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Prologue

“Here,” she says, “I’ll get you a sweater.” She’s barely done speaking before she’s taking the stairs two at a time, her espadrilles clomping against the peeling wood, transporting her down the long hallway. It’s July and twilight comes late, so even now, at nine o’clock, the last of the sun still colors the sky, but inside the house the corridors are dark and she’s neglected to illuminate the antique standing lamp at the top of the stairs as if to reflect an inner austerity. It’s their country house, but like their apartment in the city the hallway runs through it, an endless spine, which she traverses now, past the Kathe Kollwitz etchings and the street map of Paris and the photographs of her and David’s grandparents staring down at them on opposite sides of the wall from another continent and century. She moves with such purpose (dogged, implacable: those are the words David uses to describe her) that when she reaches the lip of their bedroom and steps inside she’s startled to discover she’s forgotten what she came for.

She calls out to him, but he doesn’t respond.

“Are you there?”

There’s silence.

“David?” She’ll turn seventy next spring, and David will, too. (They were born a week apart. They’ve figured it out: she was emerging from the womb at the very hour he was circumcised, the first and last Jewish ritual he ever partook of, which places him, she thinks, one Jewish ritual ahead of her.), and she’s taken to saying her memory has begun to fail her, though she knows that’s not true. Or no more true than for any sixty- nine- year- old --- or for any adult human, for that matter. To have the memory of an infant, a toddler. She recalls Clarissa at ten months, those first stabs at language, how she resolved right then to teach her daughter French and German, to do it while it was still possible. She felt the same with Lily and Noelle, and again a few years later when Leo was born. She spent her junior year in Paris, at the Sorbonne, and David spent his junior year in Düsseldorf. Her French was rusty by the time the children were born, and David’s German was rusty, too, but it was worth a try, wasn’t it, she said, and she still had her Berlitz tapes. And David, who in those days was still inclined to indulge her, allowed her to convince him to embark on a summer experiment; she would speak French to Clarissa and he would speak German. Two junior years abroad between them, one set of Berlitz tapes: the experiment lasted a week, the two of them speaking to baby Clarissa in their bad French and bad German until it became obvious to Marilyn what should have been obvious to her all along, that their daughter wasn’t going to be trilingual; she was going to be mute, a wolf- child.

She remembers now. A sweater. She stands in front of their old closet, and there they are: David’s shirts pressed and starched and evenly spaced, the shoes lined up in pairs, the sweaters folded in piles, next to them hanging a single brown cardigan. For a second she feels like a voyeur, looking in on a life that’s no longer hers, and as she reaches out to grab the cardigan her hand shakes.

She heads back downstairs, and when she reaches the landing she calls out again, but he still doesn’t respond. For an instant she panics: has he run off?

“I was calling you,” she says. “Didn’t you hear me?”

“I guess not.” David is out on the porch, reading the Times, reclined on one of their old lawn chairs. His legs stick out in front of him; he taps his feet against the edge of the chair

“I got you this.” She hands him the cardigan, which he takes obediently, but now he’s just laid it folded across his lap.

“You said you were cold.”

“Did I?” His gaze is far off, tunneling past her.

He looks pale, she thinks. He’s wearing a red button- down shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and he inhabits it so loosely that it billows around him like a pastry puff. He looks as if he’s lost weight. He has lost weight. So has she. They haven’t eaten much, either of them, this past year.

A mosquito lands on his neck. She swats at it, and he flinches. “A bug,” she says.

He nods.

A firefly alights on one of her tulips, and another one, casting the garden in a sputter of light. “The girls will be arriving soon.”

“Not for another twenty- four hours.”

“That’s soon enough.”

Another mosquito lands on him.

“The bugs love you,” she says. “Remember how we used to say that to the kids? Mornings before summer camp and we were coating them in Calamine? The mosquitoes loved Leo most of all.”

She knows what he’s thinking. That memory is selective, even in small matters like this one. But it’s true, she thinks. Leo was the most bit- up of the kids. The bugs found him the sweetest, as did she.

He rises from his chair. “I need to get a haircut.”

“David, it’s nine o’clock at night.”

“I mean tomorrow,” he says, all impatience. “I’ll go into town before the girls arrive.” He checks his reflection in the porch window. He’s patting down his hair, straightening out his shirt collar as if he has somewhere to go.

“You look good,” she says. “Handsome.” He still has a full head of hair, though it’s grown silver over the years. When, she wonders, did this happen? It’s taken place so slowly she hasn’t noticed it at all.

She’s sitting in a lawn chair, and she turns away from him. It’s been a year since Leo died, and on the teak garden table, pressed beneath a mound of books, sits a pile of programs for the memorial. There will be a service at the Lenox Community Center; then they’ll go to the cemetery for the unveiling.

“You changed into tennis shorts,” he says.

“I was thinking of hitting some balls.”

“Now?”

“The court is lit.”

He shrugs, then goes back to the Times. He skims the editorial page, the letters, and now he’s on to the arts. He folds the paper like origami, over and over on itself.

She steps off the porch and disappears into the garden. She continues along the stone path, which winds past the bushes to where their tennis court lies. The garage is next to it, and as she steps inside and flips on the court lights, the clays gets flooded in a pond of illumination.

She stands at the baseline with a bucket of balls, another bucket waiting in the garage behind her. She’s in her shorts and an indigo tank top, her sneakers laced tightly, her hair tied back, though a few strands have come loose in the nighttime heat. She breathes slowly, in and out. She hits serve after serve into the empty opponent’s court, taking something off the second serve, putting more spin on it, then returning to her first serve, hitting one ace after another. She serves into the deuce court and the ad court and the deuce court again. She empties one bucket of balls, and now she returns with the other bucket. Occasionally when she serves, her ball hits another ball lying on the clay, and they bounce off each other. There are a hundred and fifty tennis balls now, maybe two hundred, the court covered in fuzz the color of lime. Sweat drips down her forehead and singes her eyes. She simply leaves the balls lying there and returns to the house.

“Did you get it out of your system?”

She doesn’t respond.

“So this is it,” he says.

It is. After forty- two years of marriage, she’s leaving him. At least that’s how David puts it --- how he will put it, no doubt, when they tell the girls. And it’s true in a way: she was the one who finally decided she couldn’t go on like this. A week ago she asked him for a trial separation. She hates that term. As if she’s standing in front of a judge and lawyers, a jury of her peers. When she made her announcement, David said he wanted to give it another shot, but they’ve been giving it shot after shot for a year now and she has no more left in her. There are days when they don’t talk at all. She has reminded him of the statistics, what happens to a marriage when you lose a child. Eighty percent, she’s heard, maybe even ninety. Why should this surprise people? Already it’s 50 percent when nothing obvious has gone wrong. But David doesn’t want to hear statistics, and, truth be told, neither does she.

Another copy of the program lies forlornly on the porch. They’re everywhere, it seems, strewn randomly about the house. She picks one up from the steps. Leo’s photograph is across the cover, his curls corkscrewing out just like David’s, and beneath the photo are the words april 10, 1972–july 4, 2004. At the bottom of the page is a poem by William Butler Yeats.

When she told David of her plans, he wanted to call the girls immediately. He wanted to call Thisbe too. It seemed only fair, he said; Thisbe and Calder would be flying in from California. But she refused to let him call. She wanted to tell everyone in person, and to wait until after the memorial was over. But the real reason --- she has only half admitted this, even to herself --- is that she fears if David told the girls no one would come. It would serve them right, David says; she half suspects he wants to cancel himself. How can they have the memorial, David wants to know, when this is happening? But she disagrees. David thinks, How can they do this? and she thinks, How can they not?

Now, in the kitchen, she finds him on his hands and knees, taking a box cutter to four large packing boxes. He makes a single sharp motion down the center of each box. His back is to her; he looks as if he’s searching for contraband. “Do you need help?” she asks, but he doesn’t answer her.

The boxes are open now, gutted of their contents; a single Styrofoam peanut has flown out of the packing and skittered like a bug across the floor.

“The Williams Sonoma kosher special?”

He doesn’t respond.

“What’s the damage? A couple thousand dollars? More?”

David glances at the receipt, which is perched on the butcher- block table at the center of the room, lying in a bed of Styrofoam. “More or less.”

“Oh, well,” she says. “We can afford it.”

“I suppose.”

“You said you thought it was money well spent.”

The contents of the boxes (plates and bowls, cutlery, serving dishes, pans and pots, a few extras that David insisted on, including a set of bowls for the children with famous sports figures on them --- they’re sports fiends, the grandchildren) have been purchased so that Noelle, Amram, and their four boys can eat in their house. Noelle won’t eat off nonkosher dishes, even if those dishes belong to her parents. Especially, Marilyn sometimes thinks, if those dishes belong to her parents. Noelle and Amram live in Jerusalem and they visit at most once a year, so the dishes won’t get much use. It’s one of the many reasons Marilyn

has been loath to buy them. But David has been lobbying for them for years; he thinks of them as a peace offering.

“A plate for me, a plate for you?” She’s doing her best to make light of this.

He doesn’t respond.

“Noelle will still come visit,” she says. “Nothing has to change about that.” Nothing has to change about anything, she wants to say, but she knows that’s absurd.

She has found a rental on the Upper West Side, a two- bedroom in one of those all- services monstrosities, with a gym and a pool, a concierge, a playroom (it will be good for the grandchildren, she thinks), a party room, all the things she could want and a lot of things she couldn’t. It’s eleven blocks from David, which means they could run into each other grocery shopping, though in New York you can go for months without running into your own next- door neighbor. For a while, she thought it would be better to move to another neighborhood (she even considered moving to Brooklyn --- Clarissa and Nathaniel live there, so she could be nearby), but except for those few years when the girls were in high school and the family decamped to Westchester, she has spent her whole adult life on the Upper West Side. It’s hard to imagine living anywhere else. And the apartment opened up suddenly and the lease is month to month, so it will be a good place to figure out what comes next. It’s the house in Lenox that makes her heart quicken. Will she be allowed to come back here? Will she allow herself? She and David have been coming to the Berkshires summer after summer for forty years now.

“You checked the food?”

David nods. “Everything’s certified kosher.”

“Are you sure?”

He is.

More Styrofoam peanuts are strewn across the floor, including one that has lodged itself under the fridge, which Marilyn stabs at with a fork. Now she’s standing with David amidst the wreckage, and beside it all sits the bubble wrap unfurled like a runner across the length of the room. “We bought a whole kitchen,” she says. “No spatula left unturned.”

David gives her a tired smile.

“Are we supposed to bless them?” she says darkly. “Is that what you do?”

“Christen them?” David says.

She laughs, as she knows she’s supposed to, and it feels good to laugh with David. For a moment there’s a lightness between them, as if a screen has been lifted.

When David finds her a few minutes later, she’s seated in the alcove that adjoins the living room, typing on the computer. “I know what you’re thinking.”

“What?” he says.

“There she goes again. Writing another op- ed about the war.”

“What do you want me to say?”

“You could say you miss him.”

“Of course I miss him.”

“It’s been a year since he died, for God’s sake. And, yes, I know writing these things won’t bring him back, but I don’t care.” She doesn’t care, either, that she has become a mascot for the left and everyone thinks of her as the mother of the dead journalist. Because that’s what she is. It’s what David is, too: the father of the dead journalist. It’s all they’re ever going to be.

In the kitchen now, he prepares a citrus marinade for the chicken. He has chosen the menu: white gazpacho, caramelized leeks and endive, marinated chicken thighs, jalapeño- lime corn on the cob, pasta salad. They will also have watermelon slushies. At the moment, though, he’s chopping vegetables. The year before Leo died, when he retired after thirty- nine years of teaching high school English, David took a course consecrated to the very subject, five Sundays running at the 92nd Street Y. Slicing and Dicing 101, Marilyn called it; it was evidence, she believed, that he had too much time on his hands.

Though there’s certainly a technique, as he demonstrates now, the way he keeps his knife always on the cutting board, only his wrist moving. That’s all there is these days, just the sound of David when she comes home from work, cutting vegetables in their kitchen on Riverside Drive, the sound of him here too, in Lenox, her husband chopping vegetables. She thinks how hard it’s going to be, living on her own, how she has brought this on herself, the solitude, the silence, and now, when she’s alone, as if in preparation for what’s to come, she has begun to turn on the radio and she listens to music she doesn’t care for, just to hear a sound in the room.

The phone rings, but when she goes to answer it, the person has hung up. She has a brief, paranoid thought that someone is following her. A trickle of sweat makes its way down her spine. She opens the kitchen window, but it’s just as warm outside as it is in the house, so she closes the window again. Her heart still beats fast from hitting those tennis balls. She smacked one of the balls as hard as she could, clear over the fence and past the neighbor’s property. She did it for the fun of it, but it wasn’t fun. She feels the energy funnel out of her, wrung from her as if from a sponge. Sometimes she feels as if she could die, that she’d like to die; it would be better that way. “He used to walk around with his laces undone. Remember? It was like he was daring you to step on them.”

“Who?”

“What do you mean who?” Because in her life there is nobody else. And because for David there has been somebody else (there have been their girls; there have been his hobbies --- he has taken up running and become devoted to opera; he stays up late poring over librettos --- there has been this relentless chopping of vegetables), because he’s been trying to make the best of an unspeakable situation, she hasn’t been able to abide him. Is that why she’s leaving him? All she knows is she’s so very very tired. She looks at him once more and feels the rage burble inside her.

Onions, scallions, leeks, endive, cucumbers, jalapeño: he chops them all. It looks like a trash heap, like volcanic ash. Always the reasonable one. For years she counted on him to be like that. Now it assails her.

“Did you call your mother?” she asks.

He nods.

“You didn’t tell her, did you?” That was their agreement --- the agreement, at least, that she extracted from him. No one is to know until after the memorial.

“No,” he says sharply. “I didn’t.”

“Then what did you two talk about?”

“Nothing,” he says. “She’s a woman of few words, Marilyn.”

“So what were her few words?”

“She’s not coming.”

“Are you serious?” And she thinks: you told her not to come, didn’t you? Except, she realizes, she’s actually said those words.

“My mother’s been through a lot. Do you blame her for not wanting to go through it again? She’s ninety- four years old.”

“I know how old she is.”

“So let her be.”

“She’s ninety- four, and she’ll live to a hundred and forty.” She has a stronger constitution than any of them, Marilyn thinks.

She’s washing the dishes now, going at them furiously, while David is still chopping behind her, the percussive sound of him. He presses down hard on a carrot, and the top comes flying off and sails across the room. “Jesus,” he says. “Fuck! I cut myself.”

“Is it bad?”

“Bad enough.” There’s a gash in his thumb. It looks shallow at first, but now, studying it beneath the sink light, Marilyn sees it’s deeper than she realized. She takes a wad of paper towel and presses it to his hand. But the blood seeps through, so she goes to the pantry to get more paper towel, and when she returns his hands are shaking.

“Are you all right?”

“I don’t know.” He sits down on the stool and she’s above him now, attending to him. She runs his hand under cold water. The blood drips off him and into the sink, down into the garbage disposal along with the vegetable peel and citrus rind, swirling around like beet juice. She comes back with tape and a gauze pad and bandages him up.

“Slicing and Dicing 101, huh? They should have flunked me out.”

She presses her hands around his, wrapping him in gauze, as if she’s taping up a fighter. “How am I doing, doctor?”

She forces out a smile. She’s an internist by training, but she did a second residency, in infectious disease. He has come to the wrong specialist. “You’re lucky you don’t need stitches.”

“Do I need them?”

“I think I staunched the flow.”

She guides him upstairs and into their old bedroom. She has him in their bathroom beneath the flickering lights, and David is saying, “We need to replace that bulb. And the mirror,” he adds. “It has a crack in it. Hairline fracture.”

But she’s focused only on the task at hand, urging him to remain still. She takes off the bandage, which is shot through with blood, and wraps his hand again.

You’re as good as new, she wants to say, but her breath catches on the words. They’re out of the bathroom, and now David, in his white gym socks, is sitting on their old bed; tentatively, she settles herself beside him. One of his socks has a hole in it, and his big toe pokes out, white as a marshmallow nub. Through the window, she can see the tennis court still dotted with balls, lumpy as dough in the moonlight. Clean up, clean up. The girls will be coming soon, and they might want to play. “How are you feeling?”

“I’m all right.”

She’s quiet.

“Time to hit the hay.”

She nods. At home in the city, they’ve been sleeping in separate bedrooms, but this is the first time they’ve been back here, up in Lenox, alone together. It seems that David has claimed their old bedroom. Squatter’s rights. Though she, in fairness, is a squatter, too. She’s also, she understands, the bad guy here. David’s suitcase is on the floor at his feet; a shoe tree spills out of it, and a can of shaving cream.

“Good night,” she says.

He gives her a quick nod.

She turns softly on her heels and heads down the hall. When she comes back a few minutes later, David is already asleep. There he is, her husband, and she feels a momentary heartbreak, knowing she’s not supposed to be looking at him, that somehow she’s not entitled. But she continues to stand there, tears falling down her face. She’s back in their house in Larchmont, back in other houses and apartments, remembering hallways, portals, a domed ceiling high above the family dinner table, bedrooms whose configurations she can only dimly recall outside of which she used to stand at night quietly watching her children sleep --- and later, listening to David breathe softly beside her, and she, a stealthy presence among the reposed, careful not to disturb the sleep of a loved one.

1

It’s five- thirty in the morning and still dark out, but Clarissa lies awake, as she’s been for the last hour, her feet thrumming against the bed, performing their solemn agitations. Nathaniel lies undisturbed beside her. At this hour, any reasonable person would be asleep, but especially Nathaniel, who considers waking up early an affront. If it were up to him, Nathaniel would keep the schedule of a college student, which, at forty- four, is what he still looks like, a lanky teenager all bone and sinew, with dark hair so straight you could measure something with it. He’s beautiful, Clarissa thinks, and she loves him dearly, but watching him sleep makes her quietly enraged. It’s a common feeling, she supposes --- sleep to the sleepless can seem like taunting --- though Nathaniel is no common sleeper. He lies flat on his back as if pinioned to the mattress, his arms raised above his head in a look of benevolent supplication. “Nathaniel,” she whispers, trying to wake him without appearing to do so.

“Mmm . . .”

“It’s morning,” she says. “Sort of.”

She waters the African violets, then tends to the cactus beside the bed. She’s the family horticulturist --- Nathaniel says he’s indifferent to plants --- but she can be lazy about watering them. Often she cheats, watering deeply but infrequently, letting the liquid pool at the bottom of the planters and hoping that, like cats, the plants will eat only when they’re hungry. So far, at least, they don’t seem to be suffering. She has chosen bulbs that don’t require much attention, and thanks to the small garden she and Nathaniel have out back, she, a city girl, has found a new identity; she has become a grower of herbs and a puller of weeds.

She removes her suitcase from the closet and packs jeans, T-shirts, running shoes, underwear, then tosses several paperbacks into the bag, though they’ll be gone for only a few days. Evelyn Wood, her sisters used to call her. When she was ten, she saw a speed- reading advertisement on TV in which a woman was reading as fast as she could turn pages, and though her parents wouldn’t let her take the course, she gave herself her own speed- reading class, learning to move her forefinger diagonally down the page.

A couple of stray socks have landed on the chair, and she disposes of them.

“Tidying up for the housekeeper?” Nathaniel says.

“Not only.”

“You keep that up, we should pay you.”

If Brooklyn seceded from the other boroughs it would be the fourth- largest city in the United States; right now, though, it’s as silent as a mausoleum. At the window, Clarissa stands sentinel over the row of brownstones, and presently she hears the sanitation workers collecting the garbage. A man crosses the street walking his collie; a FreshDirect truck drives by. Soon the rest of the neighborhood will be up, too, off to their holiday destinations, just as she and Nathaniel will be off to theirs, to her parents’ country house in the Berkshires. Lily will be driving up from D.C.; Noelle and her family are flying in from Jerusalem. With all the children and luggage, it will take both Clarissa and Lily to transport everyone to Lenox, so they’ll be meeting Noelle at Logan Airport. And there’s her and Nathaniel’s own business to attend to first.

Gwendolyn, their hundred- pound Bernese Mountain Dog, lumbers into the room. “Good morning, you,” Clarissa says. “Have you come to say goodbye?” Gwendolyn will need to be kenneled for the holiday. Lily and Malcolm will have to kennel their dog, too, because one of Noelle’s boys is allergic to dogs.

“You look pretty,” Nathaniel says.

“It’s six in the morning, Nathaniel. No one looks pretty at this hour.” She’s in her underwear, wearing a T-shirt that reads, what if the hokey-pokey really is what it’s all about?

“You do.”

“You always say that.”

“That’s because it’s family, so he flosses regularly, and Clarissa, who hates to floss, has tried to take this as inspiration. The family that flosses together stays together, she s true.”

On the window ledge sits a plate of raisin scones, and she offers him

one. Standing before him with the plate in her hand, she feels like a Girl Scout come to sell cookies.

Nathaniel obediently eats a scone, making noises of approval, but she can feel the effort in his response. More and more he’s been doing things to please her, and though she’s grateful for this, it also makes her think that he’s mollifying her, that there’s a tinge of appeasement to his kindness. “I made those myself.”

“When?”

“Four in the morning?” she says. “Maybe three?”

It’s not bad, she thinks, taking a bite of scone; maybe she has a talent she never recognized. When they were growing up, Noelle used to call her the Girl Voted Most Likely to Succeed. In her high school --- it’s been more than twenty years now --- the students were too busy airlifting food to Nicaragua, helping organize the grape workers, spending their summers on farm collectives for anyone to have been voted most likely to succeed, and even if someone had been, it wouldn’t have been her. She graduated from Yale, an entire college of students voted most likely to succeed: the pleasers and résumé padders. She’s never been like that. Still, she isn’t used to failure, and everything that’s been happening these past months weighs heavily on her. It weighs heavily on Nathaniel too, but he expresses it differently.

She fills the toiletry kit with toothbrushes, deodorant, a razor, dental floss. There’s gum disease in Nathaniel’says. At the drugstore, she will stock up on floss, dropping ten rolls of it at the register. “Big family?” the cashier asked one time. “Eight kids,” Clarissa said, back when she was able to joke about such things.

The forecast is for rain tonight, perhaps tomorrow as well, but on July Fourth itself it’s supposed to be clear. It’s the one- year anniversary of Leo’s death, and with Noelle flying in for the memorial, it will be the first time since the funeral that the whole family will be together. Thisbe and Calder will be flying in, too. Calder is three now; Clarissa can hardly believe it.

She examines herself in the bathroom mirror. Her hair has turned strawberry blond, which is what happens every summer; the rest of the year she’s a redhead. In one shade or another, all the sisters are. Leo was a redhead, too. When they were growing up, you could always recognize the Frankel children. Now, in Israel, Noelle covers her hair, and it pains Clarissa to think about her sister’s lovely red hair, which no one is allowed to see except Amram. She has reminded Noelle how beautiful she used to be --- she’s still beautiful, of course --- and how when Noelle first came to Israel the men called her gingy and trailed her on the streets, how they all thought she’d grown up on a kibbutz until they heard her speak Hebrew.

She allows herself to wonder whether Nathaniel is right and maybe she has become beautiful herself; he’s so ardent and convincing. Her eyes are the green of freshly sliced cucumber, her face long like a mare’s, with a birthmark on the right side going down to her neck Mostly it just looks like she has a suntan, though it used to make her self- conscious. When she moves, it’s as if she’s walking in and out of shadows. “We’ll need to have sex at my parents’ place.”

“It’s been done before.”

“The house will be overrun with grandchildren.”

“All the better,” he says. “No one will notice when we sneak off.” He looks up at her from across the room. “What are you doing?”

“Checking my breasts,” she says sheepishly. “I know. I must look like a porn star.”

“No,” he says. “Just like a compulsive.”

Without even realizing it, she has developed a routine. She checks her breasts for bloating, then searches for headaches and other signs. She sticks her fingers inside her vagina to see if her cervix has gotten softer, and if it has opened a little. But it’s hard to determine whether her cervix is harder or softer, further up or further back, more closed or more open. She’s so focused on her body she can give herself pains she doesn’t really have. Sometimes she feels a headache coming on; she almost wills herself to have one. Oh God, I have a headache. It has become a joke between her and Nathaniel. It’s the reverse of the old adage: headaches are now an aphrodisiac.

She puts half a dozen ovulation kits into her suitcase, though she knows that’s more than she’ll need. In their early months together, back when they were still using condoms, Nathaniel would stick ten, twelve condoms into his suitcase, even though they were going away for just the weekend; often they were visiting Clarissa’s parents’ country house itself. “Well, well, Mister Big Shot,” Clarissa said.

“You don’t want us to run out. Do they even have drugstores in that town your parents live in?”

Haughty, haughty Nathaniel. Transplanted to New York, and with the transplant’s arrogance. He’s the one, after all, who grew up in a small town.

For good measure, she throws in a couple of pregnancy tests. Her cycles are so irregular it’s impossible to chart them: forty days, fifty days, but then it’s nineteen, and she’s spending her lunch hour in the office bathroom, her money squandered on an array of pee sticks, lurching from ovulation test to pregnancy test and back again. She buys her ovulation tests in bulk so she won’t have to keep going back, and she rotates drugstores so the clerks won’t recognize her. Sometimes she has Nathaniel buy the tests for her; it seems only fair. In her twenties, she used to buy condoms with a casualness that bordered on disdain, but this feels different to her. There’s something more private about pregnancy than about sex, and although she understands the two are connected, it’s the trying to conceive that feels personal to her.

In the bathroom, she removes the basal thermometer from its case and returns to bed. She’s supposed to take her temperature as soon as she wakes up, since any activity at all can affect the reading. But she’s been up most of the night; there’s no changing that. So she lies in bed in compensatory stillness, hoping to fool the temperature gods. She even closes her eyes, pretending to be asleep, the way she used to when she was a girl on those weekend trips to the Berkshires when she didn’t wish to play GHOST with Lily any longer and the only way to end the game was to feign sleep. She’s looking for a subtle drop followed by a sustained rise. The drop has already occurred, and it’s the rise she’s waiting for, an increase of half a degree.

But her temperature is the same as it was yesterday. “Maybe I just don’t ovulate.”

“Come on,” Nathaniel says. “The doctor says you do.” He walks barefoot across the room and rests his hand on her.

“You must think I’m crazy.”

“I don’t.”

“Sometimes I think I’m crazy.”

“Well, you’re not.” There’s an adamancy in Nathaniel’s voice. He has always been protective of her, even when the person attacking her is herself. “It takes the average woman many months to get pregnant.”

“It’s been more than many months.” Besides, she has never felt average, and even if she did, other people’s difficulties don’t make hers any easier. She’s more impatient than average, she’s finding out.

They’ve been trying for a year now; they started right after Leo died. She has gone to the doctor for some tests, and just last week she went in for more, but so far there have been no answers. The next step is to intervene medically. It’s a journey she’s willing to take, and Nathaniel is, too, though he’s a more reluctant traveler than she is. He mistrusts the medical establishment; once you start something, it’s hard to know where it will end. One place it might end is with twins, and there are already twins on Nathaniel’s side of the family. As time has passed, Clarissa has come to think twins wouldn’t be so bad, but Nathaniel believes it’s hard enough when the children are spaced a few years apart. Clarissa doesn’t disagree. It has become such a part of her family’s lore that Noelle’s difficulties were the result of being her and Lily’s sister (to this day, her mother thinks that’s why Noelle is in Jerusalem, married to Amram, mother of four) that no one can contradict it any longer. And maybe her mother is right. Clarissa doesn’t care. She doesn’t think her family should be a cautionary tale. “I’m thirty- nine,” she reminds him. “That’s one away from forty, in case you forgot.”

“You just need to be patient.”

“Please, Nathaniel. Stop it.” Often his confidence seems cavalier, but she has come to rely on it just the same; she doesn’t know what she’d do if they both were pessimistic. But then she asks herself how he can be so calm if they claim to want the same thing. It’s not that she wishes he were more understanding. He’s been hopelessly, infuriatingly understanding; it’s his very understanding that assails her. What she wants is for him to be upset. She has begun to wonder whether he wants a baby as much as she does, whether, despite everything he says, he’d be as miserable as she would be if they couldn’t have a child.

She removes an ovulation test from her suitcase and, squatting on the toilet, pees into the cup. She doubts she’s ovulating --- her temperature didn’t rise --- but measuring your basal temperature isn’t foolproof. If the pee stick is positive, the second line is as dark as or darker than the first.

She hands the stick to Nathaniel. “What do you think?”

“The control is darker.”

“Are you sure?”

He nods.

She breaks the stick in half and throws it against the wall.

“Clarissa . . .”

“Please,” she says, “don’t patronize me.”

“I haven’t even said anything.”

She returns with another ovulation test and shreds the wrapper. “Here,” she says, “you pee on it.”

“What?”

It’s a waste of a good pee stick, she understands, but she’s been wasting these sticks for months now, and she wants him to feel what it’s like.

And what will she do if Nathaniel tests positive? Sue the company?

Naked beside her, his penis flaccid, Nathaniel trundles to the toilet. He looks up at her as if hoping for a reprieve, then holds the stick beneath his urine stream, some of which bounces off the cup and trickles down his leg.

He lays the stick on top of the toilet and waits the required time. “There you have it.”

“You’re not ovulating,” she says.

“No, I’m not.”

She starts to cry. She knows what will come next. IVF. Big, painful injections every morning. She’s terrified of needles. Divorce, she has read, is common among infertile couples. She jokes that what will split her and Nathaniel up won’t be the infertility but the shots themselves. Standing in the bathroom, she decides that, if the time comes, she won’t allow Nathaniel to administer the injections. She’ll hire a professional IVF injector; she’ll pay someone she hates to give her the shots, someone she never wanted to marry in the first place. “Oh God,” she says, and she bends down with a wad of toilet paper to mop Nathaniel up, to wipe the pee off his ankles, his toes.

For years Clarissa thought she didn’t want children, even into her thirties, after she and Nathaniel had gotten together. She had read the studies, about how childless couples were happier than couples with children, and though she wasn’t someone to overemphasize happiness (she’d read her John Stuart Mill: “It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied”), she didn’t wish to underemphasize it, either. And she was happy with Nathaniel; she loved him. It’s us against the world, she used to say.

They’d met in Boston, where Nathaniel had finished his doctorate and had decided on an impulse to do something different that summer and work at a mental hospital. Clarissa was working at the hospital, too, though in her case she thought she might want to be a psychologist; she was scouting out a possible career. It was a hospital for the wealthy, and everyone looked vaguely familiar to her, as if she’d alighted on a set of old B- movie actors. One time, somebody ran naked down the hall and had to be restrained by the nursing staff. “We should take photos and send them to People,” Clarissa said.

“Or Playboy,” said Nathaniel. “Girls of the mental ward.”

It was the summer they discovered bad late- night TV. The cable hadn’t been switched off by the previous tenants, so they would stay up until two in the morning in Nathaniel’s Somerville apartment drinking beer and eating pizza while beneath them on Beacon Street teenagers were playing their boom boxes outside the Star Market. In the morning, they would haul themselves out of bed and into the shower and, with a doughnut in one hand, a cup of coffee in the other, they would negotiate the hazards of rush hour, descending into the bowels of the Porter Square station to take the T to work. Clarissa was always saying that the only difference between the patients and the staff was who had the keys. That as much as anything steered her away from psychology --- she has taken another path entirely: she does foundation work, doling out money for international relief --- because that summer she felt as if she and Nathaniel lived alone on a little island of mental health.

Through July and August, staying up late with their beer and pizza, they would talk about their respective life plans, making sure not to imply that the other was included; it was still early, after all. But it bothered Nathaniel, he later admitted, that Clarissa thought she didn’t want to have children. It cast suspicion on her and made him realize there were things about her he didn’t know.

That first year, they lived in separate apartments in Morningside Heights, a five- minute walk from Nathaniel’s office. But it was Nathaniel who suggested they move to Brooklyn, to one of the child- friendly neighborhoods near Prospect Park. A couple of years later, when marriage came up, Nathaniel wanted to know whether Clarissa would consider having children with him. If she wouldn’t, he wasn’t sure he could marry her.

To hear it put so baldly startled Clarissa. If Nathaniel wanted a mother for his children, he should have chosen someone else; there were plenty of women who’d have been happy to bear his child. It felt crude and utilitarian, not to mention unromantic, as if their relationship had been driven by an ulterior motive she’d only now unearthed. It made her wonder whether she and Nathaniel should be getting married in the first place; for a time it seemed they would have to break up.

But they loved each other, and when Clarissa, despite holding no stock in biological clocks, began to see her friends have children; when she held a friend’s baby and, to her surprise, was overcome by an almost visceral pull; when she turned thirty- one, and thirty- two, and she started to realize that although she wasn’t a kids person, exactly, she wasn’t exactly not a kids person either; when she began to think that if she never had a child she might someday regret it --- when she felt all this, and saw how important it was to Nathaniel, she agreed to try.

But a year passed, and another, and they hadn’t begun yet. She was thirty- five, she was thirty- six, she was thirty- seven, and it seemed they were in a holding pattern from which they couldn’t emerge. Then Leo was killed, and she decided they couldn’t wait any longer. Because she’d been planning her life and her brother went off and died, and there was no point, she realized, in planning things.

Something happened when it didn’t work those first few months, and she panicked, realizing she’d waited so long to get pregnant that now she might not be able to. It wasn’t supposed to happen, this savage, seemingly chemical urge to reproduce. Maybe it’s the power of suggestion, living in Brooklyn, home to the world’s greatest population explosion. Whatever the reason, this wish to have a baby has blindsided her, has blindsided Nathaniel too, who has found in the last year that he doesn’t recognize the person he married.

She’s dressed now, folding laundry in the alcove outside their bedroom, while Nathaniel is in the bathroom taking a shower. She removes her cello from its case and seats herself on the ottoman.

“Something to sing by?” Nathaniel calls out.

“I guess.” Though it’s hard to sing to Dvorak’s Cello Concerto in B Minor: there are no words. “You can hum to it,” she says, but Nathaniel can’t hear her from beneath the shower water.

When he steps out of the bathroom, she’s still moving the bow across the strings. He taps her lightly with his towel. “I thought you were in a rush to get going.”

“Careful,” she says, poking him. “You don’t want to get water on the strings.”

It’s only in the last year that she has started to play again. For years --- for decades, in fact --- her cello remained in storage. It fell into desuetude, she likes to say, though really it fell into disrepute. She didn’t so much as want to look at it. It pains her to play --- she’s such a pale version of what she once was --- but she’s driven to do it nonetheless. Music calms her in a way nothing else does, in a way it never used to when she was playing seriously.

They’ve been hoping to beat the holiday traffic, but now, as they drive through downtown Brooklyn, it seems the traffic has beaten them. On Flatbush Avenue, they’re stalled across the street from an Italian restaurant. “We could stop for a whole meal,” Nathaniel says, “in the time it would take us to get down this block.”

The Brooklyn Bridge is backed up, too. A couple of police officers flank the entrance ramp, one of them checking the trunk of a van.

“It’s only July second,” Clarissa says. “Imagine what it will be like tomorrow and the Fourth.” Green threats, yellow threats, orange threats, red threats: it’s hard for her to remember what means what. Hard, too, to stay on high alert. Watching the police officers search the van, she thinks of Leo, of course, though Leo was in Baghdad when he was killed, not on the Brooklyn Bridge. And heightened security was the last thing on his mind. For as long as she can remember, he preferred heightened insecurity.

“When does Noelle get in?”

“Please, Nathaniel. Stop it.” Often his confidence seems cavalier, but she has come to rely on it just the same; she doesn’t know what she’d do if they both were pessimistic. But then she asks herself how he can be so calm if they claim to want the same thing. It’s not that she wishes he were more understanding. He’s been hopelessly, infuriatingly understanding; it’s his very understanding that assails her. What she wants is for him to be upset. She has begun to wonder whether he wants a baby as much as she does, whether, despite everything he says, he’d be as miserable as she would be if they couldn’t have a child.

She removes an ovulation test from her suitcase and, squatting on the toilet, pees into the cup. She doubts she’s ovulating --- her temperature didn’t rise --- but measuring your basal temperature isn’t foolproof. If the pee stick is positive, the second line is as dark as or darker than the first.

She hands the stick to Nathaniel. “What do you think?”

“The control is darker.”

“Are you sure?”

He nods.

She breaks the stick in half and throws it against the wall.

“Clarissa . . .”

“Please,” she says, “don’t patronize me.”

“I haven’t even said anything.”

She returns with another ovulation test and shreds the wrapper. “Here,” she says, “you pee on it.”

“What?”

It’s a waste of a good pee stick, she understands, but she’s been wasting these sticks for months now, and she wants him to feel what it’s like.

And what will she do if Nathaniel tests positive? Sue the company?

Naked beside her, his penis flaccid, Nathaniel trundles to the toilet. He looks up at her as if hoping for a reprieve, then holds the stick beneath his urine stream, some of which bounces off the cup and trickles down his leg.

He lays the stick on top of the toilet and waits the required time. “There you have it.”

“You’re not ovulating,” she says.

“No, I’m not.”

She starts to cry. She knows what will come next. IVF. Big, painful injections every morning. She’s terrified of needles. Divorce, she has read, is common among infertile couples. She jokes that what will split her and Nathaniel up won’t be the infertility but the shots themselves. Standing in the bathroom, she decides that, if the time comes, she won’t allow Nathaniel to administer the injections. She’ll hire a professional IVF injector; she’ll pay someone she hates to give her the shots, someone she never wanted to marry in the first place. “Oh God,” she says, and she bends down with a wad of toilet paper to mop Nathaniel up, to wipe the pee off his ankles, his toes.

For years Clarissa thought she didn’t want children, even into her thirties, after she and Nathaniel had gotten together. She had read the studies, about how childless couples were happier than couples with children, and though she wasn’t someone to overemphasize happiness (she’d read her John Stuart Mill: “It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied”), she didn’t wish to underemphasize it, either. And she was happy with Nathaniel; she loved him. It’s us against the world, she used to say.

They’d met in Boston, where Nathaniel had finished his doctorate and had decided on an impulse to do something different that summer and work at a mental hospital. Clarissa was working at the hospital, too, though in her case she thought she might want to be a psychologist; she was scouting out a possible career. It was a hospital for the wealthy, and everyone looked vaguely familiar to her, as if she’d alighted on a set of old B- movie actors. One time, somebody ran naked down the hall and had to be restrained by the nursing staff. “We should take photos and send them to People,” Clarissa said.

“Or Playboy,” said Nathaniel. “Girls of the mental ward.”

It was the summer they discovered bad late- night TV. The cable hadn’t been switched off by the previous tenants, so they would stay up until two in the morning in Nathaniel’s Somerville apartment drinking beer and eating pizza while beneath them on Beacon Street teenagers were playing their boom boxes outside the Star Market. In the morning, they would haul themselves out of bed and into the shower and, with a doughnut in one hand, a cup of coffee in the other, they would negotiate the hazards of rush hour, descending into the bowels of the Porter Square station to take the T to work. Clarissa was always saying that the only difference between the patients and the staff was who had the keys. That as much as anything steered her away from psychology --- she has taken another path entirely: she does foundation work, doling out money for international relief --- because that summer she felt as if she and Nathaniel lived alone on a little island of mental health.

Through July and August, staying up late with their beer and pizza, they would talk about their respective life plans, making sure not to imply that the other was included; it was still early, after all. But it bothered Nathaniel, he later admitted, that Clarissa thought she didn’t want to have children. It cast suspicion on her and made him realize there were things about her he didn’t know.

That first year, they lived in separate apartments in Morningside Heights, a five- minute walk from Nathaniel’s office. But it was Nathaniel who suggested they move to Brooklyn, to one of the child- friendly neighborhoods near Prospect Park. A couple of years later, when marriage came up, Nathaniel wanted to know whether Clarissa would consider having children with him. If she wouldn’t, he wasn’t sure he could marry her.

To hear it put so baldly startled Clarissa. If Nathaniel wanted a mother for his children, he should have chosen someone else; there were plenty of women who’d have been happy to bear his child. It felt crude and utilitarian, not to mention unromantic, as if their relationship had been driven by an ulterior motive she’d only now unearthed. It made her wonder whether she and Nathaniel should be getting married in the first place; for a time it seemed they would have to break up.

But they loved each other, and when Clarissa, despite holding no stock in biological clocks, began to see her friends have children; when she held a friend’s baby and, to her surprise, was overcome by an almost visceral pull; when she turned thirty- one, and thirty- two, and she started to realize that although she wasn’t a kids person, exactly, she wasn’t exactly not a kids person either; when she began to think that if she never had a child she might someday regret it --- when she felt all this, and saw how important it was to Nathaniel, she agreed to try.

But a year passed, and another, and they hadn’t begun yet. She was thirty- five, she was thirty- six, she was thirty- seven, and it seemed they were in a holding pattern from which they couldn’t emerge. Then Leo was killed, and she decided they couldn’t wait any longer. Because she’d been planning her life and her brother went off and died, and there was no point, she realized, in planning things.

Something happened when it didn’t work those first few months, and she panicked, realizing she’d waited so long to get pregnant that now she might not be able to. It wasn’t supposed to happen, this savage, seemingly chemical urge to reproduce. Maybe it’s the power of suggestion, living in Brooklyn, home to the world’s greatest population explosion. Whatever the reason, this wish to have a baby has blindsided her, has blindsided Nathaniel too, who has found in the last year that he doesn’t recognize the person he married.

She’s dressed now, folding laundry in the alcove outside their bedroom, while Nathaniel is in the bathroom taking a shower. She removes her cello from its case and seats herself on the ottoman.

“Something to sing by?” Nathaniel calls out.

“I guess.” Though it’s hard to sing to Dvorak’s Cello Concerto in B Minor: there are no words. “You can hum to it,” she says, but Nathaniel can’t hear her from beneath the shower water.

When he steps out of the bathroom, she’s still moving the bow across the strings. He taps her lightly with his towel. “I thought you were in a rush to get going.”

“Careful,” she says, poking him. “You don’t want to get water on the strings.”

It’s only in the last year that she has started to play again. For years --- for decades, in fact --- her cello remained in storage. It fell into desuetude, she likes to say, though really it fell into disrepute. She didn’t so much as want to look at it. It pains her to play --- she’s such a pale version of what she once was --- but she’s driven to do it nonetheless. Music calms her in a way nothing else does, in a way it never used to when she was playing seriously.

They’ve been hoping to beat the holiday traffic, but now, as they drive through downtown Brooklyn, it seems the traffic has beaten them. On Flatbush Avenue, they’re stalled across the street from an Italian restaurant. “We could stop for a whole meal,” Nathaniel says, “in the time it would take us to get down this block.”

The Brooklyn Bridge is backed up, too. A couple of police officers flank the entrance ramp, one of them checking the trunk of a van.

“It’s only July second,” Clarissa says. “Imagine what it will be like tomorrow and the Fourth.” Green threats, yellow threats, orange threats, red threats: it’s hard for her to remember what means what. Hard, too, to stay on high alert. Watching the police officers search the van, she thinks of Leo, of course, though Leo was in Baghdad when he was killed, not on the Brooklyn Bridge. And heightened security was the last thing on his mind. For as long as she can remember, he preferred heightened insecurity.

“When does Noelle get in?”

“Four?” she says. “Maybe four- thirty?” She rifles through her bag to find her date book.

“I haven’t seen her in . . .”

“A year.” Noelle flew in for Leo’s funeral, but when it was over she returned to Jerusalem, and she hasn’t been back since. Money is tight for her and Amram. Still, Clarissa thinks, how can she have absented herself for so long? When they spoke in February, Clarissa told Noelle she’d pay for a flight, but Noelle refused; she said she’d fly in for the memorial.

“And Amram,” Nathaniel says.

“Mister Asparagus Pee.” It’s what Clarissa and Lily still call Amram. Amram and Noelle went to high school together, though back then he was known as Arthur. Arthur was the class prankster, overweight and disheveled, well liked in the way that overweight boys can be well liked, whereas a girl as heavy as Arthur would have been ostracized. Arthur was always turning scatology into philosophy. He wove elaborate theories as to why people liked the smell of their own farts; he considered suitable for scientific inquiry the question of why some people’s pee smelled after they ate asparagus while other people’s didn’t. Apparently, it was a matter of having a particular enzyme, but Arthur hypothesized that it wasn’t the pee itself but the ability to smell it that distinguished the two groups. One day, when asparagus was being served at lunch, a bunch of ninth- grade boys could be seen shuttling in and out of the bathroom under Arthur’s supervision to smell each other’s pee.

Now, as they head up the West Side Highway, Nathaniel gives a desultory wave in the direction of his office. Above the branches, Clarissa can make out the tops of the buildings on Riverside Drive. It’s the neighborhood where she spent much of her childhood. Evenings, from her family’s balcony, she used to stare across the Hudson at the Palisades, the amusement park flickering, the Ferris wheel lit up like an enormous necklace.

“Are you ready for the next few days?”

She looks at him forlornly: how could she possibly be?

An airplane streaks across the horizon, drawing something in chalk, but the writing disappears as soon as it’s been printed, lost in the cloud cover and the darkening sky, the hints of impending rain.

“Did you write out your speech?”

She shakes her head.

“You’ll have time when you get there.”

“It might be better just to speak it. Sometimes when you prepare it’s even worse.”

A car backfires. Or maybe it’s fireworks already going off. Even as a girl she was indifferent to fireworks, the boom like a rifle’s recoil, the smear of color across the sky; you’ve seen one firework, she thought then, you’ve seen them all. Now, though, it feels like taunting: all that enforced good cheer. She thinks, the nerve of Leo to die on the Fourth. As Nathaniel drives on, she falls asleep to the hum of the movement, the ticking of the grates beneath their tires. She dreams of Leo. He’s not doing anything --- he’s just hovering on the edges --- but she has an image of him as a baby, and of her changing him on the table beside his crib. Another image comes to her, a Saturday and it’s raining out, and she’s watching Leo, who’s only ten months old, thinking he’s going to talk someday, that he’s going to have opinions. It seemed inconceivable at the time, and in that inability to conceive lay a sorrow too, that her brother would grow up and eventually leave her. Often now, when she reflects on her newfound maternal impulses, she thinks back to how she felt about Leo, and she realizes these impulses have always been there and they’ve simply been submerged.

She is woken by the sound of a cell phone ringing. She reaches into her bag, but it’s Nathaniel’s phone, not hers.

He pulls over to the side of the road. He’s nodding, nodding, taking in some news.

“Who was that?” she asks when he hangs up.

“The chair of the department,” he says. “It seems I’ve won some award.”

“Nathaniel!” she says. “Congratulations!”

“I guess.”

“What do you mean you guess?”

He’s quiet.

“Well? Aren’t you going to tell me what it’s for?”

“Outstanding teacher of the year. I’m supposed to give a final lecture.”

“A final lecture?”

“Exactly. I’m forty- four years old, and they’re already packing me off. They’ll hang me like antlers from the wall.”

“Look at you. It’s amazing news, and you turn it into a cause for mourning.”

“I’m just dreading it, that’s all.”

Nathaniel is a professor at Columbia, a behavioral economist turned neuroscientist, possessor of not one but two PhDs. He doesn’t like to talk about this --- his PhDs, his success, his work in general. Now, though, the secret is out, because last year he appeared on the cover of the New York Times Magazine in an article called “The New Frontier: How Neuroscience Is Reshaping Human Consciousness.” To Nathaniel, this has all been mortifying. The photograph, certainly --- he still gets ribbed by his colleagues --- but also the phrase “whispers of a future Nobel Prize,” which appeared in the article next to his name. He’s aware of these whispers; he’d just prefer it if the rest of the world weren’t aware of them, too. Clarissa likes to say that his carefully honed reputation for sloth has been ruined. But that’s not what bothers him. He’s simply embarrassed by it all. “It’s the life of an extremely small- time rock star.” Only that, he says, overstates matters. He doubts there’s a rock star small- time enough to rival him.

Now, on the Merritt Parkway, he’s close to the car in front of him, too close, Clarissa thinks, so she tells him this, and he touches his foot to the brake. There’s construction ahead. A car is pulled over at the side of the road, and people stop to rubberneck. From behind them comes the sound of a police siren. “I think I’m about to ovulate,” Clarissa says. She has this idea that there’s an exact moment they’re supposed to have sex, though the window is a good deal larger than that, twenty- four to thirty- six hours, most people say. But within that window, certain times must be better than others.

“We don’t have to do this,” Nathaniel says.

“Do what?”

“Be so precise about things.”

“Precision matters.”

Still, he wonders aloud whether there might not be a better approach. No basal thermometers or home ovulation kits. Just have sex when they want to. It would relieve the pressure from them.

“It would decrease our chances.”

“It’s just that you’re so anxious,” he says.

Anxiety, she knows, can contribute to infertility. Not getting pregnant is making her anxious, which is making her not get pregnant. Maybe if she pretended she didn’t want it so much it would come to her unbidden.

“Worse comes to worse, there’s adoption.”

She knows this, of course, but it stings her to hear it. There are subjects she simply can’t contemplate, as if merely to entertain them will bring them on.

Ahead of them, the traffic moves so slowly it appears not to be moving at all. She thinks of drives to the Berkshires when she was a girl, those weekends when it seemed to her that everything was one long car ride, she and her sisters jostling in the backseat, Leo on their mother’s lap in front, their father behind the wheel singing songs, making up word jumbles and dictionary games, doing whatever he could to distract them.

A mist settles on the car. Nathaniel sprays wiper fluid across the windshield, and for an instant it feels as if they’re driving through a carwash before the view in front of them clears up.

She removes a Kit Kat from the glove compartment, then puts it back. She knows what Nathaniel would say. If you couldn’t eat chocolate the entire French population would have died out by now. But you could say the same thing about wine, and she’s staying away from that.

They cross the Massachusetts border and make a pit stop, and when she returns she says, “I’m ovulating.”

“How do you know?”

“I just took a test.”

“In the middle of Seven- Eleven?”

She explains to Nathaniel what he should already know, that when the test turns positive you’re set to ovulate in twenty- four to thirty- six hours. But at that point you should already be having sex; the best time to start is two days beforehand. “We need to have sex right now.”

“Absolutely,” he says. “We’ll just pull over to the side of the road. We’ll hump unobtrusively on the hood of the car.”

“That’s not what I’m saying.”

“What are you saying?”

“Let’s check into a motel.”

“We can’t,” he says. “We’re supposed to meet your sisters.”

“We’ll make it.”

“Not if we stop, we won’t. Anyway, you can’t just check into a motel at one in the afternoon.”

“Of course you can.” She directs him to the nearest exit, where the signs promise food, gas, and lodging and where, when they get off the ramp, they see a Holiday Inn, a Red Roof Inn, a Hampton Inn, a Howard Johnson. “Which will it be?” she says, her voice a sing- song, taking on a jocund air she doesn’t feel.

But Nathaniel won’t play along. He simply sits next to her, making clear through his silence that this is her project. When she pulls out her credit card at the Hampton Inn, he stands so far behind her it’s as if he doesn’t know who she is.

She walks down the hall to the elevator, but Nathaniel is still standing at the front desk, staring vacantly at the Coke machine.

“It’s a nice room,” she says when they get inside, realizing as she says this how inane she sounds. It’s like any motel room off the side of the road anywhere in the country.

Nathaniel goes into the bathroom to get a drink, and when he comes back inside he flips on the TV. He removes his shoes and lies down on the bed. He’s making a show of settling in.

“What are you doing?”

“Renting a movie.”

“No, you’re not.”

“Actually, I am.” He has purchased a German movie, a black- and- white affair, a documentary, it seems. Clarissa recognizes the skyline of Berlin, a museum, plumes of smoke rising from refineries, the Bavarian countryside. “You could have chosen a language we actually speak.”

“I speak a little German.”

“Okay,” she says. “You’ve made your point. The court registers your objection.”

Nathaniel turns off the movie and goes into the bathroom. She can hear the shower being run.

“Nathaniel, come on, what are you trying to prove? You win. I cry uncle.”

The bathroom is fogged up; in the mirror, she can make out only the barest outlines of herself. “You keep this up and we’ll really be late.”

But he doesn’t answer her.

When he gets out, he towels himself off and puts on his clothes: his underwear, his socks, his shirt, his trousers, moving slowly, meticulously, smoothing out the wrinkles. He opens the front door and steps out into the hall.

“Where are you going?”

“To get us some food.”

“Nathaniel!”

But the door has already shut behind him.

He returns a few minutes later with two cans of soda, a couple of bags of chips, and a few candy bars. He pops open a bag of chips and offers her one.

“So what are you saying? I need to take you out to dinner in order to get laid?”

He tears open a chocolate bar, and she thinks of the early days with Nathaniel, a sex act involving chocolate syrup, and hoping to hark back to those times, she drags her finger through the chocolate and touches it lightly to his cheek.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I know this isn’t very romantic.”

“No,” he says. “It’s not.”

Sex stripped of all sentiment, she thinks, though she does her best to inject sentiment into the act. It has never been this way with Nathaniel, and it won’t always be this way, but at the moment it’s hard for her to remember what sex was like between them, hard for her to envision anything but what it is now.

She’s on her back, legs up in the air, while Nathaniel, mute as a Buddha, plunges in and out of her. He ejaculates inside her, and when he’s done she lies utterly still, following the experts’ advice, a pillow beneath her rear end to assist with gravity, while his sperm swims through her, swims toward its unknown destination.

And then, because she and Nathaniel are exhausted, because they’re at a Hampton Inn where they’ve paid for their room and no one cares what they do until checkout time tomorrow morning, they allow themselves to close their eyes before driving to the airport. Limbs entwined, clothes strewn across the floor, they fall into a heavy sleep.

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