John Updike: Dying for Love

The works of Gabriel García Márquez contain a great deal of love, depicted as a doom, a demonic possession, a disease that, once contracted, cannot be easily cured. Not infrequently the afflicted are an older man and a younger woman, hardly more than a child. In “One Hundred Years of Solitude” (1967; English translation 1970), Aureliano Buendía visits a very young whore:

The adolescent mulatto girl, with her small bitch’s teats, was naked on the bed. Before Aureliano sixty-three men had passed through the room that night. From being used so much, kneaded with sweat and sighs, the air in the room had begun to turn to mud. The girl took off the soaked sheet and asked Aureliano to hold it by one side. It was as heavy as a piece of canvas. They squeezed it, twisting it at the ends until it regained its natural weight. They turned over the mat and the sweat came out of the other side. Aureliano was anxious for that operation never to end.

Her condition is pitiable:

Her back was raw. Her skin was stuck to her ribs and her breathing was forced because of an immeasurable exhaustion. Two years before, far away from there, she had fallen asleep without putting out the candle and had awakened surrounded by flames. The house where she lived with the grandmother who had raised her was reduced to ashes. Since then her grandmother carried her from town to town, putting her to bed for twenty cents in order to make up the value of the burned house. According to the girl’s calculations, she still had ten years of seventy men per night, because she also had to pay the expenses of the trip and food for both of them.

Aureliano does not take advantage of her overexploited charms, and leaves the room “troubled by a desire to weep.” He has—you guessed it—fallen in love:

He felt an irresistible need to love her and protect her. At dawn, worn out by insomnia and fever, he made the calm decision to marry her in order to free her from the despotism of her grandmother and to enjoy all the nights of satisfaction that she would give the seventy men.

This curious blend of the squalid and the enchanted—perhaps not so curious in the social context of the author’s native Colombia in the years of his youth—returns, five years later, in the long short story “The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Eréndira and Her Heartless Grandmother” (translated 1978), which was made into a movie from a script by the author. The situation has become more fabulous, with its Catholic subtext—whoredom as the martyrdom of an innocent—underlined; Eréndira’s would-be rescuer is Ulises, “a gilded adolescent with lonely maritime eyes and with the appearance of a furtive angel,” and her grandmother is fully demonic, huge in bulk, with “mercilessly tattooed” shoulders and, it turns out, green blood, “oily blood, shiny and green, just like mint honey.”

Eréndira, when we first meet her, has “just turned fourteen,” whereas Sierva María de Todos los Ángeles, the heroine of García Márquez’s uncanny short historical novel “Of Love and Other Demons” (1994; translated 1995), turns twelve as the book opens. Her mother is “an untamed mestiza of the so-called shopkeeper aristocracy: seductive, rapacious, brazen, with a hunger in her womb that could have satisfied an entire barracks.” Her father, the second Marquis de Casalduero, is a “funereal, effeminate man, as pale as a lily because the bats drained his blood while he slept.” Neither parent has any energy or affection to spare the child, so she is reared by the decaying household’s contingent of slaves, and learns their languages, dances, religion, and diet—a goat’s eyes and testicles are her favorite meal, “cooked in lard and seasoned with burning spices.” Her most striking physical feature is her radiant copper hair; it has never been cut and is braided into loops so as not to interfere with her walking.

On her birthday, she is bitten by a rabid dog, and though she never develops symptoms, the medical precautions, and her own charisma, prove to be fatal. Her father, roused to notice her existence, falls in love with her, suddenly “knowing he loved her as he had never loved in this world,” and so does the devout and learned thirty-six-year-old priest, Cayetano Delaura, who is placed in charge of the exorcism that the Church has deemed necessary, in view of her willful and feral behavior. Delaura at last proclaims his love to her: “He confessed that every moment was filled with thoughts of her, that everything he ate and drank tasted of her, that she was his life, always and everywhere, as only God had the right and power to be, and that the supreme joy of his heart would be to die with her.” Denis de Rougemont’s analysis of romantic love as a Catholic heresy could scarcely be better illustrated. As García Márquez frames these cases, an element of whoredom is necessary to the, in Stendhal’s term, “crystallization” of love.

Sordid imputations swirl about the pre-teen Sierva María. Condemned to a convent, she shows up in a hat, found in an old chest and gaily decorated with ribbons; the abbess, in her perpetual puritan fury, calls it “the hat of a slut.” Rumors of Delaura’s attentions in her convent cell cause the child to be called “his pregnant whore.” The pair do embrace, and even begin to experience, through daily exposure, “the tedium of everyday love,” but she remains a virgin, in hopes of an eventual marriage. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that she has the talent that the physician and seer Abrenuncio names when he says, “Sex is a talent, and I do not have it.” For all of Delaura’s vows, it is Sierva María who stops eating and dies for love. Her hair tells the tale: the nuns shave it off, but when she is found dead “strands of hair gushed like bubbles as they grew back on her shaved head,” and two hundred years later “a stream of living hair the intense color of copper” flows from her crypt, to the length of twenty-two metres. The miracle was witnessed, it is explained in a foreword, by the twenty-one-year-old journalist Gabriel García Márquez.

His new novel, “Memories of My Melancholy Whores” (translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman; Knopf; $20), is his first work of fiction in ten years, and a mere hundred and fifteen pages long. It revisits the figure of a young whore, “just turned fourteen,” stretched naked on a soaked bed. The moisture, this time, is her own “phosphorescent perspiration,” and her lover, our unnamed protagonist and narrator, is all of ninety years old. García Márquez, a master of the arresting first sentence, begins his little book, “The year I turned ninety, I wanted to give myself the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin.” Though the author was born in 1927 and is thus still shy of eighty, many homey details seem lifted from within his own study. The hero is a writer, having for fifty years composed a column, “El Diario de La Paz,” for the local newspaper; he reads and cites books, favoring the Roman classics, and keeps a collection of dictionaries; he listens carefully to classical music, and supplies the titles of his selections. The city he lives in is, as he is, unnamed, but its location, “twenty leagues distant” from the estuary of the Great Magdalena River, puts it in the neighborhood of García Márquez’s native town of Aracataca. As for the time of the action, the narrator gives his age as thirty-two when his father dies, “on the day the treaty of Neerlandia was signed, putting an end to the War of the Thousand Days”; that would be 1902, so our hero would have been born in 1870 and aged ninety in 1960. He tells us that he is “ugly, shy, and anachronistic,” and has “never gone to bed with a woman I didn’t pay.” A retired prostitute whom he meets on a bus refers to, perhaps in a reflex of professional flattery, “that burro’s cock the devil gave you as a reward for cowardice and stinginess.” He has never married and keeps no pets; a faithful servant, the “Indianlike, strong, rustic” Damiana, tends to his modest needs, moving about barefoot so as not to disturb his writing. Though impecunious, he attends many cultural events and knows the trials of fame: strangers approach him “with a frightening look of pitiless admiration.” His prose displays, in Edith Grossman’s expert translation, the chiselled stateliness and colorful felicities that distinguish everything García Márquez composes. “Memories of My Melancholy Whores,” reminiscent in its terseness of such stoic fellow-Latins as the Brazilian Machado de Assis and the Colombia-born Álvaro Mutis, is a velvety pleasure to read, though somewhat disagreeable to contemplate; it has the necrophiliac tendencies of the precocious short stories, obsessed with living death, that García Márquez published in his early twenties.

The virgin whom the veteran brothel madam Rosa Cabarcas provides for her old client is a poor girl who lives with her crippled mother and feeds her brothers and sisters by a daily stint of sewing on buttons in a clothing factory. She is, Rosa Cabarcas confides, “dying of fear,” because a friend of hers bled to death in losing her virginity. To quiet her nerves, she has been given a mixture of bromide and valerian that relaxes her so soundly that our hero’s night with her consists of his watching her sleep:

Her newborn breasts still seemed like a boy’s, but they appeared full to bursting with a secret energy that was ready to explode. The best part of her body were her large, silent-stepping feet with toes as long and sensitive as fingers. . . . The adornments and cosmetics could not hide her character: the haughty nose, heavy eyebrows, intense lips. I thought: A tender young fighting bull.

His subsequent visits follow the same pattern: she, drugged and exhausted by overwork, sleeps while the ninety-year-old lies beside her, eavesdropping upon her breathing, at one point so faint that he takes her pulse to reassure himself that she is still alive. He imagines her blood as it circulates “through her veins with the fluidity of a song that branched off into the most hidden areas of her body and returned to her heart, purified by love.” Whose love? Presumably his, directed toward an inert love object. He reads and sings to her, all in her sleep. Not once do we see her wake, or hear her talk, though the happy ending reports that she has feelings and awareness. His relationship, insofar as the action holds any, is with Rosa Cabarcas and those others who witnessed his whore-crazy prime, when he “was twice crowned client of the year.” Sleeping Beauty needs only to keep sleeping; her beauty under the male gaze is her raison d’être, and what she does when kissed awake is off the record, as is the cruelty of the economic system that turns young females into fair game for sexual predators. The narrator does not deplore the grim underpinnings of whoredom, or consider the atavistic barbarism of buying girls in order to crack their hymens. Such moral concerns are irrelevant to the rapture that is his basic subject—the rebirth of love and its torments in a body that he had thought was “free at last of a servitude that had kept me enslaved since the age of thirteen.” He reassures the reader, “I would not have traded the delights of my suffering for anything in the world.” He is, at ninety, alive, with love’s pain to prove it.

“Memories of My Melancholy Whores” feels less about love than about age and illness. Furtively vivid images give us whiffs of the underlying distress: “My heart filled with an acidic foam that interfered with my breathing”; “I’d rather die first, I said, my saliva icy.” The narrator’s asshole, we are told more than once, burns. His sense of reality keeps slipping, as it does with old people, sometimes into a startling loveliness: “The full moon was climbing to the middle of the sky and the world looked as if it were submerged in green water.” Magic realism has always depended on the subaqueous refractions of memory. So does love: “From then on I had her in my memory with so much clarity that I could do what I wanted with her. . . . Seeing and touching her in the flesh, she seemed less real to me than in my memory.” As both de Rougemont and Freud (in 1912’s essay “The Most Prevalent Form of Degradation in Erotic Life”) suggest, the woman present in the flesh, the wife or surrogate mother with her complicated, obdurate reality and pressing needs, is less aphrodisiac than the woman, imagined or hired, whose will is our own. In “Of Love and Other Demons,” this phantom appears as a forlorn little princess, a wild and enigmatic waif. In “Memories of My Melancholy Whores,” she is a working-class cipher who surrenders in her sleep, and whose speechless body represents the marvel of life. The instinct to memorialize one’s loves is not peculiar to nonagenarian rakes; in the slow ruin of life, such memory reverses the current for a moment and silences the voice that murmurs in our narrator’s ear, “No matter what you do, this year or in the next hundred, you will be dead forever.” The septuagenarian Gabriel García Márquez, while he is still alive, has composed, with his usual sensual gravity and Olympian humor, a love letter to the dying light.

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Margaret Talbot: The Agitator

“Yesterday, I was hysterical,” the Italian journalist and novelist Oriana Fallaci said. She was telling me a story about a local dog owner and the liberties he’d allowed his animal to take in front of Fallaci’s town house, on the Upper East Side. Big mistake. “I no longer have the energy to get really angry, like I used to,” she added. It called to mind what the journalist Robert Scheer said about Fallaci after interviewing her for Playboy, in 1981: “For the first time in my life, I found myself feeling sorry for the likes of Khomeini, Qaddafi, the Shah of Iran, and Kissinger—all of whom had been the objects of her wrath—the people she described as interviewing ‘with a thousand feelings of rage.’ ”

For two decades, from the mid-nineteen-sixties to the mid-nineteen-eighties, Fallaci was one of the sharpest political interviewers in the world. Her subjects were among the world’s most powerful figures: Yasir Arafat, Golda Meir, Indira Gandhi, Haile Selassie, Deng Xiaoping. Henry Kissinger, who later wrote that his 1972 interview with her was “the single most disastrous conversation I have ever had with any member of the press,” said that he had been flattered into granting it by the company he’d be keeping as part of Fallaci’s “journalistic pantheon.” It was more like a collection of pelts: Fallaci never left her subjects unskinned.

Fallaci’s manner of interviewing was deliberately unsettling: she approached each encounter with studied aggressiveness, made frequent nods to European existentialism (she often disarmed her subjects with bald questions about death, God, and pity), and displayed a sinuous, crafty intelligence. It didn’t hurt that she was petite and beautiful, with straight, smooth hair that she wore parted in the middle or in pigtails; melancholy blue-gray eyes, set off by eyeliner; a cigarette-cured voice; and an adorable Italian accent. During the Vietnam War, she was sometimes photographed in fatigues and a helmet; her rucksack bore handwritten instructions to return her body to the Italian Ambassador “if K.I.A.” In these images she looked as slight and vulnerable as a child. When she was shot, in 1968, while reporting on the student demonstrations in Mexico City, and then confined by the police with the wounded and the dying on one floor of an apartment building, the first impulse of the students around her was to protect her; one boy gave her his sweater, in order to cover her face from the drip of a sewage pipe. Her essential toughness never stopped taking people—men, especially—by surprise.

Fallaci’s journalism, at first conducted for the Italian magazine L’Europeo and later published in translation throughout the world, was infused with a “mythic sense of political evil,” as the writer Vivian Gornick once put it—an almost adolescent aversion to power, which suited the temperament of the times. As Fallaci explained in her preface to “Interview with History,” a 1976 collection of Q. & A.s, “Whether it comes from a despotic sovereign or an elected president, from a murderous general or a beloved leader, I see power as an inhuman and hateful phenomenon. . . . I have always looked on disobedience toward the oppressive as the only way to use the miracle of having been born.” In Fallaci’s interview with Kissinger, she told him that he had become known as “Nixon’s mental wet nurse,” and lured him into boasting that Americans admired him because he “always acted alone”—like “the cowboy who leads the wagon train by riding ahead alone on his horse, the cowboy who rides all alone into the town.” Political cartoonists mercilessly lampooned this remark, and, according to Kissinger’s memoirs, the quote soured his relations with Nixon. (Kissinger claimed that she had taken his words out of context.) But the most remarkable moment in the interview came when Fallaci bluntly asked him, about Vietnam, “Don’t you find, Dr. Kissinger, that it’s been a useless war?,” and Kissinger began his reply with the words “On this, I can agree.”

Fallaci’s interview with Khomeini, which appeared in the Times on October 7, 1979, soon after the Iranian revolution, was the most exhilarating example of her pugilistic approach. Fallaci had travelled to Qum to try to secure an interview with Khomeini, and she waited ten days before he received her. She had followed instructions from the new Islamist regime, and arrived at the Ayatollah’s home barefoot and wrapped in a chador. Almost immediately, she unleashed a barrage of questions about the closing of opposition newspapers, the treatment of Iran’s Kurdish minority, and the summary executions performed by the new regime. When Khomeini defended these practices, noting that some of the people killed had been brutal servants of the Shah, Fallaci demanded, “Is it right to shoot the poor prostitute or a woman who is unfaithful to her husband, or a man who loves another man?” The Ayatollah answered with a pair of remorseless metaphors. “If your finger suffers from gangrene, what do you do? Do you let the whole hand, and then the body, become filled with gangrene, or do you cut the finger off? What brings corruption to an entire country and its people must be pulled up like the weeds that infest a field of wheat.”

Fallaci continued posing indignant questions about the treatment of women in the new Islamic state. Why, she asked, did Khomeini compel women to “hide themselves, all bundled up,” when they had proved their equal stature by helping to bring about the Islamic revolution? Khomeini replied that the women who “contributed to the revolution were, and are, women with the Islamic dress”; they weren’t women like Fallaci, who “go around all uncovered, dragging behind them a tail of men.” A few minutes later, Fallaci asked a more insolent question: “How do you swim in a chador?” Khomeini snapped, “Our customs are none of your business. If you do not like Islamic dress you are not obliged to wear it. Because Islamic dress is for good and proper young women.” Fallaci saw an opening, and charged in. “That’s very kind of you, Imam. And since you said so, I’m going to take off this stupid, medieval rag right now.” She yanked off her chador.

In a recent e-mail, Fallaci said of Khomeini, “At that point, it was he who acted offended. He got up like a cat, as agile as a cat, an agility I would never expect in a man as old as he was, and he left me. In fact, I had to wait for twenty-four hours (or forty-eight?) to see him again and conclude the interview.” When Khomeini let her return, his son Ahmed gave Fallaci some advice: his father was still very angry, so she’d better not even mention the word “chador.” Fallaci turned the tape recorder back on and immediately revisited the subject. “First he looked at me in astonishment,” she said. “Total astonishment. Then his lips moved in a shadow of a smile. Then the shadow of a smile became a real smile. And finally it became a laugh. He laughed, yes. And, when the interview was over, Ahmed whispered to me, ‘Believe me, I never saw my father laugh. I think you are the only person in this world who made him laugh.’ ”

Fallaci recalled that she found Khomeini intelligent, and “the most handsome old man I had ever met in my life. He resembled the ‘Moses’ sculpted by Michelangelo.” And, she said, Khomeini was “not a puppet like Arafat or Qaddafi or the many other dictators I met in the Islamic world. He was a sort of Pope, a sort of king—a real leader. And it did not take long to realize that in spite of his quiet appearance he represented the Robespierre or the Lenin of something which would go very far and would poison the world. People loved him too much. They saw in him another Prophet. Worse: a God.”

Upon leaving Khomeini’s house after her first interview, Fallaci was besieged by Iranians who wanted to touch her because she’d been in the Ayatollah’s presence. “The sleeves of my shirt were all torn off, my slacks, too,” she recalled. “My arms were full of bruises, and hands, too. Do believe me: everything started with Khomeini. Without Khomeini, we would not be where we are. What a pity that, when pregnant with him, his mother did not choose to have an abortion.”

Today, Fallaci believes, the Western world is in danger of being engulfed by radical Islam. Since September 11, 2001, she has written three short, angry books advancing this argument. Two of them, “The Rage and the Pride” and “The Force of Reason,” have been translated into idiosyncratic English by Fallaci herself. (She has had difficult relationships with translators in the past.) A third, “The Apocalypse,” was recently published in Europe, in a volume that also includes a lengthy self-interview. She writes that Muslim immigration is turning Europe into “a colony of Islam,” an abject place that she calls “Eurabia,” which will soon “end up with minarets in place of the bell-towers, with the burka in place of the mini-skirt.” Fallaci argues that Islam has always had designs on Europe, invoking the siege of Constantinople in the seventh century, and the brutal incursions of the Ottoman Empire in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. She contends that contemporary immigration from Muslim countries to Europe amounts to the same thing—invasion—only this time with “children and boats” instead of “troops and cannons.” And, as Fallaci sees it, the “art of invading and conquering and subjugating” is “the only art at which the sons of Allah have always excelled.” Italy, unlike America, has never been a melting pot, or a “mosaic of diversities glued together by a citizenship. Because our cultural identity has been well defined for thousands of years we cannot bear a migratory wave of people who have nothing to do with us . . . who, on the contrary, aim to absorb us.” Muslim immigrants—with their burkas, their chadors, their separate schools—have no desire to assimilate, she believes. And European leaders, in their muddleheaded multiculturalism, have made absurd accommodations to them: allowing Muslim women to be photographed for identity documents with their heads covered; looking the other way when Muslim men violate the law by taking multiple wives or defend the abuse of women on supposedly Islamic grounds. (European governments are, in fact, hardening on these matters: France recently deported a Muslim cleric in Lyons who advocated wife-beating and the stoning of adulterous women.)

According to Fallaci, Europeans, particularly those on the political left, subject people who criticize Muslim customs to a double standard. “If you speak your mind on the Vatican, on the Catholic Church, on the Pope, on the Virgin Mary or Jesus or the saints, nobody touches your ‘right of thought and expression.’ But if you do the same with Islam, the Koran, the Prophet Muhammad, some son of Allah, you are called a xenophobic blasphemer who has committed an act of racial discrimination. If you kick the ass of a Chinese or an Eskimo or a Norwegian who has hissed at you an obscenity, nothing happens. On the contrary, you get a ‘Well done, good for you.’ But if under the same circumstances you kick the ass of an Algerian or a Moroccan or a Nigerian or a Sudanese, you get lynched.” The rhetoric of Fallaci’s trilogy is intentionally intemperate and frequently offensive: in the first volume, she writes that Muslims “breed like rats”; in the second, she writes that this statement was “a little brutal” but “indisputably accurate.” She ascribes behavior to bloodlines—Spain, she writes, has been overly acquiescent to Muslim immigrants because “too many Spaniards still have the Koran in the blood”—and her political views are often expressed in the language of disgust. Images of soiling recur in the books: at one point in “The Rage and the Pride” she complains about Somali Muslims leaving “yellow streaks of urine that profaned the millenary marbles of the Baptistery” in Florence. “Good Heavens!” she writes. “They really take long shots, these sons of Allah! How could they succeed in hitting so well that target protected by a balcony and more than two yards distant from their urinary apparatus?” Six pages later, she describes urine streaks in the Piazza San Marco, in Venice, and wonders if Muslim men will one day “shit in the Sistine Chapel.”

These books have brought Fallaci, who will turn seventy-seven later this month, and who has had cancer for more than a decade, to a strange place in her life. Much of the Italian intelligentsia now shuns her. (The German press has been highly critical, too.) A 2003 article in the left-wing newspaper La Repubblica called her “ignorantissima,” an “exhibitionist posing as the Joan of Arc of the West.” A fashionable gallery in Milan recently showed a large portrait of her—beheaded. After the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera published the long article that became “The Rage and the Pride,” La Repubblica ran a reply from Umberto Eco, which did not mention Fallaci by name but denounced cultural chauvinism and called for tolerance. “We are a pluralistic society because we permit mosques to be built in our own home, and we cannot give this up just because in Kabul they put evangelical Christians in jail,” he wrote. “If we did, we would become Taliban ourselves.”

Fallaci has repeatedly fallen afoul of some of Europe’s strict laws against vilifying religions or inciting racial hatred. (In Europe, the prevailing impulse toward certain kinds of outré opinions is to ban their expression.) In 2002, a French group, Movement Against Racism and for Friendship Between Peoples, tried unsuccessfully to get “The Rage and the Pride” banned. The following year, Swiss officials, under pressure from Muslim groups in that country, asked that she be extradited for trial; the Italian Minister of Justice refused the request. And she currently faces trial in Italy, on charges that amount to blasphemy, of all things. Last year, Adel Smith, a convert to Islam who heads a group called the Muslim Union of Italy, and who had previously sued the government to have a crucifix removed from his sons’ classroom, persuaded a judge in Bergamo to allow him to charge Fallaci with defaming Islam. A Mussolini-era criminal code holds that “whoever offends the state’s religion, by defaming those who profess it, will be punished with up to two years of imprisonment.” Though the code was written to protect the Catholic Church, it has been successively amended in the past ten years, so that it encompasses any “religion acknowledged by the state.” The complaint against Fallaci marks the first time that the code has been invoked on behalf of any religion but Catholicism. (In January, Fallaci’s supporters in the Italian Senate pushed through an amendment to the code, reducing the maximum penalty to five thousand euros.)

Yet Fallaci’s recent books, and the specious trial that she is facing as a result—her books may offend, but it is no less offensive to prosecute her for them—have also made her a beloved figure to many Europeans. The books have been best-sellers in Italy; together they have sold four million copies. To her admirers, she is an aging Cassandra, summoning her strength for one final prophecy. In September, she had a private audience with Pope Benedict XVI at Castel Gandolfo, his summer residence outside Rome. She had criticized John Paul II for making overtures to Muslims, and for not condemning terrorism heartily enough, but she has hopes for Joseph Ratzinger. (The meeting was something of a scandal in Italy, since Fallaci has always said that she is an atheist; more recently, she has called herself a “Christian atheist,” out of respect for Italy’s Catholic tradition.) Last December, the Italian government presented her with a gold medal for “cultural achievement.”

Fallaci’s arguments appeal to many Europeans on a visceral level. The murder of the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, the “honor killings” of young women in England and Sweden, and the controversy in France over whether girls may wear head scarves to school have underscored the enormous clash in values between secular Europeans and fundamentalist Muslim immigrants. In Holland, immigration officials have begun showing potential immigrants films and brochures that detail certain “European” values, including equality of the sexes and tolerance of homosexuality. The implicit suggestion is that in order to live in Europe you must accept these ideas. Such clumsy efforts betray the frustration and confusion that many Europeans have felt since the riots that broke out in the suburbs of Paris last fall—perhaps the most spectacular sign that the assimilation of Western Europe’s fifteen million Muslims has stalled in many places, and never started in others.

Some European intellectuals have given Fallaci credit for offering an enraged, articulate voice to people who are genuinely bewildered and dismayed by the challenges of assimilating Islamic immigrants. In 2002, writing in the Italian weekly Panorama, Lucia Annunziata, a former foreign correspondent and columnist, and Carlo Rossella, then the magazine’s editor, argued that “The Rage and the Pride” had “redefined Italy’s conception of the current conflict between the Western world and the Islamic world. . . . Oriana Fallaci has confronted the issue with ironclad simplicity: We are different, she has said. And, at this point, we are incompatible.” The French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut, writing in Le Point, said that Fallaci “went too far,” reducing all “Sons of Allah to their worst elements,” yet he commended her for taking “the discourse and the actions of our adversaries” at their word and—in the wake of September 11th, the execution of Daniel Pearl, the destruction of Buddhas in Afghanistan, and other atrocities committed in the name of Islam—not being intimidated by the “penitential narcissism that makes the West guilty of even that which victimizes it.”

Last year, a support committee for Fallaci collected some letters that it had received from people across Italy and presented them as a testimonial to her. A Florentine couple wrote, “Brava, Oriana. You had the courage and the pride to speak in the name of most Italians (who are perhaps too silent) who still have not sold out the social, moral, and religious values that belong to us. . . . If [immigrants] do not share our ideas, then why do they come to Italy? Why should we endure arrogance and interference by those who have no desire to integrate into our system and who are darkened by anti-Western hatred? We welcome them as guests, but immediately they act like the owners.” Another fan wrote, “In this tragic and historic moment, only one voice has been raised high to speak for the conscience of most Westerners. . . . That is why we are impotently witnessing the breakdown and decline of a civilization whose values are now ridiculed by those who are in charge of protecting them. . . . Thank you, Oriana.”

Fallaci owns an apartment in Florence and has an estate in the Tuscan countryside. But she spends most of the year in New York, where she leads a fairly solitary life and, necessarily, spends a lot of time visiting doctors. In November, when she delivered an acceptance speech for an award given by the conservative Center for the Study of Popular Culture, it was a rare public appearance.

“Darling,” she growled over the phone the first time we spoke, “as you well know, I never give interviews.” Strictly speaking, this isn’t true. Over the years, she’s given many of them, sometimes with embarrassing results—in Scheer’s 1981 Playboy interview, she complained about homosexuals who “swagger and strut and wag their tails” and “fat” women reporters who didn’t like her. When I visited her on a rainy Saturday afternoon in April, and again the next day, I found her voluble and dramatic, capable of leaping to her feet to illustrate a point, and shouting when she felt the point warranted it—which was often. She smoked little brown Nat Sherman cigarettes; smoking, she believes, “disinfects” her.

Fallaci’s New York residence is a handsome nineteenth-century brownstone, painted white, with a walled garden in the back. She had longed for such a house since childhood; as a young girl in Italy during the Second World War, she’d found a Collier’s magazine in a care package dropped by U.S. military pilots, and fallen in love with a photo essay about American houses. “It’s funny to say that, with the marvellous architecture we have in Italy, I desired a house like this,” she said. “I grew up with this obsession of a white house with a black door.” Inside, the second-floor rooms, where we talked, had a scholarly, slightly worn elegance. The bookshelves held translations of Fallaci’s books and leather-bound early editions of Dickens, Voltaire, and Shakespeare. There were eighteenth- and nineteenth-century oil paintings on the walls; an old-fashioned cream-colored dial phone sat on a small table with a stained-glass lamp. It was the sort of setting where you could imagine retired professors sipping port and sparring genially over Greek participles. It was not the sort of setting where you expected to find a woman of Fallaci’s age yelling “Mamma mia! ” and threatening to break various people’s heads and blow things up.

We sat down next to a table piled with newspaper clippings from Italy, which chronicled Fallaci’s anti-Islamic crusade: articles by her and articles about her, often on the front page. The Italian press is, as she puts it, “ob-sess-ed” with her. One article, “Reading Oriana in Tehran,” which had run in La Stampa, claimed that Fallaci was a legend among independent-minded women in Iran. “That’s damn good!” she said. Fallaci’s earlier books are widely available in Iran, but the trilogy has been banned. “You know what these women did?” she said. “They got copies in English and in French, and they photocopied them, chapter by chapter, and distributed them to others. They can go to jail for that.” The reporter for La Stampa had mainly found women who admired Fallaci for her earlier work: two female university students noted that Fallaci had been equally tough on the Shah and on Khomeini, and that she’d shown up to get her Iranian visa wearing nail polish and jeans.

On the day I visited, Fallaci was dressed like a refined European lady: tweed skirt, leaf-green sweater, handsome antique jewelry, suède pumps. She wore her hair tied neatly at the nape of her neck rather than long and loose, as she used to, but she still looked beautiful—she has a perfect oval face and robust cheekbones. She put on a pair of jewel-rimmed reading glasses as she brandished another clipping, and said with satisfaction, “Ah, this is the scandal!” The conservative newspaper Libero had campaigned, unsuccessfully, for Fallaci to be made a Senator for Life, an honor conferred by the Italian President. According to the paper, the outgoing President, Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, had considered giving Fallaci the title, but lost his nerve. “To me, in a sense, it was a relief,” Fallaci said. “I didn’t want to be Senator for Life, and stay in Rome. I would not know where to sit.” She hopped up to demonstrate, pointing to the left and the right sides of an imaginary aisle—she belonged to no political side. Nevertheless, with evident delight, she noted that Ciampi’s “wife was infuriated at him” for the decision. “For some time, she didn’t speak to him. Three days after Christmas, she managed to have me receive a bouquet of white flowers. That was cute.”

I visited Fallaci on the day before the Italian election, in which Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi was defeated by the center-left candidate, Romano Prodi. Fallaci told me that she had not sent in an absentee ballot. She loved referenda: “Do you want the hunter to go hunting under your window? No! Do you want the Koran in your schools? No!” “No” was something Fallaci was happy to say. But Berlusconi and Prodi were “two fucking idiots,” she said. “Why do the people humiliate themselves by voting? I didn’t vote. No! Because I have dignity. . . . If, at a certain moment, I had closed my nose and voted for one of them, I would spit on my own face.”

Many of the clippings on Fallaci’s table focussed on Adel Smith’s lawsuit against her. She said that she would not attend the trial, which is scheduled for later this month. Although she is no longer at risk of incarceration, she invoked the possibility. “Because, you know, I am a danger to myself if I get angry,” she said. “If they were thinking to give me three years in jail, I will say or do something for which they give me nine years! I am capable of everything if I get angry.”

I’d always thought of Fallaci as an icon of the nineteen-sixties—one of those women who had lived an emancipated life without ever calling herself a feminist, an insouciant heroine out of “The Golden Notebook” or “Bonjour Tristesse.” She denigrated marriage, got thrown out of nice restaurants for wearing slacks, and hung out with Anna Magnani and Ingrid Bergman. Her autobiographical novel “Letter to a Child Never Born” (1975) was a free woman’s despairing confession of ambivalence about bearing a child. “A Man” (1979) was a fictional tribute to her great love, the Greek resistance fighter Alexandros Panagoulis, who died in a suspicious automobile accident in Athens three years after they met. Panagoulis had been imprisoned, and endured torture, for his failed attempt on the life of the Greek junta leader George Papadopoulos, in 1968. “I didn’t want to kill a man,” he told Fallaci in an interview. “I’m not capable of killing a man. I wanted to kill a tyrant.” As a political prisoner, Panagoulis was defiant toward his captors and wrote poetry in his own blood; Fallaci considered him a model of what it is to be a man. I thought of her as a product of that heady time when big and bloody political matters were still at stake in Europe (dictators ruled Spain, Portugal, and Greece), but small, sophisticated cultural rebellions (movies, hair styles, poetic manifestos) made life chic and interesting. There’s some truth to this image, but Fallaci’s sensibility is a product less of the sixties than of the forties, and the struggle against Fascism in the Second World War.

Fallaci was born in Florence in 1929, to a family with a long history of rebellion. Her mother, Tosca, she said, was the orphaned daughter of an anarchist—“and I tell you those were people with balls! With balls! And they were the first ones to be executed.” On both sides of her family, she said, she had relatives who fought for the Risorgimento—“people who were always in jail.” Fallaci was an avid reader as a child (her parents lived modestly but splurged on books), and a favorite author was Jack London. His tales of brave acts in the face of savage nature inspired her to become a writer. She describes her father, Edoardo—a craftsman who became a leader in the anti-Fascist movement in Tuscany, and who served time in prison for it—as a sweet man. “Heroes can be sweet,” she said, adding that Panagoulis had been that way, too. But both of Fallaci’s parents prized courage and toughness in their three daughters. In “The Rage and the Pride,” she tells a story about the Allied bombardment of Florence on September 25, 1943. She and her family took refuge in a church as the bombs began to fall. The walls were shaking—the priest cried out, “Help us, Jesus!”—and Oriana, who was the eldest, at fourteen, began to cry. “In a silent, composed way, mind you,” she writes. “No moans, no hiccups. But Father noticed it all the same, and, in order to help me, to calm me down, poor Father, he did the wrong thing. He gave me a powerful slap—he stared me in the eyes and said, ‘A girl does not, must not, cry.’ ” Fallaci says that she’s never cried since—not even when Panagoulis died.

As a teen-ager, Fallaci did clandestine work for the anti-Fascist underground—she had her own nom de guerre, Emilia, and she carried explosives and delivered messages. After Italy surrendered, in September, 1943, and American and British prisoners began escaping from prison camps, one of her tasks was to accompany them “past the lines” and to safe refuge. Fallaci was chosen because she wore her hair in pigtails and looked deceptively innocent. “It was so scary, because there were minefields, and you never knew where the mines were,” she recalled. “When my mother read that in a book later, she said, to my father, ‘You would have sacrificed newly born children! You and your ideas.’ And then she said, ‘Well, but I had a feeling you were doing something like that.’ ”

Fallaci’s parents looked upon the Americans as their particular friends, and when she was in high school they insisted that she learn English when her classmates were studying French. It was the beginning of a lifelong affinity for America, even when, as during the Vietnam War, she was sharply critical of its policies. “In my old age, I have been thinking about this, and I have reached the conclusion that those who have physical courage also have moral courage,” she said. “Physical courage is a great test.” She added, “I know I have courage. But I’m not alone. My sister Neera was like me. And my second sister, Paola, too. It came from the education my parents gave us.”

She proudly told a story about her mother, which, like other recollections, sounded as if it might have been polished over time. “When my father was arrested, we didn’t know where they had him, so she went everywhere for two days and finally she found him, at the house of torture. It was called Villa Triste. They killed people there. And the Fascist major was named Mario Carità—Major Charity. Mother—I don’t know how she did it—she went to the office of Major Charity, passing a room that was full of blood on the floor, the blood of three men who had been arrested and tied together, and one of them was my father. Carità says, ‘Madam. I have no time to lose. Your husband will be executed tomorrow morning at six. You can dress in black.’ My mother got up—and I always imagine the scene this way, as if she were the Statue of Liberty—and my mother said, ‘Mario Carità, tomorrow morning I shall dress in black, like you said. But if you are born from the womb of a woman, ask your mother to do the same, because your day will come very soon.’ You could think for a year before you came up with something like that—to her, it came.” Her mother was pregnant at the time, Fallaci went on. “She mounted on her bicycle, and all at once she had pains so terrible. She entered into a beautiful building and, in the atrium, she lost the child. She put it in, I don’t know, a handkerchief or something. She mounted the bicycle again. She rode home. I opened the door, and there was mother, as pale as snow. And before she entered she said, ‘Father will be executed tomorrow morning at six, and Elena’—that was the name she had given the baby—‘is dead.’ No tears.” In the end, Edoardo Fallaci was spared, though he spent additional time in jail. Fallaci’s sister Neera became a writer, and died of cancer; Paola is a perfectionist gardener—imagine a cross between Martha Stewart and Oriana—who raises prize-quality chickens on Fallaci’s property in rural Tuscany.

Fallaci sees the threat of Islamic fundamentalism as a revival of the Fascism that she and her sisters grew up fighting. She told me, “I am convinced that the situation is politically substantially the same as in 1938, with the pact in Munich, when England and France did not understand a thing. With the Muslims, we have done the same thing.” She elaborated, in an e-mail, “Look at the Muslims: in Europe they go on with their chadors and their burkas and their djellabahs. They go on with the habits preached by the Koran, they go on with mistreating their wives and daughters. They refuse our culture, in short, and try to impose their culture, or so-called culture, on us. . . . I reject them, and this is not only my duty toward my culture. Toward my values, my principles, my civilization. It is not only my duty toward my Christian roots. It is my duty toward freedom and toward the freedom fighter I am since I was a little girl fighting as a partisan against Nazi-Fascism. Islamism is the new Nazi-Fascism. With Nazi-Fascism, no compromise is possible. No hypocritical tolerance. And those who do not understand this simple reality are feeding the suicide of the West.”

Fallaci refuses to recognize the limitations of this metaphor—say, the fact that Muslim immigration is not the same as an annexation by another state. And although European countries should indeed refuse to countenance certain cultural practices—polygamy, “honor killings,” and anti-Semitic teachings, for example—Fallaci tends to portray the worst practices of Islamic fundamentalists as representative of all Muslims. Certainly, European countries have made some foolish compromises in the name of placating Muslim residents. In Germany, where courts have ordered that Muslim religious instruction be offered in schools, just as Christian instruction is, critics have complained that the Islamic teaching often perpetuates a conservative version of Islam. The result, the historian Bernard Lewis argued, in a recent talk in Washington, is that “Islam as taught in Turkish schools is a sort of modernized, semi-secularized version of Islam, and Islam as taught in German schools is the full Wahhabi blast.” (This is a good reminder of why the American model of keeping religious instruction out of public schools facilitates assimilation.) Many of Fallaci’s objections, however, have more to do with her aesthetic sensibilities. For her, hearing Muslim prayers in Tuscany—she does her own wailing imitation—is a form of oppression. Yet such examples do not rise to the level of argument that she wants to make, which is that the native culture of Italy will collapse if Muslims keep immigrating.

“They live at our expense, because they’ve got schools, hospitals, everything,” she said at one point, beginning to shout. “And they want to build damn mosques everywhere.” She spoke of a new mosque and Islamic center planned for Colle di Val d’Elsa, near Siena. She vowed that it would not remain standing. “If I’m alive, I will go to my friends in Carrara—you know, where there is the marble. They are all anarchists. With them, I take the explosives. I make you juuump in the air. I blow it up! With the anarchists of Carrara. I do not want to see this mosque—it’s very near my house in Tuscany. I do not want to see a twenty-four-metre minaret in the landscape of Giotto. When I cannot even wear a cross or carry a Bible in their country! So I BLOW IT UP! ”

The magnificently rebellious Oriana Fallaci now cultivates, it seems, the prejudices of the petite bourgeoisie. She is opposed to abortion, unless she “were raped and made pregnant by a bin Laden or a Zarqawi.” She is fiercely opposed to gay marriage (“In the same way that the Muslims would like us all to become Muslims, they would like us all to become homosexuals”), and suspicious of immigration in general. The demonstrations by immigrants in the United States these past few months “disgust” her, especially when protesters displayed the Mexican flag. “I don’t love the Mexicans,” Fallaci said, invoking her nasty treatment at the hands of Mexican police in 1968. “If you hold a gun and say, ‘Choose who is worse between the Muslims and the Mexicans,’ I have a moment of hesitation. Then I choose the Muslims, because they have broken my balls.”

In “The Rage and the Pride,” Fallaci portrays the attacks of September 11th as a thunderclap that woke her from a quiet, novel-writing existence and transformed her, almost unwillingly, into an anti-Islamic rebel. But Fallaci’s distaste for Islam goes way back. Reasonable worries about the rise of Muslim fundamentalism were combined with a visceral revulsion and the need for a new enemy, in the post-Fascist, post-Communist world. Her interviews with Yasir Arafat (whom she loathed), Qaddafi (whom she also loathed), and even Muhammad Ali (whom she walked out on, she says, after he belched in her face) all fuelled her antipathy toward the Muslim world. So did her experiences in Beirut during its disintegration, in the nineteen-eighties—the basis for her 1990 novel, “Inshallah.”

I started wondering if Fallaci would tolerate any Muslim immigration, or any mosque in Europe, so I asked her these questions by e-mail, and she sent back lengthy replies. “The tolerance level was already surpassed fifteen or twenty years ago,” she wrote, “when the Left let the Muslims disembark on our coasts by the thousands. And it is well known . . . that I do not accept the mendacity of the so-called Moderate Islam. I do not believe that a Good Islam and a Bad Islam exist. Only Islam exists. And Islam is the Koran. And the Koran says what it says. Whatever its version. Of course there are exceptions. Also, considering the mathematical calculation of probabilities, some good Muslims must exist. I mean Muslims who appreciate freedom and democracy and secularism. But, as I say in the ‘Apocalypse,’ . . . good Muslims are few. So tragically few, in fact, that they must go around with bodyguards.” (Here she mentioned Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born former member of the Dutch parliament, whom Holland, shamefully, declared last month that it would strip of her citizenship, citing an irregularity in her 1997 asylum application.) She wrote that she found my question about whether she would tolerate any mosques in Europe “insidious” and “offensive,” because it “aims to portray me as the bloodthirsty fanatics, who during the French Revolution beheaded even the statues of the Holy Virgin and of Jesus Christ and the Saints. Or as the equally bloodthirsty fanatics of the Bolshevik Revolution, who burned the icons and executed the clergymen and used the churches as warehouses. Really, no honest person can suggest that my ideas belong to that kind of people. I am known for a life spent in the struggle for freedom, and freedom includes the freedom of religion. But the struggle for freedom does not include the submission to a religion which, like the Muslim religion, wants to annihilate other religions. Which wants to impose its ‘Mein Kampf,’ its Koran, on the whole planet. Which has done so for one thousand and four hundred years. That is, since its birth. Which, unlike any other religion, slaughters and decapitates or enslaves all those who live differently.”

My second meeting with Fallaci was a less inflammatory encounter. She is an excellent cook, and she made us lunch—cotechino sausage, polenta, mashed potatoes, and delicious little tarts with pine nuts and dried fruit—and served champagne. I’d never seen anyone approach certain kitchen tasks with such ferocity. “I must CRUSH the potatoes,” she declared. At one point, we spoke about populist leaders in Latin America, and the political left’s romance with them over the years; I mentioned Hugo Chávez, the President of Venezuela. “Mamma mia! Mamma mia! ” Fallaci shouted from the kitchen. “Listen,” she said more calmly. “You cannot govern, you cannot administrate, with an ignoramus.” When I left, she insisted on giving me a bag of chestnut flour and dictating a recipe for a dessert that she says children love. “If you make a mistake, you spoil everything,” she instructed, adding, “Get the good olive oil—not the kind they do in New Jersey.”

Fallaci was wearing a sweater and a skirt again that day. Late in life, she realized that skirts are more comfortable than the pants she had favored as a young woman. Besides, she wore pants when other women didn’t because she was “a person who had always gone against the current,” certainly since she started her writing career, at age sixteen, as a beat reporter for a Florentine newspaper. Now that everybody wore pants, what was the point? She had some evening dresses upstairs, relics from a brief period in her early thirties when she’d been a little less serious. But now they felt to her “like monuments”; where would she wear them? We talked about the historical novel that she had set aside after September 11th, when “this Islam business kidnapped me,” her regrets that she’s never had children, and her long illness. One of her doctors, she said, had asked her recently, “Why are you still alive?” Fallaci responded, “Dottore, don’t do that to me. Someday I break your head.” She added, “Another day, I smiled and said, ‘You tell me—you are the doctor.’ See, I got offended. ‘I don’t want to come here to hear about my death. Your duty is to speak to me about life, to keep me alive.’ ”

She surprised me with a charming story about being a young writer in New York in the nineteen-sixties. At the time, she recalled, she’d had a chance to interview Greta Garbo—a mutual friend wanted to set it up. But Fallaci admired Garbo’s fierce and elegant privacy, and didn’t want to pursue the matter. And then one winter evening Fallaci was shopping at the Dover Delicatessen, on Fifty-seventh Street, and Garbo happened to be there: “You couldn’t not recognize her. She was Greta Garbo. She was dressed like Greta Garbo—with the hair, the glasses. And she was choosing chicken with extreme care. She would look at a leg and toss it back, then the breast, and so on. And I felt ashamed of myself that I was observing her. I went in the other aisle, and I remember I got a lot of things, because I wanted her to go out and not go by me.” It was a rainy night and Fallaci had no umbrella. She recalled that Garbo, on her way out the door, stopped and held it open. “She said, ‘Here, Miss Fallaci.’ I looked like a poor, pitiful bird.” They walked together, under Garbo’s umbrella, to the corner of Third Avenue, and Fallaci—in a rare moment of restraint—barely said a word.

After I had interviewed Fallaci, I discovered two great examples of her journalism that I had not read before. In a witty 1963 article about Federico Fellini, Fallaci describes with wary, nervy thoroughness the many times and places that the great director kept her waiting. When she finally corners him, she begins by saying, “So then let us brace ourselves, Signor Fellini, and let us discuss Federico Fellini, just for a change. I know you find it hard: you are so withdrawing, so secretive, so modest. But it is our duty to discuss him, for the sake of the nation.” She goes on in this vein until Fellini cuts her off, saying, “Nasty liar. Rude little bitch.” In her introduction to the interview, she writes, “I used to be truly fond of Federico Fellini. Since our tragic encounter, I’m a lot less fond. To be exact, I’m no longer fond of him. That is, I don’t like him at all. Glory is a heavy burden, a murdering poison, and to bear it is an art. And to have that art is rare.” Equally absorbing, in a different way, was the section of her 1969 book, “Nothing, and So Be It,” in which she describes the events of October, 1968, in Mexico City, when soldiers shot and bayonetted hundreds of anti-government protesters. Fallaci was detained with a group of students, and was ultimately shot three times. “In war, you’ve really got a chance sometimes, but here we had none,” she writes. “The wall they’d put us up against was a place of execution; if you moved the police would execute you, if you didn’t move the soldiers would kill you, and for many nights afterward I was to have this nightmare, the nightmare of a scorpion surrounded by fire, unable even to try to jump through the fire because if it did so it would be pierced through.” Dragged down the stairs by her hair and left for dead, Fallaci was ultimately taken to a hospital, where she underwent surgery to remove the bullets. One of the doctors who cared for her came close and murmured, “Write all you’ve seen. Write it!” She did, becoming a crucial witness to a massacre that the Mexican government denied for years.

These pieces showed Fallaci in her prime. In her e-mail, however, she told me that she didn’t really remember the interview with Fellini—only that she didn’t like him. And her memories of Mexico City in 1968 had largely devolved into a dislike of Mexicans. Fallaci’s virtues are the virtues that shine most brightly in stark circumstances: the ferocious courage, and the willingness to say anything, that can amount to a life force. But Fallaci never convinced me that Europe’s encounter with immigration is that sort of circumstance.

Not that it would matter to her. “You’ve got to get old, because you have nothing to lose,” she said over lunch that afternoon. “You have this respectability that is given to you, more or less. But you don’t give a damn. It is the ne plus ultra of freedom. And things that I didn’t used to say before—you know, there is in each of us a form of timidity, of cautiousness—now I open my big mouth. I say, ‘What are you going to do to me? You go fuck yourself—I say what I want.’ ”

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David Sedaris: In the Waiting Room

Six months after moving to Paris, I gave up on French school and decided to take the easy way out. All I ever said was “Could you repeat that?” And for what? I rarely understood things the second time around, and when I did it was usually something banal, the speaker wondering how I felt about toast, or telling me that the store would close in twenty minutes. All that work for something that didn’t really matter, and so I began saying, “D’accord,” which translates to “I am in agreement,” and means, basically, “O.K.” The word was a key to a magic door, and every time I said it I felt the thrill of possibility.

“D’accord,” I told the concierge, and the next thing I knew I was sewing the eye onto a stuffed animal belonging to her granddaughter. “D’accord,” I said to the dentist, and she sent me to a periodontist, who took some X-rays and called me into his conference room for a little talk. “D’accord,” I said, and a week later I returned to his office, where he sliced my gums from top to bottom and scraped great deposits of plaque from the roots of my teeth. If I’d had any idea that this was going to happen, I’d never have said d’accord to my French publisher, who’d scheduled me the following evening for a television appearance. It was a weekly cultural program, and very popular. I followed the pop star Robbie Williams, and, as the producer settled me into my chair, I ran my tongue over my stitches. It was like having a mouthful of spiders—spooky, but it gave me something to talk about on TV, and for that I was grateful.

I said d’accord to a waiter, and received a pig’s nose standing erect on a bed of tender greens. I said it to a woman in a department store and walked away drenched in cologne. Every day was an adventure.

When I got a kidney stone, I took the Métro to a hospital, and said, “D’accord,” to a cheerful red-headed nurse, who led me to a private room and hooked me up to a Demerol drip. That was undoubtedly the best that d’accord got me, and it was followed by the worst. After the stone had passed, I spoke to a doctor, who filled out an appointment card and told me to return the following Monday, when we would do whatever it was I’d just agreed to. “D’accord,” I said, and then I supersized it with “génial,” which means “great.”

On the day of my appointment, I returned to the hospital, where I signed the register and was led by a slightly less cheerful nurse to a large dressing room. “Strip to your underwear,” she told me, and I said, “D’accord.” As the woman turned to leave, she said something else, and, looking back, I really should have asked her to repeat it, to draw a picture, if that’s what it took, because once you take your pants off d’accord isn’t really O.K. anymore.

There were three doors in the dressing room, and after removing my clothes I put my ear against each one, trying to determine which was the safest for someone in my condition. The first was loud, with lots of ringing telephones, so that was out. The second didn’t sound much different, and so I chose the third, and entered a brightly painted waiting room furnished with plastic chairs and a glass-topped table stacked high with magazines. A potted plant stood in the corner, and beside it was a second door, which was open and led into a hallway.

I took a seat and had been there for a minute or so when a couple came in and filled two of the unoccupied chairs. The first thing I noticed was that they were fully dressed, and nicely, too—no sneakers or sweatsuits for them. The woman wore a nubby gray skirt that fell to her knees and matched the fabric of her husband’s sports coat. Their black hair, which was obviously dyed, formed another match, but looked better on her than it did on him—less vain, I supposed.

“Bonjour,” I said, and it occurred to me that possibly the nurse had mentioned something about a robe, perhaps the one that had been hanging in the dressing room. I wanted more than anything to go back and get it, but, if I did, the couple would see my mistake. They’d think I was stupid, so to prove them wrong I decided to remain where I was and pretend that everything was normal. La la la.

It’s funny the things that run through your mind when you’re sitting in your underpants in front of a pair of strangers. Suicide comes up, but, just as you embrace it as a viable option, you remember that you don’t have the proper tools: no belt to wrap around your neck, no pen to drive through your nose or ear and up into your brain. I thought briefly of swallowing my watch, but there was no guarantee I’d choke on it. It’s embarrassing, but, given the way I normally eat, it would probably go down fairly easily, strap and all. A clock might be a challenge, but a Timex the size of a fifty-cent piece, no problem.

The man with the dyed black hair pulled a pair of glasses from his jacket pocket, and as he unfolded them I recalled a summer evening in my parents’ back yard. This was thirty-five years ago, a dinner for my sister Gretchen’s tenth birthday. My father grilled steaks. My mother set the picnic table with insect-repelling candles, and just as we started to eat she caught me chewing a hunk of beef the size of a coin purse. Gorging always set her off, but on this occasion it bothered her more than usual.

“I hope you choke to death,” she said.

I was twelve years old, and paused, thinking, Did I hear her correctly?

“That’s right, piggy, suffocate.”

In that moment, I hoped that I would choke to death. The knot of beef would lodge itself in my throat, and for the rest of her life my mother would feel haunted and responsible. Every time she passed a steak house, or browsed the meat counter of a grocery store, she would think of me and reflect upon what she had said—the words “hope” and “death” in the same sentence. But, of course, I hadn’t choked. Instead, I had lived and grown to adulthood, so that I could sit in this waiting room dressed in nothing but my underpants. La la la.

It was around this time that two more people entered. The woman looked to be in her mid-fifties, and accompanied an elderly man who was, if anything, overdressed: a suit, a sweater, a scarf, and an overcoat, which he removed with great difficulty, every button a challenge. Give it to me, I thought. Over here. But he was deaf to my telepathy, and handed his coat to the woman, who folded it over the back of her chair. Our eyes met for a moment—hers widening as they moved from my face to my chest—and then she picked a magazine off the table and handed it to the elderly man, who I now took to be her father. She then selected a magazine of her own, and as she turned the pages I allowed myself to relax a little. She was just a woman reading a copy of Paris Match, and I was just the person sitting across from her. True, I had no clothes on, but maybe she wouldn’t dwell on that, maybe none of these people would. The old man, the couple with their matching hair: “How was the hospital?” their friends might ask, and they’d answer, “Fine,” or “Oh, you know, the same.”

“Did you see anything fucked up?”

“No, not that I can think of.”

It sometimes helps to remind myself that not everyone is like me. Not everyone writes things down in a notebook, and then transcribes them into a diary. Fewer still will take that diary, clean it up a bit, and read it in front of an audience: “March 14th. Paris. Went with Dad to the hospital, where we sat across from a man in his underpants. They were briefs, not boxers, a little on the gray side, the elastic slack from too many washings. I later said to Father, ‘Other people have to use those chairs, too, you know,’ and he agreed that it was unsanitary.

“Odd little guy, creepy. Hair on his shoulders. Big idiot smile plastered on his face, just sitting there, mumbling to himself.”

How conceited I am to think I might be remembered, especially in a busy hospital where human misery is a matter of course. If any of these people did keep a diary, their day’s entry would likely have to do with a diagnosis, some piece of news either inconvenient or life-altering: the liver’s not a match, the cancer has spread to the spinal column. Compared with that, a man in his underpants is no more remarkable than a dust-covered plant, or the magazine- subscription card lying on the floor beside the table. Then, too, good news or bad, these people would eventually leave the hospital and return to the streets, where any number of things might wipe me from their memory.

Perhaps on their way home they’ll see a dog with a wooden leg, which I saw myself one afternoon. It was a German shepherd, and his prosthesis looked as though it had been made from a billy club. The network of straps holding the leg in place was a real eyeopener, but stranger still was the noise it made against the floor of the subway car, a dull thud that managed to sound both plaintive and forceful at the same time. Then there was the dog’s owner, who looked at his pet and then at me, with an expression reading, “That’s O.K. I took care of it.”

Or maybe they’ll run into something comparatively small yet no less astonishing. I was walking to the bus stop one morning and came upon a well-dressed woman lying on the sidewalk in front of an office-supply store. A small crowd had formed, and just as I joined it a fire truck pulled up. In America, if someone dropped to the ground, you’d call an ambulance, but in France it’s the firemen who do most of the rescuing. There were four of them, and, after checking to see that the woman was O.K., one of them returned to the truck and opened the door. I thought he was looking for an aluminum blanket, the type they use for people in shock, but instead he pulled out a goblet. Anywhere else it would have been a cup, made of paper or plastic, but this was glass, and had a stem. I guess they carry it around in the front seat, next to the axes or whatever.

The fireman filled the goblet with bottled water, and then he handed it to the woman, who was sitting up now and running her hand over her hair, the way one might when waking from a nap. It was the lead story in my diary that night, but, no matter how hard I fiddled with it, I felt something was missing. Had I mentioned that it was autumn? Did the leaves on the sidewalk contribute to my sense of utter delight, or was it just the goblet, and the dignity it bespoke: “Yes, you may be on the ground; yes, this drink may be your last—but let’s do it right, shall we?”

Everyone has his own standards, but, in my opinion, a sight like that is at least fifty times better than what I was providing. A goblet will keep you going for years, while a man in his underpants is good for maybe two days, a week at the most. Unless, of course, you are the man in his underpants, in which case it will probably stay with you for the rest of your life—not on the tip of your mind, not handy like a phone number, but still within easy reach, like a mouthful of steak, or a dog with a wooden leg. How often you’ll think of the cold plastic chair, and of the nurse’s face as she passes the room and discovers you with your hands between your knees. Such surprise, such amusement as she proposes some new adventure, then stands there, waiting for your “d’accord.”

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Martin Amis: In the Palace of the End

As one of the doubles of the son of the dictator, I am often to be found in the Palace of the End. Six days a week, to be precise: and twelve hours a day. Actual public impersonations of the successor — parades, investitures, going on television, and the like — are by now a thing of the past. But we have our standing duties. In the mornings, I set about my work in the Interrogation Wing. Then, in the afternoons, following a glass of scented coffee with the other doubles, I make filmed love to — or have filmed sex with — a series of picked beauties in the Recreation Wing. The Palace of the End is built in the shape of a titanic eagle: the beaked head downturned, the scalloped pinions outthrust. ... It was the brainchild of Old Nadir, who is very slowly dying of the injuries he sustained in the notorious "toilet bomb" assault at another of his palaces, in the south of our country. And now all power rests with his only son: Nadir the Next.

Until recently, at least, my work in the Interrogation Wing was not particularly onerous. I wasn't obliged to participate in the full course of the numerous procedures. My job was to "appear," super suddenly, at the climax of this or that cross-questioning (which might have gone on for days or weeks); flanked by armed infantrymen, I would stamp into the cubicle, wearing camouflage fatigues and cripplingly heavy combat boots, and administer one backhand blow to the suspect's face. And that was all. But nowadays, for several reasons, I am expected, as are the other doubles, to apply myself more variedly. We have not exactly been reduced to the status of mere bucket boys and poker-warmers — no; but in these tense times we must put ourselves about and show willing.

The interior of the Interrogation Wing used to be laid out in the traditional "cells and cellars" arrangement: dripping passageways, clanking iron doors, rooms within rooms ("the kennels"), and so on — with the howls and screeches of the suspects decently muffled or snatched or cut short. Now it's rather more open plan. One enters an anti-hospital, a vast factory of excruciation: there the strappado, here the bastinado; there the rack, here the wheel. The more communal atmosphere is meant "to discourage the others," and it's certainly true that, as far as the suspect is concerned, the introduction to the Interrogation Wing is far worse than any death. Indeed, it became almost universal practice for the prisoners to attempt summary suicide by the only means available: the dental excision of their own tongues.

However understandable, this response also entrained a paradox: the tongueless ones could neither proclaim their innocence nor (by far the wiser course) trumpet their guilt. In one way, it made no difference. At a certain point — perhaps months later — the prisoner's head would give a lolling nod, and the interrogator would stroll to the old Xerox machine for the standard confession, which the prisoner would then initial. After more torture preludial to death, ninety-nine per cent of those who enter the Interrogation Wing are eventually hanged; the remainder are sent home fatally envenomed, with a day or two to live — and, no doubt, a tale or two to tell. It goes without saying that this minority never includes any tongueless ones. They have a tale to tell, but they will never tell it.

Anyway, these days the question of the tongueless ones is academic. There are no more tongueless ones. All suspects now have their teeth smashed and pulled in the cubicles of the Reception Hall, long before they are even fingerprinted by the registrars.

At twelve-forty-five, the doubles congregate in the doubles' commissary, which is situated in the main body of the building — in the golden eagle's muscular torso. At any given time there are twenty or thirty doubles stationed at the Palace of the End (though there are scores of us in the capital, and dozens more in every major provincial town). Idling and milling around the doubles' commissary, we enjoy a glass of coffee, and ready ourselves for the work of the afternoon.

For a double, this half hour in the doubles' commissary is a depersonalizing experience, to say the least. We all measure six feet one, and we all weigh two hundred and twenty-seven pounds. We all have the same glistening black quiff, the same protuberant, blood-flecked brown eyes, the same slablike front teeth (with the same missing canine), the same patch over the same eye. We wear an eye patch because Nadir wears an eye patch; and Nadir wears an eye patch because he was shot in the face, by a bodyguard, seventeen months ago. And here I touch on one of the heavier duties of a Presidential double. All the injuries sustained by Nadir, during the course of the increasingly frequent and desperate attempts on his life, must, naturally, be duplicated in his surrogates. For the blast to the left eye, we were, in turn, strapped and clamped into position with a small blunderbuss poised on a tripod six inches away; many doubles were lost in the initial efforts (despite countless experiments on a variety of suspects), and many more were decommissioned when their wounds failed to heal in the proper way. Similarly, every double lacks a right kneecap, a left heel, a left shoulder, and the fourth and fifth fingers of his left hand. We have all spent time in wheelchairs, on crutches, in neck braces, in arm casts. We are additionally subject to periodic poisonings. More recently, we all had our hair scorched off (after a flamethrower attack on the son of the dictator), and for a while a team of barbers and surgeons appeared every day to regulate the condition of our fuzz and blisters.

Entering the doubles' commissary is, as I say, a depersonalizing experience. It is to enter a hall of mirrors. Who is that man by the window with his back turned to the room? He slowly swivels. Yes: it is I.... There's no little pleasure to be had, naturally, in mingling with one's peers. But the conversation is always somewhat strained. It isn't just the guaranteed presence of five or six professional informers, posing as doubles — for we are all informers, and inform on one another as a matter of course. No. It is the feeling (entirely unfounded, no doubt) that Nadir himself is perhaps among us. Once in a while, as you pass the time of day and complain about the weather, you sense in your interlocutor a wavering heat in the eyes, and a heat from the body (and a hot smell, too: the smell of power) that seems to betray the proximity of the Next.

There is one double, and one double only, with whom I feel I can be more or less myself: Mekhlis. I always know it's izings, the raucous "squad bangs," and so on. Now we recline in luxurious apartments with our lady friends of the afternoon; we feed them peeled jargonelles drenched in choice liqueurs; I might softly declaim a few verses of the immortal poet Narciso as I reach for my lute. Then, at two-fifty, you become aware of the activation of the camera, and you proceed.

Nowadays, a doubles best possible result, in the Recreation Wing, is to bring about multiple orgasm. Any kind of orgasm at all is an inestimable prize; and a solid success rate will suffice to protect a double from disfavor or disgrace or disaster. But multiple — and preferably continuous — orgasm is what we always feel we have to aim for, and it is a not entirely happy double who, sipping his cola in the commissary at seven-thirty-five, has failed, that day, to achieve it.

At the time, it was thought that the reason for Nadir's policy change was baldly utilitarian. He had, by then, simply run out of odalisques and filles de nuit, and was now working his way through the general population: young nurses, young secretaries, young schoolteachers — nearly all of them young widows, needless to say. I do not subscribe to this explanation (and am attempting to formulate my own). But the fact remains that the double confronts an altogether different kind of assignment in the Recreation Wing. On entry into its apartments, as I made the air hum with my switch, I used to encounter an ogreish wink and a lewd roll of the tongue. Now I encounter the isolated stare of the girl next door, and do so with diffidence. Mekhlis claims he speaks for all the doubles when he says that they liked it much, much better in the old days: you make your pact with pain, and that's that. Well, he doesn't speak for me. The new pressures faced by a double push down into the very lining of a man, and involve mortal danger (not least from suicide). But I wouldn't go back. No, I wouldn't go back.

And the months do pass.

Your first objective, of course, is to still the trembling. Normally you would hope to get this out of the way over lunch: you calmly adumbrate what lies ahead, and itemize the rewards and penalties attending success or failure. (The young women are also sharply warned that the lengthy verification process — polygram, scopolamine — will expose all attempts at simulation: such an orgasm, as interpreted by the Next, is a deadly affront.) And yet some of them go on trembling well into the afternoon, despite the skilled foot massage, the reciprocal ablutions, the application of many a telling unguent. Indeed, some of them never stop trembling, and the challenge, in these cases, is to find the deeper rhythm or logic of it, and so transform vibration into vibrancy. It is not the work of a moment.

Today, for example, I entertained a young anesthetist from the provincial capital. Judiciously, I plied her with fine wines, told her a succession of amusing anecdotes, and recited certain stanzas in praise of her pulchritude, which was considerable, despite the belly-dancer outfit and the ghoulish maquillage on which Nadir still invariably insists — and despite the cladding of hatred in her eyes. The young anesthetist's hands and voice were steady enough; but when I romantically hoisted her into my arms and carried her to the bed she felt like a bronze statue (one of the more modest statues of the Next, perhaps) — all suppleness and buoyancy lost, and as cold and adhesive as dry ice. Toward the end of the third hour of unpunctuated cunnilingus, I thought I might be beginning to get somewhere; but in the end the young anesthetist was unable to respond. She will lose her passport and her right to medical assistance. As for me, the non-satisfaction, the anticlimax, will go on my P-card. It will be noticed.

We used to have the ability, sometimes, to arouse them with our beauty. For we once were beautiful. Regrettably, during his various incapacitations, the Next has now gained some ninety-five pounds; and there are also the hideous "splatter wounds" to his chest and back, sustained in a dual R.P.G. and I.E.D. assault (rocket-propelled grenade and improvised explosive device) while he was travelling underground by monorail. Then, too, there was the hit from the A.T.S. — or anti-tank shell — he took in the ballroom of a provincial palace, whose casing, and much glass, became temporarily embedded in his crown and nape. No, we are not beautiful any longer. One vast lesion: that's what I am. When we shower together -and there are only a dozen of us now — we look all red and raw, like a convocation of enormous penises.

The darkest moment of the day, I find-surprisingly, perhaps-is the midday change: the adoption of the pointed slippers. This is when I have to deal with my humanity, and answer the questions posed to me by my shrivelled soul. And so I gird myself for the next cowering honey-blonde, the next pale brunette, the next resplendently contemptuous redhead, all of them trembling, trembling.

Obviously, anticlimax does not represent success-but there is a whole other order of failure. A whole other magnitude of failure. We don't talk about it. Mekhlis doesn't talk about it. I don't talk about it. This is why the moment in the locker room is, if you like, a confession: a confession of the ' male secret. . . . To err is human. It can be tolerated, every now and again. But we all know the point at which we can expect the lavish, the in-wrought wrath of the potentate. And there is, of course, another reason that this second order of failure-so radical, so all-deciding — particularly incenses Nadir the Next.

At eight o'clock, we repair to our separate bungalows on the grounds. Fraternization among doubles was always strongly discouraged (to thwart conspiracy), but now, in these days of laxity and dissolution, as the Next ages, as we age, there is a more or less nightly bazaar of black-market aphrodisiacs in our compound, all kinds of potions and philters — every known quackery, as well as every known pharmaceutical. To step out into the capital is, of course, an impossibility; a double wouldn't last half a minute in the capital, or anywhere else. But here at night, with all these pots and packets and powders, so needfully assembled and dispersed, we can still get a sense of the life of the city.... I stand before the mirror. I am choking on my own tongue-it looks like the fin of a flayed shark-and must soon submit to my third lingual "carve-, down." Is that myself I see, or am I staring through glass at another double?

The months pass. And it can't be long now. For us, and for the Next — so ceaselessly are his bastions mined, his bunkers trip-wired, his bolt-holes booby-trapped.

Some doubles say that there have been worse times to be a double of Nadir's. Years ago, before my arrival at the Palace of the End, he used to send them out to give fiery speeches in city squares, to parade invitingly in open limousines, to march at the head of tickertape tattoos. All, of course, were briskly assassinated, thus somewhat alleviating, for a short time (or so he felt), the danger posed to the Next.

Other doubles argue that there have been better times to be a double: when, for instance (this is Mekhlis), the doubles were asked to uphold their mercilessness as they moved from one wing to the other. The "pact with pain" theory. I remember those days, and the mental atmosphere was certainly very different.

Enmeshed in an atrocity-producing situation, the human being (according to Mekhlis) responds with one of two psychological strategies or mechanisms. The first is called "numbing." I remember numbing: like submission to a drug of deeply unwelcome and alien efficacy. The second strategy or mechanism, curiously, is called "doubling." That's what we all do now. There is the person of the morning, and then, following the period in the changing room, there is the person of the afternoon.

And the doubles have doubled. I think I can prove it. The laws of our country do not permit the execution of female virgins. Circumventing this stricture, by mass rape, used to be one of our perks. But ever since Nadir was shot in the face, and things changed so markedly, no double will have anything to do with the forced deflowerings; we leave all that to the bucket boys and poker-warmers and the other, humbler torturers of the Interrogation Wing.

The destiny of the failed double (one who repeatedly creeps in tears from the luxurious apartments, with his pointed slippers in his hand) is probably worth mentioning. Such a double must watch all his clan submit to the antic horror of the confessionals, but the double himself is dispatched by lethal injection -- put to sleep, like a toothless dog. No further harm or disfigurement is visited on his body.

One day I was about to supervise the "de-gloving" of an elderly suspect when Mekhlis, in contravention of a major ground rule (doubles are never to appear plurally in the Interrogation Wing), drew me aside and, in a thick, hiccuppy whisper, passed on the rumor of the latest attempt on Nadir. I had just started to work, and so there were several anxious hours to endure before I limped into the doubles' commissary at twelve-forty-five.

There are only six doubles now. Some have died from complications arising from their more recent injuries (the bazooka attack); some have taken their own lives. Many, after grimly monotonous failure, have attracted the special execration of the Next.... Because, you see, Nadir is impotent. He has ever been impotent. All his grown life, helpless, as in a dream, surrounded by women he could do nothing with.

Rumor, where there is no settled truth, stops feeling like rumor: briefly but palpably, it feels far more convincing than any immutable fact. ... It was at first believed, in the doubles' commissary, that we would lose a foot, an arm, an ear, the other eye. (The other eye -- what would that spell for our tasks of the afternoon? We could continue. But why would he want us to?) It seemed that he had been bayonetted in the guts, poleaxed in the throat, harpooned in the mouth. We spoke with unusual license (and the room was, of course, an aviary of mobile phones), because we could cast off the resilient superstition that Nadir was among us. Nadir was not among us; he was fighting for his life in one of the futuristic Presidential hospitals. Could the doctors be trusted? Or would they deliberately bungle their work, as they had with our recent tracheostomies and cerebral trephinations? At one-fifty-five, we received three independent reports that confirmed our worst fear: the Next, while crossing the Oder-Haff by submarine, had, like his father, fallen victim to the dreaded toilet bomb.

In the changing room, I sat on the bench, wearing the colossal canopy of my kimono; at my feet, the pointed slippers; by my side, the tasselled tarboosh. I was wondering, as I always do at this time of day, why the body's genius for pain so easily outstrips its fitful talent for pleasure; wondering why the pretty trillings of the bedroom are so easily silenced by the inconceivable vociferation of the Interrogation Wing; wondering why the spasms and archings of orgasm are so easily rendered inert and insensible when compared to the contortions of torture, jagged and instantaneous, like lightning. You "respond" to that, and no mistake; there's never any need to get them into the right mood. And consider how pain can be made to proliferate: where is the role, in the realm of pleasure, for the three-year-old daughter?

It is all over now, anyway. Nadir the Next will join Old Nadir in the spaceship of permanent intensive care, his center of gravity replaced by a raw hollow. Whether he lives or dies, the fetish of verisimilitude will draw each double to the sandbagged cell and its rigged toilet bowl (with the limpet mine tucked under the U-bend), and the surgical team standing by.

This afternoon in the Palace of the End I shall strive, as Nadir's proxy or prosthesis, to be ever more tremulously tender. I think I understand this gravitation of the Next's: the tendency to the tender, in the Recreation Wing. I can empathize with him, after all — and I feel something like a hard vacuum in the side of our heads where our eye used to be. But I am not the Next. I am only his double, and my half of it reads like this. When you have been hurt yourself, you don't want to hurt anyone. When you love something so intimately fragile as your own body, you don't want to hurt anyone. That's what I say to myself in the changing room. Please let me not have to, hurt anyone.

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Claudia Roth Pierpont: The Great Enemy

A moderate, amicable, reasonable man, fulfilling his duties to his family and society: Tolstoy famously condemned the type in “The Death of Ivan Ilych”—“Ivan Ilych’s life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible”—a judgment that Nathan Zuckerman believed to be uncharitable and suspected to be wrong. “Happy people exist too. Why shouldn’t they?” asks Philip Roth’s longtime alter ego, challenging Tolstoy in the early pages of “American Pastoral.” Roth’s 1997 novel depicts a moderate, amicable, and reasonable man assaulted by the forces of history: the all-American hero Swede Levov, whose shining moral confidence betrays not a chink through which the dark or terrible might penetrate. Maybe Tolstoy was right in regard to nineteenth-century Russia, Zuckerman admits; but in contemporary New Jersey, as far as anyone can tell from looking at Levov, ordinary lives turn out to be “just great, right in the American vein.” Zuckerman soon discovers how wrong his own judgment has been. Swede Levov is destroyed precisely because of his trust in the safeguards of a respectable life. How could such a man ever be prepared for the change of luck, for the loss of control, for the physical and mental suffering that has no explanation? But then who is? “The tragedy of the man not set up for tragedy,” Zuckerman concludes: “that is every man’s tragedy.”

Of all the subjects that Philip Roth has tackled in his career—the Jewish family, sex, American ideals, the betrayal of American ideals, political zealotry, personal identity, the list could go on and on—none have proved as inexhaustible as the human body (usually male) in its strength, its frailty, and its often ridiculous need. Over the years, the subject has undergone as many complications and elaborations as the author’s body of work. Performing what would seem the most interpretatively limited of acts, thirteen-year-old Alexander Portnoy, masturbating behind the bathroom door (scandalizing readers in 1969), and aging Mickey Sabbath, masturbating over his mistress’s tomb (upping the ante in 1995), are emotional worlds apart: the boy holds on to the flesh, literally, in rebellion against the life that is being forced upon him; the old man desperately holds on to the life that is being taken away. A fiercely comic shtick has become, with the passage of time, a fiercely comic shtick that is also a howl to the heavens and a profound show of grief. Of all the adversaries that this often gleefully contentious novelist has taken on (Orthodox rabbis, orthodox feminists, another list impressively long), even the most insubordinate flesh cannot evade the one that Roth—at seventy-three—has been tracking now for some time: “the adversary that is illness,” as he writes in his new book, “Everyman,” “and the calamity that waits in the wings.” It will come as no surprise to readers of “The Anatomy Lesson” or “Sabbath’s Theater” that the fortress of the body has finally been taken by the enemy.

“The Summoning of Everyman” is the full title of the fifteenth-century English morality play from which Roth has drawn his title and some of his allegorical aims. The imperious summoning is done by Death (“A great enemy,” Everyman moans, “that hath me in wait”), whom the medieval dramatist provides with a choice speaking role. Although this talkative personage arrives without warning, leaving Everyman—who has passed his life in pursuit of worldly pleasures—frantically unprepared to face the final reckoning, Roth’s hero is beset by the kind of modern medical warnings that keep death ever present in one’s mind. The question is whether these portents have left him any better prepared. Roth begins with Everyman’s end: this brief novel opens at his funeral, and goes back in time to revisit a hernia operation when he is nine, a burst appendix at thirty-four, cardiac surgery at fifty-six, and an increasingly frequent series of hospitalizations for angioplasties, the installation of heart stents, and a defibrillator. Decades of health are passed over as beside the point; there is nothing like illness to hone the consciousness. And yet, as might be expected of this least abstract of writers, Roth counters the allegorical sweep with an earthly comedy unimaginable in the book’s divinely focussed predecessor—a wholly mortal, often gorgeously mundane realm that, given the absence of God in even a walk-on role, appears as the only heaven we are likely to get.

Roth adheres to precedent, however, in the nature of his hero, who is not a celebrated writer (like Zuckerman), or a teacher of literature (like Roth’s other alter ego, David Kepesh), or even a man of “monumental ordinariness,” like Swede Levov, but, rather, a man of strictly ordinary ordinariness: the modern Everyman is a “good boy” who longed to be an artist but, choosing instead to please his parents, married and had children and went into advertising to support them. That he eventually abandoned his wife and children—and destroyed his next marriage by having an affair—makes him all the more ordinary, as he sees it, defending himself against his abandoned sons’ unappeasable anger: “He was one of the millions of American men who were party to a divorce that broke up a family. But did he beat their mother? Did he beat them? Did he fail to support their mother or fail to support them? . . . What could have been avoided?” It is initially hard to know how one is meant to take this man’s sometimes whiny excuses—he complains that his sons do not understand that “he had lost the same family they did”—particularly since Roth, in the interest of allegorical simplicity, has done without any Zuckerman-like intercessor to interpret or explain. One is left more or less on one’s own with Everyman—the character is not called by that name, but no other is supplied—who pleads his case as well as a fatally bewildered human being can.

Roth has never been a particular friend to good boys. From the brash excitability of “Portnoy’s Complaint” to the combative rage of “Sabbath’s Theater,” his heroes’ drive for moral and erotic freedom—so often bound together—has inspired his wildest flights of literary voice. Roth’s Everyman is not without the baser instincts, and one is frankly relieved when, exhausted by contrition, he turns against his now middle-aged sons with a quintessentially Rothian exclamation-dotted outburst: “You wicked bastards! You sulky fuckers! You condemning little shits!” Then, too, there is the twenty-four-year-old Danish model for whose posterior “little hole” he betrays his loving second wife. In general, though, Everyman plays the straight man, a sort of basso continuo against which other, more expressive vocal lines rise. He is no match for the furious but reasoned eloquence with which his loving wife announces that she’s throwing him out, or for the death-riff brio of any number of incidental characters: the fellow handing over the sports page in a hospital waiting room who confides that he has spent a decade recovering from deaths and divorce only to find himself sick (“And that’s when I began to imagine someone coming to me and saying, ‘Now we’re going to cut off your right arm as well. Do you think you can take that?’ ”); or the woman who has been weeping hysterically at funerals—upset, her husband reports, by the fact that “she isn’t eighteen anymore”—for fifty years. Roth has always been a devastating mimic; these voices are immediately recognizable yet sharpened to draw blood, a gathering requiem in the vernacular.

The music of speech and the convolution of motive: we could be almost anywhere in Roth’s twenty-seven published volumes. The same for the opposition of ethics and desire: the first element of the equation has often been forgotten, along with Roth’s compulsions as a moralist, which were basic to his work long before medieval allegory caught his eye. Portnoy’s infamous complaint was neither his masturbatory inclination nor the immoderate attentions of a Jewish mother but—in the book’s quasi-medical definition—“a disorder in which strongly felt ethical and altruistic impulses are perpetually warring with extreme sexual longings.” The real struggle, Portnoy wails, is to “be bad—and to enjoy it!” Roth’s Everyman, despite the benefits of experience (like Roth, he was born in 1933), suffers from much the same complaint. In this modern morality play, sex is still battling it out with a conscience as demanding as a medieval God. If the welcome news is that the body, to the very end, will not renounce its animating claims, what comes as a shock in this latest work—what makes it seem indeed a late work, corporeally humbled—is the devastating price there is to pay.

“Listen to Uncle Shmuck, will you? Things come and go, and you have got to be a receptacle, let them pass right through,” an elder wise man advises one of the twentysomething heroes of Roth’s first novel, “Letting Go.” Published in 1962, this early work was recently reissued by the Library of America, in the first of eight projected volumes—two have been released so far—that will include Roth’s entire oeuvre by 2013. (There will have to be an extension for works written after he turns eighty.) “Otherwise death will be a misery for you, boy,” the philosophical counsellor warns. “Wait and accept and learn to pull the hand away. Don’t clutch! ” Of course, the young man can’t keep himself from clutching—at everything he takes for life—or he wouldn’t be in need of such advice. Roth himself was twenty-nine when he published “Letting Go,” a long and overtly Jamesian novel in which a finespun literary drama inspired by the works of the Master is sporadically violated (and enlivened) by scenes out of an overtly Jewish literary vaudeville that point to the works of the Meister still to emerge. This first novel feels, in fact, like the work of an older, far more conventional writer than Roth had started out as, just a few years before, with the stories of “Goodbye, Columbus” (which share the Library of America volume), or than he was again to become—“Portnoy” roars onto the scene in Volume II—although at times his genuine youth does shine through. “I’m past fifty,” Uncle Shmuck offers his skeptical nephew as a guarantee of wisdom. “Nearing the end.”

Tenderness and nostalgia, however unlikely, are present almost from authorial infancy—“How do you keep life going,” another twentyish hero of “Letting Go” frets, “exactly as it was when you were ten years old?” The need to hang on is nearly as urgent as the need to escape from the all-giving, all-consuming family, and from the determinedly respectable post-immigrant Jewish world it represents. Even the most ruthless farce of such constricting family life—“Jew Jew Jew Jew Jew Jew!” the adolescent Alexander Portnoy decries the boundaries of his parents’ world; “I happen also to be a human being!”—is laced with a tenderness that more than holds its own. This is not the aspect of “Portnoy’s Complaint” that made Roth famous virtually overnight, but, now that the dirty laundry has been airing for thirty-seven years and the cause of Portnoy’s distress (while no less funny) has taken on a nearly historical dimension in the annals of Jewish anxiety, the familial affection is startlingly vivid—if, for Portnoy, just another aspect of the engulfing threat. There is his mother’s housewifely magic, the cleaning and the polishing and the jello in which sliced peaches miraculously defy the law of gravity; his father’s struggle to earn a living despite his lack of education and the crushing bias of Protestant America; the way his mother talks (“The first line of poetry I ever hear! And I remember it!”); his father walking with him on Sundays (“I can’t go off to the country and find an acorn on the ground without thinking of him”). In sum, or, rather, in teetering balance with the hysterical rage of Portnoy the grownup psychiatric patient, there is “everything I remember with pleasure—I mean with a rapturous, biting sense of loss!”

It would not be hard to trace similar veins of nearly ecstatic affection running through the works of the “savage satirist of American letters” (as Nathan Zuckerman is dubbed, when—in “Zuckerman Unbound”—he turns out to have written a book uncommonly like “Portnoy”). Even so, in more recent years personal tenderness has reached a new intensity: with Roth’s autobiographical essay “The Facts” (1988) and the story of his father’s death, in “Patrimony” (1991); with Mickey Sabbath’s aching memories of summers on the Jersey shore; and certainly with Roth’s last book, “The Plot Against America,” in which a family of working-class Newark Jews—the Roths—are caught in a fascist drama that legitimatizes all the Old World fears that drove young Portnoy to the couch, and that gives their simple decency a chance to expand into outright heroism, both physical and moral. Yet none of this holds a candle to the incandescent familial regard of “Everyman.” This is a book in which the narrator, finding that his deepest pleasure derives from visiting his parents’ graves, realizes that “the tenderness was out of control.”

Everyman may not have a name, but his older brother is called Howie, and he is perfect: healthy, strong, a self-made millionaire, affable, generous, a terrific husband, father, and brother who is also an exceptional athlete, playing both water polo and polo on a pony—a man truly out of an allegory, or a fairy tale. And the women in the book are even better. “When he is sick, every man wants his mother,” Roth wrote in “The Anatomy Lesson.” “If she’s not around, other women must do.” Here the hero is sick much of the time, and “Everyman” is filled with loyal post-op heroines waiting for the anesthesia to wear off. First, of course, there is his mother (“She was what calmed his apprehension and allowed him to be brave”) and then, in turn, his almost equally caring second wife, Phoebe (“whose soft appearance belied her equanimity and steadfastness”), and his Cordelia-like daughter, Nancy (“There are such people, spectacularly good people—miracles, really—and it was his great fortune that one of these miracles was his own incorruptible daughter”). Contrary to his reputation, Roth has been writing memorable female characters since he started out—the Library of America volumes offer numerous examples (even if one refuses to sexually reclassify the man who turns into a giant breast). His most heartfelt love story, “Sabbath’s Theater,” presents a heroine who is over fifty and (slightly) overweight but who, more important, is both sexually rapacious and spiritually pure, traits that Roth manages to make seem naturally allied. This is not often the case with Roth—this is not often the case with anyone—but in “Everyman” Roth seems determined to prove that sex and love are cripplingly irreconcilable, and that the center of life that is adult love does not hold.

Because the other sort of woman is here as well: a nineteen-year-old secretary with whom Everyman—or, as he is at the moment, Everyboss—engages in some speedy sex on the office floor; and she of the “little hole,” with whom our hero is spending a sneak weekend when his wife unexpectedly phones to tell him that his mother has had a stroke. His mother dies just before he manages to get home, and his marriage ends just afterward, prompting the stunning realization that “he had lost the two women whose devotion had been the underpinning of his strength.” And gained what, in their place? There is some good old-fashioned Rothian naughtiness about buggering his eager and well-pleased young mistress and, later on, some poignant reflections about the deeper lure of a sexual affair—“the last great outburst of everything”—when age has more or less removed it from reach. In regard to his ruined marriage, there is even the not so bad excuse that he had not slept with his wife in years. But neither the excuses nor the pleasures add up to much. The scales of gain and loss do not remotely balance. His brief marriage to the young model quickly degenerates into farce (one is actually grateful, among all these worthy heroines, to read of a completely superficial woman—or, at least, one who is not willing to play nurse). And so it happens that, facing the end of his life, Everyman is left alone.

“The worst of being unbearably alone was that you had to bear it—either that or you were sunk,” he muses. “You had to work hard to prevent your mind from sabotaging you by its looking hungrily back at the superabundant past.” But the hungry backward glance is what this book is all about. It explains the impossible goodness of so many of the characters. Roth’s Everyman is not imperceptive or naïve but helplessly under the spell of mortality: no radical insights, no celestial harmonies, only an unrelenting awareness of unalterable mistakes, an amalgam of bad conscience, gratitude, memory, and longing. Roth has written before about what such a state of mind does to our estimation of others, about the high-pitched admiration that takes hold (as he wrote in “American Pastoral”) in the limousine travelling behind the hearse. In the early nineteen-eighties, he noted in an interview how astonishingly few great works of fiction have been written about illness and disease: “Cancer Ward,” “The Magic Mountain,” “The Death of Ivan Ilych,” “Malone Dies”—virtually nothing compared with the number of works about, say, adultery. Since then, he has gone some way toward evening the score (despite the points he’s racked up for adultery). “Everyman” is a comparatively slight work—or, perhaps, an adjunct work—more akin to “The Dying Animal” than to Roth’s complex variations on the theme, and even, at times, in its exposed sentiment, closer to “Our Town” than to the dour European works that he invoked. Yet in its bright allegorical explicitness “Everyman” takes a distinctive place among the books in which Roth has by now often posed the essential question—the question that, in “Patrimony,” he imagines his eighty-six-year-old father demanding of his doctor, after bartering for two more years, then four, then finally eighty-six more years of life: Why should a man die at all?

America and Philip Roth grew up together. Roth has emphasized the fact that he never doubted his status as an all-American kid, a happily obsessed mitt-owning member of the “great secular nationalistic church” of baseball, “from which nobody had ever seemed to suggest that Jews should be excluded.” Nevertheless, as the son of a Jewish family living on a Jewish block in a predominantly Jewish section of Newark—fully aware of the aspects of life from which Jews were excluded—he suspected that “America” (as in: Mark Twain, Sinclair Lewis, Thomas Wolfe) was to be found somewhere else. He went off to college in rural Pennsylvania, amid the cornfields and the Gentiles, to see if he could find it there. And he has tracked the country’s social coördinates ever since, if not always in traditional form, particularly after baseball gave way to sex as a growing boy’s favorite sport. Alexander Portnoy’s famed pursuit of that indigenous yellow-haired creature the shiksa was in substantial part an attempt to discover—more, to possess—America: “as though my manifest destiny is to seduce a girl from each of the forty-eight states.” (“As for Alaskan and Hawaiian women,” he appends, “I really have no feelings either way.”)

To be sure, Roth has been a forceful critic (even a “savage satirist”) of American life and history: the McCarthy era, Richard Nixon, Vietnam, and straight on down to our current age of phony piety. But, on a parallel path, beginning with his return, in the late nineteen-eighties, from an unnerving long-term residence in England—where he reports that he personally encountered anti-Semitism for the first time, and where he missed the outspoken energies and immigrant-fuelled liveliness of home—Roth published book after book (“Sabbath’s Theater,” “American Pastoral,” “The Plot Against America”) showing that he believed he knew, and that he deeply loved, what this country was fundamentally about: the liberal ideals that had been fought for during the Second World War, when, as he explained to a European interviewer, “America discovered itself as America.” The fact that this was also the era of Roth’s early youth—and that his return was shortly followed by his father’s fatal illness—seems to have made it clear, when he looked back, that a Jewish block in Newark had been not only “America” but very nearly Paradise.

“Everyman” shifts the site of bliss a few miles south, to Elizabeth, where the brothers experience “life perpetual in their father-created Eden,” specifically in the modest jewelry store their father established in 1933—on the birth of his younger son—where the boys put in many cloudless hours after school. All of the era’s working-class drive and expectations are represented by this store, which also provides for some charmingly inevitable business about watches and clocks (Proust never hit on anything quite so simple for suggesting le temps perdu). Autobiographically, our most accomplished novelist—in strictly quantifiable terms, Roth has won two National Book Awards, two National Book Critics Circle Awards, two PEN/Faulkner Awards, and a Pulitzer Prize—has little in common with his hero, but Roth (who is also, of course, our most autobiographical novelist) has provided even Everyman with familiar elements of his life, principally the series of medical crises, detailed in “The Facts,” that have shaped his own awareness of mortality, and perhaps of writing as a means of warding it off. Equally familiar is an argument between father and son over a Hasidic diamond merchant who comes to do business, the young Everyman protesting, “They were now in America, free to dress and to shave and to behave as they wished.” Despite these predictable objections and the hero’s earnest secularity, one of the remarkable aspects of Roth’s rewriting of a Christian allegory—we have come a long way from Portnoy’s outraged “I am a human being!”—is how plainly unexceptional he should make it seem that this American Everyman is a Jew.

Like so many of the privileges of American society, however, the right of a historic outsider to grow up to be dully conventional has been inherited from a father who tirelessly adapted to the land that accords such wondrous rights. Roth’s most striking allegorical gesture, disguised as the operation of the family store, pays tribute to a generation’s unparalleled gift—so apparently calculating and so genuinely innocent—for turning abstract ideals into everyday life:

To lure Elizabeth’s big working-class population and to avoid alienating or frightening away the port city’s tens of thousands of churchgoing Christians with his Jewish name, he extended credit freely—just made sure they paid at least thirty or forty percent down. He never checked their credit . . . and the good will generated by his flexibility was more than worth it. He decorated the shop with a few silver-plated pieces to make it attractive—tea sets, trays, chafing dishes, candlesticks that he sold dirt cheap—and at Christmastime he always had a snow scene with Santa in the window, but the stroke of genius was to call the business not by his name but rather Everyman’s Jewelry Store, which was how it was known throughout Union County to the swarms of ordinary people who were his faithful customers until he sold his inventory to the wholesaler and retired at the age of seventy-three.

Whatever you call yourself, whatever you strive for, you will become: this is America. Or, at least, it is a vision of America, one that Roth’s personal hero, Saul Bellow, boldly set out with Augie March’s introductory phrase: “I am an American, Chicago born”—six momentous words that, as Roth has pointed out, Bellow’s son of Jewish immigrants issues without apology or ethnic hyphenation. (“That epithet American-Jewish writer has no meaning for me,” Roth has informed those critics who attempt to divide our literature into tribal schools. “If I’m not an American, I’m nothing.”) Bellow died in 2005, and, if there is a hint of valedictory farewell in “Everyman,” Roth’s book is in touch not with unquenchable Augie but with Bellow’s final, death-obsessed volume, “Ravelstein,” with its wincing tribute to “Ivan Ilych” (“Reading that story is like crossing a mountain of broken glass”), and its bemused inquiry into whether anyone—even a Jewish atheist-materialist, too smart for illusions—can ever really believe that the grave is all there is.

The climax of “Everyman” takes place in a run-down cemetery in New Jersey, just off the turnpike. We have been here before. Roth drove here accidentally, in “Patrimony”—accidentally arriving at his mother’s grave and, beside it, the plot reserved for his father—after missing a fork in the road on his way to Elizabeth, where his father was living in those years, and where he was en route to tell him of the brain tumor that was going to kill him. “Well, Ma . . .” Roth relates that he began speaking aloud, once he had decided to stay at the cemetery awhile, and he ponders the banality of one’s thinking in such places, thinking that never differs much from Hamlet’s as he contemplates the skull of Yorick—even if the language doesn’t quite compare. There are so many things one can do at a grave to try to make the dead seem present again: ask for forgiveness, ask for love, pull the weeds, trace the letters on the tombstone, even crazier things if no one is watching. But, Roth warns, you still walk away without the people you came for; all that these gestures prove, for someone like him, is that the dead are truly gone. And so he said nothing more to his mother that day, since it was too hard not to know that no one heard.

There is a gravedigger working in the cemetery this time, an easygoing man willing to explain the mechanics of the job—a seven-foot spike to probe the spot, a wood frame to shape it, an edger to keep it neat—which is the nearest he can come to explaining its mysteries. But Roth makes an extraordinary gift to the ordinary man who cannot stop asking questions, and who cannot walk away. Standing at his parents’ grave, Everyman also speaks a few words aloud: “I’m seventy-one. Your boy is seventy-one”—as might be expected, the words are hardly eloquent, not remotely a prayer, the plain expression of a common (if astounding) fact. Yet he seems not at all surprised when his parents reply. “Look back and atone for what you can atone for,” his father advises—coming close for a moment to the language of the medieval play—“and make the best of what you have left.” The hero feels released from fear, although, as it turns out, he has almost no time left. This is not giving the story away: it was in this cemetery, at his graveside, that it began. Unlike the play, in which God’s mercy ultimately leads Everyman to eternal life, Roth’s book offers no comfort. Nor is there a parting moral. There are just the mother’s words, warm with the only satisfaction to be had. “Good,” she replies to her boy, an old man himself now and about to die. “You lived.”

2006-05-01

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Antonya Nelson: Kansas

The girls left early, the two-year-old being driven to Montessori by her seventeen-year-old cousin. Three of their four parents lay in bed hungover; the fourth had risen unsteadily to fix breakfast, nauseated by her new pregnancy. Standing dazed at the stove, Anna had felt grateful to her niece, Kay-Kay, for her morning cheer, her willingness to dress little Cherry Sue, settle her in at the table, wash her face and hands—one of them bound in a bright-green cast—and then carry her off to school. Cherry Sue had been singing about babies, waving her bandaged fist like a maraca. She sang about everything these days, gesturing wildly, as if her life were a musical.

“Don’t forget her plug,” Anna told Kay-Kay, meaning the pacifier.

“My plug, my plug,” Cherry Sue chorused.

Anna was in despair about her second pregnancy, and furious with her husband, Ian, for having announced it to everyone. Now she had no choice. In her daughter’s songs the new baby already had a name—’No White or Toto—and everyone at Montessori had congratulated Anna. She was still exhausted from having Cherry Sue, who had only this month finally been weaned—by force. Just when Anna had thought she might actually repossess her body, here she was a hostage again. In more ways than one. Having another child with Ian meant that she was further delayed in leaving him. If it weren’t for Cherry Sue, she and her husband would have gone their separate ways years ago, but now their fates seemed impossibly knotted. He refused to use condoms, and he failed to withdraw because he wanted her pregnant; the baby was a weapon that he could plant like a bomb. Cherry Sue loved him, and so would the new child; children didn’t know any better. He was like the Devil, Anna thought: somebody who kept his deceits hidden until it was too late, until you were already implicated in them.

“Bye, Aunt Anna,” Kay-Kay said, with Cherry Sue hoisted on her hip, riding her cousin like a horse. Anna sniffed sentimentally. The girls were the only two people in the house who got along a hundred per cent of the time. Often mistaken for sisters (even, alarmingly, for mother and daughter), they were both fair and freckled, light-eyed, and plump in a healthy way.

“Bye-bye, Mama,” Cherry Sue sang out. “Don’t cry, Mama.”

“Don’t cry,” Kay-Kay joined in, smiling brightly. Four years ago, her adolescence had descended on the household like a lit match in a powder keg. Now the disaster had passed. Gone were the frightening clothes, the angry music, the Sharpie-marker makeup. Restored was the pretty child who bathed every day and made conversation with her family.

“Goodbye,” Anna said, sighing and waving at the girls.

It was a sunny day in Wichita, the birds were pouring their hearts out in trees just beginning to bud, and Anna fell asleep in the back-yard hammock, waking later with a sunburn, the skin on the backs of her thighs imprinted with hemp netting like a rump roast.

The family cell-phone plan had seven subscribers, their numbers each one digit apart. Kay-Kay’s was the easiest to remember, 246-2460, and she was the one most frequently called.

Her father, Henry, often forgot to turn on his phone or to charge it; he left it places—restaurants or jacket pockets. (Cherry Sue carried around one of his phones that had gone through the wash.) Henry was the oldest parent in the house, fifty-eight, a psychiatrist, a mild man who let life happen to him, let the people he loved talk him into things—like cell phones or children or trampolines. This was his third marriage, and his wife, Emily, Anna’s sister, was a generation younger than he. He kept marrying women in their twenties, having a daughter with them, then divorcing. Probably this would be his last marriage and daughter; he’d stayed in this one the longest, seeing Kay-Kay into puberty and beyond. The other girls he’d left when they were still in grade school, two half sisters whom Kay-Kay barely knew. One had married a cop. The other was a lesbian whose lover had been a patient of her father’s. Wichita was just that size, big enough for lesbians and psychoanalysis, small enough for impractical, coincidental cross-pollination.

Anna and Emily’s mother—known to everyone in the family as Nana—remembered to carry her cell phone with her, but she often mistook it for other objects: the TV remote, a radio, her glasses case. Nana lived across town in a condo that she left only on Tuesdays, when she made her “rounds”: hairdresser, physician, bridge club, grocery. Occasionally, Kay-Kay stayed over at her grandmother’s. That had been one of her dodges, during the time of trouble—saying that she was with Nana when she was simply at large. She had also thrown parties at Nana’s condo, Tuesday-afternoon blowouts, where she shared with her friends the old woman’s pharmaceuticals and liquor. Some late nights she had sneaked off with Nana’s car. For Christmas this year, however, Kay-Kay had embroidered a set of pillowcases for her grandmother, with bluebells and daisies, sheep and a shepherdess, and “I Love Nana” in rose-colored thread. The rest of the family was still taking in this revised self, this hellion turned hausfrau.

Emily and Anna had programmed into their cell phones the identical ring-tone for Kay-Kay’s calls, an assaulting electronic jangle that ended on a sour interrogative. Recently they had discussed changing it, since it no longer seemed to suit Kay-Kay. She had become someone more dulcet, they said. They had yet to settle on a new Kay-Kay ringtone, though they were reminded of the need every time the girl called, setting off that noise that never failed to startle.

Ian’s phone had a lock on its functions. Because he violated others’ privacy, he assumed that they would violate his. He had his phone in his possession at all hours, clasped in his palm like a gun. It was set to vibrate so that he alone would know when he’d been summoned. When Kay-Kay had stolen his cocaine stash, Ian had been frustratingly unable to report the theft to anyone but his wife. In debt himself—to Anna and her family, to his boss, to all his friends—he’d felt especially outraged. He was owed, by somebody: an apology, a sum of money, carte blanche.

The seventh phone belonged to Kay-Kay’s ex-boyfriend Wesley. For two years Wesley had lived in the house, eighteen when he moved in, yet not in any way an adult; Kay-Kay, only fifteen back then, had seemed more mature. Wesley’s parents were divorced, living in different states; he had no real home of his own, no address or phone number. Including him on the family plan cost an extra $9.99 a month: nothing, really. Henry paid the bills without giving them much thought. He was generous by nature. And, as a therapist, he made a lot of money, his life financed by other people’s troubles. Why shouldn’t he contribute to the welfare of his daughter’s boyfriend? When Wesley had needed a root canal, it was Emily who made the appointment. The family had coached him on his A.C.T.s, and he still stopped by to consult about perplexing pieces of the grownup world—student loans or car insurance. He was a working boy who had loved Kay-Kay dearly, and who, when he lived in the house, had kindly tolerated her teasing, about her status as a minor and his as a statutory rapist. Now he had a new girlfriend, Lucy, who was exactly—exactly—like the Kay-Kay they’d known three years ago. She even sounded like the old Kay-Kay whenever she happened to answer Wesley’s phone—sullen, stoned, suicidal. For just a second, you could be fooled, suddenly jerked back into the nightmare.

Midmorning, Emily rolled out of bed. In the kitchen she found the usual mess: Anna’s sloppy breakfast makings, eggshells, milk left out to spoil, as well as the residue of the previous night’s drinking—empty bottles and glasses, a crusty bowl of salsa, the tart odor of pickle juice, desiccated cheese rinds. Emily muttered as she ran hot water. She had been forever in this role: a mother first to her little sister, through their childhood and beyond, then to her husband, and then, of course, to Kay-Kay. Now, since Ian had declared bankruptcy and he, Anna, and Cherry Sue had moved in, she was a mother to her brother-in-law and her niece as well. And then there was Nana, who seemed more and more in need of mothering herself—unpleasant mothering, of the variety that involved wheedling and deception, and that would soon include feeding and diapering.

Responsibility was plaguing. Sometimes, to fight it, Emily was purposely irresponsible—she drank too much. She enjoyed drinking, the bright pup of the wine bottle relinquishing its cork, the gentle bell of stemware leaving the rack, the silly conversation over snacks and music, her brother-in-law showing his most tolerable self in service to the party, Henry just so happy to see everybody get along.

Emily had turned forty a week before. She hadn’t thought she’d mind it, but evidently she did.

She drank cold water, then hot coffee. Some days, there was nothing but fluid.

Kay-Kay had left her school binder behind in a pool of syrup on the kitchen table. Emily pried it off and carried it upstairs to her daughter’s bedroom, where she stood at the door. For years she’d snooped in Kay-Kay’s life, read her diary, slit open the seams of her coat, turned over the dresser drawers, shoved a hand between the mattress and the box spring. She didn’t want to do those things anymore. Suspicion was soul-killing. She told herself that Kay-Kay deserved her trust. She tossed the binder onto the bed and shut the door.

Sometimes at noon Kay-Kay came home from school. For a while, last fall, as she began her climb out of rage and wretchedness, she had brought friends back with her for lunch. She’d been proud of her quirky home life then, proud of her rambling old house with its many airy rooms, a place where you might come across her Aunt Anna sunbathing nude on the porch, or her father brandishing a civilized glass of Merlot at midday. “For my heart,” he would say. “Purely medicinal.” At noon, her boyfriend, Wesley, would be rising, zipping himself into his coveralls, ready for his shift at the lube pit; cute Cherry Sue would be humming in her high chair, Emily serving up lasagna or soup. It was a capacious kitchen, with a dining table made from an ancient farmhouse door, eight expectant chairs. Flowers in vases, fruit in bowls, cursing in the conversation.

But these days Kay-Kay mostly came home alone. She was getting ready to leave: high school, her friends, this house. Her future, Emily hoped, held college, Europe, Africa; what else had they been prepping—as well as preserving—her for but departure? Once upon a time, Emily had believed that she would do these things herself: attend Harvard, adopt orphans, observe the world from the basket of a hot-air balloon. But then she’d fallen in love with Henry—scandalously her elder, and married, to boot—and then with this funky old house, and then her daughter had been born. . . .

Today, Kay-Kay didn’t come home for lunch.

Indulging his hangover, Henry rose from bed only long enough to cancel his appointments and lumber back. Fridays were half days anyway. Emily doubted that he’d even opened his eyes between bed and phone. He was a bear, gruff, kind, loyal to a fault. He had grown soft in their nineteen years together; she was his last wife, he always said, last and best. He’d had a starter wife for practice, and another for refining his skills. Now he performed with forbearance, faith, and patience, permitting Emily to be the hotheaded one while he stood by.

“Admit it!” Emily had accused him crazily on her fortieth birthday. “I’m the oldest woman you’ve ever slept with! Old women are witches! No one even notices them, let alone finds them attractive. You don’t find old women attractive, admit it!”

“Not yet,” he’d confessed mildly.

Still woozy now, Emily decided to join him in bed, nudging herself against his furry chest. They lay together into the afternoon, bound in a cocoon of indolence: it was spring again, and they had arrived here with their girl, after a long, treacherous journey, and it seemed that only now, just now, were they safely out of the woods. Henry slept, wheezing, and Emily lay in his arms, and it wasn’t until three o’clock, when Anna borrowed Emily’s car to pick up Cherry Sue, that anyone realized that something was wrong.

“You phoned this morning,” Miss Juliet said, proving it by producing the form with the time, Anna’s name, and the fact that Cherry Sue wouldn’t be coming to school today. All the Misses at Montessori had the same voice, blameless and assured. If Cherry Sue wasn’t there it wasn’t their fault.

Kay-Kay’s cell phone sent all calls immediately to voice mail. Her greeting was a leftover from the year before. “Kay-Kay says shut up and fuck off!” a boy yelled, Sid Vicious-ly. It wasn’t even Wesley but a stranger, with Kay-Kay’s slurred laughter in the background.

The next number Anna hit was her husband’s. Like Kay-Kay, Ian was sending callers to voice mail. Shaking, Anna phoned her sister, and Emily (who always answered) advised driving to East High. “School’s not out yet. Maybe she took Cherry Sue with?”

“Maybe.”

“Show-and-tell?”

“Sure.”

At the house, Emily closed her eyes, thrown instantly back into the grim fright of the year before, and the year before that, and the year before that: her daughter, a force of nature, out wreaking havoc. “God damn it, Henry!” He sat up blurrily, his face imprinted with his own palm, as if he’d been slapped. She clapped the phone shut and threw it at him, fear leading directly to rage, and her husband, right there, ready to receive it.

School was letting out when Anna arrived. The wind had picked up, and dirt filled the air, trash flattened into the chain link. She drove against the current of muscle cars and trucks surging around her, unnerved by the exuberance with which the teen-agers handled their vehicles, their lives. They yelled and honked and screeched their tires, lighting cigarettes and popping up through sunroofs and out back windows, some riding on hoods, dust and exhaust whirling as they revved their engines. Anna scanned desperately for her niece’s gold Celica, still willing to forgive Kay-Kay if she found her there. Plenty of students came to school with their babies, or with their big embarrassing bellies held before them like basketballs. Anna guessed that Kay-Kay wasn’t beyond vying for some attention, a different kind of attention than she’d been accustomed to getting these past few years, when she’d been warned and suspended and flunked and arrested and handed poor marks not only in performance and attendance but in attitude and appearance as well—in personality, it seemed.

Often, Anna had defended her niece, even envied her—as if on behalf of her own former self, both patriotic and nostalgic for a lost homeland.

Now she searched the thinning trickle of cars and pedestrians with growing pessimism.

“They’re not here,” she told Emily on the phone, driving home.

“Where’s Ian?” Emily demanded.

“I don’t know.” Anna had no idea what Ian did with himself; borrowing her sister’s car had become a daily necessity.

“We ought to find Ian.” He had been helpful on a few occasions. He’d located tolerable community service for Kay-Kay after her possession conviction. He’d stayed up all night talking to the speedy girl when the other adults were utterly worn out. Once, when she’d declared that she would be fine with being a prostitute, he took her to the seedy side of Wichita, to some strip clubs he knew, just to give her a taste.

“You call him,” Anna said. “He won’t answer me.”

Sure enough, Ian took Emily’s call. The noise at his end of the line suggested a submarine. “Where are you?” she asked.

“Work,” he said flatly. “What do you want?”

“I wonder if you’ve seen Kay-Kay. She took Cherry Sue this morning, but they didn’t go to school.” On his end she could hear a door close, an echoing clatter. Racquetball court, she guessed. He practically lived at the club, hanging out in the seating area of the juice bar, disguising himself as a healthy body-builder type when in fact he made most of his income dealing drugs in the parking lot and the men’s locker room. His uniform was a warmup suit. A sport bottle full of vodka. Of particular appeal was the fact that he had an excuse to exit his in-laws’ house every morning, leaving his killjoy wife and her stuck-up family to themselves.

Or at least that’s what Emily thought he thought. She had no idea what really went on in her brother-in-law’s head. He’d been hanging around in her life since he was a bratty neighbor boy ten years her junior. Often, she imagined the two words he’d most like to say to her: Whatever, bitch. Now she couldn’t tell if his lack of reaction meant that he was thinking or merely stunned or already concocting a story. His silence was hermetic, and she was tempted to hang up. But Kay-Kay sometimes confided in Ian—he had the tactical advantage of being the other acknowledged delinquent in the house. Drunk, he could be endearing. The night before, for example, he’d done hilarious imitations of all four principals in “The Wizard of Oz” as if they’d been pulled over for driving under the influence.

Sober, however, he defaulted to paranoia. “I know what you’re thinking,” he said.

“No, you don’t,” she assured him.

Ian said, “Let me get back with you,” and hung up.

“ ‘Get back’ with me?” Emily said to Anna, who was coming through the mudroom door. “He said he’ll get back with me.”

“He’s an asshole,” Anna said for at least the hundredth time. Then she turned her pleading, tear-streaked face to her big sister. “Where are they?”

Meanwhile, Henry had pulled himself out of bed to perform his ritual: driving around. He had done this whenever Kay-Kay or any of the pets had disappeared. It never paid off, but it seemed somehow necessary, a biological imperative. He was confirming that the obvious explanation didn’t prevail: the lost dog wasn’t chasing tail at the park or lying like a rug in the road; the girls weren’t parked down at the Dairy Queen or visiting any of Kay-Kay’s known acquaintances.

The last time she’d run away, she’d taken a bus to Burning Man; the time before that, she’d hitchhiked to Ohio. But she’d never before had her own getaway vehicle. It was Henry who had insisted on buying Kay-Kay a car, even though Emily was opposed. They’d argued for weeks—the girl had totalled two of the family cars in a single year!—and later Emily had grudgingly acknowledged that he had been right: Kay-Kay had got a job to pay for gas, had not had one ticket or wreck, and often volunteered for trips to the grocery store or to drop off Cherry Sue.

But now look what had happened. Wait around long enough, Emily thought, and you can win any argument.

Henry slapped at his jacket pocket before he left, to show her that he had remembered his phone.

“Pointless,” Emily said, of his errand. “Complete waste of time.”

Anna began to cry again. “I’m being punished!” she said to Emily.

“For what?”

“Bellyaching about Cherry Sue! Being pissy about being pregnant!”

“Oh, please, Anna. You’re not being punished.”

“Why can’t I learn to keep my big mouth shut? Just count my fucking blessings?” Anna threw herself into a kitchen chair.

“Stop it, stop it. You’re hungry.” Emily was already pulling open the cupboard doors. “You need to eat.”

That evening, the usual emergency-vehicle sirens seemed especially frequent and jarringly loud; the wind blew so hard that it whistled through all the old house’s cracks. Tornado season was upon them again; possibly they’d end up in the basement tonight.

Their three cell phones lay on the scarred kitchen table while Emily microwaved leftovers for Henry and Anna. She herself had taken a Valium.

It was Anna who noticed the wall calendar. “Today is Friday the thirteenth!” she wailed.

“Kay-Kay doesn’t know that,” Emily said. “She loses track of what month it is, let alone the date.”

“I probably should have seen my patients today,” Henry said reflectively, a napkin tucked like a bib into his collar. “Some of them are surely superstitious.” He had stopped at the police station while he was driving around and ascertained that there’d been no accidents involving a gold Celica, no ambulance summons for a teen-ager and a toddler. His oldest daughter’s husband, Buzz, was a cop; he’d promised to keep an eye out. “The desk sergeant asked if I wanted to report a kidnapping,” Henry told Emily and Anna. “I mean, really.” He rocked his head in disbelief; he’d never grown accustomed to thinking of Kay-Kay as a criminal, even when she’d been arrested and charged, found guilty and made to pay—this despite the fact that he made his living hearing how people were routinely failed by their loved ones. At the office, he used the when-did-you-stop-beating-your-wife approach, asking not if but how often his patients fell short. With his daughter, however, he was as blustering and dumbfounded as a sitcom stereotype, a dad handicapped by blind love.

Tonight, Henry kept positing the same fuzzy scenario. “She’s doing something for somebody,” he said. “Somebody in crisis, who called her on her way to school. And then it was more complicated than she thought—it snowballed.”

“If somebody lured Kay-Kay with a phone call,” Emily said, “it wasn’t about helping someone.”

“But why take Cherry Sue?” Anna asked. “Why run away with a two-year-old? I’m always trying to run away from her.”

“Kay-Kay would never let anything happen to Cherry Sue,” Henry assured his sister-in-law.

“Not on purpose,” Emily amended.

Henry gave his wife the familiar disappointed look. “Please, Em,” he said, not wanting to believe her heartless.

“I didn’t mean what I said about running away from Cherry Sue,” Anna said pleadingly. “She’s a lot of work, but she’s good company. Much better company than her dad.” Nobody disagreed with her.

The house phone rang, and Emily answered, then held it up so that they could all listen to the high-school-attendance-office recording letting them know that their “son or daughter missed one or more classes today.”

“Oh, fuck you,” they chimed in unison while the voice went on in its flat scolding way about what steps should be taken next. They’d heard it many, many times before. Kay-Kay’s trouble, however often it had involved officials—the rule-makers and the rule-enforcers—had never been solved by them.

The mudroom door slammed open but yielded only Wesley, the ex. “Find her?” he asked. He wore his dirty garage coveralls with his name on the pocket, long-sleeved because his boss couldn’t abide tattoos. “I drove by Nana’s, just to see if her car was there, but it wasn’t . . .” Wesley trailed off. “It smells good in here.”

Emily offered him food, but he declined, gesturing toward the driveway, where the new girlfriend, Lucy, was smoking a cigarette.

“I’ll stop by the hookah bar,” he volunteered. “And maybe Java the Hut. I’ve got my cell.”

“Good man,” Henry said.

“Thanks, Wes,” Emily said, smiling wanly at him. She’d always thought he was too nice for the likes of Kay-Kay, who, Emily believed, required a little wickedness.

“WHERE R U??” Anna text-messaged Ian at midnight. It embarrassed her not to know where her husband was, not to know for sure that he wasn’t somehow involved in the girls’ disappearance. Her mother had labelled him a hoodlum years ago; as a teen-ager, he’d stolen dogs in order to claim the rewards. Anna herself had collected the cash, since she looked more like a savior than Ian. Another time, he’d shown her how easy it was to break into homes, summoning a locksmith and waltzing right into the neighbors’ house. Ian had handed down to Kay-Kay his black shirt with a neon-yellow “SECURITY” emblazoned on the back. In it, you could go anywhere, do anything.

“Looking for girls,” he texted back. Anna knew that this was true—but which girls?

She glanced up to find her big sister glaring at her, giving her an order. “You should sleep.” Pregnancy was insistent that way. This new baby, no bigger than a plum, was overruling her ability to stay alert on behalf of her other baby. She left her phone with Emily, knowing that its ring might not rouse her.

Emily sent Henry to bed, too. He kissed her cheek, leaving her on the couch, where, every hour, she dialled Kay-Kay’s number.

At four-thirty, her daughter finally responded. A couple of lines of text appeared: “We r fine Dont worry! Luv u.”

The message proved that Kay-Kay was in possession of her phone, her wits, and her cousin. Nevertheless, Emily began to cry, and, of course, this was when Ian arrived home, sneaking in like a thief.

“What?” he said, alarmed.

“She called,” Emily said. “They’re fine, she says.”

He smelled of a bar. She wanted to kill him—for being who he was and not someone else, for catching her in tears. He had never liked her, not even when he was a child. Always he’d preferred Anna; always he’d chosen Anna over Emily. Now he was beholden to Emily, her unhappy house guest. He blinked his heavy-lidded eyes. “A couple of people have seen her today,” he said, dropping into the easy chair.

“Really?”

“They think so. Cherry Sue is hard to miss, specially with that cast on her arm. They had breakfast at the I-Hop by Nana’s, then around noon they were out busking with a guitar in Old Town.”

“Where have you been?”

“Everywhere.”

“Buzz knows to look for her.”

“Buzz?”

“Henry’s son-in-law, the cop.”

Ian scowled now; Emily thought she could read his mind: What good was a cop to them? Hadn’t Ian himself supplied the most useful information yet?

“I talked to her earlier,” he said, rising.

“What?”

“She said that we really upset her last night. She’s feeling disappointed in all of us, you and me and Anna and Henry, all of us. She said she—”

“She called you?”

His mouth snapped shut, and Emily knew that he wouldn’t open it again. Whatever, bitch. Fuming, she listened as he made his way up the stairs and down the hall to the room that he and Anna shared.

On Saturday, the sky was murky, churning with a wind that seemed to want to tear the roof from the house. Henry called Buzz to confirm that nothing bad had happened overnight on the police radio band. Emily made herself turn Kay-Kay’s room upside down, page through her journal, sniff at her jewelry box, open her closet and drawers and CD cases. But Emily knew that if Kay-Kay wanted to hide something these days it would be in her car, in the trunk she could lock.

“What else did she say to Ian?” Emily finally asked Anna. Pride had prevented her from asking him. Pride, and the fear that he would tell her that it was none of her fucking business. Like a teen-ager, he had the capacity to shame you—even when you knew he was in the wrong.

“She said that we were terrible role models.” Anna was making bread, keeping busy. She leaked a tear or two into the dough, continuing to knead.

“Terrible role models?” Emily and Henry said together. Henry was making a “Missing” poster, with photographs—Cherry Sue in nothing but a diaper, Kay-Kay still sporting braces. He’d had to find a photo where her hair was its natural color, not the coal-black she’d dyed it until last Christmas.

“That’s what Ian said she said.” Anna wasn’t sure that she believed her husband. It would be just like him to try to take advantage of the situation to punish his wife and her family.

“I was telling stories about my patients,” Henry said, chastened. “About the stalker, and a few of my chem-deps—”

“You never said any names,” Anna assured him. “You’re always really careful to protect privacy.”

“Still, I shouldn’t have been talking about them.”

“I’m sure that wasn’t it.”

Emily sat across from Henry at the table, staring into her coffee as she tried to reconstruct the evening; she was prepared to take responsibility. But for what, exactly? For having been too drunk to remember, she supposed. She could recall Ian making them all laugh: the cop pulling over the drunks on the Yellow Brick Road, the Lion, the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, even that wacky dwarf, representative of the Lollipop Guild. And round-heeled, blasted Judy Garland, in her earnest full-throated way, inviting the officer for a romp in the poppy field. It had seemed like a good evening, Kay-Kay joining them for dinner, sticking around as the hour grew late, rocking Cherry Sue on her hip, helping Anna fix snacks, changing the CD when Ian complained about Henry’s music. Emily had the impression that they had been trying to please the teen-ager, all four of the adults staging an impromptu production called “Life Is Worth Living,” right here at this very table.

What they had learned about Kay-Kay, during the past few years, was that she truly could not see the point, that she did not care whether she lived or died. And, if she did not care, what was to stop her from following whatever impulse seized her? Sleep with a stranger? Why not? Inject an unknown drug? O.K. Hitchhike, wander the streets, invite outlaws into her life and hallucinations into her head—all of it without regard for what her family kept calling “the consequences,” a future with her in it. They all agreed that it was Cherry Sue who’d saved her, Cherry Sue who’d been able to light what otherwise seemed a dark void—by loving Kay-Kay as passionately as she did, by assigning Kay-Kay special status as queen of her heart. Her name had been the second one Cherry Sue said, right after Mama; when she finally learned to walk, it was Kay-Kay’s arms she aimed for and fell into.

“What do you think?” Henry asked now, holding up his poster. He put himself into motion without waiting for an answer. He would photocopy it, and then drive around posting it: in Old Town, on Douglas, by East and the other high schools, at Wal-Marts and gas stations and bars and grocery stores and truck stops and at both of the big malls. “I’ll have my cell,” he assured Emily, patting his pocket.

“Absolutely futile,” Emily told Anna when he was gone.

They watched through the window as branches flailed in the wind above the trampoline, Ian’s sole contribution to the household. He had brought it home the same way he did all his dubious belongings, with the implicit instruction that no one ask questions.

The trampoline vibrated, like a living thing. When it was first set up, Cherry Sue and Kay-Kay had climbed right on and begun to bounce together, holding hands. They danced on it to Kay-Kay’s boom-box music; they loped around its rubber surface singing about the Muffin Man; they lay upon it in the dark, after it had absorbed the sun all day, watching as the stars popped on.

Emily hadn’t wanted to accept the trampoline, not because it came from Ian but because she had foreseen the broken limb or crushed skull. Somebody would be made to pay, she knew. Some bone would have to be offered up. In the end, the sacrifice was Cherry Sue’s, her little left wrist. Off to the E.R. they’d raced, the two-year-old sobbing into Kay-Kay’s neck while Emily weaved through traffic, Anna riding shotgun, crying uselessly. Emily had met her daughter’s eyes in the rearview mirror, a complicit glance between them, the levelheaded ones. Emily had liked that moment.

Now, with her sister flour-dusted and sad before her, Emily recalled another piece of Thursday evening’s conversation. This had concerned their childhood. When they were young, and shared a bedroom, it had been Emily’s habit to lie on the bunk above Anna and cross-examine her about her imaginary friend. Every night, the same conversation:

“Tell me what she looks like,” Emily would insist.

“No.”

“What’s she doing right now?”

“I’m not telling.”

Night after night Emily wheedled, by turns threatening and pleading. She was a bully and she had to win. Finally, she’d pledged, “If you tell me her name, I’ll name my first child after her.” This promise she’d made at age nine. Down below, a long silence came from her four-year-old sister.

And then Anna had said, “Her name is Kay-Kay.”

“That’s why you named me Kay-Kay?” Kay-Kay had asked, Thursday night.

“You knew that already,” Emily said, tilting her empty wineglass once more into her mouth, not wanting to open a third bottle.

“I did not.”

“I didn’t, either,” Anna claimed.

“I’ve told you both, a thousand times.” The thing about being Anna’s sister was that, by the time Emily made good on her end of the deal, Anna had forgotten it was owed—was totally nonplussed over the telephone when Emily called blissfully from the delivery room. But Anna had been a scornful teen-ager herself then, repulsed by her sister’s marriage to a man practically their father’s age.

That had been a long time ago. Now Anna knew all about the tender sentiment attached to babies and their names. When she was pregnant herself, she’d agreed to the name that Ian chose; at that point, she had wanted him to stick around. “Cherry Sue,” he’d declared. “Just like my first Z car, may she R.I.P.”

“I don’t even remember having an imaginary friend,” Anna said to Emily now, as if she, too, had been trying to reconstruct Thursday night. “Maybe I already knew that the imaginary ones worked out better than the real ones?”

Ian entered the kitchen. “You got a problem with reality?” he said to Anna.

On the table, one of the cells rang with Kay-Kay’s awful tone. It was Anna’s, a text message: “How much Ch Sue weigh?”

“Why is she asking me this?” Anna cried.

“What the fuck?” Ian said.

Emily took only a moment to process the request. “She’s giving her Tylenol,” she deduced. “She wants to get the right dose.”

“I don’t know how much Cherry Sue weighs!” Anna burst into tears.

Ian said, “What could it be, like forty?” He was making fists, flexing his elbows as if hefting barbells.

“Twenty-five,” Emily instructed. She remembered from the E.R., when the bone had been set. “Let me text her back.”

“Thanp” was Kay-Kay’s reply.

Saturday night was a repeat of Friday night, with the actors now sick of their roles, stuck in the production. Ian had not come home, and Anna’s new baby was urging her to bed. Henry had developed the dark circles beneath his eyes that indicated that a migraine was coming, and Emily was furious at the helpless way he looked out from their depths. “A hundred posters,” he’d said, accounting for his exhaustion. There was a fleet of pill bottles on his night table, the place where his age was most evident. “Go to bed,” she snapped. “I’ll stay here with the phones.”

At 2 A.M., Wesley called. There was wind and static on his end. He was outside a party from which he had been banished, but he thought that Kay-Kay might be there. “Lucy needs to chill,” he explained, so he was going to drive her home, but he gave Emily the address.

It took Emily two seconds to decide to call Ian instead of waking either of the others; as usual, he took the call, albeit unhappily. “Yeah?” he said. He, too, was standing outside a party. He smelled of bonfire when he picked Emily up ten minutes later.

“This is a weird address,” he noted. “You sure she’d be here?”

“No,” Emily said. The address, it turned out, was a house in a new subdivision, not yet finished, with a baby-blue Porta-Potty tilting in the front yard, stakes and PVC pipes strewn about, the only lights coming from within the giant structure itself.

To Ian’s credit, he performed beautifully as party crasher. He nodded as they entered the massive front door, murmuring a few “How’s it going”s as they pushed through the crowded rooms, Emily following in his wake. The place was cavernous, echoing, warmed by body heat, smelling of sawdust. Men with stringed instruments played folk music in a corner. The people milling around, holding plastic cups and cigarettes, were older than Kay-Kay by a decade or more. Many wore cowboy hats; a yard-long sheet cake rested on a set of sawhorses.

Ian said, “This isn’t a party, it’s a hoedown.”

“I’m looking for Kay-Kay,” Emily said hopefully to the man tapping the keg in the kitchen.

“Hey, yeah,” he said. “Where is that chica?” Everyone recognized the name and nodded, smiling fondly, but no one had seen her. Ian accepted a plastic cup of beer, then grimaced as he drank.

“I was picturing teen-agers,” Emily confided to him. Some bit of Kansas miscreance, a meth lab maybe.

“You were picturing a big-ass opium den of iniquity,” Ian scoffed. “I guess I was, too.”

Emily canvassed the first floor, just to make sure, and then headed upstairs, carefully, since there was not yet a rail. Here were the future bedrooms, five of them, each white, and blank, vacant bathrooms, the smell of new carpet still in rolls. Out the windows, other hulking houses, dark like quiet ships. Was it just fatigue that made everything seem strange to her? she wondered. She dialled Wesley. “Where did you think she might be, exactly?”

“I couldn’t get to the upstairs.”

“I’m there. It’s totally empty.”

“Huh. Hang on, Emily.” Wesley was talking to somebody on his end. “I’m at St. Francis,” he said apologetically. “Lucy may have O.D.’d.”

“May have?”

“She turned blue. Now she looks better—her mom says she’s hypoglycemic, so sometimes that happens—but we’re already here . . .” he trailed off, sighing. Once again at the hospital: he’d performed a similar duty on Kay-Kay’s behalf, not that long ago. (“If one is good,” Kay-Kay had explained, “why wouldn’t two be better?”) “I’m sorry,” Wesley said. “I thought Kay-Kay might have been staying at that place. She knows some of the guys working on it. I gotta go, Emily. We’re up.”

“Good luck, Wes,” she said.

Emily went back downstairs to find Ian accepting a second beer from the man in the kitchen. “Coors?” he asked Emily. “Cake?”

“No, thanks. I was hoping somebody had seen my daughter.”

“They’re not here,” Ian said, downing his beer in one wincing swallow.

“Thanks for coming!” a few people called as they exited.

In the car, Ian snorted. “Yee-haw.” Then he grabbed his thrumming phone. “I’ll drop you off,” he said, studying its screen.

Anna, in her dream that night, birthed an apple. A green apple. The same green as Cherry Sue’s cast. In her last dream, she’d had a small black monkey, his chattering mouth full of teeth, his hair greasy. In another, she’d produced kittens, a litter of three, and one had died, just quit breathing right before her eyes. She wondered sometimes what her brother-in-law, the professional interpreter of dreams, would say about hers, what he would know about her if he heard what went on in her sleeping head.

Tonight the tornado warning siren swooped into Anna’s dream but didn’t wake her; it was Emily who pulled her to her feet and led her down into the basement, where the three of them leaned against each other on the moldering couch, waiting for the all clear.

Sarah, Henry’s oldest daughter and Buzz’s wife, arrived Sunday morning with the sun. Heavy, stoic Sarah with the hairdo, holding a hot casserole before her. Besides the oven mitts, she was dressed for church. Her greeting was a list of ingredients: egg, sausage, hash browns, cheese. “And cream-of-mushroom soup,” she finished. Sarah always wore a sorrowful expression in her father’s house, as if she saw all of its inhabitants headed in that handbasket toward Hell. At first, Emily had reciprocated, pitying Sarah back. Later, when Kay-Kay had gone wild, she simply refused to make eye contact.

The sky was blue, the air still. Emily began thanking her stepdaughter perfunctorily. At this, Sarah gazed demurely out the kitchen window, saddened but not surprised at what had befallen this group of savages. Then her brow furrowed. Out there on the trampoline slept the two missing girls, plus someone else. You could see the blond heads tipped together, little Cherry Sue’s neon-green cast on top of the tarpaulin covering them. “Thank you, Jesus,” Sarah murmured, pointing. “There they are,” she said.

“Ian said you were upset by us Thursday night.”

“Why did he say that?”

Emily glared at her brother-in-law, who glared back. Whatever, bitch. “You weren’t?”

“I may have been.” Kay-Kay shrugged. She had the air of someone to whom blame could not be attached, nor shame or repentance, either. “It’s temporary,” she’d said of the rainbow tattoo on her shoulder, before Emily could ask. Cherry Sue had a matching one on her thigh.

Ian said, “I thought you were on the run from the Man.”

Kay-Kay scoffed. “That’s you, not me. Why weren’t you all worried about poor Nana?”

The third person sleeping on the trampoline had been Anna and Emily’s mother, also missing these past two days. She, and her little dirty-white dog, unmissed by her children. This was unforgivable, according to Kay-Kay, though she was clearly also bemused.

“I thought you’d been carjacked,” Henry confessed, wiping his eyes. “I thought you’d picked up hitchhikers and got stolen, a good deed gone bad.” He kept laying his hand on Kay-Kay’s shoulder, as if never to let her leave home again. Kay-Kay studied the “Missing” poster. “I’ll have to go take those down,” he said.

Kay-Kay nodded. “I’ll help.”

Why weren’t they angrier? Emily wondered. Why had the girls’ return inspired so little in her and Anna and Henry and Ian besides relief? What was wrong with them that this was their reaction—this sense of gratitude, as if Kay-Kay had performed a rescue rather than the reverse? Cherry Sue nuzzled at Anna’s neck, absolutely fine, a faint sunburn on the bridge of her nose and her cheeks as if from healthy recreation.

“You never once dialled Nana’s cell,” Kay-Kay said. “We checked.”

“I wasn’t thinking of her,” Emily admitted. “You O.K., Mom?”

“Why wouldn’t I be?” Nana sat at the table with her dog in her lap, no worse for wear, unkempt in her usual way. She had enjoyed her trip with the girls. Medicine Lodge, a hundred miles southwest, was her home town. She hadn’t visited there in she didn’t know how long. “We stood in the back yard of the old farmhouse.”

“That’s right, Nana. For our picture.”

“That fellow with the cart full of cans took it for us.”

“You gave him a dollar.”

“And then Nipper ran off after a rabbit.”

“That’s right.”

Nana looked relieved, as always, to have her memory confirmed. She wore her standard floral muumuu; her hair hardly existed anymore, a few white tufts. Her fingers twitched in her pet’s fur, which was filled with twigs and burrs and mulberry fluff. She had not panicked when picked up by her granddaughter on Friday morning; for all she knew, it was a plan they’d made. “They’ve always had the best pie at the Toot Sweet,” she recalled. “And we slept in a motel.” Moe-tel.

“I sleep with Kay-Kay,” Cherry Sue said, smiling slyly.

“You drove to Medicine Lodge and checked into a motel?” Ian asked skeptically.

“Nana wanted to visit the old homestead,” Kay-Kay said. “It’s pretty out there. Some places, you can’t even get phone reception.”

Sarah had served everyone a glass of milk, though only Cherry Sue ever drank the stuff. As soon as she’d seen the girls and their grandmother, Sarah had phoned Buzz to say that she would be missing church today. Called to a higher need, she’d tucked a dish towel into her waistband and begun spooning out her eggy casserole while the family sat obediently. The blandness of the offering went with the blandness of the adventure being described. From the old woman and the baby they learned that there’d been burgers along with the pie, Tylenol for teething, television, some jumping on the beds, games of go fish, a walk around Nana’s old land and ruined house, the three of them holding hands, moving slowly, trailed by Nana’s little dog, trotting along leashless.

Emily listened, marvelling, exhausted: the most dramatic things, it seemed, had been happening here at home, in their heads. They had woken this morning from an experience that was precisely like a nightmare—Technicolor catastrophes, figments of imagination, suspicion, now totally erased in the light of an ordinary day. There hadn’t even been storms in Medicine Lodge, the bad weather passing just north of there. “We should call Wesley,” she noted absently. He’d no doubt had a bad dream or two himself.

“I texted him,” Kay-Kay said. “He’s still at St. Francis with the freak.”

“Nipper’s a bad dog,” Cherry Sue reported, pulling out her pacifier. “You a bad dog,” she sang at the animal.

“Nipper tends to run away,” Nana said, plucking at his nasty fur. “Just to scare us silly. Oh, we called and called, till we were blue in the face.” But then she wasn’t certain and turned uneasily to Kay-Kay.

“Hours, Nana,” Kay-Kay assured her. Both Emily and Anna waited for the girl to make a meaningful ironic comment, to let them know that she, too, had run away for the thrill of scaring some people silly, of taking their concern out for one last whirl. But Kay-Kay went back to forking up the sausage-and-egg casserole, drinking milk. Apparently, she’d forsaken her decade-long vegetarianism. On the back of the hand holding the fork was a seven-leafed marijuana plant she’d carved into it in ninth grade, a faint, fading white. She’d removed the metal stud from her tongue and the ring from her lip, so silverware went in and out without clinking. If she wasn’t careful, Emily and Anna thought at the same time, she would run to fat, like Henry’s other daughters.

She hadn’t gone anywhere alarming. She hadn’t done anything dangerous. Could they be disappointed?

“Oh, hey, check out the picture,” Kay-Kay said, wiping her mouth and flipping open her phone. She found the image.

Around the table went the cell phone, everyone squinting at the mini-picture of Nana, Kay-Kay, Cherry Sue, and Nipper. They stood beside a broken storm-cellar door, above them the bleached Kansas sky. Three big grins, and Nipper with his nose in the air, preparing to run. “I’m gonna get a print made for you, Nana,” Kay-Kay told her grandmother. She took back her phone and gazed into its tiny depths. “In black-and-white, don’t you think? Wouldn’t that be best?”

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Sasha Frere-Jones: Sex Symbols

Two ideas drive much of Christina Aguilera’s new double album, “Back to Basics”: one is that, as she states in the first song, she wants to “understand what made the soul singers and the blues figures that inspired a higher generation, the jazz makers and the groundbreakers”; the other is a recurring assertion that she has been misunderstood, and unfairly criticized. (One response to her alleged critics is a creepy track where, putatively celebrating her fans, she replays some of their voice-mail messages. It’s a long way for Aguilera to go to remind us how “amazing” and “inspiring” she is.) In the course of twenty-two songs that move from the thrilling through the well-intentioned to the overwrought, it becomes clear that Aguilera’s new album doesn’t have all that much to do with the “blues figures” or the “jazz makers.” That’s fine—Aguilera doesn’t need to reincarnate Sarah Vaughan to be a serious singer. She already is one, in the tradition of nineteen-nineties pop and R. & B., skillfully deploying melisma for razzle-dazzle, riding the bouncy syncopation of samples with the coördination of a rapper, and timing the phrases to imply her athletic dance moves—or, better yet, yours.

Aguilera, a small woman with a frighteningly capable voice, débuted in 1999 with one of teen pop’s happiest moments, “Genie in a Bottle,” a song driven by a broadly sexual metaphor: “You gotta rub me the right way.” She tweaked her assigned role of coquette by making it clear that she could whisper ecstatically, on pitch, or sing hard enough to break bulletproof glass—who cared if she writhed around in the video? The album containing “Genie” went on to sell more than eight million copies. Aguilera’s second album, “Stripped,” contained several tracks written with Linda Perry, originally of the dull nineties rock band 4 Non Blondes and now one of pop music’s reliable hired guns. (She is responsible for some of this decade’s best radio hits, including Pink’s “Get the Party Started.”) Aguilera’s irrepressible voice brings out the schmaltz in Perry. On “Stripped,” Perry’s most significant contribution was “Beautiful,” a barn burner for everyone who has ever felt less than cute on a Friday night. “I am beautiful, no matter what they say—words can’t bring me down,” goes the chorus. The way Aguilera hits the last five words—which Perry wrote as a descending line, momentarily slowing the rhythm, in a motion that pulls against the lyric’s prideful claim—produced her “Rocky” moment. You know she’s going to raise her fists and jump when she reaches the top of the steps, but you get goose bumps anyway.

“Back to Basics” maintains the plucky spirit of “Stripped,” and the songs on the second disk were co-written with and produced by Perry. In “Back in the Day,” Aguilera names some of her “groundbreakers”: “Break out the Marvin Gaye, your Etta James, your Lady Day, and Coltrane.” Though you can’t really argue with the choices, Aguilera lists her inspirations like a teen-ager with a MySpace page linking to her favorite bands; she establishes affinities, but saying doesn’t make it so. She probably does love John Coltrane and Etta James, but, aside from a few diverting period pieces—like “I Got Trouble,” a sepia-toned re-creation of early Billie Holiday engineered to sound like an old 78-r.p.m. disk, and “Candyman,” a tribute to a sexy man that sounds like the Andrews Sisters—there are precious few audible connections to any music predating the seventies soul of Stevie Wonder. (She does effectively evoke him several times.) For all the carrying on about history, a high-concept glamour photo shoot in the CD’s photo booklet—take that, downloaders!—is Aguilera’s most successful resurrection of the past.

Without a song as well written as “Beautiful,” Perry and Aguilera circle the idea of sophistication to little apparent purpose and fill up the disk with sodden, obvious ballads. The ballads do, however, give Aguilera room to sing spectacularly—“Mercy on Me” is one of several examples. (She also, on “Save Me from Myself,” apes Fiona Apple’s quiet brand of self-torment.) It’s a shame that Aguilera’s voice outstrips her ambitions. She is a pleasure to listen to, no matter how daft the lyrics.

The first disk, with almost half the tracks produced by DJ Premier—a bona-fide hip-hop auteur who usually works with rappers—is more fruitful. Aguilera and Premier, along with a gifted songwriter named Kara DioGuardi, make tense and fervid dance music on the first single, “Ain’t No Other Man.” Premier provides a compressed drum pattern that pushes along and then pauses, like a mindful pedestrian, for the zooming delivery truck of two huge horn blasts. Aguilera begins her vocal with a long, vibrating “Hey” and moves into a supple holler when she sees her man—“Something about you caught my eye”—only to interrupt herself and drop into a double-time whisper: “I don’t know what you did boy, but you had it.”

“Still Dirrty” is another rich combination of DioGuardi’s elastic melodies and Premier’s brusque rhythms. But their talents are squandered on one of Aguilera’s anxious impressions. “Still Dirrty” refers to the 2002 single “Dirrty,” from “Stripped,” which Aguilera promoted by performing in the video wearing little more than chaps, and in serious need of a bath. She seems to think that a major controversy resulted from her appearing so scantily clad, and concludes, “If I want to be provocative, well, that ain’t a sin.” Anybody who has a few minutes to walk down the street and scan the billboards, or thirty seconds to browse the Internet, will find this an epic understatement. It is hard to imagine what kind of real impediment she, or any other underdressed performer, is encountering.

Justin Timberlake is under an equally strange impression on “SexyBack,” the first single from his modest but satisfying new album, “FutureSex / LoveSounds,” where he bafflingly claims to be “bringing sexy back.” Does anything need bringing back less than sexy? It’s like proposing to bring back petroleum, or the N.F.L. Like Aguilera, Timberlake began his career on the “Mickey Mouse Club,” proceeded to experience enormous popularity as a member of the boy band ’NSync, and then trundled off toward maturity, trying to put some distance between himself and the preteen squeals. As on his first album, the excellent and sleek “Justified,” from 2002, Timberlake collaborated with the producer Timbaland, one of the most important forces in the past ten years of pop music. After slowing down for more than a year, to devote time to weight lifting, Timbaland has returned to the charts, with the singer Nelly Furtado, whose playful single “Promiscuous” stayed at No. 1 for six weeks this summer. Perhaps Timbaland still had Furtado’s quirky, charismatic voice in mind. The beat for “SexyBack” is so small it’s barely there—it needs either a big, gruff m.c. to fill up all the spaces or a tiny, girlish voice to wind around the synthetic underbrush. Timberlake does neither; his voice is sweet but not flexible, and he is at his most believable when creating breathy, multi-tracked harmonies and playing the sincere side of seduction. On “SexyBack,” Timberlake does his best to be callous and thuggish, an imitation of the bad boys he convinced your mom he would never be. (If there is anyone in pop less comfortable singing the word “motherfucker,” he hasn’t made a record yet.)

Most of “FutureSex / LoveSounds” sticks to the uncanny, ethereal funk that made “Justified” so appealing, and is savvy enough to retain Timberlake’s image as a teen cutie pie while making the sounds around his voice just shiny enough to fit the album into the landscape of 2006 pop. “My Love” is based on the kind of effortlessly odd beat that earned Timbaland his reputation: a shuddering keyboard figure that keeps trailing off and then coming back; gross, loping bass sounds; and samples of human beatboxing. Timberlake is back on bended knee, where he is most comfortable: “If I wrote you a symphony, just to say how much you mean to me, what would you do? If I told you you were beautiful, would you date me on the regular—tell me, would you?” There is no shame in going back to your own basics.

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James Surowiecki: Dealer's Choice

When General Motors was the biggest and most profitable auto manufacturer in the world, its strategy was to provide “a car for every purse and purpose.” G.M. offered a panoply of distinctive brands, each targeted at a particular category of buyer—Buick for the successful but conservative driver, Cadillac for the wealthier and more flamboyant, and so on. This was a tremendously successful strategy in the days when G.M.’s domination was unchallenged. But now, with G.M. losing billions of dollars a year and struggling to restructure, it just looks like a waste of time and money. When analysts talk about how to turn G.M. around, most start with the need to slim down the company and get rid of less popular brands. (Buick and Pontiac are perennial nominees.) It’s an eminently sensible approach, but it’s unlikely to happen anytime soon, because it would challenge the interests of some of the most powerful players in today’s auto industry—car dealers.

Car dealers, with their low-production-value TV commercials and glad-handing tactics, seem like the archetypal small businessmen, and it’s hard to believe that they could sway the decisions of global corporations like G.M. and Ford. But, collectively, they have enormous leverage. Dealers are not employees of the car companies—they own local franchises, which, in every state, are protected by so-called “franchise laws.” These laws do things like restrict G.M.’s freedom to open a new Cadillac dealership a few miles away from an old one. More important, they also make it nearly impossible for an auto manufacturer to simply shut down a dealership. If G.M. decided to get rid of Pontiac and Buick, it couldn’t just go to those dealers and say, “Nice doing business with you.” It would have to get them to agree to close up shop, which in practice would mean buying them out. When, a few years ago, G.M. actually did eliminate one of its brands, Oldsmobile, it had to shell out around a billion dollars to pay dealers off—and it still ended up defending itself in court against myriad lawsuits. As a result, dropping a brand may very well cost more than it saves, since it’s the dealers who end up with a hefty chunk of the intended savings.

You’d think that what’s bad for G.M. would also be bad for the people who sell its cars. But G.M. makes money (when it does) on new cars and on the financing of loans. Dealers, by contrast, make most of their money on servicing old cars and selling used ones. So dealers can thrive even when the automaker languishes. And at the state level they often have more political influence than automakers do. In the late nineties, for instance, local dealers were challenged by companies that wanted to sell cars over the Internet. In response, some states, including Texas, actually passed laws making it illegal to have a business selling cars online (unless you already owned a local dealership), and regulators told Internet companies to cease and desist. When Ford itself started experimenting with online sales, dealers’ vigorous objections (along with legal challenges) caused the manufacturers to quickly retreat.

If automakers sometimes find dealers difficult to do business with, it’s entirely their own fault. Why, after all, have Ford and G.M. always sold their cars through independent dealers? They could have owned the dealerships themselves, with the salesmen being employees, much as Starbucks does today with its stores. Instead, they preferred to give dealers franchises, and work with them as partners. And, historically, the automakers were not good partners. In 1920, for instance, the U.S. economy went into a deep recession. But Henry Ford kept his factories running at full tilt, and forced thousands of Ford dealers around the country to buy new cars that they had little chance of selling. The dealers knew that if they said no they’d never see a Model T again, so they ate the inventory. A decade later, when the Great Depression hit, Ford and G.M. used the same strategy to help keep the production lines going. They turned their dealers into a cushion against hard times.

In the long term, this was a disastrous tactic, because it inspired mistrustful dealers to look to the government for help. (The first franchise law was passed in 1937.) Dealers recognized that much about their businesses was always going to be out of their control—automakers not only decide what cars get made but also dictate sales strategies and incentive plans. So they decided to protect what they could, using laws to insulate themselves from competition and from the risk of being dropped by the manufacturer. And that’s what has made life so hard for the automakers today.

The irony in all this is that G.M. and Ford adopted the dealer system because they thought it would make their lives easier. A dealer who owned his own business would work harder than a mere employee, the thinking went, and would not require a lot of outside monitoring. But the benefits that the car companies reaped from franchising cost them a lot in terms of control and flexibility. There are now many things that G.M. can’t do (like shut down Buick) that it could do easily if it owned its own dealers. Car companies might like to change this—in the late nineties, both G.M. and Ford tried to start buying up dealerships. But, at this point, the system is self-protecting; dealers revolted, state regulators started nosing about, and the automakers gave up. They made a devil’s bargain some eighty years ago, and now they’re stuck with it. Call it the revenge of the middleman.

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