"Kaia"

"Larissa, I take it all, you know I do. I do because I have a life which I live while I wait for you. I read, I play my instruments, I work. On Sundays I ride up to Rahway and visit Gil. He's going to be paroled early, we hope, for good behavior. Then I'll have my buddy back. But in the meantime, on Friday nights I go out with his roomies, Harry and Mark, and we go to Newark with our guitars to jam at the local bars, and I pa.s.s the darkened Prudential building, and I think of you being with your family."

She couldn't sit as straight as he. Her back was curving, slumping. His eyes were so neutral and his voice so flat.

"Let me explain, so you don't misunderstand," Kai said. "It's not about yesterday. Yeah, that was pretty abominable, but it was just one evening, and like I said, I can take it. It's not about that." He paused to draw in his breath. His curly hair was loose and wet, his eyes somber, his face clean-shaven. He was going to work soon, and he looked almost ready to bolt out the door. "You know what it's about?"

She shook her head.

"It's about my life. And it's about yours."

"Please don't be upset with me," she repeated in a whisper. "I'll make it up to you, I promise. I don't know how, but I will."

"Yesterday was you trying to make it up to me," he said. "Trying to make up to me for the twenty-three hours a day you deny me. But you understand it couldn't have gone any other way?"

"No, it will, it'll be better."

He shook his head. "It'll never be better. This is the way it is. That was the best it could be."

"No, there's something I can doa""

He emitted a short skeptical laugh. "Maybe you can leave him. Come here and live with your Stanley."

She didn't say anything, the shame and degradation of that impossibility denying her the voice and the resources to answer even in the negative.

"You must've thought about it. I know I have. We don't talk about it because there's no point. We don't talk about it because we both know it's impossible!" The exclamation at the end was the only time today Kai had raised the pitch of his voice. Larissa didn't know how he did that, talked so calmly about calamities. She would have preferred he yelled, howled, got up, threw things. At least that would have been understandable. And yet his composure, his placid, equable nature was the thing she kept returning toa"the thing that bonded her to him so utterly: that he, of all the chaos out there, didn't make her life h.e.l.l for the hallowed trap they found themselves in. When she was with him, it was always sunshine. Which is why she kept coming back. But today she needed the Kai that didn't exist, the Kai of resentful words, of shouting, because this guise of pretend preternatural cool frightened her.

She shook her head. "Talking isn't pointless," she said.

"You and I both know," said Kai, "you can not, cannot, move in here with me, and have your children come visit you here, sit in this small s.p.a.ce, at this table and look across the room to the bed where a young kid, a few years older than your son, just f.u.c.ked their mother!" He paused, staring at her breathless. "You and I both know it can't be done. This is exile. You will lose your children. You will humiliate them, and they won't be able to look you in the face, the older ones especially. They'll choose not to see you. You'll be able to get only supervised visits, with a court-appointed stranger present. You'll be condemned. You know how I know? Because my own father had to leave his family rather than introduce us to the nineteen-year-old mango seller he got all sweet on. Or was it he couldn't introduce her to us? He turned his back on his kids either way. And we condemned him. Anyway, without me telling you, you know this. Which is why you've never brought it up."

Tears trickled down Larissa's cheeks. She kept wiping them with her cotton sleeve. Reaching over, he ripped off a paper towel and handed it to her. Ezra was right. An examined life was no picnic.

"We had it pretty good for a while, Larissa," Kai said. "But I think you and I reached the end of the line."

"Kai, please! No. Let's wait. Just a little whilealet'saplease, I'll work it out. Give me a chance."

"A chance to what?"

"To fix this."

"You can fix this?"

"I can."

"I don't see how."

"I will. You'll see. What happened yesterday won't happen again."

"Of course it will."

Mutely Larissa shook her head. She was shivering. Opening her hands to him, she whispered, her voice quivering, "Kai, pleaseahave mercy on me."

Sighing, blinking, finally rising out of the chair, Kai did.

In bed they lay naked facing each other. Her arms were wrapped around him. His were resting on her but distantly, like Pacific atolls.

"Kai, you know how I feel about you," Larissa said. "You know. I don't have to tell you."

"You don't have to tell me," he agreed. "I know. But, Larissa, I'm at the end of my rope with being your leather-jacketed toy. I never asked myself how long I'd be able to take it. Last night, I had my answer. Not much more. I'm just about done."

His face was between her palms as she kissed him, tasting her own salty tears.

"Don't give up on me just yet," she whispered. "I'm going to go talk to a psychiatrist. He'll help me figure things out."

"Will he?"

"Absolutely."

His hands drifted down between her legs. His mouth drifted down to her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. He kissed her nipples while he caressed her. "If this can't help you figure things out, I don't know what the good doctor is going to do for you. Perhaps he has moves I don't have."

She moaned. He opened her up. She opened her mouth to taste him.

Eleven minutes.

"The play should be called Waiting for Larissa," he said, pushing inside her.

Clutching him around the neck, she moaned, lifting her arms to grasp the headboard. "You don't have to wait for me, my whole heart, my lover," she said, crying from love, from sadness, from fear. "I'm right here."

Four red walls of roses later, thirst amplified not slaked, he whispered, quoting Vladimir: "Shall we go, Larissa?"

"Yes, let's go."

They do not move.

5.

The Mungo Wilderness

G.o.dot, much to Leroy's irritating self-satisfaction, was an unqualified success both with the parents and the children, despite a cast of four and a set of one barren tree in stage fright.

Maggie put her hand on Larissa, who was sitting in the dark, waiting for the curtain to rise with the script on her nervous lap. She hoped no one would forget his lines. There were so many lines, and on that bare stage there was no hiding.

"You can come with me," Maggie said solicitously.

"Come with you where?"

"To the monastery."

"Monastery! Why on earth would I do that?" She was trapped between Jared and Maggie.

Maggie lowered her voice. "Jared told us you're having a hard time."

"I'm not having a hard time." Larissa couldn't even move away, because it meant moving closer to Jared! "I'm fine."

"Jared said you needed someone to talk to."

"Not like that, Mags. Not a priest or anything. Somebody, you know, professional."

In the darkened theater with other people chatting about movies and TV shows and ice cream flavors, this is the conversation Larissa was having!

"The nuns sing beautiful psalms, so beautiful they pierce your soul. You really should come." Maggie closed her eyes. "O my G.o.d, I cry in the daytimeadeliver my soul from the sword," she softly murmured.

How's it been working out, the deliverance? Larissa wanted to ask. Taking a breath, she said instead, "Has it helped you?"

"Yes."

"Really?"

"Of course. I found peace. You think it's easy to come to peace with the fact that your body is giving out?"

"I should think not. But singing isn't quite what I'm looking for. Believe it or not, I'm all good with songs." Do the nuns play acoustic strings? Do they have deep baritones? Do they sing of soul kitchens and soft parades?

Maggie still hadn't taken her sympathetic hand away from Larissa's forearm. What was the etiquette for yanking it away?

"You can always talk to me, Lar. You know that. I understand things. I finally figured it out!a"why I'm suffering. Why we all suffera""

"Excuse me for a sec." Larissa patted Maggie on the arm and quickly stood up. "I need to make sure they remember to enter from stage left so they walk across the entire stage. I'll be right back."

For a moment, as she scanned the darkness of the school auditorium, her breath stopped because she thought she saw Kai up high, in the rafters. She wanted to call out to him, up in the tower. You know what my soft morning laud is? O grant me one more day, one more hour when I can still travel the street in the cold to sit in warmth for a blink in the afternoon before everythinga"beauty, sadness, doom in that blue attic rooma"comes crashing like skulls tumbling down stone mountains.

All the performances were sold out, even this Thursday one, but she didn't see him, not even when the lights came on at the end. She must have imagined his eyes on her.

The small cast got a long standing ovation and flowers. Larissa and Jared had made up, had come to a truce. She apologized, he bought her roses and chocolates. "Are we really not going out to dinner for Valentine's Day?" It was like he couldn't believe the confluence of events that would make the closing night of G.o.dot fall on Valentine's Day.

"How can we, Jared? The play is at seven, and at ten, we have the wrap party." She told him they would go to dinner on Sunday; the celebration would be a day late. But on Sunday, they took the kids to Watchung Mountain and went sledding. They were gone all day, and in the evening as they were coming back, it was inconceivable that they should go back home, drop off the kids, and then go out to eat by themselves. It was already so late. They found a perfectly nice hibachi steakhouse in Mountainside and had a lovely family dinner with their chatty and tired children.

On Monday after Valentine's Day, Kai had one hundred and forty-four red roses for Larissa at his place, twelve for each month he had known her. They were scattered around the room in twelve gla.s.s vases, on the nightstand, on the coffee table, on the counters, and two vases on the floor by her side of the bed. She now had a side of the bed, like she belonged here on Sunday morning. It was near the open window from where the distant oceans waved their salty winds into her gasping mouth.

They had a belated Valentine's Day celebration of their own, with rainbow sushi, chocolate cherry-chunk ice cream, excellent espresso, another bottle of bubbly. They had love, not dry silent kisses, not sleep; they had wild fires and shining naked unmasked storms. They tasted from flame-trees while cast out of Eden, but yet, oh but yet, why did it feel like bright and bitter Eden?

"Larissa," Kai began, his excited eyes burning, his breath shallow. "On Route 66 there's a town." He rose on his elbow to look down into her face. The roses in vases framed his brown-blond head in red.

Why did she go numb in the fingers? She tried not to close her eyes, not to turn away.

"In Arizona, near Flagstaff, in between the mountains and the canyon, away from the desert and the forests, there is a little town." He paused. "Not too far from the Canyon. Wouldn't it be great to open a tour company? We'd make so much money. We'd buy a little bus, maybe a 1936 Yellowstone bus, with a tarp roof and a big old wheel in the back."

"Buy it with what?"

"What do you think I've been doing with my commissions? Everything is in the bank. Anyway," he went on, "we'd charge twenty bucks for a roll around the Grand Canyon. We'd go out three times a day, in the early morning, after lunch, and at sunset. Wouldn't that be something?"

She didn't say if it would be something. She said, "What happened to touring Jersey?" She wanted to mention the Second Watchung Mountain, and how the snow glinted, all packed down by sleds and s...o...b..ards and how Michelangelo beat his older brother in a race and thought it was the greatest day of his life.

Falling back on the bed, Kai flung his arms behind his head. "Nah. I want to ride my bike on the great prairies, in the distances between the seas." He paused. "With you on my back."

"Like a little monkey," she said quietly.

His hands caressed her hips. Rolling over, he kissed her arm, the side of her breast. "Do you want to know the name of the town?"

"Is that the important thing?" She glanced at him. "The name of the town?"

"It's not un-important. Names of towns define the life within. Summit. Mountainside. Paradise Falls. The one in Arizona happens to be called Pine Springs." Kai smiled, his infectious toothy smile lighting up his face like Christmas windows. "Doesn't that sound great?"

She didn't know. She couldn't say. There were plenty of pines in Jersey. Millions of them. Pine Barrens. There was the Great Swamp. There were springs in Jersey. No canyons, but there were mountains.

Love, sushi, coffee, cold Cristal, bare beautiful Kai. He was sheepish, wrenchingly endearing. "Larissa, hear me out, okay? I don't want you to shake your head, or talk, or say anything."

Not to worry, she wanted to say. I won't shake my head or talk or say anything. Her voice was in her heart and her heart was in her stomach and couldn't be heard from the black deep.

"The dude with the wife who ran into us on the street? Doug Grant? He was going on and on to me about his trip to the Australian outback." Kai grinned. "Apparently, he went on a five-hour tour in saddle country near a place called Jindabyne, southwest past Canberra, near nowhere. He went in a modified Jeep." Kai's fingers were caressing her leg, down and up from the shank to the flank. "So it got me thinking. We could have a Jeep, a safari jungle Land Cruiser for cheap, and we'd take tourists out to the bush and narrate about the snakes and the land, and rocks, and some such."

"What?" she breathed out.

He put a finger to her lips, jumping up into a lotus position, his face shining with excitement. "You said you wouldn't say anything till you thought about it."

"Thought about what? Australia? Are you kidding?"

"I'm not."

"We know nothing about Australia."

"We'd learn. And I know a little. What do you think I've been doing while waiting for you?"

"Obviously going insane."