(Such grammar brings out the animal in me.) Mrs. Kooshof whispered the word condescension, digging a sharp Dutch elbow into my ribs. It seemed prudent to withhold further venom; I forced a smile, extended a hand, and informed Earleen that she was looking fit.

The old woman's beady eyes glistened. "Fuck fit. You want in?"

"Splendid," said I.

"Well, Jesus Christ," Earleen grunted.

She spun around in her wheelchair and led us down a filthy hallway, through air that smelled of stewed underwear. In the living room a large TV set boomed out at full blather, six or seven brutish relatives camped before it in various states of stupefaction. A few I recognized, among them Lorna Sue's mother and father-Ned and Velva. But no one rose. No one glanced up. Hesitantly, I stepped forward, but at the same instant an ill-shaven old nun-an aunt, I believe-swiveled and made a slicing motion across her throat. "Wait'll it's over!" she snapped. "Jesus Christ."

Amazing, I thought.

It was to these garbled chromosomes, this biological catastrophe that I had once cast my marital fortunes.

After a few seconds had ticked by, Mrs. Kooshof and I took seats on the soiled carpet, where with the rest of the household we witnessed the concluding minutes of a program that featured homemade videotapes of people falling off curbs and chairs and bicycles. The slack-jawed Zylstra assemblage found these mishaps hypnotic. For a moment I nearly forgave Lorna Sue and Herbie their considerable sins. After all, what else could one expect from this puddle of baboon genes? (During my years of marriage I had done everything possible to avoid the whole loathsome clan, often inventing excuses to explain my absence at family gatherings. One Christmas I was diagnosed with lupus; the following summer I received a rare summons to the Vatican.) Naturally enough, my hands-off policy had caused domestic turmoil between Lorna Sue and me. Antisocial, she claimed. A compulsive liar. The word pathological had popped up. In truth, I will admit, I do at times incline toward exaggeration, especially in self-defense, but Lorna Sue's charges were essentially without substance. Prevarication comes in many shades. Mine was true-blue. I loved her. Yes, I did-more than anything-and she should not have left me over a couple of snow-white lies, a few embarrassing documents beneath a mattress.

Thus I sat tumbling inside myself, grieving again, full of remorse and self-hatred. My senses were temporarily impaired, and I failed to notice that the television had gone silent, that the room had mostly emptied of relatives, and that Lorna Sue's bovine genitors were now studying me from the sofa. Velva munched on candied popcorn. Ned blinked and massaged his belly. Both parents had reached their mid-seventies, yet they seemed to have aged not at all. Bloated faces, dyed hair, pasty white skin. "All right, so get off the floor," Ned finally muttered. "Can't you even sit in a chair like a normal person?"

I shrugged. "Perfectly comfortable."

"What the hell you want?"

"No wanting in the least," I said. "A courtesy call. In the neighborhood, as it were."

"And there goes the fuckin' neighborhood," Ned stupidly responded. (A former Jesuit, of all things. A divinity school dropout, now a foulmouthed peddler of cliches.) Shrill laughter came from the wheelchair across the room, where Earleen sat stroking a large gray cat. The old lady wiggled her tongue at me, almost flirtatiously, then winked and kissed her cat. (I was at a loss as to what any of this might have signified. Dementia, perhaps-a household virus. More on this later.) "Anyhow, face it," Ned was saying. "You're not even family no more. Barely ever was." He squinted at his wife. "Divorced, aren't they? Abe and Lorna Sue?"

"They sure as heck are," said Velva.

"Bingo," Ned said. "Exactly what I thought."

Mrs. Kooshof nudged me. "Who's Abe?"

"That, I'm afraid, would be I."

"You told me-"

"A family nickname," I said brusquely. "Primate wordplay."

Mrs. Kooshof grinned. "Abe! I like that!"

The topic wearied me. Though discomposed, I managed a pleasant sigh and then turned and inquired about Lorna Sue's well-being.

"Fine, I guess," said Velva. "Happy as a clam." The woman's articulation, never the best, was now flawed by a mouthful of candied popcorn. "Never saw her happier, not ever, and as long as you keep away from-"

"And her new husband? The name escapes me."

"Yeah, sure, he's fine too. Rich and handsome." She swallowed and refilled. "What's it to you?"

"Compassion," said I.

"Com-what?"

"Passion, Velva. Lorna Sue and I were once locked in holy matrimony. Cuckold and wife."

Velva stopped chewing to sort this out. She was a large, square individual, almost certainly female. "Well, okay," she finally said, "but you never had no compassion about none of us. Zilch. Never even showed up for a single Christmas."

"Untrue," I replied. "One, I believe."

Velva ingested another mouthful of popcorn, glared at me, then stood up and waddled out of the room. The atmosphere, I noted, had gone sour.

A few moments passed before Ned Zylstra was able to stitch together a coherent utterance.

"All right, asshole, here's the truth," he said: "Lorna Sue don't want you near her, not in a trillion miles. She told me so. Said you'd come crawling someday, trying to worm your way back. 'Worm'-exact quote. And if you ever showed up here, she said, I was supposed to kick your ass to kingdom come. That's where she wants you. Kingdom come." The man sucked in a breath. (He was a smoker-Pall Malls.) "Beat it," he said. "You and your floozy."

Mrs. Robert Kooshof looked up with keen interest.

"Floozy?" she said.

Earleen cackled from her wheelchair. "Floozy! Jesus Christ!"

"Bingo," said Ned.

A little vein twitched at Mrs. Robert Kooshof's temple. To her credit, though, my companion remained poised. "Well, listen, I've got my problems," she said softly, "but I don't suppose flooziness is one of them."

Ned began to rise, belly wobbling, but something in Mrs. Kooshof's demeanor pressed him back into the sofa.

"Floozy," she murmured.

At that instant our alliance was fully sealed.

"Okay, then," Ned said, "but if I was you, I'd be real extra careful. The professor here, he's like your jailbird husband. One more sneaky, lying, womanizing cheat. I thought maybe you'd had your fill of that with Doc."

There was a short silence.

"Womanizing?" said Mrs. Kooshof.

"Hell, yes. He had the names written down. These long lists, like account books."

Mrs. Kooshof's eyes slid, measuring me. She rose to her feet. "With the aid of a garbage truck," she said quietly, "I believe we can find our own way out."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"It means," she said, "that I feel filthy."

Outside, Mrs. Kooshof was livid. "You cheated on her, didn't you?"

"Cheated?"

"The ex-wife, Abe."

"Please, that nickname," I said. "It rubs me the wrong way."

Mrs. Kooshof's glance grazed my forehead and ricocheted up the street. "A word of advice, Thomas. I won't tolerate this lying-cheating stuff."

"I never cheated on her."

"What then?"

"It's complicated," I said. "A mattress was involved."

We strolled the half block to Mrs. Kooshof's residence (formerly my own), stripped to the quick, ran water into her large blue bathtub, eased ourselves in, and began scrubbing off the Zylstra grime. My companion's mood was uneasy, even sullen, but as so often happens in such liquid settings, one thing swiftly led to another. Cause and effect. Splashy. And as we locked limbs-face-to-face, more or less-I was surprised by odd stirrings of tenderness, even affection. For the moment, at least, Lorna Sue seemed an abstraction, more icon than human being. Mrs. Robert Kooshof, by way of contrast, offered the undeniable bounties of the here and now. Powerful Dutch thighs. Breasts to float a navy. Yet the surprise was not physical. The surprise was this: I was at peace. I was quietly and vastly content.

Afterward, we lounged in the tub with twin glasses of Beaujolais. (Both of us, I must confide, were spent.) "Talk fast," said Mrs. Kooshof. "Short and sweet. What happened with you and Lorna Sue?"

I studied her from the far end of the tub. "The truth, you mean?"

"No long-winded speeches."

"Well, fine," I said, "but I'll have to go back to the beginning."

"When?"

"Nineteen fifty-two. It'll sound ridiculous."

"What doesn't?" She sighed.

And thus I began as I must always begin, in June 1952, middle-century Minnesota, on that silvery-hot morning when Herbie Zylstra and I nailed two plywood boards together and called it- "You already told me that," said Mrs. Kooshof.

"I didn't tell you about the cat."

* Given my paramour's Dutch ancestry, one would have expected her to insist on sharing our expenses fifty-fifty. No dice. Penny-pinching silence.

Let us pause over the word ridiculous.

It is worth noting-would you not agree?-that our lives are often sculpted by the absurd, the unlikely, the purely fortuitous. Love, for instance. Pay heed to your own pitiful history: that afternoon when you bumped into a certain young man on a sidewalk in downtown Minneapolis, or Sioux City, or Chicago. The time, let us say, was 4:14 P.M. Not twelve seconds earlier, not thirty seconds later. A horn blared. You were startled-you glanced sideways-and in that instant the fateful collision occurred. Your purse dropped to the pavement. Your diaphragm spilled out. The young man smiled. A year later you were married. Five years after that, or twelve, or twenty, the love of your life deserted you and moved to Fiji with a cheap harlot named Sandra.

We marry accidents.

We are betrayed by improbabilities.

The truth, I submit, is that we must always begin with the ridiculous, and therefore I said to Mrs. Robert Kooshof: "You recall Earleen's cat?"

"That ugly gray thing?"

"Exactly." I stretched back in the tub, tested my wine, studied the majestic woman opposite me. (Astonishing, really. Her ample physique, my own good fortune. How it turned out that the two of us had arrived at this singular junction in time and space-this house, this warm and intoxicating bubble bath-represented its own telling parable about the role of fate in human affairs. Incredible, yes? A tad ridiculous?) "Now, of course, it wasn't that cat," I told her. "An ancestor, I assume. Perhaps the great-grandmother, perhaps the great-great-grandmother. I am not up-to-date on my feline generations. In any event, the cat of which I speak-actually a very elderly cat-looked very much like the hideous gray creature you saw today. Identical markings, same stupid face."

Mrs. Robert Kooshof nodded impatiently. "Cats? Divorce? I don't follow."

"Pay attention," I said, and arranged the flats of my feet against her chest.

Mrs. Kooshof's intolerance for complexity, for the looping circuitry of a well-told tale, symptomizes an epidemic disease of our modern world. (I see it daily among my students. The short attention span, the appetite limited to linearity. Too much Melrose Place.) Ordinarily I am baffled and distressed by this syndrome, yet in the case of Mrs. Robert Kooshof I found it almost endearing. She was falling in love. Tumbling, in fact. (Hence her need to plumb my troubles with Lorna Sue. Hence impatience.) To a woman in love, or on the precipice of love, the semantic road between cat and mattress can seem arduous indeed.

I did my best to reassure her. Charitably, I ran my feet along the slope of her breasts, down to the brownish, outsized, distinctly leathern nipples, which I compressed between my toes.

"Certain detours," I said firmly, "can prove rewarding. You have to understand that as children both Herbie and Lorna Sue were fond of animals."

"Animals? What sort?"

"Oh, all sorts."

I sketched the scene for her: a house filled with wildlife. Ferrets, flies, goldfish, hamsters, pigeons, spiders, earthworms, geese. Most prominently, however, Herbie and Lorna Sue were the proud owners of a snake named Sebastian-a baby python, to be precise-which they housed in a glass cage up in the attic. This serpent, I said, was hardly the most playful pet in the world, and my strongest recollection was of a creature that never moved. ("He's not dead," Lorna Sue used to yell. "He's tired!") The only fun with Sebastian, I told Mrs. Kooshof, occurred at feeding time. Once a week the python required sustenance, which took the form of a live rat, and on Saturday mornings the three of us would troop down to Nell's Pet Shoppe just off Diagonal Road. A compelling experience. To this day, in fact, I could still see Lorna Sue standing before the rat cages, deciding which of the many inhabitants might make the most succulent meal-the plumpest, the juiciest, the most digestible. "That one," she'd finally say. "That one looks delicious."

Then we'd march home with Sebastian's dinner, which had been placed inside a little pet box with air holes and cotton lining. On the lid of each box was imprinted a poignant epitaph: I'VE FINALLY FOUND A HOME.

"Excuse me," said Mrs. Kooshof. "Get to the point."

She made a threatening gesture at the far end of the tub, a hurry-up-or-die motion, her formidable Dutch torso shifting dangerously amid the suds.

I would not be hurried.

"Digressions are digressions," I declared, "only to the faint of heart. This next part you will find hypnotic."

Mrs. Robert Kooshof gazed at me.

"You know something?" she said. "You're a sick human being, Thomas. I mean that from the bottom of my heart. And besides, you're stalling. Snakes and rats-how does it tie in with lying and cheating and divorce?"

"I never cheated," I said sharply.

"So you told me. Everything except the facts-the plain truth."

Mrs. Kooshof sniffed and gave me a belligerent stare. Her churlishness, I instantly understood, was mere camouflage for an immense vulnerability within. The woman had been severely wounded of late: a felon for a husband, a marriage gone stale. Her libido, like her spouse, had been locked away behind steel bars, and I dare say that in different ways, to different degrees, we shared a common hurt.

"Give it a chance," I said quietly. "The snake connects to the rats, the rats connect to the mattress."

"Rats?"

"Of course."

Mrs. Kooshof sighed. "Well, for Pete's sake. I thought you said cat."

"And so I did. I was just about to-"

"Christ help me," said Mrs. Kooshof.

What happened, I told her, was that on a sunny morning in 1952-in June, to be exact, barely a week before Herbie and I constructed our plywood airplane-an event occurred that created a chain reaction leading to marital cataclysm half a lifetime later. Innocently enough, this disastrous sequence began with our usual feeding program: the purchase of a fresh rat, the hike back to Herbie's house, the climb up to the attic. All perfectly routine, I explained. Herbie went through his standard pre-feeding ritual, dangling the rat by its tail over Sebastian's cage, chanting "Dinner, dinner," partly teasing, partly whetting Sebastian's appetite. On this occasion, however, the rodent was a particularly lively specimen, large and black and brawny, and with a great squeak it suddenly jerked free and dropped to the windowsill behind Sebastian's cage. Instantly, it darted outside and scrambled down to a narrow ledge four or five feet below the window. It crouched there, just out of reach.

Herbie's face creased up. The rat had cost him seventy-five cents-a fortune back then.

Anyone but Herbie, I believe, would have given up. The ledge was at most ten inches wide-thirty or forty feet above a cement driveway-but after a second he made a decisive grunting sound and said, "Stay here. I'll be right back." He disappeared down the attic stairs, returning after a few minutes with a length of rope and a large gray cat.