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typewriter, and sometimes there was a glass in the sink that might have been his. Constance had an image in her mind of the Coke bottle caught in the venetian-blind cord tapping out incoherent messages at the end of
On the Beach.
She finally went up to his room and knocked on the door.
    “Yo!” Steven yelled.
    Constance was embarrassed about disturbing him, and slipped away without saying anything. She went upstairs to the girls’ room and looked out the window. A man stood by the mailbox, scrutinizing the pickup hours posted on the front and shaking his head.
    —
    Aster came with her child, Nora. Nora was precocious. She was eight, wore a bra, had red hair down to her kneecaps and knew the genuine and incomprehensible lyrics to most of the New Wave tunes. She sang in a rasping, wasted voice and shook her little body back and forth like a mop. Aster looked at Nora as she danced. It was an irritated look, such as a wife might give a husband. Constance thought of Paul. She had been so bored with Paul, but now she wondered what it had been, exactly, that was so boring. It was difficult to remember boring things. Paul had hated mayonnaise. The first thing he had told Constance’s mother when they met was that he had owned twenty cars in his life, which was true.
    “Do you ever think about Susan,” Constance asked Ben.
    “She’s on television now,” Ben said. “It’s a Pepsi-Cola commercial but Susan is waving a piece of fried chicken.”
    “I’ve never seen that commercial,” Constance said sincerely, wishing she had never asked about Susan.
    Aster was an older woman. She seemed more impatient than the others for Steven to knock off and get on with it.
    “He’s making a miraculous synthesis up there, is he?” she said wryly. “Passion, time? Inside, outside?”
    “Are you in love with Steven,” Constance asked.
    Aster shrugged.
    Constance thought about this. Perhaps love was neither the goal nor the answer. Constance loved Ben and what good did that do him? He had just almost died from her absorption in him. Perhaps understanding was more important than Love, and perhaps the highest form of understanding was the understanding of oneself, one’s motives and desires and capabilities. Constance thought about this but the idea didn’t appeal to her much. She dismissed it.
    Aster and Nora were highly skilled at a little parlor game in which vowels, numbers and first letters of names would be used by one person, in a dizzying polygamous travelogue, to clue the other as to whispered identities.
    “I went,” Aster would say, “to Switzerland with Tim for four days and then I went to Nome with Ernest.”
    “Mick Jagger!” Nora would yell.
    Jill, glaring at Nora, whispered in Aster’s ear.
    “I went,” Aster said, “to India with Ralph for a day before I met Ned.”
    “The Ayatollah Khomeini!” Nora screamed.
    Charlotte and Jill looked at her, offended.
    That evening, everyone went out except Constance, who stayed home with Nora.
    “You know,” Nora told her, “you shouldn’t drink quinine. They won’t let airline pilots drink quinine in their gin. It affects their judgment.”
    That afternoon, downtown with Aster, Nora had bought a lot of small candles. Now she placed them all around the house in little saucers and lit them. She and Constance turned off all the lights and walked from room to room enjoying the candles.
    “Aren’t they pretty!” Nora said. She had large white feet and wore a man’s shirt as a nightie. “I think they’re so pretty. I don’t like electrical lighting. Electrical lighting just lights the whole place up at once. Everything looks so
dead,
do you know what I mean?”
    Constance peered at Nora without answering. Nora said, “It’s as though nothing can
happen
when it’s all lit up like that. It’s as though everything
is.
”
    Constance looked at the wavering pools of light cast by the little candles. She had never known a mystic before.
    “I enjoy things best that