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  She leaned, in fact, fell on him, awkward in that army rig, her face in his neck, as if only by becoming a single, solid form could they avoid making out in the parked car—the natural enactment of their American essence in a time of fragility, on this one very dark night. His being American did seem so important now; she could never have predicted that. He stroked her back with his left hand, the only part of him he was able to move at all in the lock of her embrace, and the touch of his skimming fingertips reverberated through her, like a series of pins dropped in the famous acoustic tabernacle where some of her ancestors had mysteriously prayed. And then the lights came on.

  “Congratulations,” he said. “You fixed the blackout.” Larry and Jean pulled apart as if it was morning, the alien electricity hauling them from this dream of intimacy and ease. Jean knew it was over and that this night was no kind of blueprint—it was just a blackout, a freak occurrence they’d not so much survived as inhabited. But she let it go with all the resistance she’d felt as a child at the end of a car journey, secure in her father’s arms and only pretending to be asleep, deliberately flopsy so he wouldn’t put her down. When she climbed out, practically falling from the car, Larry reached to steady her, but she found she couldn’t look at him. Not merely disoriented but grief stricken, she saw that, once again, their time was up.

  Back in 1980 there had been such a different landscape, and desire had been framed by the possibility of other offerings: an orchard of children—and, yes, why not?—the harvest of years. What might they have in front of them now? An afternoon. A snack, a chaste stroll through a gallery followed by what? Frenzied coupling? Frenzied it would have to be, and not because they were married to other people, but because a lifetime was a lot to compress. His being there with her when someone was born. Summer after summer in the same house, campanula creeping up the shingles, drunken bees in the honeysuckle. Bike paths, dog tracks, poison ivy hidden in the grass, sandy lanes banked with rosehip and beach plum; dirt roads in her mind so narrow no one can pass; they’re all alone, last sun warming the backs of their legs, walking home.

  She had imagined another life, in detail: only in detail—usually no more than a single moment from this other life, an incomplete act, evanescent, but while it lasted vivid enough to stand in for the rest. She knew the lineaments of this life as if she’d had to draw it, sketching as she traversed overhead, flying in a small aircraft (her good pilot at the controls), the scene unfolding in miniature, miles below. Seemed Larry planned to make it for one thing, however: being there with her when someone died. Not someone—Dad. That’s what really brought them together after all this time, wasn’t it? And that towering car of his, with its deafening engine and dimmer lights, was just another waiting room.

  Larry lifted her face to look at his and said, “You want to know something?”

  Jean nodded yes, unable to speak.

  “You were a truly terrible paralegal,” he said, and pulled her close. Then he reached in his pocket and fished out the car keys. “Here. You’ll need to get up to the hospital tomorrow morning. This morning. I’m going to walk down to the apartment. And I can walk to work.”

  Jean hesitated for a couple of seconds before snatching the key chain, and closing her hand around them, she whispered, “Thanks.” The stars were switched off, no longer visible. With a last hug and a glance around the Defender, Larry walked west toward Lexington Avenue, hands deep in pockets, looking skyward. As she ducked into the building, having roused the plumply dozing Manuel, Jean thought there was something different about Larry’s walk. He was bouncing on the balls of his feet, ever so slightly, a spring in him as new as her sister’s new laugh.

  Quietly, Jean called the hospital as soon as she came in. The nurse in ICU who finally answered would only say that the doctors had made no new rounds and that Mr. Warner was doing “as well as can be expected.” When pressed, she said he was asleep. But Jean was not ready for sleep. She tiptoed into the bathroom and stood in front of the mirror and had a good look at herself: this was her face for the next thing, she thought, not quite wanting to articulate that it was fatherlessness that she was staring at. And she thought she looked all right—better now than before, even with the all-weather frown line—better than when she was younger and fuller and less defined.

  Opening her mouth only a couple of inches from the mirror and instantly losing track of time, she saw that a couple of her lower teeth were quite drastically worn down by grinding. It’s taken years to get that dip, she thought, fingering the dippiest. Like generations of pilgrims piously smoothing the steps of St. Peter’s—or thousands of cows’ tongues licking out a crescent from a pillar of salt. And her hair. She pulled out a few more wisps from the remains of a French twist. There. Better a little messier still, a little more lived-in, like the hollows in her lower canines, more used up. And it was better.

  Jean finally understood, might even have said, if there was anyone to hear, that twenty years ago she’d been too young for pleasure. So there was this good news from her night with Dan: she was now in her prime. But what she’d thought about Larry all those years ago (when her body was in its prime) was, No point going on with this because he isn’t the kind of man I want to marry, though she hadn’t troubled herself to find out what kind of man he was, apart from the kind who was American and a lawyer, like Dad. How in the world had she mistaken their complete mutual ease and understanding for a soft option, something too easy?

  Yet here she was, on the brink of forty-six, an acknowledged brain, a syndicated brain, and it seemed she wanted to be taken for a fox—because yes, she wanted Shroud of Dew all over again only different, better—that is, with someone she loved—and she hated very much to think she might never have it. Jerking back from her reflection, then moving closer, she saw one thing she didn’t like: that darting expression of doubt and selfdefense—its sharpness reminded her of Bud the kestrel, beady eye aglitter. When had that started?

  If she had to pick a moment, Jean thought, the eye in question just inches from the glass, it might be the day Wayne the Washington Square pot dealer sold her that nickel bag and invited her back to his place to smoke it; how he’d touched her cheek, making it clear he wasn’t entirely focused on which bong they might use. Skinny, freckled, twelve-year-old Jeannie Warner dressed as a small man, suspenders ranged over her panel-flat chest—she knew even then you had to be a runaway from Pennsylvania, or farther, from Minnesota, to agree to a thing like that. But a part of her was immensely flattered. She’d also been devastated. That was, just possibly, the very beginning of her not wanting to be taken for a body, Jean thought. She’d wanted to be taken for a mind—of course she did, she was Bill Warner’s daughter—though almost any kind would do, a wit, a brain, even a clown or a freak in a dead man’s suit, but please, let it be something for my head: sense, sense, sense.

  She turned on the water to wash her face. Had something like that happened with Larry in the Whipple conference room? He was teaching her the vallenato when most people were queuing for their hot dogs. And she was catching on, beginning to dance and feel the lightness and exhilaration of an unmoored unity, even though all the while she was fighting her idiotic fight, fighting as if Larry was Phyllis’s idea—which he kind of was. It was such a shame, but you couldn’t help how old you were any more than you could dodge the freight of each age. Did he have any idea how hard it was to get a First in Law at Oxford? A lawyer with multiple degrees and honors, yes, of course he knew. How hard she’d tried. Any secretary could learn the vallenato, was that what she’d thought? Little fool.

  What she wished now, Jean thought, settling down at last on the squeaky blow-up bed, was that she at least had more memories in her cupboard—more to work with in the decades of solitary reminiscence that yawned before her; that she had, just a little more often, said yes instead of no. A dainty regret, perhaps, but it was hers: not for what she had done, but for what she hadn’t dared try.

  Bill Warner was not asleep at ten the n
ext morning. He was unconscious. The generators had indeed worked all during the blackout, running respirators and monitors and scanners and defibrillators. But there was no air-conditioning, and his temperature had climbed to one hundred and four. He was comatose. Panic occupied her skull like tinnitus, a fire drill only she could hear. She was sure he had entered his own blackout, never mind if the nurse called it sleep; never mind if they didn’t call it death. And she thought that, much as they wanted to get him out on day one hundred, they might want to keep him in until day ninety-nine, while his insurance lasted.

  Jean had her people on the ground, and they all helped a little. She saw less of Larry, but continued to use his car, and he kept in touch about Bill. Mark offered to come over, but she discouraged him. She had no energy for feeding him the case history; he’d be restless—there wasn’t even a clear stretch of Phyllis’s floor long enough for him to sleep on. Furthermore, she thought heavily, so long as he was linked with Giovana, he wasn’t allowed in her hometown. Her calls to London and St. Jacques were limited to telegrammatic assurances, skeletal debriefings; she avoided all extraneous persons.

  One friend, however, was insistent—Ellie Antonucci. At a Starbucks on Lexington, Ellie appeared with a newer new look than her newly blond hair: Oscar. He was enormous, and firmly latched at the breast, mother and son indifferent to the zero-tolerance glances of less demonstrably fulfilled women. She’d waited a long time for Oscar, and she wasn’t about to hide him now. The first thing Ellie said, when Jean mentioned she’d run into Iona Mackenzie at Hatchards, was “Could you tell?”

  “Tell what?” Jean asked, lowering her foot-high paper cup of milky coffee, seeing in her mind Iona’s injection-smoothed face.

  “Double mastectomy,” Ellie said. “You didn’t know? You didn’t notice?”

  “I did not notice, and no, I didn’t know.”

  “About six months ago. It was all very sudden. Something like five weeks between the diagnosis and the operation. But she was very lucky.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Yeah, really. Lucky they ever spotted it at all. There was no lump. No, seriously: no lump. Slight dryness on one nipple and the occasional drop of discharge. She has, or had, something called Paget’s disease. Rare form of cancer for much older women, hugely aggressive if it takes off. Iona would get the high-octane kind, right?”

  Ellie was feeling her way to their old joke about how Iona had to have the maximal version of everything. “And typically butch of Iona to have both off, the second a kind of citizen’s preemptive strike, and then just leaving it like that, no reconstructive surgery. Cool, don’t you think?”

  “I think it’s dignified,” Jean said firmly, and she thought, I’m a hopeless friend. An increasingly rich field for regret. She could not say a word, and so Ellie went on uninterrupted.

  “They take skin and muscle from your back and piece it in…” Ellie’s fascination had a professional feel to it. “You can have it with or without the implant,” she said, as if she was talking about shoulder pads for a costume. “The tricky bit is the nipple—a lot of cutting and scrunching and tattooing—though apparently there’s a new technique they’re using in South America, where they cadge a bit of skin from the inside of the cheek…”

  Jean got up, muttering about getting back to the hospital, and headed for the door as Ellie waved but didn’t stand, pinned to her seat by a sleeping Oscar.

  When Jean got to the fifth floor she found Phyllis at the ICU desk, barely able to see over it, trying to get someone’s attention—anyone’s attention. She was convinced the green squiggle on the heart monitor was too weak, almost flat; she was “just wondering” shouldn’t someone take a look?

  And to think that Phyllis had asked the same question, in a different hospital, thirty-three years ago, before some of these nurses and doctors were even born.

  They seemed to plan their rounds for the ten minutes the women were barred from the ward, to let Bill be washed and turned. And Phyllis had seen this too: they avoided the families because it was in these faces, in her face, that their failure was most clearly drawn. Though Bill alone presented a vivid reflection—heavy, helpless, mute, like a wounded elephant seal stranded on the beach, one who was done thrashing.

  That evening, as Jean was about to head down and out of the hospital, she bumped into Joe the nurse, coming out of the elevator. Even he had been elusive these anxious last days. Jean, holding a stack of Tupperware empties to bring home, let the elevator go.

  “Please, Joe. Talk to me. I can’t get anyone to talk to me. We’re losing him, aren’t we?”

  The nurse toyed with one of his earrings. With the paper head cover tied over his forehead he looked like a pirate. Or like a gay man dressed up as a pirate. He was searching for words, and Jean was not moving till he found them.

  “It’s a long time,” he finally said. Joe looked poised to clarify—backpedal, Jean felt—when another elevator opened and they were forced to part, to make way for people to pass. In lieu of a wave, she lifted her tower of plastic tubs and stepped into that elevator, going down. She would call Marianne soon as she got outside. And Larry. From Mom’s she’d call London. And after that, she had no idea.

  The twelfth day of Bill’s coma, like the previous eleven, was marked by the contorted face of the anguished dreamer. “ARDS—acute respiratory distress syndrome,” the doctor told them, unable to do anything but name it. And then, just at the end of visiting hours, both his girls and their mother still sitting beside him and watching the heart monitor, listening to the whir of the respirator, he opened his eyes and asked for ice. Everyone laughed to hear that voice, barely audible for the damage to his cords. Because of the water on his lungs the nurses wouldn’t let him have any. When they left the room, Jean moistened a towel and gave it to Dad to suck on. The next day, sitting mostly upright for the first time in two weeks, he couldn’t talk anymore, but he drew a picture of a house with a steep roof.

  “Not a bad little drawing,” Jean said, though the lines were shaky.

  He got out a word. He said “two” (or maybe “do”), stabbing at the front of the house. Jean, who was sitting alone with him, thought of a summerhouse they used to rent on Fire Island—it had just such a steep roof and a wide covered porch. He wanted to sit on that porch for a couple of hours. He wanted to sit on the porch—just us two. “You too.” “Let’s do.” Who could say? He was very weak, diminished. And he had drifted off again. But he was still here.

  As Bill improved, as his color came back and he could breathe for spells on his own, Marianne returned to her children, and Jean and Phyllis began again to relay their time. Every afternoon, Jean went out walking. Once, in a Madison Avenue window, she caught a glimpse of a squashy chocolate-brown handbag and stopped to inspect it, thinking of Iona, taking in the cruel joke of the dark-haired mannequin with solidly permanent breasts. She hurried on. She missed Victoria. She even missed Mark, though every flash of him was marred by one of Giovana, popping in—instant messaging Jean’s most private thoughts.

  After a particularly discouraging morning in the hospital—Bill was unconscious for the duration—Jean went alone to the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens and then to the Brooklyn Museum. How was it possible she’d never been there before? Just growing up on the Upper East Side—or maybe it was Phyllis’s fear of the “outer” boroughs, even if she had managed to find home on East Seventy-ninth Street all the way from Utah. When Jean got back to the apartment she changed into a loose gauze dress she’d bought on the beach in Grand Baie. (All these details she’d never forget.) She was hot and very tired. Phyllis must be on her way home by now. Jean put an ice cube into a tumbler of coffee from the morning’s pot. She phoned the ICU. The nurse, not one she recognized, couldn’t find him. Jean repeated his name. William Warner—William Walton Warner. The nurse couldn’t even find his name.

  He was gone.

  Before Jean could say a word, she was put on hold, listening to a loop of digitized “Greensleeves.�
��

  “No!” she cried, sinking against the kitchen cabinet to the floor, knocking her coffee off the counter with the cord, clutching the phone with both hands, and ignoring the expanding continent of brown at her feet. The nurse had gone to find an accredited messenger of death, a certified bringer of bad news, to tell her—she knew this: she’d signed the form; she was on the list. But Jean, convulsing and sobbing on the spattered linoleum, had misunderstood. Bill had been moved upstairs, out of intensive care.

  St. Jacques

  POSSESSION OF DRUGS WILL BE PUNISHED WITH DEATH. There it was again, the hand-painted warning—de la peine de mort—over the dinky luggage carousel of St. Jacques’ tiny airport. Waiting for her luggage, Jean wondered how the local powers would punish adultery. She could imagine mutts trained to sniff out envy and lust, or a bleeping wand that detected sloth or anger. She’d thought a lot about the series she’d promised for Mrs. This week, in addition to observing Bud’s flight, she’d start writing up the sins.

  Jean squinted through the glass partition beyond the conveyor belt to where Mark would be standing—or maybe Victoria, who had recently, on the third try, passed her driving test. She and Vikram had been here for over a week, waiting for Jean to return before setting off to Indonesia. She’d heard the eager restlessness in her daughter’s voice and remembered that feeling, just about. Vic wouldn’t be able to see that the present moment was perhaps the best part: poised on the brink, and ready. Jean thought of that tiny jewel of suspended flight, Emerald the hummingbird, and wondered if she was still in residence in the garden.