A Week as Andrea Benstock

Wednesday October 16, 1968

She was in the back yard with Robin when the phone rang again. It had been ringing all morning. She said, “Shit,” and went inside to answer it. The conversation which she had was a brief one, and certainly undemanding; she had been having essentially the same conversation over and over. Throughout the city her mother’s friends and Mark’s mother’s friends were checking their calendars, discovering the notation, “Andrea Benstock 30th B’day,” and reaching for the telephone. It was certainly very nice of them but it was beginning to be boring.

When the conversation ended she broke the connection, then placed the receiver on the table next to the phone. She was halfway to the door before she decided it just wasn’t cricket to leave it off the hook. If people were taking the trouble to call her to wish her well, she could at least take the trouble to answer their calls. And they’d get through sooner or later anyway. They wouldn’t let a busy signal stop them.

She replaced the receiver and stood there for a moment, glaring at the phone, daring it to ring. It remained silent. She went outside again. Robin looked up from her sandbox and sang out, “Happy Birthday!”

“You keep saying that.”

“Happy Birthday!”

“Oh, Happy Birthday yourself, elf.”

“I’m not a elf.”

“An elf. Sure you are.”

“An’ it’s not my birthday. On my birthday I’ll be four.”

“That’s right.”

“Four years old.”

“That’s terrific.”

“It’s better than thirty.”

“Go play in your sandbox, kid.”

“Go play in traffic. That’s what you always say.”

Well, she’d always wondered what happened when you were thirty years old. And now she knew. You got to play straight man to a three-year-old.

She drew a breath, put her hands on her hips, let out a sigh. She wanted a cigarette but they were in the house and it seemed inefficient to make a special trip. She could pick them up the next time the phone rang. She crossed the lawn to examine the tree they had planted their first spring in the house. It was a white oak, a sturdy and well-formed young tree, and it had reached the stage where one was able to take it seriously.

It hadn’t been that long since they’d planted it. A little over three years, and she’d always thought of the growth of trees as being a terribly slow matter. Three years ago the tree had been small enough to fit in the back of their station wagon. Mark had picked it out at the nursery and brought it home, and she remembered how he had dug a huge hole to accommodate the sizable root ball, cursing when the spade glanced off stones in the soil, panting with exertion when the hole was finally dug. Then the job of wrestling the tree over to the hole and propping it in place, and filling in the hole, and soaking the earth, and then they’d stood together with his arm around her waist and admired his handiwork.

“Some day,” he’d said, “we’ll sit in the shade. Try to make yourself believe it.”

“It does take some imagination.”

“Hell of a thing, isn’t it? I came within a few inches of a hernia lifting the son of a bitch, and now that it’s in the ground it looks like a splinter. Maybe I should have sprung for a few more bucks and bought an older tree. And let them plant it.”

“It’s more exciting this way.”

“Exciting?”

“Well, I don’t know. Fulfilling, gratifying, you know what I mean.”

“Uh-huh. You know, there really is something about planting a tree. There was a song that was popular when I was in high school, something to the effect that a man has to accomplish three things in the course of his life.”

“Plant a tree and what else?”

“Take a wife and father a child.”

“Well, you’re three for three, tiger.”

“It’s a funny feeling,” he said, “when you think of it that way.”

And it was a funny feeling now, looking at the tree and wondering how it had grown so without her really having noticed the growth. She looked from the tree to her daughter and that, too, gave her a funny feeling.

The tree had been in bud when they’d planted it. Tight buds that showed green only on close examination. “It’s quite an act of faith planting it,” she’d said at the time. “For all we know we’re digging a hole and planting a dead stick in it.”

But the buds had opened into yellow-green leaves within weeks of planting. And now the leaves were beginning to turn, going shades of rust and bronze.

And today she was thirty years old.

Perhaps a week ago she had found herself standing mesmerized at the bathroom sink, drowning in her reflection in the mirror. She came abruptly out of the state as if from a dream, unable to say how long she had been standing there or what if anything had been going through her mind. And then she’d blinked rapidly at herself, and then leaned forward to stare searchingly into her own eyes.

Looking for what?

On the night when she lost her virginity she had returned to her dormitory to gaze into the mirror. To see if she looked any different. To see if the brief intrusion of a boy’s flesh into her own flesh had left her marked like Cain. It wasn’t until months later that she happened to learn that such post-defloration scrutiny was a positive cliché.

“Christ,” she’d said. “I did that.”

“Well, of course. Everybody does.”

“But I thought I invented it, for God’s sake. And it turns out to be a cliché.”

“That’s how things get to be clichés, Andrea Beth. By everybody doing them.”

“Still.”

And what had she been looking for now?

Signs of age? She supposed they were beginning to appear. Life gradually got around to drawing lines on your face and there wasn’t a hell of a lot you could do about it. Some people seemed to accelerate the process. Eileen Fradin, living on diet pills since the birth of her second child, had managed to lose her baby face along with her baby fat, and without makeup the dark hemispheres beneath her eyes were ghastly. Andrea had never seen any similarly dramatic evidence of aging in her own face.

Oh, there were lines. The horizontal folds in her forehead that came when she raised her eyebrows no longer vanished when she lowered them. Evidently she had raised her brows once too often. “Your face should freeze like that,” her mother had used to say when Andrea would make a funny face of some sort. And in a sense people’s faces did freeze as, over the years, lines appeared to mark off one’s characteristic expressions.

She had heard that recently, but where? She leaned against the sink and remembered. Of course, sitting in front of a television set in Cheektowaga, she and Mark and Ellie and Cass Drozdowski, watching the Democrats in Chicago. There was a shot of Humphrey in his hotel room and Cass roared and slammed his drink down on the table beside him.

“Look at that face! Four years playing pratboy to the big Texas sheriff and it all shows. I swear to God it’s the truth. After the age of forty a man’s face is his own responsibility.”

She had not understood the remark when he’d made it, but now, studying her own face, she began to understand why it was true. The face you began life with was largely a matter of genetics. You could be fortunate or unfortunate by being given a face that would stop either traffic or a clock, but it was almost entirely a matter of fortune. Your face, when you were young, might be a good reflection of the person you happened to be. Or it might be quite the reverse.

But with the passage of time the expressions you fastened upon your face and the emotions you locked behind it became fixed in place. People who always drew their faces together wound up with pinched little faces. People never disturbed by thought wound up with faces like blank sheets of paper. It took a while, but ultimately you wound up looking like the person you had learned to be.

She couldn’t read much in her own reflection. The evident changes — the lines on her forehead, the touch of crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes — said little to her beyond reporting her age. And she didn’t mind looking her age, not really, any more than she minded being her age. At least she didn’t think she did.

And yet her mirror image seemed to be trying to tell her something, and sometimes it seemed as though it should be important to know what it was. Like right now.

When the telephone rang again she went into the kitchen and answered it. She chatted briefly and automatically with an aunt of Mark’s. Then she got her cigarettes, lit one, and called Mark at his office.

“Nothing special,” she told him. “Just that my phone’s been ringing all day so I decided to turn the tables.”

“Have a lot of people called?”

“Oh, all the usuals. Liz and Dick Burton, Grace and the Prince, Jackie and the Greek. All our crowd.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Fat chance a girl’d have to lie about her age in this town. These clowns mark their calendars years in advance. Somewhere here in Buffalo there’s a woman who wrote down ‘January 6, 1995 — Robin Benstock’s 30th Birthday.’ I mean they really plan ahead around here.”

“You’re crazy.”

“Well, that’s nothing new.”

“It certainly isn’t. Listen, being thirty’s not so bad. There are worse things.”

“Sure. Like being thirty-one, and thirty-two, and—”

“Idiot. I spoke to your dad. We’re meeting them at the Club for dinner.”

“Yes, I spoke to my mother.”

“I moved it from seven-thirty to eight so that we could stop and see my folks first. They wanted us to come by for a drink, and of course they’ve got something for you.”

“I can’t wait.”

“What’s that? You were mumbling.”

“Nothing, just thinking out loud.”

They went on talking, sketching in the details of the evening, establishing that the baby-sitter had been booked. Then he said, “Just a minute, somebody wants to talk to you,” and he put Casimir Drozdowski on the line.

He said, “Well, hello there. Rumor has it that it’s your birthday.”

“How did you ever hear that?”

“Listen, I read the papers. I listen to Rona Barrett. I keep on top of things.”

“I’ll just bet you do.”

“Have a sensational birthday, huh, Andrea? And don’t get too drunk tonight.”

“Fair enough.”

“Drunk, but not too drunk.”

“Okay. Cass?”

“Hmmmm?”

“Something you said a few weeks ago. A few months, actually. About a man being ultimately responsible for his own face?”

He laughed. “That’s after forty, honey.”

“I know,—”

“You got ten years before you have to worry.”

“No, what I wondered is was that your line or did you get it from somewhere?”

“It was my line.”

“Oh.”

“Except Shaw wrote it down before I had the chance, the son of a bitch.”

“George Bernard Shaw?”

“Uh-huh, but don’t ask me where he wrote it or the exact wording because I couldn’t tell you. But have a wonderful birthday, and here’s another UN member who wants to talk to you, the honorable ambassador from Sicily.”

“Andrea? Happy birthday, kid.”

“Thanks, Eddie.”

“The whole family wishes you a happy birthday,” Eddie Santora said. “The Godfather, the consigliere, everybody. They said to tell you that if-a you don’t-a have a Happy Birthday, they’s-a gonna slappa you face.”

“What I want to know is how you three lunatics ever get any work done.”

“We can’t miss. The UN always beats everybody.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“A Jew to be sneaky, a wop to be crooked, and a polack for brute force. Who’s gonna stand in our way?” His voice dropped. “Listen, Andrea, I figure you’re thirty now, that means you’re old enough to play with the big kids, right?”

“If you say so, Eddie.”

“So what I mean is you’re old enough to mess around a little, right? You and me, kid, we’re a natural combination.”

“Well, I know that, Eddie, but would Terri see it that way?”

“Listen, kid, I won’t tell if you don’t. Hang on, your old man wants to talk to you.”

Mark came back on the line. “All three of you are crazy,” she told him. “It’s good you found each other. I’ll see you around six, six-thirty?”

“Around six. I’m glad you called, honey.”

“Me, too.”

She lit another cigarette, poured herself a cup of coffee and took it outside with her. Robin was still giving the sandbox her full attention, but she turned from it at Andrea’s approach and got to her feet. She stood with her feet well apart and placed her hands very deliberately on her hips.

“Happy birthday,” she said. “Another goddam telephone call.”

Andrea tried to object to the “goddam” but couldn’t bring it off. “You’re impossible,” she said.

Robin beamed.

Andrea went to her and picked her up. “Impossible,” she said. “I don’t know what’s the matter. Other people get to have children. But what I get stuck with is—”

“A forty-year-old midget smartass!” Robin sang out.

“Smartie,” Andrea said. “A forty-year-old midget smartie.”

“Smartass.”

“I give up,” she said. She brought the child’s face very close to her own, and for an instant it was as if she was staring into her mirror again. Then she said, “I’ll tell you what.”

“Goddam smartass.”

“Yeah, that’s you, all right. Goddam smartass. I’ll tell you what. I’ll make you a deal.” Was it proper to make deals with a child? “Here’s the deal. You can say things like goddam and smartass when it’s just me.”

“And Daddy?”

“And Daddy, yes, but not—”

“And Poppa David?”

“And Poppa David.”

“And Nana Sylvy?”

“And Nana Sylvia, yes, but—”

“Not Poppa Harry,” Robin said emphatically. “Not Nana Dele.”

“Jesus.”

“Christ,” Robin echoed.

Andrea put her down and stared at her. “You know everything, don’t you? Not Poppa Harry and Nana Adele, that’s right. And not any other people. And Jesus Christ is another of those words.”

“Oh, I know that,” Robin said.

It wasn’t that children grew up so quickly. It wasn’t merely that. She’d heard that line all her life, it was what the old always said of the young, and she was beginning to see what they meant. Time passed subjectively faster the older you got, as each year in turn became a smaller proportion of your overall experience of life. Thus the years of your child’s childhood rushed by more rapidly than your own childhood had ever done.

But there was something else, too. It was that the changes in your child were so abrupt, so spontaneous, so impossible to anticipate. Someone who has for months existed as The Kid one otherwise unremarkable morning emerges as a completely defined individual. There is suddenly a personality present in what had heretofore been not much more than a warm and entertaining animal.

And all at once the attendant awe of parenthood is immeasurably extended, from My God, I made a living being! to My God, I made a person, I made this person!

Two summers ago, when Robin was a year and a half old, they had attempted to conceive another child. It was hard now to remember the degree of urgency that had accompanied that decision. It had become somehow imperative that they have another baby, and that they do so immediately so that the two children would not be too far apart in age.

But it hadn’t worked. For four months in a row they had made love faithfully on all of the appropriate nights, and each time she had remained for a minute or two with her legs high in the air, so that gravity might give the sperm a little extra assistance. And each month she was certain she was pregnant, and each time her period was almost a full week late.

Eileen had suggested that it might be breakthrough bleeding but that was impossible. She wasn’t just spotting. She was having a full period, and if anything it was a heavier flow than usual.

After four months like that she went to her doctor. When she came home she took a couple of aspirin and lay down on the couch but couldn’t sleep.

Later that night she told Mark, “I saw Lerner today. He put me back on the pill.”

“That’s going to help you get pregnant?”

“He thinks it’ll regulate my cycle.”

“Oh. How long does he want you on it?”

“He doesn’t know. He has a theory.”

“About the pill?”

“No.” She took her time forming phrases in her mind. She said, “He thinks I’ve been getting pregnant each month for the past four months. He thinks possibly I’ve aborted each time.”

“Could you do that and not know it?”

“Evidently. At that stage it would just seem like a heavier flow than usual. Which is what I’ve been having. And it’s late each time.”

“Have you ever—”

“Had anything like this before? No, I haven’t. He said it’s just an idea he has and that it doesn’t necessarily matter whether it’s the case or not.”

“What does necessarily mean?”

“Oh, don’t be worried, darling. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with me physically.”

“Now tell me what physically means.”

“You really have to watch yourself around lawyers, don’t you?” She forced a grin, then took a few seconds to light a cigarette. She said, “According to kindly old Dr. Lerner, this can happen when a woman thinks she wants to be pregnant, but deep down inside she doesn’t want to be pregnant. So she gets herself knocked up in the first place, you should please pardon the expression, and then her body takes over and, uh—”

“I thought Lerner was a gynecologist. Obstetrics and gynecology.”

“So?”

“I never knew he was a psychiatrist.”

“He said it wasn’t exactly common but that it happens more than people realize it. Having what’s technically a miscarriage and not even knowing it.”

“For that reason that you just mentioned.”

“God damn it.”

“Look, honey—”

“I want to have another baby,” she said. She was on her feet now, pacing. “At least I think I do. How is a person supposed to know what she thinks unconsciously? Mark? I don’t know what to do.”

But it was easy enough to decide, because when you didn’t know what to do you did nothing, and it was very easy to do nothing. Lerner had put her on the pill and so she remained on the pill and they both knew that eventually she would stop taking the pill and they would have another child.

Then finally she did stop taking the pill, and they talked about it, and they went to bed and he was unable to manage an erection. She tried everything she could to help him and nothing worked, and this had never happened before.

“It’s supposed to happen to everybody,” they told each other. “Too much to drink,” they told each other. “A lot of pressure at the office,” they told each other.

But the incident kept repeating itself and the explanations kept sounding hollower until both of them were careful not to voice them at all. There were nights when they tried and failed, and nights when they assiduously avoided trying, and one night, finally, when he achieved an erection but lost it seconds after entering her. He threw himself off of her and rushed out of the room.

For a few moments she lay still, waiting for tears to come. But no tears came. She got up and put on a robe and went into the living room. He was sitting in his chair with a drink in his hand and a bottle on the table beside him. He had not put any clothes on.

The sight of the drink in his hand was enormously upsetting to her. This was not like him. His drinking was purely social — the ritual cocktail before dinner, drinks with friends to augment the pleasure of their company. She would sometimes take drinks at night when he was asleep and she was not. She had always done a certain amount of that kind of drinking. But he had never done it and it frightened her.

He looked up at her. For an instant his expression was somehow defiant, but then his eyes went dull. He lowered them to his glass and drained it. He coughed harshly, caught his breath, and reached for the bottle to fill his glass.

“Well, fuck it,” she said. “Don’t hog all of it yourself.” And she took the bottle from him, raised it to her lips, put her head back and poured a few ounces of whiskey down her throat.

He said, “Jesus.”

“I want to say something.”

“Anything you want.”

“I want to say something. We are driving ourselves crazy and we are driving each other crazy and it is ridiculous. We’re making nervous wrecks out of ourselves and our sex life is going down the drain and it’s crazy, and maybe I’m getting short-tempered with the kid and God knows what effect that’ll have on her and it’s crazy, it’s a hundred percent crazy.”

He looked at her but said nothing.

“I’m going back on the pill tomorrow.”

“If that’s what you want.”

“You know what’s happening? We’re getting so we can’t even talk about it.” She seized the bottle again and drank straight from it again. His eyes widened but he didn’t comment. “I don’t want to have a baby. I had four fucking miscarriages in a row to prove I don’t want to have another baby. And you don’t want to have a baby, and that’s why we’re having this trouble now, and we won’t even face up to it, we won’t even say it out loud, as though there’s something goddam immoral about not wanting to have another baby. For God’s sake, we’re lucky, we’ve got a wonderful child, and why do we have to kill ourselves and ruin everything trying to have another one? What makes us think we’re letting the world down if we don’t have any more?”

“Not so loud.”

“It’s my own house, for God’s sake. I’ll shout if I want.”

“Robin’ll hear you.”

“She sleeps through everything.” But she did lower her voice. “It’s as if we can’t say it because it would mean something else. As if not wanting another baby means we don’t love each other any more. As if we have to keep having kids in order to prove that our marriage is all right. Who are we proving it to, for God’s sake?”

“We love each other.”

“Of course we do. And we love Robin. Not wanting a second one doesn’t mean we’re not happy with the first.”

“Don’t even say—”

“No! That’s the whole point, you have to be able to say things, to say any kind of thing. It doesn’t mean we don’t love her. It means we love her so much that we don’t need another kid, that’s what it means!”

“You’re right,” he said.

“I am, aren’t I?”

“Yes, you are.”

“Are you going to drink any more? Then let’s go to bed, darling. I just want to be held. Okay? I just want you to hold me.”

The next day she went back on the pill. They made love that night and it was good again. Attempting to conceive a child may or may not have caused his problems, but abandoning the attempt certainly solved them. They clung to each other afterward and told each other that this proved they were right not to have another baby. And they could always change their minds sometime in the future. If they ever decided that they definitely wanted a second child, they could always do something about it when the time came. It was not as though she were getting her tubes tied, or he a vasectomy.

This past spring, just after her father’s heart attack, she had begun to think of getting pregnant again. She had never given voice to the thought, recognizing it even then as being largely a response to her father’s attack. The idea stayed with her but she remained on the pill, and before much time had passed she was glad she had not acted on that impulse. Because Robin had emerged as an individual to such an extent that she could only imagine another baby as being an intruder into the family circle which the three of them constituted. There had been a time when a second baby would have been acceptable, but the time had passed.

By then, too, there was another more practical reason for her to be on the pill. Because by then she had begun sleeping with Cass Drozdowski.

It seems to her afterward that she should have been able to recognize her restlessness, to identify it for what it was. There were symptoms, certainly, though how was one to know what they were symptoms of? Nights when sleep wouldn’t come, nights when it wouldn’t stay until dawn. Days when she felt her mind going hundreds of yards up in the air, looking down at the suburb in which she lived and seeing a checkerboard, a patchwork quilt, a close-knit network of unrelated lives. She would feel a black heat spreading in her brain. Everything was too close and too busy and there was too much of it.

To walk in the woods. To be alone in an infinity of sand, to kneel down and rear back on your haunches and scream. To just scream and scream and scream—

Silent screaming, while she drove to the market with Robin in her car seat. Shrill screams that stayed echoing in the brain and never passed the lips, screams unuttered while she cooked a meal or visited her parents or sat across the room from her husband.

Not that often. Not constant, not even frequent. But enough so that, had she thought about it, she might have seen it for what it was. Might have recognized that she was ready.

As he had recognized.

She had never thought of Cass in those terms. When she had fantasies (and she had them often enough, alone or in company, peeling potatoes or making love) they never involved someone she knew. Her partners were always strangers and they generally remained wholly faceless in her fantasies. Perhaps the anonymity of her phantom partners made fantasy more acceptable, especially as a muted accompaniment of marital coupling. When you lay in your husband’s arms and thought of another man, surely it was less a matter of emotional adultery if the other man was only vaguely defined, only hazily imagined.

There were men whom she had recognized as attractive, either in the abstract or specifically attractive to her. Colleagues of Mark’s, husbands of friends, But she had recognized their attractiveness in a purely hypothetical way, with no intention of embracing them in fact or in fantasy. And even so Cass had not entered into that picture. She had never bothered to think of him as attractive.

She had thought of him — how? As someone with far more of a role to play in Mark’s life than in hers, certainly. Mark’s partner, Mark’s friend. Tall, rangy, with streaky light brown hair that he slicked straight back, hair beginning to recede now, hair allowed to pile up in curls on the nape of his longish neck. High cheekbones, deep-set gray eyes, a long narrow nose. A political anomaly, proclaiming that he couldn’t make up his mind whether to vote for George Wallace or Dick Gregory. A pole. A Catholic too lazy for out-and-out apostasy. A man with a wife, with three sons and a daughter, with two brothers and three sisters (all older than himself), with a tract house in Cheektowaga, with an ear for Chopin (“That Jewboy Rubinstein plays him better than anybody”) and country music. (“If I had anything else on the car radio it’d take me fifteen minutes longer to get where I’m going.”)

There was a particular Saturday night. It was in early May, with Martin Luther King a month in his grave and Bobby Kennedy a month away from his. David Kleinman, ten weeks after a slight coronary occlusion, was well enough to resume his dental practice on a limited scale. And that night the Benstocks had had some guests for dinner and drinks. Lawyers and their wives. Cass and Ellie Drozdowski. Jeff and Pauline Kaiser. Alan and Debbie Gersten. Not the Santoras — they were out of town.

An ordinary evening. She had spent so many evenings like this one, with these people, with other people similar to them, at her own house, at their houses. The conversation that had taken place one night at one house could have taken place as easily another night at another house with a different collection of people. It was as easy to differentiate the menus, to remember what had been served and who had had what to drink, easier to recall what clothes she had worn.

She remembered what she wore. She wore pants and a sweater. The sweater was a wedgwood blue and underneath it she wore a no-bra bra, and the pants were gray flannel and would probably not be fit to wear in company another season because they were beginning to wear slightly at the knees and beginning to pill at the crotch.

And around midnight she’d been in the kitchen, assembling a speed-the-parting-guests platter of cheese and crackers, when she sensed another’s presence and half-turned to see Cass approaching. And he looked at her, and she supposed she looked back at him because she recalled he put his left arm around her waist, his hand settled confidently on her hip, and his right hand went between her legs and fastened upon the crotch of her pants where the flannel material was starting to pill.

Just like that.

And for how long had he touched her? She with her eyes closed, blocking off one sense to enlarge another, one hand holding onto the formica countertop for balance, the other still clutching a round of Dutch cheese coated with red wax. His hand holding on her hip, holding her, and his hand between her legs, playing with her. Either he knew just where to touch her or it didn’t really matter where he touched her, just that he touched her.

For how long?

It couldn’t have been very long. It didn’t have to be very long. Her body responded without consulting her brain at all as if she were being stroked while asleep. There was not even any pleasure in it, really. It was too mechanical for pleasure to be a part of it. She responded, urgently and automatically, and his fingers worked, and she shuddered and sighed.

If he had not been holding her she would have fallen.

He continued to hold her for another few seconds until she had her balance. Then his hands disengaged themselves and he returned to the living room. He was out of the kitchen before she had her eyes open.

A little while later, while the eight of them sat with cheese and crackers and cups of coffee and final drinks, it was hard for her not to believe that she had imagined all of this. They sat, all of them, just as they would have sat if the incident in the kitchen had never taken place. The same conversation went on in quite the same way. And if she had imagined the incident, imagined it so vividly as to believe it to be true, it was a likely indication that she was losing her grip on things.

But was she any less likely to be losing her grip if it had really happened?

Then Cass’s eye caught hers, just for a second. And then, while he knew she was looking at him, he put a cheese-covered Triscuit in his mouth. And chewed and swallowed. And deliberately put the first two fingers of his right hand into his mouth and sucked appreciatively on them.

And caught her eye again. And did not quite smile.

She knew he would call, and was surprised when Monday came and went without word from him. By the time he did call, the following afternoon, she had rehearsed the conversation endlessly. In some of the versions he apologized and they agreed that nothing like that would happen again. In others he swore that he had always loved her and begged her to leave Mark. But in the little imaginary conversations that she thought of as realistic, he called and tried to coax her into an affair without success.

But the conversation did not go like that at all.

“Andrea, I’d like to see you.”

“All right.”

“Can you get free for an hour or two Thursday or Friday? Say in the early afternoon?”

“Thursday would be better. I can leave Robin with the cleaning woman.”

“I’ll be at the University Manor motel. That’s at Main and Bailey. Park your car at the shopping plaza around the corner.”

“Isn’t there parking at the motel? Oh, I get the point.”

“You don’t want the car to be seen.”

“Of course not. You’ll have to bear with me. I’m not used to having to think this way.”

“Can you get there around noon?”

“I suppose so.”

“Just call me at the motel when you have the car parked and I’ll tell you the room number.”

“All right.”

“I’ll see you then. That’s Thursday, that’s the day after tomorrow.”

“Yes, the day after tomorrow.”

She kept the date that Thursday, leaving the car in front of the bookstore on University Plaza, then taking the trouble to buy a book at the store to justify her presence. (A book she saw but did not buy was the paperback edition of John Riordan’s novel. The thought of purchasing that particular book on this particular occasion appealed to her, but she had already taken the book out of the library.)

She called him from a booth and he told her what room he was in. She walked around the corner, hoping no one saw her turn in to the motel. That was the dangerous moment and there was not much she could do about it, but she went on and turned and if anyone saw her she never knew about it. She found his room and knocked on the door and he opened it and closed it quickly as soon as she was inside.

While she was lighting a cigarette he asked her if she wanted a drink. She nodded and he put ice cubes into a glass and added Canadian Club. “All the comforts of home,” she said.

He didn’t say anything. She looked at him for a moment and thought that there ought to be something to say. But she couldn’t think what it might be. She took a small ladylike sip of her drink, put the glass down on the dresser, took a puff of her cigarette, stubbed it out in an ashtray, and began removing her clothes.

Since then they had been together perhaps a dozen times, maybe a little more than that. Their meetings usually took place on Thursday, when a sullen thick-bodied black woman named Lucinda arrived by bus to clean Andrea’s house. She would drive to the shopping plaza, park her car, walk briskly and nonchalantly around the corner to the motel. She would knock, a door would open, and within five minutes she would be out of her clothes and in bed with him,

The ease with which she did this surprised her, and went on surprising her. Not the ease with which the deception was accomplished, because of course it was simple enough to steal an hour or two in the course of a week. She was mobile and her schedule was flexible, She had her own car and did not have to account closely for her time. On those weeks when Thursday turned out to be inconvenient for one or the other of them, it was usually possible to arrange something on another mutually convenient day. Robin could be dropped at her mother’s house, at Mark’s mother’s house, at Eileen Fradin’s.

In the novels she read, women caught up in adultery found themselves doing a lot of limit testing, becoming increasingly flagrant in their behavior, either because they wanted their husbands to catch them or because they wished to establish for themselves the extent of their husbands’ gullibility. From the beginning she watched herself for signs of this pattern, and she was reassured when they failed to appear. She and Cass did not attempt to see each other more frequently, or for longer periods of time, or in more public and hence dangerous situations. On the contrary, their relationship adhered quite rigidly to the pattern originally established. In all their time together, they never skated on thinner ice than they had that first night, when he had touched her in her kitchen with Mark a matter of yards away from them.

On an emotional level, too, they were both automatically cautious and conservative. One time, after they had made love, he poured himself a drink and said, “You know, this whole business is almost too secure for an affair.”

“What do you mean?”

“We’re so accomplished at this and so cool about it. One thing I knew at the beginning was that this was going to be safe for us. Neither of us was going to fall in love with the other. Neither of us was going to think we were in love.”

“No, hardly that.”

“In books and movies the cheating people go into these mad passionate clinches whenever they’re alone together. And there’s this whole if-only number. If only we could spend a week on a white sand beach in the Caribbean. If only your husband and my wife could get swallowed by a runaway brontosaurus. If you were the only girl in the world and I was the only boy. That whole romantic routine.”

“That’s funny.”

“What?”

“You’re putting it down, the romance routine, but you sound almost wistful about it.”

“Well, of course. It’s crap, and I know it’s crap, but some of the time you have to wish you were capable of believing in that kind of crap. Listen, my mother went to Mass every morning until the day she died. I never stopped thinking that was total nonsense. I couldn’t have been much more than ten years old when I figured out that religion was baloney. The only hard part was making myself realize that other people really took it all seriously. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t occasionally envy my mother for being able to believe in it all. Not that I would want it for myself. Not that I would willingly be the kind of simpleminded person who could swallow all of that. Religion, romance, it’s the same thing, isn’t it?”

“How?”

“Easy answers. Jesus, especially with the if-only number. ‘Life would be terrific if only we could be together forever, but it wouldn’t be fair to everybody else.’ So you get to feel that things could have worked out if only, and you get to feel very noble for denying yourself, and you never have to face the fact that there’s nothing that’s gonna make everything work out well because people’s lives just don’t work out very well.”

“Not ever?”

“They don’t add up to happily-ever-after, do they?”

“No,” she said. “I guess they don’t.”

“I stopped believing in happily-ever-after around the same time as Heaven and Hell and the Immaculate Conception. It’s all the same kind of bullshit.”

“And you’re a tower of strength who can survive without all that.”

He looked thoughtfully at her for a moment. “No,” he said. “No, I’m just a cynical son of a bitch. That’s all.”

Why did they go on seeing each other?

One Thursday afternoon she asked the question aloud. They had made love and were still naked in bed. He had made himself a drink. She had lit a cigarette. It was late July and their affair, if that was the name for it, had been in progress for about two months. She sat for a moment watching the smoke rise from the tip of her cigarette, listening to the rain lashing at the window of their room.

She said, “We haven’t had this room before.”

“Huh? Haven’t we?”

“No.”

“Not the kind of thing I would remember. The rooms in this motel don’t have all that much in the way of individuality. If you’ve seen one you’ve seen ’em all.”

“I was wondering something,” she said. He waited, and she said, “I was wondering why we bother with this. You and I.”

“Because it feels good.”

“Is that all?”

He swung his legs up onto the bed, balanced his glass on his stomach. “The sex is good,” he said.

“It’s not bad for me. But it’s not really the thrill of a lifetime for you, is it?”

“I always have a good time.” He sounded just the least bit defensive.

She closed her eyes for a moment, considering this. The sex was always good for her. He always knew how to hold and touch her, and her response was always powerful, almost too intense. And yet this power and intensity did not always add up to pleasure. It was a physical reaction, a response on the part of her body which did not seem to involve more than her body, so that she was paradoxically capable of having positively electric orgasms without feeling herself to be a participant in them.

“There’s something beyond the sex.”

“Well, we enjoy each other’s company. That’s hardly a revelation.”

“That’s not what I mean,” she said. “What makes us come to this room is the people who aren’t in it.”

“That’s a little too cryptic for me.”

“Your wife and my husband.”

He looked at her.

“It’s the relationship,” she went on. “If you and Mark weren’t partners, if Ellie and I weren’t friends—”

“You’re not.”

“What?”

“You can’t stand Ellie,” he said. “You think she’s a stupid cow with brains in her tits.”

“That’s an awful thing to say.”

He shrugged. “Maybe. But why? If Mark and I didn’t happen to be partners you and Ellie would never have known each other. The two of you are cordial to each other and that’s really all that’s necessary. There’s no reason why you should pretend to have something in common.” He reached for his glass. “I don’t think Ellie particularly exists for you. You represent something to her, as it happens. I think she sees you as the sort of woman she ought to be in order to be the ideal wife for me.”

“In what way? I mean what is it about me she finds admirable?”

“Oh, you’re educated, you’re polished, you’re sophisticated.”

“I am like hell.”

“In her lights you are. And you’re witty and verbally agile and she thinks these are things that are important to me.”

“Aren’t they?”

“No, not really, but she doesn’t know that. As it happens she’s very much the kind of wife I want and need. You look surprised.”

“A little.”

“Why?”

“Maybe it was the way you said that, so matter of fact and all. I don’t know. I suppose I’ve always wondered why you married her.”

He seemed about to respond to her last remark. Instead he said, “You know, what you said a minute ago is probably fairly accurate. It is other people that keep us coming back here. And more than anything else it’s your husband.”

“Yes.”

“I think we got here the first time under our own steam. That business in the kitchen, there was a strong attraction between us, physical and otherwise. And we were both of us ready for an adventure.”

“You’ve had adventures before, haven’t you?”

“That didn’t keep me from being ready. And you were ready, it showed all over you.”

“I didn’t recognize it myself, though.”

“Uh-huh.”

“So that was enough to get us into bed once.”

“But not enough to keep us coming back for more.” He darted a glance at her. “You know, this is probably the best way to kill the whole thing. By talking it to death.”

“Maybe.”

“Let’s forget it, huh?”

“But I’m enjoying the talk.”

“Anyway it’s getting late.” He was out of bed, getting his undershorts from the chair.

“You really don’t want to talk about it.”

“That’s right.”

“Maybe it’s already talked to death. Maybe we can just forget about seeing each other any more.”

“If that’s what you want.”

“Hey!”

“Oh, hell,” she said. “Why is everything always so fucking complicated? Why does everything get messed up? I screw up everything I touch.”

“Easy, now.”

“Don’t call me any more, all right? Oh, shit, do I mean that? I don’t even know. I’m using you to get even with Mark and I don’t know why I’m mad at him. He never did anything to me. Nobody ever did anything to me. I’m the one who does everything, I fuck up other people and I fuck myself up. I love Mark. He’s my husband and I love him.”

He didn’t say anything.

“So what am I doing here? That’s a good question, isn’t it? If I love him so damn much what am I doing here?” She had been striding around the room while he went on dressing, not looking directly at her. Now he turned slowly toward her and she felt suddenly vulnerable in her nakedness.

“Cass? What should I do?”

“Better put some clothes on for openers.”

“I’m serious. What should I do?”

But he had no answer for her. That evening she decided that she would definitely not see him again. Whatever roles they were playing for each other, whatever itches they scratched in that motel, she was certain they were doing each other more harm than good. He probably realized as much himself, she told herself, and it was more than possible that he would not call her again. But if he did call she would not see him.

That night Mark made love to her. It always bothered her when they made love on the same day that she had been with Cass, and yet it seemed to happen that way more often than not. This particular time their lovemaking was intense and exciting, inordinately exciting, and it left her with a feeling of profound fulfillment that still blanketed her when she awakened the following morning.

So it was over. She had had a fairly stupid and pointless affair for reasons which she might or might not sometime examine, and it was over.

A few days later she decided she would see Cass one more time. Not to go to bed with him — she would definitely not go to bed with him — but because there was a conversation they had not quite gotten around to having and she felt it was one that ought to take place.

And then he did call. They had their usual quick conversation, agreeing to meet at the usual time and place. And she met him as agreed, and they went to bed, and they did not talk about any of the things she had decided needed to be discussed.

In the middle of the afternoon of her thirtieth birthday, Andrea sat at the kitchen table. There was a cup of coffee on the table in front of her, and a cigarette burned in the ashtray alongside the cup. The ash on the cigarette was almost two inches long now. She was letting the cigarette burn up, and she was letting the coffee grow cold, and it seemed to her suddenly that she was letting everything burn up or cool off, that things went on without her, that all the parts of her life were running away from her.

No, not running. Walking, and walking slowly, stepping off in slow motion. And all she could do was sit and watch.

She was alone in the house now. Robin was at the zoo, her little hand firmly gripped in her grandfather’s hand. About half an hour ago David Kleinman had pulled his car into the driveway, first to give her his birthday wishes in person, then to attend to the more important matter of taking Robin for a ride.

He had been an enthusiastic grandfather from the day she was born, always anxious to spend time with her, but since his heart attack he had devoted a much larger portion of his time to Robin and seemed to take more delight than ever in her company.

“Warnings change your outlook,” he had told Andrea. “I heard this all my life but you have to experience it to recognize the truth of it. You always start out convinced you’re going to live forever and over the years different things come along to give you little clues of the truth. Little hints of your own mortality. And each time you think, well, now I know what there is to know about it, now I have a realistic perception of it all. And each time you find out that there’s more to it than you quite appreciated. I wake up in the morning and see the sun and I experience this sense of wonder. It’s hard for me to describe it. A sense of great joy at being alive. A sense of the magnificence of life and of how fragile it all is at the same time. A little blood clot breaks off, a little muscle in the chest doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to work, and all at once everything stops. It’s a riddle, isn’t it? And the years go by and you find out that the answer is that there’s no answer.”

“The philosopher.”

“The philosopher,” he echoed. “Kindly old Doc Kleinman with his cracker barrel philosophy. All I know is I find myself with a great urge to spend my time in a way that gives me satisfaction. To be with your mother, not doing anything in particular, not even talking. To go for a ride, just to look at all the streets I’ve known so well for so many years. I think Robin’s beginning to know Buffalo better than you do. We drive all over, you know. And I always tell her the name of the street and point things out to her, and do you know something? She remembers from one time to the next.”

Sometimes, watching the two of them together, Andrea felt something that verged on jealousy. Oh, she was not jealous of her daughter. She was surely not capable of that. But she did envy Robin the effortless closeness she had with her grandfather. She saw in this closeness echoes of her own childhood, when she’d gone to the zoo with her own little hand wrapped in her father’s large one. (You were never as secure again as when you were a little girl and your father held you.)

So in one sense she saw her own childhood in Robin, and wanted it back again. Robin had that little-girl security not only from her father but from both her grandfathers as well. (Harry Benstock did not come around as often as David Kleinman, but it did seem as though he spent more time with Robin than he had before Andrea’s father’s heart attack.) Robin had three older men who cherished her with that total and unquestioning kind of devotion, and how could Andrea help envying her a little for it?

Especially now, when she so much wanted to be close with her father. It would seem to her that there were things she had to tell him, questions she had to ask him. That he had answers for her if she could only give voice to her questions. That each of them had parts of self which had to be deliberately revealed.

For there was only so much time available. He knew that he was not going to live forever, and now she knew it, too. Oh, he could live for a great many years. It was by no means impossible. He had made a good recovery, and men with a similar medical history often, lived to be very old men. But she sensed that he knew this would not be true in his case, and she for her part was convinced it would not. The heart attack had made him an old man and a sick man, and however much the doctors talked about the good recovery he had made, age and sickness showed themselves to her in his face. He was in his middle sixties, and she could not say that he looked older or younger than his years. But she could say, though it hurt to do so, that he looked like a man who did not have very much time.

And of course there had to be things he knew that she ought to know. He was a wise man. She had always known that, had never in adolescence made the mistake of thinking her parents to be foolish people. She had thought frequently that they had made terrible compromises with life, that her father should have been able to be the doctor he’d wanted to be instead of settling for dentistry, that her mother should have had a chance to develop her own talents instead of settling, however willingly, into life as a housewife. But that, even when she had been most rebellious, had been as far as she ever went, and she had never begun to question her father’s essential wisdom.

Sometimes these days she held elaborate conversations with him in her own mind. At night when she I couldn’t sleep, or during the day when Robin was taking her nap, she might find herself in a corner of her mind telling her father things she had never told him in actuality. She might talk about her marriage, or about the numbness she felt sometimes, as if the fingers and toes of her soul were losing their ability to feel.

They were not really conversations, these fancied discussions she had with him. Because he never offered any response. She would talk and he would draw her out, but when it was time for him to comment the conversation would come to an end.

And when they were alone together, not in her mind but in actual fact, they never did talk about any of the things that had seemed so vitally important. Instead they talked about nothing at all. It was pleasant, simply being with him, relaxing in easy conversation, but it was also frustrating that they were not saying what she somehow felt had to be said.

At times she sensed that he too had things he wanted to tell her. At other times she thought she was merely projecting her own feelings onto him. But whatever that ultimate wise conversation might be, they had not yet had it. Would they ever? Should they?

She was losing him. Just as she seemed to be losing all the other parts of her life. They grew cold. They burned themselves out. And she sat and watched, and couldn’t quite reach out to them.

Her sister-in-law called a little after three. Happy birthday, and how’s everything in Buffalo, and everything’s fine out here, the kids are fine, Jeff’s fine, everything’s fine. And they would probably be coming back east between Christmas and New Year’s and how was Robin, and how was Mark, and how was her father, was he feeling better?

“It was nice of you to call,” Andrea said at one point, and after hanging up she thought that it was nice of Linda to have called, that she was glad to have heard from her. And to have been told that everything was fine, fine, fine.

Ten minutes later the phone rang. It was Linda again, but Andrea hardly recognized her voice at first because it was so different. Pitched a little lower, and thoroughly limp, flaccid.

“Well, hello again,” Andrea said.

“Hello.”

“It’s not often I get to talk to you twice in one day, Forget something?”

“Yes.”

“Hello?”

“I said yes. I forgot something.”

“Linda? Are you all right?”

“I’m fine.”

“Well—”

“Fine fine fine. Everything’s so goddamned fine.”

“What’s the matter?”

“I was gonna talk about it with you and I called and I just did the whole usual number, I’m fine, he’s fine, they’re fine, the whole fucking world is fine, and I hung up and I just stood there saying Linda Gould, for God’s sake, what in the hell is the matter with you? Then I went to get a tranquilizer but I just took one. You play around with those things and before you know it it’s like eating peanuts. I just had to call you and tell you that everything isn’t fine.”

“Is someone ill, Linda?”

“Oh, God, no.” A laugh like a small dog barking. “No, nothing dramatic and real like that. Real things don’t happen out here. It doesn’t rain and it doesn’t snow and the air is clean and there are no slums and nothing happens. Nothing happens and I play tennis and work on my suntan and take the kids for swimming lessons and Jeff is, Jeff is—”

“Linda?”

There was a pause, and then when Linda spoke her voice was steady. “I shouldn’t be dropping all of this in your lap but I had to tell someone, Andrea. Jeff and I, I don’t know what’s going to happen. I really don’t. Almost ten years, three children, and I don’t know what’s going to happen.”

“Every couple has trouble, Linda.”

“Oh, Christ. I know that. We had trouble from the day we were married. No, this is more than that. He’s... not living here. At home. He has someone else.”

“Jeff’s living with someone else?”

“I don’t know if he’s actually living with her or not. He has a place of his own. An apartment.”

“When did this—”

“Over a month. Almost two months. I knew he was seeing someone but this has happened before, he’s very attractive and his work brings him into contact with a lot of available women and I guess I learned to handle it. Or maybe I didn’t, I don’t know, but things came to a head and blew up in my face and the next thing I knew he had moved out. So I’m here with the kids, and he makes deposits to my checking account, and the kids think he’s out of town on business a lot, and then he’ll come on Sundays and visit, and, oh, I don’t know what to do, Andrea.”

“I hadn’t heard a thing.”

“Oh, Christ. That’s the whole thing. Nobody knows.”

“You haven’t told your parents?”

“Not my parents, not Jeff’s parents. Nobody. Oh, people in town know, but nobody here knows anybody in Buffalo. And I don’t have a single goddamned friend out here. This place is full of plastic people. Nobody was actually born here. They all come here from somewhere else and after a couple of years of sitting in the sun their brains melt into goo.”

“Aren’t you friendly with anyone, Linda?”

“There are people I play tennis with, and there are people whose kids play with my kids, and I had a bridge game for a while but one girl moved and we never managed to get a regular fourth and it gradually broke up. And Jeff and I have been less social in the past couple of years. I don’t know why. It just happened little by little. And since he moved out, I don’t know, I’ve just become like a hermit. I sit in front of the television set and watch soap operas. I don’t even have the excuse that I’m caught up in them. I couldn’t care less about them but it’s something to do.”

“Is the separation—”

“Permanent? I don’t know. I don’t know what he wants. God, I don’t know what I want. That’s the God’s honest truth. This thing of his, this affair, it probably would have blown over. I could have closed my eyes again and waited it out. But for some reason I just couldn’t make myself play the game again, you know what I mean? I found myself saying all the things I hadn’t said before, and it just blew, the whole thing blew, and I think it’s better this way, it has to be, but, oh, I don’t know. That’s it, that’s everything right there. I don’t know anything.”

She was on the phone with Linda for almost half an hour, and when she finally got off she was shaking. Linda and Jeff. She had taken it for granted that they had a good marriage, a secure marriage. But evidently you couldn’t take anything for granted, ever.

She thought she had grown accustomed to seeing other people’s marriages fall apart. Her generation didn’t seem to be terribly good at staying married. The Alumnae Bulletin never failed to announce the failed marriages of a few more of her college classmates. Evidently they sent in announcements of divorce just as they proclaimed the other milestones in their lives.

She thought of Linda’s last words. “This is a hell of a trip to lay on you on your birthday, isn’t it? I’m sorry, Andrea. Don’t let it ruin the occasion for you, huh?”

Oh, certainly not. Perish the thought.

The conversation with her sister-in-law lingered throughout the evening. The busy ritual of dinner at the club kept her from thinking too intently about anything. It was almost a relief to have essentially the same conversation a couple of dozen times with a couple of dozen people.

They sat at a table for four in the club’s main dining room. Her mother sat across from her, with her father on her left and Mark on her right. From time to time Mark would take her hand or touch her leg with his.

It meant so much to spend this birthday in this room. At this table, with these people. She thought of how she had examined her thirty-year-old face in her mirror. Without these people — the three at her table, the others at the other tables — she would lack definition. She would be unframed canvas, the perimeters of her world uncharted and hazy.

Linda’s world was like that, and for the first time Andrea was able to appreciate the enormous difference between their two worlds. She and Linda both lived in cities about the same size, lived in new houses in the suburbs of their respective cities. They were both married to professional men who were doing well financially. They were both mothers. In short, they would occupy very much the same shelf in a sociologist’s cupboard, and yet their worlds were worlds apart, and the difference was very simple. She lived in the town she had been born in, while Linda lived thousands of miles away.

And that made all the difference. She belonged to an entire community in a way that neither she nor the community could change. All of these people around her, all of these people whose lives touched hers in the smallest way, were there to prop her up and be propped up by her. All of the people who had irritated her with birthday phone calls were people who made it easier for her to stay married, to stay sane, to stay alive.

Linda couldn’t expect to get that kind of support from her friends. Not when her friends were people I who had been a part of her life for a matter of months, people she knew next to nothing about, people who knew next to nothing about her. People who were her friends because friendship was convenient, but who would forget her readily and permanently when a whim — their own or an employer’s — led them away from that city, even as an earlier whim had led them there in the first place.

How very different this country club was from the place where Linda swam and played tennis. Linda’s social circle had all the permanence and commitment of those hippie communes scattered throughout the same desert. Either way you could snap your fingers and leave. Of course Linda’s friends couldn’t throw their belongings in a knapsack. They were devoutly middle-class, their lives defined by artifacts. For them a long-haul moving van took the place of a knapsack. But the difference was only a matter of degree. Emotionally it was not much more difficult for them to take leave of their friends, or of each other.

These thoughts came to her not all at once but in bits and pieces as she sat with her husband and her parents. They dropped into place like puzzle parts while she participated in conversations, ate her food, sipped her coffee.

When she had a moment to herself in the ladies’ room, she was annoyed to find herself again studying her reflection — and in such an unflattering mirror, with the fluorescent lights overhead making her look all grayish-green.

Thirty.

And graced with the perception and philosophy of the mature woman, she told herself. Well, youth for wisdom wasn’t all that bad an exchange, was it?

“You’re quiet.”

“Am I?”

“You’ve been quiet all night. Not withdrawn or anything, but a little subdued.”

“It’s the sort of occasion that subdues a girl.”

They were in the car, heading back toward their house. Her window was open and she liked the feel of the wind in her hair. The air was warm and heavy with moisture.

“Rain coming,” she said.

“Tomorrow, the paper said. It does feel like rain, doesn’t it?”

“Could we just drive around for a while?”

He glanced at her, then returned his eyes to the road. “I guess so. It’s fine with me if it’s all right with the sitter.”

“No problem.”

“Fine. Do you want to go someplace for a private drink or do you just want to drive around?”

“Let’s just drive.”

“Sure.”

She folded her hands over the buckle of her seat belt. Sometimes the belts annoyed her, though not enough to keep her from using them. Tonight, however, she felt secure, comfortably enclosed. And that seemed to be the evening’s motif, she thought — that she was comfortably enclosed, blanketed, cocooned. By this seat belt. By her husband and her parents, by her friends, by this city.

After a few minutes she took a cigarette from her purse and lit it with the dashboard lighter. She smoked half of it and said, “Your sister called this afternoon.”

“Your memory’s failing. I suppose it’s part of being thirty years old.”

“Pardon me?”

“The arteries harden. Inescapable, I guess.”

“I don’t follow you.”

“You already told me she called, remember? When we were over at my folks’ place. She called and she’s fine and Jeff’s fine and the kids are fine and when are we coming out there for a visit. Don’t you remember? And my mother was saying—”

“She called a second time.”

“Oh?”

She leaned forward to deposit ash in the ashtray, then sat back again. “I promised I wouldn’t tell you this. I spent dinner deciding whether to keep something from you or violate a confidence. That’s a part of why I’ve been so quiet.”

“I see. What did you decide?”

“To violate a confidence, obviously. Or I wouldn’t have brought this up in the first place. Although there’s no real point in telling you except that if I know about it I think you ought to know about it, too.”

“Then go ahead and tell me.”

“Jeff moved out almost two months ago.” She looked at him as she spoke, watching his face for a reaction. He had his eyes on the road so she saw his face in profile, and if he changed expression she couldn’t tell. She went on talking, giving him an abbreviated but essentially accurate version of Linda Gould’s conversation.

When she stopped speaking he didn’t say anything for a few minutes and she thought he might be waiting for her to continue. Then he said, “Well, I’m glad you told me. I think you’re right, I think it’s the sort of thing either both of us should know or neither of us should know.”

“That’s what I decided. What do you think?”

“What is there to think, really? It’s their life; it’s their marriage. We’re not really close enough to know what’s going on and how much can you tell from one phone conversation with her? If he’s been fooling around for years maybe this is nothing serious or maybe it is. Maybe he’ll decide he’s had enough and want to come home and maybe she’ll want him to come home. Or maybe not. Evidently she doesn’t even know the answers to those questions, so it’s hardly possible for us to know.”

“I suppose so.”

“Don’t you agree? You sound doubtful.”

“Well, what I mean is how do you feel about it? I don’t mean what do you think will happen or what you want to happen, but how do you feel about the whole thing?”

“Oh. I see.”

She waited.

“Sorry for them, I guess. In that I have a fundamental bias in favor of marriage.”

“Do you really?”

“Isn’t that pretty obvious? In addition to adoring you, isn’t it fairly clear that I specifically like being married to you?”

She shook her head. “That’s not what I meant. I didn’t know you were pro-marriage as a general thing.”

“Oh, yes.”

“And antidivorce.”

He nodded emphatically. “Yes again. I’m basically pretty conservative, you know. Not in politics necessarily but in other respects. I like the idea of order. Not what the word means when Nixon or Wallace use it. They use law and order so that it means keep the kids and niggers in their place and bust heads if they get out of line. But I like the idea of an ordered universe and an ordered society. That’s one of the things that attracted me to law as a profession, you know.”

“I thought it was the logic of it.”

“Definitely that, but also the order element. That’s the first object of law, you know. Not justice. Most people believe that the object of law is justice, but it’s not. It’s order. People will tolerate injustice but disorder drives them out of their minds.”

“Yes.”

“Anyway, the point is—”

“That’s literally true, isn’t it? Order keeps people sane.”

She thought about that and fitted it into what she had been thinking earlier about how the community of people she belonged to made for stability and security and, yes, sanity. She followed her thoughts for a moment and lost track of what he was saying, and then she tuned in again to hear him say, “—effect on the children, though I don’t know the answer to that. Is it better to have the kids grow up in a broken home or in one where the parents can’t stand each other? Hell, we’ve heard this one before. Every time someone we know goes through it.”

“I don’t know the answer.”

“I’m not sure anybody does. What it comes down to is what the two of them want. God knows I wouldn’t blame her if she packed up the kids and jumped on a plane and left him in the middle of the fucking desert. I never did like that son of a bitch.”

“I thought you did.”

“Never.”

“You always get along with him.”

“Oh, I get along fine with him. Everybody gets along with him, it would be impossible not to get along with him, because he’s exactly the person he thinks you want him to be. But when you peel the layers away, just who in the hell is he? Not that I’ve spent tons of time with him because I haven’t, and that’s fine with me.”

“I never had any idea you felt that way about him.”

“Well, ninety-eight percent of the time I don’t feel any way about him, because I don’t have to. But when he’s forced on my attention, well, that’s how I feel about him.”

“Funny.”

“What is?”

“All the ways that you’re hard to know, and the fact that it keeps surprising me to remind myself of the fact. When I first met you I was struck by how straightforward you were.”

“Good old Mark, solid as the rock of Gibraltar. A little dull—”

“Now stop that!”

“A little simple, a little thick between the ears, but — ouch! Jesus, that hurt!”

“Well, you had it coming.”

“Not while I’m driving, huh?”

“I’m sorry.” Then, “Are you mad?”

“No, of course not.”

“Good. Mark? Is there anything we should do?”

“About what? Oh, my sister. No, not that I can think of. Like what?”

“I don’t know. We could go out there. They’ve been after us to come out often enough.”

“Be pretty obvious, wouldn’t it?”

“I suppose so.”

“Let’s say you were in Linda’s place. Would you want to see the cavalry come riding over the hill? And from their point of view we might not even be the cavalry. We might just be the Indians.”

“You’re right. I just wish there was something we could do, that’s all.”

They drove for a while in silence, and then he said, almost to himself, “I never really got to know her. We were just far enough apart in age when we were kids, and then when we were old enough so that age didn’t matter, she was married and we were involved in different lives. If they’d lived here, but they didn’t. And then there’s Phil, he lives in Buffalo, and how close am I to him?”

“You see a lot of each other.”

“Sure, and if he needed something he’d come to me, I suppose, but I don’t really know him. Of course there’s the age difference.”

“He thinks you don’t approve of him.”

“For God’s sake, why?”

“Because he’s working for his father. You’re a lawyer and he’s a businessman and it’s not even his business and he thinks you don’t approve.”

“How do you know this? Something he said?”

“Just intuition.”

“Woman’s proverbial intuition.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Well,” he said, and paused, and then something changed in his face, as if he decided that conversation had run long enough, as if it was opening doors he would prefer to keep closed, as if he had reached for the switch and changed the channel. He reached over and put a hand on her knee. “There’s one thing we can do,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“To uphold the institution of marriage. To express our solidarity with the concept of the sanctity of the family unit.”

“How?”

He squeezed her knee. “We can go home and screw our brains out,” he said.

“Well, now,” she said. “You don’t think I’m a little old for that sort of thing? A little long in the tooth?”

“I’ve always thought your teeth were just the right length. What the hell does that expression mean, anyway?”

“I don’t know. But thirty’s old, you know.”

“Ancient.”

“The bones get brittle.”

“Uh-huh. I’ll be gentle with you.”

“You do and I’ll kill you.”

When he returned from the bathroom she was already in bed. “I’m wearing my present,” she said. “Aren’t you glad you didn’t get me a fur coat?”

“Very. I hope you know I meant it when I said to exchange it if you don’t like it.”

“I hope you know I love it.” His gift was a dress watch with a gold mesh band and a delft blue face, and she thought it was exquisite. “And it’s such a perfect gift for a thirtieth birthday.”

“How so?”

“Oh, time flying by. Like giving a gold watch to someone when he retires, so he can listen to the rest of his life ticking away.”

“I hope you don’t—”

“Ha!” She sat up in bed. “Gotcha! No, silly, I didn’t take it that way at all. Anyway, it could be worse. It could be a calendar watch. Oh, come here, don’t pout Oh, come here, my darling. Ah, yes. That’s better. That’s so much better.”

It was a good night for them to make love. Lovemaking was a virtually automatic accompaniment to significant days — birthdays, anniversaries. But tonight was especially right because the lovemaking was in such perfect harmony with the feelings that had been with her all evening. She was aware throughout of the special familiarity of their bodies, the mutual knowledge acquired over the years, and she quivered in appreciation of the genuine comfort and pleasure that grew out of this knowledge.

For quite a long time they lay on their sides facing one another, kissing lazily, touching each other with their hands. This, she sometimes thought, was truly the ultimate intimacy, the special intimacy of hands. Her hands on him, his hands on her, touching one another not so much to excite as to examine, to seek, as a blind person would seek to read a face.

Knowing each other, knowing each other so well and so long, knowing each other as no one else on earth knew either of them. Oh, there were vastnesses of him she did not know. She kept finding new depths in him. And there were infinite stretches of herself that she very carefully kept to herself. But each day and month and year they opened a few more doors and windows to each other. Sometimes in conversation. Sometimes in the touch-language of the flesh.

“Mmmmm.”

“Hmm?”

“Come on top for a while.”

“Lazy man.”

“Ahhhh.”

Slipping easily from one posture to another, lazy, warm, unhurried, and finally he was on top of her again and she wrapped her arms and legs around him and held him very tight, and he began to move within her more deliberately, and he was breathing faster and so was she, matching her breathing to his unconsciously, automatically, and she said oh, baby, oh, baby and he said yes, yes, meaning yes I am almost there, meaning yes come with me, come with me, and the door opened and they went through it, together.

She said, “Carnal knowledge.”

He took the cigarette from her lips and drew on it. She watched the smoke hanging in the still air. Smoking was not supposed to be enjoyable if you couldn’t see the smoke. The room was just light enough so that the smoke was visible.

“Wha’d you say?”

“Carnal knowledge. Tree of knowledge. And Adam knew Eve. And on her thirtieth birthday, ladies and gentlemen, Andrea Benstock suddenly discovered the meaning of phrases she’d known all her life.”

“You’re a nut.”

“How do you like doing it with an older woman? I’m supposed to be exciting and mysterious.”

“What else is new? You’ve always been exciting and mysterious.”

“Am I improving with age? Like a vintage wine?”

“Like ripe cheese.”

“You’re almost too romantic for words. Hey, gimme a drag on that butt, buster.”

“What I love about you is you’re refined.”

“Yeah, I got all this couth shit down pat. I was well brought up.” And, in her own voice, “It’s been a big day.”

“I was afraid it would be a little on the dull side for you. The usual day around the house, then the enormous novelty of a family dinner at the club. I was trying to think of something exotic to do.”

“Like flying down to Acapulco for a midnight swim?”

“Like driving up to Toronto for dinner and spending the night. But we’d already made plans with your parents and I didn’t want to spoil it for them.”

“You’re a sweet man.”

“What brought that on?”

“I don’t know. Toronto’s always fun but I’d rather do it some other time. I wanted to spend tonight doing just what we did. Doing ordinary things.”

“Thanks.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Uh-huh.”

“It must be past midnight, don’t you think? Oh, I’m sure it is. So I’m past my birthday. I am thirty years old. I am entering my thirty-first year. I can’t play ingenue parts any more, baby. The dew-eyed number is a thing of the past.”

“Listen, I’m going to be thirty-five soon.”

“So?”

“Speaking of big birthdays.”

“That’s not for a while.”

“No, but it’s lurking around the corner there.”

“Thirty-five’s a great birthday for a man.”

“It is?”

“Are you kidding? Of course it is. When a man’s thirty-five it means you can start taking him seriously. Thirty-five’s a sensational age for a man to be.”

He was silent for a moment. Then, leaning away from her to extinguish the cigarette, he said, “I won’t be promising any more.”

“Huh?” She rubbed at her eyes with the back of her hand. “Won’t be promising what?”

“The adjective, not the verb. Right now I’m still a promising young attorney.”

“Correction, you’re a successful young attorney.”

“Uh-uh. Promising. I’m too young to be a success or a failure. I can be leaning toward one or the other but unless I’m a millionaire or panhandling on Chippewa Street I’m still in the promising category. But that stops at thirty-five. By then you either keep the promise or you don’t.”

“Oh, wow.”

“So it’s a big birthday. Not to take away from the enormity of your being thirty, my dear, but I’d say thirty-five is a fairly significant moment for a man.”

She yawned luxuriously. “What fun,” she said.

“Growing old?”

“Getting to know you.”

“In the Biblical sense, that is.”

“In every sense. Getting to know you over and over again, in every sense there is.”

The dream yanked her out of sleep and very nearly out of bed. She found herself sitting up with her feet over the edge of the bed and her heart pounding. Her mouth was dry and her throat all knotted so that she couldn’t swallow.

In the dream, someone had been telling her that she was responsible for her own face. It might have been Winkie. And she was looking into a mirror, and then there was no frame to the mirror, and it began to grow and to curve in around her, until ultimately she was trapped inside of a mirrored sphere.

And she couldn’t see herself. She would begin to fasten upon her reflection and then the features would swim dizzily out of focus until finally the screen went blank and she saw that she had no self to be reflected.

And she was responsible.

She could remember the dream now. And she could remember her terror. But she could not reconcile the two. The dream did not seem a tenth as frightening as it had been.

Her watch was still strapped to her wrist. She took it off but checked the time before setting it on the bedside table. It was not quite one-thirty. It was hard to believe she had been asleep such a short period of time. The dream alone had seemed to last for hours and hours.

She went to the bathroom, used the toilet. After she was back in bed she remembered that she had wanted to look in the bathroom mirror, to assure herself that the dream was only a dream, that it was over now. But that was ridiculous, she didn’t have to do that she was done dreaming now. And the bed was comfortable, with her husband warm at her side, and it was late, and she was too tired to worry what the next dream might hold.