"I'll help you understand!" she said fiercely. "You're out of here."

"Out?"

"Yes-out!"

My satin dressing gown was all but ruined.

I disrobed on the spot, moved to the sink, attempted to rescue the garment under a stream of cold water. (Mock me, if you wish, but it is a well-known fact that individuals under intense spiritual stress will often focus upon the most incidental details. Eichmann counted paper clips. Nixon redecorated. I rinsed. And if such examples do not suffice, I could well inquire as to the petty behaviors that you pursued in the weeks after your husband deserted you in favor of a cunning redhead named Sandra. Did you not shampoo the rug? Did you not clip coupons and rearrange the furniture? A piece of advice: Cast no stones.) My efforts, in any event, were fruitless. (It is another well-established fact that Ceylonese green tea, iced or otherwise, has long been the mortal enemy of satin.) After a moment I tossed the robe aside and stood naked, as Mrs. Kooshof continued to flog me with epithets.

Her language I cannot repeat. The gist of it, however, had to do with claims that I was still "pining" for Lorna Sue, that I had made "a fool" of her (i.e., Mrs. Kooshof herself) over the public airwaves, that I treated her like "some substitute leading lady," that I could not stop "hemming and hawing," that I refused to "commit,"* that I was little more than a "sponging, freeloading, ungrateful, oversexed tomcat."

At that juncture I stopped her.

"This has degenerated," I said crossly, "into tautology." I gave the woman my harshest stare. "Sponging? Freeloading? Repetition gets us nowhere."

Mrs. Kooshof made a scoffing sound. "Fuck you, Tom, I'm not one of your cow-eyed coeds!" She threw a dish towel at me. "Put that on. Right now. You look ridiculous."

Her tone took me aback. I wrapped the towel around my middle, secured it with a convenient clothespin, stood awaiting the next onslaught.

"Listen very closely," she said. "I've done everything under the sun to please you, to make you want me. Coddled you. Filed for divorce, followed you down to Tampa, put the goddamned house up for sale. What a moron I've been! Stupid, stupid me-I even tolerated your whining about Lorna Sue. A bitch, by the way. Not half the woman I am. Not a zillionth."

She shook her head as if stumped by the mathematics, as if nothing added up.

"I mean, seriously, it's like you can't even see me. Men think I'm dynamite. Heads pop up. I'm sexy and smart and ... You don't care, do you? You don't. All this time together, you can't even call me by my first fucking name. I think you're afraid of it." She bit down on her lower lip and studied me for several seconds. "You are, aren't you? Afraid."

I examined the puddle of iced tea at her feet. No sensible reply came to mind.

"Do it," she said. "Start a sentence with Donna. Donna, I'm sorry. Donna, I wish I'd done better. Donna, we could've had a good life. Try it. Anything."

I nodded-I did try-but my vocal cords went lax.* The word Donna would not form itself. Whatever the cause, spiritual or biological, I could only gape.

Mrs. Kooshof shut her eyes.

"Well," she said.

Then a minute later she opened her eyes, smiled, and said, "Once you're on your feet, Thomas, I just want ..." She held up a hand. "Don't say a word to me. Please. Just go."

Her smile, of course, was not a smile. And the word go settled between us like a fog.

"You're sure?" I said. "You really want it to end like this?"

"I never wanted any endings. I wanted good things." She picked up her brochures, smiled brightly again-falsely. "That night you showed up here, I was so ... Crummy town, crummy husband. Then I find this wacky guy lying there by the birdbath. Like out of a spaceship or something."

"Captain Nineteen."

"Captain Nineteen. And right away-almost right away-it felt like somebody gave me a chance. That's all. A chance." She closed her eyes, stepped backward, lifted her travel brochures as if to shield herself. "I mean, you're not what I'd always dreamed about, not even close, but it felt ... This incredible perfect Tightness. The funny things you say, the way ... Look at yourself-that stupid dish towel. You can be cute, and you've got this good heart, and you're intelligent and screwy and ... If you could just stop trying so hard."

"I'll remember that. 'Try not to try.' "

She started to smile again, but the smile failed. "Some things you should've tried. You should've tried me."

"Right. No nerve."

"You should've."

She turned away. She left me there in the kitchen, alone, with a ruined robe and something sour in my throat.

"Donna!" I almost yelled.

* Occasionally, of course, my interior night life proved anything but sluggish. Pursuit dreams. Wildfire hot on my heels, Death Chant howling at my door, a venomous Spider inching up the backside of my soul.

* Twenty-four new entries, in total, including such familiar names as Toni and Megan and Carla and Fleurette and Masha and Peg and Patty and Sissy and Oriel and Deborah and Karen and Beverly and Jessie and Evelyn and Rebecca. (What a harvest!) Each encounter, of course, had to be sub-filed under myriad statistical headings; new data had to be entered under "Body Type," "Hair Coloring," "City of Origin," et cetera. Moreover, in the case of little Evelyn, I was compelled to generate brand-new categories altogether: "Bed Wetters," "Thumb Suckers," and so on.

* It will be recalled that earlier in this narrative I promised to elaborate upon the grief-laden word balcony. Here, then, is indisputable evidence-Lorna Sue's complaints notwithstanding-that I am a man who goes out of his way to honor a pledge.

* See Chapter 20 for an inspired and rigorous analysis of that much abused word commitment.

* At that instant it occurred to me, as it must now be occurring to you, that my earlier muteness may not have been entirely volitional.

All my life, for as far back as I could remember, I had been prefacing my thoughts with the words Lorna Sue. I would be taking a bubble bath, say, and out of nowhere I might think-or say aloud-Lorna Sue, I need a bar of soap or Lorna Sue, where are you? or Lorna Sue, how the hell could you ever do this to me? Second nature. Nature itself. And to substitute the name Donna-to address myself with such intimacy to another being-seemed a violation of something hallowed and divine.

On the second day of July, Herbie and Lorna Sue and her pretty-boy tycoon arrived in Owago for the holiday weekend. By chance-or more accurately, I believe, by a gift of fate-I was out for a stroll that afternoon, alone, and happened to see the big blue Mercedes pull up just before dusk: tycoon at the wheel, Herbie beside him, Lorna Sue hogging the commodious backseat.

I did not, of course, literally gasp.* But I must say that the word instantly popped to mind, as if my brain had somehow done the gasping for me. My heart raced. I immediately sat down on a neighbor's ill-tended lawn. It was one of those moments when the world comes into stark focus, when all the emotional horrors of a lifetime are squeezed into a single amazing instant.

For weeks, of course, I had known they would be arriving, yet the prospect had always seemed an impossible fantasy, a pipe dream. Bear in mind, I had not laid eyes on these three blackguards since the day of my public spanking. The passage of time, however, had done nothing to eradicate that brutal incident from my memory. Night after night, hour upon hour, I had been picking at it like a scab: my bared haunches, the disgrace, the sting, the twinkle in Herbie's eyes, the tycoon's swiftly descending yardstick, Lorna Sue's indifference, the whole multiplicity of injustices and fifth-column betrayals.

Now, at last, here they were. Delivered to me like cattle for slaughter.

I had been ordered to depart Owago that very evening, and it was therefore necessary to inform my balky host that I would be extending my stay by at least two full days.

On the surface, Mrs. Robert Kooshof did not take the news well. She strode in the direction of the telephone, threatening eviction, at which point I hastily rose up and unplugged the whole works. I looped the cord around my neck. I pulled it tight. "Two additional days," I declared, "will harm no one." (Strictly speaking, this was not the case. Immense harm, in fact, would surely be the lot of a certain triad of perfidious love villains. Last gasps, et cetera.) "Two days," I said, and winked. "I'm sure we can find ways to make the time fly."

Mrs. Kooshof took the cord from my neck.

"All right, I can't evict you," she said. "But it won't change anything. I really do want you to leave." Then she paused and squinted. "What's happening, Thomas? I can tell by that silly smirk of yours that something-"

"It is not a smirk," I said crisply. "It is a Fourth of July twinkle."

Well into the night, as Mrs. Robert Kooshof slept the sleep of the spent, I moved in stealth to the garage. Pulled out my seven mason jars. Topped them off with an inch or so of fresh gasoline.

Fuses, I reminded myself, remained a problem.

First thing in the morning, I would put my mind to the matter. A solution would be found.

For now: a bit of reconnaissance.

A trial run, if you will.

My plan, as hinted at earlier, was to issue a loud, fiery, unmistakable wake-up call-not to hurt but to scare, to vaporize that private bubble of theirs, to let them know I was a human being and not some game piece on the checkerboard of treachery. (Childish, you think? I think not. Keep in mind your impulsive, somewhat less than mature trip to Fiji: how you contemplated your own ferocious wake-up call. Except you backed off. You went chicken. And you regret it, don't you?) So, yes, a trial run, and it was with fluttery glee that I advanced in my ruined robe and corduroy slippers to the big yellow house on the corner.

No surprise to find the front door unlocked. Small town. Slovenly household.

Easy.

Down a hallway, up a flight of stairs. Little had changed: the scent of mildew and boiled cabbage. The same old clutter, the same icons and crucifixes and ceramic figurines of the Virgin Mary. I bit down on my lower lip, paused briefly in the second-floor corridor, then slipped into the first of three darkened bedrooms. Door number one: degenerate old Earleen asleep in her wheelchair, Ned and Velva in the moonlit bed beside her. Door number two: Herbie in his underwear. Door number three: imagine my grief.

Obsessed?

Time heals all wounds?

Look on the bright side?

Wish them well?

Get on with my puny little life?

Bygones be bygones?

You do not know what I know. You did not see what I saw. Lorna Sue slept with her left arm hooked around the tanned, narrow, naked waist of a male individual whose name I have vowed never again to utter, a faceless nonentity whom you have come to know (from afar) as "the tycoon."

Face reality?

I certainly did.

I squatted down and inspected the vile tycoon from a distance of eight or nine inches. Handsome, yes. Yet hardly flawless. Even in the pale, curtain-filtered moonlight I could make out his graying nostril hairs, a vast crop of winter wheat swaying with each lucky breath. An incipient blackhead upon the nose. A bulbous, crunchy-looking Adam's apple. Sadistic lips. The telltale stains of hair dye. A chipped incisor.

And beside him lay Lorna Sue-those dark eyelashes, that summer-brown skin.

My state of mind, like my heartbeat, was irregular.

Indeed, yes: I faced reality.

Much too real.

I looked away. Drew a breath. Looked back again. It was this odious conjugal scene that I had been envisioning for so many months, a slow torture of the imagination, but now the undeniable facts took on a much more banal, vulgar, and lasting substance.* The girl of my dreams-my Juliet, my eternal Magdalene, my Lorna Sue-lay aboard a mattress with this hirsute, interloping primate. (Surely, in your own tortured daydreams, you must have pictured your ex-husband snoring in the arms of his cheap new redhead? And with sufficient courage, would you not do as I did? Creep into their little thatched hut by the sea? Crouch at bedside? Stare into the love grave? Pay heed to each pornographic detail?) Live vicariously, then: The house was far from silent. Echoes of history. Childhood voices. The incessant racket of my own thoughts.

I should have strangled the son of a bitch.

Obsessed?

What is love, for God's sake, if not the most distilled obsession?

Yes, I should have plucked off his pistil, crushed his purply parts with the sleek volume of summer fiction splayed open on the nightstand. Instead, I sighed and stood up and moved to Lorna Sue's side of the bed. Even in the humid dark I could not help shivering.

Tentatively, I reached down and placed the flat of my hand upon Lorna Sue's bared left hip, holding it there to absorb her warmth. She did not stir. (How things change. In the old days the slightest touch would have awakened her.) She slept like an angel. No bad dreams, no second thoughts.

Reality?

Of course.

Yet none of it felt real. A breach of nature. Even the flesh at her hip had the texture of plastic, as if this were a facsimile of the real Lorna Sue, grotesque and artificial, and with a little shudder I yanked my hand away.

I may have moaned.

Again, there was some dead time. I noted the digital clock at bedside-3:33 A.M. Later it read 3:55. Then 4:18. Briefly, I drifted off. Memories. Visitations. (It was a product of my imagination, perhaps, but at one point Lorna Sue seemed to sit up and take me in her arms. She repented. She promised a happy ending.) Thus, in such singular ways, I found it calming to while away those wee hours in the presence of my beloved ex-wife and her tycoon, to breathe their air, to appropriate their heartbeats, to share with them the fluid movements of the unconscious.

At the first sign of dawn I slipped into the bed of Mrs. Robert Kooshof.

"You've been gone," she said.

"Just a walk."

"A walk where?"

"Nowhere."

"Bad night, then?"

I shrugged and said, "Not terrible, not good. Go to sleep now."

"Down the street, I'll bet. Sweet memories. Sweet Lorna Sue."

I said nothing. For ten or fifteen minutes Mrs. Kooshof lay very still, her eyes fixed on a patch of pinkish light spreading out across the ceiling.

"Thomas?"

"Here."

"Maybe I haven't been totally clear. I do love you. Very much. All I can."

"It's clear."

"But you still won't ...?"

The question dangled there-incomplete, unanswered-then she turned onto her side, facing away from me. Her crying was scarcely noticeable.

After an hour, when her breathing evened out, I curled up against her and shut my eyes, trying for sleep, but something in Mrs. Kooshof's scent-her shampoo, I am almost certain-made me begin reviewing our months together. Simple things: meals, baths, bed. How she had taken me in, given me exactly what I needed. How loyal she was. How she never quit. Her vital data-all those manifest and uncommon virtues-filled nearly three pages in my ledger.

But what did I feel for her? What did I truly want? The human heart, I fear, is nothing if not ambiguous, and no definitive answers came to mind. It occurred to me, obviously, that the sensible thing would be to make amends as rapidly as possible: beg forgiveness, let the past be the past, marry her, fly off to Guadeloupe or Mexico City. For months now I had been living like a maniac, out of control, chasing my own diseased history, and in the marrow of my bones I knew that nothing good could ever come of it.

Even so, I was helpless-pulled along by the undertow of my own obsession, a need to finish things. Explosions in the attic. Windows cracking. Lorna Sue screaming the word sacred through eternity.

I could almost hear it.

"Sacred!" she'd wail-that pious, God-infected, betraying little sweetie pie. "Sacred!"

* I may have slightly misstated the above facts. My presence that evening was not altogether by chance. I had been on stakeout for three straight days-more or less around the clock. My feet were killing me.