"And everybody mimics to a certain degree."

"Yeah," he says. "Like Franklin and Ernest. They aren't really original musicians. They don't write music. They play covers. They just mimic their heroes."

"Right."

"But you," he says, casting a dreamy-eyed look in my direction, "you don't mimic anyone."

"Sure, I do."

"Who?"

"Well, it's not really a who. It's a what."

"What, then?"

I know. Immediately I know. It comes to me, like a vision, but slower. It's a sound, a voice in my head. And what it says is, You are mimicking a musician. Because you aren't a musician. You are a teacher.

I don't say that out loud. Instead I turn to him and look at him and I wait. Because I know he will kiss me. And he does. And then things occur. The two of us confront each other.

We mimic lovers.

CLIVE GETS UP EARLY, just as it is getting light outside. He dresses while I am still dozing in bed. He doesn't say anything. No one mentions coffee.

I lean up on an elbow and watch him. He looks so young, standing there, ready to depart. He is grinning, as if he's gotten away with something. But he hasn't gotten away with anything at all. He has to contend with me now, with that connection, however slim, that we have forged. As he stares at me, I see his smile start to fade. He knows he's gotten more than he bargained for. And he knows, looking at me, that I've gotten less. He wants me to grin back and say something like, Wow. But seeing him want it makes me determined not to give it. This could be a character flaw, or it could be a woman's natural reaction when a man thinks he's done all the work.

"I guess there's a silver lining to everything," he says. "Even getting fired."

The trouble with young men is that sooner or later, they say something young. And you can't retch or even make a face. It's not polite.

"You'll find another job."

He says, "Maybe you could talk to Franklin?"

I laugh. "Oh. Was that some kind of down payment?"

He pretends to look hurt. "No. What are you talking about? No, of course not."

"It won't help," I tell him.

"What?"

"Talking to him. He doesn't listen to me."

"Okay. Whatever."

He opens the door, and more sunlight spills in. I feel nervous.

And I hear myself say, "When will I see you again?"

It's the death knell. It's a dirge.

He says, "You have my number. It's on the roster at McCoy's."

I want to say . . . what? Everything. I want to say, Come back here. You can't do this. Women don't chase men; men chase women. Don't run from the natural order of things.

I want to say, You can't do that to people. You can't do that to people of my gender. We invest, I want to say, in every physical transaction. What I've given you is worth more than a favor.

Except that in his mind, it isn't. And that's just a function of age. s.e.x is cheap when you're young. Disposable income. When you're older, it's a rare, mysterious metal.

He actually winks at me, then goes out and closes the door hard behind him.

I think of Hallie. I think of me saying, "Get rid of it."

As if our mistakes could be so neatly wiped away.

As if admitting we are wrong buys us anything.

IT WASN'T THE PREGNANCY that made Hallie go away. Not directly.

The pregnancy itself went away, and I wasn't sure how. She wouldn't tell me.

I waited until the end of the lesson to ask so it wouldn't look as if I were some kind of obsessed old maid living vicariously through her s.e.xual drama.

The lesson had gone well. She was playing with much more fire. She was concentrating and finding surprises and even smiling as she moved through the changes. I wondered if it was her secret, all along, that had been interfering with her music.

"So what are we going to do, Hallie?"

"Do about what?"

"What we talked about last time. Your problem."

She stared at me with genuine confusion. Then her eyebrows went up.

"Oh, that."

"Yes, that. I told you I'd help."

She waved a hand. "It's taken care of."

"What do you mean?"

"I took care of it."

"But how?"

"I know people. I have resources."

"Where did you get the money?"

She crossed her arms. "Don't you think that's a little bit none of your business?"

"You let me into this. Am I supposed to forget about it now?"

"Yes. You're supposed to forget about it now."

"I don't think that's possible."

She ignored me and started gathering her books.

"I think there's more to discuss." My tone was not lost on her. She turned her head to the side, the way dogs do when they hear a foreign sound.

"Like what?"

"Like why you were pregnant in the first place. Hallie, you have real talent and you must protect that. You're obligated to."

"Are you going to talk to me about G.o.d again?"

"I'm not talking about G.o.d. I'm talking about birth control."

"I know," she said. "I'll insist on it next time."

"There shouldn't be a next time. You shouldn't be having s.e.x. You're too young."

"And you're too old."

This stole my breath a little, like a sudden wind. "For s.e.x? Is that what you think?"

"No. To be talking to me about s.e.x. You don't know what it's like to be my age."

"I've been your age."

"Not here, not now. It's different. Things are different."

"How are they different?"

"These are weird times, okay? And L.A. is a weird place. And you learn how to survive. You have reasons for doing things. You-"

"Are you talking about bargaining?"

Her smile faded, and she said, "I won't do it again, okay?"

"Hallie, did you make some kind of bargain? Because that's something else."

"You calling me a prost.i.tute?"

"No. I don't think it was necessarily your choice."

She laughed. "How could it not be my choice? Do you even know how it works?"

"Yes, I know how it works. It's not an exchange of favors."

"What is it, then?"

I turned angry; I turned mean. I turned into your sour music teacher with the sour mothball breath.

I said, "It's a waste of my time to teach you if you're not going to take music seriously. If you're just farting around, I need to know so I can invest that energy somewhere else."

"I don't care what you do with your energy," she said without a hint of rancor.

For once in my life, I thought about what to say. I thought about it for as long as I believe I'm capable of. Here's what I came up with: Let's practice the Bach piece again, from the top, and this time I'm not going to help at all. I'm just going to listen."

So I listened, but I was far too angry to hear anything. They were just notes on a scale, coming forth, retreating, hiding, reappearing. The music was running away from her, and from me, and the two of us just sat in our folding metal chairs and watched it go. As if it weren't sacred. As if we could call it back, like a stubborn pet, and it would come back of its own volition.

We were relying on the wobbly truth that nothing likes to be kept out in the cold.

12.

ON CHRISTMAS EVE, I go down to Rae's for dinner. Rae's is a coffeeshop near McCoy's where most of us go to lunch when we forget to pack something. It's dirt cheap, but it still offends the money-conscious person to pay for a meal when you can bring a ham sandwich from home. On this particular night, I decide to go there as a treat to myself. It's too depressing to be in my trailer. Ralph, the drunk next door, has already come by for his free beer, and after he leaves, I am alone with the sounds of families preparing to be happy or else, G.o.dd.a.m.n it. I'm fully aware that on Christmas Day, somewhere in the late afternoon, unhappiness sets in as the kids tire of their toys and the parents tire of their children and each other, and the yelling starts, in the key of B. I know that is in store for me, so this is the last chance to relax.

I didn't always hate Christmas Eve. I used to like it. Mark and I celebrated the holiday in big fashion. We spent money we didn't have on presents for each other, creating an elaborate system of hiding things. Christmas morning was always a treasure hunt. We wrapped up boxes, but in the boxes were little slips of paper, giving clues as to where to search for the presents. It took half a day to go through the ritual, and by late afternoon, when all the presents had been found, we'd start drinking mimosas and I'd start cooking. By nightfall we were exhausted and we'd collapse on the couch, curled up next to each other, still drinking but now watching silly entertainment news shows on the television. We'd always reserve enough energy to make love before going to bed. To hear me tell it, it was perfect.

Well, it was perfect in the early days, and I should have known better than to trust it. I should have worked at protecting it. I can safely say that our marriage began its decline the year we didn't hide each other's presents. We just bought stuff and wrapped it up and put it under the tree. It wasn't my idea; it was Mark's. He said, "It's getting a little old, isn't it, this treasure hunt?"

"Yeah, it's old," I said, unsure of myself, scared that my childishness was starting to turn him away. Sometimes I blame myself in this regard. I tell myself that nothing would have gone wrong if I had had the guts to say, No, this is what we do. This is part of our marriage. We're hiding our presents.

Deep down, I know that he had left me in his head long before he stopped hiding the presents. His insistence on a "normal" Christmas was just a symptom of his desire to wander. He didn't need to keep a magical Christmas with me, as he had found his own magic in the arms (or at least the adoring eyes) of a weepy coed.

But think, think, I tell myself on this Christmas Eve. There must have been a point where he started to lose interest, just a little bit. A point where you could have turned it around. The other half of my brain says, No matter. You don't want him anymore. No, not anymore, but the way he was then, the way we were then. I wanted that forever. If you really wanted it forever, you would have fought. Why didn't you fight?

Because, I say, after I have parked and started my walk to Rae's, we were always working too hard at happiness. Why did we hide our presents? Because in the early days, we had nothing to give. We were too poor. We bought each other cheap presents. We hid them in order to provide a sense of occasion. He bought me violin strings, and CDs on sale, and secondhand jewelry. I bought him used books and computer paper and flimsy journals. Once, I gave him coupons to a car wash, and another time he gave me a box full of thread and needles. One year my big gift was a bottle of balsamic vinegar, because I liked it and it was too expensive. The same year, I gave him a silver pen, which he put in a drawer and never used.

If you want to, if you're interested, you can trace the demise of our marriage through the elevation of our Christmas gifts to each other. Once we stopped hiding the presents, once we started trying to make up for the lack of intrigue by paying more for the gifts, everything started going downhill.

The last Christmas we were together, we bought very nice things for each other. I got him a first edition of Robert Graves's Good-bye to All That. He got me a gold charm bracelet with musical instruments on it. Which was fine, but then we veered off into generic niceness. I bought him, that year, a cashmere scarf and leather gloves, and he bought me a sapphire ring. He never wore scarves or gloves, and I never wore fine jewelry. We had crossed over into that dangerous land of not knowing each other at all. We had crossed over into that dangerous land of letting the money speak. And once the money starts speaking, you tend to shut up.

I sit down at the counter at Rae's and am immediately waited on by Gloria, the waitress who is always there, always moderately cranky, always wearing too much makeup, her platinum hair piled up on her head. She has to be sixty, but she has devoted herself to denying the ravages of time. The only reason she hasn't had any work done is that she can't afford it. She talks to me about the recent advances in plastic surgery whenever I see her. She says, "Now they can make your lines go away with a laser. I'm thinking of doing that." I say, "No, don't do that. There has to be a downside." She also talks to me about diets, though she never seems motivated to go on one. She says, "Now there is this diet where you eat nothing but meat for thirty days. My next-door neighbor lost fifteen pounds."

Gloria never tries these things, but she never loses interest in talking about them.

When she sees me, she sidles up and says, "Merry Christmas. You want the fried egg sandwich?"