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    The walk to Alicia’s apartment is sublime. It’s cool this afternoon and perhaps this means that fall is coming sooner rather than later. I hate thoughts like that. Let fall come when it will. Her house is perched atop a hill, is covered in purple flowers and has a few stone gargoyles shooting out from the roof. Little stones lodge between my toes as I walk up her path, making my entrance less elegant than I had wanted it to be. This is when I feel old, when in bending down to shake out my shoes, I tremble and need to hold on to the side of the front door. Alicia watches this without contempt, I think, and I quickly recover my balance, in all senses.
    Paintings and drawings hang on most of the walls, though the room we sit in, a screened porch, is underdecorated, bare but for the two chairs and small round table on which is set a blue teapot, white cups and saucers, and pastries. Honeyed Greek dainties that eat into the enamel of one’s teeth. The view down the hill to the harbor is magnificent and Alicia gazes at it with the look of someone who has seen this, and it, all before. She owns the view, not because it’s hers—one doesn’t own views—but because she has incorporated it into her being. Today, because of something she’s done with her hair, I think, she reminds me of Maria Callas, were Callas an American of German and Polish descent, not Greek. Alicia’s mother was born and raised in the Polish countryside; and part of Alicia’s inheritance is a broad jaw, prominent nose, and square shoulders. She has always been a good friend to me, though there is a way in which she seems not to need anyone.
    Perhaps this is because there is a Supreme Being for Alicia. She believes in God, but I’m not sure what kind of God, and all around her apartment are religious symbols from the major faiths, and probably from some of the minor ones, too. I can only think, because I think in terms of family and tradition, that Alicia must have had an early religious education from which she turned away—it is hard for me to believe her faith wouldn’t have been shaken at some time—and to which she returned with renewed fervor after a terrible event. The loss of the child I’ve already fantasized for her, the acceptance of great failure on her part, the death of a lover, the loss of her singing voice—something must have made her turn again to God. God is a repellent idea to me, and were Alicia not so spiritually ambiguous in effect, whatever her beliefs, I would not be so fond of her. I would not even take tea with her. But she is and I do, with pleasure.
    She pours us tea, while asking the usual questions. How’s the work going? She loves my title, Household Gods, for reasons already given. But I’m sure she’d be disappointed or confused by the project were she to read it. No one ever has. The crime books I write go out under another name, and no one here reads them, I’m fairly certain. Alicia and Roger don’t consider it to be real writing, which bothers me but not very much since I too depreciate it. I am more than ambivalent about what I produce under the name Norman East. Now I’m not even sure why I chose that name. It may have had something to do with
East Lynne
or summers at Northeast Harbor, in Maine. In truth, I’ve forgotten.
    Alicia is all in white—white Indian shirt, white duck trousers, which billow about her, and white espadrilles. There’s a white cotton scarf around her throat and probably she is hiding her neck, which may be crepey, showing more years than her face, which is remarkable for its taut skin. But the scarf is tied loosely so that she may be wearing it solely for decoration, not to disguise her age. Alicia doesn’t strike one as a woman who would hide anything in an obvious way, simply not to be a cliché, simply not to appear bourgeois, not to seem to care about what ideally oughtn’t be a concern to an intelligent, rational person. But I always think it is the irrational