This is my work, Adam!

Your own work, I said. Marina.

Adam, this is my work. Have faith in me.

J C O*

O in the kitchen, a scarred but handsome old piece of furniture pushed against a window, she was accumulating odd objects, as she'd done years ago as a girl. A giant gray moth with hieroglyphic wings. Hawk feathers, tiny bird skeletons, buttons, a wooden baby's rattle she'd found in the barn. The green-glass eyes she'd prized out of the rubber doll in the marsh. Sometimes eating her first meal of the day in the afternoon, ravenous with hunger, Marina contemplated these objects, too.

T * M to Salthill were on business. Once a month she spoke with the real estate agent who oversaw the rental of her North Pearl Street house, and each Monday promptly at six .. she spoke with the capable young woman who oversaw the bookstore in Marina's absence. Marina hadn't yet had a phone installed in the old stone house, stubbornly and superstitiously she resisted. For even an unlisted number would make her vulnerable to unwanted calls. And in lonely weak moments, calls I don't want to make.

Vaguely she'd promised her women friends she would call them, but that didn't seem possible, now. They would have wished to give her advice.

(For what are women friends, except givers-of-advice both wanted and unwanted.) She would have found herself impersonating "Marina Troy,"

and doing a poor job of it.

The young bookstore manager, Molly Ivers, was resolutely cheerful, upbeat. Business in the quaint little woodframe store on Pedlar's Lane was "good"-"not bad, considering the lousy weather"- "really good" - "fantastic." A popular Salthill mystery novelist, with a New York Times bestseller, had dropped by the store at Molly's request and signed a stack of books, thirty-two had been sold in a few days. Marina in her remote outpost in the Pocono Mountains, speaking from a pay phone, agreed. "Fantastic."

She meant to be upbeat as her employee who was ten years her junior. She meant to be upbeat as a way of not arousing Molly Ivers's concern. Yet it did all seem-fantastic. To sell thirty-two copies of a book, or two; thirty-two hundred, or -thousand. To sell, to peddle; on Pedlar's Lane, you were obliged to peddle; what did this mean? What begins to elude, Adam, is meaning. My former life. Marina recalled her love of books since girlhood, Middle Age: A Romance

so much more innocent than her passion for art, but she could not now comprehend how this love had been mixed with trying, or wishing, to sell them. For when you sell, quantity matters. Quantity is the point of selling.

If it isn't, why are you in business? And what exactly is business? Like Socrates, Adam had asked such questions involving the obvious. But questions involving the obvious are the hardest to answer.

"Marina? Are you still there?"

"Molly, yes. Such good news!"

"Next week Sallie Bick is coming in. The food writer? To sign books and meet people. I'm opening the store, Sunday from two to six. I'll be serving some refreshments." Hastily Molly added, "It won't cost much at all, Marina. The author is going to provide the food."

"Molly, that sounds wonderful. I wish I could be there."

An awkward pause. Even Molly Ivers who doubted nothing doubted this.

Molly said, lowering her voice as if someone might overhear, "There's a man named Roger Cavanagh, who drops by? The lawyer? I guess you know him? He always asks about you."

"Does he!"

"He's a good customer. He always buys a hardcover book. But he seems concerned about you."

"I've told you, Molly. Just tell him I'm away."

"Marina, he knows you're away. But he wants to know where."

" 'Away' is enough explanation." Marina felt her face flush with annoyance, chagrin. "I must hang up, Molly. Someone is waiting to use this phone."

He will track me down someday. He will make me fall in love with him. But it won't happen! It will not.

I D** C**, Marina sometimes made calls from a public phone booth outside Pryde Gas & Auto Repair, where since September she'd become a regular customer; when the stone house on Mink Pond Road grew too lonely, and too confining, after hours of work in Adam's studio, Marina had to escape by driving to the Delaware River and back, or up into the mountains, or to a discount shopping center outside

J C O*

East Stroudsburg, and such drives, which she tried to see as part of her meditation as an artist, required a considerable amount of gas. She understood that she was becoming, in Damascus Crossing, population four hundred, a figure of speculation. "Miss Troy"-"the woman who lives on Mink Pond Road, alone." She tried not to notice the garage attendants observing her when she parked to use the phone booth, furtive as a woman slipping into a port-o-john under the scrutiny of male witnesses.

At other times, not wanting to brave the men's stares, Marina made her calls from County Line Realty, also in Damascus Crossing. This was the agency that for years had overseen Adam Berendt's property as a rental, provided services and a caretaker in the owner's perennial absence.

An aggressively friendly middle-aged woman named Beverly Hogan seemed to be the sole agent, running the business out of a small simulated-redwood ranch house festooned with banners that flapped in the wind, like frantic applause. Marina worried that County Line had no business, in these off-season months; except for Beverly's compact Toyota, the graveled lot was nearly always empty. Beverly Hogan was the first person Marina had become acquainted with in Damascus Crossing and had provided Marina with invaluable information. (Including the names of "highly recommended" rodent and insect exterminators, for instance.) She'd insisted that Marina use one of the agency phones "gratis" for local calls; long-distance calls, Marina was invited to make on her card. That Marina hadn't a telephone was a matter of aroused concern to Beverly as if Marina were a headstrong young girl in need of an older woman's good sense. Except for her overeager social manner, her excessive makeup and perfume and inexpertly dyed ash-blond hair, Beverly Hogan reminded Marina of certain Salthill matrons: rich women ravaged by loneliness as by sexual desire, afflicted with a compulsion to talk as physical as a tic, with mysteriously remote husbands and grown children who'd proven disappointing. What good-hearted women these were, how generous, how kind and solicitous; and how one fled them, with stammered apologies and averted eyes. Several times since Marina moved into the stone house, Beverly had driven out uninvited, alarming Marina by knocking on her front door, and when Marina at the rear of the house failed to hear, tramping cheerfully through the tall grass to knock at the back door. "Just to see how you're getting along, Marina. If you need anything." Marina had not encouraged these visits, and felt guilty afterward. She would rather have made her telephone calls in the outdoor booth smelling of urine, but she Middle Age: A Romance

understood that Beverly kept close tabs on Marina Troy's movements in Damascus Crossing, and would be hurt and resentful if Marina didn't drop by her office from time to time, to confirm a gratitude she didn't feel.

Beverly Hogan was the kind of woman you might not wish for a close friend, but you would certainly not wish for an enemy.

Always Beverly gripped and shook Marina's hand, as she was doing now, on a blustery November afternoon. Always she asked, "How are you, Marina?" intently raking Marina's face with her sympathetic eyes, behind red plastic glasses. Her attentiveness was oppressive, Marina knew she was being memorized. Her innocuous calls to Salthill were perhaps being overheard and memorized, too.

While Beverly typed away rapidly on a computer, Marina made a swift call to Molly Ivers. A surprising good week for book sales, Molly reported, considering the lousy weather; and things were sure to pick up as Christmas approached . . . When Marina hung up the phone, there was Beverly with two cups of instant coffee and peanut-butter cookies, homemade.

She said, with the air of one not liking to interfere, "I'd miss you, Marina, if you didn't drop by to use the phone, but like I've said, I couldn't live without a phone on the premises. And out in the woods like that. I'd have one connected before winter sets in, if I was you."

Marina murmured, "Yes. I probably will."

"The first real snowfall, you could be isolated."

"Yes."

"It's a friendly community here. We look out for each other. Lots of families go back generations." Beverly told tales of widows-living alone-on remote roads like Mink Pond-an elderly aunt of hers, who'd had a stroke-and a neighbor checked in on her, and saved her life.

"Dialed nine-one-one from Aunt Louise's kitchen. But she had to have a phone, you know. To make that call."

"Oh, I know. Beverly, you're right."

"There's not somebody you don't want to be calling you, is there, Marina?" Beverly's eyes opened wide in disclaiming a wish to intrude.

"Or maybe you moved here, to-get away? From?"

Marina laughed ambiguously, blushed and shook her head. The hot coffee burnt her mouth. She picked up a cookie and crumbled it in her fingers.

"People wonder, you know. I tell them, an adult woman has a right to her own life. Her privacy."

J C O*

"I suppose so."

"An ex-husband, maybe? My sister, what she went through with her ex! 'Court injunction'-the least of it."

"I'm sorry."

"I'm sorry. Guess who has to hear about it." Beverly smiled grimly, adjusting her glasses. Inside the bifocal lenses her eyes hovered like small fish. "Gory details. There's two kinds of men: the ones who all they can 'get up' is the remote control, and the ones who go crazy and want to kill you, they 'love' you so much." Beverly laughed loudly. Marina heard herself laughing in Beverly's wake, like a smaller vehicle pulled in the wake of a speeding larger vehicle, out of control. Shrewdly Beverly said, "You have the TV connected, do you? I know there was a set in the house. Nice one."

"Yes."

But was this true? Marina couldn't remember.

"The reception won't be what you're used to in the New York area. Out here, in the mountains, you need a dish satellite. Like we have."

Marina nodded sagely. At a point in this oddly intense conversation enough wisdom would have been communicated, and the older woman would release the younger. Marina's eyelids fluttered. How tired she was!

She'd begun work early that morning, in a soupy slate-gray dawn, had despaired of all she'd managed to do through the day, beginning to be frightened that she was deluding herself, and bitterly disappointing Adam. How had she imagined she was capable of "restoration"-"divination"-what madness!

Beverly, seeing that Marina's thoughts were drifting away from her, yanked them back in her cheery-commandeering way. "Marina! You bought that wonderful old house from Mr. Berendt directly, I guess? No agent?"

Marina hesitated. "Yes."

"Or did Mr. Berendt list it with an agent in New Jersey? I never heard."

"No. I don't think so."

Beverly nodded mysteriously. "A true gentleman, he was. But not what you'd call easy to read." When Marina said nothing, Beverly continued, pursing her lips, "We were all real shocked to hear-he'd passed away like he did. Only in his fifties."

"Yes. It was-unexpected."

Middle Age: A Romance **

"Of course, we didn't see much of Mr. Berendt, the past few years. He had a busy life lots of other places, I guess! When he'd come to Damascus Crossing it was for weekends mostly. He never hunted or fished and he never came in the winter to ski. He'd be alone, mostly. One summer he stayed for a month, he was a sculptor? That's what he was?"

"A sculptor, yes."

"But not statues. He didn't make statues of people. It was more what you'd call modern. 'Abstract.' Hard to figure out." Beverly sighed. She'd been eating cookies in delicate bites, as a way of not devouring them with Marina looking on, and crumbs clung to her ample bosom. "You'd wonder what it is, makes a man care about things like that? Of course a great artist, like Picasso, makes money."

Marina smiled. What was this leading to? She felt both uneasy and hopeful. Beverly had known Adam Berendt at a time when Marina had not known him; a younger Adam, remote now in time. She said, lowering her voice as if someone might overhear, "There was something sad about that man, wasn't there! In his face. His eye that was blind, and his other eye that was so sharp-seeming, like he saw inside you. I came out once and asked him, point-blank, that's the way I am sometimes, I asked him about his family, did he have kids, and-know what he said?"

"What?"

"He said, 'No and yes.' "

" 'No and yes.' What does that mean?"

Beverly laughed sadly. "Damned if I know, Marina."

How clearly Marina could hear Adam Berendt telling this woman No and yes. Meaning no he had no children of his own, yes he had children in another sense.

Beverly said shrewdly, "He liked dogs."

"Did he!"

"There was a handsome dog, he had. A shepherd. One of those older Seeing Eyes." When Marina looked blank, Beverly explained, "You know: dogs for the blind. They only use them for a few years, then they're 'retired.' They only want young dogs. So you can get older Seeing Eyes, they make excellent pets. At a place in Stroudsburg you can get them. Mr.

Berendt had one when he came out here, sometimes. But they die, you know. Sort of young. A shepherd is a large dog and large dogs don't live as long as small dogs, that's a fact. Why, I wonder?"

Marina shook her head slowly. She was feeling slightly dazed by all *

J C O*

this, like one trapped in a speeding car, forced to listen to the rapid chatter of its driver.

"It's a tragedy if you get to love the dog. You get attached."

"Yes. I know."

Marina half shut her eyes: seeing Adam, in shorts, his muscled legs tanned and hairy, squatting to hug Apollo, and the dog lavishly licking Adam's face. She'd felt an absurd pang of jealousy, knowing that Adam dared show his affection, his really boundless, boyish physical affection, with one of his dogs. To have touched Marina Troy in such a way would have been impossible for him.

Marina's eyes stung with tears, surreptitiously she brushed them away.

Sharp-eyed Beverly Hogan saw, of course. Possibly she'd been nudging Marina toward this moment. Now I know: you loved him. And you knew him no better than I did, you stuck-up bitch.

Marina glanced at her watch. She hoped she was freed now, she could leave. The sky above the mountains was an alarming mass of bruises, there was a taste of snow in the air. Beverly walked her to the door with an invitation to drop by for coffee, for a drink, for a meal anytime, at Beverly's home which was close by; and to think about getting a phone, seriously.

Marina murmured a vague assent. She was seeing those stunted unfinished pieces of Adam's awaiting her at the back of the stone house, like aborted embryos they were, reproaching her for failing to give them life.

Beverly was saying, in a warmly reminiscent voice, "I took Adam Berendt to a farm auction once. Beautiful big old ruin of a brick house on the Delaware. He bought some things. He had money, just in his wallet.

One of the things he bought was this ring." And she thrust it into Marina's face, a glassy dark amethyst in an intricate silver setting; she wore it on the third finger of her right hand, amid other, less distinctive rings.

Said Marina quietly, "It's beautiful."

"It is." Beverly continued to hold out her fleshy hand, frowning at the ring, smiling a hard little gratified smile. "Everybody says so, that's ever seen it."

Why is it when I'm inside this stone house I have come to love I can't remember what it looks like from the outside. And when I'm outside I can't remember what it looks like on the inside.

Middle Age: A Romance *

Why is it I keep losing my way. The things in the back room, taunting me.

The views from the windows don't seem to mesh somehow.

Mount Rue has been lost in mist for days.