Читать книгу The Other Side of the World - Jay Neugeboren - Страница 6

Tag Sale

On the morning Seana showed up for my father’s tag sale, I was in Borneo, so that I didn’t get his letter giving me the news until I was back in Singapore. Before his letter came, I’d had no plans to return to the States, and my father, who—quintessential Max—had the finely-tuned habit of rarely if ever putting pressure on me and, thus, of not allowing hopes to become expectations, had never asked if or when I might be coming back.

I’d been working in Singapore the previous three years for a company that dealt in palm oil, and during the years I worked for them, palm oil had surpassed soy bean oil as the most widely produced vegetable oil in the world. My job, mostly, was to monitor various stages of development, production, and sales—to make sure the contractors we hired did what we’d contracted for, and that what we promised to deliver was delivered safely and at the agreed-upon price. It was the most lucrative job I’d ever had, and though life in Singapore was tolerable—I worked hard, played hard, and was on the receiving end of a multitude of perks—it didn’t thrill me. Borneo did, however, and during some of my visits there—mini-vacations I was able to tack on to business trips—I’d thought of sending my father a round-trip plane ticket so I could show him why it was I found Borneo so enchanting, and why I sometimes fantasized living there for the rest of my life.

But it wasn’t the news about Seana showing up for my father’s tag sale that made me put this kind of fantasy on hold and, instead, to put in for a leave-without-pay in order to return home. What did that was Nick Falzetti’s death.

It was because of Nick that I’d gone to Singapore, and he had died in a freak accident on the first Saturday night after my return to Singapore from a weekend in Borneo. Nick and I had been buddies, on and off, when we were undergraduates at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, and for a few years after, and when, during our tenth college reunion we hung out together, he’d sold me a bill of goods on moving to Singapore so I could live the kind of good life he’d been living.

Nick’s parents lived in Tenants Harbor, a small town a few miles from the Maine coast, about halfway up the state to Bar Harbor and Acadia National Park, and his ex-wife, Trish, whom I’d gone with before she met Nick, lived with their son Gabe not far from Nick’s parents. I wanted to pay my respects to Nick’s family—to his parents and to Trish—but after I’d made the decision to do so, what began to get me down was thinking about the kind of messy stuff Nick, Trish, and I had gotten into way back, and once I’d gone and booked my flight and wrote my father that I was coming home, I found myself imagining, far more than was good for me, what it would be like to be with her again. And I began thinking, too, that she might be far too pleased by news of Nick’s death for anyone’s good.

By the time I arrived home, my father’s tag sale was history, and Seana, who bought the works, had moved in with him. A good deal for them both, she claimed: She got all his leftovers—and he got her.

Here’s the ad my father had put in the local papers:

Tag Sale. Retired University Professor offering material from unpublished and/or abandoned novels and stories. Items include: titles, epigraphs, opening paragraphs, opening chapters, final paragraphs, plot notions and summaries, character sketches, lists, research notes, random jottings, and select journal entries. Saturday and Sunday, 9 AM to 4:30 PM. Rain or shine. 35 Harrison Avenue, Northampton. No book dealers, please.

Seana—Seana Shulamith McGee O’Sullivan—had been one of my father’s graduate students in the late eighties—his best and brightest, and also, to his ongoing delight, his most successful. Although Seana’s first novel, Triangle, was far too raunchy to have been chosen by Oprah—it was about a mother-daughter-father ménage à trois that had a deliciously happy ending—it wound up outselling most Oprah selections and staying on The New York Times best-seller list for over a hundred weeks.

I met Seana for the first time in the spring of 1988, when my father let me sit in on one of his at-home writing workshops. I’d just passed my thirteenth birthday—I know this because I’d been Bar Mitzvahed three weeks earlier—and I remember watching Seana sitting cross-legged on the floor next to the fireplace, chewing on and off at a hangnail on her left index finger while the women in the class kept giving her looks of disdain and envy she clearly relished.

My father always cooked a sumptuous dinner for his students—never boiled up spaghetti or ordered out for pizza—and he served it on our good china, on a white damask linen tablecloth, with napkins to match, and while he and I were doing the dishes afterwards, I asked about Seana and the way the women in the class had been looking at her. “Ah,” my father sighed. And then: “I mean, after all, son, what young woman wouldn’t be resentful and envious of Seana? All that talent and productivity… and beautiful too!”

For the tag sale—after education, the region’s second largest industry, my father contended—what he’d done was to lay out on our front porch and lawn stuff that had not made its way into his published work, and that, in the time he estimated he had left—he was seventy-two and calculated his remaining productive years at sixteen—he did not expect ever to look at again.

In addition to being one upon whom nothing was lost, he wrote, he wanted to be one from whom nothing was lost. That, he explained, had been the modest raison d’être for what he’d come to call, before Seana’s arrival, ‘The First and Last Annual Max Eisner Literary Tag Sale.’ But then, as in any good novel, the wonderful and unpredictable had occurred: First (and only) person in line on a bright, chilly New England Saturday morning in early October, there was Seana—gorgeous, voluptuous, brilliant Seana, and in her mature incarnation—eager to pluck up everything so that, she announced at once, she would make sure that nothing would be lost.

What I found myself imagining when I read about my father’s tag sale was that the first sets of folders Seana came to that morning were laid out on three mahogany nesting tables that, one inside the other, had lived in a corner of our living room, by the driveway window, all through my childhood. My father had taken the tables from his mother’s apartment in Brooklyn after she died—they’d sat in a corner of his living room throughout his childhood (one of his mother’s famous “space-savers”)—and even though my father and I lived in a three-story Victorian house, and had a large living room, along with a larger dining room, smaller music room and library, and lots of surfaces on which to set down food and drinks, my father would, as his mother had, put out the three tables whenever we had company.

When I imagined the tables on our front lawn, one beside the other, what they also brought to mind were my father’s wives and girlfriends, each of whom, as he grew older, was younger than the one before, and all of whom seemed, in the way I pictured them, like a series of older, larger women within whom—as in a set of Russian matryoshka dolls—younger, leaner, more beautiful women lived.

My father had had five wives, starting with my mother (who was two years older than he was), and there were also a dozen or so long-term girlfriends, though none of the girlfriends had ever moved in with him. Still, my father was not, he’d state whenever I asked about a new relationship—this usually in response to his inquiries about my love life—a philanderer. “I’ve always been an unregenerate serial monogamist,” he’d say, “though I really do love women.”

In all their varieties, he might have added, and as different as we were in most ways, in this we were alike, because whenever a friend would offer to fix me up with someone and ask what my type was, I’d be stumped. Like my father, I had no particular preferences because, like him, I found most women, whether girlfriends or friend-friends, more interesting—and better company—than guys. And because just about always—the thing I know my father valued above all, once you’d gotten past whatever it was you found initially attractive, and maybe because, it occurs to me, it was his pre-eminent quality—they were usually kinder than guys.

Be kind, my father would say to me from as far back as I can remember, and for a long list of situations—whether it had to do with guys I played against in sports, store clerks who were incompetent, strangers who were rude, or friends and relatives who were nasty—be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.

The quote was from Philo, he said, and I grew up imagining that the name belonged to the man who’d invented the kind of pastry dough you use to make strudel or spanakopitas. When I was ten or eleven, though, I found out who Philo was, and the way it happened tells you things about my father you wouldn’t suspect from the quiet, somewhat shy man he was most of the time.

I was changing out of my uniform after a basketball game at our local YMCA on a Saturday afternoon when my father came into the locker room to see how I was doing, and while we were going over the game, one of the guys along our row of lockers called another guy a faggot. Without hesitating, my father walked over to the boy and told him that using such a term was vulgar and unacceptable, that he hoped the boy would never use it again, and that, to this end, he intended to speak with the boy’s father. My father waited for the boy to get dressed, after which he accompanied him to the Y’s lobby, where he told the boy’s father—a huge guy, six-three or -four, wearing a Boston Bruins hockey shirt—what had happened.

When the man told my father to mind his own goddamned business, my father repeated what he’d said to the boy: that use of such a word was vulgar and unacceptable, and that it demeaned not only the person to whom it referred, but, more profoundly, the person who had the unexamined need to employ such a word.

The man laughed in my father’s face, then jabbed him in the chest, told him that it took one to know one and that he’d better watch his own ass or he’d wind up skewered butt-first on a flagpole. Grabbing the front of my father’s shirt, the man said that he bet the last time my father had seen pussy was when he shoveled out cat shit at the A.S.P.C.A.

A woman at the Y desk picked up a phone—a crowd had gathered—but my father gestured to her to put it down and, very calmly, he addressed the man who was holding his shirt, and the way he did it made me think ‘Uh-oh!’, because even though my father could be a polite and accommodating man most of the time, he could, at times, be seriously roused, and then—watch out!

“Sir,” he said to the man. “I would have you know that I have known more fine women in my lifetime than have ever existed in your imagination.”

The man warned my father not to be a professor smart-ass, made a fist, and said the only reason he’d been holding back till then was because he didn’t like to hit little old men. At this point, my father, who was five-foot-six and weighed perhaps one-fifty, stepped forward and pointed to the ceiling. “Well, look at that,” he said, and as soon as the man looked up, my father stomped down hard on one of the man’s feet, and let loose with a swift one-two combination to the guy’s mid-section. When the man doubled over, my father gave him a terrific roundhouse chop to the side of the head that dropped him straight to the floor.

“In my youth, you see,” my father said, and without breathing hard, “I studied at the Flatbush Boys Club with the great champion Lew Tendler, who himself had learned the trade, in and out of the ring, from the immortal Benny Leonard.”

The man opened his eyes, but stayed where he was while my father advised him never to discount the benefits of a good education in teaching us that the use of verbal insults against those we deem inferior only served to reveal our own ignorant shortcomings.

After word of the incident got around, my father became a hero to my friends, who, when they hung out at our house, would ask him for boxing tips, and it turned out that my father knew more than a little bit about the sport. He had published a novel, Prizefighter, when he was in his twenties, and it was based in part on the life of Barney Ross, a Jewish boxing champion who’d also been a war hero, and had, from the morphine they gave him for pain when he was wounded, become a drug addict, and then a recovered drug addict. My father had been a pretty good bantamweight himself in Police Athletic League competitions, though he never did A.A.U. or Golden Gloves, and when my friends asked, he’d offer them basic stuff about feints and jabs and being alert to an opponent’s weaknesses, and, using Ross as an example, about the will to win, which derived, he asserted, from fighting for something larger than yourself.

My father told us Ross’s story: how Ross’s father was a Talmudic scholar who owned a grocery store in Chicago and was killed by gangsters in a hold-up, and how the family was made so poor by the father’s death that two of Ross’s brothers, along with his sister, were placed in an orphanage. The result was that whenever Ross was in the ring, he’d imagine he was fighting against his father’s murderers, and when he won the first of his three world championships, he used the prize money to rescue his brothers and sister from the orphanage.

After he’d finish telling us about Ross—or about Tendler, or Leonard, or “Kid” Kaplan, or Abe Attell, or Daniel Mendoza, or other great Jewish fighters—and after he’d given us a few pointers, he’d stop, hold up an index finger to indicate that the most important advice was coming, and then touch his tongue with his finger and emphasize that because it could produce words that allowed you to avoid a fight, or if you had to fight, that allowed you to distract your opponent, the tongue remained far and away your most important weapon.

“And always, always,” he would add, “be kind—fight as hard as you can, but at the same time don’t forget to nurture the kindness in your heart, the way Barney Ross did”—and one time when he gave out the saying, a friend asked if it was from Ross, and my father said no, that it was from Philo, and my friend asked who Philo was, and my father explained that Philo had been a philosopher from Alexandria who lived about fifty years before Christ, was known as Philo-the-Jew, and had been instrumental in the founding of Christianity by having combined elements of Greek mystery religions with Jewish theology.

My father usually had answers to most questions my friends asked, and if he didn’t, he’d say, “Now that’s an interesting question—may I get back to you on it?” In truth, I grew up in awe not so much of things like his boxing expertise, but of his mind, of its sheer range and intelligence, though he would dismiss praise from me and others by acknowledging that yes, maybe he had a few smarts, but if he did they were merely a result of the lucky genetic hand he’d drawn at birth.

In this, he said, he liked to think he had something in common with James Michener, though my father’s own writing—the one novel, along with a few short stories, and two books about other writers (Henry James and Willa Cather)—could not, of course, compare with Michener’s work, either in output or style. Although Michener had a low reputation among academics, my father considered him ‘a great humanist,’ and would outrage his colleagues—something he never minded doing—by teaching a course every few semesters on Michener’s essays and novels.

He owned all of Michener’s more than fifty books, many of them real door-stoppers, along with copies of some of his screenplays, and to encourage students, he would point out that Michener (whom he referred to as ‘the Rabbi Akiba of fiction’) hadn’t published his first book until he was past forty years old. He may not have been the greatest prose stylist, my father would say—something Michener himself readily conceded—but his books were richly informed, made readers of millions of people, and were—their great distinction—unlike those of any other writer, living or dead.

Like Michener, who never used researchers until he was hooked up to dialysis machines in his last years, my father was gifted with a photographic memory: if he read a page once, he had only to relax enough to locate the page somewhere in his mind and the sentences would be there for him. What helped make things easy between us was that it never seemed to bother him that I wasn’t drawn to matters intellectual or literary, and clear, too, early on, that I lacked not only his intelligence, but his phenomenal memory. Nor was I a particularly good student—I worked hard to get a B average in high school, and at UMass, where I was a business major, I worked even harder to get a three-point average. Still, as long as I applied myself, did the best I could, and, what my father considered most important of all—remained curious about the world—he seemed satisfied.

“The wonderful thing about you, Charlie,” he said to me on the afternoon of my college graduation—repeating what he’d said on previous such occasions: my Bar Mitzvah, my graduations from junior high and high school, and what he’d say each time I started a new job or brought home a new girlfriend—“the wonderful thing about you is that you’ve never disappointed me.”

Sometimes I wondered why. It wasn’t that I’d screwed up so terribly, but more that I’d never succeeded especially well at any one thing: I hadn’t married, or bought a house or an apartment, or made a ton of money, or—the nut of the thing—ever really had any clear idea of what I wanted to do with my life. More to the point, and what worried me from time to time: I’d never had much of a desire to do anything in particular with my life.

When I’d say this to him—that I sometimes wished I was more like this person or that person—friends who’d become doctors or lawyers or teachers or businessmen, who owned homes and had kids and the rest—he would seem puzzled. Why did I compare myself to others? Think of yourself as having taken the scenic route, he’d say. Or he’d tell me that in this I was really just a quintessential man of my times—a free agent, much like those professional athletes who moved to different teams and cities every few years. And weren’t we, after all, all free agents these days?

He was forever alert to the ways others might compare me to him, so that the testimonials to my character I’d get from him through the years, which he must have thought would alleviate my insecurities (they never did) went essentially like this: That I was a fine young man leading a life unlike the lives of most of my contemporaries—that I had not lost my capacity for joy, that my values were sound, and that I remained open to possibility.

Big deal, I’d think. Or, when I was in a better mood, “Words words words,” I’d say back to him, at which response he’d smile, and say something about the apple not falling far from the pear tree, but it was this kind of perpetual cheerfulness, along with his seeming blindness to the ways in which I was a fuck-up, that often irritated me. By the time I was in my mid to late twenties, his words of praise, along with the repeated injunction to be kind to everybody, especially when it came to the shits of the world, left me pretty cold. Why be kind to people who were mean and fucked over other people? Why forgive people for unforgivable acts? For all his sophistication and shrewdness—his incredible knack, especially when it came to women and books, to discerning crap from quality—he also had a surprising willingness to suffer fools gladly.

I must have seen myself as one of those fools, since I had a fairly well-developed talent for depriving myself of those things—like sticking with interesting women who actually liked me, or making sure to spend more time with Max—that might have offered more focus and direction—and more comfort and joy. Thus my tendency to change jobs (and girlfriends) regularly, to find jobs as far from home as I could, and to stay away from home for years at a time.

There was something about the tag sale, though, and, more, about Seana moving in—she wasn’t much older than several women I’d gone with—that pushed me to say things to him I’d never been able to say before: that though I was glad things were going well, and I didn’t want to piss on his new parade, there seemed something unreal about his endless good cheer. Especially, I wrote, given how much loss he’d experienced. For starters, there was the fact that his first wife (my mom) had ditched him (and me), and that two of his other four wives had died on him, so how come, I asked, there was no acknowledgement—not even when he was raising me by himself, and there wasn’t even a housekeeper around to help—of just how lousy and encumbered a lot of his life must have been?

“Well, Charlie,” he wrote back, “’twas not ever thus, let me assure you…” He understood why I might be puzzled by the ways he showed himself forth in the world, but what he’d come to believe had allowed him to be so cheerful, to use my word (healthy-minded was the term he preferred), as he thought he’d made clear on several occasions—but perhaps I hadn’t been paying attention, he wrote, or had chosen not to pay attention—had to do with a period of considerable darkness in his life, a period that began a few months before my first birthday during which he’d come as close as one could to choosing to leave this world.

Because I’d been an infant at the time, I would of course possess no conscious memory of this moment—one he’d come to think of as his missing year (an admittedly foolish way of thinking of it, he noted, since it was anything but missing)—yet once he’d survived the year, an enormous clump of feelings and fears—of debilitating vexations—that had previously bothered him were, for the most part, deprived of their power.

That was the sum of what he wrote, without giving any details (in a postscript he noted that the period he referred to lasted fourteen months and three days, but that there was a certain pleasurable tidiness for him in thinking of it as a single year), and so I found myself wondering if he’d written about this period of his life, and if Seana had found any of it in the stuff she’d taken from him.

When I woke up on my first day home—the trip took a full twenty-four hours (to avoid Hong Kong, I flew via Tokyo and landed at JFK in New York, then took limo service to Northampton)—Seana was sitting next to me on the side of the bed, looking more beautiful than ever. She had been out of the house when I’d arrived, doing research at the local library, so I had no idea how long she’d been there watching me sleep.

The last time I’d seen her had been nine or ten years before, in Chicago, where I’d been working for an insurance company as an auto accident appraiser. I’d shown up at a reading she was giving at a downtown bookstore for her second novel, Plain Jane, which was about an American woman in her mid-thirties who, after a divorce and an abortion, takes a job teaching art to teenagers at an international school in southern France, and becomes romantically involved with the headmaster. It was based, in part, on Jane Eyre—the headmaster is married, and his wife, a gifted painter who suffers from bouts of depression and mania, lives in seclusion in a cottage near the school—but, as Seana made clear in the question-and-answer period after the reading, when she reminded the audience that instead of marrying the headmaster, her heroine murders him and gets away with it—‘Reader, I buried him,’ was the book’s opening line—her novel was intended not as homage to Charlotte Brontë, but as Seana’s way of using a situation she found intrinsically intriguing—another one of O’Sullivan’s triangles, she allowed—to get at the dark side of matters that, in her opinion, Brontë had turned into sentimental nonsense. ‘Mawkish’ was the word she used to describe Brontë’s book, and afterwards—we had drinks together in her hotel’s bar—she confided that although what gave her the most pleasure in life was the act of writing itself, she did love getting a rise out of audiences by being mildly outré.

“Outré?” I asked.

“Outrageous, eccentric,” she said. She was aware that people thought her books weird, which didn’t hurt sales, and the good sales gave her the freedom to write what she wanted to write, and to live the way she wanted to live. The truth, though, was that she never thought of her books as being weird.

“I’m essentially a realist,” she said, after which, watching for my response—which was no response at all, since even if I’d been sober at the time, I don’t think I would have understood what she meant about Triangle or Plain Jane being realistic novels—she began giggling. Then she leaned toward me and kissed me on the mouth, very gently, and I was so stunned that all I could do was sit there and grin. “You can kiss me back if you’d like,” she said, and I did, and we kissed for a long time until, a finger to my forehead, she pushed me away from her. “That was very good, Charlie,” she said, and she wished me sweet dreams, and left.

Now, when I looked up at her from my bed, I saw that her reddish-brown hair was still cut page-boy style, that her eyebrows, which she never plucked or trimmed, were as dark and thick as ever, and that she had not had a chipped front tooth repaired. I’d always admired her for leaving the tooth the way it was because its imperfection had the effect of making me aware of how weirdly beautiful the rest of her was.

“It’s my apostrophe,” she had explained once when I asked about it. While playing stickball with some guy-friends in Holy Cross schoolyard in Brooklyn, near where she grew up—which wasn’t far from where Max had grown up—she’d broken off a corner of the tooth, and the resulting shape—“Why it’s a giant white apostrophe!” her high school English teacher at the time, a nun named Sister Maureen, had said—seemed a good thing for a writer to hang on to, Seana had theorized, since in addition to representing something that had been omitted—and wasn’t what a writer chose to leave out more important than what he or she chose to leave in?—the word derived from the Greek, and signified a turning away from a large audience in order to direct your words to one person in particular.

“Hey Charlie,” she said a moment after I opened my eyes.

“Hey Seana,” I said.

She caressed my forehead and said she hoped we were still friends.

“Why wouldn’t we still be friends?” I asked.

“Well, for starters, I took over your room for a while, though I’ve since relocated to the third floor guest room.”

“Then you’re not…” I began, and stopped. “I mean, you and my father have separate rooms.”

“Sure.”

“I just…”

“You really are an innocent, aren’t you?”

“That’s what Max always says.”

She leaned down, brushing my forehead with a kiss, and said that I’d had a long trip and probably wanted to wash up and get myself settled before dinner. She’d brought my bags up to the room, and there was a glass of ice water and a snack—cheese and crackers and assorted goodies she’d left on my desk—and later, after I got my bearings, she had something she wanted to show me.

I looked at the clock on my bureau, saw that it was nearly seven, but the shades were drawn, and I wasn’t sure if it was seven in the morning or the evening.

She saw the puzzled look on my face. “It’s evening,” she said.

“How long was I asleep?”

“Three hours, maybe four. I’m not sure exactly when you arrived, but you were buzzing away—beautiful Z’s—when I returned from the library. You’re good at it.”

“Good at it?”

“At sleeping. It’s a talent I wish I had.”

I sat up. “What’s the surprise?”

“No surprise. Just something I’d like your opinion on.”

“That’s all you want?”

“Don’t get fresh with me, young man,” she said. “But yes, that’s all I want—your opinion on something I’d prefer not to ask your father about, all right?”

“Sure.”

“And there is one other thing.” She opened the door to leave. “Some time—whenever, as they say these days—I want your story. I want you to tell me your story.”

“Sure,” I said. And then: “Is this the way you usually get material for your books—do you go around collecting stories from everyone you meet?”

“Not at all.”

“Then why…?”

“Why?” She shrugged, and when she spoke again she did so without looking at me. “Why? Because I guess I figure it’s the quickest, best way for you and me to get to know each other now that we’ve both grown up.”

For dinner, my father made one of our favorites—blanquette de veau, with a spinach and wild mushroom salad on the side—and he served it with a smooth, light-bodied Italian wine. I was still in the grogs from the long flight home, and the wine kept me there, but my father and Seana were in high spirits, especially when they went on riffs where they imagined the way various of his colleagues (some of whom had been Seana’s teachers) might have reacted to the tag sale, and to the deal he and Seana had reached on the morning of the tag sale.

In general, they agreed, most English department faculty members had little use for living writers, though they didn’t mind the cachet that came their way from knowing a writer who’d become a celebrity like Seana, or—what they got off on even more—being able to tell people they were friends with a colleague whose novel had been turned into a movie. In this, Seana said, they were like most people, thinking the highest compliment they could pay you was to say your book would make a great movie—as if novels were merely movies manqués.

“Is that why you made sure your first novel would be one that could not be made into a movie?” I asked.

“Not at all,” Seana said. “It certainly could be made into a movie—anything can be made into a movie these days.”

“A most depressing thought,” my father said.

“They made Lolita into a movie,” I said.

“Lolita?” my father said. “Compared to Triangle, Lolita is very pale matter, totally lacking in fire.”

Seana groaned.

“And what about Jules and Jim?” I said.

“Grim and gloomy stuff,” Seana declared, “and with heavy-handed thematic overlays—The Great War and all that—and without anybody ever really enjoying it.”

“It?” I asked.

“The sex,” my father said. “What’s so extraordinary about Triangle is the sheer joy the family takes in its sexual escapades, the great and uncomplicated delight in one another, and in who they truly are.”

“Shhh,” Seana said. “You’re embarrassing the author.”

By this time, Max had opened a second bottle of wine, and was telling us about how at faculty Christmas parties he’d walk up behind a colleague, tap the man or woman on the shoulder, and before the colleague could turn around, ask—“So tell me—how’s the new novel coming?”—to which the colleague would usually reply, “Almost done,” or “Coming along,” and then there’d be a double-take, and the inevitable question: “But how did you know?”

Somewhere between salad and dessert—my father’s delicious bread-pudding-with-maple-syrup—I fell asleep, and when I opened my eyes, Max was pouring more wine—we were on our third bottle—and raising a glass to my health. As to his own health, he said, he was feeling terrific—stronger than ever. He glanced down at his lap, then looked at me.

“Now I can bend it,” he said.

Seana rolled her eyes and declared this was the perfect example of the kind of shtik that had charmed his students—had made them use the word ‘puckish’ when they talked about him.

“A term I deplored,” my father said.

Seana leaned toward me: “Your father never fooled around with us—with his female students—the way the other profs did.”

“One should not shit where one eats,” my father said.

“Still,” Seana said, “there were those among us who thought it a shame.”

“There can be great pleasures in renunciation,” my father stated, after which he stood, inclined his head slightly toward Seana, and began removing dishes from the table while reminding me that, as he’d mentioned in one of his letters, he was planning a trip to his old neighborhood in Brooklyn, and that he hoped I’d join him. Perhaps Seana would come too.

Seana shrugged, said she preferred not to go home again if she could help it, thank you very much, and her face took on a look of such sudden sadness—her hazel-green eyes going to dark brown, her smile sucked inward—that I wanted to reach across the table and take her hands in mine, tell her that everything—everything!—was going to be all right. My father continued to clear the table while Seana remained where she was, immobile, so I stood and, on wobbly legs, began gathering plates and silverware.

“Please sit,” my father said, after which he announced that it was past his bedtime but that he knew we young people had things to talk about—Seana had so informed him earlier in the day—and that we should leave the rest of the dishes, along with the pots and pans, until morning.

He kissed Seana on the forehead, then came around the table, told me again how good it was to have me home, kissed me on the cheek, and asked me to give serious thought to accompanying him to Brooklyn, perhaps the following week.

“I need to go to Maine first,” I said. “To visit Nick’s parents.”

“Of course,” my father said, and reminded Seana that Nick had been a friend of mine from college who had lived in Singapore—who was responsible for my going there to work—and that Nick had died recently.

“You didn’t like him,” Seana said.

“Correct,” my father said. “I didn’t like him, although I didn’t wish him dead. I found him a somewhat hollow and manipulative young man.”

“You never told me that,” I said.

“He was your friend, not mine, and doubtless possessed qualities that made you favor him with your friendship.”

“My father’s right about that,” I said to Seana.

“Right that this guy was an ass?” Seana asked.

“Right that it was because of Nick that I went to Singapore.”

“So?” she said.

“So I’m just setting the record straight.”

“But surely your decision was not based wholly upon your friendship with Nick,” my father said.

“Not wholly,” I said.

“Good,” my father said, “because although Nick and your friendship with him were clearly crucial to your choice, what I’ve preferred to believe is that your primary reason for going to the Far East had to do with your thirst for adventure.”

“That too,” I said.

My father turned to Seana. “I’ll tell you something about my son that, given his often faux-naïf demeanor when it comes to matters intellectual, you might not suspect,” he said. “Charlie was a voracious reader when he was a boy, and the books he loved most were about faraway places with strange sounding names. When he was seven or eight, I started him off with a complete set of Bomba the Jungle Boy, and while other boys his age were reading The Hardy Boys or sports novels, Charlie was immersed in tales that took him on exotic journeys to the four corners of the world.”

“It’s true,” I said and, hoping to pull Seana out of her gloom, I told her about my favorite author in high school, James Ramsey Ullman, and the book reports I did on his novels—about climbing Everest, going across the Karakorum desert in China, and up and down the Amazon—along with books like Kon Tiki and Green Mansions, and before that—at about the time I was reading Bomba the Jungle Boy—the Tarzan and Doctor Dolittle books.

“When Charlie was eight years old,” my father said, “he came to me at the start of summer vacation with a question he’d been pondering. ‘Do you think,’ he asked, and in the most serious way, ‘that by the end of the summer, I’ll be old enough to go out into the world to seek my fortune?’”

“Oh my,” Seana said.

“And let us not forget Gerald Durrell,” my father said. “Charlie adored Durrell, so that when people asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up, he would say he was going to be an animal trainer and work in a zoo. Gerald—Lawrence’s brother—was a zookeeper at times, you see, as well as a naturalist and environmentalist.”

“I hope he was a better writer than his brother,” Seana said. “Have you ever read those Alexandria novels? Impossibly soppy. Soppy, sloppy, soggy—over-written, noxious, romantic, pretentious…”

“But what don’t you like about them?” my father asked, though when he smiled to show he’d meant his question ironically, Seana didn’t smile with him. “Given the impressions his early reading made on him,” my father continued, “small wonder Charlie has moved around so frequently, and has become so enchanted by the world he’s discovered in the Far East.”

Holding tightly to the stem of her wine glass, Seana leaned across the table. “So tell me something, Charlie,” she said. “Do you enjoy seeing beautiful landscapes despoiled and ravaged? Do you take pleasure in seeing men, women, and children exploited and driven to early graves in order to provide lubricants for our machines, and poisons for our food and arteries? Do you take pride in your portion of responsibility for the deadly conditions that prevail in the enchanted world you’ve been inhabiting?”

“Of course not,” I said, and resisted the urge to start talking about just what I did feel about Borneo and palm oil. “It’s complicated,” I said. “If you’d been there you’d understand that it’s very complicated…”

“What isn’t?” Seana said. “Nevertheless, our conversation has served to put me in mind once again of George Sand, a woman rarely far from my thoughts, and in particular—the obvious inspiration for the accusatory grilling I’ve just subjected you to—of her dying words: Ne détruisez pas la verdure.”

“Do not destroy the greenery,” my father said.

“I don’t need a translator,” Seana snapped. “And ‘greenery’ stinks—doesn’t begin to capture what she meant.”

“When Seana was considering continuing on for a doctorate,” my father explained, “she talked of writing her dissertation on George Sand.”

“On Sand and Eliot,” Seana said, correcting him. “The two great Georges. Gorgeous Georges? Curious Georges? Our own Ms. Oates notwithstanding, George Sand, you will recall—Amandine Aurore Lucile Dupin, and for greater part of her adult life, the Baroness Dudevant—was the most prolific female author in history. Nobody reads her anymore, though I would point out that Virginia Woolf’s father, Leslie Stephen, a man of exceptional erudition and discernment—like you, Professor Max—admired her enormously.”

“As did many men,” my father said.

“Truly and duly noted,” Seana said, her voice slurred. “Pagello above all.” Seana turned to me. “Pagello was an Italian doctor—a country doctor, but not out of Kafka, and he fell in love with Sand, and she transported him with her across Italy and lived with him in Paris, and then she ditched him, and he returned to Venice, where he married and fathered children. He died at the age of ninety-one, nearly sixty years later. Your father once considered writing a novel about him.”

“That’s true,” Max said.

“Actually, I know who you’re talking about,” I said. “I saw a movie about him where he gets to shag Juliet Binoche. A piss-poor movie, if you ask me.”

“A novel manqué? my father asked.

“Mutilé would be more like it,” Seana said. “And as for you, Max—didn’t I hear you say it was past your bedtime?”

Seana stood, steadied herself by leaning on the table, said that it was true that she and I had things to talk about, and that, to prepare herself, she would now proceed to brew a cup of coal-black coffee.

She swayed a bit as she made her way to the kitchen, stopping at my chair, where she touched my shoulder briefly, even as my father said again what a joy it was to have me home. He wished us both pleasant dreams, and headed upstairs.

The list Seana gave me—titles with brief one-sentence explanatory tags attached to them, like log-lines you see in television listings for movies—was in her handwriting, which was exquisitely graceful, a skill of small value, she asserted, and one shared by most girls who’d survived a childhood of Catholic schools. My father’s full list—titles with and without the tags—was extensive, she said. Amazing, actually—page after page of titles and snippets in search of authors and stories—so that what she’d done was to choose a baker’s dozen that on a first reading seemed the most obviously promising, and, more to the point, ones that she liked to imagine Max had had in mind for her—for novels he imagined she might imagine into being were she to come across them one day.

What she wanted from me was not my opinion—how could one have an opinion of an unwritten novel that might be based on a title and a squiggle of words?—but my immediate and, more important, my unreflective reactions.

Because what made me an ideal collaborator, she added pointedly, was that she believed me capable of a truly thoughtless response.

“Thanks,” I said.

She stared past me with glazed eyes, then blinked. “Okay,” she said, as if she were waking up. “You’re right. Okay then. I’ve thought about this and here’s what I’ve come to—that I’ve never collaborated with anyone before, so I’m doubtless wary of doing so, and covering my wariness—my sadness? my fear?—with aggression. A familiar pattern because—and I’m on a slight roll now, Charlie, so don’t interrupt, please—unlike Mister James, a writer more generously sociable than most, who wrote that the port from which he set out was the essential loneliness of life—hardly an unusual journey for an Irishman—I’ve always believed my compass was set in an opposite direction: that the port to which I’ve been heading was the essential loneliness of my life. Can you understand that?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Yes,” she repeated, and she pushed several pieces of paper across the table. “So here’s the list—what I wanted to ask you about. And now that I’ve given it to you, do you know what that makes me?”

“List-less?”

“It is apparent that you are more your father’s son than either of you understand.”

“Maybe. But consider this too—that because you made your deal with him, he’s become listless too.”

She tapped on the list with the eraser end of a pencil. “To the task at hand, young man,” she said. “Read them and then tell me, please: Which ones appeal most? Which ones seem of no interest? Which ones inspire your curiosity, and—question numéro uno—which one do you think I should use as the basis for my next novel—or, to make it easier on you, why don’t you choose three, say—but in ranked order of preference.”

I picked up the pages.

“Is that too much to ask?” she said. “Too much responsibility for an innocent young guy like you?”

“Innocent and thoughtless,” I said, correcting her.

“Oh Charlie,” she said. “You shouldn’t take my words as seriously as I sometimes do. I was just trying to get a rise out of you. My apologies—okay?”

“Okay,” I said.

This is the list she gave me:

Pagello’s Surgery. Memoirs of an aging Italian country doctor who had once been George Sand’s lover.

A Missing Year. A veteran of the Korean War, suffering intermittently from suicidal impulses, returns home to Kansas in order to marry a fellow soldier’s widowed wife even while he struggles to come to terms with the death of that soldier, an act of murder he may or may not have imagined.

Hector on 9/11. Story of a Puerto Rican teenager who, on the day the World Trade Center towers come down, has an exceptionally successful 24 hours of romance with his social studies teacher and several frightened teenage girls, all of whom are in extreme need of tenderness and consolation.

Tag Sale. A retired professor at a New England college organizes a tag sale in which he attempts to sell material from his unpublished and/or abandoned novels, and the ways in which this act affects the destinies of people dear to him.

Sky Captain. An Irish priest, chaplain to the crew of a merchant marine training ship, dies in a Marseilles brothel and is transported back across the Atlantic in the ship’s freezer among sides of beef, cartons of hamburgers, and crates of dead chickens.

Hearts and Minds. A fifty-five-year-old chemist, in line for a Nobel prize and in need of a heart transplant, receives the heart of a 19-year-old black woman who has died in an automobile crash; following the transplant, he abandons his scientific research in favor of the life of a bon vivant.

Her Private Train. An historical novel based on Theodore Roosevelt’s 1905 wolf hunt—the tale told primarily from the p.o.v. of his daughter, Alice Roosevelt Longworth—for which hunt TR set out for the territory of Oklahoma in a private train of 22 cars, with 70 fox hounds, 67 greyhounds, 60 saddle and packhorses, 44 hunters, beaters, wranglers, journalists, and one woman.

Charlie’s Story. A charming young man in his mid-thirties takes up residence in an international city in the Far East, and becomes involved with a less than charming man whose fate has (wonderful) trans formative effects on our hero.

The James Brothers. In heaven, Henry and William join with Frank and Jesse to steal the pearly gates.

Max Baer and the Star of David. The tale of Max Baer’s relationship with a black couple who, before and after he becomes heavyweight champion—a Star of David first adorning his trunks when he defeats Hitler’s boxer, Max Schmeling, in Yankee Stadium—serve him faithfully as Man Friday and housekeeper, and in which tale we discover that the couple are not husband and wife but brother and sister, and that their child is Max Baer’s son.

Make-A-Wish. A gifted young violinist, knowing she has but a year to live, shows up at her mentor’s door and declares that, like those children who get to meet their favorite athlete or rock star before they die, she has chosen to live with him for the duration.

Jules and Jim Go to White’s Castle. In 1947, two young Brooklyn Dodger fans make a pilgrimage to Maine to visit their favorite writer, E. B. White, in order to persuade White to write a book in which he has the boys befriend Jackie Robinson, thereby enabling Robinson to survive a signal moment in his first year in the Major Leagues.

We Gather Together. A Thanksgiving reunion wherein the children and grandchildren of a warring Irish family bring the family back together on the occasion of the silver anniversary of their parents’ divorce.

The story I kept thinking about on our way across Massachusetts and up toward Tenants Harbor was Make-A-Wish , even though—because?—I had not chosen it as one of the three I thought would make the best novel for Seana to work on. The three I chose were Charlie’s Story, Tag Sale, and A Missing Year, mainly because they contained elements I could relate to from Max’s life or my own.

Which, Seana had declared while we sat at the kitchen table my first night home, had nothing to do with whether or not any of them would make a good novel. Because something had happened to you, or might happen to you, had zilch to do with what made fiction work. In fiction—this is what she said she’d learned from my father—imagination and empathy: being able to conjure up lives and times unlike your own—were everything.

“Does that mean that what I’ve been believing all these years—that Triangle was based on your relationship with your mother and father—had no truth to it?”

“Don’t try to get funny with me, young man,” she said. “My life’s my life, and my stories are my stories.”

She fixed us tumblers of Drambuie over ice, then came around the table and sat next to me, an arm across my shoulder as if we were old schoolyard buddies, and said that she’d been thinking about Nick’s death, and had decided it was a bad idea for me to go up to Maine by myself, and that she was going to go with me.

“Even if I ask you to?” I said.

“Even if you ask me to,” she said, and then, before I could try to kiss her—and oh boy did I want to!—she drained her drink, chucked me on the arm, and left me in the kitchen. I waved good-bye to her after she was gone, but instead of thinking of her sweet mouth, or trying to recall what it felt like the time we did kiss, or imagining what it would be like if I went into her room later, lay down beside her, and began kissing her—I found myself picturing the two of us arriving at Trish’s house, with Trish embracing me, and the two of us kissing.

What I’d also begun wondering about, from the moment I read the Make-A-Wish synopsis, was whether the story about the violinist was really about Seana, and if, like the woman in the story, Seana had come to our house in Northampton because, knowing she was dying, she wanted to be near her mentor during the time she had left. The idea for the novel had been my father’s, but I had to wonder if Seana had either confided her situation in him at some point, or if he somehow guessed that the only reason she would take up nesting rights in our house was because it was the one place where she felt safe—at home—and because she wanted to be close to him on her way out. I stood, felt my knees wobble, and put a hand on the back of a chair to steady myself. The room tilted to one side, and then to the other, as if it were a ship going through high, rolling waves, and I told myself that I’d done much too much wondering for one evening, and that it was time to go to sleep so that I might, if I got lucky, become lost in a wild and lovely storm-tossed sea of dreams.

After we’d made our way across the small cuff of New Hampshire that connected Massachusetts to Maine, and stopped for lunch in a shoreline diner outside Kennebunkport, I remembered what I’d been thinking the night before, and asked Seana if Make-A-Wish had anything to do with her.

“It was your father’s idea, not mine,” she said.

“Sure,” I said. “But you said you thought he might have imagined some of the stories—at least the ones you showed me—in part because it was his way of giving you notions for novels that you imagined he might have imagined would be novels you might imagine.”

“Don’t get meta-fictional on me,” she said.

“Meta-who?”

“Actually, if you need reassurance, let it be known that Seana Shulamith McGee O’Sullivan subjects herself to regular check-ups—cervix, breasts, colon, heart, lungs—the works—and that the best medical teams have failed to discover anything to worry about. Which means I have to keep writing.”

“But I thought you love to write. You told me that nothing gives you more pleasure than writing.”

“I love to write,” she said, pointing a fork at me. “But you’re missing the point, Charlie.” She tapped the flat side of the fork against the side of her head. “Use your noodle, fella. Whose story is it?”

“Oh,” I said. And then again: “Oh.”

“Oh,” she said.

“But he seems fine.”

“So do we all, some days.”

“But,” I began, and leaned forward. “I mean, do you really think that’s what it’s about?”

“No,” she said.

“But why—?”

She shrugged and lifted her coffee mug, as if in a toast to Max, then sat back. “Who knows?” she said again. “Probably because I enjoy playing you—playing with you?—seeing what’s going on behind those moist brown eyes of yours. I used to love it when Max had to be out of town and he asked me to babysit you—he said I was there to house-sit so that you wouldn’t be offended and think he thought you couldn’t take care of yourself. But it was the same then: when you’re especially happy or sad—or scared—your eyes have the same beguiling quality your father’s eyes have, did you know that?”

“Maybe,” I said. “But all that stuff about ports and loneliness—what was that all about? Some perverse way of… of…?”

“Stuck for words, Charlie?”

“Let’s just forget it, okay?” I said. I picked up the check. “Let’s just forget it and blow this joint.”

“Do you have one?”

“Very funny,” I said. “But you know what?”

“What?”

“You’re not that funny,” I said. “You’re weird—I’ll give you that—and—like some of the characters in your books—with a distinctive mean streak. For sure. But you’re not funny.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment,” she said.

A short while later, in the car, Seana fell asleep, her head against the window, a rolled up sweater for a pillow. She snored lightly, her mouth open, and I tried to stay angry at her for making me believe, if only for a moment, that my father was living on borrowed time, but then it occurred to me that maybe he really was, and that when she saw my reaction, she had changed course.

I wondered, though: What difference did it make if I knew for sure—if he knew for sure—if he and Seana knew for sure, or if none of us knew anything? I tried to imagine what he might do if he did know—if he’d make any changes in the way he lived, and decided he wouldn’t, which was when I realized that the idea of getting rid of the unused parts of his writing life might have come from the knowledge—and fear—that he wouldn’t be here much longer, though a second later this led to the thought that the tag sale might have only been what it was: the kind of thing Max did now and then for no other reason than that he felt like doing it.

North of Portland, I turned off the main highway—Seana was awake now, but quiet—and took a detour west toward Naples so we could swing by the place where I’d gone to summer camp as a kid—Camp Kingswood—and where I’d been a counselor the first two summers I was at UMass. I’d been to Maine a bunch of times in the years since I’d been a camper and counselor there—Nick and Trish were married in Maine, and the year Nick and I graduated from UMass, we’d gone up there and had a wild few days with a group of friends, eight or ten of us, partying, drinking, and screwing our asses off.

Now, seeing Camp Kingswood again—leaves gone from the trees, you could see the old bunk houses, and the lake beyond, the lake calm, flat, and steel-gray in the autumn chill—I found myself telling Seana about how, starting with my first summer there, I’d fallen in love, not so much with Maine’s lakes or coastline, but with its trees, the evergreens especially—pine, hemlock, juniper, and, my favorite, Norwegian spruce.

What I’d loved about Maine, I said, was what I’d come to love about Borneo, even though the two landscapes had hardly anything in common, and that was how thick and deep the forests were, along with my sense that they were still—evergreen and hardwood here, tropical forests there—the way they might have been millions of years ago.

I talked about the different kinds of mangroves in the coastal regions of Borneo and how their root systems looked like tangles of swollen spider webs, and I talked about peat swamp forests, and how they could burst into flame spontaneously, or be set on fire by people clearing them, and how the fires could rage over hundreds of acres for months at a time and were almost impossible to extinguish because so much of the burning went on below ground, in the deepest layers of the peat. And I talked about forests I’d been to on my most recent visit to Kalimantan—Dipterocarp forests—probably at the same time Seana had been moving in with Max. About every four years—I’d been lucky enough to be there when it happened two years before—the onset of dry weather conditions, combined with El Niño, resulted in an extraordinary explosion of color, where tens of thousands of trees in these forests, many of them a hundred and twenty or thirty feet high, and any single one of them bearing four million flowers, burst into bloom. It was the most amazing thing I’d ever seen.

“Four million?” Seana said. “You counted?”

“Estimated,” I said.

“But these trees are dying—they’re being logged away to make room for your palm oil plantations, yes?”

“Yes.”

“Palm oil was used in the making of napalm, wasn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“So you are a shit,” she said.

“Probably. Still, I was wondering if you’d like to visit the forests with me and get to see them before they’re gone?”

“Sure,” she said. And then: “‘ Death is the mother of beauty,’ right?”

“Max used to say the same thing—a line from a poem, right?”

“‘Sunday Morning,’ by Wallace Stevens—I heard the lines from Max the first time too. But you say you don’t feel guilty?”

“About what?”

“About taking pleasure from seeing the beauty of these forests because you know they’re dying.”

“What good would guilt do?”

“Actually,” she said, “and take it from an Irish girl who knows about such matters—when it’s not self-destructive, guilt can be a splendid muse.”

“In some places I’ve been to in Borneo,” I said, “there can be more than seven hundred different species of trees in a twenty-five acre plot, which is more than the total number of tree species in the United States and Canada combined.”

“Impressive.”

“It’s one reason—being able to get to Borneo easily and often—I’ve stayed at the job in Singapore.”

“And you’d go there—to Borneo—if you knew you were dying, yes?”

“Yes.”

Seana was quiet for a while, after which she said she’d come to the conclusion it would be a good idea if I was the one who wrote Charlie’s Story, that she liked listening to me talk—to what she called the sweet, innocent timbre of my voice—and that maybe I could make this voice work on the page.

“I’m not as smart or talented as Max,” I said.

“Neither am I.”

“Not so,” I said.

“Well, who knows, Charlie?” she said. “But you do have the main thing most writers begin with: you loved to read when you were young. Because no matter what other reasons writers may give for why they write, most of them, in the end, will tell you that what made them want to be writers was that they loved to read when they were kids, and that they wanted to be able some day to write books that would be for others like the books they’d loved when they were growing up.”

“Max used to say pretty much the same thing when people asked him why he wrote,” I said.

“Oh yes,” Seana said. “And your father said you had a great thirst for advenure, right? So what could be more of an adventure than making up a story—creating a world that never actually existed, and peopling it with imaginary people you come to care about more than you often care about people you know, and all the while—all the while, Charlie—never knowing what’s going to happen to them next?”

“When you start writing your novels, you really don’t know what’s going to happen to the people in it?”

“No,” Seana said.

“Sounds good to me,” I said.

“Some writers—Nabokov most famously—claim they always know what’s going to happen next—that a writer is like an omniscient god who controls the destinies of all his characters.”

“Doesn’t sound like much fun,” I said.

“That’s because, despite a sometimes useless habit of being more innocent and timid than is good for you, you’re an essentially unique, adventurous, and playful young man,” she said.

“Maybe,” I said.

“Neither of us are as playful as your father is, though.”

“Not yet anyway,” I said.

“‘ Not yet anyway,’” she said, repeating my words, and when she did she looked away so that I couldn’t see her eyes. Then: “Don’t you think that’s sad, Charlie?”

I wanted to say yes, but instead I answered her question by telling her that the blossoms in the Dicterocap forests were pale and dusty, and looked something like hibiscus blossoms—wide, flat, and fringed like crepe paper, and the color of blood oranges—and that their leaves were light green and fleshy.

“Every four years, did you say? Which means that in two years we can go there, you and I—book a trip together, yes?”

“Is that what you writers do—book trips?”

“You’re not that funny either,” she said. “But sure—I’m game to go.”

I told her it was a deal, and explained what I’d learned on my trips there: that the massive flowering of the trees, and the fruiting that followed, had been a gift to the animals, especially to wild boar, who thrived on the seeds and spread them everywhere. I said that nobody knew how many centuries local populations had depended on those times when there was an abundance of seeds—and lots of pork to gorge on—but that anthropologists believed the relationship had lasted for as long as human beings had inhabited Borneo.

What I didn’t say was that most scientists had concluded that logging had probably reduced the density of the forests below the critical level needed to maintain reproductive cycles, and that the ecosystem was, therefore, irreparably damaged.

When we got to Tenants Harbor, I telephoned Nick’s parents—his mother answered, a lucky break—and I said I was in the vicinity with a friend and would like to stop by. Mrs. Falzetti said to please come, but to give her a half hour or so to tidy up. Seana was surprised I hadn’t called from Northampton, and I said I’d waited until we were nearby because I didn’t want to give them a chance to reject a visit out-of-hand, which I figured would have happened if Lorenzo, who could be nasty at times, had picked up the phone.

We had some time to kill, so I drove us out to Port Clyde, a few miles away, and we walked along the boat landing, where the ferry to Monhegan Island docked. The air was crisp, near freezing, but without wind, and Seana slipped her arm into mine. The ocean, like the lake at Camp Kingswood, was steel-gray and calm, but I knew how changeable the weather could be—how a pearl-gray sky could turn to slate-black within seconds, and how winds could become ferocious and waves could come roaring in and swamp small boats.

“Did you ever spend time here with Nick, just the two of you?” Seana asked.

“Yes,” I said. “Once—a total disaster—when we stayed with his mother and father. And I visited him and Trish a few times after they were married. For a while—before they were married, when the three of us would come up here together—I thought I might settle in these parts—not in a town around here, but on an island off the coast, where I could be totally alone and wouldn’t have to see or talk with anyone.”

“There are people around,” Seana said. “Still, it is peaceful and lovely here. Maybe Max and I can rent a house here for a few months—it would be a good place for getting work done. No distractions.”

“Except for Max,” I said.

“You never said how Nick died.”

“You’re right. I never said how Nick died.”

“Do his parents know how he died?”

“I assume so. The embassy called from Singapore, and I called too.”

“And what did you tell them?” Seana said. “And can you stop being such a tight-ass with me about it? Is there some deep, dark secret here?”

“No,” I said. “Just stupidity. Nick could be incredibly stupid sometimes—a real stupid son of a bitch. A lucky son of a bitch too a lot of the time.”

“But not this time.”

“Not this time,” I said, and I told her what had happened: how, on the first Saturday night after I’d returned from Borneo, he got drunk at a party he threw in his apartment.

“He was showing off,” I said, “and I was out on his balcony—I was pretty plastered too, and busting his chops—and he came at me, and I managed to step aside at the last second and he couldn’t stop—miscalculated—and pitched over the railing. His apartment was sixteen stories high.”

“And…?”

“And I tried to catch him—to grab him—but it was too late, of course, and when I sobered up, I went to the morgue and ID’d the body—puked all over the place, and over Nick too. Projectile vomiting, like a baby…”

“Good,” Seana said.

“Good?”

“A vegetable kind of justice.”

“I thought you’re not supposed to say bad things about the dead.”

“Why not? Given the way you and Max talk about him, it sounds as if he got what he deserved, including your leftovers.”

“Sure,” I said. “The way you got Max’s leftovers, right?”

“You can be nasty.”

“Sometimes.”

“Well, I do like that in you, Charlie,” she said. “But tell me this: given your dislike of Nick’s father, along with your claim about not being affected by guilt, why the compulsion to pay your respects?”

I was ready for her question, and said that Nick had been an only child, same as me, and that all through my teenage years, and occasionally since, I’d imagined what my father would feel if he had to watch my coffin being lowered into a grave, especially if it happened at a time when he was without a wife or live-in girlfriend, and when I’d told this to Nick, he said he’d had similar thoughts about him and his father, but that there was nothing for me to worry about, because knowing Max, he bet that if Max were single when I kicked off, he wouldn’t stay single long.

“I’m with Nick on that,” Seana said, “but imagining what people will feel after you’re dead—that’s ordinary self-serving stuff we all indulge in now and then. It doesn’t account for why we’re making this trip.”

I said that even though Mister Falzetti was a lousy piece of work, it was still something to lose your only child, and that there was this too: that after Nick died, I kept remembering what Max said once when he’d come home from the funeral of a colleague’s daughter: that the rabbis taught that although there was a word for a child who lost his parents, and for a husband or wife who lost a spouse, there was no word for someone who lost a child, so terrible was the loss.

“That’s the mush side of your father’s brain talking,” Seana said. “Sentimental crap. When he gets into his rabbinic groove, spewing homilitic pap, I head for the exits.”

“You’ve never had a child to lose,” I said.

“So?”

“So how would you know what it’s like?”

“Loss is loss.”

“I don’t buy it,” I said. “There are losses, and there are losses. They’re not all equal.”

“And imagination’s imagination,” Seana said. “It can go anywhere and feel anything. You don’t have to lose a child to feel what it would be like to lose one.”

“Methinks she doth protest too much,” I said.

“Give it a rest, Charlie,” she said.

“What I think is that if you’d ever had a child yourself, and if…”

“Goddamn you!” she said, and whacked me hard across the face with the back of her hand, then walked away, fast.

I caught up to her, grabbed her by a shoulder, and turned her around. “Hey—!” I began, but before I could say anything else, she wrenched her shoulder free and pushed me away.

“I gave you fair warning,” she said. “I gave you fair warning, and I’ll do it again. Don’t you ever talk to me like that. Don’t you ever, ever talk to me like that, do you hear? I’d have made a good mother if I’d wanted to—a damned good mother.”

“I agree.”

“Prick!” she said, and she drew back her hand to whack me again, but then let it drop to her side, and walked off toward the near end of the boat landing.

Neither of us spoke again until we were back in the car and were approaching the Falzettis’ house. The house was large, and set on a slight rise that overlooked a small fishing harbor that contained one of three islands owned by Andrew Wyeth and his wife. The Wyeths’ island was set in the mouth of the harbor and covered about twenty acres, with a beautiful old lighthouse at one end that the Wyeths had used as their home before they’d bought two other islands in the area, and before they’d moved back to Pennsylvania. I told Seana about the Wyeths, and suggested that if we stayed a few days, we might visit their other two islands, which were much larger than this one—four to five hundred acres each—and that Wyeth’s wife had turned these two islands into wildlife refuges where local fishermen could base their operations.

“Thanks for the good news on the environmental front,” Seana said, and she punched me on the arm, lightly. “So okay—here’s what just happened: because I’d convinced myself you were tougher-minded than your father, I became momentarily disillusioned—upset with myself—for having been blind to the squishy regions of your sensibility. You were right about Max, though. He’d be a distraction.”

When Nick’s mother opened the door—she was a short, compact woman with light blue eyes that, like Nick’s, were almost translucent, and gray hair that had a hazy purple sheen to it—I hugged her and told her how sorry I was about Nick, and as I did I recalled that the first time Nick invited me to his parents’ home we were halfway through a meal she’d set down for us before I realized she was his mother, and not the housekeeper.

Mrs. Falzetti said it was good to see me again and that I looked wonderful, then wiped at her eyes with the back of a hand. I introduced her to Seana, who had been one of my father’s students, I said, and—the story we’d contrived on the way north—was on her way to a writer’s retreat near Acadia National Park, and (but why was I surprised?) Seana said something sweet and appropriate about it being impossible to feel what it would be like to lose one’s only child.

Mister Falzetti came to us then—“Call me Lorenzo,” he said at once, and I hugged him too, which seemed to surprise him—his body stiffened—and told him how sorry I was about Nick, and that Nick had been my closest friend and had always looked out for me. Mister Falzetti was wearing a navy-blue blazer, a powder-blue mock-turtleneck, gray flannel slacks, and white deck shoes. I’d first met him at a UMass homecoming football game nearly twenty years before, and he looked the same now as he had then: lean, strong, and, in his yachting outfit, though without a captain’s hat, what my father would have called ‘natty.’

He looked at Seana then, and seemed taken aback that she was there, but recovered quickly and spoke to her in his usual cold, confident way: “You’re Seana O’Sullivan, aren’t you,” he said.

“That’s correct.”

“I’m an admirer of your two novels,” he said, and he led us into the living room, which was handsomely appointed in a soothing combination of contemporary furniture—sleek plastics and stainless steel—and antiques: an oak sideboard, a large French country table, rush-covered ladder-back chairs, electrified oil lamps, and, around the room, discretely placed, a dozen or so model ships, some of which, I knew, Mister Falzetti had made: fishing boats, sailboats, steamboats, ocean liners, and fully rigged tall ships like those you see in pirate movies.

If you’d met him in this setting, or in the home Nick had grown up in, in Longmeadow, Massachusetts, an upper middle class suburb south of Springfield—the house in Maine had been the family’s country home until Mister Falzetti retired and they moved here full-time—you would have thought he’d probably gone to Harvard or Yale, and had been the CEO of an old-line WASP corporation. But it wasn’t so. “What my dad does is to turn shit into gold,” was the way Nick had described his father to me. Mister Falzetti had grown up in the North End of Boston, one of nine kids from a poor Italian immigrant family, and had started out, at fourteen, digging sewer lines for a company in Newton, after which, when he was sixteen, he’d moved to a small, mostly Polish farming town in Western Massachusetts where he set up his own business—mowing lawns, plowing driveways, pumping out septic tanks. Though he never finished high school, he was a fanatic about education—the one thing, he liked to say, the bastards can’t take away from you. And when it came to smarts—Nick loved quoting him on stuff like this—being a Wop among Polacks was like being the proverbial one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind. By the time he was twenty-one, he owned his own company, which pumped out shit and sludge from people’s basements and septic systems, dug up their leach fields, put in their sewer lines, and plowed and repaired their driveways, and he’d also been able to corner lucrative contracts for school bus routes, waste treatment operations, and road work—salting, plowing, repairs—in a half-dozen Western Massachusetts towns.

“So let’s get to it, Charlie,” he said as soon as he’d poured wine for me and Seana. “Tell us about Nick, since, except perhaps for poor Trish, you knew him better than anyone. Tell us about our boy: was he happy near the end?”

“Not especially,” I said.

“He drank a lot, didn’t he.”

“He drank a lot.”

“The man from the embassy said that his alcohol level at the time of death was off the charts.”

“Probably.”

“Then tell us something else: Are you glad he’s dead?” he asked, and before I could answer, he pointed a finger at me. “The truth now, Charlie. Don’t dissemble with me. Is it a relief ? Were you glad when it happened or, in the immediate aftermath, let’s say, when the actuality—its irreversibility—hit home?”

“No.”

“You’re a liar, but a credible one,” he said. “Nick always admired that quality in you—your ability to fool people into thinking you were just an ordinary, okay guy. ‘My friend’s a regular good-time Charlie,’ he used to joke. You were the only person he knew whose way of being was a refutation of the truism that one cannot both be sincere and seem to be sincere at the same time.”

“I miss Nick more than you can know,” I said.

“I intend no criticism,” Mister Falzetti said. “We’re all upset, each in our own ways, but I’ll tell you this: you did make a terrific team, you two—like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, I used to think—Nick ever ebullient, risk-taking, wild, and so shrewd he ultimately did himself in, but in love with life, my son was!—and you, almost as smart as Nick but with an essential—what shall we call it?—naïveté? reserve? timidity?”

“Call it sleep,” Seana said, and walked by us, to a large bay window on the south side of the room.

“That’s Henry Roth, of course,” Mister Falzetti said. “He lived not too far from here, on a shit-ass farm plopped down between villages named Freedom and Liberty. The way I see it, he fled New York and came here to live so he could teach himself not to write and not to be a Jew.”

“He didn’t succeed at either,” Seana said.

“Correct,” Mister Falzetti said and, moving across the room to Seana, pointed to the lighthouse. “Now take poor Wyeth,” he said. “The son of a bitch timed his death all wrong—packed it in three days before they inaugurated that young black tennis player, so he didn’t get anywhere near the press and publicity he craved.”

“Tennis player?” I said.

“The young Ashe boy, he’s in the White House now, isn’t he, even though he has AIDS? I call it a miracle.”

“Arthur Ashe is dead, and has been for some time,” Seana said.

“Perhaps,” Mister Falzetti said. “But what difference? I admire the cool athleticism and affect, the way he rope-a-dopes his opponents, plus—all-important—the fire within. The man’s a worker—I refer to our president—and he’s a fighter too, you just wait and see. Plenty smart—smarter than Wyeth, who chose to live under his father’s thumb his whole life. That’s where the rage came from, of course.”

“We were hoping the two of you would stay for dinner,” Mrs. Falzetti said. She sat by a stone fireplace, in a narrow wooden chair, her hands clasped on her lap. The fire was low and bright, and drew the chill from the air. In the floor-to-ceiling bookcases that surrounded the fireplace I saw what looked like the same books that had been in the living room in Longmeadow, and that Nick bragged were not just there for show: The Encyclopedia Britannica, The Harvard Classics, The Great Books and Syntopicon, and uniform sets of novels by nineteenth and early twentieth century authors: Dickens, Twain, Hardy, Trollope, Scott, Stevenson, Eliot, James, Cather, Dreiser, Howells, Forster, the Brontës…

“It would please us if you would,” Mrs. Falzetti said. “We could talk about Nick, and look through old photo albums. And if you haven’t yet found lodging, we have a small guest cabin out back you’re welcome to use.”

“Thanks but no thanks,” Seana said. “Perhaps we can raincheck the invite, and join with your husband’s desire to dance on graves on some other occasion.”

“I understand,” Mister Falzetti said. “I can be irritating at times—offensive, some say—but I’ve read and admired your books, as I said, and there’s no lack of offense there for those so inclined. Your work’s marked by what I’d call a grim severity, and I like severity, admire it in prose as much as I do in people.”

“It really would be no trouble at all,” Mrs. Falzetti said. “And we needn’t talk about Nick if doing so would make you uncomfortable.”

“And I’ve read interviews with you,” Mister Falzetti said. “The few you’ve allowed, that is—quite shrewd to minimize them and keep the mystery going, which is something Wyeth, for one, never understood—and I’ve noticed that you never mention your family. So a question for the author: How come no mention of family?”

“Because I have none,” Seana said.

“Oh?”

“I excommunicated them at an early age.”

“But—let me guess—you did have a mother and father. Most of us, I’m told, have mothers and fathers.”

“Maybe,” Seana said. “Depends upon how you define your terms.”

“There’s something to be said for that,” Mister Falzetti said. “For example: if you think of that young black man’s strength of character and the fact that he only knew his father for a single month of his life, and if you then consider the lives Nick, or even Charlie here, have had—young men who’ve never had to dream up their fathers, it tells you something.”

“Tells you what?” Seana asked.

“That’s correct,” Mister Falzetti said, and he refilled Seana’s wine glass. “But tell me about Shulamith, if you will, since it’s a middle name you’ve chosen to keep. Are there Jews in your lineage?”

“There are Jews everywhere,” Seana said.

“True enough,” Mister Falzetti said. “There may even be Jews in my family, from a time when the Moors overran Southern Europe and mingled with the Italians and Spanish. Did you know—forgive the tangent, but did you know that the Roosevelts—Franklin, Theodore, and Eleanor—were descended from Dutch Jews named Rosenfeld? Rosen-veldt, to be exact.”

Seana sat down next to me and squeezed my arm. “Oh Charlie, let’s blow this joint, okay?” she said quietly, mocking me affectionately with my own phrase.

Mister Falzetti poured himself more wine. “Now, your father’s short story about The Protocols of the Elders of Zion coming true, is, in my opinion, his single most brilliant creation,” he said. “It rivals the best in Roth—in any of them: Henry, Philip, or Joseph—and it’s a damned shame he only wrote one novel, because that novel is a real knockout. I always thought he could have been another Nabokov, the mind and gift he had.”

“Has,” I corrected.

“Ah—your father’s still alive then, which makes me happy for you both,” Mister Falzetti said, “although it cannot but be hard on you at times, Charlie—to be in the presence of his unrequited ambitions. Or did he live vicariously through your books, Ms. O’Sullivan?”

“Did you live vicariously through your son, Mister Falzetti?”

“Of course not. If anything, the reverse is true—Nick admired me more than was good for him.”

“A shame, for if only you’d emulated him…”

“You’re quite good at repartee,” Mister Falzetti said. “But then words are your métier—the unapologetic and cruel wit of your characters is often the most endearing element in your novels. Now Nick could be word-clever too, of course, even if he never—”

“Nick’s dead, Mister Falzetti,” I said, finding myself unable hold back—to keep my irritation from showing. “So why don’t you just give it a rest, okay? Nothing any of us can do will bring him back.”

“Oh I know that,” Mister Falzetti said. “But I was told that you let him go, Charlie—that you held onto him for an instant before he made the plunge.”

“Hey—come on!”

I started to stand, but Seana pushed me down, stood, and lifted her wine glass so that it was only an inch or two from Mister Falzetti’s nose. “Now I bet you’re the kind of guy who puts himself to sleep some nights by imagining there’s a touch of evil about you that makes you truly fascinating,” she said, “when the truth is that you’re really just a creep.”

“And you’re the kind of woman Evelyn Waugh might have adored—a mean-spirited Catholic fabulist,” Mister Falzetti said and, very gently, he nudged Seana’s glass aside and moved past her to the fireplace. “The reason I preferred Plain Jane to Triangle,” he continued, “is because it was utterly lacking in conscience, or in anything called conscience, as the poet would have it.”

“Yeats,” Seana said, “‘The Tower.’”

“I surely won’t attempt to compete with you in a literary duel,” Mister Falzetti said, “but I will complete my thought, which is that it’s the absence of conscience in your work that I find so endearing. Unlike Waugh, whose characters are ingeniously eccentric but whose dark humor, alas, is marred by his schoolboy Catholicism, or Patricia Highsmith, say, whose characters are often charmingly amoral—true psychopaths—your characters are quintessentially normal, and very American. It’s not only that your heroine gets away with murder—it’s her lack of contrition—her ease with what she’s done that delights. Plain Jane indeed!”

“You know what?” Seana said, and she gave Mister Falzetti her most winning smile. “If I’d had a father like you, I’d have killed myself too.”

“Oh but Nick did not kill himself,” Mrs. Falzetti said, her voice assured in a way that surprised me.

“Eugenia’s correct,” Mister Falzetti said. “It was an accident. The embassy and the police assured us that it was an accident. Isn’t that so, Charlie?”

“It was an accident,” I said.

“That’s what I believe,” Mrs. Falzetti said, “although at times Lorenzo has other notions, and I trust I’m not talking out of school to say that ever since we received the news, Lorenzo has been living in a state of shock that has given rise to a prolonged and somewhat antic state of denial.”

“And I believe we’ve overstayed our welcome,” Seana said.

“Lorenzo worried about Nick more than he can admit,” Mrs. Falzetti continued. “He loved our son inordinately, and in his heart I believe he has always felt responsible for Nick’s troubles.”

“Come, come, Eugenia,” Mister Falzetti said. “Let’s not bother these young people with our disagreements.”

“What I’m saying does not excuse Lorenzo, of course,” Mrs. Falzetti said, “but it does help account for his behavior of late. That’s what I believe.”

“It’s what you want to believe,” Mister Falzetti said, and he kissed the top of his wife’s head. “Eugenia is not the same woman she was before Nick left us. It may not seem so to see her on a day like this, but she can be a pistol. Can’t you, dear?”

“I certainly can,” she said, “although I do not possess the potential to be quite as insufferable as you. Therefore, I apologize to our guests. Manners, please, Lorenzo. Manners must get us through.”

“Manners, yes, but also surprises and shrewd purchases,” Mister Falzetti said. “I bought up lots of Wyeth early on—that’s not under the heading of ‘surprise,’ which we’ll get to by and by—but when we were friendly, and before fame rotted his brain, Wyeth sold me his stuff at bargain-basement prices, along with work from the father. He couldn’t get rid of his father’s stuff fast enough, and I knew back then what we’ve come to understand since: that the father’s work will last far longer than the son’s. Burned Andy’s cheap, arrogant ass when he found out what I was getting for my stash, one by one, father and son. So don’t you worry about us, no matter how far into the toilet this lousy economy goes.”

“Which reminds me,” Mrs. Falzetti said to us. “Do you worry about what the recession has done to our economy?”

Seana started to laugh, but covered her mouth. “I’m not laughing at you or your question, ma’am,” she said. “And the answer is no—I don’t worry about the economy, and neither does Charlie, though we appreciate your concern.”

“I inherited Nick’s accounts,” I said. “I’m in good shape for a while to come.”

“I’m happy for you,” Mrs. Falzetti said. “Nick did have a generous streak in him—he’s left everything to Trish, you know.”

“We hope to visit Trish,” I said.

“Trish is a fine young woman,” Mrs. Falzetti said. “She’s done a wonderful job with Gabe and Anna. Anna is seventeen months old and quite normal so far, I’m pleased to report.”

“Ah—you’ve gone and said the magic word,” Mister Falzetti exclaimed. “Normal! And speaking of normal, I believe it’s time for our little surprise, so you will give me two more minutes, won’t you?”

“Don’t,” Mrs. Falzetti said, but I couldn’t tell if she was talking to us, or to Mister Falzetti.

“I can assure you it will be worth your while,” Mister Falzetti said. “A rare opportunity to see how we entertain ourselves up here, where the winters, as you know, can be long and dark.”

I was ready to leave, but when Seana sat where she was without moving, I stayed put. I felt distinctly numb, though, in the way I’d feel after a long walk along the coast when the cold and the damp could seep into your bones.

A minute later Mister Falzetti twirled into the room. “Ta-da!” he exclaimed. He still had on his blazer, but was wearing bright red lipstick, and a wig of blond curls, a hair net pulled down over it. He put his arm around Mrs. Falzetti.

“So what do you think?” he asked. “Honestly now. Wasn’t this worth waiting for?”

“He usually only does this on Saturday nights,” Mrs. Falzetti explained. “I feel distinctly embarrassed, and once again I do apologize.”

“Nothing to be embarrassed about or apologize for,” Mister Falzetti said. “We all have our quirky sides, but most of us are too shy—too timid—to show them forth. Think of the great pain people live with because of unexpressed desires! Think of the fabulous lives we might lead that we never get to experience. Think of Nick, and of how nasty, brutish, and short his life was—of all he hoped to do and never will.”

I wondered if Nick had ever seen his father like this, and then realized: yes or no, what difference to who he was, or to his fate? I felt an urge to defend Nick—to say to Nick’s father what Nick might have said: that though his life had been short, he’d done what he wanted when he wanted, but when I imagined Nick chiding me for being romantic and sentimental again, I decided to say nothing.

“Stop,” Mrs. Falzetti said. “Please stop, Lorenzo.”

“Nasty, brutish, and short,” Seana said. “Doubtless true. Still, he wasn’t poor or solitary.”

“Correct again,” Mister Falzetti said, and he licked a fingertip, wiped away an invisible hair from a corner of his mouth. “It’s one thing, of course, to imagine new and different lives on a piece of paper, but far different—far more tangible, wouldn’t you agree?—to let the imagination live in the actual world. Why not indulge ourselves, then, no matter how foolish and ridiculous our indulgences? Why not live the lives we desire, given that this is not a first draft—that this is all there is? Would you like to see me perform one of my music hall numbers? Would you like to kiss me?”

“Sure,” Seana said.

“I had a feeling, from your books, that you’d prove willing,” Mister Falzetti said.

“Did you?” Seana asked. “Or were you hoping you could épater me just a wee bit?”

“Perhaps,” he said. “Did I succeed?”

“Who knows?” Seana said, and cracking her glass against the side of the fireplace so quickly that I hardly noticed the motion—my eyes were fixed on Mister Falzetti’s mouth, where the lipstick had been applied the way a little girl might have applied lipstick on her first try—and with part of the glass still in her hand, and with a swift downward movement, but without splashing blood on herself, she sliced his bottom lip open.

“That should shut him up for a while,” she said. “You know what they say about having too much of a good thing.” Then she leaned toward Mister Falzetti, but instead of kissing him, she licked at the blood that ran along his chin as if, I thought, she were slurping ice cream that was melting down the side of a sugar cone.

“Thank you, dear,” Mrs. Falzetti said.

“You’re welcome,” Seana said, and then: “Duct tape.”

“Duct tape?”

“Duct tape,” Seana said. “Duct tape should seal things until an ambulance gets here. Do you have duct tape?”

“Oh I’m certain we do,” Mrs. Falzetti said, her voice animated in a way it had not been since our arrival. “Lorenzo has an excellent workshop at the other end of the house. He’s quite handy, you know.”

“And some gauze if you have it,” Seana said, after which she took her cell phone from her purse and dialled 911 while Mister Falzetti, his hand cupped under his chin, the blood pooling in his palm, smiled at us in a way that was not unlike the way Nick had smiled when, on his balcony, he’d charged at me: as if feelings of imminent triumph were being quickly replaced by childlike bewilderment.

After we’d checked into the Ocean House Hotel in Port Clyde—an early nineteenth century rooming house for local fishermen that had been turned into a bed-and-breakfast, and that was a short walk from the boat landing where the ferry docked—Seana and I drove up Route 131 to Thomaston to visit Trish. I’d called Trish from Northampton to tell her I’d be visiting Nick’s parents, and asked if it would be all right to stop by, and she had responded with a typical Trish answer: “When have I ever denied you, Charlie?” she’d said, and in a low-key monotone that had been a turn-on for me once upon a time, but which I’d come to realize had nothing to do with her trying to be seductive or mysterious, and was merely an expression of her intermittent, ongoing glooms.

I mentioned that I’d be coming with a friend, and when I told her who the friend was, she asked if I was shitting her or what. She reminded me about how smitten she’d been with Triangle (she remembered that Seana had been one of my father’s students), so was I just making this up in order to get past her hi-tech security system and into her pants again, or would Seana O’Sullivan really be coming with me?

When I said that Seana would really be with me, Trish said to come anytime we wanted, early or late, and if we felt like roughing it, we could stay over. She wouldn’t ask and wouldn’t tell, she said, but she congratulated me on my conquest, and said I was proving to be more like my father than anyone had imagined possible—anyone but her, of course, and she trusted she’d get credit for having seen my potential at a time when few others had.

I said that Seana was just a friend, and when she said something about knowing what the word ‘friend’ could mean to a guy like me, I pointed out that Seana had moved in with my father before I’d returned from Singapore.

“Well, based on her books, I figure she’s into sharing,” Trish said. “So congrats again—and to your old man too—and we’ll see you soon, buckeroo. But one favor, okay?”

“Sure.”

“Do your best not to look surprised when you see me. It’s been a while, and I had another child, and I’ve become what some people might call plump.”

“Plump is good.”

“But know this: that I do look forward to seeing you, Charlie. You’re essentially a good guy, no matter what you think and no matter what you did.”

“Can I quote you on that?”

“No,” she said, and she hung up.

“Oh my god!” Trish exclaimed as soon as we entered her house. “It’s really you, isn’t it?”

“Who else could I be?” Seana replied, clearly delighted by Trish’s uninhibited exuberance, and by Trish herself, who, though overweight, as promised, was as lovely as ever, her long, soft brown hair pulled back in a ponytail, her cheeks flushed, her slate-gray eyes aglow with eagerness and enthusiasm.

“Did Charlie tell you that Triangle is my very favorite novel of all time, and that I could recite most of it, word for word, my favorite scenes anyway.”

“Thanks but no thanks,” Seana said even as she knelt down slightly and smiled at Gabe and Anna, who were standing next to Trish, Anna holding on to Gabe’s sleeve.

“So you’re Gabe,” she said. “And this is your sister Anna, right?”

“That’s correct,” Gabe said. “I’m ten years old, going on eleven—ten going on twenty-three is the way my mother often puts it—and my sister Anna is seventeen months old, but she can walk already, and she can talk when she chooses to.”

Trish wore black carpenter’s coveralls on top of a button-down light-blue shirt, but they didn’t do much to hide the fact that she’d gained a considerable amount of weight since the last time I’d seen her—twenty to thirty pounds, at least—and I was glad she’d warned me so that I didn’t gape. The house looked the way it always had—as if the people who worked the local flea markets were storing their stuff there: clothing, suitcases, backpacks, dishes, pots and pans, Mason jars, wicker baskets, hat boxes, lamps, catalogs, magazines, and books piled everywhere.

What I wasn’t prepared for, though, and I saw that it pleased Trish to see my surprise, was Gabe. He looked more like Nick than ever and, the shocker, seemed very sturdy. The constant restlessness that had brought on various diagnoses—ADD, ADHD, autism, Asperger’s—seemed gone. His blue eyes were nearly as black as his hair, which fell to his shoulders—a shock of it lay at a diagonal across his forehead like a crow’s wing—and he stared at me without blinking. I couldn’t shake the feeling—I recalled that this had been so even before he was a year old—that there was a fierce and determined old man inside him that was staring out from a little boy’s head.

“Hey Gabe,” I said, and put out my hand. “It’s good to see you again.”

“You’re Charlie,” he said.

“I’m Charlie,” I said.

“I don’t remember you, but my mother showed me your photograph.”

“I’m Charlie,” I said again, “and I remember you from when you were a little boy.”

“My father’s dead,” he said.

“Sad to say, yes—your father’s dead.”

“You saw him die,” he said.

“I saw him fall,” I said.

“That’s accurate,” Gabe said, “and I accept the correction. But it’s not useful information.”

“Your father was my closest friend,” I said.

“I know that already,” Gabe said. “Would you be interested in seeing his ashes?”

Trish leaned toward Gabe, but without touching him. “Not yet, sweetheart,” she said. “Be patient, all right?” She turned to us. “Lorenzo—Mister Falzetti—gave the ashes to me—brought them here in a box one day, said he’d decided they’d mean more to me than to him, and I didn’t have the heart—or strength—to argue. With Lorenzo, it’s always easiest to let him have his way.”

“Like father, like son?” I asked.

“Who knows?” Trish said. “Who cares really?”

“Did you bring us any presents?” Gabe asked.

“Oh Gabe!” Trish scolded, but softly. “I’ve asked you not to…”

“It’s okay,” Seana said. “Yes, we brought gifts for you and for your sister.”

“Perhaps we can accept the gifts now and you can see the ashes later,” Gabe said.

“Sounds like a plan,” Seana said.

“But before we get too far into gift-giving,” Trish said, “how about a loving hug for the grieving ex-wife?”

“Of course,” I said. “Sorry I didn’t…”

I moved toward Trish, but Seana was there first, and when she embraced Trish, Trish collapsed as if a strut inside her had snapped.

“I’m sorry too,” Trish said, and she started crying, her body convulsing in small spasms. “In fact, I’m very sorry. I’m damned sorry. I’m one sorry, sorry girl. Sorry… sorry…”

Seana pulled Trish closer to her, even while Anna, thumb in mouth, was pillowed between them.

After a while, Trish caught her breath and stepped away. “Now it’s your turn, Charlie,” she said, and she came to me and rested her head against my chest.

“You are plump,” I said. “Plump and warm.”

“You used to say you preferred women who were ample.”

“Still true.”

“I do well on amplitude tests,” she said.

“No one better,” I said, and a moment later: “And hey—I am sorry about Nick.”

“He never saw fatherhood as a vocation, I suppose,” she said. “I mean, he was a real bastard—mean as shit when he was wasted—and a lousy father even when he tried in his half-assed way. Still, he was all the father Gabe had.”

“And Anna? I mean, what about Anna’s father, if I can ask?”

“Several of the usual small-town suspects,” Trish answered. She wiped at her nose. “I cooked supper for us. You’re in for a treat.”

“That’s correct,” Gabe said. “My mother and I made several of our best recipes—baked stuffed haddock, string beans with mushrooms and onions, candied yams, and another potato dish, I forget its name.”

“Dauphinoise,” Trish said.

“That’s correct,” Gabe said. “And for dessert, we’re having a blueberry crumble, which you can have with or without ice cream.”

“I fussed,” Trish said proudly. “I like to fuss. I was happy fussing—getting ready for your visit—and Gabe was a big help.”

“That’s correct,” Gabe said. “My mother calls me her sous-chef.”

“And sometimes he’s my Sioux chief,” Trish said.

“Ha ha,” Gabe said, his voice flat. “That’s very funny. So now can we have our gifts?”

“Probably,” Seana said.

“Probably?” Gabe cocked his head to the side. “You’re teasing me, right?”

“I’m teasing you,” Seana said.

Gabe smiled for the first time. “I like it when people tease me,” he said, “although they’re not always successful at it the way you just were.”

Seana took a stuffed animal from the canvas bag she was carrying—a brightly colored parrot into which you could slide your hand to make it into a puppet—and handed it to Anna, and then she gave Gabe the model airplane kit we’d bought for him: a Glenn Martin Bomber.

“Thank you,” he said. “My grandfather makes excellent model ships, but I prefer airplanes, especially those from World War One. How did you know?”

“Lucky guess,” Seana said. “And I consulted with Charlie here. He’s an expert at gift-giving.”

Gabe eyed me. “I know!” he exclaimed. “My mother told you about my hobby, and she told you I’d been hoping to get a Glenn Martin.”

“Maybe,” I said.

“After supper, I can show you the models I’ve already made. I have Fokkers, Aircos, SPADs, Junkers, Vickers, Halberstadts, and a Sopwith that’s a triplane with three wings, which is quite rare. My grandfather helps me build the planes sometimes, and he’s quite patient with me. Even though I’m the smartest student in my class, I also have a large temper for a boy my age. I can be difficult at times.”

“Self-knowledge is a wonderful thing,” Seana said.

“At school, I’m required to have my own teacher with me all day, in addition to the regular teacher for the other students,” he explained to Seana. “It’s called special education.”

“Figures,” Seana said.

“Figures?”

“Special education for a special guy, and you’re pretty special, aren’t you?”

“I certainly hope so,” Gabe said.

After we helped Trish put the children to bed—Gabe showed us his model airplane collection and then read a story to Seana while I read one to Anna—Trish took down a small metal box from a cabinet over the sink, and asked if we wanted to smoke some funny stuff with her.

She pushed away a bunch of clothes and laundry so we could sit side by side, and stuffed what looked like pencil shavings into a small clay pipe. She lit the pipe, inhaled, held the smoke down in her lungs, exhaled, and passed the pipe to Seana.

“Sweet,” Seana said after she’d taken a long drag.

“Lovely, lovely,” I said after I’d let the smoke permeate my lungs and float up toward my brain. “This is quality stuff.”

“That’s because some of it’s Nick,” Trish said.

“Nick?!” I said.

“Did you really?” Seana asked.

“Uh-huh. Just a small sprinkling, though.”

“How wonderful,” Seana said.

I felt nauseated, dizzy. “You actually put some of Nick’s ashes in here?” I asked.

“Uh-huh,” Trish said. “I thought of doing this—what we’re doing now—I mean I had it in mind ever since your phone call—as being a kind of private memorial ceremony Nick would appreciate, wherever he is. He’s part of us now…”

This was when Seana’s cell phone rang. “It’s Max,” she said, looking at the phone’s display screen and grinning. “His timing has always been impeccable.”

While Trish and I passed the pipe back and forth, Seana talked with Max, and told him we’d visited with Nick’s parents, were now visiting with Trish and her children, and that she’d found another home away from home—a quiet place where the two of them could be happy campers while working on their books. She told him we’d already paid for a room at an inn we weren’t going to use, and suggested he drive up and be our guest there.

“That would be so cool,” Trish said. “Even though I only met your dad a couple of times, I fell in love with him, Charlie, and used to wish he’d been my father. Is that okay?”

“Sure,” I said.

“I mean, it’s like I miss him because I wanted to know him and never did, and maybe now my chance has come. Is that okay?”

“Sure,” I said again.

“We all miss you, Max,” Seana was saying. “We do. And that includes me because I become very sad when I’m away from you.”

“Me too,” I said, and I asked Seana to ask my father if he wanted to say hello to his beloved son.

“He says he only called because he misses us and that I should say ‘Goodbye and good luck’ to you,” she said a moment later.

“That’s the title of my favorite Grace Paley story,” Trish said. She rested her head against Seana’s shoulder. “But you’re still my favorite author, so there’s no need to be jealous.”

Seana was asking Max to repeat something, and she held the phone near us so we could hear him.

“Good night, my dear children,” was what he said then. “And don’t forget to be kind to one another.”

I heard a clicking sound, and then a dial tone.

“Is that all?” I asked.

“That’s it,” Seana said.

“Well, that’s his hang-up, I suppose,” I said.

Trish laughed. “You always had a way with words, Charlie. Even Nick used to say so, and he could really put out the word-play stuff when he got rolling.”

“Do tell,” Seana said.

“All grass is flesh,” I said while I massaged the back of Trish’s neck. “That was one of Nick’s lines. All grass is flesh.”

“Okay then,” Trish said. “And now I have an important question. Does what you said before about the room at Ocean House mean you’re going to crash here tonight?”

“Of course,” Seana said.

“Oh I do love you,” Trish said, and she kissed Seana on the cheek.

Seana placed the pipe on my lap, took Trish’s face between her hands, and kissed her on the mouth.

“Wow!” Trish said when they separated. She took the pipe from me, closed her eyes and inhaled. Then she and Seana flicked tongues with each other for a while, after which, while they kissed and hummed, I filled the pipe again, and tamped the good stuff down without spilling any.

“Essence of Nick,” I proclaimed some time later. “A new fragrance for a new generation!”

I thought my inventive sloganeering might inspire words of praise from Seana, but she was too deep into Trish—without my having noticed, Trish had unbuckled her coveralls and let the shoulder straps hang down—to be aware of me. And I was too stoned to be surprised or shocked by what was going on, or to wonder much about why it had never, until this moment, occurred to me that the relationship between the mother and daughter in Triangle might have been based on experiences Seana had been having through the years with women.

“What about me?” I asked quietly.

“Your time will come, sweetheart,” Seana said, but without turning away from Trish. “Be patient.”

“Patience is one of the cardinal virtues,” Trish said. “She’s also one of my friends—Patience Roncka. She grew up in the Portuguese community, and she’s my best friend here. She met Nick early on, but she never really knew him—not in the biblical sense, I mean.”

“Neither did I,” Seana said. “Did I miss anything?”

“No,” I said.

“Oh Charlie, you’re wonderful too,” Trish said, and she turned to me, her eyes on fire with happiness.

In the morning, Trish was first to wake up, and she whispered that she could hear Anna talking to herself in her crib, and would have to leave us for a while.

“This is like a dream come true,” Trish said. “Correct that. It’s not like a dream come true because it is a dream come true since I imagined the whole thing—well, some of it, anyway—before you ever got here.”

“So which was better,” Seana asked, “the dream or the reality?”

Trish laughed. “I’m not telling,” she said.

“Smart girl,” Seana said.

“I feel like I’m living in a book you wrote just for me.”

“For us,” I corrected.

“For us,” Trish said. “Even better.”

“My pleasure,” said Seana, who was spooned against my back, her breasts warm against my skin.

“God, I hope so!” Trish said.

I took Seana’s hands in mine, at my chest, and pulled her closer while I tried to take in what was going on—what was actually happening. My head was clear, and my senses alert—I’d rarely if ever had hangovers from smoking pot; rather the opposite—I’d usually woken up especially clear-headed after a night of smoking the stuff. I knew, of course, that I’d been drawn to Seana from the first time I’d met her, and had often fantasized moments like this, but now, even though the moment I was living in seemed a dream come true for me the way Trish said it was for her, there was a difference, I wanted to say: because of the fact that I’d known Seana for more than twenty years—for most of my life!—what had happened and what was happening seemed very natural somehow—as least as inevitable and familiar as it was wonderful…

“And oh—wait a minute,” Trish said. She was propped up on an elbow, facing me. “Before I go, I have to tell you something—a secret I’ve been saving. Is that okay?”

“Sure,” Seana said.

“Okay. Here it is: Before you came, I took a chance and went off my meds—my anti-depressants.”

“Me too,” Seana said.

“You went off your meds?” Trish said.

“Yes, and a good thing too, to judge from the results.”

“I mean, are you really on meds?” Trish said.

“Many of our finest writers are on meds,” Seana said. “Mine’s Celexa—twenty milligrams, once or twice a day, depending. RPN, as they say. And you?”

“Cymbalta—sixty milligrams a day, and it’s a killer—wreaks havoc with my sexuality and my digestive system.”

“Sixty is too much,” Seana said. “Try going down to forty.”

“I’m not on any anti-depressants,” I said.

“Poor Charlie,” Trish said, kissing me on the nose. “So forlorn. But we love him anyway, don’t we?”

Seana nuzzled the nape of my neck. “Mmmmm,” she said.

Trish got out of bed, dropped an orange muu-muu over her head, then kissed each of us, me on the forehead, Seana on the back of her neck, and, stepping over toys and around baskets of laundry, called out to Anna that she was on her way.

“Did Max ever tell you about his Uncle Ben?” I asked when Trish was gone.

“No,” Seana said. “Max never told me about his Uncle Ben.”

“Ben was his favorite—his father’s younger brother, who died at sea while in with the merchant marines—but that’s another story—and he was cremated. The ashes wound up with Max, who kept them in a small covered Japanese bowl on our fireplace mantle. This was when I was a little boy, and whenever I pointed to the bowl, he’d say, ‘The way I look at it, a Benny saved is a Benny urned.’”

Seana groaned and, both arms around my waist, pulled me tight against her. “I like you a lot, you know,” she said, “even though you’re a much younger man, and more like Max than is good for me.”

When we woke the next time, I said I’d been thinking about Max—worrying about leaving him alone in our big house. I was feeling nostalgic about him—lonesome really, though perhaps not for him so much as for things we’d done together we wouldn’t ever do again.

“Lonesome’s okay,” Seana said. “But nostalgia’s a bitch, a veil for rage most of the time.”

“‘A veil for rage,’” I said. “I like that—Wallace Stevens?”

“No.”

“Seana Shulamith McGee O’Sullivan?”

“No.”

“A veil for rage because remembering stuff that way, especially childhood, masks how miserable it really was?”

“You’re smarter than you look,” she said.

“But I am definitely feeling lonesome for the guy,” I said, “and I’m wondering why I’m feeling this way now and if you’re feeling the same…”

“You know it,” she said.

Earlier, I’d been remembering something that happened on one of our first trips to New York. Max had given me a tour of his old neighborhood—shown me the famous places: the Brooklyn Museum, the Botanic Gardens, Prospect Park, where Ebbets Field used to be—but what I’d been remembering about the trip wasn’t anything we did or saw, I told Seana, but what happened on the subway.

“Going into Brooklyn we’d stayed in the front car so I could watch the train rocketing through tunnels and switching tracks, and I remember being excited—and frightened—by the possibility we might crash into an oncoming train, or that I might see somebody fall from the platform onto the tracks as our train entered a station,” I said. “Then, on the way back to Manhattan, our subway car was crowded, lots of people standing. It must have been rush hour, and there was one huge black man taking up three seats and, with a glowering expression, daring anyone to question his right to do so. He wore a red bandana on his head, pirate-style, and a sleeveless T-shirt—the kind my father said Italians called wife-beater shirts—that showed off how buff he was.