MONA

(cradling the revolver)

What's wrong with being in love with myself?

Why is that a problem?

-but the page had grown very heavy or his toe very weak. He let the page lie flat again. He pushed it underneath the sofa. His extremities had gone cool and a little bit numb. He couldn't see well.

"Russia went bankrupt in August," Gitanas said. "Maybe you heard? Unlike our elections, this was widely reported. This was economic news. This mattered to the investor. It also mattered to Lithuania. Our main trading partner now has crippling hard-currency debts and a worthless ruble. One guess which they use, dollars or rubles, to buy our hens' eggs. And to buy our truck undercarriages from our truck-undercarriage plant, which is the one good plant we have: well, it would be rubles. But the rest of the truck is made in Volgograd, and that plant closed. So we can't even get rubles."

Chip was having trouble feeling disappointed about "The Academy Purple." Never to look at the script again, never to show it to a soul: this might be a relief even greater than his relief in the men's room of Fanelli's where he'd taken the salmon from his pants.

From an enchantment of breasts and hyphens and one-inch margins he felt himself awakening to a rich and varied world to which he'd been dead for who knew how long. Years.

"I'm interested in what you're telling me," he told Gitanas.

"It's interesting. It is interesting," Gitanas agreed, still hugging himself tensely. "Brodsky said, `Fresh fish always smells, frozen smells only when it thaws.' So, and after the big thaw, when all the little fish came out of the freezer, we were passionate about this and that. I was part of it. Very much part of it. But the economy was mismanaged. I had my fun in New York, but back home-there was a depression, all right. Then, too late, 1995, we pegged the litas to the dollar and started privatizing, way too fast. It wasn't my decision, but I might have done the same. The World Bank had money that we wanted, and the World Bank said privatize. So OK, we sold the port. We sold the airline, sold the phone system. The highest bidder was usually American, sometimes Western European. This wasn't supposed to happen, but it did. Nobody in Vilnius had cash. And the phone company said, OK, we'll have foreign owners with deep pockets, but the port and the airline will still be a hundred percent Lithuanian. Well, the port and the airline were thinking the same. But still it was OK. Capital was flowing, better cuts of meat at the butcher, fewer brownouts. Even the weather seemed milder. Mostly criminals took the hard currency, but that's post-Soviet reality. After the thaw, you get the rot. Brodsky didn't live to see that. So OK, but then all the world economies started collapsing, Thailand, Brazil, Korea, and this was a problem, because all the capital ran home to the U. S. We found out, for example, that our national airline was sixty-four percent owned by the Quad Cities Fund. Which is? A no-load growth fund managed by a young guy named Dale Meyers. You never heard of Dale Meyers, but every adult citizen of Lithuania knows his name."

This tale of failure seemed to amuse Gitanas greatly. It had been a long time since Chip had had such a powerful sensation of liking somebody. His queer friends at D-- College and the Warren Street Journal were so frank and headlong in their confidences that they foreclosed actual closeness, and his responses to straight men had long fallen into one of two categories: fear and resentment of the successes, flight from the contagion of the failures. But something in Gitanas's tone appealed to him.

"Dale Meyers lives in eastern Iowa," Gitanas said. "Dale Meyers has two assistants, a big computer, and a three-billion-dollar portfolio. Dale Meyers says he didn't mean to acquire a controlling stake in our national airline. Dale says it was program trading. He says one of his assistants misentered data that caused the computer to keep increasing its position in Lithuanian Airlines without reporting the overall size of the accumulated stake. OK, Dale apologizes to all Lithuanians for the oversight. Dale says he understands the importance of an airline to a country's economy and self-esteem. But because of the crisis in Russia and the Baltics, nobody wants tickets on Lithuanian Airlines. So, and American investors are pulling money out of Quad Cities. Dale's only way to meet his obligations is liquidate Lithuanian Airlines' biggest asset. Which is its fleet. He's gonna sell three YAK40s to a Miami-based air freight company. He's gonna sell six Aerospatiale turboprops to a start-up commuter airline in Nova Scotia. In fact, he already did that, yesterday. So, whoops, no airline."

"Ouch," Chip said.

Gitanas nodded fiercely. "Yeah! Yeah! Ouch! Too bad you can't fly a truck undercarriage! OK, and then. Then an American conglomerate called Orfic Midland liquidates the Port of Kaunas. Again, overnight. Whoops! Ouch! And then sixty percent of the Bank of Lithuania gets eaten up by a suburban bank in Atlanta, Georgia. And your suburban bank then liquidates our bank's hard-currency reserves. Your bank doubles our country's commercial interest rates overnight-why? To cover heavy losses in its failed line of Dilbert affinity MasterCards. Ouch! Ouch! But interesting, huh? Lithuania's not being such a successful player, is it? Lithuania really fucked things up!"

"How are you men doing?" Eden said, returning to her office with April in tow. "Maybe you want to use the conference room?"

Gitanas put a briefcase on his lap and opened it. "I'm explaining to Cheep my gripe with America."

"April, sweetie, sit down here," Eden said. She had a big pad of newsprint which she opened on the floor near the door. "This is better paper for you. You can make big pictures now. Like me. Like Mommy. Make a big picture."

April crouched in the middle of the newsprint pad and drew a green circle around herself.

"We've petitioned the IMF and World Bank for assistance," Gitanas said. "Since they encouraged us to privatize, maybe they're interested in the fact that our privatized nation-state is now a zone of semi-anarchy, criminal warlords, and subsistence farming?

Unfortunately, IMF is handling complaints of bankrupt client states in order of the size of their respective GDPs. Lithuania was twenty-six on the list last Monday. Now we're twenty-eight. Paraguay just beat us. Always Paraguay."

"Ouch," Chip said.

"Paraguay being for some reason the bane of my existence."

"Gitanas, I told you, Chip is perfect," Eden said. "But listen-"

"IMF says expect delays of up to thirty-six months before any rescue can begin!"

Eden slumped into her chair. "Do you think we can wrap this up fairly soon?"

Gitanas showed Chip a printout from his briefcase. "You see, here, this Web page? `A service of the U. S. Department of State, Bureau of European and Canadian Affairs.' It says: Lithuanian economy severely depressed, unemployment nearly twenty percent, electricity and running water intermittent in Vilnius, scarce elsewhere. What kind of businessman is going to put money in a country like that?"

"A Lithuanian businessman?" Chip said.

"Yes, funny." Gitanas gave him an appreciative look. "But what if I need something different on this Web page and others like it? What if I need to erase what's here and put, in good American English, that our country escaped the Russian financial plague? Like, say, Lithuania now has an annual inflation rate less than six percent, per capita dollar reserves same as Germany, and a trade surplus of nearly one hundred million dollars, due to continued strong demand for Lithuania's natural resources!"

"Chip, you'd be perfect for this," Eden said.

Chip had quietly and firmly resolved never to look at Eden or say a word to her again for as long as he lived.

"What are Lithuania's natural resources?" he asked Gitanas.

"Chiefly sand and gravel," Gitanas said.

"Huge strategic reserves of sand and gravel. OK."

"Sand and gravel in abundance." Gitanas closed his briefcase. "However, so, here's a quiz for you. Why the unprecedented demand for these intriguing resources?"

"A construction boom in nearby Latvia and Finland? In sand-starved Latvia? In gravel-starved Finland?"

"And how did these countries escape the contagion of global financial collapse?"

"Latvia has strong, stable democratic institutions," Chip said. "It's the financial nerve center of the Baltics. Finland placed strict limits on the outflow of short-term foreign capital and succeeded in saving its world-class furniture industry."

The Lithuanian nodded, obviously pleased. Eden pounded her fists on her desk. "God, Gitanas, Chip's fantastic! He is so entitled to a signing bonus. Also first-class accommodations in Vilnius and a per diem in dollars."

"Vilnius?" Chip said.

"Yeah, we're selling a country," Gitanas said. "We need a satisfied U. S. customer on site. Also much, much safer to work on the Web over there."

Chip laughed. "You actually expect American investors to send you money? On the basis of, what. Of sand shortages in Latvia?"

"They're already sending me money," Gitanas said, "on the basis of a little joke I played. Not even sand and gravel, just a mean little joke I played. Tens of thousands of dollars already. But I want them to send me millions."

"Gitanas," Eden said. "Dear man. This is completely a point-incentive moment. There could not be a more perfect situation for an escalator clause. Every time Chip doubles your receipts, you give him another point of the action. Hm? Hm?"

"If I see a hundred-times increase in receipts, trust me, Cheep will be a wealthy man."

"But I'm saying let's have this in writing."

Gitanas caught Chip's eye and silently conveyed to him his opinion of their host. "Eden, this document," he said. "What is Cheep's job designation? International Wire Fraud Consultant? First Deputy Co-Conspirator?"

"Vice President for Willful Tortious Misrepresentation," Chip offered.

Eden gave a scream of pleasure. "I love it!"

"Mommy, look," April said.

"Our agreement is strictly oral," Gitanas said.

"Of course, there's nothing actually illegal about what you're doing," Eden said.

Gitanas answered her question by staring out the window for a longish while. In his red ribbed jacket he looked like a motocross rider. "Of course not," he said.

"So it isn't wire fraud," Eden said.

"No, no. Wire fraud? No."

"Because, not to be a scaredy-cat here, but wire fraud is what this almost sounds like."

"The collective fungible assets of my country disappeared in yours without a ripple," Gitanas said. "A rich powerful country made the rules we Lithuanians are dying by. Why should we respect these rules?"

"This is an essential Foucaultian question," Chip said.

"It's also a Robin Hood question," Eden said. "Which doesn't exactly reassure me on the legal front."

"I'm offering Cheep five hundred dollars American a week. Also bonuses as I see fit. Cheep, are you interested?"

"I can do better here in town," Chip said.

"Try a thousand a day, minimum," Eden said.

"A dollar goes a long way in Vilnius."

"Oh, I'm sure," Eden said. "It goes a long way on the moon, too. What's to buy?"

"Cheep," Gitanas said. "Tell Eden what dollars can buy in a poor country."

"I imagine you eat and drink pretty well," Chip said.

"A country where a young generation grew up in a state of moral anarchy, and are hungry."

"Probably not hard to find a good-looking date, if that's what you mean."

"If it doesn't break your heart," Gitanas said. "To see a sweet little girl from the provinces get down on her knees-"

"Uch, Gitanas," Eden said. "There's a child in the room."

"I'm on an island," April said. "Mommy, look at my island."

"I'm talking about children," Gitanas said. "Fifteen-year-olds. You have dollars? Thirteen. Twelve."

"Twelve years old is not a selling point with me," Chip said.

"You prefer nineteen? Nineteen comes even cheaper."

"This frankly, um," Eden said, flapping her hands.

"I want Cheep to understand why a dollar is a lot of money. Why my offer is a valid offer."

"My problem," Chip said, "is I'd be servicing American debts with those very same dollars."

"Believe me, we're familiar with this problem in Lithuania."

"Chip wants a base salary of a thousand a day, plus performance incentives," Eden said.

"One thousand per week," Gitanas said. "For lending legitimacy to my project. For creative work and reassuring callers."

"One percent of gross," Eden said. "One point minus his twenty-thousand-dollar monthly salary."

Gitanas, ignoring her, took a thick envelope from his jacket and, with hands that were stubby and unmanicured, began to count out hundreds. April was crouched on a patch of white newsprint surrounded by toothed monsters and cruel scribbles in several colors. Gitanas tossed a stack of hundreds on Eden's desk. "Three thousand," he said, "for the first three weeks."

"He gets business-class plane fare, too, of course," Eden said.

"Yes, all right."

"And first-class accommodations in Vilnius."

"There's a room in the villa, no problem."

"Also, who protects him from these criminal warlords?"

"Maybe I'm a criminal warlord myself, a little bit," Gitanas said with a wary, shame-faced smile.

Chip considered the mess of green on Eden's desk. Something was giving him a hard-on, possibly the cash, possibly the vision of corrupt and sumptuous nineteen-year-olds, or maybe just the prospect of getting on a plane and putting five thousand miles between himself and the nightmare of his life in New York City. What made drugs perpetually so sexy was the opportunity to be other. Years after he'd figured out that pot only made him paranoid and sleepless, he still got hard-ons at the thought of smoking it. Still lusted for that jailbreak.

He touched the hundreds.

"Why don't I get online and make plane reservations for you both," Eden said. "You can leave right away!"

"So, you gonna do this thing?" Gitanas asked. "It's a lot of work, lot of fun. Pretty low risk. No such thing as no risk, though. Not where there's money."

"I understand," Chip said, touching the hundreds.

In the pageantry of weddings Enid reliably experienced the paroxysmal love of place-of the Midwest in general and suburban St. Jude in particular-that for her was the only true patriotism and the only viable spirituality. Living under presidents as crooked as Nixon and stupid as Reagan and disgusting as Clinton, she'd lost interest in American flag-waving, and not one of the miracles she'd ever prayed to God for had come to pass; but at a Saturday wedding in the lilac season, from a pew of the Paradise Valley Presbyterian Church, she could look around and see two hundred nice people and not a single bad one. All her friends were nice and had nice friends, and since nice people tended to raise nice children, Enid's world was like a lawn in which the bluegrass grew so thick that evil was simply choked out: a miracle of niceness. If, for example, it was one of Esther and Kirby Root's girls coming down the Presbyterian aisle on Kirby's arm, Enid would remember how the little Root had trick-or-treated in a ballerina costume, vended Girl Scout cookies, and baby-sat Denise, and how, even after the Root girls had gone off to good midwestern colleges, they all still made a point, when home on holiday, of tapping on Enid's back door and filling her in on the doings chez Root, often sitting and visiting for an hour or more (and not, Enid knew, because Esther had told them to come over but just because they were good St. Jude kids who naturally took an interest in other people), and Enid's heart would swell at the sight of yet another sweetly charitable Root girl now receiving, as her reward, the vows of a young man with a neat haircut of the kind you saw in ads for menswear, a really super young fellow who had an upbeat attitude and was polite to older people and didn't believe in premarital sex, and who had a job that contributed to society, such as electrical engineer or environmental biologist, and who came from a loving, stable, traditional family and wanted to start a loving, stable, traditional family of his own. Unless Enid was very much deceived by appearances, young men of this caliber continued, even as the twentieth century drew to a close, to be the norm in suburban St. Jude. All the young fellows she'd known as Cub Scouts and users of her downstairs bathroom and shovelers of her snow, the many Driblett boys, the various Persons, the young Schumpert twins, all these clean-cut and handsome young men (whom Denise, as a teenager, to Enid's quiet rage, had dismissed with her look of "amusement"), had marched or would soon be marching down heartland Protestant aisles and exchanging vows with nice, normal girls and settling down, if not in St. Jude itself, then at least in the same time zone. Now, in her secret heart, where she was less different from her daughter than she liked to admit, Enid knew that tuxes came in better colors than powder blue and that bridesmaids' dresses could be cut from more interesting fabrics than mauve crepe de chine; and yet, although honesty compelled her to withhold the adjective "elegant" from weddings in this style, there was a louder and happier part of her heart that loved this kind of wedding best of all, because a lack of sophistication assured the assembled guests that for the two families being joined together there were values that mattered more than style. Enid believed in matching and was happiest at a wedding where the bridesmaids suppressed their selfish individual desires and wore dresses that matched the corsages and cocktail napkins, the icing on the cake, and the ribbons on the party favors. She liked a ceremony at Chiltsville Methodist to be followed by a modest reception at the Chiltsville Sheraton. She liked a more elegant wedding at Paradise Valley Presbyterian to culminate in the clubhouse at Deepmire, where even the complimentary matches (Dean & Trish _ June 13, 1987) matched the color scheme. Most important of all was that the bride and groom themselves match: have similar backgrounds and ages and educations. Sometimes, at a wedding hosted by less good friends of Enid's, the bride would be heavier or significantly older than the groom, or the groom's family would hail from a farm town upstate and be obviously overawed by Deepmire's elegance. Enid felt sorry for the principals at a reception like that. She just knew the marriage was going to be a struggle from day one. More typically, though, the only discordant note at Deepmire would be an off-color toast offered by some secondary groomsman, often a college buddy of the groom, often mustached or weak-chinned, invariably flushed with liquor, who sounded as if he didn't come from the Midwest at all but from some more eastern urban place, and who tried to show off by making a "humorous" reference to premarital sex, causing both groom and bride to blush or to laugh with their eyes closed (not, Enid felt, because they were amused but because they were naturally tactful and didn't want the offender to realize how offensive his remark was) while Alfred inclined his head deafly and Enid cast her eye around the room until she found a friend with whom she could exchange a reassuring frown.

Alfred loved weddings, too. They seemed to him the one kind of party that had a real purpose. Under their spell he authorized purchases (a new dress for Enid, a new suit for himself, a top-quality ten-piece teakwood salad-bowl set for a gift) that he ordinarily would have vetoed as unreasonable.

Enid had looked forward, some day when Denise was older and had finished college, to hosting a really elegant wedding and reception (though not, alas, at Deepmire, since, almost alone among their better friends, the Lamberts could not afford the astronomical Deepmire fees) for Denise and a tall, broad-shouldered, possibly Scandinavian young man whose flaxen hair would offset the defect of the too-dark and too-curly hair Denise had inherited from Enid but who would otherwise be her match. And so it just about broke Enid's heart when, one October night, not three weeks after Chuck Meisner had given his daughter Cindy the most lavish reception ever undertaken at Deepmire, with all the men in tails, and a champagne fountain, and a helicopter on the eighteenth fairway, and a brass octet playing fanfares, Denise called home with the news that she and her boss had driven to Atlantic City and gotten married in a courthouse. Enid, who had a very strong stomach (never got sick, never), had to hand the phone to Alfred and go kneel in the bathroom and take deep breaths.

The previous spring, in Philadelphia, she and Alfred had eaten a late lunch at the noisy restaurant where Denise was ruining her hands and wasting her youth. After their lunch, which was quite good but much too rich, Denise had made a point of introducing them to the "chef "under whom she'd studied and for whom she was now boiling and toiling. This "chef," Emile Berger, was a short, unsmiling, middle-aged Jew from Montreal whose idea of dressing for work was to wear an old white T-shirt (like a cook, not a chef, Enid thought; no jacket, no toque) and whose idea of shaving was to skip it. Enid would have disliked Emile and snubbed him even if she hadn't gathered, from Denise's way of hanging on his words, that he had an unhealthy degree of influence with her daughter. "Those are such rich crab cakes," she accused in the kitchen. "One bite and I was stuffed." To which, instead of apologizing and deprecating himself, as any polite St. Judean would have done, Emile responded by agreeing that, yes, if it could be managed, and the flavor was good, a "lite" crab cake would be a wonderful thing, but the question, Mrs. Lambert, was how to manage it? Eh? How to make crabmeat "lite"? Denise was following this exchange hungrily, as if she'd scripted it or were memorizing it. Outside the restaurant, before she returned to her fourteen-hour shift, Enid made sure to say to her: "He certainly is a short little man! So Jewish-looking." Her tone was less controlled than she might have wished, a little squeakier and thinner at the edges, and she could tell from the distant look in Denise's eyes and from a bitterness around her mouth that she'd bruised her daughter's feelings. Then again, all she'd done was speak the truth. And she never, not for a second, imagined that Denise-who, no matter how immature and romantic she was, and no matter how impractical her career plans, had just turned twenty-three and had a beautiful face and figure and her whole life ahead of her-would actually date a person like Emile. As to what exactly a young woman was supposed to do with her physical charms while she waited for the maturing years to pass, now that girls no longer got married quite so young, Enid was, to be sure, somewhat vague. In a general way she believed in socializing in groups of three or more; believed, in a word, in parties! The one thing she knew categorically, the principle she embraced the more passionately the more it was ridiculed in the media and popular entertainments, was that sex before marriage was immoral.

And yet, on that October night, as she knelt on the bathroom floor, Enid had the heretical thought that it might after all have been wiser, in her maternal homilies, to have laid less stress on marriage. It occurred to her that Denise's rash act might even have been prompted, in some tiny part, by her wish to do the moral thing and please her mother. Like a toothbrush in the toilet bowl, like a dead cricket in a salad, like a diaper on the dinner table, this sickening conundrum confronted Enid: that it might actually have been preferable for Denise to go ahead and commit adultery, better to sully herself with a momentary selfish pleasure, better to waste a purity that every decent young man had the right to expect from a prospective bride, than to marry Emile. Except that Denise should never have been attracted to Emile in the first place! It was the same problem Enid had with Chip and even Gary: her children didn't match. They didn't want the things that she and all her friends and all her friends' children wanted. Her children wanted radically, shamefully other things.

While observing peripherally that the bathroom carpet was more spotted than she'd realized and ought to be replaced before the holidays, Enid listened to Alfred offering to send Denise a pair of plane tickets. She was struck by the seeming calm with which Alfred took the news that his only daughter had made the biggest decision of her life without consulting him. But after he'd hung up the phone and she'd come out of the bathroom and he'd commented, simply, that life was full of surprises, she noticed how strangely his hands were shaking. The tremor was at once looser and more intense than the one he sometimes got from drinking coffee. And during the week that followed, while Enid made the best of the mortifying position in which Denise had placed her by (1) calling her best friends and sounding thrilled to announce that Denise was getting married soon! to a very nice Canadian man, yes, but she wanted immediate family only at the ceremony, so, and she was introducing her new husband at a simple, informal open house at Christmastime (none of Enid's friends believed that she was thrilled, but they gave her full credit for trying to hide her suffering; some were even sensitive enough not to ask where Denise had registered for gifts) and (2) ordering, without Denise's permission, two hundred engraved announcements, not only to make the wedding appear more conventional but also to shake the gift tree a little in hopes of receiving compensation for the dozens and dozens of teakwood salad sets that she and Alfred had given in the last twenty years: during this long week, Enid was so continually aware of Alfred's strange new tremor that when, by and by, he agreed to see his doctor and was referred to Dr. Hedgpeth and diagnosed with Parkinson's, an underground branch of her intelligence persisted in connecting his disease with Denise's announcement and so in blaming her daughter for the subsequent plummeting of her own quality of life, even though Dr. Hedgpeth had stressed that Parkinson's was somatic in origin and gradual in its onset. By the time the holidays rolled around, and Dr. Hedgpeth had provided her and Alfred with pamphlets and booklets whose drab doctor's-office color schemes, dismal line drawings, and frightening medical photos presaged a drab and dismal and frightening future, Enid was pretty well convinced that Denise and Emile had ruined her life. She was under strict orders from Alfred, however, to make Emile feel welcome in the family. So at the open house for the newlyweds she painted a smile on her face and accepted, over and over, the sincere congratulations of old family friends who loved Denise and thought she was darling (because Enid in raising her had emphasized the importance of being kind to her elders) (although what was her marriage if not an instance of excessive kindness to an elder?) where she would have much preferred condolences. The effort she made to be a good sport and cheerleader, to obey Alfred and receive her middle-aged son-in-law cordially and not say one single word about his religion, only added to the shame and anger she felt five years later when Denise and Emile were divorced and Enid had to give this news, too, to all her friends. Having attached so much meaning to the marriage, having struggled so hard to accept it, she felt that the least Denise could have done was stay married.

"Do you ever hear from Emile anymore?" Enid asked.

Denise was drying dishes in Chip's kitchen. "Occasionally."

Enid had parked herself at the dining table to clip coupons from magazines she'd taken from her Nordic Pleasurelines shoulder bag. Rain was coming down erratically in gusts that slapped and fogged the windows. Alfred was sitting on Chip's chaise with his eyes closed.

"I was just thinking," Enid said, "that even if things had worked out, and you'd stayed married, you know, Denise, Emile's going to be an old man in not too many years. And that's so much work. You can't imagine what a huge responsibility."

"In twenty-five years he'll be younger than Dad is now," Denise said.

"I don't know if I ever told you," Enid said, "about my high-school friend Norma Greene."

"You tell me about Norma Greene literally every time I see you."

"Well, you know the story, then. Norma met this man, Floyd Voinovich, who was a perfect gentleman, quite a number of years older, with a high-paying job, and he swept her off her feet! He was always taking her to Morelli's, and the Steamer, and the Bazelon Room, and the only problem-"

"Mother."

"The only problem," Enid insisted, "was that he was married. But Norma wasn't supposed to worry about that. Floyd said the whole arrangement was temporary. He said he'd made a bad mistake, he had a terrible marriage, he'd never loved his wife-"

"Mother."

"And he was going to divorce her." Enid let her eyes fall shut in raconteurial pleasure. She was aware that Denise didn't like this story, but there were plenty of things about Denise's life that were disagreeable to Enid, too, so. "Well, this went on for years. Floyd was very smooth and charming, and he could afford to do things for Norma that a man closer to her own age couldn't have. Norma developed a real taste for luxuries, and then, too, she'd met Floyd at an age when a girl falls head over heels in love, and Floyd had sworn up and down that he was going to divorce his wife and marry Norma. Well, by then Dad and I were married and had Gary. I remember Norma came over once when Gary was a baby, and she just wanted to hold him and hold him. She loved little children, oh, she just loved holding Gary, and I felt terrible for her, because by then she'd been seeing Floyd for years, and he was still not divorced. I said, Norma, you can't wait forever. She said she'd tried to stop seeing Floyd. She'd gone on dates with other men, but they were younger and they didn't seem matoor to her-Floyd was fifteen years older and very matoor, and I do understand how an older man has a matoority that can make him attractive to a younger woman-"

"Mother."

"And, of course, these younger men couldn't always afford to be taking Norma to fancy places or buying her flowers and gifts like Floyd did (because, see, he could really turn on the charm when she got impatient with him), and then, too, a lot of those younger men were interested in starting families, and Norma-"

"Wasn't so young anymore," Denise said. "I brought some dessert. Are you ready for dessert?"

"Well, you know what happened."

"Yes."

"It's a heartbreaking story, because Norma-"

"Yes. I know the story."

"Norma found herself-"

"Mother: I know the story. You seem to think it has some bearing on my own situation."

"Denise, I don't. You've never even told me what your `situation' is."

"Then why do you keep telling me the story of Norma Greene?"

"I don't see why it upsets you if it has nothing to do with your own situation."

"What upsets me is that you seem to think it does. Are you under the impression that I'm involved with a married man?"

Enid was not only under this impression but was suddenly so angry about it, so clotted with disapproval, that she had difficulty breathing.

"Finally, finally, going to get rid of some of these magazines," she said, snapping the glossy pages.

"Mother?"

"It's better not to talk about this. Just like the Navy, don't ask, don't tell."

Denise stood in the kitchen doorway with her arms crossed and a dish towel balled up in her hand. "Where did you get the idea that I'm involved with a married man?"

Enid snapped another page.

"Did Gary say something to give you that idea?"

Enid struggled to shake her head. Denise would be furious if she found out that Gary had betrayed a confidence, and though Enid spent much of her own life furious with Gary about one thing or another, she prided herself on keeping secrets, and she didn't want to get him in trouble. It was true that she'd been brooding about Denise's situation for many months and had accumulated large stores of anger. She'd ironed at the ironing board and raked the ivy beds and lain awake at night rehearsing the judgments-That is the kind of grossly selfish behavior that I will never understand and never forgive and I'm ashamed to be the parent of a person who would live like that and In a situation like this, Denise, my sympathies are one thousand percent with the wife, one thousand percent-that she yearned to pronounce on Denise's immoral lifestyle. And now she had an opportunity to pronounce these judgments. And yet, if Denise denied the charges, then all of Enid's anger, all of her refining and rehearsal of her judgments, would go wasted. And if, on the other hand, Denise admitted everything, it might still be wiser for Enid to swallow her pent-up judgments than to risk a fight. Enid needed Denise as an ally on the Christmas front, and she didn't want to set off on a luxury cruise with one son having vanished inexplicably, another son blaming her for betraying his trust, and her daughter perhaps confirming her worst fears.

With great humbling effort she therefore shook her head. "No, no, no. Gary never said a thing."

Denise narrowed her eyes. "Never said a thing about what."

"Denise," Alfred said. "Let her be."

And Denise, who obeyed Enid in nothing, promptly turned and went back into the kitchen.

Enid found a coupon offering sixty cents off I Can't Believe It's Not Butter! with any purchase of Thomas' English muffins. Her scissors cut the paper and with it the silence that had fallen.

"If I do one thing on this cruise," she said, "I'm going to get through all these magazines."

"No sign of Chip," Alfred said.

Denise brought slices of tart on dessert plates to the dining table. "I'm afraid we may have seen the last of Chip today."

"It's very peculiar," Enid said. "I don't understand why he doesn't at least call."

"I've endured worse," Alfred said.

"Dad, there's dessert. My pastry chef made a pear tart. Do you want to have it at the table?"

"Oh, that's much too big a piece for me," Enid said.

"Dad?"

Alfred didn't answer. His mouth had gone slack and sour again in the way that made Enid feel that something terrible was going to happen. He turned to the darkening, rain-spotted windows and gazed at them dully, his head hanging low.

"Dad?"

"Al? There's dessert."

Something seemed to melt in him. Still looking at the window, he raised his head with a tentative joy, as if he thought he recognized someone outside, someone he loved.

"Al, what is it?"

"Dad?"

"There are children," he said, sitting up straighter. "Do you see them?" He raised a trembling index finger. "There." His finger moved laterally, following the motion of the children he saw. "And there. And there."

He turned to Enid and Denise as if he expected them to be overjoyed to hear this news, but Enid was not the least bit overjoyed. She was about to embark on a very elegant fall color cruise on which it would be extremely important that Alfred not make mistakes like this.

"Al, those are sunflowers," she said, half angry, half beseeching. "You're seeing reflections in the window."

"Well!" He shook his head bluffly. "I thought I saw children."

"No, sunflowers," Enid said. "You saw sunflowers."

After his party was voted out of power and the Russian currency crisis had finished off the Lithuanian economy, Gitanas said, he'd passed his days alone in the old offices of the VIPPPAKJRIINPB17, devoting his idle hours to constructing a Web site whose domain name, lithuania.com, he'd purchased from an East Prussian speculator for a truckload of mimeograph machines, daisy-wheel printers, 64-kilobyte Commodore computers, and other Gorbachev-era office equipment-the party's last physical vestiges. To publicize the plight of small debtor nations, Gitanas had created a satiric Web page offering DEMOCRACY FOR PROFIT: BUY A PIECE OF EUROPEAN HISTORY and had seeded links and references in American news groups and chat rooms for investors. Visitors to the site were invited to send cash to the erstwhile VIPPPAKJRIINPB17-"one of Lithuania's most venerable political parties," the "cornerstone" of the country's governing coalition for "three of the last seven years," the leading vote-getter in the April 1993 general election, and now a "Western-leaning pro-business party" reorganized as the "Free Market Party Company." Gitanas's Web site promised that, as soon as the Free Market Party Company had bought enough votes to win a national election, its foreign investors would not only become "equity shareholders" in Lithuania Incorporated (a "for-profit nation state") but would also be rewarded, in proportion to the size of their investment, with personalized memorials to their "heroic contribution" to the "market liberation" of the country. By sending just $100, for example, an American investor could have a street in Vilnius ("no less than two hundred meters in length") named after him; for $5,000 the Free Market Party Company would hang a portrait of the investor ("minimum size 60 cm x 80 cm; includes ornate gilt frame") in the Gallery of National Heroes at the historic Slapeliai House; for $25,000 the investor would be awarded perpetual title to an eponymous town "of no fewer than 5,000 souls" and be granted a "modern, hygienic form of droit du seigneur" that met "most of" the guidelines established by the Third International Conference on Human Rights.

"It was a nasty little joke," Gitanas said from the corner of the taxicab-into which he'd wedged himself. "But who laughed? Nobody laughed. They just sent money. I gave an address and the cashier checks started coming in. E-mail queries by the hundred. What products would Lithuania Inc. make? Who were the officers in the Free Market Party Company and did they have a strong track record as managers? Did I have records of past earnings? Could the investor alternatively have a Lithuanian street or village named after his children or his children's favorite Pokemon character? Everybody wanted more information. Everybody wanted brochures. And prospectuses! And stock certificates! And brokerage information! And are we listed on such and such exchange and so forth? People want to come and visit! And nobody is laughing."

Chip was tapping on the window with a knuckle and checking out the women on Sixth Avenue. The rain was letting up, umbrellas coming down. "Are the proceeds going to you or to the Party?"

"OK, so my philosophy about that is in transition," Gitanas said. From his briefcase he took a bottle of akvavit from which he'd already poured deal-sealing shots in Eden's office. He rolled sideways and handed it to Chip, who took a healthy pull and gave it back.

"You were an English teacher," Gitanas said.

"I taught college, yeah."

"And where your people from? Scandinavia?"

"My dad's Scandinavian," Chip said. "My mom's sort of mongrel Eastern European."

"People in Vilnius will look at you and think you're one of us."

Chip was in a hurry to get to his apartment before his parents left. Now that he had cash in his pocket, a roll of thirty hundreds, he didn't care so much what his parents thought of him. In fact, he seemed to recall that a few hours earlier he'd seen his father trembling and pleading in a doorway. As he drank the akvavit and checked out the women on the sidewalk, he could no longer fathom why the old man had seemed like such a killer.

It was true that Alfred believed the only thing wrong with the death penalty was that it wasn't used often enough; true as well that the men whose gassing or electrocution he'd called for, over dinner in Chip's childhood, were usually black men from the slums on St. Jude's north side. ("Oh, Al," Enid would say, because dinner was "the family meal," and she couldn't understand why they had to spend it talking about gas chambers and slaughter in the streets.) And one Sunday morning, after he'd stood at a window counting squirrels and assessing the damage to his oak trees and zoysia the way white men in marginal neighborhoods took stock of how many houses had been lost to "the blacks," Alfred had performed an experiment in genocide. Incensed that the squirrels in his not-large front yard lacked the discipline to stop reproducing or pick up after themselves, he went to the basement and found a rat trap over which Enid, as he came upstairs with it, shook her head and made small negative noises. "Nineteen of them!" Alfred said. "Nineteen of them!" Emotional appeals were no match for the discipline of such an exact and scientific figure. He baited the trap with a piece of the same whole wheat bread that Chip had eaten, toasted, for breakfast. Then all five Lamberts went to church, and between the Gloria Patri and the Doxology a young male squirrel, engaging in the high-risk behavior of the economically desperate, helped itself to the bread and had its skull crushed. The family came home to find green flies feasting on the blood and brain matter and chewed whole-wheat bread that had erupted through the young squirrel's shattered jaws. Alfred's own mouth and chin were sewn up in the distaste that special exertions of discipline-the spanking of a child, the eating of rutabaga-always caused him. (He was quite unconscious of this distaste he betrayed for discipline.) He fetched a shovel from the garage and loaded both the trap and the squirrel corpse into the paper grocery bag that Enid had half filled with pulled crabgrass the day before. Chip was following all this from about twenty steps behind him, and so he saw how, when Alfred entered the basement from the garage, his legs buckled a little, sideways, and he pitched into the washing machine, and then he ran past the Ping-Pong table (it had always scared Chip to see his father run, he seemed too old for it, too disciplined) and disappeared into the basement bathroom; and henceforth the squirrels did whatever they wanted.

The cab was approaching University Place. Chip considered returning to the Cedar Tavern and reimbursing the bartender, maybe giving her an even hundred to make everything OK, maybe getting her name and address and writing to her from Lithuania. He was leaning forward to direct the driver to the Tavern when a radical new thought arrested him: I stole nine bucks, that's what I did, that's who I am, tough luck for her.

He sat back and extended his hand for the bottle.

Outside his building the cabby waved away his hundred-too big, too big. Gitanas dug something smaller out of his red motocross jacket.

"Why don't I meet you at your hotel?" Chip said.

Gitanas was amused. "You're joking, right? I mean, I trust you a lot. But maybe I'll wait down here. Pack your bag, take your time. Bring a warm coat and hat. Suits and ties. Think financial."

The doorman Zoroaster was nowhere to be seen. Chip had to use his key to get inside. On the elevator he took deep breaths to quell his excitement. He didn't feel afraid, he felt generous, he felt ready to embrace his father.

But his apartment was empty. His family must have left minutes earlier. Body warmth was hanging in the air, faint smells of Enid's White Shoulders perfume, and something bathroomy, something old-persony. The kitchen was cleaner than Chip had ever seen it. In the living room all the scrubbing and stowing he'd done was visible now as it hadn't been the night before. And his bookshelves were denuded. And Julia had taken her shampoos and dryer from the bathroom. And he was drunker than he'd realized. And nobody had left a note for him. There was nothing on the dining table except a slice of tart and a vase of sunflowers. He had to pack his bags, but everything around him and inside him had become so strange that for a moment he could only stand and look. The leaves of the sunflowers had black spots and were rimmed with pale senescences; the heads were meaty and splendid, heavy as brownies, thick as palms. In the center of a sunflower's Kansan face was a subtly pale button within a subtly darker areola. Nature, Chip thought, could hardly have devised a more inviting bed for a small winged insect to tumble into. He touched the brown velvet, and ecstasy washed over him.

The taxi containing three Lamberts arrived at a midtown pier where a white high-rise of a cruise ship, the Gunnar Myrdal, was blotting out the river and New Jersey and half the sky. A crowd mostly of old people had converged on the gate and reattenuated in the long, bright corridor beyond it. There was something netherworldly in their determined migration, something chilling in the cordiality and white raiment of the Nordic Pleasurelines shore personnel, the rain clouds breaking up too late to save the day-the hush of it all. A throng and twilight by the Styx.

Denise paid the cab fare and got the luggage into the hands of handlers.

"So, now, where do you go from here?" Enid asked her.

"Back to work in Philly."

"You look darling," Enid said spontaneously. "I love your hair that length."

Alfred seized Denise's hands and thanked her.

"I just wish it had been a better day for Chip," Denise said.

"Talk to Gary about Christmas," Enid said. "And do think about coming for a whole week."

Denise raised a leather cuff and checked the time. "I'll come for five days. I don't think Gary will do it, though. And who knows what's up with Chip."

"Denise," Alfred said impatiently, as if she were speaking nonsense, "please talk to Gary."

"OK, I will. I will."

Alfred's hands bounced in the air. "I don't know how much time I have! You and your mother need to get along. You and Gary need to get along."

"Al, you have plenty of-"

"We all need to get along!"

Denise had never been a crier, but her face was crumpling up. "Dad, all right," she said. "I'll talk to him."

"Your mother wants a Christmas in St. Jude."

"I'll talk to him. I promise."

"Well." He turned abruptly. "That's enough of that."

His black raincoat was flapping and whipping in the wind, and still Enid managed to hope that the weather would be perfect for cruising, that the water would be calm.

In dry clothes, with a coat bag and a duffel and cigarettes-smooth lethal Murattis, five bucks a box-Chip rode out to Kennedy with Gitanas Misevicius and boarded the Helsinki flight on which, in violation of his oral contract, Gitanas had bought coach-class, not business-class, tickets. "We can drink tonight, sleep tomorrow," he said.

Their seats were aisle and window. As Chip sat down, he recalled how Julia had ditched Gitanas. He imagined her walking quickly off the plane and then sprinting down the concourse and throwing herself into the back seat of a good old yellow cab. He felt a spasm of homesickness-terror of the other; love of the familiar-but, unlike Julia, he had no desire to bolt. He'd no sooner buckled his seat belt than he fell asleep. He awoke briefly during takeoff and went under again until the entire population of the plane, as one, lit cigarettes.

Gitanas took a computer from its case and booted up. "So Julia," he said.

For an alarmed, sleep-clouded moment Chip thought that Gitanas was addressing him as Julia.

"My wife?" Gitanas said.

"Oh. Sure."

"Yeah, she's on antidepressants. This was Eden's idea, I think. Eden kind of runs her life now, I think. You could see she didn't want me in her office today. Didn't want me in town! I'm inconvenient now. So, but, OK, so Julia started taking the drug, and suddenly she woke up and she didn't want to be with men with cigargtte burns anymore. That's what she says. Enough men with cigarette burns. Time to move on. No more men with burns." Gitanas loaded a CD into the computer's CD drive. "She wants the flat, though. At least the divorce lawyer wants her to want it. The divorce lawyer that Eden's paying for. Somebody changed the locks on the flat, I had to pay the super to let me in."

Chip closed his left hand. "Cigarette burns?"

"Yeah. Oh, yeah, I got a few." Gitanas craned his neck to see if any neighbors were listening, but all the passengers around them, except for two children with their eyes shut tight, were busy smoking. "Soviet military prison," he said. "I'll show you my memento of a pleasant stay there." He peeled his red leather jacket off one arm and rolled up the sleeve of the yellow T-shirt he was wearing underneath. A poxy interlocking constellation of scar tissue extended from his armpit down the inside of his arm to his elbow. "This was my 1990," he said. "Eight months in a Red Army barracks in the sovereign state of Lithuania."

"You were a dissident," Chip said.

"Yeah! Yeah! Dissident!" He worked his arm back into its sleeve. "It was horrible, great. Very tiring, but it didn't feel tiring. The tiredness came later."

Chip's memories of 1990 were of Tudor dramas, interminable futile fights with Tori Timmelman, a secret unhealthy involvement with certain texts of Tori's that illustrated the dehumanizing objectifications of pornography, and little else.

"So, I'm kind of scared to look at this," Gitanas said. On his computer screen was a dusky monochrome image of a bed, viewed from above, with a body beneath the blankets. "The super says she's got a boyfriend, and I retrieved some data. I had my surveillance in there from the previous owner. Motion detector, infrared, digital stills. You can look if you want. Might be interesting. Might be hot."

Chip remembered the smoke detector on the ceiling of Julia's bedroom. Often enough he'd stared up at it until the corners of his mouth were dry and his eyes had rolled back in his head. It had always seemed to him a strangely complicated smoke detector.

He sat up straighter in his seat. "Maybe you don't want to look at those."

Gitanas pointed and clicked intricately. "I'll angle the screen. You don't have to look."

Thunderheads of tobacco smoke were gathering in the aisles. Chip decided that he needed to light a Muratti; but the difference between taking a drag and taking a breath proved negligible.

"What I mean," he said, blocking the computer screen with his hand, "is maybe you want to eject the CD and not look at it."

Gitanas was genuinely startled. "Why don't I want to look at it?"

"Well, let's think about why."

"Maybe you should tell me."

"No, well, let's just think about it."

For a moment the atmosphere was furiously cheerful. Gitanas considered Chip's shoulder, his knees, and his wrist, as though deciding where to bite him. Then he ejected the CD and thrust it in Chip's face. "Fuck you!"

"I know, I know."

"Take it. Fuck you. I don't want to see it again. Take it."

Chip put the CD in his shirt pocket. He felt pretty good. He felt all right. The plane had leveled off in altitude and the noise had the steady vague white burning of dry sinuses, the color of scuffed plastic airliner windows, the taste of cold pale coffee in reusable tray-table cups. The North Atlantic night was dark and lonely, but here, on the plane, were lights in the sky. Here was sociability. It was good to be awake and to feel awakeness all around him.

"So, what, you got cigarette burns, too?" Gitanas said.

Chip showed his palm. "It's nothing."

"Self-inflicted. You pathetic American."

"Different kind of prison," Chip said.

GARY LAMBERT'S profitable entanglement with the Axon Corporation had begun three weeks earlier, on a Sunday afternoon that he'd spent in his new color darkroom, trying to enjoy reprinting two old photographs of his parents and, by enjoying it, to reassure himself about his mental health.

Gary had been worrying a lot about his mental health, but on that particular afternoon, as he left his big schist-sheathed house on Seminole Street and crossed his big back yard and climbed the outside stairs of his big garage, the weather in his brain was as warm and bright as the weather in northwest Philadelphia. A September sun was shining through a mix of haze and smallish, gray-keeled clouds, and to the extent that Gary was able to understand and track his neurochemistry (and he was a vice president at CenTrust Bank, not a shrink, let's remember) his leading indicators all seemed rather healthy.

Although in general Gary applauded the modern trend toward individual self-management of retirement funds and long-distance calling plans and private-schooling options, he was less than thrilled to be given responsibility for his own personal brain chemistry, especially when certain people in his life, notably his father, refused to take any such responsibility. But Gary was nothing if not conscientious. As he entered the darkroom, he estimated that his levels of Neurofactor 3 (i. e., serotonin: a very, very important factor) were posting seven-day or even thirty-day highs, that his Factor 2 and Factor 7 levels were likewise outperforming expectations, and that his Factor 1 had rebounded from an early-morning slump related to the glass of Armagnac he'd drunk at bedtime. He had a spring in his step, an agreeable awareness of his above-average height and his late-summer suntan. His resentment of his wife, Caroline, was moderate and well contained. Declines led advances in key indices of paranoia (e. g., his persistent suspicion that Caroline and his two older sons were mocking him), and his seasonally adjusted assessment of life's futility and brevity was consistent with the overall robustness of his mental economy. He was not the least bit clinically depressed.

He drew the velvet blackout curtains and shut the lightproof shutters, took a box of 8x10 paper from the big stainless refrigerator, and fed two strips of celluloid to the motorized negative cleaner-a sexily heavy little gadget.

He was printing images from his parents' ill-fated Decade of Connubial Golf. One showed Enid bending over in deep rough, scowling in her sunglasses in the obliterative heartland heat, her left hand squeezing the neck of her long-suffering five-wood, her right arm blurred in the act of underhandedly throwing her ball (a white smear at the image's margin) into the fairway. (She and Alfred had only ever played on flat, straight, short, cheap public courses.) In the other photo Alfred was wearing tight shorts and a billed Midland Pacific cap, black socks and prehistoric golf shoes, and was addressing a white grapefruit-sized tee marker with his prehistoric wooden driver and grinning at the camera as if to say, A ball this big I could hit!

After Gary had given the enlargements their sour baths, he raised the lights and discovered that both prints were webbed over with peculiar yellow blotches.

He cursed a little, not so much because he cared about the photographs as because he wanted to preserve his good spirits, his serotonin-rich mood, and to do this he needed a modicum of cooperation from the world of objects.

Outside, the weather was curdling. There was a trickle in the gutters, a rooftop percussion of drops from overhanging trees. Through the walls of the garage, while he shot a second pair of enlargements, Gary could hear Caroline and the boys playing soccer in the back yard. He heard footfalls and punting sounds, less frequent shouts, the seismic whump of ball colliding with garage.

When the second set of prints emerged from the fixer with the same yellow blotches, Gary knew he ought to quit. But there came a tapping on the outside door, and his youngest son, Jonah, slipped through the blackout curtain.

"Are you printing pictures?" Jonah said. Gary hastily folded the failed prints into quarters and buried them in the trash. "Just starting," he said.

He remixed his solutions and opened a fresh box of paper. Jonah sat down by a safe light and whispered as he turned the pages of one of the Narnia books, Prince Caspian, that Gary's sister, Denise, had given him. Jonah was in second grade but was already reading at a fifth-grade level. Often he spoke aloud the written words in an articulate whisper that was of a piece with his general Narnian dearness as a person. He had shining dark eyes and an oboe voice and mink-soft hair and could seem, even to Gary, more sentient animal than little boy.

Caroline did not entirely approve of Narnia-C. S. Lewis was a known Catholic propagandist, and the Narnian hero, Aslan, was a furry, four-pawed Christ figure-but Gary had enjoyed reading The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe as a boy, and he had not, it was safe to say, grown up to be a religious nut. (In fact he was a strict materialist.)

"So they kill a bear," Jonah reported, "but it's not a talking bear, and Aslan comes back, but only Lucy sees him and the others don't believe her."

Gary tweezed the prints into the stop bath. "Why don't they believe her?"

"Because she's the youngest," Jonah said.

Outside, in the rain, Caroline laughed and shouted. She had a habit of running herself ragged to keep up with the boys. In the early years of their marriage she'd worked full-time as a lawyer, but after Caleb was born she'd come into family money and now she worked half days only, at a philanthropically low salary, for the Children's Defense Fund. Her real life centered on the boys. She called them her best friends.

Six months ago, on the eve of Gary's forty-third birthday, while he and Jonah were visiting his parents in St. Jude, a pair of local contractors had come and rewired, replumbed, and re-outfitted the second floor of the garage as a surprise birthday gift from Caroline. Gary had occasionally spoken of reprinting his favorite old family photos and collecting them in a leather-bound album, an All-Time Lambert Two Hundred. But commercial printing would have sufficed for that, and meanwhile the boys were teaching him computer pixel-processing, and if he'd still needed a lab he could have rented one by the hour. His impulse on his birthday, therefore-after Caroline had led him out to the garage and presented him with a darkroom that he didn't need or want-was to weep. From certain pop-psychology books on Caroline's nightstand, however, he'd learned to recognize the Warning Signs of clinical depression, and one of these Warning Signs, the authorities all agreed, was a proclivity to inappropriate weeping, and so he'd swallowed the lump in his throat and bounded around the expensive new darkroom and exclaimed to Caroline (who was experiencing both buyer's remorse and gift-giver's anxiety) that he was utterly delighted with the gift! And then, to reassure himself that he wasn't clinically depressed and to make sure that Caroline never suspected anything of the kind, he'd resolved to work in the darkroom twice a week until the All-Time Lambert Two Hundred album was complete.

The suspicion that Caroline, consciously or not, had tried to exile him from the house by putting the darkroom in the garage was another key index of paranoia.

When the timer pealed, he transferred the third set of prints to the fixer bath and raised the lights again.

"What are those white blobs?" Jonah said, peering into the tray.

"Jonah, I don't know!"

"They look like clouds," Jonah said.

The soccer ball slammed into the side of the garage.

Gary left Enid scowling and Alfred grinning in the fixative and opened shutters. His monkey puzzle tree and the bamboo thicket next to it were glossy with rain. In the middle of the back yard, in soaked soiled jerseys that stuck to their shoulder blades, Caroline and Aaron were gulping air while Caleb tied a shoe. Caroline at forty-five had the legs of a college girl. Her hair was nearly as blond as when Gary had first met her, twenty years earlier, at a Bob Seger concert at the Spectrum. Gary was still substantially attracted to his wife, still excited by her effortless good looks and by her Quaker bloodlines. By ancient reflex, he reached for a camera and trained the zoom telephoto on her.

The look on Caroline's face dismayed him. There was a pinch in her brow, a groove of distress around her mouth. She was limping as she pursued the ball again.

Gary turned the camera on his oldest son, Aaron, who was best photographed unawares, before he could position his head at the self-conscious angle that he believed most flattered him. Aaron's face was flushed and mud-flecked in the drizzle, and Gary worked the zoom to frame a handsome shot. But resentment of Caroline was overwhelming his neurochemical defenses.

The soccer had stopped now and she was running and limping toward the house.

Lucy buried her head in his mane to hide from his face, Jonah whispered.

There came a screaming from the house.

Caleb and Aaron reacted instantly, galloping across the yard like action-picture heroes and disappearing inside. A moment later Aaron reemerged and shouted, in his newly crack-prone voice, "Dad! Dad! Dad! Dad!"

The hysteria of others made Gary methodical and calm. He left the darkroom and descended the rain-slick stairway slowly. In the open space above the commuter-rail tracks, behind the garage, a kind of spring-shower self-improvement of the light was working through the humid air.

"Dad, Grandma's on the phone!"

Gary ambled across the yard, pausing to examine and regret the injuries that the soccer had visited on the grass. The surrounding neighborhood, Chestnut Hill, was not un-Narnian. Century-old maples and ginkgos and sycamores, many of them mutilated to accommodate power lines, grew in giant riot over patched and repatched city streets bearing the names of decimated tribes. Seminole and Cherokee, Navajo and Shawnee. For miles in every direction, despite high population densities and large household incomes, there were no fast roads and few useful stores. The Land That Time Forgot, Gary called it. Most of the houses here, including his own, were made of a schist that resembled raw tin and was exactly the color of his hair.

"Dad!"

"Thank you, Aaron, I heard you the first time."

"Grandma's on the phone!"

"I know that, Aaron. You just told me."

In the slate-floored kitchen he found Caroline slumped in a chair with both hands pressed to her lower back.

"She called this morning," Caroline said. "I forgot to tell you. The phone's been ringing every five minutes, and finally I was running-"

"Thank you, Caroline."

"I was running-"

"Thank you." Gary snagged the cordless and held it at arm's length, as if to keep his mother at bay, while he proceeded into the dining room. Here he was waylaid by Caleb, who had a finger buried in the slick leaves of a catalogue. "Dad, can I talk to you for a second?"

"Not now, Caleb, your grandmother is on the phone."

"I just want-"

"Not now, I said."

Caleb shook his head and smiled in disbelief, like a much-televised athlete who'd failed to draw a penalty.

Gary crossed the marble- floored main hall into his very large living room and said hello into the little phone.

"I told Caroline," Enid said, "that I would call you back if you weren't near the phone."

"Your calls cost seven cents a minute," Gary said.

"Or you could have called me back."

"Mother, we're talking about twenty-five cents."

"I've been trying to reach you all day," she said. "The travel agent needs an answer by tomorrow morning at the latest. And, you know, we're still hoping you'll come for one last Christmas, like I promised Jonah, so-"

"Hang on a second," Gary said. "I'll check with Caroline."

"Gary, you've had months to discuss this. I'm not going to sit here and wait while you-"

"One second."

He blocked the perforations in the phone's mouthpiece with his thumb and returned to the kitchen, where Jonah was standing on a chair with a package of Oreos. Caroline, still slumped at the table, was breathing shallowly. "I did something terrible," she said, "when I ran to catch the phone."

"You were out there slipping around in the rain for two hours," Gary said.

"No, I was fine until I ran to get the phone."

"Caroline, I saw you limping before you-"

"I was fine," she said, "until I ran to get the phone, which was ringing for the fiftieth time-"

"Good, all right," Gary said, "it's my mother's fault. Now tell me what you want me to say about Christmas."

"Well, whatever. They're welcome to come here."

"We'd talked about the possibility of going there."

Caroline shook her head thoroughly, as if erasing something. "No. You talked about it. I never talked about it."

"Caroline-"

"I can't discuss this when she's on the phone. Have her call back next week."

Jonah was realizing that he could take as many cookies as he wanted and neither parent would notice.

"She needs to make arrangements now," Gary said. "They're trying to decide if they should stop here next month, after their cruise. It depends on Christmas."

"It's like I slipped a disk."

"If you won't talk about it," he said, "I'll tell her we're considering coming to St. Jude."

"No way! That was not the agreement."

"I'm proposing a one-time exception to the agreement."

"No! No!" Wet tangles of blond hair lashed and twisted as Caroline registered refusal. "You can't change the rules like that."

"A one-time exception isn't changing the rules."

"God, I think I need an X-ray," Caroline said.

Gary could feel the buzzing of his mother's voice against his thumb. "A yes or a no here?"

Standing up, Caroline leaned into him and buried her face in his sweater. She knocked lightly on his sternum with a little fist. "Please," she said, nuzzling his collarbone. "Tell her you'll call her later. Please? I really hurt my back."

Gary held the phone out to one side, his arm rigid, as she pressed against him. "Caroline. They've come here eight years in a row. It's not extreme of me to propose a one-time exception. Can I at least say we're considering the possibility?"

Caroline shook her head woefully and sank onto the chair.

"OK, fine," Gary said. "I'll make my own decision."

He strode into the dining room, where Aaron, who'd been listening, stared at him as if he were a monster of spousal cruelty.

"Dad," Caleb said, "if you're not talking to Grandma, can I ask you something?"

"No, Caleb, I'm talking to Grandma."

"Then can I talk to you right afterward?"

"Oh, God, oh, God," Caroline was saying.

In the living room Jonah had settled onto the larger leather sofa with his tower of cookies and Prince Caspian.

"Mother?"

"I don't understand this," Enid said. "If it's not a good time to talk, all right, call me back, but to make me wait ten minutes-"

"Yes, but here I am."

"Well, so, and what have you decided?"

Before Gary could answer, there burst from the kitchen a piteous raw feline wailing, a cry such as Caroline had produced during intercourse fifteen years ago, before there were boys to hear her.

"Mom, sorry, one second."

"This is not right," Enid said. "This is not polite."

"Caroline," Gary called into the kitchen, "do you think we can behave like adults for a few minutes?"

"Ah, ah, uh! Uh!" Caroline cried.

"Nobody ever died of a backache, Caroline."

"Please," she cried, "call her later. I tripped on the last step when I was running inside, Gary, it hurts-"

He turned his back on the kitchen. "Sorry, Mom."

"What on earth is going on there?"

"Caroline hurt her back a little bit playing soccer."

"You know, I hate to say this," Enid said, "but aches and pains are a part of getting older. I could talk about pain all day long if I wanted to. My hip is always hurting. As you get older, though, hopefully you get a little more matoor."

"Oh! Ahh! Ahh!" Caroline cried out voluptuously.

"Yeah, that's the hope," Gary said.

"Anyhow, what did you decide?"

"The jury's still out on Christmas," he said, "but maybe you should plan on stopping here-"

"Ow! Ow! Ow!"

"It's getting awfully late to be making Christmas reservations," Enid said severely. "You know, the Schumperts made their Hawaii reservations back in April, because last year, when they waited until September, they couldn't get the seats they-"

Aaron came running from the kitchen. "Dad!"

"I'm on the phone, Aaron."

"Dad!"

"I'm on the telephone, Aaron, as you can see."

"Dave has a colostomy," Enid said.

"You've got to do something right now," Aaron said. "Mom is really hurting. She says you have to drive her to the hospital!"

"Actually, Dad," said Caleb, sidling in with his catalogue, "there's someplace you can drive me, too."

"No, Caleb."

"No, but there's a store I really actually do need to get to?"

"The affordable seats fill up early," Enid said.

"Aaron?" Caroline shouted from the kitchen. "Aaron! Where are you? Where's your father? Where's Caleb?"

"It certainly is noisy in here for a person trying to concentrate," Jonah said.

"Mother, sorry," Gary said, "I'm going someplace quieter."

"It's getting very late," Enid said, in her voice the panic of a woman for whom each passing day, each hour, signified the booking of more seats on late-December flights and thus the particle-by-particle disintegration of any hope that Gary and Caroline would bring their boys to St. Jude for one last Christmas.

"Dad," Aaron pleaded, following Gary up the stairs to the second floor, "what do I tell her?"

"Tell her to call 911. Use your cell phone, call an ambulance." Gary raised his voice: "Caroline? Call 911!"

Nine years ago, after a midwestern trip whose particular torments had included ice storms in both Philly and St. Jude, a four-hour runway delay with a whining five-year-old and a screaming two-year-old, a night of wild vomiting by Caleb in reaction (according to Caroline) to the butter and bacon fat in Enid's holiday cooking, and a nasty spill that Caroline took on her in-laws' ice-covered driveway (her back trouble dated from her field-hockey days at Friends' Central, but she now spoke of having "reactivated" the injury on that driveway), Gary had promised his wife that he would never again ask her to go to St. Jude for Christmas. But now his parents had come to Philly eight years in a row, and although he disapproved of his mother's obsession with Christmas-it seemed to him a symptom of a larger malaise, a painful emptiness in Enid's life-he could hardly blame his parents for wanting to stay home this year. Gary also calculated that Enid would be more willing to leave St. Jude and move east if she'd had her "one last Christmas." Basically, he was prepared to make the trip, and he expected a modicum of cooperation from his wife: a mature willingness to consider the special circumstances.

He shut himself inside his study and locked the door against the shouts and whimpers of his family, the barrage of feet on stairs, the pseudo-emergency. He lifted the receiver of his study phone and turned off the cordless.

"This is ridiculous," Enid said in a defeated voice. "Why don't you call me back?"

"We haven't quite decided about December," he said, "but we may very well come to St. Jude. In which case, I think you should stop here after the cruise."

Enid was breathing rather loudly. "We're not making two trips to Philadelphia this fall," she said. "And I want to see the boys at Christmas, and so as far as I'm concerned this means you're coming to St. Jude."

"No, Mother," he said. "No, no, no. We haven't decided anything."

"I promised Jonah-"

"Jonah's not buying the tickets. Jonah's not in charge here. So you make your plans, we'll make ours, and hopefully everything will work out."

Gary could hear, with strange clarity, the rustle of dissatisfaction from Enid's nostrils. He could hear the seashore of her respiration, and all at once he realized.

"Caroline?" he said. "Caroline, are you on the line?"

The breathing ceased.

"Caroline, are you eavesdropping? Are you on the line?"

He heard a faint electronic click, a spot of static.

"Mom, sorry-"

Enid: "What on earth?"

Unbelievable! Unfuckingbelievable! Gary dropped the receiver on his desk, unlocked the door, and ran down the hallway past a bedroom in which Aaron was standing at his mirror with his brow wrinkled and his head at the Flattering Angle, past the main staircase on which Caleb was clutching his catalogue like a Jehovah's Witness with a pamphlet, to the master bedroom where Caroline was curled up fetally on a Persian rug, in her muddy clothes, a frosty gelpack pressed into her lower back.

"Are you eavesdropping on me?"

Caroline shook her head weakly, perhaps hoping to suggest that she was too infirm to have reached the phone by the bed.

"Is that a no? You're saying no? You weren't listening?"

"No, Gary," she said in a tiny voice.

"I heard the click, I heard the breathing-"

"No."

"Caroline, there are three phones on this line, I've got two of them in my study, and the third one's right here. Hello?"

"I wasn't eavesdropping. I just picked up the phone-" She inhaled through gritted teeth. "To see if the line was free. That's all."

"And sat and listened! You were eavesdropping! Like we've talked and talked and talked about not doing!"

"Gary," she said in a piteous little voice, "I swear to you I wasn't. My back is killing me. I couldn't reach to put the phone back for a minute. I put it on the floor. I wasn't eavesdropping. Please be nice to me."

That her face was beautiful and that the agony in it was mistakable for ecstasy-that the sight of her doubled-over and mud-spattered and red-cheekgd and vanquished and wild-haired on the Persian rug turned him on; that some part of him believed her denials and was full of tenderness for her-only deepened his feeling of betrayal. He stormed back up the hall to his study and slammed the door. "Mother, hello, I'm sorry."

But the line was dead. He had to dial St. Jude now at his own expense. Through the window overlooking the back yard he could see sunlit, clamshell-purple rain clouds, steam rising off the monkey puzzle tree.

Because she wasn't paying for the call, Enid sounded happier. She asked Gary if he'd heard of a company called Axon. "It's in Schwenksville, Pennsylvania," she said. "They want to buy Dad's patent. Here, I'll read you the letter. I'm a little upset about this."

At CenTrust Bank, where Gary now ran the Equities Division, he'd long specialized in large-cap securities and never much concerned himself with small fry. The name Axon was not familiar to him. But as he listened to his mother read the letter from Mr. Joseph K. Prager at Bragg Knuter & Speigh, he felt he knew these people's game. It was clear that the lawyer, in drafting a letter and sending it to an old man with a midwestern address, had offered Alfred no more than a tiny percentage of the patent's actual value. Gary knew the way these shysters worked. In Axon's position he would have done the same.

"I'm thinking we should ask for ten thousand, not five thousand," Enid said.

"When does that patent expire?" Gary said.

"In about six years."

"They must be looking at big money. Otherwise they'd just go ahead and infringe."

"The letter says it's experimental and uncertain."

"Mother, exactly. That's exactly what they want you to think. But if it's so experimental, why are they bothering with this at all? Why not just wait six years?"

"Oh, I see."

"It's very, very good that you told me about this, Mother. What you need to do now is write back to these guys and ask them for a $200,000 licensing fee up front."

Enid gasped as she'd done long ago on family car trips, when Alfred swung into oncoming traffic to pass a truck. " Two hundred thousand! Oh, my, Gary-"

"And a one percent royalty on gross revenues from their process. Tell them you're fully prepared to defend your legitimate claim in court."

"But what if they say no?"

"Trust me, these guys have no desire to litigate. There's no downside to being aggressive here."

"Well, but it's Dad's patent, and you know how he thinks."

"Put him on the phone," Gary said.

His parents were cowed by authority of all kinds. When Gary wanted to reassure himself that he'd escaped their fate, when he needed to measure his distance from St. Jude, he considered his own fearlessness in the face of authority-including the authority of his father.

"Yes," Alfred said.

"Dad," he said, "I think you should go after these guys. They're in a very weak position and you could make some real money."

In St. Jude the old man said nothing.

"You're not telling me you're going to take that offer," Gary said. "Because that's not even an option. Dad. That's not even on the menu."

"I've made my decision," Alfred said. "What I do is not your business."

"Yes, it is, though. I have a legitimate interest in this."

"Gary, you do not."

"I have a legitimate interest," Gary insisted. If Enid and Alfred ever ran out of money, it would fall to him and Caroline-not to his undercapitalized sister, not to his feckless brother-to pay for their care. But he had enough self-control not to spell this out for Alfred. "Will you at least tell me what you're going to do? Will you pay me that courtesy?"

"You could pay me the courtesy of not asking," Alfred said. "However, since you ask, I will tell you. I'm going to take what they offer and give half of the money to Orfic Midland."

The universe was mechanistic: the father spoke, the son reacted.

"Well, now, Dad," Gary said in the low, slow voice he reserved for situations in which he was very angry and very certain he was right. "You can't do that."

"I can and I will," Alfred said.

"No, really, Dad, you have to listen to me. There is absolutely no legal or moral reason for you to split the money with Orfic Midland."

"I was using the railroad's materials and equipment," Alfred said. "It was understood that I would share any income from the patents. And Mark Jamborets put me in touch with the patent lawyer. I suspect I was given a courtesy rate."

"That was fifteen years ago! The company no longer exists. The people you had the understanding with are dead."

"Not all of them are. Mark Jamborets is not."

"Dad, it's a nice sentiment. I understand the feeling, but-"

"I doubt you do."

"That railroad was raped and eviscerated by the Wroth brothers."

"I will not discuss it any further."

"This is sick! This is sick!" Gary said. "You're being loyal to a corporation that screwed you and the city of St. Jude in every conceivable way. It's screwing you again, right now, with your health insurance."

"You have your opinion, I have mine."

"And I'm saying you're being irresponsible. You're being selfish. If you want to eat peanut butter and pinch pennies, that's your business, but it's not fair to Mom and it's not fair to-"

"I don't give a damn what you and your mother think."

"It's not fair to me! Who's going to pay your bills if you get in trouble?-Who's your fallback?"

"I will endure what I have to endure," Alfred said. "Yes, and I'll eat peanut butter if I have to. I like peanut butter. It's a good food."

"And if that's what Mom has to eat, she'll eat it, too. Right? She can eat dog food if she has to! Who cares what she wants?"

"Gary, I know what the right thing to do is. I don't expect you to understand-I don't understand the decisions you make-but I know what's fair. So let that be the end of it."

"I mean, give Orfic Midland twenty-five hundred dollars if you absolutely have to," Gary said. "But that patent is worth-"

"Let that be the end of it, I said. Your mother wants to talk to you again."

"Gary," Enid cried, "the St. Jude Symphony is doing The Nutcracker in December! They do a beautiful job with the regional ballet, and it sells out so fast, tell me, do you think I should get nine tickets for the day of Christmas Eve? They have a two o'clock matinee, or we can go on the night of the twenty-third, if you think that's better. You decide."

"Mother, listen to me. Do not let Dad accept that offer. Don't let him do anything until I've seen the letter. I want you to put a copy of it in the mail to me tomorrow."

"OK, I will, but I'm thinking the important thing right now is The Nutcracker, to get nine tickets all together, because it sells out so fast, Gary, you wouldn't believe."

When he finally got off the phone, Gary pressed his hands to his eyes and saw, engraved in false colors on the darkness of his mental movie screen, two images of golf: Enid improving her lie from the rough (cheating was the word for this) and Alfred making light of his badness at the game.

The old man had pulled the same kind of self-defeating stunt fourteen years ago, after the Wroth brothers bought the Midland Pacific. Alfred was a few months shy of his sixty-fifth birthday when Fenton Creel, the Midpac's new president, took him to lunch at Morelli's in St. Jude. The top echelon of Midpac executives had been purged by the Wroths for having resisted the takeover, but Alfred, as chief engineer, had not been a part of this palace guard. In the chaos of shutting down the St. Jude office and moving operations to Little Rock, the Wroths needed somebody to keep the railroad running while the new crew, headed by Creel, learned the ropes. Creel offered Alfred a fifty percent raise and a block of Orfic stock if he would stay on for two extra years, oversee the move to Little Rock, and provide continuity.

Alfred hated the Wroths and was inclined to say no, but that night, at home, Enid went to work on him. She pointed out that the Orfic stock alone was worth $78,000, that his pension would be based on his last three full years' salary, and that here was a chance to increase their retirement income by fifty percent.

These irresistible arguments appeared to sway Alfred, but three nights later he came home and announced to Enid that he'd tendered his resignation that afternoon and that Creel had accepted it. Alfred was then seven weeks short of a full year at his last, largest salary; it made no sense at all to quit. But he gave no explanation, then or ever, to Enid or to anyone else, for his sudden turnabout. He simply said: I have made my decision.

At the Christmas table in St. Jude that year, moments after Enid had sneaked onto baby Aaron's little plate a bite of hazelnut goose stuffing and Caroline had grabbed the stuffing from the plate and marched into the kitchen and flung it in the trash like a wad of goose crap, saying, "This is pure grease-yuck," Gary lost his temper and shouted: You couldn't wait seven weeks? You couldn't wait till you were sixty-five?

Gary, I worked hard all my life. My retirement is my business, not yours.

And the man so keen to retire that he couldn't wait those last seven weeks: what had he done with his retirement? He'd sat in his blue chair.

Gary knew nothing of Axon, but Orfic Midland was the sort of conglomerate whose holdings and management structure he was paid to stay abreast of. He happened to know that the Wroth brothers had sold their controlling stake to cover losses in a Canadian gold-mining venture. Orfic Midland had joined the ranks of the indistinguishable bland megafirms whose headquarters dotted the American exurbs; its executives had been replaced like the cells of a living organism or like the letters in a game of Substitution in which SHIT turned to SHOT and SOOT and FOOT and FOOD, so that, by the time Gary had okayed the latest bulk purchase of OrficM for CenTrust's portfolio, no blamable human trace remained of the company that had shut down St. Jude's third largest employer and eliminated train service to much of rural Kansas. Orfic Midland was out of the transportation business altogether now. What survived of the Midpac's trunk lines had been sold off to enable the company to concentrate on prison-building, prison management, gourmet coffee, and financial services; a new 144-strand fiber-optic cable system lay buried in the railroad's old right-of-way.

This was the company to which Alfred felt loyal?

The more Gary thought about it, the angrier he got. He sat by himself in his study, unable to stem his rising agitation or to slow the steam-locomotive pace at which his breaths were coming. He was blind to the pretty pumpkin-yellow sunset unfolding in the tulip trees beyond the commuter tracks. He saw nothing but the principles at stake.

He might have sat there obsessing indefinitely, marshaling evidence against his father, had he not heard a rustling outside the study door. He jumped to his feet and pulled the door open.

Caleb was cross-legged on the floor, studying his catalogue. "Can I talk to you now?"

"Were you sitting out here listening to me?"

"No," Caleb said. "You said we could talk when you were done. I had a question. I was wondering what room I could put under surveillance."

Even upside down Gary could see that the prices for the equipment in Caleb's catalogue-items with brushed-aluminum cases, color LCD screens-were three-and four-figure.

"It's my new hobby," Caleb said. "I want to put a room under surveillance. Mom says I can do the kitchen if it's OK with you."

"You want to put the kitchen under surveillance as a hobby?"

"Yeah!"

Gary shook his head. He'd had many hobbies when he was a boy, and for a long time it had pained him that his own boys seemed to have none at all. Eventually Caleb had figured out that if he used the word "hobby," Gary would green-light expenditures he otherwise might have forbidden Caroline to make. Thus Caleb's hobby had been photography until Caroline had bought him an autofocus camera, an SLR with a better zoom telephoto lens than Gary's own, and a digital point-and-shoot camera. His hobby had been computers until Caroline had bought him a palmtop and a notebook. But now Caleb was nearly twelve, and Gary had been around the block one too many times. His guard was up regarding hobbies. He'd extracted from Caroline a promise not to buy Caleb more equipment of any kind without consulting with him first.

"Surveillance is not a hobby," he said.

"Dad, yes it is! Mom was the one who suggested it. She said I could start with the kitchen."

It seemed to Gary another Warning Sign of depression that his thought was: The liquor cabinet is in the kitchen.

"Better let me talk about this with Mom, all right?"

"But the store's only open till six," Caleb said.

"You can wait a few days. Don't tell me you can't."

"But I've been waiting all afternoon. You said you'd talk to me, and now it's almost night."

That it was almost night gave Gary clear title to a drink. The liquor cabinet was in the kitchen. He took a step in its direction. "What equipment exactly are we talking about?"

"Just a camera and a microphone and servo controls." Caleb thrust the catalogue at Gary. "See, I don't even need the expensive kind. This one's just six fifty. Mom said it was OK."

Time and again Gary had the feeling that there was something disagreeable that his family wanted to forget, something only he insisted on remembering; something requiring only his nod, his go-ahead, to be forgotten. This feeling, too, was a Warning Sign.

"Caleb," he said, "this sounds like something you're going to get bored with very soon. It sounds expensive and like you won't stay interested."

"No! No!" Caleb said, anguished. "I'm totally interested. Dad, it's a hobby."

"You've gotten bored, though, pretty quickly with some of the other things we've gotten you. Things you also said you were `very interested in' at the time."

"This is different," Caleb pleaded. "This time I'm really, truly interested."

Clearly the boy was prepared to spend any amount of devalued verbal currency to buy his father's acquiescence.

"Do you see what I'm saying, though?" Gary said. "Do you see the pattern? That things look one way before you buy them and another way afterward? Your feelings change after you buy things. Do you see that?"

Caleb opened his mouth, but before he could utter another plea or complaint, a craftiness flickered in his face.

"I guess," he said with seeming humility. "I guess I see that."

"Well, do you think it's going to happen with this new equipment?" Gary said.

Caleb gave every appearance of giving the question serious thought. "I think this is different," he said finally.

"Well, OK," Gary said. "But I want you to remember we had this conversation. I don't want to see this become just another expensive toy you play with for a week or two and then neglect. You're going to be a teenager pretty soon, and I want to start seeing a little longer attention span-"

"Gary, that isn't fair!" Caroline said hotly. She was hobbling from the doorway of the master bedroom, one shoulder hunched and her hand behind her back, applying pressure to the soothing gelpack.

"Hello, Caroline. Didn't realize you were listening."

"Caleb is not neglecting things."

"Right, I'm not," Caleb said.

"What you don't understand," Caroline told Gary, "is that everything's getting used in this new hobby. That's what's so brilliant about it. He's figured out a way to use all that equipment together in one-"

"Good, well, I'm glad to hear it."

"He does something creative and you make him feel guilty."

Once, when Gary had wondered aloud if giving Caleb so many gadgets might be stunting his imagination, Caroline had all but accused him of slandering his son. Among her favorite parenting books was The Technological Imagination: What Today's Children Have to Teach Their Parents, in which Nancy Claymore, Ph. D., contrasting the "tired paradigm" of Gifted Child as Socially Isolated Genius with the "wired paradigm" of Gifted Child as Creatively Connected Consumer, argued that electronic toys would soon be so cheap and widespread that a child's imagination would no longer be exercised in crayon drawings and made-up stories but in the synthesis and exploitation of existing technologies-an idea that Gary found both persuasive and depressing. When he was a boy not much younger than Caleb, his hobby had been building models with Popsicle sticks.

"Does this mean we can go to the store now?" Caleb said.

"No, Caleb, not tonight, it's almost six," Caroline said.

Caleb stamped his foot. "This always happens! I wait and wait, and then it gets too late."

"We'll rent a movie," Caroline said. "We'll get whatever movie you want."

"I don't want a movie. I want to do surveillance."

"It's not going to happen," Gary said. "So start dealing with it."

Caleb went to his room and slammed the door. Gary followed and flung it open. "That's enough now," he said. "We don't slam doors in this house."

"You slam doors!"

"I don't want to hear another word from you."

"You slam doors!"

"Do you want to spend the whole week in your room?"

Caleb replied by crossing his eyes and sucking his lips into his mouth: not another word.

Gary let his gaze drift into corners of the boy's room that he ordinarily took care not to look at. Neglected in piles, like the loot in a thief's apartment, was new photographic and computer and video equipment with an aggregate retail value possibly exceeding the annual salary of Gary's secretary at CenTrust. Such a riot of luxury in the lair of an eleven-year-old! Various chemicals that molecular floodgates had been holding back all afternoon burst loose and flooded Gary's neural pathways. A cascade of reactions initiated by Factor 6 relaxed his tear valves and sent a wave of nausea down his vagus: a "sense" that he survived from day to day by distracting himself from underground truths that day by day grew more compelling and decisive. The truth that he was going to die. That heaping your tomb with treasure wouldn't save you.

The light in the windows was failing rapidly.

"You're really going to use all this equipment?" he said with a tightness in his chest.

Caleb, his lips still involuted, gave a shrug.

"Nobody should be slamming doors," Gary said. "Me included. All right?"

"Yeah, Dad. Whatever."

Emerging from Caleb's room into the shadowed hallway, he nearly collided with Caroline, who was hurrying on tiptoe, in her stockinged feet, back in the direction of their bedroom.

"Again? Again? I say don't eavesdrop, and what do you do?"

"I wasn't eavesdropping. I've got to go lie down." And she hurried, limping, into the bedroom.

"You can run but you can't hide," Gary said, following her. "I want to know why you're eavesdropping on me."

"It is your paranoia, not my eavesdropping."

"My paranoia?"

Caroline slumped on the oaken king-size bed. After she and Gary were married, she'd undergone five years of twice-weekly therapy which the therapist, at the final session, had declared "an unqualified success" and which had given her a lifelong advantage over Gary in the race for mental health.

"You seem to think everybody except you has a problem," she said. "Which is what your mother thinks, too. Without ever-"

"Caroline. Answer me one question. Look me in the eye and answer me one question. This afternoon, when you were-"

"God, Gary, not this again. Listen to yourself."

"When you were horsing around in the rain, running yourself ragged, trying to keep up with an eleven-year-old and a fourteen-year-old-"

"You're obsessed! You're obsessed with that!"

"Running and sliding and kicking in the rain-"

"You talk to your parents and then you take your anger out on us."

"Were you limping before you came inside?" Gary shook his finger in his wife's face. "Look me in the eye, Caroline, look me right in the eye. Come on! Do it! Look me in the eye and tell me you weren't already limping."

Caroline was rocking in pain. "You're on the phone with them for the better part of an hour-"

"You can't do it!" Gary crowed in bitter triumph. "You're lying to me and you will not admit you're lying!"

"Dad! Dad!" came a cry outside the door. Gary turned and saw Aaron shaking his head wildly, beside himself, his beautiful face twisted and tear-slick. "Stop shouting at her!"

The remorse neurofactor (Factor 26) flooded the sites in Gary's brain specially tailored by evolution to respond to it.

"Aaron, all right," he said.

Aaron turned away and turned back and marched in place, taking big steps nowhere, as though trying to force the shameful tears out of his eyes and into his body, down through his legs, and stamp them out. "God, please, Dad, do-not-shout-at her."

"OK, Aaron," Gary said. "Shouting's over."

He reached to touch his son's shoulder, but Aaron fled back up the hall. Gary left Caroline and followed him, his sense of isolation deepened by this demonstration that his wife had strong allies in the house. Her sons would protect her from her husband. Her husband who was a shouter. Like his father before him. His father before him who was now depressed. But who, in his prime, as a shouter, had so frightened young Gary that it never occurred to him to intercede on his mother's behalf.

Aaron was lying face down on his bed. In the tornado aftermath of laundry and magazines on the floor of his room, the two nodes of order were his Bundy trumpet (with mutes and a music stand) and his enormous alphabetized collection of compact discs, including boxed-set complete editions of Dizzy and Satchmo and Miles Davis, plus great miscellaneous quantities of Chet Baker and Wynton Marsalis and Chuck Mangione and Herb Alpert and Al Hirt, all of which Gary had given him to encourage his interest in music.

Gary perched on the edge of the bed. "I'm sorry I upset you," he said. "As you know, I can be a mean old judgmental bastard. And sometimes your mother has trouble admitting she's wrong. Especially when-"

"Her. Back. Is. Hurt," came Aaron's voice, muffled by a Ralph Lauren duvet. "She is not lying."

"I know her back hurts, Aaron. I love your mother very much."

"Then don't shout at her."

"OK. Shouting's over. Let's have some dinner." Gary lightly judochopped Aaron's shoulder. "What do you say?"

Aaron didn't move. Further cheering words appeared to be called for, but Gary couldn't think of any. He was experiencing a critical shortage of Factors 1 and 3. He'd had the sense, moments earlier, that Caroline was on the verge of accusing him of being "depressed," and he was afraid that if the idea that he was depressed gained currency, he would forfeit his right to his opinions. He would forfeit his moral certainties; every word he spoke would become a symptom of disease; he would never again win an argument.

It was therefore all the more important now to resist depression-to fight it with the truth.

"Listen," he said. "You were out there with Mom, playing soccer. Tell me if I'm right about this. Was she limping before she went inside?"

For a moment, as Aaron roused himself from the bed, Gary believed that the truth would prevail. But the face Aaron showed him was a reddish-white raisin of revulsion and disbelief.

"You're horrible!" he said. "You're horrible!" And he ran from the room.

Ordinarily Gary wouldn't have let Aaron get away with this. Ordinarily he would have battled his son all evening if that was what it took to extract an apology from him. But his mental markets-glycemic, endocrine, over-the-synapse-were crashing. He was feeling ugly, and to battle Aaron now would only make him uglier, and the sensation of ugliness was perhaps the leading Warning Sign.

He saw that he'd made two critical mistakes. He should never have promised Caroline that there would be no more Christmases in St. Jude. And today, when she was limping and grimacing in the back yard, he should have snapped at least one picture of her. He mourned the moral advantages these mistakes had cost him.

"I am not clinically depressed," he told his reflection in the nearly dark bedroom window. With a great, marrow-taxing exertion of will, he stood up from Aaron's bed and sallied forth to prove himself capable of having an ordinary evening.

Jonah was climbing the dark stairs with Prince Caspian. "I finished the book," he said.

"Did you like it?"

"I loved it," Jonah said. "This is outstanding children's literature. Aslan made a door in the air that people walked through and disappeared. They went out of Narnia and back into the real world."

Gary dropped into a crouch. "Give me a hug."

Jonah draped his arms on him. Gary could feel the looseness of his youthful joints, the cublike pliancy, the heat radiating through his scalp and cheeks. He would have slit his own throat if the boy had needed blood; his love was immense in that way; and yet he wondered if it was only love he wanted now or whether he was also coalition-building. Securing a tactical ally for his team.

What this stagnating economy needs, thought Federal Reserve Board Chairman Gary R. Lambert, is a massive infusion of Bombay Sapphire gin.

In the kitchen Caroline and Caleb were slouched at the table drinking Coke and eating potato chips. Caroline had her feet up on another chair and pillows beneath her knees.

"What should we do for dinner?" Gary said.

His wife and middle son traded glances as if this were the stick-in-the-mud sort of question he was famous for. From the density of potato-chip crumbs he could see they were well on their way to spoiled appetites.

"Mixed grill, I guess," said Caroline.

"Oh, yeah, Dad, do a mixed grill!" Caleb said in a tone mistakable for either irony or enthusiasm.

Gary asked if there was meat.

Caroline stuffed chips into her mouth and shrugged.

Jonah asked permission to build a fire.

Gary, taking ice from the freezer, granted it.

Ordinary evening. Ordinary evening.

"If I put the camera over the table," Caleb said, "I'll get part of the dining room, too."

"You miss the whole nook, though," Caroline said. "If it's over the back door, you can sweep both ways."

Gary shielded himself with the door of the liquor cabinet while he poured four ounces of gin onto ice.

" `Alt. eighty-five'?" Caleb read from his catalogue.

"That means the camera can look almost straight down."

Still shielded by the cabinet door, Gary took a hefty warmish gulp. Then, closing the cabinet, he held up the glass in case anyone cared to see what a relatively modest drink he'd poured himself.

"Hate to break it to you," he said, "but surveillance is out. It's not appropriate as a hobby."

"Dad, you said it was OK as long as I stayed interested."

"I said I would think about it."

Caleb shook his head vehemently. "No! You didn't! You said I could do it as long as I didn't get bored."

"That is exactly what you said," Caroline confirmed with an unpleasant smile.

"Yes, Caroline, I'm sure you heard every word. But we're not putting this kitchen under surveillance. Caleb, you do not have my permission to make those purchases."

"Dad!"

"That's my decision, it's final."

"Caleb, it doesn't matter, though," Caroline said. "Gary, it doesn't matter, because he's got his own money. He can spend it however he wants. Right, Caleb?"

Out of Gary's sight, below the level of the table, she gave Caleb some kind of hand signal.

"Right, I've got my own savings!" Caleb's tone again ironic or enthusiastic or, somehow, both.

"You and I will talk about this later, Caro," Gary said. Warmth and perversion and stupidity, all deriving from the gin, were descending from behind his ears and down his arms and torso.

Jonah came back inside smelling like mesquite.

Caroline had opened a second large bag of potato chips.

"Don't spoil your appetite, guys," Gary said in a strained voice, taking food from plastic compartments.

Again mother and son traded glances.

"Yeah, right," Caleb said. "Gotta save room for mixed grill!"

Gary energetically sliced meats and skewered vegetables. Jonah set the table, spacing the flatware with the precision that he liked. The rain had stopped, but the deck was still slippery when Gary went outside.

It had started as a family joke: Dad always orders the mixed grill in restaurants, Dad only wants to go to restaurants with mixed grill on the menu. To Gary there was indeed something endlessly delicious, something irresistibly luxurious, about a bit of lamb, a bit of pork, a bit of veal, and a lean and tender modern-style sausage or two-a classic mixed grill, in short. It was such a treat that he began to do his own mixed grills at home. Along with pizza and Chinese takeout and onepot pasta meals, mixed grill became a family staple. Caroline helped out by bringing home multiple heavy blood-damp bags of meat and sausage every Saturday, and before long Gary was doing mixed grill two or even three times a week, braving all but the foulest weather on the deck, and loving it. He did partridge breasts, chicken livers, filets mignons, and Mexican-flavored turkey sausage. He did zucchini and red peppers. He did eggplant, yellow peppers, baby lamb chops, Italian sausage. He came up with a wonderful bratwurst - rib eye-bok choy combo. He loved it and loved it and loved it and then all at once he didn't.

The clinical term, ANHEDONIA, had introduced itself to him in a nightstand book of Caroline's called Feeling GREAT! (Ashley Tralpis, M. D., Ph. D.). He'd read the dictionary entry for ANHEDONIA with a shiver of recognition, a kind of malignant yes, yes: "a psychological condition characterized by inability to experience pleasure in normally pleasurable acts." ANHEDONIA was more than a Warning Sign, it was an out-and-out symptom. A dry rot spreading from pleasure to pleasure, a fungus spoiling the delight in luxury and joy in leisure which for so many years had fueled Gary's resistance to the poorthink of his parents.

The previous March, in St. Jude, Enid had observed that, for a bank vice president married to a woman who worked only part-time, pro bono, for the Children's Defense Fund, Gary seemed to do an awful lot of cooking. Gary had shut his mother up easily enough; she was married to a man who couldn't boil an egg, and obviously she was jealous. But on Gary's birthday, after he'd flown back from St. Jude with Jonah and received the expensive surprise of a color photo lab, after he'd mustered the will to exclaim, A darkroom, fantastic, I love it, I love it, Caroline handed him a platter of raw prawns and brutal sword fish steaks to grill, and he wondered if his mother had a point. On the deck, in the radiant heat, as he blackened the prawns and seared the swordfish, a weariness overtook him. The aspects of his life not related to grilling now seemed like mere blips of extraneity between the poundingly recurrent moments when he ignited the mesquite and paced the deck, avoiding smoke. Shutting his eyes, he saw twisted boogers of browning meats on a grille of chrome and hellish coals. The eternal broiling, broiling of the damned. The parching torments of compulsive repetition. On the inner walls of the grill a deep-pile carpet of phenolic black greases had accumulated. The ground behind the garage where he dumped the ashes resembled a moonscape or the yard of a cement plant. He was very, very, very sick of mixed grill, and the next morning he told Caroline: "I'm doing too much cooking."

"So do less," she said. "We'll eat out."

"I want to eat at home and I want to do less cooking."

"So order in," she said.

"It's not the same."

"You're the one who's bent on having these sit-down dinners. The boys couldn't care less."

" I care about it. It's important to me."

"Fine, but, Gary: it's not important to me, it's not important to the boys, and we're supposed to cook for you?"

He couldn't entirely blame Caroline. In the years when she'd worked full-time, he'd never complained about frozen or takeout or pre-prepared dinners. To Caroline it probably seemed that he was changing the rules on her. But to Gary it seemed that the nature of family life itself was changing-that togetherness and filiality and fraternity weren't valued the way they were when he was young.

And so here he was, still grilling. Through the kitchen windows he could see Caroline thumb-wrestling Jonah. He could see her taking Aaron's headphones to listen to music, could see her nodding to the beat. It sure looked like family life. Was there really anything amiss here but the clinical depression of the man peering in?

Caroline seemed to have forgotten how much her back hurt, but she remembered as soon as he went inside with the steaming, smoking platter of vulcanized animal protein. She seated herself sideways at the table, nudged her food with a fork, and whimpered softly. Caleb and Aaron regarded her with grave concern.

"Doesn't anyone else want to know how Prince Caspian ends?" Jonah said. "Isn't anyone curious at all?"

Caroline's eyelids were fluttering, her mouth hanging open miserably to let air trickle in and out. Gary struggled to think of something undepressed to say, something reasonably unhostile, but he was rather drunk.

"Jesus, Caroline," he said, "we know your back hurts, we know you're miserable, but if you can't even sit up straight at the table-"

Without a word she slid off her chair, hobbled to the sink with her plate, scraped her dinner into the garbage grinder, and hobbled upstairs. Caleb and Aaron excused themselves and ground up their own dinners and followed her. Altogether maybe thirty dollars' worth of meat went into the sewer, but Gary, trying to keep his Factor 3 levels off the floor, succeeded pretty well in forgetting about the animals that had died for this purpose. He sat in the leaden twilight of his buzz, ate without tasting, and listened to Jonah's impervious bright chatter.

"This is an excellent skirt steak, Dad, and I would love another piece of that grilled zucchini, please."

From the entertainment room upstairs came the woofing of prime time. Gary felt briefly sorry for Aaron and Caleb. It was a burden to have a mother need you so extremely, to be responsible for her bliss, Gary knew this. He also understood that Caroline was more alone in the world than he was. Her father had been a handsome, charismatic anthropologist who died in a plane crash in Mali when she was eleven. Her father's parents, old Quakers who intermittently said "thee," had left her half of their estate, including a well-regarded Andrew Wyeth, three Winslow Homer watercolors, and forty sylvan acres near Kennett Square for which a developer had paid an incredible sum. Caroline's mother, now seventy-six and in scarily good health, lived with her second husband in Laguna Beach and was a major benefactor of the California Democratic Party; she came east every April and bragged about not being "one of those old women" who were obsessed with their grandkids. Caroline's only sibling, a brother named Philip, was a patronizing, pocket-protected bachelor and solid-state physicist on whom her mother doted somewhat creepily. Gary hadn't known this kind of family in St. Jude. From the start, he'd loved and pitied Caroline for the misfortune and neglect she'd suffered growing up. He'd undertaken to provide a better family for her.

But after dinner, while he and Jonah were loading the dishwasher, he began to hear female laughter upstairs, actual loud laughter, and he decided that Caroline was doing something very bad to him. He was tempted to go up and crash the party. As the buzzing of the gin faded from his head, however, the clanging of an earlier anxiety was becoming audible. An Axon-related anxiety.

He wondered why a small company with a highly experimental process was bothering to offer his father money.

That the letter to Alfred had come from Bragg Knuter & Speigh, a firm that often worked closely with investment bankers, suggested due diligence-a dotting of i's and crossing of t's on the eve of something big.

"Do you want to go and be with your brothers?" Gary said to Jonah. "It sounds like fun up there."

"No, thank you," Jonah said. "I'm going to read the next Narnia book, and I thought I might go to the basement, where it's quiet. Will you come with me?"

The old playroom in the basement, still dehumidified and carpeted and pine-paneled, still nice, was afflicted with the necrosis of clutter that sooner or later kills a living space: stereo boxes, geometric Styrofoam packing solids, outdated ski and beach gear in random drifts. Aaron and Caleb's old toys were in five big bins and a dozen smaller bins. Nobody but Jonah ever touched them, and in the face of such a glut even Jonah, alone or with a play-date pal, took an essentially archaeological approach. He might devote an afternoon to unpacking half of one large bin, patiently sorting action figures and related props, vehicles, and model buildings by scale and manufacturer (toys that matched nothing he flung behind the sofa), but he rarely reached the bottom of even one bin before his play date ended or dinner was served and he reburied everything he'd excavated, and so the toys whose profusion ought to have been a seven-year-old's heaven went basically unplayed with, another lesson in ANHEDONIA for Gary to ignore as well as he could.

While Jonah settled down to read, Gary booted up Caleb's "old" laptop and went online. He typed the words axon and schwenksville in the Search field. One of the two resulting site matches was the Axon Corporation Home Page, but this site, when Gary tried to reach it, turned out to be UNDER RENOVATION. The other match led him to a deeply nested page in the Web site of Westportfolio Biofunds, whose listing of Privately Held Corporations to Watch was a cyberbackwater of drab graphics and misspellings. The Axon page had last been updated a year earlier.

Axon Corporation, 24 East Industrial Serpentine, Schwenksville, PA, a Limited Liability Corporation registered in the state of Delaware, holds wordwide rights to the Eberle Process of Directed Neurochemotaxis. The Eberle Process is profected by United States Patents 5,101,239, 5,101,599, 5,103,628, 5,103,629, and 5,105,996, for which the Axon Corporation is the sole and exclusive grantor of license. Axon engages in refinement, marketing and sales of the Eberle Process to hospitals and clinics worldwide, and in research and development of related technologies. Its founder and chairman is Dr. Earl H. Eberle, former Distinguished Lecturer in Applied Neurobiology at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

The Eberle Process of Directed Neurochemotaxis, also known as Eberle Reverse-Tomographic Chemotherapy, hav4 revolutionized the treatment of inoperable neuroblastomas and a variety of other morphologic defects of the brain.

The Eberle Process utilizes computer-orchestrated RF radiation to direct powerful carcinocdies, mutagens, and certain nonspecific toxins to diseased cerebral tissues and locally activate them without harm to surrounding healthy tissue.

At present, due to limitations in computing power, the Eberle Process requires sedating and immobilizing the patient in an Eberle Cylinder for up to thirfy-six hours while minutely orchestrated fields direct therapeutically active ligands and their inert "piggyback" carriers to the sight of disase. The next generation of Eberle Cylinders is expected to reduce maximum total treatment time to less two hours.

The Eberle Process received full FDA approval as a "safe and effective" therapy in October 1996. Widespread clincial use throughout the world in the years since then, as detailed in the numerous publications listed below, hav4 only confirmed its safety and effectiveness.

Gary's hopes of extracting quick megabucks from Axon were withering in the absence of online hype. Feeling a bit e-weary, fighting an e-headache, he ran a word search for earl eberle. The several hundred matches included articles with titles like NEW HOPE FOR NEUROBLASTOMA and A GIANT LEAP FORWARD and THIS CURE REALLY MAY BE A MIRACLE. Eberle and collaborators were also represented in professional journals with "Remote Computer-Aided Stimulation of Receptor Sites 14, 16A and 21: A Practical Demonstration," "Four Low-Toxicity Ferroacetate Complexes That Cross the BBB," "In-Vitro RF Stimulation of Colloidal Microtubules," and a dozen other papers. The reference that most interested Gary, however, had appeared in Forbes ASAP six months earlier:

Some of these developments, such as the Fogarty balloon catheter and Lasik corneal surgery, are cash cows for their respective corporate patent holders. Others, with esoteric names like the Eberle Process of Directed Neurochemotaxis, enrich their inventors the old-fashioned way: one man, one fortune. The Eberle Process, which as late as 1996 lacked regulatory approval but today is recognized as the gold standard for the treatment of a large class of cerebral tumors and lesions, is estimated to net its inventor, Johns Hopkins neurobiologist Earl H. ("Curly") Eberle, as much as $40 million annually in licensing fees and other revenues worldwide.

Forty million dollars annually was more like it. Forty million dollars annually restored Gary's hopes and pissed him off all over again. Earl Eberle earned forty million dollars annually while Alfred Lambert, also an inventor but (let's face it) a loser by temperament-one of the meek of the earth-was offered five thousand for his trouble. And planned to split this pea with Orfic Midland!

"I'm loving this book," Jonah reported. "This may be my favorite book yet."

So why, Gary wondered, why the rush-rush to get Dad's patent, eh, Curly? Why the big push-push? Financial intuition, a warm tingling in his loins, told him that perhaps, after all, a piece of inside information had fallen into his lap. A piece of inside information from an accidental (and therefore perfectly lawful) source. A juicy piece of private meat.

"It's like they're on a luxury cruise," Jonah said, "except they're trying to sail to the end of the world. See, that's where Aslan lives, at the end of the world."

In the SEC's Edgar Database Gary found an unapproved prospectus, a so-called red-herring prospectus, for an initial public offering of Axon stock. The offering was scheduled for December 15, three-plus months away. The lead underwriter was Hevy & Hodapp, one of the elite investment banks. Gary checked certain vital signs-cash flow, size of issue, size of float-and, loins tingling, hit the Download Later button.

"Jonah, nine o'clock," he said. "Run up and take your bath."

"I would love to go on a luxury cruise, Dad," Jonah said, climbing the stairs, "if that could ever be arranged."

In a different Search field, his hands a little parkinsonian, Gary entered the words beautiful, nude, and blond.

"Shut the door, please, Jonah."

On the screen an image of a beautiful nude blonde appeared. Gary pointed and clicked, and a nude tan man, photographed mainly from the rear but also in close-up from his knees to his navel, could be seen giving his fully tumid attention to the beautiful nude blonde. There was something of the assembly line in these images. The beautiful nude blonde was like fresh raw material that the nude tan man was extremely keen to process with his tool. First the material's colorful fabric casing was removed, then the material was placed on its knees and the semiskilled worker fitted his tool into its mouth, then the material was placed on its back while the worker orally calibrated it, then the worker clamped the material into a series of horizontal and vertical positions, crimping and bending the material as necessary, and very vigorously processed it with his tool .

The pictures were softening rather than hardening Gary. He wondered if he'd reached the age where money excited him more than a beautiful nude blonde engaging in sex acts, or whether ANHEDONIA, the solitary father's depression in a basement, might be encroaching even here.

Upstairs the doorbell rang. Adolescent feet came pounding down from the second floor to answer it.

Gary hastily cleansed the computer screen and went upstairs in time to see Caleb returning to the second floor with a large pizza box. Gary followed him and stood for a moment outside the entertainment room, smelling pepperoni and listening to the wordless munching of his sons and wife. On TV something military, a tank or a truck, was roaring to the accompaniment of war-movie music.

"Ve increase ze pressure, Lieutenant. Now you vill talk? Now?"

In Hands-Off Parenting: Skills for the Next Millennium, Dr. Harriet L. Schachtman warned: All too often, today's anxious parents "protect" their children from the so-called "ravages" of TV and computer games, only to expose them to the far more damaging ravages of social ostracization by their peers.

To Gary, who as a boy had been allowed half an hour of TV a day and had not felt ostracized, Schachtman's theory seemed a recipe for letting a community's most permissive parents set standards that other parents were forced to lower their own to meet. But Caroline subscribed to the theory wholeheartedly, and since she was the sole trustee of Gary's ambition not to be like his father, and since she believed that kids learned more from peer interaction than from parental instruction, Gary deferred to her judgment and let the boys watch nearly unlimited TV.

What he hadn't foreseen was that he himself would be the ostracized.

He retreated to his study and dialed St. Jude again. The kitchen cordless was still on his desk, a reminder of earlier unpleasantnessgs and of fights still to come.

He was hoping to speak to Enid, but Alfred answered the telephone and said that she was over at the Roots' house, socializing. "We had a street-association meeting tonight," he said.

Gary considered calling back later, but he refused to be cowed by his father. "Dad," he said, "I've done some research on Axon. We're looking at a company with a lot of money."

"Gary, I said I didn't want you monkeying with this," Alfred replied. "It is moot now anyway."

"What do you mean, `moot'?"

"I mean moot. It's taken care of. The documents are notarized. I'm recouping my lawyer's fees and that's the end of it."

Gary pressed two fingers into his forehead. "My God. Dad. You had it notarized? On a Sunday?"

"I will tell your mother that you called."

"Do not put those documents in the mail. Do you hear me?"

"Gary, I've had about enough of this."

"Well, too bad, because I'm just getting started!"

"I've asked you not to speak of it. If you will not behave like a decent, civilized person, then I have no choice-"

"Your decency is bullshit. Your civilization is bullshit. It's weakness! It's fear! It's bullshit!"

"I have no wish to discuss this."

"Then forget it."

"I intend to. We'll not speak of it again. Your mother and I will visit for two days next month, and we will hope to see you here in December. It's my wish that we can all be civil."

"Never mind what's going on underneath. As long as we're all `civil.' "

"That is the essence of my philosophy, yes."

"Well, it ain't mine," Gary said.

"I'm aware of that. And that's why we will spend forty-eight hours and no more."

Gary hung up angrier than ever. He'd hoped his parents would stay for an entire week in October. He'd wanted them to eat pie in Lancaster County, see a production at the Annenberg Center, drive in the Poconos, pick apples in West Chester, hear Aaron play the trumpet, watch Caleb play soccer, take delight in Jonah's company, and generally see how good Gary's life was, how worthy of their admiration and respect; and forty-eight hours was not enough time.

He left his study and kissed Jonah good night. Then he took a shower and lay down on the big oaken bed and tried to interest himself in the latest Inc. But he couldn't stop arguing with Alfred in his head.

During his visit home in March he'd been appalled by how much his father had deteriorated in the few weeks since Christmas. Alfred seemed forever on the verge of derailing as he lurched down hallways or half slid down stairs or wolfed at a sandwich from which lettuce and meat loaf rained; checking his watch incessantly, his eyes wandering whenever a conversation didn't engage him directly, the old iron horse was careering toward a crash, and Gary could hardly stand to look. Because who else, if not Gary, was going to take responsibility? Enid was hysterical and moralizing, Denise lived in a fantasyland, and Chip hadn't been to St. Jude in three years. Who else but Gary was going to say: This train should not be running on these tracks?

The first order of business, as Gary saw it, was to sell the house. Get top dollar for it, move his parents into someplace smaller, newer, safer, cheaper, and invest the difference aggressively. The house was Enid and Alfred's only large asset, and Gary took a morning to inspect the whole property slowly, inside and out. He found cracks in the grouting, rust lines in the bathroom sinks, and a softness in the master bedroom ceiling. He noticed rain stains on the inner wall of the back porch, a beard of dried suds on the chin of the old dishwasher, an alarming thump in the forced-air blower, pustules and ridges in the driveway's asphalt, termites in the woodpile, a Damoclean oak limb dangling above a dormer, finger-wide cracks in the foundation, retaining walls that listed, whitecaps of peeling paint on window jambs, big emboldened spiders in the basement, fields of dried sow bug and cricket husks, unfamiliar fungal and enteric smells, everywhere he looked the sag of entropy. Even in a rising market, the house was beginning to lose value, and Gary thought: We've got to sell this fucker now, we can't lose another day.

On the last morning of his visit, while Jonah helped Enid bake a birthday cake, Gary took Alfred to the hardware store. As soon as they were on the road, Gary said it was time to put the house on the market.

Alfred, in the passenger seat of the gerontic Olds, stared straight ahead. "Why?"

"If you miss the spring season," Gary said, "you'll have to wait another year. And you can't afford another year. You can't count on good health, and the house is losing value."

Alfred shook his head. "I've agitated for a long time. One bedroom and a kitchen is all we need. Somewhere your mother can cook and we have a place to sit. But it's no use. She doesn't want to leave."

"Dad, if you don't put yourself someplace manageable, you're going to hurt yourself. You're going to wind up in a nursing home."

"I have no intention of going to a nursing home. So."

"Just because you don't intend to doesn't mean it won't happen."

Alfred looked, in passing, at Gary's old elementary school. "Where are we going?"

"You fall down the stairs, you slip on the ice and break your hip, you're going to end up in a nursing home. Caroline's grandmother-"

"I didn't hear where we were going."

"We're going to the hardware store," Gary said. "Mom wants a dimmer switch for the kitchen."

Alfred shook his head.""She and her romantic lighting."

"She gets pleasure from it," Gary said. "What do you get pleasure from?"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean you've just about worn her out."

Alfred's active hands, on his lap, were gathering nothing-raking in a poker pot that did not exist. "I'll ask you again not to meddle," he said.

The midmorning light of a late-winter thaw, the stillness of a weekday nonhour in St. Jude, Gary wondered how his parents stood it. The oak trees were the same oily black as the crows perching in them. The sky was the same color as the salt-white pavement on which elderly St. Judean drivers obeying barbiturate speed limits were crawling to their destinations: to malls with pools of meltwater on their papered roofs, to the arterial that overlooked puddled steel yards and the state mental hospital and transmission towers feeding soaps and game shows to the ether; to the beltways and, beyond them, to a million acres of thawing hinterland where pickups were axle-deep in clay and .22s were fired in the woods and only gospel and pedal steel guitars were on the radio; to residential blocks with the same pallid glare in every window, besquirreled yellow lawns with a random plastic toy or two embedded in the dirt, a mailman whistling something Celtic and slamming mailboxes harder than he had to, because the deadness of these streets, at such a nonhour, in such a nonseason, could honestly kill you.

"Are you happy with your life?" Gary said, waiting for a left-turn arrow. "Can you say you're ever happy?"

"Gary, I have an affliction-"

"A lot of people have afflictions. If that's your excuse, fine, if you want to feel sorry for yourself, fine, but why drag Mom down?"

"Well. You'll be leaving tomorrow."

"Meaning what," Gary said. "That you'll sit in your chair and Mom will cook and clean for you?"

"There are things in life that simply have to be endured."

"Why bother staying alive, if that's your attitude? What do you have to look forward to?"

"I ask myself that question every day."

"Well, and what's your answer?" Gary said.

"What's your answer? What do you think I should look forward to?"

"Travel."

"I've traveled enough. I spent thirty years traveling."

"Time with family. Time with people you love."

"No comment."

"What do you mean, `no comment'?"

"Just that: no comment."

"You're still sore about Christmas."

"You may interpret it however you like."

"If you're sore about Christmas, you might have the consideration to say so-"

"No comment."

"Instead of insinuating."

"We should have come two days later and left two days earlier," Alfred said. "That's all I have to say on the topic of Christmas. We should have stayed forty-eight hours."

"It's because you're depressed, Dad. You are clinically depressed-"

"And so are you."

"And the responsible thing would be to get some treatment."

"Did you hear me? I said so are you."

"What are you talking about?"

"Figure it out."

"Dad, really, no, what are you talking about? I'm not the one who sits in a chair all day and sleeps."

"Underneath, you are," Alfred pronounced.

"That's simply false."

"One day you will see."

"I will not!" Gary said. "My life is on a fundamentally different basis than yours."

"Mark my words. I look at your marriage, I see what I see. Someday you'll see it, too."

"That's empty talk and you know it. You're just pissed off with me, and you have no way to deal with it."

"I've told you I don't want to discuss this."

"And I have no respect for that."

"Well, there are things in your life that I have no respect for either." It shouldn't have hurt to hear that Alfred, who was wrong about almost everything, did not respect things in Gary's life; and yet it did hurt.

At the hardware store he let Alfred pay for the dimmer switch. The old man's careful plucking of bills from his slender wallet and his faint hesitation before he offered them were signs of his respect for adollar-of his maddening belief that each one mattered.

Back at the house, while Gary and Jonah kicked a soccer ball, Alfred gathered tools and killed the power to the kitchen and set about installing the dimmer. Even at this late date it didn't occur to Gary not to let Alfred handle wiring. But when he came inside for lunch he found that his father had done no more than remove the old switch plate. He was holding the dimmer switch like a detonator that made him shake with fear.

"My affliction makes this difficult," he explained.

"You've got to sell this house," Gary said.

After lunch he took his mother and his son to the St. Jude Museum of Transport. While Jonah climbed into old locomotives and toured the dry-docked submarine and Enid sat and nursed her sore hip, Gary compiled a mental list of the museum's exhibits, hoping the list would give him a feeling of accomplishment. He couldn't deal with the exhibits themselves, their exhausting informativeness, their cheerful prose-for-the-masses. THE GOLDEN AGE OF STEAM POWER. THE DAWN OF FLIGHT. A CENTURY OF AUTOMOTIVE SAFETY. Block after block of taxing text. What Gary hated most about the Midwest was how unpampered and unprivileged he felt in it. St. Jude in its optimistic egalitarianism consistently failed to accord him the respect to which his gifts and attainments entitled him. Oh, the sadness of this place! The earnest St. Judean rubes all around him seemed curious and undepressed. Happily filling their misshapen heads with facts. As if facts were going to save them! Not one woman half as pretty or as well dressed as Caroline. Not one other man with a decent haircut or an abdomen as flat as Gary's. But, like Alfred, like Enid, they were all extremely deferential. They didn't jostle Gary or cut in front of him but waited until he'd drifted to the next exhibit. Then they gathered round and read and learned. God, he hated the Midwest! He could hardly breathe or hold his head up. He thought he might be getting sick. He took refuge in the museum's gift shop and bought a silver belt buckle, two engravings of old Midland Pacific trestles, and a pewter hip flask (all for himself), a deerskin wallet (for Aaron), and a CD-ROM Civil War game (for Caleb).

"Dad," Jonah said, "Grandma says she'll buy me two books that cost less than ten dollars each or one book for less than twenty dollars, is that OK?"

Enid and Jonah were a lovefest. Enid had always preferred little kids to big kids, and Jonah's adaptive niche in the family ecosystem was to be the perfect grandchild, eager to scramble up on laps, unafraid of bitter vegetables, underexcited by television and computer games, and skilled at cheerfully answering questions like "Are you loving school?" In St. Jude he was luxuriating in the undivided attention of three adults. He declared St. Jude the nicest place he'd ever been. From the back seat of the Oldfolksmobile, his elfin eyes wide, he marveled at everything Enid showed him.

"It's so easy to park here!

"No traffic!

"The Transport Museum is better than any museums we have, Dad, don't you agree?

"I love the legroom in this car. I think this is the nicest car I've ever ridden in.

"All the stores are so close and handy!"

That night, after they'd returned from the museum and Gary had gone out and done more shopping, Enid served stuffed pork chops and a chocolate birthday cake. Jonah was dreamily eating ice cream when she asked him if he might like to come and have Christmas in St. Jude.

"I would love that," Jonah said, his eyelids drooping with satiety.

"You could have sugar cookies, and eggnog, and help us decorate the tree," Enid said. "It'll probably snow, so you can go sledding. And, Jonah, there's a wonderful light show every year at Waindell Park, it's called Christmasland, they have the whole park lit up-"

"Mother, it's March," Gary said.

"Can we come at Christmas?" Jonah asked him.

"We'll come again very soon," Gary said. "I don't know about Christmas."

"I think Jonah would love it," Enid said.

"I would completely love it," Jonah said, hoisting another spoonload of ice cream. "I think it might turn out to be the best Christmas I ever had."

"I think so, too," Enid said.

"It's March," Gary said. "We don't talk about Christmas in March. Remember? We don't talk about it in June or August, either. Remember?"

"Well," Alfred said, standing up from the table. "I am going to bed."

"St. Jude gets my vote for Christmas," Jonah said.

Enlisting Jonah directly in her campaign, exploiting a little boy for leverage, seemed to Gary a low trick on Enid's part. After he'd put Jonah to bed, he told his mother that Christmas ought to be the last of her worries.

"Dad can't even install a light switch," he said. "And now you've got a leak upstairs, you've got water coming in around the chimney-"

"I love this house," Enid said from the kitchen sink, where she was scrubbing the pork-chop pan. "Dad just needs to work a little on his attitude."

"He needs shock treatments or medication," Gary said. "And if you want to dedicate your life to being his servant, that's your choice. If you want to live in an old house with a lot of problems, and try to keep everything just the way you like it, that's fine, too. If you want to wear yourself out trying to do both, be my guest. Just don't ask me to make Christmas plans in March so you can feel OK about it all."

Enid upended the pork-chop pan on the counter beside the overloaded drainer. Gary knew he ought to pick up a towel, but the jumble of wet pans and platters and utensils from his birthday dinner made him weary; to dry them seemed a task as Sisyphean as to repair the things wrong with his parents' house. The only way to avoid despair was not to involve himself at all.

He poured a smallish brandy nightcap while Enid, with unhappy stabbing motions, scraped waterlogged food scraps from the bottom of the sink.

"What do you think I should do?" she said.

"Sell the house," Gary said. "Call a realtor tomorrow."

"And move into some cramped, modern condominium?" Enid shook the repulsive wet scraps from her hand into the trash. "When I have to go out for the day, Dave and Mary Beth invite Dad over for lunch. He loves that, and I feel so comfortable knowing he's with them. Last fall he was out planting a new yew, and he couldn't get the old stump out, and Joe Person came over with a pickax and the two of them worked all afternoon together."

"He shouldn't be planting yews," Gary said, regretting already the smallness of his initial pour. "He shouldn't be using a pickax. The man can hardly stand up."

"Gary, I know we can't be here forever. But I want to have one last really nice family Christmas here. And I want-"

"Would you consider moving if we had that Christmas?"

New hope sweetened Enid's expression. "Would you and Caroline consider coming?"

"I can't make any promises," Gary said. "But if you'd feel more comfortable about putting the house on the market, we would certainly consider-"

"I would adore it if you came. Adore it."

"Mother, though, you have to be realistic."

"Let's get through this year," Enid said, "let's think about having Christmas here, like Jonah wants, and then we'll see!"

Gary's ANHEDONIA had worsened when he returned to Chestnut Hill. As a winter project, he'd been distilling hundreds of hours of home videos into a watchable two-hour Greatest Lambert Hits compilation that he could make quality copies of and maybe send out as a "video Christmas card." In the final edit, as he repeatedly reviewed his favorite family scenes and re-cued his favorite songs ("Wild Horses," "Time After Time," etc.), he began to hate these scenes and hate these songs. And when, in the new darkroom, he turned his attention to the All-Time Lambert Two Hundred, he found that he no longer enjoyed looking at still photographs, either. For years he'd mentally tinkered with the All-Time Two Hundred, as with an ideally balanced mutual fund, listing with great satisfaction the images that he was sure belonged in it. Now he wondered whom, besides himself, he was trying to impress with these pictures. Whom was he trying to persuade, and of what? He had a weird impulse to burn his old favorites. But his entire life was set up as a correction of his father's life, and he and Caroline had long agreed that Alfred was clinically depressed, and clinical depression was known to have genetic bases and to be substantially heritable, and so Gary had no choice but to keep resisting ANHEDONIA, keep gritting his teeth, keep doing his best to have fun .

He came awake with an itching hard-on and Caroline beside him in the sheets.

His nightstand light was still burning, but otherwise the room was dark. Caroline lay in sarcophagal posture, her back flat on the mattress and a pillow beneath her knees. Through the screens on the bedroom windows came seeping the coolish, humid air of a summer grown tired. No wind stirred the leaves of the sycamore whose lowest branches hung outside the windows.

On Caroline's nightstand was a hardcover copy of Middle Ground: How to Spare Your Child the Adolescence YOU Had (Caren Tamkin, Ph. D., 1998).

She seemed to be asleep. Her long arm, kept flabless by thrice-weekly swims at the Cricket Club, rested at her side. Gary gazed at her little nose, her wide red mouth, the blond down and the dull sheen of sweat on her upper lip, the tapering strip of exposed blond skin between the hem of her T-shirt and the elastic of her old Swarthmore College gym shorts. Her nearer breast pushed out against the inside of the T-shirt, the carmine definition of its nipple faintly visible through the fabric's stretched weave .

When he reached out and smoothed her hair, her entire body jerked as if the hand were a defibrillator paddle.

"What's going on here?" he said.

"My back is killing me."

"An hour ago you were laughing and feeling great. Now you're sore again?"

"The Motrin's wearing off."

"The mysterious resurgence of the pain."

"You haven't said a sympathetic word since I hurt my back."

"Because you're lying about how you hurt it," Gary said.

"My God. Again?"

"Two hours of soccer and horseplay in the rain, that's not the problem. It's the ringing phone."

"Yes," Caroline said. "Because your mother won't spend ten cents to leave a message. She has to let it ring three times and then hang up, ring three times and then hang up-"

"It has nothing to do with anything you did," Gary said. "It's my mom! She magically flew here and kicked you in the back because she wants to hurt you!"

"After listening to it ring and stop and ring and stop all afternoon, I'm a nervous wreck."

"Caroline, I saw you limping before you ran inside. I saw the look on your face. Don't tell me you weren't in pain already."

She shook her head. "You know what this is?"

"And then the eavesdropping!"

"Do you know what this is?"

"You're listening on the only other free phone in the house, and you have the gall to tell me-"

"Gary, you're depressed. Do you realize that?"

He laughed. "I don't think so."

"You're brooding, and suspicious, and obsessive. You walk around with a black look on your face. You don't sleep well. You don't seem to get pleasure out of anything."

"You're changing the subject," he said. "My mother called because she had a reasonable request regarding Christmas."

"Reasonable?" Now Caroline laughed. "Gary, she is bonkers on the topic of Christmas. She is a lunatic."

"Oh, Caroline. Really."

"I mean it!"

"Really. Caroline. They're going to be selling that house soon, they want us all to visit one more time before they die, Caroline, before my parents die-"

"We've always agreed about this. We agreed that five people with busy lives should not have to fly at the peak holiday season so that two people with nothing in their lives wouldn't have to come here. And I've been more than happy to have them-"

"The hell you have."

"Until suddenly the rules change!"

"You have not been happy to have them here. Caroline. They're at the point where they won't even stay for more than forty-eight hours."

"And this is my fault?" She was directing her gestures and facial expressions, somewhat eerily, at the ceiling. "What you don't understand, Gary, is that this is an emotionally healthy family. I am a loving and deeply involved mother. I have three intelligent, creative, and emotionally healthy children. If you think there's a problem in this house, you better take a look at yourself."

"I'm making a reasonable proposal," Gary said. "And you're calling me `depressed.' "

"So it's never occurred to you?"

"The minute I bring up Christmas, I'm `depressed.' "

"Seriously, are you telling me it's never occurred to you, in the last six months, that you might have a clinical problem?"

"It is extremely hostile, Caroline, to call another person crazy."

"Not if the person potentially has a clinical problem."

"I'm proposing that we go to St. Jude," he said. "If you won't talk about it like an adult, I'll make my own decision."

"Oh, yeah?" Caroline made a contemptuous noise. "I guess Jonah might go with you. But see if you can get Aaron and Caleb on the plane with you. Just ask them where they'd rather be for Christmas."

Just ask them whose team they're on .

"I was under the impression that we're a family," Gary said, "and that we do things together."

"You're the one deciding unilaterally."

"Tell me this is not a marriage-ending problem."

"You're the one who's changed."

"Because, no, Caroline, that is, no, that is ridiculous. There are good reasons to make a one-time exception this year."

"You're depressed," she said, "and I want you back. I'm tired of living with a depressed old man."

Gary for his part wanted back the Caroline who just a few nights ago had clutched him in bed when there was heavy thunder. The Caroline who came skipping toward him when he walked into a room. The semi-orphaned girl whose most fervent wish was to be on his team.

But he'd also always loved how tough she was, how unlike a Lambert, how fundamentally unsympathetic to his family. Over the years he'd collected certain remarks of hers into a kind of personal Decalogue, an All-Time Caroline Ten to which he privately referred for strength and sustenance:

1.

1. You're nothing at all like your father.