Michael Hoffman

Eighteenth segment

What a vivid dream! The doorbell rang; I went to answer it; it was the mailman, a huge stack of letters in his hand. Reaching out my own hand for them, I woke up. "What the hell?" The room was in total darkness. The alarm clock on the little couch-side table read 12:16. I'd only been asleep half an hour, though it seemed an age - or perhaps I had slept twenty-four and a half hours? Or a hundred years? Who were all those letters from? Another minute's sleep would have answered that question, and yet I had been deprived of that minute. What a stupid thing to feel bitter about, and yet since when do feelings retreat on being told they are unworthy of your intelligence?

I lay back on the pillow and closed my eyes. "Come, sleep," I murmured. "Come lie with me and be my love." But I knew her - she wouldn't come. She had been avoiding me lately, or visiting me only to tease me and then abruptly take her leave, laughing at my confusion. Nor was I the only one. Insomnia was going around, it was an epidemic. My mother too suffered from it. Only a week before I had been tiptoeing downstairs to immerse myself in my father's diaries, when suddenly I heard a timid whisper: "Len?" "Mother!" I cried.

"I can't sleep."

"Shall I fix you some hot milk?"

"Yes, please do."

And so there we were, my mother and I, drinking hot milk together at two thirty in the morning, me thinking, "Every day my life touches a new level of absurdity."

And that very morning, in the Gazette, there was a little item, so small and insignificant I would never have noticed it had it not been under Nathan Glass' byline: woman, 48, finds husband, 52, lying blood-soaked in bed, knife clutched in hand. Beside the body was a note: "I couldn't sleep."

Nathan and I had struck up a bit of a friendship lately, this despite an initial mutual dislike that had seemed the stronger for having no particular reason behind it. It was visceral - perhaps a case of like repelling like, each seeing his personal failure reflected in the other. His treatment of his helpless father, once my hero, had appalled me, and even Isaac's accounting for it to some extent did not justify it in my eyes.

But weeks passed, and we found ourselves drifting together, as two distant acquaintances will among strangers. It wasn't a question of liking each other or disliking each other; we knew each other, could seek each other out and exchange greetings: How's it goin', pretty good, how's life, could be worse. Once he said to me, "That's proof, you see, that a divine intelligence rules the world." "What's proof?" I said. "No matter how awful things are," he said, "the Holy One, blessed be He, saw to it that it could always be worse."

Awake, deserted by sleep, lying restless on my sofa at 12:30 in the dead of night, afraid of going downstairs for fear of waking my mother, I found myself thinking of him. He'd be at the Gazette now, just settling in for a night at the police radio. "Drop by anytime," he'd once said to me, his smirk seeming to add, "I know how much this invitation will mean to you." Suddenly, though, that and nothing else was exactly what I felt like doing. Why? I don't know. Why not? Isn't that enough?

I got up, slipped into my jeans, struggled into my T-shirt, noticing only after it was on that it was inside out. My glasses - where were my glasses? On the table. My watch? Ditto. What did I need my watch for? I didn't. Leave it. Let this be a timeless evening.

My hand on the door knob, I stopped. Without really thinking about it, I had imagined myself taking the car. But was it my car? Could I just disappear with it in the middle of the night? Supposing my mother heard me drive off. She would be frantic. Heaven only knows what she would think. She would have visions of her Petunia wrapped around a telephone pole in Ottawa, or of me seducing loose women in the back seat and breaking up their families. She would never get back to sleep! Well, all right, I would call a cab then. But would that solve the problem? She would hear me leave the house, see me through the window getting into the taxi... I'll leave her a note, I thought. Dear mom, I'm going out for a couple of hours... Did I have to explain exactly where I was going? Besides, what were the chances she'd even see the note? She wouldn't be looking for it, and if I left it, say, on the kitchen table... well, it might catch her eye, and it might not.

I sank down on the sofa. Forty-six years old, and no freer than a child! A law-abiding citizen, and a prisoner! Suddenly, paying Nathan Glass a visit at the Gazette became the most important thing in my life, a symbol of my right to self-determination, a supreme test of my resolve to live as a free man. I would do it! If it meant my mother lying awake all night in terror, I would do it!

I sprang to my feet and opened the door. To my surprise there was a light on in the kitchen. Had I forgotten to turn it off? No - my mother was up, sipping hot milk.

"I couldn't sleep."

"Neither could I."

"What is it with us lately?"

"Listen, I'm going out for a bit."

"At this hour?"

"I was thinking I'd drop by the Gazette and pay Nathan Glass a visit. He asked me to. You know Nathan, don't you?"

My mother shuddered. "He gives me the creeps."

"I know. He's a bit creepy."

"The car keys are in my purse."

"Thanks, mom."

There was the barest hint of fall in the night air. Thank God. I looked up into a sky studded with stars. The ancients had read our destinies in them. Moderns scan them for clues to how the universe began, or for signs of life elsewhere. Who was it - the Egyptians? the Babylonians? the Greeks? none of the above? - for whom the stars were the eyes of the gods? I read it somewhere, or did I just dream it? My father had been fascinated by the stars. A flash of memory: he, Adam and I going for a walk after dinner. It was not long after dinner, since a feeling of fullness accompanies the memory, and it must have been fall because it was already pitch dark. My father's theme, for he was discoursing, was our five senses. Only five! he mused - and then, pointing to the stars, "Somewhere up there," he said, "are beings with five hundred senses, or five thousand!" We kids must have been very young, for mingled with the recollection is a feeling of pride at being able to understand, if only barely, these lofty thoughts which would have sailed straight over poor little Adam's head. Maybe, I thought now, dad is somewhere up there, trying out his five thousand new senses, while his shell lingers, abandoned and forgotten, at the Einstein.

I started the car, backed out of the driveway, and turned left onto Quested Road. Once upon a time, in order to go downtown, you turned right on Quested and had to drive through half the city, mile after mile after mile of traffic-lighted suburbia. Now you shot straight through to an expressway a mile away, and were in the city center in a matter of minutes. There was scarcely a car on the road. Everyone who wasn't sleeping must be downtown already.

I knew exactly where the Gazette building was, not because I'd ever had business there but because one summer during my university days I'd worked at a parking lot just across the street from it. It was still there, closed now but not barred; I could leave the car in it, enjoying without analyzing the vague sense of significance this gave me. My fellow car jockey was a guy named Benoit, or Bertrand, or Bernard. Of his appearance I remember nothing but a scar on his left cheek. Of his character I recall only his driving ability, which was astonishing; he could have been on TV, so spectacular were his parking feats. My unfeigned, unabashed admiration gave him much pleasure. He spoke rapid-fire back-country French which I pretended to understand, and if he ever noticed that my contributions to our conversations, such as they were, didn't mesh with his, he never showed it. He was in his mid-thirties then, having worked at that lot for eighteen years. We're talking twenty-five years ago. He might just still be there.

In the brightly lit lobby was a desk at which sat a sleepy-looking security guard. All that light just for him, I thought. Will he challenge me if I pretend not to notice him and march straight to the elevator like a man who knows his business and knows his rights? My instant of hesitation was fatal. He challenged me. Well, fine. "I'm here to see Mr. Glass," I announced in a voice that sounded absurdly loud in my ears.

"Your name?"

"Len Fishman."

He picked up a phone and announced my presence. Nathan's voice seeped metallically between the receiver and the guard's ear: "I'll be right down!" He sounded excited.

"He'll be right down," said the guard.

***

"Well well! Well well well!" Face beaming, hand extended, he bounded out of the elevator. "Look who's here!" His grip as he shook my hand was exaggeratedly firm. His happiness at seeing me was so transparently overdone that only one interpretation was possible. He wanted me to see it, and to draw my own conclusions, which I was not slow to do: he could very easily have lived without the pleasure of my company. I smiled. "I was just passing by," I said, thinking, Two can play this game.

"The fathers sleep, while the sons make merry. You brought a bottle, of course? No? It is the custom - my visitors all bring a little something, an offering, a token of homage, for this is my domain" - we were in the elevator by now, going up - "and I am king of the castle, as you'll see in a moment. Never mind. As a man there's not much to say about me, as a journalist I have yet to distinguish myself, but as a host I am quite capable of doing the honors! You'll see. I won't disappoint you. Here we are. After you, dear sir, after you."

The room I found myself in was as brightly lit as the lobby had been, but vast, huge - a million desks, arranged, it seemed to me, in no order whatsoever - like a highway after a multi-vehicle collision. On the desks were computers of every description: desktops, laptops, notebooks, some ancient, some straight out of the ads in yesterday's Business Today. There was not a soul in sight. "You have all this all to yourself?" I asked, turning to face my companion who, I was suddenly aware, towered over me. He was almost as tall - maybe altogether as tall - as Rabbi Yanovsky.

"Not all," he said, grinning. "Not quite all. You'll see."

"You have a woman with you."

"I have three women with me. Careful there!" I had stumbled over a wire. "Here." I felt his hand on my shoulder, steering me very gently to the left. "These are my quarters." It was a small glassed-in cubicle. "My God, you have no idea how glad I am! Just take a seat, I'll be back in a jiff."

He was as good as his word, returning, it seemed, before I'd so much as had a chance to look around and get my bearings. In one hand was a bottle; in the other, two paper cups. "You're a scotch man, I believe." He showed me the label: Johnny Walker. Into each cup he poured a small quantity, handed one cup to me, raised his own, and said, "L'chaim!"

The whisky sent a delicious warm glow coursing through me. I closed my eyes and was lying on a beach of white sand, cooled by a sea of indigo blue and warmed by a golden sun. "Good stuff," he said meditatively. I opened my eyes. The gentle sound of waves remained, but was no longer quite the same. It came, in fact, as I saw now through the glass, from a vacuum cleaner. "The cleaners are here," I mumbled inanely.

"There are two of the three women. The other - where would she be, now? Not far, not far. I'll introduce you later. Well, Mr. Len Fishman! How shall I entertain you? It's a quiet night. There was an accident on the 2-and-20 around midnight, nothing serious. Shall we switch on the radio?" The police radio, he meant, which at the push of a button crackled to life - static to me, but, judging from the concentration with which he listened, meaningful to him. He chuckled. "That's Gauthier. What a clown! Thirty years that man's been a cop. Thirty years. What he hasn't seen of muck, filth, blood, puke and evil isn't worth seeing, believe me. Not the evil of the cosmic drama, like our dads are caught up in - fate and all that. Oh, no. I mean meaningless, futile evil - God! Just two weeks ago he was on a case... husband dreams this guy he knows at work is screwin' his wife. Dreams it. Well, some people believe in dreams. Wait, I'll show you." In one stride he crossed the room to a computer I hadn't noticed, and, with what seemed to me amazing speed and dexterity, typed in some instructions. "There! Go ahead, read that!"

"Man shoots wife's dream lover," I read. He interrupted me. "No, no, Jesus, that's not the way to read! Put some life into it! These are real people - real people, do you understand me? But you're right, the headline is crass, inept, unfeeling. Headline writers are like scientists, reducing everything to a formula! Life itself is a formula! E equals mc squared! Would you believe, by the way, that I've seen Einstein's brain? Oh, I have! It's cut into two hundred pieces and preserved in alcohol in two glass bottles, in Princeton, New Jersey. I went especially to see it. I interviewed the man who owns it, Thomas Harvey. 'So this is the brain that conceived relativity,' I thought. You'll laugh: there I was, looking at those gray flecks, looked more like bits of soap than anything else, trying to see relativity in them! I wrote a story - the Gazette refused to print it. But here: look at this."

He tapped some keys and another story appeared on the screen: "Man jailed for tossing boy from condo."

"Well?"

"Read it!"

"'Lachine, Que: A man charged with attempted murder for seriously injuring a 6-year-old boy after he tossed him from an apartment building last October - ' what the hell?"

"He wanted to commit suicide himself, you see, but didn't have the nerve. So he dropped the boy, a total stranger who just happened to be within reach, as a test. If the boy died instantly, well, he would jump too. Otherwise, he'd look for a more convenient way. Sergeant Gauthier, when I met him for a drink at 4 a.m. the next morning, made a little joke. Maybe next time, he said, he'll toss somebody in front of a train."

"I'm sorry, I don't see the connection."

"Connection? Between what and what?"

"Well... between this and Einstein's brain."

"What's the name of the noble institution caring for our sires in their declining years?"

"The Einstein. Is that why - "

"Why what?"

"Why you traveled all the way to Princeton, New Jersey to see Einstein's brain?"

"Oh no! Not at all! No, I'm fascinated by genius, fascinated. Think of it this way. People are living longer and longer, right? And fewer and fewer babies are being born. Soon a majority of the population will be senile! Senility will rule! We'll have to measure up to senile standards. Why am I talking in the future tense? It's happening already. Here, wait." He tapped some more keys. "'Couple caught selling nude photos of daughter.'" "Or this" - he voided the screen before I had the chance to read further, and called up: "Man kidnaps woman he wants to marry." Then he vaporized that too. "Ah, what's the use."

"Nathan," I said, suddenly overwhelmed, I'm not quite sure why, by compassion for this man no amount of compassion could make me like, "can I make a suggestion?"

"I need rest. I need a vacation."

"Well, if it's trite, I'm sorry" - for he had indeed anticipated me - "but yes, a vacation seems like - "

"You want me to let go now, now, just when I'm approaching the truth?"

"The truth! The truth of what?"

"The truth period! It has nothing to do with Einstein, strawberry quarks, the string theory, God knows what else. It is - " He broke off suddenly. He blushed faintly, lowered his eyes, seemed abashed. "Sorry. Got carried away." He smiled. "I have so few visitors up here in my... my what? my domain, that when someone does come, I don't always know what tone to take. I suppose you're wondering, but are too tactful to ask, whether I do this job by choice, or whether I've been shunted here as the journalistic equivalent of live burial."

I had, as a matter of fact, been wondering something of the sort.

"Absolutely and unequivocally, I am here because I want to be. Nineteen years I've been here - it'll be twenty years in October. Some time I'll tell you exactly why, but the fact is that just right this minute I don't feel up to it."

It sounded like a hint that his pleasure in my company was temporarily exhausted, and since fatigue was starting to get the better of me too, it seemed a good time to withdraw. "You're here till... what time?"

"Six. Twelve to six."

"Listen. Is it true" - here was another example of something I'd heard weeks before suddenly, a propos of nothing I could think of, taking on significance - "is it true that Isaac is an old friend of your family's?"

"Isaac Goldberg? Isaac the son of Abraham? Yes, why?"

"What is this 'son of Abraham' business?"

He grinned. His teeth were nicotine-stained, though I don't think I'd ever seen him smoke. "You want the short answer, or the long answer?"

I couldn't suppress a yawn. "What time is it?"

"Gettin' on for two-thirty."

"Maybe the short answer for now."

"Well, it goes back as far as I can remember. I've always known him as the son of Abraham - before I even knew the Bible story; certainly before I knew there were such things as delusions in this world. If it is a delusion, that is."

"Meaning?"

"Well, who knows. Maybe he is the son of Abraham."

"I don't follow you. Don't think me stupid. Blame my fatigue. I haven't been sleeping well lately. Neither has my mother."

"Ever hear of reincarnation?"

"I've heard of it."

"Just the other day on TV I saw a woman who claims to be Joan of Arc. No, that's not true, she doesn't claim anything. She's a semi-educated receptionist in some office somewhere, and all of a sudden she starts babbling away in a language no one understands. They call in the experts. Turns out to be medieval French. Medieval peasant French. Where on earth could she have picked that up? You can't take a course in it at Berlitz, you know."

"I'm sure there must be an explanation."

"An explanation is not always the best way to understand something. She goes into and out of her trances. When she's out, she can't remember a thing. When she's in, linguists and historians listen to her with amazement. Language, intonations, details - spot on."

"I've heard of that sort of thing before. I once had an argument with my sister-in-law about UFOs. She's a great believer in them." I myself wasn't quite sure what that had to do with anything, but the fact is I was too tired to care. I yawned, not even bothering to cover my mouth. "Really, I better be going."

"Will you be at the Einstein tomorrow?"

"Today, you mean. I suppose."

"Your sister-in-law. Would that be the lady with the crooked teeth?"

"Crooked teeth?" I laughed. Yes, her three upper front teeth were slightly crooked, but not conspicuously so. "Is that what strikes you most about her?"

He blushed slightly, and smiled sheepishly. "Oddly enough, yes. You won't tell her, of course."

"Of course. Well, I guess I'll see you tomorrow."

"I'll see you down."

"Oh, don't bother."

"The guard might give you a hard time."

We went down together, and he held open the door for me. "Thanks for coming," he said.

Outside, the night air was fresh and cool. When was the last time I'd felt cool air on my skin? It revived me at once. The relief of escape from that bright, cavernous, empty room, and of liberation from Nathan's oppressive presence, was tremendous. It made me almost lightheaded. Wasn't there somewhere I could go? An insane thought came to me: I would drive to Wall Street and see Sonia. We had, in the weeks since Linda brought us together at Mr. Bloom's, developed an interesting little friendship, hard to characterize in terms of intensity, for it was asexual and bantering and involved scarcely a hint of our old childhood relationship - we may as well have met for the first time and been drawn to one another by a common interest in eighteenth-century English fiction, for example, and it is true, we both loved Tom Jones. Amid much laughter and talk about being the only two weirdoes on the planet who still went in for that kind of thing - even Mr. Bloom had confessed to being unable to work his way past Book One - we studded our conversation and our letters (for we had become pen pals, her amazement at my failure to "get wired" yielding at last a grudging consent to adapt an out-moded means of correspondence which, she had to admit, was not ill-suited to our style of discourse) with eighteenth-century-isms like "hath" and "doth," while she, appropriating the irascible Squire Western's character to herself, exclaimed "Pox!" at least once a paragraph - and yet now, at three o'clock in the morning, suddenly wide awake and feeling like company, she was the one I most wanted to see. I would ring her bell, she would break open a bottle of claret and say, "Sit down, whoremonger." "Cheers, strumpet," I would reply, and we would clink glasses and giggle like... well, like children - so maybe our childhood relationship did come into it after all.

While I was daydreaming in that manner, the car practically drove itself, and it was just turning into Quested Road when something struck me. Crooked teeth, crooked teeth. Nathan's remark about Joan, not Joan of Arc but my sister-in-law Joan. Crooked teeth. Why did those two words suddenly seem so resonant? Of course: Dad's diary. That cryptic notation: "The woman with crooked teeth." Joan? Impossible!

 

Nineteenth segment

Without anything having been said in so many words, the assumption was that Linda and I were going to get married. I had struck up a relationship of sorts with her two kids, a girl of five and a boy of eight, and as for her, she had taken to accompanying me whenever possible on my visits to the Einstein, as much as to say, "Your father is my father." Anette, seeing this, abruptly dropped what little remained of her coquettish manner towards me and cheerfully welcomed Linda into the fold, so to speak, as my fiancée. Perversely, I regretted this. Now that she no longer flirted with me, I realized how much I had enjoyed being flirted with. Once it was actually on the tip of my tongue to tell her she had it all wrong, that Linda and I were just friends, hardly that even, just acquaintances, but Anette, as if anticipating me, shot me a look which said, dryly, schoolteacherishly and absolutely uncontradictably, "That'll do." My imagination, perhaps. Anyway, the words died on my lips.

Withered Beauty took a liking, unaccountable but pronounced, to Linda, a liking which seemed to include me. No longer jealous of Anette on my account, her sullenness towards Anette too evaporated, and though she still moaned and raged from time to time, she no longer seemed to blame her fate on Anette or any other human agency, and reconciled herself to it to the extent consistent with the normal human desire for happiness.

Most remarkable of all was Linda's effect on my father. It was Clara who noticed it first. She took me aside one afternoon and pointed it out. "You're right!" I exclaimed. My attention once drawn to it, it seemed so obvious; how could I have missed it? The fact is, he became in Linda's presence something very like his old self. He knew us all, talked more or less coherently, ate in a civilized manner, and did not insist on wearing a jacket when it was warm enough not to. "How do you explain it?" I asked Clara. "I can't," she said. "I've never seen anything like it."

Next morning over breakfast I mentioned it to my mother. She hardly ever saw Linda and Dad together, and had had little chance to observe the effect she had on him. Even my supposed impending marriage had not blunted her instinctive aversion to Linda. Why? How could someone as bland, as innocuous as Linda arouse such antipathy in anyone? Granted, my mother was a woman of strong likes and dislikes, feelings grounded in something deeper, or maybe just different, than reason. Still, her stubborn refusal to come to terms with the situation was striking. Joe's suicide gave her an excuse: look, she said, what our selfish and reckless behavior had led to, and the poor man seemed altogether forgotten, as though he had never existed. Well, there was truth in that. But was it my fault, or Linda's, that Joe's character had been such that his passing was unlamented? Even his children seemed to have forgotten him. Besides, there was no evidence his suicide had anything to do with Linda's relationship with me. We had been discreet, and his business affairs were known to be shady and complicated. In the absence of any suicide note, there was no reason to leap to the conclusion, as my mother seemed to be doing, that we were his murderers.

"It's amazing, mom," I said. "You won't recognize him."

She was skeptical, understandably enough, but agreed to come and see for herself. We were sitting outside in the garden when she arrived: dad, Linda and I, the Glasses, and Isaac. "Len," my father was saying, "you have no idea what a load it is off my mind that you have at last decided to settle down. Linda, strange but true: long ago I had a hunch that you would be the woman to bring the boy back down to earth!" (What could he have meant by that?) "Helen! I'm so glad you came. Here, let me... Len, go and get a chair for your mother. Helen, what was the name of the real estate agent who sold us the house? It's on the tip of my tongue."

"The real estate agent who sold us the house!" Mother turned to me, looking almost frightened.

"You don't remember either? Well, it's of no importance. There is no shortage of real estate agents, after all!" He laughed good-naturedly. "Is there, Isaac?" he said, turning to him.

"No, no indeed," said Isaac.

"Helen, you know Linda, of course? Linda, my wife Helen. I am," he said, "very impressed with this young lady! Very impressed indeed."

"It sounded like his usual babble to me," Mother said to me later at home.

"Oh, please, Mother!" I said. "Surely there's a difference! Okay, he's not a hundred percent, but still! Mother, listen to me. She's such a... such a harmless little thing! How can you possibly dislike her?"

"And how can you possibly love her?"

***

Ron Bloom's stony face squinted up at me from page three of the next morning's Gazette. His lips were clenched tight in front of (benumbed, I counted them) seven microphones. The headline read: "Municipal Councilor Resigns over Sex Charge."

"Nectar municipal councilor Ron Bloom, 54, resigned within an hour of being implicated in an illicit sexual relationship dating back nearly 30 years. A Nectar woman, whose name is not being released to protect her privacy, alleges that Bloom, then (as now) an English teacher at Beckman High School in Nectar, was her class teacher at the time he made sexual advances to her, which she, then 15, accepted. Bloom hinted to her that her sexual favors would 'be a factor' when it came to assigning grades, she said."

The perverse thought occurred to me that Bloom would wince over how badly written the report was.

It went on at some length about his long and honorable career as one of Beckman High's most popular teachers, and his short, sadly truncated tenure as one of Nectar's most effective councilors ever. Almost single-handedly, it said, he had brought new life to council proceedings, sponsoring bills for the establishment of a youth center and for the highly popular mobilization of young volunteers for community service, including the enthusiastically received "Angel Patrols" in community shopping malls and parks following a spate of muggings of elderly citizens. It said the woman's reason "for coming forward at this time" was not immediately known. Bloom himself, it said, refused to comment beyond promising to issue a statement later in the week.

What to do? Call him? Extend my sympathy? Offer comfort? Mechanically I turned the page. On page four there was a drought in Afghanistan; on page five a Palestinian suicide bomber had blown himself up, along with seven others, in a shopping mall north of Tel Aviv. A litter of severed arms and legs. I knew the shopping mall; I'd had a friend who worked there. Had worked there, once upon a time. How many years ago? Idiotically, I started a mental count of the years, only to bring myself up short. "For Chrissake!" I cried - aloud, I think - "keep to the point, willya?" That had been Mr. Bloom's favorite expression, minus the "for chrissake". Digression he looked upon as a personal affront. "To write clearly you have to think clearly!" Yes, Mr. Bloom. Yes, Ron.

Why had he admitted it? All he had to do was deny it. He was a respected man, a revered teacher, a community leader. Who would take the word of some anonymous woman, who had been silent for thirty years, over his? Then I thought, Wait a minute. He hasn't admitted it. He hasn't admitted anything. Resignation is not confession; surely he will clear his name and then return to work.

Mother would be up any minute. Would she notice if I surgically removed pages three and four? Of course she would, and anyway, it would be on the radio, on TV... "This is the man," I imagined her saying, her voice trembling with indignation, "on whose couch you begot those two children." "What two children, mother?" "George and Susan." "George and Susan! They're not my children, they're Linda's!" "You know perfectly well what I mean." Her answer to everything: I knew what she meant, and if I insisted on pretending not to, or pretending to find her reasoning flawed, that was evidence of my cleverness, perhaps, but even more, of my insincerity.

The phone rang. It was on the wall, directly over my head. I was not startled; I had been, subconsciously, expecting it. "Hello." "Len? Ron." "Hi." "You heard?" "I read." "Wanna come over?" "Sure. Give me half an hour." His wanting to talk to me was only natural. Having been incautious enough to confess his peccadilloes to me, he would now want to ensure my silence. "Ah, mother, good morning." "Who was that?" "Did the phone wake you?" "No, I was up."

My mother is one of those people who cannot be spoken to first thing in the morning. As children, Adam and I used to make a hilarious theatrical production of tiptoeing out of the kitchen at her approach. Only after her first cup of coffee does she settle into the day, and into what might be described as her usual self. "It was Mr. Bloom, mother," I said gently. "I'm on my way over to his place now. Shall I get your coffee ready?"

"No, leave me alone, I'll do it myself."

"Mother, listen, there's something... Are you in a fit state to be spoken to?"

That was the way to handle her. If you hinted first at any of her little idiosyncrasies, she would deny it vigorously, and suppress it with all her force; otherwise, she was as likely as not to exaggerate it, probably without being aware of doing so - to draw attention to her startling individuality, said Adam, habitually impatient with all human frailty except his own. (Once I had remarked to Adam, a propos of I'm not sure what, that in terms of character he was our mother to a T; to my surprise, he agreed.)

"What do you mean, am I in a fit state! Is something wrong?" She was all business.

"Let's just say that something is not quite right. Don't panic, it has nothing to do with us. It's Mr. Bloom. He's in trouble. I'd've kept it from you if I could, but it's in the news, you see, and - "

"What kind of trouble is Mr. Bloom in?"

"It's all nonsense, mother - it's what happens when you become a public figure. One of his former students is accusing him of having made sexual advances to her. He's resigned. He just called me, and - "

"My God!"

"That was basically my own feeling when I read it in the Gazette a few minutes ago. He has resigned in order to be free to clear his name, and then - " I was, of course, saying more than I knew. "Anyway. I wanted to prepare you before his photo on page three hit you in the face, knowing the condition you're apt to be in first thing in the morning. Really, mother. He's the best teacher Beckman ever had, and very likely the best councilman Nectar ever had. There's something about outstanding men that stimulates a certain destructive instinct in some not-so-outstanding people. I'm going over there now. You okay?"

"Of course I'm okay!"

"Okay then. I'll talk to you later."

"Take the car."

"No, I'll walk."

"It's pouring rain!"

"Can I borrow your umbrella?"

 

Twentieth segment

"Come in, come in. Listen, did you hear the one about the new cantor? 'What beautiful singing!' exclaims one Jew to another after prayers. 'Big deal,' says the other. 'If I had his voice I'd sing just as good.' Ha ha. Forgive me for dragging you out in this rain. Let me take your umbrella. A young woman buying a mink coat asks the salesman, 'If I get caught in the rain, will it get damaged?' 'Lady,' says the salesman, 'have you ever seen a mink carrying an umbrella?' Hm. You understand, of course, that this compulsive babble of mine is just a cover for my nervousness. Well, sit down, and let me explain why I summoned you - though I'm sure you've guessed already that, having a statement to craft, I would naturally enlist the aid of my most promising pupil. Would you like some coffee?"

"No, thanks."

"My wife, you'll be pleased to know, has vowed to stand by me. My daughter is still in Europe. Will it have made the papers there, I wonder. So!" He sank down on the sofa. "Here he sits, the tragic hero undone by a human flaw in his nature! What would Aristotle have to say about this, eh?"

"What are you gonna do, Mr. Bloom?"

"Listen." He drew himself up, and leaned forward. "Once and for all we are going to have to break you of this idiot habit of yours of calling me Mr. Bloom! I am not your teacher any more! I am all of eight years your senior! My name is Ron. Okay?"

"Sorry."

He subsided with a weary smile. "What am I going to do? I'm going to go back to that thesis I never wrote - I told you about it, didn't I?"

"About the absurd leap from thought to action?"

"Right. It's been unwritten too long. I'm gonna write it."

"But what about... about..."

"Well, spit it out, boy. What about what?"

"Jesus, you know what I mean!" I stood up and walked over to the window. The street was deserted except for a woman hurrying past under a red umbrella. I heard the muffled clatter of her heels against the pavement.

"I resigned from the council. Later today I will hand in my resignation at Beckman."

"You're joking!"

"By no means."

"Mr. Bloom, listen to me," I said, turning to face him. "Deny it! That's all you have to do! Who'll believe an anonymous accuser against a man - "

"No one. No one will believe her. Even if she comes forward out of the shadows of anonymity, no one will believe her if I deny it. I know that."

"Well?"

"But I don't deny it. She's telling the truth. Now Len" - he held up a hand, staying my interruption - "I know you too well to think you're going to tell me that makes no difference."

It was a challenge, and I rose to it. "You don't know me as well as you think. If you're asking my advice, I will boldly court your moral disapproval and say, As far as I'm concerned that makes no difference. Does that make me what at an earlier stage in the development of the English language they called a scoundrel?"

"Yes, I rather think it does."

"Do you have any idea who's making this accusation?"

"Of course I do."

"Did she confront you with it?"

"No."

"Do you have any idea what her motive is?"

"Not blackmail, obviously."

"I suppose not. What, then?"

"She still lives in Nectar. I see her from time to time. She's slightly mad. I've often thought - it's not a certainty, mind you - that she's that way because of what I did to her. 'What I did to her' - that makes it sound maybe worse than it was. Actually, the initiative was more hers than mine. The fact remains, she was a child, and I, as an adult and a teacher, had a certain role to play, and there's no excuse for my failure to play it."

"Even if that's true, there's still such a thing as a statute of limitations."

"In a court of law, yes. Len, I am, as you say, asking your advice, but not about this. About this my decision is made, and it's final."

"About what, then, are you asking my advice?"

"Sit down."

I sat.

"Len, are you familiar with Indian philosophy at all?"

"I've dabbled in it, as I have in many things. You want me to recommend a guru?"

"Hindus traditionally divide life into four stages. The first stage is the life of a student, a preparation for social life. The second stage is social life itself - householder, family man, payer of taxes, fulfiller of responsibility. The third stage is that of 'forest dweller'. This is a time for solitude and meditation, for addressing those eternal questions we had no time for earlier. Who am I? What is my place in the cosmos? That kind of thing. As stage one was a preparation for stage two, so is stage three a preparation for stage four, 'the wandering hermit.' I need not tell you that the wandering hermit's journey is a journey towards death. Nor need I belabor the point, for you will have guessed, perspicacious lad that you are, that I am contemplating a passage from stage two to stage three. You see - wait, let me ramble on a bit longer, if you interrupt now I'll lose the thread and we wouldn't want that to happen, would we? Broadly speaking, this generalization may be permitted: that Western civilization examines all things in their separateness, and Eastern civilization sees all things in terms of a cosmic unity. Why did this woman come forward now, now of all times, thirty-odd years later? Because I'm suddenly a bit of a public figure, and my name is in the papers from time to time? No doubt. But isn't there a deeper reason? Isn't it possible that, given the cosmic intertwining of all seemingly separate things, what looks on the surface to be an act of pure malice on her part is in fact, though she herself can have no inkling of it, an act of kindness, a gentle warning to me that stage two has expired and stage three has begun?"

"Mr. Bloom - Ron - I have a kind of philosophy of my own. It's the philosophy of a man who's wandered a great deal to no purpose, and come back to see his father dying of terminal idiocy. Basically, there's no such thing as truth. Truth is the ultimate illusion. It is the nature of the world to mold itself in accordance with our perception of it. If enough men see the sun as revolving around the earth, then the sun revolves around the earth. Copernicus did not discover the truth, he changed it. Does God exist? It's up to us. Is life a unity? If we see it that way."

"Your trouble," said Mr. Bloom, "is that you put the cart before the horse. You did stage three before stage two."

"That's possible. When I set out I had no idea of the four stages, so I may have got things ass backwards. To me, you are the victim of an act of malice. Whatever happened between you and her thirty years ago may constitute an extenuating circumstance, but no amount of extenuation can change malice into benevolence. If you take a different view of the matter, I have nothing more to say."

"All right, Len, all right."

"So, you're out of stage two and into stage three. What happens now?"

"Well, that's what I wanted your advice about. To put it crudely, I pack my bags and vanish."

"I packed my bags, but I didn't vanish. Vanishing is not as easy as it sounds."

"As I said, your timing was off."

"My timing was right on in the sense that I had no wife and child. And you?"

"My daughter is grown, and my wife - "

"Well?"

"My wife is a prominent businesswoman. She has promised to stand by me - she never hesitated a moment, which does her immense credit, of course - but inevitably my disgrace will reflect on her, and make her life difficult."

"All the more reason, I say, why you should fight this."

He was silent.

"Tell me something, Ron. This 'passage from stage two to stage three' business - had you been thinking along those lines before this came up, or - "

"Or is my sudden interest in Hindu philosophy a lazy man's excuse to avoid having to confront a challenge head on? What is the connection between action and motive? Do we ever know why we do what we do? The East discovered cause and effect long before the West did, but karma as they conceive it is vast, vast! It's not just a matter of this billiard ball moving because that billiard ball struck it. Past lives come into it. Maybe Doreen and I have some kind of bond forged in a past life, in another kalpa. Do you know what a kalpa is, by the way? This'll give you an idea of how Hindus were measuring time back when our own most learned sages were calculating that God made the world at nine p.m. on October 26, 4004 BC. A kalpa is the time required for brushes of an angel's wing once a millennium to wear away a rock several billion - I forget how many exactly - cubic miles in volume."

"Doreen."

"I have been careless. Yes, her name is Doreen. To answer your question: my interest in Indian philosophy goes back to my university days, when I took a course in it taught by the great Professor Narayan, a man of such vast learning, such intense vision, and for all that such gentle human warmth that he would have inspired a lifelong interest in plumbing fixtures, if that's what he happened to've been teaching. He was the man I modeled my own teaching career on, and though I shudder to think how unworthy I am of him, I know at least that I was a far better teacher than I would have been without his example."

"Why not ask him for advice?"

"Maybe I will. We'll get together a minyan, and hold a séance."

"What's a minyan?"

"You don't know vat iss a minyan? It's the quorum of ten adult Jews required for communal worship."

"Of course. I thought the word was familiar. It must've been your coupling it with séances that confused me."

"It's whimsical, I'll admit."

"The professor is dead, then."

"In a manner of speaking."

"Oh?"

"As far as this infinitesimal earthly sliver of life is concerned, he is indeed dead. He died two years ago."

"Were you in contact with him?"

"No, not at all. This course I'm talking about was in my junior year; I was eighteen; it was an introductory course. I was one of fifty-odd students in the lecture hall, and he had no particular knowledge of my existence. Over the years I've read his books, and then one day I noticed his obituary in the paper."

The rain had stopped, though the clouds still hung low.

"What about him?" I asked. "Had he taken up as a forest dweller?"

"No, he was teaching right up until the end, even when he had to be wheeled into the classroom."

"You don't need a séance. That's his advice to you right there."

 

Twenty-first segment

***

"Dad. Who is the woman with crooked teeth?"

He, Linda and I were alone in his room. The early afternoon sun cut a slanting path across his knees. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Linda turning a mildly puzzled gaze on me. "Joan," he said promptly. "Didn't you ever notice her front teeth?" He chuckled. His missing lower teeth, by the way, had been replaced.

"I noticed, but I never thought of making a note of them. Why did you?"

"Why did I what?"

I had the notebook with me, and I showed him the notation. "'The woman with crooked teeth,'" he read. "Yes, yes. That's Joan. A woman I had a ... you mustn't tell your mother. Promise me you won't tell?"

"I promise."

"Swear."

"All right, dad, I swear."

"A woman I once had an affair with."

"You had an affair with her."

"A brief affair. 'Fleeting' is a good word for it. A fleeting affair. You'll understand when you're older."

What to do? Pursue it further? Let it drop? Linda's not a very complex person, and it's surely futile to read nuances into her facial expressions, but hers now was, to all appearances, appealing to me to adopt the latter course. She seemed to understand, in her dim way, that I was using her, and my father's peculiar lucidity in her presence, to unravel a family mystery, and something in her - I'm judging, as I say, from her probably meaningless expression observed out of the corner of my eye, for I was not looking directly at her - seemed to rebel against it. I had said not a word to her about this beforehand, not out of a consciously formulated desire to conceal it, but naturally - it would not have occurred to me to confide in her, or for that matter to speak to her about anything that had no direct bearing on our relationship.

About that relationship... What can I say? Her company was growing unbearable to me, it was like the walls of a tiny, shrinking room, and yet the more brusquely I treated her the more deeply she seemed to love me. Alone in my mom's car, for that is where I did my most eloquent talking, to myself and to the spirits of those I desired to address, I sat her down and, firmly but gently, told her the truth. I could not marry her, did not love her, did not love anyone, was incapable of love, was not the marrying kind, etc. etc., and if I was hurting her now it was for her own good because really, I was no sort of man to build a future on. Why couldn't I tell her that to her face? Cowardice. I am a coward. So? There was a time when a man would have died rather than show himself a coward, but today courage is at best a rather quaint virtue, ranked far below intelligence and the ability to make one's way in the world with whatever means come to hand. I could think of myself as a coward without thinking the worse of myself. Who, imagining the confrontation it would provoke and the pain it would cause in Linda's childish heart, would not seek to avoid it? One tells oneself this and one tells oneself that: let it slide, my indifference will speak for itself, she'll get the message, subconsciously if not consciously; her ardor will cool, she'll let me off the hook... and so on.

There was one more thing, and in this I show myself not so much cowardly as cunning and calculating: her effect on my father. This was utterly mysterious. Nobody could account for it, though everyone observed it and acknowledged it - except my mother, who continued to insist that dad babbled as incomprehensibly in Linda's presence as in anyone else's. Perhaps her malice prevented her from admitting what she saw. Perhaps it prevented her from seeing. "How can you possibly love her?" she had demanded. Well, I couldn't, and I didn't - but would I marry her if that would restore my father to sanity? I might. Did mother read my mind? Was she trying, by pretending to see no change in dad, to (as she would surely put it to herself) prevent me from ruining my life?

Would it ruin my life? How endlessly, endlessly complex are the thoughts of even a comparatively simple man! Complex, winding, devious... It is customary to arrive at a moral judgment of a man by his actions, if they are all you know, and by his thoughts, should they enter the picture. Shall I set down my thoughts? To what purpose? To none. Maybe it's vanity. Don't we cowardly men love the evil in ourselves, the evil we would unleash on the world if only we had the courage?

Suppose I marry Linda, I thought - a woman I don't love, with two children I don't care for - for the sake of my father's sanity, on which the said woman has a mysteriously salutary effect. What a burden I would be taking on for my dear father's sake! Or: what a burden I would be casting off, for mine. My father would gain a nursemaid, and I would gain my liberty - from my father, whom I would have put in the best, kindliest and most beneficent of hands, and from my wife - for a husband, once secured, is far freer than a boyfriend in danger of being lost. Would my father and I gain those things at poor Linda's expense? Yes and no. She stood to benefit too, after all. What would she gain? A place in life - the desire for which, very likely, was all her supposed love for me signified. Did I really believe that? Yes and no. That was the view my cousin Eric encouraged me to take - rather more warmly, I thought, than was his wont. "Look," he'd said to me just the other day, he having dropped by to say hello to my mother, and the two of us having stepped over to the Four Corners for a drink, my mother having laughingly declined an invitation to join us. "When we get to heaven," he said, "our thoughts and our motives will be pure as crystal, clear as spring water. Down here they're not. The best you can do down here is, follow your inclinations and try to do as little harm as possible."

"We shouldn't try to do good?"

"I firmly believe we should not. The worst harm in the world is done not by people who consciously set out to do harm, but by people who set out to do good."

"For example?"

"Lenin. Stalin."

"Oh?"

"Few men have loved mankind with purer, more selfless hearts than they did. In that, they're in a class with Mother Theresa. Hitler too, maybe."

"You're joking."

The rest of the conversation is a bit hazy in my mind, for, frankly, the scotch I was sipping and the sublime way it was making me feel were of more immediate importance, but later, sober, I was reminded of something awful. Or rather, I was reminded of something long forgotten, the awfulness of which I only now fully understood. Or maybe not fully. Maybe I will understand it still more deeply ten years down the road. That's possible too. The notion that Hitler in his own mind had been a good man selflessly dedicated to the good of the human race was not new to me. In fact I had written a paper on that theme in college. The professor gave me a C minus. Shocked, for I thought I had written brilliantly, I went to see him. I still remember his office. Books, books everywhere, wall to wall, floor to ceiling, a chaos of books, and he at his desk, cigarette smoke curling upward from his fingers, dwarfed by the paper castle he had built round himself. "Sit down," he said, his East European accent noticeable if you listened for it, imperceptible otherwise. He eyed me benignly through thick spectacles as I cautiously and nervously removed some books from a sofa. He had lost, he went on to tell me, his entire family at Maidenek, or was it Treblinka. Father, mother, older brother, younger sister, childhood sweetheart, best friend. He spoke very quietly, though not theatrically so. "Professor," I said, my voice cracking and trembling, both for the awesome scale of his personal tragedy and for the breathtaking stand I was about to make for freedom of thought and expression. "I am of course very, very sorry to hear that" - I cleared my throat - "very sorry, but - "

He interrupted me with the faintest gesture. Very slightly, almost imperceptibly, he extended his hand. Pass me the paper, the gesture seemed to say. I passed it to him. He groped on his cluttered desk for a pen. When he handed the paper back to me, I saw that he had crossed out the C minus and written A plus. I gaped at him. I don't remember how long he let the silence drag on; not as long as it seemed, probably. Then he said, as quietly as before, "You can go now." That was all.

***

"Follow your inclinations and do as little harm as possible." It was not Hitler and Stalin Eric had had in mind then; it was himself. His affair with Barbara had entered a new phase. They were beyond having coffee at Mr. Donuts. They were sleeping together whenever possible, and distracting each other from their ordinary pursuits when not. The investment firm Eric managed on his late father's behalf - that was his own way of putting it, making clear that this was not a line of work he had undertaken of his own free will, but as a family obligation ("my father dead is as overbearing as my father living," he had once quipped in that half joking, half dead-serious way of his) - the firm was teetering badly under his less-than-steady helmsmanship; he didn't care; let the damn business rot. Rose he had never loved but had once liked; now he found the mere sight of her sparking an aversion he had not known he had in him for anyone, let alone the unoffending woman who shared, if blandly and distantly, his life.

It was the same with Barbara, he said. Having been as I mentioned somewhat the worse for liquor, though I hadn't had that much (sometimes it goes straight to my head), I am unable to quote his exact words, but their tenor was that everything about her husband now made her writhe, even his good qualities - especially his good qualities, of which, she acknowledged (and I knew), he had many. The notion that he was all the while absolutely unsuspecting, that he saw no change in her, that his whole life had been overturned without him having the faintest inkling, became in her mind a grievance; it justified her hatred; it made her see his very goodness as somehow evil.

So what was he to do? Eric demanded, as if I of all people should know. Turn his back on Rose, encourage Barbara to turn her back on the rabbi and on her children, and set out together, at fifty, for some desert isle or teeming city where they could live in such a way that nothing on earth mattered except their love for each other? Or perhaps they should acknowledge their liaison a sin and end it, sacrificing themselves on the altar of righteousness and goodness? "What would you do?"

"Après moi le deluge," I mumbled. "Have another drink."

I told him about Linda: about her effect on my father, her effect on my mother, her effect on me. "Had a crush on her in grade five."

"Little knowing..."

"What'd I come back for? What the hell did I come back for?"

***

Next morning I dialed Adam's number; I'm not sure why. I hadn't spoken to him in a long time - that was one reason. I wanted to probe the mystery of "the woman with the crooked teeth" - that was another, though exactly what form my probing would take I had no idea. "See here, Joan, did you have an affair with my father?" She had laughed once about rumors to the effect that she'd had. Very clever of her. What better way to kill a rumor than to acknowledge it and laugh at it? But rumors aren't always false, any more than clichés are always stupid. And what was Adam's take on this? Did he know? Did he care? Did I? Should I? True, the image I'd harbored of my father in my mind all my life was that of an upstanding family man who had never so much as looked at another woman - a man for whom wife and children were the whole world, a self-contained world, complete in itself and lacking nothing. Supposing the worst-case scenario, that the truth was exactly the opposite and my father was a roving philanderer. So what? Well, so nothing, but one can't help being curious. And if he was a philanderer - did my mother know? Did she conspire with him to keep the sordid truth from her innocent children's eyes? Her faithful attendance on him now hardly suggested an abused wife. On the other hand, people have any number of motives for sacrificing themselves besides the benefit of the supposed beneficiary.

What did I care? Why was I occupying my mind with these matters? What did they have to do with me? I'd lived in Africa, in Asia, in the mountains, in the jungle. I'd been away from all this, from all these people and their primly laid out suburban lives, for years, for decades. What difference did it make now who my father had had affairs with, or what Eric and Barbara did with themselves, or whether - for this was another factor in my sudden desire to contact Adam - whether the Doreen who had ruined Mr. Bloom was the Doreen of Adam's past, the woman who had once mistaken me for him.

Almost certainly she was. Doreen is not that common a name, and besides, Mr. Bloom's description of her as slightly mad seemed to fit my own observation.

 

Twenty-second segment

"He's not home," Joan told me. "Wanna buy me lunch?"

"Sure."

"Do you hate quiche very much?"

"To be honest, I have only the vaguest idea what it is. Something associated with faggy intellectuals."

"Don't they have faggy intellectuals in Borneo?"

"I'm sure they do."

"But no quiche."

"I don't know, I - "

"I suppose the local favorite is cannibal stew, or something like that."

Why did this woman irritate me so much? Something about me made her try too hard, and something about her strained efforts set my teeth on edge. Would it be too obvious to suddenly remember another appointment? I feared it would. "Where is Adam anyway?" I asked.

"With his girlfriend, I believe."

"Oh?"

"Come on over. I'm just putting the final touches on a wedding dress. There's a nice quiet little quiche place just around the corner. Try to get here by 11:30. After twelve it's hard to get a table."

"Caught you red-handed!" said Adam, answering my ring. "Joan is indisposed, she can't make it." With a hand on my shoulder he steered me out into the hall, closed the door behind us, and locked it. His hand still on my shoulder, he said, "What you doin' with my wife, bro, eh?"

"Pardon?"

"Not that I wouldn't give her to you. But I won't have her taken from me. Understand?"

"Adam, where is she?"

"Where you won't find her. Am I her husband, or not? Well, I claim a husband's rights. And if you think - Hello, Mrs. Goldblatt. Do you know my brother? Brother, this is Mrs. Goldblatt down the hall."

Mrs. Goldblatt was a tall, buxom, sagging, dyed-blonde woman of sixty. Her smile showed gold teeth. "How do you do?" she said.

We turned a corner, descended a flight of stairs, and passed through the open front door into the street. "Left turn," said Adam. "A bit warm for fall, no? Must be that global warming they're talking about. Here we are."

A bell tinkled as he pushed open the door. Joan, sitting alone at a table, looked up, smiled, and waved us over. "Hi boys!" "Jesus Christ!" I said to Adam. "What was that all about?"

He grinned. "Had you going?"

"Had him going where?" asked Joan.

"Just an expression, Jones, just an expression. A figure of speech, as you might say."

"Jones?"

"Sometimes he calls me Joan of Arc."

"Jones of Arc."

"I was talkin' to a guy the other day," I said, suddenly remembering - "something he'd seen on TV; a woman claiming to be a reincarnation of Joan of Arc."

"Must be our Joan here."

"Nathan Glass," I said, turning to Adam, who, after all, knew him too.

"What about him?"

"He's the guy who was telling me."

"Oh." He grinned ambiguously. "You've struck up a friendship with him, have you?"

"I wouldn't call it a friendship exactly. He works the graveyard shift at the Gazette. We've been talking about going partners on a project."

"What project?" Joan asked, covering rather over-eagerly for Adam's pointed failure to do so.

"You know the guy Isaac, who thinks he's the son of Abraham? Well, we're thinking of writing a book about him."

"A book!" said Joan.

"Yes," I said. "You know, a bunch of pages between covers."

Joan reddened; less furiously, I'm sure, than I did myself. Adam grinned. Adam was turning into a master of the ambiguous grin. I faced Joan. "Do you know," I said, "that a minute ago my brother here was accusing me of debauching his wife?"

"Oh was he!" exclaimed Joan. "Well now, isn't that amusing!"

"Yes," I said, "he quite terrified me with his vengeful demeanor when I rang the bell, expecting you at the door. All he needed was a dagger to complete the image of a man ready to run me through."

"Speaking of Nathan Glass," Adam interrupted. "Did he tell you the story about the high school boy who planned a murder because he wanted to know what it felt like to kill someone? All along he'd been a nice quiet young fella, as our mom might say - studied hard, always smiled and said good morning to the neighbors - but all the while, deep, deep down in his quiet little heart, lurked a haunting question: What does it feel like to - to borrow your expression - run somebody through? He had to find out. And so one fine morning he slipped his mom's kitchen knife under his jacket, said goodbye to his family, said good morning to the neighbors - but instead of going to school he roamed around looking for an opportunity, and on the corner of Heathcliffe Avenue he found one: an elderly woman waiting all alone at a bus stop - "

"Adam."

"Yes, my love."

"Are you deliberately trying to be as unpleasant as possible?"

"No, my love, I am not. I'm trying to amuse the company by telling a story, which came to mind as a result of Len's mentioning Nathan Glass." He turned to me, his grin now a smirk. "He was going to write a book about that too. It was the talk of the Einstein last year."

"So what happened?"

"Nothing happened. It never got written, that's all. Like most books."

"I meant with the boy and the woman."

"Oh. Well, he approached her from behind and stabbed her in the neck. She died two hours later in hospital. I'd give anything to know what her last thoughts were. As for the boy, naturally they found some mental illness or other which absolved him of guilt. I believe he's in an institution somewhere. Eventually they'll pronounce him cured, and set him free. He'll spend the rest of his life writing his autobiography and making the rounds of the TV talk shows."

"This is not," said Joan, "the sort of thing faggy intellectuals talk about over their quiche!"

"Well, we can talk about the symbolism in Camus if you like."

I looked up sharply - too sharply, I thought to myself an instant later - but Adam's face was bland, and Joan herself showed no sign of attaching any special significance to the remark. The significance I attached to it had to do with Joan's reminiscence to me some time back about dad, years ago, helping her with her college term paper on that very theme. That was the collaboration that had sparked rumors at the office about them having an affair, rumors which had supposedly reached Adam's ears and which he came flying to investigate. Was he trying to tell me something? He wouldn't know that I knew - unless Joan had mentioned it, which was hardly impossible. Our little threesome was awkward for many reasons, not the least of which was that the things I wanted to talk to Joan about I couldn't because of Adam, and the things I wanted to broach with Adam I couldn't because of Joan.

"Are we gonna order, or what?" said Joan tartly. "I don't know about you guys, but I'm hungry."

***

Joan had to get back to work after lunch; the wedding dress she was working on had to be finished that evening and, as she said, something unforeseen always went wrong at the last minute; experience had taught her to allow time for that. Adam and I were left alone. "Joan tells me you'd never had quiche before. Well, what do you think?"

I shrugged. "There's something I want to talk to you about."

"And it isn't quiche."

"It's about Doreen" - for suddenly it was Doreen, not Joan and her crooked teeth, that was on my mind.

"Ah. Doreen."

"I'm not prying into your private affairs. I just want to know if your Doreen is the same Doreen that's been harassing Mr. Bloom."

"She's harassing him! I thought it was the other way around."

"Why? What do you mean?"

"Well, a high school teacher fucking his fifteen-year-old student is conventionally regarded as the harasser, I believe, not the harassee."

"She went thirty years without feeling harassed. Why all of a sudden - "

"She's fucked up, goddammit! Her whole life! And he, the great educator, Nectar's most famous role model, now an activist shake-'em-up council man and media darling, he did that to her! She hasn't said a word against him that isn't gospel truth."

"Adam - do you figure for something in all this?"

"What do you mean, figure for something?"

"You know perfectly well what I mean. Are you pulling strings behind the scene? Did you goad her into speaking out?"

Adam smiled. "Do you know who you remind me of at this moment? Alyosha Karamazov!"

"I don't see the connection."

"You look as if you're about to fix your wide-open innocent eyes on me and say, in a voice throbbing with emotion, 'Adam, do you believe in God?'"

"Mr. Bloom is a friend of mine."

"Well, Ms. Wolfe is a friend of mine."

"That's her name? Wolfe? Doreen Wolfe?"

"Why not?"

"No, it just struck me..."

"Wolfe wolf wolfish? Symbolism? Nah! Doreen's a pussy-cat! As Mr. Bloom saw. Would he have dared approach her otherwise? And he was right. His secret was safe with her for thirty years. His career soared. She, meanwhile, is forty-three years old and still living with her parents for Chrissake! Her life was stillborn. And all because her teacher - her teacher - "

"Adam."

"What?"

"Don't make speeches at me. I know it's no light matter for a teacher to make sexual advances to a student. But I find your moral outrage a little hard to swallow. It doesn't suit you. And I find it hard to believe that a thing like that would fuck up a person's life for thirty years. People get over things - worse things than that."

"There's a principle in law that says, in essence, that a criminal must take his victim as he finds him. If a terrified householder has a heart attack during a burglary and dies, the burglar might well find himself charged with manslaughter. Doreen was none too stable to begin with, and this tipped her over the edge. What's so incredible about that?"

"I thought you decided not to practice law."

"I did. I'm not practicing law. I am informing you of a basic legal principle which I learned in first-year law school, when I thought I might practice law."

"Adam. Mr. Bloom did not rape her. No crime was committed - "

"Excuse me! A crime most definitely was committed. He did rape her. Sexual intercourse with someone under sixteen is statutory rape. I didn't think you needed two years of law school to know that."

"All right, all right! This is not the point!" What a hash I was making of this. With defenders like me, who needs prosecutors? "Look. I'm not denying Mr. Bloom's guilt. He doesn't deny his guilt. My one question is, what business is it of yours? Why are you mixed up in it?"

"Well, I'm not really as mixed up in it as you seem to think. Doreen is, as I said, a friend of mine. I care about her. I feel sorry for her. And I'm doing what little I can to help her."

"How is destroying Mr. Bloom going to help her?"

"She's bitter. She's been bitter all along, and now, with Bloom suddenly famous and the object of all that mass admiration, she's even more so. That's understandable. Look at it from her point of view. Think of what she's suffered. She wants redress. Can you blame her?"

"It doesn't ring true. None of this rings true, Adam."

"Oh? Why not?"

"I refuse to believe that this woman has been brooding for the past thirty years over something that can be made to sound terribly sordid in the telling but which in fact probably wasn't. Mr. Bloom is not a sordid guy. Granted he shouldn't have done what he did - even if, as he says, she's the one who came on to him rather than the other way around. To me he's guilty of an indiscretion rather than a crime. I know," I said, cutting him off, "that you can talk it up to make it sound like a crime, and for all I know it may go over that way in a court of law. But - "

"It has nothing to do with a court of law. Nobody's charging him with anything. Nobody's putting him on trial. Doreen made a public statement, which I'm sure you'll agree she has a right to do. If Bloom wants to deny it, let him deny it! Let him make a fool of her! Let him charge her with libel! But you'll notice he hasn't denied it. Instead he resigned. In short - it may not ring true to you, but it seems to ring true enough to him."

"She made the public statement at your urging."

"By no means. Why? What's in it for me?"

"She's silent for thirty years; you suddenly come back into her life, and she all of a sudden can no longer contain her outrage."

"Well?"

"And I'm to believe you had nothing to do with it?"

"Don't force me to be rude and say that what you believe or don't believe is not a major concern here."

"Does Doreen understand what the consequences would be for her if he did deny it?"

"I warned her about that. I told her that he's a popular and respected man, and a denial from him would carry weight. She said she was prepared for that." He pushed his chair back.

"Where are you going?"

"I'm a bit full. I thought I'd go for a walk. Wanna come?"

"Come with me to see dad better."

"I've seen dad."

"Don't you think - "

"Look, don't go lecturing me on filial piety now, Mr. Eastern Sage who decamped for twenty-five years. I'll tell you something. This homage you're paying him - dad wouldn't've wanted it. The last thing on earth he'd've wanted is to eat his family alive while he ... while he... Jesus Christ! What's the verb I'm looking for? Do you know that twenty-odd years ago - he would've been approaching sixty at the time - he bought a book, I forget the title, something like Six Easy Steps to a Painless Suicide. Mom screamed. Dad explained, calmly and rationally as was his way, that he had no intention of dying a lingering death, whether out of his mind with senility or in unbearable pain from cancer. He had reached the age, he said, when, though healthy, it was time to think of these things. This is mom's story I'm telling you; I wasn't there. And she, the next time she had the house to herself, marched to the bookshelf, snatched the book, took it out to the garden, and burned it. Burned it! You know how terrified mom is of fire. Dad must have noticed it was missing, but he never said a word; nor did mom. Why don't you ask her now if she wishes she'd had a more rational attitude back then, and let him go ahead? You see that Eric and I come by our thinking honestly! But I wander. What's the point of all this circumlocution? Merely that the best way to be true to dad's memory is not to spend our lives at his bedside but to get on with our own lives until our lives are over, and then, while we still have the strength - that's key, you see; dad's mistake was he waited too long. You weren't here, of course, but his deterioration was a long, slow, process. It didn't happen in a day - one day he's Mr. Saul Fishman, Nectar's resident amateur philosopher, and the next he's the Saul Fishman that Anette and Clara and the others know. Hm... where was I? Yes - the key is to act before it's too late, even if it's too soon."

"Listen - did I tell you about Linda's effect on him?" Adam met my sudden excitement with a puzzled frown. "No. Who's Linda?"

That was deflating. There was no simple answer to his simple question, and I didn't want to go into it. "A friend of mine," I mumbled. "Anyway - Jesus, that's true, you don't know!" My excitement returned, and I explained as best I could the mysterious phenomenon. "Well well," he said.

"Come with me this afternoon, you'll see."

"This afternoon?"

"Why not this afternoon?"

He stood up. "Come back to the house with me."

"What for?"

"I want to show you something."

 

Twenty-third segment

"My first encounter with God? I'll tell you. I was not from a religious family. We were bourgeois, middle-class, respectable - in a word, boring. One day - I must have been sixteen - my father takes me aside. 'Got a little joke for you son, listen. A beautiful woman is sitting alone at a bar. A young man approaches: "Buy you a drink, doll?" The woman looks up at him. "Do you like sex?" she asks. "You bet!" says the man. "You like to travel?" "Sure!" "Well, fuck off."'"

A sheepish grin and a faint blush overspread the rabbi's childish, bearded face. "My father guffawed and slapped me on the back. I just gaped at him. It was so unlike him. This was a man... I won't say of stern rectitude, nothing as forbidding as that, but at least of a certain natural decorum who had never once, never once, uttered an off-color word in my presence. Still chuckling, he left the room, leaving me to my thoughts."

"And your thoughts were...?"

"Confused, muddled. Was this an initiation, or what? Was I pleased, or upset, at this new man-to-man tone of his? It's hard to explain - mostly because I don't understand it myself. All I can say is that it had an effect on me. It changed me. Not immediately, but not long afterwards, I began to think, for the first time in my life, about God. Later on, looking back, I seemed to see my father's joke as the turning point, though if you asked me exactly what the connection is I'm sure I couldn't tell you."

"The Lord works in mysterious ways."

Rabbi Yanovsky and I had become, under Rabbi Paltiel's patient mediation, friends. Rabbi Paltiel, his small keen eyes twinkling mischievously, told Yanovsky I had at first regarded him as an oaf. Yanovsky smiled. "Rightly no doubt," he said. It is a measure of how close we had become that I was not in the least embarrassed. "What can I say?" I said. "You sing like an oaf, and all I'd heard of you was your singing."

"I sing like an oaf? Mrs. Sherman thinks I sing beautifully, and she's not alone."

"Who's Mrs. Sherman?"

"The lady who sat beside you at today's concert."

"Ah." Madame de la Dangling Tongue.

"In grade five," Yanovsky went on, "I had a teacher, an elderly lady, who loved music. She loved music with such a passion that she could not conceal her contempt for the musically ungifted - to say nothing of the musically fatally flawed, in which category" - he chuckled, showing squirrel-like teeth - "I was so unlucky as to have been born. To her an inability to sing was what poverty was to the early Calvinists, a sure sign of eternal damnation. Anyway, this teacher - Mrs. Findley, her name was - used to start every day by having several children in turn sing a hymn, solo. Oh, you have no idea, no idea, the dread, the misery, this caused me. Did she do it on purpose? I hate to say it, but I honestly think she did. I have caught myself fantasizing about her being brought in here, crippled, helpless, senile... 'Paul,' she would rap out, gritting her teeth against the desecration of her beloved music that was about to issue from my tortured, strangled throat. In agony, in terror, I would gasp out a note or two - three, four... The good Mrs. Findley would stand it as long as she could; at last she would clench her lips even tighter, stamp her foot, and hiss, 'Karen, accompany him.' Karen was the class's best singer, and what made all this infinitely more mortifying was that I had a kind of secret crush on her... And so Karen's lovely mellifluous voice would drown out my own cracked tuneless one, to the point that the much put-upon Mrs. Findley could once more bear up under the strain of being alive in this fallen world."

"Any idea where Karen is now?"

"None."

"You're not curious?"

"Not terribly, no."

"I ask because I seem to have returned to my own childhood... As a matter of fact, that's what I wanted to ask your advice about." With his encouragement, I told him the story. It did not flow smoothly. My standards of relevance, obviously, were no longer what they were when Mr. Bloom had had them in charge. Digression to him was vice, disease and criminal intent all rolled into one. The world would be a better place, he seemed to feel, if people would only learn to keep to the point. But here was I, telling my own story and unable to keep to the point because unable to find it. I lost the thread, went off on tangents, began to wish I had not started this idiotic, inconsequential narrative, and grew voluble to keep up my flagging spirits. How long did I thus impose myself on the poor man? The very fact that he showed no impatience heightened my self-reproach, as I imagined what it must be costing him to suppress it. I wound up with a false laugh and an exclamation which, no sooner uttered, I would have given anything to retract: "No wonder my brother and my cousin want to end it all!" The questioning look on the rabbi's features forced me on, for I must at all cost drown out the impression that last remark must have made. "Even a happy man, rabbi, even a happy man... Do you know what? Once, you know, I had the ambition to be a writer, a novelist, only ... well, it's a long story... there are so many long stories in my life! All of them worthless, unfortunately. Where was I? Oh yes! About the novel I would write if... hm. Here's the plot: a perfectly happy man - a wife who adores him, and whom he adores, children who do him proud, a flourishing career, a more than adequate income... Whatever a man can possibly want, he has. Suffering is as remote from him as the Black Death is from us. Even disappointment scarcely touches him. Intelligent enough to outmaneuver all rivals, his future spreads out before him, shining and triumphant. And one day, one sunshiny May morning, admiring his handsome face in his shaving mirror, the scent of lilacs wafting in on the soft spring breeze through an open window, he says to himself, smiling as always, 'I am going to kill myself. I, happy, satisfied, fulfilled, at the height of my happiness and satisfaction, with no ill prospects anywhere in sight, will blow my brains out...' Am I making sense, rabbi? Or is all this just nervous babble?"

"You're making sense."

"'Zum gali gali gali zum gali gali...'"

He laughed. "That will lead off the CD of my greatest hits, when I get around to putting it out."

"I suppose now you're going to tell me that of course it makes sense, since, for all my hero's happiness, he was bereft of God and therefore, consciously or not, in despair."

"There are ways," the rabbi replied quietly, "to make even the greatest thoughts sound trivial. I pay no compliment to anyone I call a master of that art."

"Touché."

"It's a simple fact: man is not man without God."

"I see."

"No, you don't, but one day you will."

"You foresee that for me?"

"I'm no prophet, but yes, I foresee that for you."

"You foresee that one day I will open my heart and make a place for the non-existent God."

"I hope so."

"And then I will be transformed?"

"Nothing will have changed, and yet nothing will be the same."

"Rabbi... forgive me, I try and try to fathom your thoughts, and there are even moments when I almost feel I've succeeded, but those moments don't last, the glimmer of understanding soon flickers out, and I'm left with the feeling of climbing a mountain of air."

He smiled. "Am I really so obscure?"

"You worship a non-existent, powerless God. What is the difference, exactly, between you and the atheists?"

"Atheists don't worship."

"Ah. But if God is non-existent and powerless, aren't they right to withhold their worship?"

"They are right in the sense that the hero of your novel is right to commit suicide."

I waited for him to go on - in vain. He had made his point; the ball was in my court. "Well," I said at last, feeling hopelessly obtuse but confident at least that he would not lose patience with me, "in what sense is that?"

"Life is meaningless to those who have failed to confer meaning on it. God is non-existent to those who have failed to confer existence upon him."

"Isn't it supposed to be God who confers existence upon us?"

"That view did once prevail."

"Wrongly?"

"Rightly, in the sense that man's existence without God is, shall we say, diminished."

"May I ask you a personal question?"

"Of course."

"You mention in your book an irrational act of submission, arising out of man's need for God and regardless of His existence or non-existence. Have I expressed your thought correctly?"

"Yes, entirely."

"What, then... I mean... what form did your own submission take?"

The rabbi smiled. "Zum gali gali gali, zum gali gali..."

"I see."

"Why not join me on stage next Wednesday?"

"And sing, you mean? No, rabbi, really. I don't think I'm ready for that."

"Of course not. How can one get ready for an irrational act?"

 

Twenty-fourth segment

Nectar's history as a community basically begins, coincidentally of course, with my history as a person. I was five, and Adam two, when my parents bought the house my mother and I now shared. We were one of the first families to move in. We have photographs in our albums of the house fronted by a sea of mud, later paved over to form our street. Parklawn Avenue, on which the Einstein is now located, was then a swamp where the older boys used to go to hunt frogs. I was never allowed to go so far on my own; the only time I ever saw that swamp was from the window of the family car - a 1955 Chevy Biscayne which did not, unlike Bennie Alter's dad's car next door, have a radio. Over the next few years young families poured in, drawn by the parks, the new shopping center, the low property rates and the supposedly excellent elementary school (to this day I don't know what it owed its reputation to; nor can my mother enlighten me, though even now she insists with the utmost vehemence that it was indeed an excellent school).

Years passed. Nectar prospered and grew, then aged and declined, without much happening in it that transcended the purely personal interest of its citizens. To identify yourself to people from other parts of the city as a resident of Nectar was to convey three things about yourself: Jewish, moderately prosperous, and boring. My mother had a ready answer to my complaints on that score: "You want excitement? Go to Biafra" - where a civil war was raging and whose starving children with bloated bellies were being featured in Life magazine. That sort of remark only heightened the lively and facile contempt I felt for her back then. Today I am more inclined to agree with her: excitement is something to escape rather than pursue.

All of a sudden, in my mother's old age, my father's dotage, and my advancing middle age, Nectar became interesting. It became relevant. News reporters and TV crews descended upon it, not only from all over the city but from across the country. Ron Bloom, long the community's best teacher and lately its most effective municipal councilor, had become a household name - not so much for his inspiring teaching and his effective council work, though those certainly figured in the story, lending it a delicious touch of irony, but for an unfortunate lapse in judgment dating back nearly three decades, to when he was in his twenties.

Bloom was taken by surprise, though in retrospect, he observed ruefully to me, he should have foreseen it. All he had wanted to do, he insisted, was to resign quietly and disappear, embark on that "third stage" of his. He planned to go to India. The Hindu pantheon fascinated him, with its limitless profusion of gods and goddesses so varied in their powers and their longings. "Makes old Jehovah seem rather one-dimensional in comparison, all alone up there in his sexless heaven." The study of Hinduism, he said, reminds us how large the stage is on which man plays his tiny part. "Like modern astrophysics. I don't have the brains to study that, but to sit at the feet of holy men is something we can all do."

His resignation speech was beautifully crafted - sculpted, I am tempted to say. It was brief without being abrupt, humble without being self-abasing. Reading it, I thought to myself, "He is my teacher still." He apologized to the woman he had thoughtlessly wronged decades ago. He apologized to his students, to his family, to the community. If the woman wanted to press charges against him, he would not contest them. If she did not, he would go to India and return perhaps more worthy to serve the community as a result of his reflections there. His fate was in her hands, and he was content that that was where it belonged.

Was he being disingenuous in claiming not to have anticipated the galvanizing effect the speech would have? I don't think so. My impression is that he genuinely felt he had earned the disgust of the very people who had so respected him, and was prepared to accept it as his due, with resignation, though not with self-disgust; perhaps not even with guilt. I am trying to understand his state of mind based on such indications as he gave me, indications that were vague and certainly open to more than one interpretation. That he deserved whatever mud people might fling at him he conceded. A community is entitled to judge one of its own on the appearances, particularly one like himself, whose very position required a rigorous respect for appearance. And he would submit to that judgment - but he would not share it. To the extent that he was guilty, it was as a member of the community, not as a man. As a man he must penetrate beneath the appearances; he must judge himself on the basis of what is in his heart, and the truth is, as far as I saw it, nothing he discerned there drove him to self-condemnation. Perhaps it was his proud delivery of his humble message that accounts for the effect it had. The effect on TV was stunning. It was played over and over again, first on the news, later on the afternoon talk shows. At one point in his speech he flashed a smile, no doubt unconsciously. It was the briefest of smiles, and yet the cameras honed in on it, replayed it, froze it, turned it into something dazzling. The fact is, he had very fine teeth, small, even and white, in a well-shaped mouth that (unlike my own, for example, which is incapable of shaping itself into a smile that is not stiff and awkward) is naturally adapted for smiling.

A reporter from the Calgary Herald got lucky. He fell into talk with me at the Four Corners one evening as I sat nursing a scotch. "I'm covering the Bloom thing," he said. "The Bloom thing!" I riposted with mock amiability. "Well well! Shall I tell you, in a nutshell, the essence of the Bloom thing?" "Please do." "The essence of the Bloom thing" - I was slightly tipsy but not as drunk as I was pretending to be - "is this: Nectar needed a celebrity. Now, by God, it's got one."

***

It was against this background that I got to know Doreen Wolfe a little. One afternoon I found Adam waiting for me outside as I was leaving the hospital. "You in a hurry to get home?" he asked. "No." "Well, come with me."

It was a ten-minute walk, and our silence the whole way is, I suppose, interesting, though perfectly in keeping with the odd relationship that had been developing between the two of us. I was quite content to follow without demanding an explanation. Parklawn Avenue was crowded and noisy with chattering kids on their way home from school. Once I had been one of them. Now, in their midst once again, I observed them with all the curiosity of a member of an alien species. What would they be thinking about? Homework? Sex? MTV? At one point there was a rather large group gathered around a young woman. Approaching, I noticed she was slightly pockmarked and that she had a tape recorder. A newspaper reporter, fishing for quotes.

"This way." Adam turned into Maimonides Avenue, and then into Maharal Avenue. The street names of Nectar are a story in themselves. In the early days, streets were given playground-like names: Fairside, Parklawn, our own Blossom Avenue. Later additions were named after great Jews. There was a Judah Halevi Street, a Ben-Gurion Road. I vaguely remember a brief but heated controversy over a council proposal to name a certain street Messiah Avenue. In the end it was rejected in favor of Maimonides. Maharal was the nickname of Rabbi Judah Loew, the sixteenth-century chief rabbi of Prague who, legend has it, fashioned and magically brought to life a man of earth and clay, a golem. "They should have called it Golem Avenue," my father used to say in his genial but trenchant way. Nectar's tendency to parade its Jewish roots disgusted him, to the point where mother was once moved to observe to him (the memory came back as I followed Adam in silence) that there is nothing worse than a Jewish anti-Semite.

I followed Adam up a flight of stairs leading to the second floor of a duplex on Maharal Avenue, and only then did I ask Adam, "Where are we going?" Without answering, he rang the doorbell, whose prim ding-dong resounded so clearly through the closed door that I started, as though it was my own doorbell ringing. We heard, again with remarkable clarity, what sounded like slippers padding across a carpet. The door was open by a woman of roughly my mother's age, though less well preserved because, it was apparent at a glance, she had long ago lost interest in self-preservation. "At my age I may as well just go to the dogs" - so her appearance seemed to say without a word being spoken. Her parchment face lit up at the sight of Adam. "How nice! What a surprise! Doreen will be so pleased!"

Doreen. Well well, I thought. So that's it - I'm to be presented to Doreen.

But first there was Doreen's mom to present me too. "My brother Len, who's been all over the world. Len, Mrs. Wolfe."

"All over the world!" she echoed sepulchrally, ushering us in. "Really!"

We followed her into the living room, where sat, in a wheelchair, Mr. Wolfe. As gray and shrunken and withered as his wife, he seemed no less pleased than she to see Adam. "Well, my boy! Well! How do you like this" - he raised the newspaper on his lap and tapped it vigorously for emphasis - "the Canadiens sold to an American! Is nothing sacred?" He laughed - a hollow, ghastly, rheumy sound - to show he did not take himself as seriously as his words might have suggested he did.

"Let 'em go," said Adam contemptuously. "They haven't made the playoffs in three years. Hell with 'em."

"True, true," said the man sadly. "Gone, gone the days of the Boomer, Beliveau, Richard..."

"Jacques Plante," said Adam. "My brother's childhood hero."

True enough. "Are you a hockey fan?" the old man inquired, turning to me.

"I used to be."

"Doreen's in her room," timorously interposed Mrs. Wolfe, as though afraid of her daughter being forgotten in a flood of hockey talk.

"Doreen is always in her room," sighed the old man. "The girl should get out more! Instead of hiding herself away like a... like a widow or something."

"Thank you, father, I get out quite enough, thank you."

I fear my start was violent enough to look ridiculous, though no one except Adam, who smirked faintly, gave any sign of noticing.

Her father laughed again. Evidently he was an extraordinarily good-humored man, only the debilities and infirmities of age, which his very cheerfulness showed him capable of rising above, lending an edge of horror to his joviality. His laughter ended in a prolonged though not violent fit of coughing, during which we were all respectfully silent. When it was over, he expectorated discreetly into a handkerchief and resumed, quite as though there had been no interruption, "Doreen is one person who can never be talked about behind her back! Never know when she'll creep up on you on her fairy feet. Eh, girl? Ha ha!"

According her father the briefest flash of a smile, she turned to me. "I've been after Adam to bring you here. The way we keep bumping into each other on the street..."

"Yes, we have had a couple of... encounters, haven't we?"

"I'm afraid you must think me quite mad. The first time" - she turned to Adam - "I thought he was you. I nearly jumped out of my shoes. To see you again after all these years, only to have you pretend not to recognize me! - because I was convinced that's exactly what you were doing. And yet now that I see you two together, you hardly look alike at all."

"Why would I pretend not to recognize you?" asked Adam, in a voice that sounded strange to me, and almost immediately I realized why: there was not a trace in it of the habitual irony, cynicism, sarcasm, call it what you will, that colored almost every word that came out of his mouth, even the most ordinary.

"How should I know? There could be thousands of reasons - "

"I didn't even know you were here. Last I'd heard you were in Vancouver."

"Victoria. Which is a small town. It's no place for a woman who's poisoned her husband, believe me!"

"You poisoned your husband?" Adam asked blandly.

"That's not funny!" her mother broke in, clearly not amused by the banter.

"Come," said Doreen, "let's go into my room. We'll be more comfortable. Mother, it's time for father's medicine. What would happen if I wasn't around to remind you?"

"I remember perfectly well," said the old woman.

"I need medicine like you need a hole in the head!" snapped the old man.

"Well, take it anyway, for my sake," said Doreen.

 

Twenty-fifth segment

Well?" said Adam as we sat over beers in the Four Corners. "What do you think of her?"

"Nothing in particular."

"She doesn't strike you as - how do children put it? - having a screw loose?"

How frank did he want me to be? "I'm no psychiatrist," I mumbled, reddening.

"But?"

"Well, to the extent there is a but, okay: my impression, for what little it's worth, is that every word she uttered was intelligent and appropriate, and yet - I don't really know how to say it - "

"Off-center, somehow?"

"I had the feeling she was forcing herself to be normal, kind of like, 'I know how normal people behave, and I can behave that way when I have to, even though I'm not one of them and don't want to be one of them.'"

"That's very shrewd, by God! Especially that bit about her not wanting to be normal. That's not bad, not bad at all. You've quite justified my confidence in you. I think you're right. For what little it's worth. Of course," he added, grinning, "defining normality is no easy matter. Are you, for example, normal? Am I?"

"Maybe we're all faking it."

"Some more successfully than others. You know something? The older I get, the more I find myself agreeing with dad, though I used to argue tooth and nail with him. I mean his fatalism. You'll find hints of this in his notebooks, cryptic enough but comprehensible if you know what you're looking for. Dad and I, you know, went through a period of being quite close. It was after you left. I think he looked at me one day and was surprised to find I'd grown up to the point where he could discuss serious things with me. Oh, I'm not saying I was a substitute for you. No, maybe - hm; this never occurred to me before - maybe I was a substitute for Uncle Al, who got sick around then and no longer had a taste for intellectual disputation. Fatalism. He was always convinced, our dad, that free will is an illusion and man is in the grip of blind forces. It seems to have been the unbridgeable gulf between the man he was and the man he wanted to be that made him think that way. In his later years he substituted 'genes' for 'blind forces'. In those arguments of ours, I always held out for free will. 'Man without free will is nothing,' I said. 'Man is nothing,' he affirmed. 'So what's the point of living?' 'There is no point of living.' 'And yet we live.' 'It is not any point of living that keeps us alive,' he said; 'it's the fear of death.'"

"What do you mean, the gulf between the man he was and the man he wanted to be?"

"Well, his fear of death is an example. It offended him. It mocked him. He didn't want to be afraid of death, and yet he was. Imagine being beyond your own control to that degree. We all are, of course, but, to paraphrase Mr. Dickens' Mrs. Gummidge, some feels it more."

"I daresay."

Then there was his womanizing."

"Ah."

"It was a compulsion with him. A 'blind force.' The man he wanted to be is the man we as children thought he was - the man he made sure we thought he was. Blind forces or not, he made sure he retained enough control that he took not so much as a hint of this home with him. It distracted his business life, but not his home life."

"Maybe they're connected."

"What's connected?"

"His fear of death and his womanizing."

"Hm."

"How much of all this does mom know?"

"What do you think?"

"I don't know. From her behavior, you'd say she knows nothing. But that doesn't add up either, does it?"

"Why not?"

"Is it likely we'd both have found out but she never did? In all those years? She's no fool, and anyway, those notebooks, or diaries, or whatever they are, weren't exactly unfindably hidden."

"Unfindably hidden - that's good."

"Their very existence is significant. I myself was once a compulsive scribbler into notebooks. I burned them all."

"Oh?"

"On a beach. In Tiberius."

We were silent for a time. "You gents ready for another?" said Bill. Adam and I looked at each other, and I don't know what he saw in my face, but he turned to Bill and said, "Yeah."

Maybe it meant he felt like talking. Not normally communicative, he was signaling me that, if I asked the right questions, he might answer them. I didn't much like beer, and the taste in my mouth from the three we had already had was unpleasant and made me long for toothpaste and a toothbrush, but I was not deaf to the invitation being extended. "I don't understand you," I said - hearing in my words an unpleasant echo of my mother's perennial complaint to me. "It's funny," I said. "Mom is forever telling me she doesn't understand me but that she understands you. In my opinion - for what it's worth - you're a lot more enigmatic than I am."

"Enigmatic, am I?"

"What's between you and Doreen?"

"Love."

"Oh?"

"I love her."

I waited for more - in vain.

"Does she love you?"

"What do you think?"

"How should I know?"

"You saw her."

"And from my sight of her I'm supposed to have discerned whether she loves you?"

"I thought you might have."

"I'm not much of an expert when it comes to love," I said. "Never having been in love myself."

"Is that a fact!" said Adam in mock wonderment. He sipped his beer with the air of a man savoring fine wine. "Is that a fact!"

"John Locke speaks of the impossibility of describing the taste of a pineapple to someone who's never tasted one."

"Rather an exalted source," murmured Adam, "for so bland a thought."

"I came across it just the other day, in the library."

"Doreen does love me, and we are going to elope together."

"As usual, I don't know whether you're joking or serious."

"I suppose in that sense I am enigmatic."

"Did you really marry Joan to get her away from dad?"

His smile was hard to interpret. "Who knows why a man does what he does? You mentioned Locke, which makes it less embarrassing for me to invoke Hume, who said, if I'm not mistaken, that there's no such thing as cause, the human mind merely imagines a cause-and-effect relationship when the only link between two events is time, one occurring immediately after the other. If Hume is right, then the question 'why' becomes meaningless."

Once again he broke off in what to me at least seemed mid-thought. Either he was doing it deliberately, to keep me interested, or else his mind really did work differently from mine. "Well, supposing," I said when the silence grew heavy, "for the sake of argument, that Hume is wrong. What then?"

"Fielding, you know, says that a man may marry for hatred as well as for love."

"Did you marry Joan for hatred?"

"Did I?"

"You're asking me?"

"You're my big brother. There was a time when I thought you knew everything."

"I can imagine how painfully disillusioning it must have been to discover your mistake. But since that must have happened years ago, you've probably got over it by now."

"There are times when I think I have, and other times when I'm not so sure."

"The limitations of fathers and big brothers is just one of those things that must be lived with."

"In Dostoevsky, erotic love is impossible without hatred."

"Adam. That letter you showed me of dad's. It is not conclusive, it - "

He raised a hand. "Say no more. I am not a vindictive man, nor a man to condemn on insufficient evidence. I forgive everyone, exonerate everyone. 'Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.' Not me, brother, not me. 'I am human, and nothing human is alien to me.'"

"In the diaries too, you know, he writes in such a way... he weaves fact with fancy... and anyway... if anything did happen... to the extent you can take what he says literally, he blames himself... There's a notation in the diary I hadn't understood before; now maybe I do..."

"What notation?"

"A cryptic, out-of-context notation, a girl or a woman saying, 'I'll love you with all my soul if you don't make me sleep with you.' And she pleads with him - "

"Len, do you mind if we change the subject?"

"I just... the thought of you hating Joan, torturing her..."

"Well?"

"It's none of my business, of course..."

"I don't know if I married her for hatred, it was long ago and I was young then, but one thing is sure - I hate her now. Hate her - to the point where her suffering gives me pleasure, and if it happens to be suffering inflicted by me, the pleasure is all the keener. Her suffering turns me on. Okay? Your glass is empty." He began pouring. "Say when."

"When."

"I hate her so much that her suffering has become the only sexual stimulus that works for me. It's so powerful it eclipses all others. Otherwise I'm impotent."

"Doreen?"

"I picture Joan's mortification as I make love to her."

"You said you love Doreen."

"That's what I meant."

***

Mother had a wonderful idea - we would go for a drive in the Laurentians and admire the autumn leaves, just then at their peak. I vividly remember how as a teenager I used to cringe at mother's wonderful ideas and the exaggerated cheerfulness with which she uttered them. At one point I remember I went around calling her Amanda, after the mother in The Glass Menagerie. This time, though, I was happy enough to fall in with her plan. The innocuous distraction would do us both good. I suppose it was a sign of my growing maturity that I did not even try to hide my pleasure. "Great - let's go," I said. She was surprised; she'd been braced for sarcasm. "You mean it?" she said, like a little kid receiving an unexpected indulgence from a parent.

"I mean it. One condition: I drive."

"One condition: you drive slowly."

"I will drive as though you were a crystal vase liable to shatter at the slightest jolt. How's that?"

"Just let me do my hair."

"And I'll do mine - what's left of it. Have you noticed how bald I'm getting?"

"Bald? You're mad! Anette was saying to me just yesterday that she wishes her hair was as thick as yours."

"For God's sake."

Mother insisted we make a brief stop at the hospital. "I can't help it - I think how much he used to enjoy little outings like this, and... it's hard to just go off and leave him..."

"Yes, mother, all right."

"I'll only be a minute. You can wait in the car if you like."

"No, I'll go in with you."

Did mother know about dad's affairs? Wasn't this devotion of hers inconsistent with such knowledge? Yes, but no more so than her native shrewdness and her long years of living with the man were inconsistent with ignorance. Should I take the matter up with her? To what purpose? If she did know, I'd be telling her nothing new; if she didn't, I would either be liberating her from an onerous fantasy, or depriving her of a treasured illusion. Which? I am a well-intentioned man, but not a tactful one. Surely I would say the wrong thing, or the right thing in the wrong way, and cause unhappiness which, even if in general terms justifiable in the name of truth, was surely in the present instance a cure worse than the disease. Mother was approaching eighty. That's no time of life to have your nose rubbed in harsh truths. And yet - quite possibly it was not a matter of truth at all. It might even be that she was doing this - sacrificing what remained of her life and devoting herself body and soul to her lifetime companion in his dotage - in the interest of the very illusion the two of them had sustained while Adam and I were growing up, for our sakes, to give us the semblance of a stable and loving home, a Nectar home in short, consisting of dad and mom wrapped up in each other and in their 2.3 children, the outside world existing only during daytime hours when dad disappeared to "the office."

"Hey, man." Trevor, hand extended for a high five. "You come to see ol' Hank?"

"His name is not Hank!" my mother snapped. I turned to her in surprise. The only feelings I had ever seen her display with regard to the Einstein staff were respect and gratitude. This anger was an extreme departure. She flushed. "I'm sorry. Trevor, forgive me. I know you mean nothing by it, but this habit of yours of calling him Hank - "

"Ms. Fishman, say no more. I'm the one who should be apologizin'. Hank - why on earth did I start calling him Hank, now? Hank Williams? Hank Snow? I've no idea. I didn't know it bothered you. I'll never do it again. No hard feelings?"

There were tears in mother's eyes as she smiled. "Oh Trevor, really, how could I ever have hard feelings where you're concerned? Len? Let's go outside a minute, I want to talk to you.

"We're taking him home," she said crisply before the auto door had quite closed behind us.

"Who? What're you talking about?" She wanted to take Trevor home?

"I'm not leaving him there. I was wrong to put him in there to begin with. Terribly wrong. We're taking him out today."

"Mother, supposing you calm down and - "

"Len. Look at me. Am I shaking? Is my voice trembling? Do I seem distracted to you?"

"Mrs. Fishman. Len."

"Ah, Rabbi Yanovsky! Just the man we need. My mother was just saying - "

"His mother was just saying that we are taking my husband home. Today. Rabbi Yanovsky, this place is a wonderful facility, I can't praise it highly enough - a wonderful facility for people who can no longer take care of themselves and have no one to care for them. My husband, thank God, is not in that category. He has a wife, he has sons, he has a future daughter-in-law in whose presence, so my son tells me, he becomes almost normal - his place is at home."

"Mother, he is getting the best of care, he is happy - "

"Happy! You call this happy!"

"I call it as happy as a man in his condition can be! Tell me something, mother, have you been talking to that woman, what's her name, Freedman? She has this friend," I began explaining to the rabbi, but mother cut me off.

"Never mind who I've been talking to! This has been growing on me a long time. It's not right. I can't live with my husband spending his last days in a madhouse where people go around calling him Hank! If you can live with your father - "

"Mother. Listen to me. Rabbi, I'm sorry..." Yanovsky hovered awkwardly, clearly suspecting his presence was an intrusion but at the same time fearing it would be indelicate to just leave. "Mother. Let's do what we planned - drive up north and see the leaves. It's a beautiful day. We can discuss it on the way. And if this evening you still feel the same - "

"You'll spend the whole day trying to dissuade me."

"And you'll spend the whole day resisting me." I flashed Yanovsky a grin. "Sounds like a fine relaxing outing, doesn't it?"

"I'm sorry you'll miss the concert," Yanovsky said lamely. He added, with a smile, "I've been working up a new number. Go. See the leaves. I'll forgive you for driving on the Sabbath. In the old days, on Sabbath, Jews would hire Christians to do what work had to be done. Now we have engines, motors, machines instead of Christians. That's not the orthodox interpretation, but I think it'll hold. Go. Have a good time. By the way." He had taken a step away from us, but now turned back. "Your friend David. His wife left him. I went to see him last night. He's taking it badly."

For a moment I had no idea who he was talking about.

 

Twenty-sixth segment

The weather held, I drove slowly enough to put mother at ease, the leaves were magnificent, and at a little country inn, over out-of-this-world coffee and fresh-from-the-smokehouse ham sandwiches, mother and I struck a bargain. She would do nothing for a week, and if, at the end of that week, she still felt the same, I would not stand in her way. More: I would give her all the active assistance I could. I would be her right hand. Neither of us mentioned Linda. Her remark to Rabbi Yanovsky suggested she might have been counting on the "future daughter-in-law" and the extraordinary, but by mother still unacknowledged, return to sanity dad displayed under her outwardly bland but latently potent ministration. I suppose we each had reasons for not pursuing that subject. There were implications, so far unexplored, and potentially explosive. That Linda wanted to marry me, I knew; she had made no bones about her eagerness. I think she would have been eager to marry anyone she did not have a positive aversion for. She was uncomfortable with widowhood. She needed a husband as a ship needs a sail. More than that, she needed a father for her children. I have no illusions about her deep feelings for me; I was handy, period. And I had no doubt that, in exchange for what I brought to the marriage, she would be pleased to do whatever the situation called for with respect to my father. She understood no better than anyone else the effect she had on him, but she saw it, was pleased by it, in her childish, unreflective way, and did not feel attendance on him as a burden. On the contrary, she seemed to enjoy his company. Her own father had died when she was very young. Maybe dad and I were a kind of two-in-one replacement for the missing pieces in her life: dad would be her dad, and I would be her man.

Mom, meanwhile, harbored an instinctive dislike for her that Linda's evident eagerness to please and be of service did nothing to soften. I knew mother to be very impulsive in her likes and dislikes. She considered herself a profound judge of character, a conviction dating back to my early teens. A niece of my father's brought a boyfriend over to the house, a very nice boy, so everybody said, except my mother, who pronounced ominously, "He has sneaky eyes." To make a very long story short, they married, only to be divorced two years later amid a convoluted sex and business scandal that very nearly had the very nice boy doing time in jail. Since then, it has been impossible to persuade mother that whatever spontaneous judgment she arrives at about a person does not come from some deep infallible source accessible to her alone. So it was with Linda.

I suspect that in Linda's case her aversion was not quite so oracular. Certainly no one would accuse Linda of having sneaky eyes - even, I would have thought, of having any substance at all beneath the insipid appearance she presented to the world. No, but mother had very strong views on love and its place in our lives. I don't know whether she knew what I had lately confessed to Adam, that I had never loved anyone and was incapable of love, but she certainly did know that I did not love Linda. And the idea of her son marrying without love, whatever love was, inspired in her such disgust as to make Linda's presence positively hateful to her.

This suggests another question: How much did she know of Adam's relationship with Joan, and of the background behind their marriage? She had once said that though she understood Adam, I was an enigma to her. Here was as good an instance as any of the reverse being true. Or perhaps she did know the truth. It was a question I could not even begin to consider seriously until I knew how much her much vaunted insight had penetrated the truth about her own husband, and consequently her own life. Should I order us another cup of coffee and, with all the delicacy at my command, introduce the subject? Or should I clear my throat, suggest that maybe it was time to push on, and call for the bill?

Unable to make up my mind, I did neither, slouching low in my chair to give the impression of carefree casualness and inwardly cursing my ineptitude. The restaurant was neither crowded nor empty, neither noisy or quiet, neither bright nor gloomy. The hum of conversation around us was French; we were, I believe, the only English-speakers in the room. I had been mildly surprised at the fluency with which mother had ordered in French. I commented on that now.

"I don't speak it often," she said, "but I seem to have a flair for languages. Yiddish I speak like I speak English, and I can understand and make myself understood in German, as most Yiddish-speakers can. And when we were in Spain, your father and I, within three days I was asking directions in Spanish, ordering dinner..."

"No kidding! You speak Yiddish that well?"

"Of course! That's the language we used at home when I was a girl. My father could barely speak English."

Both her parents had died years before I was born, and it suddenly occurred to me that that - their absence - was the only thing I knew about them. I didn't even know for sure what country they came from.

"What about your mother?"

"Perfectly. Perfectly. With an accent, but her grammar was better than mine."

"Tell me about them."

If someone had said to me, just out of the blue like that, "Tell me about your parents," I would have been at a total loss. What can you say about your parents? They're there, like the living room sofa and the kitchen table; finally you grow up and leave, and you come back to find them on the verge of death. It was otherwise with mother. She knew her family history inside out. She knew how Uncle So-and-so had fled through the Eastern European forests in the dead of night to escape pogroms, how another uncle had followed after the first uncle had set up a bit of a business and could send for him, how Auntie Such-and-such had toiled fourteen hours a day in a sweat shop, never complaining, resigning herself to spinsterhood so her brothers could go to college and her father could study Torah. She knew how her father and mother and my infant Uncle Al, the only one of four siblings born "over there," had been smuggled across the Russian border into Austria, how they had made their way from there to Hamburg, where they were fleeced and robbed ("by Jews!" mother exclaimed, roused even now to anger over that ancient betrayal) before finally boarding a ship for Halifax, how seasick they were on the two-week voyage (which was just as well in a way because it distracted them from hunger - they couldn't eat the ship's non-kosher food). She knew of their early struggles to get a foothold in the New World - her father had been a street peddler, an elevator operator, and, despite his hopeless English, a commercial salesman; he had then fallen ill with a disease that is easily curable today but was not then. With him out of work, the family sank into the sort of poverty that I knew from reading Dickens and traveling rich in poor countries - not otherwise.

"How old were you then?"

"I was eight when papa first got sick. And until I was eleven - "

"How did you get by, with your father out of work?"

"Al quit school and washed dishes to support the family. The restaurant he worked at is still there, I can show it to you. It's on St. Urban. Though it looks nothing like it did then."

She talked on and on. Uncle This, Aunt That, Cousin What's-her-name. Many of them I'd heard of, some I hadn't; the ones I had known in childhood I had casually dismissed as relics of a vanished past; many had died before I was born; apart from my mother, all were dead now. Relics of a vanished past - that they were, only what I realized now, and had failed to realize then, was that it was my past. How they had struggled, suffered, endured! And all that struggling, all that endurance, had culminated in... Nectar. In bland, languid, stupefied, stultifying Nectar - and in me, Nectar's son.

"Are you really interested in all this?"

Mother had suddenly realized, apparently, how long she'd been going on. The sunlight streaming in through the window at my left had grown pale. How long had we been here? "What time is it?"

"It's after five."

"Am I interested? Yes, very much. I had no idea..."

"Oh, you've heard all this before!"

"Maybe so, but it never struck me how..." How what? I didn't know how to put it.

"You know who else gets a kick out of these old stories? Eric."

"Really? I wouldn't have thought so."

"Oh yes, he's forever pumping me about the aunts and the uncles. 'When you die,' he said, 'all these people and events will vanish, it will be as if they never were.'"

"Hm."

"Shouldn't we be getting back?"

"I guess we should at that."

***

The next day Nathan Glass met us at the entrance to the Einstein. "Isaac's dead!"

"Isaac who?"

"What do you mean, Isaac who? Isaac the son of Abraham. Isaac the subject of our book. Isaac the - "

"Dead? What do you mean, dead?"

"Now you're being obtuse on purpose. I mean gathered unto his people, being old and full of days."

"He died?"

"In his sleep. Heart attack. I need a drink."

"Lemme just ask my dad if he wants to join us."

"Don't bother. I want to drink alone. Your dad's with the Wallenberg babe. Pardon me, Linda. How d'ye do, ma'am? I'm afraid I'm not quite myself."

"What's with him?" Linda asked as we mounted the stairs.

"You heard him. He's not himself."

"Len! Linda!" My father rose from his chair and ushered us into his room. Mrs. Wallenberg, seated facing the door, fixed her mournful dark eyes on me and said nothing. I noticed for the first time - was it the light in the room? - the smudge of down above her upper lip. "We were just talking about the prospects for peace under a world government. I wish I could share Mrs. Wallenberg's optimism. Confess, Mrs. Wallenberg - your optimism has more to do with your natural character than with an objective analysis of the circumstances. But maybe the same can be said of my pessimism." He laughed. "What do you think, Len? You know me better than anyone. Am I a natural pessimist?"

"I think by nature you're a good-humored pessimist. I've never understood how you manage to combine those opposites."

"Well, as Mrs. Wallenberg here would say, only to small minds are opposites mutually exclusive. You would say that, Mrs. Wallenberg, wouldn't you?"

Mrs. Wallenberg gave a faint shrug and mumbled something in Lithuanian that sounded vaguely dismissive. Then, turning to Linda, fixing her dark eyes on her, she launched into a monologue. She spoke softly but insistently. She asked questions, and answered them herself. Nothing in her tone suggested insanity, or anything but the strictest reasonableness. Linda's grip on my arm tightened. This had happened before. Linda was frightened of Mrs. Wallenberg. My father, Withered Beauty, Madame de la Dangling Tongue, Mr. Oy-yoy-yoy-yoy-YOY - with all these people she was as calm and natural as a trained and experienced nurse, though only on dad and Withered Beauty did she have the mysterious effect of relative sanity. But Mrs. Wallenberg scared her. Her fluent stream of incomprehensible babble, the look in her eyes that, though mournful, betrayed not the faintest hint of a suspicion that she was not understood, the flicker of a smile that would flit across her face from time to time, with its vague suggestion that even the deepest horrors of the world were not devoid of humor - all this could play on anyone's nerves, and Linda, perhaps because she lacked the vocabulary to talk nebulous terrors away, was particularly susceptible.

Not long before she had asked me, rather timidly, as though to say, "I know you'll think this foolish," "Do you believe in ghosts?" Half joking, I replied, "It's not the sort of question I can simply answer yes or no to." Her face a candid confession of being out of her depth, she said, in a voice rather reminiscent of Mrs. Wallenberg's, "I saw Joe's ghost."

"What?"

"I saw it as plain as... as..." Similes were not her forte.

"Did it look lifelike, or like a ghost?" I asked.

"Lifelike, and yet..." her voice trailed off.

"And yet incorporeal?" I suggested.

"He spoke to me."

"What did he say?"

"I don't know."

"You don't know?"

"He spoke English, I understood him perfectly, and yet... as soon as he left..."

"Well?"

"His words vanished from my memory."

"Has this happened more than once?"

"Three times."

"The mystical number three. If he comes forth a fourth time you won't be rid of him till the seventh, and if not then - "

"To you everything's a joke, isn't it?"

"I'm sorry. I'm just not sure how to respond to somebody who..." Somebody who what? I was groping for a way to put it when, timidly but firmly, she capped the sentence for me. "Somebody who murdered her husband."

"What? What's this?" This was the very day after Doreen had said something about murdering her husband - her apparently non-existent husband. What kind of epidemic was going around?

She said nothing, and even hung her head, as though ashamed of having let her fantasies so extravagantly get the better of her. As for me, I was happy enough not to pursue the subject. What was I getting myself into? Was I really, seriously, going to marry this woman?

Mrs. Wallenberg had finished and, her eyes focused expectantly on Linda, seemed to be awaiting an answer. Linda clung tighter to me and hung her head lower. "Just say anything," I whispered, prodding her. But she didn't, apparently she couldn't, and Mrs. Wallenberg kept looking at her, not visibly impatient and yet, it seemed, plainly determined not to let her slip out of her obligation to give an account of herself. "Mrs. Wallenberg," I heard myself say, "she's innocent." Mrs. Wallenberg turned to my father, who now said, "Just type this document in triplicate, will you?" I said, "Dad, they don't use typewriters any more, they use computers." "Yes, yes," he said meditatively. "I believe you're right."

 

Twenty-seventh segment

Scotch, Bill."

"Scotch, Len." That had become a little joke between us.

"So he's dead," I mused to Nathan.

"Just think," he said.

"Well?" He was a little tipsy, having had a considerable head start, and none too swift of tongue. He was in that state in which "Just think" seems profound enough to stand by itself, independent of further comment.

"Well, this reincarnation business. We dismiss it, it's not rational, it doesn't accord with our experience. But what if..."

"What if Isaac really was the son of Abraham? Is that what you're about to say?" He'd said it before.

"Just think..."

"Well?"

"Supposing he was. Wouldn't we be fools to deny it?"

"Of course we would. We'd be fools to deny anything that's true."

"That's what I mean."

"As long as that's all you mean, all right-thinking people will agree with you. Cheers."

"L'chaim."

When the silence was ripe for breaking, he broke it. "I ran into your brother the other day."

"Oh?"

"He told me about you guys committing suicide in three years."

I said nothing.

"He invited me to join you."

"That was nice of him."

"I said no."

"Very sensibly."

"But I've thought about it."

"And?"

"I changed my mind. I'm in."

"Okay. I'll tell him."

"Who's the other guy?"

"What other guy?"

"He said there's three of you. He told me, but I forget."

"Our cousin Eric. Nice fella. You'll like him."

"Well, good, I'm glad, because, you know, a man should... should only take his life in the company of people he likes."

"True."

"How you gonna do it?"

"Do what?"

"Commit suicide."

"Didn't Adam tell you?"

"No."

"Sleeping pills. We're all supposed to bamboozle our doctors into giving us sleeping pill prescriptions, and hoard up a three years' supply."

"But listen, listen." He leaned forward, his face so close to mine I could smell the beer on his breath. Instinctively I drew back. "If reincarnation is a fact..." Once again he let his sentence dangle, apparently figuring that I could complete it perfectly well on my own.

"You're right," I said. "It would sort of defeat the purpose."

"Gentlemen."

"Wayne. My old buddy Wayne. Sit down, Monsieur Lister, sit down."

"How's it goin', Nate?"

"Pretty fair, pretty fair."

"Listen, Len, Viv's in town, she's dyin' to meet you."

"No kidding."

Bill sidled up.

"Brador."

"Who's Viv?" Nathan asked.

"My kid sister. Fishman knew her way, way back when, when she had braces on her teeth. He took her to the prom anyway."

"She did not have braces on her teeth!"

"Certainly she did."

"Wayne, she didn't!"

"All right, she didn't. Why not come over for dinner Friday night?"

"I promised my mother..." I had promised my mother nothing, but, typically, my first instinct was to recoil. "Listen, what do you think of this business with Mr. Bloom?"

"God, what a mess! Poor guy. How's he takin' it?"

"With humor and philosophy. He's off to India to embark on life's third stage."

"I see." He turned to Nathan with a look that said, "That's what we expect from our Fishman!"

***

Wayne was a lifelong Nectar resident - or, as he liked to say, a lifelong Nectar citizen. Traveling to other parts of the country for opthalmological conferences - which was about the only traveling he did - he did not, as anyone else would, say he was from Montreal, he said he was from Nectar, and affected great astonishment at no one's having ever heard of it. That will give an idea of his sense of humor, which was amiable but not scintillating.

Nor was he particularly thoughtful - I don't mean in the sense of considerate, he certainly was that; I mean in the sense of probing into the depths of things. I once asked him what had attracted him to a career in ophthalmology. In high school his great love had been math, and in the yearbook, which almost every time I visited he insisted on spreading out and waxing nostalgic over, his "Probable Destination" was "nuclear physicist." (Mine was "vagrant"; I seem to have been blessed with a singularly acute self-knowledge.) So how, I asked him, did he end up an eye doctor of all things? I suppose what I really wanted to know was, never having chosen a career myself, how people go about deciding upon their life's work. Would it be, in his case, a fascination with the ocular mechanism? An innate desire to help people see more clearly? What? But Wayne was not to be drawn out on that theme. He seemed not to know what I was talking about. Some people were dentists, some people were bakers; he was an eye doctor; what more did I want to know?

He lived on Isaac Bashevis Singer Avenue, three blocks away from his childhood home on Pinewood Crescent. (Isaac Bashevis Singer Avenue was originally called Heywood, after I don't know who; it was renamed when I.B. Singer won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1978.) He was on friendly terms with the family who lived in his old house, and maintained those terms, he told me, simply in order that when the mood came over him he could drop in, sip tea in the kitchen and wallow in nostalgia. Other people too, no doubt, cling to their childhood, but nobody, in my experience, more unabashedly than Wayne Lister.

His son Danny was seventeen, and the first thing you noticed about him was his glasses, which seemed too big for his small, rather pasty face and were forever sliding down his nose. Couldn't his father have done better by him? "That's what he wanted," Wayne laughingly insisted when I remonstrated. "That's what's cool nowadays. 'Member when we were kids, and the cool thing was to be constantly brushing your hair out of your eyes? Well, now it's pushing your glasses back from the tip of your nose. What do you want from me?" Danny was a shy, quiet boy who could never be natural with me because he simply did not know what tone one took with a freshly materialized childhood friend of one's father. I could understand that, but unfortunately I couldn't be of much help, being no less at a loss as to what tone one took with the son of one's childhood friend. It was of course up to me, as the adult, to take the lead and put the relationship on a new footing, but my uncertain and inept attempts to do this were ineffectual, and probably only made matters worse.

With the girl, Carla, it was different. She was fourteen, rather homely, as unfortunately any child of Wayne's was doomed to be, barring a beautiful wife, which he laid no claim to. Arlene was a Nectar girl by birth, but her family had moved to Vancouver when she was two, leaving her no memories of the community's formative phase. Her place of birth was the spark that united the couple when they met in, of all places, Saqqara, Egypt. For him it was a last fling before settling down to his career, and she, five years younger, had come after earning her BFA from Simon Fraser U. They were members of separate tour groups viewing the famous Step Pyramid, and chanced to fall into conversation. It was her birth in Nectar that drew them together, he loving her for that reason alone and she sufficiently piqued by the notion of moving back to the forgotten place of her origin to encourage him. She was a nice enough woman who looked faded and worn beyond her years - certainly beyond any cares she was known to have, for she lived a life that, from the outside at least, appeared comfortable and easygoing in the extreme. She was remarkably free, for better or for worse, of ambition, and made no more use of her fine arts degree than the doodling she occasionally did in a little unfurnished and unused spare room she called, with a dismissive laugh, "the studio." Wayne, after a few beers, would expatiate at length and volubly on her exquisite talent. His exaggerations were comical, as he no doubt meant them to be, but for my part, though I'm no judge, I think she really did possess some grain of artistic talent, and maybe more than a grain. Once, looking at a puzzling circle-square-triangle ink wash of hers hanging unframed on the living room wall, I ventured to say as much. She flushed red as a peony and lowered her eyes. Her embarrassment was not affectation, it was perfectly genuine, and, embarrassed myself, I let the matter drop.

Carla was very much her mother's daughter. She too was shy but pleasant company, somehow giving you to understand, without the least conscious intention of doing so, that her real life was her inner life, and though she did not at all mind coming out of her own little world from time to time to join you in the common one, even contriving to enjoy it, it was not where she really belonged, and where she did belong admitted you no access. Her face was as doughy as her father's, her figure as shapeless as her mother's. She seemed not to mind, even, it seemed to me, to derive a certain pleasure, a certain relief from the freedom from outside attention her lack of beauty afforded her. She and I got along fine. We played, of all things, gin rummy together, a stupid and mindless card game which somehow she never failed to win.

***

"Have a drink," said Wayne, playing the bustling host. "Viv'll be here in a bit. In the meantime I'd like you to meet my lovely talented wife and my adorable children."

"Were you and Aunt Viv really sweethearts?" Carla asked, somehow contriving to pose even so awkward a question naturally and innocently.

"If they had been," said Danny, grinning maliciously, "he'd'a brought flowers."

I felt myself redden. Flowers - it had actually occurred to me to bring flowers. My social grace, under my mother's loving but exasperated tutelage, had evolved somewhat since the early days of torn jeans and rumpled T-shirts, and I was now dressed in quite respectable chino slacks, which my mother had insisted on ironing, and a pale blue sport shirt. I had pictured myself presenting Viv a bouquet of flowers, but the truth was I had no idea how it was done. What sort of flowers did one buy? What did one say as one was presenting them? Did people not of my mother's generation actually give flowers nowadays? No, rather than risk making a fool of myself I would skirt that easy main road to a woman's heart and take my chances with the muddier sidetracks. And so, clutching my habitual bottle of white wine, I set forth.

"We have a surprise guest tonight," said Wayne, joining me on the sofa, scotch in hand.

"Oh?"

"Couldn't make it to dinner. Will come later."

"Who is it?"

"Someone I think you'll like."

"Any friend of yours, Wayne... But where's Viv? Isn't she staying with you?"

"Yeah, Arlene sent her over to Feinberg's for anchovies."

"Olives!" Arlene called from the kitchen.

"Olives. So! Hm! They cloned a pig, I hear. Next it'll be humans."

"Won't be long."

Wayne, I thought, was the only educated person in the world with whom a lively discussion would fail to follow from that. But abstract questions - "abstract" defined very broadly to mean anything not directly touching his immediate existence - were not his cup of tea, and as for me, I was as nervous as a boy Danny's age facing a first date, as Danny, who observed much more than his sleepy countenance would suggest and who thought a good deal more than he said, saw clearly enough, for his face radiated enjoyment of my plight - without changing expression, for it was the curious property of his face to be expressive in intangible ways beneath a veil of expressionlessness. I'm sure he, he alone, heard my heart knocking against my ribs. Her fourteenth birthday had been two days before the graduation party I took her to. Fourteen! She was a kid, a child, so young I was embarrassed to introduce her to people. Had she really had braces on her teeth? No, that was Wayne teasing me. Why was Wayne silent? Here we were, three people sitting in a living room (Carla had gone into the kitchen to help her mother) and nobody saying a word.

"Wonder if the Habs'll make the playoffs this year," Wayne mused. "Viv!"

There she was, in front of us. I hadn't heard her come in. Surely that was impossible? I would have heard the door opening and closing, footsteps, something. She came towards me smiling, hand extended. "I'd've known you anywhere," she said.

 

Twenty-eighth segment

We sat next to each other at dinner. I'd have known her anywhere too, or so I was convinced within three minutes of our reunion. She was forty-three years old and, without looking the least bit childish, as for example Linda did, or even conspicuously young for her age, she looked no different than she did in my memory. She was someone I'd known all my life. There was no need for us to get acquainted, or to put on airs, or to be so absorbed in one another as to shut the rest of the company out. Actually I think she spoke more to Carla than to me. Clearly there was a special bond between the two of them. What did they talk about? Nothing. It was not a topical conversation. One of them would say something, the other would say something else. It was neither profound nor witty, and yet what a joy to listen to! The others evidently felt the same way. On Wayne's face was a look of pride, or maybe just contentment, that would have been smug and stupid on anyone else, or on him in a different setting. Danny, most untypical of a boy his age and of what I'd observed of his character, seemed in Viv's presence altogether at his ease, speaking when he had something to say, silent, but not sullenly silent, otherwise.

She was dressed, I was pleased to note, in a T-shirt and jeans. How well they became her! If she wore make-up I could not detect it. Her light-brown hair hung loose at her shoulders, exactly as it had thirty years before. "Would you like to come with me to the grad dance?" I could not resist saying.

"I'll go with you to Danny's."

"It's a date! I hear you have two children."

"And another on the way."

I gaped at her. "You're pregnant?"

She smiled with pleasure. "Slightly."

"How slightly?"

"Three months."

"How old are your kids?"

"Terry's thirteen, Ralph is six."

"Is Terry a boy or a girl?"

"Guess."

"Boy."

"Wrong. I'll give you one more guess."

"Wayne said you were a physiotherapist?"

"A what? No, I'm an entomologist."

"An entomologist! Insects?"

"Umhm."

"She specializes in termites," said Wayne.

"Wait a minute," I said. "I distinctly remember you saying she was a physiotherapist."

"You're mad. Why would I say that?"

"Why? Probably because you don't know the difference between the two! He never was too bright," I said with a smile to Carla, catching her eye.

"You gonna sit there and let your husband be insulted at his own dinner table?" said Wayne to Arlene. "In front of his own children?"

"No," said Arlene. "I most certainly am not." We all laughed.

"Termites!" I said.

"Actually," said Viv, "the social insects in general. They fascinate me. The complexity of their social organizations... They have war, royalty, caste systems, slaves, agriculture, even domestic animals, believe it or not. And yet everything they do is done without so much as a grain of consciousness."

"Amazing."

The doorbell rang. "Ah," said Wayne, "that must be him." His surprise guest. I'd completely forgotten. Removing the napkin from his lap, Wayne rose to open the door.

"Do you know who it is?" I asked Viv.

"No idea."

We were not kept in suspense long. Following Wayne into the dining room was Mr. Bloom. He wore a dark suit, a white shirt and a red tie, and cradled in his arms was a bouquet of yellow roses. Arlene rose smiling to take them from him. "I'm sorry I couldn't make dinner," he said.

"You're just in time for dessert," said Wayne.

"Honestly, I'm stuffed to the gills. My 'supporters' have been wining me and dining me and bending over backwards to persuade me that this community will not survive my departure. Somehow, I rather think it'll manage. Viv. How nice to see you." She rose to hug her old teacher. "Wayne tells me you're here for a conference on termites."

"Wayne has termites on the brain."

"That's funny. He said you do."

"It's a symposium of entomologists from across Canada. I read a paper on the honeybee's dance."

"The..? Pardon my ignorance."

She smiled. "An unpardonable quality in a teacher, I would have thought."

"You would have thought wrong. Appreciating our ignorance is the first and indispensable step to knowledge, as Socrates taught us. You might even say he died in defense of ignorance. However - the honeybee's dance?" She explained as she did everything - briefly, clearly and without affectation. "My major interest is in the social insects and in the amazingly complex social organizations they have evolved, without the aid of consciousness or reasoning power. Wayne once had a termite problem in the house, and so he seizes on that - though he hasn't called me the termite queen in a while, for which I'm grateful," she said, flashing her brother an affectionate smile. "Actually I have studied termites, but only as part of my overall theme. Anyway. The honeybee dance is a dance performed by scout bees to inform the hive where nectar-bearing flowers are. It is awesomely precise, and awesomely beautiful."

"Maybe I'll study entomology," mused Danny as though to himself.

"Just right for you, you little bug," laughed Wayne.

"Do you know," said Mr. Bloom, "what's even more wonderful than the complex social organizations of unconscious insects?"

"What?" said Viv.

"Human freedom." He paused. "That, to me, is the most awesome wonder in the universe, more wonderful than anything - the Big Bang, the formation of galaxies from primal matter, the mathematical precision of nature, evolution... Human freedom. Man. The only thing in the universe not determined by blind mathematical forces. From that springs Schiller's Hymn to Joy..."

"You say 'blind mathematical forces'," said Viv. "But isn't that itself wonderful? That blind force should turn out to be mathematical?"

"Oh yes! Yes! Very much so. I'm not disagreeing with you. I'm merely adding that, as marvelous as those mathematical forces are, man's potential to transcend mathematics is still more marvelous. Potential, I say. We are not born free. We are not naturally free. All we are is potentially free. Potentially."

"Mr. Bloom?"

"We're not in class now, Danny."

"Ron. I think human freedom is an illusion. Like love."

"Like love!" Wayne cried. "And have you at the tender age of seventeen concluded that love is an illusion?"

Danny reddened, but stood his ground. "We can't all be as old as you, dad!"

Wayne laughed. "No, I guess not."

"Let me put those in water for you, mother," said Carla, coming to her mother's assistance. For the past five minutes Arlene had been hovering in the doorway, evidently intending to put the flowers in water, but something had distracted her, and now, at Carla's reminder, she gasped faintly, laughed a trifle foolishly, and said, "No, thank you dear, I've got them," with that disappearing into the kitchen.

"I think Danny's right," said Mr. Bloom. Freedom is an illusion. Love is an illusion. Well? By calling them illusions have we wiped them from the face of the earth?"

"By calling them illusions," said Viv, "I think we remove them from serious consideration."

"Wrong - only from scientific consideration. Which is not," he said as though forestalling her, "the same thing. Science is wrong to exclude illusion from its world view. The greatness of man lies precisely in his illusions. In his fictions, if you will. The more science discovers about man, the more mathematically or chemically determined it finds him to be. Is this progress, or a reversion to the ancient, pre-civilized past? Consider: ancient man was prey to blind forces - the whimsical anger or bounty of the gods. It was the Greeks who first conceived of man as free. That's what tragedy is: an investigation of a new and revolutionary being - free man. Today, we increasingly see man as determined by his genes. Is modern genetic biology more 'true' than tragedy? Very likely it is. Is truth the highest goal? Not necessarily."

"Truth is not the highest goal?" Danny echoed in astonishment.

"Ron please," interposed Wayne in mock alarm. "He's at an impressionable age."

Smiling, Ron turned to me. "Do you remember," he said, "you were surprised at my preferring to teach high school instead of university? Well, that's the reason in a nutshell. I love people who are at an impressionable age. I have over the years taught everyone in this room, with the exception of Arlene and Carla - Carla, I probably would've had you next year - and if you will allow me to be your teacher again for just thirty seconds more, I will take advantage of the opportunity and exhort you to make whatever age you are an impressionable age. That's why I'm off to India - to recover my impressionability."

"Mr. Bloom?"

"Yes, Carla."

"What happened with you and that girl?"

"Carla!" Wayne was no longer clowning; he was genuinely shocked. So was I. Carla, however, was perfectly calm. So was Mr. Bloom. He did not flinch from her gaze, nor was she abashed when his eyes met hers. He smiled. "Something that never should have happened," he said quietly. "I did a very bad thing, for which I am very, very sorry, and for which I deserve a harsher punishment than I am receiving."

"Carla, I'm surprised at you!" Wayne cried, shock giving way to anger. "How dare you insult a guest in your own home? How dare you?"

"Wayne..."

"If you don't mind, Ron! I'm her father, and there are some lessons only a father can teach. Carla, apologize to Mr. Bloom this minute."

"I'm sorry, Mr. Bloom."

Arlene came in with a coffee cake, and we all sat down to dessert, effectively ending the matter, which had no sequel beyond the momentary damper it put on the atmosphere of the gathering. Mr. Bloom immediately set to work putting things right. "None for me, really, I couldn't possibly!" he cried with exaggerated warmth. Then, reconsidering, "It does look good, though. Maybe you can wrap some up for me to take home, ha ha!"

"I will with pleasure!" said Arlene, intent on showing that, if Mr. Bloom regarded his suggestion as a joke, she did not. "It's Carla's work, mostly."

"Carla! Really!" said Mr. Bloom, snatching the chance to smooth things over. "You can bake, then?"

"A little," said Carla, smiling. Sullenness and resentment had no place in her character. "Aunt Viv taught me when I stayed with her in Toronto."

"Oh," Viv said with a laugh, "she surpassed me long ago!"

"Well," said Mr. Bloom, "if Carla baked it I'll have just a little piece, just a sliver - oh, please!" he cried, seeing how much Arlene was about to cut. "Half that, half that!"

Only Wayne refused to be drawn into the unspoken agreement to wash out the stain of discord with a wave of gaiety. He picked at his cake and added nothing to the chorus of compliments, which even Danny joined with pleasant heartiness. I, as a friend of the family, knew how Danny loved his sister; I also knew that normally he would have died rather than show it. So I was pleased to see what I took to be an apparent sign of maturity in him, and even more pleased to see how Carla, lowering her eyes, lighted up at his praise. It had occurred to me once or twice before that if ever any family could make me miss having one of my own, it was this of my old friend Wayne's. Dull, stolid fellow though he was, he had certainly trumped me there.

 

Twenty-ninth segment

Arlene and Carla were so insistent that Viv leave the cleaning up to them that at last she yielded, joining us in the living room. "Sit here beside me," said Mr. Bloom, tapping the empty place on his sofa. "No, beside me!" I cried, tapping my sofa even more vigorously. Wayne, his good humor restored, laughed. "I'll sit beside you, Ron," he said, leaving his own arm chair to join Mr. Bloom. "Thanks for nothing!" said Mr. Bloom as Viv came over to sit beside me.

"Insects," mused Mr. Bloom. "Insects." Leaning forward slightly, he said to Viv, "How ever did you get interested in insects?"

"Oh, I've been fascinated by them as long as I can remember. My gross big brother would try to gross me out with captured caterpillars, spiders, ants, moths... Far from grossing me out - "

"They turned her on," said Wayne, laughing.

Viv smiled. "Well, they absorbed me. I don't know. What draws a person to one thing rather than another? Is it in our genes?"

"There's an ancient Japanese classic called The Lady Who Loved Insects," said Mr. Bloom. "It dates back to the tenth century, I believe. It's about a girl who's so weird she refuses to blacken her teeth and pluck her eyebrows like all the other girls, and doesn't care if suitors avoid her because she's more interested in raising insects than in marriage."

"Funny," said Viv, "a Japanese scientist at the symposium mentioned the very same story to me yesterday. What message are you all trying to get across, I wonder?"

"For my part," said Ron with a smile, "my only purpose is to elicit your admiration of my extensive erudition."

"You have succeeded, sir."

Danny stood up. Stretching and yawning, he said, "I'm going out. You usin' the car, dad?"

"Where're you going?" Wayne asked. "Oops, I forgot - I'm not allowed to ask. Interference in internal affairs, or whatever the diplomatic phrase is. No, I'm not using the car dad." With an effort he drew his wallet out of his pants pocket - "I'm getting fat" - and handed Danny the registration. "Ron - maybe I'll go to India with you. Maybe that's what the incomprehensible babble in my head is trying to tell me: 'Go to India!'"

"Sorry Wayne. It's a pilgrimage that has to be made alone."

Danny said his goodbyes and left.

"You mentioned Schiller," Wayne mused after a brief silence punctuated by the distant sound of running water and the clatter of plates and cutlery. "What happens to us?" He looked intently, rather sadly, at each of us in turn, and then said again, "What happens to us?"

"What do you mean?" asked Viv.

"I mean - what happens to us? Do you remember, Ron - you prob'ly don't - once we were talking after class and you showed me that Schiller poem... remember?"

"Very clearly."

"It was like... I don't know if I showed it at the time, probably not, probably tried my best not to, but... it had an effect on me, you know? 'Glory to the highest in the world, glory to the highest in me...'" He reddened.

"'Joy eternal pours its fires,' declaimed Mr. Bloom, smiling, 'in the soul of God's creation...'"

"Right, right," said Wayne. There was another silence. "Anyone care for a drink or something?"

"Sure," said Ron."

"Sure," I said."

"Drinks all around," said Wayne, getting to his feet.

"Not for me thanks," said Viv.

"Viv?" I said, turning to her. She turned to me, smiling. How I loved her smile. We all smile, of course, moving the same muscles in the same way - why are some people's smiles so radiant? Is it that they move their smile muscles more skillfully, or are they possessed of some inexplicable natural radiance? I laughed to cover the embarrassment I felt. "You know, Viv... how shall I put it? I just feel like saying something to you, although I have nothing particular to say, really. I mean... I can say to you, 'What's the weather forecast for tomorrow?' and you can reply, 'Cloudy with rain late in the day' - banality itself, and yet it'll have the effect on me that Wayne got from Schiller." It was my turn to redden. "That sounds like a declaration of love... Well" - I shudder to think of the color of my face - "maybe it is..."

"Careful there, boy" - that from Wayne. "She's a married woman."

I smiled. "You don't mind, do you? You understand me, I'm sure."

"Settle this for us once and for all, will you, Viv?" said Wayne, handing me a drink. "Did you or did you not, at age thirteen, have braces on your teeth?"

"I did."

"See?"

"You did? When I took you to the grad dance you had braces?"

"Yup."

"But - I have no memory, no memory whatever..."

"She made a point of not opening her mouth!" Wayne chortled. "Remember, Viv, how traumatized you were by those things? Just like me with my first glasses. Only difference is, I went into ophthalmology and you... didn't go into dentistry."

"No, I retreated from the world of humans into the world of bugs, and there I find my refuge to this day."

***

"Carla, my pet, come sit on my lap." Carla and Arlene had finished washing the dishes and were back among us, and Wayne, a little tipsy, I couldn't help thinking, from his excellent scotch (Glenlivet, he had announced, with much pride) was recklessly courting a stinging rebuff in front of company, but to my amazement - probably heightened by my own slight inebriation - Carla, without a trace of embarrassment, went over to her father and sat down on his knee. "There's my girl. Len..." He sighed contentedly. "You were wrong."

"Nonsense," I mumbled, not having a clue what he was talking about.

"No, you were wrong."

"I'm not convinced. What was I wrong about?"

"Joy exists. Joy is real."

"Well?"

"'All things drink with great elation/ Mother Nature's milk of joy.' What comes after that, Ron?"

"'Plant and beast and man and nation' - "

"Right, right! 'Sweetness of her breast enjoy'. What's that part about man prostrated in the dust?"

"'To man prostrated in the dust/ Joy brings friends and cheering wine'."

"Ron's right, Viv. Only poets see into the heart of things. Not scientists. Poets."

"I'm still waiting," I said, "to hear what I was wrong about."

"Oh - everything! When we were kids you were always convinced you were smarter'n me because you were gloomier, and I, idiot that I was, believed you! I figured I must lack the depth to penetrate into the gloomy heart of things! But that's wrong. Joy is at the heart of things, joy!"

"Half a glass of Glenlivet has persuaded you of that?"

"Half a glass of Glenlivet and my daughter sitting on my knee!"

"Wayne." I put my glass down on the lamp table beside me and, I remember, leaned forward, the better to punctuate my gravity with a sense of suppressed anger. "You see where we are. I've seen where we're going."

"Huh?"

"Joy is at the heart of things, you say. Listen. At this very moment my father - who, believe me, once saw deeper into 'the heart of things' than either of us - is lying at the Einstein, a babbling idiot, unable to feed himself. Joy? Once I saw him tearing apart a napkin with his teeth - his gums rather; he'd lost his teeth - misplaced them, I mean - tearing into his napkin, thinking it was food, and the gleam of joy in his eye - there was nothing of Schiller in it, believe me. And that, Wayne old buddy, friend of my childhood, is where we're all going. All of us. That is our destiny on earth. You wanna see joy? Real joy? Come with me to the Einstein tomorrow afternoon. Rabbi Yanovsky will give a concert, and when Madame de la Dangling Tongue sings It's a Long Way to Tipperary... Sorry, sorry." Abashed, I came out of whatever trance I'd been in to find the whole company staring at me, or looking away from me, in various degrees of discomfort. Viv, to my mortification, looked embarrassed, like a mother whose child's bad manners have reflected badly on her. Carla put an arm around her father's neck, as though to proclaim that the victory was his even if mine was the last word. Not that Wayne was prepared to concede me the last word. On the contrary, his inflamed face and open mouth suggested a retort of the most stinging kind forming in his brain, and who knows where it would have led had not Mr. Bloom, good-humored and self-possessed as always, intervened.

"Gentlemen, gentlemen! Of all subjects, really, this one is least susceptible to argument! You can't argue against joy - or for it. Nor can you counter joy with gritty realism. The joy Schiller sang of" - he turned now to me, as if to leave no doubt whose benefit this teacherly talking-to was for - "the joy Schiller sang of is not the good feeling arising from fortunate circumstance. It is invulnerable to adversity - it is invincible. A certain sage - are you listening? - his son died, his beloved son, and he danced, as though at a wedding instead of a funeral. 'Lord, Thy will be done!' he sang in ecstasy."

"Well, Wayne, there you are," I said. "Do you have that in you?"

He knew what I was getting at. It is even possible he saw my gaze momentarily shift to Carla. Carla certainly saw it - she shrank visibly. Half blind with confusion and shame, I began babbling. "There's a guy at the Einstein," I said, "thinks he's Isaac, the son of Abraham. Actually thinks he is - that as a small child he was taken by his father to the mountain to be sacrificed to the one true God, and that his infant life was in the gravest danger until God said to Abraham, 'Never mind, a ram'll do.' You probably think he's some kind of nut, but no, I assure you - he's a perfectly intelligent man... was, I should say, since he died this very week, age one hundred... Where was I? Oh yes! It's not a delusion in the usual sense. Once he explained it to me. 'All great experiences,' he said, 'happen not to one man but to anyone with the imagination to partake in them.' So there you are."

"I know the man you mean," said Mr. Bloom.

"Oh?"

"I've been to the Einstein. I know the people there. I know Rabbi Yanovsky very well. I've seen your father too, and talked to him."

"You have! But - "

"Rabbi Yanovsky," he said, "is one of the finest men in Nectar. One of the finest men anywhere. I'm not a practicing Jew, God knows, and ritual observance leaves me cold, but if I thought it was ritual observance that made Rabbi Yanovsky what he is, I would..."

"Would what?" said Wayne. "Put on tfillin?"

"Why not?"

"When are you leaving for India?"

"Labor Day."

"What do you say, Len? We'll chip in for a pair of tfillin for our former teacher, as a goodbye present. I'm sure he'll find them useful in India!"

 

Thirtieth segment

"She's dead, Len."

"Dead?"

"Slit her wrists in the bath. Imagine her mother when she found her. My God."

"Who's dead?" demanded my father - for it was in his room at the Einstein that Adam had chosen to deliver his news.

"No one you know, dad."

It was Adam's first visit since the evening he and Eric let me in on their suicide plan. Dad was glad to see him - though, Linda not being present, he had no idea who it was he was expending his courtesy on, or how long it had been since he had last had the pleasure. Dad was glad to see anyone who claimed an acquaintance with him, and saw no need to inquire further into the matter.

"We get over these things," he said. "When your mother died, I got over it, and so did you."

"You know," I said to Adam, "I have moments when I see a kind of symbolic truth in the nonsense he babbles. A sort of Delphic oracle, or whatever."

"Hear that, dad? You're a Delphic oracle."

"Absolutely!"

"So what's the message this time?" Adam said to me. "Mom's symbolic death?"

"It loses something when you try to explain it."

"You know who I feel like having a little talk with?" said Adam.

"Who?"

"Your friend Mr. Bloom. He's the man to help me orient myself. Yup. He's the man to help me get my bearings."

"Adam, listen. Don't do anything stupid, now."

"It's all stupid," said dad, with that characteristic laugh of his meant to efface the impression of anger he may inadvertently have given, when he got carried away and spoke more forcefully than he had intended. "It's all so... goddamn... bloody... stupid." He laughed again.

"You're right, dad," said Adam. "One hundred percent right." Then, to me, "He's my old teacher too, after all. Why shouldn't I have a talk with him?"

"Tell me about Doreen."

"Doreen McVie?" inquired dad.

"No, dad. Doreen Wolfe."

"Oh, her."

"Who's Doreen McVie?" I asked Adam.

"Search me."

"Well, tell us about Doreen Wolfe."

"What's to tell? She's dead. Your Mr. Bloom murdered her, though no court would convict him."

"If no court would convict him - "

" - why should I, right? Because when I turned my back on the study of law I also turned my back on the constraints the courts apply to our thinking. Any lawyer will tell you that the court is not concerned with the truth, only with the law. That's as it should be. Example. Supposing I commit a crime and the police discover my guilt by means of an illegal wiretap. Well, the truth is I'm guilty, but the law says I'm innocent. You grasp the distinction? I'm not talkin' too technical or nothin'? Well - "

"Come, Joan, we'll have a bite of lunch, and then I'll explain Camus to you."

"Hungry, dad?" Adam asked.

"Hungry! I'll say I'm hungry! I could eat a horse!"

"Or, with equal pleasure, horse manure," said Adam.

"Absolutely!" said dad, and laughed.

"The court, you see," Adam went on, "must take into account factors like, Was he present at the scene of the crime? Did he murder with deliberate intent? Did he have a motive for wishing her dead? Are his fingerprints on the smoking gun? And so on. All those things are relevant to law but irrelevant to the truth, which in this case is that he sowed the seeds of death in her the moment he raped her. She's been dying for thirty years. What happened in the bathtub on Monday was merely the end of a long, long process."

"Shall I tell you another truth that a court might not recognize?"

"Please."

"You don't believe a word you're saying."

"Oh?"

"Tragic things happen without anyone being to blame for them. What Bloom did thirty years ago gives you a convenient excuse to hate him, though why you should want to is beyond me. As a student you liked him. I remember. You used to talk to me about him. We used to compare impressions. You thought he was the best teacher you'd ever had."

"I've had better ones since."

"In that case you're one up on me, because I haven't. Leave him alone, Adam. I really do think you're capable of doing something awful. There's a bitterness in you that frightens me."

"Oh, banana oil!"

I laughed. "Banana oil" was Uncle Al's favorite expression, his last word in contempt and derision. Where it came from none of us knew. Could he have made it up? Unlikely. Everyone in the family acknowledged his energy and entrepreneurship, but invention was a quality he himself would never have laid claim to. Driven to the wall in his intellectual scuffles with dad, he would at last explode, "Banana oil!" - thus, in his own mind at least, turning the tables on his adversary and emerging triumphant.

There was a soft knock on the door, which opened slowly to reveal Linda timidly poking her face in. "Hello everybody."

"Our truth serum," muttered Adam under his breath.

"Linda!" said dad, rising with his habitual gallantry. "Here, sit down. Let me take your coat. It's getting a bit chilly these days - particularly at night."

"I'd better be going," Adam said, also getting to his feet.

"Oh, please stay, Adam," said Linda, flushing. She knew Adam had not been visiting dad lately, and didn't want him leaving on her account. If she had known Adam was here, she wouldn't have come. She sensed Adam's dislike for her - when she mentioned it to me, as something inexplicable to her, I didn't even bother to deny it; I just said, quite truthfully, that Adam disliked everybody and she was not to worry about it - and, though she didn't dare dislike him in turn, she was clearly afraid of him, and would have preferred to avoid him. "Please, stay. I'll go. I just popped in for a minute, to... " Her invention failed her.

"What were you saying, dad, just before, about Camus?" Adam inquired with nicely feigned innocence.

"There was a young lady at my office," said dad, "who was reading Camus at college, and I used to help her, go over the text with her..."

"Share your insights," Adam prompted.

"Yes."

"Was she a good student, this young lady?"

"Oh, excellent. Yes. She'll go far."

"She has already. Len, can I speak to you outside for a moment?" Without waiting for a reply he strode out the door into the corridor. I followed. Footsteps echoed in the distance, but there was no one immediately in sight.

"Listen," he said, rounding on me as soon as I was out the door, "you actually gonna marry that broad?"

"Mom wants to take dad out of here."

"I know. So?"

"So? Well, if I marry 'that broad,' she will keep dad more or less sane - "

"For how long? Supposing the effect, such as it is, wears off?"

Oddly enough, that simple thought had never occurred to me. "Of course, that's a possibility..."

"A probability."

"Listen, Adam, taking him out is not my idea."

"You gave her a week to think about it - "

"I never figured her determination would survive the week."

"You were wrong."

"Are you sure? What did she say to you?"

"That she's taking him home on Thursday. She will not have her Saul called Hank."

"What should we do?"

"What Doreen did, if we had any sense. Why wait three years? The absurdity of the world is simply more than a sane, intelligent person can tolerate."

"You've just exonerated Mr. Bloom."

"Oh, you and your damned Mr. Bloom! If, as you were saying before, I had no right to charge him, I have no right to exonerate him either!"

"Listen. Here's a thought: supposing we sit down with mom and tell her everything we know about dad's philandering. She probably knows a good deal already. But as long as she thinks we don't know she can shove it into the back of her mind, deny it, whatever. We can force her to confront it. It'll mean renouncing the fiction she's built up in her mind about her husband of half a century, true, but it'll also free her from her bondage to... to his insanity."

"His divine madness."

"Not only will she agree to leave him where he is, she'll - "

"Start a new life? Hit the road? Go to India? She's eighty years old, Len! You don't start a new life at eighty!"

"I don't pretend to know what people do at eighty. If they're in good health and have their wits about them, as mom unmistakably does - "

"She has everything, except just one thing."

"What's that?"

"A future."

"She could live another twenty years."

"And by then they'll have perfected bio-engineering to the point of stretching the life expectancy to half a millennium." He smiled. "All right, Len. All right. Let's do it. Let's sit her down and assault her with the truth!"

"Or alternatively - "

"He's flinching already!"

"I admit it."

"It was your idea!"

"The most rational idea, as Mr. Bloom says, cannot be put into action without a leap into the absurd. That's his thesis. Here's another idea: I marry Linda - "

"Yes, I know that one. Listen. If you marry her, you forfeit your brother's blessing. Does a brother's blessing mean nothing to you?"

"Adam, it means everything. But why - "

"Because you don't love her, and this business of sacrificing yourself for senile eighty-year-old parents frankly disgusts me. I don't like the smell of sacrifice."

"Having smelt it."

"Having choked on it. I'm choking still."

"Let's go back in, they'll be wondering about us. Mom, what are you doing here?"

"What do you mean, what am I doing here? I live here!"

I hadn't been expecting her. "Linda's here," I said. The three of us went in together. Linda shrank visibly at our approach. She smiled timidly. Adam was frightening enough, but here was mother as well. Mother must have noticed her agitation, and felt sorry for her, for she made an effort to suppress her instinctive dislike. Forcing a smile, she said, "Hello, Linda."

"Hi, Mrs. Fishman." Unable to address mother by her first name, she sounded like a little girl being polite to a friend's mom as she was served her after-school milk and cookies. "We were just talking - "

Dad cut her off. I think I noticed him first. The look in his eye was... I don't know how to describe it. It transformed him. I'd never seen him like that before. It was a murderous look, and it was fixed directly on mother. "Here's the woman who ruined my life!" He spoke quietly, but no less terrifyingly for that. Mother retreated a step, her mouth open, her hands half raised as though to defend herself. "Ruined my life," dad said again. "Ruined my life. I'll kill you, you bitch."

He laughed his disarming laugh, and returned quietly to his chair.

***

Neither teacher, father nor uncle, I have had in the course of my vagrant and useless life very little to do with children. For years I had thought of myself as having a child somewhere on the planet, a child I had never seen and of whose gender, whereabouts and fate I knew nothing; still, it gave me a feeling, hard to describe but tangible and at moments oddly comforting, of being connected to the universe and its future. Without circumstances having altered in the least, a thought that occurred to me one evening as I lay on the sofa in my yellow room, a perfectly obvious thought that somehow had never struck me before, changed everything: there was no solid reason to suppose the child mine. There was nothing I could do to satisfy myself on that point, short of returning to Thailand, seeking out the child, and having a DNA test done. Well, there was that possibility, and, hopelessly extravagant though it was, there were times, sipping scotch at the Four Corners, or looking up from the book in my lap at the Nectar Public Library, when I contemplated doing just that. Of course it was no more than a fantasy, but the hold it sometimes had on me says something of my state of mind, or, if you like, of my character.

Of the children closer to home, there were Wayne's kids, and Linda's. Wayne's children I was very fond of, in my shy way. Carla especially - but Danny, through his thin veil of cool teenage sullenness and indifference, gave me to understand, by means of various signs just this side of explicitness, that I was important to him, and I was surprised to discover how much that meant to me. The human face is a strange thing. Most of the time I would look at Danny and see in him no particular resemblance to Wayne. Other times, it would suddenly hit me. I would look at him and see Wayne at eighteen, long-forgotten memories surging vividly to life, more real than anything physically present. I would see us doing this, doing that... but more than any particular adventure was the feeling you have at that age, pervading every thought, every action, even the most mundane, of being face to face with a future as vast as the universe, as pregnant of potential as the Buddhist Void. The wave would come and go, leaving me wondering if Danny, behind his large glasses and blank look, felt the same, his outward blandness masking the most awesome emotions most of us will ever know.

Linda's children were a different matter. Perhaps because they were still small: Susan was five, and the week before I had been an honored guest, squirming in ill-concealed impatience, at George's ninth birthday party. Susan and George - their very names grated on me. I had to keep reminding myself that it wasn't their fault. Susan and George! What staid, narrow respectability those names conjure up! Once, in the mood to pick a quarrel, I said as much to Linda, who with tears in her eyes said the names had been Joe's idea. Well, what was she, I retorted, the housekeeper? Didn't she have a say in the matter? Her face crumpled, and I took her in my arms. The truth is, when she cried, and only when she cried, I felt a spark of affection and desire for her. Tears, not words, were her natural language, a language she spoke beautifully. The feel of her tears on my cheek - I would marry her, I sometimes thought, for that alone. Would she, for my sake, I wondered, take a vow of silence? She could talk to my father, if talk she must. Otherwise... This was not cruelty on my part. I would be perfectly willing to join her in the vow.

George was old enough to sense my dislike, and shrank from me. Susan was another matter. I suppose she sensed it too, but her primal need for paternal attention was stronger than her shyness, and her constant, whining fawning upon me was sometimes more than I could bear - though, to my credit, I did my best to suppress my irritation and meet her half way. I don't exactly know why they affected me this way. Maybe small children just naturally didn't agree with me - I'd had too little experience with them to know for sure. Or maybe it was that I had no sense of these particular children having anything to do with me. Perhaps if my feelings for Linda had been stronger, it would have been different. Perhaps not. They both resembled Joe more than her. They were Joe's kids - and who was Joe? A big shambling semi-retarded kid I'd known in high school who had once beat me up.

"So what should I do?" I asked Sonia, my all-purpose confidante.

"Get a computer."

"Huh?"

"So you can e-mail me instead of calling at 2 a.m."

"Is it 2 a.m.? Sorry. We unemployed lose all track of time. I have no idea how to use a computer. Life is complicated enough."

"Computers are simplifiers."

"What do you do: feed your questions, doubts, misgivings and so on into the computer, and out pops the answer?"

"Look. You disappeared once, right? Judging by your reappearance, you found something lacking in that solution, which on the face of it has so much to recommend it. All right, so you're back. You're forty-six years old. Become an adult already. Take on adult responsibility. It's time."

"You think I should marry her."

"Yes. I think you should marry her."

"Knowing that I don't love her."

"Len, face it. You love her as much as you're ever gonna love anybody. She's a nice, sweet girl. You'll do each other good. Marry her, Len. I wouldn't be saying this if I didn't sincerely think it was the best thing for both of you."

"Maybe you're saying it so you can get rid of me and go back to sleep."

"I wasn't sleeping."

"No? What were you doing?"

"Reading."

"Reading what?"

"Macbeth." She chuckled. "Now there's a marriage for you!"

"Why were you reading Macbeth at two o'clock in the morning?"

"Because my sleeping pills don't work anymore."

"Is something troubling you, Sonia? What is it?"

"Marry her, Len. I'll come to town for the wedding."