For my parents,

who never once to my knowledge tried to kill me.

You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all
your soul and with all your might. Take to heart these instructions
with which I charge you this day. Impress them upon your children.
Recite them when you stay at home and when you are away, when
you lie down and when you get up. Bind them as a sign on your
hand and let them serve as a symbol on your forehead; inscribe
them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.

—DEUTERONOMY 6:5–9
 1

The vision was like this: he was sitting in the temple and the light
was coming through the bad stained glass and he was trying to find
a comfortable position on the stupid pews. He’d suggested
something better and softer and more ergonomic but they’d said it
was a temple, not a movie theater. He couldn’t manage it without
making noise, although, of course, you could never be sure if the
noise that was audible to you was audible to anyone around you;
maybe they couldn’t hear his shifting and the rustle of the fabric of
his pants and the keys rearranging themselves slightly in his pocket
and so forth over the sound of the praying and singing and all the
other asses reorienting themselves and keys rattling and children
whispering and giggling and older people muttering and coughing
and Sarah’s mother crying and her father clearing his throat—
acoustics, after all, were really less science than art; Abbie had dealt
with plenty of acoustic consultants and materials specialists in his
professional life, and it was pretty goddamn clear that they hadn’t the
slightest idea what they were talking about. In any event each
person’s sensitivity to sound, especially in a lively acoustic
environment, was deeply personal and idiosyncratic, although Abbie,
who liked to imagine that he defied convention in many ways, was in
this regard deeply conventional. He was trying to be quiet so as to
avoid distracting his wife from the task of dealing with her mother
while simultaneously contemplating in a purely hypothetical but
deeply personally pleasing way the prospect of a really excellent fire
gutting the building that middlebrow bourgeois taste had utterly
ruined while also thinking—still vaguely, but with an increasing sense
of necessity—of somewhere to suggest for dinner, because after the
service concluded and they’d all shuffled around shaking hands and
murmuring, “Good Shabbos,” he knew he’d find himself on the front
steps of the temple with his wife and his in-laws, and his father-in-
law would suggest maybe they should all get something to eat. His
mother-in-law would neither agree nor disagree even though it would
be obvious that she was hungry—she’d say something like, “Oh,
whatever you want,” or “I just don’t want to wait in a long line”—and
Sarah would look at him helplessly, and for some reason it would be
suddenly his problem. It really was a problem because there was
nothing decent in the immediate vicinity, and none of them would
want to walk very far or bother with a cab. The congregation was
singing Adon Olam to a preposterous, lilting melody. The chazan had
said that it was Calypso, but it didn’t sound Calypso to him;
suggestively Caribbean, maybe. Then again, what did he know? The
closest he knew to Calypso was that Vonnegut book. You know the
one. “B’et ishan,” they sang. He closed his eyes.
He found himself standing in a field. All around him there were
stalks of corn. They were low yet, just at his waist. It must have been
early summer. The field fell down a shallow hill to a highway where a
few cars passed. Beyond the highway was a tangle of woods, what
grows along a highway where land was at one time cleared but over
which first weeds and then spindly, haunted trees grew back.
Beyond these woods stood another low hill, and on that hill the
weedy and unpleasant roadside gave over to a sturdier deciduous
forest. Farther away, several miles probably, although it looked
closer, a wide blue ridge swelled up a thousand feet. Just to his right,
the ridge extruded a lower promontory, a thick knot of land covered
in pines. To his left, winding up the face of the ridge, tucked into a
sort of notch in its face, was a road; it must have been that same
highway he was looking across, which wound around the lower hill
and carved its way up the base of the ridge. It was a sunny day, but
there were high, white cumuli, and wherever they drifted, they cast
shadows on the face of the ridge, ink-dark blots as big as whole
towns. It must have been late in the day, as the sun was beginning to
go down behind him, which meant that he was facing east toward
the westernmost escarpment of the Appalachians, near to Pittsburgh
where his sister lived. He squinted. There was a small clearing on
top of the mountain, just beyond the knot of land. He felt as if he was
being lifted up; he felt as if he was rising toward it, although his feet
were still planted in the dirt and the scratchy stalks were still around
his hands, which were at his sides, and something in his heart was
saying here here here here here here. He felt that he must look away
and so he turned his head, wrenched it; it felt as if he’d torn a lung
loose; it felt as if something rattled out of his chest. He looked to his
right and there, standing in the field, was a deer. It was shockingly
close to him. He had never been so close to a wild animal. It didn’t
look like a dog or a house cat, soft and uniform and sewn like a
stuffed toy. Its coat was mangy and matted, not the smoothly
speckled brown of a deer glimpsed from the car as you sped down a
country road, but a mottled, wild collision of every brown. There were
ticks in its hide; his vision was such that he saw them clenched and
ravenous against the gray-black skin under the animal’s coat. The
wind was blowing toward him, and Abbie could smell it, the buck, a
wild stink of leaves and digestion. Its small tail flicked a few times. It
exhaled, horse-like and sudden and hot. Its shoulders must have
been as high as his own shoulders. Its antlers were immense,
prehistoric, before the old world shrank to a merely human scale,
with eight points on each. They’d just begun to shed their velvet,
which was bloody and loose upon them. He could smell the blood,
also. The buck’s eyes were black and utterly inhuman and they
reflected his face. He saw in his reflection, in the eyes of this animal
that had no need or will to speak, another self that was his own self
before language and beyond language; then, apprehending
something without the need for language, he opened his eyes.
“V’a’ira,” sang the congregation.
“Is everything all right?” asked his wife.

• • •

This is how it happened.

Abbot Mayer first spoke with God at a Mostly Musical Shabbat at
Temple Beth-El on the Upper West Side. Abbie had been, until then,
generally irreligious. He thought of himself rather as a deeply
spiritual man in the broadest human tradition. He had flirted in his
younger years with Buddhism and then a vague Vedanta that mostly
involved an abortive dedication to the rigorous practice of Hatha
yoga, a period he now looked back on with some embarrassment,
not because there was anything wrong with Buddhism or yoga per
se, but because there was something slightly suspect about a hippie
kid from a prosperous family of New York Jews engaging in that kind
of stoned Orientalism. He’d subsequently settled on a kind of ethnic,
ethical Judaism that was not taxing for him and acceptable for his
wife, who did believe. Her whole family believed, actually, which
Abbie accepted even as he found it odd. He’d been raised in a
Conservative home, observing many of the forms, even intermittently
keeping kosher, depending on his mother’s moods and his father’s
appetites. He remembered their rare trips to synagogue, usually only
on High Holy Days, as hazy chains of uninterrupted and unintelligible
Hebrew. Sarah’s family was Reform, but they went regularly to
Friday-night services, sent their children to a Jewish summer camp
near Pittsburgh, had traveled as a family to Israel, and believed
thoroughly and entirely in Adonai—believed, in fact, with a melodic,
tent-revival joyfulness that struck Abbie as oddly evangelical and un-
Jewish. But, as he didn’t believe in God, he kept these thoughts to
himself, and he treated his wife’s religious interests with supportive
disinterest that, unrecognized by him, bordered on disdain. It had
never yet occurred to him that this attitude suggested to Sarah that
her faith was some kind of charming feminine hobby. He assumed
she was glad he left her to it and didn’t offer his opinions, which was,
he’d be the first to admit, a habit of his and not, perhaps, his most
pleasant.
There were, however, occasions on which it was necessary to
accompany her to services. Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, of
course, and then, once a year, in the spring, on the Friday night that
coincided with her younger brother’s Yahrtzeit. Elliot had died at
twenty-two, hit by a car in a rain-slicked intersection on 7th Avenue
in Park Slope around eleven at night. It had been one of those
frustrating accidents in which no real blame can be assigned—
perhaps the driver had approached the red light a little too fast;
perhaps Elliot had stepped out a few seconds too soon. The driver
wasn’t drunk. Elliot wasn’t drunk or, at least, not very. The preceding
week had been dry, the downpour sudden and intense. He’d been at
dinner with friends, and when the rain passed, they’d headed for the
subway, and then.
They say, whoever they are, that the death of a child is never
easy, but it was especially not so for the Liebermans, who were in
that genus of family that stays, somehow, almost miraculously
untouched by tragedy, each member of each generation, whether
family by blood or by marriage, passing peacefully and surrounded
by loved ones after nine robust decades on this earth. That, at least,
was their self-reinforcing myth. One of Sarah’s aunts had in fact died
in her sixties of breast cancer, and Sarah’s great-grandfather had
committed suicide after the crash in ’29, a fact that she hadn’t
learned until she was nearly thirty. Her own mother, drunk and a little
maudlin at a cousin’s wedding, had revealed it in a lurching
conversation overlain with the DJ’s exhortations to “the ladies.” Like
any myth, its historicity was beside the point, and the family believed
in it as surely as they believed in God, whether or not Genesis, say,
was literally true. Liebermans did not just die.
Like a lot of nonbelievers, Abbie, however much he flattered
himself as a materialist and creature of a phenomenal world, secretly
held a set of complex and interrelated superstitions, chief among
them an abiding belief in a universal principle of synchronicity, a kind
of cosmic irony in the inevitable alignment of certain things. If he
had, at the time, believed in a god, it would have been less a cruel
god or a harsh god or a judgmental god so much as a mordant one.
(Later in his life, Abbie would tell people that he came to believe
God’s evident nonexistence was positive proof that He was, in fact,
the God of the Jews, His own nonexistence being the sort of joke
that only a Jew would find funny.) One of these synchronicities, also
a source of some dismay among the Liebermans, was the fact that
Elliot’s Yahrtzeit seemed to arrive inexorably on the same weekend
as Beth-El’s monthly Mostly Musical Shabbat service, a campfire
affair transported into the sanctuary and overstocked with young
children and guitars. It was also—these were, after all, well-to-do
Reform Jews, well populated with academics and public-radio
liberals—peppily distressing in its ethnomusicological ambitions; a
typical service might involve the chazan’s recent discovery of a
traditional Ethiopian version of Ador V’dor, say, and the temple’s
core membership of enthusiasts would break out the qachels. Abbie
found it both tacky and endearing—certainly the service flitted by
more quickly with singing and dancing children, and these people
really did seem to enjoy being Jewish, something he could never
once recall from his own upbringing, whose religion had mushed in
his mind into a lot of dour, unintelligible Ashkenazi mumbling
punctuated by the percussive bronchial hacking of his own parents’
aging congregation. Nevertheless, all the happy-happy singing lent
the whole service a kind of antic, circus atmosphere, and by the time
the Mourners Kaddish rolled around at the end, Susan Lieberman
would be beside herself with nervous agitation, and Sarah would be
just as anxious and upset, ironically, from trying to keep her mother
calm.
It was ironic (or not; who could really tell as far as God is
concerned?) that Abbie had actually designed the temple or, in any
case, had been the head architect for the renovation of its current
location; it had been in the commission of this project that he’d first
met Sarah, who’d been the token younger woman on the temple
board at the time. A crypto-biblical catastrophe involving burst pipes
and flooding had ruined the old sanctuary and lobbies and the big
dining facility in the basement. The building itself had previously
been an Episcopalian church, before, as Elliott had—according to
Sarah—put it, they had disappeared up the asshole of their own
indecision, and then it was converted haphazardly into a synagogue
in the late sixties. By the time of the flood, its combination of
obliquely Christian architecture and truly regrettable later-addition
fixtures and finishes (“Walden Pond meets the Brady Bunch,” Elliott
had also called it) had begun to strike some of the congregation as
retrograde and embarrassing and Not Very Jewish. Abbie would
have told them that the architectural history of Jewish houses of
worship was fascinating in its lack of actual historical sources and
tradition; the vague hitching of Near Eastern decorative flourishes
with stained glass and auditorium seating that seemed, to Beth-El’s
leadership, as the real and authentic thing was pure invention. But in
this case, Abbie was just a junior associate in his firm, and the job
offered a nice piece of solo work; every architect’s portfolio required
a few holy places, he reasoned, and the soggy volume of the ruined
temple was an opportunity to put some of his own ideas about
salvage and environmentally sound building into practice. Abbie was
ahead of the vanguard in thinking about these things; it was what
would make him eventually, albeit retrospectively, famous.
“An architect does not design buildings; an architect solves
problems.” Thomas Arah, who’d become his adviser at Yale, told him
so—told a roomful of people, actually, during a convocation in—it
must have been 1974 or 1975. It struck him at the time as the sort of
self-satisfied banality that was better laughed at than ignored. Arah
was nearly seventy and had already lost much of his close vision to
macular degeneration. He’d become instead typically drunk—never
very, but almost always just a bit—and philo-sophical. He referred to
Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe as Frank and Mies. He
was writing some immense book, which he never finished, on the
relationships between national character, architectural vernacular,
and political economy. During Abbie’s junior year, he’d accompanied
the old man as some kind of assistant on a trip out West, a tour that
was to include several early Spanish missions in California, Pueblo
Indian cliff dwellings in Colorado, and a stop in Arizona to visit
Taliesan West. He’d done very little assisting and came to believe
that he was along just so that Arah would have a body present to
prove to waiters and stewardesses that the old man wasn’t talking to
himself. As the plane had descended into Phoenix—which was not
yet the vast sprawl of suburbs and golf courses that it would become
but which it was already quite visibly on its way to becoming—Arah
told Abbie to look out the window, where the greenish edge of
human habitation met the desert. “These people,” he told Abbie, “are
going to destroy our civilization. Los Angeles is going to break off
into the ocean. Florida is going to sink. New York is going to flood.
And these poor ignorant idiots, they are going to suck every last drop
of water out of the Colorado River, and then they’re all going to die.”
Then he pressed the call button and harangued the stewardess into
bringing him another vodka.
Arah’s beliefs—that architects were servants and functionaries of
the social organism; that architecture was about the practical, if
hopefully aesthetically pleasing, solutions to a series of definable
and identifiable practical problems; that one must resist the urge to
look at the evolution of forms as a teleology of progress and
understand it instead as an adaptive response to circumstances; that
Frank and Mies, et al. were geniuses, yes, but were also reasons to
be suspicious of the very category of genius (after all, Lloyd Wright
couldn’t so much as design a proper gutter and downspout)—
eventually converted Abbie, even as he became known among
distinctly smaller circles as something very much resembling a
genius himself. But he’d resisted them at the time; like plenty of
prosperous Jewish kids, Abbie had had no trouble syncretizing the
vaguely communal stoner ethic with a derivative version of
Objectivism—speaking of vanguards: when you believe all of your
friends to be geniuses and revolutionaries, it isn’t even a difficult
marriage. Reflecting on this period of his life in an interview years
later, he said that every young architect imagines himself as Howard
Roark at some point in his development, usually before he has to
write his first door schedule. “Howard Roark would consider a door
schedule unheroic,” Abbie had said, “but you can’t hang a thirty-inch
door in a thirty-six-inch doorway.”
No architect ever entirely eradicates that early self-image as
some kind of Promethean superman, and none of them ever
escapes the occasional desire to just dynamite the hell out of some
work of theirs that’s been bowdlerized in the process of meeting
someone else’s budget and taste. That was how Abbie felt about the
Temple Beth-El. On the occasions when he was stuck there, if
anyone had asked him about the building, which they did from time
to time, then he’d have replied with the embarrassed pride that
successful writers reserve for their early poetry. Secretly, though, he
nursed a pleasing fantasy of sneaking into the place one night and
burning it to the ground. His original designs had simplified the
already self-effacing, if prosperous, simplicity of the Episcopalians
into something of almost Shaker austerity, the only real
ornamentation to have been railings and trim and windowpanes that
made subtle reference to the Star of David. The congregation had
insisted on stained glass; then on carpeting the aisles; then, at last,
on replacing his elegant, Japanese wall panels with horrible
accordion dividers—this last was a concession to cost, Abbie knew,
but still.
So, it was during Mostly Musical Shabbat, during a Calypso
version of Adon Olam, on the occasion of the observed anniversary
of the death of a brother-in-law whom he’d never met, while staring
at a stained glass depiction of Moses leading the Israelites out of
Egypt that recalled nothing so much as a Saturday-morning, Hanna-
Barbera cartoon, that God spoke to Abbie Mayer for the very first
time. Of course, God doesn’t speak; it’s as silly to imag-ine the Lord
uttering actual words as it is to imagine that, because we are made
in God’s image, He therefore resembles in some actual, physical
way, a human being. As we are, body and soul, afterimages of the
totality and universality of the divine, frozen, sub-photographic
images of a vastness of being that is and moves, so too is our
language less even than an echo of the primordial verb of existence.
God, Abbie learned, doesn’t speak to men at all but rather puts into
their minds and hearts the knowledge of and belief in that which He
would—if He did, if He even could, speak—have said.

• • •

After the service, they stood on the front steps of the temple in the
quick spring twilight until Abbie, feeling oddly ravenous, though not
as generally discombobulated as he would have expected if you’d
told him earlier in the day that he’d receive a vision from God, asked
if anyone was hungry and suggested an Italian place on the next
block that he knew they all liked. It was an Italian restaurant as they
used to be, unconcerned with faddish authenticity, the sort of place
where you could still get lasagna and garlic bread and where the
waiters all sounded like a swim in the waves off the shore in Jersey
was the closest they’d ever got to Italy. The sun was still higher than
the buildings but sinking swiftly, and something about the quality of
its light suggested reflection off the water, although you certainly
couldn’t see the river from there. Abbie disapproved of the
neighborhood’s sometimes slavishly historic architecture, but he
approved of its lowness. He’d never designed a skyscraper. Twelve
stories was the maximum decent height for human habitation. It was
a question of scale. New York’s immensity appealed to him, but not
its height. He took Sarah’s hand, and she let it hang limply in his for
a minute before sliding it out of his grip and shaking it as if she’d
touched something wet and unpleasant before shoving it into the
pocket of her coat. Abbie gave her an inquiring look, but she stared
at the ground. But she was always upset after this service, so he
turned back to his in-laws and said, “So, what do you think?”
As was her habit, Susan Lieberman said, “Oh, I don’t know. I
don’t know if I’m really in the mood to sit in a restaurant,” and her
husband said, “Well, come on, Sue. We should eat something.”
Susan shrugged helplessly and said as long as there wasn’t a wait.
There was never a wait. Herman talked about real estate. He’d been
retired for almost five years by then but still spoke about it as if he
were always in the middle of the next big deal.
“The gays,” he told Abbie. “That’s how I know.”
“The gays?” Abbie repeated. He’d been trying to get Sarah to
look at him to no avail; she was embroiled in a quiet sidebar with her
mother. That wasn’t necessarily unusual, but he could tell that she
was upset with him, and, as was his habit, he found himself echoing
his father-in-law’s phrases as a proxy for actually conversing, which
fortunately suited Herman just fine. He let his mind file through the
inventory of recent sins that Sarah may or may not have discovered
—there is, after all, no one so paranoid as a man who makes a habit
of lying, if only by omission, to his wife; those normal moments of
distance or distraction in a marriage, which a policy of general
honesty would render as innocuous as they are inevitable, become,
each of them, immensely significant, indicative of some tear in the
veil of secrets.
“The gays,” Herman was saying, “That’s right. I always say, it’s a
good thing I’m not a prejudiced man. Well, you know, my grandfather
was in the theater, not an actor of course, but in the business, so we
always knew all kinds in my family and said, live and let live. And for
a man in real estate, the gays are the bellwether. If they’re moving in,
you can be sure that prices are going up, up, and up. That’s how I
knew to buy downtown, and as you know, it worked out well for me.”
“Yes,” Abbie said. “That’s a good policy.”
 “You ought to buy downtown, Abbie. A man of your interests?
One of these lofts. Can you believe it?” He chewed his scampi.
“Lofts,” he repeated.
“Sarah likes it here,” Abbie replied. He found that invoking
Sarah’s tastes was a prophylactic against his father-in-law’s advice.
He sent a pleading look in her direction, but she was still embroiled
with her mother.
“And tell me, Abbie, what are you working on these days?”
“Oh,” Abbie wrenched himself away from the side of Sarah’s
head. “Oh, lighting mostly.”
“Lighting? Do you do that as well? Don’t your electricians or what
have you do that sort of thing? After you design the, the building and
so forth.”
“Well, an architect doesn’t so much design buildings as he solves
problems,” Abbie said. “Anyway, very interesting new technologies in
lighting. Fluorescents, actually.”
“Fluorescents! No thank you. Like prisons and cafeterias.”
“Well—” Abbie started to say.
“Not for me,” said Herman, and that was clearly the end of it.
Herman and Susan walked home after dinner, and Abbie and
Sarah shared a silent cab to their apartment several blocks farther
north. “A nice doorman building on West End Avenue.” He could still
hear the voice of their broker, who’d hustled them through a series of
catastrophes that she must have staged as a sales tactic before
ushering them past a uniformed Russian man with huge shoulders
and a mismatched, delicate face to the brass elevators and into their
new home. “Well,” she’d said, whatever her name was. Abbie
remembered her voice, but not her name. No, Myrna, that was her
name. She was in her sixties and sounded distantly like the Bronx,
although she’d polished the rough edges into something more
generically New-York career-woman. She wore all black and had
large, but tasteful, jewelry. “Well,” she said again, and she stood
there nodding. They couldn’t say no. It was too big and much too
traditional. It had wainscoting and radiators. None of their furniture
would match. He said as much to Sarah after they’d already said
yes. “You’ll rise to the challenge, I’m sure,” she told him.
 Sarah disappeared into their bedroom as soon as they were
inside, and Abbie poured himself a scotch and went out onto the
balcony to smoke a cigarette. The balcony, that detail he liked. He’d
quit smoking years ago, but kept a pack in the freezer and still
indulged from time to time in the evening, or when he’d had quite a
lot to drink. He took a drag of the cigarette and traced a dollar sign in
the dark air and laughed at himself. “That’s a little architect’s joke,”
he said. If you looked between the buildings, you could catch sight of
the dark expanse of the Park: that carefully constructed fantasy of
how the island had been before there was a city there.
He reflected on his experience—well, that was the wrong word,
but it would have to do until he could come up with a better
euphemism—in the temple. Rationally, of course, it would have been
a confabulation, a daydream, albeit a startlingly visceral one. It
comported, after all, very closely with a train of thought he’d lately
been toying with without permitting himself seriously to commit to
considering it: leaving New York. His sister, Veronica, had suggested
it; he’d called her to ask her advice about Cathy, the woman he’d
been seeing, but when Veronica had asked him if he was calling to
talk to her about “that woman,” he’d become angry—not so much
because she called her “that woman” but more because she’d
intuited his purpose before he could reveal it, and it made him feel
like the lesser intellect. That pained him acutely, because if his sister
was, by the crudest economic measures, more successful than him,
he comforted himself with the fact that he was smarter.
As children, they’d been very close; she’d protected her dreamy,
artistic sibling by carrying the weight of their parents’ absurd
expectations on the strength of her intelligence and limitless talents
—a musician, a dancer, an artist, an athlete—and then, later, he’d
returned the favor a thousandfold when their father had discovered
Veronica’s first real girlfriend and reacted very badly. Saul Mayer
lacked Herman Lieberman’s essential libertinism. Herman had had
mistresses over the years, which Susan had always tolerated, later
confessing to her college-age daughter that, after Elliot was born,
their marriage had cooled, passion settling into a deeper, if less
physical, sort of friendship. “But it sounds terrible!” Sarah said. “He
was exploiting you!”
 “On the contrary, honey. I’ve had my fun too!”
Saul Mayer did not cheat on his wife, nor had they settled into an
amicable intellectual companionship. He’d persisted in a state of
faithful matrimonial anxiety until his wife, only sixty-two at the time,
had passed away. To discover that his daughter was a lesbian was
too much for him. But even as a stoned college kid, Abbie had
viewed the world with an inconsistent but utterly unbending
moralism, and the study of architecture had given him a Masonic
presumptuousness about his own mental superiority over most other
people, his father certainly included. This would later harden into a
less redeemable condescension, but only later—and he’d been a
rock against which their father’s anger and opprobrium crashed but
which it couldn’t erode. “It seems to me,” Veronica could still hear
him saying, languid and probably high, “that the question of whom a
person loves is very much secondary to the simple fact that a person
loves.” Her father had screamed back that it wasn’t natural. Abbie
had shrugged: “A townhouse in a city of ten million people is natural?
Coal-fired electricity is natural? Glass windows are natural? Cars
and subways are natural? What’s natural? Besides love, what is
there but artifice?” This argument hadn’t worked on their father, who
passed the rest of his life very rarely speaking to his daughter, and if
he did, whenever possible, only through the intermediary of his son,
but it had worked on Veronica, cementing permanently her sororal
loyalty. In the two decades since, Abbie had frequently tested that
permanence, but she did what she could, when he let her.
He’d called, as always, at the most inopportune time, and she’d
just hoped he wasn’t calling—again—to talk about his stupid affair.
She’d always found men to be fatuously moralistic about their own
immorality, forever haranguing their friends and wives and children
into self-serving arrangements that they then picked at with the
childish, masochistic pleasure of little boys picking at their scabs.
Her brother and Sarah had never had a traditional marriage—at least
not a wholly monogamous one. (Even thinking it, Veronica could
hear Abbie correcting her, reminding her not to equate monogamy, a
latecomer when you consider the breadth of history, with tradition.
“An aberration!” she imagined him bellowing with the particular glee
he reserved for when he won an argument that he was having only
with himself. “Something new under the sun!”)
They’d married in the early eighties. Reagan was the silly
president. New York had retained a louche permissiveness that the
rest of the country, in rediscovering some celluloid, high-desert vision
of itself, was supposedly leaving behind. Even in Manhattan, though,
you could sense a change in the tolerated transgressions. Everyone
wore suits all of a sudden, even the women, who looked terrible in
them—the men only looked ridiculous—and did coke and aspired to
steal money from retirees. Men had fewer love affairs, but there were
more hookers. Veronica was sure that all these ethnographic
impressions were completely wrong; if she’d ever mentioned them to
her brother he’d have marshaled a statistical counterargument—
delivered in that voice of utmost patience that signaled his utter
disdain—to tell her very certainly that she was most assuredly wrong
about all this. “The plural of anecdote,” he’d say with a smile. Abbie
loved clichés the way some men love Beatles albums; they recalled
the exaggeratedly pleasant memories that are so frequently
scattered around recollections of an unpleasant youth. You couldn’t
argue with him; what would be the point?
The trouble with their marriage wasn’t that Abbie fucked other
women, but that he fell in love with them. He could never accept this,
and he privately accused Sarah of a more general female jealousy.
“Female jealousy,” Veronica would repeat, and he’d sigh and say,
“You know what I mean.” The problem was that he didn’t even
realize that he fell in love with them; like all egotists, he failed to
recognize his own reflection, thinking himself somehow larger than
the strangely diminished man in the glass. And Veronica knew, to be
fair, that he never loved any of them as much as he loved his wife, or
at least, he never loved her any less than he loved any of them.
Sarah, for her part, rarely slept with other men—when she did it, she
did it instrumentally, usually because Abbie’s attention had
wandered, and after all, as Abbie would have said, “We’ve all got
needs.” He always tried to hide these other women, despite the fact
that they’d agreed to their inevitable presence early on. In his mind,
this had to do with her “jealousy issues,” whereas it was really the
guilt that sprung from his unacknowledged infatuation with them.
Veronica always knew when he was seeing someone because he
became at once furtive and solicitous. He never knew when Sarah
slept with other men. Likely he imagined she didn’t.
“Hello, Abbie.” When she’d reached across her desk to answer
the phone, she’d knocked a sheaf of relief maps onto the floor, and
when she heard her brother’s voice and greeted him a second time,
she leaned on the desk and looked at them forlornly, feeling that
stooping to pick them up would represent a kind of defeat. “Fuck,”
she muttered. It was nearly four, and Phil Harrow, her business
partner in the venture whose plans now lay scattered on the carpet,
would arrive any moment for the last meeting of the day. She had
nothing but bad news for him.
“Fuck you, too,” Abbie said. His voice sounded suspiciously
jocular. Anytime he was anything other than lugubrious and
condescending, she knew he was going to ask a favor. She hoped it
would only be money. He’d hinted about it recently, though he never
had the balls to come out and ask directly. Probably he was so
twisted around about having a sister who made so much more than
him that he’d never get over the embarrassment of asking.
“Not fuck you,” she said. “I dropped something.”
“Ahhh,” said Abbie.
No, fuck you, thought Veronica. If he was going to be intolerable
—when was he not, though?—then she was going to hang up. But
he hadn’t really said anything, and she was acting like her mother.
Or she told herself that she was acting like her mother, which always
calmed her whenever she felt herself drifting into sentiment or
annoyance, whether or not this was anything like her mother at all.
“How are you?” she asked him.
“In debt.”
“Ah.” She hadn’t expected him to come out with it so easily.
“It’s not your problem, of course.”
“No,” she said, but how could she not have been thinking: then
why did you bring it up to me?
“It’s a curious thing,” Abbie told her. “I’m sought, but not
compensated.”
“I’m sure you’re compensated.”
“Undercompensated.”
 “Mm,” she said. Her brother was famous in the minor way that
people can become famous within their own professions without ever
being known to anyone outside, and he lived grandly, flying from
conference to museum to university to give talks about saving the
world from impending catastrophe through new paradigms of design.
In arguments, he’d even accused her—“you and your housing
divisions,” he’d spat—of conspiring to drown the world. She knew
that his firm was more concept than practice, and although the
colleges paid for his flights and hotels and surely compensated him
well for his worn-out and frankly hectoring prophesies, she couldn’t
remember the last time he’d actually built something. She suspected
that his and Sarah’s tastes in wines and restaurants and the frequent
redecoration and renovation of their overlarge apartment were a little
more than he could reasonably afford. Having reached a point in her
own financial life where there was effectively nothing that she
couldn’t reasonably afford, Veronica took a slightly pornographic
pleasure in speculating on the budgets of the more cruelly leveraged
middle class, especially those to whom she was related.
“Also,” he said, “I have a problem with a woman.”
“Does Sarah know?”
“About the money? Or the woman?”
“Either, I suppose.”
“No. The latter, certainly not.”
“You should try monogamy, Abbie. It’s easier to keep your story
straight.”
“Lesbians,” he said.
“Well,” Veronica replied. “Be that as it may.”
“What am I going to do, though?”
“About the woman or the money?”
“Both.”
Veronica sighed audibly. “Forget the former, concentrate on the
latter.”
“I might need a loan.”
“A loan, Abbie. That entails repayment. With interest, as a
general rule.”
“Usurer.”
 “That’s Christian, Abbie. I think. And I have no such
compunctions. The last time you asked me for money, we didn’t
speak for a year.”
“Why was that?”
“Let’s not get into it.”
“I didn’t pay you back.”
“No. It was for the apartment. You told me you needed a larger
one for a family.”
“Yes, that didn’t work out. Not yet.”
Veronica’s assistant tapped lightly on the office door and poked in
her head. “Mr. Harrow is here. Should I send him back?”
“You’d better tell him to wait,” she said.
“Wait for what?” said Abbie.
“Not you,” Veronica told him. “I was talking to my secretary.” Her
secretary frowned as she closed the door. “Damn,” Veronica
muttered. Jill hated being called a secretary, and who could blame
her? She had some sort of absurd degree in studio art from some
preposterously expensive private college that no one had ever heard
of, and Veronica had hired her as an assistant in a rare moment of
solidarity—with what, or whom, she wasn’t sure. She reminded
herself to try to remember to offer the girl some kind of praise for
professional acumen when just enough time had passed that it
would not seem like a premeditated apology, knowing that she’d
forget. Veronica was a feminist, obviously, but she occasionally—all
right, more than occasionally—longed for a thick-ankled and
omnicompetent older woman with a bad perm and worse attitude to
keep her working life in order. Alas, they were like real craftsmen in
the construction trades: dead, retired, ever harder to find, frightfully
expensive when you did.
She realized she’d let the call lapse into silence. “I have an
appointment,” she said vaguely.
“You’re trying to get off the phone with me.”
“Yes,” she said. One lesson she had learned was that it was
pointless to be less than direct about these things.
“Well, a loan, then.”
“What’s it for, Abbie? Specifically?”
“The firm. We’re having cash flow issues.”
 “I’ll think about it. And I’d want to look at the books first.”
“Yes, I imagined.”
She’d wandered around the desk while they talked, and now she
leaned against the other side of her desk. She pinched the bridge of
her nose and closed her eyes. Her office overlooked the silver dome
of the Civic Arena. She looked out the windows. There was a hockey
game that evening, and the lots were already filling up. She looked
at the floor, the curled plans flapping in the breeze from the vent.
“Abbie?” she said. “What do you know about hydrology?”

• • •

He thought back on the rest of that conversation and watched the

smoke from his indulgent cigarette drift away from the light of the
French doors. A vision. Well, he wouldn’t be the first, and did it
matter, really, the quantity or quality of his particular faith? He
finished smoking and went back inside, where he poured himself
another drink. Then Sarah appeared. She hadn’t changed, and she
was holding a paper in her hand. “What’s this, Abbie?” she asked.
Her face was set in a look of frozen determination that Abbie found
especially ridiculous, and he smiled without meaning to.
“I don’t know. What is it?”
She slapped it on the counter in front of him. He glanced. “It’s an
American Express bill,” he said.
“And?”
“And what? I’ve told you, I’m taking care of it.”
“Taking care of what, Abbie?”
It occurred to him that he wasn’t sure what she was talking about,
but he pressed on. “I’ve spoken to my sister. She’s not averse to the
idea of a loan. Although, she mentioned, possibly, a project that I
might, oh, come out and work on.”
“What the fuck are you talking about? I’m talking about this.” Her
thin finger landed on a line item on the page, and he let himself look
and realized his error. He’d always been careless with money. It was
a mistake to charge it.
But he’d never known how to back down gracefully from a lost
position, so he said, “What’s that?”
 “That,” Sarah said, “is a doctor’s bill for a doctor’s office I don’t go
to, and you don’t go to, and when I called, I found out that it’s an
Ob/Gyn.”
“Ah.”
“Abbie,” Sarah said, “Goddamnit, how could you?”
“How could I what, Sarah? These things will happen. It meant
nothing. It means nothing. Goddamnit, and I’m having it taken care
of, too.”
What is it about some men, Sarah wondered, that makes them
imagine morality as a matter of accountancy, a balancing of
columns, the good against the bad? “You’re having it taken care of?
What are you, the mafia? You make it sound like you’re putting out a
hit!”
“You’re being ridiculous.”
That was when she broke the vase. She didn’t want to, but it had
to be done. You were damned either way, a victim or a punisher, too
weak or too angry, too emotional or too indifferent; well, better to do
something than nothing; better to be disdained than pitied. Later, she
knew, Abbie would comfort himself by recalling this demonstration of
her irrationality. And, in fact, he put on his calmest face and asked if
she’d been drinking.
She told him no.
Then she didn’t speak to him for almost a week, and although
she should have hated him, it also reminded her, in an odd way, of
why she loved him, because he let her not speak to him, let her glide
through the house in a noisy silence—the silent treatment
exacerbated by her loud stacking of dishes, phone calls with her
parents, television turned deliberately too high. He let her be angry,
which, hard as she tried to remain so, exhausted her; it deprived her
combustible fury of oxygen, and toward the end of the week, she sat
across the dining room table from him and said, “So, what are we
going to do?”
“I talked with Veronica, again,” he said. “What would you think . . .
I know I did a wrong thing. And then there’s the money. What would
you think about a fresh start?”
“A fresh start?” she said.
“Well, now you sound sarcastic.”
 Get a fresh start, she thought, as if they were just closing the
books at the end of the month and carrying forward the gains or
losses to the next period. What a fantasy, that life ever began anew,
that it consisted of a series of neat movements, like a classical
sonata. Sarah could’ve killed him for suggesting it, except that
Abbie’s notoriety had never really translated into regular returns; she
knew that. They increasingly faced, frankly, the punishing inevitability
of an unmanageable proportion of debt, and here they were in an
endless apartment with no real hope of ever filling it.
“What would it entail?” she asked him.
“Well,” he said. “How do you feel about Pennsylvania?”
 2

Isaac liked to tell people that they’d met at a dance party, and Isabel
never corrected him, because she didn’t want him to think she
noticed that sort of thing. The truth was that they’d met almost six
months before at a dinner thrown by the executive director of her
new employer, on the occasion of her decision to accept his offer of
a job and move to Pennsylvania. Isabel had been living in New York
for the last ten years, eight of them with Ben, her ex-boyfriend, an
architect who was a couple of years older. They’d started dating
when she was still in grad school, and the affair flowed swiftly into a
narrow channel of inevitability that looked, only in retrospect, only
after they’d gone over and around the rocks, like something closer to
doom. He was from a rich—but not too rich—New England family,
his mother fond of Tiffany, his father a birdwatcher and dabbler in
electronic trading. They hadn’t always been wealthy; both of them
had grown up in working-class Albany before decamping, in the
eighties, to woodland Connecticut. Ben’s father had made something
resembling a small fortune in electronics when Texas Instruments
bought out the small firm where he worked developing displays for
graphing calculators. Their aesthetic of anesthetized Woodbury
gentry, all antiquing and waxy chocolate and civilized alcoholism,
was a little too perfect, and you could tell that it was a deliberate
affectation that had matured into habit and then into character.
It was at a party for the opening of a new hotel downtown whose
name was the alphanumerical abbreviation of a Manhattan address
that might have been someone’s password to something, rendered
on all the glass doors in a frostily translucent Helvetica. Had you
asked her, Isabel would have said, “Lord only knows why I was
there.” She’d been asked by a friend who sometimes modeled (many
of her friends at the time sometimes did this, sometimes that; few
seemed to have a particular occupation), who had referred to the
party as this thing, as in, “I’m going to this thing, you ought to come.”
Isabel had acquired a carapace of blasé sophistication in college,
which had further hardened since she’d moved to the city, but she
still wasn’t the sort of person who casually showed up at things. But
Jairan, her friend, had said, “Come on, come on, there will be an
open bar.” So she went. In the earlier part of the evening, she was
surprised to feel less completely out of place than she’d expected—
there were a lot of finance dudes in those weird, square-toed
Herman Munster shoes that no amount of money seems ever to
eradicate from a certain portion of the population of men, and there
were a lot of girls who, like Jairan, sometimes modeled, who were
avoiding the men as well as they could and helping themselves to
the bar. Several hours into it, though, they were all drunk, and the
banker bros were suggesting restaurants and clubs and other
parties, and Isabel was working out how to tell her friend, and her
friend’s friends, who were by then giddily her new friends too, that
she had to go. One of the things that she’d learned about those girls
was that even as they prepared to ditch her for a guy with a big car
and a little coke, they’d have viewed her own premature departure
as a personal affront unless it was with a guy. Even knowing they’d
forget it in the morning—most of them would forget her entirely—she
decided against slipping out, imagining Jairan’s frantic, bitchy
voicemails, and she set herself to wait them out by nursing a drink at
the bar for another hour. It wasn’t yet eleven. This was where she
found Ben, in a good suit and expensive brown leather shoes that
tapered to a slim, but not too slim, point, which made her assume he
was gay. This allowed her to talk to him, which revealed to her that
he wasn’t. He had a slightly dazed and abstracted attitude that no
single gay guy would have permitted himself in that kind of crowd.
She ordered a neat scotch, and he, back to the bar, elbows on it,
gave her a complimentary sidelong look with a raised eyebrow, so
she tilted her glass to him, took a sip, and said, “Never mix, never
worry,” a phrase she’d picked up from her mother, who had in turn
acquired it from a man she’d dated who’d been fond of ironic clichés.
Ben told her that he was a wine guy. “Red or white?” she asked him,
and he looked disappointed. He asked her what she thought of the
hotel. Isabel thought he was changing the subject to spare her any
more of her embarrassing philistinism, and she felt obliged to be
casually derogatory to make up for the mistake, so she said, “It’s like
Mies meets IKEA.” She thought it was funny.
“Hi,” he said, “I’m Ben. I’m the architect.”
After it all ended, it seemed impossible that she didn’t suspect the
effortlessness of it right from the start, the speed with which they
progressed from going to dinner together to hosting dinners together
at the Lower East Side ballroom dancing studio that he’d converted
into a loft apartment, soon thereafter to living and hosting yet more
dinners together in the unfashionably fashionable third floor in
Greenpoint that he bought and gutted and redesigned himself and
transformed into the sort of home that you see in magazines—that
you did, in fact, see in certain magazines. Isabel still thought of those
as their documentary or cinematic days, a film montage set by some
awful quirky director to some sort of idiosyncratic music, Corelli
concerti grossi or Nick Lowe or something equally unsuspected until
it’s already played in the background, people moving against the
backdrop of a white brick wall and rarely spilling their wine. Ben’s
firm specialized in hotels, glimmering, trendy places that were
designed to last through three seasons of actors and art people and
expense accounts before falling out of style and moving out to
pasture as a really cool place your Mom and Dad found on Expedia.
Honey, you won’t believe the price.
Ben made a lot of money. Of course, it didn’t feel like a lot of
money to them. They were surrounded by people with even more
money, and they fell into the obscene habit of thinking of themselves
as middle class. In looking back, Isabel found it incredible that she’d
once had so much, incredible and a little sad. Ben would say, “I’m
going to be out of town next week. We’re opening the new place in
Copenhagen.” She’d say, “I’m going to take my mom to Sedona for a
long weekend in May.” They believed this was ordinary rather than
extraordinary; worse, when they considered it—rarely for her, even
more rarely for Ben—they considered it, in some way, their due.
 Then she came home one day after performing her
approximation of administrating graduate studies at Pratt all
afternoon and an early dinner with some girlfriends, and there was
Ben in the steel kitchen with a glass of wine and an open bottle that
revealed he’d polished off one glass already. He had that elided look
he’d had the first night she’d seen him, a sort of glazed wonderment
that he had in some way caused everything around him to exist.
“What’s wrong?” she asked him. And he looked at her, and she
knew. She’d already known, if she were honest with herself, which
was why, months before, she’d accepted first a phone interview and
then an interview-interview in Manhattan and then a brief trip to
Pittsburgh for a third go-round with Barry Fitzgerald, the Executive
Director of the Future Cities Institute at Carnegie Mellon University.
Ben had accepted it all too easily; Isabel knew that, too, even if
she was above admitting it to herself. He had clients—they had
friends, even—whose married lives were carried out in serendipitous
crossings at 30,000 feet, she on her way back from Aspen, he on his
way to an investors’ meeting in California, neither of them ever in
New York for very long, and even then usually without the other.
Such an arrangement seemed to Ben and Isabel to be the surest
sign of having made it. That, anyway, was what they told
themselves. But neither really wanted it; what held them together
was a ritual of bourgeois domesticity, the regularity of cooking for
other people and buying flowers and making an interesting pairing of
an obscure Madiran with the braised duck. “What’s wrong?” she
asked him, and he looked at her, and she thought that she’d never
forget what he said, although she would later exaggerate it and
come to believe the exaggeration: a kind of forgetting. He said, “I just
feel that our relationship is lacking a core of intimacy. We don’t talk.”
Which was not true, she thought, not literally. They talked constantly;
their life together was a skein of prattle about towels and the best
kind of coffee and a new lamp for the office.
“Hmm,” she said, and then, because that seemed inadequate,
added, “I don’t know what to say”—as if that wasn’t obvious enough.
Then Ben put his glass very carefully and deliberately on the
counter, and he said, “I just can’t imagine us ever getting married.”
 By then, they’d lived together for eight years, but she couldn’t
argue with him. She couldn’t imagine it either. Before he’d said it,
she’d never tried to imagine it. Perhaps that was the problem. Ben
wasn’t a bad man, just not an especially adept one. He was
charming, handsome, and smart, and yet just as superficial and
nonspecific as each of those adjectives that everyone reached for to
describe him. He’d hated his parents—despised them, he said;
they’d been cruelly indifferent to his brother, who was actually gay,
and blandly indifferent to him. They preferred their friends to their
children. Et cetera. Isabel never especially sympathized. Although
she found them a little loopy, his mom especially emitting a certain
gin and oil-soap odor of preservation, they’d never been anything
other than lovely to her, and she found them, well, charming. It was
one of the few things they’d ever openly argued about. And yet, Ben
had ended up, despite the modernist apartment and the disapproval
for most liquor and the busy job, very much, and inescapably, their
boy. He was forever unsatisfied with affection—its absence
tormented him, but when it was offered, it was never enough. It was
a trait Isabel came to ascribe to creative people. Isaac, for instance;
Isaac reminded her in many ways of Ben.
Four weeks after this last fight, which was hardly a fight, it was
settled. He gave her the car, a six-year-old BMW coupe with 80,000
miles. “I need a new one anyway,” he said. She’d officially accepted
the Pittsburgh job. She left at six on a Sunday morning. It was
November, and the broad valleys and ridges in central PA were
lightly covered with the year’s first snow. She stopped in Carlisle and
ate eggs and biscuits at the Iron Skillet surrounded by truckers and
retirees. Pennsylvania, once you get into the mountains, has a subtle
beauty, low ridges rising and falling around the highway like the deep
swells on an ocean of trees; you could imagine that it was an ocean,
swollen and swallowing the whole earth like one of God’s
punishments. It was early afternoon when she arrived in Pittsburgh
at the little carriage house apartment—furnished in the fussy but
uncluttered style of a very reasonable grandmother—where Barry
Fitzgerald had arranged for her to stay until she found a place of her
own.
 Barry had a tradition of Sunday dinners, and this one had been
hastily re-christened a welcome in her honor. He lived in Point
Breeze, a neighborhood in the East End of the city, mostly broad
streets lined by sycamores in the manner of French allées, the
houses a mix of the original, broad-porch-and-dormer Queen Annes
set stolidly back from the street and many smaller colonials and faux
English cottages where the original acre plots had been carved into
smaller lots in the twentieth century. There were also a few mid-
century modern places, and Barry lived in one of them, a sort of
hash of a Frank Lloyd Wright and a Philip Johnson on an oddly
shaped lot on a cul-de-sac lane that bordered the old Henry Clay
Frick estate, now a museum. He’d filled the house with a curatorial
and boringly correct collection of mid-century furniture. The place
had the feel of an expensive catalog, so expressly imitative of life as
to appear not so much natively alive as resurrected, but Isabel
couldn’t fault the correctness of his taste. Over the long dining room
table was a small prototype of the Lobmeyer chandeliers that hang in
the Metropolitan Opera House. The back of Barry’s house was glass,
and although he recognized it as a kind of hypocrisy, given his
profession, Barry only used incandescent bulbs—his excuse was
that these, likewise, were historically accurate. The backyard held a
small patio, a fastidious lawn, and a rectangular pool, covered now
with a tarp that sagged under pooled rainwater and a few leaves,
forlornly pretty in the warm light from the house. Barry was in his
mid-sixties, but he was one of those men who was bald by twenty-
five and spent the rest of his life passing for a robust forty-eight. He
was a small man who gave the impression of being bigger because
he had long arms and broad shoulders—he’d been a competitive
swimmer in his youth and still religiously swam laps, though not, of
course, in his own mostly decorative pool. He gestured expansively
no matter what he was saying. Isaac would later compare him to a
gorilla. (“Or an orangutan,” Isaac would say, hunching in a half-
simian impression. “A primate, in general. Non-human, of course. Dr.
Zaius!” And he’d giggle.) Barry was single, and there was an air of
sexual indeterminacy about him. Isaac would tell her that Barry was
post-gay.
 (“It’s surprisingly common, you know,” he’d say. “A lot of us
decide at some point that it just isn’t worth the trouble.”
“It doesn’t seem to be any trouble for you,” Isabel told him.
“Well, no,” he said. He giggled. “Not for me.”)
Like his home, Barry’s parties tended toward the tableaux; they
had the quality of being displayed in a vitrine, which wasn’t
diminished by the fact that he lived in a glass house. He had invited
a few members of his advisory board—our advisory board, Isabel
reminded herself—who were a serially uninteresting gang of
university faculty, non-profit administrators, the rich, the bored. They
talked to her, and to each other, as if they were leading a class of
morose and sleep-deprived undergraduates. “And of course,” one of
them said to her, “when you have a high municipal parking tax . . .”
and he trailed off and gave her a quizzical look that simultaneously
suggested he expected her to answer and hoped that she would not,
“. . . you have high parking rates,” he said at last, and then, after a
beat, added, “which is the problem.”
Their conversation ultimately regressed to the conversation that
any similar gathering has when it thinks no one who could possibly
disagree is listening: the general inability of popular democracy to
arrive at the fair and obvious technocratic solutions necessary to the
smooth running of a society; it’s practically an article of faith among
such people. They were inoffensive but banal, and the dinner was
only saved by two guests. The first, introduced to Isabel as a
“supporter of the institute” was Arthur B. Imlak. She recognized his
name, vaguely, but couldn’t place it. He was, he told her, one of the
richest men in the Commonwealth, using exactly that phrase.
“Oh?” she said.
“Marcellus shale.” He smirked, but there was something self-
deprecating about the look, something practiced, as if he’d just
revealed a mild fetish.
“Aha,” she replied.
“Barry,” he told her, “despises my business on general principle,
but he feels that the FCI is a wastewater treatment plant for the
endless river of slurry that is my money.” Then, abruptly: “Do you
sail?”
 She grinned at him—it was such a preposterous question. “I can’t
say that I do,” she told him.
“Never?” he asked, and he pulled a comical pout.
“Well—”
“I have a boat,” he interrupted. “Down in Clearwater, a sixty-foot
trimaran. I call her, The Shale Boat.”
“That’s very clever,” she told him.
“Well, Ms. Giordan,” he told her, “you just let me know when
you’re interested in putting on those sailing shoes.”
Now he grinned at her, and she was about to reply, but Barry
interjected from the far end of the table: “Is Art telling you about his
boat? He loves that goddamn boat.”
“Barry came down one time,” Imlak said, performing for everyone
now. “He fell off the dock.” Imlak was handsome, though he was
growing into a recently acquired middle-aged belly. He had silver hair
and the slightly shabby jacket of a man with a very large fortune.
Isabel noticed a preposterous watch glancing from under his cuff.
When he looked at her, his eyes winked with a cursory flirtatiousness
that she felt sure was an obligatory nod to an expected role. There
was interest in there somewhere, but it wasn’t sexual; it was for
something else, something more obscure and therefore more
unsettling. His voice was patrician, but with an edge of the coal patch
to it. “My father dug coal,” he told her another time after he’d got a
few drinks in him. “Then the mines closed, and it ruined most people
down in Fayette County, but Dad had been smart and bought up
some old houses in Uniontown and turned them into apartments.
And that was where I got my start. Buying up shitbag properties and
leasing them to shitbag tenants. Then I got into land. A man is not a
man until a man owns land.” He’d also made this latter statement on
the night of Barry’s dinner, apropos nothing, and everyone tittered
nervously. Later that night, he followed Isabel into the bathroom and
offered her a blast.
“A what?” she said.
“A blast,” he said, and he mimed it.
“Oh,” she said. “A blast.” She had a weakness for cocaine, and
she declined, knowing that if she accepted, she’d want more within
the half hour.
 “Pretend I was harassing you in here,” he said. “I have a
reputation.”
“Will do,” she assured him.
“What on earth are you doing in Pittsburgh?” he asked her.
She said that it was too soon to tell.
“Well, we’re very pleased to welcome you to our little kingdom. I
hope we can keep you.”
Isaac had arrived late. Barry didn’t appreciate lateness and made
a cursory introduction, although Isaac, younger than Isabel by at
least ten years and younger than everyone else by at least thirty,
carried with him, even more than Imlak did, a sense of imperturbable
importance. Even Barry responded with deference. In fact, Isaac
almost resembled Imlak, a more gauntly drawn version of the older
man; they might have been distant relatives, and they greeted each
other with the casual familiarity of old friends who don’t feel the need
to spend any more of the evening talking to each other. Isaac spent
most of the meal chatting with the wife of one of the advisers, a
woman who ran the Alliance Française de Pittsburgh. They spoke in
a rapid Parisian French that Isabel couldn’t understand, despite
having studied in France for a year as an undergrad. Isaac was
wearing a completely preposterous outfit, a blousy white chemise
and a pair of brown jodhpurs. He was very thin and so pale that,
when lit from behind, he appeared almost translucent at the edges.
He had fine features that you would call effeminate if you didn’t look
closely—closely considered, he was rather wolfish, or like one of
those feral dogs that rides the Moscow subway, emaciated and yet
obviously built to survive. His hair flopped all over, effortlessly stylish.
He had a hint of stubble, barely a shadow, that must have taken him
a week to grow. When Isabel came back from the bathroom, he was
describing a building to the table. “We call it The Gamelands,” he
said, “although technically it’s just outside of the state gamelands.
Anyway, you come to the end of the drive, and you can barely see it.
From that side, it’s half dug into the hillside. It sort of looks like a lot
of rocks. You know, it’s all very green. But if you walk to the end of
the field on the other side and look back at it, it looks like a bunch of
fucking glass and concrete teepees. It’s supposed to be his
masterwork, but I am pretty sure he was stoned when he did it. If it’s
still around a thousand years from now, someone’s going to think the
aliens built it.”
“What’s the building?” Isabel asked as she sat down.
“The Gamelands,” he said. He laughed. “My family estate, uh,
compound.”
“It’s not in Pittsburgh, I take it?”
“It’s in Uniontown,” he said. “Or, outside. Anyway, I have an
apartment in the city. The Gamelands is the family house. Mom and
Dad . . . and me when I’m there.” He smirked. “And of course,” he
said, “there’s the monster who lives in the woods.”
“Haha,” she said. “The monster, huh?”
“According to Abbie,” Isaac answered. He laughed again, and
Barry asked who wanted coffee or dessert.
After everyone else left—Barry had Isabel stay for a nightcap and
to chat about her schedule for the first week, starting on Tuesday—
she asked him, “Who was the kid?”
“The kid?” he said. He probably hadn’t needed that last scotch.
“Oh, Isaac? He’s Abbie’s son.”
“Abbie?”
“Abbie Mayer,” Barry said. “You know.”
“Oh, shit,” Isabel said. “Oh. Oh.”
“Oh,” Barry said. “You know him.”
“No, no. I know of him. I know his . . . work. I didn’t know he lives
in Pittsburgh.”
“Lived. He lives on top of a mountain now doing God knows what.
You ought to see the house, though. Isaac doesn’t do it justice.”
How much should she say? “I love his, well, work. He
disappeared.”
“He came out here in the late eighties. Early nineties? He was a
prick back then, too, although I, like you, ‘admired his work.’”
“Admired. Yes. Anyway, the son does seem interesting.”
“Honey,” Barry said, “that kid is fucked up.”
 3

“What am I looking at?”

Veronica had driven Abbie up to Fernwald Road below
Beechwood and pulled over with her wheels edging onto someone’s
front yard. It was what people did in Pittsburgh. It carried with it a
fifty-fifty chance of a screaming match, and yet it still seemed to be
an accepted—if not acceptable—practice: a man who’d threaten to
bash your head in for parking on his sidewalk or his grass wouldn’t
hesitate to do it himself if he had trouble finding parking. Still, this
new city was neither as small nor as backward as Abbie had feared
it might be. He’d only ever visited once, years before his sister had
moved there; he’d delivered a lecture at Carnegie Mellon, and he’d
found his hosts a little furtive, whisking him from his grand, worn-out
downtown hotel to campus to dinner to the airport. It had been
winter, and it had been raining. A cold fog refused to lift from the city,
and he remembered it as a perpetual evening. Only on the drive
from downtown to the Oakland neighborhood where the universities
were did he glimpse something like a city. The car—driven by a
pretty graduate student, he remembered that much—rose on some
kind of highway clinging to a bluff on the southeast side of the
downtown; below, there was a brown river, and on the far side many
houses on a steep hill. But although he’d found the city, if not
cosmopolitan, at least charming in a rundown sort of way and
friendly in a suspicious one, it nevertheless held, in the odd hillside
streets and strange gullies carved out of its rugged geography, a
certain remnant rural tendency. Small houses had driveways clogged
with too many cars and pickups, and sometimes when you came
around a particular bend you found yourself deep in the trees
wondering if you were in a city at all.
They’d parked, and Veronica had led him over a low metal
guardrail on the far side of the street through one of the ubiquitous
stands of woods. They were standing on the edge of a steep drop,
nearly a cliff, that fell off like a rough staircase toward a twisted little
trickle of a stream. The other bank rose almost as steeply. To the
right, through the treetops, they could see the muddy river and the
Homestead High Level Bridge, like the skeleton of a half-mile-long
dinosaur, and the smokestacks of the old Homestead Works, which
had collapsed and rusted and poisoned three miles along the river
for the last decade, ever since the often-rumored, never-arriving
demise of the steel industry at last, and swiftly, arrived.
“Greenview-on-Frick,” Veronica told him.
“Who came up with that?”
“Phil. Me. We both did.”
“It’s terrible. It sounds like some sort of moldering collection of
half-timber huts in Buggerallfordshire.”
“Phil thinks it sounds classy.”
Abbie gave her a sidelong look, and she caught his eye and
started to laugh. “Classy,” Abbie repeated. He laughed as well.
“I missed you, Ronnie.”
“God, don’t call me that. Anyway, you’ll meet him tonight.”
“Bated breath.”
“Phil knows classy,” Veronica said.
“Oy.”
“He’s not so bad, and he does know construction. We’ve done
well together.”
“Well,” Abbie said, and he grabbed a nearby branch and let
himself lean a bit farther over the edge of the precipice to get a
clearer view. “I suppose the first thing I’d say about it, or ask about it,
is where the hell do you plan to put the houses?”
“You’re looking at it.”
“That’s a lot of earth moving.”
“That’s the problem for you to solve.”
“Not my area of expertise. Doesn’t your construction king have
someone to do this sort of thing? I can do a site plan, certainly, but
I’m not certain if I’m quite up to leveling and laying out your whole
little Broadacre City here.”
“No. This is what we talked about. You’re going to be our expert
witness against the FNMR.”
“What is that, some state agency or something?”
“That’s the Friends of Nine Mile Run.”
“And Nine Mile Run is—”
“That’s right. Right down there.”
“It’s a fucking drainage ditch. I can see that from here.”
“It is now. People call it Shit Creek, actually. Or crick, in the local
vernacular. It used to be a stream that drained the park and the
neighborhoods and municipalities on the other side of the hill. It’s
mostly culverted and buried now, but the FNMR wants to restore it
and create a wetland for the park. What we need to do is convince
the zoning board that we’re not going to further ruin this grotesque
little swamp in the name of filthy lucre.”
“Are we?”
“Oh, Abbie. I like that it’s already a we for you.”
“Don’t get too attached, my dear. I am many things: visionary,
iconoclast, pathbreaker. Genius, even. But I am not—and I feel that I
already emphasized this to you—a hydrological engineer. I’d hardly
be convincing. Besides which, I am a conservationist. Although, well,
I suppose it’s already been ruined, hasn’t it?”
“You see. I don’t even have to prompt you to rationalize. You’re
going to say yes.”
“Possibly. There remains the issue of my credentials.”
“The zoning board doesn’t care about your credentials. They
want to say yes, but they don’t want to be the ones who say no to a
very nice group of very nice citizens. They need an excuse, or an
alibi, as the case may be. Trust me on this. This is my wheelhouse.”
“I remember when your calling was the law.”
“Yes. Well, that’s what got me into all this. Although, did you ever
imagine that I’d get into real estate?”
“Actually, yes. I recall as a child, gazing out of my creche at your
curly head and thinking, in that particular form of consciousness that
precedes language: one day, that girl is going to make a killing
building shitty subdivisions.”
 Veronica smiled at him and kissed his cheek and began walking
back toward the car. “And now it can be a family business.”
In the car, she asked after Sarah. He thought immediately of his
wife that day in the temple, leaning away from him in order to
comfort her mother. Sarah was a quiet iconoclast in her family,
although Abbie never learned to appreciate it. She found their
collective demeanor of blessed, raucous bonhomie weird and tiring;
she had an austere and mathematical mind back then. It wasn’t that
she disliked all the camaraderie, exactly, but that it wore her out, and
for his flaws, what Abbie had given her, what her marriage had given
her, was a home ruled by work, the turning of pages, the sound of a
needle reaching a record’s end and susurrating onto the label. Abbie
was, in the first decade anyway, reserved compared to her own
relations, however grandiose and occasionally irascible he could be
regarding his craft and profession. Sarah had loved her late brother
Elliot, a sloppy, stoned, ingenious writer, his deceptively shambling
style a disguise for a slow but powerful ambition, a tectonic drive
toward some kind of brilliant life. He’d already published a translation
of Mandelstam’s early works. His death had been terrible for her, but
she viewed it as less uniquely tragic than her parents did, in part
because a sibling is simply different from a child, but also, and in
larger part, because she more readily admitted that these things do,
finally, just happen—more often than we’d like and to us all.
Regardless, she felt obligated to observe the forms of her family’s
never-ending mourning, which involved a whole year of
circumlocutions—they could hardly say her brother’s name aloud—
interrupted on his birthday and the anniversary of his death. On
these occasions, they gave themselves over almost entirely to his
remembrance, and Sarah, who thought they’d all be better off, and
Elliot’s memory better attended to, if they’d spread these gluts of
remembering more evenly across the calendar, participated because
she figured it was still better than nothing. Abbie, who’d never known
Elliot, was politely consoling on these occasions, and in this case,
Sarah rather appreciated his reserve. “Oh, Abbie,” her mother would
say, “you’d have just loved him. I wish you two boys could have met.”
Her Elliot was suspended in a perpetual boyhood. That he’d been
in his twenties, living on his own in his own apartment in a borough
she never visited, making his first intimations of something
resembling very much what people call success—none of these
things could dislocate her memory of him as a teenager, volcanically
moody, a self-taught Czech and Russian speaker, a pretty good
violinist, but still, to her, a precociously intellectual little boy. In the
subjunctive reality, therefore, where he and Abbie might have met,
Abbie, also, would have had to still be a child. Abbie was older than
Sarah and more than a decade older than Elliot was, or had been, or
would have been. But he’d just smile ruefully at his mother-in-law
and say, “Yes, Susan, yes, I’m sure I would.”
To Veronica, he said, “Things have been better, but also, worse.
She’s taken with surprising alacrity to the apartment.” Abbie and
Sarah’s first place in Pittsburgh was a three-bedroom apartment on
the second floor of the D’Arlington on Bayard and Neville in Oakland,
a gracious, four-story, yellow-brick, turn-of-the-century building that
the real estate agent had called a “slice of old Manhattan” (Abbie
didn’t correct her), and which Abbie secretly derided as the inhabited
equivalent of a box of potpourri. It reminded Sarah of their place in
New York. Abbie privately disagreed, but he saw no reason to
disabuse her of the notion if it contributed to her happiness. That it
did not contribute to her happiness, that it made her sad rather than
wistful and mostly suggested, however imprecisely, something that
she’d lost, might have occurred to him if he’d thought about it, but it
—and he—didn’t and hadn’t.
“It’s a great apartment,” Veronica said.
“It feels like a hunting lodge or an exquisite jewelry box. I despise
it, but I’m in no position to let sincerity get in the way of a good
apology.”
“Pittsburgh,” Veronica said. “Some apology.”
“You seem to have prospered,” Abbie told her. They were on
Beechwood Boulevard gliding past handsome twenties-era houses
with steep front yards and old trees.
“Yes, true, but I arrived here by chance and it just happened to
work out for me.”
“Oh, mein shvester, you don’t give yourself enough credit for your
personal vision.”
 “My vision? You sound like Phil after he’s picked up a Drucker
book in an airport. Please. It’s the people who pursue fixed visions
who end up bankrupt.”
“Phil reads management texts? Do I really have to meet this
person? And I’ve not found visions to be especially fixed.”
“You do. And by the way that sounds very spiritual, Abbie.”
They’d come down the hill on lower Beechwood past the old
mansions on their vast, improbable yards, and she hung a left onto
Fifth Avenue. On the corner, a huge storybook Tudor stood in a
tangle of unkempt landscaping. “Now that,” Abbie said, “is a house.
It’s like Queen Elizabeth met Mad King Ludwig.”
“I’d die to get a crack at restoring it,” Veronica said. “The family
won’t sell, but they’re old. No kids. So, one of these days.”
“Regardless, and to get back to it, yes. I would say spiritual is the
proper word.”
“Should I be concerned? Remember when you got into yoga?”
“Yes. Dad was not impressed. ‘How am I going to tell your mother
that you’re into some Jap religion?’”
Veronica laughed. “Oh, God, that’s right. I can still hear you. ‘It’s
South Asian, Dad. If anyone has a reason to be upset with the
Japanese.’ ”
“Yeah,” Abbie said, “ ‘But whatever else they did to those people,
the Japs didn’t do a sneak attack on them, like they did to us!’”
“Stop. I can’t breathe, and I’m trying to drive.”
“He forgave the Germans for the Holocaust, but those dirty Japs.”
“Seriously, Abbie. I’m going to have to pull over.”
“Seriously, though, I did have a sort of a vision. I keep telling
you.”
“A vision, was it?”
“I can hear the worldly skepticism in your voice, but yes. A vision.
I know what you’re thinking.”
She was thinking that in his early professional years, Abbie had
styled himself a sort of scientist, rigorous and rational, devoted to a
very mathematical sort of beauty—somewhere along the way, he’d
discovered that it was better for his interests to be grandiloquent,
and he’d adopted a tone of secular mysticism, speaking of his world-
saving projects in a quasi-religious and semi-revelatory language,
which had landed him all those speaking gigs while frightening off his
more traditional clients, who would have been perfectly happy to
save on their water utilities or feel that their new thirty-story office
tower was in some absurd way actually good for the environment,
but who couldn’t abide some mad prophet of civilizational doom
telling them that an extra hundred dollars a square foot would, over
the passage of the decades, at very best, if everyone else did it too,
marginally slow the inevitable rising of the tides. She blamed that nut
job he’d studied with at Yale; not that Abbie had paid him much
attention while he was there, but later, after the old man died, his
publisher had approached Abbie about writing the introduction to one
last posthumous book. The two men had kept in only intermittent
touch over the years, and Abbie was shocked to find that Arah had
stipulated the request to his editor before he died. The book was
called The Pillar of Salt: The American City in the Age of Declining
Resources, and it told a grim tale of the last air conditioners cycling
off in the great, rolling brownout at the end of the easy-energy
carbon civilization.
“I’m not thinking anything.”
“You’re thinking I’ve gone slightly around the bend. But I’m not
about to start babbling on a street corner.”
“Going to keep it to the lecture hall, huh?”
“You’re feeling awfully wicked for a woman who needs my help
with something.”
“That’s fair enough. I’m sorry. Tell me about your vision.”
They’d come, coincidentally, to a red light at the corner of
Morewood. Across the street on their right, the green dome of Rodef
Shalom rose over the tops of the sycamores. “I was shown a place,”
Abbie said. “And I think I’ve dreamed of this place before, but as is
the case with dreams, the particulars dissolved when I woke from the
dream, leaving me only with the sense that I’d just failed to
apprehend something very important. This time, though, I was not
asleep. Oddly enough, actually”—he chuckled—“as I was in a
synagogue at the time, which is a place I generally find more
conducive to sleep than to epiphany.”
“You were in a synagogue?”
 “Temple, I suppose. Yes. Sarah’s brother’s thing, you know. It
was all very musical, which made it especially ridiculous. I’m not sure
what happened to make every goddamn Reform rabbi decide that
he’s Pete Seeger, but there it is. Sarah was torturing herself with her
usual dutiful reticence, her mother was making a particularly
ostentatious show of not quite crying, which is worse and more
noticeable than crying—that’s plainly the point, of course—and her
dad constantly clearing his throat. I was daydreaming about
committing arson. And that was when God spoke to me. Of course,
God doesn’t speak; God’s speech is a metaphor for His placing a
vision in your eyes and in your heart, which is suffused with the
certitude that this is what He would have told you if He did, in fact,
literally speak. The place He showed me is somewhere in the
Appalachians; I’m sure of that. I stood on a low foothill looking
eastward. I know I was looking eastward because the sun was
setting behind me. Before me, a highway wound up over the first
ridge of a mountain. At the crest of the ridge, somewhere off to the
south, I saw a small clearing, and I knew that I was meant to find and
to possess some portion of that mountain, for some reason that is,
as yet, unclear to me. Naturally, I thought of you.”
They turned onto Neville. “Abbie,” Veronica said, “I think you’re
full of shit, but under no circumstances are you allowed to tell your
wife that you came out here because of some Old Testament
daydream. You are on the apology tour. You are here to save your
marriage.”
“And save your subdivision.”
She pulled to the curb across from the D’Arlington. “It’s a planned
neighborhood. Dinner tonight is at eight. Are you sure you can find
it?”
“God is my copilot.”
“Christ, Abbie. Good-bye.”
He kissed her cheek and made a suicidal dash across the street
in front of an oncoming truck. On the far curb, he blew her a kiss and
pointed toward heaven like a quarterback after converting on a big
third down.

• • •
“Have you ever met her?”
“What’s that?” Abbie glanced at Sarah as they drove up the
McArdle Roadway on the side of Mt. Washington. On the right,
through the trees, the city appeared intermittently, lending the
impression of riding up an escalator. They passed under the tracks
of the Monongahela Incline.
“Edith. Your sister’s friend.”
“Her friend. That’s a charmingly provincial circumlocution. You’re
adapting.”
“Oh, shut up, Abbie. You know what I mean. It isn’t always a
debate, you know.”
“Yes, of course, I do.”
“That it isn’t a debate, or what I mean.”
“The latter. Both.”
“It seems absurd to say girlfriend. They’re in their forties.”
“Edith is in her late thirties, I believe, but you’re right, honey. Your
point is taken. This is a lovely road, don’t you think? The views.”
“It’s a lovely city. I hadn’t expected. I’m glad we came.”
Abbie reached across the center console and took her hand. “I’m
glad,” he said.
She permitted him that much for a few moments before they
came to the light at the top of the hill, then removed it, although
gently now, as she’d begun forcing herself to do. Sarah had yet to
decide if love was in greater part forgiveness or forbearance. They
weren’t the same thing, but you only learned that out of necessity,
and the conditions that made it necessary were terrible. She
sometimes told herself that she saw in him something that was worth
redeeming. Because if not . . .
Whatever else Sarah believed, she did not believe that Abbie
was a genius. This made her an outlier among those who knew him,
but maybe not so strange if you think about it. Before she got tired of
talking to people, Sarah used to say that their exodus out of New
York inverted the usual story of people getting rich, and in so doing
rediscovered in some way an older or more original form of
American good fortune. People used to go west to make their
fortunes, striking out from the rigid castes of the Eastern Seaboard in
order to find wealth and freedom on the frontier. Later, the frontier
closed and it was to escape the stultifying social and economic
circumstances of the agrarian heartland that people fled back to the
big cities, where a person might reinvent herself as whatever and
whomever she wanted to be. Then people were fleeing the biggest
cities again, because no one who wasn’t already rich could live in
them. They were looking for the good lives and relative material
comforts that were still available out in the provinces that began
somewhere around Wilkes-Barre/Scranton and rolled across the
whole beautiful continent until they washed up against the equally
unaffordable cities of California. She meant it all half-ironically, since
she never once felt at home after they left Manhattan, and her son,
with whom she made the mistake of sharing some version of these
thoughts years after she’d first had them, was an intolerable
undergrad at the time. He thought that they revealed her as a rather
facile thinker when it came to sociology and economics and history—
the whole notion of the blessed heartland could have been cribbed
from any political speech of the past century at least; the ruins of
Detroit or the Mexican laborers of the Central Valley or, God knew, a
few First Peoples here and there, would have something contrary to
say about the sentiment. If he’d been older, or less like his father in
that way, then he might have asked if it was fair to blame anyone for
the lies that sand down the rough edges of her circumstances.
They met Veronica and her business partner, Phillip T. Harrow, at
LeMont, a restaurant perched on the high edge of Mt. Washington, a
sort of recherché supper club with vast windows that looked across
the converging rivers and the fountain at the Point to the commodal
concrete bowl of Three Rivers Stadium. Even the valets wore rough
approximations of tuxedos, and the interior seemed designed to seat
hundreds, but on a weeknight, it was populated sparsely, and a radio
broadcast of the Pirates game that was lighting up the stadium far
below whispered tinnily into the hushed room from somewhere
behind the bar. Barry Bonds had singled.
Harrow was almost precisely what Abbie had expected, a great,
grand buffoon in a loud jacket, gone a bit soft in middle age but with
the taut strength of a man who’d worked construction much of his
life. A pair of spectacles dangled on a cord around his neck, and he
looked—it was his usual state—a little flushed. He greeted Abbie
with a rushing handshake, kissed Sarah on both cheeks, and then
went back to Abbie for one more throttling shake of the hand and a
jolting slap on the shoulder. “So this is the guy!” He said it twice.
In fact, Harrow wasn’t quite so crude as he put on. Yes, he was
from West Virginia, but he was the son of a WVU professor and a
Morgantown Hospital finance VP, and he’d gone to Ohio State,
where he’d got a degree in accounting and then an MBA. He wasn’t
a country boy, really, even if he could do a tolerable imitation of the
accent when called upon. His beery bearing had less to do with his
native state than with the lingering influence of Greek life in the Ohio
Union, that avuncular, overacted jocularity that always seems to be
compensating for something. He’d always hated West Virginia,
actually. And yet he’d made a great deal of money in it. That was
something, he supposed. The truth was that there was a lot of
money in the poor states; or it rolled around more loosely than it did
in richer and more populous ones; it was easier to shake loose. But
he kept a condo in Pittsburgh, and he’d surprise you by knowing a
thing or two about wine and the theater, and although he’d never let
on, he sometimes wept at the opera.
Edith wasn’t feeling well—Edith, they’d learn, was often not
feeling well—and she didn’t join them. Abbie had only the vaguest
sense of his sister’s companion—and he was aware of the irony of
thinking of her in that term while making fun of Sarah’s preference
for the no-more-euphemistic friend. She worked, or had worked, for
Harrow; he knew that much, and in some way this had led to his and
Veronica’s partnership. There was, Abbie thought, some irony in the
fact that everyone else in the restaurant would assume that Phil and
Veronica were a couple. Abbie delighted in inequities of information;
they struck him as the true genealogical or etymological origin of
humor, the primordial language from which all jokes ultimately
emerged.
The menu represented, in that era, an extraordinary archaeology
of otherwise lost dishes; this was in the eighties, of course, long
before America devoted whole television networks to the fussy
preparation of complex dishes, before waiters listed the components
of dishes in a sort of catechismal fugue state, but still, it was as if
someone had rescued the menu from the first-class dining room of a
sunken ocean liner and transported it five hundred miles inland.
Abbie ordered duck à l’orange, and when he specified to the
waitress that he preferred it medium rare, she shook her head and
said, “Oh, hon, you don’t want it like that. You’ll get that trichinosis.”
Abbie began to object, but Veronica put her hand on his arm and
shook her head.
When they’d all ordered and the waitress was gone, Abbie raised
his eyebrows at his sister. “Really?” he said.
“They mean well,” she told him. She shrugged. “It’s a city of
hypochondriacs, and everyone thinks they’ve got a goddamn MD.
Phil can attest.”
“Well,” Harrow said, “that and the old joke.”
“What joke is that?” asked Sarah.
Harrow tilted his head wolfishly in her direction and leaned into
the table as if taking her into a confidence. “How do you get a
Pittsburgh girl to suck your cock?”
“Oh Christ, Phil,” Veronica said. “It’s dinner.”
“Mrs. Mayer here looks like she can take it. Can you take it,
Sarah?” His grin widened. Veronica looked worryingly at her brother,
but he betrayed not the slightest indication of paying attention to the
conversation anymore. He was half turned in his seat, examining the
room.
“Well, now you have to tell me,” Sarah said.
“You dip it in ranch!” He rocked back and slapped the table.
Veronica rolled her eyes, and Sarah smiled thinly. “You get it?”
Harrow tried again. “Like, ranch dressing?” He narrowed his eyes.
“You get it,” he said. “Well, anyway, it’s a Pittsburgh thing. And here’s
the wine!” Harrow had ordered a bottle listed at two hundred dollars,
and as the waiter—a different one this time, young and male and too
thin for his collar—opened and poured his ceremonial taste, he gave
it a grand swirl and sniffed and sipped. He nodded brusquely at the
boy, then told the table: “A good California cab. Robust! Not like that
French shit.”
“Yes,” Sarah said, “I’ve read that American wine is really coming
into its own.”
“Where have you read that?” Abbie’s attention had returned.
“I don’t know, Abbie. Bon Appétit.”
 He made a face.
Harrow said, “It’s true, it’s true. Ever since the seventies, really.
Well, a toast, then.” He raised his glass. “To new endeavors.”
They touched glasses. Veronica watched her brother and sister-
in-law carefully. She could still remember when they’d met, when
Abbie was slathering his genius all over that poor unsuspecting
temple, bullying the leadership into believing that they were
courageous to let him use their sanctuary as an experiment, then
furious when they managed, late in the process, to work up the
courage to question a few of his most objectionable choices.
Architects, in her experience, were second only to economists in
their preference for models of human behavior rather than humans
themselves, an abiding conviction that people were automata who
only responded to stimuli, or, if they were not so, then that they ought
to be, that through proper design and incentives, they could be made
to behave as if they were. And Abbie, likewise, harbored the streak
of misanthropy that colored so many of the ecologically minded, an
unspoken but obviously present sentiment, a ghost haunting the
edges of his mixed-up ideology: that the world would be better off
without us. In the strictest sense, of course, that might have been
true; but it was one of those immense truths that faded into
irrelevance when confronted with the banal details of reality. Abbie
had harangued and intimidated the Beth-El board, and Sarah, who
was still young enough to consider them all ancient and hidebound,
fell in love with him. She’d hitched herself to some idea of his
greatness, and even after she’d stopped fully believing in it herself, a
kind of invincible bond remained.
Just a few nights earlier, Veronica and Edith had been lying on
the couch watching TV, some sitcom about a bickering couple, and
Veronica had made a vague comment about the unreality of the
setup, so common in TV and movies and the theater, of the eternally
miserable couple forever at each other’s throats. Edith had laughed
at her and told her that that was the way most people lived together;
that love and hatred were the same sort of unmooring of sentiment
from moderation, and it was no wonder that the one would so
frequently cohabit with the other. “You’re so smart,” Veronica told her
and kissed her head, then, thinking the gesture might have been
condescending, she added, “I mean, really.” Edith had been an all-
but-dissertation grad student at Pitt before her parents’ careless
finances and untimely deaths in a car accident, which Edith
mordantly called a double-suicide by inattention, had forced her to
look for work. Like so many women, she found herself in real estate,
and through it, with Phil Harrow, who was just expanding his
business into Pennsylvania at the time.
While they spooned through a lobster bisque that had the
consistency of pudding, the color of freshly dug clay, and the taste,
principally, of black pepper—all of them but Sarah, who pushed a
salad around her plate and poured herself a second glass of the
leggy wine—Veronica and Phil explained how they’d first met and
found themselves in business together. Sarah had asked, because
whenever she’d asked Abbie, he’d waved it off with an “Oh, you
know how these things are” and gone back to whatever he was
doing; the suggestion that he knew but found the whole thing too
boring to share was his habitual reply when he didn’t know
something.
They’d met in West Virginia. “Some motherfucker had told these
rednecks that their land was worth two million bucks, and it was
going to fuck up a deal.” Harrow flapped his hands and smiled. “Two
million dollars! It was worth a hundred thousand, maybe, on the
market. But two million was the max my buyers were willing to pay.”
Harrow had the makings of a deal to erect a plaza anchored by a
Wal-Mart and a Fairfield Inn near Beckley. It was a promising and
simple deal, in which the owners of about a hundred acres of mostly
woodland would sell to a New York–based developer, who
represented Walton interests in the Northeast, of which West Virginia
found itself a distant, dangling appendage. They’d already gobbled
most of the acreage up, and cheaply.
But thirty odd acres and a gaggle of recalcitrant yokel owners led
by some kind of redneck mafia queen named Sherri Larimer and her
pair of apparently terrifying sons stood in the way of its completion.
Someone had told her to ask for millions of dollars, ten times the
price they ought to get, the sort of money that, Harrow knew, would
come out of his construction contract on the other end. Harrow could
not abide doing business when everyone had the same information.
Profit, especially in land deals, was built on information arbitrage; it
was hard to dispossess people who knew what they possessed,
especially when they were ignorant fucks from deep in the hollers
who believed these sorts of transactions to have a kind of moral
dimension. He’d tried to approach several of the landholders
individually; one defection usually brought down an ad-hoc
association of neighbors, but they only stared at him through their
screen doors and said, “You gotta talk to Sherri.” Senator Byrd was
building another goddamn highway through the wildest part of Wild
and Wonderful West Virginia, and Harrow was trying to get these
New York fucks to buy beside a future interchange of I-64 and I-77,
not far from the New River Gorge—he’d got them to imagine that a
seasonal influx of whitewater rafters and granola-eaters was going to
support the Wal-Mart and an outlet mall and at least one hotel and a
lot of other such nonsense.
Veronica Mayer was sitting quietly in the back of a gang of
attorneys who’d flown out from New York (and from Morgantown
down to Beckley in a goddamn helicopter, if you could believe it) to
represent the General Properties Group, which in turn represented—
everyone knew—the Walton family. She was the youngest of them;
she didn’t even look thirty yet; and although Harrow thought she
looked pretty cute, he was in no position to flirt with cute lady lawyers
while a deal collapsed around him. They’d been sequestered in a
room for a couple of hours now. He was ranting, he knew, but these
wingtipped, French-cuffed assholes were going to eat him for lunch if
he didn’t play it right. Jesus goddamn Christ, he hoped one of the
Larimers did something crazy. The lawyers already knew, of course,
that the Larimers had upped the ask. Their evident calm on the
phone the day before—“That price,” said Jerry Meegan, Esquire, “is
obviously higher than we’d like, but not wholly outside of the realm of
consideration”—had sent him into a panic; no one casually throwing
around that kind of money for a few parcels of undeveloped property
could be trusted not to fuck you over. No one who used the phrase
“not wholly outside the realm of consideration” could possibly be
telling the truth.
The first time he’d met the Larimers, he’d spent five hours in a
car—not counting the drive down—just trying to find the place. He
kept ending up back in Beckley. Finally, when he felt certain he was
getting close, he pulled over at an unbelievable gas station whose
sign read FUEL, BAIT, VENISON, JERKY and asked the clerk if he
knew where they lived and the clerk removed his hat very slowly and
rubbed his head very slowly and drawled very slowly, “Well sure,
son. You just wanna go about four looks down Sullivan Road that
way and then you’ll see a sign for Split Lake Hollow Road. Now don’t
take that. You’ll wanna go a little farther along. They’re up Ward
Road, on your left.”
“I’m sorry,” Harrow said. “A few what?”
“Well, just a few looks.”
“A few looks.”
“Yessir. Just a few.”
Harrow had a personal philosophy that business success was
principally the ability to tolerate the intolerable. Like most things he
termed philosophy, it had little or no practical application for him.
“What the hell is a look?”
“Well shit,” the clerk said. “No reason to get nasty about it, young
man. A look. You know. You look down the road”—he gestured back
toward it—“and as far as you can look, that’s one look. And them
Larimers, they’re a few more looks down the road.”
The Larimers, Harrow discovered, weren’t even West Virginian.
They were from Fayette County, Pennsylvania, twenty minutes over
the state line from his own home in Morgantown. “Right up the road
from me,” Harrow said genially. Their property, just a trailer, really,
with a big wooden deck and an astonishing proliferation of
surprisingly expensive vehicles, was, they told him, just their camp.
“Like four goddamn hours up the road!” Raymond, the older of
the two sons said.
“Shut your goddamn mouth, Raymond. The adults are talking.”
Sherri Larimer blew smoke toward him. He would have been in his
early twenties at the time. “He’s talking about from Morgantown.”
She eyed Harrow. “This here’s just our camp. Like I told you.”
“I have to ask,” Harrow said. “Are you folks Larimers like Chet
Larimer? Like the Hole-in-Gun?”
“Finest shooting ranges, go-karts, and putt-putts in the Tri-state.
That’s my husband. He don’t come down the camp much, on
account of he’s on disability.” She lit a fresh cigarette and winked
broadly. “Plus he don’t drink no more, cause of his diabetes. Not
much point in camping if you can’t drink.”
She offered Harrow a beer, which he accepted, and proceeded to
listen credulously, he believed, as he told her that he could make her
a few hundred thousand bucks, with which she could have her pick
of camps.
“What’s wrong with this one?”
“Nothing, it’s a fine camp. But once they build that highway and
interchange, it won’t be much good for hunting, will it?”
“Hunting?” Sherri hooted. She pointed at the boys. “Ray don’t
hunt, and Billy over there’s got stigmatism. He couldn’t hit the side of
a barn. He ain’t bagged a deer in ten years.”
“Well, it’ll ruin the scenery. And think about the noise.”
“I’ll think about it. To be honest, I don’t much care for the drive
down here, and we got another camp up near Fairchance anyhow.”
“And you’ll talk to the other owners?”
“Sure,” Larrimer said. She puffed a thin ring of smoke. “I’ll talk to
them.”
Sherri Larimer and her sons showed up at the Holiday Inn
conference room—none of the law firms in Beckley had an available
or big enough room—in formal clothes, the boys, as Sherri called
Billy and Ray, stuffed into smooth-worn coats that pinched under
their armpits and Sherri in a lacy white dress that looked like a relic
from some evil wedding conducted before the opening credits of a
horror film. She’d been in sweats and a Mountaineers shirt when
Harrow had met her up at their property. Harrow, who had never
been an accurate close observer of human self-presentation, though
he believed otherwise, wrote it off as country-folk idiosyncrasy; it was
all just coal miners and rural welfare. The idea that she might be
putting them all on would have struck him as improbable at best. She
took a pack of slender cigarettes out of her pocketbook. Billy lit one
for her. “Let’s cut to the chase,” she said. The lawyers regarded her
impassively, except for Veronica, who sat a foot back from the table,
as if in deference to her older male counterparts, and regarded the
family across from her with a tilted head and look of polite curiosity.
Sherri gestured at her with her smoke. “Nice to see yinz brought a
lady.” Ray chuckled darkly. She narrowed her eyes. “Shut up,
Raymond.”
“Yes, Ma’am,” he said.
“I hate to be the only gal in the room.”
“I love your dress, by the way,” Veronica said.
Harrow stared at her darkly and allowed his mind to explode with
a little fireworks display of select sentiments about women in
business. She was going to fuck everything up if she talked down to
these people, and yet everything about her expression and her
bearing suggested genuine pleasure in Sherri’s getup. Sherri just
said, “Thank you, young lady. It belonged to my mother.”
“I think that lace must be handmade,” Veronica said.
“Of course it is,” Larimer said, “and I thank you for noticing.” She
puffed at the rest of them.
“Well, now that that’s out of the way,” mumbled one of the
attorneys.
Ray chuckled again.
“Shut up, Raymond.”
Jerry Meegan, the lead negotiator for the property group, said a
hundred thousand and Sherri countered with two million. He looked
at her with a mix of disdain and admiration. “I can see we’re a ways
apart,” he said.
She mirrored his look with a precision that took him slightly
aback, then glanced at Harrow and gave a theatrical wink designed
for the whole room to see. “Thing is,” she said, “I spoke to my fellow
homeowners. Some of them were eager to sell. But I said to them, I
said that yinz are holding out on us.”
Meegan smoothed a hand across the remnants of his hair and
said a hundred and fifty thousand, and Sherri countered with two
million. They progressed in this fashion, with the bald, vampire-pale,
elegantly reptilian attorney moving incrementally toward the figure
that Sherri Larimer repeated fixedly like a magical incantation, never
once without a lit cigarette. At seven hundred and fifty thousand, he
said he’d need to caucus with his colleagues.
“Yinz need to what?” said Raymond.
“Shut your goddamn mouth, Ray,” she snapped, slapping her
hand on the table. “I’ll bust your eggs, boy.” She sighed and lit a
smoke. “I’m sorry,” she told Meegan. “Yinz want to step out, or
should we?”
In the hall, Meegan turned his impenetrable black eyes on
Harrow and said, “Phillip, it seems to me that you have
underrepresented the recalcitrance of this particular party.”
“Well shit, Jerry, you said, and I quote, that two mil was ‘not
wholly outside the realm of consideration.’”
“Not wholly,” said Meegan. “Still, we rather expected that as an
initial bargaining position, not some idée fixe.”
“For fuck’s sake,” said Harrow.
“Perhaps if we approach another owner,” said one of the
interchangeable male lawyers.
“Phillip?” Meegan looked down his nose.
Harrow considered lying, then thought better of it. “She’d
probably drown anyone who talked to you in the lake.”
“Really?” said the lawyer.
“It’s an expression,” said Harrow without knowing precisely what
he meant. There was, at least, no lake.
“I’m going to make a call to Arkansas,” said Meegan. He adjusted
a cuff. “Please excuse me.”
“Mr. Harrow,” said Veronica—almost, he thought, shyly. “You
wouldn’t happen to have spotted a ladies room?”
“Sure,” Harrow answered. “Sure. It’s back by the reception.”
“Would you show me? I’m sorry. Who designs these places,
right? I’m all turned around.”
So Harrow walked her back toward the lobby, wondering how you
could get all turned around in a hallway with one left turn, thinking
women, until in the lobby she turned and faced Harrow with the
same look of gentle interest that she’d shown for Sherri Larimer’s
dress and said, “Mr. Harrow, you seem like a man who likes to make
money.”
“Sure I like to make money. Who doesn’t like money?”
“Not everyone cares about money qua money. Jerry Meegan, for
example, cares about fucking people over. That he’s made money
doing it is incidental and not really a major part of his enjoyment of it.
In any event, I have a proposition for you.”
“You do?”
 “I do.”
“That’s why we’re out here.”
“Yes and no. I really do have to piss.” (This, Harrow would later
reflect, was the moment when he felt the first throb of sexual
attraction for her, the way she said it so nonchalantly: piss.) “But you
know, two birds.”
“Okay.” Harrow crossed his arms over his broad belly. He was
wearing a polo shirt; he felt that polos and khakis occupied just the
right position on the spectrum between big city lawyers and these
redneck lunatics. “Shoot,” he said.
“This deal,” Veronica told him, “is fucked seven ways to next
Tuesday.”
“I don’t know that it’s fucked,” Harrow protested, although his gut
fled toward his always-troublesome bowels at the thought of it. This
was not a make-or-break deal for him; part of success was charting
a smooth upward trend through a mess of ups and downs, but still, it
might represent several million in revenue, with a good margin, too,
as these new box stores were little more than piles of cinder block
and fluorescent lighting. In a state with few environmental
regulations, the earthworks needed for site prep were fast, dirty, and
cheap. He could easily be looking at a million in profit. He ran a slim
operation, subcontracted almost everything, maintained only one
small office in Morgantown and had only a few full-time employees:
an engineer, a draftsman, an old, laid-off mine foreman who served
as his liaison with tradespeople, and a grim and librarianish real
estate agent named Edith—a young woman stuck with an old
woman’s name, a failed academic of some kind who’d tried to sell
houses but hated the platitudinous interactions and came to him for
the promise of uninterrupted office work and a steady salary. A
million dollars in profit. It was 1985. He could afford the lost
opportunity, but still he felt the loss palpably looming in front of him,
unavoidable as a sudden deer on a dark, narrow road in the middle
of the night.
“You know it is,” Veronica replied simply.
“Jerry said he’d contemplate two mil.”
“Jerry would contemplate killing his own mother. Quote: ‘all
outcomes are reasonable in the abstract.’ But he’s not going to go to
two, and even if he does, Sherri is going to decide that she needs
three.”
Harrow laughed at her; he laughed in such a way as to make
sure that she knew he was laughing at her. “Young lady,” he said,
“you seem very smart, and I’m sure you’re a very good lawyer back
in New York.” (He sucked his cheeks for a second. He was very
pleased with the way he pronounced New York: with the familiar
derision of a person who can afford to disdain the grimy atavism of
that city which, because it’s populated with so many refugees of the
provinces, is quite often the most provincial place in America.) “But,”
he said, “I know these people. These people are my people. Well,
more or less. And they’re not going to walk away from that kind of
money.”
She was disconcertingly unperturbed. She smiled at him
revealing rows of capped, Wall-Street teeth. She said, “No, obviously
not. But I mean, I think we both know who told them it was worth that
much to begin with? Anyway, they can make a lot more leasing it.”
“First of all, that’s total bullshit. Leasing it? The whole goddamn
project is a boondoggle!” He shouldn’t have said that to this woman,
so he barreled ahead, hoping she wouldn’t notice. “The tenants are
going to last a year if they ever move in. And the rest of the property
is already sold. She can’t just lease it. And by the way, if you’re
implying that I—”
She waved her hand. “No, Mr. Harrow. I told them.”
“You?”
“You’re surprised.”
“Yes. Goddamnit! First of all, why would you do any such thing?
And second of all, how the hell would you even know . . . I mean,
how would you, without me, even get in contact . . .”
“Well,” she said. “It’s funny. I actually first came out to open our
Pittsburgh office. And I was having a drink one night at this little bar
called Partners, and I met this very nice woman, about my age, who
was up from Morgantown for the weekend. She worked in real
estate, it turned out.”
Harrow’s arms fell. He felt his pits go damp and his small
intestines, or something down there, jerk agonizingly. “Edith?” he
said. “But she wouldn’t—”
 “We’ve been seeing each other, actually, for almost six months
now.”
“Seeing each other. Jesus fucking—”
“Mr. Harrow,” Veronica said. “Phil. They’re going to wonder where
we are. What do you say?”
“What do I say,” Phil said, neither quite a question nor quite not a
question.
“It’s not a boondoggle, Phil. This company, I’m telling you. In
twenty years, Sears will be out of business, but there will be one of
these fuckers at every crossroads in America. Which is exactly what
I told Sherri Larimer.”
And the one thing you could say about Phillip Harrow, the
Construction King of Morgantown, West Virginia, whatever else bad
you might say about him, whatever aspersions you might cast on his
character, was that he never let something as small as his own
prejudice get in the way of a good deal. So what? This lawyer was a
dyke who’d seduced his apparently dyke secretary and screwed his
multimillion-dollar deal as part of some longer con whose overall
contours he could just barely sense as he stood there stupidly in the
plasticine-colored lobby of that godawful hillbilly Holiday Inn. She
was playing him, playing her own employers, playing the Larimers
possibly, even though he thought—and surely she must have noticed
too—that they carried with them the appalling possibility of violence,
who did not, he thought, seem like the sort of people you ought to
fuck with. But then again, as someone had once told him—he forgot
who, where, when, or what it had been in regard to—life was not a
dress rehearsal. “All right,” he said. “What do you want me to do?”
“Phil,” Veronica said. How could someone so sexy be queer? “I
just need you to be yourself.”
That had been five years ago. Jerry Meegan had gone to two
million in the end. Harrow’s stomach had bucked, and he thought
that he was really going to crap in his pants, but then Sherri Larimer
had pressed her bitter yellow mouth into a tight little sphincter and
said, sourly, “I’m thinking maybe two point five.”
Meegan betrayed not one blink of emotion or disbelief and
suggested mildly that it suddenly felt as if they were negotiating in
something less than good faith. Then Raymond pulled a hunting
knife from somewhere inside his ill-fitting jacket and pounded the
point right into the table between them and asked if Jerry was
accusing them of lying. The New York boys, previously
imperturbable, lurched back in terror, Meegan so abruptly that he fell
right out of his chair, sprawling onto the polyester carpet in his many-
thousand-dollar suit. Sherri Larimer laughed. With a look of fear
mingled with despair and disbelief, they all fled the room. Larimer
laughed again. “Like cock-a-roaches,” she sneered. Harrow stood
there. He thought, I should say something. He didn’t say anything.
Veronica rose from her chair, perfectly, beatifically calm, smiled at
Sherri, and said, “Well, I’m so sorry they left so abruptly. Thank you
so much for your time.”
A little later, a pair of state police arrived. Larimer offered them
smokes, which they declined. “Well, I know,” she said. “They are
ladies’ cigarettes. But they got the same damn tobacco.”
“Was you really gonna cut him?” One of the staties asked Ray.
He looked like a teenager and seemed to find the situation amusing.
“Cut him?” Larimer shook her head. She cackled. “Son, Ray-Ray
don’t even hunt! He faints at the sight of blood.”
“Do not!”
Sherri Larimer snatched the knife, pricked the end of her index
finger, and squeezed a couple of drops onto the table.
He turned the color of her dress, covered his mouth, and he too
fled the room.

• • •

Abbie had giggled through the whole story. “Whatever happened to

these Larimers? What happened to the deal?”
Veronica shrugged. “We worked out a lease deal, and Phil and I
financed and built the whole thing on spec, and today it is West
Virginia’s most successful outlet mall. No Wal-Mart, though. They
ended up building it up the road. Even Sherri Larimer made a
bundle.”
“She’s got the magic touch,” Harrow said, putting a hand on the
back of Veronica’s chair.
“Market research,” Veronica shrugged.
 Sarah said, “I don’t understand why you were trying to cheat,
what’s her name, that Sherri Larimer.”
“Oh, I wasn’t!” Veronica put her hand on her heart and made an
approximation of the Boy Scout salute.
Harrow said, “Veronica here figured—and this is what she told
Sherri L.—that at minimum, they’d get eminent domained and walk
away from the whole thing with a couple hundred thou, which they’d
have made in the first place. At maximum, those GP dummies
would’ve given in and paid her a zillion bucks.” Phil shrugged. “I’d’ve
gotten screwed, probably, in that deal, but”—he leaned over and
planted a brotherly kiss on Veronica’s cheek—“Veronica and I didn’t
know each other yet, so no foul there. Anything in between, well, still
good for the Larimers. And Sherri didn’t have to kill anybody. As it
was, it all worked out.”
“And you found yourself in service of this colorful group
because?” At some point during the story, Sarah’s wine glass had
disappeared and been replaced by a tumbler full of something
amber. The waitress appeared and asked if anyone wanted dessert.
Harrow told her to bring another bottle of wine, “and some of
those macaroons,” he added. “Those famous macaroons.”
“That’s the Duquesne Club, hon,” the waitress told him.
“You don’t have any macaroons?” Harrow winked at Sarah when
he said it.
“Sorry, hon.”
“The booze’ll do, then.”
They were the only people left in the dining room. Far below, on
the water, a dark train of barges swam from the Monongahela into
the Ohio River. Harrow lit a cigarette and asked if anyone else
smoked.
“Surely,” Abbie said, and he accepted a Marlboro.
“You don’t smoke,” said Sarah.
“I do occasionally. When the moment presents itself.”
“To answer your question,” Veronica told Sarah, “I’d been working
on some deals in Fayette County, and their name kept coming up.
And I was already thinking of, shall we say, striking out on my own.
You know how much I hated that firm. And this was an opportunity,
not to put too fine a point on it, to ingratiate myself with the local
landowning class.”
“Always an angle,” Phil said. He made a silent toast.
“To be fair, the Larimers are a nasty bunch. Everyone down there
seems to be afraid of them. But Sherri’s never been anything but a
sweetheart to me.”
“Well, look,” Harrow said. “To the matter at hand, which we’ve
been putting off with this storytelling.”
“Yes,” Abbie said. “Well, like I told Veronica, I’m not exactly
certain I’m qualified to do what you ask. And yes”—he raised a hand
to his sister to stop her from interrupting—“I know that you only need
some kind of ersatz, quote-unquote expert to assuage the gratuitous
concerns of some committee of know-nothing appointees on a
zoning board, but still.”
“Oh, come on, Rabbi,” said Harrow. “Don’t tell me, I cannot tell a
lie. You’ve got the bona fides.”
“It’s pronounced bona fides, and, I’m sorry.”
Phil smirked, “Veronica told me that you were on a mission from
God.”
Sarah leered across the table at him. “Jesus Christ, Abbie. You
told your sister, too?”
Abbie flapped a hand at her and glared at Veronica, who put up
her own hands and said, “What? He’s my business partner.”
“Aw, shit,” said Phil. “I didn’t mean anything. I figure, you know, a
man’s religion is his own business, although I’m not what you’d call
spiritual myself. Anyway, hell, your whole thing is that you’re some
kind of environmental guy, right? Solar power and whatnot. If it walks
like a duck, am I right?”
“Not exactly.”
Sarah rattled ice in her husband’s direction. She was drunk, she
knew, but it was an odd thing: she found, when she’d had a few
drinks, it became suddenly right to do and say those things that her
sober self would never permit out of sobriety’s crippling politeness.
“Abbie is very moral,” she said. “Honesty is his policy.”
“Well,” Veronica said and made a gesture of pushing back from
the table.
 “Abbie is particularly fond of the third and seventh
commandments. Ten a distant third.”
Abbie had crossed his arms and let his face relax into a state of
practiced impassivity. He’d long ago decided that the most infuriating
response to a furious woman was to respond with the inverse of her
anger. Sarah glared at him. “Sarah,” Veronica said, “I’m going to run
to the ladies’ room before we go. Would you care to join?” She knew
it was the cheap way out, and she felt a twinge of disappointment
and frustration, knowing, of course, that her idiot business partner
and her dumb brother would interpret it in precisely the same way,
affirming whatever it was they already thought about women, those
prejudices they knew better than to vocalize, but held and believed
with self-congratulation for having the courage of conviction not to
turn away from unacceptable, unfashionable, but ineradicable truths.
When the women had gone, Phil stretched in his chair. “You sure
pissed her off,” he said.
“Like complaining about the weather,” Abbie replied.
Harrow laughed. “Good point. She’s a great-looking lady, though.
Your sister, too, by the way.”
“You’d have a better chance with my wife.” Abbie permitted
himself a smirk.
“Wait, what—” Harrow began, but he noticed the waiter
approaching and caught himself short. The waiter deposited the
check with a deferential nod. It sat on the table halfway between
them for a moment longer than was comfortable, then Harrow
grabbed it. “Just kidding, Rabbi,” he said. “This one’s on me.”
“Are you sure?” Abbie asked. Magnanimity was easier once you
knew the other guy was going to pay.
“Sure am.” He extracted a credit card from a fantastically bulbous
wallet. “Consider it a down payment. Now we’ll see about the
returns.”
 4

Late that night, Abbie told Sarah that he’d back out if she preferred
it, and she said, “Oh, no you won’t.”
“I will,” he said. “If you prefer it.”
“But I don’t prefer it. A fresh start, remember, Abbie. We need
money.”
“There’s always money.”
“Yes, there’s always money, but we don’t always have it. The
world is going to end anyway, don’t you always say? Sooner or
later? Some rancid little stream isn’t going to make it or break it.”
She went to sleep as far from him as their bed allowed, but when
he woke a bit after three—he could never sleep well after drinking,
unlike Sarah, who could, after a few, pass right into a deep eight
hours and wake in the morning without ever remembering that she’d
laid down—he found her arm across his chest. She snored quietly.
He touched her hair.
Several days afterward, he met Phil and Veronica for the hearing.
Harrow greeted him in precisely the same way as the last time they’d
met, an aggressive handshake and a rough smack on the arm. “No
cold feet, Rabbi?”
Abbie shrugged. He actually found Harrow pleasant in an
appalling way; the man’s awfulness was genuine to a degree that
most people’s politesse was not. “I suppose I’m not averse to a little
creative dissembling,” he said. “For the benefit of all and the good of
the order.”
“Good,” said Harrow. “Great! The good of the order! Ha! This guy.
Anyway, it’s because financing depends on approval here. Lord only
knows, no offense, we don’t want to build this crap with our own
money.”
“No,” said Abbie.
“How’s that little wife of yours?” asked Harrow, who was the sort
of man untroubled by a phrase like that little wife of yours.
“Champing at the bit,” Abbie said.
“Hmm,” said Harrow, but Abbie didn’t catch it.
The Zoning Board met in a WPA-era office building on Ross
Street in Downtown Pittsburgh between the stained exterior of a
judge-and-lawyer dive called the Common Plea and the groaning
rusted steel trestles supporting the on-ramp to the Liberty Bridge.
The hearing room on the first floor was a hazy combination of faculty
lounge and prison cafeteria. There were maps of city neighborhoods
on the walls, all of them hanging that one degree off level that might
as well be upside down. Witnesses and attendees sat in rows of
plastic chairs. The committee sat at a long wooden conference table
oddly placed in a corner of the room rather than front and center. A
window unit air conditioner blew warm air that smelled of something
like power steering fluid. The board members were mic’d, but the
microphones didn’t work. They were largely unintelligible to the
audience, with the exception of Joe Termini, the chairman, who
sounded as if his muffler had rusted off. A framed photograph of
Mayor Caliguiri hung offhandedly on a pillar that occupied, for no
particular reason, the exact middle of the room.
The board refused to release the order of testimony and
comment for its hearings based on an obscure principle—Joe
Termini had inherited this principle from his predecessor, who’d
inherited it from his, and so on back into the hazy prehistory of the
modern city. Termini, a former officer of the United Steelworkers local
who’d campaigned for the mayor and been rewarded with this
sinecure, had no interest in the origin of the principle, only in the
practical application of it. He viewed the discharge of his duties as
something between fatherhood and the attendance of midnight mass
on Christmas: better done than not, but best not to dig too deeply
into the particulars. Harrow and Abbie arrived early, discovered they
were the eighteenth out of nineteen applicants for adjustment, and
retired to the back of the room to share a newspaper and, in
Harrow’s case, to smoke.
Interestingly, Joe Termini’s younger son, Eddie, would become,
not quite a dozen years later, the youngest mayor in the history of
the city. Popularly known by his initials due to a series of unusual
weather events that were popularly, if briefly, interpreted as UFOs,
Eddie was primaried out of a third term after it was revealed that he
and his chief of staff, Jonah Kantsky, a man nearly fifteen years his
senior, had been having an affair. Both of them were married to
women at the time, Kantsky ostensibly happily, Eddie Termini rather
less so. The young mayor was supposedly involved in the diversion
of federal funds to his own ends and enrichment as well, but the
grand jury disbanded without bringing charges. Pittsburgh, by then,
was no less than a model of urban redevelopment, no longer a city
of browns and gray concrete, but of green and glass. People like
Isabel’s new boss, Barry Fitzgerald, flew all over the country,
extolling its virtues—high tech, politically progressive, increasingly
diverse. This was the city that Isabel moved to when she left New
York, a promised land if you didn’t happen to be a New Yorker
fleeing a far grander Babylon and your far worse mistakes. But
although the city had had a woman mayor by then and would surely
have tolerated an actually and openly gay mayor, it could not, even
in the early twenty-tens, abide the idea of a secretly gay mayor who
was also the younger man, with all that that—correctly or incorrectly
—implied. As for the UFOs, they turned out to be ball lightning, just
another bit of wild weather in a world where the whole climate was
going mad due to human stupidity and avarice. But Veronica Mayer
was right: it was, and remained, a city of hypochondriacs, and what
is a conspiracy theory if not a form of hypochondria?
Abbie quickly lost interest in the newspaper. He tried to pay
attention to the applicants who preceded them, but these applicants
and the various witnesses for and against their petitions had to
approach and sit at the table with the committee, and with the
exception of Termini’s occasional booming pronouncements—You
sher about that? Is this gonna be frame or mason-airy? You been up
the Permits desk yet?—the proceedings were muted and
incomprehensible. He stared through the windowpane above the air
conditioner on the far wall at a riveted girder supporting the ramp
and overpass. It was covered with graffiti tags that he tried
unsuccessfully to decipher. It was hot and he’d been convinced to
wear a suit. He felt the unsettling beginnings of dampness around
his collar. He was much thinner then, but still prone to sweat. He
wore, as ever, his collar open.
Since coming to Pittsburgh, the vision from the temple had
repeated itself twice—or, it would be more accurate to say, he’d had
similar, related, but distinct visions. In the first, he found himself back
in the field. This time the corn was high, taller even than he was. He
walked between the rows. The stalks and leaves had an unpleasant,
waxy quality, like the wet skin of an apple. The sky was no longer
clear, but overcast, and there was a sense that it has just rained, let
up, and was preparing to rain again. After a few hundred yards, he
emerged from the corn onto a long, rocky embankment that led
down to the edge of the familiar highway. The highway, which
appeared abandoned in his first intimation of it, was now busy. Cars
and tractor-trailers flew in both directions, and the air was full of the
confused dopplering of engine sounds. He looked to his left and saw
the deer again. It wasn’t alone. It had a fawn beside it. The fawn saw
Abbie and froze. The buck stepped forward, as if to interpose its
body deliberately between Abbie and the child. Abbie raised his
palms in a gesture meant to indicate harmlessness and openness,
but the movement, though deliberate and slow, alarmed the buck.
The buck made a sound between a cough and a grunt and exhaled
loudly. Abbie felt surprise; he didn’t know deer could vocalize. The
sound was a warning call. The fawn sprang away down the
embankment. It reached the highway. A fuel tanker’s horn blasted
across the field. When the tanker hit the fawn, it seemed nearly to
explode in blood and viscera. Abbie mouthed, Oh no! He turned. The
buck was gone. This was when he woke.
In the second version, which was briefer and more terrible, he
was the buck. He was standing between the field and the highway.
There was a fawn beside him. The fawn belonged to him, but his
consciousness had no language and therefore no sense of
possession, only a yearning that was like a hunger with no possibility
of ending. He saw an animal step out of the corn. The animal was
strange; it walked on two legs, like a bird, and had two other legs
that hung at its sides. It seemed impossible that something so
upright could move without falling over like a dying tree. The animal
was strangely furred on its head and covered almost everywhere
else with something that was not fur. The wind carried its scent to
him; the scent was horrible, sweet and strange. The weird animal
lifted its upper arms. It was terrifying; it was a thing outside of all
other things that he had ever seen. He called to the fawn. The call
had no meaning, but it contained within it an urge that he had to give
from his own body to the fawn’s body. The fawn received the urge
and acted. Then he saw it was an error, although he had no sense of
error except a vast, dark disquiet like the presentiment of a drop in
pressure that he might have felt before a storm. There were other
immense and strange animals on the hard strip of land below them,
stampeding in every direction, herdless and wild. The fawn ran into
them. He would have gone down there, but he couldn’t think; he
could only flee; the yearning hunger of possession broke open inside
of him and impelled him to leap faster and faster. The razor stalks
tore at him. This was when he woke.
When at last their turn came, Harrow slapped his shoulder and
said, “Go team.” A secretary lazily distributed folders full of MH
Partners LLP proposals for their development tentatively to be called
Greenview-on-Frick.
(“We really ought to consider changing that name?” Abbie had
suggested.
“It’s a great name!” Harrow protested. “What’s wrong with it? It’s
classy!”
“It sounds like some sort of moldering collection of half-timber
huts. It sounds like it’s inhabited by a gaggle of catamite hobbits.”
“Abbie,” Veronica said, “we discussed this.”
“I don’t know about Carmelite hobbits,” said Harrow. “But I know
classy.”)
Abbie had acceded to the name largely because he had no better
suggestion. And in fact, he was surprised to find that it wasn’t even
an altogether terrible plan. The land was scrubby and overgrown, but
it was ideally perched on a high outlook with the six hundred wooded
acres of Frick Park behind it and the river below; it afforded a nice
view of the Homestead High Level Bridge, and from certain spots on
a clear day you could see down the river in the other direction as far
as the top of the Thunderbolt at Kennywood Park. The old
Homestead Works on the other side of the river was a ruin, a rotting
monument to a lost economy, but there were already rumors that the
city might annex the whole thing with Superfund monies, tear it
down, and build a shopping complex. When Veronica had first
described the project (in broad strokes, in Harrow’s words, a view
from 30,000 feet), Abbie had imagined a lazy subdivision full of
sidewalkless streets curling back on themselves and stuffed with cul-
de-sacs as if a den of Ouroboroses had been infected by a plague of
commas, but the layout she’d finally shown him wasn’t actually
terrible; it obeyed, more or less, a logic of blocks, with a central
avenue and a small, albeit inevitably weedy and sure-to-be unused
park in the center. Its flaw was straightforward. If it were to be built, it
could not be built on forty-degree inclines. The whole hilly plot would
have to be leveled. And there was nowhere for all that land to go but
over the last hillside and down the steep slope into the gully of Nine
Mile Run.
It wasn’t, strictly speaking, a matter for the Zoning Board, and the
hearing, officially, was to approve the new street layout and the
request to reclassify the newly divided lots as residential (a mix,
specifically, of R1 RSD-2 single family detached low density and
RST RSA-3 single family attached multi-unit medium density), but
the planning commission, at that time headed by a shambolic
attorney by the name of Lou DiPresta, known colloquially as Tee-
Time Lou, would approve anything as long as the City Traffic
Engineer signed off (and the City Traffic Engineer always signed off,
lest he find himself having to read what he was signing off on). And
the planning commission, at the time, permitted no public comment.
Meanwhile, the Pennsylvania DEP and DCNR had no jurisdiction
within the city limits under the Home Rule Charter unless a project
presented a “grossly negligent and demonstrable danger to
surrounding communities or a manifestly intentional violation of the
Commonwealth’s laws of Environmental Protection and/or the
Conservation of Natural Resources”—a standard so impossibly high
as to have never once been applied successfully since the revision
of the Home Rule Charter laws in 1972.
The Zoning Board, by contrast, and much to the dismay of Joe
Termini, had been obliged to conduct all of its hearings publicly
subsequent to various minor apocalypses of urban planning in the
fifties and sixties, most especially the razing of the Lower Hill District
to make room for the Civic Arena. There had also been the
destruction of the East Liberty commercial corridor; the old
neighborhood center had been imprisoned in a peripheral boulevard
that might as well have been a moat. The city had built a gaggle of
obscene public housing high-rises along that same periphery, only to
add to the impression that the neighborhood had been redesigned
as a Bastille in which to imprison Dangerous Black People. Termini
was of the general opinion that if only the preceding generation had
wised up and given the Blacks some meaningless and superficial
gestures of respect for their historic quarters of the city, then they’d
be making a lot less fuss and trouble now. Instead, everyone went in
with bulldozers and a barely concealed language of sanitation, and
as a result Joe Termini—who didn’t, he was quite certain, have a
racist bone in his body—was forced to endure a weekly pilgrimage of
half-informed ministers and community leaders (he pronounced this
phrase, every time, as if it were encased in flashing quotation marks)
peddling a furious and often befuddling form of civic discontent.
But it wasn’t just the city’s dispossessed African-American
population, who, even Termini would admit, “had some pretty
goddamn legitimate gripes.” Since the Zoning Board began working
in public, it had become the main forum for any aggrieved citizens
who couldn’t get a letter to the editor in the paper and couldn’t get
their dumb state rep to return their frustrated calls. Most of their
grievances had exactly fuck-all to do with zoning. They complained
about police and they complained about their neighbors putting the
trash out on the wrong day and they complained that the storm
drains backed up into their basements. They complained about the
mayor and the city council and the small claims court judges and the
magistrate who upheld their sons’ DWIs when he’d only had a
couple and he just forgot to turn on his headlights is all. They
believed that the government had closed the steel mills and the coke
plants. They took these same complaints to City Council meetings,
too, but council didn’t have to conduct its business in public; their
meetings were bread and circuses; their decisions were already
made before they trundled out of their chambers. Joe Termini had
two black women and one red-diaper Jew on his board, all political
appointees like him, and they wouldn’t hear of working behind closed
doors. (In his opinion, they weren’t much for working, period, but
then, neither was he if he was honest about it. Twenty years in a mill
and then ten years as Business Agent of the Local listening to mill
workers bitch that the mills were closing was all the work he intended
to do in a lifetime.) So here he was, conducting group therapy for
people with nothing else to do in the middle of a weekday but
express their vague discontent. “Don’t you fucking people have
jobs?” he wanted to shout; sometimes he did shout it—never in
meetings. “Oh Joe,” his wife said. “Put a sock in it. Have a beer.”
“Phil,” said Joe. Harrow and Abbie took seats at the table.
Behind them, a group of well-meaning citizens led by a thin man
with wire glasses angled for chairs, but Termini held up a thick hand
and said, “Gentlemen, ladies, please. Grab some seats in the front
row over there. We’ll get to you when we get to you.”
The thin man made an indignant sound between a laugh and a
gurgle and led his troupe to the spot Termini had indicated. Termini
rolled his eyes in a gesture of friendly conspiracy at Harrow and
Abbie.
“Hey, Joe,” said Harrow, “nice to bump into you.”
“Yeah, we gotta stop meeting in these disreputable type of joints.”
He winked at the nearest board member on his left, Tonya Weston,
who made a point of treating Joseph Termini with the same benign
indifference that an old cat shows the big dumb dog with whom she’s
shared a house for most of her life. “Who’s your friend?” Termini
asked.
“Joe Termini, Abbie Mayer.”
Termini threw a half wave across the table. “Mayer? So you’re
related to this guy’s boss.” He grinned at Harrow.
“Partner,” said Harrow.
“I’m just giving you a hard time, Phil. Christ.” This time Termini
offered the wink to Abbie. He grinned. “We all know who’s got who
by the balls, though, don’t we?” He laughed: a bark.
“She’s my sister,” Abbie said.
“I can see the resemblance,” Termini replied. Abbie seemed to
wince, and Termini wondered if he’d taken the comment as some
kind of Jew thing. “I don’t mean like a Jewish thing,” he said.
“No,” said Abbie.
“Gentlemen,” said Zeb Rosen. Rosen was a criminal defense
attorney by trade who’d wormed his way onto the board through
some mysterious favor to Mayor Flaherty back in the seventies and
who’d clung to the seat ever since. Caliguiri could’ve gotten rid of
him but had seemed to find some indefinable use in having “a man
of the left” on the board. He was short, fat, and diabetic, which made
him temperamental in vague relation to his blood sugar level, and he
made a vicious pain-in-the-ass of himself at every hearing, even
though he inevitably and invariably cast his vote with whatever
majority Termini managed to cobble together. This made him an
effective ally, and Joe hated the feeling that he was indebted to the
man.
“Yeah, all right,” Joe said. “Let’s get started.” He glanced at the
binder in front of him. “Okay, let’s see, uh, Madam Secretary, you
ready?”
Bernice Brownlee glared at him from the far end of the table. “Mr.
Chairman,” she said.
Fuck her, he thought. She cast dissenting votes into the record
just to fuck with his preference for unanimity and took lousy minutes.
“Ohhhhh-kay,” he said. He put a pair of small glasses on the end
of his nose. Fuck getting old. He said, “Okay, in the next item, we
are, uh, considering the proposal by MH Partners LLP for—uh, is this
projected?” He glanced behind him. It was the previously reviewed
project, a new circular driveway at a private school in Shadyside.
“Can we get the transparency right?” he called toward the back of
the room. A skinny young man in a suit that was too big for his chest
and too short for his long arms rushed over and futzed around with
the projector. The site plan appeared, crooked. Joe drummed the
table. The kid straightened it.
“Okay, okay,” Joe began again. “The proposal by MH Partners
LLP to reclassify as, uh, varying residential a parcel . . . excuse me,
parcels, contiguous parcels, which are currently . . .” He trailed off
and turned a page over and back again. He looked toward the back
of the room again. “Barry, what the hell is this stuff currently?” There
was light laughter in the room. The same poor kid shuffled through a
stack of papers.
“Uh, sorry, Mr. Termini, Mr. Chairman. Currently mix of Limited
Industrial and, uh, some Specialty and some currently un-zoned.”
“Yeah, okay,” said Joe. “You get that, Madam Secretary?”
“Yes, I got that.”
“Okey doke. So, all right. Phil?”
“Thanks Joe.” Harrow touched the knot of his tie. “So, we request
and petition the committee for these re-classifications. I won’t list
them, as they are enumerated in the submitted packets, which, I
believe, you’ve all had time to review.”
“With a magnifying glass,” Joe interrupted and laughed.
Harrow laughed. “Right,” he said. “Diligently. Ahem. So, you can
see we propose a modified block-and-artery street plan with a
central avenue corridor. There is, um, also a few spots where we
wish to either convert to Specialty or retain current Specialty zones
for the purposes of semi-public green space. That’s, by the way, the
‘Greenview’ of our project plan title. In any case, we ultimately
propose to build a total of 105 townhouse and 103 separate single-
family housing units. That will be in three phases over an
approximately four-year period commencing with the, well, the
commencement of the project. Uh, we will connect with the current
city grid at Old Brown’s Hill Road on the southern extension and
Forward Avenue above Commercial Street on the northern side.
Connect to city sewers, storm drains, utilities, et setra et setra.”
“Great,” said Termini. “Well, any questions from the board before
we approve? That’s to say, vote?”
“Mr. Chairman!” It was the thin man with glasses.
“Yes, listen. Public comment comes after.”
“How,” the gentleman insisted, “Can public comment come after
the decision?”
“He’s right,” Brownlee said. “Mr. Chairman.”
“Christ,” Termini muttered.
 “Ask them about the leveling!” The man shouted. “The
earthworks!”
“What’s he talking about?” Termini looked at Harrow.
“Joe?” Zeb Rosen waved his hand weakly. “It’s in the proposal.
The, uh, the, uh, the, uh, property, uh, currently, uh, is, uh, consists
of a series of small hills and gullies on a ridge-like formation above
the, uh, Nine-Mile-Run stream. The plan requires significant
leveling.”
“So what?” Termini turned back to Harrow. “Don’t tell me you’re
gonna dam up the damn crick?” He laughed and stuck out his
tongue.
“No, no.” Harrow affected a look of shock. “Abbie, here, is, well,
here to explain.”
“And Abbie’s expertise?” Rosen asked, removing his own glasses
and rubbing them absently with his tie.
“Abbie,” said Harrow, “is one of the foremost environmental
architects in America, a pioneer of Earth-friendly construction and
design techniques. His resume is—is supposed—to be in the
packets as well.”
“Not in mine,” said Rosen.
“Not in mine,” said Carl Sefchek, a member of the committee
who’d strolled into the room and taken a seat only a minute before.
Termini shook his head. “Barry!” he yelled.
“Sorry, Mr. Chairman. That must be an oversight. We’ll get that
corrected.”
“You’ll get it corrected. Well, look. I’ll take Phil on his word. Abbie,
you’re the foremost whatever you are. Et setra. Tell me why this is
kosher.”
“Well,” Abbie said, feeling, as he often felt, an itch of prescient
dissatisfaction at what he was about to say, remembering, also, his
sister’s admonition that he must sound smart but not too smart,
expert but not abstracted, forceful but not prideful, competent but not
uncomfortably so. “You will actually see that the detailed plans
include a very detailed and sophisticated water and runoff
remediation plan. It is true that we intend to level much of the
property, and some earth will be moved onto the hillside on the left
bank, I suppose it would be, of the stream in question. But, I should
point out, that this hillside is currently covered with a variety of what
we would call invasive species, that is to say, it is mostly weeds, and
the streambed itself, though adjacent to maintained woodlands of
Frick Park, is, well, frankly pretty blighted. This is not a pristine
babbling brook, in other words. If anything, the increased outflow that
will result from the natural runoff from our properties will improve the
stream’s present condition.”
“He sounds like a foremost what-have-you to me,” said Joe.
“Nine Mile Run deserves to be restored, not turned into a
drainage ditch!” the little man shouted.
“It already is a drainage ditch,” Harrow snarled back.
“Let’s have some order,” Joe said. He looked down his nose.
“Phil.”
“We”—the man indicated his small coterie of citizens, women in
loose-fitting clothing and men in jackets that had seen better days;
Termini sighed—“demand that this committee table approval of these
plans pending a thorough environmental study.”
“Uh-huh,” Joe said. He glanced at his watch. “That’s really a
matter for the planning committee, and, uh, Tonya, you’re the expert.
Would you say that that falls within our purview?”
“Not at five o’clock, Mr. Chairman.”
“Good, then. Let’s put it to a vote.”
“But we object!” the man said. “And you are obligated to address
—”
“Gentlemen, ladies.” Abbie stood up and turned toward them. He
spread his arms in a manner he felt to be vaguely ecumenical. “My
name is Abbie Mayer.”
“We know who you are,” spat a woman with remarkably flat hair.
It was unfair, Abbie thought, that the most well-meaning people were
so often so plain, as if the development of conviction had, in some
manner, sapped the vital energies that would otherwise have gone
into their physical selves, leaving them with the half-formed
indeterminacy of children. A child’s awkwardness was fortunately a
passage rather than a destination. Abbie considered that he’d been
awkward himself.
Another woman called him a sell-out. He glanced at her. She
wasn’t unattractive. Well, maybe that invalidated his hypothesis. He
realized his glance was turning into a stare. He fixed his gaze just
above them, as he’d learned to do when speaking to a crowd. “If you
know me—know who I am, in any event—then you know that I, too,
am a man who believes that the ecological impact of our society, our
species even, is a matter of great import. But . . . let me give you an
example, a metaphor. I’m not sure if any of you are religious men or
women. One day, I was sitting in temple on Shabbat. I think of myself
as spiritual in the broadest human sense. And I was looking at a
beautiful stained glass window of Moses leading the Israelites out of
Egypt, and you will recall that in that story, too, in Exodus, there was
a sort of parable of environmental catastrophe, that is to say, the
plagues. And God—Adonai, we call him, as Jews—spoke to me.
Don’t be nervous. I don’t mean I heard voices. I only mean I
imagined a particular image, saw it, envisioned it, you might say. And
I happen to believe that God does not speak, but rather, that He puts
into our hearts the knowledge of that which He would have said. So,
what I saw was a green hill, covered in trees, and a stream flowing
down the slope, and a deer, a male deer with antlers. Now, I had
been reflecting on this very project at the time, and what else could
that have been but a vision of Frick Park and a stream, restored.
What I am trying to tell you is, if you know who I am, will you not
believe that I believe, fervently, that we might both build this beautiful
housing development—no, this neighborhood—amidst the trees, and
also see the stream restored down there in our urban forest, our
jewel of a park that reminds us what this city was before there was a
city here?”
Abbie thought it had come out rather well. The bespectacled man
regarded him curiously for a moment, a look Abbie recognized from
a vacation in Italy, when he’d addressed waiters and hotel clerks in a
language he was certain was Italian. Then the man leaned around
him and addressed Termini directly: “Mr. Chairman, we strenuously
object.”
“Noted for the record,” Termini told him. “We’ll even add the
strenuously part. It’ll be very descriptive. Now sit down. Everyone. All
right. We don’t need a motion, as this project was already accepted
for review. So, aye, for me. Approve.”
“Aye,” said Rosen.
 “Aye,” said Sefchek.
“Aye,” said Weston.
“Aye,” said two more committee members who’d been reading a
newspaper.
“Nay,” said Brownlee.
“The ayes have it, five to one,” said Termini. “God bless America.
Meeting is adjourned.” There was a noise from the back. Termini
glanced up. “What?” Barry signaled with his hand and waved a
packet of paperwork. “Oh, shit. One more item?” Termini glanced at
his watch. Already, the party was rising in the back. He waved them
down. “Well, we’ll just table that until our next meeting in”—he looked
at his watch for no particular reason—“two weeks’ time.” He rose
and walked out before they could protest.

• • •

Afterward, in the Ross Building lobby outside of the hearing room,

where a layer of dust or grime on the windows gave the late
afternoon light the quality of a detective novel, Harrow and Abbie
were on their way toward the exit when Barry, the young assistant,
called them briefly back. He’d hurried out of the hearing room and
was out of breath from the exertion. He carried a cardboard
accordion file held closed—possibly held together—with a thick
rubber band. One got the sense that this was his briefcase. His
glasses had migrated to the top of his head, where his hair was
already thinning. He was in his late twenties. He had, Abbie thought,
unusually long arms and unusually short legs, like an orangutan.
Harrow had been in the middle of telling Abbie that he may have laid
it on a little thick with all that God and religion stuff.
“Mr. Mayer! I’m sorry. Have you got a moment? Just a moment.
And Mr. Harrow as well.”
“Well—” Abbie began.
“Just a moment.”
“Sure, okay. Phil?”
“Sure, okay.”
Barry steered them gently out of the main lobby and into a
narrower corridor between two banks of elevators, whose old brass
doors rattled when they opened and closed, which they did rarely.
Like municipal offices everywhere, everything moved placidly. Even
the dust in the beam of sunlight from the narrow window above a
wilting potted tree seemed lethargic.
“More private over here,” Barry said.
“Yeah, okay.” Harrow caught Abbie’s eye, but Abbie shrugged.
They had nowhere to be themselves. It was the end of the day.
Harrow had already suggested, before the hearing, that they could
duck into the Common Plea after it concluded. “It’s a lawyer bar,”
he’d explained. He winked. “Long on the pour.”
“Mr. Mayer, first, let me say that I’m an immense admirer of
yours. Really. When I was an undergrad at UB . . . uh, the University
of Buffalo, I heard you give a talk at the school of architecture. I was
in the studio . . . the fine arts at the time, but my interests were
always more in design. It was a fascinating lecture, truly. Very
moving and also a little frightening. I wondered if you thought things
were really so dire.”
Abbie tried to remember what he might have said in Buffalo four
or five years ago, but it was fruitless. His talks hadn’t changed much
in substance from year to year, but he had learned to pitch them with
varying degrees of apocalyptic fervor depending on his audience. If
Buffalo had been at the university, in front of students, then he’d
probably predicted something like the end of the world.
“I think things are likely to become fairly dire,” said Abbie, “but
one does occasionally exaggerate for effect.”
Barry appeared pleased by this answer, laughed, and almost
clapped. “I would imagine so. Nevertheless, I was very moved by the
talk. The image you describe of seeing Phoenix from the air and
having this revelation was quite, uh, powerful. Quite powerful.”
“Abbie is a powerful guy,” Harrow said with his customary assault
on Abbie’s shoulder. “But we’ve really got to be, you know. We’ve got
another appointment.”
“Yes, yeah. I’m sorry. Just a moment of your time. Yeah? Okay,
thanks. So, first of all, let me formally introduce myself. My name is
Barry Fitzgerald. I’m a, well, in addition to working on the staff of the
zoning board here, I’m also a graduate student, uh, writing my
dissertation currently, about the development and decline of rust belt
cities at CMU. I mean, I’m at CMU, the cities, well, you know. And,
I’m sorry, this is . . . I don’t mean to be awkward. The thing is, I’m
setting up a, a sort of institute, a non-profit, sort of, think tank. At
CMU. Affiliated with, I should say. I’ve already filed for 501 status,
actually! But what I’m really looking for, from a fundraising and
capacity perspective is, frankly, guys like you.”
“Like us?” Harrow was amused.
“Well, like Abbie in particular. In an advisory capacity. As a board
member, perhaps. And contributor.”
“So you’re asking for money.”
“Well yes, that, too.”
“I’m more of a March of Dimes kind of guy,” Harrow told him.
“And I toss the occasional check at some venerable cultural
institution on the knife edge of dying off.”
“The thing about the Future Cities Institute, though—that’s what
it’s called—is that we’re going to be doing really vital work, I can
assure you, and in your field. And I would love to meet, you know,
formally, to go over a sort of prospectus.”
“A prospectus,” Harrow said, “is for investors. There is a promise
of return. Nonprofit institutes are charities. Now, I like charity.
Looking out for your brother man and all. But I only give to worthy
causes.”
“Mr. Mayer,” Barry turned to Abbie. “Your work was actually a
major inspiration. Your early design principles. For instance—”
“Yes, Barry. Thank you, but I’m familiar with my own principles,
design and otherwise. I’m afraid that I have to go with Phil here, on
this particular question.”
“But.” Barry looked at the ground briefly. If he was not then, as he
later became, a consummate raiser of monies, he had, even in those
early and awkward days, that imperturbable fake earnestness that
pursues every no as if it were yes. “What if”—he lifted his head
—“what if there were a return.”
“Young fella,” Harrow said, “distribution of proceeds to
shareholders is emphatically not what a non-profit does. I’m not sure
what they taught you as an art student”—he pronounced it to be
certain that it was heard, and understood, as faggot—“but in
business school, you learn that kind of thing is illegal.”
 Barry pressed on. “Joe Termini is screwing you.”
Harrow perked, and he and Abbie exchanged glances again.
“How?”
“Well,” Barry said, seeing, even then in his inexperience that he
had set the hook, “that would be confidential information of the
zoning board. I would be, I’m afraid I am unable to divulge that
information at this time.”
“Goddamnit.” Harrow began to raise his voice. Abbie put a hand
on his arm. He went on, measured but angry: “What the fuck are you
playing at? I’m a good friend of Joe Termini—”
“I’ve got no doubt that that’s the case. But seeing as he is,
despite this great friendship, about to completely screw you . . .”
“Phil,” Abbie said. “Let’s have a word.”
They walked across the lobby leaving Barry alone between the
elevators. Harrow seethed. “That little shit. He’s full of shit, too.”
“Be that as it may,” Abbie said.
“Be that as it may nothing. Joe Termini is a friend of mine.”
“A friend, really?”
“An acquaintance. Whatever. Are we debating it?”
“In your friendship. Acquaintanceship. Would he, I believe the
phrase is, screw you?”
“No. I don’t know. Sure! I mean, it is what it is! You gotta spend
money to make money. But what the hell, here? What’s the angle?”
“Well, sounds like we can find out if we give this kid some
money.”
“Fuck that little cocksucker. Did you hear his voice? Queer as a
three dollar bill. He can suck my cock, how about that?”
“Phil,” Abbie said.
“Abbie, do not give me that look. We’re partners now, but you’re
still just a hired hand on this one.”
“Listen, how much can it cost? I bet you can throw him a
thousand bucks. I’ll go on his board. That’s probably less than you
spent on dinner the other night. If it’s bogus, cancel the fucking
check! Rat him out to his boss! But listen, Phil. If it’s not bogus,
maybe it works in our favor. And plus, this is more up your alley than
mine, but isn’t he basically offering to be our paid guy on the inside
of the zoning board? That’s got to be worth something.”
 “You’re a scheming motherfucker,” Harrow said.
“Well,” said Abbie.
“No,” Harrow said. “That’s good. That’s a compliment. But you’re
the one he’s wet for. Let’s see if you can Jew him down to five
hundred. I’m not made of money.”
“Jew him down,” Abbie said.
“Aw, come on Rabbi. You know what I mean.”
Five hundred and a handshake commitment from Abbie Mayer
proved more than enough, and it was only two martinis and a half
dozen cigarettes later, in the dim back bar of the Common Plea,
surrounded by loud judges and attorneys, that Phil could bring
himself to talk about it without just muttering, “God fucking damnit!”
They’d called Veronica from a pay phone, and she’d joined them
about one and a half martinis in. She got a gin and tonic, and Abbie
explained to her the broad outlines: that there had been, for more
than a decade vague talk of building a new highway connecting
Pittsburgh and Uniontown, a shot in the arm to the rusting mill towns
of the Monongahela Valley and the declining coal towns that nestled
against the Laurel Highlands farther southeast. This project, whose
economic and topographic complexities hinted at a price tag in the
many billions of dollars, had been, for most of those ten years, hardly
even a dream, just a whisper of a fantasy that an occasional
businessman or state legislator would murmur to himself after the
twisting, poorly lit, stop-lighted haul up Route 51, a bare forty miles
from Uniontown to the Liberty Tunnels that took a half an hour longer
than it should have. And Pittsburgh, in those days, was hardly
booming itself. Its population was old and falling. And what would a
highway do? And who would pay for it? But Reagan had recently lost
the Senate, and Jack Murtha in the House had talked to Robert Byrd
from West Virginia, who said he’d support the thing if they extended
it to connect to Morgantown, and all of a sudden there was the
prospect of an open spigot of Federal money with all of its attendant
benefits.
“What’s that got to do with Greenview?” Veronica asked.
“Well, apparently, that’s where they intend—assuming this thing
happens—to have the interchange with the Parkway.” Abbie
shrugged. “So we buy the land, we prepare the land, then they
eminent domain it out from under us to build an on-ramp. It has a
certain poetic simplicity. I’m almost impressed.”
“God fucking damnit,” said Veronica.
“That’s what I said,” said Phil.
“The thing is,” Abbie said, “I don’t think it’s all bad.”
“How the fuck do you figure that?” Phil clinked his glass against
the bar as the bartender passed. “Another, darling.”
“Well,” Abbie said, “You guys have worked on road projects
before.”
“Tangentially,” Veronica said.
“And don’t we know . . . You two still know what’s her name down
in Fayette County, no?”
Harrow looked up.
“Sherri Larimer,” Veronica said.
“Sure. And she’s some kind of raja down there, yeah? And how
much can land cost in Fayette County? So why don’t we get in on
this highway business and build some beautiful housing divisions . . .
neighborhoods, out in the country.” Now Abbie shrugged. “Away from
the crime and poverty of the city. I did see a highway in my vision,
after all. Who are we,” he grinned, “to doubt the will of Hashem.”
“Abbie, you’re out of your fucking mind,” Veronica said.
“But still,” Harrow said.
“No,” said Veronica. “Yeah, I agree. A drive wouldn’t hurt.”
 5

“I don’t stand next ta no juice!” Isaac laughed. It was a punch line,

but in her spinning and slightly goggle-eyed state, Isabel felt unequal
to the task of connecting it with whatever joke preceded it. There
were just the three of them left in the apartment, and only the two of
them were still awake. It was late—3:30 AM, if the restored brass
clock on the white wall could be trusted; and Isabel wasn’t certain it
could be trusted—but not yet so late that she felt too badly about it. It
was Friday night, or Saturday morning; she told herself that she had
no particular need to be anywhere in particular anytime soon. The
truth was that Isabel was five years past an easy recovery from a
night that tipped past two in the morning. Knowing this didn’t
dissuade her. Quite the contrary.
They’d been drinking, and they’d done some lines. Isaac’s
speech and grin had that fluttering and effervescent quality that
accompanies youth and cocaine, like a face caught permanently in
the moment before a hiccup. Isabel had the rictus of approximate fun
that occludes the face of people over thirty who are acting as if
they’re still under it. Isaac’s hand rested on the little white ball of a
dog beside him. He was telling another story about going to school in
Uniontown, in Fayette County. He’d been telling them all night. The
vice principal who had, over twenty years, stolen nearly thirty
thousand dollars in quarters from the pop machines and pleaded,
when he was finally caught, that he’d only ever intended to use the
money to pay for his own kids’ college tuition. The boy rumored to
have a glass eye, the result of tossing a can of aerosol hairspray into
a bonfire at a party, whom they’d tormented in dodgeball, thinking
they might knock it loose. (“Did he really have a glass eye?” Isabel
asked. “Got me,” said Isaac.) His junior-high English teacher, Mr.
Krupp, who’d taught them about acrostic poetry using the word
DIVORCE. The life-sized statue of a mustang—the high-school
mascot—commissioned, built, installed, and then unveiled rearing
back from a horrified crowd of athletic boosters, its gigantic mustang
dick presenting between its fiberglass legs.
Why, Isabel asked, didn’t his parents send him to private school
in Pittsburgh?
“Sarah,” he said. “My mother,” he added, as if it weren’t clear. “My
mother believes in public education. She is, in the immortal words of
David Bentley Hart, a fideist who thinks she is a rationalist.”
“Who’s David Bentley Hart?”
“He’s an Eastern Orthodox Anarchist Monarchist. God. Don’t you
read the internet?”
“Okay, well, I guess not, then. How can an anarchist be a
monarchist? No, actually, never mind. And what’s the thing about
juice?”
“Jews.” He over-articulated his pronunciation. “Jews. My peoples.
In the local vernacular pronunciation. Your peoples too, from the look
of that nose.”
“Ouch.”
“No, it’s a lovely nose. Take this with a grain of salt from a huge
fag, but there’s something hideous about women with cute little
noses. A woman should have a real nose.”
“Thanks, I guess. And my father was, I think. Jewish.”
“You think?”
“Well, he and my mom weren’t married. I mean, I never knew the
guy.”
“Oh. That’s nice.”
“Most people say they’re sorry.”
“Yes, well,” he said.
There was a silence. He did a line, throwing his head back
theatrically.
“Anyway,” he said, “Later on, I told her that I wanted to invite
Adam Martens to my bar mitzvah, and she was like, ‘The boy who
said the thing about Jews?’”
 Isaac made his mother sound like a bubbie from some long-lost
Borscht-belt comedy act, even though Sarah sounded precisely like
the American neutral product of Fieldston and Wellesley that she
was.
This was the night that Isaac decided he and Isabel had really
met. He may or may not have believed that. He may have forgotten
about the dinner at Barry’s or just chosen to efface it in favor of a
better story. He may have believed both stories. He was untroubled
by contradiction. This was how they’d got there:
After a couple of months at her new job, and at Barry’s urging,
Isabel bought a house, an old Sears catalog bungalow on a steep hill
in Edgewood, with a wide porch and big eaves and a vegetable plot
at the back end of the backyard that she never got around to
planting. When Barry had first suggested that she buy a place
(they’d been on their way back from a tour of Fallingwater), she’d
laughed at the idea. She could imagine shouldering a mortgage in
Pittsburgh, where houses were old and beautiful and cheap, but with
only a paid-off used car and no prior equity and no down payment,
how would she ever get a loan? Barry shrugged and said she should
at least take a look. The next day he and his own old real estate
agent hauled Isabel around from property to property, each of which,
the agent assured her in a brittle, Virginia-Slims voice, would be
“perfect for a girl like you.” None of them was perfect for a girl like
her, least of all the Sears & Roebuck bungalow on the steep street in
Edgewood; it was perfect for a married couple twice her age,
academics or administrators, their children already adults and long-
since departed, its walls to be heaped with books and its kitchen to
be stuffed with too many sets of stemware; so of course, she fell in
love with it. Isabel always loved inappropriate things. “But,” she told
Barry, “I can’t make an offer. It isn’t 2006. I’ll never get a mortgage.”
“Oh, honey,” he said, meaning that she didn’t know what she was
talking about. She permitted him to condescend to her about money
out of a vague sense that she might benefit from his unearned
paternalism. Like a lot of gay men his age—and how he’d have
hated it to learn that Isabel considered him a gay man of his age—he
evinced a desire to take a younger girlfriend under his wing. For a
month she protested weakly that the whole idea was impossible. By
then he’d called Art Imlak, and Imlak had called someone at Dollar
Bank, and then a chirpy young woman called Isabel to tell her that
she’d been pre-approved and just needed to fill out some paperwork.
“But how?” She’d asked Barry, because it would flatter him to
pretend not to answer.
“Oh, honey,” he’d said, meaning she didn’t have to ask.
Living in Pittsburgh had been—so far—revelatory; it was the first
time since her childhood that she’d had a house in which she wanted
to live. The New York apartments with Ben had been designed for
photography, not for habitation, and every piece of low, lovely
furniture suggested that perhaps you might not want to sit on it.
Before that had been smaller apartments, shared houses, dorms.
She’d long since lost the habit of just coming home after work, and
she’d forgotten how to stay in at night. There were plenty of work
dinners with supporters and visiting professors and local developers
and politicians, and there was a dingy bar still hanging onto business
between new Thai restaurants on Braddock Avenue in Regent
Square, just a ten minute walk from her house, where she’d
occasionally drink a decent scotch for which they charged only four
dollars. But in those early months in Pittsburgh, if she wasn’t working
or having a drink after a working dinner, then she was mostly at
home on the big white slipcover couch she’d bought for the living
room, sipping wine or tea, reading and writing emails while some or
other movie played on the TV across the room. She’d made a few
friends: a married pair of architecture profs who had her to dinner
from time to time; a lawyer named Brad who took her to openings
and fundraisers and probably wanted to date her more seriously but
spared them both the embarrassment of ever bringing it up; Barry, of
course; improbably, his—and now her—real estate agent, who’d
seemingly sold a house to everyone in the city. But these weren’t
friends friends; they were all nice and charming and wanted her to
stay in the city, and she wanted to stay in the city, too, if vaguely and
in an unsettled way. The truth was that, six months in, she loved only
the house. Everything else was only fine. She still thought about Ben
and stalked his Instagram account, which was as professionally
architectural as ever, simultaneously hoping for and dreading a
photograph of humans that never appeared.
 She called her mother a couple of times a week, as much out of
boredom as out of love. Of course, she’d told her mother about
Abbie right after that first dinner that first night at Barry’s, and her
mom still asked her if she’d spoken to “that man.”
“No, mom.”
“Good.”
“I’ve met his son, though.”
“His son,” Cathy said. “My God.”

• • •

Then Jenny and Penny, two graduate students whose unlikely

rhyming names had compelled them to become friends, who both
interned at the Institute while pursuing nebulous graduate degrees at
Carnegie Mellon and texting a lot, invited Isabel out. She’d hardly
spoken a dozen words to either of them. She never understood why
they’d decided to hang out with her. She assumed that they saw her
as a charity case, not yet old enough to be irredeemably adult: de-
radicalized and conventional beyond all hope of reform or reprieve,
but not yet over the hill, not yet socially irredeemable, maybe a little
tragic in her inexplicable flight from a more glamorous life in a bigger
city, but still from that city, and therefore in some way cool enough to
bother with. They were, in their mid-twenties, still able to believe that
a city offers up a career rather than the other way around. “We’re
going to, like, this party,” they said. “It’s like this dance party. It’s
pretty gay. Like gay gay, not gay gay. Anyway, you should come,
maybe? It’s definitely the best party in the city. And The Eastern
Front is playing. He’s a DJ from like Miami or San Diego, I can’t
remember which. It’s kind of late though, but maybe we’ll have drinks
and then go over? If you want.”
If Isabel never did quite puzzle out why the girls asked her to go
out with them, then she was even less sure why she agreed: maybe
the same loneliness that she was keeping secret from herself;
maybe the boredom; maybe it was that, with the exception of one
more dinner—this time at Imlak’s downtown apartment—she hadn’t
managed to find any coke since she’d come to the city, and a gay
dance party seemed like a good opportunity.
 The Imlak dinner had been quite an absurd event involving many
cases of Veuve carelessly wasted on mere drunkenness. He
occupied half a floor in a new downtown skyscraper above the
Fairmont hotel, an immense glass cube like something out of a
science fiction movie, a near but imaginary future. Afterward, after
most of the other guests had drifted away, he’d sidled up to her,
grinning his rich man’s grin, and asked her if she wanted a blast.
This time she said yes, and he beckoned her to follow him toward a
distant bathroom. He locked the door behind them and removed a
small jewelry box from a drawer in the vanity. There was a lot of coke
in the box. They did a few blasts. “Good, isn’t it?” he said. It was
rhetorical. Arthur Imlak wasn’t a man who required that you agree
with his opinions; he assumed you already did.
“I get it from Miami,” he told her. “Same guy who sells to
Donatella Versace.”
“Oh?” Isabel said.
“I can only do very high quality coke,” he told her. “All the shit
they put in the rest of it makes my feet swell up.”
“Uh-huh,” she said. It was good coke, and she really felt it.
“Well, all right,” he said. “Back we go.” He slapped her ass
collegially, as if she’d just made a game-saving tackle.
“Arthur,” she warned, although she was also grinning, mostly
because she felt obliged to.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “You’re not my type.” But he patted her ass
again as he unlocked the door, and she wondered if it was true.
Jenny lived only a few streets away from her in Regent Square,
so she picked Isabel up, and they headed off to get Penny. Jenny
drove a mid-nineties Nissan that sounded as if it had only three
working cylinders. It was a 5-speed, which seemed like an
affectation, but then, Isabel thought, Jenny was affected. Penny lived
between Oakland and the Hill District, on a narrow street above
Schenley Farms that cut horizontally across a steep hillside with
houses on the uphill side and a near-vertical drop on the other. It
was one of the charms of the city: no one in his right mind would
have built a city there. The street was so narrow that even Jenny’s
tiny car could barely pass the cars that were parallel parked on the
other side, all of them with two wheels canted onto the sidewalk or
sunk in the mud of someone’s front yard. The city of Pittsburgh
insisted that all such streets must remain two-way. Just before they
got to Penny’s place, another car came from around the bend, and
they sat for a while in a standoff, the other driver and Jenny
gesticulating at each other through their respective windshields until
the guy in the other car, with one last baleful laying-on of his horn,
backed up and pulled into a little driveway to let them by. Jenny
cranked down the window to scream a parting “fuck you!” as they
passed. Isabel later learned that the car belonged to one of Penny’s
roommates. “He’s from Ohio,” Penny would say, as if it were
something slightly distasteful. “He’s a grad student.”
“You’re a grad student,” Isabel reminded her.
“Yeah,” she said, “but he studies, like, chemistry or some shit.”
The dance party was a monthly affair that was called Midnight
Mass. First held two years earlier on an actual Christmas Eve, an
orphans’ event for students and hipsters who didn’t or couldn’t go
home for the holidays, it had started out with a fairly even mix of
sexes and genders and sexualities before becoming, as these things
did, a largely, though not exclusively, gay event. Isabel generally
found the prospect of bouncing into a gay club with a bunch of other
women as slightly gross, a bit past its sell-by date, but they’d
assured her that this was in no way officially a gay event and there
would be plenty of women and possibly even a few straight guys.
The party, having spent its first year migrating around the city, was
now regularly held in the vast backroom of a bar in Lawrenceville, a
recently cool neighborhood of old row houses and steep, parallel
streets. The bar had been an Owls or an AmVets or some such in a
past incarnation. The front was narrow and fetid; it smelled as if it
deserved its own nature documentary in which some giddy Brit
would describe the fungal agriculture of an immense colony of ants.
The back was big enough to hold two basketball courts, although a
low, stained ceiling gave it a perversely claustrophobic feeling. It
smelled mostly of the many varieties of human sweat.
It was loud. The girls had been nattering about the event on the
way over. “It’s always a different theme,” they said. “Sometimes there
are, like, projections. Once they actually tried to fill the place up with,
like, bubbles, but they used the wrong kind or whatever, like, the
wrong kind of bubble mix I mean, and they had to cancel that one
because it just turned into a bunch of absolutely disgusting water on
the floor.”
In their defense, by the way, these were two very smart and
intellectually competent girls; it’s only a sign of the democratization
of the era that everyone sounded like exactly the same idiot. But
being told how good a party is going to be is like listening to
someone explain the punch line of a joke, and Isabel was glad to be
momentarily free of it. There was a jukebox playing a punk song that
she recognized but couldn’t place, and despite the party’s supposed
sexual provenance, the dudes actually drinking at the bar out front
were a collection of thoroughly straight crust punks and bike
messengers, the former in that sort of seventies bondage look that
punks had adopted for whatever reason, the latter in short, cut-off
jeans with elaborate tattoos on their calves. She socked this info
away for later. Before Ben, she’d had a bit of a thing for bike boys:
their silly hypertrophied thighs and skinny arms and hard asses. If
she got sick of the party, then she could find one to take home, even
if it meant convincing some half-fluent Uber driver to let them try to
jam a fixed gear in his trunk.
The sound emanating from the back was something else
altogether, a quirky, repeating cadence of deep, concussive beats.
The bartender was a fat man with a red face and tiny ears who wore
a Steelers sweatshirt and a Penguins ball cap. He had the bored
efficiency of a real bartender. He’d tended that same bar since
before the steel mills closed, but he viewed the changing clientele
with the utter equanimity that was also the mark of his vocation. He
called women sweetheart and men brother, and he drank Bacardi
from a plastic cup throughout his shifts.
Isabel bought a round and followed the girls through the narrow
hall that led to the party in the back. They were stopped at the
doorway at the far end by a familiar boy on a tall stool behind a
cocktail table. There was a cover. The boy was taking cash. He was
wearing something skintight that, when Isabel got closer, revealed
itself as cycling bib with no shirt. She didn’t even recognize him as
Isaac at first. With his chest exposed, he was even more painfully
thin and pale than he’d seemed that night at Barry’s, but there was
also something about his prematurely gristly arms and the tight,
smooth skin on his chest that intimated strength and elasticity. It was
only when he spoke that she recognized him from Barry’s dinner all
those months ago. Isaac had a remarkably specific voice,
surprisingly deep, like a lot of skinny guys, but with a choked, sinusy
timbre that made it seem higher pitched than it was and a habit of
overly correct pronunciation—like, for instance, how he’d say,
“Tyoosday.” If he recognized Isabel, he didn’t give it away, but he
was smiling, and he shouted something that she couldn’t hear
through the noise. “What?” she yelled. She leaned closer.
“Nice shoes!” he yelled back.
“Thanks! They’re Louboutin.”
“I know,” he said. “I’m going to give you the good shoe discount!”
Isabel raised an eyebrow and he said, “That means you can go in
for free.”
“Thanks!” she screamed.
“But you have to tell me your name for your sign,” he said.
“My sign?” she replied. She noticed that beside the cash box the
table was spread with construction paper and markers.
“Yeah!” he yelled. “It’s a dance competition! You have to get a
sign so we can tell who you are! I’m the judge! Well, one of the
judges. The preeminent judge! The Russian who ruins the
Americans’ chances!”
“That’s okay,” Isabel told him. “I’m good!”
He just grinned and shouted again, “What’s your name?”
“Isabel,” she shouted back.
“Isabel,” he repeated. He laughed. “That’s gay!” he said. “G-H-EY
gay!” Then he scrawled MISS HELL on the paper and checked a list
beside him and added the numeral 76 beneath it. He pinned these to
the back of her dress and sent her and her vodka into the party.
An hour and several drinks later, she found herself on the edge of
an undeniable and now surely unavoidable drunkenness. There was
another bar in the back room, and that bartender, a guy about her
age with a little gut beneath a black tee-shirt and a pair of impossibly
large, round glasses clinging to the last inch of his handsome nose,
slung under-mixed drinks in her direction and seemed to enjoy her
company. He was surely gay, but they were among the few people in
the room over thirty, and they shared the quality of being amused.
He asked her name and told her that his was Ryan. He asked where
she’d come from and where she worked and where she lived and
who she’d come with.
Isabel said, “These two girls. Penny and Jenny.”
He laughed—he laughed at everything, funny or not—and said,
“Oh, those two.”
“What do you mean?” she asked him.
“Nothing,” he said, and he laughed again. Unlike Isaac, whose
constant giggling seemed fraught with significance, Ryan-the-
bartender’s seemed as specifically meaningful as a dog’s happy
bark. “Just—those two.” A younger man came to the bar and they
exchanged a quick kiss and a whispered conference before the man
went back to the party, where he was dancing against a tall boy with
the alien beauty of a fashion model. Ryan the bartender said that
was his boyfriend, Steven.
“The tall one or the short one?”
“The short one.”
“Who’s the tall guy?” she asked.
“Oh, I don’t know his name,” said Ryan. “He’s a model or
something. I guess that probably means he works in a store.” He
grinned and laughed some more. “We’re gonna fuck him tonight, I
guess.” He laughed again.
Then Jenny and Penny can over, sweating and loose-eyed, and
grabbed Isabel’s wrists and pulled her toward the dance floor. “I’ll be
back!” she shouted over her shoulder.
“Sure thing, Miss Hell,” he said.
Isabel danced with those girls for a while in a sea of boys with
mustaches, all of them by now in various states of undress. There
were no straight guys back there; the straight men were out front
drinking shots of whiskey and smoking American Spirits and
glancing at the hockey game on the one little TV. It kept occurring to
her that she ought to ditch these girls and try to get laid, but Jenny
kept saying, “I love this song, I love this song,” no matter what the
song was, and Penny kept grabbing one boy after another and
pulling him over to dance with them and saying, “Oh my god! It’s
Aaron; I love Aaron!” or, “Oh my God! It’s Kwame; I love Kwame!”
and these boys did or did not dance with them for long. The dancing
was largely bobbing up and down, up and down, because the place
was by then too crowded to do much else. Then Isabel was spinning
around through a small clearing, and Isaac was standing behind her
with a drink. His mouth moved.
“What?” she yelled.
“Vodka tonic!” He was near her ear. “Ryan said you were drinking
vodka tonic.”
“Thanks!”
He’d slung the suspenders of his bib off. He shook his head and
hopped up and down and sweat hit Isabel’s face and mouth. “What
do you think of my party?” he screamed.
“Your party?”
“Mine!” he said.
She didn’t answer because he didn’t seem to expect her to
answer. They danced together for a while, then he drifted over to
Steven and the model and insinuated himself between them. The
model was rubbing his jeans-bound dick on Isaac’s ass; Steven
rubbed his head in an oddly feline gesture on Isaac’s chest. Isabel
glanced toward the bar, where she caught Ryan the bartender
looking in their direction and laughing some more. He was at the end
of the bar, standing beside another somewhat older guy, broad-
shouldered and severely handsome, dressed unlike anyone else in a
crisp and expensive-looking white shirt, the cuffs unbuttoned and
loose around his wrists. He was not smiling. He was not laughing.
He appeared thoroughly self-contained.
Around one-thirty, the music trailed off and Isaac was up on the
stage kissing the DJ on the lips and announcing the winners of the
dance competition; he said, “Second place, MISS HELL!” and Penny
said, “Oh my God! It’s you! Izzy!” as if Isabel had really won
something. (In fact, she’d won a bar tab worth twelve bucks, which
she used to buy drinks for Jenny and Penny.) After the
announcements, the music resumed, quieter and less singularly
insistent now that a body move in time to it, and people began
drifting out. By last call, Isabel was back at the bar, where Ryan
introduced her to Sawyer. He asked if they’d met before. “I feel like
we’ve met before,” he said.
 Isabel said that they hadn’t.
“Sawyer is Isaac’s boyfriend,” Ryan explained.
“Yes,” Sawyer said. “In a manner of speaking.”
“A manner of speaking,” Ryan repeated, laughing.
“What manner of speaking?” Isabel asked.
“Ours,” Sawyer said, “is a very modern relationship.”
“What does that mean?”
He didn’t answer. “So what do you do?” he asked instead.
“Oh,” she said, “I work for a nonprofit.”
“What nonprofit?”
“It’s called the Future Cities Institute.”
“Oh, sure,” he said, “Barry Fitzpatrick’s outfit.”
“Outfit. Ha. You know him?”
“Isaac knows him,” Sawyer said.
“Isaac knows everyone,” Ryan said as he passed carrying a bag
of trash.
“He knows a lot of people,” said Sawyer. “This is true.” He
seemed to roll his eyes no matter what he said.
Isabel asked him what he did.
“What do I do or where do I work?” he replied.
“Either.”
“I’m just giving you a hard time,” he told her. He glanced once
over his shoulder, then he observed with a droll smile that Isabel
looked like she could stand to sober up.
“Haha,” she said.
“No,” he said, and then he repeated himself more deliberately.
“You could stand to sober up.”
“Ohhh,” she said. “Sober up.”
Ryan was returning to the bar, and Sawyer flicked his head
toward wherever he’d just returned from. Ryan nodded, and Sawyer
led Isabel past the bar and past some restrooms and through a door
and down a flight of smooth-worn creaking basement stairs and
through the tubular underground tangles of a tap system and past
cases of booze to a little office set up in a corner with an old metal
desk and some filing cabinets and a couple of computers and a little
white dog sleeping placidly on a little plaid doggie bed. “Cute dog,”
she said. The dog raised its head and made the sort of contented
peep that only a small and immeasurable happy dog is able to make
and curled back about himself.
“Whose is he?” Isabel asked.
“She. Isaac’s,” Sawyer told her. “Nominally.”
They did some blow. It was not as good as Imlak’s. “So what do
you do?” Isabel asked him.
“I’m a doctor.”
“You’re too young to be a doctor.”
“Please, I’m thirty-four.”
“What kind of doctor?”
He was folding up his packet of cocaine. “Addiction medicine,” he
said.
“Shut the fuck up.”
“My mouth to God’s ears. Come on.” He gestured toward the
stairs. Back in the bar, the lights were up. Isaac was drinking a beer
against the bar, while Steven and the model made out. Ryan was
capping the liquor.
“Hmm,” Isabel said. “I appear to have lost my ride.”
“I sent them away,” Isaac told me. “I told them you were coming
with us.”
“You what?”
“Come on,” Isaac told her. “Il faut qu’on vive sa vie. No one died
from a little stranger danger. Sawyer, will you get my dog?”
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“Our place,” Sawyer replied from behind her. “Come on. We’ll
give you a ride. We’re just up the hill. I’ve just got to grab the little
girl.”
Isabel bent herself into the back seat of Sawyer’s car. It was a
small Mercedes, and she supposed then that he must really be a
doctor—what a world, wasn’t it, where a car confirmed an
occupation? Isaac kneeled on the front seat so that he faced her
while Sawyer drove home. The dog was in the back seat with her; it
had pirouetted once and settled into a ball, immediately asleep.
“So Isabel,” Isaac asked, “do you like to party?”
“I suppose I do,” she said.
“Sawyer hates parties. Sawyer is seething right now, just thinking
of all these people about to invade our domestic kingdom.”
 “He doesn’t seem to be seething,” Isabel said. She could see via
the rearview that Sawyer had a crooked grin on his face.
Isaac sniffled. “He just hides it well. So, what do you do?”
“What do I do, or where do I work?” She replied.
“Oh là. I can see you two have been talking. Did Sawyer already
offer you an amuse-bouche? Il est tout comme toi,” he said, laying
his head briefly on Sawyer’s shoulder. “Il se comporte comme un
adulte, mon copain, mais il aime faire la fête. Do you speak French?”
“A little, and badly.”
“When Sawyer first hit on me, on Grindr, he tried to show off by
acting all bilingual, all because he lived in France for like four months
when he was in college a hundred years ago.”
“This is true,” Sawyer said, his voice at once sardonic and
affectionate. It was a question frequently posed by their friends: why,
exactly, did Sawyer put up with him? There was the obvious: Isaac’s
age and strange beauty, but there was nothing especially sexual
about their relationship; it lacked any sharp edge of carnality,
suggesting far more immediately the habits and tolerances of a long-
married couple. They reminded Isabel of her and Ben, two people
locked into the inevitable aesthetic of their own shared life,
characters who discover their story is not their own.
They lived in a big apartment in a new building near the
intersection of Penn Avenue and Butler Street across from the
bronze statue of a World War I doughboy that gazed forever forlornly
toward downtown. It was a dull piece of corporate architecture
—“Yuppie dormitories,” Barry called them—the sort that got thrown
up in six months in gentrifying neighborhoods and then leased off to
a lot of Young Urban Professional types. Like Sawyer, Isabel
thought. It surprised her to think that Isaac could live there; it
seemed a little too drywall-and-mid-range-fixtures for someone of his
background and apparent tastes. It turned out that Isaac did not live
there, not technically, although he spent most of his time there, since
Sawyer, as an adult, managed to keep food in his refrigerator and
extra toilet paper under the sink. It was very much Sawyer’s place,
decorated very much as you’d expect from a mid-thirties gay yuppie
making low six figures who, Isaac would tell you, had patterned his
taste on the occasional design magazine tossed in with the yogurt
and juices in the checkout line at Whole Foods. Isaac often made fun
of Sawyer’s style behind his back. “His parents live in a four-
bedroom colonial in a subdivision.” He was a snob, but he was right
about the genealogy of his boyfriend’s tastes in art and housewares.
Isaac had his own apartment in the city, a loft (owned by his aunt)
that was almost uninhabitable due to his insatiable addiction to the
acquisition of things: furniture, art, taxidermy, bolts of fabric, exotic
houseplants (both living and dead), mannequins, costumes, and
boxes and boxes of paperback books, which he never seemed to
unpack or shelve. All of these collections were in equal parts
wondrous finds and utter junk. Ironically, for all the furniture, he didn’t
even have a proper bed, just a mattress roll and pad that he’d lay out
on the floor when he needed it, which was usually to say, when he
was fucking someone other than Sawyer and wasn’t able to do it in
Sawyer’s place.
The first time Isabel visited that loft, it was the middle of the day,
and Isaac wanted to get stoned. “It’s the middle of the day,” she said.
“Yeah,” he told her, “but it’s Saturday!”
She did a lap. It was like walking into an insane Victorian curio. “I
can’t believe your aunt lets you wreck her place like this.”
“Veronica’s been crazy since all that shit with her girlfriend,” he
said. “She doesn’t give a fuck.”
“What shit with her girlfriend?”
“You don’t know?” Isaac had a way of being astonished that
people didn’t already know things that they’d have no way of already
knowing. “Oh man, wait till you hear this.”
In Sawyer’s apartment, on the contrary, everything was in its
place, and the white rug aligned perfectly with the edge of the gray
couch. They arrived and Sawyer made Isabel a cocktail. The dog
trundled around her legs. She crouched and scratched its ears.
“What’s his name?”
“Hers. Moth,” Sawyer said.
“Moth,” Isabel repeated, rubbing his head. He gazed up at her.
“It was originally Behemoth,” Sawyer said. “It was shortened out
of either necessity or laziness.”
“Nonsense,” Isaac objected. “It’s still Behemoth.” He bent and
took the animal’s tiny, beautiful face in his hands. “He lieth under the
lotus trees, in the covert of reeds and fens, doesn’t he now, doesn’t
he? Yes he does. Yes he does.”
The dog promptly lifted its little back leg and pissed on the floor.
“Moth!” Isaac exclaimed.
“Christ,” Sawyer said. “I’ll go get some paper towels.”
“Aw,” said Isaac. “Shall any take him by the eyes or pierce
through his nose with a snare?”
The bartender and his boyfriend and their model showed up. A
few girls arrived and eyed Isabel suspiciously before settling prettily
onto a chaise. The bar boys drank beer. Isaac had a laptop open and
kept starting songs and then changing his mind about them. “Honey,”
he told Sawyer, “give everyone a little of the stuff, yeah?” They all did
a little of the stuff, and Isaac settled on some music with a hint of
North Africa or the Eastern Mediterranean. They all sat around
looking at each other. The boys and girls from the bar were posing
and biding their time, hoping for more free drugs. Isaac and the
model made faces at each other. After a short while, the boys and
girls realized that they weren’t going to get any more coke out of
Sawyer and departed when their drinks were dry. Isabel made a
move to go with them, but Isaac, who was perched on the arm of the
couch beside her, put his hand on hers and said, “Ne pars pas, toi.”
He raised an eyebrow, and she nodded as imperceptibly as she
could.
Incidentally, this was one reason to suspect that Isaac did
remember Isabel from their previous meeting. They’d shared a few
words in French at Barry’s house those several months before. It
was true that Isaac spoke French indiscriminately, maybe most often
to those who had the least idea what he was saying—this was all
part of his own affectation. But he seemed to know that Isabel would
understand him. This, in any case, was her theory.
Sawyer came back from shuffling their other guests out the door.
He yawned. “I’m going to bed,” he said.
Isabel was surprised he could be tired after doing coke.
“Drugs make Sawyer sleepy,” Isaac said. “Everything makes
Sawyer sleepy.”
This seemed to be a subtle dig, but Sawyer laughed and touched
his hair and said, “It’s true.” And then he smiled and said, “Even you,
honey,” at which Isaac frowned. He offered Isabel his hand as if
they’d just concluded a very productive business meeting and told
her that it was very nice to meet her. Then he went to bed. Isaac got
beers and then pulled out more drugs, which he’d given no prior
indication of possessing. There was nothing, Isabel thought, as
squirrely as a cokehead.
“You and Sawyer are cute,” she said. What was it that compelled
her to say such a thing? (She could hear Penny or Jenny shrieking,
“Omigod you guys are so kyoot!” over the pulse of imaginary bass.)
“I’m cute-ish,” Isaac said. “Although I am also very weird-looking.
Sawyer is handsome. He’s my silver fox.”
“He’s not that old! He’s younger than me. And also, he doesn’t
have gray hair, which I think is a prerequisite.”
“Oh, he does. You just have to get up in there. It’s hidden.”
“It’s well hidden. You guys remind me of me and my ex. My ex
and I? Me and my ex. Ben. He was older than me as well.”
“What did he do?”
“Architect.”
Isaac raised his eyebrows. “Oh dear, how dire.”
“Well,” Isabel said, missing his point, “Sawyer’s a doctor!”
“I like a man who brings home the bacon.” He sprawled across
the couch, his legs dangling over the armrests. “It suits me.”
They did a little more blow and sipped at their drinks, and Isaac
played absently with his phone, a habit that Isabel was old enough to
find rude and a bit off-putting, although at three-thirty in the morning,
what did social graces matter, really, besides which, she knew that
her sentiment was hopelessly out of date. They yammered at each
other about trivia. He asked her about her work again. That was the
night that he described Barry as post-gay, in fact. Isabel asked him
about Arthur Imlak. “My father hates him,” Isaac said, “which
endears him to me.”
“Who, Arthur or your father?”
“Oh, either. It depends.”
“Why does your father hate him? By the way, I’d really, really love
to meet your dad someday. I’m sure you’re sick of hearing it, but he’s
really . . . well someone I’d like to meet. God, sorry, that sounds so
creepy to hear myself say. I admire him, is better. He, I mean, he
practically invented my field.”
Isaac had produced a cigarette from somewhere and lit it. He
rolled his eyes. “My father is bonkers, but I guess I’m glad you find
his bullshit convincing. I guess it beats the alternatives. We’ve all got
to believe in something. He hates Imlak because Imlak fucked him
over in a property deal or something. Don’t ask me the details. I’m a
spoiled rich kid, so I have no idea how money works. If Dad hasn’t
stolen everything out of my trust yet, I intend to fritter it all away on
utter frivolity and die penniless and young. I’m thinking thirty-eight.”
He exhaled.
“I’m thirty-eight,” Isabel said. “I guess that means you just gave
me a compliment.”
“I do the strangest things when I’m not paying attention.”
“What was this deal?”
“Fuck if I know. I do know that my dad actually made a bunch of
money in it, which is the irony, I guess. I suppose Arthur made a lot
more subsequently, and I suspect that this pissed Abbie off, because
he believes himself to be uniquely entitled to the best fortune
available in any given situation. Do you know that he originally was
going to name me Dieudonné. Thank God, my mother objected—
bless her heart, she remains just subtly racist enough to tell him that
it sounded Haitian. Personally, I love Arthur. He helps me out,
money-wise, from time to time, whenever Abbie’s gotten shady
about my accounts. He takes me sailing down in Florida sometimes.”
“The Shale Boat,” Isabel said.
Isaac laughed. “Yes,” he said. “How did you know? I call it the
S.S. Minnow, on account of the fact that Arthur sounds like Thurston
Howell, III. He has a house right on Tampa Bay. Sawyer and I were
down last fall. Arthur knows all the Navy generals down there and
got one of them to bring over an actual working cannon from some
battleship from the War of 1812, which he fired out of his front yard
into the bay during a party.”
“Does the Navy have generals?” she asked.
“Whatever they are. I told Sawyer we ought to try to get one of
them to fuck me and get it on tape. He’s such a prude, though.
Anyway, it was à cause d’Arthur that we moved to fucking Uniontown
in the first place, I guess. See, he owned the land where we built The
Gamelands, which Abbie was desperate to get his hands on, and
there was some kind of complicated switcheroo. I sort of imagine
them like the contract scene in A Night at the Opera. Of course, in
the deal, Mom and I also get hauled down to Fayette County.
Fayette Nam. The not-what-we-were-promised land. Well, I mean, I
wasn’t born yet, but you get the idea. Everyone else at the
Uniontown Country Club had a father who was either a lawyer or
owned a car dealership, and they’d all been playing golf together
since they were white-wine-pickled zygotes riding along in their
mothers’ foursomes. Abbie, in one of his vain attempts to buy me off,
got me golf clubs when I was like twelve. Well, I managed to talk
Marco Larimer into letting me blow him in the woods behind the
seventh green, but then he told his mom, who was—is—a fucking
county commissioner. She took it well enough, because she’s a
criminal and criminals, even the prejudiced ones, have a higher
tolerance for perversion than ordinary decent folks, thank God. And
she didn’t tell my parents either. But you know, word got around, and
no one wanted to talk to some little homo.”
“Sorry.”
“Eh.” He shrugged. He told her his stories about going to school
in that old coal town. “So, like, it’s the first day of school at Laurel
Highlands Jr. High School, and I’ve made it through half the day
without getting noticed by anyone, really, or so I think, which is a
minor miracle for me. Then I’m back at my locker right before lunch
and this kid—Adam Martens, locker right next to mine for the next six
fucking years—looks at me and says, ‘Mayer. I heard yinz were
joosh.’ I mean, I don’t understand what the fuck he’s talking about. I
just look at him. I’m probably not even five feet tall at the time, and
he’s this big rangy redneck from North Union Township with fuzz on
his lip and a bad buzz cut that makes him look like he’s got a bold
future going on a shooting spree on an army base after a bad tour in
Afghanistan. He’s scowling at me and I don’t know how to respond,
so I say, ‘I’m sorry?’ About as dorky polite as I could possibly be. I
mean, what am I, Maggie Smith? And he says it again. ‘I heard yinz
were joosh.’ Oh, fuck; I realize he’s saying Jewish. He’s like a legit
Fayette County boy. It’s another dialect, I swear. And this is like the
worst nightmare, because I really just have no experience with actual
anti-Semitism. I mean, it doesn’t really come up in elementary
school, except the one time I had to explain to the class what a
menorah was. I was all prepared to be called a fag, not a Jew! So I
just sort of nod and mumble, ‘Yeah, I’m Jewish.’ ‘Huh,’ he says. I
realize he’s come to his locker to get a can of Skoal. He puts in a
dip, then spits in this disgusting cup that he’s got in his locker. ‘Well,’
he says, ‘I don’t stand next ta no juice.’”
“God,” Isabel said.
“He wasn’t so bad in the end. He came to my bar mitzvah,
believe it or not. Anyway, he’s in jail, now.”
“What for?”
But he was bent over the table again, and when he looked up, he
said, “So, you really want to meet my dad, huh?”
“I mean, yeah. Yes.”
He nodded and handed her a rolled ten dollar bill, which Isabel
waved away. Then she thought better and accepted. It was late.
They talked for a while longer. She left, despite his offer of a couch,
drove home, foolishly and recklessly. The next morning, when she
came out onto her porch to get the paper, because she was the sort
of person who still got a paper, believing, probably incorrectly, that it
represented some kind of defiance of history’s dumb momentum,
she saw that she’d parked with two wheels in the grass and a
headlight, still lit, now dying, nudging into the hedge below the porch.
 6

While Isabel wanted to become friends with Isaac, she expected to

become friends with Sawyer. They were closer in age for one thing,
both professional, neither prone to Isaac’s preferences for excess, or
in any case slower to recover from excess, more prone to regret it,
and therefore less assiduous in its pursuit. And that’s what seemed
to happen at first. They fell into an easy rapport with each other. Of
course, to become friends with a couple is necessarily to imagine
where your loyalties will lie when they split up. Isabel was especially
prone to ideating the inevitable dissolution of any human unit with
more than one member. It presented an obstacle, because what she
really needed was to contrive a way to meet Abbie Mayer, and Isaac
was the obvious path.
Sawyer and Isaac were perpetually on the rocks, and both of
them exquisitely calculated their behavior to embarrass and frustrate
the other. Isaac was transparently unfaithful, although his infidelity
was often more a matter of style than action, while Sawyer, though
he wasn’t shy about betraying a degree of annoyance, typically
reacted to Isaac’s deliberate provocations with a blithe unconcern
that infuriated the younger man. “I’ve never understood jealousy,”
Sawyer told Isabel. It was just the two of them at dinner two months
after they’d met. “It seems,” he said, “to reveal a lack of self-
confidence.”
Isabel protested that you could be confident but could still
experience jealousy.
“Maybe.” He put on a face as if mulling it over, but he was just
composing his next sentiment. “But I still think that in a relationship,
a romantic one, I mean, jealousy is really just anxiety about sexual
performance, which is, I don’t know, sort of related to that social
anxiety that some people have where they’re always worried that
someone, somewhere, might be having more fun than they are at
any given time.” This observation about someone, somewhere was a
mantra of his. It often showed up in a talk he gave on addiction.
He was close to being right. Sawyer was very convincing in
person. It was only when you got away from him that his insights
started to smell like exquisite rationalizations. Isabel believed him
when he told her he felt no anxiety about his boyfriend, but later,
when she’d known them a bit longer and thought about it a little
more, she saw that he was very jealous of Isaac, and that his
ostensible indifference was a form of hard-willed self-possession that
was nearly imprisonment. Sawyer deserved better, she thought, and
she later regretted that circumstances didn’t permit them a real and
durable friendship. They did remain friends online for a few years,
until she discovered that she’d been unceremoniously blocked and
dropped and defriended. He’d moved to California to work for a
medical technology start-up whose name was a common noun,
phonetically misspelled and randomly capitalized. He ended up
making a lot of money. Sawyer was smart in a mechanical way, but
he preferred to avoid thinking too deeply, and these were the people
who tended to get rich.
Isabel did ask him that night at dinner what it was that he really
saw in Isaac. “Besides the obvious,” she said.
“What’s the obvious?”
She sipped her wine. “Looks and all that,” she said. “To be
honest.”
“I think you’ll find that if you really look at Isaac, he’s not that
especially good looking.”
“He’s striking.”
“No, that’s true. But it’s not the same thing. Anyway, he’s very
good at sort of tricking you into thinking that he’s cute. Maybe he’s
beautiful, but in an ugly sort of way. I’ve always found him ever so
slightly grotesque when I really look at him.”
She said that seemed like a terrible way to talk about your
boyfriend, although once more, she thought he was very nearly right.
 “Is it?”
“To say that he’s ugly? Yes. I mean, whatever else we might tell
ourselves, physical attraction is still a big part of love, isn’t it? In the
beginning especially.”
“I didn’t say he was ugly. And you’re right. In the beginning. But
our relationship has never really been about all that. It’s always
lacked a core of physical intimacy, actually. For someone who likes
to fuck around as much as Isaac, he’s actually pretty prudish when it
comes to sex and requires a great deal of chemical courage to really
get into it.”
Isabel frowned. “So what do you see in him, then?”
“Need,” he said, and he didn’t elaborate.

• • •

Several weeks after their dinner, she complained to Sawyer that

Isaac still wouldn’t commit to introducing her to Abbie. Sawyer
laughed and told her she was mildly obsessed. “I just want to meet
the guy,” she said too sharply. “He practically invented my field.”
They were having lunch in Oakland. Sawyer’s office was in a
small research annex of the UPMC Hospital complex, and Isabel’s
was in a ghastly new Koolhaas-inspired complex on a rotten hillside
at the edge of Carnegie Mellon, just across the ravine from the
museums. Over curry noodles, he’d mentioned that Isaac had in turn
mentioned that he did indeed want Isabel to see his father’s last
realized building, since she was, in his words, “such a precious
devotée.”
“Isaac hates it,” Sawyer said, “but it’s really pretty extraordinary. I
mean, I’m a philistine where architecture is concerned, but it’s very
impressive. The kitchen, for instance, is built around this enormous
rock that’s been flattened off into an island. It’s really something else,
and the view is amazing. On a clear day, you can actually see the
top of the Steel Tower.”
“Right,” Isabel said. “But he isn’t following through.”
“The thing about Isaac,” Sawyer told her, “is that he only pursues
projects that are authentic expressions of his own personal genius.
He’s like his Dad. If you just shut up about it, he’ll eventually decide it
was his idea in the first place, and then he’ll insist. How do you think
we ended up together?”
And so she shut up about it, and not long after he cornered her
and insisted. They ended up driving to The Gamelands to spend a
weekend in August. Sawyer was out of town, visiting family. Isabel
left the office early on Friday. This was something she was still
getting used to. People in New York, even in her own abstract and
largely academic field, came in after ten but stayed late, often going
straight from the office to their evenings out, whereas in Pittsburgh,
the whole city seemed to rise early and then leave work at three in
the afternoon. She’d never lost the habit of coming in late, but she
discovered that she was still able to knock off whenever she wanted.
Barry was usually traveling anyway, or else off begging some or
other corporation for money and sponsorship. Isabel reported to him
directly, and there was no one to mark her comings and goings, not
that Barry, or anyone, would have cared when she came and went.
She went home and packed a weekend bag: a dress, a pair of jeans,
a black bra and a white bra and a sports bra and some running
clothes just in case, a bathing suit because Isaac had texted that
there was a pool. She bought iced coffee for the drive and then
picked him up in front of Sawyer’s place.
“You don’t have a bag?” she asked.
“Nah, I’ve got plenty of stuff down there.”
Almost immediately he asked if he could smoke in her car. She
said no. He clarified that he meant weed. She said maybe once they
were out of the city.
“No,” he said. “You’ve got it backwards. City cops don’t make
traffic stops. Not for white people. They don’t care. It’s staties who’ll
get you.”
“Oh really?”
“Je te jure. I’m a country boy.”
Isabel shrugged her assent, and he took a little spring-loaded
wooden case with a compartment for weed and a compartment for a
one-hitter from his pocket and got stoned without offering any to her.
He directed her out of the city by following Carson Street along
the Monongahela below a wooded hillside before cutting off on a
series of steep roads that ran up through the gullies of Hays, a now-
decrepit neighborhood of shadows and knotweed and foreboding
hills choked with sickly sumac trees. Then they rolled up though the
calcified remains of a prior round of suburban development. The
Dairy Queens and car dealerships and shopping malls that once
beckoned and drew people out of the city’s core as it fell into
disrepair had begun their own inevitable afterlife of decomposition,
as lately people wanted downtown condos and sidewalk dining
again. They passed the back end of Century Three Mall, so-named,
Isaac said, because it once housed three hundred stores, but now
held, “one Piercing Pagoda, a decorative sword shop, a vape joint,
and a Penney’s.”
“I’m sure there’s more than that,” Isabel said.
“There used to be an Orange Julius,” he replied. “Alas, the
creative destruction of capitalism.”
They turned onto Route 51, a lumpy highway Isabel did
recognize vaguely, but just a few more miles down the road, he
instructed her to merge onto 43, a toll road she’d never noticed.
“We’re in Large, PA,” he told her. “I love Large. There’s a big local
construction firm called the Dick Corporation that used to have its
headquarters out here. The Large Dick Corporation!”
Isaac called 43 the road his father almost built.
“How do you mean?”
“Back in the eighties, early nineties, my dad and my aunt and this
guy named Phil Harrow were in business together, and they were all
planning to get rich off this highway, which was the biggest
boondoggle in the history of the state of Pennsylvania. You know
they spent more than ten billion on it? Mostly federal money.” They
were doing eighty and were the only car on the road. “Empty!” he
exclaimed. “It was supposed to revitalize the Mon Valley and Fayette
County, or anyway that was the excuse. Really, it was just a lot of
greedheads siphoning money out of the government. Anyway, you’d
have to ask Abbie the whole story. He still hasn’t told me. All I know
is that he fucked over his sister and her partner, her business partner
somehow, and they don’t speak to this day. Anytime she wants
anything, my aunt I mean, she has to relay it through me, and vice
versa.”
“Family,” Isabel said.
 “There’s family, and then there’s my family. Anyway, this
primordial act of betrayal made my dad rich, supposedly, and it also
introduced his crazy ass to Uniontown, which is how he found the
mystical magical location of our humble family compound. I will say
it’s good cycling terrain.”
“You bike?” she said. She hadn’t noticed bicycles or bike gear in
either of his apartments. She’d assumed his dance-party outfit was
just a sex thing.
“I used to. I loved it, but I find it difficult to sustain affections for
very long.”
“That seems unfortunate.”
“Yes, well.”
The road took them through several dozen miles of round hills
and valleys full of dairy farms and little brick houses on long
driveways. Every few miles, the hills grew a bit higher, the houses
smaller, the American flags larger, until, upon being dumped off on
the Uniontown Bypass, they were in the real foothills of the Laurel
Mountains. Ahead of them, Laurel Ridge rose as a deep indigo wall,
and Isabel thought, as she’d thought when she drove across the
state in the opposite direction months earlier, of a wave on the
ocean, although this time it felt as if she were on the shore, and the
wide, undulating mountain was rushing in to sweep everything away.
“Home sweet home,” Isaac said. “God. This place is so evil. It’s
amazing I survived.”
“I think everyone feels that way about where they’re from,” Isabel
said. “I mean, I grew up in New York and lived there all my life,
basically, and all the young women I work with can’t imagine ever
wanting to live anywhere else, and even though I’ve only been here
—in Pittsburgh, I mean—for a little while and still sort of feel like it’s
not really my place yet, the truth is that I also feel like I escaped from
something.”
“Yes,” said Isaac a little impatiently. “But, I mean, really. It’s
amazing I survived. When we were still in school, me and my friend
Jake sort of had this idea that there was a sort of evil presence
under the whole town, you know, vaguely Lovecraftian, kind of a
slumbering and insatiable and unnameable elder god. Well, not
really unnameable. Jake decided that its name was Daroba, maybe
because it sounded Egyptian to him? Honestly, I don’t know.
Anyway, we used to blame all the local weird happenings on his evil
influence. Like when White Adam Martens went to jail for killing the
old woman. ‘Oh, Daroba did it.’”
“White Adam Martens?”
Isaac laughed. “God, sorry,” he said. “I’ve told these stories so
many times. I forget you’re new. You should use that to your
advantage, somehow. Something about you suggests that you’ve
been here all along.”
“I’m not sure how to take that.”
“It’s a compliment, more or less,” Isaac replied. “So, there were
two kids named Adam Martens in high school. One of them was
black, so everyone called him Black Adam Martens. And the other
one was White Adam Martens, who killed an old lady.”
“That’s awful,” Isabel said.
“What? The black and white thing or the murder? He was this
giant redneck, really, and if I remember right, he ended up going to
the Vo-Tech for high school. That’s where they dumped all the patch
kids and trailer trash with disciplinary problems. We were actually
friends, almost, in junior high. He picked on me for being Jewish,
although I think he had a crush on me.” He shrugged. Isaac thought
everyone had a crush on him. “Didn’t I tell you this?”
“Not the part about killing anyone.”
“Well, I was pretty tore up, if you’ll recall, on the night in question.
Anyway, meanwhile, Black Adam Martens was this huge bully. The
worst. They left all the black kids with disciplinary problems alone, on
the theory, I think, that there weren’t very many black people in the
district to begin with. The whole county was only like six percent
minority. So you can just imagine. Then poor Adam Martens—White
Adam Martens, that is to say—ended up with a big Oxycontin
problem, which is normal enough around here, and he and this older
dude, whose name I forgot—something Polish-y that ended in -ski—
they tried to break into some old lady’s trailer to steal a bunch of
Walmart gift cards. This is like right in the middle of the day, because
they’re idiots and also probably high. The old lady is watching TV,
and how about that! Today is the one day she actually remembered
to put in her hearing aid. I remember that particular fact was widely
reported. She hears them, and of course, this being the scenic rural
hamlet of Lemont Furnace, she keeps a loaded .30-06 under the
kitchen counter for just such an occasion. She gets off a shot, which
hits the older guy in the shoulder. He goes down. Adam Martens
panics, grabs the nearest thing, which is a cast-iron frying pan, and
knocks her fucking brains out. Got tried as an adult, too, poor guy.
The worst part is that we all knew that Dumbasski or whoever was
the ringleader, such as it was, and it was just bad luck. Or it was
Daroba, take your pick. A blood sacrifice to the ancient gods. So,
now, ironically, Black Adam Martens would pick on you relentlessly,
but if you ever tried to talk back to him, like, ‘Come on, Adam, leave
me alone,’ he’d just shrug his shoulders and say, ‘Hey, at least Black
Adam Martens never killed nobody!’”
“That’s terrible,” Isabel said.
“That’s Uniontown.”
“Who’s the other guy you mentioned?”
“Who? Oh, Jake? Oh, he’s a friend is all. You’ll meet him,
probably. He still lives in Uniontown.”
“And this Daroba is the monster in the woods?” she asked,
smiling, forgetting that she’d decided not to indicate or intimate that
they’d met that night at Barry Fitzgerald’s.
“What?” said Isaac. “Oh, no. Daroba isn’t real.” And this seemed
to Isabel to both answer and not answer the question.
They merged onto Route 40, the old Braddock Road. The young
George Washington and General Braddock had followed the same
road in reverse from the headwaters of the Potomac up over the
Appalachians toward the French at Fort Duquesne, where they got
their asses handed to them. Later Washington, the president, made
it the National Road, one of the first great national works in that
rough-hewn new Rome. After the Eisenhower era, parts of it had
been widened into a four-lane highway, but it was never fit to
become an interstate. It retained in its rake and bends the
precipitous feeling of a real mountain pass, the kind of road you’d
expect in the younger mountains of an older civilization. There were
other even steeper and still narrower roads that also made that climb
up Laurel Ridge—Hopwood-Fairchance Road, Stone Quarry Road,
Jumonville-Coolspring Road, Mud Pike Road. Isaac used to climb
them on his fleet, light little bike when he was a teenager with the
unlikely dream of competing in a Grand Tour one day. He used to
imagine that he was in the Pyrenees or the Dolomites even as
pickups rattled past, too close, herding him toward the dangerous
shoulders while the laughing girlfriends of the howling drivers yelled
“fag!” at the skinny kid dressed in shiny Lycra.
Isabel’s car protested even on the grade of the wider and more
regular highway. She was a city-trained and casual driver, and she
had only a hazy notion of what to do with the gears on an ascent.
Isaac was telling her about the Cumberland Classic, a spring race
that started nearby in Connellsville and rolled over a hundred miles
of these roads into Maryland. The thought of hauling herself up such
a road on a bicycle seemed absurd; the thought of doing it over and
over for six or seven hours fantastical. But Isaac was almost
rapturous in describing it, one of the few really unguarded moments
in their whole friendship. “The closest a man can get,” he told her, “to
a female orgasm comes when you summit a really big hill.” She
laughed and asked him how he knew what a female orgasm felt like.
“It feels,” he told her, “like spinning a high cadence up a nine percent
grade with the sun going in and out of the trees that are shading the
road—first pleasant, just rolling along, then a kind of exertion that
gets your heart up and your breathing a little faster like good
exercise, then a period of tiredness that you have to think through or
else you’ll back off the pace and effort and finish without really
finishing, then the last five hundred meters when you feel cold and
hot all at once and think for the love of God, you’re not actually going
to make it, then, when you do make it, the Kundalini uncurls out of its
resting place in the hollow of your pelvis and goes up your spine and
out into all your limbs down to your fingers and toes and it breaks out
through the third eye on your forehead and all your cells shudder all
at once like all the strings bowed in one chord on a cello and then
you’re over it with sweat on your chest recovering on the descent on
the other side.”
She told him that he was off on the details, but it wasn’t a bad
description as far as these things go. In fact, she found it slightly
uncanny, but she wasn’t going to tell him that. He was already smug
enough. But he caught her smiling.
 The road passed a scenic lookout two-thirds of the way up the
climb: a pull-off on the right side of the road revealed the narrow,
beautiful valley between the Pine Knob promontory and the ridge.
Isaac informed her that the area below was called Lick Hollow. He
found this funnier than it was. At the top of the ridge was the old
Summit Inn, a pile of white clapboard and dormers that called back
to an earlier era of American travel. Its letterboard sign advertised
STEAK, LOBSTER, and GOLF. They turned right just past the
Summit below a billboard for Laurel Caverns, “Western
Pennsylvania’s Largest Natural Cavern Formations.” Isaac, giggling,
explained that the caves were owned by the family of a prominent
local evangelical, Melvin Chislett, himself a former CPA who had,
one April 15, experienced his Road-to-Damascus moment and
converted from the sort of tepid, non-denominational, public
Christianity that characterizes so much American public life to a full-
bore, young-Earth, sola scripta apostle of the Good News. He took
an online course, got ordained, and founded the Seed of Faith Full
Gospel Church. Isaac described this congregation as the sort of
Christians who are ambivalent about Jews but over-the-moon for
Israel. He used that phrase, actually: “over the moon.” It was another
habit of his, an occasional anachronism in his speech. It had begun
intentionally; then it became his nature and he stopped noticing.
Chislett’s brother-in-law owned the caverns. His brother, meanwhile,
was the chief of police.
“Christ,” Isabel said. “Who isn’t related?”
“Only us. The interlopers. The immigrants.”
They passed another sign for the caverns.
“They’re really laying it on thick,” Isabel said.
“When I was in seventh grade,” Isaac told her, “we went on a field
trip there in our natural science class. Our teacher was new to the
district; I mean he was probably about my age now. And he didn’t
know any better. They explained to us how the Flood caused the
caves.”
“The Flood flood?”
“The one and only.”
“What an education.”
 “We used to say it was one of the regular haunts of Daroba. You
could really imagine an elder god getting a good laugh slinking
around in the slimy, dripping dark, surrounded by cartoon plaques of
Adam riding a friendly dinosaur in the Garden.”
The Gamelands property was on the western side of the ridge, off
a rolling road that traced the ridge’s crest between Caverns Park
Road and Mud Pike Road. It was marked only by POSTED signs on
the trees and a small stone pillar that held the mailbox at the end of
a long gravel driveway. The driveway descended into a small hollow
full of ferns before rising again through the woods until it met the
broad clearing where the house, or collection of houses, was at first
barely visible, a suggestion of rocks or peaks rising nearly
imperceptibly from the highest point of land ahead, where the
meadow finished its rise and rolled down the sunset escarpment for
a thousand feet to where the trees closed in again. The Mayers had
two dogs, great, dumb, friendly, half-wild black beasts that could just
as easily have been bears, and at the sound of wheels on the gravel,
they came bounding out of the woods barking with the pure joy of
creatures whose lives and senses are unencumbered by the rent-
taking middleman of human intellect.
“Holy shit, they’re like bears!” Isabel said, braking to avoid them
and sliding in the gravel.
“They’re my father’s familiars,” Isaac replied. It was, Isabel
thought, the first time that she’d heard him refer to Abbie as “my
father.” (It was not, in fact, but Isabel had already begun to read the
connection between Abbie and Isaac as both more and less fraught
than it really was. Like most educated, literate people, she had a
crude but persistent belief in a simple kind of psychology. She
tended to underestimate the capacity of people to be actually cruel to
each other while overestimating minor cruelty’s effect.)
The driveway wound around the front of the house. It was a
building that defied easy summary. It looked like a movie whose title
you can’t quite recall, an old teacher whose name you can’t quite
remember. The complex gave off the overwhelming sense of having
been there since the beginning of time, and yet something equally
suggested that a person could, with sufficient effort and knowledge,
fold the whole thing into the bed of a pick-up and drive away. It was
otherworldly in the way that this world’s more extraordinary places
often are. It had a Hyperborean quality to it, as if ancient astronauts
had built it at the height of their hubris before cataclysm swept them
away.
The drive spiraled to a dugout carport on the far side of the
complex. The carport didn’t appear to be connected to the rest of the
buildings; they were integrated via a series of semi-buried, skylit
corridors through the hillside. The parking, Isaac said, was his
father’s bitter concession to the necessity of driving up there in the
first place. It seemed to Isabel that if that were entirely true, there
would have been room for some number fewer than eight cars. They
parked and followed a canopied path hidden by vines and a low wall
to the entrance of what Isaac called The Children’s House. “Ironic,”
he said, “since I’m the only child. You’ll be an honorary child.
Hopefully my mother hasn’t sold the guest bed. She discovered
eBay a while back, and honest to God, anything that isn’t bolted
down.”
Below the drive, a series of terraces that traced the relief of the
hill like the lines of an elevation map stepped a hundred feet into the
meadow, cut through with gravel and brick walkways and patios and
a long, chilly-looking pool surrounded by flagstones. None of it was
in particularly good repair. The dogs wagged around their legs and
sniffed their elbows. Isabel asked their names. “Leto and Lady
Jessica,” Isaac said. Isabel raised her eyebrows. “What?” he said.
“Abbie named them. What can I say? He’s a fucking
environmentalist. He loved Dune.”
Isabel shrugged. “The patios could use a little TLC,” she said.
“Oh please,” said Isaac. “Abbie should have named this place
Deferred Maintenance.”
She’d expected—unrealistically, she knew—that the Mayer
parents would come out to greet them, but Isaac just let them into
the kids’ house, a self-contained residence: one large common area
with a fieldstone floor covered in cowhides and a hodgepodge
collection of not-quite-modern furniture, pieces reminiscent of a
prewar Hollywood apartment or a preposterous lounge in a ratty
interwar ocean liner. There was an open kitchen with white cabinets
and bar pulls, very eighties. A beautiful stairway of granite and
beechwood led to two lofted bedrooms overlooking the space below
and, through the big front windows, the sweep of property and slope
and town and hills beyond. The bathroom was set deep into the rear
of the house, lit through clerestory windows on its front-facing wall. It
contained a vast tub that was carved out of a rock formation. Isaac
showed Isabel to her room. It had a bed—a rather spindly camp bed
with a pilled, its-a-boy!-blue blanket.
“Well, I guess she sold the bed,” Isaac said.
“This isn’t original?” Isabel smiled.
“Kween,” he said. He sighed. “You’d better take mine. It’s built in,
so I presume it’s intact.”
It was. It had a rootlike quality and appeared to grow out of the
wall. “Isaac,” Isabel said, “this house really is extraordinary. I don’t
know what to say.”
“Girl, please. It looks like it was designed by a drunken elf. It
looks like Legend.”
Isabel decided it was best not to argue. People were generally
forgiving of criticisms of their families, less so of praise. She walked
to the railing at the room’s edge and looked out. “That’s Uniontown?”
She pointed down the mountain.
“God’s own creation. The U-T.” He seemed, very briefly, as if he
was going to cry. Then he laughed. “Okay,” he said. “We’d better
have a drink before I introduce you to the fam. Again, assuming ma
mère n’a pas déjà bu tout le booze avant de le remplacer avec de
l’eau.”
“Really?” Isabel said.
“You know the cliché about role reversal as parents and children
age? In our case, the inflection point came early. Of course, they
were already old when they had me. Abbie is seventy, you know.”
“I wondered about that.”
“Mom was on the verge of her ‘change of life’ as she puts it. I
suspect fertility treatments, but then again, if that had been the case,
you’d expect I’d have had a twin. Boy, that would’ve done wonders
for my porn career.” He saw her face. “I’m kidding,” he said. “I
haven’t got the dick for it.”
They went downstairs, and they found plenty of un-watered liquor
in the kitchen. Isaac poured her a vodka soda, a scotch for himself.
They sat in the weird speakeasy set of his living room while the sun
settled somewhere below the house, and the surrounding woods
threw long shadows over the terraces and lawns.
“When I was a kid,” Isaac said, “all my friends thought this place
was great, because, you know, I basically had my own house, and
Abbie and Sarah never gave a shit about what we did, so my friends
could come up here and drink and get stoned and whatever,
although of course, Abbie was always weird about the monster in the
woods.”
“I feel I’m missing the metaphor,” Isabel said. She had a vague
sense, which she would have been embarrassed to articulate, that
some or other of our comforting superstitions must be true. Nothing
so absurd as a singular god, of course, but a hazy half conviction
that we went on in some form after we died, that nature as people
understood it was an insufficient explanation for all things. But on the
rare occasions that she gave it any thought, she convinced herself
that none of it was literally true; these things only stood in, in the
end, for everything that we did not, as yet, understand.
“No metaphor,” Isaac told her. “Like, really. There’s really a
monster in the woods.”
“Like what?” she said. “Like a Cyclops? Like Bigfoot?”
“God, no. Lol.” He pronounced it lawl. “I mean, you weren’t here a
couple of years ago, but there was this amazing drug bust up north
of Pittsburgh, this sort of notorious local meth dealer-slash-scifi
author. Anyway, the cops roughed him up pretty good, and even
though he got convicted, he filed a civil suit claiming police brutality
blah blah blah. Never went anywhere, but it got some press because
the cops said, basically, that he had attacked them when they tried to
apprehend him, and he said, no, it wasn’t me. It was Bigfoot!
Anyway, yeah. Neither here nor there. No, there is a monster in the
woods. Hang on.” He took his phone out and composed a text.
She frowned. That fucking phone. “What are you doing?”
“Texting Jake to come over after dinner. He’ll attest to it. Also, I
need more pot. So, yeah, there’s a monster in the woods. It’s
different for everyone. Jake swears it’s like a giant, like a capybara or
something, with yellow eyes. My mother considers it vaporous. But
my mother is pretty vaporous. Monsters are like dogs. They come to
resemble us after we spend enough time together. I don’t know
about Abbie. I mean, I do, but he doesn’t actually call it a monster.
He has a more religious—excuse me, spiritual—interpretation. He
says that it’s in the form of a giant deer, but I’m like, ‘Abbie, that’s
just, you know, a deer.’” He paused and smiled winsomely.
“And you?”
“I don’t believe in monsters.” He smirked. “You think we’re nuts.”
“I’m not especially superstitious.”
He shrugged. “It’s Fayette County,” he said. “It’s weird.”
“Even so, that seems preternaturally weird.”
“Yes,” he said. “Preternaturally.”
They sipped their drinks, and he immersed himself in his phone.
Isabel could hear the pings and assorted percussion sounds of his
hook-up apps. You didn’t live in New York in a milieu of architects
and designers and other specimens who described themselves,
quite un-ironically, as “creatives” without becoming familiar with
these tools. She herself had even briefly, just after moving to
Pittsburgh, downloaded one of the pale hetero versions, attempting
to feel liberated as she tapped her approval (acquiescence?) in the
app store, but feeling actually rather prim. Before Ben, she’d been
able to meet men easily at bars and restaurants and parties and
produce aisles; now she was downloading a purpose-driven
computer program. It wasn’t that she was a Luddite; she loved her
laptops (work and personal), her tablet, her Kindle, her frequently
upgraded phone. Rather, it was the specificity of the thing, the way it
took what should have been freewheeling and anarchic and made it
into something practical, almost vocational. Wasn’t that a reflection
on America, or on the West, or on the dull conclusion of Capitalism,
or something? That as our education had become a mere factory for
producing employees, so too now our sentimental education became
a matter of ruthless efficacy: task-specific, goal-oriented? Anyway,
the experience was a bust. Isabel didn’t even manage to attract any
interesting grotesques, no lurid cock shots (she got a few, but they
were the opposite of lurid; they were clinical and detached; one of
them included a dollar bill held beside a boner for comparison,
making the transactional nature of the whole exchange even more
appallingly obvious: truth in advertising! get what you paid for!).
There were very few perverted demands, nothing much but the
metronomically regular interest of regular dudes, more or less her
age, income, and level of educational attainment, who, because they
were so busy killing it at the office/at the gym/with their boys/etc.
were in search of someone dully ordinary and of that variety of
athletically unerotic sex that is best performed within eye-shot of a
mirror. Of course, she knew the experience would be different for a
young gay guy, or assumed it would, anyway. Her friends in New
York had complained about it even as they shoved their faces into it.
She let Isaac do his thing and even took her own phone out to nose
through emails for a while.
Eventually he got bored. The drinks turned clammy and sweated
onto the glass table, and he sighed and said, “Once more into the
breach,” and hopped out of the chair. He led her through one of the
odd hallways—half cave dwelling and half space station—that
connected one annex of the compound to another, and they
emerged into the main house in a sort of atrium-cumfoyer, which
held at one end the crystal-palace front doors of The Gamelands.
Hung in the vaulted, jagged cathedral above them, there were a
number of mobiles that resembled a mad cross-breeding of Calder
and middling Judaica, and finally, at its center, right out of some myth
about the creation of the world by a wild clan of festive gods, an
enormous, slightly yellowing banyan tree. (“It’s the third largest
banyan tree in Pennsylvania,” Isaac claimed. Isabel hummed a
sound that she hoped sounded like interested acknowledgment.)
From there they went through a discreet doorway into the
grandest room of the house, a multilevel hangar of glass and stone
whose lower expanse held several distinctly furnished sitting areas
and an out-of-place grand piano. The upper portion included both a
large dining area with a comically vast table of curvilinear wood
surrounded by a goofy assortment of thrift-store chairs and a kitchen
centered around that big boulder island that Sawyer had mentioned,
which really was more impressive in the seeing than in the telling, a
leveled-off Gibraltar heaved up out of the floor. Isabel had almost
expected to find Abbie seated in some kind of seigniorial splendor,
throned and waiting to receive them like the ruler of a minor duchy.
Instead, the first person they met was a young man—younger than
Isabel, older than Isaac—perched precariously on a wooden A-frame
ladder beside the windows.
“Hola, Eli,” said Isaac. He left Isabel in the doorway and headed
immediately to the kitchen, where he opened the wide refrigerator
and stood, like every son everywhere at every visit home, with the
door open, surveying the contents before deciding there was nothing
he wanted and walking over to the bannister that separated the
upper and lower sections of the room. He pronounced the name Eh-
lee.
“Hello, Isaac,” said Eli. “Give me just a moment. If I talk while I’m
up here, I’m sure to fall off.” He had the slightly British accent that
many continental Europeans acquire in their studies of English over
the barest hint of his native Spanish. He pressed a gooey white
substance out of a squeeze bottle onto the joint of a windowpane
and its frame. He had an ugly but not unappealing face, a squished
nose (terribly broken in his childhood), and cleft chin that looked like
an angry fist. He had too-deep eyes that shone like those of a
threatened and threatening animal coming out of a cave. He had
very wide shoulders, narrow hips, and short legs. The whole effect
was vaguely troglodytic. But his voice betrayed a hint of aristocracy,
or at least the modern, bourgeois equivalent thereof. He swung off
the ladder with a fluid and simian maneuver, laid the squeeze bottle
on a nearby bench, wiped his hands on his jeans, and walked toward
them.
“Isabel,” Isaac said, “this is Eli. Eli, Isabel.”
He shook her hand with an American matter-of-factness that
indicated he’d been living in the country for a while, a surer sign than
any accent. “Isabel,” he said. “My pleasure to meet you. Are you a
friend of Izzy’s?” He held her eyes for a moment too long, and she
looked away, pretending to be interested in the architecture.
“Don’t call me that,” said Isaac.
Eli grinned. “Your father’s windows are leaking again. It rained
last night and dripped all over the place. I’m trying a new silicone
caulk.” (He pronounced it cock. Isabel grinned inadvertently. Isaac
caught her and made a face.) “I doubt it will work. We will have to
tear the whole place down.”
 “Haven’t I been saying it?” said Isaac. He turned to her. “Eli,” he
said, “is my father’s factotum.”
“I’d hoped to be his amanuensis,” said Eli, confirming what Isabel
had already decided: that he was not just a handyman, or that, if he
were, then it was a reinvention from some other, former life.
“Abbie is his own amanuensis,” Isaac told us. “Both king and
scribe, like David but less beautiful, like Solomon but less wise.
Where is my paterfamilias, by the way? Isabel is a genuine groupie.
She has several of his books. I saw them at her house one time after
dinner. She’d moved them from her main bookshelf, but I snooped. I
want to be there when he signs her tits.”
Had she known him better, or known him less, she thought, she’d
have smacked him, but she could only stand there and blush.
Eli elected to appear not to notice, although Isabel might have
noted a sympathetic softening of his eyes if she’d looked at him.
“Your father,” he said, “is in Uniontown. He said he’d be back later.”
“What car did he take?”
“I don’t know. The Land Rover?”
“Typical. We were supposed to have dinner. Where’s Mom?”
“He said he was going to bring back fried chicken. Sarah told me
she was going to take a nap.”
“Yeah?” Isaac smirked meanly. “How many hours ago would you
say she said that?”
“Are you two thirsty?” asked Eli. “I thought I’d have a beer on the
patio.”
Over beers, Isaac went back to talking about his weird
upbringing. He wanted to tell the story of the subterranean network
of tunnels underneath the Uniontown Mall. He and Jake had been
getting high at a small lake—really, a rain-filled and abandoned
quarry—on the far side of the Mount Saint Macrina property, a
Catholic retreat for nuns built on what had once been the estate of
J.V. Thompson, whose coal and coke fortune had been, before
bankruptcy, before Frick and Carnegie, one of the greatest of the
great American fortunes. Now the Oak Hill mansion had been
divided into dark warrens of sleeping cubicles for the nuns and the
granite balustrades on the wide patios were chipped. The property
held newer buildings, too, dormitories and chapels and a small
cemetery, but on far side of the land, there was a ten-acre stand of
old woods, and in the woods was the old quarry. In order to get
there, the boys had to move quietly across a field of low grass in the
dark. “We were afraid,” Isaac explained, “because there was a rumor
that one of the Fathers had a shotgun loaded with rock salt, and he’d
shoot you in the ass if he caught you trespassing.” In the summer,
the dense trees around the pool retained humidity; the earth threw
up ferns; the fallen logs were covered in lichens and hairlike moss.
“The pool didn’t have a bottom,” Isaac said. “It went down, down,
down forever until you passed through to the other side of the world.”
“To China.” Isabel laughed.
“Not the physical world,” he said. “That pool was where Daroba
came from.”
They liked to get high in those woods, and then afterward they’d
sneak back across the estate grounds and climb back over the
fieldstone wall that separated it from Main Street below the mall.
They’d run across four lanes of traffic—except there was rarely any
traffic—to the expanses of fast-food restaurants, where they’d giggle
as they ordered more food than they were likely to eat. Behind the
restaurants there was a rocky gully full of twisted trees and stands of
knotweed. Why it was that on this one particular night Jake decided
to walk into the trees to take a piss rather than using the bathroom at
the McDonald’s was never clear. There’s something about a teenage
boy that impels him to piss outside when possible, a sort of hormonal
exhibitionism, the desire to display the dick that’s so central to his
existence to the whole of the world, even if he’s doing so while
concealed behind a tree where no one else can actually see him.
Jake returned, out of breath. “Isaac,” he whispered, although there
was no reason to whisper. “Come on, you’ve got to see this.”
Beyond the trees, the gully reared back up in a hillside of broken
stone to the mall’s parking lots, thirty or forty feet above, but sticking
out of the side, like the obscene tailpipe of some immense
earthworks spaceship, was an un-barred storm drain pipe a little
over four feet in diameter.
“So?” said Isaac.
“Soooo,” said Jake. “We should go in.”
“Fuck no,” said Isaac. “Jesus, it’s a sewer. That’s fucking gross.”
 “It’s a storm drain,” said Jake.
“I’m not going in there,” said Isaac, but then he shrugged, and he
added, “Besides. You’d need a flashlight.”
That would have been the end of it, but a month or so later, on
the edge of fall, that far end of August just before the start of school
when the temperature dropped from eighty degrees during the day to
near fifty at night and the long evening light took on that dusk glow
that suggests the quick fading of an incandescent filament just after
the light switch is flipped off, they were back at the quarry smoking
weed, and Jake opened up his over-patched backpack—he defied
the local expectations for a black kid by being particularly fond of
Anti-Flag and the Dead Kennedys—and said, “Looooook what Iiiii
have.” He’d brought a pair of long Maglites. Isaac couldn’t think of
any reason to protest that didn’t suggest cowardice and fear of the
dark and the wet, so after smoking a little more out of the little
purple-and-green glass bowl that Isaac had stolen from Abbie, they
dashed back across the half-a-highway and through the parking lot
between McDonald’s and Long John Silver’s and through the ratty
trees past the dumpsters and then they scrambled over the sharp
stones to the lip of the pipe. Jake lifted Isaac by the legs until he
could grab the rim and pull himself up. Then Isaac hoisted Jake up
behind him. They turned on the lights and went down the tunnel.
A narrow trickle of water ran in a channel down the bottom center
of the passage. The entrance had been matted with slimy,
decomposing leaves, but five feet in, it turned surprisingly clean,
maintained by the frequent passage of water after it rained. They
walked in a crouch with the flashlights making odd concentric ovals
down the tunnel ahead of them. A breeze came toward them out of
the depths. It carried the faint odor of motor oil and grease. Although
the tunnels were concrete and laid perfectly straight, they felt
organic, as if the boys had smuggled themselves into the circulatory
system of a giant creature from an antediluvian world that had,
innumerable eons ago, crawled wearily to this spot and laid down in
its final lethargy to die. It was at once haunting and thrilling to be
there. It appealed to them in all its weirdness. Who but a couple of
pretty weird kids would crawl into a concrete tunnel under a mall at
night? After a few hundred yards, they came to a square junction.
Some light filtered from above. Looking up, they could see a grate
over an opening to the parking lot above. They had a quick debate
about which way to go out of the junction, before deciding that they’d
come far enough for one night. “Of course,” Isaac said, “we were
actually terrified, but no one was going to admit it. We smoked some
cigarettes. Jake insisted that we turn off the flashlights to conserve
batteries, which was hysterical, because we’d been in there for what,
fifteen minutes? If that. Anyway, we’re sitting there, and it’s not quite
pitch black, because there’s the light coming down from the drain
above, and then Jake says, ‘Did you feel that?’ ‘Feel what?’ I said.
‘The direction of the wind changed.’ ‘No it didn’t.’ ‘Yes, it did.’ ‘Did it?’
Then we sat there, and of course, we felt the direction of the wind
changing, which was it? I don’t know. Probably not. Then Jake says,
‘Something’s fucking breathing. Motherfucker! There’s something in
here.’ And we both went motherfucker and scurried the fuck out.
Then we swore that we were going to go back in and find whatever it
was that lived in there.”
“Did you?” Isabel asked.
“What?”
“Go back and find out.”
Isaac swirled the last inch of his beer. “God, no,” he said. “We
pretended to forget about it, because we were too fucking scared to
go back. Anyway, we were fourteen. We were getting into some
other shit.”
“But seriously,” Isabel asked, “why the fuck would you crawl
around in a storm drain?”
Isaac shrugged. “It’s Uniontown,” he answered. He giggled.
“What else was there to do?”
This was when Sarah arrived, jangling uncertainly through the
doors onto the patio. She was very thin, almost malnourished,
although her face gave the impression of slight bloating. Her big
eyes were pale green and quivered and seemed ever on the verge
of tears, like one of those delicate girls in Japanese anime. Her hair
was a nebular mane of gray frizz that blew out from her head in
every direction and fell more than halfway down her back. She was
nearly seventy herself and gave off the confusing impression of
being both older and younger: the slight swelling of her face
stretched that skin taught and made her cheeks round to an almost
pubescent effect, whereas skin hung loosely on her tiny arms. She
moved with the hesitancy of the elderly when they reached that
stage of life in which each movement is the potential prelude to a
terrible fall. She wore a billowing, sleeveless caftan and flowing
pants whose volume emphasized rather than concealed the spindly
legs beneath. She wore a great deal of jewelry—bracelets especially
—some of it clearly very fine (one diamond tennis bracelet, in
particular, shone as if it were reflecting a bonfire made of all the
paper money in the world), much of it the kind of hammered copper
junk that Isabel would have bought for her mother at one of those
white-tented art fairs that spring up in shopping districts during the
long days of summer or at stands along the road on the drive from
Santa Fe to Taos. Sarah smelled too strongly of perfume, an
overwhelming scent of sandalwood and not-quite-lavender: old-lady
perfume. And yet she carried an unmistakable whiff of immortality, a
freshness underneath the slightly boozy stink of the scent. She was
as pale as a vampire, and that, if only because of all the silly talk
about monsters, was Isabel’s first impression of her: one either risen,
or preserved, from the grave.
“I thought I heard your father.” Her voice had a gentle tremor. She
stood several feet away from the three of them as if she were afraid
to approach.
“Nope,” said Isaac, who rolled his eyes theatrically at Isabel. He
was always trying to draw her into his conspiracies of disdain, and
she’d have been ashamed to realize how frequently she obliged.
“Just us, as the saying goes.”
“I could have sworn.”
“He isn’t back from town, yet, Sarah,” said Eli, who lifted himself
out of the seat, hovering for a moment like a gymnast between the
parallel bars before dismounting over the arm and giving a broad
stretch. Isabel watched him. She wouldn’t have expected someone
so odd looking to move with such self-accustomed grace. Though
why not?
“He went to town?”
“There was a meeting,” Eli said. “About the new wellheads.”
“Oh, yes. Yes. Goodness, what time is it?”
 “Eight,” Eli told her without bothering to look at a watch or a
phone. “He should be back soon. He is bringing Roose’s.”
“Your father and that potato salad,” Sarah said, now gazing
toward her son. “I don’t think it’s any better than any other potato
salad.”
Isaac rolled his eyes again. “Roose’s is great, Mom,” he said.
(Though he shared her opinion, and he was only being contrary.)
Then he too jumped out of his seat and announced, “I’ve got to piss.”
He swept past his mother, barely pausing to plant a cursory kiss on
her cheek. Eli followed him into the house. No one had introduced
Isabel. She started to get up.
“Oh, you don’t need to get up for me,” Sarah said. Her tone
suggested that they already knew each other. It occurred to Isabel
suddenly that Sarah wasn’t just old, nor only sleep-fogged, but also
quite certainly drunk. “Do you mind if I sit?”
“No, of course not.”
Sitting was an effort for her. The chairs were low, and she made a
series of quiet, agonized noises as she lowered herself tenderly into
the one where Isaac had been.
“These knees,” she said.
Isabel murmured general assent.
“Tell me your name again, dear. I’m sorry, I’m terrible with
names.”
“Isabel.”
“How lovely,” she said. “It suits you.”
“Well,” Isabel said. “I can’t take any credit.”
“For your name?” She sighed. “No, I suppose not. Although don’t
you think that one comes to resemble one’s name, or one’s name
comes to resemble oneself. I’m not sure in which order. Like pets,
you know.”
Isabel laughed obligingly, even though she wasn’t sure Sarah
meant it to be funny, even though it resembled so closely a thought
she’d just had herself. She told Sarah that she didn’t resemble those
two monster dogs very much.
“Oh, no,” Sarah said. “But they’re Abbie’s. Have you seen
Abbie?”
“I think he’s still in town.”
 “Oh, yes. Roose’s. How could I forget?” She laughed, either at
Isabel or at some idea of her husband lugging home tubs of fried
chicken and potato salad. She could be as cruel as Isaac, or he as
cruel as her. It was hard to say in which direction the genealogy of
nastiness ran. Like her son, Sarah took an unnecessary degree of
pleasure in chuckling at other people’s expense. She’d go on, a few
days after this visit, to tell Isaac what she’d thought of Isabel. She
said she found that Isabel was uncannily like Abbie. Isaac thought
this was funny. “How do you mean?” he’d asked.
“She wants to be believed,” Sarah said, “but she’d prefer to be
liked.” Isaac didn’t see it, of course, but that had more to do with his
character than with any peculiarity of Isabel’s. Who wants to see in
his own friends a propensity for sycophancy? What would that say
about his friendships?
Sarah played idly with several bracelets, twisting them around
her pale forearm. It was a habit born of a kind of insatiable boredom,
like a dog that chews the baseboards. In New York, she’d been a
busy woman; in Pittsburgh, she’d participated nominally in Abbie’s
early business ventures, but in the years since they’d come to
Uniontown, she’d entered a semi-retirement that had turned the
obsessive part of her mind that had once made her almost erudite
and, in a conventional sense, successful, in on itself, which left her
with nervous tics and a propensity for white wine before noon.
“So,” she said. “Isabel. Tell me, what do you do? You’ll have to
excuse the question. I used to know how to make conversation
without asking it, but I’ve lost my touch.”
“Oh, I don’t mind. I work for a non-profit.”
“That’s suitably vague.”
“I’m sorry.” Isabel smiled a placatory smile. “It’s just that not many
people have heard of it. We’re really more of a think tank, I guess.
It’s called the Future Cities Institute. We used to be a part of CMU.
We’re still affiliated, actually, but we’re an independent 501, now.”
“Oh, yes. Barry Fitzgerald’s outfit,” Sarah said in an acute echo of
her son’s lover.
“You know Barry?”
“He was impossible to avoid. I’m sorry. That sounds mean. I used
to be a better conversationalist. You see, Barry was just a professor.
This would have been in the late eighties, I’d say. Early nineties. He
occupied some sort of intermediary stage between being part-time
and being tenured—the politics of that sort of thing escape me. Well,
you know, those kinds of people are expected to live the lives of the
bourgeoisie on the wages of busboys, and Barry was always
scamming around property developers, as Abbie would say, pitching
himself as a sort of consultant. Well, he was attached to an
associate, who was at the time a very dear friend of ours, Arthur
Imlak, who eventually went into business with Abbie.”
“I’ve met him,” Isabel said.
“Did he try to get you onto his boat? He has wandering hands, I
sometimes think, but he’s the product of a different moral universe.
God, did he make one of his jokes about sailing? He’s very fond of
Isaac. I sometimes think he pays more attention than Abbie. What
was I saying? Yes, Barry. Arthur is richer than decency ought to
permit now, but even then, he had quite a lot of cash, and he always
had some useless minions around. It made him feel important. It’s
not the worst quality in a man. My husband, whom you’ll meet,
doesn’t have this weakness, and I think that may be worse. In any
case, I do remember Barry. Does he still live in that house?”
“In Point Breeze,” Isabel said. “Yes, he does.”
“I used to think he had eyes for Isaac, and you know, Isaac does
have a thing for older men, unfortunately. That upsets Abbie more
than anything.” She shook her head. “Men. He never actually cared
that his son was gay, you know. But feminine? Well, thank God
Sawyer came along. He’s a good influence. Is he with you?”
“No. He couldn’t make it.”
“A doctor! I’m still enough of a Jewish mother that it pleases me
to no end. ‘And so good looking.’” She giggled at her unconvincing
attempt at imitating a Yiddish matron, which came off like her son’s
imitation of her. “How did you and Isaac meet?”
“At a party,” Isabel said, but she didn’t specify which.
“My son and his parties.”
“Mm,” Isabel said.
“And you, Isabel,” Sarah said after a moment, “What do you do?”

• • •
Abbie’s arrival at dinner took the form of a minor automobile
accident. Sarah had opened a bottle of lousy Malbec, the sort of
wine whose label suggested a bad tourism brochure, and they were
all drinking and picking at olives in the kitchen. It was after nine. The
sun had gone down. Isaac rarely looked up from his phone. Sarah
was telling Isabel about an antique store that “you must visit” in
Blawnox, just up the Allegheny River from Pittsburgh. “I bought the
most wonderful set of milk glass dishes, there,” she said. “Do you
like milk glass?” She gazed at Isabel with quivering eyes.
Isabel didn’t especially care for milk glass. She said, “Oh, I do.”
“You must go. I keep meaning to drive out again, one of these
days, but you know.”
Isabel didn’t know, nor, she thought, did Sarah. Then they heard
the sound of a car skidding on gravel and the unmistakable dull bang
of a car crumpling against a tree.
Abbie had taken the curve of the driveway around the house too
fast, fishtailed on the loose stones, and swung his rear passenger
side into the trunk of the big tulip tree that he’d planted there the
same week they’d broken ground on the main house. Everyone went
outside, though you would not say rushed, and found him standing in
the semi-dark with his door open, the dome light on, the headlights
flashing out into the evening. He was in jeans and a sport coat
whose purchase had preceded his latest round of weight gain. He
glared at the car with the aggressive, proprietary disbelief of all men
betrayed by their cars, from which they expect absolute fidelity. His
silly white hair was brushed like a mane away from his fleshy, once-
handsome face. He appeared unharmed, as did the tree. The Land
Rover had acquired a strange concavity where it now leaned against
the trunk, almost as if something had taken a bite out of it. “I told
you,” Isaac whispered to Isabel. “A monster.”
She raised an eyebrow, Spock-like, a talent or a curse of her too-
expressive face, and whispered back, “He was probably just driving
too fast.”
“Ah,” said Isaac, “but why was he driving too fast?”
Sarah had gone gingerly to her husband’s side as if she were the
one who’d just been in an accident. “Oh, Abbie,” she said, “I think
we’re in trouble.”
 “What trouble?” His voice exploded like a rifle shot through the
woods. “Look at the Goddamn car!” The dogs, reacting to his raised
voice, let loose an extended cadence of excited barking.
“Oh, Abbie,” she said, this time admonishing.
“Oh, Goddamn it, Sarah! God!” He reeled back and spread his
arms and addressed the sky. “You lousy Son of a Bitch!” It occurred
to Isabel that he, too, might be slightly drunk. “Not one minute’s
peace! Not a moment’s Goddamn rest!” He shook his head violently
and stalked over to the truck, clambering back into the driver’s seat
in order to peer into the back. Then he was screaming again. “And
You ruined the fucking chicken! Smashed!” He slammed the door
shut and began to stride toward the house, thought the better of it,
went back to the car, opened the door, yanked out the keys,
slammed the door once more, and headed back. He paused where
Isabel stood with Isaac and Eli. “We’ll get it in the morning,” he
fumed to Eli. He turned to Isaac and said, “It came close to the drive,
Isaac.”
“It’s as afraid of us as we are of it,” Isaac replied. It had the
quality of a set piece, a scene they’d acted before. Abbie hugged
him, drew his slim child against his hugeness and cupped his head
briefly with a soft hand. “I’m glad you came,” he said.
“All right, Abbie. Christ.”
Abbie turned to Isabel briefly. “You’re the girlfriend,” he said.
“I—”
“Oh, don’t look so pinched. I know he’s gay. Girlfriends. Friends
who are girls. My wife has girlfriends. My son has girlfriends. I have
only colleagues and a set of bizarre and probably meaningless
visions placed into my head by the Divine. You tell me, who got the
better deal? Did you ever try to be a prophet in the twenty-first
century? It’s like being a cardiologist in the ancient world. Your
knowledge is fundamentally inconsistent with the available tools of
the time and therefore useless. In any case, Isaac says you’re
working for Barry Fitzgerald. How’s his house? Still look like a bad
catalog?”
“Actually, yes.”
“Well, welcome to The Gamelands, which does not.” He leaned
forward and kissed Isabel on both cheeks, placing his hands on her
shoulders and swiftly sizing her up. He nodded as if he approved.
She frowned. His manner made her feel like livestock. He ran his
hands through his hair. “Well,” he said. “I suppose I’ll go make pasta
instead.”
At that moment, the headlights mercifully and automatically
blinked off.
Isabel had imagined that making pasta would consist of a pack of
dried—though probably expensive—spaghetti and a hasty red
sauce, but when Abbie said that he would make pasta, he meant it.
He’d bounced into the kitchen, tossed his coat over a chair, replaced
it with a well-stained apron, and began mixing flour and eggs for the
noodles. “Someone turn on Rigoletto,” he commanded.
“Which one?” asked Eli.
“The RCA Victor, the Solti, with Moffo and Ezio Flagello.” He
swirled the flour into the eggs with a fork, already operatic. He smiled
broadly at Isabel, who was still frowning. “If one is going to make
pasta, one should listen to music with an Ezio Flagello.” He
pronounced it again with an exaggerated Italian accent. “Ayyyy-
tseeoh!”
Isabel looked at Isaac.
“Yes,” Isaac said. “It’s always like this.”
“I went into the woods to live deliberately,” Abbie proclaimed,
sing-song.
“I’m not sure this is what Henry had in mind, Dad.”
Somewhere, everywhere, the music came on, those ominous
fanfares.
Abbie had magically acquired a glass of wine. He took a moment
away from kneading to sip it. “Ach. Terrible! Sarah, why do you buy
this swill?”
“It’s fine,” she protested.
Abbie was looking at Isabel when he answered, already drawing
her in as a helpless accomplice. That was the nature of the Mayer
men. She saw where Isaac had got it from. “A fine wine is fine, but a
wine that’s only fine?” Still, he took another sip. Then, improvising to
match the melodic line of the overture, he sang, “Baruch ata Adonai
Eloheinu, melech haOlam, borei pri haGafen.”
 “You’re laying it on a little thick, Dad,” said Isaac, who’d nosed
back into his phone.
“Seriously,” said Sarah.
“Your friend forgives me,” he said. “Don’t you, my dear? What’s
your name?”
“Isabel.”
“Eees-ah-bayyylaah! E’ un bellissimo nome così! Presumably not
a Jewess?”
“No,” she said. She added carefully, “Catholic, nominally. We
weren’t especially religious.”
“Neither were we,” said Abbie. “Which of course makes the
predicament of my life the more absurd. Sarah’s family were great
believers, but when I told her I’d had a chit-chat with Hashem, she
looked stricken.”
“It,” she paused and then said something other than what she
was going to say, “was a difficult period.”
“Excuse me,” Isaac said. He pocketed his phone and headed
toward the other room.
“These phones,” said Sarah.
“Were we really so different? Remember the opening scene of
Bye Bye Birdie?” Abbie had wrapped the pale yellow oblong of
dough in plastic and was chopping onions into a fine dice.
“I remember that Isaac was in Bye Bye Birdie in high school, but
I’ve blocked out the particulars.”
“He played the Paul Lynde role. We ought to have known, I
suppose. Anyway, my point is that we spent plenty of time on the
phone when we were teens, even if they were all landlines.”
“He’s not a teenager.”
“Be that as it may.” Abbie waved the knife loosely and moved on
to garlic. “I think it’s healthy, the constant contact. Imagine if we were
still living in tribal groups, close kinship networks. We’d be picking
each others’ nits and stumbling into each others’ tents all the time.”
“He hardly speaks to us!”
Abbie momentarily lost his air of playful bonhomie, his Falstaffian
clownishness, so committedly performed. A pained look passed over
his face, and this time he made no effort to look at Isabel. He looked
at his wife. “Let’s not,” he said.
 Eli had never returned from the record player. He was sitting near
it, drinking the bad wine, showing every indication of listening to the
music.
Sarah looked at Isabel slyly, as if somehow the other woman
wouldn’t notice, though they weren’t ten feet apart. “All right,” she
said. She twisted a bracelet and took a deep gulp of wine, which she
held in her cheeks like a chipmunk, like a college girl who’s taken a
shot without quite knowing how to swallow it, before swallowing with
a convulsive, canine shake of the head and a small sneeze. “How
was the meeting?”
“Awful. Sherri didn’t show, and Don spent the whole time unsubtly
suggesting that that poor boy accountant who took Jack Schaffer’s
seat sucks cock for a living. The Lion of Lemonwood, that one.”
“The Lion of Lemonwood?” Isabel said.
“Don is a county commissioner,” Sarah told her.
“She knows that,” said Abbie, although of course, at the time, she
didn’t. “Don Cavignac, during a prior campaign for his
primogenitured portion of this glorious barony we call Fayette
County, had a campaign aide, in a press conference, float the
nickname. It wouldn’t have stuck, except the publisher of the Herald-
Standard, or, as I like to call it, the Herald-Substandard, the Herald-
No-Standards, is Cavignac’s brother-in-law’s father-in-law. In the
more civilized portions of the world, wherever those may be, that
would mean bupkiss, but here, such connections are a veritable staff
of life. Now”—he paused for a moment to look around for a can of
tomatoes that was sitting right in front of him—“Lemonwood Acres is
a housing project, Section 8, of ill repute, which is ironically located
just across the parking lot from Isaac’s high-school alma mater. Don
likes to claim that he grew up there, as if that confers upon him some
sort of plebeian authenticity. Well, he did grow up there, in a manner
of speaking: before it became a project. His father, who was a county
commissioner before him—it’s a venerable tradition in their family—
owned half the property, and the other half was a landfill. So when
they went to build the new high school, they covered the landfill. The
school district bought up a small piece of the Cavignac property in
order to extend the parking lots, and the Cavignacs worked a classic
real estate scheme to sell their land at inflated prices to a housing
authority controlled by their own cronies, who then threw up a lot of
crap frame-and-drywall townhouses, into which they herded the
town’s most restive blacks.”
“Abbie,” said Sarah.
“I don’t endorse the racial attitudes; I merely describe them, my
dear. You can imagine, there’s something poetically correct about
building a high school and prison on top of a garbage dump. It
speaks to the underlying nature of our swiftly dying civilization.
Anyway, Cavignac gave that poor kid a public wedgie for about half
an hour during regular business. Then some minion of Art’s made a
glossy presentation about the locations of new wells and the
environmental remediation and effect mitigation plans. So many
Latinate words. Everyone was nodding off, which was the point,
surely. Until someone started yelling about his well water catching on
fire because of all the fracking. Needless to say, when we got right
down to it, it wasn’t his well water. He has city water. It was a friend
of a neighbor of a cousin, who probably just saw it in that
documentary, you know the one. He proceeded to demand ‘One ah
them BP-style paydays for ahr eekanawmic inj-ree.’”
“I read about the flammable tap water,” Isabel said.
“It’s true, actually,” Abbie told her, looking pained at having his
story interrupted. “How’s that for your End Times? Our water literally
catching on fire. But these people are all confabulators; they don’t
understand the distinction between fact, fable, and myth, and they
have no concept of the difference between a thing happening to
them directly and a thing happening to a friend who actually just
heard about it from someone who saw it on Inside Edition the other
night. And where, pray tell, is the broccoli rape?” He pronounced
rape with relish, and his eyes dared the women in the room to take
foolish, inexcusable, feminine offense.
“I threw it out,” Sarah told him. “It was wilted.”
“You threw it out? Lord, forgive us for our waste. The water is on
fire, our towns are sinking into piles of garbage, and you’d waste
food? Eli!”
“Yo!” Eli called back from across the room.
“Is there any rape left in the garden?”
 Eli (bless him, Isabel thought) didn’t rise to it. “There are mustard
greens.”
“Si. Pronto!”
Eli left through a patio door. The temperature had dropped after
sunset, and the cool night came quickly through the open door.
“Well,” said Abbie, unwrapping the pasta dough and throwing it onto
the counter with a thwack, then wiggling his chubby, floury fingers at
Isabel: “Isabellissima. Have you got strong hands?”

• • •

You’d wonder—Isabel wondered—how she could possibly have

remained enamored after actually meeting the miserable, fat old
fuck. Well, she had an ulterior motive. But beyond a desire to
discover if what her mother said about him was true, she was also
independently fascinated by him. They were alone after dinner. Isaac
had returned just before they’d all eaten with his friend Jake in tow.
Jake was a striking, young, light-skinned black man; Isabel had
imagined that he’d look just like Isaac, even though Isaac had
already described him, and she chastised herself for it. He wore his
hair in a modest Afro that had a bit of the seventies to it. He wore
thick, plastic-framed glasses like men wore in the control room when
Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, but they were merely
fashionable, not necessary. He joined them at the table. Strozzapreti
with tomato and mustard greens and flecks of red pepper. “And cacio
de Roma,” Abbie yelled at them. “Not Parmigiano!” Abbie ate
voraciously. Like a lot of good cooks, he hardly paused to taste his
own food. Eli and Isaac both ate like Europeans, fork in left hand and
knife in right. Jake was left-handed and ate without the knife. Sarah
didn’t eat much but occasionally moved the pile of noodles weakly
around the plate. Isaac and Jake told Isabel how they’d met.
“We had English together. And then gym. And health class. With
that racist pedo Eddie Milano.”
“Isaac,” said Sarah.
For someone who claimed to have hated his childhood, to have,
as he said, “barely escaped alive,” Isaac inhabited a state of
perpetual nostalgia for the country of his youth. Maybe it had really
been terrible, and the passage of time alone had whittled it down to a
skein of grotesque but funny anecdotes, or maybe it had never been
so bad and he only claimed it to excuse some of his worse habits. Or
maybe a bit of both. Contra the truism, we don’t look backward with
perfect vision. We drive relentlessly forward into the dark, and when
we glance occasionally into the rearview mirror, the objects are
never so clearly positioned, and they are closer than they appear.
After they ate, Sarah did the dishes, or anyway made a
pantomime of doing the dishes. She’d eaten practically nothing and
drank a good deal more, and she stood at the sink, staring off
absently and rubbing a sponge weakly around one dish, over and
over. Eli disappeared; he’d learned to vanish as quickly and quietly
as a cat, slipping off to one of his private retreats around the house
to be left alone. Isaac and Jake went back to Isaac’s outpost to get
stoned; they announced this at the table, but no one else seemed to
care. Isabel imagined that she was supposed to join them, but Isaac
waved her off. “Catch up with us later,” he said. “I brought you to
meet Abbie.” He gestured to his father like a man presenting a new
product on television. “Meet Abbie.”
“Perhaps Abbie wishes to retire to his study with a cigar,” Abbie
said.
“Isabel likes cigars,” Isaac said.
“Not especially.”
“Take a digestif with me on the patio,” Abbie said.
On the patio, Abbie asked if she was cold. She said she wasn’t,
although she was. He appeared to contemplate putting his arm
around her but to think the better of it. Isabel shouldn’t have felt
grateful for this minor decency, but she’d spent her life awkwardly
shrugging off the hands of men who thought they were doing her a
favor, and if minor decency was insufficient, then at least it salved for
just a moment the general indecency of living in a world with so
many men.
“So Barry Fitzgerald,” Abbie said.
“Barry Fitzgerald.”
“The Future Cities Institute. It has a science-fictional quality that I
wouldn’t expect in him. It conjures up flying cars and endless rain,
George Jetson amongst the Bladerunners.”
 “No flying cars,” Isabel said. “We’re much more mundane. Our
biggest project is the Race to 2050. I didn’t come up with the name.”
She smiled ruefully. “We get all the big property owners in town, the
universities and the big corporate landlords downtown and the
hospitals and such to pledge to reduce energy use in their buildings
by fifty percent by twenty-fifty.” She laughed. “It’s a, quote, voluntary,
non-binding pledge. So you can imagine.”
“Oh, I know all about your employer. He stole the idea from me.”
Abbie sounded proud rather than aggrieved. “Whole cloth.” He
rattled the ice in his glass and smiled. “Not the name, though. What
a thoroughly queer name. Yes, I used to give a talk in which I pointed
out that while the general focus of energy-savings programs was
vehicular efficiency, in fact the largest consumers of energy were
commercial and industrial buildings, followed by homes. The amount
of carbon you burn to keep the lights on in a typical American house
significantly exceeds the output of an automobile. And you can
imagine”—he gestured behind him—“how much this thing takes. I
designed it to be geothermal and solar powered, of course. When
the world’s wells run dry and the oil is gone and the vast human
herds get moving once again, I intended to be right here burning the
eternal flame. I actually got sued by the utility, the fucks. Yes, it is
illegal to be a net contributor to the grid. I could’ve gone entirely off,
of course, but Sarah worried, and I acquiesced. The key to a good
marriage is acquiescence, in large quantities.”
“I would have thought honesty.”
“Lord, no.”
Now Isabel smiled, and she allowed a needle in her voice.
“Would you say yours was a good marriage?”
“Ahhh,” Abbie sucked more whiskey. “She’s sharper than she
looks. I thought that must be the case. I took one look at you, and I
thought, video et taceo.”
“I don’t know that one.”
“Elizabeth I. ‘I see, and I am silent.’ You even share the name.”
“That’s a flattering comparison.”
“The answer to your question is yes, actually. Sarah tolerates my
outrageousness, and I tolerate her purposeful decline. We both
aspire to the dutiful eccentricities of our respective sexes. I will be a
grandiose old kook, and she will be a dotty old lady with a fondness
for gin. You young folks think that sounds like an awful settlement,
but great dynasties have been built on less.”
“I probably shouldn’t argue that latter point.”
“Regarding your employer, to get back to it: it’s a noble effort,
actually. I’m a fatalist, but that doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate a
good try, however destined to fail. Look down there.” Isabel looked
where he was pointing, out over the dark, descending forest to
Uniontown, twelve hundred feet below and miles away, glowing
against the dark ground like the luminescent creatures sparkling in
the wash of the waves of a nighttime ocean. “One day,” Abbie said,
“the lights are going to go out. This is a popular topic in fiction, these
days. The scuttling about of humans in the immediate post-
apocalypse. The dull horror stories of surviving in the wreck of
civilization. But they make the same error that we make in
anticipating our own end, whether that leads us to welcome it or to
try to forestall it. That is the failure to look at the longue durée.”
“Lucien Febvre,” Isabel said. She was proud of herself for
remembering.
“Marc Bloch, really. I’ve always thought. But they never went far
enough. They still thought in terms of history and economy. But
history and economy are nothing in the long run. Let me tell you
about the long run. In the long run, the story of the survivors of the
carbon age is even briefer and less significant than the age itself.
Whether we make it another hundred years or a hundred thousand.
The lights will go off, and the tall grasses and vines will grow over it
all, and the continents will move into unfamiliar arrangements, and
should God ever see fit to curse another animal with our terrible,
pandemic self-consciousness, all they’ll ever find of all of this will be
a thin layer in the geologic strata that suggests sometime, millions of
years before, a befuddling environmental catastrophe occurred, a
strange outpouring of carbon into the atmosphere, a swift extinction
of a strange number of species. They’ll argue whether it was an
asteroid or a volcano.”
“That’s a despairing vision.”
“Is it? I think not.”
 “I still like to think we could be better stewards of the natural
world.”
He laughed and placed a hand on her shoulder, almost familial.
She shivered, and she did not feel compelled to shrug it away.
“Stewards? You see, that’s our arrogance, as a species. Even in
meaning well, we claim dominion. We are imperialists to the core.”
“Well,” Isabel said, thinking she could tweak him a little, “didn’t
God grant us dominion?”
“Even God errs,” Abbie said.
“Does she?”
He spread his arms like a conductor before an orchestra. “Are we
not incontestable evidence of His immense folly?” Then, humming
Rigoletto’s lalalas from “Povero Rigoletto,” he left her and walked
back into the house. A few seconds later, he leaned back out of the
door and said, “And do stay close to the house, my dear. There is a
monster in the woods.”

• • •

That night she watched Isaac lounge on a couch and get terrifically
stoned and lay his head and legs suggestively or invitingly on Jake’s
lap, who seemed disinclined to return the affection in kind in front of
her, although he was certainly not uncomfortable receiving it. They
listened to a scratchy vinyl recording of Sawyer Brown, playing “All I
Can Do Is Cry” again and again on a beautiful old Marantz that must
once have been Abbie’s. Isabel begged off to bed, thinking she’d
read, since the bedroom opened right onto the room below, and
there’d be no dulling the music or Isaac’s never-ending giggling, but
the beer and wine and scotch had gone to her head, and she woke
up at sunrise the next morning with a thin, three-ring binder
butterflied across her chest. She’d wandered through Abbie’s library
before returning to Isaac’s side of the compound, and found, right
there on a shelf with the books he’d authored himself, this transcript
of a long-ago arbitration, in which Abbie and his sister and their
lawyers argued about who had the rights to the proceeds from the
sale of a vast tract of land. She found Jake and Isaac still asleep on
the couch, clothed mostly, though they seemed to have lost their
shirts at some point. She stepped softly past and walked to the main
house, which felt empty. She quietly returned the binder to its shelf
and then padded to the kitchen. There was a kettle on the stove, and
after a little poking around, she found both tea and an old metal
traveler’s mug. She made herself a cup of Lady Grey—it seemed an
odd variety to have lying around—and then walked outside.
It was a cold morning. There was a gray hoodie slung
haphazardly across the arm of a deck chair. Isabel assumed it must
belong to Eli and pulled it on. Having nothing else to do, the house
sleeping, she decided to walk around the property. She set off
across the broken terraces and the meadow toward the tree line
below. Uniontown looked less lovely in daylight, a grayish-brown
bloom like lichen on a rock, but it disappeared from view as she
approached the tree line. The woods were attractive, the trees
spaced evenly with little undergrowth other than an astonishment of
ferns sprouting from the dead leaves. She saw a hint of a trail and
followed it. Isabel had grown up in the city, and her experience with
woodland in her youth was mostly limited to the imagination of
Frederick Law Olmstead, although there had been one fall in which
Isabel’s mother convinced herself that the two of them would take a
road trip to New England for the leaves. Isabel was fourteen then.
Their brittle camaraderie had broken down on the second day in the
sort of mutual recrimination and acrimony that only mothers and
daughters who really love each other are capable of, and they
returned home, garnering a speeding ticket in Connecticut that only
made things worse. What Isabel remembered most about that trip
was that it was the first time her mother had mentioned the fact that
her father had been married to another woman. It was during an
argument brought on when Cathy had playfully asked Isabel if she
had a boyfriend, and Isabel had replied, with all the seriousness she
could manage, that she had “plenty of them.”
She went to college closer to nature but continued to avoid it.
Madison wasn’t without woods, but while her friends would go
tromping off on hikes, either because they didn’t feel like drinking
that weekend or else to spend a weekend drinking someplace cool,
she rarely joined. But since moving to Pittsburgh, she’d made an
effort; she’d visited Raccoon Creek and Moraine State Parks and
gone with Barry one weekend to a cabin owned by an adviser of the
Institute. The cabin was in Allegheny National Forest, but it turned
out to be just a hundred yards from a gas well access road, and the
weekend was ruined by the uninterrupted rumbling of tankers going
to and from the site. But it was Frick Park that had really convinced
her that she could like nature, or its approximation. A heavily wooded
six hundred acres in the middle of the city’s East End, it was all shale
cliffs and gullies and dogs and deer and the uncanny sense, even on
the wide, crushed gravel trails, that this was what that city had been
before it was a city, and this was what it would be after the city was
gone.
She’d started running. She was closer to forty than she cared to
think about, and she could no longer be effortlessly thin. She’d been
a runner in high school and college, then dropped it for years. She
didn’t like it, but she liked that she did it anyway. She would run from
her house down through the pretty blocks of 1940s’ houses in
Regent Square, cross Braddock Avenue and follow Hamilton past all
the four-bedrooms and the occasional English-style cottage to the
edge of the park, then half-stumble down the steep path to the Lower
Frick parking lot. She’d run along the restored Nine Mile Run,
through wetlands full of crickets and frogs, beneath a housing
development on land that someone other than Veronica Mayer and
Phil Harrow had eventually developed instead of them, until the end
of the trail where the stream emptied into the Monongahela River.
But a park, however canopied and wild it’s been permitted to
remain, is still a park, and a forest is a forest; the one resembles the
other as a man does the god in whose image he was made—an
image that’s also and only a remnant of the thing itself. What she’d
thought was a trail had died out. An experienced hiker could have
oriented herself by the slope of the land, but Isabel was almost
immediately lost. She’d been walking for ten minutes. She knew this
made her comical, a city girl who gets lost before she’s gone a
quarter mile, but laughing at herself didn’t diminish her sudden
unease. She found herself in a denser thicket, surrounded by high
clumps of waxy, impenetrable mountain laurel, the air still, without
even the sound of birds—also dark, because it was early yet, and
the steeply angled post-dawn light cast only a vestigial glow, like the
last embers of a bonfire. Looking around, forcing herself to remain
calm, she only saw more trees and more mountain laurels. The
slope was now subtle and harder to discern. She heard a sound—
she thought from behind her, but she couldn’t tell—and all of her
good sense and self-possession fled. She thought of Abbie winking
at her and telling her that there was a monster in the woods. A
monster! As if anything could be so absurd.
There are so many things we won’t admit to ourselves, desires
and fears mostly. Isabel, for instance, was mildly afraid of the dark;
at home, she didn’t mind, but even in a hotel room, she’d keep a light
burning in the bathroom all night. She was an easily panicked driver.
When she didn’t know the way, she’d turn down the radio, as if that
would help to navigate. She was afraid of revolving doors and had to
put down her panic every time she accompanied Barry to the offices
of the Carnegie Endowment downtown. And now she was—to her
chagrin—afraid of some spectral presence in a forest, the silliest fear
of all.
She stood as still as she could. That’s what people did. They
didn’t pound off into the forest or grab the baseball bat and descend
the stairs to investigate the sound in the night. They pulled the
covers closer and convinced themselves it was nothing. They turned
their heads imperceptibly to see what was behind them and hoped
that they’d find nothing there but their own mind imposing pattern
and presence on nothing at all. Isabel held her body rigid, and she
turned her head imperceptibly, toggling her eyes as far as they would
go to get a glimpse behind her, canting them so hard that it hurt. She
didn’t see anything. Slowly, very slowly, she rotated the other way
and did the same. She didn’t see anything. She sighed, a long slow
exhalation. She’d been holding her shoulders stiffly in place, and she
let them slump. She closed her eyes, and she opened them. She
nearly screamed and choked it into a rough cough. There was big
buck stepping out of the laurels. We consider ourselves observant
until forced to realize the basic weakness of the human sense of
sight. How had she missed that clot of brown in the sprawl of green?
She hadn’t been looking for it, and so she hadn’t seen it. The animal
was fifteen feet from her, no farther than the far side of a big living
room. She hoped that it would bound away when it saw her, right
back into the bushes, but of course, it had seen her—smelled her,
heard her—long before she’d seen it, and it had walked out anyway.
It regarded her placidly with one black eye. There was something
disconcerting about the gaze of an animal that lacked the binocular
arrangement of human eyes. What did its other eye see, and how
did it reconcile those two different visions into a single image in its
brain? Its new antlers were wide and covered in velvet. It looked at
her for a while, and Isabel looked at it. Then a slight breeze kicked
from behind her, and the deer’s nostrils flared. It made a sound like a
bark or a cough of its own, and it bounded back the way it had come.
She’d been holding her breath. She collected herself for a
moment. She was still lost. But then she heard the sounds of
engines and of men behaving foolishly somewhere off to her left.
She followed them, tripping through the low branches, and she was
embarrassed when she emerged into the field not two minutes later.
She’d been just a couple of hundred yards beyond the edge of the
trees the whole time. Up by the house, Eli and Isaac and Abbie and
Jake had hitched a pickup to the back of Abbie’s wrecked Land
Rover and were attempting to drag it away from the tree against
which it leaned. They weren’t having any success, but they all
seemed to be having great fun, even Isaac, who was the last person
anyone would have expected to enjoy that sort of emphatically male
entertainment. “Where were you?” asked Isaac.
“Taking a walk,” Isabel said. She felt as if she must be covered in
leaves and patted her hair. “Everyone was asleep.”
“Asleep,” Isaac giggled.
Abbie was wearing hiking boots and a huge terrycloth bathrobe
with the Marriott logo sewn into the breast. “I hope you didn’t venture
too far into our little forest,” he said.
“No. I did see a deer, though.”
“Did you hear that, Abbie?” Isaac turned on his father with a
complicated expression.
“I did.”
“Abbie’s spirit animal is the deer,” Isaac told her in that tone of his
that implied she’d be over-literal to interpret it merely as a sneer.
Eli leaned out of the window of the truck and said, “Isaac, come
help me,” even though there was nothing for Isaac to do.
 Isabel pretended not to notice the swift tension between Isaac
and his father. She smiled at Abbie and said, “I did not, I’m pleased
to report, run into anything monstrous, though.”
“Oh no?” said Isaac.
Abbie ignored him and told Isabel to come in for coffee. She did,
and that was when he told her, without prompting and in great detail,
about the vision he’d been granted in the temple many years before.
When she was safely back in Pittsburgh, safely back at work, she
went to lunch with Barry. They sat in the little amber dining room of
the teahouse on Atwood, where she’d had lunch with Sawyer not a
month before, eating the same oily curry noodles, and she told him
about the trip. She told him that she found them all very weird. “I
thought I liked weird people,” she said, “but those are some weird
people.”
Barry told her she wasn’t wrong, but, he said, it would be a good
idea for her to keep up this friendship with Isaac.
“Why?” She laughed. “I mean, they don’t give us any money, do
they?”
Barry looked around as if there might be spies, which was his
funny affectation before he spilled an especially good piece of
gossip. “Iz, come on? You didn’t notice?”
“What?”
“Imlak is that kid’s dad. Everybody knows.”
“Jesus, really?”
“Compare the noses. Why do you think I keep him around? For
Abbie Mayer? What’s he done lately?”
“Oh,” she said. “Oh.”
 7

The basic error in every conspiracy theory is that the conspiracy

theorist believes, a priori, that the conspirators know what the
conspiracy is, but plans carried out in secret are no more immune to
dumb momentum, inattention, and decay than those acted out in the
open. Maybe less so. It would be giving Abbie and Veronica and
Phillip Harrow too much credit to assign devilish intentionality to
every detail of their crass land grab. In the month or so since the
young Barry Fitzgerald had tipped Abbie and Phil off in the dusty
hallway outside of the zoning board, Phil and Veronica had quietly
pestered their couple of contacts in the Charleston and Harrisburg
statehouses respectively, harried midlevel legislative staffers who’d
passed their middle thirties without moving on to Washington, who’d
hitched their careers to the wrong sorts of idiots and madmen.
They’d tell you anything for the price of a costly steak and some
booze. There was indeed a plan, or actually, a set of three or four
competing plans, to build a new highway route along and through the
half-ruined towns of the Monongahela Valley, a decaying industrial
artery of the Steel City, and onward through the collapsed coal
economy of Fayette County and down to Morgantown, West Virginia,
which was already connected to Pittsburgh via interstate but stood to
gain a bunch of construction jobs and federal highway dollars. This
was all predicated on a vague theory that the road would somehow
revitalize the economies of Donora and Monessen and Charleroi and
Brownsville, the actual mechanics of which no one could quite
diagram or explain.
 The Mayer-Harrow triumvirate had an incidental, or exigent,
interest in the highway. Though Harrow had built plenty of roads and
interchanges over the years, the truth was that big infrastructure was
a jobs program; highways were constituent bribes, high cost but low
margin; the loose millions and billions that flowed into them went
mostly to payroll, and state and federal contracts made contractors
responsible for cost overruns. Since the jobs were bid out and
awarded to the lowest responsible bidder, even the opportunities to
pad out an estimate and build profit into the budget were
constrained.
Housing, on the other hand, was profitable, especially if the land
was cheap. There was a great deal of underdeveloped and rural land
between Pittsburgh and Uniontown, rolling acres that would be just a
half an hour from the city with a proper highway connection, ideal for
the development of bedroom communities, a phrase that Harrow had
begun repeating with talismanic intensity, as if it might abracadabra
the idea into existence. And so they decided to get involved in the
bid process on the dream highway, to get in early on the decision
about the road’s final route, to figure out as best they could the
location of future exits, and in so doing, to give themselves an early
opportunity to buy up the best parcels for future development,
cheaply and quietly, before any other speculators or developers got
to it.
Whichever route it took in the end, the longest stretch of the
highway would pass through Fayette County. “It’s time to call Sherri
Larimer,” Harrow said.
Phil and Veronica had arranged the meeting, and they’d all
loaded into Phil’s big car and floated on its glossy suspension over
the potholes on Route 51. They crossed 70 and went past the Knotty
Pine and the Cedarbrook Golf Course and up the long slow hill that
crested right around Blue Top Road and then down the steeper side,
past the car dealerships, into Perryopolis, a tiny borough noted
principally for its auto auction and its speed trap.
In fact, there was a pretty little village, frame houses and a
patriotic town square, a half mile east of the highway. If you could
call 51 a highway. Years later, a woman named Beth Yuell who’d
once cooked with Alice Waters out in California moved there and
bought one of those old houses on a half-acre lot and turned it into a
bed-and-breakfast-cum-restaurant. She bought quail from local
hunters, and in the spring, she went up into the mountains with her
golden Lab and brought back muddy paper bags full of morels,
which she served with the white asparagus that she grew herself on
another plot of land she’d bought on the other side of the river. She
told Abbie that she’d come back—she’d been born in Belle Vernon,
twenty miles away on a different river—in order to make less money
and get more for it. She’d given Isaac his first, his only, job when he
was in high school. He waited tables there for six months to save
money for a three-thousand-dollar bike that Abbie refused to buy for
him and then stopped showing up. Years later, when he was in
college, he showed up with a half case of Chateau Margaux. His
apology, he said. Beth didn’t ask where it had come from, although
she had a fair idea.
But that was all yet to happen. That day, the proprietors of MH
Partners, LLC and Mayer Design Lab were to meet Sherri Larimer at
Marge’s, which was on the side of the southbound lane of 51, just
before the auto auction. Marge’s had a reputation as a titty bar, a
reputation that was confirmed or compounded, depending, by the
presence of the by-the-hour Perry-O Motel a mile or so farther down
51. The Perry-O was reputedly the nexus of area prostitution, and it
was also a popular spot, at the time, for married men who preferred
to have sex with each other rather than with their wives, in part, one
supposed, because if ever spotted on the premises, they could
reasonably claim to have been screwing hookers, which was better
than being queer. Regardless, Marge’s specific reputation was
undeserved. It was a dive, to be sure, a windowless pile of cinder
block with a grease-clogged fry fan sprouting from the rear wall like
an oozing pimple on a featureless face, and there were surely
women—and men—here and there, who’d exchange hurried sex in a
parked car for a little drug money, but the owner-bartender was a
ham-armed woman named Bev who lived with her third husband (a
genial but quiet former truck driver now on the Social Security of his
late first wife) in a single-wide trailer out back. “I don’t need a bunch
of meth-sick drop-outs shakin their asses to nig-nog music on my
bar,” she told Abbie, months later, when he’d tried to joke with her
about the bar’s reputation. He’d raised a skeptical eyebrow—mostly
to convince himself that he wasn’t a passive recipient of such an
overtly racist comment—then quickly changed the subject and asked
why the bar was called Marge’s if her name was Bev.
She lifted his glass and wiped underneath. “Marge was my old
man’s first wife.”
“Oh. I take it she moved on,” Abbie said.
Bev looked sidelong down the bar to Sherri Larimer, and when
Abbie followed her glance, Sherri cracked an evil grin and said, “Oh,
yeah. She moved on.”
This first time Abbie visited Marge’s, though, Bev was frying
something or other in the back and only came out to introduce
herself brusquely to the Pittsburghers and give a deferential nod to
Larimer. They were served by a thin man in a tank top that exposed
a Styx tattoo on his shoulder. There were a few midday drunks
smoking cigarettes and watching soaps on the tiny TV on a shelf
above the chips and pretzels. Sherri and Billy, her older son, were at
a picnic table in the back. She was smoking her slims.
This was before Sherri became county commissioner, although
she was already rumored to be the money behind Ron Cavignac, the
then-sitting commissioner whom she’d eventually replace. The
Larimers had some real estate holdings—rentals, mostly—in
Fayette, Washington, and Greene counties, as well as their land
down in West Virginia. Sherri lived in a great gaudy mansion on a hill
above the village of Smock. Her husband, an amiable and stupid
man from an amiable and stupid Brownsville family, was nominally in
charge of the family’s most openly profitable business: combination
miniature golf courses and shooting ranges, the Hole-in-Gun chain,
of which there were three in Fayette County, one in Greene, and one
down in West Virginia just outside of Morgantown. There were
rumors that the Larimers also funneled most of the meth, heroin, and
coke into the tri-county area. Harrow thought these were only
rumors, perpetuated by the Larimers themselves as a prop to their
reputation as hard-assed local kingmakers. Veronica thought it was
entirely possible that they were drug dealers and used their
properties to launder the ill-gotten cash.
 Veronica had told Abbie to keep quiet. “These people are
suspicious,” she said, “and they require a delicate touch.” So, of
course, the first thing he did after introductions all around was to
gesture grandly at the bar and tell Sherri that he loved her
conference room.
Veronica looked at Harrow, and Harrow looked at Veronica, and
they both waited for Sherri to explode or instruct Billy to threaten
everyone with a pistol or some such Larimeresque stunt, but she
laughed and shook Abbie’s hand and said, “Shit. I like this one!” She
pumped his hand again. “The new guy.”
“Well, thanks,” said Abbie. “I hope it’s the beginning of a fruitful
relationship.”
“Fruitful,” repeated Bill. He giggled, then narrowed his eyes.
“Shut up, boy,” said Sherri. “Why are you so goddamn obsessed
with homos? It means productive. Profitable.” She studied Abbie for
a moment. “Nice suit,” she said at last.
“You ever read the Wall Street Journal?” Abbie asked.
“Abbie,” said Phil.
Sherri tapped her finger twice on the table, in a sign that Harrow
and Veronica had learned to interpret as something like a threat.
“On occasion,” said Sherri. “The truth is that I ain’t real big on
what you might call the Wall-Street mentality. I prefer to make my
money the tangible way, if you know what I mean.”
“Surely,” said Abbie. “I’m an architect by trade. Perhaps we have
that in common. The tangible. I only brought it up, because if you
ever read the Journal, you’ll notice that from time to time, there are
these ads for Hong Kong tailors who come to New York, and you can
go and pay, oh, five thousand bucks, and he’ll make you five suits,
ten shirts, and two hard-boiled eggs. Well, I always thought it was a
joke, but then one day, my wife said to me, ‘Abbie Mayer, you need
some new suits,’ and pointed out one of these ads. And I said,
‘Sarah, that’s got to be a scam.’ I’m a native of the New York
Babylon, so I assume everything is a scam. And she said, ‘No. My
father used to go to these guys.’ And her father, let me tell you, had
some very nice suits. So I went downtown to where this little guy
from Hong Kong had set up shop, and sure enough, he made me the
nicest suits I ever had.”
 “I like a man in a suit.” Sherri eyed Harrow, who was in his typical
golf shirt and khakis.
“What?” Harrow said.
“Phil and Veronica here once tried to screw me in a deal, but
Ray-Ray pulled a knife on their suit, and he crapped in his pants.”
“That’s not quite fair,” Veronica protested. “You made good
money.”
“Not quite fair,” said Larimer. “Not quite. But yinz originally came
down there with some suppositions about my sort of people.”
“Well,” said Abbie, “that’s why I’m here.” He gestured to his sister,
on his left, and to Harrow, on his right. “I am,” he said, “the people
person.”
“Can we get down to it?” asked Veronica. “I don’t mean to be the
bitch who always talks business, but I’m going to be that bitch.”
“Let’s,” said Sherri. “What do yinz drink?”
Veronica and Harrow stuck with ginger ale. Abbie asked for a
Sambuca. “Really, Abbie?” said Veronica. She indicated with her
eyes that this was not that type of bar.
Abbie in turn grinned at Sherri. “I deduce,” he said, “from her
name and bearing that Sherri here’s got some Italian in her, from
way back, and I bet there’s some Sambuca in this bar.”
“Take this one to Vegas,” Sherri told Veronica. She gestured
toward the back bar. “Now, like the lady said. Let’s get down to it.
Phil here told me the general outlines on the phone. Okay. I’m game,
in theory. But I don’t see how the hell anyone here makes money
building a damn highway, except Phil, of course. Even Phil. Shit,
you’ll have to underbid cost to get the low bid anyway.”
“We’re not going to build the highway,” said Veronica.
“Well, not the whole highway,” Harrow added.
“We’re more interested in the idea of the highway,” Abbie said.
“The concept.”
“The concept.” Larimer appeared amused. Two shots of clear
Sambuca appeared between her and Abbie. She lifted hers, he lifted
his, she tossed hers back, he tossed his back. “Did you ever actually
build a highway, Phil?”
“Ramps and interchanges.”
 “Oh, I see,” Larimer said. She nodded and tapped another
cigarette out of her pack.
“Do you?” Abbie cocked his head.
“Shit, Mr. New York, I wasn’t born at night. So what, you got
another Wal-Mart up your sleeve?”
“Better,” Veronica told her. “Subdivisions.”
“Bedroom communities,” Harrow added.
Larimer considered it. “I follow. Sure.”
“I don’t get it,” said Billy.
Sherri slapped the table. The drinks rattled. “Do you need to get
it, boy? Will you go play darts? Here.” She pulled a wallet out of her
purse and a few bills from the wallet. “Take the car down the road
and get me some of that fudge at the fudge store.”
“Aw, ma.”
“Get me some goddamn fudge, boy, or I’ll bust your eggs. And
scramble them.”
“Yes ma’am.” He skulked out, but not without turning once in the
bright doorway and projecting an angry look back into the room.
“That boy.” Larimer shook her head and found a cigarette. “Any of
yinz got kids?”
“Three boys,” said Harrow.
“I know about your kids, Phil. I’m talking to these two.”
Veronica shook her head. Abbie said, “Not yet.”
“You want mine? I got two and another one on the way. Though I
ain’t showing yet. If there’s any eggs I oughta bust, it’s my goddamn
old man’s. Anyway, where were we?”
“In order to build the thing,” Veronica said, “you’ve got to
assemble the land. The right-of-way. And then you’ve got to figure
out your exits and on-ramps, where you’re going to connect to the
local roads. The majority of this thing is going to pass through
Fayette County. I mean, we’ve looked at the topographic maps, and
there are only so many routes the thing can take. We figure probably
sixty percent of the overall mileage will be down here. So we’ve got
two issues. One issue is we’ve got to get a better sense of the route,
and that’s really why we get involved in bidding, but also, that’s a big
piece of construction, and we need someone with your . . .
connections in the local power structure as well. And issue two is we
need to quietly and quickly acquire the acreage we’ll need down the
road, so to speak.”
“To build the fuckers.”
“Yes,” Veronica agreed, “to build the fuckers.”
Sherri Larimer took a long drag. “That ain’t bad,” she said. “That
ain’t bad. Although you ain’t the only ones to think of it, that’s for
sure.”
“No,” Veronica agreed, “probably not, which is why time is of the
essence.”
“Well sure,” Sherri nodded. “But at the same time, you don’t want
to rush in. It’d be too obvious to anyone else trying to buy up the
same property.”
“Who else would be buying the same property?” Harrow asked.
“It’s hypothetical,” Sherri said. “You familiar with the term?”
Harrow grumbled.
Larimer said, “The other thing—issue three, you might say, Miss
Lawyer—is that you can’t just go buying all that land around a brand-
new, hell, not-built highway if you’re also proposing to build it.
There’s gonna be rules against that.”
“Oh, that’s where I come in,” Abbie said. Veronica noted a
change in his manner; she’d assumed he’d view the whole thing with
a prissy moral reluctance, although, needing the money, he’d come
around. Instead, he was warming up to a role as some kind of
brassy, hilarious gangster. He was probably trying to impress
Larimer, but she knew how easily Abbie could fall into a good role.
He said, “I’m the patsy.” He grinned. “The real question,” he added,
“is whether or not you think you can wrangle the prized information
out of one or other of your charming local officials, and whether or
not you can assist in convincing the Farmer Browns and Miner
Smiths around here to sell cheap and sell fast and keep their traps
shut when they do.”
She tapped her finger once, twice on the table. “Surely I can,”
she said. “Why, I’m a major benefactor, I think you’d say, around
these parts.”
“This is some good Sambuca, by the way,” Abbie said. Another
had arrived, and he was sipping it. “The black bottle, if I’m not
wrong.”
 “You’re not wrong.” She took his glass and sipped from the
opposite side of the rim. “I always did have a taste for licorice.” She
sighed. “Keeps ya regular.”

• • •

They’d ended the meeting with Harrow suggesting that Sherri let it
percolate for a few weeks, and then, on a weird, cold day in
November when freezing rain and an early snow entombed the trees
and their unfallen leaves in grotesque, translucent cocoons, Sherri
called Veronica in the morning and said they had better come down
to Uniontown to finish their chat. They met Larimer at the old Mt.
Vernon Inn, a sagging motor-court lodge whose shrink-wrapped and
mostly unoccupied rooms remained open only to justify the existence
of the inn’s actual and profitable business, which was its large and
raucous bar. It was all later torn down to make room for a Walgreens;
all the good places, Abbie would tell you, were sacrificed to
uniformity. Abbie thought it would be funny to spend the night there,
but Sherri Larimer told him it wasn’t for people like him, and she
ordered him to book rooms at the Holiday Inn out past the mall
instead. Harrow, who’d come up separately, said he’d just drive back
to Morgantown. “You might be drunk,” Veronica told him.
“I’ll certainly be drunk. What’s that got to do with it?”
Larimer had insisted that they meet at nine on a Friday night. The
bar was packed with men on a rough approach to fifty and a few
equally rough, if generally younger, women, who were all angled to
gaze mournfully at the drunks walking too carefully past the
unattended hostess desk and around the round tables between the
front door and their sweating drinks. The whole place smelled of an
ashtray left out in the rain. There was a band playing on a riser at the
far end of the room. They mostly played Little Feat covers. Larimer
bought drinks and insisted they listen to a set. Harrow rolled his eyes
and spent the next thirty minutes watching a muted baseball game
on a tiny TV over the bar and stuffing stale pretzel rods into his
mouth. The screen was so fuzzed with static that one of the drunks
beside him leaned over and mumbled through his cigarette, “Hey,
buddy, is this TV fucked up, or am I fucked up?”
 “TV looks fine to me,” Harrow told him.
“Christ,” the man muttered.
Abbie grinned and chuckled and sang along with the band and
occasionally tapped Larimer with a collegial elbow at some song lyric
that they both found funny. “What’s their name?” he yelled.
“Who?” Larimer shouted back. She drank Seven and Seven and
smoked slims.
“What’s the band called?”
“Alimony.”
Abbie’s smile grew. “Where’d they come up with that?”
Larimer chuckled and tapped ash onto the floor. “Where do you
think?” she bellowed.
Veronica spent the half hour wondering why she’d ever given up
the practice of ordinary law if the price of prosperity was this
constant mucking about in the poorest places in America. Like all of
the Mayers, she was essentially a snob; unlike them, she admitted it.
She’d done very well in this business, keeping her partnerships and
exposure limited, using other people’s money to buy and build things
from which she profited, and well. Unlike her former law firm—or any
law firm—there weren’t any old men in her way. Yes, she still had to
conduct a lot of her business through conduits like Phil Harrow, this
male-drag-at-a-distance necessitated by the same sexist systems
that would have delayed and stymied her rise in the grotesque
fraternity of the practice of law, but at least here this self-
diminishment was purely instrumental, albeit still unjust in its
necessity.
Her partner, Edith, argued this point with her. She thought these
male proxies were absurd for someone of Veronica’s intelligence and
accomplishment. Veronica pointed out that Edith had worked for
Harrow, and Edith would just give a thin smile and say, “But I’m not
you.” Veronica occasionally worried that they’d fallen into an
insupportable, gender-normative relationship in which she fulfilled
the typically male role in the household with Edith as the supportive
wife, but wasn’t that inevitable? For all she wanted to be innocent of
the wrongheadedness around her, wasn’t she ultimately tainted by it
no matter what she did? Didn’t everyone fulfill, even in their small
rebellions, the very inequities that they’d rebelled against?
 After the set was over, Larimer led them through a service door
and into a storage area stacked with folding tables and chairs. The
band had hauled down a couple of tables and turned the place into a
makeshift green room, but three of them skedaddled back to the bar
when Larimer came in, all but the frontman, a fat guy with a shiny
head and a vaguely professorial air derived mainly from the patches
on the elbows of his jacket. He was smoking a joint. “Hey Sherri,” he
said. “I was just hittin’ this nag champa. I’ll be going.”
“No, Bob. You stick around.”
Bob flicked the joint nervously and sent an appealing glance
toward Veronica, Abbie, and Harrow.
“Don’t look at them, Bobby. Look at me.”
“Sorry, Sherri. I didn’t mean anything.”
Veronica noted that unlike Larimer, unlike most of the people
she’d encountered in Uniontown, this fat stoner spoke a perfectly
uninflected American English.
“I’m sure you didn’t think you did, but I seen you looking. Don’t
worry, you can go on smoking that weed.”
“You mind? I mean, this looks serious.” He glanced around again,
caught himself, and dipped his head to look at the floor.
“I don’t mind. I insist.”
“Thanks.” He hit the joint. “All that smoke out there really gets to
me.”
Veronica raised and lowered her foot and said, “Not to be the
lawyer of the group, but maybe we ought to find somewhere more
private.” She indicated Bob with a tilt of her head. Like a lot of
lawyers, Veronica believed only provisionally in the law, but she had
a rigorous, almost religious reverence for the forms of confidentiality.
“If you don’t mind, of course, Sherri.”
“Nah,” said Larimer, and she swung her leg over the back of a
chair and sat, folding her arms across its back. “Mr. Krupp is my
main man. He’s got his finger on the pulse.”
“What pulse is that?” asked Veronica.
“The pulse of Uniontown.”
“Not much of a pulse,” said Harrow.
“Phil, shut the fuck up. Bob,” Larimer ordered, “tell them what you
told me.”
 “Ah, man, Sherri. Look, I just was a little short on the child
support, and I—”
“No, Jerry goddamn Garcia. Not about the loan. We’ll talk about
that later. Tell them about the road.”
“Well.” He took a fortifying hit. “Okay. I was drinking the other
night over at the Titlow Tavern. We had a gig. And I heard Marv
Edison tell Patrick Dell that he heard from Jerry Rittenhauer that
Mantini Construction was going to be hiring for a big PennDOT job in
the next year or so and was looking for local guys to do general
labor.”
Veronica rolled her eyes. “Who are these people?” Of all the
things she found difficult and distasteful in Fayette County, the
endless parade of names from the mouths of people who assumed
you already knew who they were was what annoyed her the most. It
was impossible to keep them straight. Edith, who’d grown up in tiny
Point Marion, told her that she ought to learn to ignore it entirely. But
Veronica had an attorney’s mind, and it demanded tags and
attributions.
“Well, let’s see,” said Krupp. “Marv and Pat are cousins, I guess.
Not actual cousins, but, I believe Marv’s mother’s sister-in-law is
Pat’s aunt, so it’s a through marriage thing. They’re just a couple of
strung-out assholes, but when they’re not on disability, they pick up
construction jobs here and there. And Jerry—excuse me, Officer
Rittenhauer—works for Mack Chislett, who’s the chief of police. The
mayor tells Mack shit, and Mack tells Jerry shit, and Jerry shouldn’t
drink whiskey, because when he does, he talks. Then he cries,
usually, or gets into fights. Which is good for us.”
“Don’t worry. I got some shit on Jerry Rittenhauer,” Larimer told
them. She tapped on the back of the chair. “We go back. Here’s what
I’m getting at. What I’m getting at is that Bill Pattaglia”—she paused
to catch Veronica in a nasty stare—“that’s the mayor—Bill Pattaglia
and that faggot Jerry—that’s Jerry Jernicki, by the way, not Jerry
Rittenhauer, who’s pretty goddamned fruity himself, if you know what
I mean—have been talking to Harrisburg, and they’re cooking up
some kind of in-state vendor requirement to keep our boy Phil here
out of the running.”
“How do they even know I’m interested?” Phil asked.
 Larimer shrugged. “Yinz been asking around, right? And you
probably already asked to get on the list for the RFP.”
“Sure.” Harrow shrugged. “I’ve got my sources, too.”
“Yeah, well, you think the people who blab shit they’re not
supposed to blab are real discreet otherwise?”
“Do you mind if I bum a hit?” Abbie asked Krupp.
“Go for it, man. I love your jacket, by the way.”
“Thank you.” Abbie accepted the joint and inhaled deeply. “One
hundred percent Egyptian linen.”
“Abbie, for fuck’s sake.” Veronica knew that she was betraying
something about herself by standing while the rest them sat or
leaned, knew that her brother found her harsh and her partner found
her hysterical, which was what you got for being a woman who gave
direction. It occurred to her that she wasn’t sure when, or if, Sherri
Larimer had stopped liking her, when her allegiance had shifted
toward her business partner and then toward her brother.
“Well, hell, what if I move my offices to Uniontown?” asked
Harrow. “That’d be easy enough.”
Veronica shook her head. “There’ll be some kind of duration of
residency requirement to avoid that sort of thing. A carpetbagger
clause, basically. That’s the usual form of these things. We need to
head it off, if it’s true. Once it’s done, it’s done.”
“Then, how do we get around it?” Harrow tipped back in his chair
and nearly fell. He caught himself. Larimer smirked. “Shit.” He
rocked again. “I mean, there’s gotta be a way around it, right? I
mean, head it off. Whatever. This is a good nut to crack, in terms of
the, you know, the larger ambitions.”
“La longue durée,” said Abbie to no one in particular, and he
laughed to himself and then took another hit.
“Marc Bloch!” said Krupp.
“Cheers!” Abbie passed the weed.
Larimer shrugged again. “My guess is that someone already
prefers Mantini, for whatever reason, but they know they won’t come
in with a low bid, so they’re trying to preempt that possibility by
cutting out Harcon. Or they’ve got the same plans as us clowns.”
“Where’s Mantini Construction?” asked Abbie.
“Connellsville,” Harrow replied. “Why?”
 “Is that in Fayette County?”
“Sure is, hon,” Larimer said. “You have a thought?”
“I don’t know,” said Abbie. He looked at her. “Do you have a
thought?”
“Weh-ellll.” Sherri Larimer was especially terrifying when she
smiled. “I think I see where you’re going with this.”
“Was I going somewhere with something?” Abbie chuckled. He’d
taken the one hit, then two, then a third before passing the weed
back to Krupp, and had forgotten what exactly they were talking
about.
“I think I see where you’re going,” said Veronica to Larimer. She
looked to Phil for support, but the coward looked away. “I’d rather . . .
it would be better to not discuss this in front of, what’s your name?
Sorry?”
“Bob.”
“Bob’s fine,” Larimer insisted.
“Sherri,” Veronica said.
Larimer regarded the other woman for a moment, and Veronica,
though she found this sort of staring contest unseemly and absurd,
the sort of dick-measuring posture better left for boys who imagined
business as a contest of wills rather than a simple question of
position and interest, matched her stare, until finally Larimer
permitted herself a smile that Veronica interpreted as the concession
that allowed her to look marginally away. Then Sherri said, “Okay.
Get out of here, Bob.”
“Well, the thing is—” he began, and he slightly lifted the still-lit
roach in his hand, but Sherri tapped twice and bit on the inside of her
lip, and Bob reversed course and said, “Yep, I’ll let you all be.” He
dropped the joint on the floor and stomped out the embers. “Uh,
cheers,” he said to none of them in particular, and he executed an
awkward half-bow that was mostly a nod of the head and all but
backed out of the room.
“I liked him,” said Abbie.
Larimer said, “Bob’s fine, Mayer.”
“Who?” said Abbie.
“I was talking to your sister.”
“Right.”
 “Fine,” Veronica said. “But there’s a certain precautionary
principle at work here.”
Harrow said, “I didn’t smoke any goddamn ganja, and I don’t
know what you’re all talking about either.”
“What I’m saying,” said Veronica, who now permitted herself to
lean against a stack of chairs, who wished, though she hadn’t had a
smoke in years, that she had a cigarette right then, or, barring that, a
scotch, “what I’m saying is, if I read you correctly, Sherri, is that we
might be able to take an opportunity to, oh, lobby against the other
participant in the process rather than the process itself.”
“Why?”
“Because no one really gives a fuck about who builds a road.
Mantini probably promised someone something. And if he didn’t,
maybe we can suggest that he did.”
“Yes,” Larimer agreed. “I’m sure we surely can.”
“Yeah, but what will that cost us?” asked Harrow.
“Haven’t the slightest,” said Veronica. “Sherri, hon. Would you
care to put a figure to it?”
Larimer said, “Shit, you got a thousand bucks?”
“What’s that for then?” Abbie asked.
“Seems cheap,” Harrow said.
“Just to be clear,” said Veronica. “If we do this, we have to, for
obvious reasons, leave the details to you, Sherri. If you’re
comfortable with that.”
She laughed loudly and lit one of her slims. “It’s not like we’re
going to kill the guy!” She raised an eyebrow at Harrow.
“Jesus Christ,” Harrow replied. “Don’t fucking kill anybody.”
“No. Obviously. Hell. I figure we’ll just plant drugs in his car.
Jernicki.”
“What?” said Abbie. “Who?”
“Don’t worry, sweetie.” Sherri patted his knee affectionately.
“That’s some good weed, huh? You know where he gets it from?”
She winked.
“She’s kidding!” said Veronica.
“Well, not about the weed.” Sherri exhaled. “I’m just saying, we’ll
spread some rumors. Pass some dispersions, if you know what I
mean.”
 Later that night, Phil was in his Lincoln on a dark road back to
Morgantown, and Veronica and Abbie were sitting in the dull Holiday
Inn bar drinking nightcaps. Abbie, no longer so stoned, asked
Veronica if they’d just agreed to something illegal. “Not strictly,” she
said, but then she murmured, “I hope,” into her glass. “By the way,”
she said, “What was Sherri talking to you about when we went back
out to the bar?”
“Oh, some property.”
“What property, Abbie?”
“None. Nothing. I mentioned to her, a few weeks ago, when we
met her at that other charming establishment, that I’d had a sort of
vision of a property on top of a mountain, which I described to her.
She was telling me—tonight I mean—that she knew just the spot.”
“Please don’t deal with Sherri Larimer without me.”
“No, no. I just. I’m just interested in looking. She told me it’s along
an old gas line access road up on top of the ridge, actually. And
cheap.”
“I’m serious, Abbie.”
“Yes, okay.”
“And stop fucking telling people that you’ve had visions. They’ll
think you’re nuts.”
“A vision, repeated. Like a theme and variations. And why the hell
do I care if they think I’m nuts? And also, you’d be surprised, really,
how perfectly willing people are to accept the basic fact of it,
provided you gauge them properly and describe it in terms they can
understand. You yuppies accept it if I cast it in terms of artistic
creativity; Sherri accepts it because she’s a superstitious yokel. But
—”
“She’s not stupid.”
“No. That’s not what I said. By the way, do you know someone
named Inman? Imnack?”
“No. Why?”
“She said he owned the property. On the mountain. I was, as you
may have noted, slightly looped at the time. I don’t think that weed
was just weed.”
“I’m going to pay, Abbie. Let’s get out of here early. This whole
town is a dive. I find it slightly threatening.”
 “Do you think? I find it charming.”
“You’re not gay. Or a woman.”
“No. But you’re not visibly. Gay, I mean. You’re visibly a woman,
which mitigates, I suppose, against the other thing.”
“Fuck you, Abbie. That’s a fucked up thing to say.” She placed a
twenty on the counter and kissed his cheek. “Seven A.M.,” she said.
“Or I leave you at the mercy of the local tribes.”

• • •

In early December, Jerry Jernicki was pulled over on 119 heading

into Uniontown for driving sixty-five miles per hour in a fifty-five zone.
“I’m sorry sir,” said Officer Jerry Rittenhauer, “but I detect the
smell of alcohol. I’m going to have to administer a field sobriety test.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?” asked Jernicki. “Do you know who
I am?”
“Step out of the car, sir.”
Jernicki asked for a breathalyzer, but, by odd coincidence,
Rittenhauer’s unit wasn’t functioning.
“Please walk nine steps and turn on one foot,” the officer ordered.
At eight steps, he told Jernicki to stop. “I’m sorry sir, but you appear
to be inebriated, and that gives me probable cause to search your
vehicle.”
“Search away,” Jernicki said. The officer then discovered
quantities of cocaine and methamphetamine just below the limit for
intent to distribute.
“That’s not mine!” protested Jernicki.
“Of course it isn’t,” said the officer.
“I swear to you,” Jernicki said. “I don’t know how that got there.”
“Me neither,” said Rittenhauer. “Now please turn around.”
Two months after that, Mayor Bill Pattaglia of Uniontown, County
Commissioner Cavignac, and Congressman Menta announced that
after discovering “irregularities in the bidding process that may have
been related to a possible kickback deal between Alan Mantini of
Mantini Construction and County Commissioner Jerome Jernicki,
whose troubles with narcotics were a cause for sorrow, and our
prayers are with him, we are pleased to announce that the bid for the
construction of a new interchange between the Uniontown Bypass
and the future Route 43 Mon-Fayette Extension of the Pennsylvania
Turnpike has nevertheless been awarded to the other lowest bidder,
Harcon Construction of Morgantown, West Virginia, who has
covenanted to use ninety percent local labor and/or subcontractors
in terms of overall payroll and invoicing, thereby bringing a net
economic benefit in excess of twenty-one million dollars directly to
Fayette County! And now we’re going to ask Phillip Harrow, CEO of
Harcon, to say a few words.”

• • •

“What the fuck, Ronny?”

“What the fuck what?”
He tossed a copy of the Uniontown Herald-Standard on her desk.
JERNICKI RESIGNS. SPECIAL ELECTION TO BE CALLED.
“Yes?”
“We did this.”
“Calm down, Abbie.”
“No. This is fucked. This is illegal.”
Veronica rubbed her temple. That morning, she’d had the same
argument with Edith. “What, specifically, is illegal?”
“Fuck you, specifically.”
“The only illegality that I can see,” Veronica said, “is this alleged
kickback scheme between former commissioner Jernicki and his
preferred firm.”
“Which is bullshit and you know it! And also, the drugs!”
“Yes, he was transporting quite a large—”
“You put them there!”
“No.”
“Sherri Larimer did it!”
“At your suggestion.”
“At my . . . Don’t you dare! I didn’t—”
“Abbie, sit down.”
“No.”
“Sit down.” She said it softly. He sat. She recalled when they
were barely teenagers, he and two other boys, boys who weren’t
even his friends, really, had tossed a neighbor’s cat from a fire
escape; he’d been utterly untroubled by the death of the poor animal
until the woman who’d owned it posted signs around the
neighborhood and its broken little body was discovered behind some
trash cans in the alley and he saw the lady, who lived in a different
building, whom none of them had ever met, standing at the end of
that alley holding back tears. She was only in her mid-thirties, though
that seemed old to them at the time, and Abbie had only happened
to be passing the scene, and he heard her sniff and say, “That poor
thing.” He made it home before he started to cry. Then he was
inconsolable, and Veronica had to hide the cause of his grief—if grief
was the right word for it—from their parents, concocting a foolishly
elaborate teenage story about Abbie having been bullied by the very
boys he’d been with when they killed the cat. Mom and Dad didn’t
believe her, but they didn’t press her either. It was in keeping with
their universal preference not to know. There was—in society, in
literature, in psychology—a belief in change by degrees, that a
person moved by increments from good to bad, each tiny tick of the
watchwork gears imperceptible until, over time, the hands on the
face had visibly moved. And in this metaphor, Abbie’s youthful
cruelty was at once an aberration and precisely such an increment.
But wasn’t it truer to say that the good and the evil, or the right and
the wrong, or the sin and the righteousness, always coexisted within
each person; he was neither one thing nor the other: not the
clockwork, but the quartz, vibrating imperceptibly between alternate
states, never, to the observer, in one or in the other; molecular;
quantum; even the act of looking might alter it. Look at that sad,
dead creature. It was only in the light of observation that it became
bad to begin with.
“Abbie,” she said, “this is the business we’re in.”
“Speak for yourself. I’m not in any business where this sort of
thing goes on.”
“Yes you are. And you know you are. But if you want out, please.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“I mean exactly what I said. Say the word. This is a business
partnership only. We’ll still be brother and sister. I won’t forsake you.
Phil will hate your guts, but what do you care? You don’t have much
of an equity stake, but if you want out, by all means, I will write you a
check. There’s no zoning board. There’s no environmental impact
study. Your input isn’t needed. You can go back to being an
architect.”
“I never stopped being an architect.”
“Abbie.”
“I didn’t.”
“When was the last time you designed a building?”
“I still have speaking engagements. I still write.”
“What was the last thing you wrote?”
“Yes, all right. Your point is taken. But this is wrong, Ronnie. And
don’t look at me like that. I’m not naïve. I understand that we are
obliged, sometimes, to live among the barbarians, such as it is. I
understand that. I understand that this business is full of unsavory
characters and that everyone is on the make and that the first truly
honest man in the building business will also be the last, but doesn’t
it fall to us to try to be decent? If not wholly honest, then mostly? If
not mostly, then occasionally? When we can? When we could still do
all right by it? Is it necessary to debase ourselves just because our
peers and our colleagues are debased?”
Veronica wove the bare fingers of her hands together, and she
looked at her brother. He wore a plain gold band. Sarah, she knew,
wore their grandmother’s diamond. “Yes,” she said.
“Yes?”
“It was a nice speech, Abbie, but yes. Yes. Yes! We do what we
need to do. Will you calm the fuck down? No one died! You make it
into this big thing. This is the way it’s done. And meanwhile, you tell
me you’re working on some private deal with the same woman you
think—with no evidence, by the way—you think set up some asshole
rural potentate on some embarrassing but ultimately irrelevant
charge that’s gonna get him an admonition and a sentence of going
to AA or something.”
“It’s not a private deal. I mean, it is, but it isn’t a business deal.”
“Oh no? What is it?”
“I’m going to build a house there. You don’t understand. I drove
down to see that property. I walked on it. I’d seen it before.” Where
he’d been angry, where he’d pontificated, now he looked at her,
pained and desperate. “I’d seen it, Ronnie.”
That night at home, after she’d had a glass of wine, after Edith,
who was an excellent cook, had served her coq au vin and poured
her another glass and turned on a Louis Armstrong and Ella
Fitzgerald album and ate with her without saying a word, because
Edith, alone, knew her, knew when Veronica needed to talk, knew
when Veronica needed to be quiet, it occurred to Veronica that her
brother might be crazy—not that it hadn’t occurred to her before,
exactly; it had, in one sense, frequently occurred to her; it had
occurred to her in the way that you’d casually call anyone whose
eccentricities exceed your own crazy. And it would have meant
something almost exactly like that, that her brother’s eccentricities
exceeded her own. But couldn’t it be true, equally true,
simultaneously true, that his madness tinged into the psychological;
that his pomposity was symptomatic of a pathology; that his
yammering on about visions wasn’t just a self-promoting self-regard
about his own genius, but rather something like mental illness—no,
not something like it; rather, the thing itself?
“Do you think my brother is crazy?” Veronica asked.
Edith picked up her shallow dinner bowl and kissed her head.
“Yes.”
“No, I mean, really crazy. Like, ill.”
“Yes,” Edith said. “I’m going to flip the record.”
“What should I do?”
She heard Edith running water in the kitchen. “I thought you were
going to flip the album.”
“You flip it. I forgot. My hands are wet.”
“But what should I do?”
Edith came into the living room, drying her hands on her stained
apron. She laughed. “You’re such a man, sometimes.”
Veronica turned on the B-side and set her face in an expression
of mocking shock. “That’s a terrible thing to say!”
“Aw, honey. It’s true, though. You always think you have to do
something. Why do you have to do anything?”
“I love you,” Veronica said.
 “Yes,” Edith said. She walked back toward the kitchen. “You’re
not half bad yourself.”
But that afternoon in her office, facing her brother across her
paper-crowded desk, the last gray winter sunlight slanting bitterly
through the windows behind her, she’d been too angry to consider
the particularities of his mental state at all, had only seen a
thickening egoist in a tightening jacket that, like all clothing that costs
too much money, was too quickly out of style, and she’d ordered him
out of her office, although, when he turned at the threshold and
asked if they were still meeting tomorrow, she’d sighed loudly and
told him yes.

• • •

That same evening, in another dining room in another part of the

East End, Sarah and Abbie had nearly the same conversation,
although Abbie’s manner wasn’t to sit silently in his own thoughts,
but to recount them volubly as they scampered through his angry
head. Sarah turned the ring around her finger and tried not to appear
distracted as Abbie called her sister-in-law a criminal, or at least a
suborner of crime. “I understand that this business is full of unsavory
characters and that everyone is on the make and that the first truly
honest man in the building business will also be the last, but doesn’t
it fall to us to try to be decent?” He shouted. “If not wholly honest,
then mostly? If not mostly, then occasionally? When we can? When
we could still do all right by it? Is it necessary to debase ourselves
just because our peers and our colleagues are debased?”
“No,” Sarah said. “It isn’t.”
“But?”
“But what?”
“But you have a look.”
“What look?”
“A look of grim skepticism. A look that says you’re humoring me.
A look that suggests you disagree but are reserving comment for the
sake of my ego.”
“I’m frequently reserving comment for the sake of your ego,
Abbie.”
 “My ego can take it.”
“Yes, possibly.” She poured herself more wine. “Or possibly not.”
“You’ve been acting strange.”
“No, Abbie. You’ve been acting strange.”
“I mean since I went to Uniontown. The first time.”
“Have I?”
“You have.”
“Abbie, did you tell Phillip Harrow that he could sleep with me?”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“Did you tell Phil Harrow that we are some kind of swingers, that
he would, ‘Have a better chance with my wife’?”
“A better chance than what?”
“Fuck you, Abbie. You did.”
“I may have joked—”
“He came here, you know.”
“Who? Phil?”
“Yes, Phil. He came here. He came here that night. He turned
around halfway to Morgantown and drove here. Drunk. He
propositioned me.”
Abbie didn’t reply. He felt a high buzzing in his skull, a pressure
behind his eyes. He stared at the space above her head.
“This was supposed to be a fresh start, Abbie. In your words. A
fresh start. This whole bullshit. This move. This, I don’t know. I even
thought maybe we’d have a kid. Or try to, again. Try, at least. Fuck
you, you tell your business partner to try to sleep with your wife?”
“I. Did you?”
“Did I? Did I what, fuck him? No, Abbie. No. He went and puked
in the bathroom. A grown man! And I gave him coffee, and then he
left.”
“Good.”
“You don’t get to say good.” Then she got up, and she said, “You
can do the dishes.”
Then Abbie said, “I bought it.”
“You bought what?”
“The land. The land I told you about. On the mountain. The land
that I saw in the dream.”
“Oh, it was just a dream now.”
 “Not always. Not just. But this is where it was supposed to
happen. This land. This is the new start I spoke of. This is it, Sarah.
This is what we wanted.”
“Oh, Abbie,” Sarah said.
“It is,” he said. The sound in his head had become a brightness
around his field of vision.
“Does your sister know?”
“Not yet,” he replied. “Not quite.”
“Oh, Abbie,” she said again.
 8

It’s harder to say what Sarah thought about all this. She was
opaque, and the gearworks of her inner life turned so silently that
even God strained to hear them whir. This would have been true
even if she hadn’t retreated into an inconsistent silence that her
family interpreted as a sort of effective if not actual dementia. To
Isabel, as she got to know them, it seemed just as likely a form of
conscious protest. If Abbie were your husband, and Isaac your son,
wouldn’t you start drinking early, too? Wouldn’t you do what you
could to avoid their joint penchant for withering disdain? When Isaac
was still just a kid, he and Sarah had formed an unusually (perhaps
unhealthily) close and confidential bond, a conspiracy of semi-
normalcy against Abbie’s more mercurial manner. Isaac, Isabel
thought, was still a kid. But the bond slackened, like old elastic, as
he approached puberty. Sarah drank less back then. “Frequently
drinking but not yet a drunk,” Isaac said, which Isabel found fishy.
Her own mother, Cathy, was in AA, and no one ever really escapes
the faith of her youth.
Isaac always knew, at least suspected, that the real reason they
left New York was an affair. For Isaac, it fulfilled a set of imperishable
convictions about his father’s character. If he did believe that Abbie
had had a vision—truthfully, he wasn’t sure, one way or the other,
but thought not—then that still wouldn’t rule out a more mundane
proximate cause. Isaac and Sarah both generally told themselves
that artistry, temperament, and the inadequacy of secular language
to convey the nature and feeling of creative inspiration were the
reality underlying the dreamy claims in Abbie’s prophetic streak. In
any case, who’s to say that any event has any singular cause?
Certainly the affair explained more convincingly how Sarah
ended up agreeing to come to Pittsburgh. It’s a perverse but frequent
trait of relationships that boredom wrecks them faster than betrayal;
infidelity tightens the grasp more than faithfulness. If Abbie had been
in love with someone else, it would have explained Sarah’s desire, or
at least her willingness, to flee with him. Certainly it was unlikely,
having weighed the evidence, to imagine that she really believed
Abbie was talking to God, first, because she was a believing Jew
who therefore believed that the age of that sort of miraculous
dialogue had passed, and second, because even if that were not the
case, Abbie was as supremely unlikely a candidate for a prophecy
as any that existed on earth—although, there is a counterargument:
is it not frequently the case that God chooses (on the infrequent
occasions when He does so choose) to speak to the least likely
among us?
Isabel talked about all this with Isaac one day in September. It
was still summer. It had been terrifically hot for a week. She’d driven
down to visit him at The Gamelands, and he’d made Eli take the
Land Rover and drive them farther into the mountains to a state park
called Ohiopyle. Isabel remarked that Pennsylvania had some utterly
extraordinary place names. “Hmm,” Isaac said, which was what he
often said when he disapproved of sentimentality. The park was in
the hills and steep valleys around a series of cataracts and waterfalls
on the Youghiogheny River, a north-flowing tributary of the
Monongahela, which in turn flowed north to Pittsburgh. They hiked
up a trail beside Meadow Run, a smaller stream that fed the river,
climbing over boulders beside a natural water slide formed where the
stream cut a narrow channel through a rock bed. Dozens of children
with burnt shoulders and white bellies were bombing down the slide,
banging their tailbones and screaming at the indifferent parents who
sat smoking on the sandstone ledges beside the water.
Isaac turned to Isabel and laughed and said, “You know what we
call this?”
“You told me,” Isabel said. “The natural water slide.”
 “No.” He laughed again. “That’s what it’s called. We call it the
Redneck Riviera.”
“Hush,” said Eli.
They climbed a muddy timber staircase to a trail running parallel
to the stream, fifty feet above. Isaac insisted that he knew a secret
swimming spot to which they could climb down from the trail. Isabel
didn’t believe him, because they kept losing the trail and finding
themselves on deer paths through the choked, dripping mountain
laurels. She held a knot of unease in her chest, and she kept
expecting that giant deer to burst forth once again from the
underbrush. Rather than backtracking, Isaac would clamber up or
slide down another muddy embankment through underbrush and
stands of ferns until he found the path again. Isabel and Eli could
only follow him. Isabel was tentative, trying to push branches aside
gently, to step lightly over or duck under fallen logs, feeling a slightly
embarrassing nausea at the thought of touching rotten wood or the
wrong type of fungus or a bug with more than six legs, while Isaac
was totally heedless, smashing through everything like one of the
nightmare feral boars that were retaking European forests and
occasionally attacking German ramblers. (Nightmare for the
ramblers, that is; what funnier, more apt metaphors for the inevitable
decline of an exhausted, dirty, nature-ruining civilization were there
than an immense wild swine pursuing a frightened white person
through the once-tamed woods?)
While they tried to keep up with Isaac, Isabel managed to elicit a
modest biography from Eli: how he he’d met the Mayers. Eliécer
Guitiérrez Valensi was a Spanish Jew—contra his last name, he was
actually from a small town just outside of Seville, though his family
was originally from the East—who’d fled his native country during the
first European currency crisis. He joked that his family had managed
to survive and even prosper through the Caliphate, which had been
good for the Jews, and the Catholic empire, which had been rather
less congenial, and the twentieth century, which had been the worst
for everyone, regardless, only to see all its children—he had two
siblings, one in Canada and one in Dubai, of all places—driven out
by the endless, repeating financial crises. His parents still lived in
Seville but he never visited. “I don’t mind it,” he said, “but it makes
my mother sad. Do you understand? When we come home, it makes
her remember that we had to leave.” His father had been, ironically,
a scholar specializing in the Almohads. He had worked for a small
UNESCO office attached to the Seville Alcazar. Eli’s mother had
written cookbooks. Eli had studied to be an architect. “Of course,” he
said. That was how he met Abbie, who, after he’d made his money
and finished his marvelous home, had gone back to giving the
occasional lecture on sustainable architecture, particularly if it could
be parlayed into an expenses-paid vacation—like many men, Abbie
only discovered thrift when it became irrelevant to his personal
finances.
“We intend,” Isaac explained to Isabel a few weeks later, “to
remain a mystery to our biographers and to pass therefore into the
kingdom of myth.” He was smoking a bowl when he said this and
lying on a pile of vintage fabric in the middle of his Pittsburgh
apartment. She’d asked him why he eschewed Facebook and why
there were, in general, so few photographs of him online. In this
regard, Isabel was very wrong, but she had no way of knowing at the
time. She’d been trying to piece together a time line of the Mayers’
travels and occupations, and she kept trying to ask clarifying
questions of Isaac without giving the whole project away. A sort of
documentary inconsistency bedeviled any attempt to account for
their lives; they frequently seemed to exist in a set of parallel
narratives, subtly different if broadly the same.
So Eli had been at university, studying to be an architect in Spain
during that pre-crash period, when it seemed that the whole of the
Iberian Peninsula was sprouting white condominiums like bright
mushrooms in a meadow after a rain. Underneath there was rot. Eli
had imagined himself designing the extraterrestrial subway
entrances and crinkled glass pavilions that had become the
particular specialty of Spanish architecture, but he found himself, at
twenty-two, without a job or any prospects of a job, certainly not a
job as an architect, and so he’d written Abbie a plaintive and
ingratiating email, reminding him that they’d met briefly at a reception
after Abbie’s lecture. In fact, Eli had hardly said a word, and he
feared he’d laughed too obligingly when Abbie disdained the
Metropol Parasol and then the Gehry Guggenheim—Spain, he’d
said, was being ruined by foreigners, a sentiment with which Eli
more or less agreed, even if it was an awfully ironic pronouncement
from a foreign architect. But Abbie also hated Calatrava and every
other major contemporary Spanish architect. “Spanish architecture
was all downhill after you kicked out the Muslims,” Abbie said. Eli
mentioned Gaudí and felt foolish for being so obvious. “Well, yes,”
Abbie had said, seeming to agree. “But there was a man who really
believed in God, even if he believed in the wrong one.”
Eli’s email went unanswered, and he nearly forgot about it. But
two weeks before Christmas, Eli tripped over the splayed body of an
unconscious young man in the doorway of his apartment building on
his way to work. Through his father’s connections, he’d managed to
find a job as a gardener at the Alcazar. At first, he’d attempted to
believe that in this work he’d found an actual vocation and a truer
form of labor than the attenuated, intellectualized, bourgeois pursuit
of his once-chosen vocation, but the truth was that the work was
miserable and dirty. The constant contact with plants afflicted him
with a hypochondriac’s conviction that he was always suffering from
a rash; the physical labor, far from invigorating, was repetitive. He
got back spasms. His shoulders ached. It exhausted him and made
him want to drink beer. He found himself gaining weight and
softening around the middle.
The young man—the boy, really—was Isaac, down on holiday
from Paris, where he was doing his semester abroad. He’d come
down to Seville to meet up with another man whom he’d met online
on GayRomeo. This man’s name was Paolo—well, his name was
activo22cm but he went by Paolo IRL—and “he was thirty-two and
he had an amazing cock,” Isaac said. “I tried to get him to come to
Paris instead, but he didn’t have any money to travel, and I was
going to be on break anyway. I got some molly from this bartender I
knew in the twentieth and got an EasyJet down to Spain. We spent
about twenty hours fucking and then he started to come down and
got pissed off and started calling me a rich English cocksucker and
telling me that he was going to tie me to the heater and get a bunch
of African guys to come over and rape my ass. Europeans are so
fucking racist. Let me tell you, that sort of thing will sober you up real
fast. I don’t think he would’ve gone through with it. I mean, we’d
been doing a lot of fucking drugs. He went to the bathroom, and I
just grabbed my stuff and got out of there.”
He should have gone to find a hotel. Instead, Isaac proceeded to
find a bar and get blisteringly drunk with what he described as one
Turkish guy and two Lithuanian women who were probably
prostitutes. He woke up the following morning in the cold, tiled
doorway with no bag, wallet, or phone and a quizzical, ugly Spanish
man kneeling over him and asking him if he was all right in
alternating Spanish, English, and German. Isaac stayed with Eli for
three days. His only good fortune had been to have left his passport
in his Paris apartment, and he had to wait for it to arrive in the mail
before he could get money from his Citibank account. Isaac liked to
grandly hint that he and Eli had had some sort of briefly magnificent
sexual affair during that period. Eli was so cheerfully good-humored
in not denying the innuendos that Isabel immediately decided that it
couldn’t be true. At some point on the second day in Eli’s apartment,
over soup and beer, Isaac offhandedly mentioned who his father
was. Eli was incredulous. “But I want to work for him!” he said. He
may have been slightly drunk at the time, because it had never
previously occurred to him that he wanted to work for Abbie Mayer,
even if he did admire the man.
“He’s not an architect anymore,” Isaac told him, which was
largely, if not entirely, true. Eli said he didn’t care, and Isaac said he’d
see what he could do. There was no faulting Isaac on this account:
he kept his most extravagant promises. He and Eli remained in touch
online, and then, rather than do anything so uncouth as bring it up
directly with his parents, Isaac simply arranged, the summer after he
returned to the States, for a visit from his friend from Spain. Eli was
not a documented immigrant: he came to visit, and he never left.
Isaac may or may not truly have known of a secret place, but he
found something resembling it. After a half an hour of fitful progress
up the trail and back again, searching for some geographic or
geologic marker that Isaac could not describe but was certain that
he’d recognize, he said, confidently (of course, he said everything
confidently), “Here it is!” He slid down another steep embankment.
Isabel and Eli followed. They came to a high outcropping, below
which they could hear the sound of rushing water. Here, finally, Isaac
was cautious. They picked their way down a series of tall natural
steps around the cliff, clinging to the twisted trees growing out of
cracks in the rock. They shimmied along the wet underside of the
cliff. They scooted down and over a rockfall. Isabel was too tentative
in hopping from one boulder to the next. She windmilled her arms on
the edge and tipped backward toward the twenty-foot drop between
them. But Eli grabbed her by a flapping wrist and yanked her onto
the rock. She fell briefly against him. “You’re okay,” he told her. She
could smell his sweat.
There they were: a wide stretch of the stream narrowed and cut a
channel between two huge, canted boulders with flat tops. It tumbled
into a clear waterfall that dropped ten feet into a deep and clear hole
below before it flowed around a sharp bend and disappeared down
the valley. The walls rose a hundred feet on either side, thick with
both the common deciduous foliage and a few slender eastern pines,
glowing with that arboreal light, a daylight cathedral, bright in the
shade and the color of something other than only sunlight. It smelled
of the passage of water over stone.
“You see,” said Isaac, who’d sensed that they’d begun to doubt
him and hammed up his bushwhacking certainty for effect.
“It’s really lovely,” said Isabel. Then: “How did you find this
place?”
“I had a vision,” he said.
“Really?”
“Ha. Wut? No. I’m just fucking with you. I was on acid with Jake. I
actually don’t know how we ever found it.”
The precise nature of Isaac’s relationship with Jake remained
unclear to Isabel, who, although she should have known better,
imagined that Isaac fucking men other than the one that he lived with
must be more complicated than it was. Also, Jake read as straight to
her, even if he did follow Isaac around The Gamelands like a young
man in something like love. It didn’t occur to her that she didn’t read
him as gay because he was black and plainly athletic and casually
masculine; if it had occurred to her, she’d have been ashamed of
herself. That it didn’t occur to her was ironically even more shameful,
yet immaterial to her self-conception.
 She was mildly unsettled by all Isaac’s lewd hinting around—if
even half of it were true, even a third. Isabel imagined him submitting
—she knew this was the wrong, at least, the incorrect word, but
thought it anyway—to all of those men. She knew that it was absurd,
obviously absurd, for her, as a woman, to think of this fact alone as
degrading, to hear her own mind using an expression like, the
passive role. As soon as she thought it, she could hear Isaac
clucking about her internalization of gender norms in her
presumption that the traditionally female sexual role was a position
of inherent inferiority or submission in the power dynamic. He would
have said it just like that, and she would have agreed as if he were
enlightening her. But she’d also have told herself that she’d been
hanging around gay guys for as long as Isaac had been alive. They
were, if anything, even more stubborn in their embrace of these
top/bottom, active/passive, boy/girl dichotomies than straight people.
Either way, she couldn’t help but consider the whole situation as if
Isaac were a girl sneaking off to service a bunch of boys, a scenario
so girded by exploitation and overlaid by the subtle threat of violence
that it made her feel squeamish and motherly and irredeemably
conventional. When she did eventually bring it up with Isaac, he
rolled his eyes and launched into a lecture: a lot of specious, over-
general nonsense about the ugliness of straight pornography (Isabel
agreed with him there) versus the fundamental role parity among
young men who slept with other men. “Because the patriarchy
exists,” he sniffed, “all heterosexual relationships are effectively
coercive. No woman can ever truly give consent. Only gay sex can
be legitimate.”
“Thank you, Adrienne Rich,” Isabel replied. (Isaac was, for all the
modern mess of the rest of his life, the suicidal cultivation of sex,
drugs, and rock and roll, a fastidious, almost fussy poet who could
recite the lyrics of Donne and Shakespeare and Auden, who read
the New Formalists, and who himself preferred to write metrical
verse. His mother viewed his art with both sad pride and loving
terror, as if in her own son she saw the ghost of her lost brother.
Abbie considered it a kind of challenge or usurpation.)
They sat on the rocks for a while watching birds and insects
move through the shaded forest and listening to the water tumble
over the rocks and into the pool below—a sound that was somehow
interrogative, pitched as a low, repeating question in a form of
language even older and further from human speech than the calls
of animals. Then Isaac said, “I’m going to swim,” and took off his
clothes. Isabel was already used to his casual nudity, which she
interpreted as a shallow but forgivable impulse to épater la
bourgeoisie. She was wearing a bathing suit under her hiking
clothes, but she’d put a bare foot into the water and found it much
too cold to even think about getting in. Isaac was shucking his tight
underwear, and Isabel was trying not to look at his dick while
simultaneously trying not to look like she was trying not to look. He’d
undoubtedly notice and make fun of her for being a prude. Eli, who
was lounging on the rock on the other side of the stream, caught her
eyes briefly, rolled his own, then closed them again and laid his head
on his crossed arms.
Isaac’s abandoned passion for cycling, like his poetry, belied his
embrace of destructive excess. His body showed all the evidence of
all those miles in the saddle on the rolling roads of Pennsylvania, a
body that could have been a tangle of knotweed, all reeds and
knobs. Had he been a swimmer or a runner, he’d have been
unspeakably beautiful, shoulders grown wide and hips narrowed, but
as he was, he had instead the kind of alluring ugliness that accrues
to living things that have adapted and evolved to one particular
environment or manner of being: a desert plant, a nocturnal predator,
one of the bioluminescent monsters that live in the dayless and
nightless depths of the ocean. His chest was nearly concave and his
belly, although taut, was slightly protuberant. His face and his
forearms and his legs below the knees were the color of darkly
stained wood; the rest of his body was so pale that it seemed to glow
around the edges where the sun seemingly passed right through
him. He fondled himself idly.
“The nice thing about a small dick,” he said, “is that you don’t
have to worry about it shrinking in cold water.” Isabel didn’t think his
dick was especially small—perhaps a bit below her own experienced
average, but within a standard deviation of the mean. He took two
long strides and launched himself from the ledge into the pool. The
water was clear, and she watched him through its weird
foreshortening lens as he sank and rose. She thought of that Millay
poem. He broke the surface with a squeal. “My God!” he yelped. “It’s
cold!”
“Is this typical?” She asked Eli, who’d turned toward her and was
leaning on one elbow. His tee-shirt drew tight across his chest.
“I couldn’t say. I’m not usually invited.”
“Not even as a chauffeur?” She smiled.
“I am the handyman.” He gestured with his free hand. It was one
of those ambiguous Southern European expressions that means
everything.
“How did you end up as the handyman anyway?”
“First, I am very handy. Second, Abbie was not well, even then.”
“What do you mean not well?”
But Isaac, who had dipped beneath the surface again and frog-
kicked away from them, came up again and turned back. He called
up: “You should come in!”
“Too cold,” Isabel said.
“You get used to it,” he replied. “Anyway, it’s bracing. You can feel
your heart trying to escape your chest.”
She told him she liked her heart right where it was.
“Yes,” said Eli. “Our hearts will remain here on this cliff.”
“Suit yourselves,” he replied. “I won’t try to convince you.” He
made some desultory motions of swimming around for a few minutes
more, then swam to the shore, waded out, and did an ungainly nude
scramble back up to where Isabel lay. He rolled his tee-shirt into a
pillow and sprawled out on a sunny part of the rock with his arms
behind his head. The cold water had shrunk his dick, and now it did
look comically small. He’d affected to close his eyes, but he hadn’t,
really, and he caught Isabel looking. “I know,” he said. He giggled.
“But one makes do with what God gives him, no?”
“Or her,” Isabel offered.
“Indeed,” Eli said. “She has a point.”
“Yes,” Isaac said, rolling to face her, “but your endowments are
just erotic accessories. Accoutrements. Except for babies, I suppose,
who don’t care about the aesthetics or architecture.”
“Dicks are accessories, too,” she told him.
“This is very enlightening,” said Eli.
 “Don’t let it go to your head,” she said, and then she bit her lip
and wondered why she’d said it.
Isaac sighed. “Would that it were so.” He rolled onto his back
again. “Alas, while being smooth is one of the youth-preserving traits
that men find erotic, a small dick is a small dick is a small dick. Even
having a smooth ass is a decreasing currency. All the hipsters and
fashion boys are a little hairy these days.”
“You don’t have a small dick,” Isabel told him. (And she blushed.
Idiot. She was being motherly again. She might as well have assured
him that he was pretty, that people would like him just for being
himself.)
“Oh, please.” He rolled once more onto his side and propped his
head on one hand. “One time I was fucking this guy, and he told me
that he couldn’t go down on me because it made him feel weird. You
know, like a child molester. I mean, that didn’t stop him from fucking
my ass. Anyway, you don’t need to reassure me. I’m not the sort of
boy who frets about his body. I am what I am and that’s all that I am,
you know, et cetera. I don’t really like getting sucked off anyway. But
in general, the point is that I’ve got bigger problems, no pun
intended.”
“What problems are those?” Isabel found herself wanting a
cigarette, though she hadn’t smoked one in years, and she
wondered if Isaac had any in the bag. She didn’t ask.
“Jesus, I don’t know. I’m not in school at the moment. I have no
prospects for a job, really. I always sort of assumed I’d just live off
my trust, but I get the distinct feeling that my father is better at
getting rich than at staying rich—he’s been one hand ahead of the
house for too long now. I just get the general sense that whatever
blessed sign he’s been living under is about to enter a retrograde
period. Call it a vision, la la la. Besides which, of course, there’s my
mother.”
“What’s wrong with your mother?”
“What isn’t wrong with my mother?”
“I don’t know,” Isabel said. “She seems fine to me.” This was not
strictly true, but she was no more capable of telling him otherwise
than she was of agreeing with him about his cock. The two most
precious things a boy had, she thought, smiling at her cheap Freud.
She looked to Eli, but he had chosen this moment to lie down again
and stare through the high branches. He was pretending not to pay
attention.
“Oh, please,” Isaac repeated, and he rolled over and closed his
eyes.
It was true that there was something off about Sarah, and not
only in the colloquial, figurative sense. No one ever seemed to
encounter her but to stumble upon her; she was always just
somewhere—sitting in a chair in some nook in the house, standing in
a plot of the garden, leaning on a counter in the kitchen—with a
serene expression and eyes unfocused and pointed in the direction
of nothing in particular. It was as if she were an android or avatar,
lolling without power or animal spirits until some distant operator
picked up the remote and turned her on. But she did flick on when
she noticed someone. Her conversation had a certain cubist quality
to it; it was a picture of something familiar rendered in a perspective
all its own. But in a family of eccentrics, a family where one man
purported to see divine visions, what was any one other eccentric,
more or less?
“Really,” Isabel said. “She’s a bit . . . she’s unique, I guess. But in
a family of eccentrics, what’s one more eccentric, more or less?”
“God, I wish I had some smokes. Or some weed. I can’t believe I
didn’t bring any. Ugh. I’m so bad at preparing. Anyway, she spends
half her time having out of body experiences and half her time
sleeping and the rest of it in the process of becoming drunk. Do you
know that last year she had to have a part of her tongue cut off? It
wasn’t cancer or anything. It was just, you know, all used up.
Cooked. Like when you leave a piece of meat in a marinade for too
long.” Isabel squinted at him. How does that happen, she wanted to
ask. But he was still talking: “That’s why she sounds like a homeless
person even when she isn’t complètement beurrée. It’s because my
dad had an affair back in New York before they moved out here. She
made him move in some sort of hysterical attempt to keep him for
herself.”
“I thought,” Isabel said, although it was hard to keep her voice
flat, hard not to betray her piqued interest, “that they came here in
pursuit off, you know, his dream. To build The Gamelands. To get
away.”
“Yeah, whatever sells his books and books his speaking gigs.
Mom may be nuts, but she likes money, too. If playing along with
Abbie the Prophet falls to the bottom line, well, no sense in
belaboring it. But no, the affair, I’m pretty sure. No one ever said
anything, obvi, but I can just tell. Then I came along. Which is some
kind of miracle—like an actual miracle—because they could never
have kids before. At least, that’s what they told me. But, you know,
you can’t be a literalist. The stories”—he sighed—“the myths are
only meant to instruct.”
Abbie might have said the same thing. Despite all their
differences, despite Isaac’s superficial cultivation of an attitude of
weary condescension toward his father (which mirrored Abbie’s
attitude of weary condescension toward everyone else), there was a
very porous border between father and son—they had the quality of
certain twins.
“I still don’t know,” Isabel said. “Your mom must be pretty
committed to Abbie’s work.” She did not add to live out here, but
Isaac knew it was what she meant.
“What work?” Isaac laughed and stretched from fingers to toes
like a cat that’s either rising from or about to go to sleep.
“Come on,” she said. “Your dad is like one of the most important
architects of the last fifty years. I mean, I know he isn’t known
outside of the profession, really, and I know he’s never gonna win a
Pritzker or whatever, but, I mean, he basically invented green
building. And before you say it, yes, I also know that I’m revealing
my own professional prejudices and green is just a buzzword like
organic or sustainable anymore, but shit, Isaac, it’s still a really big
deal—the underlying concepts, I mean, even if in practice it’s a little .
. . I don’t know, corrupted by reality.”
“Corrupted by Reality would be the title of his biography,” Isaac
replied, annoyed. He didn’t like to be contradicted, and he hated
when anyone defended his parents. Then he sighed again and
giggled his disarming giggle and said, “Anyway, my father is hardly
an architect. I know he still gives that talk from time to time. LA is
going to break off into the ocean. Florida is going to drown. New York
is going to drown. Phoenix is going to dry up and blow away. We’re
all gonna die!” He pressed his hands to his cheeks and made a
cartoon expression of matinee shock. Isabel laughed. “We’re all
gonna die,” he repeated. He sat up and hugged his knees. “Abbie’s a
fucking real estate developer. Please, you think he built The
Gamelands with the proceeds of commencement speeches and one
coffee table book? You do know how he made all that money, don’t
you?”
“I assumed . . .” Isabel began, but she realized that she didn’t
know what she assumed. She remembered Isaac blabbing about a
highway back when they’d come down to Fayette County together
for the first time. It was a weakness, contagious and endemic to
anyone who spent too much time around people with a lot of money:
they forget to wonder how or why or from where anyone got it all to
begin with.
Isaac smiled—he had this rare, broad, utterly delighted smile
where his mouth broke open and he touched the tip of his curled
tongue to his top front teeth, which he deployed when he felt like he
was winning something. “Assume nothing,” he said.
“Well, then,” Isabel said, “how did he make all that money?”
“Abbie made his money on a fucking highway.”
“A highway,” she repeated.
“Between you, me, God, PennDOT, and Uncle Sam,” Isaac told
her. “The crookedest bunch of land deals since we stole America
from the Indians. You didn’t know? I thought everyone knew.”
“No,” she said.
“Not strictly a highway,” Eli said in a sleepy voice. He didn’t move.
“Right. Not strictly a highway. Like I think I told you before, he
really got rich shilling for Arthur Imlak. Like your boss.”
“Barry isn’t rich,” Isabel told him. And she nearly asked him, right
there, if Arthur was really his father, but, of course, she didn’t.
“Please. Don’t you ever read your own 990s?”
“No. I’m not a finance person.”
“No shit you’re not. Anyway, to find out how much your bosses
make. You know, your key and highest-paid employees.”
“No,” she said.
 “Barry cleared four-fifty in 2013. Out of a three-and-change
million dollar operating budget. That ain’t bad. That was the most
recent year. You weren’t on there yet. Although I can guess.”
“That isn’t rich.”
“Oh my God,” Isaac screwed up his face. “You are ridiculous if
you think that.”
“Says a kid with a trust.”
He giggled. “You have to learn to recognize your own class.
Otherwise, you’ll figure out too late that they’re coming with the
guillotines.”
“Well, I don’t make that much.”
“I put you right around eighty-five, ninety.”
“Wrong,” she said, but he was right.
“My dad sees signs and portents and thinks the world is going to
end any day now in the fire or in the flood, but we’re all just as likely
to have our heads chopped off by some sans-culottes first. Et après,
le déluge. The thing is, to get back to the topic at hand, Abbie never
really gave a shit about green anything. He could’ve just as easily
become a right-wing radio host. Abbie just sniffed which way the
wind was blowing.”
Isabel said that she couldn’t say.
“He used to be more into pussy than money. Then the Lord
appeared to him, or he knocked one of his girlfriends up. Or both.
Thus the decision to forsake the middling equestrian orders of the
metropolis for a life of provincial riches. Shit, you’re about the right
age. Maybe we’re siblings.”
“God,” Isabel said.
“God,” said Isaac. “God.” He laughed. “Literally, God. How
fucking ironic is it that a guy who thinks he’s on a mission from
Yahweh basically makes it his career to journey west and bung a
bunch of poor ignorant yokels out of their land. It’s so fucking perfect
you’d think it was true.”
“Well,” said Eli, who’d been listening after all, “part of it is true.”
“What part?” Isabel asked, wondering what he knew.
“The God part,” he replied.

• • •
A few hundred yards upstream, a fisherman had come off the trail—it
turned out that they needn’t have clambered over all that lousy
terrain like a bunch of fools, and Isaac’s secret spot wasn’t really a
secret. The fisherman waded into a broad and shallow part of the
water and began casting his fly, whipping his slim, quivering road as
if conducting some old, strange music. When Isaac spotted him, he
frowned and grumbled and said it was time to leave. So they packed
up and hauled themselves the hard way back up to the trail. Isaac
had them continue along in the opposite direction from which they
came. After a mile, they crossed a field into a parking lot at the far
trail head, and Isaac led them out to Dinner Bell Road, which joined
up with 381, down whose gravelly berm they hiked back to Ohiopyle
village. Every few minutes, a flock of motorcycles roared past.
Almost as regularly, a gas tanker would rattle their teeth and nearly
yank them into the road in the vacuum trail of its slipstream. Once,
Eli had to pull Isabel back from the road as she stumbled and almost
fell into the path of a second tanker trailing the first. “That’s twice
now,” he said, “that I have saved your life.”
“Hero,” she said.
“Get a room,” said Isaac.
Then he stopped and held up his hand. They stopped. He
pointed, raising his arm deliberately. Ahead of them, perched
casually and unlikely on the road’s metal guardrail, a red-tailed hawk
swiveled its lovely cruel head and regarded them with an almost
human curiosity. They stared at it, and it at them, and it opened its
beak as if yawning and screamed, once, a high-pitched collision of
all the vowels in every human language. They stepped back
reflexively. Another truck went past, and the hawk spread its
improbable wings and flapped lazily once, twice, and, even more
improbably, let itself be lifted by the changing pressure of the air,
flapped a few more times, and disappeared over the rustling trees.
 9

Abbie’s frequent trips to and from Uniontown for the expressway

business and the looming start of construction on what would
become The Gamelands and the way that Sarah had taken to
wandering around their Pittsburgh apartment with a glass in hand
and cleaning things that didn’t need to be cleaned led him, in the
never-ending spirit of new beginnings that drove their marriage ever
onward from its old failures, to suggest that they move down to
Uniontown a year early. Sarah didn’t so much agree as discover that
she could come up with no good reason not to, and so, in 1991, they
rented a little house on Virginia Avenue just across the border from
Uniontown proper in South Union Township, on the fifth fairway of
the Uniontown Country Club. Lest you imagine—as Sarah briefly did
before she saw the place—that this location signified some sort of
luxurious links-side lifestyle: this was not, as was the case on
Belmont Circle just up the street, one of the gracious early-century
colonials whose French doors and oak-shaded lawns backed up
onto that same fairway. Uniontown had, at that time, a population of
just over twelve thousand—several thousand more if you counted
the North and South townships—and the rental market, insofar as it
existed at all, consisted mostly of dumpy apartments, double-wides,
and old duplexes in the coal patches that still clung to an
emphysemic life on the outskirts of town. Sarah would have been
much happier in the slightly run-down third floor of one of the old
Victorians in town; she might have at least talked a landlord into
letting her paint the walls and floors white, which would have given
her a project to occupy her days. But Abbie thought a house was
more appropriate, whatever on earth that meant. When he described
it to her, he called it a cottage. By the time she discovered its exact
nature, he’d already signed a lease.
It did have a certain charm from the exterior, a collection of
mismatched roof lines that very nearly suggested something rural
and English, but sometime in the seventies, it had been refaced with
a sort of glazed brick that, depending on the height and angle of the
sun, gave the alternating impression that the house was reflective or
that it was smeared in a fine layer of shit. The interior ground floor
had faux wood paneling, and the kitchen had a nautical theme, its
notched and eyed cabinets with phony wrought iron hardware
resembling barrels to be filled with salted meat for a long sea
voyage. There were ships on the linoleum floor. The master bedroom
was on the ground floor in an addition set at an odd angle to the rest
of the house. It had a high cathedral ceiling, but only a single small
window at its far end. The window looked into the back of a
rhododendron, and even in the middle of the day, the room sat in a
queasy twilight. There were two small dormer bedrooms and a bath
on the second floor. These rooms and the narrow stairway that led to
them were covered, even the ceilings, with flocked, patriotic
wallpaper that picked up the kitchen leitmotif: it depicted bald eagles
sewn in pale gold grasping anchors in their talons. The eagles’
beaks were open, and in each open mouth there was a tiny golden
tongue.
Most of their furniture had to go into storage—what hadn’t barely
fit, either too big for the tiny rooms, or too fine for the thick carpets.
“Abbie,” Sarah asked, “is it your intention to take me to smaller and
shittier places forever until we’re like the last two people left on
earth?”
“Wouldn’t that be interesting, to be the last two people on earth?”
“No, honey. It would not.”
“You and me, against the world.”
“We’d starve in a week.”
Abbie did insist that they join the country club. “It’s what people
do in towns like these.”
“It’s not like we golf.”
“We’ll start!”
 “I don’t want to golf.”
“You’ll meet people. It’s important.”
Actually, Abbie had a very particular, though unvoiced, reason to
want to join the club, and that was in order to meet one Arthur Imlak.
Imlak, whom he’d never seen or even spoken to on the phone, had
owned the land that Abbie bought on the hilltop. His name kept
cropping up in his business dealings around the county. The closing
on The Gamelands had been attended only by Imlak’s attorney, a
Pittsburgh lawyer named David Ben David, who said he mostly did
trial work but did handle Mr. Imlak’s realty transactions from time to
time. Ben David had treated the signing of closing documents with
an unconcealed amusement, and when Abbie asked him what he
found so funny, the lawyer had replied that he didn’t find anything
funny, per se, but rather, that he hadn’t recently seen Mr. Imlak sell
off any of his holdings. “He’s acquiring right now. And also, at this
price? He must expect a favor from you down the road.”
“I’ve never even met the guy.”
“Yes. I understand it was our mutual friend, Ms. Sherri Larimer,
who brokered the deal. For being functionally illiterate, she certainly
does get around.”
“I don’t think she’s illiterate, functionally or otherwise.”
“No, just an expression.”
“Is it?”
“What is the expression? It is what it is.”
“Where are you from? You have, I notice, a bit of an accent.”
“Ah, I’m from here. But I lived for a long time in Israel. It makes
me unplaceable.”
“Members of the tribe,” said Abbie.
“Yes,” the lawyer said. And he shrugged and repeated: “It is what
it is.”
Meeting Imlak proved easy enough. They found him, as anyone
could find him in those days, holding court at the far end of the dining
room bar at the club, a tumbler of vodka in one hand, the other free
to gesticulate in an odd, Clintonian gesture, the four fingers clutched
into a fist, the thumb laying straight out past the index, waving and
pointing to punctuate each point that he thought he was making. His
hair was still mostly black back then, and he wasn’t quite as grand as
he would soon become. He had a boat, but it was at the Fox Chapel
Yacht Club, and he had a place in Florida, but it was just a condo in
St. Pete.
The club was an immensely silly institution. Formerly a fin-de-
siècle playpen for the county’s erstwhile coal and coke millionaires,
built as a mad crossbreeding of Tara and a Loire chateau, immense,
white, and imposingly scaled, it had burned down in the mid-eighties.
That the fire had occurred at almost precisely the moment when the
club’s membership had reached its historic nadir, and that the
insurance payout covered much of the construction of a less
imposing new clubhouse as well as the stashing away of a fair chunk
of cash to defray operating costs for the next few years, was one of
those serendipitous coincidences treated by everyone who’d been
around or involved in the institution at the time as a combination
wives’ tale and knowing joke, like the winking old belief that first
pregnancies after a marriage sometimes lasted a wee bit less than
nine months. When commenting to the Herald-Standard Darryl
Pattaglia, the mayor’s cousin and the fire chief, was quoted as
saying that the cause of the fire was “either a neon light on the
second floor, an incandescent light on the first floor, or an Israelite in
the basement.”
He refused to elaborate on that, and the cause of the electrical
fire, or it might be better to say, the cause of the cause, was one of
the many reputedly criminal acts whose lack of a clear perpetrator
led them to accrue, by reputation, to the Larimer clan. Sherri never
said one thing or other about it, but she’d occasionally, apropos
nothing at all, make some aside about ball and tube wiring as
something like a metaphor for the unreliability and unpredictability of
anything really, and people took this as oblique confirmation of what
they would have believed anyway. As for the chief’s comments,
people assumed Larimer had made him say it.
The new, smaller clubhouse looked like the offspring of a
Mexican restaurant and a mid-market chain hotel. Ironically, Abbie
would discover that it was built using a prefabrication technique that
he had, once upon a time, pioneered, if not quite invented. The
invention belonged to a group of materials scientists and structural
engineers at Columbia, but Abbie had loaned his name and
reputation to the project, and he now received, from time to time, a
minor royalty for its use.
An aside: Imlak’s early fortune was based in large part on
precisely those poor rental properties that Abbie had felt
inappropriate for his wife. Arthur’s father, as he never failed to
mention, had been a miner, then a foreman, and then he’d cashed
out his whole pension to buy a few properties, which grew into a
modest local empire of trailer parks and converted mansions. The
younger Imlak’s entry into the energy business came later and by
blessed accident. He’d acquired a diesel station and truck depot
near Grindstone as part of a larger property transaction. He never
intended to operate it for more than a year or so, but in that year, he
noticed a very slight but nevertheless appreciable increase in gas
and oil company traffic through that part of the state. Imlak was
unrefined by the standards of people like Barry Fitzgerald, a vulgar
businessman, but it was this almost prophetic eye for detail that set
him apart from the vast herds of ruminant MBAs in America; it was a
few extra trucks a month way back in the eighties that led him to a
two-decade project of land and mineral rights acquisitions, a quietly
scrupulous long position that made his at-the-time much richer
friends think him slightly more eccentric than his minor millions gave
him a natural right to be. Only later, in the new millennium, did his
foresight result in a series of grand, glorious transactions, when it
was discovered that something like fifteen percent of the rights to the
extractable carbon in the Marcellus Shale in West Virginia and
Pennsylvania were held by the blandly named ABM Corporation.
If great books are frequently predicted by their opening
sentences—“All happy families” and that sort of thing—then so too
are certain relationships marked out by the first words that one
person speaks to another, and so it was with Arthur Imlak and the
Mayers—to which of them, Abbie or Sarah, he was speaking exactly
no one later remembered or admitted to remembering. “Order the
gimlet,” he told them.
“That’s the specialty?” Sarah said.
Imlak leaned on the bar and indicated the bartenders with a brief
movement of his eyes. “They don’t know that it’s supposed to be gin,
so they use vodka, and they don’t know what else is supposed to be
in it, so they use twice as much vodka.” He swirled his glass. “If you
want an especially fun night, ask for it neat. They don’t understand
displacement either, so instead of measuring by volume, they pour
by height.”
“That sounds dangerous.”
“Arthur Imlak,” he said. He shook their hands. “You’re new.”
“Yes,” said Abbie. “We just joined. Abbie Mayer. This is my wife,
Sarah.”
“Ah,” said Imlak. “Members of the tribe.”
Abbie regarded him strangely, and Sarah was taken aback. “I’m
sorry?” she said.
“Oh, no,” said Imlak. “I’m sorry. I am as well, oddly enough. My
mother died when I was a little boy, and my father remarried. He’d
never previously had much use for religion, but Beth, my stepmother,
thought it would be a good idea to give my brother and me a faith,
and she was Jewish. Now, my father was from a family of Lutherans
who became some form of non-denominational Protestant. Vaguely
Baptist, perhaps? I get it all confused. In any event, he didn’t believe
in anything, but he agreed to a Jewish wedding and occasionally
accompanied us to High Holy days and so forth. He appreciated
Judaism, in part because so much of it was conducted in a language
he couldn’t understand. Here, let me buy your first round.”
“Thank you,” Sarah said.
“No, thank you. Now tell me, Mayer, why is that name familiar to
me?”
“It’s a fairly common name,” Sarah said.
“Yes, young lady, it certainly is. But it seems to have skittered
across my desk recently. What business are you in? Oh, Jack, we’ll
have two. No, three more gimlets, please. I’m running low myself.”
“I’m an architect,” Abbie said.
“Ah, indeed,” said Imlak.
“Abbie is involved in property development,” Sarah said.
“A noble calling. A man is not a man until a man owns land, as
my father used to say. And that must be where I’ve heard the name.
Are you by any chance related to one Veronica Mayer?”
“My sister, yes. And my business partner.”
 “We’ve met, once or twice. Well, cheers.” He raised his newly
arrived glass. “To new acquaintances.”
They touched glasses. Imlak tapped his again on the bar before
drinking. “A Western Pennsylvania thing, I think,” he told them. “And
like a lot of atheists, I make up for it with a surfeit of compensatory
superstitions.”
“Yes.” Abbie sipped. The drink tasted like pure alcohol, like
cleaning solution. He took a long gulp.
“And you?” Imlak asked Sarah. “What do you do?”
“Not much anymore. I was an interior designer.”
“Do you golf?”
She laughed. “As you noted, we’re Jewish. Do you know many
Jews who golf?”
“Oh, yes. Certainly. I own a place down in Florida. St. Pete, which
is on the Gulf and therefore the more Protestant side of the state.
The Atlantic Seaboard is all Jews and Hispanic Catholics, but even
in the once-restricted environs of Tampa Bay, one finds many of our
people whacking away hopelessly at little balls. I chalk the penchant
up to our propensity for wandering aimlessly across huge tracts of
land for very long periods of time.”
Sarah smiled and said, “Perhaps I’ll take it up, then.”
“You should. You can join my foursome.” He winked. “One of us
just died. Fiorello Pattaglia. He was eighty-six and smelled like
cheap bar soap, but he was a judge, and his son is the mayor. We’re
a wonderful group. I mostly drink, and Dick and Harry—yes, it’s true;
it can’t be helped—use the occasion to sneak cigarettes where their
wives can’t catch them. We consider score-keeping to be irrelevant,
and sometimes we even forget to golf.”
“That sounds like my kind of game.”
“Yes. Now, my other advice is no matter what you do, don’t join
the women’s groups. One is called the 9-holers, the other the 18-
holers.” He laid a hand very briefly on her knee. “Pornographic, I
know. The ones who play the half rounds are mostly dotty old ladies,
and the ones who play the full round are fiercely competitive and
mostly bitches, except for Joyce, our ladies champion, whose going-
on-ten-year reign has made her kind to a fault. You’re better off
playing with men. Of course, the club officially discourages ladies
from playing except during their own designated times. I suppose
they worry that some sort of plaid orgy will break out spontaneously.
But I put together the financing package for the new clubhouse after
the old one burned down and they’re beholden to me, so I get to
break the rules. Also, they know I could join Pleasant Valley instead,
so they kiss my ass.”
“How did the old club burn down?” Abbie asked.
“Do you know the story of Crassus?”
“Yes.”
“Well, it was nothing like that,” Imlak said, and again, he winked.

• • •

The author will here risk an anticlimax by telling you right now that
Sarah sleeps with Arthur Imlak, because when he thinks about how
to tell the story, he has to decide against the false tension of a
hinted-at development and consider the pall of inevitability that the
ultimate realization of a long-foreshadowed eventuality casts
retroactively and retrospectively over everything that came before. It
is a sort of a disclaimer. What did happen did not have to happen. It
was, in the mathematical sense, improbable, and that the probability
eventually collapsed upon the occurrence of the unanticipated event
says nothing about the event’s likelihood prior to it actually
happening.
Arthur, Sarah, and Abbie became friends, or anyway Arthur and
Abbie mutually cultivated a friendship in the secure private belief that
it was in his best individual interest to do so, each believing the other
to have no inkling that this was the case. Only Arthur was correct on
that count. Sarah and Arthur, on the other hand, genuinely liked each
other. If Imlak’s overt behavior toward women was physical
familiarity, then there was nevertheless something in his manner and
demeanor that suggested a genuine, underlying, non-sexual interest
that his superficial actions were carefully calculated to hide. Which
was the truth about him? Who knows what’s true or not about
anyone? It’s flattering to believe that, in imagining a man’s life,
there’s a way to intuit the inner workings out of the visible, external
component parts, but people are, all of them, at last opaque. Even
God views His creations with astonishment. Their existence is an
accident of His majesty. They appeared at the uttermost end of His
imagining, and when He finally paused, it wasn’t for exhaustion, but
surprise.
In the early seventies, Arthur’s father had bought an old farm on
Blackstone Drive, fifty acres that looked across the last broad curve
of Route 40 before it turned perpendicular to the ridge and climbed
east into the mountains. The old farmhouse still sat at the low point
of the property near a sharp bend in the road, and both Imlak père
and his son continued renting it to the farmer who’d owned the
property previously until he died in the early 2000s, after which, as
was oddly common in Uniontown, the structure burned to the
ground. The senior Imlak had built a mod house on the high point of
the property, out of date before it was even begun. Its only attractive
feature was a broad window wall that looked out over the cornfields
to the mountains. There was an irony in the fact that this made it—
makes it still—a mirror image of The Gamelands; the two houses
faced each other across the foothills. The flat-roofed structure had
that era’s odd flavor, a modernity that assumed that all structures
would one day look like high schools or prisons, which were, by that
time, architecturally interchangeable anyway. Arthur Imlak had
added to the building over the years. A series of architects had done
their best to draw out its strong horizontal lines and turn it into
something more austerely modern, but it retained its innate
characteristic: it was ineradicably ugly. Arthur knew this was the
case, and he viewed it with an obscure pride. Contrary to the popular
sentiment, money often did buy taste, but if anyone with a bit of
money could have good taste, then it became the imperative of
those with obscenely larger fortunes to affect a sort of grotesque
gaudiness that demonstrated their transcendence of that which any
ordinary millionaire—who might, after all, be something silly like a
doctor or a lawyer—could buy.
They were at Imlak’s house for dinner one night in the July after
they’d moved to Uniontown. They’d broken ground on The
Gamelands, which now looked like a muddy scar on the mountain,
visible all the way from town. It was eight-thirty or so, and the long
evening sun blasted through the westward windows into the dining
room. Abbie told Imlak he ought to glaze the fucking windows.
“Among other things,” he said, “you’re going to ruin your furniture.”
“I’ll buy new furniture.” Imlak forked a piece of steak into his
mouth. “I don’t give a shit about furniture. You can’t get too attached
to material things.”
“Abbie just likes to give advice,” Sarah said.
“Well, you’re also killing yourself on utilities. Your cooling costs
have got to be through the roof in the summer, and this place must
leak heat all winter long.”
“Let’s open another bottle. We’ll try the Stag’s Leap.”
“Yummy,” Sarah said.
“Look.” Abbie swiveled in his chair to talk at Imlak as he went into
the kitchen to fetch the wine. “I’m telling you, I know you can afford it.
But it’s a waste. You ought to hire me to fix it. Buildings are the
biggest agents of environmental degradation, you know. It’s a fact.”
Imlak returned with the bottle and said, “Watch your husband,
Sarah. He is always angling to get me to hire him. You may be
having cash flow problems. Phil Harrow holding out on you, Abbie?”
“I’d do it as a friend,” Abbie grumbled. He looked at Sarah.
“Anyway, Sarah keeps the books. She has the mathematical mind.”
“Says the architect!”
“Architects are all bad at math. Architects who are good at math
are engineers.”
“Well,” Imlak said. “I don’t personally see the big deal. Energy is
cheap.”
“Now you’ve done it.” Sarah tossed back a half a glass and
helped herself to another.
“Chiudi la bocca, my dear.” Abbie swiveled to face Imlak. “Energy
is cheap? Arthur, don’t you realize that we stand, right now, in this
very decade, on the precipice of peak oil. The Hubbert curve puts it
right around 2000. Less than a decade away, now! How’s that for a
millenarian coincidence. Now, you may wish to believe, as do the
rest of the poor flock out there”—he gestured at the window and the
field and the highway beyond—“but I am telling you, if we don’t act,
and act fast, we will face the greatest social upheaval, the greatest
catastrophe, in the history of our species. Whole civilizations will be
upended. All this, this easy-motoring lifestyle, it’ll all be over in a
decade. Right over the hill there, down in Heritage Hills, they’re
building houses with three-car garages on spec. On spec!”
“Abbie,” Imlak said, “you’re building houses with three-car
garages on spec.”
“How do you? Never mind. Listen. The whole physical
development of American society is predicated on inexpensive
motoring. Carbon is a miracle fuel; it is an unmatched, never-to-be-
repeated form of immediate, fungible, scalable energy. There is
never going to be a battery-powered car or a miniature nuclear
reactor. That’s all a grand boondoggle. When we use up the oil,
that’s it. Adieu. Ciao. Now what I would do, if I were the benevolent
dictator, what I would do is I would issue a challenge. I would say: by
2050, you must reduce energy usage by half. You do it city by city.
You replace lightbulbs with fluorescents or LEDs. You improve
building envelopes. You limit auto traffic in the urban center, which
drives people to use public transit. You do all that, and maybe,
maybe you prolong the useful life of our society.”
Sarah told Arthur, “Abbie is on the board of a non-profit that’s
proposing exactly that.”
“Sure,” Imlak said. “Barry Fitzgerald’s outfit. I contribute.”
“Yes,” Abbie said. “I’ve seen your name.”
“Being in the energy business myself, I feel it lends an aura of
social responsibility to my otherwise rapacious capitalist endeavors.”
“I thought you were in the real estate business,” Abbie said.
Imlak shrugged. “About as much as you’re in the highway
business.”
“I feel like you’re implying something.”
“Not a thing. Although, as a man quote-unquote in the property
business, I can tell you that you ought to be cautious in your dealings
with your partners, if they’ve got you acting—not that I’m saying they
do, or are—as their straw purchaser. You should talk to my lawyer.”
Abbie began to formulate a reply, but Imlak jumped in again.
“In any case, to answer your question: I’m only in it for the
energy. Property is pointless unless it’s improvable or extractable.
The thing I’ve learned is that if it’s extractable, then the extractors
are willing to pay you a whole lot of money to guarantee future
revenues. Even very far future revenues. You see, you think that the
energy companies are hidebound, dirty, old-fashioned Texans or
weirdo Saudi royals living in the now, but kids, I’m telling you, they
are thinking decades in advance. We are, right now, sitting atop a
vast shale formation that holds more exploitable carbon than the
whole goddamn Middle East. We just don’t quite have the tech to
yank it out yet. But in another ten, twenty years we will. So between
now and then, we build some new roads and open a few Wal-Marts
to support the industry when it comes, and then those of us who own
the mineral rights, we lease it and sell it and make many hundreds of
millions. My business, my friend, is patience. And you, buddy. Why,
quite by accident, you’re doing the Lord’s work.” He tipped his glass.
Some hours later, they had consumed at least one more bottle of
wine, and Imlak had broken out a bottle of an Armagnac that he’d
discovered the year before on a trip to Bordeaux. Imlak excused
himself to go to the bathroom. Abbie slid across the couch to Sarah
and asked her quietly how the fuck it could be that Arthur Imlak knew
so much about the particulars of his business with Phil and Veronica.
Sarah said she didn’t have the foggiest notion but that Arthur
seemed like a man who kept a close watch on that sort of thing.
“Ooo, Arthur seems like a man who keeps a close watch on this sort
of thing,” Abbie said. Sarah snorted but patted his hand. They were
quite drunk. “You ought to let him think he can screw you,” Abbie
said. “Get him to tell you what he knows.”
“Oh, go to hell, Abbie!” Sarah lifted her hand and backed away
from him. She glared.
“What?” he said. “Christ, I was only kidding.”
“No. You weren’t.”
“I was.”
When Imlak returned, he seemed oddly invigorated for a man
who’d had just as much to drink as they had. Had they looked more
closely, they’d have noticed a fine dusting of off-white grains just
below his right nostril, but they didn’t look so closely. They had
another drink. Abbie tripped over a coffee table. Imlak insisted they
stay in one of the guest rooms and not drive. “It’s fine,” Abbie said,
although he was laying on his back on a couch with a bag of ice on
his shin. “I’ve got connections.”
“Yes, well,” Imlak said.
 They went to bed, and Imlak, who’d done a few more blasts, went
into his study and poured himself a long whiskey and settled into his
leather chair and found a West Coast baseball game in boring extra
innings on TV. He sipped his whiskey. He was bending over his glass
side table with a rolled fifty-dollar bill in his hand when Sarah came in
forty minutes later. She put a hand on his arm. “Can I offer you a
blast?” he asked. She extended her hand.
She wasn’t the most beautiful woman, and she even looked a
little older than she probably was, Imlak thought, but that was one of
the delights of aging; you came to prefer women of a certain age.
(Well, of course, that wasn’t wholly true; there was an admittedly
common sort of man who believed that a younger woman would
assuage his aging rather than bringing it into sharp and pitiable
relief. But Imlak didn’t consider himself a common sort of man.) Her
face and the exposed skin of her arms were tight and papery, and
her hair was brown and severe. She was so pale as to appear
almost translucent around the edges. Not beautiful, he thought
again, but she looked like no other woman he’d ever seen. She took
a sip of his drink without asking and sat on the floor beside the chair.
They watched the game in silence for a few minutes.
“Are you trying to screw my husband?” she asked.
“What if I were?”
“It’s your business. But I’d like some advance warning.”
“No. I’m not.”
She stood up and extended her hand to him.
“What about Abbie?” he said.
“He’s dead to the world.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“My marriage is very important to me, but it lacks . . . a core of
physical intimacy. We’re only married. We understand each other.”
They went to his bedroom and went through the motions quietly,
and when he tried to say something, she laid a cool hand across his
mouth and shook her head. Afterward, she said, “That was lovely,
thank you,” and she kissed his forehead. He’d been pleased, after all
the drinks and the lines, to have no trouble getting it up. He’d
suggested, at the pre-penultimate moment, that he go to the
bathroom for a condom. “Don’t be silly,” she told him. “I’m pretty
much past all that.” They took turns in the bathroom. She was
unselfconsciously dressing when he returned.
“That’s the part they leave out of the movies,” she said. “The
desperate rush to pee after you’ve fucked.”
“I like it when you say fuck.”
“Oh, please,” Sarah said. “Let’s not.”
“Where are you going?”
“I’m not going to fall asleep in your bed, Arthur. Let’s keep this
realistic. You strike me as that kind of man. I’d do it again, but I don’t
want Abbie to find out.”
“You said you had an understanding.”
“I said that, yes.”
“Look, I wasn’t entirely honest with you before. I’m not trying to
screw Abbie. Not intentionally. I like Abbie. I like both of you. Which
is,” he shrugged, “ironic, I guess. But you should know that Veronica
and Phil, that’s a different story. It’s nothing personal, but like I said,
in my business, you take the long view.”
“What are you talking about?”
“In ten, fifteen years, there’s going to be a huge debate about gas
mining in the state, and I’m going to need a lot of people to owe me.
And a couple-billion-dollar highway project is a pretty good quid pro
quo. And I’ve known Sherri Larimer since way back. We went to high
school together, actually. Red Raiders, the two of us. Anyway, what I
could really use is your help in all this.”
“My help.”
“Yes. To get Abbie to sell me all that property that those dummies
had him buy up on their behalf with their money on the cheap.”
“Why?”
“Why?” He lay back on the bed and put his hands behind his
head. “Little lady, there’s gold in them thar hills.”

• • •

Abbie had dreamed of the deer again. In the dream, he was a hawk.
He didn’t know he was a hawk. A hawk only feels its hawkness and
has no symbol to name it and place itself in a taxonomy of things. He
was high above a field of corn, which was bordered on one side by a
stand of woods separating it from the big holes over which the bird-
legged mammals would build their square wooden nests and on the
other side by the hard gray path over which the mammals rode their
strange, hollow mounts. He liked the path and the animals the
mammals rode; they made heat and he ascended easily on the air’s
own rising. He could see everything; his eyes were a miracle; no
insect on a leaf was too small for him to detect. Some deer moved
through the corn and emerged beside the gray path where one of the
mammals was standing. Even as a hawk, Abbie knew that the
mammal was him also. He tipped his wing slightly and traced a long
arc. The Abbie on the ground moved its arms, and the fawn sprang
away toward the path. The Abbie called after it, but it leapt wildly
down the embankment into the path of one of the vast, rushing
beasts, which hit it with such force that the young creature seemed
to explode. The other deer, the adult, had fled toward the woods.
The Abbie who was the hawk watched it move through the corn. It
thought—though it doesn’t think, but feels as an intersection of
competing desires—that it was a shame the armored animals didn’t
stop to eat the thing they’d killed, and thought of stooping to take a
taste himself, but there was no attraction in a thing already dead,
and he curved back toward the mountain. That was when Abbie
woke up.
Of all the blessings in his life, Abbie believed that the greatest
was his natural, general immunity to the hangover. It was just after
sunrise. Sarah was asleep beside him, her pants on the floor, her
shirt twisted around her body with the sheet. He got out of the bed
and patted his belly. He pulled on his clothes and went to the kitchen
where he gargled a little water. He walked to the windows and
looked out over the half-grown corn and noticed then what it seemed
impossible he hadn’t noticed before. He found himself walking out of
the house and across its patios and out into the fields, through the
parallel rows that rippled across the wide, descending land until the
boundary road and the highway and then, beyond the highway, the
foothill rise and the protuberance of Pine Knob and Laurel Ridge and
Route 40 climbing it toward the white Summit Inn just then reflecting
the rising sun like a beacon. He could see his own property to its
right. He walked faster; the corn scratched his arms where he’d
rolled his sleeves. He came to the edge of the property, a narrow
wire-and-post fence that separated it from a grassy berm beside the
road. There was a copse of trees to his right, and he stood there for
a long time—or for what felt like a long time—waiting for what he
expected to see. When he didn’t, when all he saw were a few cars
passing on the highway, he turned and walked back toward the
house. As he approached it, he saw, through the window, Arthur
Imlak standing beside Sarah in the kitchen. Nothing about it
suggested anything at all, which suggested everything. He permitted
himself to turn around once more and look back across the field. He
thought he saw something moving by the trees. He took a step
toward it. But whatever it was, it was too distant, and it was gone.
 10

A year after she’d arrived in Pittsburgh, Isabel learned that

Veronica Mayer had been her neighbor all along. That Isaac had
failed to mention it—no, that implies an accident, oversight, neglect.
That Isaac had chosen not to mention it surely implied something,
but she couldn’t quite imagine what. For all his pretensions to
aloofness from his odd family, he functioned as the fixed point
around which the rest of their rarely intersecting bodies ever orbited.
Isabel had known, of course, that he lived in—or hoarded and
occasionally crashed in—his aunt’s putative apartment, but that
wasn’t the sort of fact that acquired significance.
It was October, sometime after the nights got cold but before the
clocks changed, a period of shortening evenings and very long
afternoons. Everyone in the city wore black and gold on the most
inappropriate occasions. Barry had convinced Isabel to put her
house on the Edgewood House Tour, and they were well into their
second bottle of Sauvignon blanc. A steady stream of retirees and
public radio types in the same sensible waterproof hiking shoes
they’d wear on group bus-and-boat tours of second-tier European
capitals nosed in and out, complimenting Isabel’s restoration of the
window bay bench in the dining room and, when they thought she
wasn’t listening, murmuring critically about her decision to use
stainless appliances in the kitchen. She hadn’t done either; the
previous owner had done all the renovations. Isabel had only
furnished the place; her single building project had been the
installation of a sliding glass door on the shower in the guest bath. It
wasn’t on the tour. “I imagine I’d have gotten dinged for being
ahistorical,” she whispered to Barry.
“Honey,” he said, hand to heart. Then he refilled their glasses.
Barry was telling her about his friend Jeff’s trouble with the latest
boyfriend who’d started going to AA and stopped having sex. Isabel
mentioned that her mother was sober—mostly, usually—and she
retained a distant and dimmed but still faithful belief in the broad
spiritual themes of that form of sobriety. “Let go and let God and all
that,” she said. Barry thought it was all very silly, and he was in the
middle of explaining, as men only ever explain to women, that
“scientific studies” had shown that twelve-step programs had no
greater or lesser chance of successful outcomes than any other form
of therapy, quitting cold turkey, or even just moderating use “like they
do in Europe.” He was the kind of man for whom that particular
phrase had a talismanic quality, and Isabel could be reasonably sure
that it would come up in any discussion of urban planning,
transportation, healthcare, elections, or social policy—in other words,
nearly everything that they talked about. She let him go on. Barry’s
friends’ relationships were as close as he got to romances of his
own. It would have been cruel to take away the vicarious pleasure he
took in finding their catastrophic flaws. She told Barry that it seemed
to her that if these two only ever had sex when they were drunk, then
it was probably indicative of other underlying problems. But Barry
seemed to believe that it was both more and less complicated than
simply losing the regrettably necessary disinhibition of booze; rather,
it was some part of a larger program of abstemiousness, a sort of
vow of chastity appended like a dangling modifier to the life sentence
of teetotaling.
Isabel normally wouldn’t have given it much thought. She’d have
composed a look of interest and let him rattle on. It struck her, a year
into her job at the Institute, that more than anything, Barry had hired
her to be his friend. Also, she felt that just as the irreligious filled the
magical void in their lives with compensatory superstition, the
perennially single filled the void of romantic absence with a
complete, pop-psychological interest in the sex lives of others. She’d
noted it in herself. Isaac had recently broken up with Sawyer, and
she wasn’t immune to the gossipy attraction of such speculation.
 She’d accidentally witnessed the immediate aftermath of Isaac’s
break-up. He’d given her a key to his apartment, where he claimed
to have an un-upholstered but otherwise intact Edwardian divan that
would make a perfect little daybed for her small third bedroom, which
she used as an office. Isaac had made offers like this before, and
they almost never panned out; his recollections of purchases and
acquisitions were hazy at best, and Isabel had discovered that, like
his mother, he was a frequent eBay and auction seller—in Isaac’s
case, whenever he’d blown through whatever money his trust
provided for him in a month and needed to raise some quick cash.
(The irony there was that he’d spent from that same pot of inherited
money in order to acquire the things that he was now selling at a
loss. So it may not, Isabel realized when she considered it, have
been so different from Sarah’s motivation after all.) There had,
however, been at least a few cases where he’d come through
spectacularly: a 1960s ceramic espresso service from
Czechoslovakia glazed in extraordinarily bright primary colors; a
genuine (Isabel thought, and Barry agreed) 1880s Laguiole knife
with a corkscrew and carved, though badly chipped, ivory handle; a
set of 1950s highball glasses from a line commissioned by
Nordstrom, which each bore the name of a deadly poison in a fin-de-
siècle druggist font.
He told her he’d leave the furniture out for her to look at, and she
didn’t bother to ask him why he wouldn’t just show it to her himself.
He professed to believe in whimsy as a guiding life principle, though
he practiced something more akin to thoughtless inconsistency.
Isabel left work early and drove over to the apartment. She let
herself in. She found him deliriously drunk, almost insensate, his
nose and mouth so clotted with bubbling snot as to make him appear
rabid, trying and failing to pick himself off a floor strewn with the
smashed remains of whatever he’d been able to get his hands on.
He was crying—hardly even crying anymore; moaning and gasping
all at once—with a commitment that Isabel had never observed in
him before. He’d cut one of his hands in the process of breaking
things, and he’d left a few bloody semi-handprints around. The
scene was slightly ridiculous, like a pre-credit piece for a Law &
Order episode, the first murder suspect who is never the real culprit.
Isabel stood fixed in the doorway. Isaac didn’t immediately notice
her. When he did, he looked at her with red, swollen eyes and
moaned once more; it was the sound of an animal without a lot of
imperfect words for its pain. He turned his head and looked at the
broken chair beside him, wiped his nose, and turned back to her. “I
broke your chaise,” he said.
“I see that.”
“He left me.”
“Who?” Isabel asked. She knew, of course. Or she thought she
knew. With Isaac, she could never be sure. He might have meant
Jake, with whom, over the last several months, she’d noticed him
spending considerably more time than with his boyfriend; Isaac had
been going to Uniontown every weekend. Sawyer never joined him.
On one of those weekends when Isaac was away, Isabel had met
Sawyer for dinner. It had been months. He got unusually drunk, for
him, and then uncharacteristically asked her if she wanted to go out
drinking with him. She matched him drink for drink until she felt quite
unable to put one more drop in her body, and she begged off. He
hardly noticed. The next Monday at the office, Jenny and Penny told
her that they’d seen him after hours at The Castle in Bloomfield,
talking and eventually leaving with someone, or something, they
referred to as one of the local glamor drag twinks.
“Sawyer,” Isaac said after a long pause, and just saying the name
seemed at once to deflate and to sober him. He wiped his nose
again with the back of his hand and took a long, gurgling breath.
“I’m sorry,” Isabel said.
“He said he couldn’t imagine marrying me. Can you believe that?
I never even thought about it.”
“I’m sorry.”
“He said our relationship lacked a core of intimacy. Excuse me.
Whose fault is that? He’s the one who never wanted to fuck me! He’s
the one who was always stepping out with fucking nineteen-year-
olds.”
“Isaac,” she said, trying to inject a little humor into it, “you’re
stepping out with a nineteen-year-old.”
“He’s twenty-three. And fuck that. It never meant anything to me.
He fell in love with them.”
 This struck Isabel as completely incorrect. Sawyer might have
occasionally exaggerated his self-possession, but he was observably
stingy with his affection. Their own friendship, for instance, had
never progressed beyond the facts of their superficial similarities,
and it had always felt like it was underlain by an off-putting quantity
of rational calculation, as if Sawyer were the model man who
inhabits the fiction of economics, for whom even desire is at last
mere calculation of relative return value. It was Isaac who, though he
could be callow and cruel, though he was flighty and inconsistent
with his love, loved wholly and loved well; even his self-love was
careless. He was an accidental egotist, who fell heedlessly in love
with a self he should, by rights, have hated.
Because Isabel had nothing else to say, she said, “I’m sorry,”
once more.
For a moment, Isaac stared at the ground. For the first time,
Isabel thought he looked less than unnaturally alluring, just a puffy,
snotty boy whose gawky legs splayed at weird angles, too-big feet
flopping outward, clothes merely disheveled. “I loved him,” he said.
“I know,” she answered. He wanted her to think that it was a lie,
but she didn’t believe him.
“I would have married him.”
“I know you would have,” she said, although she knew he
wouldn’t have, or he would have out of some irrational fidelity to
some inexpressible principle, hanging on with the tenacity that
people reserve only for their most hopeless endeavors.
“I need a job,” he said. “Jesus Christ, I’m twenty-fucking-four. I
didn’t even finish school.”
“What do you mean? You went to Pitt.”
“I didn’t really graduate. I stopped going my senior year.” He
looked at her miserably. “Don’t tell anyone.”
“Who would I tell?”
“I don’t know. Abbie.”
“I wouldn’t tell Abbie.”
“Isabel,” he said.
“Okay. I won’t, though. I won’t.”
“It doesn’t matter. Do you think Barry would give me a job?”
“I don’t know. Probably, if you asked. Doing what, though?”
 “I don’t know, I don’t know. I’m a good writer.”
“You’re a poet. We write white papers. We write studies and
grants.”
“God,” Isaac said. “Why do people work?”
“Money,” Isabel said. “Mostly.”
“No one who has real money works. Everyone I know with money
travels. Ask Arthur the next time you see him at a party. ‘What have
you been doing, Arthur?’ ‘Traveling.’”
Isabel laughed, but not too long. “That sounds like Arthur.”
“He’s not my father, you know.”
“Isaac—”
“I know Barry told you. Or somebody did. Every time I say his
name, you get this look. It isn’t true. People are such fucks.”
“Yes, they are.”
He looked at her, and a hint of something other than misery
teased at the corners of his mouth, the bare hint of the sun’s disk
behind the gray clouds that float over Western Pennsylvania all fall.
He took a fortifying breath, picked himself off the floor, and then
stepped carefully through the wreckage of the apartment to the little
kitchen, where he found two Flintstones glasses and took a bottle of
cold-thickened vodka from the freezer and poured them each a nice
portion. “Maybe I should go into real estate,” he said.

• • •

Just as it was getting dark, and the last house tourists were
descending the walkway stairs from all the steep front yards to the
equally steep sidewalks and street, as Barry and Isabel were
finishing the bottle and starting to talk about where they ought to go
for dinner, Barry stood up and called to an older woman walking a
small dog up the street. “Veronica. Veronica!”
She looked up at his second effort and squinted toward the
porch, then took a few steps in their direction. “Barry Fitzgerald?
What in the world?”
She and the dog came up to the foot of the porch. “What are you
doing over here, Dr. Fitzgerald? I didn’t think Breezers crossed the
city line unless they were on the Parkway.”
 “I’m a rebel. Sometimes I even go to Wilkinsburg.” Barry was
slightly looped from the wine. “And I could ask you the same. I
thought you were living in Gateway Center. From downtown to
Edgewood Towne Centre? What sort of urban pioneer are you?”
“I’m seventy-five. I moved here five years ago. Just across the
street from Regent Square, so just over the border. Better taxes. I
know old people are supposed to live in condos, but I read online
that if you walk the stairs in your house twenty times a day, you’ll live
to be a hundred and twenty. Also, have you ever tried to buy
groceries downtown? Besides, my little darling here”—she indicated
the dog—“prefers life out here in nature.”
“Veronica,” Barry said, “let me introduce you to my friend Isabel.
Isabel, this is Veronica Mayer!”
“Oh, hello.” Isabel didn’t know the protocol for meeting a woman
to whom she was an utter stranger, and yet about whom she knew—
at least, had heard—so much. So she descended from the porch
and shook Veronica’s hand. The older woman didn’t look seventy-
five; she certainly looked younger than Abbie did. Isabel would have
thought her the younger sibling. They didn’t much resemble each
other physically, except that her hair was the same shocking shade
of white, although it was cut into the neatly aristocratic bowl favored
by a certain sort of well-heeled woman over sixty, and it shone with
the frequent attention of a stylist. Otherwise, she was petite and fit.
Her cheeks and jawline had begun to show the slightest sag, but her
skin lacked the linen quality that Isabel associated with age, and her
small eyes moved quickly and peered sharply out of deep sockets.
She may have had some work done on her neck, which looked a bit
too tight to Isabel. The neck was circled by an understated gold
necklace that bore a Star of David. She wore a white shirt in a man’s
cut, a pair of blue jeans, and new running shoes. The dog’s leash
was leather. Louis Vuitton, Isabel noted. Given Abbie’s and Isaac’s
descriptions of her, Isabel had imagined a rather batty old cat-lady
with a distinctly dykier and certainly more penurious look. It was one
point at which father’s and son’s otherwise divergent takes on her
agreed. But here she was, and she looked like her next stop was a
board meeting for the ballet. “I’m so pleased to meet you,” Isabel
said. “I, well, I know your nephew. And your brother.”
 She pursed her lips, but didn’t seem especially put off by this silly
thing the young lady had just blurted out. “And how do you know Dr.
Fitzgerald here?”
“Ah, he’s actually my boss.”
“Coworker,” Barry added. Like so many bosses in the non-profit
and academic world, he was remarkably democratic unless he
wanted something.
“Oh I see. This is your house?”
“Yes,” Isabel said.
“I knew the former owners slightly. He played for the symphony.”
“That’s right,” Isabel told her. “His wife worked for the school
board. I think they were moving to Florida.”
“That sounds about right. I’ve always thought it must be ghastly
to live in a place where everyone is so old they wear coats no matter
how miserably tropical it gets. Years ago, when I was about your
age, actually, I worked for a law firm that had an office in Miami, and
they sent me down for a few months to work on a probate thing.
Some giant mess of an estate. That was in the seventies, of course.
I despised it. The managing partner down there lived in this
monstrously tacky Spanish Colonial mansion in Coconut Grove, and
I had to stay in his guest house. Everyone did a tremendous amount
of cocaine, drank heavily, and some woman always ended up naked
in the pool. I’m sorry, I’m digressing. I was more incisive when I was
less antiquated. In any event, I’ve always liked this house. I love your
porch furniture.”
“Isaac actually helped me pick it out. Would you like to come
inside? We were just talking about going for dinner, but we could
have a drink first.”
“No, thank you. Perhaps lunch sometime soon? I haven’t actually
seen Isaac in ages. Bring him along. I trust he hasn’t overly abused
that apartment.”
“I think,” Isabel said, “that he’ll be devoting more attention to it.
He and Sawyer broke up recently.”
“They did?” Barry seemed surprised.
“Didn’t I tell you?”
“No. I tell you all the gossip, but you always hold out on me.”
 “Discretion is the better part of valor.” Veronica smiled at Isabel.
“My brother and I share an addiction to clichés, although I’m the only
one who’s embarrassed by it. It’s probably good that they broke up. I
never could imagine those two getting married.”
Isabel regarded her cautiously. She said, “Sawyer said something
along those lines to him, apparently. Do people have to get married
to stay together?”
“Not at all. But now that the option is available, I find myself
becoming very conservative in that regard. My late partner, Edith,
and I would have availed ourselves of the opportunity if we’d had it,
anyway.”
“I’m so sorry,” Isabel said. “She died?”
“Yes. Don’t be too sorry. It was a long time ago, now.
Unexpected, but long past. And I do have my little Bessie to keep me
company. Just two old ladies, ironically, as it would have been,
except that one of us is a dog.”
“Well, I’m sorry anyway. Was she sick?”
“Oh, no. No. My brother had her killed.” She gave a tug on the
leash, and the dog turned. “Well,” she said. “Goodnight. Isaac has
my number. We really should have lunch, the three of us. And you
too, Barry, if you like.” And she walked back to the sidewalk, where
the streetlights were coming on, and headed back down the hill
toward her own home.
Isabel looked at Barry, and Barry, for once, only turned up his
hands and shrugged. “I have no idea,” he said.

• • •

“Tell me, how is Isaac doing?” Veronica asked Isabel. It was their
second dinner together. They were eating gristly steak and frites at a
little Belgian café not far from Barry’s house in Point Breeze. It was
the weekend after the clocks turned back, and it got dark at five. All
but the most tenacious leaves had fallen suddenly off the trees, and
even when it hadn’t rained, if felt like it had rained. Isabel had gone
to dinner with her for the first time just a week after they’d met. She’d
mentioned to Isaac that she was meeting his aunt, and he made her
swear that she wouldn’t talk about him. She’d immediately betrayed
the promise. Veronica was utterly charming. Like everyone else in
that family, she liked to drink, and it was hard not to get swept up in
her pace. Isabel was tipsy before entrees. Veronica had insisted they
split a 750 mL bottle of a Trappist beer that had the viscosity of a
heel of bread soaked in onion soup—that flavor as well, actually,
yeasty and sweet—and some ungodly percentage of alcohol.
“He’s all right,” Isabel said. “I suppose. He and Sawyer are
fighting over dishes.”
“Poor Sawyer.”
“I thought you didn’t like Sawyer.”
“I like Sawyer very much. I suspect he’ll be much happier without
my nephew.”
“That’s probably true. And anyway, I think that Isaac has
something going on with his friend, Jake.”
“Oh dear. I wonder how Abbie feels about that.”
“Yeah,” Isabel said. “I always got the feeling that that kid is a sort
of opportunistic bisexual.”
“Oh, no,” Veronica waved her hand. “I meant because he’s
black.”
“Because he’s black?”
“Well, yes. You know Abbie is a terrible racist, don’t you? I mean,
not in the Fayette County sense. He’d never say nigger or anything
like that. It’s very genteel. It takes the form of condescension and
silent disapproval. He’s the sort of person who thinks that, oh, those
studies about IQ and race are very interesting.”
“I find that hard to believe, to be honest.”
“How do you think he got along so well with those rednecks down
in Fayette County? What do you think endeared him to Sherri
Larimer and Donald Cavignac and that whole gang? His business
acumen? Ha!”
“Well,” Isabel said.
“Lord,” said Veronica. “I can only imagine what else he’s told
you.”
They finished their meals and drank more of the sweet, doughy
beer. The waiter returned and asked if they’d like dessert. “We’d like
another drink,” Veronica said.
Isabel said she couldn’t.
 “Of course you can. You need a digestif.”
She knew the owner, although he wasn’t there that night, and she
knew that he kept a bottle of Alsatian eau-de-vie for certain
occasions. They drank a round of fiery pear liquor out of little clear
thimbles. Isabel felt extraordinarily drunk.
“So,” Veronica said. “Did Isaac say why it was that he and
Sawyer broke up?”
“I think Sawyer broke it off with him. He said . . . I’m sorry, this is
very strong. He said—Sawyer, that is—something to the effect that
their relationship lacked an and-I-quote core of physical intimacy.”
A strange expression chased itself across Veronica’s face like the
headlight of a car passing across a window at night. “He said that
Sawyer said that?”
“To that effect,” Isabel repeated.
“Well, that would be very odd.”
“Why?”
“Because that’s what Abbie told Sarah after she found out that he
knocked up that poor woman.”
“I’m sorry,” Isabel said. Then, evenly, she hoped casually: “What
poor woman?”
“Oh, back in New York. Before they moved out here. You know
Abbie could never keep his dick in his pants. Cathy was her name.”
“Hmm,” Isabel said.
“You know, they liked to pretend that they had some kind of open
marriage, which is what people do when they oughtn’t have ever
married in the first place. Actually, I think Isaac must be a lot like his
father in that regard. Anyway, Abbie was fucking around, imagine
that, and Sarah snooped and found out and threatened to end it, but
you know Abbie, he can never admit defeat, not even when it’s really
victory. So he told her he’d ‘have the thing taken care of’—I mean,
honestly, is there anything quite as awful as a man speaking about
an abortion, whether for or against? They’re so very proprietary
about it. Anyway, Sarah was giving him the whole how-could-you
routine, and Abbie told her that he loved her and wanted to be with
her, but that their relationship lacked a core of physical intimacy,
which he must therefore seek elsewhere, and then he proposed that
they make a new start of it. This was all conveniently elided in
retrospect to make room for his supposed discourse with Yahweh,
but the truth is that they came out here so that Abbie could save his
marriage. Astonishing, isn’t it, how much trouble we go through for
things that are obviously doomed?”
Isabel laughed. She was drunk, and she knew she had to play
that part or else give the depth of her interest away. She asked if
they should get the check.
“I’ll get the check. And don’t argue. My brother may have
screwed me, business-wise, of course, but I did get paid, ultimately.”
“All right,” Isabel said.
“Anyway, Sarah got him back when she slept with poor Arthur
Imlak.”
“Isaac told me that wasn’t true. And I’ve never heard anyone
describe Arthur Imlak as poor. Not even metaphorically.”
“I’m sure Isaac believes that. He can be shockingly naïve,
actually. And Arthur, oh, I don’t really mean it, not literally. I do think
he was actually in love with Sarah, though, and for all the money he
made I don’t think he ever got the thing he really wanted.”
“He’s really about to get what he wants. Did you hear? Barry is
giving him the Carnegie Award.”
“What on earth is that?”
“Oh, God. It’s our annual—well, usually annual—award that we
give at our annual gala. For contributions to sustainable urbanism.”
“That seems ironic. And I didn’t know you all had Carnegie
money.”
“We don’t. Well, a little, but it’s just a small operating grant.
Believe it or not—I asked—it was your old business partner who had
the idea. Back when he was on the board. He thought it sounded
classy.”
“That man.” Veronica shook her head. “I sometimes wonder what
ever happened to him.”
“I couldn’t say,” Isabel said. In fact, she’d tracked him down and
was hoping to find a way to meet him. She never did.
“Well, I suppose Arthur has given you enough money over the
years.”
“Still,” Isabel said. “It’s going to be terrible. People are already
planning a protest. The governor—the state had just elected a
Democrat who’d campaigned on a promise of a gas excise tax—was
supposed to give the keynote, but we’re hearing rumors he might
pull out.”
Veronica smiled and waved her Amex at the waiter. She sighed.
“Poor Arthur,” she said.

• • •

What Isabel didn’t tell Veronica was that she’d argued against the
whole thing. “Is it really appropriate?” she’d asked. “I mean, given his
business?”
“Arthur’s business is our business,” Barry told her, and he looked
at her across his desk with the slight scowl that he affected when he
wanted to remind her that they were not, after all, peers. Then he
told her that since she and Arthur got along so well, he thought it
would be a good idea if Isabel were the one to tell him.
So there she was at another one of Imlak’s absurd parties in his
great glass shoebox in downtown Pittsburgh. It was a pre-Christmas
Light-Up Night. A brass band was playing carols in Market Square.
Philip Johnson’s mad glass castle at PPG Place glowed like a giant,
misshapen lightbulb. It was cold, and from far above, Isabel could
see tiny skaters going around the ice rink in the plaza. She didn’t
know anyone else at the party. It was Arthur’s peculiar genius to
forever find new people to occupy the crowd scenes that his sense
of social obligation occasionally required. He kept complaining about
the caterers, and for a while he elbowed the bartender out from
behind the bar and had a grand time mixing too-strong drinks
himself. At midnight, he threw everyone out except for Isabel and a
few younger and more beautiful women, whose glum dates he sent
down the elevator with a gleeful and evil little wave of his fingers. He
gave the ringleader of these girls a cartoonishly large satchel of coke
and the iPad that controlled the house sound system. He left them
with these and a bottle of booze in the grand living room, then
hauled Isabel off to the kitchen to drink what he claimed to be sixty-
year-old scotch. He produced a second and more realistically scaled
baggie of cocaine and drew out two lines on the counter.
 She bent to do one. She tossed her head back. “You gave the
other ladies a volume discount.” She laughed.
“I gave the youth the stepped-on shit,” he said, relishing a phrase
that someone else had taught him. “It would be silly to waste the
quality on the undiscerning.”
They got high.
Isabel said, “It’s a terrible idea to give you the Carnegie Award,
you know.”
He chuckled, pleased. “Of course it’s a terrible idea. It will
undermine whatever credibility you have. Which isn’t much, frankly.”
She frowned, because even if it were true, she still didn’t like the
suggestion that her employer was in some way a fraud. She asked
him, a little testily, why, if that were the case, would he even accept.
He did a few more lines without offering any to her. He said, “I
find it entertaining to watch Barry squirm between the twinned
imperatives of his organization and its principles.” He rubbed his
nose. “The whole notion of non-profit companies performing the
good works that idiotic Americans refused to permit the true public
sector to perform is an absurdity. He laughed and told her that he
was in fact a good Marxist who was “heightening the contradictions.”
He seemed especially pleased by the phrase.
“Yeah, well,” Isabel said, annoyed in spite of herself, “isn’t it just
the deranging influence of guys like you and your big piles of loose
cash that prevent America from having a reasonable public sector in
the first place?” She put a hand on her hip.
He told her that his piles of loose cash were ultimately the result
of those same idiots ignoring their own best interest. He obscurely
referred to some comment that H. L. Mencken supposedly made
about Russia and America, but when Isabel pressed him to
remember it exactly, he told her she’d have to look it up on her own.
“You’re the scholar,” he teased. His eyes had grown narrow.
“I guess so,” she said.
Imlak said, “In any event, I like superseding that moron commie
governor that the good people of the Commonwealth have just
elected. If you can’t beat them, and you won’t join them, undermine,
undermine, undermine.”
 Isabel shrugged and asked him if he was ever going to attend to
his other guests.
“The presence of a gauche female element,” he told her, “is
purely a matter of reputation management. A man must appear to be
a certain thing.”
Isabel still believed him when he said this, though she found it
insulting, even if it wasn’t directed at her, even if in saying it to her,
Imlak was implicitly exempting her from his contempt. And then—it
was the hour, it was the aged scotch, it was the good cocaine—she
asked him flat out with the insistence that only drink and drugs and
an hour past decency permit if he was really Isaac Mayer’s father,
his biological father. And Arthur Imlak, who not two hours before had
been all loose tie and cocktail shakers and bad jokes, put his hands
on the counter on either side of her; she squirmed, and he said,
gravely, “Yes.” His breath stank. He fixed his clouded, pinpoint eyes
on hers, and he held her in his stare and said, “But you, you believe
it’s just a rumor.” She realized that one of his hands was now
gripping her wrist. It wasn’t painful, but it was almost painful. Isabel
couldn’t think of what to say; she knew that she should shout at him,
she should tell him to fuck off, but she found herself instead
searching for something funny to say, as if it were up to her to make
him realize that this was all hilarious, ha ha, just a joke; but humor
failed her too, so she just said that yes, that was what she believed.
Arthur was older than her, and she’d have doubted that he could
have kept up on a three-mile run around the park, but right then he
felt very big. Isabel could feel his elbows on her sides. He was much
taller than she was. He was leaning forward to bring his eyes level
with hers, which made their faces even closer. She didn’t want to
look away from him, because she was afraid it would make him
angry. His whole demeanor was changed. “You are not to say
anything,” he said. She shook her head. Then he leaned closer. His
mouth was by her ear. She could hear the sound of his tongue
moving behind his teeth. She felt as if her skin was going to peel
away from her own body and her throat was going to turn inside out.
“Good,” he said. Then, more quietly, his mouth even closer, he said,
“No one would hear you.” Then he was somehow on the other side
of the kitchen, leaning against the counter, swirling a scotch, grinning
as if none of it had happened. She made herself stop shaking. She
wasn’t some dumb girl. She wasn’t afraid. She stopped herself from
shaking and went out with him into the living room as if nothing had
happened and made herself party with him and those drunken young
women for another hour in some vague hope that he would not
connect what had just happened with why and when she chose to
leave.

• • •

Eli said that he would kill him, kill Imlak, do it himself with his own
hands around the sick old man’s soft neck, and Isabel thought he
thought he was trying to mean it, the poor guy. “You can’t kill him,”
she said, meaning both that it would not do to actually murder Arthur
Imlak, nor did she believe Eli could actually go through with it, even if
the moral question did not obtain. She’d called him after two in the
morning, and he’d arrived at her apartment at four. He smelled of
coffee and the cigarette he’d smoked in the car on the way.
“What are you doing here?” she asked. She hadn’t asked him to
come, only told him what had happened.
That was when he made the threat. That was when she said he
couldn’t kill Arthur.
“Arthur,” he spat. “Fuck that man.” He came inside, and Isabel
made tea. “Isabel,” he told her, “you’re too old to take these drugs.”
“Oh, thanks. So I’m old, and it’s my fault.”
“I don’t mean that.” He didn’t mean that. They sat on the couch
and drank tea. Then she lay down and put her head in his lap.
“Anyway,” she said. “You can’t kill Arthur. He’s Isaac’s father.”
“No he isn’t.”
“He admitted it.”
“They’re all liars. Arthur. Abbie. Sarah. Isaac.”
“You work for them.”
“Well, so do you, in a way.”
“Yes.”
He didn’t want to say any more about that. Instead, he told her
that for years he’d thought of going to Canada where his sister lived,
to Vancouver, out to the island, or up north on the mainland,
somewhere with cheap land on a hill near the water. He would do,
ironically, what Abbie had done: design and build a house, all his
own, although it would be a different sort of house, and he would
build most of it himself, with his own hands. It would be small. It
would have thoughtful windows. It would be the sort of house that
made the people who lived in it decide what they needed to keep
and what they must part with. It would have a steep roof and feel like
a tent beneath the tall trees. There would be a wood-burning stove in
the kitchen, and he would keep a canoe at a small dock on the
water, which he would take out when the weather was calm. There
would be whales and eagles, and even in the winter it would be
green. He dreamed of it, sometimes, the house, the water, the forest.
In the dream, sometimes, a black bear came out of the trees while
he stood on the porch. It shuffled across the pine needles. Its breath
was visible in little puffs. When it got close to him, no more distant
than the far side of a small room, it stood on two feet. The bear’s
sad, lovely eyes looked into Eli’s, and his into the bear’s. It dropped
back to its feet and shook itself like a dog coming out of the water,
and coughed, and wandered back into the forest. “A monster in the
woods,” Isabel murmured, and she thought, but later decided she’d
been wrong, that she heard Eli say one of the names of God. She
fell asleep around this point, and when she woke up, he was
sleeping too, his head tilted back against the wall, snoring lightly, his
feet on the coffee table, his legs crossed at the ankles.
 11

IN RE:
ABBOT MAYER )
dba MAYER DESIGN LAB, LLC )
)
and )
)
MH PARTNERS LLP )
ARBITRATION HEARING
THURSDAY, MARCH 21, 1991
BEFORE: SAUL MAMRY, ARBITRATOR – ATTORNEY AT LAW

APPEARANCES:

For Abbot Mayer:

David and David, P.C.
David Ben David, Esquire
1001 Wood Street
Pittsburgh, PA 15222
For MH Partners LLP
Southman Wright & Jordan, P.C.
A. Christopher Jordan, Esquire
590 Grant Street, 8th Floor
Pittsburgh, PA 15219

TRANSCRIPT OF HEARING
Witnesses
VERONICA MAYER
Direct Examination by Mr. Jordan
Cross-Examination by Mr. Ben David
PHILLIP HARROW
Direct Examination by Mr. Jordan
Cross-Examination by Mr. Ben David
ABBOT “Abbie” MAYER
Direct Examination by Mr. Ben David
Cross-Examination by Mr. Jordan
ARTHUR B. IMLAK
Not Examined

PROCEEDINGS

MR. MAMRY: Thank you. We have a court reporter who is

recording these proceedings, and that is by mutual consent of the
parties. My name is Saul Mamry, and I will be the Arbitrator—not, as
I sometimes hear it mistaken, the Arbiter—for this, well, Arbitration.
The parties have agreed to binding arbitration in this matter. The
results will be, as the name suggests, binding. I am neutral, and I
have no prior knowledge of the facts or circumstances of the . . .
circumstances. All right? We have five, I’m sorry, four witnesses who
will testify today, as well as a number of joint and individual exhibits,
which will be introduced into the record. Do I have that correct?
MR. BEN DAVID: Yes, Mr. Arbitrator.
MR. JORDAN: Yes, Mr. Arbitrator.
MR. MAMRY: Good. Excellent. Well, let’s begin. I take it we have
opening statements?
MR. JORDAN: Yes, Mr. Arbitrator. Mr. Arbitrator, in 1988, Mr.
Abbie Mayer—
MR. MAMRY: I’m sorry to interrupt already. That’s Abbot Mayer?
He goes by Abbie?
MR. JORDAN: He does, Mr. Arbitrator.
MR. MAMRY: He can answer, counselor. I probably fooled you
with the third person there, but as a general rule, when I address a
question to a person present, the present person can answer for
him- or herself. We’re not adjudicating a felony here. At least, I hope
not.
MR. JORDAN: Of course.
MR. MAMRY: Mr. Mayer?
MR. MAYER: I do, Your Honor.
MR. MAMRY: Yes, thank you, Mr. Mayer. I’m not a judge. No
need for your honors. Go ahead, Mr. Jordan.
MR. JORDAN: Thank you. Mr. Arbitrator, in 1988, Abbie Mayer
relocated to Pittsburgh with his wife, Sarah Mayer, who is a partner
in his firm, Mayer Design Lab.
MR. MAMRY: Once again, I’ll interrupt. This promises to be slow
going if I don’t manage to keep my mouth shut. I am an inveterate
kibitzer. Mrs. Mayer is not present?
MR. JORDAN: No, Mr. Arbitrator.
MR. MAMRY: Afraid she’d spill the beans?
MR. BEN DAVID: Mrs. Mayer is actually nine months pregnant
and due any day now.
MR. MAMRY: Well, that’s not precisely the sort of bean-spilling I
imagined. Mazel tov, Mr. Mayer.
MR. MAYER: [unintelligible]
MR. MAMRY: I’m sorry?
MR. BEN DAVID: Nothing, Mr. Arbitrator. In addition, although
Mrs. Mayer is technically a co-owner of the business, we would
stipulate, and I believe Mr. Jordan will agree, that she is not an active
manager. She worked principally in a support and bookkeeping
capacity.
MR. JORDAN: Yes, we would so stipulate.
MR. MAMRY: I will so accept your so stipulation. May I inquire,
however: wouldn’t bookkeeping be relevant to the matter under
dispute here? This is a financial matter, no?
MR. JORDAN: I think, Mr. Arbitrator, that I will be able to
illuminate that in my opening statement. And in short, the accounting
is not under dispute here. Rather, it is the question of whether or not
an agreement, implicit or otherwise, was breached.
MR. MAMRY: That’s right. You were giving an opening statement.
We do seem to have wandered afield. Please, continue.
 MR. JORDAN: Mr. Arbitrator, my client, MH Partners LLP
consists of two principals, Ms. Veronica Mayer—
MR. MAMRY: Any relation?
MR. JORDAN: I’m sorry?
MR. MAMRY: To Mr. Mayer.
MR. JORDAN: Yes, I was getting to that.
MR. MAMRY: Please.
MR. JORDAN: Ms. Mayer is also the older sibling of Mr. Mayer.
MR. MAMRY: Older!
Ms. Mayer: Thank you, Mr. Arbitrator.
MR. JORDAN: Ms. Mayer is an attorney herself, but her principal
business is in real estate development.
MR. MAMRY: My goodness, is anyone not a lawyer in here? I’m
sorry, go on.
MR. JORDAN: Yes. Ms. Mayer’s business partner is Mr. Phillip
Harrow, also here. Mr. Harrow is also the proprietor and CEO of a
major construction firm based in Morgantown, West Virginia, which is
called Harcon. Over the last approximately nine years, beginning in
1981, Ms. Mayer and Mr. Harrow have, under the auspices of a
limited partnership, MH Partners, engaged in a number of
development projects together and with other companies and
partners. These include residential and commercial developments,
as well as a more recent series of projects involving transportation
infrastructure. In 1987, Mr. Mayer, an architect by training and
profession, approached Ms. Mayer about a potential relocation from
his then-current residence in New York City to Western Pennsylvania
and further proposed that he would join her business as an
additional partner. As MH Partners was, at the time, engaged in a
significant residential development project, Ms. Mayer and Mr.
Harrow concluded that an architect-planner would be a strategically
advantageous partner in their business. They also believed that it
would significantly reduce their costs associated with design, site-
planning, and environmental and wastewater remediation, etc. Mr.
Mayer’s specialty was in what is called sustainable design, which is
to say, environmentally sound building.
Mr. Mayer did, in fact, subsequently move to Pittsburgh and did
likewise join his business with MH Partners. I emphasize he joined
his business, not his person. Mr. Mayer continued to operate as a
private architect and designer, and his firm became, in effect, a
contractor for MH Partners. Over the next approximately three years,
Mayer Design Lab acted as architect and planner for MH Partners.
We have—this is Joint Exhibit 1. It is a schedule of projects over that
period, along with invoices.
MR. MAMRY: I’m sorry, I’m going to interject again, here. First of
all, Mr. Ben David, you have seen this exhibit and it is a joint exhibit?
MR. BEN DAVID: Yes, Mr. Arbitrator.
MR. MAMRY: Good. And Mr. Jordan, let me see if I understand.
You are saying that although there was some, some discussion of
the possibility of Mr. Mayer joining MH Partners—I suppose that
would have made it MMH Partners, no? I give Mr. Harrow some
credit, here. Harcon. That’s rather more clever, wouldn’t you all
agree? So your contention is that Mr. Mayer and MH Partners
discussed a formal business partnership, decided against it, and Mr.
Mayer became a vendor for MH Partners?
MR. JORDAN: Partially, Mr. Arbitrator. But in fact, it is our
contention that the voluminous nature of the schedule and invoices
shows a de facto partnership existed between the businesses even if
no formal document exists to formalize or memorialize such an
understanding. As you know, a great deal of private development
work is done on a quote handshake basis. That is the situation here.
MR. MAMRY: The voluminous nature of the schedule and
invoices! Speak of angels and hear them flutter their wings. Mr. Ben
David, would you . . . Actually, no. Strike that. Well, don’t strike that.
It can remain in the record. I meant it in the common usage only. I’m
sure you’ll address the issue of voluminousness in your opening, Mr.
Ben David.
MR. BEN DAVID: Yes, Mr. Arbitrator.
MR. MAMRY: Then I am assured, voluminously. Go on, Mr.
Jordan.
MR. JORDAN: Yes. I’m getting to the end. Mr. Arbitrator,
beginning approximately two years ago, in 1989, MH Partners along
with Mayer Design Lab became significantly involved in a major
highway construction project, termed in local media the Mon-Fayette
Expressway.
 MR. MAMRY: As a point of correction, I believe it was termed by
local politicians the Mon-Fayette Expressway. I believe the local
media, such as they are, termed it the Highway to Nowhere.
MR. JORDAN: Well, be that as it may—
MR. MAMRY: Don’t worry, Mr. Jordan. I’m only kidding. The fact
that this project may or may not be a public boondoggle, white
elephant, or what have you, has no probative value here and won’t
affect my decision or award. Contracts, implied or otherwise, are
contracts regardless of the, how shall I put it, the ethical genealogy
of their origin. I never begrudge another man—or woman—his
successful scam.
MR. JORDAN: Thank you, Mr. Arbitrator. That’s a memorable
expression of a principle. To conclude, the parties to this dispute
became involved in two significant and interrelated projects. First,
Mr. Harrow’s own company, Harcon, contracted with the
Pennsylvania Department of Transportation to construct several
major portions of the aforementioned highway, with MH Partners
acting as Harcon’s agent in the bidding and contracting phases.
MR. MAMRY: They, Harcon, I’m sorry, were literally building this
Roman road?
MR. JORDAN: No, uh. They would have been the general
contractor. And, let me see, second, MH Partners, in association with
Mayer Design Lab, acquired significant land acreage contiguous with
or congruent to the right-of-way of the highway. The purpose of this
land acquisition was for the construction of a number of housing
developments—bedroom communities, Mr. Arbitrator, located in
proximity to highway exits, entrances, and interchanges. Because
MH Partners’ explicit involvement in the bidding process for highway
construction would constrain them from making these purchases
directly, owing to certain rules of that bidding process, Mayer Design
Lab, which created a subsidiary LLC known as MDL—
MR. MAMRY: I am sensing a naming convention. Go on.
MR. JORDAN: —and Mr. Mayer personally were engaged as
agents for these purchases. Here we will submit our Exhibits 1 and
2, which are records of correspondence to this effect as well as bank
records indicating transfers of funds to MDL and to Mr. Mayer for this
purpose.
 MR. MAMRY: All right. I am a bit idiosyncratic here. I don’t like
having multiple exhibits ones and twos and so forth floating around.
I’ll mark these MH Partners Exhibits 2 and 3. And the numbers will
go up from there.
MR. JORDAN: Very good, Mr. Arbitrator.
MR. MAMRY: You said you were wrapping it up, but I admit, I find
myself still in the dark middle portion of the tunnel here. Will we soon
emerge into daylight?
MR. JORDAN: Yes, of course. In 1990, Ms. Mayer approached
Mr. Mayer about the creation of a new business entity for the
purpose of developing housing on these properties. In effect, she
proposed the creation of a general contracting business that would
construct homes on spec and ultimately sell them through a real
estate partner to be determined. Mr. Mayer then informed Ms. Mayer
that this would not be possible, because he—that is to say, his
company, MDL—had sold the properties to one Arthur B. Imlak, who
is also present today; rather, actually, in fact, to a holding company
controlled by Mr. Imlak.
MR. MAMRY: I shudder to think the holding company is called
ABI.
MR. IMLAK: Close, but no cigar. ILH. That was originally Imlak
Land Holdings.
MR. MAMRY: Yes, thank you, Mr. Imlak. That was a joke, and
you’ll have your turn. I’ll reserve the cigar.
MR. JORDAN: It is our contention that Mr. Mayer violated a clear,
historic, and mutually understood oral contract in so doing. This
matter was previously adjudicated before a judge in civil court, and
we would submit the records of those proceedings as Joint Exhibit . .
. I’m afraid I’m not sure what number we’re on.
MR. MAMRY: Joint Exhibit 4. Entered. But, I’m sorry. You’ve
already been to trial? How in the many Names of the Lord did you
manage that? That was fast! God’s justice may be swift, but civil
court tends to move at a more naturally geologic and less divinely
Let-There-Be sort of pace.
MR. JORDAN: No, Mr. Arbitrator. We had several preliminary
hearings before a judge. We’d asked for an injunction. Our intention
was to overturn the illegal sale of the properties and compel their
return to MH Partners for the purpose of their original intended use.
Regrettably, the judge ruled the sales were legitimate—that is to say,
that they were not, strictly speaking, illegal. We considered going
forward seeking monetary damages in a civil forum, but at that point,
both parties felt it was in their best interests, in terms of publicity and,
frankly, cost, to submit to arbitration instead.
MR. MAMRY: Strictly speaking, everything is illegal. Broadly,
though, nothing is. Who was the judge? Actually, never mind. Forget
it. Arbitration was probably wise, and yes, certainly cheaper than
litigation. Go on.
MR. JORDAN: Very good, Mr. Arbitrator. We contend that,
although the sales may technically have been legal, they violated a
clearly understood oral contract, and that Mr. Mayer unfairly and
unjustly profited from the sale to the sole benefit of his business and
person and to the express detriment of his partners, who have
suffered grievous economic harm as a result. We submit this to you,
Mr. Arbitrator, and ask you to determine that such a violation did
occur, and as a remedy to award the full proceeds of such sales to
my clients, MH Partners LLP.
MR. MAMRY: Excellent. That all seems clear. Let’s recess for five
minutes. I’ve been drinking coffee all morning, if you know what I
mean. Mr. Ben David, you may take your place in the batter’s box.

[RECESS]

MR. MAMRY: We are back on the record. Thank you for indulging
my brief intermission there. Mr. Ben David, if you please.
MR. BEN DAVID: Thank you. Mr. Arbitrator, the issue here is
straightforward.
MR. MAMRY: That seems fairly anti-prophetic to me, Mr. Ben
David. But please, go on.
MR. BEN DAVID: Yes. Our position is straightforward. In the first
part—
MR. MAMRY: I’m sorry, Mr. Ben David. Again, the first part? I’m
going to go out on a limb here and suggest that the first part implies
a minimum of one subsequent part, possibly more, which rather
mitigates against the straightforwardness of this position, does it
not?
MR. BEN DAVID: I don’t believe so, Mr. Arbitrator. The way is
straight, if not narrow. If you would hear me out.
MR. MAMRY: Oh, yes. I am the recording angel, the man clothed
in linen with the writing instrument at his side. Go on.
MR. BEN DAVID: I’ll revise. Our position is twofold. First, that Mr.
Mayer had every legal right to sell this property, as opposing
counsel’s own exhibit demonstrates, and two, that Mr. Mayer in point
of fact generously offered to evenly divide the proceeds of said sales
with Ms. Mayer and Mr. Harrow, an offer they refused in order to
pursue the outrageous claim that Mr. Imlak should be compelled to
return his legally acquired property, or, failing that, that Mr. Mayer
should be required to pay the total proceeds of the sales to MH
Partners and retain nothing for himself.
MR. MAMRY: Let’s leave the outrageousness for the courts,
counselors. We don’t need any of those sorts of antics. You’re both
paying me to be here to arbitrate this dispute. Consider me therefore
suitably pre-impressed by the heroic outrage you all feel at the
terrible thing that has occurred.
MR. BEN DAVID: Of course.
MR. MAMRY: Go on.
MR. BEN DAVID: That’s really it, Mr. Arbitrator. We submit, in
effect, the same question as the opposing side. Did a contract exist
and was it violated? If so, what should the remedy be? If not, well,
not.
MR. MAMRY: I do appreciate brevity. I assume, from the
phrasing, that you believe no violation occurred, and therefore no
remedy is required.
MR. BEN DAVID: That’s correct, Mr. Arbitrator.
MR. MAMRY: All right, then. I have a question, before we
examine witnesses. You mentioned, Mr. Ben David, that Mr. Mayer
offered to evenly split, I believe were your words, the proceeds of
these real estate transactions with his sister and her partner over
there. By evenly split you mean?
MR. BEN DAVID: Fifty-fifty.
 MR. MAMRY: Wonder of wonders. And I am going to once again
venture out onto the thinner branches here to speculate that this
offer was proffered . . . excuse me, that sounds ridiculous. That he
made this offer orally and no written record of it exists.
MR. BEN DAVID: Mr. Mayer will testify that he made that offer.
MR. MAMRY: I think we can read that as a yes, no? Good. We
will swear in all the witnesses at once, I think, for the sake of efficacy,
and then begin examination.

DIRECT EXAMINATION OF VERONICA MAYER

MR. JORDAN: Would you state your name for the record.
MS. MAYER: Veronica Mayer.
Q: And your relationship to the matter at hand? Your position?
A: I am one of the two principal partners in MH Partners, LP.
Q: Veronica, how would you describe your business?
A: My background is in law, as you pointed out earlier. However, I
now principally work in real estate development. Originally, that was
mostly commercial real estate, but in the last five or six years, I’ve
become more involved in residential.
Q: And what is your relationship to Mr. Harrow?
A: Mr. Harrow and I met in West Virginia about ten years ago. I
was representing a commercial property developer as part of their
legal team, and Mr. Harrow was hoping to broker a land purchase
deal that would allow his company to serve as the general contractor
for the construction of a shopping plaza. We subsequently became
involved as partners in that deal, which led to the formation of MH
Partners.
Q: MH Partners is?
A: A Limited Partnership that we use for a variety of joint
ventures. Mr. Harrow and I both conduct business separately as well,
but we frequently work on projects together. The partnership makes
it easier to acquire financing and so forth, but it allows us to act as
independent agents as well.
Q: So you and Mr. Harrow have been in business . . .
A: Ten years, give or take.
Q: And what about your brother, Abbie Mayer? Is he a partner?
 A: No. We discussed it but ultimately decided against it.
Q: Why?
A: Firstly, because Abbie lacked the capital. We weren’t a
corporation. I didn’t want to see my brother on the hook if, God
forbid, we suffered a significant loss.
Q: And secondly?
A: Secondly, Abbie is a little . . . unusual.
Q: Unusual? What do you mean?
MR. BEN DAVID: Objection.
MR. JORDAN: To what?
MR. BEN DAVID: First of all, relevance? Second of all,
speculative.
MR. MAMRY: Yes, thank you, Perry Mason. I am shocked,
shocked that the lawyers are objecting. Nevertheless, I remind
everyone, once again, that this is not a court of law. I think you’ll just
have to have faith in my ability to suss out the probative value of
speculation. However, I am tempted to agree that it’s a little
untoward to wildly besmirch the man’s character. Mr. Jordan, the
relevance?
MR. JORDAN: Oral agreements, or lack thereof, are at issue, Mr.
Arbitrator. We’d contend that Mr. Mayer’s personality must be taken
into account here.
MR. MAMRY: I eagerly await your argument that you made a
deal with a wild man and subsequently suffered harm when he
behaved as such. All right. Go on.
MR. JORDAN: How is Mr. Mayer unusual?
A: Well, he’s temperamental, first of all. And he has a large ego.
He takes stands of principle that don’t always make a lot of sense.
And, well . . .
Q: It’s all right, Ms. Mayer. You can tell us.
A: Quite frankly, he has . . . religious convictions.
Q: Religions convictions? What’s wrong with that?
A: They’re unusual convictions.
MR. BEN DAVID: I really have to object again. Again,
speculation, and now, hearsay as well! Is Mr. Jordan really asking
Ms. Mayer to testify as to Mr. Mayer’s religious beliefs?
 MR. MAMRY: Hearsay is permissible in arbitration, Mr. Ben
David. Again, you’ll have to trust me to give it its due weight.
Continue, Mr. Jordan.
MR. JORDAN: Thank you. Please describe what you mean,
Veronica.
A: My brother thinks that he speaks directly to God. I don’t know
how else to say it. He has an idea that he is some kind of prophet.
MR. MAMRY: Well, now, that’s not something you hear in a
typical he-said, she-said.
Q: Indeed. But, uh. And yet, Ms. Mayer, yet you went into
business with him?
A: He was my brother, and he was having financial difficulties. I
wanted to help him. Plus, it never hurts to have an architect on the
payroll. Anyway, I think I understood it to be metaphorical at the time.
Q: Metaphorical?
A: Yes. I mean, the beliefs. His beliefs. I didn’t want to judge him
on the basis of his religiosity. I suppose a lot of people pray or talk to
God, in a sense. I didn’t think he meant it so literally. It was
something he mentioned early on, right when he was moving here—
to Pittsburgh—from New York, but after that, he rarely mentioned it. I
mean, for a time he rarely mentioned it.
Q: It didn’t interfere with your work together?
A: Not at first.
Q: But later?
A: It became . . . an issue.
Q: How? Give us an example.
A: Well, for instance, we were working on an interchange project
down in Uniontown—
Q: An interchange project?
A: Pretty common for us. Through Phil—Mr. Harrow—we’d bid on
interchange construction, and we’d also work to develop commercial
property, usually shopping, strip malls, plazas, that sort of thing,
beside. So we discovered, well into this project, I mean, with millions
already invested, the site prepared, everything, that Abbie had
started speaking to some of our local business and political contacts
about changing the route of the highway that was supposed to
connect up to the interchange.
 Q: Behind your back?
A: Yes.
Q: But why?
MR. BEN DAVID: Mr. Arbitrator—
MR. MAMRY: Yes, yes. You object. Overruled. Does that little bit
of courthouse dialogue satiate your hunger to turn this into Oral
Arguments? You’ll have every opportunity to play Clarence Darrow
on cross. Go on, Mr. Jordan.
MR. JORDAN: Why would he go behind your back?
A: He told me that the highway route was not as he’d seen it.
Q: As he’d seen it?
A: Yes. In a . . . vision. A dream.
Q: Mr. Mayer was making business decisions based on dreams?
A: Attempting to.
Q: He didn’t succeed?
A: No. It was already a done deal. That project went forward, and
he later apologized.
Q: For what did he apologize?
A: He said, in effect, that he’d been mistaken.
Q: You took that to mean that he’d been mistaken in his specific
behavior?
A: Yes.
Q: But he meant something else.
A: I believe so, yes.
Q: What do you believe he meant?
A: I believe he meant that his . . . dream, or his vision, or
whatever, was not actually about the road, but about a different piece
of property.
MR. BEN DAVID: Honestly, Mr. Arbitrator, how is this relevant? Is
Ms. Mayer Joseph? Is she going to tell us when to store the wheat?
MR. MAMRY: I haven’t the foggiest, although you, Ms. Mayer,
look nothing like a Joseph to me. But I do feel zestfully rabbinic at
the moment. I promise, Mr. Ben David, that I will take the unusual
nature of this testimony into account.
MR. JORDAN: But at the time, you accepted his apology and
went on with business as usual.
A: Yes. Correct.
 Q: Why was that necessary?
A: As you said in your opening statement, we’d bid on a
significant share of the highway construction. And there were some
conflict of interest provisions that, although they didn’t explicitly
forbid us from doing adjoining property development, convinced us
that our best and cleanest bet for assembling the necessary parcels
was to use a third-party buyer. Abbie was ideal. Siblings, it turns out,
are treated at a much lower level of scrutiny than husbands and
wives or parents and children. Perhaps the law assumes we all hate
each other.
MR. MAMRY: The law assumes little other than its own
relevance, Ms. Mayer.
MS. MAYER: I’m not sure I understand that comment.
MR. MAMRY: Me either. Go on.
Q: Despite your concerns? That is to say, you went through with
this plan despite them?
A: Yes. And, to be honest, Abbie had developed a rapport with a
number of local—that is to say, Fayette County—persons of
influence that proved beneficial in acquiring much of the property
that we desired.
Q: Now, I want you to be very clear about this. Did Abbie
understand why you were buying this property?
A: Yes, it was clear from the beginning. We discussed it on
multiple occasions. We’d seen the growth in bedroom communities
north of Pittsburgh with the construction of the Parkway North, and
we envisioned a similar building boom around the Expressway. It
was our intention to build on-spec housing subdivisions as well as to
develop other areas for the sale of individual lots to individual buyers
looking to build their own houses. To hire contractors, I mean, on
their own.
Q: Yet you never memorialized this understanding in writing.
Why?
A: I’m . . . a little uncomfortable in saying.
MR. MAMRY: Oh, I think I can guess, and I can assure you, Ms.
Mayer, that I am not here to judge whether or not you skirted the fine
line of legality in setting up straw buyers and suchlike. I’m not a
judge or officer of the court, and I’m not going to rat on you. I
presume that, since you’re a lawyer, you complied with the strict
letter, if not the broadest possible moral intent, of whatever laws
we’re talking about here. I have a saying, you know: we are all guilty,
just not necessarily of what we’re accused of. Please, speak freely.
MS. MAYER: All right. We worried that a written agreement would
become public and draw undue attention to our development plans.
To use your phrase, sir, we were less concerned with strict letters
than with broad moral intents. Or interpretations.
MR. MAMRY: A perfectly reasonable concern.
MR. JORDAN: How much property did you ultimately acquire?
A: All in, in excess of thirty million dollars’ worth of land.
MR. MAMRY: Yikes!
MR. JORDAN: Indeed. So, Veronica, at what point did you
discover that your brother had, unbeknownst to you, sold this land?
A: It would have been almost exactly a year ago. Phil and I were
going to set up a meeting for the three of us to go down to Fayette
County and meet with two of the county commissioners to talk about
some various zoning and land use issues. But when I personally put
in a call to Don Cavignac, that’s one of the commissioners, he
sounded confused. He said that he thought we’d unloaded that
property to the gas guy. I asked what he meant, and he explained
that he thought we’d sold the properties, or most of them anyway, to
one Arthur Imlak.
MR. MAMRY: That would be you, Mr. Imlak?
MR. BEN DAVID: That’s correct, Mr. Arbitrator.
MR. MAMRY: Mr. Ben David, I can assure you that Mr. Imlak can
answer the question of whether he is or is not himself, well, himself.
MR. BEN DAVID: Apologies, Mr. Arbitrator. Go ahead, Arthur.
MR. IMLAK: C’est moi.
MR. HARROW: Say what?
MR. MAMRY: Yes, thank you. Let the record show that Mr. Imlak
grinned pompously and answered in French, and that his French
was in the affirmative. Mr. Imlak is the Mr. Imlak in question.
MR. JORDAN: To reiterate, neither you nor Mr. Harrow had any
prior knowledge that Abbie Mayer intended to sell these properties.
A: None.
Q: Let’s get to the crux of the matter.
 MR. MAMRY: Yes, let’s. I’d like to think that we’ll eventually get to
the drain we’re circling.
MR. JORDAN: Of course, Mr. Arbitrator. Veronica, how much did
your brother sell these properties for?
A: Roughly forty million dollars.
Q: Well, that’s quite a nice profit, isn’t it? And Mr. Mayer was,
after all, offering to split those profits with you, was he not?
A: No, and that’s exactly the problem. He was offering to split the
total proceeds. So we’re talking about a ten million dollar loss, in
effect, borne entirely by Phil—Mr. Harrow—and myself.
Q: That’s a big loss.
A: I’d probably have no choice but to seek protection in
bankruptcy. And Mr. Harrow might be able to absorb the loss, but it
would be very difficult.
Q: All right. Just one more item. And this goes to the real financial
losses, the lost opportunity, here. What sort of opportunity losses are
we talking about?
MR. BEN DAVID: I’m going to object, again. Can Ms. Mayer
really be permitted to testify to some exaggerated potential economic
loss based on some rosy scenario of future potential profit? At very
least, it inherently prejudices any judgment against my client by
suggesting that he is responsible for some detrimental effect far out
of proportion to any actual and current monetary loss, if such losses
even exist, I’d add.
MR. MAMRY: Your ardency is noted, your objection overruled.
Please answer, Ms. Mayer.
A: We would be talking about potentially thousands of quarter-
acre residential plots, to be either sold to individual home builders or
developed, per our original plan, on spec. Of course, there would be
many millions of dollars of expense in connecting utilities, building
street plans, etc., but all told, we were looking at potential profits well
in excess of one hundred million dollars.
MR. MAMRY: Double yikes.
MR. JORDAN: Thank you, Veronica. That’s all I have, Mr.
Arbitrator.
MR. MAMRY: All right. I can see Mr. Ben David is champing at
the bit to cross.
 CROSS-EXAMINATION OF VERONICA MAYER

MR. BEN DAVID: Ms. Mayer, you testified that you utilized my
client and his business as agents for these purchases in order to
skirt legal restrictions on purchasing them yourself.
MS. MAYER: No. Contractual restrictions.
Q: I’m sorry, Ms. Mayer, I’m not sure I see the distinction.
A: Well, that may be the fault of your legal education. It’s not a
subtle distinction.
Q: Uh-huh. Contractual. Okay. And is it also your testimony that
my client provided no funds at all toward the purchase of these
properties?
A: No funds directly.
Q: I see. But indirectly?
A: Yes, Abbie paid some legal and real estate–related costs
directly. But all told, we’re talking maybe thirty or forty thousand
dollars.
Q: And the rest of the money came from?
A: From Phil and myself.
Q: It was your money.
A: We used a number of financial vehicles. Some of it was our
money. Much of it was borrowed.
MR. JORDAN: Mr. Arbitrator, all of that is contained within the
exhibits already submitted.
MR. MAMRY: Yes, I’m sure those will be scintillating. Please, Mr.
Ben David, continue.
MR. BEN DAVID: Ms. Mayer, did you give this money to Abbie
Mayer?
A: I would say it was more like a loan.
Q: To be paid back?
A: Yes, in effect.
Q: Let me ask you this. Assuming your plan had gone through, as
proposed, and you made these great piles of money, how was my
client to be paid?
A: Paid?
Q: Yes. You say that he was acting as an agent. So I presume
you were going to pay him for his services.
 A: He was . . . yes. He was going to be paid.
Q: You hesitated, Ms. Mayer.
MR. JORDAN: Is that a question?
MR. BEN DAVID: Here’s the question. How was that payment to
be calculated?
A: I’m not . . . we hadn’t fully worked that out.
Q: For a hundred-million dollar project? I find that hard to believe.
MR. MAMRY: Yes, Mr. Ben David. Your face betrays the towering
heights of your incredulity. A veritable Babel of incredulity. I see
where this is going. Ms. Mayer, I’m going to, as Mr. Ben David
memorably put it, get right to the crux of it. Were you going to pay
your brother over there a fee, or was he going to get a cut of profits?
A: A cut. A percentage.
MR. MAMRY: More than a few percent? More than ten?
A: Yes.
MR. MAMRY: I can tell by Mr. Jordan’s frown and Mr. Ben David’s
triumphant grin that I have elicited the testimony that we were just
about to spend many fruitless minutes nibbling at. Is there anything
else, Mr. Ben David?
MR. BEN DAVID: Yes, Mr. Arbitrator, if you’d permit me.
MR. MAMRY: Oh, yes, indeed. Sally forth.
MR. BEN DAVID: And don’t call me Sally.
MR. MAMRY: I’m sorry, what?
MR. BEN DAVID: Never mind, that was a—
MR. MAMRY: Yes I—
MR. BEN DAVID: A joke.
MR. MAMRY: Yes. I’ve seen the movie. Okay. Why don’t you
leave the obscurity to me?
MR. BEN DAVID: Yes.
MR. MAMRY: Go on.
Q: Ms. Mayer, you made a statement earlier. Do you recall what it
was?
A: That’s a broad net.
Q: To the effect of: it never hurts to have an architect on the
payroll.
A: Yes. Okay. I did say that.
Q: Well?
 A: Well?
Q: Was Mr. Mayer, my client, on the payroll?
A: Which payroll?
Q: Any payroll.
A: Any payroll? I couldn’t say.
Q: Any payroll of yours, Ms. Mayer.
A: I don’t recall. No.
Q: You don’t recall? Or no?
A: No. I don’t believe that Abby was on a payroll.
Q: Are you being lawyerly, here, Ms. Mayer?
A: Lawyerly? Perish the thought.
Q: Ms. Mayer, was Mr. Mayer receiving, from MH Partners, a
regular payment or payments?
A: Regular? I wouldn’t use that term.
MR. BEN DAVID: Mr. Arbitrator, I’m going to have to ask you to
compel this witness to answer directly.
MR. MAMRY: Or what? Hold her in contempt? Throw her in the
clink? You’ve chosen the wrong field, Mr. Ben David. I suggest you
try criminal defense. Or get yourself elected DA. I think we can all, as
my grandson would say, take a chill pill. Or wouldn’t say. I admit, the
lingo escapes me anymore. Ms. Mayer, for my benefit, did Mr. Mayer
receive, let us say, so as not to prejudice the reply, periodic
payments from you, Mr. Harrow, or your joint business entity?
MS. MAYER: I would say payments. I would not say periodic.
MR. MAMRY: Okay, Ms. Mayer. You’re a slippery one. I think
we’ve reached the limits of this line of questioning. Hak mir nisht ken
tshaynik. Have you got anything else?
MR. BEN DAVID: No, Mr. Arbitrator.
MR. MAMRY: Thank you. Any redirect, Mr. Jordan?
MR. JORDAN: No.
MR. MAMRY: Thank you. Ms. Mayer, you are excused, although
you’ll remain under oath should Mr. Jordan decide to recall you later
on. Mr. Jordan, do you have any questions for Mr. Harrow?

DIRECT EXAMINATION OF PHILLIP HARROW

MR. JORDAN: Just a few, Mr. Arbitrator.

 MR. MAMRY: Do go on.
MR. JORDAN: Thank you. Mr. Harrow, would you state your full
name for the record?
MR. HARROW: Phillip A. Harrow, the Construction King of
Morgantown, dubba-you vee.
MR. MAMRY: Thank you, Mr. Harrow. We can do without the
epithet.
MR. HARROW: No, I wasn’t cussing. I just meant West Virginia.
MR. MAMRY: No, that. Forget it. Go on, Mr. Jordan.
MR. JORDAN: What is your primary business?
MR. HARROW: Construction. I am the owner of Harcon, Inc.,
which is a general contractor.
Q: Excellent. And your company is currently employed, among
other places, in the construction of Pennsylvania Route 43, AKA the
Mon-Fayette Expressway.
A: We sure are.
Q: And that’s a profitable enterprise, is it not? So why get
involved in all this real estate speculation?
A: Money. Look, you hear a lot of complaining about how much
money goes into highways, and the public thinks that guys like me
are soaking the public with cost overruns and what have you, but
roads are complicated. Highways are very complicated. And very,
very expensive. Unions, you know?
Q: In other words, risky. Financially speaking.
A: Yeah. For a private contractor like me. Whereas, look, houses
are cheap and easy. And laying some surface roads for a subdivision
is a lot easier than building an elevated, limited-access highway. And
ever since I met Veronica, I’ve been doing real good for myself on
these sorts of projects.
Q: Ms. Mayer said that the loss you could take on this sale—
these sales—would be harmful to your business. Is that correct?
A: Yes. We could probably survive, but it would be close, and I’d
have to take on even more debt to cover the immediate loss, plus
paying back all the other creditors. No thanks.
Q: And to be clear, you, like Ms. Mayer, had no prior knowledge
of Mr. Mayer’s intended course of action.
A: Nope.
 Q: Let me ask you further: if you had known, what would you
have done?
A: Killed the sonofabitch.
Q: Phil.
A: I’m kidding. Christ. Kidding! I’d have hired you earlier and gone
after a conjunction.
Q: An injunction.
A: Right. Whatever. Thrown the book at him, so to speak.
Q: In other words, Mr. Harrow, your failure to take prophylactic
legal measures stands, in some way, as evidence of your lack of
prior knowledge of Mr. Mayer’s course of action, which, as you have
already testified, you would have sought to enjoin?
A: I, uh, I’m not sure about prophylactics, but sure. I’d have tried
to prevent it. If that’s what you’re getting at.
Q: Thank you. Yes. That’s all.
MR. MAMRY: How somewhat confusing, if delightfully brief. Mr.
Ben David, cross?

CROSS-EXAMINATION OF PHILLIP HARROW

MR. BEN DAVID: Mr. Harrow, did you privately suggest to Mr.
Mayer that the two of you cut his sister out of this deal?
A: What? No!
Q: You never suggested to Mr. Mayer that the two of you would
be better off, I quote, “without your lezzy sister, no offense.”
A: I don’t have a prejudiced bone in my body.
Q: Did you leave Mr. Mayer a message on his answering
machine that suggested he ought to meet you privately to talk about
something just between the two of you?
A: No!
MR. BEN DAVID: Mr. Arbitrator, I submit, as our exhibit, I guess,
5, an answering machine tape to that effect.
MR. JORDAN: Mr. Arbitrator, this tape was never produced in
discovery!
MR. MAMRY: This is, for the umpteenth time, not a court of law.
We’re in a conference room, gentlemen.
MR. JORDAN: I mean during the earlier hearings.
 MR. MAMRY: I doubt very much, given your description of those
hearings, that you went through discovery. And perhaps they just
discovered it. In any event, I’ll take it. Although I’m not sure exactly
how germane it’s going to be, unless Mr. Ben David has some kind
of double-double-cross theory. Perhaps that will be included in the
briefs.
MR. BEN DAVID: We are just demonstrating that contrary to Mr.
Jordan’s argument from voluminousness, which you’ll note he
appears to have abandoned in his examinations, that all of these
players were acting independently, and that no enforceable oral
contract can exist when you have these kinds of shenanigans going
on behind backs.
MR. MAMRY: I do hope that’s how you plan to phrase it in your
brief, Mr. Ben David. I’m tempted to cut this off, as I think I get the
point—
MR. HARROW: Your hon—I mean, Mr. Arbitrator, look, I’m not
trying to lie, here, it’s just, look, I did leave that message, but that
was of a personal nature.
MR. MAMRY: A personal nature?
MR. JORDAN: Phil—
MR. MAMRY: No, Mr. Jordan. I’d like to hear. Go on, Mr. Harrow.
MR. HARROW: Look. I was . . . I had a thing going with Sarah.
With Mr. Mayer’s wife.
MR. MAYER: These are lies and deceptions, your honor!
MR. MAMRY: Mr. Mayer, please sit down. Mr. Harrow, what are
you implying?
MR. HARROW: Look, it never got physical. It was what you’d call
an attraction from afar. A poetry sort of thing. Like in, do you know
the opera—
MR. MAYER: Poetry? You vile illiterate—
MR. MAMRY: Mr. Mayer, I’ll ask you to leave if you interrupt
again. Mr. Harrow.
MR. HARROW: I . . . Mr. Arbitrator, I don’t know how to put this.
Abbie over there, he and his wife were like, some kind of swingers.
You know what I mean. Like, they engaged in—
MR. MAMRY: Yes, Mr. Harrow. I too live in the twentieth century. I
understand the term. I don’t claim that I understand the broader
contextual relevance in this particular instance, but as Maimonides
said, “We are like those who, though beholding frequent flashes of
lightning, still find themselves in the thickest darkness of the night.”
So please, Mr. Harrow, flash on.
MR. HARROW: Well, I always just got this feeling that they were,
how can I say it, swinging at me. I mean, that Sarah was. And I
never had a reason to think that Abbie was anything but all for it.
Hell, that was one of the first things he ever said to me. He said,
“Take a chance with my wife.” I’m not making that up, Your Honor.
“Take a chance with my wife.” But, well, I wanted to clear the air. I’m
not a bad guy, and if I was going to get involved in that sort of thing, I
was going to keep it, you know, classy.
MR. BEN DAVID: In other words, Mr. Harrow, you’re asking us to
believe that this sub rosa communication with your business
partner’s brother—who was himself, per your claims—a business
partner as well, was because of some kind of infatuation with the
man’s wife?
A: I’m not sure if I understood the question, but yeah. I mean, my
point is that he seemed pretty okay with it.
Q: Pretty okay with . . . ?
A: My interest. I mean, I assumed he had some on the side as
well. I mean, it was no secret that he and Sarah—that’s his wife—
moved out here in the first place because he had some lady friend
back in NYC. I always got the sense that he knocked her up. Talk
about prophylactics, am I right judge? Which is what I mean when I
say you’ve gotta keep this sort of thing classy. Cause that, well, that
ain’t classy.
Q: Mr. Harrow. Phillip. I want to make sure I follow you here.
MR. MAMRY: No, Mr. Ben David. I’m going to intervene here.
You’ve insinuated that Mr. Harrow here was attempting to cut his
own business partner, Ms. Mayer, out of this deal to begin with,
which, obviously, would . . . obviate certain aspects of their argument
regarding Mr. Mayer’s responsibility to make either or both of them
whole in this whole deal. Mr. Harrow contends that these backdoor
communiques—the one for which you’ve submitted evidence,
anyway—constituted an attempt, abortive or otherwise, to get
permission to conduct an extramarital affair with Mr. Mayer’s wife,
which, however distasteful or contrary to the . . . received morality of
our times, would nevertheless constitute a strong argument contra
that insinuation. Have I got that essentially correct? You don’t need
to answer. Is there anything else?
MR. BEN DAVID: No, Mr. Arbitrator.
MR. MAMRY: Mr. Jordan, any redirect?
MR. JORDAN: No.
MR. MAMRY: All right. Is there anything else, Mr. Jordan?
MR. JORDAN: We rest.
MR. MAMRY: Good. Then let’s take a quick break. Once more, I
must find myself the gentleman’s lounge. And we’ll resume with Mr.
Ben David’s first witness.

[RECESS]

DIRECT EXAMINATION OF ABBOT “ABBIE” MAYER

MR. MAMRY: And we’re back.

MR. BEN DAVID: Could you state your name?
MR. MAYER: Abbot Mayer. I go by Abbie.
Q: And your occupation.
A: I am an architect by training and avocation, a property
developer by trade.
Q: Your relationship to MH Partners?
A: None.
Q: None?
A: Veronica is my sister, and Phil and I were friendly, and my firm
did business with them.
Q: What kind of business?
A: You think a lawyer and a puffed-up backhoe driver can lay out
a bedroom community or meet a modern municipal design standard?
MR. HARROW: Bedroom community? You smug motherfucker,
that was my suggestion.
MR. MAMRY: Mr. Harrow, let’s try to conduct this hearing as if it’s
entirely boring, shall we?
MR. BEN DAVID: Abbie, I’m just going to ask you to describe in
your own words what happened.
 MR. MAYER: Very well. As has been stated, my wife and I moved
to Pittsburgh a number of years ago. And yes, Mr. Mamry, I’ll just go
right out and say it, since my sister and her preposterous lackey over
there wish to smear me with it, I came, in part, because I received a
vision from God. It isn’t au courrant to talk about God, but I have a
feeling, Mr. Mamry, that you are a believer, and perhaps you’ll have
some understanding.
I was never an especially religious man, but one day, sitting in
temple—I was only there because of an obligation to my wife’s family
—I was daydreaming and staring at a window when God spoke to
me. Of course, God doesn’t speak; it’s as silly to imagine the Lord
uttering actual words as it is to imagine that, because we are made
in God’s image, He therefore resembles in some actual, physical
way, a human being. As we are, body and soul, afterimages of the
totality and universality of the Divine, frozen, sub-photographic
images of a vastness of being that is and moves, so too is our
language less even than an echo of the primordial verb of existence.
God, I learned, doesn’t speak to men at all, but rather puts into their
minds and hearts the knowledge of and belief in that which He would
—if He did, if He even could, speak—have said.
MR. MAMRY: That’s both deeply poetical and—it strikes me—
wholly correct, Mr. Mayer. Also, entirely irrelevant to the matter at
hand. Hashem may be the mover of all things, but yet he consigns to
man alone the responsibility of conducting binding arbitration. I’m
sure the Talmud has something to say about it. But for now, maybe
we can continue with the narrative.
MR. MAYER: Yes, well, as I said, I wasn’t a religious person; I
suppose I’m still not in the strict sense of the word. I am not, in other
words, an attender of services. And I might get more mileage if I just
called it a realization or a Eureka moment or some other such banal
neologism. I could say I was a man who, having achieved a serious
measure of professional success as an architect, secretly hated his
work and hated his life and at a sudden thunderclap of personal
insight decided, as Rilke said, that you must change your life.
But I cannot believe that this change came from within me. It
came from without. It was implanted in me, emplaced. It is relevant
to me. That is what I choose to believe. So you can all sneer if you
like, or assert that because my wife and I weren’t the model of petit-
bourgeois rectitude, that therefore all this God told me to do it
mumbo-jumbo is self-serving and a lie. But why would I make myself
look mad unless I truly believed? I would not.
It is, however, also true that, yes, I came out here to make
money. My sister was doing very well, and although the image of the
architect is rather glamorous, I suppose, it is a difficult business. One
depends on clients who have far too much to say about how you do
your own job, and much of it is drudgery. I had managed to carve out
a place as something more like an academic. In fact, I still lecture
from time to time. But living one honorarium to the next is quite
exhausting and precarious. It’s like being an actor or musician.
Unless you are very famous or are fortunate to be employed in a
particularly excellent company or ensemble full time, one year’s
success can be the next year’s poverty.
So there was an obvious attraction, and Veronica seemed happy
to have me, to have a person who could speak a slightly more
elevated language of aesthetics and design than Mr. Harrow, over
there, with his quote “classy developments.”
It also happens, unfortunately, that this business required that I
involve myself with a number of unsavory elements, that is to say,
that I found both my sister and Mr. Harrow willing to undertake legal
and ethical shortcuts in order to serve their—and, I admit, my—
personal financial ends. This often involved deliberately
underbidding on properties and using political connections to nudge
or coerce reluctant owners to sell. I think they just implied that I was
the one who had the close personal connections with these folks,
which couldn’t be further from the truth, of course. I wouldn’t even
know where to begin.
Well, I’ll admit it. I went along with this for a while, but eventually,
it just got to be too much. Their greed—I don’t hesitate to use the
word—was overwhelming, and their methods simply abhorrent to
me. Now, they’d like you to believe that I slunk around and did this all
with them, threw in with these flesh-peddlers operating under the
guise of darkness, but I was perfectly up front. I told them that they
could buy me out, pay me for my considerable work in acquiring
these properties. I say considerable work. I wasn’t just, as they’d like
you to believe, acting as a conduit for money not my own. I was the
one who met with realtors, who examined maps, who laid out street
plans, who spec’d designs for housing units. I worked my—excuse
me, Mr. Mamry—my ass off. I said, here, pay me, find someone else
to hold onto these, and I’ll step away. Which they were obviously
reluctant to do, because, as I said, the very nature of these deals
required a person like myself to act as, in effect, a front man.
So, seeing that they weren’t going to cooperate in all this, I just
said, to hell with it. I’d known Arthur—Mr. Imlak—socially for a while,
and I knew he already had some property interests down in the
Uniontown area. So I approached him, and he said he’d take pretty
much all of it off my hands for a not at all unreasonable sum, a sum
which, moreover, he said he could deliver in cash on the barrelhead,
so to speak. And I made a quite generous offer, if I do say so, to
Veronica and Phil, which was to split the whole deal fifty-fifty, and
then she could go her way, and I could go mine. Which they turned
down. The thing they’re neglecting to tell you is that in addition to the
sale money, Art was offering—did offer—a cut of future royalties from
gas and mineral extraction, so this whole business about taking a
loss is totally bogus. They’re taking a loss because they walked
away from a deal that I was perfectly within my rights to make. And
that, as they say, is that.
Q: Thank you. And—
A: I’m sorry, but also, one more thing: Phil Harrow never fucked
my wife.
MR. MAMRY: Yes, well, and for I hope the last time, yikes. But
okay. We’ll try to obey the rules of decorum by covering our
profanities with insincere apologies for deploying them in the first
place.
MR. MAYER: Sure. Phil Harrow never—I’m sorry, Mr. Arbitrator—
fucked my wife.
MR. BEN DAVID: Abbie, you mentioned future royalties?
A: Yes. Arthur can probably explain it in better detail. It’s a
process they’re developing to extract gas from underground rock
formations. Very promising, apparently. So there is the potential for
millions in royalties down the road.
Q: And you say they walked away from that?
 A: Extraordinary though it may seem.
Q: Did you ever consider yourself under contract to hold these
properties for MH Partners?
A: I considered that one possibility. A better one came along. I
was within my rights to make that decision. It’s not my fault that Phil
and Veronica wanted to go another way. They should have bought
the land themselves, then.
Q: You never signed anything? You never promised anything?
A: Not of that nature.
Q: And insofar as they contend you sprang this all on them, you
say that is not, in fact, the case.
A: It’s not the case.
Q: Thank you, Mr. Mayer. That’s all from me.
MR. MAMRY: Cross, Mr. Jordan?

CROSS-EXAMINATION OF ABBOT “ABBIE” MAYER

MR. JORDAN: Mr. Mayer, do you own property in Fayette

County?
A: Yes.
Q: And would it be fair to say that Mr. Imlak was instrumental in
your acquisition of this property?
A: That’s my sister’s theory. She is, as usual, exaggerating.
Q: You didn’t buy this property from Mr. Imlak?
A: Indirectly.
Q: To what end?
A: To what what end?
Q: Let me rephrase the question. Why did you purchase this
property?
A: It seemed like a good investment. I was looking for a place to
build a house.
Q: A house that you saw in one of these visions of yours?
A: You can be as snide as you like, but which one of us is an
instrument of the Lord, and which is just a hack lawyer?
Q: Is that a no?
A: Yes. I perceived, in one of these visions of mine, as you so
disdainfully put it, a highway rising along the face of a mountain, and
off to the left beside it a clearing where I would one day reside.
Q: And it is your testimony that these, shall we say, religious
convictions—
A: No.
Q: No?
A: I would not use that term.
Q: Convictions, Mr. Mayer? You have no convictions?
A: I would not use the term religious.
MR. MAMRY: Once more into the breach. I think I understand
that you’re trying to disestablish Mr. Mayer’s credibility by painting
him as a religious nut. I take the hint. For what is, I hope, the last
time, I’m going to remind everyone that this isn’t a court. There’s no
jury to try to impress. Consider your efforts to impeach Mr. Mayer
noted. Is there any other reason for this line of questioning?
MR. JORDAN: There is, Mr. Arbitrator. It’s to establish collusion
between Mr. Mayer and Mr. Imlak.
MR. MAMRY: Oh, collusion. Oh, yes, good. A secret deal to
undercut a secret deal. I have to tell you gentlemen, and lady, that
this is one of the more unusual, which is not to say uninteresting,
disputes I’ve had the professional pleasure to preside over in my
days. I’m going to have a hard time splitting this baby indeed.
Perhaps if I bash it, candy will fall out, like a piñata. Go ahead, Mr.
Jordan.
MR. JORDAN: Thank you. Mr. Mayer, would you answer the
question?
A: What was the question?
Q: Isn’t it true that Mr. Imlak initially refused to sell you the
property on which you later built your residence?
A: I didn’t even know him at the time.
Q: So you’ve claimed.
MR. BEN DAVID: Oh, come on.
MR. MAMRY: Yes, I’m inclined to agree. Mr. Jordan, we
understand you’re calling Mr. Mayer’s story into question.
MR. JORDAN: Isn’t it the case, Mr. Mayer, you proposed, as a
quid pro quo to Mr. Imlak, that if he were to sell you this piece of
property, you would be able to assist him in purchasing parcels of
land pursuant to his own business interests at below-market values?
 A: No.
Q: It isn’t?
A: No.
Q: Mr. Mayer, who is Sheryl Ellen Larimer?
A: She’s a county commissioner in Fayette County.
Q: Currently.
A: Yes, currently. What about it?
Q: Mr. Mayer, would you call her one of these, uh, unsavory
elements?
A: Well, you know what they say about politicians.
Q: Is that a yes?
A: It’s a maybe.
Q: It was a yes or no question.
A: And yet here we are. Stuck in the middle with you.
Q: Mr. Mayer—
A: Look, what do you want me to say? Sherri is a . . . You do
business with the people in office. Sometimes the promised land is
already occupied when you arrive.
MR. IMLAK: Goddamnit.
MR. MAMRY: I’m sorry, Mr. Imlak?
MR. BEN DAVID: It’s nothing, Mr. Arbitrator.
MR. JORDAN: Mr. Mayer, you said something interesting there.
You said the land was already occupied. What did you mean by
that?
A: Just that, that we bought . . .
Q: Mr. Mayer, you think very highly of your intellect, don’t you?
A: I hold myself in a healthy regard.
Q: And yet, in fact, the man sitting beside you, Arthur Imlak, a far
superior businessman, has been manipulating—
A: Oh please.
Q: —this process, and you, from the outset. Through his agent,
this Sherri Larimer. Whose strong-arm tactics—
A: Veronica, what did you tell him? What did you say you, you,
you woman—
Q: Don’t look at her, Mr. Mayer, look at me. I’m asking the
questions here. Was it you who suggested a ploy to frame a local
official, or was it Sherri Larimer? Do you know, Mr. Mayer, who this
Larimer woman’s largest campaign contributor was? How long have
the three of you—
MR. IMLAK: Goddamnit!
MR. BEN DAVID: Arthur.
MR. IMLAK: Call a caucus, Dave.
MR. BEN DAVID: Mr. Arbitrator, may I have a moment to caucus
with my clients.
MR. MAMRY: Client, Mr. Ben David. You only have one. Mr.
Imlak, I understand, is just a witness.
MR. BEN DAVID: Yes, of course. Client.
MR. JORDAN: Mr. Arbitrator, he can’t confer with his client during
cross!
MR. MAMRY: Au contraire, counselor. I see Mr. Ben David isn’t
the only aspiring DA in the room. Take five, as they say. I think we
can all stand to cool down. Fan yourselves. Eat a Snickers.

[RECESS]

MR. MAMRY: During the recess, I spoke to both counselors, and

it appears that we have reached an amicable agreement here. I
mean amicable in the courtroom, the legal, uh, sense, since no one
seems in any particular rush to fall into the other’s arms. Regardless,
agreement is the point of this exercise. I suppose that renders the
preceding . . . proceedings a waste of time, in a sense, but all things
that end justly are worth the passage. It is remarkable, isn’t it, just
how much truth the world can contain. Unless either party has a
substantive dispute with the actual conduct of this arbitration? No?
Okay, then. Obviously we can dispense with the usual post-
arbitration briefs. Counselors, what I would like is for you to each
submit to me a summary brief of the agreement we think we reached
in sidebar. I’ll make sure that we are, in fact, in harmony, and then
we will all go on our merry way, thank God. Usually we’d have forty-
five days from the conclusion of the arbitration, but since there are
no longer issues in dispute, shall we say thirty? In time for Shavuot.
 12

A month after the negotiated conclusion of this dispute with his

sister and Phillip Harrow, Abbie met Sherri Larimer for a drink. His
son had been born, miraculously, and he’d have preferred to write
the past out of his life entirely and, once more, start in a place that
was wholly new, but he felt an obligation. The settlement hadn’t gone
as Imlak had wanted, and now Arthur was suggesting that it might
endanger their relationship, that, indeed, it might cause Imlak to try
to find a means of reacquiring The Gamelands, through force or
persuasion, which was unthinkable either way. The house was three-
quarters complete, and they’d moved in upon Isaac’s birth. It had
been a long labor, and Sarah bled a lot, so the hospital kept her an
extra day to be safe. When she was sleeping, Abbie drove up the
mountain to fuss with the furniture before his wife and son arrived.
Before he drove back to the hospital, he walked around the property.
It was night and far from town and every star was out. It was April
and the air smelled of new leaves. Abbie walked to the edge of the
woods and there felt a huge presence, as if the ridge on which he
stood were the spine of the living world and the slow air through the
leaves a kind of breath. “Here we are,” he said. Somewhere between
the trees, something moved.
Imlak, meanwhile, was surprised at the degree of his own
displeasure. A good businessman should never be unprepared for
an adverse decision; success was in the arbitrage between the least-
bad and the worse. But Abbie had assured him that there was no
way his sister or Harrow or their rat attorney would ever bring up
Sherri Larimer. “No way,” he’d said. “Not with the whole thing with
Jerry Jernicki.”
“Are you sure, Abbie?” Imlak had asked. “Because I do not need
that sort of thing coming back on me.”
“Arthur,” Ben David said. They were in his office in Pittsburgh.
“What?”
“Practice not saying that sort of thing out loud.”
Imlak pouted.
In the conference room at the arbitration hearing, Imlak raged
that Abbie had proven, once again, not to know shit about shit. And
Abbie raged right back. Was it true what A. Christopher Jordan had
implied? Was Arthur the prime mover? Hadn’t it been Sherri Larimer
who’d nudged them in a certain direction in the first place? Who was
really turning the wheels? Arthur slapped a paper cup full of weak
coffee off the table. It splattered against an off-white wall. “There are
no wheels, you fucking nut! Things just move!” Then he settled down
and looked at Ben David. “Give me the verdict,” he said.
Ben David said, “We’re fucked.”
“Goddamnit.” He crossed his arms. “Abbie,” he said, and his big,
rich voice was filled with a magical tone of universal ownership.
“Abbie, I have plans for that land. Those are valuable acres. There
are potential wellhead sites.” He launched into the lecture they’d
heard before: “I am not haphazard in my acquisition of property.
There is an energy revolution coming. While everyone is off grubbing
around for oil in the Middle East, I am going to be part of a very
particular cadre of people who gets very rich. The technology is not
yet mature, but it will be soon. It will allow us to extract an
extraordinary volume of carbon fuel from the rock formations
beneath our feet. Appalachia sits on carbon reserves that make
Saudi Arabia look like a dusty filling station. It is merely a question of
getting to it. When the technology is available, and it will be within a
decade, there will be a great gold rush into this region, and there will
be a few men like me who preceded these gold diggers to the
claims. Will these properties you hold, or your sister and her glad-
handing overgrown handyman partner, materially alter my fortunes?
No. Not really. But they are still worth millions of dollars to me, in the
long run. A few million against many hundreds of millions, but still.
We had a deal, Abbie, and you are reneging on it.”
“I’m sorry,” Abbie said. He was sorry, if not for any reason Arthur
Imlak might understand.
Imlak looked at Ben David. “What are we going to do? Can we
buy the arbitrator?”
“Gods below, Arthur, shut the fuck up,” said Ben David. “Didn’t I
goddamn fucking tell you never to let that sort of shit pass your
goddamn lips?”
Imlak glared at him, then sighed. “Yes. You’re right.”
“The whole point, the whole strategy was to make this an issue of
Abbie’s, uh, whatever. Spiritual feelings. The arbitrator was going to
conclude that Veronica and Phil never should’ve entrusted this
wacko with whatever, but oh well, too bad for them. And you were
going to look like a guy who took advantage in a perfectly legal,
above-the-board, good-judge-of-character sort of way. But if they’re
willing to blow it all up and possibly even expose their own, shall we
say, questionable dealings with certain individuals, then the best
thing we can do is cut a deal. Won’t be a total loss. They’ve got the
advantage, but they’re not exactly negotiating from a position of
strength. Remember, that’s how we ended up in arbitration to begin
with. There are elements that, upon consideration, we all decided to
keep out of the usual legal forums.”
“Fuck,” said Imlak. “Okay.”
“Do you want my opinion?” Abbie asked. “As the, you know,
actual client.”
“No,” said Ben David.
Imlak stood up and said, “Do a deal.” Ben David left to find his
counterpart and do just that. Arthur closed the door and turned back
to Abbie. “Mayer,” he said, “I’m going down to Houston for a few
weeks, and then I’ll be in Florida till June. And I’m going to go
against the advice of my attorney, since he’s not in the room to
squint at me, and say the sort of thing that he doesn’t like me to say.
Take care of it.”
“Take care of it?”
“I want the whole shebang.”
 What, precisely, had he meant by that? Abbie elected not to ask
him. Imlak went on to make his first implication that it might even be
within his power to snatch The Gamelands back. “Don’t go to war
with me, Abbie,” he said. “You’ll lose. Better keep me as a brother.”
So in the end, Abbie met Larimer for a drink at the far end of the dim
country club bar, surrounded by men who smelled of grass and
leather gloves. Since becoming county commissioner, she’d taken to
wearing bright pantsuits—“like Geraldine motherfucking Ferraro!”—
and she’d joined the club. Abbie had suggested a more private
meeting, but she’d told him, “I don’t take no private meetings. You
might try to uh-sassinate me!” She howled. Abbie beat her to the bar
and had already tossed down a large glass of vodka in order to
acquire the courage for the conversation.
“Listen,” he told her. “I need a favor.”
“Yeah, well, I need a campaign contribution.”
“Really?”
“No, ya dummy. I’m pulling your leg. But I’m not really in the
favor-granting business. I’m in the business of civic responsibility
and shit.” She lit a smoke.
“Yes, well. It’s at the, uh, request of our, uh, mutual benefactor.”
“Who? Arthur? That sounds like some shit his fancy pants would
say.”
“Shh!” Abbie glanced around. “We’re in public!”
She laughed at him. She hooted. “Public. Listen to you.” She
turned in her seat and spied a tall man in khaki pants. “Hey, you!
Caddyshack.”
“Me?” The man looked away from his conversation.
“Yeah, you. You gonna call the cops on me?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Nothing,” Sherri said. “Fuck off.” She waved her cigarette at him.
She turned back to Abbie.
“Christ, Sherri. You’re bringing up the police?”
“Fuck the police. I own them police!” She tapped the bar and
grinned. “Now lay back on that couch, honey, and you tell Dr. Sherri
what it is that she can do ya for.”
After he told her, he drove back to The Gamelands. For no
particular reason, he took the long way around, a meandering path
that passed through the center of Uniontown, the empty parking lots
and sooty courthouse and the high-rises from the years when it had
been a prosperous place. Now it smelled like the polluted creeks that
trickled through it, and its population was half what it once was, and
the Walmart and Kmart plazas on the west side of town had killed
the last stores on Main Street. Main Street, really, the literalization of
a political theme, some of the dark storefronts still sporting dusty
window displays, as if the former owners had fled in the night from a
war. The mansions were all funeral homes. The handsome old
mainline churches were mostly empty. Worshiping Christians had
decamped to the boxy megachurches that preached a prosperity
gospel to a lot of laid-off workers who imagined the mines might
come back and blamed their own unions for closing them. The town
had lost fifty percent of its population in twenty years. What hope
was there for a place like that? Maybe Imlak’s magic wells would one
day employ people again, though wasn’t that just a recapitulation of
the lost coal economy, a brief flush time until the veins or pools or
reserves or whatever they were ran dry? But maybe when the
oceans all rose, and the coastal cities sank, and the vast plain of the
Mississippi turned once more into a shallow sea, the people who
remained would return to places like Uniontown, nine-hundred-
ninety-nine feet above sea level, the dust of its twentieth-century
abandonment washed away by the tropical rains.
Down Fayette Street; down the Old National Pike; past the Sweet
Pea filling station; through Hopwood where cars were crowded
around Roose’s from whose roof the giant white illuminated rooster
crowed into the night; past the big white Greek Revival house
surrounded by pines on the right where the on-ramp curved into
Route 40; then angling up into the mountains; past the Watering
Hole Restaurant and the Lick Hollow access road through the trees;
past the scenic overlook and into the last sharp bend where the
Summit Inn appeared a thousand feet ahead; over the blind peak
and a sharp right onto Skyline Drive; past the Summit’s golf course
and into the state gamelands for which, in a fit of whimsy, he’d
named his own home, then right onto his own long driveway, which
he’d already, habitually, begun to take too fast. He jammed the
brakes and slid on the gravel. It would become a habit.
 He found Sarah sitting up with Isaac and watching an old western
on TV. “You’re still up,” he said.
“He woke up. He’s sleeping now, but I’m afraid to move. How was
your meeting with Sherri?”
“Friendly, threatening, cajoling. You can imagine.”
“Yes. What did she say?”
“She was cagey. She just said we’d hear from her.”
“Why are you even doing this?”
“You know.”
“I don’t.”
“Arthur must have told you.”
“He didn’t.”
“Really?” Abbie let himself sink into a big chair in their living
room. He’d started to put on weight in those days, and he frequently
felt exhausted. But, he reminded himself, it was also very late.
“It isn’t true, Abbie, what you think. And even if it was . . .
Anyway, you told me yourself that you don’t think there’s any way he
could take the house.”
“Should we have divorced?” Abbie asked. “Instead of coming
here.”
“If we had,” Sarah said, and she looked down at their son.
“Selfish of us,” Abbie said. “Frankly, I don’t know what to do. It’s
an unusual sensation.”
“Jesus, Abbie. Try prayer.”
“That’s not how it works.”
“I wouldn’t know, clearly.”
“I didn’t mean it that way, Sarah.”
“No, I suppose not. Still.”
Abbie rubbed his face. “Do you ever pray?”
“You’re asking me if I pray?”
“Sure. We’ve never really discussed it. Outside of temple, I mean.
On a whim.”
“I guess I do, actually. In a sense.
“What do you pray for?”
“I ask God to show me what it is that I really want.”
“Hmm. What makes one desire worthier than another?”
“Christ, Abbie. I don’t know. I’m going to bed. Take your son.”
 What did she think when she handed Isaac to him, letting his
head drop a fraction of a centimeter from her hand into the bend of
his arm? Isaac made a contented noise, like a giggle, in his sleep.
When she was gone, Abbie stared at the boy for a long time. On the
television, a lawman said, “I ain’t about to leave! If there’s only one
honest man in this town, then it’s worth stayin’ and it’s worth a fight.”
He took the boy to his room and laid him in his crib. Isaac made a
sound and opened his tiny dark eyes. They watched each other for a
long time.

• • •

Over the next several years, Veronica and Phil had proceeded with
their plan, modified and moderated by their settlement-reduced
acreage into a more typical project, a few subdivisions—bedroom
communities, ahem—to be laid out on a cluster of small hills near
California, PA, just south of where the new expressway crossed I-70,
the curlicuing exchanges cradled in and carried on an eruption of
immense earthworks that would one day, when it was all cleared
away, when the last human survivors of the nuclear wars or the viral
holocaust or the end of orderly seasons were long extinct, appear to
the tool-bearing badgers or the clothes-wearing crows or the
dolphins in their rolling suits full of seawater or whatever animal God
next saw fit, if He did see fit, to curse with self-knowledge, as the
mad devotions of an incredible elder race, something worshipful and
inscrutable carved into the flesh of the world and then left to be
whittled down to nothing more than a hint of itself, if even that.
They’d moved as quickly as they could to lay out the streets and get
the building underway, perhaps believing that to delay was to invite
the still-slight possibility of another reversal of legal fortune that
would yank the property away from them again. Holes had been dug
and cinder block foundations laid and concrete poured and the first
timber frames of all those future four-bedroom colonials were now
rising like the skeletons of the Behemoths and Leviathans that
preceded men and women into creation.
Nothing untoward happened. If Sherri Larimer, for Abbie, or for
Arthur, whichever of them she really served, or for herself, if in fact
everything she did were ultimately for her benefit alone, had done
anything to convince Veronica and Phil to sell the acreage that
remained to them, Abbie hadn’t heard of it. And he felt a vague and
mounting anxiety about it, especially as their first project began to
take physical form. But Sherri never said anything about it, and
Arthur, oddly, never brought it up again. The Gamelands was
finished, and Arthur’s money was expanding in the variety of
vehicles that he himself had recommended Abbie invest it in. He
dreamed less frequently, although on occasion, when he saw
families of deer making their frequent crossings of the property, he
wondered if his God meant something by it. But of course he lived on
a mountain in Appalachia. But of course there were deer.
One night, Abbie was home with Isaac and Sarah, whose
attention, he felt, had wandered even farther after the birth of the
boy. He sometimes caught her regarding Isaac with a look of
surprise that was something other than joy. He’d overheard her
talking to him—Isaac was only a few years old—in a curiously
confessional tone, in the lowered voice that she’d adopt in a
restaurant or airport when she suspected that someone nearby
might eavesdrop. He’d heard, or thought he’d heard, his own name
in these murmured monologues, and sometimes when his son
looked at him with those black eyes, pupil-less and dark as a cloudy
sky over the ocean at night, he felt the terrifying presence of a
competing vision, as if the boy could see what Abbie saw, or
something more.
The bell rang. Sarah was watching the news. Abbie was cooking
dinner. Isaac was playing an impenetrable game with his feet. Abbie
wiped his hands on a towel and went to see who it was. As he
passed through the living room, Sarah looked up at him. “We have a
doorbell?” she said.
There were three men at the door. They had a look of savage
impermanence, as if they’d been assembled by an alien sculptor with
a passable but imperfect grasp of the human form. Abbie tilted his
head. “Can I help you?”
“Probably,” said the largest and baldest of them. He twanged
slightly.
“Who is it?” Sarah called.
 “Is that your wife?” the man asked.
“I’m not sure if I should answer that,” Abbie said.
“Whoa,” said the shorter, stockier man to his left. “That’s not very
hospitable.”
The big man grinned. It was not reassuring. “Would you be
hospitable, Boochie, if a bunch of roughnecks just showed up at your
door and you wasn’t expecting no one?”
“Do you guys know Sherri Larimer?” Abbie asked.
“Who don’t we know?” said the third man, who was nearly as big
as the first.
“Why don’t you come on in?” Abbie said.
“Who is it?” Sarah called again.
“It’s work,” Abbie yelled back, and then he watched warily as the
men came into his house and, rather improbably, unlaced and
removed their large brown work boots, which they set in a neat row
by the door.
What transpired between them? Abbie gave them beers, and
Sarah put Isaac to bed and stood behind her husband with her arms
crossed tightly, only moving from time to time to pour herself another
glass of red wine. What did they propose, and how did he reply?
They suggested something more than he was willing to suborn, and
he countered with something so negligible that it called into question
why he needed their services in the first place. “No violence,” he
said, when they pressed the issue. “What do we look like?” they
said. Sarah snorted. “Well, okay,” they said. “We know what we look
like.” They stayed for perhaps an hour and drank a six pack between
them. Abbie asked them why they’d bothered to come, when clearly
they were operating under someone else’s orders and were going to
do what they were going to do. “She’s your sister,” they said. “We
aren’t gonna do anything you aren’t comfortable with.” Abbie said he
wasn’t comfortable with any of it. “Well, okay,” they said.
“Comfortable might not be the right word.” When they left, they laced
their boots and stood in the entry hall. “This is a good house,” they
said. “Good bones.”
“Yes,” Abbie said. He stood in the threshold. As they walked back
to the big truck that they’d somehow arrived in silently, the smallest,
who’d hardly spoken, turned back and said, “Yinz have a blessed
evening. Thank you for your hospitality.”
Then, once again, there was nothing, no word or indication that
anything was ever going to happen, and the evening took on the
retrospective fogginess of a dream. Arthur Imlak stopped by several
times in the interim. No one ever said anything about anything. They
gossiped about people at the club. Arthur amused them with the
story of a dispute between the Chislett brothers, the one of whom
had long imagined building a sort of hunting lodge and entertainment
complex near Laurel Caverns, the other of whom felt gambling was
an affront to the Christian God. “You know,” Imlak said. “Guns and
slot machines. There are rumors that Harrisburg is going to approve
gaming soon. Lord knows, we need something other than the lotto to
part the poor from their hard-earned disability.” He smiled down at
Isaac. “Don’t you agree, big guy?”
Little Isaac said something that sounded very much like, “Fuck.”
Imlak grinned. “Yes,” he said. “Fuck.”

• • •

There’s a police report, and there was a brief news clip at the time,
which used the word accident. Veronica and Phil and Edith were out
touring the property on a drizzly Sunday. The plywood on the
framed-in houses was turning dark with rain. The newly excavated
foundation holes were full of mud. Veronica was in a good mood.
She’d even, after the arbitration, managed a halfway reconciliation
with her brother, though she thought that he regarded her oddly,
uncomfortably, whenever she came to the house to see her nephew.
Isaac was quite taken with her. He as yet had trouble with his Rs and
called her Wanny. She’d never especially cared for children, but she
loved the giggly, swishy little boy. She wondered if she should tell her
brother that his kid was definitely going to turn out to be gay. She
expected to visit them later that week.
Then there were three men coming over the hill. It didn’t
immediately occur to either woman what was happening—they might
have been contractors, or local guys looking for a place to drink beer
and smoke. But it was immediately clear to Phillip Harrow what was
going on, as he later told the police. “I only saw it one other place,”
he told them. “Back when I was in college. I worked at a construction
company one summer up in Cleveland, and the plumbers were on
strike, so they tried to hire some non-union guys, and then a couple
of guys from the local if you know what I mean showed up to
straighten them out. It was the same look.”
So Harrow puffed his chest and crossed his arms and waited until
the men arrived. He noted, as Abbie had, that they appeared
unfinished, cobbled together from the ugliest parts. “You’re
trespassing,” he said.
The big one turned his head as if about to consult with one of his
companions, but it was a feint. He struck Harrow once, backhanded,
across the face, so impossibly hard that his feet lifted off the ground
as he fell.
“Oh my God.” Veronica put her hands up in front of her. She
became, as she did when she was afraid, immediately lawyerly.
“Whatever it is, whatever it is, I’m sure we can work it out,” she said.
Harrow groaned and lifted himself on an elbow. “Motherfucker,”
he said.
“Yes we can,” the big one said. He took another step.
Veronica mostly thought about the cell phone. She’d left it in the
car. At that time there was barely any reception in that part of the
county. “What do you want?” She imagined they were about to be
robbed.
Harrow had got up and lunged at the man, who stepped—for his
size, daintily—aside and, as Harrow stumbled past, planted a huge,
steel-toed kick into his ass, sending him skidding face down in the
mud.
Edith turned and ran. Can you blame her?
“Hey!” one of the men—Boochie—yelled. “We just wanna talk to
you!”
She ran down the grassy hill and through the wide gully beside
the highway. That stretch of it had opened to regular traffic a year
earlier. Veronica called after her, and those men called after her, but
she was running and probably didn’t hear. An irony: had the
development ever been completed, the Department of
Transportation would have erected a wire fence down there to
prevent exactly this sort of thing from happening. She clambered up
the incline to the breakdown lane beside the highway. Almost no one
used the road then, or ever used it, other than a few long-haul
truckers who knew that it was a quick shortcut down to I-68, that it
beat the low-gear haul up over the mountain on 40. You have to
assume, the police later suggested, that she intended to wave down
a vehicle in some obscure and probably vain hope of getting a
motorist to call for help. Veronica called after her again. Edith heard
her. She stopped in mid-wave and turned back. The driver never saw
her. The weather was weird, humid and rainy, and his windshield had
been fogging up even with the windows open and the defroster on.
He didn’t even hit her head on, just clipped her. But he was doing
seventy-five, and he was hauling a full tanker of gas. He weighed
just under the legal max of eighty thousand pounds. You can
imagine. There’s nothing a human body can do but break beyond
repair. He braked too hard when he realized he’d hit someone. The
truck jackknifed and lifted off the road. It rolled and skidded. A few
seconds passed. There was a lick of flame. It exploded. The force of
it knocked those of them who were still standing to the ground.
 13

“So Mayer,” Adam Martens said, “how come you never told me
yer joosh?”
If in his mind, Isaac said, “What the fuck are you talking about?”
and walked invincibly away, then in the second-floor hallway of
Laurel Highlands Junior High School he looked at the speckled
linoleum and muttered, “I don’t know.” Elementary school had
passed, for Isaac, as a largely undifferentiated blur, unmemorable
and accidental, friendships determined by proximity, the coming and
going of days like the cycling passage of time before the invention of
history. In the evenings, he’d help his mother do the dishes while she
had her extra glass of wine; in the mornings, Abbie would drive him
down the mountain and drop him off at school, bellowing some aria
or other and conducting with both hands as he steered with his
knees.
Now everything had a brittle intentionality to it. Kids from all of the
different elementary schools mixed together, and friendship was a
matter of secret affinities that he didn’t understand. How could you
know what anyone liked until you became friends? It was as if the
other kids had developed a form of telepathy over the summer and
self-organized based on some Linnean principles of common interest
to which he had no access. They’d all grown larger, and he felt tiny.
On the first day, he’d said hello to a girl in his homeroom whom he’d
known since the first grade. She looked at him as if he had worms
growing through the flesh of his face and said, “Gawd.”
Since then he’d kept his head down and moved with a discretion
bordering on invisibility. He spoke only when called on, although Mr.
Krupp, his English teacher, had taken an obscure liking to him when
Isaac was the only student who could name the eight parts of
speech. In fact, he’d forgotten interjection, but he divided verbs into
lexical and auxiliary, and this caused Krupp to actually get down on
his knees in front of the class and cry, “Be still my heart, boy. My life
isn’t wasted after all!” Everyone looked at Isaac and laughed at him,
but he felt, hazily, for the first time that year, as if he belonged to
something. Krupp, meanwhile, ignored the laughter and kept going.
“But you forgot,” he said, and he climbed onto an unoccupied nearby
chair and hollered, “INTERJECTIONS!” The chair slipped sideways
and Krupp went sprawling across the floor. “No, don’t help me, I’m
fine,” he said. He conducted the rest of the class lying on the ground.
Most of the kids thought Krupp was a weirdo, not only for his
behavior, his habit of mock-weeping when students were wrong (i.e.,
frequently), his occasional decision simply to play audiobooks
unrelated to any particular lesson plan for an entire class period,
excerpts from literature and biographies that edged into the
inappropriate and indecent—Isaac, particularly, remembered a
segment from a history of Catherine the Great which wavered on the
edge of the pornographic in its depiction of her sexual awakening—
but also for the fact that they frequently arrived for second period to
find the room darkened, the blinds drawn, and Mr. Krupp at his desk
with his head on his arms in the dusty twilight. Alone among all the
teachers Isaac ever had, Mr. Krupp kept his desk at the back of the
room, and the kids would file in and sit uncomfortably at their desks
until—sometimes as much as ten minutes later—their teacher would
begin talking at them from behind. Once, one of the girls flipped the
light switch as she walked into the room, and Krupp moaned and
cried, “The light! The light!” Isaac, of course, recognized some of
these symptoms from Sarah, who rarely left her bedroom before ten
thirty, and who’d forced Abbie, much against his grand natural vision,
to install heavy curtains on her windows.
It was in Krupp’s class that he met Jake, who was seated beside
him based on Krupp’s obscure system of seat assignment. He based
it on what he called “the small serendipities which are the numina,
the true, old gods of education,” to the bewildered class on the first
day. Jake’s last name was Isaacs, and this struck Krupp as
impossibly fortuitous. Jake was one of only four black kids in the
school, and while he seemed generally and effortlessly popular—he
was funny; he played soccer—he was sometimes treated by kids
and teachers alike with a certain anthropological curiosity that Isaac
had noticed and found extraordinary and inappropriate. Jake was
also in the honors track, and this was treated with open curiosity,
including by most of the teaching staff. Jake took it all with a
resigned humor that seemed to Isaac to be quite impossibly graceful.
He quickly became Krupp’s other favorite when, after a section in
which they read bowdlerized excerpts from Moby-Dick, he’d
answered Krupp’s searching, “Call me blank? Call me blank?” with
“Crazy!” Krupp’s eyes widened and he looked as if he didn’t know
whether to chuckle or to die. Then Jake said, “I’m just messing with
you Mr. K. It’s Ishmael.”
“Be still my heart,” said Mr. Krupp. “Boy, I could kiss you.”
“We should probably get to know each other first,” Jake said.
“Mr. Isaacs,” Krupp said, and he wiped a real tear from his eye, “I
may reconsider my thoughts of suicide. Thank you.”
Jake always made a point of greeting Isaac, but he still seemed,
to Isaac, unapproachable; kind but distant; friendly only out of
general disposition. But later in the school year, he helped Isaac
twice in very short order. First, in health class, which was conducted
by one of the appalling gym teachers whose constant hassling of the
boys who avoided showering after phys ed harried Isaac almost as
much as his awkward interactions with his peers. Mr. Dubinsky’s
boys’ health class was conducted with an air of backslapping
barroom grotesquerie that Isaac found both embarrassing and
terrifying, and although Dubinsky touched vaguely on the subjects of
sex and hygiene, his principal interests were in the application of first
aid, and his examples were all drawn from hunting accidents. Isaac,
who’d already embarrassed himself by asking if the four-point deer
that Adam Martens had bragged about bagging was a buck or a doe
—he didn’t understand what the points referred to—would never
have chosen to speak, but he was called out of the pleasure of his
own inattention by Dubinsky saying his name sharply and, evidently,
for at least the second time. “Mayer!”
“Yes, Mr. Dubinsky?”
 “I asked, what do you do if you’re out hunting with your buddy
and he gets bit by a snake?”
“He gets bitten by a snake?” Isaac repeated.
“Yes. A poisonous snake.”
Isaac reflected briefly. With most teachers, with most adults, he
was able to read the response they desired in the questions they
asked and the way that they asked them; adults, really, were absurd
in this way, unsubtle and indiscreet as a big TV. But Dubinsky’s world
was alien to Isaac, who never knew what the hell the hairy monster
was getting at. So he filtered every action and adventure movie he’d
ever seen, and he said, “I don’t know. I guess maybe you’d suck the
venom out of the wound.”
And Dubinsky, without missing a beat, smirked and said, “Yeah,
well, what if your buddy got bit on his penis?”
Isaac flushed and felt as if he were going to piss in his pants, and
the rest of the class howled, and Dubinsky grinned as if he’d just
wrapped a good set in Vegas. Then unbidden from the back,
someone said, “Man, that’s fucked up, Mr. Dubs.”
“What did you just say to me, Jake?” Dubinsky glared toward the
rear of the room. Isaac was unable to turn. He stared down at the
desk.
“I said that’s a fucked up thing to say.”
“Young man, you better not be using that language with me,
unless you want to take a trip down to administration with me. And I
don’t think you want that.” He crossed his arms.
Jake shrugged. “I mean, you can take me down there if you want,
but I don’t know if Mr. Genarro wants to hear how you’re talking
about sucking boys’ penises or whatever.”
The class was quiet, and everyone but Isaac stared at Dubinsky,
who’d now turned pretty red himself. Dubinsky uncrossed his arms
and turned and walked back toward the blackboard, though as he
went, he shook his head and muttered, ostensibly to himself but loud
enough for everyone to hear, “Typical black.”
Isaac wanted to thank Jake, but after class he found the thought
of revisiting that moment of mortification, even in thanking someone
for ending it, too awful, and he ducked out as was his habit. A few
days later, it was Adam Martens. Martens closed his locker and
leaned against it and said, “So, Mayer, how come you never told me
yer joosh?” Martens was tall and horrible and occasionally, apropos
nothing, would fix smaller boys in his stare and say, “Worthless,” and
then laugh to himself and walk away.
“I don’t know,” Isaac said.
“Like, don’t you believe in Christ or nothing?”
“I don’t know,” Isaac said. “No.”
“So then, how do you pray? If you don’t believe in Christ.”
“I don’t know, Adam. We pray to God.”
“God is Christ.” Martens shook his head. “It’s obvious.”
“Not to us. We believe something else.”
“Yinz probably say just a bunch of spells and shit.”
“We don’t say spells.”
“Well,” Martens shrugged and pushed himself away from the
locker. “I don’t stand next ta no juice.”
It later occurred to Isaac that he had no idea how much or little of
this Jake overheard, but there he was, suddenly, passing by, and
stopping to say to Martens, “Man, leave the dude alone, Martens,
you redneck motherfucker.”
“Whatever, worthless,” Martens said. He flipped them off. “See
you queers later.”
“Thanks.” Isaac kept his eyes fixed on Jake’s feet.
“Shit, man. No problem. He’s a degenerate.”
Isaac finally let himself look at Jake, and he found himself
smiling, although even that seemed like something he should be
wary of. “Yeah. I guess so.”
“You know so. Anyway, I heard him at lunch the other day. He’s
just pissed that you didn’t invite him to your bar mitzvah even though
you invited Sandy and Aiden.”
“Sandy and Aiden are Jewish. They’re like the only people who I
invited.”
“Yeah, but Aiden and Martens play baseball together.”
“Well, I don’t think I can invite someone who doesn’t stand next to
Jews.”
Jake grinned. “Shit, you ought to invite me. I mean”—his smile
grew—“I’m just a typical black, but I do stand next to Jews. Plus, I
could get down with some spells and shit.”
 “Really?”
“Shit, yeah. Sounds cool. I’ll wear my Farrakhan tee-shirt.”
“You have to wear a button up.”
“Relax, Isaac.” Jake put his hand briefly on Isaac’s shoulder.
Isaac blushed and felt himself start to get hard. “I’m kidding.” He
clapped Isaac’s shoulder once more and headed to next period, and
Isaac whirled and stared into his locker until it was safe to move.

• • •

For years, the Mayers nominally belonged to a Reform congregation

in Pittsburgh, attending the occasional High Holy Day service, but
generally giving practical Judaism a wide berth, not least because
Abbie felt his own luminous experiences transcended any meaning
to be found in the sing-song liturgies of ordinary secular Jews. But
then Sarah decided that Isaac ought to become Bar Mitzvah, and,
since it would be mad to drive in and out of Pittsburgh that
frequently, she had them join Tree of Life synagogue in Uniontown,
where Isaac found himself, suddenly, the sole Hebrew School
student of Rabbi Patrick MacDowell, a former bank teller and
Catholic who, having married a Jewish woman in his late twenties,
first converted and then, at the age of thirty-one, dedicated himself to
the task of becoming a rabbi. (The few other Jewish kids all went to
temple in Morgantown, where there was a larger Jewish population,
and this had been Sarah’s intention as well, but Abbie felt
Morgantown to be entirely tainted by the presence of Phil Harrow,
and insisted they stay local.) Now in his forties and a widower—his
wife had had a rare and undetected cardiac condition—MacDowell
presided over a congregation so demographically similar to the one
from Abbie’s memories of his own youth that it tipped into uncanny
parody. On their first Rosh Hashanah there, MacDowell had
exhorted them in his dvar Torah to understand that though God’s
requirements may seem perplexing, a call to something impossible,
they reveal themselves in due time as something other than what we
may once have thought them to be, for instance, him, a nice Scotch-
Catholic boy, becoming a rabbi. While he spoke, Myrna
Markoupolous waddled over and, having introduced herself in a loud,
wavering voice, proceeded into a story about how the rabbi had
failed to come to visit her in the hospital after she’d had a stent put in
the year before. Sarah had been appalled; the rest of the
congregation had ignored her; Abbie smiled too broadly and
suppressed his urge to laugh, and Isaac, then twelve, stared
miserably at the floor.
The following Thursday, after regular school, he’d begun studying
the Torah portion he’d have to read the next year for his bar mitzvah,
and MacDowell, who was a man with a fondness for arcane trivia,
told the mortified boy that in the olden days, a boy’s bar mitzvah
wasn’t necessarily on or about his thirteenth calendar birthday.
Rather, the men of a congregation would take him to the baths and
pull down his pants and count his pubic hairs, of which the required
number was thirteen. MacDowell didn’t mean anything by it—he just
thought it was interesting, a grace note in a symphony of
unimportant but entertaining facts—but Isaac flushed and shoved his
head into his arms to hide his embarrassed tears. He had the worst
of it in being a slow physical but early sexual bloomer. Abbie wasn’t
the sort who bothered with, or understood, parental controls on the
internet. Isaac had been looking at porn since he was seven or eight,
and now that he was in junior high, he perceived his own diminutive
physique and total hairlessness below the head as an almost
existential inadequacy. The summer before, Marco Larimer, who was
seventeen, had told him it was cool because he looked like a girl. It
had briefly pleased and then terrified him.
He was no closer to thirteen pubic hairs when he was called
before the Torah on the Saturday after his thirteenth birthday, and
yet, despite this disappointment, and despite his full conviction that
this Judaism business was a dusty philosophy of superstitious
collectivism wholly unsuited to Man’s fundamental individuality and
heroic potential (Mr. Krupp, having found Isaac to be too precocious
for seventh-grade honors English, had loaned him The
Fountainhead), he felt actual pride in getting up and leading the
service—it was, at least, an intellectual achievement to have learned
to read Hebrew, even if only phonetically, and to have memorized all
those monotonous prayers. And he felt equally pleased that he had
made a friend who showed up to the permanently twilight interior of
Tree of Life that Saturday morning, not out of co-religious social
obligation, but because he wanted to be there.
And, Isaac reflected as he mumbled through his Torah portion,
that he really should have invited Adam Martens after all, because
Isaac had drawn the Tazria-Metzora, a long and dreaded Parsha that
trolled through three chapters in Leviticus dedicated to the detailed
discussion of ritual impurity, the impurity of women after childbirth
(gross), and then the odd and supernatural appearance of Tzaraat,
something between leprosy, athlete’s foot, black mold, and
Morgellons disease, an affliction of skin and clothing and even
buildings, which, when it appeared, required the attentions of a priest
and an extraordinary ritual:

As for the live bird, he shall take it, and then the cedar stick,
the strip of crimson wool, and the hyssop, and, along with the
live bird, he shall dip them into the blood of the slaughtered
bird, over the spring water.
He shall then sprinkle seven times upon the person being
cleansed from tzara’ath, and he shall cleanse him. He shall
then send away the live bird into the open field.
Rabbi MacDowell had said, “You might want to play down the
particulars in your dvar, Isaac,” after Isaac had shown him his first
draft. But Isaac had snuck them back in because he thought that
Jake would be impressed.
Afterward they all went to the Uniontown Country Club to eat
stuffed chicken breast and dance to DJ Don Electric, who
interspersed selections of beat-less Evanescence songs with R.
Kelly tracks and the Electric Slide. Adults whom Isaac barely knew
gave him money, although his mother forbade him from opening the
envelopes in front of anyone, and Jake told him that “that shit about
the birds was cool as fuck.”
“Yeah,” Isaac said.
“You should tell fucking Martens that you guys, like, really do
that.”
“Yeah,” Isaac said. He laughed. “It’s like a secret ritual, you know.
We don’t let any non-Jews see it.”
“Exactly,” Jake said.
 Then it was getting dark out, and the few kids’ parents had picked
them up, and Jake had taken off with the pleasing near-promise of a
very adult handshake and a “see ya soon,” and the congregants of
Tree of Life had packed into their aging Buicks and gone home, and
Isaac was sitting at his parents’ table while his mother gazed off and
occasionally patted his hand and his father laughed too loudly with
some men that Isaac didn’t know over by the bar. Arthur Imlak hadn’t
come but had sent him an envelope with a thousand dollars and a
note scrawled on the back of a business card: “Not all in one place.”
“Can we go?” he asked his mother.
“Ask your father,” she said. She looked at him and touched his
face. “Abbie, I mean.”
“Yeah, Mom. God. I know who you mean.”
“Your tone, honey.”
“Okay.”
Rather than go to Abbie, who would put his big hand on his
shoulder and yank him into some loud conversation that felt like a
fistfight, he slipped out the side of the banquet room and down the
service stairs on the side of the building with the intention of walking
around the golf course for a while before returning to the club to
gather his parents and force them to drive him home. There was a
pond on the sixth hole with a tall willow tree where you could hear
the oddly human cadences of frog calls at night. But at the bottom of
the stairs, he found his English teacher leaning against a roll door in
an alcove and smoking a pungent cigarette.
“Hey, Mr. Krupp!”
“Holy Jesus shit Christ!” He caught himself before he could
complete the act of tossing away the joint, like a batter checking his
swing. He put his whole body into recovering from it. “You scared the
hell out of me, Isaac.”
“Sorry.”
“You want some?”
“What? Oh, I mean, I don’t smoke.”
Krupp gave a chill nod of his head, acknowledgment but not
agreement. “This isn’t smoking, buddy. This is weed.”
“Well, it’s still smoking.”
 “That,” Krupp said, “is just what they want you to believe.” He
extended his hand and pinched fingers.
Isaac took a tentative and then a deeper hit and felt the fog
bubble up into the previously undiscovered chambers behind his
eyes.
“I’ve got to tell you, Isaac, that that . . . would you call that a
sermon?”
“Yeah. I mean, it’s called a dvar Torah, technically.”
“Whatever, buddy. That was a great piece of writing.”
“Thanks, Mr. Krupp.”
“Really.” He took a long drag. “Really. I mean, I’ve got to tell you,
the way that you linked the, the impure men who were forced by the
conventions of their tribe to live apart from other people with the
heroic individuality of Howard Roark. I don’t know that I could have
said it better. A truly impressive piece of oratory, young man.”
“Thanks. Can I have some more?”
“Oh, yeah. For sure. Don’t tell your dad, though.”
“You know my dad?”
“Sure. I mean, I met him. Yeah. Back in the day.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“I thought I told you. Well, anyway, you’re a great kid. Or, I guess
you’re not a kid anymore, right? You’ve got a real way with words.
I’ve had a lot of students over the years, and I’ve rarely, if ever, been
so impressed. Did you ever think about becoming a writer?”
“I guess. I’m not sure.”
“‘The afflicted man who dwells outside the city until he is healed
represents the man of individuality who will not submit to the second-
handers all around him and therefore insists on charting his own
course in the world. What his inferiors believe to be a punishment,
he knows to be a blessing,’” Krupp quoted and shook his head. “Just
great fucking stuff, Isaac.”
“Thanks, Mr. Krupp.”
“Well,” Krupp said, crushing the roach beneath the collapsing toe
of his old brown loafers, “I’ve got a gig tonight. If I were you, I’d wash
my hands before I head back inside. Get the skunk off, if you know
what I mean.”
“Thanks, Mr. Krupp.”
 “I’ll see you Monday, Isaac.”
“See you Monday, Mr. K.”
Then Isaac, stoned for the first time in his life, walked back into
the club and went to the handicapped restroom and found, after
washing his hands for three straight minutes, that he’d been washing
his hands for three straight minutes, and he smiled at his own face in
the mirror, and Isaac laughed and discovered that he couldn’t stop
laughing.
 14

Isabel was fired. Barry called her into his office and asked her to
close the door. He fussed with some items on his desk. He slid a
piece of letterhead on which her resignation letter had already been
written across his desk. He couldn’t look at her, and she took that as
a small victory. “It’s not that I want to,” he said. But Isabel suspected
—and she was right—that the question of particular desire had never
entered into it for Barry. He was a man for whom life, professional
and otherwise, consisted of passing like a thread through the fine
demands of multiple constituencies. Stakeholders, he would have
called them. He would never really please, nor not please, anyone;
his project, and his paycheck, would endure.
Penny, who’d gotten her Masters of Non-Profit Management and
promptly been hired as Barry’s special assistant for executive
projects, had warned Isabel it might be coming. The governor had
personally called Barry—perhaps he’d even dialed his cell phone
himself—to complain that the whole fucking thing (he said, “fucking
thing”) put him in an untenable position: to show up at the gala and
speak about his environmental programs only to be followed onto the
dais by one of the most public faces of fracking in the state, who
would then be honored for nothing more or less than greenwashing
his oily money through a conveniently needy charitable organization,
would be embarrassing and hypocritical. To cancel out of annoyance
or pique would be a sign of political weakness, showing his
opponents in the statehouse that some lousy accidental billionaire
could force the chief executive of the sixth-largest state in the Union
and a critical lynchpin of the electoral college to skip a public
appearance. Etc., etc. Penny had listened in on the conversation; the
forwarding system on the VoIP phones permitted the younger
employees to do that sort of thing with a casual ease that Isabel had
been born just five or ten years too early to inherit. Barry never had a
chance. The governor raised his voice. He reminded Barry that there
was a lot of popular displeasure with the state’s system for
determining and awarding non-profit status to organizations. He had
yet to really comment on the issue. Did Barry want the Future Cities
Institute to be the public cause of his deciding to take a strong
position on it?
And Barry might yet have held out, except that somehow the City
Paper got wind of it and ran a long expose on the links between the
biggest gasman in the Commonwealth and a number of supposed
environmental non-profits, the FCI most prominently. The cover
featured a cartoon of Imlak as a sort of gaseous devil rising out of
Panther Hollow to drag the Institute down into a fiery hell. An anti-
fracking group organized a demonstration and picket at the William
Penn Hotel, where the dinner was to be held, and the new state
Attorney General, another Democrat who’d promised during her own
campaign to crack down on the excesses of the industry, made
several darkly imprecise comments about “looking into” the nexus of
gas money and public environmental advocacy and lobbying. “The
question,” she said, “is whether these non-profits are living up to
their promise as purely public charities, advocating for the public
good, or whether they are little more than public relations arms of the
fracking industry.” Barry hastily announced that the 2050 Award
would not be going to Imlak after all. Arthur only learned that Barry
had hastily announced it when he read it in the Post-Gazette the
next morning, because Barry hated confrontation and didn’t bother to
call him first. Imlak promptly and furiously revoked his foundation’s
pledge of two hundred and fifty thousand in annual general operating
support over the next three years. The FCI senior staff began
receiving ominous emails from their director of finance about
departmental budget cuts, and then, at a staff meeting, Barry
promised everyone, apropos nothing, that there wouldn’t be any staff
cuts, whatever anyone may have heard. No one had heard anything
to that effect, and that’s how they knew what was coming. Despite
the modest forewarning, Isabel allowed herself briefly to believe it
wouldn’t be her.
It turned out that a sitting governor in the same party as the
mayor and the county executive did indeed trump the twenty-second
richest man in the Commonwealth. That probably should have been
clear to everyone from the beginning. Imlak may have owned some
state legislators and county commissioners, but the governor was a
project of the national party; he was an avatar of even bigger
billionaires. It was a little shocking to everyone involved, actually,
Arthur included, to discover that a hundred million bucks could count,
in certain circumstances, as mere loose change. And of course,
although not so stratospherically wealthy as Arthur B. Imlak, the
governor was a pretty rich guy himself, a millionaire many times
over, and that was just how boys got when they start pulling their
dicks out.
Isabel was ultimately punished for arguing against giving Arthur
the ridiculous award in the first place. Barry blamed her for the whole
mess; there was nothing worse for a career than being right when
your boss was disastrously wrong. In the email to the staff, also pre-
written, probably by a university lawyer, he thanked Isabel for her
hard work and dedication and hinted vaguely at a future of other
challenges. Penny left the office early, though not too early to be
noticed or to endanger her own job, and bought Isabel a few drinks
at a grotty student joint in Oakland. A group of thirty-something MBA
students were eating terrible, gigantic sandwiches and drinking beer
and chilled Crown Royal a little farther down the bar. One of them
offered a silent toast in her direction.
“This doesn’t seem like your sort of bar,” she told him. A couple of
them wore suits, and they had an air of easy spending.
“Double-D,” he said, nodding to a companion down the bar, “likes
their girly drinks.”
“Double-D?” Isabel said.
“Don Danielson.” The guy raised a glass full of something
pinkish. Little candy worms hung off the rim.
“You still give each other nicknames?” She waved the bartender
over.
 “What else are we going to do, study cost accounting?” Her
neighbor tipped his glass again. He had a punchable face and a
fuckable body under that improperly tailored suit. She briefly
considered, then decided against it.
“What about you?” he asked. “Do you like girly drinks?”
“Me?” Isabel said. “Oh, no.” She ordered a cheap scotch. “Never
mix, never worry.”
Isabel hauled herself home with that feeling of fogged regret that
came with drinking before it got dark. She fell asleep on the couch
watching a Werner Herzog movie about Siberia, and she dreamed
she was a fish who spoke with a German accent. The water was
bracing. She woke up around nine with a headache, no blanket, and
with her phone trilling on her chest.
“Eli?” she mumbled. She realized that she hadn’t answered but
rather had swiped him directly into voice mail. She sat up and called
him back. “Eli.”
“Bell, you sound terrible.” He’d taken to calling her Bell because
he knew it made her crazy. It was such an impossible trait of men,
even the good ones, that they found this sort of minor but deliberate
antagonism the funniest thing in the world. Your annoyance was the
predicate for the humor of it while at the same time a demerit against
your character.
“God, don’t call me that.”
“We kid because we love.” He’d also begun using this expression
when he knew Isabel was annoyed. It was his way of smuggling the
word into conversations to test the waters of its more sincere use.
Isabel, sinusy and hungover, was tempted to tell him right out, right
there, that she loved him. Force him to either affirm it or walk it back.
But what if he were to choose affirmation, and what if she really did?
There was a long pause, and then he told her that Abbie had a
brain aneurysm. “My God,” Isabel sat up. “Is he . . .?”
“No, no. You can’t kill him. He’ll live to a hundred seventy-five.
But he’s in the hospital.”
He’d been dizzy, and he began to slur his speech. Eli had at first
thought that Abbie was drunk or stoned, neither uncommon nor
unlikely, but then his speech became totally nonsensical, and he
vomited, and Eli called 911.
 Isabel said she’d drive down, but Eli told her there was no point.
Not yet. “They’re doing tests, still, and he’s not lucid. Come
tomorrow. Call me and I’ll meet you at the hospital.”
So Isabel drank some water and tried to read and gave up and
went to bed and lay in the dark with her mind persistently circling
back to the question of when precisely it would pass from
consciousness into unconsciousness, that unhealthy picking at the
scabby edge of sleep. But eventually she did sleep. She dreamed of
an immense, quiet forest on the other side of the continent, high
pines and a steep slope down to cold water.
Abbie was hardly more lucid the next day. Sarah had been with
him all night. They allowed his other visitors into his room only
briefly. Abbie complained that it was too bright, even though the
blinds were drawn and the lights had been dimmed. He was having
trouble moving the right side of his body, and now the doctors were
saying that it may not have been an aneurysm after all, but a stroke.
“Of some significance,” one of the in-and-out doctors added with an
uncomfortable enthusiasm. Isaac and Eli took Sarah down to the
cafeteria to force her to eat something, and Isabel was left
momentarily alone in the room with him before two nurses come and
shooed her away. Abbie’s eyes had the appearance of milk pluming
as it was poured into weak tea. Isabel, with nothing to say but stupid
encouragement, said, “You’re looking good, Abbie.”
“Mmm.” His throat rattled. “I fell off the truck,” he said.
“What truck?”
“I tried to jump off the truck.” A wide grin spread on the good side
of his face; the bad side caught up a moment later, but then the
whole thing turned to a grimace.
Isabel, who’d read somewhere that you should humor the
lacunae of reason in stroke victims and Alzheimer’s patients and the
elderly in general, said, “What were you doing on the truck in the first
place?”
Abbie murmured incoherently. Then his eyes focused on her,
one-two, the good then the bad, just like the smile. “Excuse me,
Isabellisssss . . . issima. I find myself in a state.”
“You’ll be fine,” she said, retreating again into hospital-room
banality.
 He seemed to sink into the pillows. He lifted and lowered an arm
weakly. “God asks it of you,” he said slowly, roughly. “You think you
see it. But He doesn’t speak. He doesn’t speak. What if your heart
hears only the echo of what He meant to say? What if you hear it
wrongly and still, you do as you thought He asked?”
“I don’t believe in God,” Isabel said.
Abbie looked past her, and then he said in a quavering voice that
sounded as if it was echoing up out of a well, “Tell your mother hello,
Isabel.”

• • •

Abbie, of course, had known since he’d watched her, slowly and
quietly and thinking she was alone, rifle through his office on her first
night at The Gamelands. She was a lousy sneak. She didn’t realize
that a slowly opened door creaks the loudest. She didn’t think that
the reading light she’d turned on to read the transcript of that awful,
regrettable arbitration turned the window transparent to anyone
standing outside it, invisible in the dark, catching a last smoke before
toddling off to bed. She even looked like her mother. It startled him to
think Cathy had been the same age as her daughter was now when
they’d first met. My God.
He’d met her in eighty-four. She was an accountant for a firm that
did business with his father-in-law’s practice, a little hard-edged and
with a square face. Northern Italian, maybe. He once told her it was
alluringly masculine, and she’d surprised him by accepting it as a
compliment. He hadn’t necessarily meant it as a compliment, but he
pretended he had. It was something about women who were good
with numbers. They’d met for lunch. Why had they met for lunch? He
could never remember later on. It was some pretext, something to do
with a project; something to do with a public bid; something about an
audit. It wasn’t her idea, but he remembered it as her idea. Her firm
had offices midtown, not far from Bryant Park. Unlike Sarah, she
believed him to be a genius, at least for a little while. He drove her
up to Connecticut to show her a house he’d designed for some
absurd millionaire. It was still under construction. They spent the
night there in the little trailer used by some of the workmen during
the week. That was before he got fat. Before his back got bad.
Did he love her? Not especially. Did she love him? No. If Sarah’s
sophisticated estimation of the actual limits of Abbie’s talent and
intelligence were what permitted, and what sustained, her love, then
Cathy Giordani’s slightly overawed acquiescence to Abbie’s self-
made myth was what prevented her loving him. She thought too
highly of him and perhaps not enough of herself. Not that she was
swept away or worshipful. She was in the end a practical woman, far
more practical than Sarah. She viewed Abbie, in a way, as she
viewed the presidents and CEOs of the bigger companies for whom
she worked as a CPA—not better than her at all, just of a different
scale. Her love affair with Abbie, like her business, was more than
anything mutually agreeable, companionable.
He ruined it by getting her pregnant. An accident. As much her
fault as his. In fact, she was never entirely certain it was Abbie. He
was one of only two possible candidates. But he was the more likely,
and rather than turn the whole thing into a circus, he was the one
she told. If the kid came out an unlikely blonde or something, she’d
admit to the other guy. And when she’d told him—over a charred
burger at a diner near Times Square that had the worst food but the
cleanest counters and bathrooms in the neighborhood—he’d
seemed, at first, almost pleased, as if in hearing it, he’d proven
something to himself about himself. She’d more or less expected
that and worked it into her calculated decision to tell him. She was
an accountant, after all. She balanced the books. He’d told her with
some regret that he and Sarah had tried and failed to get pregnant.
He insisted on paying for the doctor, although she had perfectly
good insurance. He was an insupportable spendthrift. She let him
because this too flattered his silly pride as a man. But he was
careless, and Sarah found out. A bill or something. So there they
were, back in the same diner, eating the same burgers, although her
girlfriend, to whom she’d confided the pregnancy, had told her that
she should lay off red meat entirely. Abbie fiddled with his napkin.
His burger was half eaten. He ordered a coffee. He appeared to
change his mind. “Actually, do you have any Bailey’s?” he asked the
waitress.
 “We don’t have liquor, sweetie.”
“How about beer?”
“Sure.”
“Bud or Bud Light?”
“Bud.”
“And no coffee?”
“No, bring me that too. We’ll see which way the evening goes.”
The waitress rolled her eyes at Cathy in a gesture of
commiseration before walking away.
He’d already told Cathy that Sarah had found out. She’d gone on
eating her burger. You didn’t drag your lover’s fight with his wife out
of him. You just had to wait.
“She said she wants me to take care of it,” Abbie said at last.
“Take care of it?” Cathy put down the last bite. She sipped her
water through a straw. “Like what, Don Corleone putting out a hit?”
“That’s what I said!”
“No way, Abbie. I don’t serve your wife. I’m not interested in what
she wants.”
“What about what I want?”
“Fuck you, Abbie. What you want? If you wanted to take care of
it, you should’ve told me a month ago. It’s too late. I’m committed.
Sunk costs. This project is in the pipeline.”
“Such a romantic.”
“I’m a CPA.”
“Be that as it may.”
“Be that as it may nothing. This is my kid, Abbie. It’s either yours
or it isn’t yours, but that’s up to you.”
“It’s ours,” he said. But when the waitress brought their drinks, he
picked the beer.

• • •

A little later in the day, the nurses kicked Isabel out of Abbie’s room,
insisting that only Isaac and Sarah—family—could stay. She’d
waited for Abbie to say something, to protest her exclusion from the
category, but he was who he was, after all. You could only expect so
much. Isaac followed her briefly out of the room and thanked her,
with unlikely sincerity, for coming. She asked him if he was going to
be okay. “Of course I am. Jake’s staying over. Anyway, it’s not like
he’s dead.” He flashed a goofy grin. “We’re not going to be rid of him
that easily.” And indeed, Isaac proved perhaps a more adept, if
mundane, prophet than his father, who recovered, though he never
lost a limp and a slight downward tug at the left side of his face, and
lived for many more years.
Eli walked her down the hospital’s long beige halls toward the
elevators. “You should come over tonight,” she told him. “I got fired.
Plus all this. I’m feeling needy.”
“I should stay. They might need me.” He stopped in the middle of
the hall.
“Not especially.”
“Not especially. But it won’t be much longer. We should get
married, Isabel.”
“Married?” She laughed, too loud. A passing doctor gave her an
admonishing look.
“Yes,” Eli said. “Why not?”
“How long have we even been a couple?”
“Who cares? We’re going to be forty.”
“Speak for yourself. I’m thirty-eight.”
“You’re thirty-nine. You just think I don’t know when your birthday
is.” This, she had to admit, was true.
Several years later, when Veronica, her mobility now a little
impaired by bad hips but still remarkably fit for a woman of almost
ninety, had flown out to Vancouver with a group of adventurous and
equally well-knit old ladies, Isabel had met her for a long lunch and
told her this story, or most of this story, judiciously edited. Veronica,
as ever, had insisted on a bottle of wine.
“Such a romantic,” she said of Eli.
“I wasn’t much better,” Isabel said. “I mean, after I thought about
it a little, I just said, sure.”
Veronica smiled. “And he hauled you off to the far end of the
continent.”
“That was part of the deal. Part of the proposal. He said we had
to have babies. Lots of babies. Canadian babies. Enough to survive
the end of the world.” She laughed. She nearly said, “He isn’t entirely
unlike your brother.” But she caught herself.
“That’s a tall order.”
“Two down. But I’m not getting younger. We’re thinking four.”
Veronica laughed. “Enjoy the wine while you can, then.”
Isabel invited her to visit them. “It’s only about an hour from the
city. Eli’s friends with a seaplane pilot. We could get you a flight over
to the island.”
Veronica thanked her and said she couldn’t. “Our cruise leaves
tomorrow.” The ladies were heading off on a National Geographic
tour up along the Pacific Canadian coast and through the Inner
Passage of Alaska.
“On the way back, then,” Isabel offered.
“Perhaps,” Veronica said. And then Isabel never heard from her
again. Isabel had flown back to the island and picked up the Jeep.
She drove through the long summer evening from Nanaimo over the
mountains, past Cowichan Lake and down the Pacific Marine Road
to Port Renfrew, then up to the wooded acres and the house that Eli
had built. He’d put the kids to bed. “How was work?” she asked. He’d
got a job with an organization that tried to preserve the forests on the
islands, aided by his sister and some judicious exaggeration of his
past employment in the field of landscape architecture. She worked
for them part time as well, telecommuting with the office in
Vancouver and visiting in person a few days a month. He didn’t
answer, but kissed her. It was almost dark.
“How was Veronica?”
“Spry,” Isabel said.
It was only a month later that she received a rare email from
Isaac telling her that Veronica had been so taken with Alaska that
she’d disembarked at Juneau, caught a flight up to Anchorage, and
from there joined a small tour headed to Denali National Park where,
hiking with a group of men half her age, she’d lost her footing on a
loose section of trail, fallen fifty feet down a steep slope, and died.
Isaac insisted that she was smiling when the guides recovered her
body, although what evidence there was of that, or how it could be
true, he never mentioned.
 15

In his junior year in high school Isaac was arrested for the first time.
There would be others, later, in college, for better reasons: for
protesting at the Republican National Convention, then again for
protesting at the Democratic National Convention; for refusing to
leave the Mellon Bank Plaza after the city decided it had had enough
of an Occupy protest. But there’s a difference in being arrested alone
than getting hauled off in a group. He’d spent the day on his bike, a
long, hilly, forty-five-mile loop that took him from The Gamelands out
to Dunbar along Jumonville Road and then up over the mountain to
Ohiopyle and back again via some old and steep state roads. It was
August, although it had been unusually cool that week, the highs
barely touching seventy. In two weeks, he’d be a senior. There was
already an autumnal quality in the air, and it hinted at something
about his life, that it was to pass into a period of bright colors and
long nights that would only ever be a glamorous disguise for a kind
of chilly retrenchment. He’d hung his bike on the rack in the carport,
noting that one of his father’s cars was gone. One of his father’s cars
was always gone. Abbie, Isaac thought, was at loose ends—he had
been for years—and it was making him crazier by the hour. The
other day he’d wandered past the door of his office and found the old
man talking to himself. He was unintelligible. Isaac banged his foot
against the door when he turned to slip away. He was graceful when
he rode but clumsy when he walked. Abbie turned and caught him
grasping at his stubbed toe. Their eyes met. “My son,” Abbie said.
He’d lately got into the habit of making this weird, nominative
pronouncement every time he caught sight of Isaac. It was creepy.
 Isaac went into his house and peeled off his kit and took a long
shower. He thought about turning on his cam, but he wasn’t in the
mood. He jerked off quickly and just for himself. He threw on jeans
and a tee-shirt and went to get something to eat. His own kitchen
was empty but for a couple of bottles of beer that he kept in the
fridge. He walked to the main house and found his mother sitting at
the dining room table and crying.
He was never shocked to see his parents cry. They both did
frequently, his father freely weeping, often at something silly, at an
opera he was listening to or at the conclusion of a sad story about
children in poverty or some animal near extinction on NPR, his
mother quietly, always sitting up straight, rarely at anything in
particular, and if you asked her why she was crying, she always said,
“I’m not.”
So this time he didn’t even bother to ask. He found some
breakfast bars in the pantry and took two of them. He found a bottle
of sparkling water in the fridge and got that as well. He stood at the
island and unwrapped a bar. While he chewed, he noticed that his
mother had a laptop open on the kitchen table. He saw what she
was looking at.
Isaac’s interest in amateur pornography would later develop into
something more tongue-in-cheek, a carefully curated porn blog,
sufferingintherear.tumblr.com, which featured a rather lovely
collection of photos, some pornographic, others only vaguely erotic,
all of them featuring boys—in various states of undress—and their
bikes. Isaac didn’t take them himself, of course; he would have said
that he was only a curator, the site a museum of his own interest.
The fact that there already existed so many images made for such
impossibly singular tastes and niches of human interest was both a
wonder and a shock, even for a kid like Isaac who’d grown up
entirely online, always knowing that anyone could find on the internet
a sheer, extraordinary volume of material for the most outrageously
peculiar interests and fetishes. Suffering in the rear, by the way, was
an expression from road racing—a cyclist having a terrible day,
mashing on, revolution after revolution, at the back of the peloton as
it rolled across some European countryside. It was the kind of silly
in-joke that Isaac found funnier than it was. At that time, though, still
in high school, before Tumblrs, before Twitter, when he still had, of
all things, a Myspace page, Isaac’s interests in the male form were
less curatorially ironic and more distinctly personal. He posted jerk-
off videos on a number of sites; they featured him in various states of
cyclist’s dress, or undress. Several had achieved more than 100,000
views.
Who knows how Sarah ever came across them? It was absurd to
imagine that she spent her unoccupied days trolling through gay
porn online. (Was it, though? Perhaps it was exactly what she did
with her unoccupied days, at once titillated and terrified that she
might encounter some image of her own son, whose activities were
less secret than he imagined.) She’d snooped around just enough to
formulate a vague but persistent suspicion that something was going
on without imagining quite what it could be. To her credit, Sarah
wasn’t the sort of woman, not the sort of mother, who would, in the
abstract, necessarily collapse into tears at the idea of her own son
masturbating for a bunch of pervs on the other end of some
anonymous network. That’s not to say that she would approve, only
that she was a person with a broader view of human sexuality; she
would have admitted some interest in the pornographic into the
normal panoply of human erotic life. But abstraction makes moral
tolerance easy, and seeing your only child orgasm into a pair of light
blue spandex shorts would surely, regardless of any prior and deeply
held beliefs in your own essential openness, trouble a mother.
Isaac, likewise, would have said that he was proud of his body,
comfortable with his sexuality, unconcerned with who saw him, proud
even to be seen. But seeing his mother sitting at the kitchen table
watching his own dick bounce around a laptop screen, he flushed,
nearly dropped his bottle of water, and hurried out of the room
without saying a word. He took the keys to one of the lesser cars, a
cranky Oldsmobile that his father had bought for him at the estate
sale after an erstwhile colleague of Sherri Larimer’s had gone to jail
for check kiting and Sherri had hastily and cheaply liquidated the
estate. He drove down the mountain, willing himself not to cry,
because unlike his parents, he found his own tears absurd.
Club Illusion was on North Pittsburgh Street in a low, windowless
building that had once been a tire shop, then a biker bar. It was
owned by Bill Pattaglia’s brother-in-law, who was married to Sherri
Larimer’s cousin, and who operated a variety of bars, nuisance and
otherwise, in Uniontown, Connellsville, Masontown, and on a dark
stretch of road outside of Republic. He had read an article in USA
Today about several once-charming, then peeling, now charming
again New England towns that had been revitalized, in some degree,
by catering to flocks of fantastically bourgie gay tourists from New
York and thereabouts. Ironically, the bar he chose to transform into a
fag bar had been, in its final prior incarnation, called The Two-Stroke.
The joke was lost on Bill. It had become the county’s premier—and
that is to say, only—gay bar. Uniontown was just then undertaking an
effort to advertise itself as a tourist destination for the sort of folks
who enjoyed whitewater rafting in the mountains and fall foliage and
Frank Lloyd Wright (Fallingwater was nearby). In any event,
business at The Two-Stroke had never been much more than a
break-even affair, with half the terrifying clientele drinking for free on
account of various past and future services to the Larimer family. It
seemed to its owner that fags were less likely to shoot each other or
run each other over with their cars. This may or may not have been
true, and the regulars were finally, thoroughly local. Still, it turned out
that there were plenty of gays in Fayette County who didn’t really
want to drive all the way to Pittsburgh to drink with their own kind.
Both of the Ls in the sign were neon high heels. He’d thought of that
himself.
It was a weeknight and the bar wasn’t crowded. Isaac was
drinking with his half-a-friend, Travis Pistella. Because of its
ownership, Illusions had few concerns with any strict construction of
legality, and the Pattaglias were anyway actually related to the
regional head of enforcement for the Pennsylvania Liquor Control
Board. Isaac had been drinking there since he was fifteen. Travis
was a skinny twenty-five-year-old white boy from New Eagle who did
weird drag down in Morgantown under the name Stella Travesty. As
a woman, he had a style of science-fictional haute couture, as if
Klaus Nomi were to have made a cameo in David Lynch’s adaptation
of Dune, but as a man, he’d never grown out of the candy-boy raver
look that had marked his own teenage years: wide, torn jeans and
tiny tight tee-shirts, a lot of bracelets and spiky hair badly frosted at
the tips. Isaac found him slightly appalling to look at. Travis did a lot
of meth and also had a desiccated look about him, but he was a
sweetie. Also, although Isaac would never smoke the stuff, he didn’t
mind doing a toot or two of speed in the parking lot, and Travis was
free with his supply.
“I can’t believe your mom found your porn,” Travis said. He was
drinking something simultaneously effervescent and fluorescent. “I
would like literally die.”
“Isn’t your mom dead?”
“Yes, girl. And if she wasn’t, it would literally kill her.”
“It’s worse because I’m in it, I guess.”
“Yes. Why didn’t you ever tell me? I would’ve watched you!”
“That’s why.”
“Shut it down. I wouldn’t have jacked off or anything! I’m not into
twinks. Although you do have a fan over there.” Travis dropped his
voice and indicated a man at the other end of the bar, a thin guy with
a tight face, in his mid-forties, sitting behind a half-drunk beer and an
empty shot glass, slumping at the shoulders as if neither was his
first.
“Oh my god. He looks like a washed up porn star, speaking of.
Look at that mustache! I’m going to need another drink.”
“Me too. I may step outside, in a minute. If you’re interested.”
“I’m interested. What am I going to say to her? What if she tells
Abbie?”
“I thought you said they were cool.”
“They’re not that cool.”
“He’s really staring.”
“God. Fuck this. Let’s get high.”
They went out into the lot behind the bar and sat on the hood of
Travis’s Cavalier and took key bumps out of a little glassine sachet.
Isaac felt the bolt behind his eyes and the immediate dull ache that
accompanied extreme awareness in his brain. He had no particular
affection for stimulants, except insofar as they allowed him to drink
more, but there really was something about meth that all the others
lacked, something visceral and terrible, as if some infinitely vaster
being than himself had been crammed inside of him, as if he could
feel, for the flickering hours before it faded, what it must feel like to
be a whole soul crammed into a tiny body during its brief, sinful,
necessary transit through the living world.
“I sometimes think,” Isaac said, “when I do meth, that this must
be what it feels like to be a whole soul crammed into a little human
body during its time as a living being.”
“That’s some deep shit, girl.”
“Fuck you. I’m serious. Can I have a little more?”
“You can. You should smoke this shit. I don’t know why you don’t.
I don’t know about any fucking souls, but it does make you want to
fuck.”
A human figure reeled out of the darkness, and a slurred, nearly
lisping, nasal voice snarled, “All right, who’s using all the foul
language?”
It was the man who’d been staring at them across the bar. He
was an odd figure in the dim light of the gravel lot, more gaunt than
he’d appeared inside and unsteady on his feet. He was wearing a
colorful sweater, stiff jeans, and brand-less white tennis shoes. He
repeated the question.
“Who the fuck are you?” Travis asked.
“What did I just tell you about the language?”
“You didn’t tell us anything,” Isaac said. “You asked.”
“Oh, are you gonna get smart with me?” He wove as he turned
his gaze on Isaac.
“I mean, I guess I am,” Isaac said.
“Well, it’s called your ass! Smart-ass!”
Travis and Isaac weren’t able to keep themselves from laughing.
The man got angrier. He got louder. “You think this is funny?”
“What the fuck, man.” Isaac slid off the hood of the car. “Fuck off.”
“It all starts with the bullshit.”
Travis was giggling. “That’s so true.”
“It all starts with the bullshit.”
“Look,” Isaac said. “We’re going to go back inside. You have a
nice night.”
“You boys aren’t going anywhere.” He straightened himself up
and attempted a menacing look. It came off as constipated.
“Um, yes we are.”
 He raised his arm and angled his head toward his armpit. He
spoke into it. “Base,” he said, “Come back. This is Officer
Rittenhauer requesting backup.”
“Is he talking to his armpit?” Travis asked.
“I think he is,” Isaac said. He grinned at the guy. “You got a mic in
there, Officer?”
“Request immediate backup.”
“Okay,” said Isaac. “See ya.” He took a step back toward the bar,
but Rittenhauer interdicted him and pushed him back with one hand.
“Whoa!” Isaac threw up his hands. “What the fuck, man?”
“I warned you about that language! Now you aren’t going
nowhere!”
“I’ll go wherever the fuck I want.” Maybe, Isaac reflected, he
shouldn’t have done that meth. He would have ordinarily found this
all much funnier. He pledged, in his mind, only to smoke weed and
drink from then on. But now he was angry. He stepped forward
again. “What are you going to do about it, faggot?” he said.
The man gave him a level gaze. “Strike,” he said quietly. “And I’ll
show you self-defense.”
So Isaac took a swing at this wavering drunk. He’d never done
that before. It was the first, and the last, time he’d ever attempt to
throw a punch. In retrospect, he realized, he hadn’t the slightest idea
how to do it. Not that it would have mattered if he had; he’d still have
found himself prostrate in the gravel, a knee in the small of his back,
his hands pinned behind him. Travis, that queen, had squeaked and
run off with his drugs. The gravel dug into Isaac’s cheek. He
squirmed but couldn’t get free. And that was how Isaac stayed until
Officer Rittenhauer’s backup arrived.
Imlak found the despondent boy in a holding cell with three large
but harmless drunks, two of them snoring on benches that seemed
ill-designed to support creatures of that size, one of them leaning
against a wall and emitting a sort of whale song. Isaac was sitting in
the corner with his head between his legs. “Come on, son,” Arthur
said. “Stop crying. Let’s get you home.” The boy looked up. Yes,
Arthur thought. He’d occasionally teased himself that Sarah was
lying about the boy’s provenance. But she wasn’t.
 He’d golfed earlier that day. He was terrible at the sport, and he
should have given it up. He’d shot 105 on the not very difficult
course. But the game fascinated him; it was something he felt he
ought to be good at, and he tortured himself by continually going
back for more. He’d still been at the club when Sarah called him.
She’d been very drunk, and he’d had a few cocktails himself. It had
taken several minutes of circuitous interrogation to discover that
Isaac was in jail, having been picked up—that is, arrested—with a
known drug dealer, although this latter character had seemingly got
away, behind some kind of queer club, by Jerry Rittenhauer no less,
remember him? Who knew Uniontown even had such a
cosmopolitan amenity? Arthur made a note to check it out at his
earliest opportunity. When he was in Florida, he got the best coke
from a kid who played records in a gay club in Ybor. “Where’s
Abbie?” he’d asked Sarah.
“He snot ansring.”
“He’s not answering?”
“No. No. No.”
“All right. Christ. Sarah, drink some coffee.”
“He’s doing pornography.”
“What? Who?” For the briefest moment, Imlak imagined she
meant Abbie. He pictured his erstwhile rival and almost-partner with
some kind of sturdily sensualist Uniontown swinger housewife in a
wood-paneled basement. There would be an old-fashioned
camcorder whirring away on a tripod across the room, and Imlak
nearly laughed out loud. But, of course, he knew what she was really
saying. He sighed. It was the sort of thing that Abbie would take
either very well or very badly, with no possible intermediate reaction
and no predicting which way he’d blow. Imlak tipped out the
bartender, made calls to Mayor Pattaglia and Chief Chislett, then
drove down to the jail behind the courthouse and picked up his
skinny, inconsolable boy.
Imlak took Isaac back to his ugly farmhouse and told the boy to
take a shower and change his clothes. “I’m not as skinny as you, but
I’m sure I have a pair of sweats around here somewhere. I’ll leave
them in the guest room. Go on. I’ll call your mother and tell her I’ve
got you.”
 “Don’t. God.”
“Don’t argue, son. Hit the showers.”
Imlak waited until the water was running, and then he called
Sarah and said that he’d got him. No, no one was going to press any
charges. It was all a big misunderstanding.
“How’d you work that out?” Sarah asked him. Icily, he thought, for
the favor he’d just done.
“I implied that Chief Chislett would find no stronger financial
supporter should he ever choose to run against Bill Pattaglia.”
“You men and your money.”
“Oh, please. How’s Abbie?”
“He just came home. He’s upset. I told him about the
pornography.”
“Was that wise, Sarah?”
“We don’t lie to each other, Arthur. That’s not part of the deal.”
“Don’t you?” Imlak thought it was extremely unlikely. “Maybe you
ought to.”
“No.”
“Christ.” Imlak glanced down the hall toward the bathroom.
“Sarah, we all have our indiscretions. Abbie’s no angel either,
needless to say.”
“Arthur, he’s just a boy.”
“He’s not a boy. Or, he is a boy, but he’s seventeen, almost
eighteen. But what do the categories matter, really? Was it
necessary? Your husband is a maniac.”
“He’s his father.”
“Sarah.”
“No, Arthur. We agreed. You and I. We agreed. Abbie will get
over it. Isaac gets arrested at a gay bar for fighting a police officer.
He’s livid, and he has every right to be. We’ve spoiled him. But we’ll
all get over it.”
“I’ll bring him home tomorrow. It’s late. He can sleep here.”
“No, Abbie wants to get him.”
“I’ll ask him. He can decide.”
“He’s my son, Arthur.”
“Be that as it may.”
 But when Isaac was out of the shower and Imlak did ask him,
Isaac said he’d go home. “I may as well get it over with.”
“Your mother seems to believe that you’re involved in some, shall
we say, sexual indiscretion, young man.”
“I guess.”
“She believes that Abbie is taking it rather badly.”
“Fuck Abbie.”
“Yes, well. I happen to know that your . . . father has a bit of a
nasty streak in him, although he likes to pretend that the bad news
that follows him around only ever arises from the tragic
misunderstanding of other parties to the various conflicts. I think it
might be wise to let him cool off.”
“You think it’ll be any better if I’m here? You know he thinks
you’re fucking my mom. Speaking of sexual indiscretions.” Isaac
looked preposterous in a gray sweatsuit three sizes too big, but he
managed a very hateful look nevertheless.
Other men would have avoided the subject, changed it, talked
around it, but Imlak only folded his hands in his lap and nodded and
said, “Yes, your mom and I were involved.”
Isaac never stopped being grateful to Arthur for that. It was all he
wanted, really: for an adult to treat him as an adult, not as some
precious and infinitely fragile thing, not as some beautiful miracle of
creation. He said, “Did Abbie know?”
“Yes, I imagine.”
“You stopped?”
“We did.”
“Why?”
“For no particular reason.”
“Did you love her, though?”
“I suppose I did.”
“Did she love you?”
“Possibly. I never asked, and she never volunteered the
information. Probably not. She loves your father.”
“Ha.”
“You’ll find these things are more complex than you’d imagine.
Also simpler.”
“It’s weird. God. She’s so old!”
 “I’m so old. And it was years ago. We weren’t quite as old then.
Old enough, though.”
“How long ago?”
“Seventeen, eighteen years.”
“Oh.” He considered this. He appeared to come to a private
decision.
“Are you sure you want to go back now?” Arthur asked.
“Yes. No, but I will.”
“Well, my advice is you should keep it to yourself.”
“Keep what?”
Imlak stood and permitted himself to kiss the boy on the top of his
head. He didn’t answer. Instead, he said “When you’re as old as me,
you’ll understand that despite what you’ve been told all your life, the
truth, in and of itself, is very rarely its own excuse.”

• • •

Imlak didn’t invite Abbie in, but the men shook hands at Imlak’s front
door and had a quiet conversation. Isaac strained to hear, but he
couldn’t. It felt as if he were being bargained for. He hated it. Arthur
came and got him and guided him to his father, a firm hand on the
small of Isaac’s back. Abbie put a big hand on Isaac’s shoulder, then
briefly touched the boy’s still-wet hair. Isaac flinched away. Abbie
sighed.
They got in the car, a long old Mercedes that looked like it ought
to have been hustling a foreign dignitary in from the airport. They
went down the drive and turned toward Morgantown Road. There,
Abbie went left, heading for the bypass.
“Shouldn’t we get my car?” Isaac asked.
“Your car?” Abbie’s hands tightened on the wheel.
“Whatever. The car.”
“Forget the car. We’ll take care of it.”
“Fine.”
“Right. Fine.”
The big car swayed onto the bypass. Abbie gunned the engine.
They wheeled around the wide curve of the highway toward the foot
of the mountain. He was a reckless driver; his driving frightened
Isaac in the best of times; it terrified him now. He finally put on his
seatbelt. They drove in silence. No radio, only the distant sound of
the tires on the road transmitted through the soft suspension and the
muted sound of the big V8. The bypass reconnected with Route 40
and angled uphill. Abbie downshifted. The engine revved and whined
at a higher pitch. Isaac had climbed the road on his bike and knew
the ramps by heart. Twelve percent here for the first five hundred
meters, then ten percent through the first curve. The last houses
dropped away. The trees closed in on either side of the road. It was
almost dark. Trucks coming in the other direction, lowest gear in their
rightmost lane, flashed lights as they bounced out of the curve.
Abbie sighed, his prelude to saying something. Isaac almost
asked him what, but thought perhaps if he didn’t ask, Abbie would
lose the courage to say anything or, more likely, just lose the thread
of whatever he’d been thinking he ought to say.
He was unlucky. Abbie didn’t forget.
“What’s going on, Isaac?”
At least, Isaac thought, Abbie was going to keep it vague. He
hoped that was the case. “Nothing,” he said.
Abbie sighed again. He shifted again. The engine whined again
and settled. They approached the first curve; the pitch diminished;
the car shot forward a little. “Nothing,” he repeated.
“Nothing,” Isaac said again.
“You don’t go to jail over nothing.”
Isaac composed his most disgusted teenage face, though Abbie
was watching the road and wouldn’t see him. “Of course you do.
That cop was drunk.”
“What were you doing in a bar?”
“What do you think?” Isaac spat back.
Abbie’s right arm tightened and flexed, and Isaac cringed away,
fearing for a moment that Abbie would hit him. He had before. Only
once, and afterward he’d entered a period of unabashed contrition
that even Isaac, who was only eight at the time, had found
embarrassing. He couldn’t even remember why—some insistent,
childish misbehavior that Abbie’s yelling only encouraged until he
slapped Isaac once across the face—but he remembered the weight
of the hand and remembered whirling and falling to the ground. Had
it even hurt? He didn’t remember it hurting.
But Abbie breathed deeply. He relaxed his arm. They exited the
curve. Fourteen percent now as they banked right into the next long
turn. “I don’t care if you’re gay, Isaac. But.” The but had no
antecedent. It hung horribly.
Isaac flushed red, pale face turning sickly pink. “I’m not gay!” He
didn’t know why he said it. It wasn’t a denial. He was; his parents
knew; he knew they knew. If it remained unspoken, it was only
because they all imagined themselves too advanced to ever have
some dowdy conversation about teenaged sexuality. But here was
Abbie, trying to do exactly that, and Isaac, seventeen, almost
eighteen, was appalled. “I’m not,” he repeated.
“Isaac,” Abbie said.
“Fuck you.”
“Isaac.”
“Leave me alone.”
Abbie, for his part, felt the muffled drumming of rage behind his
eyes. He kept them on the road. If less articulate than he’d hoped to
be when he’d planned the conversation on the way down the
mountain to get his son, then nevertheless he thought he’d evinced a
true, a convincing sympathy. And yet no one ever seemed to return
his care in kind.
“Whatever you are,” he began, then stopped abruptly again.
What an awful way to phrase it. He rolled his eyes briefly
heavenward.
“God,” Isaac muttered, full of disgust or shame or both.
“My point,” Abbie tried again. “My point is your mother and I are
worried. Worried, Isaac. About school. You’re not doing anything at
school. About your friends. Or you don’t seem to have many friends.”
“Jake is my friend.”
“Is that all? And that boy—”
“Fuck you.”
“Careful with that mouth, Isaac.”
“Oh, please.”
The last curve. The road flattening to a mere five percent. The
lookout on the right. The long straight. The white, crenelated Summit
Inn at the peak, lit from below, a ghostly wedding cake.
“And the drugs. We know you’re experimenting. And look, a little
marijuana never hurt anybody, but.” Again, the conjunction without a
phrase to be joined to the phrase preceding it. Abbie shook his head.
Isaac pursed his lips and looked away. He pressed his forehead
against the cold window.
Right at the Summit. Floating through the dark over the rolling
road, the headlights hardly adequate. Neither of them spoke again.
Abbie drummed impatiently on the wheel. Isaac’s breath fogged on
the glass. Right on the driveway. The sharp curve, where he slid, as
ever, on the gravel. Past the big tulip tree. Past the bright house, all
its windows illuminated, flushing energy carelessly into the night.
Why, Abbie thought, did Sarah insist on keeping every Goddamn
light burning? They parked in the carport. Isaac leapt out of the car
and almost ran for his own little enclave. Abbie yelled after him, “We
expect you at dinner!”
Isaac didn’t answer him but slammed the door as he went into
the house. And Abbie, standing beside the car with its door still
open, ground his molars and took another calming breath, only he
found it didn’t calm him at all, but only stoked whatever it was that
burned inside him. He closed the car door so gently and slowly that it
didn’t fully latch. He stared at the un-flush edge of it. He kicked it as
hard as he could, leaving a huge dent and sending an appalling pain
shooting into his right knee.

• • •

Neither Abbie nor Sarah said anything to Isaac when he did come
over to the main house for dinner. Sarah was drinking a glass of
wine in the living room. Abbie was in his usual place in the kitchen, a
large glass of scotch beside him, a whole fish sprawled wetly across
a big cutting board. He was scaling it angrily and haphazardly with a
fillet knife. Isaac got a bottle of water from the refrigerator and sat at
a chair in the dining room and stared at the table. The silence—
Abbie wasn’t even listening to music—drew into a dark vapor that
seeped into the room like a bad smell. Isaac felt he couldn’t bear it
anymore and pulled out his phone. It buzzed as he typed. Then
Abbie pounded his fist on the counter and asked him who the fuck
he was talking to, and Isaac told him it was none of his fucking
business, and Abbie said he paid for the phone, he paid for it, and it
was Goddamn well his business; everything that went on in that
house was his business. Then Isaac said, “Fuck you, I hate you,
both of you, and I wish I were dead.” Then Abbie said, “Fine, kill
yourself, you ungrateful, you snide little shit, you furtive little pervert,
you pornographer; I can’t believe you’re my son.” Then Isaac said,
“I’m not your fucking son, I’m not, I’m not, and you know it.” Then
Abbie was striding across the kitchen with the knife still in his hand,
maybe he’d forgotten that he had it there, maybe not, and he had
grabbed Isaac by his oversized, borrowed shirt and was dragging
him out of the chair. Then Sarah had run across the room and
grabbed Abbie’s arm, and he let go of Isaac and pushed her away.
She tripped backward and fell onto the stone floor, twisting her wrist
and screaming as she caught her fall. Then Isaac had bolted across
the room and out one of the glass doors onto the patio and he was
running across the field toward the woods. Then Abbie came running
out of the house behind him, screaming incoherently, tripping down
the terraces as he pounded after the boy. Isaac went into the woods.
The house was the only light and it disappeared. It was cloudy and
the moon was small. He held an arm in front of him, but the
branches pricked him and snapped across his face. He tripped and
stumbled forward, crying now, sobbing and gasping as he ran. Abbie
came through the trees behind him. Had Isaac run toward the road,
maybe, he’d have gotten cleanly away; he could have run for miles
and miles, and the old man never would have caught him, but he
was too small and lithe to go crashing through the underbrush, and
Abbie was huge and angry and came through like a monster made
to crush paths through the forest. Isaac tripped for real on a root or a
fallen branch. His ankle turned as he fell and when he stood to run
again the pain was so intense and so searing that he fell with a sad
yelp to the ground in the small clearing. Abbie burst into the clearing
and tripped in the same spot and flew gracelessly onto his belly. The
knife he was still carrying flew out of his hand and landed in the dirt
and leaves. He hauled himself onto his knees and saw the crying
boy in front of him try again to stand and again cry out, again weakly,
and fall back onto the ground, and then look at the crawling madman
who was nevertheless in some way or other his father, his father
nearly enough. Isaac sniffed and said, “I sprained my ankle.” Then
Abbie was holding him, kneeling beside him, holding him and
stroking his hair and crying as well. They were both of them crying in
the dimly moonlit woods. Then slowly they stopped crying, and Isaac
looked at Abbie and sniffed again and snorted and very nearly
laughed and asked, “Did you really think you were going to kill me
with a fish knife?” And Abbie sat on the ground and said, “No, no. I
don’t know. No.” Then he stood, and he stooped and helped his son
onto one foot and put the boy’s other arm around his shoulder. Then
they both noticed, at the edge of the clearing, huge and unafraid,
silent and unmoving, a tall buck, its hard antlers like the immense
branches of an ancient tree, its black eyes the night’s truest version
of itself, watching them. Its mouth went in lazy circles as it chewed
its cud.
 Acknowledgments

This book wouldn’t have been possible without my agent, Gail

Hochman, who read the first draft and told me in the nicest possible
way that it didn’t make any goddamn sense. I also have to thank my
erstwhile editor, Will Menaker, who saw me through a second draft
not all that much better than the first, and who, to my regret, has now
gone on to pursue his own weird, creative path. Thanks to the whole
team at Liveright who stepped in after Will’s departure to see this
through with me until the end. Thank you, Trevor, for putting up with
my giggling at my own jokes while I wrote them. And thanks to my
cranky, rickety old beagle, whose incontinent need to get up at five-
thirty every morning forced me out of bed and gave me a couple of
hours to write every day before I ran to catch my bus.
ALSO BY JACOB BACHARACH

The Bend of the World

 Copyright © 2017 by Jacob Bacharach

All rights reserved

First Edition

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The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Names: Bacharach, Jacob, author.

Title: The doorposts of your house and on your gates : a novel / Jacob Bacharach.
Description: First edition. | New York : Liveright Publishing Corporation, a division
of W. W. Norton & Company, [2017]
Identifiers: LCCN 2016046981 | ISBN 9781631491740 (softcover)
Subjects: LCSH: Fathers and sons—Fiction. | Single women—Fiction. |
Domestic fiction. | GSAFD: Humorous fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3602.A335 D66 2017 | DDC 813/.6—dc23 LC
record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016046981

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