The PEN,O Henry Prize Stories 2011 Part 12

Henry took a clam and looked at the dogs. They were looking away from each other now, but he said it anyway. "Look at that. They really like each other, don't they?"

"They sure do," Luke said.

Because of my mother, somebody wrote. Half the messages on the farewell board were unsigned. You were only supposed to post your final notes there, but this was a rule that was impossible to enforce, since anybody could retire one ID and come back with a new one. And you were supposed to limit yourself to just one reason, either by prioritizing, or, more elegantly, by articulating a reason that contained all other possible reasons. While Because of my mother could be unpacked at length, there was something crude, or at least unsophisticated, about it. Because of incorporation was its political equivalent: it contained a mult.i.tude of reasons, all the acc.u.mulated disappointments of the past decade for the people who cared to mourn the dashed hopes of the early part of the century. But it was less subtle and less mysterious than Because I believe, into which one could read a richer sort of disappointment, one that was tempered with hope that something besides oblivion lay on the other side of the square. This sort of post could be crude as well: Because I want to see Asian was its own common type. Still, there was something pleasing about these notes that looked forward through the square and saw something or someone waiting there, Aslan in Narnia, Dejah Thoris on Barsoom, or more private kings in more particular kingdoms. Because I have suffered enough was less appealing than Because I wish to suffer differently.

Most mysterious and most mundane of all were the last posts of the lovelorn. They were neither necessarily hopeful nor despairing. Because of Alice could mean anything in a way that Because of my mother generally could not-Alice might be hero or villain, after all, but all mothers were villains on the board. Because of Louise, Because of Juliet, Because of John, Because of Alan and Wanda and Bubbles-that one seemed like cheating to Henry, though he liked it for the possibility that Bubbles might be a chimpanzee, and for the likelihood that the circ.u.mstances driving the poster through the square must be uniquely weird and horrible. Because of George, Because of Althea, Because of you. Because I broke his heart, Because she broke my heart. Because of Bobby.

Henry took Luke and the dogs out to the old barn. There were pictures of that, too, taken back when it had been Henry's home. Henry had called them up on the ceiling and they had all looked at them, even the dogs. It was hardly a first-date activity, to share your distant past this way, though he'd done it with Bobby, the two of them sitting in an overpriced cafe in Cambridge with their phones on the table, excitedly trading pictures of their dead brothers and fathers. That had felt like showing each other their scars, part of the process of recognition by which they came independently to understand that, while it was probably too early to say they were meant for each other, they were at least very lucky to have collided. It was a less intimate revelation to show pictures of himself at five years old, naked except for a little cowboy hat and boots, to a man he had f.u.c.ked three times in the twelve hours he had known him, but it was still a startling bit of progress. He hadn't been interested in that sort of thing-the moving on that his friends and shrinks and Bobby himself had encouraged him to do-largely because it seemed both impossible and unnecessary. Trying to not be in love with Bobby was like trying to not be gay anymore, or like annulling the law of gravity by personal decree. It was ridiculous to try, and anyway gayness and gravity, for whatever sadness or limitation they might generate, felt right. Henry still wasn't interested in moving on, but there was something about his pending encounter with the square that made it feel like this was something else, similar in form but not in substance to getting over it at last, since he was about to make a permanent attestation to his devotion to Bobby, and to his objection to the end of their relations.h.i.+p.

"This is okay," he said to Hobart, the only other one of the four still awake after the slide show. Luke and his dog had fallen asleep before it finished, and now the man's head was on Henry's chest. "This is okay," Henry said again, staring down his nose at Luke's face. He was doing a whistling sort of snore, in through the nose, out through the mouth. "I'm not making out with your dog," Henry said quietly. "He's throwing up into my mouth." He wondered why he couldn't have thought to say that two days before. Hobart crawled up the bed and added his head to the empty side of Henry's chest. It was a little hard to breathe, but he still fell asleep that way.

The barn was in as much of a state of ruin as the law would allow. No one had lived there for five years, and no one sanely inclined to keep it up had lived there for fifteen. A friend of his father's, a crazy cat lady who kept birds instead of cats, had moved in after his father had died, and after she died Henry had left it empty, never visiting and only paying now and then to have it painted when the nearest neighbor complained that it was starting to look shabby in a way that was no longer picturesque. All the nearest neighbors were eventually eaten up by incorporation, and there were mansions all around now in the near distance, but Henry had never sold the place in spite of offers that grew both more generous and more threatening. He'd left it to Bobby with instructions never to sell, which he probably wouldn't-Bobby was not exactly a friend of incorporation-but who knew. Maybe he and the Brazilian would want to make another baby together, and Bobby's grandma had only been good for one.

"You used to live here?" Luke asked in the morning. "All the time?"

"All the time," Henry said. "It's why my manners are so atrocious." They were standing in what remained of the living room. A pair of squirrels were staring at them from a rafter above. The dogs were staring back. "It was fine," Henry said. "It was great, actually. As much as I remember. It doesn't have anything to do with ... it."

"Yeah. Mine neither," Luke said. They had started talking about the square during breakfast. Henry wasn't the one to bring it up. Out of nowhere and all of a sudden Luke had asked him what he was going to wear when he went through. "Shorts," Henry had said, not thinking to deny it, or even ask how Luke knew he was a Square.

"I brought a parka," Luke said.

"Because you think it will be cold?" Henry asked.

"Because I like the parka," Luke said. "It's my favorite piece of clothing. It's puffy but not too puffy." A silence followed, not entirely awkward. They were eating in the room, on the bed, and had just moved the plates to the floor for the dogs to finish up. Henry was still trying to decide what to say next when Luke reached over for his c.o.c.k, and what followed felt like a sort of conversation. Henry had always thought that having someone's c.o.c.k in your mouth ought to provide you with some kind of insight on them, though this hadn't ever been the case. Staring into someone's eyes while he pounded on their a.s.s made him feel infinitely remote from them, except of course for Bobby, and maybe it was the extraordinary intimacy he had achieved doing such things with Bobby that spoiled it with everyone else. But there was something revealing in the exchange between him and Luke. Luke was holding on to him too tightly, and he was holding on too tightly to Luke, and Henry thought he heard notes of agonized sadness in both their voices when they cried out at each other as they came. By the end of it Henry felt as if they had communicated any number of wordless secrets, and that he had a deep, dumb understanding of why Luke was going through the square, and felt sure that Luke felt the same way, and it seemed all of a piece with the whole process that it would f.u.c.k things up by asking if this was true.

"I was such a happy kid," Luke said. "Not one single thing about my childhood was f.u.c.ked up. I always wanted to put that on my gravestone, if I was going to have a gravestone."

"Mine would say ..." Henry started, and then thought better of it.

"What?" He had been going to say, He made bad choices.

"Poodle," he said. "Just, Poodle. And let people wonder what that meant, except it wouldn't mean anything." Luke put an arm around him.

"I like you," he said. "I like you." The way he stressed the like made it sound as if he hadn't liked anybody for a while.

"I like you, too," Henry said, feeling stupid and exalted at the same time. It changed nothing, to like somebody. It didn't change anything at all about why he was here, or what he was going to do. He could like somebody, and say good-bye to liking somebody, in the same way he was saying good-bye to ice cream and gingersnaps and b.l.o.w. .j.o.bs and the soft fur on the top of Hobart's head. It didn't change the past, or alter any of the choices he had made, or make him into a different person. It didn't change the fact that it was too late to do anything but proceed quietly and calmly through the square.

The dogs were taking turns leaping and barking uselessly at the squirrels. "I like you," Henry said again, trying to put the same charming emphasis on the word that Luke had, but it only came out funny, his voice breaking like he was thirteen, or like he was much sadder or more overcome than he actually was. Luke gathered him closer in his arms, and pressed his beard against Henry's beard, and Henry was sure this man was going to say something that would be awkward and delightful and terrifying, but after five minutes of squeezing him and rubbing their faces together but never quite kissing all he said was "You're cuddly."

Some days I'm INTO, Martha wrote, and some days I'm THROUGH. But I'm never not going. Everybody had those days, when the prospect of going into the square, with no expectation of anything but oblivion on the other side, was more appealing than the prospect of pa.s.sing through it to discover a new world where pain was felt less acutely, or less urgently, or even just differently, although most people liked to pretend that they were only interested in the latter destination. These were not suicides, after all. But how many people would pa.s.s through, Henry wondered, if it were in fact a guaranteed pa.s.sage to Narnia? He wasn't sure that nuzzling with Aslan would make him any less troubled over Bobby, or that topping Mr. Tumnus's hairy bottom would dispel any unwanted memories. Living beyond Bobby, beyond the pain and delight of remembering him, beyond the terrible ironies of their failed almost marriage, required something more than the promise of happiness or relief. It could only be done someplace farther away than Narnia, and maybe even someplace farther away than death, though death, according to the deep illogic that had governed all Henry's actions since he and Bobby had broken up beyond any hope of reconciling, was at least a step in the right direction. When he had made his drunken attempt to hang himself all Henry had been thinking about was getting away from Bobby, from loving him and hurting over him and from the guilt of having hurt him, but when he actually settled his weight down on the telephone cord around his neck and let himself begin to be suspended by it, some monstrously naive part of him felt like he was accelerating back toward his old lover. Killing himself, as he tried to kill himself, felt like both a way forward and a way back.

He blacked out ever so gently-he'd chosen to hang himself for the sheer painless ease of it-and he felt sure that he was traveling, felt a thrill at having made what seemed like a reportable discovery, that death was falling. This seemed like tremendously important news, the sort of thing that might have validated his short-lived and undistinguished scientific career. He thought how sad it was that he wasn't going to be able to tell Bobby-It's all right after all, he would have said, that our brothers are dead and our fathers are dead because death is only falling. And at the same time he thought, I'll tell him when I see him.

He woke up with a terrible headache, lying among the shoes on his closet floor, all his neatly pressed work clothes on top of him and splinters from the broken closet bar in his hair. He spent the night there because it seemed like this was the place he had been heading all his life, and the dreary destined comfort of it gave him the best night's sleep he'd had in months. When he woke again all the desperate intoxications of the night before had worn off, and he only felt pathetic, failed suicides being the worst sort of losers in anybody's book, his own included. He stayed in there through the morning-he'd wet himself as he lay unconscious, and did it again without much hesitation-feeling afraid to go out into what seemed now like a different world. It was early evening before growing boredom forced him to look at his phone. He'd sent a text to Bobby-I'm so sorry-and received no reply.

Henry went walking at dusk with Luke along the fence around the station where the square was housed. The dogs went quietly before them, sniffing at the gra.s.s that poked around the chain link but neither one ever finding a place to pee. When they came into view of the concrete shed, Dan barked softly at it, but Hobart only lay down and appeared to go to sleep. Henry and Luke stared silently for a while, holding hands.

"How did you know I came to Nantucket for this?" Henry asked.

"I don't know," Luke said. "Same way I knew you were gay, I guess. Squaredar."

"Huh," Henry said. "I didn't know with you until you asked. And then I knew." This seemed like a terribly lame thing to say. He was reminded of all his late conversations with Bobby, before Bobby had ended their long fruitless talk about whether or not they should try being together again by marrying the Brazilian, when hapless unrequited love of the man had kept Henry from making a single articulate point.

"And you didn't know I was gay until I came in your mouth."

"I'm slow," Henry said. "But that doesn't make you gay. Hundreds and hundreds of straight guys have come in my mouth. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds." It suddenly occurred to him that holding hands they would be too big to fit through the square.

They were quiet for a little while, until Luke heaved a big sigh and said, "There it is." His tone was somehow both reverential and disappointed.

"You couldn't have thought it would be bigger," Henry said. "Everybody knows how big it is."

"No. I just thought I would feel something ... different. If I close my eyes I can't even tell it's there."

"Well," Henry said. "Maybe it's just a hole."

Luke shook his head. "Look," he said, and pointed. Someone was approaching the shed. Luke raised a little pair of binoculars to his eyes and made an odd noise, a grunt and a laugh and also something sadder than either of those noises, and handed the gla.s.ses to Henry. It was a woman wearing a short, sparkling dress. "I don't think it's very practical to go through in heels," Henry said.

"Makes it difficult to leap properly," Luke said. "She's probably just going to fall in, which isn't right at all."

Henry put the binoculars down. "Why do you think she's going?"

Luke shrugged. " 'Cause she's too pretty for this world." He took the gla.s.ses back from Henry, who gave them up gladly, not wanting to watch her pa.s.s through the door.

"Let's go," Henry said.

"Hold on," Luke said, still watching. "She's stranded here from another dimension, and thinks this might be the way back."

"Or some dead person told her to do it," Henry said. "To be with them again. Let's go."

"Just a minute," Luke said, and lifted his head like Hobart sniffing at the harbor smells, c.o.c.king his head and listening. Henry turned and walked away, whistling for Hobart to follow him, but the dogs stayed together, sitting next to Luke, all of them sniffing and listening. Henry kept walking, and shortly they all came bounding up behind him. Luke caught him around the shoulders and pulled him close. "She's gone," he said matter-of-factly. "Did you feel it?"

All through dinner Henry wanted to ask the question that he knew he shouldn't, the question that probably didn't need to be answered, and the one that he felt intermittently sure would be ruinous to ask. But it wasn't until later, as Luke lay sweating on top of him, that he couldn't resist anymore, and he finally asked it. "How come?" he said into Luke's shoulder.

"What?"

"How come you're going through?"

"It's complicated," he said. "Why are you going?"

"It's complicated," Henry said.

"See?"

"Yeah. Dumb question," Henry said. Though in fact his reason for going through no longer seemed very complicated at all. If it was simple that didn't make it any less powerful, but crus.h.i.+ng hopeless loneliness was something Henry suddenly felt able to wrap his arms around even as he wrapped his arms around Luke. "I'm lonely" did no sort of justice to what he'd suffered in the past two years, and yet he could have said it in answer and it would have been true. It seemed suddenly like it might be possible that loneliness did not have to be a crime punishable by more and more extreme loneliness, until a person was so isolated that he felt he was being pushed toward a hole in the world.

"Not dumb. Not dumb." Luke kissed the side of Henry's neck each time he said it. "You're cuddly."

"I was going to go tomorrow," Henry said. "That was my date. That's what I paid for. But I was thinking of changing it."

"Really?"

"Really. It's not going anywhere, right? It'll be there next week. And the next week. It's kind of nice, you know, how it's always there, not going anywhere. Nice to know you could always just go in, whenever you want. But that you don't have to, yet, if you want to go to the beach tomorrow instead. Or if you want to play tennis, instead, or before. Tennis, and then in you go. Unless you want to make pancakes first."

"I don't think Hal gives refunds," Luke said. Hal was the guard who took semiofficial bribes to look the other way while people took one-way trips into the shed.

"I don't mind," Henry said. "It's just money. When were you going?"

A long silence followed. Henry was afraid to ask again, because he couldn't imagine that Luke hadn't heard him. But Luke only lay there, dripping less and less and breathing more and more deeply, until Henry decided that he was asleep. Henry was almost falling asleep himself, for all that the unanswer was a disappointment, when Luke spoke, not at all sleepily, into his shoulder. "Next week," he said. "Around then."

Then he really did fall asleep, and Henry stayed awake, thinking of the week to come, and the one after that, and the one after that, and of repairs to the barn, and s.e.x among the power tools, and the dogs frolicking, and of Bobby wondering what happened to his wonderful f.u.c.king dog, and whether Hobart would be sad if he never went back to Cambridge. Henry fell asleep not any less sad, or any less in love with Bobby, but surprised in a way that did nothing to satisfy his cynicism. Nantucket, he thought before he slept, and two dogs, and a good man asleep on him. It was all relatively all right.

How a two-hundred-pound man could roll off of him and get dressed in the dark and take his parka out of a closet full of rattling wire hangers without waking him up Henry never could figure. He left a note. You are lovely but the square is lovelier. It was pinned to Dan's collar. Both dogs stared at Henry impatiently while he sat on the bed with the note in his hands, probably wondering when they were going to go out, or be fed, or be played with, or even acknowledged when they licked his hands or jumped up on the bed to nuzzle his chest. Dan eventually peed in the corner, and then joined Hobart to lie at Henry's feet, both of them wagging their tails, then staring up at him with plaintive eyes, then eventually falling asleep as the morning turned into the afternoon. Henry finally dozed himself, the note still in his hand, maintaining the posture of sad shock he felt sure he was going to maintain forever, and did not dream of Bobby or Luke or the square or his brother or his father or the frolicking dogs or of the isle of Nantucket sinking into the sea. When he woke up he stood and stretched and rustled up his phone from where it had got lost amid the sheets. Then he called the old lady, sure he was going to tell her there was an extra dog for her to bring to Cambridge until he left her a message saying he would bring Hobart back himself.

Jane Delury.

Nothing of Consequence.

They came to Madagascar-women, all educators-to train a group of French teachers from around the island. They were housed in the living quarters of an abandoned coconut plantation and conducted their cla.s.ses in warehouses still dusty with copra. By the second week, the red soil had colored their soles and the sun their faces. Though in the cla.s.sroom they were as rigorous as they were back home, their minds drifted. Lessons on the imperfect, discussions of Orientalism, were interrupted by thoughts of what would be served for lunch or whether a driver might be hired for an excursion to the rain forest. They returned to themselves when a student raised a hand.

One man in particular impressed the women from the start because he never made an error in construction or conjugation, and he listened to their explanations with a critical tilt to his head. Unlike the other students, who wrote in pencil, Rado took notes with a fountain pen. He was young, in his twenties, but he walked in his youthful body as if borrowing it on the way to an older one. A lycee teacher in the capital, he intended to live one day in France and pursue "his work in poetry."

At the first night's dinner, after punch coco and before fish curry, Rado sat down next to Bernadette, the Merry Widow, as the others had named her at the orientation in Paris, where she barely cracked a smile or revealed anything except that her husband had been dead a year and that she found Colette underrated. She was the most taciturn and the plainest among them. The boldness of her blunt chin and large mouth might have made for pretty ugliness during her youth but in late middle age made her look masculine. She wore collar s.h.i.+rts, b.u.t.toned just below her clavicle, the sleeves rolled over her elbows. Judging by the measure of her chignon, her brown hair would fall to her shoulders.

As Bernadette spoke to Rado, she fiddled with the corner of her napkin. Now and again she laughed, which the women had never heard her do, not even that afternoon when they'd attended a performance of a dance troupe in the nearby town and were all brought onstage for a lesson. Rado laughed with her. The solitary line that marked his brow deepened, and his teeth showed, as they did not in the cla.s.sroom. Neither rose to help bring the dishes out from the kitchen until, the plates being cleared, Bernadette looked around apologetically and announced that she and Rado would fetch the pudding. The next evening, and the next, Bernadette and Rado seemed always to be leaving for the kitchen or talking over their untouched food. Their discussions could be overheard in s.n.a.t.c.hes: Rimbaud's Catholicism, the lyrics of Prevert, nothing to raise suspicion in the Director, hunched over his plate at the other end of the table, necktie tucked into his s.h.i.+rt front. But the women interpreted what he ignored. In the communal bathroom, on the path to meals, and evenings, over herbal tea, Bernadette and Rado became the subject of hushed conversation.

The coconut, he told her, as she followed him into the plantation, can travel for hundreds of miles on the ocean, even was.h.i.+ng up on the sh.o.r.es of Antarctica and Ireland.

"Really?" she asked.

He smiled. "There is no fooling you, is there?"

"Perhaps if you were a botanist. Instead of a poet."

She forced the last word from her mouth. At dinner the third night, he had shown her his notebooks of verse, which he hoped to publish in France, since on the island there was no press. She recognized the force of will it must have taken for him to go all the way to university, having grown up in a one-room house with eight brothers and sisters fated to repair cars and work plantations. Yet his writing was flat as a postcard, well-turned lines about waves on the ocean, the colors of the sunset. He chose obvious words for obvious subjects. He did not see past the surface of things.

"I hid in the fronds when I was supposed to be doing my ch.o.r.es," he said.

"You would have done better growing up in the Alps. Pines give good cover."

"You did so too?"

"Don't all children?"

He stopped to pull a frond blade from the heel of his sandal. She imagined him s.h.i.+rtless and barefoot while she, dressed in a school smock, walked with her mother through the square of her childhood village. But no, she realized, calculating the difference in their years, that was not right. When Rado was a boy, climbing trees, she was carrying babies and groceries up the steps of her apartment building. When Rado's voice was just starting to change, she was years into her fine but dull marriage, sitting at her kitchen table with a stack of papers to grade, ignorant of the affair her husband had just ended.

Only Bernadette's roommate protested the rumors. "Who knows what's going on in your room when you aren't there," one woman said, and the roommate said, "Reading." She saw what the others didn't see. How Bernadette tossed in her sleep. How she changed into her nightgown in the bathroom and slept with the sheets pulled up to her chin. If Bernadette got up at night, it was only to go down the hall to the bathroom. She was never gone long. And was it so terrible, anyway, that Bernadette had something she looked forward to in the morning, something that made her check her face in the mirror? The mirror was small and low on the wall, the light poor, and as the roommate walked into the room, Bernadette was bent toward the gla.s.s, cupping her cheeks as one might those of a child. This the roommate did not mention, but a few days later, when one of the women cornered her to let her know that Bernadette was now smoking Rado's cigarettes, the roommate said she was starting to be reminded of The Crucible.

"We are becoming the subject of gossip," Bernadette told Rado.

He laughed and took her hand to help her over a fallen tree, an unnecessary gesture that closed her throat. She could smell his body through his clothes: a stiff white s.h.i.+rt, a pair of creased pants, the apparel of a schoolboy. If she had been another kind of woman, she would have wanted to take him to the shops on the Avenue Montaigne, to pick out scarves and sweaters.

"It's the same for me," he said. "When I go back to my village, I am spurned for having left."

"But what do I have to envy?" The hope in her voice made her cringe.

"A university professors.h.i.+p."

"Not everyone wants that. And it's only part-time."

He understood nothing of the education nationale. She had told him that she taught at a lycee and a course in the continuing studies department of the university, so he imagined her a professor. She saw it happen the first night, the way his eyes stopped roaming, but she didn't correct him.

The ground turned from gra.s.s to sand. Ahead was the ocean. "The whales are migrating," Rado said. "You can see them from here."

"Really," she said flatly, then laughed. "I'm sorry. Animals have never been my thing."

"We will never own a dog together then."

Though she knew he was teasing, her chest collapsed. She had forgotten the physical yearning. The same symptoms her husband complained about in the early stage of his illness. Shortness of breath. Dizziness. Pain near the heart. Was that why he was brought back to his mistress in those days? Why he disclosed the affair?

Rado was telling her about the song of the indri lemur, which sounded like that of a humpback. He said that the lemur was magnificent and wise. Its cry was haunting. His embellishments irritated her, and she cut him off. "I saw a snake this morning. On the reef."

He lowered his hands-he had been charting the course of an invisible lemur through the canopy above-and fumbled in his s.h.i.+rt pocket for his cigarettes. "You're lucky," he said. "You wouldn't want a bite from one of those."

"Do you believe in omens?" she said.

"No," he said. "Nor in taboos."

Some of the women mentioned the situation, as they called it, to their husbands when they phoned home from the Director's office, left to them after he'd gone to bed. His quarters were on the floor above, and as they talked through the crackle of static, the women thought of the Director and kept their voices down for fear that he might be listening. The husbands barely reacted. Thirty years earlier, upon hearing about Bernadette, the husbands might have worried about their marriages. Thirty years earlier, at the airport in Paris and Lyon, the husbands would have kissed their wives longer. A few of the women became angry upon hanging up. Bernadette might have it right. What if they found a student of their own? Broke rules in all directions. Right there in the cla.s.sroom, against the map of Europe, or, like Bernadette, on the beach, where they supposed she and Rado went.

From where Bernadette stood with Rado, the reef looked smooth as a rug, but up close it was a web of crags and holes. The water was layered, a crust of cold and warmth below, the reverse of the students, whose smiles hid gentle disdain. Four-eyes, old chicken, good girl. Rado had told her the nicknames that the students coined for their teachers. Back home, Bernadette had friends like the women, friends who held her hand at her husband's funeral, called daily in the following weeks, took her to the mountains, and, after a decent interval for her to grieve, would want to invite her to dinner with divorced and widowed men. Friends who worried about her, about the way she picked up and ran off, as they called it, giving them notice only a week before. She needed time alone, so from the first she kept her distance from the women, though she knew she'd be disliked.

Earlier, her roommate had asked her for the third time if she'd like to go snorkeling, and Bernadette agreed, not wanting to tip into rudeness. Also, this was something to fill the morning until Rado was free. Bernadette went right into the water, but the roommate, winded from the walk, said she would rest first with her book. When Bernadette kicked to the surface, having seen the snake coiled in a crevice, the roommate raised her eyes.

Looking down, Bernadette saw that in her escape, the knot of her bathing suit had come undone. She was naked to the waist. "Why not?" the roommate called, and untied her own halter. Bernadette covered herself back up with a quick knot to her bathing suit straps. "It was an accident," she told her roommate, "but yes, you're right, why not?"

Later, back at the compound, before they parted ways, the roommate said, "Do you really care for him?" Her voice was hard, but her face wasn't, and it occurred to Bernadette now, as she sat down in the sand next to Rado, that the roommate might not have been fis.h.i.+ng at all but instead giving a warning.

If Bernadette hadn't held herself apart, hadn't taken on airs, the women might have felt sorry for her. Rado, in the end, would move on. He was interested only in Bernadette's connection to the university system, though he was mistaken, since she was, after all, a vacataire, not a real professor. He would have been better off with the one who came from Ma.r.s.eilles and ran a feminist press and had friends in the right places. Or with the prettiest one, whose skin and figure they all envied. If Bernadette and Rado ended up together, since these things sometimes happened (there was talk of the friend of a friend who after a stint with a medical nonprofit married a man from the Congo), Rado would expect Bernadette to wait on him like a slave. Seen in this light, they were victimizing each other.