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kept dancing and I held her close, thinking that what she’d said was probably true. Thinking how obviously and immediately different we were: her dark warmth and all the scholarly talk talk talk I would never be privy to, while the career I wanted was stretching gradually, logically ahead the way DeKuts had always said it would, into this collegiate annex that had nothing to do with books—the living, working fear and the need to use that fear for myself and for others, to physically win, that she would never understand either. And I thought how everything was going along just fine as it was—the path straight and clear, the work absolutely separate now from anything like love—how safe and simple that was, and how this woman I was dancing with could be a real diversion, a hammer in the works. How I didn’t really want any hassles, certainly didn’t need the thing she called This Kind of Trouble.
    Dancing with her, I decided all this. And at the same time felt something in her give before anything in me did. What happened then was that the soft silent force of it pulled me right in, so that the thing I didn’t want was also somehow the very thing I needed, and I knew suddenly it was in her that I’d find it, in the dancing together of her and me, and whether I wanted it or not it was the thing I must have and be part of. I held her closer with each passing second, closer and closer without even meaning to. Until the grip was fierce, full of an irrepressible ache. Until I felt myself holding on for dear sweet life itself like someone being saved from drowning, and I couldn’t let her go, so I just kept holding on.

The Clock
    ( FELIPE )
    It chimes from the hallway—Barbara’s father’s clock, old polished wood and a brass-rimmed glass case dark with age. I noticed it the first time meeting her parents. Palms soaking into the knees of my best dress trousers, scotch on the rocks swimming untouched in the tumbler before me. I was suddenly glad I’d had no time for the beach that summer and therefore no tan. It made me more acceptable to them—in other words, more white.
    I focused on the clock then, right across the living room. It was enclosed in burnished brown, possessed no blue or gray Anglo-Alsatian eyes to drill the countenances of potential sons-in-law like ice picks. This comforted me at the time.
    Ten, eleven, twelve, it chimes. Midnight. The gentle ringing fades. I rest in the dark, and listen.
    *
    I always listened at night for a sound from my daughters or my sons. Sometimes, with Barbara still asleep, I’d get out of bed, walk barefoot down the hallway. I would open the door to each room and go inside, and stand there looking at each face.
    I listen now for other sounds: a car engine, squeal of the garage. Early this morning she left. I heard the press of her weight on carpeted stairs, jangle of keys before the front door creaked open and shut, and I listened to her drive away with a flame like fear in my throat. But I said, Delgado, calm yourself. Examined shadows on the ceiling. Felt the rise and fall of bed-sheets as Barbara breathed next to me, reached over once to touch the blanketed curve of her body.
    I slide out of bed, throw on a robe, walk the hallways of my house feeling like a thief, as if it’s something that is not mine at all and will, in the end, be taken away. The carpet’s wall-to-wall, very thick. I love to tread it without shoes or socks, gliding across the hard-won luxury. It reminds me of a time—not so long ago—when I knew I was a man who had everything.
    Teresa’s door is open. From the threshold I watch her sleep, mouth agape, in the dim illumination of the nightlight she insists on. Because, she says, there are things under the bed that crawl out in the dark.
    Scaredy-cat, scaredy-cat, Roberto taunted once. She hid her face, soft dark hair falling over it in shame. Jack rescued her that day, saying, Shut up, asshole. There’s no law against being scared, you know, and