He wears a dark tweed winter jacket that fits him loosely in the shoulders, and may be missing a button, like an item of secondhand clothing Adam Berendt might have purchased. But he lacks Adam's poise, and he lacks Adam's confidence. He has not an ounce of Adam's playful sexual swagger. As he speaks he gestures excitedly. His hair has grown too long around his ears, his necktie is partly unknotted, and twisted. Still, Abigail feels a stirring of interest. Almost, she can convince herself it's sexual.

Oldt, or Ault, is a man of intelligence, and fiery principles. His eyes move restlessly about the room (where some of his listeners are attentive-seeming as Abigail, and others, mostly men, are nodding off to sleep) yet return repeatedly to her. He seems to be asking Abigail, pleading with Abigail. "Why do images of the future hold so little attraction for us? So little human appeal? Because we have not yet lived in the future. We have lived, through our ancestors, solely in the past. The past is a country we know, or believe we know. Our mission then is to preserve the past intelligently-and to preserve our own souls." But Oldt, or Ault, is so ugly.

You simply could not kiss a man with such nostrils, even with tight-shut eyes.

The parlor lights are being dimmed, the architect is preparing to show slides. A relief, Abigail won't have to stare at his face.

Is it true?-the past is a country we know, a country worth preserving?

Abigail wonders. In recent weeks, since brooding upon her death, she's been haunted by the careless words Jared had uttered in the Middlebury *

J C O*

hotel room. We're just, like, algae on a pond. Fucking green scum. Jared's contemptuous eyes, the twist of his beautiful mouth. Abigail feels a sting of hurt, remembering. Why hadn't she gone to her son, to embrace him?

Why had she been so-stupidly shy? Jared was needing her, the kid was brokenhearted, Abigail should have hugged him, wept with him. No, no, no. We are not pond algae. We are HUMAN, we have SOULS.

Abigail wipes at her eyes, distraught. She has failed as a mother. Not in trying to kill her son but in not knowing how to teach him to live.

Slides of regional landmarks. "Before" and "after" restoration. Abigail recognizes some of these. The architect Oldt, or Ault, is head of a firm that specializes in the preservation and restoration of historic sites; it seems that he's been very successful, and his work has won prestigious awards. In the semidark, the man exudes authority, even charisma. If I could love him. Someone like him. There's the old stone Griswold House (*68) in the nearby village Galilee-on-Hudson. There's the Old Post Office (*) of Bethel-on-Hudson. The Union Cliff House (*8), once a stagecoach stop on the River Road, not far from Adam's Deppe House.

The Hudson Hotel (*88) of Hastings-on-Hudson, a Victorian extrava-ganza nearly razed by a rapacious developer but saved by the efforts of preservationists. Abigail sees these heraldic images through a shimmer of tears. Even ugly buildings are beautiful, redeemed by History. The Swan's Ferry Quaker Meeting House (*8), once a near-ruin and now a branch of the Rockland County Public Library; the Palisades Battle Memorial Bell Tower (***); the classic-revival bank on Main Street, Salthill (*), owned now by a real estate agent; the Rialto, the art-deco movie house (*), also on Main Street, restored and reopened as a theater showing art films. Next, the architect shows slides of deteriorated regional buildings and sites badly in need of salvation. His conclusion is passionate: "The next decade, our first in this new century, will be the most crucial of all our decades. We hope you will give us your support. History is everyone's business."

Abigail thinks Restore me! I'm in ruins.

The lights come up. There's a reception. Abigail blinks, a little dazed.

Her first impulse is to escape, and return home: to the safety of the mausoleum. Her second impulse is to remain. She's here for a purpose. (But what purpose?) She's being greeted by Salthill acquaintances and neighbors, her hand is being shaken, ritual kisses bestowed upon her cheeks.

We're just, like, algae on a pond. Fucking green scum. These good decent dull Middle Age: A Romance **

people she's known for years. "Abigail Tierney! It's been ages." Abigail has a set response to such remarks, she's pert as a high school cheerleader- "I'm no longer Mrs. Tierney, I've reverted to 'Ms. Des Pres.' Harry and I have divorced." Abigail takes care to pronounce the absurd "Ms." like an ingenue in a situation comedy, signaling her listener not to wince on her account but to smile as Abigail is smiling. She hates it that the automatic response to her declaration is Oh! I'm sorry to hear that and has prepared another pert reply: "I'm not sorry, so you shouldn't be, either."

Now can we change the fucking subject, please!

Abigail Des Pres, Salthill's fabled neurotic divorcee, by far the most attractive woman in Pryce House tonight, as she's the youngest, finds herself the center of much masculine attention. Too much. Like a soccer ball shouted-after, and kicked. Men compete for her vacant startled smile. Her Old Mill neighbor, eighty-year-old B- in his motorized wheelchair. And there is S-, the distinguished federal judge she'd once dated, wearing beneath his dark pin-striped suit a colostomy bag; now nudging against Abigail in a way both intimate and intimidating. S- kisses her porcelain cheek and murmurs in reproach, "Abigail, where have you been keeping yourself? You seem never to be home when I call, and you never call me back." There are several men this evening who brandish the tokens of a lost, lamented manhood, two of them unwrapped cigars, the other an unlit pipe. One of the men, trying to engage Abigail in conversation, strokes the crinkly paper of his cigar as it nestles in his coat pocket; the other, smiling edgily, unable to push into Abigail's presence, is fondling his cigar, openly, clenching and clutching at it with subdued violence. And there is an old acquaintance, P-, whom Abigail might have loved a very long time ago, meditatively sucking as he often does on such occasions an unlit pipe. Smoking has been forbidden these men, you needn't ask why.

"Abigail! You're looking lovely as usual."

Abigail is stunned with disappointment. The dark-haired gentleman she'd fantasized might be Asian-American turns out to be just another Salthill acquaintance; a junk-bond millionaire and a former golfing partner of Harry's; G- swarms upon Abigail, outweighing her by one hundred pounds, kissing her cheek though she gives the man no encouragement. G- has had some sort of facial restoration and looks "young"; his hair is boldly black, raven's wing black, and suspiciously thick; beneath his expensive cologne there's a whiff of something very black, like shoe polish. G- peers at Abigail's mouth when she speaks. Their *

J C O*

conversation is awkward, disjointed. At another time, Adam would have drifted by to rescue her. Oh, where is Adam! G- is telling Abigail with a smirk that he's been meaning to call her for a long time-years!-"to commiserate"-"to share memories of that world-class bastard H.T. who treated you, frankly, excuse my language, a lady like you, like shit." How'd Abigail like to slip away from Pryce House and get a drink at the Inn?

And maybe they could have dinner together sometime soon? Abigail is desperate to escape G- but the man has backed her into a corner. Continuing to stare, avidly, at her mouth. (Is he going to kiss her? In this public place? Abigail is fluttered and panicky as a thirteen-year-old.) G- maneuvers Abigail beneath a light, explaining, in an undertone, that he's become a little deaf in both ears-"But I read lips." Unconsciously, G- smacks his lips. Abigail blushes and manages to slip away, somehow. A cocktail reception is very like a soccer game, you must keep in motion.

"M-Miss Des Pres? Hel- lo." It's the architect with the vulpine-boyish face.

During the architect's presentation Abigail had become mildly uneasy, noticing how his eyes repeatedly drifted onto her, but she'd told herself maybe she was imagining it. Now the man is quite intent upon speaking to her. His name is "Gerhardt Ault"-it turns out that he was a friend of Adam Berendt. "Though not a close friend, as I know you were, Miss Des Pres. But I admired Adam enormously. He was a true American original." Abigail frowns. She isn't at all certain she likes Adam characterized as an American original, like a stunted folk figure in a painting by the primitive artist Edward Hicks. Reluctantly she shakes hands with Ault, whose grip is moist and overly eager. The man might be fifteen, not an adult of reputation and accomplishment. He wears no cologne. He exudes sweaty-clammy unease, a whitish odor like slightly rancid oysters.

Close up, his nose is not only large but large-pored; the nostrils are cavernous. He has a faint stammer. Yet he's boyish, almost charming. Abigail smiles in her "feminine" way; Ault is a man after all, if an ugly man, and "feminine" behavior is a reflex with Abigail as with most women of her class, as a decapitated chicken is said to totter about comically while blood spurts from its throat, and just possibly the decapitated head flutters its eyelashes and attempts a coquettish smile with its beak preparatory to extinction. Gerhardt Ault has been talking of Adam Berendt's sculpted works, which he "much admires"; he seems to be under the mis-apprehension that Abigail is a "sculptress"; Abigail, who'd taken art Middle Age: A Romance *

classes with Adam a decade ago, and had no patience for the discipline of sculpting, is too annoyed to set Ault straight. Is that what he sees in me: sculptress? As he speaks, a strange animation suffuses Ault. He reminds her of-not Adam Berendt exactly; but Adam as he might have been, younger, not so stocky in build, with a narrow and not a broad face; less certain of himself, uneasy with women. Adam if he'd had two functioning eyes, and these eyes were deep-socketed, melancholy. Adam with a long beaky nose. What sense does this make? There are flecks of lint, or dan-druff, on Ault's tweedy shoulders. The man is scarcely taller than Abigail in her high heels. And his necktie, a dull striped affair, is twisted about, its torn label exposed. Macy's! Absentmindedly, Abigail reaches out to straighten the tie. An instinctive wifely gesture. As she might have done, scarcely thinking, with Adam. The effect upon Gerhardt Ault is electric.

A warm dazed flush envelops his cheeks. His nostrils widen alarmingly, like staring eyes. And his eyes flood with emotion. As if I've touched his cock. Have I touched his cock? Oh, God. Ault begins to speak, stammering, and Abigail says quickly, blushing, "I'm so sorry, Mr. Ault! I don't know what made me do-that." Ault says, "Miss Des Pres, thank you. Obviously I'm-disheveled."

He laughs shrilly. Clearly his teeth haven't been capped. He would say more, but Abigail excuses herself, and gracefully escapes.

Algae on a pond. Fucking green scum.

Abigail sits up, late. Thinking: Jared's generation is being educated to ecological interrelatedness and yet there is, for them, no higher, sacred vision. (How could Abigail fairly bring her son into the Episcopal church, in which she didn't believe? And Harrison Tierney liked to boast he'd been a "confirmed atheist" in the womb.) But "ecology" might be hardly more than cyberspace, to American kids. A video game. Fantasy. Nature consumes all, and defines all. Is there nothing beyond Nature?

No wonder Jared and his friends have no interest, not a scintilla of interest, in History. What's History but old, dead things done by old, dead people.

Life devours life, but man breaks the cycle, man has memory.

So Adam once said. Oh, why hadn't Abigail embraced Jared, to commiserate with him over Adam's death? Why had she been so reluctant to speak to him, frankly?

J C O*

Because you were pandering to him. His adolescent angst. You were flirting with him. Your own son!

S? It might be a mistake. (A terrible mistake!) Since Abigail's estate would go almost exclusively to Jared, her only child; Jared is a minor; so, Harry Tierney, that world-class bastard, would control it. My mortal enemy. I've got to outlive him!

N at precisely ten o'clock the telephone rings and Abigail hesitantly answers it-"Yes?"-resisting the shameful hope this might be Jared (for of course it won't be Jared, never will it be Jared), and there's an adenoidal voice stammering in her ear, "M-Miss Des Pres? Abigail?

Hello." Politely Abigail says, "Do I know you?" The caller says, "We met last night? At the Salthill Historic Society." A blurred vision of the architect's homely face rises before her, the melancholy eyes and enormous nostrils and that eager grimace of a smile. Oh God, why had she touched him. Why does Abigail do such things. How cruel she feels in her quilted Laura Ashley robe, barefoot, staring through a window at an edge of a sloping lawn that rises like a sharp green headache out of sight. "My name is Gerhardt Ault? We spoke briefly."

"Yes, of course. You were very-inspiring."

"I was? Thank you!"

Abigail shuts her eyes. Why say such things! As if her mouth, like the decapitated chicken head, must have its own way.

"I try, you know. I believe so-fervently. In what my associates and I are doing. Not just the buildings, you know, but-the environmental sites.

Sometimes we look at the landscape first. Where, in the past, the landscape architect would be the last to be called in, and often there wasn't any money to properly-"

Abigail presses her face against a windowpane. She's in one of the many, too many, rooms of the Cape Cod mausoleum. She's exhausted by living alone. Alone, you think too much. The brain never clicks off till bedtime.

God damn, when Roger Cavanagh kissed her, in this very room, she should have kissed him back, slid her arms around his neck and kissed, kissed. She might've brushed against his groin. That baby Roger is fathering might have been hers.

Middle Age: A Romance *

"Would you be free to have d-dinner with me? Tonight?"

"Tonight? Certainly not." Abigail has to think for a moment, to whom she's speaking.

"T-Tomorrow night?"

"I have another engagement. I'm sorry."

How cruel she's feeling. An Amazon, one of her breasts sawed off so that she can fire her arrows more expertly. She understands Camille Hoffmann's weakness for dogs. Doggy-eyes, yearning-panting, crawling to your feet.

"What about-Sunday?"

Abigail sighs. She wants to laugh incredulously. The caller, seemingly shy, tongue-tied Ault, is breathing down her neck! Abigail has to hold the receiver away from her ear.

"Sunday. I suppose so. Thank you. Good-bye!"

It's the only way to escape. Abigail hangs up the phone, and hurries from the room even as, almost immediately, it begins to ring again.

"Harry. Just tell me-how Jared is."

A pause. Harry is obviously shocked to hear her voice.

Or maybe he's trying to place the voice? So many women have passed through his life, sticky for a while, but ephemeral, like pond algae.

"We don't need to talk, otherwise. Just tell me how he is."

Harry swallows, hard. This, Abigail can hear.

"Abigail, it wasn't my idea, Jared living with me. But I had to accede to his wishes, you know."

Abigail says nothing. She grips the telephone receiver hard to keep it from trembling as her entire body is trembling.

"He did claim-you know. You tried to kill him."

Abigail shuts her eyes. Not I! The demon hand.

"Whether true or not"-Harry is being gracious, this is a surprise- "he seems to believe it. Or to wish to believe it."

"Harry, please. Will you please just simply tell me how Jared is."

"He isn't e-mailing you? I thought he was."

Like hell, you thought.

"You mean he isn't? Like-never?"

Abigail makes a faint, fading sound of acquiescence. The last peep of a decapitated chicken.

"That kid! Well, he's a kid."

J C O*

"Harrison, don't make me beg. It always comes to this: I crawl, I beg.

Just tell me how my son is, is he well?"

There's a long pause. Abigail is feeling anxious. At the other end of the line, background noises (the gorgeous young second-wife Kim, scolding a maid?) are suddenly silenced, as Harry has possibly (Abigail used to wince at such maneuvers) kicked a door shut.

"He's a kid. He's fucked-up like his friends. He's sixteen. You're asking is he 'well'?"

"How is he-'fucked-up'?" Abigail feels, despite her best maternal instinct, a surge of hope. Jared misses his mom! Jared is going through a phase, and will soon be reconciled with his mom.

Harry laughs irritably. "Let me count the ways. Academic, social, familial, psychological. His feet stink."

"It's the shoes. The running shoes. Without socks."

"Jared's feet stink without the benefit of running shoes," Harry says.

Abigail sees him, her ex-husband, running his fingers through his thinning hair; screwing up his face like a gargoyle. That look that signaled intense disgust, or the very brink of orgasm. "Though, I grant you, they stink worse with the shoes around." Harry pauses, and now Abigail sees his nose twitch. Harry was always a fastidious man, nauseated by the faintest whiff of baby shit. And Abigail, a young besotted mother, grateful for the excuse to forgo designer clothes, tight-fitting Italian shoes and weekly trips to the hairdresser, had reveled in baby-mess. Even baby shit was fine since it indicated, didn't it, that the gastrointestinal machinery was working right?

"It's just that I get so lonely. I miss Jared."

Another pause. Sudden frank emotion embarrasses Harry Tierney, if he can't turn it into a joke. "Sure. But you two were always fighting, the kid says."

"We were not always fighting!"

"I know that, but Jared . . . What does a kid know."

"Has something happened between you and Jared, Harry?"

Harry sighs. Again Abigail feels an absurd little pinprick of hope. "He says you were always nagging him. About smoking. And he says he isn't smoking."

"Harry, I've seen him smoking."

"There're worse things."

"Is he-doing drugs? Is Jared-?"

Middle Age: A Romance *

"He's sixteen. He's at boarding school. When he's technically home, he's in Manhattan. What can I say?"

"Is that it? Drugs? What-kind of drugs?"

Abigail can see Harry screw up his face again, as with a bad smell. She recalls now that he'd come to be bored with her maternalizing, as he called it. She'd overheard Harry joke crudely with male friends. When is a cunt not a cunt? When you call it Mom. Abigail's face smarts, she wishes she were in her ex-husband's presence so she could claw at his smug-sour fattish face.

Abigail says, pleading, "I didn't nag Jared, truly. But I may have hugged him." Nag, hug. You could see how the two, so very different, actions might be confused by a teenaged boy.

"Well. There you are."