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Part 1: Mutual Weirdness

Instead of enormous black curtains hanging behind my house (Veronica said), begin with someone banging on my apartment door so loud it woke me out of a deep sleep. Beside me, Roger was already sitting up. I said, "Roger, what?" and checked the digital clock on the nightstand. Three a.m. Roger slid out of bed, stood up. I asked, "What is it?"

"I don't know," he said, and went to answer it.

"Wait," I said, because when is someone hammering on your door at three in the morning ever a good thing? Roger ignored me, crossing the tiny living room to the door, which was jumping under the blows of whoever was on the other side. Now I was out of bed and going for the phone, wondering if I'd be able to dial 911 before myself and my new husband were horribly murdered.

"Yes, yes," Roger said, unlocking the door. He swung it open, and there was Ted.

It was the first time I'd seen him in person. His face—he favored Joanne, those same long, horsey features—his face was contorted, red—scarlet—all the way from the bottom of his neck right up to his crewcut. I'd never seen anyone look so angry. In his right hand, he held the wedding announcement I'd sent him. He was in his fatigues, the green ones with the brown and black spots. Roger was not expecting to find his son on the landing in the middle of the night; you heard it in the way he said, "Ted!"

"I got your message," Ted said—snarled, really.

Roger didn't know what he was talking about. Did I mention that I hadn't told him about sending Ted our announcement? He said, "What? What message?"

"This!" Ted shouted, holding up the card as if he was the district attorney and this exhibit A in a capital trial.

Roger wasn't wearing his reading glasses. He had to hunch over a little and squint to see what Ted was showing him. "Why, how did you get this?" he asked.

You could see that Ted thought Roger was mocking him. "From you!" he said, jerking the card back.

"I never," Roger started, and stopped. He'd guessed how the card came to Ted. Instead, he said, "Ted. What is this about?"

That was the invitation Ted had been waiting for. He said, "This is about you leaving my mother for some teenaged slut. This is about you breaking up a thirty-eight-year marriage so you could get your dick wet. This is about you spitting in the face of the woman who gave her life to you."

"Now wait just a minute," Roger said, but Ted shouted him down.

"This is about you bringing dishonor to our family. This is about you making yourself a laughing stock."

"That is enough!" Now Roger was shouting. He drew himself up to his full height—which still left him a head shorter than Ted. "I am your father, mister, and you will speak to me with respect. My business is my own, and you will respect that as well. I do not expect you or anyone else to judge me."

"Respect!" Ted answered. "Like the respect you and your whore showed my mother?"

"You are speaking about my wife," Roger said, "you had best change your tone."

"Or what? You'll leave me for another son?"

"This is ridiculous," Roger said. "You are ridiculous. Your mother and I have been separated for over two years, son, and this is the first you come to see me about this? At three a.m., screaming and yelling? Oh, very good. Exactly the way to impress me with whatever point it is you think you're making."

"Me?" Ted said. "I was happy to let you ruin your life. Mother's better off without you. But you couldn't leave well enough alone, could you? You had to rub my face in it." He brandished the announcement.

Roger bowed his head and said, "That was a mistake."

"You're damned right it was!"

I watched their argument unfold from the bedroom doorway. When Roger opened the door and I saw Ted standing there, I was going to go up to him and introduce myself—for about a nanosecond, until I saw his face and realized this wasn't a surprise visit. Well, it was, but more in the way an ambush is a surprise. I stopped where I was. Probably, I should have gone back to bed, but how could I sleep with the two of them yelling at each other? Things had heated up too fast. Ted's face looked like it wanted to tear itself apart—his whole body was vibrating like a wire—while Roger's hands kept clenching and unclenching. I couldn't believe that two grown men were about to start fighting because of a stupid card—I mean, it was supposed to be a nice gesture.

With every word they said, though, they edged closer to the moment I was going to have to call the cops. I'd already picked up the cordless and was holding it at the ready. Ted was yelling that this was just like Roger, he'd always thought of himself first, last, and in-between. Roger was yelling back that Ted was forgetting himself, and he'd had just about enough of this adolescent grandstanding. Finally, Roger shouted, "This conversation is over!" and went to slam the front door.

As he did, Ted stepped forward. The door bounced off his shoulder, back into Roger's hand. "This conversation is over when I say it's over," he said, taking another step. "You are not going to tell me when to leave. I am going to decide when I want to leave."

Roger pushed him. He tried. It was like pushing a tree. Ted swayed backwards, then forwards, pushing Roger on the return. Roger went over on his butt.

For Ted, this must have been a fantasy come true. Here he was, able to hold his own with his father. When Roger sat down—hard—Ted's face completely relaxed. It was still beet-red, but he looked more like a guy who'd just been exercising than someone out for retribution. He seemed surprised at how easily Roger had fallen—I think he forgot what he was about to say.

Before he could remember, Roger threw himself up off the floor and drove his head into Ted's gut. All the breath left Ted—he was like a cartoon character, his eyes big, his mouth a little "o." It was his turn to go down. On the way, he caught Roger's t-shirt and took him with him.

That was that. They went at each other full-out, rolling around the floor together, punching and kicking. I didn't bother trying to stop them. The cops took about five minutes to arrive; by which time, Roger and Ted had totaled that part of the apartment. They knocked bookcases over; they smashed the TV; they broke a lamp. It was pretty horrifying; although, I'll tell you, all the time they were pounding one another black and blue, I was thinking that, if this had happened when Ted was seventeen, it probably would've been a good thing. The cops grabbed hold of them and tried to pull them apart, but that didn't work so well. One guy got a black eye for his trouble. He pepper-sprayed the two of them. Have you ever smelled that stuff? God. I can't believe the cops are allowed to use it indoors. Roger and Ted shot away from each other, howling and rubbing their eyes furiously. They were cuffed and hauled down the stairs to the police car. I didn't feel especially bad about that. I knew I'd have to drive over to town hall to bail them out in the morning, but for the moment, it was a relief to have them out of there and in a place where they couldn't hurt themselves. I walked around the apartment opening windows to air the place out, threw an extra couple of blankets on the bed, and tried to go to sleep.

The operative word being "try." As you can imagine, sleep kept its distance. We hadn't been married a month, yet, and I had just called the cops on my husband because he was fighting with his son, for God's sake. It's pretty hard to drop off after something like that. I would've sat up watching TV, but oh yeah, I no longer had a TV, because my stepson put one of his boots through it while he was grappling with his father. I turned on the bedside light, piled Roger's pillows on top of mine, and did my best to read—Dickinson's poems, if anyone's asking—but I was no more successful at that than I was at unconsciousness. What should have been my favorite poetry was cryptic phrases and too many dashes:

"One need not be a Chamber—to be Haunted—

"One need not be a House—

"The Brain has Corridors—surpassing

"Material Place—"

I put the book down, leaned back on the pillows, and closed my eyes.

I was thinking about going to bail out Roger and Ted in a few hours. I was thinking about everything that had led up to this point.

 

Roger told me about Ted the second night he stayed over at my apartment. We were up till dawn talking, telling each other about our lives, our families. For all the time we'd already spent in conversation, it was amazing how little we actually knew about one another's lives. I could've told you Roger's choices for Dickens's top five novels, and his reasons for every ranking, but I still wasn't sure if he had one child or two. I'm sure he felt the same about me. We were sitting at the kitchen table, splitting a bottle of red wine. I had no kids, I said, what about him?

"One son," Roger said. "Edward Joseph—we call him Ted."

"How old?"

"Twenty-eight."

"What does he do?"

"He is a sergeant in the United States Army, Special Forces."

"Wow."

Roger grunted.

"So tell me about him."

For the next couple of hours, Roger did. He began with Ted's fifteenth birthday. There's an age, isn't there? Some point in your teens where you reach critical mass, where everything that's been simmering inside you boils over, and you metamorphose into the stereotypical teenager. Literally the day I turned thirteen, I realized my parents and most of my immediate and extended family were the biggest idiots who'd ever walked the face of the earth. I adjusted my behavior accordingly. It made for a fun few years—fun the way slow death by torture is fun. If you're lucky, you pass out of this stage in a couple of years, but as long as you're in it, you're useless to anyone else except maybe your closest friends.

Roger had seen this kind of behavior before. We all have, I guess. There are more than enough college students who haven't reached the end of it. On some level, he recognized it for what it was: this typical, almost impersonal response to everything. At the same time, he was deeply hurt by Ted's rejection, and he couldn't separate himself from that hurt, no matter what he knew about its cause. His son had been replaced by a sullen stranger who wore his hair long and over his face, answered every question in mumbles, and wore the same sweatshirt and jeans for days at a time.

In response, Roger became the disciplinarian. He tried, anyway, because the more he insisted on his rules, the more Ted flouted them. He abandoned his tutors, slacking off at school to the point he was constantly in danger of flunking out. He started smoking a lot of pot, and hung out with the other kids who smoked a lot of pot. He tried to sneak a girl into his room, and when Joanne and Roger caught him, stormed out of the house. He was picked up for shoplifting a couple of times; although Joanne had enough pull to make sure the charges were dropped. Time went on, and his antics worsened. He skipped school for days at a time. He came to dinner drunk or stoned or both. He did his best to hotwire Joanne's car when she refused to let him take it out for the night—but he didn't know what he was doing, and left a mess of cut and stripped wires dangling from under the dash of her Mercedes. Roger wanted to send him to military school—Roger! Can you believe it?—Joanne wanted to send him to a cousin in the south of France. They couldn't agree, so Ted stayed there with them and continued to test the limits. It was Ted's complete lack of interest in anything except getting high and hanging with his friends that really got to Roger. Out and out rebellion, angry, argumentative resistance, a coordinated rejection of his and Joanne's values, that he could've dealt with. You know how he loved to argue. Apathy, however, was beyond him. He did not know how to deal with someone who didn't care. I think Ted must have realized this and seen it as his most effective weapon.

Much too quickly and easily, Ted went from being the apple of his father's eye to the worm in the apple. There was no big confrontation—not then. His heart hardened, and he did nothing to stop it. Sometimes, they watched baseball; one of their oldest activities together. The week of the World Series was a time for détente, if not out-and-out peace, and there were moments when Roger, hearing Ted rave about a double play, his disaffection momentarily shaken by some amazing feat, would feel his heart start to soften, feel the stone cracking and something green and alive struggling to reach the surface. But then Ted would catch himself actually talking to his father like a human being, duck his head and say, "Or whatever," and slouch back in front of the TV. Maybe Roger could've said something—who knows what? maybe he could've praised Ted, told him that was a good point—maybe he could've made an effort to build on the foundation Ted had laid—but he didn't. It was too much; Roger let it be too much. His heart crusted over again, the green was smothered, and that was that.

Roger always was a bit of a fatalist. His parents died while he was young: his father of lung cancer when Roger was sixteen, his mother four years later of breast cancer, during his third year at Vanderbilt. They were both heavy smokers. His younger brother became an alcoholic young and didn't dry out for the next twenty-five years. His sister made an early, bad marriage that only ended when her husband drove into a tree and put himself into a coma that lasted a year. There was more stuff, too, more to do with his parents—his dad, especially—but I'll get to that later. Suffice it to say, his father was not the most supportive of men. Roger denied his family having any effect on him whatsoever, but obviously, watching everyone he loved relentlessly ground down affected him at the very deepest level. It was why he responded so strongly to Dickens, all those children in danger, all those families in jeopardy. You know it lay behind his drive to succeed, this overpowering desire to be different from the rest of his family. It also left him with a lasting certainty that the worst not only could happen, it would, and, more often than not, it would come out of your own actions. Why else did he stay with Joanne for so long? I'm sure that, from the second Roger first held Ted, he was bracing himself for the moment everything he was feeling—all the love, joy, pride—would sour. When it did—or, when he panicked and thought it did—Roger jumped the gun, decided to write the end to what he'd already decided was the latest chapter in the history of his life's defeats.

Ted never knew any of this at the time. I doubt Roger himself was fully aware of it—not that it was unconscious, just that he was always good at not thinking about things he didn't want to think about, especially if they made him look bad to himself. In all fairness to him, I'm not sure it would have made much of any difference to Ted if Roger had told him how he was feeling. Most likely, he would have snickered and walked away.

Probably the last major event in their relationship—before I came along—was Ted's joining the Army. Both Roger and Joanne were surprised—shocked. Ted hadn't given the slightest indication he was thinking about the military to either of them. He wasn't exactly what sprang to mind when you thought of soldier material, you know? Joanne took his decision hard, worse than Roger. She had thought that she and Ted had a special relationship, that she was the parent he talked to. Right. She was just the parent he came to when he needed money. Roger wasn't happy—he always said the military was for those who couldn't stand the burden of thinking for themselves—but he was satisfied, in a grudging way, to see Ted doing something, making a choice, however misguided. He didn't argue with Ted. Joanne was more than happy to spend hours doing that. He did, however, think that his son was even more different than he'd known. Within the week, Ted shipped out for basic training, and that was that.

By the time Roger was telling me about him, Ted had been in the Army for ten years. He'd been part of the Gulf War; although his unit had missed the major combat. He'd advanced rapidly through the ranks. I think he made sergeant within about three years. His superiors wanted him to train to be an officer, but he turned them down, said he was happy being a sergeant. What he did was move from Infantry to Special Forces. Roger and Joanne visited a couple of the bases where he was stationed. Those trips never went well. Joanne couldn't get used to the drabness of it all, while Roger couldn't stop himself from arguing with anyone who spoke two words to him. Someone would say, "Nice day," and he'd say, "Not really." You don't have to be Sigmund Freud to know he was displacing a whole heap of unresolved anger onto whoever was unfortunate enough to talk to him. After their second trip, during which Roger's continuing and unrestrained displacement almost earned him a beating from a pair of MPs, the three of them agreed that, in the future, it would be better if Ted came to see them.

From what Roger said, it sounds like the Army was the right place for Ted. I've never been a big fan of the military, either, but it works for some people, and Ted was one of them. Roger couldn't handle that. He said he wanted his son to live his own life, but what he meant was that, if Ted had wanted to get his Ph.D. in Melville instead of Dickens, he could have lived with it. His expectations for his son circled a fixed point, which was academia, and the military was light years away from that. If Ted had decided to move up to being an officer, it wouldn't have mattered. Roger would have taken that as further proof that Ted was wasting his abilities.

 

I rolled over and consulted the clock. Four-thirty, and while my body felt the hour, as far as my mind was concerned, it might as well be noon. Maybe some warm milk would help. I threw back the covers, hauled myself out of bed, found my robe, and padded out to the kitchen. On the way, I shut the living room windows, which had helped dissipate the pepper spray; although faint traces of it stung my nose. I took down a large mug from the kitchen cabinets and opened the fridge for the milk, thinking that Roger's bad memories helped explain why he and Ted would end up beating each other senseless on my living room floor, but that they weren't all. I had said so, that second night, said I couldn't believe things had always been so bad. The very fact that they had deteriorated so dramatically was proof that, once upon a time, they must have been very good, because isn't that the way these things work? You don't go from apathy to anger; if you want to find hate, the surest route's love. "What about before Ted became the teenager from hell?" I had said. "What about when he was a baby?"

Ah, Roger had said, that was different. His eyes had lost their focus—

 

—and in an instant, he was back in the delivery room at Penrose. Joanne screamed, the doctor said, "Here he is!" and Roger beheld his son, naked, wet, and crying. He and Joanne had been trying to have a baby for a long time—they were married almost ten years when she found out she was finally pregnant—and for that child to be a boy—well, you know what an old patriarch Roger was. Here was his son and heir, and all that. Not to say that Joanne didn't love him too—in her own, distant, icy way—but from the instant Roger first held Ted and looked down into his eyes, newly opened to the world, he fell in love, you know? You must have felt the same thing with your son.

For the first years of Ted's life, he and Roger were inseparable. They went everywhere together, did everything. From the time Ted was old enough to watch TV and understand what was going on, he loved baseball. Roger couldn't explain it, since he'd always preferred basketball, and as for Joanne—you can't imagine her family's got the genes for anything besides polo. Roger would turn on the TV, and Ted would crack himself up watching this game. Once Ted could stand and throw, Roger bought him his own glove and ball, a bat, the whole works—and he bought himself a glove, too. You've seen the lawn around Belvedere House. It's practically big enough for a baseball diamond. For about ten years, as soon as the weather was warm enough, the two of them went out there and threw the ball to one another. When they were tired of that, Roger pitched and Ted batted; then Ted pitched and Roger batted. And when they'd had enough of that, they went back to throwing the ball back and forth. They were a neighborhood fixture, the short guy wearing the dress shirt and slacks he taught in, the long, lanky kid in his t-shirt and jeans. Roger had never been what you'd call an athlete, and he was amazed at how much enjoyment he got from something as simple as sending the ball through the air to Ted. Ted played little league, and Roger was there for every game. By then, he had enough clout to insure a teaching schedule that wouldn't interfere with his watching Ted play. He even tried out as assistant coach for a season, but that was a disaster. Enthusiasm, he told me, is a nice supplement to ability, but it's no substitute for it. I gather he tried to inspire a team of nine-year-olds with quotations from Tennyson: "Into the valley of death rode the six hundred," and all that. He went back to cheering on the bleachers, which made everyone happier.

There was more to their relationship than baseball—a lot more. Roger read to Ted. Every night he spent at least an hour sitting at Ted's bedside, taking him through Treasure Island, The Hobbit, Ivanhoe: boys' books. Joanne was the one who was supposed to help Ted with his homework, since that's what she'd majored in in college, primary education, but can you imagine her with a class of first-graders? There's a horror story for you. She wasn't much good at explaining things—surprise, surprise—she could show Ted how to do a math problem, but he was the kind of kid who wants to know why, and that was too much for Joanne. So although Joanne insists she was responsible for Ted's education, that's not true. Roger was the one who had to leave the papers he was grading in his office on the third floor to come down to the kitchen to explain why Jefferson made the Louisiana Purchase. He sat with Ted watching his favorite cartoons; he took Ted to see the latest movies. He hadn't been prepared, he told me—he'd been completely taken by surprise by how completely besotted he was with this little boy.

There were the usual ups and downs. Ted broke his arm when he tried to play Spider-Man and climb the walls of the house. He had the typical assortment of childhood diseases, including, Roger said, the single worst case of chicken pox he had ever witnessed. He spent most of fourth grade in an on-again, off-again fight with the class bully. There were more serious problems, too. Ted wasn't a great reader. He'd sit and listen to Roger read to him for as long as Roger wanted to, but he showed little interest in opening a book on his own. Roger bought him all kinds of books on all kinds of subjects. If Ted wouldn't look at a history of the Yankees, though, there wasn't much chance of him rushing through Oliver Twist. His report cards reflected his lack of interest in reading: good grades in math and science, poor and sometimes failing grades in English and social studies. Ted tried. He spent hours at that kitchen table, laboring over his reading and writing assignments well into the night, sometimes. Roger sat up with him, doing his best to explain what to Ted seemed an increasingly complex and confusing system. He continued reading to Ted, though he prefaced each night's selection by asking Ted if he wouldn't rather read it himself. Ted always refused, and Roger made less and less pretense of hiding his disappointment, thinking he could guilt Ted into reading. He instituted a daily reading period for Ted, an hour that Ted had to spend wrestling with something Roger had selected for him. Before Ted could go outside, go to his friends' houses, even do his actual homework, he had to sit in the living room where Roger would watch him struggle through David Copperfield—which, over the course of two years, Roger made him read cover to cover. Once Ted was done, Roger would quiz him, ask him about trivial details to be sure Ted hadn't been daydreaming. It was the kind of tactic Roger employed with his students. If Ted couldn't answer the question to Roger's satisfaction, he'd be sent back to the couch for another hour. Joanne intervened when Roger's regime interfered with little league, but all that did was make him switch the time to after dinner.

It was years before one of Ted's teachers suggested that Roger and Joanne might want to have Ted tested for dyslexia, which I can't believe. I think he was in the seventh grade at that point, twelve years old. Doesn't say much for the teachers in grades one through six, does it? Doesn't say much for Joanne, either. I'm sure she must have had some training in recognizing learning disabilities. If she spent as much time with Ted on his homework as she says she did, how could she not have picked up on his? Once the diagnosis was made, Roger and Joanne spent all kinds of money on tutors for Ted, and his reading skills rapidly improved. But no matter how much his ability improved, his interest didn't. Ted was not a reader, and you can imagine how Roger—who liked to describe himself as a reader first, last, and in-between—took this. They played baseball together, watched TV and movies together, and Roger hoped there would be a time they'd sit in the library reading quietly together. He hoped too much, if you know what I mean, spent too much time brooding over this small but to him crucial difference between them. And then Ted hit fifteen, and any and all reading schedules flew out the window.

 

My hot milk was gone, and I was as awake as ever. I rose from the same kitchen table at which Roger had narrated his history with his son to me, deposited my mug in the sink, and returned to the bedroom. It was just past five; the sky was paling. In a little while, the sun would be up, and this weird night would be over. I sat on the bed. Roger and Ted's fractious relationship was one half of what brought Ted to my front door. As for the other—I don't know how much you know about Roger and me. Your wife's a faculty member; so are you, I guess. You know the scandal. You know how Roger and I got together; although, like I said, it wasn't as sordid as everyone pretended.

 

His and Joanne's marriage was over, had been for years, ever since she'd slept with a professor in the Anthropology department. I bet you didn't know that, did you? No one did, because she swore to Roger it was a mistake and he forgave her, brushed the whole thing under the carpet. None of you knew how much he put up with. You all saw him almost-drunk at one of their parties while Joanne stood there looking as cool and composed as a mannequin and you thought, "Oh, poor Joanne; look what she has to deal with." Please. Tell me the last time you saw a smile cross her face. With all the face-lifts she'd had, I'm not sure she could smile: that much pressure and the whole façade would've come tumbling down.

When everything between Roger and me began—the first time he stayed at my place—I know how lame it sounds to say it was an accident. I mean, we were together all the time, hanging out in Roger's office, drinking coffee at the diner, going to the movies—but I honestly didn't think it was anything more than—I don't know—a friendship. I'd met his wife, for God's sake, and seen the condescending smirk she gave me. She obviously didn't view me as a threat.

I had heard about Roger Croydon while I was at Penrose. Our Victorianist had a minor obsession with disproving everything Roger had written, and in the privacy of her office was quite happy to talk about Roger's "young honeys." "You just know he's sleeping with them," she'd say. "God! I thought this kind of behavior went out with the stone age." When Roger and I argued, I used some of her points against him. They didn't work; they weren't very good, really. Anyway, when I decided I was going to pursue the MA at Huguenot, I knew I was going to have to take a class with this guy. After all I'd heard, how could I not? I'd read a few of his articles, and what he had to say wasn't all bad.

What I wasn't prepared for was him, his presence. The class was his Studies in Dickens, and it was held in one of the basement classrooms in the Humanities Building—you know, no windows, low ceiling, a claustrophobe's nightmare. Not to mention the décor: molded plastic seats, folding tables, cheap walls—what I think of as civic bland. And then Roger strode in. He walked right to the front of the classroom, this short guy built more like a prize fighter than an English professor, threw his briefcase on the table, and went right into his lecture. In an instant, everything changed. The uncomfortable seats, the fluorescent lights buzzing overhead, the guy to my left coughing every two seconds, all of that vanished, or might as well have. There was only this man in tan chinos, a white dress shirt, and a fawn blazer, his hair gray but still thick and in need of a cut, his face creased and worn but animated, full of what he had to tell us about Charles Dickens.

For a while, I could recite large chunks of that first lecture; I still remember most of it. "Dickens melodramatic?" Roger asked, one eyebrow raised. "Yes, of course! What else are we to call the murder of Nancy Sykes, the death of Little Nell, the pursuit of Lady Dedlock? If melodrama abounds in Dickens's work, it is because he saw melodrama abounding in his life, in the world around him. From the beginning of his life, when he was yanked out of his routine and sent to work at a blacking factory, to its end, when he survived a train accident in France, Dickens was stalked by melodrama. So are we all, though much that passes for literature and literary criticism would like to close its eyes to it." Towards the end of the lecture, he quoted Graham Greene. "This is why, as Greene says, a novel like Great Expectations gives us the sense of eavesdropping on the narrator, listening to the conversation he is having with himself. Dickens's narrators create themselves through the stories they tell us; as, indeed, did their author."

Well. How could I not be impressed? Yes, I knew Roger was full of himself, but so what? He obviously knew what he was talking about. It didn't hurt that, from the start, I was his favorite. The first night, he stayed after class to talk to me; I showed up at his office hours the next day to continue the discussion. We met for coffee at the Plaza Diner the day after that. I went into what I suspected might be developing with my eyes open. While I attributed my Penrose professor's gossip to professional jealousy, that didn't mean there was nothing to it. Roger introduced me to Joanne the second week I knew him, however, which didn't seem like the kind of thing you'd do to someone you were planning to sleep with. The moment I met Joanne, I disliked her, and I'm sure the feeling was mutual. She was wearing this navy blue pantsuit with a blue and white striped scarf that was supposed to suggest she was ready to take the wheel of her yacht. All she needed was a captain's hat. She was so skinny, that semi-emaciated look some women embrace in middle-age as a way of convincing themselves they are, in fact, entering the prime of their lives. She was civil enough, but underneath her pleasantries, I could feel her sizing me up, turning me over the way she'd inspect a figurine she came across antiquing. It didn't take her long to decide I was a mass-produced knockoff, not worth worrying over. After that, I saw her a couple more times, and each one, she looked right through me.

All of which is to say, my suspicions of Roger receded pretty quickly. Nor did I have any designs on him. I found him incredibly attractive, more so than I would have expected I could a man his age. I didn't know exactly how old he was, but he had to be at least the same age as my mother, and I've never been one for crushes on my parents' friends. As a group, they've pretty much seemed . . . old. Not that they don't have their virtues, but the times I met my dad's work buddies, they all seemed distant, preoccupied, which no doubt they were, with their jobs, their families, paying the mortgage or the car. Roger was different. He was so—dynamic, and he had the ability to make you feel that all of that energy was focused on you. He had these green, green eyes. It was not hard to imagine those eyes looking into yours. That's why—when a woman becomes involved with an older—a much older man, the conventional wisdom is that she's looking for her father. Otherwise, how could she possibly be interested in this guy? I can't speak for everyone, but in my case, nothing could have been further from the truth. If I looked hard enough, I'm sure I could find similarities between Roger and my dad, but the point is, I'd have to make an effort to find them. Dad was low-key, funny in a goofy sort of way, a huge sports fan—when he died, one of my biggest regrets was that he never made it to the Super Bowl, or the World Series. He read, but it was mostly James Clavell and James Michener, big fat bug-crushers that he liked for what they told him about the Space Program, or Alaska, or Feudal Japan.

Whatever I might have felt, I was sure there was no way Roger would be interested, so I put any thoughts in that direction away. And for the longest time, nothing happened. When I invited Roger over to watch Nicholas Nickleby on Turner Classic Movies, there was no ulterior motive. It's funny. I still remember the date: March 1. From the moment I opened the door, he seemed awfully nervous, and I couldn't figure out why until, on his way out the door, he leaned over and kissed me. What a kiss that was. It was like, my eyes opened and I thought, "Oh." All the pieces fell into place or something. His breath tasted of the wine we'd been drinking. I kissed him back, and he put his arms around me. We—he didn't make it home that night, or the next one, either, which was no big deal, because Joanne was staying at her sister's in Manhattan for the week. Who knows what would've happened if she'd been at home? No, that's not true. Roger and I were inevitable. If it hadn't happened then and there, it would've someplace else.

That first night, afterwards, when we were lying in my bed together, holding each other the way you do after your first time with someone, I asked Roger if he'd planned this.

No, he said, although he'd hoped.

Had he done this before?

Never.

Then why now? Why me?

"I had to take the chance," he said.

 

By now, the sun had put in its daily appearance, the apartment filled with brightness. On their way out the door, the cop without the black eye had told me I could come for Roger and Ted at nine a.m. I supposed there was still enough time for a couple hours' nap if I felt like it, but I didn't, so I headed for the bathroom and the shower.

 

From the start, Roger's and my affair burned pretty hot. We couldn't get enough of each other, and discretion was not our strong suit. It only took three weeks for what was going on between us to come out, and, in retrospect, I'm surprised we managed to keep it quiet that long. There were a few close calls. You know that Roger and I were discovered by Joanne—"caught," was what she said when she opened the door to his study. She gasped and said, "I caught you!" Like a line from a bad play. She'd probably been rehearsing it. She had to have suspected something. Roger was gone from the house for more and more of each day; he returned later and later each night; he seemed happier than he had in years. How could Joanne not think he was seeing someone new? This part of our relationship—I don't know. When it was taking place, our affair seemed like the most important thing in the world. It had a consecration of its own. It was new and fresh and sure this kind of thing had happened before—how many of the college's faculty are on their second or third marriage?—but not like this, not in this way. I would think that it was like Jane Eyre. Here I was, the bright young independent woman, and here was Roger, Rochester, older, kind of cantankerous, living in this big house with an awful wife. Yes, I know the comparison's a stretch, but that was okay. If I couldn't find an exact parallel for our situation, that only emphasized its originality, you know?

Then Joanne walks in on us on the fold-out couch in Roger's office and it's, "I caught you!" and suddenly I didn't know what to think. Maybe my—our story wasn't that new. Maybe it was more a farce than a romance—some kind of second-rate Peyton Place. It turns out there is a precedent for what you've been doing. You just didn't see it because you were looking for it under literature, and it's filed under trash. Didn't Tolstoy say that God is a lousy novelist? Seems like it, sometimes, doesn't it?

Joanne was wearing a vanilla blouse and brown slacks. She stared at us trying to wrap this tiny blanket around ourselves; she hit her mark and delivered her line; she walked out. Roger was buttoning up his shirt when we heard her Mercedes start. He ran for the door, but Joanne put the pedal to the floor and peeled out of there. We stayed where we were, Roger, his shirt half-buttoned, untucked, no socks or shoes, his hand outstretched for the doorknob, me, still holding that blanket up in front of me, my hair in my eyes. For the last twenty-one days, we'd been living in our own private world full of secrets, secret signals, secret jokes, secret meetings. The rest of the world—what I thought of as the real world, which is strange, now that I think of it, because what we were doing was as real as it gets—the real world felt incredibly far away. We were living—if I call it a fairy tale, I'm not trying to be sappy or romantic—I mean, Roger was a little old to be playing Prince Charming, and my credentials for the part of Snow White were seriously lacking. It's just there was that same sense you have living in a fairy tale that here is a world that operates according to different rules than the ones we're used to. Mirrors can answer questions; animals can speak; there are dwarfs and witches and glass slippers. When we could tear ourselves apart for a minute—usually at the diner—we'd talk about where this thing was leading. We knew there would be consequences to what we were doing—we knew it, though we didn't really believe it. Consequences was just a word.

When Joanne stood there looking at us, however—when she tore out of that driveway like a bat out of hell—it was like our private fantasy world came smashing into this one. All the things we'd talked about, the possibilities we'd discussed, up to and including Roger leaving Joanne and moving out to my place, went from so many words to real possibilities. Yes, we had what we wanted. Isn't there a curse that goes, "May you get what you want"? Here we were, where we wanted to be, and it froze us.

But we thawed. I fully expected Roger to panic, say, "This has been nice, but I have a marriage to think about." I'm no fatalist, myself. It's just, they'd been together for thirty-five years. When Roger and I started sleeping together, I'd promised myself I wouldn't be stupid. I knew how I felt about him, and I thought I knew how he felt about me, but love doesn't always win the day, does it? I'd take this for what it was worth, get what I could out of it, but I had no doubt it was temporary. Even during our most—intimate moments together, this little voice in the back of my head kept reminding me, "This won't go on forever."

How shocked was I when Roger turned to me and said, "Get dressed: we have to go to the bank immediately"? All their accounts were joint, and he was afraid Joanne was on her way to empty them. "In case she's been there already, how are you for cash?" he asked as I pulled on my jeans, and it was with that question that I realized I'd been wrong. This wasn't over; this was on its way to something else entirely. I finished dressing in a hurry. We went to the bank. Joanne hadn't cleaned out their savings, so Roger took half of what was there and opened his own account. We returned to the house, and sat in the kitchen eating left-over fried chicken. Later, we watched TV in the living room. Everything was so real. It was as if we'd been living in a Monet, all fuzzy edges and warm glows, and suddenly been dumped into one of Lucian Freud's hyper-real canvases. I had this feeling—I was aware of shifting from one state to another, in a way I've been only a couple of times in my life.

A week later, Roger moved in with me. He and Joanne commenced their long and messy divorce. I became the Whore of Babylon. I'd rather not rehearse those couple of years. It would take me the rest of the night to catalogue what a complete and total bitch Joanne was. I mean, she broke into my apartment, for God's sake, and tossed it like some kind of amateur private eye. All the while, Roger and Joanne's old friends took her side, as if they had any idea what that marriage was really like. I guess the women were all afraid their husbands saw Roger as a secret hero, and the men were afraid they did, too. It was like high school, all over again. I always thought that, when you got older, you matured. How wrong was I? Here were these people two and three times my age, and we might as well have been passing notes in study-hall. Honestly, Roger and I were happy—you wouldn't believe how happy—but this childish stuff did get to us, sometimes.

The only people who weren't complete jerks to us were Addie and Harlow. I can remember how surprised—how pleasantly surprised I was the Saturday afternoon my phone rang and it was Addie, whom I didn't know, inviting us over for dinner. There was half a second when, as I was climbing the front stairs to their house, I panicked and was sure her invitation had been some kind of trap, and Joanne would be waiting for us, but I needn't have worried. Dinner could have been awkward—I mean, these guys went back to Roger and Joanne's arrival in Huguenot—but from the start, Addie made everything pleasant and comfortable. Thank God for her.

 

Even after an extra-long shower, there were more than three hours to go before I'd see Roger. I could have started to clean up the mess he and Ted had made, but I was more inclined to save that for him. I didn't want to be in the apartment anymore, however; so I decided that there were worse ways to kill some time than reading that day's Times over breakfast at the Plaza Diner. It took me a while to dress, since I wasn't sure whether casual or formal was more appropriate for picking your husband up from jail. In the end, I decided on formal, a robin's egg suit with a white blouse. I put my hair up and left my glasses on, both to make me look older and more serious. Then I left the wreckage of my living space for an early-morning drive to All the News that's Fit to Print and a plate of eggs Benedict.

 

The whole time his parents' divorce was being fought out, we never saw or heard from Ted. I was sure he'd at least call or write a letter—this was the end of his parents' marriage, after all, and you know the first thing Joanne did the day she left was phone Ted and give him her version of what had happened. I wanted Roger to call him and explain his side of things. Otherwise, I said, it made it look as if Roger was admitting he'd done something wrong. No, no, he said, it was already too late. Ted would be only too happy to believe his father was the villain. I didn't argue with him—he'd obviously made up his mind, and we had other things to worry about—though I thought about writing to Ted myself. Roger deserved to have someone offer his perspective. But when I sat down at the computer, I didn't know what to say. I couldn't figure out how to begin. "Hi, this is the woman your father left your mother for"? I couldn't see how to present Roger's version of events without seeming totally self-serving. I didn't want to do what Joanne had done, you know? There's still a file on my hard drive called "Ted Letter." Open it, and you see a blank screen.

No, all the while Joanne was breaking into my apartment, and sending me hate mail, and calling and screaming at me, we didn't hear from Ted. The times I brought him up to Roger, he said that Ted's silence spoke volumes, didn't it? All the bitterness and anger he'd felt about Ted as a teenager hadn't left him. He'd stored it, put it in boxes and tried to forget it, until he went looking for it again and found it was still bright and shiny as ever. This was when I understood how much Ted had hurt him—over a morning cup of coffee, I realized that he despised his son. It was frightening, to think that a parent would feel that way about their child. I mean, from everything Roger told me, Ted wasn't half as bad as I'd been when I was his age, and my parents never despised me. (I don't think they did, anyway.) If we hadn't been where we were—if those feelings hadn't come out of storage so recently—maybe it wouldn't have bothered me as much. But I felt like I was living with someone who had a loaded gun by the side of the bed.

(What is it Chekhov said? If you're going to introduce a gun in act one of your drama, it must be fired by act three? Something like that.)

And then came the wedding. Roger and I weren't planning it. He was barely out of his first marriage; I was content to wake up next to him each morning. We didn't need to get married. The next thing, I found out I was pregnant. We'd been rolling the dice—Roger wasn't much good with condoms, and I honestly didn't think anything would happen. Yes, stupid—and wrong. It was after the divorce was finalized. Roger had given Joanne everything—he said he wanted to make a clean break—everything except the house. That was what made the divorce take twice as long as it should have: Belvedere House. As if it hadn't seen enough misery, already. First Joanne wanted it and Roger thought it should be sold. Then he wanted it and she thought it should be sold. Then they both wanted it sold but couldn't agree how to split the proceeds. And so on. Finally, they negotiated this ridiculously complex deal, the upshot of which was that the house wasn't sold. It was rented, with the profits put into three accounts, one each for Roger and Joanne, and one for maintenance of the place. I'd suggested that exact solution to Roger a year before, but did he listen to me? No.

Anyway, I started to feel nauseated. After about three days of being unable to keep down anything more substantial than water and saltines, I started to suspect I might be pregnant. I was in denial for the next week, then I bought a home pregnancy test and confirmed it. That's the reason I married: my sixty-four-year-old boyfriend knocked me up. Neither of us was brave enough not to marry. For Roger, it had to do with the way he'd been brought up, which it did for me, too—but there was more to my decision. Once I'd decided I was going to have this baby, the prospect of everything ahead of me was overwhelming. I felt alone and terrified. Had Roger not proposed to me—which he did when I brought the home test out of the bathroom to show him: he looked up from the couch and said, "Does this mean you'll marry me?"—if he hadn't popped the question, I probably would've kicked him out.

As it was, he did, so the next day, we went to get our marriage license, and the day after that, at Town Hall, Judge Carol Tuttle officiating, I became the second Mrs. Roger Croydon. I wore a slate blue dress with a pale yellow jacket. Roger wore a shirt and tie and that blue blazer every English professor seems to have—they must get them with their doctorates. I was feeling pretty sick, and dizzy besides. I was afraid I was going to throw up on the judge. She was pretty annoying. Throughout the ceremony, she kept looking at us as if we were a sideshow attraction. "Come and see the woman who's marrying a man old enough to be her grandfather." Gasp. She was probably a friend of Joanne's.

For our wedding meal, Roger wanted to take me to the Canal House. It would have been a waste. The sight of anything more than crackers and a little clear broth was enough to send me running for the bathroom. Instead, Roger ordered a veal parm sub from Manzoni's, and we spent our wedding night curled up on the couch, watching an Outer Limits marathon on channel 11. At some point, Roger carried me through to bed, but it was just to tuck me in.

We kept the news of our marriage quiet, at first. It was nice to share a secret, again. We didn't tell anyone I was pregnant, either. We figured they'd know in due time. After a couple of weeks, when more people were noticing the plain gold bands on our fingers, we sent out notices to our families and friends. They were just plain white cards that said, "Roger and Veronica Croydon will be residing at 308 Springgrown Road, Huguenot, N.Y., 12561." Roger insisted on adding the first line of the Elizabeth Barrett Browning sonnet: "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways," which I thought was too much, but he wanted to make a point. Almost everyone ignored us, except for Addie and Harlow, who sent a beautiful card, a massive floral arrangement, and a cappuccino machine. Oh, and my mother called from California.

I haven't said that much about her, have I? Suffice it to say, I've pretty much been on my own since I was sixteen. Until then, we'd had your more-or-less standard nuclear family, dad, mom, kid. Then the dad died, the mom went to pieces, and the kid was left to fend for herself. You know who got me into Penrose; who filled out the admission forms, the financial aid forms; who went to meeting after meeting with this financial aid person and that scholarship representative? It wasn't Mom. Until the middle of my freshman year at college, she didn't do much more than sit on the couch and watch old videos of her and Dad. Nobody's grief was as profound as hers. She loved to say, "My father died, too, so I understand what you're going through. But you've never lost a spouse." I swear, I could have screamed. Anyway, over Christmas break, my first year at Penrose, she decided she'd been in mourning long enough and what she needed was a change of scenery. Her younger sister, Aunt Shirley, had invited her to come out to Santa Barbara for a while, maybe think about relocating there. Mom expected me to come with her. I had no intentions of leaving school. There was a huge fight, the upshot of which was that she moved to California, I stayed where I was and got an apartment, and we didn't see or hear that much of one another. I must've talked to her during the time after Roger and I got together, but it wasn't more than half a dozen times, and never for very long. I'd mentioned I was involved with someone, and pretty seriously, but she hadn't shown any interest beyond a, "How nice for you," so I hadn't felt obliged to fill her in on the details.

I shouldn't have been surprised when I picked up the phone one Monday morning and heard her voice saying, "You're married?" But I was, so instead of saying, "Why Mother, how nice to hear from you," I said, "Mom?"

"What have you done?"

"What do you mean? I got married."

"Yes, so I see—from a card, Veronica. I found out about my only daughter's marriage—not even about her marriage—I found out she got married, who knows when, to a man I've never heard of, from a card in the mail."

"Things happened kind of fast," I said. "I told you about Roger."

"Not that he was your fiancé."

"I told you we were living together."

"You most certainly did not."

"Yes, I did. It was a couple of phone calls ago."

"You may think you did, but, believe me, if you had told me you were living with a man, I would have remembered."

"Whatever, Mom. I know what I said."

"And I know what you didn't. Well, I guess I'll just have to accept the fact that my daughter got married and I wasn't there. Who is this Robert? Have you known him long? I hope so, if you've been living with him."

"It's Roger," I said, "Roger Croydon. We've been together a couple of years."

"Croydon? What kind of a name is that?"

"I don't know. English, I think."

"You don't know?"

"Mom."

"What does he do?"

"He's a professor at the college."

"I see. Was he your professor?"

"I did take a class with him—"

"And this is how you earned your 'A.'"

"Mom!"

"I'm sorry, it's just—how old is this man?"

"Old enough," I said.

"Why don't you want to tell me?"

"Because it's none of your business."

"Oh, I see—like your getting married was none of my business, apparently."

"Fine. Roger's sixty-four."

"Sixty-four?"

"Uh-huh."

"Veronica, you do realize that's older than I am?"

"Yes, Mom. It doesn't matter."

"Oh, I'm sure. Let me see if I have the details right. Aunt Shirley will love this. You've married your sixty-four-year-old college professor. Is there anything else? Are you pregnant?"

For an instant, I was going to tell her. Why not? It wasn't as if I was going to change the way she had already decided to think of me. Why not go all the way, give her the whole, sordid story? At the last second, though, my, "As a matter of fact, Mom, I am," became, "No, of course not." Not because I was ashamed, but because I wasn't going to use my unborn child as a weapon against its grandmother. I would tell her when my due-date was closer—or, Hell, I could mail her an announcement for that, too. She'd love that.

So maybe sending people—certain people—marriage announcements wasn't the smartest move. After the phone call, I didn't hear from my mother for another six months. If I needed any confirmation of that opinion, I received it when Ted showed up at our front door, furious.

 

My eggs Benedict were a yellow smear on the plate, my toast a sprinkling of crumbs, and I'd had three cups of decaf and two trips to the bathroom. I'd read all of the paper I cared to, and fiddled with the crossword. I checked my watch. By the time the check came and I paid it, it would be time to fetch Roger. I folded the paper and signaled my waitress.

 

After our marriage, Roger had no intention of communicating with Ted at all. He assumed Joanne would've passed the information along—not that Roger told her, either. She found out from a friend who knew the Town Clerk the same day we filed for our marriage license. Can you believe it? The joys of living in a small town. Joanne called my apartment that night and left a nasty message on my answering machine. The funny thing was, she accused Roger of getting me pregnant, which was just her trying to be mean, but which was absolutely right. We should've been angry—Roger was, a little—but it was too funny. I thought we should make an effort with Ted, try to reach out to him. I didn't feel like I could call him, not if Roger wouldn't, but sending him a card seemed within the bounds of propriety. I mean, he was as much Roger's son as he was Joanne's, and I didn't see why she should have the monopoly on him. If they could share the house, for God's sake, they could share their child. From everything Roger had told me, Ted sounded like a bright guy—I was sure he'd appreciate the effort.

When I'm wrong, I'm wrong.

 

Once I walked into town hall, I was directed to the courthouse, where I waited fifteen minutes, until Roger and Ted were led in, then another ten until the judge arrived. Father and son had spent the night in a couple of cells in the back of the police station. Neither looked the better for it. Roger was obviously exhausted—and still furious. So was Ted. I swear, if the cops hadn't been right there, they would have started all over again. At their arraignments, I stood up and spoke to the judge—not the woman who married us; this was a guy, Brace—and did my best to explain everything in a way that pointed most of the blame at myself. I said that Ted's father and I had gotten together under difficult circumstances, which Ted must have found extremely painful. When we were married, I had sent a wedding announcement to Ted as a goodwill gesture. Without any context for my action, though, he had taken it as an insult, which was understandable and which I should have anticipated. Of course he was angry. As for Roger: I hadn't told my husband I was sending the card to his son, so there was no way for him to be prepared when Ted appeared on our doorstep, furious. The situation had spiraled out of control. Roger reacted to his son's anger; the next anyone knew, the police were there. Yes, the two of them had behaved like kids, but it was all a misunderstanding. I put in a pretty good performance, enough so that the judge let them off with a "don't-ever-do-this-again." I always knew I'd make a good lawyer.

On our way to the car, Ted came over to us. I don't know what he was going to say. His face wasn't exactly friendly, but it had lost its previous fury. He caught Roger's arm and said, "Wait."

Roger stopped and said, "Take your hand off me," in a voice as cold as outer space. It was so—different, so dark that I stopped walking, too. I swear, I'd never heard him speak like that before. I'd never heard anyone speak like that. The air froze and crackled around his words. Ted jerked his hand back. Roger went on in that same, absolute zero voice: "Boy, the best part of you dribbled down your mother's leg. You have always been a disappointment to me, from your inability to read even a simple book when you were a child, to the self-indulgence of your adolescence, to the blind surrender to authority that you call a career. You are an embarrassment and a disgrace. Your life has been nothing; it is nothing; it will always be nothing. As of this moment, I am no longer your father; you are no longer my son. I disown you; I cast you from me. All bonds between us are sundered; let our blood no longer be true. And when you die, may you know fitting torment; may you not escape your failure. You are a stranger to me. Good day, sir." Eyes straight ahead, Roger limped toward the car, leaving Ted and me standing there. I went to say something to Ted, but before I could, he spat, "Fine," and stalked away.

It was ridiculous—the whole thing was like a bad joke. Who disowns anyone? If what Roger said wasn't so terrible, if I hadn't heard that arctic voice, I would have laughed the whole thing off. He disowned Ted? Who did he think he was, King Lear? Really. That voice, though. Standing there in the parking lot behind town hall, watching Roger reach the car and lean one arm against it, while Ted strode in the direction of the bus station, I was overcome with fear—not of Roger, but for him. That, and I was angry at him. However ridiculous it was, you don't say that kind of thing to your child. It was the first time I was honestly upset with him. We'd disagreed a lot—we still did, at times—but over piddling stuff. This was serious. I ran to catch up with him. He'd opened the car door, but was still leaning with one hand on the roof. When he turned his face to me, it was gray and he was panting. He said, "Honey, I believe I'm in the middle of a heart attack. Would you please drive me to the hospital?"

My dad had a heart attack; it was what killed him. I recognized the same symptoms in Roger. I wanted to call an ambulance; he refused. "Not in front of the boy." Can you believe that? Ted wasn't in sight anymore. No matter. He insisted no ambulance. Struggling not to panic, I drove Roger to Penrose at roughly a hundred and ten miles an hour. We blew past the state trooper barracks on 299, but it was at exactly the right moment. There was no one out front to see us. All the time, I'm trying to do fifteen things at once. I'm trying to keep the peddle to the floor—because speed is of the essence, right?—both hands on the wheel, both eyes on the road. I'm trying to pass whomever I can as quickly as I can. I'm trying to pay attention to Roger, who's leaning back in his seat with his eyes closed and his mouth open, so that I'm afraid he's dead and have to say, "Roger? Can you hear me?" I'm ready to take one hand off the wheel to poke him when he says, "I hear you." When we hit the Bridge, it's a wonder we don't slide right off.

As it turned out, Roger did have a heart attack—plus three broken ribs, and a bruised hip and kidney. Not to mention bruises and cuts over every square inch of his body. The heart attack wasn't that serious. The cardiologist told me it was, "worse than mild, but not up to medium." Roger didn't want anyone to know about it. While we were waiting in triage, he took my hand and said, "Don't tell anyone."

"About you and Ted?" I said. "Because it's kind of late for that."

"About this," he said, tapping his chest with one finger. I've never liked when people do that, knock on their sternums. It creeps me out—makes you sound as if you're hollow.

Although I didn't see what the big deal was, I respected Roger's wishes. The people I told about him being in the hospital assumed it was due to the fight—which, let's face it, was pretty much true. You think it's coincidence he rolls around on the floor with Ted, beating and getting beaten up by him, and the next thing his heart's saying, "Sorry, no can do"? I stayed with him that first night and the seven more he was there. To start with, he was pretty doped up, so I sat beside his bed, staring at his bruised face. The bruises were red and deep blue, and they streaked his face in a way that made me think of war paint. They made him look fierce, even asleep. I had the urge to hold his hand, to stay in contact with him, but now that the worst danger was past, I kept hearing what he'd said to Ted—which I was already thinking of as Roger's curse on him. "I disown you; I cast you from me." I wanted to laugh at it, but that was harder than you'd expect. I was sure he couldn't have made it up himself. I was certain he was quoting someone. He did that a lot, quoted Dickens or Browning or someone else without telling you he was quoting. It was like his way of saying, "Look how smart I am," and, if you didn't recognize the person he was quoting, "Look how stupid you are." I used to call him on it all the time. For a little while, I did my best to guess the source of his curse. There was enough Dickens I hadn't read for Roger to have plucked it from the pages of one loose, baggy monster or another—oh yeah, there's some pretty fierce stuff in old Charles. Have you read Little Dorrit? There's a line in there: this mother is trying to threaten her son into doing what she wants, and she tells him that if he disappoints her, then when she dies and he kneels in front of her corpse at the wake, it'll bleed. Very pleasant. The curse didn't feel like Dickens, though. It felt more like something you'd read in Faulkner, all that stuff about family and disappointment and doom. I couldn't remember what Faulkner Roger had read. He claimed he read nothing written after 1914, but that was mostly a pose.

The games English majors play, right? Everything's a text, or relates to one. It didn't take too long for me to tire of "whence the curse." Where he'd pulled it from didn't matter. What did was that he'd used it, on his son. Every time I remembered the look on Roger's face as he'd pronounced it—the sound of his voice—I put my hand over my belly. Yes, I believed this child's relationship with Roger was going to be different. Roger was not the same as he had been when Ted was a teenager. He was older, mellower, most importantly, happier. We had a better marriage than he and Joanne; already, that was obvious. We had fun—and you can be sure there's a blank spot under that word in Joanne's dictionary. Things would be better for us—for the three of us. All the same, those words: "I am no longer your father; you are no longer my son."

 

I never got the chance to find out what kind of father Roger would have been to our child. Late that first night in the hospital, I woke from where I'd fallen asleep sitting beside him with terrible cramps. I knew—even before I was completely awake, I knew. I tried to stand, to reach the call button clipped to Roger's blanket, but the pain took my legs out from underneath me. I fell and lay there on the floor. I couldn't catch my breath; the giant hand squeezing me wouldn't let me. All I could see was the space under Roger's bed. No, I thought, no no no no no. I closed my eyes, tried to fight what was happening. Yes, my body said, and the hand tightened, another round of cramps wracked me. I opened my eyes. They were streaming tears; my nose was running, too. The underside of Roger's bed wavered then blurred. I closed my eyes again as the giant hand contracted tighter. Oh God, I thought. Oh please. I could feel—I could feel things loosening inside me. Things starting to slip away. The sensation was obscene. I opened my eyes—

And instead of Roger's bed, I was looking at a flat surface—at a wall. It was maybe thirty, forty feet from me, much further than the walls of the hospital room. The floor had gone from pale tile to dark hardwood. Despite the pain, I turned my head.

Roger's bed—his room, were gone. I was in a huge, empty space like a church. No, not a church, the design was wrong. This was more like a house if everything inside, all the rooms, the halls, had been removed, and only the outside left. The crazy thing was, even with the agony digging into my belly, I recognized this place. It was the house, Belvedere House, Roger's house.

The scene lost focus as a fresh flood of tears poured into my eyes. It was harder than ever to breathe. I blinked, was still inside the house. Its walls—what I had taken for shadows crowding them I saw were openings, doorways—the interior was honeycombed with them. Inside each one, there was—

A face. Lurking at the verge of each and every doorway was a face so large it filled the space—dozens of enormous faces. Sweat had broken out all over me; now, I started to shake as the pain deepened. The faces were all the same, the nose long-broken, the heavy creases beside the mouth and over the brows, the thick hair that needed cut. Half a hundred copies of Roger's face gazed out at the vacant interior of Belvedere House. Their lips were moving, the space echoing with their vast whisper. In the general murmur, I could pick out individual phrases. "Your life has been nothing; it is nothing; it will always be nothing." "This is ridiculous. You are ridiculous." "What is it you want?" "And when you die, may you know fitting torment; may you not escape your failure." "Anything—take whatever you need."

I was losing my mind. I had to be; it was the only explanation available. This was too vivid to be a dream. The faces—there was something wrong with each of them. Where its eyes should have been, this one had empty sockets. This one's skin was peeling off in large patches, revealing what looked like scales underneath. This one spoke, and blood ran out of its mouth and down its chin. I shut my eyes and thought, Oh God. Oh God. The pain hit a high note, held it. I turned my head to the floor and kept it there, eyes still closed, as my body finished what it had begun.

By the time the night nurse found me and called for help, it was gone, the baby I'd barely started to think of as mine was gone. I felt someone shaking me, heard a voice saying, "Can you hear me?" and opened my eyes to a broad, middle-aged woman's face frowning with concern. I was back in the hospital room. There was a lot of blood. The air was thick with the stink of it; the floor was covered in it; my suit sodden with it. The nurses helped me clean up and found me someone's old sweatsuit. They wanted me to see one of the hospital's doctors—they insisted—but I refused. Yes, I understood the risks they ticked off on their fingers. I told them I'd see my own doctor first thing in the morning. For now, I didn't want to leave my husband—which wasn't exactly true. Roger had slept through my entire ordeal. He was hooked up to machines that registered his condition. He had a floor full of nurses to look after him. It was—I couldn't stand the thought of going to a doctor and having him tell me I'd had a miscarriage. I knew that was what I'd been through. I knew I'd been pregnant before and wasn't now. To hear it from a doctor, though—to hear it officially—that was too much to deal with. Neither nurse was happy about my decision, and they made me promise, repeatedly, to see my own MD the next day.

For the second day in a row, I spent the deep hours of the night awake, my body shaking, it was so desperate for sleep, my brain unable to shut down in the face of what I'd lost. Not to mention, what I'd seen while I was losing it. That—I didn't know what to call it. Hallucination was probably the appropriate word, but it didn't feel right. I didn't know what did. I would close my eyes, and I would see the empty house, the doorways, the faces. I would hear Roger saying, "Boy, the best part of you dribbled down your mother's leg." I would relive my baby sliding out of me. Every half hour, one nurse or the other poked her head in the doorway, saw I was awake, and asked me how I was feeling. I didn't know how to answer. What I was mostly was empty. Aside from my tears while I was losing the baby, I hadn't cried as much as I would have expected. I hadn't gotten that used to being pregnant in the first place. It had seemed incredible that there was another living being growing inside me. I guess it's different once you can feel the baby move. I sat beside Roger and thought, Today, he's lost both his children.

I waited until he came home to break the news to him. For the first couple of days he was at Penrose, I was afraid for his heart. The doctor told me everything was under control and Roger was going to be fine, but I didn't want to tempt fate, you know? I kept my promise to the nurses and saw my ob-gyn that following morning. He was more sympathetic than I expected, so much so that I started bawling in front of him. He made a speech about this being difficult but for the best—nature's way of sparing a life that couldn't have survived on its own. I nodded, drying my eyes and blowing my nose on the tissues he'd had ready at hand. The most important thing, he said, was that I appeared to be all right physically, and that that continue to be the case. I had to take care of myself. Mentally, it was normal to be depressed, even angry. He gave me the card of a Dr. Hawkins, a psychiatrist he'd referred patients to in the past, and made me promise to call her if I was having trouble handling this. I swear, the air the last couple of days seemed to be full of promises. I promised to call the psychiatrist if things started to get too bad. When I got in my car to drive back to the hospital, I had the strangest thought. I sat there with both hands on the steering wheel, looking into the windshield, where I could see my reflection, this woman who'd been a mother-in-process and who now was not, and I thought, This is the price of Roger's words. For a second, that idea took hold of me—I was absolutely convinced it was true—I saw Roger's face framed by a doorway, eyeless, the skin peeling away, blood pouring from his mouth. As quickly, it was gone. I shook my head, started the car, and drove back to the hospital.

 

Roger recovered rapidly. I probably could have said I'd lost the baby right away. By the time I was more sure of his condition, the hospital seemed like the wrong place. Roger knew I was keeping something from him. He kept asking me what was wrong. Nothing, I said, it was only the strain of everything. "Don't let yourself get too stressed," he said once, his second-to-last day there, "you've got someone else to think about." Somehow, I managed to smile at him.

The afternoon we came home, I told him. He was on bedrest for another week, which frustrated him. "I've been in bed a week already," he complained to the cardiologist, who told him to do as he was instructed or they'd be seeing each other again a lot sooner than either of them wanted. Having a heart attack made Roger nervous, you know? Before, you said that it can happen to anyone, at any age, which is true—and which was what Roger was trying to convince himself of the time he was in Penrose. A thirty-year-old can have a heart attack, but how do you react if they do? You're surprised. You say, "Wow, that's young for a heart attack." Because you associate heart attacks with being old. How many times have you heard someone talk about turning forty or fifty as entering heart attack country? Throughout his week in the hospital, Roger said, "I can't believe I had a heart attack." The second or third time I heard him, I realized what he was actually saying was, "I can't believe I'm old." I reassured him, told him yes, it was crazy that a man in his shape could have this happen to him. Secretly, I thought about his love for cheese, and cream sauces, and ice cream.

We came home, with instructions for a new diet, and I put Roger to bed with the latest issue of Dickens Quarterly. The apartment was still a wreck from Roger and Ted's excursion into ultimate fighting. I'd returned for a couple of hours the day before to clean up the worst of it, but the place was a mess, books all over the place, glass in the carpet, bloodstains on the floor. I dug out my cleaning supplies from under the sink, got down on my hands and knees, and started to scrub the floor. It's therapeutic, cleaning—it is for me, at least. From the bedroom, Roger called, "Honey? What are you doing?"

"Cleaning," I said.

"Are you sure that's a good idea?" Roger asked. "In your condition?"

My condition. My condition which wasn't a condition; a condition of wasn't. I stood and went through to the bedroom, where Roger lay on the bed, pillows piled up behind him, his cheap half-glasses on. He was wearing an old conference t-shirt with Dickens's faded face on it. Without removing the rubber yellow gloves I'd pulled on—a wet sponge in one hand—I sat down on the end of the bed and said, "Roger, I lost the baby. I'm sorry."

"Oh, honey," he said, dropping the journal and leaning forward, his arms open. I moved into his embrace. "When?" he asked.

"While you were in the hospital."

I felt him nod. I was expecting him to ask me why I hadn't told him, which I didn't want to have to answer. He didn't, just kept his arms around me. I'd also assumed I would cry when the words came out, but my eyes stayed dry. What I felt was more relief, relief and calm. Roger sniffled, and suddenly was weeping freely. I wound up consoling him, saying, "It's all right," repeating my doctor's words to me about nature sparing a life that couldn't have survived on its own. If I didn't entirely believe that—if I couldn't stop from connecting the miscarriage to Roger's cursing Ted—I didn't let on to him. I tried hard not to think about it.

Overnight, everything changed. Not in a big, dramatic way. It was more like sadness had entered our lives—our life. Until that moment Ted banged on the door, we'd had tough times, some very tough times, but no matter what happened—if all Roger's old friends ignored us; or Joanne called us every hour on the hour every night for a week; or she showed up at the front door of the motel we'd thought we could escape to—oh yeah, she was insane, all right—but it didn't matter if she was, not really, because she was on the outside. She could do whatever she wanted, she could say whatever she wanted, but she couldn't get between the two of us. I'm sure she realized this, and it drove her nuts. That combination of events, though, Roger's disowning Ted, his heart attack, and especially losing the baby, did what Joanne couldn't. It found its way into what we shared and—it didn't ruin it, no—it kind of tarnished it. Things were no longer as joyful. It wasn't as if I took up drinking, or Roger stayed out all night, or the two of us fought all the time. You noticed it in more subtle ways. We didn't wait for each other to be awake to have breakfast, anymore. We didn't read the Sunday Times together. We watched TV while we ate dinner. None of it was anything anyone would have worried about—we weren't in any danger of going the same way as Roger and Joanne. Things were different, that was all.

Although I struggled not to, at odd moments, I would hear Roger's curse. I would be driving across the Bridge, on my way to teach at Penrose; or I'd be in the fruit aisle at Shop Rite, wondering whether the Fuji or the Golden Delicious looked fresher; or I'd be walking back from the mailbox, sifting through the day's tally of bills and junk—and that zero-degree voice would burn my ears. "You are an embarrassment and a disgrace." "All bonds between us are sundered; let our blood no longer be true." The space I'd seen the night I lost the baby—that other Belvedere House—would crowd my vision, those doorways, those murmuring faces. Then they were gone, the sounds, the sights, and I was at the wheel, behind the shopping cart, holding a half-dozen envelopes. Probably, I should have talked to Roger about it. Scratch that: definitely, I should have talked to him. It was just—we hadn't said anything to one another about his disowning Ted—Roger's heart attack, and its attending drama, had pre-empted any and all other discussions, and by the time he was home again, there was the miscarriage to talk about, and the further we went from that parking lot, the harder it was to bring up. I assumed Roger would chalk up his words to the heat of the moment, and as for what I'd seen—I really didn't want to contemplate what that might mean for things like my sanity.

 

Hard as it was to believe, the world continued around us. When I'd entered the MA program, the economy had been going strong. We were almost at the end of the internet boom. By the time Roger and Joanne signed their divorce papers, the economy was folding in on itself and the 2000 election was stuck in recount. Roger couldn't stand Bush. He never got so caught up in the divorce that he couldn't rail about what an idiot the guy was. He used to say, "If we must have a Republican for president, why on God's green earth couldn't it be McCain, and not that vacuous boob?" I voted for Nader. All of it—politics, the economy, world events—took place in the background, if you know what I mean. We paid attention to the bombing of the Cole, to the start of the recession, but none of it compared to what we were undergoing—good and bad—none of it was very real to us.

Do I have to say that changed on September 11? What I remember most about that day—aside from the images on TV—was frantically trying to reach Ted. We were under attack. Planes had crashed into buildings. No one knew how many more might be on their way to what targets. Anything was possible. It was completely reasonable whoever was doing this would want to aim for military bases as well. The thing was, we didn't have Ted's phone number anymore. Roger had torn it out of all our address books after his return from the hospital. I tried calling information, but couldn't get through. Roger was in class. I actually dialed Joanne's number—that's how desperate I was—but it was busy. She lived in Manhattan, remember. Midtown, but who knew how safe that was? No doubt everyone in her family was calling her. I was frantic, pacing the apartment, listening to the beeping of one busy signal after another. I decided I was going to ask Roger for the number when he came home. He had a great memory for that kind of thing, and however hard he would have tried to pry Ted's number from his mind, I knew he'd be able to retrieve it if I insisted.

About ten minutes before Roger ran in the front door saying, "Oh my God, honey, have you heard?" I tried information again and got through. In a remarkably calm voice, the operator asked me what number I wanted. I told her. She gave it to me and told me to have a nice day. Bizarre. I punched in Ted's number, and waited. I was sure the line would be busy, if it was working at all. It wasn't. After what felt like hours, it started to ring. It rang, and it kept on ringing. I wondered if I'd dialed the number correctly; I wondered if it would still ring for me if the phone on the other end had been destroyed. It kept on ringing, what had to be fifty, sixty, seventy times. I considered hanging up and trying again, but was afraid I wouldn't be able to get through. I was hoping that, if I let the phone ring long enough, someone would pick up and I could ask them if Ted was okay. All the while, in the background, the TV was full of the pictures of the Towers burning, the Pentagon burning, of huge plumes of black smoke pouring into the sky. You could hear various talking heads saying they didn't know who was behind this; they didn't know the extent of it.

Finally, the other end picked up and I heard Ted's voice say, "Hello?"

I was so relieved I didn't even take the time to feel relieved. I practically shouted, "Ted! It's Veronica—your father's—Roger's—are you all right?"

There was no reply.

"Ted?" I said, "Can you hear me?"

He hung up.

When I called back, Ted's number was busy. I wasn't surprised he'd hung up; though I hoped maybe that wasn't the case, maybe wires had crossed somewhere and severed our connection. No—I knew he'd done it. But at least I'd heard his voice. I replaced the phone in its cradle, and Roger rushed in full of disaster. I didn't tell him about the call I'd just made. I thought I should wait for him to bring up Ted. He didn't. We spent the rest of that day glued to the TV as it replayed the same awful sights over and over again. Everyone, all the reporters and anchors and pundits, kept saying that what had happened was unimaginable. No, I thought, it's only imaginable. This is the kind of thing you read about, that's supposed to remain safely confined to the pages of a Tom Clancy novel.

Roger never once mentioned Ted—or Joanne, for that matter. It's strange to say, but what I realized on 9/11 was how completely my husband had rid himself of his former life. I was disappointed that he didn't suggest calling Ted—to tell the truth, I was the tiniest bit upset he didn't try to call Joanne, either. I mean, sure, she'd been a monster to us, but on a day like this one, you could look past those kind of things, at least to make sure of something as basic as whether people were alive. I could've come out and said I'd attempted to contact both of them, but each hour that passed without Roger uttering their names made what I'd done seem increasingly weird.

Do you remember what it was like, those days immediately after the attacks? I had been working on an article on Hawthorne, so I had reread a bunch of his stories and was about to begin The House of the Seven Gables for what must have been the twentieth time. The morning of the eleventh, I'd read the first couple of pages of the book when the phone rang and my friend, Alicia, was asking me if I had the TV on, a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. I put the novel down and didn't pick it up again for the rest of that day. Later—I think it was the following morning—I noticed it lying where I'd left it. I tried to go on from where I'd left off, old Maule's curse on Judge Pyncheon: "God will give him blood to drink." I couldn't do it. The words on the page refused to add up to anything. My eyes kept returning to that pronouncement. "God will give him blood to drink." Eventually, I gave up on Hawthorne and cleaned the apartment, instead. When I was done, I was tired and sweaty and didn't feel any better, but I'd found a way to pass a couple of hours. During the week that followed, I cleaned the apartment every day, sometimes twice the same day. I emptied out cabinets and scrubbed them and their contents. I rearranged the furniture in the living room. When I heard Roger say, "I disown you; I cast you from me," when I saw that whispering space, I ignored them and put my back into shifting the couch. I unscrewed the light fixtures and soaked them in the kitchen sink to remove the layers of accumulated grime. I rearranged the furniture in the bedroom. When I saw the words, "God will give him blood to drink," I ignored them, too, and tugged on the bed. I emptied out the closets, and put Roger's clothes in two piles, one to keep, and one for the Salvation Army. Roger saw what I was doing and didn't comment. His response to the disaster was to focus his complete attention on his classes. He sat at the kitchen table for hours with oversized photocopies of key passages from the books he was teaching, filling the copies with notes in half a dozen different-colored pens—one for each theme he was pursuing. By the time he put them aside, they looked like a strange combination of map and modern artwork.

One afternoon that first week—I'm pretty sure it was Friday—I drove into town for more cleaning supplies. On my way back, there was an accident on Main Street and the detour the cops had set up sent me down onto Founders, past Belvedere House. Do you know, it had been months since I'd seen it? In person, I mean. None of the routes I routinely traveled took me onto Founders, and I didn't exactly go out of my way to drive it. Now here to my left was this huge house squatting in the middle of its lawn like—like I couldn't say what. It wasn't empty; I knew that. I'd been inside it, had been with Roger in it. The house was practically a labyrinth, stuffed full of furniture and decorations. Few places were less empty. And yet, as the light shifted on its windows, I was absolutely certain that, were I to pull over, cross the lawn to the front door, and walk inside, I'd find the whole thing hollow, only walls and ceiling. I kept driving.

 

Pretty early on, I had a feeling that, when we went to war—because, right away, it was obvious to me that we were going; it was only a question of who and when—I had this feeling—a conviction—that Ted would be sent. I wasn't sure exactly what Ted did. I knew he was a sergeant in the Special Forces, but I wasn't clear what that meant. I'd asked Roger, once, what Ted's job description was. He'd said, "He and his friends do the secret things," as if I had any idea what those kinds of things might be. I'd pursued the question, asked him what "secret things" were, and he'd said, "Infiltration, reconnaissance, sabotage, assassination, that business." I didn't know how accurate Roger was—though I've since learned he was more or less on target—but I knew that Ted had been in the Army for a while, which I assumed meant he was experienced at his job, which I assumed put him at the top of the list of the people who'd be sent.

I was right. When the soldiers put their boots on the ground in Afghanistan, Ted's unit was among them. I'm not sure exactly what he did in the early days of the war, only that he was part of a lot of very intense stuff. That's how his best friend described it to me. Yes, I talked to Ted's best friend, a guy named Gene Ortiz; although he told me everyone calls him Woodpecker. I contacted him after Roger disappeared, when I was trying to fit what had happened to us into some kind of sense. I had questions about Ted, about his time in Afghanistan, so I did some research, found out who his CO had been, and called him. When he heard I was Ted's stepmother, he was very helpful. No doubt because he couldn't see me and think, "You're Ted Croydon's stepmother?" I'd been afraid he'd think my request to speak with someone who'd served with my stepson was morbid, but he said he completely understood. Specialist Ortiz and my stepson had been close to the point of inseparable, the CO said, he was sure the specialist would be happy to provide me any information I might need. "And Mrs. Croydon," the CO said, "may I just say how sorry myself and the rest of the men are about Ted? Your stepson was a model soldier—I don't think there was a man who knew him who didn't admire him. Working with him was a pleasure and a privilege." I thanked him. It was kind of nice to hear someone saying all this. The CO added that he'd tell Specialist Ortiz to expect my call and assist me in whatever way he could.

I was surprised at how nervous I was making that call. My hands shook so much that I had to punch the number in four times. I wasn't sure what Ted would have told his best friend, but it wouldn't have been too flattering. According to Gene, it wasn't; although he refused to say anything more than that Ted had been very, very angry with me. "Almost as angry as he was at his old man," he said. None of which—fortunately—made any difference to Gene. He appreciated me wanting to find out about Ted. We talked for a good couple of hours, about Ted, what he'd been like, some of the crazy pranks he'd pulled, how he and Gene had become friends. Gene didn't want to talk about Afghanistan very much. Their unit had gone in ahead of the main invasion force to, as he put it, "set up the party." "Mazar-i-Sharif, Kabul, Kandahar, Tora Bora: you name it, we were there first," he said. "We did what we did and I'm proud of it, but I'm happy I'm home and I'm sorry T.D. isn't." That's what they called him: T.D.

It took a lot of convincing, but I did get Gene to tell me about Ted's final patrol. "You don't want to hear about that," he kept saying; to which I kept answering, "Yes, I do." They had been out in Kabul, sent out to investigate rumors of Taliban holdouts. The air was abuzz with all kinds of crazy stories, but Bin Laden and Mullah Omar and more of the Taliban than should have been were still running around, so the Army took whatever information came their way seriously. It was late at night, the moon full and shining brightly. Their patrol had taken them to what all previous reports had indicated was a quiet neighborhood. Ahead, the street they were on opened into a square fed by a dozen other streets and alleys. After a quick inspection, they decided it looked safe and moved forward. When they were a little more than halfway across, they heard a loud wailing. Instantly, their guns were up and pointing at its source, an old man who came running out of one of the alleys, waving his hands. Ted swore and advanced to meet him.

That was when the ambush happened. Gene said he heard a whoosh, then the rocket-propelled grenade hit the spot where Ted and the old man were standing. "That was it for T.D.," Gene said. "The old guy, too. If it helps any, it was over before he knew it." The rest of the men spent the next fifteen minutes in a furious firefight with their attackers before killing them. "All of them?" I asked him.

"Yes, ma'am," he said.

"Good," I said, and meant it. The things you never think you'd say.

The first Roger and I learned of Ted's death came via a call from Joanne. For a change, I was the one out teaching—I had a pair of back-to-back sections of Intro to Lit at Penrose—and Roger was home. He didn't tell me about it for a full twenty-four hours. I knew he was acting differently. He was quiet, always the sign that something was wrong. I asked him if he was feeling okay. Fine, he said, fine. I didn't press him; everyone has times they feel like being quiet, right? Anyway, I had papers to grade.

At dinner the following night—we were having Chinese—I was eating cold sesame noodles. I glanced over at Roger—who if anything had been more silent today—and saw tears streaming down his face. He wasn't making any noise, just sitting there eating his chicken with snow peas while his eyes overflowed. I thought he must have been crying for some time, because there were a pair of dark patches on his shirt—he was wearing a denim shirt I'd bought him. I reached across the table and put my hand on his shoulder. He continued eating and crying. I said, "Roger, honey: What is it?"

"Ted," he said. In the sound of that one syllable, I knew; I heard Ted's death. I said, "Oh. Oh, Roger."

"Joanne called to tell me," he went on. "She said he was on patrol and they were attacked. That's all she knows. That's all anyone is saying right now."

"Honey," I said, "I'm so, so sorry."

"That's the end," Roger said, beginning to sob. "That's the end of my little boy."

It was the end of Roger, too. Not right away, but if I want to point to the moment when he set out down the road to his own end, that would be it. Although maybe not completely. I can't discount the effect returning to Belvedere House had on him.

He arrived at that decision by himself. If we had discussed it, I would have told him that I was fine with leaving the apartment—it was too small, and shrinking every day—but for God's sake, let's find somewhere new. I don't know if it would have helped us to have packed our bags and gone someplace completely different—another state. I'm sure Roger could have gotten a position at a place like BC or UConn no problem. A move like that might've caused its own problems—but whatever those might've been, they couldn't have been any worse than what we found waiting for us in the corridors of that house.

Roger was all right—well, he was functional for a couple of days. Shock. I was in shock, too, but it was a completely different kind of shock. What I was experiencing was what you go through when someone famous and distant dies. It was like the afternoon Kurt Cobain killed himself. I couldn't wrap my mind around it. Here was this guy whose music had meant so much to me—who seemed like he'd written the soundtrack to my life, you know? And he put a shotgun to his head. It's a loss, no doubt about it, but what you lose is what you've made of this person you've never met. From the way things had been left between Roger and Ted, you might have expected Roger to feel sad, upset, but not overwhelmingly so. He at least appeared to have distanced himself from Ted considerably. That was an act. Whatever the bad stuff between them, there was all this good history to balance it. Even after that last, awful confrontation, I'd walk into his office at school and catch him looking away from the picture of Ted in his baseball uniform he hadn't gotten around to taking down from his bookcase. Who knows? Roger could have been brooding over what a lousy son Ted was. The point is, he hadn't succeeded in severing himself from his son as completely as he wanted to think. It gave me hope that maybe he and Ted would be reconciled, eventually. It also meant that there was a lot more sentiment than anyone suspected waiting to rise up and carry Roger away.

That was how I thought of the change in Roger, that his grief over Ted's death was carrying him away from me. It was as if we were standing on an ice flow that was gradually breaking up; every day, he receded a little bit farther. He cried a lot at first—we both did. I'd never seen a man cry that hard or that much. He couldn't sleep. We sat up most of the night channel surfing; or Roger went out for these long walks that kept him away till dawn. I waited for him, trying not to be as anxious as I was, wishing I'd insisted on going along. I couldn't figure out where he was walking.

Now, I'm sure his destination must have been Belvedere House, the place where he and Ted had been happiest together. I can picture him standing there on the edge of the lawn, dressed in the gray sweatshirt and –pants that were his nighttime attire whether he slept in them or not. He's panting. His eyes are wide. He's remembering tossing the ball back and forth with Ted so vividly he can see them in front of him, the ball a white blur in the air. And there's the spot where he'd found Ted writhing on the ground, his arm broken after he fell off the roof. And there's the tree that still bears the black mark from where the teenage Ted, drunk on wine coolers, smacked into it with Joanne's Mercedes. Roger stares at the house's stone walls as if he could look through them to the interior he knew, to the kitchen doorway where he marked Ted's height, or the banister Ted delighted in sliding down, no matter how many times Joanne yelled at him for doing so, or Ted's room—rooms, really, because once he'd turned twelve, he convinced his parents to let him move to the third floor. Now Roger's climbing the narrow stairs that connect the second to the third floor. Now he's standing at the threshold of Ted's room, glancing at the posters of Yankees players in action that crowd the walls, at the Oxford Dickens Roger gifted him neatly arranged on the desk, at the bed unmade from when Ted last slept in it. Now he's crossing to the bed and lowering himself onto it. His nose wrinkles at the sharp bite of the Old Spice Ted has taken to wearing in imitation of one of his favorite players, beneath which are the softer odors of Ivory soap and Ted's skin. He rests there, outside and inside the house, calm if not happy, until a car passes by, startling him back into himself and his grief.

 

He would return an hour before dawn, full of words. I'd be staring out the kitchen window, wondering where he'd gone, and the lights in the yard would click on, announcing his return. Or I'd be asleep at the kitchen table, and the squeal of the front door opening would wake me. Roger would half-stumble to the couch, his face bright with sweat, his chest heaving. His heart attack was fresh enough in my mind for me to remember the way he'd let his head fall against the headrest as I sped down 299. His sneakers, the bottoms of his sweatpants, would be soaked with dew. I'd bring him a glass of water, insist he wrap a towel around his shoulders against a chill. He would sink into the couch, pressing the glass to his forehead, and say, "I haven't told you about my father, have I?"

I would shake my head. Except for some basics—a father, mother, younger brother and sister, all of them plagued by disease and disaster—I didn't know anything about his family. He never spoke of them. By the time I had met him, so much of Roger's life had already happened that his family had seemed distant, of little consequence.

Roger would drain the water and pass me the empty glass with a "Thank you." Before I had the chance to return the glass to the kitchen, he would start talking. "My father was an alcoholic. Where and when I grew up, that term did not have much currency. A man who enjoyed his bottle too much was either a drunk if it took over his life and caused him to make a fool of himself in public, or none of your damned business if the worst you noticed was that his cheeks were a little redder than they should be, or that his breath was a tad fierce. Father was one of the none-of-your-damned-business alcoholics, a designation that was not hurt by the fact that he also owned the town's undersized Sears and half-a-dozen houses. Oh yes, my dear, I knew money before I met Joanne. Father liked his bottle, but it never interfered with his business responsibilities, so it was his concern. That he would beat my brother, sister, and me when he was in his cups was nobody's concern but ours.

"You knew, when he was drunk, that someone was going to feel his fist before too long. In that way, he was almost comfortingly predictable. His drinking, which had remained at a more-or-less constant rate throughout the long work day—he started before seven and returned home for dinner at six—would take a sharp jump while we ate, two or three more glasses of Jack Daniel's by the time Mother was passing around the dessert plate. Something would happen—once, I fumbled his dessert onto the floor; another time, my brother, Rick, scraped his chair on the floor; still another, my sister, Elizabeth, laughed too hard and sprayed the milk she had been drinking across the table. If the offending party was close enough, Father's hand would lash out and catch us where he could, the jaw, the cheek, the ear. He did not believe in pulling his punches. If we were sitting too far away, he would push himself back from the table—and we knew, the second we heard his chair stutter across the floor, we knew what was on the way. He would rise, and God help you if you snickered at the way he needed to grab hold of the table to keep himself from pitching over. Even before he was on his feet, he was talking. 'Boy,' he would say, or, 'Girl,' 'what in the name of the Almighty Lord God, the good and most merciful Jehovah, have you done?'

"He had wanted to be a preacher, you see, that had been his secret, childhood desire, which had been squashed by his father, who told him in no uncertain terms where his future as the only son of the town's richest man lay. Father's business duties kept him too busy to become a deacon, which I assume the church was grateful for, but we were there in the front row every Sunday, and the walk back home was inevitably given over to Father disparaging the day's sermon, and offering his own in its stead. To give the man his due, he knew his Bible. He tended to express that knowledge, however, as a series of questions to whichever one of us he was preparing to unleash his fists on. The fourth commandment—he was obsessed with Honoring Thy Father and Mother. No matter what we did, or he thought we did, it all came back to that commandment. His hands were the instruments of God's justice, you see."

"What about your mother? What was she doing while he was terrorizing you?"

"Minding her own business. Clearing the table. Doing the dishes. She and Father had made their peace a long time ago; he did not raise his hand to her. Until we reached the age of seven, we were under her protection, unless we'd committed some particularly egregious trespass, in which case, she was the one who turned us over to Father. Once we had achieved the age of reason, however, we were his. It was bad—it was every bit as bad as you can imagine, and worse, besides." Roger reached up and fingered the bridge of his nose. "Have you ever wondered who did this?"

What do you do with that? What do you do with hurt that's festered for half a century? For five mornings running, I heard variations on the same tale: the time Father gave Elizabeth a black eye for having given him a Look; the time Rick lost one of his front teeth for an offense Roger still couldn't identify; the time Roger fled out the front door rather than face another beating—in return for which, his father had the town police arrest his son and treat him to a night in jail for his insolence, after which he got the beating. From a vague backdrop, Roger's childhood and adolescence leapt into sharp focus. I don't know if anyone's ever told you anything like this, but when they do, you wind up re-evaluating everything you know about them. Roger would talk until dawn was pouring into the apartment, when he'd finally let me lead him to bed. I would lie beside him, listening for his breathing to change, to deepen, and then I would sleep, too, as best I could.

 

After a week off from school, Roger decided to return to his classes. I tried to argue him out of it. Instead of teaching his students Great Expectations, he should be talking to a psychiatrist. "You require the services of a psychoanalyst when you do not understand what is the matter with you," he said. "I understand what is the matter with me. My son is dead and I am grieving for him. What I need is a distraction to occupy me while I do what Freud calls the work of mourning." I didn't pursue the argument, didn't tell him there was more to it than that. He was grieving, yes, but he was guilty, too. The last thing his only son had heard him say was that he was nothing and they were no longer father and son.

When the reports started to come in—about Roger not being prepared for class, thinking they were reading Bleak House when it was Little Dorrit; or delivering the same lecture for three classes in a row; or not showing up for class because he was in his office trying to pull his thoughts together on a book he'd taught for the last thirty-five years; or standing for long stretches of time in front of his students without saying anything—I wasn't exactly surprised. That's not true. I was surprised at the extent of Roger's collapse. I'd expected him to have some kind of difficulty teaching; there was no way he could be the kind of teacher he usually was. Roger at half-speed was still better than ninety-five percent of the people in that department, and I thought that it would be worth him fumbling around a little bit if it helped him in the long run. A lot of people, when they're having a hard time, they let it all hang out at home, in private, but when they go out in public, to work, they pull themselves together, you know? With Roger it was the opposite. With me, he would rally himself; with his students, he went to pieces.

While this was happening, we held Ted's memorial service. The service was my idea. Joanne held one in the city, but neither of us wanted to make the trip. You just knew it was going to be a chance for Joanne to grandstand, to present herself as the bereft but dutiful mother, while Roger would be the father who, the last time he'd seen his son, had been fighting with him. No way. Roger was going through enough, already; I had no intention of letting him walk into that. God only knows what they would have thought of me. Joanne didn't press the matter. I'm sure she was more than happy to have the spotlight to herself. Since we hadn't attended her service, we had to have one of our own. I thought it would be therapeutic, help Roger reconnect with Ted. At first, Roger wasn't interested. We had spent a Saturday driving down to the cemetery in Westchester where Ted's ashes had been buried—in Joanne's family plot, of course; Roger hadn't contested her decision. There was no headstone yet, only a strip of bare earth and a tiny American flag. On the drive, we had stopped at a mall so Roger could run into a sporting goods store. When we found Ted's grave, he removed the baseball he'd bought from his coat pocket and set it at the head of the grave. That was enough for him, Roger said. "It isn't for me," I said, "I need something more formal," which wasn't exactly true. He needed it—and if he did, so did I. We bickered about it for a week, at the end of which Roger gave in. I went to talk to the minister at the Dutch Reformed Church on Founders. I was too preoccupied with what I was going to say to the minister to pay much attention to Belvedere House. Ted's service was scheduled for the following Saturday.

I don't want to relive that hour. While it wasn't the worst thing that happened after Ted died—not by a long shot—it may have been the most painful. I sat watching him try to deliver Ted's eulogy, up at the front of the church in the new black suit I'd taken him out to buy two days before. Almost from the moment he began, with his account of how Ted hadn't wanted to read when he was boy, but Roger had made him, he'd insisted, because he'd known how important it would be to his son—and I could see him struggling not to cry and failing, I was thinking, Don't do it, honey, it's too much. That's okay. Sit down and this can be over and I won't do anything like this again, I swear. When he tried to recite that Houseman poem . . . . Once the service was over, I tried to get him back to the apartment as quickly as I could, but that was more difficult than it sounds. Despite everything, Roger insisted on staying at the church to greet and talk to the people who'd attended the service. He had that sense of obligation. I stood by his side throughout, watching the looks on people's faces as they realized they'd have to say something to Roger before they could leave. A number snuck out while he was in conversation with Benedict, who must have spent a good ten minutes trying to console Roger by explaining Four Quartets to him. Finally, I succeeded in guiding him from the church to the car. I drove. As we were buckling our seatbelts, Roger said, "I believe those who came found the service quite moving." He leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. "Thank you, dear." I swear, it was like the punchline to some awful joke. I pulled out of the parking lot and headed for home. As we passed Belvedere House, Roger turned to look at it. I half-expected him to say something, offer another quotation, but he was silent.

That night, Roger went to bed fairly early—the service had done that much for him, anyway, tired him out—while I sat up watching TV. If the afternoon had exhausted Roger, it had left me wired, on edge. There was a Twilight Zone celebration on the Sci Fi Channel, hour after hour of black and white weirdness framed by Rod Serling's laconic pronouncements. I switched between that and the cooking channel, a succession of would-be eccentric chefs taking you through the world's cuisines a half-hour at a time. Every now and again, I'd stand up to use the bathroom or rake through the refrigerator. I wasn't especially hungry; it was seeing all that food.

As I was leaning over with the refrigerator door open, trying to decide if I really wanted to open the tub of veggie dip and the bag of baby carrots, I heard Roger say, "And when you die, may you know fitting torment." At the same time, I realized someone was standing behind me. I hadn't heard any footsteps; I'd been too distracted by my memory. I was just aware of someone there, the way you are sometimes—like when you know there's a student standing outside your office. Of course I assumed it was Roger. I said, "Midnight snack, anyone?" and, when he didn't reply, stood up and turned around.

The kitchen was dark. The whole apartment was dark. For a second or two, my eyes were dazzled by the refrigerator's light and all I could see was a great white blotch on top of a great black blotch. I blinked, and the blotches started to break apart and resolve into a more coherent picture—and I saw the figure standing behind me. Even with the refrigerator light shining on it, it was dark, but it was tall, taller than Roger. My heart jumped and so did I, back into the fridge. Its contents clattered and crashed. A blast of cold—ice cold, much colder than the fridge—blew over me. I put one hand over my mouth. For an instant—not a second, less time than that—I saw this black shape, and then my vision cleared and it was gone.

I ran straight for the bedroom. I didn't close the refrigerator door behind me, and I certainly didn't stop to turn off the TV. No, I threw myself into bed beside Roger and huddled as close to him as I could. I didn't move from that spot for the rest of the night. I didn't say anything to Roger, either, even when he complained about the fridge having been left open all night. In the morning, with sunlight pouring in through the windows, what had been absolutely real a few hours before seemed much less substantial. The dark shape I'd seen standing behind me appeared the product of too little sleep and too much Twilight Zone than it did—well, of what? A supernatural experience? A ghostly visitation?

Frightening as that momentary encounter was, I worked to put it out of my mind. Together with what I'd seen when I'd lost the baby, it didn't seem to say too much good about the state of my mental health, and that was a truly terrifying prospect. It wasn't till later, when things at Belvedere House had slid from bad to worse, that I recalled it.

 

The week following Ted's memorial service brought a call from Steven asking if he could talk to me about Roger. There had been some complaints from a few of Roger's students, and Steven wanted to speak with me to get a sense of how Roger was doing. "What complaints?" I asked him, and he told me. As I listened to him try to phrase the students' grievances in as non-confrontational a way as possible—you know Steven—I saw Roger standing in front of the church. When he asked me how Roger was managing, I said, "He hasn't seemed that bad to me—all things considered—but I think he's been keeping a lot to himself. You're probably right that most of the students just resent having to work—but the rest may be onto something."

"I see," Steven said, and his voice told you he was already dreading the prospect of confronting Roger. He said, "I have a meeting with Roger scheduled this afternoon to discuss these complaints; I'm sure we'll be able to resolve this, then. Thanks for your help."

They had their meeting, but it didn't solve anything. Roger told me about it over dinner. He was angry, the most inflamed I'd seen him since Ted's death. "Apparently, some of my students are unhappy with me," he said.

"Oh?"

"They feel I am being derelict in my responsibilities. A number of them have complained to the Chair."

"Really?"

Roger nodded. "He asked if he could speak with me this afternoon—if he could 'schedule a meeting' with me. It used to be, if the Chair wanted to talk to you, she came to your office and talked to you. 'Schedule a meeting.'"

"What'd Steven say?"

"Not much of any consequence," Roger said. "I swear, that man could be a lawyer, he parses his words so. There are students who feel I have been neglecting to give them my full attention; they claim I've been repeating myself; that I don't know what novel the class is supposed to be reading; that I have missed class."

"Well," I said, "for the sake of argument, is there anything to their accusations?"

"Nothing whatsoever," Roger said. "I grant I occasionally repeat a point made in a previous class in order to establish a connection between what I said then and what I am saying now. And, from time to time, I have devoted a certain portion of my lecture to a novel other than the one currently under consideration, but that has been solely in the interest of establishing a link between that other text and the present one. As for missing class: if I have failed to be present for one or two classes here and there, it has been because I had become absorbed in trying to settle a problem raised by the novel we were reading, and time escaped me."

"Honey," I said, "you have been under a lot of stress since Ted died."

"Which means what?" Roger asked. "That you believe these charges? You were my student. You know first hand what I am like in front of a class. Did you find me irresponsible?"

"You know how much I respect you," I said. "You know you're the best professor that department—that school has. There's no question. But you've suffered a terrible loss, and that's bound to affect you. There's nothing wrong with that."

Roger wouldn't have any of it. Although he'd admitted that all the student charges were essentially true, he couldn't see that. Steven had floated the possibility of Roger taking a few weeks off—the rest of the semester, if he wanted—which Roger had declined with his full measure of scorn. As far as he was concerned, the matter was closed; although he resented what he perceived as my questioning him. We ate dinner that night in silence, and spent the rest of the night and the next morning that way, too. Roger left for school earlier than usual—making a passive-aggressive point.

Once he was at SUNY, though, it was more of the same. The students were filing into Steven's office two and three at a time, now. One tried to approach Roger directly, at the end of class, about the two papers she'd submitted that he still hadn't returned, and he lost it. He spent ten minutes going up one side of her and down the other. He didn't mention this to me. I heard it from Steven, who called me after the student's mother, understandably furious, had called him and reamed him out for half an hour. He'd tried to locate Roger—as had the student's mother before him—but Roger was nowhere to be found. After castigating the student, he'd walked out of the building headed for parts unknown. (No doubt, he'd returned to Belvedere House.) "I'm afraid Roger's behavior is becoming a bit of a problem," Steven said. I could picture him wincing at having to be so direct.

"I don't know what to tell you," I said. "I tried talking to him about it, and it didn't go over too well. I think he knows he's in trouble; he just doesn't know what to do about it."

"Well," Steven said, "this student's mother was going to call the Dean, next. I may have talked her out of it; if not, Roger could have a lot more to deal with."
Actually, Steven hadn't talked the woman out of anything. After I hung up, the phone rang again and it was the Dean, looking for Roger. She was not happy. She said she expected Professor Croydon in her office at eight-thirty tomorrow morning. I said I'd tell him, and she hung up. When he returned home that afternoon, Roger didn't breathe a word of the day's events. I kept waiting for him to confess, to offer his take on the morning, however distorted by self-justification, but nothing—not a word. I tried to wait him out, but finally, as we were getting ready for bed, I cracked and told him the Dean was expecting him in her office first thing in the morning.

"Can't," he said. "I teach then."

"I think she's arranged for someone to cover it for you."

"Has she?" Roger's cheeks flushed.

"That's what she told me," I said. "Is there anything you want to say to me?"

"No," Roger said, and that was that. I was so angry with him. I mean, I was his wife. I was the one he was supposed to talk to about things like this. But no—ever since I'd suggested his students might have a point, I'd become a member of the opposition. Fine. If this was the way he wanted things, this was the way things would be. Let the Dean try talking to him.

She did, but not in her office. Roger didn't keep their appointment. He went to his class and ordered the adjunct Steven had found to cover it out. It didn't take long for the Dean to learn what he'd done. She was waiting for him outside the room at the end of class. I don't know what Frances said to him, but you can bet she didn't pull any punches. Roger wasn't cowed. Things turned ugly pretty much immediately.

The call from the President's office took longer than I expected. One of the adjuncts I was friendly with sent me an e-mail about Roger and the Dean. I read it while I was still at Penrose, and was positive I'd find a message from someone higher-up in the Administration waiting for me on the answering machine when I got home. There wasn't, which made me nervous. I knew the Dean well enough to be sure there was no way she was going to let Roger's behavior to his student—and to her—go unpunished. Roger might have a bookshelf full of books and articles, but that only buys you so much. Needless to say, Roger didn't tell me anything about his confrontation with the Dean. I didn't tell him about the e-mail I'd received. We sat watching The News Hour, filling the time before bed with idle chatter. What a pair, right?

His behavior was more and more a mystery. I knew he was motivated by pride—Roger ranked his teaching equal with his scholarship, and to come right out and say that he was falling down on the job was an affront to decades of accomplishment. I knew that fear was driving him, too. He'd already had so much taken away from him, starting with his parents and continuing through Ted. The prospect of his career joining his list of losses must have been terrifying. I could understand how the combination of ego and anxiety would cause him to reject Steven's approach. I could even understand how it would cause him to reject mine. I didn't like it, but I understood it. What I couldn't understand was what he thought he was doing with the Dean. Roger was very conscious of position, which grew out of his sense of his own in the department and on campus. Whatever he thought of the Administration and its representatives in private, in public he always did his best to stay on good terms with them. For him to ignore a meeting with the Dean, and then to argue with her in public—especially someone as full of herself as Frances—it went against everything he'd done previously. It was a deliberate slap in the face, an invitation to disaster.

In retrospect, I think that's exactly what he was doing. Here was Roger's fatalism in action. He knew that things were bad. How much he knew, how bad he thought they were, isn't important. What is is that he recognized their badness, and decided that there was nothing he could do about it. He was on a downward spiral. Everything he'd struggled against for the whole of his adult life—all the world's evil—had finally caught up with him. There was no fighting it. His only option was to see it through to the bitter end. He was smart enough to recognize the self-fulfilling-prophecy aspect of what he was doing, but it was another case of Roger not seeing what he didn't want to.

Do I have to add that, underneath it all, he was punishing himself for Ted?

All of which makes it that much more remarkable that the President was able to talk Roger into taking a leave of absence before things got any worse. She waited out the weekend to contact Roger. At the end of his office hours on Monday, she called him herself and asked him if he'd mind joining her for lunch. He agreed. He must have taken this as the moment he'd been waiting for, the end of the line, the walk up to the guillotine. Having the President of the college fire him would have satisfied his pride; that it would be done over lunch would have soothed his anxiety.

I don't know what Carley said to him up there on the tenth floor. Roger wouldn't tell me. He was waiting for me when I opened the door that afternoon, with a big bouquet of mixed flowers already in a vase on the kitchen table. He took me in his arms, kissed me like he hadn't in weeks, and said, "I had a talk with the President today." Immediately, I tensed. I'd wondered how being fired would affect Roger's pension, if we'd have to rely on my meager paycheck. He felt me stiffen. He said, "It's all right, everything is all right. I've decided to take a leave of absence, effective immediately."

"You have?"

"Yes."

"What happened?" I wasn't a hundred percent sure this wasn't a strange joke, or a set-up for something else, a kind of loyalty test.

"Suffice it to say, I saw the error of my ways."

"Really?"

"Really. Now," he said, "in celebration of my decision—and the newfound freedom attendant upon it—I am taking you to dinner."

There were thirty essays weighting my bag, not to mention four chapters of The House of the Seven Gables I'd assigned my class that I should at least look over. I left the bag at the door and we finally had our dinner at the Canal House. What a night. I don't know if you've been to the Canal House—it's right on Main Street in Cooper Falls. It costs an arm and a leg and another arm and leg besides. But it's worth it. Roger and I both ordered seven course meals, and they were amazing. And it was all served in this old house. We were in one of the upstairs rooms, at a table next to a window. The room had a fireplace, crackling away. Faintly, you could hear other people in other rooms, voices murmuring, silverware clinking on plates, chairs scraping the floor. Roger—Roger was suddenly his old self again. It was as if he'd been carrying a tremendous weight—a sack full of boulders—for the last two months, and he'd put it down at last. He joked with the waitress, the server who brought us our courses, the wine steward. We talked like we'd used to, trading thoughts and arguing—gently—about books we were reading and teaching. I could feel myself relaxing, so much I realized I hadn't been aware how tense I had become. Roger tipped generously, and after dinner was done—concluded: you don't just finish that kind of meal, you bring it to a conclusion—we walked up Main Street to the falls. Standing looking at all that water foaming white in the moonlight, I could believe that the worst was over, that we'd come near the precipice but saved ourselves from going over it. That night—well, suffice it to say, the night ended well, too.

 

There was about a month after that that was almost the honeymoon we'd never taken. We ate out a lot, took day trips, even went away to Martha's Vineyard for a long weekend. I walked around in a daze. My students' grades improved as I read their essays through my new, rose-colored glasses. I gave out more A's that semester than I ever had. Roger was better. He was still sad over Ted's death, but it was a calmer sadness. One night, we talked over maybe trying to have another child. Neither one of us was ready, yet, but at least we could discuss it. That month—it was like a pause, you know? Even then, I felt that way, that this was only an interlude. "As of this moment, I am no longer your father; you are no longer my son": the curse was never as far from me as I would have liked, or the image of those faces hissing in their doorways. I assumed we'd settle into a more normal routine. When I remember that time, those four weeks, I wonder if there was something I could have done. Maybe I should've suggested we go away for a while, spend the next six months or a year driving cross-country—or go to Europe. Roger had lots of friends in London. We could have rented a flat and he could have shown me all the Dickens sites. I could have looked up the places Hawthorne visited when he was in London. Someplace—something that would have taken us—him—away from Huguenot, from that house.

I think that, then I think, No, there was nothing I could have done. Roger—we—had been granted a reprieve, but it was temporary. Here I am calling him the fatalist, right? I don't know. After the fact, it's hard to believe that things could have turned out any other way than they did. Roger was who he was. It's like—one semester, I took Old English, to fulfill the development of English requirement for the Master's. I wrote my final paper on Beowulf—because let's face it, when you're studying Anglo-Saxon, there's not a whole lot else to write on. Anyway, I became really interested in the word "weird." Its roots are in the Anglo-Saxon "wyrd," which most translators render as "fate," and which isn't completely accurate. I did all this research, cracked open old dictionaries you had to blow the dust off, and I discovered that what "wyrd" actually means is something like "the way things had to be because that's the way they are." It's kind of hard to wrap your mind around, at first. If things hadn't been meant to be the way they are, then they would have been different. Since they are the way they are, that must be the way they were intended to be. Talk about circular logic, I know. But I think they were on to something, on to how, when you look back over your life, the events in it can seem oddly inevitable, as if there really are Fates. I know Aristotle said character is fate, but that amounts to pretty much the same thing, doesn't it? Who can escape who they are?

During that month we had, Roger slept better than he had since hearing that Ted had died. Even on the nights he was awake late, he was calmer. He'd sit up in bed beside me, reading. No more late night walks; instead, Roger took up jogging. His doctors had been telling him he needed to start exercising on a regular basis, and he decided this was the time to follow their advice. Every morning at five, Roger set out on a run that took him from the apartment, up to campus, and back again. By the time he returned, I'd have dragged myself out of bed and started the coffee, and we'd sit at the kitchen table and have breakfast together.

Sometimes, Roger varied the route he took to or from the college. Once he'd crossed the bridge over the Svartkill, he'd turn right on Water Street and push up the steep hill, there. Or he'd turn left, onto Founders, loop around to 32, and follow that into town. At first, he did so for the sake of variety, to look at some different scenery. He took other routes, too. Over breakfast, I'd ask him where he'd gone and he'd narrate his run: past Pete's Corner Pub, only recently emptied from the previous night, its doors open to air the place out; past the bus station, full of early morning commuters to the City; or past the quiet neighborhoods around the college, nodding at the occasional fellow-jogger. If he was feeling especially ambitious, he kept going past SUNY to Dunkin' Donuts.

The bad thing about his runs was that they left Roger alone with his thoughts. As far as I'm concerned, the great thing about exercise is the excuse it gives you to hamster-out, leave your brain behind as you make your wheel go round and round. Roger couldn't do that. Some mornings, he'd spend breakfast telling me about an idea he'd had for an article. Others, he'd talk politics. His opinion of the President had never really changed. He was one of the only people I knew who cut Bush no post-9/11 slack. A lot of conversation focused on the War on Terror, especially Afghanistan. "This administration has no understanding of anything," he said. "They think of a place like Afghanistan as the setting for a Rambo movie. Do they understand that the West has been involved in that country since Dickens's day? Oh yes, the first war between a Western power and the Afghans was started in 1838, by the British. It dragged on for four years. I looked into it because I thought I might write an article about its effects on Dickens's novels of the time. The British were concerned about Russian influence on the country that bordered their Indian holdings, so they invaded and tried to replace the emir of Afghanistan with a puppet. It did not work; they suffered heavy losses and, in the end, negotiated with the same man whose ouster had been the aim of their incursion." He shook his head. "Nor is the subsequent history of Western involvement any more cause for optimism. Ask the Soviets. But Bush and his cronies think that their laser-guided bombs and unmanned surveillance drones will make things different for us. They won't. Eventually, these kinds of things come down to negotiation, to people talking to other people. Given this crew's communication skills, such does not bode well."

I wasn't sure how to respond. I mean, 9/11 had felt like the beginning of a war to me. What else were we supposed to have done?

The first time Roger told me he'd run along Founders, past Belvedere House, I looked up from my bagel. Since Ted's memorial service, we hadn't returned to Founders. I thought his sight of the house that morning was the first he'd seen it in months. I was expecting—well, I wasn't expecting anything—I was just surprised, and a little concerned about the effect encountering the place might have on him. I asked, "How was it?"

"How was what?"

"The house," I said, "seeing it again."

He hesitated, running the tape of the morning's run in his head. He said, "It was fine."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes," he said, turning to me. "Belvedere House will always stir memories in me, darling; how could it not? I lived the majority of my life under its roof. It is my house of memories, you might say. Some of them are pleasant; more, I fear, are not. But you needn't worry about my past overwhelming me. I can stand my own history." He smiled, and I smiled, too, because that was what I'd been worried about.

(I tried not to remember that huge vacant space, those faces. I almost succeeded, too.)

 

I'm not sure exactly when Roger began to vary the course of his run less. It must have been a week, maybe two, after the end of that good month. A couple of days in a row, when I asked him which way he'd taken today, he said, "Oh, the usual." I assumed that meant he'd headed straight up Main Street to the traffic light at Manheim and turned right there. I'm sure he knew I would think this way. Why he didn't want to tell me he was running past his former house on his way into and out of town—when I finally figured it out and asked him about it, Roger claimed he hadn't thought it worth mentioning. "You didn't think I'd want to know that you were running past the place you used to live with your ex-wife and dead son, twice a day, seven days a week?" I said. "Especially when there are plenty of other routes you could have been taking? You didn't find your own behavior in any way unusual?"

"Not in the slightest," Roger said. He was lying, of course, but by that point things had gone so far down the road to ruin that to hear he'd lied to me a couple of months before—or misled me, whatever—to hear that was of academic interest, at best, the kind of information you'd want to hold onto for later, after the train wreck you were part of was over and you were trying to understand what had gone wrong. Like now.

So there was Roger, in his sweats and sneakers and the sweatband I told him he didn't need but that fit his picture of a jogger, his feet pounding the pavement, the house where his relationship with his son had grown, blossomed, faded, and died looming to his right. Belvedere House with its stone first storey and wooden second, third, and attic storeys, its host of windows, its double front doors, its broad lawn dotted with the occasional tree. It sat there and drew his attention to it irresistibly, his own personal black hole, bending all his thoughts in its direction. Every window was a movie screen playing a different scene from his thirty-three years there. Do I have to say all of them were of him and Ted? On his and Joanne's bedroom window—the one that looked out on Frenchman's Mountain—he watched himself walk back and forth across the bedroom, singing Victorian lullabies to the infant Ted to soothe him back to sleep. On the kitchen window, which faced the south lawn, he saw himself sitting down beside a ten-year-old Ted at the kitchen table to explain why the Huguenots had fled France. On the basement windows, he looked at himself and Ted trying to build a basic solar panel for Ted's eighth grade science project. Other windows showed him and Ted throwing the ubiquitous baseball, after all these years, his hand still remembered the slap of the ball as it smacked into his glove, his arm, the pleasant ache of throwing fastball after fastball, his eyes, squinting against the morning sunlight. Then Roger was past the house, on his way to Route 32 and the college. The memories trailed along with him for a while, dissipating the further he went.

When Roger started going out for walks again, he presented it to me as an extension of his exercising. Once he was back from his run and breakfasted, he'd shower, shave, and sit down either to read or write. He was rereading Bleak House for the I-don't-know-how-many-eth time. While out on his runs, he said, he'd been struck by an idea for a new article on The Ghost's Walk in that novel. Roger worked straight through to the early afternoon—one or two—when he broke for lunch and a walk. "I need to unwind myself," was how he explained it, "mind and body." Of course I remembered those nights he'd spent out after Ted's death—but this was different. For one thing, it was during the day; for another, after having sat in front of the computer for five or six hours, it was no surprise that Roger would want to stretch his legs, have a change of scene. Most afternoons, I wasn't even home. If I wasn't teaching at Penrose, I was in their library, doing research for an article on Hawthorne, Dickinson, and Puritan guilt. "An afternoon stroll will complement my morning run," Roger said, which he meant one way and I took another.

His walks led him all over the place, but there weren't many that didn't include the house. Moving at a slower pace, Roger could linger over the memories he'd revisited that morning. He could recall Ted's weight in his arms, the smell of talcum powder, the floorboards creaking as he paced them. He could see Ted's fifth grade social studies textbook open on the kitchen table, a portrait of Cardinal Richelieu on the lower right hand corner of the right hand page, and he could smell the sweet Juicy Fruit gum Ted was chewing loudly, a sure sign Joanne had bored him. He could remember standing beside Ted at the cluttered basement workbench while Ted sawed the end off a piece of plywood, the saw dropping a steady stream of almost-fragrant sawdust as it rasped back and forth. Near the house and its memories, Ted didn't seem so far off, so irretrievably lost.

 

What surprises me most about Roger's decision to move back into Belvedere House is that it took him so long to come to it. The idea occurred to him early on—his third run past the house, it flickered across his mind. With each new encounter—especially after his memories started playing out on it again—returning to the house appeared less ridiculous, less masochistic, and more attractive. He couldn't imagine Joanne truly wanted to hold onto it. She had always been one of those people who doesn't like to dwell on what was. Roger had sufficient funds to purchase her share of Belvedere House if she would be willing to part with it. He'd lost some money when the dot com bubble burst, but he'd recovered it in relatively short order and made more on top of that. ("The benefits of a Republican financial advisor," he said.) He was sure he'd be able to convince Joanne to sell. It seemed increasingly important—urgent, even—that he take possession of the place again. He called his lawyer and instructed him to contact Joanne's lawyer and start talking.

I was caught completely off-guard—shocked, really. We were lying in bed one Saturday afternoon and Roger said, "I've got something to tell you."

"What is it?" I asked. I thought he was going to say that he wanted to order-out for pizza, which he'd been trying to cut back on for his cholesterol.

Instead, he said, "We're moving."

I thought he was joking. I said, "Okay, we're moving. Where are we moving to? I vote for Hawaii."

"Belvedere House."

"Right. As if Joanne would ever sell her share to you."

"She already has," he said.

"What?" I sat up.

He was serious. "I had my lawyer contact hers about buying her out. She was amenable. The lawyers negotiated a price. I mailed a check to her three days ago. Yesterday, Dr. Sullivan received her one month's notice."

That was it. The whole thing was a fait accompli. I was not happy. I said, "What makes you think I want to move?"

"Oh please, Veronica," Roger said. "How often have you complained about our lack of space? This apartment was too small for you on your own. With two of us sharing it, it's positively cramped."

The apartment was too small. When I'd moved in, I hadn't cared. Actually, its size had been one of its charms. Living room, kitchen, bedroom, and bathroom: I was like Emily Dickinson with my tiny, ordered place. I'd had to be inventive, make maximum use of the space I had, but I could look out my living room window onto a garden—Tom and Jack, the landlords, kept this enormous flower garden in the backyard—and beyond the garden was the river, with farmland on the other shore. There is something to be said for living somewhere nice; the aesthetics of place are underrated. After Roger moved in, though, what had been too little room to begin with shrank to the point of no return. He put most of his stuff in storage, but even so, every square inch of the apartment was piled high with books, CDs, and videotapes, not to mention Roger's clothes, which had a habit of displacing mine onto the bed and couch. If we'd had our baby, there would have been no way we could've stayed there.

All the same, who wants to move into the house your husband lived most of his last marriage in? That was the first thing I thought of, not Ted, but Joanne. Roger intended to take me to her house. Hers, because she'd decorated it. She'd picked the furniture, the wallpaper, the drapes, the color scheme, everything. Living there, I'd be surrounded by a hundred little reminders of her and her starched personality. I was more insecure than I should have been, I know. It's—you can stand the thought that the person you're with now was with someone before you, as long as you don't have to confront that fact daily. I said, "Okay, fair enough. The apartment is too small. Why there? Why couldn't we move someplace else?"

"Because," Roger said, "for the amount I paid Joanne, we couldn't get one-half the house."

He made it all sound so reasonable, which is why, although I debated the matter with him for the rest of the day and well into the night, in the end, I agreed. I can't lie: the prospect of having all that room was very attractive. I mean, the house had its own library, for God's sake. If Roger wanted this as badly as he did, then I figured he'd be willing to let me redecorate, which he was. Late that night, I said yes. Roger was delighted, as happy as I'd seen him. We made love, went to sleep, and, the next morning, started packing.

That afternoon—I was emptying one of the bookshelves into the last cardboard box I'd had stored under my bed. Roger had gone out to the liquor store in Joppenburgh for more. I lowered a stack of books into the box—they were all Theory, Kristeva's Powers of Horror on top. Very funny. I stood up, and the air was full of the smell of blood. Thick, copper—it was so strong I gagged. I coughed, went to turn on the fan, and I was walking across an open space towards an enormous face framed by a doorway with a cracked lintel. To either side of it were equally huge faces in their own doorways. The face opened its mouth, and its tongue, pink and wet, uncoiled down its chin and slapped onto the floor. The tongue wriggled and flopped like a fish out of water. I took a step back, through air full of Roger's words, fluttering around me like moths: "disown" and "blood" and "failure" and "anything." The oversized tongue squirmed on the floor. I took another step back. This is not happening, I said to myself. I said it out loud: "This is not happening." Blood reeked in my mouth. I shouted, "This is not happening!"

I was alone in my living room. For a second, the blood smell hung around me, then that was gone, as well. I sat down and did not raise myself up until Roger was opening the door, a stack of flattened boxes cradled in his arms. "Sitting down on the job?" he said.

"Just taking a break."

I know, I know: Why didn't I say anything? What was I supposed to say? I had a recurrence of a hallucination I had when I miscarried? Because that was what I was sure had happened. That it might have been anything more was ridiculous. If it hadn't come from what were obviously the troubled depths of my psyche, then why had it stopped when I'd told it to? (Never mind that I'd had to repeat myself.) With the prospect of taking up residence in the very house that had figured in my fantasy to begin with, wasn't it only natural for that fantasy to offer a repeat performance? Wouldn't it have been more strange if the day had passed without me seeing anything?

I realize how lame this sounds—I think I did then, too. You wouldn't guess—you'd assume that, if even one of the incidents I've described happened to you, you'd be at the psychiatrist's pronto. Maybe some people would be. It's—once everything's over and done, and you're sitting turning events over in your mind, doubt wastes no time in letting itself be heard. Was that really as bad as you're making it out to be? Aren't you being just a little bit melodramatic? You don't count on the inertia of your personality. That, and the more time passes, the more absurd the whole thing seems. You feel embarrassed, even ashamed.

All of which is to say that, I returned to packing books, and if the specter of that coppery stench haunted my nostrils, I opened a window.

Dr. Sullivan and her family moved within the week. Having thrown them out, Roger tried to make it up by returning their entire security deposit. He couldn't understand why they were so cold to him when he went around to hand them the check. "They have their own house, now," he said.

As did we. I remember my first walk through it. This was—it must have been two days after Dr. Sullivan had left. Roger had been over that same afternoon, and all of the next day, besides, and he'd been urging me to come with him. I had a small mountain of papers to grade. I was teaching a couple of summer courses the first summer session at Huguenot, and I was on a tight schedule. I sat at the kitchen table reading essays on "The Fall of the House of Usher" while Roger came and went and came back again, taking box after box of books with him. I was a little worried he would overexert himself. I got through my essays as quickly as I could, and when I'd entered the last grade in my grade book, I stood, stretched, and went out to see my new house.

You might expect that, on the drive over, I'd have yet another flashback to the hollow house of my vision, hear Roger's curse one more time. At the very least, you'd assume I'd be nervous. None of which would be right. I suppose it was because I hadn't really connected the house of my vision with the actual brick-and-mortar structure. As I turned from Springgrown onto Main, what I was remembering was the first time Roger and I had made love in the house. It had been our third day together. That afternoon, I'd met him after his two o'clock Victorian Lit class; by the time we were back at his office, I was ready to do it with him on his desk. No, he said, not here. (That was for later.) Instead, we drove down to the house. We'd barely closed the front door, and half our clothes were off. Roger led me upstairs, to the bedroom—but there was no way I was going to do anything with him on Joanne's bed. Talk about your complete turn-offs. I led him up one more floor, to his office, and the pull-out couch; although we didn't manage to unfold it. I was so—so ready, so turned on. It was like when you're first starting to explore sex, to experiment, and you feel drunk on it. He—we fit together perfectly, better than anyone else I'd been with. I was floating on the pleasure, riding the waves. As I climaxed, I threw my head back and looked out the window, at the sky blue and pale and perfect, and I had never seen anything so beautiful.

I pulled up into the driveway, parked behind Roger's car, and walked up to the front door. Roger was waiting for me. He bowed, sweeping his hand to one side, and I entered the house.

It was big. I hadn't appreciated how many rooms there were, how much the house contained. As I went from the front landing to the front parlor, from the front parlor to the dining room, from the dining room to the kitchen—Roger gushing away beside me like the world's worst tour guide—I was intensely aware of the space around me. I could almost feel it, this slight tickling at the ends of my nerves. I had expected to notice all of Joanne's touches, which I did, but I hadn't been prepared for the way the house itself would feel. I'd never been in a house where I was so conscious of the architecture, of the structure surrounding me above and below and to either side. This wasn't my first time in Belvedere House, but it was the first time I'd been—sensitive to it like this. The roof of my mouth tingled. I kept licking my lips, as if I could almost taste something. I didn't mention any of this to Roger. What would I have said? "Boy, this house feels weird"? He would have chalked it up to my knowing it was our house, now, no doubt backed up by some quotation or another from Freud—and who could have argued with him?

That sensation of the house at the tips of my nerves persisted. It moderated a bit in the days that followed, as we transferred the majority of the apartment's contents, leaving the bed and a few changes of clothes. Roger did the lion's share of the work while I was in class, traveling back and forth to the house. When I was done for the day, I'd help for an hour or two. The apartment was more overstuffed than I'd realized. We didn't unpack immediately. The entire house had to be repainted—Roger had hired a couple of graduate students to help him—then there were new carpets and furniture to be delivered. It was a heady experience, standing in the front parlor and saying that we should cart off the fraying Oriental rug in the middle of the floor and replace it with a room-sized carpet in light blue. And those paintings looked dated and dull. Suppose we hung mirrors, instead? The furniture's too dark, too much dark wood—what about something lighter? Joanne's taste was so conservative and timid, it was almost a parody of itself. I wanted to shake things up, make the house lighter, friendlier, hipper. Roger accompanied me as I went from room to room, filling a legal pad with notes that would be turned into reality within weeks. We made a couple of big day trips to IKEA, a lot more little trips to Home Depot, and ordered all kinds of things online. Redecorating a house that size—reconceiving it—was more work than I'd anticipated. I used a lot of mirrors—as if the rooms weren't big enough already—and tended towards the simpler.

That was the first time the change in my own financial situation—the difference marrying Roger had made—really came clear to me. I hadn't considered myself poor. I was. I bought all my clothes second-hand and had barely enough money to cover my bills and keep food in the fridge. Going out to the diner was an extravagance I saved for major occasions. But so what? I was a graduate student. I was supposed to be penniless. After Roger and I got together, I hadn't noticed that much of a change. I mean, we split the bills, which was nice, and we could afford to eat out at the better restaurants, or go to the movies whenever we wanted—also nice—but, all things considered, we lived a relatively plain life together. Maybe that would've changed if we'd had the baby. We would have had to move, no doubt about it, not to mention had to buy a ton of stuff. Now, being able to say, "A nice dining room set here," or, "A love seat and an easy chair there," and have Roger say, "Yes, of course," and have the things I'd called for appear—it was a pretty heady experience. I didn't exactly think of myself as rich, but I did understand I was sitting on a lot more money than I'd appreciated.

For what seemed like the longest time, the house was in a state of transition, rooms full of stacks of unopened boxes, furniture coming and going standing in the halls, drop cloths and cans of paint migrating from room to room, floor to floor. We slept at the apartment, on the bed we'd take apart and move when we were ready to leave the apartment behind. We could have bought a new bed—maybe we should have, in keeping with the spirit of new beginnings—but a lot had happened in that bed. I had bought it when I moved into the apartment. It was a queen-sized, really too big for the bedroom, but it was like a symbol of freedom, you know? Roger and I had slept in it when he came to stay with me. We'd made our child there. By taking it with us—talk about symbols. I thought it would be a way of showing that our life together was continuing in this new place. It was like transplanting your favorite rose bush.

Then, almost overnight, the house was no longer in-between. There were still cabinets to be put up and filled, a recliner and big-screen TV that were on back-order, but the house had passed the point of no return. Instead of looking like a bunch of rowdy kids had run wild through it, doing their best to ruin Joanne's carefully wrought effects, the house had become something else. All the choices I'd made cohered, and Belvedere House was no longer the epitome of old money trying to remind you of itself—discreetly, of course—now the house was the kind of place you could feel comfortable in, relax in. There was still a contrast between its exterior and interior, which startled more than one person who visited us and which I wasn't sure how to soften—or if I wanted to—but I didn't lose too much time worrying about it.

The real contrast—the one that forced itself on me—was between the way the house's interior looked and the way it felt—still felt. My awareness of it, that sense of it just beyond the edges of my nerves, so that when Roger ran his hand along a wall, my skin would prickle, continued. I would stand in the second floor hallway, its newly exposed hardwood floors catching the morning light and sharing it with the cream walls, and I could taste the way the sun felt on the wood, the plaster. One afternoon, there was a brief thunderstorm that pounded the house, and I could feel the rain thrumming on the roof, the walls, like the world's biggest shower set on high. All of which was weird, but not entirely unpleasant. What wasn't so nice was the sensation that there was more to the house than I was seeing.

At all sorts of places throughout the house I would stop, sure that I'd passed a door I hadn't remembered, and when I'd turn around, there would be no door. Even so, I would be half sure one was there—or had been a moment ago. I made a real effort to stay on top of the cleaning—Roger wanted to hire somebody to do it, but I was still enough of a socialist to find such an idea abhorrent—and I can't tell you how many times I was sure I'd washed more windows than the kitchen or the living room had. I tried to keep count, but I always seemed to lose track about halfway through. It was strange, but not so much I felt I had to tell Roger. Or maybe I should say, not so strange I didn't think he'd have an answer for it I could already guess myself.

 

There was one room in the house Roger refused to let me touch, and—you guessed it—that was Ted's. Not the third-floor room he'd moved into when he became a teenager—oh no, Roger was only too happy to have me turn that into a combination study-guest room. The room he insisted must be left alone was the one Ted had lived in as a child. I can't say I didn't understand—after all, I was bringing my bed with me—but in the expression on Roger's face when I suggested that Ted's room would make a nice place for the stationary bike he said he wanted to buy, I had my first real inkling of the reason behind Roger's desire to return to Belvedere House. A couple of weeks later, when Roger walked into the living room and handed me a box of photos of Ted, all of them from his time in the Army, and said he wondered if there might be a place for these, I remembered how his eyes had narrowed, his mouth tightened, at my idea for changing—disturbing, I'm sure he would have said—Ted's childhood room.

I spent a while staring at those more recent photos of Ted after Roger wandered back up to his office. There were formal portraits, head and chest shots of Ted in his dress uniform staring intently into the camera, the flag draped behind him. I'm sure I must have passed them—or ones very much like them—during previous visits to the house. If so, I hadn't noticed them, and Roger hadn't ever pointed them out to me. The only picture of Ted he kept and seemed to care for was the one of him in his little league uniform that looked down from a bookcase in the office at school. He had a couple of frayed and faded baby pictures tucked away in his wallet, but that was, so far as I knew, the extent of his photographs of his son. When he'd moved in with me, he hadn't brought any pictures of Ted with him—he hadn't moved any more into his office, either. All of these photographs—there were a couple dozen. Four of the formal portraits, Ted at various stages in his career, each one framed; and eighteen or twenty smaller pictures, casual shots of Ted and his friends, of him training, of him next to Hummers and helicopters, each one of these framed, as well. Roger had wrapped every photo in a plastic bag that he'd carefully taped shut, then placed them in a heavy cardboard box he'd taped tightly closed. He had sliced the box open with an X-ACTO knife before bringing it to me, but he'd left the individual pictures in their plastic envelopes. I unsealed them carefully, picking at a piece of tape until I'd loosened one edge, then sliding my thumb underneath and gently easing the rest of it off. Once I'd parted all the tape, I unfolded the plastic bag and slid the photo from it. It took me an hour and a half to unwrap the box. If I hadn't felt the need to be so elaborately careful, I could have had the pictures out in five minutes, but it was like I was an archaeologist, uncovering my husband's ancient memories, and the situation demanded a certain formality.

When I had the last photo out, I spread them all on the living room floor. Here was Ted's adult life in shorthand. That portrait in the upper-left-hand corner must have been taken not too long after he'd enlisted. That was definitely the face of an eighteen-year-old, skin in the last phases of its battle with acne, mouth struggling to appear serious, eyes wide, as if they couldn't believe Ted was actually in the Army, for God's sake. The uniform—it fit him all right, but at the same time looked too big, you know? By the time you reached the second portrait—across the floor in the upper-right-hand corner—the uniform was a better fit. The skin was clearer, the mouth more secure, and the eyes said yes, Ted was in the Army. Ted's face hadn't yet thrown off the last traces of his adolescence. It was long and thin and waiting to fill out, which it started to do in the third portrait, on the lower-left-hand corner. Probably the most dramatic difference between any two of the pictures was between the second and third. In the second, he's still a kid. You could be polite about it and call him a young man, but it's clear that, whatever combination of factors it is that makes you an adult, it hasn't happened to Ted. In the third portrait, he's grown up. His skin has left its acne far behind and is tanned. His mouth has gained enough confidence to relax. His eyes are—reserved, the lids lowered just a little, as if keeping something back. Maybe joining Special Forces had made the change in him, or maybe it had been his first serious relationship. Gene Ortiz told me that Ted had had a long and tortured affair with a woman who worked in town. She was a teacher, I think. She was also married. Can you believe it? Maybe that's why he was so mad at Roger.

By the time you arrived at the last portrait of Ted, in the lower-right-hand corner, you were looking at the man who had stood outside the apartment at three in the morning, yelling at his father. Of course, his face was calm here. Lines had cut themselves into his skin, at the corners of his eyes and mouth, hints of aging, and across the bridge of his nose, a hint of something more violent. The scar was the souvenir of a knife fight, Gene said. "A knife fight?" I said, but he claimed that was all he could tell me.

In amongst the four portraits, I placed the twenty or so smaller pictures of Ted, doing my best to arrange them chronologically. Judging from the photographic record, Ted had had a lot of friends. More than half the shots were of Ted with groups of smiling or laughing soldiers. There was also a picture of Ted lying on his bunk, reading. Bleak House. Who'd have thought? I picked that picture up, turned it over, and slid open the back of the frame. There was writing on the picture's other side, a broad scrawl. "This Dickens guy is all right," Ted had written, "although I'll probably retire before I get done with this." I closed the frame, returned that photo to its place in the sequence, and selected another. All the pictures sported brief comments from Ted, even the portraits. If I'd felt like an archaeologist staring at a wall of hieroglyphs, I'd suddenly been handed a Rosetta stone. A couple of dozen sentences hardly constituted an autobiography, but they were something.

There was one picture in particular that caught my attention, and that was because it was so different from all the others. It wasn't framed, just tucked inside an envelope whose postmark was Fort Bragg; the date was this past March, right after Ted had been killed. The photo showed Ted not in his uniform—in fact, I didn't recognize it was Ted—the only reason I thought it might be was because it was in with all these other pictures of him. The man I saw had a heavy, dark beard and was wearing a turban, a heavy brown coat, loose tan pants, and high boots. He was sitting cross-legged, a machine gun on the ground in front of him. The landscape around him was bare, arid. He was reading; I squinted and saw that it was the same copy of Bleak House Ted had been holding open on his bunk; although the book looked as if it had traveled quite a bit since then. I turned the photo over, and read, "Even here, I can't escape this guy." I assumed "here" was somewhere in Afghanistan. I meant to ask Roger about the picture, what Ted was doing dressed up like an Afghan, but it slipped my mind.

I contemplated hanging all the photos together, maybe arranging the portraits in a row on top and setting the smaller shots beneath them. In the end, I decided to spread them throughout the house. I thought of it as a way of incorporating Ted's memory into our daily lives, of welcoming him home, so to speak. I hoped that they might relieve my hyper-awareness of the house, of its unseen dimensions. Roger didn't say anything to me about my decision, but I saw him every now and again, stopped in front of a wall, noticing the photo I'd hung there. Why shouldn't Ted be part of our new home?

 

I wish I could say that our move into Belvedere House was good for Roger. But, right from the start, being surrounded by that house took its toll on him. He did his best to appear happy, which I think he was, but it was a strained happiness. He wore a smile like a soldier wears a uniform, because it's required. If you tried to call him on it, he'd deny he was anything other than perfectly content. From time to time, though, you'd catch a glimpse of him underneath the mask, itching to tear it off and let himself breathe. Returning here had been his idea, and he felt he had to put a brave face on it.

About a week after we'd finished moving in, we were sitting together in the living room, reading. I was on the couch, Roger was enjoying the recliner that had finally arrived the day before. The stereo was on low, Miles Davis's Kind of Blue. It wasn't late—ten-thirty at the most—but it felt like the middle of the night. You know how that is sometimes. You were up early; you had a busy day; it's a quiet night; and time seems to stretch out, to elasticate like taffy. You read for what you're sure must be hours, and the clock hands advance fifteen minutes. You have to leave the TV off. Switch it on, and the effect is ruined.

Anyway, there I was on the couch, reading this novel, Bliss, that one of my students had recommended to me, and little by little I became aware of the house around me. I was never unaware of it, but most of the time, it was a background sensation, like the sound of cars passing by on the street—you hear them, but they don't really register. This night—it was as though an enormous vehicle were moving slowly down the road, shaking the house, vibrating the air with its passing—something so big and loud it forces itself to your attention. There was that familiar feeling of space, but amplified, as if the rooms were fuller, held more within themselves. The house seemed deeper. From my spot on the living room couch, I could feel the house going off in all directions. Cold—suddenly, the mercury was in freefall. I was wearing a t-shirt and sweatpants, and all at once, freezing cold was pouring over me. My breath appeared in a white cloud. The cold was streaming out of the mirrors, the walls, the windows—I could almost see it eddying around the room. Along with the drop in temperature came a smell, a charcoal odor of meat left on the grill way too long, blood boiled away, fat melted, flesh carbonized. The air filled with tiny flakes, like snow, only black. Around me, the house drifted, as if I were on a cruise ship that had gone rudderless, something massive floating freely, rising and falling with the swell of the ocean. I was sure that, if I looked out the windows, I'd see the landscape drifting by. Charcoal flakes swirled about me, riding the cold. I—once, when I was a senior in high school and in my pot-smoking phase, someone gave me a bag of bad weed. I don't know what was wrong with it, but the way it made me feel—completely disoriented, as if there were something wrong with everything around me, something I could be aware of but not put my finger on—that, and dizzy to the point of nausea—that's the closest comparison I can come up with for this experience.

This was insane. I stood up, caught myself from falling over, and said, "What the hell is going on?"

Roger's face was white as the proverbial sheet, whiter, even. He had dropped his book and was gripping the arms of the recliner as if he were an astronaut and it the rocket rushing him into orbit. His eyes were focused on a scene whose reflection on his face—it was the look of someone seeing something at the limit of his ability to process. I said, "Roger!" Nothing. Pushing through the cold, I half-staggered over to him. I shoved his shoulder. "Roger!" He started, his eyes fluttering. He opened his mouth. I said, "Roger."

The air was clear. The black flakes had melted out of it, the charred stench dissipated. It was still cold, but the cold no longer was streaming into the room.

"I'm fine," Roger said, his voice's shakiness betraying him.

"Don't lie to me," I said, "you're not fine, and neither am I. What the hell just happened?"

"What do you mean?" he asked.

"Just now—I saw—I smelled—I felt like—like I don't know what—like the house was moving in all sorts of strange ways. It looked like you were—like something was happening to you, too."

I could see him trying to decide what to say, even as he was processing my words. He settled on, "Why, I was only having a little nap with my eyes open. That's all."

"Then why were your hands clutching this chair like you were afraid it was going to throw you off?"

His cheeks flushed, and I knew I was right. I added, "What was it? Some kind of mini-stroke?" which was completely unfair. Roger was very worried about the possibility of something happening to his mind as he grew older, stroke, Alzheimer's, senility. To suggest that his worst fear might have come true was hitting below the belt. I didn't care. I was frightened and I was annoyed. He was lying to me, trying to hide something, the way he'd been keeping things from me this past semester, to the point of ruin. If I stepped on his toes now, I wasn't inclined to feel too badly about doing so.

The mini-stroke remark did the trick. The flush on his cheeks went from embarrassment to anger, and he snapped, "No, I did not suffer a TIA, although I'm happy to note it's the first explanation that occurred to you."

"So tell me what happened," I said. "Look—we were both just in the middle of something very strange. I saw—these flakes, like snow, only black—like bits of charcoal—and I smelled burning, like overdone meat. I felt—the entire house felt like it was drifting through space."

Roger shook his head. He took a breath. He said, "All right. I was rereading chapter 35 of Bleak House—that's the chapter where Esther discovers her bout with smallpox has scarred her face. From the corner of my eye, I saw something on the window over there," he pointed, "across from me. The window appeared to—to shimmer—for the barest of instants, you understand, and only from the corner of my eye. When I looked directly at it, the window was as still and as solid as those to either side of it. I would have dismissed it as a trick of my eyes, and returned to Esther, except that I noticed a second peculiarity. In the windows to the right and left of that one, I could see the interior of the living room reflected. There you were, curled on the couch, and there was the stereo, with the kitchen door beyond it. The middle window, however, where I should have seen myself, was a blank. It was as if the windowpanes had been painted black. I could not understand how this could be, what combination of factors should rob the window of its reflection."

He took a second, deeper breath. "This was unusual, to be sure, but intriguing. As I sat there considering the problem of the window, trying to estimate what combination of the angle of the room's lights and my angle of vision would be necessary to produce such an effect, I became aware of something else. There was a presence on the other side of that window, someone staring in at me as I was staring out. While not an everyday occurrence, this sensation was not unprecedented. There have been instances where I've known there was a student waiting outside my office. Even at the possibility that a stranger was gazing in at us, I was neither especially worried or threatened. I assumed it to be a late-night walker whose curiosity had been piqued by the sight of the lighted windows. Honestly, I thought that, once the peeping-Tom realized he had been discovered and I was peeping at him, he would beat a hasty retreat.

"The longer I stared at the window, I noticed that I could in fact distinguish something within it. Not our secret admirer's face, no—this was so faint as to be all but impossible to see, faint and small, as if I were seeing it from across a great distance. There was a kind of opening, an archway, which gave onto a long corridor. In that corridor, there was a figure—it was too far and too dark for me to discern much about it except that it was holding its hands out to either side, stumbling forward—its left hand trailing along a wall, its right suspended in space. The entire scene—it was so distant, so hard to see I'm not positive I saw it correctly—if I saw anything at all. I squinted, trying to bring it into focus, and, as I watched the figure lurching along, my heart was moved by a tremendous pity mixed with a tremendous dread. I can not say whence the twin emotions had their origin, but their descent was immediate and overpowering. I could not move. I could only sit staring through the presence on the other side of the window at this distant figure, whom I believe were one and the same, although I am not sure why. It felt as if hours dragged by—hours of pity and dread—before you shook me free. For which I am most grateful." He smiled tightly.

"My God, Roger," I said. "What just happened?"

He shook his head. "I cannot say. Simultaneous hallucinations?"

"Did that feel like a hallucination to you?"

"Not having hallucinated a great deal, I am hardly an expert in the varieties of such experiences," he said, "but no, no it did not. I would very much like it to have been one."

"Me, too."

"The thought that it might not have been I find—unnerving."

"Yeah," I said, "it scares the crap out of me."

I wanted to discuss whatever you'd call had happened to us, but I had a hard time finding the right words—adequate words. I knew the house's history—not as thoroughly as Roger, but well-enough to know there was nothing in it to explain both of us—how would you describe it? Being touched by the paranormal? You see what I mean? Some things you go through, and the only way to approach them is in words that sound so ridiculous they basically shut you up. I can't imagine how you can write about this kind of stuff. I'd think the problem of language alone would be insurmountable.

Despite this, despite the sheer absurdity that assaulted us when we opened our mouths to speak, we did our best to talk about the possible causes for what I christened Our Mutual Weirdness. At one point, I started shaking and couldn't stop, the way you do when the flu overtakes you. Roger came over to me and held me until the fit passed, which must have been at least ten minutes. He remained pale for the rest of our discussion, as if he'd lost a pint of blood.

We threw out things like radon almost immediately. Neither of us knew that much about it, but we were reasonably sure its effects did not include incredibly vivid hallucinations. Roger wondered if we'd shared some manner of psychic encounter, but the details didn't seem to support that, either. (Or, not exactly—I explained my awareness of the house.) I leaned toward the ghostly, which Roger didn't like but agreed appeared the more likely answer. Nothing about the house's past, though—nothing we knew of—suggested a former inhabitant hanging around.

 

Roger had told me the house's pedigree late one night—it was the night I agreed to move in there. We were lying in bed, and I made some kind of remark. I can't remember what it was, but in answer, Roger related the house's history. It was, he said, "rather mundane." He said, "The house is one of the original dwellings built by the Huguenots when they settled here. A fellow named Jean Michel lived in it with his family. The house he raised was decidedly more modest than what stands there now. Like the other buildings on Founders Street, it was built of fieldstone, and occupied roughly the space of what is now the front parlor and hallway." He might have been delivering the voice-over for a PBS special on historic houses. He went on, "What you might call the house proper did not appear for another one hundred and fifty years, when Michel's great-great-grandson, Roderick Michel Sears, decided to renovate the ancestral home to something more in keeping with his status as the town's richest man. He brought in a small army of workers, and what had been another in a series of stone houses became the biggest and grandest house in the area. Since its construction, the house had been known as the Michel house; following Sears's transformation, it became the Sears House; although one local wit dubbed it the Taj Michel.

"That's the extent of the place's history, really. Thomas Belvedere summered there in 1953; there's evidence he started his 'Dark Feast' paintings during his stay. When the last owner, a woman named Nancy Milon, died in a nursing home in Florida in 1958, there were no relatives who wanted to move into the house, which was already falling into disrepair. The Huguenot Historical Society made a move to purchase it for a museum, but this fell through for reasons I don't know. The house was subdivided into ten apartments and rented to students at the college; this was the sixties in Huguenot, so you can be sure its walls witnessed their fair share of surreal experiences. By the time Joanne and I arrived in town, the place was in decay. Its upkeep was a constant and formidable task, and since it was being rented to students, the owners didn't trouble themselves over it much. We bought the place for a song, and a fairly cheap tune at that. In all our renovations and repairs, however, we failed to turn up anything out of the ordinary, no secret passages, no corpses sealed up in the walls, no Indian burial ground in the basement."

How strange is it that we didn't think of Ted right away? Well, that I didn't. Despite my inability to relegate Roger's cursing Ted to the past, not once did it occur to me that the night's strangeness might be the result of him pronouncing, "Let our blood no longer be true."

 

We went up to bed not long after deciding we weren't going to figure out what had happened to us right away. Sitting in the living room, all that space around us, I felt exposed, terribly visible and vulnerable, and I'm pretty sure Roger did, too. In bed, huddled under the covers next to Roger, wasn't much better. Sleep kept its distance, and while I was lying awake with nothing but my thoughts and the sound of Roger's snoring to distract me, there was the house around me. Not like I had in the living room—this was more the normal sensation of it I had—the normal abnormal, as opposed to the terrifying abnormal—the awareness of it at the ends of my nerves, as if I'd been outside in the freezing cold and just stepped into a hot room. Except now, I knew that feeling as one end of a scale that reached I didn't know how far: at least into the uncomfortable—the profoundly uncomfortable—and possibly well beyond. I didn't expect I'd sleep before dawn, if at all, but as I lay feeling the house around me, I seemed to flow out into it, and then it was late the next morning.

Do you know what's truly bizarre in all this? When I woke up the next morning, I was—not happy, exactly—it was more that I was relieved. For a long time, I'd been—well, you might say concerned about my mental well-being. After all, ask any doctor what the diagnosis is for visions so real you can walk around in them, and you're going to get some form of psychosis. That, or a brain tumor. Now—now, the same thing had happened, and it had happened to someone else, as well. Okay, Roger's and my experiences hadn't been exactly the same, but you see what I mean. For as troubling as the prospect of such things' reality was, there was comfort in the thought that my mind was in better shape than I'd feared.

In the days that followed, Roger dug in the village's archives in search of any clues to the Mutual Weirdness. (I was busy finishing my summer classes.) He turned up next to nothing, and what he found was tenuous at best. According to the goings-on-in-town column of The Huguenot Trumpet—basically a glorified gossip column that had a surprisingly long run, (most of the nineteenth century)—a couple of the workers Roderick Sears brought in for the expansion of the house into its present form were of "mysterious origin," given, the columnist wrote, "to strange manners and practices." What those manners and practices were, the writer didn't specify, but the description sounded to me like a bored columnist trying to inject some life into his otherwise boring report by appealing to American xenophobia. Out of curiosity, I wondered who those guys had been, what work they'd done on the house, but we couldn't find out. The columnist probably invented them.

The only other piece of possibly relevant information Roger found was in one of Thomas Belvedere's letters. Two years after his stay in the house, Belvedere wrote about the "unusual" sensations he'd experienced while living in it. He didn't go into any detail as to the nature of these sensations—although he said they were "not unconducive to a certain kind of inspiration"—in that letter or any other. Roger went so far as to call the curator of special collections at Stanford, where Belvedere's papers are, to ask her to check. She did, and found nothing. By this time, I'd turned in my final grades, so I joined Roger in consulting Belvedere's paintings, especially the "Dark Feast" series, which he began during his stay at the house, and completed shortly after. Have you seen them? I've never been that crazy about Belvedere—too much a Jackson Pollock-wannabe—but I studied those four paintings like they were the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. I didn't like them any better when I was done, but there was one, the second, that was interesting. The background is a series of black and royal blue squares, done in a kind of checkerboard effect. On top of that, Belvedere painted the silhouette of a house in lots of wavy white and yellow lines. Inside the house, so to speak, there are all these loops and swirls in dark green and purple. Belvedere arranged the background, the checkerboard, and the silhouette to suggest windows. The outline of the house wasn't an exact match to ours. There were enough angles missing and added that I could understand how no one had made the connection between the painting and the house. (No one had; I checked.) It was the house, though. Looking at it spread out across the pages of the library book on Belvedere, I had no doubt that this was my house. That wavy outline, the absent and extra windows and angles—they weren't exactly how the house felt to me, but they were like it, if that makes any sense. After about a day and a half of studying that painting, staring at it until it was burned onto the backs of my eyes, I had no doubt whatsoever that Thomas Belvedere had undergone something similar—parallel—to our experiences when he'd stayed here.

Of course, since I didn't have anything more than the painting and that line in his letter, my conviction wasn't much use. I e-mailed Belvedere's biographer, hoping that she might know something. Maybe there was a letter that wasn't in the archive, or someone had mentioned something in an interview. No luck. I went so far as to write to Belvedere's widow—she's still alive, ninety-four years old and living in Provincetown. She replied right away, but only to say that she was done answering questions about her late husband, and if I wanted to know anything about him, I should contact his biographer.

So there I was, with what seemed like reasonably good evidence that at least one other person had undergone a strange experience in the house, and nothing to do about it. I had this picture of Thomas and Viola Belvedere that I'd photocopied from his biography. It wasn't very big—about the size of a standard photo. Sometime during the first few days of my research, I'd taped it to one side of the computer screen. More and more of the time I was supposed to be devoting to following the leads I'd found, I spent staring at that picture, as if the answer I was searching for was encoded in its black-and-white depths. The photo had been taken in the spring of 1955, about a year after Belvedere's summer in the house. He and Viola were at a reception at Princeton. I don't know if you've seen a picture of Belvedere. He was medium-tall, skinny-running-to-fat, which you noticed in his stomach, straining his shirt-fronts long before the rest of his body caught up with it. For most of his life, he affected a long mustache—not quite a handlebar, but heading in that direction—and a crewcut. Not a good combination, if you ask me, but I think it was his attempt to add distinction to what was otherwise a plain face. Viola was much more interesting looking, these strong features—dark eyes, Roman nose, full lips, sharp chin. On its own, any one part of her face would have been too much; together, they held each other in balance. She was ten years older than her husband; although in this picture, him wearing a dark suit with a narrow tie that looks as if it's slowly strangling him, her in a black and white dress that looks as if it had been shipped directly from The Dick Van Dyke Show, you wouldn't guess there was more than a year between them either way.

I wondered about contacting some of the other people who'd stayed in the house—the students who'd rented it in the sixties—but the farthest I got was an awkward call to Dr. Sullivan. I couldn't figure out how to find out what I wanted to know. I mean, you can't just come out and ask someone if they had a supernatural experience, can you? You could, but they'd think you were some kind of nut. I spent about ten minutes asking if she or anyone else in her family had noticed anything strange while they were in the house, anything unusual, anything out of the ordinary. She kept saying no, no, nothing in the slightest, until she lost her patience and demanded to know what was going on. Radon gas, I said. It was the first thing that came to mind. We haven't been feeling well lately, I said, and we're concerned it might be due to radon. And wouldn't it be just my luck that she should know something about radon poisoning? I had to invent a whole history of additional, phony symptoms for Roger and me. By the end of our conversation, she was urging both of us to have full check-ups. I didn't like lying to her, but at least I was able to rule out radon as the cause for the Weirdness.

 

While I was busy with all this—and believe me, no Ph.D. student writing her dissertation worked this hard; for about two weeks, this was all I did, all day—while I was up to my elbows in the facts of Thomas Belvedere's life and studies of Abstract Expressionism, Roger was pursuing other interests. For the first week, he'd taken the lead in researching the house, but once I became involved in a serious way, he withdrew, gradually, then all at once. I didn't notice. That's not true. I noticed; I didn't attach any significance to it. He tended to run through things much more quickly than I did. Obviously, he'd taken his researches as far as he could. He had his own projects, which I assumed he'd returned to. If I hadn't been so busy with studies of the house as a structural manifestation of the feminine archetype, I probably would have paid more attention to the oversized envelopes that had started arriving in the mail for him, or I would have ventured up to the third floor to ask him what he was doing in his office for hours and hours and hours.

And if I'm being honest, more than my work kept me surrounded by the library's tall bookcases. Ever since the Mutual Weirdness, the house had felt—contingent. It was as if the invisible house, the one that hovered at the edges of my senses, had drawn closer. Not a lot closer, but sufficient to make the walls around me, the floor beneath, seem more tenuous. I would sit on the library's couch, poring over Belvedere's biography, already festooned with post-it notes in half a dozen colors, for the fiftieth time, trying to squeeze additional meaning out of details long since wrung dry, and for all my concentration—almost because of it—I would feel the house—I want to say shimmering, as if it were an enormous soap-bubble. I would be positive that, were I to put my feet on the floor, the entire house would burst, revealing—I wasn't sure what. Maybe nothing. You know how it is when you're alone. The strangest ideas seize hold of you and refuse to let go. So I left Roger to his own devices, which was a mistake.

Because it wasn't only that he was spending more and more of each day in his office—that happened when he was absorbed in an article or book—and who was I to talk about that, spending fourteen pretty-much-uninterrupted hours in the second floor library, all my material on Belvedere spread out on the floor around the computer desk. No, it was that, when I saw Roger, when he brought lunch or dinner to me, which he did most days, or if he waited for me to come to bed, which he did less and less, he seemed more stressed—more strained—than ever. His smiles were painted on. He'd jump if I tried to put my arms around him from behind. If I placed my hand on his, or his arm—you know, one of those gestures you make to your spouse—it was like touching a high voltage wire. You could practically smell the ozone. In the days after the Mutual Weirdness, I chalked up the change to that experience. I hadn't been affected that way, true, but I wasn't as much a dyed-in-the-wool rationalist as Roger, and anyway, here I was burying myself in all these books, so maybe I'd been more affected than I realized.

With each day that went by, however, Roger seemed worse. On a couple of occasions, I asked him flat-out what was wrong, only to have him shake his head and retreat out of the library. On a couple more—once in the library and once in the kitchen—he started to say something to me, only to break off after barely a sentence. During that second week, when I was in the thick of my research, I kept promising myself that I was going to do something about this—shift in Roger. I wasn't going to sit on my hands the way I had while he'd crashed and burned at school. I just needed to finish this article. Maybe I should have left, escaped, instead of sequestering myself each day in the very heart of peril. I'd like to say it was because I didn't want to abandon Roger, which isn't untrue. I knew he'd never agree to move from the house, no matter how unhappy being there was making him. But strange as it sounds, leaving didn't seem like an option to me, either. I'm not sure I can explain it, but it was like, the very same feeling that should have sent me screaming out the front door kept me exactly where I was.

That second week, there was one moment. I was curled up on the couch, plodding through this essay by Derrida that had sounded relevant when I'd read about it in another article, but had turned into the written equivalent of trying to walk down a path that's completely overgrown. No, it wasn't about Belvedere. It was on Antonin Artaud. I was tangled in a typical sentence, rereading it over and over in an attempt to force some meaning from it—and frustrated to the point of wanting to toss the pages aside and be done with them. It didn't help that it was late, about eleven, and I'd been at this nonstop since seven a.m. I had tried to take notes, but my writing had gone from sentences to words to question marks. As I was adding another question mark to the list, I noticed a figure standing in the door. I thought it was Roger, and my heart gave a little leap at the possibility that he had come to talk to me at last.

You guessed it: when I looked up, the doorway was empty. I wasn't especially freaked out. I thought I'd seen Roger and I hadn't, that was all. What gradually got to me, though, was wondering why, as I remembered what hadn't been there, I'd imagined Roger so much taller than he was? That, and something else—the figure in the doorway had been dark, as if it had been standing in shadow. Yes, I recalled that night in my apartment when I'd seen someone behind me. This had been briefer, and even less certain than my old kitchen at three a.m., but as I compared the experiences—and my chances of finishing Derrida decreased dramatically—they were similar enough to make me very nervous. The house was quiet. I could hear Roger pacing upstairs, even a pair of late-night walkers talking as they passed on the street. Underneath that quiet—or beside it—my sense of the house, at the border of my skin. Caught up in the silence and the skin was something else. Not a feeling, not an awareness of whatever had or hadn't been in the doorway—it was more the lack of awareness, a kind of positive lack, an active absence. It was enough to make me wish I could stay in the library for the rest of the night, instead of yielding myself to the danger of walking out the door and down the hall to the bedroom. I did not want to pass through the space that shadowy form had occupied. I delayed as long as I could, flipping through the introduction to the Derrida, consulting the index, but in the end, I went. I wasn't happy about it, but I left, flinching as I crossed the threshold. The hallway was dim. As I padded up it, I heard something, so faint as to be almost lost in the slide of my socks over the floor. I stopped, listening. Nothing. I waited, but whatever it was had stopped. I hurried to the bathroom. I hadn't heard words, had I? "Blood," "torment," "anything." No.

 

By the end of two weeks of research, it was pretty clear to me that the mysteries of Thomas Belvedere were going to remain unsolved. I hung on for another day, finishing a couple of articles I'd started, searching online when a new idea occurred to me, but that was as much me not wanting to have given up too soon as anything. It had been pretty clear by the end of week one that we weren't going to learn anything more than we already had. You hope, though; you hope that somewhere in the midst of all this information are the clues that you alone will notice and assemble. The mark of a scholar, right?

In looking for those non-existent clues, however, I'd been neglecting the very obvious signs that Roger's troubles were worsening. As I was reading the final article I'd copied—it was one by Harlow, on Belvedere and this H. P. Lovecraft story, "The Dreams in the Witch House"—as I was returning stacks of books to the libraries at SUNY and Penrose, finally getting myself out of the house, Roger's behavior was sliding from bad to worse. He wasn't preparing any meals. He was ordering breakfast from one of the diners and going to pick it up, lunch and dinner from Chinese and Italian restaurants and having it delivered. Once the food arrived, he carried his portion up to his office, knocking on the library door on his way past and calling that whatever meal it was was waiting for me in the kitchen. His jogging schedule had become erratic, his walking even more so. Mostly, he left his office to use the bathroom, fetch meals, and go to bed—which he didn't do until early in the morning. He was back at his office before I was awake. One night, he either slept upstairs or worked straight through till morning. I was trying to give him the benefit of the doubt—that was what I told myself—maybe he'd become obsessed with an exciting idea. What I was doing, of course, was delaying the inevitable. I was afraid of what was going to happen when I confronted Roger. I was afraid he was going to need serious psychiatric help, and I didn't have the faintest idea how to convince him to seek it out, or, if he refused, to insure he received it. Of all the possible complications I'd worried about when we got together, Roger losing his mind had not been among them, and trying to deal with it was overwhelming. How very nineteenth century. Granted, it was usually the woman who was insane and living upstairs—The Madwoman in the Attic, right? When the man was out of his mind—well, no attics for him.

When Roger showed me what he'd been doing in his office, it didn't help matters any. The day after I returned the last book on Belvedere to the library and filed my notes away for future use, Roger asked me if I would join him on the third floor. I was at the kitchen table, eating a late breakfast and leafing through the latest issue of The New Yorker. He was freshly showered—his hair was still wet—and he had on a clean pair of jeans and a blue and orange SUNY Huguenot sweatshirt. "What is it?" I asked him.

"Come up to my office and we can discuss it there," he said, and before I could ask him why we couldn't talk about it here, where I had half an omelet sitting on my plate, he walked out of the kitchen. I heard the stairs creak as he started up them.

I must have sat there for five, maybe ten minutes. I wanted to finish my breakfast, and I wasn't sure I wanted to go up to Roger's office. Tension spilled from him like heat from a sunlamp. I wasn't worried about him becoming violent or anything. I knew him well-enough to be sure that wasn't in him, and besides, I'd beaten him at arm-wrestling enough to know that, if it came down to a fight, I could kick his ass. It was—all of a sudden, that office became—whatever had been going on with Roger this past week was going to be reflected in that room, and I couldn't decide if I wanted to see that. I washed and dried my dishes, then stood looking out the kitchen windows. There was woman walking along Founders Street with her baby—she had the baby in one of those sport strollers, you know, the kind with the big wheels. She was wearing a maroon tracksuit and white sneakers; her hair was pulled back by a maroon and white headband. She was too far away for me to be able to tell for sure, but I thought she looked around my age. I couldn't see the baby. I looked down, and saw that, without realizing it, I'd put my hands over my belly. I watched the woman push the stroller past the Dutch Reformed Church, then around the bend that leads to Addie and Harlow's place. When she was out of sight, I left the kitchen and climbed the stairs.

On my way up to the third floor, along walls Roger and his students had painted pale yellow, past pictures of Ted I'd hung up the stairways, the mirrors at the top of the second floor stairs and the bottom of the third floor stairs, I was acutely aware of places where the house felt—less dense, as if, were I to smash a hammer through them, I would find, not wood and wires, pipes, but darkness, an opening into I couldn't say what. For a moment, there was almost something there—as if something were pressed against the other side of the wall, listening to me pass. I imagined Roger's face, enormous as I'd seen it that day in my apartment; I pictured those oversized features slowly bleeding onto the plaster. The vision of the house I'd first had when I miscarried seemed less psychological symbol and more . . . I wasn't sure what—diagram, maybe.

Outside the door to Roger's office, which was closed over but not shut, I paused, cleared my throat, and called, "Roger?"

"Come in," he called back.

I pushed open the door. Roger was standing a few paces in front of me, his head down, his hands clasped behind his back. He must have been holding that pose for some time, since I hadn't heard anything from the office as I'd approached it. He'd probably been that way for the last ten minutes. How theatrical, I thought, which was always true of Roger. He loved those kinds of gestures. I was so concerned with him that it took a minute for what he'd done to his office to register.

The office wasn't especially large. Our bedroom was about twice its size, the living room four or five times bigger. When we'd moved into the house, he'd set it up exactly as it had been before he'd left, and it had always been very full. To your right, as you entered, was his desk, which was fairly modest and held his computer. In the middle of the room, there was a large, heavy oak table where he would lay out whatever materials he required for his latest undertaking. This table had its own chair, an old kitchen leftover that creaked and swayed and threatened to collapse under you. He liked to sit at the table and make extensive notes—really, they were more rough drafts. To your left, there was a couch where Roger could sit and read—it folded out into a bed, and was where—well, you've heard that part of the story already, haven't you? The room was ringed with floor-to-ceiling bookcases, most of which were stuffed with the lifetime of material on Dickens Roger had collected, including first editions of most of his novels. Directly across from the doorway was a window that looked out on the back lawn. There wasn't much wall space. Over his desk, Roger had hung an oversized bulletin board that was layered with pictures and postcards, the majority of them of Dickens and his friends. He'd taped a few posters and flyers to the bookcase shelves, pretty much all of which had to do with him: lectures that he'd given, conferences he'd been the keynote speaker at, books he'd written. I suppose he was entitled.

All that had been changed. Everything was still in the same place—as far as I could tell—but now every last inch of the office had been covered in maps. I recognized their subject immediately. How could I not? In the past years, we'd all seen Afghanistan's broken oval enough times on the news and in print to know its outline. Hanging to the left of the window was an enormous map that completely obscured the bookcase it was taped to. It was some kind of National Geographic special that displayed not only the country's topography and settlements, but the sites of all the battles in the recent U.S. war. The country was colored desert-brown, outlined in a white line and, around that, a yellow line. All the surrounding countries were white, blank spaces. Roger had written on the map. I couldn't read the words from the doorway, but I could see that they clustered next to Kabul, which he'd circled in black magic marker. No, it wasn't a circle; it was a spiral whose tail descended into the city.

There were other maps of the country—other kinds of maps—hanging from the rest of the bookcases like elaborate paper drapes. None was as big as the map across from me. A few were a couple of feet wide, but most looked as if they'd been photocopied from textbooks. There was another map of Afghanistan's geography, which was next to one of those maps that show height and depth in gradations—what do you call them? Mercator maps? One color-coded map revealed the country's average rainfall amounts; another, the type and distribution of its principle crops; a third estimated its population density. A largish map broke the place down into its various tribes and ethnicities; a larger map than that marked the ebb and flow of its historical borders. A cluster of smaller maps showed the country's margins at specific historical moments. Some maps were satellite photos with borders superimposed; others looked like they'd been drawn by British cartographers during the heyday of the Empire.

Mixed in with the outlines of Afghanistan were other pieces of paper, which I recognized as maps, too, though I couldn't tell of what. There was the same variety to them, the same mix of different reference points, of new and old. Then I saw the word "Kabul" at the top of one. Every last one of these maps was covered in Roger's handwriting, in three or four different colors of ink. He'd put stickers on some of the maps—those little round ones they use for the prices at flea markets and church fairs—which he used to anchor pieces of thread connecting one map to another. Two or three Post-It notes dangled from each map of Kabul, and more filled what little space remained on the bookcases.

That wasn't all. The table in the center of the room was heaped with books, most of them with "Afghanistan" in their titles; though a few were called things like The Modern Army and Special Forces: A History. Sandwiched in between the books were manila folders stuffed with papers. A half-dozen ragged legal pads competed with stacks of oversized color photos—the ones I could see were of the streets of a city I assumed was Kabul.

I couldn't take it all in. I haven't mentioned his desk, or the books stacked on the couch. I said, "Roger."

He raised his head and said, "No doubt you're wondering what all this is about." He didn't look incredibly insane.

I nodded.

"I have been doing a little research of my own—"

"So I see."

"—and I believe I know what happened to us three weeks ago."

"All right," I said.

"Aren't you going to ask me what I think?"

I didn't need to. The moment I'd recognized the enormous map hanging across from me, I'd known. I said, "It's Ted, isn't it? You think Ted is haunting us."

Roger smiled. "You always were my brightest student. I wouldn't use the word haunting, as it connotes something more sinister than what we are experiencing. I prefer to say that Ted is trying to reach out to us."

"What makes you so sure?"

"There appears little doubt that Our Mutual Weirdness, to use your phrase, was supernatural. I have considered all the natural explanations and found every last one wanting. Given its supernatural character, the question of its origin confronts us. The house itself is the most obvious culprit; however, my investigations into its history convinced me that it was a dead-end in fairly short order, and I am correct in assuming your more extensive research confirms such a conclusion, am I not?"

"There's nothing glaringly obvious."

"Once the house is eliminated from consideration, our focus must shift to those who underwent the Weirdness. I cannot think of anything in your short life that would account for such occurrences, which leaves us with me. What is there in my life that fits the supernatural explanation? Only one thing: Ted."

He delivered his argument the same way he did his case for a particular interpretation of a passage. I said, "And you think Ted is . . . reaching out to us."

"That's right."

"Why?"

Quick as a bird flashing past a window, a look that mingled pain with something else—fear?—crossed Roger's face. "Why sweetie," he said, "I'm his father. Why wouldn't he want to contact me?"

Here it was, so soon. "Well," I said, "the last time you two spoke, you disowned him."

He flinched. "I did at that."

I didn't say anything.

"It was a mistake," Roger said at last. "I spoke in anger."

Do you know, that was the first time we'd mentioned his disowning Ted? Let alone him admitting it had been wrong. Under different circumstances, this would have been an important occasion. As it was, it was still significant, but that significance was overshadowed by its context. I said, "You were angry. Maybe Ted saw that, too. But you never took those words back. As far as Ted knew, you no longer considered him your son. I'm not trying to be mean, but why would he think anything had changed? How would he know to make the attempt to get through to you—us?"

Frowning, Roger said, "Ted and I have unfinished business."

"Okay," I said, "I guess you do. But I don't—at least, I don't think I do. Why should I be involved in this? How is my feeling the house moving around me Ted trying to communicate with me?"

"Though I am not certain, you understand, I believe your sensation of the house to be a side-effect of Ted's effort to establish contact with me."

"Then why did I notice it the moment I set foot in here?"

"Because," Roger said, "Ted has been struggling to reach me since that time—since before it, most likely. You crossed into the house at the moment he succeeded—the moment he began to succeed, I should say. The house itself may have played some role in helping his effort; its long association with him—with us—may have assisted him in focusing his energies. After all, you didn't notice these feelings on any of the previous times you were in the house, did you? As I recall, you didn't mention it during our rendezvous here."

"No," I admitted. "Why all the maps?"

"Everything you see here," Roger said, "is part of my attempt to understand Ted's death. If I am to reach out to where he is, then it is imperative for me to understand as much about the circumstances of his—his leaving this life as is possible."

"Where do you think he is? Is he still in Afghanistan?"

Roger shook his head. "I can't say for sure; although Kabul is significant as Ted's—call it his entry point to the hereafter. While I am hardly an expert in these matters, it is my guess that Ted currently inhabits what the Tibetan Buddhists call the bardo, a kind of antechamber to life. From this space, one is supposed to move away from the illusions of this world towards eternity; it is possible, however, for a soul in that state to look back the other way, to the life departed."

"Tibetan Buddhists?"

"These last weeks," Roger said, "I've acquainted myself with a great many religious traditions, in hopes that one of them might offer some clues to our situation. The Southern Baptistry of my parents and siblings speaks little to the possibility of ghosts and the ghostly. There may be warnings and encouragement from souls in heaven, or regret and temptation from souls in hell, but little else. As a rule, the more fundamentalist-leaning sects of Christianity appear to have little room for whatever is not spelled out in the Bible. The Catholics, Episcopalians, and Lutherans are somewhat more open when it comes to such matters, but they warn of demons masquerading as the dear departed. Generally speaking, Christian traditions grow very nervous at the hint of anything that suggests death may be more—or less, I suppose—than the carrots and sticks they hold out to and threaten their followers with. The failure of the faith most familiar to me to tell me where my son is sent me searching for what other peoples have had to say, which led me to the Tibetan Buddhists."

The bardo sounded analogous to Purgatory, but now wasn't the time for an extended theological debate. Instead, I said, "All right. Ted is in the bardo trying to contact you so the two of you can finish your unfinished business—so you can be reconciled and he can be at peace, I assume. What do we know about it? Is there any way we can help him?"

"I'm not sure," Roger said. "By immersing myself in the particulars of Ted's passing, I hope to become as receptive to him as possible—to put myself on his wavelength, so to speak. I can't say it has succeeded as yet, but I have only been at this for a short time. I believe that much of the work must be done from the other side, by the soul in question. We are on Ted's timetable."

"Huh," I said, or grunted. Really, what else was there to say? I wandered over to the futon, crowded with teetering stacks of books, and carefully sat down on the edge of it. Roger was watching me expectantly—waiting, I knew, for me to speak and render some kind of judgment on what he'd told me, the whole, mad explanation. Which I couldn't do. Rationally speaking, of course it was insane, but we were already at some distance from what was rational. If Roger was delusional, then I was encouraging him in the worst way just by having this conversation with him, entertaining his fantasy instead of insisting he speak to a psychiatrist. If he wasn't delusional—look, I understand that idea may seem delusional in and of itself, but I'd been at the center of the house's strangeness since I'd set foot in it. I couldn't say whether Roger's explanation was in any way accurate, but at least it acknowledged what I'd been experiencing. Was it so bad for Roger to want to talk to his son, to make up with him? I mean, given everything, wasn't it natural? People grieved in strange ways. How was what Roger was doing here different from a person who goes to church every day in hopes of a message from their loved one?

He was still waiting. I said, "What's next? Do we hire a medium? Conduct a séance?"

He exhaled; his shoulders relaxed. "No, I'm afraid it's more of the same. More research; more waiting until something happens."

"What is going to happen?"

"Ted will find a way to contact me."

"And?"

"Presumably, he will be able to move off into the bardo—to be at peace."

That was pretty much that. As I stood to leave the room, Roger surprised me by walking over and catching me in a long hug. "Thank you," he said. "I have evaded this conversation longer than I should have. I was afraid that you would not understand—to be frank, I was afraid that you would think I had descended into raving lunacy. I've wondered the same thing, myself, at certain moments. I appreciate the act of faith this requires on your part, and I am grateful."

 

I'm not sure Roger would have been quite so grateful if he'd known I went to speak to a psychiatrist myself three days later; although, since it didn't lead to anything, he might have been. I saw Dr. Hawkins, the psychiatrist my ob-gyn had recommended after the miscarriage. Her office is on Founders, in that red brick house beside the old graveyard. Yes, I noticed that, too. How appropriate, right? The funny thing is, she had a copy of one of Belvedere's paintings hanging in her tiny waiting room; this one called Night Passage. It's a small canvas, maybe a foot by a foot-and-a-half. Belvedere worked on it, on and off, for something like twelve years, from a couple of months after his stay in our house until he abandoned the piece in the mid-sixties. The critics I'd read regarded it as a five-fingered exercise, a diversion from more serious projects. It is unlike any of his other paintings; I actually like it a lot. There's none of the straining after effect you encounter in his major pieces. It reminds me of a cross between cubism and Looney Tunes. The subject of the painting is a black-and-yellow funnel, a stylized tornado, which begins in the lower-left-hand corner and curves up and across an off-white background, growing broader on the way. The funnel is presented in cross-section, as if to give the illusion you're looking down into it, but Belvedere laid on the paint so thickly that it compromises the effect. Surrounding the funnel, passing inside and out, are a series of bright, almost pastel figures that look kind of like the forms you encounter on totem poles, kind of like characters from a children's book. There's one that resembles an eagle or hawk, another that might be a fisherman, something that could be the big bad wolf. It's obvious they're members of Belvedere's personal pantheon—it is to me—but no one's bothered trying to determine their identities. I speculated a bit on them while I sat in the waiting room, wondering if I were betraying Roger.

Scratch that. I knew I was betraying him by coming here. It was a question of degree. I—it was something I felt I had to do, an option I had to explore. Going in, I had a decent idea what the psychiatrist's verdict would be—though I told myself she might surprise me.

She didn't. She's tall, Dr. Hawkins, and skinny, so much so that all her joints protrude. Her hands and feet are enormous. I felt like a little kid shaking an adult's hand when she came out to greet me. She wears her hair in a braid that hangs down her back, and these cat's-eye glasses that you know she thinks are trendy but that make her look like the mother on a fifties TV show. She had on a dull red, shapeless dress with a long necklace of black beads—to balance the braid, I guess. From almost the moment we sat down in her office and she opened her mouth, I knew I wasn't going to learn anything new. But it was like, Oh well, I'm here; I might as well talk to her. She kept insisting I call her Yvonne, to put me at ease—which it didn't. When I go to see a professional, I'm going to see them as a professional. I don't want my doctor to be my friend. I want her to be my doctor. It's the same with my students. I'm not "Veronica" to them; I'm "Professor Croydon"; "Ms. Croydon" if they're sticklers about the Ph.D.

Anyway, I sat in one of Dr. Hawkins's chairs, which wasn't half as comfortable as you'd expect a chair in a psychiatrist's office to be, and gave her the Reader's Digest version of what I've been telling you. My husband thinks the son he disowned is trying to speak to him from beyond the grave. I was paying by the hour. She heard the crucial information, asking occasional questions along the way, and when I said, "That's about it," she said, "I see," and started writing on a legal pad she had balanced on her knee. She wrote for about five minutes, filling one page and going on to another. Finally, still looking at the legal pad, she said, "Without talking to your husband myself, I can only speculate on his psychological state. It's important you understand that at the outset. What I'm offering is speculation. Informed, yes, but speculation all the same. Your husband—Roger has suffered a significant psychic trauma in the death of his son. Losing a child always wounds a parent, no matter how old the child, no matter how poor the relationship. Additionally, in this case, there were complicating factors. Roger had been ambivalent about Ted, natural enough given what you've told me of their history, but uncomfortable for a parent nonetheless. Rather than resolving itself as Ted grew older, Roger's ambivalence towards him increased—fed, I suspect, by his own lingering issues with his father—until their confrontation at the apartment allowed years of pent-up emotion to vent itself in anger and actual violence, climaxing in what you call Roger's cursing Ted. However satisfying such a release may have been in the short term—and I imagine it was very gratifying for your husband to be able to let these feelings out—in the long term, it left Roger in an even more uncomfortable psychic state. And then Ted, the object of decades of conflicting emotions, was killed. That death is like a great, black magnet. It drew all those difficult feelings down into itself and will not release them, thus significantly complicating any attempts by Roger to resolve them. How is this sounding to you? Are you with me?" she asked, looking up.

"So far," I said.

"Roger needs to find a way to come to terms with his feelings about Ted, because although Ted is dead, Roger's relationship with him is not. As you can appreciate, this is an intolerable situation. It must be addressed, and the sooner, the better. Roger could have done so positively, through conversation with you, or a therapist, an option he has not chosen. He could have done so negatively, through use of alcohol or recreational drugs, an option he also has not chosen, thankfully. He could have sought a creative outlet for his needs, writing down his memories of Ted, or writing letters to him, techniques I employ sometimes in these kinds of situations. Roger hasn't exactly chosen this course of action, but the one he has selected is related to it. He has invented a scenario that will allow him to meet his needs more directly, namely, the haunting. Tellingly, he has created a situation in which Ted is haunting him—Ted is the one who requires their reconciliation. That Roger has projected his own deepest wishes onto the ghost of his son suggests that, even in so private a fantasy as this one, Roger remains unable to face his past actions, and, I believe, his continuing feelings, fully."

"All right," I said. "Roger's living out this fantasy." I felt like adding, "Duh," but didn't. "So what's going to happen?"

Dr. Hawkins held up her hands. "That I can't say for sure. Please keep in mind, this is all hypothetical."

"I understand that," I said. "I'm asking for your opinion."

"It's unlikely that Roger will be able to come out of his fantasy on his own. Unlikely to the point of impossible, I would say. From what you've described to me of the changes in his office, he's already invested too much of himself in the scenario he's invented for him to be able to disengage from it without professional help."

"What if he doesn't want that help?"

"The fantasy will continue. It could persist for a considerable time, depending on how well Roger is able to accommodate it to his continued failure to communicate with Ted. Over time, such a failure could lead to depression—in fact, I'd say that's almost certain. It could lead to that self-destructive behavior I mentioned, to alcohol or drugs. Veronica," she said, "I know how difficult this is to hear, but without some form of intervention, your husband is not going to get better. There is no good end to this for him. Time is of the essence. The mind is like any other organ: the sooner you catch and attend to a problem, the easier it is for it to heal."

That was the end of our consultation. As I was writing the check, though, I said, "What would you say if I told you I thought there might be something to Roger's fantasy?"

"What do you mean?"

I tore off the check and handed it to her. "That maybe Roger is being haunted."

While she filled out my receipt, Dr. Hawkins was silent, but I could practically hear her composing her reply. Handing me the receipt, she said, "I would say that you were caught up in your husband's invention, possibly due to your own guilt at perceiving yourself as the cause of Roger and Ted's last fight. I would stress to you that Roger's fantasy is that. I would repeat to you that this situation cannot turn out well, and I would urge you to seek counseling for yourself immediately. Would you like to schedule another appointment?"

"No thanks," I said, folding the receipt and sliding it into my purse.

"Are you sure?"

"No," I said.

"Veronica," Dr. Hawkins said, "I don't want you to misinterpret this, but the dead are fearsome. I'm not talking about floating white sheets. I'm talking about the losses that score themselves on us. They are greedy. They are always hungry. They will take whatever you have to give them and it won't be enough. It will never be enough. I lost my sister to leukemia twenty years ago and it still grieves me. You cannot make the dead happy. You cannot achieve any kind of mystical understanding with them. Those things are the province of movies and bad self-help books. I'm sorry to speak in metaphors, but I hope my point is plain enough. You have to leave the dead to themselves, and attend to your life."

"And when the dead won't let you do that?" I asked.

"That's why we have therapy," she said.

That and a hundred and fifty bucks an hour, I thought on the walk home. With the exception of her remarks about the dead at the very end there, Dr. Hawkins hadn't said anything very surprising or interesting. I mean, you hardly needed an MD to connect the scenario Roger had described to his need to resolve his own, no-doubt-still-conflicted emotions. Nor did it require much subtlety of thought to recognize the role my guilt must be playing in my actions. When you came right down to it, you didn't have to have a higher degree to assert that the dead are implacable; though this was an interesting enough idea for me to give Dr. Hawkins credit for it. I know, I know. If I was so unhappy with her, why did I bother? Why did I sit through the entire session? Mostly, it was so I could tell myself I had given this option its full chance. Depending on what was going to happen next, I didn't want to think, "Oh, if only I'd talked to someone about everything." Now, I had spoken with a professional, found her advice pretty useless, and could move on.

Understand, I didn't doubt the importance of either Roger's or my guilt in what was occurring. I just didn't think that was all there was to it. Having brooded on Roger's version of events for the last three days, I still wasn't sure what my opinion of it was. It made sense, but only if you were willing to accept its premises, which I wasn't certain I was. After all, it was possible to the point of probable that Thomas Belvedere had undergone something during the summer he'd lived in the house. Granted, it was a dead-end as far as specific information went, but that didn't rule it out completely. Who knew what had happened in the house over the years—the decades? It had been an apartment house for college students, for crying out tears, in the sixties. And who was Roger to say there was nothing in my life to explain what we'd been going through? I'd lost a child, too. Who was to say it wasn't that spirit trying to speak to us? Given everything that had passed between him and Roger—between him and me—Ted did make a certain sense, more than that lost child and more than the house. Yet I couldn't shake the conviction that Roger's explanation was radically incomplete, that at the very root of things he'd missed something important. I wouldn't say I shared Dr. Hawkins's pessimism about the dead, not exactly, but—there was Roger staring into space, saying, "You are an embarrassment and a disgrace." "I disown you; I cast you from me."

Of course, it never occurred to me that Roger's account might sound incomplete because he was deliberately leaving something out—but I'm getting ahead of myself.

My walk had brought me to the very edge of the house's lawn. I stopped there and stood gazing up at the huge structure I was already thinking of as home, this enormous space where some of my life's most important moments had taken place. Not many, granted, and certainly not as many as for Roger, to be sure, but enough that I was connected to it, too. Uncomfortably so. Standing there watching the late afternoon sky, a riot of white clouds and bronze sunlight, reflected in the house's windows, I thought of Roger, jogging or walking past, pausing here to let his gaze wander, until he was seeing not only the physical house, but the temporal one, the structure where his memories of Ted lived.

A car passed behind me, honked its horn. I jumped and looked around. It was Lamar, the minister at the Dutch Reformed Church, in his Saturn. I returned his wave and watched him continue down the street to his residence beside the church. Fortunately, it was too far away for him to ask me what I was doing, because I didn't have a good response. Fantasizing about my husband's fantasizing? I wondered if Dr. Hawkins would drive past the house on her way home, and what she'd think of me standing here staring up at it: if she'd leap out of her car and try to administer on-the-spot emergency therapy. What's that joke? Insanity doesn't run in our family—it gallops? I went inside.

Moving around the kitchen, though, opening the fridge to see what if anything we could have for dinner, which wasn't much, mostly cartons of half-eaten fried rice and orange chicken—I swear, the Chinese take-out place must've had our pictures on their "customers-of-the-year" wall—anyway, even as I was trying to determine if we had the ingredients for a red curry, I was thinking of Roger. You've seen the house's kitchen, haven't you? It's all windows, makes it ten degrees colder than the rest of the place, especially in the winter. From the counter, I could look out across the lawn to where I'd been standing five minutes earlier. Roger had left the house for only one of his walks during the last three weeks—the first or second night after I'd joined him researching the Mutual Weirdness. He'd been gone for hours, wandering the nighttime streets of the town. I could almost picture him standing where I just had. There would have been no moon, no light on inside except for a small lamp in the library. The house would have been in shadow—in places, its edges hard to find. In a way it never had before, the house would have seemed larger to him tonight, as if all that shadow had added to its bulk, made it more massive. Roger would have jammed his hands in his pockets and blown his breath out in a half-whistle—one of the things he did when he was particularly annoyed, a hold-over from the childhood where he hadn't dared express his feelings openly. To think that this place, of all places, should have become foreign to him, the house that he had restored with his own hands, the site of his best scholarship, the location of his family, of his son, of Ted.

The red curry momentarily forgotten, I stood staring out at the lawn. Every last window in that kitchen had gone from late-afternoon sunlight to middle-of-the-night darkness. I've always had a vivid imagination, though, so I took what I was seeing as no cause for distress. I blinked and went to return to my cooking. The windows remained black, the kitchen dark. Startled, I looked up. The kitchen was surrounded by night. To my left, the dining room, to my right, the laundry room, glowed with sunlight. Between them, the kitchen surveyed moonless dark. Shadows flooded the yard. Overhead, stars dotted the sky. Holding onto the countertop, I shut my eyes and counted ten as slowly as I could. When I opened them, blackness continued to press in on me. I made a noise—half a laugh, half something else, a whimper or moan. I could not be seeing this. This had to be left over from my imagination of Roger. Unless it were some kind of drug flashback, which was unlikely, since the worst thing I'd ever done was pot and pot didn't give you flashbacks, did it? Or unless this was the first sign of a psychotic break. But if you thought you were having a psychotic break, didn't that mean you weren't? If the scene outside was a hallucination, it was a remarkably detailed one. The grass looked shorter, as if it had just been mown. The trees were late-October bare. The stars seemed different, off, rearranged into new groupings. Any fascination I might have felt was rapidly replaced by fear. I wasn't behind this; it was emanating from the same place that had produced all the other weirdness. I could feel the space on the other side of the windows, as if the house had gained another, huge room. The hair on my arms stood straight up. My mouth went dry. I let go of the countertop and walked over to the windows. I know. Why didn't I run into one of the other rooms, escape to where the sun was still shining? As I drew closer to them, I could feel cold pouring off the windows, freezing the air. This wasn't the cold you felt in the kitchen in winter. This was the kind of cold you read about in places like Antarctica, cold that burns the air free of everything but itself. Shivering, I raised my right hand and touched one of the windowpanes. It was even colder than I'd thought, so cold it rushed through me like an electric shock. I cried out, jerking my hand back—

And the scene outside vanished, replaced by late afternoon as if a giant slide projector had advanced a picture. Fingertips stinging the way they do when you scald them under the tap, I stared out over the lawn that wanted mowing, the trees heavy with leaves, the sun blazing as it sank towards the mountains, too bright after such heavy dark, the details it highlighted almost grotesque. In the space between me and the windows, the air was bitterly frigid, although the cold was running out of it like water draining from a tub. I stepped away from that fading chill. My leg struck a chair. I sat down on it.

There were footsteps in the hallway, then Roger calling, "Honey? Is everything all right?" A moment later, he hurried into the kitchen. "I thought I heard—" He caught sight of me sitting by the windows and rushed over. "What is it?"

I gestured at the windows. "Out there."

"The yard?" Roger said. "What about it? Did you see someone out there?" He was halfway to his feet.

"No," I said. "It wasn't—it changed."

"Changed? The yard? How?"

I exhaled. I could do this if I took the experience a little at a time. "It got dark."

"Dark."

"Like nighttime," I said. "It was night—night and cold."

"You looked out the window and the lawn was dark."

"Not just dark," I said. "I looked out there and it was the middle of the night. The grass, the trees, were different. Like I was seeing another time of year, fall, maybe, or winter. The stars were—I could see the stars and they weren't right. They were in different patterns. I could feel it, too—like another room. I went to the windows and touched them," I held up my right hand, showing Roger my fingertips red and raw. "It was freezing. That was when you heard me scream."

Roger took my hand in his. "Good Lord," he said. "What happened next?"

"It disappeared," I said. "Everything went back to normal."

Leaning over, Roger raised my hand and gently kissed my fingertips. His lips burned ever-so-slightly, but I smiled weakly at the sentiment. Between kisses, he said, "Poor, poor dear."

I didn't say anything.

"Did you feel," Roger started to ask, stopped. "That is, could you tell—"

"Was it Ted?" I completed his question. "I couldn't tell. There was just the sense that what was outside the house was also part of it. Not everything outside, only what I was seeing." Roger frowned—not an angry frown, but a concentration of his brows that made me ask, "What? What is it?"

"Nothing," he said, then added, "Not nothing. I'm wondering about the timing of this."

"The timing?"

"Yes," he said. "What you saw lasted how long?"

"A couple of minutes—if that."

"Then I was already on my way downstairs when it began. I paused at the office door because I thought I might want to jot down one last idea, before deciding it could use a little more time to ripen. As I was descending the stairs to see about dinner, the kitchen underwent a change that I missed at most by seconds."

"You think this was intended for you," I said.

"The coincidence is striking. The kitchen was my destination."

I wouldn't have used as strong a word as "striking," but it was worth noting. I asked, "So what was the point?"

"Why communicate with me in such a manner?"

"Yeah," I said. "Why not rattle a photograph, or turn the TV on to a baseball game? Wouldn't either of those have been more direct? What's the message here?"

Roger shook his head. "I can't say. Given that your vision was interrupted, perhaps there was more to come that would have explained what you saw. It could be you were seeing the place Ted is."

"The bardo?"

"It's possible."

"Is that what it looks like?"

"There aren't any photographs of it."

"Well, I hope not," I said. "If it's cold enough to freeze the windows like that, how cold would it be for anyone walking around in it?"

"All the more reason to help Ted depart it."

No argument there. Roger stayed in the kitchen and helped me prepare the red curry and some jasmine rice. We ate a mostly silent dinner. Roger was disappointed to have missed the latest weirdness. You didn't have to be especially observant to read it in the half-hearted way he picked at his meal. He was never a huge fan of Thai food, but he usually made a better effort than this. Maybe he was thinking about the scene I'd described to him. I was.

 

I wasn't interested in debating Roger's explanation, because I was still processing the experience, but I wasn't inclined to agree with him, either. If anything, Roger's account only underlined my feeling that there was more going on here than he recognized or was willing to recognize—underlined, and put in all caps and bold, besides. None of what we'd been involved with so far was what you'd expect from the situation Roger had come up with. Not that there's a guidebook for this stuff, but—look, when I was little, my grandma, my mother's mother, told me a story. She was watching me and we got to talking about ghosts. I don't remember what started the conversation, probably a story she told me. Grandma was a great one for stories, all the classics, and a whole book full of strange ones that I only ever heard from her. "The Boy Who Cheated the Sun"; "The Mirror's Dilemma"; "Veronica and the Hungry House." Obviously, she made up that last one for me. I think she invented them all. They were great, crazy. It's a shame she never wrote them down. She would have made a fortune.

Anyway, after some story or another, I declared to Grandma that I, for one, did not believe in ghosts. She looked at me very seriously and asked me why I'd want to say a thing like that. Because ghosts were stupid, I said. After telling me not to call anything stupid, it wasn't a nice word, Grandma said that she believed in ghosts, which was kind of a shock. I was at the age where I was trying to figure out what was real in the stories I heard, and, in general, Grandma was pretty straightforward. She didn't say anything about Santa or the Easter Bunny, but I learned from her that the Tooth Fairy was Mom and Dad's generosity, and that leprechauns were festive decorations for St. Patrick's. So when she threw the weight of her opinion behind ghosts, they immediately gained substance.

I wasn't willing to let it go at that, though; I asked her, "How come you believe in ghosts, Grandma? Did you ever see one?"

She shook her head up and down. "Oh yes," she said, "I did." That admission alone was almost enough to make me wet my pants. I didn't want to ask any more—what I'd learned already would be enough to give me nightmares for years—but I couldn't help myself. In for a penny and all that. "What did the ghost look like?" I asked.

"Oh, I shouldn't be telling you this," she said. "What will your mother say? Let's play a game, instead."

"No," I said, stamping my foot. "I want to hear what the ghost looked like."

"Temper," Grandma said, waving her finger, then, "I don't want to scare you."

We were way past that, but I said, "I'm not scared, really. Tell me."

"Please."

"Please."

"All right." I'm sure she must have known how scared I was. I think she realized that if she didn't tell me something definite, my imagination would run amok. She said, "When I was a girl your age, I was very close to my grandma, too. My daddy had gone to heaven, and Grandma Jane—that's what I called her—came over a lot to help us. We were great pals. And then, when I was a bit older, Grandma Jane got very sick and she went up to heaven, too."

"You mean she died?"

"Yes, darling, she died. I was very unhappy when she did, and I'm afraid I acted like a very bad girl for a little while."

Grandma bad was an oxymoron. I asked, "What did you do?"

"I wouldn't do what my mommy told me," she said, "and I would slam doors and run around the house and not say, 'Please,' or 'Thank you.' I was not very nice at all.

"One day," she went on, "I was an especially bad girl, so bad that I was sent to my room with no dinner. I screamed and I yelled and I jumped up and down on my bed and threw my toys all over the place."

"Grandma," I said.

"I know," she said. "There was a picture of Grandma Jane on my bureau, in front of the mirror. It was a picture from when she was a young woman. It was very old, and it was in a heavy frame made out of a metal called pewter, which looked like silver. While I was misbehaving, that picture started to shake—just a little at first, and then a lot. The picture shook and danced on my bureau and it made an awful racket as it did."

"What did you do?"

"I screamed," Grandma said, and laughed, which I thought was strange. "I screamed and sat down right there on my bed and watched that picture shake and fall over—bang!—on the bureau.

"And that was when I saw her. I looked in my mirror, and there was my grandma, standing behind me wearing her favorite dress. She was not happy. One look at her face, and I could see how upset she was with me. I turned around to her—"

"And?" I breathed.

"There was no one there. She'd only come for a moment, to tell me to pull up my socks and start behaving. From that day on, I was a much better girl."

"Did you ever see your grandma again?" I asked.

"No," she said. "She was the only ghost I ever saw, but see her I did. Your Great-aunt Eleanor—that's Grandma's younger sister—she said she saw Grandma Jane several times. I don't want you to worry though, darling. You're not going to see any ghosts."

"You did," I said.

"Yes, but I was being very bad. You're a good girl."

"Was Great-aunt Eleanor bad?"

Grandma smiled. "Your Great-aunt Eleanor was a lot of things. Don't worry about her."

That was that. Until everything with Roger, I'd never been part of anything even remotely supernatural, much less felt or seen a ghost. At Penrose, I had known a couple of people who told strange stories. There was this one girl from Long Island who talked about a haunted campground. All the counselors were supposed to have killed the campers while they slept. But you heard those when we were sitting around at two a.m. drinking and trying to freak each other out. Even that story, though—it was pretty straightforward. Apparently, there was a spot on the road leading out to the former camp where, if you drove past early in the morning, your car would stall. You had to be there at something like quarter-to-five, which, of course, was the time local legend had assigned to the massacre. No matter what you did, your car would not restart for a solid ten minutes, which was how long it had taken the counselors to slaughter every last kid. If you stepped out of your car to check the engine, you'd notice that your doors were covered in the undersized handprints of children. No one stayed out of their car to see what came next.

I never really believed the story. The handprints were a nice touch, but when I asked the girl who told it if it was true—this was a couple of days later, when our respective hangovers had long since subsided—she got very offended and walked away from me, which I took as a tacit confession she'd invented the whole thing. I was at a couple more parties where she repeated it, and the specifics remained pretty consistent, but I'd already written it off as fabrication. Later, I wasn't so sure, and wondered if she'd walked away because she was insulted at my questioning her honesty. I don't always put things in the nicest way.

The point I'm trying to make is—you could say these stories, and a few more besides, are like templates. Most ghost stories you hear fall into one of these two categories: either a single, relatively unambiguous sighting and/or occurrence, or a repeated action. The picture dances and Grandma sees her grandmother giving her that look, "Shape up," or the one hundredth car stalls at the exact same spot and time and little handprints decorate it. I know it sounds contradictory to talk about the paranormal having rules, or tendencies. But you don't run into people telling the kind of story that Roger and I were in.

We had a series of events that didn't fit the available models of supernatural experience. There was one more thing, however, and that was my grandmother's connecting the apparition of a ghost to how good or bad you were. Yes, I know it was a ploy to insure I behaved myself—and boy, did it work; no kid walked straighter and narrower than I did—at the same time, Grandma's story appeared to give the connection some weight. And here was Roger, who by his own admission had done a bad thing, had rejected his only son. Maybe it was all the Hawthorne I'd assimilated, but I was increasingly convinced that what we were undergoing was the end result of Roger's—Hawthorne would have called it his sin, and I didn't know that that word didn't fit. Roger's words—his curse had broken something—I don't know how to phrase it—they'd knocked things out of alignment, seriously out of alignment, and now we were paying the price for it. He had asked for blood to drink, and it would only be so long before it was served up for him, steaming hot in a glass with a jagged edge.

I realize this sounds like so much magical thinking. I'm sure that's what Dr. Hawkins would have diagnosed. Later that night, after we'd put away the dishes and gone through to the living room to watch TV, I laughed at the thought that here I was, back from my trip to the psychiatrist's, not only supporting Roger's ideas, but adding fuel to the fire. What else could I do? Even if I had been a good enough liar to fool Roger—which I wasn't—how had there been enough time for me to recover from what I'd seen outside the kitchen windows and invent a compelling lie? If I'd thought there was any substance to Dr. Hawkins's analysis, I guess I would have made the attempt. Telling him was proof that I had chosen to go along with him, no matter where we were headed.

 

The next week I spent in a state of high expectation. Not only did the house still tingle there at the edge of my skin, ever-ready to race from whisper to roar; now, it threatened to open to another space, to a place I could see. For three or four days, I was catching things out of the corners of my eyes—standing off to one side or the other, climbing a staircase, flashing past a window. I jumped every time, and, naturally, when I whipped my head around to look at them, there was nothing there. I kept Roger updated, but these apparitions owed their existence more to stress than the supernatural, since they wavered in and out of existence without any change in my sensation of the house.

As for Roger, his project had entered a new phase. He had cleared every last book, every last paper from the table in the center of his office, and was in the process of constructing a scale model of the neighborhood in Kabul where Ted had been killed. He studied his maps of the city for a solid day before trying to reproduce them from memory, first on a legal pad, then, when he was confident he'd memorized the layout, on the tabletop in colored chalk. The streets were yellow, the positions of various buildings orange, blue, and green, the spot where Ted died red, a red circle. Having copied the map to his satisfaction, Roger started filling in the divisions on the table with plastic buildings he'd special-ordered from a war-gaming site. The majority of them were one or two stories high, plain, dun-colored buildings most of which, Roger said, were residential. The exception was a three-storey structure that Roger said had been a movie theater before the Taliban had come to power and banned everything. "This is the place," Roger said, tapping the toy theater with a pen. His reading glasses perched on top of his head. "This is the spot from which the reports agree the rocket-propelled grenade was launched." Once he'd placed the final building, plus a row of tiny plastic trees he'd bought from another online site, I thought he was finished. There wasn't much to say. He'd been thorough and exact.

At the end of the week, when I wasn't leaping at every shadow anymore, a small, heavy package arrived for Roger via UPS. I signed for it, and brought it up to the office. When he saw the return address—Chicago—he said, "Finally!"

"What is it?" I asked. He wouldn't tell me. "You'll have to see," was the best I could get.

The package was a heavy cardboard box in which thirteen small figures had been carefully packed, individually bubblewrapped and then slotted into a styrofoam frame. Roger removed all the figures from the frame before unwrapping them, deliberately picking off the pieces of tape that sealed them into their plastic cocoons. What he uncovered were lead soldiers, each one no more than two inches high. They looked Afghan, like mujahidin. Each one was in his own pose, this one at attention, this one relaxed, this one with his gun ready to fire. They'd been painted with a remarkable attention to detail. No two were the same. Their coats and pants were faded, their tiny faces sunburned, their beards full. I couldn't tell for sure, but if I squinted, it looked as if there was writing on some of their guns.

There was only one figure that wasn't a fighter, a model of an old man wearing a striped red and yellow robe. His hair and beard were white. I knew this was the man who'd run out to Ted's patrol, with whom Ted had been trying to talk when the RPG had found them both.

"Aren't they something?" Roger said. "There's a fellow in Chicago, and this is what he does for a living. You fill out an extensive questionnaire, and then he procures the appropriate models and paints them to your specifications. He has clients all over the world, as far away as Japan." He picked up one of the figures and studied it. "What care," he said. He did that with each of the models, held it up for inspection and pronounced it acceptable. The old man came last. As Roger examined it, his lip curled.

Once he was satisfied with his purchase, Roger began placing the fighters on the table, arranging them first in a ragged line up the center of his scale-model street. "There had been rumors of Taliban holdouts at work in the city, possibly planning an attack on Karzai. Ted and his fellows were sent out to investigate."

I was confused. "Wait a minute," I said. "Aren't these guys," I pointed to the mujahidin, "the Taliban?"

"This is Ted's patrol."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes. They were Special Forces, which means they tried to live in-country like the men they were supposed to be fighting with. Call it anthropological warfare. They grew beards, wore turbans, local dress. This was supposed to allow them greater freedom of movement."

"Oh. Okay." I remembered the photo of Ted in Afghan dress, reading Dickens. "Go on."

"They moved like this, close enough to hear each other's voices, but sufficiently spread-out to minimize the chances of more than one of them being hit at once." At the end of the street was the square, the movie theater to its left. Roger studied the figures, then started picking them up and transferring them to the open space. "They came to this square," he said, "and they proceeded into it. Had they suspected danger, they would have been more cautious, kept closer to the cover of the buildings. As it was, they knew of no reason not to walk straight across; although where the street emptied into the square, one man lingered. He might have seen something. From his spot, he might have been able to catch the movement at the top of the movie theater—he was scanning the space in front of him, the tops of the buildings as well as their windows and doors, and he might have been able to raise the alarm had it not been for the distraction of this man." Roger set the model of the old man down on the right-hand side of the square, at the entrance to an alley. "He comes running out, waving his hands and yelling," Roger slid the figure across the table. "Instantly, all eyes are on him—and all guns, too." He gave each of the soldiers a quarter-turn, so that they were facing the old man. His hand moved to the third soldier in line. "Ted approached him." Roger slid the model toward the figure of the old man, until they were practically touching. He'd positioned them inside the red circle he'd drawn on the table. "His gun was at the ready, but it is my impression he did not judge the man especially threatening, or he would have maintained his position in the line. The man was as dangerous as any sacrificial animal is. While Ted attempted to converse with him, the attack began."

Roger pointed at the roof of the movie theater. "Its opening salvo was the rocket-propelled grenade, fired from here." He traced a line in the air from the theater roof to the figures of Ted and the old man. His finger hovered above them, then knocked them over. They clunked on the table. "This attack was followed by machine gun fire from several positions. Here," he touched a building beside the theater, "here," one across from it, "and here," a building between those two, opposite the place where the soldiers entered the square. "Obviously, the plan was to establish overlapping fields of fire, creating a killing zone. However, the assailants made a fatal error. Rather than positioning themselves on the rooftops of these buildings, like their friend with the RPG, they chose to fire from street-level, out of windows. I presume these men must have thought these stations would work to their advantage; they did not. Their positions significantly reduced each shooter's choice of targets and field of fire. While initially they succeeded in wounding two of the patrol," Roger touched a pair of figures near the line's center, "both were still able to use their weapons. The troops dropped to the ground, with the exception of this fellow," Roger pointed to the figure at the entrance to the square, "who had identified the theater roof as the source of the RPG and was firing upon it. He killed that assailant almost immediately. The others took longer."

Roger's face was distant and drawn. "I've not yet established the precise order of events for the remainder of the battle. I am also unsure of the exact number of attackers. Five men were killed: the one who fired the RPG; one in each of these positions," Roger gestured to the buildings on either side of the square, "and two here," the remaining building. "But there may have been others who fled when they saw that their plan to assassinate an entire American patrol had gone awry. From the moment the grenade is launched, the fight lasts approximately sixteen minutes. It ends when two of the soldiers throw hand grenades at the last attackers, the two in the same spot. Anywhere from one to two minutes after that, the reinforcements the patrol had summoned at the beginning of the firefight arrive. They will spend the rest of the night going through every building in the immediate vicinity, taking away half a dozen men for questioning. Their interrogations will prove fruitless. No one will know anything.

"As for Ted," Roger's gaze strayed to the red circle and the figures tipped over inside it. "During the first few moments of the attack, one of Ted's fellows crawls over to where he lies. He checks for a pulse, breathing, and finds neither. Subsequent examination by the Medical Examiner will conclude that Ted's death was instantaneous. All indications are that he never knew what happened to him. Nor did the man who ran out to him, the Judas goat." Roger's voice hardened. "That man makes me crave the existence of the hell of my childhood, for no other reason than that there be a place of sufficient and unending torture for him. No family came forth to claim him. He was buried in a pauper's grave. I would have been happy had he been left where he was, food for dogs."

My ears were practically ringing from the stutter of machine guns, my eyes and nose stinging from the pungent gunpowder and charred flesh. I couldn't help noticing the figure Roger had selected to represent Ted. It wasn't the fighter standing at attention, or the one holding his gun casually. To stand in for his son, he had chosen a figure in a firing stance, its legs spread, its gun held up to its cheek. If you scrutinized its face—which I did, later, after Roger went down to order dinner and I said I had to use the bathroom—if you looked closely, you could see that the figure was sighting down the barrel of its gun, one eye closed, its brow lowered in concentration. Maybe the choice had been accidental, but when I thought about the care Roger had taken unsealing each soldier and positioning it on the table, I knew it hadn't. I could imagine Dr. Hawkins's diagnosis of his selection—of the whole set-up. Scanning her legal pad, she would say, "It's an obvious attempt by Roger to bring the circumstances of Ted's death under his control by reducing them to a size he can handle and distancing them through his use of the models. The figure Roger has picked to be Ted is ambiguous. It is dynamic, performing an action we associate with soldiers. It is also aggressive, hostile. Roger's selection of it reflects his own continued ambivalence about his relationship with Ted; the figure's aiming at him suggests Roger taking aim at himself, putting himself, so to speak, in the crosshairs." "You are a stranger to me." I replaced the soldier inside the red circle, next to the old man, the generic Afghan, and went downstairs to join Roger.

 

Everything Roger was doing in his office—the research, the maps, now the model—you couldn't say any of it was making him happier, or more relaxed. Just the opposite: he was radioactive with stress; if there'd been a Geiger counter for tension, his readings would have bounced the needles right off the scale. Whatever room he was in, the air crackled. It must have been exhausting, to be wound that tight all the time. I couldn't understand how he kept going. I mean, they say your body can adjust to anything, but Good Lord. You would have thought that letting me in on what he was up to, sharing his ideas about Ted with me—and more importantly, me not laughing at him, me listening sympathetically, treating him seriously—you would have thought that would have taken the edge off his stress, dulled it, but no such luck. I was more and more sure that, for all his apparent openness, there was something Roger was keeping back from me. In the days after he showed me the model, I asked him about it on a couple of occasions. "Honey," I said, "is there anything you haven't told me?" Each time, he gave the same answer, "No, nothing." If I persisted, pressed the matter, he turned defensive, snapped, "I believe I have answered your question," which, needless to say, only made my hunch stronger.

If working in his office didn't alleviate his stress, what it allowed Roger was a way to focus that tension, direct this superabundance of nervous energy at a single point, knowing Ted's death as thoroughly as possible. It was dangerous, because Ted's death lay thick in the midst of volatile emotions Roger had yet to work through. Admitting his mistake in disowning Ted had been an important first step, but it had opened the door on a storehouse full of guilt, regret, and anger. By playing his attention over those feelings, he risked sending the whole structure up in flames.

All the same, the long hours Roger spent laboring over who in Ted's patrol had taken aim at which of their attackers, what the order of their assailants' deaths had been, what the effects of a rocket-propelled grenade on the human body were—they made Roger seem together, coherent. The benefits of obsession, I suppose. I thought that, when he finally confronted Ted's death head-on, as the irreplaceable loss it was, that coherence would help him to do what he had called his work of mourning. Maybe Dr. Hawkins had been wrong. Maybe some good could come out of his time in his office.

There was one, relatively minor improvement in Roger's behavior—he started coming to bed at night. He didn't sleep when I did. Every night, I drifted off to the steady sound of him turning the pages of whatever book he was reading. Awake or asleep, it was nice to have him there beside me. I tried not to make a big deal out of it, the first night I returned from the bathroom to find him sitting there, his book propped on his knees; I climbed into bed, leaned over and gave him a quick kiss, and picked up my own book from its place on my nightstand. Actually, I was more surprised the following night, when I entered the room and there he was, again. I couldn't help myself, "Roger," I said, "you're here."

"Yes," he said.

I wanted to ask, "Why?" but didn't think that would come out right, so I settled for "Good," and left it at that. When he was waiting for me the third night, and then the fourth, I understood that something had changed. He had decided that this was where he should be at this time, here with me. I didn't realize how happy this made me until about a week had passed. Finding Roger reading yet again, the half-glasses he'd bought at the pharmacy balanced on the end of his nose, his hair a mess—he let it go at least a month after it needed cut; before Ted had died, I used to tease him about developing crazy professor hair—my heart lifted, the way it does sometimes when happiness catches you unawares. For an instant, every detail of the scene in front of me was almost painfully clear: the lines on Roger's forehead, his wedding ring gold against his skin, the book he was reading, the edges of its cover worn a lighter shade of red, the places on the sheet where Roger weighted it taut, the yellow light of the reading lamp casting shadows across his face, his chest, the bed. It wasn't just that I remembered how much I loved him. I realized that love was even deeper than I'd known, not in spite of all the madness of recent days, but—almost because of it. The feeling was surprising, a little bit overwhelming, and in the grip of it, I did something I hadn't done in ages. I pulled my nightgown over my head, pushed down my panties, and walked over to Roger. He didn't complain when I took the book from his hands and placed it on his nightstand. He was already removing his glasses. We made love for the first time in weeks, and it was like rediscovering this person you knew years ago.

Can I tell you something crazy? I thought I might get pregnant. In fact, I hoped it. The timing was right. We weren't using any protection. Yes, given the situation, how could I have considered such a move, let alone risked it? While everything was happening, and for a short time after—when we were suddenly making up for lost time, making love the way we had when we'd first gotten together: doing it in the living room first thing in the morning, the kitchen after lunch, the third-floor stairs on the way to dinner; testing the beds in the guestrooms, the desk in the library, random chairs throughout the house; doing things that would have made the guy who wrote the Kama Sutra blush—I was filled with such hope. All at once, our problems, the black cloud we'd been living under since Ted had been killed, seemed more manageable. The bad things—Roger's disowning Ted, his heart attack, the miscarriage, Ted's death, whatever it was that was happening to us, this haunting—I was sure that if I were to have a baby, it would balance all of that, tip the scales in the other direction, even. The weirdness pressing in on me—if I were pregnant, full of life, I thought I'd be able to push back, send good energy streaming out along the very same channels that poured strangeness on me. Roger didn't ask what we were doing. If he didn't know the ultimate purpose of our lovemaking, that didn't stop him from participating enthusiastically. And he must have realized there was at least a chance something could happen. How different, finally to want to get pregnant.

Obviously, I didn't. I'd never believed those people who tell you that it isn't that easy to conceive a child. I guess all the safe-sex lectures in high school and college really did the trick. I'd become pregnant before without any difficulty, which had seemed to bear out the warnings of those teachers trying to hide their embarrassment as they talked about condoms and spermicidal lubricant. After my period showed up on time, though, that pregnancy seemed more of a fluke than I'd appreciated. Opening the door to the bathroom closet for a maxi-pad, I was disappointed. Funny how, after years of avoiding and fearing pregnancy like it was the plague, your attitude can change so quickly and completely. But my disappointment, sharp enough to blur my eyes with tears, was mixed with the tiniest drop of relief. Things were—at that point, I wasn't sure what they were.

 

At about three the morning my period arrived, I'd come out of a deep sleep to the sight of Roger sitting on the edge of the bed, his back to me. The room was dark—his reading lamp was off—but the windows admitted enough light for me to see that there was something different about him. The way he was sitting, the position of his shoulders, head—there was something odd about it. From being ready to turn over and slip back into sleep, I took a step in the other direction, not completely awake yet, but less asleep. I was about to speak, ask him what was going on, when he stood. For a moment, he remained there by the side of the bed, swaying slightly, and I understood. He was sleepwalking. Sleepstanding right then, but you know what I mean. Now I was awake. I raised myself up on an elbow. Roger turned to the door and walked out of it. I didn't know what to do. I'd never dealt with anyone sleepwalking. You weren't supposed to wake them, were you? That was supposed to drive them insane. Or was that an old wives' tale? From the hall, I heard Roger walking towards the third-floor stairs. I decided I better follow him. I wasn't sure how well sleepwalkers did on stairs.

When I leaned my head out into the hall, there was no one there. The third-floor stairs hadn't sounded their chorus of creaks, so it was as if Roger had walked right out of the house. Don't be ridiculous, I told myself, he went into a room, that's all. Maybe he had to use the bathroom.

The bathroom was empty, and anyway, his footsteps had sounded as if they were taking him further down the hall. I checked the guest room on the other side of the bathroom, then crossed the hall and peered in the library. Empty, both of them. That left two rooms, the remaining guest room, next to the library, and Ted's old room. I didn't bother with the other guest room. This wasn't a horror movie; there was no need to draw out the suspense. I found Roger standing in the middle of Ted's room, gazing at a blank wall. I paused at the doorway, watching him watching bare space. His face was slack, almost confused-looking. His lips were moving—he was speaking, his voice too low for me to hear. It was unnerving—it was downright creepy to see him there and not there, you know? When he was finished studying whatever he'd seen there, he did an about-face and headed for the door, still murmuring. I retreated into the hall, expecting him to turn left and return to our room. Instead, he turned right, to the third-floor stairs, which he began to climb with no apparent difficulty. I followed half a dozen steps behind. He reached the third floor and walked along it to his office. I don't know what I thought I'd see when I reached the door—Roger holding the figure for Ted in his hand, something like that. I didn't expect to confront Roger. His eyes were dull, his lips moving. I yelped, stepped back. No, he wasn't waiting for me. He was looking at something on the wall next to the doorway, something hung at roughly my height. Once I'd started breathing again, I tried to recall what occupied that space. I could have squeezed past Roger and seen for myself, but I didn't know if I could do so without waking him, which I was still nervous about doing. I didn't think it would drive him insane—any more so—but I wasn't feeling especially lucky. From where I was, I could see the maps draping the bookcases opposite me. Visualizing the place Roger was staring at, all I could bring to mind were more maps.

We must have held our respective positions for a half-hour, forty-five minutes, Roger totally absorbed in whatever was in front of him, me, now that the adrenaline rush had subsided, struggling to stay awake. All the while, he kept murmuring, a steady stream of sound that never grew loud enough for me to separate into sense. A couple of times I almost fell asleep. My lids grew heavy; my eyes closed; for half a second, I dozed; then my head tilted forward and I jolted awake. I should have gone back to bed. Roger appeared in no immediate danger of harming himself—he'd proved he could handle the stairs—and there would be plenty of time during the day for me to discover what had so fascinated his sleepwalking self. But I was concerned—I was curious, and my curiosity wouldn't let me return to the comfort of bed just yet. Watching Roger in this state—it was like I'd been given a window into his psyche, or—what it really was, was as if his unconscious had stepped out to take a walk around. In the process, the house—the rooms in the house had gone from rooms to symbols—everything had acquired a new level of meaning.

Finally, when the sky outside was starting to lighten, Roger left his office and returned to bed. Within seconds of his head sinking into his pillow, he was breathing deeply. I saw him safely to bed, then dashed back up the stairs. Inside the office, I fumbled for the light switch. Blinking against the sudden glare, I approached the spot where Roger had been standing. The wall beside the door was papered in maps, in eight smaller maps—each one about the size of a piece of printer paper—taped together at the edges to form a larger map. The individual maps showed streets, buildings, even trees, and were full of Roger's handwriting, of notes made in the typical assortment of different-colored inks, and of other writing, what looked like mathematical symbols, pi over delta, that kind of thing. It was a map of the square in Kabul. There was the same red circle Roger had drawn on the table, taking up almost all of one of the smaller maps and ringed by more notes than were on any of the other maps. This was what Roger had been staring at; although, as I came closer, I saw something else—something shiny inside the red circle. I drew closer. It was a mirror, a small, rectangular mirror like you find in men's toiletries bags, for shaving. It had been glued to the center of the red circle, so that, in looking into the circle, you were looking at yourself. There was no writing next to the mirror, no writing at all inside the circle, only white space and then the fall into that silvery plane. Uneasy, I stared at it. I didn't know what this was, but it was more than the effort to comprehend the circumstances of Ted's death. What more, though, I couldn't say, and it didn't take much longer than five minutes in front of this . . . diagram for me to know that I could stay there for another hour and I wouldn't be any closer to understanding the significance of what I was seeing than I was now. If I wanted to know what this meant, I would have to ask Roger.

Which was what I did that morning, forcing myself to crawl out of bed after him a few hours later. I waited until we were seated at the kitchen table with our coffee and cereal, and before Roger could open the day's Times, I said, "You know, you were sleepwalking last night." I was too tired to lead up to it with small talk.

Roger said, "I beg your pardon?"

"Sleepwalking," I said, "about three this morning."

"No," Roger said, setting the paper down.

"Yes," I said. "You woke me up getting out of bed. First you went into Ted's old room, then you went upstairs to the office. Then you came down and went back to bed."

"You followed me."

"I wanted to make sure you didn't hurt yourself."

"Why didn't you wake me?"

"Because," I said, "I heard you're not supposed to do that."

"Isn't that a myth?"

"I didn't want to take a chance."

"What did I do?"

"You stared. In Ted's room, you stared at the wall. In the office, you spent about an hour looking at that map by the door—the one with the mirror on it."

Roger said, "Hmmph."

"Do you remember any of it?"

"Not a thing."

"I took a look at that map myself," I said, "after you were asleep. Honey, what is that?"

Roger took a mouthful of cereal. "That map," he said after he swallowed, "is my attempt to bring together and coordinate the information I have gathered on Ted's death—every last piece of it. I've tried to connect all related facts with one another."

"And the symbols—the math?"

"In addition to understanding the event historically—narratively, as it were—I've also tried to comprehend it mathematically, to know the various angles of fire, the velocities of the weapons employed, the energy released. It's another means of apprehending the situation."

"Okay," I said. "What's the mirror for?"

He must have known I'd ask about that, but he blushed anyway. "I don't know."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean that setting that mirror on the map was an action I felt compelled to perform, but for reasons that remain unclear to me."

Now it was my turn to say, "Hmmph." I asked, "Where did you find it?"

"In a box of Ted's things," Roger said. "On his fourteenth birthday, I gave him a shaving kit. He'd been shaving with an electric razor for a few months by then, but I fancied I was upholding something of a Croydon family tradition. When I reached fourteen, my father presented me with a shaving mug and brush, which he told me his father had done for him on his fourteenth birthday. It was one of the few kindnesses the old man did me. In keeping with the tradition, I presented Ted with a kit that contained a mug, brush, soap cake, razor and pack of razor blades, and a travel mirror. He was less than enthusiastic about the gift. He perked up when I said I had one more thing for him, and followed me into the bathroom, but his face fell when I told him I was going to teach him to use the kit I'd given him.

"To put it mildly, that was a mistake. Ted refused to hold the razor properly, so in the process of scraping it across his neck and chin he opened dozens of cuts, some of them quite deep. There was blood everywhere, all over his shirt, the counter, the mug, the mirror. I ruined one of Joanne's good hand towels stanching the flow. When the worst was past, Ted stalked out of the bathroom, leaving me to wipe the spatter from the counter, the mug, the mirror. I placed the kit in his room, but he made a point of using the electric razor for the rest of his time in the house.

"I discovered my old gift when I went searching for the photographs of Ted. To be honest, I'm not sure how it came to be in my possession. I brought it to the house because," Roger's voice wavered, "because it had touched him, once. I kept the kit in one of the desk drawers in my office. Every now and again, I'd take it out, turn the mug over in my hands, run the brush over my palm, play sunlight off the mirror." He shrugged. "Almost the moment I started work on this particular map, I knew the mirror would go in its center. Having presented itself to me, the notion would not be denied. On the one hand, having something of Ted's included in what I was constructing seemed somehow appropriate. On the other, I was concerned that I was indulging in a kind of fetishism. My concerns aside, into the center it went.

"So much for the mirror," Roger said. "Well?"

"I don't know," I said. "If you hadn't been staring at it while you were asleep, I would have said it was no big deal."

He crossed his arms. "Since I was—"

"Since you were, I still don't know. You were in Ted's room first, and you spent a long time on the wall in there, too. Don't get me wrong. I think there's something to this. I think maybe spending so much time on Ted's death is taking its toll on you."

"It is necessary. If Ted is to exit the bardo—"

"I understand," I said. "I understand why you're doing it. All I'm saying is that doing it so much may be more than you can handle."

That was all there was to the conversation. Roger said he would have to consider the matter, and we finished breakfast in silence. Once he was done, it was upstairs for a shower, and the third floor after that.

 

So when I felt my period later that day, and realized I wasn't pregnant—up till then, I'd been in this kind of in-between state, not sure if I was or wasn't. I hadn't gone so far as to buy a home-test, because I didn't want to jinx anything and I thought it would be nice for Roger and me to go for it together, but I had found the baby name book I'd bought for my previous pregnancy and flipped through it. I'd thought about a nursery, too. There were plenty of rooms going unused in the house. The guest room closest to ours, on the other side of the bathroom, seemed like it would make a good choice. We could paint it pale green, put down a new rug, get a rocking chair—one of those gliders. Pregnancy was still a series of largely disconnected images for me, like pictures in a magazine, and when I understood that that was all it was going to be—the home-test would remain unbought; the baby name book unread; the guest room undecorated—disappointment stabbed me. I climbed the stairs to the second-floor bathroom—I'd been reading in the front parlor—with tears hot in my eyes. By the time I was opening the bathroom closet, my cheeks were wet. In the midst of that sadness, however, that sharp regret at opportunity missed, there was relief—which at the time felt like such a betrayal, yet another act of treason, as if I were admitting that I hadn't really wanted this, that I wasn't totally committed to it. For a second, my sense of my own—unworthiness, I guess, forced a series of sobs out of me.

I knew, though, I knew that wasn't it. Had I been pregnant, I would have given it everything I had. But Roger—things with Roger were worrisome. The sleepwalking, of course; the mirror didn't thrill me, either; and both of those occurred against the background of the Mutual Weirdness, which we seemed no closer to understanding—and which seemed less mutual and increasingly focused on yours truly. They say that if you wait until life is perfect to have kids, you'll never do it. Fair enough, but a child deserved better than this.

 

For a week and a half, not a night went by without me waking up at three a.m.—it was always the same time—to Roger seated on the edge of the bed. Then he was up on his feet and away. His journeys—that was how I thought of them—had two parts. The first took him to some place in the house—and once outside it—related to Ted. Granted, that was pretty much the entire building, but there were spots where the associations were especially strong. Ted's childhood room, obviously, but the third floor, too, where he'd moved as a teenager—we climbed there a couple of times. The living room was a favorite, as well. I think because it was where they had watched baseball together. Wherever the first half of his sleepwalking led Roger, the second half concluded in the same place, his office, him standing in front of that map—to which he added fresh notes every day—gazing into Ted's old mirror. Some nights, he made his rounds in a little under forty minutes. Once, he didn't wander back to bed until the sun had risen and daylight was pouring through the windows. I rose with him every night, driven by the combination of concern and curiosity; although, as he successfully navigated the house, the concern pretty much dropped away, while the curiosity deepened with each new destination.

A few hours later, I would spend breakfast narrating his previous night's perambulations to him. It got to the point he no longer waited for me to raise the subject. While I was pouring my coffee, he'd say, "So, where did my nocturnal odyssey lead last night?" You could hear the attempt at good humor in his voice—and I did my best to respond in kind—but immediately underneath it you heard the anxiety. However cavalier he wanted to appear, Roger was worried by his sleepwalking. Not worried enough to take my advice and ease up on his time in the office. (I didn't even bother suggesting he see a doctor.) Every other day or so, a new envelope or package would arrive. I swear, the things you can find on eBay. There were eight-by-ten photos of the square in Kabul that linked up side to side to form a panoramic view of it. Roger hung them right around the office so that, standing in the middle of the room, it was as if you were looking through a window in it out at the square. There was a packet of brown dirt that a man in Maine swore came from Kabul. Roger carefully scissored one end off and poured the dirt up and down the streets of the tabletop model in a fine stream, saving most of it for the square. There was a tiny box that held a fragment of scorched metal swaddled in a cotton cloth. I asked Roger what it was. He said, "A piece of a rocket-propelled grenade."

"Like the one that killed Ted?"

"As far as I've been able to ascertain," Roger said, examining the fragment, "yes, it's an exact match. The RPG-7."

That was when I decided we were getting out of that house, if not for good, then at least for a week or two. Accompanying Roger on his sleepwalking tours had taken its toll. After three nights, I was exhausted; by a week, I was dead on my feet; at a week and a half, I was the living dead. Maybe that was why the sight of him holding that little piece of metal as if it were a relic—well, I didn't know whether to shriek with laughter or sob my eyes out.

 

Something else had happened, earlier that same day. Along with Roger's latest package, the mailman had brought a letter for me. Roger left it, along with the bills and the circulars, on the kitchen table, where I found it when I went to see what I could scrounge for lunch. There was no return address; although the postmark was Provincetown, MA. The handwriting was frail and spiky, an old person's script. I thought I should recognize it, but it wasn't until I slid my thumb under the flap, eased the envelope open, and slid the folded sheets out that I learned why. The letter was from Viola Belvedere.

Sitting at the kitchen table, seven sheets of fine paper that felt like onionskin in my hand, my heart started to pound. Viola's writing covered both sides of each sheet from top to bottom, running right out to the edges of the paper. The letter was dated four days ago. My head was throbbing. I put the pages down, and went to the fridge for a glass of iced-tea. I drank half of it staring out the kitchen window, flashing back to the afternoon the window had frosted over. I looked at the kitchen table, where the pages lay, one on top of the other, the envelope beneath them. My heart wouldn't stop pounding. I wasn't sure what I expected from Viola, but it wasn't idle chatter.

Headache worse, I resumed my seat at the table. The room—it was as if the kitchen had shrunk two sizes around me, and the rest of the house with it, as if everything wanted to see what Viola had to say. I swore I could see more out of the corners of my eyes than I had five minutes ago; the kitchen's contents crowded my vision. I raised my head, and all was as it should be.

I focused on the top sheet. "Dear Mrs. Croydon," I read. "You wrote to me some time past asking about the summer my late husband spent in what is now your house. At the time, I gave your inquiry a cursory glance. To be frank, I did not give it even that. I have grown tired of carrying the burden of my husband's fame. However much it has benefited me, I have more than repaid that debt through years of answering letter after letter from anyone with an interest in Thomas's work. Far too often, my diligence has been repaid by descriptions of myself, my motives, and my effect on my husband's work that border on slander. I read everything that is written about him, you understand. Those who have not slandered me have been like vampires, returning again and again to drain information from me. The long and short of it is, I now refer all questions about Thomas's life to Professor Rice. While her biography of him makes several errors of interpretation, it is faithful to the facts of his and our lives. The professor tells me it improves her standing if I pass along the queries that come to me, so I do.

"You are not interested in my relationship with Professor Rice, I understand; you are wondering why I have changed my mind and written to you, after all. It may be that, despite my protests to the contrary, I miss my work on behalf of Thomas. He was the center of attention for so long, it was nice to have people asking me what I thought, especially scholars. But I do not think this is the case. I have no plans to answer any of the four or five dozen other letters I have received in the last few months; I have been happy to forward all of them to the professor. Your letter has nagged at me. It has resisted my efforts to dismiss it, so I have picked up my pen in hopes that a reply will satisfy it.

"I assume you have consulted Professor Rice's biography of Thomas. You know that the summer of 1953 was a difficult time for us. Thomas had not been easy in our marriage, and once our twins were born, his uneasiness increased. My cousin and her daughter moved in to help us with the babies, which made Thomas even more unhappy. His discontent was sharpened by the correspondence that had sprung up between him and an odd painter living in Greenwich Village. This man, Rudolph de Castries, contacted Thomas because he had seen one of Thomas's paintings hanging in a gallery in SoHo. I cannot recall which gallery it was. He wrote a long and admiring letter to Thomas. Thomas, who did not know de Castries's work, responded with a long letter of his own. Soon, Thomas was writing to de Castries and de Castries to him several times a week. They exchanged theories about painting, opinions of other artists, and gossip. I find men are much worse gossips than women, don't you?

"As they grew closer, our relations grew steadily more strained. I do not know if you have any children yourself, Mrs. Croydon, but if you do, you know how all-consuming their demands on you can be. My cousin and her daughter were a great help in looking after the twins, but neither of them had a very high opinion of Thomas, and they were not shy in sharing their views. Rather than sitting in the attic all hours of the day and night painting paintings no one could understand, he should be out working a proper job to support us. They would not say anything directly to Thomas, but they were adept at delivering their assessments whenever he was within earshot. I cringed when they did; at the same time, I did not stop them, because they were giving voice to sentiments I shared, at least in part.

"Thomas and I fought. Ours had always been a contentious love, but this was different. We argued fiercely and often. The last straw was a letter from de Castries I found on the dresser. This was strange, since Thomas never left his correspondence lying around. It was all filed safely away. Only later did I realize I had been intended to find it. The long and short of the letter was de Castries urging Thomas to follow his inclinations and leave me and the twins. As they had agreed, an artist could not be shackled to a family. Great art demanded a creator who was absolutely free to give himself to it, without distractions. From everything Thomas had written him about me, I would forever stand in the way of his achievements. And so on. I was devastated, and wasted no time flying up the attic to give Thomas the confrontation he so desperately wanted. The end result was him taking the suitcase he already had packed out the front door with him. He took the train from our home in Princeton into Manhattan, changing there for a train to Huguenot. De Castries had secured a room for him at what is now your house. I believe its owner was an acquaintance of his. She may have bought one of his paintings.

"Thomas stayed there for the entire summer. When I had seen him slide the suitcase out from under our bed, I had understood he intended to leave, but I had not realized for how long. I expected him back within a week, unable to stop missing me and the babies. After two weeks, I grew frantic. My cousin's declaration that another woman likely was involved did nothing to help. At last, a month after he'd left, Thomas sent a postcard informing me where he was and that he was well. I was relieved. I was also furious. I did not reply. Another postcard followed a week later. I did not answer that one, either. Next came a letter. A second arrived in four days, and a third three days after that. At first, the letters were angry, full of self-justification. Their tone quickly moderated. By summer's end, Thomas was writing me every other day or so, letters full of love and longing. He included little sketches of the house he was staying in, the views from its windows, the village he walked around in. I did not reply to any of it.

"Finally, he wrote saying that he was coming home the next Thursday. I was not there to meet him, although I sent my cousin and her daughter home the weekend before. When he knocked on the door, I opened it. He looked thinner. I had one question for him: 'Was it worth it?'

"'No,' he said.

"Satisfied, I let him in. I will not say that was the end of our troubles. He had a terrible temper, and no patience with the children. But it was the only time he left. After that summer, there were no more letters from Rudolph de Castries. A year or two later, I read of his death in the Times. From alcohol poisoning, I believe. Thomas's fortunes had improved by then. The 'Dark Feast' series had sold for more money than we had hoped. There were articles about him in Time and Life. Enough commissions came in to keep us comfortable.

"In the professor's biography, everything I have written so far is summarized in a few sentences. 'By June of 1953,' she writes, 'the stresses of Thomas and Viola's marriage had reached the point of crisis. After one fight too many, Thomas left, his destination the village of Huguenot in New York's Hudson Valley. A friend had arranged for him to stay at an old house there. During this time, the idea for the "Dark Feast" paintings came to him. When he returned to Princeton that September, he had already completed dozens of sketches, several studies in crayon and watercolor, and at least one canvas.' She makes no mention of Rudolph de Castries. I told her about his role in what happened, but as you may know, some of Thomas's papers were lost during the transit to Stanford. I suspect they are sitting in a collector's vault, accumulating value. Among the missing material were Thomas's letters from de Castries. Professor Rice contacted de Castries's biographer, but it appears he kept none of his correspondence. Since she was unable to substantiate my claim that Thomas had been in touch with de Castries with physical evidence, the professor chose to omit it. Apparently, memories are no good unless accompanied by documentation.

"I was sufficiently annoyed not to tell her that Thomas and I had spoken about that summer in 1970, the year before his death. I had no proof of that conversation, either, no tape recording or home movie, so what was the point? Really, it was pique. For the first few years after Thomas had left, I did not want to hear that summer referred to. He understood this from the start. Once or twice he let something slip out, but the look he received was enough to correct that error. As time passed, however, my curiosity grew. I could not credit that Thomas had left because he wanted to paint. He had been able to paint while he was with me. I assumed that my cousin had been correct and a woman had been involved. For a time, my suspicions fastened on the owner of the house in which he'd stayed. She was a good decade older than Thomas, but very attractive. I saw her picture in Life. In that same article, however, I learned that she had been in Europe that year, and my fears quieted. Later still, I decided there must have been someone else. I didn't know whom. It could have been someone who'd come to one of his shows. It could have been someone local he'd met pumping gas, or at the supermarket. There was a teachers' college in Huguenot; it could have been a student. Whoever she was, perhaps Thomas had planned to leave me for her and their affair had not worked out. Perhaps it had been intended to be only an affair.

"After the doctors discovered the cancer in Thomas's large intestine, I decided to ask him. I was not sure how my worst fear's being confirmed would affect me. But I could not stand the prospect of not knowing. I did not want Thomas to carry the secret of that summer to the grave with him. I would like to believe in an afterlife, but I do not. That Christmas, the right moment presented itself. The twins had gone out to visit my sister and her children. Thomas and I had the house to ourselves. I made him a whiskey sour and poured myself a large sherry, then carried them through to where he was sitting in front of the fire in the living room. By then, he was always cold. He was surprised to see the drink, but not ungrateful. We toasted the holiday. We did not say it was our last. I said I had something I wanted to ask him. I cannot imagine he had any idea what it was. It was about the summer he'd left, I said. I wanted to know if there had been another woman.

"He did not hesitate. 'No,' he said.

"In that case, what had he been doing? He smiled and said that he had been painting. The moment he had walked out the front door, he had known he would be back, so he had thrown himself into his work. He had the run of a large house. He set up easels in several of the rooms. He left pads of paper in others. When he grew tired of one idea, he moved on to another. A lot of it was junk that he had thrown out, but it had allowed him to break through to a new style. I asked him if he was sure there hadn't been a woman in the picture, so to speak. Maybe some of the canvases he'd discarded had been of her. 'Absolutely not,' he said.

"That should have been enough. It was such a relief to hear him say that there had been no one else. There was one more thing I wanted to know. 'What about Rudolph de Castries?' I asked. I had wondered why, after the two of them had been so close, Thomas had had no communication with him whatsoever once he'd returned from that summer. As you may guess, I had not been unhappy with this. Receiving a letter from him caused Thomas to withdraw from me and the babies. To be honest, after Thomas began living with us again, I had been determined to tear up any letter from Rudolph de Castries that might arrive. None had.

"At the mention of de Castries's name, Thomas grew extremely agitated. 'I had rather you not mention that man,' he said. I asked him why not. He stared at the fire for so long I assumed he was refusing to answer. I was standing to carry our empty glasses to the sink when Thomas said, 'Rudolph de Castries had a lot of ideas.'

"Yes, I said, I remembered his ideas.

"'Not that,' Thomas said, 'that was the least of it. He was a geometrist.'

"I thought this a strange word and said so. 'Do you mean he was a mathematician?' I asked.

"'Of a kind,' Thomas said. 'He had ideas about painting, about art, that were not good. At first, they excited me, because I thought I saw in them a way towards achieving something new in my work. He made pronouncements that I took as metaphors, as maxims for the artist to live and work by. They were more than that.'

"What did he mean? He shook his head. 'De Castries thought painting could accomplish much more than any one realizes. For that reason, he did not like to refer to it as painting. Sometimes he called it, "the gateway," and other times, "the quickening." His favorite term for it was "the birth canal." His uncle,' he said, and stopped.

"What about his uncle?

"'Never mind his uncle,' Thomas said. 'His uncle had some bad ideas, and he passed them on to Rudolph, who improved on them in certain ways.'

"'Did you meet him?' I asked.

"'Rudolph?' Thomas said. 'No. He was supposed to come up and spend the weekend with me, but he didn't.'

"'Did you write to him while you were at that house?'

"'For a time. Then things happened that caused me to lose faith in his idea of painting. Or rather, things happened that gave me too much faith in his ideas. Either way, I decided I had had enough of Rudolph. I wrote and told him so. There was a brief, unpleasant exchange, and I did not hear from him again.' Thomas turned his eyes from the fire to me. 'Are you thinking of buying the house I stayed in?'

"His question caught me by surprise. Although we were quite well-off by then, and no doubt could have afforded that house had we been so inclined, the thought had never crossed my mind. Why should I want to purchase the house my husband had spent his summer away from me and his children in? I said as much to Thomas, and he relaxed. 'Good, good,' he said.

"I asked him what was wrong with that house. He said, 'I fear I may have left it in worse condition than when I moved in.' This seemed ridiculous to me. Surely any damage he might have done the place would have been repaired long since. 'What damage could be,' he said.

"That was the last we spoke of that summer. Shortly thereafter, Thomas's cancer worsened, and there were more immediate things to think about than the events of seventeen years prior. In the years since my husband's death, I have reflected on our conversation that Christmas night. I am not sure how much of what Thomas said I truly understood. About ten years after we laid Thomas to rest, I became very interested in Rudolph de Castries. I spent a good deal of time in the Princeton library. Much has been written about his painting. His is the kind of work predicated on elaborate theories that academics so love. He wrote a book whose title I cannot remember. It was either Greek or Latin, and meant something like the magic of places or the magic of houses. It is dreadfully written. I will not bother expounding its contents.

"I presume you are interested in writing about Thomas's time in your house, perhaps an article for a local magazine. I have told you what I know, which I realize is not much. Thomas did not keep a diary. He said his art was all the journal he required. If your interest is more academic, then I would suggest you consider the use my husband made of Rudolph de Castries's theories. Everything I know about de Castries convinces me he was unsavory, even for an artist. Perhaps this is the real reason I did not tell Professor Rice about our Christmas conversation. As far as I know, no one has noticed the connection before now. Nonetheless, it is there. Rudolph de Castries had some influence on my husband."

Viola's letter concluded, "I wish I could explain why, after more than three decades, the memory of Thomas's final words about his summer away make me reach for my sweater. No doubt you will dismiss my reaction as an old woman's hysteria. It is not. I will not offer further assistance, as I have told you all I know. I wish you well in your endeavors."

Once I came to the end of Viola's letter, I went back to the beginning and read it a second time, then a third. The fourth and fifth reads were more skims. Far away, my headache was pounding. Here was Viola Belvedere writing—what? Was she confirming my beliefs about her husband's summer here? Or was I reading too much into her letter? I scanned it again, especially their last conversation on the subject. This de Castries seemed worth checking out. I folded the letter and replaced it in its envelope.

 

I was on my way up to the library to Google Rudolph de Castries when Roger met me at the top of the stairs to ask if I would come to his office; he had something to show me. Watching him bending over, maneuvering the fragment so that it wouldn't smudge the circle, I had to leave the room, immediately. I know, I know. After everything I'd been through in the last few weeks, to freak out over Roger's latest online purchase? You never know what your own limits are, I guess. I mean, look: their possible supernatural implications aside, Roger's activities in the office were pure desire, untrammeled by rational thought. However intrigued by them I was, I recognized that. In general, though, he was so systematic about everything it made what he was doing seem more rational—more believable. In the expression on his face as he straightened up and surveyed the model, I saw through all the research, all the model-building and mapmaking, to the heart of the matter, to my husband's raw need, to the wound of his son's death that continued to bleed deep inside him.

Mumbling something about dinner, I ran out of the office, down the stairs to the second floor, and along the hall to the stairs to the first floor. Halfway down, a tidal wave of dizziness swept over me. I thought I was about to tip over the banister. I sat down, holding onto the banister as the house swung around me. Blackness swarmed the edges of my vision. Black spots blinked in front of my eyes like messages in Morse code. I didn't lose consciousness, not exactly, but everything around me receded, as if I were at one end of a long, dark tunnel and what had been around me was at the other. I slumped back on the stairs, swooning—how Victorian, right? It wasn't as scary as I would have expected. In fact, it was surprisingly peaceful, this floating in a calm, lightless place.

In the midst of that sudden disconnect from the outside world, I was aware of the house. Rooms side by side and one on top of the other; walls inside and out; floors and ceilings; windows and doors. The sensation was no more intense than normal, but with nothing to distract me from it, I could notice that some parts of it were no longer the same. The change wasn't dramatic. With a few, notable exceptions, my connection to Belvedere House occurred at the lowest level of my perception—what I was feeling now was occurring at the lowest level of that lowest level. In places, the house was becoming thinner. I'm not talking about termites here, or dry rot; I mean the house's space was failing, losing its integrity. Not at the places you would have expected, either. Ted's childhood room was fine, but both ends of the second floor hallway weren't. At those spots—beyond them—even more faintly, more subtly, I felt movement, as if enormous things were shifting out there, swinging into position. The house was being reshaped—reconfigured—in ways I didn't understand, and that frightened me. From other parts of the house, what seemed like long tunnels stretched away so far I couldn't tell where they ended. They were empty, these tunnels, so empty, it was like they were made out of emptiness. What travels through these? I wondered, and any remaining peace I might have felt evaporated, replaced by out and out fear. I no longer wanted to be in my swoon. For that matter, I no longer wanted to be in this house. I struggled to bring myself back to consciousness, to heave myself back from wherever I was, but the swoon held me tight. I felt those empty tunnels going on and on and on, out into cold and dark. I felt them reaching to places that weren't even places, places there aren't words to describe. There was no one there—no thing—but the prospect that there would be fueled my terror.

From far away, I heard something—a voice, saying my name. For a moment, I was sure it was coming from one of those distant not-places, and I swear my heart stopped. I saw huge copies of Roger's face mouthing my name. My thoughts jumbled, Oh my God, and, They know my name, and, Stop, why won't this stop? before I realized that the voice was from someplace else, from above where I was lying on the stairs. In an instant, the world rushed back around me, Roger along with it, bending over me and saying, "Veronica? Honey, can you hear me? Veronica?"

Trying to sit up, I said, "I'm all right. I'm fine."

Roger slid his arm behind my back and helped me up. "You left in a bit of a hurry," he said. "I was on my way to lend a hand with dinner and I came upon you, collapsed here. What happened?"

"I swooned," I said.

"Why?" Roger said. "What brought this on?"

Talk about your moment of truth. What was I supposed to say? That the sight of him holding his mail-order relic had made the obsessive, wish-fulfillment nature of his work in his office painfully clear to me, and that was why I'd run out, into—what? Funny—there had been a time when I could, and would, have been that bluntly honest with him, during the first days of our relationship. We used to say these devastating things to one another, but it was okay, because we didn't really know each other that well, so we weren't aware of how terrible some of what we said was—and since we knew we were in this state of mutual ignorance, we didn't take offense. Now, it was harder to be so direct—especially about the project that occupied Roger's days and nights. Knowing each other better gave us less room to offend. As for telling him about what I'd experienced while I was out of it—that would only convince him that what he was doing was working.

Yes, wasn't it? It does seem the slightest bit contradictory, doesn't it? Here I am reducing Roger's work to desperate longing; meanwhile, I'm having these paranormal experiences. Yet each experience strengthened my conviction that Roger didn't understand what was happening to us—to me. Not that I did. I simply recognized that the situation went beyond Roger's account of it. After what had just washed over me, my need to escape the house was as great as it had ever been. So, I lied to him. I looked into his face, full of concern, and said, "It's—I'm exhausted, Roger. I need a break."

The arm supporting me tensed. "What do you mean?"

"I mean that I've been up every night with you roaming the house, and it's taken its toll. I can't function like this."

"There's no need for you to get up with me—"

"Give me a break," I said. "What else am I going to do? What would you do, if positions were reversed?"

"What are you suggesting, then?"

"A few days away. Addie told me this week's renters for the Cape House canceled at the last minute. It's too late for them to advertise it. If I call them now, we can get it." I could see the resistance gathering in his eyes, so I hurried on. "I'm not saying we have to stay for the full week, just for a couple of days—so I can catch my breath, recharge my batteries. We won't be there long enough for it to make any difference to your plans. But honey, I really need this."

"What makes you so certain I won't continue to sleepwalk at the Cape?" he asked.

"It's worth a try," I said.

His face was a study in conflicting emotions. He jabbed his teeth into his lip. "All right. Let's go to the Cape."

Had he not found me semiconscious on the stairs, I'm sure Roger would have turned down my request. At best, he would have insisted I go. I might have, too. I'm not certain I would have been able to decide if it was more important for me to be there with him, or for at least one of us to get out of the house for a few days. As it was, he saw me weak and defenseless and went along with me—which I normally would have found pathetic and repellent—but we were racing through brand new territory at a hundred miles an hour, and if weak and defenseless was what it took for us to pull off at the next exit, then so be it. The moment Roger agreed to a few days on the Cape, I struggled to my feet, lurched down the stairs, half-supported by Roger, and called Addie on the phone in the hall. She was so thrilled to have someone to take the house that she offered it to us at a discount. Could we drive out tomorrow? I asked, and Addie said yes, that would be fine. Great, I said, we'd drop off the check in the morning, on our way to the Thruway.

That was what we did. Rudolph de Castries and his crazy theories could wait. I packed a few days' supply of clothes and toiletries for Roger and me. By eight o'clock the next morning we were speeding up I-87.

 

First, though—first came the night's sleepwalking. Roger had worked the rest of that afternoon and through the night. By the time he came to bed, it was past midnight. I had wondered how the prospect of his imminent departure would affect his sleepwalking. Either he'd be so relieved, I thought, that he'd sleep like a baby, or he'd be off on his longest journey yet. As it turned out, neither of those guesses was correct. Once I'd seen him safely to the top of the third-floor stairs—force of habit—I was tempted to cut my observations short and return to bed, myself. I would have, if I hadn't realized that, tonight, Roger's constant murmur was louder than usual, and growing louder still as he neared his office. I heard him saying, "A knife, a by-God knife," and ran up after him.

He was holding his usual position, in front of his homemade map. Although the rest of his face was slack, his lips were moving furiously, almost spitting his words. His voice was angry, choked with emotion. "Words," he said. "What good are words. Curses? Don't make me laugh. Fucking motherfucker. So what. Where's the power in that? How could you hurt anyone with that? Not him. Not him at all. Take it as a compliment, most likely. Words with meaning. Sharp. Razored. Barbed, tipped with slow-acting poison. That's what you need. Not too long, or you'll lose him. Never had much of an attention span. Dyslexia, right. Not too short, or he'll brush it off. Have to hit him hard and fast. Drive it in deep, twist it, leave it stuck in his gut.

"Always wanted to be taken seriously. Wanted to amount to something. Wanted approval. Want want want. Wanted to do what he wanted to do. Wanted what he thought was important. Wanted what he hadn't earned. Want. That's where you go.

"Get his attention. The best part of you ran down your mother's leg. No, the best part of you dribbled down your mother's leg. Better. Wait. Boy, the best part of you dribbled down your mother's leg. He used to say that to me. Oldie but goodie.

"Move quickly. Get to the point. Points, pitchfork. Pitchfork him. Reading. Reading writing rithmetic. Just reading. I have always been disappointed in you. No. Isn't your problem. Your fault. You have always been a disappointment to me. Better. Say it all. From your inability to read even a single book when you were a child, to the self-indulgence of your adolescence, to the blind surrender to authority that you call a career. Careful!" Roger sucked in his breath. "Too long. Yes? Depends. What's next?

"Keep it short. You are an embarrassment and a disgrace. Good, good. Boy, the best part of you dribbled down your mother's leg. You have always been a disappointment to me, from your inability to read even a single book when you were a child, to the self-indulgence of your adolescence, to the blind surrender to authority that you call a career. You are an embarrassment and a disgrace. Yes. More?

"So much more. Nothing. Your life has been nothing. It is nothing. It will always be nothing. Okay. Get to the point. I disown you. Too short. Not enough weight. I am no longer your father; you are no longer my son. Almost. Time. As of this moment, I am no longer your father; you are no longer my son. Wait. I disown you; I cast you from me. All right. Leave it there? No no. Balance is off. A knife. Needs proper balance. Your life has been nothing; it is nothing; it will always be nothing. As of this moment, I am no longer your father; you are no longer my son. I disown you; I cast you out. Let all bonds between us be sundered; let our blood no longer be true. Yes. Enough?

"Almost. Big finish. Die. Death. When you die. And when you die. What? And when you die, may you know fitting torment. May you not escape your failure. Nice. Something to conclude? You are a stranger to me. Good day. Sir. Yes. Add the sir. Ha. Good touch."

Roger repeated the eleven sentences of his curse once, twice, three times. They didn't become any easier to hear. After the third repetition, he fell silent, and I thought this was it for the night. It was enough, believe me.

Then he spoke again, in a stage whisper that seemed too loud for the movement of his lips. To be honest, it sounded as if it came as much from the walls of the house as it did his mouth. "You know what you are asking," the whisper said. After a pause, it continued, "Much is required. What do you offer?" The words fluttered through the darkness around me. "Blood," the whisper said. "Pain." Bloodpain, bloodpain, bloodpain, the words echoed down the hall. The hair on the back of my neck was standing straight up. I wrapped my arms around myself. My heart was pounding high in my chest, almost at the base of my throat. The house, usually quiet during Roger's sleepwalk, was awake; that was what it felt like, awake and watching. Roger's mouth moved, and the whisper said, "Sweet—but not enough."

Suddenly, Roger's voice was back. "Anything," he said hoarsely. "Anything—take whatever you need. Whatever you need. Anything."

 

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Framed