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accustomed to adulation. Her detractors - and there were many - said she would soon run out of victims. But it didn't work out that way. They kept on coming. It became a kind of masochistic status symbol to be'done' or 'buried' (that quip had started even at Oxford) by Annie Graves.
    Robert phoned her one day at the office and for a moment the name meant nothing to her. 'The
tubab
who gave you a bed one night in the jungle?' he prompted.
    They met for a drink and he was much better looking than Annie remembered. He said he'd been following her byline and seemed to know every piece she'd written better than she did herself. He was an assistant district attorney and working, as much as his job allowed, for the Carter campaign. He was idealistic, bursting with enthusiasm and, most important of all, he made her laugh. He was also straighter and had shorter hair than any man she'd dated in five years.
    While Annie's wardrobe was full of black leather and safety pins, his was all button-down collars and corduroy. When they went out, it was L.L. Bean meets the Sex Pistols. And the unconventionality of this pairing was an unspoken thrill to them both.
    In bed, the zone of their relationship so long postponed and which, if she was honest with herself, she had secretly dreaded, Robert proved surprisingly free of the inhibitions she had expected. Indeed he was far more inventive than most of the drug-slackened coolsters she had lain with since coming to New York. When, weeks later, she remarked on this, Robert ruminated a moment, as she recalled him doing before declaiming details from the Dakar flight directory, and replied in perfect seriousness that he'd always believed sex, like the law, was best practiced with all due diligence.
    They were married the following spring and Grace, their only child, was born three years later.

    Annie had brought work with her on the train not through habit but in the hope that it might distract her. She had it stacked in front of her, the proofs of what she hoped was a seminal State of the Nation piece, commissioned at huge expense from a great and grizzled pain-in-the-ass novelist. One of her big-shot writers, as Grace would say. Annie had read the first paragraph three times and hadn't taken in a word.
    Then Robert called on her cellular phone. He was at the hospital. There was no change. Grace was still unconscious.
    'In a coma, you mean,' Annie said, her tone challenging him to talk straight with her.
    'That's not what they're calling it, but yes, I guess that's what it is.'
    'What else?' There was a pause. 'Come on Robert, for God's sake.'
    'Her leg's pretty bad too. It seems the truck went over it.' Annie took a wincing little breath.
    'They're looking at it now. Listen Annie, I better get back there. I'll meet you at the train.'
    'No, don't. Stay with her. I'll get a cab.'
    'Okay. I'll call you again if there's news.' He paused. 'She's going to be alright.'
    'Yes, I know.' She pressed a button on the phone and put it down. Outside, sunlit fields of perfect white altered their geometry as the train sped by. Annie rummaged in her bag for her sunglasses, put them on and laid her head back against the seat.
    The guilt had started immediately upon Robert's first call. She should have been up there. It was the first thing she said to Don Farlow when she hung up. He was sweet and came and put his arm around her, saying all the right things.
    'It would have made no difference Annie. You couldn't have done anything.'
    'Yes I could. I could have stopped her going. What was Robert thinking of, letting her go out riding on a day like this?'
    'It's a beautiful day. You wouldn't have stopped her.'
    Farlow was right of course, but the guilt remained because it wasn't, she knew, about whether or not she should have gone up with them last night. It was the mere tip of a long seam of guilt that snaked its way back through the thirteen years her daughter had been alive.
    Annie had taken six weeks off work when