James Was Here

IT GETS JAMES OUT OF BED IN THE BARELY-THERE LIGHT: He’s going to carry a gun. He can remember, in a dream, careening down a red dirt road with the grass on both sides on fire-- dream ? Nightmar e , James (in Gwen’s voice, which he still uses for talking to himself; no use wondering when that will change). Nightmare , he agrees, and detailed down to the oily wobble in the air over the flaring, vanishing grass, the ash wafting into the pickup cab, sst ing tiny holes in his sleeve. Still, it’s hard to blame a dream for craziness persisting now that he’s more or less awake, more or less himself, gazing at himself, the bathroom radiator cold as stone, radiating distilled nightlong cold like a stone. He runs an estimating hand over his face. He hugs himself, breathing his tensed arms up and down and feeling his heart beat. His reflection gazes back--not for the first time disenchanted, but in danger now of giving way to a darker response, to despair that could flash backward and forward through his life and find no hope, none, for James.

In the bedroom he asks aloud, “This is what you want?” trying to cook a little warmth into the gun with his two hands--it’s that small, his hands fold around it, clamshell, pearl--but its iciness is radiant against the small of his back, the barrel nosed down into the waistband of his Levi’s, and he keeps imagining his vertebrae as complex vapor in an X-ray, the bullet a malign black smudge. Smudge because, in flesh, it would wear the aura of its own fragments. James the X-ray tech, one of his briefer-lived jobs, strapped a fighting, wincing kid to a papoose board, the kid howling for mom, and the kid’s pictures came back with numerous greenstick fractures in various stages of healing plus that night’s broken collarbone. Unbuckling the kid, leaning in to be heard over his crying, James said, “I can talk to her.” Mom was waiting in the hallway, having a smoke. James took the cigarette from her fingers, ground it out and told her startled gaze, “You can’t touch him again like that ever. Hear me?” Yes, she nodded. James caught her jaw between his palms. His thumbs pushed her lower lip slightly upward; she gave it a helpless lick that inadvertently wet his thumbs, and she was listening, she was listening but she told anyway. “I’ve been wanting to do this,” his supervisor said, and fired James. The small of the back doesn’t gooseflesh at the gun’s cold though the nape of the neck is all rubbed-wrong, prickling suspense. The body makes unexpected connections and is honest. It’s afraid for him.

He tries the gun in his old leather jacket: a fit--he can slip his hand in, close it around the grip, and the leather blunts the shape enough that it could be his fist, jammed down hard, James in a mood. With his left fist in his left pocket for symmetry, and by keeping his shoulders conscientiously even, he can make this work, though the composition overall’s a little aggrieved or aggressive, maybe--impatient, but people have compelling reasons for not looking hard at the impatient, unshaven and mysteriously pissed-off, the kind of passerby his father used to call going nowhere fast before ruffling James’ hair to mean, Not you, never you. They’d conducted a steady, furtive trade in reassurance, that long-ago father and son, but James failed his part, leaving his father unconsoled, troubled by troubles over James’ head, while James himself intuited from the nature and vehemence of his father’s reassurance where his father’s fears for him lay, exactly. James gets closer to the closet-door mirror, wondering if this can be true, that someone (that he) can carry a gun and not have it scream gun ! The jacket’s hang is handsome with innocence. The cast of his cheekbone is grave when James tries a three-quarters profile; his eyes are lit. He thinks wildly, I look good.

Sanity lies in sliding the gun right back on the closet shelf where it goes, and to give sanity a chance James prowls his apartment--every radiator cold; he hates the cold--picking things up at random. His last radiator conversation with Silva ended with Silva’s nonchalant, “I’ll get to it when I get to it.” James makes coffee, clicks off the kitchen fluorescence, and tilts back in his chair, the jacket over the chair’s back, the gun weighing in with a plumb bob’s unwearying love of down, down, down. James might as well be in a canyon. It’s the same question of following not the sunrise but slow secondary dramas. Across the vague wall of the building opposite, a wedge of Mexican pink advances, streamerlike shadows unrolling from flaws in the stucco, crude and slapdash, like so much else about this place. In the pink wall is the second-story window that, across an elevator-shaft-shaped space bottoming out in rabbitbrush and trash, mirrors his, even to its kitchen table. Too early for the “Wide World of 4-Year-Olds,” the red-haired single mother feeding her twins. James would love her for her composure alone. She doesn’t let the twins throw her, and often enough she’s smiled across at James. She can’t smile long because the twins don’t let her; they know when her attention’s elsewhere. Counting other reasons to love her, James can list the fact that she’s still smiling when she turns to her kids again, her habit of T-shirts for nightgowns and the geraniums rampant on her landing when nobody else bothers with more than a desert-parched rush doormat, if that. They’ve talked brightly in passing--the weather, the rent--without acknowledging that they recognize each other from these windows. James supposes there are rules for being each other’s views, and that bright evasiveness is the right style. The twins are redheads, too, which makes the movie they star in a comedy. James is going to wake up one morning over there, in her little bedroom. He’s going to deal with her twins at that kitchen table, a stranger lightened of all sadness during the night, grinning, bare-chested, mysteriously at ease: You kids give your mom a break. He’ll find the Cheerios and pour the milk and let her sleep.

Twenty minutes pass without her T-shirt ghosting across that window, without her kitchen blinking into shiny space, 20 minutes in which he can’t talk himself out of carrying the gun. Carrying it for no reason, purely to see how it feels, does that make the whim less insane? Moving in here he fell into a routine in which there are tiny checks to the headlong blues, minor consolations to the general mercilessness, all day long, and that’s the routine he needs today, one with checks and consolations built in, little risk of anger and no spur-of-the-moment decisions. He’s not brilliant at the spur of the moment--not necessarily bad, but not brilliant, not good enough to go carrying a gun while improvising. This has to be a day like any other, then. A rule, a measure of sanity, some peace of mind going in.

The gun was Theresa’s, a gift from him to her because he was often gone. The gun-store clerk, resting the .32 on the blunt-needled rubber mat, promised, “Women think this is pretty.” Pretty , gleaming, fine-proportioned, a very blue black, irresistible to hold; when sniffed, neutral cold never-used machine. During the divorce Theresa told him, “Take it,” she couldn’t forget it was in the house, so James keeps it, loaded, on the high closet shelf that otherwise holds, for weird camouflage, dozens of pairs of old-man shoes, the bequest of some tenant vanished or dead, so alone in the world nobody came to collect his shoes. James imagines him sometimes, one of those neat-shirted, gaunt old men, what hair he had left slicked like a beau’s, a fragile walker, careful street crosser, James himself in 40 more years of not getting his life right.

He yearns for a cigarette, dry essence of clear-headedness. Half a pack, tucked behind a sofa cushion, has bided its time until this emergency, and if he’s going to respect the rule of ordinariness James has to get out of there now. In the parking lot he flirts with two girls, roommates, just climbing into a new Rabbit for the commute to Los Alamos, where they get kitted out like astronauts and, with giant gloves wedged through holes in a glass, manipulate flasks of radioactive tinctures. They agree it is a gray day. For the first time he can recall, James is awkwardly aware of what is in fact old habit, keeping his hands deep in his pockets. It is gray, cold enough to justify the jacket, going to rain, which they agree they need.

“We need it.” One girl.

“Yeah, we need it.” James.

“We really need it.” The other girl.

James thinks how, if any of them neglected to voice the need for rain, that omission would seem almost violent, a breach.

THE WAITRESS HAS BEEN INSPIRED BY MADONNA TO GILD HER hair and forget the roots. James likes her, her eyes gone very dark because of the stricken hair and her ears harrowingly pierced, though none of these Spanish girls go as far as crucifixes for earrings. Her gold cross, the genuine demure item, rides the pulse at the base of her throat. Harry doesn’t make them wear waitress uniforms, and James is glad not to be approached by a jaded little rayon dress every morning. In spite of her cruelly destroyed hair, Tina dresses shy. She dresses like the baby sister of five older brothers, which she is. She’s got to walk past at least a couple of brothers before she ever makes it out the door. She’s in a huge hooded sweat shirt that hangs down so far it leaves the merest margin of skirt, black long johns shrunk to skinny leggings with a hole for one knee and a boy’s high-topped sneakers. A Band-Aid swathes her thumb except for the flashy red jackknife of the nail.

He says, “Hey, your thumb.”

She says, “I know,” tired of the story.

“How’s your little girl?”

She knows he has a little girl he has every-other-weekend custody of, so this strands them safely on the narrow ledge of what they have in common. “Sick. Running a little fever. But”--tilting her coffeepot-heavied wrist to read her watch, an assured gesture sending a single ripple melting across oily black--”I’m going back there on my break, which’s soon.”

“Come on, Tina, you left her? Or is one of your brothers there?”

“No, everybody’s at work.”

“You can’t do that. Let me talk to Harry.”

“No, listen, last night I got ‘The Little Mermaid,’ and she wanted my nightgown so she’s in my nightgown, and she’s got her pig, and she’s so into ‘Little Mermaid’ it’ll make no difference when I walk in the door.”

“Pig?”

Tina does a brief cradling, rocking motion--kid’s cheek to ratty stuffed animal--very pretty, ripples washing across coffee. Tina whispers: “She asked me; I said a great name for a pig was Harry.”

“Harry needs to remember you have a kid.”

“He’s too mean to remember that.” She says, “No, listen, ‘Little Mermaid’? ‘S a good movie, really. Everything Ariel says? She says right along with her. Plus I wrote the number here on the back of her hand in case she thinks she needs me.” Tina displays her thumb, a hostage to distract him. “Cooking for my brothers. I chop right up the chile into my thumb. Wow , it burns. My brothers come blamming into the kitchen.”

“You’re cooking when you’re tired. When you’re tired’s when you hurt yourself.”

She laughs. “Tell me when I’m not tired.”

“You have to be more aggressive. Ask Harry for the day off when your kid is sick.”

“Don’t you remember being tucked in dreamy, with a fever? How it wasn’t so bad? Didn’t your mother ever have to leave you like that?”

“You don’t want to take any lessons from my mother.” He slides a fist toward the table edge her hip leans into. “And me? What if I think I need you?” If he pushed his fist any farther it would rest against marginal black skirt, girl’s hipbone, girl. Intimately, girl. When she shifts her weight to her other leg it distances her easily and doesn’t accuse him.

“Something happened. You’ve been in here a lot of mornings and not needed my number.”

“I happened. I’m awake.”

She’s amused. “Awake.” She doubts it; she likes it. The home dye job on her long johns is crudely, excessively black, and the exposed knee has the candid availability of an egg. He tells her, “I’m in love with your knee.”

She says, “Thank you,” absently, then “You broke up with somebody,” the pounce in her voice small-scale, decisive insight. Five brothers: She must often confront wayward moods, inexplicable reversals, and either she figures these out on her own, or her brothers remain mysteries. She’s learned to trust herself. It gives her a nice confidence. When she tries her conclusion as a question, it’s for politeness’s sake. “You broke up with somebody?”

This isn’t their usual conversation, which is how she can know him and not know about the end of the world. He says disarmingly, straight away, “Right.”

Tina says, “I’m getting married.”

“Tina--again? What for?” She takes this for rudeness, so he mends his ways with the story of his life. “I was married. To my little girl’s mother. We’re still friends. I almost got married again, not that long ago, either, but--right, you’re right, we broke up, I still don’t know what hit me.”

This much truth renders them mute until she lights on, “More coffee? I should look like I’m working.”

Is she pleased this exchange petered out without a really bad moment between them? She pours. It’s in her lowered eyelids that she’s pleased.

Five, a number of brothers that had to make or break her. They live, she’s told James, in a couple of trailers on land they inherited when their folks died in a car crash. Strictly speaking, the six of them own a small piece of land each. If they divided it up, none of them would actually own enough land to put a trailer on--thus, togetherness. She’s told James of ex-girlfriends driving out late at night to discover only Tina will come to the door or sit at the kitchen table with them while they cry. She’s told James she’s learned from experience not to wake any of her brothers, no matter how the girlfriends plead. None of her brothers knows how to be any consolation, Tina’s said.

James reads want ads, finding nothing worth circling. He got his contractor’s license last spring, but it hasn’t meant what he’d hoped it would mean, constant work. Mist blossoms on the window over his cup, erased by instant glassy cold when he lifts the cup, his freshened coffee hot as fever, the glass alive with reflections, a brilliant, shifty collage of outside and in--the salt and pepper shakers suspended over a distant mesa, a shard of James’ forehead with little rivers coursing down it. A radio tower signal blinks interestingly from within the salt. Tina stops at his table as she’s leaving. “Raining good, huh? Finally.”

“It needs to keep raining, not drift off somewhere else.”

“I know I’m supposed to hope for that, but it messes up our road. You didn’t eat much.” She takes his plate, though it’s another trip to the kitchen for her, and the dollar from under the salt shaker.

“Tell your little girl ‘Feel better’ from me, OK?”

“If she knew who you were.”

“You never mention me?” He sounds hurt; he tries to invest less in “Never?” And fails. “But I’m in your life every morning. Right here every morning--if I wasn’t, you’d miss me.”

She handles this as five brothers have taught her to, winsomely, giving him time to get it together. “Are you going to be gone?”

He’s not her responsibility, so why does it take his shaking his head no to free her of this conversation?

“Then I won’t miss you.” She smiles at him steadily, her smile losing certainty because she wants to be, then is, out of there.

James sticks around until her old Camaro, juiced up by one of the brothers in celebration of a little sister’s beauty, jars across the potholed parking lot. Its taillights burn in brief reckoning, it cuts across the Santa Fe-ward traffic, and she tucks the Camaro between two semis in the northbound frenzy, the second trucker leaning vengefully on his horn, James whistling under his breath, the taillights that are Tina shut off from view and carried away. Leaning on his elbows he tries the funnies, but without her this could be anywhere, spread newspapers and smeared plates, or nowhere, with nowhere’s neon-ringed clock and the apocalyptic desert sunsets that appear paint-by-number but aren’t, nowhere’s Muzak, nowhere’s regulars, nowhere’s truckers whose brooding gazes have traded an external, verifiable broken yellow line for an inner one--stroke of yellow, tick of black, stroke of yellow--real enough to undulate, climb hills, pass through woods. James stands and the gun slides downward like a bolt, the punctual end to daydreams. To the hand that seeks it out it’s reality, chill and shapely, persistent, intelligently receiving the hand that closes around it, offering a beautiful handhold.

James walks a self-conscious, self-fearful walk toward the cash register, negotiating with himself for reasonableness. After such long dislike, it’s a pleasure to carry a threat toward Harry, and he doesn’t want this to be too much of a good thing, he doesn’t want to go astray. A heavy-hipped waitress, standing out of James’ way, rests against a table, and her bottom, faced toward James, is so humanly beautiful it calms him, it lets him say to himself softly enough, This is crazy. Behind the glass counter, big slabs of breast under a completely buttoned-up cowboy shirt, straw-pale hair oiled to keep to his scalp, the half-moons for close reading etched in his bifocal lenses, is Harry, Harry taking note of James, James choosing two mints from the dish, Harry telling James, “Nickel each.”

James, incredulous: “Can’t be.”

“It’s sad.”

James says, “Is Tina going to keep working after she’s married?”

“Has she told me? I warned her I need some notice, too.”

On the spur of the moment James says, “A pack of Marlboros. No. Yeah.”

“Which?”

“Give me the cigarettes.”

Harry receives two more dollars, then refigures the constellation of James’ change on glass, his left hand sheltering the coins he’s entitled to. James loathes that hand, balanced feyly on its fingertips like some big crab, its digits cumbered by turquoise, its back turbulently veined. He loathes that hand as if Harry lives in that hand, as if the peaceably mean bulk straining at the cowboy shirt, the wattled, corded throat are an afterthought and the hand alone true Harry. Wow , James thinks, Tina’s word, Tina’s tone of startled homage to what it’s possible to feel, and then Harry confounds hate. Harry says kindly, “I remember when they were pennies, those mints: Used to steal the pennies, I’m afraid, from my mama’s purse.”

James tells Harry, “She probably knew.”

Harry shakes his head, unself-forgiving and back to mean, blinking, wondering what’s keeping James.

James resists opening the pack, feeding himself candy instead. The taste of peppermint pales from his tongue as he drives north for 30 minutes, passing Tina’s road but hardly wondering how she is, instead wondering how Gwen is, breaking, so early in the day breaking, his rule that this day can be no different, because he’s going to act on that wondering, the oncoming headlights a dazzlement undimmed by rain, he’s going to go see, the junipers holding fast with bonsai cleverness to the small eroding hillsides, the arroyos rushing knee-deep and resonant. Even before the rain’s over, a high altitude rainbow fades in, in the northeast, a trembly smear of gold and blue-violet, nothing steady about it, not one of the far-flung, surreally stable rainbows that can stop traffic along this highway after storms. On the dashboard are the small stones his daughter collects, one from each place they go together.

The red dust, with its matte, unnatural dryness, like sodden baby powder, takes boot prints graphic as the finest evidence, and James fights the heavy gate closed on its rusted hinges, securing the lock behind him while his truck idles its own ragged fog of exhaust. He remembers--not consciously, but up from below, in reflexes--the shifts and dodges of this skiddy three-quarters of a mile, the road from last night’s dream, though he wishes he didn’t suddenly understand that or have to wonder what it means. He can’t remember sleeping, only needing to sleep, only pitching his paperback thriller at the wall, 3 a.m., and, 4 a.m., having to get up to get it. A low-level glitter hangs in the ricegrass, in the chamisa and black greasewood--drops the size of orange seeds, maybe, but caught by the light, though clouds insure that the sun’s no brighter than a moon, a big moon rolling in and out of visibility. No Volvo, no smoke from either chimney, nobody home, and if his rule for today is broken, it’s not smashed into irretrievable pieces as it would have been if she were home, a risk he ran without arguing it through with himself, without any little counter-self urging James, wait. The fact that no such counter-self roused itself to contest his impulse is weirdly lonely: He doesn’t want to believe he’s alone with the gun.

James wanders around the house, giving the front door a rattle in passing, turning corners for the clicks of recognition that build toward the five senses’ very favorite consolation, maybe, in the world--being back, being home again, because this is it for James, the one and only place. Whether he likes it or not, he’s rejoicing. Small birds flash up before him, and then with nowhere to go, wing around overhead, hoping he’s not staying long, recognizing the unusual, the break in the house’s routine of daylong abandonment, dewed foxtails swatting James’ knees and slipping apart in a trail, tamped-down grass behind him, the post-rain fragrances manifold and earthy, muddy, grassy, airy. This small house lives alone on its pale sandstone ridge in such a fastness of pale, abandoned ridges that the scale of the inhuman is lunar here--even litter is touching, like litter on the moon, companionable. James kicks at a tin can rusted to oxblood. This is Spanish land-grant land, and the title to this place is worth nada , or they’d have tried buying it. The laundry gusting on the line behind the house is Levi’s in five ages of blue, and at her long-leggedness his heart beats faster. The back door he rehung to stop snow fanning in across the threshold is locked, and the key’s no longer hidden under the cat’s water dish. James fishes a drowned wasp from the dust-skinned water, a favor to a cat he doesn’t like.

If James pauses before what he does next it’s not so he can think. He’s not thinking, he’s more or less riding on the blitheness of compulsion, that energy, when he tries the latch on a window. The window grates upward, letting him in. This room resists his intrusion by a sly warp in its perspective--known, but not from this angle--by a lack of charity in her brass bed, by the whiteness of the bed’s white quilt he drops his black leather jacket on, by the conviction in its quiet. He can stop right here, without having trespassed far at all, barely having gotten in when he so badly wanted to be in , but his bowels cramp subversively, insisting on the matter-of-factly territorial s--- he enjoyed after absences from home, brief times gone on some job or other. Boot prints lag down the hallway’s polished floor after him, and seated on the toilet James works hard not to hate himself as she would hate him for this.

James strips off his T-shirt and gets barefoot to mop--her hoary old mop with cat hair in its twistedness; curious, those aspects of housekeeping fastidious people neglect; maybe they have to neglect some thing--the hallway’s ruddy smear widening and growing abstract, James warming to the work, restoring the gleam to floorboards she refinished, sanding off years of scabbed dark varnish. After serious effort, the floor’s redeemed and shining, and he was never here. He should go.

He tells himself he’s going, but her refrigerator is riches, white boxes with wire handles, white paper packages taped in white, stacked Tupperware with cloudy innards, mineral water in ranked chill tints. If he eats judiciously from several different boxes, he won’t have to empty any of them. In the glare of intensely clean cold, his nipples erect, James eats deftly from boxes he opens carefully, so they’ll close perfectly--tomatoes dripping vinaigrette back into their box, slices of rare roast beef, grilled red peppers lank as seaweed but meltingly sweet, lamb curry whose sauce has congealed to a stinging paste, small, almost-bitter olives. Eating with his fingers, he’s as far from conscience as a wolf. This is lovely violence. He can’t blame himself.

His first serious chance of finding her, if he’s going to try to find her, is at the restaurant around 3, in the lull following lunch. If he’s unlucky, she’ll use the downtime to shop. Her roving, perfectionist’s progress--rubbing the nap of each peach, checking the gold-leaf eyes of trout on ice for iridescence--can absorb the afternoon. Well, if she didn’t obsess about details, she (and Dwight, her partner: gay) could hardly hold their own in a town full of restaurants, as Santa Fe is, and she’s good. She can tease buckshot from pheasant, render rose leaves in lustrous chocolate, bargain for venison with local hunters, guys with prison tattoos on their faces and a scary delicacy in negotiation. She’s good the way you’re good if you love what you do, if it keeps you up all night some nights, if, other nights, your trivial mistakes loom in your dreams, and her sense of what was wrong with James was that he needed something to love , at which it was possible to look into her dark, strict eyes with their strikingly clear whites and laugh, and she would say severely, “Besides me.”

Outside the bedroom window he neglected to close, two sparrows start in (she would tell him what kind; lying in bed she could tell one from another). Their niches in sage are dry. They’re telling each other, “Too cheap, thank you!” Naked except for his Levi’s, James does what he has no right to do, tucks himself under her quilt, gathering his jacket to himself as a child gathers its blanket, not for comfort exactly but from some sense that the jacket’s more dangerous, or maybe only more real, sprawled across the foot of her pretty bed than in his arms. This way, even sleeping he’ll know where it is. He checks the safety--the gun malignly, mechanically black against the linen--and slides the gun back into its pocket. He hugs the jacket and sleeps like a child, parted as completely as a child from what just happened and what’s going to happen. James gone, really gone and not dreaming.

When he wakes, he’s forgotten where he is, and it takes a strand of Gwen’s hair on the pillowcase to orient him. Awareness of being watched brings him entirely awake and focused. Oh : Her striped cat has composed itself on the windowsill into a kind of sphinx of accusation. This trick of cats, suggesting reproach and heavenly tolerance at the same time, irks him. He’d like to sleep again, to sleep as he was sleeping, but he’d have to get rid of the cat, and the cat’s not leaving as long as it has James’ gaze to return; the tension, the refusal to let go first, feels a little like lovers at odds. James hides his face in the crook of an arm and lets Gwen’s bed--he can’t leave any trace he was ever here--be a good place to daydream in. That padded thump is the cat landing on the floor. She finds James. She’s upset but willing to listen, to give him a chance. He thinks, I can’t stay away; I tried , and hears, as he would in real life, You have no choice. Even in his daydream she says he has no choice. She says bluntly, I don’t need you. (Therefore you can’t need me is meant.)

“Is it that you don’t believe in needing in general,” he asked once, “or is it that you don’t believe in needing me?” She’d said, “You’re as close as I’ve come to needing anyone” and thought that was an answer.

His watch tells him 2:20, which is good. He can try catching her. The last couples are swallowing their last forkfuls; Felipe has only to lean against the wall to encourage them out. In the bathroom James rinses the taste of daytime sleep from his mouth and lets the water run across his face. He could shave with Gwen’s razor, but he owes it to her to appear aimless, vagrant, going nowhere fast , as borderline as she feared he’d be without her. He closes his eyes for a rest from his reflection but can’t rest long. The gun functions like inspiration, and his reflection’s eyes are, right, readably hostile. He protests, This isn’t me , which translates as All this anger isn’t me , which translates, at the deepest level of self-contemplation, as I’m a good man , and at that level (he doesn’t know himself any better than this; he can’t get any more inward or try for any better understanding), this avowal is met by doubt. He wills it into clarity-- a good man, I’m telling you --but it’s clouded. Doubt has credibility: Well, look at him.

By the time he’s sure she won’t be able to tell he was in her house, by the time he’s gone back through it twice, even remembering to collect the cat and dump it outside before closing the window, his watch says 2:43.

BEHIND THE GLASS DOOR, Felipe mouths a word that could well be s ---, and lets James in. Felipe sits back down at the table where he’s copying out the evening’s menu, which he’ll take down the street to Xerox on costly paper. His handwriting possesses the antique Spanish dashingness with which New Mexico was stolen for the king. He calls while writing, “Gwen. Problem.”

Gwen, from the back: “Tell me the kind of problem.”

Felipe considers James; James doesn’t want to hear the kind; Felipe calls, “Come see.”

Gwen calls, “Even in ‘Jeopardy’ I’d get a category. I can’t believe this, F.”

Felipe calls, “This needs you, OK?”

Needs her.

Her composure, her crossed arms--those could have been predicted. Her narrowed eyes, anticipated in the hundreds of imaginings that haze this acutely actual moment, are no less hurtful because he could have known she’d take no longer than this to wish him gone, James suffering a kind or quality of hurt whose phrasing would ring strange: She’s so herself ; that’s what hurts, completely separate, fresh and undiminished, while he is all raw nerves and frank loss, still. She says, “James. Nothing’s changed.”

He says ruefully, knowing rue’s the saving grace here, “You’re sure.”

He did that well enough, and it was brief enough, to give her pause, to cause her eyes to change to slightly less sure, reason for James to just as slightly push. “If something changed and I were you, I’d listen. I’d give me a chance. I couldn’t be so cold.”

Cold flirts with overkill. Felipe laughs and tells Gwen, “No? All you have to say is one ‘No.’ ”

To fend off that no, James should lift both hands and hold their palms toward Gwen, the body’s instinctive representation of innocence, which he can’t use because of the gun in his pocket. Inability to make this gesture infuriates him, the just-right response eluding him when he needs all the help he can get. “Give me five minutes, Gwen.” Almost a slip of the tongue. Almost honey. Honey would have had him out of there fast.

“No?” Felipe tutors her. “Little word, N-O . All you need,” and it could be this, Felipe’s readiness to do James harm if he can, that causes Gwen to relent, if relenting is saying, “Say whatever is on your mind, say it, and get out.”

“Gwen, can we be a little private? It’s important.”

“Important.”

“Yeah.”

This corner scarcely qualifies as private, but at least Felipe’s not in James’ face, and James out of Felipe’s force field is a lighter-hearted James who might even be good at this. They sit, and Gwen says, “How am I? Fine. That’s what ex-lovers start with, the kind of f---ed-up small talk nobody can bear, really. If we ran into each other on the street, I could understand it, maybe, but you’re making me talk like this here. How are you? Don’t answer that. I won’t tell you how you look.” Then she can’t resist. “Like hell.” Angry at him.

He says, “No small talk? I miss you like an arm. A leg. I can’t look good or be good, sleep or eat very well, make sense of our being apart.”

She leans back. Her couple of inches’ new distance figures in her voice, too. “You made nonsense of our being together. Is how I see it.”

“I can change that.” He tries to wait longer than he can actually stand to. “I’ve been working on myself. I can be different with you.” He waits, but she’s handling this with silence. “I know it can’t seem true,” he says. “Hearing it like this, of course you’re skeptical.”

“Skeptical,” she says. “I passed skeptical so long ago. Skeptical was one of the pleasanter emotions.”

“There isn’t anybody else, is there?”

“The rights you assume you have, you amaze me.” But answering the question at all, she has answered, No, nobody. He knows her that well, and she knows he knows.

He says, “I can’t live without you. I’m not good at it.”

“I could have told you you’d get to that. I could have written it down and kept the piece of paper with me and unfolded it for you when you showed up and let you read it and you’d see: ‘I can’t live without you,’ when you know that’s a lie, you can, and you have to. Saying that, can you feel what blackmail it is?” She veers away from him without leaving her chair, by uncrossing and recrossing her long legs.

He says, “I mean live like understand why I’m getting out of bed in the morning, live like knowing why I’m here, like there’s this great reason, you, for dealing with how very f---ed up the world is, being able to deal with it, a motive for getting through the day, you , and you know that, you know telling you this isn’t blackmail, it’s love.”

“Love.” She runs a forefinger around the neck of her T-shirt so the mole under her collarbone shows. Seeing him following her gesture she turns it into a yank, the T-shirt’s neck a noose. She says, “Know what I read in the paper? They did this study of men and women to see whether lovers can recognize each other. Blindfolded, whether they can find their lovers in a same-sex lineup, by touch.”

“You’re telling me this because?”

“Because a blindfolded woman can find her lover, but a blindfolded man can’t.”

“Look, Gwen, blindfolded, I’d have a hundred ways of knowing you. You’re wrong. You couldn’t find me. You’re so wrong it hurts.”

Felipe’s pen pauses so he can examine them, or not them, Gwen, her profile to James, the long, slightly upturned nose, the eye intelligently bracketed by crow’s feet, the ear unevenly hidden by her short hair. Felipe perceives some signal James can’t and resumes his scratching, radiating irritation and, as if in response to that irritation, Gwen smoothes and smoothes a table napkin.

James tries a more neutral topic. “How’s Carlos?” Carlos is Dwight’s lover, HIV-positive and, the last James heard, in the hospital.

“Home, but hurting. They even say this could be the week. James, it’s awful. Dwight’s with him a lot.”

James, it’s awful --her resistance rubbed away to show plaintive old affection and dependence. He says, “That’s good. He has to be. Hard on you, though.”

“Dwight found a new guy, a friend of a friend, to help for now.”

“Is he any good?”

“Only all right. It gets awkward, because so much of how I work needs Dwight for its other half. It’s having to discuss what Dwight would automatically know. This is selfish, sick of me, but I can’t help wondering if--, if--, how long before Dwight can come back?”

“Not sick, natural. You know it’s natural.” James says, “Can I come for you after work?”

“James, one five-minute conversation, and it’s filled with trouble, and you, only you, could think we’re seeing each other again. We’re not. We can’t. I can’t. You know what this was, James? This was you getting what you wanted.”

At the door he says, “See you,” and she says, with beautiful weariness, “No,” and waits while Felipe locks up, Felipe glad James is gone, and James is gone, he’s almost to the street before he turns to run back up the stairs. As Felipe unlocks the door, his expression is grounded like an actor’s in powerful, recollected wonder, not genuine, dramatic. “What?”

James writes on a receipt with a stub of carpenter’s pencil. “I’ll come back. We’re not finished talking. J.”

Felipe reads. “She said the N-word, James. About time.”

“None of your business, Felipe. You’re not even close enough to be a bystander to Gwen and me. I gave you a message, you give the message to her.”

Felipe tears the scrap apart and lets it confetti the industrial carpet. James’ chemistry thinks it’s Christmas and he’s alone, awake before anybody else in the house, James alone knowing it’s really Christmas. “Felipe, don’t you hate this place? Hate yourself?”

“Myself?”

“Tourists eating here spend more in one night than you make in two weeks, right?”

Felipe rests a hand on James’ jacketed shoulder. The hand is gentler than seems possible, given Felipe’s eyes, unbelievably gentle, and James backs away until Felipe can close the door between them. Felipe locks it with aggressive grace and no wasted motion. With a last grave look of complete mutual incomprehension, they part. James understands it was only luck that Felipe was gentle.

AS JAMES PASSES A TALL GIRL, she raps on a shop window, as if wanting in. But not really, he discovers when he stops behind her. She is really indicating to her also-lanky girlfriend the amber bracelet that’s alone, in the window, in being valuable. The two women are a pair of pretty smiles switched on for James. That kind of instant wattage, it’s Texan. He tires himself, slightly, entertaining them, not long but charmingly, playing the native. He guesses what their visit has been like, and how insecure they feel, tramping around in furs and cowboy boots. All tourists carry with them the premonition of mockery. James teases them into feeling briefly at home.

By the time the clerk, in her 60s and soft-spoken, fetches the bracelet for James, the tall girls are gone. Neither proved bold enough to follow James into the shop. James likes the amber’s resinous, satiny lack of resistance to handling, and the darkness variously shading the deep yellow beads. Oval and slightly blunter than oval, but none of them perfect, their sensuousness conjures for James the marbles he collected as a kid, the sensational rattling of marbles centrifugally swirled and popping in an old coffee can. The best gifts have this doubleness. The amber can mean marbles to James and, to Gwen, love after doing without, smarter love, love he’ll do nothing to harm. He’s daydreaming; he hasn’t got this kind of cash and can’t recall paying his last credit-card bill. It’s funny considering the older woman as witness, and then considering himself considering. Didn’t he just skip several steps? Why does he feel so at ease? She could go either of two ways--hyped-up frailty, suddenly old on the witness stand; or a sage calm, giving the accused a level gaze over the rims of her bifocals. She would tell the courtroom she liked him. She does like him. When he rests against it, the counter’s struck by the muted, leather-hidden thud of the gun his hand is closed possessively around, and when she studies him--he was right; he gets a due severity over the specs--he smiles as if apologizing for bumping a hip into the glass, a man, after all, in this jeweled, feminine, musical environment, a man trying to do the right thing, and she smiles and goes back to straightening a row of bracelets on a severed arm of black plaster. He says, “I want this. Can you wrap it?” and skates his surely useless card across. What he wants is to get a little closer to robbery without committing himself completely.

She’s pleased for him. “It’s very special.”

“I’m--we’re--celebrating.”

“Good!” She feeds his VISA to a machine and gift-wraps skillfully, pleating gold foil into fine corners as adroitly as if making a tiny bed, and he’s about to take the small, new-minted box when she says, “Oh, my.” He says, “Oh, my,” quoting her confusion as much as her phrase, and she says, “It’s no-ing your card.”

“It is?”

“Definitely is.” She’s flushed and sorry and, from empathy, humiliated. She’d love to salvage the situation--James’ ego, for some reason, is most dearly her concern, which means he can’t do, can’t carry off, what he was only half-thinking of trying anyway. Can’t do that to her. He says, struck, “This has never happened to me before.”

She grieves: “Your celebration!” She understood already that he has no cash on him; there is no graceful way out. The bell on the door jars and the clerk says, “What I can do is hold it for you. Under the counter. Until you can come back,” and James says, “I can’t come back,” and walks out past a middle-aged guy, suit and tie and the right to the clerk’s immediate attention, but this is hard for James, wrong, as if he’s walking away from something Gwen already loves.

THERESA’S IN AN OLD SWEAT shirt of his. He’s sure, because of her judicious lean around the door, that except for his UNM sweat shirt she’s in her underwear. He says, “Honey?” on an interrogative note of reassurance. She says “Hi” hoarsely, rising on the balls of her bare feet before kissing him, her mouth harshly chapped and her breath eucalyptus-medicinal. He says, “Sick, huh?”

“I was sleeping. Cindy’s home, too.”

“Is she pretty sick?”

“Not so bad today. She had it first, as usual, and I kid myself I’m not going to get it. What are you doing here? This isn’t one of your days.”

“I was in town.”

Her “Oh” comes in the small voice that means she thinks he was seeing Gwen, and he doesn’t know how to disillusion her, exactly. He suffers the bone-marrow bleakness that comes of hurting Theresa so fast, without meaning to. She long ago adopted this attitude of deference toward Gwen, and he never did what he needed to do--talk Theresa out of it, leave her sure of herself and unashamed and able to hold her own. That’s what his primary sense of Theresa is, even now: He wishes she could hold her own. He’d hated removing his protectiveness from between Theresa and the world.

She says, “Could you get the papers?”

He has to stoop for three New Mexicans. “Jeez, Theresa.”

“I’m sick .”

“The neighbor kids are going to start making up stories about this house, like: ‘A crazy woman lives here. Stay away.’ ”

“Nope. They trust Cindy to have an OK mom, plus none of their moms do much better. Do you know how many houses you can count before you come to a house with a man in it?” They gaze down the row of peaked tract houses in wan adobe shades and he says, “No, how many?” and she says, “I was just joking. I don’t know.” Nervously: “Lots.”

James’ mother would make an amused mouth when she answered the door to his father. James’ father would wonder if he could leave James for a while, and she’d ask, “Off on another adventure?” which meant, grown James translates, Off with another girlfriend? but girlfriend wasn’t a word that got spoken. No. James’ mother wasn’t indifferent to his father’s charm. They would both be smoking, his mother and father, committing the identical extravagant courtesy of glancing sideways to exhale. This coincidence would leave them smiling, and James would watch their smoke cat’s-paw-pat the further, upward air, thinning through several shades of almost-not-there before really being gone. He couldn’t look at them . After a certain point of complexity he couldn’t look at them. They didn’t look at him, either. After a certain point of complexity they sometimes left him there; that didn’t mean he was alone. He wasn’t sure it was his house, but he could go in. He was supposed to go in and supposed to bear his awareness of them, wherever they were. Why think wherever? They were upstairs in her room.

James says vaguely, “I wish there were men.”

“ You wish.” She shakes her head. He recognizes the arc of white latex flying from the sweat shirt’s collar down her chest. He can even recall the slip of the brush. They were painting the ceiling of Cindy’s room in this house, just bought, and when she splattered him they did the Coke-commercial thing, painting each other’s noses white, et cetera, in love. Years ago. She wipes her nose on her sleeve and he says “Jeez” again, annoyed, and she laughs and leads him inside, his carrying the gun into this house another kind of violence, violence without the least degree of justification and no quickening of interest--boredom, rather, the monotony of having to keep a secret, the slight, oppressive, shifty difficulty of recollecting just what can’t be said. He wanders through the living room in his black leather jacket, lost. She calls from the kitchen, “You can have coffee or tea. I’m making tea for me.”

She’s resting against the stove. He says, “You go back to bed,” and she yawns as he palms her hair from her forehead. Her forehead sweats against the hand he holds to it--his left hand, his careful right hand still in with the gun. He says, “I’ll make the tea. I’ll baby you.”

“Baby me? Why?”

“I’ll give you a back rub.”

“Back rub? Why?” “Because we should do better. Be better to each other.”

She says, “What are you doing here, James?”

“We made this beautiful kid, right?”

“Then you should have been good to me for the last five years, right?”

“Back to bed. The kitchen’s cold.”

This is critical in tone and rouses her. “You’re not paying the bills in this house anymore. I have to.”

“But if you’re sick, and she’s sick, it should be warm. You conserve on the wrong things.”

“I’m 101 and she’s 100-something, so we don’t mind the cold just now. Thank you for telling me how to live.”

“I’m not.”

“You came to the door five minutes ago and you’ve already pointed out several things I should be doing differently. I saw you think about telling me I shouldn’t answer the door like this.”

“Well, do you think you should? Do you think it’s a great example?”

“She’s asleep and not having any ex amp les right now and who are you to say examples ?”

“You go back to bed, I maketea for you, I bring you your tea, I give you a back rub, you start to feel better, huh? How’s that sound? Maybe I do have some ideas--like you shouldn’t come to the door half-naked--but you do OK. It’s me, my fault: I need to take some of it off your shoulders, right?”

She yanks the sweat shirt down past her panties and holds it down with a fist on its hem, though this means she’s in an awkward position when she covers her eyes with her other hand and starts to cry--stricken, fervently ugly crying, each intake of breath rattling with mucus. He can’t put his arms around her and can’t wait her out. He says, “What if you go back to bed, I bring you your tea, I give you your back rub, what if that, huh?” and she uncovers her eyes and kicks at him. Her bare foot misses his knee and she kicks again and connects with his shin and she pounds on his shoulders, not hard enough to anger him, but she makes herself felt; because he doesn’t back away it feels sexual, the authority with which she’s forced herself against him, focused formidably on him. He says, “Hey. Hey. Hey, don’t hurt me,” his defense having to do with preventing her finding out about the gun. He keeps his elbows pointed out, chicken-wing fashion, his fists deep in his pockets, leaning his left shoulder toward her to guard his right side. His keeping his hands in his pockets could easily be I can’t hurt you, see?, a male stratagem she furiously resents, then chooses (the moment’s perceptible) to be amused by. When she leans into his chest, done, he risks taking his hands out to hold her, setting his chin on the top of her head, his nose to the dour, reproachful scent unwashed hair has, both of them calmer and calmer until she says, “I hate it when you remind me how you can be.”

“Maybe I could be like that all the time, sometime.”

“For somebody else.”

They consider this with sadness.

He says, “To bed, OK?”

“You’re here. What are you doing. Are you leaving town? You haven’t come to say goodby, have you?”

I’m not saying goodby, I’m bringing you tea.”

When he does, she sits up in bed, crying again while she drinks her tea, but this crying is private, neither strategic nor caused, or not very directly caused, by James, who can therefore keep her company in it, this almost-companionability of sitting neutrally near her on the bed without touching her. He remembers, unwillingly, the morning he screwed up conclusively, so in love with Gwen he was getting stupider and stupider with Theresa, running flagrant risks, rubbing her nose in it (he sees now), denying everything with such heat he invited the next question, and the next, and the eventual end, which Theresa, for reasons of her own (because she is Theresa) delicately, decisively, almost maternally withheld. He and Gwen had stayed at a really terrible hotel, all they could afford that particular spring night, and even coming into this house and finding Theresa awake at 5 a.m., he’d thought he could carry it off, thought she’d make one more covert deal to keep their life the way it was, precariously was. His story, of the truck breaking down near Galisteo, 40 miles south, where he’d gone to inspect a job site--his story was fine. Standing, he’d rested his hands on the kitchen table, leaning into it, full of weird confidence that came, maybe, of lovemaking, gazing down at Theresa, and her look had the frank mistrust he’d come to associate with a successful lie; and he would watch that look of mistrust turn startled, then utterly bleak, as she stared from his shirt and back to his ignorant eyes and to his shirt again, so that he looked down at the shiny cockroach, long as his little finger, clambering from his pocket and then, with apprehensive, flickering delicacy, running up his shirt until he slapped it off and ground out its existence under a heel, irrelevantly absorbed in killing it, taking as long as he could to kill it, because after that they had to talk.

When she’s done crying he rubs her back for her, its scarps and indentations, its female lack of complexity and its fever-heat all appealing, but when he cups her breast she says, “Just don’t touch me” from the very brink of sleep. He says, “No?” and she says, “No.” She’s asleep.

He leans in Cindy’s doorway, all black leather jacket and startled, really out-of-the-blue hurt: No . Cindy rests on her side, watching TV with one eye closed, the eye against the pillow. The other eye takes him in and returns to the TV, and he asks her, “Does Mommy have a new friend?”

Here’s the crazy ready honesty of love: “She has Jeff.”

“Who’s Jeff, sweetie?”

She sits up, and he takes a Kleenex from the dahlia’d box on her bureau and swipes under her nose. She says, “There’s more snot,” and he swipes again, sitting down on her bed.

“You’ve never said snot before.”

“You’re just not here. I say s ---, too.”

“Sometimes I’m here. I’m here now, and you can’t say snot or s ---, OK?”

“This isn’t one of your days,” she says critically.

“I think we need more days.”

“Daddy, you’re a horse.”

“A horse?”

She says, “Horses stand up when they watch TV.”

Obediently he stands, back to her wall, painted with sky, the ceiling done in clouds with, even, a tiny airplane in whose windows Theresa claimed to have painted the three of them perfectly, though too small to see. He tells Cindy, “I never in a million years thought you’d be so beautiful.”

She says with satisfaction, “But I am.”

“Who is Jeff?”

“I’m not supposed to tell you who he is.”

“Do we keep secrets?”

“Jeff my teacher.”

“Oh, right, Jeff your teacher.” Silence except for the TV. “Is he nice?”

“You are nice or you can’t be a teacher.”

James says, “Right? So really nice? Or regular nice?”

“He has no bottom teeth in front.”

“Is he nice except for that?”

“When you look at him you just want him to have teeth.”

They watch a half an hour’s cartoons--James, to begin with, trying to regain equilibrium, to steady himself by intermittent hits of his flushed daughter’s beauty. From Acme Trap Co., the coyote orders increasingly fantastic contraptions. Hope is like that, it loves winging it. A trap goes off in bells, explosions, billowing dust, Wile E. Coyote was ecstatic, but--beep beep. Cindy is, before he’s entirely all right with this development, asleep. He wipes as tenderly as possible under her runny nose, then collects her from the bed, her arms and legs ungainly with deep sleep. He cradles her against his chest, swinging her artfully as he walks to ensure her sleep, but she wakes, as he’s latching her seat belt, enough to ask, “Does Mommy know I’m leaving?” “She’s sleeping. You and I are going for a ride.” “Why?” “I wanted a little more time with you.” “Why?” “I couldn’t go out that door without you.” “Why?” “Because I should have been able to but I wasn’t, because you were so beautiful and I felt like I was leaving you so far behind me, like you were getting smaller and smaller on the horizon when all I wanted was to be right back with you and be your father.”

“What’s the horizon?”

“I drive, all right? And you sleep, all right?”

James loved sleeping while his father drove. He drove so tirelessly--his expertise matching, for once, what he was doing; the pitch of his concentration confined to what was actually before him, none of that dangerous excess, that spillover James associated with his father--that James could sleep with a lightened conscience, temporarily relieved of the burden of his father, leaving his father to himself, adult, awake, fine. James could sleep because his father was fine. On certain long drives James experienced himself as he was to have few occasions for experiencing himself, as the child , his father’s child, and secure. Now let Cindy be the child , be, with surpassing security, his kid, James’ baby, in whose presence he could do no wrong. He’s pleased with her for the kid-like grace with which she’s found a way to sleep in her corner. Because her face is turned from him, all he can see is the rise of her cheek and the modeling of her brow and the corner of her closed eye, and her ear with the tiny hole in its earlobe. He’s struck by that minute hole. He didn’t know her ears were pierced, and it summons up for him all that he’s not going to know about her, the wilderness of her private life, the problem of her existing beyond his ken, his ignorance and bewilderment criminal, his love for her capable of flaring up to shock him.

By the time Cindy wakes it’s nearly dark, and the distance has been covered aimlessly enough to make her wonder. All 5-year-olds, maybe, love purpose and are trying to take their bearings from adults hardly confident of their own motives: If the extent of everybody’s uncertainty about everything were ever revealed, the blow would be crushing. She says, “Are we going to Granna and Grandpa’s?”--Theresa’s mother and father, who live in southern Colorado, and James is interested that Cindy got the direction right. Luck, or does she recognize the road? James tells her no. She says, “Are we going nowhere, then?”

“A kind of nowhere, uh-huh, except it’s an all right nowhere, because you’re with me, and I’m with you.”

“Why would we go nowhere?”

“I needed to think,” he tells her, not an explanation that can suffice, but she absorbs it gravely, and he says, “Look at that,” of the big moon rising, the road arrowing through the desert right to where the moon lofts upward, and she says, “Daddy, can we get closer to take a good look?”

HE PULLS OVER TO THE shoulder of the road and the desert bleaches out in a wide arc as he swings the truck around, back the way they came. He lets the truck idle. She unlatches her seat belt; he leans across to brace her door open so she can jump out; she’s a fawn whose legs are new, stilted, testing the tricky earth. She’s scared at being by herself out there --he thinks the moonlight raining down should reassure her but it doesn’t--she finds the stone she wants, she’s back beside him in their small house of the pickup cab, nursing her own daring, curious about its extent and promise, and he doesn’t interfere or praise her--so easy to appropriate children’s emotions, and disorientingly hard to let them think about themselves when that’s what you perceive they’re doing. She doesn’t fall asleep on the trip home but is sweet, necessary company.

He doesn’t want to deal with Theresa, who’s beside the truck before he’s turned off the engine, her arms crossed, her teeth chattering. Theresa says, “F---, are you trying to kill me from fear?” He says, “It was just a drive,” which wasn’t what he meant to tell Theresa at all--no, he’d have liked telling her everything, he’d have liked preventing this, her crying, covering her mouth, in fact wedging the back of her hand into her mouth and biting down. The tears course steadily past the wings of her nose, and she ignores them, and him. She rouses herself to cross to the passenger side and take Cindy in her arms. Even as she closes her arms around Cindy she’s trying to reason with herself, but this only leaves her furious and vivid and well beyond reason, and she strokes her daughter’s hair and says, with the peculiar brisk note of parents who are losing it but still confronting a child’s needs, “Are you all right? Are you hungry? Did Daddy scare you?”

“We saw the moon and stars and a rabbit ran across the road. We went nowhere.”

“Did you wonder what Daddy was doing? Are you all right? Are you all right?”

James says, “She’s all right.”

“I want to sleep in my bed, not in the truck anymore,” Cindy says from Theresa’s arms to James, and James says, “Why don’t you carry her in to bed? Then you and I can talk.”

“ Talk ,” Theresa says and spits at him. He wipes her spit from the corner of his mouth, but it’s like a taste, a taint, that got into his mouth, and he’s so innocent and injured and light on his feet that he can only get back in his truck and get out of there before she’s closed the front door behind her.

This is his town in the evening, street lights running through their green-amber-red spectrum over empty intersections, stars visible even downtown. He can’t stop himself. Some kind of high, grand, last scene is necessary, or this day will have taught him nothing, he’ll never know what moved him to carry the gun to begin with, and he can’t bear that--can’t live with that, not yet; can’t quite go home. Felipe gives him a grave smile, holding James by the shoulders to keep him from the half-empty restaurant. James shrugs him off. “This is one of your bad ideas,” Felipe says.

“You can’t say that. You don’t know me.”

“Are you so hard to know, man?”

Felipe follows him, too. James rounds on him to get Felipe to take a few steps backward, and couples at tables glance up bemused by the faltering waltz, the adrenalized, locked-gaze back-and-forth, but can’t place the aggression. Hostility’s so easily dismissed in social situations, terrifying to acknowledge, and the long dining room has a sheltering dimness so they can’t be seen clearly, and the people are mostly quiet. James remembers how tired he is and thinks he could sit down at the table, and maybe Felipe would call for Gwen, and Gwen would relent and get him something to eat--just, however briefly, take care of him, is there any way on Earth to ask for that? What if those about to embark on the most brutal acts wished only that? James is neither brutal nor about to be, but his circumstances confuse him, and he wishes that need lived more lightly in the chest, and that the gun wasn’t all willingness in the hand that holds it.

In the kitchen the new guy--it has to be the new guy--sits on a stool meditating over bright green, bright red slivers in a wok while two girls James recognizes are up to their arms in dishes. One girl is washing the knives, which the other girl instantly dries. They’re costly knives, and the girl who’s drying makes a little game of finding each knife’s balancing point. She stops this when she sees James watching. Gwen comes out of the pantry carrying several bottles of wine. She says, not wanting the new guy to realize she’s angry, probably, “Hi.”

James says, “Hi. Can we take a minute?”

“James, I’m really tired. It’s not a good time for me.”

She works at a wine cork while the new guy sticks his hand out at James. “I’m Evan.” James takes his hand and they shake cleanly, without apprehension. The new guy’s too new to know anything about James; he’s caught on enough, though, to want to know what James will do next. The mood of the kitchen is of everyone’s having worked well together and almost gotten through a long evening, the end in sight. He’s interrupted this, and they don’t quite understand how to sort themselves out, given James’ presence, except for Felipe, who is very sorted out, who is right behind James. James catches Gwen by the shoulder, and, if she hadn’t submitted instantly, he would have been forcing her to turn to face him.

“OK, James, now what?”

Felipe says, “You be real, real careful now--James, you listening?”

The new guy says, “What’s going on?”

Felipe says, “She don’t want him here, and here he is,” in soft explanation to the new guy and the two girls, who’ve backed into the counter.

Gwen says, “James, really, what next? Because I can’t guess. I’m so tired of having you walk in just because you can .”

He says, “I won’t, after tonight.”

“Right.” She sees he’s serious. “Promise.”

“I promise I won’t, but I want something first.”

Gwen shakes her head and sits down on the stool near the new guy--why him, why not Felipe? Because Felipe would really act?--but James catches her by the wrist and draws her to her feet and backs Gwen very gently up against the counter by the two girls, James saying as softly as he can manage, “Hey, Felipe, man, hold on a minute, hold on” to stave off what Felipe’s dying to do. James swipes a dish towel from the counter and tells Gwen, “Tie this over my eyes” and turns around; the towel’s dishwater-scented dankness is pleasing, for some obscure reason, and she ties a skillful knot, taking him at his word, another graceful thing about Gwen. She says, “This is what you want? Always proving something, James. Always.”

“You get next to those girls and make it so I don’t know who’s who, all right? Just do this last favor, all right?”

He listens while they stir themselves into a different line-up against the counter, and then, blind, dazzled by what she’s letting him do, he searches the face of the first girl. Her mouth parts at his touch. Even teeth, girl’s breath. She wants to say something, but she remembers that her voice would give her away. The pulse at her throat is rapid.

The new guy says, “Why should they do this?”

James skates a hand along the counter until he comes to the naked wrist of the next girl. Even cocooned in light gray, he closes his eyes; he searches her face with close, rapid touches and dismisses her. He’s sure. He moves along the counter until his hand meets the hand of the third woman and that’s enough, plenty, conviction. The length of the fingers and the startlingly muscled arm his hand follows to the shoulder is Gwen. He can’t be wrong, but he can’t not touch her face, either. He says, “It’s you,” and strokes her lower lip and rests the ball of his thumb on her front teeth for the familiar slight overlap, and he keeps thinking her arms will go around him but they don’t. They breathe together like lovers, their mouths only a little distance apart, and he says, “This is you,” and it occurs to him he could be wrong, he could be very wrong, but his thumb finds the tiny crescent of scar at the corner of her eye and he says, “I did this to you,” and Gwen in his arms doesn’t shrug him off or resist him by tensing or do anything but will him away . She wins.

Felipe says, “Enough for tonight, now, man. You need to go home now, James. She really bears with you, man, but even you must know it’s o