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telling them. Sex, mortal danger, and sometimes reprieve. For a woman, it is always, don’t you see, Scheherazade. For a man, it may be the Virginian. There he goes, then, striding through the dust of midday toward his confrontation. Here I am, of an evening, wondering whether I can hold his interest yet a while.
    Did I throw the most important thing, by accident, away?
    There was this about the infestation. First, the tent caterpillars, clustered black in grey-white webs at the clefts where trunk and branch, twigs and branches met, loathsome gossamer, sticking to hands, eyebrows, hair, as one tried with a broom or a branch to disengage them, everywhere, filmy, hopeless, travesty of silk. Sprayed them. Blasted them with torches. Must have missed a few or, more likely, they came again, borne by the wind. The crab apple was bare of leaves. The birches dangled leaves half-eaten, covered now with creatures advancing by hump and stretch, never seen to eat, only seen to crawl and rest, leaving devastation, overnight. Then, new buds, new leaves, a second growth. Within days more, the gypsy moths. Little beige egg casings all over the bark of every tree; hanging from stringy webs, at the same time, capsules, lacquered, layered, like some strange dessert, eggs in the cases, caterpillars in the hanging pupae, powdered wings on the night air, so prolific an infestation that we had three simultaneous generations of gypsy moths. They ate nothing, of course, that summer, just left their progeny to sleep and wait, on virtually every surface, on the fence, the firewood, the wisteria, webs, adobe casings, pupae, waiting all winter as we brought in and burned the firewood, sleeping, repellent, waiting, just as we waited, I suppose, for spring.
    And if I had a complaint about the matter, it was only this: that you did not help me with it. Not that you needed to help me, not that I even needed help. In the end, I called the agriculture station, and they told me what to do. But the point is that, at the time, your land, your many acres of trees were being sprayed against the infestation. And when I asked you the name of the people who were spraying your land, so that they might spray my acre and a half as well, you said you could not remember their name. Then, I asked where I ought to look in the yellow pages, and you said, and I’m afraid you said this with some small satisfaction, that it was probably in any event too late to look, because the infestation this year had been so widespread and intense that all professional sprayers would by this time be booked up. Can this be as I am telling it? That was certainly not, at the time, how I perceived it, though I know that at the time I felt dimly, more than dimly but for obscure reasons, sad. And when the builders came to make the addition, the huge addition to your new house, with much digging, and blasting, and refilling, and moving of the earth, and you praised, rather daily praised, the young Irish contractor in charge, and I asked whether he might know someone who, when his job with you was done, could dredge the silt that has accumulated in my pond, you said, No, you thought the job too small for him. Months later, when you praised and praised two brothers, Finns, who had come with their backhoe to dredge for some source of water at your place, and I asked whether they might have or know someone who had a backhoe for my pond, you said you had forgotten their names as well, and they were gone. I thought for a time this was on your part some fastidiousness, some discretion, in not wanting to have the same workmen engaged at your house as at mine. Weeks later, though, you had no hesitation in asking Paul and his son, while they were working on my land and on my time, whether and under what circumstances they might come to cut, and split, and stack your firewood. You had asked me for Paul’s name, and I had given it, but you talked with him at my place. You did not call him at home.
    It may