Abruptly, as if struck by a sledgehammer, I felt the full weight of the past twenty-four hours. A defeated sensation. In the course of one vertiginous spin around the earth's axis, I had been stripped as if by a centrifuge of the last elements of my old identity, the man I once was, those few remaining sources of personal pride and self-esteem. Everything had come to nothing. Everything signified nothing. Even my grandiose plans for revenge, which had kept me going in the absence of all else, now seemed sterile and pitiful and forlorn. Yes, even a speck ridiculous. *

There was nothing to hope for. And without hope, our chief bulwark against madness, the human spirit becomes unpredictable and sometimes dangerous.

I was hurt.

And I wanted to hurt back. No longer for revenge-just to hurt and keep hurting.

"Maybe you're right," I told Mrs. Kooshof. "Find a job teaching gender studies. Wait for opportunity to strike."

* The details are irrelevant. He dropped dead in the gutter. He deserted me. At his funeral, I yelled, "Why a goddamn turtle?" No use. He was dead.

* I did not set the famous 1957 fire that ravaged the sanctuary of St. Paul's Catholic Church in Owago, or the more minor blaze that was extinguished in the church basement a year later. I did not scribble graffiti on the church steps; I did not cut to shreds any priestly vestments; I did not add the large, cartoonish breasts that were discovered on the statue of Christ in the nave of St. Paul's. Why I was considered a suspect is beyond me.

* What is it about Thomas Henry Chippering, I often wonder, that so chafes the female sensibility? My doggedness? My refusal to kowtow? I want the truth.

* Ridiculous: Do not forget your own silly antics in the months after your husband departed for the shores of Fiji. You scolded him as if he were still in the room. You fingered his old sweaters, cuddled his tennis racket, composed long, convoluted letters full of venom and hurt. Ridiculous, obviously, but you could not stop yourself, could you?

And you? Do you have a name?

Better without. Unique as you are-and do not for a moment think otherwise-you also represent every brokenhearted lover on this planet, every stood-up date, every single mother, every bride left weeping at the altar, every widow, every orphan, every divorcee, every abandoned child, every slave sold down the river. You are the unmailed valentine. You are the forgotten birthday, the broken promise, the lapsed Catholic, the thirty pieces of silver, the abiding question of the ages: "Why hast thou forsaken me?"

All this, yes.

But you are also, admit it or not, Thomas H. Chippering. Granted, your ex-husband dwells in Fiji, and your heart aches, but like me, you are not entirely without blame. Because you, too, have had your secret love ledgers, your flights of fancy, your delusions, your checks under the mattress, your flirtations and unplugged telephones and petty betrayals of the flesh and spirit.

You are forty-nine years old. (Or thirty-nine, or twenty-nine.) You live alone. You cook for one.

But you have done your best, haven't you?

You drive to work each weekday morning. You pretend to be what you are not, chatting with your friends, attending dinner parties, visiting relatives. You've thrown away his tennis racket. Scrubbed his cigarette smoke from your carpets and upholstery. But still, at odd hours of the night, you find yourself paging through the memory books, just as I do. (Your lakeside wedding. Your white satin dress. How much you loved him-all that faith.) At times you second-guess yourself. Too dependent, you think. Took him for granted.

But then later, like me, you feel the sorrow come crushing down again. You realize that it was he who quit, he who abandoned you, he who flew off to Fiji in the company of a statuesque redhead named Sandra. (The word Sandra: you hear it on the radio, you come across it in a book, and it slices through your ribs just as surely as any lance or bullet. You hate the name, don't you? You loathe its harmonics, each bitter vowel and consonant.) And so, yes: One frantic afternoon you left work early, drove to the airport, dashed inside, and without batting an eye purchased a two-thousand-dollar ticket to Fiji.

An impulse, wasn't it?

No reservations, not even a suitcase, and after seventeen sleepless hours you found yourself checking into a resort hotel only four or five miles from his cute little house by the sea. You dined alone, as always. You felt forlorn-a little crazy, a little lost. (I'm on the right track, am I not? I know you. And I know what betrayal is.) You had no real plan in mind, just a craving to witness a fragment of your husband's new life, or to validate your own nightmares. And yet for a day or two you did not once leave the hotel. You sat by the pool. Ordered from room service. Hated yourself, hated him. Loved him. Cried. Hated him. Kept your eyes open for redheads.

Then finally, half terrified, half blind with anguish, you rented a car and drove south along the coast toward Suva. The road was narrow and treacherous-remember? It turned to gravel, then to dirt. Hot day. Flower smells. (You were drenched in Fiji.) Eventually you found his new house, but like some lovelorn teenager you circled and drove by again, then again, several times, both hoping and not hoping that you might catch sight of him.

What was it you wanted here? Confrontation? Apology? Reparations? Face it: like me, you did not have the slightest idea. You heard yourself cursing at one point-foul, goatish, God-hating language-words you never knew you knew. You told him off good, didn't you? Yes, you did. But then you collapsed against the steering wheel. You bawled at the sky, just as I had, for this was Fiji-lush and horrid-and nothing you could say or see or do would ever change anything. (What hurt most, I am sure, was the sudden certainty that romance would never again be romance, that you had nothing left to believe in, that the word Fiji would forever call to mind this golden, shimmering, love-forsaken paradise.) You drove straight to the airport. (Left behind that new sundress you had put on hold.) On the flight eastward you watched a movie with a happy ending, one that would not be yours. You drank martinis. You skimmed an advice column in Cosmo. ("We cannot commit to the future," wrote this well-meaning nitwit, "unless we come to terms with the past." Nice symmetry, nice sentiment. But you now understand, as I do, that the phrase "come to terms with" means "to assent" or "to agree." And you do not agree. The terms are intolerable-you reject them-in particular the term Fiji.) But realize this: Fiji is not Fiji.

Fiji is Pittsburgh. Fiji is Boston or London or Santa Fe or wherever else your faith has gone.

So close your eyes, my sweet, those lovely blue-green eyes, and remember standing on a dock upon a lake in a piney woods, in your white satin dress. Let me hear you take your vows again, alone this time, or with me beside you, two eccentrics, two lost and foolish souls. We know what sacred is, don't we?*

* So there. I have a sensitive side.

I did not descend to teaching gender studies. I did, however, accept a part-time appointment as an instructor at the Owago Community Day Care Center. Frying pan to fire? Perhaps so. The remuneration was abysmal, the pedagogic chores beneath my station, yet in virtually every regard my twelve attentive students proved far superior to those I had shepherded through our state university system. They were obedient in the main, open to new ideas, far less interruptive of my home life. Two or three of my toddling charges, in fact, showed clear signs of lingual promise, or at the very least had not yet developed the bone-chilling habit of misusing the word hopefully in every other goddamned sentence. (Pay attention, America! Do not say: "Hopefully she will sleep with me." She isn't hoping. You are. Do say: "I ogled her hopefully.") So, yes, the part-time job was fine.

But at this point I must come clean: I was on very shaky spiritual ground. Public humiliation. A lost wife, a lost career.

My return to Owago, to put it bluntly, was fueled by a single thermonuclear motive, namely to strike back at the Zylstra clan with every kilowatt of energy I could muster. I was seething. Day and night, night and day, I had that Son of Sam tick in my heart. How could one forget, or forgive, the sting of a public spanking? How could one overlook the unspeakable facts of cuckoldry and conjugal treason and perverse brotherly love?

It was all too much for me. I could feel the walls cracking in my soul, the seams splitting.

No more silly pranks.

Late one afternoon, after completing my day care duties, I was drawn by a sort of horizontal gravity into a hardware store off Main Street, where (in what can only be described as a sleepwalker's silver haze) I purchased a large, bright-red, ten-gallon gasoline container. Ten minutes later I arrived at the local Texaco station. I do not recall how I made my way home-I remember only the pungent smell of high octane-but within the hour I found myself in Mrs. Kooshof's garage, chuckling to myself, stashing the gasoline behind a pile of hoses and garden implements.

That same night, as Mrs. Kooshof slept, I raided her pantry-seven big mason jars.

I crept out to the garage in my pajamas.

Bombs, I was thinking, except the thinking was not thinking. Wild pictures in my head: Herbie straddling our plywood airplane; Herbie yelling "Die!" as he banked into a make-believe bombing run toward his yellow house.

I filled the seven mason jars.

Rag fuses.

And then for some time I squatted there in the chilly dark, rocking on my heels, full of rage, full of hurt, quite literally beside myself. There were two Thomas Chipperings. A lonely seven-year-old and a man of shipwrecked, terrified middle age.

My teeth chattered. Something was happening to me.

I do not mean to suggest that I was "crazy," or "sick," or "off balance"-nothing of the sort. I got by. I survived. On the surface I was my suave old self.

Still, the next several weeks amounted to an almost intolerable holding pattern. I had the explosive how; I needed the where and when. And while it would be nice to report that events followed a straight line toward apocalyptic showdown-that I instantly retaliated-the world does not operate by such linear principles. The world meanders. Hence I watched and waited. I kept my eyes open for opportunity. Sooner or later, I reasoned, the contemptible Tampa crew would show up in Owago, and on that fine day I would be throwing a welcome-home party of unforgettable magnitude.

Meanwhile, to pass the time, I had Mrs. Robert Kooshof-often-and I had my new day care responsibilities, both of which helped to bolster those cracking walls inside me.

Back to basics, in other words.

Language.

Partly to calm myself, partly because I am a born teacher, I threw myself body and soul into the linguistic education of my toddling charges. (I had taken the job reluctantly, at the command of Mrs. Kooshof, yet soon found it among the more profitable experiences of my academic life.) Even at ages three and four, my exuberant tutees seemed captivated by my lectures on the etymology of such key terms as spot and jump and Dick and Jane. Where any other instructor might have focused on a moth-eaten mongrel named Spot, I proceeded to the heart of the matter, forming a circle of chairs and discussing with my pupils the overarching nature of spottedness in general. Together, we rubbed our eyes and spotted spots. We spotted one another points at marbles, spot-checked our pronunciation, examined spot rot on an apple-spotlighted, in short, that innocuous yet wondrously polytypic word spot. (I did not, as was later charged, discuss with my three- and four-year-olds the infamous G-spot, nor did I allude to "spotting" in the cyclical or menstrual sense. Otherwise, our lessons were comprehensive.) This is not to say that things went smoothly at all times. On one occasion, I recall, a sprightly go-getter by the name of Evelyn complained about a "sore spot" in her tummy. "I'm sick," she kept moaning, to which I responded with my trademark asperity. "We are not playing games here," I informed the little troublemaker. "A sore spot where, exactly?"

"My tummy!" Evelyn snarled. "Sick!"

"A spot of the flu, perhaps?"

"Sick!"

A war of the wills ensued, concluding with a decidedly high-pitched tantrum on young Evelyn's part, and it was not long before the center's chief administrator (a somewhat overripened melon by the name of Miss Askold Wick) arrived to separate us. We were ordered into our corners, as it were, after which it was suggested to me that I stick to the textual canon.

I raised an eyebrow. "You're referring, I imagine, to that infantile 'See Spot jump' nonsense?"

"Right," said Miss Askold Wick. "And we don't permit spitting brawls."

"I did not spit. She spat."

So, yes: moments of strain. But by and large the day care job kept me on an even keel.

Less satisfactory was my domestic situation. Financial considerations had compelled me to give up my apartment in Minneapolis; by mid-May I had more or less moved in with Mrs. Robert Kooshof. The tensions, I must say, were severe. First and foremost, I had forfeited the independence of bachelorhood; I was no longer sovereign in my own domain. Her palace. Her rules. Like some callow teenager, I was made to carry out the garbage, mop floors, change storm windows-all in exchange for a paltry weekly allowance. True enough, Mrs. Robert Kooshof paid the bills. And true, too, she offered solace in the wake of my abrupt departure from academia. Nonetheless, life in small-town Owago seemed a terribly stiff price to pay. (The local night life, as one example, consisted of a shopping mall, a few seedy taverns, an aluminum-sided polka hall called The Coliseum.) For all of us, no doubt, a return to the environs of youth will prove difficult at best, but in my own case it had a very distinct tail-between-the-legs quality. I had outgrown the place; I cared little for accordion music.

So then. Given a temperament like mine, how does one survive in such drear circumstances?

One takes to drink.

One watches Melrose Place.

One builds bombs.

I did not wish to kill. Only to rock the complacent Zylstra world, alert them to the consequences of tampering with the spiritual well-being of Thomas H. Chippering.

To this end, on an early Saturday morning in late May, I strolled the three blocks down to Perkins Park, placed one of my rigged mason jars on an old sliding board, checked for bystanders, struck a match, lighted the rag fuse, and then rapidly scrambled for cover.

Six times I attempted the test. Six times the rag fuse fizzled.

One can only imagine my gloom. Still, I was nothing if not determined-enterprising too-and at 9:00 A.M. sharp I entered the Ben Franklin store on Main Street.

"Firecrackers," I said to the young lady behind the cash register. "Two packs, if you will. Deluxe. Price is no object."

The vacuous (though soignee) young chippie stared at me with eyes as dusty and barren as Tunisia.

"Firecrackers?" she mumbled. "They're illegal."

"But surely you must-"

"We don't."

I gestured at a large, self-congratulatory sign above the front door. "What about your motto?" I said severely. "Right there in black and white-'You want it, we got it.' That's what it says. You can read, can you not?"

"Not firecrackers, though."

"I want firecrackers."

"Try South Dakota," she said, "or wait till the Fourth."

"The Fourth?"

"Of July. You can count, can't you?" The insolent young Popsicle thrust four stiff fingers at me. "Cruise the neighborhoods. Any kid in town can fix you up."

I nodded.

"The Fourth," I said, and turned away. "Meanwhile, you will be hearing from the chamber of commerce."

Frayed nerves, obviously.

On a certain level, however, those days in Owago had a flat, repetitive tranquillity, which my spirit, if not my intelligence, found recuperative. I fattened on Mrs. Kooshof's Midwestern cuisine. I had my teaching duties, my evening strolls up and down North Fourth Street, my nightly romps with Mrs. Robert Kooshof. (Our engagement had brought out the animal in her.) In a sense, one could realistically say, this fallow period amounted to a trial marriage-nuptial routines, nuptial responsibilities.

Grueling, yes, but I learned a few surprising facts along the way: Mrs. Robert Kooshof was not of Dutch ancestry. (Maiden name O'Neill. Imagine my shock.) Her father had been a Democratic governor of South Dakota, later a two-term United States senator. Her brother, Jeffrey, was a movie actor whose name you might recognize. (I did not.) She had twice been pregnant. (Abortion at age twenty-three, miscarriage at age thirty-three.) She had anchored a victorious women's relay at the 1981 U.S. Collegiate Swimming Championships, the gold medal now at rest beneath a stack of scented silk underwear. (I sniffed around, yes.) She was addicted to over-the-counter sleep aids. She was an heiress. She was filthy rich. (Her grandfather had patented the machine that puts down those repetitive white stripes on every highway in America.) My beloved's bank account, I was stunned to learn, contained in excess of nine hundred thousand dollars, with God knows how much more squirreled away in stocks and bonds.

None of these facts had been brought to my attention, most crucially her wealth, and I remember marching into the living room one evening with a four-page bank statement in hand. (Nuptial rights: I had been snooping.) "And what is this?" I demanded.

Mrs. Kooshof glanced up from her knitting. "Oh, yes. I tried to-"

"We are increasing my allowance," I said. "Retroactively. With interest. You might have said something."

She stared at me for an uncomfortable length of time, her expression weary. "God knows I tried. Ten trillion times."

"You tried?"

"Sure, but I can never get a word in edge-"

"Totally inaccurate," I snapped, and with a flourish dropped the bank statement in her lap. "I trust you have no other such shocks in store."

"Well, if you really want to discuss the-"

"Is it all yours?"

"What?"

"In your lap. Those statements. The cash."

My well-heeled companion rolled her shoulders. "I guess the divorce will cost me, but after that ... I mean, it's mine, yes. Ours."

"Oh, yes?"

She smiled. "We're engaged, aren't we?"

We were indeed.

"Call me Donna," she said.

Over the rest of the evening the two of us reviewed her holdings with an eye on our shared future. The grand total remained in doubt, but as we retired for our nightly frolics I found myself tooling merrily down the golden-brick road of life, measuring the miles, counting up the infinite white stripes.

"There is something I should mention," Mrs. Kooshof said at breakfast the next morning. "Once we're married, I'll want to try my hand at-"

"Not now," I told her. "The kiddies await."

"I want-"

"We're covering the word cat today. I thought I might try out a few derivatives like ... catty, cat-and-mouse. Cathouse might be a bit much."

I polished off my coffee and began to rise, but Mrs. Kooshof pinned me to my seat with a glare.

"Just listen for once," she said. "You were complaining that I don't tell you things, so now I'm telling you. I want to get into a business of some sort. Do something productive. I have my own goals, you know."

I looked at the kitchen clock. "Very well," I said, "but let us be brief. Business? What sort?"