ROBIN PASSAFARO was a Philadelphian from a family of troublemakers and true believers. Robin’s grandfather and her uncles Jimmy and Johnny were all unreconstructed Teamsters; the grandfather, Fazio, had served under the Teamsters boss Frank Fitzsimmons as a national vice president and had run the biggest Philly local and mishandled the dues of its 3,200 members for twenty years. Fazio had survived two racketeering indictments, a coronary, a laryngectomy, and nine months of chemotherapy before retiring to Sea Isle City on the Jersey coast, where he still hobbled out onto a pier every morning and baited his crab traps with raw chicken.

Uncle Johnny, Fazio’s eldest son, got along well on two kinds of disability (“chronic and severe lumbar pain,” the claim forms stated), his seasonal cash-only house-painting business, and his luck or talent as an online day trader. Johnny lived near Veterans Stadium with his wife and their youngest daughter in a vinyl-sided row house that they’d expanded until it filled their tiny lot, from the sidewalk to the rear property line; a flower garden and a square of Astroturf were on the roof.

Uncle Jimmy (“Baby Jimmy”) was a bachelor and the site manager for IBT Document Storage, a cinder-block mausoleum that the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, in more optimistic times, had built on the industrial banks of the Delaware and later, because only three (3) loyal Teamsters had ever opted for interment in its thousand fireproof vaults, converted into a long-term repository for corporate and legal paper. Baby Jimmy was famous in local NA circles for having hooked himself on methadone without ever trying heroin.

Robin’s father, Nick, was Fazio’s middle child and the only Passafaro of his generation who never got with the Teamster program. Nick was the family brain and a committed Socialist; the Teamsters with their Nixonian and Sinatran allegiances were anathema to him. Nick married an Irish girl and pointedly moved out to racially integrated Mount Airy and embarked on a career of teaching high-school social studies in the city district, daring principals to fire him for his ebullient Trotskyism.

Nick and his wife, Colleen, had been told that they were infertile. They adopted a year-old boy, Billy, a few months before Colleen became pregnant with Robin—the first of three daughters. Robin was a teenager before she learned that Billy was adopted, but her earliest emotional memories from childhood, she told Denise, were of feeling helplessly privileged.

There was probably a good diagnostic label for Billy, corresponding to abnormal EEG waveforms or troubled red nodules or black lacunae on his CAT scan and to hypothetical causes like severe neglect or cerebral trauma in his preadoptive infancy; but his sisters, Robin especially, knew him simply as a terror. Billy soon figured out that no matter how cruel he was to Robin, she would always blame herself. If she lent him five dollars, he made fun of her for thinking he would pay it back. (If she complained to her father, Nick just gave her another five.) Billy chased her with the grasshoppers whose legs he’d clipped the ends off, the frogs he’d bathed in Clorox, and he told her—he meant it as a joke—“I hurt them because of you.” He put turds of mud in Robin’s dolls’ underpants. He called her Cow Clueless and Robin No-Breast. He stuck her forearm with a pencil and broke the lead off deep. The day after a new bicycle of hers disappeared from the garage, he turned up with a good pair of black roller skates that he said he’d found on Germantown Avenue and that he used to rocket around the neighborhood in the months while she was waiting for another bike.

Their father, Nick, had eyes for every injustice in the First and Third Worlds except those of which Billy was the author. By the time Robin started high school, Billy’s delinquency had driven her to padlock her closet, stuff Kleenex in the keyhole of her bedroom door, and sleep with her wallet beneath her pillow; but even these measures she took more sadly than angrily. She had little to complain of and she knew it. She and her sisters were poor and happy in their big falling-down house on Phil-Ellena Street, and she went to a good Quaker high school and then to an excellent Quaker college, both on full scholarships, and she married her college boyfriend and had two baby girls, while Billy was going down the tubes.

Nick had taught Billy to love politics, and Billy had repaif him by taunting him with the epithet bourgeois liberal, bourgeois liberal. When this failed to incense Nick sufficiently, Billy befriended the other Passafaros, who were predisposed to love any traitor in the family traitor’s family. After Billy was arrested on his second felony charge and Colleen threw him out of the house, his Teamster relatives gave him something of a hero’s welcome. It was a while before he fully wore it out.

He lived for a year with his Uncle Jimmy, who well into his fifties felt happiest among like-minded adolescents with whom he could share his large collections of guns and knives, Chasey Lain videos, and Warlords III and Dungeonmaster paraphernalia. But Jimmy also worshipped Elvis Presley at a shrine in one corner of his bedroom, and Billy, who never got it through his head that Jimmy wasn’t joking about Elvis, finally desecrated the shrine in some grievous and irreversible manner that Jimmy afterward refused to talk about, and was put out on the street.

From there Billy drifted into the radical underground scene in Philly—that Red Crescent of bomb-makers and Xeroxers and zinesters and punks and Bakuninites and minor vegan prophets and orgone-blanket manufacturers and women named Afrika and amateur Engels biographers and Red Army Brigade émigrés that stretched from Fishtown and Kensington in the north, over through Germantown and West Philly (where Mayor Goode had firebombed the good citizens of MOVE), and down into blighted Point Breeze. It was an odd Philly Phact that a non-negligible fraction of the city’s crimes were committed with political consciousness. After Frank Rizzo’s first mayoralty nobody could pretend that the city police force was clean or impartial; and since, in the estimation of Red Crescent denizens, all cops were murderers or, at the very least, ipso facto accessories to murder (witness MOVE!), any crime of violence or wealth redistribution to which a cop might object could be justified as a legitimate action in a long-running dirty war. This logic by and large eluded local judges, however. The young anarchist Billy Passafaro over the years drew ever more severe sentences for his crimes—probation, community service, experimental penal boot camp, and finally the state pen at Graterford. Robin and her father often argued about the justice of these sentences, Nick stroking his Lenin-like goatee and asserting that, although not a violent man himself, he was not opposed to violence in the service of ideals, Robin challenging him to specify what political ideal, exactly, Billy had advanced by stabbing a Penn undergrad with a broken pool cue.

The year before Denise met Robin, Billy was released on parole and attended a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a Community Computing Center in the poor near-north neighborhood of Nicetown. One of the many policy coups of Mayor Goode’s popular two-term successor was the commercial exploitation of the city’s public schools. The mayor had shrewdly cast the deplorable neglect of the schools as a business opportunity (“Act Fast, Be Part of Our Message of Hope,” his letters said), and the N—— Corporation had responded to his pitch by assuming responsibility for the city’s severely underfunded school athletic programs. Now the mayor had midwifed a similar arrangement with the W—— Corporation, which was donating to the city of Philadelphia sufficient units of its famous Global Desktop to “empower” every classroom in the city, plus five Community Computing Centers in blighted northern and western neighborhoods. The agreement granted W—— the exclusive right to employ for promotional and advertising purposes all classroom activities within the school district of Philadelphia, including but not limited to all Global Desktop applications. Critics of the mayor alternately denounced the “sellout” and complained that W—— was donating its slow and crash-prone Version 4.0 Desktops to the schools and its nearly useless Version 3.2 technology to the Community Computing Centers. But the mood in Nicetown on that September afternoon was buoyant. The mayor and W——’ s twenty-eight-year-old corporate-image vice president, Rick Flamburg, joined hands on big shears to cut ribbon. Local politicians of color said children and tomorrow. They said digital and democracy and history.

Outside the white tent, the usual crowd of anarchists, eyed warily by a police detail that was later criticized as having been too small, openly carried banners and placards and privately, in the pockets of their cargo pants, carried powerful bar magnets with which they hoped, amid the cake-eating and punch-drinking and confusion, to erase much data from the center’s new Global Desktops. Their banners said REFUSE IT and COMPUTERS ARE THE OPPOSITE OF REVOLUTION and THIS HEAVEN GIVES ME MIGRAINE. Billy Passafaro, neatly shaved and wearing a short-sleeve white button-down, carried a four-foot length of two-by-four on which he’d written WELCOME TO PHILADELPHIA!! When the official ceremonies ended and the scene became more appealingly anarchic, Billy edged into the crowd, smiling and holding aloft his message of goodwill, until he was close enough to the dignitaries that he could swing the two-by-four like a baseball bat and break Rick Flamburg’s skull. Three further blows demolished Flamburg’s nose, jaw, collarbone, and most of his teeth before the mayor’s bodyguard tackled Billy and a dozen cops piled on.

Billy was lucky the tent was too crowded for the cops to shoot him. He was also lucky, given the obvious premeditation of his crime and the politically awkward shortage of white inmates on death row, that Rick Flamburg didn’t die. (Less clear was whether Flamburg himself, an unmarried Dartmouth grad whom the attack left palsied, disfigured, slurred of speech, blind in one eye, and prone to incapacitating headaches, felt lucky about this.) Billy was indicted for attempted murder, first-degree assault, and assault with a deadly weapon. He categorically rejected any plea agreement and chose to represent himself in court, dismissing as “accommodationist” both his court-appointed counsel and the old Teamster attorney who offered to bill his family fifty an hour.

To the surprise of nearly everyone but Robin, who had never doubted her brother’s intelligence, Billy mounted an articulate selfdefense. He argued that the mayor’s “sale” of the children of Philadelphia into the “technoslavery” of the W—— Corporation represented a “clear and present public danger” to which he’d been justified in responding violently. He denounced the “unholy connivance” of American business and American government. He compared himself to the Minutemen at Lexington and Concord. When Robin, much later, showed Denise the trial transcript, Denise imagined bringing Billy and her brother Chip together over dinner and listening while they compared notes about “the bureaucracy,” but this dinner would have to wait until Billy had served seventy percent of his twelve-to-eighteen-year sentence at Graterford.

Nick Passafaro had taken a leave of absence and loyally attended his son’s trial. Nick went on TV and said everything you’d expect from an old red: “Once a day the victim’s black, and there’s silence; once a year the victim’s white, and there’s an outcry,” and “My son will pay dearly for his crime, but W—— will never pay for its crimes,” and “The Rick Flamburgs of the world have made billions selling phony violence to America’s children.” Nick concurred in most of Billy’s courtroom arguments and was proud of his performance, but after the photos of Flamburg’s injuries were introduced in court, he began to lose his grip. The deep V-shaped indentations in Flamburg’s cranium, nose, jaw, and clavicle spoke to a savagery of exertion, a madness, that didn’t square well with idealism. Nick stopped sleeping as the trial progressed. He stopped shaving and lost his appetite. At Colleen’s insistence, he saw a psychiatrist and came home with medications, but even then he woke her in the night. He shouted, “I won’t apologize!” He shouted, “It’s a war!” Eventually his dosages were upped, and in April the school district retired him.

Because Rick Flamburg had worked for the W—— Corporation, Robin felt responsible for all of this.

Robin had become the Passafaro ambassador to Rick Flamburg’s family, showing up at the hospital until Flamburg’s parents had spent their anger and suspicion and recognized that she was not her brother’s keeper. She sat by Flamburg and read Sports Illustrated to him. She walked alongside his walker as he shuffled up a corridor. On the night of the second of his reconstructive surgeries, she took his parents to dinner and listened to their (frankly boring) stories about their son. She told them how quick Billy had been, how in fourth grade he’d already had the spelling and handwriting skills to forge a plausible note excusing him from school, and what a fund of dirty jokes and important reproductive information he was, and how it felt to be a smart girl and see your equally smart brother make himself more stupid by the year, as if specifically to avoid becoming a person like you: how mysterious it all was and how sorry she felt about what he’d done to their son.

On the eve of Billy’s trial, Robin invited her mother to go to church. Colleen had been confirmed as a Catholic, but she hadn’t taken communion in forty years; Robin’s own church experience was confined to weddings and funerals. Nevertheless, on three consecutive Sundays, Colleen agreed to be picked up in Mount Airy and driven to her childhood parish, St. Dymphna’s, in North Philly. Leaving the sanctuary on the third Sunday, Colleen told Robin, in the faint brogue she’d retained all her life, “That’ll do for me, thanks.” After that, Robin went by herself to mass at St. Dymphna’s and, by and by, to confirmation classes.

Robin could afford the time for these good works and acts of devotion because of the W—— Corporation. Her husband, Brian Callahan, was the son of a local small-time manufacturer and had grown up comfortably in Bala-Cynwyd, playing lacrosse and developing sophisticated tastes in expectation of inheriting his father’s small specialty-chemical company. (Callahan père in his youth had profitably developed a compound that could be thrown into Bessemer converters and patch their cracks and ulcers while their ceramic walls were still hot.) Brian had married the prettiest girl in his college class (in his opinion, this was Robin), and soon after graduation he’d become president of High Temp Products. The company was housed in a yellow-brick building in an industrial park near the Tacony-Palmyra Bridge; by coincidence, its nearest living commercial neighbor was IBT Document Storage. The cerebral drain of running High Temp Products being minimal, Brian spent his executive afternoons noodling around with computer code and Fourier analysis, blasting on his presidential boom box certain cult California bands to which he was partial (Fibulator, Thinking Fellers Union, the Minutemen, the Nomatics), and writing a piece of software that in the fullness of time he quietly patented, quietly found a VC backer for, and one day, on the advice of this backer, quietly sold to the W—— Corporation for $19,500,000.

Brian’s product, called Eigenmelody, processed any piece of recorded music into an eigenvector that distilled the song’s tonal and melodic essence into discrete, manipulable coordinates. An Eigenmelody user could select a favorite Moby song, and Eigenmelody would spectroanalyze her choice, search a recorded-music database for songs with similar eigenvectors, and produce a list of kindred sounds that the user might otherwise have never found: the Au Pairs, Laura Nyro, Thomas Mapfumo, Pokrovsky’s wailing version of Les Noces. Eigenmelody was parlor game, musicological tool, and record-sales-enhancer rolled into one. Brian had worked enough kinks out of it that the behemoth of W——, belatedly scrambling for a piece of the online music-distribution action, came running to him with a big wad of monopoly money in its outstretched hand.

It was characteristic of Brian, who hadn’t mentioned the impending sale to Robin, that on the evening of the day the deal went through he didn’t breathe a word of it until the girls were in bed in their modest yuppie row house near the Art Museum and he and she were watching a Nova show about sunspots.

“Oh, by the way,” Brian said, “neither of us ever has to work again.” It was characteristic of Robin—her excitability—that on receiving this news she laughed until she got the hiccups.

Alas, there was justice in Billy’s old epithet for Robin: Cow Clueless. Robin was under the impression that she already had a good life with Brian. She lived in her town house, grew vegetables and herbs in her little back yard, taught “language arts” to ten- and eleven-year-olds at an experimental school in West Philly, sent her daughter Sinéad to an excellent private elementary school on Fairmount Avenue and her daughter Erin to the preschool program at Friends’ Select, bought softshell crabs and Jersey tomatoes at the Reading Terminal Market, took weekends and Augusts at Brian’s family’s house at Cape May, socialized with old friends who had children of their own, and burned off enough sexual energy with Brian (she ideally liked it daily, she told Denise) to keep her halfway calm.

Cow Clueless was therefore shocked by Brian’s next question. He asked her where she thought they should live. He said he was thinking of Northern California. He was also thinking of Provence, New York, and London.

“We’re happy here,” Robin said. “Why go someplace where we don’t know anybody and everybody’s a millionaire?”

“Climate,” Brian said. “Beauty, safety, culture. Style. None of which are Philly’s long suit. I’m not saying let’s move. I’m just saying tell me if there’s anyplace you’d like to go, even for a summer.”

“I like it here.”

“So we’ll stay here,” he said. “Until you feel like going someplace else.”

She was naïve enough, she told Denise, to think this ended the discussion. She had a good marriage, stably founded on childrearing, eating, and sex. It was true that she and Brian had different class backgrounds, but High Temp Products wasn’t exactly E. I. Du Pont de Nemours, and Robin, holding degrees from two elite schools, wasn’t your typical proletarian. Their few real differences came down to style, and these differences were mostly invisible to Robin, because Brian was a good husband and a nice guy and because, in her cow innocence, Robin couldn’t imagine that style had anything to do with happiness. Her musical tastes ran to John Prine and Etta James, and so Brian played Prine and James at home and saved his Bartók and Defunkt and Flaming Lips and Mission of Burma for blasting on his boom box at High Temp. That Robin dressed like a grad student in white sneakers and a purple nylon shell and oversized round wireframes of a kind last worn by fashionable people in 1978 didn’t altogether disappoint Brian, because he alone among men got to see her naked. That Robin was high-strung and had a penetrating screechy voice and a kookaburra laugh seemed, likewise, a small price to pay for a heart of gold and an eye-popping streak of lechery and a racing metabolism that kept her movie-actress thin. That Robin never shaved her armpits and too seldom washed her glasses—well, she was the mother of Brian’s children, and as long as he could play his music and tinker with his tensors by himself, he didn’t mind indulging in her the anti-style that liberal women of a certain age wore as a badge of feminist identity. This, at any rate, was how Denise imagined Brian had solved the problem of style until the money from W—— came rolling in.

(Denise, though only three years younger than Robin, could not conceive of wearing a purple nylon parka or failing to shave her armpits. She didn’t even own white sneakers.)

Robin’s first concession to her new wealth was to spend the summer house-hunting with Brian. She’d grown up in a big house and she wanted her girls to grow up in one, too. If Brian needed twelve-foot ceilings and four baths and mahogany details throughout, she could live with that. On the sixth of September they signed a contract on a grand brownstone on Panama Street, near Rittenhouse Square.

Two days later, with all the strength in his prison-built shoulders, Billy Passafaro welcomed W——’s corporate-image vice president to Philadelphia.

What Robin needed to know and couldn’t find out, in the weeks following the attack, was whether, by the time he lettered his message on a two-by-four, Billy had learned of Brian’s windfall and knew which company she and Brian owed their sudden wealth to. The answer mattered, mattered, mattered. However, it was pointless to ask Billy. She knew she wouldn’t get the truth from Billy, she’d get whatever answer he believed would hurt her worst. Billy had made it abundantly clear to Robin that he would never stop sneering at her, never address her as a peer, until she could prove to him that her life was as fucked-up and miserable as his. And it was precisely this totemic role she seemed to play for him, precisely the fact that he’d singled her out as the archetypical possessor of the happy normal life he couldn’t have, that made her feel as if hers were the head he’d swung for when he brained Rick Flamburg.

Before the trial she asked her father if he’d told Billy that Brian had sold Eigenmelody to W——. She didn’t want to ask him, but she couldn’t not. Nick, because he gave Billy money, was the only person in the family still in regular communication with him. (Uncle Jimmy had promised to shoot the desecrator of his shrine, the little prick nephew, if he ever showed his little prick Elvis-hating face again, and eventually Billy had stolen once too often from everybody else; even Nick’s parents, Fazio and Carolina, who had long insisted that there was nothing wrong with Billy but, in Fazio’s words, “attentive deficiency disorder,” no longer let their grandson inside their Sea Isle City house.)

Nick unfortunately grasped the import of Robin’s question right away. Choosing his words carefully, he replied that, no, he didn’t recall saying anything to Billy.

“It’s better if you just tell me the truth, Dad,” Robin said.

“Well. . .I. . .I don’t think there’s any connection there. . .uh, Robin.”

“Maybe it wouldn’t make me feel guilty. Maybe it would just piss me off.”

“Well. . .Robin. . .those. . .those feelings often amount to the same thing anyway. Guilt, anger, same thing. . .right? But don’t you worry about Billy.”

She hung up wondering whether Nick was trying to protect her from her guilt, trying to protect Billy from her anger, or simply spacing out under the strain. She suspected it was a combination of all three. She suspected that during the summer her father had mentioned Brian’s windfall to Billy and that father and son had then traded snidenesses and bitternesses about the W—— Corporation and bourgeois Robin and leisure-class Brian. She suspected this, if nothing else, because of how badly Brian and her father got along. Brian was never as outspoken with his wife as he was with Denise (“Nick’s the worst kind of coward,” he remarked to her once), but he made no secret of hating Nick’s bad-boy disquisitions on the uses of violence and his teeth-sucking satisfaction with his so-called socialism. Brian liked Colleen well enough (“She sure got a raw deal in that marriage,” he remarked to Denise) but shook his head and left the room whenever Nick began holding forth. Robin didn’t let herself imagine what her father and Billy had said about her and Brian. But she was pretty sure that things were said and that Rick Flamburg had paid the price. Nick’s response to the trial photographs of Flamburg lent further credence to this view.

During the trial, as her father fell apart, Robin studied the catechism at St. Dymphna’s and made two further claims on Brian’s new money. First she quit her job at the experimental school. She was no longer satisfied to work for parents paying $23,000 a year per child (although, of course, she and Brian were paying nearly that much to school Sinéad and Erin). And then she embarked on a philanthropic project. In a badly blighted section of Point Breeze, less than a mile south of their new house, she bought a vacant city block with a single derelict row house standing on one corner. She also bought five truckloads of humus and good liability insurance. Her plan was to hire local teenagers at minimum wage, teach them the rudiments of organic gardening, and let them share the profits from whatever vegetables they could sell. She threw herself into her Garden Project with a manic intensity that was scary even by Robin standards. Brian found her awake at her Global Desktop at 4 a. m., tapping both feet and comparing varieties of turnip.

With a different contractor coming to Panama Street every week to make improvements, and with Robin disappearing into a utopist sink of time and energy, Brian reconciled himself to remaining in the dismal city of his childhood. He decided to have some fun of his own. He began eating lunch at the good restaurants of Philadelphia, one after another, and comparing each to his current favorite, Mare Scuro. When he was sure that he still liked Mare Scuro best, he called the chef and made a proposal.

“The first truly cool restaurant in Philly,” he said. “The kind of place that makes a person say, ‘Hey, I could live in Philly—if I had to.’ I don’t care if anybody else actually feels that way. I just want a place that makes me feel that way. So whatever they’re paying you now, I will double. And then you go to Europe and eat for a couple of months at my expense. And then come back and design and operate a truly cool restaurant.”

“You’re going to lose vast amounts of money,” Denise replied, “if you don’t find an experienced partner or an exceptionally good manager.”

“Tell me what to do, and I’ll do it,” Brian said.

“ ‘Double,’ you said?”

“You’ve got the best place in the city.”

“ ‘Double’ is intriguing.”

“So say yes.”

“Well, it might happen,” Denise said. “But you’re still probably going to lose vast amounts of money. You’re certainly overpaying your chef.”

Denise had always had trouble saying no when she felt wanted in the right way. Growing up in suburban St. Jude, she’d been kept at safe distances from anybody who might have wanted her in this way, but after she finished high school she worked for a summer in the Signal Department of the Midland Pacific Railroad, and here, in a big sunny room with twin rows of drafting tables, she became acquainted with the desires of a dozen older men.

The brain of the Midland Pacific, the temple of its soul, was a Depression-era limestone office building with rounded rooftop crenellations like the edges of a skimpy waffle. Higher-order consciousness had its cortical seat in the boardroom and executive dining room on the sixteenth floor and in the offices of the more abstract departments (Operations, Legal, Public Relations) whose vice presidents were on fifteen. Down at the reptile-brain bottom of the building were billing, payroll, personnel, and data storage. In between were mid-level skill functions such as Engineering, which encompassed bridges, track, buildings, and signals.

The Midland Pacific lines were twelve thousand miles long, and for every signal and every wire along the way, every set of red and amber lights, every motion detector buried in ballast, every flashing cantilever crossing guard, every agglomeration of timers and relays housed in a ventless aluminum shed, there were up-to-date circuit diagrams in one of six heavy-lidded filing tanks in the tank room on the twelfth floor of headquarters. The oldest diagrams were drawn freehand in pencil on vellum, the newest with Rapidograph pens on preprinted Mylar blanks.

The draftsmen who tended these files and liaised with the field engineers who kept the railroad’s nervous system healthy and untangled were Texan and Kansan and Missourian natives: intelligent, uncultured, twangy men who’d come up the hard way from no-skill jobs in signal gangs, chopping weeds and digging postholes and stringing wire until, by virtue of their aptitude with circuits (and also, as Denise later realized, by virtue of being white), they’d been singled out for training and advancement. None had more than a year or two of college, most only high school. On a summer day when the sky got whiter and the grass got browner and their former gangmates were battling heatstroke in the field, the draftsmen were happy indeed to sit in cushioned roller chairs in air so cool they all kept cardigans handy in their personal drawers.

“You’ll find that some of the men take coffee breaks,” Alfred told Denise in the pink of the rising sun, as they drove downtown on her first morning. “I want you to know they’re not paid to take coffee breaks. I expect you not to take coffee breaks yourself. The railroad is doing us a favor by hiring you, and it’s paying you to work eight hours. I want you to remember that. If you apply yourself with the same energy you brought to your schoolwork and your trumpet-playing, you’ll be remembered as a great worker.”

Denise nodded. To say she was competitive was to put it mildly. In the high-school band there had been two girls and twelve boys in the trumpet section. She was in the first chair and boys were in the next twelve. (In the last chair was a part-Cherokee girl from downstate who hit middle C instead of high E and helped cast that pall of dissonance that shadows every high-school band.) Denise had no great passion for music, but she loved to excel, and her mother believed that bands were good for children. Enid liked the discipline of bands, the upbeat normality, the patriotism. Gary in his day had been an able boy trumpeter and Chip had (briefly, honkingly) attempted the bassoon. Denise, when her time came, asked to follow in Gary’s footsteps, but Enid didn’t think that little girls and trumpets matched. What matched little girls was flutes. But there was never much satisfaction for Denise in competing with girls. She’d insisted on the trumpet, and Alfred had backed her up, and eventually it had dawned on Enid that rental fees could be avoided if Denise used Gary’s old trumpet.

Unlike sheet music, unfortunately, the signal diagrams that Denise was given to copy and file that summer were unintelligible to her. Since she couldn’t compete with the draftsmen, she competed with the boy who’d worked in Signals the previous two summers, Alan Jamborets, the corporation counsel’s son; and since she had no way to gauge Jamborets’s performance, she worked with an intensity that she was certain nobody could match.

“Denise, whoa, God, damn,” Laredo Bob, a sweating Texan, said while she was cutting and collating blueprints.

“What?”

“You gonna burn yourself out going that fast.”

“Actually, I enjoy it,” she said. “Once I’m in the rhythm.”

“Thing is, though,” Laredo Bob said, “you can leave some of that for tomorrow.”

“I don’t enjoy it that much.”

“OK, well, but y’all take a coffee break now. You hear me?”

Draftsmen were yipping as they trotted toward the hallway.

“Coffee time!”

“Snack cart’s here!”

“Coffee time!”

She worked with undiminished speed.

Laredo Bob was the low man to whom drudge work fell when there was no summer help to relieve him. Laredo Bob ought to have to been chagrined that Denise—in full view of the boss—was performing in half an hour certain clerical tasks to which he liked to devote whole mornings while he chewed up a Swisher Sweet cigar. But Laredo Bob believed that character was destiny. To him Denise’s work habits were simply evidence that she was her daddy’s daughter and that soon enough she would be an executive just like her daddy while he, Laredo Bob, would go on performing clerical tasks at the speed you’d expect from somebody fated to perform them. Laredo Bob further believed that women were angels and men were poor sinners. The angel he was married to revealed her sweet, gracious nature mainly by forgiving his tobacky habit and feeding and clothing four children on a single smallish income, but he was by no means surprised when the Eternal Feminine turned out to have supernatural abilities in the area of labeling and alphabetically sorting thousand-count boxes of card-mounted microform. Denise seemed to Laredo Bob an all-around marvelous and purty creature. Before long he began singing a rockabilly chorus (“Denise-uh-why-you-done, what-you-did?”) when she arrived in the morning and when she returned from her lunch break in the little treeless city park across the street.

The chief of draftsmen, Sam Beuerlein, told Denise that next summer they would have to pay her not to come to work, since she was doing the work of two this summer.

A grinning Arkansan, Lamar Parker, who wore enormous thick glasses and had precancers on his forehead, asked her if her daddy had told her what a rascally, worthless crew the men of Signals were.

“Just worthless,” Denise said. “He never said rascally.”

Lamar cackled and puffed on his Tareyton and repeated her remark in case the men around him hadn’t heard it.

“Heh-heh-heh,” the draftsman named Don Armour muttered with unpleasant sarcasm.

Don Armour was the only man in Signals who seemed not to love Denise. He was a solidly built, short-legged Vietnam vet whose cheeks, close-shaved, were nearly as blue and glaucous as a plum. His blazers were tight around his massive upper arms; drafting tools seemed toy-sized in his hand; he looked like a teenager stuck at a first-grader’s desk. Instead of resting his feet on the ring of his high wheeled chair, like everyone else, he let his feet dangle, his toe-tips dragging on the floor. He draped his upper body across the drafting surface, bringing his eyes to within inches of his Rapidograph pen. After working for an hour like this, he went limp and pressed his nose into Mylar or buried his face in his hands and moaned. His coffee breaks he often passed pitched forward like a murder victim, his forehead on his table, his plastic aviator glasses in his fist.

When Denise was first introduced to Don Armour, he looked away and gave her a dead-fish handshake. When she worked at the far end of the drafting room, she could hear him murmuring things while the men around him chuckled; when she was close to him he kept silent and smirked fiercely at his tabletop. He reminded her of the smartasses who haunted the back rows of classrooms.

She was in the women’s room one morning in July when she heard Armour and Lamar outside the bathroom door by the drinking fountain where Lamar rinsed out his coffee mugs. She stood by the door and strained to hear.

“Remember we thought old Alan was a crazy worker?” Lamar said.

“I’ll say this for Jamborets,” Don Armour said. “He was a hell of a lot easier on the eyes.”

“Hee hee.”

“Hard to get much work done with somebody as good-looking as Alan Jamborets walking around all day in little skirts.”

“Alan was a pretty boy, all right.”

There was a groan. “I swear to God, Lamar,” Don Armour said, “I’m this close to filing a complaint with OSHA. This is cruel and unusual. Did you see that skirt?”

“I seen it. But shush now.”

“I’m going crazy.”

“This is a seasonal problem, Donald. It’s like to take care of itself in two months.”

“If the Wroths don’t fire me first.”

“Say, what makes you so sure this merger’s going through?”

“I sweated eight years in the field to get to this office. It’s about time something else came along and fucked things up.”

Denise was wearing a short electric-blue thrift-store skirt that in truth she was surprised was in compliance with her mother’s Islamic female dress code. To the extent that she accepted the idea that Lamar and Don Armour had been talking about her—and the idea did have an undeniable strange headache-like residency status in her brain—she felt all the more keenly snubbed by Don. She felt as if he were having a party in her own house without inviting her.

When she returned to the drafting room, he cast a skeptical eye around the room, sizing up everyone but her. As his gaze skipped past her, she felt a curious need to push her fingernails into the quick or to pinch her own nipples.

It was the season of thunder in St. Jude. The air had a smell of Mexican violence, of hurricanes or coups. There could be morning thunder from unreadably churning skies, ominous dull reports from south-county municipalities that nobody you knew had ever been to. And lunch-hour thunder from a solitary anvil wandering through otherwise semi-fair skies. And the more serious thunder of midafternoon, as solid sea-green waves of cloud rolled up in the southwest, the sun shining all the brighter locally and the heat bearing down more urgently, as if aware that time was short. And the great theater of a good dinnertime blowout, storms crowded into the fifty-mile radius of the radar’s sweep like big spiders in a little jar, clouds booming at each other from the sky’s four corners, and wave upon wave of dime-sized raindrops arriving like plagues, the picture in your window going black-and-white and fuzzy, trees and houses lurching in the flashes of lightning, small kids with swimsuits and drenched towels running home headlong, like refugees. And the drumming late at night, the rolling caissons of summer on the march.

And every day the St. Jude press carried rumblings of an impending merger. The Midpac’s importunate twin-brother suitors, Hillard and Chauncy Wroth, were in town talking to three unions. The Wroths were in Washington countering Midpac testimony before a Senate subcommittee. The Midpac had reportedly asked the Union Pacific to be its white knight. The Wroths defended their postacquisitional restructuring of the Arkansas Southern. The Midpac’s spokesman begged all concerned St. Judeans to write or call their congressmen. . .

Denise was leaving the building for lunch under partly cloudy skies when the top of a utility pole a block away from her exploded. She saw bright pink and felt the blast of thunder on her skin. Secretaries ran screaming through the little park. Denise turned on her heel and took her book and her sandwich and her plum back up to the twelfth floor, where every day two tables of pinochle formed. She sat down by the windows, but it seemed pretentious or unfriendly to be reading War and Peace. She divided her attention between the crazy skies outside and the card game nearest her.

Don Armour unwrapped a sandwich and opened it to a slice of bologna on which the texture of bread was lithographed in yellow mustard. His shoulders slumped. He wrapped the sandwich up again loosely in its foil and looked at Denise as if she were the latest torment of his day.

“Meld sixteen.”

“Who made this mess?”

“Ed,” Don Armour said, fanning cards, “you gotta be careful with those bananas.”

Ed Alberding, the most senior draftsman, had a body shaped like a bowling pin and curly gray hair like an old lady’s perm. He was blinking rapidly as he chewed banana and studied his cards. The banana, peeled, lay on the table in front of him. He broke off another dainty bite.

“Awful lot of potassium in a banana,” Don Armour said.

“Potassium’s good for you,” Lamar said from across the table.

Don Armour set his cards down and regarded Lamar gravely. “Are you joking? Doctors use potassium to induce cardiac arrest.”

“Ol’ Eddie eats two, three bananas every day,” Lamar said. “How’s that heart of yours feelin’, Mr. Ed?”

“Let’s just play the hand here, boys,” Ed said.

“But I’m terribly concerned about your health,” Don Armour said.

“You tell too many lies, mister.”

“Day after day I see you ingesting toxic potassium. It’s my duty as a friend to warn you.”

“Your trick, Don.”

“Put a card down, Don.”

“And in return all I get,” Armour said in an injured tone, “is suspicion and denial.”

“Donald, you in this game or just keepin’ that seat warm?”

“Of course, if Ed were to keel over dead of cardiac arrest, due to acute long-term potassium poisoning, that would make me fourth highest in seniority and secure me a place in Little Rock with the Arkansas Southern slash Midland Pacific, so why am I even mentioning this? Please, Ed, eat my banana, too.”

“Hee hee, watch your mouth,” Lamar said.

“Gentlemen, I believe these tricks are all mine.”

“Son of a gun!”

Shuffle, shuffle. Slap, slap.

“Ed, you know, they got computers down in Little Rock,” Don Armour said, never glancing at Denise.

“Uh-oh,” Ed said. “Computers?”

“You go down there, I’m warning you, they’re going to make you learn to use one.”

“Eddie’ll be asleep with angels before he learns computers,” Lamar said.

“I beg to differ,” Don said. “Ed’s going to go to Little Rock and learn computer drafting. He’s going to make somebody else sick to their stomach with his bananas.”

“Say, Donald, what makes you so sure you ain’t going to Little Rock yourself?”

Don shook his head. “We’d spend two, three thousand dollars less a year if we lived in Little Rock, and pretty soon I’d be making a couple thousand a year more. It’s cheap down there. Patty could work maybe half days, let the girls have a mother again. We could buy some land in the Ozarks before the girls got too old to enjoy it. Someplace with a pond. You think anybody’s gonna let that happen to me?”

Ed was sorting his cards with the nervous twitches of a chipmunk. “What do they need computers for?” he said.

“To replace useless old men with,” Don said, his plum face splitting open with an unkind smile.

“Replace us?”

“Why do you think the Wroths are buying us out and not the other way around?”

Shuffle, shuffle. Slap, slap. Denise watched the sky stick forks of lightning into the salad of trees on the Illinois horizon. While her head was turned, there was an explosion at the table.

“Jesus Christ, Ed,” Don Armour said, “why don’t you just go ahead and lick those before you put them down?”

“Easy there, Don,” said Sam Beuerlein, the chief of draftsmen.

“Am I alone in this turning my stomach?”

“Easy. Easy.”

Don threw his cards down and shoved off in his rolling chair so violently that the praying-mantis drafting light creaked and swayed. “Laredo,” he called, “come take my cards. I gotta get some banana-free air.”

“Easy.”

Don shook his head. “It’s say it now, Sam, or go crazy when the buyout happens.”

“You’re a smart man, Don,” Beuerlein said. “You’ll land on your feet no matter what.”

“I don’t know about smart. I’m not half as smart as Ed. Am I, Ed?”

Ed’s nose twitched. He tapped the table with his cards impatiently.

“Too young for Korea, too old for my war,” Don said. “That’s what I call smart. Smart enough to get off the bus and cross Olive Street every morning for twenty-five years without getting hit by a car. Smart enough to get back on it every night. That’s what counts for smart in this world.”

Sam Beuerlein raised his voice. “Don, now, you listen to me. You go take a walk, you hear? Go outside and cool down. When you get back, you may decide you owe Eddie an apology.”

“Meld eighteen,” Ed said, tapping the table.

Don pressed his hand into the small of his back and limped up the aisle, shaking his head. Laredo Bob came over with egg salad in his mustache and took Don’s cards.

“No need for apologies,” Ed said. “Let’s just play the hand here, boys.”

Denise was leaving the women’s room after lunch when Don Armour stepped off the elevator. He had a shawl of rain marks on his shoulders. He rolled his eyes at the sight of Denise, as if at some fresh persecution.

“What?” she said.

He shook his head and walked away.

“What? What?”

“Lunch hour’s over,” he said. “Aren’t you supposed to be working?”

Each wiring diagram was labeled with the name of the line and the milepost number. The Signal Engineer hatched plans for corrections, and the draftsmen sent paper copies of the diagrams into the field, highlighting additions in yellow pencil and subtractions in red. The field engineers then did the work, often improvising their own fixes and shortcuts, and sent the copies back to headquarters torn and yellowed and greasily fingerprinted, with pinches of red Arkansas dust or bits of Kansas weed chaff in their folds, and the draftsmen recorded the corrections in black ink on the Mylar and vellum originals.

Through the long afternoon, as the perch-belly white of the sky turned the color of a fish’s flanks and back, Denise folded the thousands of offprints she’d cut in the morning, six copies of each in the prescribed folds that fit in the field engineer’s binder. There were signals at mileposts 16.2 and 17.4 and 20.1 and 20.8 and 22.0 and so on up to the town of New Chartres at 74.35, the end of the line.

On the way out to the suburbs that night she asked her father if the Wroths were going to merge the railroad with the Arkansas Southern.

“I don’t know,” Alfred said. “I hope not.”

Would the company move to Little Rock?

“That seems to be their intention, if they get control.”

What would happen to the men in Signals?

“I’d guess some of the more senior ones would move. The younger ones—probably laid off. But I don’t want you talking about this.”

“I won’t,” Denise said.

Enid, as on every other Thursday night for the last thirty-five years, had dinner waiting. She’d stuffed green peppers and was abubble with enthusiasm about the coming weekend.

“You’ll have to take the bus home tomorrow,” she told Denise as they sat down at the table. “Dad and I are going to Lake Fond du Lac Estates with the Schumperts.”

“What is Lake Fond du Lac Estates?”

“It is a boondoggle,” Alfred said, “that I should have known better than to get involved with. However, your mother wore me down.”

“Al,” Enid said, “there are no strings attached. There is no pressure to go to any of the seminars. We can spend the whole weekend doing anything we want.”

“There’s bound to be pressure. The developer can’t keep giving away free weekends and not try to sell some lots.”

“The brochure said no pressure, no expectation, no strings attached.”

“I am dubious,” Alfred said.

“Mary Beth says there’s a wonderful winery near Bordentown that we can tour. And we can all swim in Lake Fond du Lac! And the brochure says there are paddleboats and a gourmet restaurant.”

“I can’t imagine a Missouri winery in mid-July is going to be appealing,” Alfred said.

“You just have to get in the spirit of things,” Enid said. “The Dribletts went last October and had so much fun. Dale said there was no pressure at all. Very little pressure, he said.”

“Consider the source.”

“What do you mean?”

“A man who sells coffins for a living.”

“Dale’s no different than anybody else.”

“I said I am dubious. But I will go.” Alfred added, to Denise: “You can take the bus home. We’ll leave a car here for you.”

“Kenny Kraikmeyer called this morning,” Enid told Denise. “He wondered if you’re free on Saturday night.”

Denise shut one eye and widened the other. “What did you say?”

“I said I thought you were.”

“You what?”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t realize you had plans.”

Denise laughed. “My only plan at the moment is to not see Kenny Kraikmeyer.”

“He was very polite,” Enid said. “You know, it doesn’t hurt to go on one date if somebody takes the trouble to ask you. If you don’t have fun, you don’t have to do it again. But you ought to start saying yes to somebody. People will think nobody’s good enough for you.”

Denise set down her fork. “Kenny Kraikmeyer literally turns my stomach.”

“Denise,” Alfred said.

“That’s not right,” Enid said, her voice trembling. “That’s not something I want to hear you saying.”

“OK, I’m sorry I said that. But I’m not free on Saturday. Not for Kenny Kraikmeyer. Who, if he wants to go out, might consider asking me.”

It occurred to Denise that Enid would probably enjoy a weekend with Kenny Kraikmeyer at Lake Fond du Lac, and that Kenny would probably have a better time there than Alfred would.

After dinner she biked over to the oldest house in the suburb, a high-ceilinged cube of antebellum brick across the street from the boarded-up commuter rail station. The house belonged to the high-school drama teacher, Henry Dusinberre, who’d left his campy Abyssinian banana and gaudy crotons and tongue-in-cheek potted palms in his favorite student’s care while he spent a month with his mother in New Orleans. Among the bordelloish antiques in Dusinberre’s parlor were twelve ornate champagne glasses, each with an ascending column of air bubbles captured in its faceted crystal stem, that he allowed only Denise, of all the young thespians and literary types who gravitated to his liquor on Saturday nights, to drink from. (“Let the little beasts use plastic cups,” he would say as he arranged his wasted limbs in his calfskin club chair. He had fought two rounds against a cancer now officially in remission, but his glossy skin and protuberant eyes suggested that all was not well oncologically. “Lambert, extraordinary creature,” he said, “sit here where I can see you in profile. Do you realize the Japanese would worship you for your neck? Worship you.”) It was in Dusinberre’s house that she’d tasted her first raw oyster, her first quail egg, her first grappa. Dusinberre steeled her in her resolve not to succumb to the charms of any (his phrase) “pimpled adolescents.” He bought dresses and jackets on approval in antique stores, and if they fit Denise he let her keep them. Fortunately, Enid, who wished that Denise would dress more like a Schumpert or a Root, held vintage clothing in such low esteem that she actually believed that a spotless embroidered yellow satin party dress with buttons of tiger-eye agate had cost Denise (as she claimed) ten dollars at the Salvation Army. Over Enid’s bitter objections she’d worn this dress to her senior prom with Peter Hicks, the substantially pimpled actor who’d played Tom to her Amanda in The Glass Menagerie. Peter Hicks, on prom night, had been invited to join her and Dusinberre in drinking from the rococo champagne glasses, but Peter was driving and stuck with his plastic cup of Coke.

After she watered the plants, she sat in Dusinberre’s calfskin chair and listened to New Order. She wished she felt like dating someone, but the boys she respected, like Peter Hicks, didn’t move her romantically, and the rest were in the mold of Kenny Kraikmeyer, who, though bound for the Naval Academy and a career in nuclear science, fancied himself a hipster and collected Cream and Jimi Hendrix “vinyl” (his word) with a passion that God had surely intended him to bring to building model submarines. Denise was a little worried by the degree of her revulsion. She didn’t understand what made her so very mean. She was unhappy to be so mean. There seemed to be something wrong with the way she thought about herself and other people.

Whenever her mother pointed this out, though, she had no choice but to nuke her.

The next day she was taking her lunch hour in the park, sunning herself in one of the tiny sleeveless tops that her mother was unaware she wore to work beneath her sweaters, when Don Armour appeared from nowhere and dropped onto the bench beside her.

“You’re not playing cards,” she said.

“I’m going crazy,” he said.

She returned her eyes to her book. She could feel him looking at her body pointedly. The air was hot but not so hot as to account for the heat on his side of her face.

He took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes. “This is where you come and sit every day.”

“Yes.”

He wasn’t good-looking. His head seemed too large, his hair was thinning, and his face had the dusky nitrite red of a wiener or bologna, except where his beard made it blue. But she recognized an amusement, a brightness, an animal sadness in his expression; and the saddle curves of his lips were inviting.

He read the spine of her book. “Count Leo Tolstoy,” he said. He shook his head and laughed silently.

“What?”

“Nothing,” he said. “I’m just trying to imagine what it’s like to be you.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean beautiful. Smart. Disciplined. Rich. Going to college. What’s it like?”

She had a ridiculous impulse to answer him by touching him, to let him feel what it was like. There was no other way, really, to answer.

She shrugged and said she didn’t know.

“Your boyfriend must feel very lucky,” Don Armour said.

“I don’t have a boyfriend.”

He flinched as if this were difficult news. “I find that puzzling and surprising.”

Denise shrugged again.

“I had a summer job when I was seventeen,” Don said. “I worked for an old Mennonite couple that had a big antique store. We used this stuff called Magic Mixture—paint thinner, wood alcohol, acetone, tung oil. It would clean up the furniture without stripping it. I’d breathe it all day and come home flying. Then around midnight I’d get this wicked headache.”

“Where’d you grow up?”

“Carbondale. Illinois. I had this idea that the Mennonites were underpaying me, in spite of the free highs. So I started borrowing their pickup at night. I had a girlfriend who needed rides. I crashed the pickup, which was how the Mennonites found out I’d been using it, and my then-stepdad said if I enlisted in the Marines he would deal with the Mennonites and their insurance company, otherwise I was on my own with the cops. So I joined the Marines in the middle of the sixties. It just seemed like the thing to do. I’ve got a real knack for timing.”

“You were in Vietnam.”

Don Armour nodded. “If this merger goes through, I’m back to where I was when I was discharged. Plus three kids and another set of skills that no one wants.”

“How old are your kids?”

“Ten, eight, and four.”

“Does your wife work?”

“She’s a school nurse. She’s at her parents’ in Indiana. They’ve got five acres and a pond. Nice for the girls.”

“Are you taking some vacation?”

“Two weeks next month.”

Denise had run out of questions. Don Armour sat bent over with his hands pressed flat between his knees. He sat like this for a long time. From the side, she could see his trademark smirk wearing through his impassivity; he seemed like a person who would always make you pay for taking him seriously or showing concern. Finally Denise stood up and said she was going inside, and he nodded as if this were a blow he’d been expecting.

It didn’t occur to her that Don Armour was smiling in embarrassment at the obviousness of his play for her sympathies, the staleness of his pickup lines. It didn’t occur to her that his performance at the pinochle table the day before had been staged for her benefit. It didn’t occur to her that he’d guessed she was eavesdropping in the bathroom and had let himself be overheard. It didn’t occur to her that Don Armour’s fundamental mode was self-pity and that he might, in his self-pity, have hit on many girls before her. It didn’t occur to her that he was already plotting—had been plotting since he first shook hands with her—how to get into her skirt. It didn’t occur to her that he averted his eyes not simply because her beauty caused him pain but because Rule # 1 in every manual advertised at the back of men’s magazines (“How to Make Her WILD for You—Every Time!”) was Ignore Her. It didn’t occur to her that the differences of class and circumstance that were causing her discomfort might be, for Don Armour, a provocation: that she might be an object he desired for its luxury, or that a fundamentally self-pitying man whose job was in jeopardy might take a variety of satisfactions in bedding the daughter of his boss’s boss’s boss. None of this occurred to Denise then or after. She was still feeling responsible ten years later.

What she was aware of, that afternoon, were the problems. That Don Armour wanted to put his hands on her but couldn’t was a problem. That through an accident of birth she had everything while the man who wanted her had so much less—this lack of parity—was a big problem. Since she was the one who had everything, the problem was clearly hers to solve. But any word of reassurance she could give him, any gesture of solidarity she could imagine making, felt condescending.

She experienced the problem intensely in her body. Her surfeit of gifts and opportunities, in comparison to Don Armour’s, manifested itself as a physical botheration—a dissatisfaction that pinching the sensitive parts of herself might address but couldn’t fix.

After lunch she went to the tank room, where the originals of all signal tracings were stored in six heavy-lidded steel tanks resembling elegant Dumpsters. Over the years, the big cardboard folders in the tanks had become overloaded, collecting lost tracings in their bulging lower depths, and Denise had been given the satisfying task of restoring order. Draftsmen visiting the tank room worked around her while she relabeled folders and unearthed long-lost vellums. The biggest tank was so deep that she had to lie on her stomach on the tank beside it, her bare legs on cold metal, and dive in with both arms to reach the bottom. She dropped the rescued tracings on the floor and reached in for more. When she surfaced for air she became aware that Don Armour was kneeling by the tank.

His shoulders were muscled like an oarsman’s and stretched his blazer tight. She didn’t know how long he’d been here or what he’d been looking at. Now he was examining an accordion-pleated vellum, a wiring plan for a signal tower at Milepost 101.35 on the McCook line. It had been drawn freehand by Ed Alberding in 1956.

“Ed was a kid when he drew this. It’s a beautiful thing.”

Denise climbed down from the tank, smoothed her skirt, and dusted herself off.

“I shouldn’t be so hard on Ed,” Don said. “He’s got talents I’ll never have.”

He seemed to be thinking less about Denise than she’d been thinking about him. He uncrumpled another tracing, and she stood looking down at a boyish whorl of his pencil-gray hair. She took a step closer and leaned a little closer yet, eclipsing her view of him with her chest.

“You’re kind of in my light,” he said.

“Do you want to have dinner with me?”

He sighed heavily. His shoulders slumped. “I’m supposed to drive to Indiana for the weekend.”

“OK.”

“But let me think about it.”

“Good. Think about it.”

She sounded cool, but her knees were unsteady as she made her way to the women’s room. She locked herself in a stall and sat and worried while, outside, the elevator bell faintly chimed and the afternoon snack cart came and went. Her worrying had no content. Her eyes simply alighted on something, the chrome bolt on the door of the stall or a square of tissue on the floor, and the next thing she knew, she’d been staring at it for five minutes and had thought about nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

She was cleaning up the tank room, five minutes before day’s end, when Don Armour’s broad face loomed up at her shoulder, his eyelids drooping sleepily behind his glasses. “Denise,” he said. “Let me take you to dinner.”

She nodded quickly. “OK.”

In a rough neighborhood, mostly poor and black, just north of downtown was an old-fashioned soda shop and diner that Henry Dusinberre and his student thespians patronized. Denise had appetite for nothing more than iced tea and french fries, but Don Armour ordered a hamburger platter and a milk shake. His posture, she noticed, was a frog’s. His head sank into his shoulders as he bent to the food. He chewed slowly, as if with irony. He cast bland smiles around the room, as if with irony. He pushed his glasses up his nose with fingers whose nails, she noticed, were bitten to the pink.

“I would never come to this neighborhood,” he said.

“These couple of blocks are pretty safe.”

“See, for you, that’s true,” he said. “A place can sense if you understand trouble. If you don’t understand it, you get left alone. My problem is I understand it. If I had come to a street like this when I was your age, something ugly would have happened.”

“I don’t see why.”

“It’s just the way it was. I would look up, and suddenly there would be three strangers who hated my guts. And I hated theirs. This is a world you can’t even see if you’re an effective and happy person. A person like you walks right through it. It’s waiting for someone like me to come along so I can have the shit beat out of me. It’s had me picked out from a mile away.”

Don Armour drove a big American sedan similar to Denise’s mother’s, only older. He piloted it patiently onto an artery and headed west at a low speed, amusing himself by slouching at the wheel (“I’m slow; my car is bad”) while other drivers roared by on the left and right.

Denise directed him to Henry Dusinberre’s house. The sun was still shining, low in the west above the plywood-eyed train station, when they mounted the stairs to Dusinberre’s porch. Don Armour looked up at the surrounding trees as if even the trees were somehow better, more expensive, in this suburb. Denise had her hand on the screen door before she realized that the door behind it was open.

“Lambert? Is that you?” Henry Dusinberre came out of the gloom of his parlor. His skin was waxier than ever, his eyes more protuberant, and his teeth seemed larger in his head. “My mother’s doctor sent me home,” he said. “He wanted to wash his hands of me. I think he’s had enough of death.”

Don Armour was retreating toward his car, head down.

“Who’s the incredible hulk?” Dusinberre said.

“A friend from work,” Denise said.

“Well, you can’t bring him in. I’m sorry. I won’t have hulks in the house. You’ll have to find someplace else.”

“Do you have food? Are you all right here?”

“Yes, run along. I feel better already, being back. That doctor and I were mutually embarrassed by my health. Apparently, child, I’m quite without white blood cells. The man was shaking with fear. He was convinced that I was going to die right there in his office. Lambert, I felt so sorry for him!” A dark hole of mirth opened in the sick man’s face. “I tried to explain to him that my white-blood-cell needs are entirely nugatory. But he seemed intent on regarding me as a medical curiosity. I had lunch with Mother and took a taxi to the airport.”

“You’re sure you’re OK.”

“Yes. Go, with my blessing. Be foolish. But not in my house. Go.”

It was unwise to be seen with Don Armour at her house before dark, with observant Roots and curious Dribletts coming and going on the street, so she directed him to the elementary school and led him into the field of grass behind it. They sat amid the electronic menagerie of bug sounds, the genital intensity of certain fragrant shrubs, the fading heat of a nice July day. Don Armour put his arms around her belly, his chin on her shoulder. They listened to the dull pops of small-bore fireworks.

In her house after dark, in the frost of its air-conditioning, she tried to move him quickly toward the stairs, but he tarried in the kitchen, he lingered in the dining room. She was pierced by the unfairness of the impression that the house was obviously making. Although her parents weren’t wealthy, her mother so yearned for a certain kind of elegance and had worked so hard to achieve it that to Don Armour the house looked like the house of rich people. He seemed reluctant to tread on the carpeting. He stopped and took proper note, as possibly no one else ever had, of the Waterford goblets and candy dishes that Enid kept on display in the breakfront. His eyes fell on each object, the music boxes, the Parisian street scenes, the matching and beautifully upholstered furniture, as they’d fallen on Denise’s body—was it just today? Today at lunch?

She put her large hand in his larger hand, knitted her fingers into his, and pulled him toward the stairs.

In her bedroom, on his knees, he planted his thumbs on her hipbones and pressed his mouth to her thighs and then to her whatever; she felt returned to a childhood world of Grimm and C. S. Lewis where a touch could be transformative. His hands made her hips into a woman’s hips, his mouth made her thighs into a woman’s thighs, her whatever into a cunt. These were the advantages of being wanted by someone older—to feel less like an ungendered marionette, to be given a guided tour of the state of her morphology, to have its usefulness elucidated by a person for whom it was just the ticket.

Boys her own age wanted something, but they didn’t seem to know exactly what. Boys her own age wanted approximately. Her function— the role she’d played on more than one lousy date—was to help them learn more specifically what they wanted, to unbutton her shirt and give them suggestions, to (as it were) flesh out their rather rudimentary ideas.

Don Armour wanted her minutely, inch by inch. She appeared to make brilliant sense to him. Simply possessing a body had never much helped her, but seeing it as a thing that she herself might want—imagining herself as Don Armour on her knees, desiring the various parts of herself—made her possession of it more forgivable. She had what the man expected to find. There was no anxiety to his location and appreciation of each feature.

When she unhooked her bra, Don bowed his head and shut his eyes.

“What is it?”

“A person could die of how beautiful you are.”

This she liked, yes.

Her feeling when she took him in her hands was a preview of her feeling a few years later, as a young cook, when she handled her first truffles, her first foie gras, her first sacs of roe.

On her eighteenth birthday her theater friends had given her a hollowed-out Bible containing a nip of Seagram’s and three candycolored condoms, which came in handy now.

Don Armour’s head, looming above her, was a lion’s head, a jack-o’-lantern. When he came, he roared. His subsiding sighs overtook one another, overlapped almost. Oh, oh, oh, oh. She’d never heard anything like it.

There was blood in proportion to her pain, which had been fairly bad, and in reverse proportion to her pleasure, which had been mainly in her head.

In the dark, after she’d grabbed a dirty towel from the laundry basket in the hall closet, she pumped her fist, at having achieved non-virginity before she left for college.

Less wonderful was the presence of a large and somewhat bloody man in her bed. It was a single bed, the only bed she’d ever slept in, and she was very tired. This perhaps explained why she made a fool of herself by standing in the middle of her room, with a towel wrapped around her, and unexpectedly weeping.

She loved Don Armour for getting up and wrapping his arms around her and not minding that she was a child. He put her to bed, found a pajama top for her, helped her into it. Kneeling by the bed, he drew the sheet up over her shoulder and stroked her head as she had to assume he often stroked his daughters’ heads. He did this until she was nearly asleep. Then the theater of his stroking expanded into regions that she had to assume were off-limits with his daughters. She tried to stay half-asleep, but he came at her more insistently, more scratchily. Everything he did either tickled or hurt, and when she made so bold as to whimper, she had her first experience of a man’s hands pressing on her head, pushing her southward.

Thankfully, when he was done, he didn’t try to spend the night. He left her room and she lay utterly still, straining to hear what he was doing and whether he was coming back. Finally—she may have dozed—she heard the click of the front door’s latch and the whinny of his big car’s starter.

She slept until noon and was showering in the downstairs bathroom shower stall, trying to comprehend what she’d done, when she heard the front door again. Heard voices.

She madly rinsed her hair, madly toweled off, and burst out of the bathroom. Her father was lying down in the den. Her mother was rinsing out the insulated picnic hamper in the kitchen sink.

“Denise, you didn’t eat any of the dinner I left you!” Enid cried. “It doesn’t look like you’ve touched a single thing.”

“I thought you guys were coming back tomorrow.”

“Lake Fond du Lac was not what we expected,” Enid said. “I don’t know what Dale and Honey were thinking. It was a big nothing.”

At the bottom of the stairs were two overnight bags. Denise ran past them and up to her bedroom, where condom wrappers and bloody linens were visible from the doorway. She closed the door behind her.

The rest of her summer was ruined. She was absolutely lonely both at work and at home. She hid the bloody sheet and the bloody towel in her closet and despaired of dealing with them. Enid was naturally surveillant and had myriad idle synapses to devote to such tasks as noticing when her daughter had her period. Denise hoped to come forward apologetically with the ruined towel and sheet at the appropriate time, two weeks hence. But Enid had brainpower to spare for the counting of linens.

“I’m missing one of my good monogrammed bath towels.”

“Oh, shoot, I left it at the pool.”

“Denise, why you took a good monogrammed bath towel, when we have so many other towels. . .And then, of all the towels to lose! Did you call the pool?”

“I went back and looked.”

“Those are very expensive towels.”

Denise never made mistakes like the one she was claiming to have made. The injustice would have rankled less if it had served a greater pleasure—if she could have gone to Don Armour and laughed about it and sought his consolation. But she didn’t love him and he didn’t love her.

At work now the friendliness of the other draftsmen was suspect; it all seemed liable to lead to fucking. Don Armour was too embarrassed, or discreet, to even meet her eyes. He spent his days in a torpor of unhappiness with the Wroth brothers and unfriendliness to everyone around him. There was nothing left for Denise at work but work, and now its dullness was a burden, now she hated it. By the end of a day, her face and neck hurt from holding back tears and working at speeds that only a person working happily could maintain without discomfort.

This, she told herself, was what happened when you acted on an impulse. She was amazed that she’d given all of two hours’ thought to her decision. She’d taken a liking to Don Armour’s eyes and mouth, she’d determined that she owed him the thing he wanted—and this was all she remembered thinking. A dirty and appealing possibility had occurred to her (I could lose my virginity tonight), and she’d leaped at the chance.

She was too proud to admit to herself, let alone to Don Armour, that he wasn’t what she wanted. She was too inexperienced to know she simply could have said, “Sorry—big mistake.” She felt a responsibility to give him more of what he wanted. She expected that an affair, if you took the trouble to start it, went on for quite a while.

She suffered for her reluctance. The first week in particular, while she worked herself up to proposing to Don Armour that they get together again on Friday night, her throat ached steadily for hours on end. But she was a trouper. She saw him on the next three Fridays, telling her parents that she was dating Kenny Kraikmeyer. Don Armour took her to dinner at a strip-mall family restaurant and then back to his flimsy little house in a tornado-alley exurb, one of fifty small towns that St. Jude in its endless sprawl was swallowing. His house embarrassed him to the point of loathing. No houses in Denise’s suburb had ceilings so low or hardware so cheap, or doors too light to slam properly, or window sashes and window tracks made of plastic. To soothe her lover and shut him up on the topic (“your life vs. mine”) that she least enjoyed, and also to fill some hours that would otherwise have passed awkwardly, she pulled him down on the Hide-A-Bed in his junk-swamped basement and brought her perfectionism to bear on a whole new world of skills.

Don Armour never said how he’d explained to his wife his cancellation of their weekend plans in Indiana. Denise couldn’t stand to ask one question about his wife.

She endured criticism from her mother for another mistake that she would never have made: failing to soak a bloody sheet immediately in cold water.

On the first Friday of August, moments after Don Armour’s two-week vacation started, he and Denise doubled back into the office and locked themselves in the tank room. She kissed him and put his hands on her tits and tried to work his fingers for him, but his hands wanted to be on her shoulders; they wanted to press her to her knees.

His stuff got up into her nasal passages.

“Are you coming down with a cold?” her father asked her a few minutes later, while they were driving past the city limits.

At home, Enid gave her the news that Henry Dusinberre (“your friend”) had died at St. Luke’s on Wednesday night.

Denise would have felt even guiltier if she hadn’t visited Dusinberre in his house as recently as Sunday. She’d found him in the grip of an intense irritation with his next-door neighbor’s baby. “I’m doing without white blood cells,” he said. “You’d think they could shut their goddamn windows. My God, that infant has lungs! I suspect they’re proud of those lungs. I suspect it’s like those bikers who disconnect their mufflers. Some spurious, savage token of manhood.” Dusinberre’s skull and bones were pushing ever closer to his skin. He discussed the cost of mailing a three-ounce package. He told Denise a meandering, incorrect story about an “octoroon” to whom he’d briefly been engaged. (“If I was surprised that she was only seventh-eighths white, imagine her surprise that I was only one-eighth straight.”) He spoke of his lifelong crusade on behalf of fifty-watt lightbulbs. (“Sixty’s too bright,” he said, “and forty is too dim.”) For years, he’d lived with death and kept it in its place by making it trivial. He still managed a reasonably wicked laugh, but in the end the struggle to hold fast to the trivial proved as desperate as any other. When Denise said goodbye and kissed him, he seemed not to apprehend her personally. He smiled with downcast eyes, as if he were a special child whose beauty was to be admired and whose tragic situation pitied.

She never saw Don Armour again either.

On Monday, August 6, after a summer of give and take, Hillard and Chauncy Wroth reached agreement with the principal rail workers’ unions. The unions had made substantial concessions for the promise of less paternalistic, more innovative management, thus sweetening the Wroths’ $26/share tender offer for the Midland Pacific with a potential near-term savings of $200 million. The Midpac’s board of managers wouldn’t vote officially for another two weeks, but the conclusion was foregone. With chaos looming, a letter came down from the president’s office accepting the resignations of all summer employees, effective Friday, August 17.

Since there were no women (besides Denise) in the drafting room, her co-workers prevailed on the Signal Engineer’s secretary to bake a farewell cake. It came out on her last afternoon of work. “I reckon it’s a major victory,” Lamar said, munching, “that we finally made you take a coffee break.”

Laredo Bob dabbed at his eyes with a handkerchief the size of a pillowcase.

Alfred passed along a compliment in the car that night.

“Sam Beuerlein,” he said, “tells me you’re the greatest worker he’s ever seen.”

Denise said nothing.

“You made a deep impression on those men. You opened their eyes to the kind of work a girl can do. I didn’t tell you this before, but I had the feeling the men were dubious about getting a girl for the summer. I think they expected a lot of chattering and not much substance.”

She was glad of her father’s admiration. But his kindness, like the kindness of the draftsmen who weren’t Don Armour, had become inaccessible to her. It seemed to fall upon her body, to refer to it somehow; and her body rebelled.

Denise-uh-why-you-done, what-you-did?

“Anyhow,” her father said, “now you’ve had a taste of life in the real world.”

Until she actually got to Philadelphia, she’d looked forward to going to school near Gary and Caroline. Their big house on Seminole Street was like a home without home’s sorrows, and Caroline, whose beauty could make Denise breathless with the sheer privilege of speaking to her, was always good for reassurance that Denise had every right to be driven crazy by her mother. By the end of her first semester of college, though, she found that she was letting Gary leave three messages on her telephone for every message she returned. (Once, just once, there was a message from Don Armour which she likewise did not return.) She found herself declining Gary’s offers to pick her up at her dorm and return her after dinner. She claimed she had to study, and then, instead of studying, she watched TV with Julia Vrais. It was a hat trick of guilt: she felt bad for lying to Gary, worse for blowing off her work, and worst of all for distracting Julia. Denise could always pull an all-nighter, but Julia was useless after ten o’clock. Julia had no motor and no rudder. Julia could not explain why her fall schedule consisted of Intro Italian, Intro Russian, Eastern Religion, and Music Theory; she accused Denise of having had unfair outside help in choosing her balanced academic diet of English, history, philosophy, and biology.

Denise for her part was jealous of the college “men” in Julia’s life. Initially both she and Julia had been besieged. An inordinate number of the junior and senior “men” who banged their trays down beside them in the dining hall were from New Jersey. They had middle-aged faces and megaphonic voices with which they compared math curricula or reminisced about that time they went to Rehoboth Beach and got so wasted. They had only three questions for Julia and Denise: (1) What’s your name? (2) What dorm are you in? and (3) Do you want to come to our party on Friday? Denise was amazed by the rudeness of this summary exam and no less amazed by Julia’s fascination with these Teaneck natives with monster digital wristwatches and merging eyebrows. Julia wore the heads-up look of a squirrel convinced that somebody has stale bread in his pocket. Leaving a party, she would shrug and tell Denise: “He’s got drugs, so I’m going with him.” Denise began to spend Friday nights studying by herself. She acquired a rep as an ice queen and possible lesbian. She lacked Julia’s ability to melt at the windowside chorusing of her name at three in the morning by the entire college soccer team. “I’m so embarrassed,” Julia would moan, in an agony of happiness, as she peered around the lowered blind. The “men” outside the window had no idea how happy they were making her and therefore, in Denise’s strict undergraduate judgment, did not deserve to have her.

Denise spent the next summer in the Hamptons with four of her dissolute college hallmates and lied to her parents about every aspect of her situation. She slept on a living-room floor and made good money as a dishwasher and prep drone at the Inn at Quogue, working elbow to elbow with a pretty girl from Scarsdale named Suzie Sterling and falling in love with the life of a cook. She loved the crazy hours, the intensity of the work, the beauty of the product. She loved the deep stillness that underlay the din. A good crew was like an elective family in which everyone in the little hot world of the kitchen stood on equal footing, and every cook had weirdnesses concealed in her past or in his character, and even in the midst of the most sweaty togetherness each family member enjoyed privacy and autonomy: she loved this.

Suzie Sterling’s father, Ed, had given Suzie and Denise several lifts into Manhattan before the night in August when Denise was biking home and almost rode right into him where he stood, by his BMW, smoking a Dunhill and hoping that she might come by alone. Ed Sterling was an entertainment lawyer. He pleaded inability to live without Denise. She hid her (borrowed) bike in some bushes by the road. That the bike was stolen by the time she came back for it the next day, and that she swore to its owner that she’d chained it to the usual post, ought to have given her fair warning of the territory she was entering. But she was excited by what she did to Sterling, by the dramatic hydraulic physiology of his desire, and when she returned to school in September she decided that a liberal-arts college did not compare well to a kitchen. She didn’t see the point of working hard on papers that only a professor ever saw; she wanted an audience. She also resented that the college was making her feel guilty about her privileges while granting certain lucky identity groups plenary indulgences from guilt. She felt guilty enough already, thank you. Almost every Sunday she took the cheap slow proletarian combo of SEPTA and New Jersey Transit to New York. She put up with Ed Sterling’s paranoid one-way telephone communications and his last-minute postponements and his chronic distraction and his jaw-taxing performance anxieties and her own shame at being taken to cheap ethnic restaurants in Woodside and Elmhurst and Jackson Heights so as not to be seen by anyone Sterling knew (because, as he told her often—running both hands through his mink-thick hair—he knew everybody in Manhattan). While her lover teetered closer to utter freakout and inability to see her anymore, Denise ate Uruguayan T-bones, Sino-Colombian tamales, thumbnail crayfish in red Thai curry, and alder-smoked Russian eels. Beauty or excellence, as typified for her by memorable food, could redeem almost any humiliation. But she never stopped feeling guilty about the bike. Her insistence that she’d chained it to the usual post.

The third time she got involved with a man twice her age, she married him. She was determined not to be a squishy liberal. She’d quit school and worked to save money for a year, had taken six months in France and Italy, and had returned to Philly to cook at a thronged fish-and-pasta place off Catharine Street. As soon as she’d picked up some skills, she offered her services at Café Louche, which was then the most exciting place in town. Emile Berger hired her on the spot, on the basis of her knife work and her looks. Within a week, he was complaining to her about the borderline competence of every person in his kitchen except her and him.

Arrogant, ironic, devoted Emile became her asylum. She felt infinitely adult with him. He said he’d had enough of marriage his first time around, but he obligingly took Denise to Atlantic City and (in the words of the Barbera D’Alba she’d been drunk on when she proposed to him) made an honest woman of her. At Café Louche they worked like partners, experience flowing from his head into hers. They sneered at their pretentious old rival, Le Bec-Fin. They impulse-bought a three-story town house on Federal Street, in a mixed black and white and Vietnamese neighborhood near the Italian Market. They talked about flavor the way Marxists talked about revolution.

When Emile had finally taught her everything he would ever teach her, she tried to teach him a thing or two—like, let’s freshen up the menu, how about, let’s maybe try that with a vegetable stock and a little bit of cumin, how about—and ran smack into that wall of irony and ironclad opinion that she’d loved as long as she was on the happy side of it. She felt more skilled and ambitious and hungry than her white-haired husband. She felt as if, while working and sleeping and working and sleeping, she’d aged so rapidly that she’d passed Emile and caught up with her parents. Her circumscribed world of round-the-clock domestic and workplace togetherness seemed to her identical to her parents’ universe of two. She had old-person aches in her young hips and knees and feet. She had scarred old-person hands, she had a dry old-person vagina, she had old-person prejudices and old-person politics, she had an old-person dislike of young people and their consumer electronics and their diction. She said to herself: “I’m too young to be so old.” Whereupon her banished guilt came screaming back up out of its cave on vengeful wings, because Emile was as devoted to her as ever, as faithful to his unchanging self, and she was the one who’d insisted they get married.

By amicable agreement she left his kitchen and signed on with a competitor, Ardennes, which needed a sous-chef and which, in her opinion, was superior to Café Louche in all things except the art of being excellent without seeming to try. (Unperspiring virtuosity was undeniably Emile’s great gift.)

At Ardennes she conceived a desire to strangle the young woman who prepped and held down garde manger. The woman, Becky Hemerling, was a culinary-institute grad with wavy blond hair and a petite flat body and fair skin that turned scarlet in the kitchen heat. Everything about Becky Hemerling sickened Denise—her C.I.A. education (Denise was an autodidact snob), her overfamiliarity with more senior cooks (especially with Denise), her vocal adoration of Jodie Foster, the stupid fish-and-bicycle texts on her T-shirts, her overuse of the word “fucking” as an intensifier, her self-conscious lesbian “solidarity” with the “latinos” and “Asians” in the kitchen, her generalizations about “right-wingers” and “Kansas” and “Peoria,” her facility with phrases like “men and women of color,” the whole bright aura of entitlement that came of basking in the approval of educators who wished that they could be as marginalized and victimized and free of guilt as she was. What is this person doing in my kitchen? Denise wondered. Cooks were not supposed to be political. Cooks were the mitochondria of humanity; they had their own separate DNA, they floated in a cell and powered it but were not really of it. Denise suspected that Becky Hemerling had chosen the cooking life to make a political point: to be one tough chick, to hold her own with the guys. Denise loathed this motivation all the more for harboring a speck of it herself. Hemerling had a way of looking at her that suggested that she (Hemerling) knew her better than she knew herself—an insinuation at once infuriating and impossible to refute. Lying awake beside Emile at night, Denise imagined squeezing Hemerling’s neck until her blue, blue eyes bugged out. She imagined pressing her thumbs into Hemerling’s windpipe until it cracked.

Then one night she fell asleep and dreamed that she was strangling Becky and that Becky didn’t mind. Becky’s blue eyes, in fact, invited further liberties. The strangler’s hands relaxed and traveled up along Becky’s jawline and past her ears to the soft skin of her temples. Becky’s lips parted and her eyes fell shut, as if in bliss, as the strangler stretched her legs out on her legs and her arms out on her arms. . .

Denise couldn’t remember being sorrier to wake from a dream.

“If you can have this feeling in a dream,” she said to herself, “it must be possible to have it in reality.”

As her marriage foundered—as she became for Emile one more flashy trend-chasing crowd-pleaser from Ardennes, and as he became for her the parent she betrayed with every word she spoke or swallowed—she took comfort in the idea that her trouble with Emile was his gender. This idea dulled the edge of her guilt. It got her through the terrible Announcement she had to make, it got Emile out the door, it propelled her through an incredibly awkward first date with Becky Hemerling. She glommed on to the belief that she was gay, she held it close and thereby spared herself just enough guilt that she could let Emile be the one to leave the house, she could live with buying him out and staying, she could allow him that moral advantage.

Unfortunately, as soon as he was gone, Denise had second thoughts. She and Becky enjoyed a lovely and instructive honeymoon and then began to fight. And fight, and fight. Their fighting life, like the sex life that so briefly preceded it, was a thing of ritual. They fought about why they were fighting so much, whose fault it was. They fought in bed late at night, they drew on unguessed reservoirs of something like libido, they were hungover from fighting in the morning. They fought their little brains out. Fought fought fought. Fought on the stairway, fought in public, fought on car seats. And although they got off regularly—climaxed in red-faced screaming fits, slammed doors, kicked walls, collapsed in wet-faced paroxysms—the lust for combat was never gone for long. It bound them together, overcame their mutual dislike. As a lover’s voice or hair or curving hip keeps triggering the need to stop everything and fuck, so Becky had a score of provocations that reliably sent Denise’s heart rate through the roof. The worst was her contention that Denise, at heart, was a liberal collectivist pure lesbian and was simply unaware of it.

“You’re so unbelievably alienated from yourself,” Becky said. “You are obviously a dyke. You obviously always were.”

“I’m not anything,” Denise said. “I’m just me.”

She wanted above all to be a private person, an independent individual. She didn’t want to belong to any group, let alone a group with bad haircuts and strange resentful clothing issues. She didn’t want a label, she didn’t want a lifestyle, and so she ended where she’d started: wanting to strangle Becky Hemerling.

She was lucky (from a guilt-management perspective) that her divorce was in the works before she and Becky had their last, unsatisfying fight. Emile had moved to Washington to run the kitchen at the Hotel Belinger for a ton of money. The Weekend of Tears, when he returned to Philly with a truck and they divided their worldly goods and packed up his share of them, was long past by the time Denise decided, in reaction to Becky, that she wasn’t a lesbian after all.

She left Ardennes and became chef at Mare Scuro, a new Adriatic seafood place. For a year she turned down every guy who asked her for a date, not just because she wasn’t interested (they were waiters, purveyors, neighbors) but because she dreaded being seen in public with a man. She dreaded the day Emile found out (or the day she had to tell him, lest he find out accidentally) that she’d fallen for another man. It was better to work hard and see nobody. Life, in her experience, had a kind of velvet luster. You looked at yourself from one perspective and all you saw was weirdness. Move your head a little bit, though, and everything looked reasonably normal. She believed she couldn’t hurt anybody as long as she was only working.

On a bright morning in May, Brian Callahan came by her house on Federal Street in his old Volvo station wagon, which was the color of pistachio ice cream. If you were going to buy an old Volvo, pale green was the color to get, and Brian was the kind of person who wouldn’t buy a vintage car in any but the best color. Now that he was rich, of course, he could have had any car he wanted custom-painted. But, like Denise, Brian was the kind of person who considered this cheating.

When she got in the car, he asked if he could blindfold her. She looked at the black bandanna he was holding. She looked at his wedding ring.

“Trust me,” he said. “It’s worth being surprised by.”

Even before he’d sold Eigenmelody for $19.5 million, Brian had moved through the world like a golden retriever. His face was meaty and less than handsome, but he had winning blue eyes and sandy hair and little-boy freckles. He looked like what he was—a former Haverford lacrosse player and basically decent man to whom nothing bad had ever happened and whom you therefore didn’t want to disappoint.

Denise let him touch her face. She let his big hands get in her hair and tie the knot, let him disable her.

The wagon’s engine sang of the work involved in propelling a chunk of metal down a road. Brian played a track from a girl-group album on his pullout stereo. Denise liked the music, but this was no surprise. Brian seemed intent on playing and saying and doing nothing that she didn’t like. For three weeks he’d been phoning her and leaving low-voiced messages. (“Hey. It’s me.”) She could see his love coming like a train, and she liked it. Was vicariously excited by it. She didn’t mistake this excitement for attraction (Hemerling, if she’d done nothing else, had made Denise suspicious of her feelings), but she couldn’t help rooting for Brian in his pursuit of her; and she’d dressed, this morning, accordingly. The way she’d dressed was hardly even fair.

Brian asked her what she thought of the song.

“Eh.” She shrugged, testing the limits of his eagerness to please. “It’s OK.”

“I’m fairly stunned,” he said. “I was pretty sure you’d love this.”

“Actually I do love it.”

She thought: What is my problem?

They were on bad road with stretches of cobblestone. They crossed railroad tracks and an undulating stretch of gravel. Brian parked. “I bought the option on this site for a dollar,” he said. “If you don’t like it, I’m out a buck.”

She put her hand to the blindfold. “I’m going to take this off.”

“No. We’re almost there.”

He gripped her arm in a legitimate way and led her across warm gravel and into shadow. She could smell the river, feel the quiet of its nearness, its sound-swallowing liquid reach. She heard keys and a padlock, the squawk of heavy-duty hinges. Cold industrial air from a pent-up reservoir flowed over her bare shoulders and between her bare legs. The smell was of a cave with no organic content.

Brian led her up four flights of metal stairs, unpadlocked another door, and led her into a warmer space where the reverb had train-station or cathedral grandeur. The air tasted of dry molds that fed on dry molds that fed on dry molds.

When Brian unblinded her, she knew immediately where she was. The Philadelphia Electric Company in the seventies had decommissioned its dirty-coal power plants—majestic buildings, like this one just south of Center City, that Denise slowed down to admire whenever she drove by. The space was bright and vast. The ceiling was sixty feet up, and Chartres-like banks of high windows punctuated the northern and southern walls. The concrete floor had been serially repatched and deeply gouged by materials even harder than itself; it was more like a terrain than a floor. In the middle of it were the exoskeletal remains of two boiler-and-turbine units that looked like house-size crickets stripped of limbs and feelers. Eroded black electromotive oblongs of lost capability. At the river end of the space were giant hatches where the coal had come in and the ashes had gone out. Traces of absent chutes and ducts and staircases brightened the smoky walls.

Denise shook her head. “You can’t put a restaurant in here.”

“I was afraid you’d say that.”

“You’re going to lose your money before I have a chance to lose it myself.”

“I might get some bank funding, too.”

“Not to mention the PCBs and asbestos we’re inhaling as we speak.”

“There you’re wrong,” Brian said. “This place wouldn’t be available if it qualified for Superfund money. Without Superfund money, PECO can’t afford to tear it down. It’s too clean.”

“Bummer for PECO.” She approached the turbines, loving the space regardless of its suitability. The industrial decay of Philadelphia, the rotting enchantments of the Workshop of the World, the survival of mega ruins in micro times: she recognized the mood from having been born into a family of older people who kept mothballed wool and iron things in ancient boxes in the basement. She’d gone to school in a bright modernity and come home every day to an older, darker world.

“You can’t heat it, you can’t cool it,” she said. “It’s a utility-bill nightmare.”

Brian, retriever, watched her intently. “My architect says we can run a floor along the entire south wall of windows. Come out about fifty feet. Glass it in on the other three sides. Put the kitchen underneath. Steam-clean the turbines, hang some spots, and let the main space just be itself.”

“This is so totally a money pit.”

“Notice there aren’t any pigeons,” Brian said. “No puddles.”

“But figure a year for the permits, another year to build, another year to get inspected. That’s a long time to pay me for nothing.”

Brian replied that he was aiming for a February opening. He had architect friends and contractor friends, and he foresaw no trouble with “L&I”—the dreaded city office of Licenses and Inspections. “The commissioner,” he said, “is a friend of my dad’s. They golf every Thursday.”

Denise laughed. Brian’s ambition and competence, to use a word of her mother’s, “tickled” her. She looked up at the arching tops of the windows. “I don’t know what kind of food you think is going to work in here.”

“Something decadent and grand. That’s your problem to solve.”

When they returned to the car, the greenness of which was of a piece with the weeds around the empty gravel lot, Brian asked if she’d made plans for Europe. “You should take at least two months,” he said. “I have an ulterior motive here.”

“Yes?”

“If you go, then I can go for a couple of weeks myself. I want to eat what you eat. I want to hear how you think.”

He said this with disarming self-interest. Who wouldn’t want to travel in Europe with a pretty woman who knew her food and wine? If you, not he, were the lucky devil who got to do it, he would be as delighted for you as he expected you, now, to be delighted for him. This was his tone.

The part of Denise that suspected she might have better sex with Brian than she’d had with other men, the part of her that recognized her own ambition in him, agreed to take six weeks in Europe and connect with him in Paris.

The other, more suspicious part of her said: “When am I going to meet your family?”

“How about next weekend? Come out and see us at Cape May.”

Cape May, New Jersey, consisted of a core of overdecorated Victorians and fashionably shabby bungalows surrounded by new printed-circuit tracts of vile boom. Naturally, being Brian’s parents, the Callahans owned one of the best old bungalows. Behind it was a pool for early-summer weekends when the ocean was cold. Here Denise, arriving late on a Saturday afternoon, found Brian and his daughters lounging while a mouse-haired woman, covered with sweat and rust, attacked a wrought-iron table with a wire brush.

Denise had expected Brian’s wife to be ironic and stylish and something of a knockout. Robin Passafaro was wearing yellow sweat pants, an MAB paint cap, a Phillies jersey of unflattering redness, and terrible glasses. She wiped her hand on her sweats and gave it to Denise. Her greeting was squeaky and oddly formal: “It’s very nice to meet you.” She went immediately back to work.

I don’t like you either, Denise thought.

Sinéad, a skinny pretty girl of ten, was sitting on the diving board with a book in her lap. She waved carefully at Denise. Erin, a younger and chunkier girl wearing headphones, was hunched over a picnic table with a scowl of concentration. She gave a low whistle.

“Erin’s learning birdcalls,” Brian said.

“Why?”

“Basically, we have no idea.”

“Magpie,” Erin announced. “Queg-queg-queg-queg?”

“This might be a good time to put that away,” Brian said.

Erin peeled off her headphones, ran to the diving board, and tried to bounce her sister off it. Sinéad’s book nearly went into the soup. She snagged it with an elegant hand. “Dad —!”

“Honey, it’s a diving board, not a reading board.”

There was a coked-up fast-forwardness to Robin’s brushing. Her work seemed pointed and resentful and it set Denise’s nerves on edge. Brian, too, sighed and considered his wife. “Are you almost done with that?”

“Do you want me to stop?”

“That would be nice, yes.”

“OK.” Robin dropped the brush and moved toward the house. “Denise, can I get you something to drink?”

“Glass of water, thanks.”

“Erin, listen,” Sinéad said. “I’ll be a black hole and you be a red dwarf.”

“I want to be a black hole,” Erin said.

“No, I’m the black hole. The red dwarf runs around in circles and gradually gets sucked in by powerful gravitational forces. The black hole sits here and reads.”

“Do we collide?” Erin said.

“Yes,” Brian interposed, “but no information about the event ever reaches the outside world. It’s a perfectly silent collision.”

Robin reappeared in a black one-piece swimsuit. With a gesture just short of rude, she gave Denise her water.

“Thank you,” Denise said.

“You’re welcome!” Robin said. She took off her glasses and dove into the deep end. She swam underwater while Erin circled the pool and emitted shrieks appropriate to a dying M- or S-class star. When Robin surfaced at the shallow end she looked naked in her semi-blindness. She looked more like the wife Denise had imagined—hair pouring in rivers down her head and shoulders, her cheekbones and dark eyebrows gleaming. As she left the pool, water beaded on the hemming of her suit and streamed through the untended hairs of her bikini line.

An old unresolved confusion gathered like asthma in Denise. She felt a need to get away and cook.

“I stopped at the necessary markets,” she told Brian.

“It doesn’t seem fair to put our guest to work,” he said.

“On the other hand, I offered, and you’re paying me.”

“There is that, yes.”

“Erin, now you be a pathogen,” Sinéad said, slipping into the water, “and I’ll be a leukocyte.”

Denise made a simple salad of red and yellow cherry tomatoes. She made quinoa with butter and saffron, and halibut steaks with a color guard of mussels and roasted peppers. She was nearly done before she thought to peer under the foil coverings of several containers in the refrigerator. Here she found a tossed salad, a fruit salad, a platter of cleaned ears of corn, and a pan of (could it be?) pigs in blankets?

Brian was drinking a beer by himself on the deck.

“There’s a dinner in the fridge,” Denise told him. “There’s already a dinner.”

“Yikes,” Brian said. “Robin must have—I guess when the girls and I were out fishing.”

“Well, there’s a whole dinner there. I just made a second whole dinner.” Denise laughed, really angry. “Do you guys not communicate?”

“No, in fact, this was not our most communicative day. Robin had some work at the Garden Project that she wanted to stay and do. I had to kind of drag her over here.”

“Well, fuck.”

“Look,” Brian said, “we’ll have your dinner now, and we can have hers tomorrow. This is totally my fault.”

“I guess!”

She found Robin on the other porch, cutting Erin’s toenails. “I just realized,” she said, “that I’ve been making dinner and you already made it. Brian didn’t tell me.”

Robin shrugged. “Whatever.”

“No, I’m really sorry about this, though.”

“Whatever,” Robin said. “The girls are excited that you’re cooking.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Whatever.”

At dinner Brian prodded his shy progeny to answer Denise’s questions. Each time she caught the girls staring at her, they lowered their eyes and reddened. Sinéad in particular seemed to know the right way to want her. Robin ate quickly with her head down and declared the food “tasty.” It wasn’t clear how much her unpleasantness was aimed at Brian and how much at Denise. She went to bed soon after the girls, and in the morning she had already left for mass when Denise got up.

“Quick question,” Brian said, pouring coffee. “How would you feel about driving me and the girls back to Philly tonight? Robin wants to get back to the Garden Project early.”

Denise hesitated. She felt positively shoved by Robin into Brian’s arms.

“Not a problem if you don’t want to,” he said. “She’s willing to take a bus and leave us the car.”

A bus? A bus?

Denise laughed. “Sure, no, I’ll drive you.” She added, echoing Robin: “Whatever!”

At the beach, as the sun burned off the metallic morning coastal clouds, she and Brian watched Erin veer through the surf while Sinéad dug a shallow grave.

“I’ll be Jimmy Hoffa,” Sinéad said, “and you guys be the Mob.”

They worked to inter the girl in sand, smoothing the cool curves of her burial mound, thumping the hollows of the living body underneath. The mound was geologically active and was experiencing little quakes, webs of fissure spreading where Sinéad’s belly rose and fell.

“I’m just now putting it together,” Brian said, “that you were married-to Emile Berger.”

“Do you know him?”

“Not personally, but I knew Café Louche. Ate there often.”

“That was us.”

“Two awfully big egos in a little kitchen.”

“Yuh.”

“Do you miss him?”

“My divorce is the great unhappiness of my life.”

“That’s an answer,” Brian said, “but not to my question.”

Sinéad was destroying her sarcophagus slowly from within, toes wriggling into daylight, a knee erupting, pink fingers sprouting from moist sand. Erin flung herself into a slurry of sand and water, picked herself up, and flung herself back down.

I could get to like these girls, Denise thought.

At home that night she called her mother and listened, as she did every Sunday, to Enid’s litany of Alfred’s sins against a healthy attitude, against a healthful lifestyle, against doctors’ orders, against circadian orthodoxies, against established principles of daytime verticality, against commonsense rules regarding ladders and staircases, against all that was fun-loving and optimistic in Enid’s nature. After fifteen grueling minutes Enid concluded, “Now, and how are you?”

Since her divorce, Denise had resolved to tell her mother fewer lies, and so she made herself come clean about her enviable travel plans. She omitted only the fact that she would travel in France with someone else’s husband; this fact already radiated trouble.

“Oh, I wish I could go with you!” Enid said. “I so love Austria.”

Denise manfully offered: “Why don’t you take a month and come over?”

“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 Semmelknödel, 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 (née 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 Hôtel des Deux Îles. 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 Cuillère 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 Îles.

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 chèvre, 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 sautéed 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.”