Affections? I ask.

  He tried to force himself upon me, she says coldly. In the house. While Robert was out.

  Given the events of earlier, I do not believe this either. Does she say the same to him of me? It occurs to me that I should bury the hatchet with my colleague, align against this woman’s tricks.

  And yet it is impossible not to feel, on some level, a kind of victory. She is here. She has one son, and for the first time, she has fully agreed to turn him over. Victory, but what strange spoils?

  I notice that she has come closer since we began speaking. I fear that she will weep, that she will try again to kiss me, that someone will see us, in early evening, on the street alone, and perceive, in our postures, an intimacy. I am certain then that I will not rid myself of her until we go ahead with the procedure; else we will travel round and round. Will it free Robert of the demons that torment him? Without doubt it will silence him. No longer will she worry about him roaming their woods, guarding his chestnuts, defying the conspiracies that rise like vapors from the earth. A “drooling piece of meat”?…Well, I hope not, of course I hope not, but if there are unseen consequences, she will manage better than others. She has her home, her Finnish woman, the silence of her woods.

  If I say No, this wound will only fester, she will be back, she will cajole, threaten, and tempt.

  I operate on Thursdays, I say: tomorrow. They can come in the evening, after the others, as the day’s last case. After that there will be a follow-up visit; this is standard. One, only. Then they will leave me alone, free of complications, with those that I can truly help.

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  Eight

  NOW a second plague comes to the house in the north woods. And while the first was brought by wind and spore, this time the mighty finger of Blame points clearly toward the interstate, the Girl Scouts of America, and eros.

  Many years ago, on the boundary of Natick and Weston, on the north shore of Nonesuch Pond, was a property belonging to the Scouts, a pleasant, quiet country area, where some fifty-two campers and sixteen to twenty counselors and staff convened each summer to enjoy swimming, boating, archery, arts and crafts, nature study, drama, and music. It was, according to all who visited, a unique property, “ideally adapted to…the charitable and educational uses of giving wholesome rural recreational and educational opportunities to groups of young city dwellers.”[*] It was also in the path of the Massachusetts Turnpike, which paid three dollars in compensation for the seizure, an amount deemed by the jury before which the Scouts brought suit to be woefully inadequate, even for a region with a long history of underpaying for land that belongs to other people.

  Among the various consequences of the purchase of the land, in addition to the loss of privacy and sense of remoteness enjoyed by the campers, was the destruction of a small forest through which the highway passed. The trees, the bulk of which were oak, birch, and pine, also included a group of fourteen elms that had lined the camp entrance until their deaths from Dutch elm disease. The Turnpike Authority, in a goodwill gesture to the campers, had processed several of these into firewood, neatly ordering them in woodpiles near the off-ramp, where, one February morning, a pair of newlyweds on their way to a ski vacation pulled off so that the wife might answer the call of nature.

  As the wife peed, the husband, Tom, vaguely aroused by the thought of his lovely bride squatting over the cold, snow-scattered field, turned his mind to the cabin he had rented, and the acts of intercourse he had planned. For this man, who appears so fleetingly, and yet so crucially, in these pages, had a thing about fireplaces. It was not clear what in his past could have given birth to such a fetish. There was no early seduction by a campfire. As a child, he had indeed been witness to the so-called “primal scene,” but his parents had been in the laundry room, far from the family hearth, and laundries did nothing for him, sexually: they were neither good nor bad, just neutral. Distantly, he recalled reading a naughty book about a scullery maid who seduced an earl before the open fire of the kitchen. But she had also seduced the falconer in the hawkery, the ostler in the stables, and a visiting baron in the dungeon, and none of these places elicited even a shiver of erotic association. And yet desire consumed him when he thought of fireplaces. The word itself was enough: the voiceless labiodental fricative giving way to the growling “r” and “pl” of “please” and “pleasure,” before it ended in a hiss.

  Having entered his marriage a virgin, Tom had since enjoyed many acts of coitus, but had yet to consummate his dream. How he imagined it! The warm light flickering across his wife’s bounding breasts. The bodies tumbling over a fireside rug (bearskin, or “Persian”). The moist lock of her crotch as if a kind of second flame. O savage ritual of sacrifice and purification! Such thoughts had only quickened (dare we say, burned brighter) since he had learned of the cabin from a colleague. In Boston, they lived in an apartment with a steam heater, which was not the same.

  We should not, then, be surprised by what went through his mind when, waiting in the former woodlot of the Girl Scouts, his eye alighted on the remnants of the turnpike woodpile. Certainly, the cabin would be well equipped with firewood, he reasoned, and yet it was a fair guess that most guests did not appreciate a flame as he did. What a crisis it would be to arrive at last, and find his dreams thwarted by a stingy host!

  No one was around. There was still space in the generous trunk of their Chevy Nomad. It wouldn’t hurt to take a few logs from the pile.

  His wife returned, and they continued on their way. They reached the cabin in the evening. What followed was everything Tom had imagined. For five days, he found himself brought repeatedly to the heights of ecstasy. How the light of the fire shimmered in the sheen of sweat that collected on the neck of his beloved! And the shock that ran through him to feel her fire-warmed haunches! Watching the shadows of their cavorting forms upon the cabin walls, he felt at times as if they were not mortals, but two beasts rutting in the burning ruins of a post-apocalyptic world. They also went skiing.

  As it turned out, stealing the firewood was unnecessary—the cabin had enough. And so, when the day came and the couple reluctantly climbed back into the Nomad, they left behind some logs of elm, and in the elm, the larvae of a scolytid beetle overwintering within the bark.

  * * *

  —

  Our attention now turns to the beetle.

  Had the young couple paused even briefly in their mutual enjoyment, and pulled back the bark of the log on which Tom had found that he could place his feet for better purchase, they might have wondered how such an exquisite work of art had come to be. For the larval chambers of the elm bark beetle are nothing short of masterpieces. What might we compare them to? Etched Viking labyrinths? The facial tattoos of certain Pacific Islanders? A giant centipede? But they are nonpareil. Such symmetry, such grace! Other beetles, in comparison, are mindless stumblers, leaving winding, drunken squiggles in their wakes.

  But what would have astounded our young lovers even more, would have been to learn that only six months prior, this winding maze had been a pleasure palace like their own.

  With regard to the beetle, the romp began, as sex romps often do, with carpentry. A female beetle, slightly smaller than a rice grain, had found herself, one summer afternoon, wandering about the logs that lay beside the off-ramp. Do not ask me how she got there; she came from another log, as did her mother before her—it is logs and beetles all the way back. But she was hungry, and so delighted to have found the elm wood that she gave her hairy little rump a shake. For some time, she scurried over the bark, until she found a place to make her burrow. It was her first burrow, but the work came instinctively. She bored inside, excavated a smooth, straight corridor, tidied it, settled down, and released a siren’s plume of pheromones that drifted through the empty chambers and out into the air.

  And what perfume! Threo-4-methyl-3-heptanol! Alpha-multistriatin! Alpha-cubebene! Can we fault then the young swain who, flying by, paused mid-flight, swiped the air with his antennae, and made a U-turn toward her borehole? Shivers of lust passed through his elytra as he found her scent grow stronger. And beneath the bark, within the gallery, what heaven! The scent was overwhelming—it was as if he’d walked inside her genital chamber itself. He purred and dipped, so befuddled by her smell he nearly mated with a mite. The mites cleared out—they had long learned not to get between a pair of scolytids in heat.

  From there our little stud advanced along the corridor unimpeded. Did he stop to appreciate her handiwork? Unlikely. For, despite the darkness, he could sense that he was getting closer. If only we could know the things he said to her as he approached her sanctum, and what she answered in her own lascivious purr. He dipped his head—he did not know why he did this, but such moves were coded in his serum. He touched her. First her frons and then—oh, God—her epistome. Rubbed his setae on her abdomen. Sensed a stirring of his aedeagus: during his fourteen days of earthly existence, he had wondered what the thing was for, and now he had his answer. Her genital chamber opened, his aedeagus extended, retracted, extended again. He had never known it capable of such agency. It was as if it possessed a mind of its own.

  He mounted.

  And then she threw him off, smashed him against the wall with such aggression that the peeping mites went scurrying in fear.

  Puzzled, he cowered in the corner of the scented room…But why? How? Her smell! Her hushed clicking of encouragement! Her open genital chamber! And then to greet him with such violence! Was he not welcome after all? But to leave, well, it was not so easy: try turning around inside a corridor the width of a rice grain with your aedeagus hanging out. The mocking twitter of the spying mites grew stronger. Damn the little fuckers, he would try again.

  He scuttled forward, gently tapped her sides with his antennae, hummed and ducked his head, awaited her attack. But this time she didn’t strike him. Tentatively, he lifted his gaze and again approached her. Another tap, and then she turned. Before him rose her coxites. Halloo! His palps shook. His feet did a little dance in place, but then, recalling his first failure, he restrained himself. Gyrated for a bit, waited for his aedeagus to retract, then swiveled and pressed against her, back to back, as his member swelled again and slid inside her, and she pulled him deep into the scented den.

  The product of this congress was the raft of eggs she laid in nooks carved in the wall of the main gallery.

  The next spring, the larvae hatched. Creamy little baubles, each as plump and pampered as an emperor’s favorite child, they turned from the central chamber and began to chew in parallel ranks. By the time they reached their fill and stopped to pupate, they’d carved that Viking maze of such sublime design.

  But we have forgotten something. The galleries within this slab of elm aren’t empty when the larvae awake, but carpeted with the very fungus that had killed the tree before the turnpike chopped it up.

  * * *

  —

  The story now shifts again, from the first beetle and her mate, to her scion, the seventh beetle on the right, who chews her way to freedom one April morning, long after Tom has left. The cabin is dark when she emerges, and it takes a moment for her to orient herself within her new, cold universe. Her antennae tap, her head pivots. Laden with fungal spores, she flies up into the rafters of the cabin, where she spies a gap. On the roof she pauses, then takes flight.

  She does not set out to find that particular elm tree planted by a retired Major of the British Army to shade his dooryard. The scent of elm is everywhere. Live elm, sick elm, dead elm, wild, planted; in addition to the forest, nearly every town and city in New England has used the tree to line its avenues. Lubricant spreads over her mouthparts. For the first time in her short life, she has an inkling of the appetite of which she’s capable. But the wind is stiff, and now she finds that she is soaring higher. It carries her over the woods and fields and streets lined with a feast that she cannot reach. Up a valley. When at last she fights her way down, she is floating over a yellow house.

  She is going very fast when she strikes the chimney and tumbles down two shingles, then rights herself and probes the air with her antennae. The fungal spores still coat her wings in streaks of silver. Twelve feet away, the scent plume of an elm is unmistakable. A great tree, nearly two hundred years old. It is a short flight to the spreading canopy, where she pauses, bids goodbye to daylight, and begins to eat.

  Skip Notes

  * Newton Girl Scout Council v. Mass. Turnpike Auth., 335 Mass. 189 (1956).

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  Nine

  SHE had signed up for the prison pen-pal program soon after joining the Women’s Benevolence League, a nondenominational association devoted to the creation of a better future through friendship and good works. She had been invited by Agnes Taylor, the town librarian, who sensed, she knew, her isolation. The group met weekly, at different houses across the county, sometimes almost two hours away. But she didn’t mind the driving—it was a welcome distraction, and gave her a reason to be out of the house, and in the world.

  There were twelve other women in the county chapter, and it was the responsibility of the host to set each week’s agenda, though this varied little. They began with minutes, proceeded to important announcements, progressed to readings and special topics, and then moved on to outreach. Over the years, outreach had depended on the personal interests of the participants, and consisted primarily of immigrants, prisoners, and children. The programs for children had been suspended after accusations that the Benevolents were pagan, though this couldn’t have been further from the truth. No one was keeping such close tabs on either immigrants or prisoners, so those programs had remained untouched.

  The monthly pen-pal program was organized by Professor John Trumbull of the Community College, the eldest son of Mrs. Trumbull, one of the founders of the county chapter. For nearly a decade, Professor Trumbull had taught a literature course at the state prison in Concord, part of an education and rehabilitation initiative. The course was called Captivity Tales, and surveyed the long history of first-person accounts of prisoners across time—from the Bible through the recent writings of Martin Luther King Jr. and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn—most of which were included in a volume, Captivity Tales, edited by Professor Trumbull himself. The initial intent of the pen-pal program was to have the Benevolents and the prisoners write to each other about topics from the course, but from the beginning, the Benevolents had trouble keeping up with the reading. So the prisoners wrote about the readings and the Benevolents wrote about…Well, they wrote about anything that came to mind. Professor Trumbull, they all decided, was qualified to speak on Little Dorrit. He could elevate the prisoners with his gift, while they would serve the equally vital role of friendship.

  Almost immediately, Lillian had proved to be the most prolific letter writer in the circle, or, as Professor Trumbull described her, “the star.” She was proud of her success, and it relieved both her loneliness and her growing worry that something was happening to her thinking. She could not say exactly when she had first noticed the changes. She had always been a little flighty, and she had endured so much hardship that it was understandable, as Agnes once told her, that she might, from time to time, find herself a little out of sorts. But lately it seemed that she was forgetting more than usual, such as which groceries she needed, or even the name of her dog, a feisty terrier that had been a gift from the other ladies in the chapter. And with the new street signs they were putting up everywhere, and the old farmhouses coming down, and more and more dirt roads asphalted, it was easy to get lost. Worse, though, was the sense that she was having trouble following the meetings, or that the others were having trouble following her. Once, even, Agnes and Sally Garfield had approached her when the meeting was over and asked if there was anything the matter. Of course not! she’d said, perplexed and angry, but then she’d gone out to her car and found herself uncertain of where she was going, and Agnes and Sally were tapping at her window. She’d ended up in the hospital—in the end, it had turned out to be an infection in the bladder. Imagine that! A bladder infection causing such confusion! But when it was over, her mind still didn’t feel the same.

  Perhaps this was one reason she liked the pen-pal program. For she could write and she didn’t worry that the prisoner would be bored by her, or misunderstand her, and if they did, they were forgiving, and grateful to have contact with “the world.” And they knew that not everyone always made the best decisions. Just as they knew that, if one was simply patient, a friend’s true essence would emerge in time.

  * * *

  —

  There were six prisoners participating in the program when Lillian joined. Three were regulars who had been there since the beginning, and three were recent additions. The process was simple. Each month, Professor Trumbull would deliver the letters to the Benevolents, and collect the letters to the prisoners in turn. He did not read them—it was important, he said, that the prisoners felt that they had a real correspondence—though the group was encouraged to share highlights from the prisoners’ letters with one another. Not secrets, said Trumbull. His students (he did not call them “prisoners”) had come from worlds where trust was in very short supply.

  This was the first rule. The second rule was that one should never ask a prisoner about his crime or his release date, unless he mentioned it first, and even then, one should not show undue interest in such matters. The third rule was never to question a prisoner’s protestations of innocence. The fourth rule, which seemed to Lillian to be a contradiction, at least in spirit, of the second and third rules, was that one should only use one’s first name and never include one’s home address.