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Xica went into a rage when she saw Marina eating everything in sight. She hurled paraffin blocks, snowflakes, and sequined bells so hard toward the kitchen that I knew she had guessed the truth. When Marina escaped through a window, Manuel held out his arms and tried to go after her. We
had to restrain him, and he fell down into the Christmas debris and twitched with shock. Xica and I rolled him onto a huge, padded tablecloth. We hoisted the ends and rocked him like a child in a hammock to stop his crying. Manuel spoke the last words he would ever say after his accident:
Marina. Marina.

“Be quiet, sweetheart. She's here,” Xica whispered, nodding toward me.

“I'm here,” I said.

I doubt we fooled him, but he quieted down. Our arms soon tired and he sagged to the ground, but we kept swaying, ignoring the tearing of our net, until the waves of lulling finally took him. When Manuel was asleep we got on our hands and knees, graying Xica and I, to pick up the trimmings and the stars.

————

Some entries I read in the
Ofensa
book of Dona Xica Adelinha Costa:

—
#15. Mr. Alfred Kearny, Lodi florist, January 20.
Fainting not enough anymore. Knocked over ten wreaths when I fell. Still he would not admit he is after my son's wife. Tomorrow I'll pour honey inside his store, and by nightfall black ants will be eating his flowers.

—
#32. Marina Guimarães Costa, March 2.
Twice, three times a day I wash her sheets! She comes home with that sin smell. It will travel down the hall to Manuel's room if I do not scrub and bleach it from her cloth. My hands are turning ghost white.

—
#48. O Nosso Senhor, April
17. Why did You make her the one thing he has not forgotten? Untie this ribbon!

—
#54. Mrs. Lamont, May
1. Spreading gossip. To teach her silence I'll phone her five times today and say nothing when she answers.

—
#56. The Sun, May
5. Too hot. Bug and spider nests in house. Feel poisoned. Hate the Sun.

————

Xica finally packed Marina's bags and threw her out. Mr. Kearny hid her in his guesthouse and told his ragdoll wife it was the only charitable thing to do.

Father Ribeiro took Xica and Manuel sailing at Lake Tahoe. He meant well. Water calls to us if we avoid it too long, and he thought the Costas needed to answer the water's cry. Water would melt Xica's bile and teach
her forgiveness, and it would soothe Manuel's heartbreak. I did not want to go, but Father Ribeiro insisted that I was one of the few friends Xica had left in the entire parish.

————

We were not far from shore. A young woman ran from the lapping water up the sand, tossing her hair as a man chased her. Even on our boat we could see the sparkling curves of their backs. She squealed while leading him farther from us. When he caught her, they collapsed together into a single tumbling dot on the horizon.

Manuel stared after them and suddenly threw off his life jacket. Father Ribeiro grabbed for him, but he was already over the edge.

————

Xica Adelinha Costa had tried to escape Portuguese fate by moving halfway across the world, to a dry inland patch, but there she was for the second time in her life on a shoreline wailing over the body of a dead man. Father Ribeiro, dripping and gasping, still giving the corpse the kiss of life, could not console Xica.

She grabbed a knife from a nearby picnic table and with one upward slice cut open the useless ribbon on her wrist. The ground was already claiming Manuel. Sand, leaves, and gravel coated his wet skin and filled his eyes and ears. Xica held him and tried to brush the debris away with the lament that convulses newborns, body blind and purple, the lament that told me she had already fallen into another world.

————

She wanted air to kill her instead of water. The day after she buried her son, she dressed in a long brocade gown and lay in the sleeping net. My parents fed her broth and told her to stop talking nonsense. “I'll be gone before dinnertime,” she said simply. She closed her eyes and put her will to work.

Father Ribeiro came by to remind her that Manuel had not actually killed himself—he was a child, and when a child sees what he wants, a flash that speaks to memory, he flings himself toward it. His innocence meant he was in heaven. “So you shouldn't give up heart,” Father said.

She did give up heart: She gave it to me. God still owed her a wish, and I was the only one who believed she could hold Him to it. My parents and Father Ribeiro were off discussing which doctors to call when Xica
opened her eyes long enough to put my hand on her chest. “Rosa,” she said. “My Rosa.”

Her heart fluttered like a trapped hummingbird. Perhaps she was drawing all her blood toward it, because it beat harder and faster while her calves drained and her hands, face, and neck paled to chalk. Even the star in the cove of her throat dimmed. She was pulling up a winding sheet inside herself.

“Xiquinha,” I said. I felt the bird fly up against her ribs, trying to break through and splatter on my palm. She was straining her heart upward as far as she could, loud and furious, directly into my hand. As I bent my face closer to hear the wing beat, the raging bird exploded, and then my Xica was gone.

————

After Marina had a miscarriage, Kearny's wife nursed her briefly and then ordered her out of their lives. Suddenly Marina had no more lover and no more baby. She took over Xica's empty house. Soon after Marina returned, I put a conch shell on her porch. No one can resist sealing the cold pink lip against an ear to hear the water echoing. I knew one widow who carried a conch in her purse to clap to her head like a transistor radio whenever she wanted to induce a good sobbing. Marina was such a glutton I knew she would fill herself with tides. She would probably take the shell to bed.

At the drugstore a week later I bought wax-candy skeletons. Children bite off the skulls, drink the cherry-water inside, and chew the wax until it disappears. I set the skeletons in toy plastic boats around Marina's windows and doors. Before leaving for school that day I heard her bellowing.

I punctured every inch of her garden hose. It spouted water everywhere like a gunned whale.

I hesitated after they found Marina aimlessly wandering the highway. Then I heard two women gossiping:
She killed her husband, and now she's queen of the house
. The next day I uprooted some plants from my father's aquarium, slapped them on an old doll, and left it strangling on Marina's porch.

One morning when Marina left to sell some chickens, I took the key from behind her mailbox, entered the house, and uncaged her birds. She
would return to find them shrieking and pecking the apples on the table. She would never catch them. I hid hardboiled eggs and left a typewritten note:
Ten Easter eggs in here. Tear the place up before they rot.

————

Certain delicacies in our cupboards were meant to last forever—the sulfured apricots, the grosgrain-tied bags of sugared almonds, the port with ashy mold around the cork. I stole them for Michael Paganelli, the boy who had come to work on the Bettencourt ranch. I had just started high school, and after classes he would be waiting for me in his pickup. We ate sweets and drank until I was gut-sick and brave enough to taste Michael's salt by licking his neck. I spanned parts of him: From his left nipple to his sternum was one strained hand stretch. My forefinger and thumb measured him nosetip to chin.

Alone at night I could put him back together. I spread my hand out on my chest and thought: Michael's breastbone is now crushed here. I have captured the size of him. The night breeze lifted my bedclothes as I touched Michael's lengths all over me.

It was worth lying to my parents. It was worth the stealing. My battle with Marina, and even the faces of my beloved dead neighbors, evaporated under the sheer height and weight of my new love.

————

Sex happens the way a pearl is formed. It begins with a grain or parasitic worm that itches in the soft lining until the entire animal buckles around it. With enough slathering it will relax into a gem.

The first time I made love was in water. Michael and I dove into the swimming hole outside town. The moon came down to be in the water with us, and in its round ghost center I measured Michael's erection so I would have it again when I was alone: more than my hand's widest stretch. Touch anemones at low tide and watch their tissue shudder and their color deepen. When Michael disappeared in me I cried his name, because this was how I had always thought of love—a jolt of swallowing someone alive. Sometimes we thrashed into deeper water. We submerged below the moon and kicked hard to come up choking on it.

Love had odd unforeseen glories. I came not from what he was doing
but from arching against his rough belly. I would never have guessed that his tongue in my ear could cause rapture, or that not knowing how to ask him to speak my name could trigger such sadness. The sheer force of his coming thrust me from the water, and suspended in the chill, with stabbing pains and my blood on his thigh, I wondered why people are fated to have this torment forever.

————

They said the stench of rotting eggs drove her crazy. The house was a shambles, and here and there a myna chipped at the bright eggs putrefying on the floor. Mrs. Riley came by one day with an embroidery job and found the wild-haired Marina in a place smelling like a dead animal.

She took Marina to the hospital, where nurses closed her bulging eyes with cool witch hazel. They spoon-fed her purees and kept a night-light by her bed. Mrs. Riley called half of Lodi with daily reports. After a week doctors said that Marina was not sick enough to keep in the hospital, but she would never fully recover as long as she remained alone.

————

Michael acted as if he didn't know me. He stopped coming by after school, and when I went to the Bettencourt ranch he looked straight through me.

The next day I returned to the ranch and beat Michael's truck with a plank to chip off half the paint. Rust would set in before he could hammer out all the dents.

When love no longer recognizes us, we fall into the strangest outbursts and comas. I had restless sex with the first boy who came along at school, and then I collapsed into shock. I lay in my room until Mamãe tried to rub my shoulders and ask me what hurt. “Leave me alone,” I snapped, wrenching away. That is the final curse of dryness: We forget about those closest to us and dwell suspended upon what has been snatched away. We who are robbed should be forgiven everything.

————

We recaged the birds, and I taught the mynas to speak so that the empty house would ring occasionally with throaty words. Marina liked the snapdragons and lilacs I planted for her. Marina: Do you recognize that
plant there? It is what we call Our Lady's grass. Dozens of Azoreans smuggled it over here because they could not survive without its penetrating oil, only to discover that it grows wild in the hills.

I know what my punishment will be. Someday I will have to live a long time alone, long enough to imagine several times that I will never recover. Anytime I think
this cannot continue
, my sentence will double. This solitude will come after a great love has died, for then I will not be free so much as haunted with dead perfume.

One day, when mosquito bites covered Marina, I thought of Xica washing bruised Manuel outside in a large metal tub. She would keep the warm water and the soap out of his half-blind eyes, and as she worked, pouring long streams over him, she had such radiance that I knew she had the whole world there in her arms. There was not a trace of anguish as she smiled down at him. When she was done, she would lift the wounded man up into the light. Xica was so splendid before bitterness choked her, so glorious when she bore him aloft.

I found Marina writhing from bug attacks. They loved her sweet blood. I mixed some baking soda with water, and while cradling her I dabbed it over her itching red sores. I would have to keep the worms and spiders from chewing her. Marina could not stop scratching, and I remembered a touch my mother would give me when I was afraid at night. She would run her thumbs up under my eyebrows, along the bone and out to the temple. This sweeping over my eyelids always melted my nerves.

Marina rested back against my chest while I put her to sleep with my mother's eye-stroking. Here is the seal from which all grace comes: We must create Pietàs in order to live. Flesh that is torn, flesh that is dead or dying, even as it is rotting through your fingers—hold it next to your heart. Find ripe and tender flesh too, and hold it in your arms, because your life depends on it. Hold it for as long as you can, and ask for its blessing.

Barbara Croft

In dreams, the headlights make two narrow tunnels through the darkness. The woman appears on the right. The dun-colored grocery bag she carries shields her face, so that all that Chapin sees is a fringe of curly white hair and a white-gloved hand. He lifts his foot to apply the brakes, but something prevents him. He struggles and presses backward and feels the prickle of nylon upholstery on his neck. She starts to cross, and there is that moment that Chapin can't get past.

Then the bag flies upward in slow motion, cartwheels, and spills over the hood, dumping a shower of pickle jars and paper towels and Jell-O pudding boxes. There is no sound while this happens. There is no color, except the pearly pale green of a cabbage, tumbling slowly toward the windshield, casting its shadow over the dashboard, striking noiselessly.

Chapin awakes. The sheets are tangled around his ankles. Marilyn stirs but seems to know what has happened. It is the same dream, and not a dream. She reaches over and rubs his shoulder automatically.

Chapin gets up and walks down the hall to the kitchen. Sunlight is pouring in. He starts the coffee, feeds the cat, brings the paper in. The sea is brilliant. The light makes Chapin dizzy, and only opening the patio doors to the chilly, copper taste of the air clears his head. He goes out on the deck and down the wooden steps to the beach.

————

It happened two years ago, during a guest semester at Grinnell College. Someone had loaned him a battered white Toyota. He drove to Iowa City; he did that often. The woman must have been deaf, senile, something. The coroner said that she never knew what hit her. The verdict was that Chapin had not been at fault. The woman was eighty-one, had a history of erratic behavior, one of those reclusive types that lives in a crumbling house with a zillion cats. Chapin had, for once, not been drinking.

He stops at the little coffee shop on the beach. The girl behind the counter is wearing cut-off jeans that barely cover her ass and the sort of tight knit top they call a “sports bra.” She is lean and tan. Her hair is, of course, blond. And when she hands Chapin the coffee cup, she lets her fingertips slide over his so lightly that he's not completely sure he feels anything. A faint disturbance of air, perhaps, that's all.

“Have a good one.”

Chapin was not invited back to Grinnell. The department chair denied there was any connection. “Fresh faces,” he said, “new points of view.” And maybe, in fact, there wasn't any connection. Maybe they liked his work. Chapin remembers standing in the flat wash of late afternoon sunlight, he and the chair, on the walkway to Old Main. The chair's voice was like the hum of insects. Staring down, Chapin saw the bricks of the sidewalk begin to separate. They lifted and floated apart, but very slowly, the way dye spreads in water, the way clouds move.

————

Two children are playing on the beach. A golden retriever chases between them. They are six or seven, a boy and a girl. The sunlight striking the reds and blues of their clothing is almost painful against the pale sand.

His first impulse had been to just keep going. Independent of his will, his right foot pressed down hard. The pedal went clear to the floor, and the car surged forward. Then, again of its own will, his foot jumped off the gas
and hit the brake. The car swung to the left. Chapin remembers revolving on the wet pavement, the car spinning slowly like a tired carnival ride. When it stopped he was facing the way he had come.

————

“It was two years ago,” Chapin told his therapist. Seeing her was Marilyn's idea.

“And?”

Chapin bowed his head slightly toward her, raised his eyebrows. This was back in New York, three months ago.

“Have you been able to put it behind you?” she said.

Chapin surveyed the cluttered landscape of her desk: pictures of children—a boy and a girl—in various poses, in ornate frames, “Daddy” leaning into some of the shots; papers, folders, desktop toys, the kind of thing you give a professional person in order to show you are not intimidated. Underneath the gild of our educations, these things insisted, aren't we all just simply human beings?

“It's not really the kind of thing you ‘put behind you,'” Chapin said dryly.

“Still having the dreams?”

“Dream. Yes.”

She glanced at her watch, pulled a pad of paper from a desk drawer. “I'm going to give you something to help you sleep.”

She scribbled quickly, folded the paper, and handed it over.

Chapin stood, extending his hand.

“The directions will be on the bottle.”

He nodded.

“Take them,” she said, looking into his eyes with professional concern. “Promise me?”

He nodded again.

He walked out, closing the door on the tasteful mauve carpet, the well-groomed plants. Smiling at the receptionist, Chapin crumpled the prescription in his pocket.

————

“Have a good walk?”

Chapin nods.

Marilyn is puttering with petunias in a cedar windowbox. Dirt streaks her long, freckled forearms. “Have Kit and Harry opened up their place?”

Chapin appraises her bones. Her lankiness delights him, the functionality of her frame. “I didn't notice,” he says.

She smiles, for no reason. Why does she do that?

Chapin has decided to leave his wife, or, better yet, to make his wife leave him. It's too much trouble now, keeping it up. The daily exercise of marriage exhausts him, the effort of slogging through the little things: shopping and holidays, laundry, and brief and boring vacations to all the predictable places; her family and his family and their mutual friends. And, he thinks, any kind of change…

“I'm driving into town later,” she says. “Want to come along?”

He shakes his head.

“You could drive.”

He says nothing.

“You know, you should get back to it,” she says. “Start driving again, let go of the past.”

“Why?”

“Oh, David.” She tilts her head to the left. “Come with me.”

“I just don't want to,” he says.

————

The moment she goes, he feels a sense of relief. Not happiness, but the freedom to be depressed. He feels almost lighthearted. He changes into swim trunks, selects a paperback book he's been meaning to read, finds a beach chair on the deck, and goes down to the sand.

The sea is a flat gray-blue. No breakers today. The waves uncurl in creamy ruffles and pull back with a sigh. Other than the scuff marks left by the children, there is not a footprint anywhere, not yet.

How to do it. Quickly. How to make it easy and all right. She has this loyalty thing, and so domestic. A good soldier, Marilyn. He doesn't want to hurt her.

When they met, she was seventeen. He was two years older. It seems impossible to ever have been that young. His parents and her parents belonged to the same club. They met at the pool. He remembers showing off,
pulling funny stunts on the low board; he almost feels it physically: the cannonball, the fake fall, his arms and legs cocked at odd angles, dropping through sunlight, falling, falling; then the cold explosion of the water. In the silence he almost hears her laughter.

The girl from the coffee shop walks by, smiles at him. He gets the feeling she does this to every man. It amuses her to turn them on, gives her a sense of power. Chapin on the beach, the grizzled hair on his sagging chest, the blue-veined legs, the twisted toes with their horny, yellow nails, is no longer the man young women yearn for. He knows this. He feels satirized.

She sets up near him, makes a show of spreading her yellow towel, bending at the waist to give him ideas. Then the meditation: standing, left knee bent. She must have seen this on a postcard somewhere. Her left hand fanned on her left hipbone, she puts the right demurely to her brow, shades her eyes, and looks out on the sea, pensive. Ah, my dear, Chapin thinks. Such an amateur.

Chapin opens his book and tries the first paragraph. Individual words make sense, but not the whole thing. He tries it again. He reads the first two pages. Nothing grabs him. He flips to the middle and reads a passage or two, goes back and starts at the beginning. Three pages in, he is still not connecting. He turns to the back cover and finds out what the book is about.

“Good?”

Chapin looks up.

The girl nods toward the book.

“Not very.”

“Those bestsellers are always a disappointment.”

Like she would know, Chapin thinks. On the other hand,…

An airplane goes over, a prop plane, pulling a gaudy banner. The drone of the engine sounds like a giant insect. They ought to ban those things, Chapin thinks. An Airedale trots by, yards ahead of his owner. No leash, Chapin notes. And the rule is, always has been, all dogs must be leashed.

“Would you like to get a drink?” This comes out so predictably Chapin would have felt negligent not to have said it. Of course, it was inevitable. So much is.

She smiles. “Love to.”

She has that kind of downturned smile that Marilyn always makes fun of, the kind that says, Ain't I cute? Well, why not? She is.

They walk to The Cove, an ersatz pirates' lair, and order daiquiris, which, Chapin thinks, is just about perfect.

————

“You had an affair.”

“I had a fling.” He told Marilyn right away.

“With a woman who drinks daiquiris.” Marilyn is a scotch drinker. Glenfiddich, no ice. “Were these banana daiquiris?” she says.

Chapin says nothing.

“I'm more hurt than angry. You know that.” She lights a cigarette. “Now you've got me smoking again,” she says.

The hard part is that it would be so easy. Just the one word—“Sorry”—would probably do it. Marilyn loves him. As though he were worth it. Amazing.

————

Chapin sees the girl again, more daiquiris, and, yes, as a matter of fact, they are banana. She is a comfort, someone that he can't hurt. Ironically, the tacky nautical setting of The Cove, all fishing nets and lobster traps, the overripe appearance of the girl, make the thing look a little like cartoon lust: an aging intellectual with a faithful, classy wife making a fool of himself with a nubile gum-popper half his age. He can imagine his therapist shaking her head.

But with such insight.

————

Hurricane lamps on the glass-top table, white linen, a small crystal bowl full of unassuming, pastel flowers. The table is set by the patio doors, which are closed against the wind. Dusk. The glass reflects them at their dinner—ghost marrieds, keeping it under control.

“‘Through a glass darkly,'” Chapin says, nodding toward the glass doors in which an echoing Chapin is nodding back. “I feel watched.”

“I'll open them,” Marilyn says

“No, don't.”

Chapin's wife is an excellent cook. She does simple things, but in such
a way that the essence of the dish—in this case, chicken simmered in a light wine and tarragon sauce—presents itself. Chapin eats quietly, slowly, savoring a glass of chilled Chablis.

“Why don't you say something?” she says.

“Me?”

She looks around the room pointedly. “Do you see anyone else?”

Chapin nods discreetly toward the patio doors. “Mon frère.” Marilyn smiles.

“It wouldn't take much,” she says, “to save it.”

“I know.”

Sand drifts across the patio floor. The darkness deepens. Chapin puts down his fork and stares out to sea.

————

Once you have killed, it is easy to kill again. Crossed the line, something like that.

But how?

He and the bimbo discovered in bed? Tacky. Chapin rejects it. Suicide attempt? Too predictable. The silent treatment takes too long, and uncontrollable lapses into happiness intrude, set you back for months. Something quicker.

Marilyn is sleeping in a canvas deck chair, an old
New Yorker
open in her lap. The sun bleaches her out. She seems transparent, no more substantial than her magazine. She has pushed her glasses up on her forehead, and Chapin watches her eyes. REM beneath the eyelids. Does she dream? Her hair is down. Chapin lifts a lock and tickles her ear. She tosses her head like a colt but doesn't wake. He slicks it into a thin red strand and holds it under her nose—a Fu Manchu, drooping, comic, Yosemite Sam.

Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Chapin makes a low, cluck-clucking sound. The fact is, he is not a very good writer. Or, maybe he is, and his style is just not in fashion. In an age of memoirs, Chapin avoids first person, strives for a clean narrative line, shaped by character. Character is the heart of fiction, Chapin tells—used to tell—his students. Plot is just revelation. But which came first?

Her hair is a paintbrush. He trails it down her neck, dusts the hollow at the base of her throat. She stretches as though responding to a caress, and
Chapin notes how fine her hair is, how the color reminds him of strawberry jam. The midday sunlight ignites it, and just as he is about to kiss her, Marilyn awakes and smiles at him.

————

Chapin's wife believes he is suicidal. No, he just wants his life to fit. The mismatch of their spirits causes her pain. So, this is a love story after all.

“I called for reservations,” she says.

She is dressed for dinner in beige silk and stands before the hallway mirror, primping. Chapin watches. Thinking, thinking, he cannot find a way out. Guilt would be easy, but Chapin, in fact, is not guilty. So much for a ritualized release.

“Want to drive?”

Chapin shakes his head.

“Do you good.”

How can he tell her he doesn't want good done?

She tilts her head, fastening an earring. Light falls on the delicate curve of her neck, a simple thing that almost breaks his heart.

“There won't be any traffic,” she says.

“I don't know.”

She puts her arms around his waist. “Do it for me,” she says.