Sometimes, when they make love, Kate smooths Alan’s flesh with her fingers and sees again the face of her young lover. Sometimes, when Alan sleeps, he looks eighteen again, but now she sees pouches beneath his eyes, little puckers around his mouth. He has lost his rosy summer tan, his skin is gray, fear lies unabashed in his eyes.

She talks tough to him. “You think you’re scared, kiddo? How about a little sympathy for me?”

“If this turns out to be bad,” he says, “they’ll take my face away, piece by piece. What will you do then?”

She puts her hand on his thigh. “I’ll start a little lower, lover,” she says.

Success. She has made Alan smile.

A young nurse has come for him with a wheelchair. Alan’s face is so elegant that even she responds to it. Narrow nose, slender chin, pale blue eyes. Kate brushes her lips against his cheek, touches his tight silver curls. Still establishing the franchise, she thinks.

Docile, he climbs out of bed into the wheelchair, looking very neat and tucked up, like a good schoolboy. They are going to take out the little lump he has inside his cheek and have a look at it. Biopsy. A simple procedure, the doctor says.

Alan hates pajamas. He likes to sleep naked or in his shorts. Early in their marriage, before they got used to each other, that angered her. It was a lower-middle-class way to sleep, she said, and she was lower-middle-class enough without being reminded of it in bed. But Alan, in his lordly way, slept as he pleased. Now she is not lower-middle-class any more, and now—for the nurse, for the hospital, for old man death—he wears pajamas. Kate feels tears.

The nurse wheels Alan down the hall. First there will be tests. Then Alan will be “prepped.” The procedure itself will take an hour, another hour before he comes down from the recovery room. “He won’t even know you’re here for an hour after that,” the young nurse has told her. “You might as well go home.”

But Kate has decided to stay. She walks to the window and looks down at the hospital’s crowded parking lot and the Long Island Expressway beyond it. She has a lot of time to kill.

The telephone rings next to Alan’s empty bed. Kate hesitates, thinks it must be for someone else, then picks it up anyway.

It is Paula. She was hoping to catch Alan before he went to the operating room, she apologizes. She is calling on behalf of her whole office. They want to wish Alan luck. It is not an intrusion, she trusts.

When Kate talks to Paula the years depart briefly. For a moment she sees Paula as she was in law school, a serious, slender young woman. Paula does something with her voice when she talks to Kate. She makes it sound professional. It is her lawyer voice and it vibrates with discreet, unspoken words—long ago, forgotten now, no need for anger, Kate.

Kate doesn’t care if her own voice is murderous. Die in excruciating pain, bitch. Hair turned gray? A little thick around the middle, are you? Hips too broad? Serves you damn right.

“Tell them all thank you,” she says.

She has, on occasion, lifted the phone in her kitchen and heard Alan talking to Paula on the extension in his study. Perfectly natural. Paula’s firm does business with Alan’s. She puts on a “just colleagues” voice for such occasions. It infuriates Kate. She slams out of the house, drives around until she has cooled off, returns at last to Alan’s pained and chastened face.

Now she picks up her coat and walks out of the hospital room. The little nurse is sitting at the station near the elevators. She is not very pretty, Kate notes.

“Oh, you’re going home,” chirps the nurse. “Good idea.”

Kate’s anger melts. She’s only a kid, younger than Jason.

“I think I’ll drive out on the Island for a while,” she says. “The leaves are turning.”

“Do some shopping,” the nurse advises.

_____________

Kate watches the parkway unfurl itself. The trees are almost red, almost gold. In a week a telephone call will let them know the nature of the tissue they are slicing off Alan’s tender cheek, its temperament, its structure, its intentions. Not to be too pessimistic says the great man, the witch doctor. Nor too optimistic. The auguries will tell.

Kate drives swiftly. How many times in Jason’s troubled childhood had she flung herself into her car and headed east? East to Montauk and off the end of the parkway into the boiling sea.

A fantasy, of course. In truth she never went that far. Would turn around somewhere in the middle of the Island where the great suburban cemeteries begin, tombstones flat to the ground, no angels or “ever in our hearts” allowed. Alan’s parents are buried in one of them, she and Alan have plots nearby. She wonders if Jason knows.

Far out on the Island there are old villages with churchyards in the middle of the town. On Main Street. People buried with their friends, relatives, enemies, neighbors. Grandchildren knowing where their grandparents are.

She never got as far as the Montauk lighthouse. Turned around because Jason needed her, crying in the principal’s office, expelled from a birthday party, waiting for her at the psychiatrist’s.

“What makes you do such things, Jason?”

A little boy with angry eyes. “I don’t know.”

A long time since they have seen Jason, that skinny exile. Kate tries to think of him on his hill in Oregon, sitting beside his potter’s kiln, making wonderful shapes of clay and color with the flexible artist’s fingers he has inherited from his accountant father. Tries to see as well, Linda, his friend, lover, roommate, whatever. The mother of Kate’s grandchild. She pictures Linda thin-faced, bird-boned, barefoot. With long brown hair. But who knows? When Jason telephoned to tell them the baby had been born (it was nice of him), after she said, How much does he weigh (he didn’t know), it wasn’t possible to ask, What does his mother look like?

And what does he look like, this unknown grandson with his long Hindustani name (fourteen letters in his first name alone) who has set up housekeeping in her heart since the day of Jason’s telephone call? She plays with him sometimes in a waking dream, holding him in her arms, dancing him around the room. A dream of second chances.

_____________

Old marriages, old wounds. An old, bitter wound in this one. When Kate was pregnant with Jason, Alan left her for Paula. Alan never wants to talk about it, but Kate cannot let it alone. When Kate was pregnant with Jason, Alan left her for Paula. Long ago. Long over. Her pain lies dormant for seasons, then suddenly awakes and chews its fierce way out. She cannot forgive him.

There was once a different Kate, a chubby girl in sneakers, terrific lindy-hopper. A clever solemn boy was her friend, her lover. Handsome Alan. He married her. He could have done better, of course. Everyone said so.

She remembers a different Paula too, smart girl Paula, a woman before her time, the equal of Alan in every way. And she remembers Alan, distracted and nervous, forgetting to come home, not eating. And one night he simply tells her.

A towering betrayal. Her poor swollen body shudders and trembles. “Please,” says Alan, “don’t shake like that.” But she cannot help it.

When Jason is born Alan returns, contrite. “Take me back, Katie, I love you.” And she does. He is, after all, Jason’s father. And the man of her dreams.

And out of it all comes a new Kate, a painstaking facsimile of the old one, the core of her shattered and glued together, at the core of the core an uncrushable stone. The old Kate is gone. He never gets her back again, that blithe and sunny girl, that dancing clown.

He had to do it for the experience, he says. They were so young when they got married.

Horseshit. He wanted sex? Who told him not to have sex? He didn’t have to desert her for it. Not when she was pregnant.

He doesn’t buy that. That’s the new Kate, talking liberated. Who told little Alan not to have sex? Everybody.

“It’s ancient history,” says Alan in misery.

“Quaint,” says Kate.

From Alan’s childhood, another answer: October 1929, the stock market crashes and Alan’s father, Herman the wheeler-dealer, moves his mistress Angelina from her Madison Avenue apartment to their house in Queens. In their innocence his parents instruct Alan to call her “Aunt Angie.”

Talk about forgiveness! “Why did your mother put up with it? She must have been crazy.”

“It was lonesome in Queens. She was happy to have company. ”

Maybe. In the middle of the night Alan would hear his mother yelling. He would double the pillow over his ears.

In Kate’s heart another answer: she doesn’t know why he came back. He really could have done better.

_____________

How to tell the psychiatrist about Jason?

When Alan leaves her alone to her pregnancy, it is as if she has fallen into a well in which she cannot drown, from which she cannot be extricated, condemned forever to its narrow embrace. The doctor gives her pills, uppers, downers, inside-outers. Alan’s drunken babe reels inside of her.

“Where is the father?” the harried resident asks in the delivery room as Jason is put into her arms and her tears fall on his squashed little face, and she feels for him a melting, treasonous yearning, deep in her womb, real as last. And a stone in her heart that she does not know is anger.

Where is the father? In Wilmington, Delaware, getting Paula an illegal abortion. From love, from stupidity, from fear of fatherhood, from the memory of Herman’s bare feet slapping down the hall to Angelina’s room, he has made her pregnant too. “The father is dead,” she says.

No. Start again.

Jason came plunging out of my womb, she says, howling his disaffection for the world. Jason flailed at my breast with perfect tiny fingers, as if he were drinking vinegar and bile.

When Jason was a little boy, she says, he kicked the third grade teacher and was expelled.

When Jason was in junior high, she says, he let his hair grow long. The principal sewed ruffles on his pants to teach him not to look like a girl.

In high school Jason smoked pot in the parking lot. He was suspended.

When the revolution came, she says, it loved Jason. It dropped a rock on his head at Columbia, clubbed him on the ear at Whitehall Street, gave him a bum trip in Cambridge and a couple of nights in a Chicago jail. By a fluke he missed Kent State, but the FBI got pictures of him pounding on Nixon’s car in San Jose.

And one morning at two o’clock the telephone rings. It is the police. They have been chasing Jason all night as he ran naked down the parkways, in and out of the shrubbery, between the headlights. They have found him at last in a Texaco station, lying in a pool of black grease next to the dumpster, clutching his crotch in his unconscious hand.

In the beer cans and the trash. My love. My little boy. My Jason.

_____________

She has reached the cemeteries. She turns the car around and drives back to the hospital. She still has time to wait. He had better not say “Paula” when he comes out of the anesthesia, she thinks.

He doesn’t, of course. She sits beside the bed and holds his hand. Alan’s mouth is swollen, blood-streaked, but his face is intact, the stitches inside.

“Katie,” he says, but that is all he is able to say.

_____________

They have a week for waiting, a week to deal with apprehension. Make time go faster. Slower. Something.

“Let’s go to Jones Beach,” says Kate one morning. “We can watch the lovers making out on the boardwalk.”

Alan laughs, agrees to let her drive him there. The lovers on autumn days are all old couples, some men and women, but mostly women together. Many varieties of Middle European accents. The women have a joke. Now we are married to each other, they say.

A flash of insight comes to Kate as she drives. “When you came back to me, Alan, was it because I made you laugh?”

“Lay off me, Katie, I’m a sick man.”

She drives silently.

But he touches her hair. “I want you to forget it,” he says. “I want you to forgive me. I want it never to have happened.”

What is forgiveness? she asks herself.

No answer.

_____________

On the boardwalk Alan recalls the Jones Beach of his childhood, before Robert Moses discovered it, he says.

“Over there,” he points, “was a long, long jetty.” His father and he would fish from it. For flounder. Blues. Mostly nothing.

“Did your mother come with you?”

“No, but Angie did. Sometimes.”

Kate squints against the sparkling sea, the golden sand, picturing quiet little curly-haired Alan in knickers, with his dazzling old man and the old man’s dark-eyed, hoarse-voiced mistress. Both of them dead now. Alan’s mother too. That unholy trio.

She remembers Jones Beach on their high-school dates, a rosy brick complex with an obelisk, a sinuous boardwalk, pavilions for skating and dancing and shooting arrows. A wonderful, cheap, romantic place. A gift to the people.

“It never changes,” says Kate. “That’s why I love it.”

“We change,” says Alan.

“Not so much. I’m still fat and you’re still beautiful.”

Alan winces when he laughs. The stitches pull. Nevertheless, she makes him laugh.

In front of one of the red brick buildings the old people are sunning themselves in beach chairs. A couple on a bench catches Kate’s eye as they pass. The woman’s face is tracked with wrinkles, but she has a golden wig. The man is gaunt, a skeletal man, his eyes fixed on the distant sky. Her hand is on his arm and she is leaning forward, talking directly into his face as if to detain him. But it is really too late, he is already gone. Kate shivers.

They stop at the old dance pavilion. It is silent and empty the season over. In the summer people still dance there, feet sticking and dragging on the cement floor. Middle-aged people dancing the dances of their youth under the stars. Sometimes a rock band comes and the kids dance too. But the grown-ups can’t dance with their children, the music separates them.

“You were a great dancer,” says Alan.

Kate points with a flourish to the pavilion. “Have you any idea what happened on that dance floor? On that dance floor Katie Singer first felt sexual desire.”

“Where’s the plaque?”

“It used to be over there, but Puerto Ricans stole it.”

She leans against him and he holds her. “Who’d you feel it for?” he says. “Me?”

“Who else?” Clowning for him. “Such a virgin like I was?”

Along with the stitches the hospital has given him tears. She brushes them with her fingers.

“I don’t want to die,” he says.

“Cut it out, Alan. I’m running out of jokes.”

_____________

Alan is healing, the tender cheek not so afflicted as it was. His fingers turn the pages of Time magazine, but he is not reading. The television is fluttering beside his chair, the sound turned off. In Alan’s pale eyes she sees memory and pain. Alan is thinking about life, about Jason.

Kate cannot bear to see him so introspective. She wishes he would watch a basketball game. She sits on the arm of his chair to distract him, curls his hair seductively around her finger.

She aims for a Hungarian courtesan’s accent. “Let me entertain you,” she says, not very convincingly.

“How about a belly dance?” says Alan, turning pages.

“I’m out of practice. How about some pot?”

He looks up at her. “You don’t really have any.”

“I do. I found it in Jason’s closet. In the corner. Does it matter if it’s old?”

Alan is laughing. “You don’t know how to roll it.”

“I’ve been practicing.”

“OK, but in case it doesn’t work let’s have martinis too.”

They begin by alternating gravely. He hands her the glass, she hands him the joint. A sip, a puff. They watch each other for symptoms.

“You’re supposed to swallow it,” he says.

“I am swallowing it.”

“The smoke, not the drink.”

“I’m not supposed to swallow the drink?” she giggles. “I’m supposed to sniff it up my nose?”

Alan finds that hilarious.

Between them, expanding and contracting, Kate sees bands of energy rising in undulating waves from the floor. Through the waves a regal Alan approaches, a great, wide, lascivious smile floating two inches off his face. She is so happy to see him alive and well that she says Long Live the King and performs for his highness her daring, death-defying act. Encore after encore, until exhausted she falls to the ground.

When they are awake they are naked on the scratchy carpet of the staircase landing. Alan is playing scales on her spine. “You loved that,” he croons. She crosses her eyes, makes a face at him. “It was all right.”

“Come on. You loved it, You know you did.”

She rises, staggering. They guide each other to bed. “If I say I loved it,” she says, “you’ll want to do it all the time.”

_____________

In the morning she is asleep when the telephone rings. Alan races to answer it. Instantly she is awake. It is too soon for the hospital report, but she hears Alan’s elated voice and she thinks briefly, maybe. Maybe it’s OK.

Alan returns and pulls her out of bed. His face is shining, his voice jubilant. “That was Jason. And Linda. They’re coming to visit us, they’re at the airport. Bringing the baby, Rabindranath Tagore, whatever his name is.”

They hug each other rapturously, Kate so flooded with rejoicing that she is in tears.

Alan does a little naked dance. “I’m going to be a grandfather,” he sings.

_____________

They celebrate all day. Kate decides to cook something complicated. They drive to the docks and admire the boats, slender sailboats and fat cabin cruisers. Alan thinks some day they might have a sailboat. Kate lets him think so.

She is so happy that she talks to everyone. Heaps of silver and gold fish are piled on the wharf, fresh off the boats. The wharf is crowded with thrifty housewives, bargain hunters. She exchanges recipes with an Indian woman in a sari. A young black woman, her hair in elegant cornrows, listens in and nods agreement. Kate splurges on lobster, halibut, crabs, oysters, mussels, extra fish heads. The two women clap their hands, applauding her choices.

“My grandson is coming to visit,” she tells them. “We’re going to have a feast.”

“God,” says Alan, “you’re not going to feed that to the baby?”

The three women fall into giggles.

They cook the fish stew together, Kate laughing at Alan’s ineptness. She accuses him of purposeful clumsiness. He doesn’t really want to help. He denies it, picks up a fish head, pretends to drop it down the front of her shirt. She shrieks. They hug, kiss, behave like children. They are very nervous.

In the evening Jason and Linda arrive. Jason is very tan. He has put on weight. He has a dark beard. He puts his arms around Alan and kisses him. Alan cries.

Linda is taller than Kate expected, larger-boned, fair-haired. She has a lovely, plain, open face, round glasses, a true smile. Someone, thinks Kate approvingly, has taken good care of her.

The baby is sleeping on Linda’s breast in a cloth cradle hung from her shoulders. Kate touches him, awed. He looks like Jason.

_____________

At night, lying beside Alan, a thought comes to Kate. “How did Jason know you were sick?”

Alan is silent.

“Alan? Are you sleeping?”

“Paula called him,” says Alan.

Kate stares silently at the ceiling.

“Are you angry?” he says.

“Why doesn’t Paula get out of my life?”

“She feels bad about you. She wants to feel better, I guess. By doing something for you.”

“For you.”

“I guess so. For herself too. Kate, are you angry?”

Tears slip from the corners of Kate’s eyes. He kisses her, licks the tears. “Dear old friend,” he says, “are you ever going to forgive me?”

Kate sniffs. “If she comes to your funeral it will ruin my whole day.”

Alan rolls over, wrestles her, pins her to the bed. They are both laughing. “Rotten person,” he says, loving her.

Luck is with them. God, how we have loved each other’s flesh, she thinks. They fall asleep, feet entangled. Kate dreams.

In her dream they are children. There is a school bus on the road, and a brook. Golden hairs gleam on the back of Alan’s neck as he walks toward the bus. Where are you going? she calls to him, but his back is turned and he does not answer. He is wearing an old-fashioned jacket and it makes her laugh out loud.

Don’t leave without me, Alan, she says.