He tried to intercept the baby’s glossy, blurry stare. The baby was actually attractive, for a baby, and not bald at all, as it happened. Hello, Otto thought to it, let’s you and I communicate in some manner far superior to the verbal one.

  The baby ignored him. Whatever she was making of the blanket, the table legs, the shod sets of feet, she wasn’t about to let on to Otto. Well, see if he cared.

  William was looking at him. So, what was he supposed to do? Oh, all right, he’d contribute. Despite his current clarity of mind.

  “And how was China?” he asked. “Was the food as bad as they say?”

  Naomi looked at him blankly. “Well, I don’t know, actually,” she said. “Honey, how was the food?”

  “The food,” Margaret said. “Not memorable, apparently.”

  “The things people have to do in order to have children,” Otto said.

  “We toyed with the idea of giving birth,” Margaret said. “That is, Naomi toyed with it.”

  “At first,” Naomi said, “I thought, what a shame to miss an experience that nature intended for us. And, I mean, there was this guy at work, or of course there’s always—But then I thought, what, am I an idiot? I mean, just because you’ve got arms and legs, it doesn’t mean you have to—”

  “No,” William said. “But still. I can understand how you felt.”

  “Have to what?” Margaret said.

  “I can’t,” Otto said.

  “Have to what?” Margaret said.

  “I can’t understand it,” Otto said. “I’ve just never envied the capacity. Others are awestruck, not I. I’ve never even remotely wished I were able to give birth, and, in fact, I’ve never wanted a baby. Of course it’s inhuman not to want one, but I’m just not human. I’m not a human being. William is a human being. Maybe William wanted a baby. I never thought to ask. Was that what you were trying to tell me the other day, William? Were you trying to tell me that I’ve ruined your life? Did you want a baby? Have I ruined your life? Well, it’s too bad. I’m sorry. I was too selfish ever to ask if you wanted one, and I’m too selfish to want one myself. I’m more selfish than my own genes. I’m not fighting for my DNA, I’m fighting against it!”

  “I’m happy as I am,” William said. He sat, his arms wrapped tightly around himself, looking at the floor. The baby coughed. “Who needs more champagne?”

  “You see?” Otto said into the tundra of silence William left behind him as he retreated into the kitchen. “I really am a monster.”

  Miles away, Naomi sat blushing, her hands clasped in her lap. Then she scooped up the baby. “There, there,” she said.

  But Margaret sat back, eyebrows raised in semicircles, contemplating something that seemed to be hanging a few feet under the ceiling. “Oh, I don’t know,” she said, and the room shuttled back into proportion. “I suppose you could say it’s human to want a child, in the sense that it’s biologically mandated. But I mean, you could say that, or you could say it’s simply unimaginative. Or you could say it’s unselfish or you could say it’s selfish, or you could say pretty much anything about it at all. Or you could just say, well, I want one. But when you get right down to it, really, one what? Because, actually—I mean, well, look at Molly. I mean, actually, they’re awfully specific.”

  “I suppose I meant, like, crawl around on all fours, or something,” Naomi said. “I mean, just because you’ve got—But look, there they already are, all these babies, so many of them, just waiting, waiting, waiting on the shelves for someone to take care of them. We could have gone to Romania, we could have gone to Guatemala, we could have gone almost anywhere—just, for various reasons, we decided to go to China.”

  “And we both really liked the idea,” Margaret said, “that you could go as far away as you could possibly get, and there would be your child.”

  “Uh-huh,” Naomi nodded, soberly. “How crazy is that?”

  “I abase myself,” Otto told William as they washed and dried the champagne glasses. “I don’t need to tell you how deeply I’ll regret having embarrassed you in front of Naomi and Margaret.” He clasped the limp dishtowel to his heart. “How deeply I’ll regret having been insufficiently mawkish about the miracle of life. I don’t need to tell you how ashamed I’ll feel the minute I calm down. How deeply I’ll regret having trampled your life, and how deeply I’ll regret being what I am. Well, that last part I regret already. I profoundly regret every tiny crumb of myself. I don’t need to go into it all once again, I’m sure. Just send back the form, pertinent boxes checked: ‘I intend to accept your forthcoming apology for—’”

  “Please stop,” William said.

  “Oh, how awful to have ruined the life of such a marvelous man! Have I ruined your life? You can tell me; we’re friends.”

  “Otto, I’m going upstairs now. I didn’t sleep well last night, and I’m tired.”

  “Yes, go upstairs.”

  “Good night,” William said.

  “Yes, go to sleep, why not?” Oh, it was like trying to pick a fight with a dog toy! “Just you go on off to sleep.”

  “Otto, listen to me. My concert is tomorrow. I want to be able to play adequately. I don’t know why you’re unhappy. You do interesting work, you’re admired, we live in a wonderful place, we have wonderful friends. We have everything we need and most of the things we want. We have excellent lives by anyone’s standard. I’m happy, and I wish you were. I know that you’ve been upset these last few days, I asked if you wanted to talk, and you said you didn’t. Now you do, but this happens to be the one night of the year when I most need my sleep. Can it wait till tomorrow? I’m very tired, and you’re obviously very tired, as well. Try and get some sleep, please.”

  “‘Try and get some sleep?’ ‘Try and get some sleep?’ This is unbearable! I’ve spent the best years of my life with a man who doesn’t know how to use the word ‘and’! ‘And’ is not part of the infinitive! ‘And’ means ‘in addition to.’ It’s not ‘Try and get some sleep,’ it’s ‘Try to get some sleep.’ To! To! To! To! To! To! To! Please try to get some sleep!”

  Otto sat down heavily at the kitchen table and began to sob.

  How arbitrary it all was, and cruel. This identity, that identity: Otto, William, Portia, Molly, the doctor …

  She’d be up now, sitting at her own kitchen table, the white enamel table with a cup of tea, thinking about something, about numbers streaming past in stately sequences, about remote astral pageants … The doctor had rested his hand kindly on her shoulder. And what she must have felt then! Oh, to convert that weight of the world’s compassion into something worthwhile—the taste, if only she could have lifted his hand and kissed it, the living satin feel of his skin … Everyone had to put things aside, to put things aside for good.

  The way they had smiled at one another, she and that doctor! What can you do, their smiles had said. The handsome doctor in his handsome-doctor suit and Sharon in her disheveled-lunatic suit; what a charade. In this life, Sharon’s little spark of consciousness would be costumed inescapably as a waif at the margins of mental organization and the doctor’s would be costumed inescapably as a flashing exemplar of supreme competence; in this life (and, frankly, there would be no other) the hospital was where they would meet.

  “Otto—”

  A hand was resting on Otto’s shoulder.

  “William,” Otto said. It was William. They were in the clean, dim kitchen. The full moon had risen high over the neighbors’ buildings, where the lights were almost all out. Had he been asleep? He blinked up at William, whose face, shadowed against the light of the night sky, was as inflected, as ample in mystery as the face in the moon. “It’s late, my darling,” Otto said. “I’m tired. What are we doing down here?”

  LIKE IT OR NOT

  Kate would have a little tour of the coast, Giovanna would have the satisfaction of having provided an excursion for her American houseguest without having to interrupt her own work, and the man whom everyone called Harry would have the pleasure, as Giovanna put it, of Kate’s company: demonstrably a good thing for all concerned.

  “I wish this weren’t happening,” Kate said. “I’ll be inconveniencing him. And besides—”

  “No.” Giovanna waved a finger. “This is the point. He goes every few months to check on this place of his. He loves to show people about, he loves to poke around the little shops. So, why not? You’ll go with him as far as one of the towns, you’ll give him a chance to shop, you’ll give him a chance to shine, you’ll spend the night at some pleasant hotel, then he’ll go on and you’ll find your way back here by taxi and train.”

  So, yes—it was hard to say just who was doing whom a favor …

  “The coast is very beautiful,” Giovanna added. “You don’t feel like enjoying such things right now, I know, but right now is when your chance presents itself.”

  The whole thing had twisted itself into shape several days earlier at a party—a noisy roomful of Giovanna’s friends. Harry had been speaking to Kate in English, but his unplaceable accent and the wedges of other languages flashing around Kate chopped up her concentration. She tried to follow his voice—he was obliged to go frequently to the coast …

  Had she left enough in the freezer? Brice and Blair were hardly children, but whenever they came back home they reverted to sheer incompetence. Besides, they’d be so busy dealing with their father …

  And was Kate fond of it? the person, Harry, was asking.

  “Fond of …” She searched his face. “Oh. Well, actually I’ve never …” and then both she and he were silenced, rounding this corner of the conversation and seeing its direction.

  Giovanna had simply stood there, smiling a bright, vague smile, as though she couldn’t hear a thing. And Harry had been polite—technically, at least; Kate gave him every opportunity to weasel out of an invitation to her, but he’d shouldered the burden manfully. And so there it was, the thing that was going to happen, like it or not. Still, Giovanna was right. And perhaps the very fact that Kate was in no mood to do anything proved, in fact, that she should submit gracefully to whatever … opportunity came her way.

  Over and over, now that she was visiting Giovanna, she’d recall—the phone ringing, herself answering … as if, listening hard enough this time, she might hear something different. Sitting on the sofa, shoes off … It was December 3, the date was on the quizzes she was grading. She’d almost knocked over her cup of tea, answering the phone with her hands full of papers. “Has Baker talked to you about what’s going on with him?” Norman had asked.

  It was the gentleness of Norman’s voice that stayed with her, the tea swaying in her cup. What practical difference did Baker’s illness make to her life? Almost none. It was a good fifteen years since she and Baker had gotten divorced.

  She’d sent out her annual Christmas letter:

  Sorry to be late this year, everyone, (as usual!) but school seems to get more and more time-consuming. Always more administrative annoyances, more student crises … This year we had to learn a new drill, in addition to the fire drill and the cyclone drill—a drive-by shooting drill! You can tell how old all the teachers here are by what we do when that bell goes off. Anyone else remember the atomic-bomb drill? Whenever the alarm rings I still just dive under the desk. Blair is surviving her first year of law school. Brice swears he’ll never …

  and so on. She looked at what she’d written—apparently a description of her life.

  To Giovanna’s copy she appended a note: “I’m fine, really, but Baker’s sick. Very. And Blair and Brice are here this week spending days with him and Norman, nights with me. Blair’s fiance calls every few hours, frantically apologizing. He pleads, she storms. Grand opera! Will she just please tell him why she’s angry? She’s not angry, she insists—it’s just all this apologizing … I guess the diva-gene skipped a generation. Speaking of which, Mother asks after you. She still talks about how that boring friend of Baker’s followed you back to Europe after the wedding. She’s weirdly sweet sometimes these days. Think that means she’s dying? It scares me out of my wits, actually …”

  Giovanna faxed Kate at school: Come stay over spring break. No excuses.

  It had been so many years since they’d seen each other, letters were so rarely exchanged, that Giovanna had come to seem abstract; Kate hadn’t even been aware of confiding. She stared at the fax as she went into her classroom. The map was still rolled down over the blackboard from the previous class. In fact, Giovanna was not only capable, evidently, of reading the note, she was also less than fifteen inches away.

  They had met almost thirty years earlier at a college to which Kate had been sent for its patrician reputation and its august location, and to which Giovanna had been exiled for its puritanical reputation and backwater location, far removed from her own country and her customary amusements. Kate had first encountered the famous Giovanna in the hall outside her room, passed out on the floor, had dragged her inside, revived her, and from then on had joyfully assisted her in and out windows on extralegal forays, after hours, to destinations unequivocally off-limits, with scandalously older men—the more distinguished of the professors, local politicians, visiting lecturers and entertainers …

  The two girls found one another’s characteristics, both national and personal, hilarious and illuminating. They scrutinized each other—the one stolid, socially awkward, midwestern, and oblique; the other polished, European, and satirical—as if each were looking into a transforming mirror, which reflected now certain qualities, now certain others. So many possibilities had floated in that mirror!

  While Giovanna worked long hours at her firm, Kate walked dutifully through the city, staring at churches, paintings, and fountains. What had she seen? She couldn’t have said. She drew the line absolutely, she’d told Blair, at taking photographs. “But, Mother,” Blair had said. “You’d get so much more out of your trip!” Poor Brice—how would he be faring at home with his sister? All his life Blair had been trying to turn him upside down and shake him, as if she could dislodge hidden problems from his pockets like loose change.

  At night, Kate and Giovanna ate in local trattorias, then sat in Giovanna’s huge apartment, sipping wine and talking lazily. How pleasant it must be to live like Giovanna, surrounded by beauty, by beautiful objects, so many of which had been in her family for generations. The years slid through their conversation, looping around, forming a fragile, shifting lace. “Is it possible?” Giovanna said. “We’re older than your mother was when we met.”

  “Too strange,” Kate said. “Too scary.” When she dropped by every week or so now to check on her mother, Kate would often find her asleep in a chair, her head dropping sideways, her mouth slightly open. “Most of the time she’s still fairly true to form, thank heavens. She’s attached the one available old gent around and she’s running him ragged. He simply beams. All the sweet local widows are still standing at his door, clutching their pies and pot roasts. They don’t know what hit them. You know, all those years, when Baker and I were having so much trouble and neither of us quite understood what was happening and the kids were frantic and the house was pandemonium all the time—just as we’d all start screaming at each other, the phone would ring and there she’d be, saying, ‘So, how is everyone enjoying this beautiful Sunday afternoon?’ Now the phone rings and she says, ‘Kate! What are you doing at home on a Saturday night?’”

  “Ah, well.” Giovanna lit a cigarette, kindling its forbidden fragrance. “She’s having an adventure. And what about you?”

  “Me!” Kate said. “Me?”

  “What about that guy you wrote me about a year or two ago—Rover, Rower …”

  “Rowan. Oh, lord. Blair was very enthusiastic about that one. One day she said to me, ‘Mother, where’s this going, this thing with Rowan?’ I said, ‘Going? I’m almost fifty!’”

  Giovanna exhaled a curtain of smoke. From behind it, her steady gaze rested on Kate. “You broke it off?”

  “Give me a drag, please. Of course not. Though to tell you the truth, I just don’t feel the need to put myself through all that again. I really don’t. Anyhow, the day came, naturally, when he said he wasn’t, guess what, ready for commitment—he actually used the word—so soon after his divorce. And then naturally the next day came, when I heard he’d married a twenty-three-year-old.”

  “You should live here.” Giovanna yawned. “Here in Europe, you still have the chance to lose your lovers to someone your own age.”

  Much nicer, they’d agreed, clinking glasses.

  There was no stone, arch, column, pediment, square inch of painting in the vicinity that Harry couldn’t expound upon. He knew what pirates had lived in which of the caves below them, the Latin names of the trees, all twisted by wind, the composition of the rocks … Did Kate see the dome way off there? They didn’t have time to stop, unfortunately, but it was a very important church, as no doubt she knew, built by X in the twelfth century, rebuilt by Y in the thirteenth, then built again on the orders of the Archbishop of Z … Inside there was a wonderful Annunciation by A, a wonderful pietà by B, and of course she’d seen reproductions, hadn’t she, of the altarpiece …

  It wasn’t fair. He expected everyone to be as yielding to beautiful objects as he was, as easily transported. Her expression, she hoped, as the avalanche of information—art gossip—rained down, was not the one she saw daily on the faces of her students. Her poor, exasperating students, so resentful, so uncomprehending … The truth was that most of them had so many problems in their lives that each precious, clarifying fragment Kate struggled to hand over to them was just one more intrusion. Yet there she stood, day after day, talking, talking, talking … And every once in a while—she could see it—it was as if a door opened in a high stone wall.