It was a good job, or at least I knew that it was going to be. I had an anonymous drawing board in an anonymous big room full of bright, serious young men and women bent over similar boards, all in smocks over the chic wine and eggplant and gray clothing that all New Yorkers seemed to wear. The entire office had an air of forward motion, involvement, muted excitement. From the beginning everyone was nice to me, and Carl Seaborn was warm and courtly and downright fatherly. He had a long, pale Medici face and thinning white hair, and might have been formidable, but wasn't. He sent a car and driver for me on Christmas morning to bring me out to the big, gray-shingled house in Bridgehampton, and I fell in love with the serene little green and white towns, all clapboard and drifted snow, that we passed. Wainscott, Southampton, Water Mill...they looked like the substantial, insular towns and suburbs I had visited with my friends from the Cape, all those summers ago; I would be all right here. And I was. The drill came back to me, word and gesture and inflection: perfect. In Carl Seaborn's big Colonial, I was surrounded by his picturebook family: smiling, ash-haired, tanned wife, identical daughter home from Wellesley, two well-mannered young sons home from Choate, beaming, white-aproned retainer in the fragrant kitchen, capering sheepdog on the hearth rug in the library where the big, radiant tree stood. We had roast beef and Yorkshire pudding for dinner, and carols played softly on the hi fi set, and we had toasts to the New Year and my new job and Paul's imminent joining of the firm with lovely, silken, dry champagne, and I thought, gratefully, that even if the whole thing was almost ridiculously redolent of an upperclass Norman Rockwell painting, it was still as seductive a scene as my starved heart had ever beheld. I determined then and there that somehow Paul and I would surround ourselves with family at our Christmases by the sea, even if they were someone else's.

"It was like something in an English country house play from the Thirties," I said to Paul the next night, when I phoned. "I kept expecting the vicar and his wife to come by for brandy after dinner."

"Neat trick, considering that they're Jewish," Paul said, and I could hear the smile in his voice across the night miles. "What about the apartment?"

"It's perfect. Of course, it's awfully small, and it has no furniture to speak of, and the bed comes out of the wall," I said. "I thought I was going to be able to pick up a few things for it, but even at second-hand shops things are so expensive up here. And do you know what a junior draftsman makes? We're going to have to be very, very frugal for a long time..."

"You won't be a draftsman long," he said. "By the time I get there you'll be a full-fledged designer, and you can get discounts. And I'll hit 'em up for new furniture just before I come."

"Well, you can hardly do that, seeing as how you're not going to be going with them," I said. "They'll probably fire me, as it is, when you don't."

"How will they know I'm not, until the stuff's bought and in?" he said. "And you're too good to fire. All's fair, Katie. All's fair."

"How was your dinner at the Fowlers?" I said. "Did you get roast turkey and Grandma's stuffing and all that? What's the house like?"

"The house is sort of like the Boston Public Library," Paul said. "I kept wanting to check out Proust. Everything in its place and the flowers and plants are artificial. The bed in the room I slept in had red silk hangings, for God's sake. And we had an all brand-name Christmas dinner, served, by God, by a Negro butler."

"Lord," I said. "You'd never know it from Ginger, would you? Was it just you all?"

"No," he said. "Fig was there, too."

"Fig? Why wasn't Fig at her own house for Christmas dinner?" I said.

"I don't know. I didn't want to ask, and she didn't say. I didn't see much of her," he said. "I took her and Ginger to the movies the last night there, but mostly I was with Ginger's father. We went duck hunting up the Warrior, and played some poker. I like him, I think. He's a pirate, of course, but not a bad kind of pirate. And I think he liked me. It's plain he wishes he had a son; he tried hard with Ginger, but it's pretty clear she's afraid of him."

I did not say anything for a moment, and then I said, "How long did you stay? I thought you were just going up for the day..."

"Well, I was, but then the heat went off in the apartment, and the Gorgon was in Texas, and so I went for three or four. It was okay. They're pretty loose people, and I was able to give them a little design advice on a pool and pool house they want to put in this summer. It paid my way, I think."

"I miss you so much," I said, suddenly desolate.

"I miss you, too, my dear, lovely Kate," he said. "You just don't know. I guess I'm just going to stay in a cold shower from now until Nag's Head."

"I know. I don't think I can wait," I said. Tears were beginning to thicken in my throat.

"Work hard," he said. "Work very hard; work night and day so you don't think about it and you won't have time to go out with slick New York guys. The time will pass before you know it, and we'll be there."

It didn't, though. I did work prodigiously, as much to advance myself to the rank of designer so I could afford some things for the apartment as to keep busy, but the time still crept by on sticky small fly's feet. Nag's Head and the big house and the beach seemed stuck in amber, far in the future. I did little else besides work; somehow I kept putting off the trips to the museums and galleries and the theaters, and the concerts and the plays that I had planned. For one thing, they cost a great deal. For another, always, in the back of my mind was, "I'll wait for that until Paul comes. I'll save it until he's here." I walked about the city a great deal, and I read enormously, and I worked. I wrote him every night. I read and reread his letters, that came twice a week; I could not realistically expect him to write as often as I did. I called him as arranged every Wednesday night and every Sunday, after the rates went down. And I waited.

In the first week of February, his Monday letter did not come. When I called that Wednesday night, I said, "Is anything wrong? I missed your letter."

"Oh, Christ," he said. "No, nothing's wrong. I just flat forgot. I'm sorry, Katie. I've been in the lab every second I wasn't asleep; there's a competition from Raytheon with a three thousand dollar prize, and I'm trying for that..."

"Oh, good," I said. "What are you doing for it?"

"Actually," he said, "I'm doing the pool and pool house for the Fowlers. The project is for a residential leisure facility."

"Oh," I said. "Well, that's great. Bring some sketches to Nag's Head, will you?"

"Sure will," he said.

"It's only five weeks now," I said.

"Don't I know it," he said.

On Sunday when I called he was not there. It had never happened before. I was worried, and sounded it when I finally got him, at midnight.

"The library," he said. He sounded distracted and tired. "I'm sorry again, sugar. This is really a bad quarter for me. You mustn't worry when you don't get me."

"No, I won't. It's just that we decided on these nights..."

"I know. I'll do better," he said.

There was no Monday letter; and he did not answer his telephone on Wednesday or Sunday. The letter the Monday after that was scribbled and brief and noncommittal, and the alarm that I had steadfastly banished to the back of my mind surfaced. He was sick; something had happened with his grades; he had been evicted...I called. He was not at home. He was not there the next night, either, or the next.

That night I swallowed my wounded pride and called Cecie, to see if she had heard anything from him. The phone rang and rang, and finally it was Fig who answered it, not Cecie.

"Oh, Effie, it's you," she caroled. "I thought you'd deserted us. I was just telling Cecie the other night that you'd probably gotten so New Yorky that..."

"Is she in? Cecie?" I said. I could barely hear myself over the pounding of my heart.

"No, I think she's at the library," Fig said. "Won't I do?"

"Well actually, I was trying to reach Paul, and I thought maybe..."

"You mean he hasn't called or written you?" she said. Her voice was intimate and horrified, as if I had confessed I had a venereal disease. "How thoughtless! I'll get on him tomorrow night, I have a tutoring session with him. He's fine, Effie; he's working awfully hard is all. I fuss at him all the time about it. Boy, am I going to read him the riot act about not calling you..."

"No, don't," I said numbly. "Just ask him to call when he has a minute."

And I hung up.

He did not call.

I spent two days and nights in dumb, sleepless misery, and then I called Cecie again. Again, I got Fig.

"I'm afraid she's in the infirmary," Fig said solemnly. "She should have been a long time ago. All she ever does is sleep. She doesn't go to classes anymore. I'm sure she's flunking. Did Paul call? He said he would."

"Yes," I said.

I called again two nights later, dulled and sapped with fear and despair. This time, after many rings, it was picked up by Lucy Davenport, who lived two doors down.

"She went home yesterday," Lucy said. "I think somebody was sick, or maybe it was her. Listen, how's New York? We envy you to death; we were all talking about it at dinner last night."

"Fine," I said.

"Maybe we'll all come see you, en masse," she giggled. "Do you want to talk to Fig?"

"No," I said.

The next day, when I got in from work, as ill and detached as a person with one of the great, depleting tropical malaises, there was a letter from him in my box. It was a thin one. I did not wait for the elevator, but ran all the way up four flights of stairs, and dashed into the apartment, leaving the door open, and sat down to read it. Everything would be all right now, there would be a perfectly simple explanation, I would laugh at myself and sleep that night, the frail spring would come on in a rush, in two weeks we would be together by the sea at Nag's Head...

The letter said that he was marrying Ginger Fowler the day after her spring graduation, at the house on the Outer Banks. They would be moving there; her father was giving them the house for a wedding present, and he had already designed the studio addition. It would begin rising on the dunes in April. He was desperately, terribly, miserably sorry. There was no excuse for any of this. He was a complete rat and he knew it. He had loved me, truly. But he loved Ginger, too, and she him, and quite frankly he needed the kind of money she had, and she knew that, and was willing to take him on those terms, and he thought they could have a good life. I was not to blame her. It had all been his idea. I must forget him forthwith. He knew, with my gifts and a promising career with a great design house, that I would do wonderfully well. Better by far than I might have with him. At least he had been able to give me my start.

"I would have hurt you sooner or later," he said. "It seems to be what I do best. At least it won't be when there's no turning back for either of us."

He signed it, simply, Paul.

Sometime in the middle of the night, when I was struggling to keep on breathing through the white-hot anguish, when I was thinking in terms of living just one more hour, and then just one more minute, "...surely I can do that, surely I can get through one more hour, one more minute, and then it will be day..." I thought of Cecie. The thought was like cool water, like night, like sleep. I rose and stumbled to the telephone and lifted the receiver to dial, and then I remembered that she was not there; that she had gone home. I could, I knew, get the number of the old house on the Tidewater cove from Information, but I did not. Cecie had not even come to my graduation. She had not even said goodbye. And she had not liked Paul; had almost, at times, seemed to fear him. I knew that I would get sympathy and succor from Cecie; I knew that as certainly as I knew she still lived on the earth. But I knew, too, that under it there would be relief. I did not call.

Sometime later even than that, my eye fell on the dog-eared little chartreuse and rust copy of the Viking Portable Dorothy Parker that I had brought from Randolph. "I'll read it every night before I go to bed, Cece. Like the Bible. And you do, too, and we can laugh together." I picked it up and it opened itself to a page near the beginning of "Enough Rope." There was a red-violet blot on the page; raspberry turnovers, I remembered, one night in the winter, saved from supper. I read: "Oh, sad are winter nights, and slow; And sad's a song that's dumb; And sad it is to lie and know Another dawn will come."

I took the book to the window and cranked the dingy casement open and flung it out into the night. There was the faintest thinning of the dark in the east, toward the hidden river, and a fresh, small wind smelling of earth and new green, somewhere far out on Long Island, came teasing by, and was gone. I waited until I heard the book land in the alley four flights below.

And then I sat down to wait for morning.

Chapter Nine.

ALAN woke me at seven, as the pink was beginning to go out of the flat sheen at the tide line, and I got out of bed and showered and put on clean slacks and a shirt, and pulled my wild hair up into its French knot. How long had I been wearing it like that? So long that my fingers could and did gather up the heavy mass and form the knot of their own volition. I had not paid a great deal of attention to my appearance in a long time. It seemed somehow to be thumbing my nose at fate to do so.

I was as stiff and sluggish as if I had slept off a hangover, and then I remembered that indeed I had. I grimaced. The few times I have ever waked after drinking too much, it has taken me days to make peace with myself. Control is still too important.

Alan was sitting at the umbrella table on the deck drinking coffee. The cool sea-light picked out the gray threads in his beard and hair, and threw the lines at the corners of his dark eyes into sharp relief. At first he did not see me, and sat slumped on his spine, legs stretched out before him, head resting on his chest as if he were sleeping. But I knew he was not. Tension was clear in the muscles of his neck and shoulders and arms, although people who did not know him well probably would not have seen it. But I knew. I knew that worry about me lay like sinew just below his skin. Remorse at the sorry little scene in the bedroom, and at my blurted words about the Pacmen's return, flamed through me and I ran across the deck and put my arms around him from behind and kissed the top of his head. His hair was thick and springy, slightly wiry, under my mouth.

"I hate what I did to you this afternoon," I said. "It doesn't do for me to drink, and it doesn't do to go back into all that. I should have known better even than to open that damned letter. Forgive me and feed me, in that order."

"I will, both," he said without turning around to me. "Forgive you now, and feed you forthwith. But I want to talk to you first. Sit down for a minute."

"Uh-oh," I said, going around the table and sitting opposite him. "This sounds like a capital T talk."

"I guess it is," he said. "I hope it won't be, but I guess it is, at that. Kate..."

And he fell silent and looked at me. My stomach plummeted as in a runaway elevator, and sweat broke out at my hairline. I knew the look. It was a look that said that something greatly different from the way I was accustomed to things happening was about to be asked. Perhaps even commanded. Alan could, sometimes, command; he did it rarely, but enough of the blood of those iron Minsk patriarchs still ran in his veins so that he did it easily when he thought he had no other recourse. I thought that we were at one of those places now. I damned myself silently; I had gotten us here myself.

"Tell me," I said. "Nothing could be as bad as The Look."

"I called Ginger Sibley while you were asleep and told her you were coming," he said, calmly and reasonably. But the pulse in his throat said that he was not calm.

"No," I said, just as calmly. My own galloping heart showed me the lie of it.

"I'm going down to Bucks County at the end of the month on the Conroy project," he said. "I called them, too. It's set now and I can't back out of it. And I can't leave you alone the way you are. You're not fooling me; I know you've got it in your head the stuff's back. I'll lay off taking you to McCracken now, but in return you're going to have to go to Nag's Head while I'm gone. You just can't ask me to give up my work on top of everything else."

I was very angry with him; this was not fair. He had promised to put off the Bucks County project until the fall, after my last checkup, and now he had gone back on his word. And he had come very close to betraying me by calling Ginger when he knew that I did not want to go. It was blackmail, and his closed, stubborn face told me that he knew it.

"You know what I think of both those things, I suppose," I said coldly.

"I do, and you're right to think it, and I'm sorry I had to do them. But I'm not going to apologize to you. I have a life to lead, too. It can't stop because you've put yours on hold."

"Alan, I don't mind being by myself," I began. "I like it, I'll be perfectly happy here while you..."

He rose.

"Then I'm calling McCracken and putting you into the hospital in the morning and getting the tests done now," he said.

"No, don't," I cried softly, and he sat back down. He stared levelly at me. I knew that I could do or say nothing to change his mind. Under his easy sweetness, Alan is as stubborn a man as walks upon the earth. And he seldom doubts the rightness of his decisions, though he comes to them very slowly and carefully.

"What are you doing to me?" I whispered.

"Trying to save your life," he said. "Trying to give it back to you. Trying to save...us. I don't think the lovely thing that we are can stand another month of this death in life. We may stay together but the thing that we are won't be here anymore. I can't stand that, Katie. I'd rather leave you. I'd rather you left me. If you don't care about yourself, can't you care enough about me just to go down to Nag's Head and see your oldest friends for a week? Is that so hard? Don't you care about me, Kate?"

I began to cry again, drearily, tiredly, dully. It seemed in that moment that there were more tears in my body than blood or bone or tissue. Just tears and the Pacmen.

"More than anything," I said. "I just don't know if it's enough."

"Well, decide," he said. "And let me know."

He turned and went into the house, and in a minute or so I heard the sound of the Volvo's engine start up, and heard it wind out onto Potato Road and finally vanish down it toward Bridgehampton. I sat on the deck as the dark fell down around me and thought, very clearly, just exactly what would my life be like if Alan were not in it, and never had been?

And the answer was, nothing at all.

I met him at almost the exact instant that Ginger Fowler was marrying Paul Sibley beside the sea at Nag's Head, and we went out and got drunk together, and were seldom apart after that. Years later a friend of ours got a contract to do a book called Meeting Cute, and wanted to use ours in it.

"It's got everything," she said. "Sex, romance, revenge, urban interest, and a happy ending."

But I would not allow it. There was nothing cute about that time in my life; when I met Alan I had not yet decided if I would live, and though I did not see it until much later, he was one of the factors that tipped the scales toward life. When he touched his gin and tonic to mine that night and said, "L'chaim," he spoke a greater truth than he could possibly have known. I was far too superstitious to let that meeting be put into a book for the momentary titillation of stockbrokers on the 9:20 from Larchmont.

The unique legacy of the suicide to his children is possibility. Death as an option. Even while the thought of it appalls and angers and devastates, suicide remains one of the things the suicide's child may consider with impunity as an answer, because it has been done successfully by his parent. It is not that he wants to die by his own hand; it is simply that it can never be something of which he can say, "I would never do that." His creator has done it; ergo, so might he. As a possibility it has probably saved as many lives as the actuality has taken. It is only when it is acted upon that it kills. I know that many of the nights after the letter came from Paul I was able, finally, to sleep enough to sustain life because the thought would come stealing into my mind, cool and whole, "I can always die. If it gets too bad, I can always do that."

And knowing it, could go on for one more day.

It is how I got through those first cold spring days: one hour at a time. One twilight at a time. One evening. One midnight. I went to work at dawn and stayed late; I walked home slowly and turned on my second-hand television the instant I entered the apartment. I could not watch dramas, and it was nearly a year before I could listen to my records, but the idiot noise of game shows and comedy half-hours got me through many nights, and books of a certain type got me through the others. I don't remember crying much; I was terribly afraid that if I began the tears would sweep me swiftly into the abyss. I don't remember very much of what I actually did in those early months; that period of time to me now seems like time spent in a long illness, an illness with fever. I have some impressions, and a general sense of desperate and primitive pain that did not end, but over it all there is a kind of still nothingness. Alan calls it my First Ice Age.

I do remember that about the second month, in April, I devised a way to get through the pain. Or rather, I resurrected it. I simply sat down and thought, "How would a woman who was not about to die of pain live in New York?" and I acted like that. It was how I had gotten through long stretches of childhood and adolescence, and it served me remarkably well again, for a time. I don't know why I did not think of it sooner.

A young woman in New York with a job like mine would be happy and energetic and committed, so I smiled and made friends and worked prodigiously and volunteered for more. I went to lunch with this young man or woman or that; I read the Times Arts & Leisure section conscientiously every Sunday, so that I would be able to join in the repartee about books and movies and plays. No one asked me on formal dates; it was widely known that I was the property of the paragon who was coming from France, like Lancelot, to be the King's favorite, and that was respected. But I know that I was liked for myself-or for the self I presented-and I was grateful for the easy conversation that wrapped me from morning till night. Often I could not put a name to the face from which it was issuing. But I was still grateful. When the sound stopped, ah, that was when danger lurked. That was when the abyss howled.

"How's Paul?" Carl Seaborn would say frequently, stopping by my board.

"He's fine," I would say, smiling brilliantly.

"Haven't heard from him in ages."