Convalescing

She was a fair young woman in blue, her arms and legs tanned, lean, ready for grappling with the enormous problems of life he had gone blind to, her voice attractively raspy and yet professional, her blond hair pulled back like his wife's, though not so nice as his wife's. She eyed him with a small universal smile and said, "Do you prefer toothpaste or tooth powder?" He thought this over, giving it more thought than he should have. The two of them–the girl, a stranger to him, and the man, a kindly and amused stranger to himself–were standing in his side yard, a handsome green yard well-kept and unthreatening, on a Saturday afternoon when everyone else was out. He wanted to congratulate her on her pretty smile–did she prefer toothpaste, herself? What was her secret? But her smile was not very pretty, only coaxing, and he had a vision of his wife's quick excited smile, superimposed upon hers; the girl seemed suddenly uninteresting.

"Toothpaste," he said. He did not know if this were true, but it was not quite a lie.

She checked something off on a paper stuck to her clipboard. Yes, her seriousness made her uninteresting. Life was a joke she hadn't caught. "About how many hours a week do you watch television?"

Though he was a convalescent, which is to say not an invalid, he did not watch television many hours a week. He did not watch television at all. His own catastrophe had been followed by the catastrophe of a leading American politician, and the networks had been crowded with dour fake reluctant news and old film clips and reports and prophecies he had not wanted to note. In a pleasant stupor he had turned aside, and even "his" record collection did not interest him. It was "his" because he understood that it belonged to him and was the result of many years of collecting, replacing, hunting up of rare records, but he could not really recall these years nor could he recall the pleasure he must have had, sometime, in music or in life.

He smiled with the smile he had learned in imitation of his own smiling face in snapshots. To be polite he said, "Oh, maybe ten hours a week?"

"Only ten?" The girl was disappointed.

"More like twenty."

"Twenty." She checked something off.

And so, while he fooled around with the hose and cast an admiring eye on the lawn, on the girl, and on the houses across the street with their new coats of paint and their newly sanded brick and their relaxed, welcoming air of approval, the girl went through a litany of mechanical raspy questions: Do you smoke? How many packs a day? Filtertip or plain? Regular or king-size? Which magazines do you subscribe to? Do you own an American car ?–or two cars? Which makes? Standard or compact? Does your car have an air-conditioner and if not would you be interested in one? Do you prefer beer in bottles or in cans? Do you have an automatic can opener? Are you for, against, undecided concerning the Vietnam War?

The first questions had panicked him because he did not know the answers. But he was considerate enough not to show panic; why alarm a young person? The girl was fifteen years younger than he, not much older than his daughter. So he answered slowly, seriously, giving the answers he imagined someone with his name–David Scott–might give, the most pleasant answers to come out of a house that looked like his-a colonial with a fieldstone front, a neat expensive house–for why disturb the harmony of a fine June day?

After about ten minutes the girl said, "Thank you very much!"

"Did you–have you come to any conclusions?"

"No, we don't come to conclusions." She blushed, holding the clipboard up to her chest. "I mean people like myself don't. We just interview."

"You don't come to any conclusions?" he said, his heart sinking.

"What kind of conclusions did you want?"

"Are the answers at least normal? Convincing?"

The girl eyed him suspiciously, though she was still smiling. But why disturb the harmony of the day?–so he waved her on, smiling himself to show that this was nothing important, she should move on, go to the DeLillos' house next door and ask them about toothpaste–.

"Thank you very much," said the girl.

He returned to his lawn work, in a kind of sleep. Such stupor has its deeper dimensions, its geography, not to be noted on a chart; he felt safe in his inch or two of grass. He watered some bushes with his clean green hose. Was this his hose, bought when? The bushes, planted by another man, the head of another household, perhaps fictitious, were not really his bushes but only in his keeping until he sold the house to another head of a family, anxious to settle down on this good green street. And would he then become fictitious? Or was he fictitious already?

At two-thirty his daughter came home from her cello lesson, the cello in its dusty black case much too big for her. She looked victimized, a refugee from war, trudging along a country road toward some humiliating fate. His daughter, only thirteen. Her name was Eunice, not David's idea of a name for a baby girl, but now she had grown up into a Eunice and dragged her cello off to a music lesson every Saturday, keen and nervous about her music, her scrawny legs, her mother's forgetfulness, her father's vague suffering. She greeted him warmly. He greeted her. "How was it today?" he said, a standard question. Grown more awkward in his gaze, now dragging the case along the ground, she shifted her ninety pounds from one foot to another, pretending to think over his question, a little embarrassed maybe by–by what?–by his new sports shirt, which was too new, or too vivid a yellow?–too sporty for a convalescing man? "Oh, you know, coming along," she said. Her posture was bad, no nagging could improve it. Her legs were certainly too thin. What help could her father give her? He loved her but could not truly believe in this love. Eunice, her smile ironic from too many A's and too little joy, glanced at him with her dreamy dark eyes and seemed to be forgiving him for not loving her, for having forgotten her.

Sad to say, he had forgotten her.

Panic had arisen in him, to think that he had a child. They told him he had a daughter. A wife and a thirteen-year-old daughter. Nothing else? Many other things, they told him, being gentle and wise, speaking in the intonations of civilized men, exactly the intonations he had mastered for nearly thirty years, himself, but had somehow forgotten. "Daughter? My daughter? Where, who?" he had cried, hysterical. But that hysteria had passed.

Now he was safe at home, convalescing. He went in to work two afternoons a week, on the bus, and in a while he would go in three afternoons. He had forgotten nothing of his work. His memory for small, meager details had not deserted him, though it seemed the memory of another man, somehow acquired by him. He was being drawn back into life like a minor thread, drawn into a complicated tapestry of vivid, major colors, a tapestry that would tolerate him. He admired the tapestry and he feared for his own destiny in it, that thin thread, a slowly strengthening thread that might come to some destination.... In a few weeks, a few months? When he remembered who he was? When he woke up to find himself inhabiting his body again, returned to himself, the same person he had been all along?

"Mother isn't back yet?" Eunice said.

"She'll be back soon," he said, glad to feel how all tension, all concern shifted off on to his wife, his absent wife, and left him free.

Alone, he felt the new, familiar numbness again. It was his only emotion and it was not an emotion but the absence of one, the tingling of nerves in anticipation of an emotion, the regret of emotion lost, not clearly remembered. He was in love with his wife but it was a condition he could not feel. From a close, intimate distance he admired her, this hurried, forgetful, busy woman, a very attractive woman whose striking face made her daughter's withdraw out of shyness–a woman with the kind of face he had always admired, from a distance, not hoping to win her. Yet he had won her. "He" had accomplished it, some fifteen years ago, but he could not remember how and he could not remember, though he tried desperately, the enormous joy that must have been his....

She arrived home, in her own car. She smiled and waved to him and he saw that her hair had been done, in anticipation of Saturday night, and that she had immense patience and love for him but no need for him, this sickly quiet man to whom she found herself married. "I saw Tony Harper downtown," she said, gathering up packages from the back seat of the car, "and he asked after you, he wants us all to get together soon.... He didn't look too well, himself."

David could not remember "Tony Harper" except for the name, a certain face, a certain nervous manner. They had gone to law school together at the University of Michigan, but he could not remember Tony Harper. His wife's smile showed that she did not catch on or had no time to catch on; she might have thought his convalescence could be speeded up by ignoring it.

"Where did you park downtown?" he said.

"In a garage, one of those places where you drive around and up onto different levels ... you know."

He found her confidence astounding. He no longer drove a car; he took a bus, or his wife drove him. But she drove everywhere, downtown in terrible traffic, out to far-flung suburbs to visit women friends, at home on the road, on the telephone, in the two storeys and basement of their complicated house. He felt the emptiness in him grow sharper, teased by her strength. He said, "You should be careful in a place like that. Those garages aren't very safe."

"Aren't safe, why not?"

"Someone could follow you up to your car, there aren't any watchmen or guards around. I mean it. You should be more careful."

The packages in her arms were gaily colored–pink, mint green, yellow. They spoke of mysterious silken things, of fragrant things, airy secrets from him. She knew what she wanted. She knew where to buy it. Since his accident he knew nothing. He spoke out of habit, using words automatically; perhaps if he tried to remember which words to use he would stand dumb. Catatonic, turned into a statue. He sensed that fate ahead and tried to dodge it, by taking an interest. He was interested in the state of his lawn. He was interested in his daughter's music lessons. Friends were coming over that evening, for a quiet evening. An old familiar couple he could nearly remember. Old friends, safe friends. Nothing alarming. He took an interest in his daughter and in his wife, whom he feared a little, and he did worry about her parking in an unattended garage deep in the heart of a hot crowded city.

"I can take care of myself," she said. But her voice sounded suddenly lame, guilty. She was nearly his height, and he imagined that since the accident he had become shorter. He had lost weight until his ribs showed and no doubt he had lost some inches also, why not? Anything was possible. His lovely wife, whom he had courted and won in the guise of another, younger, more joyful self, now stood staring gloomily at him and must have noticed the contrast between his bony, accusing face and the healthy Saturday sunlight.

"It isn't always just a woman's purse they want," he said, as if trying to break through his own numbness. "Sometimes there are a bunch of them, no more than kids, and down there nobody will bother coming if you scream for help. Oh, they'll come after a while, after somebody tells a policeman, but by then it would be too late …"

"I'll be more careful," she said.

"Yes, please. Be more careful."

II

Look, look at that!–an automobile is speeding along just under the legal speed limit, on an expressway, at five-twenty on a Wednesday afternoon in spring. The automobile is black and expensive but not outstanding. In four lanes of sparkling traffic it does not especially catch the eye. Cars and trucks of all sizes, trucks loaded down with evergreen snippings and dismembered trees, trucks loaded with other trucks, great trucks hauling great vans, bright blue, with Chrysler Corporation on their sides–all rushing along with certain destinations, unswerving. At four minutes from the point of collision, point X, the black car is held in firm control by its driver, a man with thinning dark hair and a pleasant, undistinguished face, his brain taking in without excitement the various familiar sights of this expressway, billboards and embankments littered with paper and other trash, and in the sleepy dense sky contrails of jets appear–these lines of white smoke in the sky please him. What do they mean? The day hasn't been too bad, he is not exactly exhausted. Not worried. At the back of his mind something is trying to open and spread its wings, but the pain would be too great and he fights it down. He is not worried. He knows exactly how to drive this expressway, when to get into the right lane and when to exit.

A shape of black, softer than smoke but then hardening to something brittle, like a crow's wings–he fights it down, he does not acknowledge it.

At five twenty-one he passes the Cooley Avenue Overpass, speeding into its shadow and out of its shadow, hardly aware of it, and at five twenty-two his attention is caught by a stalled car on the shoulder of the expressway, an angry­looking rusty car with rear fenders shaped into fins. An impulse of sympathy for the car's owner–who is nowhere around. Then the sympathy fades, he has driven past, on his way home and certain of his destination. He makes his way through the slightly smutty air, crashing through it with his heavy, expensive car, cleaving a way through, with the ease of a hand turned sideways to make a casual gesture in the air-and the time, he notes, is now five twenty-three on the Goodyear Tire Clock–and he imagines whimsically that somewhere in this city someone is thinking, maybe in the Adventure Lounge that looks sadly down upon the expressway onto point X, someone is thinking sullenly I wish to hell they would burn this city down because there is too much gravity in the city, too much noise, the planet is bloodstained and weary with cataclysms, especially in this city. A few hundred feet from point X a blue automobile appears, with fins, leaping to life in the sunlight. Out of nowhere? The driver of the black car notices it but only casually, since so many objects leap forward into one's attention in the space of only one minute–

All the rest is fiction, not remembered.

It became fiction because it was told to David, explained to him; he believed it the way he believed in the reality of Napoleon, Christ, Julius Caesar; the way he believed in the reality of impoverished Ozark families photographed for Life Magazine; the way he believed in his grandparents' parents, people who must have existed but were out of sight, X's that had to be postulated and accepted on faith. It was a more solid form of fiction than the fiction of novels and legends, but not much more solid.

What is missing, then? A point of view.

What is tragically missing? A personality. That is, a soul. What happened at point X, that mysterious point X? If he made the trip back to that spot he would see nothing much. The Adventure Lounge, blocked off by the expressway and on a dead-end street, looks down upon the site but looks down without commitment. No witnesses to the accident. Hundreds of eyes but no witnesses. On the other side there is the usual wire fence, with dozens of yellowed newspaper pages flattened against it, and beyond the fence another street, and beyond that some vacated stores–nothing, no witnesses. It could not have been said that David himself was a witness. He witnessed nothing. So if he returned he would remember nothing, all the evidence has been cleared away and swept up. Traffic rushed past five minutes later. It rushed past two minutes later. In fact, except in the two lanes that were affected, traffic did not stop at all but only slowed down. The planet flowed, the minute hand on the Goodyear Tire Clock made its determined leap, a black car and a blue car swept together with a terrible grace as if decades of planning had led them to this impact, two minor threads in a mad, brilliant tapestry come together at last for a trivial climax. The cars slammed together, side to side, they shook, shuddered, gave way, came apart ... and then what happened?

Was it an ordinary accident, with ordinary blood?
He did not want to force the accident out of his memory because he thought that might be dangerous. Repression was dangerous. So he tried to remember it. He knew he had had an accident–a fractured skull, broken ribs, multiple lacerations, wounds, scratches. These things had happened to his own body. He knew also that for twenty minutes, recorded faithfully on the Goodyear Tire Clock, he had lain in the wreckage of his car, not unconscious, groaning aloud for help, probably, and no help had come. The other driver had died at once. Better not to think of that. But David had not died and had lain bleeding in the hot searing metal of his car, among the expensive smashed gadgets and ripped upholstery, for twenty minutes while traffic went on by. Yet he did not truly remember those twenty minutes.

People said, "My God, what a scandal! Twenty minutes!" and other people said, by way of explanation, "There must have been a communication breakdown." But these remarks did not mean anything. He could not remember those twenty minutes of agony and so, in a sense, they did not exist. But in those twenty minutes he had evidently died.

He thought about the accident, the "twenty minutes," trying to remember. He could not remember. Something blocked him off. He thought of himself as a character in a story, trying to remember himself in order to come alive. How to get out of this fiction? How to remember himself? What must he do to be saved?

III

In the hospital his wife came to him shyly. She had a criminal's anxiety to please, an expert liar's love of lying. He had forgotten her but, seeing her, some dim alarming recollection set him right. A lovely woman, a woman to be won. She looked at him and might have imagined him as he had been, before the accident, though the accident had not really damaged his face–slightly coarse skin now rather pale, dark, deep eyes, prominent eyebrows, dark hair grown a little thin at the crown and the temples–yes, her husband–but he looked back at her with no more than polite recognition. They talked about the house, about home. About Eunice. About friends, his work, whether his mother should be told. (Senile, she had forgotten him and he could not feel guilt at having forgotten her–an aged woman in an expensive nursing home.)

On the day before his release she had said, "So you'll be coming home tomorrow?"

He had felt panic at once. "Home?"

"Yes, tomorrow, you'll be coming home tomorrow ...?"

"Yes."

"I'm so glad."

They had stared uneasily at each other. He said her name to himself, Elaine, but he could not believe in it. He knew that they had been married for nearly fifteen years, that they had a daughter whom they loved in the way in which daughters are loved, that they had lain together for years of darkness, sometimes asleep and sometimes awake, in love, thinking of their love or of other, quite ordinary things, harmlessly.. but he could not quite believe it.

His own name was David Scott. The identification bracelet he wore, made up of beads, told him that and would not let him forget.

And so, back home, he lay upstairs in the handsome big bedroom, getting back his strength. Somewhere "his" strength existed, to be won back. He was resting. Convalescing. He could certainly remember this bedroom, but he had the idea he'd seen it in a movie or in a photograph. While Elaine chattered to him in the sure, friendly, impersonal tone of a hospital nurse, nudging him back to health, he answered her in the way a husband might, recovering from some terrible shock to his body and soul. But a certain blankness in him could not escape her, could it?–was she pretending? He asked to see the photograph album and for days looked at old snapshots, clever enough to know that he had to relearn everything. He stared at the pictures of a man said to be himself. He knew the man was himself because of the scribbled notations on the backs of the pictures, in Elaine's half-familiar handwriting, David June 1958 .... David Fall '61.... David, David, David….More interesting to him were snapshots of Eunice, growing up. A handful of snapshots, flicked, would show a girl growing up jerkily, unwillingly, forced into growth by the terrible mechanism of muscles and bones. And more interesting than these were the snapshots of Elaine, that charming woman, Elaine playing tennis with a friend, Elaine in her dark bathing suit (she did not bother noting her own name on the backs of such snapshots: certain of her own identity, it was enough for her to write Nantucket Summer '66), and occasionally Elaine with David, wife and husband.

From these snapshots he judged himself to have been a pleasant, kindly man, well-liked by family and friends. The friends in the snapshots changed gradually, their places taken by other friends, but they all looked like pleasant, kindly people. He was grateful for them. Though they did not lift him out of his sleep he had the hope that someday they would, just as Elaine would, bringing him back to life....

She had awoken him once. One morning, quite casually, he remembered a conversation he'd had with her a month or so ago, before the accident. He had come home for some papers, just after lunch, and while looking through his desk drawers he'd glanced out to see her hurrying into the house. Her spring coat was unbuttoned, her hair a little blown, but her face was lustrous, radiant, a face she no longer showed to him–and he had known, suddenly, that she was in love. He went downstairs. She opened the door with her own key and he stood there, in the dim back hallway, quietly waiting for her to enter, fearful of her happiness. She had been quite surprised to see him. He had wanted to get out, escape, but something made him linger ... she talked him into having a cup of coffee, she was so energetic and nervous and happy that he dared not contradict her; so they sat in the kitchen and she told him.

"I can't help it, I've fallen in love. I didn't want it to happen," she said.

He felt faint, though he had guessed her secret. He could not speak.

"Please don't hate me, what can I do?" she said. Her breath was rapid and sweet. In her glowing health, in the daring of her body and face, she had strength that he no longer had–she had his name, she had everything in their marriage and something secret beside, something that went beyond all that he could offer her. She had gone beyond him, outlived him.

"What do you want to do?" he had asked, suddenly afraid. "I have to marry him. Can't I–can't we–? Is it too awful? You don't want me now anyway, do you, after this?–won't you want to divorce me?"

"Is that what you want?"

"I don't know what I want. Please don't hate me. Yes, I want to marry him, I can't do anything about my feelings. I can't help myself."

He had sat staring toward her, appalled and numb. She did not seem familiar to him. Her rapid, fluttery voice–her nervous hands, lighting a cigarette–her flushed cheeks and brilliant eyes that indicated how beautiful she was, elsewhere, made beautiful by someone else's existence–these things were a shock to him, the features of a stranger. She was a woman he could never win. Drawn to her, at a party, he might engage her in ordinary conversation for a few minutes and get her to smile that charming smile, but he could never hold her.

"Who is it?" he said.

"I don't want to tell you yet. Please. Can you understand?" "Is he married? Do I know him?"

"Yes, you know him, very well, and he's married–yes–he has children–I'm sorry–I don't know how it happened but we can't change anything, we've waited and thought about this for almost a year but there's nothing we can do, we love each other, I can't explain except by coming back again and again to that–."

"You're in love, I understand. I think I understand," he said slowly.

"Do you hate me?"

"No."<

"But what–what do you feel? What do you feel?" And she stared at him as if really seeing him for the first time, alarmed at his silence.

"I don't feel anything," he said. What was strange was that her disclosure seemed more than personal, more than private–it was like a door suddenly opening to show him the unsettled landscape of the world, something beyond his control and indifferent to him, knowing no laws, opaque and mysterious and terrifying.

Two days later, on a Wednesday afternoon, he had had his "accident."

Now he spoke to her gravely of parking downtown, of being cautious. "You know how people in trouble are ignored," he said, drawing upon his own trouble to bully her into submission, into a look of guilt. Dressed for Saturday shopping, long-legged and lively, she had been cowed by something dark in his eye and he wondered if she was recalling that conversation, that unforgotten conversation, and whether she knew that he remembered everything or whether she knew nothing, absolutely innocent in her own honesty. She would never bring the subject up again, he felt sure. He was safe in her kindliness. But she was so frank and honest, herself. In conversations with friends she would say But I myself, I have to fight prejudice in myself or she would say, though such a remark was unpleasant, I really don't agree with you.... David, made complex and subtle by his years of training, never committed himself clearly to one side or another, reluctant to take a stand and not sure of the wisdom of taking a stand: why?

He took some of her packages from her and they went into the house, into the kitchen. Eunice was there, drinking a glass of milk. Elaine complained about Eunice's untidy room, and about the lateness of the hour, and with her deft quick fingers she brushed strands of hair back out of her eyes. "Did anyone call or stop by?" she asked. David had heard the telephone ring, that was true, but hadn't had the energy to answer it. So he told her only, "Yes, somebody stopped by, just a girl interviewer for a marketing survey. She asked me various questions like 'Do you have an automatic can opener?'"

"And what did you answer?" Elaine said, teasing.

"I said yes."

She laughed and went to the sink, where the automatic can opener was fastened to the wall. "Yes, here it is, you remembered–but we never use it. It's broken."

"I remembered it very clearly," he said with a fake, strained smile.

"And in this drawer," she said, opening a drawer, "we have a collection of can openers–this gadget here, which is broken, and this one here, which I bought only the other week, and this old-fashioned thing–here–and even this grimy bottle opener, the handiest of all for opening bottles." She showed him a small rusted bottle opener, three or four inches long. He could remember none of these things but their shapes intrigued him. Just such things–bottle and can openers of all makes, simple and ingenious, broken, rusted, new, guaranteed, unused, hand-run, or automatic–such things were the property of homeowners up and down the block, everywhere in this lovely green neighborhood, everywhere in the country. Their kitchen junk drawer itself, cluttered with such innocent objects, was American and proved that he was a normal American because he owned it.

"I'm glad you remembered," Elaine said. 

She had come home safely, she had returned. Safe from downtown, safe from the expressway and its dangers–home to him and her daughter, home to keep them safe. He felt an enlargement of his numbness, suddenly, to think of her lost to him. It was like a sack of compressed, cold air, this numbness, in a space just beneath his heart. It was perhaps the space in which his soul had resided, when he had had a soul.

IV

So now they have assassination flags for sale, special flags," their friend Taylor was saying. "They can be lowered on a string to half-mast, that’s their unique value. I saw them for sale in the discount drugstore." Taylor had an ironic, helpless smirk, his intellectual smirk; he used it when talking about ironic and helpless things, like the assassinations of American leaders or the fate of the middle class. He himself was in real estate, a business his father had left him, and he was watching it dwindle in his grasp, shrink unaccountably in spite of his superior brains and good looks. His wife, maternal and tolerant, watched him with her usual smile; she was a solid woman, as Elaine liked to say in lackluster defense of her, a sensible woman and just the wife for Taylor. Withdrawn slightly, David listened to everything that was said. He made an attempt to listen to things that were not said, but he could not decipher them. Taylor and Brenda MacIntyre were old friends of theirs, going back a decade to simpler and warmer times, when David had been on the way up and Taylor not yet on the way down. Between Elaine and Brenda there was a kind of friendship, mysterious like the friendships of all women with women–what had they in common, Brenda with her bland smile, Elaine with her alert, quizzical look?

"Civilization is coming to an end, maybe," Elaine said. "People can't always be wrong about predicting the end. There have been final generations, the very end of epochs, and there must have been–there must be–individuals who are the last survivors of their worlds–isn't that plausible?" They laughed at her seriousness, but she did not release them. She fixed Taylor with an accusing look so that David wondered, for an instant, whether he was the one-then he rejected this thought, Taylor was too obvious-and said, "No one wants to think about the end. People want to talk about it, for conversation. But no one is prepared for a real ending because they haven't done anything yet, they're still Waiting….”<

"Waiting for what?" Brenda said.

"To live. To wake up. They can't admit that their lives are coming to an end when they haven't yet lived."

Though the living room was large they were sitting close together. Elaine's manner was slightly aggressive, argumentative, intimate, her long legs tucked under her, strangely feminine and persistent at the same time; she looked younger than thirty-four. David understood that he was not talking enough. He had to be intimate with these people, he had to draw them all together, be in harmony with them. His friends–and he was willing to call them friends, and grateful for their existence–would speak of him the next day, to other friends, saying David still isn't well; I worry about him. He finished his drink. Did he drink too much, or not enough? Would they wonder why he wasn't drinking as much as he had previously, the old, lively, cuckolded David, or would they wonder why he was drinking so much? He thought idly of people gossiping about him, secretaries at his office, his partners, his partners' wives, his friends-with nothing better to do than to gossip about him, marveling at the seams in his personality, glued together, patched up, a stand-in for the other David and not convincing. Now Brenda and Taylor were talking heatedly. Brenda was talking and Taylor was trying to wrench the conversation away from her.br> 
"No, please, let me tell Elaine," Brenda was saying, "she has a daughter herself and she knows–."

"Why the hell are you bringing this up?”

"Elaine and David can give us advice. I don't care who knows. I don't have secrets." Brenda leaned forward to entrust her secret to Elaine, who would certainly run out and tell everyone the next morning...."It's Judy. She got caught shop-lifting. I had to go down to the store, Steinboch's, and talk with the manager. How do you like that?–fif teen years old and she has an allowance, and she goes out and steals."

"What did she steal?" Elaine asked.

"It doesn't matter what she stole," Taylor said.

"She took some stockings. But only because they were out on the counter, she would have taken anything. She told me," Brenda said. The hour was late. She had a slightly self-righteous, smug, drunken smile; David wondered suddenly if perhaps he had never seen this woman before, really. It might be that they were all strangers. Watching her, alarmed at her admission of so private a secret, he wondered also whether he ought to escape. Before it was too late and too many secrets were told, so that the four of them would be bound together for eternity....

"I'm very sorry to hear that," Elaine said.

"Yes, that's ... that's bad news," David said.

"Well, it's happening. Not just Judy. It's happening all over and nobody knows what to do."

"What did you do?" Elaine asked.

"I told you, nobody knows what to do. I talked to her. She said she wouldn't do it again, that's what she said. I chose to believe her, so did Taylor. What else can you do?"

"With Eunice something different came up," Elaine said, and David dreaded hearing what might come next–he did not remember anything coming up about her, any trouble. "She went to a birthday party for a friend of hers, and about ten other girls were invited. She left her purse with her coat, upstairs in the girl's bedroom. Then, when she went to go home, she found that someone had taken her money–took the money out of her billfold. But she was afraid to say anything to the girl or her mother, because–because she was afraid–."

"Of what?" said Taylor.

"Of never being asked back again, I think."

"What? Really?"

"Or afraid of losing her friends. Afraid of complaining at all, making any fuss," Elaine said. She looked so stricken, herself, ashamed of her daughter and weary over such daughterly weaknesses, that Taylor reached over to stroke her hand. In this instant David was reminded of his wife's lover, her secret, second husband, a more satisfying and demanding man than David himself.

"Well–don't forget when you were that age," Brenda said.

Taylor brought Elaine's hand up to his lips and kissed it. "You're so demanding. It's you who demand too much of people, you," he said fondly.

David saw them through a kind of mist, these people in a photograph, people who had had a hand in his fate. Through them he might know himself. But the way into knowing himself had something to do also with the coming-together of two cars, of tons of steel, the pulsating pain of twenty minutes' wait on the shoulder of an expressway and an hour's wait in the emergency ward of a noisy hospital–it had too much to do with knowing his daughter and her precocious failure, her cowardice that was his own cowardice, inherited. He thought of his wife in the kitchen, weeks ago, through the excitement of her words reliving an exquisite passion he could never again evoke in her. He pressed his hands against his forehead, baffled by the mystery of personality. Who were these people? Who was this woman, that she had come to mean so much to him? It was not just his own soul that was opaque, lost, but the souls of people he loved and had believed he knew, had trusted.... And, beyond them, the shadowy souls of people known to him only over the television screen or in newspaper photographs, the famous and notorious, monumental figures, shadowy nubs of being as mysterious to him as his own past.

"I read in a magazine about these teenage clubs in, where was it, Sacramento," Brenda said in a shocked, hushed voice, as if teenagers might be listening, "and my God you wouldn't believe–."

David got up. With a gesture he indicated that he was going to refill his drink. "Here, take mine," Taylor said. David took it and went out to the kitchen, a partly familiar room, safe. He sat down. Then, nervous, he got up and walked along the very clean, clean counter, running his knuckles along it. He wondered in a daze who he was and to whose country he had come. It was true that he was married–there was a certificate to prove it-and he did own this house, he had $10,000 yet to pay on the mortgage–and he had contributed toward bringing another person into the world, though he hadn't the slightest knowledge of what that meant–and so–and so it was certain that he had a specific identity. But the identity was empty, numb. His body was paralyzed as if by a dentist's giant needle, expelling forgetfulness and silence into his spine.

He studied the spices in Elaine's spice rack. For a while she had taken cooking lessons–she'd been domestic for years, then switched to outward, intellectual, humanistic interests like integration and voting reform–and she had collected a number of spices, all in identical green jars, parsley, oregano, clove, ginger, sweet basil, nutmeg, even white pepper, even saffron. Inside his body he felt something straining to open itself, to spread its wings. Its muscles ached for freedom. He leaned against the counter and gripped his skull. He was going mad. The slowness of his bones was driving him mad. Kennedy had been assassinated just the other day, the second Kennedy, shot in the back of the skull and killed, and David's own life made no more sense than that death. Yet he had the glancing notion that he might have pulled the trigger, himself, granted a certain immunity. Granted safety, invisibility....

Out on the counter, lying on the clean-wiped counter, was the bottle opener Elaine had held up to him that afternoon, as if showing him something important. He picked it up. Bottle caps were scattered around it, from bottles of bitter lemon. This bottle opener was the cheapest kind, sold for a nickel or given away for advertising purposes…it had rusted and only part of its legend was readable: Hamm' s–from the land of sky blue waters. The opener was very sharp at one point; David tested it on his thumb. Very sharp. It should have been enough to wake him. He pressed the point against his wrist, thinking. For all of his life he had been certain of himself, beginning with his name; nothing had escaped him. And yet everything had escaped him. He had felt certain emotions–love and hate–and had been swept along in violence by these emotions, purified by them like his wife Elaine, justified by them as the assassin of Kennedy and the assassins of other men are justified by emotions. But it had all been without meaning. The emotions faded, the events could not be remembered–and where, in such a puzzle, was a fixed point? He stared at the dingy little bottle opener and wondered if so meager an object might have a soul of its own, a center of gravity firmly fixed and measurable.

"What's wrong? What are you doing?"

Elaine stood staring at him. She was nervous, her voice uneasy. He saw that her clear, handsome brow was damp with droplets of worry–from the tense discussion of daughters or worry over this strange husband? She was looking at the can opener in his hand. Perhaps she thought he was holding it as a weapon, imagining it as a weapon?–perhaps he was contemplating a sudden surprise for her, raking the point down across the skin of her cheek?

He shivered, thinking of that.

"What are you doing out here? I've been waiting for you to come back–I didn't think you felt well–."

She put her hand on his arm.

Again he thought of the can opener, its sharp little point....

"Please, please don't be sick," she said. She looked into his face. For a moment he remained rigid, secretive in thought. Then he pressed his hands against his forehead.

"You won't leave me?" he said.

"No."

"You'll never leave me?" He was sweating.

She put her arms around him. "I'll never leave you. Please don't think of it." She spoke gently and yet with an air of certainty, as if making a public vow, a vow of commitment and energy. He was weak with relief, but he felt no shame, nothing. Emotions faded. Events could not be remembered. Perhaps his wife had not committed adultery, perhaps he had imagined everything? He was still a convalescent and people must treat him with gentleness.