The New Yorker Stories Part 32

"Oh-painting wicker white, or something. Painting the walls yellow. If you'd had amniocentesis, you could paint them blue or pink."

"We're leaving up the wallpaper," Oliver says. "Why would a thirty-year-old woman have amniocentesis?"

"I hate wicker," I say. "Wicker is for Easter baskets."

Barbara stretches. "Notice the way it goes?" she says. "I ask a simple question, he answers for you, as if you're helpless now that you're pregnant, and that gives you time to think and zing back some snappy reply."

"I think you're the Queen of Snappiness," Oliver says to her.

"Like the Emperor of Ice Cream?" She puts down her Dutch detective novel. "I never did understand Wallace Stevens," she says. "Do any of you?"

Sven has come back with his camera and is focusing. The cat has walked away, but he wasn't focusing on the cat anyway; it's a group shot: Barbara in her tiny white bikini, Oliver in cut-off jeans, with the white raggedy strings trailing down his tan legs, and me in my shorts and baggy embroidered top that my huge stomach bulges hard against.

"Smile," Sven says. "Do I really have to say smile?"

This is the weekend of Barbara's sixtieth birthday, and Oliver's half brother Craig has also come for the occasion. He has given her an early present: a pink T-s.h.i.+rt that says "60." Oliver and I brought G.o.divas and a hair comb with a silk lily glued to it. Sven will give her a card and some orchids, flown in from some unimaginably far-off place, and a check. She will express shock at the check and not show anyone the amount, though she will pa.s.s around his birthday card. At dinner, the orchids will be in a vase, and Sven will tell some anecdote about a shoot he once went on in some faraway country.

Craig has brought two women with him, unexpectedly. They are tall, blond, silent, and look like twins but are not. Their clothes are permeated with marijuana. When they were introduced, one was wearing a Sony Walkman and the other had a tortoisesh.e.l.l hair ornament in the shape of a turtle.

Now it is getting dark and we are all having spritzers. I have had too many spritzers. I feel that everyone is looking at everyone else's naked feet. The twins who are not twins have baby toes that curl under, so you can see the plum-colored polish on only four toes. Craig has square toenails and calluses on his heels which come from playing tennis. Oliver's long, tan feet are rubbing my legs. The dryness of his soles feels wonderful as he rubs his feet up and down the sticky sweat that has dried on my calves. Barbara has long toenails, painted bronze. Sven's big toes are oblong and shapeless, the way balloons look when you first begin to blow them up. My toenails aren't polished, because I can hardly bend over. I look at Oliver's feet and mine and try to imagine a composite baby foot. As Sven pours, it is the first time I realize that my drink is gone and I have been crunching ice.

In our bedroom, Oliver cups his hands around my hard stomach as I lie on my side facing away from him and kisses my hair from underneath, slowly moving down my spine to where his lips rest on one hipbone.

"My gla.s.s of ice water just made a ring on the night table," he says. He takes a sip of water. I hear him sigh and put the gla.s.s back on the table.

"I want to get married," I mumble into the pillow. "I don't want to end up bitter, like Barbara."

He snorts. "She's bitter because she kept getting married, and when the last one died he left almost everything to Craig. She's bored with Sven, now that his pictures aren't selling anymore."

"Oliver," I say, and am surprised at how helpless I sound. "You sounded like your mother just then. At least talk sense to me."

Oliver slides his cheek to my b.u.t.tock. "Remember the first time you rubbed my back and it felt so good that I started laughing?" Oliver says. "And you didn't know why I was doing it and you got insulted? And the time you got drunk and sang along with Eddie Fisher on 'Wish You Were Here' and you were so good I laughed until I got the hiccups?" He rolls over. "We're married," he says. He slides his cheek to the hollow of my back. "Let me tell you what happened on the crosstown bus last week," he goes on. "A messenger got on. Twenty or so. Carrying a pile of envelopes. Started talking CB chatter to the baby on the lap of a woman sitting next to him. The woman and the baby got off at Madison, and between there and Third he started addressing the bus in general. He said, 'Everybody's heard of pie in the sky. They say Smokey in the Sky. Smokey the Bear's what they call the cops. But you know what I say? I say Bear in the Air. It's like "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds"-LSD. LSD is acid.' He had on running shoes and jeans and a white b.u.t.ton-down s.h.i.+rt with a tie hanging around his neck."

"Why did you tell me that story?" I say.

"Anybody can get it together to do something perfunctory. The minute that messenger got off the bus he tied that tie and delivered that c.r.a.p he was carrying." He turns again, sighs. "I can't talk about marriage in this crazy house. Let's walk on the beach." can get it together to do something perfunctory. The minute that messenger got off the bus he tied that tie and delivered that c.r.a.p he was carrying." He turns again, sighs. "I can't talk about marriage in this crazy house. Let's walk on the beach."

"It's so late," I say. "It must be after midnight. I'm exhausted from sitting all day, drinking and doing nothing."

"I'll tell you the truth," he whispers. "I can't stand to hear Barbara and Sven making love."

I listen, wondering if he's putting me on. "That's mice running through the walls," I say.

Sunday afternoon, and Barbara and I are walking the beach, a little tipsy after our picnic lunch. I wonder what she'd think if I told her that her son and I are not married. She gives the impression that what she hasn't lived through she has imagined. And much of what she says comes true. She said the pool would crack; she warned Craig that the girls weren't to be trusted, and, sure enough, this morning they were gone, taking with them the huge silver bowl she keeps lemons and limes in, a silver meat platter with coiled-serpent handles, and four silver ladles-almost as if they'd planned some bizarre tea party for themselves. He'd met them, he said, at Odeon, in the city. That was his explanation. Craig is the only person I know who gets up in the morning, brushes his teeth, and takes a Valium blue. Now we have left him playing a game called Public a.s.sistance with Sven, at the side of the pool. Oliver was still upstairs sleeping when I came down at eleven. "I'll marry you," he said sleepily as I climbed out of bed. "I had a dream that I didn't and we were always unhappy."

I am in the middle of rambling on to Barbara, telling her that Oliver's dreams amaze me. They seem to be about states of feeling; they don't have any symbols in them, or even moments. He wakes up and his dreams have summarized things. I want to blurt out, "We lied to you, years ago. We said we got married, and we didn't. We had a fight and a flat tire and it rained, and we checked into an inn and just never got married."

"My first husband, Cadby, collected b.u.t.terflies," she says. "I could never understand that. He'd stand by a little window in our bedroom-we had a bas.e.m.e.nt apartment in Cambridge, just before the war-and he'd hold the b.u.t.terflies in the frames to the light, as if the way the light struck them told him something their wings wouldn't have if they'd flown by." She looks out to the ocean. "Not that there were b.u.t.terflies flying around Cambridge," she says. "I just realized that."

I laugh.

"Not what you were talking about at all?" she says.

"I don't know," I say. "Lately I catch myself talking just to distract myself. Nothing seems real but my body, and my body is so heavy so heavy."

She smiles at me. She has long auburn hair, streaked with white, and curly bangs that blow every which way, like the tide foaming into pools.

Both sons, she has just told me, were accidents. "Now I'm too old, and for the first time I'd like to do it again. I envy men for being able to conceive children late in life. You know that picture of Pica.s.so and his son, Claude? Robert Capa took it. It's in Sven's darkroom-the postcard of it, tacked up. They're on the beach, and the child is being held forward, bigger than its father, rubbing an eye. Being held by Pica.s.so, simply smiling and rubbing an eye."

"What wine was that we drank?" I say, tracing a heart in the sand with my big toe.

"La Vieille Ferme blanc," she says. "Nothing special." She picks up a sh.e.l.l-a small mussel sh.e.l.l, black outside, opalescent inside. She drops it carefully into one cup of her tiny bikini top. In her house are ferns, in baskets on the floor, and all around them on top of the soil sit little treasures: bits of gla.s.s, broken jewelry, sh.e.l.ls, gold twine. One of the most beautiful is an asparagus fern that now cascades over a huge circle of exposed flashbulbs stuck in the earth; each summer I gently lift the branches and peek, the way I used to go to my grandmother's summer house and open her closet to see if the faint pencil markings of the heights of her grandchildren were still there.

"You love him?" she says.

In five years, it is the first time we have ever really talked.

Yes, I nod.

"I've had four husbands. I'm sure you know that-that's my claim to fame, and ridicule, forever. But the first died, quite young. Hodgkin's disease. There's a seventy-percent cure now, I believe, for Hodgkin's disease. The second one left me for a lady cardiologist. You knew Harold. And now you know Sven." She puts another sh.e.l.l in her bikini, centering it over her nipple. "Actually, I only had two chances out of four. Sven would like a little baby he could hold in front of his face on the beach, but I'm too old. The body of a thirty-year-old, and I'm too old."

I kick sand, look at the ocean. I feel too full, too woozy, but I'm getting desperate to walk, to move faster.

"Do you think Oliver and Craig will ever like each other?" I say.

She shrugs. "Oh-I don't want to talk about them. It's my birthday, and I want to talk girl talk. Maybe I'll never talk to you this way again."

"Why?" I say.

"I've always had... feelings feelings about things. Sven made fun of me when I said at Christmas that the pool would crack. I knew both times I was pregnant I'd have boys. I so much didn't want a second child, but now I'm glad I had him. He's more intelligent than Craig. On my deathbed, Craig will probably bring some woman to the house who'll steal the covers." She bends and picks up a s.h.i.+ny stone, throws it into the water. "I didn't love my first husband," she says. about things. Sven made fun of me when I said at Christmas that the pool would crack. I knew both times I was pregnant I'd have boys. I so much didn't want a second child, but now I'm glad I had him. He's more intelligent than Craig. On my deathbed, Craig will probably bring some woman to the house who'll steal the covers." She bends and picks up a s.h.i.+ny stone, throws it into the water. "I didn't love my first husband," she says.

"Why didn't you?"

"His spirit was dying. His spirit was dying before he got sick and died." She runs her hand across her bare stomach. "People your age don't talk that way, do they? We fought, and I left him, and that was in the days when young ladies did not leave young men. I got an apartment in New York, and for so many weeks I was all right-my mother sent all the nice ladies she knew over to amuse me, and it was such a relief not to have to cope. That was also in the days when young men didn't cry, and he'd put his head on my chest and cry about things I couldn't understand. Look at me now, with this body. I'm embarra.s.sed by the irony of it-the dry pool, the useless body. It's too obvious even to talk about it. I sound like T. S. Eliot, with his bank-clerk self-pity, don't I?" She is staring at the ocean. "When I thought everything was in order-I even had a new beau-I was trying to hang a picture one morning: a painting of a field of little trees, with a doe walking through. I had it positioned where I thought it should go, and I held it to the wall and backed up, but I couldn't quite tell, because I couldn't back up enough. I didn't have any husband to hold it to the wall. I dropped it and broke the gla.s.s and cried." She pushes her hair back, twines the rubber band she has worn on her wrist around her hair again. Through her bikini I can see the outline of the sh.e.l.ls. Her hands hang at her sides. "We've come too far," she says. "Aren't you exhausted?"

We are almost up to the Davises' house. That means that we've walked about three miles, and through my heaviness I feel a sort of light-headedness. I'm thinking, I'm tired but it doesn't matter. Being married doesn't matter. Knowing how to talk about things matters. I sink down in the sand, like a novice with a revelation. Barbara looks concerned; then, a little drunkenly, I watch her face change. She's decided that I'm just responding, taking a rest. A seagull dives, gets what it wants. We sit next to each other facing the water, her flat tan stomach facing the ocean like a mirror.

It is night, and we are still outdoors, beside the pool. Sven's face has a flickery, shadowed look, like a jack-o'-lantern's. A citronella candle burns on the white metal table beside his chair.

"He decided not to call the police," Sven says. "I agree. Since those two young ladies obviously did not want want your c.r.a.ppy silver, they're saddled with sort of pirates' treasure, and, as we all know, pirate s.h.i.+ps sink." your c.r.a.ppy silver, they're saddled with sort of pirates' treasure, and, as we all know, pirate s.h.i.+ps sink."

"You're going to wait?" Barbara says to Craig. "How will you get all our silver back?"

Craig is tossing a tennis ball up and down. It disappears into the darkness, then slaps into his hands again. "You know what?" he says. "One night I'll run into them at Odeon. That's the thing-nothing is ever the end."

"Well, this is my birthday birthday, and I hope we don't have to talk about things ending." Barbara is wearing her pink T-s.h.i.+rt, which seems to have shrunk in the wash. Her small b.r.e.a.s.t.s are visible beneath it. She has on white pedal pushers and has kicked off her black patent-leather sandals.

"Happy birthday," Sven says, and takes her hand.

I reach out and take Oliver's hand. The first time I met his family I cried. I slept on their foldout sofa and drank champagne and watched The Lady Vanishes The Lady Vanishes on TV, and during the night he crept downstairs to hold me, and I was crying. I had short hair then. I can remember his hand closing around it, crus.h.i.+ng it. Now it hangs long and thin, and he moves it gently, pus.h.i.+ng it aside. I can't remember the last time I cried. When I first met her, Barbara surprised me because she was so sharp-tongued. Now I have learned that it is their dull lives that make people begin to say cutting things. on TV, and during the night he crept downstairs to hold me, and I was crying. I had short hair then. I can remember his hand closing around it, crus.h.i.+ng it. Now it hangs long and thin, and he moves it gently, pus.h.i.+ng it aside. I can't remember the last time I cried. When I first met her, Barbara surprised me because she was so sharp-tongued. Now I have learned that it is their dull lives that make people begin to say cutting things.

I look over my shoulder at the beach at night-sand bleached white by the light of the moon, foamy waves silently was.h.i.+ng ash.o.r.e, a hollow sound from the wind all over, like the echo of a conch sh.e.l.l held against the ear. The roar in my head is all from pain. All day, the baby has been kicking and kicking, and now I know that the heaviness I felt earlier, the disquiet, must be labor. It's almost a full month early-labor coupled with danger. I keep my hands away from my stomach, as if it might quiet itself. Sven opens a bottle of club soda and it gushes into the tall gla.s.s pitcher that sits on the table between his chair and Barbara's. He begins to unscrew the cork in a bottle of white wine. Inside me, once, making my stomach pulse, the baby turns over. I concentrate, desperately, on the first thing I see. I focus on Sven's fingers and count them, as though my baby were born and now I have to look for perfection. There is every possibility that my baby will be loved and cared for and will grow up to be like any of these people. Another contraction, and I reach out for Oliver's hand but stop in time and stroke it, don't squeeze.

I am really at some out-of-the-way beach house, with a man I am not married to and people I do not love, in labor.

Sven squeezes a lemon into the pitcher. Smoky drops fall into the soda and wine. I smile, the first to hold out my gla.s.s. Pain is relative.

Like Gla.s.s

In the picture, only the man is looking at the camera. The baby in the chair, out on the lawn, is looking in another direction, not at his father. His father has a grip on a collie-trying, no doubt, to make the dog turn its head toward the lens. The dog looks away, no s.p.a.ce separating its snout from the white border. I wonder why, in those days, photographs had borders that looked as if they had been cut with pinking shears.

The collie is dead. The man with a pompadour of curly brown hair and with large, sloping shoulders was alive, the last time I heard. The baby grew up and became my husband and now is no longer married to me. I am trying to follow his line of vision in the picture. Obviously, he'd had enough of paying attention to his father or to the dog that day. It is a picture of a baby gazing into the distance.

I have a lot of distinct memories of things that happened while I was married, but lately I've been thinking about two things that are similar, although they have nothing in common. We lived on the top floor of a brownstone. When we decided to separate and I moved out, Paul changed the lock on the door. When I came back to take my things, there was no way to get them. I went away and thought about it until I didn't feel angry anymore. By then it was winter, and cold leaked in my windows. I had my daughter, and other things, to think about. In the cold, though, walking around the apartment in a sweater most people would have thought thick enough to wear outside, or huddling on the sofa under an old red-and-brown afghan, I would start feeling romantic about my husband.

One afternoon-it was February 13, the day before Valentine's Day-I had a couple of drinks and put on my long green coat with a huge hood that made me look like a monk and went to the window and saw that the snow had melted on the sidewalk: I could get away with wearing my comfortable rubber-soled sandals with thick wool socks. So I went out and stopped at Sheridan Square to buy Hamlet Hamlet and flipped through until I found what I was looking for. Then I went to our old building and buzzed Larry. He lives in the bas.e.m.e.nt-what is called a garden apartment. He opened the door and unlocked the high black iron gate. My husband had always said that Larry looked and acted like Loretta Young; he was always exuberant, he had puffy hair and crinkly eyes, and he didn't look as if he belonged to either s.e.x. Larry was surprised to see me. I can be charming when I want to be, so I acted slightly b.u.mbly and apologetic and smiled to let him know that what I was asking was a silly thing: could I stand in his garden for a minute and call out a poem to my husband? I saw Larry looking at my hands, moving in the pockets of my coat. The page torn from and flipped through until I found what I was looking for. Then I went to our old building and buzzed Larry. He lives in the bas.e.m.e.nt-what is called a garden apartment. He opened the door and unlocked the high black iron gate. My husband had always said that Larry looked and acted like Loretta Young; he was always exuberant, he had puffy hair and crinkly eyes, and he didn't look as if he belonged to either s.e.x. Larry was surprised to see me. I can be charming when I want to be, so I acted slightly b.u.mbly and apologetic and smiled to let him know that what I was asking was a silly thing: could I stand in his garden for a minute and call out a poem to my husband? I saw Larry looking at my hands, moving in the pockets of my coat. The page torn from Hamlet Hamlet was in one pocket, the rest of the book in the other. Larry laughed. How could my husband hear me, he asked. It was February. There were storm windows. But he let me in, and I walked down his long, narrow hallway, through the back room that he used as an office, to the door that led out to the back garden. I pushed open the door, and his gray poodle came yapping up to my ankles. It looked like a cactus, with maple leaves stuck in its coat. was in one pocket, the rest of the book in the other. Larry laughed. How could my husband hear me, he asked. It was February. There were storm windows. But he let me in, and I walked down his long, narrow hallway, through the back room that he used as an office, to the door that led out to the back garden. I pushed open the door, and his gray poodle came yapping up to my ankles. It looked like a cactus, with maple leaves stuck in its coat.

I picked up a little stone-Larry had small rocks bordering his walkway, all touching, as if they were a chain. I threw the stone at my husband's fourth-floor bedroom window, and hit it-tonk!-on the very first try. Blurrily, I watched the look of puzzlement on Larry's face. My real attention was on my husband's face, when it appeared at the window, full of rage, then wonder. I looked at the torn-out page and recited, liltingly, Ophelia's song: " 'Tomorrow is Saint Valentine's day / All in the morning betime, / And I a maid at your window, / To be your Valentine.' "

"Are you insane insane?" Paul called down to me. It was a shout, really, but his voice hung thin in the air. It floated down.

"I did it," Larry said, coming out, s.h.i.+vering, cowering as he looked up to the fourth floor. "I let her in."

I could smell jasmine when the wind blew. I had put on too much perfume. Even if he did take me in, he'd back off; he'd never let me be his valentine. What he noticed, of course, when he'd come downstairs to lead me out of the garden, seconds later, was the Scotch on my breath.

"This is all wrong," I said, as he pulled me by the hand past Larry, who stood holding his barking poodle in the hallway. "I only had two Scotches," I said. "I just realized when the wind blew that I smell like a flower garden."

"You bet it's all wrong," he said, squeezing my hand so hard it almost broke. Then he shook off my hand and walked up the steps, went in and slammed the door behind him. I watched a hairline crack leap across all four panes of gla.s.s at the top of the door.

The other thing happened in happier times, when we were visiting my sister, Karin, on Twenty-third Street. It was the first time we had met Dan, the man she was engaged to, and we had brought a bottle of champagne. We drank her wine first, and ate her cheese and told stories and heard stories and smoked a joint, and sometime after midnight my husband went to the refrigerator and got out our wine-Spanish champagne, in a black bottle. He pointed the bottle away from him, and we all squinted, silently watching. At the same instant that the cork popped, as we were all saying "Hooray!" or "That does it!"-whatever we were saying-we heard gla.s.s raining down, and Paul suddenly crouched, and then we looked above him to see a hole in the skylight, and through the hole black sky.

I've just told these stories to my daughter, Eliza, who is six. She used to like stories to end with a moral, like fairy tales, but now she thinks that's kid's stuff. She still wants to know what stories mean, but now she wants me to tell her. The point of the two stories-well, I don't know what the point is, I'm always telling her. That he broke the gla.s.s by mistake, and that the cork broke the gla.s.s by a miracle. The point is that broken gla.s.s is broken gla.s.s.

"That's a joke ending," she says. "It's dumb." She frowns.

I cop out, too tired to think, and then tell her another part of the story to distract her: Uncle Dan and Aunt Karin told the superintendent that the hole must have come from something that fell from above. He knew they were lying-nothing was above them-but what could he say? He asked them whether they thought perhaps meteorites shrank to the size of gumb.a.l.l.s falling through New York's polluted air. He hated not only his tenants but the whole city.

She watches me digress. She reaches for the cologne on her night table and lifts her long blond hair, and I spray her neck. She takes the bottle and sprays her wrists, rubs them together, holds out her wrists for me to smell. I make a silly face and pretend to be dazed by such a wonderful smell. I stroke her hair until she is silent, and tiptoe out, still moving as if I'm walking through broken gla.s.s.

Once a week, for a couple of hours, I read to a man named Norman, who is blind. In the year I've been doing it, he and I have sort of become friends. He usually greets me with something like "So what's new with your life?" He sits behind his desk and I sit beside it, in a chair. This is the way a teacher and pupil should sit, and I've fallen into the pattern of letting him ask.

He gets up to open the window. It's always too hot in his little office. His movements are exaggerated, like a bird's: the quickly c.o.c.ked head, the way he grips the edge of his desk when he's bored. He grips the edge, releases his hold, grabs again, like a parrot s.h.i.+fting on its bar. Norman has never seen a bird. He has an eight-year-old daughter, who likes to describe things to him, although she is a prankster and sometimes deliberately lies, he has told me. He buys her things from the joke shop on the corner of the street where he works. He takes home little pills that will make drinks bubble over, buzzers to conceal in the palm of your hand, little black plastic flies to freeze in ice cubes, rubber eyegla.s.s rims attached to a fat nose and a bushy mustache. "Daddy, now I'm wearing my big nose," she says. "Daddy, I put a black fly in your ice cube, so spit it out if it sinks in your drink, all right?" My daughter and I have gone to two dinners at their house. My daughter thinks that his daughter is a little weird. The last time we visited, when the girls were playing and Norman was was.h.i.+ng dishes, his wife showed me the hallway she had just wallpapered. It took her forever to decide on the wallpaper, she told me. We stood there, dwarfed by wallpaper imprinted with the trunks of s.h.i.+ny silver trees that her husband would never see.

What's new with me? My divorce is final.

My husband remembers the circ.u.mstances of the photograph. I told him it was impossible-he was an infant. No, he was a child when the picture was taken, he said-he just looked small because he was slumped in the chair. He remembers it all distinctly. Rufus the dog was there, and his father, and he was looking slightly upward because that was where his mother was, holding the camera. I was amazed that I had made a mystery of something that had such a simple answer. It is a picture of a baby looking at its mother. For the millionth time he asks why must I make myself morose, why call in the middle of the night.

Eliza is asleep. I sit on the edge of her bed in the half-darkness, tempting fate, fidgeting with a paperweight with bursts of red color inside, tossing it in the air. One false move and she will wake up. One mistake and gla.s.s shatters. I like the smoothness of it, the heaviness as it slaps into my palm over and over.

Today when I went to Norman, he was sitting on his window ledge, with his arms crossed over his chest. He had been uptown at a meeting that morning, where a man had come up to him and said, "Be grateful for the cane. Everybody who doesn't take hold of something has something take hold of them." Norman tells me this, and we are both silent. Does he want me to tell him, the way Eliza wants me to summarize stories, what I think it means? Since Norman and I are adults, I answer my silent question with another question: What do you do with a shard of sorrow?

Desire

Bryce was sitting at the kitchen table in his father's house, cutting out a picture of Times Square. It was a picture from a coloring book, but Bryce wasn't interested in coloring; he just wanted to cut out pictures so he could see what they looked like outside the book. This drawing was of people crossing the street between the Sheraton-Astor and F. W. Woolworth. There were also other buildings, but these were the ones the people seemed to be moving between. The picture was round; it was supposed to look as if it had been drawn on a bottle cap. Bryce had a hard time getting the scissors around the edge of the cap, because they were blunt-tipped. At home, at his mother's house in Vermont, he had real scissors and he was allowed to taste anything, including alcohol, and his half sister Maddy was a lot more fun than Bill Monteforte, who lived next door to his father here in Pennsylvania and who never had time to play. But he had missed his father, and he had been the one who called to invite himself to this house for his spring vacation.

His father, B.B., was standing in the doorway now, complaining because Bryce was so quiet and so glum. "It took quite a few polite letters to your mother to get her to let loose of you for a week," B.B. said. "You get here and you go into a slump. It would be a real problem if you had to do anything important, like go up to bat with the bases loaded and two outs."

"Mom's new neighbor is the father of a guy that plays for the Redskins," Bryce said.

The scissors slipped. Since he'd ruined it, Bryce now cut on the diagonal, severing half the people in Times Square from the other half. He looked out the window and saw a squirrel stealing seed from the bird feeder. The gray birds were so tiny anyway, it didn't look as if they needed anything to eat.

"Are we going to that auction tonight, or what?" Bryce said.

"Maybe. It depends on whether Rona gets over her headache."

B.B. sprinkled little blue and white crystals of dishwasher soap into the machine and closed it. He pushed two b.u.t.tons and listened carefully.

"Remember now," he said, "I don't want you getting excited at the auction if you see something you want. You put your hand up, and that's a bid bid. You have to really, really want something and then ask me before you put your hand up. You can't shoot your hand up. Imagine that you're a soldier down in the trenches and there's a war going on."

"I don't even care about the dumb auction," Bryce said.

"What if there was a Turkish prayer rug you wanted and it had the most beautiful muted colors you'd ever seen in your life?" B.B. sat down in the chair across from Bryce. The back of the chair was in the shape of an upside-down triangle. The seat was a right-side-up triangle. The triangles were covered with aqua plastic. B.B. s.h.i.+fted on the chair. Bryce could see that he wanted an answer.

"Or we'll play Let's Pretend," B.B. said. "Let's pretend a lion is coming at you and there's a tree with a cheetah in it and up ahead of you it's just low dry gra.s.s. Would you climb the tree, or start running?"

"Neither," Bryce said.

"Come on. You've either got to run or something something. There's known dangers and unknown dangers. What would you do?"

"People can't tell what they'd do in a situation like that," Bryce said.

"No?"

"What's a cheetah?" Bryce said. "Are you sure they get in trees?"

B.B. frowned. He had a drink in his hand. He pushed the ice cube to the bottom and they both watched it bob up. Bryce leaned over and reached into the drink and gave it a push, too.

"No licking that finger," B.B. said.

Bryce wiped a wet streak across the red down vest he wore in the house.