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boys talked about her odor. The smell of sour milk or of meat grease poorly doused with Chanel.
    Marvin believed it might be drugs but didn’t say that to anyone; instead he turned his attention to someone in the accounting department. Only Madelaine asked and, receiving a vacant stare, didn’t ask again for over two months until she cajoled Nancy to lunch at a new restaurant full of aquariums and gorgeous waiters in tight Italian pants that zipped up the side.
    â€œWhat is wrong? What’s happened? Are you ill? You had a mammogram last month… is that it? Nancy, can I help? Everyone’s worried sick about you.”
    And on and on until she had stopped, her face flushed, her eyes full of tears. Real tears for me, Nancy thought, and patted Madelaine’s hand and told her everything would be fine soon. Only a temporary personal problem. “It’s my mother… she’s terribly sick,” she told her. And added the threat of cancer since Madelaine had mentioned the mammogram.
    And later in one of the rooms, her rumpled suit collecting cat hair, chenille threads, the odor of pork sausage and eggs for supper, she was sorry for lying, for sacrificing her mother, and wondered what if it were true.
    But she breathed in the age, was, to her mind, older than her mother, than the man she slept next to every night. Once he had reached for her, his small hand running up her thigh. But she had brushed him away and felt sincere and elevated by her dismissal. “Maybe tomorrow night,” she whispered into his deaf ear. “Huh?” “Not now, later,” she spoke up, her voice muffled by carpet, drapes, afghans.
    She still did well at selling houses. She’s lost almost all of her beauty, the newer man said. The newest woman had never seen it. “But not her touch; no, she’s still got that magic touch.”
    I’m learning everything, she thought. About it all. And she took on the older clients, men who wanted to rub up against her in narrow doorways in empty office buildings. Their wives in other cities. And she stayed still for them, her eyes averted, until they both passed into long corridors scuffed by mailing carts.
    By now she had practically emptied her house. There were a few clothes, all the photographs, the answering machine all lighted up, the tape crammed with voices and whining beeps.
    She never altered a single thing at Mr. Warrant’s. She tucked her underwear in the drawer below his, she drank disgustingly thick whole milk. She delighted in the filtered light through the blinds. She roared her car past the destroyed mills; it rocketed over the uneven tracks.
    Until a Saturday morning when she brought the heavy pistol from the drawer and sat on the bed. Their bed, she said to herself. It was like a movie pistol, the barrel long and octagonal. She counted its sides more than once.
    She recollected a photograph whose absence or perhaps presence somewhere else—at her mother’s, not in albums but in shoeless boxes?—worried her. It wasn’t her father but a friend of his in uniform wearing a pistol in a waxy brown scabbard. “A fellow officer,” she heard him say. His voice was a young man’s voice in her ears.
    She believed it was unloaded, thought she’d seen the cartridges in a drawer or in a jar in some other room. But she couldn’t be sure and so quickly brought the barrel up to her lips and opened wide. “Ouch, your teeth!” the German had shouted. And a joke, long ago though only in high school, wasn’t it? About the desire for fold-back teeth in a woman. This thickness on her tongue and mouth like lava, or an animal burrowing in the throat.
    She sucked the metal of it. All greasy and shedlike. Garages and body shops. The litter of unsalable things.
    But you know she didn’t bleed until almost sixty hours later. It was a little before two in the morning when she sat up and said “Oh Jesus”