"Not the 'anesthetized' Marina. Of course!"

Now she had the documents of ownership to this property at **8 Mink Pond Road, Damascus County, Pennsylvania. She had the keys. She had the sketchy map Adam had left with her, and a list of names, telephone numbers. But these were years old, and probably outdated; Marina would make her own queries in town.

The stone house, built in * by well-to-do Philadelphians, was at least a mile from its nearest neighbor on the unpaved, curving mountain road that dead-ended a mile beyond Marina's mailbox. From the road you could see few dwellings, all were hidden behind thick stands of birches, pines, scrub oaks, and enormous clay-colored boulders. The nearest town-if you could call Damascus Crossing, population four hundred, a town-was seven miles to the west. Thirty miles to the nearest city, gaunt and bravely ugly East Stroudsburg, on the Delaware River. Marina was alone in this remote beautiful place breathing in air that tasted chill and stony as the air of a well sunk deep in the earth and she wanted to believe she'd made the right decision, not out of grief and despair needing to escape Adam's death, the nightly morbidity of obsession thoughts, mourning like chewing the inside of her lips or, as in the later stages of starvation when the body begins to feed upon the protein of the very brain, self-devouring, lethal. Marina. Go away. Save your life. One of us, drowned, is quite enough.

To save her life, then. That was why she was here.

"Oh, God, Adam! Don't let me fail."

With a clearer eye she began to see: the house was old, much work Middle Age: A Romance *

would have to be done to make a few rooms habitable through the winter.

Badly the house needed airing, and cleaning. Everywhere there were cobwebs, the floors were covered in stained sheets of newspaper, venetian blinds were broken and emitted a jocose sort of autumn sunshine. How entirely different from Marina's tidy constricted Salthill house. Here, dust motes writhed in the air. Grimy sheets had been draped over the few pieces of furniture. Two floors to the house, a narrow stairway connecting.

Cramped bathrooms, plumbing that worked, but only barely. The kitchen was an ample room, modernized in an outmoded seventies style, pieces of loose linoleum on the floor, covered in grime. Marina tried to imagine Adam in this room, sitting at the plain wooden table that faced a window, stocky shoulders hunched forward as he peered out the window at a distant mountain but the vision eluded her, just yet. The truth was, Adam hadn't lived here often. He hadn't visited his "stone house in the mountains" for years. A local caretaker was hired to tend to it, and a local real estate agent rented it out to summer tenants.

Was there nothing of Adam here, would she discover nothing of him, how could she bear such solitude.

Marina was too restless to sit down. Nerved-up from her drive across northern New Jersey on I-8. This plunge-into-the-unknown. Walking another time through the house, counting rooms upstairs and down, but each time she counted a different number, like a fairy-tale heroine under a spell, for were there three bedrooms upstairs? or four? and downstairs, what?-the large open living-dining room, an aged fieldstone fireplace measuring perhaps twelve feet across to accommodate cross-sawed tree trunks, fireplace and stacked kindling festooned in cobweb like gossamer confetti. In the next room, overlooking a steep hill strewn with boulders, there were tottering bookshelves crammed with paperback romances, mysteries, crossword puzzles, and knitting patterns; the walls covered in a blinding poppy-red print Marina couldn't imagine Adam tolerat-ing, let alone having chosen. For here was a stranger's house, an unexpected house. And everywhere underfoot, tiny skeletons of birds and rodents; everywhere the desiccated husks of insects; a large number of silver-gray moths with wings beautifully marked in black, as with hieroglyphics.

What strange moths! Large as hummingbirds. Marina picked one up to examine closely. Its wings were covered in a fine luminous powder, its tiny black eyes shone like mica.

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"Adam, see here? A true work of art!"

Marina came to herself, and with a shiver let the thing fall.

Wiping her powder-smeared fingers unconsciously on her clothing Marina continued through her new house. Her house! Her possession, and her responsibility. She did not want to think that beneath her excitement was an undercurrent of something very like dread, panic. For this was an adventure out of her lost girlhood-wasn't it? Each room was a surprise, floorboards creaked beneath her feet as if in warning. Strange: the view from one window seemed subtly different from the same view from another. Where was Mount Rue? She'd found it before: at just under three thousand feet, the highest peak in the Poconos. There was High Knob, a smaller peak. Or was she confusing them? Her view was obscured by vines growing over windows, grimy panes. She heard something overhead, a scuttling sound along the roof: squirrels? hawks?

(Red-tailed hawks were plentiful in the Poconos, Marina had noticed them drifting in the sky above Mink Pond Road as if leading her onward.

This way! This way!) She listened carefully, telling herself it was nothing, of course.

It was then she pushed open the door to the back room. The door stuck just perceptibly as if it were latched shut, but the latch was loose, and did not hold. She couldn't recall if she'd already seen this room on her quick excursion through the house. So many doors in the old stone house: one that led downstairs to the cellar, opening off the kitchen, others to closets, a storage room. But this was a door to a room Marina hadn't noticed previously, apparently built as an addition to the rear of the house; boldly Marina pushed the door open, stepped inside, and her breath caught in her throat, for-what were these strange things?

Crude works of art, unfinished sculptures of Adam's. This must have been his workroom, much smaller and darker than his Salthill studio.

It was cavelike and shadowy and smelled of dust, damp, and disuse. A melancholy odor. Gnarly vines grew across the windows like exposed veins. Though it was a whitish-glaring autumn day, little light came into the room. Marina switched on an overhead light, but nothing happened, of course, she hadn't yet made arrangements for electricity to be turned on.

I am the new owner of the property at ** Mink Pond Road, Damascus Crossing. Will you please supply me with power?

Marina entered Adam's former workroom shyly, wondering at her good fortune. Here was something of Adam Berendt, left behind! Forgot-Middle Age: A Romance *

ten even by him, it seemed. (Or had Adam deeded the house to Marina years ago, knowing she'd one day discover these?) She was fascinated to see that several of the sculptures were constructed like sculptures of Adam's she knew, including the ambitious Laocoon, but these were hardly more than skeletal, rather like sketches. Even when completed, they would have been small-scale, coming barely to Marina's shoulder; Adam's completed work was often sizable, monumental. Unable to resist touching-for Marina was a sculptor, sculptors must touch-Marina ran her fingers over the twisted scrap metal, the sheets of brittle plastic, aluminum foil, cellophane, and shards of glass embedded in clay. How many years had it been since Adam had touched these? Dust in layers, everywhere cobwebs like powdery lace. Adam had been negligent about securing his materials, binding them together with wire, twine, or clothesline, and some materials had broken away from the construct and fallen to the floor.

"Oh, Adam. Look what you've done." She could hear his voice in protest: he'd wanted, he said, the haphazard ephemeral fluidity of life; of things called art happening by accident, even clumsy or ironic accident, and but once. Most sculptors want permanence. Adam had thought permanence "overrated." And so he'd been careless, sloppy. Sometimes. For look at the condition of these pieces.

His Salthill friends had had to rescue some of Adam's best work from him and now, ironically, these works would outlive the man.

The constructions left behind in the old stone house in the Poconos were crude and sketchy and would certainly look to an unsympathetic eye not very promising, but Marina Troy knew better! She knew how such sketches might evolve by slow, groping degrees into something very different, if the artist persevered. Sometimes, you were simply struck by lightning. Inside each construction was a vision, the artist's vision, and this vision might even now, years later, be realized. Marina could imagine filling in certain of the pieces, determining the trajectories of curves and completing them. These abandoned sculptures of Adam Berendt's, what were they but riddles?-precious gems obscured in sludge?

It had become late afternoon. This warm whitish day in early September. Nine weeks after Adam's death. A day that had begun in some anxiety, in an obscure dark, but already so long ago, in so distant a place, Marina scarcely recalled. Calmly her heart was beating now. A great happiness suffused her like a light coming slowly up.

"Adam! I can finish these for you. That's why I'm here."

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O * waning light Marina tramped through tall grasses gone to seed. Like frozen waves they were. Yet buzzing with gnats, tiny flies. She was wearing trousers, a long-sleeved shirt. Prickly vines caught at her like importunate strangers. Wild rose, hidden amid the grass. It would have to be cleared away lest it take over everything. At the front of the house was a screened-in porch made of wood painted magenta-gray, though peeling now, and the screen was rusted and pocked, and would have to be replaced. A sinewy vine resembling wisteria was pushing through the screen and would soon cover the porch and the windows. It, too, would have to be cleared away lest it take over everything. Hello! My name is Marina Troy and I'm the new owner of the property at ** Mink Pond Road, will you please help me?

Yet how beautiful the grasses like stilled, frozen waves, and the wild rose and vines. Soon it would be autumn, deciduous leaves turning color against the unchanging pines. And overhead a sky pale as a watercolor wash of no distinct color, a faint sepia-gold shading into blue.

A phone?

She would not have a phone.

But shouldn't she have a phone?

No.

In case of- No.

Wasn't it irresponsible as well as dangerous, a woman alone in this remote place, without a- No.

She feared Roger Cavanagh telephoning her. Between them was a shared memory like a shared flap of skin. No, no! The thought revulsed her. In weak moments she felt a dull sullen ache between her legs, waking in the night from dreams of sexual yearning in which she opened herself to the man, moaning with desire, unless he'd become any man, the beautiful supple warm body of the male to be touched, caressed, kissed, enjoined Come to me! Oh, please. And waking agitated, ashamed. What did a woman lacking a lover do, that was not ignoble, piteous, self-disgusting, when sexual yearning came so strong? She half believed that Roger Cavanagh must sense her feeling. Did he dream of Marina, too? Almost, they'd become lovers. It had nearly happened. But then it had not happened. A slapstick Middle Age: A Romance *

scene! Marina had a vague absurd memory-of course it was absurd!-of Adam watching the two of them as they'd grappled like drowning swimmers on the gritty floor of Adam's studio, laughing uproariously. She knew that Roger would never forgive her for that episode, and she did not want to forgive him. How awkward they'd been, spreading and raking Adam's ashes into his garden. When by accident he'd touched her arm, Marina had recoiled in distaste. No, no! She was not an irrational person (was this what irrational persons told themselves?) and yet she could not bear Roger Cavanagh's touch. Yet he'd called her through the summer. She knew from mutual friends that he'd asked about her, often. Roger Cavanagh was a man, a lawyer, for whom the telephone is an automatic extension of his will; and his will, a lawyer's will, must be consummated. She knew, and she dreaded knowing. But she'd escaped him, and would escape him. She had fled to Damascus County, Pennsylvania, to escape him. I don't want you, it's Adam I want. Adam I love.

In time, she supposed he would acquire her address. She would not think about it. Her responsibilities in Salthill she'd delegated to others. A young woman named Molly Ivers was managing the bookstore in her absence and when Marina wanted to speak with Molly she would telephone her from Damascus Crossing, and she'd given Molly the number of a real estate agent in the vicinity if there was an urgent reason for them to speak.

And Molly had Marina's post office box number in town, which she had sworn not to give out to others. And Marina had left information with relatives in Maine, in case of an emergency involving her mother. Enough, enough!

Circling the house in a distended loop, walking with difficulty through the wavy grass, Marina stumbled upon the remains of a stone well. She had a childhood dread of such deep, depthless things, like elevator shafts descending into-what? Don't look. The drinking water for the house came from an underground spring that must have flowed into this well, but the well itself was covered with heavy planks, no longer in use. There were several outbuildings on the property: a small asphalt-sided garage, a guest cabin made of authentic-looking logs, a storage barn and a dilapi-dated shed. The garage was crammed with useless old things, rusted hand mower, cracked earthware pots, a bicycle with a flat tire. Nothing of Adam's. The guest cabin was a single unadorned room with a braided rug faded to no-color, a pot-bellied stove covered in cobwebs, bunk beds and bare, stained mattresses. On the floor lay a boy's laceless sneaker. And the

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mummified remains of a small gray bird, a junco. In the storage barn were a tractor with flat tires, gardening equipment, boxes, and items of furniture, everything covered in cobwebs and not a thing that would seem to have belonged to Adam. The detritus of strangers' lives that might have been fascinating to Marina if converted into art but otherwise held no interest. As Marina stood in the doorway, something behind the tractor scuttled violently away, Marina had a glimpse of a dark-furred creature blurred with speed, rather large for a raccoon but she wanted to think it must be a raccoon, nothing more dangerous. Her heart was beating with adrenaline as if she'd been running. She knew there was no reason to be afraid, she was alone here. Yet she stood in the grass, trembling.

Forty acres. Hers.

The vehicle in the driveway, parked near the house, a steely-gray Jeep with a military look, startled her-it was new, Marina's new purchase, she'd decided she wanted a larger, heavier vehicle for Damascus County and had traded in her compact car for a Jeep and driving westward to Pennsylvania amid a thunderous roar of trucks and trailers she'd been grateful for the vehicle's heft, and had come to appreciate its height. But she wasn't yet accustomed to owning it. She wasn't accustomed to seeing it.

"All mine?"

This property, this gift, in Damascus County! She'd told few Salthill friends about it. Roger Cavanagh had to know, but she'd never discussed it with him. Years ago when Adam had first spoken of it to Marina she'd been annoyed with him, upset, hadn't wanted to listen because the gift, though well intentioned, was hurtful to her. She'd wanted to protest, "But Adam, I love you! Won't you miss me? How can you send me away for a year?" The very word Damascus was painful to her. Now as waning sunshine in this beautiful remote place in the mountains swiped across her face and upper body like a scythe's blade she began to wonder: Maybe Adam had intended to visit her, during that year away? Maybe he'd intended to stay with her in the old stone house? Away from Salthill-on-Hudson. The scrutiny of their friends.

Maybe she'd misunderstood.

She wished now she'd asked Adam more forcibly about the property.

Why he'd purchased it, and when he'd actually lived here. Why he'd never sold it. (But he'd owned numerous remote scattered properties. Some of these under different names.) Marina recalled Adam mentioning in passing that he'd spent weekends here-"In retreat"-when he'd been living in Nassau County, Long Island, but when Marina pressed him to inquire Middle Age: A Romance *

what he'd been doing at that time in his life, why had he been living on Long Island, Adam had shrugged and said evasively, "Nothing of monumental interest, Marina." It was like a door shut gently but firmly in her face. He'd come to remind her of a man afflicted with amnesia who has grown contented with his condition, you dared wake such a man at your own peril.

Yet Marina bitterly regretted she hadn't wakened Adam Berendt.

Possibly another woman had. But not Marina Troy.

All this while, distracted by her thoughts, Marina was skirting the edge of the clearing, down beyond the storage barn where the land was flatter, marshy. Beyond this, the pinewoods began again. You could see how the woods were pushing inward, always inward into the clearing, saplings, tall bushes, wild rose and briars. Always nature was pushing, and man resisting. You felt a thrill of horror, and yet of satisfaction: when man gave up this resistance, nature rushed in triumphant. If Marina didn't prevent it, within a few years the property would be inundated by the forest, obliterated. The very driveway leading back from Mink Pond Road would be obscured. "It's my responsibility, is it? Yes." She felt heartened. She was confident. Adam Berendt had given her this gift for a reason, she would be equal to it.

A strong, sickening odor wafted to her. The ground was spongy underfoot. Here was scattered trash: pieces of rotted lumber, a bucket of hard-congealed tar, children's toys, a naked and hairless rubber doll with widened glass-green eyes. Marina was disgusted, that Adam's former tenants had littered his property like this. Half-consciously she picked up the doll. A bland blank face, but the eyes glittered like jewels. Marina pried out the eyes, dropped the doll and studied the glass eyes in the palm of her hand. A strange thing for her to have done. Already she was beginning to think like an artist, one for whom any stray object might be an inspiration: "What does it mean, I've found these?" But the odor was distracting. Her nostrils pinched, she felt a tinge of nausea. Her instinct was to depart quickly but instead she pushed forward through wild rose and rushes, drawn by curiosity, staring in horror at-what? The naked body of a woman with matted brown hair, sprawled lifeless, partly hidden in the grass.

No. It was an animal.

Was it? An animal, it must be a dead animal.

Marina's eyes filled with tears of shock. Scarcely could she see. Now her heart was truly hammering in her chest.

Cautiously she crept forward, she had to determine this. Seeing to her

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relief of course it wasn't a human being, but the carcass of a white-tailed deer.

A doe. Partly decomposed. Much of the belly and torso was missing, cruelly torn away by predators, but the head remained, the slender neck craned far to one side and the mouth frozen open in the anguished pose of the dying horse in Picasso's Guernica.

I Marina Troy's thirty-ninth year, unexpectedly and more or less contentedly she lived alone in an isolated stone house in primitive surroundings in the Pocono Mountains, in northeastern Pennsylvania; in Damascus County near the crossroads town of Damascus Crossing of which, only a short time before, she'd never heard.

It was madness! It was to be the great adventure of her life.

From her arrival in September through the remainder of the year Marina immersed herself in completing Adam Berendt's fragmentary constructions. You could not really call these "sculptures"-they were embryos she would bring to life. By turns she was exhilarated and despairing. It was a risky thing she did. She'd set aside plans for her own work, indefinitely.

This was far more urgent work. Some mornings she woke inspired, suffused with energy and a need to begin work immediately, still barefoot, in her flannel nightgown with a sweater twined around her shoulders, and her mouth still tasting of sleep; other mornings, when autumn rain pounded against the windows of the drafty stone house, she woke groggily to a sense of oppression, as if a weight lay upon her chest, a heavy dark-furred creature the front of whose bullet-head she could not see. Yet it has a snout. It sucks at my breath. It has small beady yellow-glass eyes. She had to push the furry creature from her in order to fully wake. She would lie then breathing hard, panting, in the unfamiliar bed, blinking and staring at the unfamiliar ceiling, for some minutes until she recovered her senses, and remembered where she was, and why.

Damascus County, Pennsylvania. In an old summer house built of stone, on forty acres of hilly, wooded land, this lonely beautiful impractical place deeded to her by Adam Berendt. Yet she was coming to think it a legacy. Left to Marina in Adam's will.

Bequeathed to my friend Marina Troy. Beloved friend Marina Troy who has survived me.

Middle Age: A Romance

She knew what they were saying of her in Salthill-on-Hudson. Where has Marina gone, why has Marina behaved so recklessly, is Marina in a state of shock, is Marina in a state of mourning, how can Marina break away from her own life, her responsibilities, is it true she's going away for a year to live alone, and-why? Marina's heart beat in indignation, imagining. She would not explain or defend herself. She was determined. She'd made her decision. She would break with her anesthetized Salthill life. So Adam had described it-"anesthetized." No more! Her house on North Pearl Street was leased to tenants, she'd hired a capable young woman manager for the bookstore, she'd resigned as personal executor of Adam Berendt's estate, not wanting to learn more of Adam's private, secret life. I will remember the man as I knew him. I will never surrender that.

Once Marina was fully wakened and out of that deep seductive clinging sleep and once she'd begun working in the studio at the rear of the house, the narrow windows now cleared of vines on the outside, and cobwebs on the inside, and sunlight, if there was sunlight, entering from the east, she felt much stronger. It was a fact, she was happy. Now she'd so radically sim-plified her life, she was happy. She'd come to Damascus County with the original intention of working on her own art, which she'd abandoned years ago in her twenties, and she fully intended to take up her "own" art again sometime in the future, only just not yet. "This is more important. This is crucial." She felt that she was arguing with Adam himself, and she would convince him. Entering into a trancelike state, working tirelessly. She was not inventing. This was "restoration"-"divination." No objects she added to Adam's uncompleted pieces, no scrap metal, or plastic, or broken glass, or tree limbs, were merely her idea. On the studio walls she'd taped photos of Adam's finished sculptures back in Salthill (as it happened, among the few things she'd packed to bring to the Poconos were these photos, for Marina hadn't wanted to go away without mementos of Adam's work) and often she stood staring at these for long periods of time, almost unseeing, under the spell of their mystery. Come to me. Enter me. Give life to me!

Strange it seemed to her, unfair and unjust, that Adam Berendt hadn't been recognized during his lifetime as a sculptor of genuine talent. His work should have been represented by major galleries. It should have been purchased by major museums. If only he hadn't lacked ambition! Surely Adam had been as gifted and original a sculptor as Raul Farco, whose work he'd purchased anonymously for the arts council. Surely he was as American-idiosyncratic as Rauschenberg, and in his more austere pieces

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as powerful as Henry Moore . . . "But it's no good to think in that way. It's demeaning to Adam."

As time passed two pieces of Adam's, reproduced in the photographs, exerted a strong influence on Marina. The "natural crucifix" made of a grotesquely twisted oak limb, with oddly shaped rocks and stones at its base, and the six-foot "American Laocoon" of translucent plastic, which seemed, even in the photograph, to be constantly changing hues as if living, breathing. Yet while Marina recalled this large unsettling construction in Adam's studio as heroic, in this space, which was smaller and less brightly lit, it seemed to have acquired a taunting, malicious air. Catch me if you can. But you will never catch me.

But Marina was not directly copying any of Adam's existing work. She was not!

When she completed these sculptures, if they seemed to her of merit commensurate with Adam's previous work, and not an insult to his memory, she intended to find for them a New York gallery of distinction. It was a bold, risky thing she was doing, unprecedented. The Poconos work of Adam Berendt, as these pieces would likely be called, would be recognized immediately as by Adam Berendt, yet it would be entirely new, unique. Works of Berendt the man had not lived to create. A miracle. Marina would have to acknowledge her role in their creation, for to fail to do so would be to commit a forgery, but in fact as she worked she emptied her mind, conscientious as a Zen monk in meditation, of her personal ideas, memories, reflexes, impulses, that she might be guided by Adam's vision. She'd brought a number of his books with her, and at mealtimes and in the evening she read avidly; and reread; committing to memory certain of the passages Adam had underlined in Plato, Ovid, Blake, Walt Whitman, Gerard Manley Hopkins. Were these clues to her lover's deepest, most elusive soul, he'd never revealed to Marina Troy- I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.

What hours, O what black hours we have spent This night! what sights you, heart, saw; ways you went!

And more must, in yet longer light's day.

When she worked with Adam's sculptures, she felt his power directed through her nerves and fingertips. For long hours she worked entranced.

Middle Age: A Romance

She was only part-conscious, all her life was in her fingers. If she happened to glance up at a sudden movement outside the window, at the edge of the clearing, or in the forest, or in the sky beyond Mount Rue, she scarcely registered what she saw. For she saw inwardly. As her fingers worked, she might hear, or seem to hear, a vehicle approaching her house, along the rutted drive; she might hear a voice, rising in the wind yet immediately fading; she might catch a glimpse of a fleeting figure (human?

animal?) at the edge of the woods. Yet she was protected from alarm, she could not be distracted.

Through the autumn and into early winter Marina worked in this way, and was happy. Slowly, very slowly she was making progress! It was her strategy to focus upon an individual piece of Adam's at a time, conceiving of it as a riddle, as a heroine in a fairy tale is confronted with a riddle she must solve, or suffer what fate, she didn't wish to know. This work she built up slowly, expanding it, deepening it, then when she hit a snag moving to another, and to another, for she hoped to bring the eleven pieces to completion more or less simultaneously. Adam had worked this way, on numerous pieces in sequence, in varying styles and modes.

Until her head spun so she wanted to laugh. Her senses were dazzled.

Until at last (by mid-afternoon) she was emptied of the vision of the other who inhabited her, for the time being.

A , the furry weight on her chest. Pressing its snout against her mouth, to suck away her breath. Flattening her breasts against her rib cage. She would suffocate! Yet the creature was warm, strangely comforting. She tried to lift her arms, to embrace it. Its fur was long, rather coarse, the hue of wood smoke, thickening for the upcoming winter.

S * the doorway Marina contemplated her handiwork.

The fragmentary stunted things she'd found in the old stone house were beginning to take shape, to be of interest to the eye. Maybe.

Marina, what about your own work?