Galilee.

"Are you telling me you believe what this guy was saying?"

"I haven"t finished. He said the other sign was going to have something to do with a man from the sea."

Mitch.e.l.l sighed: "That"s so lame," he said. "She probably told him something about the situation... and he just fed it back to her."

"Maybe," Garrison said.

"Well what"s the alternative?" Mitch.e.l.l said, a little irritably, "That this d.i.c.khead"s right, and we"re all heading for disaster?"

"Yeah," Garrison said. "That"s the alternative."

"I prefer my version."

Garrison sipped his wine. "Like I said..." he murmured, "you"ve always had a weak stomach."

"What"s that supposed to mean?"

Garrison gave a rare smile. "That you don"t want to even contemplate the possibility that there"s something going on here we should be taking seriously. That maybe things are falling apart?"

Mitch.e.l.l threw up his hands. "I can"t believe I"m having this conversation," he said. "With you, of all people. You"re supposed to be the rational one in the family."

"And look where it got me," Garrison growled.

"You look just fine to me."

"Jesus." Garrison shook his head. "That goes to show how much we understand one another, doesn"t it? I"m chewing antidepressams like f.u.c.king candies, Mitch. I go to a.n.a.lysis four times a week. The sight of my wife naked makes me want to puke. Does that help paint the picture for you?" He eyed his wine. "I shouldn"t really be drinking alcohol. Not with antidepressants. But right now I don"t give a f.u.c.k." He paused, then said, "You want something more to eat?"

"No thanks.""You"ve got room for ice cream. Allow yourself some childish pleasures once in a while. They"re very therapeutic."

"I"m putting on love handles."

"No woman on the f.u.c.king planet"s going to throw you out of bed because you"ve got a fat a.s.s.

Eat some ice cream."

"Don"t change the subject. We were talking about you mixing drink and pills."

"No we weren"t. We were talking about me getting a little crazy, because it"s done me no f.u.c.king good staying sane."

"So get crazy," Mitch.e.l.l said. "I don"t give a s.h.i.t. Take the next board meeting naked. Fire everyone. Hire deaf-mutes. Do whatever the f.u.c.k you want, but don"t start listening to some c.r.a.p from a f.u.c.king astrologer."

"He was talking about Galilee, Mitch."

"A man from the seal? That could be anybody."

"But it wasn"t anybody. It was him. It was Galilee."

"You know what," Mitch.e.l.l said, raising his hands, "Let"s.stop talking about this."

"Why?"

"Because the conversation"s going round in circles. And I"m bored."

Garrison stared at him, then expelled a long, strangely contented breath. "So what are you doing with the rest of the night?" he said.

Mitch glanced at his watch. "Going home to bed."

"Alone?"

"Yes. Alone."

"No s.e.x. No ice cream. You"re going to die a miserable man, you know that? I could arrange some company for you if you like."

"No thanks."

"Are you sure?"

Mitch.e.l.l laughed. "I"m sure.""What"s so funny?"

"You. Trying to get me laid, like I was still seventeen. Remember that wh.o.r.e you brought back to the house for me?"

"Juanita."

"Juanita! Right. Jesus, what a memory!" .

"All she wanted to do-"

"Don"t remind me-"

"-was sit on your face! You should have married her," Garrison said, pushing his chair back and getting up. "You"d have twenty kids by now." Mitch.e.l.l looked sour. "Don"t get mad. Ypu know it"s true. We both f.u.c.ked up. We should have married dumb b.i.t.c.hes with childbearing hips. But no. I choose a drunk and you choose a shopgirl." He picked up his gla.s.s and drained the last of his wine. "Well... have a nice night."

"Where are you off to?"

"I"ve got an a.s.signation."

"Anyone I know?"

"I don"t even know her," Garrison said as he headed away from the table. "You"ll see. It"s much easier that way."

XV.

i There was a time in my life-many, many years ago; more years than I care to count-when nothing gave me more pleasure than to listen to songs of love. I could even sing a few, if I was drunk enough. On occasion, before I lost the use of my legs, we"d venture out together, my wife Chiyojo, Marietta and myself, to see traveling players in Raleigh, and there"d always been a spot or two in the show when the mood would become sweetly melancholy, and a crooner, or a quartet of crooners, or the leading lady with a handkerchief clutched to her bosom, would offer up something to tug at our hearts. "I"ll Remember You, Love, In My Prayers," or "White Wings"; the more grotesquely sentimental the better as far as I was concerned. But I lost my appet.i.te for such entertainments when Chiyojo died. A plaintive ballad about love irrevocably lost was a fine thing to indulge in when the idol of your affections was sitting beside you, her hand clutching yours.

But when she was taken from me--under circ.u.mstances so tragic they beggared anything a songwriter might dream up-I would start to weep as soon as a minor chord was played.

And yet, in spite of my resistance to the subject, it creeps closer to these pages with every pa.s.singmoment. Sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, this account draws nearer and nearer to a time when love must appear, transforming the lives of the characters I"ve set before you. Few will be untouched by its consequences, however immune they may believe themselves.

And that, of course, includes myself. I"ve wondered more than once if fear of my own vulnerability was not the reason I didn"t attempt to put pen to paper earlier. The pa.s.sion for words was always in me, from my mother, and I"ve certainly had plenty of spare time in the last century or so. But I could never do it. I was afraid-I am still afraid-that once I begin to write about love I will find myself consumed by the very fire I am building to burn other hearts.

Of course in the end I have no choice. The romance approaches, as inevitable as the apocalypse Garrison was telling his brother about in the restaurant: because, of course, they are one and the same.

Garrison parted from Mitch.e.l.l outside the restaurant, dismissed his driver and went uptown to an apartment which he had purchased, unknown to anyone else in the family, for exactly the purpose he intended to use it tonight. He let himself in, pleased to find that the temperature of the place was far lower than would usually be thought to be comfortable, which fact meant the erotic rituals of the evening had already begun. He didn"t go directly to the bedroom, though he was now in a state of excitement. In the living room he poured himself a drink, and stood by the window to sip it and savor the moments of antic.i.p.ation. Oh, if only all life were as rich and real to him as these moments; as charged with meaning and emotion. Tomorrow, of course, he would despise himself a little, and behave like a perfect sonof ab.i.t.c.h to any and all who crossed his path.

But tonight? Tonight, marinating in the knowledge of what lay before him, he was as dose as he knew how to being a happy man. At last he set down the gla.s.s, without really drinking much at all, and loosening his tie wandered through to the elegantly appointed bedroom. The door was ajar. There was a light burning inside. He entered.

The woman was lying on the bed. Her name was Melodic, he"d been told (though he doubted any woman who sold her body for this kind of purpose used the name they"d been brought with to G.o.d). There she lay, under a sheet, perfectly still, her eyes closed. There were a dozen white and yellow lilies on the pillow around her head; a nice funereal touch, courtesy of the man who arranged these scenarios for Garrison, Fred Platt. The smell of the flowers was not strong enough to compete with the other scent in the room however: that of disinfectant. Again, one of Plan"s felicities, this piney scent; one which Garrison had been a little unsettled by at first, pressing his fantasies as it did still closer to grim reality. But Platt knew Garrison"s psyche well: that first time with the disinfectant stinging the sinuses had been an erotic revelation. Now the scent was an indispensable part of the fantasy.

He approached the bed, and stood at the end of it, looking down at the woman, studying her body for some sign of a shudder. But he could see only the very slightest tremor, which clearly the woman was doing her best to suppress. Good for her, he thought; she was a professional. He admired professionalism in all matters: in the trading of stocks, in the cooking of food, in the imitation of death. If it was worth doing, as Loretta was fond of saying, then it was worth doing properly.He reached down and plucked at the sheet, sliding it out from beneath Melodie"s hands, which were crossed on her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. She was naked beneath the sheet, her body made up with a pale pancake, then dusted down, to lend her a cadaverous hue.

"Lovely," he said, without a trace of irony.

She was indeed a pretty sight: her b.r.e.a.s.t.s small, her nipples alert with cold, and long. Her pubic hair was neatly trimmed, so as to offer him a glimpse of her intricately-made l.a.b.i.a. He would lick there soon.

But first, the feet. He pulled the sheet off her completely, and let it drop to the floor. Then he went down on his knees at the end of the bed and applied his lips to the woman"s flesh. She was cold: the consequence of lying on a bed of ice sealed in plastic. He kissed her toes, and then the soles of her feet, slipping his hands around her slim ankles while he did so. Now that he had his skin against hers he could feel the tremors deep in her tissue, but they weren"t violent enough to distract him from the illusion. He could believe she was dead with very little difficulty. Dead and cold and unresisting.

I won"t go on with the description; there"s no need. For those of you who wish to picture Garrison Geary pleasuring himself with a woman playing dead, you have all the information you need to conjure it; go to it if you wish. For the rest of us, enough to know that this was his special pleasure, his most-antic.i.p.ated bliss. I can"t tell you why. I don"t know what strange twist his psyche took that made this ritual so arousing to him: or who put it there. But there it was; and there I"ll leave him, covering the pseudo-corpse with kisses in preparation for the so-called act of love.

For his part, Mitch.e.l.l had decided to go back to the apartment to sleep. Rachel would come back there, tonight, he thought, and all would be forgiven. He"d hear a sound in the bedroom, and open his eyes to see her silhouette against the starry sky (he hated to sleep with the drapes closed; it made him dream smothering dreams), and she"d shed her clothes, and say she was sorry, so sorry, then slip into bed beside him. Perhaps they"d make love, but probably not. Probably she"d just put her head in the crook of his arm, and lay her hand on his chest, and they"d fall asleep that way, as they had when they"d first shared a bed.

But his romantic expectations were dashed. She didn"t come home that night. He slept alone in the huge bed; at least he slept for the first hour or so, before waking with a stabbing ache in his lower abdomen, so sharp it made him want to cry like a baby. Cursing Garrison and his d.a.m.nable Mr. Ko, he staggered, bent nearly double, into the bathroom, and dug through the medications there for something to soothe the pain. His sight was blurred with agony, and his hands shaking.

It took him fully two or three minutes to locate the appropriate bottle of tablets and he"d no sooner fingered a couple of them onto his tongue than he felt a crippling spasm in his bowels, and only just reached the toilet in time before expelling a watery stream of foul-smelling feces. When the expulsion came to an end he stayed put, knowing the respite was only temporary. The ache in his belly had not been mellowed at all; he still felt as though his bowels were being pierced with needles.He began to cry while he sat there, the tears coming haltingly at first, then as a flow he could not halt. He put his hands over his face, which was burning hot, sobbing behind his palms. It seemed he could not imagine misery profounder than the misery he felt now: abandoned, sick, confused.

What had he done to deserve this? Nothing. He"d lived the best life he knew how to live. So why was he sitting here like a d.a.m.ned soul, smelling his own stench rising all around him, tormented by the predictions Garrison had whispered in his ear? And why didn"t he know where his wife was tonight? Why wasn"t she here to comfort him, waiting in the bed to hold him in her arms once the spasms had pa.s.sed; her touch cool, her voice full of love? Why was he alone?

Oh Lord, why was he alone?

Across town. Garrison returned from the bedroom where he had lately shot his seed. The icy recipient of his love had been admirably inert throughout his plugging of her body; not once had she grunted or cried out, even when his ministrations had become less than gentlemanly.

Sometimes, not satisfied with his v.a.g.i.n.al explorations, he liked to roll the "corpses" over and take them a.n.a.lly.

Tonight had been one of those times, and once again Mr. Platt had planned for the eventuality.

When Garrison had rolled the girl over and parted her fesses, he"d found the back pa.s.sage already lubricated for him. In he"d gone, eschewing the protection that most would think advisable when s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g with this cla.s.s of woman, and had discharged inside her.

Then he"d got up, wiped himself on the sheet, and zipping up his pants (which he had not even dropped to mid-thigh during this whole business), left the room. As he exited he said: "It"s over.

You can get up," and was curiously comforted to see that the woman made a move to rise from the bed before he departed the room. It was all just a game, wasn"t it? There was no harm in it.

Look, she was resurrected! Stretching, yawning, looking for her envelope of cash, which Garrison had placed on the bedside table, as always. She would go on her way without even knowing who her violator was (or so Garrison liked to imagine. The women were instructed to keep their eyes closed throughout the game. If they peeped, Platt could be cruel).

Garrison went straight down into the street, to his car, and drove away. Anyone catching sight of him in the driver"s seat would have thought: there goes a man happy with his lot in life.

As I said earlier, it wouldn"t last. He would get up tomorrow feeling thoroughly disgusted with himself; but the self-disgust would last twenty-four hours-forty-eight at most-and then the desire he"d quenched tonight would flicker into life again, and grow in strength over a period of a week or two, until at last he couldn"t resist it any longer, and he"d be on the phone to Platt in a kind of trance, saying that he needed one of his "special nights," just as soon as possible. And the whole ritual would be repeated.

What a strange thing it was, he thought, to be Garrison Geary. To possess as much power as he possessed, and yet feel in his troubled soul such a lack of self-regard that he was only able to make love with a woman who pa.s.sed for dead. What a peculiar specimen of humanity he was!And yet he could not feel entirely ashamed of this peculiarity. There was a part of him that was perversely proud tonight; proud that he was capable of doing what he"d just done; proud that even in this city, which was a magnet for men and women who lived unusual lives, the fantasy he"d enacted would be thought disgraceful. What might he not do with this perversity of his, he wondered, if he once unleashed it outside the bounds of his s.e.xual life? What changes might he work upon the world if he put his darker energies to better purpose than f.u.c.king an icy c.u.n.t?

But what, what? If there was some greater purpose to his life, why couldn"t he see it? If there was a path that he was intended to follow, why hadn"t he stumbled onto it by now? Sometimes he felt like an athlete who"d sweated himself into a frenzy in preparation for a race that n.o.body had summoned him to run. And with every day he failed to compete his chances of winning that race- when he finally knew what course it would follow-became more remote.

Soon, he thought to himself; I have to know what my purpose is soon, or I"ll be too old to do anything about it. I"ll die without having really lived, and the moment I"m in the ground I"ll be forgotten.

It has to be soon.

XVI.

The night Rachel had come home she"d told her mother that she wanted as few people as possible to know that she was here, but in a community as small and as well-knit as Dansky no secret so large could be kept for very long. The following morning she"d gone out to put some letters in the postbox for her mother, and had been seen doing so by Mrs. Bedrosian, the widow who lived next door.

"Well, well," Mrs. Bedrosian had said, "Is that you Rachel?"

"Yes. It"s me."

That was the full extent of the exchange. But it was all that was needed. Half an hour later the telephone started to ring-people from around town making apparently casual calls to see how Rachel"s mother was doing, then lightly dropping into conversation the fact that they"d heard Rachel -was home for the weekend; and-just by the way-had she brought her husband home with her?

Sherrie simply lied. She hadn"t been feeling very well, she told everyone, and Rachel had come to spend a few days with her. "And no," she invariably added, "Mitch.e.l.l isn"t with her. So you can stop sniffing after an invitation to meet him, if that"s why you"re asking."

The lie worked well. After half a dozen such calls word spread that even if there was something worth gossiping about here, Sherrie Pallenberg wasn"t going to be providing any fuel.

"Of course that won"t stop them talking," Sherrie remarked. "They"ve got nothing better to do, you see. This d.a.m.n town.""I thought you liked it here," Rachel said to her.

They were sitting in the kitchen at lunchtime, eating peach cobbler.

"If your father was still alive, it might be different. But I"m on my own. And what do I have for company? Other widows." She rolled her eyes. "We get together for brunches and bridge, and you know they"re all sweet souls, they really are, and I don"t want to sound ungrateful, but, Lord, after a while I get so bored talking about drapes and soap operas and how little they see their children."

"Is that one of your complaints?"

"No, no. You"ve got your own life to live. I don"t expect you to be on my doorstep every five minutes checking up on me."

"You might be seeing rather more of me in future," Rachel said.

Her mother shook her head. "It"s just a bad patch you and Mitch are going through. You"ll come out the other side of it, you"ll see."

"I don"t think it"s as simple as that," Rachel said. "We"re not suited to one another."

"n.o.body ever is," her mother replied nonchalantly.

"You don"t mean that."

"I certainly do. Honey, listen to me. n.o.body, and I mean n.o.body, is ever deep in their hearts perfectly suited to anybody else. You have to make compromises. Great big compromises. I know I did with Hank and I"m sure if Hank were alive he"d say exactly the same thing about me.

We decided to make it work. I suppose..." she allowed herself a sad little smile. "... I suppose we realized that we weren"t going to do any better than what we had right there and then. I know it doesn"t sound very romantic, but it"s the way it was. And you know, once I got over that silly feeling that this wasn"t Prince Charming-that he was just an ordinary man who farted in bed and couldn"t keep his eyes off a pretty waitress-I was quite happy."

"The thing is Mitch doesn"t look at waitresses."

"Well... lucky you. So what"s the problem?"

Rachel set down her fork and stared at her half-eaten cobbler. "I"ve got so much to be grateful for," she said, as though she were saying her prayers. "I know that. Lord, when I think of how - much Mitch has given me..."