"Well, I wish I had been a better brother."

"Exactly what does that mean?"

He was stung. "You're not helping."

"What am I supposed to be helping with? Are you drunk? You must have just finished lunch and are full of wine and Armagnac."

"Oh, to h.e.l.l with it."

"Now you're the brother I know."

"Wait a minute! Don't hang up, please. I don't want to bicker." He cleared his throat. "How about a family get-together tomorrow? On me, of course. There's this nice place for kids out on Milburn Road, called The Corral."

"I got rid of that s.l.u.tty au pair," said Robin. "She wanted to spend her night off with some biker thug in my house. And you have no idea of quite how sick you can get hearing a Polish accent day after day, no matter how cute it was in the beginning."

"How about tomorrow?"

"Ross is flying to the Coast on Monday. I'd like to have a day with him around here."

"Well, maybe some other time soon, then."

"Roy," Robin said with an edge to her voice, "you were seen last night having dinner alone with Sam Grandy's wife."

"Who told you that?" Roy was furious.

"Mitzi Copeland saw you there," said she, citing a shrewish pal.

It went against the grain to go through the explanation once again, especially to his sister, but Roy did so.

"Look." Robin's tone, routinely petulant, turned nasty. "I wouldn't blame you, and I certainly wouldn't blame her."

"Okay, you don't like him. Let's let it go at that."

"That's what I've always done, Roy, but it might not last forever."

"In fairness I should point out that though you dumped him, he's not the bitter one."

She snorted savagely. "He's got no complaint against me."

"Just do me a favor, if you will, Rob. It's not right to besmirch the character of his wife. Please set Mitzi straight if she mentions the matter again. Tell her you got the truth right from the horse's mouth-or horse's a.s.s, if you prefer."

"I can't remember you ever being that concerned with anyone else's reputation."

"Maybe because I'm not a liar.... I'm serious about having a family Sunday. Maybe next weekend?"

"I'm getting a new au pair and she has to be broken in."

"Check with you next week then," said Roy. Then, doggedly returning to the motive that had caused him to call her in the first place, he added, "I love you, Rob." Though the sentiment was sincere enough, he expected to get a barb in return. But he was only partially right.

"What brought that on?"

"Self-pity, if you like. You're really all I've got."

"I like to think you might eventually get your act together, Roy. I really do." This was probably as much warmth as he could expect from his sister unless he underwent a total transformation, i.e., discarded his cars, preferably at a considerable loss, and went into a real business; acquired a wife who would dominate him but be dominated by Robin and produce fewer children, worse-behaved and less talented than hers; and buy a comfortable home devoid of chic.

Nevertheless he said, "Thanks, Rob. Your good wishes mean a lot to me."

"Mind not calling me Rob?"

"I thought you liked that."

"I used to, but now I wonder if it doesn't sound like a guy's name."

He had driven only about a mile on Milburn Road, heading back to town though without a conscious destination, when he saw, parked on the shoulder not far ahead, a car by now so familiar that the very sight of its dirty-beige drabness quickened his heartbeat. It was Kristin's Corolla, resting, though on a level surface, at a slight imbalance. From his high perch in the Grand Cherokee, the Toyota's right tire was not visible, but he knew it was deflated.

He brought the Jeep to a stop behind the other car and dashed to its window. Kristin's fair head was in her hands.

"Are you okay? You had a blowout?"

She lowered her hands from her distressed face. She showed no surprise in seeing him. "I did everything right," she said with anger. "Didn't panic-brake, kept steering, and let the car slow itself. Came to a stop without damage-then, for no reason whatever, went into hysterics." Her cheeks were flushed.

"That's normal enough," said Roy.

"d.a.m.n. I just wish I could stop shaking. I must look like a fool."

"I can say this, if it does any good: From outside I can't see any shaking. It doesn't look like you're moving a muscle. It's probably a nervous reaction."

"Roy?" she asked. "Would you mind just holding me?"

He went around to the pa.s.senger's side and got in.

The strange fact was that when he first put his arms around her the experience seemed no more than the kind of superficial social embrace exchanged between members of opposite s.e.xes (sometimes even man-to-man and performed by athletes and politicians) on meeting in public. But as it happened, he had never given Kristin such a hug. From the first, touching his best friend's wife in any way was covered by the same tacit taboo by which he and Sam never touched each other: These best friends, in twenty years of friendship, had never shaken hands.

Now his left arm was across her slender back, his hand cupping her shouldercap. His right hand was not yet in play. He did not know quite where to put it, for despite her request, Kristin at first did nothing to facilitate his compliance, maintaining her spine flush against the seat, bending forward only just enough for the insertion of his arm. He clasped rather than enclosed her, at the last inch of her narrow body.

The situation was altogether abstract until she finally leaned against him, her right arm against his left side. Slowly her head came into his neck.

"Thanks," she murmured. "It does help."

She was apparently more at ease than he. His prior experience of women went for naught. For an unthinking instant he wished he could compare notes with Sam, something he had never really done in the case of others, never having shared another with his best friend. Roy anyway was discreet about his liaisons. He had never had a taste for s.e.xual gloating.... But then the moment at hand was not in the least s.e.xual, nor was, seen from the corner of his eye, her sleek, styled hair and her fragrance, not nearly so erotic at close quarters as when it had been wafted from the interior of the parked car. She continued to be more idea than fact.

After a while he asked her if she felt better. "I ought to change that tire."

Several cars had pa.s.sed them since his arm was around her. That sort of thing was always noticed. If they were recognized they would be compromised once again-as usual, unjustly.

"h.e.l.l with it." She spoke almost stridently, though her head remained on his shoulder.

"There ought to be a towrope in the Jeep, but there isn't. I'll call Towne Garage. Leave the key under the seat, and I'll run you home."

"h.e.l.l with it," she repeated, now lifting her head. But it was still too close for him to turn and look at her without a collision of faces.

"Well, I should do something." When he shrugged he was aware of her slight weight, still against his side but pressing now and not simply leaning. He had acquired her as, literally, a dependent. He could not leave the car without taking her into account. "Shouldn't I?"

She responded with a question of her own and, unlike his, with a point-insofar, that is, as he could rely on his hearing alone: What she asked was incredible to his faculty of reason.

"Do you want me?"

He did not, though briefly, when she had first entered the car in The Corral lot and again when she entwined her fingers with his, he thought he did. The question now made no sense when applied to what he felt for her. There was no romance in it. Want referred to that which he had often known, and frequently satisfied, with other women-too many of them, as he could only now admit, in his lifelong reluctance to see himself as mere lecher.

The fact was that he had never been, and perhaps did not know how to be, a lover.

His arm was still across her back, his hand on her far shoulder. He shook her slightly, in a be-a-good-fellow gesture, an effort to diminish the moment, saying, "Of course I do. Now I'd better call the garage."

"I've always wanted you," she said. "From the first time I ever saw you, as a kid. I guess that's why I asked about the car."

"You had contempt for me when you grew up."

"You don't have to admire those you want."

"Tell me about it!" That slipped out before Roy knew what he was saying. It was on the money but sounded awfully crude, so he lost his inhibition against candor. "I admire you tremendously. Just to be in your company means the world to me."

"We've spent hardly any time together."

"It has seemed like a lot to me. So to me anyway we already have a history." He reclaimed his arm and said gently, "Come on, now. I'll give you a lift."

She stayed in place. "Are you trying to get rid of me?"

"If you want to put it that way."

"You're being loyal to Sam."

"I'm also wondering what in the world I could do for a woman like you."

"Shouldn't I be the one to ask that?"

"But I suspect you won't. I should not have told you how I felt about you. What were you supposed to do with that information? It was selfish of me to leave you with such a burden."

"Do you think I'm acting now out of a sense of obligation?" She was seemingly more curious than angry.

"I certainly am."

"Well, I'm not. I've had enough of that."

He drew away, so that he had room to look at her for the first time since this moment of intimacy had begun. It had been years since he last sat in the pa.s.senger's seat of a motor vehicle, an incongruous place for any but coa.r.s.e feelings. But by her very presence Kristin transformed it. "I think you can appreciate my position."

"Let me explain mine. I don't have a vast experience of men: I mean personal as opposed to professional. What I've always been focused on was my career. I didn't date much through school. I wasn't asked all that often, and when I did go out it was usually with the kind of guy with whom I had supposedly a good deal in common. We would talk finance all evening, then at the end he would start kissing me and feeling me up and want to go to bed. I finally tolerated this a few times so as to try to be normal. I wasn't a lesbian but I didn't care much for the company of such men, either, and I didn't know how I was ever going to meet any other kind. Worse, when I left school and went into the world, it was these kinds of men I was competing with. Well, eventually I met Sam. Did he ever tell you how?"

"He never has," said Roy, "and I didn't ask. I don't go out of my way to exchange information with him about women. Probably that's because he doesn't approve of mine-or maybe I should say that what he doesn't like are not my girlfriends but my relations with them. If I questioned him about you, he would have used it to preach to me."

"We turned him down for a loan," said Kristin. "As soon as he got the letter, he came to the bank. I was a loan officer then, out in the open, what we down there call the barnyard, and my main ambition at that time was simply to get promoted to a private office with a door. But when his huge figure loomed over my desk, I was happy to be where the guard could come to my rescue."

"I'm sure he was nice."

"'So, okay, keep your d.a.m.ned money,' he said, 'but have dinner with me. It might not be a very good meal, because as you should be the first to know, I couldn't afford one. But I'll keep my hands to myself and get you home early so your parents won't worry.'"

"That's old Sam."

"I didn't look that young and didn't want to. Furthermore I was insulted that he would think a line like that was attractive, but then I found myself feeling sorry for him. He has sad eyes even when he's laughing."

Roy remembered that he had earlier believed Kristin lacking in a sense of humor. By now he could refine it further to a particular incapacity for irony, of which Sam had a great supply that had remained undiminished by any success he had in life; he had of course a.s.sumed she would be amused by a caricature of bad-taste male-chauvinist flattery. What Roy's own approach might have been could not be considered. He would not have made one. A tall, flat-chested short-haired blonde with cool eyes had never been his type.

Kristin continued. "So I went out with him and had a good time. We ate junk food and played machine games. He has all sorts of interests as you know, and that can be entertaining even if you don't share them, at first maybe especially if you don't share them." She frowned. "And he didn't try to convince me how important he was. I liked that about him then, but now I don't know...." She put her face into her hands and suddenly wept without a sound.

Roy had a man's dread of a woman's grief, though with him it was rather the sobs than the tears that so threatened the natural order of things. He had heard too many of his mother's when he was a child, but by nature she was a histrionic woman. That was not true of Kristin-unless it was a side of her he had not seen before.

"Let me take you home."

"I still haven't explained why I married him," she said doggedly, clenching her fist. "It all happened in such a hurry, I don't even know why, except it was fun." She glared at him with reddened eyes. "Isn't that pathetic? I meet a guy whose chief recommendation is he's not threatened by me, he's not competing with me, and I have to marry him before he gets away. And here's just how pitiful it turns out to be: It didn't take long after I married him to realize it was a simpleminded illusion of mine. I can't really blame him for that. I hoodwinked myself. He's the most extreme compet.i.tor I've ever had, except that he does it in a subtle way I was too nave to recognize. If he was only trying to get my job! I could handle that."

Roy could take no decent satisfaction in profiting by Sam's failure, if indeed he was so doing. However, his contempt for his best friend could not but increase: It was only human. At the same time he felt guilty for enjoying the confidence of a disloyal wife.

With an effort he managed to say, "He's really proud of you."

Kristin did not acknowledge this a.s.surance. "Roy." She seized the steering wheel and not his available left hand. "Roy." She turned her face from him to gaze through the windshield and ask wistfully, "Would you mind taking me to bed someplace?"

After dropping Kristin off at the Towne Garage, to which her car had been towed and where it was now parked, the flat repaired, Roy felt too lonely to go home. He returned the Jeep to the lot behind his business. The big doors to the realm of Paul and Diego were closed, the windows dark. After all, it was almost nine. Roy could have used their company this evening. Simply to hang out while they tuned an engine, to risk having an eardrum shattered or being asphyxiated from exhaust fumes, exchanging no conversation, would have been therapeutic.

He climbed the hill, which proved steeper than he remembered. Should a man in his supposed condition be already feeling the effects of age? He could hardly have been worn out by excessive physical lovemaking. His performance, insofar as it could be so called, had been too chagrining to reflect on. He dreaded meeting Kristin again, yet he was more in love with her than ever.

He let himself in to the darkened showroom and groped his way to the office, trying not to touch any fenders in the process. The office was also dark, Mrs. Forsythe having forgotten his standing instruction to leave on one small source of illumination against which the police, in their regular drive-bys, might see the silhouettes of intruders or take suspicious notice that it was out.

He turned on the old gooseneck, clamsh.e.l.l-shaded lamp atop his desk, one of the few material souvenirs of his mother's family. He had kept it because it had first been owned by his maternal grandfather, whose little ornamental-iron shop had failed during the Great Depression and who subsequently found a job as a janitor at twelve dollars a week. His son, Roy's uncle, whose medals Roy kept at home in a silver box he had made for the purpose, was one of the twelve thousand Americans killed in the taking of Okinawa, where a hundred and ten thousand j.a.panese died, many by their own hand, including their generals, who disemboweled themselves while being simultaneously beheaded by their aides.

So far as Roy knew, the only person on either side of his family to commit suicide was his own father, and that was not for honor but rather after a diagnosis of illness.

There was a tapping at the front door. He stood up and squinted out between the cars, trying to discern who it might be, but could not do so before his eyes adjusted in the transition from staring at a light oak desktop under a sixty-watt bulb. Meanwhile he had walked out far enough so that his gestures could be recognized.

By then he could see the uniform. He went to open the door. It was Officer Velikovsky.

"Hi, Mr. Courtright. I just noticed a different light was on."

"Thanks for doing a careful job as always.... I'm particularly glad to see you. I tried to pick up your wife today, but I wasn't man enough to pull it off."

Velikovsky a.s.sumed a wide grin. "She told me about the incident. I says, 'You missed the only opportunity you're gonna get at your age.' She says, 'I always miss the boat. Look who I married when I was young.' She's got a mouth on her."

"She's a good woman."

The officer shrugged, though he looked proud. "I'm not yet ready to recycle her."