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Ithaca as Mrs. Trevor Boone.
    Now, nineteen years later, the Boone House was hers. Old Mrs. Boone’s high-ceilinged rooms, once filled with overstuffed mahogany furniture and oil portraits of dead ancestors, were filled with Eadie’s giant fertility goddesses. She liked to look around the house and see them scattered like the monoliths of Easter Island. They made her feel powerful. They reminded her she was a woman who could do anything she set her mind to.
    In the street below, the tour bus chugged away with its cargo of enthralled tourists. Eadie lay back on her pillow and yawned and stretched and looked at the clock. Denton took her stretching as an invitation, but she rolled away from him and said, “You need to get going. It’s almost nine o’clock.” She was supposed to meet Lavonne Zibolsky for lunch to discuss the damn firm party that no one wanted to attend, much less plan. If it weren’t for the fact that Lavonne was one of her best friends, Eadie wouldn’t have agreed to help. Eadie wasn’t even going to the party now that Trevor and his pubescent legal secretary would both be there. Eadie was quiet for a moment, considering this. The clock ticked steadily. A damp breeze heavy with the scent of wood smoke blew through the room. She rolled over and faced Denton again. “What are you doing next Saturday night?” she said.
    He reached his hand out to cup her breast but she pushed it away. “I don’t know,” he said, grinning. “I’ll have to check my appointment book.”
    She imagined the shocked expressions of the crowd as she entered the party. She imagined the drama of the moment. She imagined Trevor and Tonya, stunned and running for cover. Eadie smiled at this pleasant vision. “You’re going to a party,” she told Denton, having just decided. “Put it on your calendar or in your book or whatever the hell you have to do. You’re going.”
    Denton put his arm under his head and stared intently at the huge, headless torso that stood in front of the opened window. “Just what exactly is that thing?” he asked, frowning. It was Eadie’s newest piece. She was rather proud of it.
    “You tell me,” she said, looking fondly at the goddess. Having decided to crash her husband’s firm’s party, Eadie could relax now. She had a plan. She only wondered why she hadn’t thought of it before. “What is it?” she said, pinching Denton’s thick bicep. Each sculpture was unique and yet each carried the same features; huge pendulous breasts, bulging bellies, headless torsos.
    “Well, I’m not sure.” Denton’s handsome brow wrinkled. He stuck his lower lip out and squinted his eyes slightly. He had the slack, perplexed look of a small boy asked to solve a complex algebraic problem in his head. “I’m not sure but it makes me feel sad.”
    “Sad?” Eadie frowned and sat up on her elbow. Anyone else lying beside Denton in bed would have thought him adorable, but Eadie felt nothing but a growing sense of irritation with his lack of intelligence and artistic vision. “Why in the world would it make you feel sad?”
    “I don’t know.” He sat up in bed and wrapped his arms around his knees, sucking his lower lip, his eyes narrowly following the curves of the goddess. He chewed his bottom lip. He tilted his head. “It looks kind of like a sad walrus or a seal,” he said finally. “Like one of those seals you see in
National Geographic Magazine.
The ones that lie abandoned on the ice waiting for some Eskimo to come and beat them to death with a club.”
    Eadie stared at his silly handsome face. She felt as if someone had driven an ice pick into her chest. Her breath seeped out of her punctured lungs and collected in her throat like poison gas. She wondered at the possibility of sustaining a lasting relationship with a stupid person. She wondered if Trevor would be able to do it.
    “I think it’s a seal,” Denton repeated, grinning.
    “Well, I guess that’s why you’re not paid to