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lately grown soft and potted. What women find attractive is one of the mysteries of the universe. For a moment I wanted to take her and possess her roughly, but the impulse quickly passed, short-circuited by fatigue. She was meanwhile continuing to stare at me quietly. Probably, given my lack of initiative, she was thinking of giving up on the evening. Or maybe she was itching for the alternate satisfaction of a cigarette. She’d only recently stopped smoking, and the truth was that in a certain real way, though I didn’t smoke myself, I missed those cigarettes of hers almost as much as I imagined she did. Not for the moon smell of ash on her breath, but for that way in which the cigarette seemedto hold out hope that everything wasn’t completely tucked in and tidy-nice in our lives; that the world as it spun in the orbital belt of days around our house wasn’t as entirely stable and stain free as it seemed and might, in the end, still surprise us. I needed that ventilating ounce of transgression. I missed it.
    With a deep breath, I moved toward her, willing myself hard.
    She closed her eyes and spread her legs.
    I pressed my dry lips on hers, and soon after, entered her from a million miles away. High over my body, behind the shut eyes of the laboring sexual animal, my mind quickly filled with a lovely image of fertile green grass, and above this grass, a flung baseball that seemed to hang for a moment in the air, plump and fruity, before accelerating into my mitt with an explosive thump! In my mind’s eye my father, a young man, was tossing the ball with me. He was lithe and happy, the hair was thick on his head, he was in the vibrant spring of his life, and I was still so small a child as to be frankly amazed by the physical facts of the backyard universe: the green fountain of the weeping willow tree, the smell of the summer air, and the way the boatlike prow of the roof of our house steadily, silently interrupted the going by of the sky.
    “Are you going to come, darling?” my wife asked quietly.
    With a racking sigh, I loosed a small burning arrow from the center of my body, a muscled entreaty to life to give something back. Sometimes, when she was in a good mood, Lucy went along at the moment of my climax, participating with subtle inner orchestrations that allowed me a long, delicious flight into the vaulted recesses of herbody. But tonight, my mind elsewhere, I had the distinct sense of an impulse balked and pinching upward from the root of my sex. The feeling was wordless, but no less specific for that. Silently disappointed, I gave her a peck on the cheek, then withdrew from her and went to wash up. My cramped orgasm was already sending tingling sad antlers through my nervous system, and promising a night of bad sleep ahead. When I came back from the bathroom, Lucy had returned to her previous position of lying on her back with empty eyes, staring at nothing in particular. The only difference was that she was now covered up to the chin with a sheet and there was a downward sadness in the lines around her mouth. Basic human gallantry dictated that so soon after lovemaking, inquiries be made. I was clearing my throat reluctantly to ask her what was wrong when she beat me to it.
    In a fake-casual voice, staring at a spot in space two inches over my left ear, she said that Rob’s sister, Belinda Castor, had called and left a message asking that I call her back. Then, in an eloquent slither of sheets, my wife, still bearing within her the seeds of my desire to outrun death and stamp my face on the body of love, rolled over away from me, and all the way to the other side of the world.

Chapter 6
    W E’D GROWN UP TOGETHER, ME AND THE Castor kids. It was hard to explain to outsiders, but we were a troop of three, and we moved with the synchronized thought processes of dolphins, or geese. If there was a fort to build, Rob assigned the roles and Belinda and I, a year apart, sprang into action. When we leafed through