"No, I came straight in the back."

"You want me to show you how to use it?"

"Sure."

"Come," he said. "Because I've got to start heading back. I have an appointment at one. What time is it?"

"Twelve thirty."

"Yeah, I gotta run. Normally I don't schedule anything for lunch, but this is a sure sale, the widowed sixty-year-old man wants to buy a Jag for his thirty-year-old girlfriend."

"Isn't that a bit of an overkill?"

Kai grinned naughtily. "How else," he said, "is he going to get her to sleep with him?"

And in the afternoon Larissa stood in front of the mirror in the front hall, staring severely into her face, into her eyes, while the ice cream melted in the plastic bags, still in the trunk of her Jag. A small thing that might eventually be noticed by the discerning youngest members of her family, those who enjoyed eating ice cream. Mom, they might say, why does the ice cream always taste like it's been melted and refrozen? Why are you bringing home melted ice cream? How long is the drive from King's, Mom? Isn't it just four minutes? Does ice cream melt this fast? What are you doing with your afternoons that you need to keep standing in front of the mirror while our precious ice cream turns to heavy cream?

One thing Larissa did not do as the ice cream pooled on her Jaguar floor was write to Che. Dear Che, help me. How do I extricate myself from this awful thing I'm falling into, a thing made geometrically more awful by the stark truth of it: I don't even write you this so-called letter asking for instructions on self-extrication. I rationalize it away like a college grad, a slightly mocking adult who can reason. I say, how in the world is Che going to help me? She can't even help herself with Lorenzo. That's what I say. But the real reason I can't write to you is because I don't want to, and that's worse even than sitting in the car, the knowledge of my unashamed and actualized self. I know that all I want is for one o'clock to come, to be upon me faster, so I can see his face, so I can hear his laughing, teasing voice speak to me I don't even know of whata"masonry? Luxury cars? Funerals? I don't know. I don't care. I barely listen. Sitting next to him is what I listen to. The leather and Dial soap and denim smell of him in my car, twenty, unmarried, childless. When I look at him, I'm not in the middle of my life but at the very beginning, one of the Great Swamp Revue traveling Jersey in search of a stage, a joke, a performance, something real amid the illusion, or is it an illusion amid all things real? The Jersey Footlight Players is what I am part of again, putting on quite a show on that stage that's the driver seat of my Winter Gold Jag, and that's the sordid why I haven't written you since February. I'm afraid that in my shallow words you will hear the profound truth of what's happening to me. I'm drawing away from you as I'm drawing nearer the black chasm that's got him in it, slowly realizing, reluctantly admitting that he is the only thing I want.

8.

Auditing Safeguards

The navigation purchase did not ease its way into Jared's full comprehension over the next few days, and on Sat.u.r.day night, when they had gathered with their friends for dinner at the house, Jared brought it up again.

Maggie immediately exclaimed, "Jared! That's what I said to her! Explain yourself, Larissa, to your friends and your husband. It makes no sense."

"Why do you need a nav system, Lar?" asked Ezra.

"It. Was. An. Impulse. Buy." Larissa shot Jared a look that she hoped conveyed that if he wanted a woman tonight it would have to be one other than his wife.

"I understand," said Ezra. "But it's like you listening to someone else's stage direction. It's just so out of character."

"Perhaps I'm playing a different character."

She and Jared had a fight instead of s.e.x that Sat.u.r.day night. Larissa was upset with him for embarra.s.sing her, and he said, "Embarra.s.sing you? Well, let me ask you, how do you think I feel when Ezra says to me earlier tonight, hey man, can't believe your wife finally agreed to direct the spring play?"

"So? You're embarra.s.sed by that?"

"Not by that!" he shouted. Jared never shouted. "But you never told me."

Why did she look so surprised by this? As if she hadn't realized she hadn't told him. "It just happened, Jared. It wasn't like I was keeping it from you. It happened two days ago. Three."

"It happened on Monday, and today is Sat.u.r.daya"nighta"and this is the first conversation you and I are having about it."

"If you can call this a conversation."

"It's more words than we've had about it for a week!"

"A couple of days!"

"Stop it, Larissa. I know when I'm being bulls.h.i.tted."

"Jared, you were home late on Monday, on Tuesday we had Emily's cello, on Wednesday, I don't even know. I wasn't hiding it." She stammered a little, then recovered.

"Did it slip your mind?"

"Yes. It slipped my mind. What's the big deal?"

"Larissa, what's the big deal? It's only been the sole topic of conversation between you and Ezra the past two months."

"Come on, not the sole topica"

"Ezra didn't tell it to me like it was news," Jared said. "He mentioned it to me, as in, isn't it great that Larissa is doing this. Why would you not tell me?"

"I forgot!"

"You forgot? Like you forgot to tell me about the nav system?"

"Oh, cut it out! Just stop it. I didn't tell you because I thought you'd be upset, okay? We had decided I wouldn't take the position, and then I did."

"So which is it, Larissa? Did it slip your mind, or did you deliber ately not tell me? Let's not mix up the lamest of your excuses."

She breathed in and out deeply, like she was training for a scene. "You're upset."

"You're so observant. Why didn't you talk to me about it first?"

"You told me to take the play if I wanted to! Remember? Those were your words. Take it if you want, Lar. Now suddenly I have to call you on Monday morning about it!"

"You could've told me Monday night, no?"

"No! Leroy was about to cast auditions for G.o.dot! It was an emergency."

"What does that have to do with Monday night?"

"Immediate action was required."

"Immediate action, yes. But immediate secrecy?"

"Oh, for G.o.d's sake! What are you more upset by, Jared? That I agreed to do it, or that I didn't tell you?"

"So many things I can't name them all."

"Which one would you like to deal with first?"

"None of them, Larissa. Not a single f.u.c.king one." And then a second later: "How about this one? Why would you keep these things a secret from me?"

"How can it be a secret? I was the one who told you!"

"Not about the play."

"No," she conceded. "But about the nav."

"Oh, so now we're parsing our secrecy, are we?"

"Oh G.o.d!"

"And you could hardly keep the nav hidden, could you?"

"I had no intention of keeping it hidden!"

"Your car," Jared continued, "was not in the garage when I came home. You had to *splain that one somehow. And now you're going to be spending all your time at Pingry. What do you intend to do with our children?"

"Do not be so melodramatic. I have Sheila, I have Leroy. Fred, Ezra. I have my line reader. We'll be fine."

"Fine and dandy. You'll know how to get to Pingry. You'll have your navigation system, won't you?"

Without resolution Jared was confounded all Sunday. He felt as if there was a piece of the puzzle he was missing, but he didn't know what the piece was. He didn't even know there had been a puzzle! Now suddenly there were missing pieces in it. What was the thing that grated on him, in the scheme of things, in the whole tapestry? He didn't care if Larissa decided to direct a play. If it worked out, great. And he didn't really care about the nav system, though he certainly didn't think it was money well spent. But if she wanted it, then she should have it. No, there was something else niggling him, feeling not right to him. Was it something about Larissa, something about her boots? No. Her jeans? No. Her made-up face, her styled hair? Her smile, the details of the hastily prepared dinner, of Michelangelo's drawing lying on the floor in the mud room instead of being hung up on the fridge? Something wasn't quite rightalike a razor blade in Jell-O.

But then on Monday, Prudential's second quarter results showed a drop in revenue of twelve percent, and Jared spent the day going over every department's budget after a directive to cut costs by a commensurate twelve percent; the conservation of a.s.sets required his direct partic.i.p.ation in every facet of revenues, expenditures, and payroll and took his every available brain molecule. To implement the short-range goal of resolving the unknowable mystery that was his complicated yet complete marriage to Larissa required strategy and planning, but all week he developed projects and programs that lowered the operating costs of a multi-billion-dollar business. a.n.a.lyzing cash flow and pinpointing weak investment product lines took all his time and his mental resources. A week pa.s.sed.

The second week was all about the auditing safeguards. With the personal tax liability deadline looming, he stayed at work till seven or eight at night to enact guidelines that would make an audit by the Treasury Department not frightening but welcome. He welcomed the transparency of a more streamlined organization, the diversification of the company's a.s.sets into other ventures around New Jersey that masked some of the heavy tax burden the company was carrying. This was no small undertaking. And no one knew New Jersey's financial regulatory statutes better than Jared. The company depended on him and he would not let them down. By the time the crisis at work was averteda"by hima"and costs were brought under control, he tried once again to reach for the bug that had niggled him, but it was gone. And at home, Larissa was her old smiling, cooking, pleasant self, the kids were dressed, homework was done, ch.o.r.es, TV, everything ticked along smoothly. It was just an aberration, Jared said to himself, after she had apologized yet again for forgetting to tell him about the play, about the stupid navigation. He had been anxious about other things and took it out on her. Filled with remorse, he had bought her something extra beautiful for her birthday on April 4, a white gold necklace with her name etched in diamonds. "Does this mean we have to give the car back?" she said. "Because technically you already gave me a birthday present."

Three weeks later on a glittering Sat.u.r.day night in late April he drove her in her Jag to a belated celebration dinner in New York. Maggie, Ezra, Evelyn, Malcolm, Bo and Jonny met up with them. They reserved a round table in the middle of Union Square Cafe like knights of the Algonquin. It was a raucous, loud evening, and it wouldn't be a get-together between old friends if there weren't a pa.s.sionate altercation about one thing or another. This time it was about altruism. But before altruism, Ezra proclaimed that Larissa was doing a bang-up job with Much Ado; once again, another tinge of remorse for Jared. There he was yelling at her, while the kids at home and at school adored her. He made a mental note to be nicer to her, to cut her some slack. Look how beautiful she was, with the diamond necklace, her face young and gleaming, laughing at some stupid thing Ezra said, or Malcolm, quoting verbatim from Shakespeare, her long hair shiny, silky, all of her shiny, silky. She didn't look forty, that was for sure, as her melodious soft alto sang counterpoint to the tune of Ezra's argumentative reasoned tenor.

"Is that what you want to be?" Ezra was saying. "An altruist? You don't believe you have any right to exist for your own sake, for the sake of existing? Must you only find value in your own existence by becoming a slave to someone else's? Why is everything about self-sacrifice? You are not an animal, Larissa, why are you acting like a burnt offering? And why do I suspect you're just being a devil's advocate? Don't smile. I know I'm right. What about you? Have you got no intrinsic value of your own? No worth inherent to you simply by the virtue of your own existence?"

Malcolm intervened. Malcolm loved to intervene. He had a mustache that he twirled, a disagreeable gesture that was very good for intervening. "But, Ezra," said Malcolm, twirling the fervent brown *stache, making Larissa laugh from across the table, "Ezra, you're talking nonsense, no?"

"No!"

"Wait." Malcolm took the hand away from his face to raise it patiently to an excited Ezra. "You have to help other people. We are a community, this is what makes us a civilization."

"Oh, please. Community is just a way for people to judge you. Doesn't it matter what else you've done? You could've created the wireless radio. The wheel. The guy who spends all his time watching rabbits mate, you think he's doing it for civilization? Or the guy who sits in a dank room pining after his dead child and writes a bitter treatise on the randomness of the beginning of life, changing the course of civilizationa"why didn't they tell him to serve in a soup kitchen? The man thought organic matter could grow from inorganic things! Do we judge him? Civilization has always moved forward on the backs and with the sweat of those who recognized their internal needs as equally worthy of the community's needs. More worthy."

"Why can't you do both?" Maggie piped up.

"That's a woman's answer," said Ezra, looking at his wife with frank affection.

"Why can't you do neither?" asked Larissa.

Ezra laughed. "That's a Romantic's answer," he replied. "Is that what you are?"

"A woman can do both," Maggie persisted.

"A woman can't!" Ezra exclaimed. "From ancient times, the woman has made the choice that subservience for the greater good is more important than her own interests. You know this to be true, for biological reasons, for sociological reasons. Which is why women are to be found almost nowhere in the progress of civilization. Women defend the status quo. The nest. The offspring. Women have given themselves over to this purpose."

"Yet without women all life would come to a grinding halt."

"I'm not saying you don't serve a purpose, Mary-Margaret," Ezra said solemnly.

"Women have made a choice to do this, to take care of their young!" Maggie said. "Because it is for the ultimate good of mankinda"so that b.a.s.t.a.r.ds like you could spend all their time reading idiotic books and playing with your test tubes." Maggie scored major points with the two women at the table.

"Yes," said Ezra with amus.e.m.e.nt. "It is for the good of mankind. But what about the good of the woman?"

"Yes, for the good of her, too, Ezra," said Evelyn. "Larissa and I were discussing this just the other day, right, Larissa?"

"Right, Ev."

"Women are saved through childbirth," said Evelyn, smiling, with Larissa blinklessly nodding.

"Exactly," said Ezra. "But you know why they can be saved? Because someone else hunts and gathers. Someone has to get up each morning, slog to work, deal with people he doesn't like, do c.r.a.p things, answer to c.r.a.p bosses, make boring phone calls, attend numbing meetings. Right, Jared?"

"I know you love to mock what I do, Professor," said Jared, "but I run the finances of a company that has global a.s.sets totaling $485 billion." Malcolm whistled. Evelyn looked at him impressed. Maggie glared at Ezra with a "pwned!" expression. Bo glared at her Jonny as if to say, why can't you get a d.a.m.ned job, even as a dishwasher? Only Larissa was playing with the umbrella in her Sangria and didn't look up. "We have thirty-five thousand employees," continued Jared. "That's a lot of men and women I pay who hunt and gather for their families. I'm not even talking about all the money instruments we offer so an English teacher like you can put Dylan through college. That's got to be worth something, isn't it, Ezra?"

"It is," Ezra a.s.sented. "Because of that, your wife is home. Larissa bakes, which smells good and tastes delicious. She takes care of your offspring, most of whom I a.s.sume you love because they do not bang the drums at two in the morning. Larissa, tell usa"to take care of things you love, is there slog in that?"

"There is no slog, Ezra," agreed Larissa, drink thoroughly stirred.

"But, Ezra," said Maggie, "you were just arguing that the woman is a more pathetic creature than man because she lives to serve other people. Yet you paint man as also serving, except serving those he doesn't love. So who's got the better life?"

"Without a doubt, the woman," said Ezra, and they all laughed. Voices calmed down, emotions ran slower, Jared poured more red wine, the music overhead switched to reggae jazz, quite the combo. When Jared glanced at Larissa sitting on his right, the smile was frozen on her porcelain face, her white teeth as if in a lion's grimace, her made-up eyes glazed bya"drink? And then she spoke in a non-sequitur. She said: "We can do it on a sunny flooraRoll on our backs screaming with mirth, glad in the guilt of our madness."

Ezra and Malcolm looked at her blankly, but Jonny went ooooh, ain't Lar so fly quoting Morrison, because Jonny was a music freak and knew everything, and Evelyn responded by quoting Chesterton, and then Walker Percy. They had been talking about the angst of life, or perhaps the emptiness of living only for yourself, or what it meant to be a working man, a working woman, to be parentsaand suddenly the little bug Jared had been searching for crawled out from wherever it was hiding, on Jim Morrison's back, dragging the navigation system and the play and the secrets with it, because in the twenty years he had known Larissa, she had never quoted Morrison. Ever. And tonight, voila, a whole punctuation-ridden sentence, like a bawdy limerick, straight from the Lizard King's mouth. Were The Doors and Shakespeare in any way related? But he couldn't ask because the moment had pa.s.sed. The waiter brought the cake, and it was her birthday celebration, after alla"he didn't want to seem churlisha"and in the car Larissa slept, having drunk too much, and Jared drove home with the radio on, and of course, what else playingaOf our elaborate plans, the end, of everything that stands, the enda "I never heard you quote Morrison before," he said to her that night in bed. "What made you quote him?"

And she replied, her back to him, "I'm reading Wonderland Avenue. A memoir by Danny Sugerman. You should read it; it's the most fascinating book."

"I don't read about Morrison. I'm not a fan," Jared said. "He is too self-indulgent."

"Who? No."

"Oh, it's all so beautiful and lyrical," continued Jared. "He free verses, he rhymes, he combines death and thighs, Mexico and storms. What does it mean? Ultimately he's got no philosophy to hang your Mexican hat on. He's just a gifted stoner, being pretentiously superficial."

"He's not pretentiousa"what are you talking about?"