Copper brought the news. The words tunneled through bundles of telephone cable buried underground, then leapt softly across the city on arcs of telephone wire. The syllables entered a third-floor apartment and there, with the strength of a whisper, ended in the receiver Bianca held to her ear. I’m sorry, repeated a woman’s voice. So, so sorry.

Bianca felt calm when the gendarmes arrived to escort her to her husband. During the labyrinthine drive, she watched the cars jockey for open patches of slick pavement. She watched the windshield wipers sweep across the whole scene, almost tireless in their duty were it not for a hint of rubbery complaint. She did not panic. David would be nursing a sprained leg, or a broken arm, perhaps just a bandaged contusion from his accident. The car pulled up at the rear of a gray building. From the outside, the building was unassuming, inside it was hushed, almost pretending not to exist. She realized they were at the morgue. As she followed the gendarmes down the corridor she felt the urge to laugh. Where was she at this moment, really? Sleeping, of course. Was it the middle of the night now as she dreamt, or was she drugged within the unknown boundaries of an overly-long afternoon nap? She could be in a park, in the rented apartment, maybe even on a bench along the river. It was disconcerting, this sense of not knowing where she actually, actually was. Instead of napping, she should be shopping, or waiting to pay the bill at a cafe. La note, s’il vous plâit. Or, since she was on the subject of this dream, she should be having flamboyant fantasies instead of finding herself issuing bone-real complaints. She was certainly not here, so many turns and doorways later, staring at her husband’s body, laid out as though asleep on the brushed steel countertop that matched the one in their kitchen back home. David, wake up, she said to herself. Let’s end this scene with a cliché.

He died immediately, someone said. The man who spoke appeared to be a doctor. Was he a doctor? she asked. Yes. Yes he was. Like the other men in the room, this doctor seemed both somber and bored. She wondered why there would be a doctor in a morgue. He could be lying. She tried to conjure up some dream extras, a clown, cats, Walter Cronkite. She wanted Walter to recite the lyrics to a Stevie Wonder tune, as he had a few dreams ago, in a reassuring, droll roll of words. Like a fool I went and stayed too long / Now I’m wondering if your love’s still strong / Ooo baby, here I am, signed, sealed delivered, I’m yours. But Walter Cronkite was a no-show for this act. She glanced at the present company and wondered what was expected of her. She nodded at what they told her, but she wasn’t really listening. No one, it seemed, spoke English, or at least the kind of English Bianca could understand at this moment. Simple words, free from accents and talk of accidents. If this were real, she knew she wouldn’t be this calm. She would be desperate, crazed, collapsing with grief. That was a great consolation. Then the explanation came and poisoned everything. This is shock, a voice inside her explained. She recognized the voice. It was Walter Cronkite. Mr. Cronkite cleared his throat. He’d just read the information on a bulletin and now he had to tell her. He was duty-bound. He had no choice. Your husband is dead. What you’re feeling now is shock. The truth’ll hit you and then you’re going to lose it. But not just yet. I’ll keep you posted. That’s the way it is. The man who said he was a doctor rattled a half-filled orange vial, then pressed the container of pills into Bianca’s hand. He folded her fingers around the petite bottle. She had such difficulty grasping the container.

Back in the apartment she and David had rented, Bianca tried to rid the rooms of the darkness. But no matter how many lights she turned on, and no matter the number of windows she unlatched and swung wide to the warm outside air, the darkness would not leave. Bianca felt the same numbness that had followed her from the morgue. She took three more of the small white pills to keep herself numb.

On the floor of the bedroom, David’s suitcase yawned open like a giant clam displaying a fabric muscle. David had been so busy over the past couple weeks that he hadn’t even bothered to move his clothes out of the suitcase. On top of the half-filled dresser sat pages from David’s project on Fryderyk Chopin, as well as a book of Chopin’s correspondence, various dog-eared journals on music theory and music history, and a small pocket-sized bust of the composer that David had been using as a paperweight since he’d begun writing the Chopin book last year. Bianca picked up the bust and ran her thumb over Chopin’s face. She placed it aside, took the book of Chopin’s collected letters, and sat down on the bed. David’s illegible notes were scrawled in the margins. Her eyes rested on a page where David had circled a line Chopin had written: You can’t think how delightful it was to meet her more intimately, just in the house, on a sofa. She closed the book.

Just a year earlier, David had been having an affair with one of his students. He’d even brought the girl over to their house during finals week. Afterward, there had been flimsy excuses on his part for having cheated, not mentioned specifically, but there. His stupidity, Bianca’s seven-year age over him, their failure at pregnancy. She had kicked David out of the house for a week before letting him return. He’d then taken a one-year sabbatical from the college, holed himself up at home in his office and wrote his book on Chopin. Now they were spending a month in Paris while he worked with a French translator. A publisher here with a reputation for putting out academic titles with low print runs had accepted a French translation, even though David hadn’t yet published the book on Chopin at home, in English. This was, at least for him, a working vacation. A tax write-off. A deduction.

Coming to Paris had marked an entire year since David’s cheating—affair was too gracious a word. On days when she forgot his infidelity, life seemed good again. And then there were the other days, even here in Paris, when the thought of the student raced to her mind as soon as she awoke. On those days, she wondered what David’s eyes saw in a waitress, or a woman following her dog down the street, or the college girls laughing their way back into Paris now at the end of summer. Bianca’s suspicious eyes became masculine, alert to the shadow of cleavage, high hemlines and tight skirts. On such a day, the smallest thing could bring up such hurt, like this line in a letter by Chopin. You can’t think how delightful it was to meet her more intimately, just in the house, on a sofa. Had David circled the line because of its happy coincidence to his own feelings with the student? Even after a year of repentance, of verbal I-love-yous, did he love her? Bianca loved her husband, still, but she trusted him less now. The sad fact was that one indiscretion flawed him so deeply, for life. And then, right then as she sat on the bed with the closed book of Chopin’s letters in her hand, it hit her. David. Dead.

Dear Mr. Photographer,

Yes, Italy. Now, before you start cursing me, consider this: how many car thieves tell you where your car is, and do so in a hand-written letter? (Hold this page up to the light and you’ll see a watermark in the silhouette of a palace. Not our palace, but a nice touch, right?) No car thief would, of course, which is my roundabout way of saying I’m not really a car thief. True thieves don’t mail you back your keys, enclose a map, and fill up the tank for you. You’re welcome, by the way.

I can certainly understand how being in possession of your car for a few days could make me seem like a thief. And, if I’m going to be honest with you in this letter (and I am, 100%), there was a section of road there where I felt I might be stealing. It was when I figured out how to turn on the seat warmers (we were driving south through the Alps). But see the part above. About the keys and a map being in this envelope. If anything, I’m a borrower. Incidentally, the we in “we were driving south through the Alps” doesn’t refer to Elisa, as I’m sure you know—if you’ve had the decency to follow up with her and her injuries. I had a male companion. The quiet, silent type.

So you won’t be taken aback when you get into your BMW: the stains on the passenger seat should come out, no problem. Oh, and you’re down one pistol.

I’m going to give you some more tidbits about me now, so just…just sit tight. You may, of course, have already jumped to the map, grabbed the keys, and hurled these pages into the trash. I’ll never know. My words could be fluttering about the surface of a Munich dump or expunged in an incinerator. But hear me out. After all, I had your BMW washed and did I mention the full tank? What’s the rush that you can’t spare a few minutes to read a few pages? The car will be there when you get there. The dump’s not going anywhere.

Here’s an idea: if you’re not in the mood to read my letter now, maybe you could read it on the train to Venice or on a flight there—you seem the flying type. Are you at the airport gate now, or are you in the air? I’m picturing you in first class, up there at 30,000 feet, belt loosened. You’re flying down on a Tuesday afternoon. A glass of something strong is on your fold-down tray, a magazine or two unread on the empty seat beside you, courtesy Lufthansa. I hope you booked a window seat. I can’t get enough of seeing the world shrunk down so small you can see cars but not people, like there’s not a being below to hold the problems our brains are sopped wet with. If only everything would stay distant and miniature when our feet are on the ground. If only we were giants.

“Ms. Rosenschatz! Emma!”

Arriving well into the search, Paul found Cherish enjoying the spectacle of park employees scouring the grounds on her behalf, a distinctly pleased look on her face going unchanged even when she recognized him coming up the bleachers. The aluminum rungs shook as he took them two at a time, finally solidifying as he reached the uppermost row.

“She took off again,” Cherish said hopelessly, holding a leash.

“You’re becoming more of a dog loser than a dog walker,” Paul said.

From beyond third base a megaphone amplified the silence until it seemed to pick up an atomic-level hiss, squelched finally by the voice Paul had heard straight out to Washington Boulevard on the park’s eastern perimeter.

“Ms. Rosenshatz,” said the voice. “We have your daughter.”

“Sit down,” Cherish said. “Isn’t this great?”

“We have your daughter.”

The second daughter came at them directly, the megaphone held by one of the park’s finest, its flat center cone a pupillary black, the amplified statement seeming inappropriately threatening to Paul, even crime scene-ish. Through his feet he could feel the vibrations of a basketball being dribbled against the bleachers by a figure at the diagonally opposite end of the structure. Behind the man with the megaphone stood a half-dozen park employees wearing the same dusty green jackets. They walked in a line, heading into the woods that started up at the farthest boundary of the outfield where the lawn mowers gave up and the ratty half-chewed forest began.

“Ms. Rosenscha…” The megaphone picked up some feedback—crawnwahnshalloliehawgenshawn. Brawn?—“Rosen…” There was more unintelligible noise from the park policeman’s waist-mounted walkie-talkie.

“He doesn’t even know how to use it,” Cherish said.

“It’s just his walkie-talkie cutting in.”

“I like that word, walkie-talkie. Walk-ie, talk-ie. It’s like baby-talk.” Cherish laughed.

“Tell them who Emma is,” Paul said, descending a couple of rows.

“Why? They’re helping.”

“Straighten it out. No one’s laughing but you.”

It was nearly night, but low clouds trapped a chilly light that only disappeared in the darker recesses of the park. Paul adjusted his cap, worn only because he had yet to shower this day and the cowlicks, persisting through an entirely unproductive day of videoclip-watching and reinvigorated by a late afternoon nap, made him look like a village idiot.

“But it’s hilarious,” Cherish said.

“It’s a ridiculous name for a dog.”

“…schatz. Ms. Rosen…”

“How long’s this been going on?” Paul asked, nodding to the man with the megaphone.

“An hour. Maybe two.”

“Here?”

“Oh no. We’ve been all over the park.”

“She’s been missing since…” he thought for a moment. “Two?”

“Okay, maybe it’s been three hours.”

Emma Rosenschatz wasn’t even his dog. She belonged to Pauline. True, he’d once wished the dog were free, or rather that he was free of it, but unless Emma park-hopped to the greenbelt and then out to the last tracts of forest and happened to resurrect some canine hunting instincts, the dog was toast. With a name like Emma Rosenschatz, going feral wasn’t so much inevitable as impossible. She’d get gang-raped by coyotes or pissed on by deer or not even get that far and instead get transfixed by an oncoming garbage truck, and this time he wouldn’t be there for her.

Miles interrupts his brother once more, this time with a photograph.

“Cool it,” Gabriel says, putting down his girlfriend’s letter. “No more.”

Gabriel pinches the Polaroid off his chest and hurls it into the room with a flick of his wrist. The photo hits the far wall like a June bug and drops onto Miles’ suitcase, a second-hand Samsonite plastered with enough stickers to make Miles seem the world’s most travelled thirteen-year-old.

Miles retrieves the Polaroid. He doesn’t expect his brother to have a last-minute change of heart, but still, how can Gabriel choose to work through the summer instead of take what’s being offered to him, what Miles, in his head, has been calling Summer of Tits II? Miles pins the Polaroid to his side of the corkboard above their shared metal desk and stares at it awhile. He remembers watching the photo develop the summer before: first the cloud-dolloped sky and the silhouette of a cove, then women with skin flawless as new modeling clay, sunbathing in the nude. In the photo’s foreground, Gabriel poses in yellow swimming trunks, a rock in one hand and a once-visible grin on a face that Miles covers with his thumb whenever he masturbates to the women standing just behind his brother. A year of thumb-holds have made Gabriel’s face unrecognizable, but even so, Miles can’t shake the feeling he’s in for a stoning.

Rather than pack shorts and t-shirts for a summer at their father’s farmhouse in Norway, Gabriel lies in his jumpsuit, his name stitched in gold thread that sparkles from newness, the gray fabric still creased and giving off a chemical sheen. Unfamiliar work boots sit under Gabriel’s terrarium, the tank now hosting an assortment of nightclub matchbooks. Miles doesn’t understand why his brother needs a uniform to sweep. If Gabriel wasn’t getting some sugar from his girlfriend he would be on the plane with him tomorrow. Miles stares at the back of the letter Gabriel has resumed reading. He can see typed words through the onion paper, single-spaced dense-as-night lines visited every few sentences by the ghosts of correction tape. The tail of the y in Gabriel’s girlfriend’s signature curves up into a smile with tiny stars for eyes.

“Spooky,” Miles says.

“Now what?” Gabriel says.

Love comes to mind first, but Miles he says, “You.”

He wants to call his brother pussy-whipped, but his brother would pummel him. So he says it in his head: you’re pussy-whipped. Gabriel doesn’t reply. Still reading and staying put; sacrificing a summer abroad for snatch. Miles hums the melody to Batman aloud, while in his head he sings: Nana-nana-nana-nana, Snatchman. Snatchman. SNATCHMAN! What a word. Snatch. Like a latch, or something taken. He can’t get his mind around the lack of it, nothing but creases, a closed book. His brother knows a chapter or two, but won’t share the plot, instead smiling at him whenever he asks in a way that makes Miles feel doomed with virginity. Miles guesses snatch is something he won’t fall for until he tries it, and then be hooked. He’s heard that about heroin, too.

Blakey lost his wife to a fast-moving cancer named Dr. Kevn Foley. The doctor shared the news with Blakey on an Octoberfestless October afternoon in Blakey’s basement pool room where the doctor seemed completely at home expounding on his love for Blakey’s wife, only pausing when lining up, and usually making, a shot.

FACT: This was the first time Blakey had ever met the doctor.

FACT: The doctor knew trick shots.

FACT: Blakey was terrifically high.

Later, in the shower, a sober Blakey thought of a myriad different ways to harm the doctor. He could shoot him, gouge him with some fine German cutlery, disfigure him with bleach, or: knock him unconscious and put him in a car (stolen, of course), drive the car to an abandoned meat-packing district, perfume the entire car in gasoline and—spark—compact the doctor’s existence into just a midnight plume of crematory smoke. TV was educational.

At the time of the revelation, Blakey had been incapacitated by the doctor’s newscaster looks and hypnotist voice. The M.D. made Blakey feel almost guilty for being the impediment to a full-bloomed romance between the doctor and Blakey’s wife Lizzie. Great things would happen after his wife moved in with the doctor, Foley assured him. Life would be better for everyone involved. Blakey envisioned them running for a thankless political office, or starting a charity, or simply exploding with sweet intentions, like a struck piñata. When the doctor finished his spiel, Lizzie came downstairs and told Blakey the truth about those out-of-state conferences, the gym membership, and all the other excuses she’d used to spend time with the doctor (who was now performing trick shots in the background). Blakey wondered if the doctor had shown his wife a thing or two on the felt? That would explain The Stain Lizzie blamed on sweaty ceiling pipes. He asked, they said yes, but not before looking at each other, thoughts bumping back and forth so loudly Blakey could almost hear them. Was it the pool table or the living room table? Was it this pool table, or that other one? And remember that one table where you got up and I and you and then we…?

The hot water gave out. Blakey dressed and within five minutes was speeding, stop sign to stop sign, to the doctor’s house in the Heights. He replayed more of the doctor’s visit in his head. The doctor’s hightops coated in chalk dust. Him standing there, grinding a cube onto Blakey’s favorite cue stick. Was that some kind of Freudian thing? He couldn’t help but see Dr. Foley’s kind stare as the front to a med-schooled mind diagnosing the deficiencies in Blakey that had driven his wife from him. He probably looked at cancer patients that way. The stricken, terminals. Blakey felt asymptomatic. How had he failed his wife? Was he a bad conversationalist? Did he not work, keep the cars clean, do the yardwork (until he caved and used the three Ecuadorian brothers who did the neighbor’s lawn—great, great, great decision!)? He’d even lost his love handles earlier in the year by going on that Cajun diet where the sheer amount of cayenne pepper made it too painful to overeat. Was he a bad catch when it came to other appetites and affections? But how would his wife know? It had been many weeks, fortnights, since they’d even slept with each other, forget sex for the moment. He had timed them once and discovered they only spent fifty minutes in the same room together—for a week. Nights were even more separate. She slept in the other bedroom because she couldn’t take his snoring. But Blakey had tape recorded himself and other than the necessary farts, coughs and side-to-side shifting and realignments, he hadn’t heard even a cursory snort from himself. Meanwhile, he could hear his wife inside her bedroom, turning the crisp pages of magazines and watching movies and always typing on her laptop. Now, though, knowing about the doctor, Blakey realized the spastic plastic clicks were less than innocent. They were not “work taken home,” but:

DRLOVE: MMM.

LizzieBoredom: That feels so good, doctor. I love it when I pretend to touch myself where you tell me to touch myself so I can pretend to arouse myself, so that I arouse you. My husband could walk in at any minute. Counterclockwise, Doctor?

DRLOVE: MMM.

LizzieBoredom: You should have taken typing. Here’s to you Mr. Shaninatitsch, middle-school typing teacher, toupee king, and letch. Oh yes. Almost there, Doctor (but thinking of Mr. Shaninatitsch, the hunting, the pecking. The touch typing.)

DRLOVE: NNN

DRLOVE: I NEAN MMM

DRLOVE: MEAN. I MEAN. SHIT. BATTERY LOW.

Or, perhaps more likely:

DRLOVE: Just leave him Liz. He’s not making you happy. I am a doctor. I have money. I am good-looking and work out. My cholesterol is 170. I will make you happy. I have motherless children and you are not yet a mother and no longer 30.

LizzieBoredom: You’re right. I deserve to be happy. I don’t love him. He doesn’t love me. Any more. We’re like strangers in the same house.

DRLOVE: It would be needlessly cruel to let your lives continue this way.

LizzieBoredom: It’s a given. This marriage is over. But you better watch it. Blakey’s in the know. And he’s heading to your house now, clear-headed and angry.

Blakey: I am.

“It’s a confession booth,” Jill says.

I stare at the large cardboard box in my sister’s garage. A velvet curtain covers an opening in the box’s side. “I thought I’d go to the party as Visiting Brother,” I say.

“C’mon. I’ve spent all week on this costume. Try it on.”

I put down my airline-tagged backpack. Over the velvet curtain, Jill has written Confess Here, Sinner! with a glitter pen. The box is surprisingly heavy. You could build homes from cardboard like this. The inside is perfumed shade.

“What was in here?”

“What?”

I part the curtain. “What was in here?”

“My new washing machine.”

Behind Jill sits her Mercedes and a wall of plastic storage tubs. As for my sister, she looks the same as the last time we were together, a year or so ago. That is, radiant and healthy, as though California-born.

“It’s stuffy,” I say, taking off the costume.

“You’ll love it, listening to people’s secrets.”

“Nobody is going to confess anything real.”

“That reminds me. I have a non-disclosure agreement for you to sign.”

I should mention that Jill is a lawyer, though she’s probably kidding about the agreement. She draws up entertainment contracts or copyrights or something like that. A job like none other in my family. Serious money. Our father used to be a real estate agent. He sold plots of cattle land and stink-bad properties in Elgin. Mom was a substitute teacher for twenty years straight. Jill didn’t want any of that. During semester breaks, she’d come home tan, pretty and wiser. She even sounded different, her voice completely free of drawl and bland as TV news. Sometimes I think she’s adopted, gifted beyond our family’s genes. It helps explain the alchemy of her success.

Jill hits a wall switch that brings down the garage door. I pick up my pack.

I’ve never been to a Hollywood party before. Nor Hollywood. My last New Year’s party with Jill was a decade ago, back home. It was a mild Texas night and we ended up on the roof of our parents’ home drinking, smoking and launching bottle rockets with our friends. My guys loved her friends because they were older, mostly girls, and pretended to be easily impressed. They were women, and we were boys. Jill’s friends oohed and aahed whenever a bottle rocket reached the lowest of the clouds and burst inside with a warm glow. I remember my parents coming home from their own party, drunk and randy, and Jill’s friends saying, Oh my God! OH MY GOD! as they huddled around the bathroom roof vent, listening to my parents going at it in the bedroom below. It embarrassed me so much I left and sat downstairs on the front porch. One of Jill’s friends, Lisa, had her arm in a sling from a motorbike accident and she laughed so hard she rolled off the roof and landed right in front of me, breaking, among other things, her good arm. If I had been looking, I might have caught her. In a recurring dream I had for years afterwards, I did catch her, and she fell in love with me on the spot. I carried her away just as I caught her. The dream always began that way, the catch being just the prelude to adolescent fantasies.

Jill leads the way into a just-lit hallway. “Did you bring black shoes?”

“Just these.”

She gives my sneakers a scowl. My backpack only has a few clothes, a toothbrush and a paperback.

“You’re going to need black pants, too. And a shave and a haircut.”

I poke my head into the rooms we pass: a wine cellar, a laundry room, then a home gym. It’s like a strip mall in her house. Tiny oil paintings of organs and body parts are hung along the hallway. A heart, an ear…

“What’s this?”

“A spleen.”

…a spleen, elbow, lungs. Creepy. The hallway then opens up into a bright glass and steel space big enough it holds palm trees. All the furniture is retro and there are sculptures on the tables and sideboards, and pop art hanging on the walls that aren’t translucent. I spot a Lichtenstein. I’m floored.

“What? You like?” She then points to a framed magazine spread that shows her house and a woman standing in the spot where Jill now has a side table. On the table is a sculpture of a skyscraper that gradually turns into a penis. (Modern Architect — June/July issue, 1952, pp. 38-39. The woman in the photo is smoking with a long cigarette holder and looks like one of the characters in the boardgame Clue.)

Pioneertown can be heartbreakingly lonesome. There’s no one thing that makes it so, nothing I can put a finger on. It’s more atmospheric in its workings. A kind of loneliness that makes me wish to be somewhere else, rather than discover its source.

For now, I’m drinking a decaf inside the Red Dog Saloon, here in Pioneertown, both built in the mid-40s for shooting Westerns. Dark clouds cake the sky, and though there’s blue in the distance, it’s too far away to do more than tease. The wind has changed in the hour I’ve been here, the gusts folding back the delicate hands of each snowflake into mean cold grit that stings the cacti and the stained wooden fronts of the bank, hotel, and livery across the street, buildings that have been private residences since the last production crews left. At the end of this snow-dusted street, Louie will ride in. I study the Coors clock mounted above the bar, its idyllic depiction of snowpack endlessly melting into a cascade of ice-cold water. He’s late.

I’m a stop on Louie’s bicycle trek across America. Ten years have passed since I’ve seen him. I’ve been married and divorced in less than half that time. Louie and I were once a couple, back when I was going to school in Seattle, my other life before my father became ill. I was going to be a botanist. Louie was studying to be a teacher and is one. Louie and I used to go out for breakfast every Sunday, a place called Eggs, then go back to my apartment, make love, then lounge in bed until far past noon. It’s how I remember those mornings, anyway. Another thing I recall is his great back massages, his thumbs like steamrollers, his knuckles like pneumatic drills.

Louie might not recognize me. I’m thirty-two, but my face looks forty, with deep wrinkles from squinting and a tan that looks like it goes straight down to my bones, even now in winter. I am the toughest-looking woman I know. And though I’ve got good friends, make just enough money, and have no mortgage payments and no debts — nothing to cause me to look the way I do — I still look like one of those Dust Bowl mothers in those black and white photos, a crowd of gaunt children at her apron strings, the woman leaned against a doorjamb from the fatigue of simply standing. I’m not fond of mirrors.

My name is Melody, by the way. A while back, a friend of mine put me in the personals section of the local paper. I have the clipping on my fridge for kicks. It reads: SWDF, 29, THIN, FUN & FULL OF HEAT. Everything up to and including THIN is right. The rest is like seeing the Virgin Mary in a fruitcake. I received a reply from the ad. And I’ll admit I was curious. I caught myself thinking about things, like how it feels to kiss a man you love, or how it is to see him from afar when he doesn’t know you’re looking at him yet. That heavy smell in bed, on his clothes and in your car, even when he’s not there. But the want ad instead confirmed the desert’s limitations. The single inquiry turned out to be from my ex-husband, who lives nearby in Landers. I first met him after my Dad passed away. I was married to him for a couple months of fun and a few more years of misery. If there was any consolation to receiving just one reply to the ad, it was that my ex resorted to personal ads.

While waiting for Louie, I’ve been talking to an older couple sitting at another table. They’re the only other people in the Red Dog besides me. They just retired to Pioneertown and are surprised by the snow, coming, as they have, from someplace back East. People think of desert and they think of heat, cactus, sand and mirages. But it’s cold here in the winter, especially at night, I say. This is high desert. Cold as a witch’s tit, the man from the other table puts it to his wife. I can tell in his voice that he’ll be okay, though. For the past half hour, he’s been talking it out, getting himself used to the differences between what he expected and what he’s finding. And it sounds like his wife loves it. Even has on a fringed suede jacket.

Not to make this some sob story, but I moved here to take care of my dad. He’s gone now. While he was still alive, I managed an amicable relationship with the desert by willfully sweeping the rest of the world away. I ignored the Pacific Ocean. I clear cut visions of forest from my head because of the longing I would feel if I allowed them to be. But I eventually thought of moving. First after my father died, then after my divorce. But contemplating a move and carrying it out are two distant relatives. Leaving means the house will need to be sold — no small feat considering that empty lots nearby sell for near nothing, and the repairs the house will need. With moving, there’s the matter of finding another place to live and another job. Until recently, these uncertainties have made me hesitate. The desert has a way of clamping down on people, emotion and time until nothing wants to move or change, or ever hope to. I did not want to come here, nor stay, but so many years in one place and I lost momentum. And then, suddenly, I am pregnant and can feel change coming.

It was last year that I decided I wanted a kid. The desire came to me gradually, spreading a cloud over all other priorities and generating its own insistent weather. There’s this guy I’m with who has a great build, a good smile and is also mild-mannered and kind, the sorts of traits I hope are hard-wired into genes. His bad traits, and there are enough, seem acquired and less likely to pass themselves on. Until recently, I had been sleeping with him at every opportunity, wearing him out. He takes me for a nymphomaniac, I think. But that’s okay. He’s held up his part of the undiscussed bargain, done his deed, sowed the oat I needed and remained oblivious. Right at this moment, he’s outside the Red Dog Saloon, getting shot, stumbling, clutching his imaginary wound and falling to the snow-dusted ground. He’ll get up again in a second. There, see? His name is Harold, but he goes by Hank. He’s part of a group of us in town who reenact gunfights. Unlike most of us who do this, Hank sees being a cowboy as a lifestyle decision. After making his money in software, he moved to Pioneertown and filled his house with Western memorabilia: wagon wheels, branding irons, and saddles for kitchen stools. He doesn’t even own a computer. You’ll only find electrical outlets in the bathroom and kitchen and that only has to do with meeting code. Coming into his house, the first thing that’s noticeable is the smell. It’s warm and permanent, a combination of oil, leather, candles and old wood. After the force of the smell comes the sound. The boot-worn wooden floors creak with every step, even mine, light as I am. On the walls of Hank’s bedroom are photos of Pioneertown in its Hollywood heydays. It’s a trip, his house.

Watching him feign his death, I don’t feel sorrow. Not even a pang, as a true cowboy might say. Is it wrong to move this way between hearts and beds? Maybe. Should I have chosen more carefully from the men in Pioneertown, ventured down into Landers perhaps, or Palm Springs or L.A., and there spent a couple years finding myself a future husband, a new job, another house? Decide some Sunday morning, while lazing away the hours in bed with Mr. Husband, that we want children, and change our love-making, our fucking, into the act of procreation? Please. Getting what you want from life is like trying to finish a 1000-piece puzzle with 500 pieces. I’ll be old, gone more likely, before I ever get a chance to glance at the box cover of my life and appreciate what I’ve missed. So, when I get stuck one place, it’s best to start over in another. If pieces are missing, that’s no fault of mine. This is my new philosophy, one I have yet to put into practice.

Kidnapping. Out loud it seems more real. With the thoughts I have, I should be sitting rigid in a serious chair, or else running down a street shooting a gun at the sky. Yet what am I doing? Dabbing a bit of toothpaste drool that hangs from the corner of my lips. Checking the hair in my brush for split ends. I am tearing out my hair from the inside.

Bennett. You’re highlighting the day’s trip on a AAA map of Montana. Dog-eared tour books for the states between us and the Pacific are spread out on the motel bed. Home in Richmond, Virginia would be yards away on your map. Maybe outside the motel room, down the corridor, where the ice machine hums. Here, where we are now, the network of roads looks like a diagram of blood vessels. We could be in the brain, a leg muscle or the lining of a heart. This could have been a different summer if your sister hadn’t implored us to watch Ryan. Remember. This trip was your idea. You decided to take three straight weeks off from the radio station. And no small thing to get someone else to host the big band show, you had said, as if that were a reason. We were thinking of spending a week in Bermuda, remember? I could have gotten fifteen percent off before the travel office shut down. Then your sister calls with her dilemma. For the past three weeks, you’ve been thinking she’s still in Italy to bring back her husband. You think I’m still using the Visa, not the MasterCard, to pay for the rooms. Personally, I can see why he refused to come home. He’s a wine importer. I’ve always thought that sketches the outlines of an understanding.

I look at Ryan on the Murphy bed with the proud possession of a mother. Not his mother, but me. In crayon, he’s copying pictures from that art book you bought him. He’s going to be another Picasso.

“Why don’t you see if you can get through again?” you ask.

The last time I called your sister, from a pay phone in that Iowa rest stop, I could tell she’d been laughing right before she picked up the receiver. You know, I could hear that turn in her voice. I heard her husband in the background, and I think he was laughing, too. They were probably drunk.

I can picture her in Italy when she found him. She probably threw open a pair of louver doors and, spotting him on a veranda, pretended to fall apart until he broke down. The next morning, the two of them lay in bed together as though the world was theirs again. If I had spoken with her instead of hanging up, I know she would have described the villa where she met him—the pensione where she tracked him down—as gorgeous. In my ear she would have turned the entire experience into a vacation, promising to bring us a bottle of Chianti when she picks up Ryan. But I hung up before saying a word. I did. When we drove through Iowa and the trip meter turned digits in a new state, I didn’t feel bad. No offense to Iowa.

I swallow a few aspirins then hit the bathroom lights. In the dim mirror I scrutinize my long wet hair without any split ends and my unmade face and my eyes. My irises move like the lens of an uncertain photographer, my pupils bloom.

Unless your sister has talked with our neighbors, she can’t know where we are. Bennett, you told her we’d maybe take Ryan to the beach. Her ignorance is a feeling worth money. I think your sister has taken it all for granted. Lately, I’ve begun to think that life itself is the sum of taking things for granted, and that when we forget about our health, we are stricken, and when these things include happiness, joy, love, then we are lost. I only pretend to be an optimist. You would say there is a midpoint in life, some fulcrum of justice on which happiness strived for tips to happiness earned. Patience is the key—in your words. But do I expand more than you say? Do you know that I make you talk? Listen.

“What are you thinking?” I ask.

“Which way we should enter Yellowstone. Do you want to see the hot springs on the way in, or leaving?”

“It doesn’t matter,” I say, watching you fold up your map.

“Are you going to call tonight?”

“Yeah. Yeah. Give me a second.”

I reach for my purse and find the address book lying beside the postcard you wrote in Kentucky to your sister. We can always mail it on the way back, if you ask. The call takes a long time to fall into place.

“Hello?” Ryan’s father answers.

An instinctive response jumps to my throat, but I cut it silent and hold the air in my lungs, afraid that my breathing will somehow betray my identity. I put my hand over the receiver. What can I say or tell him? Or you? I shrug as though I am not getting through. I should be an actress.

“Hello? Who is this?” comes the voice again.

I hang up with my finger, hearing the rush of space fill the broken connection that was open for a moment, where I could have said what is on my mind. Hi. We’ve kidnapped your six-year-old son. Yes, that’s right. And one day he will thank me for it.

“No answer again?”

“Busy,” I disagree, as though complicating a lie will make it more convincing. You have the funniest frown, Bennett.

“At least we know they’re home,” you say. “Come on, let’s get some sleep. Turn off the lamp. Goodnight Ryan. We have Yellowstone tomorrow.”

“Which entrance?” I ask.

“We’ll decide on the way. Goodnight Ryan. Ryan?”

“He’s asleep.”

You turn onto your side to look at me, cutting off the moon. Have you been counting the days? I want you, and I don’t want you.

I close my eyes but feel as though I am still able to discern, faintly, the dark shapes of furniture, the gray of walls, the tightness of the room. It seems as though I’m still standing there in the darkness of the cavern we visited that afternoon. My thoughts spill from room to room, through cracks into the yet undiscovered passages, deep down in the breathing mountain. I see one of those fissures ahead and climb to it, stretching my arm inside. I can feel the open space within and try to wedge in a shoulder. Then a foot. I exhale to make myself thin. This could lead to a way out.

You kiss my shoulder, first.

Cray had no need to pedal this direction of the Burkhart trail, which ran, without switchbacks, down along one side of the canyon. On this groove, Cray felt himself pulled at a clip that blurred everything wide of the trail: rock, air, and his thoughts. His fingers flinched over the brakes. Behind him, he could hear the clang of pebbles tumbling between the spokes of Murphy’s bike.

Cray and Murphy both worked for the gas company in L.A. Murphy, like Cray, was married, but fat, a year younger, and recently promoted. He was also a first time father-to-be. With all that momentum, Cray expected Murphy to pass him at any moment. He could only attribute his present lead to how he dealt with fear: to be aware as he crossed his threshold and to know when to pull himself back. Cray had been trying to avoid hindrances, like the long sandy ruts in the trail, that slowed him down and turned the rumble of his tires into a heavy forceless hiss. A couple miles back, rounding a turn in the canyon wall, he’d almost plowed into a line of hikers. A man in back swung a thermos in one hand and a bible in the other. Cray’s rims squealed as he slowed and rode around them on the inside of the trail. They called him brother. “Morning, Brother.” He had thought it funny that the group was headed in the direction of Devil’s Punchbowl, where, with only a single thermos among them, they would definitely be tested. Cray himself had two water bottles clasped to the bike frame.

Since the near collision, Cray had taken to shouting “Hallelujah” around every turn; partly as a moment’s warning, partly for the way he could draw the word out depending on how well the lay of the trail ahead matched his expectations. So far, the ride had been pure Baptist.

Cray glanced over his shoulder at where Murphy was muttering to himself. Murphy’s sweatshirt was already stained from the morning’s effort. Wait till we ride uphill, Cray thought.

“I need shock absorbers!” Murphy shouted at Cray. “Or it’s eunuchdom.”

Cray laughed, thinking it funny that Murphy was in a situation he hadn’t completely prepared himself for.

A few hours earlier, Cray, Murphy and Murphy’s wife Clair had been in Murphy’s bedroom discussing the bed’s canopy of half inch-thick steel. Clair sat on the covers, cradling a cup of coffee with both hands. Around her were enough pillows for a harem. Cray had never seen their bedroom before, and the sight of the metal posts and protective canopy made him feel like he was in the bedroom of a shop teacher, or in some tropical country where termites consumed anything not constructed of metal.

“It was expensive,” Clair said.

“But worth it,” Murphy added. He was retying the drawstring on his sweat pants. He also wore a matching sweatshirt that was less faded, and a lot of sleep in his face. He’d only just woken up when Cray had driven up a half-hour earlier, ready to throw Murphy’s bike in his van and head up into the San Gabriel Mountains. Murphy still wasn’t ready. Murphy rapped his ring finger against one of the black metal posts.

“We can sleep knowing we’ll get up again the next morning,” he said to Cray. He sat beside his wife and began lacing up a pair of wide sneakers. “No matter how bad it shakes, even if a whole floor comes down on us, we’ll crawl out in the same shape we crawled in.”

“We don’t have time to run down the stairs,” Clair said. “Besides, it seems all the earthquakes come at night, you know?”

Cray nodded. “Seems that way.”

Murphy and Clair lived in Northridge. Their TV had shot out a window during the quake, and since then, Murphy had grown a goatee to cover a scar left by flying glass. Cray tried to understand their fear. The earthquake had been bad, sure, but the bed seemed an extreme reaction. Perhaps they were concerned for more than their safety, Cray thought. Maybe they feared change, or maybe they were just content.

Cray thought of his own bed. The mattress needed to be replaced—the couch, where Cray had slept a couple nights in the last month, had more spring. He and his wife Dee and their two kids lived in a house bordering undeveloped land. Their bed was unprotected from the plaster above them, or the two-by-fours and Spanish tile, or the night. But Cray didn’t fear those things crushing him, except, perhaps, the last one. Dee worked nights as an anesthesiologist and he had trouble, sometimes, sleeping. Cray had begun to harbor the suspicion that all the pain Dee numbed at work she somehow kept as a reserve from which she could shoot down his best arguments for moving. True, they hadn’t lived in this house very long, but he was growing tired of the heat and density and his job. He had mentioned several towns in northern California—Redding, Yreka, Ukiah—somewhere where there was a hospital and a utility company nearby where they could find work. Or he could even switch jobs. He didn’t care one way or another, really. Their kids could have plenty of space in places like these. But Dee was steadfast against any idea of moving. That he even thought these things scared her, she told him. Murphy and Dee should have married each other, Cray thought. They were both loud and big and opposed to change. But Cray knew things would be changing soon, at least for Murphy. Cray looked at Murphy’s wife and at the swell in her terry cloth robe.

“What about when junior comes along?” Cray asked. “Going to fortify the crib?”

Murphy snapped his fingers. “Now there’s something to think about.”

Cray didn’t doubt the implementation of what, to him, had been a jest. Everything else in the condo was earthquake proofed. He could see wads of Velcro sticking out under the feet of porcelain dolls on the dresser. A new TV hung up in a corner like those in hospitals, with the remote velcroed to a night stand. But all this meant little, because Murphy’s life would change when he became a father, and Cray had told him that and used it as bait to get him to go into the mountains for the weekend. Now or never, he had said, or at least for a long long while. And you’ll be even fatter then, he’d joked, even though it would probably be true. Cray thought they were getting old for mountain biking, which was why he’d been so adamant about the weekend.

Murphy finished lacing up his shoes. He slapped both knees and then stood up.

“Okay,” he said. “I’m ready.”

“Good,” Cray said. “The man is ready.”

Clair stood up and shook her head at them.

Cray knew she thought mountain biking was juvenile and reckless and it felt good to feel younger.

Cray followed Murphy into the kitchen and took up the handle on one end of a cooler stocked with food. They were ready.

You have turned pages for six other concert pianists before falling in love with Sergei, privately, in your insomniac heart. Watching his naked hands sweep music from the Steinway’s strings, you ignore that most pianists keep their fingers unadorned, and that deep down in Sergei’s pocket there may lie a soft ring of promise to another, much like the one worn by his manager.

His manager would not be despicable were she to always dote, but her disposition can suddenly thud the other way, like a piano lid fallen shut, booming discord intent on not being hushed. Now, though, she is speaking Russian to him between quick kisses. These are drops of water on your kindled doubt of his matrimonial status. Nevertheless, you continue stoking at his coldness toward the woman, at his separate arrivals and departures. You would rather tend a tenable possibility than know for certain. Her kisses crackle and steam off, leaving you alone with Sergei.

You sit in a chair while he leans forward to mark his copy of Scriabin’s piano sonata with a dull and stubby pencil. You have prepared for this. You reach into your purse.

“Here, I have a sharp one.”

“Oh, it’s all right. This one I like. It is light and I don’t have to see what I write if I don’t want to. That can have its advantages, yes?”

You would pluck a year off of your life for every day you could sit there, alone on his left where he will soon need you to turn the page. His fingers fit the keys like a mold from which they were cast, but each digit limber, lifting the notes off as though from a harp. The music rises and his fingers bleed into angry dissonance, the music wavering through his body, rising through the glinting brass pedal into his feet and legs and causing Sergei to shift on the bench. The music continues to throw itself into his body, waving his elbows, tightening his shoulders, turning his neck to putty. He grunts slightly, air sucking into his nostrils with a faint whistle, as though he has been holding his breath until after this difficult passage. Your eyes stumble through his black hair, slide down his profile to the feverish sweat beaded above his lips. You want to touch those lips. You are lost.

When to turn? You throw yourself into the page, trying to catch your eyes on a clump of eighth notes, a crescendo or grace note, a marker by which you can find your bearing. There. Quickly, you pinch the top right corner of the printed music, feeling the soft and wrinkled paper as you whip open the next two pages. Sergei tilts toward you as you sit, coming closer in a musical descent, but then the steps calm and he climbs back up the keys. Your eye catches the double bar of the last measure and you wish for anything but the approach of the end. Sergei soothes through the final line, the music rising in a flutter of trills, higher and higher. Evaporating. You savor the fermata. His hands lift from the keys and hover there a moment. Sergei clenches them into fists in the air, then releases.

“Better,” he says.

You look at your own fingers and find that the tips have turned a dark silver. You realize that you have been pinching and turning the end of your pencil between them.

“We take five minutes,” Sergei says, rising.

You stand. “Would you like me to bring you a coffee?”

“Thank you. No.” He holds his long pale fingers toward you, the cuticles cut nearly to the pink above crescent moons. “These shake from caffeine.”

He walks off behind you. You hear him speak to someone in passing, and then it is quiet.

In your apartment you have several of his recordings either bought or loaned. You know everything about his professional life that can be extracted from liner notes: born in 1962 in Kiev to an engineer and housewife, educated at the conservatory under Z. Koztrokoff, first concert age fourteen followed by a tour in the Crimea the following year. Since then, fifteen years of concerts, records, teaching, and then the last five years of silence. Until now. On the cover of his last recording, he is seated at the piano, facing away from it, looking straight into the camera. His skin looks soft, his sideburns are long and curled, his hair in complete disarray. But he is smiling.

Alone on stage, you stand and walk around the enormous piano. It is a symbol of another world, where being proficient in the language doesn’t mean you can speak it fluently. But there you are, bulging and twisting in the lacquer of the instrument. There you are turning its pages.

“No, not Phillips,” Terje said. “I need a flathead screwdriver. One with a short handle.”

The salesman nodded, then disappeared down a narrow aisle. While waiting, Terje’s glance slid down a wall of paint cans, rummaged through the display of belt and circular sanders, and lingered in the thick sheen from a stack of linoleum flooring. He caught himself reading the prices and turned away, opening the front of his coat in the warm shop. The glasses rested on his nose with a reminding weight and began to steam. He felt fortunate he had to wear the prop for only a few hours and that his eyes were, otherwise, as sharp as he could imagine eyes to be.

Terje had been back in Norway for a week. Out of nostalgia for his student days he had rented a furnished apartment on Neumann street. His usual tools were at the house in Spain, and he felt a little upset at himself for having waited until now to buy the screwdriver. When he wasn’t painting, he dealt predominantly with religious items, although like today, he would consent to do the occasional museum piece. Thieving was not difficult. Especially here. Several years ago, someone ran a ladder up the back wall of the National Gallery in Oslo, broke a window, and absconded with Edvard Munch’s Scream. That’s how easy it could be. He himself had stolen enough art over the years to fill a museum of respectable size, though rarely did he possess a piece for more than a month.

Today, as with each time, he felt wonderfully sick with nerves. In the shop, his entire torso throbbed with the adrenaline of the procrastinator, making him smile like a neophyte in the business. By the time the salesman returned with the correct screwdriver, Terje felt the first fringes of a happiness he hadn’t possessed in months. It was all about possession. He took the screwdriver from the salesman’s hand and gripped it in his own.

“Perfect.”

“Listen, is your name Terje?” The salesman’s hand was shaped like a gun.

“Yeah?”

“I thought it was you. How have you been?”

“Fine,” Terje said. “But do I know you?” He set the screwdriver down on the counter.

The salesman made a click in his mouth and pointed at Terje again. “Sure. I’m Einar. We were stationed together up north. Remember?”

Imagining the salesman in fatigues did not help Terje to place him, though the name began to have a familiar ring.

“Yeah. Sure,” Terje said, shaking Einar’s hand, hoping for a recollection of the soldier in the salesman. “I didn’t know you lived here,” he said.

“Me? Of course. Where else, right? Right?”

Terje felt like he’d forgotten some quip between them from years ago. He chuckled to cover himself, all the while looking the salesman in the eye, hoping a recognition there would spread a familiarity out to Einar’s other features. Nothing.

“How long have you been living in Bergen?” Einar asked.

“I’m just here on business. Then I’m leaving again.”

“Too bad,” Einar said, ringing up the sale.

Terje pulled a card from his wallet to wave through the machine, but thought better of it and handed Einar a bill instead.

“Listen,” Einar said. “I take my lunch in a few minutes. Do you have time for a coffee, or are you in a hurry?”

“Me? In a hurry?” Terje laughed, trying to ghost up a joke from the past he couldn’t recall.

“You know the pastry shop round the corner?” Einar asked.

“No,” Terje said. “Wait. Of course. The one right round the corner.”

“You can’t miss it.”

“Right.” Terje slid the screwdriver into his pocket and took the receipt and change. “See you there?”

“Ten minutes.”

Terje jogged down the steps from the hardware shop and wove himself back into the sidewalk crowd. His watch read a little after twelve. Then, in a synaptic flash, his mind slipped him a fifteen-year-old memory of Einar, causing him to halt in front of a lighting store. The sight before him in the shop window—a nested stack of crenelated lamp shades—wavered to his mind’s eye as he fit the sudden memory of Einar’s lean face atop the features he’d left behind in the shop: pale fat cheeks, hair thin and curling. Good God! He had a tooth missing, too. Terje couldn’t understand it. Then he recalled more than the face. Einar had been the one who caught the jeep on fire.

They’d been stationed together fifty miles from the Russian border in a deep sunless winter. It was the last time Terje had grown a beard; everyone had stopped shaving to protect their faces from the chapping slaps of cold. They were clearing out after camping for several days. To start the jeeps, Terje remembered patting down the snow beneath the engines with shovels, then pouring gasoline into the frozen basins. Einar threw a match into the pool of fuel, and Terje remembered them all standing back as the fire thawed the engine, the light reaching the tops of their boots. Einar climbed into the jeep and managed to turn over the engine, then pulled forward away from the fire, letting the light reach the scrawny birch trees at the periphery of darkness where, also, the sides of the tents emerged, like sheets on clotheslines strung between the trees. But another light erupted from under the jeep. A frozen oil leak had melted and began burning with a virulent intensity. Someone shouted to Einar and Einar stopped and began frantically shoveling snow up under the jeep. Terje remembered the awkward feel of pitching snow into the brightening flames which, despite their efforts, swept up into the engine and soon outlined the rim of the hood in yellow. Eventually, the entire jeep caught fire, the upholstery contracting and tearing open holes, throwing the sharp scent of foam rubber into the air where it froze before falling in wisps of ash. Terje remembered backing up toward the trees with the others, waiting for the jeep to explode.

It all began in the ground.

Sandra picked the glass shards from the kitchen floor and tried to cradle them softly in her other palm. She emptied what had been part of a set of two thin vases into the trash and blew the last slivers from her shaking hand. The glass vase had been the only vulnerable thing, there at the edge of the kitchen counter. She’d heard it smash from outside, where she’d run at the first sensation that the ground had begun to move. The other vase had been packed away just moments before the quake, in the safety of newspaper and cardboard, along with nearly everything she and her husband had ever owned.

She could hear Guy upstairs in the loft, tuning the radio to the local Mammoth Lakes station, KMMT, waiting for the numbers.

“What was it?” she asked.

“They’re still waiting for it to come in,” Guy said, “but it’s going to be close.”

Until she married Guy and retired with him to the eastern folds of the Sierra Nevadas, Sandra’s forty-nine years had been free from earthquakes. She had grown accustomed to a life that seemed to float. Her expectations had drifted to far horizons which, with time, seemed to disappear into dusky impossibilities. She’d raised a son, Jason, alone, had managed to make a living at an airplane assembly plant in Seattle, and had resigned herself to one of those simple lives which she had thought were people’s lowest common denominator of contentment.

A thin line of blood emerged in her palm. Sandra turned on the tap and held her hands under the biting cold of mountain water. Here, in this house, she’d found something she took for the happiness which had alluded her for nearly fifty years. The horizons which had held dim views of pleasure and joy revealed her surprising closeness, so that a glance at the mountains through the windows of their home seemed an impossible luxury that she’d begun to believe, most luxuriously of all, was hers to keep.

In ten years, the timbered house had become the storeroom of weekend sojourns to fairs, swap meets and antique shops. No worries had prevented her from turning a house into a home. The ceramic cowboys with petrified lassos, the buffalo head and even the chow triangle seemed natural denizens of an eternal home. A feeling close to history settled on her life, her relationship, and the house in which she slept, ate and loved. Comfortable routine woke her, moved her, let her lie in the low Sierra sun. In the winter, the ski lifts were only five minutes by car, and the lifts then took them to the top of the serrated world.

Not until then did the upset of geologic shifting enter her life. The past summer had been the worst. Hot, with the mornings sweating dew and the ground shivering like a feverish child. At night she dreamed of lava.

At first, the quakes had caused little more stir than a creak on the stairs, with months between geologic footfalls. She’d been able to forget their presence. But since summer, the earth moved daily, compounding the earlier innocuousness into a worry that could not find release in light-hearted jokes about mountain life. Nothing was stable. Townsfolk were jittery, property values showed five and six digit cracks, and new construction seemed unable to take a firm hold. And in all this, Sandra discovered that never before had she been so comfortable in the house, with her husband and the preciousness of still moments. Guy scoffed at the idea of moving. Between the two of them, she’d seen what had formed in town, a rift between the concerned and the unconcerned. As long as there formed no middle ground, there seemed no agreement on danger, and therefore the shaking seemed both dangerous and common place.

“Finally,” Guy said from the loft.

Sandra pulled her hands from the faucet’s stream of water. Her fingers were numb with cold, but the blood had stopped. “What, did you win?”

“3.0,” Guy said. “Exactly.”

Guy and his friends in town had an earthquake pool. No one had taken the pot in the past four quakes and the last she’d heard, it was up to nearly four-hundred dollars. Since the new year, Guy had been betting a reading of 3.0 on the Richter scale.

“You should break even with that,” Sandra said, looking up at the loft where he had his work room. There’d been a dozen quakes and a dozen twenty dollar bills going into other betters’ pockets.

“Just about,” Guy said. “I knew it was a three-zero. I could feel it was right there.”

She could see the silhouette of his movements on the cathedral ceiling, the shadow of his chest as large as the stuffed buffalo head that hung under the apex of the roof. His voice shook slightly from happiness.

“Congratulations,” Sandra said. “Your number was bound to come up.” At the start of the quake, running outside, she had not thought of scale, of numbers. But she was happy for him. At this time, with the possibility of evacuation hanging over them, she took hold of every piece of good news.

Sandra turned on the coffee maker, then went about emptying the dishwasher. Through the window, she could see that the western horizon was blackening. With warm plates in hand, she began restocking the nearly bare cupboards with place settings for two. The good decade old china, crystal, along with the years’ accumulation of clothes, books, and failed hobbies—and the more sizable results of successful ones—lay packed with old news in dozens of boxes on both floors of the house.

Pulling out the dishwasher’s second tier, Sandra began placing the equally sparse silverware into the drawers. In the background, she could hear Guy working up in the loft. He’d changed the radio station. The volume was low enough that she could discern him humming the melody over the snip of cutting shears and the hammering of penny nails. Guy was still at the alchemy. Now retired, he made scenes of the Old West from beer cans.

The loudest male orgasm on record took place in a motel room in Big Sur, California on a recent cold spring night. I was next door.

Big Sur, if you’ve never been, isn’t a town. It’s a valley of coastal redwoods, pine and oak, ferns, clover, grass and wildflowers. It’s a river, driftwood beaches, cliffs, surf, seals and green green sea. Highway 1, a tenuous tethering of San Francisco and Los Angeles, winds two lanes through Big Sur country. Compared to either of those cities, Big Sur is a place of welcome quiet, broken only by the occasionally gunning of motorcycles heading toward the “bikers welcome” bar, or the liberated acceleration of cars who’ve managed to overtake an RV they’ve been trapped behind for miles. Although Big Sur now has the gas stations, restaurants and general stores the writer Henry Miller in Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch hoped would never come, the “odious claptrap that makes Suburbia horrendous,” this section of the Carmel – San Simeon Highway has somehow managed to contain these suburban horrors. They’re few and far between, clad in darkening wood, overshadowed by trees. Homes are nowhere to be seen, hidden up dirt roads with forbidding signs. Slow growth among old growth. Recent land slides north and south of Big Sur have necessitated night-time road closures, spreading a blanket of stillness impenetrable from outside. No sound but night birds and the frogs, no movement but the soft slow brush of a local’s homeward-bound pickup truck traveling alongside the gurgle of the Big Sur River. Most nights.

At some hour past midnight, I was startled awake by two empty-all sighs from a deeply-pleasured woman, followed by unbelievably annoying male laughter. If you’ve ever tried to slumber to the unsolicited sounds of sex, you’ll recognize the path that winds through surprise, amusement and arousal to finally dead-end at annoyance. Sex, real and not your own, is a scenery-whoring RV holding you up and blocking your view. There may be worse sounds to hear from next door — machinery, late night TV sports commentary — but these are at least real and carry a certain mumbling rhythm. The sex I can attest to lacked a white-noise quality, with an air of disingenuousness that made me suspicious.

A hazy thought: what stokes the libido when we’re in motel beds? What could possibly make one in the wanting mood after hours of driving, and moments after taking the key from a sixty-year old Pakistani who, while you envision the queen-size spread, is returning to his dinner just behind the beaded doorway from where he emerged? Is it the single room, dominated by an unavoidable bed; a space where the only options are sleep or sex? In the case of this Big Sur motel, yes. I’d been happy to hear it was free of a TV, radio, alarm clock, and phone, but little did I contemplate how motel asceticism, by limiting the choice of possible acts, pours more gusto into those that remain.

I’ll admit, my girlfriend and I too felt the draw of our motel bed and succumbed. You’ve felt the draw of motel beds, too, I’m sure. But not like our neighbors. After the woman’s orgasm and the man’s laughter fell a peaceful lull, which I mistook at the time for a peaceful completion. Were they, at this late hour, perhaps doing a little post coitus reading of a local author? Surely not Robinson Jeffers, who knew this coast so well but from whose quaint self-built cottage in Carmel didn’t issue poetry to spice a night in a motel room. (Imagine yourself hauling stones from the sea to build Tor House, then writing poetry after lunch. Exhausting work.) Kerouac? Too much of an alcoholic stupor. Henry Miller? There we go. They’d perhaps spent the afternoon at the Henry Miller library, and pretended they’d actually read Tropic of Cancer, turned on by the idea of pornography without realizing sex’s mundane portrayal there amid a squalor of prostitutes and venereal disease. I heard a male groan of pleasure from the other room. So they weren’t reading.

While it’s true I have excellent hearing — as a kid I could tell you which neighbors had their TVs on by detecting a unit’s high-frequency whine — the sounds which proceeded to came through the motel wall were at volumes which preclude any kind of aural voyeurism on my part. This was loud, through-the-walls, openly broadcast sex. If the motel had TVs, I’d have easily mistaken the noise next door for a hearing-impaired porn aficionado watching a flick. I waited to hear a squeaking mattress, but not a spring seemed to move. A few words slipped through the wall, along with what inexplicably sounded like xylophone music, creating a confusing picture as to what was transpiring. The man groaned with pleasure, then laughed, in such a quick exchange that the foreign reaches of lust and comedy became sudden neighbors.

It’ll happen, eventually. Perhaps during a Friday evening, the two of you relaxing on the couch and finishing some take-out. Your girlfriend moves closer, places a hand on your arm and flashes a mischievous smile. Looking into her widening pupils, you consider the possibility that the dinner has made her amorous, or, more reluctantly, that she’s just after the last egg roll. And then it happens.

“[Insert your own pet name here],” she says. “I was thinking. How do you feel about taking dance lessons?”

“Dance lessons?” Yes, by all means, act dumbfounded. That choking on your coconut curry bit is good.

“It’ll be fun,” she says. Notice she doesn’t offer the Heimlich.

“Don’t we already dance,” you manage to gasp, your face red and fever-hot.

No. You do not dance. She doesn’t find anything bona fide in your slow-dance foreplay footwork, or the solo Risky Business moves she once caught you doing on the kitchen’s slick linoleum. She wants real dancing, the kind that breaks all ties with the bad habits you’ve picked up over the years: high school dances, MTV, packed clubs, and especially concerts — home of the Stadium-seating twist and head-bob. She’s thankful you were too young to get into break dancing, and too old, now, for raves.

“Aren’t dance lessons expensive?” you ask, trying to blockade her request as innocently as possible. After all, she can understand your frugality, especially given how the two of you have started saving for a down payment on an eventual condo. Unfortunately for you, your girlfriend has already looked into the matter. Tonight’s dinner — your idea — cost far more than a group dance lesson. She’s more than happy to go Dutch on the lessons, she says. She’ll even pay your way. “And there’s a dance studio just down the street. We can walk there. It’ll be fun.” Fun. A word you feel is being bandied about a little too liberally.

Might as well admit it. This is bad, with dance lessons an inevitability not far from the death & taxes category. You could get a new girlfriend, but you’re not going to cop-out now, are you? You could injure yourself, say playing Frisbee, or mountain biking, but that simply would delay the inevitable.

“The first lesson starts this week,” she says, genuinely excited. “Do you prefer East Coast or West Coast?”

“How about we just stay here.”

“No, silly. I mean East coast or West coast swing. (You know what she means.) Or we could do salsa. Or cha-cha, or the rumba…” You’re on to her. She’s giving you the illusion of choice (“…or the fox trot, or the merengue…”), daring you to turn down every dance she mentions, and making it more difficult to refuse taking lessons outright. Oh, how easily you took uneventful Friday evenings for granted! “Can I have the rest of the Pad Thai?” she asks, finally running out of names for dances the two of you can learn.

Hand her the carton and say yes. Succumb to that word.