He imagined himself speaking with Adam Berendt. Lionel at his most rational, sincere. "There is-must be-something greater than just us.

Something beyond- us."

But there was no Adam with him, Lionel was alone. He paused. He listened. Distant as thunder at the horizon, or earth-gouging machines in the new tract development off Wheatsheaf Drive, that laughter.

So ashamed! she'd wept. He'd said, Hey, don't be, please. How many times he and the girl in the pink chiffon repeated these words, Lionel wouldn't recall. Quite a few times.

Not Kitzie or Mimi, in fact it had been Camille. The girl with the runny nose, mascara-tears streaking her face. She'd tried to wipe her nose on the shoulder of her dress as Lionel held her awkwardly, to comfort her.

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Poor Camille: he hadn't known her last name. She'd stammered out "Camille" as a child might, as if he must know her, she was the younger sister of a guy in Lionel's freshman-year dorm. Now it was Lionel's junior year and he lived at the handsome Deke house on the hill and homecoming weekend one of his drunken Deke brothers had ditched this poor shivering girl and it was ten .. and the house so blaring, you couldn't hear yourself think. Couldn't hear yourself speak. This girl, hiding in the cloakroom. A flushed flower-petal face that made Lionel blink hard, and swallow hard. The palms of his hands sweaty. By accident he'd discovered her crying. Pink chiffon, and breasts, and curly fair-brown hair like a doll's hair cascading to her shoulders. Camille's young figure in the pink chiffon was shapely yet her effect upon Lionel wasn't sexual, he felt instead a brotherly compassion for her, a need to protect her from his crude fraternity brothers, and from further humiliation. Yet when she turned her damp, smeared face, her quivering lips, to him, wholly without disguise, without subterfuge, lurching into his arms, he wasn't prepared. She'd come to Colgate from Ithaca College for the weekend, staying at a hotel in town, oh, it was only Friday night and what was she going to do, what was she going to do she wanted to die, so absolutely ashamed she wanted to die, she'd been insulted by that horrible person, treated like dirt and laughed at, yes and she'd been made to drink more than she'd wanted, and she was sure there was something in her drink, LSD maybe, her head was swirling, heart beating so fast, she was staying at a hotel in town but hadn't any way of getting there, didn't even know where the hotel was, how far from the Deke house, oh she was so ashamed! so ashamed! wanted to die!

how could anybody be so cruel, crude, treating her like this, he'd seemed so nice on the phone, and she'd been looking forward to this weekend, this was a new dress she'd bought for the weekend, her brother had arranged for the date, would he have something to answer for! would he, ever! she'd be telling their father about this insult, tomorrow morning! she'd come to the campus in a car with three other girls from Ithaca College, they wouldn't be driving back till Sunday afternoon, how would she get home, oh, she was so ashamed! everybody at her college would know, everybody would be talking about her, pitying her, oh, she couldn't bear pity, she'd never been treated like this by any date before, she wanted to die! absolutely to die! And Lionel told her please don't be ashamed, for God's sake it was his asshole fraternity brother who should be ashamed, Lionel was comforting this weeping shivering girl awkwardly, trying to remem-

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ber her brother's last name, homecoming weekend at Colgate was frat parties like this, wild earsplitting drunken and not for sensitive girls like Camille, even her name was sensitive, delicate, Camille was to Lionel the most beautiful name he'd ever spoken, like music, he was helping her find her coat, would she like him to drive her to the hotel, he had a car, he'd like to drive her to the hotel, it was the least he could do, to try to make amends for how badly she'd been treated. And in Lionel's car driving to the hotel as Camille's tears subsided, as she dabbed at her heated face with a tissue (she'd found in her coat pocket), and blew her nose, Lionel felt that he was behaving well; he was behaving like a gentleman; his father would be proud of him; for once, he'd be proud of himself. And it was so easy. It all just happened. Later he would learn that Camille's family was rich: they owned extensive investment properties in Rhode Island, where Camille had grown up. She was two years younger than Lionel and three inches shorter, which seemed just right. A good Christian girl as unquestioning of biblical authority as of hair and clothing fashions; not an honors student, but a "dedicated" education major at Ithaca College. Her desire was to teach elementary grades, maybe join the Peace Corps first, oh, but she wanted to be married someday, of course, and she wanted to be a mother, of course!

In this way (though not immediately: Lionel went out with other girls after graduating from Colgate, moving to New York to work in Hoffmann Publishing, Inc., and sweet vulnerable Camille had "disappointments") they were destined to marry, and to have two children, and to move to Old Mill Way in Salthill-on-Hudson where, as year followed year, they would be so happy.

Adam was the only one of them I could talk to. Even if I couldn't talk to him.

One of the profound shocks of Lionel's life in Salthill, that Adam Berendt was so suddenly and unexpectedly dead. And Lionel would never see him again!

"Adam? Dead? For Christ's sake how? "-so it would be exclaimed through Salthill, by Salthill men.

The women reacted very differently. But then, women always reacted very differently. They stared, and burst helplessly into tears. The response was instantaneous, there was no defense, resistance, incredulity. Though Middle Age: A Romance

they cried, "No! Oh, no! Adam! " there was immediate acceptance. Like Camille, the women were likely to instinctively cover their stricken eyes, their faces that were cracking like cheap crockery.

For the men the crucial death-question was how, for Adam had been in their aggrieved words so much alive. He'd been filled with life, and had seemed indestructible. And the next crucial question was how old.

Not even Roger Cavanagh seemed to know, exactly. Somewhere beyond fifty, presumably, but not too far beyond. Lionel thought of his own age, fifty-two (fifty- two! ) with a tinge of anxiety. As a boy he'd been unable to imagine being even twenty-one. In his early twenties, he'd been unable to imagine being thirty. In his thirties, forty had seemed the absolute terminal point; and, in his forties, fifty had seemed the absolute terminal point. And now. Strange how Adam's death shook Lionel more forcibly than even Scott's death had shaken him. Though Scott had been so young, and Lionel's own brother.

In the late evening of July Fourth and through the following day the terrible news of Adam Berendt's death (by drowning? heart attack?) was relayed through Salthill. Lionel had learned when he'd walked into a room and seen his wife standing with a telephone receiver pressed against her ear, her face stricken, eyes welling with tears and shoulders hunched as if to ward off a blow, no more aware of Lionel than if he were himself a ghost, bodiless. Camille cried out, wounded in her heart. Bursting immediately into tears of grief, and so Lionel knew.

By quick degrees a narrative unfolded. An air of childlike reproach un-derlay it, as in a fairy tale in which even the innocent-especially the innocent!-are punished for behaving incautiously. For if Adam hadn't left his Salthill friends to attend a fund-raising event in Jones Point, among strangers, having told not even Marina Troy where he was going, he'd be alive now; if he'd gone to the Archers' annual barbecue, he'd be alive now.

If he'd had an urge to go sailing (but Adam hadn't been much interested in boating, and he lived right on the river), why hadn't he gone with Owen Cutler and others, that afternoon? It was understood, Adam had had a standing invitation from Owen, so how could you explain his behavior?

He'd accepted an invitation from strangers. He'd gone sailing with strangers. He'd died among strangers. Drowned in the Hudson River rescuing a woman when their sailboat collapsed, or drowned rescuing a child, or, no, a heart attack after he'd made the dramatic rescue, having dived into the river from a "dangerous" height. So the narrative was relayed

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through Salthill. By telephone, and in person. Not Roger or Marina but others had become bearers of the terrible news, and its amplification. Always the refrain was Why did he-! Why, so reckless-! It was said, it had become a tragic secondary theme, that Marina had driven to Jones Point, "desperate" to see Adam in the hospital, but she'd arrived too late. It was said that Marina had "collapsed," and was "under medication." The refrain was Poor Marina! What a loss to Marina! Though not everyone believed that Adam and Marina had been lovers, there were dissenters on this point, and the dissenters were likely to be women. Lionel was repelled by such speculation. His strained nerves couldn't bear it. He retreated, fled the house. He would drive in his Saab into the hills. Couldn't bear Camille on the phone commiserating with one or another of their friends, weeping as if her tears were inexhaustible. And that hurt, shocked, plaintive-child voice, he'd first heard more than thirty years before in the Deke cloakroom. That girl. Her runny nose. Oh God, my life-why?

The earth opened at Lionel's feet, as it must have opened for Adam.

" W * I console her? Adam was my friend, too."

Prowling the darkened house. Like a nocturnal animal in its burrow.

Hearing, at a close distance, yet muffled, a woman sobbing. Through floorboards and layers of expensive Oriental carpets. As if in the history of the Macomb House, or the Wade House, numerous unknown women had hidden away to weep in secret for men not their husbands, and their accumulated grief was a harsh, heartrending music.

Lionel, downstairs in the room called the pantry, adjacent to the kitchen, unscrewed the top of a bottle of Kentucky bourbon and drank from the bottle, just a sip, to wet his parched mouth; and the taste and slow burn of the bourbon in his mouth, in his throat and beyond was deeply pleasurable. Lionel was not a drinker; Hoffmann men were not drinkers; or, if they were, they drank in moderation and in dignified secrecy; they did not call attention to themselves, ever. Lionel would take another small sip, and possibly another. But no more. "I'll miss you, Adam. God damn." But he wanted Adam's death to be private, for himself alone. He hated the public ceremonial nature of Death. So much in Salthill was public, as if one's soul had to be turned inside out, bared to the world. In his solitary moods on the commuter train, in his Manhattan apartment, on airplanes when he felt the plane shudder as if at the apex of Middle Age: A Romance

a death dive, Lionel turned his thoughts eagerly inward, to discover that inward was perilous, too; his soul was a sort of curved reflective surface that distorts, as in a funhouse mirror, the face of one peering into it. You might be anyone, any face. The face is mere skin. Accident. He seemed at such times to be approaching a profound yet unspeakable truth: that our identities are accidents. He recalled, not very precisely, Plato's Allegory of the Cave, from that forbidding book The Republic: mankind is imprisoned inside a cave of flickering shadows, mesmerized by illusion. But to be free of the cave is to risk blindness because the light of true day is dazzling. And to be free of the cave is to risk ostracism from those who remain blind.

Through the floorboards, the weeping continued. Lionel hardened his heart against the sound. His face froze in a half grimace of sorrow or of contempt for such sorrow. Whatever you do, don't laugh. At the cremation service, don't laugh. He would not weep for Adam, he hadn't wept for Scott. The Hoffmann men, on the whole, were not the sort for easy grief.

Wouldn't seek out Camille hiding away in her bathroom, the hell with consoling a wife who'd committed adultery in her heart, with her husband's closest and most trusted friend. Let the woman console him.

"Adam was my friend, too."

He took another small sip of bourbon, replaced the top and hid the bottle away in the cupboard.

Ashes to ashes, and dust to dust.

There would be no funeral for Adam Berendt, and no church service.

Only the stark ceremony of "cremation" miles away in Nyack. Nyack! No one ever went to Nyack willingly. Lionel panicked at the thought of the cremation of Adam Berendt, but told Camille he didn't want to attend for moral reasons, the very thought of cremation offended his Christian temperament, and Camille stared at him in distress, asking would he let his wife go alone? was he so heartless? had he cared so little for their friend Adam? and as her voice quavered on the brink of hysteria Lionel quickly acquiesced, for Camille was right, of course. If she makes a fool of herself in public.

He loved his wife, he'd forgive her. But no man can bear public exposure.

Like a dream this was. On a weekday morning in July when Lionel should have been in his executive office at Hoffmann Publishing, Inc., on

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the fiftieth floor of one of the newer Park Avenue buildings, grateful to return from the overwrought four-day holiday weekend, instead he and Camille were turning into a large asphalt parking lot off ugly Route W.

Nyack Burial-Cremation Services, Inc. A number of cars-Lionel recognized friends' cars-were already parked in the lot. "What a nightmare!"

Lionel shuddered. Except for the tall, ominously stained chimneys the crematorium resembled a suburban public library, low, flat-rooted, of cheap buff-colored brick. Inside, before they could get their bearings, the Hoffmanns were forcibly greeted by the crematorium director, Mr. Shad, a tall, dark-suited gentleman with a gravely twinkling eye and a skin that looked as if it had been lifted and stretched; Mr. Shad welcomed them on this mournful occasion in their lives, shaking hands vigorously with them both, gravely smiling, urging them to ask questions about the procedure if they had any, after the service perhaps, and the Hoffmanns said yes, yes, they would, eager to move on, for the gleam in Mr. Shad's eye was fearful.

A youngish usher with dark sideburns and oily pompadour urged them into a fiercely air-conditioned lounge designated The Chapel, where there were rows of seats and, on a raised platform at the front, a plain pine coffin. Adam's coffin! Lionel smiled in confusion, looking for his friends. The Chapel was windowless and shadowy as the inside of a lung. Numerous persons stood awkwardly, not wanting to sit down so soon; if this was a social gathering, it was one in which things had gone wrong. "There!- our friends." Like wraiths with the impediments of bodies they stumbled in the direction of Salthill faces. Their well-dressed friends and acquaintances were so out of place here as to seem like imposters. And there were strangers, persons at whom they would not glance. Camille was taken up in female embraces, blinking back tears. Lionel's hand was vehemently shaken. "What a nightmare, eh?" "Christ. Isn't it." This was a gathering of individuals in which you'd naturally glance about for Adam's good-natured battered face. His absence was conspicuous. And the time of day was wrong. Not yet noon, and Lionel had been awake for hours. He'd poured himself a half glass of bourbon to steady his nerves but it seemed not to have had any effect upon him, none; hadn't even burned going down. And he'd gargled, and regargled with Listerine, that mouthwash he detested.

Camille, he seemed to know, though certainly he hadn't been spying on her, had medicated herself with one or two of her "calming" pills. (What these prescribed pills were exactly, Lionel didn't know. Hadn't wanted to inquire. Antidepressants, probably. Antidepressants were all the rage now, Middle Age: A Romance *

said to be enormously popular in Salthill among the wives of Lionel's friends as, several decades before, tranquilizers had been popular among the wives and mothers of Broom Hills.) How disoriented they were, these friends of Adam's. His survivors. Mourners. Trying not to stare at the aggressively plain pine coffin on a raised platform at the front of the chapel.

Trying not to think the obvious thought Adam is inside? A body? What was the smell in this place, despite the frenetic frigid-air currents. Lionel's sensitive nostrils pinched. He prayed not to become nauseated.

Mozart's Requiem Mass was being piped into the chapel. The tape seemed to be just slightly defective, playing at an accelerated speed.

Lionel had never attended a cremation service before. He supposed it was a good, necessary procedure: burning, not storing the dead body; if you didn't believe in the resurrection of the body at the Second Coming of Christ, what point in hoarding the dead? The earth was rapidly filling up, for sure. You read about cemetery-plot scarcity all the time. Worse than housing shortages. The Asian nations with their great surplus of humanity weren't sentimental, knew what to do, funeral pyres, burning beside "holy"

rivers, of course, those people were heathens. Cremation offended Lionel's sense of protocol. That behind those somber burgundy-velvet drapes there was a roaring furnace, or an oven, prepared to reduce a human body to ash.

Ashes to ashes, and dust to dust. The chapel walls seemed to press inward.

Covered in innocuous nature-murals of a nineteenth-century type, like the faux-primitive landscapes of that French painter Rousseau. Their over-done leafy veined green was muted, faded; the deep vibrancy of life's green, of Adam's actual garden, would be out of place here. "Please. Take seats."

Camille had been whispering with women friends, and now turned to Lionel, her face dazed and melting. She stumbled in her impractical high heels and Lionel instinctively took her arm, to steady her. They sat in a middle row of seats, shivering. A woman directly behind Lionel startled him by leaning forward to growl into his ear, "It's so perverse, Lionel, my God! Adam in that box. And us stumbling around like brain-damaged sheep." The woman's voice was husky, sexy; her breath smelled of something rich and ripe, like port wine. She'd been a lover of Adam Berendt, too, it was generally believed, though Lionel hadn't ever quite believed it: Owen Cutler's wife, Augusta, the smoked-ham heiress. It was flamboyant Augusta's habit to murmur such intimate remarks into Lionel Hoffmann's ear in the presence of his wife and others, for of their circle Lionel was the most stiff, the most reserved, the most easily embarrassed and offended;

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and such was Augusta's way of flirtation. Her eyes were slanted and sly as figs and she outlined them elaborately in blue-black ink that quickly smudged, so that her eyes looked blackened, as by a cruel lover. Her mouth was a perfect crimson heart, oozing blood. To kiss that mouth, Lionel often thought, was to invite hemorrhage. Had Adam loved this woman, had he rooted in her soft ample body? There was something both arousing and repugnant in the thought. Augusta Cutler was of an ambiguous age, the mother of grown children, the wife of gentlemanly Owen whom everyone liked, to a degree; Adam had certainly liked him, and would not (would Adam?) have drawn his wife into adultery. She's too old for it. Too fat! In fact, Augusta was a sumptuous female in the Rubens mode, big-boned, sensuous; with cascades of highlighted blond hair; though Lionel avoided looking at her when she was aware of him, he often gazed at her during long, slow dinner parties when she was involved with other men. Her necklines were tight and dipping and as hours passed, and Augusta drank and ate, her breasts became ever more engorged and tiny beads of perspiration glittered on her rosy skin. Once, at the Hoffmanns' New Year's Eve party, Augusta had pressed herself boldly against Lionel as they danced a fox-trot, peering at him sidelong, the tip of her pink tongue protruding between her moist lips. Her crimson nails dug into his arms like plastic claws. "Lionel. Someday. Yes?" Lionel, embarrassed, pretended not to hear.

The amplified dance music was very loud.

Lionel shuddered, passing his hands over his eyes. "What a nightmare!"

"Will you please stop saying that." Camille nudged him, pleading.

Lionel hadn't realized he'd spoken aloud. Someone was addressing the gathering of mourners: Mr. Shad. Explaining the service which would be brief. Shad's black-dyed hair fitted his head like a shiny shoe. As he spoke, his lips lifted from his gums in a way that fascinated and repelled; his teeth, or dentures, gleamed very white, and gave a sort of dignified echo to his words. Lionel frowned in a pretense of concentration. Adam? In that- box? The perversity of death swept over Lionel. It was a sickening sensation he'd had at his brother Scott's funeral though his brother's funeral had been beautiful, in the family church in Broom Hills; banks of flowers, and an excellent organist playing Bach with a light touch, and two hundred in attendance at least. It was a sensation he'd had most powerfully at the age of ten, on the grassy bank of Broom Lake, seeing the dead young couple entwined and softly rotting together in each other's arms. But I didn't see! I Middle Age: A Romance

saw nothing. I wasn't the one. Mr. Shad wanted the gathering of friends of Adam Berendt to know that, if they had any questions about the procedure, he would be very happy to answer them, after the service. And there was "educational" literature available. Lionel's nostrils pinched. He could smell the hot oven. Just behind that wall of velvet drapes. Adam's coffin, the most frugal Lionel had ever seen outside a film of the Old West, was cleverly hooked to a mechanism that would tug it forward, through the velvet drapes and an opening in the wall and into the fired-up oven and eternity. Lionel swallowed hard, and reasoned that this was what Adam wanted, wasn't it? That gruff no-bullshit guy, who'd have said take my dead body and trundle it off with the trash, what the hell. Lionel was trying to listen to the second speaker: Roger Cavanagh. One of Lionel's old Salthill friends with whom he exchanged perhaps a dozen words a year, and with whom he sometimes played squash, and tennis, both men killers on the court, seeking the jugular; but Roger had a reputation for shady behavior, cheating maybe, while Lionel was the quintessential good sport, gracious in defeat. This morning Roger's eyes were ringed with fatigue as if he hadn't slept in nights. His skin was coarse and pasty like something applied with a trowel. But he was wearing a handsome dark summer suit, his thinning hair brushed back neatly from his keen raptor's face. Lionel hadn't quite understood why his friend's marriage had disintegrated years ago, and why Roger had been left behind in Salthill bereft, hurt, enraged, and of course he'd never inquired. The sexual lives of friends are best left unimagined, and unimaginable. Roger was speaking hesitantly of the suddenness and the shock of Adam's death; there would be a memorial service in the fall; this ceremony had been delayed two full days as he and Marina had tried without success to locate relatives of Adam's. In his flat, cryptic lawyer's voice Roger said, "There seem to be no 'Berendts' who have heard of our Adam." The remark was blown about in the churning air currents, like a stricken moth.

Meaning-what? Lionel was annoyed as hell.

Next, Marina Troy came forward to speak. Always, there was something enigmatic and unpredictable about this woman; she was one of the younger women in the Hoffmanns' circle, but you'd have characterized her as an older-young woman, a girl who'd grown up missing her youth. Or so it had always seemed to Lionel, who dropped by the Salthill Bookstore sometimes to purchase books he'd seen reviewed enthusiastically, mainly history, biographies of financiers, statesmen, and other men of the world,

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rarely did Lionel read these books through, but he meant to, someday; in the meantime, he was accumulating an impressive library; and he liked, as he said, to support poor Marina in that store. What was striking about Marina was that you never quite knew what she might say or do, as she seemed not to know herself. "Th-thank you for coming, on this sad occasion. Adam would be-would be-oh, you know how Adam would be - so happy to see you, and only just s-sorry that, that-" Marina was breathless, radiant-faced and strange to her friends, who stared at her as if they'd never seen her before, in dread of what she might say next. The shock of her friend's (lover's?) death seemed to have devastated her; to have rendered her young, as if the layers of her brittle personality, carefully constructed in adulthood, had been peeled violently away. She was deathly pale, with the redhead's translucent skin; faint bluish veins quivered beneath that skin, like wires. Her eyes were enormous, damp and blinking.

Her pale mouth resembled an animated wound. Like a sleepwalker she seemed but dimly aware of her surroundings. She wore black, but a curious iridescent-purple black, loose and indefinable, crinkled, possibly a tunic over a long skirt, a black knit shawl wrapped around her shoulders; she was visibly shivering from the cold air, and from excitement; as she spoke, she glanced repeatedly at the plain pine coffin a few yards away, that seemed to glow in the indirect lighting, as if she expected-what? Some sort of response from it, or from the man inside? Lionel saw to his disgust that Marina was bare-legged; on her naked feet were old, water-stained sandals. What poor taste! Obviously, the woman had no husband to oversee her public apparel, or her grooming. The red-glinting hair that Lionel in his remote way admired, and often found himself gazing at, had been plaited so tightly that the corners of Marina's eyes looked slanted; its crownlike bulk was covered in a black lace mantilla, and affixed to this was, improbably, a black satin rose with floppy petals. It was the sort of cloth rose you'd find on a woman's hat. It had a cheap theatrical look, of showy excess; pinned to Marina's head, it bobbed distractingly, disfiguring as a growth. Lionel frowned in disapproval as, years ago, he'd often frowned in disapproval of his children when they embarrassed and displeased him. Marina was speaking in a deceptively calm voice of Adam Berendt, their "beloved mutual friend"; of the "terrible loss" of such a good, generous man, in their community; of his "heroic"-"sacrificial"- death. She paused, as if she'd lost her way. She smiled in confusion. She regarded the coffin almost coquettishly. "What we all want to know, Middle Age: A Romance

Adam, is, why?-why did you throw your life away, if that's what you did, and what does it mean for us? " In the startled silence, no one moved; Lionel had a sense of everyone in the chapel, some fifty or sixty people, including Mr. Shad and several ushers at the rear, remaining very still.

But Marina, staring and blinking and smiling, like a sleepwalker managing to wake, if only for a few seconds, to get her bearings, went on to speak in a more normal manner, telling her listeners that the cremation service was what Adam had requested; he'd told her, once when they were out hiking, and they'd come upon the carcass of a dead creature, that what he wanted, when he died, was to be "burnt to a crisp." At this, there was an eruption of nervous laughter in the chapel. Marina's lips twitched, too.

She glanced at the coffin as if in approval of Adam's wit. "And so, Adam,"

she said, almost merrily, "we will honor your request." Marina ended by taking out of the folds and layers of her curious costume a battered paperback book, Great Dialogues of Plato Lionel was able to read, for he was far-sighted in middle age, and with schoolgirl earnestness Marina read a short passage from the Phaedo which, as she explained, recounts the death of Socrates by state-mandated suicide, in the company of a few followers who were his disciples, and loved him. Asked on his deathbed how he would wish to be buried, Socrates said, "How you like, if you catch me and I don't escape you . . . I shall not be here then with you; I shall have gone away . . . Be confident; and bury my body as you please and as you think would be most according to custom." Having read these words, Marina ceased abruptly as if someone had jabbed a knife against her spine. "Oh!

Oh, God." The smooth taut girlish face shattered, Marina began to cry, anguished. In that instant, to the horror of all who were watching, Marina Troy aged thirty years.

In this way, the formal ceremony ended.

Mozart's Requiem Mass was immediately resumed, in the midst of a phrase of music, pitched rather too high, and demented-sounding. Adam's type of music? You wouldn't have thought so: Adam was in the habit of whistling brisk tuneless tunes. He'd had few classical CDs in his possession, so far as Lionel knew. "What a nightmare!" At this point the plain pine coffin had begun to move. There was a cinematic quality to its departure. It was being tugged jerkily forward, then more smoothly, on its partly hidden rubbery hook; pulled out of sight through an opening in the velvet draperies as everyone, aghast, stared. What was happening? Was this happening? The tacky velvet drapes promised a theatrical experience but there

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would be no further revelation: Adam's coffin disappeared, and the drapes fell back into place.

Gone! So quickly.

To be burnt to a crisp.

L * * to flee to the men's room. Where, locked in a stall, in dread that someone among his friends might come in, and hear him, and recognize his shoes, he vomited into a toilet bowl.

Not that he'd eaten much that morning. But there was the acid-bourbon, more fiery in its upward trajectory than in its downward.

T , to escape. Yet no one could leave just yet. With no religious ritual to make an ending, how to make an ending? They were in the parking lot, amid their glittering cars. How many hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of cars. They were dazed by the action of sunshine on black asphalt. The sun glared and glowered from all directions. Lionel felt better for having vomited, he'd vomited up not only the hot little knot of bourbon in his guts but the nauseating smell of the chapel. Poor Marina!-her tears had provoked many of the women into fresh bouts of weeping, so that their meticulously prepared faces were beginning to resemble melting wedding cakes. Even a few of the more sensitive, or weaker, men. But not Lionel Hoffmann, who was stoic; determined not to betray emotion, in public; or in private. Hysteria disgusted him as it disgusted all Hoffmann men. And what was this in his hand: a stiff little ivory card, pressed upon him by Mr. Shad as he'd left the building, a business card Lionel tore into pieces, and tossed away. Had everyone been given these despicable little cards? "It's no worse, is it, than a coffin lowered into the earth, I mean witnessing it," Owen Cutler was saying, reasoning, "and clumps of dirt shoveled onto it, and we actually didn't- see. We saw nothing." Augusta Cutler who'd hurriedly put on dark glasses, pointed above their heads, "Oh, but look." Puffs of pearly-white smoke lifted from a chimney, trailing upward. "And what is that smell." In a tragic voice Camille said, "This is the end of an era." And burst into fresh tears.

Lionel looked at his wife for the first time in recent memory. That woman, his wife? His? The runny-nosed girl in the cloakroom at the Deke house, thirty years later. And she was thirty years older. The round childish softly Middle Age: A Romance

pretty face was plumper, flaccid at the jawline; the pink-flushed skin was rubbery as a doll's. Grief, and the anger of grief, had deepened lines in her forehead usually disguised by makeup, and bracketing her mouth. A pike's mouth it seemed to Lionel, contorted by suffering. Lionel felt both tenderness and repugnance, seeing Camille like this. Exposed to the world.

He knew it was unfair to believe that only the young and attractive should display such emotion publicly, yet he wanted to hurry to Camille, literally with his arms, or his coat, to hide her from the laughter and pity of the world. But as he turned, blinking in the dazzling light, to take in the others, his friends, he realized his mistake. The change had come upon them all, all were middle-aged, and ravaged. Camille Hoffmann was the world, the world was Camille Hoffmann.

T , in the house on Old Mill Way, the Hoffmanns slept. In their burrow-marriage, the Hoffmanns slept. In the antique four-poster bed at the top of the old Colonial Macomb House, or was it the Wade House, a landmark of local history, the Hoffmanns, exhausted, slept. Always they slept in a single bed by custom; for their marriage was sanctified by Custom. (Except when Lionel was forced to be away overnight in Manhattan, or was out of town on business, which was frequently the case in recent years. Then they slept in separate beds.) Their intense, separate, far-flung bouts of sleep.

For sleep is not one, but many. These regions of the soul inaccessible to all others save the sleeper; and even the sleeper is helpless to determine the course of dreaming, the spillage of emotion. No matter how others press against us, or grasp us in their arms. Take me with you. Where are you going?

Don't you love me?

In their expensive burrow-marriage from which oxygen had leaked, leaving the air humid and stale as soiled bedclothes. Though the bedclothes on the four-poster bed were expensive linen, and scarcely soiled.