I stood above the White River on a ledge of rock. Below me was a swimming hole, empty in the early morning. To my right was a high metal bridge; it led across the water to a dirt road that snaked up into the wooded hills. Beyond the bridge was a campground, yellow tents on the river bank, the smoke of breakfast fires rising. To my left, upstream, the river wound around a bend and out of sight. There would have been heavy rapids up there a month or two before. Even now, it was white water, sluicing into view around jutting gray boulders, slapping into the sides of the ledge upon which I stood before smoothing out over the deep water below me. As I looked in that direction, there came a high, delighted, feminine cry. A girl rounded the bend of the river, riding a yellow inner tube over the swift waves.

She had a tangled blonde mane. She was suntanned and sleek. She wore a small bikini that left the sweet upper globes of her breasts bare. She dangled her hands in the water and threw back her head as she rode and screamed and laughed. She was in her teens – in her twenties maybe – and how she made me ache, my soul in my groin. I watched her sail under me, heard her cry out wonderfully to her boyfriend, who now came around the bend after her in a tube of his own. I could have died of the longing. Oh, oh, oh, I thought. Oh, youth irretrievable. Oh schmuck, schmuck, schmuck.

Then Agnes called me from the bridge. ‘Harry!’

I looked up and saw her striding across, waving to me over the rail as she came. I picked up the overnight bag I’d bought in Rutland and scrambled down the rock with it and up a scrubby path to the road. I walked onto the bridge to meet her. She strode on toward me, grinning. I couldn’t take her in, not all of her, not as fast as she came and with all my expectations blown away. I don’t know how I’d pictured her. Wan and nervy and overquick, I guess. Not like this. Small, lean, muscular, so brown her smile flashed white; all the leopardy vibrance in her visible sinews, all the powerful vibrance in her eyes. Her face had thinned – I remembered the grim, round, monkey-featured face of yore – and now the features were very sharp and strong and framed in a downpour of long, straight, black, black hair.

‘Welcome to disaster,’ she said, and I tossed my bag to the pavement and we threw our arms around each other.

And so I was a blank, and held her hard, pouring myself over her, closing my eyes. I smelled the sun in her skin and felt the strength in her arms and the pressure of her breasts against me. She was wearing just cut-off jeans and a black halter top and I pressed my fingers gratefully into the hot skin of her bare back and her bare shoulders.

We broke. She held me at arms length, looking me over. With that white smile and those eyes, their overpowering liveliness.

‘So?’ she said. ‘Are you an asshole?’

‘Pretty much,’ I managed to get out. ‘Yeah.’

‘My luck – and here I’ve been praying you’d come.’

She had a deep laugh that rung in me. I picked up my bag, and she took my arm, wrapped her arms cozily around mine as we started walking back across the bridge.

‘So what’s the plan?’ she said up at me. ‘We fuck each other and the Dionysian and Appolonian merge in a great white flash and all nature’s set aright?’

‘Uh … well, yeah, that was my general outline.’

‘I’ll bet.’ We strolled to the dirt road. ‘God,’ she said with a comical sigh. ‘If we could really just be what we meant to each other! Instead of what we are.’

I laughed too, looking down into her sable hair.

I had had no idea it would be so good to see her.

The road climbed steeply and more steeply still. Past an inn on an acre of cleared land, and a pinewood vacation cabin back in the trees. Past a few more driveways and then into thicker forest, becoming a rutted switchback as it climbed. Agnes waved at the windshields of a jeep or two that came bumping down past us to the bridge below. But after that, we were alone together, the forest dwarfing us and pressing in on the roadsides with spills of mulch and beer cans, and drawing back into superstitious depths strafed by the morning sun. It was a tough climb for me and I was breathing hard. And I was beginning to feel nervous, with this sense that I was climbing away from everyone everywhere. And Agnes said:

‘So I shouldn’t have written you all that shit, huh? I really was praying you’d come.’

‘No, no,’ I puffed. ‘I wanted to hear from you.’

‘Well. Since you are here, would you mind making everything in my past have been all right?’

‘Sure, no problem.’

‘And there’s kind of a clunking noise in my refrigerator too. God, it’s nice to have a man around the house.’

I smiled, but she was way ahead of me. I couldn’t think of anything clever to say and, in fact, began to feel almost a panic of solitude and misgiving. She spoke as if we both knew why I was here, and I didn’t. And she cursed so much, which made me uncomfortable in a woman. And she didn’t shave under her arms, I noticed too, which made my heart sink and even repelled me. I didn’t know her, I didn’t really know her. I gazed off into the forest to avoid her now, huffing hard with the steep climb, and huffing harder to fill the silence. No houses anywhere, no view but trees. The tortuous forest interior murmurous and chilling as a monk’s chant. Low bursts of birdsong coming from its invisible reaches, call and response, intimate and strange like conversations on the streets of other countries. I mean, where the hell was I? What the hell was I doing here? Where was my family? Where was everybody? I had a shock as I noticed some crouched thing peering back at me from in there: a car, it turned out; the rusted skeleton of an abandoned Pontiac, staring like a giant toad from its decaying headlight sockets. That did it. My fragile sense of escape broke open, and I got a full blast of the insanity of what I’d done. My poor wife! The police! And to be here alone, with this stranger, this neurotic woman who could barely hold her own life together …

I turned to her, meaning to pull away, and then I saw her and it was all right again. She had her face confidently lifted to the mountain breeze, and strands of black hair playing on her browned skin – and I did know her; that hadn’t changed. And I did understand what was going on, sort of, though I wasn’t as precise and glib about it all as she. Well, it had always been like that between us, hadn’t it. She was one of these artist types, after all.

‘I didn’t just come here, you know, for you, because of your letters,’ I said, without thinking. She didn’t get me at first – and then she did, before I finished: ‘I’m in trouble of my own.’

Her reaction wasn’t everything I might’ve wished: her energy did falter, her chin jerked a little to one side as if she’d taken a blow. But she showed me that bright white grin again. ‘Sure, right,’ she said. ‘We’ll talk all about it.’ And I had my first glimpse of how strong the force still was in her – joy, I would say now, the force of joy – and how battered it was, how she staggered inwardly, and reeled.

‘Look.’ She pointed proudly up a final, steep ascent. ‘There’s my house.’

It stood behind red pines on the top of a hill. A long, one-story log cabin with a low, shingled hip roof. There was a round tin chimney gleaming up from the roof’s center. Black smoke chugged from it steadily, blowing off to the side as it cleared the trees and dissipating beneath the clear sky.

‘It’s great,’ I gasped, working hard up the slope. ‘But I hope you know CPR.’

‘You’re an old New York City fart,’ she said, tugging on my arm.

‘Thanks. I needed you to tell me that. Christ!’ I pulled up, halfway there, trying to catch my breath, looking around me. There was a view from here, over the forest top. Your basic green hills in misty distance, with swathing strokes of light and shadow. ‘Great spot,’ I said, like any New Yorker admiring a country house. ‘How much land do you have?’

‘Oh, acres and acres. Woods and The Swimhole and The Meadow of Wildflowers and the Path Through The Pines and the Valley of Dead Elms and after that there’s a nature preserve that goes on forever. We used …’

She barely said this last, but I got the picture immediately. We used to wander through it together, she was about to say. And I imagined Roland and her to the sound of violins, tripping sweetly hand in hand, discovering and christening the mysterious regions of their domain. Sad stuff now that it had all gone sour. ‘Wow,’ I said, still leaning on my New Yorkisms. ‘How the hell could you afford it?’

‘My Dad’s money, when he died. We built the house ourselves, my friends and I. One of the good things about being an artist is you know all these craftsmen who are out of work. Come on.’ She had let go of my arm and was continuing up the hill easily, the big muscles showing on her thighs. ‘You can explore while I work.’

‘Work? I just got here. And it’s Sunday. And I haven’t seen you for twenty years.’

‘I know, but the light. I gotta use the light. Come on.’

She waved me up as I labored after her. Seeing her above me, framed against the red shafts of pines, vital and at home and with her butt moving in her short jeans, I had a momentary impulse to catch up with her and take her by the arm, to swing her round to some violins of my own and pull her to me. I had the momentary sense that if I kissed her like that, like in a movie, this would work out, whatever this was, like a movie, and I would get clear of everything somehow. Of course, I was a little long in the tooth already to believe that and probably didn’t have the courage anyway. And I was just glad, finally, to pull alongside her again and be next to her again as we continued on to the top.

The cabin stood on a circle of dark red earth. An old gray pickup was parked out by the perimeter. The site was set back from the edge of the hill and the high pines screened and shaded it making it feel tenebrous and secluded. She led me inside through a flimsy screen door which slammed loudly behind us.

‘It’s not big or anything,’ she said, as I blinked at it after the sunlight.

This central room was most of the house, it seemed, too small to be sprawling, but broad enough under the cathedral beams. Dark but airy, with small windows all thrown open. Rustic and spare: just a sloppy purple sofa and some exhausted log chairs pulled haphazardly around a wood stove in the middle of the floor. The night cold lingered indoors and the stove was lit. The fire outlined the iron door in orange, and I could hear it breathing harshly, one long exhalation.

At the first sight of the place, I felt another small surge of loneliness, of misgiving. I couldn’t have said just why.

‘The kitchen’s over there,’ said Agnes, pointing to a railed alcove on the room’s far side. ‘There should be some food or other if you’re hungry.’

‘Yeah, I am.’

‘That’s my bedroom and the bathroom, and that’s my studio. And that’s it.’

Dutifully I ambled over to the bathroom door, holding my bag before me in both hands. Then I moved to the bedroom and peeked in. It was darker in there with the pine trunks outside pressing close to the windows, but it was light enough to see the bed unmade and toiletries scattered, and her clothes for days, maybe weeks, tossed down on chairs and the floor and anywhere. I glanced over at the studio too, but that door was shut.

‘The place is a mess, I know,’ she said.

I nodded at it all, the way one does, ambling back toward her. ‘It’s great. Really.’

She nodded too, looking the place over herself. I came to stand in front of her.

‘It’s not the light,’ she said up at me. ‘Obviously. I mean, about working, my having to work. I need to work. I just …’ She shrugged.

‘Oh, no, yeah, sure, right,’ I said. And I nodded some more. ‘So what are we, like, in love with each other? Or we would’ve been, or …’

‘Just what in tarnation’s going on around here?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Beats me,’ she lied blithely – good thing I hadn’t mentioned my sudden agony of terror and yearning. She went up on tiptoe to kiss my cheek: mwah. ‘Why don’t you explore the place till I’m done. There’s paths all over.’

My frustrated urge to connect with her was nearly desperate as she walked away. And now here was something really strange, something practically gothic, to make it worse. As she went to the studio, she drew a single key from the pocket of her cut-offs. I mean, the house was wide open, but this one door had a deadbolt. She unlocked it. She opened the door only slightly too, and slipped secretively through the gap.

‘Don’t get lost,’ she said, smiling brightly one more time.

I tossed my bag down by the sofa. It’s a little late for that, I thought.

She closed the door behind her and damn me if I didn’t hear her bolt it again from within.

I’d planned a moment then for a gander at the details. The framed pictures on the wall, the flower vase on a rough-hewn dining table, the mugs and crockery I’d spotted hanging from hooks on the kitchen wall – to search for a clue, I mean. Because something really was off about the place: that aura of a dangerous despair wasn’t all coming from me. It was something simple, basic, and it bugged me: a forgotten song sort of thing. But it was no good trying to figure it out now. Now, it was body time in flesh city, the functions had had it with mystery and romance. I was starving, I needed to take a piss – and tired, God, I was exhausted, nearly sick with it, nearly swaying.

Agnes began to work. I heard her going at it. Whack, whack, whack, chuck, chuck, chuck behind the bolted door. Mallet and chisel on wood. I stumbled roughly into the bathroom. Even the bathroom door had no lock, but I was just too tired to think about it anymore. I pissed with my chin on my chest, my eyes closing. Then I forced myself to the kitchen and scarfed handfuls of fresh-baked bread and Swiss cheese at the open refrigerator door. Woozily, I resolved that this was what I would do from now on: eat only healthy, simple foods like this; and I would move to the country when my troubles were over, and learn the names of all the trees and birds.

I tottered to the sofa and dropped down on it. To the intermittent rhythms of her chisel, and the steady warm breathing of the woodstove beside me, I fell into a black sleep.

When I woke up it was well into the afternoon. The fire was out, and I was chilly, though the air through the window was warm. For a few seconds, it was quiet, and I lay on the sofa, hoping Agnes had finished. But then the mallet started in again behind the studio door. No wonder she had such muscular arms.

I sat up, got up quickly, washed up quickly, putting some vigor into it. I’d decided to take Agnes’s advice and go out for a while – before the ominous atmosphere of Castle Mallory began to oppress me again. On a shelf braced up beside the kitchen railing, I found a row of books, solemn women’s novels and a few paperbacks on art and a few on nature. One of these last was a handbook on wildflowers. I picked it out, ready to make a start on this new, organic life of mine.

But the first thing I did, I admit, when I got outside, was wander round the house to the studio side. Just curious – I wanted to see if I could look in through the windows and see what all the secrecy was about. I passed by with a great show of innocence, hands in pockets, glancing all around. The windows were all hung over, though, with stained canvases. Stepping back, I saw, on the slope of the roof, two plexiglas bubbles through which she got this precious light of hers. So that was that. I set off on my own to explore.

The day was fine. There was a fresh, poignant undercurrent in the breezes. A path of spongy duff angled down westerly through the woods, and I took that, marching briskly. Hut, hut, good exercise, good for the mind. A little sweat to ease the wracking woe-is-me routine.

After a few minutes, I became aware of the steady hiss of the river off to my left. I could see it then through the trees, foamy and rippling over its rocky bed. I figured I must be approaching the Swimhole; my flower handbook wouldn’t be much good there, so I turned off at a dog’s leg I saw and headed deeper into the forest.

The biographies of Agnes go on forever about these acres, her property, and its importance to her, the place-names she gave. Roland gives poetical interviews from his Hollywood home, and art school girls make pilgrimages, and every other year or so some jerk waxes half-smart on its effect on her work or even its symbolism in her mind, God help us. But for all that, it was a magical place, I felt it right away. Maybe it was her, the way she loved it, the way she moved in it, as I’d already seen, as its creature, in such off-handed communion. Also, though, there were patches of it that simply resonated in the mind somehow. They were beautiful, but they were so weirdly familiar and effortless too, like just one more grand view on a picture postcard. You couldn’t admire them, you could hardly really see them at all. They just drew you in, fairy-tale fashion, to some zone of natural imagination, as you moved along.

I felt the effect even then, as I headed down this narrowing trail. Low hornbeams and half-sprouted elms closed over me to form a descending tunnel. It thickened and gloomed as it curled around, and I could see ahead where it opened again into a sedate medallion of mote-hung gold. Anyone can imagine the metaphors, the symbols – this shadowy passage into radiant light – it’s all been done; it’s a small industry these days. But they botch up the fact of it, the feeling of it. Because it was somehow all so known already; it was defiantly unremarkable.

I collided with the fabulous web of a tiny spider. and, dragging the sticky silk from my lips, bowed out of the tunnel and into what she had called The Meadow of Wildflowers. It was a great, stout crescent of grass bordered by forest on three sides and by low hills along the northwest fringe. It was very green, and wonderful with sprays of purple, and yellow and white – loosestrife and goldenrod and Queen Anne’s lace, that is, with white moths and monarchs bobbing around over it, and gnats dancing in the beams from the sun, which had sunk now to the crest of a hill.

I walked out into it, bugs springing from the grass before my feet and chittering and rattling all around me. Redwinged blackbirds ditching their blinds and making for the trees as I came on farther. And I reached the center of it, where the colorful meadow was all around me, the hills and the trees and so on. And again, it was all so placidly present, so there, it felt, within as well as without, that it really beggared thought; so beggared thought, in fact, that I found it a bit hard to bear.

So I got me out my book, I did, and started naming off the flowers. Kneeling over clover with a scientific frown, chucking the bellflowers with my finger. Sticking my shnoz in the milkweed and watching the grubs shimmy up its boles. That reminded me of Agnes and her monkey statue with the worms in it. And looking up, I noticed that the whole place brought Agnes back to me in the way she hadn’t herself. The old times were with me now: the stream in back of her house, the walks home – the ache of regret, too, which I guess was part of what I’d come for.

Well, after enough of this, I could stand the place a little better. And I got to my feet, and the sun was just down, and the sky was royal blue with an undulent line of tangerine above the hills, and what do you know? I was one serene Harry suddenly. Or at least a more solid Harry, a more actual Harry, who had a real, calmer sense of his situation, who knew the score. I did know it, to my surprise. There really wasn’t much mystery to it, after all. I had a pretty good sense of what would happen next – with the Feds, I mean, and the newspapers, and my wife. I realized I had to call my wife too. She’d be terrified I’d killed myself or something. The doofus. I could’ve kicked my own ass, just panicking, just running out on her like that.

So I sighed. I gave the meadow a last once-over. A magical spot it was, absolutely.

And then the sky went a shade darker and the big empty place began to seem kind of creepy, so I hied it the hell out of there.

Incredibly enough, our heroine was still locked up and malleting away when I got back, lamplight now seeping under the studio door. But then, just moments after I came in, she seemed to give over. I heard other noises briefly as I replaced her wildflower book on the shelf – sweeping maybe, and some heavy piece of furniture scraping the floor. And then the bolt thunked back, the door opened a little. She slipped out, and with her back to me, shot the bolt home once again.

Christ, what was she building in there, a vampire? Whatever it was, it had sure drained her. All that morning’s vim was history. She looked limp and weak, her tan a thin layer over sunken cheeks and deep pallor. And she seemed irritated to see me waiting for her, as if I were one more problem than she could tolerate today. This is the woman who wrote those letters to me, I thought.

‘You okay?’ I said.

‘Tired.’ She tried to smile, brushing her hair off her forehead. ‘Why don’t you pour yourself a drink while I make dinner?’

‘No, that’s all right.’ I was a purified, natural man now, see; no more booze. ‘Well, on second thought, what have you got?’

I had a beer, leaning on the kitchen rail with the bottle. Watching as she shuffled wearily from refrigerator to stove. She made Spanish omelettes, pretty expertly it looked like. I’m attracted to domestic women, and the sight of her cooking fueled my warmth for her and my vague fantasies of escape.

I told her how I’d gone to the meadow, which seemed to brighten her up a little. A few times as I described the experience, she lifted a smile to me and said, ‘Yes. Yes.’ But then she’d sink away again, and go on about her work without speaking; blinking with exhaustion sometimes, or coming to a stop for a moment, forgetting what she had meant to do.

She was silent for a long time too as we ate together at either end of the rude wooden table. I was pretty much out of conversation myself and there were longer and longer lapses: the sounds of metal forks on clay plates, the miserable concentration on grains of rice and scraps of egg, the steady traffic of frogs outside and the crickets between the floorboards. All depressing as hell, because I wanted so much to be with her, to feel close to her, not to be alone.

Finally, and with an effort I think, she raised her face. But she regarded me none-too-pleasantly and her voice was hollow and wry. ‘So?’ she said. ‘Are the police after you?’

I nodded. ‘I would think so, by now.’

‘You’re not a murderer or anything, I hope.’

‘No.’ I leaned back heavily in my chair with a second bottle of beer. ‘Just a scumbag basically. Overlooked some minor political bullshit, took some illegal gifts, cheated on my wife. You know the routine. The screws want me to rat on Bugsy and Big Al.’

‘Uh huh. And will you?’

‘No.’ This is what I had decided in the meadow. ‘I actually hope they nail the bastards. But I’m not turning them in to buy out of my mistakes. Ricco squeals on no one.’

She kept up the sardonic tone, but I could see she was suffering in those live-wire eyes. I hated this. ‘Will you have to go to jail?’

‘I don’t think so. To be honest. They haven’t really got that much on me. I didn’t do that much. They’ll just lean on me, make sure it all gets in the papers. And I’ll be disbarred, probably.’

‘What about your wife? What’ll she do?’

I shrugged. ‘Forgive me, I would think. I couldn’t bear that. I’ll have to leave her.’

‘Do you love her?’ I didn’t answer. ‘Ah, you do,’ she said. ‘She was made for you. You adore her.’

She was studying me with unnerving directness, so I studied her back. High cheeks, deep eyes, thick lips and a beakish sort of nose, all intense and overpowering. Not beautiful. It was her energy that made her so desirable, I figured. Or maybe the beer. I sure wanted those cut-offs gone just now; I wanted in between those muscular legs of hers.

‘I do have to call her,’ I said.

She gave a tired snort, sitting back from her empty plate. ‘You’ll have to take the truck into town. My phone’s been cut off.’

‘You’re joking.’

‘This morning. About ten minutes after you called me.’

‘Because of money?’

I think she considered lying about this. She turned in her chair and glanced at me sidewise. It made me feel my position: this nostalgic fugitive intruding on her years of solitude. But she gave in. She said: ‘Oh, it was on purpose, more or less. Roland’s been badgering me. He’s getting annoyed. You know, he has some big offer to go to Hollywood and score a movie. He doesn’t know what to do with the kid.’

I suppose I wanted to get back at her for the crack about Marianne – before I could stop myself, I said: ‘Maybe you ought to take her, Agnes. Obviously, this shit is just killing you.’

She laughed once, a sound like something falling to the ground. ‘Maybe you should just stay out of it, Harry.’

Tilted back in my chair, I raised my bottle to her. ‘Right,’ I said, ‘that’s what I meant.’

The night had gone colder fast, the way it does in the mountains. Agnes closed the windows while I cleaned up the dishes. She brought in logs from outdoors somewhere and built the fire again in the woodstove.

When I was finished, she was sitting on the couch with a glass of wine, staring blankly at the blaze through the stove’s open door. I sat down next to her. She put her head on my shoulder.

‘Sorry, Mr Har.’

‘No, no.’ I put my arm around her. I kissed the white part in her black hair. I breathed in wood and work-sweat and some feminine shampoo.

‘Evil Agnes mustn’t hold you to her imagination,’ she said. ‘I can’t be much of a thrill for you either.’ She sighed. ‘It’s all just who you are in the end.’

‘God, I hope not. I haven’t the faintest fucking notion of who I am. That’s how I got the shaft.’

She gave a low, appealing giggle into my shirtfront – by which time, of course, my hardon was caught painfully against the crux of my thigh. An intrusion on this gentle moment, but there you are. I looked away from her to cool myself down, concentrating on the melancholy reaches of the room.

And then, as they say, it hit me: what was so wrong with the place. What was so oddly morose and somehow suspenseful, even frightening about it, as if some ceaseless minor chord echoed in its atmosphere.

‘Where’s all your work?’ I asked her.

‘Hm?’

‘It can’t all be in the studio? I mean, you’ve been at it for, like, what? Five years? Seven years? Vere’s da art, Chahlie?’

She raised her face to me sleepily. ‘Oh,’ she murmured. ‘Don’t, Harry.’ She let me kiss her, and kissed me so softly on the lips that I wanted to rend my garments with the unfairness of life and with my desire.

‘I’m finished,’ she whispered up at me. ‘I love you, you know. I’ve always loved you. But I’m finished. I’m already dead.’

It was a little tough to sleep with my hair standing on end like that, my eyes jacked wide open and the tip of my dick somewhere up around my chest. Still, I did manage to doze off around three in the morning, clutching my blanket around my chin on the sofa as the last of the fire died.

It was the clang of the woodstove door that woke me in the morning. Some time near six, with the sky just barely light. I pulled my nose out of the dusty upholstery and rolled over, squinting. Agnes was retreating from the stove to the front door as the fire snorted to life again. She was wearing a thin, ratty bathrobe of green tartan and I could tell, by the flow of her body, that she was naked underneath.

‘Ssh,’ she whispered at me. ‘I’m going for my swim. Go back to sleep.’

I pulled my blanket close around me, glad for the warmth of the fire, and watched through narrowed eyes as she worked the wooden door open and pushed out through the screen. I listened to her light footsteps fading on the path into the forest, and then lay watching the orange outline around the woodstove door while the pall of fear and sadness settled over me.

Agnes, though … I was dressed and showered when she came back, and she was full of bright smiles and energy again. Rubbing her wet hair with a towel she carried, her breasts and buttocks printed in water on her robe and she all wifely unconcern. Electrifying it was, though I clung to my self-pity.

She dressed in her bedroom with the door open, while I wandered into the kitchen. I pondered the old-fashioned coffee pot helplessly and listened to the sounds of her tossing her wardrobe around, searching for an outfit.

‘Go on, old Harry, I’ll do it,’ she said, rushing in – in shorts now and an I Lo Vermont sweatshirt – chasing me away. I managed to put some butter and knives on the table, all dolefully. And she made corn bread – fresh corn bread from scratch – chattering the while about the pleasures of the Swimhole. ‘Go down in the afternoon, when the water’s warmer. About three o’clock, it’s perfect. You have to wear a suit then, though, cause all these fucking, you know, tubers and canoers go by,’ and on and on like that. She was very enthusiastic about it.

Breakfast took a long time, more than an hour, first juice, then coffee, then the hot bread when it was ready, and coffee again with our feet up on the extra chairs. She talked about the property and the places I should go and explore while she was working, and it was enviable and charming how much she loved the place. Thinking back on it, I realize she didn’t mention the Valley of Dead Elms again, but I didn’t notice that at the time. She directed me to the Path Through The Pines and Cathedral Ridge and something called the Elf Hollow, and described them excitedly with her black eyebrows hiked up and her hands held open in the space in front of her. I suppose there was a touch of mystic back-to-nature stuff in the way she talked, but I felt I understood it, having been to the Meadow of Wildflowers, and anyway, she was very appealing as she talked, throwing herself back in her chair sometimes as if startled and laughing a lot at her own raptures. I confess, I would have liked to steer her back to this fascinating business about loving me, and even to have shared a comforting groan or two over the impossible situation we were clearly heading for. But her mood would not allow it, and the force of her interests – the force of her in general – was far greater than mine, which I also understood and acknowledged even then in my manly pride.

As we refreshed our second mugs of coffee – and I picked more chunks of corn bread from the pan – she moved from exalting Vermont to dishing New York and its corrupt world of art galleries and theorists. I guess every failed artist sings this tune – that’s what I chalked it up to then – but it did sound awful, especially this business about galleries taking fifty per cent of the sale; I was aghast at that. Mainly, in any event, this was her springboard into her own concept of the enterprise at hand. And talking about this – about art, I mean – made her eyes downright hypnotic with excitement. I couldn’t keep up with everything she said, but the way she said it – it sure did make me want to lunge across the table and kiss her mad and fuck her silly. All right, that may not have been the response she was going for, but it was mine own, and I’ll hold it up to any of the claptrappers who dissect her nowadays and who’d have to run back under their toadstools clutching their various genitals, I swear, if ever she strode back onto the scene. They’ve never come near understanding her, never guessed the half of it, never touched it, committed as they are to their own notions and careers. She was all over the place, all over history, with huge, sweeping, inflexible ideas – the kind you get when you argue mostly with yourself – and a vision that covered mankind from the creation to the night before last. The Holocaust was a big part of it – the chamber doors of Auschwitz being a sort of modern Gates of Hell – and the Gates of Hell played their part and the Industrial Revolution and Newton and Darwin and guys like that – Freud; and the Death of Faith, which had to do, so help me, with her Bible theories, and a general picture of humanity as a single organism, going through childhood, maturity and death eventually, and all the while deluded into feeling that the inevitable cycles and developments of each stage were its own creations and within its power. Artists just needed craft and inborn genius – Craft! Craft! she said, Genius! Talent! – simply to capture nature, and it was nature, not art, that would change in the evolving human mind. That’s the Harry version of it anyway. ‘Abstraction,’ I remember she said, ‘is the panicky reaction to the materialistic revelation of the human form; the discovery of the real body, without magic, without any bullshit about the soul is what sent us into a panic of abstraction. That’s why every new abstract trend is always being described as ‘bold’ or ‘daring’ or ‘shocking’. To hide the fact that it’s all just cowardice and horror really. And the fucking theorists who hold the structure up are just like the Catholic monks except with God taken out of it. The inner systems of speculation outlive their purposes. They just can’t stop stuffing their angels onto the heads of pins. That’s why I fucking hate New York. It’s the new Vatican. It is!’

Well, we all have our lives, I guess, and our ideas, smart and stupid, are just our emotions made to sound like objective truths. That’s how I see it now, at least, though at the time I had no thought, no clue, that there was anything desperate in what she said, any last plea to the gods or powers for exactly that sort of courage and realism which she demanded from the unable age but in no way possessed. Oh man! was what I thought as I lifted my coffee to my lips once more, as I watched her across the rim where she gestured and railed, her aspect turned to neon: Oh man, would I like to ball her! God! What she is! What she could have been! Christ, what I could have been if I just could’ve loved her long enough to discover … something, myself, anything.

She tapered off in the end and became watchful. Still pleasant and full of beans, but careful of the light, see, expertly gauging the spread of daylight at the cabin windows. My loneliness seeped back into me as I realized what she was waiting for and that she was going to get up soon and go lock herself into the studio again. I tried to keep her talking, questioned her, diddled her vanity, but eventually she set her mug down with a definitive clump and stood from her chair, stretching.

‘The keys to the truck are hanging up in the kitchen,’ she said.

Which was bad enough – because, of course, this call I had to make to Marianne was weighing a ton on me. But when she had unlocked the studio again, and slipped so cautiously inside, and shot the bolt; when the whack and chunk of the mallet and chisel started – to go on, I knew, until the daylight failed – it was worse still. I found that the oppressive sadness of the cabin had been thrice magnified by the sudden absence of her vitality. All that talk, I mean, all that sexy, jazzed-up yammering about art and man’s destiny and so forth – and now there I sat alone at the breakfast table with the birds cheeping indifferently in the pines outside and, around me, the big dark wooden room gloating and cavernous. And empty. Empty.

Where was her sculpture, for Christ’s sake? All that yammering. All those years of work. Where the hell was her art?

I bumped down the dirt hill in the pickup. Over the metal bridge with the campers waking on the banks far below, and a few kids diving off the boulders to the right. I drove the curling mountain two-lane down into Gaysville. Not much of a town. A few gas stations at the edge of the road, a restaurant, which was closed, a few general stores. I bought myself a Times at one of these last and sat in the truck’s cab reading it over. Parked on the slope, I was, of the little asphalt strip outside, in the far slot, next to the old-style glassed-in phone booth. The sun shone through the booth, the phone waited expressionless inside, and the blood, in my throat, in my heart, in my whole body, was as heavy as molten stone.

I was there, in the paper, all right. Front page, a one column lead. Commissioner Vanishes As Inquiry Nears. A good story. The Feds had slipped them everything. The assessments, the Florida trip, the hookers. Even the connection to Umberman, who was quoted saying he was ‘deeply hurt’ that a young man he’d trusted and supported should have shown himself to be blah blah blah. Well, at least Marianne knew the story now. That ought to have made it easier on me. But it took a long time before I kicked my way out of the truck, and walked heavily to the phone.

It was not at all how I’d imagined – and I’d thought I’d imagined it every way it could be. She didn’t go noble on me, or hysterical or cold. After the first long trembling silence of relief when she heard my voice, she was the same Marianne whom I knew and lived with: we talked it over as husband and wife would, as if discussing a child’s sickness, say, or the loss of a job. Her voice was quiet and measured. She’d been terribly worried about me, she said. Was I all right? Did I have a place to stay? Stuff like that. Charlie was at the park with a sitter, which was a blessing: I didn’t have to hear him babbling in the background. Yes, I thought, this can be borne, I can get through this. It was only later, when I was driving back to the cabin, that I saw the big picture of it, that I had to pull over to the roadside for a moment to pound wildly on the steering wheel and spit curses at my own stupidity and ignorance. It was then, finally, that I understood how much she’d looked up to me and respected me, the way women do when they love you, and how I hadn’t begun to realize that – wouldn’t have believed it if I had – until I’d blown it all. For something. For what? I couldn’t remember.

But on the phone, I just concentrated on getting through. I explained to her what I thought would happen. I tried to make it sound as endurable as I could.

‘Where are you now?’ she asked me softly.

‘I shouldn’t say that,’ I told her, fumbling for a reason. ‘The Feds, you know, they might ask you. I don’t want you to have to lie. I just need a few more days.’

And then she said: ‘Are you with that girl? The one in Vermont, the one who writes to you?’

‘No, no, of course not,’ I said. ‘I just need to be alone and think, that’s all.’

So then, when she did start to cry, I figured it was because I was still lying to her, even now, which meant the marriage was pretty well over, which only I had already known.

It was a few seconds before she got her voice again. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

‘Christ,’ I said, clutching my breast in my fist. ‘Christ, don’t apologize to me, Marianne.’

‘Well,’ she said, after another silence. ‘Come back soon, all right? And don’t hurt yourself anymore. We love you.’

I tried to tell her I loved her too, but the stone wouldn’t clear my throat.

My hike that morning was not so successful as the first. I was too miserable, for one thing, and I got lost in a particularly scrubby patch of woods for another. I managed to learn the names of a few trees from another of Agnes’s handbooks, and then gave it up and worked my way back to the cabin around one o’clock. I ate a couple of cold chicken legs while Agnes hammered away behind her door. And then I drank a beer, which knocked me out on the sofa after last night’s sleepless hours.

I was awake before the day started dying in earnest. I lay where I was, listening to the mallet go, my soul like an anvil. When I got up, it was to push back the grinning emptiness of the place a little. The room was beginning to gather shadows in the corners and basically get on my nerves.

I paced the room a while and read the books on the shelf and paced the room again to the chisel’s rhythm. I found myself eyeing the bolted studio door every so often and I felt its draw on my curiosity and my yearning. I stepped outside only once – to break that attraction, and to breathe the cooling air beneath the pines and watch the sun setting into the green hills. Then, going back inside, I eventually wandered over to the clapboard wall that separated the main room from her bedroom. I studied the pictures hanging there; I hadn’t taken much notice of them before.

It was a little gallery, five pictures in a straight row. Just photographs torn out of books or magazines and sloppily placed behind the glass of cheap snapshot frames. All were of sculpture from different times. I suppose I could identify them now, but I couldn’t then. There was some typical Egyptian king or other sitting stiffly on a throne; an absolute gas of a Greek soldier with a neat-o helmet and a face as noble as a god’s; a Roman emperor – Vespasian probably – pointing grandly over his dominions; a sexy Michelangelo nude seeming to rouse himself languorously out of the rough marble; and some sort of unpleasant mish-mash of slates or stones arranged out in the desert somewhere. I went over them carefully, to pass the time, feeling there must be some point to the arrangement. Great moments in sculpture, great sculpture on parade – something like that. Which shows you how much I knew about it.

I was surprised by the sound of the bolt thunking home and turned to find Agnes already there. Leaning back against the studio door with both hands behind her. Still and stiff as a statue herself, as if petrified by exhaustion. Her cheeks were heavy again and her complexion sallow. She glared at me – sneered at me almost, I thought, as if to say: who let this idiot into my house?

It didn’t matter: I was delighted to see her, and my mood warmed and rose.

‘Hi!’ I said.

She snorted. She asked thickly: ‘Like my gallery?’

‘Uh … Yeah, sure.’

She pushed off the door as if to come toward me, but instead she stopped where she was and rubbed her face with both hands, wearily. When she looked up, wincing, she headed past me for the kitchen. She waved the pictures away, going on as if it bored her.

‘Jew killers I’ve known and loved,’ she said.

Puzzled, I examined the pictures again, even scratching the side of my head with a finger. ‘I guess I missed that.’

She was in the kitchen now, out of sight. I heard her uncapping a couple of beers.

‘The Egyptians enslaved us,’ she called out. ‘The Greeks laid the groundwork for anti-Semitic theories.’

‘Did they? Man, they were clever.’

‘Their ideal of perfection inspired the Nazis. And the Romans fucking flattened Jerusalem, the Vatican set us on fire for laughs …’

‘And the modern guys bore us to death?’ I called back.

She carried in the beers with a tired strut. Handed me a bottle. ‘That’s our answer. That inhuman, meaningless crap. Who would look at that shit if you could look at Michelangelo?’

As she knocked back the brew, she fixed such a gaze of intimate rancor on the photographs that I gave up trying to kid her out of it. It was another of her humongous theories and typical that way, but more connected, I suspected from her letters, to these after-work depletions of hers.

‘I don’t get it,’ I said. ‘You mean, if we want to make good art, we have to be anti-Semitic again?’

Her laugh was ugly. ‘What do you mean “we”, Jew-boy?’

I managed to let this ride. ‘I guess I’m just not up on all the Jewish stuff, to be honest. I wasn’t raised that way. Hell, everybody hates everybody else most of the time. I figure you can’t get obsessed about it.’

That’s what I said, all right. And why that – which sounded reasonable enough – should’ve seemed insipid to me at the moment, while what she said – which was kind of nuts – seemed profound, I don’t know. But Agnes gave me another what-an-idiot look, and I somehow felt I deserved it. Then she threw the whole thing over, half-smiling, letting out her breath with a whiffle.

‘Okay,’ she said, still not altogether pleasantly. ‘D’you call your wife?’

She asked this, and then drifted away, yawning, to the front door. It was still standing open, despite the chillier dusk, and she leaned against the frame with her beer, looking out through the screen at the pines.

‘Yeah,’ I said softly, and hoped she’d leave it at that.

And she did. She leaned in the doorway without speaking again. I swigged my beer, alone where I was. I was annoyed – disappointed, I guess, having been so eager to see her. In fact, I was beginning to feel a sort a grim ire against her depression, and against mine, and against the whole cabin’s blackening atmosphere; a sort of sturdy defiance, like those brave Englishmen feel in ghost stories when they go crouching with lanterns down the hallways of their haunted homes.

Then bang went the woodstove door and up I woke – up after about two hours of sleep, having spent most of my time getting wretched over Marianne and Charlie and the Feds and how withdrawn Agnes had been over dinner last night and how much it all made me feel alone, poor boy. But now, as the throaty sussuration of the fire deepened, I rolled over on the sofa slowly, and there Agnes was, crouching right by me, her face close to mine, our noses nearly touching. And her smile was what you would have to call sunny. And she said, ‘Hiya, cutes. Wanna swim naked?’

‘Yeah!’ I said, and I sat up, throwing the cover aside.

The Swimhole, as she’d named it, was where I’d figured it would be: down lower on the western path, past the dog’s leg which led to the meadow. Another turn off, on the left side this time, took us fairly tumbling down a steep forest slope until we spilled out onto a little sandspit at the river’s edge. Here, the White, though narrow, deepened into a strongly flowing pool, decorated with grey rocks by the banks and screened in by thick trees on either shore. It was a lovely place: the river winding out of view to left and right, the mountain’s morning mist hanging low over us, black birds shooting out of the trees and across the water to the far trees, and the air loud with the water’s confidential swash: it was a place of reminiscent mysteries. Indeed, a city boy like me had to wonder if some primordial Harry hadn’t summered in some such place and loved it well enough to work the memory into his generations: like the tunnel to the meadow, like the meadow too, the pool seemed to greet in me some inner impression of itself so that I had that sense again of an overriding stillness.

‘It reminds me …’ I said, then hesitated, but she rewarded me with such a lively grin, that I finished: ‘Doesn’t it? Of the place behind your house?’

‘A little, I guess,’ she said.

‘Sort of anyway. I don’t know.’

Agnes dropped our towels on the sand and stepped away from me. She moved out onto a flat boulder that cantilevered over the pool in a perfect diving surface. As she moved to the edge, she slipped the tatty green robe off and let it fall to her heels. Naked, from the back, she looked scrawny and brown and muscular, with a full valentine of a bottom only slightly paler than the rest. Along with your basic aching joy at seeing a woman nude, a powerful romantic sadness welled up in me, so that I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to dance a wild pan-dance to a frenzied bacchanal or just rip my own head off at the intolerable sweetness of mortality.

I opted for getting out of my clothes: I peeled my shirt off. Agnes dove in. I stopped and watched her, grunting softly when I caught the fruity flash between her legs. Then, talking my dick down to a respectable angle, I worked my jeans off too. I was glad I’d been going to the gym, I’ll tell you, but a little ashamed at the pallid pinkness of my skin. As Agnes surfaced, whooping at the cold, I jogged quickly out onto the rock and hurled myself into the river.

Well, it was cold all right, and we screamed and shivered our cheeks. And the current was stronger than it looked and swept me steadily downstream so that I had to splash and fight to pull up level with her.

‘Watch,’ she called – she had to shout over the White’s great murmur. ‘Like this.’ She did the sidestroke, facing me, strong graceful sweeps of her two hands. ‘You can swim and swim like this without moving.’ Because she was headed into the current, see, and it kept her right where she was.

I followed suit, and there we lay together, motionless in the water save for our strokes, breathing hard into each other’s faces. Her nakedness was soft and ripply – and riveting – just beneath the surface.

‘Was I a total bitch last night?’ she called to me.

‘Not total,’ I gasped. ‘I think I’m falling in love with you too.’

‘Agh!’ she said. ‘We should be seventeen! This should be happening when we’re seventeen!’

‘I know. That’s what I keep thinking. Is there anything worse than not being seventeen?’

‘Being seventeen?’

‘Right,’ I said. ‘Right.’

Soon, I was exhausted, out of breath. Vanity-exercising in a gym, I was finding out, means just about nothing when you start hiking in woods and swimming in rivers. I had to head in. And that was hard work too. Making it back to the rock against the current, trying to climb but finding no good purchase for my fingers as my legs were pulled downstream. Eventually, I shuffled my way around, gripping the boulder, until my feet touched the pebbles on the river bed. Then I hopped and danced my way over the sharp stones to the strand.

I toweled myself off while Agnes rolled over discretely on her other side and kept on stroking. Even after I’d dressed again, she went at it for a long time. I sat out at the end of the diving rock and watched her, and listened to the water and the sudden calls of birds, saw the mist burn off and the sky come out pale blue, watched the sun angle in through the downriver trees, felt my heart breaking. That sort of thing.

Often, remembering, prick in hand, I have asked myself why I didn’t clasp her as she came out of the water and try my luck at drawing her wet body to the sand. The answer is unacceptable to me as I’ve become, and even taunts me, but at the time there simply seemed a mysterious rhythm to the thing. Having seen or sensed that it was this – this natural metabolism of desire – that had been shattered on our first go round, I was supersititious and careful of it. And in the mornings, when she was so charming and vital and all, I indulged my sadness and my panicked terror with the fantasy that, tended lovingly, the rhythm could be restored. I had it all backwards, of course: it was her morning cheer that was the most horrible thing about her. But how – as I always end up asking next in my scummy anguish – how was I to know?

That morning especially, of our handful of mornings, we seemed a possibility. We climbed back to the cabin through the dawn woods hand in hand. She taught me – pretty comically – to make muffin batter while she zipped through the arcana of the coffee gizmo just as if by the way. We sat at the table with our feet up on the chairs, and for the first time, we talked about being children together. I recited my idylls about our little stream and our evenings, and she imitated her own witchy voice and rituals so that I had to smile a lot to hide how much they affected me still. Then we stopped for a while. We sat silently. For myself, I was afraid to go on any farther. I was afraid our old friendship would begin to seem strange or even sick in some way, if we talked about it too much. It’s the details, you know, that get you. I was afraid to murder the romance.

But Agnes said: ‘So? Don’t you want to hear about your father?’

I shrugged. ‘We never really had a chance to talk about it.’

‘Yeah, well. What would I have said? “Having a wonderful time with your Dad. Wish you were here?”’

I kept my smile plastered on, gazing at the floor.

‘I mean, most of the time when he was there, with my mother, I was at school or something. I mean, obviously. But sometimes, I’d come home and he’d be there. I’d have my milk and cookies and he’d ask me what I was learning in school and that sort of thing.’

‘And he’d tell you those stories. The ones you used to tell me,’ I said, not looking up. ‘About astronomy and stuff.’

‘Yeah, that’s right. It sure seems like they were taking a hell of chance, though, doesn’t it? I mean, I could’ve just babbled to my Dad about the whole thing. They never told me not to.’

I answered heavily: ‘Maybe you knew you’d lose him if you did.’

‘My father?’

‘Mine.’

Now we were both making a careful study of the floor. I was beginning to feel a little ill.

And Agnes said: ‘Look, it was probably a lot easier for him, you know. We were like this make-believe family he had on the side. He didn’t have to deal with our problems – he just got all the good stuff. He could just come by and fuck my mother, charm the kid, then do all his farting and stuff at home.’

‘You don’t have to talk about it that way,’ I said. I washed the taste of it down with coffee. ‘I’m sure it was nice for you.’

She rolled her eyes. ‘It was nice. Sue me.’ I snorted. ‘Forgive me,’ she said.

‘Oh Christ.’ I laughed. I pinched my eyes shut. ‘Oh hell, hell, hell. The man was just such a shlub at home. Whining, you know. Mourning all his lost chances. “I wanted to be an astronomer,” he used to say, “but … I had a family to support.” Like his life was my fault.’ Agnes leaned forward, listening sympathetically. It annoyed the shit out of me, her sympathy, but I went on. ‘What can I say? I wish I was there too. It’s just so weird to think there was this whole other Dad … or not maybe, I don’t know; maybe I just couldn’t see it or something. It’s like I used to wish sometimes I could’ve been there that time he was pitching woo at Aunt May. Before I was born. They oughta let you do that. Just watch some scenes before you’re born, just to fill you in. Then later you can say, “All right, the guy’s a beaten asshole now, but he did have this moment of romance or integrity or something.” I mean, it’s kind of like being half an orphan otherwise.’

Agnes grinned and put her elbow on the table, her chin in her hand. She said wickedly, ‘Gee, Harry, and I thought you loved me for myself.’

I made a face. I almost echoed that back at her but thought better of it – finally, finally, beginning to get the idea that it was I who was by far the stronger of the two of us. ‘Oh, shut up,’ I said.

Staring at the floor, I heard her chuckle, and then sigh – and then drink and set her mug down with that definitive thud. She pushed her chair back. I looked up and saw her stand.

‘So when are you leaving?’ She always said the hardest things just as she was moving out of reach.

‘It better be goddamned soon,’ I said bluntly – and I was still surprised to see it hurt her, to get that glimpse of punch-drunkenness in her eyes. More gently I said: ‘I make it worse by staying. You know. I mean, Jesus, they could bring me back in handcuffs if they find me. I mean, not to put too fine a point on it, but I happen to be scared out of my wits.’ And I still thought this was because of the police and the scandal and so on.

Maybe Agnes knew better because she offered this as if to relieve me: ‘Well – anyway – I’m going to work now.’

I sat where I was as she moved past. Sat and listened to the sounds of the studio door – unlocked, opened, shut, locked again. After a moment of suspense, I flinched: the mallet had started for the day.

I hiked out and found the Path Through The Pines, which was kind of the property’s tourist attraction: not magical, like the other places, I mean, but just fun to see. The trees here had been cleared, I guess, at some point and replanted in tidy rows – half an acre, say, of white pines and then another half of red. When you walked from the first section to the second, the effect was of moving through a stark gray landscape – past empty silver shafts with their first branches high above eye level – and then into a field of rich shade and colors where the orange trunks rose from the red earth and bloomed in low boughs everywhere, bearing green needles and brown cones. You could even stand between the two halves, looking right then left, heightening the sense that you were on the border of two countries, two worlds. I found myself searching for some meaning to this illusion. I tried to read some hopeful omen into it, a pep-talk from the gods about my future. But that annoyed me soon enough. I couldn’t work up the superstition. I mean, how much pull was some dead lumberjack likely to have with the Feds?

So I turned back – which provides only this small irony: that I must have been less than fifty yards from the southern ridge of the Valley of Dead Elms. Not that finding it those few hours earlier would have made much difference to my slow, unconscious ratiocinations. Laying aside any regret-filled daydreams I might have, I sincerely doubt I would’ve gone galloping back to the cabin to rescue Agnes from her personal krakens. I didn’t even know I was in that story. I thought I was in the Harry and Agnes Have A Bittersweet Romance story. Oh, and anyway, I didn’t find it, so what the fuck’s the dif?

So it was home to another merry afternoon of staring at the locked studio door, listening to the mallet hit the chisel, the chisel bite the wood. This though it was a fine summer’s day again and I might well have lunched and napped and hiked back out for hours. I did make myself some lunch and I caught up on some of the sleep I’d lost last night, though I think I was beginning to have nightmares, because I woke up sweating. But then, despite my resolution to return at least to the meadow and drink in some of that wisdom and serenity stuff I’d had the first day, I stayed where I was. Lying on the sofa with an unread book. Staring at the studio door. Feeling oppressed and irritable, curious, and drawn to that locked room as by an hypnotic command. Listening to the mallet within, which seemed to me more swift and furious today than ever before.

Once, toward evening, she stopped, the mallet stopped. And I, who had been pacing aimlessly, stopped where I was and watched the door intently. I heard a sound from in there, which might have been a cough, which might have been a suppressed sneeze. But which might also have been a strangled sob, as of someone weeping violently but trying to hold down the noise.

I began to creep quietly toward the door. The idea was to listen, though I’m not sure I’d have had the courage to knock. But a floorboard creaked under me, and there was some swift shuffling in the studio, and then the hammering started up again – so I retired in defeat.

All this put me in a dark and heroic mood. That feeling of defiance rose in me again. It was beginning to seem as if my capacity for self-pity might not be bottomless after all, nor my willingness to submit to the cabin’s grim and esoteric atmosphere. On top of which, I wanted her – though she cursed a blue streak and she wasn’t blonde and didn’t shave beneath her arms – I was crazy for her, had been cheated, so I felt, of some natural, formative intimacy with her, and did not want to waste another evening tiptoeing round her miseries while the law threatened to separate us again.

So a couple more hours went by. The sunset shift of birds came on outside, singing mostly low notes and sadly. The light beneath the pines around us thickened to a reddish loam. Agnes’s hammering tapered off – a little earlier than usual, I thought. And I heard a thud and a rattling clank, as if she’d dropped both mallet and chisel to the floor in sheer exhaustion. So I imagined it, anyway. And I stood prepared for her in noble pose in the center of the floor. Waited while the usual sweepings and shufflings went on in the studio unseen.

Then back went the bolt. The door opened – just that exasperating crack. She slipped out so carefully, turned to shut the door so quickly, that she didn’t even see me there, but was re-locking the door before our eyes had met.

But she knew I was waiting, must’ve known. And she stood with her back to me a long time, resting her forehead against the door, as if she barely had the strength to stand unaided. Still defiant, I stayed as I was, planning to outlast her, to hold my ground until she finally came around.

But my resolve broke. The silence in the cabin went on – in the cabin and its shadows – and I was suddenly afraid – I didn’t know of what. I had some idea that when she did turn, she would fix me with a skeletal stare and whisper again, I’m dead, Harry. I’m already dead. I’m not sure I could have stomached that.

‘Agnes,’ I broke out. ‘Come on, Agnes. Where’s your work? Show me what you’ve been doing. Where the hell is all your work?’

Slowly, slowly, she pushed off the door, as if lifting a great weight that held her against it. She showed me the side of her face, and gave one of those belittling snorts that cut right into me.

‘I need a drink,’ she said. ‘I need a beer.’

She looked, when she turned, too forbidding to mess with. I let her walk past me to the kitchen.

‘Shit,’ I muttered.

Nonetheless, I did go after her. I stood at the kitchen entryway. And when she swaggered into it, bottle in fist, I confronted her, my hands in my pockets, my face set.

She sighed, as if I were just a bother to her. She swigged her beer arrogantly. She shrugged.

‘All right,’ she said finally. ‘I don’t know what good it’ll do. But come on, if you want. I’ll show you.’

She led me down that first path I’d taken, her beer bottle tapping her thigh as she walked. The sky, which was clear, wasn’t quite twilit yet, but was just beginning to lose its substance in a richer depth of blue. This changed – the light, I mean, changed as we headed down, and as the trees closed in around us. There was real gloaming beneath the leaves and when it brightened in open patches it was never as bright as it had been in the patch just before. We heard the river as we went down, a thin hiss and gurgle at that distance. Then she turned off, as I had, onto the dog’s leg, and I followed her, bending over, into the tunnel of low-hung boughs. The shade beneath them hurt the eyes, being not like night but just as deep; grainy and strange to peer through. And it wasn’t much better when we came out into the meadow, where now the first dusk was spreading downward from the sky and staining all the wildflower glories a uniform grayish blue. With the grass high around her bare legs, Agnes crossed the meadow quickly, hewing to the eastern border of forest. I lagged behind, and panting at that. And my broken attempts to make conversation – to liven things up a little – did the proverbial lead balloon.

It was a long meadow, longer than it looked. I remembered that – how far you had to go to reach the center. By the time we came to the hollow of its crescent, where the woodline bulged out into the grass, the day was ending truly, the twilight becoming smoother and more dense. We came upon a white rag tied to a bowed sapling. It marked another trail, and Agnes turned onto it.

The forest was now diffusing into forms and shadows – fingery extensions, and jutting, grinning boles, tortuous vines and startled stones upstanding. As a New Yorker, I confess I began to grow a bit concerned about coming upon the stray werewolf in here or confronting a rampaging troll, say, in the dark. I told this to Agnes – it was a good excuse to pull up closer to her – and she surprised me with loud, delighted laughter, her white teeth flashing. I suppose I was consoled a bit that she, at least, had come into her element.

The trail went on, but she turned off it. ‘Hey,’ I said, because she seemed to have stepped into an impossible thicket of scratchy brush. But when, in a hurry to be with her, I forced my shoulder through the first mass of briars, I found there was a way through where the foliage had been well trodden down. All the same, it was a narrow passage, and the whip-like branches lashed my face as I went after her, and thorns caught at my clothes.

So on we went, and the brush grew thinner after a while, and slowly, we emerged onto a scrubby plain where the trees were sparse and low. The pall of dusk was full upon us now, but the light was better here than in the forest. And I could see, there before me, with Agnes a small featureless shape moving beneath them, a staggered row of huge dead trees, their leafless branches reaching far into the dissolving sky. They were creepy all right. They looked like witches’ brooms: going straight up then spreading raggedly from the vertical. They towered above us and loomed over us darkly.

‘Agnes!’ I called out, spooked. She stopped for me. I kicked quickly through the high grass to her side. She raised her white eyes up to them and I raised mine.

‘What are they?’ I said. ‘Why are they all dead?’

‘Elm trees,’ she told me, and sipped at her beer. ‘Dutch elm disease. It came over in the Thirties with the European logs they used for furniture. The bark beetles take it from tree to tree. Almost all the old elms are dead up here now.’

‘Yiminey cricket!’ I said. But she didn’t laugh. In fact, when I glanced down, she was gone – she was moving off under these giants and past them. I hurried the hell after her.

It was unnerving to pass under those louring figures, to shuttle so close by their stout, knotted, staring trunks. I was glad to catch up with Agnes where she now stood, on a rim on the far side of them. She swigged more beer – swigged fiercely – and gestured before her. I looked out. Beneath our feet here, a gentle slope led down into a small, marshy valley. Just a sort of unkempt bowl in the earth, loud as a swamp with trilling insects and guttural frogs. Above it, all along the valley’s rim, the dead elms stood, spraying up against the violet sky, their gnarled features sinking into silhouette slowly, as if reluctantly, as the night came on. Impressive, they were – they looked like the solemn guardians of the place. They were so impressive, in fact, that all my first attention was on the eerie effect of them, and it was several moments before I understood what I was actually seeing in the valley below.

‘Oh, for God’s sake, Agnes,’ I said then. ‘I mean, for God’s sake.’

Now, it’s a famous sight, of course. The pictures that little shnook from the local weekly snapped have been in newspapers and museums around the world. I even heard some crazy dame on TV once explaining that it was really Agnes’s post-modern feminist masterpiece, and that poor old Roland destroyed it in the interests of some phallacious commercial conspiracy or something. Well, okay, that’s her planet. But I was there, there with Agnes. I came on it in that gloam as if it were some jungle ziggurat in an impossible clearing, and there was no theorizing about it, I tell you, I knew right away: I was looking down at an epic work of pure self-destruction.

They were everywhere in the bottom of the valley. Their hands clawed up from the swampy earth, their faces gaped at the dying heavens, their bodies contorted with agonized grace into the heartbreaking blur of mulch and decay below. Some were lying on their sides, some stood like columns, most jutted at angles, half-sunk in the mud. The shrill, unceasing burr of the insects vibrated up from all around them, and it made me think at once both of the slugs and beetles ravening in their wood and of their own brainless cries – because they seemed to me to be rotting alive down there, all of them. And when that image came to me, I turned my face away.

Agnes took another pop at her bottle. She sat down on the slope, leaned back on her elbows, observing this masterpiece of hers with an insolent smirk as aggravating as any adolescent’s. I felt it as a challenge to me, and got fired up again. Well, all right: I turned back and started edging my way down the slope.

The mud squelched up over my shoes as the land flattened under me. I had to pull up hard as I worked my way farther out toward the middle of the valley. The dead elms strung along the ridge stared down as I moved in among the discarded statues, and I felt chilled by that and unanchored, afloat, with all the empty space going dark all around me.

I came first upon an angel, fallen back on its Renaissance wings, and with a body carved in the final bloated stages of starvation. Its passive, beaten eyes looked into mine and I actually shivered at the sight of it. Part of one wing had liquefied and I could see the crawlies moving on the mulch. And I heard them busily chirping, which was horrible. And I staggered on through the mud. I came to a muscle man with the body of a snake, and then a small centaur raping a woman twice his size; further on, I found some sort of hunkering creature with a countenance like Apollo’s – and they were all half-rotten, their color changing from the brown of sodden wood to a crumbling black which was indistinguishable from the earth. I splashed and stumbled from station to station, bracing myself on the thrashing tail of a lamia or the friable arm of a centurion gone mad. And, after a while, I paused, my figure at the center of those wooden figures everywhere, all those sculpted limbs and faces half-upreaching, half-submerged, surrounding me – and I looked up at her where she lay watching on the slope beneath the towering elms. And I thought: What the hell is wrong with her? And my blood ran sour as if, really, down deep, I knew.

By then, too, for all my inexpertise, I think I had begun to realize – what everyone says now, what I couldn’t have exactly put into words – that even though the sculptures were melting away, they had remained artworks, somehow, still. The various forms and passages of their ruination had become part of them, even lent them a mysterious depth of time, like the lost arms of Venus de Milo, say, or the missing head of Victory. And just as I had when I was a kid – when she made that Play-Doh skull for me and I carried it home? – I had started thinking: Gee, you know, if she put her mind to it, she could really do something with some of this stuff. So that’s the thought I held onto, the thought I resolved to carry up to her. And I pushed the other knowledge away.

It got darker – it was almost night. The hundred struggling shadows of Agnes’s work were being dragged almost violently into the blackness as the surrounding elms frowned somberly down. Mosquitoes had already made a meal of my ankles and were now biting my arms and making that disgusting zeet noise in my ears. Swatting at them with both hands, I hauled my way back through the mud to the edge of the valley. I climbed up the slope again to Agnes. She still lay where she was, sneering triumphantly, insouciantly tipping her bottle up, though it was almost empty now.

I stood over her. I scratched my nose. I tried to think of the most encouraging response.

‘Gosh, honey,’ I said finally, ‘some of that stuff looks pretty good.’

Agnes blew out a quick laugh. I wanted to slug her.

‘Well, come on,’ I said. ‘What the hell do you want?’

She gave a frown – as if she were considering the question. She raised her bottle up before her and cocked her head like a painter viewing his canvas past his thumb. ‘If I could make a child,’ she said. ‘All right? A real child of glory, so that every one who looked at her, or heard about her, or just sort of knew from the cultural buzz that she was there would feel … not just love … but that unbearable tenderness you feel when you see your own child and it’s like your – body almost – your own body except exposed to life, stripped of that sense we all have of our own invulnerability, you know, and stripped of our crusts of caution … if it would make people feel that kind of desperate love, parental love …’ She lowered the bottle, brought her hand to her mouth and wiped her lips with the back of it, but all the while staring out over the valley. ‘And then,’ she went on cooly, ‘And then … if I could destroy her. See what I mean? Just smash her, pulverize her, reduce her to something that hardly had even existed because … well, for no reason, just because I wanted to, because she was what she was, because she filled some role in some play going on in my mind. Because she was a Jew. And then, and then, if everyone would feel her, see, being ruined, just feel it almost in the air, and every … caring or even uncaring heart would just … break open … just burst open and out would spill this – hot poison, this black grief all down the middle of their souls so that there would never be an end in all their lives to the grief, to the grief and the poison …’ She flashed her hollowed eyes up at me, her mouth contorting. ‘That would be a work of art.’

‘What are you, nuts?’ I said. ‘Ya dumb broad! That would be an atrocity!’ She glowered at me so angrily that I felt possibly I’d misspoken. ‘Well, I don’t know much about art,’ I added, ‘but I mean I know what I like.’

At that – and at my idiotic smile – she groaned, loudly. She fell back on the grass, throwing one arm across her face, shaking her head. I stood there stupidly, but that didn’t seem to help much. So finally, I gave a shrug and sat down on the slope next to her.

After a moment or two, her lying there like that, I began to get the sense that maybe she was crying. Not that she shuddered or gasped or anything, but just from the way she opened her mouth to breathe and wouldn’t take her arm away from her eyes. I tried to think of what to do, surveying the weird scene meanwhile: the tortured shapes in the valley striving up from the muck – or sinking down into it really – and the black forms of the elms standing grim watch over them on the ridge. I spoke over the racket of insects.

‘So am I being, like, a gormless mooncalf here or what?’

She laughed – and I thought I was right: she was crying. She dragged her arm across her eyes – to dry them, I guessed – and maybe they would’ve glistened when she looked up at me, but it was too dark now to tell.

‘Oh, shit, Harry,’ she said. ‘Don’t go.’

‘Oh, come on, sweetheart, look …’ I said. Sure, but what was the rest of the sentence? We’ll work it out? We’ll think of something? Nothing’s as bad as it seems? Wait till the sun shines, Nellie? ‘Oy, shit,’ was my choice finally. I collapsed onto my back and lay beside her.

We lay still. We didn’t talk. I felt her shoulder brushing mine. I felt her fanning hair blow soft against my temple. The sky, I noticed, had taken on a strange appearance. A sort of iron solidity, low and suffocating, as if the valley had a lid on it. Just clouds, I thought, moving in fast the way they do in the mountains, but I couldn’t be sure in that darkness and I began to feel trapped there and claustrophobic. I peered up to see if I could make out any stars to gauge the clouds by, but there were none at first. Then one, right in the center of the sky, winked and faded, then winked again, and shone. Vega, by God, I thought hopefully. Vega in the lyre.

‘Hey, look,’ I said. ‘Make a wish.’

And Agnes answered at once: ‘I wish everything had been fucking different.’

I laughed – well, it really was dreadful. And the clouds – because they were clouds – proceeded to make their cheery contribution to the night by sweeping over that awful valley in great thundery gobs, catching a-hold of that cute little star, and just smothering the shit right out of it.

It started to rain as we hiked back and, right after we got inside, it started to pour. Loud, heavy fists of water drumming on the roof, in the pine branches, in the puddling dirt. Agnes made us sandwiches and we ate without speaking as if overwhelmed by the pervasive noise. I even found myself eyeing the ceiling as we sat there, half expecting the torrents to pound their way in – it was that heavy, that loud. I made a few comments on it, but got no answer. And finally Agnes stood up and wearily carried her plate in to the kitchen. She paused at my chair when she came back. I took hold of her arm and she bent to kiss the top of my head, almost pityingly. Then she shuffled away into the bathroom and began to get ready for bed.

I lay on the sofa that night listening to the downpour. I thought about the rain falling on the Valley of Dead Elms, of the soaked wood and the insects breeding in the water. For the first time, I think, I began to get a sense of what Agnes had wanted from me, how much she had wanted and hoped for. I even started to fantasize more supernatural expectations as well, wondering if maybe, in my cowardly escape from Manhattan, I had been Brought Here For A Purpose after all. Well, better to consider such bullshit, I guess, than to meditate on how ill-equipped I was to serve this imaginary purpose, to serve any purpose whatsoever; or to consider how disappointed the poor girl must be, how desperate it must’ve made her feel to see her last chance of a white knight come riding up the hill and have it turn out to be Sir Schmuck himself – of all creatures most corrupt, dear Lord, a New York City politician!

The unrelenting rain put me to sleep at last, but powerful blasts of thunder woke me in the night, startled me from nightmares in which the elms stared down as the decaying carcasses in the valley bottom began to move, began to pull themselves slowly from the rising muck and claw their way up the grassy slope with bright eyes to come crawling home to their creator … Yuck. I didn’t sleep again till nigh on morning, and was slow to rouse myself at the sound of the woodstove clanging shut. I came to consciousness by small degrees: of the cold first – and it was plenty cold in the cabin by then – and the comforting breath of the fire next, and then the rain. The rain hadn’t slackened, was still hammering down, splashing raucously outside in what must be great pools of mud and water by now.

Then I heard the screen door slam, and spun around, throwing off my cover.

‘You can’t go out in that,’ I croaked – but she was already passing by the window in her green robe, already drenched and her black hair matted. ‘Agnes!’ I shouted. But she didn’t hear, or pretended not to, and continued on down the path to the river.

Blear-eyed – blear-all-over – I padded into the bathroom to piss and shower and shave. I made myself as fresh as I could, with great helpings of deodorant and the cleanest clothes I had – even some underwear I’d washed in the sink the morning before. Some lingerings of last night’s sense of mission were still moving in me, some vague idea of trying to live up to her romantic imagination of me. Whatever: I’d managed to make myself look as lawyerly and competent as I knew how by the time she came gallumphing back to the cabin through the mud and rain.

It was a waste of time. She was too miserable to notice. For all I knew, she was past hope as far as Sir Harry was concerned. She came in clutching the soaked rag of her robe around her, shivering, breathless, her eyes dull, her lips blue. She made small, unhappy noises through her chattering teeth, and hurried straight past me into the kitchen. She tried to make coffee, her robe falling open as she fumbled the pieces of the percolator in her trembling hands. I moved beside her and helped her put the gadget together, disconcerted by her grey nakedness and by my yearning for her – and by her wide-eyed, shuddery countenance, which put the kibosh on any ill-formed fantasies I might have had of earnestly urging her to success and salvation.

She went in to the bathroom while the coffee perked. I waited on the sofa through her long shower. I watched the steam coming out beneath the bathroom door and heard her gasping with relief at the heat. She rushed out without a word, mummified in towels, scurried to her bedroom, and dressed. I watched through the open door as towels and clothes went flying across the room. I eyed the ceiling some more as the rain kept battering away.

When she came out, she was wearing full-length jeans and a baggy plaid shirt. She smiled at me briefly, and returned to the kitchen without a word. This was pretty subdued stuff for the morning, when she usually seemed most alive. So I trailed in after her with dark misgivings, prompted by her glumness to a tremulous urgency and zeal.

She was slapping some bread in the toaster, her back to me.

‘Listen, Agnes …’ I said.

She raised her hand and made a rapid movement with it, signaling me to stop. ‘No, no, no, don’t. Okay? Let’s not talk about it. I shouldn’t have taken you out there. I just get bitchy when I’m tired. I did it to bother you. It’s not your problem, all right? You’ve got enough fucking problems of your own, really.’

‘It took me by surprise, that’s all. I didn’t know what to say. But listen, we should talk about it. There’s some really good work … It could still be treated, preserved and …’

‘Stop! Please. Okay?’

She said this loud enough to shut me up, half turning to me with a stern frown. Then, briskly decisive, she grabbed a mug and splashed some coffee in it.

‘Listen,’ she said. ‘There’s toast; butter’s in the fridge. I’m not hungry. I’m going in to work.’

‘Oh, come on, Agnes,’ I said, in a reasonable voice – but in truth, I was starting to panic. I was losing her – I could feel it. I’d lost her already – lost her again. I’d failed some test of response out there in that god-awful trashcan of a valley of hers. Well, all right, I knew I’d failed. Hell, what did I know about artists and their sensitive souls and what you were supposed to say to them and when? I needed a chance to figure it out, that’s all. I was figuring it out, sort of. And now, before I could, this iron veil was between us suddenly – and in the morning, too, when there was most to hope for. What she would be like by nightfall if she was this way now, heaven knew. I couldn’t stand the thought of so much loneliness. The urgency went up me like fire and, before she could pick up her coffee and leave, I stepped forward. I took her arm.

She yanked the arm up, but I held on.

‘Harry!’ she said. I yanked her to me. I took her by the elbows. ‘Don’t,’ she said.

‘Let me.’

I kissed her – a botched job – she turned her face aside. I pulled her, wrestled, like a bloody teenager, to work my body against hers. Well, I had a hardon hot as fever: I wanted her to feel how much I desired her, as if then she must surrender herself unto our redemption. Like a teenager – what choice had I given her? – she cried out: ‘Stop, stop, stop! Jesus!’ And she twisted away so sharply that I’d have hurt her if I’d held on. I released her, and her own impetus sent her stumbling back a step.

‘For Christ’s sake, Harry,’ she said – said sadly, rubbing her arms where I’d gripped them.

I blinked – and came to a sense of myself. Too appalled for words, I leaned against the counter and slugged myself in the forehead with the heel of my palm. She made a noise at that – amusement? Disdain? Disgust?

‘I’m going to work,’ she repeated.

She snatched up her mug and walked away. Sir Hardon the Stupid stayed slumped where he was.

That was my last full day in the cabin – her last full day alive – and the worst, with the rain and all, the never-ending rain. It was so loud sometimes even her mallet blows were lost in it – or became part of it because they seemed not so much inaudible as ubiquitous, and all the more nerve-wracking for that, if that’s possible, if that can be believed. If I could have gone out, taken a hike, worked off some of the energy of my embarrassment – my shame, that is, my failure – it might have made the hours almost tolerable, or so I thought. I even considered driving into town, but I knew I’d see the papers there and couldn’t stand to rub my face in yet more of my own inadequacies. So I just sat, or paced, or stared at the blurring pages of books, or stared out the window at the gray curtain of water which showed no sign of letting up, or swung my beetled brow back over my shoulder to cast foul glances at the studio door as if it were my enemy. By midday, I’d exhausted myself with such occupations and yet got myself too wrought up to sleep. After an hour or so of tossing on the sofa, I was up again and at it, my fingers in my hair. I couldn’t think by then, was too confused to think, and could only submerge the revving faculties in a sort of sludge of memories and daydreams occasionally broken by blazing jets of raw, dumb wanting and rage; anger at myself, at her; like fires burning in a bog.

It was out of this mess that I fashioned my decision; in the late afternoon – plucked it like Jack Horner, like revelation, proudly, surely – and with a little smile of vengeance at the locked door. I was getting out of here – that was it. I was leaving. Going home this very evening, as soon as I had a chance to say thank you, ma’am, and goodbye. I wasn’t going to just hang around, making trouble for myself. Nursing some crazy would-be artist out of her aesthetic doldrums. I had my own life – I had a wife and family to destroy. Scandals to be buried under. Jail time to serve. I was a busy man, for Christ’s sake.

With the heavy rain keeping jig time, I gathered up my belongings – my toiletries, my clothes. Stuffed them in my overnight bag. Set my overnight bag decisively by the front door. That done, I went in the kitchen and got me a brew, yessir. Carried it out into that dreadfully empty room, and swigged it manfully, using the bottle as an adolescent prop the way she’d done with hers the night before. It was almost time now. I waited for her. The sound of the mallet rose out of the sound of the rain and spread back through it again, and was everywhere.

What happened in that studio, behind that locked door, what happened to change everything for us – if it did change everything, if it changed anything – I can only conjecture. Some people make a living of such theories; me, I just pass the awful time. But I do have a guess. Based on what I heard and saw and what happened. I do have an image of it – the nights of self-laceration wouldn’t be complete without one.

Agnes – to set the facts down first – Agnes made a sound. I heard it when the mallet suddenly stopped that evening. I heard it even above the noise of the rain. But it wasn’t loud – she didn’t cry out or sob or shriek or anything. It was just a low, throaty, shuddering expulsion of air. A sort of drawn-out ‘Uh!’ sound. And in my opinion – and I’m the only one alive who heard it – it was a genuine exclamation of horror.

That is just a guess, though. I’d never heard one before. I’ve never heard one since. It’s not really something that comes up that often. Even in a situation where the horrors follow thick and fast – a war or a hospital or something – I imagine you get inured to it and such noises swiftly cease. So whatever her revelation was – if it was a revelation – it had to have been the grand premiere of it and a hell of a shock to boot. And my guess is … not that she saw herself, not that she realized what she was doing – she saw fine, she knew already; ‘I’m finished. I’m dead,’ she’d told me, and that pretty much covered it. She already understood – a lot better than I – how her powerful instinct for joy had been hollowed out, eaten away from the center until it was really only the armor of an old habit, mostly rotten, holding her up, loving, lamenting, creating and destroying by rote according to the pure, loveless logic of psychosis. It was only a matter of time before the whole thing went finally down; she already knew all of that. No, I think what she saw was the rest of us, everybody else. Me, for instance, for inspiration – because I think it was my half-comprehending dismay at the sight of the valley, my ridiculous attempt at salvation-through-ravishment that gave her the clue. That made her realize, as the day wore on, that I really did love her. Blundering lowlife that I was. And maybe, when that notion worked its way into the impeccable reasoning of her insanity, maybe she saw at the same moment that Roland loved her too, better yet, in his decent, shallow way, and her baby – her baby was doomed to adore her, the way kids are. And maybe also – still guessing, just guessing remember – maybe also it occurred to her, by corollary, that there was this whole gang of people, fractious, tedious, snooty, high-living bourgeois snobs, who were also ready to love her – her audience, waiting to love her – because the things she made were beautiful, had a beauty that hadn’t been achieved I think for almost a century, and because that beauty would give them pleasure for a moment and a moment’s peace. I imagine that all that – the love, the beauty – if she had thought about it at all before – had seemed pretty small potatoes next to her visionary mission, the Great Truth she was trying to convey; had seemed an irrelevant point of culture or chemistry to her, and explicable to the point of nothingness beside the sweep of human history she had in mind. So the image I form finally is that her mallet hand and her chisel hand fell dramatically to her side, and her lips parted as her perception shifted just that little. And it suddenly seemed to her that to fuck with love and beauty in the interest of a mere Great Truth was a terrible folly and an unpardonable sin. And she was horrified at what she had done.

Well, we all have our lives, and our ideas, smart and stupid, are just our emotions made to sound like objective truths. And that’s my idea about what happened in the studio.

A moment later, anyway – without the usual noises of sweeping up and rearranging – the bolt shot back. She slipped out into the room with her usual stealth, but quickly now, as if escaping, as if she couldn’t get out of there fast enough. She took the time to lock the door again, the key clacking on the rim of metal before it would go in, but then she swung around with her eyes jacked wide, searching the room desperately until she saw me right there in front of her. She saw me – and stood still, and hugged herself hard, trembling, and tucked her chin down, pulling into herself, pulling herself small. ‘Harry,’ she said, her voice shivering. ‘Harry.’

I set the beer bottle on the floor and went to her. ‘What’s wrong? What the hell’s the matter? Agnes.’ I put my arms around her. She burrowed against my chest, trembling all over. ‘Jesus, Agnes,’ I said. I put my hand on the back of her head and held her against me. After a moment, she freed her arms. She braced her hands on my chest and lifted her face as if she wanted me to kiss her. So I did. She kissed me back hungrily, our tongues coming together, my hands going over her with passion and relief.

When she broke off, she took my hand – clutched it in both of hers, and hers still shaking. She went toward the bedroom, my hand captured like that. And I followed eagerly, trying not to think, letting my thoughts get washed away by the overriding rhythm of the rain.

Well, it was pretty good sex. Not bad at all, really, considering: first time together, too impatient for much expertise. A bit of anxiety in the opening moments, what with all the frenzy and expectations. And we banged our teeth in the heated kissing, which sent a shoot of dull pain up into that little hollow spot just behind my right eye. When I managed to wrest my hair out of her fingers, I nuzzled my way over her hard belly to bury my face between her thighs – and that was good, she seemed to really like that. But she had a bitter, sweaty smell and taste that took some getting used to, and then when I did, and when I looked up along her and saw her arching and red-faced and got the image set in my head of how this pussy I was licking, this tangy purple heat was part of her, was part of Agnes, well, I got so excited that I couldn’t carry on at it maybe as long as I should have. So I reared up, wiping my lips with my hand, and went into her, which was dynamite, just great for all concerned. We got a rhythm going between us for a while, and that was pure pleasure too, even a joy, her face beneath me wonderfully mottled and lovable and her breasts thrilling to see in motion and sharp and urgent between my lips. I even dug my nose into the dank black hair beneath her arm, God love it, and it wowed me, truly, and made her laugh and cry out. Naturally, you know, with all that inning and outing, the mind wanders sometimes, and there were murky patches of fantasy – My Highness commanding obeisance from some model I’d seen in one of Marianne’s magazines, to be precise. That brought me too close to climax too soon so that I had to pull back and then I got doused with thoughts of federal prosecutors and my wronged wife and child, which in turn nearly did me in. Still, still, there were whole expanses of really spectacular clarity, moments like lakewater, when I was pumping into her with great sweetness and assurance, quiet-hearted with awareness and feeling the world and all its creatures were right well-made. She was very precious to me then; I wanted to pour my soul all over her like honey. And when, at last, she came – and she really came; I had my finger in her ass and could feel the contractions – it was so poignant and exciting that it carried me along, and we slammed together in a last spasm that spread through whole seconds of mindless unity.

Of course, after that, right after that, in the calm of mind that followed, when I rolled onto my back and lay sprawled beneath the white wash of the thudding rainfall – with my brain clear of boiling semen, I mean – I saw at once how impossible this whole thing was. We could never have made a go of it, we two. She all geniusy and impassioned and crazy, and me – leaving my troubles and entanglements aside – basically conservative and solidly middle class. I couldn’t see it with my stones on fire, but it was instantly clear to me the minute I came. Well, I thought, gazing up at the ceiling, what do you know? You live and learn.

And Agnes rolled away from me onto her side and started weeping.

It was very violent – it was frightening. She was curled up with her knees to her chest and her hands clenched at her mouth and the knobs of her spine stuck out at me looking fragile. And the sobs, as the saying goes, racked her. Really made her quake and shudder as if some animal in its death throes were trapped inside her.

I propped myself up on an elbow over her, raising my eyebrows as another bout of sobbing was swept under a rising gust outside that made the rain splatter noisily. I laid a hand on her shoulder, but she didn’t react, and it was scary to feel the seizure come up through her flesh into my palm.

‘Gee,’ I said faintly, ‘was it good for you too?’

She laughed and moaned and sobbed all at once, moving her hands up to cover her face. I started to speak again, anything just to bring her down to earth, but she pulled away from me, unfolded her legs and, climbing off the bed as I called to her, hurried, naked, weeping, out of the room.

Unsure what to do, I stayed on the bed at first. I tried to listen, over the racket of the downpour, to hear where she was, what she was up to. I figured she’d get herself a beer or something, maybe cry it out alone on the sofa. Maybe go back into the studio and work her feelings off on the wood – that’s what I thought she’d done when I heard the door shutting. But then I heard another noise through the wall – a noise from the bathroom: she was opening the medicine chest in there.

I threw myself off the bed and got out of the bedroom fast. I grabbed the bathroom doorknob, yanked the door open just as she was screwing the cap off the bottle.

‘Don’t do that, Agnes. You don’t need that,’ I said.

Crying, trembling, she shook about seven tablets into her palm. I stepped forward and grabbed her wrist.

‘Let go!’ she said – she practically shrieked it. She tried to pull away, dropping some of the tablets to the floor.

‘It’s too many,’ I said. ‘You’ll kill yourself.’

‘Let me go.’ But with another sob, she went limp in my grip. She hung her head and cried miserably as the rest of the tablets dropped noiselessly from her hand.

‘I mean, that’s crazy,’ I said, feeling awful for her. I tugged the bottle gently from her fingers and set it on the sink. She tilted against me, and I held her, held her up, feeling her tears running into the hair on my chest. ‘What did you expect?’ I said, just to say something. ‘We’re just people here. I mean, what did you expect?’

After a while, she let me lead her back to bed. She was much calmer, and even lay with her head on my chest, watching her own hand toying with my shoulder. I kissed her hair and petted her and murmured to her, my stomach only slowly untying its knots. I felt good that I’d kept her from taking the pills: I hated the thought of her trashed on that shit, with all her energy gone. And as I lay there, thinking about it now, realizing that our future as a couple was what you might call limited, I began to think that maybe my best bet here – maybe my Purpose, if you will – ‘was to try to talk her into meeting with Roland, and she’d have to be off the pills for that. Maybe if she made some peace with him, I thought, logged some time with her daughter, you know; maybe it would get her out of this depressing eyrie of hers and back into some semblance of a normal, healthy life.

But thick-skulled as I may have been, other suspicions were beginning to condense as well. It was pretty obvious I’d touched on something more – worse – than till now I’d understood. Working my way so close to her – by virtue of my claims on her past and imagination, by virtue of my love and my lust and my panic and despair – I’d clearly set one toe into the Sea of Bad she held inside. And there was more Bad than I could account for by what I knew of her. More at least than I’d figured on anyway, knowing what I knew.

I really did want to help her – and I was curious to get the whole story. So, lying there, holding her, warmed by her body against the cold sound of the rain, I conceived my nocturnal project while Agnes sunk away, finally, exhausted, into sleep.

I didn’t wait there long – less than half an hour. I was afraid the constant rain rhythm would lull me and make me doze. Besides, I’d read somewhere that the earliest part of sleep is the deepest – and I was also afraid she would wake up hungry, because I didn’t think she had eaten all day. So, soon as she started to snore fairly steadily, I slipped out from under her. Tensely, I watched her roll over. I watched her resettle on her other side till she began to snore again. Then, kicking through the clothing that lay strewn around the floor, I moved to the spot where I had thrown her jeans, picked them up, and began going through the pockets.

The studio keys were there in the right front. I gripped them in my fist as I removed them so they wouldn’t jangle. I went from the room on tiptoe – flinching, bracing, looking back every time the boards creaked underneath me, though I doubt the creaks could have been audible to her over the noise of the rain. At any rate, she still lay quiet when I reached the door. So, steeling myself as best I could, I moved into the other room.

I’m not, I suspect, particularly courageous – I knew she would find this a terrible betrayal, and the suspense as I reached the studio door was murderous; I nearly gave it up. But I managed to work the key in the lock, and made a great, elaborate, slow business of turning back the bolt. I pushed the door open, slipped in – my plan, at this point, being to take a quick look and then run like anything back to bed.

I found the light switch on the wall. I flipped it up. I was thinking, God, God, what if she comes in now, what could I say? But the next moment, my thoughts were obliterated by a jolt of surprise – because the room, at first glance, seemed to be empty.

It was a big rustic room of rough log walls and unfinished floorboards. Sheets lay crumpled here and there along the edges, and there were pencil sketches on newsprint tacked up at eye level all around. There was a jumble of various-sized logs and branches just to the right of me too, with a wicked-looking chain-saw tossed in among them. But nothing else, I thought – until I looked left, and discovered all the rest. Under a rain-splashed skylight in the corner, stood her small worktable. Her chisel pack was unfolded on it and the chisels lay skewed, some in, some out of their pockets. Her mallet had been dropped beside the table’s leg – so much smaller, the mallet, than I’d pictured it. And there was her high stool for sitting at; and a plywood stand with a covering sheet fallen into the woodchips at its base. And atop the stand, alone atop the stand – there stood the one statue; that’s all; just the one.

Well, that was strange – wasn’t it? – I thought that was strange right away – that there was just the one work in progress. No models, no maquettes, no other works at other stages. Just this one – and it looked so small too, no more than three feet high – less – and so little completed. She was in here chiseling away so much, so many hours. Was she throwing everything into the valley? As I crept closer to it, the screeking boards crying up to the pattering ceiling, I saw that only the face had been finished really. The rest had just the vague shape of a human figure chopped into the surface by a few rude strokes. And then, and finally, these thoughts also were blown away as I came right up to it, as I got my first good look.

Agnes was right about at least one thing, I’ve noticed: artists, critics – they are always describing their creations in very melodramatic terms: shattering, breathtaking, shocking, revolutionary. Personally, I think it’s just because they lead such boring, solitary lives and need to put some fireworks into them. I mean, everyone dreams of heroics and having a hand in world events and so on, and they spend their lives in their rooms making useless little things. Once I even heard a writer say he wished he lived under a more repressive regime so he could endure the torture and censorship which make art important. I thought he ought to just stick his penis in an electrical outlet to get the feel of it – because none of that really is ever to the point in the end.

See, I saw that child, her statue, Agnes’s Child of Glory, and it wasn’t a dramatic or shattering thing at all. It was apparent, even at that stage, even to me, that she was getting it right, getting exactly what she wanted, and the effect was one of – I don’t know – a depth of recognition more than anything. It was an impression that met the impression within, like the meadow full of wildflowers or the swimming hole: almost a cliche but revivified by its insistent presence and individuality. Man, I wish I could see it again now, stand before it again – now, I mean, that I know a little, have studied a little, albeit studied in my half-crazed, alchemic efforts to bring the dead woman back to life. But even in my ignorance then, it did finally dawn on me that this exasperating gal o’ mine had been up to something incredible here on her mountain top, was accomplishing something historic even, if out of so repetitive a thing one can make a history of sensation. All fearful of discovery, all keyed for interruption and the incriminating cry as I was, I still looked at her Child, at the barely sculpted face of it, and felt that still, sad hallelujah of release that comes when the substance of great things feared and hoped for is revealed to have been obvious all along.

It was Lena, I guess – her half-sister Lena – I’m almost sure of it – I mean, wasn’t that what she’d been trying for even as a kid? Lena at the edge of the ravine, at the very end of her life. So young, little more than a toddler, still trailing clouds of glory as it were, but also, somehow, staring with knowledge if without comprehension into her own meaningless destruction. Now too – now that I’ve seen the model for it – I guess it was the other Lena as well, Agnes’s daughter. I didn’t know that at the time, I didn’t even think about it but, sure, I guess that was also part of the point of what she had been doing here.

Anyway, my reaction to this discovery was almost comically stupid. Well, it was pure resistance at this stage. I had all the facts, I knew everything; it was pure denial that kept me from putting it together. Instead, I went positively radiant with hope and determination. Ho, ho, thought I, a small, rapt smile creasing my idiot features; ho, ho, if I could bring this down! If I could help bring her down with this from the mountaintop, guide her through our love to a happier life creating such things as this, well then, young Harry, my son, my pal, well then, even your scandal, even your selfishness, your unkindness, your very corruption would become mere footnotes in the Book of Art, mere quibbles beside your magnificent contribution – nay lad, next to your salvation, after all!

This called for a sandwich. Back I tread to the formerly hated door with a last fond glance at the Child – and a quick check to make sure I hadn’t left footprints in any stray sawdust – and touching the lightswitch, I gently shut up the studio, and gently locked it.

I went to the kitchen and slapped some goat cheese on wheat, and stood at the window chomping away and chuckling in what must have been an hysteria of impossible aspirations. I watched the rainwater streaking the pane, and listened to it spanking the slates of the roof and, hey, it was letting up a little, I fancied. Yes, it was. Oh, how symbolical, I thought, and how right it would be – how perfect, I thought, popping the last of my sandwich in the old gob – how perfect if tomorrow should dawn bright and clear.

The day dawned bright and clear, all right, the storm finally abating in the last dark hours, the big clouds just blowing over and away as the clang of the woodstove door in the next room woke me. I lay there gathering my thoughts a moment, memories surfacing. I had awakened at one point in the dead of night, I recalled, and found Agnes lying also awake beside me. She’d been staring quietly up at the ceiling, a small, unpleasant smile on her lips; a sneer almost. And I had shuffled close to her and nuzzled against her neck and murmured I loved her as I fell back to sleep. Some hours after, as dawn was coming, I woke again – or became aware, at least, that the rain was stopping. The raucous thwacking at the roof had become a scattered drip-dripping from the eaves and from the trees … What else did I remember? Oh yes: nightmares – I had had nightmares – those came back to me last. Ominous, importunate dreams, full of eager faces staring through inky murk. I suppose my subconscious had been working things out, assembling what I knew. The valley, the routine, the disconnected phone, I have to work, the one statue. They had come back to me in my dreams as whispers, messages, urgent, distant, muffled as if through fog. I closed my eyes, straining to hear them again. If I could make a child … The little clay figures in the stream back home, the baby she had almost drowned, a child of glory … I guess, in my sleep, defences down, I had finally let the whole picture come together because now, as I lay there, casting for my dreams, the facts began to arrange themselves. Agnes’s evening depressions – it occurred to me, as if out of nowhere, that these were glimmers of her better self – her happier, saner self, I mean. Signs that the weight of the love she still could feel, the beauty she still could make had been resurrected, were threatening to overwhelm her grand ambitions and intentions. I ran my two hands up into my hair. Yes. That was right. I understood. And in the morning, she was cheerful – cheerful because she had triumphed again, her intentions, her artistic mission had triumphed again, was marching on. I mean: nuts. What if she was nuts, in other words! Caught in one of those ritual treadmills of insanity like some guy on a street corner arranging buttons in a gutter. Christ! It could have been going on for months. Long before I came: days, weeks, months literally, before I showed up to disturb her. Doing the same thing day after day after day, again and again going into her locked room, chiseling out the same face, the same child, over and over and over until her heart sickened with love, at what she saw as this trial of mere love against her revelation, and then every morning, every fucking morning …

‘Jesus Christ!’ I said aloud.

The clang of the woodstove door.

I got tangled in the covers as I hurled myself from the bed. Cursing, I ripped them off me, and hurtled, naked, over the bedroom threshold. The peaceful susurration of the stove was deep and chesty. The orange glow around the door sent out blinding spokes of glare. I grabbed the door handle, searing my fingers. Threw the door open and stuck my hand into the blaze.

‘Damn it!’ I shouted. ‘God damn it!’

For a single instant, I had hold of it, even drew it to the edge of the fire. Saw, as through a dancing red glass, the face already shrinking into flaking char. And then I fell back, hissing in pain, gripping my hand to my chest and gritting my teeth as the red flesh blistered. And the thick log shifted back into its bed of ashes and was hidden completely by the unbroken shroud of fire.

‘Oh … bah!’ I said. Furious, I stalked back into the bedroom. I yanked my pants off the bed’s footboard, yanked them on, up over my nakedness, barely remembering to push my penis down clear as I yanked the zipper up with another curse.

I stomped back through the central room with a convulsive sneer at the jolly stove. I kicked the screen door open and stepped out, barefoot, into a muddy puddle up to my cuffs.

I sloshed to the edge of the Swimhole trail. There was no sign of her.

‘Agnes!’ I shouted, clenching both my fists. ‘Agnes!’

And then, with another harsh expulsion of breath, I threw my hands to my sides in disgust. I shook my head. And then – standing quiet like that – I heard the river.

Well, I was a city boy. It hadn’t occurred to me – what happens to a river, I mean, after two nights and a day of torrential rains. I suppose I knew in the back of my mind; I suppose I could have answered if someone had asked. But I was a city boy. I just hadn’t thought about it. Not until I stood there, not until I heard that sound.

I started running. Down the trail – all mud now, mud and puddles and swift rivulets of brown water. I had, I guess, some crazy hope that it was just some sort of aural glitch – that steady bellow rising through the forest to my left – that it was magnified between the banks or something, that it sounded worse than it was. But there was no mistaking the fact of it as I splashed, mudspattered, nearer to its source. The thing was roaring – roaring – like a giant trapped in a pit, that sort of echoing, hollow, interminable roar. I rushed past the turn off to the meadow – I was wheezing for breath – and saw the other turn off up ahead, and the steep forested hill to the river’s edge, now sliding with mud. I saw the river then too, through the trees. Unrecognizable as the river I knew. Half again as wide and twice as high, whipped by tornadoes of frothing white, and the driving current scored atop its surface in long, moving sinews of implacable force.

I left the trail – before the turn off, I just cut off it and raced into the trees. Immediately, my feet were swept down and out from under me. I dropped hard onto my ass, sliding in the mud, rolling in the mud to find my feet again. Grabbing hold of tree trunks, I got a few more steps – let go and charged and fell again, forward this time, thudding to the wet earth on my shoulder as the filth sprayed up over my mouth and eyes. Again, I rolled. I grabbed at a tree, and dragged myself up. I worked myself, sliding, to the next tree and the next …

And already, I was at the edge of the water. It had risen that high, that far into the woods. The sandspit, of course, was gone, was buried under the rushing current. Even the diving rock was wholly covered, and where its extension had been was now a lashing serpent’s tail of green-white spume.

Agnes stood naked there, on the far side of the rock, with the foam thrown up around her. She stood at the very brink of the forest, at the brink of the water, between two trees. Her green robe was lying in the mud behind her. She was poised to dive and I, braced against a tree twenty yards away, had no chance of reaching her. I suppose I could have shouted – assuming she could have heard me over the river’s roar – but I knew there was no point to it. This was part of the ritual too – this she did after the burning in remembrance and communion – and for all I know the secret motive of the whole business had always lain in the fact that the river would one day rise. If I’d ever had a chance to break the spell, it was probably when she’d taken me along with her to swim here, when she’d allowed me to come that close to the mystery. Maybe I should have ravished her on the beach that day and just hoped like hell she’d love me. I sort of doubt it would have worked like that. Then, after all, she’d been in her pride – and even last night, when the terror struck her, me and my precious dick and my cut-rate humanity had just been things to mourn over and sneer at in the dark; I had nothing near the power of her compulsion.

So, leaning on the tree, I closed my eyes and said, ‘Aw, Agnes.’ And when I looked again, she dove.

Maybe she had a moment of comprehension then – because she buckled as she fell, as if to stop herself mid-air, and she plunged into the water sloppily. The current slammed her into the diving rock and the serpentine waves grabbed hold of her and tossed her over. Her body was pulled down beneath the water, her limbs splayed, as if she had no power at all, as if she were a doll or a puppet. But she was still conscious, I think, because she surfaced once in the next second or so, and I saw her chin tilt up and her mouth open as she fought for air. She was facing upriver. The next whirlpool was just behind her. That dragged her under finally, and she was drowned.