"Well, that's for me to know," she said. "Either way, you better stay right there."

"I will, sweetheart. I am."

"And Tommy too."

"Don't worry. He's not budging."

Herbie's calm impressed me. He spoke in a lulling, liturgical monotone, his movements as slow and practiced as any altar boy's.

Clearly, this was a situation he had encountered more than once. Herbie the suppliant, Lorna Sue the dispenser of grace. Briefly, then, a number of thoughts came streaming at me in disarray: the whole unnatural bond between them, which I now perceived as a terrible shackling, each of them chained to a single summer day in 1952. She was forever the maimed girl-goddess; Herbie was forever her guardian and caretaker. They were frozen in the great permafrost of history. Stunted. Trapped. Compulsively, like a pair of drug addicts, they could not stop replicating the horrid past-a rusty nail, a plywood cross.* True, there were mysteries I would never fathom, a silent center to it all, but at bottom this was not an erotic relationship; I had been in error on that count.

At the same time, though, as I watched Herbie's frightened, tender face, I could not help thinking that Lorna Sue had always been far more his than mine.

Hard to admit, but I had married a child.

How much time elapsed I cannot accurately estimate. Not long-probably only seconds-yet it seemed as if the three of us had been pressed together in that dark, stuffy attic for a lifetime.

When Lorna Sue's sparkler came close to burning out, she used it to light another.

"Both of you," she said, "you're both to blame. And this whole smelly, rotten house. I should just blow it all up. Kaboom."

"You shouldn't," Herbie said quietly.

"Why not?"

"Because you don't want that, princess. Because we all adore you."

She flicked her eyes at me. "Even you, Tommy?"

"Even what?"

"Do you adore me?"

My gaze shifted to the three mason jars in front of her. "For the time being," I said judiciously, "the issue seems neither here nor there." I essayed a winning smile. "Those bombs of mine: how did you happen to ...?"

"You spy, I spy, we all spy," she said. "Answer my question. Do you adore me?"*

"Do I adore you?"

"Right."

"That calls for a yes or no, I presume?"

"What the heck else?" she snapped.

And thus once again, my very existence now in the balance, I was dragged kicking and screaming into a familiar box canyon. The curious thing, however, was that the old, easy response did not leap to my lips. Not so long ago I would have screamed a defiant, ear-splitting Yes. Now I was not so sure. Moreover, to complicate matters, I could not help but be aware of Mrs. Robert Kooshof on the stairs behind me.

It was necessary to rely on instinct.

"Let's put it this way," I ventured, testing the elasticity of the past tense. "You were my one and only. You were the girl of my dreams."

"Were?" she said alertly.

"Why quibble over-"

Lorna Sue cut me off with a caustic laugh. "Right there," she said, "that's why I should blow you to pieces. Always evading. Like when you sucked Faith Graffenteen's nose, you couldn't just admit it."

"That was a lifetime ago," I said irritably, "and I sucked no one's nose. A buss upon the cheek. And she forced me."

"Forced you?"

"Exactly," I said, and sighed.

We had plowed this fallow ground before, and it struck me that nothing in our lives ever comes to absolute closure-not love, not betrayal, not the most inane episode of youth. We are surrounded by loose ends; we are awash in whys and maybes. An absence of faith, one might call it.

Lorna Sue instantly proved the point.

"I suppose all the rest of them forced you? The ones in your ledger?"

"I never-"

"What crap!"

(No faith: case closed.) Her voice had gone hoarse and gummy, no longer that of a schoolgirl. "Anyway, don't go blaming it on me," she said, and moved her sparkler to within lethal range of the bombs. "I'm not the one who went after anything in a skirt. Or lied. Or kept a ledger under the mattress." She lighted a fresh sparkler. "And now you've got some fresh new bimbo."

"Bimbo," I said, "would be incorrect."

"It is correct. Get on your knees."

"Pardon?"

"Your knees."

"You aren't serious?"

"Down," she said.

I studied her for a moment-this woman I had never known-and then suddenly, to my own astonishment, I found myself smiling. Mrs. Kooshof was right: jealousy. Or close enough to offer a kind of consolation.

A door squeaked open inside me.

Did I love her? I did. Was she still sacred? She was not.

Lorna Sue looked at me hard.

One cannot be certain about such things, but perhaps she noted the shift inside me. A vein fluttered at her forehead. Slowly, she pushed up to her feet, moved back a step, and then transferred the hot end of the sparkler to the palm of her left hand.

I could smell the flesh cooking.

"I mean it, I'll blow you up," she said. "Everybody. Myself too. Don't think I'm not serious."

"You always were."

"Down."

I shook my head. Amazing, but I heard myself uttering that daring, difficult, conclusive word, No.*

Lorna Sue gaped at me.

"We're not kids anymore," I said. "No kneeling. No, thanks. Just no. No more games."

"This isn't a game!" she screamed. "God, are you blind? I'm burning myself."

"Blind is what I was."

I turned.

I made my way to the stairs.

Then I turned back again.

For a man who lives by words, a man whose very being amounts to little more than language, it came as the ultimate satisfaction-indeed, the only vengeance that could ever make a difference-to stop and square my shoulders and return to Lorna Sue the parting gift of a long, cold, reptilian stare.

"A piece of advice," I said. (Imagine the thrill in my bones.) "Grow up. Don't be a seven-year-old."

In the end it was neither Herbie nor I who disarmed the former girl of my dreams. It was Mrs. Robert Kooshof. She walked across the attic floor, took the sparkler from Lorna Sue's hand, extinguished it, then joined me at the top of the stairs.

Not a minute later we were on the sidewalk outside, heading home.

Which brings me, finally, to add a word in behalf of my steadfast companion, paramour, mistress, consort, and buxom bride-to-be.

To those tyrants of gender who would denigrate her, who would dare lift their noses and call Mrs. Robert Kooshof spineless or submissive or wishy-washy-to all such blind, bewhiskered, man-hating ideologues I belligerently submit that there is something to be said for essential goodness. There is something to be said for decency. There is something to be said for tolerance and endurance and faith and forgiveness and rugged hope and never, never giving up.

She tossed the sparkler into the street.

Later she prepared breakfast for two.

Weak? A doormat?

"Do the dishes," she said, "then pack your bags. This is history, Thomas."

* I was pleased to note that the man's IQ had plummeted like the mercury on a deep-freeze thermometer. Handsome, yes, and tycoon rich, but at the moment he could not have passed first-grade finger painting. All of us, I believe, can take heart in the scene. Things come around. Now and then, given time and patience, the world does in fact dispense a kind of justice.

* A common phenomenon. Little Red Rhonda, for instance, once confided to me that she had been the victim of a sexually abusive father. "Even so, for some stupid reason," she told me, "I keep chasing perverted old fruitcakes like you." (A sad story. I comforted the girl as best I could.) It also occurs to me, by the way, that I cannot exclude myself from this redundant psychological paradigm. Again and again, over the course of a lifetime, I seem to have repeated certain fundamental mistakes. Witness the word mattress. Witness a well-stocked love ledger. Witness my desperate, bumbling, ill-starred attempts to win a hand or two in the rigged poker game of romance.

* Adore. Check your Webster's Third, sense number 1: "to worship with profound reverence: pay divine honors to: honor as a deity or divine: offer worship to." (At this point I would suggest that you pause to ask yourself a simple binary question: In your heart of hearts, after all is said and done, do you still adore your faithless, unfaithful ex-husband? Does the word adore mean what it once meant? Is not language itself as pliable as the human heart? Yes or no?) * Odd thing. The word was no-spoken quietly, barely a whisper-but it felt to me like a loud, liberating, sublimely heroic yes.

And so we reside for the present on a balmy, hospitable, out-of-the-way island somewhere southeast of Tampa, somewhere north of Venezuela, a spot on our planet whose precise latitude and longitude must for security reasons go undisclosed. Mrs. Robert Kooshof makes pottery. I prune the bougainvillea, cultivate vegetables, fine-tune this personal record. In the evenings we consume fresh fish, a drink or two, and very often each other.

We have dwelled here nearly six months. Tomorrow is Christmas.

A new life, one could say. And a very good life, all considered, at least for the time being. We live in the hills above a lovely aqua bay, in what our leasing agent calls a "Villa" but that in fact is little more than a small, pink-painted prefab, of which there are far too many in these parts. There is a kiln out back, a garden that requires much fertilizer. We have few neighbors. A quarter mile down the slope, where the hills flatten out into tourist country, there is a modest parish town-more a village, actually-whose quaint, Frankish name I am not at liberty to reveal.

Beyond the town, along the beach to the west, is a thriving Club Med.

On weekdays Mrs. Kooshof rises early. She walks down the gravel road that winds into town, thence to a tiny shop just off Rue du--, where she peddles her pottery under the somewhat fraudulent tag of "native ware." But give her credit. It is her dream, after all, and the dream has come true. She owns a half interest in the shop. She seems content. She wears colorful pareus and shell jewelry and often a blossom in her hair. She is tropic brown. Her clients are mostly widows and librarians, perhaps a few pensive newlyweds, all fresh off the cruise ships that ride at anchor in our pretty aqua bay.

Sometimes I come to sit on the porch in front of the shop. There is a trellis overhead. I sip coffee softened with milk. I compose my thoughts. I consult my internal dictionary. Turtle, I sometimes think. Commitment. Substance. Roses. Pontiac. Cornfield. If. Lost. Sacred. Tycoon. Tampa. Occasionally, should inspiration strike, I will jot down a memory or two, or a telling footnote to this volume. But for the most part I watch the aqua bay.

At noon, when the shop closes for the standard island siesta, Mrs. Robert Kooshof and I cross the street for lunch at a favorite cafe. We eat expensively. She is well-off, remember, and there is no reason to shortchange ourselves. In the same breath, however, I must mention that the tropical life has rendered us newly health conscious-two or three glasses of wine, not a drop more, accompanied by a piece of grilled Creole grouper. To date I have dropped twelve unflattering pounds. I sport a Coppertone physique, a salt-and-pepper beard, a suite of hand-tailored seersucker suits. (In this same regard, I might add, Mrs. Kooshof has been urging that I try a mother-of-pearl earring. And who knows? On my deathbed I might very well comply.) Over lunch we converse. Slowly but steadily, though not without moments of retrogression, I have begun to master the high art of listening, a development that in myriad ways has expanded my universe. I have learned, for instance, that my beloved's divorce is but a week from becoming final; that her abusive, inattentive, altogether spiteful husband will be receiving a financial settlement far beyond fair; that his parole has been approved; that he hits the street next Thursday; that for all his good fortune, he remains unhappy with me; that he vows vengeance; that the tycoon's leaden shoe has apparently been transferred to another foot. Our current exile, therefore, strikes me as foresighted.

Not that we plan to stay forever.

Another year. Three tops.

Mrs. Kooshof has quite prudently taken her house off the market, and it is a near certainty that sooner or later we shall return to live there, upon the prairie of my youth, in the Rock Cornish Hen Capital of the World.

And why not? As good as nowhere. Isolation, it appears, has become the dominant motif of our lives.

Which in the end is for the better.

It is not so much escape I seek, although escape has its own neck-saving virtues, but rather, more fundamentally, it is to remove myself from the hurly-burly, to pause and take stock, to reflect upon the man I was, the man I am, the man I may become. I have learned some things. A "flirt-bird," yes-Lorna Sue's creative slang has been duly registered in my dictionary. Slightly too forward at times. Presumptuous, perhaps. Such personal concessions, of course, still have a tendency to stick in this old flirt-bird's craw, for I am not one to dwell on my deficits, yet it has become clear that I may have once or twice taken my love craving to an ungentlemanly extreme and that in the course of events I may have split a hair or two in justifying these appetites.

My love ledger, needless to say, is a thing of the past. Like the rest of the world-like you-I keep the records in my head.

I make progress with each languid hour.

In the heat of midday, after lunch, Mrs. Robert Kooshof and I will often take a short stroll down to the bay, where we wet our feet, after which I escort her back to the shop, put a kiss to her lips, bid her a profitable afternoon, and then make my solitary way westward toward the pristine topless beaches of Club Med.

So then.

Like an invalid on the mend, hour to hour, I gradually reclaim my life.

But let it be said, loud and clear, that even an old flirt-bird can be taught new tricks. In recent weeks I have taken up seaside hair braiding-an honorable trade in this warm clime. Eight American dollars a head. Tips excluded. Chitchat gratis. The chartered aircraft arrive like clockwork from New York and Paris and Naples, week after exhilarating week, and I have yet to experience a shortage of silky tresses upon the club's immaculate and fertile beaches.

Do I miss academia?

I am a pig in heaven.

I specialize in corn rows. I envision a Rock Cornish Salon in my prairie future.

As of the moment, I must guiltily confess, Mrs. Robert Kooshof knows none of this. She sniffs at my skin. She wonders. In the evenings, as we sit beneath the stars in our hilltop garden, she will often ask how this memoir is coming along, to which I reply, "Slowly, slowly," and then after a time she will sigh and say, "Thomas, you don't touch them, do you?" And on those eerily clairvoyant occasions I will explain to her, with impeccable honesty, that my policy has always been (and always will be) strictly hands off.

True enough: the proud, brawny tomcat still struts within me. Untamed, thank the Lord, but learning how to love.

I lost a wife, I gained back a friend. Herbie has come to visit twice. He will return, I hope, one day soon. On his last stopover he reported that Lorna Sue and her tycoon are doing well. No fires of late. Her spells come and go. Basically she is happy. There is not a great deal of passion to the marriage, I am sad to learn, but the tycoon worships her and offers the everyday sacrifice of selfhood.

On his own part, Herbie says, he is contemplating a move northward. Toronto, he thinks. He wept a little when he told me this, for to renounce his vows as Lorna Sue's caretaker will amount to its own kind of divorce, a betrayal and forswearing, a breach of faith, an end to something both numinous and profane.