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  T said, “Looked like the slug from hell.”

  Lester took his wet T-shirt from the boat and waded out into the water. “You see those pink eyes?” He wiped at the slime with his shirt and then held it to his nose. “Stinks,” he said.

  T slid his pole under a thwart and then went around to the bow to push the boat back into the lake. “I’m ready to go.”

  Lester grabbed the boat by the transom and pulled it the rest of the way into the water as T leaped into the bow.

  “How come I do all the hard work?” Lester said, retrieving his tiger underwear from its rock.

  “Because I’m the old guy,” T said.

  Lester said, “You think that’s it?” He waded out into the water again and then pulled himself into the boat, where he dropped the engine down and squeezed a rubber bulb attached to a hose that ran from a red gas container.

  “Or it could be because I’ve got the fifty thousand you want,” T said.

  “Sixty,” Lester said, and then started the engine with a single pull on a black cord.

  At the back entrance to the cabin, T stopped a minute and watched Lester drifting a few feet out from the shore, standing upright in the boat and casting his line toward the rocks with what looked like intense concentration. He was barefoot and shirtless, wearing only his jeans. From where T looked down at him, with a frontal view, in bright sunlight, he appeared boyishly innocent, his hair wet and pulled back, his chest and arms muscled and almost completely hairless. From the back, T imagined, with his long hair pasted against his neck and the orange Bengal tiger prowling the green woods of his shoulder blade, he’d cut a different picture.

  It was obvious to T, when Lester dropped him off on the rocks and told him he wanted to fish a little more, that he was intentionally being left alone with Jenny, and he felt anxious now as he was about to enter the cabin. He felt as if he and Lester had negotiated a deal and now he was here to sign the contract—though in fact they had agreed upon exactly nothing. They hadn’t said another two words to each other on the trip back across the lake, and Lester had dropped him off with a simple “I’m going to fish a little more.” Still, he felt as though something had changed, as though Jenny were his for the taking now, and he hesitated outside the cabin. He imagined her in bed, still warm from the bath, waiting for him, and the thought made him flush a little as he recalled the image of her throwing off the quilt and walking naked away from his bed, that shock of blond hair bouncing over a catlike harmony of muscle and skin—and there was something more than that, more than her body alone, her youth alone, that he could feel pulling at him. It was as if, when he was with her, with Jenny, there was something in the interaction that made him feel… He couldn’t find the words for it. And maybe it wasn’t even that she made him feel it but only that she made him feel the possibility of it. She made him feel… comfortable, or at ease, or maybe just more human. Whatever it was, he realized it was something he hadn’t felt in a long time—and that thought, that he hadn’t felt that way in a very long time, seemed somehow dangerous.

  Rather than enter the cabin immediately, he found a long, flat rock out of Lester’s view and lay back in the sunlight. After a moment, he took off his shirt to better enjoy the warmth of the rock on his back and the sun on his chest. He wondered if there weren’t something special about the Saint Lawrence River and the Thousand Islands, at least where he was concerned. So much had happened for him here in the past, and now, upon his first return in more than thirty years, this. It was almost a reversal of the former situation, and he had the odd sense of time warping and bending back on itself, casting him into the 1960s again, only in another dimension, where all the details were reversed. Then he was a boy, here with an older woman. Now he was an older man, here with a girl.

  He understood, in retrospect, that he had been in love with Carolyn Wald. He had traveled upstate to see her only a few days before he married Brooke and found that she had aged considerably in the four years since he had graduated from Syracuse and gone off to travel in Europe on his own for a few months, as was customary for hippies back then. He had contacted her on average once or twice a year after his return to the States, and she had always refused to see him. He had called her from San Louis Obispo, where he had spent almost a year living on a commune with a moody Chinese girl who had changed her name from Kim to Lost Feather. He had called her from Wallkill, New York, where he had spent another year working on a horse farm, living with a sculptor named Josephine, a woman he remembered as intelligent, talented, and neurotic. And he had phoned her several times from Manhattan, where he had gone through several inconsequential relationships while working an assortment of temporary jobs. She had refused to see him every time, once telling him he had never meant anything to her and asking him not to call again. It wasn’t until he told her that he was marrying Brooke and needed to see her one more time that she had agreed, and when he arrived at her house in Syracuse after an absence of four years, he felt like a supplicant, though he had no idea what it was that he wanted.

  He guessed, thinking back now on how much she had aged, that she had probably already begun her struggles with cancer. Her obituary claimed she had been battling it for many years. He knew, really, almost nothing about those years—but cancer would explain why she had refused to see him, and why she seemed thinner than he remembered, her face more pinched and lined with wrinkles. Still, once he was inside her house again, inside her enclave of bookcase-lined walls with art everywhere—standing sculptures, hanging paintings, floating mobiles—where colorful displays of fresh-cut flowers scented the air, he quickly stopped noticing her age and found himself caught up again in her enthusiasm for poetry and art, for literature, for culture, for science, politics, history; caught up in their typical lopsided conversations where the sound of her voice worked on him like a spell. Just as was the case when he was her student, all he had to do was listen. Even now, lying shirtless on a rock in sunlight, remembering back more than thirty years, that vivid sense came back to him, the sense he had in her presence, listening to her talk, the sense of being part of a world that mattered, a teeming world animated by passion and knowledge and belief, a world that he ached to participate in and so wanted intensely to make love to her, not because of his lust or her beauty but because making love to her was his only means of really participating in her life, as if by making love he could become a part of her world.

  On his rock above the Saint Lawrence, T jumped upright, startled by a family of sleek, long-necked, furry brown creatures scurrying past his feet. They looked like the offspring of a snake that mated with a duck, and they paused a moment to look at him, yanking him abruptly out of his memories, before hurrying on. He had a sense then of the utter weirdness of time, how it flies and yet never moves, until at his age life sometimes felt, in actuality, like one perpetual, unending moment. Back in Syracuse, then, a heartbeat ago, he had reached across the dining table in the midst of conversation, taken Carolyn’s hands in his, and pulled her to him for a kiss. After that, they spent the rest of the afternoon in the bedroom. They went out to a good restaurant for dinner, and then back to her bedroom for the night; the next day he returned to New York for his wedding rehearsal. Then, in another heartbeat, thirty years passed and now Carolyn was dead and he was old and her lively world that he had so desired was lost to him, and he was left alone in his vacuum-sealed world of Salem, Virginia; and now another heartbeat and he was up and putting his shirt on and starting back to the cabin.

  Inside, as soon as he closed the door behind him, Jenny called out, “Is that you, T? Lester?” Her voice came from the hallway.

  “It’s me,” he called back. He noticed an orange juice container on the table and poured himself a glass.

  “Where’s Lester?”

  “Still fishing.” T finished off the juice and looked out the window, where he could see Lester standing in the boat, reeling in line artfully, with the pole to his side, playing with the action.

  �
�Did you guys catch anything?”

  “Nothing,” T called back. He put his glass in the sink. “Lester might catch himself a cold, though. He wound up in the water.”

  “He’s a clown,” Jenny said. “He’s still out there fishing?”

  “You can see him from the window. He looks like he’s enjoying himself.”

  “Great,” Jenny said. “Come on back here. I’m in the tub.”

  In the bathroom, he found her submerged from the neck down under a field of bubbles. Her hair was wet and slicked back over her head. “Where,” he asked, “did you find bubblebath?”

  “Under the kitchen sink,” she said, as if it were absurd to think the cabin might be without bubble-bath. “I was looking for dish detergent.”

  “Fate,” T said.

  “Bubbles,” she said, then pouted. “But it’s lonely in here. I don’t have any company.”

  T sat on the john beside the tub and touched her cheek with the back of his hand. She looked a little pale, and he thought he saw a hint of strain in her eyes. “You want company?”

  She leaned into his touch and arched upward slightly as she simultaneously massaged the small of her back, which pushed her body up out of the bubbles. “You could just stare at me,” she said. “Or you could get in here with me. That way I wouldn’t have to massage my own back.” She turned her head quickly and kissed his hand. “You could do it for me.”

  T went to dry his hands on a long blue towel that was draped over the back of the john. When he picked up the towel, he upset a container of pills underneath it. “What’s this?” he asked, holding up the brown plastic vial.

  “Tylenol,” she said. “Headache.” She looked up at him coyly. “Come on in here and make me feel better.”

  “Jenny,” he said, watching her in the bath, where she had tossed her head back and closed her eyes, the white sheet of bubbles sliding down off her breasts and stomach.

  “Yes?” she said dreamily. “T?” The wet pink of her skin rose out of the foam of the bath as water dripped from her hair and off her face. She opened her eyes. “Are you getting in with me?” she asked, a touch of indignation now in her tone, as if it were beyond belief that he wouldn’t want to get in the bath with her.

  T watched her closely for a moment longer, then undressed and got into the tub. He sat behind her with his knees up, leaving her most of the space and water, then slid down as far as he could, so that her head was resting on his chest. He massaged her neck. “Jenny,” he said again. He kissed her on the top of her head. “This is crazy,” he said, “but…” He wrapped his arms around her shoulders and held her tightly.

  Jenny purred and reached behind her, between his legs. “What’s this I feel?” she said. She seemed a little surprised as she ran her fingers along the hard length of him. “Do baths turn you on?”

  T took Jenny by the shoulders and turned her around, so that they were both sitting with their knees up in the tub, facing each other. He slid his legs under her thighs and tried to pull her up onto him, but she resisted, thrusting her arm out and pushing him away. In a moment her expression, which had been coy and seductive all along, turned suddenly sad and then melted into tears. “Jesus,” she said. “You’re surprising me. I thought…”

  “What?” he said. “What’s wrong? You don’t…?”

  “I do,” she said. “Yes, but—” She covered her face with her hands, mashing clumps of bubbles into her eyes and hair, which she then roughly brushed away with her forearm as she spun around, turning her back to T. “Hold me again,” she said. “Please.”

  T put his arms around her and held her to his chest.

  “I can’t right now,” she said softly. “I’m hurting right now.”

  “Hurting?” T reached for the pills and saw from the label that they were Tylenol with codeine. “Is it what Lester said?” he asked. “But we didn’t—”

  “It’s just something that happens with me,” she said. “It doesn’t have to be sex.”

  T massaged her gently, moving his fingers from her neck to her temples and forehead. “And this has been going on how long?” he asked. “How many years?”

  Jenny sank down deeper into the water. “I enjoy sex,” she said. “I swear I do. This is just something I have to deal with sometimes.” She rubbed his leg under the water, as if to reassure him. “I want to make love to you,” she said. “It just can’t be right now. It hurts too much.”

  “Jenny,” he said. “With me—” He took her hand and massaged the palm. “I’m concerned,” he said, “honestly, with what might cause this kind of thing. It’s the medical—”

  “I’ve seen more doctors,” she said. “They’re all, they have no idea.”

  “They’ve checked you out? You’ve been—”

  “I’ve been to everybody,” she said. “I’ve had every test done.” She spoke with her eyes closed. She might have been lying comfortably in her bed talking to a lover. “They’re all, they can’t find anything. So, I mean, I have at least the consolation of knowing I don’t have a tumor or something like that, which, for a long time, I was convinced—”

  “But the doctors don’t— What kind of pain is it?”

  “Do you really need to know this?”

  “I don’t need to,” T said. “I’m concerned for you.”

  Jenny looked up at him. She seemed to be exploring his face, trying to read it. “Sometimes it’s like if I even think about sex. And it always hurts after,” she said. “It starts like a dull ache and then it keeps getting deeper until it’s like my whole middle is throbbing.” With her free hand she played with the surface of the bath water. “But a couple of magic pills and a hot bath fix me right up. And I swear it doesn’t hurt during sex. Sex is great. I mean, it can be great. It’s just, after—”

  T said, “I find it hard to believe— They don’t even have any theories, the doctors?”

  “They’re all,” Jenny said, her voice tinged with obvious anger and frustration. “They’re all— They don’t say, you know: you’re crazy. But they’re like: it’s nothing physical, so— You figure it out. If it’s not physical, then what else? Right?”

  “But you don’t— That’s not something—”

  “You should feel this—and then tell me it’s in my head. Fuck them. That’s, you know— That’s bullshit.”

  “All right,” T said. He put the hand he’d been massaging back in the water and started in on the other. “Have you tried nontraditional— Other kinds of medicine than traditional, Western—”

  “I feel like—” she said. “To me—” She sighed. “Okay,” she said, “here comes my fucked-up story. If you get to know me— What’s Lester told you?”

  “About you? What’s he told me about you?”

  “I know you didn’t talk about fishing all that time. He must have told you something.”

  “He told me about the trial,” T said. “He told me about your uncle.”

  “Chucky?” She pulled her hand away and slid down a little deeper into the water.

  “Both of them, actually,” T said. “But mostly the stuff about the pictures and the trial. He said your mother killed your father when she found the pictures.”

  “That’s true,” she said, and she arched her neck so that she was looking at him upside down. “How fucked up is that?”

  He kissed her on the forehead. “But the pain from sex—” he said. “That goes back before the trial, doesn’t it?”

  “Goes back forever,” she said, and then dropped down into the water until only her eyes were visible above the bubbles.

  T said, “Where are you going, Jenny?” and wiped foam away from her hair.

  She exhaled into the bubbles, blowing them away, and then emerged and shook her head, splashing water out into the bathroom. “I’ll tell you something—he didn’t just take pictures of me.”

  T pulled her back up to his chest. He reached for the towel and wiped water and soap from her face.

  “I’ve always told everybody
Chucky only took pictures— Really, he only took pictures, I swear —like I was defending him, like he really wasn’t that bad, but the truth is—” She turned sideways to look up at him. “I don’t know why I want to tell you this.”

  “Go ahead.” He pressed his thumbs into the hollow at the base of her neck and squeezed her shoulders gently. “Go ahead and tell me.”

  “You know my other uncle, Ronnie,” she said, settling herself in the tub again, leaning back to T, “he was the sweetest man on Earth.”

  “This is the one that drowned himself?”

  She nodded. “He was smart, he was gentle, he loved classical guitar— That’s his guitar we got with us.”

  “Lester said.”

  “Couldn’t play worth a shit, though. Always said he was going to learn soon as he could make the time. Did Lester tell you I was close to him?”

  “He did,” T said. “He told me that.”

  “He played backgammon too,” she said. “Wasn’t particularly good at that either. I started beating him soon as I learned how to play.”

  “He sounds different from the picture I get of the rest of your family.”

  “It was mostly that he was sweet,” she said. “That’s the only word I can think of that describes it. My father was a quiet man too, but weird quiet, like he wasn’t really there. Weird that way. You had to know him a while and then you just figured—oh, that’s the way he is.”

  “What was so weird?”

  “Just— He wouldn’t look at people. He’d watch the ground. He didn’t talk, hardly ever. He was weird that way.”