Instead, Marina said, in a lowered voice as if ashamed, stumbling on the path and blinking away tears, "I-I'd wanted to be an artist. As long ago as I could remember. There was no one else in my family who had such notions. We were a practical family. My father was a high school teacher, it was a job. My mother, before she got married, a nurse. They worked, they earned salaries. Me, I had 'visions.' I was an excitable, nervous girl. In college, at the University of Maine, I understood that, to be an artist, you must filter your vision through technique. I became interested in sculpting and pottery. But not conventional pottery-experimental, odd work. Pottery that doesn't sell! It was calming, I seemed to fly out of myself in a kind of trance. After graduation, this was in the eighties, I lived with some friends in Provincetown, very cheaply, and I was happy there, a local gallery sold some of my things, then I got restless and moved to San Francisco, and for a while I was living in a wonderful ramshackle old ranch house in Mendocino, you'd have loved that place, Adam!-instead of the river outside your house, you'd see mountains. A mountain is a kind of vertical river, isn't it? And the light cascading down. I was happy there, and doing some decent work; for a long time I'd been out of contact with my family, they hated my life, they didn't want to understand it, then my father got sick and I came back east, and something happened there, between me and what I was doing, between my hands and what they touched, and that's fatal for an artist, isn't it? It was as if I'd lost my nerve.

A young artist has courage, maybe the courage of ignorance. Then you lose that courage. I didn't know it at first. I kept going for a while, Middle Age: A Romance

mechanically. I loved my work but it became too important to me. It was my life, my breath. It was obsessive. I did sculpting, I suppose you could call it, on a smaller scale than your work, and in natural forms, not metal, but it exhausted me, I couldn't sleep, my head was filled with 'visions.' I wanted to create astonishing things that hadn't been imagined before. I wanted so badly-" Marina felt the old, sick excitement; she'd been speaking rapidly, heedlessly. Why am I doing this. Exposing myself. As if it could make this man love me!

They'd ascended the hill, and were in an open, grassy area; wild rose was blooming in white clusters; to the east, miles away, the Hudson River was of the hue of weathered stone, flattened by distance, without motion as a design in wallpaper. Adam, who'd climbed the hill without betraying exertion, he whose legs were hard-knotted with muscle, twice the size of Marina's slender legs, waited a respectful moment before asking, "How long was this phase of your life?" "About a year. A year and a half. I ran away to live again in New York, with a friend. He was an artist, too. And he had a commercial job in graphic design. I believed I loved him, it was part of my desperation." Adam asked, "And then what happened, Marina?" Marina said, "I don't know. I've tried not to think about it. I don't 'dwell' upon the past. I had a collapse, I guess. I suppose I was sick, physically. I seemed always to have a fever. I was terrified to sleep, I was anxious and angry all the time. Everything I touched, I seemed to destroy. My hands had turned against me. My lover couldn't live with me, he said. I drove him away, and begged him to come back; I drove him away again; I hated what I was doing, my work, I destroyed most of it, I lost all faith in myself; I even threw out most of my clothes. I returned to Bangor, I got a job. It was my duty, I believed, to visit my mother, even if she didn't know who I was, or care. When there's someone very sick, you can measure yourself against that person, and take comfort that you're not so bad.

That's sanity-that thrill of relief. Even with the sorrow, relief. But this confirmed my resolve not to risk mental breakdown. 'Art' isn't worth it.

And there was another side of me: I'd worked in bookstores, and I love books. I love the look and smell of books, the culture of books. There's a romance, too, in sanity, isn't there? I like the kind of people who come into bookstores. Thank God, I thought, I'd given up on the other-that craziness. I came into a little money and I borrowed money and I took over the mortgage on Salthill's 'quaint' little bookstore and I've been happy here."

Marina laughed. She was stubborn, and just slightly angry. "I am happy."

But was Adam impressed? In his droll, blunt way evidently not.

J C O*

He said, "Maybe you've embraced failure too quickly."

Marina was stung. Failure!

"I'll give you another chance, Marina. A choice. A way back into the life you abandoned."

I * that Adam proposed to Marina Troy that he make a gift to her. Make a gift was the expression he used. He would sign over to her the ownership of a forty-acre property in the Pocono Mountains, in Pennsylvania, approximately one hundred miles west of the hill upon which they were standing. An old lodge, but in good condition; of fieldstone and half-timbering; seven miles from a small town called Damascus Crossing, and about thirty miles from the city of East Stroudsburg, on the Delaware River. Marina listened to this, without fully comprehending. Adam was pointing westward, and Marina turned to see a sequence of hazing receding hills, a horizon of trees that must have been only a few miles away but seemed distant. "Don't look so alarmed, Marina," Adam said, bemused, as if this were the crux of Marina's alarm, "-the place has been winterized, insulated. It's furnished, more or less. There's a deep spring well, the purest water I've ever tasted. You could live alone there, Marina, undisturbed, and undistracted by any of us in Salthill. You could do the work for which you were born." Adam spoke excitedly, sincerely; Marina had never heard him, or any of her adult acquaintances, speak in such a way.

This man does love me. But on a spiritual plane. Not human. Tears sprang into her eyes, she was so deeply moved; yet of course it was impossible, an absurd proposition. "But Adam, what of the bookstore? I couldn't-"

"What of the bookstore? It will be there when you return, if you want it. If you return. Say you're gone a year: we'll hire a full-time manager. There's your current assistant who seems very capable. And of course I'd be in town to oversee things." Adam let his hand fall, and clamp, upon Marina's shoulder; the weight of this hand, and its heat, nearly made her stagger.

Marina continued to protest, and Adam continued to make plans. "Your Pearl Street house, you can rent it for a high price. I happen to know about Salthill real estate, and it's as inflated as properties in Westchester County.

Your droll little place, the size of a dollhouse, would be snapped up within twenty-four hours, and with your rental money you'd have more than enough to support yourself." Marina stared at her friend's face that seemed now to be glowing, glaring more fiercely. And his hand on her shoulder, so Middle Age: A Romance *

warm. I can't. Can't breathe. Long Marina had yearned to be touched by Adam Berendt, yet this touch was strange to her, disconcerting. They were standing so close together they might have been mistaken for a couple.

Marina had to resist a sudden impulse to step into Adam's arms, to embrace him around his burly chest, lay her head against him, and be comforted in her distress, even as Adam was the agent of her distress. She disengaged herself from the weight and heat of his hand. "Adam, of course I couldn't accept such a gift. How have you come into this property, that you can throw it away? What are you thinking of?" Adam said, surprised, "What am I thinking of? I'm thinking of you." "I'm not a young woman any longer, Adam. And even if I-" "Bullshit."

Abruptly then, Adam turned away, and continued on the hiking trail.

He was offended, thwarted. He would speak no more on the subject that day. Like a woman who has crawled out of a wreck, Marina glanced down at herself to see if she was still there. She wiped her damp, clammy face carefully with a tissue, tightened the laces of her hiking shoes, and followed after Adam who was nearly out of sight.

Marina hoped the preposterous offer he'd made to her would be discreetly forgotten, but a few days later, Adam stopped by her narrow lavender house at the top of North Pearl Street, beside the Catholic churchyard, to present to her several fully executed legal documents deeding a property in Damascus County, Pennsylvania, to her; and, in a manila envelope, a hand-drawn map in colored inks, labeled keys, and a page-long list of instructions regarding the operation of the house. With maddening aplomb he said, "Anytime you wish, Marina. It's yours now, it will be waiting." Marina was frightened, furious. She wanted to strike Adam with her fists. "Adam, are you crazy? I can't accept such a gift from you." Adam said, winking, "From whom, then, Marina, would you accept it?" "Adam, God damn it, I can't." But Adam merely placed the items on a table in Marina's front room, and strode back into her kitchen to brew himself coffee. (It was Adam's custom to drop by houses in Salthill where he was known and, in his words, tolerated. How vast were his friends, acquaintances, neighbors, Marina had no idea. Sometimes he bicycled about, sometimes he walked.

Sometimes he was accompanied by his dog, Apollo, "Apollodoros." If you invited Adam, he was sure not to come; if you did not, he might.) Marina begged Adam to take back the gift, and Adam said pleasantly, "Marina, a gift from the gods can't be rejected without invoking a curse. In time, you'll come round." Adam took his coffee mug back into the sunroom, and

J C O*

Marina joined him, with a mug of her own, and for a half hour or so they talked of other things; when Adam left, declining her offer of dinner, he squeezed her hand hard, wetly kissed her cheek, and laughed at her. Marina thought, Is he mad? She could hear him laughing to himself halfway down the block.

The gift as she would come to think of it. She couldn't bring herself to touch the items he'd left for several days. This was to be Marina's fate, was it? "No."

It was as she'd known: she wasn't strong enough. She couldn't have borne freedom in the Pocono Mountains, or anywhere. She'd lost the courage of her youth. The audacity of her youth. Never again, to her relief, did Adam bring up the subject of the farmhouse in Damascus County, Pennsylvania, and Marina never brought it up. Of course, there was the knowledge of it between them, unspoken; as, Marina supposed, the knowledge of an unborn child, a creature aborted in the womb, must hover between a woman and a man, forever in consciousness yet never spoken of.

Marina put the gift away for safekeeping. She dared not try to return it to Adam. After this, though she continued to love him, she feared him, too, and rather resented him. No man should be so powerful, meddling with another's soul.

And a year and six weeks later, Adam was dead. Marina was herself the personal executor of his estate. With a pang of dread she supposed the gift was still hers?

How death enters your life. Following Adam's death, and that stranger's body in the morgue, things began to loosen and unravel. Marina was a passenger in a careening vehicle that at high speed begins to shudder. Your instinct is, hide your eyes.

But in fact she was a responsible woman. The owner of the last independent bookstore in the village, widely admired as a still-youngish woman of independent means. Adam Berendt's friend, and the "personal executor"

of Adam's estate.

Marina would make arrangements for Adam's body to be cremated, by way of a funeral home in Nyack. She must try to notify his relatives. (But who were Adam's relatives?) Somehow, his car would have to be driven Middle Age: A Romance

back to Salthill. And there was the emergency matter of Adam's dog: what had happened to Apollo? When Marina returned to Salthill in the evening of July Fourth, groggy and exhausted from her ordeal at the medical center, she drove directly to Adam's house on the river thinking, I alone am responsible for that dog. But at Adam's house, where was Apollo?

When Adam was away for brief periods he usually left the dog outside, on a long leash, but Marina couldn't find Apollo in his usual place, had he slipped his leash, knowing somehow that his master was in distress, and run away? The silver-tipped husky was nowhere on Adam's property, Marina called and called for him until her throat was hoarse, tramping through the tall grass, through a wooded area, at last along the River Road wild-eyed and disheveled, crying, "Apollo? Apollo! " How furious she was, at both the dog and his dead master! Her drawn white face was illuminated in oncoming headlights that flared up, blinded her, and mercifully disappeared. Salthill was such a small community, Marina dreaded one of these drivers recognizing her, but no one did, nor did any residents of the River Road at whose houses she stopped to report having seen the lost dog. No one had heard "unusual barking." Marina thought Apollo knows that Adam has died. Marina reported the missing dog to the Salthill Animal Watch, and went home, staggering with exhaustion.

Envy Apollo! Adam once said. Of all of us, Apollo alone doesn't know he must die.

A of Adam's death, Marina had been living for seven years, contentedly enough, in the magical Village of Salthill-on-Hudson, where everyone was middle-aged.

She'd noticed immediately: Salthill residents who appeared to her young-"youthful"-in some cases strikingly attractive, in their late twenties or early thirties-were in fact middle-aged. Well into their forties, fifties, sometimes sixties. Salthill residents who looked frankly "middle-aged" were elderly. The only really young couples who could afford to live in Salthill were sons and daughters of the rich, and these had about them a vigorous, health-minded, resolutely "upbeat" American-middle-aged aura.

Adolescents and even children in Salthill, staggering beneath the weight of their parents' ambitions for them like overburdened camels, were middle-aged in spirit. The most commendable thing you might say of such offspring was that they were wonderfully mature for their ages even as the most

J C O*

commendable thing you might say about the elderly, if you could identify them, was that they were wonderfully young for their ages. No matter the demographics of Salthill and its environs, the median age had to be fifty.

It was possible, Adam Berendt refuted these observations. He was believed to be in his early fifties, and he looked exactly that age. But of course, he was middle-aged-"The very essence of that state of the soul."

Marina Troy, who on her last, startling birthday was thirty-eight, could console herself at least, if consolation was what she wanted, that she looked "much younger" than her age. If one didn't look too closely, in too unsparing a light.

Long she'd imagined herself as a girl, not quite a woman, with a curse blighting her maturity. Though in fact she wasn't a virgin, she'd long led a virginal life. She'd become, in Salthill, a "character" in others' imaginations. Like Adam Berendt, though Marina wasn't so strong, nor so popular, a "character" as Adam had been. A minor character. An eccentric. All communities are myth-making, and none more so than communities of the privileged and the sequestered, like Salthill. Where some of us have turned to salt, like Lot's wife?

The Village of Salthill-on-Hudson, population ,, was less than an hour's drive north of the George Washington Bridge; by train, you arrived at Grand Central Station in twenty-eight minutes, at least ideally. It was both a "historic" region-an old Dutch community founded in *6 on the west bank of the Hudson River, rebuilt and enlarged in *8 by devout members of the utopian Salthill Community under the messianic leader-ship of Captain Moses Salthill, who would in time, overwhelmed by angelic and demonic voices in "fiercesome contention," take his own life- and zealously, vibrantly contemporary. Here was community spirit in an almost literal sense. Even Salthill Republicans, it was fondly (if not altogether accurately) claimed, voted liberal. There was a palpable community self, a soul. You couldn't avoid it. Owner of the landmark Salthill Bookstore on Pedlar's Lane, in the heart of the "charming" historic district, Marina Troy could not avoid it.

Adam had said, of Salthill, that it was a place that, lacking legends, except for the long-dead early settlers, had to invent its own. And maybe this had become true, since World War II, of America itself. There were no true "heroes"-for there could be no "heroics." Yet the instinct for "heroes"-"heroines"-"legends" remained undiminished. At any time, a number of individuals must be designated as "legendary" by the media; a Middle Age: A Romance

number of individuals must be designated as "local characters" in their communities. The wish to believe that Adam Berendt had been a recluse, for instance, a man of mystery, could not be borne out by any actual behavior on Adam's part over the years; though Marina sensed it would be intensified after his death. And there was Marina Troy, a "character" on a smaller scale.

The unmarried, never-married, virginal-appearing and "fiercely independent" Marina Troy. A figure of romance, to others at least, in this green suburban world in which everyone was married, or had been married. "They speculate about us," Marina's friend Abigail Des Pres told her, "-I'm the lonely, sexually rapacious neurotic divorcee, forever in quest of a man; you're the mysterious maiden, with the long glamorous hair like what's-her-name in the fairy tale. Not Rumpelstiltskin-" "Rapunzel?"

"-a sort of unconscious temptress. Men are drawn, intrigued, but frightened away." "Are they? How?" "The collective sense is there must be some secret in your life, Marina. So they think." Marina laughed, though this disclosure alarmed and annoyed her. Her true secret, her repudiated hope of being an artist, she intended not to share with anyone (except Adam, who would never betray a secret).

"But, Abigail, who is this 'they'?"

" 'They.' Who surround us."

So tales were told of Marina Troy. Those beautiful somber stony-gray eyes! Her face in repose, so melancholy! Marina could be made to laugh, but silently. Though she was the daughter of a high school science teacher in unromantic Pike River, Maine, north of Bangor, and a woman who'd been briefly a registered nurse, yet her Salthill legend was of a "patrician New England" family who'd lost their fortune (shipbuilding? banking?) in the Depression. Though Marina frequently traveled back to Maine to visit her mother in a Bangor nursing home, and an older, married sister, it was widely believed that Marina's "patrician" family had disowned her. (Surely the estrangement had to do with sex? And maybe politics? Marina Troy was "very left, very liberal.") Marina protested none of these tales, for they were never told to her directly. But she was aware of them as we're uneasily aware of reflections of ourselves in mirrors or shiny surfaces at which, in the company of others, we don't want to glance. Except with Adam, Marina knew better than to speak of her private life to Salthill friends. She knew how the most reluctantly uttered confidence was soon taken up by the Salthill circle,

J C O*

tossed into the air and batted about, as a pack of dogs might take up a hapless creature, tossing its body into the air, yipping and barking excitedly until nothing remained but a patch of bloody skin or a few beautiful, bloody feathers.

She understood, though, that Salthill most admired Marina Troy for her "devotion" to the Salthill Bookstore. This cramped little store was situ-ated in a block of rowhouses that veered uphill from Salthill's Main Street like steps, each of the woodframe buildings painted a different color, maroon, yellow, pale green, brick red, chalk white, like an illustration in a nineteenth-century children's book. Of course, Pedlar's Lane was cobbled, and one way, and so narrow that trucks moved along it slowly, like hunks of coarse thread pushing through the eye of a needle. Of course, no parking was allowed on or even near Pedlar's Lane, which cut down on customers considerably. A gigantic Barnes & Noble store at the gigantic White Hills Mall twenty minutes away in Nyack, and Internet book sales, were gradually drawing off even long faithful customers of the store, yet there was romance in such doomed idealism-wasn't there? Especially to the affluent who had no firsthand knowledge of it, as Marina did.

Salthill was intrigued, too, that in a gallant or quixotic gesture a few years before, Adam Berendt had invested in the Salthill Bookstore. Or he'd at least lent his friend Marina money. (How much, no one knew. No one supposed that Adam had much money. A sculptor who gave most of his work away, and seemed never to be working? Who drove a * Mercedes through the decades, and lived in an eighteenth-century stone house badly in need of renovating?) Marina lived at 88 North Pearl Street, a brisk ten-minute walk from Pedlar's Lane, or a five-minute bicycle ride, in a Victorian shingleboard painted lavender, beginning just perceptibly to peel, with purple grapevine trim; seen from the street, Marina's house had a quaint storybook quality, like her store; its facade was so narrow, a man might almost encompass it by stretching wide both his arms as, in a playful gesture, a male visitor had once done. "Marina, you live in a dollhouse!" Marina felt obliged to plant purple pansies and petunias in the windowboxes of her house. Her small front yard was bounded by a three-foot wrought-iron fence; on her front step, there was a braided welcome mat. Inside the house were three rooms downstairs, and three rooms upstairs; the stairs were unnervingly steep, and warped; the floorboards of each room were warped; the old glass of the windowpanes was wavy as if afflicted with astigmatism. You could love Middle Age: A Romance

such a house, and be terribly tired of living in it. As you could love books, and be terribly tired of the commerce of books.

Adam had visited Marina many times in the house at 88 North Pearl, but not once had he lain in her brass bed at the top of the house. The Salthill circle was curious about this possibility, and neither Marina nor Adam felt obliged to enlighten them. In fact, Adam had climbed the steep stairs, making their aged wood creak, and he'd entered the bedroom with its slanting ceiling, but only to help Marina paper the walls. He'd fixed drips in her bathrooms, upstairs and down. He'd offered to caulk the windows and would surely have done so before the first frost of that year, except he'd been killed in midsummer.

What is the romance of a Marina Troy, for her married female friends?

She supposed it must be her aloneness. Women who couldn't bear a few minutes' solitude in their lavish homes, who frantically telephoned friends through the day and filled up their calendars with dinners, cocktail parties, luncheons, tennis dates, excursions into the city, charitable organizations; women who collapsed when their children departed for college, or for summers abroad, or even for summer camp; women who panicked at the possibility of divorce, yet also at the possibility of spending a quiet weekend alone with their husbands; women who kept lengthy, annotated lists of individuals who "owed" them and whom they "owed," and to what degree, nonetheless spoke of admiring Marina, and of envying her. Yet they were keen to contaminate her aloneness. They invited her to their continuous stream of parties, not minding that, though she owed everyone in town, she rarely reciprocated; they took care to seat her beside such eligible bachelors as Adam Berendt, who, it seemed, had never been married; and Roger Cavanagh, whose marriage had dissolved, leaving him witty and ironic, handicapped as with a wizened or missing limb. These women, most of them beautiful well into middle-age, spoke kindly of Marina's "unique" beauty; her "patrician" profile; for a woman prized by their circle could hardly be plain.

Marina wore striking clothes, quite unlike her Salthill women friends who shopped exclusively at designer stores; but these were "striking" perhaps by accident. Long hobbling skirts, often with alarming slits in the sides; velvet jackets wearing out at the elbows, and too tight in the shoulders; expensive but water-stained leather boots to the knee; curious carved-looking shoes with or without heels, or black running shoes with floppy black shoelaces. She was known to be one of Salthill's "runners"; it

J C O*

was a matter of common knowledge that she and her friend Adam Berendt went hiking together, on ambitious treks. She wore shorts, trousers, slacks, jeans; often these were a size or two too large; and cable-knit sweaters that looked as if they were hand knit, but were not. In fact, Marina was not very domestic. When at last she couldn't avoid it, and invited friends to dinner, the meal tended to be hastily prepared; often, she hauled it home from Chez Helene, Salthill's premiere food shop. (If Marina's friends sighted Chez Helene containers in her kitchen, they passed along the good news to one another: "We're in luck tonight.") Marina's dread of domesticity had a darker side. She feared opening that vein, for what if she bled to death?

It was seven years before Adam's death she'd been introduced to him by an older Salthill couple, the Hoffmanns. Fondly it would be recounted how at that meeting Adam Berendt had shaken the young red-haired woman's hand and fixed her with his critical left eye and loudly, lavishly declared she was a contemporary Elizabeth I-"You know, the Hilliard portraits." Impulsively Adam lifted Marina's hand to kiss the knuckles, even as Marina, the abashed Rapunzel, stared at him in astonishment.

Who on earth is this man?

She'd avoided Adam for the remainder of the evening. The mere sight of him provoked a blush like a hemorrhage into her face.

But she'd been touched with pleasure, too. For she was a vain woman, at heart. Marina Troy, Virgin Queen.

In fact, the celebrated Hilliard portraits of Elizabeth I, which Marina sought out the next morning in her bookstore, depict a very pale, unsmiling, eyebrowless red-haired woman of indeterminate age, neither young nor old; her nose long and narrow, her eyes wary, vigilant. Except for the Queen's excessively ornate attire, which exuded an air almost of madness, you couldn't have guessed that this individual was a woman, female.

M of these things, as a way of not thinking of Adam's death. Upstairs in her crooked little woodframe house at the top of North Pearl Street beside the churchyard. She couldn't hope to sleep just yet. It was only midnight. July fifth, and the maddening fireworks silenced at last. She'd been making telephone calls, and speaking quietly over the phone, and finally she'd asked other friends to make the rest of her calls for her; and now the phone receiver lay off the hook, utterly silent as if the cord had been cut.

Middle Age: A Romance

She'd embraced him, or tried to. Stroked his grimacing face. Kissed his discolored eyelids. The body he'd become. Not Adam.

A vigil for Adam. She'd rummaged through her bureau drawers, retrieved the gift, placing it quickly on a table; not examining the documents. She'd found snapshots of Adam and herself, and several charcoal sketches she'd made of him a few years before. Evidence. He did exist. In my life. For some reason, one day she'd had an urge to sketch Adam, though she hadn't picked up a charcoal stick in years. "My ugly mug?" Adam asked. "Hell, why?" He hadn't really wanted to pose for Marina, sitting still in such a way was too passive for him, made him restless, but he'd given in, for Marina had prevailed upon him and he was a good-natured guy, a good sport. And maybe he'd been curious to see just how talented Marina was.

So Adam had posed for Marina, in the solarium at the rear of her house, and she'd tried, God how she'd tried to capture his likeness, his spirit; finally giving up, and putting the sketches away, though she hadn't showed them to Adam, knowing he'd have laughed at them, and wanted to rip them up. She'd saved the sketches for they were a sign of their intimacy, hers and Adam's; and of the highly intense, concentrated hour they'd spent on that January afternoon that would otherwise have dissolved into oblivion. (Except: Marina recalled how that evening she and Adam were officially involved in a public occasion at the Salthill Arts Council hall. An anonymous, presumably wealthy local donor had given the organization, in which Marina was an officer that year, a tall columnar sculpture in travertine marble and cherry wood, by the distinguished Ar-gentine sculpture Raul Farco, and the Arts Council had talked Adam into publicly presenting the sculpture, to an audience largely unfamiliar with Farco's work. Adam professed to dislike events of this nature, yet, once on his feet, assured of his audience's interest, he spoke with zest and enthusiasm, and was warmly applauded. He'd worn a bulky tweed green-heather sport coat, gray trousers that didn't match, a midnight-blue shirt and a necktie of style and beauty, Marina suspected it must be a gift from a woman. But she wasn't jealous.) Examining the sketches now, Marina was sharply disappointed. She had been half hoping, after the horror of Jones Point . . . But she'd failed to capture the man's mysterious essence. You could identify this brute-looking character as Adam Berendt, but it wasn't Adam Berendt; it was a dummy, a mannequin; a simulacrum of a middle-aged, stocky man with a creased face, balding head, and unnatural eyes, from which all youth, vigor, mystery had departed. As in the morgue he'd

J C O*

lain inert. Both eyes now blind. Mouth partly open as if he had one more thing to say-but what?

Marina picked up a charcoal stick and tried to correct Adam's likeness.

Willing herself to remember Adam as he'd been in life. Not in death but in life. Standing before her, here in this room as he'd done in life. Smiling.

Reaching out to her. Was he teasing her? About what? The hills are still there, Marina! But he'd laughed at her, too. He'd laughed at all of Salthill, yet without meanness. Marina began to tremble, seeing the man so clearly.

Hearing his voice. Yet, fumbling with the charcoal stick, as unable to express what she saw as a young child. "Oh, Adam." It was true: by any crite-ria, he'd had an ugly mug. His skin had looked singed, and his nose had been broken, and there was a startlingly white barbed-wire scar through his right eyebrow. Yet, why wasn't he ugly? On the contrary, Adam seemed to Marina beautiful . . .

In Plato's Phaedo Socrates assures us Our soul is imperishable and immortal and existed before we were born.

"Oh, Adam. Is this true? I don't think this is true."

It was *:8 .. Marina's hand faltered. The charcoal stick that had been so inept fell to the floor. The drawings were crude, hopeless. The man had gone. Adam had departed. How to endure this night? Marina should have torn up the drawings, these testaments to her loss, but even this act of defiance was beyond her.

How death enters life. And life is altered. She knew that Roger Cavanagh, who was Adam's lawyer, and had been his friend, would call her soon, and within minutes of her replacing the phone on the hook, cautiously, with dread, the phone rang, and it was Roger. Instructing her to please come to his office in town, if she was free. He had private, urgent business with her. "Is it-Adam's will?" Marina asked, and Roger said, "Yes. Adam's will."

Marina had wakened in a state of suspended emotion. She'd slept poorly the previous night. Struggling not to drown as Thwaite Thwaite entered her dreams with nightmare logic. Thwaite that was a foul licorice substance pushing down her throat. In an overly bright daylight she moved like a sleepwalker. Or like a woman suffering a classic hangover.

Thinking how, under normal circumstances, she'd have been irritated with Middle Age: A Romance *

Roger Cavanagh, so absorbed in his lawyer-mode that he hadn't even commiserated with Marina about Adam's death.

Roger Cavanagh, whose wife had divorced him, and won custody of their daughter. How often Marina had been seated beside this man, at Salthill dinner parties, as if, somehow, in their friends' eyes, Marina and Roger must be "fated"; yet neither seemed to feel much for the other except wariness, a vague sexual unease. Roger rarely came into the Salthill Bookstore. He was a man who acknowledged almost boastfully that he "hadn't time" for serious reading; newspapers, TV, and professional jour-nals were all he "had time" for. How Adam had tolerated him, Marina couldn't imagine. Roger put her in mind of sharp, dark things: shark fins, spikes of wrought-iron fences, painful jolts in the darkness as you stumbled from bed. Years ago, he'd called her several times to ask her-what, Marina couldn't recall. The essence of an unmarried man telephoning an unmarried woman in such circumstances must mean, to be blunt about it, Will you have sex with me? Marina laughed aloud, blindly coiling a braid around her head, not caring to observe herself very closely in the mirror.