how to clink rims and toast.

How long will you stay?

She managed, she thought, to do a reasonable job of describing her situation considering the language barrier.  Her ears were bad.  Or one was, and the other would soon follow.  She would teach for a couple of months until she earned enough money to travel around and experience the world.  Then she would return to the States and go deaf.

Even to her, the story sounded false, like one of the far-fetched excuses she’d heard foreigners used—a sudden death in the family, AIDS (if the employer was resistant)—when they were ready to quit and travel again.  Two months at the school now seemed pitifully short, barely enough time to remember the kids’ names.

She thought he would demand she stay longer.  Instead, he wrote, the timing suits me, then wanted to know how much money was enough.

She aimed high, took a stab.  “Three-thousand US dollars.”

He nodded perfunctorily, as though he had arrived at the same figure.

Did he understand?  She wasn’t sure.  He pressed his tooth with his thumb, shook out his hand.

Helen Keller, he wrote.

“Well, not exactly,” she tried to explain.

He poured another dash of wine into his teacup and slugged it down as if he himself had been handed her diagnosis.

His sister Meimei arrived the following weekend carrying the kind of cheap mesh bag tourists bought when they had too many souvenirs to lug home.  It was full of kitchen utensils.  She spent all of Saturday in the kitchen, filling the school with smells.  First pork, then fish, then sweet bean.  Then something fiery that caught in Catherine’s throat and made her cough and step outside.

The weather was pleasant, a not-too-hot summer day, and she decided she would take a walk.  She didn’t make it five yards before the father of a student stopped on his bike to shake her hand.  A woman hailed her from across the street.  Two students skipped around a yard singing her name.  Could she come to their house for lunch?  She couldn’t remember if it was rude or not to accept.  But then she had no choice, because her students pulled her into a small row house also filled with the aroma of cooking.  It was the first of three lunches.  Afterwards, she was escorted back to the school by a small, exuberant crowd.

A feast awaited her.  Meimei, a round-faced girl of eighteen, led her to the makeshift table; she’d turned over three cardboard boxes to accommodate all the food.  They both knelt down before eight or so plates, and Meimei put a scoop of rice in a bowl for each of them.

Catherine eyed the food, already stuffed.  “Should we wait for Mr. Wang?” she asked.

She could see a sliver of light underneath the kitchen door, the flicker of a shadow, Mr. Wang walking past.  The school now smelled of ginger.

Meimei put two flat hands to one side of her cheek.  “He will not eat.  He rests.”

“Do you think he’s caught whatever’s going around?”  A couple of Catherine’s students had gone home sick that week.

Meimei nodded, unsure of herself.  She pushed a whole fried fish towards Catherine, the eyes an icy blue.  Catherine tried to think of a subject they had in common.

“I met Mr. Wang at the market.  I don’t know much about him.”

Meimei had yet to pick up her chopsticks, apparently not hungry either.  “He dreamed to be an English teacher since he was a boy.  He listened to cassette tapes every night when he went to sleep.”  She frowned at the pea sprouts.  “He is a good brother, a good man, just twenty-four years old.  He likes to do everything for himself, but he cannot cook.”

“The students like him.”

“He was afraid they would laugh.”

Catherine heard the water turn on in the kitchen, wondered if Mr. Wang was listening through the door.  “Even the first day, the classrooms were overflowing.  He had to start a waiting list.  Some drove all the way from Taipei.”

Meimei stood up when the light in the kitchen went off.  “He worried no one would come.”

“Can I help you clear the dishes?”

Meimei motioned for Catherine to remain seated.  “Please.”

Meimei went into the kitchen without turning on the light and shut the door behind her.  Catherine stared at the wall; the paint had bubbled up in a few spots but otherwise looked decent.  She heard a lone motorcycle roar down the street, the muffler shot.  A dog barked.  She thought maybe Meimei had gone to bed when Meimei came out carrying a deck of cards.

“Can you play?”

“Sure.”

Meimei shuffled the cards.  “I will go to nursing school after this.”

“I don’t know what I want to do.”

Meimei looked surprised.  “You are a teacher!”

“Right now.  But it’s not my career.”

“Why not?”

“I’m too young to commit myself to any one thing.”

Meimei set the deck down between them.  “You are very brave!”

They didn’t know any of the same games, so Catherine taught Meimei how to play crazy eights.  Meimei showed Catherine how to hide cards up her sleeve.

The concierge touched her shoulder.  The person she was meeting had arrived, which was strange, because she wasn’t meeting anyone.  She had made that up so she wouldn’t be disturbed.  He motioned to the corner of the lobby where a Chinese man sat with his back to her, kneading his knuckles against his lips.

She knew it was a misunderstanding; it was all too familiar.  She’d become accustomed to nodding at garbled speech in restaurants, to answering the wrong question, to missing the joke, to people talking into her deaf ear (her husband had complained she purposely turned it towards him).  Her kids’ friends had imitated her behind her back, tapping a lampshade and saying, “I need to be on your right side to hear you,” and, “Could you please face me when you speak?”  It felt like half of her was underwater.  But she knew how to go through the motions—she was adept at smiling her way through meaningless exchanges—and she would do so now.

She walked across the lobby to the man.  “Hello?  The concierge said you were looking for me?”

“Oh, I’m sorry.  There’s been a mix-up.  I’m waiting for a different American woman.”

“I thought that might be the case.”

She gave a small bow and retreated back to her foam seat.

Three weeks later, in the evening, she was taping her students’ pictures on the classroom wall when the room began to spin.  She clutched the back of the chair she was standing on and screamed.  He came running, dropped his masking tape, which looked to her like it rolled up a wall.

He took her in his arms and lifted her off the chair, pinning her hands to her sides, as if he thought she might try to inflict harm on herself.  She fell to the floor and he went down with her, angling his body underneath hers to lessen the blow.  He tried to make her comfortable, brushing away the hair that stuck to her lips, moving her elbow so it didn’t jab her in the side.  Then he wrapped himself around her and didn’t let go.  She lay in his grip, his heart pounding against her back, as the room bucked and swam.

She woke several hours later to darkness and his even breath against her neck.  He smelled of scallions and furniture polish; his palms were cool.  Her throat felt sore and her cheek was chafed from the rough carpet, but the room was still, upright.  She could hear the toilet down the hall, its gurgles and sighs.

She’d lain plenty of times in the arms of a boy, but never under these circumstances.  Should she leave?  Stay?  In any case, she had to use the bathroom.  She pried back his fingers and made for the door.

The second-floor bathroom had been designed for the students.  She had to squat to reach the toilet seat; the sink came to her thighs.  She ran the hot water and leaned over to let the steam rise to her face.  She looked in the mirror: he would call a doctor if he saw her like this.  She tried to pinch color into her cheeks, then combed her hair with her fingernails on the way out.

He was awake, standing by the classroom window, looking down onto the street below, holding the slats of the blind apart with his forefinger and thumb.  There were no streetlights, but the market had an outside light that gave the intersection a dusky glow.  He tugged at the drawstring, showed her it was stuck.  Together, they untangled the knots until the blind opened and closed freely, then went their separate ways to catch the last few hours of sleep, as if they often met at night to make minor repairs.

Will you give me an English name?  He wrote the following morning at breakfast.

She stood back and nodded, walked a circle around him, made a show of trying to think of a name that fit.  She was surprised to catch herself flirting.  She thought of Robert first, but she’d had a fling with a Rob once.  Same went for Anthony, Tim, Nick, David, John, Peter, Mike, Charles, and most other common American male names that came to mind.  They all had associations.  It would be unfair to peg him as the captain of the lacrosse team or the dorm proctor or the guy who ate Fruit Loops in the cafeteria alone.  Mr. Wang was unlike anyone she had met before.

“How about Dirk?”  He was not a Dirk, but it was either that or she’d have to start searching in a different language.

Dirt?

“No, D-I-R-K.  Dirk.”

He mouthed it to himself, nodded.  He wrote it down in his notepad and underlined it twice.

I am honored.

She had the feeling if she’d given him the name Dirt, he would have said the same thing.

“Don’t you ever get tired of writing?”

Sometimes.

“It takes forever,” she said through an exaggerated yawn, surprised—again—to find herself trying to pick a fight.

Thank you for your patience.  He didn’t take the bait.

“You don’t need help with your spelling.”

I must continue to practice.

Later, lying on her tatami, listening to the sound of crickets wafting through her open window, she thought perhaps she would stay longer.  As a favor to him.

The following week, on the night her hearing ear started crackling, a noise that in no way could be interpreted as good, she ran downstairs to the kitchen.  Mr. Wang was contemplating his notepad, crumpled balls of paper strewn at his feet.  He stood up forcefully, toppling his chair.  She didn’t say anything but he knew.  He strode across the room and cupped her ears, pulled her head to his chest.

He held her, stroking her shoulder, her cheek, circling the scar on her chin leftover from a bout of chickenpox.  He swayed from side to side, and they began to move around the kitchen.  This calmed her down.  He seemed to be saying: if this was her moment to go deaf, her ruin, together they would defy it.  He eased her down onto his tatami and tucked his body against hers.  She reached for his thigh, but he guided her hand away.  He breathed with his mouth against the back of her shirt, lulling her to sleep.

In the morning, he put his watch to her good ear and seemed as relieved as she was when she could hear it tick.

 

She didn’t see him the next day, or the one after.  There was a sign on the door of the school canceling his classes, and his students went home.  Meimei arrived mid-week and she and Mr. Wang were holed up in the kitchen, talking in low voices.  When Catherine crept downstairs at four in the morning, his light was still on.

“Where’s Mr. Wang?” she asked Meimei at dinner the following night.  It was a feast again—sesame noodles, egg flower soup, shredded pork, bamboo shoots—as if every night they expected company that never came.

“He rests.”

“Again?”

“His neck,” Meimei said, brushing the front of her own.

“A sore throat?”

“His hand also.”

“Why doesn’t he come out?”

“He is—how do you say?—pride.”

The kitchen door hadn’t opened in two days.  Catherine had repeatedly checked the floor around the bulletin board in the hallway, thinking he might have pinned a note for her there that had fallen down.

“Is he avoiding me?”

“He is sick.”  Meimei accidentally spit out a piece of noodle and put a hand over her mouth.

“He stayed up pretty late last night for being so sick.”

“He cannot sleep.”

“Do you think he’ll teach tomorrow?  I’m afraid the students will stop coming if he keeps canceling class.”

“They will come.”

“I doubt for much longer.”

Meimei pushed a bamboo shoot with her chopsticks.  She brought it to her mouth, but at the last moment withdrew it.  “Where else has no tuition?”

“What do you mean no tuition?”

Meimei tipped her head forward, letting her hair fall over her eyes.  “Already, I say too much.”

Meimei wanted to play crazy eights after dinner, but first she had to run out to buy MSG at the market before it closed.  Catherine waited until she left before knocking on the kitchen door.

“What’s going on around here?  Open up!”

No answer.  She thought she heard a sound like rustling leaves.

“Classes are free?” she said.  “What kind of school is this?  Why did you bring me out here in the first place?”

Again, rustling.

“You said you’d pay me three thousand dollars.”

The fridge clicked on, an unsteady, wavering hum.

“I know you’re in there.”

She was getting ready to barge in when the door opened.  He stood there swallowing, holding his throat, a diminished, less nourished version of himself.  His eyes searched hers for something—understanding? compassion?—or perhaps just to gauge the truth of what she saw.

He fumbled with a slip of paper, tried to write something down, but his hand wouldn’t cooperate, wouldn’t hold still.  She realized she hadn’t heard him speak in weeks.  She slapped the pen out of his hand.

“No, tell me to my face,” she said.  “You owe me at least that!”

He slurred something unintelligible, saliva coating his lips, swung his head in the direction of a thick envelope lying on the counter near the sink.  Even from the hall, she could tell there was more than three thousand dollars inside.  He stumbled across the kitchen to retrieve it; she couldn’t bear to watch.  For a moment, she imagined throwing herself at his feet, but then shut the door and left, as if he were just another boyfriend who had fallen out of grace.

This time it was the man nudging her.  He thought he’d recognized her.  Had she ever lived in this town?

She said she had a long time ago.

Was she an English teacher?

Not now.  But before, yes.

The man sat down across from her and folded his hands, looking like the bearer of bad news.  He had the kind of intrusive mustache that made lip-reading difficult.

“I was a student of yours.”

“Oh?”

“You gave me the English name—what was it?—Bernie.”

“How awful.  I don’t know what I was thinking.”

“Then you don’t mind that I changed it?”

“God, no.”

“I always felt guilty.”

“Please don’t.  What is it now?”

“Ben.”

“Much better.  It suits you.”

The man looked pleased.  “Do you remember me?”

She nodded vaguely, picturing a group of kids sucking on blood popsicles before class.  Their red mouths had sickened her at first—it looked like they’d been gorging on raw flesh—but after a while, she’d learned to pretend it was cherry or grape.  Was Bernie the one who had lice?  The one who’d lost his tooth in a steamed bun?  Or maybe that was all of them, one and the same.

“What happened to the school?” she said.

“Changed hands a couple times, torn down, and now this.  What brings you back?”

“I left the school in a hurry, forgot some things.”

The man looked around, amused.  “You weren’t expecting to find them, were you?”

“I don’t know what I expected.  Probably not.”

“You did leave rather abruptly, I remember.  After six weeks?”

“I returned home.”  She reluctantly took out her earplug; she’d wanted to take a break from listening—it was a constant strain with one ear—but the man wouldn’t quit and the mustache was throwing her off.

“You don’t like the music?” he laughed, pointing up to the speaker as a clash of cymbals broke in.

“My ears are very sensitive,” she said, stupidly.  You told people you were part deaf, and they’d holler about a sister confined to a wheelchair or a widower uncle who’d gone blind, as if to remind you that purgatory was better than hell.

The man lifted a clenched hand to his mouth, as if to cough, but didn’t.   “You knew he had Lou Gehrig’s disease?” he said, touching his lip.  “His parents bought him the school so he could live out his dream before, you know…”

“I knew he was sick.”

“He was embarrassed by his voice.  His speech became impaired.  It didn’t take long for the rest to follow.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“There was a rumor he ran off with you and opened a new school.”

“No.”

“I believed it, anyway.  Even after I knew the truth.  It’s funny, I still have to catch myself.”

A blond-haired American woman arrived, and the man introduced her as his fiancée.  He’d met her online.  “All because I had a great English teacher,” the man said, flourishing a hand at Catherine.  They were planning on having their wedding banquet at the hotel.  They were late for a meeting with the chef to finalize the menu.

The wedding was only a week away, but would Catherine be able to attend?

She would not.  She had to get back to the tour group—and, of course—to her kids, her job, to finalize her divorce, to the accrual of mundane problems unimaginable to her the last time she was here.

 

In the end, she called her parents for help and they wired her the money to come home.  She finished college, dating the roommate of her ex-boyfriend senior year.  She learned sign language—to hedge her bets—and got a degree in speech-language pathology.  She was paired with Bobby Anderson in a mixed-doubles tennis tournament one summer and married him the next.  The doctors were wrong: the hearing in her good ear fluctuated over the years but never left.  She vigilantly protected what she had with earplugs.  She worked part-time and had kids.  She’d been impatient with them at times, but she’d also been there for every musical performance, every game, once stopping up her younger son’s bloody nose with a new silk blouse.  She’d been known—after a few drinks—to sing karaoke every so often.

There were times her tinnitus got so bad, it kept her up at night.

Awake at night, she sometimes thought about him, wishing she’d stayed, but what was the use?

She’d made whatever she’d made of herself.  That part was done.

She packed her green knapsack, ran out the front door, and bumped into Meimei on her way back from the market, nearly knocking her into a rose bush.  She thought Meimei might try to stop her, but instead she wordlessly dropped her bag of groceries, led her out into the intersection, and helped her flag down a passing bus.

The girls at the hostel were different, but the same.  They shuffled cards on their bunks and took turns cutting the deck.  The Danish woman had returned after a short modeling stint, for which she hadn’t been paid, and was looking for more work.  She sat on her cot, clipping her nails.

“That man from the street market?  I remember he gave you that money up front.  What did he want from you?”

“It was a school,” Catherine mumbled.

“Did you sleep with him?”

“It wasn’t like that.”

The girls gave her sympathetic nods.  “Of course not,” they said.  “Try not to think about it too much.”

They moved their card game over to her bunk, consoling her, saying what a letdown life was, how sorry they were to see her go.

 

The call caught Elliot off guard, as if he’d been caught peeping into a window of Amanda Ward’s bedroom.  In fact, when the phone rang, he was standing in the enclosed sun porch, in his very own home, stealing an oblique glance at the Ward home.  And wondering—in an idle and muddled whimsy of Amanda—whether behind all that substantial brick she was at home, whether either of the two windows he could see, one up, one down, impenetrable in daylight by reflection of the southern sun and at night by the lined drapes, concealed her and Victor sitting amiably, doing whatever it is partners in an established and secure marriage find to do.

The developer of their particular and privileged neighborhood had intentionally stuttered the lots, so that no house stared squarely into the façade of another.  It was an architectural nod to gentility: it was rude to stare, even if one were a house.   The Slaymakers had added the porch to their handsome Tudor to brighten the home in months of short light.  The prospect Elliot enjoyed included three of the Slaymakers’ trees—the American elm and the silver maple, dormant but weeks from bud, the Engleman spruce—and across the road the elm, maple and evergreen of the Wards.  The Ward flowerbeds would spill color from the day they were planted through the first frost, but as yet they had not been turned.  Abundant, that was the word he wanted.  At the curb cut of the Wards’ driveway on a cedar post that had weathered silver stood the Ward mailbox, ducks on the wing, rising from cattails.

Elliot could see up the gravel drive to the northerly corner of their house.  The master bedroom, he knew, was in the rear, on the far corner.  Had its windows been visible, he would have been watching them.

These serene and sturdy houses were not the couples’ only point of contact.  The Wards and the Slaymakers enjoyed an occasional evening of bridge together, took in a random movie, usually an art-theatre film, once a year traded dinners.  Elliot’s law firm had done Victor and Amanda’s estate plan, and the Slaymakers had briefly consulted Victor, a psychologist, when their eldest son had a bumpy year at school.  Elliot remembered with gratitude Victor’s sound counsel, and with resentment his refusal to send them a bill.

Elliot was not as a rule given to teasing.  But he had gotten laughs at parties by hailing Victor as a cynical psychologist, rather than a clinical one.  After the first time Victor merely smiled and nodded, but, marking an initial wince, Eliot had made it a running gag.

The couples occupied for each other perhaps not that most intimate circle of friends but the next concentric ring.  Of Amanda, Sybil had reservations.  It was true that she chattered about trivialities, travel, spas, cosmetic surgery.  Sybil found that self-absorbed, underscored by the fact that she was too pretty for her years.  Once, to Elliot, Sybil called her a flirt.    Victor, naturally, she found substantial.  As a foursome, Sybil gravitated to Victor.  That left Amanda to Elliot.

He answered the first ring.  “Elliot,” she said in a tight breath, “ it’s Amanda,” and caught him unprepared.  He took a self-conscious moment to respond, to find the proper tone of warmth.   Then he waited, in the custom, for her to state her business.

“I don’t how to begin,” Amanda said.  In the pause Elliot gathered himself, found that posture of counselor, a man used to fielding the problems of others.

“Just tell me what’s up.”

“Can I come see you?” The telephone wires sharpened her voice, “On a professional basis?”

“Professional?”  Elliot asked only because she had emphasized the word.

“Confidential.”

“Of course.”

He visualized his next day’s calendar and offered several times.  They agreed on one, and he hung up pleased with his secret.  The work of a tax lawyer does not often engage one’s psychological insights, but he was gratified somehow in the urgency of her word and, in the studied way she said them.  He was always flattered when trusted with another’s matters, but here he had a second, darker response.  The visit would add dialogue to his mute daydreams on the sun porch.

 

In their own conversations, Sybil managed to make Amanda an object of private fun.  Amanda’s itineraries, Amanda’s garden, Amanda’s shoe closet.  As the couples glided through their middle years, freed from the exigencies of child-rearing and finances, Sybil’s interests had become increasingly socieatal, increasingly somber.  She was lately concerned over what she called the world situation, and always had a disease in need of organization or a landlocked nation in need of beneficence.

Eliot was pleased for her, but it seemed so serious.  Her appearance followed her interests, and grew sensible—that was her adjective whenever Elliot commented on a new article of clothing—as she moved from lover to manager.  It was during this period that she’d adopted a new palette –colors for a wardrobe that attended her emerging focus.   It was all, he told himself with a logic tinged by the melancholy that attends the loss of romance, an appropriate heading for his wife to set.  After all, she was good at it: adequately educated, Junior-League trained, efficient.  He wondered, though, why the causes she chose were always so distant, at least an ocean from home, and so obscure.  And why it was that she could not simultaneously oversee the earth’s downtrodden and maintain some flair in her dress.

 

He chewed on none of these thoughts the next day, as he walked into his firm’s waiting room to retrieve Amanda.  Federalist, the designer had told the firm’s executive committee, that was the style of the furniture, and all the partners agreed, thinking reverentially of Hamilton,Jeffersonand their essays.  He took a moment to study her before she became aware of him.

Amanda sat perched on the edge of a burgundy leather settee, her hands folded on her knees, taut and alert.  Her slender and stockinged legs crossed at the ankle, and he noted the angle at which they interrupted the line of brass rivets about the couch’s frame.  She might have been applying for a legal position, but for her age.  And except for her dress.  The tweed suit alone, doubtless some designer whose name Elliot would not know—would have cost a new lawyer a month’s salary.  He spoke her name, she rose and, though their evening custom was to touch cheeks, here they immediately seemed to agree on four hands, each gripping the other’s wrists, trapeze style.  He held hers a split second after she’d let go.

Other women clients wore perfume, he was sure of it, though he couldn’t remember any.  Her scent was faint as wildflower and wonderfully out of place.  He guided her by the elbow down a corridor lined with shelves of books.  She remarked on how grave it all seemed, and he said, not meaning to poke fun at either her or the life he led, “Yes, yes.  Serious business, this.”

The fact was he didn’t especially care for Victor.  The man was too tall, too assured.  He had kindly eyes that he could crinkle at will.  He had turned them once or twice on Elliot trying to inject sincerity into a political argument, humaneness he called it, as if he had some sort of patent on understanding.  That was what Elliot liked least about the man, this sincerity.  Not his athleticism or his lean, cowboy looks, or the intuitive way he had with people.  Especially women.  Victor seemed to think whatever flimsy degree he needed as a therapist conferred transcendent powers of compassion.  And the damn thing was, just acting that way established his authority.

In Elliot’s office, Amanda and he sat away from the desk at a small table he used for tête-à-têtes, its maple drum top and the ubiquitous lined pad between them.  At the top of the page, he printed her name and the date, mostly to signal to her that he took her at her word—this was to be a professional consultation.  That was another thing, his refusal to bill for their consultation.  Coming as it did right after Victor had sent his law firm a substantial check for setting up the trusts, it seemed a reprisal.

“I don’t know where to start,” she said, beginning again.  “I’ve rehearsed this, but sitting here what I had in mind to say seems wrong.  I shouldn’t have come,” she added but made no move to leave.

“Just take your time,” Elliot replied.  He considered other, more intimate responses but hung back.  The heather cast of her suit caught up in her gray eyes and somehow complicated their color.  When she began to talk, he found himself staring at her mouth.

“I’m not even sure if this is the kind of thing you know anything about.”

“I’m a tax lawyer,” he said gently.  “But my practice touches on a wide variety of matters.  Usually corporate, of course, but estate planning involves me in family issues.  Personal issues,” he offered.

“Family law?”

“No,” he quickly disclaimed.  The caste of lawyer to which Elliot belonged looked down on matrimonial practice.  “No, our firm does some of that when absolutely necessary, but I have little contact with it.”  He often used the sentence at cocktail parties to distance himself from advice-seekers, from unwanted and casual inquiries, but here once spoken he regretted it was out.

“Oh,” she said, disappointed.

“Amanda, whatever it is, tell me.  In my years of practice, I’ve heard just about everything.”  The statement was a gross exaggeration, but the intimate nature of what he imagined she wanted to tell him goaded him on.  Not his shyness, but his usual professional reserve began to fall away.  The more personal her need, the less qualified he was to address it, and the more he wanted to.

“I’m sorry,” she examined her flawless manicure and thumbed at a cuticle.  “I’ve false-carded you.  This isn’t about the law.”

He realized his fascination was, not improper, unusual.  As if while turning through television stations he had come across naked figures.  Curious that she would introduce a term from their bridge table.  Was it an attempt to bring the home, his home, into the conversation?  Elliot waited.

She rubbed at an invisible spot on the nail of her thumb.  “I can only blurt it out,” she said at last.  “I believe Victor is having an affair.”

“What makes you think that?”  If this wasn’t a legal matter, Elliot reasoned, if she’s not here to see me in my legal capacity, then there’s no call for restraint.  No need to warn her that a professional needed objectivity and that, on the subject of her marriage, of her, he was not objective.

She cocked her head as if trying to see a different him.

“A wife can tell, Elliot.  Victor talks all the time of a colleague.”  She spoke an unfamiliar name. “They’ve served on committees together,” Amanda explained.  “I’ve met her, functions.”

“And?”  Elliot couldn’t believe his fortune.  He needed to decide where to direct this.

“He talks of her all the time.”

“And what gives you cause for suspicion?”

“Well, that, for one thing.  And I’ve met her.  She’s gorgeous.”

“Come now, Amanda.  There are very few women who can compete…” and he put his hands out palms up, as if presenting a platter.  He meant to indicate her beauty.  She ignored the stumble, the confused gesture.

“All he talks about is this woman, her problems—apparently she’s in a difficult business partnership, bickering over money—her quandary.  What about me?  What about my quandary?”  Liquid swelled in her lower lids and twin tears seeped out.  She daubed them away before they had a chance to run.  When had she retrieved the tissue?  She held it balled in a fist.

“Amanda, let’s be realistic.  Victor admires this woman, she comes to him for help.  So far that’s all we know.  Do you have any evidence of…?”  Elliot let the word go.  Adultery was too clinical, sex too bald.  She shook her head and from the force of her reaction he feared she would begin to cry for real.

His question made her color.  “Victor has always been, how can I say this, very physical.  And lately, he’s not.  He’s not interested at all.  In me.”  She looked up.  If you could round up all the wrinkles that she’d had removed, Sybil loved to gossip about her, you could make raisins out of an entire vineyard.

“I find that hard to believe.”

Amanda was not unused to the occasional cocktail party proposition.  Alert for signs, she looked at him and found only the chaste compliment of a friend.

“Well, thank you.  But it’s true.”

“Have you talked to him about it?”  Again the head-shake, again Elliot considered that he might be helping neither her nor his own cause, whatever his was, that he would have to cut closer to the bone.  He reached across the small table and put his hand over her fist.

“And that’s it?  His declining interest?”

“Not declining, Elliot.  Absent.  I’ve begged.  I’ve done…this is not easy for me to talk about…everything I know how.”  Her voice sunk to an incendiary hush.  “Believe me,” and here she gave a little embarrassed laugh, “everything.”

“Amanda, perhaps you first need to gather the facts.  His appetite…” Elliot started.  That was his established practice—first, marshal the facts, then research a problem until the answer formed itself.   Elliot liked to think that he settled on the solution the way a falling leaf settles on the ground.  He was not comfortable with the topic of Victor’s impotence or indifference, Victor’s dalliances.  “His appetite….  You mustn’t jump to conclusions.  Men reach a certain age and they change.”

“I wish it were that,” she said, not admitting the possibility.

“It’s quite likely.  The few facts you have suggest that, rather than anything more…”  He let sensational go by.  Considered lubricious, irresponsible.

“…complicated.”

“You think so?”

“Of course.  You’re not the only gender that changes.” He picked the softer noun deliberately.  “Just because menopause grabs all the headlines at the supermarket newsstands….” This produced the smile he’d aimed for.  She put her other hand on top of the pile and squeezed his.

“I suppose.  But I don’t think….”

“You’re reacting to suspicions, Amanda.  Suspicions, at a time in life when all of us have insecurities about our marriages.  It’s only natural.”

“Perhaps I am.”

“Of course you are.  Before the execution comes the trial.  And before that the arrest.”

“And before that the crime?”

“Only with the guilty.”  She laughed, and the movement of her head loosed a second pair of tears that she, freeing her hands and dispersing the pile, blotted away.

“Elliot, can I ask you…?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Will you speak to him?”

He wanted to expand his role in this little drama.  She had not sought him out as a lawyer.  What might be unethical at the bar was perfectly innocent here.  No harm in his extending help if she felt it would be useful.   He found himself wondering about her scent.  Would it be too personal to ask?   Indelicate?

“Speak to him?  I wouldn’t know what to say.  I can’t simply come out and inquire whether he’s sleeping with this woman.  Or considering it.”  The first flowering shrubs, he thought.  That wonderful morning when you walk out to get the newspaper and the aroma of lilac bushes has blown in overnight.  Not that far away now, any day.   It would be like Amanda to change her scent with the seasons.

“You’ll think of a way.  You’re so good with words.  Please, Elliot.  I would so appreciate knowing.  Anything at all.”

He considered pointing out that he had no training for this sort of thing, that ministers or therapists or even columnists for the lovelorn were a better source of advice.  He considered saying no.  But only for a moment.  He agreed to take on the task.  He already had an idea of how to approach it.  He took her to the door and here, standing in the closed office, leaned his face to hers.  Amanda moved forward and put her lips to his cheek, the softest touch.  Then she placed the tips of her fingers on the spot she had kissed, and uttered words too quietly for him to understand, the only one he made out was Dear.

She let herself out.

The best perfume, he mused, plays not in the nostrils, but in the memory.  Memory past and future.  The paper of his legal pad showed a stain, a washed-out yellow that deepened to buttercup where the liquid of the tissue had leaked through.  He tore off the page, crumpled it with great satisfaction, and tossed it in the trash.

 

Elliot had never been in Victor’s office, in any therapist’s office for that matter.  He found himself contemplating the deliberation, the motives—isn’t that what this was about?—that was revealed in its layout and decor.  Victor’s was the first suite off the elevator.  One entered a small foyer that served as a waiting room.  It held no receptionist, only a commonplace sofa and chairs, a stack of stale and unoffending magazines on a coffee table.  A short hall, each end protected by a door, then led to the inner office, guarding, Elliot supposed, the privacy of the conversation within.  From the far side of that office a separate exit led back to the building hallway.  The design allowed patients to pass into and from the consulting room without confronting each other.

The main room was both ordinary and precise, its furniture vaguely modern but comfortable.  Two Eames chairs, upholstered in black leather against rich teak, and two couches were grouped in a circle, and seemed to invite a visitor to find his own comfort.  Elliot noticed a worn track on the carpet by the window, where some patients apparently paced.  He selected one of the reclining chairs and Victor took the one opposite.

“Is this right?” he asked, to make sure he hadn’t arrogated Victor’s place.

“There is no right,” Victor answered with an easy smile and Elliot chalked the opening point for the opponent.

“I mean to see you,” Elliot hesitated over the echo, “on a professional basis.”

“I can’t do that.  You’re a friend.  I’m flattered you came to me.  You tell me generally about the matter and I’ll recommend you to someone.”

“Are you going to duck out of this behind some concept of ethics?”  Elliot smiled to cover his unease.  Victor made it clear he was used to that.

“There are good reasons for the rule.  Perhaps they don’t apply in the practice of law.”  He waited.  Was he aware of Amanda’s visit?  Had husband and wife had it out, would his plan fall apart and he be exposed?

“We have canons of ethics as well.”

Victor gave a nod that said, Of course you do.  “I simply meant the circumstances of the professions are different.”

“If you’re not going to accept me as a patient, I wonder whether I should proceed.”

Elliot had embarked on the practice of tax law because it was largely an intellectual exercise.  In a way it was like raking leaves.  Transactions, assets and desires arrived in disarray and the lawyer’s job was to order them, to build appropriate piles, so that by the end of his task he had imposed neatness.  The field had little of the confrontation and melodrama that were the nourishment of the television shows.  Elliot had found both law school and his first years in a large firm distressingly competitive, and this branch of the law, shunned by many for its scholarship and complexity, suited him.  He was unused to the situation in which he now found himself—the possibility that this apparently trivial conversation was indeed a negotiation over something of importance to both of them.

“If you’re having second thoughts,” Victor said off-handedly, “by all means let’s drop it.  It may help to tell you, even though I’m not accepting you as a patient, that whatever you say here is confidential.  You have my word on it.  As a doctor.”  Of course he acts comfortable.  He faces this with every new visit.  He’s at home.  Elliot took a breath through his mouth and pressed on.

“I’m considering embarking on a course of conduct that I realize is faulty, wrong.  But I can’t seem to stop myself.  I need some advice.”

“What kind of conduct?”

Elliot’s original plan was to go to Victor and tell him the truth.  He had no practice at dissembling and felt sure a therapist would be skilled at discovering falsehoods.  To tell him the truth and then engage him in a discussion on the prospect of marital infidelity.

“It’s a woman.  Understand, I’ve been faithful to Sybil all these years.  Without a glimmer, really.  I’ve never thought of anything like this.  Now there comes this woman—you don’t know her, I see her at work, she’s a colleague—and she’s all I can think of.”

Victor pursed his lips.  It was his only reaction.  He rose.  “I’ll get you a name.  He’s a very good man, you’ll get along.”

“Is that all you have to say?”

Elliot wasn’t sure Victor had heard him.  He walked to the desk and wrote with a fountain pen on a pad, a small, white pad.  “You and Sybil are friends of mine.  I shouldn’t be your doctor.”  He tore off the sheet, walked back and handed it to Victor.

That was another thing.  They’re always referring to themselves as doctors.  They’re the only Ph.D.’s outside a university who do that.

“He’s in the book.  I can get you his number if you like.”

“No, no.  I’ll find it.”  Elliot made to rise, but Victor’s fingers lifted, the smallest movement, to indicate he had something else.

“I’m very fond of Sybil.  You know that.  We both are.”

He had brought Amanda into the conversation.    Elliot froze—what would come next?

“And speaking as a friend, I’d hate to see you jeopardize a marriage of twenty-one years…?”

“Twenty-two in April.”  For their twentieth, the Slaymakers had given a party on the country club patio.  The Wards were there.  Amanda had worn an off-white silk blouse and black velvet slacks.  Do women still call them slacks?

“…of twenty-two years for something so silly as a fling.  You’re a sensible man, Elliot.  Your practice of tax law involves you in investments, am I right?  That may be a helpful way to think of it.  The risks here don’t justify the rewards.”

That evening at the party it had grown chilly, and Amanda had fetched a cardigan sweater.  She put it on just before he asked her to dance.  It was soft to the touch, cashmere she told him, and a becoming shade of yellow.

“Lemon chiffon,” she told him.  “It’s supposed to be a cool shade, but at the moment I’m interested in warmth.”

Victor said something Elliot didn’t catch.  Instead, he nodded his head as if he were absorbing, indeed persuaded by, the advice.  Then he used what he’d decided to say.

“Since we’re friends, and not doctor-patient,” Victor had provided the opening.  “Since we’re friends, I’ll ask you something I couldn’t ask the man,” here he held up the slip of paper Victor had given him, “who will be my therapist.  Have you ever done anything similar?”

Victor watched him evenly.  “I wonder,” his voice had lost none of its warmth, a knack, Elliot realized, which was in itself a device to coax an immediate and bogus intimacy.  “I wonder whether you came to me with your problem because you believe that I have.  You know, a lot of people choose their analyst because they think they know the answers he’ll give.”

Victor didn’t wait for Elliot’s denial.  It took him the briefest moment to decide to answer, a long second for which he closed his eyes.

“I never have.  In this office I see a lot of the harm that infidelity, distrust, breach of faith cause.  I know our profession is famous for its supposed vacuum of fixed points, but I don’t subscribe.  Everything isn’t relative, anything doesn’t go.”

The interview was over and they rose together.  “This has been very helpful,” Elliot said, showing the slip of paper.  “Thank you.  I do wish you’d bill me for your time.”

“You go see that man,” Victor said, ignoring the request.  “He’s quite good.”

In the elevator Elliot congratulated himself on the way he had put his skills to the mission.  He had found what he’d come for, and at very little cost of stance.  Interesting, too, the way Victor had, the setting, the manner.  Not at all what Elliot imagined a therapist’s room to be, darkened, a single couch, a chair set behind the reclining head of the analysand.

Still, not something he wanted to try again.  Complete loss of position.  Victor Ward had the advantage from the get-go.

 

“You’re dawdling this morning.  Avoiding the office?”  Sybil poured him a second cup of coffee, in itself an expansion of routine.  Leave it to Sybil to notice.  She’d be on to a schedule change faster than lipstick on the collar.

“I have to stop at the Wards this morning.  Discuss some papers.”  He touched the briefcase he’d propped by the breakfast table.  Better to explain his visit in advance.  He would park in the Wards’ drive.  “I’ll take my coffee and look them over on the porch.”

Victor Ward also kept regular hours.  Elliot knew from his own appointment that Victor’s first patient arrived at 8:30.  Sure enough, a few minutes after eight, Victor’s red roadster backed out of their property.

Elliot pulled into the very drive, trying to move from his mind the lurid, delicious symbolism.  He slammed the car’s door harder than he intended.  Underneath his foot the gravel gave a satisfying crunch.  He remembered Victor saying that every spring he had the gravel raked and washed, to prevent it from compacting.  The flowerbeds were freshly turned and Elliot’s eyes watered at the tangy smell of fertilizer.  This very weekend she would likely be out, kneeling and preparing the earth for the flats of annuals she put in each spring.  Last year this time he’d stopped by and chatted as she knelt on the ground and trowelled perfect, conical holes into the soil.  She had no plan, she told him, she liked to spread out the plantings and prepare all the beds before deciding what colors would go where.  Not art, she’d said smiling, just improvisation.

Elliot stood a moment to consider the Ward home.  It was a blockish, Georgian building, freshly trimmed in white.  Amanda had added working shutters, and had them pointed forest green and hinged with black iron, after a sketch she’d found in a book.  The drive bowed through a port-cochere that had, he knew from the neighborhood’s history, once welcomed carriages.  It was a handsome house, looking for all the world as the Wards did.  Handsome, substantial, tasteful.

And private.  How private with its regular windows, shuttered outside and draped within, how readily it could close itself off from view.  Someone had trimmed the wisteria in front of the library window, to clear the prospect.  From where he stood he could see into the library, that was doubtless where they would sit, see the turn of the drape.  He knew the fabric, a rich cream backdrop on which a pattern of birds of paradise repeated.   He had, he realized, been in that room only during evenings, when the draperies were closed, when the house opened its doors and just for the moment the private lives of its inhabitants were –what? –suspended? Stored upstairs?  Dressed in costume?

Amanda answered the door and offered her hand.  He shook it and remarked on her dress.  It was a floral print.  It fitted her closely to the waist, where it flared in a way he thought had gone out of style.  The belt was a tied sash, in the same print.  Over it she wore the yellow sweater, its sleeves pushed up.  He mentioned it.  Lemon chiffon.

“You’re very observant,” she said to his compliment.

“For a tax lawyer?”

“For a man.”

She seated him in the library, and insisted on coffee.  He looked down on the wisteria, noticed the vine-ends and the blue-violet buds.  She returned carrying a tray with china service and a silver pot.  Then easily she poured and served, and sat back wearing a look that was both patient and expectant.

“You’re not dressed for gardening.”

“I’m going into town today.”  When she crossed her legs at the knee they gave a satiny whisper.

“Can I give you a ride?”

“I’ll take my car, I have errands.  Elliot, what have you found?”

He had thought through his words.  It was a bit like giving legal advice.  One must include the proper balance of risk, the proper disclaimers of certitude.  Of course it wasn’t legal advice, he told himself again.  This was a personal matter, and personal wishes can be weighed.  But still.  One needs to consider how the advice will sound if things turn out differently than expected, if the advice is exposed to the light.

“Amanda, I want you to realize that I don’t have a definitive answer.  I wasn’t able to confront Victor, only to talk in generalities.  We talked disposition, philosophy.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Well, we talked as adults.  This is a time in life that people like us, you and me, who have led one life faithfully and happily, may find themselves wondering about paths not taken.  It’s only natural.  And some of us wonder whether we’ll have another chance.”

“Another chance for what?”

“For whatever.  To go off to the tropics and administer to the savages.  Or join the circus,” his eye came upon a photograph in the bookshelves, Victor and Amanda in summery clothes on the deck of a sailboat, “or sail away.  To be a pirate, or whatever….” He disliked the word, the kids had adopted it as a slogan and now he had used it twice.

The books in the shelves lay in surprising disarray.  They had been pushed in so that the photographs could be displayed, a wedding party, kids in ski gear, a daughter in cap and gown.  Interesting, he thought.  He remembered reading somewhere that scent, unlike sight or sound, travels on actual molecules.  If he withdrew a book and opened its pages he could capture the scent of her, not an incorporeal wave but the actual particles of scent from her body.

“Are you thinking of becoming a pirate, Elliot?  Boarding another man’s boat and stealing Maureen O’Hara from under his nose?”

“Not Maureen O’Hara,” he said, and uncomfortable, he glanced into his coffee, surprised to find it gone.

He had a sudden vision.  The two of them were in a bare room: a single chair, in which he sat, and a bed.  She was on the bed.  Fully dressed.  In the sweater.  Sitting shoeless with her hands around her legs, her head resting on her knees.  She was troubled.  He wanted to move to her, but wasn’t sure where to touch her.   Perhaps lightly, on the back, on that cashmere expanse….

When he looked up she was examining him.

“Amanda.  Victor and I discussed the possibilities of life.  We agreed that everyone should examine them.  And I must tell you I think you’re right about him.  I think he’s seeing someone else.”

She gave the briefest shudder, mostly in the brow, and Elliot thought that she brightened.  Not with joy but with attention, the way a small animal instantly grows alert at a shadow or creak that may bring menace.

Elliot had now entered that house, he had entered the library with its drapes pulled back and its glimpse of his own house across the road, just the corner, the sun porch where he so often stood.  He was thrilled by the words he’d spoken.  He could see himself on his sun porch looking across to this room, and he knew he would relive the pleasure of this visit each time he saw her windows.

What he said would remain behind him, like cigar-smoke, no—better, like the subtle scent she wore.  It would linger in the fabric of the room, in the tufted ottoman and the comfortable wing chairs covered in damask.  He had entered the house to stay, in a way, he knew, that created for himself and its occupants a new and private life.

 

 

Watson took a sip from his water, glancing only once toward the commotion.  Not the kind of place you’d expect to see a baby, but true to the murmurings, the little guy was straight off a Gerber label, smiling like a cherub at his newfound celebrity, as stunning as his parents.  They took a table too close, nestling junior into the high chair the maitre d’ managed to have materialize.  Instead of joining in on the gawking, Watson said, “Just like me at that age, Dad?”

His father stared off Watson’s shoulder as if he loved nothing more than an infant’s gooing and gahhing.  Or maybe it was Momma’s cleavage that caught his attention.  Watson could only hope.  Displayed in a cocktail dress cut low enough for any teenager, Watson couldn’t deny it had caught his attention.  Assistant material all the way.

His father plucked his napkin from the table, unfolding it a corner at a time, turning it to show both sides, then snapped its starched hem with a flick of his wrists, settling it across his lap as if making a rabbit disappear.  Behind Watson the baby burbled out a laugh, and Watson’s father’s eyebrows shot up, a clown’s face, flirting with whatever was at hand.  Even a baby boy.  Watson looked at his plate, patted his own napkin into place.

The waiter made his arrival, Watson following his father’s lead with a Scotch and soda, and as they listened to the night’s specials his father retrieved a bill from his inside jacket pocket, a one or a five, Watson wasn’t sure which.  He worked it with the same flair as his napkin, though his fingers, the knobbed knuckles, had more trouble than they used to with the folding and flipping and flourishes.  The waiter stuttered mid mango chutney, a real smile cracking his veneer when Watson’s father held up the bill, folded into a tiny, green-checked tuxedo jacket, razor sharp collar points.  He did his slight of hand, that still as assured as ever, revealing his suddenly empty palms a moment before pulling the bill out of the waiter’s sleeve.  He held it up to him, and said, “Please, take it to the young gentleman over there.  A gift, from me.”

“Dad,” Watson said.

“From me,” his father repeated.  “Doctor Marvelo.”

The waiter glanced between the two of them, the tiny jacket pinched between his fingertips, as if it might vanish again, paused long enough Watson worried his father might pull a full water glass out of his fly, but he turned at last, and Watson watched his father as he imagined the waiter making a slight, apologetic bow, holding out the bill, nodding toward their table.  His father’s smile, held just below beaming, tremored for an instant, then went flatline, the waiter returning, saying, “They thank you, Sir, but are afraid the child would only try to eat it.”

The waiter left a moment for smiles that didn’t come, then placed the dollar jacket on the linen.

“You keep it,” his father said, but the waiter took a step back, saying he’d return with their drinks, give them a moment more for their decisions, the bill left on the edge of the cloth like a stain.

Watson had seen it all before, the young lovely across the room presented with another of whatever she’d been drinking, a discreet nod toward his father, then the drink carried away, his father disappearing before his eyes, as if Watson were dining with an empty jacket.  But playing up to a baby.  That was new.

“As if I were offering to sell their little dear into the slave trade,” his father muttered.

“Instead of simply trying to steal his spotlight?” Watson said.

His father shot a glare his way and Watson said, “You could have offered to saw him in half.”

The drinks arrived.  Watson lifted his toward his father.  “Happy Birthday, Dad.”

His father scanned the restaurant, took a sip.  “They haven’t been happy in a long time.”

“Dad.”

His father looked at Watson, not drinking, not speaking, not reaching to put the folded bill back into his jacket.  “They used to know me,” he said.  “Wherever I went.”

True enough, Watson thought, but so long ago, Watson’s mother still alive.  Doctor Marvelo and The Amazing Lucia, his lovely assistant.  They’d have had to have performed with elephants though, to get anywhere near memories sharp enough to recall those days.  “No, no, not Alzheimer’s,” he told his friends.  “Just attention deficit disorder.  He cannot bear the lack of attention.”

His father hadn’t cheered by the time their food arrived, and Watson had to watch him slice a morsel from his prime rib, put it into his mouth, fork turned back European style, like his mother before the cancer—no trick or illusion about it—made her disappear.  His slice of bread sat beside his plate, one bite torn off, crumbs dotting the linen, letting everyone see they’d performed in Paris, Prague, the continent.

Watson guessed it would be the bread.

It had been a decade, his mother gone that long again already, since Watson had been able to gather enough of his father’s friends to make a raucous night of the birthday.  All performers, though Watson’s father hadn’t made an appearance since the death of his wife, the showing off was a show in itself.  Just out of college, flush with his first paychecks in the real world, Watson had been clueless enough to rent an entire club sight unseen.  The glass back bar the side of a swimming pool, mermaids performing for their pleasure, had been as much a surprise to Watson as to everyone else.

And, as more and more attention swung toward the mermaids, their oversized tip snifter filling with bills, Watson found himself looking for his father.  He’d been right beside him, grumping about the damn mermaids, and then, poof, gone, just like his old act.

He was thinking of checking the restroom, the coat check, when a roar went up at the bar, and Watson turned to see his father reappear in a froth of bubbles behind the glass, stripped down to his boxers, chasing after a very startled mermaid.  The crowd went wild, throwing napkins at the glass, cocktail straws.  But the mermaids scattered like minnows, leaving only his father mugging behind the glass, something he couldn’t hope would hold the crowd the way the bikini-topped college girls had.

The cheers turned to jeers, then died out completely, everyone back to their drinks, their stories, their endless rounds of one-upmanship.

Only Watson saw his father reach for the glass, his eyes as wide as if Watson’s mother had walked into the bar, back from the dead, the greatest magic trick ever, only to find his father trapped in all that water behind a glass wall.  Watson actually glanced over his shoulder, wondering what his father could have seen, and by the time he looked back, his father’s stare had become fixed, his body sinking, arm still reaching, a last breath trailing out of his mouth, bubbles coiling toward the surface.

Watson tore out of the room, up the stairs to the pool, and dove in fully clothed, barely noticing the mermaids beached against the far wall, hobbled by their ridiculous fish tails.  He grabbed his father by a wave of his still dyed black showman’s hair and pushed for the surface, only at that instant remembering the time before, at the beach.

When Watson began winning his meets not by touches but by body lengths, when the colleges started waving their scholarships, his father, pointing out that it had been he who had taught him to swim in the first place, took Watson to the beaches like he hadn’t since his mother had been alive.  A fabulous swimmer himself, fit and trim as any twenty year old, only the whitening chest hair giving him away, they’d body-surfed together like kids.  Between waves, he declared that this was what swimming was for, not churning back and forth over some black line on a pool bottom, like some trained aquatic rat.

It was his father who noticed the lifeguard watching them, pointed her out to Watson, a woman straight out of a fantasy.  He urged and badgered, but she was so far beyond any high school kid that Watson only swam out deeper, beyond the break.  His father followed, insisting she could be Watson’s, all he had to do was walk out and be noticed, maybe pull a coin out from behind her ear, or, as his father said, “Pluck it straight from the depth of wonders of that mighty bosom.”  Cheeks burning, Watson stroked steadily away.  But his father stuck beside him, matching him stroke for stroke.  Watson dove, changing directions underwater like a deepwater game of Marco-Polo, zigzagging until his lungs burned.  When at last he popped up to check his bearings, his father was nowhere to be seen.  Only the line of people on the beach, the empty lifeguard tower.

Watson treaded harder, lifting himself to see the guard churn through the surf line, rescue tube trailing behind.  He looked out ahead of her, and then farther, until he saw the black patch of his father’s hair, the last weak wave of arm, the collapse of it back into the water.

Watson swam like he never had in any pool, barely, it felt, touching the water, more skipping across it, beating the guard and her head start, yanking back on that hair, turning his father’s face to the air.  He’d only made a couple of pulls toward the beach when the guard slapped her tube out to him, said, “Clip him in.”

Watson did and one on each side of the tube, they checked, found his breath sputtering in, then out, and started hauling him toward the beach.  Watson and the guard were close enough their legs touched, big wide scissor kicks.  She told him he was quite a swimmer, that they both were.  She said she’d been having fun watching them.

“He’s my dad,” was all Watson could think to say.

Back on the sand, the crowd huddled around, his father sat up, forearms draped across his knees, the very picture of exhaustion, but, Watson noticed, with his belly sucked in tight.  He held the crowd spellbound with his tale of the riptide, the slick, deadly pull of it, as if it had “nefarious intentions, tugging me out toward oblivion.”

“Riptide?” Watson asked, and he caught the guard’s glance his way.  “Dad, I was right with you.  I didn’t feel a thing.”

His father kept his head down, hair dragging in front of his face.  He only tilted a palm up, almost too weary to explain.  “A rip can be awfully tight.  Taking one, leaving another.”

“But,” Watson started, looking to the guard, who only shrugged those shoulders, said, “I don’t know.  I’ve never seen one.”

His father looked up then, turned his head slowly to meet Watson’s eye.  “Would it have helped, son, if it had taken you as well?”

“Well, no, but…”

“Tell me, son, how big a riptide would you require to sweep your life away?”

His father deigned to let Watson and the lifeguard help him to the car, saying thank you, thank you, to the crowd, as at the end of one of his performances, although he never once gave in, never admitted that one thing about it was staged.  As close as he ever came was as Watson drove him home, both of them silent until his father quoted him.  “’He’s my dad?’  After everything, that’s the best you could do?”

Watson drove, looking straight ahead.

“My god, she was yours for the taking.  Dressed and trussed and served on a platter.”

“I don’t need an assistant, Dad.  You do.”

They did not speak again, that day, or ever, about his father’s drowning.

Nor did they about the mermaid episode.  His father only gasping on the deck after Watson’s single breath of mouth to mouth, turning toward the mermaids, saying, “My son,” Watson wishing his mouth was still clamped over his father’s, silencing him.

“Dad,” Watson said, water streaming from his suit, “are you okay?”

None of the mermaids making a move toward them, his father had only muttered, “Unbelievable.  They, they did not lift a fin or flipper to assist me,” and one of the girls said, “We’re the entertainment, asshole.  You weren’t even supposed to be in the goddamned pool.”

Now, watching his father’s glance return again and again to his spurned dollar bill, Watson watched each bite he took.

It was the bread.  A bit of crust that wouldn’t slow a seagull.

He watched his father’s jaw work once as he stared at the beautiful couple with the beautiful child, a scene that brought who knew what out of his past.  Then he stopped.  Stopped everything.  No motion whatsoever.  Just frozen there, for longer than Watson could have credited.

Then, as slowly as if he’d wrapped time around himself, Watson’s father turned to him, eyes not bulged as Watson expected, but just seeming to see more clearly than he had in ages, the present instead of the past.

“Dad,” Watson said.  “Please don’t.  Not tonight.”

His father dipped his head just perceptibly to one side, not unlike a bright dog working out a perplexing command.

“Dad.  I’ll get up and leave.  I swear I will.”

His father, Watson thought, bowed to him, but he was only reaching for his water glass, which he caught too high on the rim, tipping it over, water launched out across the table but soaking into the linen before reaching Watson.  A few heads turned.  His father didn’t give them a glance, reached instead for his highball glass, lifted it and took a sip which leaked out the corners of his mouth.

“Please,” Watson said.  Napkin in his fist, he pushed back his chair.

His father searched his son’s face, the corners of his eyes crinkling into something more question than smile.

“I can stay under longer than you can, Dad.  Remember?”  Watson took a big, cheek swelling puff and clamped his lips shut, nodding his head side to side, humming the Jeopardy song, letting out too much air, finding himself straining too soon.  He hadn’t been swimming in a long time.

Ever the master, his father’s face flushed, lips tingeing blue.  He made no move to stand, to go for help, did not lift his hands to his throat.

And then there they were, the beautiful couple, there at their table, the woman bending toward his father, but his father giving her not so much as a glance, even when she asked, “Are you all right?  Can I help?”

The father never took his eyes off his son’s.

Watson let his air out in a rush.  “For God’s sake, Dad.”

“He’s choking,” the woman said.  “We took a class.  When Dylan was born.”

The husband, Watson saw now, had circled behind his father’s chair, was reaching around to lift him.

“He’s not choking,” Watson said.

“He’s going to pass out.  He’s turning blue.”

“He’s a magician.  It’s a trick.”

The couple gaped.

“Doctor Marvelo!” Watson said, waving his palm toward him as his mother had on the stage.  “At your service.”

“But, he’s choking!”

His father’s eyes followed Watson as he stood and threw his napkin down.  He stepped around the table, saying, “Excuse me,” to the husband as if cutting in on a dance.

Watson wrapped his arms under his father’s, his fist clenched beneath his father’s sternum, his other hand wrapping over it.  The waiter skimmed toward them as if on wheels. The maitre d’ looked up from his podium.

“Do you really want me to do this?” Watson asked, his lips as close to his father’s ear as a kiss.

“I’ll break every one of your ribs.  Drive fragments into your lungs.  Burst your liver.  Is that what you want?”

And as he whispered, Watson wondered, left behind all these years, nothing left to amaze anyone with, if that was all his father had ever really wanted, not rescue, not attention, but only to finish the act, to finally be reunited with his Amazing Lucia, take their place on the grandest stage of all.

“Tell me what you want, Dad,” Watson whispered.

“He’s choking to death!” the beautiful woman said, upsetting her baby, who, left behind in the high chair, began ratcheting up a whimper.

Watson had to lean forward as his father’s head sank toward his chest, had to haul back as his weight slumped in his arms.

“He’s unconscious!”

The waiter at his elbow.  “Sir?”

“Dad?” Watson said.  He gave his father a shake.  “Tell me.”

“Sir, he cannot speak.  Measures must be taken.”

Watson looked up, saw the faces, every one, riveted on them, could nearly feel the heat of the spotlight.  The waiter tugged at his arm.  The husband, the father of that beautiful child, bent low to look into his father’s face.  “He’s blue,” he said.

“He’s performing,” Watson said, but they were all leaning toward him, so expectant, their own breaths held.

Watson lifted his father and gave one sharp tug, more blow than hug, nothing shrouded in kindness, and a small piece of bread crust struck the linen, followed immediately by an intake so sudden and so rushed it could have been mistaken for the roll of the sea.

Watson bent forward, whispered, “The Marvelous Marvelo,” and sat his father back in his chair, where the beautiful woman knelt beside him taking his hand, dressed and trussed and served on a platter.

Watson’s father took more oceanic breaths, and the crowd leaned back, the maitre d’ announcing that the ambulance would arrive in seconds.

As Watson stepped around the table, plucked his napkin up from beside his plate, snapping its hem with one short, sharp flick of his wrists, applause began to scatter through the house, and Watson found his father looking only at him, eyes rimmed with tears that trickled across the creased and lined landscape of his face.

“Bravo,” Watson said.  “Bravo.”

He saw his father swallow, the working of the Adam’s apple a thing both exhausted and aching, and his father lifted his hands, reaching them toward Watson but spreading them wide, palms up in offering.  “Ladies and gentleman,” he said, his voice as hoarse and choked as a sideshow barker’s.  “I give you, my son.”