She stopped everything, stood, walked naked to her dresser, and took out a small box. He missed her on the bed for those minutes. Her legs looked better all in one piece. He’d thought her calves muscular. They made perfect sense now, knees like quivering egg yolks. Her skin had a smell like warm grain. She sat at the edge, frosting the diaphragm with gel. Breeze lifted the curtain. It was a square room, the walls and the floor painted white. The table, where she’d been reading, held a jar of thin-petaled flowers. He burst out laughing after he came.

  She laughed then, too, saying, “What? What?”

  They lay there, not sleeping, one or the other of them getting up to go to the bathroom down the hall and then returning. There was a tiny sink in one corner of the room. Her white bed reminded him of his mom’s in the place. He thought of his mom less frequently now and never for long. At one point, Susan flattened her belly, pulled out the diaphragm, and went to wash it in that sink. A white nightgown hung on a peg. She pulled it on.

  When they began again, she retrieved the diaphragm. It sprang onto the floor. She had to wash it once more and start over. He lifted a piece of her hair, looped it around his finger. She was not beautiful, but there were no bad angles. Maybe that was beautiful.

  Walter put on Duke Ellington. It don’t mean a thing.

  Three times, Susan called restaurants to ask if they could get in and three times they didn’t leave the bed. Horns pranced around the ceiling.

  Susan scrambled eggs at the enormous sorority stove, twirling from the refrigerator to the counter. She loved to dance. She and Carrie had danced at the same studio as little girls.

  “Remember when I was supposed to get a ride up with your family?” Walter asked.

  “My mother said something.”

  “My mom was hypersensitive. Especially about being a mom.”

  “I won’t make excuses for my mother,” Susan said. “She’s impossible. No one understands that more than I do. My dad spends his life trying to repair the damage.”

  “Are they happily married?”

  “I don’t know how he can be, but they are.”

  * * *

  —

  Walter smelled like green apples, even in yesterday’s clothes, after showering in the airy sorority bathroom. He let Susan sleep and drove to the bakery where they’d gone the first morning of scouting. The bakers gave him a muffin straight from the oven. Blueberry cornmeal. He poured cream from the industrial refrigerator into his coffee, leaving a dollar on the metal table. He allowed himself some luxuries now.

  Outside the Clovis city limit, guys lined up for daywork, leaning against a wall, like girls in a beauty pageant. Not all were young. Walter sped up. He hated the idea of his GC pointing: You, You, Not You.

  In the trailer, looking at a pinup calendar that showed a girl Walter’s age spread in a pose he hoped she’d been paid a lot for, he saw his mom’s birthday was last week. He’d forgotten. He’d send something. It wouldn’t matter that he was late; he doubted she kept track anymore. Had they celebrated? Julie and Donnie had probably driven down. What could he get her? Susan would know.

  The ground underneath the old school was full of rocks. Foundation work had fallen eight days behind schedule and his structural engineer was late. The lighting had to be redrawn before the conduit could be laid in. He bent over the plan. The GC sipped from a green thermos. “You know, the guys say you’re a cross-dresser. And a virgin. Think they got you there.”

  “Please take down this calendar,” Walter said.

  The grad students trekked the site in hard hats. Walter kept a ledger. He’d checked out a book from the library to learn accounting. But the numbers made him daydream: he’d buy his mom a house. Somewhere quieter than LA. This was his old fantasy, revised. Maybe Donnie would still go along. Walter could buy an undervalued place and fix it up. He’d know how by then. A small town where she could walk, meet a friend. Maybe Julie would move, too. She’d said she was thinking of retiring.

  The grad students, holding flooring samples and a color board, came to ask if they could bring a few friends down for a day.

  * * *

  —

  He and Susan had the sorority house to themselves. Walter drove there straight from Clovis every evening. The last night of spring break they baked a chicken and talked about whether or not to tell Carrie. Not, they decided, for now.

  The day everyone came back to campus, after work, Walter turned south, for no reason. He didn’t feel like going back to the empty Pelican Building. His mom had attended College of the Sequoias and then transferred to UCLA. She’d loved UCLA and had often driven them through the campus. College of the Sequoias was in a place called Visalia.

  His mom had been smart and pretty. He’d seen pictures. College of the Sequoias sounded small, backed by the Sierra Nevada. But he was passing huge agricultural sheds, factories, and strip malls. He had to detour around a bucolic town fenced off for a maximum-security prison under construction. When he finally found the college, the buildings were painted the ubiquitous brownish white of California institutions, including the unfinished prison. He parked. He didn’t notice any buildings that looked like dorms. Most were one story, flat. He bought a chicken taco from a cart and asked where the sororities and fraternities were. The kid shrugged, then handed him his taco in yellow paper, darkened in spots from juice. The people he saw didn’t look like Berkeley students. They were older, with shorter hair. Can you look poor? He decided yes.

  His mom had put herself through college working in a canning factory. She’d also talked about sorority parties. From those contradictory bits of history he’d done what listeners have always done: he’d chosen the romance. Now he saw. College of the Sequoias didn’t look like a school that had sororities.

  He couldn’t have believed, when his mom first went into the place in Norwalk, that she would be there now. He would be graduating with everyone else, he thought, if she was still herself. She would have come to see him walk across the lawn in a cap and gown.

  55.

  A teacher in the MFA program—“the lady sculptor,” Troy called her—was having a show. He and Lina took three subways to the Brooklyn warehouse and walked among huge iron horses. A wall was hung with female heads mounted on plaques. Trophy Wives was the series title.

  They both admired the work, but on the train back Lina was quiet. Troy kicked her boot until she said what was wrong. “The women everyone likes do work that looks like men’s. Big. Monumental. Horses.”

  “They’re broken-down horses. Sad old men slumping on them. Did you see their dicks? They’re not heroic. That’s her thing. She’s the opposite of traditional statuary.”

  “She’s beautiful. That probably helps.” Lina knew she sounded pathetic.

  “You’re plenty pretty,” Troy said, and Lina recognized the kindness of this. She’d never been his type. Troy went for tall Black women with big breasts and what he called noble asses.

  “That’s because I’m Black,” he’d once said, when she asked him if he dated white girls.

  She hadn’t yet found a reliable path to her talent, if she had any, but Lina felt most inspired the closer she came to pain.

  “You can be the Arshile Gorky of Barnard,” Troy said.

  She’d read about Gorky in the bookshop. “Didn’t he commit suicide?”

  “Not till way later. You can be middle-period Gorky, when he got married and had a kid and became wildly successful.”

  Gorky was another artist Lina hadn’t heard of until this year. She was ashamed of her education. She went to a museum every week and made herself look at one new gallery each time. It would take her fourteen months at the Met, she figured, before she’d have to start over again.

  * * *

  —

  “Why don’t you try sculpture again?” Troy asked.

  “There’s so much construction. Engineering. It’s like building a car.”

  “What about, like, Calder’s circus? I bet he made those wire dolls sitting down. You know when he was a student he worked for a police magazine. They sent him out to sketch the Ringling Brothers.”

  Lina told Troy about her high school teacher, Mr. Riddle, who’d welded together debris he found left after the Watts Riots. He rescued a cash register from a burned-out store. “That store never did open up again,” he’d told her. “Korean people. Older.”

  * * *

  —

  More than halfway through college, Lina’s real life had still not yet begun. She was trying to be a painter. But, while she arranged her life around this ambition—was that the right word for it? Maybe the more accurate one would be wish—she didn’t spend much time painting. She thought about shapes while sitting at the bus stop. And now she stood in her studio waiting, listening to a rake scrape on concrete somewhere outside. She was waiting for some prompting. Not an idea, exactly. More like a hunch.

  A group of kids passed below, loud and happy.

  56.

  Walter was having sex every night. Sometimes twice, once three times. But he didn’t feel fully romantic. Or maybe this was him fully romantic. He believed, though, that strands of passion ran inside him, still untapped. He remembered Carrie’s maroon nipples. Like hearing a scrap of melody. Was that romance?

  He and Susan had their first fight. I don’t believe in Valentine’s Day was what he’d said that started it. That Hallmark invented the holiday.

  “Hallmark’s older than I’d thought, then,” she said, “because Chaucer wrote Saint Valentine’s Day was when birds find their mates. There’s some reference in Hamlet, too, I think. And isn’t it Mother’s Day Hallmark invented? Mother’s Day, Valentine’s Day, they’re not things to believe in or not believe in. They don’t have a theology. They’re opportunities to make someone feel appreciated or to deny them that.”

  “It’s June, Susan,” he pointed out.

  “I’m not talking about whether or not you’ll send me a card next February.” She shook her head. “I can’t be with a withholder. I won’t live with little denials.” The way she said that, it sounded like he’d proposed.

  She was like a dog trained to sniff out drugs. She’d found the missing strain in his affection. She wanted the Valentine feeling. Probably everyone did. But alone that night in the Pelican, listening to the Beatles, he softened. That wasn’t there, maybe. But a lot else was. Fun was the one thing that money can’t buy. They did have fun.

  Maybe this was the difference between a great love and a real one.

  The next day, after work, he bought daffodils. When he handed them to her and reached for her neck, it felt like proposing. With a slam he realized this had always been the fear. With Susan, there would never be a reason for it to end.

  He missed a day of construction for her graduation. The night before, Susan and Carrie gave a dinner party on the sorority porch, with dishes from The Moosewood Cookbook. Susan slept in Walter’s loft and left before her parents arrived in the morning. She and Carrie would fly to India in a week. Carrie would return for library school. But Susan, usually the most organized of them all, planned to continue traveling, for she didn’t know how long. When she was gathering her things from the chair in his attic, he said, “So is this it? I mean, us?”

  She asked, “Have you ever read Jane Austen?”

  He hadn’t gotten around to her yet. She said that Jane Austen had written a book about a brat. At one point, this brat is asking herself whether she’s in love with a guy she thinks she’s in love with. Because she finds, when he leaves town, she’s completely able to be herself. She decides she’s “quite enough in love.” Susan looked down. “I think you’re quite enough in love. Now I have to decide if I need something more. Anyway, you should try reading her.”

  * * *

  —

  At graduation, Mr. Matthews told Walter that he hoped to see him walk next year. Carrie stood between her mother and father, holding a bouquet of roses wrapped in green tissue as if she was about to drop them on the ground. Dr. Melinda felt bird-boned in his arms when he hugged her. Everyone was going away, and he was staying. It was hard to explain to people’s parents. He’d never convince Ken’s dad that the plot of his future would turn on finding Central. He didn’t know if he’d come back to school. If he did return, everyone he cared about would be gone.

  He stayed in the Pelican Building another nineteen months. Over the Ping-Pong table, where he’d done layouts for the Berkeley Poetry Review, he and Ken redrew the irrigation, moving it two feet farther from the foundation. That first summer, they drove to big commercial nurseries in the Central Valley. Walter wanted roses, but Ken said that they required finicky maintenance.

  “You can have roses at your house someday. For here, we need something trample-resistant, like ferns.”

  Walter didn’t find ferns exciting. “Story of my life.”

  Eventually even Cathy left. He watched her graduate from behind a tree. He still lived in the Pelican, with an almost unimaginable sum of money in a Wells Fargo account.

  Then, just after the new year of 1978, the leak sprang.

  57.

  Lina waited until the kid was at the register. He’d seen her reading in the corner all last year. She wanted him to know she bought books, too.

  He charged her half the sticker price. She felt a pulse of luck, then made herself alert him to the discrepancy.

  “On sale,” he said. His name was Etienne Wong. He was half French, half Chinese. He’d grown up in the neighborhood. His mother and dad taught dance. They’d had a studio on Amsterdam.

  “Ballet? Modern?”

  “Ballroom.”

  Only a few red and brown leaves were still on the branches outside. Most had fallen.

  * * *

  —

  What was supposed to happen to her? Lina wanted a career, but by the end of her second fall in New York, she still spent more time waiting to paint than painting. The girl in slip dresses stood working whenever Lina passed her half-open door. How did she do that? When Lina asked, the girl, Larkin, said, “I don’t think about it.”

  And other people fell in love, Lina couldn’t help noticing. She never had. She didn’t count Dino, though she remembered the chaste mornings he’d taught her to play tennis in the dewy park on courts painted like Mondrians.

  * * *

  —

  Etienne lived on the ground floor of an old building. He’d made his own sleeping loft. On the walls hung pictures of a female bodybuilder who turned out to be his sister. He gave Lina the best chair while he cooked. A Morris chair, he explained, and showed her how to adjust the level of the back. He’d found it in an alley and restored it.

  He handed her a bowl of pasta with soba noodles, asparagus, peas, and spices. She ate it all. He refilled her tumbler of wine.

  She admired the chair. What could they talk about, though?

  She unbuttoned his shirt and his skin was smooth, evenly brown. He had no hair at all on his chest. He was beautiful, like Gauguin’s women were beautiful, and his face had that wide-boned quality of submission. She liked touching him the way she imagined a man would, touching a woman.

  “What are you studying?” he asked, and as she listed her classes, he said, “I was no good at school.”

  “Do you think you’d ever go back?”

  “I’m happy at the bookstore. They promoted me to assistant manager.”

  They couldn’t quite talk.

  * * *

  —

  In her bed, a screen of falling snow against the dull red-brick building out the window, he stopped. “You’re not responding to me.”

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “From the waist down you’re not responding.”

  Girls on her hall freshman year had talked about the mechanics of sex the way they’d talked about their diets. One had had a vibrator.

  She squirmed, ticklish, at the bristle of his chin on her thighs. He asked her, from there, if she masturbated. She hadn’t, though her dorm friends had talked about that, too.

  “We’ll have to teach you.”

  The orgasm was unmistakable. She sat up, embarrassed that he’d seen her tremble. It felt as if her belly wasn’t flat anymore.

  She turned her head when he tried to kiss her with that mouth.

  “Tell me if it hurts.”

  It hurt a little, something sharp. But then just a pressure.

  So this was the real first time. January 17, 1977. After, she threw a pillow at him. They were both hungry. She made Top Ramen on her hot plate, wearing only a T-shirt and socks. Feet got dirty here from just walking barefoot at home. Lina remembered the model on the plinth and had taken to wearing socks, even to bed.

  A week later, she opened her mail to find a copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves.

  * * *

  —

  Lina would have liked to fall in love properly, the way people did in the books in her great books class. Maybe the writers had been exaggerating? Still, she thought she wanted that someday. It didn’t have to be now. She and Etienne saw each other every two or three weeks, always alone. She never introduced him to a friend. They talked about the books he was reading, by philosophers she had never heard of. Once, she took him to the Met, to the rooms that quieted her, the large, empty galleries of torsos. They walked around the evocative fragments where she could still sense love centuries later, lingering around a hip, or a missing forearm.