“Why would I be putting you on? It’s not to my advantage to make this place sound exciting.”

  “But how did he happen to tell you that?”

  “I went outside on the off chance there was a phone any-where in sight. He was talking on the phone in his car. I hung around, and he let me use the phone. He was happy that he had what he needed and could split.”

  “You just walked up and asked if you could use his phone?”

  Mel nodded. “What’s so strange about that? I said I wanted to make sure my kid was okay.”

  She felt a pang when he said “my kid.” Will really did seem to be as much Mel’s child as her own. He had Mel’s way of sitting with his legs uncrossed, both feet dangling because he could not yet plant them on the floor. He bit his bottom lip when he was concentrating, like Mel. He had Mel’s way of saying no without shaking his head as an accompanying gesture. Both of them often threw their pillows on the floor when they slept. And of course they never drank the right beverage from the right glass. For a drink of water Will would take a tiny glass; for an inch of apple juice he’d reach for a beer glass. It was just the cast of his eyes that sometimes reminded her of Wayne—that way of looking slightly down and to the side, even when nothing important seemed to be happening there.

  “Guess who!” a flamingo said, stepping in front of her. She could smell alcohol on the flamingo’s breath. Like the private detective, she looked down and saw Duncan’s worn Adidas, though she could have told from the voice alone.

  “Duncan,” she said, and he nodded without taking off his headpiece. A palm tree stood next to him: someone in a badly made outfit fashioned out of a sheet painted to look like wood. Big green-painted cardboard palm fronds protruded from the shoulders. The person wore a black eye mask, with a small painted moon curving over one of the eyes.

  “Take our picture,” Duncan said, stepping in front of the camera. He put a pink wing around the palm tree. “Mel,” Duncan said, “I really enjoyed that Harry Mulisch book you let me borrow. I keep forgetting to bring it back.”

  Jody inclined her head and looked into the camera. There they were: two happy, silly people who had no doubt given great thought as to how they would appear. They didn’t seem that different from the engaged couples who put on their best clothes and sat side by side to smile for posterity.

  As Duncan and the palm tree walked away, a dog came up and sniffed Jody’s leg. A fireman tugged at the dog’s leash, smiling at Jody and Mel and saying that the dog was really a rabbit in disguise, but that he was a real fireman.

  “I’m the woman in the Toulouse-Lautrec painting,” a blue-faced woman announced, butting her way in front of the camera.

  Jody looked through the lens. The woman stood very still, chin resting on her shoulder.

  “Got it,” Jody said, looking up. But she had not taken the picture. There was something about the woman she didn’t like—something deeper than the paint and the rakish hat. As the woman moved away Jody moved the tripod a little to the side, centering Mel in the picture. She did not take that picture either, because when she cared about someone, she didn’t like to waste time taking pictures that didn’t reveal him. Mel was sure that he was being photographed, though. He put the celery top back over his head and stood very formally, hands at his sides. Was it mock seriousness, or was he really so used to being accommodating? For a moment she felt vulnerable and sentimental, as if she wanted to rush into Mel’s arms.

  That was the good thing about having a camera between you and the rest of the world: It afforded some protection, a way to stall for time. She walked forward and gave him only a quick hug. She could almost hear Mary Vickers’s voice: Playing with fire. She kissed Mel quickly on the lips. His lips were cool, as was his hand, which he put briefly on the back of her neck as they kissed.

  She looked around for Mary Vickers, who had come as Cinderella, to say goodbye, but the room was very crowded.

  It was possible that Mary Vickers had left early with Wagoner, who, as usual, had gotten drunk. Those thoughts flashed through her mind in the few seconds it took Mel to bend and zip her camera bag. Camera bag over his shoulder and tripod in her hand, the celery stalk and the American Bandstand cutie started out into the night.

  As they left the church, Mary Vickers was about a mile ahead of them down the road. She had quarreled with Wagoner (if you could call it that—she insisted he turn over the car keys; he tossed them at her and walked off). She had sat in the cold car for a few minutes, expecting that he would come to his senses and reappear, but as she waited she got angrier and thought that he could find his own way home. One of his drinking buddies could escort him. One of those men whose faces got mottled by drink until they turned as rosy as the madras pants they wore.

  Mary passed over a small bridge and looked at the moon glowing over a field. She drove by a trickle of a brook that passed under some willow trees. The spring before, during Will ’n’ Wag’s short-lived fascination with butterfly hunting, she and Jody and the boys had picnicked under those trees. Jody had described to her a photograph of Nabokov, running forward with a butterfly net—Jody could make other people’s photographs seem more real than what was actually in front of her as she spoke—and they had agreed that, at the boys’ early age, it was impossible to say what interests would keep up, what hobbies were worth investing money in. Mel had fashioned the butterfly nets from netting that held the padding around busts that had been shipped to the gallery in New York, and sturdy sticks he had collected on a walk. In spite of everyone’s complaints that there were no available men in New York, when you did find a New York man, he seemed too good to be true. It was her ex-lover she was thinking of.

  Licking her chapped lips, she remembered his taste for alcohol that burned going down—drinks meant to get you wired, none of those diluted bourbon-and-waters that Wagoner sipped until bedtime. She tried to think that she had been attracted, yet again, to another alcoholic, but that was an oversimplification. She had been attracted to someone who was energetic and a little crazy, and who had ventured to involve her in his flirtation with danger.

  A sepia shadow spread in front of the car. She found it difficult to believe that what she saw was real, that it wasn’t just some externalization of what had been going through her mind. It was as if Impossibility had materialized—taken real form—so that she could hit up against it. What had been going through her mind? The willow trees sprang up. She had bit her lip as the car slammed to a stop. There was the cold taste of blood in her mouth.

  She had hit a deer. All in a second, her thoughts and her car collided with a deer that ran in front of the headlights. She touched her seat belt to make sure it was fastened. She looked out the front window. For a vertiginous second, the shadow rose and twisted before it crumpled, like something in a horror movie. She fiddled with the shoulder strap of the seat belt like a lady lightly fingering her corsage. Below her fingers, her heart was racing. She said—probably out loud—“My God. I hit a deer.”

  There were no other cars. She kept searching the rearview mirror. She looked out the window on the passenger’s side and saw the moon again, but no cars coming in either direction. In a few seconds headlights flashed into the rearview, but by then it seemed she had been sitting there for an hour. She was too shaken to get out of the seat. Rather than having an urge to bolt, she felt glued in place: a heavy person, a ludicrous statue, a woman in a formal dress sitting behind the wheel of a car, a deer crumpled in front of her headlights.

  Lights began to blink behind her. A man in a tuxedo who had been at the party was tapping on the window, asking if she was all right. His round-faced wife, who had dressed as Mao, was standing behind her husband, her hands clasped over her mouth. Eventually she lowered one hand and made a circular motion.

  The window rolled down, but Mary Vickers didn’t remember having done it. New York, she thought suddenly, but what she was saying was “No. I’m fine.” She was fine, but she had hit a deer. Mao’s hand was now clasping her hand, which gripped the seat belt.

  As more cars stopped, Mao helped her out of the car. A real estate agent dressed as Peter Pan ran past everyone and bent over the deer. “Stay back,” he shouted. “You don’t know what’s going to happen.” He said that he had a rifle. That he had a rifle, but he didn’t think he was going to have to use it. Suddenly Wagoner had come from nowhere and was looking at Mary, perplexed. Or maybe he was worried. Or angry, because people in front of the car were assessing the damage. One headlight shot off to the side, cockeyed. There was the moon, over to the right, and the beam of light to the left from the headlight.

  The deer was dead. Wagoner, as if he had been just a moment’s apparition, had suddenly disappeared (later, he would tell her that once he saw she was all right he ran down the hillside to take a piss before his bladder exploded). “Let’s move the cars,” Batman was saying. “We’ll have a real pileup if we don’t.”

  The wind blew a swirl of leaves against Mary Vickers’s leg as she stood shakily outside the car, and she jumped, thinking that something had stabbed her. She could smell the dead deer’s blood, and taste blood inside her mouth. Mel stood beside her, frowning and examining her cut lip. If Mel was there, then Jody must be there. She looked down and saw that the side mirror had broken. Glass beads spread out in the road as though fish had spawned there. Was this the same world in which little boys chased butterflies? She turned and looked at Jody.

  Jody had been moving fast. She had a roll of 1000 ASA in her camera and was in the process of taking photographs of Casper the Ghost as he crouched with Peter Pan by the car headlights. As she moved the camera and Mary Vickers’s startled look suddenly became the central image of the frame, she clicked quickly. Thank you, God, she was thinking, for the invention of the auto winder. The next shot she took was the photograph that would later be blown up and hung on the large wall to the right-hand side of Haveabud’s gallery in New York—the primary display wall, the place people always looked as they began to find their way into the depths of the gallery: Mary Vickers’s eyes, bright enough to bore a hole through the camera lens, full moon shining to one side, people clotted together on the road, and in the background the large form of a ghost, white body billowing in the wind, looking down at who knew what.

  Of course you do not want the child to be a ventriloquist’s dummy, but if there could be a bit more sitting on the knee, a little less of the back of the head and more of the profile as you spoke, that might be all the better. The child that reminds you of your own mortality needs so much tending to—so many wisps of hair brushed off the forehead, so many dollar bills handed out, so many anklet cuffs turned down, so much humming to accompany the soprano-sung solo—that it is almost impossible to decide whether to be as quick-talking as an escaped convict, or as patient as a penitent.

  It is understandable that parents play a little game of self-deception and think they know everything about their child—that with their peripheral vision and with their ear inched backward an extra bit to listen they need not turn to see the child’s predictable expression: the gleeful smile, the lowered eyes. In this way, they miss the unexpected. They make the mistake of thinking children are simpler than they, and that therefore they have children figured out. (The children know better. They know that at least some of the time they can rush toward danger faster than their parents can stop them. That the parent who confiscates the water gun has failed to notice the slingshot in the back pocket. That tying shoelaces is a reassuring activity for parents. That off-key bedtime singing should be tolerated because it helps parents unwind.)

  You have created the child, but you could not have anticipated the child’s power. Because the child’s presence and desires are so constant, it becomes the course of least possible pain to persuade yourself that being subsumed is synonymous with parenthood. You can only pray that by early evening the child’s eyelids will grow heavy with sleep. Then you hope that the sleeping child will not loom large in your own dreams, that once the night-light has been switched on, that beam of light alone may guide the child to dreamland.

  In the silence of the house, you can sort out the day’s failures and successes. You can admit that you have approached the child with a mixture of awe, regret, and envy. Wouldn’t it be nice to scream louder than the child? To plead for peace as diligently as the child pleads for adventure? Couldn’t the tables be turned, and couldn’t you be found hiding underneath?

  Parents can endure only so many tears before they become impervious, can listen to only so much pleading before whatever is being requested—the smooth peanut butter, the puppy in the pound—begins, cosmically, not to matter. It is predictable that the child denied a mongrel will contort its face into a version of the thing it most desires.

  Fact: The child is your child whether or not the crib seems some days like a sinking ship. In order to proceed, focus your attention even though the haunting lullaby you sing distracts you. Grab on to the diaper as if you were clinging to the mast of a ship. Ignore the Sirens’ song tinkling on the child’s music box that would lure you into drowning in memories of your own childhood. Consult the experts and let them steer the way; call a sympathetic friend whose child is six months older.

  There are so many books published to advise you about the child’s upbringing, so many predictions about patterns you will notice and pleas to which you will be subjected. Psychologists will speak to you on early-morning television shows, mothers in the park will disagree, relatives will try to pull the rug out from under whatever you believe, the pediatrician’s calm may turn to poorly disguised mystification, and the comic on late-night TV will effectively satirize the creature whose existence you care so much about.

  The message is always to change doubt to certainty and proceed. Sit by the sandbox with newfound strength. Embrace the squirming child and urge him to behave differently. Insist on eye contact when you speak. Do not let others turn the child upside down. Check the baby-sitter’s references. Lock the cabinet that contains the cleaning products below the sink. Regular visits to the doctor. Two security blankets, so one can be washed. Check toe room in shoes regularly, by depressing the leather underneath your thumb. Comb tangled hair from the ends up. Speak out against environmental hazards. Look out for danger, but do not communicate your fear to the child. Buckle your seat belt. Cut down on consumption of red meat. Learn a jingle called “The Toothbrush Is Your Friend.” Advise him not to bother kitty when she’s eating. Try to make a game of gathering up toys with the child. Don’t overdramatize the scary parts of books. Do everything right, all the time, and the child will prosper. It’s as simple as that, except for fate, luck, heredity, chance, the astrological sign under which the child was born, his order of birth, his first encounter with evil, the girl who jilts him in spite of his excellent qualities, the war that is being fought when he is a young man, the drugs he may try once or too many times, the friends he makes, how he scores on tests, how well he endures kidding about his shortcomings, how ambitious he becomes, how far he falls behind, circumstantial evidence, ironic perspective, danger when it is least expected, difficulty in triumphing over circumstance, people with hidden agendas, and animals with rabies. With these things in mind, you will watch the child hopscotch from certainty to uncertainty, throwing the stone of trust before him, going all the way to the end by hopping one-footed, then turning and hopping back, full grown, much taller, with a puzzled expression that may not leave his face whether he is succeeding or failing.

  Does it seem impossible that the child will grow up? That the bashful smile will become a bold expression? The sparkling eyes in need of corrective lenses? That fevers will subside, that there will be no more bloody knees, that a briefcase will replace the blue security blanket? You must resist the tendency to think ahead; wishing for peace is not the same as wanting things to change forever, and when all is said and done (a state only songwriters believe in), the child will never really be gone, even though he grows up. You will find that although the child may be remembered in association with one or two prized toys, more likely the child will be remembered alone, standing with his legs parted, his arms dangling at his sides, pants fallen down a bit so that only the toes of the sneakers are visible. He will be standing the way he stood in the snapshot, with an expanse of field—or maybe the beach—around him. A little thing, but you will remember that distinctly without having a photograph in front of you. That will be the way, in fact, the child will stay: a visual image—one that, even at the time, you squinted to look harder at, whether or not a camera was raised to your eye.

  When you are thirty, the child is two. At forty, you realize that the child in the house, the child you live with, is still, when you close your eyes, or the moment he has walked from the room, two years old. When you are sixty, and the child is gone, the child will also be two, but then you will be more certain. Seeing pictures of your child at different ages, you will not hesitate for a moment. You will point to the two-year-old, not the ten-year-old or the twenty-year-old. He will always be that high. With a nick above the eyebrow. Those eyes, at that point a bit too large for his face, so that, in remembering the eyes, you are sure that your child possessed startling intensity. He might be wearing some article of clothing purchased for a special occasion, but unless the picture of the shirt with the anchor and the sheepshank knot is right in front of you, you will not think much about that. He will be in typical little-boy clothes, smiling or looking straight at the camera with a tolerant expression that may show a hint of fatigue: Another picture? Why do you want it? What can it mean to you? He will be there with you without special costumes or toys as the years go by: the child alone, more and more a fact. Your life before the child seems too long ago to think of. What happened with the child, something of a blur. There were late-night walks in the summer heat, weren’t there? Didn’t the child once assume that you could give him pointers about how to fly? Didn’t he think he was recreating the rumbling of Vesuvius with the plastic straw in the glass of chocolate milk? You go on—and the child goes on—but you change, as the child sees you. You do, but he does not. He stays the same, no matter how many marriages, mortgages, dogs, and children he may surround himself with—he does not change, so he is not vulnerable. It becomes difficult to remember that he ever was. That the dog snapped at him, and he was afraid. That the cut got infected. That night after night, the same blue-bodied demon flicked its tail in his dreams. Sticky fingers. Wet sheets. Wet kisses. A flood of tears. As you remember him, the child is always two.