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planning to make your public statement on your flight.” She is gravely serious.
    “Oh, no,” I tell her. “That would be crazy.”

Five
    I miss Chloe,” says Hector out of the blue. He is staring at her statue.
    “No, you don’t. You couldn’t stand her. And she felt the same way about you.”
    “She adored me,” he says with a straight face, which is all he has. “And I felt very warmly toward her.”
    I make a few more notes for the Chautauqua lecture, then head for the dock again to adjust the winches. The assembly is nearly complete. I am glad I chose the Da Vinci model. Sir Ralph’s plans also provided schematics for the Bellifortis, the Stirling, and the War Wolf, whose name I found darkly appealing. But in the end I selected the Da Vinci because it looked so clean, so purposeful in the pictures, and even more so as it has come together under the tarp.
    “Have it your way,” I tell Hector. It is 11:09. Tick tock, ticktock . He follows a few paces behind me. An outsider observing us would conclude that we represented the heartwarming tableau of man and his best and most loyal friend.
    “The thing about Chloe,” he goes on, emboldened by the fact that I want to drop the topic, “was that she lived in the world, she made plans, she talked to everybody. With Chloe, we had a little life around here.”
    “A little too much for my taste.”
    “So why did you marry her?”
    “Because she had a lovely soul. Still does.”
    “Then why did she marry you ?”
    “She mistook the occasional normalities in my fiction for the life I preferred.” But why am I spilling all this to Cujo? “I have an idea!” I tell him. “Why don’t you revert to type and dig up a bone or something? Or maybe create a meal out of your own vomit?”
    “You’re a misanthrope,” he says. “You hate everyone.”
    In fact, I am not a misanthrope, though I do not bother to protest the characterization. I like certain, select individuals. I even have a few friends distributed across America and Europe, two in Africa, and one in Asia Minor, with whom I exchange greetings once every three or four years, which is how we remain friends. I bear no one ill will, except Lapham. I am perfectly content to watch others go happily about their business, unless one of those others is Lapham. I also was perfectly content to see my family—Chloe and the children—go happily about their business in the great wide world. It did not matter that what seemed great and wide to them was alien territory to me.
    But watching those others, my family included, always felt to me like viewing a painting on a museum wall—one of those 1890s New England winter scenes, in which boys and girls skate on a glassy pond and their parents, swathed in colorful scarves, haul sleds through the thick snow. I was entranced by such paintings, pleased to see any segment of the race engaged in civilized play; I wished the participants well. And when it came to my own family, I wished them well too. I did my best to ensure their well-being. I just never wanted to be part of the picture.
    Hector paws the planks on the dock. He has mistaken my silence for assent. “Who but a misanthrope would live like this?”
    “What’s wrong with the way I live?” I ask a dog.
    “What’s wrong?” he says. “Where to begin? How many people watch Murder She Wrote reruns all day long? The show was bad enough the first time around. Now you watch the repeats, and the repeats of the repeats.”
    “Jessica Fletcher is an agent of justice. That is why I watch it.”
    “And why Junior Gilliam, whoever he may be?”
    “Because he could turn a double play better than anyone in baseball. His pivot was poetry— good poetry. Not that you would appreciate such a thing.”
    “And why Blossom Dearie?”
    “Because she sings on key, not that you…” I give him the first few bars of one of her blues standards: “Is you is or is you ain’t my baby?”
    “You live too much in the