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  Long story short, I went back to Ham’s wigwam and sacked his food. Long story short, I ate his food while he followed her body all the way to Lake Michigan, where he stood on the shore and rolled his shoulders, as if bracing for a fight. He stood on the shore and bellowed. He was a grand, operatic bellower. His voice spiraled out over the water, as if blown from a conch shell. A big fat bellow that came five miles up the river to his wigwam, where by the time the sound got to me it was weak and feeble but still as clear as day. I sat, held off on my chewing as long as I could, and listened, clenching my teeth against the ringing in my ears and the soft breeze that was coming through the leaves as evening approached. I was happy, because when the evening light met the Kalamazoo it did so on equal terms, and then for a while, until night fell and it was too dark to see, the river looked clean and even drinkable, Meg, as pure as anything you’ve seen in the world up until now.

  He talked and then fell silent and then talked some more, until a few hours later they were in Niagara Falls and he nudged her awake so she could see the mist plume over the horizon. Then they drove along the river and up to the observation station and got out to stretch their legs. That river goes the wrong fucking way, it goes north instead of south, he explained, taking her hand. Then he climbed onto the fence and sat, patting the wooden railing. It goes against the grain of gravity heading that way, Meg. And it did. To their right the Niagara’s water tore along the bank, groped hard, forming small eddies in which leaves and bits of trash pooled; to their left all fury and wonder until the river got close to the edge and then grew smooth and calm, thin with hesitation. You’ll be able to walk out there if you’re careful enough and stick with the harder surface near the edge, he said, and if I tell you to do it, you’ll do it, won’t you? You’ll step right out there on your beautiful little feet when I give you the command, and you’ll be just fine.

  One more textbook case of discard and loss, another suicide fished out of the waters. Bodies were pushed to the bottom initially—for a few minutes—and then, unless snagged on the rocks below, they bobbed up and twirled around, unable to catch the outflow, which made it easy for the man named Kit Wilson, who took his Zodiac out with the collecting nets, to catch hold of her body and draw it up against the hull. Another slipper, he thought. Another foolish tourist who got too close. Another drunkard unable to resist the lure of danger. Another kid who went in too deep and couldn’t get out of the rage. Another American testing the edge. (Canadians rarely went over.) Another girl skinny-dipping with her boyfriend, swimming too far out into the tangle of currents, taking the long trip down with plenty of time to think over her life and to consider the mistakes she’d made in one form or another. Maybe she simply couldn’t live up to the expectations that life had, and decided that this was the best way to go, majestic and grand, united with the great drive of the water that had been coming over this escarpment for a million years (with the exception of that wonderful time, years ago, when just a trickle came over the scarred jawbone of rock while the rest of the mighty river was surprised to find itself diverted through the power-plant intake pipes). It seemed that at least once a year the same girl came over the falls to give him a bit role in the large drama that would culminate when the news crews showed up and asked him to speak. His Canuck voice would be clear and exact: We don’t know where she came from. No idea why she did it. The falls aren’t something to fool with. And, No, I don’t get used to pulling them out like this.

  He fished her out and saw that she was maybe fourteen or fifteen, with a thin, malformed rump, tiny arms, and a bruised face, cut along her brow, from which stared a pair of mute blue eyes. Her lips were pulled back in a grimace, exposing a gap between her two front teeth. Looking down at the body, flexing along with the hull, he got a hint of her story. (Later he’d hear her name, Meg Allen, and learn that her history could be traced back as far as a hotel in Cleveland, where she had murdered a seed dealer from a place called Mansfield, and then a bit farther back, to a hell-on-earth childhood in Akron.) Whatever produced these bodies with regularity would go on, he thought. If there was a way to stop it, it had long ago been forgotten. He held the tiller and got the motor going full throttle and watched as the wake dug surprisingly straight and clean out of the torment. He loved the feel of the boat when its stern cut deep and, in turn, the bow lifted toward the sky, slapping over the waves. He loved the way the wake spread itself out—even in the foam and rage—and how, when he was past the wash-up, as they called it, the water gathered itself into order and smoothed quickly, as if eager to be done with all the noise and to get back to a more settled existence on the way down to the whirlpool, where it would spin mindlessly for a few minutes before being released into the relative calm of the river as it headed toward the merciful breadth of Lake Ontario.

  Reading Chekhov

  He was a thirty-five-year-old part-time student at Union Seminary. In four years he would be the minister of a church up the Hudson, in a place called Sneden’s Landing. But at this time he was working for an interdenominational insurance organization in an office building on Claremont Avenue, just off Broadway. The view from his window was spectacular, stretching all the way up to the George Washington Bridge and the Palisades beyond. When the carillon played in the tower of Riverside Church, across the street—the individuated notes of the bells smearing together by the time they reached him—he sometimes felt its vibrations, spreading his fingers out against the glass.

  She commuted in from a town thirty miles up the river and worked two floors down as an insurance adjuster. Steeples that have toppled in storms, she explained. You know, church fires and the like. Midwestern churches are always burning, being rebuilt, and then burning again. I think of church fires as a kind of civic right of passage. You know, bucket brigades passing hand-to-hand. Then there are lawsuits, of course, elderly slips and so on. You’d be surprised at how often people stumble during Communion. But this is not really what I do. I’m a voice coach by training.

  Adultery is multifaceted, he said. It’s shapeless but at the same time has a rudimentary figure, like a snowflake; an abundance of clichés surround it and yet it’s unique, an entity different each time. Over the window in his bedroom was a grate secured with a large padlock. The sun came through the grate and then the embroidered curtains he brought back from Spain, spreading a lattice across her body that he traced with his fingers, from her belly—with its cesarean scar—to her chin.

  There was the inelegance of it, too, of course, and the requisite lies that must be told, and the foolishness they felt when alone: his feeling of desertion when she was up at her house along the river. He went down near the water, to walk the length of Riverside Park, to breathe the creosote and salt air, and to look at the edge of the Palisades beyond the bridge.

  The superstructure that held the subway where it emerged from the tunnel at Broadway and 125th Street. The brutal way the trains heaved to a stop, out of sight but not out of earshot—the clandestine sensation of secreting some part of his life away.

  They made love in his apartment most afternoons, one way or another, during lunch.

  I don’t care about this job. I’m a part-timer. I’m not obligated to this career, he said.

  We provide fine insurance for religious institutions under the umbrella, but otherwise we’re just another business; we weigh the risk factors—and she stopped herself here because it was easy, she found, to fall into a mindless prattle about the nature of the insurance business, about the ways risks were covered. This subject, along with the embroidered curtains, made her think of the time in Spain, with her husband, when they had gone up onto the mesa for dinner with a British couple, a man who worked for Lloyd’s of London. She remembered something seminal about that night; they had felt so young, so fresh, so keenly American. They drank a punch made of Pimm’s and talked about life. Then there had been—and here she was somewhat fuzzy on the details—an insinuation about group sex? A hint at some form of experimentation? It was
never clear. They’d excused themselves, gone to the car, driven down the road into Carboneras, laughing and excited, cutting straight through the town. The street busy, jammed with people, she had sensed the carrying of a secret agreement, of something deep and unspoken.

  The night when the circumstances were correct—her daughter was on a sleepover with a friend, her husband away on business—they took a cab through the park to the East Side for dinner, roaring through the trees, the redolent smell of the earth, passing the old horse stables, to emerge into a larger order, the stateliness of Park Avenue.

  The rattle of the emerging subway, salsa music from gypsy cabs—if he listened, when she woke him to make love again, he heard these sounds coalesce and deteriorate into nothingness: the quaint, paradoxical dynamic of knowing and not knowing. She’d become acutely aware of this sensation much later, when she moved back to the city and was living near Park Avenue, looking down at the traffic.

  The great sorrow of being part of the overall tradition, for lack of a better phrase: knowing that Chekhov had it right. They read “The Lady with the Pet Dog” together, in the grass in the park, lying on a blanket, while across the street, near Grant’s Tomb, a boy lifted a pit bull up by a stick to strengthen its jaw.

  I’d come to Lincoln Center some night, he said, when you’re with your husband, and watch you two listening to the symphony. I’d meet you at the fountain during the intermission and we’d steal away.

  No, we’d meet just as we’re meeting now. Except it would go on forever. The story would end and then it would just keep going, the way this one does. That’s what it’s about. It would keep going onward, like the light from a star. We know they’re not going to find a way out, around it, and we know that they’re just going to continue until it ends.

  But it doesn’t end, he said. He was on his back with his hand behind his head and the sun coming down through the bristle of his whiskers.

  Around the edge of her voice when she was tense, or anxious, came the tightness of her Midwestern upbringing; she spoke one afternoon about her daughter. She’s, well, how should I say this? She’s kind of a troubled teenage kid. Maybe not much different than most. A little on the edge. Troubled is the only word I can find for it. I try never to say it because to say it is to make it so. But saying it to you seems safe enough.

  The point where lust and love meet, where one ends and the other begins: the innate sincerity buried in the act of betrayal. The way it revealed the vestiges of her home to her, so that upon her return she saw everything, the pebbles in the driveway a buttermilk color, the old shingles smeared with moss, the clapboards lifting away from their nails, the yard wide and grand all the way down to the water’s edge, the light in her daughter’s room through the curtains . . .

  Dressing in the morning, snapping and adjusting undergarments, examining herself in the mirror with one hand on her belly, like Napoleon, lifting her skirt up her over her thighs, the single spritz of perfume around her belt line, all in the pale predawn light. With her mug of coffee at the kitchen sink, craning a bit to see if the traffic was heavy on the bridge: a chain of moving lights. She would cross it in a few minutes and go to the platform and wait, feeling a small soft pulse in her groin.

  They stood together on the grating over the East River Drive, in the whoosh of updraft, and engaged in a long kiss while beside them the river gathered the last light of the Manhattan day. The kiss brought them as close to floating, as close to flying, as they’d ever get, and proved to be the most memorable moment, one that would remain with her for the rest of her life: the tangle of her hair around his face and lips, the touch of his fingers near the waistband of her skirt, while the cars passed beneath.

  Using the excuse of work obligation, she came in on a Sunday, met him in the doorway of his building, and they walked to a service together. The reverend’s voice boomed past the microphone, reverberating hard against the stone, speaking about the elegance of grace, about the manner of forgiveness and the nature of redemption. He quoted from the book of Job:

  The squares of the town forget them;

  their name is no longer remembered;

  so wickedness is broken like a tree.

  On top of the flat pleats of her tweed skirt, tight against her spreading thighs, their hands rested, clasped firmly.

  One year, from start to finish, the affair bent in a great arch, the first hints of lust building into the long lovemaking sessions at the apartment, twisting into the thick helix of obligation, the secretiveness of talk.

  I want you to see the house, she said. I want you to know where I live, to get an idea. I want you to know a little bit about my life the way I know about yours. I’d like you to see my daughter. I want to kiss you on the riverbank, to implicate you into my existence . . .

  He rented a car, an old blue Ford—the kind of car a priest might drive—and drove across the bridge, turning up to the parkway as she had directed, exiting and following the river, crossing the town to her house, which stood up a drive—complacent-looking, just as she had described it, with its white clapboard and the lawn behind it stretching down to the water. He drove to the end of the road, to the park she had mentioned, and turned around and went past the house again. In his ribs was the clench of sadness. There was a light on in the upstairs window, behind a gauze of cotton, soft and yellowish. Her bedroom, he knew, was in the back and out of sight, facing the water.

  He waited in the coffee shop for darkness to arrive, and emerged back into a soft fall evening. This time the house was silent and dark, and the car in the driveway was gone.

  At the lookout off the Palisades Parkway, in her car, the lights of the Bronx a Milky Way of stars quivering in the Indian summer heat: Every year a kid falls from the Palisades here, she said, or leaps. I’ve talked to my daughter . . . mouths kissing . . . about it, about the dangers . . . kissing, parting . . . there is a reasonableness in her, there is something that still listens . . .

  As she left her office, the thin black skirt she wore was overcharged with static. She sprayed it and felt it lift away, but by the time she was back on the street it was recharged, clinging in wavelets to her thighs, riding along her crotch, sliding up with each step as she climbed the stairs to his apartment, where, in the wintry afternoon light, she stood before him and marched, letting the hem rise up and up her thighs until he was on his knees, clutching her waistband by the elastic.

  There was the disrobing, the unveiling, the sublime exposure. The sunlight was low and cold; a bitter wind came in across Riverside. The heat in the pipes lurched and thumped, and from the steam valve there came a sputter, the sound of lips parting. He opened the window and she thought of her own house, leaking heat, the old plaster cold to the touch. It was that simple, in some ways, the wonder of the affair, the sense of lines that were drawn and redrawn: to have demarcations so clear and perfect, like lines on a map, not the regions and countries but the everlasting longitudes and latitudes; that part she retained when all else was gone.