Loyalty

This happened, the first part, four or five years before everything else. In those days I was still sweeping a lot of stuff under the rug with Clarissa, and we didn't see the Elstners often, because my wife, given the history, was never really at ease around Paul and Ann. Instead, every few months, Paul Elstner and I would take in a game on our own—basketball in the winter, baseball in the summer—meeting first for an early dinner, usually at Gil's, near the University Field House, formerly Gil's Men's Bar and still a bastion of a lost world, with its walls wainscoted in sleek oak.

And so we were there, feeling timeless, telling tales about our cases and our kids, when this character came to a halt near our table. I could feel Elstner start at the sight of him. The man had a generation on us. putting him near 70 at this point. He was in a longhair cashmere topcoat, with a heavy cuff link winking on his sleeve and his sparse hair puffed up in a $50 do. But he was the kind you couldn't really dress up. He was working a toothpick in his mouth, and on his meaty face there was a harsh look of ingrained self-importance. He was a tough mug, you could see it, the kind whose father had come over on the boat and who had grown up hard himself.

"Christ," Elstner whispered. He'd raised his menu to surround his face. "Christ, don't look at him. Oh. Christ." Elstner has always run a little over the margins. Never mind the dumb stuff 20 years before when we were law school roommates. But even now, a married grown-up with two daughters. Paul would ride around in the dead of winter with his car windows open so he wouldn't kill himself with his own cigar smoke, a pair of yellow headphones mounted over his earmuffs so he could rock with the Rolling Stones despite the onrushing wind. Looking at him with the two sides of the menu pushed against his ears, even though he was twice the size of the guy he was hiding from, I figured, It's Elstner.

"Maurie Moleva," Paul said when the old guy at last had moved on. "I just didn't want him remembering I'm still alive." Elstner swallowed hard on the hunk of schnitzel he'd stopped chewing when Moleva appeared.

I asked what it was Paul had done to Maurie.

"Me? Nothin'. Nada. This isn't about what anybody did to Maurie. It's about what Maurie did to somebody else." Elstner looked into his Diet Coke while the racket of the restaurant swelled around us. "This is obviously a story I shouldn't be telling anybody," he said.

"Okay," I answered, meaning I was not asking for more. Elstner rattled the cubes in his drink, chasing a necklace of tiny brown bubbles to the sides of the glass, plainly reconsidering it all, the secret and its consequences.

"This was a long time ago," he finally said. "Before the earth had cooled. No more than a year after you and I finished law school. I was still working for Jack Barrish. You remember Jack. Wacky stuff was always going on around that office. He's defending hookers and taking it out in trade, or trying to give me something hot—a camera, a suit—instead of half my salary. You remember."

"I remember," I said.

"Anyway, Jack, you know, his business clients are all Kehwahnee hustlers just like him, and this guy Maurie Moleva is one of them. Dr. Moleva, PhD. Research chemist who went into business. A few years back now, he sold off his company to some New York Stock Exchange outfit, Tinker and Something, one of those conglomerates, I read about it in the Journal, 40 million bucks, 50 million, you know, pocket money to them but a piece of change. Back then, the time I'm talking about, the company was still Maurie's.

"Moleva started out making household products, bleach and spot remover, off-brand stuff that they'd sell at the independent grocers, but by then he's really ringing the gong selling to the military. One of his biggest contracts is for windshield washer fluid. For jeeps. Airplanes. Tanks. Helicopters. And of course, the kind of guy he is, whatever he's got, he wants more, so the government is like. We need some chemical, HD-12 or whatever, in the washer fluid, in case we're in the desert, the sand won't stick. And Maurie, he's a smart guy, we've got several hundred thousand troops in the jungles of Nam, no sand there, and the HD-12, I don't know, it adds two bucks a gallon, so he tells them on the assembly line, 'Leave it out.'

"Now the guys on the line, they're all to a man Maurie's people from the old country. Including Maurie's cousin Dragon. When Cousin Dragon was about nine years old, he started in writing to Maurie, 'America's my dream, I need to come to America, I hate these commies over here, they're godless tyrants, they crush the spirit of every man,' and Maurie read these letters for about a decade. He'd never set eyes on Dragon, but like every tough SOB I ever met, he's sort of a softie on his own time, very sentimental. So Maurie pays Dragon's way, meets his plane, kisses Dragon's cheeks, gives him a diamond medallion with the American flag surrounded by some vines that are a big symbol in the homeland and puts Dragon to work on the line. Then Maurie goes off to tell everybody at the church men's club what a hero he is for rescuing his young cousin.

"Anyway, Dragon's here for a while and he begins to get the lowdown. Maurie's sons are driving shiny cars, they got lovely wives and big houses, and Cousin Dragon is bustin' his hump on the line, starting at six A.M. every day because Maurie doesn't like his employees stuck in traffic. And long story short, Dragon begins to remember what's so great about communism. He starts in asking, Where's a little more for the workin' stiff? He even, God save the poor son of a bitch, talks on the assembly line about a union. Not smart. Maurie gets his two sons and they throw Dragon's butt out. Literally. They toss him through the door in the middle of winter without his hat and gloves. 'I bought your fuckin' hat, I bought your gloves, I brought your ungrateful pink heinie here from the old country. Go.'

"Bad news for Dragon. And worse news it turns out for Maurie. Because within a few months, an Army helicopter gets caught in a desert storm and goes kerplunk in the Mojave. One survivor. Who says they went down because they couldn't get the sand off their frigging windshield.

"So we have a big federal grand jury investigation started up. Which is where my boss Jack comes in. The G, of course, has figured out that their wind-shield wiper fluid doesn't have any HD-12 in it and Maurie's answer is, 'Darn it, can you believe what knuckle-balls I got on my line? I need better help.' That's not so bad, right? As a defense? That could sell?"

It sounded okay to me, but I'd never practiced criminal law.

"It didn't," Elstner said. "Nope. The AUSA says, 'Nope, we're gonna put Maurie in the pokey, let the big boys call him Sweetie. We're gonna forfeit Maurie's great big business cause he's a racketeer.' 'How you gonna do that?' Jack says. "This is a terrible accident.' 'Nope,' says the AUSA. 'Nope, I got a witness.'"

"Dragon."

"You can move on to the Jeopardy round."

"So Maurie did some time?"

"Hardly. Negative on that one, flight commander. Maurie strolled. Here's where I come into the picture," Elstner said.

I made a sound to show I was getting interested.

"There was this night," Paul said. "I get a call. Past midnight. It's Maurie. Says he's been phoning Boss Jack everywhere and can't find him. When I tell Maurie that Jack went to take an emergency dep in Boston, you'd think from the sound that old Maurie was passing a stone. Finally he tells me to meet up with him instead. Now, I don't even own a car. I have to go wake up my sister across town. And I'm following Maurie's directions, which take me to East Bumble-fuck. There are moons of Jupiter that are closer. I'm in cornfields. And here near one of these roadside telephone booths, here at 2:30 in the goddamn morning, here is Maurie Moleva. It's springtime. The earth is soft. Stuff is growing. The air smells of loam. There's a bright moon. He's in a rumpled seersucker suit. With mud up to his knees. He's got on a straw fedora and he's carrying a briefcase. He gets in the car and tells me to drive him home. That's all he says. Not hello. Not thanks. Just, 'Drive.' The Great Communicator. At his feet he's got the briefcase, which won't quite close because the wooden handle of something is sticking out of it. He's got a ring of grime under his polished fingernails, and every so often he's jiggling a chain in one palm. In time I see the medallion—diamond, flag, vines. I didn't have a clue right then whose it was, but still and all, this is bad voodoo. I'm definitely scared, especially a few days later when it turns out that good old Cousin Dragon is AWOL."

"Isn't that big trouble for Maurie?" I asked. "Prosecutors aren't going to have to summon the oracle to figure out who'd want to disappear Dragon."

"Yeah, well, Maurie's not stupid. Nobody will ever hang that on him. In about a week, Dragon's beater car turns up at the airport. So the FBI searches all the flight manifests and, can you imagine, one of them shows Dragon boarded a plane home the same night Maurie was taking mud baths in the boonies. Had a reservation and all, paid his ticket in cash. Bureau questions the guys on Maurie's line and some are saying Dragon was talking about making some big-time money. Couple of them are even hearing from Aunt Tatiana who heard from Cousin Lugo how Dragon's back in the old country and acting real flush.

"Now the G, of course, they're up Maurie's hind end with a miner's light, because they just know he paid off dear old Dragon to boogie. Feebies tear up every bank account, they stick Maurie's bookkeeper in the grand jury, hoping to trace the money, but no luck. So they call Interpol to find Dragon, but he left no trail once he stepped off the plane.

"And of course, I'm young and dumb, and this is really killing me. Attorney-client, I can't talk about what I know, and I'm too petrified to do it anyway, but one Sunday I mosey back to where I picked Maurie up, just hoping to figure all this out for my own sake. Which I pretty much do. Maurie's in the chemical business, right? Ever hear of hazardous waste?"

"That's how Clarissa describes our marriage."

Elstner stopped to laugh. "Yeah, right. Well, this place, these days you'd call it a brownfield, a disposal site. My guess, it was owned by the outfit that hauled Maurie's stuff. Today, with the EPA, you probably have to have the Marines posted at the perimeter, but back then there's just a chain-link fence, and you can see somebody did a number on the padlock. Inside there are all these trenches, each longer than a football field, set about 20 yards apart and filled with rock and soil. The last one's open, maybe three, four feet deep with Styrofoam liner, and a couple (continued on page 292)Loyalty(continued from page 106) dozen 55-gallon drums of shit in there waiting to be buried."

"And 'RIP Dragon' written on one of the drums. Is that how it adds?"

"That's my arithmetic. I figure Dr. Maurie told Dragon he'd send him home rich, then took the guy down instead. Fella like Maurie, he'd kill you sooner than let you put the squeeze on him."

"And who got on the airplane with Dragon's passport?"

"My bet? One of the sons. Cousins, there's probably some resemblance. Besides, something like this stays at home."

"That's why you quit on Jack?"

"Hey, after this one, a nice real estate deal, that sounded just right. And even so, I've been scared all these years Maurie was gonna come for me with his meat ax or his latrine shovel or whatever it was he had in that briefcase. That's why this tale never got told. I mean," Elstner said, looking across the table, "how can you tell anyone a story like this?"

•

So that was what my pal Paul Elstner had told me several years before. By now I was seeing a good deal of Paul, because I had left Clarissa. I barely got out at first, but one of Paul's partners had deserted Elstner on their season tickets for the Hands basketball games over at the university, and I was happy to buy in.

Like most people who split up, I had told myself that I was starting a new life, a better life, a life in which I'd finally become my true self, but turmoil consumed most of my private moments, confining me within walls of pain. It is such a mystery, really, that you can stop loving someone. You grow up believing love is one of the epic forces of nature, like tidal patterns and the creeping of the earth's crust, an indomitable element. So how can it just go away? I would turn this question over in my head for hours at a time, sitting in my bare high-rise apartment and watching the city twinkle desolately at night.

I didn't know if I had married Clarissa for the wrong reasons or if she had changed, with the babies, the years at home, the death of her older sister and her mother. I could not explain why a somewhat wry, laconic woman, whom I'd found thrillingly bright when I first met her, became so obsessed with her children's health that barely a week passed without a visit to the pediatrician, or why at the age of 40 a person who had been a defiant atheist returned to the Catholic Church and insisted, with the same ferocity with which she had once spurned religion, that the boys be baptized in a faith I did not share. I could not explain any of it, the passions or the quirks that had grown unbearably grating over time, but we had ended up like most couples who don't make it—embittered rivals who saw each other as emblems of life's shortcomings.

My sons had remained with their mother. At all moments, I seemed to feel them behind me, like passengers left on some pier. They were both in high school, a sophomore and a senior. I felt awful for them. But I felt worse for myself.

I moved into an apartment building in Center City, not far from work. The building's population was mostly young, late-20s just-getting-starteds. I was weirdly aware of the number who moved out each week. Common sense suggested that they had fallen in love and were relocating to begin a life with someone else. The sight of furniture on dollies, of bags and boxes piled in the service elevator, seemed to seize all of my attention, like somebody calling my name.

I turned into one of those people who arrive home for a night alone, carrying as much as possible—the cleaning, something I'd had repaired and a few groceries for dinner. Twice a week I saw my sons. The other nights I tried not to drink too much, certain that this cataclysm would finally make me the gentle alcoholic my father was in his later years, always waiting for sunset and the first manhattan. I had been told that women would find a successful single man in his late 40s magnetic, but I felt too sad even to start in that direction. Eventually, I began attending the kind of tony intellectual events around the city at which I'd envisioned myself when I first came here for law school and which Clarissa for years had derided as a complete bore—art openings, symphonies, lectures. There were few singles at these events, and I often felt out of place, but I was desperate to make some effort at self-improvement.

One of these evenings, involving a fund-raising dinner and a reading by a poet celebrated in circles too narrow to mean much to me, was held in the West Bank condo of old acquaintances, Leo Levitz, a shrink, and his wife, Ruth, whose industrial-design firm has been an off-and-on client of mine for years. In their late 60s, the Levitzes had achieved an enviable settled grace. Vivid paintings and objects of primitive art they'd gathered from around the world crowded the track-lit corridors of their apartment. Alone, I studied each piece, deeply struck that a congenial married life could be reflected by such tangible beauty.

By 10, the gathering had thinned and I prepared to shirk the pretense I had made of being cheerful, humorous, of feeling I was of interest to other people. Shortly, I would again be on my own. I bade the Levitzes good-bye. Waiting in the small corridor outside their door for the elevator, I heard a vague thudding. I swore out loud when I realized it was the skylight overhead.

"I'm sorry?" A tall woman with straight black hair was working the key into the lock of her apartment across the hall. I'd noticed her once or twice during the evening, especially as she'd departed immediately before me. She smiled sociably, revealing a front tooth lapped over its neighbor. She had a long face and dark eyes, a woman close to my age who knew she still retained much of the appeal of youth.

"Is it raining out there?" I asked. It was fall, late November, and the prediction had been snow rather than rain. Without an umbrella, my topcoat would become sodden and emit a repellent scent that would taint the close air of my apartment.

"Take a look." Across the threshold, she gestured to her living room window. Staring down, I could make out both rain and snow, leaving a lethal glister on the streets. The smarter taxi drivers, who valued their lives and property, would already have called it a night.

She introduced herself as Karen Kolmar. Her apartment had soft yellow walls and deep Chinese rugs. A book about Coco Chanel was open on a cocktail table. We talked about the poet who'd read.

"His work seemed cold to me," she said. "But I suppose a lot of it was just over my head." She shrugged, not much concerned.

I would have said the same thing, I told her, but lacked the strength of character to admit it.

"I'm at peace as a middlebrow," she answered. I liked her. Self-awareness seemed a particularly appealing trait at the moment.

She asked whether it was the Levitzes or poetry that had brought me around, and in no time I had explained my situation in life, saying far too much about Clarissa. Karen Kolmar smiled philosophically. She was not wearing a wedding ring and no doubt had encountered her share of guys like me.

In fact, I soon picked out a photo of a fellow I figured for her beau, given the prominence with which the picture was displayed on the closed ebony lid of a baby grand in the corner. A healthy-looking older guy, he seemed mildly familiar, if only for his buoyant smile that appeared all too obviously manufactured for the sake of the camera. Looking at the photograph, I sized up my hostess's situation. A divorce. Some money. This guy who was at least 10 years too old for her but who probably paid a lot of attention. That, I was slowly coming to realize, was one more sadness in divorce, not merely getting to the middle of your life and confessing that the most basic things had not worked out but finding that you're one of life's bench players waiting to get on the court again with the rest of the second string.

"That's my father," she told me, when she caught my eye. "I just put up his picture a couple of days ago. We're having a rapprochement. My mother died and so we're being nice to one another. It might not last. We didn't speak for two years before this."

She asked if my parents were living. Neither was. Like her, I'd lost my mother recently. I wondered all the time if I would have left Clarissa but for that, if I'd hung on to my marriage for years for my mother's sake. I thought I might have. I told her that—I seemed willing to say anything, and she to listen to it appreciatively.

"I'm trying to figure out if my father is why I have trouble with men."

She didn't seem to me to have much problem with men. She knew what she was doing.

"Three-time loser," she added and waggled the fourth finger of her left hand.

"God, three times," I said, before I could catch myself. "I'd throw myself under a train."

That could have gone badly, but her look was sadly sympathetic.

"It gets easier," she said. "Unfortunately." She didn't have kids, though. That was different. She asked if I was thinking of going back. I wasn't, although Clarissa, after weeks in which she'd been shrill and recklessly accusing—no one person could ever love me as much as I wanted to be loved; I was trying to change her because I could not change myself—had recently turned plaintive. After all this time, she asked me. After all this time? It was the only thing that ever had any resonance.

When I got ready to leave, Karen emerged from another room with an umbrella.

"I won't melt," I said.

"You can bring it back." She smiled, enjoying the fact that she was so far ahead of me. Walking me to the door, she took my arm.

I was quite happy until, halfway downstairs in the elevator, it came to me that she looked a good deal like Clarissa.

•

I brought the umbrella back, naturally. I called ahead, and then it started to rain as soon as I got there, which led to a pretty good laugh. We just dashed around the corner and sat on the stools in a little coffee bar, talking about ourselves.

She ran the sales division of a chemical company her father had founded and sold several years ago to a big conglomerate. I figured she was one of those sleek women I noticed in airports, always looking resourceful and self-possessed in their dark tailored suits, able to climb onto the plane at the last instant and still somehow get their luggage into the carry-on.

"You don't really seem like a salesman," I told her. "Too sincere."

"That's why I'm good. I don't lie," she said. "I never lie." Her dark eyes rose over her paper cup in a measured warning. "I didn't believe I could handle sales. But I needed a job after my first divorce. And when I was a kid, I was always jealous that my brothers went to the office with my father." Her father, pushing 75 now, still ran the company under the terms of his buyout.

"How'd that work when you weren't talking to him?"

"E-mail." She laughed.

I was impressed with her rugged sense of humor about the way life had turned out. Her last name, for example, was her second husband's.

"You really wouldn't really call that a marriage. He was a country-club buddy of my father's, older and very polished, but it just never took. We were together six weeks, and kind of split up at a party one night and never were under the same roof again. I thought, Oh god, I'm not going to change all my credit cards again. I just did that. They were still coming in the mail, a different one each day. At some point, you have to start moving forward."

As we walked back to her place, a huge clap of thunder rattled the street, and the rain suddenly fell as if poured from a bucket. The small umbrella offered little protection, and I pushed her into a street-corner bus shelter where I kissed her. I was afraid it might seem like a moment from a movie, but I guess everybody wants some of that in her life.

"That was very stylish," she said, and rubbed one finger under her lip to deal with the lipstick smudge. "You're a stylish guy."

The next time I saw her, we ended up walking down to the river. It was drizzling again, but there'd been plenty of winter weather, and the River Kindle was covered by a solid frozen sheet. Standing on the ice, you could still feel the lurking movement beneath, the vibration of the Cory Falls a hundred feet away, the telltale swirls of the water and its many enigmas.

Rain glossed the surface, refracting the lights of Center City and making it possible to skate along. Karen had trained as a girl and did wonderful, graceful movements, skidding ahead on a pair of Keds, encouraging me to follow her. She's an adventure, I thought. This woman's an adventure. My skin went electric, not just about her but for myself.

•

"You're not going to say anything to her. Tell me you're not." Elstner and I had stopped for a beer after the basketball game, mostly so Paul could have a final cigar before he got home, where Ann did not permit them. "Maurie will dissolve my bones in a vat of acid."

I had figured it out a while ago, probably by the second time I saw Karen. The details were a while coming back to me. But by then, as I told Elstner, I was involved.

"For crying out loud," I said. "I won't say anything. I thought you'd think it was funny."

"Sure. Funny. I'll laugh as soon as I change my diaper." Elstner blustered his lips. "Have you met Dr. Moleva yet?"

I had, in fact, only a few days before, when I'd picked Karen up at their Center City office. His smile was disturbing. He had bad teeth, like a farm animal whose poor bloodlines couldn't be concealed. To his daughter, he was a source of never-ending vexation. At work he was imperious, then blamed his subordinates when his orders turned out to be wrong. As a father, he attacked her often and made a habit of overlooking what was important to her. He hadn't been able to remember my name, although she gave it to him three times in the few minutes we were together.

"Kind of your run-of-the-mill jerk," I said.

"And murderer," added Paul.

"She hates him, I think. You know. Underneath."

Elstner shivered again. "Christ," he said. "Why don't you go out with 25-year-old women like other guys your age?"

"Hey, cut me some slack. It won't make any difference."

Elstner groaned. "You think you can just know something like that about somebody and it won't matter?"

"Paul——"

"Listen. Did I ever give you advice about women?"

In our third year of law school, Elstner went out with a tall dark girl, an undergraduate who had the lean elegant moves of a whippet. Very moody. Very attractive. She smiled with notable reluctance. She seemed exotic because she knew a lot about motorcycles and introduced us to mescal—the saltshaker, the lime, the worm in the bottle. After their third date, I told Elstner I didn't think she was really right for him. To this day he seemed to agree, but two or three months later, on a whim, I called her myself. That was Clarissa. Elstner for one reason or another never said much, not even the kind of jokes you might expect, not when I married her or lived with her for 22 years, not even when I told him that our life together had become a barren misery and that I'd asked for a divorce. Maybe he thought I'd saved him. Or used him. He never said. I never asked.

"No," I told him, "you never gave me advice about women."

"Well," he said, "that's the only reason I'm not gonna start."

•

When you're having great sex, it seems to be the center of the world. Everything else—work, the news, people on the street—has a remote, second-tier quality, as if none of it will ever fully reach you. The rest of life seems a pretext, a recovery period before the shuddering starts again.

Over the holidays, Clarissa and I divided time with the boys. For Christmas she took them on the annual journey to Pennsylvania and her parents' home. Knowing their absence would be hard on me, I accepted when one of my partners offered his cabin up in Skageon. Clarissa hated the cold, and it had been years since I had passed any part of winter in the woods. On a chance, I invited Karen and she accepted, eager to avoid the annual holiday collisions with her father.

We left late on the 25th and made an elaborate Christmas dinner while it stormed outside. What followed were three of those crystalline days that occasionally bless the Midwest, when the snows magnify the available light and the lack of clouds leaves the air thin and exciting. We snowshoed for hours, then, exhausted by our treks, passed the long dark nights in bed, an intermittent languor of sleeping and reading, lovemaking and laughter. Driving back to the Tri-Cities, to the year-end deadlines of my law practice and the turmoil of my broken marriage, I felt the exhilaration of having finally, briefly, lived the life I'd longed for.

I spent the next couple of nights at Karen's apartment. I had second thoughts about the Levitzes, who also knew Clarissa, but they were away. Even in her own bed, Karen slept poorly. Initially I was afraid it was my presence, but she said she never got more than three or four hours in a row, which seemed somehow at odds with her resigned exterior. She would buck awake, thrashing with the demons of a savage nightmare.

"What was the dream?" I asked the second night.

She shook her head, unwilling or unable to answer. She was naked and had her arms wrapped about herself. When I laid my hand on her narrow back, I could feel her heart hammering.

"Go back to sleep," she said. "I'll get up until I calm down."

I asked what she would do.

"I have my things. I like cognac. I like Edith Piaf, in some moods. Or big symphonies. It's a good time to reflect."

Clarissa also did not sleep well. She read. In the middle of the night I'd find her propped on her pillow, a minute lamp clipped onto her book. The only pleasure I ever took in business travel was in not having to sleep with a pillow over my head.

Without warning Karen said, "I was dreaming about a fire." She was looking at the ceiling and a plaster rosette sculpted where a gas lamp had hung decades before. "I was in a fire with my father. I was watching the fire come toward him and there wasn't anything I could do."

"Frightening," I said.

"It's not what I dream that doesn't make sense to me. It's the way I react. All I had to do was shout, 'Watch out.' But the person I was in that dream—she didn't even know that shouting was possible. Why do you think you're yourself in a dream when you don't know the most basic things?"

Perhaps that was how life really was, I said, full of blind spots and the inability to do what seems obvious. She didn't take much to the suggestion.

"Do you dream about your father often?" I asked.

She wrinkled her mouth. "Why would you ask that?"

I didn't have an answer, not one I could speak. She went for her robe and told me again to go back to sleep.

"You know, my father likes you," she said in the morning, as I was driving her to work. "He says you're solid."

I wasn't sure what basis Maurie had to comment, although it was a remark that, a year before, I might have made about myself.

"He has a lot of good qualities," she added. "He's not all one way. Did you know he was a war hero?"

"Really? What kind of hero?"

"Are there kinds? A hero. He has medals. From Korea."

"Did he kill anyone?"

"God," she said. "What a question. Like I'm going to say, 'Daddy, who'd you shoot?' It was a war. He saved some people. He killed some people. Why else do they give you medals?" She kissed me before leaving the car, but bent to eye me from the curb. "What's your thing with my father?" she asked.

•

Karen and I spent New Year's Eve with the Elstners, enjoying dinner at their home, then, as midnight approached, a few minutes of revelry in the local hangout where Paul made an appearance most nights to smoke a cigar. I thought it had gone well—Elstner and I had engaged in our usual good-spirited mocking of one another, amusing the women—and when Paul and I went to a game later that week, he made it a point to say how much Ann and he had liked Karen.

"The only thing is," Elstner said, as he drove to the University Field House after dinner, "I nearly soaked my socks every time she mentioned her father. She always talk about him that much?"

"She works with him, Paul. He's her boss."

He gave an equivocal nod, clearly not inclined to question my hasty defense.

"Truth is," I added, "I always wonder how she'd be about her father if that story you told me had the right ending—you know, if Maurie got nabbed for offing his relative, and Karen knew it. Probably make a big difference, don't you think?"

"How's that?"

"She has no perspective on him. I mean, he's her dad. So whenever he clobbers her, she's inclined to think maybe it's her fault, that he's really a good guy underneath. But if she knew what a cruel character he is, an actual killer, that would have an impact." I was moving full throttle with the idea that had propelled me for months now, the belief that new perspectives and new information could make life a happier enterprise.

"Well, that didn't happen," he said. "Maurie's roaming free. And nobody's going to be diming him out now. Right?"

"Right," I said. "But it's strange knowing."

Paul had been keeping a close eye on the traffic. We were caught in the pregame rush, staggering a few feet and then stopping again as the cars funneled into the lot, but Elstner turned to me fully now. He might as well have said I told you so.

"Maybe strange is what you want, champ," he said.

"Meaning what?"

"Meaning you could have walked away as soon as you figured out who she was."

"Hey, I like this woman. More than 'like.'"

Paul had worked his mouth into a funny shape as he reflected. "Here," said Elstner, "mind if I tell you a weird story?"

"Another one?"

He paused to give me a sick smile, then asked, "Remember Rhonda Carling?"

"Rhonda Carling? The woman you went out with before Ann?"

"Her. Did I ever tell you about our sex life?"

"Christ, I don't think so."

"This was the bad old days, right? Virginity mattered." He grimaced. "Listen to me. 'Bad old days.' A man with two daughters."

"Don't act like a Cro-Magnon. Rhonda Carling and her virtue. I have the context."

"Well," he said, "she liked to play halvsies."

"Halvsies?"

"You know. To go just partway. So she remained, you know, intact."

"No," I said.

"Oh yeah," he said. "Now, I really dug Rhonda. And this halfway stuff, it had its moments. Kind of like surgery, very exact, and very exciting, with all the fuss and bother and holding back. And all the danger. I mean, I'm always trying to figure out what happens if we go one angstrom too far. Am I engaged or dead on the side of the road?"

Only Elstner, I thought to myself.

"But it was also pretty frigging strange. The whole thing really bugged me. What was wrong with her? Or me? It was bizarre, but it went on the whole time I was seeing her. Finally, I met Ann at her brother's at Thanksgiving, which is just about when Rhonda got interested in a guy she was working with, and we sort of faded away.

"One night, say six months later, I bumped into Rhonda at the A&P and we went out for coffee, just to sort of officially throw the dirt on the grave, and she tells me this other fellow has popped the question and something else. 'Are you hurt?' she says. 'My pride,' I say. She smiles, nicely, we liked each other, she says, 'Halfway's all you wanted, Paul.' And soon as she said it, I knew she had that just right."

Paul lowered the window to pay the parking attendant, then surged forward into the lot. As ever with Elstner, I was having a hard time following his logic.

"Meaning what? I should think about marrying Karen?" Even saying it seemed preposterous. I was still at the stage where I couldn't imagine being married to anyone but Clarissa.

Safely in a space, Paul threw the car into park and studied me.

"Forget it," he said finally. "It's just a story."

•

My law firm followed the quaint custom of holding a formal dinner at the conclusion of the firm's fiscal year in January. It was intended to celebrate our successes, but was frequently an occasion for teeth gritting among those who were upset about the annual division of spoils. I looked forward to having Karen with me, both to buffer me from the simmering quarrels and to show her off to my colleagues, before whom I'd suffered the shame of not holding together my home. Already in my tux, I swept by her office to collect her. She walked to the car mincingly, trying not to dirty her silk shoes on the icy street. She was in a long gown, its revealing crepe neckline visible in the parting of her coat. I whistled. She smiled as she peeked down through the car door, but made no move to get in.

"I can't go," she said. "There's a presentation tomorrow. My whole staff is upstairs. Somehow my father forgot to mention he had rescheduled with the customer, until he saw me dressed. I must have told him 10 times how excited I was to be going with you tonight." She leaned inside. "Will you kill me?"

"Not you. Better not ask about Maurie. I thought you said he liked me."

"He does. You're not the issue. Believe me." She shook her head in sad wonder. "Why don't you come back when you're done?" She gave a salacious little waggle to her brow. "I'll letcha take me home."

When I returned near midnight, I found her unsettled. She'd had words with her father, the usual stuff about his indifference to her. I was angry enough with him to relinquish my customary restraint.

"Have you ever kept track of how much time you spend being upset about Maurie?" I asked her.

"Who knows? Sometimes it seems as if I've lost years that way. What's the point?"

"I guess I wonder now and then why you put yourself in harm's way."

"You mean cut myself off?"

"Keep a distance. Nobody forces you to work with the guy."

"It's a family business. I'm in the family. And I refuse to just hand it all over to my brothers. You don't like my father, do you?"

I weighed my options. "I don't like the way he treats you."

"Neither do I, sometimes. But he's my father. And my problem." She did not speak for the rest of the ride.

I suspect we were each ready to call it a night. But we hadn't had many disagreements, and experience had taught us both the perils of parting angry. I came up. We had a drink and talked, then got around to doing what we did best.

As we groped, she slid from my arms, already naked below, and with a naughty grin pulled the belt from my trousers. I thought she was going for my fly, but instead she pushed me to a seated position on the bed, then threw herself across my lap. She bent one leg from the knee and touched her lip impishly. She put the folded belt in my hand.

"Spank me," she said.

I looked down at her behind as if it were a face. This was a new note between us. All I could think of to say was, "Why?"

"Why not? I feel like it."

"I don't think I can do that," I finally said.

"I'll enjoy it. I'm asking you to do it. This isn't whips and chains. Use your hand, if you'd rather. I'll enjoy it."

I tried one swat.

"Hard," she said. "Harder. Keep doing it. I'll say when I want you to stop. I'll enjoy it."

But I didn't.

"No," I said suddenly, and pushed her off my lap. I went for my clothing.

"What?"

"I don't want to be this to you," I said.

"Be what? The man who pleases me?"

"Not like that."

"It's what I want," she said.

"No," I said again and left.

•

"I think I have to tell her," I said to Elstner the next night. "About her father."

Paul took his time now. I'd been late and we'd skipped Gil's, settling instead for dogs we were gobbling down as we stood at a little linoleum table fixed to one of the elderly pillars in the Field House.

"You can't tell her," Paul said then. "That's all. You can't. You can't for my sake. And her sake. And your sake. You can't. This isn't comedy. This is real life. This guy is a murderer. And smart enough to realize there's no statute of limitations. He killed a man to keep from getting caught. You think he wouldn't do it again?"

"Paul, she wouldn't say anything to Maurie. I'd make her promise."

"Like you promised me?"

"I'll keep you out of it."

"He'll figure it out. She knows we're friends." Paul seldom took advantage of his size, but he'd drawn himself up to his full height. I wanted to explain what it was like to be alone, to feel you have a chance to regain the purpose love alone imparts.

"Paul, it might make a difference. It might open her eyes. To this whole thing with her old man. I really think it might."

"You think people open their eyes just because you tell them to look? There's no happily-ever-after on this. You're dreaming."

I kept shaking my head. "This is your fault, Elstner."

"My fault? Because I told you a story years ago about the father of some girl you didn't even know existed?"

"No," I said. "No. Because of what you said last time. About stopping at halfway? I'll say it to myself now, if I don't do this. I want to go for it all with this woman. To see if she can really be what I need. So don't tell me it's her or you."

Elstner stalked away to drop his little paper basket, now bearing only a few specks of relish, into the trash. When he came back, he said, "I'm not telling you it's her or me. I'm telling you that you don't have that choice. You gave me your word. And I have a God-given right to sleep at night. So you can't tell her." He stared at me, giving no ground. Instead he was calling in the cards guys like to think they have with one another, especially honor and loyalty.

Inside the arena, the horn blared, indicating the end of the shootaround. It was game time. Paul's eyes had never left mine.

"I can't tell her," I said at last.

•

I told her anyway.

I didn't see Karen or call her for several days after that encounter in her bedroom. Four or five nights along, I returned from work to find two items at my apartment door, a little bud vase with two sweetheart roses in fresh water, and a narrow box. Inside was a pair of suspenders with a note. "Forget about your belt.... Sorry to mess up.... Call me. Please."

I met her for lunch the next day.

"I offended you," she said, as soon as the waiter had left us in peace.

"No."

"I know I did. I didn't think. We've been so compatible that way, I just got caught up in my own stuff. I was stupid."

"It's not that." I felt she was taking me as puritanical or blinkered. "There are just some things I have in my head."

"What things?"

"I can't explain."

"Try," she said. "Please. This doesn't have to be an impasse."

I avoided several questions and she grew more imploring.

"What is it?" She leaned across the table to touch my hands. "What's theproblem? What aren't you saying?" In her long face, I saw an urgency no different than my own, a will to connect and to escape the complexities of what had left us alone, to be a better person with a better life. In the end, it was exactly as I had told Elstner. I could not stop halfway, without taking the chance.

"There's something I've been told," I answered. I was surprised at the smoothness with which the tale emerged. I'd heard a story. From a reliable source. Someone I knew. A former prosecutor. I was so intent on the telling that I did not at first notice her draw away on the other side of the table, but when I finished, she was watching me with a bitter smile.

"That?" she asked. "That ridiculous, moldy rumor? Do you know how long people have been saying that? It's absurd."

It was one of those moments. In the crowded dining room, I thought I could somehow hear my watch tick. After a confused instant, I decided she had simply not understood. I repeated myself, more slowly, but her look soon hardened with suspicion. That glass wall I had smashed against so often with Clarissa had descended. Karen stared through it with appalling remoteness.

"And why are you telling me this?" she asked then. "Is that how you see me? Is this something genetic?"

"Of course not."

"So what is the point? I'm neurotic? Because my father is supposedly some hoodlum?" With vehemence, she shifted in her chair. "You know, every divorced man I meet either has had no therapy or way too much. Go shrink somebody else's head." I reached for her as she marched from the table. "No!" she said and swung her arm away violently. "It's me anyway. You don't want me. My father is just an excuse."

She disappeared around a pillar. In her wake, I was miserable, but I knew two things for certain. It was over. And I was never going to tell Paul.

•

In late March, the Hands ended a dismal season with one more agonizing loss. They took the game to overtime, then, while they were trailing by a single point with only a few seconds left, Pokey Corr, the Hands' only star, broke free on the baseline and ascended toward the basket. He wound up and slammed his intended dunk shot against the back iron of the rim. Along with everyone else in the stadium, Pokey watched as the ball floated along an arc that brought it down almost at center court as time expired.

Like a losing bettor at the track, Elstner threw the season's last ticket into the air. Then we started up toward the exit, inching ahead as the crowd merged into the walkways. From one stair above, I felt the weight of someone staring. It was Maurie Moleva.

"Oh, Christ!" he said. "Look at this. The heartbreaker." His tone wasn't completely malicious. His crooked brown teeth even appeared briefly as he smiled.

"It was mutual," I said.

"Not how I hear it. How you keeping?"

I said I was okay.

"Gone back to your wife yet?"

I absorbed Dr. Moleva's estimate of my situation, which he must have shared with his daughter long ago. With Maurie, anything that came at Karen's expense was never waylaid by circumspection.

"Not so far as I know," I told him. Clarissa had lately taken to mentioning counseling, an option she'd adamantly refused during the years I'd suggested it. Now I had no idea how to regard her surrender. I was fairly sure I no longer had the strength or interest. Oddly, though, there were moments when I felt sorry for her, sorry to see that loneliness had broken her will. Clarissa liked to portray herself as a person beyond regrets.

Maurie introduced me to his companion, a woman not quite his age. Reliably himself, Elstner had stood, face averted, as if studying something on the empty basketball court behind us.

"Doctor, did you ever meet Paul Elstner?" Elstner went rigid as I placed my hand on his shoulder, but he turned and greeted Moleva.

"Not so as I recall," Moleva answered. "But I don't remember my own name these days. Bad eyes, bad back, bad memory. I'm beginning to think I'm not getting younger."

We all laughed as if this were original, then, when the crowd began moving, parted with a genial wave.

Elstner was still agitated when we settled in my car. "Thanks," he said. "Thanks a lot. I really needed to renew acquaintances."

"I didn't have any choice. And besides—he doesn't remember you. I really don't think he does. Not tonight anyway."

"Probably not most nights," said Elstner. "That's how he sleeps."

I edged my car out of the lot.

"So you never told her?" Elstner asked me. "I'd have bet a whole lot you told her."

"I told her."

He swore at me. "I knew you'd tell her."

"I thought it would make a difference, Paul."

"Screw you. You're too old to believe people change because you want them to. They change because they get tired of themselves."

"She didn't believe it anyway," I said. "And I knew you'd be fine, because she'd never tell her old man about it."

"And how's that?"

"Because she'd never take the chance on seeing it might be true."

The remark cast him down into silence as we swept into the lights and rush of the highway. After a few minutes his indignation rose up again.

"I can't believe you told her," he said. "Jesus Christ. Why do I put up with you?"

"Why do you?" I asked with sudden earnestness. The question seemed to exasperate him more than anything I'd said yet.

"Because you're part of my life," said Elstner. "How many people do we get in a lifetime? And I'm loyal. I'm a loyal person. Loyalty is an undervalued virtue these days. Besides, I have too much respect for myself to think I wasted 25 years on you. Or that I just figured you out. You've always been trying to find the Holy Grail with women. You haven't changed either."

"Well, apparently then, I expected better from her."

"Don't laugh, pal." My sarcasm had provoked Elstner to point a finger. "The older I get, the more I'm just watching the same movie. He's and she's, the attraction is that they're different, right? Everybody's looking for the other piece. And then nothing makes them crazier. She's upset because he's not like she is, or vice versa, and then there are nimrods like you who actually think different oughta mean better, all the time hoping that will make you better, too. Grow up."

With that blow delivered, he did not speak until we reached his house. I was furious, but also aware that I was due a lashing of some kind. A client, a trader from the exchange, had given me a couple of Cubans. I'd left them on the dashboard for Paul and remembered them now, fortuitous timing. Elstner studied the label with appreciation.

"Smoke one with me," he said.

Hanging around with Paul, I'd puffed on a short cigar now and then and saw the wisdom of a peace pipe. I rolled down all the windows. It was a fairly mild night for mid-March, and we lit up the Cubans and reclined the front seats and talked in a dreamy reconciled way, reviewing the season. The Hands, who'd been a Final Four team within the last decade, were not even going to the Big Dance this season. We tried at great length to discern the ephemeral difference between winning and losing, how coaching and spirit contribute to talent. We talked about great teams we'd seen and, by contrast, recollected our own failed careers as high school athletes.

Finally, Elstner decided it was time for him to get inside. I watched as Paul, with his sloppy loping stride, made his way to the house he'd lived in for decades. From the door, he gave an elaborate wave, like a campaigning politician. I thought he was marking the end of the season or the peace reestablished between us, but over time the image of him there on his stoop, grandly flagging his hand, has returned to me often, and with it the suspicion that he meant to acknowledge more. An intuitive creature like Elstner probably knew before I did that I was headed back to Clarissa, that she and I would find a new mercy with each other and make better of it, and that, as a result, I would see him less. Paul never required any explanation. In fact, I had no doubt that reviving my marriage was what he would have counseled, if I'd ever allowed him to lift his embargo on advice.

I remember all this because we lost Paul Elstner last week. He developed cancer of the liver and slipped off in a matter of months. I saw him often during his illness. One day he cataloged all the other ways he'd worried he might die—an extensive list with Maurie Moleva still on it—but he spoke the name without rancor. It turns out that there are far too many ironies as one's life draws to a close to linger much with a small one like that.

It was Paul's wish, another of his harmless eccentricities, to be buried in cigar ash. On a bitterly cold day, with the graveyard mounded with snow, the casket was lowered and the entire burial procession was presented with lighted Coronas. Paul had many friends, of course, and we formed a long, moving circle around the open grave, each person approaching to tamp whatever ash had developed since the last time she or he had gone past. The proceedings had all the comic elements Elstner would have savored, with designated puffers to keep the cigars going for the nonsmokers and many mourners making smart comments about the smell, which they figured would linger in their clothing forever, Paul's unwelcome ghost. This rite continued for more than half an hour, with the group dwindling in the cold. I was among the last. The ember by now was near the fingertips of my gloves. Before surrendering the last bit to the earth, I stood above the casket, desperate to speak, but able to summon only a few fragments to mind. All our longings, I thought. All our futility. The comfort we can be to each other. Then Clarissa and I went home.

"He's in a Seersucker Suit. With Mud up to his Knees. He's Jiggling a Chain in one Palm. This is Bad Voodoo. I'm Definitely Scared."