Now he glanced to see who it was, and flipped it open.“Hey.”

His wife. No preamble. “Upper Nyack called.”

The elementary school. “What’s up?”

“They wanted to know if Biscuit’s all right.”

“They couldn’t ask her?” He aimed for Groucho Marx, even as he felt the sinking in his gut.

“John, she skipped again. Do you think you could get over to the house?”

John refrained from sighing into the phone. This was their daughter’s fifth unexcused absence this year, her third since winter break alone. They’d been called in to discuss the matter last month, after the most recent incident. He and Ricky had sat down with the principal, Biscuit’s teacher, and the school guidance counselor, and they’d had a lengthy, convivial, and unilluminating conversation, not so much about Biscuit as about curricular benchmarks, hormones, childhood depression, pharmaceutical research, and the works of Carol Gilligan, Mary Pipher, and Rachel Simmons.The meeting had ended with John feeling touched by the concern of the school personnel, Ricky seething at what she characterized as their prepackaged condescension, and neither of them one whit closer to understanding what was going on with their daughter.

John was baffled. All he could think was that Biscuit seemed awfully young to have truancy issues. When he’d been ten he would no more have thought of playing hooky than robbing a bank. “Did you try calling the house?”

“I did.” Her brevity told all.

Still, he hesitated.

“Do you think you could drive over?” she asked again; he could hear her working to make it a request.

Now John did sigh. He looked at the glistening paintbrush in his hand. The four students in the scene shop with him, currently applying soy-based theater paint to a dozen flats, would be unable to go beyond that task without his guidance. He’d counted on cutting the brick wall out of Styrofoam this afternoon. It would take at least an hour and a half to go home, register his and Ricky’s concern with Biscuit, and make it back to campus. And it wouldn’t be fair to the students, who were required to work in the scene shop for course credit, to ask them to rearrange their schedules and come back later in the day. Which meant he’d wind up giving them credit for hours worked, while he himself would cut and paint the wall alone tonight. In fact, despite the relative minimalism of the set, and the fact that John was largely recycling an old design (For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf was a perennial favorite at Congers Community College; this was its second production during his short tenure there), the opening was only four days away, so he could pretty well prophesy at least one all-nighter in his immediate future.

When John first met Ricky Shapiro, when they’d first begun dating, it had not been uncommon for him to spend entire nights in the theater. Back then he’d earned a living (after a fashion, Ricky would qualify) teching professional shows at Broadway and regional theaters. He had many happy memories of her visiting him at work on a set after midnight, when the world at large was dark and oblivious, and all light, all life seemed temporarily concentrated within whatever minor world he was constructing. She’d bring in food and they’d sit at the edge of the stage together—he in his painty, sawdusty clothes, she looking so clean and smelling so good—with little white cardboard take-out containers spread out around them. Their love had sprung up, taken root, and run rampant in half-realized forests and tenement houses, castles and kitchens, drawing rooms and hospital rooms, and once in heaven, and once in Denmark.

Back then Ricky—a freshly minted financial engineer (a “quant,” as they called themselves, as she called herself, with a kind of utilitarian pride), not long out of graduate school and playing her new role to the hilt in hose and pumps, pencil skirts and tailored shirts—had been captivated by all his tricks of the trade: how you’d mix perlite (the tiny white balls in potting soil) with paint in order to bring texture to an interior surface; how you’d spray a little paint on the artificial flora, in order to pull it into the world of the show; how, for a big backdrop, you’d spray fixative on charcoal, then tint it and build up a few layers of paint to give it the depth and richness of an oil painting. She’d loved the lingo of the scene shop: scumble painting, scenic fitches, pounce wheels. She’d loved the tools of his profession, from flogger to feather duster, chicken wire to Cellupress; even the most banal piece of equipment—the hair dryer he’d use to quick-dry a patch of paint in order to check the end color—fascinated her in its theatrical context. With a kind of busybody intensity he found sexy, she’d insist he describe to her, in detail and in language she could understand, exactly what he was working on, on a given night, and why he was going about it in that particular way.

“All make-believe,” she would say. “All this for just pretend.” Her tone of wonderment at once paying tribute and poking fun.

“But this stuff is real,” John would counter, rapping his knuckles against the wooden brace holding up a painted storefront, fingering a sharktooth scrim. “Your stuff’s pretend.”

“My stuff!”

“What are derivatives? Stuff you can’t touch. Futures. Swaps. Forwards. Backwards.”

“There’s no backwards, smart guy.”

“Oh, no?”

“No . . . oh.”

Already he’d have turned her around, positioned her tight against his hips, begun to peel her skirt up slowly from the hem.

The truth is he’d never been particularly interested in her world. Volatility arbitrage had sounded exotic—hell, had sounded hot—when first she’d uttered it, tucking a piece of hair primly behind her ear as she did. And it was a rush when he’d realized how flat-out smart she was, how quick and sharp, in a way he’d never be; her interest in him seemed to confer on him a sort of attractiveness he hadn’t suspected he possessed. But in another respect, although John avoided thinking of it in such terms, he found Ricky’s profession beneath him. He thought of her and all her ilk—not only other quants but the whole phylum: investment bankers, hedge fund managers, speculators, riskmanagement analysts—as so many self-absorbed children playing an elaborate game of make-believe, running around dressed in the costumes of power brokers, issuing decrees in gobbledygook, trading promises like wads of play money. Sipping air from plastic teacups. Although he was both too considerate and too uncertain of this view to voice these impressions outright, his general opinion of her field was not exactly a secret. Even before their marriage it had begun to show.

As for Ricky, what had started as genuine interest in John’s work transformed over time not into feigned interest but frank resentment. At first, and really, all throughout Paul’s toddlerhood, she’d continued to be at least nominally supportive. If she’d tolerated John’s late nights and sporadic employment with more stoicism than grace, she’d made only the occasional, concertedly factual observation of the strain it put on her. After Biscuit was born, however, Ricky had put her foot down and John had given up this work, with its gypsy schedule and irregular paychecks.

In fact, John knew the phrase “put her foot down” did Ricky a disservice—for any number of reasons, one being she had not actually put her foot down but merely registered her preference; another being John had not been unhappy to accept the job at Congers Community College’s Llewellyn-Price Theater. The Llewellyn-Price, a five-hundred-seat performance center, was used (or “utilized,” as CCC brochures unfailingly put it) not only for campus productions but also by amateur and professional groups from around the county. John, whose official title for the past nine years had been Lecturer in Theater Design, taught one course each semester covering the basics of stagecraft and lighting; managed the scene shop; designed sets for a fourshow season; helped supervise the student work crews; and served as technical consultant for outside groups using the space. An insane job.Which he did not pretend not to love.

This was precisely what complicated matters on the phone now with his wife. Ricky, who for the past three years had headed the research group of Birnbaum and Traux in White Plains, hated her job as passionately and openly as he loved his. The work itself had once captivated her: the search for patterns in apparently random systems, the idea that one could forecast future volatility, devise models of what was “true in expectation.” It wasn’t simply that she’d loved the notion of hidden order, of discernible outcomes. It was that she’d cast her lot with it, banked on its existence. It was almost not too much to call it her principles, her faith.

When they first met, Ricky’d been contemplating going for a doctorate in the philosophy of mathematics. Sometimes John wondered, with a kind of confused, guilty perturbation, how things might have turned out if she’d gone this route. She’d have been happier, he supposed. They might all have been. Even if it meant they’d still be paying off student loans, renting instead of owning, borrowing instead of investing. He couldn’t help his rather embarrassingly rosy image of what their life would have looked like then—chillier house, older cars, rattier sweaters, more pasta, less steak: happier.

At the beginning of the economic crisis, and during the long plummeting months of recession, he’d lived with the fear that she would lose her job. Daily he rehearsed receiving the news, offering consolations, making adjustments, weathering loss. The dread was a pressure in his chest, a gnawing in his bones. His very teeth ached with it.Yet when things began to bottom out, when the layoffs tapered off and the market began to evince feeble signs of life, he was aware of a bashful, bewildered disappointment. They had been left unscathed, untested. Only then did he wonder if such a test might have been their saving grace, the very thing that would have shaken them awake, restored to them their vitality, their happiness. Like that summer at Cabruda Lake, when, tested, they’d risen admirably to the occasion, surprising themselves a little, discovering within their relationship something heartier, at once more stalwart and accommodating than they’d known.

Ricky never complained about what she did, the work itself, but she griped volubly about the accoutrements of her job: the twice daily commute across the bridge; the fact that she had to leave the house each morning before the rest of the family was awake and arrive home each evening too late to cook dinner; the fact that she had to wear “clothes,” as she put it (she had a special, contemptuous way of pronouncing the word in this context); and, perhaps most of all, the fact that she earned three times as much as her husband, making her job pretty much unquittable. John knew all of this, including the fact that the last part was not, strictly speaking, true, that Ricky could quit if only he were willing to do something that paid more. That this was a possibility they had never properly discussed loomed over him at all times.

It was because he lived in trepidation of such a discussion, because he lived with the burden of his unspoken (by either of them) indebtedness, that he knew he would give in to Ricky’s current request: would go to the house, check on Biscuit, and scold her in some weary fashion, even though he felt there was little to be achieved by such a gesture. And because he knew, and knew Ricky knew, that he would ultimately give in, John took a moment to dispute the necessity.

“You don’t think it can wait?” He spoke softly, angling his body so that its bulk afforded him some privacy from the students. “I mean, we’ve all been here before. What am I even going to say? That we haven’t already said.”

Ricky sipped in a quick breath. Clearly she’d prepared her answer. “It sends a message, though. If you go home now. If we confront—sorry, if you confront her right away. Then at least she gets a sense of the urgency. That we’re not taking this lightly.”

“Yeah.” He stroked some paint across the top of the stretched muslin, using up what was already on the brush. “You’re right.”

“Thanks.”

“Don’t do that.”

“Yeah, but—thanks, John.”

He slipped the phone back in his pocket. It wouldn’t be so bad, returning later tonight. Lance Oprisu, the Llewellyn-Price’s technical director, who ordinarily bore chief responsibility for executing the sets that John designed, was on leave this semester, which had turned out to be both burden and blessing. Although John’s workload was more stressful, he had found the increased solitude, the sheer number of hours he’d been spending alone now in the theater, welcome. Tonight he’d have the scene shop to himself, a ready supply of Diet Coke from the vending machine down the hall,The Doors blasting on the stereo, and no students around to mock, however affectionately, his musical tastes. He knew when he got in the right groove he could work solo with as much efficiency as an entire crew of students. Nor would it be awful to spend a night out of the house. He set the brush across the top of the paint can and turned around to face the students, none of whom looked up.

Amy and Pureza were working, minimally, on a single flat; mostly they seemed to be deep in conversation, Pureza doing the majority of the talking, Amy murmuring at intervals, “Claro. Claro, que sí.” Iryna wasn’t working on the set at all, but applying color to her face instead, from a seriously impressive eye shadow kit; at a glance it contained some twenty cakes of color. Vivi was wearing red earbuds and grooving to whatever music she was absorbing through them, but she had, bless her heart, finished one flat already and was halfway through her second.

“Ah, people,” said John. His inclination was to say, “You guys,” but he had learned that this didn’t go over well with his students, predominantly female, first-generation college students, almost a third of them first-generation Americans. Addressing them as “women” seemed too stiff, “ladies” too sexist, “folks” too grassroots, and “kids” too insulting. So: “People?” said John again, louder, and they turned to him. He waited for Vivi to remove one earbud. “I’m going to have to take off early today. I’d like you to finish up these flats, but then you can go. It’s my screwup, not yours, so you can still sign the crew sheet for two hours. Iryna.”

Sighing, eye-shadow wand in hand, she turned from the little round mirror balanced on her palm. “I’m leaving you in charge of making sure all the brushes get cleaned. And you’re responsible for making sure the paint cans have their lids pressed on. Tightly.Yes?” She nodded with an air of bored self-pity that John ignored.

From the start he had placed a similar degree of trust in his students as he’d placed in the professionals with whom he’d built Broadway sets, and nearly always his expectations were duly met. In return, the students wound up respecting not only him but, more important, the craft—or so their course evaluations often stated. He knew the students regarded him warmly, too, from the way they gently teased him. John was a tall man, burly, with curling dark hair on his head and face; over the years he’d been mostly amused to hear himself likened to Paul Bunyan, Bluto, the Brawny paper towel man.

When he left the building a thin rain was falling, and the drive from Congers to Nyack was a palette of grays, broken up by licorice-stalk trees and spectral flashes of snow at the side of the road. The Ford Ranger’s wiper blades needed replacing, something John had been reminding himself and then forgetting to do for months. He took the winding roads slowly: no point hurrying. Lately, something had gone wrong with the car speakers, too, and after a minute of staticky classic rock, he switched the radio off and listened instead to the wet tires, the metronomic wipers. His thoughts were troubled, but not by his daughter, never mind that she was the cause of his leaving work early; it was his wife who preoccupied him as he drove.

Ricky had turned thirty-seven yesterday. In the afternoon, she’d gone to adult lap swim at the Y and John had baked a yellow cake from a box. He’d topped it—his own inspiration, of which he’d been pleased—with cream he whipped and strawberries he sliced.While he’d been making the cake, the kids had walked into town with a twenty and a ten he’d taken from his wallet and instructions to pick out gifts for their mother. Biscuit had returned with a mood ring and a Whitman’s Sampler, Paul with a woodenhandled cheese knife. John—who found it harder to pick out a gift for his wife every year, and who, although Ricky always expressed gratitude for whatever he gave her, felt increasingly inept at pleasing her (this in turn leading him to make progressively more outlandish choices)—had already bought her a mandolin. It arrived complete with padded case, instructional DVD, practice book, tuner, and set of picks. He’d been excited about it when he ordered it online, then in doubt ever since.

Part of the problem was his fluctuating inclination over how much to spend. When he bought her something expensive he felt sheepish about the fact that it was so obviously her earnings that allowed him to do so.Yet when he bought her something modest he felt just as sheepish and like a spoilsport, besides.Thus the schizophrenia of his gift-giving over time: one year daisies and a water pitcher; another platinum and emerald earrings; one year a Kiva gift certificate; the next a Kindle. This year, he’d half consciously striven to balance the extravagance of the mandolin with the humbleness of the food. For the birthday supper he’d served tacos and black cherry soda, which had seemed a jolly, festive menu back in the supermarket but inadequate, collegiate, once they were all actually sitting at the table. Ricky looked ten years younger than her age in an enormous SUNY New Paltz sweatshirt and holey jeans, her still-wet hair combed straight past her shoulders. The wavy white-gray strands that had begun to striate the brown this past year were invisible now, weighted down by the dark damp lot. Seeing her this way, as if polished and pared by her swim, and smelling the chlorine in her hair, John could not help but imagine her in water. He could envision the precise stroke of her limbs, the supple way she sliced through liquid, although it had been years since he’d actually seen her swim. After cake she’d opened her presents, and despite the attentive way in which she thanked them each by name, John had the distinct impression the only gift she genuinely appreciated was the Whitman’s Sampler.

Later that night John had carried the instrument upstairs and set it on the foot of the bed, where Ricky, wearing the giant sweatshirt as pajamas, sat up reading The Economist. “Have you opened it yet?” he asked.

She’d given him a look that combined, he believed, contrition and resentment before laying aside the magazine. Her hair, now dry, had regained its measure of gold, and it shone in the lamplight as she bent forward to unzip the padded case. A wing of it, faintly threaded with gray, fell over her shoulder, curtaining her face. He’d reached over and with a thick forefinger tucked it behind her ear, a movement that felt at once tentative and bold. She hadn’t reacted at all, neither withdrew nor softened under his touch, but gazed steadily at the instrument in its case, surveying its glossy tobacco surface, the curves of its f-holes, the mother-of-pearl inlays on its fingerboard. At last she’d looked up at him and smiled. “It’s beautiful, John.” He was aware she had not touched it. She zipped the case shut, placed it on the floor beside the bed, retrieved her magazine. Later, under the covers, the backs of her slim bare legs had fit un-protestingly against the bulky warmth of his.

Ricky never got mad at him anymore. Once, he might have considered her volatile, might even have called her hot-blooded. Feisty. He thought of her in their courtship days, the salty sting of her, the way she might look up from the table and spike the air with her fork, the way she’d fill a doorway and bring the heel of her boot down. The crack of it, the candor. Now she never expressed anger toward him. Under direct questioning, she claimed not to possess any. Nor could he think of any crime, any infraction, for which she might blame him. And yet. John found himself repeatedly, increasingly, preparing for a sort of imaginary defense, as though he might be brought up on charges at a moment’s notice. Though she no longer roused herself to anger, it felt like she was furious. It had been this way since before the baby’s death.

Ricky’s crimes were well documented. They numbered two: the ancient infidelity and the more recent one, both of which he’d forgiven, been so broad as to forgive. These events had not broken them. Here they were a year after their greatest trial, standing proof, something very like intact. Thanks in large part to his exercise of tolerance, so impressive to them both. Why, then, with such ample reserves, such stockpiles of goodwill owed him (if you were going to think of it in such terms, make an equation of it, a balance sheet, though of course that was more Ricky’s domain than his), why did he worry he’d done wrong?

Turning the truck onto their street, he had actively to remind himself of the task at hand: it wasn’t Appeasing Ricky, but rather Confronting Biscuit. He supposed he agreed with Ricky that one of them ought to deal with the issue straightaway, but despite what he had to admit would at this point be called his daughter’s chronic cutting, he couldn’t manage to summon real anxiety over Biscuit. If he did not understand her, neither did he worry about her. Whatever her idiosyncrasies, she struck him as being herself untroubled by them, which was in a way what mattered most. Sometimes he had the odd thought that of them all, Biscuit alone seemed to know what she was doing, what she was about.

John parked in the gravel driveway, cut through the rain over the scrap of front lawn, and strode up the steps to the porch.This porch had been the great hook back when he and Ricky first saw the house, on an October afternoon eleven years earlier. They’d been living in the city then, in a one-bedroom way over on West Twenty-ninth, near the river. They had borrowed Ricky’s parents’ car in order to take little Paul, then two, apple picking in Rockland County.The day was unseasonably hot, the orchard packed, the remaining fruit all on the highest branches, the ladders all taken, and to top it off John got stung by a bee. But then they’d gone and had lunch in Nyack and a river breeze wafted up the hill, and afterward, as they’d been strolling down the sidewalk toward ice cream, with Paul asleep in the carrier on John’s back, they’d paused to look at the photos in the storefront of a real estate office, and popped inside on a lark.

It had been premature: they didn’t really have the money for a down payment (this was before Ricky had been recruited by Birnbaum and Traux, back when she’d been working downtown part-time as a consultant), nor had they convinced themselves they were ready to leave the city for the suburbs. But as luck had it, one agent had been sitting idle and fairly pounced on them with an offer to show a handful of properties straightaway. For the next several hours, as they’d viewed house upon house in the hilly, residential neighborhoods, their sense of themselves as essentially urbanites only increased. But the fifth time they’d emerged from the agent’s car—this time stepping out into eighty-degree heat just a block from the main drag, where a small public park sloped down toward the river—and saw the FOR SALE sign marking a perfectly modest dwelling in the middle of the block, they’d both felt something neither had ever known before: house lust.

In a village architecturally dominated byVictorians, this house had been small and plain as a swallow’s nest. A big fir shaded the low structure, whose stucco was the color of shredded wheat, and it had covered the diminutive lawn with pine needles, a blanket of bronze. The clay tile roof had a few bald patches, and the chimney a visible crack.There’d been something of a witch’s cottage about the dwelling, echoes of a house under an enchantment. What tilted it away from outright cheerlessness and delivered it instead—just—into the realm of charm, had been the wide front porch, disproportionately deep, disproportionately gracious, the entrance framed by the sinewy branches of a wisteria. It had been well past the season of its blossoming, but its leaves hung thick and heavy, the lush gold of ripened pears.

Instantly, John began playing the game he occasionally played: if this were a set he had built, what would have been his intention? What would its design have been meant to convey to an audience, even before the play had begun? A haunting tranquillity? A disheveled haven? Indulgence? Humility? Beauty? He could not decide.

The block ran downhill, sloping steeply at the bottom toward the river’s edge. The water on this day of unseasonable heat had looked quenching and calm. Ricky, whose second pregnancy had just been beginning to show on her slight frame, and John, with the sleeping Paul drooling a dark wet patch on his shoulder, had reached out at the same moment and found each other’s hands. The agent, shrewdly enough, had taken note and said nothing, giving the fantasy time in which to colonize her clients’ hearts. She had let them be the ones to initiate movement toward the house, materializing before them somewhat magically as they approached the door and handing the key—this had been the master touch—to Ricky. Turning it in the lock, Ricky had slid John such a look as he had never before seen on her face: like a cat scenting cream, almost sultry with determination.

Many times over the ensuing years of variously stressful mortgage payments, insurance premiums, and property tax increases—not to mention broken hot water heaters, windows that no longer fit snugly into their casements, and roof jobs gone awry—one or the other of them had looked up from a clutter of bills and contracts to curse the real estate agent; it was their private joke that she had indeed been magic, an evil sorceress. But beneath the jest, it was understood that he and Ricky remained in the house’s thrall, and having bought it was one thing they never regretted.

As John crossed the porch now, rain beat on the roof loud as pebbles on tin. A broken drainpipe caused a cascade beyond the eastern end of the porch, making an opaque curtain of water there. John wiped his feet and went in, called out to Biscuit and was answered by the shrilling of the teakettle. If he had paused to consider, he might have found this odd, as his daughter was not a tea drinker. But he did not, and it didn’t occur to him until he entered the kitchen that he would find there someone other than Biscuit.