"No..." Saying it automatically, hating that prefacing question; she always had. It was like waving a red flag: You're going to hate this.

Why were you having an affair, Neal?

Well, you won't get mad, will you?

"The idea started taking shape a week ago," Sarah began, "right after you left with Clay. And then when we talked on Tuesday after you'd spent the night before with his friends, that only firmed it up more."

Adrienne sat motionless, not liking the way this was heading. Clay, the friends he wouldn't even refer to as friends ... this was too close.

"Don't look at me that way." Sarah leaned forward, elbows propped on the spines of books. "I want to do my thesis on the social climate and milieu that Clay and the others come out of. That kind of doomsday subculture and malaise that are woven through the post-boomer generation. All those people who missed out on the banquet, and mostly got stuck with the leftovers and the bills. The ones who don't have any hope or faith left, to the extent that they don't even see the point of trying."

Adrienne shook her head. "You're doing it again." Hoping to argue on the side of generalities rather than specifics. "Another idea rears it head, and you just can't get enough of it. Do you know how many times I've listened to this same kind of pitch?"

"What, are you keeping score?"

"Six times, Sarah."

"So I've finally committed myself to one. You knew it had to happen eventually. This is what I want to do. This is the one."

"And I've heard that line, too." She s.n.a.t.c.hed the bottle away and belted down a swallow, flipped the silky blond hair up off her neck; it suddenly felt too hot. "And I suppose if you stumble across some lost tribe up in the Rockies, then that'll be the one, the one, the big one."

"Objection!" Sarah cut in. "Ludicrous example." And Adrienne nodded, Oh, all right, so it is, I speak in principle but have it your way.

Sarah took the bottle from her and set it aside so she could hold her by both hands. "I told you I wanted to do something I could get really pa.s.sionate about. And I think this matters very much. Besides," she said, squeezing Adrienne's hands, "my adviser liked it."

She felt some of the starch flow from her shoulders. Well. Well. This did shed a light of validation on things, didn't it?

"Cultural anthropology?" she said softly. "Fishbine thought this idea fit?"

Sarah nodded. "He's actually pretty progressive." She let go of Adrienne's hands and implored with her own as she rocked up onto her haunches. "I think the next time the world yields up another lost tribe, that'll be it. There won't be any more. We've found them all and most of the time they've become a little more like us, and they're never any better for it. And you know? That's what intrigues me most, why we're the ones so screwed up.

"There's nothing I could do with a more primitive culture that wouldn't be redundant. So why not look at my own the way it is right now? The whole field of anthropology, it's been at a kind of pivotal point for the past several years. It's still asking the same questions, but we have to ask them in a whole new context. So in a way, the whole field becomes fresh all over again."

"Because the world's changed so much," Adrienne said.

"That's right. It's taking a new look at family structures, gender and race relations. Migration. Warfare. Law and order. All of those things are giving us fits right now and it's because we mostly ignored them, except in the most superficial ways." Sarah ran both hands back through her hair and it became a savage mane. "I just want to be part of that. It excites me."

"I know," said Adrienne. "I understand that. But..." And why such a p.r.i.c.kly reception to this? She knew perfectly well that Sarah had not come up here to intellectually seduce Clay from her, but to be just as perfectly irrational, that was exactly how it felt. And she almost had to laugh. Fighting over a man? That was the last thing she'd ever expected to happen.

"But what?" asked Sarah.

Oh, out with it. "It feels like a tremendous conflict of interest brewing here. Almost to the point of it being unethical."

"I thought about that. But you're not in a clinical setting anymore. As soon as you brought him into your home - my home, too - and agreed to take him to his, you entered a new area. I'm not one of them, but some people would call that unethical. But it's a weird case, so..." Sarah shook her head. "You're taking a good long look at Clay in his natural environment to see how it relates to him. I just want to take a look at his natural environment to see how it relates to everyone."

And this was it, wasn't it? Adrienne looked at her bluntly. "You're in my territory now."

"That's what really bothers you, isn't it?"

Adrienne sat still for a moment, then nodded.

Sarah c.o.c.ked one corner of her mouth, like a disgruntled teenager. "You have a problem with sharing sometimes."

It should have stung. Another time it might have, but not now. Because it felt justified? "It's an occupational hazard."

Sarah took the wine bottle, rolled it between flattened palms for contemplative moments. "Answer me one thing: What do you think I'm going to do to Clay, or anyone else?"

"Do?" Adrienne blinked. "I'm not sure I follow - "

"Yes you do. What effect do you think I'm going to have on the reason you're here?"

Adrienne tried to answer, found she could not. This had cut the legs from beneath her. With Clay's friends - or whatever they were to him - she wasn't even sure she should remain in contact. They had met and she had learned what they were like and perhaps that should be enough, although to be honest, a couple of them, Nina and Twitch, she had rather liked.

She pictured Sarah with them, all of them, plus any other peripheral folks who drifted along. Anthropologically speaking, fieldwork involved living with a group for a time and a.s.similating a part of them. She wasn't so sure she liked the tone of what Sarah would be taking in.

Based on what she had seen the other night, they were bitter and spiteful, they had no direction in their lives, and when they weren't staring morosely at the world at large, they were picking at one another. Well, sometimes you had to make a conscious effort to see the light of day, and it really was worth the effort; tell yourself, Get on with it, that the world didn't end for you unless you let it happen. Adrienne knew that, as a professional, she wasn't supposed to react to others judgmentally, but sometimes you still just felt like slapping someone.

And this was the emotional environment that Sarah would be a.s.similating? Adrienne could see nothing constructive coming of this - And she realized how ridiculous that sounded. As if she were turning into her own mother, anybody's mother, circa the teen years: I don't like those friends of yours, they're a bad influence.

So what did that leave her with, simple jealousy?

"We take the same kind of oath, you know," Sarah told her. "You're not an M.D. but that doesn't matter. Do no harm.' That applies to you, too. From my end, it's 'Never endanger the informant.' And we wouldn't be working at cross-purposes. I might even be of help to you. I come at things from a different perspective. So I might see something that you miss."

Adrienne nodded. I'm the only one here who came to make an impact. She didn't...

She came to be impacted.

"I'll leave this up to you," Sarah said. "If you say no, I'll live with that."

Adrienne straightened, sharply. "Don't do this to me. I don't make your decisions for you and I'm not starting with this one."

Sarah took a long, slow drink of the wine. Reached over to retrieve her down vest from where she had dropped it on the floor, held it on her lap. Was it as manipulative a gesture as it felt? So subtle, so d.a.m.nably subtle. In the moment Adrienne felt lost, helpless, imagining how Sarah must have been with her father ten, fifteen years ago. Twisting him around her finger as teenage girls are wont to do. She might have gotten anything.

"What are we going to do, Adrienne?" she asked.

"Stay," was all that finally rose to her lips, as she pulled the vest from Sarah's lap, hands, intentions. "Stay."

Seventeen.

Keeping his appointments with Adrienne, Clay began to see, was a matter of faith, faith that something good would come of them. It had become more binding here than during his tenure on Ward Five, when he had nothing else to do. Now he actually had to extend an effort.

He liked the condo better than the hotel. The hotel hadn't worked for him at all, if only for a single session, but what a bust that session had been. Sitting in chairs by the window, the round table dragged aside so that it would be no barrier between them, but that hadn't helped. He'd sat there for most of the time as if a cork were in his brain, and had left with a headache as bad as the pain after he'd smashed his forehead with the cast.

He found he could relax at Adrienne's condo, maybe a quarter of the living room given to a desk and a pair of chairs and a love seat. If he did not let his eyes stray too far he could sustain the illusion it was an actual office. She had obviously gone to some trouble for him.

What he had not counted on, though, was seeing her lover up here. Sarah. An unexpected delight, that. She had to know what he was and what was wrong with him - doctors weren't supposed to talk but he never believed they didn't - yet not once could he catch her looking at him as if he belonged in a sideshow. She headed out the door after a couple minutes and he almost told them there was no need, but stopped. Adrienne did not seem that loose about it all; had to maintain protocol, if nothing else.

They had exchanged the couch for a love seat, but the routine was familiar by now: his back to the wall, following where thought and memory and psychic wreckage led. There were times he regarded his head as a jar, Adrienne's occasional questions and prompts just more swipes of a kitchen knife to make sure he was sc.r.a.ped out as clean as possible.

Will there ever be an end to this? he wondered, and of course there would be, but when would they have enough? He had to admit he felt better since having someone to unload on, to talk with and not just be talked at, but this remission would surely last no longer than the treatment itself. Still, the thought of turning it into a lifetime habit would be enough to make him opt for Erin's joke. You look like they gave you a lobotomy, she had laughed when seeing the st.i.tches across his brow. a.s.suming he lived to fifty, he could not picture himself in this same pose, week after week. Go ahead, he would have to tell them at some point, while tapping his frontal lobe. Drill here, make it messy.

There would come an end. Adrienne would someday return home. Maybe she would be the one to decide enough was enough. Or maybe those footing the bills would seal the purse and leave her with no choice. And then? Adrift again and perhaps no better than before, the inside of his head spread thin for everyone's benefit but his own. Perhaps someone, somewhere, waiting for the pressures to again mount within him, watching from afar for his greatest explosion, so they might nod and concur, Yes, we all feared it would happen someday but we could not hold him. Let us learn from this tragic mistake.

So maybe it really was best to try while he had the chance.

I am what my birth made me but isn't there some way to rise above it? There should be. There must be.

"Let me ask you something," he said, far into the session. "Do you think people are inherently good or bad?"

Adrienne shifted to one side in her chair. "Always asking the easy questions, aren't you?"

He shrugged: Sorry, just being myself. She now knew better than to try ducking these questions, or turning them around back onto him; he had conditioned her well; he could be relentless in pursuing where she stood on matters.

Clay watched as she formulated her answer - the soft tilts of her head, the interplay between hand and ear. Away from the hospital she was no longer wearing her hair pinned back. Good for her; it made her look so much less prim. She now looked like a Nordic athlete.

"No, I don't," she said. "I believe there's a capacity in everyone to fulfill a certain potential. But whether or not they reach it, and how it emerges - say, whether it's constructive or destructive - depends largely on the experiences they've had, and there you get into so many cultural and environmental factors that it's impossible to even list them all. But then, in most people those experiences are an ongoing process, so I certainly don't believe they're locked in."

"So life experience, this overrides biology."

"In my book it usually can."

"So you think I can save myself." He knew what was coming - "What do you think?"

Nailed it. "I believe you think so."

"You know what I meant."

Clay nodded: Yeah, just sparring with you. "You're probably right. I suppose I do believe in the power of the individual. But we're not left alone, we don't live in vacuums. I've tried and it doesn't work. Other people always want in, even if they have to force themselves in. So that negates the power of the individual. I think it's mostly in a collective sense that we're failures. Like a chain being only as strong as its weakest link. The same thing applies to a society. It's no better, no stronger, than its lowest offenders."

"That discounts a lot of good that people do for others," said Adrienne, and he thought she was probably picturing Mother Teresa right now. She would.

"That doesn't discount it, that just puts it in a context of being hopeless, more or less. It's individuals that do good, but individuals die. It's societies that chew everything up, and they keep right on going until there's nothing left." He took a deep breath. "I think the world's been shaking itself down for a long time, trying to bottom out toward a lowest common denominator...

"But that's just one weak link's opinion. Got any coffee?"

And they went on for another forty minutes or so, until Clay at last decided he was talked out for one afternoon, then realized they had been at this for more than an hour and a half.

On the way to the door he asked if she and Sarah had plans for the following night, confident they would not. Who else would they know here, who else had they had time to know? Adrienne asked why before she answered.

"Thought you might like to head over to Graham's awhile," he said. "You told him you'd like to see his work. Sarah would like it, probably."

"I'll ask her."

"She'll say yes," Clay said, so sure of himself that he didn't look at her when detouring into the kitchen to grab a notepad by the phone and write directions.

He did not even attempt to show his paintings - that was the thing Clay never understood about Graham. Content to let them be seen only by close acquaintances, and the occasional stranger who had heard of them and wore him down through persistence, Graham consigned them to the walls of his bas.e.m.e.nt apartment and studio. They hung alone, bleak portals made even more so by the absence of frames, somehow more naked and raw that way, and so far as Clay knew, none of them had a name.

"I don't see why you shouldn't," Clay had once said about Graham's reticence to exhibit. "People go for H.R. Giger, they should go for yours."

Graham had shaken his head, so appalled at the idea that he had to light a cigarette to put himself right again. "It's not a question of acceptance. Galleries expect you to stand around that first night and make putrid small talk to people who'd cross the street to avoid you any other time. No, I don't think so."

"Like that would stop you from walking out if you felt like it," Clay had said, knowing this was just one more excuse. Graham had so many they should be numbered. "Anyway, I've figured out what the plan is. You're going to wait until you die early and they'll find everything and you'll become this cult celebrity."

Graham's face had lifted with a Mona Lisa smile, aloof and knowing; here's to life and untimely death and skyrocketing market values. "It would be a hilarious inside joke, wouldn't it?"

Clay had agreed. It was only the young and talented who became G.o.ds after their deaths. The mediocre were even more completely forgotten, and the old went on to just rewards. Only the young seeded debates of speculation, what might have been.

At the time he had been jealous, thinking, I'll die and there won't be a thing left behind, not one lasting bit of graffiti I scrawled on this world to say I pa.s.sed through. Now he knew he'd been wrong. At least geneticists would know his name. He wondered if they would store his brain in a jar, or keep even more of him around, like the skeleton of Truganini, last of the extinct Tasmanians, displayed for the generations to follow. Better living through the study of mutants could be their motto.

And thus he was in a contemplative mood arriving at Graham's on Monday night. Erin, pale blond hair ethereal against her baggy black sweater, was already there to film his arrival, or maybe she had been there all day - he'd not talked with her since she'd spent Friday night with him. Nina came alone; Twitch was at work. Sarah and Adrienne were last, Sarah bringing a few bottles of wine.

They all seemed to get along. One would never know that Sarah was walking in on a roomful of strangers. With Graham she got into a discussion of Dali and Francis Bacon; with Nina she discovered they were both fans of the writing of Charles Bukowski. Even Erin dropped her guard and warmed up rather quickly, and elicited no judgment when she sprang her frequent test, telling how she earned part of her income. Erin shared industry secrets, told Sarah what Clay had already known for some time: splattered s.e.m.e.n in still-life c.u.m-shots was hardly ever real, but a mixture of unflavored gelatin for viscosity and dishwashing liquid for pearlescence, and was squirted from a small turkey baster.

"I never thought it quite looked real," Sarah said.

Adrienne glanced askance at her. "How would you know?"

"I grew up with three brothers, don't forget. p.u.b.erty wasn't always dry."

"That might've been enough to turn me to women," Erin said.

Graham made a small grunt. "But think of all the fascinating career highlights you would've missed out on."

She turned back to him, almost coy, as coy as Erin could be when actually herself. "Don't be jealous, when they're in my mouth I'm still thinking of you."

"Where are they when you're thinking of Clay?"

Erin frosted, just a bit, a fine ice-eyed edge of pique. "Wherever it feels good," she said, and left it at that.

Clay added nothing, content to stay out of it, thinking only, This can't last, this triangle. Someone was eventually bound to get seriously hurt, and he doubted he would be the one, no matter what transpired.

Soon, Adrienne talked Graham into giving them a tour of his paintings, and he consented. Walking them through the haphazard placement, in black jeans and T-shirt, an apple picker's cap atop his limp curls, and an open bottle of wine planted against one hip, he reminded Clay of some lost Parisian, out of place and out of time, and especially out of faith in himself. The canvases came with frequent disclaimers: I should have painted over that one; I was drunk most of that month.

"Compliment him enough," Clay told Adrienne, "and maybe he'll give you one. Anything to replace that washed-out impressionist c.r.a.p in your office."

He skipped out on most of the tour; had seen them all many times. The grimy metal structures rendered in oils and acrylics; the furnaces, the bridges to nowhere, the girders turned to pretzels by holocausts unknown. But then he realized that, off in one gloomy corner, Graham had begun discussing a painting he had not yet seen. On his way over, he heard Graham say it had been done the whole time Clay had been gone. b.a.s.t.a.r.d, hadn't even told him about this one.

He admired it beside Adrienne and Sarah, seeing it as they must. The difference in scope was obvious at a glance. While the earlier works had but one subject, with this, the eye hardly knew where to begin. Graham had to have poured nearly every spare moment into this over the weeks Clay had been AWOL, and even then it was ... it was...