Suburban Jigsaw

Lucille is obsessed with love's great mystery. When she and Larry first moved to this pretty neighborhood, her notion of love was inextricably tied up with marriage and family. Larry, whose business career had taken off when he cornered the market on disposable wearables, was feeling ecstatically full of himself (Top of the world, Ma! he liked to exclaim, rearing high above her when about to have his orgasm, which was always a thrilling moment for her as well and brought on an orgasm of her own, or something like one), and their lovemaking was delightfully spontaneous and lighthearted. One of the products he had in his portfolio was candy panties, of which he was sent samples, and not only did he like to eat them off her, he also wore them (he was so cute in those thin little things!) and let her do the same. They tasted like cotton candy, and licking them off seemed both very sophisticated and like being a child again at the circus. They simply had fun and, almost as an afterthought, had children, whom they also loved, and she thought this was how it would be until they got old and loved each other in another, quieter way and devoted themselves to their grandchildren.

But then she met Pavel the handyman. He came to clean out their gutters, and he quite bluntly, and quite excitingly, said he'd like to clean out hers. She became flustered and resisted--this would not do at all--but the next thing she knew, she was into something quite different from anything she had ever experienced before. She doesn't even know if she should still call it love. It is certainly full of passion and desire and is incredibly erotic, but there's not much of simple fun or tenderness in it. It's closer to the bone than that, an expression that, when she used it, made Pavel laugh. Pavel calls what they do fucking, a word she has never used before, not out loud, but that's just what it is, something that brings out the animal in her, overriding mind and heart. And conscience. And good taste. Vulgar, yes, it is. Though she knows it is wrong and dangerous and has tried to stop it, she can't. He feels like a giant in her; whichever way he takes her, he completely fills her up, and now she knows what an orgasm really is, and she suffers from an insatiable desire for more and more. Pavel teases her about this as she invents job after job for him to do, and he often takes off his pants while he does the jobs and makes her wait and wait, staring at his big hammer, as he calls it, and his strong, handsome bottom while he changes a washer or paints a patch of ceiling or gets down on his hands and knees to rewire a wall plug.

This mad obsession with the handyman has caused a great deal of turmoil and remorse in Lucille, for she loves Larry and the little family they have made together and she knows he is true to her and worth all the Pavels in the world and she really doesn't want to hurt him, while at the same time the fun they were having in bed together isn't really all that much fun anymore. She is talking about this in a somewhat coded way (she pretends to be talking about a book she has read) one afternoon in the local bookstore coffee lounge with her young friend Rick from the neighborhood literary society, a gentle fellow who works in the bookstore and writes poems about the sadness of life for the Sunday supplement of the city newspaper. He reminds her of several books they have read together in the literary society, which celebrate love in all its varieties, from the merely physical to the most pure and transcendent, and he gets down a copy of Madame Bovary and reads a passage from it to her, and while he is doing that he takes her hands in his and interrupts his reading to tell her he adores her, he has since the moment he saw her when she first came to one of their Tuesday-night meetings, when they were discussing Women in Love. When I saw you, it was like a miracle, he says. And so, well, something else gets started, and again it is something quite different.

Lucille's husband, Larry, is also suffering pangs of turmoil and guilt, though they don't show on his face because he is by nature such a happy fellow. Larry's success in life, as in business, has been due to his singular focus, which was how he made his fortune on disposable wearables. When Larry sets his mind on something, he sticks to it and stays by it, and that includes his relationship with Lucille, who is his sexy, loving helpmeet and the mother of his children. He knows that such lifelong relationships risk being stifled by routine, so he works hard at enlivening theirs with novelty and romantic surprise. But Larry is also a kind and generous man touched by the pain and sorrow of others, so when their neighbor Opal, a demure widow living alone since the tragic highway death of her husband (the perils of commuting!), asked him for help in opening a stuck window in her bedroom and then fell into his arms sobbing, he felt somehow humanly obliged to help her alleviate her terrible loneliness. After all, what did it cost him? Another disposable. And she was so profoundly grateful, weeping afterward like a happy child and holding him tight and saying he was the loveliest man she had ever known. She has often had things that needed fixing since then, and Larry has found much gratification in being of service to a fellow being in need, but also a certain anguish. He is not a man who keeps secrets well and fears for the moment when dear, faithful Lucille finds out. Already he is practicing what he might say to her should that happen.

Victor, who lives on the other side of the widow's house with his little homebody wife, Evelyn, has fewer scruples. When the widow asked him for help with a stuck window, he didn't even bother to take his tools with him, other than the one he knew she really wanted. She was passionate and tender and grateful, if somewhat straitlaced (there are many things she hasn't done and won't do), but it was better than fucking a prostitute, which, since he moved here at his boss's urging (a good place to raise children, he said with a smirk around his bobbing cigar), has been his usual fare, other than Evelyn, who seems to get little pleasure out of it and gives little. Victor, though frustrated by the widow's entrenched naivete, is also grateful and takes what she offers him, treating her like the proper lady she is. Victor is a top-rank insurance salesman who has known many women in his day, though he has found himself somewhat cut off from the action in this neighborhood, so he is glad that at least the widow is available, and when he hasn't been sent off traveling by his boss, which is all too often these days, he visits her at least once a week to unstick her windows. At one point Victor met with his boss to ask about cutting back on the travel--it was taking the starch out of him, and he wasn't seeing enough of his kids--but his boss said he was doing a great job, raised his pay and sent him out on the road again. Victor knows there's a lot going on out here in the suburbs, there always is, these places are made for it, just a matter of getting your tab in the right hole, but he and Evelyn are apparently living on the wrong street. His boss is a generous guy to work for, but he is a fat, ugly old fart reduced to fucking whores (he passed a phone number on to Victor) and no longer appreciates the subtler things in life. Victor keeps his eye on the housing ads and stays in touch by phone with Homer, a local real-estate agent with the style of a fagged-out undertaker. Victor has told him what he's looking for, but the dismal creep never seems to get the picture.

He is a creep, but lrene is attracted to horny, melancholic losers like Homer as long as they are not married (married guys are pushovers but always have the same irritating hang-ups); they are fun to seduce, and because they have no will of their own they are usually ready to play any game she proposes. For lrene love is exciting only when it's theatrical and transgressive. Her unsuspecting lovers are really supporting actors in a licentious drama of sexual outlawry starring lrene. Sometimes quite literally: She has videocams mounted in her bedroom, where there is only a big black mat on the floor, and she has hired professional (continued on page 151)Jigsaw(continued from page 100) photographers and filmmakers to follow her on some of her public escapades, posting the results on the Internet. She hangs out in the corner bar where she picks up her co-stars, as she calls them, and one night she picked up Homer there. She sat down beside him at the bar and started talking with him about the utter madness of the so-called civilized world, striking a chord with Homer, and pretty soon she had his pants open and his sex in her hand, thumbing him off. She spun him on his stool to send his spunk flying into the midst of the patrons standing around the bar, with the consequence that they dragged Homer off his stool in disgust and thumped the daylights out of him while Irene sat watching from her perch, clutching herself between her legs with both hands, dizzy with ecstasy and trying not to fall off her stool.

Homer had had a few that night and was never quite sure what happened or how, except that he remembered thinking when she pulled his dick out that it was both completely insane and the most glorious thing that had happened to him since he got dumped out of puberty. The end result was seriously depressing, but then so was much of his life, so he hasn't been able completely to disavow it even though it cost him a tooth and a shiner. When Homer is down in the dumps, which is most of the time, he tries to look up cheerful Lily with the golden curls, who will sleep with just about anybody in the neighborhood, even a fucked-up depressive like himself, the only problem being to catch her when she's free. He had her to himself for a while when she was house hunting, a lost golden age he mourns. They tried out every place he took her to, sometimes on kitchen counters or the odd carpeted floor, mostly standing up on bare boards against a freshly painted wall beside curtainless windows (once he saw crazy, beautiful Irene passing by, dressed only in a wide-brimmed fluorescent orange hat with green flowers and purple stilettos: Did she know he was in there?) and whenever possible in front of fitted mirrors. Lily's desire, not his. Homer never looks at one of the damned things, for he is never cheered by what he sees there. Lily had been recently divorced and said she wanted to be in the middle of the social whirl, and eventually he found her the perfect place, complete with pool and bedrooms with mirrored ceilings, and though they had a lot of fun when they found it, it was really bad luck because that ended his exclusive rights. In fact, since moving in she has seemed only to be tolerating him, so even the occasional happy moment with her is cause for further gloom. Homer knows what Victor is looking for and has a line on a property that might work for him, but he really doesn't want more competition for Lily's time. He has other options, though even more depressing--he can let Irene mess him up again, for example--and fresh clients are always coming along who are excited by the glamour of empty rooms and good for a quick one-off. But Lily is the only one who can lift him out of himself, and he needs her from time to time as a junkie needs a fix.

The property Homer has in mind for Victor belongs to a gynecologist named Oscar, who is thinking of selling up and changing neighborhoods while he still has a reputation and a practice left and before some husband shoots him. Oscar knows the real-estate agent is somewhat enthralled by that wiry exhibitionist who is often seen, out on the street or in the corner bar, as stitchless as the women in his private examination room, and admittedly there is something electric about the little sprite, but though intense, perverse women appeal to him, the kicks she delivers are not really where Oscar's appetites lie. Oscar needs physical pain, not mere humiliation. The lash arouses him, giving or receiving, bondage does. The apparati of dominatrices give him an erotic charge, and he keeps his own doctor's office stocked with exotic toys. He takes his punishment from professionals and deals it out to willing submissive women. Of whom there are never few. He is not cruel--he is a healer, after all--and in fact the threat of pain, especially when one is helpless, is always more stimulating than pain itself, as his women all agree, no matter their predilections, but there has to be real pain from time to make the threat of pain more than a game of make-believe. It was Sheila who taught him that principle by strapping him over a velvet horsing stool the first time he consulted her and whipping him till he screamed. Now just the strapping, the feel of velvet against his groin, the sight and sound of the whip, do it for him. Her foot between his shoulder blades, her heated curling iron. He will miss Sheila if he leaves the neighborhood.

As will Wanda miss her doctor if he goes. She went to him for a checkup, fearful she might have caught something from a casual, almost accidental fling with a sad sack who came to give an estimate on their home at a time when her husband was worried his bank might be transferring him to another branch. She was right; she has had to go back every week for further treatment. Call it that. It's pretty awesome. Getting a dose was maybe the most interesting thing that has ever happened to her, if she really did and he didn't just make it up to keep her coming back. Whatever, no matter. On her first visit the doctor asked her to strip down completely, and he buckled her to an examining table with her legs spread apart and her knees up. She had left her socks on, and he peeled them away slowly, one by one--as if skinning her, making her more naked than she ever thought she could be--all the while watching her somberly through his thick glasses as she went wet between the legs. Then he put little clamps on her to open her up and poked all sorts of things up her, including his whole hand, his fingers pushing and probing. It hurt, and she knew he was trying to hurt her, but his crisp white jacket was open, and she could see he was enormously excited and there was a kind of fire in his goggly eyes, and that excited her, too. Her total helplessness did. It was like being trapped in somebody else's nightmare, terrifying but excitingly vivid. He could kill her, she knew, and she could do nothing about it. She was at his mercy, and he doesn't seem to have a lot of that. Being what he wants her to be is what protects her.

Sheila also hopes the doctor will stay. He is one of her most responsive and malleable clients, and he pays well. Love doesn't factor into it, never does. If anything, Sheila has the corner of her eye on Odette. Most of Sheila's men are pathetic little self-hating wimps, which is to say they are also in love with themselves; they often like to watch their punishment in mirrors. She hates them and finds a certain satisfaction in castigating their flabby suburban souls and corrupt, pallid flesh, but no pleasure. Igor is by nature a tougher sort, though still a narcissist, one of those pompous self-made men these neighborhoods are always full of, but he wants only to be tied up in leather thongs and paddled from time to time. He says it reminds him of his school days and makes him feel like a kid again. He really doesn't have a clue about the true nature of her art, which is about progression, not regression. It takes an unusual imagination to be able to grasp that and go with it, and the doctor is so endowed. Not only has she been able to push him into greater and greater depths of depravity and pain (which is Sheila's definition of growing up), she finds she is learning from him as she goes, not about technique but about the deeper meaning of her art. Which at some level is about love, after all.

Odette, like big Sheila, who frightens her with her strange sideways glances, is also a businesswoman, but she has much less personally at stake. It's just a job. Art she doesn't know, though skills, yes. She is good at her work and, in this expensive neighborhood, well paid for it. No one has ever complained, and they keep asking for her services. In fact, she makes more money than the guy she lives with, which helps keep the arrogant pig in his place. Mostly it's just the old slap and tickle with a few toys of the trade thrown in, but she has her inevitable share of perverts, too, and can roll with that, though she has her limits. Fantasy's okay, dressing up is, if guys want to wear panties and high heels, fine, and she lets her clients choose their favorite orifices, it's all the same to her. She even tolerates the old guy with the handlebars who tries to sell her insurance on her asshole while buggering her (she also services his subordinate, a regular guy who wants only to get his rocks off, and she figures if she could talk them into it she could take on both of them at once and make double the pay). But Odette hates pain of any kind and doesn't understand how people can be turned on by it. Some guy smacks her bottom, that sucker is out of there and he's not coming back. Pinches, love bites, bruising, same thing. House rules. Dishing it out is not fun for her either, for she has a tender heart, but she has a customer who wants it that way, and she submits to the idea only because it's part of the profession and he's a big spender. He likes her to wear a riding helmet and boots and get on his fat, hairy back and swat his withers with a riding crop. Odette imagines him to be the thug she lives with and is able to lay it on him with vindictive vigor at least for a stroke or two, but then she just gets bored and is reduced to draping him over her lap and, while examining her nails, stubbing out cigarette butts on his behind.

Lily shares a lot of Odette's aptitudes and attitudes (she doesn't know this; they have seen each other at a distance, shopping in the neighborhood boutiques, but have never spoken), though she would never think of charging money for any of it and in fact often helps out her lovers, especially quality studs like the guy who comes to fix her plumbing and clean her pool or the sweet melancholic boy from the bookstore who brings her books she never reads and adores her madly, or so he says. And why not? She is indeed adorable. Not all her lovers are so desirable, and once they've had a little fun together some of these guys seem to think they own her and are hard to get rid of. That bluesy dork who sold her her house, for example, worse than her ex-husband. She should probably be more discriminating, but it's really not in her nature. As for the neighborhood doctor, Lily also hopes he'll stay. He's a beastly sonuvabitch and has truly weird ideas (she'll never forget the time she went to him for an examination when she thought she was pregnant! it's a good thing she wasn't!), and she likes pain even less than Odette, taking just about everything there is for it, even when she's not suffering any. But the doctor makes up for the rough stuff by providing her with all the painkillers, antibiotics, amphetamines, tranquilizers and contraceptives she wants, and he just fills out the pattern of the neighborhood somehow. She's not sure she'd be who she is if he left. Everything happens around Lily and her swimming pool, and he is something of what happens, and now that she has located herself here and is happy she wants everything to stay that way.

If Lily is surrounded by lovers and admirers, no one even notices Evelyn. Sometimes when she can get a babysitter she goes to the Tuesday-night literary-society meetings and sits in the back of the room, and they don't even know she is there. Shop clerks look right through her. She could walk down the street in her birthday suit, like that wild little girl on the other side of the neighborhood, and people would not even tip their hat. Not that she ever would do that. She is happy being nondescript and unnoticed. It was she who chose this house far from the center of things, even though it's not in the nicest part of town. She stays at home and keeps house and makes fruit jellies and feeds the children when they come home from school and tends the back garden and watches television and waits for Victor, who is gone a lot of the time now, to return from his travels. So just how she ended up in bed in the middle of one morning with her husband's boss, Evelyn is not sure. It is not the sort of thing that ever happens to her, but then no one has ever asked before, so maybe it might have happened all the time. It began almost as soon as they moved in, on the day Victor left on one of his sales trips; it was as if he were there waiting for her. He was very persuasive, and somehow she felt cornered. Didn't she want to help her husband, she was asked, and wasn't this the easiest way to do it? It's true, Victor has kept getting raises ever since, though she has seen less and less of him. Not that she misses him all that much. When he is home he complains all the time about all the traveling he is being asked to do, about the stupid street they live on and about that nuisance of a widow next door who doesn't seem to be able to change a lightbulb for herself. And then he is no sooner here than gone, and even as his car is pulling out of the drive, there's her husband's boss back in her bed again, puffing on one of his big brown cigars, letting the ash fall where it may and mostly on her chenille bedspread. He likes to do dirty things, but then so does Victor. Evelyn has always had the feeling she has never met the right man in her life.

Lucille is one of those who have failed to notice Evelyn at the literary-society meetings, but then she fails to notice just about anyone there other than her beautiful young poet, who conducts the meetings. Lucille, at a time in her life when she thought romance was a thing of the past, has found herself quite astonishingly head over heels in love. It is a love unlike any she has ever known, so profound and moving it almost makes her bones ache. They just fit in all ways, and he adores her as she adores him. But it is also an ill-fated love, for it has no logical outcome: She is a happily married woman with children (whom she has been neglecting, she knows, dropping them off at nursery schools or with babysitters; she must do something about that), and sooner or later they will have to bring this divine madness to an end. But not now, not now; it would break her heart--and his. Of late at the society, they have been discussing a book by a Russian, and Lucille has wanted to protest that she doesn't think an older man seducing a child is very nice, but then she realizes that her relationship with Rick is not much different and she has no right to be critical. Rick is so tender about her age, much nicer than the girl in the novel. He kisses her wherever time has made its mark and gasps with wistful joy when he fondles her breasts, which in truth have seen better days. When they first made love and he was so eager to see everything, she worried about her stretch marks, but he wrote a poem about them, which was the sweetest thing. It was just for her; he didn't publish it in the Sunday supplement, thank goodness. She still finds jobs for Pavel to do, but that's like a separate part of her life, somewhere she goes from time to time, like to the movies--or, better said, to the library, for her time with the handyman amounts to a kind of self-study and search for the true breadth and meaning of love while she is still young enough (she feels so young!) to do so. Lucille thought she was tired of her body, but suddenly she just loves it.

Pavel is great demand in the little community, a craftsman much appreciated who can crack any problem, but when he doesn't have jobs to do and his woman is playing her trade and he can't go back to the house, he often goes for a swim in Lily's pool. Provided that Lily, the hottest piece in the neighborhood, is not entertaining some other guy. Pavel likes to swim bareassed, watched admiringly by the divorcée, also in the altogether, which she wears well. He has often told her she could make a killing on the game, but she only smiles and says she has enough money and doesn't like the business world. Sometimes she jumps in the pool with him and they thrash around a bit in the way kids do, but mostly she just squats at the edge of the pool with her drink in one hand and his in the other, and he comes by from time to time to give her a lick to salt his drink and tell her what a princess she is and what a sweet coozie she has. The handyman follows the old rule of love, treating sluts like ladies and ladies like sluts, and though he doesn't succeed too well at the first part, he is a master of the second. And anyway it works with Lily either way; she's happy girl. She likes it all ways when it comes to the main feature, but above all after a cool hit or two (she has her own steady supplier, whom Pavel taps into indirectly) on her big round satin-sheeted bed under the ceiling mirror.

Rick has been there, gazing up through Lily's things at himself, what he could see of himself, his hands squeezing the cheeks of her bottom, her head with its tight blonde curls, matching those now scuffing his chin, bobbing away between his raised knees like a--what? Like an animated merkin, a word he has discovered in a book he's reading and hopes he's using correctly. It was a dazzling sight, and he felt as he sometimes feels when sitting beside her pool, gazing into its cerulean depths: as if he is being sucked down (or up) into the tortex of...of...what did that Norwegian writer call it? A maelstrom. The dizzying maelstrom of love. From which there is no escape, only surrender. When Lily walked into the bookstore and went straight to the back, where they keep the more salacious material, he fell immediately in love with her and told her he adored her, and the next thing he knew, there he was, under the mirror. Of course, his true love is Lucille; with her he feels like Lancelot with Queen Guinevere. It is a noble passion that lifts him above himself, and he is utterly devoted to her and will love her forever. Even if forever, as he knows, is merely a literary convention. Her fading beauty breaks his heart. Sometime, gazing at her during an embrace while kissing away her worry lines, tears come to his eyes. Lily he thought of at first as just a kind of adventure on the side, a bit of casual sallying forth of the errant sort, but he underestimated love's overmastering force, as so many characters in novels do, usually to their regret, for in spite of himself he has come to love her madly, adoring her with all his heart, as she adores him. She quite literally lifts his spirits, not only with the little pills she gives him (so you won't be so sad, she says) but also with her lightness of being, her sweet vulnerability, her tender incarnation of impermanence, ephemerality, the phantom self, the human tragedy.

Not all love is so ennobling or inspiring. Rick knows this. He has read a lot of books about the perverse side of love, its depravities and obsessions, and so he was not completely surprised when he also fell under the spell of a strange, wild enchantress in the bar on the corner by the bookstore. Rick often stops in the bar for a few drinks after work to meditate on the puzzle of life, that grand enigma, trying to put the pieces together, as one might say, and one might say, and one night, one thing following upon another, he found himself making mad, passionate love to frenetic creature in the lit street window of his bookstore, right in the middle of a display of popular books on religion and mysticism and before a fascinated audience out in the street, an audience that eventually included the police. He was arrested and lost his job at the bookstore, but he got it back again when Lily talked to the owners and bought a thousand dollars' worth of cookbooks. That should have been the end of it, especially when he discovered the entire display-window episode on the Internet (his face is thankfully somewhat obscured; Lucille may not recognize him and probably knows nothing about computers anyway), but even though the bewitching nymph is dragging him down into the baser side of himself and into further danger, he has kept going back to the bar; he can't stop himself. He is completely in her power. She is a veritable spider woman, a Circe, a voracious Lorelei (he has written a prose poem called "The Succulent Succubus," but the Sunday supplement has not yet accepted it). And the terrible truth is he loves her no less than any of the others and has told her so, choking up with the emotion of it even as she tied him to the lamppost, and he fears there may be no end to his capacity for that notorious and enigmatic affection. He feels like an unhappy character in a postmodern novel, condemned to live forever inside a form he cannot escape. A man by love possessed.

Wanda is also a prisoner of strange love, but what or who she is in love with she can't quite say. It is not exactly the doctor, who is not even attractive and has very hairy hands, but more like some kind of terrible, compelling power that is inside him like a demon and that overwhelms her and makes her feel as though she is melting. Each time she has been back for a checkup, he has found new things to do with wires and big steel things and clamps and needles and a little stiff whip like a magician's wand that he uses on her when giving her hot enemas, and even before the straps are buckled she is already having the most ferocious orgasms and at the same time peeing herself in terror. She has never known anything like it. Her husband will make love only if she works at arousing him, and then always passively, with her on top doing everything. It's hardly worth it. It's as if he's never gotten over his nursemaid giving him his baths and pinching his little nipples. The doctor won't let her touch him--in fact, she can't locked down like that--but sometimes he gets too excited, especially when she starts to cry, and he has to excuse himself for a minute, after which he is always crueler than ever. It is a quirky sort of love. They never talk about what they are doing; they just silently play their parts--her shameful sickness, his furious treatments--like naughty little kids playing doctor.

Though his wife ridicules his passivity, Alan has also learned about love through playacting. In fact, it might be said he seeks Wanda's ridicule, for that was always part of his nursemaid's games as well, she heaping playful scorn upon him even as she dallied with him, insisting always that he lie utterly still and be completely silent or she wouldn't play with him anymore. All of this happened long ago in his parents' house far away in the center of the city, but he has tried to re-create something of that house in his own little corner of the world, even down to the old-fashioned bathroom fixtures and the children's-book illustrations of dying maidens and wounded knights on the bedroom walls. His upbringing has made him a circumspect and courteous person and so has served to raise his prestige at the bank (he is the quiet, wise man to whom one comes for advice) while at the same time depriving him of any ambition, making advancement seem a kind of vague threat to his tranquility. When it is offered, he always politely but resolutely turns it down. Which also provokes his wife's derision, in spite of all the expensive gifts he buys her. She is not Alan's first wife, of course. They come and go, claiming mental cruelty and taking away substantial portions of his wealth, and Wanda will no doubt soon follow. She has been ill of late, though ominously she won't say of what, and has become quite distracted, unwilling or unable to play their little games or even give him his baths, so for lack of any other outlet (he is attracted to the pretty young divorcée who has recently moved into the neighborhood, but he could never approach her, much less touch her) he has taken to visiting a professional lady in the neighborhood who specializes in various forms of humiliation. What he asks of her is so little it is no doubt insult to her talents, and she clearly despises him for it (he watches her in the mirrors, not himself), but it is that loathing perhaps more than the punishment or simple humiliation that he seeks.

Lucille, sitting in the bookstore coffee lounge with her young lover, has finally decided she must put her life in order and bring an end to her adultery (even the word shocks her, often as she has seen it written), which threatens, she knows, to destroy her marriage. She has already canceled Pavel's next visit and gotten the name of a new handyman who is said to be old and fat, and she has booked a day at the zoo with the children (she feels as though she hardly knows them!), a day previously devoted each week to Rick. This is a nice community, full of bankers and lawyers and doctors and business executives and real-estate brokers, and she worries that her behavior will become known and embarrass her husband and turn the happy life she and Larry have created for themselves into a kind of French-novel nightmare. She also worries that Larry might already have guessed something of what was happening, perhaps sensing her infidelity in the diminishing intensity of their own romance, for the normally high-spirited fellow has acquired a certain tender, wistful demeanor (which is attractive to her, even though she feels accused by it), and she almost wishes he might have an affair and so make her feel less guilty about her own. While trying to get up the courage to tell Rick (how lovely he is! how she adores him!) that it's over, she sips her cappuccino and listens to him explain his theories about the neighborhood. Certainly he knows a lot about the place just from the books people are reading, and it is his belief, he says, that something is being spelled out and he has been trying to piece it all together. You're Lucille, and I'm Rick, he says. That's important. Of course it is, she smiles, touched. No, I mean it wouldn't work if it were the other way around. Goodness, I can't even imagine it! No, he says, and he smiles. I can't either. I only meant...well, it may be something significant or it may not, but it doesn't matter. Life, like literature, he says, taking her hands in his, is often quite frivolous. She finds his theories amusingly paranoid, reminiscent of a contemporary writer they have been discussing in the literary society, and is about to say so when a girl comes in wearing only a short, nearly transparent nightie. Maybe that sort of thing is the fashion nowadays, but it doesn't belong in this neighborhood, and it has poor Rick, who has let go of her hands and sprung to his feet, completely flustered. The girl, after taking in blushing Rick, turns and gives Lucille the most wicked grin, as though she knows everything, and Lucille is suddenly afraid it's already too late. Are those cameras? It is a moment when Lucille has a sudden understanding of the phrase "My heart stood still!" The girl has an arm around Rick and seems to be taking his trousers down. Lucille doesn't know whether to rush over and defend her lover (her ex-lover, she is already thinking) from this scandalous attack or to flee, her research project concluded.

Larry is home alone, just removing a reheated cup on coffee from the microwave, Lucille having left for her usual afternoon of shopping and browsing in the bookstore, when the widow from next door turns up, bursting in through his kitchen door with a somewhat desperate look on her face. Larry, whose changed demeanor has in truth been due to an unwonted commingling of pleasure and regret, has been staying away from the widow of late, fearful that Lucille might get suspicious. Lucille is a good reader and his face, he knows, is an open book. Moreover, he has no doubt been seen going in and out of Opal's house rather too often, and this is the sort of neighborhood where any sort of irregular romantic behavior would naturally be frowned upon, even if it had to do with being of assistance to a poor lonely widow who deserved everyone's sympathy. Opal says now she is afraid there might be a mouse behind the refrigerator and she is terrified and needs his help and why hasn't he been by recently? He tries to explain, but she breaks into tears and falls weakly against his chest with her arms around him. Such a soft, willowy creature, he cannot find it in his heart to be cruel to her. I'm so sorry, she whispers. I'm such a slut, I know it. I just want to fuck all the time and blow people's cocks off, and, well, whatever, you name it, I don't care what you do! Even as she says these outrageous things, Opal somehow sounds as demure and innocent as ever. Where, Larry wonders as the widow undoes his belt buckle, did she learn such language? She must have had other visitors. She has also learned some new things she never did before. Which is how it is that he's standing in the kitchen with a cup of lukewarm coffee in his hand, his pants around his ankles and his penis in Opal's mouth, thinking that life is amazing and completely inscrutable, when he hears his wife come in through the front door. He tries to remember what it was he'd planned to say if ever he had to explain things to her, but his mind is a complete blank.

Capricious. Malicious. Vicious. Delicious. Perverse. Curse. Verse. Or worse. Gross. Eros. Is that a rhyme? Hmm. A dose is. Verbose. No, she is not verbose. She's ribald. He scribbled. Improper. A showstopper. A whirly girly. Illicit. So kiss it. Don't miss it. Obscene Irene. Lean and mean. She's offbeat. Indiscreet. Street meat in heat. Rick is sitting all alone beside Lily's pool like the period at the end of a sentence, tripping (ripping? flipping?) on her little pills and searching for the right words (it's easy, they're flying all about him) to describe the crazy creature from the corner bar for a lyric he is writing, probably not for the Sunday supplement. In fact, he is entering a new phase of his poetical career, to which he is at the moment able to devote himself full-time, and the Sunday supplement is probably not part of it. He is in the diabolic frolic phase, writing his exciting, bizarre memoir, searching for the absurd furred bird word. Oh man! It has been an amazing day! He has lost his job again, but Lily, who is off to the doctor to restock her medications (that's right, the doctor restocked her; he unlocked her--Rick is on a roll, he has never felt so creative or so wise, for he's got the picture now, he has put it all together, he can read the neighborhood), promises to get his job back for him one way or another. As Lily says, they need him to run the literary society; he makes them a lot of money getting all those ladies in the neighborhood to buy new books each week, and thanks to Irene he even has a certain celebrity status now as a kind of Internet amateur porn star that makes it difficult for them to ignore him. They have no choice. And that's not all that's illumined his day. Even as his pants came down in front of Irene's camera crew, his true love and muse suddenly called off their romance to return to her husband, which was terribly distressing in the midst of all his other troubles, and he thought that Irene had spoiled things forever with Lucille, but then 15 minutes later his dearly beloved was back again and dragging him into the stockroom for the most beautiful time they have ever had together. She was really fired up (love's great mystery, what can he say, that old cliché, the poet's métier), and they'd be locked up in there still if she hadn't had to go home to get her gutters cleaned.