Cul-de-Sac

Woodland Terrace was a cul-de-sac on the side of a hill in the upscale quarter of a university town in central New York state. You could get to it easily if you wanted; its entrance, a narrow, sycamore-shaded near-alley, lay mere blocks from State Highway 79. But there was no reason to go unless you lived there or were delivering something to the people who did. Only three houses stood on Woodland Terrace, and though they were by no means expensive or especially beautiful, the people who lived in them felt like they had gotten away with something. The street was quiet, buffered from the highway by houses, trees and a creek so that the occasional distant noise of a passing truck seemed a comfort rather than an annoyance, and between the end of the cul-de-sac and the next neighborhood lay an abandoned farm field and a jogging path. It was as isolated as a street could be in this small, high-density town, and the people who lived there liked it that way.

The first house on the left in the cul-de-sac was low, long and modern, and behind its louvered windows, for six hours of each day, sat a man named William Piven. He was 40 years old and a poet, and went by Bill, except on paper. He wrote one poem daily and had no other formal means of occupying his time. His wife was named Janeane Collum, and she taught art history at the college. This position was an avocation, not a profession: She was merely an adjunct. Her main source of income was her own personal fortune, which had come from her grandfather's, and now her father's, tobacco empire. Janeane smoked copiously and with great pleasure, and liked to say that she was employed in the family business after all. She was very pretty, with a humorous, round face and piercing gray eyes that she often kept only half open; her hair was long and prematurely silver, and she kept her body hidden by large loose blouses, baggy pants and caftans, giving the impression of an older woman who happened to look young. Her husband, on the other hand, looked like a prematurely aged youth. He still had all his dark-brown hair and carried a perpetual faceful of beard stubble that outlined features sharp and alert and judgmental. He was simultaneously ingratiating and intimidating before he even opened his mouth, but when he did, the voice that emerged was deep and flawlessly modulated. He sounded a bit like a New Englander, though he was actually from Buffalo.

The next house, a mock Tudor, was occupied by Linda and Graeme Dock. They were from Christchurch, New Zealand, and a day rarely passed when they did not comment on that city's superiority to the one they presently lived in. Graeme also taught at the college; he was a botanist. He often described the New Zealand plant species he longed for and derided the local flora with delighted bitterness, gesturing with his cigarette, which, like his neighbor Janeane, he always held between the third and fourth fingers of his right hand. He liked to drink but thought Americans took drinking too seriously. He thought Americans took everything too seriously, but smoking and drinking especially. Nevertheless, he worried about his health every time he smoked or drank and often wondered if he was addicted to both. His wife, a dangerously thin, tan woman with sunken eyes, high cheekbones and fingernails bitten to the quick, spoke rarely except when asked a direct question and spent most of her time in the spring and summer working in the garden, tending the very plants her husband despised. Little was known about what she did during the winter.

The third house was a Dutch colonial, and its inhabitants, Randy and Betsy McLaughlin, were new. They had moved here a year ago July, and it was now early September. They were middle-class Americans and very, very friendly. They both worked at the college–Randy in the hotel-administration school, where he taught classes on recreation marketing, employee management and memo writing; Betsy (part-time) at the college bookstore. Betsy was plump and cute and barely into her 30s; she had married young and retained many of the qualities she must have had in her student days. She was a good listener and had a winning smile. If she had opinions, she didn't reveal them to her neighbors. Randy, on the other hand, seemed rather dark in mood. He dressed in golf shirts tucked into belted chinos, though to Bill Piven's disappointment, he didn't play golf. He appeared disappointed by life but, like his wife, would never have said so if he was. He was round-faced and sharp-nosed, like a sundial. None of the neighbors liked him.

Not that any of them would have said so. Indeed, the people who lived on Woodland Terrace kept a respectable emotional distance. They socialized, of course; it was impossible not to. They even got together every once in a while for a potluck dinner or a few drinks on someone's patio, but you wouldn't have called any of them friends. It wouldn't even be necessary to mention these people at all if not for something that happened at the end of September, which brought things to light that, with enough apathy and the slightest bit of obfuscating will, might forever have been kept secret.

•

Bill Piven first learned that something was wrong when he heard through his open windows the electronic bleep of a telephone, followed by a sort of strangled cry. It was a lovely day in late summer. He was in the middle of a poem, which is to say four lines through it. He had been writing it all morning, at a rate of about a line an hour, and what he had so far was this:

A garland of chimney swifts decorates First Presbyterian.

Above the congregation they worship mosquitoes,

He wasn't happy with it, but that was par for the course. He'd gone to graduate school to learn to write poems, and for a few years afterward had published them here and there, in small-circulation journals that paid in copies. Then, around the time he met Janeane at an avant-garde jazz concert, he sold a poem about a barn to a general-interest magazine read by a million people a week and was paid at a rate of a dollar a word. He decided then and there that he would never accept less for one of his poems, and so he began to tailor them to this magazine and sent them there exclusively. He'd been doing this, without success, for 13 years. Writing poetry had become a compulsion, and in fact he hated doing it, but he feared what not writing it would do to his self-regard, and so he endured.

The scream he heard on this day–he supposed that was what you could call it–had almost certainly come from the McLaughlins', which would mean that Betsy had made it. It was followed by silence, and he had almost decided to return to his poem when a car glided into the cul-de-sac, a police car, its lights flashing but its siren quiet.

Obviously someone was dead. It would turn out to be Randy. He was run down in a pedestrian crosswalk by a drug-addled economics major in a Lincoln Navigator. The student was driving without a license, which had been revoked after multiple DUI convictions, and would eventually hang himself in prison. But that was later. Bill watched two police officers enter the house, then emerge 20 minutes later with Betsy painfully hunched between them. She looked like she had developed both osteoporosis and rheumatoid arthritis in the space of 30 minutes. The officers helped her into the back of the car, then drove away.

When the car was out of sight, the phone rang. It was Linda Dock. She said, "Randy's dead. I heard them say so."

"Well," said Bill. He picked up his pencil and crossed out the fourth, then the third, second and first lines of his poem. "Come on over."

She hesitated. "It wouldn't seem right."

"I'll see you in 10 minutes."

He hung up, then he tore the page off his legal pad and dropped it into the trash. It didn't feel so bad. Poetry wasn't what he lived for; it was merely what kept him alive. What he lived for (continued on page 142)Cul-de-Sac(continued from page 68) these days, he thought as he watched Linda Dock beeline across Woodland Terrace, was screwing Linda Dock.

Meanwhile what had happened was making its way through the campus grapevine. Janeane Collum received several e-mails that bore the bad news. She didn't need to be here today—it was Thursday, and she only taught Monday, Wednesday and Friday—but she always came to campus between eight and two because she didn't like being at home when Bill was writing his poem. The news of Randy's death was unwelcome, and she might have gone home immediately out of some desire, some obligation, to comfort her grieving neighbor, except that she was waiting for her lunch date to show up. And sure enough, he did.

"Randy McLaughlin," said Graeme, filling her office doorway like a security guard. He must have run here; he was panting.

"I know."

He hung his head. "I suppose we ought to just go home."

She considered. Outside, the arts quad looked entirely normal, the students strolling, checking their watches, sleeping under trees as if nothing untoward had happened. The college was large enough to absorb a professor's death with barely a ripple. She said, "No," and Graeme waited a moment. "No," she went on eventually, "let's stay."

"Are you certain?" he asked, surprised.

She did love his accent. "Yes," she said. "What else are we going to do?"

"I suppose you're right." He let his hands fall from the doorjamb. "Meet you there in 10, then?"

"Ten minutes."

He left. There was the Rakin Hotel, the training ground of the hotel-management school where Randy McLaughlin worked and in front of which he had just been killed. Janeane paid for a room there three afternoons a week, in cash, under a fake name. She passed the 10 minutes doing what she always did when she had to wait to meet Graeme, and that was shop online for towels. She had found a bed-and-bath retailer that sold an incredible array of colorful, thick, fluffy towels, and she clicked through the photographs of happy, comfortable people wrapping the towels around their bodies or pressing the towels to their faces. She thought briefly about Randy McLaughlin and about the incredible weirdness of his death and then got up. There was a mirror on the back of her office door, and she looked into it. She lifted up her blouse. After a moment's thought she took off her bra so that there wouldn't be lines pressed into her back and breasts when Graeme undressed her. Then she put her blouse back on, stuck the bra on her bookshelf and headed over to the Rakin Hotel.

•

Bill Piven and Linda Dock did not know that their spouses were sleeping together. Janeane Collum and Graeme Dock did not know that their spouses were sleeping together. Each couple—that is, each illicit couple—had discussed the possibility and dismissed it out of hand. Bill had said to Linda, "Do you think Graeme is screwing anybody?"

"Not me," said Linda. "He doesn't like skinny women. He likes chubby women."

"Like Janeane," said Bill.

"Not quite that chubby," said Linda, which irritated him. His wife was only chubby compared to Linda, whose effortful emaciation made all women seem heavy by comparison. Lying in bed, Bill could, by gripping her at the ribs, lift her into the air above him. He found this very exciting. He said to her, "She's not very chubby," and Linda said, "Sorry, no, I suppose not," and Bill said, "When would she have an affair? She's never home alone," and Linda said, "When indeed."

And Janeane had once said to Graeme, "I wonder if Bill and Linda are having affairs," and Graeme had replied, "You mean with each other?"

Janeane had laughed. "Oh geez, no, I didn't mean that." They were smoking as many cigarettes as they could before two o'clock, the time of Graeme's class.

"Well, it's not impossible. Though I can't imagine it."

"No. God."

"They must see each other during the day, though, mustn't they? She's outside in the garden or sitting staring out the window."

"He has to see her, up in his attic."

"Still, I doubt it," Graeme said in a summary tone.

"God, yes, so do I," she replied, lighting a fresh cigarette.

It is tempting to wonder what the four might have thought if they were to have discovered their spouses' affairs, and it is probably the fact that none of them would have much cared that caused them to willfully blind themselves to the possibility. Because if everyone was fucking everyone else and nobody much cared, then the entire arrangement of the neighborhood was a ridiculous pretense, and they might as well just give it up and swap. Or all of them leave altogether. And of course they couldn't do that.

•

The reason being that they all had children. Bill Piven and Janeane Collum had a daughter, an inexplicably cute and chipper 10-year-old named Nancy. The Docks had two lanky, quiet sons, 11-year-old Ian and 12-year-old David. The McLaughlins had a three-year-old and a five-year-old, Hannah and Peter. In the summer, these children filled up their parents' days; academic life made the summer months seem endless and empty, and everyone emerged from them frustrated and angry. It was a year ago, in fact, that the affairs began, right after the summer ended, when all the ill feelings that had been pent up for months were set loose. With Janeane and Graeme it had been a chance meeting at the hotel cafeteria; with Linda and Bill it had been some frank staring at each other out the windows until one of them (Linda) just came on over. From three o'clock onward, each day belonged to the children and the cuckolded spouse, and then in the morning, the affairs started up again. Nobody enjoyed the weekends, the children least of all. Nancy didn't like the older boys, and they didn't like Nancy. Hannah and Peter, however, played together in apparent harmony.

When the police car returned at around 2:30, it was Hannah and Peter (gathered from preschool and kindergarten) who emerged first, followed by the two officers who had come earlier. While the children stood motionless in the overgrown grass (and it was going to get a lot more overgrown than that, Bill thought as he watched), the officers coaxed Betsy, with great effort, from the car and led her to the door. The children were forced to follow behind. It occurred to Bill that Betsy was not going to have an easy time of it.

"She looks terrible," Bill said.

"I reckon you would too," Linda muttered, pulling on her shorts, which had to be belted to stay up.

"Maybe."

There was an audible pause in the sound of her dressing, and then he heard the chime of her belt buckle. "You're cruel."

"Maybe," he said. He was naked. He looked down into the wastebasket, where his aborted poem lay crumpled. He didn't care a whit for it, nor did he feel the need to write another. He felt buoyant and shameless.

"Get dressed," Linda said. "She'll be home any moment. Don't make this day any worse." And she left without saying good-bye.

•

Bill Piven was cruel. He knew this about himself—he was a poet, after all; they're supposed to know things about themselves—but had chosen somewhere along the line to enjoy it rather than be bothered by it (or, God forbid, correct it). His father had been an account representative at an industrial-lubricant factory and made his living pestering, cajoling and badgering his clients into buying things. He pestered Bill as well, about his clothing, his ambition, the way he spent his time. "Take that shirt off," his father would tell him when he left home on a date. "Here," he'd say, having found a replacement, "wear this," and he would throw the shirt at his son's face. The family went on miserable budget vacations to time-share villages where his company had a deal. "You don't want to play volleyball?" his father would demand. "Who the hell are you anyway? Everybody's playing volleyball. Play volleyball." "What do you want to walk in the woods for? Bring a gun! Come back empty-handed and you can eat weeds for dinner. Kid wants a walk. Walk home, if that's what you want." As a teenager Bill was hounded by a horrible, seething rage; he ground his teeth nights and his school locker was dented in six places. It didn't occur to him at the time that it was his father he was angry at; he figured he was mad at the government. Until, that is, just before graduation. Bill had decided to matriculate at an itty-bitty liberal-arts college in Ohio, and his father said, "Little pissant college. You'll never work a day in your life. Nothing but hippies and homos, and I bet you end up being both," and Bill, dressed in his cap and ill-fitting gown, his mother kneeling at his feet with a mouthful of straight pins, grabbed him by the lapels and threw him through a sliding glass door.

Not that being able to name his hatred did him any good. He spent a semester getting into fights and was threatened with expulsion. Then he discovered pot. He smoked every day, and his personality changed. He spoke very quietly, so that people had to come close to hear him. He never asked questions, only made calm, firm, unimpeachable statements. "Dance with me." "You drive." "Get out." "Marry me." His primary recipient of such statements used to be Janeane, but she had grown tired of them. She responded "Yeah, yeah" to almost everything he said. Now he mostly talked this way to Graeme. "Golf tomorrow," began a typical conversation.

"I promised Linda I would help with the Japanese maple."

"I've got us an 8:30 tee time."

A sigh. "I'm in no mood for it."

"Don't be a pussy. See you then."

And always he came. Bill loved capitulation, loved the entire process: the dogged chopping, the moment of silence, the splintering wood, the victim's fall. If he had suspected that Graeme was humoring him—that he considered Bill Piven to be a pathetic, sneering little wanker with a masturbatory scribbling habit and a wife he didn't deserve—it would likely not have lessened his satisfaction one bit. Even if he was nothing but mush inside, his bullyism was a vault around him.

And Graeme was, in fact, humoring him. He enjoyed playing golf with this pushy twerp; his resistance was a put-on. When Bill reached into his golf bag for the sack of weed he kept there—when he turned around to Graeme with a challenge in his eye and his rolling papers in his hand—Graeme only pretended to object. "Not here," he primly muttered, as if someone might be watching, as if this hypothetical person might actually care. "Do you want to get us kicked out?" Bill Piven would shake his shaggy head and chuckle a snotty chuckle. "That's what you're most afraid of, isn't it? Getting kicked out. Barred from paradise. Deported. Toughen up, neighbor. There's more to life than being afraid of losing." And lose he did, on the golf course anyway, because Bill Piven actually cared about winning and Graeme didn't.

But Graeme was indeed afraid—that much Piven had got right. Everything felt provisional to Graeme: his green card, his lecturer's status, his health. Everybody in his family of laborers and farmers was gouty, everyone had arthritis, everyone had heart trouble. Graeme Dock was a big man, the picture of health to other people (especially to Janeane, which is what first attracted her), but he felt like a weakling, his mind trapped in the bulky body of a doomed freak. Sometimes he wished he would just go ahead and get gout or arthritis or have a heart attack so he could quit worrying and merely suffer. The only time he felt strong was when he was with a woman, but Linda, who had lost 30 pounds in two years and who shrank from him when they passed in the hall, had apparently come to fear his strength, and he was loath to exhibit it around her. Janeane, on the other hand, squealed with delight when he flung her onto the hotel bed. That sound was the most gratifying thing he heard on any given day.

He was glad to have a friend like Bill Piven. Piven was an asshole, and Graeme liked being friends with an asshole; it seemed to him very American. So did hanging around with one's next-door neighbor and screwing his wife. So did all this golfing. "So you golf," Graeme had said to him, when they first met. "Golf," Piven replied, "is not a verb. One plays golf. I play golf." "So you don't golf, then," Graeme came back flatly, and the flash of irritation on his neighbor's face was his first lesson in Bill's antic volatility.

As for Janeane and Linda, they didn't like each other at all—Janeane finding her neighbor to be stuck-up, asexual and emotionally stunted, and Linda regarding Janeane as ditzy, blowsy, fat and loud. Yet because they were women and because their husbands would never do it, they went together to the McLaughlin house some weeks after Randy's funeral to check in on Betsy and see how she was doing. Both felt guilty about not going over sooner, but they didn't know her well, her kids were still little, and she still spent a lot of time thinking and talking about them, which was a major turn-off, friendwise. But when she opened her door to Linda and Janeane, it was a bright and cheerful hello with which they were greeted, as though she had been really looking forward to seeing them, and as if that weren't disconcerting enough, she immediately launched into a frenetic monolog punctuated by sudden jerks of her hands, both of which wore latex gloves and one of which also clutched a paintbrush drooling with the orange-pink flat interior house paint that half covered the living-room walls.

"As you can see, I've been doing a little redecorating. I know it must seem strange especially since you'd think I'd've had enough change in my life these past few weeks, but in a way it's very therapeutic, having this thing to do, and I find the color soothing, and anyway I need to do something while the children are at their grandparents', and I'm hoping that when they come back it will be like, it will seem like, almost as if we're starting a special new life, that there will be a sense of renewal rather than loss—I mean, there will definitely be a sense of loss, I mean, I'm feeling it now for sure, and the children maybe even more, Randy being their father—but in addition to that I'm hoping there will be a renewal feeling. Like that life goes on and there is more of it to live, and, though they will never have a father again, that there are other things in life to experience besides having a father, or for me, a husband. Though I suppose I don't rule out remarrying someday, not that this is something on my mind just now, except for the fact of my mentioning it. Mostly I am in a grieving sort of stage now and a painting stage; mostly I'm crying inside over what happened, but on the outside I'm coping very well as you can see and hardly crying on the outside at all, except at night when I can't sleep. Which is usually, but whatever!" She invited them into the kitchen for some coffee that she never actually got around to making. Instead, absently, she gave them juice. "With the kids away it'll spoil, oh, you don't want it? That's all right I'll pour it down the drain." It was Janeane who suggested that the families all have a picnic together or, since the weather was beginning to turn, maybe a dinner, a potluck dinner.

"Potluck for us, I mean," Janeane added. "You won't have to cook or bring anything at all."

"Great, I really would appreciate that. How about tonight? I haven't made any plans for tonight."

"Tonight? I don't know---"

"Tonight will do well for us," Linda said, speaking for the first time, irritated at Janeane's reckless hospitality and eager to see her forced to take responsibility for it.

"Um," Janeane said, "I guess that's okay."

•

Bill did the cooking. He always did; he was the best cook of the four, as he often reminded everyone, adding that there was no point in eating inferior food when his own was available. Everything he made had to be filled with exotic ingredients and overwhelming seasonings, in compensation, Graeme surmised, for the soothing buffer he placed between himself and real experience, and in accordance with an epic self-absorption that prevented him from imagining even for a moment how his actions might inconvenience other people. "What a bloody bastard," Graeme muttered to his wife when they found themselves alone in the kitchen getting drink refills. "I'll bloat like a beached whale tonight," Linda tittered in response, for once in agreement about her lover's behavior, for in addition to poisoning the food, Bill had devoted himself entirely to Betsy McLaughlin's comfort, jumping to his feet whenever she seemed at a loss for something to eat or drink and responding to her every utterance with lurid solicitousness, nodding and grunting in satisfaction as if she were a Nobel laureate or pornographic movie. It was obvious that she was turning him on, and though Linda was probably as disgusted by this as his wife, her own relationship with him had the advantage of being secret and so she didn't have to be humiliated as well.

In spite of Bill's performance, Betsy herself remained the star of the evening, having arrived in the same clothes she'd spent the day working in and emitting a bitter aroma of house paint, florid deodorant and nervous perspiration. She ate like a horse despite her newly acquired gauntness, leading everyone to wonder if she was barfing it all up after each meal, and she managed between mouthfuls to keep up a pretty much constant flow of embarrassingly candid chatter.

"It's funny but I really miss sex with Randy—I mean, of course I do, but I have to admit I'm a little obsessed by it, and it isn't even like we did it very often or even at all in the past few months on account of his job being so time-consuming and the children exhausting us all day and waking up all the time at night. I mean I'm actually, if you can believe it, in a kind of autoerotic sort of fog these days at the same time that I'm so miserable. At any rate I think I'm rediscovering myself, sort of uncovering things about myself I'd either forgotten or never wanted to notice, certain I guess you could say habits of thinking and acting and ways I trick myself into not accomplishing anything, to the extent that when the kids come home tomorrow I'm worried they'll hardly recognize me, I'm so totally energized by grief. At any rate it's gonna be weird, ha-ha!"

Every few minutes Bill would extend a question, a request for elaboration or clarification, that would trigger another five or 10 minutes of monolog. And with the children banished to Nancy's bedroom for a video, this left plenty of dynamic space for significant glances, which were exchanged at some risk back and forth among the members of the group.

Graeme, to Janeane: Divorce him.

Linda, to Bill: I'm still here.

Bill, to Graeme: She's a live one!

Janeane, to Bill: Enough already.

A few days later, the weekend mercifully over, Graeme suggested to Janeane that maybe Bill was going to attempt to seduce Betsy McLaughlin and that perhaps this wouldn't be such a bad thing. "It would certainly justify this, wouldn't it?" he said, gesturing over their bodies on the hotel bed. "And you could kick him out for good."

Miffed, she said, "I don't need him to fool around to have a reason to kick him out."

"So why don't you?" He was nervous saying this; he'd long wanted to.

"There are reasons not to," she replied after a moment.

He might have asked what they were but had the good sense to keep mum. He wouldn't have liked the answer: that Bill Piven was smarter than Graeme Dock, his intelligence worked like X-ray vision on other people's motivations, and it provided Janeane with an endless supply of fascinating and hilarious adult conversation. In all matters except those in which he was personally implicated, he was swift as an arrow, and Janeane precisely the kind of person—unabashedly credulous and open to surprise and delight—to guide him to his target. They were like a comedy team, performing only for themselves. Their marriage's essential function functioned still, so what if he thought she was too fat? So what if he looked to her like an invalid and embarrassed her at dinner? But sweet, worried, strapping Graeme didn't want or need to know any of this. Janeane said, almost as an afterthought, "Don't rock the boat."

He sighed and reached for his pants. "Righto," he spat.

Meanwhile Linda Dock was having some trouble getting hold of Bill Piven. She could see him moving around in his studio, scribbling on his legal pad. She could even hear the phone ringing through their windows as she called. She knew she was being weak; every time she dialed she could feel her soul shrink. She wanted Graeme to commiserate with—he held her up, he protected her, he made her feel that her frailty was noble and good. But of course she couldn't do that. It would crush him if he knew; it would confirm his worst fears. (As it happened, she didn't know his worst fears; she wasn't privy to his nightly horrors, his visions of the boys being consumed by fire, of imprisonment and torture, of impoverishment.) Her job was to react and be soothed, not to make waves. But everyone wants power, and Linda Dock had power over Bill Piven. She flitted around him like a butterfly, pollinating his masculine self. Her attention transformed him from shambling oaf to conquering knight, or so he once said in his poetic way that she had to admit annoyed her somewhat.

So what in the hell was he doing now? He wasn't writing poetry, that was certain—his pencil was going like mad, he had to have three pages by now. She watched until he got up to pee, waited 30 seconds, then called again. "What," he said.

"I've been trying to call you."

"I know."

"Well?"

"Well what?"

She waited for him to say something else, but nothing was forthcoming. She felt a sudden disgust: not for him but for herself, her thinness, her weakness. She wanted to throw up. She said, "Oh, forget it," and hung up. And threw up.

•

Just as well, Bill thought; the time had come to act. He tore the pages off his legal pad and brought them into the kitchen to burn. He opened the window over the sink and held a match to the yellow paper. Words curled in on themselves. And then she took his hot red cock in hand and said to him, This looks good maybe I should.... When only ash was left, he cleaned the sink and inhaled deeply from the open window. Yes, her children were in day care. He hoped she would be as she had been at dinner. Unwashed, pungent, frenetic. He walked out the door and crossed the street diagonally to the McLaughlin house.

In her kitchen, Linda Dock groaned and bit her lower lip until it bled.

He knocked. She answered with startling swiftness. "Hi, come in, I was just about to start in on the kitchen, but you can tell me what you think of this idea I have, I think it's going to be good, over here I'll put...." Yes, very good, even if she wasn't sweating and looked quite clean in her gray tracksuit, which, he noticed, clung to her in very appealing ways. She sat him down at the table, offered him no food or drink. Good, yes, no need for any of that. "Randy never did want anything changed, he was so sentimental, he never let me throw away a single stuffed animal even though we had a hundred that the kids never touched, my God, I wish people would realize that there are something like a million times the amount of stuffed animals in this world than are needed, where are they all going, you have to ask (concluded on page 149)Cul-de-Sac(continued from page 146) yourself. At any rate I was thinking of tearing out these cabinets and replacing them with---"

"Take off your clothes," said Bill Piven.

"With nice ones with glass panels, what was that?"

"Take off your clothes."

Her mouth hung open, not in surprise but because that's where she had left it. She coughed quietly, made a small musical noise, a wordless remark. "That's what I thought you said. Anyway the question is whether the cabinets are adequate as they are. After all, I could paint them, and maybe glass doors could be added"—and she unzipped her sweatshirt and discarded it on the floor—"but I don't know what sizes they come in, if they're in standard sizes or if you have to get them custom-made"—and now her white T-shirt, a bit stained around the collar he was pleased to see, came up over her head, and she unlatched her bra and let it fall with the other things—"or if it would be cheaper to simply get the new cabinets all at once, with the doors and everything. Where do you want this to happen?"

"The cabinets?"

She was untying the drawstring on her sweatpants. "Us having sex. That's the deal, right, you're here to have sex with me?"

"Yes."

"I'd say the bedroom, but Linda can see right in our window and there's no curtains, I don't know why I never got around to that, Randy would say 'Oh, we have nothing to hide,' but of course Linda looks at me like she wants to eat me, I want to hide everything from that woman. And so should you, I suppose, I'm sure she's jealous as all get-out. So the living room, I'll draw the shades."

"Jealous?" He couldn't believe it: She was naked. She looked terrific. All naked women looked terrific.

"Of you and me having sex? Because you two usually have sex?"

"Do we now?"

"Yes. What are you doing still dressed? This was your idea, wasn't it?"

"Yes."

"Go to the couch. I'll get the windows."

He obeyed, dazed. He marveled at the wonderful diversity of opportunity in life, the way nothing could be predicted, the way the imagination could never compare to the magnificent inventiveness of circumstance. She fell into his arms on the fluffy white sofa. She was still talking.

What she was thinking, though, remained unsaid. She had wanted this for so long: not necessarily sex and not necessarily Bill, but the feeling of being desired by people from the outside world. She had long been the object of desire to the children, to Randy; their need had enveloped her, held her, soothed her and suffocated her. Running her hands through Randy's hair as he kissed her breasts, she often marveled at its whorls and patterns, how similar they were to the children's, which for years she had traced with her fingers as she nursed them. None of the three of them, not Randy nor the children, ever noticed they were the same on top. The shape of their hair, how it sat on their heads, became the shape of their desire. It drew them to her and oppressed her.

She had envied the Docks and the Piven-Collums, envied them their casual cynicism and ironic neighborliness and vicious joshing. She envied the cocktails they sometimes made one another on winter afternoons and, once she noticed what was going on, envied their affairs. She was not attracted to Bill Piven (too scruffy) nor to Graeme Dock (too nervous), but she envied them their compulsions, their passionate anger and fear. She envied the risks their women took in defying them, and she envied their children, who were grown and at school and functioned perfectly well without their parents around.

It was almost a shame, she thought as she pulled Bill Piven to her and licked his stunned and haggard face, that she didn't care anymore. Certainly it would disappoint Bill when she told him she never wanted to do this again. But she had found, at the very moment when at last she might be drawn into their circle, that she no longer wanted anything but what she had, that there was more to be made—indeed, far more than there was time to make it—of herself, of her home and her children and her mind. Randy was dead and she was miserable, but she was alive, and there wasn't any room in that life for her pitiable neighbors. Soon their world would go to pieces, and they would all dry up and blow away, and she would be left with her fatherless children to endure in this place. Because she was staying in the cul-de-sac—she would be its queen. Come summer she would lie alone in the back lot in the middle of the night, gazing up at the stars, her stars, and nothing else would matter, and the worst pain would be behind her while for her neighbors it would just have begun.

Tomorrow Linda Dock would drop off her boys at school and on the way out open a certain locker in the fifth-grade hallway and slip a folded note into a certain backpack. And tomorrow afternoon, while stuffing her library books into the backpack, Nancy Piven would find the note and read it, and it would tell her for certain that what she'd long suspected was true (though not in so many words), that her parents and her parents' friends were not quite real, that their status as figures worthy of respect was entirely arbitrary, and that the only authority—and the only responsibility for what she did in her life—was her own. She would not show the note to her mother. She would stuff it into the trash before she even got on the bus. She would cry, but only a little, and would be finished before she got home. She would decide that she would never say a word about it, even if it proved to be true, and she would let them love her for as long as they needed to.

He first learned something was wrong when he heard through his open windows a sort of strangled cry.