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the word 'psychiatrist' frightens everybody who isn't rich, the woman was saying—you should see some kind of specialist if you're so miserable."
    "A Weltschmerz specialist." Jack turns and smiles at her. Though she too is over sixty—sixty-one to his sixty-three— her face is wrinkle-free; what in a lean woman would be deep creases are on her round face lightly etched, smoothed to a girlish delicacy by tiie fat keeping her skin taut. "No thanks, honey," he says. "I dish out wisdom all day, I have no tolerance for absorbing it myself. Too many antibodies."
    He has found over the years that, fended off by him on one topic, she will, rather than lose his attention entirely, quickly resort to another. "Speaking of antibodies, Herm was saying on the phone yesterday—this is in strict confidence, Jack, even I shouldn't know, promise you won't tell anybody—"
    "I promise."
    "—she tells me these things because she has to vent and I'm out of the loop that's down there—she said that her boss is about to elevate the terror-threat level for this area from yellow to orange. I thought it might be on the radio, but it wasn't. What do you think it means?"
    Hermione's boss is the Secretary of Homeland Security, a born-again right-wing stooge with some Kraut name like Haffenreffer, down in Washington. "It means tbey want us to feel they're not just sitting on our tax dollars. They want us to feel they have a handle on this thing. But they don't."
    "Is that what you're worrying about, when you worry?"
    "No, dear. It's the last thing on my mind, to be honest. Bring 'em on. I was thinking, looking out the window, this whole neighborhood could do with a good bomb."
    "Oh, Jack, you shouldn't even joke about it, those poor young men up there on the top stories, calling their wives on cell phones to tell them they loved them."
    "I know, I know. I shouldn't even joke."
    "Markie keeps saying we should move out to be closer to him in Albuquerque."
    "He says it, honey, but he doesn't mean it. Us moving closer is die last thing he wants." Fearing that his enunciating this trutb might have hurt the boy's mother, he jokes, "I don't know why diat is. We never beat him or locked him in a closet."
    "They would never bomb the desert," BetJi goes on, arguing as if they are a few debating points away from going to Albuquerque.
    "That's right: they, as you call them, love the desert."
    She takes enough offense at his sarcasm to get off his case, he observes with mingled relief and regret. She manages an old-fashioned haughty toss of her head and says, "It must be
    wonderful, to be so unconcerned about what worries everybody else," and turns back to the bedroom to make the bed and, on the same scale of pillowy exertion, to get herself dressed for her day at the library.
    What have I done, he asks himself, to deserve such fidelity, such wifely trust? He is disappointed, slightly, that she hadn't disputed his rude claim that their son, a thriving ophthalmologist with three dear sun-kissed, dutifully bespectacled children and a bottle-blonde, pure Jewish, superficially friendly but basically standoffish wife from Short Hills, doesn't want his parents nearby. He and Beth have their myths between them, and one is that Mark loves them as much as they—helplessly, their nest holding only one egg— love him. In fact, Jack Levy wouldn't mind calling it quits around here; after a lifetime of an old-time industrial burg dying on its feet and turning into a Third World jungle, a shift to the Sun Belt might do him good. Beth, too. Last winter had been a brute in the Middle Atlantic region, and there are still, in the constant shadow between some of the neighborhood's close-packed houses, little humps of snow black with dirt.
    At Central High, his guidance counselor's room is one of the smallest—a former long supply closet whose gray metal storage shelves remain, supporting a scattering of college catalogues, telephone directories, handbooks of psychology, and