"Denise, there's no way could I leave Dad by himself."

"He can come, too."

"You know what he says. He's given up on land tours. He has too much trouble with his legs. So, you just go and have a wonderful time for me. Say hello to my favorite city! And be sure and visit Cindy Meisner. She and Klaus have a chalet in St. Moritz and a huge, elegant apartment in Vienna."

To Enid, Austria meant "The Blue Danube" and "Edelweiss." The music boxes in her living room, with their floral and Alpine marquetry, all came from Vienna. Enid was fond of saying that her mother's mother had been "Viennese," because this was a synonym, in her mind, for "Austrian," by which she meant "of or relating to the Austro-Hungarian Empire"-an empire that at the time of her grandmother's birth had encompassed lands from north of Prague to south of Sarajevo. Denise, who as a girl had had a massive crush on Barbra Streisand in Yentl and who as a teenager had steeped herself in I. B. Singer and Sholem Aleichem, once badgered from Enid an admission that the grandmother in question might in fact have been Jewish. Which, as she pointed out in triumph, would make both her and Enid Jewish by direct matrilineal descent. But Enid, quickly backpedaling, said that no, no, her grandmother had been Catholic.

Denise had a professional interest in certain flavors from her grandmother's cooking-country ribs and fresh sauerkraut, gooseberries and whortleberries, dumplings, trouts, and sausages. The culinary problem was to make central European heartiness palatable to Size 4 Petites. The Titanium Card crowd didn't want Wagnerian slabs of Sauerbraten, or softballs of Semmelkndel, or alps of Schlag. This crowd might, however, eat sauerkraut. If ever there was a food for chicks with toothpick legs: low-fat and high-flavor and versatile, ready to fall in bed with pork, with goose, with chicken, with chestnuts, ready to take a raw plunge with mackerel sashimi or smoked bluefish. . .

Severing her last ties with Mare Scuro, she flew to Frankfurt as a salaried employee of Brian Callahan with a no-limit American Express card. In Germany she drove a hundred miles an hour and was tailgated by cars flashing their high beams. In Vienna she looked for a Vienna that didn't exist. She ate nothing that she couldn't have done better herself; one night she had Wiener schnitzel and thought, yes, this is Wiener schnitzel, uh huh. Her idea of Austria was way more vivid than Austria itself. She went to the Kunsthistorisches Museum and the Philharmonic; she reproached herself for being a bad tourist. She got so bored and lonely that she finally called Cindy von Kippel (nee Meisner) and accepted an invitation to dinner at her seventeen-room apartment on the Ringstrasse.

Cindy had gone thick around the middle and looked, Denise thought, far worse than she had to. Her features were lost in foundation, rouge, and lipstick. Her black silk pants were roomy in the hips and tight at the ankles. Brushing cheeks and weathering the tear-gas attack of Cindy's perfume, Denise was surprised to detect bacterial breath.

Cindy's husband, Klaus, had yard-wide shoulders, narrow hips, and a butt of fascinating tininess. The von Kippel living room was half a block long and furnished with gilt chairs in sociability-killing formations. Ancestral Watteauery hung on the walls, as did Klaus's Olympic bronze medal, mounted and framed, beneath the largest chandelier.

"What you see here is merely a replica," Klaus told Denise. "The original medal is in safe storage."

On a Louis XIV-ish sideboard was a plate of bread disks, a mangled smoked fish with the consistency of chunk canned tuna, and a not-large piece of Emmentaler.

Klaus took a bottle from a silver bucket and poured Sekt with a flourish. "To our culinary pilgrim," he said, raising a glass. "Welcome to the holy city of Wien."

The Sekt was sweet and overcarbonated and remarkably much like Sprite.

"It's so neat you're here!" Cindy cried. She snapped her fingers frantically, and a maid hurried in through a side door. "Annerl, hun," Cindy said in a more babyish voice, "remember I said use the rye bread, not the white bread?"

"Yis, madam," the middle-aged Annerl said.

"So it's sort of too late now, because I meant this white bread for later, but I really wish you'd take this back and bring us the rye bread instead! And then maybe send someone out for more white bread for later!" Cindy explained to Denise: "She's so so sweet, but so so silly. Aren't you, Annerl? Aren't you a silly thing?"

"Yis, madam."

"Well, you know what it's like, you're a chef," Cindy told Denise as Annerl exited. "It's probably even worse for you, the stupidity of people."

"The arrogance and stupidity," Klaus said.

"Tell somebody what to do," Cindy said, "ond they just go do something else, it's so frustrating! So frustrating!"

"My mother sends her greetings," Denise said.

"Your mom is so neat. She was always so nice to me. Klaus, you know the tiny, tiny little house my family used to live in (a long time ago, when I was a tiny, tiny little girl), well, Denise's parents were our neighbors. My mom and her mom are still good friends. I guess your folks are still in their little old house, right?"

Klaus gave a harsh laugh and turned to Denise. "Do you know what I rilly hate about St. Jude?"

"No," Denise said. "What do you really hate about St. Jude?"

"I rilly hate the phony democracy. The people in St. Jude pretend they're all alike. It's all very nice. Nice, nice, nice. But the people are not all alike. Not at all. There are class differences, there are race differences, there are enormous and decisive economic differences, and yet nobody's honest in this case. Everybody pretends! Have you noticed this?"

"Do you mean," Denise said, "like the differences between my mom and Cindy's mom?"

"No, I don't know your mother."

"Klaus, actually!" Cindy said. "Actually you did meet her. Three Thanksgivings ago, at the open house. Remember?"

"Well, you see, everybody's the same," Klaus explained. "That's what I'm telling you. How can you distinguish the people when everybody pretends to be the same?"

Annerl came back with the dismal plate and different bread.

"Here, try some of this fish," Cindy urged Denise. "Isn't this champagne wonderful? Really different! Klaus and I used to drink it drier, but then we found this, and we love it."

"There's a snob appeal to the dry," Klaus said. "But those who rilly know their Sekt know this emperor, this Extra-Trocken, is quite naked."

Denise crossed her legs and said, "My mother tells me you're a doctor."

"Yah, sports medicine," Klaus said.

"All the best skiers come to Klaus!" Cindy said.

"This is how I repay my debt to society," Klaus said.

Though Cindy begged her to stay, Denise escaped from the Ringstrasse before nine and escaped from Vienna the next morning, heading east across the haze-white valley of the middle Danube. Conscious of spending Brian's money, she worked long days, walking Budapest sector by sector, taking notes at every meal, checking out bakeries and tiny stalls and cavernous restaurants rescued from the brink of terminal neglect. She traveled as far east as Ruthenia, the birthplace of Enid's father's parents, now a trans-Carpathian smidgen of the Ukraine. In the landscapes she traversed there was no trace of shtetl. No Jews to speak of in any but the largest cities. Everything as durably, drably Gentile as she'd reconciled herself to being. The food, by and large, was coarse. The Carpathian highlands, everywhere scarred with the stab wounds of coal and pitchblende mining, looked suitable for burying lime-sprinkled bodies in mass graves. Denise saw faces that resembled her own, but they were closed and prematurely weathered, not a word of English in their eyes. She had no roots. This was not her country.

She flew to Paris and met Brian in the lobby of the Htel des Deux Iles. In June he'd spoken of bringing his whole family, but he'd come alone. He was wearing American khakis and a very wrinkled white shirt. Denise was so lonely she almost jumped into his arms.

What kind of idiot, she wondered, lets her husband go to Paris with a person like me?

They ate dinner at La Cuillere Curieuse, a Michelin two-star establishment that in Denise's opinion was trying too hard. She didn't want raw yellowtail or papaya confit when she came to France. On the other hand, she was plenty sick of goulash.

Brian, deferring to her judgment absolutely, made her choose the wine and order both dinners. Over coffee she asked him why Robin hadn't come along to Paris.

"It's the first zucchini harvest at the Garden Project," he said with uncharacteristic bitterness.

"Travel is a chore for some people," Denise said.

"It didn't use to be for Robin," Brian said. "We used to take great trips, all over the West. And now that we can really afford it, she doesn't want to go. It's like she's on strike against money."

"It must be a shock, suddenly having so much."

"Look, I just want to have fun with it," Brian said. "I don't want to be a different person. But I'm not going to wear sackcloth, either."

"Is that what Robin is doing?"

"She hasn't been happy since the day I sold the company."

Let's get an egg timer, Denise thought, and see how long this marriage lasts.

She waited in vain, as they walked the length of the quai after dinner, for Brian to brush her hand with his. He kept looking at her hopefully, as if to be sure she had no objection to his stopping at this store window or veering down that side street. He had a happy canine way of seeking approval without seeming insecure. He described his plans for the Generator as if it were a party that he was almost certain she would enjoy. Clearly convinced, in the same way, that he was doing a Good Thing that she wanted, he backed away from her hygienically when they parted for the night in the lobby of the Deux Iles.

She endured ten days of his affability. Toward the end she couldn't stand to see herself in mirrors, her face seemed to her so ravaged, her tits so droopy, her hair such a frizzball, her clothes so traveled-out. She was, basically, shocked that this unhappy husband was resisting her. Even though he had good reason to resist her! He being the father of two lovely girls! And she being, after all, his paid employee! She respected his resistance, she believed that this was how adults should behave; and she was extremely unhappy about it.

She bent her will to the task of not feeling overweight and starving herself. It didn't help that she was sick of lunch and dinner and wanted only picnics. Wanted baguettes, white peaches, dry chevre, and coffee. She was sick of watching Brian enjoy a meal. She hated Robin for having a husband she could trust. She hated Robin for her rudeness at Cape May. She cursed Robin in her head, called Robin a cunt and threatened to fuck her husband. Several nights, after dinner, she considered violating her own twisted ethics and putting the moves on Brian (because surely he would defer to her judgment; surely, given permission, he would jump up on her bed and pant and grin and lick her hand), but she was finally too demoralized by her hair and clothes. She was ready to go home.

Two nights before they left, she knocked on Brian's door before dinner and he pulled her into his room and kissed her.

He'd given no warning of his change of heart. She visited the confessor in her head and was able to say, "Nothing! I did nothing! I knocked on the door, and next thing I know, he's on his knees."

On his knees, he pressed her hands to his face. She looked at him as she'd looked at Don Armour long ago. His desire brought cool topical relief to the dryness and crackedness, the bodywide distress, of her person. She followed him to bed.

Naturally, being good at everything, Brian knew how to kiss. He had the oblique style she liked. She murmured ambiguously: "I love your taste." He put his hands everywhere she'd expected him to put them. She unbuttoned his shirt as the woman does at a certain point. She licked his nipple in the nodding, firm way of a grooming cat. She put a practiced, curled hand on the lump in his pants. She was beautifully, avidly adulterous and she knew it. She embarked on buckle work, on hook and button projects, on elastic-band labors, until there began to swell inside her, hardly noticeable and then suddenly distinct, and then not merely distinct but increasingly painful in its pressure on her peritoneum and eyeballs and arteries and meninges, a body-sized, Robin-faced balloon of wrongness.

Brian's voice was in her ear. He was asking the protection question. He'd mistaken her discomfort for transports, her squirming for an invitation. She clarified by rolling out of bed and crouching in a corner of the hotel room. She said she couldn't.

Brian sat up on the bed and made no reply. She stole a glance and confirmed that his endowment was per expectation for the man who had everything. She suspected that she wouldn't soon forget the sight of this dick. Would be seeing it when she closed her eyes, at inconvenient times, in far-fetched contexts.

She apologized to him.

"No, you're right," Brian said, deferring to her judgment. "I feel terrible. I've never done anything like this."

"See, I have," she said, lest he think her merely timid. "More than once. And I don't want to anymore."

"No, of course, you're right."

"If you weren't married- If I weren't your employee -"

"Listen, I'm dealing with it. I'm going in the bathroom now. I'm dealing with it."

"Thank you."

Part of her thought: What is my problem?

Another part of her thought: For once in my life, I'm doing the right thing.

She spent four nights by herself in Alsace and flew home from Frankfurt. She was shocked when she went to see the progress that Brian's team had made at the Generator in her absence. The building-within-a-building was already framed out, the concrete sub floors poured. She could see what the effect would be: a bright bubble of modernity in a twilight of monumental industry. Although she had faith in her cooking, the grandness of the space made her nervous. She wished that she'd insisted on an ordinary plain space in which her food could shine alone. She felt seduced and suckered somehow-as if, unbeknownst to her, Brian had been competing with her for the world's attention. As if, all along, in his affable way, he'd been angling to make the restaurant his, not hers.

She was haunted, just as she'd feared, by the afterimage of his dick. She felt gladder and gladder that she hadn't let him put it in her. Brian had every advantage that she had, plus many of his own. He was male, he was rich, he was a born insider; he wasn't hampered by Lambert weirdnesses or strong opinions; he was an amateur with nothing to lose but throwaway money, and to succeed all he needed was a good idea and somebody else (namely her) to do the hard work. How lucky she'd been, in that hotel room, to recognize him as her adversary! Two more minutes and she would have disappeared. She would have become another facet of his really fun life, her beauty reflecting on his irresistibility, her talents redounding to his restaurant's glory. How lucky she'd been, how lucky.

She believed that if, when the Generator opened, reviewers paid more attention to the space than to the food, she would lose and Brian would win. And so she worked her ass off. She convection-roasted country ribs to brownness and cut them thin, along the grain, for presentation, reduced and darkened the kraut gravy to bring out its nutty, earthy, cabbagy, porky flavor, and arted up the plate with twin testicular new potatoes, a cluster of Brussels sprouts, and a spoon of stewed white beans that she lightly spiked with roasted garlic. She invented luxurious new white sausages. She matched a fennel relish, roasted potatoes, and good bitter wholesome rapini with fabulous pork chops that she bought direct from a sixties holdover organic farmer who did his own butchering and made his own deliveries. She took the guy to lunch and visited his farm in Lancaster County and met the hogs in question, examined their eclectic diet (boiled yams and chicken wings, acorns and chestnuts) and toured the soundproofed room where they were slaughtered. She extracted commitments from her old crew at Mare Scuro. She took former colleagues out on Brian's AmEx and sized up the local competition (most of it reassuringly undistinguished) and sampled desserts to see if anybody's pastry chef was worth stealing. She staged one-woman late-night forcemeat festivals. She made sauerkraut in five-gallon buckets in her basement. She made it with red cabbage and with shredded kale in cabbage juice, with juniper berries and black peppercorns. She hurried along the fermentation with hundred-watt bulbs.

Brian still called her every day, but he didn't take her driving in his Volvo anymore, he didn't play her music. Behind his polite questions she sensed a waning interest. She recommended an old friend of hers, Rob Zito, to manage the Generator, and when Brian took the two of them to lunch, he stayed for half an hour. He had an appointment in New York.

One night Denise called him at home and instead got Robin Passafaro. Robin's clipped phrases -"OK," "Whatever," "Yes," "I'll tell him, " "OK"-so irritated Denise that she deliberately kept her on the line. She asked how the Garden Project was going.

"Fine," Robin said. "I'll tell Brian you called."

"Could I come over sometime and see it?"

Robin replied with naked rudeness: "Why?"

"Well," Denise said, "it's something Brian talks about" (this was a lie; he rarely mentioned it), "it's an interesting project" (in fact, it sounded utopian and crackpot), "ond, you know, I love vegetables."

"Uh huh."

"So maybe some Saturday afternoon or something."

"Whenever."

A moment later Denise slammed the phone down in its cradle. She was angry, among other things, at how fake she'd sounded to herself. "I could have fucked your husband!" she said. "And I chose not to! So how about a little friendliness?"

Maybe, if she'd been a better person, she would have left Robin alone. Maybe she wanted to make Robin like her simply to deny her the satisfaction of disliking her-to win that contest of esteem. Maybe she was just picking up the gauntlet. But the desire to be liked was real. She was haunted by the feeling that Robin had been in the hotel room with her and Brian; by that bursting sensation of Robin's presence inside her body.

On the last Saturday of baseball season she cooked at home for eight hours, shrink-wrapping trout, juggling half a dozen kraut salads, and pairing the pan juices of sauteed kidneys with interesting spirits. Late in the day she went for a walk and, finding herself going west, crossed Broad Street into the ghetto of Point Breeze, where Robin had her Project.

The weather was fine. Early autumn in Philadelphia brought smells of fresh seawater and tidewater, gradual abatements in temperature, a quiet abdication of control by the humid air masses that had held the onshore breeze at bay all summer. Denise passed an old woman in a housecoat standing watch while two dusty men unloaded Acme groceries from a corroded Pinto's hatchback. Cinderblock was the material of choice over here for blinding windows. There were fire-gutted LUNC ONETTEs and P ZER As. Friable houses with bedsheet curtains. Expanses of fresh asphalt that seemed to seal the neighborhood's fate more than promise renewal.

Denise didn't care if she saw Robin. Almost better, in a way, to score the point subtly-to let Robin find out from Brian that she'd taken the trouble to walk by the Project.

She came to a block within whose chain-link confines were small hills of mulch and large piles of wilted vegetation. At the far corner of the block, behind the only house left standing on it, somebody was working rocky soil with a shovel.

The front door of the solitary house was open. A black girl of college age was sitting at a desk that also contained a vastly ghastly plaid sofa and a wheeled blackboard on which a column of names (Lateesha, Latoya, Tyrell) was followed by columns of HOURS TO DATE and DOLLARS TO DATE.

"Looking for Robin," Denise said.

The girl nodded at the open rear door of the house. "She's in back."

The garden was raw but peaceful. Not much seemed to have been grown here besides squashes and their cousins, but the patches of vine were extensive, and the smells of mulch and dirt, and the onshore autumn breeze, were full of childhood memory.

Robin was shoveling rubble into a makeshift sieve. She had thin arms and a hummingbird metabolism and took many fast small bites of rubble instead of fewer big ones. She was wearing a black bandanna and a very dirty T-shirt with the text QUALITY DAYCARE: PAY NOW OR PAY LATER. She seemed neither surprised nor pleased to see Denise.

"This is a big project," Denise said.

Robin shrugged, holding the shovel with both hands as if to stress that she felt interrupted.

"Do you want some help?" Denise said.

"No. The kids were supposed to do this, but there's a game over at the river. I'm just cleaning up."

She whacked the rubble in the sieve to urge some dirt through. Caught in the mesh were fragments of brick and mortar, gobs of roofing tar, ailanthus limbs, petrified cat shit, Baccardi and Yuengling labels with backings of broken glass.

"So what did you grow?" Denise said.

Robin shrugged again. "Nothing that would impress you."

"Well, like what?"

"Like zucchini and pumpkins."

"I cook with both of those."

"Yeah."

"Who's the girl?"

"I have a couple of half-time assistants that I pay. Sara's a junior at Temple."

"And who are the kids who were supposed to be here?"

"Neighborhood kids between twelve and sixteen." Robin took off her glasses and rubbed sweat from her face with a dirty sleeve. Denise had forgotten, or had never noticed to begin with, what a pretty mouth she had. "They get minimum wage plus vegetables, plus a share of any money we make."

"Do you subtract expenses?"

"That would discourage them."

"Right."

Robin looked away, across the street, at a row of dead buildings with rusting sheet-metal cornices. "Brian says you're very competitive."

"Oh really?"

"He said he wouldn't want to arm-wrestle you."

Denise winced.

"He said he wouldn't want to be the other chef in the kitchen with you."

"No danger of that," Denise said.

"He said he wouldn't want to play Scrabble with you."

"Uh huh."

"He said he wouldn't want to play Trivial Pursuit with you."

OK, OK, Denise thought.

Robin was breathing hard. "Anyway."

"Yeah, anyway."

"Here's why I didn't go to Paris," Robin said. "I thought Erin was too young. Sinead was having fun at art camp, and I had tons of work here."

"I understood that."

"And you guys were going to be talking about food all day. And Brian said it was business. So."

Denise raised her eyes from the dirt but couldn't quite look Robin in the eye. "It was business."

Robin, her lip trembling, said, "Whatever!"

Above the ghetto a fleet of copper-bottomed clouds, Revere Ware clouds, had withdrawn to the northwest. It was the moment when the blue backdrop of the sky grayed to the same value as the stratus formations in front of it, when night light and day light were in equilibrium.

"you know, I'm not really into guys," Denise said.

"Pardon me?"

"I said I don't sleep with men anymore. Since I got divorced."

Robin frowned as if this made no sense to her at all. "Does Brian know that?"

"I don't know. Not from my telling him."

Robin thought this over for a moment and then began to laugh. She said, "Hee hee hee!" She said, "Ha ha ha!" Her laugh was full-throated and embarrassing and, at the same time, Denise thought, lovely. It echoed off the rusty-corniced houses. "Poor Brian!" she said. "Poor Brian!"

Robin immediately became more cordial. She put down her shovel and gave Denise a tour of the garden -"my little enchanted kingdom" she called it. Finding that she had Denise's interest, she risked enthusiasm. Here was a new asparagus patch, here two rows of young pear and apple trees that she hoped to espalier, here the late crops of sunflowers, acorn squash, and kale. She'd planted only sure winners this summer, hoping to hook a core group of local teenagers and reward them for the thankless infrastructural work of preparing beds, running pipes, adjusting drainages, and connecting rain barrels to the roof of the house.

"This is basically a selfish project," Robin said. "I always wanted a big garden, and now the whole inner city's going back to farmland. But the kids who really need to be out working with their hands and learning what fresh food tastes like are the ones who aren't doing it. They're latchkey kids. They're getting high, they're having sex, or they're stuck in some classroom until six with a computer. But they're also at an age when it's still fun to play in the dirt."

"Though possibly not as much fun as sex or drugs."

"Maybe not for ninety percent of kids," Robin said. "I just want there to be something for the other ten percent. Some alternative that doesn't involve computers. I want Sinead and Erin to be around kids who aren't like them. I want them to learn how to work. I want them to know that work isn't just pointing and clicking."

"This is very admirable," Denise said.

Robin, mistaking her tone, said, "Whatever."

Denise sat on the plastic skin of a bale of peat moss while Robin washed up and changed her clothes. Maybe it was because she could count on one hand the autumn Saturday evenings that she'd spent outside a kitchen since she was twenty, or maybe because some sentimental part of her was taken in by the egalitarian ideal that Klaus von Kippel found so phony in St. Jude, but the word she wanted to apply to Robin Passafaro, who had lived in urban Philly all her life, was "midwestern." By which she meant hopeful or enthusiastic or community-spirited.

She didn't care so much, after all, about being liked. She found herself liking. When Robin came out and locked the house, Denise asked if she had time for dinner.

"Brian and his dad took the girls to see the Phillies," Robin said. "They'll come home full of stadium food. So, sure. We can have dinner."

"I have stuff in my kitchen," Denise said. "Do you mind?"

"Anything. Whatever."

Typically, if a chef invited you to dinner, you considered yourself lucky and you hastened to show it. But Robin seemed determined not to be impressed.

Night had fallen. The air on Catharine Street smelled like the last weekend of baseball. Walking east, Robin told Denise the story of her brother, Billy. Denise had already heard the story from Brian, but parts of Robin's version were new to her.

"So wait," she said. "Brian sold his company to W--, and then Billy attacked one of W--'s vice presidents, and you think there's a connection?"

"God, yes," Robin said. "That's what's so horrible."

"Brian didn't mention that part."

Shrillness came pouring out of Robin. "I can't believe it! That's the whole point. God! It is so, so, so like him not to mention that part. Because that part might actually make things hard for him, you know, the way things are hard for me. It might get in the way of his fun time in Paris, or his lunch date with Harvey Keitel, or whatever. I can't believe he didn't mention it."

"Explain to me what the problem is?"

"Rick Flamburg's disabled for life," Robin said. "My brother is in jail for the next ten or fifteen years, this horrible company is corrupting the city schools, my father is on anti-psychotics, and Brian is like, hey, look what W-- just did for us, let's move to Mendocino!"

"But you didn't do anything wrong," Denise said. "You're not responsible for any of those other things."

Robin turned and looked straight into her. "What's life for?"

"I don't know."

"I don't either. But I don't think it's about winning."

They marched along in silence. Denise, to whom winning did matter, grimly noted that, on top of all his other luck, Brian had married a woman of principle and spirit.

She further noted, however, that Robin didn't seem particularly loyal.

Denise's living room contained little more than it had after Emile had emptied it three years earlier. In their contest of self-denials, on the Weekend of Tears, Denise had had the double advantage of feeling guiltier than Emile and of having already agreed to take the house. In the end she'd succeeded in making Emile take practically every joint possession that she liked or valued and many others that she didn't like but could have used.

The emptiness of the house had disgusted Becky Hemerling. It was cold, it was self-hating, it was a monastery.

"Nice and spare," Robin commented.

Denise sat her down at the half Ping-Pong table that served as her kitchen table, opened a fifty-dollar wine, and proceeded to feed her. Denise had seldom had to struggle with her weight, but she would have blimped out in a month if she'd eaten like Robin. She watched in awe as her guest, elbows flying, devoured two kidneys and a homemade sausage, tried each of the kraut salads, and spread butter on her third healthy wedge of artisanal rye bread.

She herself had the butterflies and ate hardly anything.

"St. Jude is one of my favorite saints," Robin said. "Did Brian tell you I've been going to church?"

"He mentioned it, yes."

"I'm sure he did. I'm sure he was very understanding and patient!" Robin's voice was loud and her face red with wine. Denise felt a striction in her chest. "Anyway, one of the great things about being Catholic is you get to have saints, like St. Jude."

"Patron saint of hopeless causes?"

"Exactly. What's a church for if not lost causes?"

"I feel this way about sports teams," Denise said. "That the winners don't need your help."

Robin nodded. "You know what I mean. But if you live with Brian you start feeling like there's something wrong with losers. Not that he'll actually criticize you. He'll always be very understanding and patient and loving. Brian's great! Nothing wrong with Brian! It's just that he'd rather root for a winner. And I'm not really a winner like that. And I don't really want to be."

Denise would never have talked about Emile like this. She wouldn't do it even now.

"See, but you are that kind of winner," Robin said. "That's why I frankly sort of saw you as my potential replacement. I saw you as next in line."

"Nope."

Robin made her self-consciously delighted sounds. She said, "Hee hee hee!"

"In Brian's defense," Denise said, "I don't think he needs you to be Brooke Astor. I think he'd settle for bourgeois."

"I can live with being bourgeois," Robin said. "A house like this is what I want. I love that your kitchen table is half a Ping-Pong table."

"It's yours for twenty bucks."

"Brian's wonderful. He's the person I wanted to spend my life with, he's the father of my kids. I'm the problem. I'm the one who's not getting with the program. I'm the one who's going to confirmation class. Listen, do you have a jacket? I'm freezing."

The low candles were spilling wax in the October draft. Denise fetched her favorite jean jacket, a discontinued Levi's product with a woolen lining, and noticed how large it looked on Robin's smaller arms, how it engulfed her thinner shoulders, like a letter jacket on a ballplayer's girlfriend.

The next day, wearing the jacket herself, she found it softer and lighter than she remembered. She pulled on the collar and hugged herself with it.

No matter how hard she worked that fall, she had more free time and a more flexible schedule than she'd had in many years. She began to drop by the Project with food from her kitchen. She went over to Brian and Robin's house on Panama Street, found Brian away, and stayed for an evening. A few nights later, when Brian came home and found her baking madeleines with the girls, he acted as if he'd seen her in his kitchen a hundred times.

She had a lifetime of practice at arriving late in a family of four and being loved by all. Her next conquest on Panama Street was Sinead, the serious reader, the little fashion plate. Denise took her shopping on Saturdays. She bought her costume jewelry, an antique Tuscan jewelry case, mid-seventies disco and proto-disco albums, old illustrated books about costumes, Antarctica, Jackie Kennedy, and shipbuilding. She helped Sinead select larger, brighter, lesser gifts for Erin. Sinead, like her father, had impeccable taste. She wore black jeans and corduroy miniskirts and jumpers, silver bangles, and strings of plastic beads even longer than her very long hair. In Denise's kitchen, after shopping, she peeled potatoes immaculately or rolled out simple doughs while the cook contrived lagniappes for a child's palate: wedges of pear, strips of homemade mortadella, elderberry sorbet in a doll-size bowl of elderberry soup, lambsmeat ravioli Xed with mint-charged olive oil, cubes of fried polenta.

On the rare occasions, like weddings, when Robin and Brian still went out together, Denise baby-sat the girls at Panama Street. She taught them how to make spinach pasta and how to tango. She listened to Erin recite the U. S. presidents in order. She joined Sinead in raiding drawers for costumes.

"Denise and I will be ethnologists," Sinead said, "ond, Erin, you can be a Hmong person."

As she watched Sinead work out with Erin how a Hmong woman might comport herself, as she watched her dance to Donna Summer with her lazy half-bored minimalism, barely lifting her heels from the floor, faintly rolling her shoulders and letting her hair slide and sift across her back (Erin all the while throwing epileptic fits), Denise loved not only the girl but the girl's parents for whatever childrearing magic they'd brought to bear on her.

Robin was less impressed. "Of course they love you," she said. "You're not trying to comb the tangles out of Sinead's hair. You're not arguing for twenty minutes about what constitutes `making the bed.' You never see Sinead's math scores."

"They're not good?" the smitten baby-sitter said.

"They're appalling. We may threaten not to let her see you if they don't improve."

"Oh, don't do that."

"Maybe you'd like to do some long division with her."

"I'll do anything."

One Sunday in November, while the family of five was walking in Fairmount Park, Brian remarked to Denise, "Robin's really warmed to you. I wasn't sure she would."

"I like Robin a lot," Denise said.

"I think at first she felt a little intimidated by you."

"She had good reason to. Didn't she."

"I never told her anything."

"Well, thank you for that."

It didn't escape Denise that the qualities that would have enabled Brian to cheat on Robin-his sense of entitlement, his retrieverish conviction that whatever he was doing was the Good Thing We All Want-would also make it easy to cheat on him. Denise could feel herself becoming an extension of "Robin" in Brian's mind, and since "Robin" had permanent status as "great" in Brian's estimation, neither she nor "Denise" required further thought or worry on his part.

Brian seemed to put similarly absolute faith in Denise's friend Rob Zito to oversee the Generator. Brian kept himself reasonably well informed, but mainly, as the weather got colder, he was absent. Denise briefly wondered if he'd fallen for another female, but the new darling turned out to be an independent filmmaker, Jerry Schwartz, who was noted for his exquisite taste in sound-track music and his skill at repeatedly finding funding for red-ink art-house projects. ("A film best enjoyed," Entertainment Weekly said of Schwartz's mopey slasher flick Moody Fruit, "with both eyes closed.") A fervent admirer of Schwartz's sound tracks, Brian had swooped down like an angel with a crucial fifty thou just as Schwartz began principal photography on a modern-dress Crime and Punishment in which Raskolnikov, played by Giovanni Ribisi, was a young anarchist and rabid audiophile living underground in North Philadelphia. While Denise and Rob Zito were making hardware and lighting decisions at the Generator, Brian joined Schwartz and Ribisi et al. on location at soulful ruins in Nicetown, and swapped CDs with Schwartz from identical zippered CD carrying cases, and ate dinner at Pastis in New York with Schwartz and Greil Marcus or Stephen Malkmus.

Without realizing it, Denise had let herself imagine that Brian and Robin had no sex life anymore. So on New Year's Eve, when she and four couples and a mob of children gathered at the house on Panama Street and she saw Brian and Robin necking in the kitchen after midnight, she pulled her coat from the bottom of the coat pile and ran from the house. For more than a week she was too ripped up to call Robin or see the girls. She had a thing for a straight woman who was married to a man whom she herself might have liked to marry. It was a reasonably hopeless case. And St. Jude gave and St. Jude took away.

Robin ended Denise's moratorium with a phone call. She was screeching mad. "Do you know what Jerry Schwartz's movie is about?"

"Uh, Dostoevsky in Germantown?"

"You know it. How come I didn't know it? Because he kept it from me, because he knew what I would think!"

"We're talking about a Giovanni-Ribisi-as-wispily-bearded-Raskolnikov type of thing," Denise said.

"My husband," Robin said, "has put fifty thousand dollars, which he got from the W-- Corporation, into a movie about a North Philly anarchist who splits two women's skulls and goes to jail for it! He's getting off on how cool it is to hang out with Giovanni Ribisi, and Jerry Schwartz, and Ian What's His Face, and Stephen Whoever, while my North Philly anarchist brother, who really did split somebody's skull -"

"No, I get it," Denise said. "There's a definite want of sensitivity there."

"I don't even think so," Robin said. "I think he's deeply pissed off with me and he doesn't even know it."

From that day forward, Denise became a stealthy advocate of infidelity. She learned that by defending Brian's minor insensitivities she could spur Robin to more serious accusations with which she then reluctantly concurred. She listened and she listened. She took care to understand Robin better than anyone else ever had. She plied Robin with the questions Brian wasn't asking: about Billy, about her dad, about church, about her Garden Project plans, about the half-dozen teenagers who'd caught the gardening bug and were coming back next summer, about the romantic and academic travails of her young assistants. She attended Seed Catalogue Night at the Project and put faces to the names of Robin's favorite kids. She did long division with Sinead. She nudged conversations in the direction of movie stars or popular music or high fashion, the sorest topics in Robin's marriage. To the untrained ear, she sounded as if she were merely advocating closer friendship; but she had seen Robin eat, she knew this woman's hunger.

When a sewer-line problem delayed the opening of the Generator, Brian took the opportunity to attend the Kalamazoo Film Festival with Jerry Schwartz, and Denise took the opportunity to hang out with Robin and the girls for five nights running. The last of these nights found her agonizing in the video store. She finally settled on Wait Until Dark (disgusting male menaces resourceful Audrey Hepburn, whose coloration happens to resemble Denise Lambert's) and Something Wild (kinky, gorgeous Melanie Griffith liberates Jeff Daniels from a dead marriage). The very titles, when she arrived at Panama Street, made Robin blush.

Between movies, after midnight, they drank whiskey on the living-room sofa, and in a voice that even for her was unusually squeaky Robin asked permission to ask Denise a personal question. "How often, in, like, a week," she said, "did you and Emile fool around?"

"I'm not the person to ask about what's normal," Denise answered. "I've mainly seen normal in the rearview mirror."

"I know. I know." Robin stared intensely at the blue TV screen. "But, what did you think was normal?"

"I guess, at the time, I had the sense," Denise said, telling herself large number, say a large number, "that maybe three times a week might be normal."

Robin sighed loudly. A square inch or two of her left knee rested against Denise's right knee. "Just tell me what you think is normal," she said.

"I think for some people, once a day feels right."

Robin spoke in a voice like an ice cube compressed between molars. "I might like that. That doesn't sound bad to me."

A numbing and prickling and burning broke out on the engaged portion of Denise's knee.

"I take it that's not how things are."

"Like twice a MONTH," Robin said through her teeth. "Twice a MONTH."

"Do you think Brian's seeing somebody?"

"I don't know what he does. But it doesn't involve me. And I just feel like such a freak."

"You're not a freak. You're the opposite."

"So what's the other movie?"

" Something Wild."

"OK, whatever. Let's watch it."

For the next two hours Denise mainly paid attention to her hand, which she'd laid on the sofa cushion within easy reach of Robin's. The hand wasn't comfortable there, it wanted to be retracted, but she didn't want to give up hard-won territory.

When the movie ended they watched TV, and then they were silent for an impossibly long time, five minutes or a year, and still Robin didn't take the warm, five-fingered bait. Denise would have welcomed some pushy male sexuality right around now. In hindsight, the week and a half she'd waited before Brian grabbed her had passed like a heartbeat.

At 4 a.m., sick with tiredness and impatience, she stood up to leave. Robin put on her shoes and her purple nylon parka and walked her to her car. Here, at last, she seized Denise's hand in both of hers. She rubbed Denise's palm with her dry, grown-woman thumbs. She said she was glad that Denise was her friend.

Stay the course, Denise enjoined herself. Be sisterly.

"I'm glad, too," she said.

Robin produced the spoken cackle that Denise had come to recognize as pure distilled self-consciousness. She said, "Hee hee hee!" She looked at Denise's hand, which she was kneading nervously in hers now. "Wouldn't it be ironic if I was the one who cheated on Brian?"

"Oh God," Denise said involuntarily.

"Don't worry." Robin made a first around Denise's index finger and squeezed it hard, in spasms. "I'm totally joking."

Denise stared at her. Are you even listening to what you're saying? Are you aware of what you're doing to my finger?

Robin pressed the hand to her mouth now and bit down on it with lip-cushioned teeth, sort of softly gnawed on it, and then dropped it and skittered away. She bounced from one foot to the other. "So I'll see you."

The next day, Brian came back from Michigan and put an end to the house party.

Denise flew to St. Jude for a long Easter weekend, and Enid, like a toy piano with one working note, spoke every day of her old friend Norma Greene and Norma Greene's tragic involvement with a married man. Denise, to change the subject, observed that Alfred was livelier and sharper than Enid portrayed him in her letters and Sunday calls.

"He pulls himself together when you're in town," Enid countered. "When we're alone, he's impossible."

"When you're alone, maybe you're too focused on him."

"Denise, if you lived with a man who slept in his chair all day -"

"Mother, the more you nag, the more he resists."

"You don't see it, because you're only here for a few days. But I know what I'm talking about. And I don't know what I'm going to do."

If I lived with a person who was hysterically critical of me, Denise thought, I would sleep in a chair.

Back in Philly, the kitchen at the Generator was finally available. Denise's life returned to near-normal levels of madness as she assembled and trained her crew, invited her pastry-chef finalists to compete head to head, and solved a thousand problems of delivery, scheduling, production, and pricing. As a piece of architecture, the restaurant was every bit as stunning as she'd feared, but for once in her career she'd prepared a menu properly and had twenty winners on it. The food was a three-way conversation between Paris and Bologna and Vienna, a Continental conference call with her own trademark emphasis on flavor over flash. Seeing Brian again in person, rather than imagining him through Robin's eyes, she remembered how much she liked him. She awoke, to an extent, from her dreams of conquest. As she fired up the Garland and drilled her line and sharpened her knives, she thought: An idle brain is the Devil's workshop. If she had been working as hard as God intended her to work, she would never have had time to chase someone's wife.

She went into full avoidance mode, working 6 a.m. to midnight. The more days she spent free of the spell that Robin's body and body heat and hunger cast on her, the more willing she was to admit how little she liked Robin's nervousness, and Robin's bad haircut and worse clothes, and Robin's rusty-hinge voice, and Robin's forced laughter, her whole profound uncoolness. Brian's benign neglect of his wife, his hands-off attitude of "Yeah, Robin's great," made more sense now to Denise. Robin was great; and yet, if you were married to her, you might need some time away from her incandescent energy, you might enjoy a few days by yourself in New York, and Paris, and Sundance. . .

But the damage had been done. Denise's case for infidelity had apparently been compelling. With a persistence the more irritating for the shyness and apologies that accompanied it, Robin began to seek her out. She came to the Generator. She took Denise to lunch. She called Denise at midnight and chattered about the mildly interesting things that Denise had long pretended to be extremely interested in. She caught Denise at home on a Sunday afternoon and drank tea at the half Ping-Pong table, blushing and hee-heeing.

And part of Denise was thinking, as the tea went cold: Shit, she's really into me now. This part of her considered, as if it were an actual threat of harm, the exhausting circumstance: She wants sex every day. This same part of her was thinking also: My God, the way she eats. And: I am not a "lesbian."

At the same time, another part of her was literally awash in desire. She'd never seen so objectively what an illness sex was, what a collection of bodily symptoms, because she'd never been remotely as sick as Robin made her.

During a lull in the chatter, beneath a corner of the Ping-Pong table, Robin gripped Denise's tastefully shod foot between her own knobby, white, purple-and-orange-accented sneakers. A moment later she leaned forward and seized Denise's hand. Her blush looked life-threatening.

"So," she said. "I've been thinking."

The Generator opened on May 23, exactly a year after Brian began paying Denise her inflated salary. The opening was delayed a final week so that Brian and Jerry Schwartz could attend the festival at Cannes. Every night, while he was away, Denise repaid his generosity and his faith in her by going to Panama Street and sleeping with his wife. Her brain might feel like the brain of a questionable calf's head at a Ninth Street "discount" butcher, but she was never as tired as she initially believed. One kiss, one hand on the knee, awakened her body to itself. She felt haunted, animated, revved, by the ghost of every coital encounter she'd ever nixed in her marriage. She shut her eyes against Robin's back and pillowed her cheek between her shoulder blades, her hands supporting Robin's breasts, which were round and flat and strangely light; she felt like a kitten with two powder puffs. She dozed for a couple of hours and then scraped herself out of the sheets, opened the door that Robin had locked against surprise visits from Erin or Sinead, and crept down and out into the damp Philly dawn and shivered violently.

Brian had placed strong cryptic ads for the Generator in the local weeklies and monthlies and had put the buzz out through his network, but 26 covers on the first day of lunch and 45 that night did not exactly tax Denise's kitchen. The glassed-in dining room, suspended in a blue Cherenkov glow, sat 140; she was ready for 300-cover evenings. Brian and Robin and the girls came to dinner on a Saturday and stopped briefly in the kitchen. Denise did a good impression of being at ease with the girls, and Robin, looking great in red lipstick and a little black dress, did a good impression of being Brian's wife.

Denise fixed things as well as she could with the authorities in her head. She reminded herself that Brian had dropped to his knees in Paris; that she was doing nothing worse than playing by his rules; that she'd waited for Robin to make the first move. But moral hair-splitting could not explain her complete, dead absence of remorse. In conversation with Brian she was distracted and thick-headed. She caught the meaning of his words at the last moment, as if he were speaking French. She had reason to seem strung out, of course-she routinely slept four hours a night, and before long the kitchen was running at full throttle-and Brian, distracted by his film projects, was every bit as easy to deceive as she'd anticipated. But "deceive" wasn't even the word. "Dissociate" was more like it. Her affair was like a dream life unfolding in that locked and soundproofed chamber of her brain where, growing up in St. Jude, she'd learned to hide desires.

Reviewers descended on the Generator in late June and came away happy. The Inquirer invoked matrimony: the "wedding" of a "completely unique" setting with "serious and seriously delicious food" from the "perfectionist" Denise Lambert for a "must-have" experience that "single-handedly" put Philadelphia on the "map of cool." Brian was ecstatic but Denise was not. She thought the language made the place sound crappy and middlebrow. She counted four paragraphs about architecture and decor, three paragraphs about nothing, two about service, one about wine, two about desserts, and only seven about her food.

"They didn't mention my sauerkraut," she said, angry nearly to the point of tears.

The reservation line rang day and night. She needed to work, to work. But Robin called her at midmorning or midafternoon on the executive chef's line, her voice pinched with shyness, her cadences syncopated with embarrassment: "So-I was wondering-do you think-could I see you for a minute?" And instead of saying no, Denise kept saying yes. Kept delegating or delaying sensitive inventory work, tricky preroastings, and necessary phone calls to purveyors to slip away and meet Robin in the nearest strip of park along the Schuylkill. Sometimes they just sat on a bench, discreetly held hands, and, although non-work conversations during work hours made Denise extremely impatient, discussed Robin's guilt and her own dissociated lack of it, and what it meant to be doing what they were doing, how exactly it had come to pass. But soon the talking tapered off. Robin's voice on the executive chef's line came to signify tongue. She didn't say more than a word or two before Denise tuned out. Robin's tongue and lips continued to form the instructions demanded by the day's exigencies, but in Denise's ear they were already speaking that other language of up and down and round and round that her body intuitively understood and autonomously obeyed; sometimes she melted so hard at the sound of this voice that her abdomen caved in and she doubled over; for the next hour-plus there was nothing in the world but tongue, no inventory or buttered pheasants or unpaid purveyors; she left the Generator in a buzzing hypnotized state of poor reflexes, the volume of the world's noise lowered to near zero, other drivers luckily obeying basic traffic laws. Her car was like a tongue gliding down the melty asphalt streets, her feet like twin tongues licking pavement, the front door of the house on Panama Street like a mouth that swallowed her, the Persian runner in the hall outside the master bedroom like a tongue beckoning, the bed in its cloak of comforter and pillows a big soft tongue begging to be depressed, and then.

This was all, safe to say, new territory. Denise had never wanted anything, certainly not sex, like this. Simply coming, when she was married, had come to seem like a laborious but occasionally necessary kitchen chore. She cooked for fourteen hours and routinely fell asleep in street clothes. The last thing she wanted late at night was to follow a complicated and increasingly time-consuming recipe for a dish she was too tired to enjoy in any case. Prep time a minimum fifteen minutes. Even after that, the cooking was seldom straightforward. The pan overheated, the heat was too high, the heat was too low, the onions refused to caramelize or burned immediately and stuck; you had to set the pan aside to cool off, you had to start over after painful discussion with the now angry and anguished sous-chef, and inevitably the meat got tough and stringy, the sauce lost its complexity in the repeated dilutions and deglazings, and it was so fucking late, and your eyes were burning, and OK, with enough time and effort you could fairly reliably get the sucker plated, but by then it was something you might hesitate to serve your floor personnel; you simply bolted it ("OK, there," you thought, "I came") and fell asleep with an ache. And it was so not worth the effort. But she'd made the effort every week or two because her coming mattered to Emile and she felt guilty. Him she could please as adroitly and unfailingly (and, before long, as unthinkingly) as she clarified consomme; and what pride, what pleasure, she took in the exercise of her skills! Emile, however, seemed to believe that without a few shudders and semi-willed sighs on her part the marriage would be in trouble, and although later events proved him one-hundred-percent correct, she couldn't help feeling, in the years before she clapped eyes on Becky Hemerling, enormous guilt and pressure and resentment on the O front.

Robin was pret- -manger. You didn't need a recipe, you didn't need prep, to eat a peach. Here was the peach, boom, here was the payoff. Denise had had intimations of ease like this with Hemerling, but only now, at the age of thirty-two, did she get what all the fuss was about. Once she got it, there was trouble. In August the girls went to camp and Brian went to London, and the executive chef of the hottest new restaurant in the region would get out of a bed only to find herself down on some carpet, would dress only to find herself undressing, would come as close to escape as the entry hall and then find herself coming with her back to the front door; jelly-kneed and slit-eyed, she dragged herself back to a kitchen to which she'd promised to return in forty-five minutes. And this was not good. The restaurant was suffering. There was gridlock on the line, delays on the floor. Twice she had to strike entrees from the menu because the kitchen, doing without her, had run out of prep time. And still she went AWOL in the middle of the second evening rush. She drove through Crack Haven and down Junk Row and past Blunt Alley to the Garden Project, where Robin had a blanket. Most of the garden was mulched and limed and planted now. Tomatoes had grown up inside bald tires outfitted with cylinders of gutter screen. And the searchlights and wing lights of landing jets, and the smog-stunted constellations, and the radium glow from the watch glass of Veterans Stadium, and the heat lightning over Tinicum, and the moon to which filthy Camden had given hepatitis as it rose, all these compromised urban lights were reflected in the skins of adolescent eggplants, young peppers and cukes and sweet corn, pubescent cantaloupes. Denise, naked in the middle of the city, rolled off the blanket into night-cool dirt, a sandy loam, freshly turned. She rested a cheek in it, pushed her Robiny fingers down into it.

"God, stop, stop," Robin squeaked, "that's our new lettuce."

Then Brian was home and they started taking stupid chances. Robin explained to Erin that Denise hadn't felt well and had needed to lie down in the bedroom. There was a feverish episode in the pantry at Panama Street while Brian read E. B. White aloud not twenty feet away. Finally, a week before Labor Day, there came a morning in the director's office at the Garden Project when the weight of two bodies on Robin's antique wooden desk chair snapped its back off. They were laughing when they heard Brian's voice.

Robin jumped up and unlocked the door and opened it in one motion, to conceal that it had been locked. Brian was holding a basket of speckled green erections. He was surprised-but delighted, as always-to see Denise. "What's going on in there?"

Denise knelt by Robin's desk, her shirt untucked. "Robin's chair broke," she said. "I'm licking a take at Robin's chair."

"I asked Denise if she could fix it!" Robin squeaked.

"What are you doing here?" Brian asked Denise, very curious.

"I had the same thought you had," she said. "Zucchini."

"Sara said nobody was here."

Robin was edging away. "I'll go talk to her. She should know when I'm here."

"How did Robin break that?" Brian asked Denise.

"I don't know," she said. She had the bad child's impulse to cry when caught red-handed.

Brian picked up the top half of the chair. He had never specifically reminded Denise of her father, but she was pierced now by the resemblance to Alfred in his intelligent sympathy for the broken object. "This is good oak," he said. "Weird it should just suddenly break."

She rose from her knees and wandered into the hall, stuffing shirt into pants as she went. She kept wandering until she was outside and got into her car. She drove up Bainbridge Street to the river. Pulled up to a galvanized guardrail and killed the engine by letting out the clutch, let the car lurch into the guardrail and bounce back dead, and now, finally, she broke down and cried about the broken chair.

Her head was clearer when she returned to the Generator. She saw that she was in the weeds on every front. There were unanswered phone messages from a food writer at the Times, from an editor at Gourmet, and from the latest restaurateur hoping to steal Brian's chef. A thousand dollars' worth of unrotated duck breasts and veal chops had gone bad in the walk-in. Everybody in the kitchen knew and nobody had told her that a needle had turned up in the employee bathroom. The pastry chef claimed to have left Denise a pair of handwritten notes, presumably salary-related, that Denise had no memory of seeing.

"Why is nobody ordering country ribs?" Denise asked Rob Zito. "Why are the waiters not pushing my phenomenally delicious and unusual country ribs?"

"Americans don't like sauerkraut," Zito said.

"The hell they don't. I've seen my reflection in the plates coming back when people order it. I've counted my eyelashes."

"It's possible we get some German nationals in here," Zito said. "German passport-holders may be responsible for those clean plates."

"Is it possible you don't like sauerkraut yourself?"

"It's an interesting food," Zito said.

She didn't hear from Robin and she didn't call her. She gave the Times an interview and let herself be photographed, she stroked the pastry chef's ego, she stayed late and bagged up the spoiled meats in privacy, she fired the dishwasher who'd tied off in the john, and every lunch and every dinner she dogged the line and troubleshot.

On Labor Day: deadnesexactly it had come tos. She made herself leave her office and went walking in the empty hot city, bending her steps, in her loneliness, toward Panama Street. She had a liquid Pavlovian response when she saw the house. The brownstone facade was still a face, the door still a tongue. Robin's car was in the street but Brian's wasn't; they'd gone to Cape May. Denise rang the bell, although she could already tell, from a dustiness around the door, that nobody was home. She let herself in with the dead-bolt key on which she'd written "R/B." She walked up two flights to the parental bedroom. The house's expensive retrofitted central air conditioner was doing its job, the cool canned-smelling air contending with Labor Day sunbeams. As she lay down on the unmade parental bed, she remembered the smell and the quiet of the St. Judean summer afternoons when she would be left alone in the house and could be, for a couple of hours, as weird as she wanted. She brought herself off. She lay on the snarled sheets, a slice of sunlight falling on her chest. She took a second helping of herself and stretched her arms luxuriantly. Beneath a parental pillow, she scratched her hand on the foil corner of something like a condom wrapper.

It was a condom wrapper. Torn and empty. She actually whimpered as she pictured the penetrative act it attested to. She actually clutched her head.

She scrambled out of the bed and smoothed her dress across her hips. She scanned the sheets for other sickening surprises. Well, of course a married couple had sex. Of course. But Robin had told her that she wasn't on the Pill, she'd said that she and Brian no longer fooled around enough to bother; and all summer long Denise had seen and tasted and smelled no trace of a husband on her lover's body, and so she'd let herself forget the obvious.

She knelt at the wastebasket by Brian's dresser. She stirred Kleenexes, ticket stubs, and segments of floss and found another condom wrapper. Hatred of Robin, hatred and jealousy, were coming on like a migraine. She went into the master-bedroom bathroom and found two more wrappers and a knotted rubber in the can beneath the sink.

She actually hit her temples with her fists. She heard the breath in her teeth as she ran down the stairs and let herself out into the late afternoon. The temperature was ninety and she was shivering. Weirdness, weirdness. She hiked back to the Generator and let herself in at the loading dock. She inventoried oils and cheeses and flours and spices, drew up meticulous order sheets, left twenty voice-mail messages in a wry and articulate and civilized voice, did her e-mail chores, fried herself a kidney on the Garland, chased it with a single shot of grappa, and called a cab at midnight.

Robin showed up in the kitchen unannounced the next morning. She was wearing a big white shirt that appeared to have been Brian's. Denise's stomach flipped at the sight of her. She led her back to the executive chef's office and shut the door.

"I can't do this anymore," Robin said.

"Good, neither can I, so."

Robin's face was all blotch. She scratched her head and scrunched up her nose with tic-like incessancy and pushed on the bridge of her glasses. "I haven't been to church since June," she said. "Sinead's caught me in about ten different lies. She wants to know why you're never around. I don't even know half the kids turning up at the Project lately. Everything's a mess, and I just can't do it anymore."

Denise choked out a question: "How's Brian?"

Robin blushed. "He doesn't know anything. He's the same as always. You know-he likes you, he likes me."

"I bet."

"Things have gotten weird."

"Well, and I've got a lot of work here, so."

"Brian never did anything bad to me. He didn't deserve this."

Denise's phone rang and she let it ring. Her head felt close to cracking open. She couldn't stand to hear Robin say Brian's name.

Robin raised her face to the ceiling, pearls of tear beading in her lashes. "I don't know what I came for. I don't know what I'm saying. I'm just feeling really, really bad and incredibly alone."

"Get over it," Denise said. "That's what I'm going to do."

"Why are you being so cold?"

"Because I'm a cold person."

"If you'd call me, or say you loved me -"

"Get over it! For God's sake! Get over it! Get over it!"

Robin gave her a beseeching look; but really, even if the matter of the condoms were somehow cleared up, what was Denise supposed to do? Quit working at the restaurant that was making her a star? Go live in the ghetto and be one of Sinead and Erin's two mommies? Start wearing big sneakers and cooking vegetarian?

She knew she was telling herself lies, but she didn't know which of the things in her head were the lies and which were the truth. She stared at her desk until Robin yanked open the door and fled.

The next morning the Generator made the front page of the New York Times food section, below the fold. Beneath the headline ("Generating Buzz by the Megawatt") was a photograph of Denise, the interior and exterior architectural shots having been relegated to , where her country ribs and sauerkraut could also be seen. This was better. This was more like it. By noon she'd been offered a guest appearance on the Food Channel and a permanent monthly column in Philadelphia. She bypassed Rob Zito and instructed the reservation girl to start overbooking by forty seats an evening. Gary and Caroline called separately with congratulations. She dressed down Zito for refusing a weekend reservation to the local NBC-affiliate anchorwoman, she let herself abuse him a little bit, it felt good.

Expensive people of a sort formerly scarce in Philadelphia were three-deep at the bar when Brian came by with a dozen roses. He hugged Denise and she lingered in his arms. She gave him a little bit of what men liked.

"We need more tables," she said. "Three fours and a six at a minimum. We need a full-time reservationist who knows how to screen. We need better parking-lot security. We need a pastry chef with more imagination and less attitude. Also think about replacing Rob with somebody from New York who can handle the kind of customer profile we're going to get."

Brian was surprised. "You want to do that to Rob?"

"He wouldn't push my ribs and sauerkraut," Denise said. "The Times liked my ribs and sauerkraut. I say fuck him if he can't do the job."

The hardness in her voice brought a glow to Brian's eyes. He seemed to like her like this.

"Whatever you think," he said.

Late Saturday night she joined Brian and Jerry Schwartz and two cheekboned blondes and the lead singer and the lead guitarist from one of her favorite bands for drinks on the little railed-in aerie that Brian had rigged on the roof of the Generator. The night was warm and the bugs along the river were nearly as loud as the Schuylkill Expressway. Both blondes were talking on their phones. Denise accepted a cigarette from the guitarist, who was hoarse from a gig, and let him examine her scars.

"Holy shit, your hands are worse than mine."

"The job," she said, "consists of tolerating pain."

"Cooks do notoriously abuse their substances."

"I like a drink at midnight," she said. "Two Tylenols when I get up at six."

"Nobody's tougher than Denise," Brian bragged unattractively over the antennae of the blondes.

The guitarist responded by sticking his tongue out, holding his cigarette like an eyedropper, and lowering the coal into the glistening cleft. The sizzle was loud enough to distract the blondes from their phoning. The taller one squealed and spoke the guitarist's name and said he was insane.

"Well, but I'm wondering what substances you've ingested," Denise said.

The guitarist applied cold vodka directly to the burn. The taller blonde, unhappy with his performance, answered, "Klonopin and Jameson's and whatever that is now."

"Well, and a tongue is wet," Denise said, extinguishing her own cigarette on the tender skin behind her ear. She felt like she'd taken a bullet in the head, but she flicked the dead cigarette toward the river casually.

The aerie got very quiet. Her weirdness was showing as she didn't use to let it show. Because she didn't have to-because she could have trimmed a rack of lamb now or had a conversation with her mother-she produced a strangled scream, a comical sound, to reassure her audience.

"Are you OK?" Brian asked her later in the parking lot.

"I've burned myself worse by accident."

"No, I mean are you OK? That was a little scary to watch."

"You're the one who bragged about my toughness, thanks."

"I'm trying to say I feel bad about that."

She was awake in pain all night.

A week later she and Brian hired the former manager of the Union Square Cafe and fired Rob Zito.

A week after that the mayor of Philadelphia, the junior senator from New Jersey, the CEO of the W-- Corporation, and Jodie Foster were in the restaurant.

A week after that, Brian took Denise home after work and she invited him inside. Over the same fifty-dollar wine she'd once served his wife, he asked if she and Robin had had a falling-out.

Denise pursed her lips and shook her head. "I've just gotten very busy."

"That's what I thought. I figured it didn't have anything to do with you. Robin's pissed off with everything lately. Especially with anything that has to do with me."

"I miss hanging out with the girls," Denise said.

"Believe me, they miss you," Brian said. He added, with a slight stammer, "I'm-thinking of moving out."

Denise said she was sorry to hear it.

"The sackcloth business is out of control," he said, pouring. "She's been going to nightly mass for the last three weeks. I didn't even know there was such a thing. And I literally can't say a word about the Generator without setting off an explosion. She, meanwhile, is talking about home-schooling the girls. She's decided our house is too big. She wants to move into the Project house and home-school the girls and maybe a couple of the Project kids. `Rasheed'? `Marilou'? Which, what a great place for Sinead and Erin to grow up, a brownfield in Point Breeze. We're verging over into the loony, a little bit. I mean, Robin is great. She believes in better things than I believe in. I'm just not sure I love her anymore. I feel like I'm arguing with Nicky Passafaro. It's Class Hatred II, the Sequel."

"Robin is full of guilt," Denise said.

"She's verging on being an irresponsible parent."

Denise found breath to ask: "Would you want to take the girls, if it came to that?"

Brian shook his head. "I'm not sure, if it came to that, that Robin would actually want custody. I could see her giving up everything."

"Don't bet on it."

Denise thought of Robin brushing Sinead's hair and suddenly-keenly, terribly-missed her crazy yearnings, her excesses and accesses, her innocence. A switch was flipped and Denise's brain became a passive screen on which was projected a highlight reel of all that was excellent in the person she'd driven away. She reappreciated the least of Robin's habits and gestures and distinguishing marks, her preference for scalded milk in her coffee, and the off-color cap on the front tooth that her brother had broken with a rock, and the way she put her head down like a goat and butted Denise with love.

Denise, pleading exhaustion, made Brian leave. Early the next morning a tropical depression slid up the seaboard, a humid hurricane-like disturbance that set trees thrashing moodily and water spilling over curbs. Denise left the Generator in the hands of her sous and took the train to New York to bail out her feckless brother and entertain her parents. In the stress of lunch, as Enid repeated verbatim her narrative of Norma Greene, Denise didn't notice any change in herself. She had a still-working old self, a Version 3.2 or a Version 4.0, that deplored the deplorable in Enid and loved the lovable in Alfred. Not until she was at the pier and her mother kissed her and a quite different Denise, a Version 5.0, nearly put her tongue in the pretty old woman's mouth, nearly ran her hands down Enid's hips and thighs, nearly caved in and promised to come at Christmas for as long as Enid wanted, did the extent of the correction she was undergoing reveal itself.

She sat on a southbound train while rain-glazed local platforms flashed by at intercity speed. Her father at the lunch table had looked insane. And if he was losing his mind, it was possible that Enid had not been exaggerating her difficulties with him, possible that Alfred really was a mess who pulled himself together for his children, possible that Enid wasn't entirely the embarrassing nag and pestilence that Denise for twenty years had made her out to be, possible that Alfred's problems went deeper than having the wrong wife, possible that Enid's problems did not go much deeper than having the wrong husband, possible that Denise was more like Enid than she had ever dreamed. She listened to the pa-thum-pa-thum-pa-thump of wheels on track and watched the October sky darken. There might have been hope for her if she could have stayed on the train, but it was a short ride to Philly, and then she was back at work and had no time to think about anything until she went to the Axon road show with Gary and surprised herself by defending not only Alfred but Enid as well in the arguments that followed.

She could not remember a time when she had loved her mother.

She was soaking in her bathtub around nine o'clock that night when Brian called and invited her to dinner with him and Jerry Schwartz, Mira Sorvino, Stanley Tucci, a Famous American Director, a Famous British Author, and other luminaries. The Famous Director had just finished shooting a film in Camden, and Brian and Schwartz had roped him into a private screening of Crime and Punishment and Rock and Roll.

"It's my night off," Denise said.

"Martin says he'll send his driver," Brian said. "I'd be grateful if you came. My marriage is over."

She put on a black cashmere dress, ate a banana to avoid seeming hungry at dinner, and rode with the director's driver up to Tacconelli's, the storefront pizzeria in Kensington. A dozen famous and semifamous people, plus Brian and the simian, round-shouldered Jerry Schwartz, had taken over three tables at the rear. Denise kissed Brian on the mouth and sat down between him and the Famous British Author, who appeared to have an evening's worth of cricket-and darts-related wit with which he wished to regale Mira Sorvino. The Famous Director told Denise he'd had her country ribs and sauerkraut and loved them, but she changed the subject as fast as she could. She was clearly there as Brian's date; the movie people weren't interested in either of them. She put her hand on Brian's knee, as if consolingly.

"Raskolnikov in headphones, listening to Trent Reznor while he whacks the old lady, is so perfect," the very least famous person at the table, a college-age intern of the director, gushed to Jerry Schwartz.

"Actually, it's the Nomatics," Schwartz corrected with devastating lack of condescension.

"Not Nine Inch Nails?"

Schwartz lowered his eyelids and shook his head minimally. "Nomatics, 1980, `Held in Trust.' Later covered with insufficient attribution by that person whose name you just mentioned."

"Everybody steals from the Nomatics," Brian said.

"They suffered on the cross of obscurity so that others might enjoy eternal fame," Schwartz said.

"What's their best record?"

"Give me your address, I'll make you a CD," Brian said. "It's all brilliant," Schwartz said, "until `Thorazine Sunrise.' That was when Tom Paquette quit, but the band didn't realize it was dead until two albums later. Somebody had to break that news to them."

"I suppose that a country that teaches creationism in its schools," the Famous British Author remarked to Mira Sorvino, "may be forgiven for believing that baseball does not derive from cricket."

It occurred to Denise that Stanley Tucci had directed and starred in her favorite restaurant movie. She happily talked shop with him, resenting the beautiful Sorvino a little less and enjoying, if not the company itself, then at least her own lack of intimidation by it.

Brian drove her home from Tacconelli's in his Volvo. She felt entitled and attractive and well aerated and alive. Brian, however, was angry.

"Robin was supposed to be there," he said. "I guess you could call it an ultimatum. But she'd agreed to go to dinner with us. She was going to take some tiny, minimal interest in what I'm doing with my life, even if I knew she'd deliberately dress like a grad student to make me uncomfortable and prove her point. And then I was going to spend next Saturday at the Project. That was the agreement. And then this morning she decides she's going to march against the death penalty instead. I'm no fan of the death penalty. But Khellye Withers is not my idea of a poster boy for leniency. And a promise is a promise. I didn't see that one fewer candle in the candlelight vigil was going to make much difference. I said she could miss one march for my sake. I said, why don't I write a check to the ACLU, whatever size you want. Which didn't go over so well."

"Writing checks, no, not good," Denise said.

"I realized that. But things got said that are going to be hard to unsay. I frankly don't have a lot of interest in unsaying them."

"You never know," Denise said.

Washington Avenue between the river and Broad was lonely at eleven on a Monday evening. Brian appeared to be experiencing his first real disappointment in life, and he couldn't stop talking. "Remember when you said if I weren't married and you weren't my employee?"

"I remember."

"Does that still hold?"

"Let's go in and have a drink," Denise said.

Which was how Brian came to be sleeping in her bed at nine-thirty the next morning when her doorbell rang.

She was still full of the alcohol that had fueled completion of the picture of weirdness and moral chaos that her life seemed bent on being. Beneath her soddenness, though, an agreeable fizz of celebrity lingered from the night before. It was stronger than anything she felt for Brian.

The doorbell rang again. She got up and put on a maroon silk robe and looked out the window. Robin Passafaro was standing on the stoop. Brian's Volvo was parked across the street.

Denise considered not answering the door, but Robin wouldn't be looking for her here if she hadn't already tried the Generator.

"It's Robin," she said. "Stay here and be quiet."

Brian in the morning light still wore his pissed-off expression of the night before. "I don't care if she knows I'm here."

"Yeah, but I do."

"Well, my car's right across the street."

"I'm aware of that."

She, too, felt strangely pissed off with Robin. All summer, betraying Brian, she'd never felt anything like the contempt she felt for his wife as she descended the stairs now. Annoying Robin, stubborn Robin, screeching Robin, hooting Robin, styleless Robin, clueless Robin.

And yet, the moment she opened the door, her body recognized what it wanted. It wanted Brian on the street and Robin in her bed.

Robin's teeth were chattering, though the morning wasn't cold. "Can I come in?"

"I'm about to go to work," Denise said.

"Five minutes," Robin said.

It seemed impossible that she hadn't seen the pistachio-colored wagon across the street. Denise let her into the front hall and closed the door.

"My marriage is over," Robin said. "He didn't even come home last night."

"I'm sorry."

"I've been praying for my marriage, but I get distracted by the thought of you. I'm kneeling in church and I start thinking about your body."

Dread settled on Denise. She didn't exactly feel guilty-the egg timer on an ailing marriage had run out; at worst she'd hurried the clock along-but she was sorry that she'd wronged this person, sorry she'd competed. She took Robin's hands and said, "I want to see you and I want to talk to you. I don't like what's happened. But I have to go to work now."

The telephone rang in the living room. Robin bit her lip and nodded. "OK."

"Can we meet at two?" Denise said.

"OK."

"I'll call you from work."

Robin nodded again. Denise let her out and shut the door and released five breaths' worth of air.

"Denise, it's Gary, I don't know where you are, but call me when you get this, there's been an accident, Dad fell off the cruise ship, he fell about eight stories, I just talked to Mom-"

She ran to the phone and picked up. "Gary."

"I tried you at work."

"Is he alive?"

"Well, he shouldn't be," Gary said. "But he is."

Gary was at his best in emergencies. The qualities that had infuriated her the day before were a comfort now. She wanted him to know it all. She wanted him to sound pleased with his own calm.

"They apparently towed him for a mile in forty-five-degree water before the ship could stop," Gary said. "They've got a helicopter coming to take him to New Brunswick. But his back is not broken. His heart is still working. He's able to speak. He's a tough old guy. He could be fine."

"How's Mom?"

"She's concerned that the cruise is being delayed while the helicopter comes. Other people are being inconvenienced."

Denise laughed with relief. "Poor Mom. She wanted this cruise so badly."

"Well, I'm afraid her cruising days with Dad are over."

The doorbell rang again. Immediately there was a pounding on the door as well, a pounding and a kicking.

"Gary, hang on one second."

"What's going on?"

"Let me call you right back."

The doorbell rang so long and hard it changed its tone, went flat and a little hoarse. She opened the door to a trembling mouth and eyes bright with hatred.

"Get out of my way," Robin said, "because I don't want to touch any part of you."

"I made a really bad mistake last night."

"Get out of my way!"

Denise stood aside, and Robin headed up the stairs. Denise sat in the only chair in her penitential living room and listened to the shouting. She was struck by how seldom in her childhood her parents, that other married couple in her life, that other incompatible pair, had shouted at each other. They'd held their peace and let the proxy war unfold inside their daughter's head.

Whenever she was with Brian she would pine for Robin's body and sincerity and good works and be repelled by Brian's smug coolness, and whenever she was with Robin she would pine for Brian's good taste and like-mindedness and wish that Robin would notice how sensational she looked in black cashmere.

Easy for you guys, she thought. You can split in two.

The shouting stopped. Robin came running down the stairs and went on out the front door without slowing.

Brian followed a few minutes later. Denise had expected Robin's disapproval and could handle it, but from Brian she was hoping for a word of understanding.

"You're fired," he said.

________

FROM: Denise3@cheapnet.com TO: exprof@gaddisfly.com SUBJECT: Let's maybe try a little harder next time _______________________________________

Lovely to see you on Saturday. I really appreciated your effort to hurry back and help me out.

Since then, Dad's fallen off the cruise ship and been pulled out of icy water with a broken arm, a dislocated shoulder, a detached retina, short-term memory loss, and possibly a mild stroke, he and Mom have been helicoptered to New Brunswick, I've been fired from the best job I may ever have, and Gary and I have learned about a new medical technology that I feel certain you would agree is horrifying and dystopic and malignant except that it's good for Parkinson's and can maybe help Dad.

Other than that, not much to report.

Hope all's well wherever the fuck you are. Julia says Lithuania and expects me to believe it.

FROM: exprof@gaddisfly.com TO: Denise3@cheapnet.com SUBJECT: Re: &rdsquo; Let's maybe try a little harder next time&ldsquo;

________________________________________

Business opportunity in Lithuania. Julia's husband, Gitanas, is paying me to produce a profit-making website. It's actually a lot of fun and not unlucrative.

All your favorite high-school groups are on the radio here. Smiths, New Order, Billy Idol. A blast from the past. I saw an old man kill a horse with a shotgun on a street near the airport. I'd been on Baltic soil for maybe fifteen minutes. Welcome to Lithuania!

Talked to Mom this morning, got the whole story, made my apologies, so don't worry about that.

I'm sorry about your job. To be honest, I'm stunned. I can't believe anyone would fire you.

Where are you working now?

FROM: Denise3@cheapnet.com TO: exprof@gaddisfly.com SUBJECT: Holiday responsibilities ________________________________________

Mom says you won't commit to coming home for Christmas, and she expects me to believe it. But I'm thinking no way could you talk to a woman who's just had the highlight of her year truncated by an accident, and who otherwise has a shitty life with a semi-disabled man, and who hasn't gotten to be at home for Christmas since like Dan Quayle's vice presidency, and who *survives* by looking forward to things, and who loves Christmas the way other people love sex, and who's seen you for all of forty-five minutes in the last three years: I'm thinking no way could you have told this woman, nope, sorry, staying in Vilnius.

(Vilnius!)

Mom must have misunderstood you. Please clarify.

Since you ask, I'm not working anywhere. Subbing a little at Mare Scuro but otherwise sleeping until two in the afternoon. If this continues, I may have to do some therapeutic thing of the sort that will horrify you. Got to regain my appetite for shopping and other non-free consumer pleasures.

The last thing I heard about Gitanas Misevicious was that he'd given Julia two black eyes. But whatever.

FROM: exprof@gaddisfly.com TO: Denise3@cheapnet.com SUBJECT: Re: &ldqu; Holiday responsibilities _______________________________________

I intend to get to St. Jude as soon as I make some money. Maybe even by Dad's birthday. But Christmas is hell, you know that. There's no worse time. You can tell Mom I'll come early in the new year.

Mom says that Caroline and the boys will be in St. Jude for Christmas. Can this be true?

Don't not take a psychotropic on my account.

FROM: Denise3@cheapnet.com TO: exprof@gaddisfly.com SUBJECT: "The only thing I hurt was my dignity"

________________________________________

Nice try, but no, sorry, I insist that you come for Christmas.

I've been talking to Axon, and the plan is to give Dad six months of Corecktall beginning right after New Year's, and to let him and Mom stay with me while that's going on. (Helpfully, my life is in ruins, so it's easy to make myself available.) The only way this scenario won't happen is if Axon's medical staff decides that Dad has non-drug-related dementia. He admittedly seemed pretty shaky when he was in New York, but he's been sounding good on the phone. "All I hurt when I fell was my dignity," etc. They took the cast off his arm a week early.

Anyway, he's probably going to be with me in Philly for his birthday, and for the rest of the winter and spring too, and so Christmas is the time for you to come to St. Jude, and so please don't argue with me anymore, just do it.

I eagerly (but with confidence) await confirmation that you will be there.

P. S. Caroline, Aaron, and Caleb are not coming. Gary's coming with Jonah and flying back to Philly at noon on the 25th.

P. P. S. Don't worry, I say NO to drugs.

FROM: exprof@gaddisfly.com TO: Denise3@cheapnet.com SUBJECT: Re: "The only thing I hurt was my dignity"

_______________________________________

I saw a man shot six times in the stomach last night. A paid hit in a club called Musmiryte. It had nothing to do with us, but I wasn't happy to see it.

It's not clear to me why I'm required to come to St. Jude on some specific date. If Mom and Dad were my children, whom I'd created out of nothing without asking their permission, I could understand being responsible for them. Parents have an overwhelming Darwinian hard-wired genetic stake in their children's welfare. But children, it seems to me, have no corresponding debt to their parents.

Basically, I have very little to say to these people. And I don't think they want to hear what I do have to say.

Why don't I plan to see them when they're in Philadelphia? That sounds more fun anyway. That way all nine of us can get together, instead of just six of us.

FROM: Denise3@cheapnet.com TO: exprof@gaddisfly.com SUBJECT: A serious flaming from your pissed-off sister _______________________________________

My god you sound self-pitying.

I'm saying come for MY sake. For MY sake. And also for YOUR OWN sake, because I'm sure it's very cool and interesting and adult-feeling to watch somebody get shot in the stomach, but you only have two parents, and if you miss your time with them now you won't get another chance.

I'll admit it: I'm a mess.

I will tell you-because I want to tell someone-even though you never told me why YOU got fired-that I was fired for sleeping with my boss's wife.

So, what do you think * I* have to say to "these people"? What do you think my little Sunday chats with Mom are like these days?

You owe me $20,500. How's THAT for a debt?

Buy the fucking ticket. I'll reimburse you.

I love you and I miss you. Don't ask me why.

FROM: Denise3@cheapnet.com TO: exprof@gaddisfly.com SUBJECT: Remorse _______________________________________

I'm sorry I flamed you. The last line is the only one I meant. I don't have the right temperament for e-mail. Please write back. Please come for Christmas.

FROM: Denise3@cheapnet.com TO: exprof@gaddisfly.com SUBJECT: Worry _______________________________________

Please, please, please don't talk about people getting shot and then do the silence thing to me.

FROM: Denise3@cheapnet.com TO: exprof@gaddisfly.com SUBJECT: Only six more shopping days before Christmas!

_______________________________________

Chip? Are you there? Please write or call.

Global Warming Enhances Value of Lithuania Incorporated VILNIUS, OCTOBER 30. With world ocean levels rising by more than an inch per year and millions of cubic meters of ocean beach eroded daily, the European Council on Natural Resources this week warned that Europe could face "catastrophic" shortages of sand and gravel by the end of the decade.

"Throughout history, mankind has regarded sand and gravel as inexhaustible resources," said ECNR chairman Jacques Dormand. "Sadly, our overreliance on greenhouse-gas-producing fossil fuels will leave many central European countries, including Germany, at the mercy of sand-and-gravel cartel states, particularly sand-rich Lithuania, if they wish to continue with basic road-building and construction."

Gitanas R. Misevicius, founder and CEO of Lithuania's Free Market Party Company, compared the impending European sand-and-gravel crisis to the oil crisis of 1973. "Back then," Misevicius said, "tiny oil-rich countries like Bahrain and Brunei were the mice that roared. Tomorrow, Lithuania."

Chairman Dormand described the pro-Western, pro-business Free Market Party Company as "currently the only political movement in Lithuania willing to deal fairly and responsibly with Western capital markets.

"Our misfortune," Dormand said, "is that most of Europe's reserve sand-and-gravel capacity is in the hands of Baltic nationalists beside whom Muammar Gadhafi looks like Charles de Gaulle. I scarcely exaggerate in saying that the future economic stability of the EC is in the hands of a few brave Eastern capitalists like Mr. Misevicius. . ."

The beauty of the Internet was that Chip could post whole-cloth fabrications without troubling to check even his spelling. Reliability on the Web was ninety-eight percent a function of how slick and cool your site looked. Although Chip personally wasn't fluent in Web, he was an American under forty, and Americans under forty were exquisite judges of what was slick and cool and what was not. He and Gitanas went to a pub called Prie Universiteto and hired five young Lithuanians in Phish and R. E. M. T-shirts for thirty dollars a day plus millions of worthless stock options, and for a month Chip rode these slang-slinging Webheads mercilessly. He made them study American sites like nbci.com and Oracle. He told them to do it like this, to make it look like this.

Lithuania.com was officially launched on November 5. A high-res banner-DEMOCRACY PAYS HANDSOME DIVIDENDS-unfurled to the accompaniment of sixteen joyful bars of the "Dance of the Coachmen and Grooms" in Petrushka. Side by side, in a rich blue graphical space below the banner, were a black-and-white Before picture ("Socialist Vilnius") of shell-scarred facades and shattered lindens on the Gedimino Prospektas and a luscious color After photograph ("Free-Market Vilnius") of a honey-lit harborside development of boutiques and bistros. (The development was actually in Denmark.) For a week Chip and Gitanas had stayed up late drinking beer and composing the other pages, which promised investors the various eponyms and inseminatory privileges from Gitanas's original bitter posting and also, according to the level of financial commitment, * - time-shares in ministerial beachside villas at Palanga!

* - pro rata mineral rights and logging rights to all national parklands!

* - appointment of selected local magistrates and judges!

* - blanket 24-hour-a-day parking privileges in perpetuity in the Old City of Vilnius!

* -fifty-percent discount on selected rentals of Lithuanian national troops and armaments on a sign-up basis, except during wartime!

* - no-hassle adoptions of Lithuanian girl babies!

* - discretionary immunity from left-turn-on-red prohibitions!

* - inclusion of the investor's likeness on commemorative stamps, collector's-item coins, microbrewery beer labels, bas-relief chocolate-covered Lithuanian cookies, Heroic Leader trading cards, printed wrapping tissue for holiday clementines, etc.!

* - honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Vilnius University, founded in 1578!

* - "no-questions-asked" access to wiretaps and other state-security apparatus!

* - the legally enforceable right, whilst on Lithuanian soil, to such titles and honorifics as "Your Lordship" and "Your Ladyship" and "Your Grace," with non-use by service personnel punishable by public flogging and up to sixty days in jail!

* - last-minute "bumping" privileges for train and plane seats, reserved-seating cultural events, and table reservations at participating five-star restaurants and nightclubs!

* - "top-of-the-list" priority for liver, heart, and cornea transplants at Vilnius's famed Antakalnis Hospital!

* - no-limit hunting and fishing licenses, plus off-season privileges in national game reserves!

* - your name in block letters on the side of large boats!

* - etc., etc.!

The lesson that Gitanas had learned and that Chip was now learning was that the more patently satirical the promises, the lustier the influx of American capital. Day after day Chip churned out press releases, make-believe financial statements, earnest tracts arguing the Hegelian inevitability of a nakedly commercial politics, gushing eyewitness accounts of Lithuania's boom-economy-in-the-making, slow-pitch questions in online investment chat rooms, and line-drive-home-run answers. If he got flamed for his lies or his ignorance, he simply moved to another chat room. He wrote text for the stock certificates and for the accompanying brochure ("Congratulations-You Are Now a Free-Market Patriot of Lithuania") and had them sumptuously printed on cotton-rich stock. He felt as if, finally, here in the realm of pure fabrication, he'd found his metier. Exactly as Melissa Paquette had promised him long ago, it was a gas to start a company, a gas to see the money flowing in.

A reporter for USA Today e-mailed to ask: "Is this for real?"

Chip e-mailed back: "It's for real. The for-profit nation-state, with a globally dispersed citizenry of shareholders, is the next stage in the evolution of political economy. `Enlightened neotechnofeudalism' is blossoming in Lithuania. Come see for yourself. I can guarantee you a minimum ninety minutes' face time with G. Misevicius."

There was no reply from USA Today. Chip worried that he'd overplayed his hand; but weekly gross receipts were topping forty thousand dollars. The money came in the form of bank drafts, credit-card numbers, e-cash encryption keys, wire transfers to Credit Suisse, and hundred-dollar bills in airmail envelopes. Gitanas plowed much of the money into his ancillary enterprises, but, per agreement, he did double Chip's salary as profits rose.

Chip was living rent-free in the stucco villa where the commander of the Soviet garrison had once eaten pheasants and drunk Gewurztraminers and chatted with Moscow on secure phone links. The villa had been stoned and looted and tagged with triumphant graffiti in the fall of 1990, and had then stood derelict until the VIPPPAKJRIINPB17 was voted out of power and Gitanas was recalled from the UN. Gitanas had been attracted to the shattered villa by its unbeatable price (it was free), by its outstanding security arrangements (including an armored tower and a U. S.-embassy-quality fence), and by the opportunity to sleep in the bedroom of the very commander who'd had him tortured for six months in the old Soviet barracks next door. Gitanas and other Party members had worked weekends with trowels and scrapers to restore the villa, but the Party had disbanded altogether before the job was finished. Now half the rooms stood vacant, the floors splashed with broken glass. As throughout the Old City, heat and hot water originated at a mammoth Central Boiler Facility and dissipated much vigor in the long trip, via buried pipes and leaky risers, to the showers and radiators of the villa. Gitanas had set up offices for the Free Market Party Company in the former grand ballroom, claimed the master bedroom for himself, installed Chip in the former aide-de-camp's suite on the third floor, and let the young Webheads crash where they pleased.

Although Chip was still paying the rent on his New York apartment and the monthly minimum on his Visa bills, he felt agreeably affluent in Vilnius. He ordered from the top of menus, shared his booze and cigarettes with those less fortunate, and never looked at the prices in the natural food store near the university where he bought his groceries.

True to Gitanas's word, there were plenty of underage girls in heavy makeup available at the bars and pizzerias, but by leaving New York and escaping from "The Academy Purple," Chip seemed to have lost his need to fall in love with adolescent strangers. Twice a week he and Gitanas visited the Club Metropol and, after a massage and before a sauna, had their needs efficiently gratified on the Metropol's indifferently clean foam cushions. Most of the Metropol's female clinicians were in their thirties and led daytime lives that revolved around child care, or parent care, or the university's International Journalism program, or the making of art in political hues that nobody would buy. Chip was surprised by how willing these women were, while they dressed and fixed their hair, to speak to him like a human being. He was struck by how much pleasure they seemed to take in their daytime lives, how blah their night work was by contrast, how altogether meaningless; and since he himself had begun to take active pleasure in his daytime work, he became, with each therapeutic (trans) act(ion) on the massage mat, a little more adept at putting his body in its place, at putting sex in its place, at understanding what love was and wasn't. With each prepaid ejaculation he rid himself of another ounce of the hereditary shame that had resisted fifteen years of sustained theoretical attack. What remained was a gratitude that he expressed in the form of two hundred percent tips. At two or three in the morning, when the city lay oppressed by a darkness that seemed to have fallen weeks earlier, he and Gitanas returned to the villa through high-sulfur smoke and snow or fog or drizzle.

Gitanas was Chip's real love in Vilnius. Chip particularly liked how much Gitanas liked him. Everywhere the two men went, people asked if they were brothers, but the truth was that Chip felt less like a sibling of Gitanas than like his girlfriend. He felt much like Julia: perpetually feted, lavishly treated, and almost wholly dependent on Gitanas for favors and guidance and basic necessities. He sang for his supper, like Julia. He was a valued employee, a vulnerable and delightful American, an object of amusement and indulgence and even mystery; and what a great pleasure it was, for a change, to be the pursued one-to have qualities and attributes that somebody else so wanted.

All in all, he found Vilnius a lovely world of braised beef and cabbage and potato pancakes, of beer and vodka and tobacco, of comradeship, subversive enterprise, and pussy. He liked a climate and a latitude that substantially dispensed with daylight. He could sleep extremely late and still rise with the sun, and very soon after breakfast the time came for an evening pick-me-up of coffee and a cigarette. His was partly a student life (he'd always loved a student life) and partly a life in the fast lane of dot-com start-ups. From a distance of four thousand miles, everything he'd left behind in the U. S. looked manageably small-his parents, his debts, his failures, his loss of Julia. He felt so much better on the work front and sex front and friendship front that for a while he forgot what misery tasted like. He resolved to stay in Vilnius until he'd earned enough money to pay down his debts to Denise and to his credit-card issuers. He believed that as few as six months would suffice for this.

How wholly typical it was of his luck, then, that before he could enjoy even two good months in Vilnius, both his father and Lithuania fell apart.

Denise in her e-mails had been hectoring Chip about Alfred's health and insisting that Chip come to St. Jude for Christmas, but a trip home in December held little attraction. He suspected that if he abandoned the villa, even for a week, something stupid would prevent him from returning. A spell would be broken, a magic lost. But Denise, who was the steadiest person he knew, finally sent him an e-mail in which she sounded downright desperate. Chip skimmed the message before he realized that he shouldn't have looked at it at all, because it named the sum he owed her. The misery whose taste he thought he'd forgotten, the troubles that had seemed small from a distance, filled his head again.

He deleted the e-mail and immediately regretted it. He had a dreamlike semi-memory of the phrase fired for sleeping with my boss's wife. But this was such an unlikely phrase, coming from Denise, and his eye had brushed over it so quickly, that he couldn't fully credit the memory. If his sister was on her way out as a lesbian (which, come to think of it, would make sense of several aspects of Denise that had always puzzled him), then she could certainly now use the support of her Foucaultian older brother, but Chip wasn't ready to go home yet, and so he assumed that his memory had deceived him and that her phrase had referred to something else.

He smoked three cigarettes, dissolving his anxiety in rationalizations and counteraccusations and a fresh resolve to stay in Lithuania until he could pay his sister the $20,500 that he owed her. If Alfred lived with Denise until June, this meant that Chip could stay in Lithuania for another six months and still keep his promise of an all-family reunion in Philadelphia.

Lithuania, unfortunately, was rattling down the road toward anarchy.

Through October and November, despite the global financial crisis, a veneer of normalcy had adhered to Vilnius. Farmers still brought to market poultry and livestock for which they were paid in litai that they then spent on Russian gasoline, on domestic beer and vodka, on stonewashed jeans and Spice Girls sweatshirts, on pirated X Files videos imported from economies even sicker than Lithuania's. The truckers who distributed the gasoline and the workers who distilled the vodka and the kerchiefed old women who sold the Spice Girls sweatshirts out of wooden carts all bought the farmers' beef and chicken. The land produced, the litai circulated, and in Vilnius, at least, the pubs and clubs stayed open late.

But the economy wasn't simply local. You could give litai to the Russian petroleum exporter who supplied your country with gasoline, but this exporter was within his rights to ask which Lithuanian goods or services, exactly, he might care to spend his litai on. It was easy to buy litai at the official rate of four per dollar. Hard, however, to buy a dollar for four litai! In a familiar paradox of depression, goods became scarce because there were no buyers. The harder it was to find aluminum foil or ground beef or motor oil, the more tempting it became to hijack truckloads of these commodities or to muscle in on their distribution. Meanwhile public servants (notably the police) continued to draw fixed salaries of irrelevant litai. The underground economy soon learned to price a precinct captain as unerringly as it priced a box of lightbulbs.

Chip was struck by the broad similarities between black-market Lithuania and free-market America. In both countries, wealth was concentrated in the hands of a few; any meaningful distinction between private and public sectors had disappeared; captains of commerce lived in a ceaseless anxiety that drove them to expand their empires ruthlessly; ordinary citizens lived in ceaseless fear of being fired and ceaseless confusion about which powerful private interest owned which formerly public institution on any given day; and the economy was fueled largely by the elite's insatiable demand for luxury. (In Vilnius, by November of that dismal autumn, five criminal oligarchs were responsible for employing thousands of carpenters, bricklayers, craftsmen, cooks, prostitutes, barkeeps, auto mechanics, and bodyguards.) The main difference between America and Lithuania, as far as Chip could see, was that in America the wealthy few subdued the unwealthy many by means of mind-numbing and soul-killing entertainments and gadgetry and pharmaceuticals, whereas in Lithuania the powerful few subdued the unpowerful many by threatening violence.

It warmed his Foucaultian heart, in a way, to live in a land where property ownership and the control of public discourse were so obviously a matter of who had the guns.

The Lithuanian with the most guns was an ethnic Russian named Victor Lichenkev, who had parlayed the cash liquidity of his heroin and Ecstasy near-monopoly into absolute control of the Bank of Lithuania after the bank's previous owner, FrendLeeTrust of Atlanta, had catastrophically misjudged consumer appetite for its Dilbert MasterCards. Victor Lichenkev's cash reserves enabled him to arm a five-hundred-man private "constabulary" which in October boldly surrounded the Chernobyl-type nuclear reactor at Ignalina, 120 kilometers northeast of Vilnius, that supplied three-quarters of the nation's electricity. The siege gave Lichenkev excellent leverage in negotiating his purchase of the country's largest utility from the rival oligarch who himself had bought it on the cheap during the great privatization. Overnight, Lichenkev gained control of every litas flowing from every electric meter in the country; but, fearing that his Russian heritage might provoke nationalist animosity, he took care not to abuse his new power. As a gesture of goodwill, he slashed electricity prices by the fifteen percent that the previous oligarch had been overcharging. On the resulting wave of popularity, he chartered a new political party (the Cheap Power for the People Party) and fielded a slate of parliamentary candidates for the mid-December national elections.

And still the land produced and the litai circulated. A slasher flick called Moody Fruit opened at the Lietuva and the Vingis. Lithuanian drolleries issued from Jennifer Aniston's mouth on Friends. City workers emptied concrete-clad garbage receptacles on the square outside St. Catherine's. But every day was darker and shorter than the day before.

As a global player, Lithuania had been fading since the death of Vytautas the Great in 1430. For six hundred years the country was passed around among Poland, Prussia, and Russia like a much-recycled wedding present (the leatherette ice bucket; the salad tongs). The country's language and a memory of better times survived, but the main fact about Lithuania was that it wasn't very large. In the twentieth century, the Gestapo and SS could liquidate 200,000 Lithuanian Jews and the Soviets could deport another quarter-million citizens to Siberia without attracting undue international attention.

Gitanas Misevicius came from a family of priests and soldiers and bureaucrats near the Belorussian border. His paternal grandfather, a local judge, had failed a Q&A session with the new Communist administrators in 1940 and had been sent to the gulag, along with his wife, and never heard from again. Gitanas's father owned a pub in Vidiskes and gave aid and comfort to the partisan resistance movement (the so-called Forest Brothers) until hostilities ceased in '53.

A year after Gitanas was born, Vidiskes and eight surrounding municipalities were emptied by the puppet government to clear the way for the first of two nuclear power plants. The fifteen thousand people thus displaced ("for reasons of safety") were offered housing in a brand-new, fully modern small city, Khrushchevai, that had been erected hastily in the lake country west of Ignalina.

"Kind of bleak-looking, all cinderblock, no trees," Gitanas told Chip. "My dad's new pub had a cinderblock bar, cinderblock booths, cinderblock shelves. The socialist planned economy in Belorussia had made too many cinderblocks and was giving them away for nothing. Or so we were told. Anyway, we all move in. We got our cinderblock beds and our cinderblock playground equipment and our cinderblock park benches. The years go by, I'm ten years old, and suddenly everybody's mom or dad's got lung cancer. I mean everybody's. Well, and then my dad's got a lung tumor, and finally the authorities come and take a look at Khrushchevai, and lo and behold, we got a radon problem. Serious radon problem. Really fucking disastrous radon problem, actually. Because it turns out those cinderblocks are mildly radioactive! And radon is pooling in every closed room in Khrushchevai. Especially rooms like a pub, with not a lot of air, where the owner sits all day and smokes cigarettes. Like for instance my dad does. Well, Belorussia, which is our sister socialist republic (and which, by the way, we Lithuanians used to own), Belorussia says it's really sorry. There must have somehow been some pitchblende in those cinderblocks, says Belorussia. Big mistake. Sorry, sorry, sorry. So we all move out of Khrushchevai, and my dad dies, horribly, at ten minutes after midnight on the day after his wedding anniversary, because he doesn't want my mom remembering his death on their wedding date, and then thirty years go by, and Gorbachev steps down, and finally we get to take a look in those old archives, and what do you know? There was no weird glut of cinderblock due to poor planning. There was no snafu in the five-year plan. There was a deliberate strategy of recycling very-low-grade nuclear waste in building materials. On the theory that the cement in cinderblock renders the radioisotopes harmless! But the Belorussians had Geiger counters, and that was the end of that happy dream of harmlessness, and so a thousand trainloads of cinderblock got sent to us, who had no reason to suspect that anything was wrong."

"Ouch," Chip said.

"It's beyond ouch," Gitanas said. "It killed my dad when I was eleven. And my best friend's dad. And hundreds of other people, over the years. And everything made sense. There was always an enemy with a big red target on his back. There was a big evil daddy U. S. S. R. that we all could hate, until the nineties."

The platform of the VIPPPAKJRIINPB17, which Gitanas helped found after Independence, consisted of one very broad and heavy plank: the Soviets must pay for raping Lithuania. For a while, in the nineties, it was possible to run the country on pure hatred. But soon other parties emerged with platforms which, while giving revanchism its due, also sought to move beyond it. By the end of the nineties, after the VIPPPAKJRIINPB17 lost its last seat in the Seimas, all that remained of the party was its half-renovated villa.

Gitanas tried to make political sense of the world around him and could not. The world had made sense when the Red Army was illegally detaining him, asking him questions that he refused to answer, and slowly covering the left side of his body with third-degree burns. After Independence, though, politics had lost its coherence. Even as simple and vital an issue as Soviet reparations to Lithuania was bedeviled by the fact that during World War II the Lithuanians themselves had helped persecute the Jews and by the fact that many of the people now running the Kremlin were themselves former anti-Soviet patriots who deserved reparations nearly as much as the Lithuanians did.

"What do I do now," Gitanas asked Chip, "when the invader is a system and a culture, not an army? The best future I can hope now for my country is that someday it looks more like a second-rate country in the West. More like everybody else, in other words."

"More like Denmark, with its attractive harborside bistros and boutiques," Chip said.

"How Lithuanian we all felt," Gitanas said, "when we could point to the Soviets and say: No, we're not like that. But to say, No, we are not free-market, no, we are not globalized-this doesn't make me feel Lithuanian. This makes me feel stupid and Stone Age. So how do I be a patriot now? What positive thing do I stand for? What is the positive definition of my country?"

Gitanas continued to reside in the semiderelict villa. He offered the aide-de-camp's suite to his mother, but she preferred to stay in her apartment outside Ignalina. As was de rigueur for all Lithuanian officials of that era, especially for revanchists like himself, he acquired a piece of formerly Communist property-a twenty percent stake in Sucrosas, the beet-sugar refinery that was Lithuania's second-largest single-site employer-and lived fairly comfortably as a retired patriot on the dividends.

For a time, like Chip, Gitanas glimpsed salvation in the person of Julia Vrais: in her beauty, in her American path-of-least-resistance quest for pleasure. Then Julia ditched him on a Berlin-bound jet. Hers was the latest betrayal in a life that had come to seem a numbing parade of betrayals. He was screwed by the Soviets, screwed by the Lithuanian electorate, and screwed by Julia. Finally he was screwed by the IMF and World Bank, and he brought a forty-year load of bitterness to the joke of Lithuania Incorporated.

Hiring Chip to run the Free Market Party Company was the first good decision he'd made in a long time. Gitanas had gone to New York to find a divorce lawyer and possibly to hire a cheap American actor, somebody middle-aged and failing, whom he could install in Vilnius to reassure such callers and visitors as Lithuania Incorporated might attract. He could hardly believe that a man as young and talented as Chip was willing to work for him. He was only briefly dismayed that Chip had been sleeping with his wife. In Gitanas's experience, everyone eventually betrayed him. He appreciated that Chip had accomplished his betrayal before they even met.

As for Chip, the inferiority he felt in Vilnius as a "pathetic American" who spoke neither Lithuanian nor Russian, and whose father hadn't died of lung cancer at an early age, and whose grandparents hadn't disappeared into Siberia, and who'd never been tortured for his ideals in an unheated military-prison cell, was offset by his competence as an employee and by the memory of certain extremely flattering contrasts that Julia used to draw between him and Gitanas. In pubs and clubs, where the two men often didn't bother to deny that they were brothers, Chip had the sensation of being the more successful of the two.

"I was a pretty good deputy prime minister," Gitanas said gloomily. "I'm not a very good criminal warlord."

Warlord, indeed, was a somewhat glorified term for Gitanas's line of work. He was exhibiting signs of failure with which Chip was all too familiar. He spent an hour worrying for every minute he spent doing. Investors around the globe were sending him gaudy sums that he deposited in his Credit Suisse account every Friday afternoon, but he couldn't decide whether to use the money "honestly" (i.e., to buy seats in Parliament for the Free Market Party Company) or to commit fraud unabashedly and pour his ill-gotten hard currency into even less legitimate businesses. For a while he sort of did both and sort of did neither. Finally his market research (which he conducted by quizzing drunken strangers in bars) persuaded him that, in the current economic climate, even a Bolshevik had a better chance of attracting votes than a party with "Free Market" in its name.

Abandoning any notion of staying legit, Gitanas hired bodyguards. Soon Victor Lichenkev asked his spies: Why is this has-been patriot Misevicius bothering with protection? Gitanas had been far safer as an undefended has-been patriot than he was as the commander of ten strapping Kalashnikov-toting youths. He was obliged to retain more bodyguards, and Chip, for fear of getting shot, stopped leaving the compound without an escort.

"You're not in danger," Gitanas assured him. "Lichenkev might want to kill me and take over the company for himself. But you're the goose with the golden ovaries."

The back of Chip's neck nonetheless prickled with vulnerability when he went out in public. On the night of Thanksgiving in America he watched two of Lichenkev's men elbow through the crowd at a sticky-floored club called Musmiryte and put six holes in the abdomen of a red-haired "wine and spirits importer." That Lichenkev's men had walked past Chip without harming him did go to prove Gitanas's point. But the body of the "wine and spirits importer" looked every bit as soft, in comparison to bullets, as Chip had always feared a body was. Bad overloads of current flooded the dying man's nerves. Violent convulsions, hidden stores of galvanic energy, immensely distressing electrochemical outcomes, had clearly lain latent in his wiring all his life.

Gitanas showed up at Musmiryte half an hour later. "My problem," he mused, looking at the bloodstains, "is it's easier for me to be shot than to shoot."

"There you go again, running yourself down," Chip said.

"I'm good at enduring pain, bad at inflicting it."

"Seriously. Don't be so hard on yourself."

"Kill or be killed. It's not an easy concept."

Gitanas had tried to be aggressive. As a criminal warlord, he did have one fine asset: the cash generated by the Free Market Party Company. After Lichenkev's forces had surrounded the Ignalina reactor and coerced the sale of Lithuanian Electric, Gitanas sold his lucrative stake in Sucrosas, emptied the coffers of the Free Market Party Company, and bought a controlling interest in the principal cellular phone-service provider in Lithuania. The company, Transbaltic Wireless, was the only utility in his price range. He gave his bodyguards 1,000 domestic minutes per month, plus free voice mail and caller ID, and put them to work monitoring calls on Lichenkev's many Transbaltic cell phones. When he learned that Lichenkev was about to dump his entire position in the National Tannery and Livestock Products and Byproducts Corporation, Gitanas was able to short his own shares. The move netted him a bundle but proved fatal in the long run. Lichenkev, tipped off to the monitoring of his phones, switched service to a more secure regional system operated out of Riga. Then he turned around and attacked Gitanas.

On the eve of the December 20 elections, an electrical substation "occident" selectively blacked out the switching center of Transbaltic Wireless and six of its transceiver towers. A mob of angry young Vilniusian cell phone users with shaved heads and goatees attempted to storm Transbaltic's offices. Transbaltic's management called for help on ordinary copper-wire lines; the "police" responding to the call joined the mob in looting the office and laying siege to its treasury until the arrival of three vanloads of "police" from the only precinct that Gitanas could afford to pay off. After a pitched battle, the first group of "police" retreated, and the remaining "police" dispersed the mob.

Through Friday night and into Saturday morning the company's technical staff scrambled to repair the Brezhnev-era emergency generator that provided backup power to the switching center. The generator's main transfer bus was badly corroded, and when the senior supervisor jiggled it to test its integrity he snapped if off at the base. Working to reattach it in the light of candles and flashlights, the supervisor then burned a hole in the primary induction coil with his welding torch, and given the political instabilities surrounding the election there were no other gas-powered AC generators to be had at any price in Vilnius (and certainly no three-phase generators of the kind for which the switching center had been retrofitted for no better reason than that an old Brezhnev-era three-phase generator was available for cheap), and meanwhile electrical-parts suppliers in Poland and Finland were reluctant, given the political instabilities, to ship anything into Lithuania without first receiving payment in hard Western currency, and so a country whose citizens, like so many of their Western counterparts, had simply disconnected their copper-wire telephones when cell phones became cheap and universal was plunged into a communications silence of nineteenth-century proportions.

On a very gloomy Sunday morning, Lichenkev and his slate of smugglers and hit men on the Cheap Power for the People Party ticket claimed 38 of the 141 seats in the Seimas. But the Lithuanian President, Audrius Vitkunas, a charismatic and paranoid arch-nationalist who hated Russia and the West with equal passion, refused to certify the election results.

"Hydrophobic Lichenkev and his mouth-frothing hellhounds will not intimidate me!" Vitkunas shouted in a televised address on Sunday evening. "Localized power failures, a near-total breakdown in the communications network of the capital and its environs, and the presence of roving heavily armed `constabularies' of Lichenkev's hired mouth-frothing lickspittle hellhounds do not inspire confidence that yesterday's voting reflects the stubborn will and immense good sense of the great and glorious immortal Lithuanian People! I will not, I cannot, I must not, I durst not, I shall not certify these scum-flecked, maggot-riddled, tertiary-syphilitic national parliamentary election results!"

Gitanas and Chip watched the address on the television in the former ballroom at the villa. Two bodyguards quietly played Dungeonmaster in a corner of the room while Gitanas translated for Chip the richer nuggets of Vitkunasian rhetoric. The peaty light of the year's shortest day had faded in the casement windows.

"I got a real bad feeling about this," Gitanas said. "I got a feeling Lichenkev wants to gun down Vitkunas and take his chances with whoever replaces him."

Chip, who was doing his best to forget that Christmas was four days away, had no wish to hang on in Vilnius only to be driven out a week after the holiday. He asked Gitanas if he'd thought about emptying the Credit Suisse account and leaving the country.

"Oh, sure." Gitanas was wearing his red motocross jacket and hugging himself. "I think about shopping at Bloomingdale's every day. I think about the big tree at Rockefeller Center."

"Then what's keeping you?"

Gitanas scratched his scalp and smelled his fingernails, blending the aroma of scalp with the skin-oil smells from around his nose, taking obvious comfort in sebum. "If I leave," he said, "ond the trouble blows over, then where am I? I'm fucked three ways. I'm not employable in America. As of next month, I'm not married to an American. And my mom's in Ignalina. What do I got in New York?"

"We could run this thing in New York."

"They got laws there. They'd shut us down in a week. I'm fucked three ways."

Toward midnight Chip went upstairs and inserted himself between his thin, cold East Bloc sheets. His room smelled of damp plaster, cigarettes, and strong synthetic shampoo fragrances such as pleased the Baltic nose. His mind was aware of its own racing. He didn't fall into sleep but skipped off it, again and again, like a stone on water. He kept mistaking the streetlight in his window for the light of day. He went downstairs and realized that it was already late afternoon on Christmas Eve; he had the oversleeper's panicked sense of having fallen behind, of lacking information. His mother was making Christmas Eve dinner in the kitchen. His father, youthful in a leather jacket, was sitting in the ballroom in the dim late light and watching the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather. Chip, to be friendly, asked him what the news was.

"Tell Chip," Alfred told Chip, whom he didn't recognize, "there's trouble in the East."

Real daylight came at eight. A shouting in the street woke him up. His room was cold but not freezing; a smell of warm dust came off the radiator-the city's Central Boiler Facility still functioning, the social order still intact.

Through the branches of the spruce trees outside his window he saw a crowd of several dozen men and women in bulky overcoats milling outside the fence. A dusting of snow had fallen in the night. Two of Gitanas's security men, the brothers Jonas and Aidaris-big blond fellows with semiautomatics on straps-were parleying through the bars of the front gate with a pair of middle-aged women whose brassy hair and red faces, like the heat in Chip's radiator, gave evidence of ordinary life's persistence.

Downstairs the ballroom echoed with emphatic televised Lithuanian declarations. Gitanas was sitting exactly where Chip had left him the night before, but his clothes were different and he appeared to have slept.

The gray morning light and the snow on the trees and the peripheral sense of disarray and breakup recalled the end of an academic fall term, the last day of exams before the Christmas break. Chip went to the kitchen and poured Vitasoy Delite Vanilla soy milk on a bowl of Barbara's All-Natural Shredded Oats Bite Size cereal. He drank some of the viscous German organic black-cherry juice that he'd lately been enjoying. He made two mugs of instant coffee and took them to the ballroom, where Gitanas had turned off the TV and was sniffing his fingernails again.

Chip asked him what the news was.

"All my bodyguards ran away except Jonas and Aidaris," Gitanas said. "They took the VW and the Lada. I doubt they're coming back."

"With protectors like this, who needs attackers?" Chip said.

"They left us the Stomper, which is a crime magnet."

"When did this happen?"

"Must have been right after President Vitkunas put the Army on alert."

Chip laughed. "When did that happen?"

"Early this morning. Everything in the city is apparently still functioning-except, of course, Transbaltic Wireless," Gitanas said.

The mob in the street had swelled. There were perhaps a hundred people now, holding aloft cell phones that collectively produced an eerie, angelic sound. They were playing the sequence of tones that signified SERVICE INTERRUPTION.

"I want you to go back to New York," Gitanas said. "We'll see what happens here. Maybe I'll come, maybe I won't. I gotta see my mother for Christmas. Meantime, here's your severance."

He tossed Chip a thick brown envelope just as multiple thuds were sounding on the villa's outer walls. Chip dropped the envelope. A rock crashed through a window and bounced to a stop by the television set. The rock was four-sided, a broken corner of granite cobblestone. It was coated with fresh hostility and seemed faintly embarrassed.

Gitanas dialed the "police" on the copper-wire line and spoke wearily. The brothers Jonas and Aidaris, fingers on triggers, came in through the front door, followed by cold air with a sprucey Yule flavor. The brothers were cousins of Gitanas; this was presumably why they hadn't deserted with the others. Gitanas put down the phone and conferred with them in Lithuanian.

The brown envelope contained a meaty stack of fifty-and hundred-dollar bills.

Chip's feeling from his dream, his belated realization that the holiday had come, was persisting in the daylight. None of the young Webheads had reported to work today, and now Gitanas had given him a present, and snow was clinging to the boughs of spruces, and carolers in bulky coats were at the gate. . .

"Pack your bags," Gitanas said. "Jonas will take you to the airport."

Chip went upstairs with an empty head and heart. He heard guns banging on the front porch, the ting-a-ling of ejected casings, Jonas and Aidaris firing (he hoped) at the sky. Jingle bells, jingle bells.

He put on his leather pants and leather coat. Repacking his bag connected him to the moment of unpacking it in early October, completed a loop of time and pulled a drawstring that made the twelve intervening weeks disappear. Here he was again, packing.

Gitanas was smelling his fingers, his eyes on the news, when Chip returned to the ballroom. Victor Lichenkev's mustaches went up and down on the TV screen.

"What's he saying?"

Gitanas shrugged. "That Vitkunas is mentally unfit, et cetera. That Vitkunas is mounting a putsch to reverse the legitimate will of the Lithuanian people, et cetera."

"You should come with me," Chip said.

"I'm gonna go see my mother," Gitanas said. "I'll call you next week."

Chip put his arms around his friend and squeezed him. He could smell the scalp oils that Gitanas in his agitation had been sniffing. He felt as if he were hugging himself, feeling his own primate shoulder blades, the scratch of his own woolen sweater. He also felt his friend's gloom-how not-there he was, how distracted or shut down-and it made him, too, feel lost.

Jonas beeped the horn on the gravel drive outside the front door.

"Let's meet up in New York," Chip said.

"OK, maybe." Gitanas pulled away and wandered back to the television.

Only a few stragglers remained to throw rocks at the Stomper as Jonas and Chip roared through the open gate. They drove south out of the city center on a street lined with forbidding gas stations and brown-walled, traffic-scarred buildings that seemed happiest and most themselves on days, like this one, when the weather was raw and the light was poor. Jonas spoke very little English but managed to exude tolerance toward Chip, if not friendliness, while keeping his eyes on the rearview mirror. Traffic was extremely sparse this morning, and sport-utility vehicles, those workhorses of the warlord class, attracted unhealthy attention in times of instability.

The little airport was mobbed with young people speaking the languages of the West. Since the Quad Cities Fund had liquidated Lietuvos Avialinijos, other airlines had taken over some of the routes, but the curtailed flight schedule (fourteen departures a day for a capital of Europe) wasn't equipped to handle loads like today's. Hundreds of British, German, and American students and entrepreneurs, many of their faces familiar to Chip from his pub-crawling with Gitanas, had converged on the reservation counters of Finnair and Lufthansa, Aeroflot and LOT Polish Airlines.

Doughty city buses were arriving with fresh loads of foreign nationals. As far as Chip could see, none of the counter lines were moving at all. He tallied the flights on the Outbound board and chose the airline, Finnair, with the most departures.

At the end of the very long Finnair line were two American college girls in bell-bottom jeans and other Sixties Revival wear. The names on their luggage were Tiffany and Cheryl.

"Do you have tickets?" Chip asked.

"For tomorrow," Tiffany said. "But things looked kinda nasty, so."

"Is this line moving?"

"I don't know. We've only been here ten minutes."

"It hasn't moved in ten minutes?"

"There's only one person at the counter," Tiffany said. "But it's not like there's some other, better Finnair counter someplace else, so."

Chip was feeling disoriented and had to steel himself not to hail a cab and return to Gitanas.

Cheryl said to Tiffany: "So my dad's like, you've got to sublet if you're going to Europe, and I'm like, I promised Anna she could stay there weekends when there's home games so she can sleep with Jason, right? I can't take a promise back-right? But my dad's getting like all bottom-line, and I'm like, hello, it's my condominium, right? You bought it for me, right? I didn't know I was going to have some stranger, you know, who, like, fries things on the stove, and sleeps in my bed?"

Tiffany said: "That is so-gross."

Cheryl said: "And uses my pillows?"

Two more non-Lithuanians, a pair of Belgians, joined the line behind Chip. Simply not to be the last in line brought some relief. Chip, in French, asked the Belgians to watch his bag and hold his place. He went to the men's room, locked himself in a stall, and counted the money Gitanas had given him.

It was $29,250.

It upset him somehow. It made him afraid.

A voice on a bathroom speaker announced, in Lithuanian and then Russian and then English, that LOT Polish Airlines Flight # 331 from Warsaw had been canceled.

Chip put twenty hundreds in his T-shirt pocket, twenty hundreds in his left boot, and returned the rest of the money to the envelope, which he hid inside his T-shirt, against his belly. He wished that Gitanas hadn't given him the money. Without money, he'd had a good reason to stay in Vilnius. Now that he had no good reason, a simple fact which the previous twelve weeks had kept hidden was stripped naked in the fecal, uric bathroom stall. The simple fact was that he was afraid to go home.

No man likes to see his cowardice as clearly as Chip could see his now. He was angry at the money and angry at Gitanas for giving it to him and angry at Lithuania for falling apart, but the fact remained that he was afraid to go home, and this was nobody's fault but his.

He reclaimed his place in the Finnair line, which hadn't moved at all. Airport speakers were announcing the cancellation of Flight # 1048 from Helsinki. A collective groan went up, and bodies surged forward, the head of the line blunting itself against the counter like a delta.

Cheryl and Tiffany kicked their bags forward. Chip kicked his bag forward. He felt returned to the world and he didn't like it. A kind of hospital light, a light of seriousness and inescapability, fell on the girls and the baggage and the Finnair personnel in their uniforms. Chip had nowhere to hide. Everyone around him was reading a novel. He hadn't read a novel in at least a year. The prospect frightened him nearly as much as the prospect of Christmas in St. Jude. He wanted to go out and hail a cab, but he suspected that Gitanas had already fled the city.

He stood in the hard light until the hour was 2:00 and then 2:30-early morning in St. Jude. While the Belgians watched his bag again, he waited in a different line and made a credit-card phone call.

Enid's voice was slurred and tiny. "Wello?"

"Hi, Mom, it's me."

Her voice trebled instantly in pitch and volume. "Chip? Oh, Chip! Al, it's Chip! It's Chip! Chip, where are you?"

"I'm at the airport in Vilnius. I'm on my way home."

"Oh, wonderful! Wonderful! Wonderful! Now, tell me, when do you get here?"

"I don't have a ticket yet," he said. "Things are sort of falling apart here. But tomorrow afternoon sometime. Wednesday at the latest."

"Wonderful!"

He hadn't been prepared for the joy in his mother's voice. If he'd ever known that he could bring joy to another person, he'd long since forgotten it. He took care to steady his own voice and keep his word count low. He said that he would call again as soon as he was at a better airport.

"This is wonderful news," Enid said. "I'm so happy!"

"OK, then, I'll see you soon."

Already the great Baltic winter night was shouldering in from the north. Veterans from the front of the Finnair line reported that the rest of the day's flights were sold out and that at least one of these flights was likely to be canceled, but Chip hoped that by flashing a couple of hundreds he could secure those "bumping privileges" that he'd lampooned on lithuania.com. Failing that, he would buy somebody's ticket for lots of cash.

Cheryl said: "Oh my God, Tiffany, the StairMaster is so-totally butt-building."

Tiffany said: "Only if you, like, stick it out."

Cheryl said: "Everybody sticks it out. You can't help it. Your legs get tired."

Tiffany said: "Duh! It's a StairMaster! Your legs are supposed to get tired."

Cheryl looked out a window and asked, with withering undergraduate disdain: "Excuse me, why is there a tank in the middle of the runway?"

A minute later the lights went out and the phones went dead.

DOWN IN THE BASEMENT, at the eastern end of the Ping-Pong table, Alfred was unpacking a Maker's Mark whiskey carton filled with Christmas-tree lights. He already had prescription drugs and an enema kit on the table. He had a sugar cookie freshly baked by Enid in a shape suggestive of a terrier but meant to be a reindeer. He had a Log Cabin syrup carton containing the large colored lights that he'd formerly hung on the outdoor yews. He had a pump-action shotgun in a zippered canvas case, and a box of twenty-gauge shells. He had rare clarity and the will to use it while it lasted.

A shadowy light of late afternoon was captive in the window wells. The furnace was cycling on often, the house leaking heat. Alfred's red sweater hung on him in skewed folds and bulges, as if he were a log or a chair. His gray wool slacks were afflicted with stains that he had no choice but to tolerate, because the only other option was to take leave of his senses, and he wasn't quite ready to do that.

Uppermost in the Maker's Mark carton was a very long string of white Christmas lights coiled bulkily around a wand of cardboard. The string stank of mildew from the storeroom beneath the porch, and when he put the plug into an outlet he could see right away that all was not well. Most of the lights were burning brightly, but near the center of the spool was a patch of unlit bulbs-a substantia nigra deep inside the tangle. He unwound the spool with veering hands, paying the string out on the Ping-Pong table. At the very end of it was an unsightly stretch of dead bulbs.

He understood what modernity expected of him now. Modernity expected him to drive to a big discount store and replace the damaged string. But the discount stores were mobbed at this time of year; he'd be in line for twenty minutes. He didn't mind waiting, but Enid wouldn't let him drive the car now, and Enid did mind waiting. She was upstairs flogging herself through the home stretch of Christmas prep.

Much better, Alfred thought, to stay out of sight in the basement, to work with what he had. It offended his sense of proportion and economy to throw away a ninety-percent serviceable string of lights. It offended his sense of himself, because he was an individual from an age of individuals, and a string of lights was, like him, an individual thing. No matter how little the thing had cost, to throw it away was to deny its value and, by extension, the value of individuals generally: to willfully designate as trash an object that you knew wasn't trash.

Modernity expected this designation and Alfred resisted it.

Unfortunately, he didn't know how to fix the lights. He didn't understand how a stretch of fifteen bulbs could go dead. He examined the transition from light to darkness and saw no change in the wiring pattern between the last burning bulb and the first dead one. He couldn't follow the three constituent wires through all their twists and braidings. The circuit was semiparallel in some complex way he didn't see the point of.

In the old days, Christmas lights had come in short strings that were wired serially. If a single bulb burned out or even just loosened in its socket, the circuit was broken and the entire string went dark. One of the season's rituals for Gary and Chip had been to tighten each little brass-footed bulb in a darkened string and then, if this didn't work, to replace each bulb in turn until the dead culprit was found. (What joy the boys had taken in the resurrection of a string!) By the time Denise was old enough to help with the lights, the technology had advanced. The wiring was parallel, and the bulbs had snap-in plastic bases. A single faulty light didn't affect the rest of the community but identified itself instantly for instant replacement. . .

Alfred's hands were rotating on his wrists like the twin heads of an eggbeater. As well as he could, he advanced his fingers along the string, squeezing and twisting the wires as he went-and the dark stretch reignited! The string was complete!

What had he done?

He smoothed out the string on the Ping-Pong table. Almost immediately, the faulty segment went dark again. He tried to revive it by squeezing it and patting it, but this time he had no luck.

(You fitted the barrel of the shotgun into your mouth and you reached for the switch.)

He reexamined the braid of olive-drab wires. Even now, even at this extremity of his affliction, he believed he could sit down with pencil and paper and reinvent the principles of basic circuitry. He was certain, for the moment, of his ability to do this; but the task of puzzling out a parallel circuit was far more daunting than the task, say, of driving to a discount store and waiting in line. The mental task required an inductive rediscovery of basic precepts; it required a rewiring of his own cerebral circuitry. It was truly marvelous that such a thing was even thinkable-that a forgetful old man alone in his basement with his shotgun and his sugar cookie and his big blue chair could spontaneously regenerate organic circuitry complex enough to understand electricity-but the energy that this reversal of entropy would cost him vastly exceeded the energy available to him in the form of his sugar cookie. Maybe if he ate a whole box of sugar cookies all at once, he could relearn parallel circuitry and make sense of the peculiar three-wire braiding of these infernal lights. But oh, my God, a person got so tired.

He shook the string and the dead lights came on again. He shook it and shook it and they didn't go out. By the time he'd coiled the string back onto the makeshift spool, however, the deep interior was dark again. Two hundred bulbs were burning bright, and modernity insisted that he junk the whole thing.

He suspected that somewhere, somehow, this new technology was stupid or lazy. Some young engineer had taken a shortcut and failed to anticipate the consequences that he was suffering now. But because he didn't understand the technology, he had no way to know the nature of the failure or to take steps to correct it.

And so the goddamned lights made a victim of him, and there wasn't a goddamned thing he could do except go out and spend.

You were outfitted as a boy with a will to fix things by yourself and with a respect for individual physical objects, but eventually some of your internal hardware (including such mental hardware as this will and this respect) became obsolete, and so, even though many other parts of you still functioned well, an argument could be made for junking the whole human machine.

Which was another way of saying he was tired.

He fitted the cookie into his mouth. Chewed carefully and swallowed. It was hell to get old.

Fortunately, there were thousands of other lights in the Maker's Mark box. Alfred methodically plugged in each bunch. He found three shorter strings in good working order, but all the rest were either inexplicably dead or were so old that the light was faint and yellow; and three shorter strings wouldn't cover the whole tree.

At the bottom of the box he found packages of replacement bulbs, carefully labeled. He found strings that he'd spliced back together after excising faulty segments. He found old serial strings whose broken sockets he'd hot-wired with drops of solder. He was amazed, in retrospect, that he'd had time to do all this repair work amid so many other responsibilities.

Oh, the myths, the childish optimism, of the fix! The hope that an object might never have to wear out. The dumb faith that there would always be a future in which he, Alfred, would not only be alive but have enough energy to make repairs. The quiet conviction that all his thrift and all his conservator's passion would have a point, later on: that someday he would wake up transformed into a wholly different person with infinite energy and infinite time to attend to all the objects that he'd saved, to keep it all working, to keep it all together.

"I ought to pitch the whole damn lot of it," he said aloud.

His hands wagged. They always wagged.

He took the shotgun into his workshop and leaned it against the laboratory bench.

The problem was insoluble. There he'd been, in extremely cold salty water, his lungs half-full and his heavy legs cramping and his shoulder useless in its socket, and all he would have had to do was nothing. Let go and drown. But he kicked, it was a reflex. He didn't like the depths and so he kicked, and then down from above had rained orange flotation devices. He'd stuck his working arm through a hole in one of them just as a really serious combination of wave and undertow-the Gunnar Myrdal's wake-sent him into a gargantuan wash-and-spin. All he would have had to do then was let go. And yet it was clear, even as he was nearly drowning there in the North Atlantic, that in the other place there would be no objects whatsoever: that this miserable orange flotation device through which he'd stuck his arm, this fundamentally inscrutable and ungiving fabric-clad hunk of foam, would be a GOD in the objectless world of death toward which he was headed, would be the SUPREME I-AM-WHAT-I-AM in that universe of unbeing. For a few minutes, the orange flotation device was the only object he had. It was his last object and so, instinctively, he loved it and pulled it close.

Then they hauled him out of the water and dried him off and wrapped him up. They treated him like a child, and he reconsidered the wisdom of surviving. There was nothing wrong with him except his one-eyed blindness and his non-working shoulder and a few other small things, but they spoke to him as if he were an idiot, a lad, a demented person. In their phony solicitude, their thinly veiled contempt, he saw the future that he'd chosen in the water. It was a nursing-home future and it made him weep. He should have just drowned.

He shut and locked the door of the laboratory, because it all came down to privacy, didn't it? Without privacy there was no point in being an individual. And they would give him no privacy in a nursing home. They would be like the people on the helicopter and not leave him be.

He undid his pants, took out the rag that he kept folded in his underwear, and peed into a Yuban can.

He'd bought the gun a year before his retirement. He'd imagined that retirement would bring that radical transformation. He'd imagined himself hunting and fishing, imagined himself back in Kansas and Nebraska on a little boat at dawn, imagined a ridiculous and improbable life of recreation for himself.

The gun had a velvety, inviting action, but soon after he bought it, a starling had broken its neck on the kitchen window while he was eating lunch. He hadn't been able to finish eating, and he'd never fired the gun.

The human species was given dominion over the earth and took the opportunity to exterminate other species and warm the atmosphere and generally ruin things in its own image, but it paid this price for its privileges: that the finite and specific animal body of this species contained a brain capable of conceiving the infinite and wishing to be infinite itself.

There came a time, however, when death ceased to be the enforcer of finitude and began to look, instead, like the last opportunity for radical transformation, the only plausible portal to the infinite.

But to be seen as the finite carcass in a sea of blood and bone chips and gray matter-to inflict that version of himself on other people-was a violation of privacy so profound it seemed it would outlive him.

He was also afraid that it might hurt.

And there was a very important question that he still wanted answered. His children were coming, Gary and Denise and maybe even Chip, his intellectual son. It was possible that Chip, if he came, could answer the very important question.

And the question was:

The question was:

Enid hadn't felt ashamed at all, not the tiniest bit, when the warning horns were sounding and the Gunnar Myrdal was shuddering with the reversal of its thrusters and Sylvia Roth was pulling her through the crowded Pippi Longstocking Ballroom, crying, "Here's his wife, let us through!" It hadn't embarrassed Enid to see Dr. Hibbard again as he knelt on the shuffleboard deck and cut the wet clothes off her husband with dainty surgical clippers. Not even when the assistant cruise director who was helping her pack Alfred's bags found a yellowed diaper in an ice bucket, not even when Alfred cursed the nurses and orderlies on the mainland, not even when the face of Khellye Withers on the TV in Alfred's hospital room reminded her that she hadn't said a comforting word to Sylvia on the eve of Withers's execution, did she feel shame.

She returned to St. Jude in such good spirits that she was able to call Gary and confess that, rather than sending Alfred's notarized patent-licensing agreement to the Axon Corporation, she'd hidden it in the laundry room. After Gary had given her the disappointing news that five thousand dollars was probably a reasonable licensing fee after all, she went to the basement to retrieve the notarized agreement and couldn't find it in its hiding place. Strangely unembarrassed, she called Schwenksville and asked Axon to send her a duplicate set of contracts. Alfred was puzzled when she presented him with these duplicates, but she waved her hands and said, well, things get lost in the mail. Dave Schumpert again served as notary, and she was feeling quite all right until she ran out of Aslan and nearly died of shame.

Her shame was crippling and atrocious. It mattered to her now, as it hadn't a week earlier, that a thousand happy travelers on the Gunnar Myrdal had witnessed how peculiar she and Alfred were. Everyone on the ship had understood that the landing at historic Gaspe was being delayed and the side trip to scenic Bonaventure Island was being canceled because the palsied man in the awful raincoat had gone where nobody was supposed to go, because his wife had selfishly enjoyed herself at an investment lecture, because she'd taken a drug so bad that no doctor in America could legally prescribe it, because she didn't believe in God and she didn't respect the law, because she was horribly, unspeakably different from other people.

Night after night she lay awake, suffered shame, and pictured the golden caplets. She was ashamed of lusting for these caplets, but she was also convinced that only they could bring relief.

In early November she took Alfred to the Corporate Woods Medical Complex for his bimonthly neurological checkup. Denise, who'd signed Alfred up for Axon's Phase II testing of Corecktall, had been asking Enid if he seemed "demented." Enid referred the question to Dr. Hedgpeth during his private interview with her, and Hedgpeth replied that Alfred's periodic confusion did suggest early Alzheimer's or Lewybody dementia-at which point Enid interrupted to ask whether possibly Alfred's dopamine-boosters were causing his "hallucinations." Hedgpeth couldn't deny that this was possible. He said the only sure way to rule out dementia would be to put Alfred in the hospital for a ten-day "drug holiday."

Enid, in her shame, didn't mention to Hedgpeth that she was leery of hospitals now. She didn't mention that there had been some raging and some thrashing and some cursing in the Canadian hospital, some overturning of Styrofoam water pitchers and of wheeled IV-drip stands, until Alfred was sedated. She didn't mention that Alfred had requested that she shoot him before she put him in a place like that again.

Nor, when Hedgpeth asked how she was holding up, did she mention her little Aslan problem. Fearing that Hedgpeth would recognize her as a weak-willed, wild-eyed substance-craver, she didn't even ask him for an alternative "sleep aid." However, she did mention that she wasn't sleeping well. She stressed this, in fact: not sleeping well at all. But Hedgpeth merely suggested that she try a different bed. He suggested Tylenol PM.

It seemed unfair to Enid, as she lay in the dark beside her snoring husband, that a drug legally purchasable in so many other countries should be unavailable to her in America. It seemed unfair that many of her friends had "sleep aids" of the sort that Hedgpeth had failed to offer her. How cruelly scrupulous Hedgpeth was! She could have gone to a different doctor, of course, and asked for a "sleep aid," but this other doctor would surely wonder why her own doctors weren't giving her the drugs.

Such was her situation when Bea and Chuck Meisner departed for six weeks of winter family fun in Austria. The day before the Meisners left, Enid had lunch with Bea at Deepmire and asked her to do her a favor in Vienna. She pressed into Bea's hands a slip of paper on which she'd copied information from an empty SampLpak-ASLAN `Cruiser' (rhadamanthine citrate 88%, 3-methyl-rhadamanthine chloride 12%)-with the annotation Temporarily unavailable in U. S., I need 6 months supply.

"Now, don't bother if it's any trouble," she told Bea, "but if Klaus could write you a prescription, it would be so much easier than my doctor trying to get something from overseas, so, anyway, I hope you have a wonderful time in my favorite country!"

Enid couldn't have asked such a shameful favor of anyone but Bea. Even Bea she dared to ask only because (a) Bea was a tiny bit dumb, and (b) Bea's husband had once upon a time made his own shameful insider purchase of Erie Belt stock, and (c) Enid felt that Chuck had never properly thanked or compensated Alfred for that inside information.

No sooner had the Meisners flown away, however, than Enid's shame mysteriously abated. As if an evil spell had worn off, she began to sleep better and think less about the drug. She brought her powers of selective forgetfulness to bear on the favor she'd asked of Bea. She began to feel like herself again, which was to say: optimistic.

She bought two tickets for a flight to Philadelphia on January 15. She told her friends that the Axon Corporation was testing an exciting new brain therapy called Corecktall and that Alfred, because he'd sold his patent to Axon, was eligible for the tests. She said that Denise was being a doll and offering to let her and Alfred stay in Philadelphia for as long as the testing lasted. She said that, no, Corecktall was not a laxative, it was a revolutionary new treatment for Parkinson's disease. She said that, yes, the name was confusing, but it was not a laxative.

"Tell the people at Axon," she told Denise, "that Dad has some mild symptoms of hallucination which his doctor says are probably drug-related. Then, see, if Corecktall helps him, we can take him off the medication, and the hallucinations will probably stop."

She told not only her friends but everybody else she knew in St. Jude, including her butcher, her broker, and her mailman, that her grandson Jonah was coming for the holidays. Naturally she was disappointed that Gary and Jonah were staying for just three days and were leaving at noon on Christmas, but plenty of fun could be packed into three days. She had tickets for the Christmasland light show and The Nutcracker; tree-trimming, sledding, caroling, and a Christmas Eve church service were also on the bill. She dug out cookie recipes that she hadn't used in twenty years. She laid in eggnog.

On the Sunday before Christmas she awoke at 3:05 a.m. and thought: Thirty-six hours. Four hours later she got up thinking: Thirty-two hours. Late in the day she took Alfred to the street-association Christmas party at Dale and Honey Driblett's, sat him down safely with Kirby Root, and proceeded to remind all her neighbors that her favorite grandson, who'd been looking forward all year to a Christmas in St. Jude, was arriving tomorrow afternoon. She located Alfred in the Dribletts' downstairs bathroom and argued with him unexpectedly about his supposed constipation. She took him home and put him to bed, erased the argument from her memory, and sat down in the dining room to knock off another dozen Christmas cards.

Already the wicker basket for incoming greetings contained a four-inch stack of cards from old friends like Norma Greene and new friends like Sylvia Roth. More and more senders Xeroxed or word-processed their Christmas notes, but Enid was having none of this. Even if it meant being late with them, she'd undertaken to handwrite a hundred notes and hand-address nearly two hundred envelopes. Besides her standard Two-Paragraph Note and her four-paragraph Full Note, she had a boilerplate Short Note:

Loved our cruise to see the autumn color in New England and maritime Canada. Al took an unexpected "swim" in the Gulf of St. Lawrence but is feeling "ship-shape" again! Denise's super-deluxe new restaurant in Phila. was written up in the NY Times. Chip continued work at his NYC law firm and pursued investments in Eastern Europe. We enjoyed a wonderful visit from Gary and our "precocious" youngest grandson Jonah. Hoping the whole family will be in St. Jude for Christmas-a heavenly treat for me! Love to you all--

It was ten o'clock and she was shaking the cramp from her writing hand when Gary called from Philadelphia.

"Looking forward to seeing the two of you in seventeen hours!" Enid sang into the telephone.

"Some bad news here," Gary said. "Jonah's been throwing up and has a fever. I don't think I can take him on the plane."

This camel of disappointment balked at the needle's eye of Enid's willingness to apprehend it.

"See how he feels in the morning," she said. "Kids get twenty-four-hour bugs, I bet he'll be fine. He can rest on the plane if he needs to. He can go to bed early and sleep late on Tuesday!"

"Mother."

"If he's really sick, Gary, I understand, he can't come. But if he gets over his fever-"

"Believe me, we're all disappointed. Especially Jonah."

"No need to make any decision right this minute. Tomorrow is a completely new day."

"I'm warning you it will probably just be me."

"Well, but, Gary, things could look very, very different in the morning. Why don't you wait and make your decision then, and surprise me. I bet everything's going to work out fine!"

It was the season of joy and miracles, and Enid went to bed full of hope.

Early the next morning she was awakened-rewarded-by the ringing of the phone, the sound of Chip's voice, the news that he was coming home from Lithuania within forty-eight hours and the family would be complete on Christmas Eve. She was humming when she went downstairs and pinned another ornament on the Advent calendar that hung on the front door.

For as long as anyone could remember, the Tuesday ladies' group at the church had raised money by manufacturing Advent calendars. These calendars were not, as Enid would hasten to tell you, the cheap windowed cardboard items that you bought for five dollars in a cellophane sleeve. They were beautifully hand-sewn and reusable. A green felt Christmas tree was stitched to a square of bleached canvas with twelve numbered pockets across the top and another twelve across the bottom. On each morning of Advent your children took an ornament from a pocket-a tiny rocking horse of felt and sequins, or a yellow felt turtledove, or a sequin-encrusted toy soldier-and pinned it to the tree. Even now, with her children all grown, Enid continued to shuffle and distribute the ornaments in their pockets every November 30. Only the ornament in the twenty-fourth pocket was the same every year: a tiny plastic Christ child in a walnut shell spray-painted gold. Although Enid generally fell far short of fervor in her Christian beliefs, she was devout about this ornament. To her it was an icon not merely of the Lord but of her own three babies and of all the sweet baby-smelling babies of the world. She'd filled the twenty-fourth pocket for thirty years, she knew very well what it contained, and still the anticipation of opening it could take her breath away.

"It's wonderful news about Chip, don't you think?" she asked Alfred at breakfast.

Alfred was shoveling up his hamster-pellet All-Bran and drinking his morning drink of hot milk and water. His expression was like a perspectival regression toward a vanishing point of misery.

"Chip will be here tomorrow," Enid repeated. "Isn't that wonderful news? Aren't you happy?"

Alfred consulted with the soggy mass of All-Bran on his wandering spoon. "Well," he said. "If he comes."

"He said he'd be here tomorrow afternoon," Enid said. "Maybe, if he's not too tired, he can go to The Nutcracker with us. I still have six tickets."

"I am dubious," Alfred said.

That his comments actually pertained to her questions-that in spite of the infinity in his eyes he was participating in a finite conversation-made up for the sourness in his face.

Enid had pinned her hopes, like a baby in a walnut shell, on Corecktall. If Alfred proved to be too confused to participate in the testing, she didn't know what she was going to do. Her life therefore bore a strange resemblance to the lives of those friends of hers, Chuck Meisner and Joe Person in particular, who were "addicted" to monitoring their investments. According to Bea, Chuck's anxiety drove him to check quotes on his computer two or three times an hour, and the last time Enid and Alfred had gone out with the Persons, Joe had made Enid frantic by cell-phoning three different brokers from the restaurant. But she was the same way with Alfred: painfully attuned to every hopeful upswing, forever fearful of a crash.

Her freest hour of the day came after breakfast. Every morning, as soon as Alfred had downed his cup of hot milky water, he went to the basement and focused on evacuation. Enid wasn't welcome to speak to him during this peak hour of his anxiety, but she could leave him to his own devices. His colonic preoccupations were a madness but not the kind of madness that would disqualify him for Corecktall.

Outside the kitchen window, snow flakes from an eerily blueclouded sky drifted through the twigs of an unthriving dogwood that had been planted (this really dated it) by Chuck Meisner. Enid mixed and refrigerated a ham loaf for later baking and assembled a salad of bananas, green grapes, canned pineapple, marshmallows, and lemon Jell-O. These foods, along with twice-baked potatoes, were official St. Jude favorites of Jonah's and were on the menu for tonight.

For months she'd imagined Jonah pinning the Christ child to the Advent calendar on the morning of the twenty-fourth.

Elated by her second cup of coffee, she went upstairs and knelt by the old cherrywood dresser of Gary's where she kept gifts and party favors. She'd finished her Christmas shopping weeks ago, but all she'd bought for Chip was a sale-priced brown-and-red Pendleton wool bathrobe. Chip had forfeited her goodwill several Christmases ago by sending her a used-looking cookbook, Foods of Morocco, wrapped in aluminum foil and decorated with stick-on pictures of coat hangers with red slashes through them. Now that he was coming home from Lithuania, however, she wanted to reward him to the full extent of her gift budget. Which was:

Alfred: no set amount Chip, Denise: $100 each, plus grapefruit Gary, Caroline: $60 each, maximum, plus grapefruit Aaron, Caleb: $30 each, maximum Jonah (this year only): no set amount

Having paid $55 for the bathrobe, she needed $45 worth of additional gifts for Chip. She rummaged in the dresser drawers. She rejected the vases in shopworn boxes from Hong Kong, the many matching bridge decks and score pads, the many thematic cocktail napkins, the really neat and really useless pen-and-pencil sets, the many travel alarm clocks that folded up or beeped in unusual ways, the shoehorn with a telescoping handle, the inexplicably dull Korean steak knives, the cork-bottomed bronze coasters with locomotives engraved on their faces, the ceramic 5x7 picture frame with the word "Memories" in glazed lavender script, the onyx turtle figurines from Mexico, and the cleverly boxed kit of ribbon and wrapping paper called The Gift of Giving. She weighed the suitability of the pewter candle snuffer and the Lucite saltshaker cum pepper grinder. Recalling the paucity of Chip's home furnishings, she decided that the snuffer and the shaker/grinder would do just fine.

In the season of joy and miracles, while she wrapped, she forgot about the urine-smelling laboratory and its noxious crickets. She was able not to care that Alfred had put up the Christmas tree at a twenty-degree tilt. She could believe that Jonah was feeling just as healthy this morning as she was.

By the time she'd finished her wrapping, the light in the gull-plumage winter sky had a midday angle and intensity. She went down to the basement, where she found the Ping-Pong table buried under green strings of lights, like a chassis engulfed by kudzu, and Alfred seated on the floor with electrician's tape, pliers, and extension cords.

"Damn these lights!" he said.

"Al, what are you doing on the floor?"

"These goddamned cheap new lights!"

"Don't worry about them. Just leave them. Let Gary and Jonah do that. Come upstairs and have lunch."

The flight from Philadelphia was due in at one-thirty. Gary was going to rent a car and be at the house by three, and Enid intended to let Alfred sleep in the meantime, because tonight she would have reinforcements. Tonight, if he got up and wandered, she wouldn't be the only one on duty.

The quiet in the house after lunch was of such density that it nearly stopped the clocks. These final hours of waiting ought to have been the perfect time to write some Christmas cards, a win-win occasion in which either the minutes would fly by or she would get a lot of work done; but time could not be cheated in this way. Beginning a Short Note, she felt as if she were pushing her pen through molasses. She lost track of her words, wrote took an unexpected "swim" in an unexpected "swim," and had to throw the card away. She stood up to check the kitchen clock and found that five minutes had passed since she'd last checked. She arranged an assortment of cookies on a lacquered wooden holiday plate. She set a knife and a huge pear on a cutting board. She shook a carton of eggnog. She loaded the coffeemaker in case Gary wanted coffee. She sat down to write a Short Note and saw in the blank whiteness of the card a reflection of her mind. She went to the window and peered out at the bleached zoysia lawn. The mailman, struggling with holiday volumes, was coming up the walk with a mighty bundle that he pushed through the slot in three batches. She pounced on the mail and sorted wheat from chaff, but she was too distracted to open the cards. She went down to the blue chair in the basement.

"Al," she shouted, "I think you should get up."

He sat up haystack-haired and empty-eyed. "Are they here?"

"Any minute. Maybe you want to freshen up."

"Who's coming?"

"Gary and Jonah, unless Jonah's too sick."

"Gary," Alfred said. "And Jonah."

"Why don't you take a shower?"

He shook his head. "No showers."

"If you want to be stuck in that tub when they get here-"

"I think I'm entitled to a bath, after the work I've done."

There was a nice shower stall in the downstairs bathroom, but Alfred had never liked to stand while bathing. Since Enid now refused to help him get out of the upstairs tub, he sometimes sat there for an hour, the water cold and soap-gray at his haunches, before he contrived to extricate himself, because he was so stubborn.

He had bathwater running in the upstairs bathroom when the long-awaited knock finally came.

Enid rushed to the front door and opened it to the vision of her handsome elder son alone on the front stoop. He was wearing his calfskin jacket and holding a carry-on suitcase and a paper shopping bag. Sunlight, low and polarized, had found a way around the clouds, as it often did near the end of a winter day. Flooding the street was the preposterous golden indoor light with which a minor painter might illuminate the parting of the Red Sea. The bricks of the Persons' house, the blue and purple winter clouds, and the dark green resinous shrubs were all so falsely vivid as to be not even pretty but alien, foreboding.

"Where's Jonah?" Enid cried.

Gary came inside and set his bags down. "He still has a fever."

Enid accepted a kiss. Needing a moment to collect herself, she told Gary to bring his other suitcase in while he was at it.

"This is my only suitcase," he informed her in a courtroom kind of voice.

She stared at the tiny bag. "That's all you brought?"

"Look, I know you're disappointed about Jonah-"

"How high was his fever?"

"A hundred this morning."

"A hundred is not a high fever!"

Gary sighed and looked away, tilting his head to align it with the axis of the listing Christmas tree. "Look," he said. "Jonah's disappointed. I'm disappointed. You're disappointed. Can we leave it at that? We're all disappointed."

"It's just that I'm all ready for him," Enid said. "I made his favorite dinner-"

"I specifically warned you-"

"I got tickets for Waindell Park tonight!"

Gary shook his head and walked toward the kitchen. "So we'll go to the park," he said. "And then tomorrow Denise is here."

"Chip too!"

Gary laughed. "What, from Lithuania?"

"He called this morning."

"I'll believe that when I see it," Gary said.

The world in the windows looked less real than Enid would have liked. The spotlight of sunshine coming in under the ceiling of cloud was the dream light of no familiar hour of the day. She had an intimation that the family she'd tried to bring together was no longer the family she remembered-that this Christmas would be nothing at all like the Christmases of old. But she was doing her best to adjust to the new reality. She was suddenly very excited that Chip was coming. And since Jonah's wrapped gifts would now be going to Philadelphia with Gary, she needed to wrap some travel alarm clocks and pen-and-pencil sets for Caleb and Aaron to reduce the contrast in her giving. She could do this while she waited for Denise and Chip.

"I have so many cookies," she told Gary, who was washing his hands fastidiously at the kitchen sink. "I have a pear that I can slice, and some of that dark coffee that you kids like."

Gary sniffed her dish towel before he dried his hands with it.

Alfred began to bellow her name from upstairs.

"Uch, Gary," she said, "he's stuck in the tub again. You go help him. I won't do it anymore."

Gary dried his hands extremely thoroughly. "Why isn't he using the shower like we talked about?"

"He says he likes to sit down."

"Well, tough luck," Gary said. "This is a man whose gospel is taking responsibility for yourself."

Alfred bellowed her name again.

"Go, Gary, help him," she said.

Gary, with ominous calm, smoothed and straightened the folded dish towel on its rack. "Here are the ground rules, Mother," he said in the courtroom voice. "Are you listening? These are the ground rules. For the next three days, I will do anything you want me to do, except deal with Dad in situations he shouldn't be in. If he wants to climb a ladder and fall off, I'm going to let him lie on the ground. If he bleeds to death, he bleeds to death. If he can't get out of the bathtub without my help, he'll be spending Christmas in the bathtub. Have I made myself clear? Apart from that, I will do anything you want me to do. And then, on Christmas morning, you and he and I are going to sit down and have a talk-"

"ENID." Alfred's voice was amazingly loud. "SOMEBODY'S AT THE DOOR!"

Enid sighed heavily and went to the bottom of the stairs. "Al, it's Gary."

"Can you help me?" came the cry.

"Gary, go see what he wants."

Gary stood in the dining room with folded arms. "Did I not make my ground rules clear?"

Enid was remembering things about her elder son which she liked to forget when he wasn't around. She climbed the stairs slowly, trying to work a knot of pain out of her hip.

"Al," she said, entering the bathroom, "I can't help you out of the tub, you have to figure that out yourself."

He was sitting in two inches of water with his arm extended and his fingers fluttering. "Get that," he said.

"Get what?"

"That bottle."

His bottle of Snowy Mane hair-whitening shampoo had fallen to the floor behind him. Enid knelt carefully on the bath mat, favoring her hip, and put the bottle in his hands. He massaged it vaguely, as though seeking purchase or struggling to remember how to open it. His legs were hairless, his hands spotted, but his shoulders were still strong.

"I'll be damned," he said, grinning at the bottle.

Whatever heat the water had begun with had dissipated in the December-cool room. There was a smell of Dial soap and, more faintly, old age. Enid had knelt in this exact spot thousands of times to wash her children's hair and rinse their heads with hot water from a 11/2-quart saucepan that she brought up from the kitchen for that purpose. She watched her husband turn the shampoo bottle over in his hands.

"Oh, Al," she said, "what are we going to do?"

"Help me with this."

"All right. I'll help you"

The doorbell rang.

"There it is again."

"Gary," Enid called, "see who that is." She squeezed shampoo into her palm. "You've got to start taking showers instead."

"Not steady enough on my feet"

"Here, wet your hair." She paddled a hand in the tepid water, to give Alfred the idea. He splashed some on his head. She could hear Gary talking to one of her friends, somebody female and chipper and St. Judean, Esther Root maybe.

"We can get a stool for the shower," she said, lathering Alfred's hair. "We can put a strong bar in there to hold on to, like Dr. Hedgpeth said we should. Maybe Gary can do that tomorrow."

Alfred's voice vibrated in his skull and on up through her fingers: "Gary and Jonah got in all right?"

"No, just Gary," Enid said. "Jonah has a high, high fever and terrible vomiting. Poor kid, he's much too sick to fly."

Alfred winced in sympathy.

"Lean over now and I'll rinse."

If Alfred was trying to lean forward, it was evident only from a trembling in his legs, not from any change in his position.

"You need to do much more stretching," Enid said. "Did you ever look at that sheet from Dr. Hedgpeth?"

Alfred shook his head. "Didn't help."

"Maybe Denise can teach you how to do those exercises. You might like that."

She reached behind her for the water glass from the sink. She filled it and refilled it at the bathtub's tap, pouring the hot water over her husband's head. With his eyes squeezed shut he could have been a child.

"You'll have to get yourself out now," she said. "I won't help you."

"I have my own method," he said.

Down in the living room Gary was kneeling to straighten the crooked tree.

"Who was at the door?" Enid said.

"Bea Meisner," he said, not looking up. "There's a gift on the mantel."

"Bea Meisner?" A late flame of shame flickered in Enid. "I thought they were staying in Austria for the holiday."

"No, they're here for one day and then going to La Jolla."

"That's where Katie and Stew live. Did she bring anything?"

"On the mantel," Gary said.

The gift from Bea was a festively wrapped bottle of something presumably Austrian.

"Anything else?" Enid said.

Gary, clapping fir needles from his hands, gave her a funny look. "Were you expecting something else?"

"No, no," she said. "There was a silly little thing I asked her to get in Vienna, but I'm sure she forgot."

Gary's eyes narrowed. "What silly little thing?"

"Oh, nothing, just, nothing." Enid examined the bottle to see if anything was attached to it. She'd survived her infatuation with Aslan, she'd done the work necessary to forget him, and she was by no means sure she wanted to see the Lion again. But the Lion still had power over her. She had a sensation from long ago, a pleasurable apprehension of a lover's return. It made her miss how she used to miss Alfred.

She chided: "Why didn't you invite her in?"

"Chuck was waiting in their Jaguar," Gary said. "I gather they're making the rounds."

"Well." Enid unwrapped the bottle-it was a Halb-Trocken Austrian champagne-to be sure there was no hidden package.

"That is an extremely sugary-looking wine," Gary said.

She asked him to build a fire. She stood and marveled as her competent gray-haired son walked steadily to the woodpile, returned with a load of logs on one arm, deftly arranged them in the fireplace, and lit a match on the first try. The whole job took five minutes. Gary was doing nothing more than function the way a man was supposed to function, and yet, in contrast to the man Enid lived with, his capabilities seemed godlike. His least gesture was glorious to watch.

Along with her relief at having him in the house, though, came the awareness of how soon he would leave again.

Alfred, wearing a sport coat, stopped in the living room and visited with Gary for a minute before repairing to the den for a high-decibel dose of local news. His age and his stoop had taken two or three inches off his height, which not long ago had been the same as Gary's.

While Gary, with exquisite motor control, hung the lights on the tree, Enid sat by the fire and unpacked the liquor cartons in which she kept her ornaments. Everywhere she'd traveled she'd spent the bulk of her pocket money on ornaments. In her mind, while Gary hung them, she traveled back to a Sweden populated by straw reindeers and little red horses, to a Norway whose citizens wore authentic Lapp reindeer-skin boots, to a Venice where all the animals were made of glass, to a dollhouse Germany of enameled wood Santas and angels, to an Austria of wooden soldiers and tiny Alpine churches. In Belgium the doves of peace were made of chocolate and wrapped decoratively in foil, and in France the gendarme dolls and artiste dolls were impeccably dressed, and in Switzerland the bronze bells tinkled above overtly religious mini-creches. Andalusia was atwitter with gaudy birds; Mexico jangled with its painted tin cutouts. On the high plateaux of China, the noiseless gallop of a herd of silk horses. In Japan, the Zen silence of its lacquered abstractions.

Gary hung each ornament as Enid directed. He was seeming different to her-calmer, more matoor, more deliberate-until she asked him to do a little job for her tomorrow.

"Installing a bar in the shower is not a `little job,' " he replied. "It would have made sense a year ago, but it doesn't now. Dad can use the bathtub for another few days until we deal with this house."

"It's still four weeks before we fly to Philadelphia," Enid said. "I want him to get in the habit of using the shower. I want you to buy a stool and put a bar in there tomorrow, so it's done."

Gary sighed. "Are you thinking you and Dad can actually stay in this house?"

"If Corecktall helps him-"

"Mother, he's being evaluated for dementia. Do you honestly believe-"

"For non-drug-related dementia."

"Look, I don't want to puncture your bubble-"

"Denise has it all set up. We have to try it."

"So, and then what?" Gary said. "He's miraculously cured, and the two of you live here happily ever after?"

The light in the windows had died entirely. Enid didn't understand why her sweet, responsible oldest child, with whom she'd felt such a bond from his infancy onward, became so angry, now, when she came to him in need. She unwrapped a Styrofoam ball that he'd decorated with fabric and sequins when he was nine or ten. "Do you remember this?"

Gary took the ball. "We made these in Mrs. Ostriker's class."

"You gave it to me."

"Did I?"

"You said you'd do anything I asked tomorrow," Enid said. "This is what I'm asking."

"All right! All right!" Gary threw his hands in the air. "I'll buy the stool! I'll install the bar!"

After dinner he took the Olds from the garage, and the three of them went to Christmasland.

From the back seat Enid could see the undersides of clouds catching urban light; the patches of clear sky were darker and riddled with stars. Gary piloted the car down narrow suburban roads to the limestone gates of Waindell Park, where a long queue of cars, trucks, and minivans was waiting to enter.

"Look at all the cars," Alfred said with no trace of his old impatience.

By charging admission to Christmasland, the county helped defray the cost of mounting this annual extravaganza. A county park ranger took the Lamberts' ticket and told Gary to extinguish all but his parking lights. The Olds crept forward in a line of darkened vehicles that had never looked more like animals than they did now, collectively, in their humble procession through the park.

For most of the year, Waindell was a tired place of burnt grass, brown ponds, and unambitious limestone pavilions. In December, by day, it looked its very worst. Garish cables and utilitarian power lines crisscrossed the lawns. Armatures and scaffolds were exposed in their flimsiness, their provisionality, their metallic knobbiness of joint. Hundreds of trees and shrubs were draped in light strings, limbs sagging as if hammered by a freezing rain of glass and plastic.

By night the park was Christmasland. Enid drew breath sharply as the Olds crept up a hill of light and across a landscape made luminous. Just as the beasts were said to speak on Christmas Eve, so the natural order of the suburbs seemed overturned here, the ordinarily dark land alive with light, the ordinarily lively road dark with crawling traffic.

The mild gradients of Waindell's slopes and the intimacy of its ridgelines' relations with the sky were midwestern. So, it seemed to Enid, were the hush and patience of the drivers; so were the isolated close-knit frontier communities of oaks and maples. She'd spent the last eight Christmases exiled in the alien East, and now, at last, she felt at home. She imagined being buried in this landscape. She was happy to think of her bones resting on a hillside such as this.

There came scintillant pavilions, luminous reindeer, pendants and necklaces of gathered photons, electro-pointillist Santa Claus faces, a glade of towering glowing candy canes.

"Lot of work involved here," Alfred commented.

"Well, I'm sorry Jonah couldn't come after all," Gary said, as if, until now, he had not been sorry.

The spectacle was nothing more than lights in darkness, but Enid was speechless. So often credulity was asked of you, so seldom could you summon it absolutely, but here at Waindell Park she could. Somebody had set out to delight all comers, and Enid was delighted. And tomorrow Denise and Chip came, tomorrow was The Nutcracker, and on Wednesday they would take the Christ baby from its pocket and pin the walnut cradle to the tree: she had so much to look forward to.

In the morning, Gary drove over to Hospital City, the close-in suburb where St. Jude's big medical centers were concentrated, and held his breath among the eighty-pound men in wheelchairs and the five-hundred-pound women in tentlike dresses who clogged the aisles of Central Discount Medical Supply. Gary hated his mother for sending him here, but he recognized how lucky he was in comparison to her, how free and advantaged, and so he set his jaw and kept maximum distance from the bodies of these locals who were loading up on syringes and rubber gloves, on butterscotch bedside candies, on absorptive pads in every imaginable size and shape, on jumbo 144-packs of get-well cards and CDs of flute music and videos of visualization exercises and disposable plastic hoses and bags that connected to harder plastic interfaces sewn into living flesh.

Gary's problem with illness in aggregate, aside from the fact that it involved large quantities of human bodies and that he didn't like human bodies in large quantities, was that it seemed to him low-class. Poor people smoked, poor people ate Krispy Kreme doughnuts by the dozen. Poor people were made pregnant by close relatives. Poor people practiced poor hygiene and lived in toxic neighborhoods. Poor people with their ailments constituted a subspecies of humanity that thankfully remained invisible to Gary except in hospitals and in places like Central Discount Medical. They were a dumber, sadder, fatter, more resignedly suffering breed. A Diseased underclass that he really, really liked to keep away from.

However, he'd arrived in St. Jude feeling guilty about several circumstances that he'd concealed from Enid, and he'd vowed to be a good son for three days, and so in spite of his embarrassment he pushed through the crowds of the lame and halt, entered Central Discount Medical's vast furniture showroom, and looked for a stool for his father to sit on while he showered.

A full-symphonic version of the most tedious Christmas song ever written, "Little Drummer Boy," dripped from hidden speakers in the showroom. The morning outside the showroom's plate-glass windows was brilliant, windy, cold. A sheet of newsprint wrapped itself around a parking meter with erotic-looking desperation. Awnings creaked and automotive mud flaps shivered.

The wide array of medical stools and the variety of afflictions to which they attested might have upset Gary had he not been able to make aesthetic judgments.

He wondered, for example, why beige. Medical plastic was usually beige; at best, a sickly gray. Why not red? Why not black? Why not teal?

Maybe the beige plastic was intended to ensure that the furniture be used for medical purposes only. Maybe the manufacturer was afraid that, if the chairs were too handsome, people would be tempted to buy them for nonmedical purposes.

There was a problem to avoid, all right: too many people wanting to buy your product!

Gary shook his head. The idiocy of these manufacturers.

He picked out a sturdy, low aluminum stool with a wide beige seat. He selected a heavy-duty (beige!) gripping bar for the shower. Marveling at the gouge-level pricing, he took these items to the checkout counter, where a friendly midwestern girl, possibly evangelical (she had a brocade sweater and feather-cut bangs), showed the bar codes to a laser beam and remarked to Gary, in a downstate drawl, that these aluminum chairs were really a super product. "So lahtweight, practically indestructible," she said. "Is it for your mom or your dad?"

Gary resented invasions of his privacy and refused the girl the satisfaction of an answer. He did, however, nod.

"Our older folks get shaky in the shower at a certain point. Guess it happens to us all, eventually." The young philosopher swiped Gary's AmEx through a groove. "You home for the holidays, helpin' out a little bit?"

"You know what these stools would really be good for," Gary said, "would be to hang yourself. Don't you think?"

Life drained from the girl's smile. "I don't know about that."

"Nice and light-easy to kick away."

"Sign this, please, sir."

He had to fight the wind to push the Exit door open. The wind had teeth today, it bit right through his calfskin jacket. It was a wind unchecked by any serious topography between the Arctic and St. Jude.

Driving north toward the airport, with the low sun mercifully behind him, Gary wondered if he'd been cruel to the girl. Possibly he had. But he was under stress, and a person under stress, it seemed to him, had a right to be strict in the boundaries he established for himself-strict in his moral accounting, strict about what he would and wouldn't do, strict about who he was and who he wasn't and whom he would and wouldn't talk to. If a perky, homely evangelical girl insisted on talking, he had a right to choose the topic.

He was aware, nevertheless, that if the girl had been more attractive, he might have been less cruel.

Everything in St. Jude strove to put him in the wrong. But in the months since he'd surrendered to Caroline (and his hand had healed nicely, thank you, with hardly a scar), he'd reconciled himself to being the villain in St. Jude. When you knew in advance that your mother would consider you the villain no matter what you did, you lost your incentive to play by her rules. You asserted your own rules. You did whatever it took to preserve yourself. You pretended, if need be, that a healthy child of yours was sick.

The truth about Jonah was that he'd freely chosen not to come to St. Jude. This was in accordance with the terms of Gary's surrender to Caroline in October. Holding five nonrefundable plane tickets to St. Jude, Gary had told his family that he wanted everyone to come along with him for Christmas, but that nobody would be forced to go. Caroline and Caleb and Aaron had all instantly and loudly said no thank you; Jonah, still under the spell of his grandmother's enthusiasm, declared that he would "very much like" to go. Gary never actually promised Enid that Jonah was coming, but he also never warned her that he might not.

In November Caroline bought four tickets to see the magician Alain Gregarius on December 22 and another four tickets for The Lion King in New York City on December 23. "Jonah can come along if he's here," she explained, "otherwise Aaron or Caleb can bring a friend." Gary wanted to ask why she hadn't bought tickets for the week after Christmas, which would have spared Jonah a difficult choice. Ever since the October surrender, however, he and Caroline had been enjoying a second honeymoon, and although it was understood that Gary, as a dutiful son, would be going to St. Jude for three days, a shadow fell on his domestic bliss whenever he made reference to the trip. The more days that elapsed without mention of Enid or Christmas, the more Caroline seemed to want him, the more she included him in her private jokes with Aaron and Caleb, and the less depressed he felt. Indeed, the topic of his depression hadn't come up once since the morning of Alfred's fall. Silence on the topic of Christmas seemed a small price to pay for such domestic harmony.

And for a while the treats and attention that Enid had promised Jonah in St. Jude seemed to outweigh the attractions of Alain Gregarius and The Lion King. Jonah mused aloud at the dinner table about Christmasland and the Advent calendar that Grandma talked so much about; he ignored, or didn't see, the winks and smiles that Caleb and Aaron were exchanging. But Caroline more and more openly encouraged the older boys to laugh at their grandparents and to tell stories about Alfred's cluelessness ("He called it Intendo!") and Enid's puritanism ("She asked what the show was rated!") and Enid's parsimony ("There were two green beans and she wrapped them up in foil!"), and Gary, since his surrender, had begun to join in the laughter himself ("Grandma is funny, isn't she?"), and finally Jonah became self-conscious about his plans. At the age of eight, he fell under the tyranny of Cool. First he ceased to bring up Christmas at the dinner table, and then when Caleb with his trademark semi-irony asked if he was looking forward to Christmasland, Jonah replied, in an effortfully wicked voice, "It's probably really stupid."

"Lots of fat people in big cars driving around in the dark," Aaron said.

"Telling each other how wunnerful it is," Caroline said.

"Wunnerful, wunnerful," Caleb said.

"You shouldn't make fun of your grandmother," Gary said.

"They're not making fun of her," Caroline said.

"Right, we're not," Caleb said. "It's just that people are funny in St. Jude. Aren't they, Jonah?"

"People certainly are very large there," Jonah said.

On Saturday night, three days ago, Jonah had thrown up after dinner and gone to bed with a mild fever. By Sunday evening, his color and appetite were back to normal, and Caroline played her final trump. For Aaron's birthday, earlier in the month, she'd bought an expensive computer game, God Project II, in which players designed and operated organisms to compete in a working ecosystem. She hadn't allowed Aaron and Caleb to start the game until classes ended, and now, when they finally did start, she insisted that they let Jonah be Microbes, because Microbes, in any ecosystem, had the most fun and never lost.

By bedtime on Sunday, Jonah was entranced with his team of killer bacteria and looked forward to sending them into battle the next day. When Gary woke him on Monday morning and asked if he was coming to St. Jude, Jonah said he'd rather stay home.

"It's your choice," Gary said. "But it would mean a lot to your grandma if you came."

"What if it's not fun, though?"

"There's never a guarantee that something's going to be fun," Gary said. "But you'll make Grandma happy. That's one thing I can guarantee."

Jonah's face clouded. "Can I think about it for an hour?"

"OK, one hour. But then we have to pack and go."

The end of the hour found Jonah deeply immersed in God Project II. One strain of his bacteria had blinded eighty percent of Aaron's small hoofed mammals.

"It's OK not to go," Caroline assured Jonah. "Your personal choice is what matters here. This is your vacation."

Nobody will be forced to go .

"I'll say it one more time," Gary said. "Your grandma is really looking forward to seeing you."

To Caroline's face there came a desolation, a deep tearful stare, reminiscent of the troubles in September. She rose without a word and left the entertainment room.

Jonah's answer came in a voice not much louder than a whisper: "I think I'm going to stay here."

If it had still been September, Gary might have seen in Jonah's decision a parable of the crisis of moral duty in a culture of consumer choice. He might have become depressed. But he'd been down that road now and he knew there was nothing for him at the end of it.

He packed his bag and kissed Caroline. "I'll be happy when you're back," she said.

In a strict moral sense Gary knew he hadn't done anything wrong. He'd never promised Enid that Jonah was coming. It was simply to spare himself an argument that he'd lied about Jonah's fever.

Similarly, to spare Enid's feelings, he hadn't mentioned that in the six business days since the IPO, his five thousand shares of Axon Corporation stock, for which he'd paid $60,000, had risen in value to $118,000. Here again, he'd done nothing wrong, but given the pitiful size of Alfred's patent-licensing fee from Axon, concealment seemed the wisest policy.

The same also went for the little package Gary had zipped into the inside pocket of his jacket.

Jets were dropping from the bright sky, happy in their metal skins, while he jockeyed through the crush of senior traffic converging at the airport. The days before Christmas were the St. Jude airport's finest hour-its raison d'etre, almost. Every garage was full and every walkway thronged.

Denise was right on time, however. Even the airlines conspired to protect her from the embarrassment of a late arrival or an inconvenienced brother. She was standing, per family custom, at a little-used gate on the departure level. Her overcoat was a crazy garnet woolen thing with pink velvet trim, and something about her head seemed different to Gary-more makeup than usual, maybe. More lipstick. Each time he'd seen Denise in the last year (most recently at Thanksgiving), she'd looked more emphatically unlike the person he'd always imagined that she would grow up to be.

When he kissed her, he smelled cigarettes.

"You've become a smoker," he said, making room in the trunk for her suitcase and shopping bag.

Denise smiled. "Unlock the door, I'm freezing."

Gary flipped open his sunglasses. Driving south into glare, he was nearly sideswiped while merging. Road aggression was encroaching in St. Jude; traffic no longer moved so sluggishly that an eastern driver could pleasurably slalom through it.

"I bet Mom's happy Jonah's here," Denise said.

"As a matter of fact, Jonah is not here."

Her head turned sharply. "You didn't bring him?"