"You mean-you've been joking?"

Robin made her pug-face. "You'd believe anything, Dad, I guess! Any low, nasty, disgusting thing about your own Robin." Another time she giggled and ran from him, slipping by him as a skilled hockey player might slip by a clumsy player; she ran back to the car, where the door had swung open in the rain, and climbed inside. It was a game! This running in the rain, making Daddy follow. In a daze, another time, Daddy followed.

Robin announced, blowing her nose, "I guess I want to go back to school, Dad. This wasn't such a great idea. I've got a lot of work to do, O.K.?"

"You don't want to go to Washington after all? The museums-?"

"I guess not."

"But, Robin, why not?-we'd planned."

"I said. I have work to do, I'm failing two courses. And my roommate's got some friends visiting today and tomorrow, these kind of weird, wild characters from Exeter."

Blindly Roger jammed the key into the ignition. His daughter wasn't pregnant. She was not accusing him of incest, rape. It had all been a joke, a prank. One day, possibly, they would laugh at it.

Roger returned to the interstate highway, to take an exit that would allow him to reverse his course, to return north to Nicodemus, Maryland.

The rain had lightened, though it still ran in rivulets down the BMW's windows. Overhead the sky was dense with clouds like mucus. Robin, shivering with delight, daring, barely suppressing a childish attack of the giggles, glanced sidelong at Roger. "Your face, Dad. You should see your face." She pushed the rearview mirror in his direction, so he had no choice but to see the face reflected there.

F!

M adness.There came the morning,at last she drove up river to Jones Point. She located the Thwaite house. It was a redwood and brick ranch overlooking the river. This was a chill neutral day in October. He'd died in the heat of summer. It seemed a foreign country by now, the circumstances of his death. For a half hour she sat in her car, parked just up the road from the house, smoking a cigarette. Not a deranged neurotic woman, truly she didn't blame the Thwaites for Adam's death.

Yes but someone is to blame. A man is gone.

She'd had no clear intention, setting out. She was a woman of lush emotions, of impulse and instinct; through her life as a vital, seductive woman, she'd "followed her heart"; this was the quality in Augusta Cutler that most characterized her. She feared that, without this quality, she'd have had no personality at all.

It was a Saturday, the child wouldn't be in school.

Quaking with excitement, like walking onto a brightly lighted stage.

For weeks, for months she'd rehearsed this moment. Yet only in fantasy for she'd never truly believed she would do such a thing. Adam, for one, would not have approved.

Gussie! For God's sake. Let me go.

Quaking with excitement, which wasn't like Augusta Cutler. A woman of calculated effects. A woman usually thrilled to be perceiving herself, *

Middle Age: A Romance **

admiring the beauty of her face, her body, her clothes, her style, through others' eyes. Unless it was fear? Fear of what she might say, or do. As the door was opened at last, a harried-looking young woman stood in the doorway, staring at Augusta. She said: "Yes? What do you want?"

This was the wife of Harold Thwaite. Augusta wasn't certain of the name. Janet, Janice? Mrs. Thwaite seemed to the elder woman impudently young. There was a further insult here. Young Mrs. Thwaite wore a sweatshirt, jeans. She was slender, twenty pounds lighter than Augusta Cutler; her breasts were hidden inside the sweatshirt that bore the legend *

. It was a Saturday morning, children's voices were raised in the house behind her. A telephone rang. Mrs. Thwaite's expression was tight with suspicion.

Quickly Augusta said, "Mrs. Thwaite? You don't know me. I'm Augusta Cutler, I live in Salthill, I was a, a-" not knowing how to describe her relationship with Adam, disliking to claim intimacy, not wanting to sound sentimental, "-a close friend of Adam Berendt's. I-wondered if we might speak? For just a minute."

The young woman stared at the middle-aged woman with alarm and a growing revulsion. Yet something constrained her, a need to be courteous; she dared not shut the door in Augusta Cutler's face.

Behind her a child's voice lifted. Mom- my?

Augusta said, a little stiffly, "Mrs. Thwaite? I think you know-who Adam Berendt was?"

Mrs. Thwaite said, "No. Not actually." She was surprisingly prim, nervous. A nerve twitched in her left eyelid. "We didn't know . . . that man."

Augusta's heart was beating rapidly. There were times, even before Adam's death, when she'd felt faint; ascending even a brief flight of stairs, she might feel light-headed; her moistly radiant skin, her still-youthful beauty, maintained by moisturizers, creams, oils, facials, and collagen injections, was deceiving to her as to others, for she was fifty-two years old, and not a woman devoted to exercising.

"I understand. I realize. You didn't know . . . him. And so I was hoping," Augusta said, half-pleading, "you might want to? You, and Samantha? I've brought along a few things." In her handbag, a packet of snapshots. Adam Berendt, with his Salthill friends. Adam Berendt, with some of his sculptures. Adam Berendt, alone. "May I come inside?" Some- *

J C O*

thing was being exposed in Augusta, like the white flash of bone piercing skin. The raw white pain that accompanies it. Behind the woman, in a farther room, the child appeared. A little fluff-haired blond girl carrying a small object.

"Samantha? Is that-Samantha?" Augusta called. She would have stepped into the house except the harried-looking woman in sweatshirt and jeans, quick as a girl athlete, blocked her way.

"I'm sorry. Whoever you are. You'd better leave."

"Let me talk to your daughter, please? For just a minute."

"I said I'm sorry. No."

"It would mean so much to her, I think," Augusta said, "not now so much as in the future? When she's older, and thinks back? You will allow her to-think back, won't you? You will keep Adam's memory alive- won't you?"

In an angry shaking voice the younger woman said, "I said go away!

You're not welcome here! Upsetting us! I'm going to call the police if you don't go away. This is a private home, you're not welcome here, we've been through all this, no more! "

Augusta drew breath to protest, but the door was shut in her face.

"How can you! He died for-for your family! Your well-being, your selfish happiness!"

It was an absurd melodramatic scene. Afterward, Augusta would but dimly remember except to think Was that me? That desperate woman.

Of course she retreated, she returned to Salthill and the refuge of her home. She'd had a final impression of the little blond girl staring in her direction, listening. It will matter to her. Someday. There was that solace, of which she was certain.

No one in Salthill would ever know. She'd had no close confidante except Adam. But now the madness had touched her, ah! she was alive.

Departing. There was a woman of Junoesque beauty, fifty-two years old.

She announced to her husband, "I'm quitting." Their children were grown and departed, they lived alone together in a six-bedroom French Normandy house on Pheasant Run, in a semirural neighborhood of similarly large, expensive homes a few miles west of Salthill-on-Hudson, New York. "Whatever this is, this mausoleum, I'm quitting." Since early childhood she'd had magical dreams of flying along the surface of the earth, Middle Age: A Romance *

leaping into the sky, breaking into a strange beautiful singing speech all would hear and admire, and none would comprehend. Sometimes in her dreams she was splendidly naked, defiant and unafraid. "Because I can't breathe. And I must breathe, to live." It was true, the air in the Cutlers'

house was sometimes unnourishing. You could breathe deeply, yet not get enough oxygen. Ascending even a brief flight of stairs, you might feel light-headed, dazed as a time-traveler. What is this place, why am I here?

The house was surrounded by tall elegant trees, Scots pine and blue cedar, their fragrant piercing needles entered her sleep and caused her to cry aloud. "Yes, dear? What?" Her husband smiled his vague distracted smile.

He was reading the New York Times business section. He had heard his wife's voice, but not her words. Often in the night, when they shared the same bed, when Augusta poked him awake because he was snoring loudly, or turning restlessly, Owen would say, "Just a minute, dear," and he said this now, frowning at something in the paper, "Just a minute, dear. Yes?" It was an epoch of magical transformations, the onset of the twenty-first century. It was an epoch of abrupt stops and starts. Of acquisitions, merg-ers, blunt and irremediable disappearances. You might have your old frayed face peeled away, and a new, tender face sculpted in its place. You might have your very vision redesigned by laser. The husband frowned, glancing over his reading glasses. In the eyes of some, Owen Cutler was still a handsome man; in the eyes of others, he appeared unnervingly puffy, parboiled. Another Salthill man of integrity. Yet romance dwelt in his heart, often in public he was observed gazing at his wife with a sort of appalled admiration. "Gussie? What did you say just now?" How fierce, how invigorated Augusta felt, having made her decision! The one-eyed man had entered her soul, he had forced her to see her life without illusion. And the Thwaite woman, shutting a door in her face. Yes, it was time. "How long have we been married, Owen?" Though she already knew the answer yet she counted on the fingers of both hands, twice, three times. Before coming downstairs on this breezy Sunday morning in late October she'd washed her face in very cold water. Her eyes were dilated, blazing like Christmas lights. Fifty-two years old, which is not young, yet not old. This man did not know her, knew but the shell, the husk of her, the feminine mannerisms, the makeup and clothes, the inexhaustible spring of emotion. Her grown children did not know her, certainly her friends did not know her. Only the one-eyed man had known her soul. For what was Augusta but a swath of brilliant sunshine breaking through *

J C O*

thunderhead clouds, ah! she was alive. "Thirty-one years. By the end of this week, thirty-two. That's enough." The husband's face was of a porous, florid hue. The mouth was strangely small, pointed like a beak. Over the tops of his half-moon glasses he regarded his wife, an emotional woman, a woman dear to him in her very excesses, with something like astonishment. He was fifty-five years old, he took a powerful medication to control high blood pressure. His genitals drooped like skinned organs, somewhat shrunken, inconsequent, in his boxer shorts, hidden by his clothes; always, he was aware of them, without knowing why. So strange to think that his once-hot seed had engendered children: his. These were long since grown and departed but sometimes in the quiet house you could hear their jarring footfalls, their quarrels, the echoes of raised child-voices. "Gussie, what? What is enough? " For thirty-one years she'd been held hostage by her children, no one could have guessed how bitterly she resented it, as she resented her wifehood, her motherhood, her very comfort as the wife of Owen Cutler, her diminished soul beating against its confinement like a bird trapped in a chimney. "Gussie, you're feverish.

Your hair in your face, no shoes on your feet, you're unwell." The husband had no idea how she'd loved Adam Berendt, he had no idea of her passionate inner life. He would not know. With his partners he owned medical facilities in Rockland County and upstate. His investments were narrow but carefully chosen. He, too, was a dreamer since childhood, he had magical dreams! dreams of intense happiness! that dissolved tragically when he opened his eyes. In Salthill he was a prominent citizen, everywhere he went his hand was warmly shaken. It astonished him, that no one had yet guessed that Owen Cutler was a froth of bubbles floating upon a void. It filled him with wonder, both guilt and gratitude, that others should shake his hand, that women should teeter on the toes of their expensive shoes, to graze their lips against his cheek, as if he were as real as they. "Gussie? What?" He saw his wife's mouth moving but could not comprehend her words. Suddenly, she seemed to be speaking foreign words, distasteful gibberish-words. And her mouth that was always made up lusciously red-gleaming as a work of art was raw and pale, thin-lipped.

At the age of nineteen Augusta Fitzgerald had been the most gorgeous and the most "vivacious" of that season's crop of debutantes in Atlanta, Georgia, she'd quickly fled north to escape her fate. Yet here was her fate, a man rising to his feet, approaching her to claim her. "Don't! Don't touch me. I've told you all this is over." A thin cold autumn wind had been Middle Age: A Romance *

blowing through the night, the sky had been washed clean. Like isolated thoughts through the night evergreen needles fell on the slate roofs. The husband saw the dangerous feral-flash of his wife's eyes yet dared to touch her. He wanted merely to calm her, he dreaded a hysterical woman. "No!

Never again." Wildly she slapped at him. He could not believe the strength in her soft fleshy body. "Gussie, please! You are feverish. You are unwell." It was an epoch of diminished souls and yet an epoch of thrilling public romance. The President and the Girl Intern. These were Jove and Io, inflamed by passion. Both were blundering, clumsy, bovine yet handsome creatures. No mortals could presume to judge them. The childlike exultation in the face of the Girl Intern in the fetching beret as she leans forward to be publicly hugged, kissed, raised to stardom by the boyishly grinning President. And there was the tragic romance of the Black Athlete and the Blond Beauty, his former wife and the mother of his children.

All of America had thrilled to their story. The Black Athlete was a handsome hot-blooded man in the prime of life who'd loved the Blond Beauty so much he'd had to murder her. His passion was such, he'd nearly severed her head from her body with a butcher knife. This was a manly passion lesser individuals might thrill to, and envy. Owen Cutler accepted it that he was no longer moved by passion, yet still in his heart there remained romance, or the memory of romance. His own beautiful girl-bride in her lacy dazzling-white bridal gown. The love of his youth. Now, this middle-aged woman who denounced him. "Owen, we've lost all mystery for each other. We're corpses embalmed together, this is our mausoleum. I can't bear it any longer." She began at last to weep. But when he tried sensibly to restrain her, she raked her nails down the side of his face, slapped and kicked at him like a maddened cat. "Augusta! God damn you." He was a man who rarely cursed, and now the woman had goaded him into cursing her. She ran from him. She fled upstairs. He was quaking with shock and fury, he would not pursue her. How he dreaded, despised, loathed hysterical women! These Salthill women. They were keening harpies mourning the death of the one-eyed man. A rogue, that Berendt. A suspicious character. In death, yet more suspicious. He, Owen Cutler, scarcely gave death a thought. If queried, he would have boasted that he was indifferent, stoic.

He'd been baptized in the Episcopal church and he believed in the immortality of the soul, to a degree. Not all souls, not mass-souls, the teeming populations of the under-earth, but the souls of civilized Western populations. He'd long ago made out his will. Signed, sealed, fully *

J C O*

executed. Just another legal document among a lifetime of such documents. He would not indulge his hysterical wife, that was no good. The Salthill women fantasized about Adam Berendt because Berendt had been an old battered rogue elephant living at the edge of the clearing. He'd avoided marriage, domestic life. There was something infuriating about Berendt. Always, the one-eyed man was right; even in acknowledging he might be mistaken, he came across as right; the kind of man to put the rest of us in the wrong; when Owen heard of Berendt's death, the first word that crossed his lips was "Good!" If he seriously believed that Augusta had been the one-eyed man's lover . . . Her warm sensuous female body opened to that brute . . . If she'd been unfaithful to Owen . . . "No. Impossible." Women fantasized, invented. To save their lives. Men had to understand, forgive. These women, still physically beautiful, desirable, retaining as if by magic their youth well into their fifties, and beyond, past childbirth, well into menopause-their penchant for romance and exaggeration had to be forgiven. Though of course it was a sickness. He refused to trot after Augusta like a trained dog. "Let her come to me." He dabbed at his face with a tissue and was surprised to see how lightly it had bled. Thirty years ago, his and Augusta's quarrels had risen swift as wild-fire, Augusta had sometimes struck at Owen and he'd grappled with her and they'd ended making love, panting and ecstatic. Now, no longer. All that was finished. Owen was glad that Berendt had died, and was gone from Salthill. Through one of the house's exquisite leaded windows, Owen saw sunlight winking and jeering at him, that he took his bubble-life so seriously.

Upstairs, Augusta threw on clothes. She had money: in fact, she had wads of money, in large denominations: in secret she'd been making preparations for just such a flight. She would buy her ticket at the airport.

"But where? Where can I go? Adam, give me a sign." Her eyes gleamed like the eyes of one deranged by a vision. She would not be deterred from her vision. The damned children had held her hostage, well into their twenties. The man downstairs had held her hostage. And yes, her "femininity" had held her hostage. But no more.

"Adam, this is the right thing to do, isn't it? I must breathe."

If only he'd allowed her to love him. As only Augusta knew how.

Gussie darling, no. We can't.

She'd said, laughing, Bullshit!

Laughing at Adam who'd seemed just slightly shocked by her. Though Middle Age: A Romance *

they joked a good deal, and exchanged bawdy witticisms, he was a man you didn't touch carelessly, or provocatively. Yet that side of Adam that was brooding and preoccupied with his sculptures and the pursuit of old dull things like philosophy and truth, Augusta ignored. Why didn't he pay more attention to her, why didn't he adore her? Augusta's luscious female mouth that, in private, with uninhibited men not her husband, loved to utter profanities. And obscenities. Teasing Why not fuck me just once, Adam, give it a try? C'mon! He'd laughed, turned away from her yes but Augusta could see he was flattered, and aroused.

You know it wouldn't be just once, Gussie. And it wouldn't be just a fuck.

She knew! She shouldn't be endangering their friendship. For this friendship with Adam Berendt had become the most valuable thing in Augusta's life. Not even motherhood had meant so much to her.

It was in June, several weeks before Adam was to die, that he came to swim in the Cutlers' pool, as often he came at Augusta's invitation, and that afternoon only Augusta was present, and she saw another time the shiny burn scars on Adam's chest beneath the grizzled hairs, and more fine, feathery scars on his back, and for the first time she dared speak of these scars, because she and Adam were alone together and it was a moment of possible intimacy, and in the pool she dared touch him, and felt him shiver at her touch. Was this a childhood accident, Adam?

Augusta knew, she shouldn't pursue the subject. But she couldn't resist.

Were others injured in the fire, Adam? It was a sudden terrible hunger in her, almost a mother's hunger, to know! But Adam drew away, and seemed not to hear, swimming to the far end of the pool. Swimming away from me.

Swimming to his death.

The quaking bright water through which Adam Berendt swam with short choppy splashing strokes, wet head lifted and alert like an otter's, seemed to float in a distant reflected sky. Only a single time, mildly medicated, had Augusta returned to Adam's property on the River Road. To contemplate in horror-awe the soil in which her lover's ashes had been raked. It was late July, the garden was overgrown with weeds, tall thistles and blossoming vines, life was teeming here, sun-baked and except for the sounds of insects and birds utterly silent. Adam's tomatoes were stunted, black-blistered from heat and no rain; the pole beans were withered, stricken by some sort of disease. Everywhere were aphids, Japanese beetles. Sunflowers drooped along the back fence, not nearly so tall as they'd grown under Adam's care in the past. Life devours life, Adam had said, but *

J C O*

man breaks the cycle, man has memory. But was that so? How trustworthy was memory? How ephemeral, how doomed to oblivion? Augusta, wandering in the garden, a full-bodied woman one might have mistaken for a much younger woman, a still-questing, still-yearning woman, slapped at flies and gnats with increasing exasperation, and began suddenly to cry.

Then she laughed. Oh, it was ridiculous! Why was she here! Staring at the crumbly earth beneath her expensive sandals, looking for-what? Grains of powder, Adam Berendt's lost being? Adam himself would be laughing at her. Gussie! Christ's sake, go home. He was a God-damned prude, Adam Berendt; always advising Salthill women to go home to their husbands, families; easy for him, the bastard, who had no wife, no family. She might have defied Adam, for Augusta, years before, had had lovers; not many, but a few; carefully chosen lovers who were not Salthill residents, but were men of her social class; men who knew, if only distantly, her husband; men who respected her husband, and by extension beautiful Augusta Cutler; yes, the penises of numerous men had been taken into her soft sensuous desirable body, yes and given her pleasure, though an intermittent and er-ratic pleasure, and Owen had never known. ( Had Owen guessed?

Suspected? Sometimes seeing his gaze drift onto her in social gatherings, that strange impersonal look of possession, and pride in possession, she'd felt a thrill of fear, and she'd wondered.) Not long after the visit to the garden, there came in the mail, addressed to *. * , a plain manila envelope marked - *, no return address, postmarked Salthill, and inside the envelope were the six or seven nude photos Augusta had taken of herself with a timed, tripod camera, lying nude on a sofa in the pose of Manet's Olympia, opulent-bodied Augusta wearing only pearls, a flower in her hair, with her pug-nosed snowy-white Persian cat at her bare feet-the photos she'd given to Adam, as a joke. (Well, not entirely as a joke. The poses were glamorous, sleazy, lurid, lascivious, and inviting.) How they'd roared with laughter. Adam had loved the photos of his pal Gussie, he'd put them away for safekeeping. But he'd died. You never quite think: my lover might die. And then? Another woman was executor of his personal estate. The photos had been found. No note accompanied them but Augusta surmised they'd been sent by Marina Troy. Such a tactful gesture was typical of the quiet red-haired youngish woman. Augusta was deeply grateful to Marina, for the photos might have been used to blackmail Augusta; she'd left herself open for such a predicament, such a scandal; at the Middle Age: A Romance *

same time, Augusta was deeply embarrassed, even mortified. God damn: what business was it of Marina Troy's, that Augusta Cutler had been in love with Adam Berendt? (Even more she dreaded the younger woman knowing that Adam hadn't quite returned Augusta's love. That was the true insult.) Yet Augusta, a generous woman, a good-sport sort of woman, visited the Salthill Bookstore on Pedlar's Lane, and in a typical flurry of buying purchased more than three hundred dollars' worth of books in a short period of time. Augusta was an avid reader of romances so long as these were disguised as "serious"-"literary"-novels; otherwise, prose failed to grip her imagination, she fell into a romantic-erotic reverie that no fiction could penetrate. But, that day in Marina's bookstore, Augusta was disapppointed that Marina hid in her back office while a young college-girl assistant waited on her. Please tell Marina hello from her friend Gussie. I'll be calling her soon for a dinner party. Yet somehow, Augusta never called Marina; she'd planned to return to the quaint little store on Pedlar's Lane soon again, and buy more books, yet somehow she had not; the summer slipped away; she began to avoid Marina Troy, whenever they chanced to meet; the very sight of the lanky melancholy red-haired youngish woman became an annoyance to her; and in the fall she heard from mutual friends that Marina had abruptly left Salthill, leasing her house, hiring a manager to supervise the store; rumor was, Marina had gone to live in the Catskills, unless it was the Adirondacks, or the Poconos, on property Adam Berendt had left her in his will. This news was devastating to Augusta, for Adam had left her nothing. She instructed herself Don't be jealous, you don't know the circumstances. Adam felt sorry for her. You are the one he loved.

Now she was packing her things, she would fly away, her heart lifted in exaltation. Since childhood she'd had such magical dreams! Even the eye of God looked upon her in loving approval. Oh, Adam. My love. I will come to you. I swear.

The Search. There came the husband seeking the wife, repentant, or seeming so, for perhaps in his heart he was still very angry with the hysterical woman, and he looked for her in the bedroom, but she wasn't there; he looked for her in adjacent rooms, including her steamy-fragrant bathroom, but she wasn't there; he looked for her in the guest wing of the *

J C O*

house, but she wasn't there; he looked for her downstairs in the formal living room, and in the informal family room, in the dining room and in the kitchen and in the solarium, but she was in none of these places; he looked for her in his own study, and he looked for her in the basement, and he looked for her on the rear stairs, and in closets, but she wasn't there. "Augusta?" he cried, "Augusta darling?" the alarmed husband cried, but there was no answer, there would be no answer, his wife of almost thirty-two years had vanished, no sound in the house except the familiar ghost-echoes, mere vibrations of sound that, even as you strain to listen, fade.

. . . And I Don't Escape You R.

T F D *

D amascus County, Pennsylvania. Where I have come as a pilgrim to discover- whatever awaits me, to be discovered.

And here was the first surprise of her new life: in a rear room of the house Adam Berendt had deeded to her in the Pocono Mountains, she discovered a number of unfinished sculpted pieces, obviously Adam's work. Pushing open a door to what she assumed would be another barely furnished bedroom and seeing, in this shadowy cave with tattered sheets of newspaper strewn on bare floorboards, in air that looked congealed with time, objects of about the size of stunted human beings, crude constructions of scrap metal and Plexiglas, plastic and aluminum foil, soft-rotted wood, dried bullrushes, pieces of clay and glittering glass. Marina's first reaction was fright-were these things alive? But her second reaction was gratitude.

"Adam! You've left these for me."

A first hour of her new life. Already, taking possession of the stone house on this fine blazing autumn day. Already in the first flush of ownership, walking through rooms she scarcely saw. Already she was talking to herself. As she would never have done in Salthill. Even alone in her house at the top of North Pearl Street. For here in the foothills of the Poconos, in northeastern Pennsylvania, on forty acres of *

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uncultivated fields and pine woods, in the handsome old stone house Adam Berendt had deeded to her, there was no one to hear. Silence like a glass to be shattered.

"All this? Mine? It's beautiful."

It was beautiful. Views of hills, pines, mountains from nearly every window. In a haze of first possession walking through the rooms of the old stone house. A roaring-in-the-ears like a distant waterfall. For this was so new, so utterly strange to her. My house. The gift her lover had bequeathed her, for no other reason than that: he'd loved her.

He'd loved the Marina Troy who was yet to be. The artist Marina Troy who'd abandoned her art a decade ago, out of cowardice. Out of terror.

Out of a very practical fear of failure. That Marina Troy, Adam Berendt had loved.