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was a garment at the other end of the spectrum of female apparel from the hospital gown Amy Bellette had converted into a dress, its color paler and softer than tan and woven of a thick, soft cashmere. The sweater could easily have cost a thousand bucks, and she looked languid wearing it, languid and in enticing repose, as though she were wearing a kimono. She spoke rapidly and quietly, however, as highly complicated people will do, under pressure particularly.
    "Why are you coming to New York?" was Jamie's response to my gaze.
    "I have a friend who's ill here," I said.
    I still had no clear idea what I was doing in their apartment, what it was I wanted. To make things different for myself? Exactly how? To see a Victorian replica of a medieval church out the window while I worked rather than my mammoth maples and uneven stone walls? To see cars
moving when I looked down to the street below rather than the deer and the crows and the wild turkeys that populated my woods?
    "She has a brain tumor," I explained, merely out of a need to talk. To talk to her.
    "Well, we're leaving," Jamie told me, "because I don't wish to be snuffed out in the name of Allah."
    "Isn't that unlikely," I asked, "on West Seventy-first?"
    "This city is at the heart of their pathology. Bin Laden dreams only of evil, and he calls that evil 'New York.'"
    "I wouldn't know," I said. "I don't see any papers. I haven't for years. I picked up a
New York Review
for the ads. I have no idea what's going on."
    "You do know about the election," Billy said.
    "Practically nothing," I said. "People don't talk openly about politics in the hick town where I live, certainly never to an outsider like me. I don't turn on the TV much. No, I don't know a thing."
    "You haven't followed the war?"
    "No."
    "You haven't followed Bush's lies?"
    "No."
    "That's hard to believe," Billy said, "when I think of your books."
    "I've served my tour as exasperated liberal and indignant citizen," I said, seemingly talking to him while once again talking for her, and out of a motive hidden even from myself when I began, out of a yearning whose might I would have hoped had all but withered away. Whatever
the force prying me back open at seventy-one—whatever the force that had sent me down to New York to the urologist in the first place—was quickly regathering its strength in the presence of Jamie Logan wearing her wide-necked thousand-buck cardigan sweater hanging loose over a low-cut camisole. "I don't wish to register an opinion, I don't want to express myself on 'the issues'—I don't even want to know what they are. It no longer suits me to know, and what doesn't suit me, I expunge. That's why I live where I do. That's why you want to live where I do."
    "Why Jamie wants to," Billy said.
    "It's so. I'm scared all the time," she said. "A new vantage point might help." Here she broke off, but not because she had thought better of admitting her fears to someone interested in swapping his safely remote rural residence for a potentially imperiled New York apartment, but because Billy was looking at her as though she were deliberately attempting to provoke him in front of me. If his relationship to her was worshipful, it wasn't exclusively worshipful. This was a marriage, after all, and he could be tried by his lovely wife as well.
    "Are others leaving," I asked her, "because they're frightened of a terrorist attack?"
    "Others have certainly been talking about it," Billy allowed.
    "Some have left," Jamie put in.
    "People you know?" I asked.
    "No," Billy said decisively. "We'll be the first."
    With a smile not overly generous, with what I, transfixed by her (subjugated as quickly as I imagined Billy to have been, though for reasons having to do with finding myself at the other edge of experience from him, at the rim that borders oblivion), took to be the air of a temptress—a tauntingly aloof temptress—Jamie added, "I like to be first."
    "Well, if you want my place," I said,