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My wife's sad, meager secret. I must grant her that secret. Lionel felt his heart swell with magnanimity for the first time in memory.

Though when he'd come to bed he'd been exhausted and depressed, now he felt exhilarated, inspired. The broken halves of my life. I must make one! Determining that Camille was safely asleep, Lionel slipped from bed.

Barefoot in pajama bottoms and T-shirt, both damp with perspiration, he made his way quietly out of the bedroom, along the darkened corridor to the rear stairs. Like the eye of a benign god, faint moonlight guided his way. In his study, he shut the door behind him. Smiled. Sighed! By the digital clock on his desk, it was : .. Call anytime, darling. By magic I will know it is you. Lionel held his breath as he punched out the memorized number, his fingers moving swiftly and unerringly. Miles away in the third-floor walk-up loft on West th Street a telephone rang, and rang; and at last the receiver was lifted. Her soft shy tentative lightly accented voice-"Yes? Who is it?" Lionel cupped his hand over the receiver and said in a rush of words, "Siri, darling, it's me. Something terrible, and wonderful, has happened."

F * , exhilarated, swaying like a drunken man, Lionel was leaving his darkened study to return to bed when to his surprise the stairway light was switched on, and there stood Camille frightened, staring, a dressing gown hastily pulled over her nightclothes, at the top of the stairs. "Lionel, what's wrong? Why are you here? " When Lionel stood stunned, unmoving, Camille quickly descended the stairs, her plump breasts quivering, her anxious face crosshatched with shadowlike spiderwebs. She came to Lionel, a short, soft-bodied, anxious woman, laying her hand on his arm. "Lionel? Darling, what is it? You look- stricken." Lionel stammered he was too restless to sleep, couldn't get that ghastly visit to Nyack out of his head, he was sorry he'd disturbed her.

Camille hugged him, pushing into his arms and laying her head against his chest. He stood unmoving, trapped. He could not resist. Camille was shivering, and smelled of sweet, stale talcum. "Oh, Lionel! I know. I'm so afraid. Hold me!" Lionel dutifully closed his arms around his wife. Thank God, she couldn't see his guilty, flushed face! "You do love me, Lionel, don't you?" Camille asked wistfully. Lionel stroked her soft, boneless shoulders, her fine disheveled hair, murmuring, "Of course I love you, darling. You know that. Always." Lionel had regained much of his composure Middle Age: A Romance **

and took strength in comforting the trembling woman. Next morning he would tell her. Next evening. He would tell her about Siri. He would bring the broken halves of his life together.

Camille stiffened suddenly. "What's that?"

"What?"

"That-sound."

They listened, huddled together at the foot of the stairs. A noise as of desperate scratching? sticks being rubbed together, raked against wood?

"It must be an animal," Lionel whispered. The hairs at the nape of his neck stirred. Hand in hand the Hoffmanns made their fearful way through the shadowy house to the kitchen, where Lionel boldly switched on an outside light. Camille crept to a window to look out. Camille cried, "Oh, Lionel! Come see."

There, in the sudden ellipsis of light on the walk, dragging a wounded hind leg and his eyes brimming with sorrow, was Adam's lost Apollo.

T M R*

I *' **the face of an adolescent boy leaps at her. So beautiful!

Eleven days after Adam Berendt's death.

She tells herself she is not violating the terms of the agreement. She is not in personal contact with her son Jared.

Jared Tierney. Abigail Des Pres's fifteen-year-old son who bears his father's name, not hers. Her son, named for her enemy.

Through the binoculars' magnified, slightly distorted lenses she stares.

She isn't accustomed to the heavy, clumsy instrument, her hands with their guilty tremor grip it tight, pressing it against the bridge of her nose.

Already the sensitive bridge of her nose has begun to chafe. Is Abigail Des Pres so sensitive? A pervert posing as a concerned mother. No, a mother in strenuous denial she's a pervert.

In actual life, Abigail could not stare at her son so avidly. So without shame. He'd be deeply uncomfortable, even disgusted; he'd slam out of the room. But this isn't actual life, this is something else. Since Adam's death, all is unreal. A thin covering like sparkly cellophane wrap over oblivion. Abigail bites her lower lip, hard. Contemplating the boy's cheekbones, the curve of his jaw, a dimple in his right chin like a tiny incision; the thick eyebrows darker than the chestnut-brown hair. The eyes she knows are steely-blue though she can't see their color, at this distance. Steely-blue, seeing too much.

Middle Age: A Romance *

But Jared can't see her now. Walking with his friends beneath tall trees, through spangled sunshine, talking and laughing and oblivious of his mother's transfixed eyes upon him. A man once pressed his thick stumpy thumb against an artery beating in her throat and that artery is beating now, hot and urgent. Jared! Jared. I want you.

It's nearly noon of a bright summer day. In a northerly place: Vermont?

Why has Jared gone so far away from home, to summer school? But it was necessary, Abigail concedes. She understands. Jared had a difficult year at the Preston Academy, emotional pressure exerted by both his parents, he'd received a D in English, an outright F in math, he'd been resentful at the prospect of going away for six weeks to summer school yet now he looks very happy, even relaxed, and Abigail his mother concedes yes, that's a good thing-isn't it? You do want your only child to be happy even if, clearly, you are not the agent of his happiness.

For a fleeting moment Abigail thinks that Jared might see her. The way he's lifting his head, frowning. His desperate mother-in-disguise at a distance of about forty feet, hidden inside a parked car. If he sights her, if he discovers her, she'll drop the incriminating binoculars and throw herself on the boy's mercy. Jared, forgive me! I didn't realize what I was doing. I didn't realize the lenses would actually magnify. I didn't realize that boy was-you.

Maybe he'd laugh? Shake his head in adolescent dismay at her, and laugh?

Maybe not.

Yet the painful fact is, Abigail Des Pres, forty-two-year-old divorcee, former debutante, former beauty, a reasonably intelligent and educated woman, not an intellectual, but endowed with common sense, a moral woman, a decent woman, a woman-with-a-sense-of-humor, a moderately active participant in such civic-minded organizations as Planned Parenthood, Literacy Volunteers of America, Friends of the Salthill Trust, is stalking her own son.

The painful fact is, Abigail Des Pres is doing exactly what she's been forbidden.

It's different now, Adam is gone. I have no one now.

And Jared will never know.

She doesn't plan to stay another night in Middlebury. She will be leaving that afternoon. Returning to Salthill. She vows.

And Jared isn't aware of her, in any case. Not Jared nor the boys he's walking with. Abigail Des Pres, the former Mrs. Harrison Tierney, *

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crouched behind an olive-tinted window of a rented luxury Lexus; frowning and squinting through a pair of binoculars; the Lexus was chosen for its discreetly darkened windows, it's a rental because Abigail doesn't want her own car to be recognized by her son. She has thought this through, hasn't she? Not impulse but premeditation. Shameless, unconscionable.

She knows. She has parked the Lexus inconspicuously with other vehicles on a residential street in a metered place for which she has paid, a quarter for a precious hour. Abigail has a pocketful of quarters, clinking like pi-rate's gold! She's been willing to wait all morning here at the edge of the Middlebury campus, to sight her son whom she has not seen, has not touched, has not kissed in nearly two weeks.

She'd telephoned Jared when the terrible news came. Jared had always liked Adam, he'd been close to Adam for some months during the worst of the divorce siege, but Jared didn't return Abigail's calls for a day and a half, and then on the phone he sounded remote, detached, sullen. Oh, honey, isn't this terrible tragic news, Abigail wept. I can't believe he's gone, honey, can you? Oh, my God. Far away in Vermont the boy said quietly, Yeah, it's real sad, Mr. Berendt was O. K. You better get hold of yourself, Mom, y'know? I'm not coming home.

Abigail was shocked, she'd had no idea of taking Jared out of summer school.

It's fascinating, it's dangerous, to watch Jared like this, without his knowing. And be invisible herself. When Abigail stares at him through the powerful lenses, he's unnervingly close; when she lowers the lenses, his figure leaps back, his face becomes a miniature, she might not recognize him. He's safely distant. She's safely distant.

So far as Jared knows (and Abigail doesn't flatter herself he's actually thinking of her) his mother is at their Salthill home, the spacious lonely Cape Cod on the more rural stretch of Wheatsheaf Drive, * miles to the south; while Jared is in leafy Middlebury, Vermont, where the Preston Academy, for a hefty fee, holds its six-week summer session. So far as Jared knows, there is nothing to know, nor to suspect. Of course you're not coming home, Abigail told him, hurt. I just thought you'd want to know about Adam.

Maybe, after they hung up, Jared broke down in tears? Is that possible?

Jared might be in mourning, he's wearing the baggy black T-shirt Abigail especially dislikes, though in fact he may own several of these T-shirts bearing a cryptic codified message no adult can decipher (the word **

Middle Age: A Romance *

in lurid red prominence on his chest) and oversized khaki shorts falling down his hips; the filthy Nike running shoes that must have some mysterious sentimental value to him, he refuses to give them up, and unlaced laces, and of course, no socks. No socks! Which is why (Abigail's nostrils pinch at the memory) her son's feet smell like damp-rot fungus. But the other boys are sockless, too. Maybe their smells compose a singular smell, the statement of an American generation born in the mid-*8s? Commingled with boy-hormones?

Desperate-mother humor. The shameful fact is, Abigail Des Pres adores her son exactly as she'd adored him when he was a baby, when he was a toddler, fitting not only uncomplainingly but very happily into her arms. Maybe more, now her marriage is over, and her emotional life a wreck. Gladly would she live among the smells of Jared's size-ten feet in those running shoes, greasy-hair smells, armpit- and crotch-smells, if only Jared would adore his mother half as much as she adores him. A kernel, a crumb, a nanosecond of adoration!

If Jared would meet her gaze unflinchingly. And say he loves her, and his love is not pity. He loves her and respects her. In her ceaseless and exhausting struggle with the ex-husband who happens to be Jared's father, Jared sympathizes with her, his mother. Hey, Mom, it's O. K. I'm on your side.

Abigail, if caught, can't claim this is an impulsive act. Spying on her son. After all she'd driven deliberately to Middlebury, Vermont. She'd gone to the gigantic nightmare Nyack Mall to purchase the binoculars, also known as spy-glasses, in a sporting goods store. Coolly she'd identified herself as a novice bird-watcher with myopia, she'd needed a high-powered instrument and price was no object.

"Adam, don't judge me harshly! I tried. But Jared is gone for six weeks, and now you. Gone forever."

Since the ghastly morning of Adam's cremation, Abigail has lapsed into the habit of murmuring aloud. Since that morning when, sedated, swaying on her feet and her eyes seared from continuous crying, she'd glanced innocently skyward . . . As smoke lifted in bland powdery puffs and tendrils bearing away the spirit of the only man she'd ever truly, purely loved; the only man, in her long embattled life after childhood, who'd seemed to her worthy of an intelligent woman's adoration. "Now turned to ashes, smoke? A jar of waste? "

And then, the scattering of ashes. Abigail had refused to attend. She'd *

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been called, by both Marina Troy and Roger Cavanagh, but she'd declined. They planned to rake Adam's ashes into Adam's garden above the river, as Adam had requested. On the phone Abigail was suddenly rude, abrupt. "I can't! No more! I want to remember Adam as a man, for God's sake. Not fertilizer."

Abigail sits crouched behind the wheel of the rented Lexus, pressing the heavy clumsy binoculars against the delicate bridge of her nose, where they'll leave a mark. Since the death, Abigail's skin is sensitive, hurtful.

Her moist mouth falls open. In contemplation of the remarkable boy who is her son. (She's hoping her breasts won't leak sweet warm milk inside the black silk Shanghai Tang tunic top.) Spying on him like this, yes, it's con-temptible, yes, she's ashamed, but Jared wouldn't allow her to look at him like this, ever. He hates her looking at him at all, with her dark somber heavy-lidded erotic gaze. He's too normal, he's fiercely normal. He wants to be average. The American boy not as Michelangelo's blandly perfect David but as Bernini's David, with a furrowed brow and mutinous stance.

Jared is the hot, beating core of Abigail's life. As if her very heart stands outside her, raw and vulnerable, suffused with its own mysterious unknowable life.

At an intersection of paths Jared and his friends pause to talk with other boys. Boys smoking cigarettes! All wear baseball caps reversed on their heads, all wear backpacks. Baggy T-shirts bearing inscrutable codes and logos of rock bands, slipping-down shorts, bare brawny down-covered legs, bare feet inside unlaced running shoes. A herd of them. Patiently Abigail waits as tall loutish strangers obscure her vision of Jared. Hulking boys who are the precious sons of other mothers; mere blurs here beside the upright flame of her son. The Preston summer session is composed mostly of students like Jared who have failed or done poorly during the academic year and whose parents are becoming anxious they won't be admitted into first-rate universities, and Abigail wonders if Jared is one of these, an average low-achieving teenaged boy amid the herd, or whether he's in disguise as such a boy.

Abigail watches in dismay as Jared takes a cigarette offered him, and lights up. "Oh, honey. No." Though she isn't truly surprised. (She'd several times smelled smoke in his room, in his hair and clothes this past year. No matter Jared denied it. Rolling his eyes and informing her she was being paranoid. Later claiming he possibly smoked now and then for his nerves.

No big deal, Mom.) Middle Age: A Romance *

Jared and his friends move on. Jared exhales smoke as he shakes his head to flick hair out of his eyes. What ease in his most ordinary motions: so long as he doesn't know he's being observed. Someone tosses a Frisbee in his direction and Jared leaps to catch it, leaps like a dolphin, his cigarette clamped between his teeth, and with a twist of his wrist sends the Day-Glo orange object skimming back. So quick, so graceful, Abigail is dazed. It's as if the boy has shaken out a bolt of silk in the sun, a banner of shimmering light, silk that is his own soul, and a second later lets it drop.

Through splotched sunshine the boys move. They pass girls in tank tops and shorts, slightly older girls, Middlebury College students probably, no exchange between the groups of young people, and as they walk on Jared and his friends mutter slyly to one another and erupt into laughter.

Abigail can't hear the laughter at this distance, the car windows rolled up tight, but she flinches, knowing it's crude. And what crude words spring effortlessly from Jared's beautiful mouth?

Abigail Des Pres who has many times (inadvertently!) overheard her son with his prep school friends, visiting their home in Salthill, feels a blush rise into her face.

Oh, Jared, honey, must you and your friends use such- language?

Fuck, Mom, you spying on me again?

Jared! I am not spying, this is my house. I'm asking you why- such words?

Don't listen, Mom. Then it won't upset you, O.K.?

This exchange they'd had earlier in the summer. Jared hadn't been angry or defensive, really. There's a peculiar sweet reasonableness about him at such times. As years before he'd wanted to know why nigger was a nasty word, but if you said the n- word like on TV, it was all right?

A good question. All children's questions are good. But how to answer? Abigail can't any longer kiss her little boy's frowning forehead with the serenity of a Botticelli madonna and murmur Why? 'Cause Mommy says so.

Jared and his friends have been approaching the street where the Lexus is parked, not head-on but slantwise. They appear to be heading not for a dormitory or dining hall but in the direction of a small commercial area, a block of stores and restaurants. Abigail stares greedily, she has only these few snatched minutes before she loses Jared. (She isn't going to telephone him from her hotel, she'll be leaving in a few hours. She is not going to contact him.) Her eyes feel bloodshot. Her heart is beating like a gong.

Jared is beginning to loom in the binocular lenses like a cinematic image *

J C O*

in close-up. His smooth taut tanned skin is slightly blemished, there's a scattering of pimples at his hairline it looks as if he's been scratching. His hair sticks out in taffy-like tufts beneath the soiled Yankees cap, it has grown long on his neck and looks stiff with grease. Almost certainly, Jared isn't clean. Two-minute showers, a few rough swipes with a bar of soap, soiled mangled towels tossed to the floor. What can you do? During the long months of separation and divorce, when Harrison moved out to live in New York City with a new woman said to resemble a younger Abigail, one of the forms Jared's deep unhappiness took was a refusal to wash thoroughly; a reaction that mostly amused her ex-husband Harry, but upset Abigail. Yet-what can a parent do? It was a custody compromise that, instead of living part time with each parent, Jared would board at the Preston Academy, near Springfield, Massachusetts; during the summer, he would mostly live with Abigail, but spend some time with Harry; they would alternate, or somehow share, school breaks and holidays. The Preston Academy was a respected, and very expensive private school for students not quite good enough for Andover, Exeter, St. Paul's, Lawrence-ville; it was reputed to be less drug-infested than most, and no student had ever killed him- or herself on its premises. (Though as Jared pointed out, this pristine record didn't include Preston students who'd "offed themselves off-campus.") At Preston, Jared has shared a suite with boys no more disposed to keeping themselves clean than he, what can you do?

Abigail isn't one of those mothers obsessed with dirt, dirtiness. A nag of a mom. A TV mom. No, she wishes only that she could monitor her son without his knowing. By remote control, for instance, like an expensive electronic toy.

A faint moustache on Jared's upper lip! Or maybe just a shadow. Jared has begun to shave, Abigail believes. How many times a week, she has no idea. This she knows not from Jared (who would die before telling his mother such an intimate fact about himself ) but from the ex-husband Harrison, who can't resist telling Abigail about things he believes might roil her, unsettle her; any stray fact to suggest how the stability she so yearns for is going to be denied her. In one of their few recent phone conversations Harry allowed Abigail to know that he'd lent Jared a razor one weekend when Jared was visiting, and so Jared's lifetime of shaving has begun. It was like Harry, sly and cruel and charming when he wished, to worm his way back into their son's emotional life after years of indifference. A growing boy needs a father. Not just a mother. Even you, Abigail, must Middle Age: A Romance *

know this. Abigail responded with dignity, thank God it was a phone conversation and her ex-husband couldn't see the sick, beaten look in her face.

Yes, she did concede the point, yes, she knew. A boy needs a father. Not you.

Since the divorce there have been men romantically interested in Abigail, but Abigail can force herself to feel no interest for them. No more!

She has become sexually anesthetized-neutralized-and intends to remain in that state. So it isn't likely she will be remarrying soon, it isn't likely that Jared the growing boy will be living with a stepfather soon.

Had Adam Berendt loved Abigail? Yes. But not in that way.

(Abigail's tender ears still ring with the cruelty of Harrison's just a mother, as one might say just a minor head cold, or just a side order of coleslaw, please. And the insulting even you, Abigail.) By this time Jared and the other boys are striding away, in the direction of a McDonald's. As if hypnotized, Abigail continues to stare at the back of Jared's head, the reversed cap, the narrow shoulders in the baggy black T-shirt, the downy glint of his swinging arms and legs. It cheers her to see, or to imagine she sees, Jared tossing his cigarette into a gutter. "Honey, take care. I love you." Now what? She's both relieved he didn't see her, and acutely disappointed. Now nothing remains for her except the long drive back to Salthill, to that lonely house. Before leaving for Middlebury, Jared suggested that she spend a month on Nantucket, she had old, very rich friends with an enormous house on the ocean, but no, Abigail hadn't wanted to leave Salthill, for there was Adam, her dear friend Adam . . .

The other morning, very early, she'd been wakened from her sedated sleep by a frantic scratching below her window, and a high keening sound, and looked out to discover Adam's silver-haired Apollo, heartbroken Apollo, at the back door, an old gardening glove of Adam's in his jaws.

She fed Apollo, petted and stroked his coarse hair, and wept over him.

Two of a kind, they were. Lost souls of Hades.

Though Jared has nearly disappeared from view, Abigail continues to hold the binoculars to her eyes, hurting the delicate bones above her nose.

Now she's leaning forward, her elbows over the steering wheel. There's a sudden rapping on the windshield. Abigail lowers the binoculars, and sees to her horror that a uniformed man is peering into the car at her. "Ma'am?

Will you open this door, please?"

A nightmare!

Abigail, blushing, fumbles to open the door, which is heavy as lead.

The Middlebury cop, in dark-tinted aviator sunglasses, a crisply ironed **

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short-sleeved blue shirt with a tin-looking badge, leather holster and smart polished pistol riding his hip, doesn't help her with the door, but stares at her, frowning and bemused.

"Ma'am, what are you doing?"

"Officer! I-can explain."

Abigail's wrists are too weak to support the heavy binoculars, she lowers them to her lap. Her eyes that feel bursting with capillaries lift in soft female supplication. Her eyelids tremble. Her lips tremble. At such times Abigail Des Pres's social poise can help. To a degree. Women in the Des Pres family have been bred through the generations to exude this softness, this pleading-for-understanding, in the face of masculine suspicion and hostility. In youthful middle-age Abigail is still a beautiful woman, if very thin; out of fearfulness she always dresses expensively, in good taste, and her hair, face, and nails are impeccably groomed. For this shameful expedition she's wearing the elegant black silk Shanghai Tang tunic, matching trousers, open-toed Gucci sandals. The rings on her long thin fingers, the jewel-studded gold watch on her slender wrist; the rented Lexus with olive-tinted windows; Abigail's French perfume-all these, the Middlebury cop, a flat-bellied man of about thirty-five, is taking in. Abigail says in a hoarse whisper, "Officer, I've been-watching over my son. That's all.

At a distance. I don't want him to know I'm here. He thinks I'm back home. His father and I are divorced. He's only fifteen, he's here for the Preston Academy summer session, I promised him I wouldn't try to see him, but I-I couldn't stay away. I was so lonely without him. Officer, I'm so embarrassed. Please don't arrest me!" Abigail smiles plaintively, wiping at her eyes. She knows she isn't going to be arrested.