Certainly Siri had a life of her own as she'd more than once informed him.

Siri was not for hire. As a therapist she was for hire but otherwise, not.

And even as a therapist at the clinic, she was not obliged to work with any patient she didn't wish to work with. This was a policy at the clinic, of course. For it sometimes happened that patients (male, predatory) began to be obsessed with their female therapists, tried to contact them outside the clinic, pursued and stalked them. "But Siri, Mr. Hoffmann, is not for hire. Yes?"

Yes. But no. Lionel loved to undress her roughly, yanking off her white nylon smock and trousers. By his request she wore her uniform to the apartment at East *st. By his request she wore her hair plaited and knotted at the nape of her neck. It was his pleasure to unpin her hair, unplait the long crimped hair with its nutmeg-smell, its mildly rank unwashed monkey-smell he loved. While making love Lionel wrapped a strand of hair around her neck, in play. She taunted him Mr. Hoffmann! Squeeze!

Hurt me! I know how you like it. Laughing at his face dissolving in orgasm like something softly rotted, dissolving in water. Laughing and biting his lower lip, drawing a bead of blood.

H believe: he'd become such a man.

That painful episode. At Christmas. He and Siri were about to leave for Key West. Siri was late meeting him at the apartment. The phone Middle Age: A Romance

rang. Eagerly and imprudently he'd lifted the receiver. And there was the shock of Marcy's voice. Whining accusing hurt-little-girl Marcy. "Daddy?

Is that you? This is your daughter Marcy"-her voice heavy with sarcasm, he could imagine her glaring eyes-"I've been trying and try ing to reach you, Mother has told me, oh, Daddy what is happening? -we're not going to have Christmas this year-" And like a coward Lionel hung up.

"I can't believe this. I've become a man who hangs up on his own daughter."

He would not tell anyone this. Not even Siri to whom he told too many secrets. Instead, he poured Scotch into a glass and drank. Still, he laughed. It was funny.

I J , in the New Year. Things began to change. Siri began to murmur in his arms lightly mocking Yes you love me like this, but do you respect me? He caught a glimpse of her sullen hurt-little-girl face in a mirror and was shocked at its coarseness. And the glaring-wet eyes, like Marcy's.

M to him. Oh, Mr. Hoffmann! There was missing from his study one of the framed photographs. The frame was of fine leather, expensive. Maria was anxious to tell her employer, who stood grimly silent that she, she was not the one who took it, each week she dusted the photographs and always stopped to look at that one, Mr. Hoffmann so young and smiling, standing on the beach, and Mrs. Hoffmann so young and pretty, and the little girl so sweet, and the little boy, such a happy beautiful family, poor Maria was close to tears in the face of her employer's enigmatic silence begging him to understand that she, she was not the one who took away the photograph, like the other items, please did Mr. Hoffmann believe her?

Lionel passed his fingertips over his eyelids. "Maria. Of course."

H * to Siri. No accusations. Yet Siri seemed to take offense. Siri was silent, aloof. Siri refused to accompany Lionel to a cocktail party where, Lionel had planned this in his luxurious-erotic dreams, she was to wear a gorgeous lime-colored silk dress slit high up the thigh he'd bought for her at the trendy boutique Kyrie on Madison Avenue. Yes, you

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love me. Mr. Hoff- mann. But respect? Like Mrs. Hoffmann, you respect? Tearing at the silk fabric, the exquisite cloth buttons. Till he caught her, held her, her hard-muscled angry limbs, feeling the strength drain from her, Siri sobbing against him, or seeming to sob. Because I am made to feel hurt by you, not respected by you. Only your wife, away in Salthill, in that house, you respect.

C, Lionel respected his wife Camille. And loved her.

No matter what his children were saying.

No matter what all of Salthill was saying.

He would not be cruel to Camille. Would not treat his wife of thirty years as other men, for instance that bastard Harry Tierney, had treated their wives. Oh Christ but I am suffocating. If only Camille would leave me.

That damned house! Adam bores me, too. His death.

Over drinks with Harry Tierney he vowed he would not be cruel to Camille. He would make a generous settlement with Camille. He'd give her the house. Camille loved that house, the kids loved that house, the decent thing to do would be to give it to her outright-"And good-bye."

Harry Tierney looking very youthful, slick tufts of dark hair sprouting on his shiny head, grizzled dark eyebrows, his left eyelid drooping in a smirk, lifted his glass of Scotch, saying cheerfully, "I'll drink to that, friend." Was Harry, that notorious selfish bastard, laughing at Lionel?

Laughing at Lionel Hoffmann, the man of conscience? Lionel began to speak quickly. He was a good decent man, yes, he was a Christian and proud of it. He'd been brought up to be a gentleman. Harry Tierney listened to this, chewing nuts. The men, who'd never been friends in Salthill, had become friends of a kind here in Manhattan where both now lived. They were in the Skytop Club, Park Avenue, fifty-sixth floor overlooking nighttime sparkling Manhattan like jewels. At a distance, you can't discern between true jewels and fake jewels because both are sparkling, dazzling to the eye. And so Manhattan was sparkling, dazzling to the eye. After some minutes Harry Tierney interrupted Lionel to ask, "Who's your new love, Lionel? This sounds serious." Blushing, Lionel stammered, "I-I'm not sure." Harry laughed, "Not sure of the girl's name?" "Not sure if she's my-" Lionel hesitated as if his mouth were filled with something sticky, "- 'love.' " Harry asked how old she was, and Lionel, his judgment weakened by Scotch, answered, "She's about- Middle Age: A Romance

thirty. I think." Harry nodded, as if this was a good answer. "And where'd you meet her, Lionel?" "At the clinic." "The clinic?" "The Neck and Back Clinic on Park. You know-you recommended it a few months ago when I had neck pain." Harry's eyebrows lifted. He was chewing brazil nuts noisily. "She's a therapist there? Which one?" Lionel swallowed. He was smiling in confusion. Did he dare-in this place, to this man-utter the name that meant so much to him! "S-Siri." "Siri!" Lionel felt a stab of apprehension at the tone of his friend's voice. Harry's gaze was veiled, his jaws grinding a little less forcibly. Clearly he was taken by surprise, and he was embarrassed.

For the first time in Lionel's experience, Harry Tierney was at a loss for words.

S L a patient at the clinic. His neck pain had diminished, miraculously; but he was in terror of it returning. Without Siri, there is only pain. As Siri's patient, Lionel was required to partly undress and to lie quietly, passively, without resistance on Siri's table; sometimes they behaved as if they were strangers, addressing each other in formal voices as "Miss Siri" and "Mr. Hoffmann." The therapist's deft trained hands controlled Lionel. What a powerful erotic tension between them!

Lionel's penis pulsed with blood, he groaned with desire Siri primly refused to appease.

"Mr. Hoff-mann! If anyone should see."

D* S disappeared. Where? With whom? Lionel dared not accuse her, she laughed in his face saying she hadn't disappeared to herself, had she, only to him.

"I am my own self, I hope. I don't belong to you."

She wanted him to marry her, Lionel guessed. Just as, a lifetime ago, Camille had wanted him to marry her. An engagement ring, ritual celebra-tions culminating in a lavish wedding party, marriage and a house, a baby, and another baby. Vertigo overcame Lionel, he had already lived his life.

The babies, now grown, possessed of adult demands, bombarded him with telephone calls, the most embarrassing of which came to Hoffmann Publishing, Inc., and incessant e-mail messages. It was rare for Lionel to check his personal computer in the apartment on East 6*st, he couldn't

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bear it. He prowled Siri's grungy neighborhood off St. Marks Square. Did it trouble him that he was the oldest individual in sight, excepting homeless persons dozing in doorways or babbling into their hands?

He called the clinic, he risked humiliating himself by dropping by the clinic. The receptionists knew him. Siri's sister-therapists knew him.

Some of them smiled in sympathy, or in pity. Or were they laughing at him. "Mr. Hoffmann! Siri isn't in today." With as much dignity as the tremor in his voice allowed, Lionel inquired if anyone knew where Siri had gone, for instance had she gone out of the city? And when was she expected back? And who were her friends, her male friends, what were their names, surely names could be supplied, for a price?

"Mr. Hoffmann. No."

The pain in his neck returned. He listed to one side, clenching his neck in his hand. He was walking on a Midtown cross-street. He was headed for the Plaza Hotel where he'd made a reservation to have lunch with Kevin, finally he'd agreed to see Kevin who'd been pleading with him Dad! We have to talk. We really have to talk. What all this craziness is doing to Mom, scares me! But when Lionel arrived at the Plaza, Kevin wasn't there.

When Lionel checked with the maitre d', he discovered there was no reservation in his name. When the maitre d' checked his reservation book, he discovered that Lionel's reservation had been for the previous day.

Siri returned. Siri telephoned Lionel. In a pocket of the sealskin coat Lionel had bought for her at I. Magnin he would discover a boarding pass for a Continental flight, San Diego to New York. Seat E which was first-class, window. Who'd paid for this, Lionel wondered. Him?

I * Hoffmann Publishing, Inc.! Siri had hinted that Lionel might sell the business, retire as a multi-millionaire and travel the world , why not, you are not getting any younger or any poorer, yes? Siri had a friend, a divorce attorney. Siri's attorney-friend also dealt in prenuptial contracts. That house in Salthill you have never taken me to, maybe it should be sold? Such a big expensive property for a sad old woman living there alone. At Hoffmann Publishing, Inc., Lionel was CEO and very much respected and feared. Even the older Hoffmann shareholders approved of him. Of course, Lionel wasn't the man his father had been, but the company was doing exceptionally well. Riding the ongoing wave of American prosperity, they were selling more books, bringing in more revenue, year Middle Age: A Romance *

after year. There were interested buyers, of course, an immense American conglomerate. If Lionel sold, he'd make a fortune. But he'd have to confront his relatives. Oh, but he was bored with publishing eight-hundred-page illustrated books priced at two hundred dollars, on such subjects as endocrinology, gastroenterology, otolaryngological surgery, ophthalmo-logical surgery, cardiovascular surgery! If once he'd been genuinely intrigued by medical science, as his father had been, he'd long since lost interest. Mankind was overwhelmed with specialized information, as the universe was composed of invisible wormholes in incalculable quantities, merely to contemplate the phenomenon of such quantities was to risk vertigo, nausea, spiritual exhaustion, and despair. Money- making was far eas-ier. Money- making in a booming free market economy. Money- making, which he'd done, and might even take some pride in, if he wished. If Lionel Hoffmann still considered himself a man of pride.

He laughed aloud. Thinking how close to monkey- making, money- making was.

" N * the right to judge me."

Thoughts like maddened wasps in Lionel's skull! He was thinking he would not be bullied by self-styled moralists. Not by his intrusive children, not by his strangely uncomplaining wife, not by his Hoffmann relatives, not by Salthill friends. Former friends! Not by the pious dead.

Adam Berendt hadn't been any saint, far from it. Adam too had made money in real estate and junk bonds and there was something shadowy, possibly even illegal about his finances, but you'd never have guessed it from the man's pretense of living like Socrates, for Truth and Beauty.

Lionel had heard plenty in the months since Adam's death. There were rumors that Adam had used false names in money-making schemes, that there was a cache of love letters from women, including certain Salthill wives, hidden beneath the floorboards of his studio; there were shocking photos of nude women, some of them depicting sex acts, taken by Adam himself.

Lionel smiled to think of it. No, it was disturbing. It was sickening. Yet perhaps liberating, too.

Maybe the rumors were exaggerated, and maybe not. Who knew.

(Lionel knew there were lurid rumors making the rounds in Salthill, for his daughter Marcy had e-mailed him the information, knowing it

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would upset him. Lionel Hoffmann involved with a woman "young enough to be his daughter." Lionel Hoffmann of all people involved with a "model," a "go-go dancer," a "soft-porn actress," a "high-class call girl.") Still, if Camille had been involved with Adam, that would account for her readiness to forgive him. Sending him messages that clawed at his heart. Lionel dear, I will always love you. I will always be your loving wife.

Please know that! Your Camille. If Siri discovered these, she was furious, and ripped them into bits. It was Siri's conviction that Camille wasn't forgiving at all, but manipulative.

"She'll do anything to keep you, but not for love. I am the one who loves you, my Mr. Hoffmann."

And Siri demonstrated how.

A * , on a Midtown street, Lionel heard a familiar voice call his name, and turned to see an eagerly smiling Roger Cavanagh striding toward him. "Lionel! How the hell are you?" The men shook hands. Roger seemed to Lionel an apparition out of a dimly recalled and vaguely regretted past. But Lionel had always liked Roger, one of Salthill's battered souls.

"How am I? I'm-fine."

The men had drinks in a Sixth Avenue bar. Roger's eyes glittered with secrets. He was in the city on business: he was doing volunteer work for the National Project to Free the Innocent-"You know, one of Adam's causes. He left them fifty thousand dollars. I've gotten involved." Roger spoke with unnerving animation of the case he was appealing in federal court, the *8 conviction for first-degree murder in Hunterdon, New Jersey, of a black man named Elroy Jackson, Jr. Lionel listened. Or tried to listen. How tedious, another's idealism. But no: he was feeling envy. To care about something other than oneself, one's ridiculous sexual needs . . .

Lionel was trying not to think of Siri. Their most recent disagreement.

His disagreement, with her. He felt like a man who has devoured a rich gourmet meal, carrying it now like lead in his bowels.

Roger was saying, having shifted to another subject without Lionel's awareness, "Marriage! It's the great mystery, Lionel, isn't it? We can't live without it, and we can't live within it. Obviously men weren't intended to be domesticated, like animals. Men were intended by nature to be polygamous, promiscuous. This is common knowledge. Our glands know it. We Middle Age: A Romance

were meant to impregnate as many females as possible before we collapse or get killed by some other zealous seed-bearer. That's 'nature'-and nature is irrefutable. At the same time, anything other than marriage with a woman you love is just shit. You know it, Lionel, and I know it." Roger drank, shaking ash carelessly across the table. The men were in a swanky lounge called The Cigar Bar where busty waitresses in black spandex tank tops and tights emerged out of the shadows like Nubian slaves bearing drinks, with luminous made-up faces like leering masks. Lionel laughed, resenting Roger's remark. "Do I know it? Know what?" Roger ignored Lionel's belligerent tone, saying, "There's no life in loneliness, even in being alone. How Adam did it, I can't comprehend. There was a man made for family life! I think he felt he wasn't 'worthy' of a complete life. He'd done something, or caused something to be done, I think. When he was a kid. I never asked him outright, of course. As his executor I've been making inquiries into his past but always come to a dead-end. He's from Minnesota, yet also from Montana. He was born in *8, or in *6. I'm pretty certain he changed his name, officially. And used other names, unofficially. If a man wants to erase his past it's for a useful reason, right? A friend should honor that." Lionel asked, intrigued, "Adam changed his name officially?

From what?" It came to him that the folly of his life sprang from his remaining "Hoffmann" when he was no "Hoffmann." If he'd had the courage to change his name, and to choose another; to walk away from his family's money . . . Roger said, "A man needs a family as much as a woman does. I know, I've lost mine. I've lost my daughter, who hates my guts. I've been in love with a woman, and it hasn't gone well." Roger paused, and signaled for another drink. Lionel was embarrassed. He guessed that Roger was speaking of Marina Troy. At Adam's cremation ceremony he'd seen Roger with Marina, and at the ghastly spreading of Adam's ashes-that sick, stricken look in Roger's face when Marina pushed away from him. That, too, he'd envied. "She disappeared from Salthill. She left me. Though we weren't what you'd call lovers, I know she meant to leave me. The hell with it." Roger laughed harshly. The men drank in silence for a while. Lionel was resigned to a night alone, in anticipation of calling Siri in the morning. And he was becoming resigned to marrying her. For if he didn't marry her, he would lose her. And if he lost her, he couldn't bear it. And so he would have to divorce Camille, and that would destroy Camille. In a sensible, pragmatic, polygamous society, Lionel could simply have added on Siri as a second wife. A new, young,

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physically robust female. A fertile female. By now, in his prosperous early fifties, he'd have had several young wives. He wouldn't have become a mummy, pain throbbing in his neck. He wondered what edgy, nerved-up Roger did for sex. For love.

Suddenly, with a guarded expression, Roger said, "My real news, Lionel is: I'm going to be a father." Lionel said, "A- what?" Roger said, grinning, "A father." Lionel said, "You already are a father . . ." and Roger said, "For the second time, I'll be a father. And this time I mean to do it right."

As Lionel listened now avidly, Roger told him that the woman was a young paralegal working for the National Project to Free the Innocent with whom he'd become "involved" since the previous fall but with whom he wasn't in love-"And Naomi certainly isn't in love with me." There had been the possibility of the young woman having an abortion but through a "mutual arrangement" she was going to have the baby, and . . . Roger spoke excitedly yet with an air of wonderment like one who has been struck over the head by a blunt weapon. Lionel listened in disbelief, and in dismay. A father! A second time! And by way of a woman Roger didn't love!

The thought of Siri pregnant with his child both excited and repelled Lionel. And yet: what a testament to a middle-aged male's virility.

Lionel had no option but to ask when the baby was due, and Roger said, proudly, July eleven. In a lowered voice he added, "When Robin learns she'll be disgusted." Lionel said, impulsively, "My children are disgusted with me, too." The men laughed suddenly.

They drank, and laughed. Lionel felt his sinuses aching. Elsewhere in the lounge men were smoking cigars. Luxuriantly, lasciviously. Busty waitresses in shiny black spandex moved through clouds of smoke with fierce, fixed smiles. Lionel was laughing but his jaws seemed to have locked. A searing pain lifted from the nape of his neck into his skull. Hot tears ran down his cheeks but in the smoky twilight of The Cigar Bar his companion could pretend, with impeccable Salthill tact, not to notice.

I * that Lionel returned alone to the apartment on East 6*st to discover a faint stink of cigar smoke pervading the rooms.

Innocently thinking, It's in my clothing. My hair. Not here. He tried to recall whether the president had smoked a cigar, and believed he had not.

In the bedroom Lionel discovered the green satin bedspread carelessly Middle Age: A Romance

drawn up over wrinkled linen sheets; disbelieving, he stooped to examine coin-sized splotches of still-damp mucus on the bottom sheet. Another man's semen? Was it possible? There were smudges of lipstick on the pillows, the hue of dried blood, Siri's shade of lipstick. Amid the bedclothes, Siri's rich nutmeg smell and the smell of another, rank and animal, a sweaty male. In the dazzling white tile bathroom every towel appeared to have been roughly used and hung crooked from racks or lay damply wadded on the floor; the shower was dripping, and long dark snaky hairs were trapped in the drain. The air was still humid but steam had evapo-rated from the mirrors. In the zinc-framed mirror above the sink, a man's ashen, appalled face floated foolish as a child's balloon. His mouth was slack and his brain was struck blank as with a mallet.

"A S ! Thor! "

She had only to appear in the doorway, framed in sunlight, before she summoned them, and the dogs came running. She lifted her hands, clapping just three times. How they adored their mistress, and how beautiful they were to her!

First came Thor, panting and eager, the youngest, a two-year-old Doberman pinscher with a lean-muscled, burnished-dark body like liquid energy, urgent eyes and razor teeth. Next came the older Apollo, with the husky-shepherd's deep chest and solid hindquarters, yet puppylike in his eagerness to please. Finally, there was the smaller, spidery Shadow, coarsely black-furred, on three legs, shimmying his narrow hindquarters, panting so quickly his breath made a whistling sound. "Good dogs!

Come." Where once Camille Hoffmann had taken pleasure in feeding her husband and children, and in feeding guests seated at her long dining room table, now she took a more ardent, less anxious pleasure in feeding her dogs in a corner of the kitchen, each in his separate bowl. "Here, Thor.

Here, Apollo. Mind your manners, now! And here, Shadow. Don't spill.

Good dogs." A yellow plastic bowl for Thor. A red plastic bowl for Apollo.

A dark green plastic bowl for Shadow. And a large white plastic water bowl for all three dogs, neatly set upon sheets of newspaper.

These sheets of newspaper (usually the stock market pages of the New York Times) Camille changed every two or three days, depending upon how messily the dogs ate.

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Now in the New Year the beautifully restored old Colonial house on Old Mill Way was no longer a burrow. It had become a space open to daylight. Camille laughed to think she'd once fussed so over her furniture, her curtains and carpets. She'd once allowed herself to be upset when the children tracked mud into the spotless downstairs rooms. She'd been physically ill when, the morning after one of the Hoffmanns' New Year's Eve festive dinner-dance parties, she'd discovered burn marks on the hardwood floor of a newly remodeled guest bathroom, where someone, presumably drunk, had stubbed out a cigarette. ("In our house, Lionel.

One of our so-called friends. Can you imagine. Who could it be!" The probable suspect, both Camille and Lionel agreed, was Harry Tierney, who'd left Salthill soon afterward, thumbing his nose at them all.) What did such trivial things matter? On only his second day with Camille, the high-strung young Doberman, Thor, dashed past her into the dining room to throw himself with a savage snarl against a window (having seen what might have been a bird's shadow passing outside?), sank his teeth into the antique lace curtains, and tugged, and all came tumbling in a heap. Apollo and Shadow, not to be outdone in vigilance, and jealous of their mistress's new adoptee, barked excitedly. "Oh, you bad boys! You're destroying my beautiful house," Camille laughed.

In fact she was upset. She worried what Lionel would say when, one day soon, he returned home. "This is his house, too. He has allergies. He'll be appalled." And what would Camille's relatives say when they visited, both hers and Lionel's; and such Salthill friends as Beatrice Archer and Abigail Des Pres, who telephoned often, concerned that Camille spent too much time alone. (Camille wanted to protest she wasn't alone: she had Apollo, Shadow, and Thor. And she had her volunteer work at the Rockland County Homeless Animal Shelter, which meant a good deal to her; she was making friends there, and would make more. People like me. People who understand animals. At Christmas, Camille had made a generous contribution to the New Jersey Friends of the American Associated Humane Societies and in the spring she would volunteer to help in their statewide campaign to influence citizens to vote yes in an upcoming election, for a proposal to make cruelty to animals and animal abuse felonies and not merely misdemeanors punishable by token fines.) In this new phase of her life Camille felt like an explorer who has blundered onto a strange, unexpected terrain, for which nothing in her previous life has prepared her.

But she would be prepared, in time. She believed this!

Middle Age: A Romance