Adam Berendt! Marina was stunned. She remembered how Adam had been persuaded to formally present the graceful columnar marble piece in Middle Age: A Romance *

the Arts Council hall; how, once Adam overcame his initial awkwardness, speaking in front of a gathering that contained so many friends, he'd seemed to soar, not eloquent exactly but warm and enthusiastic, explaining why the marble sculpture was an important work, speaking of the community's gratitude to the "unknown" donor. For once, Adam said, artist and donor need not be conjoined, only the artist and his work would be celebrated. Everyone had clapped enthusiastically. It had seemed to them that Adam's insight was profound. But he was speaking of himself.

Beneath scattered newspaper pages on a table, Marina found Adam's filthy, much thumbed address book. Quickly she looked under "B"-but there were no Berendts listed. Many names in the little book were messily crossed out and entire pages were missing. There were numerous inser-tions, business cards and slips of paper, falling out of the dog-eared pages.

Marina couldn't resist turning to "T"-and there was Marina Troy listed.

Her hand began to shake. How sordid it was, this business of recording the names of human beings, addresses, and telephone numbers as they intersect with our lives; when they no longer intersect, we cross them out, or .

tear out their page. Adam had marked occasional names with ; she .

seemed to know that indicated an individual no longer living. For some reason her heart was pounding quickly. What did it mean that Marina Troy, North Pearl Street, was included in Adam Berendt's address book, with so many others? It meant nothing, of course. Marina said with sudden bitterness, "What do we want from one another, really? All this frantic 'collecting' of one another. Friends, social life. After death, it must all seem so futile." Roger, seated at Adam's swivel chair, made a snorting sound. "Maybe before death, too." Marina tossed the address book down onto the desk in front of him, with sudden vehemence.

Quickly Roger leafed through the little book, as if its secrets might spill out at once. She knew he was seeking "C"- Roger Cavanagh. Marina felt a stab of dislike for the man. Why couldn't he be Adam, why couldn't he have died in Adam's place? His forehead was oily and furrowed with fine cracks; his small, hurt, sullen mouth was offensive to her, as if she'd kissed it once, and tasted rot. Roger must have been fatigued by the morning's effort but he sat drumming his fingers on the desk top and Marina had an impulse to lay a hand on his. But she'd never touch the man! We're co-conspirators. Criminals together. But neither of us understands the extent of the crime. She felt shame, to have invaded her dead lover's home; to have learned facts about him he had not wanted known, at least not by her; and

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the shame was compounded by Roger Cavanagh's presence, as if both were looking upon Adam naked, each having to know that the other knew. Marina tried for the right tone, saying, in an undertone, "The strangest thing is, Roger, that Adam was alive twenty-four hours ago, and now he is not. The rest of this, his private life, his secrecy-is not so strange."

But was this true? Marina meant to be brave.

She understood that Roger both wanted to look at her, and did not want to look at her. Here was the true strangeness! Roger was acutely conscious, as a man, of being alone with Marina, a woman; his friend, and Adam's friend, yet a woman; he was aware of Marina's distraught state; her flushed, hurt face and angry eyes; unless her eyes were filled with sorrow, and threatened to infect his own with their emotion. He wasn't a man who trusted emotion. Not his own, and certainly no one else's. He was a lawyer not just by trade but by nature. That was why Marina instinctively disliked him: unlike Adam, he was a man who required control. A man with a short temper, with a reputation for taking offense. His divorce had badly shaken him and he disliked and distrusted all women on principle; even as he felt an aggressive, impersonal sexual desire for all women, a wish to seize, to maul, to pummel, to penetrate; yet, more powerfully, a wish not to touch, nor even come near. No, not near! His revulsion for women, Marina guessed, was both physical and moral. Shrewdly she saw that, if he could hurt you without touching, he would hurt you; but not at the price of touching. And there stood Marina Troy uncomfortably close, only a few feet away in this sunlit but deathly silent house above the river, Adam Berendt's house where they'd never before been alone together, and perhaps had never been together at all, even in Adam's company. And now Adam was gone. Marina was saying, faltering, not knowing what she said, wanting to dispel the tension between them, "I-don't feel that I'm equal to Adam's death. To death. I'm not worthy of-whatever it is. I resent it, I think, that he died the way he did, among strangers. For strangers. This hideous name 'Thwaite' is choking me."

This rush of words caused Roger to regard Marina yet more keenly.

He lifted his eyes, that seemed to Marina eerie, reptilian eyes, heavy-lidded and yet quick-darting, curiously beautiful eyes, with a burnished-gold sheen, taking in Marina's carelessly plaited red hair that was falling loose, in damp strands and tendrils; and her slender, angular girl's body beneath her clothes, her skin that gave off the heat of despair. She was Middle Age: A Romance

thinking that Roger Cavanagh had never seen Marina Troy so exposed; unprotected by the bright, brittle armor of her personality.

Roger stood, and made a movement toward Marina as if to comfort her, but Marina instinctively stepped back.

He asked, "What did Adam look like, last night?"

Marina stared at him, offended.

"Please, Marina. You were the only witness. I need to know."

"You can't know!"

"Tell me."

Those reptilian eyes: Marina shuddered.

Yet saying, calmly, "Adam was-noble in death. Like a statue. A Rodin." She touched her fingertips to her eyes. Seeing again the actual man, the body her lover had become. Stiffening of rigor mortis yet the jaw and mouth slack, losing their shape. Marina had a dread of this man, a rival of Adam's, seeing Adam through her eyes, naked and exposed. Roger asked, "Was death-instantaneous? He didn't suffer, did he?" and Marina said, "No. He didn't suffer. The emergency room doctor told me." Why was she saying this, why when this was a lie, simply to placate Roger Cavanagh who was behaving so strangely, wholly unlike himself; why, when she detested him. With a bizarre half-smile Roger said, "That's good then, Marina, isn't it?-that Adam didn't suffer." Marina was going to say yes, yes that's good, but instead she laughed harshly, "No! There's nothing 'good' about this. Don't be ridiculous."

She ran from him. Had he been going to touch her with his repulsive fingers? Comfort her? Blindly she ran into the long rectangular room that was Adam's studio. The air was cooler here, the ceiling higher. Always in this room that smelled of clay, paint, turpentine there was a faint chill of the ancient cellar beneath, its earthen floor. Adam had joked (but was this funny?) that in the old days before Salthill had become civilized, in the time of the notorious tavern-brothel, that earthen cellar had surely been used for quick burials. (They asked Adam if he'd been digging down there, and Adam said certainly not, he hadn't the slightest curiosity about finding, or not finding, two-hundred-year-old bones.) Of all the rooms in the stone house this was the one most associated with Adam. If you couldn't find Adam anywhere else, you would find him here; and Apollo close by.

"Adam. Adam! For God's sake! " It was possible to think that the man was hiding from her, willfully. A rivulet of perspiration ran down her face hot as a tear. What did Cavanagh want from her! She felt his sexual interest,

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an impersonal interest, and his revulsion against it; perhaps she felt an identical sensation, she who would have described herself as stunned, un-sexed, by grief. She hadn't spoken harshly, or spoken her heart, to anyone in the past ten years or more, as she'd just spoken to Roger Cavanagh; she'd never raised her voice. Adam's death opening in me. A black wound.

Was Roger following? She wished the man would go home and leave her. She was Adam Berendt's personal executor. She would oversee the house, arrange to have it cleaned, begin putting Adam's mysterious life in order. Moving now through the studio touching Adam's things that had taken on a new significance now, having outlived him. Artworks, furniture, massive stone fireplace; on a bench, a discarded shirt of his, an ordinary T-shirt, shamelessly she snatched it up and pressed it against her face, breathing in Adam's briny, clayey odor. She wasn't going to cry. Not here.

She'd cried enough. She stumbled against a crude, uncompleted clay figure on the floor. It was a wood floor covered in places by rug remnants and outspread newspapers, splattered with dried paint. In her haze of grief she imagined she saw-what?-Apollo?-a ghostly-gray shape dozing in his usual place by Adam's work table, but no: don't be ridiculous: it was a patch of sunshine maggoty with dust motes.

Why was she here, she couldn't remember. If Adam wasn't here to greet her, and he wasn't. But if she was in Adam's house it must be for a purpose, and Adam must be that purpose. She was searching for-what?

She knew she must not scream "Adam!" because someone, a man, a man she scarcely knew, was in the house with her, observing her, and would report back to others, Marina Troy is deranged with grief.

Here was Adam's long, cluttered work table shoved against a window.

On the windowsill, desiccated husks of dead flies, wasps. And the window-all the windows-needed washing. And she would wash them.

There was Adam's broken-backed easy chair, covered with a stained bedspread; and there was Adam's garage-sale sofa with its worn, pumpkin-colored corduroy upholstery where sometimes he slept, working late in his studio and too lazy to undress and go properly to bed, even to remove his shoes. How could such a man marry, obviously he could not. Nor live with any woman. Everywhere in Adam's studio there were uncompleted works, clay figures Marina had been seeing for years, collage-sculptures made of scrap metal, driftwood, storm debris, pieces of lumber, mirror fragments, bits of crockery and ceramics. There were hulking humanoid forms made of wood and awaiting the magic of life, and now that Adam was gone they Middle Age: A Romance

would never receive it. Dozens of canvases of various sizes leaned against the walls, festooned with cobwebs. Most of these were uncompleted, Adam hadn't glanced at them in years yet he claimed to remember them all and intended to return to each of them, someday.

Had the man thought he'd live forever?

For months Adam had been working on a convoluted sculpture, his personal vision, he said, of the ancient nightmare Laocoon: the sea serpent that crushed a father and his sons in its coils, exacting a god's terrible vengeance. Except in Adam's American vision the human figures resembled slender elongated fish, poised as if swimming in a striated amber substance. This strange sculpture stood about six feet tall and measured about four feet in circumference at its base. How beautiful it was to Mariana, you could circle it and see undulating patterns of light through its partially transparent material; Adam had fashioned it from layers of plastic melted together and stained the hues of wood, straw, rushes. Standing before it now, Marina had the idea that the Laocoon was alive. She reached out to touch it and found it unexpectedly warm.

Why had Adam encouraged Marina to return to her long-abandoned art, and remained so indifferent to his own? Marina had known many talented artists in her earlier life, but no one less driven, less ambitious, than Adam. He was so without "ego," you'd worry he might forget to breathe.

His "male ego" was of no more significance to him than a trailing shoelace.

Yet he'd thought himself vain. He'd thought himself ugly. He'd sketched himself as a Cro-Magnon male with a low, bony forehead. If a woman dared to suggest that she found him attractive, Adam laughingly dismissed the very possibility. You could not make him think what his inner logic refused to allow him to think. Once when Marina and some others, at a dinner party, chided Adam for not taking his talent more seriously, he'd told them that, in middle age, he took nothing seriously except Truth; he'd become far more interested in the moral life than in the aesthetic life.

But isn't art a form of Truth?

No. Art is a cruel falsehood erected upon the corpse of Truth.

This was a bit dictatorial for Adam Berendt, who usually spoke without emphasis. He'd laughed at his pretensions, attributing the remark to Spinoza; or, better yet, Walter Benjamin.

Marina was opening drawers and cupboards in Adam's studio looking for-what? Behind her in the doorway stood Roger Cavanagh, sucking at his wounded mouth and watching her, uncertain what to do. Had Marina

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Troy actually screamed at him, or only just spoken harshly? As women in Salthill never spoke. At least, to men not their husbands or lovers.

This man would make her pay, Marina knew. If he could. She'd seen those reptile eyes beneath the puffy lids, fixed upon her.

Then, this happened.

Like a fevered scene in a film.

Until this moment of the headlong plunge of the past eighteen hours Marina would have described the film as somber, tragic; painful as if something were inside her guts twisting and churning. She would not have described the film as comic-grotesque. Yet somehow it happened that Marina opened the door to a cabinet near Adam's work table, which she'd always assumed Adam had used for art supplies, and there she discovered a cache of personal items: hand-knit sweaters neatly folded, in stacks; cashmere mufflers; elegant silk neckties still in their boxes. There was a small black box from Cartier containing platinum gold cuff links engraved A. B.-a card enclosed, Love to Adam on his mystery-birthday, Gussie. (Augusta Cutler? Owen Cutler's wife?) There was, attached to a bulky Aran wool sweater, a floppy black satin rose of the size of a woman's fist, with a card inscribed in crimson ink n Leila. (But who was Leila?

Marina knew no Leila in Salthill.) Marina's face flushed with blood.

These were Adam's gifts-from-women-who-adored-him. And most of them looked as if they'd never been worn.

On a high shelf of the cabinet was a cardboard box, and this box, like her predecessor Pandora, Marina could not leave alone; though knowing (for how could she not know, her heart beating in fury and mortification, face burning as if she'd been soundly slapped on both cheeks) that it would be in her best interest to close the cabinet door with dignity, and retreat. But Marina tugged at the box, ignoring Roger Cavanagh who offered to take it down for her, and ingloriously the box toppled over, and its contents spilled on the floor: a cache now of cards, perfumed letters, and glossy photographs.

Even now, Marina might have retreated with a modicum of dignity.

Yet there she was kneeling amid these lurid scattered things, hair falling into her face. From a distance, she might have resembled a greedy penitent.

Adam's women. So many? It should not have surprised Marina, yet it surprised Marina, for (she would understand this later, in a calmer time) she'd long refused to think of Adam's life as it failed to touch upon her; Middle Age: A Romance

she'd long refused to consider that, if he had not been her lover, he must have sought other women sexually, and even romantically; not for Adam Berendt the role of celibate, yet she'd wished to imagine him that way.

Now, here was evidence to refute her delusion. A packet of handwritten letters from-was it Camille Hoffmann, Lionel's wife? These were dated over the past seven years and were signed Love, Camille. On pale blue sta-tionery, wispy as lingerie, a lengthy handwritten letter dated May of that year signed Love, Abigail. Marina's friend Abigail Des Pres! Marina quickly looked away, not wanting to see even a fragment of what Abigail had written to Adam. There were many birthday cards, holiday cards, Thank you and Thinking of you! cards which Marina didn't wish to examine. There were numerous postcards, and many of these were reproductions of works of art, for Adam's women would have wished to indicate their good taste. In dread Marina turned over a card that looked familiar, a surreal landscape painting by the German Caspar David Frederich, to discover her own handwriting on the back, and Love, Marina. The card was dated two summers ago when she'd traveled in Europe. Wincing, Marina thrust the card away, not wanting Roger to see. But probably he'd seen.

Those eyes missed nothing! Marina would have ripped the card into pieces except it belonged to Adam's estate.

Thinking Of all utterances of the past none are so painful as those written in the hope of winning another's love.

Snapshots of Adam with Salthill friends, and with strangers. So many smiling people! So much happiness! Marina snatched up to examine closely a luridly colored picture that resembled a publicity photo, a ruddy-faced Adam Berendt in sports clothes, with an unfamiliar moustache, in what might have been a casino; Adam was looking just slightly embarrassed, in that one-eye-squinting way of his, while a heavily made-up blonde in a red sequined dress leaned familiarly against him, resting her upper arm and part of her ample bosom against his shoulder. Adam looked like a winner. He might have been in his early forties, with still thick graying hair and a relatively unlined face. The glamorous blonde might have been a high-priced hooker. On the back of the photo was stamped The Dunes, Vegas. Nov. , *.

And what was this? Several soft-filtered photographs of a naked, fleshy woman reclining on a sofa in the pose of Manet's Olympia; with alarmingly full roseate-nippled breasts and a swath of dark pubic hair; extravagant pearls around her neck, and an insolent-looking flat-faced white

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Persian cat at her feet. The woman wasn't young, though still very attractive; like the Vegas hooker she was heavily made up, and rings glittered on her fingers; her smile was studied and lascivious. One of her plump hands rested on her round little belly. Marina felt a tinge of disgust, and dismay, for her sex; the female sex; how pathetic we are, offering ourselves like meat. Marina saw suddenly that this woman was-Augusta Cutler? She recognized the Persian cat.

"This is hateful."

Adam Berendt, striding like a Cyclops among these ridiculous women.

Stooping to pick them up at will, devouring female flesh. Oh, and Marina Troy was among them! She began to slap and tear at the photos, cards, letters, gifts, as Roger, squatting beside her, tried to calm her. "Marina, no.

Don't. You can't know what any of this actually means."

"I know! I'm not a fool."

"Women liked Adam: you knew that. He was friends with both women and men, but women are inclined to write, and to be effusive. This will all remain confidential, of course."

"Augusta Cutler! That woman has grown children."

This was the true horror, worse than Adam's suspicious finances: a low sexual comedy, where Marina in her grief had hoped to find pathos, pure cleansing emotion.

Roger may have thought this was funny, a comedy, or he may have been upset like Marina, startled and disoriented; it was difficult for Marina to interpret his behavior, except that it oppressed her, and her nostrils pinched at the cloying odor that wafted from his skin of cologne and male underarm sweat. She hated this man! This man who was a witness to her humiliation! He wouldn't even let her claw at the evidence, he kept seizing her hands, restraining her gently, yet firmly too, as if she were a child, and he the child's father, the male, supremely in control. Marina had begun to cry now, angrily. There was nothing of grief in these tears. She was flammable material, and Roger was a lighted match leaning dangerously close.

Marina said, "Leave me alone, God damn you! Don't touch me. I hate you," and Roger said, "You don't hate me. That's bullshit." She felt his breath against her face. He was gripping her hands more tightly. Without transition they were struggling, in a grunting sort of silence. There was an air of the improbable and the fantastic about what was happening. A blazing light seemed to illuminate them, as on a stage, before an invisible audience. They were in Adam's house, and where was Adam? Why were Middle Age: A Romance

they in Adam's studio, alone together? Why on their knees, on the floor?

There could be no explanation. The previous morning at this exact time, Marina could not have comprehended such an event. I don't even like Roger Cavanagh. He dislikes me. Yet Roger was kissing Marina, pressing his bared teeth against her mouth and neck; as if he wanted to hurt her, and Marina was in a mood to be hurt; overcome with longing for him, or for whoever he was; a man, a sexual being, in Adam's place; in the exigency of the moment, stricken with desire like a violent thirst, she could not have recalled Roger's name. Yet her hands groped over him. Her hands clutched at him.

There was the surprise of his hard-muscled back, his superior size and weight. She heard herself moan, in misery. In sexual longing. Was this, so suddenly, a love scene? Had the pathos yielded to frenetic comedy, and that in turn to a frenetic love scene? It has been so long. I've forgotten how.

What was happening was clumsy, harried, blind; she and the man blundered together like swimmers in a rough surf. Roger pulled at Marina's clothing, nearly tearing it, and Marina's dazed grasping fingers pulled at his shirt, and at his trousers, where he was guiding her hand. Marina had not remembered how quickly excited a man becomes, sexually aroused with a woman for the first time; the hot, accelerated breath like a dog's panting; the strength of the arms, and the urgent thrusting body; between his legs, the wondrous thing-come-alive which Roger brought her hand to touch, to caress; even as he unzipped his trousers. They were kissing, groaning. They would have made love then on the floor, the hard hurting stained floor, the floor that smelled of clay, paint, turpentine and the ancient cellar beneath, except as Roger pushed apart Marina's thighs, hoist-ing himself upon her like a flag, he must have had a glimpse of something in her face that alarmed him, her eyes squinting shut and lips drawn back in a grimace of anticipated pain, and the discomfort of her plaited hair crushed against the back of her head and against the floor, or maybe each heard their friend's footfall approaching, Adam's raised, amused voice What the hell are you doing, Marina? Roger? I haven't been dead twenty-four hours yet, and you're fucking in my house? Almost at once, Roger's erection faded; he muttered what sounded like "I can't. I'm sorry." Marina struck the man with both fists. She was wild, uncontrollable; she kicked at him, and raised her knee into his groin; afterward she would recall her frenzied behavior with deep shame; at the moment, she took a savage joy in it, clawing at the man, drawing blood on his face and beneath his ear. His face, contorted with alarm! She had to laugh. He grabbed at her wrists

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and held her still; he bit at her shoulder where her shirt had been torn away, and he bit at her breasts; he was panting, furious; his penis had gone limp as a deflated balloon, mashed against Marina's crinkly red swath of pubic hair.

Abruptly then it was over. The madness had passed through them, and from them. A summer squall, blown into the air. They lay together on the floor of Adam Berendt's studio, spared the need to look at each other, for a long time, exhausted and defeated.

O M W: T C *

T hrough the walls ofthe stately old Colonial house,through hardwood floors and layers of thick carpet, distended as if by Time, came the sound of a woman sobbing.

Her heart was broken, and not for him.

O together on Old Mill Way north of the Village of Salthill-on-Hudson, in a meticulously restored eighteenth-century Colonial house on a hillside, a man and a woman of youthful middle age who'd been married so long ("Half our lifetimes at least") they no longer saw each other, like moles in a burrow.

There was a distinct comfort in this, and the satisfactions of custom.

For this man and this woman were the offspring of families of Custom.

(Meaning good breeding and good money, though not a showy excess of money, on both sides of the marriage.) Strange!-that the burrow, the house, was spacious and much admired and very expensive on four acres of prime Rockland County real estate, and yet remained a burrow. Strange that it was so confining and airless, though the present owners as well as previous owners had expanded it, and refurbished it, and spent a good deal of money on making it a showcase.

("It's like a dream, living here. Sometimes I worry I'll wake up suddenly- and all this happiness will have gone.") *

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