husband nor her lover. Thwaite powerful as no other emotion Marina had ever felt for another person.

And the anger. God damn how could you. Without saying good-bye. Did you know, did you wish to know, why didn't you let me tell you, how I felt about you. And now!

A boating accident. So many, each Fourth of July. Across the United States. Boating and traffic accidents. And accidents with fireworks and firecrackers, especially illegally purchased firecrackers, Marina found herself listening in a trance to-what?-a stranger's voice, a radio voice this time, before switching it off and pounding at the little plastic radio (on her kitchen windowsill) with her fist. Oh, what did she care for the accidents of strangers? Even their "senseless" deaths.

Now Adam was gone, it was going to be difficult for her to care about much.

The official diagnosis was that Adam Berendt had died of cardiac arrest. His skull had been badly fractured, as well. He'd died, evidently, within minutes of being lifted out of the river; in the speeding ambulance.

At approximately 6: .. of July Fourth. Marina hoped that he'd died unconscious, unknowing. But she hadn't dared ask. Thwaite, death. Nothing to be done. A tragedy. If an accident can be a tragedy. You heard yourself utter that word tragedy as others did. It was a way of speaking, a way of attempting to assuage pain. You would not say of a good man's death that he'd died accidentally, and therefore stupidly. Tragedy was the word for there was no other. Never kissed me. As I'd wanted him to. Never her breasts, her belly, between her thighs. That not-touching and not-kissing was her secret. She would ponder it in the night for a long time. She would ponder it in the bookstore, knowing that Adam Berendt would never drop by, not again. If the telephone rang it would not be him, and if someone knocked at her door it would not be him. Through the barbiturate haze that slowed her heartbeat almost to stopping she would ponder these simple facts.

The Thwaite family had expressed a public wish to meet with Adam Berendt's family. His "survivors." To thank them for Adam's sacrifice.

Anyone other than Adam's immediate family, a wife or a blood relative, wouldn't qualify.

Hypocrite sons of bitches. I was as close to Adam as anyone who knew him.

But she wouldn't hate them. She wouldn't become obsessed with an illusory enemy. Mr. and Mrs. Harold Thwaite of Jones Point, New York.

Within twenty-four hours they'd received their share of public media Middle Age: A Romance *

attention and censure: newscasters hadn't accused them of being "negligent parents" but there'd been that implication, and police were going to "investigate" the accident in which the Thwaites' eight-year-old daughter, Samantha, and ten-year-old son had gone out onto the Hudson River in a neighbor's sailboat manned not by an adult but by a thirteen-year-old boy.

The boat had been equipped with child-sized life jackets but none of the children was wearing one. Yes, it was stupid. It was negligence. Possibly criminal negligence. But how much more merciful, simply to forgive.

She would hear her voice on the telephone, commiserating with friends, "Being bitter won't bring Adam back. And Adam was the most logical of men."

And again, "Wasn't it just like Adam! If-he had to go-without warning, suddenly-he would have wished for-something like this."

But was this true? There came Thwaite Thwaite to taunt her, when she was being most rational, responsible. Thwaite the tarry black phlegm of death.

M to Jones Point because, in Adam Berendt's wallet, there was no information regarding next of kin. In case of emergency had been left blank.

Had the man no family? No one?

What was found in the badly worn wallet was a water-soaked little white card: T S B*, *. ***

Pedlar's Lane Salthill-on-Hudson, NY proprietor Marina Troy On the reverse of the little card was Marina's home telephone number, scrawled in pencil, and it was this number authorities called.

So Marina was summoned. By a voice of authority. Like a sleepwalker she obeyed. Too stunned even to think, It can't be, can it? Not like this.

In a calm sort of panic she was driving. She would not recall afterward getting into the car. Starting the motor. That suspension of time before

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she would see the irrefutable body. Yet she'd had a sense, for Marina Troy was a woman with an appreciation of bittersweet ironies, that this was a cruel time to be driving to Jones Point on such a mission. For dusk was the luminous time, the romantic time. At dusk, she'd often thought of Adam Berendt. At dusk, she'd often been with Adam Berendt. Now across the wide gleaming river was a scattering of lights like startled thoughts. On the river, there were ghostly sailboats and speedboats winking lights.

Marina wondered: Was it safe to be boating on the river, as night came on? There were occasional freighters, enormous commercial barges beside which the pleasure craft seemed of no more substance than moths. Why had Adam been on the river, in a sailboat? Whose sailboat, where? Why at Jones Point? If I'd been with him. Why wasn't I with him. Marina and Adam were planning to see each other, with Salthill friends, the following evening. That had been their plan.

Why didn't you call us, Marina. Let us go with you. What a shock for you.

Are you sure you're all right?

She was sure. Oh, yes! Only just she was so furious, and so heartsick.

Wanting to drive up to see him, alone. Not wanting any talk. Not even commiseration. Shared tears. Maybe he isn't dead, it's someone else? Another man? Marina had been told only the stark fact that Adam, or a man pur-ported to be "Adam Berendt," had died a short time before of complica-tions resulting from a "boating accident" on the river.

The river! Marina recalled how from Adam's studio, at the rear of his house, you could stand staring across the river, those long mesmerized moments as light faded on the agitated waves, and dusk deepened at the edges of things; dusk, a quality of earth; while an eerie oily-glistening light remained on the water. In the west, the sun was chemical red and gorgeous, bleeding at the horizon like a burst egg yolk.

On both sides of the river fireworks erupted. Fourth of July: the American holiday celebrating gunfire, rockets, aggression, death to the enemy.

Across the river on the east bank of the Hudson, in the vicinity of Tarry-town, gaudy pinwheels of crimson, gold, blinding-white light were rising, soaring and falling soundlessly into the river. And a moment later replaced by more explosions, gaudy glittering colors rising, sinking soundlessly to extinction. "Stop. Stop. Stop." This idiotic celebration, at a time of death.

As if in mockery of a man's death. Even in Jones Point, where death awaited her. Lurid bright carnival colors pitching up into the now-darkening sky over the river. Exploding yellow calyxes, crimson eyeballs, Middle Age: A Romance *

streamers of rainbow guts. Hideous, hellish. Marina recalled that fireworks are jokey symbols of sexual orgasm, and the thought repelled her.

Never us. And now never.

In her state of suspended shock she located the Jones Point Medical Center. Not a large facility. Parked her car, and ran to the rear entrance.

She was breathless, breathing through her mouth. As, on their hikes in Eagle Mountain Preserve, Adam had cautioned her never to do. Inside, in a brightly lit lobby, Marina was met by strangers who'd clearly been awaiting her. She heard her name-"Marina Troy?" She who was the friend of Adam Berendt. These people not known to Marina, a half dozen of them, yet a crowd, introduced themselves as "friends"-"new friends"-of Adam's, organizers of that day's fund-raising cookout. (Fund-raising cookout? ) Marina stared at these individuals, wordless. A weepy woman in her forties, raw-eyed, in a very young halter-top sundress with a shawl draped over her shoulders, dared to call Marina "Marina" and to embrace Marina's stiffened shoulders as if they were two women linked by mutual loss; as if Marina Troy's shock and mounting horror were to be so easily shared.

"Marina, we are so very very very sorry." Marina, breathing through her mouth, pushed away, managing not to scream.

The Thwaites were not present. Marina was spared knowing of Thwaite until a later hour.

The next several hours would pass like a delirium dream of distortions and quick dazzling cuts.

"Marina Troy? You're here for Adam Berendt? Please come with us."

Escape! Marina was being led away from the guilty-faced "friends" in sports clothes, one of whom managed, as she'd discover afterward, to slip into her hand the keys to Adam's car. What had Adam to do with these people, why hadn't he told her about them, a Fourth of July cookout in Jones Point? Had that awful woman been one who'd adored and pursued him? Marina was trembling with fury, at them and at Adam for his poor judgment. Wasn't it like him! Impulsive, impetuous! A young man in hospital whites and an older Asian-American woman who'd looked upon Marina sympathetically were leading her to the morgue for the viewing and identification, and they spoke softly to Marina, preparing her for the ordeal (was this a fixed script? though Marina had never heard it before, she seemed somehow to recognize it) but Marina was having difficulty comprehending, nor was she in this breathless blinking-eyed state aware of the shiny corridors through which she was being taken; an elevator

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entered, and exited on a lower floor. Underground? "Adam? Adam! " She had only a vague awareness of someone speaking aloud. Possibly it was her. Wiping her nose on the edge of her hand. Rummaged in her purse but couldn't find a clean tissue, God damn. And God damn why was it so cold here? While outside the air was warm and heavy as an expelled breath.

Couldn't stop shivering. Adam had commented, sometimes on their hikes, Marina's fingernails turned blue, she must have low blood pressure, was she anemic? and Marina laughingly protested, no, certainly not. She wasn't a woman comfortable with being looked at, considered. She hadn't a normal store of vanity, and that was indeed a handicap. She'd run to her car after the summons came to her, drove twenty-three miles in whatever clothes she'd been wearing, denim shorts, a T-shirt that fitted her slender torso loosely, bare pale legs and well-worn sandals. Tendrils of damp hair stuck to her forehead and neck like seaweed. She hadn't glanced at herself in any mirror in hours and she wondered how desperate she would seem, to Adam's critical eye. Marina for Christ's sake get hold of yourself.

Or would he say, sobered by his near-escape, Marina, thank you! For coming to me on such short notice.

Marina was being warned. Of what? The young man and the Asian-American woman in their crisp hospital uniforms. Warning her she should prepare herself? How, her self? Car keys clutched in her hand. Her sweaty palm. She'd been entrusted with these keys, and told that Adam's Mercedes was parked behind Emergency. (How anxious they'd been, the cookout couple, to transfer the car keys to Marina, and to be rid of the nuisance of Adam's car.) She was being led into a large refrigerated room.

The morgue. Stark lighting here. A powerful chemical odor. "Yes.

That's-him. You have the right man." Idiot, why had she said such a thing? Yet her voice was even and calm, and reliable. Marina Troy was one of those whose concern is to behave in a civilized manner; in a way helpful, not hurtful, to others. She was not a woman of raw emotion. She was not a woman to break down in tears. She was not a woman to break down at all. In public. Yet her vision had narrowed strangely (good, for she was in a medical facility, if she were having a hemorrhage or a stroke it could not be happening at a more convenient time) so that she was able to see little in the fluorescent-lit space except the man who lay motionless on a gurney beneath the strongest of the lights. "Adam?" How bulky this body was, how graceless. Yet profound. Had Marina ever seen any person, living Middle Age: A Romance

or dead, looking so profound? Adam might have been a sculpture of subtly colored lead. It would weigh, what would it weigh!-a literal ton. This thing both was and was not Adam Berendt, her friend. The indignity of being near naked, in strangers' eyes! Marina had seen Adam in swim trunks, she'd been struck by his barrel-like torso covered in swaths and swirls of silver-glinting hair thick as an animal's pelt, but at such times he'd been in motion; always in her memory, Adam had been a man in motion; and that made all the difference. Here, lying exposed on his back, no pillow for his head so that his head too rested flat on the aluminum surface, Adam was clearly "dead"; "deadness" lifted like a vapor from his ashen, slack skin, the sightless eyes, the mouth partly agape. Which of the eyes was the blind eye, now you could not have told. Both were nearly shut, sickly-white crescents. "Adam? It's Marina." She was whispering.

Though she knew that Adam was dead, yet she was close beside him whispering. As if some secret might pass between them, unknown to observers. Marina fumbled to take hold of Adam's hand. So heavy!-she could lift it only with difficulty. Adam's muscles were rigid in the death-lock of rigor mortis, was that the explanation? This man who'd been so special in life, unique, subjected now to the most common of death symptoms. And decay to follow. "Cremation. His wish was for cremation."

Marina spoke distractedly. She was but half conscious of being questioned. "He must have next of kin, in the Midwest I think, or the West, but-I don't know who they would be. I-I'm not the one to know." If her questioners had believed her the lover of Adam Berendt, now they must be reassessing her. But she'd taken Adam's hand firmly in hers, as if to assure him. Knowing his instinct would be to draw away from her in manly embarrassment. How mortified Adam would be, laid out naked like this beneath a flimsy sheet, and he'd not have liked to see Marina here, nor any of his Salthill friends. Any of his women friends. Marina's voice echoed faintly in the room that seemed so vast, her vision severely diminished, focused upon Adam. "Yes. I can give you his lawyer's name. But just not now. Can I be alone with him, please. Now." Her voice rose sharply on now. This hand gripped in both her shaky hands: clearly it was a "dead"

hand. Yet it was her dear friend's hand. The big, bruised knuckles, thick fingers and thumbs twice the size of her own, and the nails discolored and ridged with dirt. Adam was a gardener, a handyman, a stonemason, an occasional sculptor; a man who loved to work with his hands, and put them to hard use. You could see, in Adam's use of himself, how a man wishes to

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pay little heed to how he wears himself out physically. Adam's fingernails had begun to crack recently, Adam had casually complained, and this made getting the dirt out virtually impossible even with a knife blade; Marina had said it must be a mineral or vitamin deficiency, concerned for him, but Adam had been indifferent and changed the subject. "Adam. Oh, my God." Her head was ringing. Her heart was beating strangely. (Maybe it was a cerebral hemorrhage? A gathering of pressure as of water building up outside this lighted space; as if, and for a fleeting moment, as in dream logic, she thought this might be so, she'd descended into a vessel like a submarine, deep under water.) The strangers in white had left her alone with Adam. She had the idea that they were observing her through one-way glass brick. She touched Adam's face as perhaps she wouldn't have done, quite like this, in life. His cheeks had gone slack. Crepey flesh beneath his jaws. Strange, he looked ashen, who in life had always seemed flushed, overheated. Now his blood was draining out of his face. Draining downward. Blood thickening in its own rigidity, as if congealing from a massive wound. There was a gash in Adam's skull and forehead where he'd been struck by a boat (a rescue boat?) and the gash had bled, but had ceased bleeding; it would not bleed now; if cut elsewhere, Adam wouldn't bleed; his flesh was "dead." Marina hated it that Adam was looking so old.

She wanted to protest to the hospital staff, Adam Berendt didn't look like this. So old, and so ugly. Deep shadowed creases beneath his eyes, his bumpy skull visible through his thinning, short-trimmed hair, that slack mouth. In the corner of the mouth, something white and crusty. If Marina could coax a smile from him, for Adam was the sort of man you could tease, he'd be himself again, and good-looking, with that bold funny sexy swagger, but she was beginning to feel desperate, she could not make him respond. Here I am. Marina. Adam, you know me. Of course she knew that he was dead. Yet she couldn't help thinking that, in Adam's sly way, he was kidding; had to be kidding; breathing very faintly, but breathing. "Could this man be in a coma? " Marina spoke sharply, accusingly. She was shivering, her teeth chattering. Her skin puckered and pimpled in goose bumps, hairs stirring at the nape of her neck. Whispering, "Can you hear me, Adam?" Yes, this was ridiculous, but she had to ask, didn't she? "They think I'm your lover. But who is your lover? I don't envy her." Often, Marina was angry with Adam without informing him. She was angry with him now for behaving recklessly. Stupidly. Diving into the Hudson River? "Saving" a child from drowning? Where were the child's parents?

Middle Age: A Romance

Who will pay? Adam Berendt had died of cardiac arrest in a "boating accident"? Wasn't it like him: offering aid to total strangers. Bad enough, helping his needy friends. Straining his back, after a New Year's Eve party at the Hoffmanns', helping a drunken friend dislodge his enormous luxury Lexus from a snowy ditch on Old Mill Way.

When Adam remarked to Marina that he wanted to be cremated, not buried, in a simple, private ceremony, and his ashes scattered on his property, mixed in the soil of his garden, he'd continued to ask Marina if she would be his "personal executor"; and Marina, deeply moved, but agitated, not at all wanting to pursue the subject of her friend's mortality, had quickly said yes, yes of course-whatever "personal executor" might mean.

(Seeing to his household effects, maybe. Assuming care of his dog. Oh, poor Apollo! Marina had tried, but she'd never been able to feel affection for Adam's part husky, part shepherd mongrel who eagerly licked any part of Marina's body he wasn't prevented from licking.) Nor had she taken the opportunity to ask Adam about his family, relatives, who should be noti-fied in a time of emergency, where did these mysterious folks live; would Adam be leaving a list of instructions with his lawyer? None of these practical questions had Marina asked. Instead, she'd laughed nervously and allowed Adam to change the subject. She hadn't wanted to think that Adam would die before her. (As if, considering that Adam was in his early fifties and Marina in her late thirties, this wasn't likely.) If you catch me and I don't escape you. These mysterious words were from Plato's Phaedo, which Adam sometimes quoted, the lyric, long death of Socrates who, having drunk poison, awaiting death, in the company of his friends, had turned playful. But the dead are easily caught, Marina was thinking. The dead escape no one. "Oh, poor Adam. You weren't ready, I know. Darling, I'm so sorry." She was greedily kissing Adam's hands, both his hurt, stiffened hands. She was pressing against him, absorbing cold from him, the terrible bulk of him, a fallen colossus, heavy as lead; she kissed his forehead, his half-shut eyes. She cradled his head. She stroked his quill-hair. Kissed his lips. Dared to kiss a dead man's lips. She'd been going to ask him frankly Do you know how I love you, Adam? Though risking the end of their friendship. Adam, why don't you know? She pressed herself against him. She was shameless, desperate. She passed out of consciousness, in a swoon. A smothering wave rose in her, again came the sensation of being deep under water, and doomed. Her strength drained from her, she was weak, falling. She was wracked with spasms of vomiting.

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She would strike the side of her head against something metallic and sharp and when they lifted her, to wake her, speaking her name urgently, she would discover that the front of her shirt was covered in a foul-smelling glutinous liquid, she'd coughed up the rank river water that had drowned Adam Berendt but of what help was this, Adam was still dead.

"S, M Tell me: what's the purpose of life?"

They were hiking together, Marina and her friend Adam Berendt, in the Eagle Mountain Preserve, north of Hastings-on-Hudson. They were not a couple, though often together. "Just friends. But very close friends."

Marina understood that Adam had many friends, and he was a man who enjoyed plying them with sudden sharp questions. It was known that Adam's interests were impassioned but curiously impersonal. You would never get to know the man intimately. But you might get to know yourself.

It was May of the year preceding Adam's death. Marina was the only woman friend of Adam's who enjoyed the out-of-doors and who was hardy enough to accompany him on hikes. He teased and baited her, he embarrassed her, but she didn't mind. She said, "Do you mean what's the purpose of 'life,' or what's the purpose of 'my life'? There's a crucial distinction." Adam said, "Answer one, and you'll answer the other." Marina laughed, though feeling a bit rebuffed. "The purpose of life, Adam"-she drew a deep breath as they were ascending a steep hill-"is to get to the top of this hill." Adam said, "And beyond this hill?" Marina said, "I can't see beyond this hill, yet. It's just theory."

Was it a form of sex, she wondered. Adam Berendt prodding, probing, querying his friends. His women friends.

Adam said expansively, "Beyond all hills, Marina."

"Beyond all physical hills?"

"What other sorts of hills are there, Marina?"

Marina knew. Marina knew where this was going. She was a young headstrong dog, untrained. Her master directed her, with only his voice that was kindly, hypnotic, and tireless.

"Inner hills. Spiritual hills."

"Do you feel that there are spiritual hills in your life, Marina, that you have yet to climb?"

"Yes. I suppose so."

Middle Age: A Romance

"And how would you describe them, Marina?"

Don't do this to me! Don't expose me.

I don't need to answer you. Who are you, to me?

Adam Berendt had come into Marina's life unexpected. With the authority of a protector, one who'd known her from childhood.

Knowing that the Salthill Bookstore was in a financial crisis, Adam had invested as a silent partner; often he dropped by the store to help her openly, greeting customers, shelving books and doing inventory, talking her out of becoming discouraged. (Oh, Adam sensed she was suicidal! In that way of American women, whether unmarried or married, young or not-young, brooding at twilight through windows that, as twilight deepens, become ghostly smirking mirrors of the soul.) To be discouraged, depressed, over business, mere money, when the world is a place of rapture, Marina! No. He did touch her, with his big, rather battered-looking hands. He was one to touch while speaking, smiling. Marina's forearms, Marina's shoulders. He might cup his hand on the top of your head, patting in approval as (for instance) he might pat his dog Apollo's head in a similar gesture of approval, or easy affection. He might kiss Marina's cheek, he might hug Marina in greeting, or in farewell. In Salthill, such kisses and hugs, and some of them quite extravagant, were social displays: women hugging men, and the men needing to mime passivity; women hugging women, with emotion, affection. Or the ritual display of it. Marina Troy was likely to be a stiff partner in such displays, for she felt herself insufficiently female, or feminine; and, being unmarried, she had not quite the freedom to embrace men, especially a man like Adam for whom she felt strong emotion, as her married women friends did. Oh, Adam! If I dared touch you.

Here was a mystery. How Adam Berendt, a part-time teacher and not-successful sculptor, mostly unemployed, had enough money to help Marina repay her bank loan and to invest in the Salthill Bookstore. (And he'd invested quite a bit, Marina was surprised.) And he wanted no one to know: "This is our secret, Marina." Adam might drop by the store several days in succession, fluttering Marina's heart, and then stay away for a week, or more; he disliked telephones, and rarely called; if you called Adam, as Marina sometimes did, in a weak mood, his telephone might ring, ring, ring forlornly; he had no answering machine. He was one to chafe at the expectations of others. He might come to a party, but he might not. Impulse seemed to guide him. Unless it was strategy. You

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couldn't predict Adam Berendt, he was a master who didn't need his subjects. Yet, in his presence, it was impossible not to think This man! He loves me, alone.

". . . my spiritual self? The hills I haven't yet climbed."

Marina felt embarrassed, saying such things. She felt like a child, anxious yet trusting; as, in her own childhood, she'd never been, for there'd been no Adam Berendt in her family or among her acquaintances. Saying, goading, in his expansive, kindly voice, "Marina, what are these hills exactly? That you haven't climbed?"

It was the pure Socratic method. The impersonal quest for Truth.

Marina felt the unease, and the excitement, of the hunt. Not she was the hunted, but the elusive Truth. For there was nothing personal here.

Was there?

Adam, you. You are the hills! Loving you.

Loving a man. Fully, sexually.