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prepared
     for three. When he tells him, Jose does not have the courtesy to look surprised. He says
     to him the table has already been set.
    H IS FATHER BEDS the girl every night for
     the next three weeks. A native brings her two trunks. The Wallaces themselves do not
     appear. His father has made some arrangement—clearly his father has made some
     arrangement. It is true the girl has no reputation to lose and it is also true the
     situation does not necessarily look so bad. She is engaged to Tom. She has a place on
     the farm while she recovers her health and then there is the difficulty of adjusting to
     the life in the valley.
    Which is different. Different to what she knows and not so different after
     all. Because she has already found her way. She is a girl who lands on her feet.
    Tom walks the house and does his best to avoid her. Naturally he runs into
     her at every turn. She wanders the halls ina state of growing
     undress. A hair ribbon that has come undone, a strap that has fallen loose. It gets
     worse—much worse, until she is walking the halls, dragging herself from room to
     room, draping herself on the chairs and settees in nothing more than the excuse of a
     dressing gown. Sometimes not even that. Sometimes nothing more than a chemise and Tom
     swears it is worse than if she had been naked.
    She is like a bitch in heat. The same smell comes off the animals during
     mating season. Then they run across the land, eyes rolling back in their heads, sick and
     made foul with desire. They have to lock the dogs away when they are like this. There is
     nothing else for it. They should do the same to the girl only it is too late and the
     fever has already set in. Into all of them, into the walls of the house.
    Soon, within a matter of days, she finds her way into his mother’s
     wardrobe. Silk dresses and fur wraps and clothes, clothes far more costly than those she
     arrived in. Now every evening she dresses for dinner. She puts on a chiffon frock, she
     draws the tasseled belt tight. The colors are rich and the fabrics delicate and they are
     cut in the complicated way that means quality. Tom has an eye for such things. Generally
     useless but now put into practice.
    He scans her every night and soon he notices that there are jewels, there
     are diamonds and emeralds, hanging from her slender wrist and neck, tucked up into her
     hair. She arrives with tortoiseshell clips and sapphire rings, she is practically
     glittering when she comes down to dinner, a shiny, ghostly apparition in his
     mother’s clothes. There are clear differencesbetween the two
     women. Nonetheless, Tom sees his father’s gaze clamp onto her.
    Now his father walks her to the table each night. She sits between Tom and
     his father, Tom at one end of the table, his father at the other, and the girl sitting
     between them. She will take Tom’s place. In no time she will be sitting across
     from the old man and presiding over the table. With her newfound airs and graces.
     Already she is playing the lady of the house and is surprisingly good at it.
    Every night he walks the halls and there is a nightmare of sounds
     emanating from his father’s bedroom. Sickly moans and thumps in the night.
     Suckling and animal bellowing. The stuff of nightmares, which he remembers from
     childhood. He stands outside his father’s door. He lowers his head and listens.
     The noise is loud, the house and all the rooms are full with things, bureaus and sofas
     and carpets, but the sound travels just like the building is hollow.
    He does not know how he will face the girl in the morning and still he
     does. Every morning she looks smug and suddenly well fed. Stuffed—that is one way
     of putting it. He understands some things about the situation. That he was marked for
     the fool from the start. That this was always part of the plan. That they are right to
     view him with contempt. No doubt they are laughing at him now, from the dampness of
     their