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again. “Why is he coming in early?”
    “I don’t know. Nothing’s wrong. He just said he wanted to see us, just wanted to talk to us. Said we’d have a long breakfast in the morning. He sounded homesick.”
    I smiled. Warmth spread through the middle of me. Tee used to cut his trips short sometimes just to come home and see us, and we’d always have a long

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    pancake and sausage and conversation breakfast the next morning. The morning after the night of his homecoming…my face colored at the thought of those nights. He had not done it in a long time, though. Did I have time for Neiman Marcus? No, but there was that black chiffon thing he’d ordered for me, as a joke, from Frederick’s of Hollywood two Christmases back. The one with the slit in the bikini panties. I wondered if I could still get into it.
    It makes no difference. I’ll be out of it in no time, I thought, running up the stairs toward our bedroom with the idea of changing the sturdy, striped wash-and-wear sheets for the ivory Porthault ones my mother-in-law had given me for some unremembered anniversary. She had them even on her beds in the Redwine beach house on Sea Island. She also had Isobel to wash and iron them. I had never taken mine out of the ribbons they’d come in.
    “Oh, by the way, Ma, how’s your bee-hind?” Teddy called up the stairs after me, and as if on cue, the itching flame-stitched itself across my buttocks.
    “Going to be fine,” I called back, scratching hard. “Charlie thinks it’s an allergy.”
    “Jeez, I hope it’s not to me or Lazarus, or to Dad.”
    “Don’t flatter yourself,” I yelled, and went into the bedroom to peel off my panty hose and panties and soak my affronted rear in a warm tub.
    Tee was very late coming in. I have usually fallen early into a light, waiting sleep since he has been traveling for Coke on this assignment, but this time I was awake. His step on the stairs was so familiar that I could feel it in the beat of my blood; there was the place he always UP ISLAND / 33
    broke stride, where the landing curved, and there was the next-to-top step that always creaked. I thought that there was something different about tonight, though, and then realized that his footsteps were slower, and heavier. Tired; he must be so tired. This insane traveling had gone on for far too long.
    He came quietly into the bedroom, as he always did when I slept, and moved about with the ease of one who has undressed in this familiar dark many times before. I heard his shoes fall, and then the rustle that meant his pants were going down, and the little swish as he tossed them on the ottoman from the big blue easy chair under the window that looked out over the garden. The smaller swish of his shirt followed.
    He went into the bathroom and closed the door. I waited until I heard the toilet flush and the lavatory water stop running, and then reached for the switch on the bedside lamp.
    When I heard the door open again, I clicked it on.
    “Hey, meester, you wan’ a girl?” I called.
    He froze in the flare of light, staring at me with near black, unfocused eyes. His face was emptied out and utterly still.
    For a moment my breath stopped. He looked mortally tired, bled white, old. His face was all angles and hollows in the shadows, and the stubble on his chin was so pronounced that I could see it from across the room. It is so fine and light a gold that you almost can never tell when he needs a shave.
    “Honey?” I said tentatively, and sat up in bed in a great rustle of plastic. And then his face crumpled and he began to laugh.
    Back in the silly seventies, a quintessentially silly woman named Marabelle Morgan had written a ludicrous antifeminist diatribe called The Total Woman. One 34 / Anne Rivers Siddons
    of the husband-pleasing stratagems she had suggested was wrapping your naked self in Saran Wrap and meeting hubby at the door with a cold martini when he came home from work. Tee and I had