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but always honking an ooga-ooga horn so they’d know it wasn’t for real.
    Dr. Boemer went on and on, his voice like a cold engine trying to start. The hour was up and Mr. Sparrow was standing with his hand on the doorknob and Dr. Boemer could not stop telling about yet one more interesting OCD case. Being from California, frozen pump handles had no reality for him, but obsessive treadmill running did, and obsessive copyediting and grammar correcting, solitaire playing, throat clearing, belly itching, Web surfing, folk dancing, digital photographing, pants adjusting, geyser gazing, apologizing. He had a client named Mrs. Sanderson who could not speak a simple sentence without prefacing it with a “I’m so sorry but—” or “Begging your pardon—.” Mr. Sparrow said, “Excuse me but I’m fairly certain that it’s a violation of medical ethics to disclose these details,” and Dr. Boemer went on telling about OCDs he had known, as Mr. Sparrow left the office and stood at the elevator (“There was this one guy I recall who hummed to himself. Boy that was a case. We worked on him for almost two years.”) and the elevator doors closed and Mr. Sparrow never went back. But the tongue-on-the-pump-handle fear remained strong.
    Except if he went to Kuhikuhikapapa’u’maumau.

7. An old argument rears its sweet little head once again
     
     
    H e stood under the hot shower listening to Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 6 and, without thinking, pressed his tongue against a pipe, which was hot, and he recoiled and slipped slightly and joggled something in his lower back. Call Nicole the shiatsu therapist , he thought. He put on a pair of chinos and a white shirt and sandals and slipped into the kitchen where Simon had the breakfast made, two poached eggs (slightly runny) on rye toast, OJ, a latte, a sliced pear.
    “Have you decided what time you wish to leave, sir?” Simon said. “All is in high readiness on all fronts. The troops are at attention, awaiting your command. The plane is fueled, the pilots rested, the snacks replenished—”
    “I know, I know. First I have to find out when Mrs. Sparrow wants to go and then we’re all set.”
    Joyce returned from her walk at 10:44 A.M. and said it was brisk and bracing outdoors and good for her ailment. She took off her wire-rim glasses and stood across the table and he was struck with a rush of dumb love for her. The great question of his life (Who do you love?) resolved in this tall broad-shouldered woman with mahogany hair tied back in a copper clip, grinning at him, crinkling her Roman nose, in her cowboy shirt and gray sweatpants, the sheer elegance of her, and he stood up and put his arms around her, tears in his eyes.
    He met her the same year Coyote Corp. got off the ground when he judged a Christmas Gift-Wrap Contest at Marshall Field, which she won in the final round, the globular round, wrapping a basketball in golden paper, and hers had not a wrinkle or crinkle or rip in it. And he sat next to her at the awards luncheon and she talked about her aspirations in theater and he about coyote grass and he proposed a weekend at Mackinac Island and she told him that she would feel terrible guilt about such a thing because during her acting-school days in New York she had, in order to protect her cheap sublet of an apartment on West 86th and Broadway, dressed up in a black silk dress and a mantilla and attended early morning mass, impersonating the old lady from whom she’d sublet and who had died, and after eight months in the role of Mrs. Manicotti she came to feel a true religious devotion she had not felt in her upbringing as a Methodist in Wauwatosa, which caused a rift with her family who were willing to accept agnosticism but Catholicism was another matter. “Whatever we are, we are not Catholic,” said her mother. “We stand. We do not kneel.” But Joyce loved the kneeling part especially at midnight mass on Christmas Eve, when her faith was renewed, if